April 2020 - In Xavier's footsteps, a journey around my room

I first came across Xavier le Maistre's faux travelogue 'A journey around my room' when I was researching material that might be useful for my M.A. dissertation. It was cited as a pre-cursor of psychogeographical literature. Though I noted it, time pressures were such that I never got around to reading it. Published in 1795, it records Le Maistre's two months under house arrest in Turin, imposed by the civic authorities after he wounded a rival in a duel. The journal is written in a mock heroic style. It alternates between  a parody of a travel journal which treats the indoors as unknown territory, interspersed with personal ramblings on more metaphysical matters. As 'lockdown' was imposed I thought, what better moment to immerse myself in Le Maistre's interior expedition.

In the event, though Le Maistre's book was entertaining, and divided into forty two short chapters perfectly suited to the dive in concentration which seems to accompany being marooned indoors, its tone was irritating, 'foppish' almost. It's difficult to empathise with some entitled eighteenth century aristocrat grounded by an ASBO bemoaning the fact he is missing out on costume balls and the carnival when you are similarly afflicted through no fault of your own, and fated to watch a global pandemic cut down, country by country, the world's oldest, poorest and most vulnerable people.

However, it did occur to me, what would a journey through my room entail taking Le Maistre as the starting point? Occasionally I have thought about writing a 'crown of sonnets' but have always managed to find a good excuse not to. Sometimes the sequence is  called a 'sonnet corona'. With days to fill and only weeding, decorating and iPlayer to stave-off mental meltdown, if this was not the moment to attempt a 'sonnet corona', when would be? As a 'newbie' I thought I would start with the simpler, seven sonnet sequence. The 15 sonnet cycle - the heroic crown or  sonnet redoublé looks mightily tricky, but May seems set to be as locked-down as April, so perhaps I might continue this....

1/4/2020

From bed to bureau - a trip of forty days,

under house arrest time slows, or rather

attenuates the way a sun-shaft greys

when thin clouds drift across. Always farther,

always beyond the ever receding

horizon, somewhere between now and then,

time became the ground we were conceding,

but no one knows to whom or why or when.

Le Maistre proved no help, his musings trite,

self-aggrandizing, sentimental tosh.

Instead, embrace routine! The pure delight

of chopping vegetables and pots to wash.

For us there is no carnival outside,

an emptied world awaits the rising tide.

 7/4/2020

An emptied world awaits the rising tide.

Where once we looked to God we watch the screen,

appreciate the numbers game - next slide! 

Death's five day rolling average, the mean

or median seem matter-less if you're

that scattergram's black dot! Come 5pm

it's briefing time, the PM.'s at death's door, 

robotic men in suits step-in, condemned

to echo their Adviser's puerile patter:

"Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives.."

- propaganda in perfect pentameter!

Do as we say, or people here will die;

we comply, hostages to the Hobbesian lie.

 10/4/2020

We comply, hostages to the Hobbsian lie -

democracy's a sham, a puppet show

that hides elites' protection racket. They die

in droves, the old and weak;  the 'foe'

invisible as our unspoken fears.

Enmeshed in myth, the only thing we know -

the world is not the same as it appears

twittering on screen. Out of the window,

unstoppable, spring unfolds anyway,

a green contagion; birds tweet our relief.

There is only grief in human hearsay,

but solace in the wild, faith in disbelief.

Bright days, white blossom flecking woodland streams,

then restless nights edged by sinister dreams.

 11/4/2020

A restless night edged by sinister dreams:

A voice repeating, "No-one tells the truth."

A twilit street, is nothing what it seems?

Each shadow hides a faceless, trilbied sleuth,

(a noirish mise-en-scene). Out of the gloom

the spooks close in, I break out in a sweat.

Jump cut. Stark naked in my living room,

I face a firing squad - last cigarette

before they shoot, it morphs by magic

into a digital thermometer -

37 degrees. I wake.. hardly tragic!

"You are ridiculous," I mutter.

MacNeice was right, 'we cannot beg for pardon'.

Dawn's dull light spreads plague-like through the garden.,

11/4/2020

Dawn's dull light spreads plague-like through the garden.

Blackbirds sing, the hunting owls go quiet.

In 'solitary' our hearts must surely harden,

'Dying Egypt, dying' as we deny it.

Finally I fall asleep, wake-up late

to glorious sunshine, summer in spring,

so beautiful I feel disconsolate.

Earth always will prevail, knowing nothing

of our grand designs or for what we yearn.

A widget in the system, a slight force,

this cocky primate's smart linguistic turn

unsignified in Nature's wordless course.

Unseen, there is no beauty in the wild,

only the regarded can be defiled.

24/4/2020

'Only the regarded can be defiled'.

