HIGH-WIRE ACTS AND LETHAL SYNTAX:
Recent Ragged Lion Journals
By David Hackbridge Johnson ©11.v.2020
Two Ragged Lions at once. The months telescope and April and May arrive
in one envelope. Reading them one after
the other gives a distinct pleasure of continuities – albeit in work that often
emphasises the disjunct, the conflicted, even the liminal hovering over the
abyss. The editor, E.A.D. Sellors has
not burdened the journal with lengthy justifications in the form of an
editorial; neither has he offered biographies of the writers. This saves me the trouble of having to
regurgitate such information as can be found elsewhere – on the web for example
– something I haven’t done yet as I wanted to plunge into the work. Some poets are better known to me than not at
all. Hence, for this reader, the
freshness of discovery. The works
published are all of merit – if I talk about some and not others it is simply
that some pieces struck a few sparks off me.
Others are works in progress for me as a reader and require a groping
towards response. Both issues (which are
#2 and #3 of the Ragged Lion Journal) contain poems, short stories, prose-poems
and valuable pieces of criticism.
If I take (from RLJ #2) – Scott
Wannberg (an arch re-telling of the Hamlet story), S. A. Griffin (many
image-yokings in a nod to, perhaps, Breton and Ashbery in equal measure), John
Dorsey (two poems of apparently simple nostalgia that belie a fear of imminent
disappearance), A. D. Winans (a superb gangster poem), Neeli Cherlovski (a
tragedy of compressed lives), – as a
group exhibiting a quasi-Beat flavour I hope this doesn’t do too much damage to
their individual voices. There is an
admixture of the New York School; something of O’Hara’s ‘Personism’ – a
willingness to let ‘everything’ into the poem even if that is not what we
get. There is a laconic stance that
appeals by means of demotic syntax; a rolling-barrage of imagery (especially in
Griffin) that gives the impression that the words are searching for the form
they will take. Thus, work that cannot
be second guessed. So my assumption is
that these are American writers – but I haven’t found time to check. Perhaps they hail from Oxford. Or Tooting.
Perhaps Erika Krouse fits in this
group too – but I rather see her work as a condensed and fragmented family
saga; a family hampered by generational distance, disappointment – a
miniaturised evocation of dissolution in relationships as we find writ large in
Jayne Ann Phillips’ Machine Dreams, or in John Williams’ Stoner. Krouse provides not a panoramic view but one
of snapshots – or vignettes, each one sutured to the next by the linkage of
word chains that meld the 14 sections together – a ‘prose sonnet’ form as she
calls it. Most moving is the scene where
the mother, whose daughter can't express love to her and vice versa, has had
her luggage ransacked at the airport; we observe her sitting beside the empty
suitcase: ‘She cried, not loud, but thoroughly.
Nothing to give.’ A hollow space
opens up here – one of hopelessness and defeat.
Bill Meissner’s short story Balancing: Karl Wallenda’s Watch is
alarmingly vertiginous. A relationship
is in the balance due to the fact that two lovers can’t tell each other the
things that really matter – and these tender refusals are played out against
the backdrop (I shouldn’t have used ‘drop’) of the death of Karl Wallenda, the
dynastic head of the high-wire act The Flying Wallendas. The conclusion unites both fear and
dependency in an image of falling: ‘They balance there together, as if it will
always be this way between them: catching each other, then falling, then
catching each other again.’
Derek Adams gives us a résumé of
work by Pascale Petit and Matthew Sweeney.
I just note that Sweeney has a high-wire poem called The Wobble (see the Wallendas, above –
yes, hopefully they always remain above….), and that another of his poems, Reading,
has a man in court explaining why he was reading in his car on the M1, but that
it was poetry and ‘….they’re mostly short.
You can look up/between them….’.
I’ll chip in here with the thought that the arraigned driver must have
been reading Ed Dorn who wrote poetry at the steering wheel of his car in short
bursts. Adams informs us, among much
else, that a poem of Petit’s features a mask of fire ants. This striking image makes me very much want
to read her work, which I do not know.
Tom Bland is in both RLJ #2 and #3,
so he is the link poet if you will. When
a young boy gets run over in a poem (not a frequent happening) I immediately
have in mind the image of the road death in Robert Altman’s movie based on
Raymond Carver’s tales and poems, Short
Cuts – ‘Casey didn’t make it this time….’.
In Bland’s The pottery eyes,
the death is not a pointless tragedy but a willed thanatos of
celebrity-inspired suicide. A Lana Del
Ray lyric appears emblazoned on a bakery lorry and the obsessed boy hurls
himself under the wheels – his dream fulfilled.
This is a Ballardian gesture – a pedestrianised version of Crash.
The leap into metal, glass and plastic.
An erotics of collision – Del Rey’s creamy baritonal lament as
soundtrack, the roaring vehicle mistaken for her glossy image. More of a homage to than derivative of
Ballard, the poem treats the incident as, incidental to buying a fridge. The fridge is nevertheless a ‘work of art’,
made so by its associations with the ultimate creative act – that of creative
expungement by suicide. The poem allows
in other fetishized behaviours including necrophilia and incest. Even the lover in a sexual interlude is
playing dead it seems. A poem both funny
and alarming, The pottery eyes tells
us much of obsession and realised fantasy, and the pay-off of potential
destruction.
