Giles Goodland

prose poem

Falling Asleep: The Human Voice is a River

On Friday after work I went to the Oswald reading. I had run at lunch, was feeling tired, and outside the college I folded my bike, the porter stood it into a cupboard for me, I walked into the quad and found the room, felt sure I had been here before, perhaps years ago. It was nicely heated, even though I was early there were already several people sitting. I recognised some of my students, or former students, and sat next to K, with my Brompton bag and fluorescent jacket, at the end of the row, we chatted for a little while, and I took out my phone and texted Z and felt cosy and expectant. I recognised A in the row behind me, but I did not want to talk to anyone, really, I felt at this end of the week as if I just wanted to cruise downwards until she was there at the front, looking younger than I had thought she would (we’d last met a decade ago) but with one arm in a cast. Right from the start of the first poem I knew I would sleep, I in fact intended to sleep, her voice lulls and is soft enough to sink into, she slowly becomes inaudible to me, I can float at a level somewhere between consciousness and sleep, deep sleep is below me like the bed of a still deep pool I can submerge into carefully, because after a certain point there is no rushing back, no climbing out until I am fully immersed, not needing to breathe. I am fully aquatic now, the words are perceived as shoals of small trout, darting, loving the shadows under the trees. I feel my body starting away, awake, she is reading something different, I listen a little, straighten my body, but then I feel I am slumped again and her voice is a river tinkling past me, some dim music I can half remember, all this time she is reading without script, from memory, the room is full of rapt attentive people, it is as if my sleeping is a mild protest, even though I love her poetry I also resent her self-assuredness, her voice seems very definite, something of Sitwell, not that I dislike Sitwell, as I dream I see a dark pool again, on which there are insects moving, squat, penny-like shapes, perhaps musical notes, sounds, or they may be bedbugs, but seeing them spin crazily on the surface of the water, they are whirligig beetles, I explain this to the children, who are younger, and interested in her speaking from memory, as if that is the thing she can add to what poetry has been before, at length hearing an obscure noise underground, an unclosed ghost, I feel myself emerging, a slight alteration in her voice suggests that she is reaching a conclusion, but this is a great sleep, more than a little dip, a paddle in a dark stretch of water, I have crossed some small stream that was unexpectedly deep and find I am in a wide lake fringed by forest, here I begin giddily to come out of the water and shake myself like a dog, and soon I am more vibrantly aware than if I had not slept, yes she is still reading about Tithonus, the man who grew older and never died, it is all interesting, I like her syntax, her delivery, it is so comfortable I would always want her to read to me in this voice so I can sleep again and again, adjusting my breathing and level of attention as I please, my level in the water. I feel refreshed as if I have really swum along with it, as she on the stage instructed me, I followed, a porpoise following a boat and when she reached the shore, or came near, I turned away. I woke into my side-fellows, K on the one side and a short-haired female student on the other, who looked at me waggishly. They thought they had heard the reading, but I had followed it more deeply, and had nothing more to say to those around me. It occurred to me to go up to shake her hand but I decided not to, she was already surrounded by students, the train beckoning, the weekend breaking around me.

Giles Goodland lives and works in London. His next book will be Civil Twilight (Free Verse Editions, late 2021). Back in 1994 he met Alice Oswald at an Eric Gregory awards ceremony, where they shared a stage. He would like to stress that he does not find her readings soporific. He was just really tired.

Joyelle McSweeney

essay

The River of English

1.

Listen,

Listen this is not the ordinary surface river
This is not river at all this is something
Like a huge repeating mechanism
Banging and banging the jetty

Very hard to define, most close in kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using no other sails than their shining wings.

Listen, Alice Oswald's A Sleepwalk on the Severn is like the night mail, important for how it moves, how it gestures a nightscape it moves through, how it refers both to itself and what it carries, how it arrives awash with deposits of sound and orthography. It's a piece of nightwriting, it's what English does at night, and the river. Oswald armors the poem with both a prologue and a forenote, each well-riveted with nots: "this is not the ordinary surface river"; "This is not a play." But this negative method achieves a kind of reversed current, a charm, a poison that sinks in the ear, floods the ears' crazy channels and finds the brain, volts its electrostatic fluids like notional wings that beat in closed vaults.

The kind of nightwriting that carries night in its thick wings. That can only be read in the dark.

Such a battery of paradox, pluses and minuses, things that are, things that are not. This is the dynamo that keeps poetry going, and the heart, and thought, inside the skull's locked theater, its permanent illusory night. There darkness might be translated to light, and, ok, vice versa. Au quai. A dark channel where dead girls and sailors ride like leukocytes. The whiteness of the page stands in for the darkness of the night. The blackness of the type stands in for something written in light: counterlight or insight. Maybe all poetry is (night)writ on water, made from and for death. Maybe all written poetry is nightwriting, the seen standing in for sound, cerement of an oral form, ready to be breathed back to life.

This river is not
This poem is not

Easy to forget that our ears are locked with fluid, riven with canals like the Greek Underworld, like Victorians thought bound the Moon and Venus, planetary, erotic, immediate and remote, rushy canals where the dead arrive to stroll beneath locked skies. Easy to forget, before its crudescent screens, under the upturned bowl of its sky, that English is a language of jetsam, its erratic orthographies a record of more and less violent clashes and declines. 

I think Alice Oswald, dream secretary, wants to fish her poem up out of the river of English, or fish English up out of the river of poetry, livid, sticky, ragged, gagging.

[This poem] aims to record what happens when the moon moves over us-- its effect on water and its effect on voices.  

For 'the Moon' read English. And Death.


2.  Darklight, darklight
It starts one night
With a little sleepless smallness
A few stars creep out like cress.

Per its forenote, A Sleepwalk on the Severn sets out to accompany the Moon on her phases, and this opening quatrain from the first chorus isolates the new moon's rise. Being quatrain-shaped, the chorus depends on pairs of rhyme, both fullrhyme and near-rhyme. This momentum is not epic but depends on the singsong momentum of nursery rhyme. Nursery rhyme is interesting because it is thought of as oral and pre-literate but plays a role in print culture, introducing children to the object of the book. Nursery rhyme has its own temporality: one reads it to get to its end, but then one often reads it again, reads it to a child until that child can recite. Keep going. The nursery rhyme is an earworm, but it also worms the eye. In the evocatively limited vocabulary Oswald has chosen, we keep falling back into those occult English orthographies that vex all learners: light, light, night.

Night after night
The same night, I am always
trying to lift my body off its hook

But it's like searchlights out here
I keep being followed by a strip of light
I keep seeing the moon
Mother of all grasses

In this sing-song, intuitive patterning, the sound that repeats and makes the chorus singable is also unpronounceable, the 'gh' in night and light. This silent gh, this little knuckle in the eye where sound blinks, little Middle English lagniappe, keeps interrupting the simplicity of the sound's transcription, a bone in the throat of the eye of sound. In the next chorus, Oswald reverses the technique, and the eye is met with eyerhymes that don't sonically rhyme:

And things half seen wax and wane in the wind
Their leaves grow sharp and almost blue than blind

This night I'm half resigned the grasses only half sleep

Here the words that appear to rhyme (wind, blind) do not, wind never receives a rhyme, and the rhyme with blind surfaces where it visually should not, in the middle of the following line, tucked against that vexing silent g: resigned. Snag where History lays her finger: that signature: that unvoiced g: that ligature

fishbone in the throat of (written) English

that blight

that makes the throat and vowel long

as if for the Moon.


3. Full Moon

When the Moon comes into her fullness she is romanced by the drowned sailor: nightscape, riverscape, poemscape, earscape become congealed and commingled as in a flooded grave. The stage direction reads:

This is several nights later. A lonely place where the Severn runs along lawns and lights that speak ship language in bright colours float past. There's the Wind on your ears like a hood. Two sleepwalkers struggling along, one huge with eyes closed, the other staring (that's me) being followed by a cloud. Keep going...

Here the signature element of vision (light) becomes sonic and speaks. When it speaks it speaks a 'ship language', some fluid effusion in the space of normally pneumatic speech. Wind (is this the double of the unrhymed 'wind' discussed above?) is not 'in' the ears as is idiomatically usual but 'on your ears like a hood.' This hood could be the hood of a protective garment, or a carceral one; I think the latter. I think the hood prevents sight, because vision doesn't seem to be working normally in this passage. One is either close-eyed or 'staring', and to stare is not to see. It is to be agog. Meanwhile the phantom 'g' with its detectible/undetectable ghost orthography moves all over this passage, going soft, hard, silent, continuous, going...

The scene elapses in the submerged flooded theater of the skull. We never feel the sky is an open space the Moon could pass through but a lid, ceiling, cave flank, coverlet.  "Sailor kisses the Moon. Poor thing. She enters her cloud. This is strange. Frozen fog look of the air. Dead hands of trees stroking the sky's fur." When the Moon speaks she both speaks in and acknowledges this agglutinated scene, using 'g'-ridden, eely English: "Eels etc. [...]There's that horrible sucking sound. The glug glug of the tide."

The chorus this time is given over to the dead-handed trees who also speak glottally and seemingly from inside the skull-theater. They relate a dream of being the full moon: Good God!

It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will through a little peephole
I had no voice no mouth nothing to express my trouble
[...]

This moment is arguably the apex of this lunar-structured piece, yet it is not *exactly* the full moon that rises here, but rather, the relation of a moon-dream which has risen in the collective non-moon mind of the chorus of trees. In other words, we are at at least two removes from the Moon herself, depending how you count-- within the relation of a dream of non-moon beings, who dream of being the moon. Yet, interestingly, this mis-en-abyme of representation does not distance or reduce the moon-i-ness of this moment-- instead it seems to amplify it. As the moon-dream rises in the eel-y English, the multiplication of material effects entails its own kind of luster:

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight
Almost frost but softer almost ash bust wholer
Made of water which has strictly speaking
No feature but a kind of counterlight call it insight

Like in woods when they jostle their hooded shapes
Their heads congealed together having murdered each other

Here's that strange word 'hooded' again-- occult, concealed, indistinct, a prisoner, victim, sacrifice, or criminal hiding his face. The accretion of magic -ight words "counterlight call it insight" would at first seem to break the spell of Mooniness by breaking the stanza and delivering us back to the terrestrial level, a cluster of murderer-trees. I would argue this ultimate moment of moon-iness is the ultimate moment of suffusion.  Moon is revealed to be simultaneously a celestial and a terrestrial being, entering English as the 'gh' in light. At the apex or crisis of the piece, the Moon comes into a presence so high and full that it is also its opposite-- a clustered collapsed copse of trees. 

There are moon-beings sound-beings such as deer and half deer
Passing through there whose eyes can pierce through things

I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible

Moon is revealed to be simultaneously a celestial and a terrestrial being, entering English as the 'gh' in light. She entails of confusing, ecstatic sublime pulse of opposites: apex and nadir, plus and minus, erased and exposed, suffusing and being suffused. She becomes a kind of super material, a kind of super-presence that cannot be described in a single phrase but in a gluey, eely agglutination--the eely congealment that is English. In this catchment, nothing is gone, because everything that seemingly itself actually suffuses the whole, sticks around in nightwriting, rises in the throat or on the page like a sailor or dead girl in the river. The Moon is the Moon but also a kind of fluid with hydrostatic properties, that goes down and rises like a river. An English river. Gh gh. The river of English.

Sometimes the moon is less and
Sometimes she moves behind and sometimes she's gone.
Sometimes it's the moon. Sometimes it's the rain.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author, most recently, of Toxicon and Arachne, poems, and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a work of goth ecopoetics.

