Luke Roberts, TO MY CONTEMPORARIES

Luke Roberts’ new, self-published book, printed, released, and distributed for free towards the end of last year, all quietly, all without fanfare, is called To My Contemporaries (a title borrowed from Edwin Rolfe). As this title might suggest, it relentlessly foregrounds referentiality, by which I suppose I mean naming, something that Roberts has been concerned with for a while, but in a way that develops from its use in both of his preceding books, Left Helicon (Equipage, 2013) and Keep All Your Friends (MATERIALS, 2014). Left Helicon’s invocations of historical, political and literary figures often function as often hard-to-place jokes:

Now I imitate Neruda from memory;

Engels, the beautiful walrus;

Samuel Beckett feeding ice-cream

to a three-legged dog, it is the saddest thing;

The name of my band is Theodor’s Swimsuit,

on a striped recliner,  

it is the second saddest thing;

[…] if you bring Mussolini

into this, I will shoot him in a duel. I will use the robot

Bertolt Brecht to travel back in time, and I will go to town

on Gabriele D’Annunzio.

           

(Most of those examples are from the poem ‘People from the Book Kept Entering the Room’, whose title suggests that these proliferating references function as much as interruptions to the present moment of composition, or inhabitation, as to points of clarification and contextualisation for it.) KALYF deploys such naming them more as part of a sublimated(?) or ambiguous research project (without wanting that term to sound like the subsumption of poetic concern to academic funding-drive), perhaps in the mode of the earlier False Flags, with its take on conspiracy theories, moon landings and Cold War chess games. Thus, the argument about secrecy and clandestine political movements which references Comrade Bala, Patty Hearst, and the like, in the book’s concluding poem, ‘Agitprop: An Ode’. 

In To My Contemporaries, however, the names are more explicitly posed in terms of what they can teach us: the poem is about reading, and learning from the poets of the past and the poets of now, disagreeing with them, recalibrating them, etc. Or it functions as a survey, a summing-up, reckonings and engagements with the feeling of a particular poetical and political moment, mournful lookings-back and reassessments, workings-through. TMC is very much a poem of address, as its title suggests, but it’s not exactly a grandly rhetorical, public poem – there are all sorts of ironizations, disguises, feints and so on, familiar to readers of Roberts’ poetry over the years, though there is here a definite change in register.

The poem is, in essence, a political pastoral – pastoral elements having crept into ‘Agitprop’, and here being more explicitly fore-grounded, in setting at least, though this is perhaps more background, or ambience, than the explicit and obsessive concern it might be in the work of, say, Lisa Robertson, or even the scrupulous attention to natural detail found in such writers as R.F. Langley and Peter Larkin. Such vagueness is explicitly remarked upon and turned into a joke – how simultaneous recall erases the distinctions between seasons, the specificity of the landscape supposedly attended to, the unsuitability of the poet themselves for that purpose: “It was summer, it was autumn, it was spring […] Implausible that the revolutionary bucolic / should fall to me, the bearer of gratuitous hayfever.” The poem is also suspicious of an attachment to place that romanticizes any inherent quality of – say – racial belonging – “If you absorb a place it absorbs you / is wholly untrue […] a porch in the West of the military tract […] afraid of desolation / but doing duty to where you belong offends my sensibility”. Likewise, its presentation of culinary delights is tinged by its obvious metaphorical overlay with the discourse surrounding migration and economic inclusion within the European Union: “Now fed on Polish blueberries most days / a harvest of European plums, / Greek honey / abundance / waiting for the ground war to slow its circle.”

Despite these self-conscious asides, half-apologies, and criticism, the poem’s pastoralism is not exactly programmatic, though it has the structure of this in some manner – in part, perhaps, due to the fact that it’s a single sequence, in three books, rather than a collection of single poems, as in the previous two collections. It begins with an un-named second person plural, in a particular place, looking at plants and waiting for their washing:

We were in the ice-cold pagoda observing the angiosperms

we were outside the actual laundromat

These lines immediately establish a play between inside and outside, the reality of the place and incident described and its transformation and re-framing within an (often obscured and non-linear) poetic narrative. “I” and “we” are insistently there from the beginning, and the poem describes its own mission statement as early as the fourth line – “This is a poem about timing and advice” – even as it also betrays a scepticism about the grounds for this mission, and the poet’s suitability for accomplishing it:

how to begin when versatility’s in thrall to caution

afraid of repetition

falling short of what we’d shyly call an ethics.

