'Love's not so pure and abstract as they use[d] to say'

An epigraph from Sylvia Plath (Love Letter) stands at the gate of Blandine Longre's aptly named collection of poems, Clarities: 'I knew you at once./ Tree and stone glittered, without shadows'. This defamiliarised moment of clarity, this love epiphany, is suspended like a beacon over Longre's remarkable writing of diverse epiphanic experience. These poems are coming out of the chasm of experiential, momentous exchange - with clarity. But that clarity is not composed of sweetness and light: it's a carnival of grotesques and conflicting impulses, of puissant exchanges and mutilating forays and retreats. We are in the realm of emotional experience. It's a vulnerable world of affirmation, deformation, offering and denial; we all know it: it's what makes us tick.

Blandine Longre has found a language for the push/pull, the gut-wrenching/the ecstatic, the vulnerable/the guarded: the matter of our emotional, energetic composition. Her writing is fueled by a passion and an honesty, that unholy, oxymoronic coupling out of which we attempt to mediate our lives, but normally fail. Longre explores the complex variety and intensity of the 'clarity' experience, not as it exists as a rare, even fetishised, potential event, but as it has frequent bearing on all our significant perceptions. It's a dynamic component of our lives, our deals with ourselves, our mirroring exchanges and our important relationships. It constitutes our sanity and our potential for happiness - and it isn't always pretty. Longre has invited us in to the theatre of terrible reckoning, before Superego intervention closes the gate and the matter is banished to the realm of the repressed.

How to read the other and the self in the eye of the other, John Donne's ecstatic business, is a theme ('the whole discordant symphony of selfhood' [I-soul]. The intimate relationship is the most critical in this respect. Here's the first poem in full:

When the time comes

Put a distant face to your proffered name

- flesh-struck, curse-furrowed, demented (you choose)

Then in the vacant soul's retina,

look at your lone visage and foretell what

your feud of a body could not

(from where its words knelt uprightly so)

Through slaughtered days and strangled dawns

(Jolting nights in between)

no word nor rock for it

- - the fleck of your yes-eye against a no-mouth backdrop

mere distorted painlines.

Blandine Longre has tipped her hat to Donne by way of other epigraphs within this collection. There are buried allusions as well: 'sur-faces now undone as coarsely as they were/ half-donned' (Exhumation). Donne bestowed his own epigraph upon a history of love poetry with his 'John Donne, Anne Donne, undone'.

In When the time comes, Longre steps sure-footedly into the metaphysical tradition. The poem is in the form of a sonnet and contains a conceit. The imperatives, 'put', 'look', throw out the challenge to the bracketed 'you', by way of aside: 'you choose' with its hooting owl vowels. 'Lone visage' (echoing 'distant face') and a similarly echoing ('flesh-struck, curse-furrowed, demented') and characteristically concise image, 'feud of a body', are opposed. 'Its words knelt uprightly so': oh, the pious posturing of expressive intention! 'No word nor rock for it': defying concrete manifestation. As a paradigmatic literary affirmation of self, Joyce's Molly Bloom's 'yes' lingers on. Longre's 'earthy screech of she-raptures' [Expurgation] or 'my yesohyes plea' [Up and down and the reverse] correspond. Here however, the poet identifies the duplicity of 'the fleck of your yes-eye against a no-mouth backdrop' like a Rorschach mask. It's the matter of emotional ambivalence: ('mistaking a noyes for a yesno' [Up and down and the reverse])

When the time comes launches by way of the power of the imperative, heads towards the diminuendo of the past participle in perfect pairings ('slaughtered days', 'strangled dawns'), and shuts down with a bold final framing by way of remarkable condensation: 'mere distorted painlines'. 'Mere' returns 'lone'; 'distorted' returns 'feud of a body'; 'painlines' returns 'curse-furrowed'. The syllogism is complete. As an accolade to Donne, it is pitch-perfect; as a contemporary adaptation of the sonnet form, it has both phenomenal integrity and technical brilliance.

A subsequent poem takes up another theme: the provisional uncertainty or conditionality of the modal auxiliary. Avoiding the blackest eye of might addresses the power of deferred response full on. (Later poems speaks of 'shredded oughts-to-be' (Fatum) or 'the perhaps of a mutability' (Épouvante)). Though this 'might' was never more ambiguous, its more obvious rendering being 'strength' or 'power':

Avoiding the blackest eye of might

-- its overfed despotism a maddening guile

I am a field a realm a route

an expanse of everdark crops

[...]