Ian Brinton

book review

The New Pastoral by Deborah Lilley

In a lecture on the ‘Staying Power of Pastoral’ delivered to the Royal Irish Academy in 2002 Seamus Heaney had argued that the viability of pastoral poetry continuing to possess a central place in the developing world of poetic modernism has always been dependent upon ‘its ability to meet the challenges of new and sometimes tragic historical circumstances.’ Tracing some aspects of the way pastoral poetry had developed from Theocritus to Virgil and then on towards the present day the lecture mapped out Heaney’s pathway through idealised landscapes which were being constantly modified to take into account shifting social and geographical realities. As Deborah Lilley puts it in her opening paragraph of this new study of the role of the pastoral in modern literature, the pastoral ‘has been used, in varying forms and frames, to represent and query the conditions in which it is called up.’

Lilley’s book examines some of the critical opportunities offered to the reader by looking at concepts of the pastoral in a new way and by some close textual examination of a range of modern fiction she brings the eye to bear upon how the genre of the pastoral ‘is concerned with the interfaces between people and place, with conceptions of and interconnections between the urban and rural, humans and nature, and with the effects of these interrelationships.’ Her  focus is upon contemporary British writers who, over the past twenty years, have been discovering new ways of seeing and new ways of using the pastoral mode to explore and understand the concepts of both the human and the natural, the country and the city, the past and the present. Inevitably Lilley compels us to recognize the enormous changes which have faced the genre in the wake of environmental crisis but rather than opting for an all-too-easy dystopian despair her arguments move us forward to examine the critical opportunities offered within such a fast-changing environment. Time and again her focus is upon our understanding of the relationship between ourselves and the moving world around us. As a reader and critic she does not intend to dwell upon a nostalgic movement of retreat but upon a new way of seeing and a firmly perceived sense of both the fragility and the enduring quality of the Now. Quoting Robert Macfarlane from a Guardian newspaper article of 2005 Lilley’s subject is not writing about landscape in some simplified descriptive manner ‘but a restructuring of the human attitude towards nature – and there can be few subjects more urgent or necessary of our attention than this.’

Ranging from Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005) to Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), and from Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009) to Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World from the same year Deborah Lilley guides us along pathways which themselves possess a quality of the mythic. On one side we can see what Richard Kerridge had made clear when he pointed out to us in 2000 the seductive temptation of the language of catastrophe, prophesying disaster with a hint of relish (Ecothrillers: Environmental Cliffhangers)  and on the other we can recognize the power of Daniel Defoe’s recognition of the state of mind experienced by Robinson Crusoe whose experience in the early eighteenth-century of the terrifying emptiness of the expanse of ocean leads him to recognize that  ‘we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contrariness; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.’

Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World evokes a post-Flood existence on an island where we are offered a contrast with the preceding destruction of the known and the valued. Recalling the first real flood attributable to climate change in Los Angeles in 2005 the father-figure, resembling a self-elected contemporary Noah, recalls a city left ‘smeared with filth…blocked drains, spilled trash, dead bodies’ accompanied by a sense of shocking apprehension as he remembers witnessing a ‘pack of dogs killing a cat, dogs that used to be pets, their jaws now slick with drool and hunger, eyes wild.’ However, as the novel progresses we become aware that the idyllic, nostalgic escape from a drowned civilization is itself a myth perpetuated by this self-elected saviour who wishes to be seen as a modern counterpart to God’s chosen ark-builder. Pa can be seen visiting a secret cabin which contains both a computer and a damning journal in which he records both his deception and his daily fears of discovery. The Orphic glance over the shoulder to gaze upon  what has now gone is a refusal to accept knowledge and the attempt to replace the existing world with a reconstruction of an idealised past is a form of nympholepsy. The failure to come to terms with the reality of the changing world is akin to the seductive desire of Homer’s lotus eaters from Book 9 of The Odyssey and the powerful attraction of the unreal is caught in the father’s written assertion that ‘It is better to forget what you KNOW and to believe only what you can SEE with your own two eyes.’

A similar form of search for a lost Eden of pastoral bliss is central to Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days in which we are presented with James, another self-aggrandising father-figure, who takes his eight-year-old daughter Peggy to live in a cabin in the woods. This escape into what is proposed as a ‘retreat’ (and here one might note the merging of a religious desire for spiritual comfort with a removal from the present into the past) is doomed to failure and the ‘pastoral glow’ that eases their entry into their new world quickly fades as James’s grip on reality loosens: ‘he fails to heed the fading of summer’ so that they barely survive their first winter. After some years Peggy escapes to discover that the world is still in fact turning and her mother had been looking for her for a decade. The novelist’s focus is upon what Lilley recognises as the enormous disparity between an imagined pastoral future of James and the Retreaters and the physical hardships faced by his and Peggy’s subsistence presenting the reader with a dark warning against the allure of turning towards pastoral simplicity against the complexity of reality along with the ‘untruths and obfuscations that are required to bring it into being and maintain its illusion.’

The powerfully seductive world of the nympholept signals the dangers of seeking a return to a world which has gone and few writers of pastoral poetry have come to terms with this as effectively as the First World War poet, Edward Thomas whose 1915 poem ‘Sedge-warblers’ contemplates the suicidal beckoning of the pastoral nymph. Thomas dreams of a time ‘Long past and irrecoverable’ where a river bears the reflection of

Another beauty, divine and feminine,
Child to the sun, a nymph whose soul unstained
Could love all day, and never hate or tire…

Recognising the toxic nature of the illusion and before he ‘had drained / Its poison’ he shifts his focus to the song of sedge-warblers

Quick, shrill or grating, a song to match the heat
Of the strong sun…
Their song that lacks all words, all melody,
All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.

There is something essentially morbid about being trapped in a world from which the sought-after escape lies tantalisingly in the mind and yet firmly beyond the grasp and the poisonous element of this attitude towards the pastoral world is examined very convincingly by Lilley when she looks at the work of Lawrence Buell whose ‘Toxic Discourse’ had appeared in Critical Enquiry in 1998. Buell had anticipated that ‘narratives of rude awakening’ would themselves reveal the follies of some current attitudes towards environmental concern. In his 2001 book Writing for an Endangered World Buell had alerted us to narratives that present ‘disenchantment from the illusion of the green oasis’ as being accompanied by ‘totalising images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration.’ Buell suggests that ‘Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal’ and yet the shock tactics of apocalyptic writing failed to anticipate the ‘fatiguing effect of the frequency with which images of eco-apocalypse would come to be used.’ The point is taken up by Mike Hulme in Why We Disagree About Climate Change (C.U.P. 2009) when he notes that the ‘counterintuitive outcome of such language…frequently leads to disempowerment, apathy and scepticism among its audience.’ This can of course be seen in Liz Jensen’s 2009 eco-thriller The Rapture which is set in a British seaside town threatened by the interlinked effects of pollution and warming temperatures. What Kerridge had referred to as that hint of relish becomes what Timothy Clark recognises as an ‘indulgence in a pleasurable destructiveness’ which inevitably compromises the novel’s ‘attempted status as a sort of activist fiction.’

The welcoming of death as an inevitable rest is an expression of a nostalgic tendency in which the underlying impulse is not to go forward to meet it as much as a returning to a lost world of freedom from effort, a state which can be approximated to pre-natal life. In his 1922 book  Problems in Dynamic Psychology J.T. MacCurdy had pointed out that ‘if reality is difficult to endure, and if acute consciousness is developmentally connected with the recognition of external reality, and if contact with the environment is essentially a function of consciousness…then a most natural regression would appear with a dissolution of consciousness associated with some expression of return to the earlier type of existence.’

In her concluding chapter, ‘Uncertain nature’, Deborah Lilley looks unflinchingly at the sirens of apocalypse and quotes again from Buell:

Since Rachel Carson, environmental crisis has rapidly evolved and
substantially changed in form, not just in nature, but also in human
discourse about it.

She presents us with an uncompromising awareness of the toxicity of some eco-disaster writing:

In the novel, the threat of totalising disaster is weakened by the already-
degraded state of the environment. The insidious character of its toxicity
and the incipient nature of its effects, from the violence of the weather to
its likely impact on food production, result in a sense of inevitability that
generates feelings of helplessness.

However, Lilley also reminds us that any lingering reliance on an ideal past landscape ‘demonstrates a lack of adaptation to the conditions of environmental crisis, and a failure to register the scale and scope of its impact upon the ways that we see and understand the world.’ Looking at Jensen’s ‘new pastoral’ novel Lilley notes that lurid descriptions of an escalating crisis ‘couple with the limited effect that its threat appears to register’ to reflect some of the shortcomings of apocalypse. The dystopian element that invades recent environmental apocalyptic narratives seems to leave behind an unreadable nature.

The seeking for permanence in some of the novels examined by Lilley is different from the awareness of a shifting sense of the present which can be found in some contemporary pastoral poetry. For instance both Alice Oswald and Peter Larkin offer a contrast to the indulgent madness of nostalgia, that Orphic vision which can only present a vanishing reality. When Larkin’s sequence of poems, City Trappings (Veer Books), appeared in 2016 it opened with a note concerning his area of focus:

These poems arise from an ambivalent fascination with new perceptions
of the urban environment and wildlife, especially in terms of remaining
pockets of ‘trapped’ or encapsulated countryside…

The poet’s near-microscopic focus upon what he sees permits the reader to become aware of what might lie behind this fascination and in the concluding poem the pun on the word ‘spell’ offers clarity of communication to accompany the sense of mystery that has always haunted the world of the pastoral:

where urbanisation dives
for no human help, spell
out the survival nodes

coalescent emergency ribbons
a green inference: less of ours
in the more to be given

Similarly it is the ‘numerical workings’ in Alice Oswald’s ‘River’ from her 2005 collection Woods etc. that we are instructed to listen to ‘right down the length of Devon’. The staying power of the pastoral that was the subject of Seamus Heaney’s lecture can be both seen and heard as

the river slows down and goes on

  with storm trash clustered on its branches
and paper unfolding underwater
and pairs of ducks swimming over bright grass among flooded
          willows

the earth’s eye
looking through the earth’s bones

carries the moon carries the sun but keeps nothing

Writing in The Guardian in December 2005, Alice Oswald had made a very direct statement about the importance of poetry in its dealing with both the world of the pastoral and the world of nature:

“We have a problem with our fields, with our weather, with our water, with the very air we breathe;
but we can’t quite react, we can’t quite get our minds in gear. One reason perhaps is that our minds are
conditioned by the wrong kind of nature poem, the kind that leaves us comfortable, melancholy, inert.
Nostalgic. Dishonest.”

Quoting from this article four years later in Figures of Memory, Poetry, Space, and the Past (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) Charles Armstrong went on to contemplate some of those unignorable crises which have compelled societies to re-evaluate their institutions and heritages and the serious tone of both his and Alice Oswald’s writing goes far beyond that Orphic glance of wistful yearning which is the poison for the nympholept. Armstrong suggests that Oswald’s poetry is obsessed with the ‘fleeting instant’, resolutely pursuing ‘the clap of time’ (‘The Apple Shed’) that vanishes as quickly as it is sensed. He sees her poetry as being alert to the vital movements of the natural world and points us towards ‘Sea Poem’, the opening poem of Woods etc., which does not offer the comfort of a subjective vantage-point from which to look at water but by contrast contemplates the water’s own movement as she questions ‘what is water in the eyes of water’. The poet contemplates an ‘oscillation endlessly shaken / into an entirely new structure’ and ‘a wave, a winged form / splitting up into sharp glances’.

If one wished to suggest a tradition within which Alice Oswald’s poetry can be seen most clearly it is not going to be enough to suggest the names of either Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney. Indeed it might be interesting to speculate what answer Charles Tomlinson might have given in the spring of 1956 to the question concerning where poetry came from. He might well have been prompted to respond by offering a form of words on a blank page creating the poem he wrote at that time in which waves are ‘Launched into an opposing wind’ before hanging ‘Grappled beneath the onrush.’ The title he gave to the poem was ‘The Atlantic’ and as a wave withdraws down the sand and pebbles it  

                                             leaves, like the after-image
                  Released from the floor of a now different mind,
         A quick gold, dyeing the uncovering beach
                  With sunglaze.

