tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-279889442024-03-13T07:18:27.110+00:00MercuneuticsCritical Reflections from a Hermetic Point-of-view.A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-23353248325287108392020-03-10T13:47:00.001+00:002020-03-15T19:50:16.691+00:00Connor and Seal, Jee Leong Koh<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Jee Leong Koh’s latest book feels like a work that
has been waiting to hatch for many years. It is a new departure, Koh has never
repeated a concept, but it is, at the same time, a book that brings to focus
two longstanding concerns. The first of these is poetic and the second of these
is personal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Ever since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Payday
Loans</i> (2007), Koh has been asking a question about poetry: does a poet
learn best by inhabiting a set form or by wandering from one form to another? Is
life a contained house like Dickinson or an open road like Bishop? The toing
and froing can be seen in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Payday Loans</i>,
a sonnet series, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Equal to the Earth </i>(2009),
a variety of forms, then back to a series of ghazals in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seven Studies for a Self Portrait </i>(2011)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connor and Seal, </i>the
two threads interweave: Part One adopts highly varied forms; Part 2 adheres to
a single form. The result is a book built from loose observations and tight
reflections. Taken together, the two parts make a blistering whole. The
narrative method glances in the direction of Rita Dove’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thomas and Beulah </i>(1986) in which two perspectives are given on a
relationship. Mirror faces mirror. And this new book follows on from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Steep Tea</i> (2015) where every poem responds towards a female muse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The second concern relates to identity: how do
nationality, gay, and poet coalesce? It is suggested by one of the book’s reviewers
that Koh is a follower of Auden. If anything, Koh descends from Gunn’s
ancestral tree, for he, no less than Gunn, pursues a belief that a writer must
have the freedom to write formally or not, and only when a poet follows a
belief that the poem knows its form – the stone knows the form that the sculptor
imparts it (Pound) – can s/he have the scope to ask questions about self; and probe
the relation of that self, the inside, to society, the outside.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">At the start of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connor
and Seal, </i>a timeline is given. This stretches from 1983, the birth of Seal
in Jamaica to the death of Connor, in America, in 2066. The book is at once a
description of the past and a projection of life into the future – probably,
the most challenging aspect of the volume as the reader has to embrace a sexual
universe that is science fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Part one of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connor
and Seal</i> is filled with inventiveness, wit and emotion. “A Tale of Two
Cities, Three Maybe” is written with sing-a-long bravado:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";"> She’s in
love with the boy</span></i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> She’s in love with the boy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> but after a whole year of suckin’ boner<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> she knows she’s been conned by Conner.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">“Ackee and Saltfish” is a layered lyric where every
syllable is weighed. And “Yellow Leaves (Turing)” is an original dialogue on
Shakespearean art between a human artist and an artificial intelligence <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Part two of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connor
and Seal </i>is written in sixty-two quatrains that approximate an ABBA
structure. Seal’s vision of life’s new order balances brutal honesty and
sensual frankness, one circling into the other like yin and yang. A surreal reality prevails: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>the
cancer sun of the computer screen<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>bathes
now the dying flower of my face<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>the
indices fall in a coup de grace<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>or
fly up tempting the empyrean.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The sequence is pulled towards a gravitational
centre, the sexual release of an exhausted Seal, then spins off into an
apocalyptic climax. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">he backdrop for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connor and Seal </i>is Harlem. A Harlem that has mutated beyond the gay
world of McKay, Barth</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "lucida grande";">è</span><span style="font-family: "verdana";"> Hughes, Locke and
Cullen, into a symbol for America itself, a Harlem that Koh celebrates for its
rich diversity. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;">A Harlem of the past, present, and future, a matrix into which Koh projects a relationship that crosses the fraught racial line and asks questions about race, gender, sexuality in Trump's repressive America and in the future.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;"> </span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Connor and
Seal </span></i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">is a challenging and
absorbing read, a daring publication by Sibling Rivalry Press, and a truly ambitious
work by its author.</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-78181600357126375682020-01-23T21:15:00.003+00:002020-01-28T10:59:09.886+00:00Playtime. Andrew McMillan<br />
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The Canadian literary critic, Terry Goldie, once posed a provocative question by way of a statement: does the homosexual, when not having sex, have an identity? If homosexual is an identity based on sexual activity, what exactly is the homosexual outside the sexual act? This tongue-in-cheek approach suggests a problem for the gay poet: there is a compulsion to write about gay sex so that identity is remembered and demonstrated. This approach underlies McMillan's book second book of poetry. Rather than move on from his triumphant <i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=27988944#editor/target=post;postID=3971021485651192570;onPublishedMenu=overviewstats;onClosedMenu=overviewstats;postNum=9;src=link">Physical</a> , Playtime </i>moves<i> </i>backwards into adolescence and the birth of sexual activity. Out of forty poems, nearly half are about sexual play. Of course, this fits one interpretation of playtime, and enlarges on the whimsical cover. The trades description act is not broken. At the same time, it reduces to the volume to a banal level: I am gay and this is what I do. </div>
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<i>Playtime</i> has received wonderful reviews, mainly from female critics, and they have managed to find wondrous lyrical play within the poems, identifying fissures in McMillan's poetic lines and observing the escape of emotion and blood. To me, they seem to have avoided the obvious: <i>Playtime </i>goes where many gay poets have gone before, and the poems, though dextrously written, hardly stretch the imagination. Poems tread familiar territory: there is the partner that is HIV positive and causes a visit to a sexual health clinic; there is the dash to view internet porn as a way of returning energy to sex; there is the overworked resemblance between physical sport and sexual exertion. There are poems where unusual meetings, "Phonebox", offer uncertainty and something tantalising and new. And poems, such as "Anaphora Penises", where the writing is pretentiously dull:</div>
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<i> when you've seen one you've seen them all I think</i></div>
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<i> </i>you're wrong each one is a fingerprint unique</div>
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each with its own way of being in the world ... </div>
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According to the blurb from Cape Poetry, <i>Playtime </i>tells us stories that "some of us ... have never found the courage to read before." And perhaps that is the problem for those of us who have had the courage to read poetry from the margins-- the shock tactics aren't shocking. The "vital ... confessions" are more a cause of embarrassment than "spiritual" revelation. I was left hoping that the bell would ring and end playtime early, so that lessons might begin.</div>
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A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-50209992316442014502020-01-23T11:55:00.000+00:002020-01-23T13:15:28.034+00:00Tilting Our Plates, Cyril Wong.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">A groundbreaking volume of poetry. The title suggests how the humblest of acts can be enlightening and the poems in </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">work through two clefs. The bass clef relates to mortal earth and the treble clef to mythological time. Two narratives exist together, the life of two male lovers and the the loving actions of the main Hindu gods. Each of the ten titled poems takes its title from a musical term, specifically the act of singing. Music enters Cyril Wong's poetry in this volume at two levels: the literal, where a reader hears melopoeia; the metaphoric, where music relates to time and states of existence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">In this work, the lovers are described, not characterised, and exist as moods in a musical composition. Time is a key theme of love poetry and this volume in particular where seven of the sections relate to musical tempo. The central and defining moment in the lovers' narrative is when both are found to be HIV positive. Yet this is described as "the gift", not as a tragedy, or as the religious line would be: a punishment for homosexuality. Life is a death sentence, so AIDS paradoxically becomes an aid that allows the lovers to face mortality and the nature of their love. As Sontag argued in <i>AIDS and its Metaphors</i>, AIDS is beset by military and violent metaphors that run counter to healing. The battle against AIDS reduces an individual to a casualty in a field of war. The poems in this volume hit a therapeutic chord.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><i style="font-style: italic;">Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light </i>is a volume about metaphor and how words bear life, support it and carry it across into understanding. In Western thought, the symbol for balance is the androgyne, the union of binary genders, two in one. Depth psychology would see this as the blending of Anima and Animus, vast cosmic archetypes. The closing of <i>Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light</i> suggests something else: the emanation Harihara, born as Shiva's maleness opens to Vishnu, creates a male-male archetype that opens a new understanding for the gay lovers and by implication: gay love.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Cyril Wong is a highly significant poet/gay poet. He writes with honesty and panache, but reveals an ability to write with the pedal pressed in this volume, sustaining desire from one poem to another and composing an original sequence of poems. Gay poet, like confessional poet, is not a reductive term when applied to Cyril Wong: it simply records one vital aspect of his creative universe. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><br /></span></span>A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-88118299392953387252020-01-21T13:44:00.000+00:002020-01-23T08:33:08.916+00:00Circumference, Poetic Measurement, Mark Ward<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><i>Circumference </i>usually
relates to a part of the anatomy in gay poetry. Thankfully, Mark Ward’s
<i>Circumference</i> has higher aspirations. His chapbook’s title conjures Donne’s
famous image of a circle that is drawn as two souls, like the legs of a compass,
yearn for one another. What evolves from the title is a fine collection of
poems that map the boundaries of human life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The plot of <i>Circumference</i>
is simple and that is one of the book’s strengths. Tommy’s father is dying and
that requires Tommy (the narrator) to return to Pepperell, a small town in
Massachusetts. Inevitably, this results in a confrontation with his mother who
has never coped with his sexual orientation, and memories of Mike, his first, traumatic love. The plot reads like the distillation of a larger work: only the bones are
left. And this works wonderfully because it allows Ward, as the author, to
concentrate on emotions: the reader is f</span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">reed from narrative
demands and allowed to follow every nuance of conflict and heartache. Ward
creates the local flavour of Pepperell well, but just enough to allow the
setting to generalise. It could be any small town anywhere, a place not unlike
the many towns where young gay men have struggled to find themselves and
stretch out their hands, like Blake’s God, but in defiance of Old Nobodaddy, to
break the circle of their mental and bodily imprisonment. There is a sense in
which <i>Circumference</i> is a modern morality play… it speaks to the gay Everyman as
he wanders the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The poems are split into
two time periods, 1939-42, when Tommy is in his teens and 1959, when he has
reached the age of thirty-five. This sets Ward a novelist’s problem: he must
create Tommy at 35 and Tommy’s recreation of himself at fourteen to eighteen—
without becoming over sentimental and childish. The child-voice must exist with
the man-voice. Ward spans this problem by writing poetry that selects a variety
of fitting forms. The opening two poems illustrate this transition well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> The intermittent man in my
bed </span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">decides</span> </div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">tonight to talk,</span><span style="font-family: "verdana";"> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">says Pepperell, </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> that can’t </i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">be a real place</span></i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">, and whatever little we had</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> dies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Stark, detached, casual,
Tommy is depicted precisely. Then the tightly controlled verse opens lyrically
as Mike is remembered: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> I don't sleep the night</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> stretches out like</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> days retreat into twilight</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> my missing Mike</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> my soul to keep in line of sight</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> a lengthy hike</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> haunting me so I decide</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Rhyme stratifies adult feeling, the ee in sleep/retreat/keep, the like/Mike/hike progression, the
night/light/sight final rhymes, and in the midst, a childish, Christian prayer: "</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">Now I
lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” There is sophistication,
but with Tommy at 14, a simpler list, as the poem switches between experience
and innocence:</span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span>
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> Everyone knows what a homo is</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;"> </span></span><br />
<i style="color: #222222; font-family: verdana;"> eyes locked to similar skin...</i><br />
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><i> </i>his only interest, destroying innocence</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> he swaddles himself, trying </i>[.]</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><i>Circumference</i> is a slight book in length, but it is one that
has taken </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">a considerable amount of crafting and leaves an impression
much deeper than its twenty-eight pages. This impact comes from the cohesion
created by Ward. A sequence is a difficult object to create, too much flow and
it melts away, poems only have meaning within a whole, too static and it is
just a collection of loose poems without relationship. The four in-the-present
poems that are titled Circumference are fluid creations whereas the in-the-past poems
are discrete pieces— some, like the heartfelt “Resisting Existence”, could be stand alone poems. The result is that of a mind in full flow
as it faces a crisis in the present and a mind that perceives the past in terms
of key, self-contained events. Such is a true reflection on how memory develops
with age. If we look back through time, to a moment of real emotion, Sterne’s
sentimental absurd, points at which time’s narrative deepens around some small
event, we can feel ourselves re-writing that event until we have a story that
makes intimate sense. There are poems in <i>Circumference</i> that do this sublimely,
poems such as “A School Photograph” and “Monsters in the Closet.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Saturdays
are spent in the dark;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>a
creature double feature, Mike’s hand<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>clasped
in mine, or trailing tickles<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>down
forearms. In almost darkness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>heads
can find shoulders, heartbeats<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>slow
to satiated symmetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">A childish event, going to the cinema, a treat, yet over it
arcs a child’s recognition of a psychological darkness and a worrying
awareness of how reality and the unreal mime one another. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">In a world where size falsely matters, novels are about blockbusters and trilogies and poetry is about the volume of around seventy poems (usually stuffed
with a lot of dross that detracts from the fine poems) it is good to see a
small press back a piece of short, quality writing </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">that is well worth reading and well worth buying.</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-48147918016609079632020-01-20T08:16:00.000+00:002020-01-23T08:33:30.732+00:00The Experiment of the Tropics, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bt4CDJOsBaA/XIIcyF9HA1I/AAAAAAAAB3Y/5f2K33FmoVoA1u4KO-5FWZrYv-onfxFkgCLcBGAs/s1600/51M2eAz7YtL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bt4CDJOsBaA/XIIcyF9HA1I/AAAAAAAAB3Y/5f2K33FmoVoA1u4KO-5FWZrYv-onfxFkgCLcBGAs/s400/51M2eAz7YtL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a writer from Cebu, a place name that translates as "trade". This new volume of poetry shows him to be an enterprising poet who is devoted to words and interchanging meanings. His first volume, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Highest Hiding Place </i>(2009), was awarded the Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award (2011). His second book of poetry, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Experiment of the Tropics</i> (2019), has
achieved the inaugural <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/gaudyboy/"><span style="color: blue;">Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize</span></a>. Recently, he has also gained the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; line-height: 19.32px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Ani ng Dangal award for contributions to art and culture. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Not surprisingly, these three awards identify Ypil as a writer whose work originates in Asia. </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">The Experiment of the Tropics </i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">takes the
Philippines as its framework and reaches out intellectually and lyrically:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Longing is a head turned away towards a
century.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Singing needs a somewhere else across an
ocean, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">beyond a mountain,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Meanwhile, a lark sitting on a bough sings
over and over </span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">until
we sleep.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(How Does Love Begin).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The first poem remembers the building of a dam in
Bolocboloc. Ypil, however, commemorates a group of three women and one man as
they stand and marvel (almost a transformation of Apollo and the three Graces).
The man holds out his hands in an erotic and robust gesture as water spills
from a protruding pipe. It is “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">magic</i>”.
Technological advancement gives way to wonder. This is a fitting start to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Experiment of the Tropics</i>. The
Tropics, the turning points upon Earth, are connected etymologically to tropes—
figurative expressions in language. And Ypil’s second volume reclaims the
forgotten through poetical motifs: magic, imagination, movement, journeys,
stasis, deportment, gesture, pose:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>…
If you can’t walk straight, dear sir,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>at
least sit straight [.]<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>(I
Could Say).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The poems in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Experiment of the Tropics</i> ask pertinent questions about colonialism and identity:
this is a volume with global appeal and timely relevance. The colonial agenda
has always liked to trumpet its success. The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (1904)
exhibited the progression of nations whilst portraying Filipinos as primitives.
