More info can be found at the Mutual's website.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
20.4.11
Readings at The Mutual Assembly
Along with other members of the Glasgow Open School and contributors to the Glasgow Review of Books, I will be reading selections from the poetry of Fernando Pessoa tomorrow evening at the Ironbbratz Studios at 84 Miller Street, as part of The Mutual's week-long Assembly. The event begins at 7pm and will also include workshops, discussions and a potluck supper! Come on down!
4.3.11
Guild Halls
At last night's GOSSIP #2, we got into a mini-discussion about the potential political associations with the word "guildhalls", the context being Philip Larkin's poem "Going, Going":
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms
In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.
Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score
Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when
You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon
It was these lines that made us think:
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
Some, in hating the poem, singled this stanza out as evidence of a deeply deadening conservatism. That the list given here is full of lifeless things, lifeless and quaint and enemies of progress. There are no people in that list (enhanced by shadows without the things that make them). There are (presumably empty) meadows and lanes, and carved choirs - still, heavy objects, an impression compounded by the inevitable associations readers will have with choirs - a group of people, singing, perhaps even joyously - juxtaposed with the rigid createdness of "carved", something hewn out of a lump of inanimate matter, perhaps a little crudely, not quite the real thing. The lively hand that did the carving, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen. That "carved choirs" can also refer to objects in a church further encourages this sense of solidity and solemnity.
But guildhalls?
I said that to me, guildhalls - and more specifically guilds - connect to a particularly English collectivity, a civic pride that is not conservative but actually something of the opposite. Not radical exactly, but certainly connected with a sense of an active culture of trade expertise. The guilds fit in my head with libraries as services for the people, as seen in this film of the Sheffield City Library. So I thought I'd look them up, to see whether my associations have any basis.
The Wikipedia page on guilds describes them as:
"an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society"
As those three descriptions suggest, the guild doesn't neatly fall into an idea of right-wing conservatism nor left-wing collectivism. Whilst they were organisations of workers, they conspired to keep their trade secrets secret, and appear to have been more associations of individuals than a genuinely collective group. Nevertheless, in some senses they could be seen as opposing a capitalist idea of mass production, and certainly in some areas of contemporary culture, the idea of the master craftsman is seen as a positive alternative to cheap, mass produced products. See for instance the artisan and organic food movements.
Of course, these movements have faced criticisms - that they privilege individuals with enough time and money to buy the products these artisans produce, as well as seeing solutions in individualistic endeavours that have no potential for mass application. The amount of land needed for all farming to be organic, for instance, is so large that any idea of Britain being able to sustain that sort of production remains dead in the water. (Not to mention the de-toxification process the soil would need to undergo, as well as the complete silencing of global mega agri-business corporations).
But to counter that again, one could suggest that the guild idea is worth retaining for an idea that can seem both more abstract and more practical: the idea of the master craftsman ensures that trades continue in some form and do not become conscripted into a global corporate economy that makes shoddy products cheaply and quickly, and without any real connections being established between the crafter, the materials and those that use the product. That people remain that know what blacksmithing is, or cobbling, or being a butcher, or a furniture maker. If a prominent effect of globalisation has been to separate people from their immediate environments, and to discourage meaningful contact between people and the food they eat, the tools they use and so on, then the master craftsman or woman and the guilds may be a way of re-establishing these connections. In books, for instance, in a market where Amazon has pretty much any book anyone could want, often for extremely cheap prices and available at the click of a button, it is refreshing and encouraging that small presses aware of the history of book-binding and proficient in its skills are re-appearing.
It doesn't seem, then, in the end, that guildhalls have particular associations with any specific political viewpoint. I suppose in a way that complicates Larkin's mourning. What complicates more, though, I think, is to compare the things/ideas that he is ostensibly mourning in the poem with the things/ideas movements like the slow food movement, the green movement, DIY culture and the like are championing, and to wonder whether the words "conservative" and "progressive" have the same meaning as they did in 1972, when "Going, Going" was written, or even if they have any meaning at all anymore, whether they are even useful words to invoke when talking about political aims.
I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms
In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.
Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score
Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when
You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon
It was these lines that made us think:
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
Some, in hating the poem, singled this stanza out as evidence of a deeply deadening conservatism. That the list given here is full of lifeless things, lifeless and quaint and enemies of progress. There are no people in that list (enhanced by shadows without the things that make them). There are (presumably empty) meadows and lanes, and carved choirs - still, heavy objects, an impression compounded by the inevitable associations readers will have with choirs - a group of people, singing, perhaps even joyously - juxtaposed with the rigid createdness of "carved", something hewn out of a lump of inanimate matter, perhaps a little crudely, not quite the real thing. The lively hand that did the carving, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen. That "carved choirs" can also refer to objects in a church further encourages this sense of solidity and solemnity.
But guildhalls?
