Listening, listening (Naked Eye Publishing), 11pp, £9.99. You can buy a copy here.
I was saddened to learn about the death of Bob Cooper, an old friend whose work and company I enjoyed in equal measure. A couple of years ago he asked me for a few lines for his latest collection – I’m very sorry to think it will probably be his last. As ever, I ended up doing a sort of mini-review I now post by way of tribute.
Bob Cooper’s Listening, listening continues his exploration of the long, carefully-worked line, which blends thoughtfulness and powerful utterance in a manner which seeks to occupy, it seems, a middle ground of the poetic imagination between Simon Armitage and Walt Whitman.
Like Armitage, he has a compassionate eye for our behaviours under pressure, and the book is full of encounters and bearings of witness, statements of a nation in distress and seeking a supportive ear. It amounts to an eloquent rethreading of the power of the imagination through a unjust system, ravelling up the damage done, doing justice to that in us which persists in hope and in reaching out to each other in humankindness.
Like Whitman, that long line is put to the good work of internalising the experience of others, and this book contains imaginary multitudes, from Borges and Brueghel to the Romantic poets re-imagined as the Famous Five of ‘Willie Long-Legs’, ‘Little Johnny K’, etc. The poets (from Auden to Rilke) are always set in the contemporary moment, post-Brexit, labouring under the burdens of austerity, eyeing our callous and self-serving, self-styled ‘betters’, neatly reimagined here in the figure of ‘Boris Falstaff’.
This substantial pamphlet/mini-collection from Nikki Robson – NI-born, Dundee Uni grad (their Writing MLitt), Dundee Renga alumna, and fellow Dundee workshopper – is just out from V.Press. (I write this on the practically palindromic 5.2.25.)
Incidentally, V. Press also publish a swathe of writers from the North-East of England, including Newcastle Uni CW and EngLit folk, Ian Glass, David O’Hanlon, and Mary-Jane Holmes: so do check them out.
The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping, said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’).
You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship.
It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another.’
Driven, if not driven wild, by coincidence, I had occasion just the other day to post something by a very old friend, Martyn Crucefix, on a current website, the Ghost Furniture Catalogue, which I’m co-curating with Sophie Herxheimer. The particular coincidence in this case being that I was already contemplating this post, and that it is Martyn’s own excellent website I always think of as a corrective contrast to this, far more occasional, blog.
Early on, he posted a succinct outline of what he reckoned a poetry site had to do in this diffusive era in order to be paid attention to. I cannot of course find it now, but it was common sense stuff: post regularly so folk become accustomed to your presence; include images to pace out the flow of text; do not self-obsess (eg review regularly, so folk become accustomed, etc) – that sort of thing.
I remember reading it and – knowing what I know about my inconsistent, contrary, self-obsessed, so-called ‘self’ – thinking, ‘Oh dear.’ And so it has proved, with this blog, without at all intending it as such, becoming an exercise in How Not To Do It. That’s fine, of course, if it’s your intention to Go Away And Stop Bothering The Folks. Less so if you’d prefer to Retreat Slowly, With Many Long, Longing Looks Over Your Shoulder, just in case someone should, you know, call…
For instance, I’d intended, in my usual one-step-forward/two-steps-sideways/three-steps-back sort of way (a rewriting of the White Knight’s move), to ‘promote’ three of my books in the period leading up to Xmas, as though that would persuade anyone to buy any of them.
Fortunately, that Stranger, Coincidence, decided to take further pity on me. The Wreck appeared in October 2020, when everyone’s attention was quite rightly elsewhere and so sank without trace. (Wait, can anyone else hear a tiny tin violin playing ‘Wae is him’ upon a metaphorical raft, bobbing in the imaginary distance?)
It garnered a handful of good-to-very good reviews and sold almost as many copies, implying that each of those reviewers had reached at least one enthusiastic reader – and that, I thought, was that. Then, the other week, just as I began to remember my good-if-self-centred intentions, Bloodaxe contacted me and said they’d uncovered another review from 2023, and it was very good. No sooner had I sought out the link than they wrote again and said did I know that, thanks to the agency of the Scottish Poetry Library, The Scotsman had this very January published a poem from the self-same volume? No, I didn’t: thanks to Kevin Williamson in his role as SPL’s social media maven.
Why, it was as though it had, if not resurfaced suddenly, crewed by ghastly green liches and sea-devils, at least been detected by sonar, lounging on its side on the seabed, flicking through an old waterproof comic.
