girls with names like stars were absorbed by the powerful current of magnetic doors

The separation of the two Joan Londons is my own invention but the separation between the words "wine flag" and a meaning in the Cantos is, I believe, the deliberate invention of Pound. The first one seems trivial to the rest of the world, but the second one has been mentioned at some other time in a work of scholarship -- maybe -- I can imagine it -- but not the Joans, and this reminds me obliquely of Colette Laure Lucienne Peignot, 1903 - 1938, who burnt almost everything she wrote because, according to her boyfriend Georges Bataille, "she had the greatest conceivable concern not to confide what seemed heartrending to her to those who cannot be moved," a diagnosis that seems to be confirmed by her own surviving prose, which was published in 1977 under the title Encrits de Laure and translated, twenty years later, into English, by Jeanine Herman. In the 'Correspondence' section of the book she tells her sister-in-law that she wants to communicate distress to her without mutilating it. It is a matter of self-respect, in her, not to reconcile herself to the fact that a writer is a person who commands a nugget of calm. The form of distress is incoherence or things-apart. Grammar will compel it together. I read her Story of a Little Girl and see coherence. "I know it well; it is not a city but an octopus. All parallel and diagonal streets converge toward a liquid, swollen center. Each tentacle of the beast has a single line of houses with two facades, one with small windowpanes, the other with heavy curtains. It is there that, from the mouth of Vérax, I heard the good news of Notre-Dame-de-Cléry, there that I saw Violette's beautiful eyes injected with the blackest ink, there finally that Justus and Bételgeuse, Vérax and La Chevelure and all the girls with names like stars were absorbed by the powerful current of magnetic doors." Liking her a lot, I think, "Maybe she is sabotaged by her own medium." In the library I open a book of essays by an American named Lewis Herbert Chrisman, 1893 - 1965, who is praising Ruskin by crushing him into a shape. "For over twenty years he was preeminently a critic of art. But he was no dilettante defender of that pictorial putrescence which is sometimes foisted upon a gullible public by depraved purveyors of vileness which they miscall art. Ruskin was the unfailing champion of the things which are honest and …" When this writer hands himself the satisfaction of two alliterations you know he is happy to realise that the words "critic of art," if he left them alone, would not tell the public what he wanted to say. If he could have put his point into the words "critic of art," without the addendum, would he have been even happier? John Ruskin, Preacher, and Other Essays, 1921.

chimneys smoke in the cross light

When I heard that an author I hadn’t read had won the Patrick White Award then I went to the Guardian website where there was an excerpt from her recent book, The Golden Age, 2014, but the excerpt was so boring that I couldn’t reconcile it with the idea of this author, whose name is Joan London, winning a prize named after Patrick White, who believed, 1) that the independence of a serious human person would be understood as a kind of offensive violence, and 2) that this offensiveness should exist in fictional expression as well as in fictional character: putting White on a wavelength with Rabelais.

If I want to believe that the London who should win the Patrick White Award exists then I have to trust the reviewers and critics who say that she is exceptional and unfairly neglected, that she deserves all of the awards that she has won (this is Kerryn Goldworthy in the Australian Book Review) and that she should win more of them (this is Elizabeth Webby in The Conversation).

I need to believe two things, 1) that in its place, in the book, the excerpt is evidence that London is a singular writer, and 2) in isolation it misrepresents her. I have read her and not read her, and she vanishes in the excerpt; the excerpt has concealed the writer instead of revealing her, and she is eerily going and present and incomplete without the absence being structured, polite, poetic, or tempting. There are lines in Pound’s Cantos about the action of recession.

Sail passed here in April; may return in October
Boat fades in silver; slowly;
Sun blaze alone on the river

Where wine flag catches the sunset
Sparse chimneys smoke in the cross light (Canto XLIX)

He describes things disappearing but he has made something that is there and so you must describe disappearance in order to have the present thing that is not absence but something like a calm memorial in its favour, not it, itself, as war memorials are not like death. You can dwell on a war memorial but not on death as it is happening, you can’t stand there dwelling as the muddy soldier is straining to tolerate a bullet, but you can look at a stone. The fading boat was invented so that it could stand like a still part in Pound's machinery while the sad vivacity of things in transition appealed to him … (at that moment in my draft I wrote, “but the form of disappearingness itself was not tempting, the poem does not vanish”, then I rethought it and I am wrong because the strange words “wine flag” have established an unbridged gap between the English language that they were written in and the Chinese scenery that he hints at in another way three lines afterwards: “a world is covered with jade.” London is withdrawn from me when I read the excerpt, yet at no moment is she curtailed completely below the shape of a suggestion, which is also the shape of things within the Cantos, these existences that the poet gives to you before questioning them, first “Comes the snow scur on the river,” but three lines later, “The flowing water clots as with cold.” My italics).

imagine singing

What about the other poets in the Anthology?

