Review: ‘The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems’, V.R. “Bunny” Lang, ed. Rosa Campbell.

The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems. V.R. “Bunny” Lang. ed. Rosa Campbell. Carcanet Classics, 2024. pp.232. ISBN 978-1-80017-337-8.

If Bunny Lang is mentioned in the same breath as any other poet, it is usually Frank O’Hara. Given that, as editor Rosa Campbell reminds us, Lang and O’Hara worked out together how to be poets, if you approach this book looking for echoes of O’Hara’s “I did this, then I did that, then I did something else” poems you will be bewildered. That isn’t how Lang works. If I can compare her to anyone, then I haven’t been struck so forcefully by poetry since reading Lyn Hejinian. The placement of text, spaces, upper-case letters, and so on in poems like “Pique-Dame” or “I Waited Five Hundred Centuries for the White Crow” makes me think instantly of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry. But whereas Hejinian makes it clear that she loosens her own proprietorship of a poem, thereby relinquishing her authority over meaning into the hands of her readers, Lang serves us with poetry that seems so intensely personal that we feel she would rap our knuckles if we tried any such malarkey with her words. She seems to pose to us the questions “What does poetry do? What is it for?” and as soon as we start to answer she interrupts us and says “No. You’re wrong. Stop and think again.” And then, on the other hand, her poems seem to grow without any such deliberation.

Her poems are difficult. Not long (well, not many of them), not full of obscure words, apparently not deeply philosophical, not high-flown, just difficult. But only difficult inasmuch as where she starts a poem doesn’t necessarily indicate where she’s going with it, nor that stops on the journey and the terminus will be recognisable. That is what holds me, though it sometimes leaves me begging for a connection that isn’t obviously there; it is as though the difficulty doesn’t make any poem inaccessible. Read a poem – wow! – on to the next one, and the next, and worry about meaning some other time, is one way to approach them; no one will penalise you if you want to sit and puzzle, and puzzle and sit, and seek and wonder, though.

Rosa Campbell spent a long time poring through the archive of the documents of Lang’s life in the Houghton Library at Harvard, unearthing the collection in this book. Some of them have been published before, many have not. Campbell writes, of the things she felt she had to leave out, that they are “fragments […] handwritten in pencil on little blue sheets and scribbled in the margins of theatre programmes, typed on the torn-off top of a letter draft or hovering uncertainly  at the bottom of the manuscript of a poem.” Oh how I wish they had been included! Or that they had been given an edited volume of their own – the koan and haiku of Bunny Lang! Or perhaps I will take my own copy of The Miraculous Season over to Harvard, seek out these fragments, and use my pencil to make a palimpsest around and through the printed verses!

These fragments may be part of the chronicling of the creation and interruption of Lang’s poems that Campbell draws to our attention, the “typewriter which jams” and the “voice downstairs” and the “telephone which enters” and every damned porlocking thing that dams the sacred river of Lang’s poetsmithy. But sometimes the metal of a poem is left with only a coat of primer, declared finished by circumstance. We sometimes look at work with the raw materials deliberately left visible, the scaffolding left in place as part of the project.

I’m at my first reading. It won’t be my last. How could it be. I am picking up lines like “Now guests no longer come here to dismay our waiting” (and I remember Michael Flanders’ quip, noting that the Greek word for “stranger” and “guest” are the same, “Hence ‘xenophobia’ – fear or loathing of guests”). “The workaday webs of us admiring spiders.” “[…] folds and faults / Zones and vaults.” 

I learned something, though. There is no end to the week.
Sunday you can call it but it does not mean
That Sunday anything will end. No indeed.

“Stones see back” (Hello Maurice Merleau-Ponty and your principle of reversibility!). The whole of “Things I Have Learned In Canada,” reading like five verses from a cock-eyed apocrypha, proverbs, handy hints and tips, lackadaisical matchbox aphorisms designed to cause more trouble than cure, some bloody brilliant such as “Use your ears and you will be able to speak a variety of languages. Speak them and forget your own.” Yeah, maybe start with Ojibwe? A love poem (?) that ends:

Terror and weakness, Marvellous James
With nothing on his face but purpose
And sometimes, ownership.
January, Betelgeuse – 
Brazil, tundra, stars,
I love you very much,
I recognise my loss
I love you very much,
I love you very much.