Indeed, the claim is that this is a poem about timing and advice, rather than an actual enacting of a particular kind of timing or a giving of a particular breed of advice. A concern here is whether the poet themselves has something to teach their readers, or whether they themselves might accomplish the task of self-interrogation – itself potentially instructive to others – or whether both these things might fall apart in ironic feints and half-declarations which are almost immediately backtracked upon. Such a problematic would seem particularly to be encapsulated in the line on the following page: “you could finally be divulged”. This is an odd grammatical usage, reversing the usual subject-object structure associated with the verb, so that rather than the speaker divulging something, making it known, they themselves (and, moreover, addressing themselves in the second person) would be the one divulged. ‘Divulged’ sounds here something like ‘divested’, a casting off of secrecy perhaps: though what exactly is meant by the “twofold office” of the previous line which, again, sits in an awkwardly elided grammatical relation to what follows it, is unclear. But what’s central here, nonetheless, and however much apparent disclosure and foregrounding actually functions as another means of giving the slip, of – perhaps, and intentionally, dissembling – is the poet as narrator: in this sense differing from Edwin Rolfe, whose own To My Contemporaries opens with the following ‘Credo’:

To welcome multitudes – the miracle of deeds

performed in unison – the mind

must first renounce the fiction of the self

and its vainglory.

This is not to suggest that Roberts’ poem lapses into a kind of idealized bourgeois individualism – however much that term suggests a crushing, anti-poetic Stalinism, and however much I’d see the opposition between ‘poetry of the individual’ and ‘poetry of the masses’ as crude and unhelpful  – but that its negotiations of “what we’d shyly call an ethics” are more intimate than Rolfe’s “strength and togetherness / of bodies phalanxed in a common cause, / of fists tight-clenched around a crimson banner”. So the narrator in Roberts’ poem draws in elements of intimate or private reference, perhaps intelligible in their full sense only to close friends, and also reaching for a more public form of address – though ‘public’ here might mean as much those friends as an ambition towards a soap-box oratory, an imagining that the poem will mean anything to an imagined political crowd just waiting to be inspired by revolutionary poetry. The poem is more coy and double-bluffing than that, though this shouldn’t imply that there is a secret key, that there really is such a thing as the “secret poem” on which Joseph Persad focuses in his recent review of Left Helicon for Hix Eros. This is a work that so insistently and consistently draws attention to and thinks critically but not distantly through its own circumstances or concerns – it feels and is, I think, a poetry that really means what it says and means something, does something with it.

So, the pastoral, then, as background; the slow, drawn-out process of grinding defeat inflicted by the Coalition, and now, Tory government in the UK, the slow fade-out from the hopes of the Student Movement of 2010-2011, at its most publicly visible, active and radicalized; the impact of certain disputes and fallings-out amongst a ‘community’ of Anglophone poets over the past few years as well; and all these as part of a coming to terms with certain things that the poet’s past poetry has done, which this poem attempts to explicitly bid farewell to. Leave-taking more broadly is something the poem is concerned with –geographical departure, or the death of the poet Stephen Rodefer, mentioned twice in the final section – as well as spring, new starts, the pastoral, the harvest, the birds, the flowers; that balance.

The poem is in three sections (‘Books’): the first, from which I’ve already quoted, establishing something of a narrative, or at least a sense of place, whose dipping in and out of real landscape and a more ephemeral or idealized pastoral variant is played on. Thus, “the actual Laundromat” is a half-joking claim for factual accuracy, the absence of place names and the generalising specificity of locations which are also mythological and poetic tropes – the sea, the forest, et al – a co-existing counter-tendency. There is a distinct and distinctive sound patterning here, more exaggerated even than in Roberts’ previous books, which, for a whole section, leads to a series of end-rhymed lines, with plenty of internal rhyming echoes across these lines as well. This relates to the developing theme of beginning, ending, and return. A familiar move in Roberts’ poetry for years now has been the placing of an adjective at the end of a line (often equating with a syntactical unit), rather than before the noun to which it refers. This is also done with adverbs, often playing on the English-language ambiguity wherein words like “forgetful” implicitly read as “forgetfully”. One could say that this marks a displacement from objects described to quality, the imbuing of those objects with feeling, but I think it functions more as a way of maintaining simultaneous meanings, so that that process of imbuing something apparently solid with something more confusedly personal is deliberately fore-grounded and keeps the sense of the phrase mobile. Some examples: “to write this down forgetful”; “on certain shores uncertain”; “with our justice under-nourished”; “parallels of impressive orchestration unavoidable”. This kind of suspension, or inversion – a suspension whose quality of syntatical and line-ending resolution problematizes as much as it resolves – as an equivalent to what the poem names in the following manner: “nourished endings, solemn and inevitable / the starting point is flinching in compression.” (Inversion also echoes in the inversion (or reversal) of the Biblical creation myth, in which the (male) poet is created out of the rib of their (female) lover - “And Jack knew all the flowers’ names” / therefore I would be her rib” - taught by or (in the second section), spoken through by them: “So Jack spoke through the imperfect medium of Luke” - itself a reversal of Alice Notley's phrase about Jack Kerouac. This is, after all, a love poem of sorts.)