The first time I read Bertram Stevens' choice I came away with a quick impression of softness and grandness or quietness and grandness, the language of grandness (“gold,” and “purple” objects, verbs happening “oft”) without royal aggression: here were people who would rather talk about roses than say anything satirical, here nostalgia was the fad, never comedy – and even on a second and third look it's not a funny book, Stevens not a man who cared about humour in poems (see his selection from Banjo Paterson -- nature things and Clancy of the Overflow), and Walter Murdoch in 1918 wasn't mad keen either, in The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse – still, the different level of attention in the second and third go-arounds penetrated that first impression and now I realise that a few poets like John Farrell (1851 – 1904) had the impatience that I smelt faintly, faintly when I was reading Bathgate's Sydney.

“The noisiest find quiet graves,” is the way he sums up the deaths of British adventurers abroad in Australia to England (1897), which may not look like much but when I saw him write in close phrases through the whole poem I thought that here was a poet whose ideas came to him so vividly that they came as song.

“I imagine singing I imagine | getting it right,” wrote Geoffrey Hill once, and Paul Muldoon, talking about T.S. Eliot in 2011, said, “He has a great ear, a rarer and rarer commodity these days, even among fairly highly regarded poets.” Ezra Pound is an advocate of song in The ABC of Reading. It's possible that Hill, who admires Pound, was echoing the ABC when he associates “singing” with “getting it right.” But Hill is hard on himself and uses absolutes. Not “getting it acceptable” but “getting it right.” “Either the thing moves, RAPMASTER, or it | does not,” is what he believes* in Speech! Speech!, the enjambment reminding me of the same before the word “mute” in Wordsworth's There was a Boy, which I would not have thought of if Himadri at The Argumentative Old Git hadn't written about it in July.

The moment of silence before the admission of incapacity, that's what I'm looking at, does not speak in one case, does not work in the other. “Hopefully, RAPMASTER, I can take stock | how best to oút-ráp you.” There's always something to live up to. (The Moldovan bots have overtaken the Russians in my stats.)

* He challenges the value of movement ("I disclaim spontaneity, | the appearance of which is power") but not the fact of it. "I wíll | mátch you fake pindaric for trite | violence, evil twin."

his richest notes

Rummaging through Far South Fancies I go searching for darkness set against other things. “Our woods are dark, our lakelets' waters clear” from Faerie, “Where the dawn the darkness breaks | Floats a lightsome fleecy cloud” from Lament for Te Heu Heu, “Naught the expanse of yellow breaks, | Save where a darker spot denotes | Some straggling bush” (Our Heritage), “The sky was quickly darkened, | Where erst all had been fair” (The Praetor Aelius Tubero), “The moko chimes his richest notes |'Mid dark green kaio trees” (A New Zealand Reverie), and meanwhile in Light he, the poet, imagines darkness, representing self-interest, “smitten” by God: “God is light.”

Full many an evil influence doth lurk ;
Some dark as night, and others seeming fair

Seeming fair but dark at heart. Seeming fair, but, examined rightfully, it is dark. “Passion's oft for Love mistaken” in Eric Iredale but they are different. “Passion dies but Love's eternal.” A love that has passed is an illegitimate love. “But pure love is never sating.” A rock is more virtuous than a puddle, a tree is closer to heaven than a worm. To endure is virtuous, per se. Ezra Pound put the same assumption into his ABC of Reading. It was not uncommon.

Darkness is a sign of strength in The Clematis and a kind hiding spot in other places (“They gain the whare's safe retreat,| And in its friendly darkness hide” (Hinemoa)); descriptive threat of depth elsewhere.

