neoneoclassicalism

sometimes I just want to do something silli, man! (wow metasilliness)

has anyone else noticed how augustan our time is? we’ve got ourselves a large, powerful empire flexing its muscles, in which much poetry is created with conscious artifice (of course, this is more an attitude thing; it takes as much work, perhaps more, to construct poetry that looks natural or organic), a sense of the importance of community, and the poetic appropriation of other discourses. much as pope improved homer and virgil, poets like flarfists today improve google and other discourses. sometimes this is done in high seriousness, like some of those working in “language” poetry’s wake, while at others in a satirical vein that swift wouldn’t have been too upset about.

people talk about “formalism” as if there could be such a thing as formless poetry, but it is the foregrounding of form and associated linguistic devices in a lot of contemporary poetry (I’m thinking of recent poetry's creations of new forms; e.g. hejinian’s My Life; tranter’s haquiris; or those hay(na)kus, sure they're generally not hard forms to write within, but then again, after pope hit his heroic straps, I’m sure it wasn’t that difficult for him to turn out couplet after couplet) that makes me think of the augustan mode. if there’s anything like a little relevance in what I’m saying, why are important and wonderful poets like alexander pope generally still overlooked in favour of the romantics and modernists? is it our fear of obvious, regular rhyme? does it just sound too childish or monotonous for us?

rhyme is still important to so much poetry being written today. even the most minimal stuff, like saroyam’s lighght, utilises and plays off this ancient poetic device. other old things like this are just as important. perhaps a.d hope was right in saying (in his great little essay, "the discursive mode") that we just can’t hear the beautiful, supple, baroque music in the heroic couplet form as well as the Augustans themselves could. the infinite variation caused by slightly different placings of the caesura, the amazing tension caused when syntax is pushed against the balance imposed by the couplet; all this isn’t simple or boring. I think we’re living in quite an augustan age, and maybe it’d be good for us to look more at – engage and sometimes maybe even enjoy what those poets were doing back then.

ten reasons i like korea

used to Sydney bookshops, where u’d b lucky to come across a copy of yeats’ collected poems in their 20-book “poetry section” let alone a slessor or harwood (gleebooks and better dead than read are two notable exceptions), going to a Korean bookshop is a revelation. right there at youngpoong bookstore near jongak station (영풍문고, 종악역), in pride of place next to the top ten novel and top ten non-fiction shelves, are the top ten poetry books of the week! could u even imagine such a thing in most western countries?

poetry is vibrant, varied, and important here in korea. of course, in this top ten , there’s always a few manifestations of poetry pulp – number one this week is 작은 기쁨 by 이해인 (i love that i can translate this as little joy, seems a bit like one of those little “inspirational” books u can find at bookshop counters in oz) – but there’s usually one or two more experimental items (number four this week looks interesting – 당신의 첫 (your first) by 김혜순 (kim hyesoon) – this publishing house puts out great titles.) another book worth getting hands on comes in at number 5 with a bullet, 내딸을백원에팝니다 (selling my daughter for 100 won ) by 장진성, a north Korean who’s defected southwards. I’ve already got number 10, 좋은 시 2008 (good poems – like those “best of’s” u get in oz or the states), but due to a backlog of books that I shd be reading, I haven’t even dipped into it as yet.

poets aren’t rockstars here – my students idolise k-pop stars like Big Bang or Super Junior, not writers like 고은 (Ko Eun) or 김승희 (Kim Seung-hee) – but poetry does seem to play a bigger part in korean lives than most australian ones. every subway station has at least a couple of poems on its walls, and most Koreans u ask would be able to quote 천상병’s 귀촌 (ch’eon sang byeong’s “back to heaven”) or 김소월’s 진달래 꽃 (kim sowol’s azaelea(s)). this higher profile of poetry excites me, and seems to be an environment that fosters a wide range of poetic material; great stuff that is doing new things to the page and the ear.

friggin with ur work.

