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Contenido proporcionado por David Caddy. Todo el contenido del podcast, incluidos episodios, gráficos y descripciones de podcast, lo carga y proporciona directamente David Caddy o su socio de plataforma de podcast. Si cree que alguien está utilizando su trabajo protegido por derechos de autor sin su permiso, puede seguir el proceso descrito aquí https://es.player.fm/legal.
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SoHereWeAre
John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position.
Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward.
I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work.
Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America.
Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral?
His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority.
This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context.
Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one.
By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed.
The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language.
The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think.
William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are clear. By implication he rejects two recent ideas that seem to me to be misleading. One that the pastoral is solely a discourse of retreat and two that its age has ended, as suggested in Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (Routledge 1999) and elsewhere. He sees the radical pastoral as occupying the fringe areas between the rural and urban and between speech / writing and thought. (p.67) Although the pastoral is a discourse of ideological accommodation the anti-pastoral can be read as breaking new ground and making us think anew as Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton and Courbet, the painter, have shown. I would like to suggest though that the response to the pastoral, and that arguably includes the anti-pastoral, is to do its opposite that is as Elizabeth Cook has written of my work ‘to repeatedly unpack the simple to examine the latent complexity of implication and relationship’ (Elizabeth Cook ‘Man In Black: David Caddy’ The Use of English Vol. 60 No. 2 Summer 2008) within the context of a localised and deeper social history.
Coming to The New Arcadia after reading Disclosed Poetics, it is surprisingly orthodox and simple. Promoted as a response to Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) it employs irony to present the ‘new’ Arcadia not in a ‘feigned’ or fantasy realm but in modern rural Western Australia with all the downsides of rural life being used to present the anti-pastoral.
The Old Arcadia, a prose romance with poems and Eclogues, is a virtuoso performance of French and Italian forms transposed into English verse. Sidney wrote this way for the music and passions that the words could excite. The Eclogues are largely songs and recitations on such themes as marriage, melancholy and death presented during singing competitions that provide the pretext for the metrical complexity and experiment introduced by each singer. The work’s success is derived from the tension between the formal experiments and thematic exploration involving enormous inventiveness and a full command of English.
The New Arcadia is divided into five acts, each beginning with
a narrative drive poem that provides a temporal snapshot and ending with an Eclogue, and employs a range of registers characterised by a modulated musical language. It has a graceful flow with flourishes of higher pitched narration depicting the Avon Valley, east of Perth, beset with unsettling relationships between people, animals, birds and plants.
Compared to the Old Arcadia, it is not a dramatic literary construct designed to advance thinking about moral and emotional behaviour. There is plenty of death and invention and a relative lack of love poems. It is written at speed as if there is a need to cover a wide region rather than localised space and consequently the speakers have more neutral than dialect voices. The lack of rough edges to the poetry somewhat mitigates against seeing this as a true opposite to the Old Arcadia where all the characters portrayed are good poets. The narrator explains that ‘People measure lives by the miles / they’ve chewed up’ and that there’s ‘a lot of bad poetry here’.
The New Arcadia is best seen as anti-pastoral rather than radical pastoral. Anti-pastoral has a long tradition at least going back to Ralegh’s ‘The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd’ (1600) satirical riposte to Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ (1600) and would include Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), Mary Collier’s reply The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck (1739). Interestingly, these and other anti-pastoral poems became read as pastoral poems and that may eventually happen to Kinsella’s work. Indeed rather than seeing the touchstone of the break with the pastoral in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ there is an alternative tradition provided by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794, which involves a much different use of language. The anti-pastoral satirical tradition of Ralegh and Milton is relevant to this tradition and I was surprised not to see reference to this work in Kinsella’s largely autobiographical chapter on ageing in Disclosed Poetics. Briefly the Arcadian world of conventions and cycles of conflicting judgements about country and city, male and female, and the contrary states of youth, maturity and old age, are brought under great strain from within. As Ralegh says in ‘The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd’
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckonong yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, -
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
It may be then that Ralegh and Milton were interested, as Kinsella is now, in undoing the mechanics of the pastoral from within. However, the anti-pastoral should move forward and explore the tensions and contradictions between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine selves, the country and city, the workings of globalisation as it impacts upon rural economies, landowner and tenant and farm worker, tenant and farm worker.
One of Kinsella’s strengths is his eagerness to be open about his various subject positions and an ability to acknowledge his own prejudices. As he writes in Disclosed Poetics (p. xi), ‘Ploughing a field on Wheatlands when I was eighteen is every bit as important to me as first reading Deleuze and Guattari, and being a vegan as essential as enjoying the poetry of Shelley. In my adult life, the teaching of poetry has become inseparable from my poetics: I teach what and how I have learnt so others can learn for themselves. I am interested in offering approaches and processes, not end results. The unfinished intrigues me.’
Although his family and farm, Wheatlands, are mentioned in The New Arcadia, his exact relationship to the land is not examined or presented. Although it is possible to infer that parents within the range of large landowner to smallholder raised him, the exact conditions and status are excluded. The value of this information is relevant to questions concerning who worked and originally lived on the land.
His ‘Eclogue Of Presence’ (pp. 96-101) does though raise the question of ownership and land access.
Farmer
Everything you see stretched between river and hills
is mine, and you need my permission to cross even the
gullies
that run along the fenceline - I’ve see you hanging
around in the scrub,
looking the place over – well. I’ll warn you, I hear a noise
and shoot first …. you think being up so early in the
morning
will keep me from knowing, think again – and my eyes see
into the evening.
Young Bloke
This scrub is for anyone to walk through, unna? And when
evening
comes we don’t hang around anyway, there’s spirits that
come of the hills
that’ll get even a bloke like you. In the early morning
we come from town to watch the roos leap the gullies
and escape from your farm before machine-noise
makes them afraid, before they vanish into the scrub.
Farmer
If a kangaroo has a go at my crops and takes to the scrub
I’ll go straight after it, or waiting until evening
where I’ll catch it on a trail with a spotlight, and the noise
they hear will be the sound of death come down from the
hills,
down from my house where guns are loaded, no gullies
will protect them, and they’ll never see morning.
Young Bloke
My dad says your family brought mourning
to my cousins, unna? And though the mallee scrub
hides your killing, and though the gullies
are choked silent with wire and sheep carcasses, evening
brings a light that shows the dead the way up to the hills
where they fill the darkness and occupy every noise.
The Eclogue continues giving voice to the Farmer and young
Aborigine and effectively contrasts their different views of the land as an unresolved debate. Many other poems perform the same function of presenting unresolved tensions and conflicts.
White Cockatoos
Spectres inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out
of blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve
but that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’
yellow parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,
down in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward
whereabouts unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere. (p. 56)
Disclosed Poetics provides the poem’s context by explaining the role and function of parrots in Australian poetry and culture as political and environmental symbols. The poem plays on the knowledge that white cockatoos are pests that eat crops and fruit and the paradox between its familiarity as an object of splendour and derision. The poem’s own acknowledged failure in the ‘broken glass’ simile thus leads to the larger realisation that the poem only partially grasps the actual impact of such birds on the psyche.
Given the way that the pastoral ideology works to incorporate its opposite within its own dialectic The New Arcadia, despite its flourishes in poems such as, ‘Extreme Conditions Occasion The Fox’, ‘Dead Wood And Scorpions’ and the Reflectors poems, does lack in linguistic disobedience. It is to Kinsella’s enormous credit that he has produced a most unusual book that more than questions the foundations of his critically successful poetry.
…
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SoHereWeAre
John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position.
Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward.
I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work.
Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America.
Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral?
His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority.
This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context.
Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one.
By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed.
The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language.
The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think.
William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are clear. By implication he rejects two recent ideas that seem to me to be misleading. One that the pastoral is solely a discourse of retreat and two that its age has ended, as suggested in Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (Routledge 1999) and elsewhere. He sees the radical pastoral as occupying the fringe areas between the rural and urban and between speech / writing and thought. (p.67) Although the pastoral is a discourse of ideological accommodation the anti-pastoral can be read as breaking new ground and making us think anew as Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton and Courbet, the painter, have shown. I would like to suggest though that the response to the pastoral, and that arguably includes the anti-pastoral, is to do its opposite that is as Elizabeth Cook has written of my work ‘to repeatedly unpack the simple to examine the latent complexity of implication and relationship’ (Elizabeth Cook ‘Man In Black: David Caddy’ The Use of English Vol. 60 No. 2 Summer 2008) within the context of a localised and deeper social history.
Coming to The New Arcadia after reading Disclosed Poetics, it is surprisingly orthodox and simple. Promoted as a response to Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) it employs irony to present the ‘new’ Arcadia not in a ‘feigned’ or fantasy realm but in modern rural Western Australia with all the downsides of rural life being used to present the anti-pastoral.
The Old Arcadia, a prose romance with poems and Eclogues, is a virtuoso performance of French and Italian forms transposed into English verse. Sidney wrote this way for the music and passions that the words could excite. The Eclogues are largely songs and recitations on such themes as marriage, melancholy and death presented during singing competitions that provide the pretext for the metrical complexity and experiment introduced by each singer. The work’s success is derived from the tension between the formal experiments and thematic exploration involving enormous inventiveness and a full command of English.
The New Arcadia is divided into five acts, each beginning with
a narrative drive poem that provides a temporal snapshot and ending with an Eclogue, and employs a range of registers characterised by a modulated musical language. It has a graceful flow with flourishes of higher pitched narration depicting the Avon Valley, east of Perth, beset with unsettling relationships between people, animals, birds and plants.
Compared to the Old Arcadia, it is not a dramatic literary construct designed to advance thinking about moral and emotional behaviour. There is plenty of death and invention and a relative lack of love poems. It is written at speed as if there is a need to cover a wide region rather than localised space and consequently the speakers have more neutral than dialect voices. The lack of rough edges to the poetry somewhat mitigates against seeing this as a true opposite to the Old Arcadia where all the characters portrayed are good poets. The narrator explains that ‘People measure lives by the miles / they’ve chewed up’ and that there’s ‘a lot of bad poetry here’.
The New Arcadia is best seen as anti-pastoral rather than radical pastoral. Anti-pastoral has a long tradition at least going back to Ralegh’s ‘The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd’ (1600) satirical riposte to Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ (1600) and would include Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), Mary Collier’s reply The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck (1739). Interestingly, these and other anti-pastoral poems became read as pastoral poems and that may eventually happen to Kinsella’s work. Indeed rather than seeing the touchstone of the break with the pastoral in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ there is an alternative tradition provided by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794, which involves a much different use of language. The anti-pastoral satirical tradition of Ralegh and Milton is relevant to this tradition and I was surprised not to see reference to this work in Kinsella’s largely autobiographical chapter on ageing in Disclosed Poetics. Briefly the Arcadian world of conventions and cycles of conflicting judgements about country and city, male and female, and the contrary states of youth, maturity and old age, are brought under great strain from within. As Ralegh says in ‘The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd’
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckonong yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, -
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
It may be then that Ralegh and Milton were interested, as Kinsella is now, in undoing the mechanics of the pastoral from within. However, the anti-pastoral should move forward and explore the tensions and contradictions between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine selves, the country and city, the workings of globalisation as it impacts upon rural economies, landowner and tenant and farm worker, tenant and farm worker.
One of Kinsella’s strengths is his eagerness to be open about his various subject positions and an ability to acknowledge his own prejudices. As he writes in Disclosed Poetics (p. xi), ‘Ploughing a field on Wheatlands when I was eighteen is every bit as important to me as first reading Deleuze and Guattari, and being a vegan as essential as enjoying the poetry of Shelley. In my adult life, the teaching of poetry has become inseparable from my poetics: I teach what and how I have learnt so others can learn for themselves. I am interested in offering approaches and processes, not end results. The unfinished intrigues me.’
Although his family and farm, Wheatlands, are mentioned in The New Arcadia, his exact relationship to the land is not examined or presented. Although it is possible to infer that parents within the range of large landowner to smallholder raised him, the exact conditions and status are excluded. The value of this information is relevant to questions concerning who worked and originally lived on the land.
His ‘Eclogue Of Presence’ (pp. 96-101) does though raise the question of ownership and land access.
Farmer
Everything you see stretched between river and hills
is mine, and you need my permission to cross even the
gullies
that run along the fenceline - I’ve see you hanging
around in the scrub,
looking the place over – well. I’ll warn you, I hear a noise
and shoot first …. you think being up so early in the
morning
will keep me from knowing, think again – and my eyes see
into the evening.
Young Bloke
This scrub is for anyone to walk through, unna? And when
evening
comes we don’t hang around anyway, there’s spirits that
come of the hills
that’ll get even a bloke like you. In the early morning
we come from town to watch the roos leap the gullies
and escape from your farm before machine-noise
makes them afraid, before they vanish into the scrub.