Were Alice Oswald to have been asked the same question in 2005 she might have answered

         water deep in its own world
steep shafts warm streams
coal salt cod weed
dispersed outflows and flytipping
 
and the sun and its reflexion
throwing two shadows
what is the beauty of water
sky is its beauty

Ian Brinton’s most recent publications include Islands of Voices, selected poems of Douglas Oliver (Shearsman Books, 2020). His translation of Paul Valéry’s selected poems, with a Preface by Michael Heller, appeared in early 2021 from Muscaliet Press and Paris Scenes, a translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens has just appeared from Two Rivers Press. He reviews for The London Magazine, PN Review, Long Poem Magazine, Golden Handcuffs Review and co-edits the magazine SNOW.

Mary Newell

review

When Poetry “Rivers”: Reflections on Cole Swensen’s Gave and Alice Oswald’s Dart

Poetic treatments of rivers are as varied as the transfigurations of Proteus. The book-length poems addressed in this essay, Cole Swensen’s Gave and Alice Oswald’s Dart, suggest some of that range while honoring two European waterways, the Gave de Pau in the south of France and the Dart in Devon, southwest England. Through very different approaches, both authors capture the dynamic quality of streaming water as it intersects with nearby lives. Oswald signals such aliveness with a tumult of varied voices and tales in concrete images whose velocity provokes sensory overload. Swensen’s spacious net provides deep-breath moments where unvarnished impressions can penetrate beneath habits of interpretation to reverberate recursively. Both authors witness the river communities they write about, while employing the linguistic calisthenics of poetics to engage readers in dynamic modes of apprehending the texts and through these, to reflect anew on the surrounding more-than-human world. In the process, they provide ample occasion to revel in linguistic delights.   

Historically, rivers have been influential in defining geography and assisting trade, industry, agriculture, and transportation. Beyond these practical considerations, rivers generally have metaphoric and aesthetic appeal, as Swensen discusses:
They radiate deeply binding associations with time, the flow of life, and the passage from life to death,
among others. To live beside a river is to live in constant connection to and conversation with these
powerful and eternal elements.
Their compelling aesthetic appeal, she writes, derives from their continuing movement.
It's the motion that is compelling; it's as if the various circulatory systems in our bodies—blood, lymph,
mucus—all respond at a visceral level to this motion. (Swensen, LWR)
Rivers that flood, host drownings, and become polluted, yet sustain multiple life forms, attest to the dynamism and incommensurability of the ecosystem as a whole in contrast to human desires to control or understand through static categories.

Oswald is a long-term resident of the Devon area traversed by the Dart and often swims in the river. Her project developed from regional inhabitation combined with two years of interviews.  Dart was designed as a community project, as explained in the preface:
This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two
years I've been recording conversations with people who know the river. I've used these records as
life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters - linking their voices into a sound-map of
the river, a songline from the source to the sea.
Oswald derived a deep connection to terrain from years working as a gardener:
It was the foundation of a different way of perceiving things. Instead of looking at landscape in a
baffled, longing way, it was a release when I worked outside to feel that I was using it, part of it. I
became critical of any account that was not a working account. (Kellaway qtd. in Parham 121)
Of the voices Oswald selected for Dart
All are 'working' voices. This reflects my preoccupation with Work as a power-line for language. When
a sewage worker talks of liquid being 'clarified', when a fisheries officer talks of the water 'riffling' or a
stone-waller says 'scrudging', those words have never had such flare.
While Oswald forefronts such occupational jargon, as well as local dialect and varieties of phraseology, the composition of Dart involved a dual process of translation, as indicated in her in-process report:
I began to think it was people's living, unselfconscious voices, not their poems, that were most awake
to the river… my method is to tape a conversation with someone who works on the Dart, then go
home and write it down from memory. I then work with these two kinds of record - one precise, one
distorted by the mind - to generate the poem's language.
Marginal glosses introduce workers for whom the river is a resource, interspersed with local tales, as of Jan Coo, a swimmer who drowned and “haunts the Dart,” local sayings (“Dart Dart / Every year thou / Claimest a heart”), and ancient legends from times when the local oaks participated in sacred rituals. While each voice is distinct, Oswald writes that the marginal glosses “do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.”

Oswald tries to retain “the structure of oral poetry, which tends to be accretive rather than syntactic” and which employs “self-sufficient sentences that keep the poem open to the many centred energies of the natural world” (The Thunder Mutters x). Although most of its voices are human, Dart depicts these “many centered energies” as numerous species’ commingled niches, for example:
The spider of the rapids running over the repeated note
of disorder and rhythm in collision, the simulacrum fly
spinning a shelter of silk among the stones  (7)
This tercet sets a keynote for the volume. The assonance and alliteration provide continuity for the forward momentum, while the urgent tempo implies a simultaneous rush of water and thought and then modulates in the third line, where the breathy soft vowels accompany an action of shelter in a less volatile zone of the river. All are sentient forces, including the river itself. As pointed out by John Parham, the interplay between humans and the more-than-human world in Dart resembles the chaotic ecology suggested by Daniel Botkin, in which the “harmony of nature”
is by its very essence discordant, created from the simultaneous movements of many
tones, the combination of many processes flowing at the same time along various
scales, leading not to a simple melody but to a symphony at some times harsh and
at some times pleasing. (Botkin qtd in Parham 112)

Dart is an animated mural, saturated with a dense interleaving of prose descriptions, poetic passages, dialogues, quotations, shifts in perspective and notations of historical and legendry incidents tumbled into one network. The ongoing succession of voices of the living and dead and of the river itself, each telling a tale, and the often-urgent impetus of the text, its rhythms not impeded by end-stops (periods) simulate the tempo of a powerful river. Dart’s personas generally seem immersed in their milieu; the concrete sensory images, often inflected with emotional intensity, are among the features that pull readers toward immersion in the poem’s sonorous language.

In contrast to the tumult of voices and images in Dart, Gave is an evocation in one calm, reflective voice, elegantly reserved and elliptical. Its texture is filigree-like in balancing text and white space, voice and the silences between. Swensen was invited to do a residency at Pau by the association “Poésie dans les Chais” and its director, Didier Bourda. She started writing about the Gave de Pau, a river she enjoyed walking beside. Her book was developed during two on-site residencies. Among her sources, the archives of the département, the Pyrénées-Atlantique, housed in Pau, offered significant material. Textual research was enriched by interviews with local historians. While aware that history is always inflected through cultural and personal filters, Swensen found that the reports of living historians revivified the history they recounted. The archival research provided data for the lists of “Views of the Gave” by various artists, in which the varied viewing angles support Swensen’s contention that no one viewpoint is “the” correct one. These précis detail the choice of materials and subject matter; they invite readers into the scene through first person plural address, as if you were present, e.g. “we are standing far off, up on a hillside… (43). The Mediathèque de Pau’s digital archive contains hundreds of postcards, “and they all make it quite clear… that Pau does not exist without its river…(49). These passages play counterpoint to the sparse, sometimes ethereal texture of the poetic sections.  

In researching and writing about Gave as an “outsider,” Swensen could be considered a bystander witness. In an interview, she calls the witness role “a type of viewing that’s both inside and out of the event, that brings to the viewing the capacity for human emotion, for compassion, but holds it openly, evenly” (Anderson, Rumpus interview). Swensen further defines the witness role “as the act of being present to something, whether it’s an event, a situation, a person, a view.” She notes that “Walking enacts a particularly enabling witness in that …it fixes the event in a way that avoids stasis, a way that anchors something without stopping it… To witness is to walk out of the self, it is to present the self as an opened space, a space that, in turn, invites occupation, occupation by the witnessed. The witness harbors…”  (Walk v). To hold a view open would allow an impression to register without superimposing personal judgments. Yet the process of articulating such an impression cannot avoid some degree of interpretation. Swensen notes that “It’s impossible for one person to present another’s voice unaltered” (55).  Poetry, though, can approach the fullness of human truth through “bringing language as art into the heart of the language of information” (NSN 55).

Some of Swensen’s discussion of documentary poetry in Noise that Stays Noise (NSN) seems to apply to her own research-based poetry, as Lynn Keller suggests. First is the issue of “how to reconcile the language of information with the language of art,” the latter linked to “poeticity: the unquantifiable qualities of sound relationship, word associations, and innate rhythms.” Swensen maintains that Americans associate truth with “transparency or ready accessibility.” Because poetry creates its own internally-consistent truth-value and need not be a microcosm of the “the world at large,” “documentary poetry has a paradox at its core.” If a writer can “bring language as art” “into the heart of language as information,” this will create a vibrant tension “by positing an incommensurability at the center of the work, an irritant that demands attention and refuses complacency.” “Poetry can also attain a unique relationship to truth, because it implicitly acknowledges and interrogates the limitations of language. The truth of the human situation can’t fit into language…because human truth surpasses fact.” To arrive at such a full vision, the “fully complex version must incite the imagination of the reader, must get the reader… into a responsive engagement with” facts (NSN 53-58 passim).

Her chosen method for such a merger of “informational art” in Gave is an alternation of informative prose with lineated “poetic” pages. Swensen establishes the verisimilitude that research-based poetry demands in the date-ordered historical sections delineating floods, bridges and other crossings and in the précis of artists’ renderings of the river. These passages contrast to poetic passages where, as Lynn Keller notes about Swensen’s work, “syntax fades into mystery or is interrupted” (“Truths” 284).  The poetic passages allow an extension beyond the factual to explore the domains where “human truth surpasses fact” – the range of “poeticity.” Writers can “use poeticity to slow down our assimilation of language, to encourage us to take detours, to ponder alternatives” (Swensen, NSN, passim). As a result of this structure, the historical précis preserve their facticity, while a compelling indeterminacy hovers around the edges, providing opportunities for readers to expand the poem’s significance through their extensional reflections.

Where most Dart personas interact directly with river-water, the persona in Gave is usually located alongside the river. Here, the embodied grounding derives from the persona’s movement of walking near and with the river. Swensen relates her own walking praxis to her writing: “My focus is on the rhythmic relationship between body and ground and the visual relationships among the elements of the always-changing scene” (Anderson). This triangulation between body-ground and visual relationships may provide an elusive network of cohesion beneath syntax that often fragments from apparent coherence. Research in developmental psychology suggests that all language reception and production is deeply connected with walking rhythms (Walle). Writing closely correlated with walking might allow one to elicit a body-brain state that predates much cultural learning to arrive at fresher impressions of one’s surroundings. The uncluttered language of Gave’s poetic passages suggests such a directness of perception: the poem pierces to the elements of water, sun, and wind and their visible and considered interactions, often without an overlay of figurative language. In any case, the triangulation highlights Swensen’s ongoing engagement with the visual and aesthetic components of perception.

The visual system is not a passive receiver of impressions like a camera lens but rather an active interpretive system. A simple act of identifying something requires extensive neural convergence and synthesis. More than half the neural connections involved in an act of seeing are downstream, from other brain areas, rather than upstream, from impressions of the external world. As these currents synthesize, their activity relates the new impression to the organism’s prior experience and interprets it in light of the immediate situation. The emergent interpretation is context-sensitive. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio indicates the reciprocity involved in an act of perception: “Perceiving the environment, then, is not just a matter of having the brain receive direct signals from a given stimulus, let alone receive direct pictures. The organism actively modifies itself such that the interfacing can take place optimally” (225). This view of visual activity is reflected in a passage from Gave, which queries the relative speed in several transecting movements, on different scales.
You walk alongside the river. No; you walk always faster? And does
that mean each molecule of water? Or does a body of water form internal
bodies, pockets that move in counterpoint, in back-beat, in eddies? Or …
 ….          What stays? I watch a large branch being carried down by the
river, and then a kayaker, moving faster, then turn to walk back upstream
like I’m walking into the arms of some thing.  (19)
The multiple rhythms suggest a dynamic perceptual field, moving water’s complexity paired with the persona’s changing tempo, while the questions incite cognitive leaps beyond the visible. “You” are invited to entertain those questions while locating yourself liminally in a parallel context. The expression in the final line exemplifies the reciprocity of vision as the persona  joins with the field of perception. This moment exemplifies what physicist Karen Barad calls “Meeting the Universe Halfway” in the book of that title. An attentive reader can partake of this attentive openness.

