26. Night Train / Litany - Michael Hofmann

Quite a few poems on the theme of remembering towards the end of the Approximately Nowhere section of MH’s Selected. The final poem, Litany, is a list of people, places, and scenes from “months of transition/ in a room on the Harrow Road,” a merging together of disparate beauty and chaos, set out like an address to a divinity, although the “Dear god” at the beginning could also be a expression of world-weariness. It’s a terrific poem, full of inventive language and images.

The penultimate one, Night Train, is entirely different. Like Malvern Road, it’s a memory of a memory. The narrator is on a train thinking about another train journey made years earlier. He’s “in the half-compartment/ set aside for the handicapped,” which indicates, I think, more a state of mind than any physical disability. He remembers this old journey in which he suggests to a woman that they might elope, or at least:

I put it to you, not joking,
though you weren’t to know that then

The casual ease of these lines half-disguises their terrible sadness. There’s already a sense of melancholy, an inevitable rejection - in fact, more than a rejection, not even realising there was anything to reject. The train goes on from this place in the middle of nowhere towards London and a bar where the woman works. The poem unexpectedly turns to the way the woman dresses and wears her hair as suggesting someone not knowing whether she wanted to be the goddess Venus or Joan of Arc.

The poem riffs on hopelessness – the handicapped carriage, the narrator feeling “parched and let down,” his plan (not taken seriously) to elope and walk into the wild away from a conventional existence, and a woman unsure of her own identity (or, at least, that’s how the narrator portrays her).

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Shore Poets, Euro 2008, ...or Both?

Here’s the dilemma. Tonight, the Shore Poets have an excellent programme of readers – Richard Price, Angela MacSevany, and Simon Pomery. It starts at 7.45pm.

Tonight also is the final of Euro 2008 between Germany and Span, which starts at 7.45pm.

So what should I do?

It partly depends on getting a babysitter, but I might be able to do both if I record the match. That way, I can see the poets and then watch the game when I return, as if it were live.

The obvious problem with this solution is getting home without knowing who won. There will be many hurdles to overcome – Spaniards and Germans (there are many in the city at the moment) wandering around Edinburgh after the game, either singing at the top of their voices or looking utterly inconsolable – a dead giveaway. Conversations about the game on buses or on the streets, TVs replaying the vital goals in shop windows, flags raised from bars and restaurants. I’ve considered a taxi, but it’s odds-on that the driver will start talking about the game. Wearing ear muffs and a blindfold might draw me too much unwanted attention. It’s a tough one.

25. Malvern Road - Michael Hofmann

Malvern Road took me aback. The first few stanzas follow a couple moving in together, their first house, poor but happy, and full of hope. I read the first line, but it slipped from mind until I read the poem (one sentence long over two pages) again:

It’s only a short walk, and we’ll never make it

That’s like a warning to the reader that things aren’t going to turn out too well. The narrator is close to the old house and seems to be addressing his partner years on in L3 with his “Do you remember?” The memory of moving in follows, and then plenty of detail, intimate detail:

the health centre padlocked and grilled like an offie,
the prefab post office set down at an odd angle,
the bank that closed down, the undertaker who stayed open

It looks like a poem of nostalgia, memory of a more hopeful time despite difficulties. And then comes the final few lines, and it’s those which took me aback. They come almost out of the blue, until you go back to that first line and see how it was inevitable all along. But I find those final lines ambiguous and sudden:

…you whimpered comfort to your phantom baby boy
you didn’t have and said you’d mind him, as now,
to my shame, you have and you do.

I’m probably being really thick, but I keep changing my mind on what I think those lines mean. Is the baby no more a phantom than all the other memories he’s outlined? Or are all the memories as much phantoms as the baby?

Or - taking things in a more literal sense - could it be that they lost a baby in the womb and that he's forgotten (surely that's impossible?)? Or that she wanted a baby, he didn't, and she's reminding him of that now - almost as an accusation, and as a kick in the teeth to the romantic nostaligia?

I read a review in which the reviewer said this poem seemed “less finished” than most in this Selected. But I don’t know…I think the jarring suddenness of the close is deliberate and provocative.

24. XXXX - Michael Hofmann

I'm just hoping that title doesn't bring a whole load of people to this blog who are looking for something very different from poetry! I'm sorry, hardcore people, but blame Michael Hofmann who chose the title. You might like this better in any case.