Here’s the review, from The Bottle Imp, by Matthew Macdonald:
And here’s your summative paragraph/blurbtastic quote:
‘All of this is to say that the collection is filled to bursting with a variety of poetic forms and styles that beg to be devoured through multiple readings and which present a veritable smӧrgåsbord of themes and content for any reader. The Wreck of the Fathership reveals Herbert at the height of his powers…’
Here I should also present the poem as reproduced in The Scotsman as an instance of that altitude. It’s called ‘Rain Habbies’ and is one of a series of Tay-watching pieces written while renting a flat looking over Broughty Ferry beach, mostly written around the time of my father’s death, some premonitory, others in mourning:
This was all a delightful surprise, especially given the thing I thought I’d be posting about, given the cyclical nature of human ghastliness, was how the re-election of Trumpo had brought back to mind those works featuring him and the Billionaire Bunch as the Nobodaddy n Hangers-On of the Apocalypse. (The Wreck is divided/broken apart on this rock of the Good Father Lost and the Bad Dad Triumphant.)
Here’s the title poem as performed back then for the Newcastle Poetry Festival, repositioned now for the Trumpo/Musky inauguration. (NB you’ll have to sign in to view it.)
In fact, given the sense of grim recurrence that prospect induces, I think I must reinstate the series of ‘Executive Quatrains’ with which I offered my own puny opposition to the first reign of Trumpo. Here’s the image+poem combo for the first of this new series, as represented over on my Tumblr site, where previous instances can also be found, including those which made their way into the anthology What Rough Beast, edited by Merryn Williams and Rip Bulkeley.
(I delayed this final post both because we hit the holiday period and because I had the sense it wasn’t finished – indeed couldn’t be finished until the book mentioned at the start turned up in the true Chekhovian style at the end. As, as luck would have it, it does.See below.
I also delayed till here the footnote on Eddie Morgan’s ‘Starlings’ and how his Interference was affected by Autocorrect, because… well, see below.)
3
The final forgetting was of the book itself – Unselected Poems appeared in February of this year, but here I am only turning to it now, more than nine months later, as though some kind of distended gestation has been taking place. As though remembering were an embryonic porpoise or horse – perhaps even a seal. Or mebbe I just mean retirement itself, which for me as for many has meant retreating from The Job and turning in a more full-on fashion to The Work.
Just as the Unselected is apparently based in a paradox (how can you select that which has not been selected?), so the taking on of the consequence of my actions turns out to be a slower, stranger process than I understood. To refer back to ‘The Road Not Taken’, this time of my life appears to be that ‘another day’ for which Frost ‘kept’ the first road. (Which road did I take, again?)
Part of that strangeness is a mourning. When I caught up with another old pal, Robert Crawford, at the recent celebrations of Fergusson’s bicentenary, he spoke about retiring during Lockdown, and having to grab what he could of his office library due to the restrictions imposed on (as we thought) all of us at that time. While he would never compare it with the suffering and loss experienced by so many in our plague years, I could see giving up so many of his books had nonetheless had a traumatic effect on him. These secret woundings still require us to convalesce, if possible.
So in a sense I wasn’t all that surprised to realise, mid-way through the ‘intergenerational dialogue’ with Josie Giles for the Autumn issue of The Poetry Review that, although I have had several books out this year, and it might be a good idea to mention one or more of them – in a professional albeit casual sort of way – I had so far forgotten to do so.
(Hence the not-at-all-shoehorned-in manner in which I refer, firstly there and secondly here, to the Unselected; to the co-authored study of collaborative translation; and to The Iconostasis of Anxiety.)
Postscript
By the way, I’ve just returned from rummaging by torchlight in my mother’s garage for that forgotten library book – it showed up in the third box (of twelve or so). One I had already looked in, of course. That book was Stanzas, by Giorgio Agamben, a complex, often problematic thinker, but this instance of luck requires that I end on a stochastic response: the old Sortes Vergilianae. So here is what it uncovered:
‘The artist who, in Plato’s text, draws the images (eikonas) of things in the soul is the phantasy; these pictures are in fact…defined as “phantasms” (phantasmata). The central theme of the Philebus is not, however, knowledge, but pleasure, and, if Plato here evokes the problem of memory and the phantasy, it is because he is anxious to show that desire and pleasure are impossible without this “painting in the soul”…’
It may be in this sense that the Unselected actually works: I was trying to put a book together as though it made sense of a life, whereas, as soon as I gave it a go, I lost my starting point and had to make up phantom lives instead. And, as I believe Tim Hardin remarked, ‘How can we select our phantasmata?’
* ‘The Starlings in George Square’ – as I tried to write ‘fankled’, autocorrect Scotocorrected it to ‘rankled’, which is why I will never switch autocorrect off. Eg the word ‘ungathered’ has, in the writing of this piece, been corrected to ‘unfathered’. Twice.
