Guest Review: Brinton On Swift

If it weren't for the fact it is almost my birthday - or that mirrors and doubles and water-gazing figure prominently in my new collection (which speaks to, almost as an ironic retort, my New and Selected from the previous year) - I might not have succumbed to this narcissistic temptation - really an honour. Ian Brinton, Prynne expert, scholar and critic - has sent in a delightful gift - an unasked-for piece of writing on my new book. I post it to share the gift with you.

Ian Brinton on
Mainstream Love Hotel

The heraldic statement concerning objects which William Carlos Williams included in Book I of Paterson, published in 1946, came from an early piece of his written in 1927:

Before the grass is out the people are out
and bare twigs still whip the wind—
when there is nothing, in the pause between
snow and grass in the parks and at the street ends
—Say it, no ideas but in things—

In these lines there is, of course, more than just ‘things’. There is a sense of time as winter ends without spring having begun and the newness of hope that takes people outside is juxtaposed with ‘bare twigs’ and ‘whip’: time for the first public movements, caught in the pause between one world and another, leading to social mingling in parks and at street ends.

The cinematic quality of Todd Swift’s poetry combines a similar sense of objects caught in their movement: light and time held in a balancing act:

no one else but a girl
on the bicycle

turning out of dark
from the corner

the second time
she cycles the block

a thin spoke of light
is broken alongside—

a rushing—
as of great distances

This poem is titled ‘At twilight’, a name which itself catches the shift from one moment to another, both morning and evening, and opens with such clarity as the bare scene of the page is host to ‘a girl’ whose position at the line’s end ensures a small enough break in the breath to allow, ‘on the bicycle’, a sense of photographic framing. But this photograph is no still as the present participle opens the third line to bring her from one light to another, round the corner and into our vision. The clicking movement of her wheel spokes sounds for us with ‘second’, ‘cycles’, ‘block’ and ‘broken’ before the emotional resonance of the experience confronts us with both proximity and distance. The echo of Carlos Williams brings, of course, to mind the amount that depends upon ‘a red wheel/barrow’, that 1923 ‘mobile-like arrangement’ (Wallace Stevens) which Hugh Kenner suggested had words that ‘dangle in equidependency, attracting the attention, isolating it, so that the sentence in which they are arrayed comes to seem like a suspension system.’

Swift’s eye for the particular goes beyond the world of description to capture ‘the bright aspect of recollection’ where

Shelved, small events
keep their status
and know their place
in the hierarchy.
(‘Too many and too often’)

The world of the particular is the world of linguistic differentiation, ‘this’ not ‘that’, ‘these’ not ‘those’, a sense of proximity rather than distance, a sense of bringing the catch home and relishing the value of ‘These days’:

These are the days
not other days
these are the days I was
working towards
as other further weeks,
working for days
that now I see have come in,
fish from the street

sold fresh, the man
in his whites, ringing to bring
fish just off the boats

As if to eschew any association with the quick inspired flash of poetry Swift’s ideas are matured and they are worked out over time with a full awareness that the present moment is an accumulation of what has taken place before: the HERE & NOW can only have any importance because of its debt to the THEN:

days that were in the sea
not so long ago
not brought home to me,
I’d thought to have my work
done by now, to have reached

the goals set out long ago,
I won’t get there now
no need to, here, see
what was earned, not owed,

Time and again Todd Swift grounds his language and ideas in the personal and there is a convincing quality to its domestic reference that avoids the prurient by appealing to the universal:

these days of you and me—
more than pensions, savings,
toil, long hours, ever bring—
days beginning with us in bed

and ending with us asleep—
between is the time worked
on, to make, and keep
no other days
no other ways
these are them, here,
in the basket, glinting like coins,
fish fresh and shining from the sea.

The musical movement forward in these lines, replete with repetition announcing and restating the value of the moment, allows us to settle for the satisfaction of glinting coins being superseded by the transient freshness of that last line. Charles Olson wrote his own poem titled ‘These Days’ (10th January 1950) and sent it to Carlos Williams a couple of days later:

whatever you have to say, leave
the roots on, let them
dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clear
where they come from

Time and again throughout mainstream love hotel Todd Swift leaves the roots on and we can watch and value the accumulation of a life where things take on new values.

by Ian Brinton

Perfumed Cannibals

My review of Luke Kennard and Frederick Seidel's collections is now online, having been published and posted by Poetry London.