Early photographs included in this volume portray the Philippines under USA
domination and correct the term “primitive”. The “experiment” in Ypil’s title cuts many
ways: it refers to the experiments practised by colonisers upon the colonised
and intimates the investigative nature of his volume. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In an
influential essay on gay poetry, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Orpheus
in the Bronx,</i> Reginald Shepherd raised key questions about identity
politics. Where a writer pursued what was already known about the self,
discoveries, he believed, would always be rhetorical and confined. When a
writer searched for the unknown and the experimental, then poetry began. As
rhetoric closes down images of the self, so poetry opens up ways of viewing the
self. The triumph of Ypil’s volume is that it constantly opens up, unfurls, and
in doing so he draws away from identity politics into a poetry that portrays
the complexity of who we are...as human beings...as citizens. The city, the polis, is a changing entity moving
in many directions and with many perspectives— just like the self. Images begin,
develop, and sometimes over-expose, disappear in the flux between history and
the present. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Experiment of the Tropics </i>includes some telling historical photographs. And like Roland Barthes, Ypil has a wonderful eye
for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">punctum</i>, the personal that
“punctures” and shocks, which affirms through its emotional connection:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>…
In the way the lone bud extended forlornly<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Towards
the ear of the man in the picture<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>as
if was the hand of his lover reaching<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>from
across the bed to part his hair— [.]<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>(The
Hankie in the Breast Pocket).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sexual
identity is a significant strand in this volume and one that harmonises with
the whole. Ypil has a marvellous sense of orality, the mouth and its sexual
energy, and how words become music on the page. His poetry is acutely phrased
and as carefully notated on the page as that of Robert Duncan or Cyril Wong. To
read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Experiment of the Tropics </i>is
to enter into an experience that absorbs and intrigues. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">This is a complete volume of poetry: finely type-set and proof-read, richly illustrated with compelling black and white photographs, and presented in a well-designed cover that suggests both an archipelago and the splintering of vision found within the poems. Poet and Publisher have created something exceptional in <i>The Experiment of the Tropics</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-4839621403104633732020-01-19T18:55:00.000+00:002020-01-23T08:34:18.709+00:00Soho, Richard Scott.<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oY8SW2IJNwo/XHQ2PMH4ZFI/AAAAAAAABwU/Njz_ghTKMcELTzTdPFjaPJfoAmgEvTaSwCLcBGAs/s1600/2Q%253D%253D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="293" data-original-width="196" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oY8SW2IJNwo/XHQ2PMH4ZFI/AAAAAAAABwU/Njz_ghTKMcELTzTdPFjaPJfoAmgEvTaSwCLcBGAs/s320/2Q%253D%253D.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OUqrgr88akE/XHQ2PNhpGVI/AAAAAAAABwY/6Oo_3hbBE_06tI2bIA1WqMwliuc3PP7dgCLcBGAs/s1600/tumblr_oq61ccx2Kj1sjmae6o1_400.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="400" height="304" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OUqrgr88akE/XHQ2PNhpGVI/AAAAAAAABwY/6Oo_3hbBE_06tI2bIA1WqMwliuc3PP7dgCLcBGAs/s320/tumblr_oq61ccx2Kj1sjmae6o1_400.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Richard Scott’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soho </i>is an exuberant, poetic cornucopia,
a horn-of-plenty, over-spilling with erotic similes and metaphors. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>& lovage boys were my<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>crops my ripe-red yield<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>my seeds each one exploding<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>onto my lips like and sherbet… [.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(le jardin secret).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Scott writes
enthusiastically about writing the word “cock”, in an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ambit</i> review on gay poetry. For him, it is a political act: a
“filthy shout” of defiance that sticks out from the page. This is where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soho </i>starts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">In the first poem, a reader
is asked to imagine a 17-18 year old Scott, as he sits in a public library, in
1998, making a political gesture. He reads through Palgrave's "Golden Treasury
of Verse" and humorously adds sexual graffiti to its pages. He starts with
a marginal entry: “COCK”. Reviewers have loved the bravado here and in doing so
have been deflected from paying attention to the poem and a key question: How biographically
true is it? Critics admire Scott for his confessional vulnerability— which
becomes something else when the poetry is stage-managed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the library where there is not one gay poem,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>not even Cavafy eyeing his grappa-sozzled lads— I<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>open again the Golden Treasury of Verse and write… [.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">There is something all too
knowing in the tone. Scott’s “grappa-sozzled lads” is a comical line, modern
and dissonant, but how apposite is it as an image? Cavafy’s homoeroticism is
Greek, melancholic after the event, fragranced by the wine-dark sea and
history. It has little to do with drunkenness and lads drinking Italian brandy.
The witticism isn’t quite as clever as Scott believes. It feels like a line
that works well in performance, but sits awkwardly on the page as a reader
reflects on what is being said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">There is something odd too
about this particular edition of Palgrave read by Scott. It contains Larkin
(b.1922) who could not have been in the "Golden Treasury of Verse"
that was despised by Pound and Modernism for its out-of-date Victorian
sentiments. Of course, the volume that Scott has in mind is the 1994 re-print
of Palgrave's work, which brought the anthology up-to-date. And here problems
of veracity begin. Scott quotes Hopkins, "tongue true and vaunt", and
relates ecstatically how he finally found a queer subtext (oral sex) in
Hopkin's "The Bugler's First Communion". That is miraculous indeed
for the poem does not occur in the "Golden Treasury" of 1994.
Furthermore, Scott's states (with eyes rolling in disbelief) that "In the
library... there is not one obvious gay poem." How odd, because in the
volume that Scott is reading there is a Shakepeare sonnet to his male lover, a
poem by Gunn about two male lovers (from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Man with Night Sweats)</i> and a pithy lyric from Anne Stevenson where she
describes <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Auden and Isherwood<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Stalking glad boys in Berlin. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">How are these missed? Scott's
poem concludes with an indelicate pun on "rimming" and another cliché
on come/cum: his wondrous interventions in the texts will
"illuminate" the matter for "readers-to-come." The poetry in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soho</i> is invariably reviewed as
confessional, when, in fact, it is a clever artifice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Scott’s “ prize-winning “Crocodile”
does convince, its snappy, biting lines deal bravely and boldly with male rape.
But “Childhood” and “Fishmonger”, which deal with paedophilia, are forced
constructs. They are examples of what has been termed Scott’s
“faux-confessionalism”, a slippery term indeed— poetically and morally. <a href="https://poetryschool.com/how-i-did-it/michael-marks-edition-richard-scott-cover-boys/">In an article for The Poetry School</a>, “How I did it”. Scott admits that his poem about
gay pornography, “Cover Boys”, is artificial: ”</span><span style="background: white; font-family: "verdana";">My poem isn’t true, but it is honest." This is a disconcerting line to take for it offers a reality that (as Scott confesses) was put together by Googling and has no connection to autobiography, to an interpretation of life events. Of course, every poem is a transmutation of life, but the Confessional mode, of all poetic styles, has to be rooted in a lived life, not in facts collected from the internet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i>Soho</i> is split into five parts— its library preface, Admission,
Verlaine in Soho, Shame and Soho. The second part is unevenly written. “Slav
boys will tell you” is a concrete poem, a mushroom that alludes to a cock, yet
again. The obvious, phallic joke is demeaning. Scott seems to have in mind the
“Slav boys” of gay pornography rather than the thoughtful gay poetry of Hamdija
Demirovic— a Slav boy at the time of writing his rich and experimental work.
“Public Toilets in Regent’s Park” is Gunn minus his frankness and sexual honesty. Verlaine in Soho updates the poet’s 1872-3
visit to London. In the fourth section, Scott provides helpful critical
signposts to Whitman, Doty, Socrates, Genet, Freud, Bersani, Sedgwick,
Foucault, Socrates, Hanson in case the reader might miss them. The bias towards
Theory rather than poets indicates the direction in which the writing
heads—Hanson’s essay on “Teaching Shame” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gay
Shame</i>. The final section, a Whitmanesque paean to Soho and gay history, is
the strongest of all the sections. Here, Scott writes with force and
virtuosity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Robert Duncan in his
daring self-outing, “The Homosexual in Society”, objected to the term “gay”, to
its cheerful superficiality, to its willingness to overlook sorrow and the depths
of male identity. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soho</i>, Scott has faced
the darker depths of being gay and for that he must be commended. He has shown
the dense shadow that is also part of the rainbow flag. The problem with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soho </i>is that its murkiness records shame,
and not much else, and not always honestly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><!--EndFragment-->A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-36521963911359373392020-01-18T22:15:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:22:36.831+00:00Poetry and Cannibalism.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WjPcAizkEBI/XHg5CpqJg4I/AAAAAAAAByU/PAHfSWw-010ld06e5vZIa8a-Zq2VIowLACLcBGAs/s1600/41YkifmgSRL._SX304_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="306" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WjPcAizkEBI/XHg5CpqJg4I/AAAAAAAAByU/PAHfSWw-010ld06e5vZIa8a-Zq2VIowLACLcBGAs/s320/41YkifmgSRL._SX304_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="195" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thom Gunn’s <em>Boss Cupid</em> (2000) contains a disturbing sequence of poems about the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. Reviews at the time of publication acknowledged Gunn’s daring imagination in this sequence. This was a poetry of bravado (even machismo, yet another example of Gunn’s fearless, masculine worship of Eros and power). Reading the sequence eight years later, they seem nonetheless disturbing. Why? Firstly, they link poetry and its relationship to beauty with acts of incredible ugliness. Secondly, they use an ironical strategy that is awkward. The strategy is in bad taste— unpalatable— phrases that suggest exactly what the sequence is about. Not just Eros and power, but the taste of civilisation, its consumption of sex.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Gunn was no stranger to Pound. He did, of course, edit an introductory volume on Pound for Faber, and the title of Gunn’s cannibal sequence, "Troubadour", plays with the Poundian world view of poetry. As Pound said, hermetically, punning in “Visiting Card”: AMOR is the energy that drives ROMA and ROMA/civilisation is AMOR/love in reverse: its reflection. “Troubadour”, <em>Songs for Jeffrey Dahmer</em>, are offered as songs to be sung by Dahmer, as if Dahmer himself was a troubadour from the middle ages. And Dahmer sings, not as Daniel, not as Cavalcanti, but as a mad Pierre Vidal, a symbol of perverted life (Vidal=vital), a poet-lover whose erotic desires changed him (so it is said) into a wolf. <em>E fo del plus fols homes que mai fossen</em>. “He was one of the maddest men that ever lived”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The opening line of “Hitch Hiker” stands somewhere between modern pop song and Elizabethan song. “Oh do not leave me now,” is a line that opens a taut lyric wherein Dahmer reflects on the body of 19 year old Stephen Hicks; except, in Gunn’s poem, there are no specifics and the speaker addresses a generalised you. In the second poem of the sequence, “Iron Man”, the ironic direction is pursued fully. Animal-like, “in the kennel of...inaction,” Dahmer returns to adolescent masturbation fantasies and men who were “good enough to eat.” Proleptically, his sexual consumerism (of male images) looks forward in time to a point when he will eat the bodies of men…literally. The third poem, stylistically, returns to the first and draws close to what fascinates Gunn. The crawl-space in which Dahmer concealed his victims becomes a metaphor for the poetic space in which the poet-lover seeks to draw close to the “hidden centre” of the beloved. The final poems in the sequence, “A Borrowed Man” and “Final Song”, are acts of remembrance, a putting together of members/limbs such that memory holds the hunger of sex. They draw close to Dahmer’s view of cannibalism. By eating his sexual partners “They made [him] feel like they were a permanent part of [him]”. Dahmer’s grim museum of body parts transcends memory, however, for they are actual records, fetishes of Eros. The whole sequence reads like a perverse, cannibalistic <em>Symposium</em>, a banquet of erotic horrors seen as beautiful truths.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Gunn’s "Troubadour" presents the world through Dahmer’s mouth. It leaves a sickening taste in the reader’s imagination (and stomach). The ironical strategies within the poem avoid what cannot be avoided. The real victims. And rather more disturbingly, the racist desires that drove Dahmer. As his pornographic desire for sex became a lust for a certain kind of body type, his victims became young African American men who were socially and emotionally vulnerable to his predatory, controlling instincts. Gunn says nothing about these themes, preferring to make Dahmer a type for gay, male love at the extremes. Dahmer simply takes Gunn’s gnawing of armpits to a darker, sexual level.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In <em>Otherhood</em> (2003), Reginald Shepherd also creates a poem around Dahmer and sexual desire. But in Shepherd’s “Hygiene” nothing is avoided. The two approaches are very interesting. Gunn is known for his directness and yet the ironical under-cutting of “Troubadour” makes for a poem that is indirect, circling around core areas. Shepherd’s poetic method is elliptical, renowned for its orbiting of a felt core, its heart. But what he produces in “Hygiene” is a poem that has more honesty and insight than Gunn’s. Its directness comes from an honesty of direction/intent. Shepherd’s methodology owes something to Duncan’s open field composition, a charged network of ides, yet the final energy is original, pure Shepherd. Working from an image of Athene Hygeia, the goddess of wisdom and sanitation, Shepherd progresses to a dark image of Pilate-like cleansing, “Everyone in this town is still washing his hands/ of Jeffrey Dahmer”. The sanitation of memory contains a lie: it avoids a racial crime. Like Gunn, Shepherd picks up the deadly pick-up instincts of Dahmer: “Couldn’t you just eat him there?” But in “Hygiene”, there is no attempt to romanticize Dahmer. He represents the White male who stalks the Black male, how one part of society hunts another. In the lines “Every white man on my bus home looks/like him, what I’d want to be destroyed/by, want to be”, the poem recapitulates the terrible dynamic that Fanon outlined in <em>Black Skin, White Mask</em>; and in the inter-locking syntax, Shepherd intelligently captures the twisted relationship between captivation and captive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Gunn’s “Troubadour” was originally conceived before <em>Boss Cupid</em>, was set to music by Jay Lyon in 1998. Shepherd’s “Hygiene” was anthologized in <em>Real Things</em> (1999). Written so close together, the two poems appear as intimate reflections by two poets on society and Eros. If Gunn started with Pound, Shepherd started with the protégé of Pound, Cummings. The epigram to “Hygiene” comes from Cummings’ “Buffalo Bill”: “how do you like your blue-eyed boy/Mister Death”. The suggestion is that Dahmer, the preferred White American boy, is as much a product of the American psyche as Buffalo Bill. Of the two reflections on dark Eros, I have to say that I find Shepherd’s more incisive and less forced…more able to confront and visualize the relationship between the individual and social psyche.</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-35001826521763522672020-01-18T11:44:00.000+00:002020-01-23T12:25:31.769+00:00Robert Duncan: Centenary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g5tAMzd3rhs/XHkZc6IFAXI/AAAAAAAAB1s/7bP1_PslWn4UFadu5Y32SBxoCi2cM4E6ACLcBGAs/s1600/imgres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g5tAMzd3rhs/XHkZc6IFAXI/AAAAAAAAB1s/7bP1_PslWn4UFadu5Y32SBxoCi2cM4E6ACLcBGAs/s320/imgres.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">2019 was the centenary of
Robert Duncan’s birth. Born on January 7<sup>th</sup>, as a mid-Capricorn,
Duncan (a committed Hermeticist) would have heard instant rhymes between his birth
and the life to come. Capricorn is shaped after the Sumarian god, Enki. He was
the god of intelligence, the “ear” of the Universe. Duncan was to become a poet
with a refined ear, developing a complex, open-field poetry, with a visual
layout that indicated the voice’s music, the timing of sound, silence, and
breath. Being ruled by Saturn, the Capricornian personality is driven by the
darker parts of the psyche. This dominates much of Duncan’s poetry, giving it
range and melancholic depth. The tone is heard clearly in “Heavenly City,
Earthly City (1947) and “Berkeley Poems” (1966):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The heart in the darkness of the city sings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Among my friends, love is a great sorrow,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It has become a daily burden, a feast,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A gluttony for fools, a heart’s famine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Often, this saturnine
spirit has been attributed solely to Duncan’s homosexuality. Certainly, there
is a basis for that. In his daring self-outing in “The Homosexual in Society”,
Duncan was scathing about the levity he found in the gay lifestyle:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> … </span><span style="background: white; font-family: "verdana";">one found that the group language did not allow for any
feeling at all other than this self-ridicule, this “gaiety” (it is significant
that the homosexual’s word for his own kind is “gay).</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "verdana";">But behind “the love that is a great sorrow” and the “feast”
that cannot be enjoyed, is the myth of Tiresias, the poet as prophet, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana";">someone who could not enjoy a daily meal because his
cornucopia of plenty (another Capricorn image) was snatched away by the
Harpies.</span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "verdana";">At the opening of The H.D. Book, Duncan’s masterwork on
poetry— </span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "verdana";">by way of a sustained meditation on the Hermeticism of H.D.—
Duncan laments the point at which literary education, if not all education,
took the wrong path: it is the point at which “self-improvement” replaced
“self-knowledge.” That is a truly saturnine perception, a person might bring
Milton’s <i>Il Penseroso</i> to mind: a mind turned to a gloomy Muse and the darkness
of the cosmos. Rather than encourage students to venture inwards, like an
alchemist, to find the vitriol/glass of vision—</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><b>V</b>isita <b>I</b>nteriora
<b>T</b>errae</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> <b>R</b>ectificando
<b>I</b>nvenies <b>O</b>ccultum <b>L</b>apidem— teachers have turned to an outward reality, simply
improving an individual for society’s needs.</span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">The
image of poet-mentor casts a long shadow over Duncan’s work. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">And
it is the weight of this, rather than his homosexuality, that accounts for the
melancholy bass throughout his work. The darkness heard in the early poems expands
through Duncan’s open sequence of </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">Passages:</i></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>None will raise his eyes to the stars
at night<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Nor take thought if his life light
years and the outer reaches<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>of Heaven before he was;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(Passages 17). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">Translating
from the <i>Hermetica</i>, “The Asklepios”, Duncan envisages the greatest
sadness—being an orphan among the stars.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">But
set against this darkness is another element of Capricorn: a capriciousness, a
tendency to turn, to follow the turnings of poetry, and make the leap from
earth to heaven, from dark to light— black ecstasy. Following Agrippa (and
Milton), Duncan recognises a divine melancholy in which the fires of vision
burn in the name of Love: this is the dark solar solstice, the cosmic
turning point, which occurs in Capricorn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> Under
the lemon tree<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> a</span>s I drowsed on the sun, I heard,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> Lucifer’s
Song in Love of His Lord,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> f</span>iery essence, the black desolation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> ascending
thru the created hierarchies<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> into
the light of the Beloved.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>("Out of the Black").<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">At
the close of Groundwork II, “In the Dark”, his final volume, Duncan returns to
a haunting image of Dr John Dee, who was Elizabeth I’s mathematician, astrologer,
and architect of Gloriana’s imperial imagination. In an obsidian mirror, a
black stone, Dee conversed with angels. And Duncan remembers this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>… The magic <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> has always been there, the magnetic purr<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> run
over me, the feel as of a cat’s fur<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> charging
the refusal to feel. That black stone,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";"> now
I see, has its electric familiar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">Out
of blackness, the energies of magnetic obsidian, comes an energy that defeats ennui or acidia. It is deeply appropriate that Duncan’s work closes with a tribute to
Pound, who began Duncan’s lifelong journey into open form— in “That black
stone”, Pound’s rose in the steel dust, a metaphor for the energy of the Image,
is recast. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "verdana";">Duncan
remains one of the most vital poets: and his contribution to “gay” poetics
should never be forgotten.</span></div>
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A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-14434718643217257492020-01-17T15:24:00.000+00:002020-01-23T08:35:12.974+00:00Scott, Wong and Gunn, The Poetics of Sex<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PXKw5-hDQJ4/XH_hqNF8OLI/AAAAAAAAB24/e66trc-B4GkW-CKjMsZpy5Y63dKn3DSgACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/imgres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="196" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PXKw5-hDQJ4/XH_hqNF8OLI/AAAAAAAAB24/e66trc-B4GkW-CKjMsZpy5Y63dKn3DSgACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/imgres.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Writing in <i>The Poetics of
Space</i>, Bachelard discusses box-like spaces in terms of intimacy and security.
