Scott Thurston (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  Scott Thurston began writing in the poetry scene situated around Gilbert Adair’s Sub-Voicive Poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project workshops in London in the late eighties. In 1995 he moved to Poland where he taught English as a foreign language. He returned to the UK in 1997 and completed a Ph.D. on Linguistically Innovative Poetry. He currently lectures in English and Creative Writing at The University of Salford and lives in Liverpool. He edits The Radiator, a journal of contemporary poetics. His books include Turns (with Robert Sheppard) (Ship of Fools/Radiator: Liverpool, 2003), Sleight of Foot (Reality Street Editions: London, 1996) (Selection), State(s)walk(s) (Writers Forum: London, 1994) and Poems Nov 89 – Jun 91 (Writers Forum: London, 1991). Hold: Poems 1994-2004 is due out from Shearsman books in 2006.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857745
ISBN:  9781876857745
Author:  Scott Thurston
Title:  The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk
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:  232pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  13 mm
Weight:  348 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:  This exciting volume combines the diverse talents of an impressive range of writer-critics in an engaged and lively response to the poetry of Geraldine Monk. Monk’s reputation as one of the most exciting and provocative writer-performers on the British scene has been established for some time and this new collection aims to reflect critically on a prolific career which has spawned fourteen major works in the last twenty five years. The contributions within pursue several lines of enquiry beginning with considerations of the early pamphlets published in the late seventies and early eighties, the substantial works of the mid-late 80s and 90s and the major collections of the beginning of the twenty first century. Unsurprisingly what many consider as one of Monk’s finest books, 1994’s Interrregnum (now available in the new Salt Selected Poems) – a stunningly complex evocation of the fate of the Pendle Witches – is examined from a variety of angles concerning its poetics of difficulty, its relationship to ideas of place, nature and eco-criticism, and its politics. Other contributors look at the presence of the ‘eerie’ in Monk’s work; the role and function of children’s games throughout her oeuvre and the ways Monk engages with the visual and the sonic aspects of language. This will be the first collection of critical responses to Monk’s poetry and will be a must for any reader interested in engaging with this dynamic and strenuous writer.

Table of contents:
Foreword by Jeff Nuttall
Introduction by Scott Thurston
‘Geraldine Monk in Staithes’ by Bill Griffiths
‘Poetry, Difficulty and Geraldine Monk’s Interregnum’ by Christine Kennedy and David Kennedy
‘“Home-hills”: place, nature and landscape in the poetry of Geraldine Monk’ by Harriet Tarlo
‘What the Tourists Never See: The Social Poetics of Geraldine Monk’ by Sean Bonney
‘Geraldine Monk’s Eerie revealing’ by David Annwn
‘Ring a-ring a-rosy: girls’ games in the poetry of Geraldine Monk’ by Frances Presley
‘“Eye-spy”: Geraldine Monk and the Visible’ by Elizabeth James
‘Geraldine Monk in Performance’ by Chris Goode
Bibliography
Index

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INTRODUCTION

Geraldine Monk is one of the most exciting and consistently engaging poets writing in Britain today. Since her first books appeared in the late 1970s she has produced an extraordinarily wide-ranging and innovative poetry with a strong underlying commitment to feminist and other political concerns. Monk has published almost exclusively throughout her career with small presses – including her own Siren Press and Gargoyle imprints as well as other presses run by poet-publishers, such as Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum press, or more recently Alan Halsey’s West House Books. The publication of Monk’s Selected Poems by Salt in 2003 collected a number of earlier works which were either out of print or very rare and gave rise to the possibility of this companion volume, the first critical book on Monk’s poetry and designed to be read alongside the Selected Poems.

The diversity of Monk’s concerns is reflected in the range of approaches and interests of the writers whose work is collected here. Virtually all of Monk’s published output is discussed in this collection, with particular attention paid to the impact of her first books in the late seventies and early eighties, to the important long poem Interregnum (1994) – considered by many contributors to be amongst her finest work – and to her most recent publications at the time this volume was compiled. The complexity and scale of Interregnum itself has permitted three separate considerations which cover themes of difficulty and emotion; place, landscape, nature and women’s relationship to nature, and the importance of history. Taken together, these three essays represent the fullest critical account yet of this key poem of the nineties. Other contributors deal with the necessity of reading Monk’s work within the crucial contexts of women’s writing in general, and of women’s experimental writing in particular, whilst acknowledging the craft, eeriness and political sharpness of her poetry. Further contributions examine the significance of Monk’s practice for the development of visuality in poetry and also the role of voice and performance in her presentation of her work. Furthermore, it is a privilege to be able to include in this volume a recent statement of poetics and accompanying poem by Geraldine Monk herself which brilliantly illustrate a key theme of her work: that poetry can be means of collaborating with the dead.

