‘When a finger points at the moon, an idiot points at the finger’

David’s poetry is the moon (and the sun, and the stars).

The idiot is…

well, just check this thread.

New Zealand doesn’t deserve a writer of David’s genius!

LAW AND ORDER

Don’t be deceived by the roses in that prim vase.
The nuzzling buds, the sluttish petals unfurling -
anther, stamen, pistil erect,
twitching for a fuck.

Outside, in the hot dark, the sap simmers.
The grass shoots up green blades.
Pods burst.
The oleander thrashes at the glass.
Tendrils reach and grasp.

In the Serengeti a predator is ripping something apart.

Listen: the bulbs are sprouting.

There’s a tremor in Mexico City.

The compost is fraught with worms.

Beneath a lagoon somewhere, something silently explodes.

I quite agree with you – there are other conversations which David Lyndon Brown’s poems are part of. If I focus on a poem like ‘Law and Order’, rather than a poem that is more obviously connected to ‘gay Auckland’, that’s not because I think the second type of poem is less important, but because I perhaps don’t feel well qualified to discuss it. I am interested in hearing or reading such a discussion, though. I hope Skin Hunger attracts additional reviewers who explore its other aspects.

When I discussed David’s prose works Calling the Fish and Marked Men back in 2007, I talked about them in relation to the decline of the quality of life that many Aucklanders experienced as a result of the neo-liberal capitalist ‘reforms’ of the ’80s and ’90s:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2007/07/decay-and-beauty.html

There was an interesting discussion about that review, too!

Instead, it seems to me that what James objects to in his comments above is authoritative, prescriptive readings of poems – which, let’s face it, academics are prone to, simply by virtue of their disciplinary penchant for asserting claims to knowledge.

To “turn people away from poetry for fear they might not get it” …it seems a little perverse to assume that discussion, or thought, are the likely culprits here. Isn’t it more likely that the aggressive assertion of one particular set of thoughts about a poem may turn away – be inhospitable to – those with other frames of reference or relationships with that poem?

A case in point is Scott’s assertion in his reply to James that:
“David Lyndon Brown’s poem acquires its meaning and value within that conversation.” These are strong words: the MEANING of the work is conferred in this way. The conversation in question is a
“complex and long-running conversation in which poets have faced up to a seemingly fundamental feature of human life – the isolation we feel from the natural world and the threat which that world seems to pose to us.”
A conversation, moreover, which “involves many writers, living and dead.”

An emphatic assertion. But what of those who approach Brown’s poem through other conversations, other means? Why should they be invalidated? What might it mean, for example, to approach a poem like Law and Order, with all its connections between nature and sex, as part of the conversations his book has within homosexual discourses, or within gay Auckland? The review here relegates those aspects of the work to the margins, rather quaintly suggesting that those “poems set amidst Auckland’s gay community have considerable sociological and historical value”. I want to emphasise, though, that there is “meaning and value” to be found for Brown’s poem within that conversation, too.

Why should poetry somehow be the privileged domain of writers, writers, and more writers? Perhaps James has a point: there is certainly something fundamentally inhospitable about the idea that poetry is somehow hermetically sealed against other aspects of human experience, human history, and human culture.

I found some of the poems in that book to be of a quality of what I would call great – and many are very moving. Particularly the poems concerning his mother’s death, as my own mother died of a stroke.

Criticism is how literature is promulgated and promoted. How else is a potential audience to hear of this book?

If Scott thought the book was rubbish he would “tear it to pieces”

I know him and I know David enough to know that sparks would fly. But such is the nature of writing and the creative process. It is a part of a larger “industry” in all Art.

But clearly this was a very positive review.

I was there when David read these poems at Auckland Live (at the Thirsty Dog in K Road) and I realised then I had to get a copy of his book.)