Locked boxes represent hiding, are protected hermetic spaces. Though they are
never absolutely safe, he remarks, because they can be threatened by extreme
violence. (And it should be added: guile). These thoughts echo around the
toilets in gay poetry, not in quite the way that Bachelard would have seen. But
yes, cubicles, from the Latin “to lie down”, are confined spaces, like shells,
that open up to a world beyond their smallness— they have an interior life that
is separate from the outside. Also, they are places open to police entrapment
and surveillance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The confined space of the toilet-box, as <a href="https://lux.org.uk/writing/off-streets-toilets-marc-siegel">Marc Siegel</a> has argued (in relation to a 2017 art exhibition in Berlin that featured
men and urinals) is a synecdoche for the
closet, for the shame in which gay men seal themselves away with forbidden
desires. The </span><i><span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Pissbudenschwulen</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">, cottagers or tea-room users, are viewed in German gay culture as the lowest level in the gay sexual
hierarchy. Three very different poems by Thom Gunn (<i>The Passages of Joy</i>, 1982),
Nicholas Wong, (<i>Crevasse</i>, 2015) and Richard Scott (<i>Soho</i>, 2018) reveal different
visions of the toilet/closet. Reading them chronologically, but in reverse, is
interesting, in terms of what they say about gay “identity” and how they
operate as poems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Public Toilets in Regents Park.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">The men hear are bird footed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">feathering past the attendant’s
two-way mirror<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">unperturbed by the colonising
micro-organisms<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";"><i>bulleidia<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>cohetia<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>shigellosis<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Scott’s “bird footed” dehumanises
the cottaging men from the onset and the meaning isn’t exactly clear. Is the
reader to imagine them as web-footed and adapted for puddles of water? Or does
Scott mean that they resemble dinosaurs? The term “bird footed” usually appears
in Paleontology. The gay men blur as they pass the spying mirror, if we read
“feathering” in a technological way. As is typical with Scott, the poetry moves
excitedly with thematic metaphors and there is a tendency to word-play rather than fix a real scene: “feathering” is
looking towards the end of the poem where gay men have idiomatically feathered
their nest. In lines 3-4 there is a switch to a medical register and
“colonising” indicates that the men are not in control— are subject to disease's colonial
rule and infection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Stanza 2 develops this theme: this
is a place where the “fist deep” pool” in the u-bend and the activities on
offer produce a risk of venereal infection. Of course, Scott intends the
sexual-pun on “fist-deep” and “fisting”, but is the cleverness appropriate
here? Fisting is not an activity usually associated with cottagers, those on the borders of gay
sex, nor is it likely in a small cubicle. The iconography of cottaging centres on the glory hole. Here, again, Scott is playing with images rather than imagining
the psychology of the scene. The men are cyphers in a language game. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Compare this with Wong:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Self-portrait as a Cubicle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Keep me clean—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">that microbial oval toilet seat,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">over-used, turned <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">ivory with occasional drips<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">of yellow<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">a Jackson Pollock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">on periphery.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Literally, Wong provides a ground
perspective. In a state of metamorphosis he has become the cubicle. He seats
himself objectively outside the act. The poem fulfils the next stanza:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Keep me sanitized<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">The poetry is cleaned up. Superfluous
words are removed. And it cleverly reverses Duchamp’s art process. His infamous
readymade, <i>Fountain 1917</i>, became a work of art because of how <i>he</i> saw it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Here,
the cubicle claims art as its own. The poem turns craftily on “drips/of
yellow.” The “drip” paintings of Pollock are conjured up and the toilet signs
itself as a work of art. At the closing of the poem, the cubicle is animated
into a human participant. By removing himself to an object outside of himself,
Wong depicts not only the isolation that comes with being gay but also the
alienation that comes with writing his experiences, especially intimate sexual one, in a colonial language. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">These poems show two very
different views of sexualised cubicles. Thom Gunn’s version of the
closet/toilet is written from an entirely human perspective. His poem is an
impulsive and known encounter, rather than an improvised and anonymous one. By
setting it within dialogue, as a story being told, Gunn preserves an intimacy
between two men and draws a reader into the poem as a third party. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">The Miracle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">“Right to the end, that man, he
was so hot,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">That driving to the airport we
stopped off<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">At some McDonald’s and do you know
what,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">We did it there. He couldn’t get
enough.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #323232; font-family: "verdana"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">—<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">There at the counter? — “No, that’s public stuff<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">‘There in the rest room. He pulled
down his fly,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">And through his shirt I felt him
warm and trim.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">I squeezed his nipples and began
to cry<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">At losing this my miracle… [“.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">This poem is model Gunn. Iambic
pentameter is loosened into<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>memorable
speech and exact casual rhymes create a bound experience. Within traditional
form, unorthodox subject matter is gradually exposed. And the eye is firmly on
sensation, especially touch, as language moves towards a spiritual,
psychological boundary— “my miracle”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">How far a poem can travel in a
short space of time is often a test of quality. By the close of Scott’s poem, a
reader has moved through some rather forced ornithological metaphors, “a
beautiful cock unfolding like a swan’s neck”, heard “gasps of contact…inside
each nested cubicle” (do toilet cubicles nest inside one another like living
room coffee tables or storage boxes?), to the point where the sexual occupants
“disperse as mallards from the face of a pond”. The termination of the poem is appropriate, it does portray how the cottaging males escape quickly and return to
their natural environment. They merge once again into their parkland habitat.
But the poem has done nothing new: it has described cottaging in lurid detail,
as a locus of shame, and that is it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Wong’s poem concludes by drawing
together a variety of eyes. The art object views the eye peering through a hole
in its body and beholds the human in the next cubicle as a lover of beauty: it
sees in its artistic terms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">You peep<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">through it, a fecund<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">kaleidoscope<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">for a face—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">less prepuce<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">cordoned off by me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Kaleidoscope etymologically is
made from “beauty” and “form”, though “scope” suggests seeing and visual form.
The words rotate as a kaleidoscope does. A reader sees (with the cubicle) an
eye gazing through the hole. The adjective “fecund” suggests intellectual/aesthetic
productivity, exactly what the lavatorial art object would perceive. The “face”
in the next cubicle is reduced to its hole, but the existence of a face is
acknowledged. A further reduction occurs as “face” becomes <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“faceless prepuce” and a penis obliterates the
human: the man is nothing except his penis. The poem ends by observing with a
sense of wonder and vision whilst recognising that the sexual act is
“cordoned”, restricted by the wall of the cubicle, and also, if we think of
“cordoned” as a line of bodies or a rope marking off a prohibited scene, an act
that is policed by the cubicle and by society. This is a fine example of
concision— a lot is covered in a few lines. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">At the close of “The Miracle”, a miraculous
love is symbolised by a stain that is left on one of the men’s boots as a result of sex. This
leads to:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">How can it still be there?” – “My
friend, at night<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">I make it shine again, I love him
so,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Like they renew a saint’s blood
out of sight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">But we’re not Catholic, see, so
it’s all right.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Gunn’s Hardyesque poem, based on
an anecdote told to him, converts the anonymity of the corporate bathroom into
a scene for corporeal desire and wonder-working: the lover becomes a pilgrim
who keeps his holy artefact in great shape by artifice. The poem is told with
wit and human sensitivity, and inserts American gay sex (provocatively) into
established English traditionalism. This poem bends Hardy, as does the epigraph
at the start of <i>Boss Cupid</i> (2010): “… a cool, queer tale.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #323232; font-family: "verdana";">Scott, Wong and Gunn are three
poets of the body, but they have very different perspectives on being gay. These
three poems from three countries and three continents— the UK, Hong Kong and the
USA, Europe, Asia and North America— record <i>Klappensex </i>with distinctive and
challenging perspectives. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-18697337567794058862020-01-16T22:56:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:01:12.003+00:00Double Vision in Barnfield's Homoerotic Poetry (2)<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Among
the London poets of the 1590s, pastoral epithets were established and shared:
Spenser as Colin, Drayton as Rowland, and Barnfield as Daphnis. Leo Daugherty
has argued convincingly that the Ganymede spoken of by Barnfield/Daphnis was
none other than William, Sixth Earl of Derby, who inherited the poetic title on
the death of his brother, Ferdinando (<i>William Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield
and the Sixth Earl of Derby</i> (p.13). The family’s heraldic crest bears an eagle
to connect them to the Ganymede myth. The Derby family were closely connected
to hermetical movements in the C16, most noticeably to Dr John Dee, who had
been the astrological and political advisor to Elizabeth I. Though Barnfield
dedicates <i>Cynthia</i> to William, saying “small is the gift”, he must have been
aware of how large was the connection. By linking <i>Cynthia</i> to the Sixth Earl, he
connects the book to Ganymede (his love) and hermetic political movements in
Elizabethan England—which is where the poetical vision begins.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">“Cynthia”
is composed around an elaborate conceit that Peele had used in The <i>Arraignment
of Paris </i>(1584). At the close of his dramatic masque (performed in front of the
Queen), Majestie (Juno/Hera), Love (Venus/Aphrodite), Vertue (Minerva/Athene)
refuse the golden ball/orb of power and present the gift to Elizabeth. (In
<i>Astraea</i>, pp.63-4, Yates notes Barnfield’s imitation of this theme). This poetic
conceit was also visually present in a painting by Eworth (1569) hung at
Whitehall Palace. Elizabeth, as Paris, as three-in-one, a trinity harmonizing all of the goddesses, maintains the orb for herself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Using
hermetical number symbolism, Stanzas 1-15 of “Cynthia”, form a ladder of ascent
(as in <i>The Psalms</i>) that culminate in a vision of the triple-formed Elizabeth,
the Spenserian Faerie Queene who possesses Power, Loveliness and Wisdom. Stanza
16 celebrates Elizabeth as the Sun and Stanza 17 as a “peerelesse Prince”.
Unlike the visual conceit of Eworth, Barnfield dwells on the androgynous nature
of Elizabeth who is both the Idea of physical pulchritude in woman and of
mental wisdom in men. Such is an orthodox Spenserian view (Britomart,
Belphoebe, and even Una in whom Sylvanus see his youthful male beloved, Cyparissus).
