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Barque Press

anycon

11

What do people think of their stuff? Hot White Andy in particular.

Oh I'm sure they'd say it's complexly ironised.

Bah, I can rustle one up in 5. Let's see.

What plainsung clue, plumage claim, unguligrade walks?
Avec plumes of salt and gall? And if pungent blame,
what, pluming plays your game, and gleams? Such – gloom around:
there is a grail beneath us, half of what we might
have wanted – she must have thought herself a writer
of getting talent – and – I had no wish, agree,
to deny her • I am a prodigy of this.

Singular clones, brown your pelves; good to a scarcely
credible extent + counting (without pelfs 'nof couse).
I have such trendy taste! Applaud me, love-governors,
plausive givers, bundles of gain, cream & flattened thunder!
Where's the weighing pad? Why is my sadness utter?
No: for I am fat with you, this couldn't count as light
(or shouldn't be made to). And loss is what – to have –
you have to give • right?

Reply 3

Da Bachtopus

12

anycon

What do people think of their stuff? Hot White Andy in particular.

I don't think I really 'got' Sutherland till I watched those videos a month ago (also whilst reading that edition of the Chig Rev). Though I prefer other poets that Barque publish to him, there's only so much schizophrenic noise I can take before it starts to get uniform.

I need to go out now and can't write more.

Reply 4

Gault

{All errors deliberate.}

Reply 5

Da Bachtopus

12

^^ you've not really got the fragmented syntax quite right. You need to supress more words (articles especially) and have far more anacoluthon. Also, you revert to a basically iambic line, which Sutherland does on occasion, but his metre is generally far more distrupted than yours - any iambs stick out clearly. Your vocabulary also doesn't really imitate the various fields used by this kind of avant Brit poetry.

I know this stuff lends itself easily to parody, but there is more there to pay attention to than you seem to have done, even if only on the level of verbal texture.

Reply 6

Profesh

20

It's iconoclastic, I suppose.

Reply 7

the_alba

12

You get the sense with him that if he walked past Hughes's or Larkin's Collected in the window of Blackwell's, he'd be holding his nose and looking for a bin to vomit into. A bit wanky, conceited, fun-becoming-po-faced, I don't know. I still haven't made up my mind about him.

Reply 8

Da Bachtopus

12

the_alba

You get the sense with him that if he walked past Hughes's or Larkin's Collected in the window of Blackwell's, he'd be holding his nose and looking for a bin to vomit into. A bit wanky, conceited, fun-becoming-po-faced, I don't know. I still haven't made up my mind about him.

Yes, I don't like what I perceive to be a dismissal of certain writers purely on ideological grounds, regardless of their accomplishment. (Though I never liked Hughes, and am not a huge Larkin fan, but I suppose I should read more of him.)

I feel rather with this sort of thing that there's a specific poetic and academic tradition that these guys are coming out of, which perhaps illuminates /how/ you can end up writing like this. At the same time, it's difficult for this not to land you in a ditch of stock theory responses which ultimately only discuss the poetic / aesthetic of, say, Sutherland, and don't press on the content of the poetry itself.

For all my skepticism, though, I think he's intelligent and his poetry can amuse and shock and linger in spite of the wankiness and implication that any other poetic isn't worth considering (being a manifestation of false consciousness, &c.). I'm more of a receptive spectator than a commited partisan. The Barque poets are diverse enough to be interesting (I'd sooner read more poems by Brady or Wilkinson or Drew Milne than more Sutherland though).

Reply 9

Franc Vouloir

11

Da Bachtopus

... there's a specific poetic and academic tradition that these guys are coming out of, which perhaps illuminates /how/ you can end up writing like this. At the same time, it's difficult for this not to land you in a ditch of stock theory responses which ultimately only discuss the poetic / aesthetic of, say, Sutherland, and don't press on the content of the poetry itself.

This is certainly how things look from my relatively uneducated perspective. The type of thing that Sutherland's doing is essentially & necessarily risky: when it doesn't work, you look like a cock; when it works, it ****ing works. Any criticism that doesn't take a comparable amount of risk (e.g. by resorting to stock theoretical responses) is just going to be boring. (& we all know that boredom is counter-revolutionary.)

Reply 10

Gault

Da Bachtopus

^^ you've not really got the fragmented syntax quite right.

My point was that avantgarde poetry too often disguises an inane kind of romanticism. Sutherland is rather cryptically a lyric poet. I know the woman whom 'Andy Cheng' is based on -- it's a love poem about her.

Reply 11

anycon

OP

11

Da Bachtopus

I don't think I really 'got' Sutherland till I watched those videos a month ago (also whilst reading that edition of the Chig Rev).

Sort of the same experience. I enjoy his YouTube video. He's witty and fun (heavens, please not 'ludic') and I can't tell how seriously he takes his taking himself seriously. I'd read HWA over your standard new Carcanet any time, though Antifreeze bored me.

That said, Geoffrey Hill wraps KS, Larkin and Hughes into a mewling ball and boots it into nextdoor's koi pond.

Figuratively.

Reply 12

Da Bachtopus

12

Gault

My point was that avantgarde poetry too often disguises an inane kind of romanticism. Sutherland is rather cryptically a lyric poet. I know the woman whom 'Andy Cheng' is based on -- it's a love poem about her.

I thought your point was to show that you could parody difficult poetry in a few minutes, and it would be indistinguishable? Maybe I misunderstood; either way, it's quite interesting that when writing quickly you preserve some sort of iambic pentameter. I expect most English people would.

