New books and Leigh Davis

Wrote some more shite today. Yay!

Bought a massive pile of books yesterday, which has left me broke but excited.

I'll list them ay?

• Bloodclot, Tusiata Avia
• Favourite Monsters, James Brown
• Everything Talks, Sam Sampson (been wanting to read some of his stuff for ages)
• How to Live by the Sea, Lyn Davidson
• The Fainter, Damien Wilkins

So much cool stuff to read and it's all from here!

OK then. Here comes the big spiel about Leigh Davis. Chris suggested that I check out his book Willy's Gazette (1983, Jack Books) mainly, I think, because he uses a central character (Willy) to hold a loose kind of narrative through the often mysterious and perplexing poems, most of which are title-less and don't have a clear beginning and end. I had no idea looking into him would open up such a can of worms.

Firstly, I've read about half of Willy's Gazette and I think I get the gist of where it is going, or, I guess, where it isn't going and indeed Willy does kind of hold it together, but other than that it seems to be an almost random assortment of lines, details, musing, dialogue, which don't seem to ever convey anything particularly concrete. It is set with an almost hypnotic, but not predictable, rhythm though which keeps you reading on kind of transfixed I guess. It is also printed quite weirdly in a type script on a large format book (roughly A4 size) and the cover is black with plain white lettering. There are some parts that have been through scored like you can do on a type-writer. I'm sure it was all wonderfully avant-garde at the time. Today it just seems a little shitty and hard to read, like the writer hasn't put much effort in. I dunno. I think the main thing is that it just isn't that inviting to read.

So anyway, I was interested in his use of disjunction and the kind of slipperiness of what was going on in any particular bit. So I looked him up on the Internet to find out more about him and to see if his stuff has changed since 1983. I read a weird almost combative interview with a guy from Landfall in 1985. It seemed Leigh was being asked to defend his controversial criticisms of Allen Curnow's and CK Stead's work that he published in his magazine And. The interviewer also asked him about how he views society as being poor readers of poetry, how they kind of swallow the 'traditionally' inspired stuff and most are quite unaccepting of avant-garde poetics and are not willing to let go of what they think a poem is or should be. Which in many ways is true I think, but they way he argued his points. Fuck me, he sounded like some kind of pseudo-intellectual fascist. I couldn't really follow his logic in most of it, partly because of my limited academic vocabulary, buy mainly I think because he was more interested in inciting than arguing. It was a bit all over the place and weird. So overall, I dunno, not impressed I guess. No wonder avant-garde poetry has such a bad name. That word is so dirty now. People seem to think of pompous wankers, which I guess many of them were. I think these days though, writers (and artists) seem less interested in arguing poetics and more interested in just creating and accepting the way everyone does their own thing.

For the issue of Blackmail Press I am helping to edit, we had a sentence - 'Good art is about resisting tradition' in the call for submissions. James in the class, who claims it was an accident, used this in an exercise we did, changing 'resisting' to 'resenting.' I was horrified that some people might mis-read it like that, subconsciously or something. And I guess that is highlighted again with regard to Leigh Davis - he seems to be all about 'resenting' rather than 'resisting,' there is a world of difference in those two things. I think resisting is about acknowledgement and respect and kind of leaning on tradition, but one where you are conscious of that and know that you have to push back to get anywhere. Resentment, is well, just bitter and I guess that would come across in your work.

Passing through (to the other side?)

Dia comes from the Greek word to mean 'passing through'. And Michelle Leggott's take on that in her 1994, AUP book of poetry is unusual in the context of poetry.

The first two sections are highly experimental and graphical, so much so that I found myself skimming over them, looking for the real word-driven pieces to appear. I liked them though, possibly more the look of them than the poems themselves. Something I would put on my wall rather than read in a book perhaps. Particularly Micromelismata which is a poem written to the exact structure of an ASCII art depiction of a pair of lips. It did look cool.

Anyway the next section, Blue Irises, is a good half to two thirds of the book and consists of a series of sonnets. Well I call them sonnets because they are 14 lines long. Most of them have numbered titles (a few with names) implying that they are standalone pieces. However after reading about 10 of these you begin to realise that they sort of run on into each other, some more obviously than others, and start reading it as one long poem.

I couldn't help wanting each one to stand on its own though. Some I think did and some didn't. She has a very syntactically confusing style. Some lines seem to link up with the next, other don't connect at all in either an syntactical, imagistic or logical way. I found this distancing at times. A few lines grabbed straight away however, even though they made no real sense. Maybe on further reading I would get more of these. This one in particular:

I am the parabola, a crural bow strung

across the single point of my dripping ascent

or

Not as plains that spread into us slowly, but as

a wind wet with carillons or winter's cold isthmus

I think both those passages show a classical skill with music and rhythm. Particularly that second one reminds of a Robert Frost line (or maybe I'm confusing Frost with someone else?).

Anyone her work seems like an abstract collage of phrases and words (some made up?) rather than a collage of images and I think that is one thing that would make this work really jump to life for me. The odd image or piece of dialogue or something to cling to in the storm. That sounds like me forcing my own poetics on it, and I am, but what else can I do.

I can understand why this book won the Montana prize, it is incredibly inventive, smart and supple. And I think the work towards the end of the book really hinted at Michelle's work to come. Particularly the last poem that uses much, much shorter lines. The sentiments and abstraction are the same, but for some reason those shorter lines and smaller stanzas give us time to absorb and delight in each twist and turn and also discover some new ones with the syncopated rhythm and the way that three words on their own can mean something different when taken out of the context of their enveloping sentence.

Of course, that poem does not have the sonnet structure and the heavy classical music and I can see why she explored both, but for me, all considerations of awe aside, I simply enjoyed the last two sections of the book much more. I felt elated and excited while reading each line and had that equal ? and ! thing at the end. With the sonnet poems I felt like I was wading through each line, looking for little gems which sometimes came and sometimes didn't and at the end I was more relieved than anything else.

I'll be getting more of her books for sure. Maybe some of her later ones and some of her earlier ones.

Shit, I've gone way over time.