After all this, a transition, nicely managed, a marked shift in register, from first to second book: the end of the first asking what story “you” (either the poet themselves, or its readers) “want to be told”, abruptly concluding “well okay” and then beginning on the next page with a declarative citation of George Oppen. The second book is the shortest of the three, in terms of page numbers at least, though with far longer lines substituting for the three-step structure of the sections that surround it – and is more didactic (from “timing” to “advice”), while carrying on the fragments of narrative reference to place, the metaphorical use of pastoral setting: for instance, the fire in the forest, “curated entirely by unreliable poets”, which seems to be a dig at the unthinking fetishisation of would-be revolutionary activity (“a fire in the forest”) within a situation not yet revolutionary, where the conditions aren’t right. I say ‘didactic’, but one might better substitute the word ‘rhetorical’, or even expansive, as references to flowers and the writing of poets about flowers (the “insurgent botany” of the first section) transition into a list of “these poets [who] are your friends”: a roll call, without naming names (save the late Stephen Rodefer, who recurs in the final section), but rather places, which function as a “parallel of impressive orchestration unavoidable.” This list of Anglo-American poets, recognisable in terms of who exactly is being referred to, to those in the know, recognisable at least as an index of international poetic kinship to those who aren’t, seems to be one of those who might give both the poet of this poem, and the ‘contemporaries’ to whom it is addressed, advice. O’Hara is obviously lurking around here, and not just in the obvious joke about “our lapsed curiosity about the poets / in Ghana”; but the advice sought here is less fleeting, less part of an on-the-move sociality than O’Hara’s.

Apart from this list – a single stanza – this section carries over from the first a recurrence of ribs, ribcages, hips and the heart – again, internalisation, this time on a specifically physical plane, as well as the play between privacy and disclosure, sometimes explicitly in contrast to the address to the dispersed poets, its play on a kind of internationalism, an “impressive orchestration unavoidable”, distance, with the flower functioning as symbolic object both specific (through reference to its uses in literary and botany trivia) and “undefined.” The poem wrestling with definitions, schemas, clarity on the one hand, irony, turning away, shifts in scene and reference on the other, the set of declarations within the final sentence seeing the poet apparently “renounce[ing] my title”. (This perhaps a reference to the joking boasts from from False Flag’s already-ironized ‘Colossal Boredom Swan Song’, with its “withdraw[al] to my ethical bin bag” and “accept[ance] of everything, every tiresome imitation of flight”. Here, the phrase ‘champion of poetry’ reads both as a claim to skill, with poetry as competition and act of mastery asserted over other poets, and as a more generous championing of poetry: “I champion of poetry, salute the elders, put my / foot in a desk, kicking poetry with a desk lamp / strapped to my heart”). Having renounced this title, they propose to reconvene later on “with exacter measures, with better poems, / celebrations of a less sacrificial nature”, and the section ends ominously on the lines “blame all over the ocean.”

If solidarity has broken down into recrimination, there’s nonetheless some promise held out: but the third section doesn’t provide the triumphal assertion of a new programme for poetry, Rolfe-ian or otherwise. Instead, it functions as something like a coda to the second, with its gathering together of the disparate or distanced (by geography, circumstance, straitening of circumstance, suspicion, paranoia, moving on, betrayal, the inability to cope and deal with violences of all kinds – all the rest of it). It functions as a chastened or careful way to begin again after a grand gathering together which is both invocation and farewell. The formal workings here echo this double sense. Such workings – echoed in three poems, outtakes from TMC, which appear in the Xmas magazine YULE LOG – play out mainly through repetitions of words or phrases, the poet deliberately tweaking or rather, spannering (but not quite) the works of the poem. Maybe they could be more accurately figured using a sonic metaphor, as little glitches, distortions, feedbacks, which mesh or extend a different way the use of rhyme and particular cadence, within its frame, the frame of a particular style, troubling it without destroying it.

Towards the end of the poem, an anecdote appears, in which the poet encounters a homeless man outside a late-opening grocery store / off-licence, stopping to call the emergency services. There’s a risk in this sort of move, perhaps, of the return of a kind of philanthropism, a demonstration of the poet’s ethical commitment, as a person, through a specific act of inter-personal kindness; but the way the story is recounted belies that. “Here is my realism”, writes Roberts, preceding to describe waiting with the man and calling the emergency services and concluding “I didn’t love him at all”. What I get from this is that an ethics of care, that acts of political solidarity, might not be prefaced on love of a specific person, but on a more general sense of solidarity, which in itself actually functions as a more reasonable, expansive, useful and practicable sense of what love might mean -- however much poets like to go for extremes, to put themselves through the wrangler of love, elevated in triumph or abjection, aggrandizing and narrativizing their emotional lives, meshing them with politics, making claims for them. “Meet me with everyone / you love, even badly” refigures the roll-call of contemporaries from the second section, on a more intimate scale, and one which, nonetheless, leaves the definition of love, conventional or – given the evidence of this poem – most likely otherwise, open, negotiable, to be struggled with and lived.

The poet concludes with advice that is to himself as much as to his contemporaries, and which might, in some roundabout way, describe the purpose of the poem itself:

write to everyone

you know

write to everyone.

