Shotgun Review #5: Loydell's Annunciations

George Ttoouli reviews Rupert Loydell's Dear Mary (Shearsman 2017)

Poetry book - available from Shearsman

Time taken to read: This was my toilet book for a few weeks while I was meeting a deadline. For a week I kept getting stuck on the preface. Then I switched to dipping in randomly, reading a few short pieces in a row or one long piece, to get a sense of the mood, tone, etc. Finally, I read the whole book (exc. preface) in one sitting while listening to ‘Dear Mary’ on repeat – about 52min. I still haven’t finished the preface, not for any fault of the writing, just, well, it’s not poetry.

Time taken to review: 1hr (+ some editing)

Where found: Sent by Shearsman. Possibly for review. It’s hard to tell with Rupert, he’s been sending me things in the post for over a decade. I didn't even give him my new address.[1]

Transparency: Rupert has been a long-standing affiliate for G&P. We’ve published his solo work, some of his collaborations, various bits and pieces. Also that aggressive interview, which is still the most successful in the series, despite being the first attempt. Rupert has also published some of my work at Stride Magazine and smallminded books and also the other one which published the thing he did with Sarah Cave, which they've been talking about on G&P this week. Some might say I’m too close to him, but this is a poetry-only love affair, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think we’ve met face to face since, oh, about 2002, when he told me over a busy restaurant table that I was trying to be ‘too clever’ in my poetry. I’ve always appreciated that honesty and respect him enough to serve the same back.

Time started: 13:15-14:15 to draft + editing

Review:

Anyone wondering where Luke Kennard gets his schtick from could save themselves the bother of digging around and read Rupert Loydell's poetry.[2] Particularly this new book, Dear Mary, just out from Shearsman (April 2017). The hallmarks are all there: the strangely inviting personal voice, the diaristic sense of someone's idiosyncratic life being recorded, a headlong confrontation with religion (tho with less of LK's trademark doubt and self-castigation), and, of course, the wry humour. But where Kennard's humour is the dominant note for a lot of his work - a bass line from which he deviates, much to the disappointment of his audiences, no doubt (stop trying to show range!) - Loydell's poetry carries a less-than-obvious central emotional tone, from which he can go many places. The work isn't pigeonhole-able in the same way.

As a result, it's easier to start with the complexity underwriting this book: the multiply-threaded frame, the sense of a lived experience undigested or filtered for 'meaning.' One of the pieces that most brilliantly encapsulates Dear Mary's range arrives early on, dedicated to David Miller. Starting as if it wants to be a prose review mixed with diary, it shifts to a slim column of images, before returning to a summative prose:

The poet's book has served me well, and has sat literally and conceptually alongside a short book on colour, a re-read novel of occult training and enlightenment, and a fictional exploration of moments when the celestial and human met or even touched.

('"A Process of Discovery"' - the title has quotation marks to denote its origin as a title from Miller).

I didn't check the notes before reading and assumed the book on colour was Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour (which serves as the title of one of Dear Mary's later poems). The notes tell me otherwise - it's not entirely significant however. What's obvious is how well Loydell weaves these aesthetic and personal elements through the book, using journal styles and minimalism and a range of other modes, somehow held together by a deft complexity of tone and emotion.

Colour is the strongest, early feature-of-significance to the poems. Part of the book might be taken as a discourse on painting, on sensory visuals, on the meaning of colour preferences. An early poem ('Lost in Colour') notes, presumably, Loydell's artistic training and how to others he seemed "seduced by colour" - a criticism he wears proudly. (The moment is reminiscent, to me at least, of Robin Blaser sharing Charles Olson's accusation, that Blaser's supposedly rubbish with syntax, in a collection called Syntax.) Of course, the play with voices elsewhere suggests I'm just making a rookie mistake, associating the training with the author's biography, but that's the mode at the beginning: lyrical memoir.

