Points of View - Poetry Review - Volume 98:2 Summer 2008

Poetry is a thoroughly different beast to prose, and consequently deserves to be read in a thoroughly different way.

My preferred method, and most poetry readers have their own method of choice, is to read it through first without stopping to annotate or consider thoroughly, just concentrating on getting a feel for the poem and it’s narrative thread and general message. Others prefer to read aloud to get a feel for poetry in the mouth, the full sounds, but as I often read on the train this may strike some of my fellow-travellers as a little odd. Furthermore, I feel I can gauge a poem’s sound pretty well without having to read it aloud, as I can enounce it in my head.

After this, I comb through it with a pencil, making annotations on rhyme, meter, syntax, imagery, or whatever strikes me particularly relevant for that poem.

This is where poetry differs from prose for me, for while I do make some annotations when reading prose, they are nowhere near as thorough as those I make when reading poetry.

Poetry is wordsmithery at its highest form, delicate threads of sentences and punctuation interwoven to make a blanket of sound, rich in terms of layered meanings, imagery and simple flow of language. To put it simply, everything matters in poetry. When you’re working with perhaps as little as four lines, there is no room for superfluity, and this is where the beauty of poetry lies for me.
After reading poetry, prose can often seem like the work of children, simple and bare to the point of inanity.

This is the first issue of Poetry Review I have read. It begins with about 50 pages of poetry, selected from various new volumes. While I enjoyed some of the poems, I’d much rather read a whole volume of poetry by one poet, as this allows themes to circulate, it allows feelings and a sense of something to brew into something fit for imbibing. The kind of poetry reading where we jump between authors is almost like snacking – it satisfies a quick need but leaves us essentially unsatisfied, needing more.

Next comes about 15 pages about ‘Poets into Prose’, and this was far and away my favourite section of the magazine. Poets cannot help but be poets even when writing prose, and it is consequently a rich, slower prose than that of pure prose stylists. Alan Brownjohn’s ‘There and Back’, a story of a trip to Bucharest, stood out.

Tim Liardet sums up individual poets very succinctly, but we can apply his comments to poetry as a whole, as an art form distinct from prose:

‘All good poets…have created [their] own dialect and very rarely abandon it.’

(p. 103)

Next come some 30 pages of reviews, followed by a few pages of endnotes, comprising an editorial and bits of prose and poetry.

All in all this is an engaging magazine that is aware of poetry’s marginal place in the literary world, but also seems to sense a second-coming. As Fiona Sampson states in her editorial:

‘Poetry Review is proud to celebrate and learn from multiple points of view in today’s remarkably fertile poetic climate: whose intelligent fluidity, we believe, will allow the Next Big Thing to emerge.’ (p. 118)

It could just be that poetry’s inherent opposition to the pace of modern life ensures its survival as a future art form, despite many viewing it as an already long-dead art form.

Swing Hammer Swing - Jeff Torrington

As a long-time fan of Scottish fiction, I looked forward to delving into Torrington’s Whitbread winner with relish.

Written in the Scots demotic that his compatriots James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have received so much criticism and acclaim for, respectively, Torrington tells the story of the, literal, decline of the Gorbals of the 1960s over one week in the life of Tam Clay.

Father-to-be, wordsmith manqué, adulterer, heavy drinker and accidental arsonist, Tam Clay is the itinerant voice of the working class.

According to The Scotsman’s obituary of Torrington, the author was "fêted by the London literary establishment as the epitome of the working-class Glaswegian done good," yet the aforementioned Kelman, when his ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ won the 1994 Booker Prize, had his novel labelled as a ‘disgrace’ by one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger.

I’ve very little authority to judge what is authentic working-class Glaswegian voice, having grown up in a middle-class West Midlands family, but there seems to be very little difference between the two voices apart from:

1. Torrington’s narrator, Tam Clay, is a more educated man, making overt references to Sartre, Kierkegaard and other renowned authors.

2. Torrington’s Clay swears a lot less than Kelman’s Sammy Samuels.

Essentially, it seems there is a working class voice the establishment can accept, one that is essentially inferior and happy to be inferior to them, with no pretensions of uprising; and one that they cannot accept, one that is boisterous and is ready to put up a fight in the name of his condition.

Tam Clay is essentially a passive observer, content just to whittle away his life in the Gorbals as it falls apart around him, happy to make comments such as ‘February’s such a waste of a month’ (p.301) and move one without further comment.

Sammy Samuels is mentally incapable of such a comment, as for him it would have to be followed by a string of invective about why February is such a waste of a month and whose fault it is.

Yet this does not make him a disgrace. His is just as legitimate a working-class voice as Clay’s, and possibly more so if it says a few things that you don’t want to hear. Because isn’t that what the working class often is to the establishment, something that they don’t want to hear?

Torrington sums up the difference between Clay and Samuels perfectly on page 140:

‘’It was too bad that the blind in literature were doubly disadvantaged; readers tend to assume they’re symbolic: ‘I presume your blind chappy represents the spiritual myopia of contemporary society?’ ‘Well, naw, as a matter of fact he jist couldnae see!’”

Clay, with his functioning eyes, only observes the surfaces of things, whereas Samuels, with his blindness, sees beneath the skin of bureaucratic injustices to the symbols of power that they represent and cannot help but yell out against them.

Both are legitimate working class voices, but only one is acceptable to the establishment.

Под Русским флагом вокруг светом - (Around the world under the Russian flag)

Reading relies, more than we often realise, on word associations. Particularly adjectivally, words can gather or lose a lot of flavour according to the writer’s choice of one word over another.

Reading a book in a foreign language, one can automatically lose a lot of this feeling, struggling to get a handle on concrete meaning rather than looking for subtleties of meaning, especially when far from fluent in the language being read.

Something I am struck by in the two foreign languages I know well enough to comment on – Russian and Polish – is the relative lack of expression available in those languages, in comparison to English. Often dictionary entries for one English word have cver five or six words in Russian or Polish, and thus, as a foreigner at least, one has to wonder if the subtlety of expression we’re capable of in English would be possible at all in these languages.

Another interesting, and related, point is how the language itself controls our way of thinking. A friend of mine who speaks German says that you have to be incredibly organised in your sentences just to speak the language, and that for him this explains why a lot of Germans are such organised people in general life.

Russian is a fairly regular language in terms of declinations, but very flexible in terms of sentence structure, enabling the same sentence to be given four or five different stresses according to word order. It’s also very particular, with six grammatical cases.

I suppose that the language reflects the heavily stratified levels of etiquette in Russian society, with different forms of address and use of names according to who you’re talking to, while the grammatical cases, typical of Slavonic languages, also reflect this need to know exactly where everything stands.

On the other hand, the malleable sentences could, for the fertile mind, be the spark that fires up the ever-so rebellious Russian mind, or the rebellious literary Russian mind at least.

This is all just really half-boiled speculation of course, but I feel that there is some root underneath all this, although my knowledge of Russian leaves me unable to say much more about it.

The book itself, ‘Around the world under the Russian flag’, is a fairly dry plod through the history of Russian exploration, looking at the scrapes the sailors got into during a three year period (1803-1806) and how they escaped from them. There are a lot of ‘negotiations’ in the book, with the Russians always coming out on top, be it against the Chinese or the Native Americans. Its stoical nature is certainly something that we can still see in Russia’s foreign relations today. Never is a smile anywhere near the surface of Medvedev's or Putin’s face, apart from when strutting about in leather during victory parades of course.

Picture courtesy of: http://psybok.wordpress.com/