D L Brown references many writers (directly or obliquely) so in no way is he not “literary”, or is he not also philosophic or even ‘religious’ in a sense of that word: integrated with that there is an intense feeling of life beng so close to death and the enormity of the sexual (and sometimes the wry humour of that sexuality or sensuality and life) – the being alive in the world – and death is powerfuly present as well as life and desire and the body.

And his language and his images are extraordinarily intense, which reinforces the “terrible beauty” depicted.

Here are some jottings on poetry by Marx Clark that some might appreciate

http://clarkmax.blogspot.com/2009/06/o-learn-to-read-what-silent-love-hath.html

James seems to see the involved and passionate discussions that can arise around poetry – discussions that can find venues in the introductions to books, in book reviews, in forums like this one, and even (horror of horrors) in academic seminar rooms – as impediments to the actual experience of poetry.

James is implicitly suggesting that there is a radical separation between the sort of experience that a poem gives us and a sort of experience that we have when we engage in intellectual debate. He seems to be suggesting that a poem communicates directly, bypassing the parts of our brain that we engage when we talk about, say, politics, or philosophy, or history. It is wrong, James seems to be saying, for us to read too much in to a poem, by interpreting and discussing it in terms of ideas and events which it does not directly respond to or describe. We should ‘get’ a poem, not think about it. Literary criticism should be no more than a species of journalism, supplying simple facts about the production and publication of texts.

I have some sympathy with James’ stance. I think that academic discourse, in particular, can all too often disfigure the work of poets, by converting their images into ugly pieces of jargon, and turning their insights into ‘concepts’ to be moved about in irrelevant arguments.

Even outside the academy, there is a tendency to regard poems as more or less elaborate puzzles disguising some sort of ‘message’ which it is the reader’s task to discover and ponder. Once the message has been extracted, the poem – the images, the turns of phrase, the shapes of the lines and the sounds they make – can be cast aside, like the rind of a fruit. I’ve been involved in several arguments with political activists who believe that the purpose of poetry, and of art in general, is to serve ‘the people’ by broadcasting didactic arguments to as large an audience as possible. There is no ontological difference, as far as these self-appointed commissars of culture are concerned, between a poem and a poster.

Although I sympathise with some of his points, I think James throws the baby out with the bathwater by implying that the experience of poetry owes nothing to the intellectual discourse surrounding poetry. David Lyndon Brown’s Skin Hunger was launched on the same night as Ted Jenner’s Writers in Residence, a book for which I wrote an introduction. On the surface, at least, Ted and David are very different writers: where David’s poems are laconic and concrete, Ted’s are long, self-conscious, and filled with very deliberate allusions to the classical world as well as twenty-first century geopolitics.

Titus asked me to say a few words about Ted’s book, and I delivered a boozy, rather rambling talk filled with names like Heraclitus, Rimbaud, Hitler, and Ezra Pound. At one point, a fan of David’s interrupted me to ask me when I was going to talk about Ted’s poetry, or better still David’s poetry. I could see his point.

All I could say, in my defence, was that I didn’t know how to talk about Ted without talking about the other people I’d mentioned, and about the traditions in which Ted is immersed. As I see them, Ted’s poems are part of a conversation – a frequently frustrated, sometimes angry dialogue, but a conversation nonetheless – with European history and culture: a dialogue about the relation between the ideal and the real, the relation of the individual to the collective, the meaning of democracy and human rights, and the place of the arts in society. We cannot really read Ted’s work without entering into this discussion.

David Lyndon Brown might seem like a very different writer, but I think that his poems are also part of a conversation, or a set of conversations, and that it is the critic’s job to describe and enter into these converations.

Let’s examine ‘Law and Order’, one of the poems I mentioned in my review of David’s book:

Don’t be deceived by the roses in that prim vase.
The nuzzling buds, the sluttish petals unfurling –
anther, stamen, pistil erect,
twitching for a fuck.

Outside in the hot dark, the sap simmers.
The grass shoots up green blades.
Pods burst.
The oleander thrashes at the glass.
Tendrils reach and grasp.