Yet this colour-conversation is where the book's 'realism' or 'interpretability' begins to break down for me. Ostensibly, we're led in the first half of the collection through Loydell's love affair with Italian Renaissance paintings of Mary and the Annunciation, while on holiday in Tuscany. He paints, he swims, he mucks about with colours, he drags his family on long drives to see his favourite paintings in remote churches, only to find the churches closed and no one around to let them in... If you ask me, Loydell must be an insufferable person to go on holiday with.

But this is a projection, a reconstruction. By the mid-point in the book I found myself thinking Loydell's never been to Italy in his life. The whole thing is a set up. All the artists and poets and critics referenced are actually twentieth century or more recent: Francis Bacon, Deborah Turbeville, David Hart, David Toop, David Batchelor (a lot of Davids) - the 'Fra Angelico' is Diane Cole Ahl's, not some 16thC maestro.

The 'aha!' moment for me is in a piece called 'The Pictures Started to Instruct Me': "I wanted all the colours to be present at once. / ... How difficult it becomes when one / tries to get very close to the facts". This is not real representation, but an interrogation of how difficult it is to turn the real world into art. The danger then is that you start to believe these unreal representations more than the world itself.

Moments of real experience in the first half of the collection contribute to a sense of the ridiculousness of artistic living. At the end of the poem for David Miller, the painter-poet gives up for a bit, decides to go for a swim: "A startled lizard runs from the sudden splash." The juxtaposition is somewhat ridiculous because the poem has barely made an attempt to locate the poet spatially in Tuscany. Is he in the sea? A lake? A pool? Where the hell is the lizard and how has the painter-poet even noticed it, if he's jumping into the water? The perspective is all shot through: that's the point: this isn't trying to represent reality. It's interrogating the ease at which we are 'seduced by colour' when we read, or view art.

Which then leads me to the second thread: "a fictional moment when the celestial and the human met or even touched". The 'Mary' of the title is, unobviously, a composite. The notes here reveal the lyrics of Steve Miller's 'Dear Mary' are themselves collaged from the lyrics of several other musicians' songs.[3] So too this Mary, filtering multiple Marys into a composite; they're not really about Mary herself, most of the time, but about the process of hunting down what Mary means, building that picture from multiple sources, making idiosyncratic connections and compiling them into something that seems believable enough to be real, but in fact, like the worlds built in each painting, is just another subjective version of the world, a new world, a world-in-itself.

This sense establishes itself and then, having prepped you through a kind of uncanny accrual of not-quite-right glitches in the matrix, we're offered the first proper discomfort provided by a number of long pieces: 'Shadow Triptych' after Francis Bacon. The three parts are not numbered, and the columns are, in turn, located to the left hand side of the page, the centre and the right, each in straight-edged columns, like the panels of a triptych. The series is in fact a kind of essay, or series of essays. And it's here (and in the later long pieces, particularly 'My Paper Aunt') where the collection's occult influences seem most prevalent.

The essay combines all the threads I've emphasised, but the tone shifts to something unnerving: the tones of Bacon's paintings, the fleshy torture, the sense of darkness inside those faceless jumbles of tendon and muscle. The notes to the poem are a long list of influences, including Bacon's paintings, of course, but also, surprisingly Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase' and, unsurprisingly, E.M. Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the entire 'Shadow Triptych' is a cento, but then, that's the beauty of the whole collection: it never lets you shake off the createdness of its 'world,' and that its 'world' is nothing more than the subjective experiences of just one person, nexused through many other subjectivities. (Nothing more! Hah!)

That said, there's more here than merely listening to someone else's heartbeat-in-language. That's not the point. I started with a comparison to Kennard at the beginning (my association, deployed in expectation (some of) our reader(s) might be familiar), I'll deviate back there now. There are a few poems here that I almost took as sacriligeous. In one, Mary goes online dating while Joseph's out. An angel shows up and "When he disrobed, it was a bit of a shock to see what he'd kept hidden" ('Online Dating Annunciation').

Later, there's 'Alien Annunciation': "according to Mary her pet's barking continued to get louder and louder throughout the visitation." If these had been part of a novella by, say, Colm Toibin, there'd probably have been a witch hunt. Instead, located here, there's a gentility and a kindness - a making senseness to how they form part of the picture of someone trying to make sense of a celestial encounter with the human, the real. The need to make sense, even where it transcends understanding.

