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Fiona SampsonOn Listening |
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Biographical note: Fiona Sampson has published fourteen books – poetry, philosophy of language and books on writing process – of which the most recent are Common Prayer (Carcanet, 2007) and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (Macmillan, 2005). Her awards include the Newdigate Prize; ‘Trumpeldor Beach’ was short-listed for the 2006 Forward Prize; and she has been widely translated, with eight books in translation, including Travel Diary, awarded the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia). She contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times and other publications; and is the editor of Poetry Review.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844713271
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Short
description/annotation: On Listening is a collection of essays covering many of the key areas of contemporary debate in creative writing. From translation as the art of the impossible to the significance of community writing projects, by way of teaching debate and personal enthusiasms, it affords a portrait of the field as a whole.
Main description: On Listening is a collection of essays on poetry, written for various occasions over the last few years. Ranging from scholarly papers to literary non-fiction, critical writing to lectures, each allows a different way in to the book’s central preoccupation. On Listening is concerned, centrally, with the nature of poetic practice. Using both philosophy of language and an editor’s literary ear, theory and the author’s own experience as a poet, this book examines good writing practice from the inside out; and asks how it can be developed: by teaching and community facilitation, by reading and travelling and, where those two interests come together, in translation.
Table of contents:
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Excerpt from book: The ephemeral I wake in the dark and the dream evaporates before I can grasp the details The numinous haunts us. But we understand that the ephemeral is not the numinous. The ephemeral is that vapour-trail of what has been outlived – what has outlived itself – with which we litter our world. The ephemeral, we believe, fails to sustain itself; is incapable of sustaining itself beyond the bright space of our attention. Chocolate wrapper, jingle, fly-poster: it comes in many forms, striking across registers of taste and levels of consumption. Ephemera may be high art (the archived theatre programme), culturally significant (graffiti) or useful (cling-wrap in your fridge). It may be intrinsic to daily life, like the train timetable I carry in my wallet; or as exceptional as the condolence card I sent earlier. Roll-ups, tarpaulins, crisp packets, light bulbs, fake tan, membership leaflets, price-tags, tea-shop doilies, microwave soup-cartons, lipstick, cardboard stands for Special Offers all the detail of contemporary Britain segues by in a cheerful, slightly louche cavalcade. The ephemeral, after all, is modernity, acceleration, a world continually changing itself out of reach. But it’s a double life. The first, at the hub of things human, is anxiously contemporary; fraught with dependency and meaning. This is an existence as — that which can be smoked, spread out, emptied, switched on, smeared, read, binned, sullied, used up: verbs of consumption. The ephemeral seems to have obligations to the market. At least, piece by piece it mimics the way the market, that mystery shopper, picks up and puts down, fingers and rejects. Piece by piece, the ephemeral mimics the market’s indecision; its lingering glances and flirtations, its purchases in a burst of certainty and its all-too-swift regret. After the consummation of ownership — the a posteriori regret. Maybe the wrapper could have been bigger, brighter, more boldly designed? Let’s try it. Maybe the newspaper would be more portable if we changed it to tabloid format? Maybe another brand of bar snack would be tastier? We’re still hungry. The ephemeral shows us that the market is a machine for turning the present into the past. It’s a time-capsule, showing us the before and after of consumption in the same moment. Its frailty – the vulnerability of a sacrifice — allows it to symbolise its own future. The future of the roll-up is a puff of smoke, a gritty lining to your throat, a limp cuff of paper (and possibly a filter) in the ash-tray or behind the bins. The future of the chocolate wrapper’s a land-fill site somewhere in middle England. But these futures, whether short or long, are not posterities. They’re the second life of ephemera. Ephemera jewels the rubbish-tips of the world. It snuggles between the joists and batons of houses — that old newspaper laid down by long-ago plasterers, the lost cat-collar — and roofs the homes of others. Ephemera lies down in drawers, with memories, souvenirs and hair-grips. It thickens on the walls below the railway-bridge. It goes on, somehow resisting the narrative of disposal which sees itself as final. Curtains. Finito. Alone among the things of this world, the ephemeral carries on being itself. But ephemera, whose destiny has always been to be thrown away, carries right on being itself. The second gift of the ephemera time-machine is that it shows us that it’s possible to survive change: “We shall not all die; but we shall be changed: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye”. What use to us, though, is this survival? Why should we care — in other than as ecologists – about the future of what we no longer have any use for? What has it to do with us? Except that of course here the twinkling God’s-eye is ours. In rendering something ephemeral, we render it — if not immortal, at least enduring. The market creates waste; we create the endurance of meaning in the ephemeral. Giving up its claim to permanence, the ephemeral gains continuing identity in-itself. We know this model: gain through relinquishment. Live lightly and the whole earth is yours, the rich man and the eye of the needle, be a citizen of the world not just of your small corner of it, consume less and there’ll be more world left. T-shirts and