peter boyle is an excellent poet. he has a well-trained ear for the lyric, and does wonderful things with the form - new and exciting things. for that matter, i don't think i know anybody that thinks jorge luis borges is anything less than an excellent poet. so is their stance against excessive drafting something for me to worry about? *

u see, it generally takes me around 10 drafts for me to think that a poem is starting to head in the right direction. i'll mess around with a poem for weeks, chopping a word off here, changing "with" to "in" and then back again, adding something there - tho i'm more likely to delete something. i often feel like john nash played by big russ in a beautiful mind; crazily muttering to myself over what i see as a beautiful pattern, but other people might see as a terrifying mess. a less intelligent version of course lol. often, indeed, i'm a bit concerned if my drafting process ends at the 10th version. surely there's more work to do there?

well, maybe i SHOULD be worried then. if i have to frig around with things so much, perhaps it means that there's nothing good to frig around with to begin with, so i should just throw my hands up and walk away. a lot of major (and not so major) journals would seem to agree with me here.

yet i don't really buy this at all. one attitude towards writing (a Romantic one, i'd say) is one of allowing an organic form to burst out from inside u and blaze itself upon a waiting page. excessive revision, in this perspective, would kill this beautiful breathing thing. yet, this is a troubled view when inspected closely; one only need to look at wordsworth's manifesto in lyrical ballads to see that the distinction between nature and artifice is an immensely conflicted one.

perhaps my approach to composition is too mechanical - like i'm tinkering with a motor or, better yet, have a lego kit in front of me (the good old bricks, without those specialised bits which force u to make a fire engine and a fire engine only), and that i'm at liberty to take out bits or put in something until i get a bit bored. where's the inspiration? the magic?

for me, i don't think there's some perfect-formed poem nestled in my soul somewhere begging for an easy birth. i prefer to look at the words i have at hand, sound them out, fiddle with them to see if there are any weak bits, throw the whole thing away for a bit to have a meal or a wank, and get back to playing with it later. a kind of barthesian (i love how his (author's) name plays such an important role in that death essay) blender, grabbing words that are around me and seeing if anything good happens when they're mushed together.

i respect and love people that have some high plan of Poetry, some sort of making plain of the unconscious. beautiful stuff is written like that. yet the tinkerers among the poets make beautiful, bright things as well. intentionality is a perilous concept, and i often try to forget about it as much as i can when playing with poems. as paradoxical as it is, it's a way for me to get past blabbering about myself in too obvious a fashion. i really don't think i'm so interesting a person that i can be justified in holding some deliberate poetic construct of myself squarely in the audience's face.

then again, my last little river poem (see my 2nd post here), took only about 5 biggish revisions, and i think i'm going to leave it alone now. this is something very different for me: a poem that i haven't fucked with endlessly, but still think is done. i wonder if there will be many more like that?



* peter boyle said in an interview(printed on pg. 41 of illumina, an excellent little sydney journal published last year): "if I revise something ten times to try to make it work it nearly always means there was no sufficient impetus to write the poem to start with"

The Gentle Water Bird**********IN PROGRESS***********

* * Thanks to the good people at Fisher Library at Syd U, you can find John Shaw Neilson’s Collected Poems (including this one, of course) online here.

as with a number of australian poets, something of a mythology of apology has sprung up around the name and figure of john shaw neilson. “jock” often poses as a simple farmer, too busy chopping down trees and going blind to read too many books, blessed with a natural gift for taking down dictation simply and directly from his pastoral surroundings. this characterisation is seen in john shaw neilson’s correspondence itself, and finds probably its most memorable manifestation in judith wright’s work on him (tho, to be fair, there are more strands than this one present in her poem). much work has been done to place the oddity of a versifying manual labourer comfortably within the field of australian poetry. “jock” becomes some kind of squinting noble savage. and, certainly, the gentle simplicity of neilson’s poetry seems to remain one of its finest qualities.