Reviews

Poetry London Spring 2010 No. 65 - among many other interesting things - includes a review of the Oxfam DVD Asking A Shadow To Dance, directed by Jennifer Oey, produced by Martin Penny, with 35 poets selected by yours truly. The reviewer, TS Eliot-prize winner, Philip Gross, says, "the project does good service both to Oxfam and to poetry." Also reviewed is my debut British collection, Mainstream Love Hotel, from tall-lighthouse (2009). Julia Bird, Salt poet and good egg, argues that "Swift's poems become truly spirited and involving" when the experimental and lyric fuse, and spots the "verbal refractions" that either "illuminate or merely dazzle" and notes the "skilled and deliberate" formal structuring of the collection. She singles out the poem 'Green Girl in Vermont' for being "endlessly re-readable". Read it for yourself.

Citizens Kane and Etter

I am reading this coming Thursday in Brighton, with American citizens slash British-based poets, Carrie Etter and Daniel Kane, who are on the avant-garde edge of things. A tall-lighthouse gig. Hope to see you there, for a start time of 8 pm, at Redroaster Coffee House, 1d St James's Street, Brighton. Never been to Brighton before, despite being a big fan of Greene's novel.

Spring Cummings In

To my mind - and many poetry lovers - Spring means ee cummings and his disturbing-delightful poem of piracies, puddles, and the goatfooted balloonman. Here's a version - the least eccentric of the amateur versions I've located online. My mother used to read this to me when I was very young, and I can't help but admit it contributed mightily to my poetry urge.

In St. Lambert, where I grew up, the Spring Equinox meant ice breaking up on the great St. Lawrence seaway, and very dramatic floods as foot-high snowbanks melted, as giant icicles plummeted, deadly as daggers, and the sunsets were a brilliant blue-into-vermilion-into-black. The air was so fresh and clean, and I'd run with my huskey dog, Rascal, and write poems in my head. This equinox is equally moving to me.

It's been just over half a year since I entered the worst of my private darkness, and I feel a coming out into light, out of the mind's inner-winter. Hope springs eternal. Sometimes, it actually arrives, on time.

Memories of Montreal St Patrick's Days

Montreal - with its lively Irish-Quebec traditions - always had huge St Patrick's Day parades. My parents would take me as a kid, and I recall the many red-faced men waving from their rather ordinary flat-bed trucks, touched with a strand of green something. The highlight for me was always the horses, and the horse-s--t, and the musical marchers stepping with the luck of the Irish down the littered streets. It was usually bitterly cold - sometimes zero or below. After the parade my mother would want an Irish coffee, and we'd go and have something green to drink - as I got older, coloured beer. My father, Irish-Canadian (his Mom from Belfast) would sing us Bing Crosby songs from the album Shamrocks and Shillelaghs. Who threw the overalls in Mrs Murphy's chowder...

Winter was breaking, the town was festive, - it always seemed like a good omen for the rest of the year. As I got older, Winter Carnival debates would sometimes fall around that time. Debaters from across the world would gather at McGill for tournaments - I won top speaker at several of these in my late teens, early twenties. My best memory of the period was when I was 21, and read poetry at McGill, for my English girlfriend of the time, a Ms. Smith. It was a good reading with bands and other poets, in the student union.

22 years ago, I can still barely recall the thrill of having written a new poem for someone I loved, still fresh with discovery of poems and language. 22 years later, I no longer drink - and poems come less readily - but with an Irish wife and many Irish friends, the day still holds great meaning to me.

Identity Delayed

To answer the comment about my cheering for Canada at the Olympics... people do have divided loyalties. I have a dual sense of identity - part-Canadian )where born), part British/Irish, where I live. As Morrissey sang, "Irish blood, English heart" (or was it vice versa?). My wife, who is Irish, cheers Canada, since we met there. We both have affection for Hungary and Hungarians, as we lived for a few years in Budapest. Why the need to pin down other people's identity? Dual citizens abound, with multiple passports - and in 19th century and before, as Paul Fussel reminded us, there were no passports (very few before the 1930s) - you just went and travelled. As Sydney Greenstreet once called himself, maybe poets are "citizens of the world". All this to say, be not confused - Eyewear sees double (at least).