RLJ #3 has such themes of violence,
to others and to self, at its heart – one may say that the central work here is
R. J. Dent’s fine translation of the 2nd Canto from Count de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror – the canto
featuring the appalling ship wreck culminating in the copulation of Maldoror
and a shark. #3 might be subtitled
‘Under the Sign of Lautréamont’. The
Count, that proto-Decadent, can be felt in the work of Jeremy Reed (who wrote
the splendid Isidore – his
novelisation of Lautréamont’s life), in the work of Audrey Szasz, and in that
of Lana Durjava, whose Francis Bacon: A
Corrosive Kind of Love, describes an abusive relationship predicated on
some form of violence in order to release sexual and spiritual energy – the
type of relationship that occurs in Maldoror
in the heightened form of the lurid-baroque. To find Trakl, Daumal and Stanislas de Guaita
– all expanders of consciousness by any means available, although usually in a
jar, brings further voices to the Maldororian chorus. That de Guaita is mentioned at all (in
Durjava’s other piece) is a sign of what I hope is a resurgence of interest in
this figure, whose works I can boast of having read at least in part, and to whose
flat in Paris I have made pilgrimage.
These authors form an occult congeries worthy of Edmond Bailly’s
bookshop in rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin! – (now an Apple Store….).
Bland’s boy suicide feeds a theme
deeply adumbrated in Durjava’s essay Self-Destruction
in Art and Life. We are given a list
of the six famous suicides of the Dada/Surrealist groupings and the
intellectual journeys that led them there. She also explores the idea of disease as a
gift, illness as the ‘intention in life’ – her quotation from Svevo. I was put in mind here of H. P. Lovecraft’s
almost disembodied descriptions of his own decay during terminal illness – the
observing body outside the dying body.
Durjava’s approach to such taboos is unflinching.
Disembodied violence finds
apocalyptic expression in Paul Curran’s dystopian poem Generation Bloodbath. The
world of the ‘we’ is under constant assault by poisoning, torture, firebombing
and dubious therapeutics. A sequence of
regimes – ‘old’, ‘neo’, ‘new’ – come and go, each one often strangely absent, their
traces left in weird products that are tools of repression masquerading as
benefit. Then, they ‘retreated for the
weekend’, they ‘vanished from our screens’ – as if once set in motion the
grinding down of the populace can be managed by remote access. Their acts of repression are trade-marked and
copyrighted: ‘Atrocity®’, ‘Pseudo-Regime™’, ‘SnuffCorpus©’ – as if even murder
is a commodity. Any nods to the
Orwellian must be gratefully acknowledged as the message is still pertinent.
To return to Bland – his exhilarating
style already recognisable from just two poems.
The mixture of the philosophical and the popular strikes home again; this
time it’s Slavoj Žižek and Kate Winslet.
Why I Didn’t Fuck Zizek ends
in a drag competition where the poet lets everything hang out – and I mean
everything. The violence is more comedic
than in Curran but the sketch-like scenes encapsulate thoughts of extreme
violence nevertheless – even if they are things thought and not acted out. The death-drive that overshadows much of
RLJ#3 is still there. I might mention an
affinity between Tom Bland and the work a young poet Caspar Heinemann where a
similar deeply serious yet very funny aesthetic is on display. The ease with which such poetry teases the
notion of the post-modern might be enough to label them ‘post-post-modern’. Theory is not disbarred but left in play at
the mercy of rapier wits.
Two poets to end this brief
survey. Jeremy Reed needs no
introduction to lovers of counterculture.
He is, among much else, Soho’s poet-laureate. The sights, smells, colours, and above all,
the people of the West End are everywhere in Reed’s work. He is a flâneur
of the old, yet new school – the streets he wanders through, the bars he writes
in are changing every day; he himself changes with the volatility of the
environment. But his sensual eye always
prepares a sting for the unwary – like much of the work here, he is unflinching
in his revelations. In Crack we see a life crushed by addiction
– even the syntax is crushed: ‘I catch one phrase in three’. Reed makes this person real and yet he knows
that the life is on a knife edge – ‘until without warning you terminate’. In The
Devil in Red Velvet, Reed glories in the luxurious colours and textures of
Liberty fabrics – a feast of colour words on show like a swatch of vivid
flashes that catch the poet’s eye. But
an ‘ammonia smell’ instils fear and there is ‘a hammered red’ figure that is
‘dislodged from the dark’. As if the flâneur has met his malicious Doppelgänger. The glamour-syntax of Reed
can be found in the poems of Audrey Szasz.
There is the same fascination with dressed and adorned figures – a
specificity by ‘sequins’, ‘lashes’, ‘zippers’, ‘sables’ and ‘minks’ – these
words can be descriptive or used as similes; indeed such is the visual
vividness that it hardly matters.
Szasz’s work appeared in RLJ #1 and by now, like Bland’s, it is
instantly recognisable. Whereas Reed is
often celebratory or elegiac, Szasz plays on more grand guignol tropes – there is violence in the colourings and feel
of clothes – as if threat is latent.
Anger comes through, cutting but not severing the curiously delicate way
in which the verse in structured. The
knife is poised, but as in Ballard (again) the prosody is poised too, in a
different way. The knife is finally
wielded in New Mutations – here a grim
murder which cannot be random since it must be staged: ‘the victim’s
precision-crafted smile’ – the technique in this line is lethal!
