Pour la joie

For Joy Hendry

Is Mandelstam’s message-in-a-bottle a published edition consisting of one unique copy? Is a readership of one enough to constitute a public? 

There are many real stories, each unique, of miraculous survivals, discoveries, restitutions, gifts from the worlds of the dead: Miklós Radnóti’s last notebook, Anne Frank’s Diary, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the tablets bearing and transporting the Epic of Gilgamesh. Nor are these acts of witnessing exceptions. These single texts were left buried by their authors, scribes, recorders, compilers. They were left deliberately for the dead, among the dead, with a living readership of none. And I think their burial was indeed a kind of floating: that readership of none involved the texts being tossed, whirled, swirled into a timelessness, into an indeterminate interim time between then (whenever) and now (whenever), in a time that was (is) a nothing, a non-time, that belonged (belongs) neither here nor there nor anywhere, but was (is) nevertheless a latency, which, even if only retrospectively and retroactively, is seen-to-have-been, known-to-have-been, an attendance, a waiting, a patience: as if in a cocoon, as if in a hibernation, as if in a womb. A waiting for what? Embedded both in the making itself and in the attempt to register, record and preserve the words, even among the dead, was there not always the chance, even the hope, of a receiver, a reader, a discovery, a recognition, a life?

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There is a very real way in which all these texts are purely contemporary. They have all got through to us.

Chance? Or expectation, hope, intention, promise? Or are such notions too inflated, too purposively full of destiny-talk and teleology-spiel, to ring true?

Well then, accident, coincidence, serendipity?

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Poems – refrigerated soul food? 

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If so, who for?

For the souls of the dead, that they might be transported safely? But could the dead read? And if any could, would they?

For the living among the dead?

For those sentenced to live forever among the dead, as if dead?

Do you or I know anyone like that? And if we did, could or would such a person ever be interested in a poem? The officials who arrested Anne Frank? The guards who shot Miklós Radnóti?

Come off it.

And what of those like you and me, living, ‘for the time being’, among the living?

2. The Necessity of Publishing

Conventionally, publishing involves a book, an edition, a magazine, an issue, a numéro: a number. It involves quantity, investment, production, sales, distribution, purchase. Publishing involves funding, publicity, marketing. The privacy of a singular dialogue of-and-for two (poet and reader) each of whom maintains that dialogue to-and-for toi and, through the poem’s window, looks at the other in the eye (l’œil, le je) even across death – whether directly or indirectly, whether opaquely or transparently – is sunk, left behind, lost sight of or abandoned altogether in a pluralized and formalised multilogue. And the desired goal, the targeted public, is formulated and envisioned as a massive amassed vous, which scarcely even maintains any vestiges of the dignity of plurality but congeals into a sort of agglutinated and de-individualised blob (as readers get sunk in readership).

Then, whoever manages even to start to think about matters like the gift and the call of poetry, is a rare and strong-minded person indeed.

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Publishers who do manage this feat sometimes appear to be only a little lower than the angels – but angels as crazed and obsessive, as clear-sighted and determined, as quavering and baffled, as poets themselves.

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As between turns to among, the simple and relatively unfiltered and transparent medium of a poem pour toi ceases to be an interiorised or sacrosanct or privileged space. For a start, it is tapped, wrapped, packaged, taped, rewrapped, revamped, made up, tarted up: the medium itself is pluralized and re-massed as the media. There seems no way in which this can’t happen. Or rather, if there is I don’t yet know it. And the medium is no longer the message (McLuhan) but the media are. Or should it rather be said, the media is?

(Certain plurals do seem to agglutinate into a singular blobbery. In contemporary usage, doesn’t the word media appear to be gradually undergoing transformation into a singular collective noun, rather like data and criteria? Perhaps one day they’ll all be prized girl’s names. Hey folks, our circus is proud to announce a new triple act: the sisters Media, Data and Criteria ... Followed by Phenomena and a host of others.)

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In such a world, can poetry any longer be or consist of a matter between I and the other, I and an-other, I and Thou, or even me and thee? Je may be a mess, a muddle, a mystery, a monster, but even if still un autre – if the evidence of a good deal of contemporary poetry is anything to go by, je hardly seems an entity that is prepared to talk or even to be capable of talking to or commingling with any toi. And anyway, toi tends to get formulated as vous autres, a membership, a club, a team, a staff, a personnel: you guys. Everybody is tu anyway, in business and politics these days. We’re all on Christian-name-terms, aren’t we, guys, at least among club-members, regardless of how deeply we may despise, detest or feel indifferent to each-other-and-one-another. And the result of all this blurring may well be that nobody can (really-and-truly-cross-my-heart) be relied on to be a tu or toi. Interiority is left out, cast out, gone out of, escaped from. So: is what occurs at this point of transaction a desertion of intimacy, a going outside, outwith, without intimacy? Where to?