VOICING A RIVER
Gave’s first “poetics” page begins with the words:
no river rivers / no river knows
                                          of rivers after / on others wander
Already “river” has become a verb and an agent that can “know.”  Although it appears here in a construct of negation, on the following page it becomes “no river/ unseen” (10), though later, we hear there are parts of rivers that “we never see” (58). The shifting ambiguity correlates with the flux of water. This first poem quietly introduces the text’s main foci: the parallel movements of walking and rivering: “on walking/ on river;” the interactions of river and sun, which slips into the tale as “a bit/ of a sun thing/ a thing of the sun”; and a sketch of activity on the banks, which shape the river in a shifting way, since rivers are often “over-reaching” (9). “Thing,” the most generalized word for a concrete item – almost a linguistic blank - cannot help but raise the question, what kind of thing? Any readerly expectation for ensuing clarification will be continually deferred, as indeterminacy is a defining feature of the book.   

What happens to language when it rivers? There is a hint on the first page, with the open “o” of “overflowing” echoed for two lines in “flower,”  “towered,” and “tower,” like circular dents from a stone skipping in water. These echoes cleverly take the reader out of the water, demonstrating that “A river is always more than its water” (26). Later we hear that over eons the river has shifted its course; it now appears as “a river ungainly yet/ silvered…” The fluidity of water emerges through shifting elemental images, revisited in variants, along with reminders that  the same spot in the river is never the same, as “a river slips…(58), and that layers of river move relative to each other, each layer affecting the others, as do the lines of the poem.  The river is shown in interaction with the surrounding elements of sun; wind; and activity of perceiver. Repetition of words and phrases, with variation, connects to the riverine theme:
all repetition is in some part spell
as all water repeats itself   (18).
The unembellished language, large proportion of white space, and omissions of punctuation produce an incantatory tone, while the ongoing questioning alerts readers to their responsibility in seeking a syncretic meaning reverberating among the text’s sparse words.

Most of the lineated “poetic pages” have left and right sections with the lines staggered between sides. The majority of right hand line sections are left-aligned, but at varied distances from the left section. On a few pages, the text meanders irregularly. As a result of these variations, the middle white space fluctuates in size and shape, as a river’s width fluctuates, both geographically and temporally. Although no simple analogy seems applicable, this bit of unpredictability suggests the dynamic parameters of a fluid medium. Writing about Mallarme’s Un coup de des, Swensen claims: “White space becomes the silent medium that connects and supports the more volatile, vulnerable tissue of language, even as it also becomes the absence within the sign system that connects the work to the reading body…” (NSN 14). These openings in the text provide spaces of indeterminacy that allow readers to interpolate from their own experiential base and actively construct connections. Complete certainty can cause a “suppression of imagination,” writes Swensen. The unquantifiable qualities of “poeticity” resist such closure: they slow the reading speed and reduce decipherability but provide more opportunity for the reader’s imaginative interjections (Swensen NSN 7).

One method Swensen adopts from documentary poetics is threading: “elements or details that reach back to other places- not long enough or close enough to be considered repetitions but small details that echo and haunt and set up a system of overtones” (NSN 61). The snapshot images are not accretive but reflect recursively on prior statements as well as those to come, so they split reader’s attention toward echoes of prior images that they seem to reactivate. This technique seems well aligned to a watery theme: a river keeps moving, but the water is still there, in front of you. One thread that appears intermittently in Gave is a contrast between the river’s dynamism and a human’s attempt to measure it or find its center: “a person with a compass” can be “tracing perfect circles”; yet the river has changed its flow pattern and remains “itinerant, capricious,” its “more localized changeability” demonstrating a “reckless disregard for geography, cartography, and all other attempts at order” (17). Time, too, disrupts attempts at facile comprehension:  side by side with the literal history, Gave introduces a kind of ghosting where the former course of the river tugs the present course toward it in an unseen dimension. This abstract measuring desire contrasts to literal measuring in Dart by the water treatment inspector; he feels limited in his attempt to control the water’s quality through quantified measures.

A final example of threading in Gave is the set of sun-water interactions; they neither repeat nor accrete into a more complete image, but permeate the text like echoes from an unidentified source; “overtones” is a good analogy. Hints such as  “the way it moved in the sun/ and the way the sun moved it” (17) weave through the text in evocative language that doesn’t yield a fully developed image but suggests a complex relationship that remains inconclusive at the books’ conclusion. There is relative visual cohesion on the next to last page because the lines are not split. Yet the partial anaphora of “or” challenges any fixity of view. The sun-river interaction, implies the text, exceeds what we can perceive:
There is only one river and it is in the sun.
Or sunlight stands upon the river
or moves across it like a lathe. ….
or we could say
there is only one sun      and the river within …
Is the sun in the river, as reflection, or the river in the sun – its domain of influence? Such open-ended questions reverberate through and beyond the poem’s spare language. The final page ends with a little-considered fact, followed by an extraordinary image that encapsulates the resonant indeterminacy of the book as a whole:
most rivers/ are not actually flowing, but falling

the length of themselves/ times the sun” (58).
…………
Early in Dart, an otter offers a view of the balance of the wild and “civilized” on the river’s perimeter:
everyone converges on bridges, bank holidays it fills up with
cars, people set up tables in the reeds, but a mile either side
you’re back into wilderness” (6).
This view establishes an orientation to the terrain. Unlike Gave, the outer frame of Dart follows the river’s geographical parameters from source to sea. This narrative order provides a provisional sense of cohesion, which is reinforced by the partially repeated questions at beginning and end. “Who’s this moving alive over the moor?” begins the poem and initiates an intermittent dialog between an animate river and its visitors. The walker, “an old man seeking and finding a difficulty,” expects to find his way by map. Meanwhile the river, “trying to summon itself by speaking,” is “working/ into the drift of his thinking, wanting his heart” (1). Personified from the outset as a far-from-innocuous character, the river critiques human self-preoccupation:
listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking
rustling and jingling his keys
at the centre of his own noise,
clomping the silence in pieces….
Here is a human viewed from “outside” as an interloper, thrusting his artificial noises over the  flow sounds. The irony of the discordant purposes is brief: the man finds a rapport with the water’s liveliness as he discovers the river
in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river/
one step-width water/ of linked stones /trills in the stones/
glides in the trills/ eels in the glides
This set of nested containers, including three sequential choriambs enfolded within the emerging river, offers a sense of living processes interleaved. The map-holder is a stand-in for our attempts at controlling or sorting things out literality; his engagement in the vital activity of the river acts as an invitation to approach the text with a more open mindset. In an ongoing series of shifts, the walker’s confidence in the map “folded in my mack pocket” fades before his growing awareness of vulnerability as night approaches. Such brief snapshots of a person’s internal shifts concomitant with the river’s activity enrich the narrative blend.

Narrative cohesion is challenged throughout the poem, for example by the incompleteness of many of the tales and the ongoing disruptions of linear temporal sequence.  Historical events are looped through and not necessarily dated. Past legends continue to circulate, and ghosts lurk in the river’s depths: for example, a struggling swimmer is accompanied by ghosts of long-past warriors who drowned here (23). Many of the personas are in the river, or drawing water or fish from it. Aware of its passengers, the river seems poised to fold them into its own being, to out-voice them and let them slide under its flow. A confident canoeist who falls into the rapids has voice as well as body submerged under the riverflow’s unique voice:
come warmeth, I can outcanoevre you
into the smallest small where it moils up
and masses under the sloosh gates, put your head
The river’s voice, its “jabber of pidgin-river,” is ambiguous and multi-valent: the Dart absorbs, even seems to desire, dead bodies, yet also provides water and sustenance to other beings.

In addition to numerous personas telling of their individual activities in local dialect or  occupational jargon, there is an occasional anonymous vocalizing presence. The water treatment manager justifies his decisions in making potable water to an anonymous other voice: “I do my best. …, it’s a lot for one man to carry on his shoulders.” Finally, he admits “if there’s too much, I waste it off down the storm flow, it’s not my problem” (26). Both authors chose not to be didactic in their ecological concern, but enfold testaments to how individual actions impinge on communities. Other voices in Dart reveal the far-reaching connections of the local, in terms of migration, travel, and commerce. Occasionally, there are deep-breath pauses to appreciate aesthetics, as when a fisherman says of salmon:  “it takes your breath away, generations of them inscribed into this river.” Too, Dart has some full-stop moments: a blank half-page after an extended description of a drowning, ending with “and the silence pouring into what’s left maybe eighty/ seconds” (21). Death is a full-stop even when, like Oswald, one considers it generative of new life. 

The plethora of individual voices recede at the end before a novel “who”:  
who's this moving in the dark? Me.
This is me, anonymous, water's soliloquy,
all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,
whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,
driving my many selves from cave to cave . . .
This dynamic, composite presence, the shape-shifter Proteus, encompasses all the voices of the poem not as a blend, but as many strands intersecting: not “we,” but “many selves,” richly inflected with multiple sonorities, epochs, and worldviews. Like Proteus, the river remains unfathomable; it retains the “inexplicable knot of the river’s body.” The repetition of “Who…?” at the end offers syntactic balance. However, the whole poem-panorama is left inconclusive by ending with ellipses. We infer that the river flows on, Oswald implicitly sharing Swensen’s perception that “a river doesn’t end/ in the sea” (20). The river encompasses all its multi-species histories within its four-dimensional body. It flows, or falls, and stays.

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES
While the mixture of narrative and lyric elements found in both texts no longer seems radical, it is worth exploring how this enables the authors’ purposes. I discussed above how Swensen challenges facile linear ordering. She offers a more complex view of connectivity in one example where the narrative skips across time periods and modalities and links visual art to current practical necessities.

The centrality of walking to Swensen’s writing praxis implies that a primary viewing position for the poetic pages is the bank of the river. Yet one passage varies from that pattern:
Or you can view it from the middle, on one of those lazy days when the river
runs broad and low across the plain between the mountains and Orthez.
The water is so clear that you can see to the bottom, down to the stones
that built all these houses and roads, and in the middle of the river, a fisherman—
it’s the opening day of the season—the water coming just up to his
knees—casting long and slow downstream. (51)
This novel view, described in the present tense, turns out to be a postcard image from 1929, “Where to Find Salmon in the Gave de Pau, by Olivier Dunouau.” Then the text skips to its present, linking the historical fish to the contemporary ones who need to maneuver around a dam. On the following page, the persona watching the fisherman sees a dead fish and wonders “what it died of.” This indirect suggestion that the river might be polluted is made explicit on the following page, which attributes the increased pollution to population pressure. “Fish” acts as a pivot, a node in a multi-dimensional network allowing perspectival shifts between multiple contexts and time periods. This passage too employs threading in the reiterated mention of the “stones that built all those houses and roads,” a statement that indicates the local inhabitants’ many debts to the river.

John Parham considers a narrative/ lyric mix an asset for bringing a living, sentient ecosystem into focus. He suggests that “an intermixture of narrative and lyric forms offers a potentially fertile model for an alternative ecopoetics: one where phenomenological modes of writing, able to generate a deep ecological regard for other species, and to which lyric poetry seems well suited, might combine with a narrative mode that seeks to unravel the complex interrelationship of human with nonhuman.” He takes his definition of phenomenological modes of writing from Jonathan Bate’s claim that “the immediacy of the poetic image, as rendered in sound… has the capacity to recreate what might be called the “phenomenological moment” …the moment at which direct encounter with nature impacts upon human consciousness.” By this means, Parham claims, “poetic expression can circumvent layers of culturally mediated meaning” (116).

