Rough Breathing

by Harry Gilonis

  * a song-sing is for the poet, editor, publisher and critic Peter Quartermain; it elaborates on Stephen Dedalus peeing on Sandymount Strand.

  * [For Tony Baker] is for the poet, also editor/publisher of the important little magazine Figs. Richard Feynman is the American quantum physicist, an enthusiasm of Tony’s at the time. Fall is (Wittgensteinian) German for whatever-is-the-case, as well as American autumn.

  * The cover versions are just that: William Carlos Williams’s 1934 poem ‘This is just to say …’ put through an antique online translation engine, and then that process reversed. The (mis-)readings generated must (logically) relate to features of their ‘source’ languages, offering qualities and charms that a non-native speaker could not have ‘written’. An October 2017 Catalan cover here replaces an earlier Spanish one.

  * Songbook was an abortive project to produce translations as distant from their (ancient Chinese) originals – poems in the Shih Ching [‘Book of Songs’] – as possible; a notion spawned by the fact of the immense polyvalency of most ideograms in Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary.

  * The line from a Hebridean notebook was written whilst in the Outer Hebrides, walking along the fringes of the machair, a unique and fragile ecosystem: the meeting-point of alkaline shell-sand and acidic peat makes for a well-drained, neutral soil that, in spring, hosts an astonishing flora – and many rabbits.

  * The two carnivore sonnets refer to two dragonflies found in the UK, the ruddy darter and the golden-ringed dragonfly.

  * The 5 Latin poems comprise ‘English’ homonyms found in the Latin text of poems from Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes; a gentle exploration of the friendships involved in the faux ami. My work can seem to divide between an early quasi-Objectivist mode in which the poem reflects a ‘truth’ about the ‘world’, followed later by a ‘linguistic turn’. These early poems, from the mid-’80s, spoil that neat account.

  there is from every thing … first appeared in Figs magazine (1987). Llyn Peris is a lake in a glacial valley near Llanberis, in north Wales. Two phrases come from Salvatore Quasimodo’s ‘Isola di Ulisse’ (risonanze effimere; acqua stellata). When this was written, I didn’t know Bunting’s Briggflatts, so the half-echo of ‘Orion strides over Farne’ is accidental. The Welsh phrase (mine, not from any canonical source) describes the scene: ‘clear sky and clear night’.

  Daruma first appeared in my Louis Zukofsky, or Whoever Someone Else Thought He Was (Twickenham and Wakefield: North and South, 1988) - see Zukofsky’s 1961 poem of the same title. A daruma is a Japanese good luck mascot in the shape of a squat figurine. Initially both its eyes are blank mattwhite ovals, and my poem describes its correct subsequent handling.

  remembering Paul Haines first appeared in Other Poetry magazine (1988), and honours the Canadian poet and librettist for Carla Bley; his words for her 1974 album Tropic Appetites supply the closing couplet.

  The Five Impromptus first appeared in my first book of poems, Reliefs (Dublin: hardPressed Poetry, 1988; reprinted Durham: Pig Press, 1990). Zettel (German, ‘scrap of paper’) is the editorial title given to a posthumous collation of such from the copious leavings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The 199th ‘scrap’ reads, ‘Suppose someone were to say “imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful?!”.’

  liquid (Cona… first appeared in Figs magazine (1987), and was reprinted in Reliefs. I don’t suppose many can still remember Cona coffee machines, which made indifferent coffee rather noisily.

  The Two Poems from the English of the Wordsworths first appeared in Reliefs; see further Philip Terry’s Introduction to this book.

  for Lorine Niedecker honours the undervalued American poet; it first appeared in Reliefs.

  start / with what / you know… is also from Reliefs. It uses a song-lyric of Tim Hodgkinson in which those who presume to speak for a crowd to which they don’t belong so ‘betray once more the people who get made into crowds’. George Oppen, as throughout, is behind any mention of ‘clarity’, here from Of Being Numerous 22: ‘Clarity // In the sense of transparence, / I don’t mean that much can be explained.’ Oppen’s earlier poem ‘Antique’ speaks of ‘survival’s / thin, thin radiance’. See also Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Book v, 1017 b): ‘“Being” and “that which is” mean that some […] things […] “are” potentially, others in complete reality […] we say the Hermes is in the stone, and the half of the line is in the line, and we say of that which is not yet ripe that it is wheat’.

  to catch / the ‘grain’ / of things…, also from Reliefs, draws on walks with poets: Tony Baker in the Derbyshire White Peak, and Jonathan Williams along the banks of the Rawthey. Wood melick (Melica uniflora) is a delicate and beautiful grass.

