Poetry: Review - 'The Hoplite Journals' by Martin Anderson

At the risk of alienating the more casual visitor, I'm continuing with my occasional republication of reviews, essays and features written for literary magazines. In this case - with Tremblestone in abeyance - 'Hotel of Shadows' hasn't and may never be printed on the page, but it seems a shame for it never to be read when reviews are at a premium for any writer...

HOTEL OF SHADOWS

Martin Anderson, The Hoplite Journals.

Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter, EX4 4LD

Martin Anderson realises a form in which action and dialogue are of the inner world, that is the outer world turned outside-in; compiles a phrase book to translate sensation into perception, and then reflects upon it; the mind a hall of mirrors in which the ego exists, though as we chase it, the less like fire and more like smoke it seems. That panoply of diverse vistas, voices. Where are you, unable to sit still, taking off to now?

These meditations occur at the boundary between occidental and oriental modes of self-enquiry, thought experiments that occur in the cities of Asia where east meets west, shape shifting and casting shadow plays in the magic lantern of the self. They owe something to the art of loci, a memory technique that Matteo Ricci took to China as the memory palace, a visual repository of ideas and images situated in architectural space. Draw this line around your life, here, where it does not exist; locate yourself at this particular point in space and time, and then eradicate it.

Malraux and Picasso further developed the concept as their musée imaginaire, a gallery without walls where they hung not so much objects of art as ideas of art, unconstrained by physical possession. Anderson’s own method is less static, a journey through landscape of place and mind in the tradition of Basho’s poetic diaries, in and of the world and yet beyond it. They are not explicitly Buddhist but a seeker in that tradition would recognise their quality of insight. They are not linear either, but do move.

Those are the frames, what of the pictures? The Hoplite Journals are the records of campaigns into where language can take us, intense inner battles against complacency with words, the author challenging himself to experience as if for the first time, and capture what cannot be captured as precisely as motes allow. A long poem, then, divided into cantos, each section of which is a chain of thought to be escaped from, the reader as Houdini.

Absorbing such work demands an approach that puts mind on the line. The common sense is of being elsewhere, never quite at home, and on edge like this horizon, upon which we listen for our own lives, ungarlanded and uncelebrated, as they arrive and leave without us. We are invited to make connections we don’t ordinarily make, like seeing familiar landscapes from above, or living a day of our life in another body.

Why do we become alien, choose exile? There is self-pleasure in the isolation of being abroad, but to achieve it is never easy. We are always reaching for the just out of reach, the tension Anderson inhabits but is restless in, wanting the moon, not just the finger. Keep on keeping on. For all children are brought up in a land that is foreign, and are, therefore, natural and curious travellers. Perspectives and tenses switch, the cubist language of Blood on the Tracks. And even when the train stopped, no one got on or got off.

One travels alone or does not travel at all…Over the empty tract of this page voices are calling. Liquid prose, not so much finding its place as defining it, a meniscus on the contours of what is. Alone, each of us, amidst the floating debris of all lived moments known and unknown to us. Here is the country that does not exist. There is the woman who died at the passing of her own illusions. Words wrought by tough love, in paragraphs the size and shape of instants. Inflate the balloon, then burst it. Now try and blow it up again. We yearn to capture the fleeting drift of ephemera that define us, situating our being.

The danger is that language detached from its ordinary purpose stiffens, becomes sallow, a book on the slab. But this is not the work of a coroner. It engages with life, does not detach us from it. The objective is to break the boredom of sameness that contains us, escape the grey of a northern continent, not seeing through the fog of unlived days. We remember only that which can be forgotten. Pursuing the many, finding the few, sifting the fewer for the one until we have become what we contemplate.

Again, the risk of existing in life as a cultured consumer, lost in our base sophistication, not shaping but only receiving. Such are the temptations of the megalopolis and the contrary urge to escape it, until we entered a landscape where the city was forgotten. Spiritual tourism is not the answer. Anderson’s rituals are private, not off-the-shelf observations; he peers beneath surfaces, knowing identity is a reflection on the water we can reach into and thus disrupt, reform. Place, time and object, yearn for that ideal solitude that will reunite them. This is the ungiven - that which cannot be taken away.

If a poet is true to himself, the idea of the poem is invariably greater than the poem itself. Anderson plays on this tragedy. Memory becomes tincture, a homeopathic presence, intangible but pervasive. There is existential comedy aplenty here. Messages dictated, sent by telegram, translated by the shaman of an obscure tribe who traces these mysterious markings with his fingers, symbols etched on a sacred log, and intones them as Artaud. A time before instant communication, in which we achieve so little by saying so much.

Anderson takes the responsibility of creation seriously, decrying the replication of the familiar, those who seek patronage and prizes for mimicking the scriveners who have gone before them, with ever diminishing returns; ants dragging looted booty towards the queen of recognition, apple seeds from ruined orchards. The endless clack of typewriters – infinity’s monkeys. We’ve read enough. We’ve read too much, already.