To introduce each contribution in turn, Bill Griffiths opens the Companion with an account of the context and publication of Monk’s early work: the books Long Wake (1979), Rotations (1979), La Quinta del Sordo (1980), Banquet (1980) and Spreading the Cards (1980). Griffiths knew Monk personally during this time and assisted in the publication of Long Wake. He offers a useful guide to the overall themes and devices of these works: the memory and dream poems of Long Wake with their attendant awareness of place, the responses to the harrowing work of Goya in La Quinta del Sordo, the seasonal cycle explored in emotions of Rotations, the sensual language explorations of Banquet and the wide-ranging explorations of language and event in Spreading the Cards. As Griffiths suggests, this early work shows ‘remarkable confidence in generating subject matter from the immediate and personal’; a facility which is still present in Monk’s mature writing.

The trio of essays which take Interregnum as their main focus begins with Christine Kennedy and David Kennedy’s piece, which approaches Monk’s work from the perspective of ‘difficulty.’ This is a key concept that has attended the critical reception of innovative poetry like Monk’s, often as a form of objection to such work’s challenge to traditional forms. The authors demonstrate the constructed nature of ‘difficulty’ as it relates to innovative poetry but argue that if innovative poetry is difficult, then it is to do with the kind of experiences that it explores and the intensity with which it does so, rather than as a function of purely formal devices. Interregnum takes as its focus the deaths of ten men and women from Pendle, Lancashire accused of witchcraft and hanged in Lancaster castle in 1612. The poem opens by exploring the current life and rituals surrounding Pendle Hill before descending into the maelstrom surrounding the trials within which Monk evokes the voices of the dead accused. As the authors argue, the difficulty of this text lies principally in the way in which Monk handles this dark material. She takes the reader fully into an engaged, imaginative reading without the mediation of any quaint historical devices which might set up a safe distance between the reader and the events. The emotional intensity of the poem is thus pitched very high: dominated by the themes of oppression and resistance and how these conflicts are inscribed on the body. The authors therefore conclude that the ‘difficulty’ and challenge of Monk’s poem lies in how it demands that the reader examine his or her own cultural prejudices and assumptions in the act of reading: a demand that can be heard elsewhere in Monk’s oeuvre.

Harriet Tarlo focuses on the role of place, landscape and nature in Interregnum, making a link with the work of eco-critics such as Kate Soper and Patrick D. Murphy and eco-feminist Annette Kolodny in examining the way that Monk’s work challenges simplistic ideologies and seeks a more integrated approach to understanding the relationships between the human and the non-human world. For Tarlo, reading Interregnum involves being pushed to consider our ‘human investment in nature, how this sits with our sense of the sacred, and our cultural sense of ourselves, be it in terms of gender or nationality.’ Tarlo examines these themes in Monk’s early poetry before looking at how the first part of Interregnum dramatises the relationships between human and nature, human and animal, in the interactions between contemporary users of Pendle Hill. The notion of the patriarchal domination of nature is crucial here, as is the view that this is linked to the domination of women which is central to the main section of the book. Tarlo shows how Monk challenges patriarchal constructions of women’s identities and sexuality and explores how women’s identification with nature can become a force for liberation and expression. Tarlo concludes her essay by examining how the role of Jennet Device – the nine year old whose testimony at the witch trials was instrumental in the fate of her family – operates as a figure for the precarious and exploited position of the virgin girl in society.

Sean Bonney’s account of Interregnum places Monk’s work in a tradition of radical British writing which includes her contemporaries Maggie O’Sullivan, Barry MacSweeney and Bill Griffiths as well as earlier poets such as Basil Bunting, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Blake and Abiezer Coppe. As Tarlo, Bonney is concerned with Monk’s engagement with place, but takes a more historical perspective. He examines how the opening section of Interregnum deals with the present Pendle Hill as a tourist site on which various hill-walkers, day-trippers, Christians and Pagans converge in tension with the local inhabitants. ‘Palimpsestus’ – the second section of the poem – then acts as a bridge between the present and the past history of Pendle in making the link to the witch trials. Citing Kurt Selligman’s argument that the revival of witchcraft in the middle ages was the response of the poor rural population to increasing oppression by Church and State authorities, Bonney reads Monk’s portrayal of the witches’ defiance of authority as key to the poem. In Hidden Cities (1995), Monk’s alternative bus tour of Manchester, Bonney identifies Monk’s poetic insistence that any reading of history has ‘real and active consequences’ on the nature of the present, signalled in this text’s opposition to the official tourist version of Manchester’s history. Bonney concludes therefore that Monk’s concern with place is inextricable from her concern with history and that her poetry constitutes a political act in its aim to grasp the ‘entirety of history in order to change the present, and the future.’

