Blogrant

Chris Andrews

I don’t know if I am an excessively glass-half-empty person – I hope not – but it’s certainly true that I am more often disappointed than I should be with follow-ups to poetry collections I have liked. It would be unkind to cite examples, so instead why not celebrate an exception? I first came across the Australian poet Chris Andrews (b. 1962) when he won the 2011 Anthony Hecht Prize. I was a finalist myself in that competition – judged by Mark Strand – and have never been able to decide whether it is galling or consoling that Chris’s Lime Green Chair was a better book than (what would become) The Sadness of Animals. We have had to wait over a decade for another volume – Andrews has been earning his crust in the meantime teaching European literature at the University of Western Sydney and is also a prolific translator, most notably of Roberto Bolaño and César Aira (neither of whom, curiously, are European) – but at last we have The Oblong Plot, published in Australia by Puncher & Wattmann but procurable elsewhere from Amazon. And the only disappointing thing about it is the slightly inferior binding: the card covers curl too easily with use – which they are going to get.

A peculiarity of Chris Andrews’ output is that each of his three collections so far are built around a particular verse form – of his own invention, so far as I can tell. In Cut Lunch (Gininderra Press, Australia, 2002), Lime Green Chair’s only predecessor, this consists of three five-line stanzas with a sort of terza rima rhyme scheme – that is, with the middle line of each verse providing the first and last of the next – sometimes (not always) the middle line of the last stanza referring back to the outside two of the first.

Rather than having you imagine this, here is an example:

The Things You Are

 You are an ill-lit archive where extinct brands

of ice-cream are filed under Lickety Split.

You’re all the hardships your ancestors came through

what you swallowed a couple of hours ago

and a set of instinctive short-cut commands.

The guy who said you’re exactly what you do

no wonder his life was a race against time

but the ones who say it’s all in how you frame

your mind sound like they’re selling unhappiness

insurance. Maybe you’re how you cycle through

these ways of thinking but there are some who say

you are still what you were before you could speak

or already what you will be in the hands

of people who won’t need to know who you are

when almost everything has been stripped away.

The stanza breaks seem there to emphasise the scheme rather than indicating any kind of break in sense or change of direction: the narrative just hurdles or hurtles over them,

And that hurtle effect – which is also evident in Andrews’ next two volumes – is reinforced by an absence of any punctuation other than the full stop (the second stanza in particular could do with the odd comma). There is another important feature here, which is less easy to notice: a pretty strict syllable count, hendecasyllables to be specific. I say ‘pretty strict’ rather than ‘strict’ only because he will award words like ‘everything’ three syllables (as indeed most people pronounce them), rather than four. I think I may leave a more extended discussion of syllabics for another day, but they are there in all three books.

I should say that there are a certain number of poems in Cut Lunch, as in Lime Green Chair and The Oblong Plot, which do not follow the given scheme. To my taste they seem marginally less successful (in all three) but I would not want to put too much weight on that.

When we reach the Hecht-winning Lime Green Chair, the rhymes have been ditched (but we get a bit of punctuation in exchange), and, although hendecasyllables still reign, there is a new stanza form: thirteen lines followed by eight. Fellow Aussie, fellow Chris, Chris Wallace-Crabbe – no mean poet himself – is quoted on the back cover claiming that the form “mockingly subverts centuries of the sonnet in English”, but it is hard to see how. Again, in defiance of Chris 2’s suggestion that the break between the 13 and the 8 constitutes a volta, the poem again as often as not vaults over the abyss without breaking stride. In this one there is, in fact, a sense break at the stanza break.

Prop

I prop up the dog and wait for him to pee.

Three a.m. A phrase goes floating through my head:

“A still Prussian-blue night with rather weak stars.”

In the dirt where summer scorched the lawn away

a puddle forms, burnt-umber summer that changed

the climate of feeling about climate change.

Weak stars because a fullish moon is climbing

into the sky like scandalous new talent

with no intention of inspiring envy,

climbing above the autumnal pergola

shedding butter- and claret-coloured vine leaves

sprung from a stock gnarled like an arthritic leg,

rotting at the core, propped up with a fence post.

Moonlight makes the puddle’s meniscus glisten.

The sky my black cab dripping from the car wash.

The Earth wobbling on through space, riddled with life,

from the thickening mothers of vinegar

to insomniacs anonymous who see

a future of unscheduled meetings with death,

from sap-green bamboo for Shanghai scaffolding

to an old dog running away in his dreams.

The pace of it leaves you quite breathless, don’t you think?

Having been responsible for (guilty of?) I fair bit of soppiness in my time, I can’t resist also giving you just the last, 8-line section of ‘My Life Without You’ – Chris in uncharacteristically romantic vein:

Next year it will be twenty years already.

You’ve probably forgotten most of the times

you made all the difference (if you ever knew)

by not being otherwise than as you are:

a perfect stranger to dinginess. You were

the barefoot breeze all along the branching path,

the breathable light and the ocean-washed air.

