Tags
2014, George Szirtes, Kevin Reid, poem, poems, Poetry, review, The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, verse
Fez (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The dressing up box in my daughter’s room is dangerous. One moment I’m daddy but, sporting a witch’s hat, I’ll have her shrieking from the room in abject terror. As the fabric of the universe warps, any item I’m holding – a wand, a stick, a Very Hungry Caterpillar – will turn into an instrument of untold power. Blokes don’t go in for hats much these days, more’s the pity, as we’re depriving ourselves of an everyday theatricality that would enrich our world but, when we stumble into the right shop – a gentlemen’s outfitters with period ashtrays screwed to the changing rooms’ walls – we’ll model hat upon hat as if our admittance to the Royal Enclosure depended upon it. The archeology of our language has yet to come to terms with our hatlessness as, every day, we’re prepared to ‘eat our hats,’ at ‘the drop of a hat,’ in a room ‘as black as your hat.’ When we’re done, we’ll ‘hang up our hats,’ keeping our new secret ‘under our hats,’ etc, etc, etc.
René Magritte, ‘La trahison des images,’ 1928 – 29 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Kevin Reid’s and George Szirtes’ Wordless is a riot of the surreal and Reid’s cover image, a bowler hat set between a knife and a fork, immediately sets about mining the most absurd idiomatic reaches of the English language while, with perversity, Szirtes’ text asserts itself against the images with all the exclamatory power that simple sentences and statements can muster: ‘There was never a doubt. There was only ever the absolute. / The hat in itself was neither surreal nor mundane. / It was a hat for God’s sake!’ Reid’s shape-shifting, metamorphic hat suddenly stabilizes for a moment before surreal images like Magritte’s Golconde spring to mind, and hat images and associations spin off again.
Michael Craig-Martin, ‘An Oak Tree,’ 1973
It’s tempting to impose order and meaning on the suggestive interplay between words and images but the text resists such reductiveness and, before long, the reader is disorientated but the sun, the objects in the frame that should provide fixed points of reference, does not stay still either. One image shows a mask ‘reclin[ing]’ against a glass of water and Szirtes’ verb jars with the image. Knocked off balance, I can’t tell whether I’m looking at a glass, or at an oak tree – in the Michael Craig-Martin sense of the thing. In one photo, even a toilet develops a face and a personality.
That Reid and Szirtes have managed to disrupt so many of ‘the rules’ is impressive. Szirtes’ prose poems prevent anyone looking for meaning in classical poetic technique and, as they’re presented as intertitles, the whole proceeding feels like a phantasmagoria, a magic lantern show. In Wordless, Reid and Szirtes pull a marvellous rabbit out of the hat.
Buy Wordless from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press
RELATED LINKS
Poor Rude Lines 
I’d ‘take my hat off to you’ (if I was wearing one) but you are so right, hats, (not baseball caps) but the real deal are emotive and evocative. Might I say too that they suit some but not others. You have to ‘carry’ the look. (Mmm, thinking of Clark Gable, love old Movie stars, or should that be old movies with stars of the time? 😉
Ha ha! Sadly, I’ve never managed to carry off a hatted look. I persevered with a fluffy Red Army thingie as a teen, but have now reconciled myself to hatless dullness.
How did those who were despised and rejected by their hats manage in the despotic era of the tricorn, the bowler, the trilby?
Pingback: Wordless | Adult & Teen Fiction
The last line of Hamish Whyte’s poem ‘New Clothes’ is “the difference a hat makes”, and on the cover of his pamphlet (‘Hannah, Are You Listening?’) there is a hat and an umbrella. There are men who still wear them.
I liked this blog entry because it made me think about hats again. My Auntie Ida who was a milliner. My great-great-grandmother in the only photo I have over her, wearing a magnificent hat (you got dressed up for photos in those days). And in our dressing up box, we had a collapsing top hat. You could pop the top down so it packed flat. We used it for conjuring tricks. We were very fond of that hat. I have no idea where it came from or who once wore it. I imagine it was one of the dead uncles.
I seem to have a lot of difficulty leaving comments on WordPress sites. This tells me I’m logged in successfully, but my comment didn’t seem to appear. Perhaps it’s awaiting moderation.
No, it wasn’t. (See above). It lost my comment while it was logging me in. This has happened to me often on WordPress sites before and it’s very irritating and always (even more annoyingly) feels like it’s my fault.
Anyway, back to the original comment. Your blog reminded me immediately of a poem in Hamish Whyte’s pamphlet ‘Hannah, Are You LIstening?’ (which also has a picture of a man’s hat on the cover’. The poem is ‘New Clothes’ and the very last line is ‘the difference a hat makes’. Some men still wear hats. Hamish is one of them.
And then I thought (thank you for bringing hats to mind) of our dressing up box. One of our favourite things in it was the collapsible top hat. If you pressed on the flat top it collapsed (deliberately) into the brim so it could be packed flat. Marvellous hat. It popped up again equally convincingly and with no sign of creases. We used it for practising conjuring tricks. All sorts of things were pulled out of that hat. Harry Corbett had a lot to do with it.
The collapsible top hat sounds like a marvel and I think that Santa Claus needs to bring one at Christmas, if his elves still manufacture such things. What fun that hat must have been!
I can’t find the Hamish Whyte poem online to read in full but just thinking about that last line is a joy. I had no idea that this most recent post would end up being about hats, and I have spent much of the week thinking about them as a result. As is so often the case with me, the first association was with Eliot, and the idea of the hat not fitting which, sadly, is the way it generally is with me: ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’
A milliner would probably have told you the hat not fitting was not a fault in you but in the hat. 😉 You need the hat for the job. Vide, the end of Peter Daniels’ poem ‘Hat and Pan’:
Any hat will get you by, but the one for the job
gets you hired: the cap for the fool, trilby for the jackal.
When he accepts the assignment, Hat eats the contract.
Pancake keeps a skeleton key for the shackles.
Pingback: Kevin Reids’s Burdlife | Poor Rude Lines