Curtis Is As Kurt Does

"I feel it closing in / Day in, day out ..." Ian Curtis (pictured) sang on "Digital" - a curiously futuristic title in the late 70s. Now he is one of the true digital icons. The band he led, Joy Division, blooded the new post-punk era in May 1980, when Curtis - most famously - killed himself before embarking for America - indeed, the 27th anniversary was yesterday.

One wants to write Amerika. For Curtis is the Kafka of popular independent music - or its Van Gogh, maybe - a European figure of strange tormented, imaginative frequencies, whose antennae were tuned to isolated, icy cold black transmissions. His radio played the depths of German feeling, angst, and history.

The enduring fascination with Curtis - a new film debuted to acclaim at Cannes yesterday, with the three remaining members of the band (New Order) present - is entirely morbid and entirely justified. Like Sylvia Plath before him, and Ms. Kane after, his is an English Suicide underwritten by extraordinary artistic talent. The word genius fits this epileptic man.

Why? Three reasons. One, his lyrics were uniquely potent in their objective correlation of the post-industrial wasteland he inhabited with his own dying soul. Two, his strange, estranged, robotic delivery (in terms of deadpan voice and spasmodic physical performance) fully brought across the message of his words, embodying true existential anxiety as no one in music had before. Three, his songs are, time and again, barren yet perfect melodies poised on an exhilarating knife edge between total human austerity, and passionate, neo-romantic utterance - they are beautifully spare, like a slagheap in sunlight, or perhaps sunlight photographed in black and white. Joy Division was an uncanny package, whose timing, indeed, control (and ultimate complete giving away of that, in death) are emblematic. In an age when artists, celebrities, and rock stars dream of being great, few incarnate an idea, or a vision, unto death. Kurt is one. But first, was Curtis.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/hdxm/

Poem by Sudeep Sen

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Sudeep Sen (pictured) this Friday.

Sen is the 2004 recipient of the prestigious ‘Pleiades’ honour at the world’s oldest poetry festival — the Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia — for having made “significant contribution to modern world poetry”. Sen studied at St. Columba’s School and read literature at Delhi University and in the USA. As an Inlaks Scholar, he completed an MS from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. Winner of many international and national prizes, he was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA) for poems included in Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins). More recently, he has published Postcards from Bangladesh, Prayer Flag, Distracted Geographies, and Rain.

His poetry appears in important international anthologies published by Penguin, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Norton, Knopf, Everyman, Macmillan, and Granta; and his other writings have appeared in the TLS, Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, and London Magazine, among others. Sen was an international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is the editor of Atlas, editorial director of Aark Arts, and lives in New Delhi and London.

Mediterranean

1

A bright red boat
Yellow capsicums

Blue fishing nets
Ochre fort walls

2

Sahar’s silk blouse
gold and sheer

Her dark black
kohl-lined lashes

3

A street child’s
brown fists

holding the rainbow
in his small grasp

4

My lost memory
white and frozen

now melts colour
ready to refract


poem by Sudeep Sen, reprinted with permission of the author

In The Dark

Eyewear often writes about popular music - sometimes reviewing "pop music" - and this might strike some readers as less serious writing than that which considers, say, poetry, or even film. They might be right. Little popular music bears the same weight of scrutiny as a first-rate poem, or great film.

Indeed, the names of those composers, lyricists, performers and singer-songwriters who have distinguished themselves as being artists, while arguably large, may truly include only a few creators of genius - Cole Porter, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, The Beatles / George Martin, The Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, The Doors, Patti Smith, Joy Division, The Smiths, Nirvana, Elliott Smith - and the perennial Bob Dylan, for instance.

There are others, but not too many more. Why this is so, no one can say - but it may have something to do with the fact that while intelligent pop music is open to the full resources and strictures that also mark and shape poetry - music and metaphor, thought and feeling, form and content for starters - pop music is not, ultimately, about intelligence. It is about entertainment, and memorability, and also being something very lovely or charming or even sentimental, that moves a listener, to dance, or hum along, but surely, to buy. Art does not simply enchant, though, it can alarm, or warn. Music with words that bears the full pressure of art's demands is more often called opera, or a musical. Wagner or Britten loom.

