Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 02_02 (Contents and Abstracts)

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry • 02_02 September 2010

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Volume 2 Number 2 September 2010ISSN 1758-2733

Volume 2 Number 2 September 2010

Editorial / Scott Thurston

Notices

‘I am something nonne’: Jeff Hilson’s Nature Writing / Peter Jaeger

A Shattering Release: Douglas Oliver’s The Shattered Crys-tal / Jon Clay

Temporal Unfixity in the Work of Lee Harwood / Stephen Mooney

Aspect Shifts: On Tom Raworth’s The Big Green Day / Robin Purves

Andrew Duncan: Review Essay / Robert Hampson

Book Reviews

Edited by Robert Sheppard and Scott Thurston

http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

ISSN 1758-2733http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

Journal of British and Irish

CONTENTSISSN 1758-2733

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry © Gylphi Limited, Canterbury, UK ISSN 1758-2733 | 02_02 | 2010 | http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

Volume 2, Number 2, September 2010

EDITORIAL 115

NOTIcEs

David chaloner 1944–2010 119

Edwin Morgan 1920–2010 121

The Papers of Bob cobbing at the British Library 123Chris Beckett

ARTIcLEs

‘I am something nonne’: Jeff Hilson’s Nature Writing 125Peter Jaeger

A shattering Release: Douglas Oliver’s The Shattered Crystal 137Jon Clay

Temporal Unfixity in the Work of Lee Harwood 149Stephen Mooney

Aspect shifts: On Tom Raworth’s The Big Green Day 171Robin Purves

Andrew Duncan: Review Essay 189Robert Hampson

BOOk REvIEWs

Jeff Hilson (ed.), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets 199Reviewed by Gilbert Adair

Benjamin keatinge and Aengus Woods (eds), Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey 204Reviewed by Alex Davis


EDITORIALVolume 2, Number 2

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry © Gylphi Limited, Canterbury, UK ISSN 1758-2733 | 02_02 | 2010 (115–117) | http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

EDITORIALIt seems fitting to open the editorial of the third issue of the journal with an account of the third launch event that took place at University college cork on the 16 March 2010. Thanks are due to Jimmy cummins, a poet, magazine editor and research student at Ucc, for being a prime mover in making the event happen and to Alex Davis and sam Ladkin for offering papers. In his introductory remarks cummins identified cork as Ireland’s most important centre for the study of innovative poetries, a history linked with the remarkable soundEye festival, which has now been running for fourteen years with a mission to create a ‘point of juncture between traditions’. Alex Davis’s paper built upon this context by offering a comprehensive examination of the interactions between British and Irish Poetry from the beginning of the twentieth century. His survey sought to intervene in orthodox readings of Irish poetry as developing in isolation, drawing out its engagements with writing elsewhere and tracing the ‘fitful presence’ of indigenous modernist poet-ics during the interwar period. Davis crucially argued for the journal as providing an occasion for rethinking the relationship between British and Irish modernisms, in this plural sense irreducible to typical themes such as alienation or fragmentation. He called for a necessarily ‘thick de-scription’ in empirical investigations of modernism, so that it might be reconstructed without being lost altogether.

Ladkin’s contribution also took modernism as a starting point – spe-cifically T. J. clark’s conjecture that it is a myth that our current culture has shifted from a textual to a visual predominance. Examining this as-sertion in the context of the Internet, Ladkin asked ‘what kind of person does the Internet want me to be?’ while identifying a crisis of attention that threatens the ‘mythic academic brain’ with ‘google atrophy’ and be-coming ‘Pavlov’s surfer’. Analysing the allure of the Internet in its ability to mimic desire to perfection, Ladkin saw contemporary poetry as taking issue with clark’s analogous modernism of the word. Reading examples of chris Goode and Michael kindellan’s poetry Ladkin saw a distrust of


NOTICEVolume 2, Number 2


David Chaloner 1944–2010David chaloner’s salt Collected Poems (2005) should be proof enough of the strength and value of his work, but I suspect it has not been read or studied enough. A large volume, featuring work over four decades, it shows both a consistent lyrical voice – self-aware, ironical, watching clouds above rooftops – and a growing anger at capitalist opportunism during recession – possibly a theme for our times – developing into the more allusive and vocalized late style.

