Short Cuts
Review: Simon Smith Reverdy Road
Reverdy Road, Salt, £10.95, ISBN 1844710270,
Fifteen Exits, Waterloo Press (51 Waterloo Street, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 1AN), £9, ISBN 1902731077
If poetry were just about enviable coinages, Simon Smith would be on the syllabus. Try this, from the opening poem of the first of the three sequences re-published as Reverdy Road:
…I was just shuffling my feet
And then you swayed along with dance
Steps – that is everything in a train
as if I were drunk in charge of your love
Or these lines (which have been rattling around my head for weeks) from the second sequence “Household Gods”:
When all the assembled
Missiles are parody of dream
Aesthetic time is over.
Smith is also master of the deceptively casual poem, as in “Asking for It”, which begins “Household Gods”. It reads in toto thus: “A garden gate missing two slats / Kicked in is asking for more attention”, showing the directness of found poetry and the off-the-cuff spontaneity that characterises the best of the Beats.
Yet as characteristic of Smith’s work as such quick, light touches and imaginative leaps is a tendency to crude self-contradiction (“To tell you what you want to know / To tell you the truth I’m not going to”, for example). In his excellent first full-length collection Fifteen Exits (2001) such clumsy self-contradictions proved a very effective means of grounding Smith’s more exotic flights into Romanticism – a kind of bathos that allowed him to marry personable matter-of-factness with high Modernist collages of literary and philosophical reference (Wittgenstein, Lucretius, a wide range of – mainly US
– poets). The result was an almost Elizabethan method of muscular poetic disputation and metaphysical (in both senses) wit, refracted through a postmodern love of the texture and inconstancy of language itself. Denying the defining aesthetic qualities of British avant-garde poetry – namely density and the tight fracturing of sense – their mastery, the poems of Fifteen Exits encouraged the reader with partial narratives and apparently autobiographical titbits, without descending into an emotionally coercive confessionalism. (One line in Reverdy Road – “Too fast to pick off without a little biography
too” – may suggest Smith feels he went too far in this regard.) That the poems of Fifteen Exits were awkward – occasionally cussed – enhanced their charm, seeming to turn the Modernist epic of the everyday into something more nervous and democratically open, a kind of Frank O’Hara but more self-aware and consequently less self-possessed.
The wide-eyed and oddly abstracted beauty of that first book is also
evident here. There is the charming optimism of “you do amazing things simply by reading”, as well as the extreme lyricism of “Tears of rain wind round eaves tears of rain wind round eaves / Tears of rain wind round eaves tears of rain wind round eaves”. The latter is an instructive example of Smith’s approach. We pronounce “tears” confidently enough, but “wind” is more treacherous – should it be read as verb instead of noun? Such enactments of indecision – the nervousness I mentioned – lend grit to the moments of cheery optimism, and give an edge to the banality of lines like “Why are sex and love so exclusive?”.
The principal difference between Reverdy Road and Fifteen Exits,
however, is even more apparent than these similarities. Here Smith almost exclusively favours the short form. Only five poems over the 233 pages that make up this collection get on to a second page; none of those longer poems appear in the more than a hundred pages of the central sequence “Household Gods”. Smith’s version of the short form is neither the world-in-a-blade-of grass of the Japanese haiku, nor Williams’s red wheelbarrow. Rather they are
the modern progeny of the Imagists – insistently contemporary, often
extremely vivid, sometimes crude, too frequently forced. For all the casually acute observations (“Mobiles twitter call signs the birds catch”, say, from the final sequence “Xenia”), there are too many “Overheard poems that fit a notebook”, as Smith himself helpfully describes them – one-line joke poems, incomplete last lines, embedded song lyrics, circles of self-reference.With so few lines between each technical flourish, the effect of reading poem after
poem is strangely deadening. It is as if an improvising pianist eschewed the productive density of total abstraction without allowing himself the time and space to modulate between melodic and more angular chord clusters, thus robbing the audience of the pleasures of surprise, tension and resolution.
At its best (in “Xenia” particularly), Smith’s use of the short form over so many pages achieves an effect comparable to a villanelle. Repeated sound patterns, images and ideas give the poems cohesion and forward momentum, and the marvellous disputaciousness of Fifteen Exits returns in a modified form. But Reverdy Road is – as Smith might put it, given his wanton way with clichés – a game of two-thirds: the title sequence and “Xenia” are great, “Household Gods” uneven and ultimately wearisome. It is hardly controversial
to point out the huge impact that the recording medium has had on the development of music – the three-minute pop song was a response to the amount of time available on one side of the old 78rpm records; the James Brown “Funky Drummer” break became the staple of countless ’80s hip hop tracks because it was the best of the samples preloaded by the manufacturers into the most popular early sampler. The discussion of the effect of modes of publication on poetry is less common, yet it seems this collection of Smith’s
poetry suffers precisely from the ingenious variety of modes in which he initially published it. The title sequence was first published as a pamphlet, in the frontispiece of which Smith advertised the forthcoming longer work: “This … is the first section of a book length work also titled Reverdy Road”, noting that the additional poems would be “complementary to the poems published here”.Yet the original sequence seems little enhanced by its republication
with the two later sequences. Similarly, “Household Gods” is more
compelling as an e-book(www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/HG/SS1.html) than it is on the page. In the e-book format each new poem appears for ten seconds, before being replaced by the next, a mode of presentation that encourages less intense scrutiny of each poem, emphasising their lightness and quickness, enacting their elusiveness and rendering the repetitions of technique and content less irritatingly apparent.
Of course not everyone has access to webzines, nor to the grapevine
information about forthcoming pamphlet publications, so Salt’s avowed policy of publishing fugitive works in a form that will remain available as long as Salt themselves remain in business is sound. Salt also did well not to cram multiple poems on to each single page (if you doubt their wisdom, witness those Emily Dickinson collections that pack the poems in knee-deep to cut printing costs), but such impeccable respect towards their authors has not been matched here by an equivalent respect for their readers: Reverdy Road should have been shown the pruning hook. Two-thirds of a fine book of
poems may be as much as anyone deserves, but it’s half as much as I expected.
Page(s) 91-94
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