Mark Thwaite MANCHESTER, UK A librarian by profession, Mark spends his time hoarding books, drinking tea, and looking into the middle distance. Monday: 11.27.06 | Permalink | Comments (4)

I’m not one for conflict, but I was pleased to see the rumpus in the US that ensued over Alice Quinn’s Elizabeth Bishop book (Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments), back in March. Poetry isn’t often in the news, being seen as irrelevant to our more pressing, quotidian concerns, and perhaps this is right: conflict within the poetry world is often over the most arcane issues. But when an argument over whether or not it was right to publish early versions of a poet’s work enters the mainstream it shows, at least, that poetry is alive and kicking, and that its issues can resonate beyond its own limited constituency. Quinn’s collection has just been released by Carcanet Press (based in my adopted home town of Manchester, England), so it seems like a good time to revisit some of the issues raised by the fuss.

Just last Thursday, I attended a wonderful “Elizabeth Bishop Celebration” at Manchester’s magnificent mock-Roman Central Library. (The library was only built in 1934, and was at that time the largest public library building in the UK, but you’d swear it had been there forever.) The event was certainly about marking the UK publication of the Quinn volume, but this was just the excuse needed to gather together enough people who would happily spend a lunch hour hearing Bishop’s finely crafted lines. About one hundred people crammed into a small committee room to hear Michael Schmidt, Carcanet’s chief and a fine poet in his own right, give a brief personal introduction to Bishop (he had corresponded with, but never met, the writer) and read the first, and rather clumsy draft of “One Art” (“How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” and “The Art of Losing Things” are each tested as titles in this early incarnation). Then, ten or so readers, myself included, read fourteen or fifteen of Bishop’s finished poems and the event closed with a recording of Bishop herself reading “Crusoe in England.”

You will recall, early in the year, with the US publication of the book, that the redoubtable Helen Vendler (the last living embodiment of a still-relevant New Critic?) was more than a little vexed with Quinn for having the temerity and impertinence (the impropriety, one suspects Vendler thinks) to return from the Department of Special Collections at Vassar College with Bishop’s “drafts and fragments” and expose them to the light of day. With the publication of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, non-academic lovers of Bishop’s poetry could now get a precious insight into the mechanics of how Bishop actually made her verse: how she crafted it, how she worked tirelessly at her prosody, at how to achieve the unity of form and content that she was seeking and that best fitted what she wanted to communicate and explore. The altercation was instructive, however, and Vendler’s argument, which I reject, was not entirely absurd. Bishop only published “some eighty poems and thirty translations” in her lifetime, was never one to rush into print, and she didn’t want these drafts and early attempts published. Her poetry was polished, her art fully formed, these are mere sketches and not for public consumption. They do not represent new, finished poems. They do not represent her art. But Quinn has never claimed that they did represent new, completed poems: if she—or her publisher—had claimed such then there would, indeed, be an issue, but that was not the case.

Why do we need to see these drafts? (One might very well ask, why do we need poetry? For now, I'll answer that by misquoting Bertolt Brecht’s Motto: in the dark times, there needs to be poetry about the dark times.) Why—and in what way—are these fragments and unformed, unfinished scraps helpful to the reader? What can we get from them that we can’t get from the finished poems themselves? They are instructive precisely because they remind us of the work of poetry, of the fact that poems are always a work in progress. And they show us that discovering what conjunctions of words, in which form, best express, test and stretch meaning is precisely the job of the poet. Hearing Schmidt read the clumsy first outline of “One Art” and then, later, hearing the finished piece, one appreciated very clearly that the attempt in a poem to say what one wants to say is, certainly, partially inspiration (there is to all art an irreducible element, something miraculous), but beyond that there is craft. To see Bishop stuttering, misfiring and failing is to begin to understand her poetry. And, from there, to begin to understand her art.

I read a lot of translated novels and poems. Indeed, the majority of books that I hold most dear weren't originally written in English and so I owe a good deal of my reading pleasure to the skills of translators.

