Blind Reading the Blind

David Midgley reads ‘The Sea Book’, by ?lhan Berk
The Sea Book

I

Chaws

I read, stretched out, looked at the sail fish.
All day I kept saying this line to myself.
The weather was cloudy, it’s cloudy I said.
I went out, walked around, checked on repairs.
I pulled a long face at the workers. A stone had fallen,
a plank out of place: I put them right. A child
dashed an octopus against pebbles. I smiled at the child
then I went and turned on a closed fountain.
A woman asked for a street and I showed the way.
Suddenly I recalled I was going swimming that evening
so I went to change. I saw day creeping away.
I sat down then and worked at my Sea Book.

 

II

Threewells Street

A whole long day I watched the sea. Great sea.
Storms gathered in. I sat and chiseled out

a skiff. A road lapped its way to the sea,
later going down behind Pazarda?. Barely seen.

A Greek ship offshore was slowing, putting anchor down.
Aganta! I shouted suddenly. The sea echoed back.

The city was water. Water everywhere. Water, water, water.
I threw a fish into the air and the skiff bowed under me.

—The day’s shortened, air sharp as a knife! I said.
Then I got up and headed off for Threewells Street.

 

III

The City

Today I rose early. I woke up the sea.
A man was holding up a squid, showing it off.
I leaned over to look in his eyes, they were sky-blue, round.
He breathed deeply like a heavy labourer.
Three men sat drinking tea and reading the sky.
One was describing the Lodos wind, acting out
the part. “In Bodrum, before Christ, there were only
the Salmakis and Zephyria districts,” said another.
I was thinking of the Dorians and Alexander the Great,
of Saint Peter’s château and the Chevalier de Naillac.
At six the sun came up and we all dispersed.

 

IV

Hay

I was on the coast, I suddenly remembered this today.
I climbed up and looked at the city from a hill.

A ruined monastery remained ruined,
I thought of its monks, a little of their women too.

I bent down and smelled a stem of hay, followed by
the long braying of a donkey, a goat melody. I was enraptured.

A man was painting a rusted boat.
I cast him my “hello” into the boat.

Then off I went to draw a sketch of a chimney.
Looking at myself in the evening light: hay from head to toe.

 

V

Those from Karya

Who are those folk from Karya? Three times I asked. Then
I thought back to yesterday, how I’d been swimming.
I’d seen seaweed. I’ve wanted to write about it for years
and the sea’s depths. Saying this I climbed into bed.
I’ve a terrible love of my body, my nose, my arms,
my feet; your hairs, my hairs as they rise
on my stomach; my eyelashes and your mouth.
Then my nakedness, my terrible nakedness,
my legs, my groin. That’s why I stretch out
my body, why I grow the hairs in my ears.
For my body I say these things. Then? Then
—Who are those Karya folk? I ask, and fill my pipe.

 

VI

Ecology

I’m learning to name plants. Grasses, flowers.
I take up a laurel. This is wormwood I say.

I’m beginning to inspect from several angles
I tear off a wormwood leaf, then its juice

seeps into my hand. I twist off a branch
from its stem. I count the rings

of a long thin willow branch, then place it
in a stream, alert to the world’s opulent greens.

So it is, the whole day I stroll around
then suddenly take up the pen to write.

From Ikinci Yeni: The Turkish Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. George Messo, (Shearsman, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610668. £10.95. Reproduced with permission.

In the spirit of Aldeburgh Poetry Festival’s ‘blind criticism’ events, I asked David Midgley to select poetry at random from a stack of review titles. He first gave me a number in a range of books on my desk not going out for review, and then a number from the range of pages in that book . By chance he landed on this sequence of poems by ?lhan Berk. Until the article was finished David did not know the author of the poems, or that the sequence was in translation.

