REVIEWS:
Peter Manson: Birth Windows.
Chris Goode: Boomer Console. Keston Sutherland: Bar Zero. All Barque Jeff Hilson: 12 Stretchers. Writers Forum. performances by Khaled Hakim & Rob Holloway;
Up until recently, you couldn’t actually buy Rob
Holloway's poetry anywhere. Should I review what people say to me? Maybe we
should stick to written product, but that seems a kind of commodity fetishism. I
think ideas and procedures are the elements of wealth, circulating within poems
but also outside them. I think the whole textmilieu is part of the subject of
poetry, and of people who are supposed to write about poetry. I saw a
performance of Rob Holloway's in the SubVoicive series where he had spent a day
or so beforehand sampling texts from various sources, had stored these on a
computer set up in the performance space, and the performance event consisted of
him reading out these sampled texts (modified perhaps?) in a random order. I
don’t think there was any record made of the event, i.e. of the order of the
texts. I don’t think the texts (ordered or “flat”) will ever form a
consumable item, something I could carry home or exhibit. It was a “runtime
only” creation. Which leaves my memory of it (everyone else’s memory, too),
a sort of line of sand which records a wave but is physically not a wave. I
think the performance was “about” the unconscious procedures by which we
make a poem or organise consciousness. Producing a serial verbal event puts
poems on a par with other events; if we start to ask why the Poem is superior,
we stumble over the rules by which someone constructs a poem, and we start to
see the structure as the surface data disappears from view.
I think the problem in writing a review like this is about sharing and
irritation: if I review a book of poems, you can find a copy, we can share the
experience I am evoking – at least possibly, at least to the extent that the
verbal code captures and keeps and yields what it should. A performance is like
a conversation – if it was terribly important, it can be irritating to someone
who wasn’t there to be told so. But should I reduce cultural history to what
can be stored, transported, and (eventually) sold & consumed? This is too
blunt. Anyway, I suspect that the best thing a review does is to supply the
“feel” around the texts, the swish of voices and ideas which flows through
the poem, when it works, and out the other side. Standing on the landing in Sean
Bonney’s flat in Vauxhall at 2 am one night, with a can of Pils in my hand,
may be an incredibly precious moment for the whole sociocultural complex,
something multidimensional and irrecuperable. At this stage, for these poets, we
want an awareness of the indefinite and fertile mass of what is about to happen,
not an asset inventory of exactly what has already been written. Rudolf Otto
remarks that in pictures the sublime is always expressed by something indefinite
and indistinct, and this dimensionless sublime is surely how the future appears
to us.
In the same series, Allen Fisher did an act where
he drew a picture without looking at it. What this uncovered was a compound
structure of the brain: as you draw a line, there is a correction loop fed by
the eye. The uncorrected lines come from an 'earlier" centre of control,
they are more subjective. They are high energy, while the corrections are much
smaller —resembling, perhaps, the fins
ecarts identified by Bourdieu as characteristic of upper middle class
tastes. The primary artistic act of drawing a line is not primary but compound,
governed by feedback. And the primary act of uttering a line?
What Allen was exposing there was the feedback loop
itself. The question, what is reflexivity. The working of the brain is not
"primally unified" but has a time dimension and occurs in partly
distinct phases. The brain is composed of many different organs (virtual
organs?) which can be separated out like the parts of some complex music.
There is a book on Harry Thubron in the library at the Craft Centre in
Islington which describes teaching drawing, starting around 1912, by having
pupils draw without being allowed to look at the paper, or drawing only when the
object had been hidden (so that they had to memorise it). So Allen’s
procedures are very close to didactic ones, in fact to an Art School tradition.
(He wrote a poem about Thubron, I can’t remember its name.) Well, this is no
secret. Not only am I quite happy with a didactic environment, I also think that
an environment which allows puzzles, exploration, recombination, pattern
acquisition, is a good place to be, and even that art always converges on this
kind of arrangement. The rules of art cannot be parted from those of information
theory, and the acquisition of information cannot readily be parted from
teaching and learning. As we know, Allen was a grand-scale truant at school;
designing lessons that hold the attention is not easy. We can say, at least,
that the problems of staging, contextualising, and sequencing data are urgent
for poets. It’s quite OK for poetry to be “didactic”, the source of
failure is beyond that, in its being boring, repetitive, confused, false, etc.
