Tags
2012, A Day on Facebook, A Volta for the Sonnet as a Drag Queen, Adventures in Form, Chris McCabe, Facebook, George Szirtes, Hanna Silva, Hannah Silva, Hello my friend, Jackie Kay, Penned in the Margins, Rishi Dastidar, sonnet, Sophie Mayer, The Analogue Guide to Parenting, The Private Parts of Girls, Tom Chivers, Twitter
Book Browsers on Cuesta de Moyano I (Photo credit: shehani)
Reporting back from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, George Szirtes quotes Jackie Kay: “Why do novelists so fear the death of the novel?’ she asked. ‘Poets don’t fear the death of the poem.” This anxiety has been bubbling in the media for a while and the argument goes that the novel is disconnecting from the lives we lead.
iPhone 5 Safari (Photo credit: methodshop.com)
Just look around any human activity – you’ll find us in our hoards, lurking in the shadows (to best see the screen) and worshipping our smartphones, updating our statuses, tweeting. The novel is a long form and humanity, it seems, is in love with the shortest of forms. A doorstop like Clarissa is just an offensive weapon, or furniture. We’re too busy for doorstops now. We have lives to live and tweets to graze.
English: Drag queen before show (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The point here isn’t to knock the novel but to observe how poetry is thriving. In Adventures in Form, Tom Chivers (editor), offers a tour of the most innovative poetry being written now. It bastardizes and riffs with a multitude of forms, both past and present, demonstrating that poetry’s in rude health. In the first section, TRADITIONAL REVISED, new life is breathed into old forms. In Hanna Silva‘s Hello my friend, she makes brilliant use of the sestina, recycling spam email into something relentless and inescapable. ‘I am contacting you with something urgent, / you have always been a good friend. / I need to inform you of the following: / It is important that we remain connected. / It is important that we don’t avoid the subject. / Please switch on your TV and watch the news’. In A Volta for the Sonnet as a Drag Queen, Sophie Mayer foregrounds the artificiality of the form in the first of the two sonnets: ‘The sonnet’s a drag, and girl, it knows: sticks its / falsies, lines up its lashes. Lamé, lurex, tits / aglitter’. In The Private Parts of Girls, Mayer broke new boundaries between form and genre with her sci-fi poetry and here her language updates Shakespeare’s knowing, playful, gender-bending pyrotechnics which were, in turn, a rebooting of a form which was a bit tired and clichéd, even when he got his mitts on it. As Shakespeare had innuendo working at full stretch, not least with his name, ‘Will’, so does Mayer. ‘Again, again. Limbs aglow/akimbo / if enjambed: the stance, the torch, the blow // that’s always coming. The twist, you know it.’ After this childishness, the sonnet reaches the volta and with the paradoxical coyness of a tranny, Mayer leaves her twist hidden in a gusset. In the second sonnet all hell’s unleashed, as line breaks break words and the form is ‘mutated to meet the needs of / a poisoned world’.
Fountain from Marcel Duchamp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the tons of art which proceed it, the FOUND MATERIALS section shows poetry transforming unlikely source materials into objects of wonder and strangeness. Chris McCabe works with his children’s speech in The Analogue Guide to Parenting, a poem described by Chivers as ‘very funny’. However, as the lines are endlessly repeated through the poem’s week, this humour looks more like an oral attrition which all parents will recognise. My daughter’s inflicted Shrek 2 on me enough times for me to see the existential darkness at the heart of this particular brand of inanity: ‘Why have you chewed the monkey? / Don’t push the lion in the postbox. / Careful on the pony with a full nappy. / Why have you chewed the monkey? / Don’t get jam in the ridges. / Why have you chewed the monkey?’
It was the TXTS, TWEETS, AND STATUS UPDATES section which really grabbed me. Poets and wits colonised these twenty-first century spaces instinctively and Rishi Dastidar‘s A day on Facebook is a powerful expression of modern life. The poem starts: ‘is absence of breakfast, mostly // is not thanking the Academy for anything at all // has said goodbye to his Coney Island babe // is wondering what Alistair Cooke would have made of it all’. Dastidar’s juxtaposition of ordinary and celebrity lives is an open-ended invitation for us to consider the values of our society. The final update, ‘The beast still needs feeding’ horrifies, as we wonder to what private mania this might refer. Or is the beast the social media?
Buy this anthology. Reading it feels like wandering around the next must-see gallery exhibition: sometimes you’ll spend longer staring at Chivers’ discrete, public-spirited explanations than at the works themselves. However, like every art exhibition, although some of the work will inevitably leave you cold, the discoveries (and there are many to be made here) far outweigh them. Chivers’ evidence demonstrates that poetry’s as vital, relevant and light on its feet as it ever was. A golden age is dawning.
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Poor Rude Lines 
Wow, this anthology looks amazing! Thanks for sharing!
Hi Rob. It is amazing. If you get hold of a copy, do let me know what you think of it.
