A monthly series of active reading.
4)
Sarah Crewe, 'flick invicta'
Philip Terry, 'Advanced Immorality'
Thinking about the place of language as a whole and how it functions. How does/can it move from the poetic to the conceptual? Is there a difference? There is a distance between how language is functioning throughout the different texts in the Terry. The movement of how we read is affected, or how I read.
Crewe’s language functions in a different way, it functions as poetic throughout, the movement of it coming from a series of internal perspectives. Perspective of the language and what is placed against interests me in her work. The gaps are visible by space. I kept thinking these poems were skeletal figures being eroded again and again. I’m interested
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In 'Advanced Immorality' and 'A Berlin Notebook' Terry finds poetic structures that neatly hold the tension between the economical/sparse and the more expansive, more speech-like tendencies in the writing. These are composed in units of text that are counted and repeated for instance, in 'Advanced Immorality':
3 6 3
7
1 2 1
where the numbers indicate lines.
In ‘A Berlin Notebook’ the rigorous count-structure allows a sampling of space/place, so the ‘businessmen’ fill the 12 allocations above and 4 allocations below the ‘free’ text, suggesting that they are a sample of countless businessmen. Picked out for the middle section is, ‘in sunglasses, on a cord, on a bike, mouth like a handlebar moustache’ an image that is picked out from a countless background.
Crewe’s structural methods are more oblique, yet we see a similar intention in ‘flick / Newsham park’
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The reader and how they read is being considered by both. There is a sense that order of language is important but there are ways this can be broken in the reading experience. The 'Berlin Notebook' interests me because of its ordered quality but also its insistence and constant re-ordering of experience and the space of the city. Structure then allows for the language to move in this freer way - for associations to be built in the reading
Building of and taking away 'FLICK' in Crewe is built and taken away. Flick is object, body, person, thing and somehow breaks apart the actual structure of the collection.
Movement between pieces is difficult for me in the Terry, I want to spend more time in one place than the other or figure out how one is working differently. How he functions as a writer is interesting to think about then as he is doing multiple things, he is making language function in multiple ways. Does this make us think about the potential of language, the potential of how we can write. Is Terry commenting on the functions of the poetic? The fact the poetic and its meaning can shift in one volume? What is his poetic if it moves throughout?
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I would compare Terry's book with last month's Joanne Ashcroft. In each we are able to observe how the writing shifts given a new set of rules. Perhaps Terry's shifts are more extreme - HAMLET certainly seems to follow a conceptual writing tradition.
There is something in Crewe's positioning of text that seems more instinctive and responsive to the point where it could be said a structure is not required?
I am glad to have found the poem ‘Advanced Immorality’ and will return to it, yet there is something in coupling it to Appeal in Air by Philip Davenport, how that is a real book-object that is perhaps interesting. Or is this a fetishistic response to Davenport’s book?
I would also like to mention the tendency in both Crewe and Terry to use two-word units e.g. witchhunt graffiti / fountain obsolete (Crewe) and trotting dog / Flowering orchid (Terry) – this tendency to engage in two-word units is intriguing!
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The economics of poetics and where poetry finds itself today, should a poetic book be a place where there are multiple sides. I kept seeing a book on the shelf called 'Poet's Market' and there is a need to think about that, where is this.
The multiple uses of the book as a space to not only offer a narrative or an aesthetic like Crewe but a space for experiment and many poetics functioning at one time. Is the book appropriate for poetics? Is there more we can do? Should it change? Can we define our own poetic or 'a' poetic?
Saarah Crewe, 'flick invicta', Oystercatcher Press
Philip Terry, 'Advanced Immorality', if p then q press
more press free press RESPOND
Hi Becky and Ryan
ReplyDeleteIn reply to some of your ideas about programming/curating I thought you might find this interesting.
There were something like 250 pages given to me by Philip Terry. I decided that the poems which are in Advanced Immorality were the right amount, right shape and also addressed if p then q’s concern of making a book that is very accessible on first reading but which also has the possibility of being explored by the same reader on a number of occasions. I think the 250 odd pages I received were something like 2 years’ worth of work. Of course in some sense the selection I chose, and then suggested to Philip Terry, has a unity since it is now ‘the book’, like you pointed out, but it was chosen and ordered very specifically. Advanced Immorality is also is a kind of antonymic bootleg version of Elementary Morality from the mighty Carcanet press – also by Philip Terry/Raymond Queneau.
I used to have a number of Prince bootlegs including one of Parade (called Charade). All of the songs on this album, and some of Prince’s other bootlegs, play synonym and antonym games so that Girls and Boys becomes Women and Men and a track on the outer sleeve called Heaven (which didn’t make the cut of the official album) becomes Hell on the sticker in the middle of the LP, as if to say these things are equivalents but not.
For Terry’s Advanced Immorality I had Pink Floyd’s Meddle as a model. That is to say on Meddle, a first song which is different to the others in style, 3 songs which are equivalent in length and style, a very short song and a very long song (the only song on the B-side):
Side A
One of These Days (5.57)
A Pillow of Winds (5.10)
Fearless (6.08)
San Tropez (3.43)
Seamus (2.16)
Side B
Echoes (23.29)
AI doesn’t quite fit that model but you can see it has a huge poem at the start which is so joyful in its hugeness – not a labour. The quennets of Advanced Immorality and Berlin Notebooks wrapping each end of side B (if 50 ½ was the only song on the A-side). Clop Clop is here then it’s gone balancing strangely with the long stuff:
Side A
50 ½ Crime Novels for Beginners
Side B
Advanced Immorality
First Steps in Phonology
Hamlet
Clop Clop (very short)
Days
A Berlin Notebook
I can see how you might say that Hamlet doesn’t perhaps fit in the collection (as it is more traditionally conceptual whereas the other poems use processes which don’t dominate the poems). Sometimes I think I like it when one thing doesn’t fit in, sometimes that is the fitting in for me. I think it’s Gombrich who says there is an ‘imperfection in perfection’, and others have said something similar. Hamlet is one sharp distinction and not a number of them which is a kind of balance too. Of course in one sense Hamlet could be considered to fit in with the other poems in Advanced Immorality since a key feature of Terry’s work is the playing of a variety of Oulipean games, the book being a collection of games.
All good, James