Instead, he invites us to draw up the bamboo ladder – climb above, look down, look up, transcend. Exercise the method of doubt. Discard the known to know. Disrupt the routine by the extraordinary and you have poetry. Is that what we came here for? Impermanence is a given. Beginnings end. The leaves fall. Our lives return to what they were before we claimed them. I commend this book; its pages are fragile and will fall apart, though you will go first, into the unknown and unknowable, its greatest concern.

Damian Furniss.

Poetry: Elisabeth Blestsoe

I'm delighted to hear that Shearsman Books will be publishing a comprehensive selection of the earlier works of Elisabeth Bletsoe later this month under the title 'Pharmacopoeia and Early Selected Works' bringing back into print all of 'Pharmacopoeia' (Odyssey/Terrible Work), selections from 'The Regardians' (Odyssey) and 'Portraits of the Artist's Sister' (Odyssey), and some miscellaneous poems.

You can find further details on the Shearsman site, together with more information on her 2008 collection 'Landscape from a Dream'.

We'll endeavour to get Elisabeth on The Blah Blah Blah Show at some future date, but in the mean time, an audo recording of her reading 'The Seperable Soul' is available on the 'Gists and Piths' blog.

To mark this reprinting of Elisabeth's earlier work, I'm reproducing my 1996 essay on her poetry, first published in the now sadly defunct 'Poetry Quarterly Review' to coincide with the publication of the first edition of 'Pharmacopoeia'.

GARDENS OF EARTH AND LIGHT

The Poetry of Elisabeth Bletsoe

In his novel Love and Death on Long Island Gilbert Adair's central character writes a history of the representation of angels in the arts, its premise being that only by aspiration to and concourse with some form of the super-natural is the artist able to create out of the humility that is, or should be, his natural state and essence. So it is with THE REGARDIANS. Strong poetry doesn't just respectfully copy the way things are, it creates. It can make and unmake the very gods themselves, but only because it comes from the silence beyond the ego monkey's jabbering.

Last year the New York Times best-sellers list featured more angels than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Christian fundamentalists were as keen to tell us of their guardians as supposed abductees their alien consorts. In this country comparable 'literature' is more likely to be infected with new age whimsy. THE REGARDIANS is different. Bletsoe's angels are not ethereal beings, nor do they confine themselves to airy realms or deal in the empyreal. Far from ,cynical paganism', self-righteous evangelism and the Aquarian pick-and-mix; she is a Quaker and steeped in the traditions of English nonconformism. Hence the intention is as much political as spiritual. The millenarian hard rain nightmare of The Cloudseeder features Uriel the fire of God, connecting the Revelations-inspired visionaries of the late Middle Ages with latterday environmental apocalyptics, giving us a Dantean view of the cityscape of Cardiff. In The 'Oary Man Gabriel is seen in his role as heavenly ambassador, invoked by Gerard Winstanley in the founding of the Digger movement:

thrust into consciousness

by the radical English dreamers

who claimed your authority:

the Fiery Roll inscribed with blueprints

for a world

turned upside-down

It is a work of invocations, less prayers than active summonings of the human powers the angels represent into her consciousness and that of humanity at large. Thus, Archangelis and Lachrimatory draw on the mythologies of patriarchal religion (Bletsoe especially makes use of Jewish angelologies, later adopted by Christians and Muslims just as the Jews appropriated the gods of neighbouring nations and tribes into their heavenly hierarchies) only to undermine them: the dark energies of Michael and Cassiel summoned to recharge the female spirit more through opposition than identification, a vision of the weighers of souls, detached voyeurs in the guise of God's civil servants who know:

Heaven and Hell are the same place

all the suppressed beatings

of your enshrouded heart

cannot disguise

your secret joy

in failing

Similarly, Azrael triggers a cut-up of headlines from organs of the death culture: numbed to genuine experience of mortality we have no respect for life. The range of reference is sometimes astonishing but it is mutated into a strain of the language virus previously undetected: lain Sinclair meets the King James Bible. Infectious.

Bletsoe works in projects rather than poems. PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST'S SISTER (published after, but written before, THE REGARDIANS) has a thematic unity, developing female 'mood-states' and 'life-situations' out of the paintings of Edvard Munch. It is a sequence meant to be read as a whole as his Frieze of Life paintings were meant to be viewed in one exhibition, each one note in the cumulative symphony. Munch is a poet's painter who thought in literary terms, sketching out his poem of love, life and death in words long before he recreated them in figurative art. Like Munch, Bletsoe writes out of her psyche rather than about it, employing a method that transcends autobiography while drawing on, at times, almost physiological memories- In the subconscious, Jung theorised, what is specifically personal is experienced in imagery we hold in common, in archetypes. With her knowledge of mythology and the contexts that generate their changing forms, mythmaking becomes reflective. The book takes the form of an archetypal journey, towards individuation and, in the macrocosm, sexual harmony, but in the language of human experience rather than psycho-babble. Moonlight is a fulcrum point in the book, fear turning to acceptance:

