The Trial

I.

The rod heated. It struck
Your flesh. The handcuffs
Clipped tight onto arms
Raised as wings.

Like the Saint of Tyron,
Who fought a monster’s spit—
In defence of “brothers”
With biblical names—

You made yourself loved
And played the martyr;
Not knowing the twist
Of the sadist’s grip;

The turn of the key
In the gaoler’s cell;
The burning lust
In Law’s stiff hand.

It was, my comrade,
A role you suited well,
Loveless, alone,
And terrified of love.

For the heart knew only
At the heart of itself,
The Hood and pulse
Of its local streets;

The stirring of life
As a thrumming of wings.
A dark insect-need—
Not the locus of self.

II.

In the darkest days
Of that painful trial,
I know, my friend,
How the hours curved;

Recording your stress
Towards the very instant
When pain might conclude
And freedom mend.

I hope you will rest now.
For here is closure.
Allow love’s calm
Be given without bounds.

Accept this tranquillity
For as long as it lasts…
So wounding passes and
The moment of passion.

Just breathe this Pennine cold
In a garden of spices
As the act of an innocent
Who fought for justice.

It was not the outcome
That men thought to tell,
Dreaming of that peace
That comes after screwing.

For they fucked you up
And copped you well,
And thought how your truth
Would collapse to their lie.

III.

This judgement, for me,
Is the fragrance of thyme
Bunched in a freshness
That began with Spring.

And the calm that endures
In the space between us,
Is more than a calm
Succeeding a storm.

Those days at your side
Have assuaged my years
And brought an old man closer
To life, through healing.

I did what was asked:
Gave care without fear,
I did not fail to hold
Your hand when you offered.

At a distance, I kept
My sharp observance;
Did not poke my need
In a blood-shot eye.

Found love as beginning
And love as return.—
And salvaged all I could
In the name of salvation.

Good night, loved man,
Take a bath and dream,
Prepare your Hamlet speech,
Let the rest be silent.

Publishing Triangle Award.

The Publishing Triangle was founded in1988 to further the publishing of books by gay authors or with gay themes. In 2001, it instituted the Triangle award for Gay Poetry, which became (in 2004) the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. The 2008 short-list includes three books of poetry: Henri Cole, Blackbird and Wolf, Steve Fellner, Blind Date with Cavafy, and Daniel Hall, Under Sleep. The three books represent different areas of the publishing world: Cole’s work is backed by a major publisher, Farrar. Straus and Giroux; Hall’s work comes from an academic press, The University of Chicago; and Fellners’ from a worthy small press, Marsh Hawk.

The three volumes nominated this year are diverse indeed. They would appear to represent poets at different stages of poetic and personal development. Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf is a sixth collection, Under Sleep a third, and Blind Date with Cavafy is a debut collection. Taken together, these volumes show the differences that exist in “gay poetry” (assuming that such an entity exists, as it must for the purpose of the award!). In Cole, the reader hears a unified and assured contemplative, forensic voice. In Hall, a constant lyrical awareness. And in Fellner, a changing, experimental tone, a bit rough at times.

Steve Fellner’s Blind Date with Cavafy comes heralded by 5 recommendations. Such trumpeting tends to make me suspicious. It seems like protesting too much. Of the recommendations, Timothy Liu’s is to the heart-of-the-matter: “when his masks begin to fall away, an authentic face remains.” And when the extrovert games are over and done with, there is a heart at the centre of Fellner’s work. The poetry in Blind Date with Cavafy is wonderfully extrovert. It is a poetry of tall-stories and clever twists. The title poem is intelligently thought out and well-paced and is an amusing commentary on Cavafy: “How many men/are worthy of a memory?” Not all the masks function, however, and there are occasional irritations in the printing: “Herimone” for Hermione in "Deus Ex Machina". And some of the poems read like over-the-top stand-up performance pieces. But overall, this is a lively volume by a poet who is prepared to take risks, and achieves two things admirably: it has a gay sensibility, though a bit tortured (would be worthy of the Gunn award) and it is goes beyond the confines of “gay” to become witty poetry!

Daniel Hall’s Under Sleep is a rich volume, in terms of ideas as well as emotions. Hall has a fine ear for cadence and imagery. This volume is anything but the work of a somnambulist. It is refined, astute, and subtle. Throughout this volume, Hall shows his sense of technique— poems are bound together with silken threads rather than shackles. “A Winter Apple” is a short lyric that demonstrates real attention to sound and meaning: “endlessly up/and down the macadam, end/over end, back to seed or/ on to cider…” the “en” echoes “am” in macadam”, “ack” repeats “ac” and the hanging “Or” is counter-pointed by the rich flow in “cider”. Hall’s poems are made from this continuous moving and returning of sound. In longer poems, such as “Celestial Event” and “Pilgrim Heights”, the attention to sound and meaning is linked to a rewarding, articulate diction. Under Sleep is a volume by a real craftsperson!

The three sections of Blackbird and Wolf, Birthday, Gravity and Center, and Dune, constitute a finely written trilogy. Each section takes its title from a key poem within the whole. Some reviewers, have seen this volume as a draining away of emotion, a sort-of-purging-of-the-self. That thought is fundamentally wrong. The voice that speaks throughout knows that language can bury emotion and emotion can tear language apart. What exists (as the cover of the book implies) is a rippling rather than a ripping, and Cole emerges as a writer who is both aware and wary of language. In the poem “Gulls”, the poetic voice swims past “a bulky form that was Mother/in her pink swimsuit” and suddenly kicks past “Blake’s Ulro and Beulah”. The poems in Blackbird and Wolf are made out of the matrix of language, layers of artifice (Ulro) and eros (Beulah). Their emotion is born from precision. So, “a solid blackbird flew into view, catching a bee in its mouth”… not a blackbird of language, but something real within language. The poems in this volume have dexterity and simplicity and testify to not only to a gay sensibility, but also to human sensitivity. Cole’s ability to be balance sentiment with mental agility creates a poetry that transmutes sentimentality: “When I opened your little gothic wings/on my whitewashed chest of drawers,/I almost fear you, as if today were my funeral.”

All of these three poets deserve to win the Thom Gunn award. Each has written a significant volume of poetry. In spirit, though, Henri Cole is closest to Gunn: he has that ability to look into darkness with restraint. And like Gunn, the poetry is all the more powerful for being technically controlled.

Free Verse is not poetry.

Today’s The Observer carried this article: “Poetry Guardians Reject Modern Verse”. The Queen’s English Group, spear-headed by Michael George Gibson, has launched an attack on Modern Free Verse, quite simply stating that it isn’t poetry.

As a mission statement, the society has this to say: “The Society hopes to attract those who are interested in, and knowledgeable about, the English language.” According to its website, that is about 1000 in number. Not a massive following then. And judging from its latest AGM, it doesn’t seem to contain many worthies in the fields of English, linguistics and literature.

Michael George Gibson, however, clearly considers himself a worthy and his aim is clear: Andrew Motion as the Poet Laureate (a rather easy target) and Michael Schmidt (one of the Poetry Society Judges in 2007 and something of a moving target). Gibson does not consider the winner of The Poetry Society award to be a poet (obviously Michael Schmidt did…well, had to, bearing in mind he publishes her work under the imprint of Carcanet!). For Gibson, poetry is simple: it has rhythm and rhyme and all would be much better if the English language returned to medieval and earlier models. More alliteration. More music! More general silliness!

Gibson also seems disgruntled because The Poetry Society has been recalcitrant in the war of words and refused to give a definition of poetry. At least, one with which The Queen’s English Group would agree.

Unfortunately, The Observer does not publish a poem by Michael George Gibson. It sets up an argument between Donne’s “The Sun Rising” (liked by Gibson) and Schmidt’s “Pangur Ban” (disliked by Gibson, but hardly Schmidt at his best—something of a fixed fight, I’d say). In the interest of a fair fight, here is a poem by the bruiser of the English Guard:

The Fisher:

She is the sea; and he is the fisher

Who watches the surf sliding over the sand:

She is the sea; and he the fond wisher,

Who waits with his hook and coiled line on the strand.

The tide when right in will be foaming and fish-full -

Silvered with herring, blue-mackerel-teeming - :

She is the sea; and he stands there, wish-full,

Ready to cast, awaiting the gleaming

Of silver and blue in the surging-green-streaming.

Well, poets “in glass houses”… and is this English grammar-:?

In defence of free-verse poetry, Ruth Padel quotes Eliot. She ought to have cited Pound: “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job”. Old Ez should have added woman, but that aside, that’s moreorless the issue. Yes, there is rather a lot of free verse that trickles these days like treacle or urine, without much sense of technique or thought. But Pound was right. Modern English is not suited to rhyme in the way that Chaucer's French-English was. Modern English is not Old English and the days of The Seafarer crossed the whale-road of time a long time ago. (Incidentally, did Beowulf, that paradigm of English rhyme?) Gibson’s “The Fisher” is a throw-back to days long gone. And “surging green streaming” has to be one of the most ill-sounding and ill- imagined lines ever written. And was it too hard to write two four-line stanzas?

