Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Enough is enough! Even good things end. This last selection from ‘Pensées - Work In Progress’ acts as an introduction, with the necessarily inchoate format, to the book called Pensées which will be out before not too long.

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Pensées are hieroglyphic fragments, pointers to help focus perception. They are part of an explanatory rationale to the multi-titled, example book  i’ll unsee U in my dreams, where intentions are not easily discerned. The intentions are about content and its formal structural interdependence, season word equivalents, effects of ‘moment’ transfiguration when transcribed by the language medium, ‘cycles’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ language in relation to context, the effect on the reader, the effect of reader interpretation, historical relationships, Regional v Global, ‘I’ in ha(I)ku as an expression of Ego, ‘unclarity’, free-form or not, Zen or not - to name but a few!

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There is always a degree of fear attached to subverting convention and questioning assumptions. It is always useful if alternative perceptions and interpretations of ‘reality’, leading to temporary developments, are stimulated. A ‘worst case’ scenario would be for the Pensées reflections and concerns to be ignored as incomprehensible, applied superficially, or appropriated by a liberal convention able to absorb and bury free-roaming individualism.

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The Waste Land of T.S.Eliot, published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce’s limited edition of Ulysses, gave poetic tradition a good working over; it was, in a period of experimentation, the culmination of a modern poetry movement. As Malcolm Bradbury pointed out in The Modern World, it was ‘an extraordinary bridge between the great poetic and mythic achievements of the past and the poetic necessities of the present, because... it was a great undermining and a new beginning’. It was a learned and difficult work, but the learning was not mere pedantry; more ‘a complex method of interweaving old and modern poetic cadences... and was a profound critique of the arid culture of the time’. Both remain examples to our ‘everyday’.

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For many haiku/senryu poem manufacturers simile is 99.8% anathema and 99.9% unacceptable, even though its role is to amplify and clarify, by application in another context, that which might be too complex to comprehend or fully realise as a stand-alone object. With an aim of partially explaining Pensées and the previous ‘book-as-sample’, I shall use, if not similes, at least a couple of analogies.

Analogy One is a rare example of creative achievement in the sporting arena. It forever altered the activity of high jumping. Technological improvements did not negate the primary importance of two uprights and a moveable bar. The same applies to height, footgear and ‘run-up’ requirements. Change was in the content and form of the jump, which had knock-on consequences for the run-up pattern. Height was achieved by moving from the conventional style of the ‘scissor kick’ to the revolutionary ‘Forsbury Flop’. This was not a lineal or evolutionary development, but lateral problem-solving at its best. A quantum leap (sorry!), it changed everything! For Dick Forsbury, the magnitude of the achievement is all the greater for devising the change after becoming skilled in globally accepted conventions, with specific characteristics, attributes, guidelines and ‘rules’. The massive alteration to his existing ‘mind-set’ moved him into the new mental space of creative artist. Followers ‘flop’ higher than he, but they begin their learning curve from the baseline of his revolution. ‘Scissor-kick’, as a style, as content and form, is Dodo! To make use of this historical antecedent is not only counter-productive it is a dinosaur recipe.

Analogy Two reminds us of the vast quantity of creative music written and performed under the Baroque umbrella, with its highly identifiable stylistic conventions, using characteristics and structures that complied with ruling parameters. They may have seemed eternal. So with 350 years of modern haiku! Millions written, of variable quality! Despite the seemingly limitless variations, they fit neatly within a well-tended-garden-of-confinement. Baroque structures and content would not allow in at least Mahler, Brahms, Glass, Mendelssohn, Grieg, Sibelius, the musical structures of India, China, Japan. Today’s haiku do not allow in... ?

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Experimentation for its own sake is acceptable in that it is a device, much like those of the surrealists, to open doors of unselfconscious attachment. All else needs to be backed up with strong conviction and a stronger rationale. There should be no concern that, on the whole, outcomes are rejected, unless dumbed down plagiarism rears its flat-topped convention-making head.

bitter                                               shadow might
this not comprehend                                        into        birdblacks
                 nightday                                     deeper                sow
or u                                                snow hints

Mostly, they are laid to rest in peace. Only a brave, well-balanced, broad-backed editor could act differently. It is like asking Vivaldi, posthumous Editor of that classically structured journal  The Baroque Music Quarterly to not understand but support, print and perform the works of say, Schönberg, Satie or Gorecki. Now, there’s a perspective to ponder!

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Marshall McCluhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media and The Medium is the Massage, despite Jonathan Miller’s brave attempt to demolish, leapfrogged existing perceptions. Almost as iconoclastic as Einstein’s e=mc2, Gurdjieff in All and Everything, and Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel, McCluhan’s thesis is an overarching process that shifts reality awareness. In haiku terms, language is our medium of ‘moment’ experience transfiguration. Changing language changes everything! This includes content/structure/form relationships; extending expression and range of meaning; increased connections between allusion, innuendo, ambiguity, and, in addition to image juxtaposition, word and sound juxtapositions, making new, if temporary, parameters.

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Pensées is not about haiku that result from semantic word play or syntactic displacement. These are examples of a process. THEY ARE NOT THE PROCESS! The expression of this process is Pensées (and the example book i’ll unsee U in my dreams), which asserts that nothing should be taken for granted, that it is appropriate to question, examine, review and take a fresh look at components of the genre, and maybe realign them, or reduce the emphasis of some and increase others if the context makes this an imperative. Examples include understanding ‘unclarity’, more covert expressions, purposeful ambiguity and innuendo; in fact, the use of any device if it increases a holistic approach to form, function and content in haiku. In short, Pensées is yet another beginning, a WHY? and WHY NOT?

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Finally, that Pensées title! It is an ironic, mannered hint at the tendency to preciousness, pretentiousness, and even an unconscious jingoistic fundament-alism that, with time, seems to creep into the haiku genre and soon settles, insidiously affecting structure, content and perception