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Review of Christopher Middleton's Collected Poems - Oliver Dixon, The Wolf
11 August 2009
If the self-belittling complacency of most mainstream volumes can elicit a weary, Marianne Moore-like ‘I, too, dislike it’ in even the most ardent poetry-enthusiast, this momentous accumulation of more than 60 years’ work by an exiled maverick luminary should act as a widespread restorer of faith, a kick-start for any writer who values imaginative exuberance over mere zany anecdotalism, and a counter-example so fecund in its untiring inventiveness and stylistic range that it reads almost like a primer of late- and post-Modernist poetics, a gloriously suggestive compendium of missed opportunities and unpursed bridleways in post-war English poetry. At the same time, this is magnanimous, approachable work steeped in a plurality of cultural traditions: Christopher Middleton remains, as Douglas Dunn suggests, ‘an avant-garde poet we can actually read.’
Middleton – now over 80 and a highly-esteemed translator as well as a poet: an habitué of the US and elsewhere for most of his adult life – first insinuated himself into my consciousness as an awkwardly anomalous presence in the anthologies I pored over during my adolescence. In Al Alvarez’s New Poetry, he seemed to have more in common with unhinged exotic-seemed Americans like Berryman and Plath than the more stolid Britons he was lumped with. Edward Lucie-Smith, in his Penguin anthology entitled British Poetry Since 1945, placed Middleton among the surprisingly few poets open then to‘Influences From Abroad’, but in the individual introduction seemed to have difficulty in describing his work: that he was ‘interested in the anti-logic Pataphysics’ was intriguing but unelucidating.
As for Middleton’s poems themselves, they cut an odd figure within the context of a 60s scene caught somewhere between the provincial conservativism of the Movement and the rag-taggle congeries of styles emerging out of what used to be called ‘counter-culture’ e.g. Pop/protest/underground poetries. Although their breadth of reference and continental air gave them a whiff of academia, there was a playful, almost anarchic spirit to the way early poems like ‘The Thousand Things’ or ‘A Bunch of Grapes’ juggled with linguistic structures, sense-impressions and ideas as though they were interchangeable components of a process, and as though that volatile mobilisation itself were the nub and motor of the poem, rather than the delivering of gloomy little messages parcelled-up in neat closing couplets favoured by Larkin and his colleagues, like village postmen who had read too much Hardy.
This collection shows, however, that these are actually far from being Middleton’s earliest efforts. His first widely-published book Torse 3, although it appeared in 1962, contains poems dating back to 1948; furthermore, a quick look at an internet Bibliography reveals 3 early ‘disowned’ volumes: Poems (1944), Nocturne in Eden (1945) and The Vision of a Drowned Man (1949). It would be interesting to know if any of this juvenilia made it into Torse 3: a minor criticism of this Collected (see below) is the lack of editorial information it offers on inclusions and omissions, of which there seem to be a number.
The rather flighty titles of these lost books, even so, perhaps hint at some of Middleton’s formative influences,and this is borne out by one or two of the Torse poems. ‘Absences’, in particular, smacks of the rather over-written, quasi-mystical Neo-Romanticism of the New Apocalypse, even with a trace of Dylan Thomas-ish sound-over-sense: ‘They see nought of the night, / Though an emerald semblance outward goes’. (Significantly, this is the only piece in the whole book to which Middleton has addended a specific year – 1949 – as though to ensure it is read in context.) Even less felicitous, ‘Tenebrae’s attempt at a ‘La Figlia Che Piange’– like amorous address is hamstrung by awkward stagey syntax that lapses into the Yoda-like inversion ‘Large, upright, undubitably gone she has’.
Thankfully, this 40s influence seems to have been rapidly worked-through and outgrown. One of the key early poems ‘Male Torso’ could perhaps have its provenance in the sonorous, jumbled overlays of dream-imagery that Apocalyptic poets like Henry Treece and Nicholas Moore often went in for, yet Middleton’s command of form has already allowed him to invest the whole piece with such muscular rhythmic propulsion, buoyed with startling collocations (‘once buxom canvas quilled’) and a spirallingrefrain (‘Before I woke’), it seems closer to the hypnotic narrative-surge of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre’ than to any English models.