Farmer
If a kangaroo has a go at my crops and takes to the scrub
I’ll go straight after it, or waiting until evening
where I’ll catch it on a trail with a spotlight, and the noise
they hear will be the sound of death come down from the
hills,
down from my house where guns are loaded, no gullies
will protect them, and they’ll never see morning.
Young Bloke
My dad says your family brought mourning
to my cousins, unna? And though the mallee scrub
hides your killing, and though the gullies
are choked silent with wire and sheep carcasses, evening
brings a light that shows the dead the way up to the hills
where they fill the darkness and occupy every noise.
The Eclogue continues giving voice to the Farmer and young
Aborigine and effectively contrasts their different views of the land as an unresolved debate. Many other poems perform the same function of presenting unresolved tensions and conflicts.
White Cockatoos
Spectres inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out
of blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve
but that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’
yellow parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,
down in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward
whereabouts unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere. (p. 56)
Disclosed Poetics provides the poem’s context by explaining the role and function of parrots in Australian poetry and culture as political and environmental symbols. The poem plays on the knowledge that white cockatoos are pests that eat crops and fruit and the paradox between its familiarity as an object of splendour and derision. The poem’s own acknowledged failure in the ‘broken glass’ simile thus leads to the larger realisation that the poem only partially grasps the actual impact of such birds on the psyche.
Given the way that the pastoral ideology works to incorporate its opposite within its own dialectic The New Arcadia, despite its flourishes in poems such as, ‘Extreme Conditions Occasion The Fox’, ‘Dead Wood And Scorpions’ and the Reflectors poems, does lack in linguistic disobedience. It is to Kinsella’s enormous credit that he has produced a most unusual book that more than questions the foundations of his critically successful poetry.
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SoHereWeAre
John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position.
Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward.
I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work.
Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America.
Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral?
His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority.
This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context.
Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one.
By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed.
The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language.
The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think.
William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are clear. By implication he rejects two recent ideas that seem to me to be misleading. One that the pastoral is solely a discourse of retreat and two that its age has ended, as suggested in Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (Routledge 1999) and elsewhere. He sees the radical pastoral as occupying the fringe areas between the rural and urban and between speech / writing and thought. (p.67) Although the pastoral is a discourse of ideological accommodation the anti-pastoral can be read as breaking new ground and making us think anew as Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton and Courbet, the painter, have shown. I would like to suggest though that the response to the pastoral, and that arguably includes the anti-pastoral, is to do its opposite that is as Elizabeth Cook has written of my work ‘to repeatedly unpack the simple to examine the latent complexity of implication and relationship’ (Elizabeth Cook ‘Man In Black: David Caddy’ The Use of English Vol. 60 No. 2 Summer 2008) within the context of a localised and deeper social history.
Coming to The New Arcadia after reading Disclosed Poetics, it is surprisingly orthodox and simple. Promoted as a response to Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) it employs irony to present the ‘new’ Arcadia not in a ‘feigned’ or fantasy realm but in modern rural Western Australia with all the downsides of rural life being used to present the anti-pastoral.
The Old Arcadia, a prose romance with poems and Eclogues, is a virtuoso performance of French and Italian forms transposed into English verse. Sidney wrote this way for the music and passions that the words could excite. The Eclogues are largely songs and recitations on such themes as marriage, melancholy and death presented during singing competitions that provide the pretext for the metrical complexity and experiment introduced by each singer. The work’s success is derived from the tension between the formal experiments and thematic exploration involving enormous inventiveness and a full command of English.
The New Arcadia is divided into five acts, each beginning with
a narrative drive poem that provides a temporal snapshot and ending with an Eclogue, and employs a range of registers characterised by a modulated musical language. It has a graceful flow with flourishes of higher pitched narration depicting the Avon Valley, east of Perth, beset with unsettling relationships between people, animals, birds and plants.
Compared to the Old Arcadia, it is not a dramatic literary construct designed to advance thinking about moral and emotional behaviour. There is plenty of death and invention and a relative lack of love poems. It is written at speed as if there is a need to cover a wide region rather than localised space and consequently the speakers have more neutral than dialect voices. The lack of rough edges to the poetry somewhat mitigates against seeing this as a true opposite to the Old Arcadia where all the characters portrayed are good poets. The narrator explains that ‘People measure lives by the miles / they’ve chewed up’ and that there’s ‘a lot of bad poetry here’.
The New Arcadia is best seen as anti-pastoral rather than radical pastoral. Anti-pastoral has a long tradition at least going back to Ralegh’s ‘The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd’ (1600) satirical riposte to Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ (1600) and would include Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), Mary Collier’s reply The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck (1739). Interestingly, these and other anti-pastoral poems became read as pastoral poems and that may eventually happen to Kinsella’s work. Indeed rather than seeing the touchstone of the break with the pastoral in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ there is an alternative tradition provided by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794, which involves a much different use of language. The anti-pastoral satirical tradition of Ralegh and Milton is relevant to this tradition and I was surprised not to see reference to this work in Kinsella’s largely autobiographical chapter on ageing in Disclosed Poetics. Briefly the Arcadian world of conventions and cycles of conflicting judgements about country and city, male and female, and the contrary states of youth, maturity and old age, are brought under great strain from within. As Ralegh says in ‘The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd’
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckonong yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, -
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
It may be then that Ralegh and Milton were interested, as Kinsella is now, in undoing the mechanics of the pastoral from within. However, the anti-pastoral should move forward and explore the tensions and contradictions between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine selves, the country and city, the workings of globalisation as it impacts upon rural economies, landowner and tenant and farm worker, tenant and farm worker.
One of Kinsella’s strengths is his eagerness to be open about his various subject positions and an ability to acknowledge his own prejudices. As he writes in Disclosed Poetics (p. xi), ‘Ploughing a field on Wheatlands when I was eighteen is every bit as important to me as first reading Deleuze and Guattari, and being a vegan as essential as enjoying the poetry of Shelley. In my adult life, the teaching of poetry has become inseparable from my poetics: I teach what and how I have learnt so others can learn for themselves. I am interested in offering approaches and processes, not end results. The unfinished intrigues me.’
Although his family and farm, Wheatlands, are mentioned in The New Arcadia, his exact relationship to the land is not examined or presented. Although it is possible to infer that parents within the range of large landowner to smallholder raised him, the exact conditions and status are excluded. The value of this information is relevant to questions concerning who worked and originally lived on the land.
His ‘Eclogue Of Presence’ (pp. 96-101) does though raise the question of ownership and land access.
Farmer
Everything you see stretched between river and hills
is mine, and you need my permission to cross even the
gullies
that run along the fenceline - I’ve see you hanging
around in the scrub,
looking the place over – well. I’ll warn you, I hear a noise
and shoot first …. you think being up so early in the
morning
will keep me from knowing, think again – and my eyes see
into the evening.
Young Bloke
This scrub is for anyone to walk through, unna? And when
evening
comes we don’t hang around anyway, there’s spirits that
come of the hills
that’ll get even a bloke like you. In the early morning
we come from town to watch the roos leap the gullies
and escape from your farm before machine-noise
makes them afraid, before they vanish into the scrub.
Farmer
If a kangaroo has a go at my crops and takes to the scrub
I’ll go straight after it, or waiting until evening
where I’ll catch it on a trail with a spotlight, and the noise
they hear will be the sound of death come down from the
hills,
down from my house where guns are loaded, no gullies
will protect them, and they’ll never see morning.
Young Bloke
My dad says your family brought mourning
to my cousins, unna? And though the mallee scrub
hides your killing, and though the gullies
are choked silent with wire and sheep carcasses, evening
brings a light that shows the dead the way up to the hills
where they fill the darkness and occupy every noise.
The Eclogue continues giving voice to the Farmer and young
Aborigine and effectively contrasts their different views of the land as an unresolved debate. Many other poems perform the same function of presenting unresolved tensions and conflicts.
White Cockatoos
Spectres inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out
of blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve
but that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’
yellow parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,
down in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward
whereabouts unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere. (p. 56)
Disclosed Poetics provides the poem’s context by explaining the role and function of parrots in Australian poetry and culture as political and environmental symbols. The poem plays on the knowledge that white cockatoos are pests that eat crops and fruit and the paradox between its familiarity as an object of splendour and derision. The poem’s own acknowledged failure in the ‘broken glass’ simile thus leads to the larger realisation that the poem only partially grasps the actual impact of such birds on the psyche.
Given the way that the pastoral ideology works to incorporate its opposite within its own dialectic The New Arcadia, despite its flourishes in poems such as, ‘Extreme Conditions Occasion The Fox’, ‘Dead Wood And Scorpions’ and the Reflectors poems, does lack in linguistic disobedience. It is to Kinsella’s enormous credit that he has produced a most unusual book that more than questions the foundations of his critically successful poetry.
…
continue reading
SoHereWeAre
John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position.
Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward.
I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work.
Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America.
Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral?
His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority.
This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context.
Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one.
By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed.
The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language.
The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think.
William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are clear. By implication he rejects two recent ideas that seem to me to be misleading. One that the pastoral is solely a discourse of retreat and two that its age has ended, as suggested in Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (Routledge 1999) and elsewhere. He sees the radical pastoral as occupying the fringe areas between the rural and urban and between speech / writing and thought. (p.67) Although the pastoral is a discourse of ideological accommodation the anti-pastoral can be read as breaking new ground and making us think anew as Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton and Courbet, the painter, have shown. I would like to suggest though that the response to the pastoral, and that arguably includes the anti-pastoral, is to do its opposite that is as Elizabeth Cook has written of my work ‘to repeatedly unpack the simple to examine the latent complexity of implication and relationship’ (Elizabeth Cook ‘Man In Black: David Caddy’ The Use of English Vol. 60 No. 2 Summer 2008) within the context of a localised and deeper social history.
Coming to The New Arcadia after reading Disclosed Poetics, it is surprisingly orthodox and simple. Promoted as a response to Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) it employs irony to present the ‘new’ Arcadia not in a ‘feigned’ or fantasy realm but in modern rural Western Australia with all the downsides of rural life being used to present the anti-pastoral.
The Old Arcadia, a prose romance with poems and Eclogues, is a virtuoso performance of French and Italian forms transposed into English verse. Sidney wrote this way for the music and passions that the words could excite. The Eclogues are largely songs and recitations on such themes as marriage, melancholy and death presented during singing competitions that provide the pretext for the metrical complexity and experiment introduced by each singer. The work’s success is derived from the tension between the formal experiments and thematic exploration involving enormous inventiveness and a full command of English.
The New Arcadia is divided into five acts, each beginning with
a narrative drive poem that provides a temporal snapshot and ending with an Eclogue, and employs a range of registers characterised by a modulated musical language. It has a graceful flow with flourishes of higher pitched narration depicting the Avon Valley, east of Perth, beset with unsettling relationships between people, animals, birds and plants.
Compared to the Old Arcadia, it is not a dramatic literary construct designed to advance thinking about moral and emotional behaviour. There is plenty of death and invention and a relative lack of love poems. It is written at speed as if there is a need to cover a wide region rather than localised space and consequently the speakers have more neutral than dialect voices. The lack of rough edges to the poetry somewhat mitigates against seeing this as a true opposite to the Old Arcadia where all the characters portrayed are good poets. The narrator explains that ‘People measure lives by the miles / they’ve chewed up’ and that there’s ‘a lot of bad poetry here’.
The New Arcadia is best seen as anti-pastoral rather than radical pastoral. Anti-pastoral has a long tradition at least going back to Ralegh’s ‘The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd’ (1600) satirical riposte to Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ (1600) and would include Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), Mary Collier’s reply The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck (1739). Interestingly, these and other anti-pastoral poems became read as pastoral poems and that may eventually happen to Kinsella’s work. Indeed rather than seeing the touchstone of the break with the pastoral in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ there is an alternative tradition provided by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794, which involves a much different use of language. The anti-pastoral satirical tradition of Ralegh and Milton is relevant to this tradition and I was surprised not to see reference to this work in Kinsella’s largely autobiographical chapter on ageing in Disclosed Poetics. Briefly the Arcadian world of conventions and cycles of conflicting judgements about country and city, male and female, and the contrary states of youth, maturity and old age, are brought under great strain from within. As Ralegh says in ‘The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd’
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckonong yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, -
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
It may be then that Ralegh and Milton were interested, as Kinsella is now, in undoing the mechanics of the pastoral from within. However, the anti-pastoral should move forward and explore the tensions and contradictions between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine selves, the country and city, the workings of globalisation as it impacts upon rural economies, landowner and tenant and farm worker, tenant and farm worker.