His association with the cambridge school – real enough in terms of a shared tone – always amused him, given that he left school at 16. He en-tered the world of design in which he made his living, and was eventually responsible for some large projects both in Britain and Holland. Featured early in Horovitz’s 1969 anthology Children of Albion, he went on to pub-lish volumes such as Hotel Zingo, of which he gave me a numbered and signed copy when we shared a reading in Durham in 1981, and it remains a favourite. He was affable, ruggedly handsome and charming.

The best source for details of his life and work remains the interview in Tim Allen and Andrew Duncan (eds), Don’t Start Me Talking (salt, 2007), including details of performance and collaborative work.

ROBERT SHEPPARD




Edwin Morgan 1920–2010scotland’s national poet, Glasgow’s laureate, Morgan was also one of the first concrete poets in Britain. His work ranges from social real-ist dramatic monologues to science fiction poems, ‘emergent’ poems to ‘instamatic’ poems, Beat-like pronouncements on Marilyn Monroe to a translation of Beowulf. He put Mayakovsky into scots, and English into Martian. He made the sonnet his own, and Glasgow’s. He lived long enough to safely come out as a gay man, and long enough to collect two mighty volumes, one of poems, the second of translations. We will miss the work but we will also miss the range.

ROBERT SHEPPARD




The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British LibraryThe editors’ contextualization of this Journal (inside front-cover) offers a number of terms of description for its focus, several of which – ‘Lon-don school’, ‘concrete poetry’ and ‘performance writing’ – can be read-ily applied to publisher and performance poet Bob cobbing (1920-2002), whose work needs no introduction to readers of these pages. cobbing’s wide-ranging papers at the British Library, spanning more than fifty years of innovation, are now available to researchers. They amount to 212 files, under the reference Add Ms 88909, and a catalogue is available at: http://searcharchives.bl.uk/

The archive is arranged as follows:Personal Material (Add Ms 88909/1-11);•Hendon and Finchley (Add Ms 88909/12-33);•correspondence (Add Ms 88909/34-40);•Works (Add Ms 88909/41-78);•Writers Forum, Association of Little Presses, and New River Project •(Add Ms 88909/79-96);Bob cobbing and his contemporaries (Add Ms 88909/97-142);•The Poetry society and Poets conference (Add Ms 88909/143-158).•

The diversity and unity of this rich collection reflect the closely inte-grated professional strands of cobbing’s life and work. In addition to a representative selection of poetry, the collection includes papers relating to the imprint Writers Forum, to the Association of Little Presses (ALP), and to the New River Project. Through a combination of letters, pocket diary entries and an extensive run of flyers and programmes, cobbing’s many performances, at home and overseas, can be traced from the 1960s to the end of the century. The collection includes a substantial body of material from the 1950s when cobbing was, by day, a school teacher and by evening the energizing force behind a suite of local arts groups and societies in Hendon and Finchley, including art house film show-ings, classes in modern poetry and art history, theatre performances, art and photography exhibitions, and poetry workshops (the origins of the


ARTICLEVolume 2, Number 2


‘I am something nonne’Jeff Hilson’s Nature Writing

PETER JAEgERRoehampton University, UK

ABSTRACTThis article considers how Jeff Hilson’s Bird Bird (2009) foregrounds boundaries between the sociolinguistic construction of nature, and the formal, material processes that are found everywhere in the natural environment. Rather than depicting the ecopoetical themes of decay, entropy and transformation by pointing to these characteristics in an extra-textual referent, Bird Bird ’s formal features emphasize ecological unpredictability and dynamism in material form. Jonathan skinner’s work on ecopoetics and Robert smithson’s writing on entropy provide critical methodologies for considering Hilson’s text, which employs a surplus of information about nature, to the point where that information cancels out its own clear transmission. The article concludes by analysing Bird Bird ’s poetics in relation to slavoj Žižek’s writing on subjectivity and the ecological crisis.

