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I happened to be reading Peter Dent's recent book from
Stride, Adversaria, when I was asked
to review this new one from Shearsman. The first poem in the Stride book
('Perception') begins appealingly, even if after a mere dozen or so words one
doesn't have any clue what's going on or quite where we're headed:
New seasonal
light to
freshen up my
First is in
improbable
clues come last
I found this intriguing. There are obvious associative moves going on: new,
freshen, first..... and then maybe 'clues' could be a knowing writer's
manoeuvre. It's all handled fairly delicately, and is interesting enough to
continue. I had not read Dent before, and I didn't know what I was getting
into, but it certainly wasn't going to be predictable, and surprise is at
least one of the things I've come to poetry for.
Where does the poem go from there? You may be wondering. Well, it goes here:
Perpetuum
mobile like
the man says
As you see, things (whatever they may or may not be, concrete or abstract)
are on the move. Always. Later in the same poem there is an almost tremendous
bit: one couplet's second line reads
As the words
swing true to form
say
the next couplet begins
When in a westerly
that's awol
'Say when', exposed and bare, stripped down, stretched, you have to look at
it, and if you look you'll probably think. Goodness knows what you will
think. Call me sad, but I sat at my desk for several moments just wondering
at this. Say when. What it means, how it is, why, whenever, how. For a few
minutes there I was somewhere else. Language. Gosh. Poetry. Gosh. No sir, I cannot
say what it means. I might try and say what it was like to experience it, but
I've tried a couple of times on another piece of paper and failed miserably.
I know I don't have the courage to write poems of this sort. When I attempt
it the results always strike me as embarrassing. I am better with jokes.
Poetry world can hold us all. It's probable, even, if not merely possible,
that the poet had no intention of me thinking about 'say when' that way. I
don't care and I don't expect he does, although I suspect he may be quietly
pleased that I thought at all.
There are times, I have to admit, I find some of this kind of poetry (not
'this' poetry, particularly, just 'this kind of poetry' - the kind of poetry,
to be dreadfully general, that looks on first sight as if it doesn't want to
be read by mere mortals) too self-regarding and knowingly intellectual. Too
often one gets the idea that the poet is clever and knows he/she is clever
and/or maybe they're not that clever but they can sound clever and look clever
and sometimes that's enough. People build careers on less.
Anyway, here is the first poem from 'Handmade Equations', the book I'm
supposed to be writing about. I like it. It's called 'New Register':
Smouldering
the new blues attaching themselves
To Autumn
hills where his someone watches as
Always anxious at the wheel of
an empty sky
His
words more likely to
turn a fortune in
Its quick
immaculate machinery
and its gratis
Invitation to
nothing else he knows
it knows
Himself the
demand lies elsewhere
seeing over
The hills
what looks like trouble
skies burning
Up with
promise familiar
easy roads now just
Impossible to
read he'll not be
finished so easily
His starmaps
left for night for
love left partly
Consummated
too immaterial an illusion trying
To see him
off and minus belief
it's easy if
Still an
interim account the
answers trickling in
To a natural
lake come October
reconstructed
Asking to see
it out woods high on
the skyline
Find him
dreaming up the marvellous
extremes
Of
chance he's steering
clear he's ready to go
There is something light of touch and almost beautiful about this. It also
manages, elegantly, to taste of the colloquial and its opposite in the same
mouthful. In an instance of happy (or not) coincidence, while I was typing
this poem up I received an e-mail from a friend who I'd asked to review this
book for my own website. After spending a couple of weeks with it he
declined, and said he'd found it boring and hadn't been able to engage with
it at all. And I can understand that response. I kept finding my mind, in
spite of my strictest instructions, trying to hold these poems together and
pull some kind of narrative or paraphrasable meaning out of them. And they
don't work like that: frustration is the only possible end of such an
attempt. It was only when I was at my sharpest and most receptive that I was
able to overcome the desire to own the poems in that 'I've worked this out'
kind of a way. That made me think about what state one has to be in to read
poems in the first place; I then remembered there were loads of times when I
didn't want to have anything to do with my own poems, never mind somebody else's, and especially
never mind somebody else's which were, on the face of it, as intent on making
my reading life difficult as they were on making it a delight. And even today
I sat down to read Dent's book, and I was okay for two or three pages and
then I lost it. I unconsciously shifted from being open to the experience of
the poem, to wanting something more mundane, like a piece of information I
could chew on and digest, thank you very much. Then I realised I was hungry
and I wanted lunch, which may explain everything.
