ROUGH BREATHING
selected poems
Harry Gilonis
Contents
Title Page
Introduction by Philip Terry
Catullus played Bach,
a song-sing
[for Tony Baker]
cover versions
Songbook 1
from a Hebridean notebook
two carnivore sonnets
5 Latin Poems
there is from every thing …
Daruma
remembering Paul Haines
Five Impromptus
liquid (Cona …
Two Poems from the English of the Wordsworths
for Lorine Niedecker
start with what you know …
to catch the grain of things …
Song for Annie
from Axioms
on the white …
Theory
lines for David Bellingham (and in memory M. E. S.)
Descant on a Theme by Brian Coffey
from far away [co-written with Tony Baker]
The Matter of Britain
Win(s)ter Songs
three, plus a distant relation
content1 fitting …
Learning the Warblers
Some Horatian Ingredients
northern ghazal
some (of forty) fungi
Pelagic
The Inscriptions
Window, Light Outside
Reading Hölderlin on Orkney
… both buoyed and clever …
Pibroch
for Michael Finnissy
Song 9
Afar / Alongside
walk the line
thinking of Evan, walking on Chesil
Webern sings The Keel Row for Howard
six translations of Matsuo Bashō …
WIND KEEN…
an egg for E.
remembering Scott LaFaro
Wedding Song
century’s end ghazal
a small alba
pond…
Afghan ghazal
sound shanty for bob cobbing
Three Misreadings of Horatian Odes
foreign policy
white
Taliesin
for Louis Zukofsky, a hundred years on
35 stanzas from unHealed
Processions written inside chivalry
Blair’s Grave
from NORTH HILLS
an epithalamy, or ballad
Bass adds Bass
Georg Trakl fails to write a Christmas poem
David Davis’s bone density
The Matter of Ireland
Revisions (after Roy Fisher)
Coping Batter
a breath of air
Acknowledgements & Annotations
About the Author
Copyright
That is, the unwritten (but sounded) H at the beginning of some Greek words beginning with a vowel. Formerly marked with a symbol that looked like half an H (my initial initial), it’s the sound at the start of my given name. Over time it simplified down to the form above. Later grammarians called it the spiritus asper, every bit as much ‘rough spirit’ as ‘rough breathing’. It is also called, in a nice mix of tonalities, an ‘aspiration’.
Roland Barthes, speaking of the ‘grain of the voice’, describes movement deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes; the way the voice bears (out) the materiality of the body, with its checkings and releasings of breath. Simple breath holds no interest; the lungs are stupid organs. That graininess, for Barthes, inheres in friction, that sign of resistance: the body made manifest in the voice. As also in the hand as it writes. Rough breathing, then, is where writing, as well as speech, begins. Words must be shaggy as well as combed smooth.
Theodor Adorno, in an aside during a lecture in the 1950s, affirmed that the pure ‘this-here’ that art seeks to present cannot unfold in time or in space – ‘all it can do really is take a breath’. Anything beyond that would be a betrayal. And yet we must keep breathing, must we not? And speaking. And writing. All language, poetry included, is a roughening of the breath.
Harry Gilonis
Introduction
by Philip Terry
A tall man stands atop a ladder. His hand reaches out and moves over the shelves of a bookcase, hovering over the poems of Kingsley Amis, brushing past several slim volumes by W. H. Auden, before alighting on a book by a relatively unknown poet, Tony Baker. The hand belongs to Harry Gilonis, who is working at the Poetry Society bookshop in Earl’s Court. Here, at the end of each financial year, depreciation of stock had to be entered as an element of the accounts, so Gilonis found himself inspecting books for wear and tear from the top of a ladder. He started at ‘A’, and quickly found himself caught up short by his first acquaintance with Tony B-for-Baker and Richard C-for-Caddel, and many others (ending with Louis Zukofsky’s “A”). As he climbed down the ladder to put aside more books to buy, he was discovering, not through peers or teachers but through impure serendipity, that interesting poetry wasn’t just written by dead Americans. There was not only the post-Poundian, but the Objectivist and post-Objectivist, as well as the many English and Irish followers in that tradition, and it was a vibrant and living tradition at that.