Oswald shares this aim in wanting to create “a kind of porousness or sorcery that brings living things unmediated into the text” (The Thunder Mutters x). As I hope this essay demonstrates, to provide readers with the full impact of a direct impression requires sophisticated linguistic labor. Both authors push language beyond customary formulations toward what could be called linguistic overflow.

LINGUISTIC OVERFLOW  
Swensen reiterates the Gave’s capacity for overflowing its boundaries:    
a river by nature overflows/ its terms (29)
And so the river overflowed. In fact, the history of the region is a history
of its floods  (31)
This matter-of-fact statement is followed by four pages of historical précis regarding specific floods and their damages. The river can’t be delimited. It overflows its banks, occasionally changes its course, and “doesn’t end/ in the sea” (20); by implication, the idea of ending is a human-imposed boundary on an ongoing process. Instead, A river “is its destination” (54). 

Overflow is a theme within the poem’s syntax, as well. The poetic sections reverberate with a sense of order that periodically exceeds its limits, as the measured phrases are interrupted or break into fragments like water splatters. While Gave has a strong focus on the visual and aesthetic, Swensen is equally concerned with  sonority. She claims that a full saturation of both visual and verbal in poetry will incite a non-habituated response, a new syncretic view:
poetry that works to maximize these two modes can deliver an experience that is 100
percent aural and 100 percent visual, which results in an overload, an overflow, which
spills into another zone of perception…”  (NSN 32). 
Here is one subtle example of how the poem can provide  “overflow” through multi-sensory interjections:
a river is a slippage
                                                 is its business
                                                                                    river heading elsewhere
with a candle  (54)
In a passage of indefinite images and actions, held together through the mesmerizing sound of assonance and alliteration, the sudden appearance of a candle pops out as a non-sequitur. Novelty alerts the senses to attend. There is at least a momentary break in reading tempo to reconsider the passage’s significance. The following page connects lit candles with pilgrims at Lourdes, 30 miles upstream, and describes their historical connection to Pau. Although in this case the cumulative references are proximal, there is still a demand for active participation by readers, in order to synthesize cognitive connections across page boundaries and sensory modalities.

Oswald expresses a parallel engagement with pushing language to limits where it can inculcate newness: “I’m interested in how many layers you can excavate in personality,” she says.
At the top it’s all quite named. But you go down through the animal and the vegetable and then you
get to the mineral. At that level of concentration you can respond to the non-human by half turning
into it. Poetry is not about language but about what happens when language gets impossible.”  (Armitstead interview)
This impulse to blend one’s embodied cognition with other life forms invites the kind of attentive, witness attitude described by Swensen: an openness to receiving impressions beyond pre-existing categories. Then comes the sorcery of poetics. Dart and Gave require very different negotiations for full appreciation. Yet both elicit fresh impressions in alert readers through their linguistic intensity. Dart approximates sensory overload from its density of unique images and tales, while Gave instigates overload through surprise, paradox, and other techniques that disrupt habitual mentation.

However deeply probed, rivers retain indeterminate elements on various scales and registers, both practical and metaphoric. Even without the poets’ reminders of ecological concerns, this fact points us toward the incommensurability of an ecosystem that always exceeds human views. In or out of the river, we pass through time along with other vulnerable life-forms. These books help us attend more fully to the vitality that immerses us. They invite us to look anew at the world we thought we knew, approaching its dynamism where “new water keeps flowing through each single strand of water” (Theodore Schwenke qtd. in Oswald, Dart 20).
……………




Works Cited

Anderson, Maria. “The Rumpus Interview with Cole Swensen.  May 9th, 2016. <https://therumpus.net/2016/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-cole-swensen/>
Armitstead, Claire “Alice Oswald”  <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/alice-oswald-interview-falling-awake>
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994.
Keller, Lynn. “Truths Surpassing Fact: Cole Swensen’s Research- Based Poetics.” in Sewell, Lisa and Kazim Ali. North American Women Poets in the 21st Century. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP. 267-291.
-       “Singing Spaces: Fractal Geometries in Cole Swensen’s Oh.” Journal of Modern Literature 31.1 (2007): 136-160.
Oswald, Alice. Dart. London: Faber& Faber, 2002.
-       The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
Parham, John. “’Two-Ply’: Discordant Nature and English Landscape in Alice Oswald’s Dart.”
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 64; April 2012. 111-129.
Swensen, Cole.  Gave. Oakland, CA: Omnidawn, 2017.
-       Noise That Stays Noise: Essays. Ann Arbor: U Michigan Press, 2011. (NSN)
-       “Living with the River.” conference presentation.  (LWR)
-       “On Walking On.” Conjunctions, No. 63, (2014).  95-101. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/24517848>.
-       Walk. Essay Press 2015. https://issuu.com/essaypress/docs/swensenep_pages.
Walle, Eric A. "Infant Social Development across the Transition from Crawling to Walking.” Front Psychology 2016; 7: 960.

Donald Revell

review

Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe: The Poetry of Toby Martinez de las Rivas

The pastoral has surely traveled a great distance from its name. Go and find me a true shepherd anywhere in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”; and there is scarcely a sheepcote noticed anywhere in Geoffrey Hill’s searing, exquisitely tender reproaches. And yet pastoral purposes have (almost) never faltered. The pastoral is a projection beyond masquerade. It is a convention scorching conventions. It must have been the “dictionary” Samuel Johnson who condemned “Lycidas” as “disgusting”; the poet would have honored Milton’s visionary extremism. Johnson must somehow have lost the name of action by insisting upon a name and so, unwittingly, kept company with just those tyrannies the pastoral was first, so long ago in Sicily, imagined to reprove.

The pastoral is ever—and especially now that the planet more and more ferociously shuns us and our devices and designs—a rusticated serenity. And how serenity rages! It rages against the ignorant vendettas that pretend to govern us. It rages against fictions of progress that lead precisely nowhere, yet always in increasingly vicious circles. It praises too. It praises the human instinct towards proper station and proper regard. It praises the elements and seasons whose limits free the imagination to envision Beauty as the efflorescence of the Good. Most importantly of all, it praises the supernatural foundation of the Good: a recurring, persistent and ever green vertu.

Vertu was Chaucer’s central mystery, and it is with notice of the lamentable debasement of that mystery that the pastoral, in English, began: in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, where Colin Clout, Spenser’s pattern of himself, mourned for “The God of shepheards” (i.e. Chaucer) and for the dispossession of vertu. From Colin’s moment to our own, it is with the strange, exilic fortunes of vertu that the pastoral has concerned itself. From Colin’s moment to our own, poems written in the true pastoral mode (which admits of no courtesies but courage) have raged at the edge of our hearing and of the critics’ reach from their several Arcadias, raising the banners of vertu above the borderlands. Just now, the pastoral seems most safely and surely entrusted to a younger British poet—Toby Martinez de las Rivas. In his two published collections—Terror (2014) and Black Sun (2018)—de las Rivas claims kin with those poets whose rusticated witness against the beast (we and all our weakling accommodations are the beast) constitute the pastoral tradition, furthering the energies of that tradition into our present idiom and peril.

Nearly every poem by de las Rivas is an adventure of faith, a leap from the margin into spacious declaration. And the rhythm of his declarations amplifies the pastoral spaces and moments of each poem. History accompanies the creaturely; doctrine glistens upon the branch of a tree. Here is the opening of “Crede”:

               Judas as a secret Messiah forgoing the garden of the nihilists for the branch of the tree.
               The body as miniaturized image of the state, inviolate.
               Tyler’s vision of the commons, burned before the king at Smithfield, to his satisfaction.
               On the road to Northumberland, John Ball’s envois, little admonishments in code.
               I have pled I might not always be a shaking reed.

The suicide of Judas rebukes the canons and makes a second crucifix of the hanging tree. Always, if we consider rightly (si recte calculum ponas, as Petronius put it) the pastoral voice, in exilic secrecy, seconds Messiah. And de las Rivas moves on from the unacknowledged martyrdom of Iscariot to the martyrs of the Peasant Revolt in the time of Richard II—Chaucer’s time. Wat Tyler (the name of action) and John Ball (the faith of action) died into a bewildernessed commons from which wild ground they continue to admonish the powers of this world. And, as de las Rivas beautifully avers, also to admonish the poet now, even as he prays for the strength to keep faith with the martyrs and not to remain “a shaking reed”. Suitably chastened, “Crede” goes on to take up the pastoral task in explicit terms and, in crisis, with a renewed urgency.

               The bleat, desperate.
               Tumbled stells, the razed sheepfold that is our northern image of the body of Christ.
               One bitter season before two
               sweet.
               Fluorspar, correlative to purging fire.
               Furthermore, bright fields of rape, the trampled nests above the thistleheads, alleluia.

The hungry sheep look up and are set ablaze. But the fires are purgative and not annihilating. Bitterness is somehow redoubled in sweetness. It is as though, for de las Rivas, the pastoral now serves in itself as a redemptive form of memory and restored attentiveness. The visionary commons flower into “bright fields”. The “trampled nests” arise in praise of resurrection. The martyrs in “Crede”, both the despised and the acknowledged, are amplified and then justified here.

There is an Ur-pastoral, and de las Rivas carries it forward as well. The foundational songs of Syracusan Theocritus and Bion had, albeit unknowingly, antecedents in the Psalms. Before pastoral poets ever adopted “the homely slighted shepherd’s trade”, there was David. In “Shiggaion”, de las Rivas amplifies the Shiggaion of David, Psalm 7, a frantic lament that takes its title from the Hebrew “shagah”, meaning “to transgress morally” and, by extension, “to reel about wildly.” In the Psalm, it is a stabbing sense of universal iniquity that leads David to pray for extinction: “Let the enemy persecute my soul and take it; yea, let him tread down my life upon the earth, and lay mine honor in the dust.” In de las Rivas’ amplification, iniquity is imaged out of allegory as “ignorance”, as “blight”, as “black stinking potatoes”. And the contemporary psalmist imagines himself likewise driven to the brink.

               another day rising, a man teetering
                   on the edge of a desk on tiptoes, feet
               scrabbling, his neck in a noose,
                   such is thy part, crowned wyth reytes,

               bere mee to the leatherall tyde, bear
                   me, if you can and if he back straight
               as a buttercup stalk permits you, if
                   it is allowed & approved by communal

               delete all reference to such, sinful,
                   man is alone, so scuttle back & forth
               across my patriotic Brunel Clifton
                   bridge of a riveted back, the rest sold,

               here in the sink of my, my stinking
                   vulgate body.

Like Spenser, de las Rivas roves throughout his entire English, finding only, to his horror, iniquitous roots struck deep into a “stinking/vulgate body.” The psalmist’s death-wish signals futurity as a poet “teetering…in a noose”. And yet, in the pastoral, brinksmanship becomes an Arcady and not an end. David makes a turn and an outcry, each of which signals the farther transgressions, i.e. Faith and Repair. “My defense is of God, which saveth the upright heart.” For de las Rivas, faith takes the form of creation itself, natur naturans, and repair the ruin of human grammars on behalf of God’s original and orginating impropriety:

                        Does the goshawk, its
                   Wingtip pivoting around the inward

               arc of its turning circle as the finch
                    break cover from beneath the tarred
               bird table, authentic rural design,
                    the serried fir trees as dead in the land

               as their tenders care a shite for the
                    for the proper grammar? It is grammar,
               the purity of design, the framework
                    shaking, never collapsing until finally

               permitted to do so.

At the brink of extinction, the pastoral discovers its wild permissions: permission to survive; permission to gather a new grammar from the air, a hunting grammar whose self-evident authenticity, as of a “wingtip pivoting”, is, in each and every particular, a song of praise. And praise, in despite of iniquity, is the triumph of vertu and its timeless vindications.