It works either way. The 'despotism' of the conditional? The 'maddening guile' of the provisional 'might'? The might of 'might'? Certain kinds of imagery set up camp in the realm of the ambiguous. It's obvious to state that there's a resolute irreducibility about the best poetic imagery, which is why it has been written thus in the first place. One can only sit in awe of the effect. Eliot spoke of 'the image of absolute necessity' in his essays on metaphysical poetry. Pound described an image as 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'. HD's early Imagiste poems come to mind: they are elusive in terms of explication and are already impervious to reduction. Some of Laura Riding's experiments are also evoked for me, as in use of the present participle here:

Wreck-born snakes refusing to embrace

their wet down (never was a river redder)

crisscrossing their anathema

begging for parched soil and dryscape

(the perhaps of a mutability)

[...]

(Épouvante)

The uniqueness that is Blandine Longre's in this collection of poems is twofold, in my opinion. Firstly, she has identified a domain: the all-powerful operation of the instincts and vicissitudes, their processes, their drives and their vital interactions. Secondly, she has found a language and a form: a vehicle for their expression. It involves neologism, courageous experiment and a fierce intelligence to maintain such sustained control over the material. There is an immanence of the object in her writing which is entirely compelling.

Blandine Longre invites us to share an intensity of seeing, comprehending, reading the other and beyond: responding to the judgment call and interpreting the momentous subtlety of the moment. She has constituted an art of the matter of seeing: seeing in a most intimate and shockingly dynamic way. The irreducible integrity of the image that Pound once envisaged is herein extant. Clarities is an astonishing debut. Blandine Longre has unleashed a new, vital, metaphysical animal upon an unsuspecting public. Be warned!

Purchase your copy here: http://blackheraldpress.wordpress.com/

Let's Get Visceral...

I am in receipt of two volumes of poetry from the newly formed Black Herald Press. Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs have taken the bold step into publishing and have begun by publishing their own recent work. I am yet to read Blandine Longre's Clarities, though I have dipped in and caught something of the flavour and it looks very exciting. (Review to follow)
[Both books are available for purchase here: http://blackheraldpress.wordpress.com/]

I have had a copy of Pauls Stubbs's second published volume, The Icon Maker (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2008), kicking around for a couple of years now. Occasionally I mislay it and I am troubled until I find it again. I read it at odd hours and have always found it strangely consoling, though 'consoling' is an adjective quite at odds with its visceral content. Stubbs addresses the condition of a world in which God is dead or departed and the religious impulse is atrophied. Flesh and bone remain, of course, in abundance. A review citation from Alice Oswald on the jacket states: 'Stubbs is one of very few living poets whose work I go back to'. I can only concur; partly because of the difficulty of consuming a whole poem in one or two or three bites - there's always more - and partly because of its stark, discomforting originality, so jarringly at odds with a contemporary idiom. As a 'culture consumer', I have got used to bite-sized poetry; there is, after all, so much to read, to listen to, to see. And this is one of the ways in which I think we are all prone to behave; we don't commonly make the effort. But Stubbs has already discerned the 'now logocentric impulse to remove Calvary from [the] mind' (Without Philosophy) and this very impulse is implicitly the foil for the kind of writing he is doing.

Then there's the idiom. 'Calvary'? There are swathes of biblical reference in his writing. It's not fashionable to resurrect the idea of God, particularly a Christian God, or, further, to address a forgotten metaphysical landscape of apparently redundant images - and icons. But again, this is precisely the point; our atrophied sensibility can barely recognise the significance of that landscape:

After the crucifixion I found
that there was very little new
work, so, forced to wait for
the body of the next God to die,
I did this: I went back into my studio,
to create masks [...] (The Icon Maker)