Schmidt compares Gibson’s baying to the “new formalism” in the US. He is too polite. He gives his opponent’s argument too much intellectual weight. The arguments of The Queen’s English Society ought to be allowed to fade way like an English mist upon a dark mire: The Observer should not have bothered to observe them and given them credibility.

Tom Paulin, The Secret Life of Poems.

Tom Paulin has a reputation as the scourge of the cultural establishment. Often the tv critic who kicks against the pricks and does not feel (rightly so) the need to court popular opinion and just be a likeable media personality. Perhaps, therefore, The Secret Life of Poems, carries something of an interrogatory tone: the secret life will be dragged alive and kicking into the bright gaze of Paulin’s stare. A few critics have read his latest book in this way, finding it rough and rude and unfinished. This is to do a fascinating book a real injustice! (Is that ! too much? A reading of Paulin’s book leaves a reader questioning practices). Paulin has a forensic intelligence...in this volume he also comes across as a great reader of human life.

The Secret Life of Poems is called “A Poetry Primer”. This it certainly isn’t. It is a “primer” in the painting sense. A layer of interpretation is applied to the poem: as a canvas is primed, then parts of the canvas are worked on. Paulin works on the areas that interest him and this is what gives the book its vigour and life. Instead of the usual polished lit crit approach, a reader is introduced to lines of enquiry…and different lines of enquiry in different poems. Some of the strongest insights come when Paulin begins in one direction and ends in another. So, he starts off looking for the weakness in Lowell’s “Sailing home from Rapallo” and finishes by finding that it has a “finer structure”. Paulin’s method includes an elasticity— how far might a poem be stretched before it starts to resist the approach. Such a method could become a kind of torture…not so in Paulin’s hands…he is aware (as a poet) of the poetic medium and how far the body of the poem can be shaped.

There are three principal strengths to this book. Firstly, it ranges from the English Renaissance to contemporary poetry. Secondly, it selects from American and English traditions. None of the Silliman “School of Quietude” nonsense for Paulin. Thirdly, it follows what is often neglected in poetry criticism: the meaning in the music of the poem, how sound and stress work within the sensitive reader to draw connections and secret/implied links.

Paulin’s reading of Milton is interesting because he finds fault with Milton and from those faults comes to an appreciation of deeper virtues. His analysis of Lowell is engaging. He approaches the dark elements of (Ted) Hughes. His reading of Muldoon's "Quoof" hears all of the poems subtleties. Herbert's "The Flower" blossoms. Keats’ “To Autumn” is wonderfully re-imagined as a piece of sociological and political criticism, rather than a piece of Romantic pastoral. And that points to the strong element of Paulin’s readings and also his occasional weaknesses. When Paulin senses that a poem is earthed in politics, he is a gardener gardening. When poems becomes rarified, he produces a battle of wills. Strangely, his reading of “Sailing to Byzantium” is one of the least satisfactory. Paulin’s Irish bias gives Yeats a place. But “Sailing to Byzantium”, though it talks of youth and age, is grounded in a virtual, occult world, not Ireland. The poem was in early form a draft for Yeats’ initiation into the grade of Adeptus Exemptus in The Golden Dawn. This was the Jupiter grade looking towards the Saturn grade. Written some years later than this, “Sailing to Byzantium” gazes from the land of Jupiter (and youth) towards the city of Saturn (old age and eternal wisdom). Byzantium is more than Wisdom. It is the eternal land across the abyss of the Tree of Life— and entrance into eternity and “unageing intellect”. This is a context of no interest to the non-hermetic Paulin. If there is another flaw in the book it is the fact that Paulin sometimes over reads. The critic Edna Longley has stated that Paulin’s criticism sometimes becomes a criticism of what Paulin has recently read in his head. That comment would seem to be true of his approach to Craine Raine. One common word is enough to send Paulin into detailed comparisons with Larkin. It is as if Raine has suddenly acquired Pound’s logopoetic precision in Mauberley and one word implies a treatise. But this ought to be overlooked. Paulin is someone who reads poetry, for the words, for the texture, not just for the general feeling. He reads to find the new--not what a hundred other critics have trotted out in tribute to each other (rather than the poem).

There is much to enjoy in Paulin’s The Secret Lives of Poems. And the book is provocative, speculative, experimental, brilliant, simply a book that takes the reader into a labyrinth of sounds and contexts. Dull this book isn’t. The final poem investigated is McKendrick’s “Apotheosis”. It makes a fitting ending to a study that metamorphoses literary criticism.