It's fairly obvious, if you look at "blind" drawings like those
ones, how the styles of painters differ in their mix of gestural energy and
spatial precision. The way different parts of the brain work together seems
important for character, for the way people assemble other behaviour patterns
(not just drawing and speaking). It's because this kind of "phasing"
sheds light on so many behaviour patterns, including sexual ones, that it's so
fascinating to watch it being exhibited: it's not a far-fetched topic, it's part
of us. Introspection fulfilled many of its tasks a long time ago, and must now
move on to intact issues or be perfunctory and empty.
Rob’s performance crystallised a floating fact
– about the cheapness of information, or the data wealth of the environment.
The universe is happening everywhere, all of the time. If we could produce a
formula for modern poetry, it would be this: capturing that ownerless passive
wealth. Of course there are sub-clauses, like “do it without coming over as
mindless random jerkiness”, “sequence the data and recombine it”, “get
the pace absolutely right”. The Christian cosmology has been dismantled and
replaced by one that that pours out in every direction. Once data is cheap, it's
not precious.
Tim asked me to review a clutch of pamphlets from
Barque Press, an astonishingly active Cambridge outfit who have produced almost
40 of the things in about 2 years (7 of these being by K Sutherland). I have to
notify him that I can’t review Chris Hamilton-Emory’s pamphlet, since he is
production manager at Folio-Salt, who published a certain book of mine. It would
be unethical to plug this or to review Chris’ work. Via Folio Salt, rem.press
and Equipage, Cambridge tends to dominate the serious small press world. This is
surprising, really. I wouldn’t say that a torrent of brilliant poets has come
out of Cambridge over the past 20 years. The truth is something much more like,
“Cambridge is hostile to poetry but there was a raft of poets for about 10
years after 1965, and there was a burst again while Stephen Rodefer was a writer
in residence about 10 years ago”. We have to be careful, since there is a new
student generation every three years (arguably, every year): continuity is only
residual. It’s true that much of the poetry I can exhibit as new and important
is written by two recent C*b*ge graduates, Helen Macdonald and Karlien van den
Beukel. Otherwise, there is a febrile student activity of people learning to
write poetry. As a scene, it is very active, and some of the alumni may produce
poetry in future.
Barque Press is part of youth culture. Maybe I can
try a partial sketch of youth culture as a way into this poetic sensorium.
Projection onto artist figures. The assembly of bafflingly complex tests which
art has to pass (to be able to be projected-onto). Structuring of the artworks
by the tests. Desperate fear of being left behind. In this regime artworks are
incredibly important, but only for a very brief time. The febrile consumption of
art products tied to the wish to define oneself through the display of virtual
commodities which advertise a way of living and offer a shared framework of
manners in which to live it. The constant shifting, the over-consumption of such
products, many in the course of a day, and the latching together of compound
assumptions, inside which songs or poems are then written, hard for anyone else
to trace effectively. Helpless consumerism masked by a search for authenticity.
Judging people by their clothes and forever trying on clothes to escape
judgment. The exit from shared frames to achieve individuality, competing via
stylistic offsets, permitted by the structure of the commodity system (which
calculates on it). The converse of such “hillbilly fever” is an attachment
to real (personal) experience which is slowed down, predictable, and includes
the possibility of failure. “Fever” is in fact the opposite of authenticity.
University libraries as equivalents of record shops, where a similar regime of
reckless grabbing of resources, of searching for worked objects that externalise
the (wished-for) self, gobbles up entire poetic systems. The glimpse of a
liberty where you become whatever you say and say whatever you think. Being
terrified by the slowness of adult poetry where basic personality structures
have cooled and hardened. Identifying instability of identity with the rhythmic
unpredictability, the swing, which differentiates a good pop record from a bad
one. Integrity as a slowing of the body clock.