Review: Swift on Identity Parade

Todd Swift reviews
Identity Parade
edited by Roddy Lumsden

Poetry anthologies are like beds: the most interesting question is who is and isn’t in them. Roddy Lumsden’s monumental Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) is a long-awaited generational summing up from one of the UK’s most active poet-editor-organisers. Lumsden, a master formalist, and crafty word-player, has mentored many younger poets for over a decade, and knows the mainstream British poetry world like few other practitioners. The anthology features 85 poets – and, in pluralist fashion – they represent a variety of styles and linguistic approaches, from performance poetry to the well-made lyric. There are also a few “experimental” poets included (such as Richard Price), and the Introduction is more or less unique among such enterprises for being not editorially bellicose but open.

It is also notable – and this extends Bloodaxe’s long-term dedication to women poets – that there are more women than men represented. Lumsden has set out the terms of what made poets eligible for inclusion: their debut in the last 17 years or so, and from a British-Irish press; born in Britain or Ireland (what Lumsden calls “here”); or based here for more than a decade. He has tended to exclude, therefore, poets over the age of 55 who published first books in the 90s, and poets born in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand (for instance) who may have lived and worked in the UK or Ireland, for less than ten years. As such, there seems to be a desire to delimit the poetic community to national borders – a possibly latent antimodernist, or at least conservative, position. Many previous British/Irish anthologies of other decades have opted to included poets like Eliot, Adcock, Stevenson, Plath, Donaghy, Porter, Pound and Wevill – “foreigners” who moved here and made Britain home. Of more concern is the question – does the book suffer from, even still, too much inclusiveness? Its refreshingly broad church attitude would tend to err on the side of plenty rather than austere evaluative discrimination. Lumsden claims in his Introduction to have modelled the anthology a bit on the American recent door-stopper, Legitimate Dangers, from 2006; that anthology is almost unreadably thick, but does offer a panoptical overview of what some editors think is the contemporary US direction. Another similar anthology was Carmine Starnino’s Canadian book, The New Canon, with 50 new poets.

What emerges from such extensive “almanacs” is a sense that the critical faculty has been short-circuited by the sheer plenitude of published poets, many with legitimate claims to being respected, even necessary, as a piece of the contemporary puzzle. Lumsden notes in his Introduction the interesting idea that this period’s period style is “individualism” – and that this may be connected to the new digital mediascape, which has at once fragmented and multiplied options. This may be so, but reading the poets and poems in Identity Parade, one is not so much struck by lack of uniformity, as by certain moods, modes, tones, and rhythms that do reoccur. Far from being an entirely heterogeneous and strange period – at least as represented by Lumsden – most of the poems selected are relatively coherent.

Most tell stories, express emotions, are witty or engagingly imaginative, and use the forms and manner made famous by Heaney, Muldoon, Duffy, or Paterson – clearly the four presiding spirits. American influences would tend to the lighter and more amiable of the New York School type. There are very few poems here that deeply interrogate the nature of language, in the manner of Prynne, Bernstein, or Lisa Robertson. Not that this is required of poems, of course.

What is odd is how this compression of talent – and this is a very talented generation – manages to diminish even the larger figures in the midst of the pack, who feel a bit crushed in the crowd. These might be Patience Agbabi, Alice Oswald, Paul Farley, Luke Kennard, Jen Hadfield, Gwyneth Lewis, Jacob Polley, Richard Price, John Stammers, and Kevin Higgins. To select just ten of the more impressive. Then again, readers will locate other constellations and clusters of interest. Also missing are the show-stoppers - the lightning-strike poems - that mark a poet or generation as great. While there are hundreds of good, solid, well-written and often genuinely dazzling or inventive poems included, it is hard to actually recollect a dozen or more whose lines are so memorable as to represent a genuine threat to Ted Hughes, Larkin, or Mahon. As such, it may still be very much a provisional period, not yet fully formed - and the leaders of the pack have yet to fully dominate the minor figures. Or put their own stamp on the language. In a longer review I'd cite the best poems, but leave it here for the reader to find them on their own.

