The Metaphysical Tramdriver: Reading Luciano Erba

The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems. Luciano Erba, translated by Peter Robinson. Princeton University Press, 2007. 288 pp. $17.95 / £12.50

with thanks to Poetry Ireland Review, where this piece first appeared.


The poetry traditions of different cultures intersect pretty randomly at the best of times. Poets will, if they can, peer over the fence of language to see what the neighbours are up to, or rely on the services of translators to bring them the news. Sheer happenstance often determines what gets translated: what happens to interest a given translator at a given time, what publisher is prepared to publish the result. Italian poetry has, in fact, been pretty well served in English. Of twentieth century poets, Montale, Ungaretti, Saba, Pavese, Zanzotto, Bertolucci, Luzi are all available in fine recent translations. Catherine O’Brien’s anthology The Green Flame is still an excellent starting point for an exploration of contemporary Italian poetry, as is Jamie McKendrick’s monolingual Faber anthology. But the immediately useful context for Luciano Erba is Peter Robinson and Marcus Perryman’s translations of Vittorio Sereni published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press. Indeed Peter Robinson tells us that the first words of Erba’s that he read were in a poem by Sereni which cited two lines from his early poem ‘Tabula Rasa?’.

Sereni, like Erba a Milanese poet, was one of the most significant figures of post-war Italian poetry and one of the defining poets of the so-called linea lombarda or Lombard line, a term originating in an anthology edited by Luciano Anceschi in 1952. The linea lombarda is taken to mean a certain kind of lyric sobriety, a poetry of reality, of things, of the quotidian and often marginal; metropolitan in tone and often subject-matter, anti-idealistic or disenchanted, unillusioned. None of these will apply equally to the various poets associated with it and like all such terms it’s more useful as a shorthand than a true analysis. Erba’s own view of the usefulness of movements can be gauged from his poem ‘Linea Lombarda’:

Prejudices, commonplaces I adore
I like to think that there are
always girls with clogs in Holland
that they play the mandolin at Naples
that just a bit anxious you await me
when I change between Lambrate and Garibaldi.

Lambrate and Garibaldi are train stations in Milan; from the romantic clichés of Holland and Naples to the bathos of the poet changing trains is itself an entirely characteristic journey through shades of irony.



Probably the most defining characteristic of Luciano Erba is detachment – less a political position than a function of his sensibility. Fastidious, delicately ironic, he doesn’t fit comfortably into any category. Italian critics have observed the traces of Montale and Sereni but also his distance from the hermeticism of the 40s, as from post-war neorealism. They cite his ‘natural lightness of touch’ and preference for highly concrete details, as well as his subtle and apparently even-tempered music. In his introductory essay Robinson emphasises his anomalous position in the post-war context: ‘In a cultural context where all is "political," detachment of a French nineteenth-century bohemian kind, of a Gautier or Baudelaire, can be crudely construed as reactionary.’

France and French poetry are important to Erba – he has translated Michaux, Ponge, Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars among others. One of his early poems is dedicated to Philippe Jaccottet who, like Erba, is a highly visual and material poet whose poems are, in his translator Derek Mahon’s words ‘recognizably circumstantial, and empirical in their relation to the “real world”’. The earliest poems here display a talent and sensibility already fully formed. Erba strikes his distinctive note and announces the temperament as well as the typical concerns of the work. He seems to have a very secure sense of where he is in relation to the tradition and the contemporary scene – but also he has a clear confidence in his own procedures. Only certain things tempt him into speech and very often they are things which are concealed, submerged, at the margins of experience:

The vignette in the old illustrated book
never noticed under its tissue paper
all the times I’d turned its pages
revealed to me another city
that climbs and stretches along a river
under a night-blue sky.
From the roofs men look at stars
which seem like kites
women appear on high loggias
while on the far bank of the river
a traveler ties his horse to a tree-trunk:
he too has discovered the city.
(‘Another City’)

A typical Erba poem of this period begins in offhand manner, and with a few quick brushstrokes blocks in specific details and a mysterious situation.

Tabula Rasa?

It’s any evening
crossed by half-empty trams
moving to quench their thirst for wind.
You see me advance as you know
in districts without memory?
I’ve a cream tie, an old
weight of desires
I await only the death
of every thing that had to touch me.

The specific details – the half-empty trams, the cream tie, seem to struggle to press some vivid reality on a scene the poet seems to have half vanished from. The dandyish tone seems itself to function as a kind of self-removal. The relationship with the world seems to operate within ironising distances. We are always conscious of the poet arranging his composition and placing himself as a self-aware character in his own dramas. Sometimes the poems present themselves as snatches of conversation offered without preamble or context. They are often as much about what is excluded as what is present, relishing their silences as much as their articulations, and the concrete details can be deceptive – they don’t so much tie us to a world as signal an attitude; they are knowing, subtle, highly conscious of themselves as artifacts and of their relationship with the tradition. The early poems evoke, or seem to evoke, a world of orderly comfort, of panama hats, fathers in white linen suits, cream ties and elaborate hats and women in fresh blouses:

Your white blouse, Carlina,
who ironed it with such care?
( ‘After the Holidays’)

or

Your latest blouse, Mercedes
of mercerized cotton. . .