The poem is a bid at the spectrum auction. The consumption of high
culture (as of youth culture) relies on overall semantic frameworks by which the
individual signs are related to behavioural gestures and interpersonal
exchanges. The fever regime produces constantly new frameworks (by mixing and
matching), and the problem is then of making the framework current at any moment
visible, so that the reader can find out what the poem means. Over-consumption
(youth solemnly listening to the radio or CD player many hours a day, 7 days a
week) makes following rule-shifts easy; the lack of “programmed consumption”
in small press poetry makes a complete failure of communication always likely.
Predictability is linked to intelligibility but could actually be seen as a
failure of communication: as speed was the burden
of the message, the true intent. I have been dubious about reviewing Barque
Press output, because they’re so obviously students, but I really liked the
pamphlets by Peter Manson and Keston Sutherland.
It is hard to tell the difference between anxiety
and rage. The disaffected reject culture because of rage or because of anxiety.
Lack of trust, lack of firm & beneficent relationships, condemn them to
fury. Lack of shared context makes it hard for them to write. I think perhaps we
can draw a link between media fever and the life of the intellect. Abstract
ideas similarly move at far, far higher speeds than real life (than your body,
I suppose) and are similarly irritating to the fogey-ogres who run the shop. In
fact, we could define poetic conservatives as people who hate ideas. This hatred
is one of the great features of English culture. Belief in the possibility of
personal change, the energy to abandon your investments and redraw your maps,
are youthful traits. The idea of continuing to learn and improvise in adulthood
is quite seductive. It’s quite a long path from the instability and imitation
of a “media freak” to being an intellectual – but
thought is instability.
The basic traits of the student body at Cambridge,
and of their teachers, are competitiveness and intellectual talent. These do
help you write poetry. However, a poet is less likely to develop at Cambridge,
because too many of the students see strictly academic work as the paramount
means of competing with their peers. You win by maximising prestige assets which
a wider world does not recognise. So far as there is a social order in
Cambridge, it stacks the odds against anyone writing poetry. When a peer-group
redefine poetry as the means of competition, Cambridge is very productive,
because it has a concentration of talent and of the wish to achieve. This moment
is unstable, because student groups finish and move out, and because the
pressure to succeed at exams is too great. Ex-students are unlikely to continue
writing poetry, because everything changes when you leave Cambridge: even if you
stay, your friends leave. So the word “promising” has to be used with
caution.
The town is also home to a kind of artists’ colony. It is less
stressful than a big city, and full of bookshops, libraries, and people
interested in culture. This explains why Grace Lake, Tom Raworth, and Michael
Ayres, for example, live there. But anywhere else is sympathetic to poetry, if
it is cheap to live there, there are squats and so on, and there is a population
of Bohemians who think that the arts are the most important thing in life and
who distrust artistic authority, both the managers and the market. In Cambridge,
the dominant orthodoxy is run by alarmingly intelligent people, and this makes
it hard to be a rebel. I think good poetry is written by dropouts. Spending time
on the dole is the best recipe. Anywhere where people are either non-competitive
or at least think the obvious form of competition is stupid is more
conducive to poetry.
The function of the whole higher education plant in the town is to locate and develop talent. People spend several hours a day talking about “is this person incredibly talented?”, it’s like farmers talking about prices, a boring tic. Locally, interest in good poems is slight compared to the interest in “potential”. In the case of the victim, spending 12 hours a day asking “am I incredibly talented?” is at least better than spending the same amount of time in surveillance of older poetic figures to make sure that they don’t deviate from their allotted role of arranging a career for you. Dodman’s rule: selfconsciousness prevents consciousness.