Perhaps we never see beyond the sign;

eschewing fact, we choose to be beguiled,

mistaking unintelligent design

for Providence; our vivid here and now,

mere accidents narrated into sense.

Our 'hunting fathers' tried to beat the odds

to stave off hunger, drought or pestilence 

by bowing down before capricious gods,

believing bison painted deep in caves

controlled the hairy ones outside. For us,

though freed from deities who strike or save

at will, we're doomed, alas, to trust in Boris!

As memory fades our long todays seems endless;

the future looms before us, bleak and friendless.

 30/4/2020

The future looms before us bleak and friendless -

NB. to my miserable friend T. S.

'April - not cruel, more horrendous',

but as he said, 'stirring dull roots' nonetheless.

I click through last spring's photographs. Stevns Klint -

white cliffs in scintillating light, a line

less than a hand-span wide through chalk and flint

delineates the dinosaurs' decline -

their sudden mass extinction. Is ours next?

Well yes, but no-one knows how long before

it's our turn to be utterly 'T-Rexed' -

a plastic sliver on some silent shore.

Bright days exclude us, diminished inside

an emptied world, an ever ebbing tide.

After Auden (Paysage immoralisé)

Hearing of children dying in parched valleys,
'Heretics' besieged on arid mountains,
The dispossessed adrift on dangerous water,
Marooned in squalor on picture postcard islands,
Living rough within our glittering cities -
We toss loose change to salve our burgeoning sorrow.

We, whose trite anxieties mask endless sorrow,
Sit by pools overlooking verdant valleys,
Or penthouse balconies in towering cities
With distant view of smog-smudged, snow-capped mountains -
Share Snapchat pics of migrants trapped on islands,
Feign outrage as we sip our sparkling water:

Big pharma commodified tap water,
Cyber gurus monetised our sorrow;
Watch C-list celebs shag on virtual islands,
Eden shot in lush, panoptic valleys:
Re-tweeted memes make molehills into mountains,
A smog of sadness spreads across our cities;

Watch super-heroes save imperilled cities,
Their magic powers holding back the water
Rising all around like shimmering mountains.
Strip-back the CGI, a world of sorrow
Overwhelms us, shadowing our golden valleys,
Inundating once hospitable islands:

Hopeless, these once hospitable islands;
Crumbling, these old imperial cities;

Forgotten, these empty, blossoming valleys.
No gods or heroes sweep across the water
To save us from our desolating sorrow
Looming before us like dark, impassable mountains.

Our future is an aftermath. Grey mountains,
Half submerged, shrunk to humid, swampy islands
Give beggarly shelter, but from our sorrow
There is no shelter. Couched in ruined cities
Ragged gangs skirmish over dwindling water;
Nearby, arcane cults skulk in sunbaked valleys.

And sorrow falls like mercurial melt water
From cloud-veiled mountains; esconced in bleak valleys
We dream of cities as viridian islands.

The presence of absence

David Katz posted a link to Harper's Bazaar on Facebook today. It feature John Ashbery's last poem, hand wriiten a few days before he died.

Climate Correction

By John Ashbery

So what if there was an attempt to widen
the gap. Reel in the scenery.
It’s unlike us to reel in the difference.

We got the room
in other hands, to exit like a merino ghost.
What was I telling you about?

Walks in the reeds. Be
contumely about it.
You need a chaser.

In other words, persist, but rather
a dense shadow fanned out.
Not exactly evil, but you get the point.

'Gnomic to the end,' I commented.

Google his name and you get one of those helpful obits in a box that the big G spacialises in.  It's not exactly 'Mount Parnassos' but I suppose its the best poets can hope for these days.

I liked the quote: I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

It's the most sensible thing I have seen written about Ashbery's work and it is pleasing that he wrote it himself. He turned the barely comprehensible into an art form; his poems turn in on themselves, enticing the reader to make sense of them, but the meaning remains elusive, like shifting shadows or an echo which refuses to fade. See, I told you what he said himself about his writing made more sense. 

RIP. He was one of the greats - I have a signed first edition of 'Hotel Lautrement' published by Carcenet in 1992. Looking at his signature is a poignant moment - the presence of absence.

Headlands

Back in 2008 I was looking through some of the poems I had written before I discovered poetry on the internet and became a refugee in the out-lands of New Formalism. One poem called 'Alnmouth' written in 1979 caught my eye, and I wrote some companion pieces to make a little suite of poem about estuaries.

The following year the Raintown Review published the suite. It struck me then that using some of the material in my 'juvenilia' notebooks and locating these around newer poems might be an interesting way to explore how my ideas and technique had developed over the years. A number of the poems were written about the sea and coastal landscapes - so I had a half-baked idea about writing a small collection of these suites - a set of 'seascapes'.