It is ‘the beautiful country’ of memory, all iconic detail sufficient unto itself, the world as a series of meticulous friezes. It’s tricky to decipher the precise tone of these poems, and transferring their nuances is probably the single most challenging translation task. Their mixture of irony and longing give them a simultaneous intimacy and distance; their ambition seems to be, as in ‘In the Ivory Tower’ to ‘tell long stories of things/we’ve to leave behind.’ Yet Erba’s manner of telling is as much as about concealment and suggestion:

To tell and describe: medals
clouds tapestries skies
ciphers that are born in the hair
lamed zayin aleph
to D on June morning.

The notes inform us that D is a person and that the hair falling across her forehead somehow evoked the Hebrew letters. It’s a signal, maybe, that telling and describing function as elements in a highly individual erotics of perception.

Peter Robinson includes an essay by Erba at the end of the book, ‘On Tradition and Discovery’, which emphasises his distance from the various established modes of thinking about poetry and ‘isms’ in general and argues for ‘authentic simplicity’ and the ‘importance of objects’:

Whether you’re dealing with enlarged details, or with Gulliverized scales, even if we’d better not speak of gracious miniatures. I recover in this way the vision of adolescence, at least so I believe. It is in the comparison with the little, in the discovery of what had always escaped the attention, that I encounter the most diverse and unexpected surprises of being...

It may well be that Erba’s is ‘a poetry of objects’, as Robinson notes in his translator’s preface and that ‘Like other Milanese poets with whom he is associated, he avoids the dangers of high afflatus by sticking to the details of circumstantial existence’ but it is the manner in which the objects and the circumstances are disposed that really defines the poetry, and the apparent materiality can be as much a hindrance as a benefit for the translator. The objects and the poetry exist in a mind space that is both very distinctive and deeply embedded in the Italian poetic tradition, and the particular weight of the objects or poems can be hard to gauge. And it is a poetry ‘that lives in its intimate expressive detail. ‘The brevity and ‘lightness’ of the poems also pose their own challenges: ‘The translator has such a small canvas on which to effect an equivalent coordination of parts, and to find a recognizably similar lyrical gesture as that performed by the poem itself.’

There is, though, a temperamental affinity between Erba’s mandarin modesty and the expressive range of English. The English poems which Robinson has made out of Erba’s originals sit well in the tradition of English language poetry. The ‘lyrical gesture’ of the Italian seems to work as efficiently and as tellingly in English. This may be due to the tonal range Erba deploys; he is as much a poet of tone as of objects, and to enjoy him you have to tune in to his particular range. Once attuned, there’s much to enjoy. Some of the earlier poems here are as fine as anything he later achieved. One of the most striking is ‘Senza Risposta’ (Without Reply) a love poem or doubt poem, questioning yet still cool and poised:

Ti ha portata novembre. Quanti mesi
dell’anno durerà la dolceamara
vicenda di due sguardi, di due voci?

November has brought you. How many months
of the year will the bitter-sweet
affair of two looks, of two voices endure?

In the original the repetition of the idea of the woman ‘portata da novembre’ has a powerful rhetorical effect maybe not quite replicated in English

non sono
che un uomo tra mille e centomila
ma non sei
che una donna portata da novembre
e un mese dona e un altro ci saccheggia.

....I’m only
a man among thousands and hundreds of thousands
but you’re only
a woman that November brings
and one month grants and another plunders from us.

Poems like these don’t seek any other purpose than themselves, and they resist definitive closure. They find their urgency in a kind of spareness and wit. The expedition of ‘Book of Hours’ ends with a separation in the city ‘amid building-site quartz and mica’ ; the poet and his companion return home ‘pursued at our heels by life/as by a friendly dog that catches up with us.’

These early poems were written in the fifties, a period of much experimentation in Italian poetry. Seventeen years separate the publication of Il male minore (The Lesser Evil) and his next collection, Il prato più verde (The Greener Meadow) so it may well be that Erba felt himself very much out of step with the poetic currents of his era – that he was too Frenchified, too middle-class, too much the self-aware ironiser.

In ‘On Tradition and Discovery’ he also affirms his attraction to ‘indefinite space’, ‘undecided regions, uncertain places, non-places’. Something in Erba’s imagination comes alive in these interstitial regions. In ‘Closing a Trunk Once More’ an unused object, a hat found in a trunk and replaced once more, is the impetus. The poet is literally suspended between the worlds of earth and sky in ‘I Live Thirty Metres Above the Ground’, where he imagines what happened in the air he now occupies

crossed over centuries back
perhaps by a flight of herons
with below it all the falconry
of the Torrianis, the Erbas even. . .

The in-betweenness is also a reflection of the middle class identification most explicitly portrayed in ‘Without A Compass’

According to Darwin I’d not be of the fittest
according to Malthus not even born
according to Lombroso I’ll end bad anyway
and not to mention Marx, me, petit bourgeois
running for it. . .