A note to self but also advice in general, encouragement, necessity; in times of dispersal, as any poet, or anyone, might figure them; the necessity of communication, re-evaluation, continued dialogue, and one which might take place more privately, more carefully, with more openness to risk and disagreement, than in the fractious and fracturing fora of an often confused public debate about the political function of poetry (however useful and laudable and central to our thought that might be). The poem, then, engages with and emerges from the difficulties of finding frames for such concerns which don’t descend into bickering and to the crossing of wires, but to a different kind of crossing (a word I’m thinking of here in relation to a recent series of videos made by the poet Richard Owens). We often can’t see these things clearly until after they’ve past – and, in some ways, perhaps even less so after. And we know this from examining the histories of the poets and the poetries we read, the literary histories that are constructed around them, both by these poets themselves and by others, the historians, the critics, the new generations, those who come after. So it can be hard to say just what exactly these words - given, renounced, ironized, declared, affirmed - will mean – and who will read them. But for now, this is what seems important, to me at least, about them.

And then the rest of that conclusion: the burning of the heather on the hillside by the apprentices who “threw their tools / in the sea”, which, perhaps because of a coincidence in my own reading, when I first encountered drafts of the poem, rather than because of something specifically in the poem itself, brings to mind these lines from the poem ‘Landscape with Three People’, included in the late Lee Harwood’s 1966 pamphlet The Man With Blue Eyes:

I loved him and I loved her

and no understanding was offered

to the first citizen

when the ricks were burnt.

Those lines, which I’ve not found glossed or discussed in detail in any of the existing Harwood criticism, explicitly foreground the book’s bisexuality, but what I’m interested in here, in relation to Roberts, is how they offer a removed ambience while apparently tapping into a register associated with acts of historical violence and turmoil – they sound, at least, as if culled from a historical account of machine-breaking, acts of sabotage in reaction to the cruel displacements of the Industrial Revolution; in that sense mirroring the poem’s landscape setting. Roberts, too, plays on the relation between closure and disclosure, historical record and a more numinous interiority, but his poem differs from the elision of temporalities, settings, registers and referents evinced in Harwood’s “and” – a privacy redolent of John Ashbery, the ‘man with blue eyes’ of the title, and arguably associated with the poems’ own acts of privacy or concealment around the issue of sexuality, poised half in and half out of the closet. Roberts’ privacy is of a different kind; is perhaps about the pleasures of concealment, the near-paranoia borne of conditions of political defeat – if ones less dramatic than the references to political torture, resistant fighting and the like that (again somewhat ambiguously and atmospherically) pepper The Man with Blue Eyes and The White Room. In any case, the hillside burning is here a means, perhaps, of imbuing the pastoral with a history of resistance and solidarity, rather than of the class distinctions so often imbued within it, from Spenser on Ireland to the seventeenth- and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landed gentry surveying the harmonious shaping of their estate; to make it something wilder, a site of conflict and violence as much as of pleasure and escape.

But, again, this isn’t explicitly thematic; we could read the apprentices as younger poets, the contemporaries of the title themselves, learning their craft as much through destruction as imitation; or as something else entirely. In any case, to conclude abruptly, I like the poem’s self-reflexive questioning of the problem of love in poetry, and the way that ethical conduct in love might be inflected, in life, by its use as material for poetry: so that the poet says they are (maybe) done with “loving eruditely”. And its final lines, in the wake of Rodefer’s death and personal dispersal, on “holding on to the living” and calling time and closing; true to the spirit of the poem as a whole, in general free of bombast, with the right combination of warmth, generosity, and self-criticism that doesn’t turn into elongated writhing display and is, frequently, genuinely moving.