I have form in this sort of disorganised misplacement: a couple of prose works – a very early travel piece from the early 80s about my first visits to Milan and Florence; a late 90s piece about, ironically, memory and artefacts (in fact, furniture), called Virtual Sideboard – had also gorn.
When they eventually turned up, they never turned out to be as good as my imagination had made them in the interim – the ‘travelovel’ returned complete with a contemporaneous letter from my old schoolmate, the novelist James Meek, pointing out very politely exactly what was wrong with its undergraduate solipsism: he was always smarter about voice and the bigger picture.
That quality gap would no doubt apply to Big Red should it ever be recoverable. (It might be easier just to write it again, based on my memory of what it was probably or ‘should’ have been about – but would it be ‘better’? Would it be ‘authentic’?) But the UnselectedPoems is, nonetheless, a sort of spanning of all such gaps in our progress.
One poem, about the Working Self, dedicated to the late Martin Conway, who introduced me to the term, focusses on these successive ideas of ourselves, which are outgrown every now and then (in about seven year units in my case) as circumstances (or just ageing) affect us.
Our self-image and therefore our memories are not carried over perfectly from stage to stage. While we remain responsible for all their follies and, equally, inherit the benefits of their few achievements, we are not exactly who we were and do not remember as they remembered, but this is the sort of detail we confabulate in order to achieve coherence – a narrative rather than a sequence of possibly discreet episodes, as Galen Strawsen would put it.
This is why, I think, we are often surprised when, hurrying down the street, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in a shop window and think ‘Who is that auld feller?’ – we still expect to see the previous self. Indeed, I often have the impression that both my past selves and my potential other selves – other lives turned from at those moments whether of decision or doubt – together with certain persistent patterns, figures, or locations in my dream world, are still ongoing, deeper in the imagination or unconscious, programmes running in the background as it were.
More objectively, it is in this sense that a personal ‘archive’ – by which I mean both the heaps/files/wineboxes of one’s papers and that actual library one builds up over the decades – is a sort of archaeological record of these selves, a composite portrait of and extension of each of them, indicating by its order, disorder, location, and relocation, the category of The Proximate.
So too, like the nine Troys, the layers of the Unselected Poems attempt to present these layers, and so the single poems which are interspersed between the sequences are alternative selves, whether digital copies, revenants, found texts, the body deconstructed into its five senses, or fantastical robots.
When I retired earlier this year, I packed up my university office library into 16 or so large boxes and crates and several bags for life (now sacs pour livres). While doing so I came across a library book I had been advancing – painfully slowly – through and thought to myself very sternly, ‘Do not put this in a large box, crate, or sac where it will be forgotten…’
By the time the return notices for it began to arrive from the Robinson Library, my books were divided between North Shields and Monifieth, and no amount of preliminary peering at the top layers of boxes would yield up the missing work.
This instance of what Morgan thought of as ‘interference’ in the signal/
At the General Post Office The clerks write Three Pounds Starling in the savings-books. Each telephone-booth is like an aviary. I tried to send a parcel to County Kerry but -The cables to Cairo got fankled, sir. What’s that? I said the cables to Cairo got fankled.*
/between the would-be controller in my heid and me, the slipshod executor of actual deeds, serves as a guide to the chain of forgettings or rather miscataloguings which characterises my creative processes. My Unselected Poems is exactly that: a selection based in a misplacement and made up of a series of leavings-out.
When the idea of gathering together hitherto ungathered sequences came to me, it was because of a work written at what Frost would call a divergence in a wood.
Back in the early 90s, I built my first Bloodaxe collection on a sequence called The Cortina Sonata, organised, as you might imagine, along the lines of a sonata. But there was another sequence of love poems written in parallel called Big Red – my partner had ‘big’ red hair at the time – based in a trip we’d made to New York in the late 80s where we stayed at the Chelsea Hotel and had a mildly wild time (compared to some).
This ‘unselection’ should begin with that, I thought: the New York theme will set up the contents nicely, I thought. (The poems were actually ungathered because they were usually based in specific projects, often collaborative – as with On Your Nerve, a performance piece from 1996 celebrating New York School poet, Frank O’Hara, featuring his poetry and work written in response by myself, David Kinloch, and Donny O’Rourke.)
Except I couldn’t find Big Red anywhere among my papers. Like the misplaced library book, it had gone as though it had never existed.
(I really thought I’d posted this elegiac weighing up of Jim Stewart’s first and only collection, THIS (The Voyage Out, 2018) six years ago. I can find the post ‘before’, as it were, which reflects briefly on his loss alongside my own meditations on, at that point, the four year point of grieving for my father.