He recks not what result his action brings,
The dark and rushing waters o'er his head

(from Eric Iredale)

We have harnessed the binary properties of electrons, said the mathematician to me when he was discussing life; and look at computers for example, which work by asking for discrete packages of energy either spurted or withdrawn, every unit always on or off, but what about the other properties, the not-binary, not understood by us, and never used, because we can't – he said, and wished that physicists would work widely, towards uncertainty, and not inwardly, towards corralling and reportable successes, public profiles: that was how he saw them, with expectation guiding them into a disappointing temptation. “Bauerlein et al. (2010) claim that we are currently experiencing an ‘avalanche of low-quality research’, and academia has become an environment where ‘[a]spiring researchers are turned into publish-or-perish entrepreneurs, often becoming more or less cynical about the higher ideals of the pursuit of knowledge’,” is the opening line of a quote at flowerville.

give me the greatest possible pleasure

Reading Evan S. Connell's Points for a Compass Rose I began thinking about tautness in poetry -- why? -- because I was trying to work out why this poem (book-long, but that wasn't the reason) seemed so idle, and why my attention kept floating away while I was reading it.

Oddly, it's a busy poem on the surface -- a full, full poem. Connell, American, who published the Compass Rose in 1973, has taken his cues from Pliny and Robert Burton* and chocked the work full of historical anecdotes, quotes, facts, for example, "Eggs laid by the roc, or Aepyornis, / measure 13" in length, 9" in width, / each shell holds two gallons of fluid" or "truly ancient bronzes, / those which have lain in the earth for centuries, / acquire a pure blue color like that of the kingfisher" or "The Derbikkai who inhabit the Caspian littoral / punish every crime with death, according to Strabo" or "William II of England felt a cold wind pass through his side; / the next day Tyrell's arrow killed him" or "Jean Fouquet / commissioned to paint the king's mistress, Jeanne Sorel, / depicted her as the Virgin Mary with an aureole / of angels," and so on. I can open to any page and find four or five or six interesting stories. So why (I wondered) am I not riveted?

I thought the answer might lie with his narrator, who is a chatty man, prissy, with a habit of summoning your attention. "Look," he says, or, "Listen," or

Now come closer. Sit next to me.
What would you like to hear?
I deal mostly in mysteries and fables

The prissiness, or aloofness, or verbal self-protection, comes through in his throwaway words and phrases: "indeed," "You may know or you may not," "I don't presume to know," "I must say," "Quite a few years," "What I'm getting at," "If it pleases you / to believe them, very well," "I consider," "Permit me," "I would perhaps suggest." He has a personal story too: he is American, the Vietnam war is on, he is afraid that his son is going to be called up, and he is angry at the politicians and journalists who are promoting the war. Here, perhaps, is a reason for his self-shielding language, which acts like a verbal padding: he is hurt and depressed, as well as learned, and so his agitation expresses itself pedantically.

"The character," you might say, "feels overwhelmed by the past and the present, and so he tries to control the only thing left to him, which is speech. "I consider strict control essential," he says at one point. (Here his creator is poking fun at him: the rest of the poem lets us know that strict control is impossible.) He refines his meaning by qualifying it; at the same time he makes it baroque with stock phrases. Perhaps he is numbing himself with these cushions. Perhaps he is full of self-doubt. He sees the massive complications of the past, and its viciousnesses, and he says to us, Look! Listen! We do this over and over again. Vietnam is the contemporary version. He tells us about Mongols who slaughtered their enemies, and about ridiculous instances of humankind trying to identify an enemy so that it can be punished -- "A host of beetles that ravaged the vineyard / of Saint Julian were commanded to appear in King's Court" -- and then stories about witches hanging themselves in their cells, and about German soldiers carrying bat wings to protect themselves from harm, and from this he concludes that people are irrational, volatile, and superstitious."

But this is nonsense, the character feels nothing and does nothing, he is being written by a poet, and the poet is overdoing it -- overdoing the interjections, I mean; there are too many of them -- or (I think now, remembering Ezra Pound's Cantos) underdoing it, in other words, he is not utilising the possibilities of the character as a character. When Pound brings in a voice that takes the long way round, as Connell's narrator does, he gives the roundaboutness a comic point. He exaggerates the fussiness.

So far as I can concerned, it wd
Give me the greatest possible pleasure
or be more acceptable to me,
And I shd. like to be party to it, as was promised me,
either as participant or adherent.
As for my service money,
Perhaps you and your father wd. draw it
And send it on to me as quickly as possible

Under all the politeness we're talking about money. (It's interesting, as an aside, how writers who acknowlege the power of money -- Christina Stead, Balzac, Pound here -- are often so meaty and funny as well as acid, despairing -- look, they say, people have such elevated pretensions, but living thwarts them. Money to these authors is like food in Rabelais, it's an earthy, dirty need.)