Robinson comments acutely on how a poem like this ‘outflanks the sorts of class-based political criticism that Erba’s work had received at the hands of Franco Fortini and others. Yet nevertheless, "petit bourgeois" is exactly the experience with which Erba’s poetry might fictively identify itself, because that is a class in ambivalent transit between two more unequivocally valorized social positions.’ It’s certainly true that Erba returns again and again to emblems of bourgeois life – the obsessive attentiveness to clothing, the expensive ‘raphael album’ in which his ‘blondest daughter’ draws, or the fine furniture in ‘Relocation’ which offers a solitary consolation to the relocated gazer. When the rest of the city moves for the bars on a foggy evening

you head for the foggy blue sign
of a furniture shop display
where you look at the damask beds
the pettineuses the buffé the contrabuffé
then go home and stand a long time at the mirror.

It’s an equivocal poetry, a poetry of indefiniteness which holds the world at bay, and yet paradoxically this allows the world to press itself all the more powerfully on his senses when he does admit it. Some of the finest of the poems from the 1977 collection Il prato più verde (The Greener Meadow) are the poems written for his daughters, including that collection’s title poem, where all of the details combine to a form a kind of incantatory naming, as if the act of naming, of marshalling the evidence of the real could amount to a spell against disenchantment or metaphysical despair.

There are several other poems in this vein, such as ‘The Goodbyes’, and ‘Seven and a Half’, all economic and controlled gestures making much of the most unexpected and unpromising materials, and all seeming to observe life from a bemused height, and finding their energy in the zone between belief and disbelief. Maybe his most chara
cteristic poem is ‘The Metaphysical Tramdriver’ from his 1989 collection L’ippopotamo (The Hippopotamus):

Sometimes the dream returns where it happens
I’m maneuvring a tram without rails
through fields of potatoes and green figs
the wheels don’t sink in the crops
I avoid bird-scarers and huts
go to meet September, towards October
the passengers are my own dead.
At waking there comes back the ancient doubt
if this life weren’t a chance event
and our own just a poor monologue
of homemade questions and answers.
I believe, don’t believe, when believing I’d like
to take to the beyond with me a bit of the here
even the scar that marks my leg
and keeps me company.
Sure, and so? another voice in excelsis
appears to say.
Another?

This ‘Credo, non credo’ defines very well the Erba enterprise, a scepticism which secures itself in the tangible – though it’s entirely typical that for Erba the tangible should be represented by a companionable scar.

The translations are very close to the originals and often deliberately flat – as if the intent is to move them as little as possible into an English language comfort zone. They very much defer to the originals on the left hand pages, and probably assume the readers will direct themselves to those. This might explain a certain awkwardness of phrasing sometimes where the English leans a bit too heavily on the Italian and the transition from poem in Italian to poem in English doesn’t full come off. In this sense the best way to enjoy this selection is stereophonically, moving from the Italian to the English and back again. The closeness is Robinson’s stated aim in his ‘Translator’s Preface’ : ‘I prefer translations that stick as closely as to their originals as possible, but which nevertheless aim to read as poems in their new language.’ More often than not he succeeds very well in finding an ‘equivalent gesture’ in English for what Erba does in his own language. He gives us a body of intriguing and challenging work that adds considerably to our sense of the tonal range of post-war Italian poetry.

The Thing Is

Shameless self-promotion

The launch will take place in Waterstone's Dublin on Thursday, 15 October, 6 pm, along with Vona Groarke, Tom French , Kerry Hardie and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Any excuse to get a viol on the cover. The particular excuse in this case is provided by Captain Tobias Hume, mercenary soldier and composer for the viol.

Music for Viols
(Tobias Hume’s Good Againe)

Good again
this night, this late
to hear that tune and fall
again, the slow dark drag,
texture
of thickly branched trees
swaying above water,
of sound moving
from the farthest pit
to pour down.
God and the devil
must play the viol.
The door of the world
swings open
on Hume’s excited figure.
After sadness, hunger,
royal blindness
to the great shame of this land
and those that do not help me
after a bellyful of snails
and the sniping of lutenists
good again to stand
with the night
in Jordi’s hands
and listen
and walk in
as far as the tune will go.

Writing the bare bones

Collected Poems, by Michael Smith, Shearsman Books, 242pp, £12.95

MICHAEL SMITH has a well-deserved reputation as a prolific and engaging translator of poetry, with versions of Vallejo, Hernandez, Claudio Rodriguez, Lorca and many others to his name.

He is also well known for his work as a publisher with the influential New Writers’ Press and as an advocate of the Irish modernist tradition.

Prolific translators can often find their own work overshadowed by the work they negotiate across the linguistic borders, so it’s good to be reminded of what Smith has achieved in his own right. The poems gathered here cover all the work Smith wants to preserve from seven previous collections, but what’s striking is how much of a piece they are. The essential elements of both style and subject matter were set in place at an early stage and he has stuck pretty consistently to them.

The poetry is spare, avoiding any kind of formal or rhetorical flourish; it’s a bare-bones aesthetic and it suits the cool regard of these poems.