‘Belabouring in Vain’: Scattered Notes on Michael Haslam

Let’s start with the introduction Haslam pens to the volume around which these notes will flip and flap (‘A Cure for Woodness’, the concluding part of his ‘Music’ trilogy). There at first is posited an apparent desire to get away from that soundplay, that rhyming rhythmic jingle-jangle (which John Wilkinson would term a schizoid ‘clang association’ (viz. his analysis of John Wieners’ work)) in which H. has so often revelled, arcane etymological connections not as language’s historical sedimentation (viz. Adorno), but as sidetracks, the eccentric investigations, almost, of a Victorian leisured gentleman (tho’ rougher-shod, and informed by a life of labour): locality and quaintness, amateur histories (some of which spirit, now I think of it, does hover round certain of the ‘English Intelligencer’ prose that’s recently been put out by Mountain Press, particularly Peter Riley’s various investigations of Britain’s stone age past – though there things are more tempered by (a) academic temperament and (b) a sometimes crushingly Olsonian grand project to reclaim origin and to re-write history thru what I guess one might call ‘investigative verse’). In part, of course (and as the succeeding poems in actuality prove) H. actually wants to defend that laboured-leisured sense of non-academic play, often within Nature (we’ll let the generalized term stand, as place-holder, for now) as refreshment for melancholy or ‘woodness’, as a consolation not Romantic-regressive but necessary: “the birds and mammals, streams and flowers and trees, the web of all living life and the pleroma of physical forces, with humanity de-centred”; even without the “religious cause,” in which Nature, however ‘fallen’, still revealed something of God (to the monks on Skellig Michael, for instance, or to St Francis, exhibiting humility and openness in a non-anthropocentric universe), “there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our being enlivened by the beauty of our sustaining ecology” (but note a total lack of sentimental earth-mother piety in this (tho’ the earth as feminine fecundity trope does crop out with a fair frequency in the following verses): “It’s marvellous how consoling the cruelties of nature can be”) – in any case, (inter-)dependence rather than just Brute (Social) Darwinism, the fittest survival; the role of co-operation, yes? But still this worry that the language sound-play and often blatant use of rhyme into which H’s verse has moved functions as regression and narrative from his earlier ‘languescope’ of impersonal undirection and non-paraphrasability, in which the question of “whether the results divulged merely my own so-called ‘Unconscious’ or the truth of the world would be for the world to judge.” Yet the “grand abstract vision” (viz. Hart Crane’s Bridge as abstract synthesis in poetry of that which in life remains messily separate and clashing (as Atlantis, eternity, “one song” which “devoutly binds,” “in single chrysalsis the many twain”)) can’t be accomplished, even in verse: the fall instead is into plot and soundplay – not as (fortunate?) Fall but as “waves & cycles of personal emotional happenstance” – despondence, confidence, elation, tragedy, etc – which aren’t exactly specific in the narrative fixity they impose on the poem; rather, “personal, but common enough” – not as exact specific biography, the poem as confession, ‘authenticated’ by its status as document of inner struggle (and thus elevating the role of the author as one who feels ‘more’, or ‘better’, than us ordinary mortals, and whose documented feelings thus deserve more attention or respect more than those of non-artists). The aim is to avoid being falsely ‘universal’, un-historically/-socially specific in a disingenuous, metaphysical, escapist sense of unchanging essence, whilst simultaneously acknowledging and highlighting personal contingency, even a certain capriciousness. Such capriciousness is central to Haslam’s persona, and is what perhaps enables the free-flowing (though of course, exquisitely controlled and skilful) Delight of his poetry – drawing attention to a certain sonic materiality, sensuous sound-patterning and excited jibber-jabber prized over a previous investment in what H. describes as a certain modernist absence, a near-religious worship of the void (the 'languescope': “There was a time when I was strongly drawn to the lure of an idea of absence. How can Emptiness shine like a tin can? The siren idea I drew from a concept formed from what I might call post-Symbolist French poetry. I remember hearing and reading such stuff in the 1970s. So much whiteness, nothingness, void, and silence, absolute silence. There was something almost mystical in the absence of God: you could almost worship the blankness.”) Instead of such abstracted paring-down, we have here instead an associative play that is almost out of control, that takes one out of oneself, or that takes one outside a structuring sense of one’s self as a stable and rounded entity, instead focussing the sharp or blurred edges of moment-to-moment existence as experienced and lived in its non-schematic minutiae. It’s a little like watching a Stan Brakhage film, where Brakhage’s field of activity and wandering attention is on the play of light and movement, its forms of organization super-fast and contingent. (One could take any number of the painstakingly hand-painted and hand-scratched frames of those brief but highly, highly concentrated, flitteringly dense films from the latter part of his career, and present them as miniature paintings in themselves, but their cumulative power is very much meant to be, and indeed is, in their total effect, their combination into the moving ream: film as mitigating against the permanence (and thus the commercialization and elitist museum-bound segregation) of the art object, as a liberation of perception into temporal flux and flow). Similarly, any one of Haslam’s phrases might cause one to trip and pause on its delicious sonic effect (he could easily have made a fine sound poet), causing one to have to go back and re-read the line, and maybe the line before that, to get back into the ‘sense’ of it – it’s what makes reading Haslam such an exhausting pleasure, such a capacious joy: not because of difficulty of allusion, the kind of stringency demanded by certain forms of late modernist poetry, but because of sheer glorious density. Such density is, of course, a density of allusion and of multiplying potential meanings, cross-connections, associations, etc, as much as it is a density of sound, and the two are, I’d argue, closely connected: sound patternings spark sense connections that would not occur to the ‘rational’ mind, even if afterwards they are rationalized, placed in argumentative order, saying something rather than merely playing with nice vocalized jingle-jangles. (The process, in fact, is not that far off, in general methodology, if not in impact or real practical similarity, to the work J.H. Prynne was writing in the 90s and 2000s (‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ of course being a different proposition altogether, moving through tough and extended argument rather than the building up of thematic area by the build-up of quick-jump fragments and associative build-up)). The difference to Brakhage, of course, is that Haslam is working with language, packed full of signification and allusion, whereas Brakhage, particularly in those abstracted films, can move from visual signification to the creation of new forms that have no exact parallel in what we might see in the world itself (the closest analogy, and one he frequently made, being to ‘closed-eye vision’, that delicate patterning of light synapses when one closes one’s eyes (or, as D. Oliver puts it in ‘The Harmless Building’, “the ever-present background of combinational probability laws that were a more-modern hesistance of the swarm towards pattern, a swirling and sparkling”). Of course, H. could have moved into sound poetry proper, and that he did not suggests that his project is still very much invested in meaning – not the ‘liberated’ meaning of a grunt or growl (viz. Burroughs’ oft-cited statement that “words are an arbitrary communication system and any sound could do as well. An exquisite sonnet could be conveyed in bestial snarls and grunts.” Without overlooking the importance formed by language's non-verbal semantic elements – those qualities of voice (timbre, rhythm, pitch, etc) which are not so much formalized codes (though they contain recognizable features that allow them to be 'read') as individualized modes of conscious or unconscious expression – it would seem foolish to prioritize non-linguistic communication units as something 'better than language'; and, allowing for rhetorical overstatement, the valorization of a kind of 'primitive' animality (why "bestial snarls and grunts" rather than, say, the 'motherease' with which an infant is lulled? well, I guess Burroughs' misogyny would answer that question...) seems a little problematic. By this, of course, I don’t mean to suggest that poems should be all lulling sweetness and light…); OK, so not that ‘animal liberation’ thru sound, access to one’s inner spirit-man, one’s inner lion (a la McClure) (however parodically and delightfully ridiculous this is made to seem by Cobbing, his tongue firmly popping in his cheek), but a negotiation with the fact of mouthing words through tongue and teeth and spittle, a kind of muttering musical complex inside the head which one could become stuck inside, and which poetry’s delicate task is to pick its way through, using that near-schizoid sound to sound out new meanings, new association complexes, to combat language’s bureaucratized or war-mongering straitjacketing without falling into a lulling sonic cocoon of regressive rhyming chiming nonsense:

