Rough Breathing

by Harry Gilonis

  Window, Light Outside started out as an attempt to map Horace’s Epistle II.iii (known colloquially as the ‘Ars Poetica’) against Gustaf Sobin’s 1984 long poem ‘The Earth as Air: an Ars Poetica’. I cannot now trace all the quotations and allusions, but the opening echoes Horace’s (re-shaping a quotation from Richard II via Zukofsky, a horse-obsessive); ‘[man] reden kann’ is from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Water forget-me-not is M. scorpioides; the ‘trees’ leaves’ passage is after ‘Ars Poetica’ lines 60–61. The Greek word for ‘truth’, ἀλήθεια, comes from ληθώ, ‘to be unknown, hidden’, with α-, a ‘prefix of privation’. The resultant semi-mystical reading of ‘truth-as-disclosing’, and the ‘earthen jug’, are both Heideggerian (a now thoroughly lapsed enthusiasm). However the jug also comes from late paintings by Georges Braque (there was a splendid exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997), as do the lemon and other still-life items. Horace, too, praises the ‘banquets of a frugal table’. Roger Tabor’s The Private Life of the Domestic Cat provided an anatomical detail which helped explain an R.B. Kitaj drawing, My Cat and her Husband, which lies behind one passage. Gilbert White’s wasp is described in his letter of 7 July 1797 in The Natural History of Selborne. ‘Clarity’ is as always here from George Oppen; in this instance from his poem ‘Route’:

  Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful

  thing in the world,

  A limited, limiting clarity

  The sun shines off the sea through the doorway of the cloister on the Venetian cemetery island of San Michele. The poem’s title comes from a photograph by Bill Culbert, described in the poem and reproduced on the front cover of the anthology The Invisible Reader (London: Invisible Books, 1995), in which the poem first appeared.

  Reading Hölderlin on Orkney was written up from notes made around Rackwick on the island of Hoy in March 1995; I had Richard Sieburth’s remarkable edition of Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments with me. Scraps of it made their way into what I wrote, indicated in the poem in boldface. There are snippets of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Orkney Lyrics’, which were reprinted in the same issue of Oar in which these poems first appeared; Finlay stole from Engels (via Hugh MacDiarmid) before I did. A phrase comes from the anomalously Gaelic rather than Orcadian singing of Talitha MacKenzie, but I have made proper use of Hugh Marwick’s magisterial The Orkney Norn – see therein for geo, a narrow coastal gully with the sea at its bottom, and tullimentan, ‘scintillating, twinkling’, the latter semi-anglicised at the close. Berriedale is a tiny cleft off the side of a deep-bottomed glacial valley on Hoy; it is thought that glacial ice, unable to penetrate it, left pre-glacial flora able to survive there, as they do to this day. The Burn of Light is a nearby stream; it and all the other place-names are on the Ordnance Survey 1:25000 sheet for Hoy (OS 462). The sequence first appeared in Oar magazine from Kirkwall, Orkney (1995), and then as a stand-alone book (Hampton Wick, Surrey: grille and Simple Vice Books, 1997), reprinted, again on Orkney (Harray: Brae Editions, 2010).

  “…both buoyed and clever…” was collaged out of chapters 22, 23 and 24 of R. L. Stevenson’s 1883 Treasure Island – the section of that book subtitled ‘the cruise of the coracle’. It was published as a postcard as an affectionate nod to Coracle-the-publisher, very much in the spirit of Simon Cutts’s own note on that pocket-sized vessel.

  Pibroch (Scots Gaelic piobaireachd, literally ‘piping’) is the high-art mode of Scots bagpipe music. In a pibroch an initial tune or ‘ground’ (the urlar) is repeated first in reduced form (the ‘thumb-variation’) and then with each melody-note surrounded by an incrementally-increasing halo of grace-notes, ending in the ludicrously ornate ‘crown-variation’; a performance closing with a repeat of the unadorned ground. My sequence is an attempt to replicate this verbally. Two sections appeared in the booklet for the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World (Tooting, London: Ship of Fools, 1994) and the whole as a book (Edinburgh: Morning Star Publications, 1996), with facing-page Gaelic translations by Maoilios Caimbeul. The base melody of a piobaireachd could be a well-known tune; having seen the curious adaptation of herons to the treeless Hebridean shores, I was struck by Sorley Maclean’s poem ‘A’ Chorra-Ghridheach’ (‘The Heron’), and took some features from it as my ‘ground’.

  walk the line records walking many miles along the length of the Chesil Beach (a long pebbly tombolo-spit on the coast of Dorset); it was first published in OBJECT Permanence magazine (1996) and as a book (London: Last adanA, 2000). Passages in italics are translated /adapted from haiku by Buson, Issa, Sampu and Shiki. The related poem thinking of Evan, / walking on Chesil is the opening of an abandoned attempt to expand the theme; it first appeared in a Sub Voicive Poetry Programme for a reading on 30 April 1996. ‘Evan’ is the saxophonist Evan Parker.