In the Serengeti a predator is tearing something apart.

The formal features of ‘Law and Order’ – its unrhymed free verse lines of carefully varied lengths, for instance – might not seem remarkable today, but one hundred and twenty years ago they would have made the piece unpublishable. For even the most forward-thinking English-language literary editors of the late nineteenth century, ‘Law and Order’s lack of a ‘regular’ rhythm and its wildly varying line lengths would mean that it could not even be considered a poem, let alone a ‘successful’ poem.

Only after a heroic struggle in the early twentieth century by modernist poets and – perhaps just as importantly – modernist literary critics, did the style which David uses win acceptance. Even today, nearly ninety years after TS Eliot published The Wasteland, there are many people who do not believe that a ‘real’ poem can be unmetered, or even unrhymed. The style of ‘Law and Order’ is not something that is ‘natural’ to David, something that we can ‘get’ without any knowledge of literary history. When David uses the style, and when we appreciate it, we are affirming a certain definition of poetry, and rejecting another one.

Without falling into the trap of making the poem into a mere vehicle for the delivery of a message, let’s examine the argument which ‘Law and Order’ insinuates. David begins the poem by looking at the roses sitting inside in a ‘prim’ vase. Humans love to domesticate the rose, either in gardens or in flowerpots or in vases. The flower has often been used to symbolise beauty and refinement, but David rejects these connotations, and the dichotomy between the ‘nice’ and ‘brutish’ parts of nature which they both rely upon and reinforce. In a series of images that bring sex together with violence, David suggests a continuity between the apparently-innocent rose in the vase, the wild vegetation outside his window, and the violent predators of the faraway African plains.

Whether or not we find ‘Law and Order’ convincing, we cannot help reading it in the light of other texts. Blake’s famous poem ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright’, for instance, raises the question of the character of the natural world, and of the guilt or innocence of a God responsible for the ferocity of this world:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?

Blake left his questions unanswered, but others have not been so reticent. In his long sequence of poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers, DH Lawrence recognised and celebrated the ferocity of which the natural world is capable. Deeply distressed by the First World War, Lawrence was attempting to turn away from the human world, and find refuge in the innocent chaos of nature. For Lawrence, the violence of nature was not comprable to the violence of humans, because it was not the product of reason and malice. In his poem ‘Snake’, Lawrence reinterprets a creature that has often been made into a symbol of evil:

…he seemed to me like a king,
Like a king in exile, crowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again…

A quarter century later, the great Welsh writer Alun Lewis found in the forested mountains along the border between India and Burma an escape from a human world whcih seemed to have gone mad:

But we who dream beside this jungle pool
prefer the instinctive rightness of the poised
pied kingfisher deep darting for a fish
To all the banal rectitude of states,
The dew-bright diamonds on a viper’s back
To the slow poison of a meaning lost
And the vituperations of the just.

Lawrence and Lewis offer variations on one of many possible responses to the problem that Blake’s poem posed. Geoffrey Hill, who is often considered Britain’s leading living poet, offers a very different vision of the ferocity of nature in his eary poem ‘Genesis’, where a mysterious, remote God deliberately introduces violence into the world in order to charge it with meaning:

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
to ravage and redeem the world.
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

I am not suggesting that we need to have read Hill, Lewis and Lawrence, nor even Blake, to appreciate ‘Law and Order’. Nor am I suggesting that one writer is ‘correct’ and the others ‘wrong’ in his response to the theme they share. I am offering poems like ‘Snake’ and ‘Genesis’ as examples of a complex and long-running conversation in which poets have faced up to a seemingly fundamental feature of human life – the isolation we feel from the natural world and the threat which that world seems to pose to us. David Lyndon Brown’s poem acquires its meaning and value within that conversation. Reading and responding to David is not a matter of ‘getting’ the hermetic meaning of a single human, but of entering into a conversation which involves many writers, living and dead.