“The polymorphous parts / of sorry sores and soothing phoney story sorts” (‘A Bunch of Tales’).

Which seems to suggest that any chiming stories that are told are fakes, tho’ elsewhere, as we’ll see, the figure of wounds or bruises, blemish and waste and mess, stand more for a kind of down-to-earthness, a literal materialism that is multiple and, yes, poly-morphous (and poly-tonal, -phonic?), which H. wd most certainly endorse, and wish to participate within, in that self-description. And, let’s think about this: sound and stories have their linkage, in oral epic, the sounded refrain (refrain as both to sound again, and not to do so, to ‘refrain from’ – that dialectic in origin (as the original sensed of the word ‘rhythm’ clash between blockage and flow; as the Dogon word for ‘to open’ and ‘to lcose’ is the same): refrain, then, might be both affirmative action and negative inaction, refusal of action, excess and decorum.) And stories as sorting, arranging of multiple experience into one followed trajectory, one strand of narrative, akin (again I quote) to Hart Crane’s “one song devoutly bind[ing],” his “many twain[ing][…]in single chrysalis.” “Erosis” – giving over to eros (“woodness” as madness, including sexual elation, self-forgetting (madmens’ selves multiply, are forgot, become archetypical (Poor Tom, the generic crazed vagrant), also as erosion (of self? of land? of boundaries?) – the play in this section on ‘so’ sounds and on wounds, s’s and o’s, decay as painful wound (the "worm returning", penetrating in, as in Blake’s Sick Rose) and as ecstatic, tho’ “sickly bliss” – the holy fool, the blessed disease. A particularly striking conceit: clowns as nude weatherpeople (forecasters? rain dancers? the shamanic function sleeping right at the back of that most gleaming of regularized TV banality-bulletins, the weather report). And, ah, stars, as in Bunting’s ‘Briggflats’, that distance – “with starry gaps / of high renown.” A “cry” as birdsong, lyric O (not I) utterance, both the utterly personal and the inarticulate unperson’d, “sounding out of the depths of being” (Nietzsche), ‘O’ as folksong collective utterance at that moment of most personal pain (Prynne’s ‘English Poetry & Emphatical Language’), as danger/pain signal and as ‘music’ (birdsong – nature as decoration, no: “The cry might sound alarming. Clear enough. / It’s nothing personal. It could be couched / and may be decorated with birds.”)

“I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’” (Chuck D)