“Cynthia” is a vision of political order in the key of chastity. The twenty
sonnets that follow are homoerotic, but also in the key of Virgo. This is
introduced by the Latin emblem for the whole volume: <i>Quod cupio, nequeo</i>, “What
I desire, I cannot have.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">In
taking the pseudonym, Daphnis, Barnfield draws upon classical Greek myth. He is
the male laurel, Apollo’s tree, a shepherd son of Hermes, who offended Eros and
Aphrodite and was consequently cursed with unrequited love. He is the
homoerotic poet whose desire cannot be consummated. His Ganymede isn’t the
Ganymede of traditional mythologizing, but a beautiful boy, as Sonnet 9
explains, whom was created by Diana and Venus—a contained lover wholly “to
chastity inclinde.” The twenty sonnets place homoerotic desire in the context
of a world where they cannot be physically realised, yet, as Neo-Platonism
claimed, they allow for a poetic birth out of chastity (just as Elizabeth’s
reign as Gloriana was born from her chastity). <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The twenty sonnets, as already, said parallel the twenty Spenserian Stanzas of Barnfield's Gloriana vision. They also consciously open where "Cynthia" closes: Beauty, Majestie and Virtue quarrel over who shall possess Ganymede. Beauty/Love/Venus demands his lips, his cheeks, his eyes and hair; Majesty/Hera requests his brow, chin, countenance and stature; Virtue asks only for his Modesty and wins. If Barnfield had been a cultured Neo-Platonist, he would have known, as Ficino and Bruno argued via the myth of The Judgement of Paris, that a trinity should not be split, but remain as a dynamic whole. Virtue triumphs in Sonnet 2 and in Sonnet 3, Barnfield dismisses Virtue in favour of Beauty/Love, for he wishes for </span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">"loues faire eie" alone (line 14). Sonnet 4 diverges further still from the trinitarian vision of "Cynthia" as Barnfield recognises that Ganymede, unlike Elizabeth, is a sun with night, so does not dwell in continual glory. The Barnfield<i> s</i>onnets progress towards a homoerotic love for Ganymede, under the guidance of one goddess, Venus. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The sensual core of the <i>Sonnets </i>commences with Sonnet 6. This has been described disparagingly as a wet-dream poem. Such a judgement is somewhat adolescent itself. This is a young poet writing within the conventions of his time, not a C20 confessional poet... Sonnet 6 describes the rejuvenating effect of sexual release. And Sonnet 7 recognises the beauty and fear contained within desire. Barnfield's swan on the Thames is stock imagery from Drayton's <i>The Shepherd's Garland </i>(1593), but there are some gentle, personal touches. Ganymede is a "pruned" lover, like a swan that has oiled its feathers with its beak, and his feathers/hairs are massaged and decorative-- the imagery runs beautifully into Neptune washing the lover's feet with splashes of water. An extreme modern reading by Charles explains Barnfield's fear, at this point, as one of "outing" ("Barnfield's Lovers Discourse", <i>The Affectionate Shepherd, Celebrating Richard Barnfield</i>, p.179). Thetis, being heterosexual, will divulge the gay love between Ganymede and Daphnis. There is little, however, within the text to support this modern interpretation. Barnfield states that he does not fear Neptune (even though he loved the boy Pelops, which is implied) nor Apollo who desired the boy Hyacinthus, nor Sylvanus who loved Cyparissus. They would understand his desire. His fear is Thetis and the currents of heterosexuality. Ganymede's love wounds like the spear of Achilles (Sonnet 5) and Achilles' mother could open up dangerous tributaries.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The sonnets are unswerving in their aim towards pleasure. They refuse to pull back into a refined, distant worship of Neo-Platonic Mind and Courtiership. The target is nature's "lips ripe strawberries in Nectar wet" (Sonnet 17). In making this choice, Daphnis must accept that he draws further away from the political context of "Cynthia". That distance is measured in Sonnet 15 (a climactic point, as in "Cynthia") where Barnfield notes that divine males loved boys and did not look down on pastoral swains whereas the Court and intellect are "infected" by pride. Chastity has become hard-heartedness. In sonnets 16 and 17, Barnfield focuses on the problematical nature of language in the <i>Sonnets. </i></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Weening to kisse his lips, as my loue's fee's (fees?)</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">I feel but Aire, but Aire to bee him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Thus with Ixion, kisse I clouds in vaine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Thus with Ixion, feele I endles pain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">(ll. 11-14)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Punning on "fees" as expenses and intercourse, Barnfield senses that his sexual metaphors are no more than deceptions--like the duped Ixion, he is left penetrating a cloud-shaped Hera/Majesty--and thus acquiring a life of "endles paine". Even so, in Sonnet 17, an alternative pleasure is imagined in which the beautiful body, exceeding Apollo and Adonis, might create a beautiful body of words to be loved. Eventually this to-and fro-ing comes to a point of exhaustion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The
“Ode” that follows the two sequences describes the death of Daphnis. Here, Barnfield's model is Theocritus' <i>Idylls</i> 1. An unknown speaker finds Daphnis weeping for his beloved. "Fancy" pulls Daphnis towards his boy love and "Love" pulls him towards a nymph. Consequently, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana";">he
abandons Ganymede for a triple-formed Eliza (Beauty, Majesty and Wisdom). It is
a surrender to Elizabethan times, one that requires he give up a fanciful
desire for Ganymede (homoeroticism) for what love commands: heterosexuality. His acceptance of that Idea leads to a broken heart. Using the pastoral mirror of The Golden Age, the Daphnis poems, in </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Cynthia</i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">, are an exploration of same sex desire in Elizabethan England.</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-39710214856511925702020-01-16T20:09:00.000+00:002020-01-22T11:41:33.558+00:00Physical, Poetry and Andrew McMillan<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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</span><br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">Andrew
McMillan’s </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Physical</i><span style="font-family: "verdana";"> was recently nominated for the Forward
Prize for Poetry and won The Guardian First Book Award, in November,
2015. It was a deserved win and one notable for a number of
reasons. </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Physical</i><span style="font-family: "verdana";"> placed poetry on The Guardian First Book
Award list for the first time in 16 years. (A shocking reminder of how a
powerful cultural force historically has become side-lined among readers...to
the point that only two poets have ever made the shortlist). The accolade also
acknowledged the talent of a gay writer whose themes are not immediately in
touch with the lives of the many book-groups that took part in the judging
process: a tribute to liberalism and fair-mindedness. (Curious, though, how the
book groups felt the need to recognise the difference and remoteness in
McMillan's gay life yet somehow felt close to a mythically inspired novel about
a fishing expedition in Nigeria! Perhaps, that fact tells us something about
reading habits and genres: when it comes to novels, readers actively seek
fictional worlds beyond their own reality; when it comes to poetry they seek an
endorsement of their own world). And finally, the win recognised a
poetical voice that is Northern and rooted and mercifully free of dreaming
spires and English</span><i style="font-family: verdana;">ness</i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">At
the presentation in London, McMillan paid tribute to his editor at Cape, Robin
Robertson, and that seems a sensible place to begin this review of <i>Physical </i>because
so much of how poetry appears these days is down to the work of a poet and how
that work is manipulated by publishing houses into its final form.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The
introductory blurb by Cape promotes McMillan’s poetry as an “almost religious
celebration of the flesh” in “colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy
Metaphysical music”. That “almost” is quite revealing, for it notes
that this description isn’t McMillan’s work exactly; in fact, the tone of
worship is about as close to religion as the semen stain that Gunn memorizes
with such precision on “the toe of a boot” in “The Miracle” (<i>The Passages
of Joy</i>, 1982). Each night it is polished and renewed like
"a saint’s blood". It is unfortunate that, in England, when it comes
to male-to-male sexual writing, we are unable to promote naked flesh without
dressing it in spirituality. One of McMillan’s achievements is that he is able
to love the flesh for what it is and write with candour…and wit. The Cape blurb
has led some reviewers to hear the blurb rather than the actual poetry and talk
of “hymns to the male body”, as if McMillan is Michelangelo addressing
Cavalieri. (This is encouraged by the cover’s representative gay, naked male,
which echoes the provocative design that Carcanet produced for Neil
Powell’s <i>True Colours,</i> in 1991. Carcanet dared to go as far as
a bare torso with open trousers and a hanging leather belt. Cape has gone as
far as a crack-shot, de-capitated and de-membered, so as the viewer can add
their own desires to the smooth, marbled, classical body. McMillan's honest
poetry has nothing to do with the body-beautiful. But a beautiful butt sells
better than normality). Seduced by this, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/12/poet-makes-guardian-first-book-award-shortlist-male-body-andrew-mcmillan"><span style="color: blue;">Alison
Flood</span></a> has felt a “heavy scent of sensuality” in McMillan's work.
Probably, only a female reviewer with no unfortunate knowledge of male toilets
could describe a poem about male urinals as possessing a “scent”. The wit of
McMillan is learnt more from the twisting debates of Gunn and his ability to
transform a poem with a surprise conclusion is learnt from St. Thom rather than
directly from Donne and Marvell. As with Gunn, there is a modern Elizabethanism
and like the poet who paid homage to Hermes in <i>Moly</i>, McMillan is
well-aware of the poetical trickster. He uses the flow of words (no
punctuation) to create rich, Mannerist effects. What is most likeable about
McMillan is his love of verbal tricks rather than the usual dull accounts of
tricks picked up in gay bars. The “colloquial Yorkshire rhythms” are heard in
the middle section of <i>Physical</i>, in the re-published pamphlet
“protest of the physical”. And, maybe, they are heard too obviously, for comic
effect:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> drunk
man to the drunker woman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> <i>where
you from</i>? Barnsley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaarnslie<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The
northern voice is heard more effectively in the weighting of certain syllables
and words, in a dryness and flatness of tone. The long poem “protest of the
physical” <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/05/physical-andrew-mcmillan-review-poetry"><span style="color: blue;">has
been compared to <i>Howl</i> and McMillan to Ginsberg</span></a>. It isn’t
comparable and he isn’t:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> the
men are weeping in the gym<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> using
the hand dryer to cover<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> their
sobs their hearts have grown too big<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> for
their chests…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">That
could be Ginsberg’s <i>Howl</i>, but for the conscious irony and
analytical mockery. There is surrealism in "The Men are Weeping in the
Gym" that is closer to Liverpool, Patten and Henri, than Berkeley,
California. Those northern readers who know Route Publishers, in Pontefract,
and have read <i>Howl for Now </i>(2005) will not be fooled by such
empty comparisons. (There is critical life outside the South). McMillan is
McMillan and he possesses his own voice. In truth, “protest for the physical”,
though important to McMillan, as it got him out of a writing-rut and into
ploughing new fields;- isn’t the strongest work in <i>Physical. </i>The
most memorable poems are those such as “Urination” and “Yoga” where there is
direct communication with the reader and you listen to the voice in the words,
on the page, and the shifts of humour and pathos and a sense of what comes out,
not in poetry, but in the gay photography of Wolfgang Tillmans, where every
little thing matters and homeliness and the commonplace exist alongside
existence and uncertainty:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> the
toilet is an intimacy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> only
shared with parents when you are young<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> and
once again when they are older<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> and
with lovers when say on a Sunday<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> morning
stretching into the bathroom<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> you
wake to the sound of stream into bowl<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"> and
go to hug the naked body…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">I
would rather read that, on a Sabbath, than go to Church! That is poetic
communion. “Strongman” has wonderful humour and pathos and an ability to
present complex ideas in clear images. “Finally” is a plangent lyric with a
moving ending.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana";">The
problem in assessing </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Physical, </i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">is where to place McMillan as a
gay poet, something that current reviews avoid. (Do the reviewers know any gay
poetry outside Gunn and Ginsberg?) And something that Cape's publishing blurb
and public recommendations avoid too. Even Mark Doty alludes to "male
desire" rather than be direct about the nature of the poetry, allowing the
reader to deduce that this must be gay poetry because Doty, as the most
well-known gay (American) poet in the UK, as a Cape poet, is praising it to his
gay Cape readership. All of the </span><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/poet-andrew-mcmillan-growing-up-gay-and-the-books-that-helped-me-10393584.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: blue;">biographical,
journalistic pieces</span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="color: blue;"> </span>written about McMillan dwell on his gay sexuality,
yet this is rubbed away in the volume's shaping. Richard Scott, writing
for </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Ambit</i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">, places McMillan alongside Jee Leong Koh…because he
writes about “cocks”. He also sees McMillan as “Doty-esque”. Indeed, there is
influence from Mark Doty on McMillan: it is heard in the blend of narrative
construction and lyricism. Yet, Doty-esque he isn’t. The diminutive (though
Scott means it as praise) is not just. Like Randall Mann, in </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Breakfast
with Thom Gunn</i><span style="font-family: "verdana";"> (2009), McMillan writes with an eye on Gunn, but his
writing is truer to the spirit of Gunn and possesses a greater technical range.
As Gunn learnt from Robert Duncan without copying technique, so McMillan has
learnt from Gunn without becoming Gunn-esque. Gunn is the signpost at the
Yorkshire crossroads. It points in many directions, towards the Pennines and
beyond-- across the Atlantic. When writing, McMillan makes leaps in thought and
syntax that are like climbing a staircase and missing a step. Ground disappears
and re-appears. The love of language and how it can dazzle and deceive (like
the physical body) is reminiscent of Reginald Shepherd, though McMillan does
not push as far into realms of multi-layered perceptions. Shepherd is the true
gay Metaphysical poet (and Duncan). He is careful not to make his poems into
poems about language: they are poems about personal human experience. They are
confessional, yet they are not genre poems about coming out. They are
individual, contradictory poems that arise from the enquiring body that lived
and carried them. </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Physical </i><span style="font-family: "verdana";">is a significant debut by a poet
who can write about sexual identity without the dreary polemics of identity
politics. McMillan is an intriguing poet and a valuable, emerging gay poet.</span></div>
</div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-4141404904154636612020-01-15T21:44:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:02:03.664+00:00Double Vision in Barnfield's homoerotic poetry (1)<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Reading
habits are changing, as Alberto Mangual observes in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Traveller, the Tower, and the
Worm: The Reader as Metaphor.</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>The
World Wide Web takes the reader on a journey of many roads, often at
speed...and (I would add) frequently down the same paths with repeat
information. One of the problems with the World Wide Web is the ease of
reproduction: material is copied and pasted from one site to another such that
errors multiply. Like Spencer's wandering Red Cross Knight, the reader finds
that killing Error does not stop the spawning. Before attempting to review
Barnfield's<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Cynthia</i>, it is
necessary to remove some of the misconceptions about the author and his
work in general. Nothing new, I know will be said, but it is best to be on
solid ground as regards biography and influences.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Richard
Barnfield was baptised on June 13th, 1574, in Norbury, Staffordshire. As with
Shakespeare, his date of birth is not known. Little time, however, passed
between birth and baptism in the C16. Infant mortality was high, so parents
were eager to have their child ready for Heaven. Two days intervened in the
case of Elizabeth I. Richard Barnfield would have been born somewhere around
June 10th, 1574. Astrologically, this would have made him a Gemini. As a
follower of Spenser, who was well aware (as any learned person in Elizabethan
England) of hermetical matters, Barnfield was born under the sign of the
androgyne and twins. I would not wish to make too much of this fact, but it
should be kept in mind as a reader considers Barnfield's concern with twinning
and male to male love.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Two
dates are given (across the internet) for Barnfield's death, 1620 and 1627.
1620 is correct. As Worrall pointed out in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Notes
and Queries<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>(1992, pp.
170-1), the 1627 will, taken as evidence of Barnfield's death, was Barnfield's
father's will. That same will has been used to create a certain prejudice
against Barnfield: he married, had a son, Robert, and his poems, therefore, are
little more than a literary pastoral game by a heterosexual poet. Not so. It
should be added, as regards this line of prejudice, that even if Barnfield had
married it would not have meant that the poetry was automatically some kind of
posturing. Heterosexual marriage, then as now, was and is a convention that
"gay" men undertake. Interestingly, the prejudice is forgotten when
it comes to Shakespeare. He married, had two daughters and one son, yet<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Sonnets</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>are readily taken as masterpieces of
male to male sexuality.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The
Poetry Foundation has this to say about Barnfield: [he] "published <em>Cynthia</em>, modelling his collection—which
includes a 20-sonnet sequence—after the poems of Spenser and Shakespeare."
The mention of the "20-sonnet sequence" intimates an influence from
Shakespeare's sonnets. Across the internet, there are many discussion that
connect Barnfield's sonnets with those of Shakespeare. Such is unlikely. Recent
discoveries have linked the Dark Lady of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Sonnets</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>to Lucy Negro who was
a prostitute-actor, notably mentioned in the 1594 Christmas entertainments. Her
reputation spread through the rest of the decade. Prior to this connection,
critics attributed sonnets 127-54 to the middle of the 1590s. Now, this seems
to be likely. This only suggests a date of composition for these sonnets-- it
doesn't suggest an audience date. Certainly, Shakespeare's
"sugared-sonnets" were circulating among a literary elite in 1598, as
Mere's mentions them. But<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Sonnets<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>were largely unknown
until 1609. The idea that Barnfield was a diluter of Shakespeare is simply
incorrect. If anything, Shakespeare built on Barnfield's work, so the influence
works in the opposite direction to what is assumed across the internet. On a
simple technical note, Barnfield's sonnets are not Shakespearean sonnets: use a
different rhyme scheme and do not show the characteristic octet/sestet split.
If Barnfield accessed any Shakespeare beyond the early plays, it would have
been<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Venus and Adonis</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Rape of Lucrece</i>. The strongest influence on Barnfield is Spenser; and this
shows in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Cynthia</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Barnfield
was 20 years old when he wrote and published <i>Cynthia, which </i>opens
with two sections that are drawn together in a third poem, "An Ode".