The other Barque productions that Tim sent me were
by Keston Sutherland, Chris Goode, and Peter Manson. The cell around Barque (run
by Keston & Andrea Brady) has more heads and probably more layers than poems
already published would tell us. Andrea is probably the best poet in this
milieu, but her poems aren’t in the present batch. Manson is the ex-co-editor
of Object Permanence, the Glasgow
avant-garde magazine, and the connection between that scene and the English
“not Bloodaxe” line is one of great interest. He has also published visual
poetry with the London Writers Forum concern – but not, so far as I know,
anything with a Scottish publisher. This just points to a whole set of problems
we already know about. Access to publication in Scotland is extremely limited
and heavily biased in favour of pop and folk idioms. Conservative editors and
poets have a hundred tricks for obscuring what is innovative. It is not in fact
true that Cardinal Winning and Robert Crawford raised a petition with a million
signatures denouncing innovation in poetry as "drams from Lucifer's own
teats". Much as you may deplore poetic currents arriving later than 1706,
the song does change from time to time – and this brings us to Manson. The
Scottish poetic avant garde at present consists of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin
Morgan, Rob MacKenzie, and Manson. Birth
Windows is a milestone in Scottish literature. When I published a poem of
Manson’s in AE, I couldn’t actually understand it, but I found it beautiful
and haunting. Several years later, I find I can understand quite a lot of the
poems in Birth Windows – teetering
on the edge all the time. Two translations in Birth
Windows point us to Mallarme, and for rapid recognition this is a useful
name: evoking a fastidious approach to language over tiny extents, polishing the
setting of words until the fabric of familiarity collapses and we fall through
into a micro-dimension of strangeness without apparent limits. The flaws in this
recognition can usefully be picked up when we have some more of Manson’s work
to admire. If we look at the short poem "In vitro" we can see
something of how he works.
Explode from the vent
of ephemeral glassware
rather than garlanding its bitter vigil
the neck breaks off, uncut.
I know well two mouths never drank
not my mother's, no lover of hers —
never with this Chimera,
me, sylph of the Petri dish!
A decanter that's tasted no wine
but long widowhood
grudges with dying breath
—o funereal kiss! —
that the dark
should spawn roses.
The title means in glass, referring to processes
being observed in test tubes; in the poem, it seems to mean, more narrowly, in
vitro fertilisation. The speaker is the offspring of in-vitro fertilisation, IVF.
The poem is a series of negations and paradoxes, partaking in fact of a rather
17th century rhetoric; the figure which has an "I" pronouncing a
series of impossibilities (adunata) is
actually not unknown to Latin literature as a riddle form, and the whole is
close to an Anglo-Latin riddle, Ego sum natus gelido ex viscere tellus, where
the thing speaking about its "birth" is a gold ring. Such riddles were
usually inscribed on objects, where their shape followed the three-dimensional
anatomy of the object. Manson's poems seem to follow, tightly, the surface of a
wrenched and perforated 3D space. The theme seems to be the bitter fate of the
"mother", the test-tube. Rather than receiving a hymeneal garland (as
part of the wedding-rite), it is broken. The birth was not the result of two
people making love (stanza 2); the speaker was produced in a petri dish
(containing nutrients for a culture, usually of bacteria). A "Chimera"
is three kinds of monster in one body; in biology, an organism produced by two
sperm fertilising the same egg; here, the offspring of glass and flesh — of
dual nature. Sylph is glossed as "an air spirit", so perhaps the
reference is to the "open air", external to a maternal matrix,
where the fertilisation took place. The dying breath of the decanter (=test tube
with fertilised ovum) is some air trapped in it; why it grudges is not clear to
me. The "roses" (stanza 4) are the pinks of flesh, now blossoming in
the "dark" of the womb where the ovum will become a baby.
I have trouble retrieving the meaning of these poems but I find them
attractive places to spend time. As with music, it is individual passages that
haunt me which persuaded me to come back to the poems:
The walls' burden, Erato, appended
as who will speak, linear gold
Collapse thought down to the sixty
words you own, dumb in impaction
An epitaph's outflow in beeswax,
the twice-reddened wick
-
speechcraft
—I enjoy these words as decorative arrangements
of geometrical elements before discovering what they signify. (Robin Purves has
in fact tried an exegesis of this poem, in Angel
Exhaust 16.) I think two themes of the pamphlet would be extreme physical
situations (structuring an anatomy), and sudden illumination of various kinds
(the word wax appears three times). The phrase Kirlian snapshot might be thematic; Kirlian was a Russian technician
who took photographs by ultrahigh voltage flares, in which auras became clearly
visible. This was an extreme physical situation. The pattern of unbearable
bursts of light breaking through darkness may be indicative for the opacity of
the style, and the breakthroughs it winds us up to.