A suicide note containing a horrible curse – “I wish you no petty dismays.” A surprise party where the bridegroom doesn’t recognise the guests. A whole poem:

At last the Indians have their summer.
While the rest of us were at the beach
They were waiting.

A letter from a Grandma that begins with “And.” If you have “passed unharmed through the miraculous season” you will have reached the end of the book. You may want to start again. I know I want to. 

Let me leave you with a thought about the poem “Two Cats Have Killed A Bird.” It is clearly inscribed “For Frank O’Hara” and is as near a love-song one to the other as we’re likely to get, even though as a love-song it is the sort that you need to be dreaming to recognise for one. Of Lang’s juxtaposition with O’Hara, Campbell says, “This is often the fate of women who happen to be connected to famous male artists and writers, regardless of their own professions or talents; relegated to the status of auxiliary, passive inspiration, they freeze into silence.” That alone would be sufficient for this book to be both valid and valuable. The fact that Lang is capable of elbowing any (male) member of the New York School aside to wince and count his ribs, adds to the validity and value a poetic power.

The Miraculous Season was a labour of love on the part of Rosa Campbell, is evidence of her academic tenacity and, in showcasing V.R. “Bunny” Lang, showcases one hell of a 20c poet.

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Review: ‘Poyums’, by Len Pennie

Poyums, Len Pennie. Canongate, 2024, hardback, 116pp. ISBN 978-1-80530-138-7. 

Len Pennie is a young Scottish poet writing in English and Scots, a journalist, and an active advocate of the Scots language. She is well-known on social media, as a result of which she has had to put up with a lot of pestering that goes beyond banter. Small wonder that her poems can be sharp, aimed, and delivered on target. The simple design by Valeri Rangelov on the front cover of the book could strike you as a stylised tulip, but in fact it’s a flaming match, and that says something about how Len Pennie works as a poet – she uses the seductive devices of meter and rhyme, she uses her gentle wit, until suddenly ye ken fine ye’ve been telt! “You are not poetry,” she says, “you’re just a man, neither stanza, verse, couplet nor line; I did not write you, get the fuck off my page, there is nothing about you that is mine.”

It isn’t often that I make a point of pre-ordering a book of poetry – or any book, for that matter. I made an exception for Len Pennie’s Poyums. 

Does meter and rhyme work for her? It’s an old dodge, it has been done to death, but it works for John Cooper Clarke, it works for Linton Kwesi Johnson, it works in rap. When the ancient Greeks invented iambic pentameter, they did so because a line could be easily remembered and delivered in a single breath. That’s the strength. However, to someone reading, say, Richard Siken or Oisín Breen it’s outmoded, and that’s the weakness. Sometimes Len Pennie has to tinker to make it work. A line like “but when soap’s been rinsed off and I’m all nice and dried” scans perfectly, but makes the reader feel like maybe the syntax lacks a definite article somewhere; it certainly made me read it over twice. This is why – bear with me – I love to hear Len read her poetry aloud more than reading it for myself. I’m too bloody critical, which comes of studying literature. I sit there counting metric beans, waiting for a poet to hirple. But then along she comes and bowls a googly with enjambement, rhyming “ways he” with “crazy,” and that’s no mis-step but rather a wee skip and a dance, and I have to smile.

Lemn Sissay is quoted on the front cover as calling Len “a poet who redefines what poetry is and who it is for.” Is that a fair comment? Well, poetry can say things that, somehow, prose would never allow to be said; it can say things that would simply sound snide or like invective; it can be polemic, but because it is also entertaining you can kid yourself it isn’t. Len takes on issues such as spite and violence toward women, issues that I thought society was getting over. But it isn’t. I’m seventy-three and I have never known a time in my life when there has been such racism, sexism, and gender-hatred. So no matter how entertaining her poetry is, it is not here for entertainment. It is polemic. 