It was you. I knew it, I had no idea.

And so to The Oblong Plot. And to a new verse form – this time three nine-line nine-syllable stanzas (enneasyllabics, in case you wanted to know). Once more, better to show than to tell:

Under Fang

Day my colour-bound myopia,

before you go can I just say how

claret leaves cut puzzles in the blue

and what the skywriter hearted there

was anybody’s progressive guess.

Day the only place for us to park

our demountable utopia,

don’t slip away like a timid guest

before I can say just how you go.

Another brilliant day gone missing

the never-yet assembled fragments,

with nothing to guide me but the ghost

of a pattern: net trap set to catch

the matter that could make a part whole.

Rumbly bins, Venus dipping to kiss

lichen-crusted tiles, and here you are:

dusk my shot of myalgia my

shadow-flooded topiary maze.

It might be true, what my brother says:

I like to aim low. My ambition:

to remain an opsimath. Success:

not having given up just yet.

But I stand under a blown street lamp.

It’s Alphard, so my phone-eye tells me,

At the far end of the starlight thread.

Somebody watching under you, Fang.

Deep sky night my ache my opiate.

Three colons in three lines in the last stanza! – but the hurtle is still there, for all that. This is, incidentally, not the only poem to show that the young Andrews was paying attention in astronomy class.

Doing a bit of (minimal) background research on Charles Lamb’s well-known ‘The Old Familiar Faces’ (‘why?’ is another story), I was surprised to find that he wrote this quintessentially old man’s poem when he was not quite twenty-three:

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

This brought to mind, tangentially, another juvenile old-man’s-poem of great beauty, it seems to me, ‘Pleasures’ by the Second World War poet Keith Douglas; this is all of it:

Forgotten the red leaves painting the temple in summer,
Forgotten my squirrel in his dark chamber,
The great turtle and the catamaran;
Rivers, where the mosaic stones are found.

That church, amputated by high explosive,
Where priests no more lift up their murmurous Latin,
And only the sun, a solitary worshipper,
Tiptoes towards the altar and rests there.

These and the hazy tropic where I lived
In tall seas where the bright fish go like footmen
Down the blue corridors about their business –
The jewelled skulls are down there – I have forgotten,

Almost forgot. How slowly they return
Like princes into the rooms they once owned. How dimly
I see the imaginary moon, the magic painter
Of wide, deserted acres with splendour and silence.

Once on Monte Nero in the spring
Some peasant girl fashioned for love and work
Taught me a smile that I had forgotten.
It is so hard to speak that language now.

Almost forgot, how slowly they return
Like princes into the halls they once owned.

– the which weepy retrospective was written at the age of eighteen, before he had even left school. Before, too, the outbreak of the war in which he would die six years later.

Headstone of Keith Douglas (1920-1944)

John Keats, of course, was

              …“half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

         To take into the air my quiet breath;

                Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

         To cease upon the midnight with no pain…

in the spring/autumn of 1819, when he was rising 24. But he might have known, or at least suspected, that he would not see the spring or autumn of 1821

It is true, I think, that young poets are more romantically attracted to death than those of us for whom it has become a nearer prospect, and it is perhaps the case that nostalgia also becomes less appealing when it is, as it were, compulsory – when looking back is all, or most of, what’s left?  I have been in the unkind habit of suggesting that most poems by young Italian aspirants are 15-30 lines long, not more than the three or four words per line, with the last line being, as often as not, “della morte”. In fairness I should say that it took a fair amount of scrolling, a couple of years back, to find the following on the excellent Internopoesia poem-a-day site (no less excellent, of course, for my having been on it a couple of times):

…E questa è gioia,

è l’attimo in cui sfioro con le dita
l’angolo del giorno,
è il suo tramonto
quando chiama a sé la sera
e mi sovviene il tempo
e la sua arsura
e con un gesto impallidito
scosto la carezza
poco prima
ben accetta
della morte.

…And this is joy,

the moment my fingers graze

the corner of the day,

and sundown

calling the evening home,

bringing time to mind,

all that it burns,

and with a pale gesture

I push away the caress

(a little earlier

all but welcome)

of death.

[more or less]

Fosca Navarra (aetas 22)

Death-embracing aside (and Fosca, I am happy to say, is still with us and has published a novel in the meantime), one of the dangers of laying out a poem this way is that it puts an unnecessary pressure on individual lines – which can struggle to bear the aphoristic weight loaded onto them – and especially the last. Hence, no doubt, short lines habitually reaching for big concepts.

Talent Scouts

Here are three paragraphs from the ‘submissions’ pages of three different publishers.

1. We actively encourage diverse submissions, and would be delighted to see more poetry submitted by women, and by writers from BAME, disabled and LGBTQ backgrounds and any who have traditionally been poorly represented in poetry publishing.
2. We actively encourage and welcome diverse submissions, and would love to see more poetry submitted to us by poets who are Black, Asian, mixed race or from other underrepresented ethnic backgrounds, identify as LGBTQI+, who are neurodiverse, D/deaf, disabled, working class or on a low income. 
3. We encourage submissions from all communities, faiths, backgrounds, and from anyone who experiences racism, ableism, poverty, homo- and trans-phobia, those under 30 years old, and from everyone else.