  Song for Annie is also from Reliefs. A ‘clew’ (or ‘clue’) is a ball of thread, often assembled from small pieces; one was used by Theseus to escape from the labyrinth, and the word has been used figuratively for solutions to perplexities or difficulties. The quotation is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.

  The six Axioms were completed in 1989; I first appeared in Oasis magazine (1990), II in Grille magazine (1992) and IV and VI in screens and tasted parallels magazine (1990). The full set was published as a book co-authored with David Connearn, who made a series of intercalary drawings (Cambridge: Ankle Press, 1994; reprinted, 1998). David has made two new drawings specifically for this book. The poems ‘read’ the solo soprano saxophone playing of Steve Lacy (on two Italian live LPs called Axieme) through Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumously-published Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics; music and words share a concern for testing things out for their truthfulness. There are some small-scale textual borrowings from poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and David Miller (to whom the first two sections are dedicated), song lyrics by Peter Blegvad (dedicatee of IV), and the sleeve-notes to Hugh Hopper’s masterpiece, 1984 (1973), by John Agam, dedicatee of the final section. Section II refers specifically to Lacy’s composition ‘The New Duck’.

  on the white / grass… first appeared in Other Poetry magazine, issue 25 (1989).

  Theory first appeared in Stride magazine (1989); the examples of phenomena not easily mapped by traditional mathematical physics are from René Thom (quoted in Woodcock & Davis’s 1978 Catastrophe Theory).

  * The lines for David Bellingham (photographer, artist, writer and publisher) permute the photographer Ilse Bing: ‘Repetition, even at the highest level of craftsmanship, is empty, therefore: SAY IT ONCE!’. David and I share a taste for the music of The Fall; an early 7″ single has it that the 3 ‘R’s are ‘repetition, repetition and … repetition’.

  Descant on a Theme by Brian Coffey first appeared in Other Poetry magazine (1990). I suspect Coffey first met the ch’ien [] bird in Apollinaire’s Zone, where it is called a pihi; I have not been able to trace it in Su Tung-p’o (a favourite poet of Coffey). Suspendat hirundo, ‘the swallow hangs down’, is a piece of close observation of the bird’s roosting habits from Virgil’s Georgics (IV.307). ‘All the summer long is the swallow a most instructive pattern of unwearied industry and affection’, writes Gilbert White in the Natural History of Selborne (1789). Elth’, elthe, chelidon, [ηλθ᾿ ηλθε χελιδών], ‘comes, comes the swallow’, is the Greek poet Theognis’s song of their arrival. Pliny the Elder says swallows do not go far when they migrate, but ‘only to sunny valleys in the mountains’ (Naturalis Historia, x); the poem’s close gives Gilbert White’s different, and decidedly odd, take on the hibernatory behaviour of swallows in Hampshire – from his Natural History.

  from far away is a ‘hyakuin’ or 100-stanza renga (a Japanese linked-verse form); it was co-written with the poet Tony Baker, then living ‘far away’ from me in rural Derbyshire, as I from him in London. I wrote the first, and all subsequent odd-numbered stanzas; he the second, and all subsequent even-numbered ones. The opening of the sequence was published as a stand-alone letterpress broadside, renga (Vancouver, BC: Slug Press, 1990); two further extracts appeared in screens
and tasted parallels magazine, and the whole sequence in West Coast Line magazine (both 1990) and as a co-authored stand-alone book (London: Oasis Books, 1998). The ‘post / script’ to the Oasis edition proffers some of the ‘less evident sources of these noises’ in the canonical order of the subject-categories of renga:

  ‘persons beasts and insects’: autumn crocus 7 (line 2 – see Geoffrey Grigson’s Englishman’s Flora); blackberries 46, 47; the northern English (and Scottish) flower Campanula rotundifolia 99; spring sandwort / ‘leadwort’ (Minuartia verna), locally rife in the lead-mining areas of Derbyshire 9; the mushroom Geastrum triplex 30; and Fern – a poet’s cat – 1.

  ‘signs of persons’: writers, Aristotle 47; Walter Benjamin 75; the Bible 31; William Blake (rough draft) 87; Basil Bunting 45, 95; Paul Celan 97; A.H. Clough 77; the Confucian classics 81; Dashiell Hammett 51; Heidegger 69; Krazy Kat (G. Herriman) 31; Jorge Manrique 33; Pound 43 (his funeral, in Venice), 44, 61; Proust 21; Arthur (and Evgenia) Ransome – their joint grave 99; ‘Uncle Remus’ (J.W. Riley) 47; William Carlos Williams (last letter to James Laughlin) 41; Parson James Woodforde (via Jane Grigson) 81; Louis Zukofsky 35 – musicians, anonymous folk 5, 21; Scots piping 52, 53; Captain Beefheart 47; Cage 28; Debussy 5; Delius 19; Ives 13, 67, 90; Thelonius Monk 95; – and artists, Joseph Beuys 68, 85; Hans Hofmann 67; R.B. Kitaj 83; Stanley Spencer (his decorations in Burghclere chapel, near the Greenham Common air-base) 59.