And with that on, now, to what I think’s the best poem in the book, ‘Belabouring in Vain’. Here there's play on lyric as mass/ folk / fairy (faerie?) pastoral, not as gossamer Edwardian kids at the end of the garden but as rough reverie (wood dwellers misconstrued as spirits might be outlaws, wild (green) men, Winstanley’s commune trying to eke out an arboured existence). So we have leaking, pissing, shitting, ‘wages’ recurring throughout – cash, consequences (wages of sin); we have art as (parodied) lyric (French?) delicacy –“pull faces / thinking phrases for the lyric graces, lilac cordial, vanilla curlew and so on. And hammer on / until the limb’s gone numb” – from easily-slipped dance or drink to lifted hammer, beating out the rhythm in repetitive strain  – art literally become wanking about, as in – “They say it [Art] wanks / to wage thankless assault on taste, by means of / glorious plebeian ructions” – some coarser (Anglo-Saxon?) materiality. The eruption of that rough rusticity of a peasant-pastoralised lyric, not as distanced court dalliance, rural tourism (“a cheap holiday in other people’s [idealized] misery”) but from within the place itself, or from some vantage near enough in sympathy not to render its fantasies spun too wildly into regression and lie: the people, labour, material facts, material world – as against, again, the courtly nostalgized idealisation of yer common-or-garden non-political pastoral idyll (that non-politics of course implicitly and insidiously political in its conservative claim). “There are dozens of us delving in the mass / of gross behaviour” – a kind of free love orgy (“each labourer may love / his or her next or nearest neighbour[…]dreaming nakedness, I readdress thy face”) which is partly imagined as “reverie” and dream, perhaps akin to the gender reversals and temporary madnesses in Shakespeare’s ‘green worlds’ – As You Like It’s Forest of Arden, Cymbeline’s Welsh mountains, the Tempest’s Isle, Twelfth Night’s Illyria, and most particularly, A Midsummer Night Dream’s Athenian Forest. Here we might recall RF Langley’s poem ‘Cash Point’, in which AMND leaps into the present, with a cash point as the “hole in the wall” through which Pyramus and Thisbe communicate, that hole as a point of access between a world of reality and a world of dreams (occurring explicitly in a play within a play, a parodied love story, Romeo and Juliet played for laughs) – like Bottom, those that seek to escape, say, the urban world, the world of court intrigue or brow-beating end up being turned into donkeys, literally being made an ass of. Langley suggests that both Pyramus and Thisbe’s attempt to keep their love alive through the hole (the sexual punning obvious, that hole perhaps, even, as a glory hole, anonymising and rendering almost entirely individualistic what should be an ecstatic inter-personal closeness), and a modern attempt to “cash in dreams for reality, language for things” (in Jeremy Noel-Tod’s words), are efforts doomed to failure, fictions of consoling artifice: the quasi-magical exchange of a pin number for a piece of paper which will allow one to purchase material things is a kind of ‘cashing in’ on the dreams that, say, promises of endless credit encourage –“With your last twitch you can / point at the letters that make up / the spell” – ‘spell’ referring to words as well as to magic, to the act of naming a desire that, it is hoped, produces the material effects of that desire’s presence, but which ends up as just another deferral, another consoling fiction as are the fairies in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (a play which, for AD Nuttall (in ‘Shakespeare the Thinker’) is “not escapist; it is about escapism,” subjecting its subject to a “philosophic scrutiny of the status of love-experience” to be “maintained to the end of the comedy”). If Langley remains sceptical about the consoling power of either cash or nature (elsewhere, he draws together a territorial dispute between a beetle and a wasp and the suspicion which led to the execution and torture of numerous women during the era of witch trials – misrepresentation, the fantasy of fairies and witches, as both consoling and dangerous, leading (as does the fantasy of endless cash and credit) to immiseration and exploitation), Haslam is more like Mercutio, in whose Queen Mab speech – according to Nuttall’s account of it – “wild imagination” ends up “outrun[ning] intellect”; and, unlike Mercutio, he starts off by wishing to believe, if not in the literal existence of fairies, at least in some notion of a consoling nature, or, at least, a nature that is both curse and cure, both the cause of madness and the restoration to sanity: and this can happen in a poem, which can question its own premises, its own wildness of imaginative fancy and sound-play at the same time as revelling in precisely those qualities, constructing connections not possible in the real world, perhaps, bending time in and around on itself to create constellations of country labourers, lyric poets, poetic work and the work on the land, not ignoring the structures of oppression within either, nor valourising himself as a kind of modern-day John Clare (who’s later namechecked), but as partly-parodied “yokel local-focal,” wandering in eccentric bumbling bucolic melancholia.