Ironically, it might well have been this note which alerted me to the basic method of the mini-review: having been asked to produce a sentence for the back cover, I ended up doing a small but hopefully helpful assessment of the whole book.So this should have been the first in this series, not the tenth.
I was nudged to post it here, as so often, by the purity of coincidence: a week or two ago, a friend asked if I had the text of a lovely poem by Jim, ‘Snowdrops’, then, this morning, Facebook casts my post about receiving a copy of the book up upon the waverly shoreline of my attention.)
THIS, a gently directive yet typically emphatic title of Jim Stewart’s posthumous collection – immediately followed by the equally locational subheading, ‘Tay Poems’ – insists on acts of intense observation of plants, animals, birds, and insects which, through long refinement and mastery of craft, become transcendent meditations.
Jim Stewart’s work, as Kirsty Gunn observes in her moving introduction, is all about this process of creation-as-responsiveness; THIS is everywhere shot through with epiphanic phrasings that place Jim Stewart within what Norman MacCaig famously called a ‘Zen Calvinist’ sensibility. There is an obsessive need to learn from the non-human a way of responding to how we really are, rather than how we suppose ourselves to be, an ethical dimension which lifts the poetry from the proudly local or the carefully observant to the deeply spiritual in a disillusioned version of that term.
THIS serves to establish Jim Stewart, with a single volume, as one of the most significant Scottish poets of the last twenty years.
In the garden’s dusk these were the last lights out, lambencies that floated and dwindled in the dark.
Here’s a link to Jim reading from THIS. The book is still available if you search around – I’ll update with a direct link to The Voyage Out press when I find one.
(Endless Blue,the new pamphlet frae outgoing Stirling Makar, Laura T. Fyfe, is a braw summation of some of the much work she has been daein over the busy course of her Makarship.
Honest disclaimer: I got to know Laura and the ither City Makars through a scheme set up by the Scottish Poetry Library for us current and former city makars tae pool resources and expertise (or, in my case, saying out loud thae random things that drift thru ma heid) – and some of us (Laura, Jim Carruth, Hannah Lavery, Niall O’Gallagher) did a few readings thegither under the City Makar banner.)
The seventeen poems of Endless Blue take us from the moment a fossil footprint is formed – and why – through the very different but almost complementary constructions of female and male identities then, via a Buddhist retreat at Lochearnhead, oot into the endlessnesses hinted at in its title: those ‘spaces of the universe’ that sae terrified Pascale.
It’s a lang way to go, but these poems are in no hurry, retelling us fairy tales about how types of the feminine have come to displace our sense of ourselves in ‘Changeling’ and, in ‘You’re never too old…’, how the ‘nearly new’ gets primped up and rendered prince-worthy again. Male identity is explored in the brilliant Scots of ‘Taps aff’ – ‘peeliwally bams wi/muckle great Moby Dick kytes’ – and the hilariously awfy sporting rituals of ‘In Concert’.
These are poems open equally to deep time and spatial vastness, as in ‘Scream if you wantae’, where a sense of clinging to the Earth as it tumbles through space exposes how sma we are. It’s nae surprise that there’s a Scots version here of Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ – this is a world in which the danger is you ‘Stomp a flea and stairve a spider’.
However, the key sense throughout is of a freedom beyond the limits of those identities we impose on ourselves: ‘There are no names on cave paintings’. That vulnerable freedom is evoked again in ‘Where my roots lie’ with its locationary opening line ‘Three trees minded us’, neatly poised between the Scots and English meanings of ‘minded’.
Endless Blue begins wi a prehistoric lass and, though it’s no the last poem, in a sense it ends wi the contemporary lass of ‘Over the Edge of Blue’, in that the pamphlet positions its ain freedoms in particularities of place, perception, and memory: those points at which the world sees us as much as we see it, and sees us whole.
I wrote this note to self when I realised that, along with everything else I’d let slide this summer as I tried to retire in good order, I’d failed to share across social media those pieces of work I’d managed to complete at the kind request and gentle cajoling of others. Untimeliness is next to oddity in a culture run on contemporaneity, chronometry, instantaneity, and yantantethering.
There are those so in tune with the geist of the zeit that everything they do appears just when it should. Then there are us losers for whom anything we do either doesn’t appear at all or misses by that one predictable unit in our lives, the country mile. Our ongoing task is getting used to it, and even that we’re not so hot at. Xenochronicity is just one of the ways I persuade myself that, despite myself, I have a certain sense of liberty.
