William Rowe (Ed.)

Biographical note:  William Rowe teaches contemporary British and Latin American poetry at Birkbeck College, where he is Director of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. He has written on Maggie O’Sullivan, Lee Harwood, Eric Mottram, Allen Fisher, and William Carlos Williams and is the author of Three Lyric Poets: Lee Harwood, Barry MacSweeney and Chris Torrance, forthcoming from Northcote House in the Writers and Their Work series. His translations of contemporary Latin American poets have been widely published, and he has three books on Latin American poetry, including Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (OUP, 2000).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712496
ISBN:  9781844712496
Author:  William Rowe
Title:  The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  10-Jul-07
Extent:  236pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  354 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Griffiths has one of the finest ears – for song, for varieties and cadences of speech – of any poet writing today. His compacted lyrics flash with intelligence and humour. They are shaped by anger, empathy and childish delight. But they are also charged with the excitement of contemporary form: swift, filmic montage and free use of the page space. His poems dig, probe, reveal, expose the language as it is lived, with a range possibly unequalled in any British poet. Their sharp diagnoses of social domination and the ideas that sustain and mask it are a wake-up call. But there is nothing dry about them: they savour language, ask you to dance with it, show you the pain in it, enlarge the world with it. Griffiths was a key member of the British Poetry Revival, both as an activist in the Poetry Society and in the small press scene, and as a writer of inventive, formally innovative poetry. He continues to explore the shapes of contemporary experience, and to denounce agencies of unfreedom. By now he is the author of a large body of work, which this book seeks to make available to ordinary readers. The essays collected here offer guides to reading, commentaries on forms and sources, and a range of insights into how the poems work. There is also a bibliography, an interview, photographs and visuals, all of which help to give a vivid sense of Griffiths’s world.

Table of contents:
ARCHIVE
1. Jeff Nuttall: Introduction
2. Iain Sinclair: Diorama of the Fixed Eye-Ball
3. Eric Mottram: ‘Every New Book Hacking on Barz’: The Poetry of Bill Griffiths
4. Clive Bush: The Secret Commonwealth
NINETEEN SEVENTIES
5. Paula Claire: Bill Griffiths : A Severe Case of Hypergraphia
6. Sean O’Huigin: Earl’s Court Squared
7. Alan Halsey: Pirate Press: A Bibliographical Excursion
8. Robert Hampson: Bill Griffiths and the Old English Lyric
EIGHTIES AND AFTER
9. Tony Baker: From Black Cocoa Out
10. John Seed: ‘In music far mair sweet’: Bill Griffiths in Durham
11. Fernanda Teixeira de Medeiros: ‘& that / that divide’: poetry and social commentary in Bill Griffiths
12. Gilbert Adair: Darwin’s Dialogues as Punctuations of Equilibrium
13. William Rowe: Bill Griffiths’s The Mud Fort: Language as vulnerability and revolt in an age of compliance
14. Steve Cox: Scars in a haunted landscape: Bill Griffiths’ Ghost Tales of Seaville
INTERVIEW
15. Bill Griffiths and William Rowe
BIBLIOGRAPHY
16. Doug Jones
VISUALS

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Jeff Nuttall: Introduction

Bill Griffiths’ poems are dazzling. More than any work in English since Gertrude Stein they insist on being recognised as surfaces and structures. Statements are made. Stories are told. Places and people are described. A bitter anarchism is expressed, also Nietzschean yearning towards energy and joy. Yet statement, narration, description and expression are kept in check so that the poem is seen as itself, a poem, an artefact, an edifice with an importance over and above its subject matter. It is not the light and the landscape, the sense of motion of limbs or machine, the anger and the disappointments, the passions and hungers, which are magnificent. It is the poem itself which, in Griffiths’ work, perpetually dazzles and astonishes in exactly the way the great stained-glass windows of European cathedrals dazzle and astonish before the eye has recognised whatever image is depicted.

