"Intercapillary/Space"

Ralph Hawkins and Alan Halsey
 
 
 

 
 
 



 
 
 




 
 
 




 
 
 

by Michael Peverett

Being (temporarily, as I suppose) without an income, the thought crossed my mind that choosing to write about Strafford was an especially unhopeful way of earning wordly reward; a Victorian verse-play, one of the least admired of objects in that least practical class of objects, fine literature. In this somewhat senile state of mind I felt a certain private identification with the condemned Strafford and his never-to-be-realized vision of retiring into private life, "under a quince tree by a fish-pond side", his idea of seeing (from the aimlessly unparticular outside) how "the Senate goes on swimmingly". The young Browning was amazingly good at foreseeing the prospects of middle age.

But of course there are one or two fortunate people who can turn an honest penny from such pursuits as this. One of them is the excellent Browning scholar Clyde De L. Ryals, whose valuable chapter on Strafford in Becoming Browning (1983) is available to read here. (Perhaps all the other chapters are available likewise, but for some reason when I try to get at them it plays havoc with my laptop.)

This book was about Browning's early works. Professor Ryals had previously written another book about Browning's late poetry and has since written a well-received biography, so we await only the ripely magisterial meditation on the central and essential masterpieces, a book (I hope) such as was J.A.W Bennett's Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge. Merely to have read all Browning's poems is probably sufficient in itself to qualify as one of the world's leading Browning authorities. Ezra Pound boasted that he had read Sordello and couldn't see what the problem was, but after all that's only one poem.

This was Browning's first play and the one that is least like a closet drama; five acts and numerous speaking parts. It played for five nights in 1837, with Macready in the title role; it was critically rather well received, well attended, and it might perhaps have played for more, but the actor who played Pym had another engagement, and Macready (who thought the play needed drastic changes to make it act well) was content to let it drop.

I would love to see a performance of Strafford. No-one raises their eyebrows over a hundred performances of Elgar's Sea Pictures, so surely we could have one of Strafford. It would be a challenge to bring it off, however: a challenge such as ought to get a producer fired up.

I suppose one difference from Elgar sixty years on is that Browning's play is sourly and bracingly unroyalist AND unpatriotic.

He is brilliant at portraying upper-class putdowns. Here is Charles, entering for the first time and finding the newly-returned Strafford with Pym:

     (The KING enters. WENTWORTH lets fall PYM's hand.)

     Cha. Arrived, my Lord? - This Gentleman, we know,
     Was your old friend :
                    (To PYM.) The Scots shall be informed
     What we determine for their happiness. (Exit PYM.)
     You have made haste, my Lord.

Charles concisely manages to tell Pym to fuck off and to make sure he does so with the most hateful expression of god-like Monarchism ringing in his ears; politely acknowledging, at the same time, that Strafford does have a past, and yet leaving a little menacing chill hanging in the air as to what might happen were Strafford to forget that such friendships are very much a past matter. Yet Charles' several messages to both men are mere second nature, they cost him no effort. It is not he who is jealous of Strafford's loyalty - the jealousy comes all from the other side. He is actually too dense to accompany the habitual high tone with any real political awareness.

As the scene continues Strafford tries fruitlessly to break down the social barrier between himself and the man he loves, but Charles never emits the right noises:

     (Went.).. I am here, now - you mean to trust me, now -
     All will go on so well!
     Cha.                    Be sure I will -
     I've heard that I should trust you : as you came
     Even Carlisle was telling me . . .
     Went.                     No, - hear nothing -
     Be told nothing about me! You're not told
     Your right-hand serves you, or your children love you!
     Cha. You love me . . . only rise !

As a matter of fact Charles does trust Strafford, so far as that goes, but that's not really what this conversation is about. Charles sees himself as a corporation, not as a man. He can only concede that Strafford loves him, no more. He cannot give anything but royal favours. The gew-gaw in this scene, the conferred earldom, is what bulks largest both for him and for his queen, who makes a memorably charmless entrance a few minutes later, just as Strafford takes his leave:

     Cha. That man must love me!
     Queen.                    Is it over then?
     Why he looks yellower than ever! well,
     At least we shall not hear eternally
     Of his vast services: he's paid at last.

The court manner of speech is beautifully conveyed, and Browning's re-engineered Lucy Carlisle - saccharine in most respects - is happily not immune from it either. This flexible, unpoetic, socially adept dialogue is one of the many slightly surprising delights of Strafford - for whatever reason, it is not what we think of as Browningesque. (I suppose the basic reason is that Browning was conscious of a play appearing in public, and of a tie-in book that for the first time he was not publishing himself. These pressures disciplined him to produce something carefully unlike himself.)