I said that to me, guildhalls - and more specifically guilds - connect to a particularly English collectivity, a civic pride that is not conservative but actually something of the opposite. Not radical exactly, but certainly connected with a sense of an active culture of trade expertise. The guilds fit in my head with libraries as services for the people, as seen in this film of the Sheffield City Library. So I thought I'd look them up, to see whether my associations have any basis.
The Wikipedia page on guilds describes them as:
"an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society"
As those three descriptions suggest, the guild doesn't neatly fall into an idea of right-wing conservatism nor left-wing collectivism. Whilst they were organisations of workers, they conspired to keep their trade secrets secret, and appear to have been more associations of individuals than a genuinely collective group. Nevertheless, in some senses they could be seen as opposing a capitalist idea of mass production, and certainly in some areas of contemporary culture, the idea of the master craftsman is seen as a positive alternative to cheap, mass produced products. See for instance the artisan and organic food movements.
Of course, these movements have faced criticisms - that they privilege individuals with enough time and money to buy the products these artisans produce, as well as seeing solutions in individualistic endeavours that have no potential for mass application. The amount of land needed for all farming to be organic, for instance, is so large that any idea of Britain being able to sustain that sort of production remains dead in the water. (Not to mention the de-toxification process the soil would need to undergo, as well as the complete silencing of global mega agri-business corporations).
But to counter that again, one could suggest that the guild idea is worth retaining for an idea that can seem both more abstract and more practical: the idea of the master craftsman ensures that trades continue in some form and do not become conscripted into a global corporate economy that makes shoddy products cheaply and quickly, and without any real connections being established between the crafter, the materials and those that use the product. That people remain that know what blacksmithing is, or cobbling, or being a butcher, or a furniture maker. If a prominent effect of globalisation has been to separate people from their immediate environments, and to discourage meaningful contact between people and the food they eat, the tools they use and so on, then the master craftsman or woman and the guilds may be a way of re-establishing these connections. In books, for instance, in a market where Amazon has pretty much any book anyone could want, often for extremely cheap prices and available at the click of a button, it is refreshing and encouraging that small presses aware of the history of book-binding and proficient in its skills are re-appearing.
It doesn't seem, then, in the end, that guildhalls have particular associations with any specific political viewpoint. I suppose in a way that complicates Larkin's mourning. What complicates more, though, I think, is to compare the things/ideas that he is ostensibly mourning in the poem with the things/ideas movements like the slow food movement, the green movement, DIY culture and the like are championing, and to wonder whether the words "conservative" and "progressive" have the same meaning as they did in 1972, when "Going, Going" was written, or even if they have any meaning at all anymore, whether they are even useful words to invoke when talking about political aims.
17.10.10
The (Personal) Historical Importance of the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop
My friend Henry is writing his Ph.D. on the poet CH (Charles Hubert) (!) Sisson. He was born in Bristol on the 22nd of April 1914, and the Telegraph's obituary from 2003 describes him as "the son of a watch and clock repairer who later became an optician." His roots were, as Sisson himself put it, in "innumerable generations of farmers" and he grew up in Eastville, notable for being for much of the twentieth century the home of my football team, Bristol Rovers.
The Eastville Stadium -- near the giant gas works that gave Rovers their nickname "The Gas" and their fans that of "Gasheads" -- was demolished in 1998 after a decade out of use to make way for an Ikea superstore. Sisson's house itself, if not entirely demolished, was certainly adapted. He notes in his autobiography (On The Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography) that his childhood home "is now the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop".
Eastville was where my mum and her brothers and her dad first watched Rovers. We've also since been to the Ikea. I don't know if Sisson's house still stands, no longer his house nor the Supporter's Club Shop, which has moved, along with the team itself, to the Memorial Stadium in Horfield.
What I like to imagine, though, is my mum walking past Sisson's house on the way to a game, maybe with her dad who was roughly the same generation as Sisson (and from a roughly similar background). Sisson, at that time, was presumably in the middle (or late-middle) of the writing career that Henry is now studying. In passing Sisson's house -- or the Supporter's Club Shop -- my mum marked out a connection fifty years in advance of my meeting Henry in Glasgow in 2009.
The Eastville Stadium -- near the giant gas works that gave Rovers their nickname "The Gas" and their fans that of "Gasheads" -- was demolished in 1998 after a decade out of use to make way for an Ikea superstore. Sisson's house itself, if not entirely demolished, was certainly adapted. He notes in his autobiography (On The Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography) that his childhood home "is now the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop".
Eastville was where my mum and her brothers and her dad first watched Rovers. We've also since been to the Ikea. I don't know if Sisson's house still stands, no longer his house nor the Supporter's Club Shop, which has moved, along with the team itself, to the Memorial Stadium in Horfield.
