Frighteningly Contemporary

 

Nathan Thompson reviews Perdika Press

Tomas Weber, The Small Stones (2009), ISBN: 9781905649105. £4.95
Jacqui Rowe, Apollinaire (2009). ISBN: 9781905649129. £4.95
Mario Petrucci, Sappho (2008). ISBN: 9781905649099. £4.95
Mario Petrucci, somewhere is january (2008). ISBN: 9781905649068. £4.95
Peter Brennan, Didymoi (2008). ISBN: 9781905649082. £4.95

Perdika Press pamphlets are beautiful objects: marble-effect card covers in freshly-cleaned cathedral beige; author name and title on the front (logo at the bottom); brief note about the press and longer note about the poet(s) on the back.  The design is simple and effective.  If I saw a Perdika pamphlet in a shop I’d want to own it even before I’d opened it, even if there were a label on it saying, You are never allowed to open this book Nathan and anyway it’s rubbish.  But it would be a shame not to open it.  Based on the selection sitting beside my typewriter, Perdika publishes poetry that isn’t rubbish at all and which ranges from work by familiar names, such as Mario Petrucci, to first publications by up-and-coming poets such as Tomas Weber. 

So, suitably intrigued, I fired off an email to the founding editor of Perdika Press, Peter Brennan, who duly rounded up the Perdika gang for questioning.

*

Interview

Nathan Thompson: First of all, how and where did it all start?

Peter Brennan: Perdika began with a group of friends who’d devoted themselves to writing and teaching poetry, who felt the need for a press that could operate more or less along the lines of the small presses of the early and mid-20th century, taking forward modernist experimentation, exploring its consequences for the present day.

A couple of informal meetings were held at my flat in the late ’90s, after which Nick and I chinked beer glasses in the village of Perdika on the island of Aegina in 2000. Subsequently Mario, myself and Nick laid the foundations for the operation that finally began when I retired from school teaching in 2005.

A key moment was when Mario brought in samples of pamphlets he’d been judging for the PBS, adding them to my in-house British Library – and the feel and form of the pamphlet suddenly fell from the sky, seemed not only possible but clear.

NT: How does Perdika Press fit in with the current landscape?  When there are so many pamphlet publishers out there, what makes Perdika stand out (apart from the pamphlets’ simple, but beautiful, design)?

PB: Thanks for the compliment!  The design reflects our values.  We publish sequences and short collections that (we believe) are scrupulously composed by poets who’ve thought long and hard about where they fit into the current – rather blurred and confusing – landscape, in the light of the astonishing innovatory impulses of the last hundred years.  We look above all for linguistic energy and precision, for poetry that’s as little self-gratifying as possible.  As Yeats put it, “poets, learn your trade, / Sing whatever is well made…” We intend to publish work that’ll last – and don’t regard the pamphlet form as ephemeral.  The (apparent) periphery of poetry is still – just about – a vital and essential place where new species can evolve.

NT: ‘Innovation’ is cited as one of the things the press is keen to promote.  It’s a word that’s caused no end of controversy and debate in contemporary poetry.  What does it mean to you, and how does innovation manifest itself in the material you publish?

PB: As already implied, our understanding is that true innovation can only proceed on the basis of a profound engagement with what’s gone before.  Think of Hopkins, when he observed of his predecessors: “I admire – and do otherwise.”  We feel that contemporary poetry has an urgent and ongoing need to ask itself questions similar to those the modernists posed.  Are we, for example, fully exploring the ways in which our art can answer to our time?  This doesn’t mean, for us, embracing a populist agenda – nor any aversion to popularity either.

NT: What’s the process for selecting a Perdika poet?  Poets on the list range from those publishing their first collections, such as Tomas Weber, to those who were pretty much established before Tomas Weber was born.  Is there a slush pile, or do you approach writers whose work interests you?

PB: Quality, full stop.  We won’t publish a pamphlet we wouldn’t want to buy ourselves!  We seek work that refreshes and surprises us, that adds its increment (as T.S. Eliot observed) to the evolution and advancement of art.  Then, of course, there’s simple enjoyment – though not for its own sake.  In short, we’re open to anyone who’s seeking to work with language and meaning in the ways we’ve suggested.  We began by publishing what we had to hand, which might have made us seem a little insular; but we’re now gradually widening our net, and have approached some poets whose work really mobilises the resources of language.

NT: How heavily involved are you in the creative process?  Do your poets largely edit their own work, or do you have more of a hands-on approach?