  ‘peaks’ and other places ‘travelled to’ (or lived in): Derbyshire 2, 48, 49 (an old leadminers’ pub in Winster), 64, 70, 90; the Lake District 99; Lakeland rivers 3 (Ure and Eden); Northumberland 63, 69; Wales 74, 75 (Porth Neigwl); the Yorkshire Dales 62, 69.

  ‘grievances’: Greenham Common 59; the greed of landlords – Marx, footnoting J.S. Mill, on kelp cultivation in the Hebrides – 39; the sub-languages of advertising (23, 40) and politics (11, 30, 42, 84); oil pollution 51, 52; the hubris of ‘authoritative sources’ 47 (Aristotle’s text is properly Latinised as insecutabilibus, ‘indivisible’), 61.

  Not least there are words about love; which must speak for itself, or remain silent.

  The Matter of Britain was published as a year’s-end postcard (1990); the title is a term for the corpus of mediaeval stories surrounding King Arthur. Here it is taken more literally, as a ‘materialist’ acrostic is generated from ‘matter’, from the names of British minerals. This isn’t a ‘pure’ process (unlike, say, some of Jackson Mac Low’s work), as there is a considerable element of choice involved; trying to keep metrical and sonorous variety, avoid the same endings too many times in a row, et cetera. Indeed, I didn’t initially pay close enough attention; it was only when assembling this book that I realised how inappropriate the original line 4, ‘Dolomite’, was; found in the UK, yes, but obviously far more closely associated with Italy.

  The Win(s)ter Songs were published in a special ‘Pastoral’ issue of fragmente magazine (1991). Winster is the Derbyshire village where the poet Tony Baker used to live; the poems, however, have a more complex history than ‘records of country walks’. Peter Riley’s Strange Family (Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1973), declared itself on first publication to be a ‘Missa Parodia super Lucis Diei Cantiones Jeremiae Prinni’. My ‘Songs’ draw on both Strange Family and on Day Light Songs (Pampisford, Cambs and Cheltenham, Glos: R. Books, 1968).

  The three haiku were first published in Haiku Quarterly (1991) and their haikuesque relation in Kirkup, Cobb, and Mortimer’s The Haiku Hundred (Cullercoats, North Shields: Iron Press, 1992, reprinted 2015).

  content fitting form first appeared as the first of many Form Books form-Cards, for the year’s-end in 1992; a riposte by Brian Coffey was published as card no. 2, and the two pieces together appeared in Coffey’s final book, salute /verse /circumstance (London: Form Books, 1994, reprinted 2005).

  Learning the Warblers was published as a book (London: Writers Forum, 1993). The texts are a response to a set of decidedly conventional poems on bird-watching by the sound- (and page-) poet P. C. Fencott; they are collaged from a wide range of bird-books to produce the sound-poems Fencott might have come up with. I briefly re-ordered the set to follow the now-standard British Ornithologists’ Union listing order, but didn’t like the results, aesthetically, and have here kept to the original order, that of Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom’s once-canonical field-guide. There can be limits to the rigorousness of process.

  The Horatian Ingredients were first published as a pair of postcards (1993). The bi-millennial anniversary of the Roman poet Horace in 1992 prompted my anthology Horace Whom I Hated So (London: Five Eyes of Wiwaxia); remembering Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts’s garlic-heavy collaboration Aglio 6 Olio (Docking, Norfolk: Coracle, 1992), I asked her to ‘illustrate’ Horace’s garlic-phobic 3rd Epode therein. The poetry librarian Geoffrey Soar, hearing of the proposed anthology, gave me a couple of laurel (bay) leaves from Horace’s villa, visited by him and his wife Val; they were reproduced on the cover of the finished book.

  A ghazal is an Arabic-Persian verse-form made up of couplets connected by mood rather than narrative. My northern ghazal (published as an end-of-year card in 1993) ends, as such poems formally should, with a ‘pen-name’; not that of its author, but one given to ‘Wavy Hair-grass’, a tenacious, sturdy grass usually indicative of poor-quality moorland soils. Bunting’s Briggflatts presents, persuasively, the idea that animals and plants are reasonable dramatis personae for a poem, on an equal standing with humans and not to be idly anthropomorphised.