  Webern sings The Keel Row for Howard, that is, as a birthday gift for the composer Howard Skempton; it first appeared in the anthology PIECES for Howard Skempton, published as Spanner issue 35, guest-edited by me (1997). This is my one dodecaphonic poem, complete with a retrograde of its ‘row’ after a more traditional interlude; Skempton has written a setting of ‘The Keel Row’ for piano.

  The six translations of Matsuo Bashō’s fūryū-no / hajime ya oku no / ta-ue-uta inside a poem for Cecilia Vicuña are exactly that; they occupy the odd stanzas. Bashō’s poem speaks of the connection between ‘high’ art and everyday labour, as does the work of the Chile-born sculptor, installation artist, weaver, singer and poet Cecilia Vicuña. As a piece of quasi-Oulipian play, the even stanzas – which expand on the haiku – draw on its Japanese vocabulary via a Spanish-English dictionary (fūryū, ‘culture’, transmutes into fuego, ‘fire’, for example). The poem appeared first in Boxkite magazine, and was published as a booklet that same year (London: Grille, 1997).

  * WIND KEEN is a reworking of an anonymous old Welsh poem, ‘Y Gaeaf’ (‘Winter’), from the tenth/eleventh century (it is found in the ‘Black Book of Carmarthen’ MS); it opens with four four-lettered words, llym awel llwm bryn, which fall naturally into English likewise: ‘Keen gust bare hill’. Remembering Hamish Fulton’s artwork recording a walk in Canada’s Baffin Island, ROCK / FALL / ECHO / DUST, I wondered if it would be possible to replicate the world of ‘Y Gaeaf’ in a similar manner.

  an egg for E. appeared first in Oyster Boy Review (1999); an inedible Easter-Egg, after the fashion of the ancient Greek pattern-poet Simias.

  remembering Scott LaFaro also first appeared in Oyster Boy Review (1999); LaFaro is the great jazz bassist (Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans…) who died young in a car-crash.

  * Wedding-Song was written for my musician friends Richard and Mary. The boldface elements derive from the epithalamia of Sappho and Catullus.

  The century’s end ghazal was written on 31 December 2000, some way after Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (dated 31 December 1900); it was published as an end-of-year /century /millennium card. The implicit ‘signature’ of the ghazal is that of the (un-named) thrush.

  * a small alba comes from the notebook for a visit to a private garden in Provence, filled with work by Ian Hamilton Finlay. An alba is a Provençal dawn-song (as against the northern aubade); the shape of this one has something in common with some works by Finlay.

  * pond… is another notebook poem; it collates some English translations of the opening of Bashō’s famous haiku, furuike ya.

  * The Afghan ghazal is a response to Tony Baker and Richard Caddel’s collaborative Monksnailsongs (Bray, Co. Wicklow, Éire: Wild Honey Press, 2002); it draws on Blanford and Godwin-Austen, Fauna of British India: Mollusca… (1908) and Simms, In Afghanistan (2001), and makes passing use of the titles of Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung and Günter Grass’s From the Diary of a Snail. This ghazal is collectively ‘signed’ by the molluscs who inhabit it.

  The sound shanty for bob cobbing first appeared in for Bob Cobbing: a celebration (Sutton, Surrey: Mainstream Poetry, 2000). It lists Scottish islands uninhabited as of 1974. There are doubtless m
ore now.

  The 2001 Three Misreadings of Horatian Odes first appeared in Quid 9, the ‘Against Imperialism’ issue (2002). They recognise that whilst the poet Horace (who had fought for the Roman republic in the field against Octavian/Augustus) had good pragmatic reasons personally for writing poems urging that Emperor to attack Arabia, the poems themselves remain inexcusable. As do the actions of those who excused like imbecilities two millennia later. The ‘misreadings’ are, in order, those of liberal cultural commentators, western statesmen, and the author; the last-listed needs to apologise for using elements from the unimpeachable commentaries of Nisbet & Hubbard in these ‘odes’.