“Crede” and “Shiggaion” both appear in de las Rivas’ debut collection, Terror. The poems of his second book, Black Sun, continue his pastoral projections, but with this difference: having voiced his sorrowing faith and his rage at iniquity, de las Rivas now mounts a steadfast watch. There is, after all, such a thing as pastoral patience. Milton’s shepherd took note of, and courage from a sunset. The attentions of patience are thus rewarded now and again, with new pleasures and new purposes.  A gorgeous instance of this is “Hunting Kestrel, Danebury”, here quoted in full,

               Here is the ghost of a child I once knew
               still playing among the withering harebells
               & the gorgeous moue of the fairy flax.
               I look beyond his bare golden head
               to the kestrel that quarters the ramparts
               & see a semblance of absolute love,
               absolute mercy—at least a baffling, wild
               joy—that, at least—in the watchfully poised
               javelin of the head, the rapidity
               of her stoop & strike, her failure, her re-
               lofting, the gaze that hungers into the spindle
               without end: whose flowers are blood red,
               whose roots dive down among the lost chieftains.
               A lonely god waits for us in the earth.

Again, a new and hunting grammar is gathered from the air. But here it is a grammar beyond cases and tenses, a grammar of endlessness and continuity, prompted by mercy and sustained by joy. The kestrel’s stoop strikes down not only into prey but into the bloodline maintaining all of creation. Air and earth conjoin in a simultaneous act of kinetic worship; the pastoral action models the patience of “lost chieftains” and of their “lonely god”. As did Hopkins before him, de las Rivas images in a hunting bird the durable patience and perdurable joy of reproof. Time itself reproves the follies of inattention. In the pastoral, memory schools patience and patience soars, ready to strike. Remember Milton’s “two-handed engine”. Black Sun clearly remembers, and these newer poems convert both sorrow and rage into acuity. With one beautiful participle—“relofting”—de las Rivas restores the pastoral to its tireless vigilance and certain reward.

One of the qualities I admire most in these poems is the way in which acuity (and what is sometimes a genuine knife’s edge of acuity) never mars, never misdirects filial piety or fierce compassion. It as though critical insight itself were a feature of love. And of course it is, and of course this is the very heart of the pastoral: to outrage lovingly; to reprove tearfully; to mend, in the accents of the wilderness, the idiom of a beloved civitas. In his poem “England” (how Blake would have approved so brash a title!), de las Rivas takes his stand upon the selvage of home, there to reprove the present day in the name of eternity.

               I have come to stand at your border
               in the darkness where invisible things suffer
               & the golden windows of the last estate
               cast proprietary glances on the earth.
               Where the bailiff parks up with his sandwich
               and the burnt-out car is mercifully at rest.
               Hermosa, let me try a final
               octave turning south into a wind that stubbornly
               flitters through torn pennants of sacking,
               purrs in the steel tubes of the gate;
               that drives each ponderous & docile cloud
               slowly out across the State that is only
               an image of the body inviolate,
               the nation that extends through all time & space.

The nation, which is eternal, reproves the rubbish of the temporal State. Margins assert the primacy and right of the invisible over the false, tatterdemalion claims of materiality. And so it is that the final, self-declared octave of the poem conjures the image of a spiritual England---the England of Spenser and Blake and of Palmer’s golden landscapes—over which “ponderous & docile” clouds unfold the extensive vertu of “all time & space.” Toby Martinez de las Rivas keeps good company, and in so doing, keeps faith with the pastoral’s eternal moment and motives.

Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry and six volumes of translation from the French, including works by Apollinaire, Laforgue, Rimbaud and Verlaine. A former Fellow of the Ingram-Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations, he has also been twice awarded fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Having taught at the universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, he is currently Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Elisa Jensen

artwork

Raven in Fog

Swan Road

Night Raven

Elisa Jensen lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Academy Museum, The American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Revson Foundation.

She has shown extensively in New York and in Europe and her work has been featured in Whitehot Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artcritical.com, The New York Sun, and the New York Daily News. She currently teaches at the New York Studio School and Pratt Institute. More about her work can be found here: www.elisajensen.com

t.pleman

artwork

Climbing Out of Her Own Cockpit

Painting after Oswald’s SWAN.

t.pleman, originally from California, now lives in Mississippi where she writes, draws, paints, and shoots photos using both a camera and her phone-camera. She says she works emotionally and empathetically, gazing at and rendering the subtleties of human movement, what she calls the "motion of emotion." Her work draws from her love of literature, film, poetry, music, animals, nature, words, shapes, colors, and the human body.

Katrina Roberts

visual erasures

Fox

Body

Full Moon

Katrina Roberts is author of four books and a chapbook of poems, as well as editor of an anthology. Her manuscript Likeness was a finalist for the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2019. Her poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. Her graphic poetry (nominated for a Pushcart prize, and named finalist for the New Alchemy Award) and visual reviews, appear in journals including Poetry Northwest, Thrush Poetry, Indianapolis Review, Permafrost, American Journal of Poetry, BOMB, The Ilanot Review, Root & Star, The Journal, and in anthologies including: Lilac City Fairy Tales Vol IV; and Evergreen: Fairy Tales, Essays, and Fables from the Dark Northwest. She teaches, and curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College, and co-runs the Walla Walla Distilling Company. (www.katrinaroberts.net)

Cal Wenby

asemic drawing

Owl Light

asemic drawing after Alice Oswald

Cal Wenby is a poet, artist and photographer living in the U.K. Most recently, he has had work published in The Café Review, Utsanga, Marsh Flower Gallery, Sonic Boom, Attic Zine, X-Peri, Queerly, Hidden Noise and Mad Swirl.

Antje Derks

needle felting

Grey Wethers Standing Stone Circle

Felted landscape of Dartmoor, using native British wool, including found wool gathered on hikes of Dartmoor.

Grimspound

The wide grassy path that leads to the top of Bellever Tor, a granite tor 443 meters high. Cists, stone rows, and an ancient trackway dot the surrounding landscape.

Bellever Tor

After snowfall this winter, near Grimspound- a Bronze Age settlement. Note how the sheep blend in but for the red marks on their backs to show they’ve been tupped (are in lamb).

Small Copse Near Buckland Beacon

A small copse near Buckland Beacon, another granite tor overlooking the Dart valley. "Beacons" were places where ancient and pre-technology man lit "signal" fires.

Antje Derks is a fibre artist, writer and teacher of English. She lives in South Devon, close to Dartmoor. In her spare time, she hikes the moor looking for shed sheep’s wool along with plants, bark and other foliage to turn into dye. The wool is washed, carded and hand dyed and incorporated into her Dartmoor landscapes.

Marcus Good

images

Scorehill Stone Circle

Hingston Hill Cairn Circle and Stone Row

Merrivale Stone Row

Marcus Good lives and works in Bristol, England, and is a keen visitor and photographer of UK prehistoric sites. He is particularly interested in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.

Tom Pickard

3 images

Hartside Cafe in a Helm Wind

The Helm Wind is a north-easterly "named Wind" in England that scours the southwest slopes of Cumbria's Cross Fell.

Helm Wind over Hartside

While Mr Pickard was cowering behind a draughty limestone dyke on Blackfell, a ‘dandy longlegs’ clung to his journal, sheltering from a 40mph wind.

Tom Pickard’s Fiends Fell is published by Flood Editions. His Winter Migrants was published by Carcanet. He is currently working on an extended Fiends Fell and on a stage version of Ballad of Jamie Allan.

Emily Wilson

drawing

Bloodroot Botanical

Sanguinaria canadensis - Bloodroot, found and drawn in Iowa

Emily Wilson is the author of three books of poems, The Keep (2001), Micrographia (2009), and The Great Medieval Yellows (2015). She lives and works (and botanizes) in Iowa City, Iowa.

John Drever

audio file

Listening In on a Dawn Springtime Walk by the River Dart with John Levack Drever and Alice Oswald

C. 5am, 6th April 2012, Ashprington, Devon. Recorded by Drever.

Transcript:

[Inaudible for about two minutes. Leaves and branches crackling.]

AO: …It is very interesting what you were saying about those recordings [the recitation of Memorial for CD] lacking in ambient noise, it makes it very dead, doesn’t it?

JLD: Well, I’m kind of a believer in that although background ambience can be silent, it still actually signifies a lot.

AO: Yes, yes. The clock ticking and we always go mad…

JLD: I guess it makes the voice massive and it is also so close-miked.

AO: I suppose it’s meant to sound [as if] it’s in your head.

JLD: Were you in a kind of booth when you...?

AO: He let me do it all in one go. I hate that thing of stopping and starting.

JLD: That’s what I was going to ask, the listener will never really know, but you assume that there were multiple takes, kind of Glenn Gould style.

AO: Whenever there was a turn of the page, I just made a long pause, which they edited out.

JLD: You didn’t listen back and agonize over one word here and there that sounded a bit odd, not that is does?

AO: No, I didn’t listen. When I did Dart they made me go back and forward.

JLD: I liked it. Was there a director, editor?

AO: Yes, they’re editors, not directors. Then you have to bow down...

JLD: Then how else do you do it, though, unless it’s a live performance?

AO: Yes, I did it live at the South Bank and I much rather they recorded that.

JLD: Memorial?

AO: Yes, because when you are speaking to an audience, it has meaning in it.

JLD: It is the same as music, there is a performance practice.

AO: Yes, does recorded music sounds very different?

JLD: There was this kind of historical moment when performers like Glenn Gould… one of the first solo performers to get obsessed with the recording studio, actually gave up doing live performances in front of an audience.

AO: Really? To me that’s all about striving for some perfection that shouldn’t really exist.

JLD: Yeah. Weirdly, he used massive amounts of edits. And he kind of shunned the audience. But weirdly, in the recordings you still hear him singing away to himself. When he’s playing. He’s a terrible [singer]...he’s playing Goldberg Variations but going [approximates Glenn Gould singing along]. So that survives. It sounds odd. It’s kind of a trademark.

AO: I started writing a novel. I got really interested in this case in America. Where someone committed suicide, and the family went to court because they said that the cause had been listening to pop music.

JLD: Eh? Marilyn Manson or something.

AO: It was saying that the record, when you played it backwards, it was saying “do it, do it, do it.” And there was this big case. [Someone] played another of his songs backward and it said something like [inaudible]. And I just got really interested in the idea of a court case based on recorded sound. And the idea of…

JLD: Audio forensics…

AO: … recording angels recording the whole of someone’s life and then hearing what’s going on as a subtext. So what...I’m trying to spend my time interpreting noise into language.  It would be interesting for lawyers to try and work out someone’s everyday life and what the noises are actually saying to them.

JLD:  I heard a sound work recently by Christopher DeLaurenti [Of Silences Intemporally Sung: Luigi Nono's Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima (2011)]. He got hold of the old Deutshe Grammophon’s recording of the La Salle String Quartet performing an Diotima (1979-80). A very beautiful string quartet. It’s an interesting work related to poetry as the original Nono score has text by Hölderin, that the string quartet members are supposed to read as they are performing, but without saying it. Anyway, this piece is quite interesting because it’s an old recording of a string quartet that has lots of long silences in it and is quite noisy. DeLaurenti, who’s edited the recording to produce a new work – he’s a kind of soundscape recording artist. So, he’s got really interested in those little gaps in between. And, for example, the recordings of the performers tuning their instruments on the fly and those little moments and all those tiny gaps. Everything but the Nono piece is left, basically.

AO: How wonderful. A Sleepwalk on the Severn which was quite a weird piece which a lot of people didn’t really get...The structure is meant to represent, it had these poems that bled into prose, prose is meant to be the kind of rumblings and mutterings you get around the poem, don’t you? Because I always think that a poem is the last most emphatic thought.  And if you could kind of...poems work by needing silences and that’s what their punctuation is a kind of musical notation of silence. And so, I’ve always been interested in the idea of picking out what’s in that silence, what kind of voices are going on that are preparing for the next line.