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Doesn’t the going abroad, the casting out, the outcasting of intimacy signal broadcasting?

From which, at least as far as current practice in the English speaking world is concerned, nearly all poetry is programmatically excluded anyway.

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There are several apparently insoluble double-binds that knot (or if not, seem or seam to knot) our contemporary poetry. Poetry has to get published to be circulated and read. But, in the process of being published, is it possible that the poetry of poetry, the poetry of poetry, the poetry in poetry, whatever is poetic about poetry, may shrink, trickle away, do a vanishing act, etc, – no trick, mind, but for real – at any rate be transformed into something that is not poetry?

Unpoetry? Noetry? Knowetry? 

Know-itry Schmo-itry.

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The question today is no longer even Hölderlin’s (“What use poets in a desperate time?”) and shouldn’t be confused with it.

All times are desperate. But our time has passed through desperation into another state or condition which I (for one) don’t (yet) know how to name. Michel Deguy calls this “cultural” culture and this formulation is a convincing one but to me it doesn’t anywhere nearly adequately encapsulate the creeping insidiousness of global capitalisticism – a hideous neologism that somehow just crept in here of its own accord: perhaps suggesting ‘plastic capitalism’, or ‘plastic post-capitalism’? An adhesive, agglutinative, malleable and adaptable variant, bearing the same relation to capitalism as super-virus to virus? The current version of capitalism now seems so effective and powerful that it no longer appears to need anything more than the pretence of democratic process to mask it. I repeat: the question is no longer Hölderlin’s, which is by now just about as Old Hat, moth-eaten, tatty and tawdry as the speed-worshipping proto-fascist Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto or Pound’s Make it new. 

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But haven’t we all been hooked on speed of some kind at one time or other?

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I think the question is – at least in western, westernised and westernising societies – what is poetry to do now and how is it to survive in a world constrained, ruled and run by the media, spin doctors and invisible, extraterritorial, militarised, corporate capital?

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Answer Number I:

Poetry needs to be go-getting, opportunistic, out-there, smiley, spongy, pongy, obsequious, entertaining, glad-to-oblige. Poetry needs to find allies where it can, wherever it can, even if it goes against the grain, even if these are only allies-in-time-of-need, fair-weather friends, cynical manipulators, finitely-windowed fellow-travellers, convenient cross-sector partners, no-such-thing-as-free-lunchers, vested-interest-mongers, part-time government agents, etc. – even if only to get (hobble? creep? crawl? grovel?) along as best as it can, whether by investing its energies and respects in such institutions as the Nobel Prize for Literature (and pyramids-and-pyramids-galore more prizes, tumbling almost as far as nursery schools), business sponsorship, Poetry on the Underground, self-advertising on the Internet, Arts Council grants and fellowships (involving complex application procedures and the compulsory filling-in of forms with the ‘aid’ of bureaucrats with titles like ‘Literature Development Officers’, in order to ensure the fulfilment of governmental criteria and strategies), performance - poetry - gigs, or jobs - for - the - girls - and / or - boys in American - style Creative Writing Programs or even trad - neo - Oxbridge - Camford - Eng - Lit Depts. And not to mention willingness - nay - eagerness to perform pseudo - social - work - cum - therapy - sessions in running creativity and self-expression and self-discovery workshops for (wait-for-it): criminals, disturbed teenagers, applicants for political asylum, inmates of care-institutions, schools, orphanages, sheltered housing, old-age-homes, hospices, and various other kinds of lock-up units. And not to mention bandwaggoning onto this or that mysticism, eco-trend, pro- or anti- Good Cause, whether Radical or Liberal or Arch-Conservative, whether Blue or Green or Pink or Red, whether chronically sanctified or perennially harvested or annually carnivalised or hopefully only temporarily trivialised, whether bannering National Poetry Day or Regional Speak Week or National Brotherhood Week ... And not to mention doing one’s damnedest to get into the anthologies and/or performances celebrating this and protesting that and insinuating or revealing or quietly and tactfully understating that Those - Who - Are - Not - With - Us - Do - Not - Include - Yours - Truly, who is of course entirely coincidentally a genuinely suitable and worthily orthodox candidate for acceptance, inclusion, enrolment in the faculty or office or canon in question according to the appropriate criteria ...

