Memesis

I thought memes had gone out of fashion on the internets, but I’ve just gotten tagged by none other than Ron S. as a “Thinking Blogger,” & while I’m of course flattered by the mention, I’m a bit depressed by how he describes me: “Mark Scroggins, a scrupulous literary scholar who doesn’t take short cuts even in his blog.” Oh well, farewell to my cherished self-image of jaunty, effervescent bons mots, of quicksilver connections & startling juxtapositions. Meet my next avatar: Professor Microscope Drudge. Ain’t that sexy?

(& I do write poems...)

Just for the record, my own five “Thinking Bloggers” (remembering that to my mind “thinking” covers a hell of a lot more than Dupinesque ratiocination or Cartesian headaching): Michael Peverett, Kate Greenstreet, Josh Corey, Juliana Spahr, & John Latta.
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In the midst of a veritable s––tstorm of grading, but snatching the rare moment to read a few more pages into a handful of books. Right now, the snazzy juxtaposition of Ruskin’s Aratra Pentelici: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture (1871) & Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993). Odd that both books take the form of lecture series – Ruskin’s a real live course deliver’d at Oxford during Michaelmas Term 1870, McCloud’s a virtual classroom in which a cartoonish reduction of the author hisself lectures us from panel to panel. Both fellas have bigger fish to fry than their immediate subjects, of course: like all of his JR’s late works, Aratra Pentelici is as much about national morals & the ethics of art as it is about a given medium, while SM’C manages to give us a potted global theory of all the arts. A tall order, given that he’s simultaneously trying to defend a medium that gets (or got more often back in ’93) dismissed as the happy hunting ground of spotty teenagers. More later.
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One of my two or three favorite English poets, Peter Riley, has a fascinating interview on the Greek website Poeticanet, where he promises to get around to talking about the genealogy of contemporary BritPoetry but never quite gets thru the ‘Sixties. Fascinating nonetheless, especially in his discussion of the modernist poetics of WS Graham & Dylan Thomas.

Peter Riley: Distant Points

Much of my poetry reading consists of browsing my way through stacks of long-ago purchased but unread books. There’s no decent poetry bookshop within an hour and a half, so I end up buying masses of stuff when I visit the metropoles, then working my way through it later. Needless to say, I don’t do a very good job of keeping up with what’s hottest off the presses. (Yes, do send books – much obliged, and I’m sure we can arrange some sort of swap!)

Which explains why I’ve only now gotten around to reading Peter Riley’s Distant Points: Excavations Part One Books One and Two (Reality Street Editions, 1995). Riley is known as a “Cambridge” poet, which means he’s part of the group vaguely associated with J. H. Prynne – in short, one of the most important epicenters of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. (The invisibility of interesting British poetry in the United States will be one of the recurrent themes of this blog, I think, something that ought to begin to be rectified by rich websites such as Robert Sheppard’s Pages.)

Distant Points is a series of prose poems, Riley explains, “concerned with the human burial deposits of the so-called Neolithic/Bronze Age culture of what is now the Yorkshire Wolds, as documented in two books of late 19th Century tumulus excavation accounts: by J R. Mortimer (1905) and Canon William Greenwell (1877).” Each poem is titled with the numerical designation of an individual excavation, and combines verbatim descriptions of the mound’s contents – often eliciting a good deal of unintentional (to their original authors) pathos – with linguistic material Riley draws from any number of other sources: various works on Renaissance music, Pound, Kierkegaard, Jacques Roubaud, Elaine Scarry, Beckett, Sir Thomas Browne, etc. It makes for a fascinating mix, which grows in emotional intensity over the course of the book. Here, for instance, from page 37:

280.
head to East, upper torso lying on its back but crouched at a right-angle and knees turned sharply to left, and the head also turned to face South… remembering all the tricks of warmth, twisting aside, avoiding the sky Both hands raised to the head, the left touching the neck, the right arm doubled back with the hand behind the head but clear, clearly coloured clearly set, a whole row of sorrows parting the air, rote of stedfastnes in the hands’ guardian delay. Spun then in passion’s careless reach who thought a life was a sum, with double sorrow dowbyl sorow complayn I must of the failure, to clear before dawn and bring the disadvantaged to their gathering or the self to its principal. As it did in the wrested moment, earth Like heavn still in it selfe delighted.

This strikes me as an extraordinary poetry, one which takes the techniques of modernism to almost a certain limit, yet retains the entire lyric and emotional intensity of the English tradition behind Riley. I’m not sure I see in any point in speaking of this work as somehow “postmodern”: if anything, it announces how much life remains in the techniques and procedures of high modernism.