Observation is one of their key drivers, and very often they focus on the city of Dublin; characteristically he’s prowling the “Old rotten heart of the city” and “pondering time’s evil” where “In the shadow of the cathedral” “the dogs of want scavenge/amid excrement and the wormy legs of children”.

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Walking into Poetry

I’ve always liked the idea of walking into a poem. Certain kinds of poets walk their way into their poems. They take walks and compose poems out of what they see, as in the case of Charles Reznikoff in his walks around New York, or they use walks to work out a poem, finding in the physical rhythm of the walk an inner rhythm that releases the imagination. I think of Jacques Réda out for his daily fix of asphalt in the vingtième, whose whole aesthetic is constructed out of his explorations of the spaces around him, or of a poet like Thomas A Clark who also walks very deliberately into poetry, whose daily practice of walking is the reason and impetus for the work. And this is where the notion becomes interesting. It's not simply that a poet engages in an activity, goes hill-climbing or flyfishing or haunting second hand bookshops, but that there's a synthesis between the activity and the deepest intentions of the poetry. What follows is in part an exploration of what it means to walk into poetry.

‘Standing Still and Walking in Strath Nethy: An Interview with Thomas A Clark’ by Alec Finlay (Edinburgh Review 94, Autumn 1995) begins with a quotation from Mandelstam speculating on the relationship between walking and prosody:

The question occurs to me - and quite seriously - how many shoe soles, how many ox-hide soles Alighieri wore out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy. The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape. The step, linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands is the beginning of prosody.
Osip Mandelstam, THE NOISES OF TIME, trans. by Clarence Brown

This, though, is the least interesting aspect of the subject, as Clark is quick to point out – ‘I'm not really sure that the rhythm of walking gets into the poems much at all'. What interests Clark and affects his practice is how the walk can remove his mind from its normal routines and provide a separate, defined physical space, ‘a time in parenthesis, a contemplative time’.

You walk out of your usual context, into a more open relation with things. Hopefully, you arrive at a clarity, an immediacy of perception, and you lend attention to that, stay with whatever is happening, internally as well as externally, instead of being displaced into the past or future, instead of being caught up in an attitude.

(‘Standing Still and Walking in Strath Nethy: An Interview with Thomas A Clark’)

A walk, in this sense, is a stepping outside of the self; it is necessarily a journey, a movement away from routine into perception. There's a link here between walking and immediacy: the poet who walks keeps his eyes open, and senses alert. There is a relationship between what is seen and what is written down, the poetry is in the encounter. Clark’s poems are in fact ‘more about standing still than about walking’, and this stillness is at the heart of walking into a poem. He makes a distinction between a walk and a journey:

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.
.....
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.

The pace of a walk will determine the number and variety of things to be encountered, from the broad outlines of a mountain range to a tit's nest among the lichen, and the quality of attention that will be brought to bear upon them.
from ‘In Praise of Walking’

If walking becomes an exceptional activity it loses flavour; it is the ordinariness and dailiness that interests Clark. To have any meaning it needs to be constant and unencumbered.

In walking you should travel light, carry as little as possible. It’s a simplification of the kind used in philosophy or science. By a process of distancing, or selecting, you mark out an area of enquiry. It seems to be the case that as you leave behind your everyday consciousness you come closer to things, to natural objects and their particular ways of being.
(Standing Still and Walking in Strath Nethy: An Interview with Thomas A Clark)

Pleasure, perception, lightness. To read the prose poems of Distance and Proximity is to be conscious of their silence: physically, in that the pieces are a series of short declarations surrounded by white space but also because their response to the world is that of a mind that has been cleansed of thought or self or the myriad of accompanying noises we surround ourselves with. Clark’s verses and prose poems are trying to find a way of inhabiting the world with the lightest human print possible, as in the opening line of ‘Jouissance’: ‘The first of all pleasures is that things exist in and for themselves.’


Clark’s walking is a deliberate, unhurried activity. It’s not a frenetic rush through the landscape. It doesn’t attempt to be comprehensive or particularly active. Nor is there any attempt to insert the self into the natural world through anthropomorphic fantasy or Wordsworthian egotistical sublime. There’s no Hughesian fever for a kind of total description, with all the resources of the language deployed for empathetic alignment with nature in its force and ferocity. What there is instead is a meditative sparsity, a minimalist paring down of things to their essential aspects. The language is presentational rather than analaytic and the human relationship with nature isn’t so much problematised as gently foregrounded. Clark’s relationship with the natural world is essentially celebratory. ‘It’s important to realise that both the poems and the walks are in answer to a movement of desire – for clear air, silence, responsiveness, in the midst of a life, no different from anybody’s life, in which these are largely absent.’ (Standing Still interview)


The poems do note and observe but the mode isn’t descriptive and the rapture is kept well in check .This may come partly from the sense that the poems don’t set themselves any agendas in advance – their commitment to a kind of contingent discovery means that the poems tend to function in a zone of calm alertness. It may also have something to do with the fact that Clark has ‘always kept a distance from the idea that the writer is someone who knows or feels something special which is expressed in the writing’. Part of the freedom, and the quietude, of the lines stems from that sense of having ‘nothing to say’. Nothing, that is, which is predetermined; the attempt instead is to let the world, observed and attended to, inscribe itself on the poet’s mind:

as I walked out early
into the order of things
the world was up before me
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

from ‘Sixteen Sonnets’