"Cynthia"<i> </i>is a sequence of twenty Spenserian stanzas
spoken by Barnfield's pastoral persona, Daphnis. The sonnets, as already said,
number twenty and record Daphnis's love for Ganymede. "An Ode"
describes how an unmentioned person finds Daphnis broken-hearted for his love
of "a lasse" more beautiful than Ganymede. Numbers were often used to
carry silent meanings in Renaissance poetry and the double use of twenty
represents Barnfield, aged 20, split, like a halved androgyne, between two
different visions. But before those visions are looked at, it is useful to
set a context for the volume by discussing the framing of the poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><br />
</span><i><span style="color: black;">Cynthia<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></i><span style="color: black;">opens with an address to the reader. The
author is Barnfield. He begins by acknowledging<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Affectionate Shepherd</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(1594) as his work, disowns "two
Books" that have been wrongly attributed, and then refers to licentious
interpretations of his work. It has been said that Barnfield apologises for his
"</span><span style="color: blue;">interested representation of homoerotic desire</span><span style="color: black;">"</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: black;">(Norton, Rictor, "Pastoral Homoeroticism, p.6). In
truth, Barnfield simply disassociates himself from the wrong readings (not
stated overtly) and evokes classical precedent as his defence: Virgil's<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Eclogue II</i>. At the close of his
address. Barnfield makes it clear that the model for “Cynthia” is Spenser and
his returning to Spenser is worth some careful thought. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As
a student of Spenserian pastoral, Barnfield would have known the controversy
surrounding E.K.'s gloss on the homoerotic element of the "January"
eclogue in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Shepherd's
Calendar</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(1579). Colin
explains that he does not love Hobbinol, though Hobbinol loves him, and he is
devoted to Rosalind. A mere two lines of unsensual verse<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It is not Hobinol,
wherefore I plaine.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Albee my
loue he seeke with daily suit<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(Ianvarie, ll 55-56)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">caused
E.K to hear pederasty and defend Spenser, mainly via Plato. Rictor Norton
repeatedly points out (in articles across the net and in print) that Webbe
heard a similar note in the "June" eclogue and this caused him
to sneer, in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>A Discourse
of English Poetrie</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(1586), at
Spenser's familiarity with Italian sodomy. If this were true, Spenser would be
a dangerous model for Barnfield to use. In fact, in his<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Discourse,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>Webbe repeats that others have
said that Spenser used "unsavoury love" in "June" and was
aware of Italian sodomy, but all he hears in the eclogue is old friendship sacrificed
to heterosexual love, as often happens to young men. By making “Cynthia” into
"the first imitation of the verse of that excellent Poet Maister
Spenser", Barnfield is consciously making a connection with the homoerotic
element in English pastoral. And it is <i>English</i>
pastoral, nor Virgilian Latin/Roman/Italian pastoral because <i>Cynthia</i> continues the imperial theme of
Elizabethan England. There is no accident in how Spenser selects Spenser’s
dangerous “April” eclogue as a major source. In this eclogue Hobbinol refers
openly to his love for Colin, "on him was all my care and ioye"
(l.23) and then sings, in Colin's absence, one of Colin's harmonius
"lays". Hobbinol, the beloved, recreates his love with a song of
"Eliza, Queene of Shepherdes all" ("April", l.34). Spenser
sets Hobbinol’s nature inspired love of Colin as the context for a divine
vision of Elizabeth I’s reign. This connection is revived in <i>Cynthia</i>. The first poem, “Cynthia” uses
the Spenserian Stanza to overtly link Barnfield’s work with the political
vision of Spenser’s <i>The Faerie Queene </i>(1590), Books 1-3. The twenty sonnets
show, as Spenser did with Colin and Hobbinol, the natural love connected to
that political vision. Golden Age pastoral is used by Barnfield to connect the love of men to natural order, not unnatural lust.</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-1158568742242310662020-01-15T09:25:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:23:30.428+00:00<div align="justify">
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<span style="font-size: 130%;"><strong>The Lateness of Being? Essex Hemphill.</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">(Essex Hemphill--top left--from a photo by Rotimi Fani-Kayode).</span></div>
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As a poet, Hemphill faced, as he saw it, a triple exile. And there was a fourth exile made from trying to make sense of the three. Simply, Hemphill was an exile because he was black—he belonged to a minority ethnic group symbolically governed from the WHITE house. He was an exile because he was gay—he lived on a daily basis under the laws of heterotyranny. Finallly, he was a radical(black gay) poet—Hemphill would have said raDICKal—no publishing house was likely to put his words into print freely. Hemphill’s existence, like Red Annie who speaks these words to the USA, was founded on a hard struggle: Am I more black than gay? Am I more gay than black? Am I more a poet than black and gay? How does the black poet speak to the gay audience? How does the gay poet speak to the black audience? The permutations build a complex sense of identity in crisis--all of which were imposed by patriarchy upon Hemphill.<br />
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By adding “late” to “black gay poet”, unintentionally, the publicity blurb suggests that death too is a hard fact of existence—for Hemphill. This attaching of “late” to poets is becoming quite fashionable, but why?<br />
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Would we say the “late Shakespeare”? Well, no, because his death is a well-known fact.<br />
What about, then, the “late white gay poet Thom Gunn”. That sounds ridiculous. Again, the phrase is a kind of tautology because everything stated is well known.<br />
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So, what is that “late” supposed to say about Hemphill? He just died? Well no he didn’t: it is some 10 years since his death, so the “late” is not an obituary notice.<br />
He died from AIDS? * Is it the nature of the death that is important? Certainly, that would make sense as it was Hemphill’s gay-black status that placed him wide open to such a virulent and opportunistic disease. Yet, the “late” only contains this sense if a person knows the biographical facts—not much point in telling what is already known.<br />
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But this still begs a question, for me? Hemphill is a great poet—as good as Ginsberg, whose work exists in the present tense. His work is not dead and attributed elegiacally to a dead poet. Ginsberg is Ginsberg. Why can’t Hemphill be Hemphill?<br />
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This use of “late” is a form of modern, linguistic nonsense. It does not belong to Hemphill in some existential sense. It belongs to him in one sense only: the critical world has been late in its recognition of a significant gay, black, poet. </div>
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">* Marechera, like Hemphill died of AIDs... and in the mid 1980s, 40% of Zimbabweans were HIV+. Interestingly, this is not always mentioned about Marechera, but always mentioned about Hemphill. Heterosexual AIDs is best not mentioned whereas homosexual AIDs always has to be mentioned. There is also a tendency, now, to speak of Marechera as "late"...but this is from a different angle, as if critics would like the bad boy of African literature to take his ghost elsewhere. Perhaps, it would make more sense to speak of the living poetry of Hemphill and make sure the ghost continues to haunt.</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-67009365034768955672020-01-13T15:01:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:02:54.555+00:00Richard Barnfield's Cynthia <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iDt-0Mg9kEw/VlXNJb18T8I/AAAAAAAABOs/YfJpBkJdblc/s1600/dscf0467.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iDt-0Mg9kEw/VlXNJb18T8I/AAAAAAAABOs/YfJpBkJdblc/s320/dscf0467.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clive Hicks-Jenkins, illustration for the <i>Cynthia</i> sonnets.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For various reasons, poetry volumes are frequently badly reviewed. As modern collections are loosely focused, reviewing habitually consists of picking out a few poems, saying why they are liked, and then adding some sort of value judgement on poetic themes and achievement. This method doesn't work for Renaissance volumes that are planned with structural images, for they demand that a reader has a sense of unity and reference. Perhaps, there is more to Barnfield's </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cynthia </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">than obviously meets the eye. Next post will return to Barnfield's homoerotic works of 1595.</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-62996964218263735432020-01-12T23:26:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:27:32.845+00:00The Black Image: The Harlem Renaissance.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_cVVjNq24-k/XHgy9ZncFXI/AAAAAAAABwo/WSdKOELD3PQkYZfrLMP62u6vj1GTGSFfACLcBGAs/s1600/5054282619_c8449c1915_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="507" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_cVVjNq24-k/XHgy9ZncFXI/AAAAAAAABwo/WSdKOELD3PQkYZfrLMP62u6vj1GTGSFfACLcBGAs/s400/5054282619_c8449c1915_b.jpg" width="252" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In <em>Ten 8</em> (1992) Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien sketched out a discourse on black male sexuality. Their argument was based on a landscape of stereotypical desire that was ploughed according to the demands of white males. A fuller working of this thesis took place in <em>Welcome to the Jungle</em> with the co-authors following Foucault and Fanon to implicate the black male gaze within the area of prejudice, that is to say: racist imagery operates around a belief that black men are “hypersexual” and this is one of a number of myths (entrenched by historical slavery) that black males would rather not lose…have demystified. As bell hooks has asserted, this racist iconography is a source of power and men who are made powerless by society cling to power (however dubious it might be) because it affords an area in which they might exist. Mercer and Julien insist upon demystifying, however, and do so to provide a classic critique of Mapplethorpe and his art of sexual objectification. For Julien, this was artistically articulated in <em>Looking for Langston</em> (1989). Mercer, however, adopted a revised position in 1986 and 1989. His second essay, "How Do I Iook?" plays with a semantic ambiguity. The question could belong to the person viewed: how do I look to you? Or it could belong to the person viewing: how do I look at you? This double strand allowed Mercer to see Mapplethorpe in a gentler (less racist light)…would have to disagree here…for every photograph now speaks in two ways. It becomes the creation of the white man’s gaze and also an expression of black male desire (when viewed by a black male). Historically, Mercer’s re-looking at racial fetishism was justified: you only have to compare poets such as Branner and Harris to see a divergence in response:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">thank you</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">mister Mapplethorpe</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">for lassoing all a’ my</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">crazy gazelle selves</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">and tying them</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">to 8 x 10 glossies</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(“Poem for Robert”, DB Branner)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">THAT’S RIGHT</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">COME SEE THE MAPPLETHORPE SHOW</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">COME SEE BLACK MEN</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">BLACK MEN</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">COMPOSED AND EXPOSED</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">FROM THE AMERICAN DREAM</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(“Come see”, K Harris).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And what lies behind this divergence is an unexpected question: What is “whiteness”? White men look into blackness to try and see what their own “whiteness” is. The black male—as mirror image—raises a question about the reality of the white male: as the white male makes the black male the reality of his desire so the white male becomes virtual…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This “How do I look?” approach is applied by <a href="http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1696_reg.html"><span style="color: #330099;">James Smalls throughout his study of Carl Van Vechten’s</span> </a>private photographs. Van Vechten, the white architect of the Harlem Renaissance, was an enigmatic figure. Humoroulsy depicted by Covarrubias, in 1926, as a white man turning negro, itself a symbol of what the white man sought when “the Negro was in vogue”, Van Vechten’s private, homoerotic photographs depict a double world of desire. At their most mysterious, they use a black male and a white male (usually Juante Allan Meadows and Hugh Laing) to represent a double desire: Van Vechten’s attraction to the white and the black male ideal. The result is what Smalls terms Van Vechten’s “camp” and “primitivism”. For Van Vechten, primitivism enshrined a sexual response, permitted it to exist within the realm of art, and within this space, the black male could come to life. (This is the ambivalent position that Mercer and Julien opened up: the space that frees the black man also imprisons him within assumptions—be naked, yet clothed by my prejudices). By contrasting this primitivism with civilisation, the white male became Van Vechten’s symbolic point of entry. Juante Allan Meadows’ primitive wildness is counter-pointed by Hugh Laing’s control. The two dancers enact more than a <em>pas de deux</em>. They are part of a <em>ménage a trois</em> in which they dance with the choreographer, Van Vechten. The humorous “camp” element acts as a kind of justifying and protective veil, as if Van Vechten is only playing, when in fact he is seriously involved with his world of double desire. If Laing represents the sexual transgression, Meadows represents the racial and sexual transgression. Laing’s acceptance of Meadows substitutes for Van Vechten’s desire for the black male and Meadows inclusion in Laing’s world represents an incarnation of the spiritual blackness that Van Vechten worships as Harlem. In the photographs in which white male buttocks and black male penis are present and staged, Van Vechten suggests a fetishistic desire of entry and enterer, a quasi-mysticism in which civilisation and primitivism meet. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The photographs of Van Vechten are fascinating insights into the duplex world of the Harlem Renaissance…images that try to unravel “whiteness” by weaving a worship of blackness— a camp, occult black magic! </span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-39045144047459085112020-01-12T22:45:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:04:37.034+00:00The Sonnets of Richard Barnfield.<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/SutudiB21tI/AAAAAAAAAss/LGCRj_C-Hik/s1600-h/ShepherdsCJan.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5398530031963526866" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/SutudiB21tI/AAAAAAAAAss/LGCRj_C-Hik/s320/ShepherdsCJan.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 191px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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The term “gay”draws a number of elements around it: the homosexual, the homoerotic and the homosocial. It is not a term used easily. The matter isn’t helped much by using the term poet of a “gay sensibility”. That too often implies a poet who is gay, but writes about other things such that gay aspects appear here and there. <em>The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse</em> (1987) was a curious mish-mash, not only in terms of “gay” but also in terms of poetry: it included a lot of verse-and-worse. Heavily featured poets included the Classical, Catullus, Strato, Martial and Meleager, the pseudo-classical, Cavafy, and Shakespeare and Barnfield.<br />
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To include 12 sonnets by Barnfield lifted an almost unknown poet into a major Classical league. It has always puzzled me if this was justified. Is the poetry of Barnfield so important in the history of “gay” poetries?<br />
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Richard Barnfield was born in 1574. He was in every way a contemporary of Shakespeare. Barnfield’s <em>The Affectionate Shepherd</em> (1594) mixed Virgil and Spenser to tell of a relationship between Ganymede and Daphnis. It was typical Renaissance pastoral with a male-male relationship at the core, following the precedent set by Virgil, Bion and Theocritus. A few months later than this work, Barnfield published <em>Cynthia </em>(1595), a volume that extended the theme of <em>The Affectionate Shepherd</em> via twenty sonnets. This is the sonnet sequence filtered out by <em>The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse</em>.<br />
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Sonnet 1 of Barnfield’s sequence is dedicated to Beauty, which enters the poet’s heart; like a thief, to steal his calm. Sonnet 2 is an extended conceit in which Beauty and Majesty yield to Virtue in Love’s battlefield. The battlefield in Sonnet 3 is extended to Philosophy; and the conclusion is that the greatest good is the Beloved’s “faire eye”. The sequence seems to be building towards the relationship of Love and Light…Spenserian Neo-Platonism…but Sonnet 4 only produces a well-worn sonnet idea: Ganymede’s eyes are like stars, he is the Sun, and his absence brings darkness to the poet. Sonnet 5 does not fair much better in terms of originality. A comparison between Achilles-War and Ganymede-Love is tediously worked through to an obvious conclusion. Very little of this appears in <em>The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse</em> (though 1 and 4 appear). Sonnets 6-8 are represented however as worthy of attention. And these are stronger. Suddenly, there is a progression from distant worshipping to homoerotic desire. Daphnis/Barnfield now longs to be kissed by “sweet coral lips”, to be a pillow to receive his lover’s kisses, and he delights, with an echo of Spenser, in his lover swimming like a “silver swan” in the Thames. It is nice poeticising. Sonnet 9 is a cooling down of the erotic tone, the equivalent of a cold shower for the hopefully (but unlikely) aroused reader. The history of Ganymede is revealed— he is born from Diana’s blood, that is to say, he is Chaste.Sonnets 10-12, also anthologised, work from chastity to revelation to admiration. Ganymede discovers that Daphnis loves him. The final poems run variations on what has gone before, slowly burying emotion with classical wit and allusions. Sonnet 17 advances the intimate connection between body and poetry:<br />
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Cherry lipped Adonis in his snow shape<br />
Might not compare with his pure ivory white,<br />
On whose fair front a poet might write<br />
(XVII, 1-3).<br />