So do you have to be in a state of very bright and aware being-there-ness to
read these poems? I'm not sure I can sit down and read them for any great
length of time, but since I never sit down and read poems for any great
length of time ever that still doesn't resolve anything for me. One certainly
has to be prepared to read them in the way the best poems demand you read
them, which is not on your terms, but on theirs. And to know also that a
personal, individual reaction to whatever goes off in them is perfectly fine.
You may never know exactly what the poet is getting at, or understand exactly
where this stuff came from. They are, I suggest, intelligent things that ask
only that you treat them with intelligence and the kind of openness and
examination and exploration with which they were made. Reading poetry isn't a
science. It may not even be an art. But it is demanding sometimes.
Not that these poems are difficult, particularly. Not in a word kind of a
way. Consider the poem quoted above. The words are simple enough. They are
also, more or less, in a simple
enough order. One might encounter some early difficulties in working out why
some phrases are next to other phrases. But I have stood in front of
paintings and wondered why, and I have sat in cinemas and wondered why on
earth. And I have listened to music and wondered. Usually in the presence of
books of poetry one is tempted to turn on the TV.
Smouldering
the new blues attaching themselves
To Autumn
hills where his someone watches as
Always anxious at the wheel of
an empty sky
His
words more likely to
turn a fortune in
Its quick
immaculate machinery
and its gratis
Invitation to
nothing else he
knows it knows
One can bring all sorts of things to this. 'Smouldering' has a variety of
associations, for starters. You can say much the same about the other words.
But I don't want to read these poems like I was doing a university course,
although one cannot help, perhaps, trying to get at how they work. If I was a
furniture maker I guess I'd want to know how someone made this rather
enchanting but unusual (imaginary) chair I'm sitting on. So let me try and
cut to the chase, if there is one to cut to. After nearly three pages of muttering
it's about time.
These poems strike me as personal poems that, instead of the usual look-at-me
of personal poems, reflect back at the reader and say look for yourself. An
individual interpretation seems to be the only response available. Any notion
of trying to get at what personal things prompted the poems seems at the same
time futile and unnecessary. The poems therefore become remarkably empowering
objects. They become your own, and Peter Dent can ride off into the distance
with them, and you can ride off with them in the opposite direction, and the
poems are yours and his. Perhaps this happens with lots of poems. I'm not
sure I've ever thought about it in quite this way, in so many words, but I'm
tempted to think it's worth thinking about. So, do we come back after all to
how these poems mean whatever the hell you want them to mean? That's a pretty
low way of putting it, and suggests the wanton obscurity of modern poetry and
its attendant laziness which its detractors have been known to allege. It's
not the way I'd put it. I'd go for how these poems ask us to read and attend
and think. They are about, if 'about' is the correct word, how we are, in a
world of thought and things. That seems so bland, put like that, as to be
almost wholly meaningless. Perception and experience may be better words, but
I'm starting to think a crash course in philosophy might be on the cards.
Dent is engaged in a tremendous attempt to place thought and the world on to
the page, but it's far from being a didactic project. The reader is asked,
rather, to engage with the poems and join in the attempt. He or she has to do
a great deal of work - sometimes, to be honest, simply to get a handle on a
few lines. But when you have a hold of that metaphorical handle, even if it's
only briefly, it's singularly interesting. I only wish I could describe it.
No way are these poems for that unlikely animal, the general poetry reader
who, perhaps, would prefer a recognisable subject matter and some kind of
narrative resolution. But there's lots of other places that reader can go.
The poems are a challenge. As challenges go, I think this one is worth taking
up, but you have to want to be there.
© Martin Stannard, 2005
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