In a more thematically driven essay, David Annwn explores the history of the meaning of the Scots word eerie, inspired by how Monk’s poetry often involves ‘doubles, mirrors, shadows and guardian spirits.’ A key sense is of a state of consciousness aware of ‘prevalent mysterious powers’, which Annwn, with reference to the French writers associated with l’ecriture feminine: Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, contrasts with Freud’s unheimliche: arguing for the latter as a more static conceptualisation of this kind of awareness. Whilst acknowledging the role of clairvoyance and other related psychic activity in the history of women’s writing, Annwn carefully qualifies the risks of designating Monk’s poetry as eerie, since it plays into the hands of a common critical trope in regard not only to Monk’s work, but also to that of poets such as Maggie O’Sullivan, whereby women’s writing becomes othered as an exotic, otherworldly, intuitive practice, a move often tantamount to undermining its intellectual seriousness. Instead Annwn cites the increasing usage of eerie by critics ‘to denote that acuity to seeing that which is subtly present, (but not apparent to everyone), and the linking of that faculty to rare skills and formal experimentation.’ Annwn demonstrates this usage in his readings of a wide range of extracts from Monk’s work, including specific accounts of Long Wake, Fluvium (2001) and the pamphlet Mary Through the Looking Glass (2002): this last recently republished as part of Monk’s Escafeld Hangings (2005). In his extensive reading of Mary Through the Looking Glass Annwn explores Monk’s concern with the confined female figure of Mary Queen of Scots, imprisoned in Monk’s adopted home city of Sheffield (and the central figure of Escafeld Hangings). Mary’s postures before the mirror seem embued with all the eeriness of an encounter with the subconscious, with dreams of freedom and desire, whilst Monk’s writing, in its virtuosic punning, shifting of registers and sonic exuberance, constantly reminds one of the crafted nature of this transport. Indeed the key to eeriness lies within this sense of craft at levels of language not usually encountered in the everyday.

Frances Presley discusses Monk’s work in the context of debates about women’s experimental writing, particularly in relation to what Clair Wills has called a false polarisation between formal experimentation and expressivity, as if such qualities were mutually exclusive and reflected differences between male and female writing. Presley acknowledges how experimental poetry by both men and women can be expressive, but also suggests that a commitment to a socialist framework in male experimental writing often coincides with male critics’ apparent discomfort with the feminism of Monk’s texts, and how she portrays her female self. Whilst acknowledging the important influence of Bob Cobbing on Monk’s poetry, Presley also points out how Monk has developed her practice to take into account the possibilities of concrete and sound poetry as a new form of communication, without withdrawing from an engagement with the debates of current politics and religion informed by gender. Presley’s reading of Monk’s fourth poem in La Quinta del Sordo acknowledges the political resonances of a depiction of bullying as an allegory of Thatcherism and shows how the poem situates this in the context of children’s games, as both preparation for the socialising and controlling games of adulthood and a means for surviving or resisting adulthood; showing how Monk’s work was also bitterly aware of women’s complicity with cruel and irrational policies during the Thatcher era. Presley explores how the experimental, the expressive and feminism persist and transform in the totality of Monk’s oeuvre, taking a tour of Noctivagations (2001) before coming full circle with a consideration of ‘Mary Through the Looking Glass.’ Alert to Monk’s interest in ‘girls and women in real or imaginary prisons, rather than at play’ Presley also makes a powerful connection with the image-theme of girlhood: linking the poem to ‘the land of children’s games, of grown up nonsense rhymes which might provide a means of escape.’

Elizabeth James undertakes an examination of the role of the visual in Monk’s poetry on several fronts. Thematically she explores how the concern with eyes and seeing in Monk’s poetry indicates an interest in ‘the implications of visibility for the individual’, particularly for the female individual. This is connected to the themes of witnessing and the notion of blindedness as a social condition in Interregnum, and the making visible of those who are invisible, such as the incarcerated Mary Queen of Scots. Vision in Monk’s work is also linked to memory and memorialisation, to prophecy and to human sympathy through weeping. This powerful gathering of concerns extends to a consideration of the visual appearance of the poem on the page itself: the role of layout and typography. As James argues:



The page as such has cultural valency: ‘Centre’ and ‘margins’ are socio-political and cultural categories also. Matters of practical poetics, such as prosody, typography and visual arrangement, can be held to imply and even to activate these categories.



