Skip to main content
Read page text
page 230
and 11) name ‘rulers’ of the region, and names assigned to oil-fields therein (though, of course, the war was never about oil). The penultimate section (stanza group 10) draws on arms-dealer promo. prose, plus that company’s ‘ethics policy’. I couldn’t make it up. [Stanza groups 1 and 2 appeared in Angel Exhaust magazine (2006); stanza group 4 in The New Review of Literature (2006); stanza groups 5 and 8 in the magazine Poetry Wales (2008), reprinted in Goodby and Davies, The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966– 2016 (Llangattock, Powys: Aquifer Books, in association with Boiled String Press, Swansea, 2018); stanza group 6 appeared on the website Archive of the Now (www.archiveofthenow.org), uploaded 2006; stanza groups 7, 9, 10 and 11 in …further evidence of nerves: Cambridge Poetry Summit 2005 (Cambridge: Barque /Arehouse, 2005) and in Readings: Small Publishers Fair 2004 (Research Group for Artists’ Publications, Cromford, Derbys, 2005). * Stanza group 3 was rewritten for this book, and is thus previously unpublished.] Processions written inside chivalry first appeared in Issue 1 online (2008). It is accurately signed on the page, as the ‘poem’  wasn’t ‘written’ by ‘me’, or indeed by anyone; its text appeared as part of a vast corpus of well over a thousand pages, assembled by a web-surfing ‘bot’ which turned text-extracts into poem-like entities and randomly ascribed them under the names of poets with a digital presence. Some ‘victims’ of this process tried to locate and take legal proceedings against the responsible parties. I take a broader view of authorship, and am happy to acknowledge my nominal responsibility here; indeed, I have sought out (and been granted) formal permission by the editor of Issue 1 to reprint ‘my’  ‘poem’ here. Issue 1 itself is no longer online, but a cloned version survives at www.stephenmclaughlin.net/issue-1/ Issue-1_Fall-2008.pdf ; you will find many, many poems therein that are equally not by their authors ( John Ashbery, Thomas A Clark, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Vanessa Place, William Shakespeare, Robert Sheppard…). * Blair’s Grave is the title often given to Robert Blair’s once well-known poem of 1743, The Grave. William Blake made in 1805 a series of illustrations for it, and wrote a connected poem, ‘Dedication of the Illustrations to Blair’s Grave ’. My sequence makes use of this material, together with speeches by Tony Blair and remarks made on a range of political blogs at the time of his resignation. These poems make selective use of material generated by an online cut-up engine, making a contrast to the wholly mechanical construction of the preceding piece. north hills  is my collective title for a very large group of  ‘faithless’ translations from old Chinese originals. I’ve discussed its methodology in the 228
page 231
front-matter to two books drawn from that corpus (eye-blink and ‘North Hills ’) and the interested reader is directed thence. In short, my contention is that the syntactic practice of some Chinese writing is of considerable poetic interest. Chinese characters are in themselves immutable; such modification as they receive is achieved by the addition of other words /characters acting as articles or personal pronouns; these are often dispensed with in poetry. This omission opens up an indeterminate space for the reader to enter and play. Such poems, common in the T’ang dynasty in particular, avoid restricting action to a specific agent (or even gendering that agent) and also refrain from committing such action to one specific time. Obviously it is impossible to replicate such effects, which rely on specificities of literary Chinese, in English; so the north hills poems set out to do just that. For this reason all the poems gathered here are given in more than one version, in a direct attempt to show the implicit variety held in their originals. They loop round alphabetically to start and end with versions of a poem often said to be the most impermeably difficult in all Chinese literature … The first Li Shang-yin text was made as a unique poem-card for an improvised performance of Chris Goode & Jonny Liron’s World of Work (Sussex Poetry Festival, Brighton, 2010), with each Chinese character represented by a single English word; it was reprinted online at Infinite Editions (www.infiniteeditions.blogspot.co.uk ); second version * . Li’s original refers en passant to the famous philosopher dreaming he is a butterfly, or vice versa, paradox. The second Po Chü-I version was published in eye-blink (London: Veer Books, 2010); the first version * . ‘Flamingo feathers’  is a form of the decorative plant Celosia argentea. The second version is dedicated to the poet Jeff Hilson, author of A grasses primer (London: Form Books, 2000); ‘timothy’ is an actual grass (Phleum pratense). The twin versions of  Tai Shu-lun were made for an anthology celebrating the joint sixtieth birthdays of the poets Alan Halsey and Gavin Selerie, Salamanders & Mandrake: Gavin Selerie & Alan Halsey at Sixty (Wakefield: ISPress, 2009). There are borrowings from their work. The first T’ao Ch’ien version appeared in veer off magazine (2008), and is dedicated to Sean Bonney; second version * . Galtymore is an Irish mountain; Simon Cutts’s reworking of a line of Mallarmé is here reworked, after a photo he took in his seventieth birthday year; the poem is for him. The Chinese original of  Ts’ui Hao’s poem alludes to the anonymous ‘Summoning the Recluse’ (from the second-century ad anthology Ch’u Tz’u [‘Songs of the South’]); I’ve used a line from Wordsworth’s ‘The Recluse’ in its stead (in the first version only). The second version nods amicably to Bill Griffiths’s  ‘Version of Ts’ui Hao’s Poem of the 229