I thought the “living UK poet” bias plus aversion to mainstream content unduly limited the selection. “The Back Seat of my Mother’s Car” (Julia Copus) is a reasonable line-based palindrome. Heidi Williamson’s “If Then Else” (http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/heidiwilliamsonpoems.shtml) or Leontia Flynn’s “Perl Poem” might have strengthened the Code section. True, they’re not pure code, but some of the other poems are included very generously – e.g. because they’re in the 2nd person.
http://www.cprw.com/without-a-net-optic-graphic-and-acoustic-formations-in-free-verse-by-ernest-hilbert (Without a Net: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse) includes some types that Chivers explicitly excludes, and contains some old poems, but the newer poems that it does include aren’t bad.
Hi, Tim.
Thanks for posting the links – I’ve not read Heidi Williamson and, on the strength of If Then Else, I’ll be reading more. I’ll need some time to get around to Hilbert’s CPR post (what a fabulous acronym) but it looks superb.
I see what you mean about the living UK poet bias but, as far as I was concerned, Adventures in Form introduced me to a number of new voices, so I was quite the happy camper. It clocks in at under a tenner, it’s convenient to carry and the decent introduction points the curious to our literary heritage.
“a multitude of new and unusual forms” says the blurb – unusual maybe, but most are decades if not centuries old, and some of the new ones (e.g. Fibs) are “so what?” forms as far as I’m concerned. Years ago Stephen Burt tried to describe a then-emerging US trait – “Elliptical poets like insistent, bravura forms, forms that can shatter and recoalesce, forms with repetends … Ellipticals caress the technical”. It looks to me as if the UK’s beginning to catch up.
I realise how easy it is to witter on about anthology inclusions/exclusions, but I look upon the book as a missed opportunity. Several of the names/voices are familiar to me from Best British Poetry and The SALT book of younger poets. I’m surprized there’s not more overlap – in the former, Andrew Philip’s “10 x 10” and especially Jon Stone’s http://peonymoon.wordpress.com/tag/jon-stone-mustard merit attention; in the latter book Phil Brown’s “Diptych” is in the form of Down and Across
crossword clues. Then there’s “Intelligent Album Rock” (Katy Evans-Bush), etc.
Perhaps some of these poems post-date the selection process.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your feedback on the anthology. I must just say that I hope the marketing copy – ‘multitude’ and so on – is not misleading, because I never intended the book to be in any way comprehensive.
As an editor and publisher, I don’t have the resources, nor really the will, to create any kind of comprehensive or authoritative anthology. For a start, the way I pulled together Adventures was to draw up a list of poets I thought might have suitable material, and requesting them to send poems for me to see. I also followed a fair few recommendations, but essentially most of the contributors were already known to me. I didn’t go through past collections or other anthologies looking for poems.
As an anthology it came together in an incredibly organic (ie. haphazard) way, and this is probably the result of the slipperiness of form as the governing theme of the book. Where, for instance, does form become concept become content, and how do you judge how ‘new’ or ‘unusual’ a form is? I don’t mind saying that I struggled greatly with the structure of the book, and feel it was never resolved sufficiently.
This isn’t an excuse, of course, just an explanation – because it was never intended to be an authoritative survey of new/unusual forms, just a strange little primer one might dip in and out of.
Specifically re. ’10 x 10′ and ‘Mustard’, Jon and Andy both contributed to the anthology, but chose not to submit those particular poems.
I’m afraid I’d not come across Leontia Flynn’s ‘Perl Poem’, which is a shame. Thanks for flagging it up.
All the best,
Tom
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your feedback on the anthology. I must just say that I hope the marketing copy – ‘multitude’ and so on – is not misleading, because I never intended the book to be in any way comprehensive.
As an editor and publisher, I don’t have the resources, nor really the will, to create any kind of comprehensive or authoritative anthology. For a start, the way I pulled together Adventures was to draw up a list of poets I thought might have suitable material, and requesting them to send poems for me to see. I also followed a fair few recommendations, but essentially most of the contributors were already known to me. I didn’t go through past collections or other anthologies looking for poems.
As an anthology it came together in an incredibly organic (ie. haphazard) way, and this is probably the result of the slipperiness of form as the governing theme of the book. Where, for instance, does form become concept become content, and how do you judge how ‘new’ or ‘unusual’ a form is? I don’t mind saying that I struggled greatly with the structure of the book, and feel it was never resolved sufficiently.
This isn’t an excuse, of course, just an explanation – because it was never intended to be an authoritative survey of new/unusual forms, just a strange little primer one might dip in and out of.
Specifically re. ’10 x 10′ and ‘Mustard’, Jon and Andy both contributed to the anthology, but chose not to submit those particular poems.
I’m afraid I’d not come across Leontia Flynn’s ‘Perl Poem’, which is a shame. Thanks for flagging it up.
All the best,
Tom
Thanks for the explanation Tom. I’d wondered if money was the issue with ‘Perl Poem’. I suspect that many of the more obsessive examples lurk in the backwaters of the mainstream small press, and wouldn’t have been expensive. Magazine editors (who maybe pick such poems as novelty items) might have been useful contacts. There were two line-palindromes in July 2008’s issue of Weyfarers. In Bill Turner’s Anagram Homage (published in Iota in the days when it was stapled), every line is an anagram of the same UK poet. Here’s one stanza
Is a pen neutral? I
peer (Italian sun!)
at plain ruin, see
in alien pasture
a supernal tie-in.
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