Barque writers have shown an interest in scientific knowledge. The
attempt to move into a realm of distinctions finer than everyday language.
Difficult unless you find a way of getting information over in a very fast and
clear way. Describing this as an envy-formation is unrevealing, since language
is one long serial act of incorporation and the poet who does not incorporate
the desirable must fail. The amount of information available is so huge that the
question of relevance and motivation becomes central. Clearly, a journal about
beetles is far more exact and data-rich than a poem, and yet we are not rushing
out to buy it. People should read Allen Fisher more carefully.
Recently, while trying to map childminders in Bromley (don't ask), I
found a hamlet called Keston on the map — near Keston Mark, which sounds like er?
Nearby are the Metropolitan Police Dog Training Establishment, The Temple (Roman
Mausoleum), and a feature called "War Bank". Aha! the Molosseum and
the Mausoleum. With Keston, it’s the sense of flow which gives the poems their
appeal, the handling of rhythm to give forward impetus even when the meaning is
mystifying. In general, the problem is finding out what the meaning is.
"Remark to the West Wind" runs:
Ring the changes, ring them up,
as the wind in verdict, out from
the sun departed, here throughout
the city runs on faces and windows.
Wind primordial, disordered
asyndeton blowing over
windows and faces, whisper, is this
here remark yet the camp
concentration touching your
invisible acumen? Outringing
in my ears, the serene
brake-screech you might imitate.
The second stanza is genuinely fine writing,
especially if we relineate it:
Wind primordial
disordered
asyndeton
blowing over windows and faces
whisper
What’s
this – an apologue to a personalised energy of nature? And words that actually
give away a state of mind? Is this a case of crypto-authenticity? The western
wind recalls a 13th century lyric,
recycled by St Etienne in an utterly wonderful record. Can we expect St Etienne
covers of St Keston? The whole poem is rather sylph-like, ideas exuberantly
chasing each other rather than combined in some formal pattern. The wind is the
product of hot air being less dense than cold, the source of the heat being the
sun, as the poem remarks; departed, because the wind is coming from the west
(which implies the sun shining in the east, in fact). Asyndeton is a kind of
speech where links and consequences are not marked — a feature of Tom
Raworth's style (and the reverse of Prynne's style). It is closely related to
parataxis, and is not quite the same as being disordered. The word creates an
image of the wind as a language which has not yet found words, and a parallel to
the marginally more articulated (discontinuous) "speech" of the bells.
If the wind is disordered, it is by taking up the shapes of objects when
language does this, we call it "meaning". I think we have to put a
little keston mark over that camp concentration phrase.
I couldn't find out what "bar zero" means, although it is
possibly a name for a symbol for zero Æ used
in data preparation sheets (in the days of punch cards), and mathematically to
mean the null set (of which zero is not a member — it has zero members). This
does not fit the bill. The word "zero" is scattered throughout the
text, possibly via a programmed word-substitution method. The visible
arrangement of syntax creates the shape of a mind in motion, disagreeing with
itself, vocal and reflexive. This is terribly attractive because we are
surrounded by poets who are all ignorant and brutal energy, or want to sound
like the white noise of random electrical discharges. Horrible! Sutherland’s
sentence structure points to an affable subtlety even when the meaning is
irretrievable:
Glances intensely upon you riot is not
that something you dream for
often and it makes the type
of you drop, no inflicted echo
am I runny
and slurred talk that way vitiated so
suddenly to grab faces, to clutch at an eye,
here says you defect luminously, the starfall
acid to candour.