Gilonis’s interest in poetry began as a reader, not a writer, when, as it were, he went to school (like others before him including Basil Bunting) with Ezra Pound – the Ezuversity as it has sometimes been called. He spent a year reading the Cantos on the dole – an apprenticeship no longer available – using a university library ticket to access source books, from Provençal and Chinese dictionaries to books on art and architecture. After that he took the job at the Poetry Society bookshop. When, some time later, he began writing his own poetry, even collaborating with Tony Baker on some works, he began to produce poems that stand out in the sometimes insular English tradition as rich and strange. Here was a poetry that is radically open to other traditions and other poets across continents and across time, from William Carlos Williams to Li Shang-yin, from Trakl to Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker and Tom Raworth, and beyond poetry to the work of composers, of both classical and popular traditions, and of artists and thinkers, from Klee to Wittgenstein. The poetry is also characterised by an unusual openness to both traditional and emergent poetic forms such as visual, sound and performance poetry, and by a politics situated firmly on the Left. It is an oeuvre that is vibrant, alive and full of possibility, with its eye set firmly on the future.
One of the early sequences included in this volume, ‘cover versions’, takes William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘This is just to say’ and rings the changes in a set of variations, which render the poem not in, say, German or Italian, but as it might be written in English by a German or an Italian. The Portuguese version, for example, begins:
that I ate
the plums
who were in
icebox
The combined effect of these versions, like a verbal installation, makes the moment of Williams’s poem ricochet across the Atlantic, from country to country, from fridge to icebox to cooler. This theme of variation and translation – which links back to Bach’s Goldberg Variations and to Raymond Queneau and other Oulipians – is a key modus operandi in Gilonis’s work (it is there also in the NORTH HILLS corpus and in ‘Three Misreadings of Horatian Odes’, and elsewhere), and it puts Gilonis at the head of a long line of innovative contemporary poets, from Tim Atkins to Peter Hughes and Caroline Bergvall, who have been engaged in renewing poetry with experimental, prismatic, forms of translation.
Other poems here engage with nature and the pastoral tradition. In the second of his ‘two carnivore sonnets’ Gilonis describes the speed, swoop and blur
of the airborne predator, capturing its darting in the movement of the language:
light on blur of wings
only seen
after its vanishing
The carnivore in question, Cordulegaster boltonii, the golden-ringed dragonfly, could have been the subject of a Ted Hughes poem, but the delicacy and precision of observation here, with its respect for the insect-other, makes Hughes’s work seem almost bombastic in comparison. Another diptych, ‘Two Poems from the English of the Wordsworths’, gives us a different take on nature poetry. These pieces obliquely circle round Wordsworth’s poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, in the first piece by sampling excerpts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal entry of 15 April 1805 describing the same episode (which Gilonis defamiliarises by removing any reference to ‘daffodils’), in the second by performing erasures on Wordsworth’s poem itself. Gilonis is attracted to the poem because, like the Wordsworths, he takes seriously the idea of writing about flowers, and in other poems, such as ‘walk the line’, his descriptive eye is arresting in its precision:
on a far slower
swell; sea
-campion’s white
globular calices
bright nodes shining
on a ground of buff
It is typical of Gilonis to approach with new eyes a traditional poetic task such as this (he does much the same with the ekphrastic), to both pick up on and renew the tradition with experimental forms. Though the Wordsworths’ work once helped lift the veil on nature, the tradition it established has, through repetition, become part of what, paradoxically, prevents us from seeing. There is nothing more clichéd than a poem about flowers.
Gilonis’s meticulous use of language inspires meticulous reading. Many of his poems take delight in meaningful word-play, reminding us of the different senses hiding behind a single word, of words’ homophones (‘peace’ and ‘piece’), or the different words hiding in a single sequence of letters. In ‘remembering Scott LaFaro’ he writes, in an efflorescence of word-play reminiscent of Raworth:
– wind
and light
move the
leaves
day
and night
leave no
moves
Such close attention to language, here and elsewhere, reminds us of the different layers and different senses packed into words. The effect is part of a larger de-sedimentation of the language, an exploding of linguistic hierarchies, through which the reader has a greater awareness of words’ multiple senses, and the words in the poem, even its letters, begin to breathe. There is a linguistic turn here, but it is one that is simultaneously embodied, which is one reason why place plays such an important role in these poems. The suggestion is that attention to the signifier and attention to the world are not mutually exclusive, as some readings of structuralism have suggested, but folded together. The point is made succinctly in ‘The Matter of Britain’, each line literally part of the ‘matter’ of Britain – Natrolite, Opal, etc. – while, as an acrostic, the letters placed along the left-hand margin read: NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS.