But there are very good pop musicians, who deserve to be appreciated for the serious, innovative, often thrilling creators they are - not just during their period, but after it. OMD, who have recently begun to tour again, are one such group. Their heyday, in the early 1980s, saw them conquer America with a song in a John Hughes film, Pretty in Pink, and so they share a sort of fate with Simple Minds. They are too often maligned for being "an 80s band" - as if a band was ever not of its time. But OMD created sonic works of great resonance, and, yes, intelligence. Few melodies are more ironic or disturbing, than "Enola Gay". You hum to an atrocity. Architecture & Morality is often considered their finest album - and indeed it is the one they are currently touring anew. It is a great work, but their second album, Organisation, is actually better, though perhaps rougher in places.

Its last song, "Stanlow", a homage to an oil rig, is the most beautiful industrial pop song ever written, and its inclusion of the machinery of the rig is both haunting and musical, without ever losing its heavy identity as a thing apart from what we think of as the diction of song. One of the songs on the album even relates to Ian Curtis, and it is often forgotten how OMD, who played with Joy Division, were of that time and place. Less famous than Joy Division, but in some ways as intriguing, OMD's later work is more upbeat, just as New Order's was, in the late 80s. No harm in that. Pop music can be popular, after all.

http://www.omd.uk.com/html/biography.html

Don't Quit Your Day-Lewis Job

One of the mysteries of poetry is that one can be hard pressed to tell, from among one's many contemporaries, whose poetry will "last" - but after only 35 or 40 years, the mist has lifted, and it is as if the chaff or dross had never existed, so clear is the view to the gold of the wheat fields. Consider Yeats, or Larkin, who both famously anthologized shiploads of dud poets in their Oxford anthologies, presumably because they thought it was "good" poetry.

Ian Hamilton's Against Oblivion is worth reading, concerning the point at which a poet, a body of work, a reputation, is beginning, like New Orleans, to sink, or like the Pisan tower, to lean. The movement can be in the other direction, too - poet-editors and critics are now rediscovering worth in Lynette Roberts, for instance - but more often than not, the direction is conclusive, and it is towards a reputation at rock bottom.

Cecil Day-Lewis (pictured) seems to be at that stage now. The recent review, by the current Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (see link), is fascinating for a number of reasons. But one of the most striking aspects of the piece, is that for all the age's apparent indeterminacy on aesthetic and textual matters, bad writing is bad writing, and usually gets outed, sooner or later. Particularly, poetry - often thought to be rather easy to write by those who don't write it, or who simply dabble - is an extraordinary litmus taste for a good mind. It is simply not possible to fool a poem into existence, hard as one might try. Beneath the surface - indeed, on the surface - each choice the poet makes betrays their intelligence - and their knowledge - of their art. Poetry is so often compared to magic, it might be a corrective to instead compare it to the game of chess, if only to see if that makes metaphoric sense, too. I think it does. Each line is a move in a game where no false move can win.

As Paul Muldoon has shown, a poem is a complex web of allusion; words, images, phrases, echo and rebound, through the words. At the end of the day, the poet's choice of diction and syntax (the words, and their order) combine with whatever formal patterns are employed (metre, rhythm) to project a sense of a personality - what Alvarez - among others - calls "voice". This voice either stales or stays fresh, over time.

Auden, whose under-celebrated centenary this is, cannot wither or stale. As Hamilton wrote, he was oblivion-proof. Day-Lewis, who worked in the shadow of Auden, and aped his style, could not evade oblivion, because he never managed to find a style, a voice of his own. There is a force, a fuse, a fire, in an original poet, that lights them home, and keeps their work alive. Dylan Thomas - so often maligned now - had it. W.S. Graham had it. Some do. But some poets can't lift their writing off the page, and into that space that sustains. Can you?

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2077492,00.html

Are You Equipped?