I’m going to leave you with my favourite verse. It’s not from her most hard-hitting poem, but on the second and third reading of it you do feel the jester’s bladder bash you round the back of your head. This is perhaps where Lan Pennie’s talent really lies – like a medieval court jester she is allowed to speak truth to power without fear of punishment. Her poem ‘The Library’ starts by inverting: “What if stories told us? What if books read us back?” The final verse goes:

So I sat at my typewriter, writing my wrongs,
And putting each book back where each book belongs.
And as each shelf was filled with the pages I chose,
Like the sunset in exile, my library rose,
And with each tome handcrafted, from paper to spine,
My library’s open, and the stories are mine.
I own my own narrative, rewrite the start,
Delved inside the ashes and salvaged my heart,
And though far from idyllic, I do not intend
To abandon my book till I’ve written the end.

Poyums is a book not to abandon until you have read it to the end, and maybe picked it up again from time to time.

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Iconic Photographs of the 20c: Ella Fitzgerald in a jail cell. Plus thoughts about liberation.

Ella Fitzgerald, her personal assistant Georgiana Henry, Illinois Jacquet, and Dizzy Gillespie, in a holding cell in 1955, Houston TX. I have not been able to find a credit for this photo.

From en.rattibha.com:
Ella Fitzgerald found herself in a jail cell in 1955 for singing to an integrated audience. When American jazz producer and concert promoter Norman Gran rented Houston’s Music Hall, he included a non-segregation clause. He removed all signs designating “white” or “Black” in the bathrooms and refused to pre-sell tickets to prevent segregation. He recalls an incident: “A person approached me early at the concert hall, wanting to change seats because they were sitting next to a black person. I said, ‘No, you can have your money back, but we’re not changing your seat.’ The customer took the refund. We did everything we could to ensure integration.” 

Despite no disturbances in the integrated crowd, the police showed up to arrest the performers between sets. They arrested the group on gambling charges because some jazz musicians were playing craps, while Fitzgerald was sipping coffee. The group was taken to the police station, where one officer asked Fitzgerald for her autograph. After paying a fine, they were released and able to perform their second set for an unsuspecting audience. 

In a 1963 interview, Fitzgerald discussed her frustration with dealing with racism in the South: “Maybe I’m stepping out of line, but I have to say it because it’s in my heart. It’s disheartening that we can’t perform in certain parts of the South like we do overseas, where everyone comes to enjoy the music without prejudice. I used to stay silent because people would say, ‘Showbiz folks should stay out of politics,’ but we’ve been embarrassed so much. Fans can’t understand why we don’t play in Alabama or why we can’t have a concert. Music is music.”

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The Emancipation Proclamation – Presidential Proclamation 95 – was drafted on or around September 22^nd 1862, and the actual Proclamation made, by US President Abraham Lincoln on January 1^st 1863. The slaves were emancipated. Who was liberated?

One hundred years later, during the 1954-1968 Civil Rights Movement, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place, on August 28^th 1963. The leaders eventually met with President John F Kennedy, who promised to pass the Civil Rights Act. He was assassinated later in the same year, and the Act was eventually passed in 1964 Under the Presidency of Lyndon B Johnson. Who was liberated?

Fifty years after the March on Washington, in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement came together. And I ask this rhetorical question: in the one-hundred-and-sixty-plus years since the Emancipation Proclamation, who has been liberated? I answer: no one. Emancipation is not liberation, civil rights are not liberation, whose lives matter is not liberation. Liberation is total, universal, and no matter what and where the oppression is, the oppressed and the oppressor need liberating – possibly the oppressor more so, being trapped in a mind-set. It is precisely the ignorance of this that perpetuates oppression, makes the apparent progress of the intervening years almost superficial. Not true? Then look at the resurgence of reactionary politics and policies in the USA, and in the rest of the world, for when America sneezes, the military enforcer of worldwide capitalism gives the rest of us a cold. Tell me, if you dare, that there is not the burden of a mind-set that needs lifting.

I remember Alexander Dubček saying, after the USSR-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, “No oppression can stand the test of time.” This may well be true, in fact I know it to be true. But it is no excuse for the rest of us to keep our heads down and wait for it to pass. Dubček also reminded us that “the power of the people is greater than the people in power.” That means we have to stand up to be counted.

Which brings a profound and necessary question, which I will not attempt to answer today. The liberation of the oppressor means a profound metanoia. How on earth is that to happen? Even if the oppressed throw off oppression, how is that metanoia to happen?

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