The Penig Film

It has been a time of interviews recently, one for Iota magazine (plus poems), which, I am delighted to say, looks a properly classy joint for a poet to stumble into. And there is this, with Sarah Hymas, that is, she says also due to appear on the Litfest blog in November.

There is a link in Sarah's piece to a film about the liberation of Penig concentration camp, where my mother was incarcerated. This is the film, the second one after Leipzig and the validating material (the clip is one of a series now on YouTube):



There is a sequence of poems titled 'The Penig Film' in The Burning of the Books and Other Poems. The film was not this one, or rather it was a shorter clip from it, just a minute or so, without commentary. This shows more. I could not identify my mother in the film I saw, nor can I in this - the quality of film is just not good enough - though it is possible she might be one of the figures shown. Why would the film show her specifically? There were many others there. However, the film does show the hospital, which seems familiar. I think this photograph might have been taken there.



My mother at the Penig hospital with GI George, in memory of whom I was named, though he was not my father. I was born rather too late for that. But of course I wonder about George - he would have been not too far from the cameraman shooting the Penig film. To see the film, longer, with commentary, is a rather shaking experience, shaking all over again (not to mention the terrible stills from Leipzig that precede it). The poem is in the book and appeared originally in The Manhattan Review - but I might put it up here too since the text itself is not on the link.

*

While linking, there is a wonderful and very long piece on the New and Collected Poems in the most recent Hungarian Quarterly, though this link takes you only to the first of several pages. There is also, I understand, a long piece by John Taylor due in the Antioch Review. More on that when it appears.

Stopping dead

And then we talk - this is another group - about the extraneous and the necessary. How do we know what is extraneous?

A great many years ago when I was a Chagallian painter a little drunk on those gorgeous luminous colours, I wanted to fill my paintings with gorgeous luminous colours. Yes, but when I did so there was no real luminosity in the whole.

Luminosity is not the product of lot of luminous colour. It is one or two luminous colours concentrated in one major area and dispersed in smaller patches against a warm resonant matrix of neutral tone. The green in the green paintings was greener for not being surrounded by red and blue and amber and pink. It glowed against one or other form of darkness, and when it had another green to refer to, a similar green, not necessarily exactly the same green. It was as if the greens rhymed or sang in a chorus of some sort.

Ut pictura poesis in this respect too. The big eye-catching word or image or phrase will tell more when it lies at the core of the poem, attracting other lesser images of its type. Intensity tends to kill intensity. Each line freezes the mind at its own point in the narrative.

There has to be narrative of some sort. Even in a lyric poem. It's not a story, yet something is different by the end. Something has changed. The mind has to move. Anything that prevents its movement is extraneous. Anything that helps is necessary.

The poet as the letter 'I'

This is one thing we discuss very near the beginning of any course. Who is the 'I' that appears in a lyric poem? Do we expect more from it than we would from a work of fiction (Reader, I married him)? What are the limits of 'I'? When does it break the glass floor of art and fall through into the cellar of the vulnerable self?

But then when I say 'I' here, how far is that figure detached from the living person at the desk hitting the keys of his computer. How far, in other words, is 'I' discernible as a single complete entity?

Under law it most certainly discernible. That, after all, is the business of law: to discern, to demarcate, to assign responsibility, to hold us culpable. 'Not I' says D. H. Lawrence, 'but the wind that blows through me'. Not much use for the embezzler, the murderer, or the illegal parker to protest in such terms*. The law fingers us.

In art we make not only an 'I' but a world for the 'I' to inhabit. Maybe art is the only true place for a complete 'I' to inhabit. Maybe that is why we need art, so that we may live somewhere that offers dimension and meaning, where the laws are parallel laws, where the complexity of the act (I lashed out and he died, I have always thought it the greatest act of courage to fiddle the figures of a large corporation, I am useless at parking and can't see double yellow lines because they are to me a sign of pure evil). It is a cage for the impossible beasts.

Or, to put it more plainly, is a poem with 'I' in it true in the way law is true? Is the suffering 'I' in a poem a vulnerable cry for help. How do we deal with the 'I'? "I is at the centre of the lyric poem" wrote John Heath-Stubbs, "and only there not arrogant" (quoted from memory* now corrected thanks to reader).