Against its hateful court, shallow queen and miserable king stand the Faction. Hampden and Vane the Younger were then conceived as heroic images of statesmen selflessly devoted to England (Hampden's statue dignified the new Palace of Westminster a few years after Strafford). Browning's play, though it honours these two splendid men - in particular the impulsive Vane - (of Hampden he mainly considers, perhaps, that he was said to be a man of few words) - , teaches us to shiver at the invocation of England. Chesterton complained that Strafford is insufficiently political, because Strafford's political philosophy is not made plain to us. Instead, Strafford's actions are motivated entirely by lover-like devotion to the king - a totally self-sacrificial devotion, though not at all a blind one, which compels Strafford to claim personal responsibility for all Charles' meanest and most stupid actions.

But Chesterton's complaint is unreasonable to some degree, though it is understandable. So much history is demanded of the reader - this is another of the pleasures of Strafford - that we may be misled into thinking that the play is a virtually ungarnished and accurate historical account of Strafford's downfall. But that, while I think it would make a great drama in theory, is really an impossible project. Browning comes nowhere near it. To take some glaring examples, Strafford in the play hardly ever speaks of Laud without some coolness: historically, Laud was one of his closest friends. In Strafford, no-one mentions Catholicism: Pym, historically, was obsessed with, and chiefly motivated by, the belief that Strafford lay at the heart of a Catholic conspiracy. In Strafford, Pym and Hampden defend the process of Attainder from the outraged protests of Vane and others; historically they opposed it at first, as Forster discovered and Browning must have known. And who reading Strafford could possibly imagine that the odious court gossip Sir Henry Vane (Vane the Elder) would in a very short time be joining with his son in opposition to arbitrary power, which historically is just what did happen?

[It's a question whether Browning modifies the relative ages of the persons. The year is 1640 at the start of the play. Strafford was 47, Charles 40 (but he still acts childishly). Pym was 56, but I think in the play we tend to regard him as about the same age as Strafford (e.g. because of Pym's "That walked in youth with me").]

*

Still, Chesterton's remark is a good starting-point. Browning's play is interested in power-politics, in the political will, in the psychology of politics; it is comparatively (though by no means altogether) uninvolved in the rights and wrongs of the issues that divide the characters. In that respect there are a lot of points in common between Strafford and e.g. Trollope's entertaining Phineas novels of thirty years later.

*

Pym has his revenge on Charles in the fourth Act. He is a man who makes dramatically unexpected entrances, of which this is one. He comes to the king, alone, to ask a mild question: if the Attainder is approved by both houses, will the king sign it? If the answer is no, he will not even propose it to parliament. Charles, under pressure, does one of those unexpected things that are characteristic of the play's awareness: he of all people suddenly becomes both acute and humane:

                                   You think
     Because you hate the Earl . . . (turn not away -
     We know you hate him) - no one else could love
     Strafford . . . but he has saved me - many times -
     Think what he has endured . . . proud too . . . you feel
     What he endured! - And, do you know one strange,
     One frightful thing? We all have used that man
     As though he had been ours . . . with not a source
     Of happy thoughts except in us . . . and yet
     Strafford has children, and a home as well,
     Just as if we had never been! . . . Ah Sir,
     You are moved - you - a solitary man
     Wed to your cause - to England if you will!

It is true and wise: but how much pressure he is under! For still, humanity is only an instrument here. The noble speech has a political subtext: Charles in his mild, meditative remarks is exploring in Pym's presence the concessionary possibility of dropping the human shield of Strafford and of taking responsibility for his own unpopular acts. Pym understands him perfectly. Politely accepting the king's reluctance he turns as if to go; but Pym is like the lawyer in Armadale, and he knows that the time to do all the really serious business is when the interview appears to be over. A meandering regret for the weary business of politics turns wanderingly into a hypothetical advice and suddenly focusses into a real threat:

     I thought, Sire, could I find myself with you –
     After this Trial – alone – as man to man –
     I might say something – warn you – pray you – save you –
     Mark me, King Charles, save — you!
     But God must do it. Yet I warn you, Sire —
      (With Strafford's faded eyes yet full on me)
     As you would have no deeper question moved
     —"How long the Many shall endure the One" . . .

And with that Charles' resistance collapses. Pym momentarily takes Strafford's place at the king's elbow and, at a still deeper level (as Charles with his "we all have used that man" accuses) he becomes an arbitrary ruler himself. He is King Pym.