for, indeed, this poem is an excellent accomplishment in the gentle mode. its nursery-like rhyme scheme, soft cadences, and often childlike vocabulary converge in a quiet, gentle tone. we have personification that wouldn’t be out of place in a children’s book (a “frowning” God, stars that “say” things, the crane as the speaker’s “friend”), and a speaker at “play,” just like any bush kid. the delicate assonance and alliteration in such phrasing as “little children and the Spring,” and even the reference to a (vengeful) God as “terrible and thunder-blue” aid in surrounding this poem with a quiet, wonderful, childlike aura.

simple though the tone may be, it was not brought about in a simple manner. the gentle atmosphere of this poem is bound together by a structure that is almost mathematical in its strictness. the elements of this poem, from the usage of repetition and the rhyme scheme, right through to the imagery and themes, are exactingly plotted upon an axis running like a backbone down the length of the poem, enabling dynamics of a richness quietly stunning in its complexity.

although the most noticeable formal feature of this poem is the simple triplet organisation of the stanzas, these easy rhymes are mobilised to bind the poem with a tightness that is as extensive as it is unobtrusive. phrasing, rhythms and rhyme groupings are repeated and modulated at points crucial to the movement of the imagery and themes. throughout the poem, a vertical plane is established upon which overarching movement progresses - from dark, through mist, to light; and from above to below. refrain-like basic rhyme groupings are repeated at important positions upon this axis to emphasise the turning points – both local and major – in this movement and its various possible significances.

the first stanza serves as a preliminary sketch of the basic variables we are dealing with. the opening line, with its phrase, “in the far days,” establishes a relationship between time and distance, the word “far” being applicable to either. it is then that the underlying axis of the poem is first laid out; the “fear was upon” the speaker, a trajectory which positions an above (the fear’s ), and a below (the “me” upon which it bears).

this mapping is developed in the following stanza, where the rhythm of the poem’s opening line is first repeated, and then slightly modified to allow the first, and most pronounced, enjambment of the poem. this enables “God,” the upper limit within the poem, to be appropriately emphasised. God is figured as “frowning through” the dimness, at once reaching the base of the axis from its upper extreme and being revealed as a source of fear, indeed terror.

the opening processes of the poem effect a repeated mapping of the axis from above to below, saturated with an atmosphere of fear, trembling and dimness. the reader is directed back to the far, dim days in which the thunder-blue God and discoloured creeds (st. 3) are oppressive forces. light coloured flowers and the rainbow are situated between the speaker (lower limit) and God (upper limit), yet associated with the speaker through their shared trembling. Here we have the “white and cream” flowers and the rainbow threatened by a “thunder-blue” God and “discoloured” creeds. Thus, the initial movement is one of darkness from above pressing on lightness below, resulting in both dimness and trembling.

the movement of the fifth stanza enacts a confusingly complex interplay of darkness and light. in reading it, we first come upon the darkness of night, in which there are “many stars,” which could be reasonably understood as points of illumination. however, in the dynamics of this stanza, this understanding is almost immediately undercut by the enjambed second line, where we learn that the stars “say/dark things,” and that this darkness even remains in daylight. as the reading eyes move across the text, they thus encounter firstly darkness ("night"), then (assumedly) light ("stars"), quickly jumping to darkness again ("dark things") moving in light ("day"). a lot of work is being done in this stanza, which ends with a recapitulation of the opening theme (notice how the phrase from the first stanza"(f)ear was upon me" is repeated at this point).

song be gentle

i love fireworks. daring experiments, bold revolutions, outrageous ruptures - these are the lifeblood of poetry. quietude, on the other hand, leads to stasis, and stasis leads ultimately to rot. a lot of bad poetry gets written in environments of complacency. yet it’s still not the case that all important, nor, definitely, all beautiful poetry smacks you in the face with the thunderclap of its brilliance.

