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Both these books use the discourses we swim in, the
constant ebb and surge of news, marketing spiel, slogans and sound-bites.
Indeed, Goodland's book uses 'none of the author's own words', instead
constructing a collage from different periodical/journalistic sources. Of
course, individual words aren't really a poet's 'own' anyway, so this sort of
highly crafted collage is just as much 'written' as any other book of
poems.
Goodland's theme is capital: exchange, value, consumption and pollution in
their many forms, with each title steering the reader brilliantly. This is a
topic that modernist writing has been drawn to repeatedly - for example, see
Prynne's work on coinage and Pound's obsessions with usury/'true' value. In
Goodland's work, the effects can be striking, as in 'Cancer Capital':
The Soviet leader
had inoperable cancer of the jaw
his works are 'an
instrument for the detection and disclosure of the
cancers of
alienation
powerful agents
will selectively kill the malignant cells without
destroying normal...
Or, from 'Intellectual Capital':
he opens the first
stanza with the words 'Let us call it death'
which, because of
the harsh experience of war and death, can never
again represent the
reality of the narrator's world
the production
enjoyed neither the time nor the money necessary to
perfect its
illusions
readers are
demonstrating that everything natural or spontaneous
in language is a
rhetorical device
identify the
notoriously obedient English intelligentsia as chief
culprits...
Other illuminating titles are 'Child Capital' ('led to the notion of sperm as
sexual capital. She emphasises the power...'), 'Dead Capital' ('none told me
the kidneys were from condemned prisoners...'), Sleeping Capital ('it's the
dream of the American wasteland that disturbs so many sleepers...') and
Symbolic Capital ('I got cancer two years ago and now I'm very sorry that I
ever used that kind of disease metaphor.'). The overall effect is unsettling
and pretty much inexhaustible - every time I read the poems, more emerged,
from my own reactions.
Pawlak's employs a much looser method. He uses 'official versions' and then
undercuts them himself, with his own words. Often the pay-off seems rather
slight; for example, from 'Credible Information, 1999-2003':
At the wedding of
Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones
Sir Geoffrey
Shakerly, official photographer,
observed a 'feeling
of euphoria'
as he snapped
pictures in Windsor Castle
after the ceremony
at St. George's Chapel.
He did allow that
one official photograph
of the bride and
groom, the assembled
members of their
families, and foreign royals,
had to be doctored,
because Prince William,
son of Prince
Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales,
and second in line
to the throne,
did not look happy
enough.
But, more impressively, from '21st Century Newsbriefs III: Leading
by Example':
COERCIVE
INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES
BARRED BY MILITARY
Snarling attack
dogs,
held, straining at
leashes,
inches away from
naked prisoners' faces,
will henceforth be
muzzled.
*
PRESIDENT CLAIMS
THAT MANY ARE
THANKFUL THE U.S.
IS IN IRAQ
Kim Jong-il, the
leader of North Korea, no doubt;
and the leaders of
Iran and Syria as well.
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The odd thing is how little room there is for the reader,
despite the writing being less programmatic. And, although referencing the
news media constantly, Powlak doesn't really capture the tone - which is
everything to me - it's more a content thing. Perhaps I'm being unfair, since
the book is very enjoyable, and uses that easy-going, highly readable loose
line that is acutely skilled. It may also be a cultural thing - what seems
cutting to an American is tame and obvious to an Englishman. Also, there's no
justification for measuring his book against another (except I'm doing a
joint review). But in comparison, what's most impressive about Goodland's
work is how numerous and unexpected the effects are, how satisfying it is to
glimpse the connections, without any authorial comment.
These sampling techniques aren't new, but they do seem to be growing in
popularity and success; two excellent recent examples being Laurie Duggan's
reprinted The Ash Range and John
Seed's Pictures from Mayhew
(both from Shearsman). In these, the energy and picaresque joy of language
freed from ego and 'I've won the poem' bravado makes me wonder: why doesn't
all poetry similarly cut loose? Perhaps not to the extent of using quoted
sources, but at least by acquiescing in the madness, hatreds, uncertainties
and contradictions. Why is so much poetry worried about seeming to be above
all this, seeking perfection and purity? Maybe it's better to work from the
inside, if language has been so irrevocably contaminated. After all, the poet
is inside. There's a related
point about prose poetry as ideal for this, which I haven't room to
explore.
Many would say these questions are all wrong; poetry doesn't do anything, it just is - see numerous discussions,
linking back to Auden's famous lines on making nothing happen. Further, the
very last thing poetry should be is happily contaminated with such horrors:
poetry is a sanctuary, a purification of language, a place for epiphanies,
'workshops', widdershins of leaves and worshipping all things Celtic.
But there's a growing argument that the tedium, sameness and ultimate failure
of much 'mainstream' poetry comes from infection with some official discourse
- bien pensant, smug, covertly self-seeking while claiming modesty and
chumminess - reified in the New Labour 'project' and its Goebbels figures.
Hear it in carefully modulated tones of Andrew Motion whenever he's on the Today programme.
This discourse comes with the Newspeak terms 'diversity' and 'accessibility'
bolted on - coercing the lost readership onto Bloodaxe Anthologies that speak
to 'everyday people'. What poses as a personal lyric is assiduously playing
the power game, seeking affirmation and inclusion, practising careerism and
exclusion. Its validation comes via Soviet style awards and citations, with critically
untested claims of quality and craft used to silence dissent.
Such is the powerful analysis begun by Andrew Duncan and Andrew Jordan (of 10th
Muse). Clearly this view is just jealous
sniping to many mainstream poets, who are understandably peeved when their
'racket' is exposed. But even on its own terms, the model of 'accessibility'
and 'inclusion' has been an abject failure - it has created fewer readers and
more writers - the very opposite of what the 'New Generation Game' and other
celebrity gimmicks attempted. It is surely significant how unmoved the much
targeted 'general readership' has proved; as one Year 11 GCSE student said
about an AQA anthology poet: 'That Gillian Clarke, she sucks c***, don't
she?'
Paradoxically, one can argue that the limitless supply of instantaneous
information and stimulation explains both the lost readership that Neil
Astley et al chase, and the global system which Goodland chronicles - the
bizarre Japanese teeny-bopper perversions, food fetishes, death obsessions
(especially cancer), parasitism and guiltless sadism that late capitalism is
smeared with.
However, I think one can also accept Goodland's work as symptomatic, but
argue that it's all down to power, not any particular ideology. So - in
theory - a book like his could have been produced at any time. Of course, the
technology, the access to an almost infinite amount of written material at
the click of a mouse, means it can only be done now. But the drive to do it,
the helplessness of an individual in any power structure, has always been
there. Not least under systems following the philosophy of another writer
associated with a work called 'Capital'.
© Paul
Sutton 2006
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