There any number of poets I would have liked to see here, such as John Stiles, James Byrne, Isobel Dixon, Jane Yeh, Tom French, Paul Perry, Kathryn Maris, Kathryn Simmonds, or Andrea Brady, to offer a few personal favourites drawn from poets based in Britain or Ireland. But it’s Lumsden’s book, not mine. What is missing – to some extent - is any definitive evaluative discernment, able to offer this generation a map out of the rush and roar of the poetry bourse. A selection of 35 or 40 – one thinks of the Paterson anthology of recent years – might have been less even-handed, but could have actually been diagnostic.

Still, as a survey of the last decade and a half in the UK, this is a very good, useful, and genuinely engaged and engaging effort. Identity Parade will be the de facto go-to guide for many teachers, students, and lay-readers for years to come, and offers rewards and surprises even to the hardened poetry experts out there. Lumsden is to be praised for his hard work in putting this labour of love together. The line-up is already forming for the next book of this kind, no doubt to appear in 2020 - which will hopefully star poets like Emily Berry, Sam Riviere, and Helen Mort, among others.

Shutout Island?

There is a scene in Shutter Island where a doctor tells the Federal Marshall hunting a lost mental patient that "once you are called crazy" every protestation of sanity only confirms the diagnosis. Foucault 101 this may be, but it bears recalling. The same is true for any self-description. They are fraught, minefields. The moment "I" reply to someone's label of me, I am implicated in their discourse. Denise Riley has written of this alienating linguistic situation in several of her studies. It occurs to me I am creating the same linguistic vicious circle by asking the question - as I did of Roddy Lumsden recently at Eyewear - am I a British poet? The answer is a resounding no. And, in fact, it explains a lot about my behaviour these past 7 years, doesn't it? Imagine if you think you are a cat, but are a dog.

Every catlike thing you do will be met with scorn or derision or confusion from the real cats; and dogs will not recognize you either. You become lost. Disoriented. Readers, I entered into the British poetry community from day one - naively and enthusiastically and genuinely - as someone who thought their identity was "British". Having lived in London now for 7 years, my editing, compering, teaching, and research work, all is based on the idea I have a hyphenated identity - that I am British-Canadian (born in Canada, long-term tax-paying resident of Britain). Of course, not ever being included in anthologies here (or in The Poetry Archive etc) was always puzzling and frustrating. I also have operated under another assumption: I am a good serious poet. So, let's spell it out. Todd's delusion: I think I am a good serious member of the British poetry community. That means I consider myself on a level playing field with Lumsden, Farley, Laird, Stammers, etc. If readers and critics think that, in fact a) I am not a member of the British poetry community and b) am not a good serious poet of that level - then they are entitled to consider me either deluded, misinformed, or tragically in denial. Just as in Shutter Island, the protagonist's vision of reality is so far from the truth as to represent a wound in nature, I either am completely out to lunch, or not. Which is it? Am I dog or cat? Shutout, or in? On an island, or a prison? The answer may require a decision to move to another country. After all, what point living in a place that thinks you should be barking at those you want to lick milk with.

Looks Like Up To Me

This is the anniversary of my worst - although gloriously survived - year. At the end of February a year ago, a very close loved one became ill, and faced surgery. First few days of March saw them quite ill in hospital, when the surgery went a bit wrong. They recovered, but the stress of that time reminded me of three years before, in 2006, when I spent a summer with my father, by his side in hospital, as he lay dying of brain cancer.

Harrowing doesn't quite touch on that period. I suppose I was returned, if only second time farcically, to the storm and strain of inhospitality that even the best wards tend to offer. Fear of dying in such surrounds, fear of losing someone there, is now a part of what I need to work through - and I know I join millions who share my feelings.

Over summer 2009, worries and losses piled up, and by September 2009, I was suffering from - as long-time readers may recall - severe esophagitis (perhaps one of the most painful conditions). Every swallow, even water, was torment. I felt like (I was) dying. I became very depressed. Over the past five months I have come through a darkness such as I didn't expect to ever have to face. Each day has seen a slow step forward, with hope and health gradually improving, until, these days, I am back at work, not in 24-hour pain, and, to some degree, positive of outlook.