XXXX is about being 40. But it’s as though the narrator is going through a kind of male menopause! He pisses in bottles, chews longlife food, identifies with a fox, and decides to “spend a wet evening under a tree.”

The images are wacky but not so wacky that they appear unbelievable. He veers near the edge when he writes;

For half an hour, amid palpitations, I watched
two children I was sure were mine.

The humour is dark, the sense of chaos not unfamiliar. Only the radio, which he keeps on as much as his father ever did, gives him a sense of equilibrium and stops the world from sliding away from under his feet.

I loved this poem, while feeling slightly scared by it, maybe because the unstated truths it hints at are rather close to home. My favourite lines are:

I’m forty. I free the jammed light-push with my fingernails
to give the hall a rest.

23. Intimations of Immortality - Michael Hofmann

I’m not certain of what’s going on in Intimations of Immortality, but the images are surprising and the usual ironic humour is present. It’s set in Gainesville, in Florida state.

The images revolve around the theme of time – life and a possible future – so you have the “retirement country” with “cryogenics to follow”, and the narrator drinks orange juice “till it fizzes and after.”

The poem begins and ends with what I presume are local expressions – “Have a nice day and get one free” is the beginning. MH’s vocabulary is, I think, amusingly ironic – old ladies “squinny” and “bimble” – and the absurdities of life are given a bleakly humorous twist in a town:

where they give a man
five death sentences
to run more or less concurrently

I liked this poem, the images operating by suggestion and not easily codified into some overarching ‘message’.

22. Cheltenham - Michael Hofmann

Cheltenham recounts the story of a literary festival at which MH’s translation of his father’s book is being read by his mother. The poem starts with his elderly parents shuffling round the main square to the festival venue. The town is gloomy, an “old folks town.”

Ted Hughes is in the audience and afterwards asks MH’s father if he has ever “like an Innuit/ dreamed of his own defeat and death.” The next stanza is a classic:

My father, who’s heard some questions, but never anything
like this, doesn’t know Ted Hughes,
perhaps hears ‘idiot’, gives an indignant no
in his miraculously clear English.

The poem ends with the short November day coming to an end with a “grumpy early night.”

I suppose this poem was partly a vehicle for MH to tell this memorable literary anecdote, but the way he frames the poem does get to the heart of his father’s grumpiness, which was also the root of genuine humour. There’s some very good writing in this poem, especially in the first two stanzas.

For Gert Hofmann, died 1 July 1993 - Michael Hofmann

A confession: although MH’s ‘father-poems’ have been widely admired, they don’t tend to be my favourites from his work. They are good poems, mind you, but I usually prefer his other stuff.

I didn’t find the father-poems from Acrimony (1986) to be quite as acerbic as I’d been led to expect (that's not necessarily a criticism!). In the section from Approximately Nowhere (1999), there are several more, and these are supposed to be more forgiving, more positive about his father.

It starts with For Gert Hofmann, died 1 July 1993. The poem describes the family house – both the changes and what stays the same, the marks he has left on the world. The blinds are at half-mast, the place where his father sat is empty, the clock ticks on, the wastepaper basket is abraded by “so much balled-up paper/ nosebleeds and peach-pits,” the books are the same as ever, the berries are already reddening.

There are also images of separation – water separates the lettuce from its greenflies, there are two chairs – one for the father and one for the mother, an African mask hanging on a wall is supposed to keep away evil spirits.

I thought this was a good poem – moving, capturing a moment of separation. It doesn’t get maudlin – the father is presented as:

for once not at his post, not in the penumbra
frowning up from his manuscript at he world.

But even this is a scene of loss, even the frowning is missed.

The ending is intriguing. The berries are reddening, a symbol of aging, approaching ripeness, but MH then adds that “the inscrutable blackbirds will scorn them months more.” It’s an image connected with mortality. The berries appear ready but won’t be taken for another while. Perhaps MH is feeling that sense of mortality in himself.

Magma Launch

Tomorrow, Monday 23rd June from 8pm, I’ll be at the Troubadour Café in London for the launch of Magma, issue 41. I have a couple of poems in the issue, so I’ll be reading them on the night, along with many other contributors. Carol Rumens and John Hegley are the special guest poets.