Torse 3, in general, reads like an apprentice book of experiments: ‘developable surfaces’ that lay the foundations for later work. These include a range of effects more conventional than one might expect from Middleton: blank verse in ‘Oystercatchers’, off-rhymed couplets in ‘Objects at Brampton Ash’; even a sonnet, albeit mostly unrhymed (‘Aesthetics for Benetto Gulgo’). From the bafflingly inaccurate suggestion, in a recent article on Collected Poems, that the ‘traditional forms on display (however cunningly camouflaged) quite overwhelm the “experimental” verse’, one might almost infer that the reviewer didn’t get beyond this opening section. The sequence ‘Herman Moon’s Hourbook’is a first attempt at the use of personae and dramatic ‘unselvings’. Michael Hamburger, in his classic study The Truth of Poetry, identified Middleton and Geoffrey Hill as the only two contemporaries impatient with the unproblematic, empirical ‘I’ employed unthinkingly in most English poetry, and as such comparable with Pessoa, Machado and Pound. Whether Herman Moon comes to life as anything more than a name on which to hang a group of vaguely train-related poems is questionable, however, although the oblique, defamiliarising observations of this heteronymous commuter provide another route beyond the Romantic ego. Equally, it might be read as Middleton’s smaller-scale ‘Mauberley’, a ‘farewell to London’ both as restrictive social milieu and repository of overbearing literary tradition.
Relocation to the States seems to have been as liberating a move for Middleton as it was for Thom Gunn and Auden before him. Initially, like the Gunn of My Sad Captains, he experiments with syllabics as a transitional mode of engagement with American open form. ‘An Englishman in Texas’ adroitly wields a complex stanza-form to carve out an apostrophe to his adoptive country and the bracing sense of space, colour and natural profusion it offers: ‘let him move once, / free, of himself, into some few things’. It’s from this point onward, indeed, that Middleton’s writing really takes off and begins to develop its distinctive timbre and reach, branching out with new energetic confidence in several directions at once. Our Flowers and Nice Bones (1969) see forays into concrete/sound poetry (more readable than most examples of the genre thanks to Middleton’s ludic wit eg. ‘nude nun on dunes had been stunned and screwed’), found poems from various sources, Williams-like ‘objectivist’ lyrics, brief prose ‘fictions’. The approach towards language is increasingly fluid and Joycean: there are no pre-set formal templates within which to fit neat portions of confessional or descriptive subject-matter; each text is an inclusive act of discovering, through animated dialogue with some point of focus (be it human, animal, household object, historical locale), its own organic form. Or, as Middleton puts it in his remarkable ars poetica ‘Reflections on a Viking Prow’: ‘Verbal design mimes an extrinsic concrete thing or kinetic grouping of things, but mimes in such a way as to melt reference into wording of high intrinsic interest.’
The same essay proposes the ancient hand-made artefact (such as a carved longboat prow) as a model for what he calls the ‘configural poem’, an impersonal yet vibrant structuring rooted both in a ‘time/space axis’ and ‘the rhythms of a unique formal vision’. This conceptual framework comes to fruition in what I think of as the prime Middleton of 70s and 80s volumes like The Lonely Suppers of W V Balloon, Carminalenia and Two Horse Wagon Going By. Poem after poem astounds and delights not only with the linguistic verve and originality of its ’figurative speech’, but also with the generous depth of its curiosity about the world, its continual endeavour to grant access to marginalised perspectives and voices. ‘Old Woman at the County Dump’, for example, uses both tenderness and dark humour to transmogrify a tramp-lady into a kind of primordial earth-goddess symbolically standing against the devaluing wastefulness of consumerism:
History
has beaten most of the life outof her body,
but still the days flash on,
nights blossom with new moons,the people
burst through time, breakingthings like toys,
and leave her the rubble.