People are reluctant to allow words to do this. The image of Christ may be presented in a thousand fragments of coloured glass because glass, light and architecture are materials in which structure is expected to take priority over content. But words in their day-to-day function are the vehicle of information. If priority is made secondary to their glory then a cautious and insecure area of the mind panics in case efficiency is lost in euphoria. To allow such a panic to determine the nature of poetry is to set poetry on a level with road signs and government white papers. Griffiths’ work refuses such a levelling with aggressive vigour. Instruction manuals deal with facts. Poetry deals with excitement and joy. It may certainly inform but its first purpose is to energise, to exalt the spirit and kindle the eye. Griffiths’ work is a vivid demonstration of this priority.

How does he do it? He uses a variety of language: prison talk (‘its sick fucked-up / fish (that gave emselves up) jumped on the / hookz’); biker talk (‘Hey, Blue! Tell? / What cars a’like racin’ at you’); dialect (‘sow’d as a tapioca most / ‘at curds-up or cuts in the tabby sky’); literal translation (‘no-yes grass’s semi-audible sweet-howl’); ancient English (‘Unlovely come I here some knight / That would with monsterdom fight’). The literal translation places English words in unusual syntactical positions which present the text as form a fraction of a second before the content registers. Similarly the colloquial passages use phonetic spelling, obscure nicknames, opaque references, to delay comprehension so that form makes its unimpeded impact (‘the grand bagged billy’s eyes / strained out from the glass-indoors / at quaint manner of its ledding / an’ loud earth-up’). Throughout the text syntax is playfully and/or sometimes violently rearranged into an unfamiliar and unexpected order: (‘Art being or being Our Art Art beginning And art / and starting-white hedge (be) doing Trigger tiger / wide-bayed snowy-up is Yolk-yellow (girl) see / deep Fella’).

In the forms thus composed sound appropriates a major role. Rhymes, rhythms, alliterations, vowels accelerate, explode or dissolve in relentless, marvellously controlled sequences. Space and punctuation are used as silences, delays, percussion, or are withdrawn to achieve speed and smooth flow. Parentheses are opened but not closed. Sentences are begun but merge into other sentences before a full stop is inserted. A manipulation of phrase edges is used with a similar effect to that of Dada poetry. There are also similarities to the way in which a saxophonist like John Coltrane will rephrase a melody relentlessly, again and again, to find all the possibilities of a given handful of notes.

The sense, when it does burst through, comes enhanced, each image or event spun, polished, illuminated and celebrated by its membership of such a majestic galaxy. What filters through the myriad colours, chips of rainbow, frozen dew of forms, is light, the sun itself, life, sensibility and glory – ‘Locked in in the beauty, Locked into the beauty, Locked in in the beauty.’

Unpublished endorsement :  Bill Griffiths’s mix of street-wise academia and boundary dancing poetry have engaged audiences now for at least four decades. He possesses that ability to mix chance with intent, history with fiction and irreverent music with non-received pronunciation in order to deliver what has become one of the most consistently creative bodies of poetic writing made during the past century. That his name does not yet trip off the tongue of mainstream poetry buyers is something that should be swiftly corrected. To know where we are with our verse in the UK an understanding of Griffiths is essential.

Peter Finch

Unpublished endorsement :  In a world packed with fraudulent choirboys, every now and again a truly oppositional voice gets through. Bill Griffiths has one of those voices. It’s great to see his shattered sea shanties and anarchist shards of sprung wit finally getting a little of the attention they deserve.

Sean Bonney

Unpublished endorsement :  Bill Griffiths is a national treasure and it sometimes seems he is buried under a mound like the Sutton Hoo treasures, inviolate, timely and glittering, but there’s not a speck of dirt on him. Our treasure hoard is his word hoard. He loans us his unique perspectives — gnomic, relaxed, critical, esoteric, outsider — along with his loan words. Compressed like a jewel they accept the elucidation generously offered to them, without specifically inviting it. This book provides that.

Robert Sheppard

Unpublished endorsement :  Bill Griffiths is one the most distinguished poets to come to the fore in British poetry in the 1970s. He is at once erudite and accomplished, drawing from Old English as often as modern and contemporary parlance. From his ground-breaking sequence Cycles to his translations of The Battle of Maldon to his more recent Durham, his work engages with gravitas, humour and song – often in the same poem. Reading and rereading his work continues to be both invigorating and sustaining. Each new collection of his work brings reliable strength with vulnerable surprise.

Allen Fisher