*

English drama, from Ane Satyre (OK, that is Scottish) onwards, had been preoccupied with a conflict between private affection and public business. In the earlier drama this took the form of the monarch's Favourites, as in Marlowe's Edward II or Shakespeare's Richard II. Arbitrary love is associated with arbitrary will - in fact it is not called love but something dirtier. In Strafford, the love is high-minded, and the message is transmuted, no longer pressed by the author as good government but recognized instead as merely inevitable: political momentum will find a way to override private affection. This time it isn't the king's love of Strafford that is the issue - what existence did that ever have? - , it is Pym's love of Strafford. Hampden provides the justification:

                                   England speaks
     Louder than Strafford! Who are we, to play
     The generous pardoner at her expense -

And Pym, at length impatient with fainter hearts, provides the psychological methodology:

     Fien. I never thought it could have come to this!
     Pym. (turning from ST. JOHN). But I have made myself familiar, Fiennes,
     With that one thought – have walked, and sat, and slept,
     That thought before me! I have done such things,
     Being the chosen man that should destroy
     This Strafford! You have taken up that thought
     To play with – for a gentle stimulant –
     To give a dignity to idler life
     By the dim prospect of this deed to come . . .
     But ever with the softening, sure belief,
     That all would come some strange way right at last!

Pym becomes increasingly terrifying as the play wears on. By the last scene he sounds deranged, a messianic chosen one who does not converse in any normal sense but only declaims his mission and only listens to his "England" for guidance. As Strafford prophetically tells him, varying Blake:

     What? England that you love – our land – become
     A green and putrefying charnel...

*

Strafford must be allowed the privilege of having just made a heroic self-sacrifice of his own life (which was true - in reality he put it in a letter to Charles). Still, the accusation against Pym isn't fair. It is Charles' rule in defiance of Parliament that drives the country to war.

     Fien. Had we made out some weightier charge . . .
     Pym.                              You say
     That these are petty charges! Can we come
     to the real charge at all? There he is safe!
     In tyranny's stronghold! Apostasy
     Is not a crime – Treachery not a crime!
     The cheek burns, the blood tingles, when you name
     Their names, but where's the power to take revenge
     Upon them? We must make occasion serve:
     The Oversight, pay for the Giant Sin
     That mocks us!

Browning, I don't know why, doesn't choose to spell out the concrete evils attributable to Strafford that are comprehended by Pym's terms: Apostasy and Treachery. This permits a false interpretation of the action, in which Strafford is a victim who has always been old and sick, and has never really been guilty of anything except trying to forestall civil war.

If this is a fault, it nevertheless places the reader in a curiously gripping position: that of never being able to weigh exactly what the characters are claiming. In most earlier drama, the audience is gifted knowledge beyond what is known to the characters - "dramatic irony" becomes possible. Browning flirts with it a little in the final act, when Strafford being visited by Hollis assumes that a way will be found to get him off, but we already know that Hollis must tell him to prepare to die. This is not typical, however. What is more typical is Browning dropping us into the midst of a political scene in which everyone is talking - not very coherently, and often not very sincerely - about matters on which we can form no independent judgment. We cannot even quite understand them. From this impressionistic babble an airy sublimity sometimes emerges, e.g. Strafford reflecting:

     His path! Where's England's path? Diverging wide,
     And not to join again the track my foot
     Must follow – whither? All that forlorn way –
     Among the tombs!

Who can explain what Strafford means here by describing his track as "among the tombs"? Or later on in the speech, the supreme forsaken star? These must be senile intimations of his own fate.

In this intuitiveness, as in the bedrock of national history on which Browning builds - or flings together - these extravagant vehemences, Strafford instantiates a sobering feature of his poetic career. In arriving at the mature and admirable "achievement" of his middle years, what is notable is how much he surrenders to get at it. Strafford's successor, the extremely forgettable King Victor and King Charles, has quite a lot in common with it, except that the story, as Browning quotes Voltaire, concerns "a terrible event without consequences", a pure - a mere - drama of the soul in costume. That's where he was headed. But Strafford remains to show that we could have witnessed a different kind of engagement with history. It leaves me with some regrets about that, and a feeling that Pym's words about "a gentle stimulant To give a dignity to idler life" linger as a rebuke incurred by that later career.

*

Van Dyck's paintings are evidently an influence on Strafford. Its hero reflecting on "The man with the mild voice and mournful eyes" is alluding to Van Dyck's portraits of the king, "a face fit to paint the Saviour from" according to Bernini's (possibly apocryphal) remark.



I like to think that Browning's conception of Strafford as both confidently capable and all too aware of being isolated from his own party is influenced by, in particular, the Petworth portrait.