We all know what Robert Frost said: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” So, am I only reading pale, neutered versions of the real thing? Should I give up on foreign-language poetry? Cleave to the colloquial and local and abjure the formal and foreign? Or should I take Frost’s truism as a challenge? I would argue that poetry in our native tongue is also what gets lost in translation as the language seeks its object and as the poet attempts to discover best how to say what they are seeking to find. Walter Benjamin said, in “The Task of The Translator,” that “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages”—and our own tongue is the first language that is foreign to us. If a translator’s job is nigh-on impossible (to get not only the language correctly rendered, but also all its registers and inferences and resonances), so too is the task of the poet: to make language strange and, firstly, to remember that it is already strange.

Notwithstanding this, some writers most certainly seem to pose a formidable technical challenge to any translator above and beyond these more philosophical difficulties. I always think of Georges Perec’s 1969 work La Disparition, a 300 page lipogrammatic novel, written entirely without the letter “e.” It was translated from the French into English by Gilbert Adair (as A Void). I still reel just thinking about that mammoth, staggering, impossible task.

And, then, I think of Paul Celan.

Of what does one think when one thinks of Celan? The Jewish Holocaust, of course, but then, also, the seeming impossibility to the poet himself of Germany and of writing in German. For Celan, translating his thoughts about Germany, and her history, and his life as a Jew, into (and out of) German, into his verses, was the primary challenge of his writing. He never lived in Germany, after the war settling in France whose language he spoke fluently, but “only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies.” The levels of impossibility begin before Paul Celan even begins to write. And before we begin to read.

You forget you forget
The words turned flint in the fist,

flashes of punctuation
crystallize
at your wrist,

out of the earth’s
cracked crests,
pauses come charging,

there, at
the sacrificial bush
where memory flares up,
you two are taken
in One breath

For Celan, one imagines that it is impossible not to fail in what he is trying to do, and perhaps he writes knowing he will fail. Because of those impossibilities, he writes; because of them we read.

One reads Pierre Joris’s translations of Celan (his Breathturn collection has just been re-released by Green Integer) knowing that Joris—an accomplished writer in his own right—knows that the definitive translation is a chimera. His versions have a truth because they understand the limits of verisimilitude. That could sound like faint praise, could be misread to imply that I mean that Joris isn’t technically up to the job. He is. These are great translations, harsher than Hamburger (Celan’s most lyrical translator to my ear), but clear, hard-lined, crisp. This is “Highgate”:

An angel walks through the room—:
you, close to the unopened book,
absolve me
once again.

Twice the heather finds nourishment.
Twice it pales.

Reading Celan in translation, one knows that one can only approach the work via its very disappearance. (Celan himself said, “Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language.”) And one does well to read all the extant translations (John Felstiner, Michael Hamburger, Ian Fairley, Robert Kelly, Popov & McHugh as well as Joris) to underscore the impossibility of the approach. (One reads all the translations and they form a kind of parallax view: not one gets it quite right but via them all one encircles the work: the work, perhaps, being what not one of them can capture.) Moving towards Celan’s hard-surrealism, one imagines that one has a grasp of his meaning, something ineffable has been gathered in, but then it seems to unfurl, the desired-for fixed comprehending is lost. Knowing this formidable barrier, knowing the impossibility of fixing meaning, one becomes enamoured of the work, aware of its life because of its depth. Formidable and sometimes forbidding, Celan’s work deepens each time we reread it. And if we cannot read it in the original German, one can read along with some fine translators whose first task as translators has been to be readers themselves. Readers of these impossible and necessary works.

Roy Fisher is a Birmingham poet. His often jazz-inspired work shows how place and folk conspire with each other, and inspire each other, in the lives they lead in the landscapes in which they lead them. His is a singular voice: harsh, sometimes crabby but, equally, ironic yet warm and often very funny. This is “Epic”:

‘Stranger, in your own land
how do men call you?’

‘I will tell you. Men call me Roy
Fisher. Women call me
remote.’

Poetry is many things to many people. Whilst there is room, no doubt, for the sentimental, the deeply personal, the spiritual, there should also be space for much else: the dispassionate, the humorous, the arcane and the difficult. But defining poetry—like defining the novel—is a foolish occupation. Poetry is what it does. Poetry is each poet’s attempt in each poem to write about what they are trying to say via a form they are happy to call poetry. If that definition is too catholic for you, I think you’ll find that any that is more restrictive excludes some poems that you probably love.