kEyWORDSecopoetics•ecocriticism•Jeff Hilson•naturepoetry•RobertSmithson•JonathanSkinner•SlavojŽižek

Jonathan skinner (2005: 128) has pointed out that contemporary ec-ocriticsm has tended to privilege the referential function of language, in which poets ‘refer “outside” the poem to a “natural” topos’. This approach – when taken by both poets and critics – cannot help but refer-ence literary convention and the pastoral tradition. A good example of this sort of contemporary ecocriticism can be found in J. scott Bryson’s (2002) anthology of essays Ecocriticism: A Critical Introduction. Although Bryson (2002: 5) cautions that any definition of the term ecopoetry should remain fluid, he considers ecopoetry as a ‘subset of nature po-etry that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary




A Shattering ReleaseDouglas Oliver’s The Shattered Crystal

JON CLAyRichmond upon Thames College, Uk

ABSTRACTThis article, making use of Deleuzian concepts for critical purposes, focuses on a crystal motif as a figure for a totalitarian ideal of lyric poetry. shattering crystal is the production of a disruption of such lyric coherence. References to Paul celan in Douglas Oliver’s The Shattered Crystal unfold an association of a certain crystalline ideal with a fascist moralism. Oliver’s own poetry disrupts or deterritorializes the lyric via a delirious poetic composition of a multicultural contemporary Paris and the exiles (celan, Heine, Oliver himself) and minority communities composing the city. such deliriums are composed of celanian counter-words that also deterritorialize the currently dominant form of ‘the human’ – the subject.

kEyWORDSArrondissements•PaulCelan•Deleuze•delirium•deterritorialization•Guattari•DouglasOliver•The Shattered Crystal

This article aims to approach Douglas Oliver’s poetry sequence The Shattered Crystal by way of concepts such as deterritorialization, affect, percept and the work of art as a monument (concepts referenced in the notes) drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. These concepts are not put under any critical pressure here, but this fact is not meant to indicate that such pressure is not useful or not wanted; this article is not, however, a philosophical examination of Deleuze (and Guattari’s) work. Rather, I use these concepts because I find them to be useful for thinking about some aspects of Oliver’s sequence. It also seems worth remarking that my use of these concepts, and consequently this article as a whole, is based on previously published work by myself look-




Temporal Unfixity in the Work of Lee Harwood

STEPHEN MOONEyBirkbeck, University of London, Uk

ABSTRACTLee Harwood’s poetry employs a disjunctive temporality that is both multiple and unfixed in relation to the visuality of the page as well as to the live poetry reading (performance). cinematic techniques (such as framing and cutting) complicate both the visual and temporal fields of the poem. Paying particular attention to oral recordings by Harwood, I examine the temporal complexity a reading of his poems displays and brings into contact with the reader/listener. Positing a temporal operation that is disjunctive, unfinished and unfixed, I propose an openness in Harwood’s poetry to external and internal temporal factors that engage both the poem and the reader/listener, and link this to background temporality.

kEyWORDSbackground temporality • frame • Lee Harwood • poetics • poetryreading•temporality•visuality

A past ‘real’, memories haunting amongst reality;the present so . . . ? dazed? startled? (‘October night’, Harwood, 2004b: 416)

something slipping awaya steady reduction of timenotched off (‘south coast’, Harwood, 2004b: 454)

In the poetry of Lee Harwood, visuality and temporality come together in surprising ways that demonstrate complex fracturing, framing, and other operations upon visual perspective that are particularly effectual