But Browning's conception of the English court resists the sombrely lyrical idealization of aristocracy in Van Dyck's paintings (as here, Queen Henrietta Maria):


*

Denzil Holles (Hollis in Strafford), the socially mobile Parliamentarian who was also Strafford's brother-in-law and Charles' childhood playmate, may also have been the author of this satire on Cromwell as Hercules Furens, inscribed on a West-Country hillside:

What was it like being dead?
Well, he says, the best thing was that language stopped. (from XXXI)

So the mordant humour - a real scream, yes, almost a scream - carries on. A month or two back, the long-awaited (in every sense) final chapter (XXXIII) of St Leonards emerged on GreatWorks. Soon, I hope, the whole enormous work - now retitled Dwelling - will be published by Reality Street Editions. In the mean time go and check out a chapter or two. The final one, battered aficionados won't be surprised to learn, is among much else a series of increasingly hollow-laughter jokes at the expense of those who have been hanging on for it.

Much earlier in this amazing book's serialisation, I tried to say a bit more about it. Now I just want to hold the book in my hand, and start being dazzled by it in a different way.

Oh, you only want to read the last page? I can't bear to spoil it for you, but this is what it's like as it hurtles towards that silence:

Will there be music during the night. This is fate surely. They have framed us pretty well. This is that fateful empire. This is a true echo of what I was going through during time. I am now watertight. She bends the tongue of influence at court. I am a landmark work. She admits love. We are benighted. We have dipped our bodies into the old night of our names. I unbolt the word and a folding takes place: a cento and rhapsody of uncircumferenced motion. By the way, at the moment I'm hanging dead from the light flitting—a garble of patchwork, a studious incorporation of tense lines.

Suffice to say she's preaching a new demigod, a recent carnation of the heroic. Go in, enter the story in detail. We're not approaching overkill—we're now in overkill. I dream there's a fire and the things and the people have to be removed, forever. (from XXXIII)


MP

Seven sentences discovered in Betty Mulcahy's How to Speak a Poem (Autolycus Press, 1987):

It is therefore desirable that a considerable reserve of air be kept in the lungs, for much of the volume of the voice, as well as the control, is lost when the muscles of the chest are too slack.

(Of humming...) If the lips do not tingle at all, it will mean that the sound is being produced too far back in the throat, and for full audibility of speaking it needs to be brought forward.

But there is much that can be done quite simply to improve both vowels and consonants. The long, ie, sustainable vowel sounds are 'OO'.. 'OH'...'AW'...'AH'...'AY'...'EE'... "Who goes forth armed may lead".

Unless you are going to read in public from the book - and for me this is seldom desirable - now could be the time to write out or type out the poem to get it away from its covers and out into the open.

I do stress early memorising because it is difficult to get far with a poem until the words belong to the speaker... And when spoken from memory they do then come from inside the speaker, as they came from inside the poet.

(Of sonnets...) Incidentally, the time it takes to speak 14 lines is approximately one minute and there is a school of thought which says that this length was chosen because one minute is also the time it takes for the blood to circulate the body once. How true this is I have no idea but it is a nice thought and could ensure a good rate of speaking.

Your speaking qualifications could be tested and proved by taking the National Poetry Society's graded examinations*, which culminate in their final accolade of a Gold Medal. The Gold Medal audition is... considered a test of performance ability and takes place before an invited audience.
*Headquarters: 21 Earls Court Square, London SW5 9DE


Notes:

Betty Mulcahy: won the final English Festival of Spoken Poetry, became a professional verse reader (Midland Arts Association, BBC), worked in education (Arts Council Writers-in-School Scheme), was a National Poetry Society council member and Gold Medal judge. Also wrote To Speak True, Pergamon 1969. Unfortunately I did not manage to track down any online recordings of Betty Mulcahy's readings. I did find her memoir of the British cinematographer David Watkin.

Dannie Abse: Cardiff poet and doctor, b.1923. Many publications since 1948.

Phoebe Hesketh: Lancashire nature poet, 1909-2005, published sixteen books of which the best known was her second, Lean Forward, Spring (1948).

Vernon Scannell: British poet, 1922-2007. Many publications since 1948.

John Smith: Sussex poet, b. 1924, compiler (with William Kean Seymour) of The Pattern of Poetry: The Poetry Society Verse Speaking Anthology (1963), and A Feast of Poetry (1985).

The National Poetry Society graded examinations, like the National Poetry Secretariat and the Earls Court headquarters (also famous for Poetry Wars), no longer exist. Similar examinations are still organized by e.g. LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art).

MP

by Michael Peverett

Leevi Lehto is a totally net-enabled poet, so one can begin anywhere. For example, in his corner of Anny Ballardini's Poet's Corner, where everyone has a corner. Here are four of the sonnets from Lake Onega, the English version of this work, which appears in totality in the book I'm reviewing. (This totality, however, is only partial, because of the work's previous incarnation in Finnish, at which stage it also had a web interface that allowed you to generate new poems.) The English version is not exactly a translation in the traditional sense, Some of its sonnets are homophonically derived, some present quite new material. E.g. "Oft and always" - The note explains: "The Finnish version is a translation of Sir Philip Sydney's 'Sonnet 45' in Astrophil and Stella (1581-82), the English one an improvisation on that".