These parts are perhaps closest to the aforementioned Kennardian absurdism. Tonally, however, they range out of easy laughter. There's a batch of poems in the second half of the book where humour seems to be the dominant mode, but in context of what's gone before, particular the doomy triptych, it's hard to take them as release or relief.

Or perhaps they're a temporary relief. A bit like the process-driven pieces. A few poems smack of googlisms, lists heavy with repetition and wild juxtaposition, where the ego shines out from the cracks between curated pieces, rather than glowing in the voice-driven language. The more deceptive pieces, the ones where the voice does a very good job of sounding familiar, are the places where I found myself least secure. The process-driven stuff - flarf, Oulipo, those conscious moments of trying to get outside of representational, first person lyric conventions - feels, to me, like it has had its day, especially here, with Dear Mary's unstable eye/I. Those diary pieces, so deceptively inviting, stretch the lyric mode into strange places, finding room to manoeuvre a personal personality within the constraints of very poetry-looking poetry.

Actually, if I had to give you an accurate sense of this book, I'd say, it's a bit like wearing a Rupert-suit for an hour. Yes, really; this is poetry as a record of experience, through and through: lived moments coupled to the reflections on, the long-running tracks of thought to which one person idiosyncratically returns, time and again, coupled to a private journalism, curated through a totalising subjectivity, but one which is always overstretching the rigidity of those boundaries with new perspectives, alternative subjectivities entering through, melding with the pluralist eye/I.

The poems in Dear Mary are knitted from the real experience of a person, filtered through the alembic known as Rupert Loydell and passed on, partial, imperfect, formed into meanings and moments, against which you'll find a flicker of what it means to be not-yourself, for just a moment. If that sounds a little bit Buffalo Bill, well, maybe that's fair enough: it's just the wrong side of understandable to leave me with an uncanny feeling of having been dropped into something too familiar to be knowable.

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[1] This is a lie, of course, and I should also add, I've had some delightful things in the post from Rupert, including a dozen or more issues from small-minded books.

[2] The fact check elves (OK, read: Rupert) notes that Kennard and Nathan Thompson and Rupert were all associated around Exeter at some point, along with people like Andy Brown (still there) and Alasdair Paterson (not sure if he's still there), latter of whom used to run a reading event, where perhaps they fraternised. The influence is speculation on my part. Also, I've slightly edited the passive aggressive, 'I miss you, Luke' out of the first sentence of the review, for reasons just stated.

[3] My rush job missed the fact that it isn't Steve Miller's song that's collaged, but Rupert's poem of the same title.

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (4/4)

"Fizzy-cola bottles with their light and dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt."

SC:

Not questioning is a problem. I hope I use poetry as an enquiry, or perhaps an interrogation, of philosophy, theology and language.

Sometimes you write poems that are about yourself, your friends, your family which could be read as memoir. Do you think it’s more difficult for women to do this and remain, to the reader, detached as men can? I use characterisation in my poems, partly to avoid this, and so that any details appropriated from my own life are allowed to exist outside of the context me.

So for example, we both talk about faith (or lack/doubt) in our poetry. Do you find that you are asked personal questions about religion?

And, while we’re adopting this serious tone, what’s your favourite pick ’n mix sweet? Mine’s fizzy-cola bottles with their light and dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt.

RML:

I don't know if I have ever done pick'n'mix! I used to like Kola Cubes when I was a kid. And white chocolate mice. Those sherbet flying saucer things too, with cardboard shells that stuck to the top of your mouth.

I was talking – well emailing – Clark Allison earlier about this whole idea of us being present in our poems. He quite rightly said we can only write about what we experience, but I was adamant that I want my poems to move away from confession. They obviously are about things that interest or concern me, but it doesn't mean the narrators are me, or that everything said in the poem is me speaking, or that what happens in them happened to me.

I have no idea if it's more difficult for women to be as detached. I don't see why it should be, and there are plenty of experimental women writers who choose not to write autobiographically or confessionally. It's also quite clear that even the likes of Lowell and Plath construct their own poetic personas. Everything is mediated!

