Issue 33: Adam Piette
Steve Ely, Eely (Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2024)
Trudie Gorman, Trust the Damage (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2024)
Tom Raworth, Cancer (Manchester: Carcanet, 2025)
Where does the poem come from if not the imagination in its nest of words. Might the imagination then be nothing but words with some mysterious drive running through its syntax and diction-repertoire, the poet a channel merely for the flow. Or is reason the secret sharer disguised as the imagination and dressing up its calculated moves as free form improvisations. Or could it be that langue and parole are one and the same, always local always on the tip of the tongue on specific occasions: doing the job of communication, even though fictionalised and animated by role play & dramatic plot, so as to secure an acceptable speech act triad, speaker, language, receiver, for the comfort of strangers. Is the where of the question 'where does it come from' referring to anything like a real place. What might that be like. The three texts reviewed here explore the questions of the weird origin of the poem in very different and exhilarating ways. Fusing them into one tidy package will not be attempted: but the query is a real one, and turns on the ways we live in language.
It would be a mistake to take Steve Ely's Eely as a joke about his name: this book is a ferocious and immeasurable triptych, a spectacular long poem that stands as a paean to the eel, as a satire of all that destroys environment, as a condemnation of the history of the draining of the fens. It takes into the body of the poet-persona the toxic blood of the eel: the second section gives a rowdy account of Ely being bitten by an eel, and the bite not only historically communicated the potentially lethal ichthyohemotoxin into his bloodstream, but stands as a figure for the guilt for the murder of nature. The casual decapitation of eels when fishing for tastier prey was the norm when Ely went on his bird-nesting and fishing trips with fellow anglers as a boy; like the 'merciless ravage' of the secret grove in Wordsworth's 'Nutting', the killing of the eel who bit him has ecological Cain-and-Abel foundational force in the long poem. It also, in magical realist Gothic mode, makes him a poet: the bite releases a bitter dark energy in the young Ely and turns him into a were-eel, a killing machine taking Jekyll-like pleasure in acts of revenge for the other great crime of the poem, the devastating draining of the fenlands that took place in the 17th century, thanks to the work of Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, commissioned to clear the so-called wastes by Charles 1. The draining was an ethnic cleansing, clearing the fens of their inhabitants and handing over the reclaimed lands to Dutch settlers, on the model of the Ulster Plantation. It was also an act of ecocide of staggering proportions, destroying the richest eco-system of the British Isles and turning it into an agricultural waste land. The great first section of the poem tracks the eel on its extraordinary journey to its mating grounds in the Sargasso Sea, familiar to readers of Graham Swift's Waterland. But where Swift appropriated the eel to conjure a story about the repression of dark incestuous history in the fens, Ely gives all his considerable poetic gifts absolutely over to this other species, detailing the transformation of the eel from egg to leptocephali to glass eel to elver to yellow and silver forms and final sexual being in the warm sea of Sargasso. Their journey to this species-origin is, extraordinarily, towards not only mating space but also graveyard, for the eels die after they copulate, the dead flesh forming a thick silt under the Sargassum. The leptocephali and elvers do not, as some once thought, return to their parents' haunts, but arbitrarily spread out from the Sargasso to all points, taken by the complex currents on all sides of the maritime environment. The European and American eels have been doing this since the late Cretaceous when North America was much closer to Europe (Japanese eels mate at the Mariana trench, then drift back on the North Equatorial Current). Ely's quite extraordinarily beautiful tracking of the eels to their adopted homes imagines a specific journey of an eel to the Northern waterways east of Sheffield, a return to the scene of the decapitation; but also what is being tracked are the new dangers the eels face from pollution, from destroyed habitat, from poisoned rivers, from agricultural and sea pesticides and hazards. Ely takes grand liberties here, not least because so little is still known about the extraordinary creatures. It was only 2022 that scientists had direct evidence of the Sargasso migration by attaching satellite tags to 26 eels from rivers in the Azores archipelago. They travel separately, as it were, and not in shoals. Furthermore, there is still no evidence of wild eels becoming male or female for the mating, as none have been caught in the act: they develop sexual organs, it is supposed from the study of captive eels, as they approach the spawning waters. And scientists have no idea what happens during mating, for this takes place so deep in the sea, at photocline depths. Ely's liberties are tremendous, but tremendously lively: he stages the mating in a tour de force section of his poem, rich in trans-species erotic energy, pumping milt and 'depth charge / blast of sperm', Lawrentian and weird. What is being found in this and other key zones of the poem are the sexual-unconscious drives at the back of the compositional impulse, a Joycean-Rabelaisian comic and super-natural fiction of origin that admits its fictitiousness at the same time as it revels in the display.