JLD: Because the poet is present in that piece, or work. Or do you, is that you, or just an avatar or something?

AO: Yes. It’s me secretly slipping in, the recording...kind of pedantically trying to record the landscape. People couldn’t really make head nor tail…

JLD: Well, I like it a lot. I like that it makes it more, well it makes it less definitive as well. It’s like you are trying to endeavor to do something.

AO: I think that’s what people, what the mainstream poetry world it quite, they like very perfect texts.

JLD: Whereas the Dart is such a strong title. It’s like a kind of, … it’s not A Dart or Some Darts, or, not that I am criticizing but it works on a different,…

AO: [inaudible] interestingly a different way to do it, wouldn’t it? Your Darts.

JLD: Well, they do. You do present multiple...

AO: Multiple voices, yes. So, it’s meant to be kind of protean… So, your practice is all about lack of definition, though, isn’t it?  It’s about process rather than, of such imperfect pieces going into a work, is it? It that too specific?

JLD: Erm. I don’t really know. Mmm.

AO: I suppose any experimental practice…

JLD: Well, I like to sound somewhat random on one level. Although it’s very common actually in this kind of post-Cagian [John Cage] world, where you’re often faking a level of randomness.

AO: [mostly inaudible, talk about the landscape of the walk] Sorry, what were you saying, post-Cage?

JLD: Yes, you make it sound as if it were a bit random but it’s not completely random. So, it’s a level of messiness.

AO: Yes, I think I deal with that as well in language. But it’s not that it’s artificial messiness. It’s a form that allows something other than itself to come in. So that the author mustn’t dominate the piece completely. My kind of model/structure, was always kind of the Japanese Noh play, it’s really interesting that thing where you have a conversation going on between people and then a god or something from the other world appears close to a god. And to me, it works like that and you have this kind of rational, kindling dialogue and something that summons something that is not the poem but detects a poem. I [am] interested in the kind of poem that shivers when something from outside comes in that you are not in control of.... It’s like a tidiness summoning a messiness.

JLD: So, then I guess you’re then revising, revising…

AO: No, not really. Not unless, [there is] more than when I started out at first.

JLD: So, it’s more improvisatory.

AO: It’s not revising, it’s that it might take a hell of a lot goes to get the right question that will bring the right answer. It feels like my working practice is a form of listening to the voices in my head and it's as if I mishear it when a poem doesn’t work––I haven’t focused enough and heard it. It’s like listening really hard to silence.

JLD: An internal…

AO: An internal silence. I was interested in getting right back at that to people that generate texts from listening to the muttering in their heads.

JLD: You know there’s this myth about Mahler and you can see it in this Ken Russell film [Mahler (1974)]. Mahler’s kind of composing, and you know his first job is always to make a hut before he started working on this symphony, to build his new hut in this really idyllic location during his holidays.

AO: In order to work there?

JLD: Yes. He had the most idyllic hut and this lake and so…

AO: Is that because he’s using the ambient sound?

JLD: Yes. In the film you see him being really inspired by the cowbells and the birds and the sounds of nature but then you see him trying to compose in the hut and he’s like really pissed off because it’s too noisy. He’s like: “Go away now! I’ve done my absorbing or my imbibing”.

AO: Is that true? What do you think?

JLD: I don’t know. I don’t know. [Yes, it was true, on one occasion he ordered the birds to be shot.] I don’t really mind if it’s a Ken Russell fallacy. I kind of like that idea that “I’ve had enough now”, “I’ve been inspired now”, “put my earplugs in now because now it’s the internal processes taking on...."

AO: It’s the hope that the mind has somehow recorded it…

JLD: Do you know Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony? Because it’s really interesting, comparing it to the Mahler symphonies...because they’re both romantic, sublime type composers, but Richard Strauss took a very different approach than Mahler because he didn’t like all the symbolism, because Mahler immediately becomes whatever, you know the birds become children’s voices, angels, etc… and it’s all representative whereas the Alpine Symphony is you know, is more about climbing up this mountain in the morning and it's more about scale and exhilaration....

AO: Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to get into in Dart. I don’t want the sound of water. I’d much rather find music that gives you that feeling of the same thing…. But your pieces are very interested in real sound, they do use, not representatively necessarily…

JLD: Well, it depends. That’s the problem with the soundscape, with the notion of the soundscape composition is that it’s a strange art form because it’s tacitly representational because you turn on the microphone and you make an effort to record something as beautifully as possible with the best mic for that situation and try not to have handling noise like I am doing this now, it’s going to be a terrible recording but you try to be invisible in that process. And then you do a bit of editing and make your piece. The problem is representation is, it’s missed a level of, what’s the word? Translation, or authorship I don’t know? And a lot of composers this quite famous guy, Matthew Herbert, he, I heard him talk a couple of times about saying in Mahler’s era, he didn’t have any recording devices. So, you know, he had to use orchestras to represent his experience with the countryside. But what is great now is that we have recorders so we can actually have that sound, so we’ve got nothing to worry about anymore and I kind of [think] that, that’s rubbish. Is that what Mahler would do now? Would he just run around with a microphone? And say this is a piece about my experience. So, this is potentially a very lazy medium, field recording. The cattle grids piece [Cattle Grids of Dartmoor (2005)] is completely different. And see, my Hong Kong piece [Ochlophonic Study #3: Hong Kong (2002-8)], which is now a completely messy piece which has been developing over years and years and years. But I now talk about that as being a really experiential piece, as me trying to make sense of Hong Kong. The fact is, it’s a really densely crowded soundscape.

AO: Is it a piece you just keep adding to?

JLD: Not anymore. There are very different ancillary pieces I think but the big city is kind of done now.  The problem with the Hong Kong piece was that I’ve got such nice recordings, beautiful recordings. Very interesting recordings but every time I try to make a piece out of it, they become less interesting.

AO: That’s very interesting. That’s like Ted Hughes’ notebooks. There’s one book called Moortown Diary where he’s in the farmland and he’d just make notes everyday as he farmed and he came to try to makes the notes into a poem and he realized that whenever he did that, they’d lost some of their vitality. And so I think he kind of, it’s funny he did that book after working a lot with Peter Brook where he was doing a lot of helping with actors to improvise language and [then] happened upon something in his work that was about improvisation. That’s what I like about Sean’s [Sean Borodale] work actually at his best I think he’s doing that note-taking unedited.

JLD: Have you gotten a long way on, say, since the angel piece. [Angel: in which an angel sees everything closing in on itself at the moment of dawn (1997)]?

AO: It’s an uncharacteristic piece anyway for me.

JLD: Where every word counts. Where the weight you put on every word…

AO: Well, it was very Dartington, very Cecil Collins [painter based in Dartington from 1936-43], it wasn’t really typical of the way I write. I mean, yes, I suppose every time I do a new book, I change completely what I’m doing.

JLD: It must have been difficult going from river Dart to the Severn where it’s kind of a geographical travelogue…

AO: The trouble is, I always get asked to read Dart. I’m not going to do that. With the Severn it’s really much more about the moon and the tides than.

JLD: In this paper about you being, what’s the word, a gardener-poet? Or what’s the term you use?

AO: People like putting me in a box. I hope, I try to just shake up any labels that I am given. People are a little bit phased by Memorial it seems to have done something a little bit different.... Oh my god, look it’s a really high tide. Oh, you don’t have boots on. You’ll get really cold. I have never seen it that high. We could go somewhere else. That’s very interesting. It’s not normally that high. I’ve never seen it that high. But we could go down…

JLD: I can take my shoes off.

AO: It would really be cold. That would be dedication.

JLD: Very thin, the reeds.

AO: Very thin. They’ve got sort of areas where they have been trampled.

JLD: But as a very individual kind of thing. I was thinking about the acoustics of reeds because actually there’s … I was talking with Trevor Cox, an acoustician [see Trevor Cox’s Sonic Wonderland (Vintage, 2014) where he recounts an early morning encounter with JLD listening to Eurasian bitterns in Ham Wall, Somerset] and I was thinking of a bittern call, a very low-frequency call and it only happens in reed beds.

AO: And is that to with the reeds…

JLD: Well, I thought it had something to do with the reeds but I think it’s just because the bittern can hide in the reeds. But I thought maybe that kind of thing that David [Prior] and Francis [Crow] did [Organ of Corti (2010-11) by Liminal] through an acoustic feature [i.e. sonic crystals], as sound hits as a especially as that high-frequency hits, it actually bounces back again and bends round. And different frequencies behave in different ways, so...

AO: So are bitterns high or low frequencies?

JLD: Well, low frequencies would cope better because they’re much more bendy. Higher frequencies are more like, they go off at the angle of reflection. [makes low sound: DOOMP] off it goes again. There was this amazing documentary on telly years ago where this blind guy who’s learned to click really precisely, and he had objects on a table. And he’s going [chk chk chk chk sound] like there’s a cylindrical object there and an egg-shaped object there, and he’s just got to walk around it and go “chk chk chk” and it’s a very precise tick that he did.

AO: That’s amazing. When I used to work as a gardener we used to have to, we had a little hammer for tapping flowerpots to see if they needed watering. It made a different sound if it needed watering. So where should we go? What do you need for recording? We could skirt around the edge and…

JLD: Just nice to walk and talk. [Both inaudible for a bit] I didn’t bring my wellies.... Do people think of those projects with multiple voices, I don’t know much about poetry, but obvious references like Under Milk Wood [radio drama by poet Dylan Thomas, 1954]?

AO: Yes, that one is often brought up and I love that poem.

JLD: It makes a great radio piece.

AO: Yes, but to me it’s much more from thinking very hard about the oral tradition and Homer. I think always wanted to find what it is in Homer, a freshness that written poetry didn’t really have. And it felt that it really wasn’t composed by one person. That is, it had an accumulation of voices. And trying to recover that idea that a poem isn’t just one author, because if you have one author, it becomes very particular and quite stiff and it’s really of the world but if you have lots of voices and you have spaces between voices that allow sort of freedom space....

[Inaudible. Talk about where to walk next.]

AO: Like crowds, when you look at the reeds you see something thin and think what it will do to sound, but when I look at them, I think of crowds. I just love the feeling of the noise reeds make, it is a crowd noise. You love wind, yeah. You don’t need much. But there are other birds that live in reeds, like reed warblers they don’t have a low frequency. They must be using them in a different way.

JLD: The bitterns are interesting. I read recently that they use their esophagus to make the sound, rather than a syrinx. Cause I was wondering how they do it because there’s a similar bird, like a parrot that does a similar thing, called a kakapo which is a flightless parrot. So, cause can’t fly, it has to, basically with an inbuilt knowledge of acoustics – birds are good acousticians – so a kakapo actually makes a kind of bowl nest. The male kakapo in its lek makes a very pristine bowl shape in the ground which it is always cleaning. It chooses a location that might be beside the back of a tree so the sound will bounce off the back of the tree to reflect forward. And then they make this very low-frequency call to the back side. Very similar to a bittern. I didn’t really understand how bitterns were doing that but they’re inflating a different part of their body. Seems to be the esophagus, so the anatomy changes in springtime so they can make this sound.

AO: It’s interesting when sound and digestion occupy the same place.

JLD: That’s the breath as well, but it’s so noisy it’s a stupid place to put the voice box. And then when I clear my throat, which I tend to do a lot, it is full of signification, which is really unfair when all I want to do is clear my throat.

AO: I like that though, the clicks and coughs that the body makes underneath the [inaudible].... The moon is completely full. When I woke this morning, it was just going down. Really red moon. Very full and this is why there is a very high tide. It’s close to the equinox isn’t it?... I’m interested in the difference between the land birds' and the water birds' song. It’s like water birds just kind of shriek and sing a song full of grief and the land birds are twittery and cheerful.

JLD: It’s probably just acoustics really. These land birds can get high up. They can communicate from really get great positions. ...But if you are low down, like the bittern’s low-frequency call, they travel much further along water. That’s called the “foghorn effect,” the way the sound can travel vast distances along the surface of the water.