‘Belabouring’s implied orgy, if it’s imagined as a kind of Green World dream, is also sex as concretion melding, as assertion of body into text rather than the virginal idealization of courtly love (L’Amour de Loin). The ‘gross’ of “gross behaviour” is an excess (viz. the talk of wages and work and counting up (archaic) coins) – ‘gros’ as Falstaffian fatness – ‘delving’ as digging into the earth (here a sexualized activity, no doubt) and as undoubtedly echoing John Ball’s famous notion of communal peasant closeness to land (“when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”), that non-hierarchical commons involving a free and shared sexuality as well as labour (hopefully not in the sense of customary tribal prostitution (polygamy for men) that Marx criticises with regard to notions of ‘free love’ in a non-Communist society (the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is yer reference here)). The poem’s title implies that reverie itself is a kind of labour, whether this be labour as birth, ripeness (“a state of ripe undress”), but still at a remove, a recall, a recoil; yet ‘reverie’, in its modern sense, only tells half the story – from the OED, we find a Dionysian ‘madess, delirium, wildness, rage, revelry, wantonness (13th cent. in Old French), incoherent thinking, wandering of the mind, foolish idea, idiocy, absurdity’ – similar indeed to that earlier traced etymology of ‘woodness’: reverie as ‘ravery’ rather than the Debussyian introspection with which one would normally be inclined to read the term). That danger of idealization, fictionalization, telling stories in sound that sound sound but that in fact deceive, taking sound as sense to take leave of one’s senses, in the woods, a mad malady, and yes, this is anticipated and satirised, or fun is poked at it, even in the midst of the most jangling-dangling bits of sound-patterning, where one might think meaning had completely run away with the fairies: thus, the anticipatory rhyme and word-prefiguring of “the butchers dress/ the tripe with cress[…]the village lads and lases[…]in states of ripe undress.” Tripe and cress, daintiness and roughness (roughage), animal / meat and vegetable / plant, the shit or piss that comes out and the food that goes in (the “lyric graces” of “lilac cordial” and “vanilla curlew” (addition, entry) turn to “a loss, a slash, a pee, a piss”, a kind of jocular “aperture” between inner and outer, self and nature into which the waste goes, defecating outside: “that’s my own / at the aperture, open flies / at the back of the shed, / the industrial wate”; where flies become both zippers and insects, organic waste paradoxically industrial, this latter reminding us, perhaps, of the human workers who enabled the, say, inhuman machine-ations of the Industrial Revolution to sprout. Read yer E.P Thompson. ‘Work’, in the poetic and the more usual physical sense, as both making (in the sense of the poetic ‘makir’), crafting, and as sweat, labour, physicality: if art is “hard at work / against vulgarity”, it is really also vulgar because of the hardness of its work, its sweat and flesh and bone (even as, at the end, Haslam drifts from what might thus seem a too-simple celebration of the Victorian work ethic into a more dreamily reveried in- or e-vocation of pastoralized haystack romping – tho’ even there, “the village lads and lasses lay about themselves with mops” – there playing into the last few lines’ play on the clean and the dirty, lyric grace and lyric grit or dirt or mirth or girth, the afore-mentioned tripe and cress, “cleaners wip[ing up] the mess.” And in such messy play of word and worth (where value is, say, meaning, in that metaphor of artistic merit in monied terms we can’t avoid, it seems (seams of “the ore raw bouse”)), ‘mess’ transl(iter)ates into the penultimate line’s ‘mass’, wehre mess is am ass of amassed meaning, hard to master, the labour forcing the pun, the point, to his master’s consternation, to the consternation of the reader reading or delving for solving or solvent clues, for --- synthesis, Haslam here substituting the synthetic for the organic, the synaesthetic (as in ‘A Bunch of Tales’’ sensual mingling – “send out an ear to look”) for the single-minded, in multiplicity, simultaneity, super-imposition, in an ecstatic equivalent of sonic jangle that points to a lighter version of (again) Brakhage’s dissolutions of overlaid image: over-laid, be-laboured, a ‘lay’ as sex and as song, laying back and going for it, energy and repose, labour and reverie, making us work in pleasure, reconciled even, as in Marx’s unalienated dream that we might so be, in the full communism of the individual free to pursue whatever course at that moment is fancied – hunter, fisherman, critic, at different times of the day. That this happens, or even can happen, only in poetry or in necessarily speculative philosophical aside does not render it simply a pipe dream, a song that drugs and dulls to stupor, but as that refreshment that H. found, in his introduction, in the woods above his home, that we might find in a notion of complete personal and political liberation (or as near as could be complete in the necessarily shifting provisionality of any apparent completeness within a non-metaphysical, dialectical understanding of the world as continuous movement, dynamism, contradiction, growth (viz. Mao Zedong, y’all)) – that refreshment necessary to go on at all, to re-invigorate the struggle, whether for continuing poetic composition (‘continuale song’) or continuing fights for the removal of oppression, the ‘green world’ not as the containment structure it assumes as temporary ritual breakout within an inherently conservative framework, but as the possibility for a real radicalism to be (whether in imagination or reality) tried, tested, worked thru, poetry’s su/staining alternative. (But there’s so much of this, in this, that I can’t take too much at one time – so much rhyme, excess, express-train-wandering all over the track (tho’ in fact, as one reads on, one realizes that the range of referenced tropes is relatively slim in recurrence across the whole scope of the book). It would be too easy to overdose, to glaze things over, to just collapse – to fall flat on your back and let it all wash over you. Or you’d go mad, get that wild woodness Haslam harps on, fall head over heels into some realm that not so much heals but hauls one unstoppably in all conceivable directions, un-homing, crazed flight. In that sense, I guess, it’s precisely the opposite of the staid stillnesses in yr common garden pastoral idyll (even Larkin (Philip)’s urban scrubland blanknesses (‘Here’)) - the ‘city’ energy of modernism exploding into a Natural riot of song and voice, bird and birth and berth, in real multiplicity that opening outside: where be-laboured reverie becomes just as much a fantastic dance as hard labour, exploding vibrancies of wired contemplation.)

More (maybe) to follow.