So yes, characterisation, disruptive syntax, parataxis, jump cuts, collage, multiple voices etc are all useful tools to disabuse readers that it's me opening my heart up.

I do sometimes get asked about the content of my poems, yes. It's sometimes interesting to talk about the sources of ideas, but it depends who is asking. Despite our 'postmodernist loss of metanarratives' it's amazing how many universal ideas and stories do still exist, and the idea of the spiritual (or religious) is definitely one of them.

SC:

I think you’re ignoring the epiphanic nature of the pick‘n’mix counter.

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© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

YES RUPERT, STOP IGNORING THE EPIPHANIC NATURE OF THE PICK'N'MIX COUNTER. - GT.

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (3/4)

"Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a rubber duck."

RML:

Well, I look forward to the new ten poems... Yes, the male presence is interesting, something I've played with in Dear Mary, though more as a possible erotic presence or sexy male hunk than menacing presence.

I love Robert Lax's work, but it's so bare and minimal that I don't often find that it leaves room for associative texts, variations or responses, whereas the annunciation is already part of a complex web of ideas, images, theology, belief systems and associative stuff that one can go on forever responding and reinventing. I mean just that jump from angel to devil to snake to Jim Morrison of the Doors is easy. I can't do that with Lax! (He might have been relieved.)

What I do like is the sense that both Lax and Merton were in many ways recluses who lived apart from the world yet were able to intelligently observe and comment on it. I feel too awash in information, images, texts and music to get that kind of perspective. Though I wouldn't mind being a hermit in Tuscany for a while – as long as I could fly to New York or London every so often. And before you laugh, remember Thomas Merton was the kind of solitary person who sometimes jumped over the monastery wall to drink whisky with his friends and publisher. A civilized way to live, I feel.

SC:

Perhaps. Merton scores very low in Hermit Top Trumps though.

RML:

Possibly, although I think he has high spiritual superpowers which sometimes win out.

Anyway, what about this idea of themes and specifics within a web of stuff rather than on its own. Did you feel the Fra Angelico was outside your subject areas? How did you get from that painting to the ideas you used?

SC:

I didn’t. As you mentioned earlier, the annunciation has a complex web of associative images, texts and references in popular culture, so I came to it through different means. I don’t think I looked at the painting until we were several poems in. I’d written a few poems about Mary previously concerned with the bodily reality of giving birth. At the time of writing the Snow Angel Annunciation poem, I was mostly inspired by Pål Moddi’s version of Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer, the music video of which features the Norwegian folk-singer sitting on the steps of a church near the Norwegian/Russian border in sub-zero temperatures, the church having decided that it was too politically risky allowing him to play inside the church. That sense of faith being silenced and being forced to exist in the margins is present in that poem. Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a rubber duck.

I imagine when I look more closely at Fra Angelico I will be more interested in him. I like monks and nuns… not in a 1970s Nunsploitation kind of way though.

I have this web of ideas developed over thirty years of varying degrees of religious education, misinformation and re-constructed fragments in which to piece together my annunciation poems. Sunday school, Catholic friends at university, Jesus cartoons, religious music, a research interest in mysticism and the Robert Powell movie Jesus of Nazareth left plenty of material to build my new annunciation nest with.

Can you think of any more hermits for Hermit Top Trumps?

RML:

I guess Thoreau has to go straight in the set. Perhaps Saint Francis and some of the Desert Fathers. After that I kind of run out of steam. I don't think hermits is a specialist area of mine at all! If I thought harder it would be rather heavy on Christian mystics and recluses though, despite my shelves full of poets.

Marginalized belief is interesting... Sydney Carter, the poet and songwriter ('Lord of the Dance' is his most famous) writes well about spiritual doubt, and the tension with faith, which of course is much more interesting than people who are sure about everything. My friend A.C. Evans always talks about the 'leap of doubt', with a nod to existentialism and gnosticism, as well as a cynical take on occult and conspiracy theories. My own mix of Sunday school, church and reading liberal and postmodern theology, along with the death-of-god and humanist strands, not to mention fiction by the likes of Charles Williams and Tim Winton has produced my own peculiar take on it all, which as I put in 'Sudden Impact':

      We must look at what

      we see, make up our minds, pay attention

      to surfaces and the different ways they

      catch the light through religious smoke.

