FAR LANGUAGE
(I made reference to this and the re-write I made for The Poetry of Saying, which I also quoted in the last posting here. This is the original text.)
Barry MacSweeney: Odes, Trigram.
The first quality that strikes you is the celerity, the quickness of movement
within these poems. Many of them replace
the conventional margin with a central axis, a form borrowed from McClure (see
example below). The kinetics of this
contrasts the movements of the reading eye on a horizontal plane with a
vertical linearity. Thus we begin one
ode with the line, ‘Crepuscular phantoms energised manhood, soap’ only to be
arrowed down the page to the five single-word lines at its end.
The second quality, allied
to this, is the condensation of the text.
The lesson may have been learned from Bunting (who had, years before,
supplied Pound with his maxim ‘dichten = condensare’), though MacSweeney’s Odes owe little to Bunting’s and employ
a more rigorous condensation. This is not the economy that comes of careful
revision but is an economy built into the compositional process. It is perhaps too simple to attribute this
wholly to MacSweeney’s journalistic training, yet we are aware of weird
headline-like qualities in the statements: ‘Oak-pin/shells/survive the/China
Sea’ (p.40). Yet it is difficult to
imagine a story to match the headline.
Something more than pared economy gives these poems their strength,
makes this the most powerful collection to have appeared for some time.
Condensation is so acute as
to actually block, and frustrate, our reading at the informational level. Given a naturalistic reading we could say
simply that MacSweeney is retreating into private
meaning, has created a poetry so dense with personal reference, that he
excludes us from the province of meaning altogether. Although this is true, in so far as we
recognise repeated motifs with a special significance for a barely discernable
‘I’ of the text, MacSweeney’s ‘obscurity’ is wilful. He has said, ‘I’ve worked towards this
condensing of language, this cutting across meaning, not having words next to
each other which are supposed to be there, but in a way … I think they are
shocking.’ (p.37, Poetry Information
18). They are attempts to make a
potential reader more acutely responsive to his language.
This is not a poetry where
you can safely ‘get’ the state of mind of the author. The metaphors are only half-elaborated, at
one remove from their usual level of connection.
WING ODE
The
feet are white boats. Hands are
unlocked
keys of colour & shape. Love
me. Feel me beside you
and
within.
(Boats
in
April rain
pools)
I
break my chrysalis
&
Rise!
Walk
as a golden man.
This, one of the shorter, early odes, leaves little
doubt as to its central image of a springtime emergence from a chrysalis, but
the connections between ‘feet’ and ‘white
boats’, and between ‘hands’ and ‘colour
& shape’ are not directly paraphrasable, although we recognise the patterning
of the artifice, the symmetry of the thought.
‘Unlocked keys’ suggests many possibilities of interpretation from
paradox to pun. By squeezing metaphoric
language into this indeterminacy MacSweeney has ensured that the poems stay poetic. The hermeneutic exercise (my own notes
included) is useless to grasp the poetic complexity, beyond the definition of
several difficult usages of vocabulary.
The exemplary text, the most dense, is the 1971 ode to Jim Morrison of
the Doors, ‘Just 22 and I Don’t Mind Dying’.
MacSweeney himself has said of this, ‘The style is compressed,
paratactic. You know what I mean -
commas acting as magnets drawing the next thing in, without having to go into
‘ands’, ‘thes’, all sorts of descriptive shit.
What you’re getting in fact was the facets of a diamond, like the facets
of a stone, like complete shape, like Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture.’ (Poetry
Information 18, p.36) The Vorticist
legacy is an important one, with MacSweeney replacing the linearity of
syntactic structure with a linearity of movement. An essential element of expression has been
squeezed out of what is still a very expressive poetry. ‘Just 22 …’ reminds me of certain symbolist
texts.
Blow and she tinkles. Burn the desk, my new
vampire, blousy and blue. Giraffes invade the hands
´
chaque ¾tage. Qui?
Smoke your kiss.
Although this poetry requires a special reading, and
is not dissimilar from a great deal of so-called Cambridge poetry with which
MacSweeney has some links, it does not attempt to produce anaemic verse that
remains wittily and indecisively ‘surface’.
It admittedly does have wit (‘If finesse is crinkly you’re a / Dairy Box
wrapper, whose heart’s crisp.’), yet its refusal to be pegged down resists any
claim for its autonomy; it gestures towards the referential. It lacks the sophisticated smoothness of tone
associated with much Cambridge poetry.
It is also, it is worth adding, as far as possible from the linear
strategies of MacSweeney’s own Black
Torch poem.
Reading is cumulative across
the book. Concepts and symbols rime (in
Duncan’s sense) and at their repetition we cling to them as familiar gobbets of
meaning, though they are frequently slippery fish that, as we handle and
unhook, we lose back into the water. The
‘Wing Ode’ above is contextualised by reference to the euphoric ‘Rise/up and
live!’ of the preceding ‘Flame Ode’.
Symbols of masculine sexuality, Snake and Wolf, and of female sexuality,
Torpedo and Vixen, abound throughout, as do references to MacSweeney’s tragic
heroes, Morrison and Thomas Chatterton.
There is some verbal play. Thus
the ‘Make your naked phone call moan’ of ‘Flame Ode’ echoes the ‘Make your
naked pencil mine’ of the following ‘Torpedo’.
The ‘O pulchritudinous orb de la dish scourer,/bring suds!’ exists in
the tension of mutual parody with the beginning of ‘Dunce Ode’: ‘O
pusillanimous orb de la Brillo / fetch pseuds!’
Other sonic devices, such as unexpected rhyme, occasional regular rhythm
and alliteration, give a too-graceful edge to what is, in terms of syntax,
vocabulary and symbolism, an intensely disturbing experience.
The heightened language of
the Odes, pertaining, as the title
implies, to music and its morphologies of feeling,
goes beyond the demands of a poetry of pure surface. Celerity is a guerilla tactic against a
language that belongs increasingly to the controllers of our society. In ‘Far Cliff Babylon’ MacSweeney can adopt a
persona that declares with frightening simplicity in lines that are parodied
throughout the piece:
I
am 16.
I
am a Tory. My
vision
of the future represents
no
people.
These poems cannot be pinned down, anaesthetised
with a fixed meaning, though the feeling - so often of an anger that verges on
the sadistic - is distinct. We are
forced to join in the mechanics of language.
We can’t rest in too many of the familiar notions of space/time, social
details, idea, or traditional image, most of the comforting impedimenta of
‘poetry’ as it is understood and transmitted accordingly in the package-deal
mentality of our educationalists. In
‘Far Cliff Babylon’ there comes the stark realisation that ‘I have died every
day since I gave up poetry. / Dangerous condescending humans lapped it
up.’ Despite this, the real triumph of
these poems is that they ‘move’ the reader - in both senses of the word. Yet the ‘movement’ of the poems, the celerity
of the text, resists that static aestheticisation of the feeling, that
comforting, introspective notion of having been ‘moved’. If they move us, these poems move us onwards.
17-19 April
1980 Reality Studios 3:2, 1981