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Answer number 2: 

No, absolutely no way, not in that world, not in any of those worlds. Poetry would rather be seen dead (which, ahem, it is, actually – although, friend, you must not-repeat-not admit that to anybody, especially yourself), than be so awfully, dearie me, compromised, corrupted – prostituted. No, poetry must make its own purer and cleaner and fairer world underneath and around and somehow outside the reach or confines of that world – even if it constantly risks being ignored or swallowed up or crucified or even (note the surreptitious thrilling smile), well, Sebastianised by ‘their’ outrageous arrows (not to mention slings). Let the Ugly Stepsisters tart themselves up and go out partying. Let them get themselves laid by anyone who can advance their careers. Poetry, the sincere unsinecured Cinderella, Cendrillon, Cenerentola, Pepeljuga (etc.) of the globalised Arts, had better stay quietly at home in the kitchen – befriended only by vermin and by that gentle, incompetent buffoon, her platonic pantomime mate, Buttons, the pure puer aeternus – where she can go on doing the daily sweeping up and mopping and slopping out, and perhaps a bit of sewing and stitching now and then. A bit of pricking and needling, like. And perhaps a bit of yoga and reflexology and holding hands. After all, she can always compensate herself secure in the knowledge that she was born before her time, so it’s hardly surprising that no-one understands her, is it eh darling. Is it eh ducky. For isn’t she (Poetry) a good avant-garde girl? And anyway, how could she be wholly convinced that she would exactly want anyone to understand her – which would rather spoil the fun of being avant-garde, wouldn’t it? Never mind. For some day, phoenix-like, she will rise from the ashes of herself. Some day she will win the lottery. Aye although positively steeped in Post-Modernity and its Discontents, she and her perennially prepubescent Buttons can always saunter up front-stage and hand-in-hand deliver a plangent kitsch rendering of Somewhere There’s a Place for Us or Somewhere Over the Rainbow or even Some Day My Prince Will Come. Sure, some day she may even get to wear the Emperor’s New Clothes, even if those diaphanous robes can only be rented out a day at a time from some vastly more successful celebrity: footballer or singer or TV star or even Don or Professor or Prize-Winner ...

Yeah? Well, maybe. Maybe Baby.

 
Maybe Schmaybe.

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Poetry as Cinderella? Could it be that of all the arts poetry is the one which has increasingly tended to occupy one of two possible conditions according to a strict either/or, switch-on/off model: on the one hand, the condition of being valueless, worthless (sans valeur, sans mérite); or, on the other, that of being considered, at least by the in-people and the right-people, as invaluable, priceless (inestimable, hors de prix)?

3. In Double Parenthesis

((If an editor pays me for the publication of a poem – a rare occurrence – I’m overjoyed. And am I not even a little (coyly, smugly, self-preeningly) shocked?

But then why is it I feel slightly uncomfortable, even embarrassed, if I sell a book of poems? My friends – who ‘in principle’ might be said to ‘respect’ or ‘approve of’ or ‘feel affectionate to’ my poems, that is to say, my friends who are at least tolerant of the notion that I ‘write poems’, that what ‘I-am-about’ is writing them (which is perhaps one of the reasons why they are my friends) – rarely if ever buy my books. Poetry is simply not something they expect to buy. They seem to expect me to give them copies.

If I were a novelist, a biographer or a psychologist or a writer of cookery books, say, or perhaps any one of many other kinds of ‘writer’, I don’t think this would apply. Or at least, not so completely. I think my friends might well be happy enough to go and buy my books. I might even have a readership. I might even get royalties. Real classy, eh? I might even be a Someone.

But as a poet, I give away far more copies of my books than the publisher ever sells. I can’t even say I’m uncomfortable doing this. I somehow feel my friends are right. I accept this situation. I almost feel I’d somehow be cheating if I sold them a book of poems.

Why?

I swap books of poems with other poets, mine for yours, yours for mine. We sign copies for each other. These days I very rarely buy books of contemporary poems. Rarely need to.

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I’m preparing a collection of short poems entitled A Gift. The idea is that if I give you a copy of it, I’ll be able to say, with no specially marked inflection, “Here is a gift for you.” (pour toi), and you’ll be offered the chance to hear or not hear the italics and quotation marks and capital letters marking ‘A Gift’ – just as you choose.