  * Another Gulf War piece, foreign policy, uses search-and-replace software on a core text. It has been performed with live improvised musical accompaniment and/or electronic treatment in the UK and at an arts festival in Sweden.

  white came about the day I went to see a small exhibition of small and (mostly) white paintings by Robert Ryman, all of which had single-word titles (I think in the Mayor Gallery in the early ’80s?). I was taken by the array of technical possibilities the paintings displayed – different densities of paint, speed and precision of application, even the relationship with the frames; and found myself considering the one-word titles as sorts of ‘frames’ as well. The methodology was to use Roget’s Thesaurus to match synonyms for ‘white’ and for the title-words. In theory it need never stop… It was published in The Other Room Anthology 6 (Manchester: The Other Room Press, 2014).

  Taliesin was first published online among Peter Quartermain’s edited tributes to the poet Richard Caddel, in Jacket 20 (http://jacketmagazine.com/20/quart-cadd.htm), 2003. It makes some use of one of his favoured techniques – ‘loose phonic translation’ – used on a poem from one of his (and my) favourite literatures, early Welsh poetry; here a poem from the Canu Taliesin beginning ‘Kynan kat diffret…’, chosen because it mentions, as I thus do, a once-famous Welsh ruling family, the Cadelling, descendants of a ‘Cadell’.

  for Louis Zukofsky, a hundred years on was first published as a postcard by Coracle, Ballybeg, Éire, in 2004 – the centenary of Zukofsky’s birth, which went pretty much as unmarked as the anniversaries of his death have (save for the anthology I edited ten years after his death – see note to ‘Daruma’ above). This poem makes use of the text surrounding the line from Two Gentlemen of Verona that Zukofsky used for his dark ‘valentine’ for Cid Corman, ‘Julia’s Wild’, incorporated into his long and astonishing Shakespearian meditation Bottom: on Shakespeare.

  The germ of the unHealed project was re-reading the fragmentary old Welsh poem-cycle the Canu Heledd (‘Songs of Heledd’). I was reading a line, Eglwysseu Bassa collasant eu breint (‘The churches at Bassa have lost their privileges /status’), when, as I looked, the churches at Bassa became the houses at Basra in Iraq, and collasant became ‘collapsed’, breint ‘burnt’. And that was that; the impetus was imperative, to take a relatively unknown, once everyday tale of English soldiery invading a neighbouring country and behaving badly – and bring it up-to-date. In part I did this and produced reasonably accurate translations (as the first, and especially the second, group of stanzas); but also unreasonably inaccurate ones – as e.g. using a Chinese-English dictionary. Iraqi place-names replace similar-sounding Welsh ones throughout, for obvious reasons. The dinar is an Iraqi coin; the oud a Middle-Eastern stringed instrument, ancestor of the lute; a co-ax is British army slang for a weapon mounted ‘co-axially’ to work in unison with another larger or smaller one, as (e.g.) a machine-gun aligned with the main gun on a tank; hesh stands for ‘high-explosive squash head’, a type of ammunition particularly effective against tank armour – and buildings. The sections included here use, amongst other techniques, relatively straight translation (stanza groups 1 and 2, the former with more of the modern world); phonetically-derived substitution from external texts (ornithological material in stanza group 3, interrupting a more focussed reading non-logically; an ‘Open Letter to the Iraqi People’ by Tony Blair in stanza group 7, ending in the original Welsh phrase; and reports of the cruise-missile attack on Shu’ale marketplace in stanza group 9); vocabulary generated phonetically from the original Welsh (stanza groups 4, 5 and 6, with differing degrees of reworking). The two list-poems (stanza groups 8 and 11) name ‘rulers’ of the region, and names assigned to oil-fields therein (though, of course, the war was never about oil). The penultimate section (stanza group 10) draws on arms-dealer promo. prose, plus that company’s ‘ethics policy’. I couldn’t make it up. [Stanza groups 1 and 2 appeared in Angel Exhaust magazine (2006); stanza group 4 in The New Review of Literature (2006); stanza groups 5 and 8 in the magazine Poetry Wales (2008), reprinted in Goodby and Davies, The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966–2016 (Llangattock, Powys: Aquifer Books, in association with Boiled String Press, Swansea, 2018); stanza group 6 appeared on the website Archive of the Now (www.archiveofthenow.org), uploaded 2006; stanza groups 7, 9, 10 and 11 in …further evidence of nerves: Cambridge Poetry Summit 2005 (Cambridge: Barque /Arehouse, 2005) and in Readings: Small Publishers Fair 2004 (Research Group for Artists’ Publications, Cromford, Derbys, 2005). * Stanza group 3 was rewritten for this book, and is thus previously unpublished.]