One of Kinsella’s strengths is his eagerness to be open about his various subject positions and an ability to acknowledge his own prejudices. As he writes in Disclosed Poetics (p. xi), ‘Ploughing a field on Wheatlands when I was eighteen is every bit as important to me as first reading Deleuze and Guattari, and being a vegan as essential as enjoying the poetry of Shelley. In my adult life, the teaching of poetry has become inseparable from my poetics: I teach what and how I have learnt so others can learn for themselves. I am interested in offering approaches and processes, not end results. The unfinished intrigues me.’
Although his family and farm, Wheatlands, are mentioned in The New Arcadia, his exact relationship to the land is not examined or presented. Although it is possible to infer that parents within the range of large landowner to smallholder raised him, the exact conditions and status are excluded. The value of this information is relevant to questions concerning who worked and originally lived on the land.
His ‘Eclogue Of Presence’ (pp. 96-101) does though raise the question of ownership and land access.
Farmer
Everything you see stretched between river and hills
is mine, and you need my permission to cross even the
gullies
that run along the fenceline - I’ve see you hanging
around in the scrub,
looking the place over – well. I’ll warn you, I hear a noise
and shoot first …. you think being up so early in the
morning
will keep me from knowing, think again – and my eyes see
into the evening.
Young Bloke
This scrub is for anyone to walk through, unna? And when
evening
comes we don’t hang around anyway, there’s spirits that
come of the hills
that’ll get even a bloke like you. In the early morning
we come from town to watch the roos leap the gullies
and escape from your farm before machine-noise
makes them afraid, before they vanish into the scrub.
Farmer
If a kangaroo has a go at my crops and takes to the scrub
I’ll go straight after it, or waiting until evening
where I’ll catch it on a trail with a spotlight, and the noise
they hear will be the sound of death come down from the
hills,
down from my house where guns are loaded, no gullies
will protect them, and they’ll never see morning.
Young Bloke
My dad says your family brought mourning
to my cousins, unna? And though the mallee scrub
hides your killing, and though the gullies
are choked silent with wire and sheep carcasses, evening
brings a light that shows the dead the way up to the hills
where they fill the darkness and occupy every noise.
The Eclogue continues giving voice to the Farmer and young
Aborigine and effectively contrasts their different views of the land as an unresolved debate. Many other poems perform the same function of presenting unresolved tensions and conflicts.
White Cockatoos
Spectres inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out
of blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve
but that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’
yellow parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,
down in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward
whereabouts unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere. (p. 56)
Disclosed Poetics provides the poem’s context by explaining the role and function of parrots in Australian poetry and culture as political and environmental symbols. The poem plays on the knowledge that white cockatoos are pests that eat crops and fruit and the paradox between its familiarity as an object of splendour and derision. The poem’s own acknowledged failure in the ‘broken glass’ simile thus leads to the larger realisation that the poem only partially grasps the actual impact of such birds on the psyche.
Given the way that the pastoral ideology works to incorporate its opposite within its own dialectic The New Arcadia, despite its flourishes in poems such as, ‘Extreme Conditions Occasion The Fox’, ‘Dead Wood And Scorpions’ and the Reflectors poems, does lack in linguistic disobedience. It is to Kinsella’s enormous credit that he has produced a most unusual book that more than questions the foundations of his critically successful poetry.
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×Click here for issuu link SoHereWeAre Click here to listen to So Here We Are on MiPoradio SoHereWeAre My first recollection of entering Piddles Wood near Fiddleford in the mid-Sixties is of sinking into wet mud along the rutted uphill path and of the constant patter of raindrops on a dense flora of shrubs, ferns, creepers and moss. Enchanted by this ancient woodland of oak, ash and hazel, I became a regular visitor and soon discovered the remains of a campfire strewn with cider and methylated spirit bottles and a makeshift stove. A little higher uphill was the disused brick house that had been the home of a woodman in the Fifties and an orchard of apple and plum trees. The place seemed alive with living things and yet had an otherworldly nature due to the variation and nature of sounds and the prospect of encountering some stag, tramp or creature. I became aware of the way cuckoos and owls mimic human voices and of the extraordinary variety of butterflies and moths. This early experience of ancient woodland eventually led to poems and an interest in woods in social and literary history as well as what is now called biodiversity and ecology. Unlike my father and grandfather, I am not a carpenter although I do follow the happenings around my local woods and that filters into my poems. Whenever I walk Piddles Wood now I recall the Dorset Elizabethan poet, George Turbeville’s Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting (1576). Turbeville (1540-1610) was from nearby Winterborne Whitchurch and belonged to the old Dorset family recalled by Thomas Hardy in his novel, Tess of the d’Ubervilles (1888). His book is a manual on the etiquette and language of all things connected to hunting. It is also a poetry book with a commendatory poem on the noble art by George Gascoigne, the Green Knight, and poems by Turbeville from the viewpoint of the huntsman and the various hunted animals. The book, dedicated to the Queen’s Master of Hart Hounds, is a work of translation from English, French, Latin, Italian and Dutch sources designed to offer the best guide to noble and gentlemen available and it became an immensely popular and important work in shaping hunting behaviour for several centuries. The virtues, nature and properties of stags, hounds and dogs are identified and the deer hunter is taught how to read behaviour and physical signs in animals. The book also features one of the first appearances in English of Raynard the Fox, the ballad popularised by John Masefield in his 1919 poem and a staple of BBC radio broadcasting during the twentieth century. Based on mainly anonymous late twelfth and thirteenth century French poets, Turbeville omits the bawdy and comic elements of the original. It is his book on hunting far more than his Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (1567) and translations of Ovid that give him importance in English social and literary history. For his guidebook and poems have their opposite in illegal hunting, or poaching, and in the history of those excluded from the noble art that sought access to the bounty of the wood. Poaching continues in 2008 and is a business for some and a form of economic survival for others. Increasingly well-organised at the top end of the business are those that organise stag hunts in Piddles Wood at £1,000 per gun and at the bottom end are joy-hunters that lack the income to do much more and people stealing kindling wood and timber. In between are warring factions of gypsies and gamekeepers that roam far and wide in acts of poaching and cruelty. Hunting forests were subject to harsh Forest law, imposed by the Normans, with punishments of castration and mutilation. Indeed the word ‘forest’ was originally a judicial term meaning land that had been placed off limits by royal decree. By the twelfth century there were 66 Royal Forests and 70 private chases controlled by strict Forest law. Here the King and other nobles had the right to keep deer, wild boar and other prey. ‘Forest’ also carries within it a meaning of being outside the public domain and it is this meaning that poets have utilised. Forests and woods then are potentially where the world is turned upside down, as in Shakespeare’s As You Like It or A Midsummer’s Night Dream. It is a place of sexual discovery and assignation, danger and deceit, where pagan spirits can take over a man, such as Falstaff, as in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Things can be different and the pastoral can be disrupted to allow otherness to enter. Protest poems against Forest law date back to the Old English poem, ‘The Rhyme of William’ found in the Peterborough Chronicle (1087). (See Robert Pogue Harrison – Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation Chicago University Press 1992 page 76) I would like to look at some forests as they appear in English poetry. This is a vast theme and I only intend these remarks as introductory and to dovetail into previous talks. From the seventeenth century the history of forests is one of progressive deforestation with attendant struggles over rights, access and poaching. Forest officers according to forest law that had been encoded since the twelfth century essentially kept royal forests fertile. As more land was turned over from the monarchy into chases and parks and eventual enclosure, the more non-landowners lost pasture and common rights and forest access. Forest land became stripped of wood, turf, gorse and timber as private owners unwilling to compensate commoners with rights of pasture, turf and wood took advantage of their new market freedom. New money and new types of landowners produced barren and disputed forests. This divide between public men with landed property and the new private competitive men unmotivated by public spirit is seen in Alexander Pope’s poem, Windsor Forest (1713). Here Windsor Forest signifies an older order of values, land and custom, domestic peace and harmony, as in line 42 ‘And peace and plenty tell, a STUART reigns.’ The poem celebrates a brief period of harmony between forest officials and foresters during Queen Anne’s reign. The Forest, continually shrinking in size throughout the eighteenth century, was divided into parkland owned by the Crown and private owners, enclosed arable and meadow land, thick coppices and smaller woods, moor land and marginal lands with squatters. It was still highly regulated and from 1716 the harmony was destroyed by new forest laws brought in by the Whig government leading to intense hostilities between poachers and forest officials between 1720 and 1723. (See E.P. Thompson – Whigs and Hunters Allen Lane 1975 pp 28-9) Pope, whose experience of growing up at Binfield on the western part of the forest underlay much of his pastoral poetry, celebrates the harmony of the forest economy with its balance between hunters and farmers. This is contrasted with the earlier tyranny of William III’s reign. A tyranny that returned as Walpole’s Government sided with the new moneyed interests against the foresters and passed the Black Act (1723) introducing the death penalty for breaking forest laws. Eric Mottram’s Windsor Forest (Pig Press 1979) draws upon the Herne the Hunter legend first mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor and explores the historical and mythological origin of a specific wood demon. The poem serves as a local study of power relations within the forest over time and of a self in conflict with authority. It employs an open-field approach with a kind of Victorian sub-horror imagery derived from W. Harrison Ainsworth’s historical romance, Windsor Castle (1844) and George Cruikshank’s illustrations, supported by references to British and Celtic deities and reminders that the legend is based in part, at least, upon historical relations and conditions from the fourteenth century onwards. The lines are heavily compacted with information and references to how belief in a wood demon is ingrained in English culture and linked to widespread popular beliefs. The forester / narrator is tested, as in the legend, by the offer of liberation into demonic power and example of Herne, which he tries to resist, ‘I may be in league with darkness / but I have no wish to aid him’ for his crimes. This implicit association between Herne and darkness recalls the Windsor Forest poachers blacking their faces to disguise their identity in their struggle with forest officials as sketched by E.P. Thompson in Whigs and Hunters. The wood demon is the product of repression and revenge. ‘I have known no human passion except hatred and revenge.’ The poem ends with the forester seeing demonic energy ‘more through deeds’ and ‘hunt horns’ calling ‘the allegiances’, which implies a dual demonic nature in both sides of the divide. The poem catches the slippery nature and energy of a wood demon through sudden narrative shifts, dense and arcane language that produces an unsettling effect. There is uncertainty over the range of possible meanings and inferences and their exact relationship to the narrative that requires further enquiry. For example, Herne is introduced as ‘wild spectral humanity’ and described thus: deer skins around tawny gaunt limbs he his a skull helmet antlered phosphoric fire cut in links rusted from his left arm chain on his right wrist a horned owl dilated taloned erect red balled feathers angered in full cauldrons the moons (page 1) This appears to be a description of Cruikshank’s Herne illustrations. However, Mottram has added ‘phosphoric fire’, ‘red balled’ and ‘full cauldrons’. The ‘phosphoric fire’ could be a reference to Lucifer’s fall making the connection with the fallen Herne and also introducing some notion of transformation from hunter to spirit to Satan or another demonised figure. Note the use of ‘links’ indicating relations beyond the links on chain maille to preface this line of connection. Windsor Forest is a complex poem that opens up a wide area of association. For example, it connects the dangers of the forest with forbidden and erotic love through the presence and quotation from Anne Boleyn’s lover, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who presumably employed Herne to regain Anne and ‘now follows druid fire’. Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt’, perhaps about Anne, acknowledges that he may hunt ‘an hind’ no more. Herne’s woodcraft is associated with Celtic deities and regeneration ‘on occasion he appeared as a monk in dark second skin’, Actaeon, the Greek hunter who changed into a stag, and Ogham script, the ‘three strikes’ used to name a tree. Gypsies, amongst those squatting on the forest’s margins, are also linked with Herne, through ‘skin’ in a passage where the hunter and trapped buck appear to find release. Mottram developed his Herne investigations into A Book of Herne (Arrowspire Press 1981), linking with Herne with the Green Man and widening his theme of a self in conflict with authority, desire and madness. The Easter stag hunt that the poet John Clare witnessed in Epping Forest, north east of Greater London, in 1841 was an annual event from 1226 until 1858. His being was affected that Easter Monday by standing next to ‘a stout, tall, young woman, dressed in a darkish fox-red, cotton gown as a milkmaid or farm-servant.’ He was a poet that to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase breathes ‘authentic speech’. (See Maurice Merleau-Ponty – The Phenomenology of Perception Routledge 1996 Page 194) He is awake to the nuances of each living being in Epping Forest and they invest his poetry with clarity as he names and speaks for them. Clare’s poem ‘London versus Epping Forest’ has become a powerful statement for the green movement in that it calls for responsible stewardship of the forest and its inhabitants. The brakes, like young stag’s horns, come up in Spring, And hide the rabbit holes and fox’s den; They crowd about the forest everywhere; The ling and holly-bush, and wood of beach, With room enough to walk and search for flowers; Then look away and see the Kentish heights. Nature is lofty in her better mood, She leaves the world and greatness all behind; Thus London, like a shrub among the hills, Lies hid and lower than the bushes here. I could not bear to see the tearing plough Root up and steal the Forest from the poor, But leave to freedom all she loves untamed, The forest walk enjoyed and loved by all. The forest’s greatness over London, that is a representation of commercial capital, is defined in terms of its measurement and ability to bestow freedom to all that exists within itself. This includes the poor whose freedoms are being eroded by the loss of forest land. Clare asserts the right to roam and access to wood’s bounty for the poor at a time when enclosure reduced the Forest in size from 9,000 acres in 1793 to 7,000 acres in 1848. (See John Rodgers – The English Woodland Batsford 1941 page 34) His earlier poem ‘To A Fallen Elm’ proclaims the right to life for every living thing and by using an old tree evokes the full panoply of ancient statutes that won and protected the access and other rights denied by enclosure, saying ‘right was wrong and wrong was right’. Clare’s poem is quite distinct and more powerful than for example William Cowper’s acquiesence to loss in ‘The Poplar-field’ (1784) or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lament for the loss of the Binsey poplars in 1879. For him the elm tree is as much a temporal as a spatial landmark and when a tree goes he is disorientated physically and mentally. Clare is Epping Forest’s most eloquent and radical defender in the tradition of the poetry of complaint. Epping Forest itself has a long literary history that interweaves with the use of woods in poetry. (See William Addison – Epping Forest: Its Literary and Historical Associations Dent 1945) Elizabethan poets and courtiers, such as George Gascoigne, Thomas Lodge and Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1653), lived and wrote in the wood. Wroth was the first English woman to publish an original work of prose fiction, Urania (1621). This work within the Sidney-Spenser school has a supplement of 103 sonnets and songs, ‘Pamhilia to Amphilanthus’, was the first English sonnet sequence published by a woman. Lady Mary was a patron to poets, such as Ben Jonson, who dedicated The Alchemist (1610) to her and George Chapman. Johnson’s poem ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ employs a different pastoral language to the Sidney-Spenser poets to place his subject. Helen and Edward Thomas, whose first book was The Woodland Life (1897), settled at High Beech cottage from October 1915 until 1917, when Edward was stationed at Loughton Camp and studied Clare. (Addison – Epping Forest page 227) Thomas’ poetry has echoes of Clare’s especially in a poem like ‘Home’ with its suggestion of dwelling in a place where the birds and the narrator have one memory and the same relationship to the wood. It is one of Thomas’ poems of course that so inspired the young Robert Frost. The narrator hears the birds and sees the April mist and is at one with the environment. ‘Twas home; one nationality’. (See Edward Thomas – Collected Poems OUP 1981 page 59) Clare hated the enclosure acts that sequestered land away from the peasantry and well knew the impact of enclosed commons, parks and woodland. William Cobbett in his Rural Rides (1830) questioned for what and for whom are the deer kept in the New Forest and why should any man be transported for catching Forest game when it is public property? The Commissioners of Woods and Forests farmed hay and planted saplings for the deer out of public money until the 1851 Deer Removal Act. Deer were never fully removed and the New Forest remains one of the largest unenclosed forest areas in England with unified Commons rights going back to a 1698 statute. Its complex ‘rights of common’ pre-exist Royal hunting law. In 2005 it became a National Park with the Forestry Commission retaining its powers to manage Crown land and the Verderers under the New Forest Acts. Protest issues around the Forest continue, as it is hard to make a living from such stringent laws in what is largely a wasteland. Of recent poems on the New Forest, Jeremy Hooker’s collaboration with the sculptor, Lee Grandjean, entitled Their Silence A Language (Enitharmon Press 1993), is more concerned with tree-images than the social and economic history and ecology of the Forest. Hooker uses the tree as a symbol with different usages and meaning as a means to achieve perception. It effectively links trees and woods with creativity but misses out on their impact upon community identity. His images are sparse and simple, employing some of the analogies between carving and use of poetic language suggested by Donald Davie in Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1965), but without penetrating far beyond a narrow range of awareness and perception. It is, though, original in being about the trees of one Forest. Sadly, though the book fails to negotiate the real relations of the Forest and centres on a limited imagism and basic mythology, as in ‘Druid Song’ (page 42): Who keeps the vert and the venison? Who calls the creatures into a circle? The stag-headed one, bearded with green leaves, lies down with the tree that was windthrown in its prime, the lightning-shattered, all the litter of the seasons. These come again – new wood, timber. But Thor’s tree is down, the groves of the oakmen are felled. There is no leaf, no twig that does not grow upon the tree of life. Where is the tree that will rise to lift up the image of its maker? Clare’s response to Epping Forest can be interestingly compared to Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax (1651), a poem that features the private wood of Lord Fairfax. Here the first person narrator confers with the birds and trees and wants to be one with their lives and world (stanza 71); considers how his mind is made safe by the wood and the manner of his contemplation (stanza 76) and longs to be enslaved by its protective brambles and briars, invoking an image of crucifixion as the key to a spiritual life (stanza 77) and ultimately the ordered world of Fairfax’s country house. (See Andrew Marvell – Selected Poems Carcanet 1988 pp.83-85) Marvell’s wood is quite distinct from John Milton’s Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle 1634 (1645), which concerns a young woman, the Lady, who becomes lost in a wild wood (Haywood Forest) near Ludlow Castle, the home of Comus, a magician shepherd. Comus lives a life of sexual and sensual excess and attempts to seduce the Lady with ‘orient liquor’. With the help of her Christian brothers and the earth Goddess, Sabrina the Nymph, her virtue remains intact. However, Comus is not beaten and runs away to continue his ways. Milton breaks the conventions of both the masque and the pastoral by allowing Comus to survive. The wood is traditionally the scene of disruptive disorder conquered by the forces of virtue usually represented by the monarch. Milton’s ending is open and there is no recourse to any pastoral nostalgia. The idea of using the wood as a setting for evil is anti-pastoral and the work has a radical aspect that Blake recognised when he wrote that Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party’. John Kinsella’s recent version of Comus (Comus: A Dialogic Mask Arc 2008) has seized upon this and develops the anti-pastoral elements of the original and places it within a contemporary setting. Commissioned by the Cambridge University Marlowe Society to celebrate Milton’s 400th birthday, Kinsella’s Comus interacts with the original and brings out its environmental and sexual subtexts. His Comus is a genetic scientist who swallows Viagra and amphetamines. The Lady’s chastity as in the original concerns the temperate use of nature and self-control. Kinsella’s Comus is interfering with nature and is seriously out of control. Temperance in the original is the virtue that ethically preserves the wood and earth. As in the original it is Sabrina the Nymph, who springs to the defence of the Lady at the Attendant Spirit’s request against the unethical scientist, and sings: I hope to show That where rushes and willows and osier grow We can let things be, No need for motor boats or cars, Effluent pipes or phone towers, Fertilisers that bring algae To choke ducks and fish; I am wary of the developer’s ambush, Building to the water’s edge, Let the stoats hunt and squirrels forage, And so, farm hand, at your request I am here. (page 64) Here the Lady becomes an eco-warrior delineating and arguing against Comus’s excessive tampering with and exploitation of nature. However, virtue is seen as an incomplete or pragmatic answer as the saving of wild place in the developed world is at the expense of another in the third world. The Attendant Spirit eulogises: So don’t despair, all this greenie poetry won’t mean you’ll lose your luxuries. Those of you who’d follow me, remember the code word: LIBERTY… virtue doesn’t mean you can’t have your cake and eat it too. (page 68) Kinsella thinks globally in his revitalisation of verse drama and draws attention to the need for local action. Reading Kinsella, I hear echoes of seventeenth century environmental concerns in our present situation, the problems of deforestation, air pollution, draining of wetlands (a concern of the Levellers), overbuilding, toxic mining, maltreatment of outcasts, gypsies and animals, destruction of habitats and dispossession of the poor, and the need to sing of the earth’s complaints and the need for wise and ethical cultivation. The wood is not merely a place of sanctuary, as in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, and testing of conflicting virtues and vices but also of potential regeneration.…
Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. SoHereWeAre John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position. Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward. I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work. Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America. Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral? His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority. This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context. Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one. By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed. The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language. The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’ They that have power to hurt, and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow: Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think. William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are clear. By implication he rejects two recent ideas that seem to me to be misleading. One that the pastoral is solely a discourse of retreat and two that its age has ended, as suggested in Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (Routledge 1999) and elsewhere. He sees the radical pastoral as occupying the fringe areas between the rural and urban and between speech / writing and thought. (p.67) Although the pastoral is a discourse of ideological accommodation the anti-pastoral can be read as breaking new ground and making us think anew as Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton and Courbet, the painter, have shown. I would like to suggest though that the response to the pastoral, and that arguably includes the anti-pastoral, is to do its opposite that is as Elizabeth Cook has written of my work ‘to repeatedly unpack the simple to examine the latent complexity of implication and relationship’ (Elizabeth Cook ‘Man In Black: David Caddy’ The Use of English Vol. 60 No. 2 Summer 2008) within the context of a localised and deeper social history. Coming to The New Arcadia after reading Disclosed Poetics, it is surprisingly orthodox and simple. Promoted as a response to Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) it employs irony to present the ‘new’ Arcadia not in a ‘feigned’ or fantasy realm but in modern rural Western Australia with all the downsides of rural life being used to present the anti-pastoral. The Old Arcadia, a prose romance with poems and Eclogues, is a virtuoso performance of French and Italian forms transposed into English verse. Sidney wrote this way for the music and passions that the words could excite. The Eclogues are largely songs and recitations on such themes as marriage, melancholy and death presented during singing competitions that provide the pretext for the metrical complexity and experiment introduced by each singer. The work’s success is derived from the tension between the formal experiments and thematic exploration involving enormous inventiveness and a full command of English. The New Arcadia is divided into five acts, each beginning with a narrative drive poem that provides a temporal snapshot and ending with an Eclogue, and employs a range of registers characterised by a modulated musical language. It has a graceful flow with flourishes of higher pitched narration depicting the Avon Valley, east of Perth, beset with unsettling relationships between people, animals, birds and plants. Compared to the Old Arcadia, it is not a dramatic literary construct designed to advance thinking about moral and emotional behaviour. There is plenty of death and invention and a relative lack of love poems. It is written at speed as if there is a need to cover a wide region rather than localised space and consequently the speakers have more neutral than dialect voices. The lack of rough edges to the poetry somewhat mitigates against seeing this as a true opposite to the Old Arcadia where all the characters portrayed are good poets. The narrator explains that ‘People measure lives by the miles / they’ve chewed up’ and that there’s ‘a lot of bad poetry here’. The New Arcadia is best seen as anti-pastoral rather than radical pastoral. Anti-pastoral has a long tradition at least going back to Ralegh’s ‘The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd’ (1600) satirical riposte to Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ (1600) and would include Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), Mary Collier’s reply The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck (1739). Interestingly, these and other anti-pastoral poems became read as pastoral poems and that may eventually happen to Kinsella’s work. Indeed rather than seeing the touchstone of the break with the pastoral in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ there is an alternative tradition provided by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794, which involves a much different use of language. The anti-pastoral satirical tradition of Ralegh and Milton is relevant to this tradition and I was surprised not to see reference to this work in Kinsella’s largely autobiographical chapter on ageing in Disclosed Poetics. Briefly the Arcadian world of conventions and cycles of conflicting judgements about country and city, male and female, and the contrary states of youth, maturity and old age, are brought under great strain from within. As Ralegh says in ‘The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd’ The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckonong yields: A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall. The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, - In folly ripe, in reason rotten. It may be then that Ralegh and Milton were interested, as Kinsella is now, in undoing the mechanics of the pastoral from within. However, the anti-pastoral should move forward and explore the tensions and contradictions between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine selves, the country and city, the workings of globalisation as it impacts upon rural economies, landowner and tenant and farm worker, tenant and farm worker. One of Kinsella’s strengths is his eagerness to be open about his various subject positions and an ability to acknowledge his own prejudices. As he writes in Disclosed Poetics (p. xi), ‘Ploughing a field on Wheatlands when I was eighteen is every bit as important to me as first reading Deleuze and Guattari, and being a vegan as essential as enjoying the poetry of Shelley. In my adult life, the teaching of poetry has become inseparable from my poetics: I teach what and how I have learnt so others can learn for themselves. I am interested in offering approaches and processes, not end results. The unfinished intrigues me.’ Although his family and farm, Wheatlands, are mentioned in The New Arcadia, his exact relationship to the land is not examined or presented. Although it is possible to infer that parents within the range of large landowner to smallholder raised him, the exact conditions and status are excluded. The value of this information is relevant to questions concerning who worked and originally lived on the land. His ‘Eclogue Of Presence’ (pp. 96-101) does though raise the question of ownership and land access. Farmer Everything you see stretched between river and hills is mine, and you need my permission to cross even the gullies that run along the fenceline - I’ve see you hanging around in the scrub, looking the place over – well. I’ll warn you, I hear a noise and shoot first …. you think being up so early in the morning will keep me from knowing, think again – and my eyes see into the evening. Young Bloke This scrub is for anyone to walk through, unna? And when evening comes we don’t hang around anyway, there’s spirits that come of the hills that’ll get even a bloke like you. In the early morning we come from town to watch the roos leap the gullies and escape from your farm before machine-noise makes them afraid, before they vanish into the scrub. Farmer If a kangaroo has a go at my crops and takes to the scrub I’ll go straight after it, or waiting until evening where I’ll catch it on a trail with a spotlight, and the noise they hear will be the sound of death come down from the hills, down from my house where guns are loaded, no gullies will protect them, and they’ll never see morning. Young Bloke My dad says your family brought mourning to my cousins, unna? And though the mallee scrub hides your killing, and though the gullies are choked silent with wire and sheep carcasses, evening brings a light that shows the dead the way up to the hills where they fill the darkness and occupy every noise. The Eclogue continues giving voice to the Farmer and young Aborigine and effectively contrasts their different views of the land as an unresolved debate. Many other poems perform the same function of presenting unresolved tensions and conflicts. White Cockatoos Spectres inverting sunlit paddocks after late rain field into quadrature out of blind-spots, raucous it’s said, like broken glass in a nature reserve but that’s no comparison; cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters reflect clusters of white feathers from canopies of wandoos or sheaths of flight, down in deep green crops ready to turn when rains are gone, beaks turned back toward whereabouts unknown, but almost certain to appear, at least as atmosphere. (p. 56) Disclosed Poetics provides the poem’s context by explaining the role and function of parrots in Australian poetry and culture as political and environmental symbols. The poem plays on the knowledge that white cockatoos are pests that eat crops and fruit and the paradox between its familiarity as an object of splendour and derision. The poem’s own acknowledged failure in the ‘broken glass’ simile thus leads to the larger realisation that the poem only partially grasps the actual impact of such birds on the psyche. Given the way that the pastoral ideology works to incorporate its opposite within its own dialectic The New Arcadia, despite its flourishes in poems such as, ‘Extreme Conditions Occasion The Fox’, ‘Dead Wood And Scorpions’ and the Reflectors poems, does lack in linguistic disobedience. It is to Kinsella’s enormous credit that he has produced a most unusual book that more than questions the foundations of his critically successful poetry.…
Click here to listen to So Here We Are on miporadio. So Here We Are A great variety of absorbing poetry is obscured by its omission from mainstream publishing, newspaper reviews and the critical narrowness of national poetry awards. There is, at least, a lack of balance dating back to the late 1970s and the changes at the Poetry Society, as described by Peter Barry in Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006). National poetry awards are essentially judged by a small coterie of friends who give each other awards, as delineated by Private Eye magazine in July 2002 and as Tom Chivers reminded us earlier this year in Tears in the Fence 45. They are essentially unrepresentative of what is and has been happening in English poetry, incredibly safe and unchallenging. There is a tame parochialism and narrowness that has its roots in notions of nation and identity forged between the World Wars and reinforced by the Movement in the Fifties and its apologists in the Eighties. ‘English decency’ as Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion wrote in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982). There is an antagonism towards the discovery of meaning and form in language and to reading widely and deeply that flares up in spats about what constitutes poetry and who should control the field. (See for example Don Paterson’s 2004 T.S. Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, Neil Astley’s 2005 StAnza Lecture, ‘Bile Guile and Dangerous to Poetry’ and their responses. Conversely there is the predominantly modernist line of thought that seeks to avoid any market taint. Friends refusing to review friends work for fear of selling out.) The New Generation Poets of the Nineties and its marketing machinery similarly adopted a cosy world of vernacular spontaneity and simplistic forms of connection between poetry and life. This strategy involved an acceleration of the critical deterioration heralded by Morrison and Motion. This was not always the case and there are signs that younger readers, thanks to new technology and a greater awareness of disparate writing, are having no truck with this narrowness. I would like to discuss an example of this absorbing poetry that encourages openness and takes the reader off the beaten track and to indicate why there may be signs of change. I first encountered Allen Fisher’s Place in literary magazines at Compendium Bookshop in Camden Town, London in the mid 1970s. This was an exciting time to visit Compendium and buy such magazines as Grosseteste Review, Curtains, The Park, Poetry Information, Aggie Weston’s, Joe Dimaggio, Reality Studios, Sixpack, Spectacular Diseases and Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review. Scattered amongst such magazines were extracts from Place by the poet and painter, Allen Fisher. It seemed like samizdat literature. It was inspirational in the sense that it allowed itself the privilege of drawing upon a wide range of sources that impinged upon South London, where Fisher was born and raised. Place Book One, for which Fisher jointly won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Poetry Award, appeared in (Aloes Books) 1974 and was followed by other parts of the project, culminating in Unpolished Mirrors (Reality Studios 1986) and finally appearing as one book, Place (Realty Street Editions) in 2005. In common with J.H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier and Iain Sinclair, Fisher drew upon Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1960), Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968) and his ‘Projective Verse’ essay (1950) to articulate a rich seam of sources and information from archaeology, history and geography. I don’t think that you can discuss Olson’s impact in England without mentioning Ed Dorn’s enthusiasm and encouragement to English poets, whilst he was a Fulbright Fellow at Essex University, to follow this path. Raised and educated during the Depression, his poetry was concerned with limits and thresholds of place and identity. Dorn had been taught by Olson at Black Mountain College, lived at Gloucester, the location of the Maximus Poems, and clearly was an inspirational figure. Like the Maximus Poems, Place is a sprawling work, although not an epic work in the sense of a journey out and in. It is more about process and contemplation than journey. It has a relentless and flat movement forward. The book’s organisation is Olsonian, with five main books: Place Book One, Eros:Father:Pattern, Stane, Becoming and Unpolished Mirrors. Place Book One is subtitled in roman numerals 1-XXXVII, and contains within it an internal sequence ‘Lakes’ and a section subtitled ‘Making an Essay // Out Of Place’. Stane, the Scottish word for stone, is subtitled Place Book III: XLV-LXXX1 and so on. There is a complex numbering system at work for each poem or section of the project. There is also a series entitled ‘Grampians’ that appears in Place Book One and Stane as well as letters to friends, a response to the publication of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and direct quotations from fellow poets Anthony Barnett and Pierre Joris. There are poems with lines and stanzas at different angles and poems that use horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines to connect bits of text and to allude to other connections. However defamiliarising this might be, it is clearly a development out of Olson, with its shared emphasis on the complexity and plurality of cognition, rather than an imitation. There is no immediately assimilated narrative, Place requires the reader to become immersed in the conflicting range of references and readings that constitute its object. The preface states: this set takes the form of an essay in fragments that brought together bring about their own symmetry their own chaos and later, I await the day when this book will lose & find itself in a general movement of ideas. Place begins by peeling away layers of history and settlement along the Lambeth causeway to the City of London. Through mostly unidentified historical, literary, philosophical and documentary sources the Lambeth people are shown standing on the sites of battlefields bridging the City banks with cattle fields. Fisher’s fragments highlight indices of nineteenth century poverty, submerged pathways and streams, lines of migration and waste, ley lines and boundaries. He seldom attempts to prioritise one fragment over another but rather teases out possible underlying structures and association through juxtaposition. In contrast to the stable identity and formal restraint of Movement and New Generation poets, open field produces polyphonic and fragmented perceptions. On one level there is a kind of levelling of sources and ideas, reminiscent of Eric Mottram’s essays, that can engender a less than engaged response. Sometimes the conflicting energies are dissipated, or need to be held in suspension, as other perceptions and lines of enquiry enter the poem. Yet on another, one could argue that Fisher’s play on the binaries of the visible and actual, of giving and taking, of sources and deposits, of underlying and artificial divides is an example of an attempted Tao, with its allusiveness intact. Fisher’s achievement in this initially bewildering and subsequently compelling poem is to seek out processes and possibilities and to encourage his readers to embrace this as a work in progress that involves their active participation. In many ways, it was the experience of reading and not understanding Place that forced me to make linkages between the concept of place and other discourses that impinge upon any place. In my experience that involved linking with Foucault’s discourse analysis and thinking about process and on a practical level realising that a knowledge of place required a full understanding of natural and human sciences as well as social, economic, legal and historical processes. Place Book One is entitled Place rather than Lambeth or South London and that surely suggests Fisher is attempting to move beyond Williams’ Paterson and Olson’s Maximus. the loci of a sphere i have seen it I, not Maximus, but a citizen of Lambeth cyclic on linear planes Here the narrative self, with small and large I to indicate selves, is located in a specific place in the manner of Paterson and the ‘not Maximus’ indicating that this is not an imitation. This is a long poem with a Shelleyan scope for poetry built upon American models with an English philosophical hinterland. The fifth book, Unpolished Mirrors, employs a Blakean flourish with the gardener’s, Watling’s and Wren’s monologues within an enquiry into memory, perception and consciousness that includes references that extend beyond London’s literary and scientific history, John Dee and the theatre of memory, to the specialist language of scientific research. Fisher has clearly absorbed Pound, Oppen, Olson, Rukeyser, Reznikoff, Zukofsy and so on. The arrangement of fragments can be seen as both strength and weakness. The strength comes from the emphasis on process, which Fisher develops in later work, such as Brixton Fractals (1985), and the weakness comes from the failure to elaborate the interconnectedness of all through linkages. I suspect that an underlying resource that Fisher draws upon is A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), a work that was introduced to me by John Cowper Powys’ brother in law, Gerard Casey, in the early Eighties. Although not listed in the bibliographical resources, the work has resonance with the Taoist methodology. Whitehead’s central metaphysical idea identifies reality with process. He saw the universe as being in constant flow and change and rejected the dualisms of mind and body, of knowing subject and transcendent object, of man and nature, believing in the interconnection of all things. Another feature is that Fisher includes within the poem some of the background thinking to his work in progress as a kind of estrangement in the Brechtian sense. It can be disconcerting for readers to encounter passages of philosophy with brackets closed and opened. However, this is Blakean in the knowledge that ‘without contraries there is no progression’ and similarly works to keep Place outside of the poetic mainstream and inside a broader avant-garde of poetry as process. Place’s Taoist approach is combined with aspects of late Sixties esoteric research and thinking. These are specifically English sources such as The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones (1925) by Alfred Watkins and The View Over Atlantis (1969) by John Michell, both of which present ley-line theory, and The Patterns of the Past (1969), research into underground water systems and ancient sites, by Guy Underwood, a pioneer of earth-energy dowsing. Fisher uses this speculative material on the underlying lines and patterns detected by dowsing to great effect as the Lambeth walker seeking out hidden sources of energy. His contemporary, Iain Sinclair, was similarly divining the past in Hackney, East London, in Lud Heat (1975), which along with Andrew Crozier’s The Veil Poem (1974), is similarly fragmentary and concerned with showing that the world reveals itself, not as a given, but through perception and process. Place involves much more than I have indicated here. It is the thinking behind a work such as Place that is as important as the range and uses made of the content. The poetry may not be as quotable as T.S. Eliot or be as linguistically hinged as Andrew Crozier or as formally elegant as Peter Riley, but it is very effective and works on the reader with repeated readings. Multifaceted long poems such as Place are rare and challenging. They are not elitist per se as time and scholarship wear them down to manageable tenancies. They are adult and awake, moving forward. There are many ways in and out of their ingenuity. Parts of Place Book One echo the connections between the psychogeography of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem and sexuality. There is a sense of fully exploring the relations between the narrator’s body and the body of Lambeth. Place also contributed to the popularisation of pyschogeography in Britain through its emphasis on walking London and its connection with the large body of work produced by Iain Sinclair. One could also examine the way individual poems mark the extent, through fragmentation, to which the narrative self interjects within certain discourses. Place implicitly encourages moral and political thinking, of the need to break out of confined dogmas, peer groups and idioms. It shines as a beacon to show possible ways forward in that endless movement from the natural landscape to the cultural and back again. It makes you consider citizenship, moral responsibility and what it is to live in a place. It makes you think about the limits and thresholds of place, speech, identity and audience. Time has moved on since Place first appeared and we are now a more fragmented and multinational nation, although you would not know this from our national poetry prizewinners. The post-Wordsworthian critique of the pastoral is not merely localised anymore, it is contextualised globally as poetry itself is becoming increasingly contextualised globally. The Australian globetrotting poet, John Kinsella, has a useful introduction to this in Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (2007). Based in Gambier, Ohio, Kinsella is a remarkable poet of birds and the beach concerned with issues of nation, place and self that reverberate internationally. Younger poets and critics are more aware of the twentieth century English modernist tradition these days thanks to new technology developments. Literary websites, such as John Tranter’s Jacket magazine, have led the field in essays, articles and new poems within an international modernist aesthetic. Individual poets, such as Ron Silliman, have used blogs to discuss a wide range of modernist and other poetries. There are also sites that actively encourage the sharing of wide reading, such as Goodreads and Stumble Upon, and networking sites, such as Myspace and Facebook, used by younger people where older poets have made contacts and found a new audience. Younger poets and critics have started their own blogs, such as Edmund Hardy’s Intercapilliary Space, and display their knowledge and interests. The Internet fosters wide reading through its search engines and, although the information is not always accurate or reliable, there is a great opportunity to discover those marginalised poets of substance that have been almost written out of existence. Combine this with the success of non-mainstream English publishers, such as Shearsman and Salt, and it is broadly possible to say that there may be an underlying change in emphasis under way in English poetry that will eventually see an end to the current ridiculous situation.…
Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio So Here We Are Thomas A. Clark, born in Greenock, Scotland in 1944, writes an attentive poetry, giving space to each word and statement so that it can breathe and linger with the reader. His poetry is also attentive to walking, to the necessity of slow deliberation, and to words and their resonance. I would like to explore walking as a poetic theme using Clark’s work as a starting point to weave backwards and forwards. The first poem in Thomas A. Clark’s Sixteen Sonnets (Moschatel Press 1981) begins: as I walked out early into the order of things the world was up before me This neatly situates the narrative self within a prior world of phenomena and perceptions. The ‘order of things’ carrying the phenomena and ‘the world was up’ denoting the ongoing activity. That phrase ‘the order of things’ is recognisable as the English title of Michel Foucault’s study of the epistemology of the human sciences (Les Mots et les Choses 1966 translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences 1970) and alerts the reader to questions of the ordering of knowledge and of the interaction between the self and the world. Clark’s narrative self walks out into the order of things, that is to say, assuming that things are out there and moving with a sense of attentiveness and becoming. It is therefore a knowing self and walking becomes the act of that knowing self. The poem continues as I stepped out bravely the very camber of the road turned me to its purpose it was on a morning early I put design behind me hear us and deliver us to the hazard of the road in all the anonymous places where the couch grass grows watch over us and keep us to the temper of the road Here discovery and the world with all its terrors are already active and the narrative self steps out to build with the hazardous ground as it is. The line ‘here us and deliver us’ invokes the dissenting tradition of Piers the Plowman, Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton and Blake and of being delivered from oppression to the promised land. Here explicitly defined as ‘in all the anonymous places / where the couch grass grows’ and enveloped within the echoes of a prayer that is conditioned by temper, with all its variant meanings implied. For Wordsworth and others walking was seen as an aid to the recovery of memory, creative expression and connecting to the divine. Wordsworth’s walking poems, such as ‘An Evening Walk’, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar, ‘The Female Vagrant’ and ‘Michael’ connected walking with poetic labour, poverty and the rural poor. Walking then carries within it a subversive content through its associations with poverty, necessity, wandering, awareness and discovery. From Hazlitt’s 1823 essay ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets’ we learn that the young Coleridge liked ‘to compose over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption’. The Romantics set a vogue for walking that was fuelled by guide books and institutionalised by anti-enclosure associations, open spaces and footpath societies and linked to the making of the self. The walking ideology, though, fixes upon walking as an educational experience rather than the cognitive processes of perception, memory, judgement and reasoning that were central to Wordsworth and Hazlitt. One of my fondest memories of the 1998 Wessex Poetry Festival was Thomas A Clark’s reading early on a Sunday morning, which culminated in a reading of In Praise of Walking (1988), a poem consisting of forty statements about walking that weave across the nineteenth century ideology of walking. In Praise of Walking begins: Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world. It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away. That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing. Walking is the human way of getting about. Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering. There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves. A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way. This deceptively simple poem interjects into an expansive realm of discursive poetics that has been the main path of English poetry and dissent since the nineteenth century. Clark, in common, with J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley, Geraldine Monk and others, has begun to move beyond the Wordsworthian rupture with the pastoral into new territory. Following the poem then we note that the world is reached by setting out, again implying ordering, and is there to be discovered, suggesting our knowledge of the world is partial or incomplete and implying an action and a process. The use of ‘we’ suggests that it is possible for us all to discover the world. The ‘least possible baggage’ suggests that closure of thought and emotional response hinders discovery of the world. Discovery, here, implies making connections as we walk and possibly reconnecting with the physical world and human life before or outside of mechanisation. The second statement acknowledges the possibility of walking away from the world of ‘coercion, violence, property, triviality’. It does not imply withdrawal as such but rather choice. Triviality recalls John Gay’s Trivia, Or The Art of Walking The Streets of London (1716), an important poem in the history of walking poems. Trivia here refers to the Roman goddess of crossroads, the three ways. This public poem takes the form of a narrated walk through London’s streets with a mock classical overlay that advises the reader on the city’s perils and the walker on how to dress. There is a lot of waste, sewage and incipient violence. It presents a distorted image of beggars and urban poverty as Tim Hitchcock points out in a new edition of the poem, edited by Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (OUP 2007). So ‘triviality’ here might signify after Gay an element of frivolity and distortion from the underlying conditions as well as implying a movement away from the unimportant to the important. The third statement registers the connections between the visionary and the primacy of immediate experience. Note the absence of interest in the self and use of the plural in this clear espousal of an undefined world of discovery and visions. Walking is seen as part of the visionary tradition rather than any specific elaboration of a self. This is Wordsworthian then without the self as object. A walk is its own measure. I am reminded here of John Ashbery’s poem ‘Just Walking Around’ where he writes The segments of the trip swing open like an orange. There is light in there and mystery and food. In other words it is the journey that is important and that may involve opening into ‘light’ (vision), ‘mystery’ (the unknown) and ‘food’ (sustenance and thought). Clark’s poem’s insistence on the connections between walking and humanness clearly is in contradistinction to those elements of social and economic life where humans are under the constraints of ‘time, work and discipline’ and of an infrastructure that is eroding those places where it is still possible to walk. John Barrell in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 (CUP 1972) points out the insularity of local transport systems in that period and travellers’ perceptions of the pre-enclosure landscape as mysterious and hostile. Once in a network of paths it was not easy for a traveller to find a way out unless they had local knowledge. The poem invokes those hidden paths as a reminder of how far the earth has been transformed by transport systems, networks and motorways and how it is still possible to find new ways of doing things. Kim Taplin has explored the history of footpaths in The English Path (Perry Green Press 2000) through the writings of John Clare, William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and contemporary poets such as David Caddy, Jeremy Hooker, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Barry MacSweeney, Iain Sinclair and John Welch. She shows how the network of footpaths connects humans with the natural world as well as place with place and how walking has and still does set boundaries. Iain Sinclair has developed the London literary walk into a mode of creation, echoing that other London walker, David Gascoyne’s Night Thoughts (1955), in works such as Lights Out For The Territory (1997), where he writes: ‘Time on these excursions should be allowed to unravel at its own speed, that’s the whole point of the exercise. To shift away from the culture of consumption into a meandering stream.’ The poem continues with the powerful line: There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them. When I visited the childhood home of the writer, poet and broadcaster, John Arlott (1914-1991), at Basingstoke, I was astounded to find a tall and pin-thin Gothic building near a cemetery. The cramped living room was seemingly impossible for a family to use. It seemed to be devoid of light. Within and without exuded a distinct aura. There was both a joy and a sadness. This beguiling place began to make sense in relation to Arlott’s determination to become a writer, his involvement in the literary world, of the BBC and pubs of Soho, and resonated again with the personal tragedies of his later life. The ‘Voice of English Summer’ indeed had always been surrounded by darkness. In sum, this peculiar house made sense in relation to the life of the poet, cricket commentator and wine connoisseur and I felt that I knew more about Arlott as a result of walking there. Clark’s poem is in argument with or contradistinction to Wordsworth’s and other earlier walking poems. What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way. To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk. The most distant places seem accessible once one is on the road. Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes. In the course of a walk we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone. Clark’s emphasis upon discovery is quite distinct from T.S.Eliot’s lines from Little Gidding (1942): We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive at where we started And know the place for the first time. For Clark, walking is not so much about knowing as discovering. ‘A dull walk’, he writes, ‘is not without value’. The emphasis is on slowness as opposed to the speed of modern communications and those things we share outside of commercial and monetary value. Making connections, discovery, in this sense concerns reading the landscape encountered. This can take different directions from the materialist to the mystical. From J.H. Prynne through Sinclair to the novelist, John Cowper Powys, who used walking as a way of reaching the elemental and magical world of sensation and transformations. By the way, Jeremy Noel-Tod has written an excellent introduction to the figure of walking in the poetry of J.H. Prynne, in Necessary Steps: poetry, elegy, walking, spirit edited by David Kennedy (Shearsman 2007). There is a sense in which walking serves, in all these writers, as a means of reading, of stimulating connections by motion across the path, the past and present. The poem continues: Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all contribute to the dislocation of a persistent self interest. Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant. The most lonely places are the most lovely. Walking is egalitarian and democratic; we do not become experts at walking and one side of the road is as good as another. Walking is not so much romantic as reasonable. The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement. Here a differentiation is being made between a tourist and a local walker and I take reason to be allied to discovery. It thus implies a movement beyond a Wordsworthian interest in self to a sense of logic as survival. In other words, as a way of discovering how to save the earth from further destruction. The poem ends: To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we can have. There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to myself again. Is there anything that is better than to be out, walking, in the clear air? ‘To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we can have.’ thus reminds the reader that, regardless of difference, we are all part of the universe. This is quite close to Gary Snyder’s idea that ‘walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.’ Clark though moves the terrain to the question of value and venerates walking per se as a step towards radical and alternative value. It is, as it were, a movement attendant to the discovery of the world as it is and outside of self interest. Walking connects us with the physical earth and the distant unknown through the motion of moving forwards. It is also a movement from the actual to the possible in cognitive and human terms.…