There has always been a political element to the work, but obliquely so, and never in terms of ideology or power(both negative terms in these poems). From the celebratory landscape of ‘An Englishman in Texas’, Middleton’s engagement with American culture soon progresses to a more nuanced critique of how baleful social forces have shaped his local environment. ‘Essay on the Texas Panhandle’’s sparse, loose-scattered phrases paint a bleak scenario of ‘treeless levels’ with depopulated communities (‘splutter of empty shacks’), evidently the aftermath of an aggressive oil-industry’s ravages:
wonder how else the wealth for wars
could have been extracted
to support
single vision vested interest
the owners’ all-falsifying consciousness
It’s not only through exploration of human processes that Middleton’s political vision comes into play, however. Just as attentively listening to birdsong can be ‘not unpolitical’ (‘How toListen to Birds’), the interactive encounter with the Other around which each poem is moulded provides a pattern for more generous social relationships, empathetic openness to the non-human fostering greater accord with the human. It is on this level that Middleton, who writes a sinuously and un sentimentally about birds, beasts, flowers, insects and trees as Lawrence or Hughes, could be co-opted into the burgeoning zone of eco-poetry, although the categorisation would no doubt be a delimiting one for so unco-optable a writer. The prose-poem‘Bivuoac’ ends with an incredible close-up evocation of a cicada hatching-out of its pupa, an inceptual microcosm of natural renewal:
The cicada glowed as if dusted with a pollen out of which, for the sake of argument, the breath of a beyond conjectured the world’s first agile anatomies… From high up in an elm its first ancient cackle fizzed into the onset of the dark.
Furthermore, the political dimension to the poems is frequently allied to a quasi-religious sense of the numinous or sacred in a way that recalls the phrase Derek Mahon used Phillippe Jaccottet: ‘secular mysticism’. This can take the form of a kind of transformative animism, in poems like ‘Snake Rock’, or in invocations to an unnameable creative deity or spirit, such as ‘Holy Cow’ (‘her radiant / free / ongoing creation’) or ‘Anasphere’. At times, this redemptive spirit can even seem inseperable from poetic inspiration itself, as in the marvellous self-generating flâneur-poem ‘The Prose of Walking Back To China’: ‘nothing in the voice / Guide the poem but a wave / Continually broken / And restored’.
More recent volumes like The Word Pavilion and The Anti-Basilisk may lack the lyrical verve and playful diversity of earlier work, but their more ruminative, bookish flavour adds a further octave to Middleton’s impressive range. If an oeuvre that embodies notions of poetry as a vehicle for political and spiritual re-invention were not felt to be indispensable enough in our current climate, Middleton’s work is also of key importance in the way it straddles disparate tendencies and – in a poetry scene often bedevilled by bickering between mainstream and avant-garde camps –s ign-posts what Ron Silliman calls a ‘Third Way’.
One’s only quibble with this admirable volume is the quantity of texts it excludes – individual poems such as ‘The Child at the Piano’ and ‘January 1919’ from Torse 3 are in the Selected Writings but not here. In addition, whole volumes like Pataxanadu (1977) and Serpentine (1985), which are mostly (but not entirely) prose-poems are omitted – unfair, perhaps, as quite a few prose-poems from other volumes are included in the Collected. No doubt, given its already hefty size, space was the main consideration here. Am I the only reader who will be waiting with impatience for Middleton’s Complete Writings, juvenilia and translations included?
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Middleton – now over 80 and a highly-esteemed translator as well as a poet: an habitué of the US and elsewhere for most of his adult life – first insinuated himself into my consciousness as an awkwardly anomalous presence in the anthologies I pored over during my adolescence. In Al Alvarez’s New Poetry, he seemed to have more in common with unhinged exotic-seemed Americans like Berryman and Plath than the more stolid Britons he was lumped with. Edward Lucie-Smith, in his Penguin anthology entitled British Poetry Since 1945, placed Middleton among the surprisingly few poets open then to‘Influences From Abroad’, but in the individual introduction seemed to have difficulty in describing his work: that he was ‘interested in the anti-logic Pataphysics’ was intriguing but unelucidating.
As for Middleton’s poems themselves, they cut an odd figure within the context of a 60s scene caught somewhere between the provincial conservativism of the Movement and the rag-taggle congeries of styles emerging out of what used to be called ‘counter-culture’ e.g. Pop/protest/underground poetries. Although their breadth of reference and continental air gave them a whiff of academia, there was a playful, almost anarchic spirit to the way early poems like ‘The Thousand Things’ or ‘A Bunch of Grapes’ juggled with linguistic structures, sense-impressions and ideas as though they were interchangeable components of a process, and as though that volatile mobilisation itself were the nub and motor of the poem, rather than the delivering of gloomy little messages parcelled-up in neat closing couplets favoured by Larkin and his colleagues, like village postmen who had read too much Hardy.