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In the ultimate poem, like a true Christian Neo-Platonist, Barnfield begins to place more hope in “favour from that heavenly grace”, but there is none of the genuine emotional torture heard in the sonnets of Michelangelo as he is torn between homoerotic earthly desire and the chaste love of God. </div>
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The sonnets of Richard Barnfield have a curiosity value, a place in the history of "gay" poetry, but little more. They never touch the homosexual, are fingered by the erotic, and fail to embrace the homosocial, to portray a relationship between two men with anything approaching depth and vision</div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-33732925133018103582020-01-11T15:45:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:05:34.851+00:00Orpheus in the Bronx by Reginald Shepherd.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OaQXDetm7Zs/XHg3UmRL_8I/AAAAAAAABx4/z9webKO29LUCuuWgipZGpUntaKw56lW4ACLcBGAs/s1600/orpheus-in-the-bronx.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="353" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OaQXDetm7Zs/XHg3UmRL_8I/AAAAAAAABx4/z9webKO29LUCuuWgipZGpUntaKw56lW4ACLcBGAs/s320/orpheus-in-the-bronx.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>Orpheus in the Bronx</em>, (University of Michigan Press, 2007) is the poetic title of <a href="http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #000099;">Reginald Shepherd’s </span></a>new book of essays. It is a fine title, one that aligns clearly with a number of essays in this collection: “To make me who I am”, an autobiographical essay about poetry and the Bronx; “Toward an Urban Pastoral", which concerns itself with the poetry and the city—the city as metaphor within the poetic imagination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Without question, these are rich and intelligent essays, some of which are fixed forms of posts from Reginald Shepherd’s poetry blog. “The Other’s Other” is a thought-provoking reflection upon the author’s dislike of identity politics. <em>Orpheus in the Bronx</em> is sub-titled “Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry”. The , between Identity and Politics suggests that a third of this volume is concerned with politics. Not so. Politics, here, equals, polis, of the city, and is bound up with Identity Politics and how a poet might affirm his creative freedom (against the pressures of group demands) to live within the real city and the city of imagination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Reginald Shepherd’s opposition to identity politics (and its gravitational pull towards the agendas of others) has sometimes seemed like a denial of identity: it has allowed some critics to read his work as distanced and complicated rather than approachable and complex. So, it is interesting that this volume opens with a beautifully paced autobiography of how a young (gay, Black) man grew against hostile educational pressures. Reading this essay, the work of Kenneth and Mamie Clark came frequently to mind. Their Northside Centre, in Harlem, began to investigate psychological disturbances amidst Black youngsters. Their focus eventually turned towards literacy issues: psychological distress, they found, was rooted in literacy, the inability to be empowered by language. The theme which emerges again and again in Reginald Shepherd’s essay is this exactly. Orpheus is the energy that lifts him up, word and books are the power to survive. The first essay establishes what can be heard in his latest poems from <em>Fata Morgana</em>, in poems such as “Orpheus Plays the Bronx” and “A Handful of Sand”, namely, a warm and questioning intelligence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>Orpheus in the Bronx</em>, is divided into four sections: “Portrait of the Artist”, “Manifestos of a Sort”, “Readings” and “A Poetics”. It will be true, I guess, that different readers will find different qualities in each section. Certainly, “To Make Me Who I am”, which is “Portrait of the Artist”, is affirmative and significant. From “Manifestos of a Sort”, “The Other’s Other” and “Toward an Urban Pastoral” are provocative and incisive pieces of writing. All of the six essays in “Readings” are interesting, though for me, “Shadows and Light Moving on Water” is more a collection of notes than an essay. And “On Jorie Graham’s <em>Erosion</em>”, though full of insights, can be frustrating at times. Sometimes, demonstrations are like reading rubbed out hieroglyphics. For example: “Graham’s poem [“Kimono”] does not acknowledge the necessity or even the possibility of distinguishing between what Hopkins calls the [?] “the true and the false instress of nature” (<em>OINB</em>, p.101). Instress and Inscape, in Hopkins, are complex terms, meaning something like Buber’s I-Thou, or Shelley’s experiments with Platonic synaesthesia and Ideal Form, or Pound’s Eleusininan Vortex in <em>The Cantos</em>, and this kind of abbreviated argument is hard to comprehend. The essay which really sings in this section is 'On Alvin Feinman’s “True Night”'. It is affectionate, empathetic and beautifully cadenced. The final section of essays pursues the purpose of poetry: first, in the abstract, by viewing Wallace Stevens and Yeats; second, in the concrete, by considering why Reginald Shepherd writes poetry.</span><br />
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<img alt="" border="0" height="200" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5173171929119937554" src="https://bp0.blogger.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/R8rMdf03VBI/AAAAAAAAAUY/32C2owZuchU/s200/scn106.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 192px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 157px;" width="194" /><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>Orpheus in the Bronx</em> is a very important collection of essays. Reginald Shepherd draws upon a wide reading of poets to expand his thoughts. Of course, this is challenging, but it is also truthful for Reginald Shepherd believes in truth-telling and is aware (unlike some poets today) that the American muse did not spring by parthogenesis from the head of Whitman or a seminal clot in the brain of Olson. You don’t have to be Gay to want to read this volume. You don’t have to be Black to enjoy it. You don’t have to be a Poet to follow it. You do, however, have to be human and in love with words, which is probably as life should be! Reading this collection is like turning around a Greek vase and discovering the many interlinked faces of a mythic (his)story.</span></div>
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A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-72120179216991112272020-01-10T00:13:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:06:32.785+00:00Post Identity Politics.<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For the past few days I have been reading </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Song After All </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(2013) which is a series of exchanges between Reginald Shepherd and Alan Contreras. At the core of the book is a discussion on gay male post identity politics. To make the discussion clear, Contreras (as Editor) includes Part Two of Shepherd's blog post and their follow-up comments. I remembered reading these at the time. Eight years on (to the very day by coincidence) I read them with a different perspective--not to disagree with Shepherd, who was right to insist that gay identity poetry produces dreary poetry, nor to change my view on the discussions we had, but to note a personal take on the debate that was not present then. There is a world of difference between the poetic spectrum and waving the rainbow flag. <a href="http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/gay-male-poetry-post-identity-politics_08.html"><span style="color: blue;">I re-read the debate with different eyes</span></a>: must be the new varifocal glasses.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Firstly, having returned to Shepherd's blog, I noticed his belief that there was a change in consciousness that could be called pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall, a point at which the gay world shifted and gay identity became political. That is often stated, but how true is it? In Part Five of his posts on post identity politics, Shepherd posts an AWP presentation by Brian Teare in which the issue is approached through Thom Gunn's admiration and friendship with Robert Duncan. Strangely, hardly anything is said about Gunn's response to Duncan's courageous outing of himself in <i>Politics</i>...in 1944...twenty-five years before Stonewall. Nor is anything mentioned about how the situation went against the Duncan grain. Duncan's statement in <i>Politics </i>was a political stand and Duncan's argument with Ransom was equally political: Duncan told Ransom that his refusal to publish the poem was against the First Amendment. Yet Duncan believed that politics and poetry did not mix: political activism was not the role of the poet. Perhaps, Teare ought to have made the important point that identity did not create poetry for Duncan, but that poetry was the creation of complex identities. Homosexuality, for Duncan, was defined by poetry and the idea of identity politics was a falsehood. Possibilities existed within poetry and within that totality the love of men would seek new definitions. Duncan knew H.D. in depth and there was no identity outside the poet, outside H(ermetic) D(efinition).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On a simpler note...for whom was Stonewall such a massive watershed? For USA "gay" poets who can shrug off the label "gay". But the debate surely ranges beyond here. Is post-identity a luxury for USA poets? What about the emerging gay poets in Singapore, for example, who are as significant as the USA poets, but do not live in a society that allows them to be free, where society is two-faced and a liberal face masks another that wears a conservative blindfold. Or the oppressed poets in Russia under Putin? Can they live in a state of post identity politics?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It is interesting and worrying how insular the AWP debates were...I am speaking only of those cited in Shepherd's blogs. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Secondly, having returned to Shepherd's blog post (as quoted in <i>Song After All</i>) I started to assemble the varied responses. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">1) <b>"Gay poet" is a double displacement...both gay and poet are marginalised within society."</b> (A minority-ethnic gay poet, then, has a triple displacement???). Post-identity makes the cancelling of "gay" acceptable. But would the poets who cancel "gay" be as happy about cancelling "Black" or "American". Clearly not, as all the poets think within their American identity. Shepherd would cancel "Black" and "Gay" because the purpose of poetry is what language can create. Poetry is the creation of what is possible and should not be restricted by what is. I empathise with his intelligent view. (It is why, in <i>Song After All</i>, he finds little value in Essex Hemphill and poetic activism). Shepherd's position is very much in line with Duncan--the poem is everything. But what happens when all the "gay poets" transform into poets? What happens to visibility?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">2) <b>Gay poetry has lost its element of risk, it is trying to pass (as in society) as straight. </b>So, the change from "gay poet" into "poet" follows the trend of passing. Ronan McDonald makes a telling point in <i>The Death of the Critic (</i>2007<i>) </i>that no one wants to be just a critic these days. Critics are "Critics and Writers" so that the unacceptable is made acceptable by the honoured term "Writer". It is interesting to note a similar step being taken by Poets. They are no longer simply Poets: they are Poets and Writers. As society moves away from the Arts, the tendency is to dump terms that do not pass. It is part of the need to be "liked" at all costs. If a Poet wants to protect Poet, why not protect Gay? Is the post-identity phase a way of denying the thorn-in-the-side?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">3) <b>Gay is a sign of the "antithetical"</b>...poets gain strength from their antagonism. Here, it is curious how gay is always seen as antithetical to straight, how homosexuality is a reaction to the heterosexual norm. Marjorie Garber wisely points out in <i>Vice Versa </i>(1996) that this common assumption is a huge mistake. Heterosexual is a cultural back-formation. "Homosexual" was coined, then "heterosexual" was created to reflect the opposite. Edward Carpenter, the radical Socialist thinker (in the UK, not USA) imagined this in one of his poems in <i>Democracy </i>when he viewed the Uranian Adam as homosexual before the creation of Eve--what a daring idea, that Adam had an identity that could be known before heterosexuality came along! The gay male is not antithetical to straights, he is antithetical to orthodox perception. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">4) <b>Queerness creates questioning</b>. It is perpetual challenge. Would the questioning stop, though, if the term "gay" is dropped from "gay poet"? Isn't the Poet about questioning too. Isn't that what a poet does? Isn't poetry about a challenge to what <i>is </i>by creating what Shepherd called <i>Otherhood</i>? Is "gay poet" a double-questioning of assumed reality or a tautology? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">5) <b>There is a danger that as society becomes more accepting of gay people that the process of "normalising" begins.</b> Is that a loss of identity, of difference? Is the loss of "gay poet" a step towards conformity and a loss of a unique poetic voice? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">6) UK gets a mention...interestingly, though, Gregory Woods is quoted for his historical view-point, not as a significant "gay poet", so no real attempt to widen the debate beyond American poetry. The gay poet expands awareness by engaging with paradoxical language, a variety of language beyond the mainstream. Is this more to do with "poet" rather than "gay"?... "British poet and author"...the word gay is not attributed to Woods...strangely he already seems to have been liberated beyond the identity politics boundary and has entered into the post-identity Paradise!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">7) <b>Is there still a need to reflect gay desire in poetry in which case "gay poet" remains a valid term?</b> The sexual element of gay poetry--which marked identity politics--is in retreat. Poets are afraid of being confessional because Confessional Poet is a feared label. But maybe...beyond the USA...there isn't that fear. American poetry had to go through its stages of Confessionalism to break new ground...maybe Confessionalism is a legitimate goal for poets outside the USA. Maybe there is a poetry beyond the prison-camps that the USA has elected so that the tedious can argue against the tedious. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(Shepherd was absolutely correct about the danger of camps and allegiances and the restrictions of having to write is a certain way). Gay, as Duncan saw, is a misleading word for the homophilic (Carpenter) experience. If the sexual element disappears from poetry written by men who live men...what kind of poetry is left. As the writer Terry Goldie once asked in an essay on Fanon, what happens to the homosexual when he isn't having sex? Does the homosexual only exist in the act of sex? There is a continual sense within this debate on post-identity poetry that "gay" means something wider than sex, even so, if poets deny a sexual core because they wish to move beyond a limiting definition, then something vital is lost. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">8) Is the change from "gay poet" to "poet" a step back into the closet? Or is it an elevation to Parnassus, an entrance into the world of Poets United?</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-62411408953014702052020-01-09T21:46:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:08:26.496+00:00Owen Dodson and Poetry.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://wanderingcaravan-bronzebuckaroo.blogspot.com/2007/04/owen-dodson.html">Owen Dodson</a>. Books still have a magic of their own. There is a thrill in opening a book for the first time, touching the crisp pages, watching how they fall back as if they have not been touched, so refusing the enquiring gaze. With second hand books it is somewhat different. They have a used story to tell… And that story is often implied, cryptic, too much for a hermeticist to reject! I was intrigued, therefore, to come across a copy of Owen Dodson's poetry in a small second-handbook shop in Wales. Books travel. But how did that copy find a home amidst the rolling green hills of Wales rather than some place in Washington D.C.? I suppose the answer rests with the bold, black free inscription flowing like waves across the title page:</span><br />
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<em><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Your name is Johnny,<br />My names is Owen,<br />Hello across the sea.<br />England------USA,<br />October 5, 1976.”</span></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Owen, is of course, Owen Dodson. But Johnny? Not a passing acquaintance, since Dodson sent a copy of his photographic book on Harlem to the same Johnny in 1978; and this one came from Dodson’s family home, from his sister, in New York. The inscription to the poetry book suggests an introduction, a friend of a friend and someone not met. Yet, you don’t send signed new first editions unsolicited. So, who was the Johnny, in England, who merited the attention of a 62 year old ex-Howard University professor of drama and major Black dramatist?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The book now exudes mustiness. It belongs to a period when poetry books were published on quality paper and came unevenly cut. In the pockled paper there is a soft grain: a grain that fits the soft, elegiac tone that runs through <em>Powerful Long Ladder</em>. Published in 1946, this volume has a private and public face: it mourns the war dead, but also a world only half-acknowledged, as was typical of the Harlem Renaissance poets. “Counterpoint" is for the magician of that period, Carl Van Vechten, and comes with an ominous refrain: “Terror does not belong to open day”, as if suggesting a secret life beyond the glamour and glitz. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Countee Cullen” is an elegy written shortly after the poet’s death, in 1946, and this touches, like the Van Vechten poem, upon a world of secret desires: Cullen’s love for other Black men. There is a finely crafted short lyric for the Black gay actor and singer, Gordon Heath, who had just appeared, on Broadway, as Brett Charles, in <em>Deep are the Roots</em>: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">CIRCLE ONE</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nothing happens only once,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nothing happens only here,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Every love that lies asleep</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Wakes today another year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Why we sailed and how we prosper</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Will be sung and lived again;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">All the lands repeat themselves,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Shore for shore and men for men.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The echoes accumulate until they ring behind the ambivalent “you”. Like Auden before him, Dodson had learnt how to use the “you” to imply a personal, private and secretive “he”:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">THE VERDICT.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There is no evidence that you loved me,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Or witnesses: there was fire for the letters,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And those I told are promised, sealed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Once there was a prism even the sun</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Could not glory, light came from</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Somewhere more abstract than the sky.