Click below to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I would like to say a few words about the poet and translator, Bill Griffiths, who died in September, aged 59, and briefly sketch the context and scope of his work. He produced more than two hundred books and pamphlets and translated from Old English, Welsh, Romany, Latin, Norse and other languages. He was in the tradition of Radical pamphleteers, concerned with planting the Liberty Tree, and wrote with commitment to make you think about the words and materials under review. He was concerned with the discourses of power and their effects and with the erosion of local democracy. He had a great ear for music and quickly assimilated speech patterns. Some of his works are beautiful artworks, such as A History of the Solar System / Fragments: A History of the Solar System (Writers Forum / Pirate Press 1978). This consists of A4 sheets folded to A5 and machine stitched into a concertina format within green covers. It is a work that literally opens out the world of cosmology, alchemy and belief to show that the universe is multiple and diverse. I have always kept this on my desk to remind me of Bill’s inventiveness and that poetry should open out to another place. His passing leaves a large gap in English poetry. He was born Brian Bransom Griffiths at Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 August 1948. His father was a teacher and mother had been a civil servant. When I first met in August 1973 he was known as Billy Griffiths. He arrived at the Windsor Free Festival poetry event, which I had instigated, with his mentor, sound poet, Bob Cobbing, and read with him prior to another double act, Robert Calvert and Michael Moorcock. He was an impressive reader using cut-up direct speech and intense syntactical compression in poems about bikers and Vikings. He was like the reading, moody and provocative. I met him several times that autumn and kept in regular contact, receiving most of his Pirate Press editions and subscribing to his various books. He was an inquisitive and supportive, albeit argumentative, character. Bearded, with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his fingers, he was part of London’s anarchist squatting community and mixed with bikers, Hell’s Angels, gypsies, renegade Irishmen and other outsiders. Although he squatted in inner London, writing about the dispossessed in Whitechapel (Whitechapel: April & May, End, & Start Texts (Pirate Press 1977), he returned to live at his parental home until he moved into a riverboat at Cowley, near Uxbridge, in the mid 1980s. Private and irascible, I had no idea that he had a degree in Medieval and Modern History from University College, London. He was independent and radically, non-conformist. We argued incessantly about the usefulness of education and how to develop alternative poetic strategies and readership. I was writing and giving away poems at the time and he urged me to not go to University so that I would think more in alternative ways. This was a time of social and industrial unrest, of fragmentation and protest, and such a proposition was not so fanciful if you had private means, which I did not. I went to University and this upset Bill, who was committed to the ideals of an alternative society. He made poetry his life, placing it above all other concerns, and was continually producing new work. He employed disparate materials often prefaced by notes based upon his etymological and historical research that alerted his readers to the direction of his thinking. He used juxtaposition and narrative disjunctions to allow other discourses and voices into his poems to add another dimension to the subject under review. Typically, his endings refuse any closure to indicate a situation or event is continuous. I recall seeing him in spring 1977 when he was strung out and not in great health. He gave a blistering reading at Portsmouth Polytechnic Fine Art Department. It was a provocative exposure of the mid-Victorian civil service’s handling of criminal justice and prisons using found and cut-up texts and documentary evidence. Some of these poems appeared in Poetry Review Volume 67 Nos. 1 and 2. He was cleverly using found texts from the past to comment on the present. It was his riposte to my decision to study History and to engage in post-graduate literary study, all part of an argument about theory and practice. His analysis was similar in scope to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). That night we discussed the Annales School of historiography and the difference in approaches between historians such, the Marxist, George Rudé and the anarchist, Richard Cobb. The methodological argument between them comes down to the importance attached to the document. Bill’s eyes lit up as he extolled the virtues of the document, archives and proper systems of storage and access. Bill later worked as an archivist on several project, including cataloguing Eric Mottram’s Archive at King’s College, London, and became a member of the Society of Archivists. Bill was, in essence, writing a history of power ‘from below’ to use the Annales School term. Bill was an associate of Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum Press and workshop, a regular contributor to Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review, a stalwart of the Association of Little Presses (ALP), producing the newsletter (PALPI) and Print Shop Manager at the Poetry Society from June 1974. As such, he was an integral part of the London hub, along with such poets as Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair, Lee Harwood, Gilbert Adair, Ken Edwards and Jeff Nuttall, of what Eric Mottram termed the English Poetry Renaissance or Revival. Bill used the Association of Little Presses book fairs to sell his hand printed books and pamphlets and developed his own independent ways of reaching a loyal readership. He was produced many publications in the Poetry Society basement and several works, including War w/ Windsor (Pirate Press 1973), Idylls of the Dog, King and other Poems (Pirate Press 1975), Cycles (Pirate Press 1975) and The Song of the Hunnish Victory of Pippin the King (Earthgrip Press 1976), went into multiple editions. This was a golden age of little press activity and it was hurting the larger poetry presses. Eric Mottram at Poetry Review was accused of publishing too many foreign poets and lost his job. The Poetry Society print shop where Bill printed his and other London based publications was closed down. The whole apparatus of support, including the National Poetry Secretariat, wonderfully administered by Pamela Clunies-Ross, for little press poets outside London, was taken away. A documentary account of this is given in Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006). His early work includes War w/ Windsor, which appeared in several editions, and Cycles, distinguished by their disruptive use of language and radical scope. It is in marked contrast to the conventional poetry of that period and takes prison and urban deprivation as its main themes in a sustained study of the manifestations of repression. War w/ Windsor explores the social parameters of bikers and the law at a time when the stop and search laws were in frequent use by the police on any individual that appeared to be vaguely outcast. Stop and search was based on sections 4 and 6 of the Vagrancy Act (1824) and became a contributory factor in the 1980 St Paul’s, Bristol and 1981 Brixton, riots. Incidentally, his poem, ‘The Toxteth Riots’ (in The Mud Fort: Selected Poems 1984-2004 Salt 2004) quotes the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee emphasising ‘police harassment over a long period’ as the main cause of the disorder. War w/ Windsor gives voice to the biker’s world, the Windsor Chapter and Uxbridge Nomads war against each other and the police, of prison and social control, employing broken syntax in linked sets of sound poems that catch their speech patterns in terse narratives. Here’s the opening of ‘To Johnny Prez Hells Angel Nomads’ 1. Christmas straight- Jacket kid Packet of light fields Eye 2. With no lamps, roads Without airforce or Angels, wd you jin Ruislip? A lion in you In a law-shop 3. The motor-bike is acorn yellow Johnny Bev Bob White my mind Gonna pick up of Pepper is day yep 4. Bev as the sea wave wake See this this is Angels getting the booting of their life in Scrubs This is Johnny This is me picking up snout bits in Brixton 5. Johnny begot, beading of black Jack-club Dance kick at drums, can-banging Death-douce 6. And love Works to mix to mix you up miscates the soul Love Shooting blood out; all Red-laking; well Shut in the breasts of her. Bill shared the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for 1974, with Allen Fisher, for such work. Bill augmented his interests in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Romany, Norse and other languages into his work. Cycle 1 (On Dover Borstal) begins: Ictus! as I ain’t like ever to be still but kaleidoscope, lock and knock my sleeping ‘Ictus’ being Latin for a physical hit or strike, also signifying the first or regular beat in Latin verse, although there is historical confusion over this (see Oxford English Dictionary OED 1) and in medicine the beat of the pulse (OED 2 a), implies impact, stress and a sense of confusion and physicality. The exclamation mark emphasises and raises the pitch of utterance, echoing Romantic exclamatory usage in terms of outcry and suspense. That impact is implied is reinforced by line four’s ‘lock and knock in my sleeping’ and that the narrative self is under review is achieved by the switch from the ‘I’ of line two to the ‘my’ of line 4. It continues: Within the complex of the fort against the French, Dover, ‘s mighty imperfection: fits to the sea, the moat (and ported, kinging the blue, closed, so built-made and the salty grass and rubble of chalk growing writing the chalk-kid shout for separation Here the writing shows an educated, disorientated narrator aware of the war machinery at work, ‘the barbwire is German / it is made with razorblades’ and employs alliteration and disjunctions that dazzle and surprise. You’re you and I ain’t any one but you The bright crazy rings in agate spring is. It is an intensely physical poem, alert to historical knowledge, with a narrator self awake to a landscape and seascape of cuts and bruises and wanting to break free ‘to think on the pattern of an action’. It is this tension of wanting and needing to escape that he dramatically captures. Bob Cobbing’s sound and visual poetry workshops at the Poetry Society from 1969-1977 were a formative and continual inspiration. Bill’s concern with the materiality, and ways of scripting, utterances led him back to Old English literature and other languages with traditions of cryptic utterances and runic signs. He also acknowledged in an interview with Will Rowe the impact of Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred (1968), with its global ethnopoetics and concern with archaic poetry. The book provided his introduction to works, such as The Nine Herb Charm (1981), that he would later translate himself. Bill regularly toured with Cobbing and Paula Claire as Konkrete Canticle, the sound and visual poetry group, from 1974 until 1979, from 1984 -1988 and again from 1990 until 1992. They toured Canada, Sweden, Germany and the U.K. Here Bill developed different uses for the voice in poetry, fragmenting vowels and consonants, and explored the edges of utterance. As Paula Claire has written in The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths (Salt 2007), Bill continually worked on texts and left behind a whole range of poetic experiments in hypergraphics spanning the repertoire of communication signs in their broadest sense. This is deposited in her Archive. Through Eric Mottram, who taught English and American Literature at King’s College, London, Bill encountered the wide range of poetries published in the Poetry Review and returned to study Old English at King’s, gaining a Ph.D. in 1987. His translation work began, with John Porter, working on the late medieval Icelandic texts in Gisli’s Saga – The Verses (Pirate Press 1974) and then Beowulf: Anglo-Saxon Text with Modern English Parallel (Pirate Press 1975). In these and later works, Bill emphasises the rhythmic and would often produce the original text, a literal one and poetic version. His poetic versions though were in marked contrast to standard translations. It was if he was scraping away the Victorian gloss and returning to older traditions through rhythm and sound and placing them in the context of music and dance. His connections at King’s College led to a fruitful relationship with Anglo-Saxon Books in Norfolk, who published The Battle of Maldon (1991, revised 2000) and Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (1996, revised 2003). In 1990 he moved to Seaham in Durham and became involved in the collection and archiving of dialect materials. His selected poems 1969-1989, introduced by Jeff Nuttall, appeared in Future Exiles: 3 London Poets (Paladin 1992). He became Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University. He published A Dictionary of North-East Dialect (Northumberland University Press 2005), several collections of dialect literature and wrote some ghost stories, set in the baroque world of English local government. Pitmatic, his last book, concerns North East coalminers and their dialect and clearly has a social-political dimension. He remained a political and campaigning poet as later books such as, A Book of Spilt Cities (Etruscan 1999) and Durham and Other Sequences (West House Books 2002) show. Although he also wrote extensively on Plotinus, Darwin and Seaham, it is his consistent writing about struggles between the dispossessed and the police that stand out. See for example such late poems as ‘Detective Notes’ and ‘Thirteen Thoughts as though Woken in Caravan Town at Dawn by 150 Policemen in Riot Gear With Helicopter and Film Back-Up at Saltersgate Near Tow Law in Co. Durham on the Sixth of March 1996’ from 1997. 10. We have babies ‘n births sometimes secessions; burials; communities are moved, demolition eases the feral-search for ground for housing the kings of the dock-weed be warned. and the opulent win the shadow-box, choose the puppets on show for hands with legs ‘n wages we are subliminated into tokens ‘n riddle-stanzas or left a road march (see Worlds of New Measure: An anthology of five contemporary British Poets Edited by Clive Bush Talus Editions 1997) Bill’s poetry has a difficult, edgy surface that is oppositional. It employs an array of languages, often in the same poem or set of poems. Colloquial or spoken English, Anglo-Saxon, local dialects collide with Latin, French and Standard English, the written language of power. It his work on the procedures of law and bureaucracy, on prison; his commitment to a locality and its linguistic culture as a base for poetry; his use of ordinary people’s lived experience through a musical ear and cut-up disjunctions; his efforts to write polyphonically and to remove the obfuscation of Victorian language over archaic poetries and his continual movement to offset the structures of power with citizenship and the dialect of poetic language that will survive. Bill Griffiths I miss your stubbornness and cussedness already.…
Download mp3 and link here. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England Travelling on the Damory Bus from my home to Salisbury is an event in itself. The bus company’s website and bus stop timetables offer no reliable information on the Service. We rely upon memory that there is a bus leaving the village some time between 9.20 am and 9.40 am and the hope that it continues. So here we are on the bus filled with retired professionals looking out at the summer landscape. There are plenty of horses and sheep in fields, signs of turf cutting and wheat ripening. We see deer, pheasant, buzzards and no one in the fields. We pass by Ashmore with its iconic dewpond, ill-kempt wood and no indigenous population, not far from Society photographer, Cecil Beaton’s old home, Ashcombe House, now occupied by Mr & Mrs Ritchie. The bus falters going up hill as we leave Fontmell Magna and descend deeper into Cranborne Chase, a downland with dense woodland vestiges, Neolithic and Bronze Age earthworks that straddles parts of Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. The name refers to the land as a place of hunting and has been sparsely populated since Saxon times. It is easy to see the contours of history here. There are houses and entrances designed by the dramatist and architect, John Van Brugh, and humbler buildings that carry with them the association of bloody struggles between landowners, with their retinue of keepers, foresters and verderers, and poachers. Open an OS map and you will see that struggle in location and place names around the Chase. Dominated by the Cathedral, with its tall spire and chapter house holding one of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, Salisbury is a compact, lively city on the edge of the Plain, a barren chalk plateau to the north west of the Chase. In recent years it has suffered from an overdose of literature development officers and writers in residence who visit and leave little behind. This has been happening throughout the country and does not produce local literary communities. In fact, they can be counter-productive. The idea of introducing outsiders as experts, often people at the beginning of their career and without much literary experience, is fatally flawed and a waste of public money. It is a fragmented poetry scene, with people travelling in a thirty-mile radius to attend poetry events, lacking in leadership and direction. There are no magazines or poetry publishers to support the local scene. Yet it has an International Arts Festival and a vast literary history from Sir Philip Sidney, William Browne through George Herbert, Henry Fielding, to Hazlitt, Trollope, Hardy, W.H. Hudson, William Golding and David Gascoyne. John Constable’s painting The Cathedral From The Bishop’s Grounds (1825) is often cited as one of England’s best views. It is an extraordinary confluence of place, spirit and identity and is worth investigating in terms of how poets have used the confluence to probe history, identity, and the georgic. It was in March 1913 that poet, Edward Thomas, crossed over Harnham Bridge, near the Cathedral, ‘where the tiled roofs are so mossy, and went up under that bank of sombre-shimmering ivy just to look where the roads branch’, on his literary pilgrimage by bicycle from Clapham in London to the Quantock Hills and Coleridge’s