These lines are typical – the world up before him, allowing himself to be led by the road, putting ‘design’ behind him and putting his faith squarely in the contingent and in the small, unnoticed places. They move and observe and recall and are at the same time a studied declaration of poetic intent, as explicitly concerned with the singing as with the song, and even if the inclination and ambition of the work is to let the world have its say – ‘I’d always want to attempt to see things in themselves, from their side, to take le parti pris des choses’ – the poems exist in the space between the perceiver and the perceived and are quite at home in the self-consciousness of the relationship.

somewhere in the poem
a stag should enter
but the stag is lost at
a crossroad of sunbeams
what the poem weaves
the forest will unravel

(Sixteen Sonnets)

Clark is a poet of place, or rather, of specific places. These are occasionally named or identifiable – Scottish landscape is important for him – but he’s not really interested in the particular lore of a place; even placenames can be ‘too historically or socially determined for my purpose, too tied to habitation’. He is instead more interested in ‘on the one hand, a geological or geographic spread, a landscape, or on the other hand, with a much smaller sense of place, a place in a hedge, or under a rock.’ The poems are encounters with land and sea-scapes which are specific yet exemplary. Wherever he is, whatever he is looking at, the result is a poetry of benign encounter, of the intelligence quietly apprehending the world.

it is a time to speak
to say that the light
this afternoon is lovely
and that all the small
expedients we manage
within the light are lovely
the most fragile devices
what else do we need
not the glitter nor the music
nor the overcrowded air
we need each other
and a space in which to speak
to say that the light
this afternoon is lovely

(A Rumour over Heather)

This ‘space in which to speak’ is where the poetry characteristically takes place

the little decisions
crossing rough ground
is it here or there
I will plant my feet
small crucial decisions
they are never taken
there is only the air
that I tread upon until
some levity or gravity
bears me to the earth

(Byrony Burn)

Walking into poetry for Clark implies a whole series of decisions: about subject matter, form, publication and distribution; it is the expression of a complete aesthetic. This is part of the attraction of the work, the sense that it is all of a piece, that all of the parts connect. It accounts too for the uniformity of the work, the sense that no one piece draws undue attention to itself, no one line seems more privileged than another.

The sequence is the favoured mode, though his deployment of it calls for a looser term. The kind of sequences or gatherings that Clark writes distribute their parts evenly and neutrally in a democratic ordering where each self-sufficient unit carries equal weight. The parts or even the lines seem interchangeable. This is also because their movement isn’t linear, impelled forward by argument or seeking definitive resolution – each step of the journey is important, as in these examples from The Path to the Sea

the seal in the cold water
rises to a clarity
of curiosity, a lapping
of silver, a lapping of grey

(from ‘Forest without Trees’

or

behind cloud
a mountain’s
implied weight

(from Rills and Tussocks)

The poems want to give themselves up to the small journey. Sometimes, with their second person address, these ‘path’ poems read like instructions or guides for the journey:

trust the tangled path
the sea at your elbow
it will lead you through
complex information
meadow-grass and bent-grass
to a fine sea-view

in among the grasses
are the manifold
spaces little places
where intention is
no longer gathered
but ramified dispersed

(from ‘The High Path’)

The final lines of The Path to the Sea avoid any kind of finality, they are another injunction to take a small, repeatable journey:

on a clear day
unfasten the gate
and take the path
over the machair
through the daisies
down to the sea

(from ‘Turning’)

All of this adds up to a poetry of deliberate and, for Clarke, liberating limitation. If the work is attentive to the marginal and ‘the overlooked places’ he also cultivates his own distance from the metropolitan mainstream (if there is such a creature) and from the normal channels of poetry distribution and commerce. These channels are in any case so marginal in the culture that a further distancing from them is an act of willed isolation – but mitigated, as are all of today’s marginal positions, by the use of the internet. Clarke runs an interesting and entirely characteristic site (http://www.thomasaclark.co.uk). It’s characteristic in the sense that it defuses many of the expectations of a reader/browser encountering a site. At the time of writing it presents a blue screen with the poet’s name which, when clicked, presents an image of a wall with the word AURORA. There are no instructions, frames, side panels, links or any of the usual cluttering paraphernalia of websites. Nor is there any way except to navigate except by going forward. If you click on the wall you are presented with the following lines

when you walk by the sea
the light shifts on on the water

and then subsequently, two lines on each page:

attention comes and goes
when you walk by the sea

when you walk by the sea
it waits by your shoulder

it is the same and not the same
when you walk by the sea

when you walk by the sea
the mist tastes of rosemary

your dimensions are variable
when you walk by the sea

Eventually we learn that the wall in the photograph was designed by Thomas A Clark and Donald Urquhart as part of a regeneration project in the mining village of Dysart. We also learn that before the project was completed the wall was demolished ‘on “safety” grounds, and in response to “public demand”’, so that photographs and the texts are only available to the public through the internet. The site is therefore an act of record and a highly controlled aesthetic space, made in the way a book might be made.