There's also a wry, comic edge. On first reading, one is not alert to this possibility, apart from remarking the occasional parenthetic interventions, but there's an ironic undertone at work here. The juxtaposition of the signifier, 'Calvary', with the matter-of-factness of 'there was very little new/ work' is characteristically bathetic. Then there's the list-making curiosity of: 'I did this: I went back into my studio', which says so much more than the pared down 'I went back into my studio'. This kind of repetition at first appears redundant and runs against the grain of the poetic rule of a Pound or a Frost, 'use no superfluous word'. But Stubbs has created a distinctive idiom. His repeated pronouns, his 'I's and 'it's, at first seem like poetic tics or something approaching the French use of 'c'est'. It is this latter reinforcement which has the force of edict, and I think this is closer to the disturbingly courageous voice which is Stubbs in flight. He is uncompromising and the disparity of idea and matter are characteristically yoked together as in the Donnean, Metaphysical tradition. As a lone, prophetic voice in the wilderness, Stubbs evokes the historical significance of other such voices and testaments and they become of a piece with the kind of writing he is doing.

The new, long poem, Ex Nihilo, is a tour-de-force. Building on the ground of The Icon Maker, here a world of new beginning and becoming is imagined and its logics and incidentals pursued. It's a poem about the act of creation, and the poet's rib is the Adamic starting point for a prolonged meditation on the genesis of art, creativity and poetic consciousness. The 'I' which begins the poem is an 'I' which disintegrates, fragments, as the body becomes a discorporate symbol within a Picassoesque landscape of bone-rib outcrops and Svankmajeran intrinsically motivated, corporeal assemblages. Some of the phraseology is sublime. Here we have a temporary return of 'I':

as I, I milk back my ink
from the first etymological gland
of language,
while checking out each new sensory terminus
for the arrival of what makeshift or barbaric form?

This 'I', (this not 'I'), neatly encapsulates a tradition of dancing with poetic subjectivity, but has the matter of finding a true language been better expressed? 'Milk back my ink/ from the first etymological gland/ of language' is so alliteratively concise. Then there is the matter of form.

[...] Something double-breathed
and superhuman, but not yet me, no, only this,
this breaking free of a fault, of some
yet to-be-encountered sin;
(imagine a terrible but mistaken inhabitant
of your own soul)

This is a radical extension of dédoublement: eery and intensely unsettling. An unwelcome and fearful imagining born out of the naked shudder of the rawness of the new-born soul breaks in and is not readily discarded. The liminal consciousness of the poetic 'I' suspended in its bracketed container has both the force and the near comic innocence of a child conjuring a bogeyman. The potential for 'fault' or 'sin' always lurks, but there is a nascent purity which shimmers with all the intensity of a Blakeian, Manichean vision.

The Derridean/Lacanian/Barthesian philosophical axis, which reconstituted the language/meaning problematic, launched us all into an era of 'playfulness' and has, in some measure, informed quite distinct modes of production. On the one hand it has, partially, relegitimised the ludic world of the performative lyric, a mode already established in the mid twentieth century partly in reaction to T.S. Eliot's dominance (though his homeopathic trace remains); Simon Armitage would be a prime example of this tendency. On another, there is the radically experimental world of such as Scott Thurston and Tom Raworth, in which language is 'liberated' from syntactic chains and relaunched in a paradigmatic dimension. The latter school has some bearing on any explication of Stubbs's linguistic effects, in that his acts of dislocation mess with the syntagmatic apparatus and deliver new layers of meaning, and that meaning may be unbidden, novel, unsettling and affective.

Paul Stubbs's Ex Nihilo is the antidote to a poetry publishing current which appears to admit the most trivial of efforts. Poetry is a broad church and there's no intrinsic harm in accessibility. However, Stubbs is coming from an entirely different place. He's not writing for the reader who is looking for the habitual 'performative' element, though performance there is in every scalpel's incision. The poet as surgeon diving deep for the soul, excavates the flesh, avoids his own anaesthesia and confronts that primeval landscape in an acupunctural ecstasy with only the agony of an already conscient subjectivity echoing the necessity of intervention.

This review reflects an initial immersion in Stubbs's complex poem. I will inevitably return to this book and it will doubtless haunt me as did The Icon Maker. Ex Nihilo is a poem replete with original ideas, perspectives and perceptions. It eschews the 'duplicitous form, its goodbye' in an act of creative becoming. Herein, Paul Stubbs combines the power of the makar with the vision of the savant and manages nothing less than invoking a truly original word event.

Once again, here's a link to Black Herald where you can purchase:

http://blackheraldpress.wordpress.com/