Two matters of great urgency emerge from the tracking of the eel: first, the ecological imperative to acknowledge the violence being done to all environments, but to sea and waterways most of all, and to force into consciousness both the guilt that must be borne if serious action is to be taken and the difficult understanding of endangered species close to extinction; and second, the close proximity of human language and its potential for creativity to the guilt complex, for the power to make, to generate, to foster and spawn as human gifts of language production are identical with the capitalist drive to tame nature, to adopt envir0nment as material for transformation, and has a death drive at the heart of its fake empathy for the more than human.
Eely has many cognate creative intertexts: Ted Hughes and his attention to fish and angling, Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns in the superb medievalist histories and stories that the long poem plays with, David Jones's rich palimpsest styles; but also Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the medievalist and class consciousness of Bill Griffiths, the rich crazy modernism of Lynette Roberts. But the text it quotes from most perhaps is Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, which took the cruelty of humans to eels as its instancing of Nazi cruelty to their victims. The were-eel sections of the poem hit heights of ethical animus rarely seen in poetry: and hit home too at the roots of the very gifts of creative speech that make this such a great poem. The crunchiness, material pleasure and almost tactile materiality of the language, its naming, the punchy colour of the geographical range, its concreteness, its objective flair, are near to awe-inspiring – as here, taken almost at random, in the thirteeners of 'Pantaneel', in the third section, imagining the fens reclaimed in some near future when sea waters rise, and the life returns that the draining destroyed, starting with cranes:
High-stepping the kjarr into Moorends' flashlands,
skewering frogs and voles. Top ridges of the solar farm
barely breaking water, the crossbars of the Welfare Ground,
a foot above the ripple. Beyond the grime of Warplands Farm,
Okavango sedgelands to the overstepping tidal flats of Ouse;
blurry ungulates stud the plain, a scatter of erratics.
Whoopers cruise the Dutch Barn's shadow, pen and cob,
a litter of half-grown cygnets, upending in the algal soup,
plucking out pondweed, diving beetles, the monstrous
Palaeozoic nymphs of Anax imperator. Pike rise like crocs
in the sunlit gloom, hanging their gaff-jaws, fixing the gaze
of their riflescope copaline eyes
And so it goes, scanning the waters for life that is no longer there, a utopian dreaming that offers its gift of visionary ecopoetics as part of the necessary were-eel price to be paid for the murders committed. The cranes skewer the lifeforms with the violence that humans imitate without rhyme or reason. Even the well meaning new ecology, here with the solar farms, are part of the system of killing fields. The dream of returning the fens to a state resembling the Okavango Delta in Africa is warped by the high-stepping overstepping violence of colonialism, and the vision of the fens as an alluvial paradise regained must confess its blurry dreaming and the ways such erratic arbitrary romanticism was part of the problem, maybe one of the enabling sources to the annexing of the imperator. The whooper swans cruise the waterways in the shadow of the Dutch farms that destroyed the environment. The dragonfly nymphs are captured in verse that consumes them as the cygnets do. We have Ted Hughes' pike, but the riflescope copaline eyes fix their gaze on us as guilty predator.