I'd not say the lyricism is really all that "disguised" or "cryptic" (though its precise objets are). In a sense, talking about its relation to lyric is another critical cliché of avant poetry. Inanity: possibly, though I think this depends on the levels of irony you see as being in play. I don't get the impression you'd give them benefit of doubt though :wink:

Reply 13

Da Bachtopus

12

anycon

Sort of the same experience. I enjoy his YouTube video. He's witty and fun (heavens, please not 'ludic') and I can't tell how seriously he takes his taking himself seriously. I'd read HWA over your standard new Carcanet any time, though Antifreeze bored me.

That said, Geoffrey Hill wraps KS, Larkin and Hughes into a mewling ball and boots it into nextdoor's koi pond.

Part B is hilarious. I'd rather needed confirmation of the fact that there was humour in there, and not just academic Marxist rant.

Geoffrey Hill: yes. He's giving a talk in Paris this month, which I'm looking forward to, despite going to a lecture he did in Cambridge and finding it dreadful.

Reply 14

anycon

OP

11

Da Bachtopus

Geoffrey Hill: yes. He's giving a talk in Paris this month, which I'm looking forward to, despite going to a lecture he did in Cambridge and finding it dreadful.

Are you going to get the Collected Critical Writings? I'm holding out on a freebie from OUP.

Reply 15

Gault

Da Bachtopus

I thought your point was to show that you could parody difficult poetry in a few minutes, and it would be indistinguishable?

Yes, that too. But without the 'indistinguishable'. Approximate?

either way, it's quite interesting that when writing quickly you preserve some sort of iambic pentameter. I expect most English people would.

Isn't it hexameter? The iambs were fully intended.

I'd not say the lyricism is really all that "disguised" or "cryptic" (though its precise objets are).

The sentimentality is.

In a sense, talking about its relation to lyric is another critical cliché of avant poetry.

Only if you say clichéd things about the relation.

Do you see any merit in the view that many of these Barque poems are versions -- parodies with rather reverent than mocking intent -- of Prynne?

Reply 16

Da Bachtopus

12

anycon

Are you going to get the Collected Critical Writings? I'm holding out on a freebie from OUP.

It's been on pre-order from Amazon since about September. No freebies for me.

Reply 17

Da Bachtopus

12

Gault

Isn't it hexameter? The iambs were fully intended.

Fine on the intention, though I'm inclined still to read most of them as five (principal) beat lines, rather than six, which depart from a pentameter base. Unless the hexameter were a clearly-established metrical set, I'd say that most longer quasi-iambic lines in English would inevitably be ghosted by pentameter, even if they were all hypermetric.

The sentimentality is.

Yes.

Only if you say clichéd things about the relation.

Again, yes; but I suppose my point was more that pulling out the lyric-shaped can opener is all too comfortable and habitual a strategy for cracking into these austere blocks of text. (I'm not in the mood right now for intelligent metaphors.)

Do you see any merit in the view that many of these Barque poems are versions -- parodies with rather reverent than mocking intent -- of Prynne?

More than just "merit", I think this is a bitter truth. I certainly get the impression that most people come to this poetry via Prynne; I'd even be cynical enough to suggest they some come as hungry undergraduates eager to prove they're au point in the literary world and smart enough to handle the legendary JHP. Cynicism aside, I get the impression that all the other 'influences' on this poetic (principally going back via the American tradition: Olson, Dorn + some Burnstein; but also the rest of the British Poetry Revivial) are read after departing from Prynne, who remains the figurehead and focal point. But, having said that, there's a reasonable tonal variety amongs the reverent 'parodies': Sutherland's hyperactivity is a considerable departure, and a different Prynnification from that of Wilkinson, who maintains a measured, asured poise.

Two more rather cynical points: 1) that reverent (perhaps unconscious) parody could be the result of an anxiety to be absolutely modern, not in this case trying to depass and depart from Prynne's influence, but more to avoid being a reactionary; 2) that subscribing to a poetic allied to an ideology dismissing on political grounds certain poetic forms, saves you from having to acquaint yourself with the poetic content of rival traditions.

I'm not willing to elevate Barque to some kind of monolithic poetic NOW, but I'm not going to avoid keeping track of what their poets get up to, or reading more of what they've published. Though, TBH, I kind of think that having been in Cambridge for three years narrowed my impressions of the avant to this particular group, and I'd sooner read up on more recent Australian or US poets right now. Not to mention Mr Hill and all the Irishmen.

Reply 18

the_alba

12

^^ Agreed. Though I think, even more cynically, that the Prynne parade are as keen to get under the skin of rival traditions, especially the Picador / Bloodaxe axis (how pleasingly incongruous that they publish Prynne) as anything else, and the whole Cambridge-y, né Black Mountain-y tradition is as much defined by what it isn't doing than what it is, at least in the UK, and at least now.

Anyone see Jeremy Noel-Tod's, sorry, 'Ron Paste's' spoof pamphlet? Sutherland takes a bullet. Landfill Press.

Reply 19

anycon

OP

11

Da Bachtopus

Not to mention Mr Hill and all the Irishmen.

You mean you haven't read up on Hill yet? What the hill have you been doing? Get everything he's written and spend a secluded month or so with it, and a good university library.

The Triumph of Love is a great book.

Anyone see Jeremy Noel-Tod's, sorry, 'Ron Paste's' spoof pamphlet? Sutherland takes a bullet. Landfill Press.

I have indeed. Zurcher's is their best pamphlet, by a long way.

Barque Press

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