This collection shows, however, that these are actually far from being Middleton’s earliest efforts. His first widely-published book Torse 3, although it appeared in 1962, contains poems dating back to 1948; furthermore, a quick look at an internet Bibliography reveals 3 early ‘disowned’ volumes: Poems (1944), Nocturne in Eden (1945) and The Vision of a Drowned Man (1949). It would be interesting to know if any of this juvenilia made it into Torse 3: a minor criticism of this Collected (see below) is the lack of editorial information it offers on inclusions and omissions, of which there seem to be a number.
The rather flighty titles of these lost books, even so, perhaps hint at some of Middleton’s formative influences,and this is borne out by one or two of the Torse poems. ‘Absences’, in particular, smacks of the rather over-written, quasi-mystical Neo-Romanticism of the New Apocalypse, even with a trace of Dylan Thomas-ish sound-over-sense: ‘They see nought of the night, / Though an emerald semblance outward goes’. (Significantly, this is the only piece in the whole book to which Middleton has addended a specific year – 1949 – as though to ensure it is read in context.) Even less felicitous, ‘Tenebrae’s attempt at a ‘La Figlia Che Piange’– like amorous address is hamstrung by awkward stagey syntax that lapses into the Yoda-like inversion ‘Large, upright, undubitably gone she has’.
Thankfully, this 40s influence seems to have been rapidly worked-through and outgrown. One of the key early poems ‘Male Torso’ could perhaps have its provenance in the sonorous, jumbled overlays of dream-imagery that Apocalyptic poets like Henry Treece and Nicholas Moore often went in for, yet Middleton’s command of form has already allowed him to invest the whole piece with such muscular rhythmic propulsion, buoyed with startling collocations (‘once buxom canvas quilled’) and a spirallingrefrain (‘Before I woke’), it seems closer to the hypnotic narrative-surge of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre’ than to any English models.
Torse 3, in general, reads like an apprentice book of experiments: ‘developable surfaces’ that lay the foundations for later work. These include a range of effects more conventional than one might expect from Middleton: blank verse in ‘Oystercatchers’, off-rhymed couplets in ‘Objects at Brampton Ash’; even a sonnet, albeit mostly unrhymed (‘Aesthetics for Benetto Gulgo’). From the bafflingly inaccurate suggestion, in a recent article on Collected Poems, that the ‘traditional forms on display (however cunningly camouflaged) quite overwhelm the “experimental” verse’, one might almost infer that the reviewer didn’t get beyond this opening section. The sequence ‘Herman Moon’s Hourbook’is a first attempt at the use of personae and dramatic ‘unselvings’. Michael Hamburger, in his classic study The Truth of Poetry, identified Middleton and Geoffrey Hill as the only two contemporaries impatient with the unproblematic, empirical ‘I’ employed unthinkingly in most English poetry, and as such comparable with Pessoa, Machado and Pound. Whether Herman Moon comes to life as anything more than a name on which to hang a group of vaguely train-related poems is questionable, however, although the oblique, defamiliarising observations of this heteronymous commuter provide another route beyond the Romantic ego. Equally, it might be read as Middleton’s smaller-scale ‘Mauberley’, a ‘farewell to London’ both as restrictive social milieu and repository of overbearing literary tradition.
Relocation to the States seems to have been as liberating a move for Middleton as it was for Thom Gunn and Auden before him. Initially, like the Gunn of My Sad Captains, he experiments with syllabics as a transitional mode of engagement with American open form. ‘An Englishman in Texas’ adroitly wields a complex stanza-form to carve out an apostrophe to his adoptive country and the bracing sense of space, colour and natural profusion it offers: ‘let him move once, / free, of himself, into some few things’. It’s from this point onward, indeed, that Middleton’s writing really takes off and begins to develop its distinctive timbre and reach, branching out with new energetic confidence in several directions at once. Our Flowers and Nice Bones (1969) see forays into concrete/sound poetry (more readable than most examples of the genre thanks to Middleton’s ludic wit eg. ‘nude nun on dunes had been stunned and screwed’), found poems from various sources, Williams-like ‘objectivist’ lyrics, brief prose ‘fictions’. The approach towards language is increasingly fluid and Joycean: there are no pre-set formal templates within which to fit neat portions of confessional or descriptive subject-matter; each text is an inclusive act of discovering, through animated dialogue with some point of focus (be it human, animal, household object, historical locale), its own organic form. Or, as Middleton puts it in his remarkable ars poetica ‘Reflections on a Viking Prow’: ‘Verbal design mimes an extrinsic concrete thing or kinetic grouping of things, but mimes in such a way as to melt reference into wording of high intrinsic interest.’