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But light is the name, there is no other;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This light was human living, not aerial,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Mixed, fragrant, showing even at blazing noon,</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Never in a dark so solid nothing</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Struck through: sun or star or moon</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Or artificial lamp, electric-full.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It is no secret: the somewhere light was you,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nor the flesh part only, not the bone part merely</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But the dream undyed with passion:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You when there was no henceforth</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To walk, no now to penetrate,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">No therewas to shadow. You in clarity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The prism still lies near the clock,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But time nestling up to dawn, to spring in afternoon,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Loves hours, only hours, never light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>Powerful Long Ladder</em> is a significant volume which contains a lost imagination that once stretched like human arms to embrace love and death. Dodson gets no metion in the Academy of American Poets. His poetry, like the above examples, ranges from short lyrics to dramatic dialogues, and are often written with an apocalyptic and metaphyscial fire. Dodson's imagination in <em>Powerful Long Ladder</em> is strongest when it is most personal. Its roots are deep, especially at the close when they mix prophecy and politics and reverberate like Baldwin:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Brothers, let us discover our hearts again...</span></div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-73976252665141561942020-01-08T21:31:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:09:05.302+00:00Burnings, Ocean Vuong (update)<div align="justify">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bvgx1Ue107w/TbHl4cRNkII/AAAAAAAAAzs/ULO5yhBfBfw/s1600/51cFcbJt6sL__SS500_.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5598508569622057090" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bvgx1Ue107w/TbHl4cRNkII/AAAAAAAAAzs/ULO5yhBfBfw/s320/51cFcbJt6sL__SS500_.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a> Like many (USA) poets, <a href="http://oceanvuong.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #3333ff;">Ocean Vuong</span></a> has published quite widely within internet journals. (His blog contains a comprehensive list of these places). Two points ought to be made in the light of this: 70% of his chapbook, <em>Burnings</em>, can be read via the net; <em>Burnings</em> has been well-edited, such that is contains a high quality selection of his electronically published work. And putting those two points together, internet publishing can easily dilute poetic achievement (because of the lack of attention to type-setting and weak critical standards by editors with insufficient literary experiences) and nothing can replace the pleasure of a well-structured volume of poetry enjoyed at length. And that is what <em>Burnings</em> offers. It is a chapbook with structural integrity (and judicious editing) which affords as much insight and intelligence as a first book.<br />
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<em>Burnings</em> is an effective title for this volume. (More gutsy and descriptive than the original <em>Arrival by Fire</em>). The whole consists of a thoughtful Ars Poetica followed by two sections that show a sensitive and sensual poet at work. Each section contains 12 poems that react like macrocosm and microcosm. Section (i) seeks to relate the poet to a historical, geographical, cultural context. Literally, a matrix, for the wider world is experienced through the Mother—mother, grandmother, the subconscious <em>Anima</em>. Section (ii) shows the <em>Anima </em>at work, the poet reaching from the motherland within to confront love. Significant Modernists have worked with the Mars-Venus <em>concordia discors</em> much valued by the Renaissance. For Pound, AMOR-ROMA, symbolised how ROMA (patriarchy) could be reversed to AMOR (matriarchy). The power of light issuing as divine love within the female destroys darkness to construct civilisation in <em>The Cantos</em>. In <em>Trilogy</em>, the female angelic spectrum is conjured by H.D.to rejuvenate a post-war Europe destroyed by men. Duncan’s <em>Passages </em>rise out of Pound and H.D. to depict the eternal battle between Love and War. <em>Burnings</em> works within this grand field, but at a highly personal level as it refers back to The Vietnam War. As the poet hides in a deathly dark “Where…the sins/promised by out fathers/could not find us” (“Revelation”, ll 3-5), he also awakes to the living light of the grandmother who “kisses as if to breathe/you inside her” (“Kissing in Vietnamese”, ll 12-13). Section (i) contains memorable, grand poems such as “Song of my Mothers”; also, poems that quiver with memory, like “Time-Maker”, which longs to turn back time and heal a violent parental conflict. There are occasional moments when grandure succumbs to bare philosophising: Like all photographs/this one fails/to reveal the picture (“The Photograph” ll12-14); moments when the poetry is strained. Mainly, though, the poetry sings with finely cadenced lines and perfectly timed imagery:<br />
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On the balcony—a woman hanging rags,<br />
her voice delicate, almost fractured<br />
<br />
as it weaves through the gray sheet<br />
framing her silhouette.<br />
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(“Sai Gon, again”, ll3-6).<br />
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That is finely done. A plain image. One that comes alive as the voice begins. The brittle voice is caught in the material of language, heard in the bony “ate” and “act”. The verb “weave” carries the sound into the cloth, as it absorbs. And finally, the blurred voice becomes a faint image, “her silhouette”. Constantly, against the executions of war, Ocean Vuong creates breath-giving linguistic execution. He understands the quiet power of language. Like the voice entering the cloth which receives the woman’s projected image, he has a gift for projecting the matrix of the Mother into language:<br />
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I did not think how the wind stopped hissing<br />
through the cracked window, or how<br />
<br />
she softly exhaled as I pulled closer knowing<br />
this was not right: a boy reaching out<br />
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and into the shell of a husband…<br />
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(“The Touch”, ll 11-15).<br />
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What a re-creation of the Oedipal myth.<br />
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Section (ii) of <em>Burnings</em> is “a boy reaching out”. It is an account of a young man coming to terms with his different sexuality, one that must balance the burning world of the Father with the watery world of the Mother. This section could have easily become an anti-climax after section (i), just another collection of coming out poems. Mercifully, this is not the case. The quality of writing is sustained and the sense of individuality isn’t lost.<br />
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What is most admirable about <em>Burnings</em> is how the poems have been arranged so as they inter-relate and the attention to details. So, in section (i), an originally underweight “If you are a Refugee” has 2 stanzas added to it—it is important that this biographical poem resonates. And in section (ii), in the wonderful “Song on the Subway” (where music carries the poet on an alchemical, regressive journey back into infanthood and a violin’s womb) telling revisions are made. A clichéd “It kills me” is removed. A rhetorical “iron jaws” is replaced by more realistic “steel jaws” (doors on a train). And a redundant “something like” is removed. These changes suggest a poet who cares about his craft (and a Press that cares about its work).<br />
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The cover-work for <em>Burnings</em> portrays a Munch-like mouth and is based on part of Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize photo.<br />
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It is a dramatic image that fits with the re-occurring mouth image within the volume. For Ocean Vuong, the mouth is the source of a scream, the opening for sexual pleasure, the origin of kisses that bind memory and the symbol of starvation. The mouth is also an indicator for what Ocean Vuong has found in this volume: a poetic voice that leaves the page and speaks to the reader. And yes, his finely told narratives, with their revealed psychological content, often have the quality of myth, which derives from "a mouthing".</div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-80997857401674939862020-01-07T23:56:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:09:39.310+00:00Jericho Brown and James Allen Hall.<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/SuOIoAx64MI/AAAAAAAAAsk/OcTVeCrKyJQ/s1600-h/hawking_women.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396306999505510594" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/SuOIoAx64MI/AAAAAAAAAsk/OcTVeCrKyJQ/s320/hawking_women.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 201px;" /></a> <br />
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Gay men are gay because they have been feminized by over-contact with the mother. This prevailing piece of Oedipal wisdom has always seemed ignorant to me. More to the point, it seemed to be exactly the explanation that patriarchy would produce: Why not make a hatred of women into the cause and justification for hating gay men, women-men? At the same time, however, I was aware of the power exerted by mothers in gay poets’ lives…but in a positive way…their openness to the Jungian Anima, the Feminine Principle. The binding power of the Mother is something fully expressed by Robert Duncan when he wrote “My mother would be a falconress,/And I her gay falcon treading her wrist…" (<em>Bending the Bow</em>, p.52). </div>
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Interestingly,<a href="http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/022/conversation_brown_hall.html"> Issue 22 of <em>Boxcar Poetry Review</em></a>, includes a fascinating discussion between Jericho Brown and James Hall about the personal origins of their poetry. It is a discussion in which the Mother, in one form or another, looms.<br />
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James Allen opens their dialogue with a reference to Mark Doty on the dangers of revising the past from the present. (A good point for writers, since there is nothing more futile than trying to revise what is enmeshed in the past with a view from the present. It is the mistake of Orpheus: do not try to turn back. Let the past follow the present until it becomes part of the present). And Jericho Brown responds with a similar point of reference. (Not surprising, since both poets were mentored by Mark Doty as writing students). For them both, Mark Doty appears as a matrix, a mother to their work, what the alchemist’s term the <em>prima materia</em>. </div>
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As the dialogue progresses, Jericho Brown suggests that poetry/writing is a conversation. That does not, on the surface, seem much like a definition for poetry. But as Nor Hall, the author of the perceptive <em>The Moon and the Virgin</em>, a study of the Mother and poetics, would say, those poets who are bound to the mother are also bound to the roots and origins of words, the mother-language of creativity. A conversation is <em>vers</em>, a turning, literally, a turning around: it is <em>vers libre</em> in which the placement of words and line-breaks/turns give structure to speech. There is something quite intimate and fitting about how James Hall recounts the following:<br />
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“I remember late nights with you on the phone as we played with line breaks of our poems…”<br />
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The phone conversation has conversation as its subject. In the mothering night, both poets play the Mother’s games.<br />
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Following the paradigm of Toni Wolff in <em>Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche</em> (1956), Nor Hall develops a four-fold view of the Anima. She is Amazon, Medial, Mother and Hetaira: virgin, sibyl, creator and wife. For James Hall, in <em>Now You're the Enemy</em>, the Mother is the Dark Mother, the witch-mother:<br />
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“My mother has struggled with depression, adultery, and suicide for most of her adult life.”<br />
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She is a haunted space into which his book of poems allows an undesired entry. He expresses a wish to close that door, to write free of the mother. He doesn’t explain what that would be like. H.D., knowing the opposite pole to the Dark Mother, the hetaira, would describe it as a way of self-containment, of divorce from any relationship, of a wish to “melt down/integrate” in the crucible of the imagination (<em>Trilogy</em>).<br />
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The Mother does not appear explicitly, during the interview, in Jericho Brown’s world. It is the Father that raises his head…and hand. But she is subtly present in two major parts of the dialogue. Firstly, she appears when Jericho Brown discusses his poem “Rick” (a poem in reply to Rick Barot). A close friend suggested that “Rick” should not be included in<em> Please</em> because it was too “gossipy” (for a poem about inter-racial relationships?) Jericho Brown defends his decision, during the dialogue, by suggesting its seriousness, the fact that Rick Barot loved its “metaphors”. In fact, “Rick” is one of the best poems in <em>Please,</em> not at all superficial, for gossiping is a vital aspect of the Mother. Gossip is derived from the roots, <em>god</em> and <em>sybbe</em>, and implies truthful speaking, a medial voice. The mediatorial aspect of the Mother comes in many guises. In ancient Greece, she would have been the gossiping sibyl of Apollo. In Tudor times, she was the truth-telling prophetess, such as Paulina in <em>The Winter’s Tale</em>. In the seventeenth century, she became the unbridled woman, the Puritan woman testifying to God. Today, she is the Diva, the voice that transmits emotional truths and stands between the world of patriarchy and matriachy. This quality is beautifully realised by Jericho Brown whilst discussing the divas within <em>Please</em>:<br />
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“Divas are also quite unapologetically talented...They mean for their very presence to make people cry, just as the poet must mean for his or her poems to make readers fully feel an emotion."<br />
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That is a wonderful example of the Mother speaking from within the man— a revelation of the alignment between the Diva and the gay poet who is open to the liberating voice of his Anima. Jericho Brown closes the interview by recognising the medial nature of his next manuscript and describes his present life as<br />
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“…the Wood Between the Worlds”…<br />
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In other words a world that saps the power of the witch-mother (The White Witch in Narnia) yet advances passivity and waiting. This implies, as with James Hall, a future shifting within the Mother paradigm. Hopefully, this will be towards the pole of the Amazon, ARTemis, a state that allows the self to support, yet stand-back from creation, to explore points of involvement in life and art.<br />
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Do read…it is a fascinating dialogue!</div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-80300852387790439432020-01-06T20:46:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:10:27.936+00:00Please, Jericho Brown.<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/Sb1u75MjrjI/AAAAAAAAAks/emFuwj4cPm8/s1600-h/Prise_de_J%25C3%25A9richo.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5313525110611881522" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/Sb1u75MjrjI/AAAAAAAAAks/emFuwj4cPm8/s320/Prise_de_J%25C3%25A9richo.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 273px;" /></a><br />
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I wish poets and publishers didn’t feel the need to herald new poetry editions with bombastic recommendations. Of course, this is a sign of the Age. The public has to be told which brand of soup to buy: such decisions are presumed too difficult for the mass. But poetry? Does an art aimed at sensitive readers require an approach designed for the (allegedly) anaesthetised? Jericho’s Brown’s <em>Please</em> is announced by three powerful voices. Mark Doty’s recommendation is to the point and “live-wire” is a fitting phrase for the energy in Brown’s poetic lines. Less to the point are Hayes’ indulgent tribute which ends bathetically with “I could never say all I love about this book…” and Claudia Rankine’s mystical pronouncements, which sink into darkness. “<em>Please </em>continually repositions its readers inside the violence of the interruption, the psychic break.” She is knocked-out by the poet's “devastating genius”. (If only she had been hermetically silenced before writing her blurb and not managed to combine two clichés into a hysterical summation). Jericho’s Brown’s <em>Please</em> does not require this very American approach (but I suppose this is what you get when devoted friends write notes of recommendation). <em>Please</em> is thoughtfully put together. It is a finely produced book. It heralds itself beautifully, through skill and modest eloquence. The publishers (Western Michigan University) have assembled a handsome volume: an allusive cover, a resonant photo-page, a clear and attractive text. The author demonstrates a craft that is rich in tone and has clearly devoted time to arranging poems and considering the subtle relationships between parts and the whole.<br />
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<em>Please</em>, as a title, is perfect. The word suggests request and demand, prayer and conversation, plea, ease, and finally pleasure. Jericho’s Brown’s poems, by following musical connections, continually work with echoes from the title. Some of the strongest poems in the volume, such as “Lush Life”, “Crickets” and “Lion” are truly aware of pleasure’s shadow and how, like a cut, pain awakens the body into vital sensation.<br />
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Jericho, from the Hebrew, draws upon two senses, sight and smell. The city was bright as <em>the moon</em> and <em>fragrant </em>with herbs. The final poem in the volume, “Because My Name Is Jericho,” references the battle between Joshua and Jericho. It is a climax to a book which allows the author to say, with justification, “I am just as much a man/As Joshua”. But it isn’t just the final poem that plays with Jericho. The poetry develops through a sense of otherness, the moon, “Dark Side of the Planet”. The imagery of smell is inseparable from the poet’s sense of existence and survival: “One fist clenched/My brown bag as I sniffed for magnolia and made a deal with the dark.” (“Runaway”, <em>P.</em> p.58); “I smell liquor on your breath/Soon your arms will be too heavy to lift…” (“Your Body Made Heavy with Gin”, <em>P. </em>p.53). Unlike the metaphysical Donne, Jericho Brown doesn’t labour the connection between city and body, but implicit, within <em>Please</em> is the spiritual equation Jericho=city=body, and how the poet refuses to allow his body to fall, like the Biblical city, to blows of physical and mental violence. <em>Please</em> is a modern volume with an original voice. Yet this freshness is enriched by the author’s awareness of the past. “Prayer of the Backhanded” sings along to James Baldwin, linking musical strain to emotional strain. There are moments of jazz, stressed rhythms and falling cadences that echo Langston Hughes. And in the city-body linkage there is the troubled voodoo music of Essex Hemphill, though this is sung in a different key. In “Rights and Permissions”, Hemphill offers a bleak image of existence: his “warm seed” has nowhere to go. In “Family Portrait”, Brown offers a similar vision but within the context of love:<br />