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Joke? Perhaps. Sentimentalisation? Well, maybe. But I’m interested, among other things, in finding out how a publisher might sell such a book, that is, assuming a publisher can be found.

Doesn’t my entitlement of it constitute an act which entitles it to nothing but No Sales whatever? Won’t the label A Gift inevitably dictate that the book-as-product – as they say – will price itself out of the market?

Into what?

Into worthlessness? Being remaindered?? Into a few prize items in the rare books trade?

 
Sans valeur or hors de prix?

 
Maybe schmaybe.))

4. Steps Towards an Ecology of Poetry?

Isn’t there enough of the stuff (poetry) around already to require that we take some such steps?

And if there’s any truth in my contention that the gift must be integral in formulating a viable poetics, here arises a problem, whose only answer, so far as I can (now, yet) see, is contradiction and puzzlement, stress and anguish.

A flippant way of putting it might be:

Question:      Have any of your poems been translated?

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What then, if any, internal principles govern the ‘economy’ or ‘ecology’ of poetry? Now if these ‘pure’ principles were, as I’ve been suggesting, those of the gift alone, then what economic or ecological principles should or could apply – or be brought into play – for poetry’s circulation?

Doesn’t the circulation of ‘so-called’ gifts in any system of exchange stop them being ‘real’ gifts at the precise moment that they go into circulation? Or, more simply: can a gift be sold? If it is sold, is it then any longer a gift?

Does this self-effacing or self-denying contradiction mean that poetry can only be circulated in a counter-economy or rather (or even) mean that the circulation of poetry in itself involves the denial or refutation of economy, at least, that is, of the so-called ‘normal’ rules of monetary economy in (our) capitalist or post-capitalist society?

More knotty double-binds?

Is an editor or publisher who pays me buying my poem? Of course s/he isn’t. S/he can’t.

Isn’t all this because the poem itself is irreducible to any mere existence on a page?

So the poem is on the page but not on the page. Every copy is original, is the original. The copy is the essence. (Thanks, Plato, but all the same, would you like to leave now?)

The poem is priceless (hors de prix). It is unbuyable.

How then can it be sellable?

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Is the poem itself a Laingian knot? Language, defying meaning, itself made and become reflexive, self-reflective, self-reflecting?

Is poetry adequately describable, perhaps, as language in a state of double-bind?

Neat, but not just that. Doesn’t what is ‘poetic’ constitute precisely the delineation, tracing, tracking of the structure of the double-bind, and hence its seeing-through, its being-seen-through?

5. A Gift in the Marketplace?

Counter-economies. The potlatch principle? Competition in outshining one another in generosity as the basic mode of exchange in an economy?

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Couldn’t it well be argued by an observer, and not necessarily an over-cynical one, that the attractive veneer of many ‘alternative’, ‘spiritual’, ‘humanistic’, ‘green’, ‘anarchistic’, ‘artsy’, ‘neo-sixties’, ‘eco’ (etc.) groups in reality merely masks Big Business turned so effectively inside out by the systematic and deliberate application of doublethink that the latter’s structures are simply mirrored, and then successfully and ruthlessly replicated?

Can’t poets – out of choice or desperation? – get as fooled as easily as anyone else by such spuriously presented temptations? A discussion of this would impinge on how poetry is and has been packaged and marketed.

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The samizdat of websites? E-books?

Yes!

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Patronage? Sponsorship? Public subsidy? Does one ever get any of these without graft, without compromise, without toeing a line, without somehow representing or swallowing someone else’s spurious or unpalatable idea of social engineering? A Fellowship? A Residency? Lottery money? Luck be a Lady tonight?

I (you) should be so lucky.

(I occasionally am.)

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But couldn’t the state we are in about them be described as a patient haste, a frenetic quietness, a near-panicked devotion, a quiet fury, a frenzied raging at the edge of silence? Against the cutting edge of silence, its deadly blade?

I wonder: shall any one of us have time even to bury our poems? Shan’t we (all) have to leave them (all) for dead – whether among the dead or among the living? Float them there for futurity? For recognition of and by even just one single living toi among the ranks of the living and not-yet-born who, like us, are addressed in Villon’s ballade? Frères humains qui après nous vivez?

And Soeurs humaines qui après nous vivez? 

Together with the sisters. And about time too. To rejoice, to rejoice with and to be rejoiced in.

Pour la joie et le jeu de la poésie. Pour toi.

For Joy.

'Pour la joie' (2003): published in Chapman, Edinburgh, 2004, and The Paper, Sheffield, 2004