PB: Mario and I do get heavily involved.  Or, to be more precise, we’re drawn into a relationship with the work, which necessitates dialogue.  There’ve been many fraught moments as a consequence of taking that decision.  In our last pamphlet, Simon Jenner kindly referred to our “startling dedication” as editors, but it must be difficult for some authors to have their work so closely attended to.  Few major presses seem to give quite that level of attention, and perhaps authors don’t always welcome it.  Nevertheless, no work of art is ever the creation merely of an individual; so our aim is to negotiate the best possible text with the poet.  This sometimes means proposing quite radical amendments, while also optimising the sequencing of poems, which can make or break a pamphlet.  Most of our publications read quite differently from the manuscript which was first sent to us.  Fortunately, most of our victims – we mean, authors – are grateful; one or two, though, have decided not to complete the process, which is, of course, their privilege.

NT: The Perdika list incorporates a healthy amount of poetry in translation.  How do you judge the merits of a translation, and what do you, as a reader, hope to get out of it?  Do you approach it as you would original work, or do you read it in a different way?  Does Perdika promote a particular approach to translation?

PB: We encourage any approach to translation that results in convincing English poetry and which – in our judgment – doesn’t traduce the original.  For instance, Jacqui Rowe’s renderings of Apollinaire are very free indeed, whereas Christine North’s versions of Mallarmé and Laforgue stay close to their sources – and Simon Jenner’s Pessoa is – marvellously – not a translation at all!  Each approach, we think, leads to something unprecedented being said about the original poetry, which perhaps also helps point ways forward for poets writing in English, now.

NT: What’s next for Perdika?

PB: As with any young soul, to live.  To endure.

*

Review

Turning to the pamphlets themselves, and while we’re on the subject of youth, Tomas Weber’s debut collection is remarkably assured for such a young poet.  The Small Stones is a sequence of twenty-three lyrical, at times almost imagist, poems that, to (rather lazily – I know, I know) quote the back cover, build “on the achievements of the generation of Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull and Peter Riley” and are “radically informed by American high modernism.”  That’s quite a lot for a poet of around twenty to live up to and it struck me as perhaps not the most helpful blurb in the world, well-meaning as it undoubtedly is. 

While it is perfectly feasible that Weber has read and thoroughly ingested these writers, I really didn’t detect much regurgitation here.  What I did detect was a remarkable eye for detail, a great ear and a willingness to engage intelligently with language and its limitations.  There’s a combined romanticism and reticence to these lyrics, in which language does as much talking as it can then, when it’s reached its limits, quite sensibly stops:

A truth   the girl who is always
dancing

who frees herself
and scrapes her edges
of form

that girl captured here
behind huge trees

her song
branching out
beyond the wood

that girl never
painted as lines

but as the movement     

            (from ‘XX’)

To back-peddle a little, I sometimes detected hints of Ezra Pound, sometimes a touch of Gary Snyder, sometimes a brush of Lee Harwood, and, occasionally, as above, maybe even a dash of Yeats.  But whatever his influences, Tomas Weber is very much his own man.  There’s a precision to his work, a sense of focus and seriousness without dullness or unnecessary verbal density, which, combined with a modernist-romantic aesthetic, makes his work both initially approachable and rewarding on repeated reading.  There are a lot of poets a good deal older and more established than Tomas Weber who might feel that they would have given their eye-teeth to have written this pamphlet, or maybe should have, instead of retreating into another book about the weather or a deceased relative.  Finding a young poet who’s aware of what’s actually been going on in poetry for the last forty years, and isn’t hell-bent on producing variations on a theme of Hughes-Heaney-Armitage, is a real rarity and a pleasure.  To indulge in a little light cliché, Tomas Weber is one to watch.  

Knowing where translation ends and creation begins isn’t always easy in Mario Petrucci’s versions of Sappho (the pamphlet is simply called Sappho, just to keep you in the loop).  I don’t have a copy of Sappho’s fragments to hand and, even if I did, I can’t read ancient Greek so there’s going to be an element of winging it here.  But these are fascinating poems, whatever else they might be; the blend of a touch of light absurdism and urbane media-conscious modernity, with cool classicism, is a top trope. (It’s a new game for critics and poets in which you sit round a table and are each dealt a book of contemporary poetry: various tropes have points attached, based on adaptability, originality, reader-laughter-levels etc. – if you win you get a trope named after you, and a biscuit with your trope on it). Here is one example:

Love, unhinge me.  Shake me
like a tumbler of clear vinegar mistaken
for water – or at a tower block window
bereft of glass, sudden air’s untamed
shoulder...

You’ll note that I misused the term ‘trope’ there to make an excuse to crowbar in a (weak) joke.  Sorry.  But it reminds me that there’s an element of, Hey, fragments are a good excuse to go in for a bit of ludic imagism and I’m damn well going to do it, about this pamphlet.  That’s fine though when it’s balanced with a sense of sassy fun, as it is here:

I’d rather watch the Statue of Liberty
glide down my aisle than a world of rickshaws.
Hey, I’d take an unmade-up Monroe over some
geisha any day.  Hell, who wouldn’t?

which seems to portray Sappho as a kind of lesbian version of Ernest Hemingway. 