At the same time, the quality of the writing must also be acknowledged: the lusciousness of the play of the sound-repetitions and local rhythm (the musical line 'crocs', 'gaff-jaws', 'gaze', eyes', the dactylic lilt to 'fixing the gaze /of their riflescope copaline eyes', for instance) nurses the same utopian dream, but in terms of language itself. Ely's accomplishments and felicities are being offered as exempla presenting musicality and flow of language as one of the ways of water that have been corrupted by the ecocide underway. The long poem imagines the Sargasso as also the originary zone of creativity in language; and this analogy is extended through various concatenations, most importantly sections of the poem that imagine the eels' journeying as cosmological, as though the whole universe were a sea, possibly drawing on the pulp fiction SF novel, The Sargasso of Space by Edmond Hamilton, which imagines a graveyard of space, a 'dead-area' where the crew's space ship is marooned. The poem stakes its claim on such far-fetched analogies, at the same time as presenting analogy itself as one of the mastering fictions that has enabled human destructiveness in the name of 'natural' Nietzschean drives. One of the finest poems in this collection of poems-as-long poem is 'The Dream of Sturgeon', which tracks this endangered species much as it has the eel, seeing it as a fellow traveller from a distant pre-human past (sturgeon have been swimming also since the Cretaceous):
Born in the Garden, died in the Flames,
Cain's spree-kill, carbon-offset Endtime.
Ninety million years of life, two hundred years of death,
coming down every year to the same fear:
will this be the spring that none return? (146)
The sturgeon is as much a victim of our analogies and the eschatology and mythology of our language-system as it is of our physical predation. This spirited, astonishing, bewildering collection is one of the best long poems I have read, transformatory, guilt-making, tough in surmise and Gothic splendours of the imagination, offered up as scar tissue and donation to the creatures on the very edge, subject to the violence that we do.
Violence of another kind is taken on and presented by the Irish poet, Trudie Gorman, who spent five years of various kinds of agony suffering illness the medical establishment could not name, and also suffering the micro-aggressions levelled against her for her origins on a poverty-stricken Dublin estate, for her dependence on welfare, coloured by her sense of the ways her own acceptance by Ireland as a working-class poet is marked by tokenism on the part of a privileged middle class relishing her otherness and pain. The poems are powerful, unbearable, stricken, also adroit, sharp, telling. The ambiguous title, Trust the Damage, has a characteristic poise that balances the poet's own powers to recuperate something from the devastating things she went through (her poetry trusts that the damage can be made into something good) with the tonalities of the hostile environment (trust this poor damaged woman to write the way she does). The collection has six sections that track the ill body as strange companion to the confounded mind living alongside and through it, and one of those sections has a poem I will read as representative, though it is part of a specific style and topic, the 'Body, as Protest'. The title of the poem 'The body is not a thing' is protest enough: levelled at the medicalised non-holistic world of the hospitals with their reification of the sick body, and was written at the height of Covid-19, with an epigraph by a medical expert acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of 'vulnerable groups' will die and then the virus will fizzle out. The cruelty of this mechanical acceptance of the stat weaves into the longer story of Trudie Gorman's agon, one of the symptoms of which has been simple collapse down to the floor because of the pain:
I play dead on a hotel room floor in Waterford
because that's what I'm good at –
for years now.
This is how the poem opens, taking us to the hotel that poetry reading organisers have found for her, the scene of the collapse from the pain. Her poetry is admired for the ways she plays dead so well, she understands that; and laced through is a nasty superego voice that uses this to determine her (that's all you're good at). From the floor, she notices the 'strange shackling of the chandelier above / my warped body', and the 'palatial carpet' on her 'hived skin', and warns her heart about the luxury of the room: 'I am alien / to splendour', that is, alien to her as council estate Dubliner, such that its very luxury may be toxic to her, the palatial carpet causing the hives. Just as alien is the hotel's assumption as to what constitutes an ordinary human being: 'I am bruised at the centre', she tells herself, as though the shackled chandelier and the warped body were figuring the ways Ireland as a culture both enchains its poor and underclasses, and warps all perception of their body politic. The centre of such a culture may pretend to have women like her, bodies like hers, at its core: but the centre can only hold her there as 'bruised', as damaged goods. What the hotel room does as a space is to remind her of her radical otherness from the dominant class: 'I was never everyone else', the poem astoundingly states. The Joycean confidence that a character could stand for everyone (HCE as Here Comes Everybody) is dismantled as a classist error. 'Vulnerable groups' are never allowed in to the definition of ordinariness, of everyone-ness. The line swerves away from the commoner 'I was never anyone else' into this powerful indictment of normative values operative as naturalising, self-evident forces more powerful than convention: powering through our assumptions and desires and definitions as culture itself.