home at Nether Stowey. Thomas’s journey, with the Other Man, who eats brown bread and monkey-nuts, the status of whom is uncertain, has a potent relevance. Although, on the surface, it is a journey searching for signs of spring and observing what is present through earlier poetic responses, it is also a journey of self-discovery, written against the threat of a World War, and a probing of identity, the unconscious, spiritual purpose and landscape looking for rebirth. In Pursuit Of Spring (1914), is a search for poetic understanding with Coleridge the dissenter, the man in black as Hazlitt called him, as a figurative destination, that is to say it is a journey that extends from the superficial to the dark and disturbing. Thomas was moved to have the Other Man quote in full and with relish George Herbert’s sonnet on Sin on his way to St Andrew’s Bemerton, where Herbert was rector and died in 1633. It is a chilly, tiny Low Anglican church, with a strong atmosphere of piety, a stained glass portrait of Herbert, and well worth a visit. The adjacent old rectory, rebuilt by Herbert, is now in private hands. My phone call asking to visit was declined. Thomas cycles on through the Plain, with its five river valleys, interrupted only by a railway line and military camps, noting in this remote and treeless landscape the rooks, pewits and larks. Like Coleridge, Thomas has a fondness for birds (he notes that there are more birds than people in Salisbury that Sunday morning) and is less godly than his alter ego, the Other Man. Just outside Erlestoke he meets two ex-sailors, vagrants, who mention the Titanic, bless him and appear to be asking for money, which he refuses to give, and cycles on. He is more concerned with his uneasy conscience than whether the beggars ‘slept dry and ate enough’. Thomas is arguing with himself about the Christian idea of charity so beloved by Herbert. He is struck by seeing the whole through the inner and outer nature of small things, through the particulars of place, through oppositions, the mildness and wildness of nature, those defining imaginative characteristics he also saw in Coleridge. Salisbury, its river confluence, the Plain and Stonehenge feature in Song Three of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, Or A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, With intermixture of the most remarquable Stories, Antiquites, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodies of the same (1612), a curious work written in rhyming couplets of twelve syllable lines and engraved maps decorated with goddesses and allegorical figures. Here the traveller-poet uses the marriage and competition between rivers as a unifying symbol. Drayton was part of the Sidney–Spenser literary grouping that came to nearby Wilton House, where Sir Philip Sidney had written most of The Arcadia (1590), a prose romance, that later so outraged Hazlitt that he called it ‘one of the greatest monuments of abuse of intellectual power upon record’ and A Defence of Poetry (1595), which defends poetry as the highest art and equal of nature under God. Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, preserved and published her brother’s work after his death in 1586, completed his translation of the Psalms and made Wilton into a college of learning, poetry and alchemy. It was the spiritual centre of the Sidney-Spenser movement in English poetry, with many links to poets and writers associated with the Mermaid Tavern in London. Mary was patron to Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Drayton and William Browne. Shakespeare is thought to have attended the 1603 royal performance of As You Like It at Wilton. Donne is said to have visited. Ralegh’s half brother, Adrian Gilbert, was her resident advisor and Fulke Greville, as elder statesman of the group was Mary’s most trusted ally. Drayton’s attempt to preserve Albion’s history through topography and to forge a national identity was inspired by William Camden’s Britannia (1586). The ‘chorography’ of the book’s title refers to the physical and historical description of a single locality. These included written itineraries and routes across a territory with particular histories, points of interest and local lore. The controlling image of the river stems from Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion (1596). This idea and image fuels Poly-Olbion’s celebration of national diversity, with rivers, as loci of conflict and song, serving to unify the country. Drayton essentially produces a map of England based upon rivers and ancient monuments that is linked to ideas of visual memory and national identity. The final part of Book One ends with a celebration of Kentish independence and liberty against Norman yoke and placing Kent as the foremost English shire. William Wordsworth echoes this in ‘To the Men of Kent’, one of the ‘Sonnets dedicated to Liberty’, in Poems (1807). Ye, of yore Did from the Norman win a gallant wreath; confirm’d the charters that were yours before. This patriotism is rooted not in Westminster but in the tradition of local defence of liberty. Wordsworth’s debt to Drayton is evinced by the many references to rivers and can be read as a kind of up-dated sense of history through topography. Wordsworth as a public poet helped the idea of history through topography further permeate English culture and identity. Tony Blair’s New Labour Government in 1997 somewhat incoherently tried to produce a national brand with its slogan, ‘Cool Britannia’, based on one of Ben & Jerry’s ice-creams, using pop musicians as symbols of youthful vibrancy and referring to a transient fashionable London scene. It completely misread how national identity comes to be ingrained as an image and viewpoint as well as the politics behind such images and viewpoints. Here’s E.M. Forster in The Longest Journey (1907): ‘He saw how all the water converges at Salisbury; how Salisbury lies in a shallow basin, just at the change of soil. He saw to the north the Plain, and the stream of the Cad flowing down from it, with a tributary that broke out suddenly, as the chalk streams do: one village had clustered round the source and clothed itself with trees. He saw Old Sarum, and hints of the Avon valley, and the land above Stonehenge. And behind him he saw the great wood beginning unobtrusively, as if the down too needed shaving; and into it the road to London slipped, covering the bushes with white dust. Chalk made the dust white, chalk made the water clear, chalk made the clean rolling outlines of the land, and favoured the grass and the distant coronals of trees. Here is the heart of our island: the Chilterns, the North Downs, the South Downs radiate hence. The fibres of England unite in Wiltshire, and did we condescend to worship her, here we should erect our national shrine.’ In this symbolic and philosophical novel which contrasts the local waterways and ‘slowly modulating’ chalk downs with the quadrangular academic world of Cambridge, Rickie ‘the lonely and deformed’ character recites lines from Percy Shelley’s Epipsychidion (1821), at the Rings, that establish the novel’s theme and gives it its title. I was never attached to that great sect Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the world a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, - though it is the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, By the broad highway of the world - and so With one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and longest journey go. Forster draws upon Shelley’s poetry, with its ecological reading, G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), Greek and Wagnerian mythology within a mystical and symbolic structure to delineate his characters difficulties in choosing a life companion. Behind all this, Forster acknowledges an originating experience of talking to a young lame shepherd on Figsbury Rings, whom he offers a tip of sixpence and is declined. The narrator sees Salisbury as a living creature with powers of movement, and ‘ugly cataracts of brick’ looking ‘outwards at a pagan entrenchment’ and away from the cathedral, neglecting ‘the poise of the earth, and the sentiments she has decreed.’ ‘They are the modern spirit’, he observes. He goes on in an unconscious echo of Drayton, although possibly not of Wordsworth. ‘Streams do divide. Distances do still exist. It is easier to know men in your valley than those who live in the next. It is easier to know men well. The country is not paradise, (an embedded reference to both Sidney’s Arcadia and Milton) and can show the vices that grieve a good man everywhere. But there is room and leisure.’ Forster’s sense of national identity is defined like Wordsworth by topography and regionalism and is in the tradition of Camden and Drayton. Wordsworth walked across the Salisbury Plain in August 1793, an experience that produced The Salisbury Plain Poems (Cornell 1975), ‘The Female Vagrant’ first published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), and fed into The Prelude. He changed these poems several times. The unpublished Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795), a dark gothic poem concerns a sailor who, having been press ganged into the navy after war service, becomes a murderer and robber to provide for his family. Penniless and an outlaw, he meets a soldier’s widow, as he walks across the Plain. She is homeless, penniless, has lost her family. Both are outcasts and face the inhumanity of Justice. The poem relentlessly shows the human impact of war and links human waste to the historical landscape. This poem was later revised as Guilt and Sorrow: or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain (1842) with the image of the sailor’s suicide ‘hung high in iron case’ removed. This self-censoring of the younger, radical Wordsworth is a good example of how the struggles of the rural poor and outcasts can be written out of memory. J.H. Prynne in Field-Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ And Others (private publication distributed by Barque Press 2007), points out that W.H. Hudson on his cycle journey (A Shepherd’s Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs, 1910 pp 4-5) through the Salisbury Plain writes about a young boy, a bird scarer, running across the ploughed field towards the road merely to see him pass and consciously neutralises elegiac landscape writing by the avoidance of any polemical, ecological or contemplative input. It is a low pitch non-poetic narration without pathos or melancholy in contrast to Wordsworth’s high pitch narration. Hudson’s non-committal tones and registers, omitting the rawness of the georgic, caught the Edwardian mood of nostalgia for rural ways and were immensely popular. Bird scaring, though, did not die out in Dorset until the Thirties. One of this summer’s other recommended reads has been Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, which will surely join Waterlog, his aquatic journey through Britain, as a classic of nature writing in the tradition of Gilbert White and John Stewart Collis. Wildwood argues, echoing W.H. Auden, that ‘the enemies of woods are always the enemies of culture and humanity’ and supports this with references from William Cobbett, John Ruskin and various poets. Deakin wanders from place to place seeking out, what Edward Thomas called the ‘fifth element’, wood. He succeeds in his aim ‘to excite a feeling for the importance of trees through a greater understanding of them’ by showing the links between the greenwood spirit and democratic freedom. In particular, he sketches the history of Great Wishford’s 1603 charter of rights to collect wood in the Royal Forest of Groveley some six miles outside of Salisbury and the annual May celebration of Oak Apple Day. This requires the whole village ‘to go in a dance’ to Salisbury Cathedral. The villagers legally protected their wood rights at court in 1292, 1318, 1332 and 1825 from landowners eager to use the wood for hunting. The Earl of Pembroke had the manor and wood enclosed in 1809, creating more restrictions that worsened the impact of the 1820s economic depression. More disputes followed leading in 1892 to the formation of the Oak Apple Club in the village, under the Labour banner ‘Unity is Strength’, to represent wood rights and customs and perpetuate the May celebrations. These involve pagan fertility and other rituals at the parish church and Salisbury Cathedral. The acorn and oak tree motifs were part of the socialist and anarchist movements defence of liberties. Further disputes occurred in 1931 and 1933 and it wasn’t until 1987 that a new accord was reached allowing the villagers their full rights. The annual Oak Apple Day continues and is an apt reminder of legal victory. The economic depression following the wars with France, enclosure acts and the Corn Laws, which banned the import of foreign grain and kept the price of bread artificially high, hurt agricultural workers particularly badly as described by William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) and there were riots in Salisbury. The painter, John Constable was not immune to what was happening and if you compare his Salisbury Cathedral From The River (1820), which shows the landscape as a social playground, with Salisbury Cathedral From The Meadow (1831), you will see the stark contrast. What is amazing is that the exact spot where Constable painted one of his most literary and symbolic works still exists and when you stand there the painting is more explicable. Constable portrays two agricultural labourers crossing a stream by horse and cart set against Salisbury Cathedral under a rainbow, after a storm, and next to an outsized ash tree on the left, moving towards a shrivelled ash to the right. In the central foreground is a dog, with a grave to the left and fencing to the right. The ash trees are symbolic of life’s disparities, with the Cathedral representing faith and resurrection and the rainbow hope. The rainbow has to be symbolic as it is in the wrong meteorological place. The dog appears to be observing the scene and directing the viewer’s gaze toward the horse and cart, which is empty. They could have delivered grain to the city or come from the city without grain. Conventionally read the painting is dominated on the left by the shrub and gigantic ash tree soaring above the distant Cathedral and the illuminated eye of the storm in the mid-central and upper part of the scene. The bright light is at a distance beyond the spire. The shrub and gigantic ash are unadulterated, untamed by reason, a life force, with which the agricultural labourer and waterman are seemingly in harmony. The rainbow encloses the darker half of the painting that is mirrored by the circling stream, representing consciousness and the enduring faith of the labourers in balance with the natural world during an economic and political storm. It is thus an emotional response, with the rainbow of hope encompassing faith and the labourers in harmony with the wildness of the natural world, to the social-political situation. However, when you stand at the exact place that Constable chose and widen the frame of reference you see to the left beyond the Church of St Thomas, is Fisherton Mill where grain was used for bread making and that to the right leads to the older water-mill at Harnham, where grain is used for bread-making and stock feeding. We are thus at the centre of the city’s agricultural economy and its supporting relationship to the neighbouring villages. The painting is thus built around an absence of the exact economic conditions that mark the empty cart. The painting has a nine line quotation from James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-30). The Seasons was a celebration of the divine order behind the apparent chaos of nature. For the Romantics, including Constable, it was memorable for its descriptions of weather, landscapes, of the moods and colours of the natural world. Mood is dominating economic relations in this painting. Looking again, the dog, separated from the labourers by the stream and on the wrong side to be part of their company, centres the non-economic human connection with the land and acts as a psychological bulwark against wrenching economic conditions. Constable’s Cathedral view, often listed as one of England’s greatest, serves to show how economic relations, poverty and the struggles behind them are blanked out of cultural memory. It is a failure to appreciate local history and distinctiveness.…
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