This religious smoke, along with new age smoke, and fundamentalist smoke, seems to me to cloud everything.

It's not so much faith being silenced, as doubt being silenced; we are asked not to question at all. And if we don't engage with thinking and questioning we seem to end up with pick'n'mix anything-goes woolly new-age nonsense.

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© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (2/4)

"Poets can be like the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most of the work yourself"

SC:

I don’t think these annunciation poems would have happened for me if you’d just emailed me a copy of the Fra Angelico painting one rainy Sunday.

Poets can be like the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most of the work yourself. They come along and unlock the mechanism and you think, ‘well, I was almost there’ but, in the end, they did open the jar for you because, before they came along with their jar-opening words, you were just looking at some jam (maybe Marmite if we’re talking contemporary art) through glass, scraping away the label or reading the contents list trying to imagine how all that might come together…

Sad. No toast for you and along comes this poet and out come the jam-words and everyone can have toast.

Slava was the result of me trying to open two jars at once and making a mess all over the floor. The first was the poet Robert Lax whose ekphrastic blue/black poem continues to fixate me. It really isn’t much more than, as you say, mimesis and yet something lives in the words that doesn’t in the Reinhardt painting it mirrors.

Perhaps it’s the poet himself, or, perhaps, something that the poet brought to the painting that I couldn’t.

The second jar was the polyarnik Vyascheslav Korotkin who appeared in the Guardian as photographed by Evgenia Arbugaeva. He’s the real Slava. I don’t know if I imagined a whole new life for him. I didn’t want to get too personal. Nevertheless, his life fascinated me. Turning him into a monk allowed me to work at the two emerging ideas at once. I’ve never met Lax or Korotkin but both unlocked problems I needed to work through and I had to find a way to enjoy toast with them.

I guess I did something similar in my re-imaginings of the annunciation. I wanted to re-introduce elements such as the difficult family dynamics, secrets and unreliable male figures that are erased from the gospel version of the story and work out how those erasures were problematic for me. Whilst also, hopefully, entertaining with my brand of heretical religiosity.

RML:

So, I guess like me, though perhaps with different concerns, you are weaving stories (in poetry) around and from paintings or stories or other poems? I think the idea of layers is one that I found myself peeling away when I started to think about why the Fra Angelico annunciation in San Giovanni Valdarno appeals to me so much. It's not just the image itself, it's the fact it's the least known and regarded of his annunciation paintings, the fact it used to be in a small room behind the church altar which you had to squeeze in to, and then all the symbols and motifs I had to read about to understand. Lilies, porticos, blue dress, abstract floors, not to mention early ideas of perspective; and then the centuries of annunciation paintings everywhere in Western Europe, not least of course in every tiny Italian church you care to enter.

And of course I am fascinated by this asexual, often muscular being, with glorious wings, in conversation with this placid and devotional, slightly bewildered virgin woman, who even as it happens seems to have ideas of 'Queen of Heaven' dumped on her. Where's Joseph in all this? Why are so many of the angels so prettified and resplendent? There's a magical moment being painted here, basically a kind of alien encounter – things from another world arriving in the human world. I somehow wanted to write about all that, hence the variations and retellings of the annunciation story, imaginary paintings by those, like Francis Bacon, who never did and probably never would, paint an annunciation, and a wider set of poems about Italy, colour, abstraction, and contemporary art. The series still seems to be spiralling away from the completed Dear Mary book into new areas, hence our collaboration.

Did something like this happen between Lax and Korotkin for you? I mean Lax does come with various baggage attached: ideas of being a hermit, his murky past in America, his friendship with Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt, the very cult nature of his work: elusive in language and style, but also in its availability! You suggested that sending you a Fra Angelico jpeg wouldn't have done anything, presumably just a Lax book wouldn't have either? It's associative and contextual stuff, plus the personal links we bring as individuals to a subject, yes?