— GT

*
You do not need a decoder ring to read poetry. In fact, you don’t even need to know what a decoder ring is – which is a good thing for me; otherwise I’d really be up a creek. I have stood by this thesis for some time, but today I’m putting my money where my mouth is and discussing a poem, ‘The Sea Book’, about which I know nothing. I don’t know who wrote it, or what it’s (nominally) ‘about’, or where it might be ‘set’, or even the meaning of all of the words within it; and I have agreed not to look up any of that information.
Although this might seem like a bit of a high-wire act for someone largely unversed in recent poetry, it really shouldn’t. The thing I do know about the poem is that I’ve read it, and thought about it, and responded to it emotionally and analytically. My contention is that the text should speak to something within each reader. Naturally, there will be commonalities in different interpretations of a poem. For instance, many readers might think that the idea of ‘the sea’ is important in a poem called ‘The Sea Book’. But that doesn’t weaken the validity of an individual response. As far as I’m concerned, once someone has read the poem in question, they are now ‘authorised’ to discuss it. Even if they didn’t understand all the words.
It turns out that ‘The Sea Book’, randomly picked as it was, actually played into my internal discussion of ‘authority’, personal reaction, and ‘informed’ analysis. So that I don’t shoot myself in the foot straight away, I would ask that you treat all the ‘authoritative’ analysis of the poem hereafter as merely my response, which of course it is – even though I will write my opinion definitively. I’ll also try to stop using ‘scare-quotes’ now.
I have chosen to read the poet as a man both to save ink (he/she/it), and also because of “ hairs as they rise / on my stomach” , “ hairs in my ears ”, and “ I ask, and fill my pipe ”. Whether the writer is a man or a woman is not important to my reading, in any case.

I

Chaws

‘The Sea Book’ is in six parts, and it smacks you in the face with an odd word immediately : “ Chaws”.  Let’s come back to that later. The poem proper starts with “ I read ” – and that beginning connects to a number of the poem’s themes. For one thing, every time I start the poem I read it as the present tense – ‘I read’. But the full line is, “ I read, stretched out, looked at the sail fish” , which makes the line more comfortable with “ I read ” as past tense. This initial difficulty hints at a key tension in the poem: the distinction between immediate experience and memory; between words assembled as a creation and words delivered in recollection.

‘Chaws’ is full to bursting with ‘I’: “ I read” , “ I kept” , “ I said” , “ I went” : fourteen ‘I’s in twelve lines. It’s self-indulgent; it reads like the daily poetic diary of an English teacher gone off for a month by the sea somewhere and determined to come home with a publishable book of poems. It’s minute in its scale: “ I went out, walked around” , “ I pulled a long face” , “ A stone had fallen, / a plank out of place: I put them right.” The poet comes across as the hero of his own memories.

But from this diary-language, this day-by-the-sea scrapbook, emerges a sense of self-awareness: ‘Chaws’ becomes a comment on the diary poem rather than an unreflecting example of it. The juxtaposition of past and present, memory and performance, is played out further in the second and third lines:

All day I kept saying this line to myself.

The weather was cloudy, it’s cloudy I said.

Life becomes a rehearsal for the poem to be written: the text takes priority, from “ I read ” in the morning to “ I worked at my Sea Book” in the evening. The ‘was’ butts heads with the ‘is’. Even in the present tense the weather is debatable – it is debatable in the moment itself, and not merely in the memory – “ it’s cloudy I said” . Should the fact of the clouds be more trustworthy in memory – ‘it was cloudy’ – when the man himself, in the moment, has to make his claim of the cloudiness out loud? He must perform it to himself, to test its veracity. And again, your interpretation of his statement might vary: he might be saying it’s cloudy because it is, and hence it’s now reported to us simply so that we know it was cloudy. Or he might be saying it’s cloudy to see how it would sound as a line in a poem, the line he “ kept saying” . We don’t know, and the poet knows we don’t know, and all of ‘Chaws’ pretends certainty while quietly undercutting itself.
The colloquial language of the everyday is turned surprisingly upon itself: a woman’s humdrum request for directions takes on a surreal, abstract quality when put in shorthand:

This shorthand also enables the poet to fit that line to the same length as the penultimate:

The lines are also matched by their endings, ‘way’ and ‘away’. The first feels anapaestic; and the penultimate line also starts with an anapaest, but its emphasis is placed in the heavily stressed centre : it slows down to follow the creep of the setting sun. The other moment of more concertedly metrical lyricism comes in that early couplet, “ All day I kept saying [...] it’s cloudy I said ”, with both lines at eleven syllables, and exactly metrically mirroring each other. I read them as dactylic with a free stress at each end, but you might prefer to consider them anapaestic with a shorter foot, an iamb, at the start. It is, perhaps, not coincidental that the lines which feature more recognisable metrical structures and a stronger sense of rhythm and artifice, less like the conversational voice, are those at the beginning and the end of the stanza. The stanza, it is suggested, encompasses a day, and that day is bookended by the writer’s concern for the poem it must engender. It is, then, a telling irony that the most recognisably lyric moments in the stanza occur when the poet is thinking about the poem he’ll have to write about the place and not when the poet is actually out experiencing the thing itself.

I have no idea whether the word ‘Chaws’ has a technical meaning, is an ordinary word, or is perhaps a proper name. But, thanks to the unexpected leaps the brain makes when it is not pursuing familiar paths, I have noticed that it’s another way of spelling ‘chores’. Again, this fits the phrases “ walked around, checked on repairs” and “ turned on a closed fountain ” just as well as “ saying this line ” and “ worked on my Sea Book” . If we accept this, a pleasing parallel between form and content emerges: the aimless wandering around town and the scrounging for ‘poetic’ fodder are equally ‘chores’; and much as one might try to work “ a plank out of place” into important literary material, ‘Chaws’ is an everyday word, ‘chores’, reworked into something intentionally alien.

The ambiguity displayed within the text over the relevance of immediate, authentic experience versus artistic license ties in quite helpfully to my own concerns about a blind reading, a potentially inauthentic reading if you will, in which some words must be treated as simple sounds because no other meaning is known; in which a place can only be conjured by the sound of its name, and not by consulting the guidebook or hopping on Wikipedia. When a poem is set somewhere you have never been, never even heard of, it can feel as though the poet is exploiting the reader’s fear of strangeness for his own benefit. One accusation frequently levelled at poetry is that it is elitist, requiring some special appreciation that only the select few can bring to bear. But much of the work of a poem is done through sound and cadence, to which everyone who can read has access.
Words like ‘Chaws’, and the later use of proper names and places, confer one explicit benefit. A reader’s ignorance of some of the words, local terms and proper names keeps the piece strange . People possess a strong inherent desire to order, rationalise and identify causes, situations and results. This is extremely helpful when figuring out the purpose of the circulation of blood or the operation of an aerofoil, but it is difficult to overstate the risks of applying a dogmatic, value-oriented set of conclusions to a text whose inherent nature is to mean different things to different readers. As long as we know that we do not know everything about a poem, we cannot be lulled into overlooking its potential for a wide spectrum of interpretation; we are not bored by it, and we cannot dismiss it. So it is easy to be miffed by a poet’s use of odd words, but really, he is doing us a favour – as long as we don’t all run off to solve the puzzle , dictionary in hand, and having looked up those words, set the poem aside as accomplished .

II

Threewells Street

The second stanza’s increase in lyricism and structure accompanies a tighter focus on physical surroundings. Although there is still plenty of ‘I’ to go around, there are fewer overt statements concerned with the act of recording rather than the subject itself. The first couplet is the most carefully structured, with its lines of equal syllable count, and most particularly the second line split into halves, the caesura a mirror between “ Storms gathered in” and “ I sat and chiseled out” . It seems almost redundant to remark that the relationship between ‘in’/‘out’ formally reflects that same push and pull of experiencing a phenomenon – the gathering of the storm – versus artistic representation.

In a bid to actually live up to the name of the poem, the second stanza revolves around the theme of the sea. In its second couplet, “ A road lapped its way to the sea ... / Barely seen ”. The language of physical geography is subsumed by the vocabulary of the sea’s flux – “ lapped ” – and the road is obscured “ down behind Pazarda? ”. Later:

Aganta! I shouted suddenly. The sea echoed back.

The city was water. Water everywhere. Water, water, water.
I threw a fish into the air and the skiff bowed under me.