I’ve recently been appointed associate editor with the magazine (I submitted the poems a few months before this happened). I’m not sure exactly what’s involved in that yet, but I’m sure I’ll soon find out! Magma is one of the best magazines in the UK at the moment and I’m pleased to be connected to it.

20. Guanajauto Two Times - Michael Hofmann

In Guanajuato Two Times, MH imagines returning to the same places in Guanajuato he’s already been and writing about them, an exercise in nostalgia; also, the dull safety in never doing anything new. He reflects on José José, one of Mexico’s most celebrated singers who battled with an alcohol problem late in his career and who seemed a different person to his younger self.

I could slowly become a ghost, slowly familiar,
slowly invisible, amiable, obtuse…

MH captures the sense of the familiar seeming invisible. Although the subject may recognise himself in revisiting old memories, it’s only a shadow of his present self, which will mean little or nothing to anyone else – hence the next line, “I could say, ‘Remember me?’ to the blank bellhop.”

I love the blank humour of the lines,

I could learn the Spanish for
‘I shall have returned’…

The future perfect tense, ironic in itself, and rarely used.

I wondered whether the ending was a little too self-pitying – there’s the bleakness, but not quite the usual black humour. He hears bells,;

not real bells
but recordings of former bells,
and never for me.

The final line makes the point of his invisibility to the world, even though he is at the centre of his own existence (as we all are), but I think it could be one line too many. I like the poem generally though. It’s the last one in this section from Corona, Corona.

Being Earnest

I always enjoy reading Patrick Kurp’s blog, Anecdotal Evidence, and this post on Herbert Morris, a poet unknown to me, was no exception.

Kurp quotes Eric Ormsby, who contrasts Morris’s work with the “career-building narcissism” and “sameness of tone” he detects in many poets. The rather discomforting quotation is worth pondering:

Earnestness is a splendid virtue; while essential to social workers and scoutmasters, it is, however, of limited value to poets who usually prove to be better writers when they are shifty, unscrupulous, and shamelessly insincere--in matters, that is, unconnected with their craft. Earnestness, by contrast, deadens; it homogenizes the sentiments; it may flirt with irony but never dangerously so; it subordinates magic to agenda; it seeks to please rather than to charm; it hankers after acceptance and respectability, however much it may squawk the opposite--and was any great or good poem ever truly respectable?

19. Las Casas - Michael Hofmann

Las Casas describes a Mexican town. Or more than that, unobtrusively describes the contradictions, oppositions and juxtapositions within it. He’s an observer and makes no claims to understand the nuances of the culture – the opening line is, “I leaned round the corner in a Gold Rush town.” There’s the mix of people from Europe, North America, the Ladinos and the Indians, “everyone a source of money to everyone else.” The shops have a weird mix of products on their shelves and well-built houses share space with burgeoning pastel shacks “whose quick spread swallowed the airport.” There’s the noise during the day and the deserted streets after eight o’clock. Fireworks produce “jubilation, and no eyes raised.”

I presume MH is talking about San Cristobal de las Casas in the southern Chiapas region. I’ve been there and, I must admit, I loved the place. It’s painted in the off-the-beaten-track tourist brochures as an ethereal place, and it certainly is a bit dreamy, the mirage of a haven a tourist might dream of settling in. But MH cuts straight through the superficial romance.

I liked his description of the living and the dead both heading to the “aquamarine graveyard” to the sound of music (bright colours, death, and music appear inseparable in Mexico), but my favourite lines are those which close the poem:

the scrape of rockets up the sky, a flash in the pan,
a percussive crash, a surprisingly durable cloud.
Jubilation, and no eyes raised.

18. Pastorale - Michael Hofmann

I’ll skip past the odd but very interesting Days of 1987 with its fabulous opening lines:

I was lying out on the caesium lawn,
on the ribs and ligatures of a split deckchair

Instead, I’ll stop at Pastorale, which is about as far from rural idyll as you can go. The narrator watches the cars racing down the motorway from the verge. He also sees roadkill, old cans, haystacks and sheep, which he describes as “ancillary, bacillary blocks of anthrax.”