I spend so little time now writing poetry. When I travel I get so lost in the moment that time to be reflective evaporates, and what time I have to write gets spent on the travel blog, which is engaging and fun, whereas poetry is, at least for me, a serious business. So, I have written no poetry at all since last summer. I went through a phase of thinking, maybe that's it, I have nothing more to say. However, over the past two years we have travelled 10,000 miles around the shores of the Mediterranean, and even if no humans read the words, somehow I feel I need to pay back Mare Nostrum for all the beautiful dawns, spectacular sunsets, starry nights and grey wind-lashed days she has gifted me over recent months. 

But my starting point is a colder, bigger sea. I wrote 'Cap de Chevre' soon after returning from a holiday in Brittany in the summer of 1980. So, the starting point of a suite called 'Headlands' could have been this grainy snapshot.

Cap de Chevre, Finisterre, July 1980

Headlands


1. Cap de Chèvre

Finistère means 'earth's end'. 
Gulls cry,
sea, sky,
fractured rock,
all crave chaos.

Granite stacks,
obdurate, crumbling,
plunge dizzily into nothing

Sea fret
dank silence,
always the Atlantic surging close,
then distant.

Images of Ys
possess our dreams.
Awakening, we see traced in mist

cracked domes
broken colonnades.

Skulls of the drowned 

glimpsed through seaweed.

Nothing exists beyond change.

Over the past two weeks I have had a go at adding to the suite - firstly a Triolet recalling a walk we took in early February 2015 around the Puntas de Calnegre, a remote headland south of Mazarron in Murcia, Spain.

Evening, Puntas de Calnegre

 2. Puntas de Calnegre

The road becomes a stony track -

find solace in dilapidation,

wind-seared palms, a sun bleached shack.

The road becomes a stony track,

we reach a cove, then double back

through bleak garrigue and desolation.

The road becomes a stony track –

find solace in dilapidation.

One idea I had about these suites is that each would reference boyhood memory, an acknowledgement that my love of the sea and coasts is rooted in childhood and teenage experience of the Northumbrian coast. I still have copies of the Agfa transparencies I took in the summer following my A levels - looking at these was the starting point for the following rondeau. 

Cullernose Point, Howick, July 1973

3. Cullernose Point

Old transparencies: colours fade,
feeding false memory. Afraid,
beneath a dark promontory, a lone
boy plays among the staithes’ splintered bones,
his red coat rusted, his blond hair greyed.

Everything decays. Clouds cascade

over whin-sill cliffs, spindrift’s spray
mists the bay in sepia-tones.
Old transparencies

degrade. Our shabby masquerade
becomes a handy stock-in-trade;
opaque ceremonies condone
unquestioned myth, we crave the known;
though uncertainty's dank perfume pervades
old transparencies.

4. Homecoming

For Susan Sharman


The sky, sea, white cliffs – all grey,
or so it seems when we return.
Our journey gently drifts astern,
the sky, sea, white cliffs – all grey
metaphors of mundane today -
the tyranny of trite concerns.
The sky, sea, white cliffs – all grey
or so it seems when we return.






I wrote about Gill's description of homecoming as an 'endish feeling' on our travel blog. I guess this is an attempt to capture endish slump in a triolet. It was prompted by a post by fellow traveller, Susan Sharman on the Motorhome Adventures Facebook site, so it only seems fair to dedicated it to her.

The odd thing about exphrasis..

"For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does...it's not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture."  John Ashbery

“A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

At the core of exphrastic poetry lies an ambiguity. As Ashbery so beautifully puts it,  a poem 'unrolls' in time, whereas Barthes observes, images deny ripening. I would argue that the greatest exphrastic poem is Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Throughout Keats plays with this ambiguity, the poem is built around a paradox. He claims at the outset that the images on the urn  'express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme' but the stanzas which follow explore how this is in fact a 'cold pastoral' - the imagery is centred on stymied intent and desolation:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

... What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

What draws me to exphrasis is the possibilities which open-up when you apply poetry's capacity to 'unroll through time' to static objects, like paintings or photographs. To go back to the Barthes quote, by inhabiting exphrasia's paradoxical territory perhaps it is possible to re-conceive duration, affectively or symbolically, the poem becomes an impure discourse, but one that seeks to re-assert 'mythic Time' -

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

With these thoughts in mind I have been looking back on some of my own efforts - for a long time I felt uncomfortable about writing poetry about paintings - it seemed a cop-out somehow, trading on 'ready-made' imagery. It was only when I came to think about the opening chapters of Camera Lucida and discovered an early work by Panofsky from the 1920s - Perspective as Symbolic Form that the potential of exphrasis began to occur to me. I think I failed to see beyond the Art Historian's 'pure intellectual discourse' and began to re-discover a more visceral relationship with pictures.