SC:

Yes. I guess so. My nest of words. Your nest of words. The nest of words around certain iconic images. We’re all throwing bits of nest at each other as we interact and consequently making new nests or maybe adding extensions to the roost. Everything from the nest gets used and re-used and you can see the architecture of my brain-nest in my poems. To quote Vahni Capildeo, ‘language is my home’ and I think I can more easily understand the Lax poetry and the accounts of Korotkin’s life and build nest-images with that than I can with the Fra Angelico painting. Although, to contradict myself, I also found Evgenia Arbugaeva’s images a necessary handle on Korotkin’s life and Lax’s poetry is often concretely imagistic.

In some of my annunciation poems, I’ve changed the story completely. I was fixated, for a time, with the idea of a menacingly male angelic presence. The bluebeard figure of Leonard Cohen and the androgynous David Bowie are both symbolic of more complex, contemporary ideas of female sexuality. Both are just as problematic as the original.

It’s a strange scene, something of a monolith, that if looked at closer unravels like a green field, which you can either decide is just a green field and get on with your life or you can lie down and listen to how it’s an infinite number of other things.

You know I think I’ve just thought up ten new annunciation poems whilst writing this. Second book?

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© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (1/4)

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell recently collaborated on a series of annunciations (sort of), published as Impossible Songs (Analogue Flashback 2017). They talk about ekphrasis, religion, philosophy, nests and pick'n'mix. Also poetry.

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"It would be rude not to leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work"

RML:

Your poems often adopt disguises, appear to be about one thing but are actually about another. I'm thinking about Moomin poems that aren't actually about the trolls, and annunciation poems that are not really, or just, about angels and virgins.

SC:

I blame my Brown Owl.

The first art work I remember making – that didn’t consist of my parents standing next to a strange abstract expression of a house – was a pasta Jesus smiling serenely from a cardboard canvas. I suppose, even then, that was more about lunch.

The sense of the absurd is important in the poems you mention but this absurdism is also underpinned with a serious reflection usually existential. I think poetry has displaced my sense of character and Moomins, rubber ducks, angels and virgins are all fragmented apparitions of my understanding/misunderstanding of philosophy, theology or life. I studied philosophy for a time and wrote more interesting marginalia about Heideggerian shadow-puppets than I did essays about the sublime. I use masks and puppets as ways to express a sense of displacement, either my own or someone else’s.

Writing a straight description of a painting or an event has its place but it isn’t the kind of poetry that I’ve ever wanted to write. This approach loses some of the extra-imaginative content of life. If I went to a gallery, for example, I wouldn’t want to respond to the art work in this way because I would be missing something important in the exchange between me and the artwork. It would be rude not to leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work. Moominmamma wouldn’t approve of such behaviour. The Moomins throw up their own problems. As somebody else’s literary invention, there’s the risk of writing too closely to the original. Something new has to come from the interaction to justify it.

If you want to read stories about the Moomins then there’s this writer called Tove Jansson who does a great job. For the Annunciation, I recommend The Gospel of Luke. That’s my favourite.

The point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the same thing.

The point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the same thing.

RML:

Yes, of course, although ekphrasis is also to do with mimesis and the translation of image into language. But like you I want to bring some different ideas and ways of thinking to my subject matter.

In your Slava poems it is almost as though you invented a character, a state of mind, and a place for him to live, and then wrote what happened. Most of my work gets fixated on an event or idea, in the Dear Mary poems the annunciation, and work from there. I loved thinking about seeing the annunciation through a surveillance camera, or re-imagining it as an alien encounter (which I guess in many ways it was!), and looking at some of the different paintings that artists have done.

There's part of me always thinks it would be better to somehow just get my readers to look at the Fra Angelico annunciations in San Marco, Florence or San Giovanni though... I'm not trying to be modest, but there is a sense that words don't do them justice. But I hope the different ways of thinking about them, and about the whole concept of another world intervening in the human one, is a different experience. It's that intervention that I am fascinated by at the moment.

I always work in series of paintings too.

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© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017