Aspect ShiftsOn Tom Raworth’s The Big Green Day

ROBIN PURVESUniversity of Central Lancashire, Uk

ABSTRACTThis essay discusses The Big Green Day, Tom Raworth’s second book of poems, published in 1968 by Trigram Press. It focuses mainly on what can and cannot be said about the relation between Raworth’s poetry and the visual art by Jim Dine that the book also includes. The drawings are not designed to illustrate any of Raworth’s texts but the essay aims to show that an analysis of analogous traits in the drawings and poems can shed light on the decision to include the drawings, on the aesthetic practices of poet and visual artist, and on the declared success of their collaboration.

kEyWORDSConceptualart•JimDine•Imagism•Minimalism•TomRaworth

It is common, when Tom Raworth’s poetry is mentioned or discussed, to begin with an admission that it poses intractable problems for anyone who wants to talk or write about it, problems which must be all the more problematic given that it is rare to come across someone who has dif-ficulty enjoying the poems. Another, related trope in criticism devoted to Raworth involves pointing out that his work is unjustly neglected in the Uk, especially when compared to his reception in the UsA. Taken together, these tendencies might have led critics based in Britain to in-dulge in straightforward advocacy or advertisement rather than critical analysis: I love these poems, and if it turns out that I cannot explain to you why I do, well, no matter – simply read the poems yourself and you will love them too. Good critical writing on Raworth does in fact exist, however, and even if some of his most helpful critics still alert readers upfront to the inevitability of their failing to provide a sufficient response to the poems, there is no need to be left with the impression that despite


REVIEW ESSAYVolume 2, Number 2


Andrew DuncanReview Essay

Andrew Duncan, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (cambridge: salt Publishing, 2003), 344 pp. IsBN 1–876857-57–9

Andrew Duncan, Origins of the Underground: British Poetry Between Apocryphon and Incident Light 1933–79 (cambridge: salt Publishing, 2008), 311 pp. IsBN 978–1-84471–078-2

Andrew Duncan, The Council of Heresy: A primer of poetry in a balkanised terrain (Exeter: shearsman Books, 2009), 314 pp. IsBN 978–1-84861–007-1

Andrew Duncan began publishing poetry in 1978. His first collection, Cut Memories and False Commands, a selection from his long sequence ‘Threads of Iron’, was published by Reality street in 1991, and a second collection (of poems from 1983 to 1988), Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pic-tures, was published by Waterloo Press in 2000. He has also published a number of pamphlets, including Knife Cuts the Water (cambridge: Poeti-cal Histories, 1990), From the Kitchen Floor (London: Microbrigade, 1992), Sound Surface (London: Wiwaxia, 1992), Alien Skies (cambridge: Equi-page, 1993), and his work was anthologized in both The New British Poet-ry (Paladin, 1988) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996). As these pub-lication details suggest, Duncan successfully moved between the poetry worlds of cambridge and London for at least two decades. since 1992, he has edited the magazine Angel Exhaust alone or with others. Issue 8, ‘The Bloodsoaked Royston Perimeter’, which he co-edited with Adrian clarke in 1992, promised (and delivered) ‘new poetry from cambridge and Lon-don’ and included interviews with John Wilkinson and Gilbert Adair as representative figures of the two camps. As Tony Frazer suggested, in Shearsman 35, the Andrew Duncan special Issue, Angel Exhaust is ‘one of the most consistently interesting and provocative journals to be found in the Uk’ both for its selection of poetry and its commitment to extended critical engagements with contemporary poetry.

since the late 1990s, Duncan has been working on a large-scale criti-cal project – a series of six books on British poetry between 1960 and


BOOK REVIEWVolume 2, Number 2


Jeff Hilson (ed.), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Hastings: Reality street Editions, 2008), 354 pp. IsBN 978-1-87440-039-4

