I really enjoyed the latest episode of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, which featured John Goodby, Leo Mellor and Nerys Williams discussing Dylan Thomas.
So I thought I’d start the summer season of Some Flowers Soon with an extract from what Thomas wrote in 1950 to a student who asked him about poetry. It was published posthumously as a ‘Poetic Manifesto’ in 1961, and parts of it have become widely quoted — including this:
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, ‘Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.’ But you’re back again where you began. You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words.
Thomas’s comment above this, however, is less well known:
I, myself, do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only the poems I like. This means, of course, that I have to read a lot of poems I don’t like before I find the ones I do, but, when I do find the ones I do, then all I can say is ‘Here they are’, and read them to myself for pleasure.
I’m going to try to use these posts to do something similar — not to review new poetry, exactly, but to say ‘here they are’ about things that I’m enjoying, mid-read. If nothing else this will, I hope, ensure Some Flowers Soon lives up to Private Eye’s recent description of me as ‘enthusiastic’.
So here is this week’s enthusiasm: The Clouds The Birds The Frogs, a small collection of new prose poems by the American poet and satirist Kent Johnson. Reviewing Johnson’s I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field (2015), I once wrote:
The frequently institutional vignettes of I Once Met continue Johnson’s favourite theme of the ‘Avant Garde in the Ivy League’, and play familiar games with the duck-rabbit of fact and invention (‘poetic license,’ he writes, has sometimes been employed in ‘a deepening of the genuine’). What is unexpected is how cumulatively moving the book is. The satirist, wrote Robert Graves, is a left-handed poet.
This thought came back to me dipping into the ‘seven story poems, two dream reviews, and one translucine’ of The Clouds The Birds The Frogs, which begins with a story poem about a group of poets ‘reading amazing experimental poems to each other’ as their armoured train to Seattle ‘disappeared under snows’:
Things went from bad to worse. The Budweiser ran out and then the $4 yoghurts and the Pop-Tarts, too. After a few weeks, we began to eat the weaker ones. Then it was time to draw straws. Some poets went mad, tunnelled up the snow with spoons, and crawled off across the crust, never to be found. The great spruces loomed. Yet thanks be to God, the Merciful One, the following May saw record heat, and the train roofs began to peek through the snows.
At the other end of the pamphlet — which has been finely designed by O. Tong — Johnson’s ‘translucine’ of César Vallejo’s ‘Voy a hablar de la esperanza’ (‘The Following Address is About Hope’), mixes English and Spanish to speak of suffering with a movingly uncertain humour (‘Hoy I just plain sufro’).
One hundred copies of The Clouds The Birds The Frogs are available for £5 each from Sam Riviere’s If A Leaf Falls press, along with other good things: https://samriviere.com/index.php?/together/if-a-leaf-falls-press/