The same essay proposes the ancient hand-made artefact (such as a carved longboat prow) as a model for what he calls the ‘configural poem’, an impersonal yet vibrant structuring rooted both in a ‘time/space axis’ and ‘the rhythms of a unique formal vision’. This conceptual framework comes to fruition in what I think of as the prime Middleton of 70s and 80s volumes like The Lonely Suppers of W V Balloon, Carminalenia and Two Horse Wagon Going By. Poem after poem astounds and delights not only with the linguistic verve and originality of its ’figurative speech’, but also with the generous depth of its curiosity about the world, its continual endeavour to grant access to marginalised perspectives and voices. ‘Old Woman at the County Dump’, for example, uses both tenderness and dark humour to transmogrify a tramp-lady into a kind of primordial earth-goddess symbolically standing against the devaluing wastefulness of consumerism:
History
has beaten most of the life outof her body,
but still the days flash on,
nights blossom with new moons,the people
burst through time, breakingthings like toys,
and leave her the rubble.
could have been extracted
to support
single vision vested interest
the owners’ all-falsifying consciousness
It’s not only through exploration of human processes that Middleton’s political vision comes into play, however. Just as attentively listening to birdsong can be ‘not unpolitical’ (‘How toListen to Birds’), the interactive encounter with the Other around which each poem is moulded provides a pattern for more generous social relationships, empathetic openness to the non-human fostering greater accord with the human. It is on this level that Middleton, who writes a sinuously and un sentimentally about birds, beasts, flowers, insects and trees as Lawrence or Hughes, could be co-opted into the burgeoning zone of eco-poetry, although the categorisation would no doubt be a delimiting one for so unco-optable a writer. The prose-poem‘Bivuoac’ ends with an incredible close-up evocation of a cicada hatching-out of its pupa, an inceptual microcosm of natural renewal:
The cicada glowed as if dusted with a pollen out of which, for the sake of argument, the breath of a beyond conjectured the world’s first agile anatomies… From high up in an elm its first ancient cackle fizzed into the onset of the dark.
Furthermore, the political dimension to the poems is frequently allied to a quasi-religious sense of the numinous or sacred in a way that recalls the phrase Derek Mahon used Phillippe Jaccottet: ‘secular mysticism’. This can take the form of a kind of transformative animism, in poems like ‘Snake Rock’, or in invocations to an unnameable creative deity or spirit, such as ‘Holy Cow’ (‘her radiant / free / ongoing creation’) or ‘Anasphere’. At times, this redemptive spirit can even seem inseperable from poetic inspiration itself, as in the marvellous self-generating flâneur-poem ‘The Prose of Walking Back To China’: ‘nothing in the voice / Guide the poem but a wave / Continually broken / And restored’.
More recent volumes like The Word Pavilion and The Anti-Basilisk may lack the lyrical verve and playful diversity of earlier work, but their more ruminative, bookish flavour adds a further octave to Middleton’s impressive range. If an oeuvre that embodies notions of poetry as a vehicle for political and spiritual re-invention were not felt to be indispensable enough in our current climate, Middleton’s work is also of key importance in the way it straddles disparate tendencies and – in a poetry scene often bedevilled by bickering between mainstream and avant-garde camps –s ign-posts what Ron Silliman calls a ‘Third Way’.
One’s only quibble with this admirable volume is the quantity of texts it excludes – individual poems such as ‘The Child at the Piano’ and ‘January 1919’ from Torse 3 are in the Selected Writings but not here. In addition, whole volumes like Pataxanadu (1977) and Serpentine (1985), which are mostly (but not entirely) prose-poems are omitted – unfair, perhaps, as quite a few prose-poems from other volumes are included in the Collected. No doubt, given its already hefty size, space was the main consideration here. Am I the only reader who will be waiting with impatience for Middleton’s Complete Writings, juvenilia and translations included?
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