AO: Water is very good with sound. So, you must spend a lot of your time naturally thinking about birds if you are an acoustician?

JLD: Yes and no. I remember Tony Whitehead [ornithologist and soundscape recorder based in Devon] telling me about a very common bird like a crow and it flaps its wings, you know, sort of flapping its wings. I made some comments saying, it’s giving off noises and Tony said no, that’s communicating. Every sound it makes is communication.

AO: When I was going to write about ravens and all the different ways they communicate—a lot of it is wing flaps and clicks.

JLD: I had an interesting problem with my larynx. It was a bit scary. I was at the tail end of a cold and my larynx had a kind of a spasm a couple of times, which meant I couldn’t breathe. It was quite a scary moment. It just closed.

AO: Like asthma?

JLD: That’s what the doctor said, but this is actually the larynx. Not my lungs but my larynx.

AO: Like your throat was closing up?

JLD: Yes, the larynx would just close. Involuntarily. I could breathe out, but I couldn’t breathe in. Maybe for about fifty seconds.

AO: It’s not something you can treat?

JLD: Luckily it hasn’t happened for a while now. I think it may have been virally related. I find it interesting that the voice box could kill you. If the voice box closes down, it just closes. You can’t breathe. That’s a bit stupid.

AO: Well, but that’s interesting because I noticed that when I was doing Memorial in the South Bank – an hour and a quarter – from heart and was quite nervous that I might forget it. I just became so aware of my breathing that every time when I was speaking, I couldn’t breathe and I just became interested in... why poems are punctuated as they are, it shows you where to breathe, the voice is the stopping of the breath, particularly consonants.

JLD: I certainly think about breathing when I’m composing. Probably comes from playing the violin, you think of a bow length, and a bow length, and a bow length which is a breath. It’s like an inhale, exhale. Down bow, up bow.

AO: I was taking really deep breaths when I was performing, you know, because I’d get through a paragraph section and I’d try to do it all in one breath and then just breathe, or very short breaths.

JLD: This might be a silly question, but did you get any training or guidance?

AO: Not really, no. My brother’s an actor and I talked to him after that. And the thing that really interested me that he said is that the human mind works in three-second snatches. You re-think something every three seconds.

JLD: I think William James said something like that – the specious present.

AO: Anyway he was saying that when he’s acting, he uses that. He breathes and re-thinks every three seconds and I find that really helpful because it measures about half a line. And so, whereas previously I was thinking how I’d get through a whole 12 lines text.

JLD: Kind of a big gulp.

AO: If you break it up and imagine yourself recomposing every three seconds…

JLD: So, you’d have had to have learnt it that way.

AO: No, no, I learnt it in longer sections but then if I’m re-articulating it, I make myself hesitate every three seconds.

JLD: I’ve been listening to the CD [of Memorial] and you rapidly produce quite a mesmeric effect for me as a listener.

 

AO: I’m really torn by that because people often say after reading that, they went into a kind of trance. But in a way, I’m much more interested in poetry waking people up.

JLD: In Dart you definitely go BANG. Suddenly something happens and BANG we’re in another situation now and the energy is completely different.

AO: I mean there should be that effect in Memorial because it’s a series of different people, but I suppose it’s always an authorial voice in a sense.

JLD: There are pitch qualities to your voice and maybe the recordings emphasize it less than live performance. You know you could take one of those recordings and kind of see the pitch contour of the whole thing. It’d be interesting to do, to see if there’s a consistency to it.... Maybe you wouldn’t want to do that. Now the tools exist where you can analyze it very quickly and get a sense of…

AO: I normally hit quite low when I’m sort of controlling it, but if I get into it, I’ll go higher, I think... There’s a big difference in where you and I work. I’m very interested in memory. And, er...

JLD: I’m terrified of memory.

AO: Yeah, well you see, I’m terrified of it too but I think that’s what I like about it. Before I went the South Bank to perform, I just had my book and an oyster shell and I thought, either I’ll take the book in or I’ll take the oyster shell in and I knew if I took the book in I’d be so timid I would refer to it. But if I didn’t have it, it’d be like jumping off a rock in cold water. You just have to do it! But I think that edge of fear, I really like hearing that in a poet. I like the fact that it’s there and it matters, and you might do it wrong.

JLD: Be like “Oh shit!” Can I say it like that?

AO: Or just having to spontaneously compose if you do do it.

JLD: You must get people sitting there with the texts in their hand.

AO: Oh, it really annoys me. At the very end of that performance, I noticed there was actually someone with a little torch in the audience. Completely threw me.

JLD: Do you know Ursonate, the famous sound poetry piece by Kurt Schwitters from the 1930s. It’s an extraordinary piece. It’s got this very fast...it’s all phonetically based, German phonetically based nonsense and rhythms and stuff.... This must be a quarry, I guess.

AO: Yes. There are a lot of lime quarries around here.

JLD: I’ll send you my paper on sound walks [Soundwalking: Aural Excursions into the Everyday (Ashgate, 2009)].  It’s kind of a historical paper so it’s not my take. I did my best. It’s really for teaching but it’ll give a sense that there’s a tradition and different influences and...

AO: I’ve always found the walk quite a difficult form. I’ve always liked the idea of writing a piece that is simply a walk. Because at first, language is quite photographic it tends to, at any rate, mine does, it tends to work in flashes of stillness and then jumps to the next one. And it’s quite hard, partly because of the rhythms I use. I’ve always been very against flowing rhythms, like particularly against the iambic pentameter, the main rhythm English poetry has worked in.

JLD: That Peter’s [Peter Oswald] territory.

AO: Well, maybe that’s why. So, I’ve been much more interested in the rhythms that jolt and jar and that makes it quite hard to write a walking poem because I don’t have anything kind of fluid and flowing in my repertoire.

JLD: The big pieces are very flowing.

AO: Well, they are.

JLD: There’s maybe like a piece of music you could...you could have a different level of perspective. There’s a larger scale.

AO: In a way I think Memorial is the most even of them all, it’s got a monotony in it that responds to walking. But something like Dart is much more danced, really. So, it’s much more jagged.... But I composed a lot of Memorial while walking. I would, I’d basically copy out the Greek on a bit of paper and walk with it until, until I felt I could really see not just the words but what the words were looking at. And then I’d sort of write while I was walking.

JLD: But did you stop and start?

AO: I’d have a little notebook and I’d sort of, I’d walk, and if I thought there was something I needed to remember, I’d jot it down. And then also, when I was learning a poem, I would do that on that particular walk. It’s very much for me, that the tracks around here are embedded into that poem.

JLD: Would you want to tell people that, or?

AO: I wouldn’t keep it from people.

JLD: I’m wondering if you would end up with people doing a kind of heritage trail and this is the point where various characters got killed…

AO: That would be disgusting! [laughing] All these Greek epic characters on a Devon lane.

JLD: Well, the level of interest in the work is pretty high. Well it’s kind of fetishistic…

AO: But a walk is a kind of prose rhythm and I think the iambic pentameter is halfway between poetry and prose. And it is a walking rhythm; it’s got that footstep in it.

JLD: There is a great book by Jean-François Augoyard called Step By Step [Pas à Pas: Essai sur le cheminement quotidien en milieu urbain (Éditions du Seuil, 1979)] where he’s interested in... have you come across Michel de Certeau who talks about walking as a kind of speech act. And Augoyard, he’s actually taken it from Augoyard who goes into tremendous detail about all the linguistic acts that go into walking.

AO: Really? Like what?

JLD: That’s a good question. Like hyperbole. He’s kind of a semiotician and so it’s a way of kind of talking about, he’s interested in observing everyday people’s walking habits in cities.

AO: That’s fascinating. I can’t imagine how... so hyperbole would be a sort of walk like that?

JLD: Well, it’s how you talk about the walk. “We almost died…,” or something.

AO: Is it about walking itself, the physical act?

JLD: Yes, finding ways of walking as a speech act. I mean it’s classically French so it’s kind of ridiculous on one level, an attempt to take semiotics on quite an extreme level.

AO: You’re so widely read in this kind of obscure…

JLD: “Everybody knows about it.”  He’s a great guy. I know him a bit.

AO: How do you know him?

JLD: He created a center in Grenoble called CRESSON which is about architecture and sound and sociology. He’s much more social science based than Schafer [R. Murray Schafer], though, his problem is, well he never translated the stuff. It’s always been in French. So everybody completely ignored it apart from a bunch of people taking PhDs in this part of France.

AO: I’d like to talk to you at some point about this project I want to do at Sharpham and get a community reading of Paradise Lost, probably take about 12 hours…

 

A Note:

At 5am on the 6th April 2012, Alice Oswald and John Levack Drever set out on a walk departing from Alice’s home at the time, in Ashprington, Devon. Alice retraced a walk by the side of the river Dart. She had made this walk by herself many times, a walk which had played a formative role in her practice including the devising and setting to memory of Memorial (2011). On the morning of their walk, whilst the river was experiencing a particularly high tide, they enjoyed a candid discussion finding commonalities between their respective art practices of poetry and soundscape composition (i.e. composing with field recording). John recorded their chat accompanied by the springtime dawn soundscape emanating from the banks of the Dart and the reed beds.

Alice and John first met in Dartington in 1996 when Alice was writer-in-residence at Dartingon Hall, and John was commencing his PhD at Dartington College of Arts. They collaborated on John’s commission from Ina-GRM (Paris), Soundings of Angel (1999) which was based on Alice’s poem Angel: in which an angel sees everything closing in on itself at the moment of dawn (1997), a work that also took inspiration from the painting Cecil Collins made during his time there (1936-43) and the surrounding bird song of the Dartington estate, including the Robins of Dartington, famously studied by David Lack (The Life of the Robin, 1943). The work is structured around three consecutive readings of Alice’s poem, firstly by Alice, followed by Peter Oswald and finally Alaric Sumner, interspersed with three more abstract sonic renderings of the poem by John.

Alice and John have both had a sustained engagement with Dartmoor: whilst Alice was developing materials that would go on to form Dart (2002), John was leading Sounding Dartmoor, a public soundscape study of Dartmoor National Park in collaboration with Aune Head Arts and the University of Plymouth. Alice included a section of John’s Cattle Grids of Dartmoor (2005) in her inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

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Operating at the intersection of acoustics, audiology, urban design, sound art, soundscape studies, and experimental music, John Drever’s practice represents an ongoing inquiry into the perception, design and practice of everyday environmental sound. He has a special interest in soundscape methods, in particular field recording and soundwalking. Resulting from the findings of his study on the noise impact of high-speed hand dryers, Drever coined the term auraldiversity: an attempt to reconceptualize hearing in sound practice that diverges from a paradigm predicated on a singular, idealized, symmetrical model of hearing (i.e. auraltypical) that has predominated.

Drever is Professor of Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-leads the Unit for Sound Practice Research (SPR). In 1998 he co-founded and chaired the UK and Ireland Soundscape Community (a regional affiliate of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology) for whom he chaired Sound Practice: the 1st UKISC Conference on sound, culture and environments in 2001 at Dartington College of Arts.

Drever is an avid collaborator and has devised work in many different configurations and contexts. Commissions range from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, France (1999), WDR Studio Akustische Kunst, Germany (2011) to Shiga National Museum, Japan (2012). He is a founding a member of arts collective Blind Ditch. He has had the honour of working with a wide range of writers and poets including comedian Mark Kelly, Tony Lopez, Alice Oswald, Alaric Sumner (1952-2000) and extensively with sound poet Lawrence Upton (1949-2020).

Carolina Ebeid

multimedia poetry

Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet interested in the cross-sections of video art and hybrid texts. Her first book You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior was published by Noemi Press as part of the Akrilica Series, and selected as one of ten best debuts of 2016 by Poets & Writers. Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. A longtime editor, she helps edit poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the online zine Visible Binary.