The next section of the poem interrogates the reasons she may have been invited to read her work at Waterford: it's because of 'accessibility', the fact 'they must be seen to care', to show 'they want to love me'. 'One of these things', she writes, 'is true'; and we suspect it is the second motivation; if only because that public act of 'being seen to care' folds into itself the tokenism of accessibility and the fiction of loving care. This dissent to the rationale for her performance of herself as working-class, as underclass, as sick body playing dead runs deeper than we might suppose: 'Their language is my slow self-violation', and related to the death rate of the pandemic. If she accepts the machinery of fake care written into the ways class operates in the arts, it is to suppose herself as one of the dead vulnerable groups that are asked to play out their death both as 'self-violation' on the stage of the dominant culture, and as acceptable, accessible statistic. 'I cry on stage again' – we cannot tell whether this is being presented as her playing her part well, the weeping a play-acting of the public self-violation the culture demands; or as not just the thing the public pays for, but a deep feeling beyond their consumption of it. The latter becomes more plausible as the poem moves into its final stages:
It's a low soft hum,
the strength it took to stand buckling.
Limbs greedy for the ground again.
the sweet home of the floor
The hum is mysterious, especially the way it is related so closely by the syntax to the buckling of the legs, and the reprise of the floor-show suffering of the pain in the hotel room. She acknowledges that her heart 'has done this before' (as it literally has in the opening lines), and relates this repeated compulsion to her relationship to the alien public, described as a room full of strangers who 'take their mask off / when I'm not around'; and again she zeros in on their lapping up of her as sick body as curative contrast to their wellness ('they care about sick lives when I'm in the room' because they 'care about not being sick', she remarks caustically). The poem ends:
I take the money.
I go home early to a different room,
in the summer hum of the council estate
blue with my gathering heartbeat –
the largest luxury I know.
The heart that warned her about the alienating hotel room's luxury and its shackling of her as subaltern, the heart that buckled her legs when on display to the culture of cruel mocking care, gathers force when home on the council estate. The hum that had accompanied the buckling is revealed as the undertone of her being as defined by class-as-home, and the consonance of home and hum and different room describe a comforting environment as much as entailing a resistant energy ranged against the normative culture of 'everyone else'. Room is made for her own difference in ways that do not weep or buckle, and a bare life functions beyond the homo sacer disposability of the regimes working the stats: as a 'gathering heartbeat' that we can hear in the rhythms of this poem we are reading here and now. Gorman discovers a home for her poetics in the summer hum and in her own heartbeat, a joint fusion of basic life force, poetic rhythm and the hum of a self-homing that heals the performed self-violation demanded by a narcissist culture of spectacle. The poem emerges from the hum as a home because its 'low soft hum' is a nurturing environment, in paradoxical ways for it is only a home because it chimes with the hum of self-accompaniment that is only detectable under hostile stress (the low soft hum felt on stage in Waterford) or when secure within a vulnerable group that is determined to live and not be sacrificed. The poem emerges as if from the council estate, but registers too as an internal self-accompaniment of the body (hum of blood heard when you close your ears) that is core dwelling place for the creative spirit. The blue of the bruised core under surveillance by the alien culture is turned into another luxury, the luxury of being alive as a mocking form of Saint Patrick Blue, claiming the heritage of the culture as her own, as her estate's, as her homemade space. Trudie Gorman's collection is wise and true, a power to be reckoned with, finding the heart of self-made culture in itself as a set of lyrics, a vitality of being that sings a low soft hum of creative life, turning the damage and the bruise and the exclusions into somebody else, a body of work.