The project and the means of its presentation reminds us of the importance of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay to Clark. Finlay combined poetry and sculpture in his famous garden in the Pentland Hills, Little Sparta, and resisted the convention that books were the only means of distributing poetry. Finlay’s interest in the poem as material object is echoed in Clark’s practice of publishing poems as cards, or in home-produced limited editions – he set up his own press, Moschatel Press, with his wife the artist Laurie Clark, using a small press they were given as a wedding present. Indeed, about a third of his biographical note in The Path to the Sea is devoted to the press: ‘At first a vehicle for small publications by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams and others, it soon developed into a means of formal investigation within his own poetry, treating the book as imaginative space, the page as a framing device or as quiet around an image or a phrase, the turning of pages as revelation or delay.’

Finlay’s work offered Clark an example of ‘a very careful, small, meticulous making’ and it’s a way of making he has continued to profit from and develop into a subtle, rewarding instrument.


Books discussed: Thomas A Clark, The Path to the Sea, Arc, 2005; Distance and Proximity, Pocketbooks, 2001; The Tempers of Hazard (with Barry MacSweeney and Chris Torrance), Paladin, 1993. See also Thomas Clark’s website at http://www.thomasaclark.co.uk

Putting a price on culture

ON ST PATRICK’S DAY this year the Taoiseach presented US president Barack Obama and vice president Joe Biden with limited editions of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and The Cure at Troy with inscriptions by the poet. In his dedication to Obama, Seamus Heaney quotes from the poem’s introduction of the character of Beowulf as “a man who comes in an hour of need . . . there was no one else like him alive”. The first lady Michelle Obama was presented with a collection of Eavan Boland’s poems, and her daughters Sasha and Malia were each given a copy of Bairbre McCarthy’s The Keeper of the Crock of Gold. The reception that evening included a reading by poet Paul Muldoon and music by the Shannon Rovers pipe band.

What does this tell us? It indicates, surely, that songs, music and poetry are a valuable currency. Out of the many possible gifts he could have given, the Taoiseach chose to present the president and his family with works of creative imagination, the kind of imagination that is in fact readily associated with Ireland and Irishness, the imagination that fuels films, rock songs, symphonies, theatre as well as novels, short stories and poems.

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Dèia

In the house
a great silence, the roped-off tables and chairs,
the shirt and hat still on their hook as if at any second
he might come in and reach for them. I’ll be down
at the water’s edge, looking out. . . We were the ghosts
beyond the ropes, peering in
to breathe tunes into a wind-up gramophone,
work the hand-press into the night, infuse
the flags with the tang of bread and oil.
But that clarity, how everything blazed
in the undaunted light of itself. A typewriter
nailed down for all eternity, drafts a whisper from ink
flourishing their imperfections.
In the museum room a looped film of the artist shaving,
shelves of his books; ‘I breed pedigree dogs to feed my cats’.
The place held its breath. In this readiness what could resist?
Touch nothing but listen for the lift-off, the print
of the house on its own waiting, the lucky lope
of the sleek black cat through the ropes, and out.

Luciano Erba

Pastello

alle piccole
Francesca e Caterina
ma come può un coniglio
fare il prato più verde
una strada ferrata
una stazione di mattoni rossi
nascondersi fra colline di robinie
per farle più spinose e più robinie
sopratutto questo odore di foglie nuove
ma come può?
come è possibile
che tutto un mondo si colori di mattino
se vi tengo per mano

Pastel

to the little ones
Francesca and Caterina

but how can a rabbit
make the meadow greener
a railway line
a red brick station
hide themselves among hills of robinia
to make them more thorny and the more robinia
above all this smell of new leaves
but how can it?
how is it possible
that a whole world grow colored with morning
if I hold you two by the hand

from The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems, Luciano Erba, Translated by Peter Robinson, Princeton University Press, 2006

Heaney at 70

RTE's Heaney at 70 site

My own introduction to the box set of the Collected Poems

Irish Times special feature

Excellent review by Barra O Seaghdha of Stepping Stones

Thin-skinned dreams: Reading Friederike Mayröcker

(with thanks to Poetry Ireland Review, where this first appeared)


Friederike Mayröcker, Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006. Translated by Richard Dove. Carcanet, 2007.

Some facts first: Friederike Mayröcker was born in Vienna in 1924, worked as an English teacher from 1946 until 1969, since when she has lived as a freelance writer. She began writing in her teens and was first published in the Viennese avant-garde magazine Plan. From her beginnings as a writer she has been associated with the Wiener Gruppe, figures such as Hans Weigel, Andreas Okopenko, H.C. Artmann and her companion Ernst Jandl, whom she met in 1954. Since giving up her teaching job she has lived, in Jeremy Over’s words in a recent (Autumn 2008) issue of New Books in German, ‘an almost hermetical existence surrounded by unruly mountains of books, papers and notes in a tiny flat in the Zentagasse district of Vienna. . .’ where she ‘started to produce the main body of her extraordinary avant-garde literary work.’