Humanity and nature are set in total opposition. In fact, even nature seems to contain oppositions within itself. While the farmer tried to make order, the narrator walked “contre-sens” (more French, perhaps because no English equivalent quite gets that idea of contrariness and senselessness in the one phrase), the cars “razored past” – everything speaks of a split, and death is all around. It’s a ten-line poem, set in five unrhymed couplets, and my favourite two lines are probably these ones following, which compress so much into few words. The narrator walks:

noting a hedgehog’s defensive needle-spill,

the bullet-copper and bullet-steel of pheasants

So another bleak view of the world slicing through a veneer of beauty. You wouldn't expect anything less from MH.

17. From A to B and Back Again - Michael Hofmann

That’s me two behind now, after missing yesterday. Ah well…

From A to B and Back Again belongs to the Absurdist school. It begins with the Northern Line whose tracks are like a “curving cicatrice” (a mark, impression, scar). It ends with a woman in a maternity hospital “on an empty drip” who shows the narrator her scars – “one in the metropolis” and the other in the “unconcerned suburbs.” In between, the narrator drops into the Barnet maternity hospital “by accident” and finds in there the woman with the scars, whom he calls “my love.”

So there are the cicatrice/ scars and the train journey/ metropolis–unconcerned suburbs connections. There’s the question of why he should drop into a maternity hospital “by accident,” given that his lover is in there. Why would she be on an “empty drip?” The hospital porter is illiterate but he and the narrator manage to find the lover’s name among the Os. All quite odd.

The language and rhythms are lively enough. But I don’t really know what this poem is getting at. It could be that it reveals a detachment in the narrator, that the images reflect his painfully superficial attitude to the woman and to other serious events in his life – his visit is accidental, the woman’s name among the Os makes me think of zeros, he’s made the journey from the metropolis (London, I presume) to the “unconcerned suburbs” of Barnet, mirrored in the woman’s body – maybe…these are all guesses.

I liked these lines:

There was Barnet, my glottal stop, trying hard
to live up to its name, colloquial and harmless and trite.

The line-break made me think something positive was coming, as did the first phrase of the next line – but the three adjectives that follow progressively destroy the place (poor old Barnet!). But it’s also the narrator’s stop and “glottal stop”, so he is implicated in his own description.

Les Murray in Glasgow

Last Thursday at Sloan’s Bar in Glasgow, I enjoyed hearing Australia’s greatest contemporary poet, Les Murray, read a selection of his poems.

Murray’s 1986 Selected Poems on Carcanet Press was one of the first poetry books I bought. I had been blown away by the ingenuity of The Quality of Sprawl. I can’t remember how or where I first came to read that poem, but I felt compelled to seek out more of his work. I hadn’t read all that much poetry and didn’t find the Selected easy, but it changed my life, one of those pivotal books that turned me onto what good poems could do.

It was great to hear Les Murray read. He came over as a very relaxed, companionable person – intriguing in itself considering that he has Asperger’s Syndrome. He reads his poems as if he’s chatting to friends in a supermarket queue. Again, considering how tightly crafted they are, that was surprising. As an example, have a look at An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow and then listen to Les Murray reading it. See what I mean? He read fairly quickly too – not always easy to take in – but many of the poems were stunning.

All the books he had on sale disappeared instantly, but I’ve just ordered his latest collection, The Biplane Houses and look forward to reading it.

Afterwards, I joined a bunch of Glasgow-based poets for a couple of drinks and caught the 11.30pm bus home. It’s always nice to catch up with friends in the West.

Contessa Miseria

More Carmen Consoli. This time becasue I like the song and this is a terrific version of it, even better than on the studio CD. Partly also because I would just love to be up there on that 'stage' with the whole city of Rome as background!

16. Up in the Air - Michael Hofmann

What to make of Up in the Air? The poem shoots about from image to image, but there’s no coherent single scene, no narrative, no obvious sense. And yet, it’s a terrific poem!

It seems to me that each phrase implies the next phrase. At times, the links are no more than faint suggestions. For example in S1 and S2, there’s an alcoholic, which leads to a divorcée with a dogseat, which leads to “birds barking in the trees”, which leads to a heron on a river bank, which leads to ‘soul survivors’ from the Titanic, which leads to ‘My Girl’ (a soul classic), which leads to a dancing girl etc.