Tom Raworth's lost collection, Cancer, was drawn together by Miles Champion based on texts that Raworth had written between September 1970 and May 1971, and which he planned to publish with Frontier Press, Harvey Brown's Massachusetts press, in 1973, but funding ran dry. It is made up of three projects, Logbook, a strange account of a sea voyage (which was published separately in 1976 by Poltroon Press) composed in Colchester, September-November 1970, the letters he wrote to Ed Dorn whilst at Yaddo, the writers' retreat in Saratoga, New York, April-May 1971 (also published separately as 'Letters from Yaddo' in 1987), and a selection of his journals written back at Colchester, January-March 1971. The collection therefore places the writing of Logbook in sequence as preceding the Yaddo experience. As Jeremy Noel-Tod has shown, Logbook's prose poetics form 'most concerted period of experiment activity' with prose as medium, the years 1969 to 1972.[1] The single-minded and linear form of prose suited the 'logbook' styles of the satirical target, colonial inhabitings of the imperial world, as Noel-Tod argues. Equally, there is a clear relish in the acid inhabiting of genre, the sea voyage tales that nourished the imperial imagination, in order to dismantle the compositional arrogance of a annexing imperator, with a view to a decolonial purging of the authorial authority of empire. The captain with his logbook is a writer in his room, smoking whilst watching 'a man in a white suit turning the corner' as he types away: 'Ash fills my fingerprints making a soft cushing sound as I type on, pausing only this time to watch my fingers move, have a pain in my stomach, pay close attention to three words in the lyric.' The self-regard of the writer, watching his fingers moving, is identical with the colonial mobility of the 'man in the white suit': and has the quality of the death drive, there as the ash in the fingerprints, and the 'cushing' sound both a cushioned over-production of hormonal messages (Cushing's syndrome), as in a viral over-generation of imperial text, and vampiric (Peter Cushing), secretly parasitical on world culture. The imperial writer is deviously associated with close reading, synonymous with writerly self-love and hypochondria, a morbid and paranoid self-care as fear of infection. The proximity of the creative text to the writer is symptomatic of a self-soothing fiction of the author as valetudinarian observer of the spectacle of empire.
The Yaddo experiences that followed this decolonial skit are revealed in the journal and letters to Dorn as curiously lazy and self-regarding. The texts paint a picture of Raworth indulging himself with useless routines in the Saratoga cabin, rather like a parody of Thoreau; and it becomes clear that the practice of prose writing as developed to pass the time is both a time-wasting diversion from the task at hand, writing poetry, and a substitute, not always very successful, for the drug-taking pleasures Raworth had got very much used to in the States. The logbook texts, then, look like they are emerging from a reflection on the Thoreau-writer as Irish/English author in America, inviting a guilty acknowledgement of the imperial arrogance of the figure as lampooned in adventure fiction mode. That this pretty much also acts as Raworth's farewell to the prose poem is indicative of the closed system of the satire: Raworth can offer himself up as English or British only so far, after all. But for the purposes of this review, I'd like to close read (with all the irony that entails, I admit) a section of the correspondence with Dorn that does shift to poetry, and I hope reveals the Raworth view of the played-out origin of the poem as strange text.
The shift occurs in the last letter of the Yaddo correspondence with Dorn. He is telling Dorn about a time-travelling moment that seems to have occurred often at Yaddo, as the isolation prompted return of childhood memories:[2] timber trucks are passing nearby and he remembers a Christmas when he was five and an uncle reading the first poem he wrote, and how devastated he felt when the uncle accuses him of plagiarism. The incident prompts him to send Dorn a copy of what he calls a novel entitled 'Plastic Spoon', but it is set out as a poem, and runs:
t.v. is out of focus, or so the watch swings
i mean he is examining it, taking a cigarette, looking
voice says 'the picture of indian face' wind, wind
he hears it behind, swinging bleached out in the window
The focalisation is difficult, the 'i' become 'he', and the smoking author of the future logbook is taking his time, is watching TV like the writer the man in the white suit. The i/he becomes a 'looking / voice', the observer as speaker, and the attitude of the late modernist writer with his televisuals is to reproduce colonial representations, as in watching a western on TV. The Indian face that is seen on TV is weirdly a wind too: like the dangerous weather systems that assault Jack in the Overlook Hotel with its genocidal situation on top of an Indian burial ground in The Shining. It is a wind that is related to the compulsion to repeat, a death drive hum that can be heard 'behind' the subject', in the face of the subject, on the subject's TV, its elements repeated in the proximal sentence, 'swinging bleached out in the window', as linguistic bits and pieces. The poem goes on in two further stanzaic sections:
peddler sings ‘nothin’ . . . I just wanna talk t’yuh’
‘come up’n sit’n the (now let i deviate
holding three kings : this is now, seven p.m.