Also in this corner are a couple of translations of classical Finnish poets, Eino Leino and Aaro Hellaakoski. The classical era in Finnish poetry is not much further back than the start of the twentieth century - before that, Finnish was not often a written language. So Eino Leino is a patriarch poet, though roughly contemporary with Yeats. When Leino comes into English the results tend to be barbaric, no more so in Lehto than in Cid Erik Tallqvist (Voices from Finland, 1947):

     Said his say thus the Earth-Spirit:
     »Three-lock Kouta art by name called.»

     Gloomily smiled Gloomy Kouta;
     »What man can know, I know also,
     What the gods can, that can I, too;
     But not bind the blue flame's burning,
     Nor bring back by black art bygones.»

And here by Lehto:

     My heart is a harp-of-the-wind, of-the-wind,
     its strings are a seat for a ceaseless song,
     when in night, and in day, alone, alone,
     it sounds to the air, ever-shivering.

     Here on earth so cursedly familiar
     are the yards of the clouds, the huts of the winds.
     No brothers nor sisters I ever can have:
     As strange is my self, just tingles and rings!

But Lehto's barbaric English is adopted more methodically. This is from Aaro Hellaakoski's most famous poem "Hauen laulu" (the Pike's Song):

     From his hole so wet and drenching
     a pike rose up to tree to sing


     when through the greyish net of clouds
     first gleam of day was seen
     and at the lake the lapping waves
     woke up with joyous mean
     the pike rose to the spruce's crone
     to take a bite at reddish cone


      [Kosteasta kodostaan
     nous hauki puuhun laulamaan

     kun puhki pilvien harmajain
     jo himersi päivän kajo
     ja järvelle heräsi nauravain
     lainehitten ajo
     nous hauki kuusen latvukseen
     punaista käpyä purrakseen]

Or take the later lines:

               opening his
                mouth so bony
               sidewise moving
                the jawbone phony

Nothing in the original really excuses the word "phony", it is there for the felicitous sound like "crone" and "mean". Lehto says, in the introduction to this book, a bit plaintively: "There may be an element of Second Language English in at least some of [the self-translations] - if so, the reader is asked not to see it as altogether inadvertent." As that sentence itself shows, Lehto's English is as near fluent as dammit - and why would it not be, since he has lived and taught in the US for the last twenty years? This linguistic barbarism is intentional, even when it is accidental, as perhaps when the poem by Eino Leino ends "I give rice to the feelings", a mere typo for "voice" as I suppose. If you want an unpoetic sample of Lehto writing in English, then pick one of his many important and engaging essays on transnational literature in a post-Language context, as sampled here:

I've at times thought of myself as an American poet only writing in Finnish, at others as a Finnish one, yet whose medium is more or less "barbaric" English.
("Finland Between Coercive Swedish and Barbaric Danish" - Interview with Annelie Axén in Kritiker 5 (June 2007)).

I'd like to speak about language-fugal sublime here.
("Plurifying the Languages of the Trite" - and see Note 5 of the same essay).

I have proposed a concept of literature of "Barbaric English" - the English spoken as a second language. This has now developed into an interest of all kind of barbarized versions of all the languages involved (I just finished a longish poem in Norwegian, a language I don't know enough even to know what I have said in the piece.) These development will evidently pose new challenges for American poets, many of whose, if truth be told, are only too complacent with only disfiguring their own dear English.
("In the Un-American Tree; The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetries and Their Aftermath, with a Special Reference to Charles Bernstein Translated". The Norwegian poem is here.)

..about "Nations Being Enemies of Literature". I've used this slogan to describe a special mission of ntamo [Lehto's internet publishing house] to chart a new (public) space beyond and between nations, a transnational literary scene....
("Nothing That Is Initially Interesting To More Than Seven People Can Ever Change The Consciousness Of The Masses")

But the best arguments for Lehto's barbaric English are 1. His inspiring reading of one of the sonnets, "Exactly. Absolutely" with its authoritatively deviant pronunciations, and 2. The national self-crippling defence-mechanism of identifying and bonding over the extraordinary quaintness of foreignisms, as evinced not only by lovers of true poetry and standards in Hampstead but by motorists complaining about offshore call-centres and by almost-daily comic routines on the Chris Moyles show.

Paradoxically, to fully appreciate the contrariness of Lehto's slogan about nations being enemies of literature, you have to see it against a Finnish background, i.e. the devout Herderian nationalism that gave such enormous impetus to the birth of written literature in Finnish, in e.g. Eino Leino.