What I like to imagine, though, is my mum walking past Sisson's house on the way to a game, maybe with her dad who was roughly the same generation as Sisson (and from a roughly similar background). Sisson, at that time, was presumably in the middle (or late-middle) of the writing career that Henry is now studying. In passing Sisson's house -- or the Supporter's Club Shop -- my mum marked out a connection fifty years in advance of my meeting Henry in Glasgow in 2009.
31.10.09
11.9.09
Discovering Frank O'Hara & Laughing at Solemn Michael McClure
Today I've been at an academic conference at Glasgow University organised by my friends Derek and Erik (and others). Entitled New Clear Forms: American Poetry and Cold War Culture the figure that floated through all of the papers was Frank O'Hara.
I'd heard the name before, and had vaguely placed the New York School of which he a part (along with John Ashberry, James Schuyler and loads of others) temporally. So when connections were made with the abstract expressionists a few remembrances came back to me. Having said that, I'd never really heard any of the poetry that came out of this school. Here's O'Hara reading "Having a coke with you":
I think it's lovely, and we got a chance to see more of this footage at a screening of work by Colin Still, from Optic Nerve Productions, who has made many films, some for Channel 4, on various New York School and Beat poets.
Still showed us a nearly-finished film on Michael McClure, which me, Erik and Derek spent laughing hysterically through, but trying not to show it. He's a very solemn man, is McClure, and mixing solemnity with new age stuff about the doors of perception and a "ball of gas in my stomach" makes for some very funny moments: it is impossible to intone seriously the words "pink bandaid" for instance, and raising a dolphin skull from below a table with the words "and then I found this skull" before talking about "seeing in it all the way back to the first mammals" and "all life" is quite difficult to do without raising a snigger.
I'd heard the name before, and had vaguely placed the New York School of which he a part (along with John Ashberry, James Schuyler and loads of others) temporally. So when connections were made with the abstract expressionists a few remembrances came back to me. Having said that, I'd never really heard any of the poetry that came out of this school. Here's O'Hara reading "Having a coke with you":
I think it's lovely, and we got a chance to see more of this footage at a screening of work by Colin Still, from Optic Nerve Productions, who has made many films, some for Channel 4, on various New York School and Beat poets.
Still showed us a nearly-finished film on Michael McClure, which me, Erik and Derek spent laughing hysterically through, but trying not to show it. He's a very solemn man, is McClure, and mixing solemnity with new age stuff about the doors of perception and a "ball of gas in my stomach" makes for some very funny moments: it is impossible to intone seriously the words "pink bandaid" for instance, and raising a dolphin skull from below a table with the words "and then I found this skull" before talking about "seeing in it all the way back to the first mammals" and "all life" is quite difficult to do without raising a snigger.
28.5.09
3.5.09
Football and Poetry
21.4.09
Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, Edgard Varèse - Poème électronique
Browsing Rhizome today, I found this.
It appears to be an attempt at creating an audio-visual environment that accompanies the Philips Pavilion. Rhizome linked to Media Art Net who described it as "the first, electronic-spatial environment to combine architecture, film, light and music to a total experience made to functions in time and space."
Dated 1958 - before the similar audio-visual-environmental light-shows of late 60s Gustav Metzger and Cream - it's an interesting embrace of new technologies and collaboration between different art forms; a spirit we can perhaps see in the new media art that Rhizome produces, initiates and exhibits. It's possible that the early, faltering steps of electronic visual manipulation seen in the Poème électronique are replicated in the collaborations between web designers, artists, musicians and architects seen on Rhizome's website, Turbulence, BLDGBLOG and others.
A study could be done of the "childhood" periods of art movements and techniques, charting the early, more carefree stages. I've often thought - most likely others have too - that the best time to be a rock music fan would've been between, say, 1958 and 1968. Likewise hip-hop, which I still think is sufficiently teenage to be interesting, was probably most exciting in the 80s. I find it difficult to make a comparison for the 2000s.
It appears to be an attempt at creating an audio-visual environment that accompanies the Philips Pavilion. Rhizome linked to Media Art Net who described it as "the first, electronic-spatial environment to combine architecture, film, light and music to a total experience made to functions in time and space."
Dated 1958 - before the similar audio-visual-environmental light-shows of late 60s Gustav Metzger and Cream - it's an interesting embrace of new technologies and collaboration between different art forms; a spirit we can perhaps see in the new media art that Rhizome produces, initiates and exhibits. It's possible that the early, faltering steps of electronic visual manipulation seen in the Poème électronique are replicated in the collaborations between web designers, artists, musicians and architects seen on Rhizome's website, Turbulence, BLDGBLOG and others.
A study could be done of the "childhood" periods of art movements and techniques, charting the early, more carefree stages. I've often thought - most likely others have too - that the best time to be a rock music fan would've been between, say, 1958 and 1968. Likewise hip-hop, which I still think is sufficiently teenage to be interesting, was probably most exciting in the 80s. I find it difficult to make a comparison for the 2000s.
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.