Aside from the fact that the phrase ‘nor any drop to drink’ does not feature in the above, I take issue with the fact that this part of the poem seems to be themed around the sea, and water, without actually saying anything about it, or describing it meaningfully. There is not so much engagement as there is invocation – as if naming the sea were enough to create it. The closest we get is a single adjective: “ Great sea. ” Forgive me, but I prefer Homer’s wine-dark sea.

Somewhat more interesting here is the unusual use of the first person. The voice is evidently not quite self-aware, surprising himself by “ shouting suddenly” , and throwing a fish into the air. The skiff that he was chiseling in the first couplet now appears fully-fledged, perhaps floating on the “ water everywhere” . “ Aganta!” then appears to operate like ‘abracadabra’, placing the writer in his up-sized skiff magically out on the water beside the “ Greek ship offshore” . In other words, we are back to the idea of the word, the invocation, summoning the experience. Instead of reading about the experience of the place here, we read about the writer imagining a possible experience. The focus of this approach is not the experience itself, though; it is to emphasise the falseness, or otherworldness, of the process of imagining in the first place.

The day’s shortened, air sharp as a knife! I said.
Then I got up and headed off for Threewells Street.

The poet arises – perhaps from where “ I read, stretched out” in ‘Chaws’. There is another reported statement about the world (to accompany “ The weather was cloudy, it’s cloudy I said ”). The “ day’s shortened ”, perhaps cut by the “ air sharp as a knife” – to ten lines.

III

The City

The first half of ‘The City’ is description and the second half is reference, almost an uninterrupted list of allusions. But T.S. Eliot it ain’t. This third stanza is weaker, though it has momentary flashes of potential, like a neuron attempting to fire but never quite reaching its threshold. It is, at any rate, a coherent experience, and the use of “ I woke up the sea ” as a way to convey the early hour is a nice touch. But in the light of the sun the gathering disperse s, and the stanza ends: with sufficient light shed on the matter, there is nothing further to discuss.

IV

Hay

After the nadir of ‘The City’, there is an unexpectedly powerful lyric in the form of ‘Hay’. It has the surrealism of memory – and the phrase “ I suddenly remembered this today” distinguishes this memory from the diary-form of the previous “ Today I rose early ”. Its straightforward certainty is a refreshing change: “ A ruined monastery remained ruined” . There is still a sense of reportage instead of the thing itself : we learn that “ I was enraptured.” But that is a small thing, because in this stanza rapture is conveyed in other ways as well, from simplicity – “ I bent down and smelled a stem of hay” – to the yoking together of words surprisingly – “ the long braying of a donkey, a goat melody.”

The final couplet of ‘Hay’ revisits the poem’s larger concern:

Then off I went to draw a sketch of a chimney.
Looking at myself in the evening light: hay from head to toe.

As in a dream, we shift focus abruptly from walking in the fields to “ a sketch of a chimney ”. Linearity is disrupted and we move back from the chimney to a vision of the poet himself: “ hay from head to toe” . As when the woman asked for a street, or when there was “ water everywhere ”, the colloquialism of the phrase feeds into a pre-existing surrealist context that transforms its sense from idiomatic to literal: instead of a man with pieces of hay clinging to his garments, “ hay from head to toe” here conjures up a vision of a scarecrow, a man all of hay. This, too, works as part of the internalisation of rapture: a complete transformation of the individual from within as a result of his experience.

In ‘The Sea Book’ there is a consistent back-and-forth between genuinely pedestrian phrases (“ Then off I went to draw” ) and phrases that confound our expectations with their strangeness (“ The city was water” ). They fight for authority over the boundary between the remembered and the invented; the expected and the unknown. The straight narrative lines present a concrete record of what happened. But then lines like “ Aganta! I shouted suddenly” suggest that the narrator is unpredictable – a character constructed like any other, to be viewed in the third person; not an omniscient speaker of truth.