The liberty of not having to do things ‘on time’ is a self-defeating one in the obvious sense that, in print, missed deadlines mean non-appearance. But even online, where the perpetual capacity to re-edit and/or self-publish means punctuality may be more relaxed, to deprive yourself of the hit of contemporaneity – given almost no one pays you any attention anyway – is not a good move.
But it is nonetheless liberating in that the work produced gets a chance to agree more with one’s internal creative rhythms, whatever they are and however skewed they’ve gotten. Besides, in the double negativland of xenochronicity, a piece is not really invalidated by not appearing on time, which with perspective (AKA hindsight) is just a framing device.
Lastly, lateness doesn’t negate the role of καίρος or rhetorical timeliness which may well still occasion a work, whether its product does or not appear ‘on time’: that inspirational push can still have a positive effect, then, bearing in mind the timeliness of the result may still go unnoticed as an act of creative shaping – to go unnoticed, after all, remains the fate of almost everything we produce. So it is that the awareness of the audience that a piece of writing is timely is a positive when it happens, but not a negative when it doesn’t. Yippee ki yay.
There are to date 60+ references on my blog to what I think of as ‘xenochronicity’, and the original definition, dating from March 2007, is so old that it refers to a previous website that no longer exists, as well as to numerous long-gone projects of that era.
So here’s an edit that cuts to the continuing problematic nub of how creative space and chronological time intersect. According to the rhetorical, this ideally occurs via the intervention of ο καιρός, the coincidence of timeliness and aptness (in Aristotle, ‘arriving at the right conclusion on the right grounds at the right time’). In modern Greek, kairos also means ‘the weather’ but, for some of us losers, predicting the weather is not so easy.
As Mark E. Smith, the original Post-Nearly Man, once asked, ‘Moderninity, what is it?’ Xenochronicity is a term derived from two sources – Zappa’s xenochrony and Jung’s synchronicity. Definitions, gentlemen, please:
Zappa: ‘In this technique, various tracks from unrelated sources are randomly synchronized with each other to make a final composition with rhythmic relationships unachievable by other means.’
Jung: ‘Synchronicity . . . consists of two factors: a) An unconscious image comes into consciousness either directly (i.e., literally) or indirectly (symbolized or suggested) in the form of a dream, idea, or premonition. b) An objective situation coincides with this content. The one is as puzzling as the other.’
Thank you. Now, what do I mean by it? That the things I do all turn out to be interconnected, but that I am too stupid to notice this at the time. (You may apply this argument to yourself, substituting ‘busy’ for ‘stupid’.) Moreover, that when I attempt to align myself to what I dimly perceive as the zeitgeist, the nap of the universe appears to be against me. Equally, whenever I try to match this process to some date, issue or anniversary that the reading public or just the media can get a handle on, I always fail miserably.
I’m constantly aware of relinquishing creative process – letting some book I should’ve read slip into the pile of ‘one day’ reads; missing that movie that had a scene that just related to…what was that dream I was going to note down? I’m constantly improvising in response to the latest project, the latest deadline – which I’m always stretching or missing.
I’m the same when confronted by any aspect of the poetry ‘biz’ — prizes? I miss the deadline; awards? I botch the form-filling; submitting poems and touting for reviews? I forget; schmoozing events? I can’t even make myself turn up.
Get your act together you inefficient, self-defeating oaf, the admonitory voices cry, and fair enough. But what I’m pursuing here is how that recalcitrance is part of the creative fugue, the necessary trance that means you finally do connect the obsessions to each other and get a momentary glimpse of the whole terrain.
Reluctance, stubbornness and waywardness are creative virtues if only in these terms.
Creativity requires us to be strangers to time, if not to time-keeping, to enter that space in which, as Jung has it, things can connect according to acausal principles. These dazes and delays can be decades long, and the works you glimpse in them can mutate as though they’re dreams or even held in some compelling fugue state of their own. Perhaps they’re simply maturing, or you are. Perhaps they’re crossing the lightyears inside.
Certainly, I have enough ideas floating in that indeterminate landscape, and every now and then, I’ll sit down to write one thing and another will demand to appear instead.
Equally, that space corresponds for me with the kind of space depicted across my social media ‘presence’. No, the ‘articles’, reviews, etc are not in any particular order. Yes, there are too many ‘projects’ all on different sites. No, there’s not really a good reason why some photos are on Tumblr and others on Insta. No, assuming anyone would ever want to know where my next gig is, they won’t find out here.
But, as I continue to see art very much as the process of finding quite specific shapes – some on the page, some in experience – and some in this space, where a few different instruments and time signatures are currently still attempting to combine.
gairnet provides: press of blll 