Page Text

View plaintext

and 11) name ‘rulers’ of the region, and names assigned to oil-fields therein (though, of course, the war was never about oil). The penultimate section (stanza group 10) draws on arms-dealer promo. prose, plus that company’s ‘ethics policy’. I couldn’t make it up. [Stanza groups 1 and 2 appeared in Angel Exhaust magazine (2006); stanza group 4 in The New Review of Literature (2006); stanza groups 5 and 8 in the magazine Poetry Wales (2008), reprinted in Goodby and Davies, The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966– 2016 (Llangattock, Powys: Aquifer Books, in association with Boiled String Press, Swansea, 2018); stanza group 6 appeared on the website Archive of the Now (www.archiveofthenow.org), uploaded 2006; stanza groups 7, 9, 10 and 11 in …further evidence of nerves: Cambridge Poetry Summit 2005 (Cambridge: Barque /Arehouse, 2005) and in Readings: Small Publishers Fair 2004 (Research Group for Artists’ Publications, Cromford, Derbys, 2005). * Stanza group 3 was rewritten for this book, and is thus previously unpublished.] Processions written inside chivalry first appeared in Issue 1 online (2008). It is accurately signed on the page, as the ‘poem’  wasn’t ‘written’ by ‘me’, or indeed by anyone; its text appeared as part of a vast corpus of well over a thousand pages, assembled by a web-surfing ‘bot’ which turned text-extracts into poem-like entities and randomly ascribed them under the names of poets with a digital presence. Some ‘victims’ of this process tried to locate and take legal proceedings against the responsible parties. I take a broader view of authorship, and am happy to acknowledge my nominal responsibility here; indeed, I have sought out (and been granted) formal permission by the editor of Issue 1 to reprint ‘my’  ‘poem’ here. Issue 1 itself is no longer online, but a cloned version survives at www.stephenmclaughlin.net/issue-1/ Issue-1_Fall-2008.pdf ; you will find many, many poems therein that are equally not by their authors ( John Ashbery, Thomas A Clark, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Vanessa Place, William Shakespeare, Robert Sheppard…). * Blair’s Grave is the title often given to Robert Blair’s once well-known poem of 1743, The Grave. William Blake made in 1805 a series of illustrations for it, and wrote a connected poem, ‘Dedication of the Illustrations to Blair’s Grave ’. My sequence makes use of this material, together with speeches by Tony Blair and remarks made on a range of political blogs at the time of his resignation. These poems make selective use of material generated by an online cut-up engine, making a contrast to the wholly mechanical construction of the preceding piece.

north hills  is my collective title for a very large group of  ‘faithless’ translations from old Chinese originals. I’ve discussed its methodology in the

228

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content