Two classic sonnet forms, broadly identified with Petrarch and shake-speare: Petrarch gives the octave / sestet structure that provides the title for ken Edwards’s eight + six (Reality street, 2003); shakespeare, while reaching some preliminary thematic destination by the end of the octave, uses rime to suggest three quatrains, and throws the climax, a.k.a. the turn, into the closing couplet. In this, he bequeaths ‘the English sonnet’ as, arguably, the model of poetic completeness, in the sense of a capacity to snare in its own unity a folded aspect of experience; hence perhaps its attraction to conservatively formalist poets. The brief of Jeff Hilson’s anthology was to uncover a sufficient number of ‘linguistically innova-tive poets’ to make a compilation of their ventures into the form ‘a viable project’ (p. 8); not the least interesting of its revelations is that for such sonneteers post-World War II (the 84-poet collection begins with sam-ples from Edwin Denby’s In Public, In Private of 1948), the Petrarchan 8/6 structure has proved as or more generative than the shakespearean. Granted, Denby had an initial fondness for some askew summation in the final couplet; later he tended to level the syntactic units, bending them away from any syllogistic progression. This was brought to a logi-cal conclusion in Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (1964), which proceeds by recombining discrete lines from earlier sonnets as building-blocks for subsequent ones, on the model, Hilson argues, of a field in physics. In light of the ‘open field techniques’ to which this had inspired charles Olson, ‘Berrigan’s use of closed form to achieve a similar end is a radical move’; cutting across the classic pair of variously hierarchal forms with a form at once egalitarian and palpably constrained, it was ‘responsible for something of a latter-day sonnet renaissance amongst linguistically innovative poets’ (pp. 16, 11).

What are the responsibilities of an anthology taking on this renais-sance, specifically with regard to the prowling question of completeness? In a posting of september 30, 2008, after noting some omissions he considers regrettable, Ron silliman nonetheless concludes that Hilson’s


BOOK REVIEWVolume 2, Number 2


Benjamin keatinge and Aengus Woods (eds), Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 288 pp.

keatinge and Woods observe in their introduction to this valuable and timely collection of essays and memoirs that ‘coffey has received less than his due from the Irish critical establishment’ (p. 1). Despite early praise by his friend and contemporary, samuel Beckett, and pioneering work at recovering and evaluating his oeuvre by, among others, Gerald Dawe, J. c. c. Mays and stan smith, coffey still incites ill-informed in-vective. keatinge and Woods single out the negative judgements of two recent studies of Irish poetry: Alan Gillis’ Irish Poetry of the 1930s (2005) and Justin Quinn’s Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000 (2008), in which cof-fey’s work is perceived to be ‘self-indulgent’ (Gillis) and ‘derivative’ of American modernist poetry (Quinn). such unsustainable comments fail to do justice to a highly variegated (albeit uneven) body of work span-ning over half a century, one which ranges from the exquisite tonality of Third Person (1938) through the meditative richness of ‘Missouri se-quence’ (1962) to the often poignant existential and spiritual reflections of Advent (1975) and the compelling juxtapositions of antiquity and the cold War in Death of Hektor (1979). coffey’s reputation has not been helped by the absence of a comprehensive collected edition of his poetry, such as those established for two poets with whom coffey is often associ-ated in accounts of twentieth-century Irish poetry: Thomas MacGreevy and Denis Devlin, whose poetry has been scrupulously edited by, respec-tively, susan schreibman and J. c. c. Mays. Dedalus Press’ Poems and Versions 1929–1990 (1991) was, at best, an interim collection of coffey’s poems, omitting a number of late satirical works, translations, concrete poems and illustrated works; it is also currently out of print.

But keatinge and Woods suggest that, besides the relatively fugitive nature of the poetry (and its under-representation in anthologies of modern Irish poetry), our understanding of coffey’s long poetic career has arguably been hampered by an over-concentration, on the part of admirers and detractors alike, on his status as one of a small number of ‘1930s’ Irish poetic modernists, corralled with MacGreevy, Devlin and samuel Beckett into a specious avant-garde grouping. The contributors

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