i want to turn my senses to poetic voices that are often drowned out by such thunder. they speak quietly, carefully; exploring their spaces with a soft, tentative footstep. simple words, sung gently. poems that with their light structures and cadences emanate an aura of hopeful calm. if we don't crane our hungry ears toward their hushed tones, we won't be able to hear what these soft little nursery rhymes can really tell us.

often, it’s the case that such little rhymes appear to be so innocuous that they don’t raise enough of a reaction to really register as worthy poetry. the time and effort spent straining one’s ears to pick up their tiny voices could be better spent directed toward more worthy matters.

i want to argue that this lightness of touch is of radical and profound importance. these poems, with their music of silence, their deceptively easy structures, may reach into rich, hidden immensities that other, bolder poems soar straight over. these songs may be gentle, but I’d like to intimate that they are also deep.

"let your song be gentle," this is the simple request of john shaw neilson on behalf of these little poems. and it is towards him that i first stretch my ear.

Rivers.

about an hour ago i was sitting down by the local stream, watching some ducks. at one point, my circle of focus centred on two smaller ducks who were finding some sort of nutrition in the stream of moving, putrid water. on one edge of this circle, three much larger ducks started to move toward the centre, while at another edge, so too did a black plastic bag, floating downstream. i know this sounds a bit like something that weird kid out of american beauty (he was really the worst element in an otherwise gorgeous movie) would delight in, but this swell of movement felt like a beautiful little piece of music. which, of course, got me to thinking about poems.

i like the rumour that goes around about how one of the first known bits of cuneiform was a bitch about how there's nothing new under the sun. somehow writing finds a need to always gesture to a better past, and complain about how tired all themes and concepts are these days. u can get that kinda idea from oldmate derrida. while i was thinking of my little, dirty northern seoul stream, a string of poems came to my mind - possum's waste land (my stream displays quite grandly the unglorious beauty of the human-induced fishflops of our world - our destruction is so teardemandingly gorgeous), bob adamson's writings of the hawkesbury river, john shaw neilson's beautiful, delicate "The Gentle Water Bird," (ok that's a lake, but i saw a crane - 학- as well as ducks and crap) and batblind old homer's oceanus... sitting by this stream seemed to make it impossible for me not to think of the massive weight of river literature bearing down, in, around, and thru my very eyes and brain.

it gets me to a-thinking. how the fuck could i possibly consider writing a river poem, when so many amazing things have been written about it. there seems to be no way to get my dirty little stream down on paper cleanly, without everything i've read (and haven't read) forcing itself onto my poor little bit of music. why write one at all? i love all those poems, but i'd prefer if i didn't have to engage their particular ethics in my writing - look what our greedy crusoe eyes and hands have done to our longsuffering island of a world.

it seems what i have to do is engage all these worldviews in even the simplest of little landscape poems. this is something that people like john kinsella, peter minter and kate fagan engage in a beautiful and complex manner. something i'd like to spend much more time exploring.

Fantastic!

Not another fucken poetry blog!

This is a companion blog to my other blog, mrgiles. i like that one. it's kinda inoffensive and unassuming, and i'd love to keep it that way. this is going to be more mr hyde - as self serving and narcissistic as so many blogs are. it will discuss poetry, and as all good (?) blogs, will be rambling and poorly annotated. be warned; sometimes i like using words like "discourse" and "power structure". i also find excrement an infinite source of hilarity.

so why start another damn blog about poetry? well, i don't really expect too many people to read it, so i hope it's not too destructive to the blogosphere's ecology. it's more the idea of an internet audience which will drive this space - hopefully this will give a different focus to my ramblings - it's a sort of easy medium between my notebook scrawlings and the rigidity of academic papers. i want to explore what poetry can and does mean to me, what i think it can do, and how it works. this sounds terribly like clockwork orange functionalism, but i hope i don't murder to dissect too much. the main focus (i believe) will be australian and korean poetry that has been written since the start of last century, but i'm sure there will be lots of little byronic tangents.

well anyways, here goes...