The unruly piles of books and papers are reproduced on the over of Richard Dove’s translations of her work in Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Carcanet, 2007) in a mixed media piece by Linda Waber from 1995. Atelier Friederike Mayröcker is an impression of the kind of romantically fruitful artistic disorder beloved of the public – think of the Bacon Studio in Dublin – but it offers us an image of the working method that might help us if we don’t take it too literally. The piles of papers, painted as generic clutter, may have a perfectly rational coherence for the poet. The space is tiny and the stuff seems to be bursting out of it, as if it can’t be contained; and almost a quarter of the scene is dominated by the buildings of Vienna visible from the poet’s apartment, and that in itself is a useful image: the city spilling in, perpetually available to the avid eye of the poet. Vienna is crucial to Mayröcker; to a great extent she writes with the city. In an interview she has said that she can only write in Vienna, and described how during a six month residency in Berlin she found herself unable to write; she had to go home to Vienna for a weekend in order to write anything.



Avante-garde is a very general and maybe not especially helpful description. Mayröcker’s work is a kind of continuous torrent of freely associative, passionate language in the service of private obsessions; in the service, if you like, of the individual lived life rather than the life of the greater social entity. There is nothing specifically national or political in this work, nothing identifiably sociological. Its methods favour the apparently random: the habitual use of collage techniques which layer seemingly disparate levels of experience. But because it it so clearly rooted in the experimental tradition – she herself singles out the period between 1966 and 1971 as her ‘experimental years’ during which she concentrated mainly on the manipulation of language, on making explicitly concretist and Dadaist poems – her later work has little need of the obvious armoury of alienation and is in fact highly approachable.

The techniques which deflect or distract the reader from some kind of normal autobiographical expectation do in fact cohere – they cohere into what interests the poet, what engages her attention. They have in common a certain pitch of language, a certain emotional intensity. The pitch is influenced by the fact that the poems are often conceived as letters; they have specific addressees. Many are addressed to Jandl after his death in 2000 and the ‘raving language’ or ‘rasende Sprache’ of the title is a language of heightened perception that comes from the intensity of this address:

I’m writing deluded letters which you’ll never receive,
such thin and vulnerable skin-intercourse, this is merciful
weather, the whitethroat’s kiss in the gardens. . this
word in the wire in communion I’m dreaming of you, and
ecstasy itself, this magpie,
have just invented language raving language.

Hallucinatory and ecstatic, these poems seem to invent their own searing idiom. Mayröcker in this aligns herself with the tradition of Hölderlin, an important precursor for her, as indicated by Richard Dove in his excellent introduction to this selection:

...Hölderlin became a key point of reference in the 1970s, and ...she has deliberately adopted – or rather adapted – elements of his late hymnic style. Isolated phrases are taken over lock, stock and barrel. . . .But it is in terms of syntax that the affinity is greatest – Mayröcker’s primitivistic parataxis has a similar ‘Asian’ feel to Hölderlin’s (to cite the eighteenth-century distinction between ‘Asian’, i.e. non-classical, and ‘Attic’, i.e. conventionally neo-classical). In her mouth, parts of speech like aber (but) or nämlich (namely) have a decidedly Hölderlinian feel.

(Introduction, xxi)

Her poem about a visit to the Hölderlin tower in Tübingen begins with the striking image of the poet getting her Hölderlin fix:

Hölderlin’s Tower, River Neckar, In May

this snort of Hölderlin
in the bright-red Hölderlin room/
standing in the corridor
my glance falls on the red flowers in the glass
bordered by petals
shed
nothing else/
the room empty just the vase of flowers
two old chairs --
I open a window
in the garden, you say, the trees
are still the same as in his time
bur we hear a snatch of music the bluish
silverware is glittering

for Valerie Lawitscha

The suggestion of drug-taking is deliberate. In his note on the poem Richard Dove discusses his search for the best English rendition of the noun:

What is certain is that Hölderlin is a drug for this poet. During a conversation in Vienna in February 2005, I asked Mayröcker how she wished ‘eine Prise Hölderlin ’ to be translated – a pinch (as in ‘a pinch of salt’ or ‘a pinch of snuff) or a snort (as in ‘a snort of cocaine’). Her answer was instantaneous: a snort.’
xxviii

Her influences are eclectic, and derived from wide reading. Apart from Hölderlin she cites Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Henri Michaux, Beckett and Gertrude Stein, but it's reading itself which is the real influence -- ‘Writing/is applied reading’ one poem announces briskly – and an inevitable spur to imaginative work. Writing about her in a recent New Books in German, Jeremy Over notes the importance of reading :

At Vienna’s Schule für Dichtung (‘Poetry Academy’), she recommended to probably horrified student writers that they read for at least ten hours a day. . .

(Jeremy Over, New Books in German)
http://www.new-books-in-german.com/english/316/220/220/129002/design1.html

The reliance on collage is one application of reading. Books provide an endless source of found material to be deployed and orchestrated. It’s the technique of an inward and remarkably self-contained sensibility.