What this fails to convey is the sheer variety of poems and approaches here. Many begin with a musical theme, such as ‘pibroch’ (for Sorley Maclean): pibroch, a Scottish mode of piping, is a theme-and-variation form, and here Gilonis extemporises on the theme of Sorley Maclean’s poem ‘A’ Chorra-Ghridheach’ (‘The Heron’) to magnificent effect. But there are also playful sound poems based on birdsong notation – ‘Learning the Warblers’ – experiments in concrete poetry such as ‘an egg for E.’, minimalist nature poems reminiscent of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Thomas A Clark, such as ‘WIND KEEN’, which cry out to be carved in slate or cut into the side of a chalk hill; ghazals, shanties, re-visioning translations and misreadings, collaborations, and poems based on noun-plus-adjective combinations reminiscent of Queneau’s quennet. And there are powerful performance and political poems, such as ‘foreign policy’, and unHealed, which creatively translates from the Welsh of the Canu Heledd (‘long after the old Welsh’, as Gilonis puts it):
watcher wearied in tabu ringed
a chant be in retch
grown wrong duty
wrath gadgetry threw way edgy
a wrath eddy a wind ode
wage idly war
Again working with variation, the poem progressively metamorphoses this ancient lament into a fierce critique of coalition warmongering, here with lines taken verbatim from the ‘corporate ethics’ and other sections of the website of a company that manufactured cruise-missiles used in Iraq:
fully field programmable
with in-flight re-targeting
to cover the whole kill chain
with sensor-to-shooter capability
for effects-based engagement
and an integral good-faith report
The volume and variety of poems collected here, combined with their linguistic depth, makes it impossible to discuss very many of them in great detail in an introduction. Yet what becomes increasingly clear as one reads is that this is a body of work of the highest ambition, and highest order. If all of English poetry of the last fifty years was suddenly lost from the archive, in the kind of textual catastrophe envisioned in Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Verbivore, one could go a long way towards reconstructing much of the best of it, and much of what matters about it in terms of the future of poetry, starting from the poems in this book. Read it. Then read it again.
Philip Terry
ROUGH BREATHING
Catullus played Bach,
moving
with the
upbow &
the voice:
Schaue …
hear
fiddle
playing clear
music
still(s)
the
air, an
aria
under a
flaked arch
arco, light(s)
in air
after
-noon, between
slab stone,
before
the sixth hour
:
from the vault
saints &
prophets gaze
dispassionate;
I did not
expect
this pattern
:
alert, such
particulars
elate, and hurt
tears streaming
from the eyes:
o gods
grant me this thing
that song
bowed &
fingered
giving itself
after &
beyond
the words
with
what grace
-notes,
what
measure,
the song
set(s) free
:
a beginning, a
leap
a setting, a
placing
of the bow
a small softness
begins the stroke
the idea
is suffused
in light
marble swirl, and
Licht
-ung,
the light
-ning –
music overhea(r)d
love
/
unclouding
the rose
in the stone
:
the un-
concealed –
a quick lift
of the bow
the tone
dies away
(distance
is not bridged
or abolished)
time
makes
melody
&
the rest
is (a sign of
silence:
… prati
ultimi flos;
Bach
read
<
br /> Catullus
,
saw
a
small flower
at the field’s
edge
cut
by the share
and
unfolding
into
song
for my father, violinist
a song-sing
for Peter Quartermain
breathing
the littoral:
an ammoniac air,
brine &
iodine
ineluctable
bladder’s
wreck
in patches
on ledges
on the side
of the rock
splashed
with spray
swirling
foam
lines
the runnel
branching
slantwise
down
to the sea
[for Tony Baker]
a
Feynman
line
dividing
truth from lies:
the world divides …
“it is not put together
cannot be put together
states of affairs are not
there are states that are”
from this
Rough Breathing Page 1