So, Hardy: "I leaned upon a coppice gate / when frost was spectre grey...." etc.

Late. Late back from the private view of Justin Partyka's show. Father still in hospital. "...and winter's eye made desolate . The weakening eye of day..."


*Later thought: though they do do so at times, in terms like: "I wasn't being myself", or "Some devil got into me", or "It was my medication", or indeed the infamous "I was only following orders".

Sunday night is... Understatement x 2

Peggy Lee (1943) with Benny Goodman's orchestra



Peggy Lee, some twenty-five years later in the late 60s. Max Bennett (bass), Jack Sperling (drums).


Understatement, universally considered to be the hallmark of the English. Understatement is, of course, implication. It isn't blowsy, in-your-face, mega-diva 'giving': it is holding back for more. It disciplines itself. Its tie (if it is wearing one) is straight. It allows you your say but it could cut you dead. It is, potentially, cruel. ("We don't want any mishaps, do we, Mr Bond?") but it is not committed to cruelty. It could just as easily be an offering. ("Go on, you finish the sentence.")

Implication is ambiguity, so implication is at the heart of poetry too. Some would reduce this to the flat, cool gesture of irony, but irony is know-all. Implication and understatement can go with a warm heart (there's a non-ironic expression if ever there was one) as well as with a cool mind. I can't quite see irony doing that. Generosity with intelligence and more than a smidgeon of courage, The good balance at the right time. I say good, rather than right. That's understatement. Casting a cold eye but feeling every part of the emotion.

And Peggy Lee is considerably cooler than Jessica Rabbit.

Hungary walking

UNITED NATIONS —France on Wednesday led a walkout of a dozen delegations, including the United States, to protest a fiery speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the UN General Assembly.

“It is disappointing that Mr Ahmadinejad has once again chosen to espouse hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Mark Kornblau, spokesman to the US mission to the United Nations, said in a statement.

Delegations from Argentina, Australia, Britain, Costa Rica, Denmark, France Germany, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand and the United States left the room as Ahmadinejad began to rail against Israel, a European source said.

Reassuring. Encouraging. He was in fact railing against Jews and going about the traditional art of Holocaust denial. See also Norm, and Gene.

And the first review...

It is very rare to find a first day review of a poetry book in a major newspaper so I am delighted and astounded by today's Independent review by Boyd Tonkin, which goes like this (brief but bejewelled):

BLOODAXE £8.95 (102PP) (FREE P&P) FROM THE INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOP: 08430 600 030
The Burning of the Books, By George Szirtes
Reviewed by Boyd Tonkin

Any new collection from George Szirtes will treat its readers to a unique poetic combination: immense versatility and virtuosity when it comes to form, but also a tireless sympathy that dwells clear-sightedly on shocks, traumas and hard-won renewals from a century of migration and massacre.

This volume has typically strong-voiced sequences on memory and time: photographs of war, an émigré wrestler from the poet's native Hungary, or the secret clocks of the body in the lovely "The Birds". But its title sequence truly takes the breath away: a meditation on the love and hatred of knowledge, and why fury against literature did not start or end on Nazis' pyres: "Because the word is angular and has sharp edges/ That cut you". Read Szirtes to feel the exquisite, excruciating paper cuts of history.

(GS grins with happy stupid look on face)

The Burning of the Books and Other Poems

Flagged before, it is actually out today, just the day after Fortinbras at the Fishhouses, the book of essays, appeared on Bloodaxe's website. These are dangerous times. I go about in pairs. With a bit of luck it will be a case of flagged today and copies flogged tomorrow.

Sadly, my father has just been taken into hospital in London, though they assure me he's OK, under observation, and may well be out next morning. C meanwhile is down at her mother's, making sure the plumber that comes tomorrow knows his tap from his elbow. My father is 92. C's mother is 89.

Mortals, eh? Get a touch of the mortals myself, now and then. Nothing actually happens, only on the metaphysical level. It's metaphysical hearts and lungs and livers and kidneys there.