Another talker nonpareil

The latest issue of ABR sports a bit of wordplay reminiscent of a tabloid headline - "Littoral Truth" - but it is wonderfully apt, and one feels sure the subject of the main article, the recently deceased Peter Porter, would have appreciated it. After all, a predecessor whose presence loomed large through Porter's thought and writing was W. H. Auden, who had said "Good poets have a weakness for bad puns."

Peter Steele's article on Porter is packed with choice quotes from Porter and others. He includes Porter's statements that "No poet can be great who is not memorable, unmistakeable and a virtuoso," and that "All the poetry I love is potential energy come to rest."

Another key figure for Porter was Robert Browning: "In his copious and generous output, Browning satisfies the unquenchable haranguer which is in each of us. We are born, we talk and we die. But chiefly we talk, and when we meet a good talker we listen. Browning is the talker non pareil."

There is much else worth quoting in the piece, so much that I'd surely infringe copyright if I put all the good bits in this blog. Fortunately ABR has made the article available online here.

Collectible words

In the poem 'Francis Bacon's Studio' appearing on Justin Lowe's BluePepper blog, Mark O'Flynn kicks off with the words "From the perspex doorway" ... setting aside the problem of how a doorway (as opposed to a door) can be perspex, the use of the word 'perspex' acts to pin down the poem's temporal setting. O'Flynn also uses the word 'bloodshot' - which also has something of a contemporary feel to it, although it was used by Keats and Matthew Arnold and Hart Crane, & always coupled with the word 'eye', O'Flynn also uses it to describe an eye, whereas Peter Porter has used the word more imaginatively in the phrase "the bloodshot hills". There are moments when O'Flynn seem to tap into what the language is using us for ... the phrase 'holy, primal mess' is interesting: "holy mess" plays with the colloquial "unholy mess" but also carries with it echoes of "holy messengers", so the words acquire a resonance beyond their literal meaning.

The word 'perspex' appears in poems by both Peter Porter and Roy Fuller. Porter uses it as a prop to give a sense of the contemporary or futuristic - "watch the the cuckoo in your perspex panel"; whereas Fuller uses it to find a fresh image, a fresh comparison "the rain had stopped and through the perspex air", which is the sort of thing Auden was up to when he likened the chimneys of a power house to recently fired rifles. This drive to capture the details of the physical world, all its detritus, reminds me of the title poem of Donald Platt's 'Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, Guns'

Mozart once said that he wrote music
    by finding the notes
that love one another and putting them

    together. But remembering how
the dissonant opening bars of his string quartet
    in C major grate

against each other and yet somehow cohere,
    I like to think
he found a different kind of order,

    the same principle
of musical composition that inspired the roadside sign
    I saw on Rt. 29:

Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns.
    It makes me do a U
-turn pull over, and park among the rusted-out

    pick-ups. ...

Browning had a magpie's approach to grabbing the shiny new bits of language and putting them to use ... he used the word 'cocktail' and referred to the striking of a match only about a decade after matches were first introduced to Britain. But whether it's Platt on Route 29, or Auden with his goal post, wind-gauge, pylon & bobbing buoy, or Adam Kirsch with his humvee - the collective project of using poems as Cornell boxes of contemporary nouns is clear. A recent debut collection by Kathryn Simmonds, Sunday at the Skin Launderette (Seren 2008, winner of the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection) displays the same tendency. In one short poem, appropriately entitled 'News', she mentions the tube, the night bus, Woolworths, flatmates & fake Chanel. In another poem (which was featured at Todd Swift's Eyewear in August) Simmonds' category of human types - hillwalkers, Hare Krishna followers, war photographers, ambassadors, sous chefs, surveillance officers, apprentice pharmacists - takes us right back to Horace's Ode I,i, which Donald Hall reimagined in The Museum of Clear Ideas.

... I know that some people
require fame as athletes; still others demand
election to office or every gadget
for sale on 42nd Street; Tanaquil
enjoys dozing in the British Museum
and its pub; she prefers them to Disney World,
while her Chair, who won an all-expenses-paid
weekend in Rome, Italy, would have favored
Las Vegas. Marvin enjoys drinking himself
quadriplegic, Joan backpacks through Toledo,
Kim helicopters into Iranian
deserts, and Flaccus shoots tame wild antelope
in a hired game preserve. ...

Of course it's not just the nouns ... those verbs 'to backpack' 'to helicopter' do a lot of the work. Hall concludes his rendition of Horace I,i

I know that some people exist to look thin,
others stare at television sets all day
until they die, and others expend their lives
to redeem the dying. As for Horsecollar,
Decius, he'll take this desk, this blank paper,
this Bic, and the fragile possibility
that, with your support, the Muse may favor him.

Rain and Pearls: Simon Turner

You Are Here, Simon Turner's first collection, is published by Heaventree Press (Coventry) and has a baffling cover without a single word on the front, no title, no author's name; the spine and back cover are normal enough. There are plenty of sequences here, including three 'Storm Journal' poems scattered through the first section. Turner shows a fluency of description, and an emphasis on images, some fresh (lightning making sound of 'tearing fabric' or thunder 'punching down behind the houses opposite') and some familiar ...

clatter of shovel-blade scraping on concrete.
Rain-pearls on the window-glass getting the light.

The rain-pearls echo Wilde in nature-poet vein:

In vain the sad narcissus, wan and white
At its own beauty, hung across the stream,
The purple dragon-fly had no delight
With its gold-dust to make his wings a-gleam,
Ah! no delight the jasmine-bloom to kiss,
Or brush the rain-pearls from the eucharis.

Frost also uses the image "the rain is pearls so early, Before it changes to diamonds in the sun". This is a descendant of the similar dew/pearl image, which Dryden used a few times:

'Twas on a joyless and a gloomy morn,
Wet was the grass, and hung with pearls the thorn;

As well as the image of drops of water looking like pearls, there is also the image of pearls or beads falling like rain. Browning has 'Break the rosary in a pearly rain' and Tennyson also, somewhat circularly describes the water of a fountain in terms of raining pearls:

The fountain of the moment, playing, now
A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls