The Who – live and in the studio.

There is often a perceived conflict on the part of listeners between the raucous, loose and mesmeric performances of the Who live and their studio output – an output often contrasted with the former as lacking the grip and force of comparable live outings and as being incoherent, trend orientated and startlingly discordant with the image of destructive, unhinged, wild musicians. This is somewhat understandable, take 1967′s ‘The Who Sell Out’ or even its precursor ‘A Quick One’ and contrast it with what most listeners who encounter the Who [who were not of age in the early sixties] start off with – 1970′s ‘Live at Leeds’ or any other such iteration of their live set of the late sixties and early seventies, that is post Tommy[1969] and pre Who’s Next [1971]. Even taking Tommy itself with its light, flushing horns, its bizarre themes, vocal harmonies, acoustic guitar and an unusually restrained John Entwistle [in comparison with his playing on Quadrophenia] it can seem a whole world away from what was going on  on the stage [compare the studio version of 'Sparks' to its live rendition]. Let’s go over the common accusations here -

1) The Who in the studio are inconsistent and show a lack of self-identity, often fumbling their way through movements in popular music without really developing their own sound.

2) In studio they’re either pompous and a little inaccessible – Tommy, Who’s Next [to a lesser extent], Quadrophenia – or they’re unusual and vaguely alienating – ‘A Quick One’, ‘Who Sell Out’.

Conclusion:

They do pack a punch live but ‘Who’s Next’ is their only accessible studio album and therefore their only successful studio album which translates into – anything from ‘My Generation’ to ‘Who Sell Out’ is too early for me to listen to [and the unclean also tend to say 'listen to a whole album, ughh'] and ‘Tommy’ and ‘Quadrophenia’ are too arcane to really get into to – so I listen to their classic live set, some of their singles and ‘Who’s Next’.

The evidence:

Early Who material around the time of ‘My Generation ‘ [1965] and ‘A Quick One’ [1966] is comprised mostly of a bunch of singles which sound a little like the early Kinks and a lot like a group without the finish and composure of the Beatles or the Stones. As well as this there is a tendency to play covers of R&B from the preceding fifties or even the pop of the early sixties ‘Please, Please, Please’ or ‘Heatwave’ for example. Alongside this is the quirky, insular sensibility of totally alien tracks like Moon’s ‘Cobwebs and Strange’, Entwistle’s ‘Boris the Spider’ or Townshend’s ‘Happy Jack’ not to mention ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ itself.

‘The Who Sell Out’ [1967] often put across as the Who’s only ‘great’ album continues the trend of jocular weirdness, the only trait to really distinguish the group from their contemporaries at this point in terms of intent. However this wonderful concept album with its love songs and radio jingles bears little resemblance to the Who as the arena rock giants of the seventies and its opening track ‘Armenia city in the sky’ must confound the listener who has grown accustomed to ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. It seems [I obviously disagree to an extent] to betray a slight aping of the psychedelic scene of the time, particularly or even solely in the case of ‘I can see for miles’.

Tommy [1969] is thematically inconsistent and totally and undeniably bizarre. I have seen many attempts to dilute its value by claiming that concept albums like ‘Arthur ‘ [The Kinks - 1969, a great album in its own right] or ‘S.F. Sorrow’ [The Pretty Things - 1968] are in the case of the former better, more harmonious [the old accusation of the Who as constantly botching what they produce, half getting there] and in the case of the latter more deserving of the claim to establishing the ‘rock opera’ genre [for the critic who doesn't believe Tommy is musically worth considering a handy way of dismissing also its historic value].

Who’s Next [1971] is a failed successor to Tommy which produces two very popular anthemic set-pieces and Quadrophenia [1973] is deemed too dense and confusing, lacking the catchy, gentler sounds of Tommy to qualify it as a ‘great’ album – the difficulty with which the Who perform it live doesn’t help either.

Why this is [mostly] nonsense:

The Who unlike any other group of the same time period are actually creative in the sense of the exploration of a variety of different sounds – they seem to imitate trends of the period precisely because they are themselves deeply uncomfortable with those trends and aren’t satisfied with them. Hence the constant tone of discomfort and tension beneath the majority of their ‘derivative’ early back-catalog . Take a track like ‘Whiskey Man’ the dark and disturbing lyrics undermine the soft, early Beatles era pop sensibility of the tune and are delightfully out of sync with the mellow horns. Take ‘My Generation’ [the song] or ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ the former a punk/grunge oddity with a thrilling base line from Entwistle completely dissimilar to anything of the same period [in fact on that record they sound closer to the Clash than their own contemporaries] the latter a prog-rock tale of infidelity with an engine driver. The weirdness of their early catalog is a wicked, alternative commentary on the early sixties a commentary exemplified in the ‘Who Sell Out’ as playfully and unromantically undermining the delightful pop of the Beach Boys, the Beatles et al – the early Who are seditious, they offer an uneven, strange counter-narrative to their contemporaries and most important of all they are mucking about in search of sound, not trading off image [that's a bit harsh but I won't retract it]

By the time Tommy comes along they have turned this sonic weirdness into an inimitable ‘rock opera’ [Tommy is in a category of its own which is why I am reluctant to use the term 'rock opera' - not because it is so excellent though that there are no genuine comparative examples, simply because it is entirely unique, Quadrophenia its only relative, and a distant one at that]. Who’s Next may seem like arena rock or typical seventies fare but its narrative is once again about undermining and questioning the excess of the late sixties – in fact this album is closer to ‘A Quick One’ than anything else, only it has absorbed some of the expansive tendencies of the music scene of the time . Quadrophenia is a late masterpiece.

The reality is that the Who’s live performances show only the previously hidden plumbing of the band, the energy and skill which they used to create interesting, distinct music [unlike Led Zeppelin]. They can play, not only can they play but they can out play almost any other outfit I can think of, but what is important is that that energy, that raw musical thrashing about is then what is concentrated into expression and exploration in the studio [Quadrophenia is an example of Pete finally really exploiting the power of Entwistle and Moon as a rhythm section which leads] and this is good – very good.

They can thrash about, put on an intense spectacle, arguably better than any other contemporary – BUT and this is the clincher, they still choose only to use that as material, not to let it dominate their output.

My conclusion is that they have four ‘great’ albums – ‘Who Sell Out’, ‘Tommy’, ‘Who’s Next’ and ‘Quadrophenia’ – that they have the most diverse back-catalog of any of their contemporaries, that their influence on music of that kind in the decades that followed was ultimately greater than either that of the Beatles or the Stones [Zeppelin had no notable influence whatsoever - I'm evil] and that the relation between their live performances and their studio work is not inconsistent at all – the exhaustive energy of their live performances is the incredible basis of their work in the studio, and its an energy that they have but choose not to allow dominate them stylistically [consider that the infamous Live at Leeds in its original format is composed mostly of odd singles and covers, even tracks that were never actually intended for recording - in fact looking at it there isn't really a genuine Who-hit to list].

If you think of the Who as an arena-rock band you haven’t met them yet.

As to their contemporaries I think they should be preferred flat out to the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Zeppelin [ughhh], Hendrix and a whole host of second-rate groups from the same period [Jefferson Airplane or The Animals for example] – Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ [1967] is as good as Tommy but for Love itself it is a singular stroke of brilliance [though Da Capo is great too], the Kinks are not up there with the Who in my book but they are close, and it is equally true to say of them that in the end they too are more influential than the Beatles or Stones – in fact my rating of the four great British bands of that period goes

The Who

The Kinks

The Rolling Stones

The Beatles.

Also the best thing of the sixties; Tommy live.

Anatomy of a Poem – Michael Hartnett and Harry Clifton part 2

We last left off with a quick analysis of a poem by Michael Hartnett – now I’d like to look at one of Clifton’s poems which has some similarity I think in structure but more importantly a striking similarity in terms of subject. The poem is ‘Warp Spasm’ from ‘The Liberal Cage’ [1988]

Here I have reproduced it as it is difficult enough [again] to get a hold of it.

“Regressive, the lines of fate
Bewitching your face,
Distorting it, running it through
From somewhere speechless
Inside you, erupt
In a spasm of hatred -
A voice.

And suddenly, I hear
Not language, or the usual fears
That have household names
To disguise them, but evil made explicit,
Usurping the net of energies
With its own electricity
Of darkness,

And Ireland
Tonight, the artificial lights
Ablaze like consciousness, illuminating
Indoor life, where sibylline daughters stand
In luxury like our own
With blood on their hands -

Dissolves, reverts
To the freezing flagstones of ancient floors
And you a child, at three or four,
And murder in the air
From below the stairs, or the bottom drawer,
Or the ages before birth,
The endless wars.

Keep your voice down -
There are people above us, and people below,
As well seek an answer to this
In legend, or analysis
Or Irelands of long ago.
What was done to you, back then,
You will never know.”

I suppose we should dispense with some technical considerations first – the control here is not as tight as that of Hartnett. This is the result of a definite narrative structure and the broader, more self-sufficient images which naturally accompany such a structure. In this case the narrative forms a movement of place which results in a thematic development attached fundamentally to a series of set-piece images which are abandoned as we continue through the poem – there is not a sense that the image is bound to the theme directly, where an image continues to resonate through the poem or finds itself consistently transformed throughout the poem because of its fundamental connection with the uncovered object of the poem – that is as that stuff which burns away about the object and has its shape, is its shroud. Where ever there is a narrative based process of description there is the risk of disposable imagery which is to say that there can be images whose development serves only a means through a set of descriptive phases and this results in a greater slack, a greater width which creates more resistance and therefore reduces the momentum of the poem. The two obvious examples in this poem are the contrasted images of the modern ‘illuminated’ household and the house of ‘ancient floors’ both places within the poem that are not carried over in its progression towards the final expression of its disclosed theme. You can stop in both of these images to look around, in fact you can stop as long as you like because by their nature these images do not find conclusion in the poem, are not limited and so have an openness that has them fade into shadow where the poet’s voice ceases to give them full or final description and yet that shadow is tangible as really existing in connection to the image, as simply a part of the image that is left unsaid, undeveloped – this is the result of giving any image in a poem a kind of self-sufficiency, a life of its own.

What am I saying here though? That this is to be avoided when it comes to poetry in general? Not in this case, here Clifton maintains enough control and the poem is short and precise enough to avoid the reader tarrying long in either place. The danger though is real enough – it is not to be admired in a poet when he or she creates a great mass of disposed images that linger in half-life about the desired object, the scent in flared nostrils of a something that is just underneath the experience and yet is still not rooted out. They may become in this case a barrier to the reader’s progression into the heart of the poem or poem-series – in short there should be a drop in a poem, a being pulled down through it inexorably, we are not talking here of parlours to stroll through or expansive panoramic scenes. Poetry is an art-form in a way distinct from all other types of literature; that is it is better as art than any other kind of literature and as such it must drive us through to the real in a way we do not expect but unconsciously desire. Drawn down through the bottle neck of a poem’s asceticism always.

What is notable here again though is a fixation with history in a way which bears striking resemblance to Hartnett’s poem – that is a fixation with the numberless unrecorded acts which are still to be felt in the present having formed it but which cannot be directly discerned, whose violence is real and lives on unending, enduring through the present and with the present but which cannot be named, cannot be summoned to trial – which happened in the ‘ages before birth’. Here there is the sense of being shaped in a way that cannot be known by acts that are distant from us but somehow find their way to us through history – in contrast to Hartnett though here there is the lingering of violence, here there is the deep sense of the sharp negativity of an inheritance one is entirely unprepared for. The final lines themselves sum up the impossible sense of being harmed before one should be able to be harmed, of having a wound one never received.

Both of these poems are better examples for young Irish poets to work with than the work of many of their more recognised, more prominent contemporaries [I'm thinking of Heaney or Longley here]. There is no dependency or reliance on the unique nature of the Irish experience of the mid to late twentieth century in the English speaking world to distinguish the poems and yet there is still a distinctly Irish tone. This being crucial in enabling Irish poets to deal with universal themes without abandoning the sense of a distinct Anglo-Irish poetic tradition – a tradition as distinct in its sensibility from American or English poetry as that of Czech, Polish or indeed South American poetry. Indeed I’d venture that Irish poetry has much more in common with the likes of Neruda, Herbert or Vallejo than it does with Auden or Hughes, Bishop or Ashbery.

It’s like Yeats and Kavanagh reconciled I suppose. It is the difference between a poetry which explains or makes lucid the Irish experience or point of view to an English speaking world hungry to understand and accommodate it and a poetry which explains or makes lucid Ireland to itself – it is the latter that will be in demand in the future I think.

Anatomy of a Poem – Michael Hartnett and Harry Clifton part 1

Thought that I’d put off Rilke for a little while more and let some of my readers who are likely to be unfamiliar with the lesser known Irish poets of recent years get a taste for their work. To achieve this I’ll be taking a look first at a poem from the Limerick born poet Michael Hartnett [perhaps best known for his work in Irish-language poetry] from his English collection ‘The Killing of Dreams’ [1992] and a poem from Dublin born poet Harry Clifton [currently the Irish professor of Poetry] from his collection ‘The Liberal Cage’ [1988].

Let’s start with Hartnett the poem I’ve selected which is ‘In the Landscape’ – here I reproduce it as it is difficult enough to find I imagine -

” 1.

One more midge in the swirling ghost
that dances like a cone
above a pond with duckweed
spewing from its throat,
I love the tree as much as lightning does;
I care as much for sunset as the sun.

2.

Maps tell us nothing.
Marking the position of a well,
the presence of a granite spur,
the distance between monoliths,
they cannot trace
the mental rubrics of the deaths and myths
that occured here and occur
still in the mindscape of the race
that first enacted rituals
for the spirit of this place.
When the uneasy builders meet
to celebrate an alien laying-on of hands
where their newer churches rise
and they move together in imported stateliness
or in an over-frantic dance,
the old realities among the dancers stand
with sad and comprehending eyes.”

There’s no denying that this is a minor poem – the mark of such a poem being its self-contained reach. A poem that succeeds artistically reaches beyond itself and there is tangibly the sense of strain, particularly of a driving tension which seems against the odds to the hold the poem together and which grips the reader in its rhythmic procession such that the reader has little choice in the matter. There is in these kinds of poem a sense that the poem itself determines the experience of the reader, shapes the space into which the reader enters. The more space you feel in a poem the less determined or focused the force which produces the poem – therefore the less possibility that something, some distinct aspect of reality is uncovered in the poem. In fact it follows from this as I reflect that the greater tendency of the poet to rely on fall back on a set of images or experiences that are removed from the possibility of being re-appropriated poetically the weaker the output. This would seem to contradict common sense but the more realistic or natural the poet attempts to be the more dominated he or she is by the images, the sounds which he/she should be reshaping in light of the poems strain to overcome language. This reflects for example what I mentioned earlier about Heaney’s poem not recounting in a traditionally realistic fashion the described event but instead transforming that event entirely within the context of the poetic space created. So here are two suggested rules with regard to critically taking apart a poem – firstly that there should be a limited sense of maneuverability the poem ideally should fit exactly about that aspect of the real it uncovers and therefore no waste, no image or sound however well crafted that does not serve the poem’s strain towards overcoming itself and secondly no use of a backdrop which overwhelms the poem, in other words no traditional realism [that sense of mimesis or reproduction] ever – the poem has its worth by expressing something that can only be expressed within the poetic medium and therefore the poet who cannot master or subordinate the language to the challenge is ruled by the language itself and gets nowhere or is drowned in the emotional/intellectual [the two are intertwined] landscape he/she is creating.

The problem I face here is that while I would definitely describe Hartnett’s poem as finished, complete, self-contained and therefore minor it fulfills both of these demands quite exceptionally. There’s no room at all here for deviating from the poem itself. It takes control instantly and its pace and procession is so finely produced that as a reader one is led from beginning to end seamlessly, without slipping out over the edge of the poem, without finding a space in it to take up a position and begin trying to make sense of it – for the proper order is that the poem reshapes the reader and not that the reader must appropriate the poem to his or her own subjective self. There should be no room at all for the reader to ‘get into’ the poem and here there isn’t so I’m quite satisfied. As well as this the instant ring of the poem’s single movement from beginning to end marks a craftsmanship which must include a control over the poetic material [the imagery and sound and so on]. The sense of harmony is that the poem vibrates with singularity of purpose – like a bolt running clean from the first line to the last about which the poem sounds as the reader’s ear runs over it.

Interesting to note here is the fascination of the poet with a profound sense of history, not the Hegelian concept which is so wide and all-consuming in its movements but of the endless number of historical acts which in fact shape the present situation without ever being capable of being pried out and examined themselves. That are undeniably in the present but are also entirely silent in their observance of that present. This is of great importance for any understanding of the Irish sense of self-identity – while Yeats concerned himself with creating this sense of Anglo-Irish literature itself many poets from Kavanagh to Heaney have gutted the actual stuff of 1920s-1970s Ireland as prime material for their poetry Hartnett here has a more forward reaching grasp. Here is the sense of a collision of old and new, of the great pain of moving forward, of trundling limbs – here is the recognition that that same Ireland which was chewed up with great enthusiasm after Kavanagh [who I exclude from this criticism] was disappearing as quickly as it was being digested.

Another noticeable issue with a lot of modern Irish poetry is its attention to material detail – that is its fixation with actual experiences and its relatively omnipresent scorn for symbolic, cryptic or ‘post-modern’ [though I am reluctant to use the term] tendencies. This is in sharp contrast to how other alternative forms like the novel or the play have developed within Ireland with figures like James Joyce, Brian O’Nolan [Flann O'Brien] and Samuel Beckett leading the charge internationally in a sharp deviation from traditional literary forms and subjects, in the case of all three often by comically distorting the very literary form they were making use of. This influence however is not to be felt in modern Irish poetry where by and large there is a tenacious attachment to strange, almost disturbing pastoral imagery and a strong sense of the importance and centrality of a dark and painful past which continues to influence and shape the present. To account for this I can only suggest that the poet after Yeats who does most to shape the poetic sensibility of Ireland is the little known [internationally anyway] figure of Patrick Kavanagh who’s insistence on the significance of the simple and direct and who’s attachment to the imagery of his rural home in Monaghan and indeed to a kind of renewed even vigorous sense of the religious has created possibly an escape from the dominant trends in English language poetry. That is in so far as  Kavanagh remains entirely outside any recognisable literary tradition and remains uninfluenced by any ideological commitments with regard to how poetry functions fundamentally.

Anyway I’ll pick up on this theme again when I move on to part two which deal with Harry Clifton.

Anatomy of a Poem – John Ashbery

The poem I’ll be discussing today is ‘The Ecclesiast’ by John Ashbery – I’ll be doing so in the same context as previous; that is with the specific intent of uncovering more about the nature of poetry itself – as such my analysis will pay no attention to the work of Ashbery as a whole body with a common thematic structure which might assist in the task of analysis, this discussion is restricted to the poem itself, considered not in the context of the poet but in the context of poetry as an abstract art-form.

In case you don’t own a copy yourself you can find it here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/61841189/Ashbery-John-Selected-Poems pg 68.

Okay onto the real work -

Firstly we’re not dealing with the kind of backdrop we found in both previous poems (Heaney, Wordsworth) where there was a single, coherent environment taking the form of a clear narrative which the reader was drawn into, where that environment was constructed out of actual personal experiences – instead we’re looking at something a little more complicated, a little more modern. Let’s do a little preparatory work before we make the real incisions here and talk about the kinds of support structures we see in various poems that provide the surrounding framework in which the reading of the poem takes place.

I think three divisions are merited here, largely poets can use a single, coherent backdrop, usually based on a real experience that has a clear, progressing narrative [1], an emotional state or single thought which is then drawn out throughout the course of the poem [2], or the reader him/herself is used as the grounds of the poem with the poem drawing itself against this common ground of human experience, rolling over it, weathering it with the intention of revealing something within this continuous movement of images and thoughts [3] –  at least this is the case where the personal voice of the poet is present, otherwise it is possible to count a fourth, where there is the use of a metaphorical structure to explore an issue in the vein of storytelling, though this is discontinuous for me from the poetic tradition proper [4]. Here’s a list to elucidate.

[1]: Wordsworth – Tintern Abbey, crucial is the laying out of the environment in which the poem takes place, the reader moves through this descriptive creation of a surrounding context.

[2]: Yeats – Circus Animals Desertion, a state of emotional and intellectual unrest at the approach of death is the basis, the grounds of this poem, is where it takes place, where it ventures out from.

[3]: T.S. Eliot – Four Quartets, the grounds of this poem is the common ground of world [the extended set of all things we can have knowledge about].

[4]: Milton  - Paradise Lost, a large, heavy mythological framework is used for an exploration of an idea which is extended as one would find in the novel but intense and pure enough to remain connected to the language of poetic speech.

So for [1] we can say that the images are fixed as they are drawn from an actual experience, the narrative too must be cohesive in its progression because to invite discord into the backdrop the poet is creating is to invite the disintegration of the poem – it is believed in this case that some realisation is intrinsically attached to a fixed narrative usually directly experienced by the poet, perhaps it is better to say that some realisation is reached naturally through some definite experience and therefore the environment of that definite experience becomes the dominant supportive structure of the poem. See Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight for example. The poetic intellect is in these cases acutely aware but passive, inspiration plays a key role in this kind of poetry.

And similarly . . . . .

[2] we can say that the poem’s imagery and structure will be tied down to the given emotional-intellectual state and will consist in a set of metaphors, sounds, explorations that swivel about this state, that constantly refer back to it. In this case the central theme is held up and the set of images and sounds which spiral about it are deemed to continuously enrich the given theme until at some point something is gleaned from that state and this concludes the poem – or terminates the successive flow of imagery. See Vallejo’s ‘Los heraldos negros’ although in this case it is more an example of the failure to draw anything more, anything therapeutic from the poetic exploration of the given state. In these cases we should note that the poet starts out trying to dispel or come to terms with the state. In this case the poetic intellect is both active and passive, it passively enters into a state of emotional- intellectual unrest or excitement and it works on this state furiously by means of a set of images and sounds that are expressive of this state – in this way [2] appears the opposite of [1] the emotional-intellectual state is the basis of the poem not what is reached at its conclusion.

[3] we can say here that the object of the poem is what is being made clear through the course of the poem and therefore cannot itself appear as the foundation of the poem. The poem is a set of sounds and images that bore away at what is known only vaguely until, if successful, something reveals itself in this continuous movement of recycled images kept coherent by a basic rhythmic structure that is normally not formal. The poem in this case sets out to seek, it doesn’t yet have its object properly fixed, in this case then the poem is a kind of discovery for the poet him or herself as what it eventually uncovers is the kind of objective ground which had been previously concealed beneath the vibrant, impatient activity of life. It must therefore run itself over the object directly – that is it must take a universal in the truest sense for its object, for its ground. See Rilke’s ‘To Music’ or Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Study of the Object’ – in this case the poetic intellect is entirely active as it takes for itself an object and works on it, there is no need for inspiration because the poet reaches out to grasp a feature of the world and deal with it directly.

I won’t get into [4] here as I’m probably boring you to death, haven’t even touched the actual Ashbery poem yet.

My copy of Ashbery's selected

So pretty quickly I can now identify this poem as having two basic structural characteristics – firstly that it falls into [3] that is that there is a continuous flow of contrasting images which are connected by a common theme that they are stubbornly uncovering or weathering. In this case there is no logic to the introduction of images that could be deemed progressively coherent, either in the sense of a clear narrative or the careful construction of a total image – there is more the feel of conversation, the unthinking out-slinging of lines that are connected only by coming from the same state of mind as opposed to being linked in their own individual form. Secondly that there is a faint detection of place introduced during the concluding stanza which is tonally connected to the entire poem and gives a very light, ragged sense of continuity to the piece.

This is reflective of the poet at work because a faint, rather frail sense of place is a handy equivalent to a conversational, unfocused state of mind. The poem therefore has a feel of various ruminations connected by their common point of origin [as opposed to a more desirable thematic consistency] which pass outward, hover for a moment and then are drawn back inwards. To give the poem a fixed placed where the voice of the poem remains static is to give these images a point to return to and dissolve themselves in. It also gives an ability to resolve or conclude without a finality of tone, various considerations mature and then dissipate in the poet [who is present in the poem's structure] thus the poem beings and ends in this state of mind, this conversation – which gives us that distinct sense that nothing has been ventured or reached in the poem of substance but this has nothing to do with whether or not the poem is meaningful and more to do with the poem’s basic structure, which by taking an unfocused point of reflective activity as its centre necessitates a short-life span for all raised considerations – in this kind of poem many things flourish and die and none find themselves concluded in a satisfactory manner.

“Fine vapours escape from whatever is doing the living. / The night is cold and delicate and full of angels / Pounding down on the living. The factories are all lit up, / The chime goes unheard. / We are together at last, though far apart.”

This would be the final stanza which establishes a fixed place where the poem dissolves into itself, that is back into the point it originally emanated from.

How is this for a poetic methodology? Not bad. It’s more diverse, there’s a great variety of images that don’t necessarily relate in any obvious way to one another which results in a density and intricacy of sound which is lacking in both the case of Heaney and Wordsworth. We tend to, in our comfortable criticism of literary modernism, forget the sparse texture of English poetry from Wordsworth through to Tennyson, a sparsity which in the case of the latter seriously limited his capacity to engage meaningfully with his experience of grief and loss. English language poetry in particular suffers a great deal from a conservative attitude to the way in which a poem is structured [I'm not speaking here of formal verse, it is a testament to how flaccid the serious study of poetry has been that its technical aspects have been ignored or treated as consisting of 'inherited formal verse structures' - this could also read as the curse of the idiot's distinction that is the running dichotomy of truth-value and emotional-value as mutually exclusive and part of different realms, as in Science/Art, real intellectual trash right there] an unflinching attachment to simple, cohesive landscapes, small fracture-less experiences as poems. The guilty include Wordsworth, Byron-Shelley-Keats [whose appeal to classical mythology is a sign of overriding weakness in terms of imagination], Swinburne, Tennyson, Hopkins, Auden, Bishop, Lowell, Hughes – exceptions include Eliot, Yeats and Larkin [Larkin is the only English poet of his kind who is slyly, unexpectedly and brilliantly transcendental].

It must be said however that the lack of desire on the part of the poet to develop raised considerations that is reflected in the structures he chooses for his poems – well at least for this poem condemn him has uninterested in the final purpose of poetry. That is to say that any kind of final conclusion or attempt to settle things, to resolve things is simply absent – by choice. You might say that Pound isn’t himself in control of the imagery he creates and is mastered by it while Ashbery simply isn’t interested in doing much else with it. Both are therefore examples of failed imagery which finds a life of its own outside the traditional task of the poem.

I’ll be hopefully moving onto to Rilke [as promised] next.

Carving up Music – part 1

For me it is ideal to make a clean split in our understanding of the kinds of music which exist; the first is wide, has a grip on the actual things of life which it doesn’t seek to transcend or re-structure with some sense of finality, only discuss, engage with, touch, over the last century it has become more varied and experimental and a great deal more thrilling – it is folk music, the second is exclusive, starved, abstract and possessing a reach that easily out-runs the latter – it is the artistic.

It is important to remember that in this case I take music to mean a playing with sound as a form of expression – where the expressive act is the means by which any conscious state (emotional or otherwise) is rendered into something that is interacted with, and by that means becomes something that we can recognise as a thing – a something other-than-us which we have immediate access to and is yet also outside of us, it is what gives us a sense of interaction with a reality – the hardness of experience as an experience of certain abstract things [love, beauty etc] is given by means of representing them through expression; where expression is not symbolic of them but is the very means by which they come to be things that are interacted with as opposed to ineffable private states. The urge to produce a language, any language [including the language of music] arises not from any utilitarian purpose but the natural tension of the blind things taking shape within us which demand completion through expression – the banging of one’s fists is not symbolic of an internal state of anger it is how one knows one is angry, how a state of being angry comes to be stable and complete. Thus music is this kind of phenomenon – that there is sound side by side with that there is consciousness, the playing with the possibilities of sound and its ability to be related in the sense of expression is the whole realm of the musical. Thus the art in music is music turned to one purpose or aim, an artistic one.

With that out of the way I can delve a little deeper into my distinction of two primary forces in music – folk and art.

I’ve long felt that most of what we call modern music as in pop/rock/punk what have you is the result of what happens when folk music is connected to an infrastructure that allows for the recording of music and its easy and economical distribution to widely dislocated listeners. By this I mean that folk music is a music rooted into a community, that is based in an expression of the concrete phenomena of the everyday that each of us encounters without a desire to somehow overcome these phenomena, only to deal with them, touch up against them, acknowledge them and run them round a little. Turn them over. Its a music that is so to speak enmeshed in life, picking up and rolling about its various fragmented experiences as they swell and break – it has nothing of the transcendent about it. Initially folk music remains an unrecorded [in the sense of audio-preservation] kind of music with no possibility of flawless re-production and therefore musician-specificity, and also with no potential for escape beyond the confines of the communities it emerges in precisely because no infrastructure exists to give it a life that is truly beyond those communities and the traditional musicians that maintain it. In short when you take the basic nature of folk music and introduce to it the ability to record and distribute at will you do a number of things – firstly you destroy the set of songs that are common property to all musicians playing with a tradition and you create from that a new sense of ownership, whereby a musician can lay claim to a set of work because it has gained a new feature it had lacked previously, longevity. This isn’t necessarily bad at all, by doing so you introduce much more variety and willingness to experiment in the creation of musical works because ownership is guaranteed – and not just in a commercial sense, Tommy will always be the work of the Who regardless of who has the right to the music – unfortunately the tradition of freely exchanged music which is adapted and reproduced in a unique fashion musician to musician largely disappears, at least when we look at the kind of exchange that took place in Blues or even in the early, New Orleans focused incarnations of Jazz. Secondly you increase the ambition of each musician with regard to their subject-matter, the promise of longevity and wide distribution results in a kind of existence for their music which previously had been the sole preserve of the institution which was the abstract form of classic music, where preservation and re-production had been created without the need for the kind of technological infrastructure we’re discussing.

On the other hand classical music represents the austerity of a form of music that has dedicated itself entirely to the artistic task which is a overcoming and restructuring of its subject-matter, an attempt at a kind of expression which gets inside a phenomenon and reproduces it from within. I should be taking a further look at this distinction tomorrow when I’ll discuss the artistic mode in more detail. I might also attempt an analysis of an Ashbery poem for my continuing series ‘anatomy of a poem’ -

Spooky.

Here’s an example to elucidate what I mean:

Art - incredible, transformative, quality of elevating and re-structuring our experience

Folk - touches on and engages with everything we're familiar with in a re-invigorating way which strikes a common cord softly - no disturbance.

What George Clinton can teach us Europeans

In the opening track of their eponymous album ‘Funkadelic’ the George Clinton led project poses a very essential question – what is a Funkadelic? From that point on the revelatory, extraterestrial mythology of the P-Funk is created out of a handful of surprisingly brilliant albums from an incredible group of bizarre musicians [I'm refering here to Parliament and Funkadelic as one entity]. Their impact lies in the self-provision of an evaluative narrative for the African-American community. It is not the Vedas by any stretch but it addresses an ongoing question, how a social group of predominantly African descent with little tangible connection to a continent ravaged by European colonisers and whose influence on the culture and politics of a young nation is substantial are to view and understand themselves in their relation to the cultural and political entity of the United States. Now obviously these albums are a self-conscious parody of a founding mythology in a humorous vein but there is no doubt something to the excessive and parodic displayal of the religion of the Funk – just look up the infamous ‘swing down sweet chariot’ break in ‘Mothership Connection’ – which connects with listeners in a way that steps beyond the comedic, and that’s something which is both ostensibly ridiculous and yet still underneath it quite serious . White America can largely fabricate a mythos for itself from a fictitious rendering of recent history with particular, devote attention to the breakaway from the UK iniated in mid to late eighteenth century. How however do the various racial groups that make up the US and yet do not participate in this founding mythos come to prepare for themselves a self-image? A problem particularly acute for a group brought into the child-nation against its will, deprived [to an extent] of their own language and rites and systematically oppressed for decades.

You should own this album. No excuses.

The question – ‘what is a European?’ may seem unnescessary and artificial in comparison. In fact this is not an entirely untrue appraisal. A chain of economic and politic events have suddenly made this question essential though, given it some real vitality, caused us to wonder as to whether or not there exists more than a polite facade of common European identity and heritage placed over a colder intersection of economic interests. Now it is suddenly true to say that once again ideology is a prime motivator holding itself above distinctly economic concerns – our previous comfortable relation with an economics unhindered by political intervention has been quite violently shattered. The English press are even warming up to Ed Miliband – it is in short a changed world or at the very least a changed Europe – and in it the question of what we actually want from the European project beyond trade benefits is important. For it is ideology I think which has shaped the policy decisions of Europe’s leaders in their reaction to the deep seated instability of a Euro-zone over-burdened with debt. It is what hardline conservatives in our neighbouring UK hate most a ‘technocratic’ vision of the EU. A vision of what the union should constitute has shaped the policies which we are told will bring it into existence. It is Berlin cries the structural imbalance of the Union which has resulted in its near-collapse, global meltdown be forgotten, refusal to deal directly with the debt dissapear – the ostensible solution, perfect the Union by making it harmonious with the vision of a fiscally integrated economic union dominated naturally by the largest economy, Germany. Of course this is no doubt Berlin’s vision of the EU, it is evidently not that of London and I don’t think it is that of Ireland, Greece, Italy or France for that matter. The one thing I do know is that we’re all unsure as to what we want now outside some level of restored stability and an end to the fear of contagion and prolonged recession.
When we come to vote on Merkel’s rescue package for the EU [if we come to vote on it, for my readers unfamiliar with Irish politics we have a clause which makes it necessary to hold a referendum to alter any aspect of our consitution, as such we are a bit of thorn in the side of the big policy makers in the EU] we will be staring at a disguised form of this question ‘What is a European?’ – now we will probably pass the package. Our options are limited and fiscal restraint is eventually going to feature in the structure of the EU. However its focus on two factors [1] the proposed profilgacy of the vice of certain European players (PIGS) and [2] the need to restrain by means of lawful sanctions their natural tendency towards irresponsible economic policy are fictions that feature in the centralist’s vision of the EU – problems that shouldn’t be addressed in isolation from the problems of the de-regulated global economics of the late twentieth century. What I mean by this is that the sudden importance of developing for ourselves a self-identity as Europeans [moreover a distinctly non-national kind of self-identity] will not vanish with this rather unsatisfactory and blinkered short-term plan for Europe. It may be time that we manufactured a vision of what Europe can be not simply as a country going along for the ride because the economics suit us, but as a people invested in the project with a position to defend and assert. The answer is not euro-scepticism, it is articulating a vision of what Europe means to us so that we know what it should come to look like in the future, so that it can compete with the strongly invested interest of the German people – so that the EU project won’t fail in the hands of dictatorial Merkel and poodle-like Sarkozy [though I still have my hopes with regards to Monti].
If anyone should need proof of our commital to the project they should only look to the vicious war on debt being fought in the poor peripheries of Europe through austerity – we should bear that only in exchange for a voice and only with the support of our fellow Europeans who we shield by refusing the easy and hasty course of default. Once again I can only mull over that question that has without warning snapped sharply into view – what is this genocidal, ingenious creature of avarice and artistic passion, of poverty and pilfered riches, of Christianity decaying atop the ancient roots of Paganism which we call the European? OR

How can I be an Irishman who is also a European unless they are both two distinct kinds of things? So much for all the nonsense I’ve been reading [and we've been spoonfed] about a lack of cultural bedrock to support the EU, the form of that question alone defeats such a point of view – that is I smell a category error.

Comments on the historical nature of political shifts

A piece appeared recently in the UT which primarily concerned itself with what there was to learn from the decade which has passed since that tragic day in September of 2001. Being bitterly philosophic and quite disgustingly analytic I couldn’t help but ask myself as to just who was doing this ‘learning’. Who exactly has been taking lessons from the slow unravelling of those tremendous historical processes which reveal themselves only gradually over the years? To me it seemed that the ostensible answer was the American people. A fine answer it is. Surely it is the American sense of self, the American sense of place in the world which has been tested the most over the last ten years? So it would seem logical to ask ‘where do we go from here?’ and really mean ‘where does the US go from here?’ – that is not all there is to ask however. We as non-Americans and more specifically I suppose as Europeans need to assess how the last decade has changed our perception of the world and our place in it. This is the angle I wish to approach most of all. I’ll put forward several simple points that hopefully will combine into one compelling and coherent argument that rises quite natrually from the analysis.
The priveleged position of power and influence enjoyed by the US over the last several decades was brought about by determined historical factors, or at the very least there are discernable historical factors which are responsible for creating the space in which the US could reshape itself as a, and perhaps even the world power. What a statement – how do I intend to defend it?
The structure of the world is inherently logical but not in an obvious way, not in the sense of discernable laws that amplify our knowledge. It [the world] cannot be any other way than it is, it cannot defy or contradict itself. To understand this look at proposotional logic – it is like magic, for there seem to be certain rules that language cannot break without invalidating itself. Thus there are discernable ‘mechanisms’ but these can only be shown and never explained. To attempt to explain them would be to show why language is this way and not that way, and ultimately why the world is this and not that way [which is of course impossible]. Thus there is a whole abstract structure of possiblity which waits for the moment of realisation – this abstract structure is the limited set of all reactive agents and their possible actions. If you can accept that human behaviour is rationally motivated – that is by ideas, then you can see where I’m going. We can make free choices (the liberties I’m taking) but we make them within the context of a historical world of fixed possibilities. Before the act all is possibility, after it the world itself takes over, makes the power of the act its own and responds and more it does all this in a logically consisent way. If this makes sense to you you’ll understand then how history waits hand and knee on the actions of individuals to propel it forward but once those individuals themselves make their choices they then can not escape and cannot control the reaction [not speaking about traditional causality] that follows. This is the essence of human freedom in the sensitive context of the past that lives yet in the present or rather is the pummeling force which produces the present. I may place my finger on the trigger of a gun and feel the power of what possibilites it presents but once I pull on the trigger the logical structure of the world takes over and I cannot take back the flung bullet or avoid the facts (of the way the world is) which kill.
So it is that a conflict that really began in 1914 shattered the grand, colonial heart of Europe tossing into the scrap heap age-old Monarchies, revolutionising Eastern Europe and devastating the previously stable economies of democratic nations like Great Britain. The lamentable deployment of atomic weapons in Japan resulted in the pacification of a large sweep of the Pacific ocean. The iron curtain created a political and economic friction which would leave the US with uprecedented influence over the ‘free world’ right up until the collapse of the USSR. Weakened political and economic systems the world over divided by ideology from Eastern Europe, Russia and China and all open to the restructuring aid of the US – this created the right situation for the American people to take centre stage in world affairs. It transpired all, arguably, from the hand of a Serbian. So it is that we think we have power over ourselves, so it is that we find that we do not.
My next bold statement. This period of historical grace where the US was central to the re-development of Western Europe (for example) is finite. As it seems almost self-evident that there are changes in the state of peoples, nations and in the global system as a whole I find it easy to suggest that if there are definite historical conditions that are integral to shaping how the world looks politically, economically [and so on] at any point, then it is true to say that those conditions degrade and undergo change and that this has a defininte effect on the shape of the word politically, economically [and so on]. This leads me to make some general conclusions.
There are essentially two options open to the US as these historical conditions begin to shift. Firstly the US could adjust and find other conditions on which to base its international dominance OR it could seek to use whatever means available, including one assumes force, to preserve the previous conditions intact, and therefore the dominance which follows from them. There are however no other historical conditions great enough within reasonable reach on which to re-ground American global dominance. Therefore unless force is used to preserve those pre-existing conditions the only option that remains is to adjust to playing a different role in international politics. Events outside of the control of the US render the use of force void. The collapse of the USSR, the emergence of China as a central part of the global economic system, rapid global integration – these phenomena are outside the control of the US and they undermine the historical conditions which helped to create the hegemony enjoyed over previous decades. Thus it would seem that the only sensible option, given the force of historical change, is to adjust to this gradual global shift. The question then is how the US can reshape itself in the light of its continued centrality to world affairs in the context however of the undeniable loss of its position of dominance.

What does this mean for us non-Americans? What do we have to learn from this analysis?

Simple. Robert Gates was right. We can no longer afford as Europeans to languish beneath the impressive canopy of American international influence. The psychological effect of 9/11 was so pronounced because it showed Americans and indeed the world that the great God of the United States of America could bleed, was mortal. That no one is invulnerable and that nothing is truly eternal. We felt this as much as any American. Now is a difficult period in which we begin to deal with the seismic events of the early twentieth century. Europe has not recovered, neither has Russia, neither has Asia. The way in which the various nations of this tumultuous continent – on which we have had everything from Beethoven to genocide – have dealt with the economic crisis has thrown up the deep divisions that remain. That leave us looking petty, that cast unsavoury light on the yet living spirit of national self-interest which so happily facilitated our mutual destruction only sixty (or so) years ago. In some ways the criticism of Robert Gates was justified. We have languished quite happy to allow the Americans to take centre stage and dictate world events. Now we need to react to the diminishing dominance of the US so as to seek out the options that will allow humanity to proceed through this time of change in as constructive and peaceful a manner as possible. I suppose I would like to challenge the many, varied peoples of this continent to wake up to the reality of global integration. To make Europe a cohesive and fair union, to begin to push for stronger international co-operation – to make amends for the politics of self-interest we have bequethed the world and the mess we created as we colonised and brutalised all the corners of this earth. To put away that indifferent attitude which in the UK and France threatens the resucitation of vain aspirations to Empire, which in the self-loving ‘North’ of Europe allows for Germany and Scandinavia to stubbornly insist that their economic strength comes form their own inherent virtues and not from the favourable conditions of the Union and of geography and history which are themselves, let us not forget, evidently mercurial. Let us work past the embarrising sting of the corrupt cronyism of Italy, Ireland, Greece.
It is we in the West who are now having to react – and we cannot do that in this state of slumberous inner turmoil and conflict. If we Europeans genuinely feel that the US is not capable of providing for the international structures and the leadership which will be needed in the future – for whatever reasons, economic and social strain perhaps, a sense of moral invalidation as a result of the ill-advised ‘crusades’ of the past decade, or as I think the inability to react to a changing world decisively and with purpose – then we are required to step up.

You can only play it safe for so long before the world changes regardless of you, shifting beneath your feet.