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Biographical note: SIMON PERRIL was born in 1968 and lives in Oakham, Rutland, with his wife Gabrielle and their daughters Erin and Holly. His poetry collections include Nitrate (Salt) and A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher Press). He has written widely on contemporary poetry and poetics, and edited The Salt Companion to John James (Salt). He teaches at De Montfort University, Leicester, and loves silent movies, and noisy music. And cats. Visit www.simonperril.com
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781876857967
ISBN: 9781876857967
Author: Simon Perril
Title: The Salt Companion to John James
Series: Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CSBH
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Mar-10
Extent: 280pp
Height: 228 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight: 420 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 14.99
Price: USD 21.95
Rights: World
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description/annotation: This groundbreaking volume tackles John James’ Welsh heritage and the politics of national identity. It looks at the impact of the visual arts, music and popular culture, as well as situating James in both Romantic and Modernist contexts. This is the perfect companion to this most engaging of contemporary poets.
Main description: This book is the first collection of essays ever published on John James, praised in The Guardian as this “extremely enjoyable and charismatic poet”. Like Mayakovsky, this Welsh-born sometime Cambridge resident has produced a body of work perfectly able to marry lyricism and coarseness, rage and tenderness – and, like the Futurist, to weld the aesthetic to the social. In this volume, a range of writer-critics explore five decades of this poet’s varied work. John Wilkinson describes James as “one of the great sensualists of twentieth-century lyric poetry”, whereas Garry Kelly situates his late ’70s work between the “pogo spittle” of Punk and the “collie weed pastoral of Reggae”. Romana Huk shows the impact of jazz’s expansions and improvisations upon James’ sense of form – but also his embrace of painterly techniques to overwrite and displace his voice. Simon Perril hears in that voice a complex set of tones: a hybrid of the Welsh ‘praise’ tradition, playfully mannered English reserve, and New York School exuberance. This indispensable collection tackles James’ Welsh heritage and the politics of national identity. It looks at the impact of the visual arts, music and popular culture, as well as situating James in both Romantic and Modernist contexts. In short, this book is the perfect companion to this most engaging of contemporary poets.
Table of contents:
Simon Perril ‘all but indifference’: an Introduction
John Hall Dress and Address: ‘John James’in John James
John Wilkinson Maybe / Rather Than: The Writing of John James in the 1970s
Peter Cartwright ‘art is a balm to the brain / & gives a certain resolution: The impact of, and engagement with, the visual arts in John James’ writing
Romana Huk ‘We confront the // pow // sawdust’: Repetition, obliteration and shifting frames in John James’ early poetry
Garry Kelly The Hong Kong Gardens of Babylon: Music in the poetry of John James 1975-1979
John Wilkinson The Line to Take: An Appreciation of the Seventies Poetry of John James
Andrew Duncan Days and Nights in the Forest: the Welsh foreshore of John James
Simon Perril ‘dreaming the dream that no one has the power to evict’: John James and the Politics of Indolence
John Wilkinson Unexpected Excellent Sausage: on simplicity in O’Hara, Lowell, Berrigan and James
Mark Leahy ‘I might have been a painter’: John James and the Relation between Visual and Verbal Arts
Pete Smith The English Experience: from Broadway & Pine to Splott Road
John James Bibliography View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample ( KB)
Excerpt from book:
from ’all but indifference’: an Introduction
Simon Perril
In a review of the late books Kinderlieder and Dreaming Flesh, Robert Sheppard pleaded ‘A collected John James, someone please!’i. Ten years later, and Salt published Collected Poems, earning this ‘extremely enjoyable and charismatic poet’ praise in The Guardian ii. When interviewed by Kelvin Corcoran in the early 1980s, Peter Riley bemoaned ‘the neglect of someone like John James strikes me as particularly reprehensible, because his poetry is actually a popular poetry in some ways, it refers to people like Mayakovsky and O’Hara, the self in it is a popular self: a brash, open, aggressive, stylish, perky sort of self … it speaks of public places, and should be heard in them, literally.’iii Despite this being the first book-length collection of essays on James, he has not been without champions. John Wilkinson was the first person to write at any length on John James, at first in Grosseteste Review, and then in Angel Exhaust. Both pieces are reprinted here in revised forms as key essays that continue to be informative. The second of his essays here, ‘The Line to Take’, includes an account of how James was heard in one particular public place — Kettles Yard art gallery in the late 70s; staggering between exhibits, and clad in bondage regalia. This James was then certainly the rightful heir of Mayakovsky’s ‘intimate yell’.