V

Those from Karya

‘Those from Karya’ is a stanza full of questions, the most notable being, “ Who are those folk from Karya?” I do not know Karya, and this is not a problem, because neither does the writer, and this ignorance is key to the dialectic being created between the search for meaningless knowledge – trivia, essentially – and the value of one’s own experience. It can come as no surprise at this stage that stanza five is another slant on this conflict; another way of presenting this difference. To my mind, though, this distinction is not best represented by the poet’s method of telling me everything, whether it be ‘I’ve wanted to write about seaweed’, or “ I’ve a terrible love of my body, my nose, my arms” . And the distinction has certainly already been made clear by this stage in ‘The Sea Book’.

On the other hand, while the conceit of “ those Karya folk” and the writer’s desire to write adds little to what has come before, there is some interesting territory covered in the “ terrible love of my body” , and “ my nakedness, my terrible nakedness ”. It is an explicit discussion of the immediateness of personal experience, through the recognition of our only true way of interacting with the world: the body, the gateway between physicality and abstraction. It is weakened, as indeed is the whole poem, by its use again of the list-form, of naming without description. In all twelve lines of ‘Those from Karya’, there are but two adjectives: and they are both “ terrible” . There is no simile or evident metaphor. This stark, largely uncoloured view might be said to reduce the subjectivity of the writing: where a choice of adjective might be contentious, the existence of an object is far less so. In a poem that highlights our limitations when communicating ideas and experiences, eliminating adjectives as a means of providing a more ‘objective’ narrative makes sense.

‘Those from Karya’ sets up an answer as well as a question. His “ terrible nakedness ” is “ why I stretch out / my body, why I grow the hairs in my ears.” Assigning motive to an involuntary process of growth is essentially delusional: but it is precisely this sort of delusion that the poem addresses throughout: the idea that by describing the way something is, we control it, we harvest from it some sort of utility. And the distinction between narrative and assertion is again made clear immediately after this statement: “ For my body I say these things. ” The above, the delusional, cannot be trusted, because everything is really reported and nothing is experience – for this man, even his own body is a constituency to be addressed.

VI

Ecology

I’m learning to name plants. Grasses, flowers.
I take up a laurel. This is wormwood I say.

The sixth and final stanza takes its place in the poem’s pattern of one stanza of contiguous lines followed by one of couplets; but it lacks some of the lyricism of ‘Threewells Street’ and ‘Hay’.  Line-breaks between couplets do lead to interesting effects:

I’m beginning to inspect from several angles
I tear off a wormwood leaf, then its juice

seeps into my hand. I twist off a branch
from its stem. I count the rings

‘Ecology’, literally ‘the study of living arrangements’, is not an inappropriate way to think about ‘The Sea Book’ as a whole. If you were to ask, ‘Which living arrangements?’, I think the most reasonable answer might be, ‘Living with oneself’. Not in the sense of guilt, but the far more basic question of how to unify a sense of identity with personal experience. When we need to clarify this identity, we call upon memories in order to demonstrate what happened and how we responded. This allows us to shape a narrative for our own lives: as in almost any field of science or philosophy, the pursuit of self-knowledge requires us to tell stories. The great power of the word, the logos , is its flexibility. It can be turned to any object, or marry two concepts: it is a building block within the abstract realm. But this power is dangerous. In stories, anything can be made true, with the right choice of words. This concept is at the heart of the notion of sophistry.

Throughout ‘The Sea Book’, words are used to define, name, and delimit. But it is so written that the implausibility of this approach toward defining meaning, or even attempting to define a concrete history of events, becomes clear. Even in its own name – ‘The Sea Book’ – the poem misrepresents itself. In the transparent artifice of the writer’s apparent free will and unpredictability within his own story, the instability of the system is made clear:

So it is, the whole day I stroll around

then suddenly take up the pen to write.

I hope that my interpretation might be interesting to you as you read the poem for yourself. I do find myself wondering if the sort of exploration in ‘The Sea Book’ wouldn’t be better achieved in prose: not necessarily in my review, but perhaps not in a six-part poem either. There is a degree to which it is like painting a canvas brown and saying it is mud – as a way to prove that it is not identifiable as mud. That’s all very well: but where do you want to hang the thing?