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Showing posts with label <b>Andrew Motion</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, March 04, 2009</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><img height="240" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/5Ryu37SDGIynkJWSjhvHoK7AojfsOEl5Nl3yJvBlZx-H0IzKtW9buKo31FE9dphjfW_DycBCbVMgidSy-hwu%3Ds0-d" width="154"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The question posed by Andrew Motion&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.godine.com/isbn.asp?isbn=1567923895"><span style='color:black'>The Mower</span></a>, </i>out any minute now from David R. <span class=SpellE>Godine</span>, is: Has Britain&#8217;s most recent poet laureate always been a dreadful writer, or is this just the case of a talented young man who believed his own press clippings &amp; slouched into a life of unrelenting clichés passed off as profound thoughts? A third conceivable argument is that he <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>intends</i> to be awful, an instance of flarf <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>avant la <span class=SpellE>lettre</span></i>. How else might one explain the following?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Earth&#8217;s axel creaks; the year jolts on; the trees<br>
begin to slip their brittle leaves, their flakes of rust<br>
and darkness takes the edge off daylight, not<br>
because it wants to &#8211; never that. <span class=GramE>Because it must.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Four hackneyed images of time passing followed by a line that could only read aloud by placing the back of one&#8217;s hand against one&#8217;s brow before yielding the most histrionic pathetic &#8211; seriously pathetic &#8211; fallacy I can recall. It is hard to imagine reading this to an audience that did not double over in laughter. There is not one phrase here that is not overwritten, not one image that is not stiff with rigor mortis. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The second half of this little ode, entitled &#8220;Mythology,&#8221; is even more appalling just because it is in such bad taste:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>And you?</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;
color:black'> Your life was not your own to keep<br>
or lose. Beside the river, swerving underground<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
the future tracked you, snapping at your heels:<br>
Diana breathless, hunted by your own quick hounds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A poem of mourning for the late Princess Diana.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Motion does at least reach for <span class=SpellE>polysemy</span> in the final sentence, jumbling together the image of goddess of the hunt with the real-life woman chased by paparazzi through the streets of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Paris</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. But Motion apparently can&#8217;t help himself, calling the <span class=SpellE>photogs</span> &#8220;the future&#8221; &amp; turning the image into one last cliché of the hunt. Just for good measure, Motion&#8217;s muddled grammar has the river, rather than Diana or the photographers, swerving underground. The </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Seine</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> does no such thing, and the mythological Diana is of course a hunter, not prey. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Intellectually this poem would be an embarrassment for a college freshman. Motion wasn&#8217;t yet the laureate when Diana died, so this isn&#8217;t something he was required to do. In one sense, it may even have been an audition. Ironically, this poem is toward the end of the book&#8217;s &#8220;Selected&#8221; portion, which is to say Motion thinks it&#8217;s a keeper. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Was it ever thus? The book&#8217;s second poem, &#8220;In the Attic,&#8221; is every bit as committed to the hoariest clichés &amp; unfathomable overwriting. The speaker in the attic paws through the clothes of the deceased, kneeling:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>My hands push down<br>
between hollow, invisible sleeves<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
hesitate,<br>
then take hold and lift:<br>
<br>
a green holiday, a red christening;<br>
all your unfinished lives<br>
fading through dark summers,<br>
entering my head as dust. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is not the sleeves that are invisible, one wants to shout, but rather the presence of the dead. This book is chock full of such cringe-worthy moments.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The one thing Motion does excel at is his sense of measure, particularly the use of iambics to slow the text down &amp; lend it a sense of gait. Still, he suffers, as do so many &#8220;new formalists,&#8221;&#185; from the occasional need to add unnecessary language just to keep lines even, as in &#8220;square of&#8221; in<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>With storm light in the east but no rain yet<br>
I came in from mowing my square of lawn<br>
and paused in the doorway to glance round<br>
at my handiwork and the feckless apple blossom<br>
<br>
blurring those trim stripes and Hovver-sweeps&#178;<br>
I had meant to last. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I actually like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>feckless, </i>in part because the trochee works there, and the emphasis on one-syllable words in the first line is effective. But inflating the second line to keep thing consistent gives the passage as a whole &#8211; this is the first sentence of the book&#8217;s title poem &#8211; a bloated feeling, every bit as blurred as the trim stripes of Motion&#8217;s lawn. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Trite imagery (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>green </i>holiday / <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>red </i>christening), vague thinking, padded metrics, overwriting everywhere &#8211; what exactly are the values that </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Britain</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s version of Official Verse Culture is trying to champion?</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> If ever one wanted to construct an argument that the British were incapable of serious thought, here is exhibit A. Yet </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Britain</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> has often had brilliant poets &amp; has many now. They are obviously quite apart from the inbred world of received culture that Motion represents, which feels like the 18<sup>th</sup> century gone to rot.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Who are not formalists at all, but rather pattern obsessives for whom the creation of new form is something of a taboo.</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#178; My guess is that Motion means &#8220;</span><st1:City> <st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hoover</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>.&#8221; The phrase &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Hovver</span>-sweeps&#8221; never appeared on the internet until this review. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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