   One thing that leaps to the eye is their similarity – do they share a copywriter, or is this an unusual subcategory of literary plagiarism?

   The first example is surely the oddest. Given the number of women occupying key seats in the poetry Dress Circle, it’s odd to find them classed with the disadvantaged. What, besides, is a disabled or LGBTXYZ background? Many of the practices denoted by the more outré letters of the alphabet soup might be thought to make their champions unlikely to be providing family backgrounds for aspirant poets any time soon. And have the offspring of the disabled been “poorly represented in poetry publishing”, traditionally or otherwise? I would be mildly surprised if statistics were available. 

   But intriguing though these mysteries are, my question is: why have these paragraphs been inserted at all?

   I would imagine that publishers, even poetry publishers, would like to shift books. Do they think that the named categories write more accomplished verse or, failing that, at least sell more of it? Perhaps the Bookseller will shortly produce some figures for 2025 poetry sales that will answer the second part of the question, but my impression was that Seamus Heaney, even posthumously, remains pretty much at the top of the charts, and he would not tick many, or any, of these talent scouts’ boxes. As to talent, you will have to answer for yourselves the first part – but, bigot that I am, I would not myself expect, say, animal rapists (Z for ‘Zoo’, in case you’re curious) to be disproportionately gifted in this (or any other) field.

   There remains of course the possibility that the publishers don’t really mean it (the “and from everyone else” in the third example might hint as much), that they are just ‘virtue signalling’. But where is the virtue in promoting arbitrary non-literary groupings, and who is being signalled to?

January ’26

LAST WEEK JORDI TORRENT, the film director responsible for my entire celluloid career (a non-speaking 20 seconds), who has clearly been reading Arthur Waley’sThe Opium War through Chinese Eyes, sent me a poetic challenge: to perform the exercise set by Lin Zexu, the better part of 200 years ago, for aspirant imperial civil servants in his charge:

On August 1oth, he summoned to a re-test sixty students, twenty from each Academy, of whom all but four presented themselves. The subject of the poem they had to write was ‘For one evening the miasmic mists by the wind have been rolled away’. The rhyme had to be ‘Han’… 

And by “tomorrow lunchtime” what is more.  

This was the result: 

The Rhyme had to be ‘Han’ 

for Jordi and Flavia 

“For one evening the miasmic mists 

 by the wind have been rolled away” 

Granted that, once the fog has lifted,              

what do we see? The silhouette of a man 

carved into the hillside, at his wrists 

and ankles rings of moss, a nosegay 

of wildflowers placed by a prude 

over his cock, which hasn’t been …thrifted,  

shall we say – a neologism, I admit, crude, 

and arguably uncalled-for, since ‘Han’  

was supposed to be the rhyme. 

The problem, though, is the same every time 

we write poems to order: that the world  

wriggles out from under us. In this case, 

a sudden crosswind has slyly whirled 

aloft the flowery figleaf, and the race  

is on between the punctual puritan 

and a returning miasma to reimpose 

decorum – but still, weren’t we supposed 

willy-nilly to make the rhyme ‘Han’? 

of which, I have to say, I am foolishly proud, under the circumstances.  

But it set me to thinking about writing to order generally. Of course, since the earliest times, poets have written – been required to write – paeans to the boss class. Horace, for one, wrote many lines in praise of Augustus, not always his best: Odes I, 2, for example, which ends “…hic ames dici pater atque princeps, / neu sinas Medos equitare inultos / te duce, Caesar.” Andrew Marvell, some centuries later, wrote (with a nod to his Roman predecessor) the rather surprising – though not wholly un-nuanced – ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’:  

…So restless Cromwell could not cease 

In the inglorious arts of peace, 

But thorough advent’rous war 

Urged his active star. 

And like the three-fork’d lightning, etc  

But the practice has lapsed somewhat in recent times, except for the variable efforts of British Poets Laureate. Betjeman’s ‘Death of George V’ was perhaps not a high point in his oeuvre: 

Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe 
Flutter and bear up the Norfolk sky: 
In that red house in a red mahogany book-case 
The stamp collection waits with mounts long dry. 

but Ted Hughes was sufficiently unashamed of his official efforts to make a book of them, Rain-Charm for the Duchy (1992) – and the title poem is at least OK, if not better than that. We will draw a veil over Amanda Gorman’s heroically bad ‘The Hill We Climb’, read, none the less, with admirable self-confidence at the Biden-Harris inauguration earlier this year. 

Not all poems-to-order are political, though, and there are a number of still-flourishing genres of more intimate ‘occasional poems’ – epithalamia, birth poems, elegies, poems prompted by Catalan film-directors… – some of which, having gone on long enough today, I will have a look at next time. 

20.07.2021