Eyewear is open to innovative linguistic practice, and small press publishing, in poetry. Equipage is one of the places where these two things meet, with significance, in the UK. See their new catalogue below.

E Q U I P A G E

c/o Rod Mengham, Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL, U.K.


JUST PUBLISHED:

Simon Jarvis, F subscript zero, 8” x 9”, price £4.00
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Andrew Duncan (editor and translator), Depart, Kaspar: Modern German Poems, A5, 44pp, price £3.00

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Poem by Evie Christie

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Evie Christie (pictured) this Friday. She's a young Canadian poet, born in Peterborough, Ontario, who now lives in Toronto. That's all the biography I have. Other than that, all I know is, her debut collection from ECW Press is very promising.

It's raw, brave, explosive stuff - full of old men who work in "porno stores", shotgun shells, and tornadoes - it's mythic and it's real, and low and high - Wild West poetry for a broken heart and a racing mind. Ken Babstock, one of Canada's finest poets under 40, has written of Gutted that "Christie's poems frighten themselves awake". I recommend her. You''ll find more at www.ecwpress.com - the poem here is from Gutted and is reprinted with permission of the author.

Straw

I’ve told you about the sheep’s heart.
I can’t say how many pounds without
The blood, only that it was two fists, mine
Not yours (which are considerably larger).

A man was ablaze on Queen’s Park Blvd., we heard
The sirens and later learned on TV that farming is,
As suspected, not the best career choice these days.
It wasn’t like that when we smelled of straw.

Remember our sun-burnt brothers’ bikes,
Funded with 8 hour bailing days, minus lunch?
Or how the smell of shit and feed announced
Formals and final grades? And your first time

In the barn, razor marks straw-lined you
Neck-to-ass, and big, cool bovine eyes, so much
Like the open shutters of heavy German cameras,
You’d sometimes wonder what they kept of you.

Risky Business

I've been reading Al Alvarez's wonderful new collection of essays - his first in 40 years - called Risky Business. It's just out from Bloomsbury, and, aside from the literary reviews, there are rugged insights into poker, mountain climbing, polar expeditions and oil rig roughnecking. As the blurb says, and rightly, he's Britain's "most unusual man of letters". And, arguably, its bravest - the one with most integrity.

When I interviewed him for Magma a year or so ago, I was struck by his ongoing commitment to an intelligent modernism. His belief in, and support of, Sylvia Plath, pictured, and several other major voices of the mid-century (Lowell, Herbert), endures. More impressively, by republishing his infamous 1980 appraisal of Seamus Heaney (first appearing in the New York Review of Books) 27 years later, and after the Nobel, he sticks to principles that have not, for him staled. Alvarez wrote of Heaney's work, then, that "it challenges no presuppositions, does not upset or scare, is mellifluous, craftsmanly, and often perfect within its chosen limits. In other words, it is beautiful minor poetry, like Philip Larkin's, though replacing his tetchy, bachelor gloom with something sweeter, more sensual, more open to the world - more, in a word, married."

Alvarez may be wrong here (Heaney can upset, and is not always perfect) but who else, of the mainstream critical establishment, then, or now, in the American-British world of letters, could have written that, or would have dared, in such a forum? Who else so intelligently, and stylishly, and with commitment, thought through to consider and place contemporary poets within the Tradition, the canon? No one, really.

Ian Hamilton is another such critic, much missed. The age of the mainstream reviewer - erudite, direct, engaged, explanatory, sensible, scrupulous, unimpressed and unintimidated, and at arm's length from power or what passes for power among poets - is ending, or has passed already. There are younger (chiefly Irish and Canadian) very good critics, like Starnino, or Redmond, who appear relatively fearless, but they have yet to write a definitive survey of their age, their era, as R. Jarrell did. Where is their A Poetry Chronicle, say, or Beyond All This Fiddle?

Alvarez told me he missed the decline of literate reviewing, as academicism overrun the world of letters. Now, we have complex essays and often short puff-piece reviews, but fewer stately, armchair writings on poets, and poems. Poetry is sustained by such writing, and such bravery. Here's to a revival of fortune for the riskiest business.