Human Folly at London Met

Space Poet has returned to her blog!

Welcome (back) world.

Let me begin by drawing your attention to a forthcoming event organised by The Facility, London Met’s excellent centre for creative practice as research. I’m on the steering committee now and am really looking forward to this evening. It’s free to attend and the readers and presenters are all excellent, not least our guest poet Andy Brown who will be talking about his new collection The Fool and the Physician.

I must stress that the title of this blog entry and of the forthcoming event has nothing to do with recent grim announcements concerning redundancies. Although of course one’s mind can all too easily stray towards such unintended allusions. I take no responsibility for that. The event itself will hopefully take our minds off such matters.

Anthology

Dictionary.com's definition of anthology:

1630s, from L. anthologia, from Gk. anthologia "flower-gathering," from anthos "a flower" (anther) + logia "collection, collecting," from legein "gather". Modern sense (which emerged in Late Gk.) is metaphoric, "flowers" of verse, small poems by various writers gathered together.

Students often get confused by the difference between single-author poetry collections and often more substantial anthologies of contemporary poetry.  But 'small poems by various writers gathered together' has a certain resonance to it. It reminds me, in its cadence and final word, of Johnson's definition of metaphysical poetry as 'heterogenous ideas...yoked by violence together'. One expects both variety and a certain amount of surprise and discovery. Why small poems though? I suppose the dominance of the lyric poem is still an established fact in contemporary English language poetry, and has been for the last hundred years or so (still there are plenty of long poems and sequences to challenge this generalisation). Look through the Norton Anthology of Poetry to find plenty of long poems by the many poets writing pre-twentieth century. 

A reader new to poetry might think that there will automatically be a good variety in anthologies. But it's been interesting reviewing US and UK twentieth century 'gatherings', which is when the importance of the anthology really took precedent. No anthology is without its bias, even if it's the general lyric outlook of Palgrave's Golden Treasury which arguably started the vogue for anthologies towards the end of the nineteenth century.  On into the twentieth century traditional Georgian and modernist Imagist anthologies vied for supremacy, with (as far as I know) only D. H. Lawrence getting published in both camps. After the Second World War Robert Conquest's  edited New Lines, presenting the 'Movement' poets with their formal conservatism and deliberate turning away from visionary oratory (that was the realm of the 'New Apocalypse' of the forties, inspired by Dylan Thomas and others). Then A. Alvarez published The New Poetry twice - the second time foregrounding Plath, who had recently committed suicide. Alvarez was much more interested in potential, innovation, and the influence of the US poets. And so the story goes.

Peter Childs has quite a useful summary (more detailed than the above) in his introductory section of The Twentieth Century in Poetry. He goes up to the Bloodaxe volume also named The New Poetry, edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley and claims it to be 'curiously homogenising in its introductory remarks, claiming a new cohesiveness and the end of 'British poetry's tribal divisions'. I remember this anthology's publication; I guess it was the first one I bought as a 'gathering' of 'contemporary poetry'; for interest and creative investment rather than study. I remember sitting  reading it in a Cambridge cafe and being quite excited to witness what felt like a poetic 'moment' of significance. I suppose that's what the publication of a substantial anthology does feel like. 

Childs concludes his survey by remarking that 'the clearest message...should be that anthologists have reacted against each other - that each widely accepted and adopted collection...has sought to challenge the view of poetry advocated by a previous editor.' Interestingly,  'New' remains the most common adjective in poetry anthologies, while 'influential twentieth-century anthologies have generally been those that choose a small selection of emergent poets and argue that they constitute a new generation or a shift in poetic sensibility' .

Perhaps two shifts could be noted in the early anthologies of the twenty-first century. But perhaps not - it's too early to tell, really. But it seems that the interest in and usefulness of the focused anthology is still strong: I'm interested in women poets so it's been great to have Deryn Rees-Jones' Bloodaxe anthology Modern Women Poets and even more interesting to have the contemporary take on modern experimental women writers in Carrie Etter's Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets. In fact I'm really looking forward to the discussion at the South Bank Centre on women's poetry anthologies on September 1st next week.