Consciousness follows from the silencing of
self-assertion, and the sensation of speed follows from being conscious. It’s
difficult to see what the argument’s about, for the most part, but we guess
that symbolic arrays are being reconfigured somewhere. Possibly this is just
"blank logic", clause structures pointing suggestively to a sense
which is missing. Are we getting more than the impact of warm relaxing words
like "dreaming" “starfall" "luminous"
"candour" as a kind of aural textile? Blank logic seems to be a
speciality of Barque writers. One of the things with KS is that his poems climb
up the hills and fall down the holes, he either has not, or does not believe in,
a philosophy or theory. KS having struggled with Prynne’s technique (with
sounds as of cables straining and a grip slipping) for a while is now drawing on
the technique of Andrea Brady, to better effect. A recent poem in The
Quid seems to represent arriving balance and maturity.
What is the opposite of blank logic? darkened logic? chromatic logic?
gloss logic? logic matte? logic latte?Chris
Goode's pamphlet is called Boomer Console.
If you are going to cut very rapidly it is useful to develop a way of making the
images arresting and recognizable in a short space. If the individual snatches
are blurred and uninterpretable, the overall effect is like a camera bouncing
down a flight of steps one by one. From handheld authenticity to what? The
impression made by this pamphlet is one of indifference and frustration. The
“feel” of the eye constantly being distracted by a new thing from the old
thing which it didn’t really engage with may be “contemporary” in that
young people are having this experience while watching TV, flipping through
racks of CDs, wandering around shopping malls, patrolling university libraries,
etc. However, we suspect that one part of the future is being interested. The
text gives off messages like “skittish” “fear of commitment” or “not
taking things in”. The Stooges, of course, were able to take states of boredom
and indifference and make you emotionally identify with them. But they knew how
to fill the subliminal channels. Not use them as garbage chutes.
I planned to interview Rob as research for this piece, but that fell
through. I met him by accident on a train when I was very tired and emotional,
and although philologically incomplete this did reveal the key fact that Spanner
are going to publish the text of the performance discussed above. But I haven't
actually read it. Personal contact finally allowed me, after months of effort,
to buy a copy of Jeff Hilson's 12
Stretchers just before going to press. No time for a review, but I had a lot
of fun with this. It's in "stretched" format, although it's not quite
stretched from 1 to 12" as it's only 11" high. (Stretchers are also
the battens on a painter's canvas.) The OED gives us 'stretcher: An exaggerated
story or yarn', also a quote from Lydgate 'There were bosters, braggars, &
brybores, Praters fasers, stretchers, & wrythers'. Wrythers Forum? They're
also the 'tenter hooks' of the Cross, it says. The lines are all the same length
(not in syllable count), and the automatic quality of this progression (could
the rigid quadrilateral, 12 pages of 33 lines, refer to the rigid backing of a
canvas?) somehow takes away the need for motivation, the poem is one long string
of irrational, domestic, but also captivating slips or jumps from one idea to
another:
in
your all red cawl and kepi now
that's what's called related oh
look at the gleaners (they are poor
and live in france) arise arise for
hickory practice machinery will
in for a kill in for a green bridge
become perilous to the smallest
ok name a stoker by the name of
Williams and the care of how
there are a hair for physic keep
old plants pull out of huge essex
the brain as jumble sale combined with telephone
exchange, and virtually all the images of any poetry book cross the screen
sometime but in the wrong order. More like listening to two records at once than
like a DJ mixmastering. 'they was this wide and scarry with effects' scratching
and larging? Quotes Bascom Lamarr Lunceford. I think the title means 'a
leg-stretch, an idle burst of energy'. Arminian stretchers of the royal
prerogative were caressed & preferred. Tiny Montgomery says 'hello'.