  The forty fungi (Docking, Norfolk: Coracle, 1994; reprinted online by onedit at www.onedit.net/issue9/harryg/harryg001.html (1997) and as a physical book a year later (Ballybeg, Co. Tipperary, Éire: Coracle, 2008)) are forty poems of forty syllables each, dealing with forty wild mushrooms found in the UK, all with English ‘common names’, all met by me in the field, and – where known to be edible – eaten by me. Each mushroom is illustrated by the book’s co-author, Erica Van Horn.

  field mushroom (for Lesley Simms): encountered on a visit to the Simmses near Bellingham in Northumberland; nearby Hesleyside gives its name to the gorgeous Northumbrian small-pipe tune ‘Sweet Hesleyside’.

  penny bun (for Simon Cutts, a great poet of foodstuffs): B. edulis is the cep or porcini of chefs; the circular, sticky cap resembles the old-fashioned ‘sticky bun’. ‘Mycorrhizal’, technical term for a mushroom / plant co-dependency, often crucial to both species. The first ‘pattern-poem’ in this book.

  chanterelle (for Arthur Haswell): an apricot-coloured mushroom found walking with him near the South Tyne in Northumberland.

  velvet shank (for Colin Simms, poet-naturalist): Watch Crags, above the Chirdon Burn near Bellingham in Northumberland.

  orange birch bolete (for the late Kathleen Cooper, who introduced me to mycology).

  blewit (for Alec Finlay, haiku and renga enthusiast): the italicised poem is after a haiku by Bashō (it opens ‘matsutake ya’, identifying Bashō’s mushroom as the ‘pine mushroom’, Tricholoma matsutake). Blewits used to be sold in markets in Derbyshire, called there ‘blue-legs’ (their stems – stipes – being a blue-purple in colour).

  oyster fungus (for Catherine Gilonis, who trusted me enough to eat them after we found a batch on Wimbledon Common).

  dung roundhead (for Jonathan Williams): seen in majestic profusion on a walk with Jonathan and Tom Meyer on the Howgill Fells north of Dentdale. Another ‘pattern-poem’.

  Pelagic, ‘pertaining to the ocean or high seas’, is used of birds that occupy such spaces, as here the gannet, which will fly long distances to avoid over-passing even the slenderest spit of land. The epigraph is from Homer’s Odyssey, Book III: ‘Athene / seen as a sea-eagle’. The sequence was first published in the magazine-anthology Mad Cow 1 (Manchester, 1994).

  A set of four pieces for Michael Finnissy – one of the greatest living composers in these islands – are grouped together here: for Michael Finnissy itself appeared first in Vertical Images magazine (1994); there is a submerged allusion to
his 1981 piano piece Rushes – cinematographic rather than botanical, as is the 1968 piano piece Song 9 (which owes its title to a film by Stan Brakhage). The poem, which describes the ‘choreography’ needed to signal the presence of internal silences in the piece, appeared first in Shrike magazine (1995); it is reprinted in the programme for the Michael Finnissy complete piano music concert series given by Ian Pace (1996), the poem’s dedicatee, and in Caddel & Quartermain’s Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). Both these poems were reprinted in Brougham, Fox & Pace, Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy (Aldershot, 1997). Afar and Alongside were published together as a broadside (Hampton Wick, Surrey: Simple Vice Books, 1996). This pair bounce off two pieces by Finnissy and the poems that lie behind them: Afar (1966–67), for chamber ensemble, titled from Beckett’s translation of Eluard’s ‘A perte de vue’, and Alongside (1979), for chamber orchestra, titled from Trakl’s ‘Trompeten’.

  The Inscriptions was published by Ian Hamilton Finlay in his ‘Echoes Series’, with a facing-page ‘echo’ by him (‘The Inscriptions’ [Echoes Series] [Dunsyre, Lanark: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995]). Both poems were reprinted in Green Waters (Stromness, Orkney: The Pier Arts Centre /Edinburgh: Polygon /Edinburgh: Morning Star /Lochmaddy, North Uist: Taigh Chearsabhagh: pocketbooks, 1998). My poem owes its origin to an Appendix in J.D. Beazley’s Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1963), in which Beazley says most classical Greek vase-painters were declaredly homosexual; the so-called ‘kalos-names’, the names of boys who were said to be kalos, ‘beautiful’, appear in inscriptions, usually on the unseen base of the pot. These names are important tools for attribution and analysis. A handful of minor vase-painters were openly heterosexual; Beazley’s Appendix IV lists their ‘kale-names’: those of women once thought beautiful, of whom almost no smaller trace could be left.