*

So, on to the book in question. Salt, whose translation series has never really got off the ground, have presented it as a translation (a self-translation, mainly) from the Finnish, and have put the inevitable iconically unspoiled lake on the jacket so we appreciate that we're abroad and that this represents an added attraction. To a certain extent this is wrong. Some of the poetry was written in English from the start, and some of the rest has been not so much translated from Finnish as composed anew in its new language. So is Lake Onega and Other Poems really an exemplary work in a new mode, the true transnational literature that Lehto envisages in his essays, the first sample of this new World Poetry, as he names it in "Plurifying the Langues of the Trite"? Well no, I think it is premature to characterize it in that way: more accurately, I should call it a dream of a new world poetry, or perhaps (to further misquote one of Lehto's favourite quotations) the "pursuit of transnational poetry by other means".

For a start, there is that traditional-looking title, which deserves to be considered in two halves. I suppose some non-Finnish readers might assume that Lake Onega is a lake in Finland: it is not. It is a big lake in Russian Karelia. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of this lake is turbulent with political resonance in a Finnish context. As Lehto himself helpfully explains: "This was the furthest the Finnish troops advanced during The Continuation War, 1942-45 - too far in many people's opinion, me included." In other words the title invokes the whole vexed, buried and inflamed matter of ultra-Nationalist Finnish claims (romantic or realistic) to a larger Finland incorporating some part or other of the Karelian backwoods where the Kalevala oral traditions once supplied the material for what became reinvented as a national epic (the one thing that the oral material very certainly was not...). But how does Lake Onega manifest itself in the sonnet sequence to which it gives a title? In the most deadpan way imaginable: as a word. For example Ääinen (the Finnish name for Lake Onega) is treated as a kind of stretched pun, since it also can be interpreted as meaning "little sound" and therefore a literal equivalent of "sonnet". Besides that, the name links up with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin - the hero's surname (not a genuine Russian surname) is derived from the lake in question. And the eponymous sonnet itself consists of a series of mainly hilarious book-titles, a deflation of all the pretensions of title:

     Maigret and His Lady Friend. Widow of Yours,
     Hostess of Mine. Fumbling Poems. The Sin.
     Manners of the Youth. Wine for the Wise. Lake Onega,
     its Plants, & Fish, & Flow, & Waters.

     Eugene Onegin. A Conversation. Sister.
     The Horse's Sex-Life, Short Stories.
     Tax-Index of the Helsinki Region. ...

Lake Onega (here and elsewhere referring to the sonnet sequence of that name, not the whole book) therefore blankly refuses to invoke nationalism and history, it absolutely insists on its internationalism, its word-games, its messy open space into which almost any subject may stream, but from which nothing like a subject emerges. "Not written against a horizon of meaning", as Lehto somewhere felicitously puts it. Yet at the same time for a Finnish poet to name a sonnet sequence Lake Onega is somewhat akin to a US poet writing a non-referential book and calling it Bay of Pigs, or maybe like when Swell Maps put out a single about "sucking city boys today" in 1978 called "Dresden Style". (Don't press these analogies, history fans...)

And now for the second half of the title, and Other Poems. The book proposes itself as a kind of selection of Lehto's later work, arranged chronologically so that we can read a story of metamorphosis from (in the early 1990s) lyrics in the manner of Finnish modernism to (in more recent times) "more procedurally oriented work" - for example, the Google-based poem "Of the Help Her Art" from around 2003. So while the materials are distinctly innovative in form, the book itself is quite an old-fashioned kind of artistic narrative, a reader for the uncommittedly curious. Lehto is no doubt a realistic enough operator to know that getting a poetry book published outside your native land, except by the most miniscule of book presses, is difficult enough on any terms; some such compromise as a putative "Selected" is probably inevitable. But anyway, how should this narrative be read? Should we say of the earlier poems in the book (though they are by no means early ones in terms of Lehto's entire career) that they are there to be seen as outmoded, merely to introduce and set off the more radical work that follows? Or should we see this later work as accepted by the publishers only on the proviso that there ought to be some "real" poetry as well? I don't know, but the resulting mixed impression is certainly absorbing, even if we don't perhaps know the code - maybe because we don't. And I'm willing to believe that it's considerably more absorbing than e.g. Lehto's hardcore Päivä (Day) of 2004, a response to Kenneth Goldsmith's Day that easily disproves Goldsmith's claim to be the most boring writer who ever lived (it consists of Finnish newsfeed from Aug 20, 2003, but with the sentences rearranged in alphabetical order) - though even this produces unputdownable reading compared to Craig Dworkin's austere Parse or Emma Kay's numbing Worldview (read about all of them here).