the wounded healer at the crossroads

opening the portals to a second life

loosely shrouded in delicious white

not a ghost, but a Sister

she sails her broken eggshells

over an ocean of night

It works almost like a series of mystery plays, the paintings tableaux: the stage-like simplicity of the settings and sometimes theatrical exaggeration of the postures of Munch's women become frames in the storyboard that Bletsoe fills out. If the work depended on an intimate knowledge of the paintings it would be problematic: like the printed text of an unseen movie (Brian Hinton) verbal commentaries on visual media rarely work. However, adopting the personae of Munch's subjects enables an investigation of not just the artist-model relationship, but also that of the observer and observed, on many levels. The poems have grown out of her relationship with the pictures. Whether we agree with her interpretation of Munch as being unusually attuned to the feminine (in the context of the nineteenth century, Presbyterian Scandinavia as depicted in, for example, the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg), her giving the voiceless a voice is what matters. Rather than trying to describe the spatial economy, contrastive colouring and sketchy rendering of the paintings she adopts their poetic equivalents: the prevailing tones of summer nocturnals conjured by her lunar idiom. As Munch was a great painter, so Bletsoe, also, is a great poet of the night. Dreams within dreams, where boundaries between mortality and the immortal, fact and imagination, are thin, as in the Madonna section of The Lady with the Brooch:

in her mouth's corner a spectre of death

in her two lips the joy of life

PORTRAITS... is an examination of repression, the power it generates and the possibility of channelling that power, using the vampire myth, for example, as an externalisation of the other within to enable surrender to it. It admits grief as a positive process, the deep awareness of mortality developing maturity, a prelude and inducement to transcendence. And within all of this inner alchemy, it is the women - a fearful girl at puberty, the tragi-comedy of a doomed affair in Ashes, watching the hands and skin of The Dead Mother - that put flesh on the spirit work and give it life.

PHARMACOPOEIA, shortly to be published, is a slim, interim pamphlet that elusively and allusively tells the story of a relationship in moments, each marked by a particular flower in a particular landscape. It veers from despair to fulfilment as if a love potion had been prepared along the course of the interlinked journeys. Bletsoe is a ruthless crafter of language which is here pared down so that the poems are almost tinctures. In emotional biography less is always more and what is omitted more telling than what is said. The language is restrained, almost academic at times, such that the occasional personal statement feels like the eyes of lovers meeting in the incendiary field that we lie down in & fall into the sky.

Elisabeth is a herbalist (Pharmacopoeia means a list of medical ingredients, including instructions on their preparation and use) and the text is challenging to the botanically illiterate, intercutting pieces from ancient herbals, folklore etc. However, even in this, both her slimmest and most difficult work, the characteristic features of her distinctive method are maintained.

She displays an almost Japanese discipline of concrete description and restraint, each piece a string of beautiful haiku-like beads. The way the text is laid out like a musical score hints at the breath patterns she achieves in performance, enabling the reader to recreate them in her own voice. (The use of space on the page is an additional visual aesthetic.) Form is defined not by rules but intention, discovered in the act of writing: ripples on the silence it emerges from. The poem as journey, inner and outer, such that the subject and reader are changed by its conclusion and given the impetus to reach it. Above all it is the sense of absolute commitment to her role as receiver/ transmitter that gives the intensity of Poetry as magic or medicine; not for mirroring but manifestation. (Sarah Hopkins).

We are also faced with a concentration that might put off the casual reader: the depth of reference, lexical range; a density of expression not found in the currently prevalent modes of social realism and autotherapy. But surely even the uncommitted will feel its tensions, be captured by its sound and rhythm and enter inner labyrinths where the heart does the thinking and the head begins to feel: nothing is stated, none of her immense and wide-ranging knowledge is made use of, unless it is also felt.

OOSER, still in progress, takes Bletsoe home to Dorset, and populates its landscape with the marginalised and dispossessed: the villagers of Tyneham, the Tolpuddle martyrs... Those poems already published in magazines¹ reinhabit some of the women of Thomas Hardy's novels and empower them with a sexuality he could only allude to given the strictures of the late Victorian novel. In opposition to Virginia Woolf's view that he makes them the weaker and the fleshlier... clinging to the stronger (man) and obscuring their vision she finds an openness to the feminine principle, not just in the eroticisation of the other but a genuine empathy with the sufferings of a sex caught in the double-bind of nineteenth century sexual hypocrisy. She takes the tragedies of their situations and makes them celebrations of a latent power:

neither life or death dilute me:

out of suffering may come the cure

The Ooser itself was a fertility idol co-opted into Christian festivals and bastardised as the devil. Evolving out of a British tradition of horned fertility gods going back 10,000 years it was transformed into a figure of terror, haunting sexual miscreants in skimmity rides and giving evil a face in mumming. Its last authentic Dorset representation was sold to America. A crude reproduction now amuses tourists in local Morris dances. It is about to refind its voice.

In her fine poem, Poetry, Marianne Moore longs for ‘literalists of the imagination’ who ....can present / for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'.

Enjoy the gardens. Beware the toads.

¹ Rainbarrows (ODYSSEY #18)

Cross-in-Hand (TERRIBLE WORK #5)

PQR SPRING 1996