Like Mayakovsky, this Welsh-born sometime Cambridge resident has produced a body of work perfectly able to marry lyricism and coarseness, rage and tenderness — and, like the Futurist, weld the aesthetic to the social. And this is one cloud who knows his trousers: from embroidered bellbottoms to ‘passe naval whites,’ from bondage pants to ripped Levis, James’ poetry has worn many styles — all with inimitable braggadocio. There is also a complexity to this work that arises in its subtlety of tone and address. It is most noticeably on display in A Theory of Poetry, a work self-consciously ‘performed in a fusion of / calculation cynicism & fervour’ (James 2002: 135). This poem might ransack Richard Morphet’s introduction to the catalogue to Howard Hodgkin: Forty-Five paintings 1949-1975, but what it assembles from it is a ‘voice’, replete with quotation marks, audaciously poised between sincere insincerity and insincere sincerityiv.
There is in James a politics of poise that also has French provenance — despite A Theory’s playful warning ‘love France by all means / but love your own language first.’ In the account of the artist Constantin Guys given in Baudelaire’s seminal essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ the French poet suggests that Guys had mastered ‘that only too difficult art … of being sincere without being absurd.’ This gives us the tonal tightrope John James’ poems often walk. Guys is figured as a ‘passionate spectator’ setting ‘up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement’v (Baudelaire 2003: 9). But Baudelaire’s essay offers another model of detachment that might inform James’ preoccupation with indifference; the complex figure of the ‘dandy’. Baudelaire discusses him in terms of an aspiration to insensitivity — ’the dandy is blase, or pretends to be so, for reasons of policy and caste’ (9). James’ Collected Poems warns us, twice, to ‘watch out’ for ‘our casual blase mean and cocky / how-would-you-like-a-punch-in-the-nose / attitude’ (156). For Baudelaire, the dandy’s cultivated reserve is a protest; a refusal to be moved in a climate in which capitalism is already adept at manipulating emotion to stimulate consumption. James understands the menace of mimicry; he is moved by everything — so systematically and excessively that taking pleasure is to consciously steal from the inauthentic and cynical realm of market forces. This poetry has always been attuned to various musics, and has mastered a quality present in certain vocalists; an almost oxymoronic tone of emotive deadpan found in, say, the best of Lou Reed or the Fall’s Mark E. Smith. And yet, it is also found in the poetry of James’ early mentor Roy Fisher, particularly in his ‘The Making of the Book,’ surely an influence on A Theory Of Poetry:
’And remember, though you’re only a poet,
there’s somebody, somewhere, whose patience
it falls to you finally to exhaust.
For poetry, we have to take it, is essential,
though menial; its purpose
constantly to set up little enmities’vi.
Visitors to the Eighth Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry in 1996 could have picked up a small, free, blue card with a John James poem on it. Given that it does not appear in the Collected Poems, I give it here in full:
EN SEVRAGE:
in the barn the lambs were bleating all night long
but beloved have no fear
at least they will not do so in their poetry
It is in James’ late, sparse style; but has much to offer an introduction to this book. The French title, meaning weaning, offers another complex negotiation of detachment. This is an occasional poem, a form that Mallarme, despite his reputation as otherworldly Symbolist, devoted his later years to; producing stanzas for eggs, envelopes, fans, jugs and proto-mail art. Marian Zwerling Sugano even suggests that the ‘Vers de Circonstance can be read as enacting a new conception of poetry, a democratic writing that evidences the other pole of the occasional, the mobile / trivial rather than the immobile / monumental.’vii. James’ work certainly carries this impetus, and is deeply suspicious of solemnity. ‘En Sevrage’ — with its title evocation of weaning and severance — can be read as a critique of the expectation that plaintive cries are the appropriate occasion for a poem: the lambs might be distressed at their enforced detachment from mother’s milk, but this upset will not colour their poetry. And yet, as is so often the case with James, the complexity of his work lies in the subtlety of tone and address.
Unpublished endorsement: To re-read John James’s poetry in light of this collection of ground-breaking essays is to be struck again by the sheer intelligence and wiry elegance of the man’s work. “Stringent & lean / as well as luscious from time to time” (A Theory of Poetry), the poems exhibit a dazzling tonal play that is fully earned by James’s sure if unassuming grasp of poetry’s political entailments. This volume has much for both the newcomer to the work and for the longtime fan; it says loudly: “Read him!” Peter Nicholls - Professor of English, New York University. Unpublished endorsement: How, without even setting eyes on a word of text, a blindman might relish this ‘politics of poise’, the brand alone, that doubling of christian names like a ‘60s crimper with a serious literary habit: I WANT IT, I WANT TO BE TOLD AND I TRUST THE TELLERS (FOR NOW). This gathering promises much use, and better than use, pleasure. The poet crosses borders, effortlessly and upright. It is the first of its kind, allegedly; and ripe to go. Iain Sinclair Unpublished endorsement: Somebody once said you couldn’t have revolutionary pleasure. Desire yes, but pleasure no! John James’ poetry proves otherwise. Sensuous, intellectual, balancing suave self-control and abject abandon, it can eulogise the perfect sausage as well as show the fractured textual lyric selves we haunt. It’s not as comforting in the snug as it first seems, whatever the irony. I’m glad that this book elucidates the mysteries. It is timely, necessary and will return us to the poems refreshed and kitted out. Robert Sheppard |
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