As it stands, you will spend a lot more time reading the exquisite "Snowfall" (1994) or, of course, Lake Onega (1997) than "Of the Help Her Art". The relation that this last poem bears to e.g. "Snowfall" is like the protective translucent tissue page to the relief-coloured aquatint in an old book, i.e. you are affected by the tissue page, you may even appreciate its purity and lack of datedness compared to the aquatint, but you don't spend much time staring at it. But as Goldsmith has often remarked, it is not necessarily the point of writings in the conceptualist zone actually to be read, or readable.

However, the contrast is not quite so stark as all that. Unexpectedly, there are continuities in Lehto's work that pass across these quite radical formal boundaries, for example a musical witnessing of urban business, as here:

     80
     timely too                all, the buried ones included
     And without forgetting the dead ones, he specified

     81
     as an across-this-world's-swarming-and-whirling-large-
     flat-floor-walking,
                    specifying shadow

     82
     as a snowy rain
     a-flooding with butterfly- and certain kind of bread-formed
                         words

     83
     with cities, objects with their aftermarket, pots, flowers
     on window sills, with carpets shelves light-spots measure-
          sticks houses
                    concepts

(from "Snowfall")

and here:

     containing partly acoustic music, partly that from the turn
          of the century,
     reflected at the surface of the wall using a computer and a
          video-gun,
     and during the intermission to the holy ceremony,
          refreshments. I really was taken over by horror
     when I saw burned that good man form Biscay, who as
          godfather had married the godmother

     reflected at the surface of the wall using a computer and a
          video-gun:
     XXL size lush big-breasted shaven offers relief to men of
          all sizes and descr in Yliviesk evenings nights.
     When I saw burned that good man form Biscay, who as
          godfather had married the godmother,
     I'm excited by him having sex with another man:

(from "Ananke: A Pantoum", in which, Lehto tells us, "The bulk of the poem is based on direct quotations from online and newspaper dating services".) A Lehtoic sound and manner emerges clearly from both these poems, the first of them perceptibly late-Finnish-modernist and the second broadly procedural. In that respect Lake Onega and Other Poems reads very well as a unified book, not merely a historico-biographical record of experimentation.

And, in every way central to the book, I keep drifting back to Lake Onega itself, which is the most fascinating piece of construction here. Sonnets - a rare form in Finnish - could hardly be more traditional in English terms, and Lehto (unlike many modern sonneteers) is continuously interested in realizing the traditional sound of a sonnet, e.g.

     Ear's yelling question's killing seismograph,
     in linkup one, two thousand chilling mall
     virtually uniting all the drunkards

     to really vouch it all, for rotting vitamins,
     vigils whereat? Men may take it all,
     consigning even. Or reeling moonward.

This is the sestet of "Negative Capability", - "Half-homophonical on the Finnish original which, again, is half-homophinical on John Keat's 'Bright Star' sonnet". Whose sestet goes:

     No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
     Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
     To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
     Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
     Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
     And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

It's surprising what survives this double mash-up through the sieves of language - the play of double-L sounds, the resumption of the repeated absolute "ever" in the repeated absolute "all", and the near-rehabilitation of "ever---or" in the last line. But Keats' vision of swooning inactivity is thoroughly translated away from its tender context of a loved one's embrace; socialized, it turns into reeling drunkards in a mall and also into human technological progress, e.g. travelling to the moon. Both "stedfast" and both mindless, exactly as per Keats' recipe, and sarcastically offering a new interpretation to the phrase "negative capability".

Perhaps sarcasm isn't quite the right word. Though mordant judgment, or potentially mordant judgment, characteristically surrounds such comic episodes as the admin department in "Back Office", or the cod-opera trimmings of "Jagellonicae", one thinks rather of the stance of Lake Onega as distinctively open-minded. Judgments stream into the poems because human discourse tends to be highly judgmental. But in using the phrase "open-minded" of Lehto's sequence I don't particularly mean "non-judgmental", either. What I refer particularly to is the openness at source, i.e. to the range of materials allowed in, not to what is judged of them. Most poets, I suspect, exercise a very strict control over this phase of the process. You might choose literary models (such as Sidney or Keats) or philosophical or scientific ideas, or popular proverbs, you might treasure found particles of slang or obscenity or objective perceptiveness or pop culture. You might give vent to private-personal expression. You might make the poem represent who you are, or you might try to avoid that at all costs. But generally, you decide to exclude some few of these possibilies: they're not part of your vision. In Lake Onega none of these are excluded, so that possibly a teleological "vision" has been junked altogether. By continually messing up the materials by further destructive processes like barbaric English or backwards quotation or the double-homophony mentioned above, more source-material is allowed in than was allowed for; it is not just musical ingenuity, though it is that (Lehto evidently gives full musical weight to his term "language-fugal sublime"). It is one of those overflowing parties, like the one in Carry On Abroad.