Much of contemporary suffering is the result of performance poetry. There
is a candidly vile aura emitted by the new performance academicism, with its
rejection of expressivity, its woodenness, its solemnity, its didacticism, its
repetitiousness. However, not all performances are mere mazurkas of rascality
and naivety. Brian Catling and Khaled Hakim are interesting exceptions. There
isn’t much of Khaled’s work on paper (some in Foil, some in Angel Exhaust,
some in Equofinality in 1986),
although his improvised performances have provided consistent pleasure over a
number of years. K. told me his family were mud-farmers in Sylhet, which is in
East Bengal. I did some research on this. It is a very flat area just under the
very high mountains of Assam, which produce torrential rains that run off into
the nearest plain. Up until the Middle Ages, the area was a sea; diking and
embankment produced a new province, although it is still under water much of the
year, a lake dotted with artificial hills. The Sylhet and Brakhage districts are
virtual landscapes. The week I read about this, I was reading John Michell’s The
View Over Atlantis, where he claims that English hills are artificial,
raised (by the use of Earth Energies) along pre-existing energy lines, as
revealed by the movements of snails. Andy Jordan’s nonist movement claims that
all English landscapes are virtual, and has pointed out that early landscapes
didn’t have much detail, they only acquired more features and denser texturing
as society got richer. Does this imply a prehistoric link between Wessex and
Assam? No. The Sylhetis spent much of their life in boats and so were well
placed to become one of the foundations of the Merchant Navy, as lascars. This
meant they were present in any seaport town, and so it was practical for some of
their number to start cafes doing Sylheti food. This is the origin of the Indian
restaurant as we know it today. According to the mediaeval pilgrim Alfonte
Escalante Font, troupes of Sylheti dancing boys wandered the liana’d ridges of
Assam and the red deserts of Kirghizstan, dressed in light costumes made from
old fishing-nets, blowing on conches to drive off yetis, giving improvised
verbal performances that play on Situationist derives
and incorporate witty parodies of Peter Gidal, and selling Turkish Delight and
sherbet fountains in the interval. Khaled comes out of an arts lab scene in
Birmingham, followed by time with the Film-makers’ Co-op in London (originally
at Gloucester Avenue), a hands-on avant-garde scene. I know too much about
avant-garde film to be able to talk about it (probably the only avant-garde art
I actually like). Khaled planned a magazine called Narrative not Narrative; he was puzzled at the absence of narrative
from chic poetry, why narrative was taboo. Narrative is basic to film because a
camera is a “continuous present”; although in fact the questioning of
narrative is basic to the avant-garde, (coded in the term “structural film”,
which really means “anti-narrative”).
K narrates the adventures of a
Chaplin figure in a virtual landscape populated by cultural managers. So far as
I know, there is no stylistic connection between K. and any poet on the English
scene. However, he is heavily involved with the avant film scene, and is
inspired by that. The filmistas couldn’t really afford sets or actors, so
their films shifted away from “situations” and into conceptual discourse, a
shift which in Khaled produces a withdrawal from the poem as such into a world
of reflexivity. The filmis were
saturated in Hollywood narrative, and Khaled too likes to use archaic stock
settings as the basis for improvisation. These stalwart narratives tend to go
awry when a Bengali is at the centre of them. Adelante
is the cry around the hillside. We keell you, gringo, but we keell you slow.
One of the films Khaled made with Take Away Productions (shown at the new
Filmmakers' Co-op hideout in Hoxton) was a recuperation of a Bollywood
spectacular, possibly a mixture of re-edited “source material” and new
sequences. My notes are not very revealing, my memories feverish, but it seems
that in that culture even an avant-garde film has to be a musical featuring big
dance numbers.
Ask poets why they don’t write narrative, and they don’t know the answer. They know it’s not OK to write it, though. They internalise a thousand imperatives unconsciously, and the only trace is the anxiety they feel when the command is violated. Under the verbal investment in “reflexivity”, the real rules are learnt covertly, subliminally, through imitation and anxiety. Khaled’s narratives point to this; like all great comedy, they are based on deep inhibitions. They are also like a tribal travelogue on the picturesque but savage way of life of the intellectuals – who don’t like to admit that they have collective customs. For months he searched the caves of Samoa, looking for a great sea-creature. The diegesis was rigorously structural and impressed his girlfriend. The stories are a reel of wind-ups, they say “your reactions to art are big clichés which repeat on a daily basis, smothered by film music”.
© Andrew Duncan