But secondly, heralded possibly by the 1993 New Poetry claim to an end to tribal division, there is an interest less in spearheading a new movement or poetic grouping, more a sense of connections to be made within diversity. I know I'm hopping continents here, but I picked up a new Norton anthology in City Lights when we were in San Francisco last month: American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry where, as well as some lengthy representations of fantastic poets, there is a great emphasis on connection and (of course) hybridity rather than division, particularly the old binary division between traditional and experimental. Cole Swenson defines this new connectivity between old divisions as 'lines of pursuit that operate in a rhizomatic rather than arboreal fashion, leading ever outward':

'The rhizome is an appropriate model, not only for new Internet publications but for the current world of contemporary poetry as a whole. The two-camp model, with its parallel hierarchies, is increasingly giving way to a more laterally ordered network composed of nodes that branch outward toward smaller nodes, which themselves branch outward in an intricate and ever-changing structure of exchange and influence. Some nodes may be extremely experimental, and some extremely conservative, but many of them are true intersections of these extremes, so that the previous adjectives - well-made, decorous, traditional, formal, and refined, as well as spontaneous, immediate, bardic, irrational, translogical, open-ended, and ambiguous - all still apply, but in new combinations.' (Cole Swenson's introduction)

This sounds rather wonderful. Swenson cites multiculturalism, gender equality, and new technologies as all helping to develop this new sort of poetic connection. Again I think it is too early to tell whether this really is a shift towards generosity of readership and poetic community or some kind of new grouping, after all. 

Back in the UK, Identity Parade is a substantial anthology published by Bloodaxe this year. It really is substantial: 84 poets, and 'probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured'. I'm in it and absolutely delighted to be so. Of course many good poets who could be in it aren't, and there have been points of contention over some of the stipulated 'criteria'; but, ultimately editor Roddy Lumsden had to make his choices. His lucid and practical introduction (he discusses his own processes of choosing poets for the anthology) is quite humble in comparison with other anthology intros which serve more manifesto-like purposes. Lumsden presents 'the pluralist now' and is less concerned than Swenson to find optimistic lateral connections in the contemporary media age. Indeed, he is disinclined to find connections: 

'The predominant social and cultural phenomena of the 1990s and 2000s have been diversity and information overload. We no longer watch the same handful of television channels, hear the same limited news, listen to the same clutch of bands, visit predictable tourist destinations; in our trouser pockets, most of us carry the colossal almanac that is the internet... though critics and academics will seek - and find - traits and trends in the larger bodies of work represented here, this might well be the generation of poets least driven by movements, fashions, conceptual and stylistic sharing.' (Lumsden's introduction to Identity Parade)

Time will tell; a combination of both Swenson and Lumsden might be the best way to preface the contemporary poetry world. Is it a world, a forest, a matrix (a hall of mirrors?) : impossible to be honestly definitive of one's own time, but very much possible to engage with and enjoy it, however necessarily incomplete that engagement might be, however much of a work in progress.

Margery's Mirror

Keeping up with my reading. I'm on Clarissa Atkinson's Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. The introduction is particularly interesting as I'm still lecturing on the Autobiography module at work and always on the look out for new insights. Atkinson, rightly noticing that Margery Kempe by some measures at least wrote (well, dictated) the first autobiography in the English language, makes a connection between the development of this genre and the introduction of 'accurate' silver-backed mirrors into society, enabling the recognition of an individual self and thus the ability to speak and write about the individual, albeit in the language of medieval alterity, the language of medieval religion and spirituality. Atkinson actually quotes another critic, Georges Gusdorf:

'Literary historians and critics vary widely in their opinions as to when and under what circumstances "real" autobiography first appeared. Georges Gusdorf ties its beginnings to the invention of the mirror, which he says "would seem to have disrupted human experience, especially from that moment when the mediocre metal plates that were used in antiquity gave way at the end of the Middle Ages to silver-backed mirrors produced by Venetian technique. From that moment, the image in the mirror became a part of the scene of life..." The mirror image complemented Renaissance anthropology, stimulated the new art of self-portrait, and permitted people to see themselves as unique beings. In relation to autobiography it worked, on the one hand, to revitalize the Christian tradition of confession...and on the other hand, by stimulating attention to the individual, the mirror image helped to turn autobiographers away from the "deforming" theological image in which every subject is first a creature - and a sinner. The medieval world view had to break down before "man could have any interest in seeing himself as he is without any taint of the transcendent" '

Of course as Atkinson points out, Margery's book is very much concerned with the idea that its subject is a 'creature' and one significantly tainted first with mental distress and breakdown, and subsequently with the transcendent. 'Most critics assign the beginnings of 'real' autobiography to a date later than the end of the Middle Ages,' she comments. Yet perhaps the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe does mark a significant transitional state when the sense of an individual reflected through language and text begins to emerge. Furthermore Margery sees herself as 'ordained to be a mirror'; boldly and uncomfortably pointing out the faults of her contemporaries and fellow pilgrims. She is also, because of the diverse interpretive communities and developing readership of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, something of a mirror to us, reflecting our own interests and ways of reading. She is not the first mystic to use the imagery of mirrors - the early fourteenth-century 'Mirror of Simple Souls' is a particularly interesting earlier text, particularly because it was initially condemned as heretical before being 'adopted' as a legitimate treatise of spiritual guidance. But still - the time and trends in Margery's book are unique and perhaps even mark the beginnings of a cultural 'mirror stage', the psychoanalytical term for the beginnings of the sense of a complete individual self (Lacan places it at about age two) and at the same time a sense of separation, even alienation, from self and others.