We often know a small number of random facts about a wide-range of subjects: I know that elephants have a gestation period of 22 months; that parsley is poisonous to parrots; and that Birmingham (the largest city in the UK’s Midlands; often thought of as England’s Second City, a position it testily vies for with my adopted home of Manchester) has more canals than Venice. I also know—without ever having been there—that Venice is quite beautiful. Birmingham—where I have been very many times—is not. Or, rather, is not obviously so. But in every city and town, men and women have loved and struggled and lived. They have created ugliness, been crushed by conflict, acted badly and they have, through all of these lived lives, made and thought and done many beautiful things too. Roy Fisher is a Birmingham poet and his Birmingham is full of “light, sharp edges . . . the dog odour / of water, new flats, suburb trees . . . oil-marked asphalt / and, in the darkness . . . a sort of grass.”

On Monday, I talked about Elizabeth Bishop and, yesterday, about Paul Celan. Both are very different poets, but both command a considerable audience. It is likely that poetry readers in both the US and in the UK will know both poets names. Roy Fisher, however, is a more minor and much more local voice. A teacher and a musician, Fisher was inspired by the (American) Black Mountain poets: a Midlands boy he may be, but even in his colloquialism his influences and influence reach beyond the local. Actually, I think that’s the point I want to make here: poetry can certainly embody the local, but it can also destroy it as well. Destroy what is stifling or insular or parochial about the local and make it immediately larger than itself. Certainly, it is important to focus on the concrete in any poem (what is it actually saying? how is it saying it? does the form in which it is saying it help or hinder what it is trying to achieve?), but the allegorical moment is always there, and the poem always has one eye on it. A poem is always about its own subject matter and itself as a poem, but it is also always not about these things. A poem is always also not about itself.

Where’s Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it. Two. More or less.

[. . .]

Tame, the Dark River; these English spread their works
southward then westward, then all ways

[. . .]

. . . a river called Rea, meaning river,
and misspelt at that. Before they merge

they’re both steered straight, in channels

When I last saw Fisher read (at the University of Manchester) he had a hacking cough that kept interrupting his reading. And then he kept interrupting himself with anecdotes of when, where, how he wrote his pieces. When he could talk no more, he reached for his water, and a pianist played some bars of some jazz classics until he was able to resume. Despite his frailty that day, Fisher was a compelling presence and he brought out in his work a stronger, stranger, blacker humour and a more insistent warmth and wisdom than I’d found on the page. In a recent interview with the Guardian newspaper, the poet Don Paterson said about public performances that he’d “begun to think that it forges an unnaturally close relationship between you and the work.” I’ve been thinking about that as I recalled Fisher’s gig, reading his words, a picture of his face in mind, the sound of his cough accompanying my reading, beating time to it.

Has Fisher the person imposed himself too closely onto his words? Am I now reading his words, having heard him read them, with his inflexions and hesitations and nuances and emphases? With his gentle, barely-there Brummie accent? I’m not sure. But I do know that Fisher himself felt a distance from his own words, and perhaps through them a distance, sometimes via his very proximity, from the Birmingham he loves. And I do know when I read Fisher, sometimes hearing him read along with me in my mind, that his lines and his landscapes are only provisionally local: Roy Fisher is not a Birmingham poet.

With their lack of subtlety and inability either to see or apply nuance, both Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have been seeking to promulgate a kind of militant, proselytizing atheism of late. I’d like to suggest that both should read more poetry. An atheist myself, I’m uncomfortable with their anti-religious stance for a number of reasons—not least both scientists inability to get to grips with the persistence of religious thought, its ubiquity, its breadth and its beauty.

Critics like the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, and the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, have both recently done great jobs puncturing the hubris of Dawkins’ clumsy and provocative The God Delusion. I won’t repeat their arguments, instead I want to talk about the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. A world-renowned writer, Tranströmer lets us think about all our delusions and what they make us susceptible to and perceptive of.

On the back of my copy of the New Collected Poems the blurb says Tranströmer “sees the world from a height, in a mystic dimension.” On Robin Robertson’s recent versions, The Deleted World, the back-cover copy reads, “a deeply spiritual but secular writer.” I argued yesterday the proffering any definition of poetry was foolhardy, but one way to think about poetry can be to work through the seeming contradiction of a form of writing that seeks to say something about the sacred without being religious. A poem should resonate, and the note that it sounds deep in your mind is transcendent, uncanny and inexplicable.