  Processions written inside chivalry first appeared in Issue 1 online (2008). It is accurately signed on the page, as the ‘poem’ wasn’t ‘written’ by ‘me’, or indeed by anyone; its text appeared as part of a vast corpus of well over a thousand pages, assembled by a web-surfing ‘bot’ which turned text-extracts into poem-like entities and randomly ascribed them under the names of poets with a digital presence. Some ‘victims’ of this process tried to locate and take legal proceedings against the responsible parties. I take a broader view of authorship, and am happy to acknowledge my nominal responsibility here; indeed, I have sought out (and been granted) formal permission by the editor of Issue 1 to reprint ‘my’ ‘poem’ here. Issue 1 itself is no longer online, but a cloned version survives at www.stephenmclaughlin.net/issue-1/Issue-1_Fall-2008.pdf; you will find many, many poems therein that are equally not by their authors (John Ashbery, Thomas A Clark, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Vanessa Place, William Shakespeare, Robert Sheppard…).

  * Blair’s Grave is the title often given to Robert Blair’s once well-known poem of 1743, The Grave. William Blake made in 1805 a series of illustrations for it, and wrote a connected poem, ‘Dedication of the Illustrations to Blair’s Grave’. My sequence makes use of this material, together with speeches by Tony Blair and remarks made on a range of political blogs at the time of his resignation. These poems make selective use of material generated by an online cut-up engine, making a contrast to the wholly mechanical construction of the preceding piece.

  NORTH HILLS is my collective title for a very large group of ‘faithless’ translations from old Chinese originals. I’ve discussed its methodology in the front-matter to two books drawn from that corpus (eye-blink and ‘North Hills’) and the interested reader is directed thence. In short, my contention is that the syntactic practice of some Chinese writing is of considerable poetic interest. Chinese characters are in themselves immutable; such modification as they receive is achieved by the addition of other words /characters acting as articles or personal pronouns; these are often dispensed with in poetry. This omission opens up an indeterminate space for the reader to enter and play. Such poems, common in the T’ang dynasty in particular, avoid restricting action to a specific agent (or even gendering that agent) and also refrain from committing such action to one specific time. Obviously it is impossible to replicate such effects, which rely on specificities of literary Chinese, in English; so the NORTH HILLS poems set out to do just that. For this reason all the poems gathered here are given in more than one version, in a direct attempt to show the implicit variety held in their originals. They loop round alphabetically to start and end with versions of a poem often said to be the most impermeably difficult in all Chinese literature …

  The first Li Shang-yin
text was made as a unique poem-card for an improvised performance of Chris Goode & Jonny Liron’s World of Work (Sussex Poetry Festival, Brighton, 2010), with each Chinese character represented by a single English word; it was reprinted online at Infinite Editions (www.infiniteeditions.blogspot.co.uk); second version *. Li’s original refers en passant to the famous philosopher dreaming he is a butterfly, or vice versa, paradox.

  The second Po Chü-I version was published in eye-blink (London: Veer Books, 2010); the first version *. ‘Flamingo feathers’ is a form of the decorative plant Celosia argentea. The second version is dedicated to the poet Jeff Hilson, author of A grasses primer (London: Form Books, 2000); ‘timothy’ is an actual grass (Phleum pratense).

  The twin versions of Tai Shu-lun were made for an anthology celebrating the joint sixtieth birthdays of the poets Alan Halsey and Gavin Selerie, Salamanders & Mandrake: Gavin Selerie & Alan Halsey at Sixty (Wakefield: ISPress, 2009). There are borrowings from their work.

  The first T’ao Ch’ien version appeared in veer off magazine (2008), and is dedicated to Sean Bonney; second version *. Galtymore is an Irish mountain; Simon Cutts’s reworking of a line of Mallarmé is here reworked, after a photo he took in his seventieth birthday year; the poem is for him.

  The Chinese original of Ts’ui Hao’s poem alludes to the anonymous ‘Summoning the Recluse’ (from the second-century AD anthology Ch’u Tz’u [‘Songs of the South’]); I’ve used a line from Wordsworth’s ‘The Recluse’ in its stead (in the first version only). The second version nods amicably to Bill Griffiths’s ‘Version of Ts’ui Hao’s Poem of the Pavilion of a Taoist Sage’, and was done in thanks to Alan Halsey and Ken Edwards for their work in editing Griffiths’s Collected Earlier Poems. (Both versions *.)