It would be fascinating, as I was discussing with a colleague in the pub a couple of nights ago, to read a cultural history of mirrors. I wonder if such a text is available but I don't know of it? Would there be gender implications of mirror use as well as social and generational ones (almost certainly)? Silver and exact, as Plath writes in her mirror poem, the mirror would make a compelling and still relevant focus for all sorts of psychological, spiritual and cultural concerns.

Nemerov, a poet of Margery Kempe

I've been wondering whether any modern poets have tackled Margery Kempe. Plenty of poems have been written about Julian; she seems to inspire quite a few meditations in the genre, many of which are beautiful and some quite linguistically challenging too. Literature and Theology magazine are (fingers crossed) publishing an extended article of my conference paper from last year on this topic. But Margery - could her agitated witness prompt the measured lines of formal or accessible poetry?

I was pleased to track down Howard Nemerov's poem 'A Poem of Margery Kempe' today. I found a reference to it towards the end of Mitchell's book, where she notes that 'In the thirty-two short lines of the poem, the self-consciousness of Kempe is emphasised through eleven uses of the pronoun 'I', and twelve occurrences of 'me' or 'my'. And so it does - plus the repeated refrain, 'Alas! that ever I did sin,/ It is full merry in heaven'. These are words taken direct from Margery's text, and they're worthy of a refrain, I think: surprising, memorable, honest and uplifting. Nemerov's Kempe poem is from his second, 1947 collection, Guide to the Ruins, which critic Milton Crane says "is the work of an original and sensitive mind, alive to the thousand anxieties and agonies of our age." Kempe's voice in the poem, a sort of dramatic monologue without an immediate interlocutor, is certainly strong, yet intensely troubled too, vulnerable to self-fracturing:

I creature being mad
They locked me in my room
Where, bound upon the bed
With smiling Satan there
I would have broke my side
And given my heart to God.
Men said it was pride
Brought me to that despair.

Alas! That ever I did sin,
It is full merry in heaven


The poem is simply written but formally, if discretely, contained, as was Nemerov's style, certainly in this volume. There is a sort of mimicking of the simplicity of medieval devotional verse too. The refrain is a ray of something - I was going to write unruliness, but that's not quite right - of persistent joy and simplicity despite the distress of the poem's speaking subject and perhaps also of its time of writing. 'Crying out odd and even', as the final verse ends.

Hopefully I'll track down some more Margery poems, but this one has given pause for thought. Nemerov was a substantial poet, and one about whom I know relatively little thus far. But he himself was happy to speak about the creativity afforded by relative ignorance; talking about the poetic process, "It's like a fairy tale. You're allowed to do it as long as you don't know too much about it." Nevertheless I get the feeling that the earliest published editions of Margery's book must have struck a chord, or a dischord, or a sort of melody.

Fountains

Why are apparitions of the Virgin Mary so often associated with the discovery of fountains, springs, unexpected underground streams? A  priest at the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham pointed this out yesterday, citing the memorable depiction of Jennifer Jones as Bernadette Soubirous, scrabbling in the dirt at Lourdes, digging for water as 'The Lady' had instructed her to, watched by a mocking and sceptical crowd. Something to do with fertility of earth and body, perhaps, and  sacred, healing, magical qualities attached the springs so found. Water is traditionally a feminine element, fluid and unstructured, compared to the more predictable structures of stone and brick of which churches are usually constructed. It must indeed have been a disturbing discovery to find a spring under the foundations of the reconstructed Anglican shrine here, at the beginning of the last century. Not the sort of elemental foundations on which to form a firm church. Or perhaps, just the opposite. Anyway Walsingham is one of the very few sacred sites, especially in the UK, where you can attend and participate in a religious 'sprinkling' of Holy Water, descending down stone steps to the origin of the spring, to receive silver ladles of water, then ascending again, with a gentle fountain playing all the while outside.