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“My breath is also released<br />
As I shiver onto my boyfriend’s back,<br />
Then open my eyes to the faces<br />
Of my children, faintly<br />
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Sketched in white swirls<br />
On brown skin…"<br />
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(<em>P.</em> p.56).<br />
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<em>Please</em> is a volume that requires careful reading. I would have to disagree entirely with <a href="http://immunizationagainstinvisibility.blogspot.com/2008/10/please-that-sounds-like-music-from.html">Melissa McEwan’s </a>claim that “Some poems have to be read and then reread. But not <em>these</em> poems.” In her desire to free the poems from accusations of “difficulty”, she has done the volume an unintended disservice. <em>Please</em> is a complex musical composition and though some poems, such as “Lunch” and “I Have Just Picked Up a Man” are ironical, single-read poems, most of the poetry requires re-reading. Re-reading doesn’t imply a flaw in a poem: it is what a conscientious reader should wish to do, especially if the poem is pleasing, and (in the case of <em>Please</em>) desire to do! <em>Please</em> is a volume of poetry that bestows pleasure in relation to the time given to it, much like love, much like music. It isn’t a poetry of trumpets that stomps its way around the page…leave that to Joshua…rather a poetry of sentience written by a poet who knows how to modulate language and make the score on the page become music in the reader's mind. </div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-623368577073641302020-01-06T11:30:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:09:59.734+00:00Outside the Lines: some modern gay poets<br />
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<em>Not exactly eclectic this book. It is a selection of conversations with 12 gay poets. Another piece of cul-de-sac criticism: the gay poet.</em><br />
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But nothing could be more wrong minded than this approach. There are many admirable aspects to this book and the first is: it shows how eclectic gay poetry is! Varied to the point that this book achieves too important things: firstly, it takes gay as a starting point for selection, then widens that concept as the twelve poets talk, until the focus becomes poetry; secondly, it constantly questions the extent to which poetry originates (for these poets) in their gay identity without ever being crass. Probably, the finest gay poet in the United Kingdom is Gregory Woods, a poet of considerable technical ability and intellectual depth. Before, reading <em>Outside the Lines</em>, I found myself reading his attack on Mark Doty as an “aesthetic” poet (think Wilde) who shrinks away from eroticism and the body; for Woods, therefore, a poet who substitutes a gay sensibility for being gay. In contrast to this narrowness, Christopher Hennessy accepts a spectrum of possibilities, is neither judgemental nor prescriptive, and leaves the reader with a sense of openness. </div>
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The book is a fine piece of generous criticism which seeks to identify with its subjects. This is its second admirable quality. In 1981, Denis Donoghue wrote a provocative (and sadly neglected) book on criticism, <em>Ferocious Alphabets</em>. Essentially a series of radio broadcasts, it attacked the loss of voice in criticism, the retreat into ideologies—“lunatics of the one idea”—to the point that criticism became “A Dialogue of One”. By its very nature, a series of conversations, <em>Outside the Lines</em> includes the reader within the lines of conversation. What could have been an exclusive project—don’t bother with this unless you’re gay—becomes inclusive—listen, this actually is interesting. After reading all the interviews, I was left with four significant conversations (for me): Thom Gunn, Mark Doty, Reginald Shepherd, Timothy Lieu. And I was left wondering, “Why?” “Was it because I knew them best and was I just identifying with them because they said what I agreed with?” At first, I thought: probably. But then, no. Shepherd is entirely new, as is Lieu. So, what was it that marked these chapters out? Eventually, I realised another common factor. These were all phone conversations, a medium requiring total attention to the voice, such that I was being drawn to not just the poets but also the voice of the critic. </div>
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This point leads to the third notable strength of this book: <a href="http://thegrublog.blogspot.com/2007/08/art-of-interview.html"><span style="color: #cc33cc;">the author is an enquiring interviewer</span></a>. He knows what questions to ask. He equally knows what questions the poets would expect him to ask and that leads to divergent questioning, a bit of the expected, a bit of a surprise. So, when questioning Gunn, the usual question about poetic form was posed, to which Gunn gave his familiar answer: the poem selects the style, it knows what it needs to be. The Poundian response out of the Renaissance: "the stone knows the form". But what revelations come with the discussions about movements (and really, for Gunn, The Movement). Simply, this is a refreshing book about poetry, something that you do not get in England. And though Christopher Hennessy never says it, one that does not pretend that all gay poets are white or of a certain class or believe this credo because they are black or recite this mantra because they are gay. Gunn was a master at blending the sacred and profane. <em>Outside the Lines</em> manages to fuse the saintly word of academia with the common-sense talk of real human beings. It is intelligently structured with an overview of the poets followed by a synopsis of each poet before the relevant conversation. The book has almost a Platonic symposium feel to it, intelligent and eloquent conversation, with dialogues to which the reader is a priviliged listener, but it is also absolutely contemporary and on the cutting-edge of what modern poetry is and might be.</div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-11669120792547880102020-01-05T21:08:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:10:58.429+00:00Reginald Shepherd...<div align="justify">
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The death of Reginald Shepherd on September 10th came with tragic weight. Given his candid account of his illness, time was not on his side: Death waited in the wings (though unable to catch the winged words that had already flown). The tributes to him have been fitting and moving, though I would wish to differ from the writer who said that Reginald Shepherd was best known as a blogger and from those bloggers who praised his genius whilst admitting that they had never read his poetry. To not have seen Reginald Shepherd as a poet first and foremost is an error…to believe that his identity might be divorced from his poetry is a fallacy. True, Reginald Shepherd happily walked a tightrope with Poetry in one hand and Criticism in the other, could balance the quill and scales with consummate ease, but his love (as revealed by his poetry) was always poetry…the act of making (as he phrased it) the original that would endure rather than the transient new—he valued gold from the crucible rather than bling modernism.<br />
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In <em>Orpheus in the Bronx</em> (2007), Reginald Shepherd published a timely essay: “One state of the Art.” Designed as an extended version of his introduction to <em>The Iowa Anthology</em> (2004), this essay outlines the crossroads of modern verse, or post-modern verse, or post-post modern verse ad infinitum. This essay engages with some of the nonsense that often outraged him: the need for poethoods; the discounting of lyricism; and the mythical “school of quietude”. The essay is modern in its vision and yet it derives from older versions of poetic theorizing. The opening claim that “poetry is passion” (70) is pure Milton.<br />
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Like Reginald Shepherd, I have no liking for the anti-“school of quietude” critics and poets. Viewed from across The Pond, this appears as American arrogance: it dispenses (in its ignorance) with the whole history of UK poetry, as if contemporary poetry must spring by parthogenseis from hydra-headed American modernism. There is something curiously English about Reginald Shepherd; and I mean that in the best sense. Like Christopher Middleton, he seeks vistas, poetic and critical, and his belief in the experience of poetry rhymes fully with Middleton’s belief in "prosetic space": that poetry is original, not second-hand, is a living first-hand experience, not a re-making of the real in a virtual sphere. Shepherd and Middleton share a world view of poetry and as such never accept the “pre-cooked, processed” nature of language, a language governed by isms— a revolution made from conformism.<br />
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At the close of “One state of the Art”, Reginald Shepherd welcomes the poets who approach the self “as an open question”. Presumably, by extension, that means a poetry with an open field (as Duncan would have said) in which the self can be constructed. The poem makes the self, not the self the poem. That view is key in understanding Reginald Shepherd’s dislike of identity poetics and a methodology that places the fixed self before the flux of creation. The final words of this important essay return to Milton. The open poets stand against the “poets for whom the self” is “cynosure” and “mystification” (78). The allusion is to Milton’s divine melancholic whose lyrical blackness cancels out the frivolous “cynosure” <em>of L’Allegro</em> (l.80). The “mystification” of the false poet is transmuted by Milton, in <em>Il Penseroso</em>, to a worship of the links between word and nature—into a truly hermetic poetic placing himself/herself amidst the cosmos. <em>Il Penseroso</em> seeks to revive a new Orpheus for a fallen age. The poetry of Reginald Shepherd does the same. Some have wandered off the track to lament (Romantically) what Reginald Shepherd’s poetry might have been…in years to come. They would be wiser to stay and consider the immense achievement of his poetry as it exists. The poetry of Reginald Shepherd has an hermetic density…like HD’s…which will endure because it was made with Hermes’ flame; and like HD he wrote against Death, bringing creation out of disorder.</div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27988944.post-28636633568845235952020-01-05T11:58:00.000+00:002020-01-21T17:11:34.492+00:00Theories and Apparitions, Mark Doty.<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/SVp_400lG6I/AAAAAAAAAg0/exlP1f0HiqA/s1600-h/9780224085281.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5285677726901279650" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1yfI2N5vQY4/SVp_400lG6I/AAAAAAAAAg0/exlP1f0HiqA/s320/9780224085281.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 212px;" /></a><br />
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In 2001, the novelist Colm Toibin published <em>Love in a Dark Time</em>, a series of critical essays on homosexuality, one of which discussed the poetry of Mark Doty. To be precise, “The Search for Redemption” focused on the poetry from 1993-1996: Toibin shows no awareness of the poetry from 1987-1991, presumably because this was not written for a gay Muse. With only <em>My Alexandria</em> and <em>Atlantis </em>in front of him, Toibin sets out analyse the faults and successes of Doty’s work. Toibin’s short essay (some nine pages) is significant because it represents an early reading of Doty’s work. It is also has curiousity value because it shows two very different minds at work. Over the years, Toibin has deliberately adopted an ambivalent attitude towards his gay identity: not surprising that his finest novel, <em>The Master</em>, should centre on Henry James. Doty—amongst contemporary gay poets— has a sure sense of his gay identity, as a man, as a poet, as a visionary. What worries Toibin mostly, in his essay, is Doty’s (supposed) lack of precision with language, with the exact word. The resultant essay is rather like Henry James, the master of nuance, worrying over <em>what he believes to be</em> Oscar Wilde’s camp and too easy emotional language. It is a strange affair, since Toibin is awkwardly unaware of Doty’s scrupulous attention to sensual detail.<br />
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In “The Search for Redemption,” Toibin reads Doty’s poetry in the context of his prose: not an admirable starting point for criticising poetry! Beginning with “Demolition” (p.1), then jumping to the centre of <em>My Alexandria</em>, with “The Wings” (pp.39-51), Toibin hears a “clotted” Lowell and a satiated poetry. That disparaging “clotted” reveals quite a lot, suggesting a thick creamy language which does not flow. Conversely, Toibin finds the music of <em>Atlantis </em>to be too runny and the emotions too “slack”. Toibin picks out six poems which all contain the phrase “I love.” He struggles with the simple, emotional intensity of Doty’s line.<br />
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Toibin’s reading of Doty is an excellent example of low-brow journalism masquerading as high-brow criticism. Yes, Doty confesses to Lowellisms in <em>My Alexandria</em> (and Toibin is quick to follow an authorial signpost), but there is hi-tec precision in “Difference” and language is peeled to a sliver in “No”. And <em>Atlantis </em>can hardly be judged on a few lines. What Toibin’s essay really shows is the inability of a prose writer to read poetry; so much so that he has to rely on Doty’s autobiographical prose work to give him basic factual clues to an art that in Doty’s hands in neither basic nor factual. “Redemption” is entirely the wrong word for Doty’s earlier work. It comes with over-tones of sin and being delivered from evil. Doty is a transcendental poet, one who is unafraid (like Whitman) to hear and see the metaphysical arise in the human body.<br />
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Toibin’s treatment of Doty, unfortunately, is reminiscent of the criticism (offered by UK critics) towards Gunn. <em>Atlantis</em> is Doty’s middle work, like Gunn’s <em>Jack Straw's Castle</em>, which was viewed as a falling-off, a loosening of sentiments and technique…and too proud of its gayness to be wholesome! It has taken astute critics such as Gregory Woods to show that Gunn’s work is part of a progression; and the same can be said of Doty’s work.<br />
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Mark Doty’s latest volume, <em>Theories and Apparitions</em> (2008), maintains the quality of writing that has gone before, but there are new tonalities. It is a fine collection of controlled poems. Many of the poems balance line control with flowing narratives that naturally meander like rivers. Doty is wary of a kind of poetry that gets from A to B too quickly, equally suspicious of a poetry that goes nowhere and drowns in a welter of unmoving images. Running through the volume is a light-filled and light-hearted hermeticism which questions and upholds language. Recent reviews of <em>Theories and Apparitions</em> have used words like “sound-bite” and “colloquial” to characterise the poetry. Both descriptions undervalue the quality of Mark Doty’s writing: “sound-bite” should be replaced with hi-definition and “colloquial” with plainspeaking.<br />
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The opening poem, in <em>Theories and Apparitions</em>, begins—uncharacteristically—in a very English setting. One night, near Hoarwithy, Hertforshire, Doty is presented with the music of a pipistrelle bat. Aware that the word “pipistrelle” means “evening” such that the name of the bat is literally born from darkness, the bat becomes a cipher for the birth of a poem. Two different responses are sinuously woven within the poem, one is English and Wordsworthian, another is American and Whitmanesque. Doty identifies his response as born out of Whitman: he attaches an ambassadorial function to the bat, that of a “quick” hermetical messenger, who possesses a voice that only Doty hears, which marks him out, like a visionary, for an epiphany within nature, within the nature of language:<br />
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“Does the poem reside in experience<br />
or in self-consciousness<br />
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about experience?”<br />
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Poetry isn’t just about listening to a poet relate experience. It is about listening to something magical on the borderland where language stirs in relation to self:<br />
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“A word in your ear, says the night.”<br />
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The ability, like a hermeticist, to cross from the physical into the metaphysical, without losing the thread (and the reader in the process) is one of Mark Doty’s many skills.<br />
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The first poem is an honest opening to the whole of <em>Theories and Apparitions</em>. It introduces the psychic element within the volume. It opens the double pathways: theory and the testing of artistic experience: apparition and the observing of spectral encounters. The "Apparition" poems, arranged throughout the volume, work almost as crescendos within the whole music. The first of these, “Apparition (Favourite poem)” is a crisp poem about the efficacy of language, one in which an exact and detailed human voice speaks. It moves from a reverberating, mystical opening—“dust and sleep, burning so slowly”— into a sharp memory of a young Texan man reading Shelley. The speaker becomes a “vessel” for Shelley’s voice without losing his own, just as Doty relives the experience of the boy’s voice without losing his own. How the Word endures in the world is reflected upon with accuracy and emotion. The third “Apparition” is an encounter with Whitman. This isn’t Ginsberg’s outrageous Whitman seen in “A Supermarket in California”, a poet made in the image of Ginsberg, or Lorca’s heroic Whitman, “Adam-blooded”, fighting foul sensuality in the bull-ring of New York, but a poet in his 30s, with “warm lines around the eyes/dilated as by an opiate”, a softer Whitman than the visionary in Doty’s “A letter to Walt Whitman”, <em>Source</em> (2001). Within the medium of the poem, Doty creates a middle-aged, mediatorial Whitman, who is, but “isn’t the man I know”, whose quality of vision (in a poem all about seeing) shares the quality of Doty’s verse. This is a beautifully imagined poem about tradition and the continuity of feeling. The other poets who occur as apparitions include Berryman, Dugan, and a rather showy Hom(m)er in the guise of an “archaic” peacock!<br />
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<em>Theories and Apparitions</em> is a wonderful collection of poems. Doty--thankfully-- isn’t (Pound’s) Homer with an “ear, ear for the sea-surge” and what is epic in life. Rather, like the pipistrelle, he demonstrates an acute ear for words and their echoes within the dark human psyche. Unlike Wilde, who worshipped the elaborate peacock feather, which came to stand for his theory of Beauty, Mark Doty's rejection of the-peacock's tail-approach-to-poetry is a rejection of excess and redundancy. In his world, there is only the <em>cauda pavonis </em>of Blakeian hermeticism and a recognition that every little thing matters or nothing matters at all: poetry resides in the connections between everday actions and how language graces them. This is a volume characterised by its attentiveness to narrative, its distinctions in feeling and its evocative use of imagery.</div>
A.H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/08716463684593767622noreply@blogger.com0