the poem the variations the will the spring the from
The underclass other, like Wordsworth's leech gatherer, is heard as if singing, and seems to be being positioned as 'natural' origin of the poem we are reading. But the 'i' is gambling, his killer hand revealing his poker face in terms of a chance-generated monarchical egotism, and he is left pondering about the real here and now answer to where this poem is really coming from. It comes, with its variations, from 'the will the spring the from'; in other words, it is an act of will, this poem is what i wills; it springs from this temporal zone, seven p.m. but without any content, it seems; its origin is language itself, the langue-parole system that engineers origins by way of the word 'from'. Doubt ruins the confidence though one might have that this triad, will, temporal zone (ie immediate context), language, explains a thing. For as the peddler states, he sings nothing, and sings just to communicate, and also to allow the poet as class-distinct listener to the leech-gatherer to deviate from all his tasks and duties (including actually carefully listening).
The next section, (and I'll end with this) to 'Plastic Spoon' runs as follows:
blur blur
what’s that? oh
sepia screw
take a spin in the focal length
bicycle days (or: a telegram)
la la la LA la la la
The poem has deviated alright: it has moved into the blurry zone familiar to Ely's ungulates, but there is a blurriness about the context, the time, the language, clouding over any readable will. The 'blur blur' is talked about as if it were a sound heard, like the timber lorries passing by: there is a machine generating the sound, but it is mysterious, a 'sepia screw', as though conjoining nostalgia for something remembered with a mechanism for altering the focus and perspective of the focaliser. The screw reminds the poet of his halcyon days as a kid on a bike, and the screw might be something to help with keeping that bike on the road, as useful as a mode of communication might be, a telegram (tele-gram, writing at a distance), writing according to the bi-cycle of repetition, compulsively produced, 'blur blur', to create a music of repetition as rhythm, as music, as sound-repetition (' la la la LA la la la'). Raworth has moved his poem rapidly away from the lines describing the poet as televisual colonist, as compromised listener to the underclass, as the singer of nothing but communicable deviation: on towards this blurry sense of the poem as issuing from the language machine, a zone of repetition compulsion, emptily screwing out nostalgia, a vacuous music of tra la las. He has notably moved the thinking on away from the assumption, based on an easy-going New York School dailiness model, that the poem comes out of the immediate real and its randomness, as the lack of any legible link between what the poem is doing and the days at Yaddo (or Colchester).[3] The comedy of this is striking, as is the light cynicism: what it does not do is wipe out the politics of the roles of the poet. The poem's answer to the question 'where does the poem come from' is luminous and blurry at the same time: it comes from language, soit; but where do the specifics of the language come from but the blur blur of the language machine that must communicate the variations, 'the will the spring the from', of the lyric in its abstract making.
[1] Jeremy Noel-Tod, 'Logbook: Against Prose' (2017), https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/63668/1/RAWORTH_LOGBOOK_ARTICLE_MAY_17.pdf With thanks to Miles Champion for helping me get the chronology of the texts in Cancer right.
[2] Some of the reminiscences feature recall of the open heart surgery Raworth underwent in the 1950s; the hospital scenes, though, especially with Cancer as title, point forward spookily to the endless procedures Raworth had to suffer battling against the cancer that eventually killed him in 2017.
[3] The point of his letter to Martin Stannard on the composition of the fourteener elegy for Patrizia Vicinelli is that the day-context, his Marseille wanderings and noticings during the hours he wrote it, has little to do with the poem as composed. As the poem itself states, it is 'ejected from the real' but not defined by it, or even given 'real' content by it. 'A Letter to Martin Stannard', Earn Your Milk: Collected Prose (Cambridge: Salt, 2009), 166-171.
Adam Piette teaches as the University of Sheffield and co-edits Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam.
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