Just from sheer coincidence I managed to walk out of the second-hand bookshop here with a copy of Eleven British Poets: An Anthology  edited by Michael Schmidt in the 1980s, where the last ethos of Movement Poets sit alongside Heaney and Hughes. Elizabeth Jennings is the only woman poet. Well, perhaps not so much a coincidence, considering the lectures I'll be writing in the new academic year. But I opened the volume on Jennings' poem 'Fountain' which according to the notes, was her favourite out of her own poems. Here's the last verse:

Observe it there - the fountain, too fast for shadows,
Too wild for the lights which illuminate it to hold,
Even a moment, an ounce of water back;
Stare at such prodigality and consider
It is the elegance here, it is the taming,
The keeping fast in a thousand flowering sprays,
That build this energy up but lets the watchers
See in that sress an image of utter calm,
A stillness there. It is how we must have felt
Once at the edge of some perpetual stream
Fearful of touching, bringing no thirst at all,
Panicked by no perception of ourselves
But drawing the water down to the deepest wonder.

Hope and Faith

On travels myself in a minor way this weekend as Mum and I go to Walsingham , 'England's Nazareth', as we generally do mid August. I've taken a couple of books with me, the first of which is Marea Mitchell's essentially cultural materialist account of The Book of Margery Kempe.

Fascinating in that Mitchell concerns herself not only with Margery and what she says (or dictates) in what is still known as the first autobiography in the English language, but also with its cultural reception and indeed how the discovery of Margery's complete text in 1934 led to the difficult and sometimes acrimonious production of the first published scholarly version of the text by Sandford Leech and his one-time mentor, Hope Emily Allen.

Allen's life is clearly fascinating in itself. An American born 'Independent Scholar' and apparently a distant cousin of Evelyn Underhill, Allen's parents were for some time members of the idealistic Oneida community, and Allen possibly carried some of its collaborative, frank-speaking ethos throughout her scholarly life, despite her claim to be a 'Christian agnostic'.  Without the clear categorisations, commissions and deadlines of tertiary education, it seems as though Allen was in some ways ahead of her time in blending textual research with social, historical and cultural context. She was a medieval scholar and a feminist too, and felt that Margery Kempe offered ample opportunity for her wide field of academic interests. During and after her collaboration on the initial text, she claimed to be pouring her scholarship into a second publication which would be 'the synthesis of Margery the mystic and the woman'. As Mitchell writes:

It is not surprising that The Book of Margery Kempe lent itself so much to her imagination, given her belief that the Book needed both literary and historical perspective, and an understanding of the connections between the mystical and the social. In 1949 she wrote to Mabel Day of her 'wide ranging desire to make it my magnum opus - in which at least all the absorptions of my various incarnations coalesce, even though not all the methods''.

Grand ambitions indeed. Alas, this volume never saw completion. Allen was a meticulous scholar as well as a wide-ranging one and perhaps never felt she had followed up enough leads, drawn all the threads together. Perhaps she lacked the necessary institutional support or, in a strange way, the confidence to complete. She had to be content with having set together many dry bones for a future researcher to flesh out into a living work. And this has still not been done.

Allen was not solely a dryasdust scholar, however, despite the reproduction in Mitchell's book of a formal photographic portrait where she looks both staid and skeletal. She had a strong informal web of contacts, many of whom were women and two of whom, Joan Wake and Dorothy Ellis, were also strong independent scholars. They compared themselves to the three anchoresses to whom the thirteenth century Ancrene Riwle was addressed, but they bickered and conforted and advised each other in the way of many intense friendships between women. Does Mitchell dwell too much on the gossipy details of their volumous correspondence? Maybe; but the mixture of concerns in their letters does reflect the wide horizons of unofficial female writing of that and perhaps any time. I loved the conclusion of chapter 3, where Mitchell documents a particular evening in which Allen, Wake and some other women celebrated publication of their books by holding a bonfire of their proofs and notes. 'The image of Allen and her friends singing and dancing around the fire, celebrating their intellectual productivity, is an image to set alongside the formal presentation,' observes Mitchell. Fortunately there are no witchcraft trials these days. Anyway the stage is set for the rest of Margery's textual history in recent decades, and a strange sense of unruliness sits appropriately alongside her religious revelations.

Muir Woods

We have been in San Francisco for a couple of nights; seriously not enough time to explore the city, but enough to get a sense of its vibrancy. Today a trip away from cities and commercialism in order to see the giant redwoods in Muir woods. The light was wonderful - and at one point we saw a fawn who seemed totally unconcerned with human presence. Thanks to K who took these photos and suggested the visit in the first place.