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Knowing, as I do, that there's a lot more where this came
from, I can only marvel at the excessive imagination of Tim Allen's writing.
To call him fecund would be a massive understatement. Settings is a series of seventy seven pieces - whether prose
blocks, poems or prose poems is a moot point and probably irrelevant - each
taking up no more than a page of text and each being a discrete object,
although there are, of course, occasional 'overlaps' and suggestions which
are reprised at a later point. No matter, the essential point to be made is
that these artworks feature a number of techniques common to poetry - Tim is
particularly keen on punning and on the use of assonance and alliteration,
usually as a way of steering the 'narrative' in a completely new direction -
and are cumulative in the sense that the more of them you read the more you
get a feel for what is going on here. Which is what, exactly?
As John Hall says in the back-cover blurb 'There's no story but there is
certainly a scene...' yet the sense of a story being told is everywhere in
this collection, where biographical detail, disguised or otherwise, jostles
with
an array of materials and 'subjects', from popular culture and WW1 to the
details of a poetry reading for hospital radio where a certain Kenny Knight,
apparently, spilled coffee over the protagonist's microphone. Although
high-octane emotions burst through at irregular points and serious thinking
is often interrupted by dazzling displays of linguistic wordplay - often
leading to intentional dead-ends - there is nevertheless a sense of flatness
here which is induced by Allen's refusal to set up any sort of hierarchical
value-system of material or information. Although this collection represents
a particular individual's highly personal 'outlook/inlook' on the world
there's an essentially democratic motivation behind this writing. Yet Allen
is never bland or lacking in imagination - even the material which may have
been 'throwaway' is heightened due to the author's strong sense of euphony,
a deep
need to make the poetry work as texture, as sentences balanced into
harmony forever teetering on the edge of collapse.
It is a genuine wonder, given the wide variety of materials used to construct
these texts, that they hold together at all, yet there is coherence and there
is certainly a great deal of pleasure to be got from engaging with them.
There are times when I laughed aloud when reading these poems and times when
my brow tightened as I attempted to follow a particular 'thought train' only
to realise that the sense I was making collapsed into nothing as the writing
changed course, shifted by a pun into a completely different mood and off on
another tangent. There are times, of course, when this sort of game-playing
can be irritating but the irritation never lasts for long and it often
promotes some serious thinking or at least a good hearty laugh. Ok, let's get
particular.
Set 44, where the author 'discusses' the work of the avant-garde poet John
Wilkinson, not the occasion for a barrel of laughs, you might think, but
think again:
...It takes longer to read a page
by John Wilkinson than to write one of mine a - nurse reads me a page as if I was in the
children's ward it takes him longer to get - home from the hospital than it does to do a
shift. ....
This is funny because if you've struggled with the density of a Wilkinson
poem you know exactly what Allen is getting at but it's also a serious point
- Wilkinson is, sometimes!, worth struggling with - but the shift into
location changes the context and then adds detail which throws up a whole
load of other thoughts and feelings if you've a mind to let yours wander.
There's a lightness of touch here which balances the 'immediate' with the
longer-term' and which is, I think, the source for a lot of the pleasure to
be gained from reading Allen's work, if you're prepared to engage in the
first instance.
Some of the commentaries display a caustic yet somehow restrained sense of
the absurd, as in Set 67, where among other matters, Allen touches on the
theme of conceptual art via an intrusion into 'the mind' of The Chapman Bros:
...The Chapman Brothers should stick life-sized figurines of traffic cops
without their cars on all the sites the project could be called Babblefield.
A glider made of all the sauce that ever dripped down the bottle could take this in even if the critics remain as
baffled as unpoliticised widows.
....
The invention here is fantastic. I've a pretty good idea of Allen's views on
conceptual art (we've had lots of 'discussions' over the years) but the
answer in this instance is to project something even more absurd and perhaps
trivial yet incredibly imaginative at the same time. The IDEA of making a
glider out of all the sauce that ever dripped down the bottle is completely barmy, not to say impossible, but
also very witty in the context of an Alice in Wonderland universe - perhaps somebody should try it!
Allen marshals an enormous width of material into his projected landscapes
where the 'real' brushes up against ' the imagined' and both are given equal
footing even where real rage and anger break through to make clear this isn't
post-modern writing in its cool, detached form. Then again, I also find myself persuaded and enlivened by the pure
aesthetic delight involved in his work: 'Polish greasily rots in desk grain
but the limbs and faces of my imaginary siblings shine.' Just read that line
for its resonance and its sound, never mind the meaning! Sets is full of such sentences, where the language is
made to work hard for its living yet it all seems so light and good to
hear.
I wasn't too sure about the 'glossary' at the end of the book, together with
Allen's comments about the 'partiality of cultural references' often included
in other books, but I warmed to it in the end. Nobody is ever going to be
able to know all the names in a volume with such wide reference points and I
don't see this as being a problem of elite versus popular - we all have
slightly different accumulations of cultural baggage, whether popular or
otherwise (I have a particular blind-spot when it comes to sporting matters,
for example). Yet this is a user-friendly guide as well as being personal to
the author and it can be used as an aid to further research if you so desire.
© Steve Spence 2008
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