Lake Onega even finds room for an open-minded admission of Finnish modernism, in the form of a palimpsest on Pentti Saarikoski. You can discover a critique in this, but my perception is that for all the manifest difference in the kind of poem this is, there is no definable distance between Lehto and his subject. The concerns of the world transgress both languages and poetries.

     The Language of Flow (I think)

     Asking the Water, I ask where I swim:
     what gets "in-read" in you, being a "dream";
     that and no more? not consciousness?
     deep as a major, strong as a minor, as

     a traitorous hunch, a wizard so white, as
     a parish or garish, a gang, parasite - and a kite
      (in my view), and perhaps a swaying
     of night - and the steeple I broke myself

     against, a shipwreck (not transposing to earth).
     A luscious being, in view of the uncles.
     A blossoming flight. A translative. Full

     as vacuum, though full of you,
     encircled, departed, in view of the strand
     and all the bundles there, if you please.

*

NOTE 1: As readers of English poetry we naturally tend to associate Lehto with his American connections e.g. Bernstein and Goldsmith. The Finnish connections are doubtless as important: Jyrki Pellinen, Arto Kytöhonka, Matti Tiisala, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jukka Mallinen, Aki Salmela, Janne Nummela, Cia Rinne, Tuukka Terho, Jukka Tervo, Markku Aalto, and many other writers - mere names to me - on ntamo).

NOTE 2: It's time to take issue with Lehto about something, and it's this: "It wouldn't surprise me to see the next step in this process to be a certain return to creativity - this time not based on a vision of authentic language but on the authentic experience of the strangeness of all languages instead: in the spirit in which I have proposed Finnish to be seen as one of the real world languages - i.e. marginal to the point of being able to stand for all the others' marginality..." (from "Nothing That Is Initially Interesting To More Than Seven People Can Ever Change The Consciousness Of the Masses"). Applauding the general concept, I feel like pointing out immediately that Finnish and the other Nordic languages are in some ways very exceptional - consider just for instance its remarkably high standing, the high regard in which the Nordic zone is held within e.g. the rather xenophobic English-speaking zone - popularly perceived as (not only white and first-world and affluent but) more culturally advanced, better at design and technology and politics and education and politeness, than even we are... an uninspected esteem that e.g. this essay contributes uneasily towards cementing. Or consider the unique relationship of Finland to two super-powers, its mysterious if sometimes fraught closeness to Russia and in another respect its cultural fraternity with the USA - no other western European nation has such a young literature, so unreservedly committed to international modernism and secularism. Obviously I am speaking at a high level of generality, and anyone who knows better could have fun ripping these generalizations to shreds, but the point is that there's no way that Finnish can usefully represent e.g. the 520 languages of Nigeria (English excluded), most with no written literature. If Finnish poetry is an important growth-point marking one pattern for future transactions between cultures (and it is), this is precisely because it is unrepresentative, it is marginal in unusual conditions.

*

Leevi Lehto's Lake Onega and Other Poems was published by Salt in 2006 (ISBN 978 1 84471 115 4).

 

Peter Jaeger’s Rapid Eye Movement runs continuous paragraphs at the top and bottom of each page – the upper consists of sentences from dream accounts; the lower consist of found sentences containing the word ‘dream’.

EH: In this bicameral book, what might appear to be the emancipation of lyric subjectivity into an ongoing, jagged spark (the upper line) is also an estrangement of this running world by a reflection which isn’t its own, poetry as the political experience of a double thread which runs everywhere through the polis.

MFB: The rapid eye movement of the title can be the waking rapidity which Jaeger’s archiving allows. To be positivist about it, the upper paragraph consists not of dream accounts but of dreams themselves – the telling of a dream is the dream, that’s how the dream exists and that’s all we know of it.

EH: Which is precisely the viewpoint in Norman Malcolm’s Dreaming (1959), a response to the then-dominance of rapid eye movement as a scientific theory of dreams.

MFB: A book I like, a little footnote to Wittgenstein. Perhaps the estrangement is more simply the displacement of narrative passing through language.

EH: At the first read, Jaeger’s book is like listening to the speaking shell in Book V of The Prelude – a book abstracted from a place about to close – only you’ve got one shell for each ear and they’ve both taken an ethnographic turn - or one ear has gone for a high speed version of The Canterbury Tales, a tale a sentence, with the dream frame from earlier Chaucer poems reinserted.

MFB: Immersed in these dreams, the idea of the sensible world has become destitute, the world has been cancelled from within - waking cancels itself out in endlessly restless narratives. Which is to say that the poem is all body and no sense.

EH: Or all sense but no world. Contrariwise, I would say that the subjects shown in the upper sentences don’t fit anywhere, but this is not a suspension or cancellation – it is its own dream of sparks, subjects passing through poetry in an inverse to any visibly shared spectacle of politics. Here matchless given images rise up into a reassembling horizon-line.