I still have the chronic condition, and have had to radically alter my lifestyle and diet. I now weight 67 kg, or around 10.5 stone, which means I am thinner than since I was 24, and can't drink wine or coffee currently. It's an odd back to the future purgatory. My work colleagues have been great, and teaching, which I love, is what I now do. I am about to turn 44. Middle age never felt like this before. Some days I feel old as the hills, but the mirror returns the face of a young man, doubtful, hopeful, tentative, determined. Full of love and vinegar.

Todd Swift Reading in Cambridge March 2

Next week will be busy for me, exciting, and a little exhausting. Following on from hosting the Oxfam event on March 1, Tuesday March 2 finds me reading in Cambridge with Charlotte Runcie, for tall-lighthouse and Helen Mort, along with other poets from the floor. A chance to get a signed copy of my 2009 collection, Mainstream Love Hotel. The event starts at 7.45 pm, at the trendy gastropub,The Punter, 3 Pound Hill, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB3 0AE. Admission is £3; concession £2.

TP On MLH

Tom Phillips, over at his blog, has a review of Mainstream Love Hotel.

Swift Sightings

What's a blog for, if not to sometimes toot one's own horn - and all the better when the links also lead to much other excellent writing. My poems appear at the recently online Blackbox Manifold 4, in good company, with work also there by (among others) Charles Bernstein, Sean O'Brien, John Tranter and Medbh McGuckian; several of the poets share an exploration of high rhetoric and poetic excess, which is good to see. And, a new poem is happily up at Hand + Star.

MLH gets a review

Mainstream Love Hotel, my 2009 British debut, has recently received one of its first reviews, from Barbara Smith.

Still Ill

I am doing my best to recover. Find this more challenging than expected. Have a lot to say about new poets and collections, hope to do that when better later this year. Will write more in 4 weeks hopefully. Yours, Todd. ps thanks for the comments.

Todd Swift For Sale

I cannot hope to compete with The Beatles, who roll out this week their video games and remastered mono tracks. How many fans got mono from the fab four fellers? Anyway, I too am rolling out my latest (sometimes music-themed) collection of love poems, and poems that love poetry (maybe too much). For those abroad, or bored, or all-aboard, they can go here to the mainstream love hotel site and order a copy. Thanks! Canadian orders will be possible soon, too. I'll suggest they do a US thing too.

Mainstream Love Hotel

My 6th full poetry collection - and debut British collection (after living here since 2003) - is being launched at the legendary Calder Bookshop, on The Cut, in London, at 7 pm, Tuesday, September 15th (three weeks from today). The publisher is that intrepid small press, now in its tenth year, tall-lighthouse, run by the great Les Robinson. The title is Mainstream Love Hotel. You are very welcome to attend the launch - admission and wine free.

A New Poem Inspired By Reading Giles Goodland

Hammersmith, June

The sadness of England.
The coming storm.
The exodus from Tesco.
The death by flu.
The disused factory.
The walk under the rail bridge.
The can of lager in the hand.
The silence of certain streets.
The man smoking by the nursery.
The internet in the video store.
The broken espresso machine.
The 11.30 Mass.
The sunbathers on the Green.
The uneven footing.
The broken pavement.
The methadone clinic.
The shelves outside the shop.
The closed inquiry.
The rain at five to six.
The word path.
The hot and cold.
The end of the class.
The poets of promise.
The ground floor flat.
The geraniums in the box.
The sense of an ending.
The slow growth for another year.
The fear of the impending.
The autumn after the summer.
The unsigned contract.
The request for information.
The loss of nerve.
The godfather agreement.
The leukaemia email.
The post on the floor.
The revolutions elsewhere.
The rubber band left untouched.
The locks on the door.
The friends over after dinner.
The bra being modelled.
The detector vans.
The five novels from Amazon.
The thunder.
The artificial night of a storm.
The brother’s child.
The return to either/or.
The despair of small things.
The respect for the brickwork.
The reading light turned off.
The way a list is.
The book by Goodland.

poem by Todd Swift

Seaway Reviews Update

Kate Rogers, the Canadian poet, has just published a review of Seaway at Cha, the Asian literary journal with an international remit. It has also been recently reviewed at NPR. And, to make matters better, also at Osprey, Scotland's ongoing online literary journal.

Pleasurable moments

Speaking of which, I just spotted this at Lemonhound. It kindly mentions a poem from my New and Selected, Seaway, in the same breath, or breadth, as several poets I admire. Thank you.