It is autumn or winter, cold certainly. The light is fading or it is, now, fully dark. There are figures over there, and we can just make them out stark against the bleak countryside. The land seems strange to them although they have always lived here. Then we zoom in. This is us: this is our world, the surreal world that we all inhabit, and reach beyond. And this is Tranströmer’s poetry, his silent world, in “Midwinter”:

A blue light
streams out of my clothes.
Midwinter.
Ringing tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world,
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled over the border.

Literature writes knowing that the blank page is where we all return to. Foucault famously remarked (at the end of The Order of Things) that Man will be erased “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” I’m taking his image out of context, but all poetry is written with, against, in the face of such erasure. The book will close and the poem will lie unread, the reader may read on, but never for very much longer. We draw our strength from death: without it, everything would be absurd: “the calendar is full but the future is blank,” Tranströmer says in “Black Postcards.” But this is neither reason to despair nor to proselytize. Neither science nor religion, which can both be equally knuckle-headed, help us face up to the absurdity of our meagerness and yet negotiate our insignificance by attending to ourselves and to the words that we can write about ourselves: “So many things I have liked, have they any weight?”

It is always a winter night, but a small kind of sense is made, if we are lucky, and if we listen, with and from each other:

Throughout those dismal months my life was only sparked alight
when I made love to you.

In “Solitude,” the poet speaks of a concrete event, of a car crash. “I was nearly killed here, one night in February,” he says. His world nearly ended and then he realized what we all know and live denying:

I almost felt that I could rest
and take a breath
before the crash.

A month or so back the intensively peer-reviewed, internationally respected British medical journal The Lancet suggested that an additional 650,000 people have died in Iraq due to the prosecution of the second Gulf War. And who knows how many more deaths there have been since then? It is such a terrible figure, such an unthinkable number that simply saying the number out loud should be enough for something, anything, somehow to happen. Yet nothing happens.

Worse, knowing of this, and of the magnitude of this mass-murder, I’ve just been blathering on about poetry all this week and I haven’t mentioned daily life and its hurt and its horror. The air is heavy with smoke, and when you get up close no doubt you can see the fear and anger and hurt in people’s eyes. But from the comfort of my home in Manchester, watching the news, those same people, those victims or insurgents, those terrorists or peasants, those people so like you and me, so unlike you and me, can look like any anonymous victims: they populate the news bulletins, but they do not occupy nearly enough of my thoughts.

Such a terrible tragedy . . . but tragedy, of course, this is not. This is bloody power politics: power and its politics writing itself in the real world in real blood. And yet, all this week, I’ve been blathering on about poetry and I haven’t mentioned this slaughter.

I'm chary of underscoring the pedagogical moment within literature, but poetry does teach us attention to language. This is a skill we might want sometimes to transfer to the political realm. The UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, George Bush Jr.’s poodle he is sometimes called (such imagery!), attempted his own cruel poetry, we might instead call them lies, over a “sexed-up” dossier (such a neologism!) concerning the reasons for the invasion of Iraq. He continues to dissemble over those reasons and the mess that his liberal imperialism has caused in that benighted country. What a mess, now, in Mesopotamia.

After Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno, who pondered many things and yet seems to have been reduced to this misunderstood soundbite, pondered whether lyric poetry should not be written after the outrage. Well, we should ask today, can it be enjoyed—it is certainly being written—in the face of illegal wars? Of course it can. On Monday I misquoted Brecht’s “Motto.” Here it is in John Willet’s translation:

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.

But I want to say more and less than this. I don’t want to advocate some return to didactic, politically-inspired poeticising: I’m not entirely opposed to it, actually, but politics often makes for very bad poetry. And nor do I want to advocate some kind of empty, feel-good verse. I want us to realize that poetry is already itself, embodying as it does language’s reflection on itself as and in language, intimately political, intrinsically philosophical. It is unable to be other than this because its very otherness is this.

Poetry should not be read for its edifying effects. In the face of death—and we live and we write each day in the face of that limit even if, for me, that limit isn’t daily instantiating itself around me, isn’t stealing my children, despoiling my home, destroying my sanity—we attempt meaning by living. And we live in language. And at its best, poetry is language at its best. It doesn’t teach us about life, it trials, it translates and it embodies our lives. We no more need to be taught how to read poetry than we need to be taught how to live. But a good life is hard to find. Like a good poem. Like a good reader.