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I
nearly stopped before I began. I did not want to read the book for itself, I
just wasn't interested enough. I had just been startled to find something
humdrum with a little more fizz to it than normal. I was mildly curious
initially at the look of the collages, of poems, translations, and found
poems - for example, even from the kids' programme LazyTown. A line of dialogue from the pantomime
villain Robbie Rotten "HOW / can I be bad / when / she / says / some /
thing / good" is set against a kind of Pythonesque comedy riff "SHE
SHOULD allegory / synonym at him,
/ he allegory / metaphor
from her; / should her re-allegory / synonym from him / re-allegory /
metaphor at her". I did know some of the poets, and some of the poems,
translated, and that's what hooked me. I had a sense of testing what I
thought was, say, Baudelaire or Mallarme's style, against Lightman's
translations where I didn't know the original.
Lightman dabbles in mockery, self-deprecation, parody of all and sundry. He
can say something, then not have any further discussion, and yet there is the
hope for a wake of charm. He is at least prepared to write for people who may
never have seen a poem and may never be expected to read or hear another
poem.
There are wonderful moments where, if you know Lightman, you do momentarily
think of him as the author of some passages that (daringly) push him a little
further (working in a new way) to more literariness or more lyricism than he
previously overtly showed. When his work billows out a space, held open
sometimes as tensely as the big tent of which Tony Blair used to speak,
sometimes with eight or ten basic pegs and lines of basic force yet billowly
to wallow in nonetheless.
REPUBLICAN
DEMOCRAT
unloved
the
unhated
hate
love
precipitating
world's
cruising
the
within
anchor
ending
dry
yank
dock.
There are various attempts at the spiritual, love in the spiritual sense as
much as in any other. And there is worry over sin. How does one recognize sin
in one's own expression, for example bluff jokey racist slang like
"yank", including and especially in one's most pious self-expression?
I want to ask, for many, what a Christian does, even when it is not
ostensibly in prayer, with the will to mischief sabotaging what must be felt,
and owned full-throated in the presence of God, in earnest. The will to
mischief can only make it harder to speak in earnest, but then what of
Christ's injunction (at one specific point in the Gospels, not necessarily as
a mode for talking to one kind or category of audience) not to cast pearls
among swine? ??Lightman may be modelling an unspoken tendency, an unspoken
battle with parody, among the would-be pious. For them his work may be then a
(colourful) sermon in which he admits to something uncomfortable, that
strikes a chord, so that we marshal our forces the stronger against it. If
one feels moved to find it so, this raises many questions of what he seems to
be doing and what he is doing. And what about when out of church bounds? Il
n'y'a pas hors-eglise?
It says on the blurb that Lightman makes Public Art? Is Duetcetera Public Art, visual poetry?
Jeffrey Side has proposed that a poem should produce a kind of simultaneous
performance of itself in the reader, so that there is overload and surplus
but also a feeling of pace and direction, of voice. How can a visual poem
have that kind of direction and pace? Its words are often simple (there's a
whole school of minimalist concrete poem that Marjorie Perloff has implied
fears the sentence) and at an angle, or in a specially chosen font (or
fonts). If the whole book is in one font, all at the same point size, and on
the one level, is it still visual poetry? Bringing two voices together, as
Lightman has often done making videos of two poets reading his poems (or new
double column poems made by both poets), seems to hint at the energy of two
voices implied in every visual bringing together of poems. Each poet takes a
deliberate through composed tone to their own column, yet brings alive the
moment by moment of each word to make synchronicity work. They don't cling to
each other, but more to themselves, with qualifications, moments of noticing
each other. Like children hard to bring out of their world. Is the child's
enviable world of presentness the one made by interaction with others, only
in glimpses?
Doesn't this render a strange new historical moment for the Wordsworthian
idea that poetry speaks to the child in us? School discussions of poetry make
a mockery of Wordsworthian innocence at its finest. They actually inhibit it.
Yet in a rare classroom, among all and not least one of the generic
classrooms, a Wordsworth poem might get an outing, even a hearing. An early
Prynne poem, where Prynne is at is his most Wordsworthian, might. I've
personally taught the same workshop on writing mesostic poetry in many
schools, and it's often gone the same. The form, like the acrostic but with
greater flexibility, encourages one to snatch, chance-like, at expressions to
incorporate into the poem ? the plainer but also the gawkier the better. The
kind of poetry this encourages young people to write is a great deal better
than the poetry of finding similes, the dull syntax and the preponderance of
the word 'like' in young people's poetry. The language style rule is
"keep it plain", and the form rule, "make it fit a
pattern". A self-indulgent longwindedness, pace Henry James, might be
the adult form of keeping it plain, or have within it a plain or plangent
rhythm. If it weren't for two swear words on page p61, this might be a good
kid's poetry book, along exactly the challenging lines indicated in the
sequence that ends the book.
The sequence focusses on a child's imagined experience of art (with vanity
enough, of one of Lightman's performances, no less). The lefthand columns in
these closing pages are all written as if by a young school-age child:
"Mrs Pubbus / used to tell me which poems / she thought were good or bad
/ and sometimes too grown-up, / I thought / she really / feared / poems / she
did and did not / talk / about badly read outloud". This voice indicates
both a simple clarity about grown-ups, that the teacher "feared /
poems" of all sorts, but also that the teacher (the adult other, with
special rules for interaction with children) had an openness to working
through that fear if only the poems weren't "badly read". If they
were well read outloud - and which poems ever are? - she was perhaps open to
talking about all, but maybe not talking "outloud". This indicates
a child's view, to read adults like a book, feel adults' fear (all the time)
and yet to know respect and hope (when at primary school age) for the moment.
Teachers are so rarely fully hardened, or hard-hearted, when teaching at
primary school.
When these lines come together with a sometimes waffly general statement of
poetics by Lightman in the right hand column (who seems as I say to be the
Daddy named in the left hand columns), we get further glosses of possibility,
of hope in the moment borne on general waves of dismissive vengeful anger and
responding to fear:
Definitely No. I'd
offer something for
Mrs Pubbus the
other to hear,
used to tell
me which poems not
deflate, but
she thought were good or
bad trouble
and sometimes too
grown-up, to come up with
an exploitative
I thought
counterpoint
she
really had the potential
to feel
feared good art in
the draft
poems technically,
with double
she did and did not
probe, even
talk us
about
badly read outloud Escher
scales upon B&W.
Lightman has written a few online reviews of other people's poetry.
Poet-reviewers often have a habit of coming up with formulations, when
describing other people's work, that are all too ready to cut and paste into
a review of their own work. Sometimes this is vanity, sometimes the very
pasted quote ricochets about, neither applying fully to the reviewed work or
the reviewer's own work. It would be interesting to look at Lightman's review
of Bruce Smith and David Antin in this light, especially since Bruce Smith's
work is ostensibly in a double-column or duet form and Lightman doesn't seem
to rate its achievement but only its general habits of language style, which
would apply if the columns were single column poems or prose. Certainly, I
imagine, Lightman would dislike having the whole formal enterprise of the
book written off quite so smartly as Lightman writes off Smith's. On a
conscious level, at least. Such is the superficiality of reviewing and
response to it. Should the reviewer and the reviewed be talking much,
convivially much, after the publication of the review? Perhaps there is
deferral after an insistent point is made, at least between the counterpoint
selves of the debatees.
© Ira
Lightman 2009
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