And looking at Pound I think of something else about Connell: he doesn't have the puns and wordplay of other poets -- he lacks the basic element of surprise, an elementary pleasure. Les Murray in his recent short poem The Conversations draws on the same mass storehouse of folk tale and Aubrey-fact, but he does it brusque and crisp:

A full moon always rises at sunset
and a person is taller at night.
Many fear their phobias more than death.
The glass King of France feared he’d shatter.
Chinese eunuchs kept their testes in spirit.

…

The heart of a groomed horse slows down.
A fact is a small compact faith,
a sense-datum to beasts, a power to man
even if true, even while true—
we read these laws in Isaac Neurone.

In "The glass king of France" and "Isaac Neurone" I see the creator's alert joy-with-words that I was expecting from Connell (my brain saying, "This is a poem, therefore it will be like this …" an expectation that comes from exposure to other poets besides Murray and Pound -- opening the Selected Gwen Harwood I find her punning -- "Dad the Impaler!" -- and opening the Selected of Geoffrey Hill I find him riffing on "lilies of the field" with "lilies of the veldt." Opening Milton I see him rrrolling on words like a fat seal on a rock: "Restore us, and regain the blissful seat," "To mortal men, he with his horrid crew"). There are moments when his train switches tracks from one thought to another -- surprises there -- but these moments are softened by the long relaxed feel of the thing, those throwaway "indeeds" and "If you wills," and other words that have nothing to do with the character of the narrator, but seem to be there for no reason at all, like this "countless" and "the very finest:"

In Peru is an aquaduct of hewn stone and cement
Extending countless miles across sierras and rivers. .
There is also an artificial garden whose soil
Is composed of the very finest flakes of gold

Prose can cope with that kind of chatter (the reader more likely to expect expansion and length), but in poetry even a small unnecessary word is a roadbump. "Poems are short fast religions," says Murray, and "In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language," says W.S. Merwin, but those null-words and stock phrases are something other than the origin of language, perhaps they are a return to a state of pre-origin -- for if words were invented to describe objects and state intentions then those throwaways do neither; they establish empty space, describe nothing, state no intention, and fill the role of grunts and ums, pre-language space-fillers and gropings -- and the brain of the character seems introverted; it shrinks back and flops its hands out in despair.







* He mentions both of them, and Herodotus too I think. Here's his Burton:

What next? Burton asked leave to establish before us
a stupend, vast, infinite ocean of incredible madness
and folly -- a sea of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs,
Euripuses and contrary tides clogged with monsters,
uncouth shapes, roaring waves, tempests and Siren calms,
Halcyonian seas, unspeakable misery, such Comedies
and Tragedies, such preposterous ridiculous feral and
lamentable fits that he knew not whether they were more
to be pitied or derided, or be believed

Alive and Fulminating

Where will I start?

Three days ago I had a chance to do a quick secondhand bookshop run, and I so took it, and so I ran, first up and down B. Street, and then along other streets to the east and west where there were two more shops I wanted to visit. As usual everybody has copies of Ezra Pound's biography and books assessing his work, but nothing by the man himself. I've been searching for a secondhand Cantos ever since I read a thin white and green 1967 Faber Selected Cantos and enjoyed the - what did I enjoy? The compendium quality of it, the anecdotes, the jerky thrown-out feel of the thing, as if there was a bucket somewhere back there, behind the page, and Pound was planting his trowel in the bucket and doling out stories. Clive James called it a "panscopic grab bag".

Fifty years ago, when the mad old amateur fascist was still alive and fulminating, I fell for the idea of his panscopic grab bag the way that I was then apt to fall for the idea of love. […] I think I can nowadays go right through the long text of that doomed project and show that although it has some arresting passages, they are not quite as arresting as their author meant them to be, and indeed claimed them to be by the way he chose their diction and set them into position.

A novel is a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it, wrote Randall Jarrell in his introduction to Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, explaining that Man was marvellous in spite of its faults, which are, I think, also virtues - but a poem is not supposed to be a novel, a long thing with things wrong with it; it is not supposed to be floppy and windy. James decided, after his first long rush of love, that the Cantos were windy, more light than heat.

Even the statements most obviously aimed at creating an impression of limpidity […] raise the question of whether very much is going on at all.

I'm never going to know if this is meant to be my opinion as well unless I can find the thing. Never mind, I discovered something even better, a copy of Proust's By Way of Saint-Beuve, "the fascinating mixture of autobiographical fiction and literary criticism that he wrote shortly before he started on his masterpiece," translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was her only published translation.

I am still in the autobiographical parts and Marcel is masturbating on a lilac.