In the same way that the late, fragmentary Hölderlin appeals, her imagination fastens on fragmentariness as if the rendering of the fragmentary were the only true way to engage with the world. Her poems are shot through with, and driven by a fierce sense of mortality and an accompanying determination to pack in as much of the world as possible. The work is visually rich; she is a very painterly kind of poet -- she has described herself as an ‘Augenmensch’, an ‘eye person’. There’s a kind of ferocity or a fierce anxiety about the way she crowds the visible into her lines; the eye that is in love with the world is acutely aware that everything looked at is vanishing and that its ecstasy is a form of grief:

….. I
only know this life
won’t be coming my way again, not I
my heart is grazing
in mournful pastures

(country rain, july)

A poem like ‘in praise of a fragment’ gets all these concerns in: the random, material world, ‘the thought of transience’, unstoppable joy and a deliberate inconclusiveness that is her particular fidelity to experience:

across the street
at two facing windows
a woman and a man call out
the state of the world to one another /
on the sliding roofs of containers for old glass
the sign with an arrow in three languages
hier öffnen open ouvert /
the thought of transience
gets me howling
while I tread the cobbles
beneath mimosa trees and the oriental
candyfloss wafts through open windows out into freedom /
lilac is blossoming in a small lane /
on rubber soles a youngster
is leaping through sudden May rain /
the young robinia leaves torn down in a nightly storm
are swimming on the surface of a lustrous
puddle / gesticulating
horse-drawn cart

with a pursed lip the apostrophe,

The rapt attention and inclusiveness are a by-product of ‘der Gedanke der Vergänglichkeit’, ‘the thought of transience’ that makes her howl. Inconclusion is the conclusion, and the grammar goes about its own independent business. We can see too in a poem like this how the freedom of the technique is a reined freedom; the method is associative, the laying down of apparently disparate layers, but the different layers reinforce each other, and add to the impact of the poem – an it’s a canny kind of associativeness, the randomness is judiciously selected. The poems are full of these kinds of moments of passing life caught in the sudden ecstatic glare of attention, with the language a headlong rush to capture them before they vanish:

in the effulgence of hair
this effulgence of hair in the window
hair-effulgence, never seen anything like it
reflection of a tail of blonde hair
in the front window of a car
hair-effulgence of a woman who remained invisible
eyes mouth nose chin not to be made out, just the angle
of the hair
blonde hair
(drum) dripping dropping of hair, chimera
in the morning

(effulgence of hair)

or

with windows flung open on the morning of a radiant
August day such an August day / to drink
the flowing air /still / tell myself I’m alive /still /
and now and here yet finitely
or through the blinding blue sails the finite
swallow

Some of the most attractive and striking poems here are those written about her mother in old age. The stark presentation of her mother’s mental disintegration is accompanied by the poet’s unshakeable sense of the world continuing on its way:

to spit around
the little prayer-mat
babble around throw one’s arms around
as though I were now her mother and she
my child. . . it’s all, she says, getting turned
inside out, she’d
expected more of old age, the world’s
lost its charm

meanwhile February shoots up
in mimosa plumage

(‘on this morning’)

This double or multiple focus is very characteristic of the work. In another of these poems the poet and her mother contemplate a tree outside the hospital window

is that a gingko tree, she says,
there’s something else you can write about
the nun looking after her
comes to her bed and says
do you want to confess and take communion tomorrow
and holds her hand
I say she’s without sin, always has been
the white-stockinged
finches among the leaves

(‘mother, eighty-three, hospital’ )

Through all the work runs the sense of poetry as a kind of continuous conversation – with the self, with writers, artists, friends, and with Ernst Jandl. They have the intimate form of letters – practically every poem has a specific addressee – and this accounts for much of their liveliness. It also accounts for their urgency, both in the sense that the poems move with the speed of letters written at speed, but also in the sense of felt pressure of something needing to be said. There are no half-measures – the rhapsodic pitch is sustained convincingly, informed by a rage against mortality that makes her ‘CLEAVE to this earth’.

At over two hundred pages, Richard Dove’s is a substantial collection but it still amounts, as he reminds us, to only about a quarter of her output. It makes a convincing case in English for this prolific and remarkable poet.

Michael Hartnett Remembered

Good piece in today's Irish Times by Michael Smith, Remembering Michael Hartnett

Sandalwood comes to my mind

Carl Rakosi
from Excercises in Scriptural Writing

Sandalwood comes to my mind
when I think of you
and the triumph of your shoulders.
Greek chorus girls came to me
in the course of the day
and from a distance
Celtic vestals too,
but you bring me the Holy Land
and the sound of deep themes
in the inner chamber.

I give you praise
in the language
of wells and vineyards.

Your hand recalls
the salty heat of barbarism.
Your mouth is a pouch
for the accents of queens.
Your eyes flow over
with a gentle psalm
like the fawn eyes
of the woodland.

Your black hair
plucks my strings.

In the foggy wilderness
is not your heart
a hermit thrush?