It’s impossible to say what the poem is ‘about’, but again I’d feel that it reflects an inner psychology, a sense of everything in the narrator’s life being ‘up in the air’, unsettled, blurred. There are so many brilliant lines and images in this poem, such a bizarre imagination at work, that the poem demands re-reading. I love the “alcoholic devotedly spooning/ pâté from a tub,” the girl dancing “like the alphabet/ mostly like the letter A,” the fingers as “sheep’s knuckle-bones dicing for the seamless garment” and the airport “with its complement of tiny, specialised, ministering/ vehicles.” Just fantastic stuff. My favourite section:

.................................................…I was Ajax,
I had stolen another man’s captive, slaughtered sheep
like a maniac, counted my friends till
I fell asleep, now I would have to swim for it

in the greasy, yellow, woollen waves…

This is unhinged madness and brilliance. Both conspire to inhabit every stanza of this poem.

15. Freebird - Michael Hofmann

Freebird mixes up registers and juxtaposes details to build up a picture of a hot summer’s day in a squalid part of town. It begins with a quote from DH Lawrence – “One forms not the faintest inward attachment, especially here in America” – which leads me to believe that the poem must centre around the detached, observer-narrator.

The poem begins with girls tanning themselves around a swimming pool, as if we’re in a holiday resort, but it soon becomes clear that the pool is a curious anomaly and the tanning is happening in “Stranglers’ weather”. The birds flying overhead are “mockingbirds” (no accident surely). The place smells. People mentioned include a tattooed con man and an anguished pest control man dealing with cockroaches.

Two phrases struck me. The first is “I was cuntstruck and fat.” That’s obviously meant to be noticed! It comes out of the blue. In this poem, the narrator looks at the tanning girls, hears a young couple making love in a flat above and the loud blast of Lynyrd Skynyrd from somewhere (presumably the song of the poem’s title with a “seven-minute instrumental coda” thrown in). But he seems pretty lethargic about it all.

The second phrase is the final line, describing the love-making girl – “Her little screams petered out, inachevée.” Now, why the French word here? It means “unfinished” and could suggest the girl's dissatisfaction at a premature end. The literal sense is that she’s drowned out when the Lynyrd Skynyrd is turned up. Freebird recalls those mocking birds from S2, flashing green as they pass over - surely a view of the narrator’s state of mind. Indeed, the whole poem is like a loose metaphor for inner turmoil. The narrator might feel detached from his surroundings, but they have inserted their hooks into him.

Andrew Philip on Salt!

Great news! My friend, and fellow HappenStance poet, Andrew Philip, has been signed by Salt Publications. They will publish Andy’s first collection, The Ambulance Box, probably sometime in 2009.

As you’ll see from Andy’s blog entry, I’ve read a few versions of his manuscript in draft form. I suspect it would have been accepted for publication even the way it was first time I read it, but he’s taken his time and strengthened it over the last nine months or so. It will be a really good book!

14. Marvin Gaye - Michael Hofmann

The next seven entries on Michael Hofmann’s Selected Poems will be from the Corona, Corona (1993) section. The first few poems are very interesting, but I can’t cover everything. I’m going to kick off with Marvin Gaye. It gives the illusion of prosy reportage, but it’s not really.

The poem is written in unrhymed tercets. Each stanza contains a few facts about Gaye, some background facts, a little information (“Including duets, he had fifty-five chart entries.”), and so on. But the more ordinary facts are juxtaposed with some quite strange ones, everything in the same flat tone. So we learn that Gaye’s life “followed the rhythm of albums and tours,” but also that “He thought there was another word for ‘virgin’ that wasn’t ‘eunuch’,” a weird detail for a poem which appears to be setting out the significant facts of someone’s life.

The effect is unsettling. The poem effectively coveys the idea of a strange individual, of madness, and when we learn that “In Ostend he felt the eyes of the Belgians on him,” his paranoia is no surprise. The distancing effected in the final line – “A dog collar shot a purple dressing-gown, twice” (Gaye was killed by his clergyman father) – continues (shockingly) the flat tone used to describe Gaye’s life.

Plain style, a deliberate flatness, is often used in contemporary poetry, but sometimes the poems are really little more than prose narratives cut up into lines. I mean, they are poems, but I often think they could have been written far better. I write such poems myself at times and you can see them splashed all over current literary magazines, but I’m not often satisfied with the results - either the ones I write or the ones I read.

However, here, the flatness works really well. The emotionless reporting of facts, the way no single detail appears more important or relevant than another, is chilling.