James also includes in her discussion a consideration of the fact that many of Monk’s books bear portraits of her, both photographic and graphic. Reading these images as varieties of experimental self-presentation, James points out how Monk once again confounds the false binary of experimentation and expressivity in her interest not only in disjunctive collage poetics but also in more traditional explorations of personae, dramatic or lyric. James concludes her discussion with a detailed account of Monk’s book Sky Scrapers (1986). This poem-sequence, ostensibly ‘about’ clouds and the sky, explores the visual in many of the ways outlined above: thematically, James argues, the book rehabilitates the pathetic fallacy by turning clouds and sky, not into pseudo-people, but into sites or screens for the associative projections of language. Layout is used subtly to signal shifts or patterns in tone and argument, and the cover and frontispiece play an important role in placing such visions in an urban context. As James concludes, although Monk is not a practitioner of exclusively visual poetics, her work in this area is an important contribution to the development of visuality in poetry and such an approach is a key part of her commitment as a writer.

Chris Goode takes the importance of performance to Monk as a starting point for a discussion which focuses on the idea of voice: both on the page and in live and recorded performance. For Goode the idea of the ‘outward movement’ of the voice models the activity of Monk’s poetry. Speculating on how the way in which a poem appears on the page can evoke a poet’s voice (stylistically or individually), but does not, nevertheless, resemble the experience we have when we hear the poet herself read, Goode argues that the crucial element of performance is how the poet’s voice is embodied. Monk’s 2003 performance at the Camden People’s Theatre (hosted by Goode) also reveals Monk’s related concern with dis- or post-embodied voices, in her billing of her reading of other poets’ poems as a ‘seance.’ In Monk’s important poetics text ‘Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text’ (2002) she discusses and perceives continuities between oppositions such as vocalised/unvocalised, private/public and dis/embodied. Through this Goode builds up a picture of a poet engaged with the paradox that finding one’s own voice is also to acknowledge the constraints of one’s own body and socio-political identity. However, rather than seeing voice as a category to be stabilised, rather like the stylistic voice which can amount to a kind of brand identity, this situation is actually an opportunity.

For Goode, voice can be seen as a performed event rather than a static value: as Monk herself writes: ‘To perform is to in habit space.’ This has important consequences for Monk’s practice and Goode explores this principally in relation to Monk’s first CD collaboration with electroacoustic composer Martin Archer: Angel High Wires (2001), where the treatment of the recorded voice creates all manner of creative opportunities. In relation to Monk’s treatment of text on the page, Goode describes how she uses the full range of typographical devices available in modern word-processing packages to make possible on the page what isn’t possible in the performed voice. Again, almost paradoxically, this contributes to further individuation of voice when the texts come to be read. Crucially, when the voices that concern Monk are those of others – Gerard Manley Hopkins or Mary Queen of Scots, for example – this complex set of shifting relations opens up imaginative space in which seemingly unbridgeable gaps between the past and present, between self and other suddenly become crossable.

It is this very possibility that is explored by Monk herself in her own contribution ‘Collaborations with the Dead.’ Working from a model of identity that acknowledges its psychological and physiological limits, Monk nevertheless affirms the human need and desire to overstep ‘social, temporal, geographic and individual entrenchments.’ Within the context of writing she identifies the means of this enquiry as experimentation with form and content, but argues that this too is ultimately limited, until it comes up with the possibility of disrupting itself via collaboration with an other. Acknowledging the frustrations and tensions of creative collaboration with other writers she also wittily posits an alternative, that is, collaboration with writers who are no longer living. Outlining the role of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry in Monk’s composition of Interregnum, her use of Roman poets in ‘Roman Rumourals’ and use of Mary Queen of Scots’ letters and poems in Escafeld Hangings, Monk reveals a incisive visionary and revisionary practice which, whilst she acknowledges that it is necessarily conducted ‘without permission’, emerges as a deeply serious and engaged relationship with literary history. Monk’s ideas here are also given full illustration by the presentation of her collaboration with John Donne: ‘A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day.’

Monk’s poetics of collaboration finds a poignant analogue in the fact that the Companion is dedicated to the memory of the poet, artist, musician, publisher, teacher and actor Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004) who is also the author of the volume’s foreword; quite possibly one of the last pieces of writing he completed before his death in January 2004. Remarkably Nuttall was also the first person to ever review a book of Monk’s poetry and Monk has acknowledged the importance of Nuttall’s influence for her development as a writer, through her contact with him in Leeds in the 1970s. The gesture is a significant one as it also indicates the importance to Monk of her participation in the energetic, constantly-shifting and cross-disciplinary social networks that have attended the production of innovative writing over the past few decades – indeed, many of the contributors to this volume can be said to share in this context as fellow writers and performers as well as critics, musicians, actors, directors and visual artists, to many of whom Nuttall was also an inspirational figure. It therefore seems fitting that this critical companion to the work of one of our most adventurous and talented poets should be carried out under the sign of Nuttall, as much as Monk’s work itself demonstrates the scope of its own developing importance in the landscape of contemporary British poetry.

Scott Thurston