poetics | Marie Marshall

Pinning the tail on sunlight

Nice things people have said to me so far in 2019:

“You’re too brilliant to pin down, Marie. Like trying to pin the tail on the sunlight.”

“In my version of you, more like trying to pin the blame on an exploding supernova.”

“… arrogant bint!”

The third one there was said affectionately, I can assure you.

Not so much a revival, more a recycle:

In 2010 I opened a new website for my Lithopoesis project. I have played around on the edges of experimental poetry more-or-less ever since my stint of writing sonnets came to a close (“I’ve learned how to draw,” I said, “and now I’m entitled to pickle a shark and call it ‘art’.”), and it is now almost a decade since that particular period of work. The last post I made there, adding a forgotten piece of work, rather than constructing something new, was in 2012.

Now, however, I have decided to add another page there, to house the dribs and drabs of what I call ‘Impact Art’. Now, you know me – I don’t like to explain what I’m doing. You read my poetry and my prose, as is, and you make what you can of them. I feel, more often than not, that explanation is a destructive process. You, on the other hand, take over the matter of creation as soon as you see something of mine, as soon as you look at it, give it attention, relate to it, react to it, interpret it. Let that interpretation run to a scholarly thesis if you wish, go nuts, it’s fine by me.

So go and have a look at my ‘Impact Art’. Clicking the image to the right of this post will take you to its threshold; or you can simply click on the ‘Impact Art’ tab at the top of the page, over on the Lithopoesis site. Follow the blog there – I’ll post an update in the blog section whenever I add something new.

Am I still writing poetry?

Yes, over at Kvenna ráð I am. I’m resting my ‘Two hundred and seven words’ prose-poetry at the moment, and dropping an occasional haikuform poem, but yes I’m still dabbling. Go there, follow that too.

Thank you.

November 11, 2017

Poetics: Difficulty 2

When I posted a short article on ‘difficult poetry’ a while back – and here I jump in and admit that I tend to shy away from explaining my own poetics – I didn’t realise that another poet, one whose work I admire, was going to pick up the ball and run with it. Daniel Paul Marshall (no relation) has thought long and hard about the subject, gone deeper into the issues, and written more on the subject than I could hope to. I commend his article to you.

Dylan Thomas

Daniel mentions Dylan Thomas. Thomas is a poet who had a great influence on my writing at one time. I didn’t try to write like him, but rather I felt myself drifted along on the flotsam of his words, his transferred epithets, his god-knows-what. So I thought I would celebrate him today with one of my ‘easy’ poems from the past. This is a straight-down-the-line sonnet I wrote in 2008, and it uses some of Thomas’s words, as quoted by Daniel.

Closing time at Laugharne

I miss you – yes I do, you boozy Celt!
I’ve half a mind to hear you spin a yarn
While you, with pints of stout beneath your belt,
Traipse homewards through the rainy streets of Laugharne,
From Brown’s Hotel, where we propped up the bar
Till closing time. What’s closing time to me
Or you? Come on – the Boathouse isn’t far –
Down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack sea!
There’s pen and paper ready for your muse,
A bottle, and some glasses for a toast,
We’ll sit, and laugh, and rhyme a while, and booze –
But, Duw, dear lad, you’re nothing but a ghost!
Can such as you go, gentle, into night,
Or did you rage against that dying light?

1 Comment

September 9, 2017

Poetics: difficulty

But the fact of modern poetry’s being “hard to read” can be extolled as a virtue in and of itself […]. In writing that is propelled by sonic associations, for example, what one might call musicality, the result may, paradoxically, be a form of realism, giving the poem’s language material reality, palpability, presence, and worldliness. Such difficulty, even when it doesn’t produce conventional sense, may be engaging in its own right; or, from another point of view, it may be disengaging. It may be emblematic of resistance, elaborating a rejection and even a defiance of the production of totalizing and normalizing meanings, in resisting dogmatism, it may create spaces for ambiguity, provisionality, and difference. […] it may serve to roughen the surface of the work, so that it catches one’s attention, impedes one’s reading, wakes one up to reality. (Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, p330)

I am grateful to a friend of mine for pointing me in the direction of the above quotation. It comes from a book of collected essays by one of the late 20c’s most challenging and fascinating poets, and one for whom I have a great regard. I say 20c, but of course Lyn Hejinian is still with us, and long may she remain. My reference was to the fact that it was in the 1970s that she, along with the likes of Barrett Watten, came to write a type of poetry that attempted to put the reader and the reader’s interpretation at the forefront of the creative process.

RolandBarthes I have often, in conversation and on line, mentioned Roland Barthes’ famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’. These days it has become fashionable to scoff at Barthes, but for me he will always remain someone who forced home the important lesson that it is impossible to isolate The Great Poet-Goddess and Her Great Work from what came before and what comes after, that this Great Work is a work of a moment’s completion, after which it is totally free of the further influence of the Great Poet-Goddess, and is the property of all of us.

And that last phrase – ‘the property of all of us’ – is a principle that drives much of my poetry these days. I write for everybody. I write my poetry to turn it over to you. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to read. ‘Accessibility’ isn’t the point. Everything is inaccessible until you access it, and to access something doesn’t necessarily means you’ll instantly ‘get’ it.

People seem to think that it’s all right to be really into, say, Wagner, and yet also listen to Country & Western, and Trance. But not the other way round, for some reason. That’s where class and intellectual snobbery rear their ugly heads, and conversely intellectual reverse-snobbery too – yes, it works both ways. And all of this makes people feel that they can’t pick up something outside their comfort zone. We fear the facile and we fear the difficult.

But my message today is that difficulty belongs to all of us. Lyn Hejinian’s words at the head of this blog post seem, at first sight, not to offer much satisfaction. They are not a key to interpreting the intentions of a ‘difficult’ poet’s work, they seem to leave all that up in the air – it might be this, it might be that, it might be the other. But that is nothing more nor less than openness. It is an invitation to take a piece of ‘difficult’ poetry (or art, or music, or whatever) and run with it. If you don’t ‘get’ all of it, so what? Get what you can, make something out of it, play with the words and with the associations they spark in your own mind.

My poetry, at least some of it, resides here. Pick it up and run with it. It’s yours.

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Marie Marshall

Tag: poetics

March 30, 2019