Incompleteness has acquired new overtones during the last century or so, many poets treating it as a virtue – it’s a way of indicating that language can only be pushed so far towards meaning before it breaks down.  As such, work that is incomplete by dint of erosion over time presents peculiar challenges – it’s not deliberately incomplete (we presume) but its incompleteness is inextricably linked to the way it’s been perceived for centuries. 

There are advantages to this.  In a sense, fragments from the ancient world communicate more than complete texts: They come with the baggage of previous interpretations and completions that reflect the culture and history of their own era, whether self-consciously incorporating the day-to-day-contemporary or attempting to get back to some sense of the original.  So the gaps in Sappho’s poems are a kind of patina, both in their unadulterated gappy form and in terms of the plethora of ways in which translators have attempted to fill in these gaps.  As such, these poems communicate a sense of age but without the didactic authority of complete texts, allowing the reader/translator to enter into a dialogue with the poems in a way that a more prescriptive finished text from the same period doesn’t: there’s room for every age to create its own Sappho.  In this sense, she’s almost more a cultural barometer than a poet and doing justice to that tradition necessitates her re-creation every time a poet translates her.  As a result, ‘Sappho’ becomes increasingly multi-faceted, taking on the preoccupations of every period and every poet who translates her.  Mario Petrucci, by emphasising the possibilities for a loose and straightforwardly contemporary reinterpretation of the fragmented nature of Sappho’s work, makes a virtue of the opportunities for creative refashioning this implies.  You wouldn’t mistake his Sappho for anyone else’s:

Of every room she glides into she
makes a première, where vying starlets roll
eyes and disappear.  A full moon in a room
she is, too sheer for a glance, her red
carpets silver.

Continuing the theme of translation, Jacqui Rowe’s Apollinaire selects from Apollinaire’s war-themed poetry, emphasising the serious side of surrealism.  What other response to the horrors of rational, machine-led modern warfare can there be but to juxtapose it with the irrationalities of thought that lead to war in the first place?  And for me this pamphlet was something of a revelation.  Of course, the link between the surrealist/dadaist aesthetics and methods of modern warfare are well documented, but I’ve not previously read a collection of surrealist poems that emphasises the link so dramatically.  And the stream of consciousness imagery can be shatteringly effective:

footsoldiers
barrow merchants
you hold magnitude
of the dirt that made you
travel further than you advance
blue angels canter
in grey damp wooded track

(from ‘From 2ème Cannonier conducteur’)

The dual meanings of lines such as “the dirt that made you”, suggest both the organically human and the whole context and process behind the order to fight. These moments are captured here in direct and fast-paced translations that nonetheless give you pause to realise just how intelligently designed these seemingly improvisatory poems can be.  The pamphlet has sent me scurrying off in search of more Apollinaire and I’ll be on the lookout for more Jacqui Rowe too.  There’s a real wow factor to these translations, (self-confessedly loose) driven by detailed attention to the sounds they make, that renders the poems frighteningly contemporary; the perfectly captured images really do make your hair stand on end:    

bullets coo this water
course of shells flares
unpetalled closes earth
keening tidal as breaker
crooning in my crayoned
covert sojourn with
wakefulness scratching
mortal buzz

(from ‘Le poète from Chant de l’honneur’)

There’s no room for syntax in war, yet Rowe manages to make Appolinaire’s disjunctions lyrical and affecting.  So many sounds wash over you in that stanza alone that are simultaneously chaotic and forward-moving, beautiful and menacing.  The sheer density of this work brings to mind Prynne’s lyrical laser-beams.  These translations share with Prynne a tightly controlled apparent chaos of meaning, in which language is squeezed so hard that it sobs and bursts at the seams.  I don’t know the original poems, but these translations stand on their own as first-rate poetry.

In summary then, for me these are three stand-out steers from the Perdika corral, but there’s just space to mention a couple of others. Peter Brennan’s own Didymoi is a rather more conventional beast than the pamphlets discussed above.  He draws on classical mythology, counterpointing it with day-to-day observation to good effect and slanting shy of the clichéd or hackneyed – well worth a read.  Mario Petrucci’s somewhere is january is a carefully crafted and engaging collection of short-lined, tightly constructed lyrics, making clever use of punning line-breaks to emphasise the slipperiness of meaning and the vitality of language.  And then there are Tom Jones’s Akhmatova (is that the Tom Jones?  I really hope so) and Christine North’s Laforgue to get your teeth into on the translation front.  

So, if you’re interested in contemporary poetry, and if you’ve read this far you probably are (either that or you’re my mother – hi mum!), then you could do a lot worse than to invest in a couple of these pamphlets.  And if you’ve no interest in contemporary poetry, but just like to surround yourself with beautiful-looking things, then, well, you could do a lot worse than to invest in a couple of these pamphlets.  It seems that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.