bookmarks, tea-towels and fridge magnets, little books of wisdom and calendars: they know it too, in every (ephemeral) pore. But this isn’t it; or not quite all of it, at least. In giving up its claim on permanence, the ephemeral creates a new kind of meaning. In St Thomas’s Gospel, Thomas is the disciple who cannot find a way to name Jesus: Jesus said to his followers, “Compare me to something and tell me what I am like.” It’s not that to name him would be blasphemous; but that it would simply be inaccurate, because he transcends every name. But in fact all naming is a failure of this kind; a falling-short from the insight which is genuine encounter. Ephemera almost completely slips under the wire of naming, once it embarks on its second life: the one it doesn’t lead in relation to us. How do we name the blackish, slightly crinkly scrap of paper in a way which differentiates it from the silvery waxed scrap on which some print is still visible? Or a red irregular corner of folded paper? Only by trying to articulate the in-itself of each. Each piece of ephemera exists in-itself, uniquely shaped by the manner of its decay. To say that one scrap is one kind of former chocolate wrapper and another comes from another brand is to fail to describe it with sufficient precision. No wonder archaeologists resort to filing artefacts under location codes. But the nameless in-itself-ness of ephemera is a reminder of the limits of language. It suggests how extraordinary it would be to free ourselves from the “identity politics” of language practices. As we relinquish names – our own, or ones we’re used to handing out – we move into a spaciousness, which is to say into something underdetermined. Unidentified, we’re free to reinvent ourselves and the world of our experience. It’s like going to a party where no-one knows us. Without being able to name something, we’re forced to open up our attention: to glimpse, as well as we can, what something is in-itself. Loosening the bonds of identity, the ephemeral shows us – as its third revelation – doesn’t destroy the individuality of which the world is made up; but enhances it. Suddenly we can have the cabinet of marvels of early childhood restored to us, “return to the place from which we started and see it for the first time”. And maybe we glimpse some of this in the playfulness we associate with ephemera: the colourfulness we expect of it, the lack of solemnity with which we use it, its intrinsic informality. The ephemeral, that most worldly detritus, restores to us a paradoxical sense of the potential of innocence. In the Burnside poem I used as an epigraph, the numinous is a spiritual quality which haunts daily life, rendering it meaningful but also unstable. The numinous flits away the moment you expect to lay hands – or eyes – on it directly. But it is present before the moment of realisation with which you scare it away, interwoven into the texture of the daily. The numinous, being necessary, is part of the very structure of our lives. Enduring and ephemeral, it lights up what we know – and what we can do – with meaning. With possibility. Like the ephemeral, it advertises the fact that it must travel away from us; it augers complexity, transition, renewal. My fingers fidget a piece of paper as I sit writing this. I could tell you something about what it feels like; something about its pallor and – mmm – its warmly inky smell. But it’s ephemeral. In a minute or two it will float into my waste-paper-bin. The bin’s full of papers; of wrappers and tissues and rejected drafts. They move easily away. Some will go in the fire shortly, sprout the astonishing orange flames of acid-treated paper, disappear from sight. And who’s to say that the white flutter of a sheet of paper has less of the numinous than an effect of light in the fold of the curtain? Who’s to say that the ephemeral bears less weight of insight than the numinous? Time moves on, moving the light in the curtain across and out of the room. The essay gets written. Soon, probably, it too will prove ephemeral. Outside, the barn owl starts its long gliding evening sweeps up and down the paddock. What remain are the smell of ash; the hint of an idea; a trembling sense of mutability here in the room, alongside the familiar shelves, cupboards, table.
Previous review quote: [ ] the urgent final poem in which the lovers make love in luminous detail [ ] Words and phrases detach from each other to become free-floating, sensory. The poem concludes in a flurry of colliding impressions. [ ] Sampson is working on the very outer edges of language here, seeking for the truths that emerge at the instant when syntax, vocabulary and even the shape of words on the page dissolves. Her mellifluous verse-novel provides a compelling exploration of the points at which language and love intersect, and draws a conclusion that is, in its way, as experimental as the rest of her collection. The Guardian
Previous review quote: Consistently and strikingly lyrical [ .] sensual passion. TLS
Previous review quote: This book arcs memorably across a continent [ ] charts with a thrillingly original touch the blind hope and bitter helplessness of two people trapped in a deadening love. [ ] Sampson’s eye for the memories buried in apparently mundane sights, her instinct for the fresh and perfect metaphor, was already in evidence in Folding the Real (2001) and here it appears again, well honed [ ] Recurring motifs [ ] are folded into the evolving narrative like memories trailing through dream landscapes [ ] And the final poem a dazzling, dizzying plunge into the realm of the id. [..] Meaning, in Sampson’s best poetry, doesn’t come to rest at all; it storms its way on, at once poignantly and brutally, through love and its losses. The Irish Times
Previous review quote: Sampson’s flawless ear comes first; the imagery comes second. But when the imagery does come [ ] it delivers an ecstatic hit. Poetry London
Previous review quote: The most generous thing the poet can do is to give us some vivid, piercing memories that become our experience. The author here, dangerously and marvellously, comes close to revealing herself as a symbol. She reminds me of Nerval, travelling east. Tomaz Salamun
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