{"id":8041,"date":"2022-12-01T12:45:26","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T12:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=8041"},"modified":"2022-12-03T13:30:01","modified_gmt":"2022-12-03T13:30:01","slug":"simon-perrill-the-words-you-can-and-do-remember-by-the-hand-to-write-defy-the-night-john-james-and-the-resistance-to-gravity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/8041\/simon-perrill-the-words-you-can-and-do-remember-by-the-hand-to-write-defy-the-night-john-james-and-the-resistance-to-gravity\/","title":{"rendered":"Simon Perril: \u2018The Words You Can and Do Remember by the Hand to Write \/ defy the Night\u2019: John James and the Resistance to Gravity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lightness is an important motif, quality, and trajectory in the later poetry of John James \u2013 beyond the The\u00a0<\/em>Collected Poems<\/em> and particularly in the Equipage volume In Romsey Town<\/em>. By \u2018Lightness,\u2019 I don\u2019t mean the kind of simplicity that John Wilkinson writes so well about; I take my bearings from Italo Calvino. When contemplating his 40 years writing fiction, and seeking some definitive account of his various experiments he decided \u2018my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.\u2019 And he proceeds to pit what he calls the values of \u2018lightness\u2019 against his sense of the pressures a young writer is under to \u2018represent his own time.\u2019 He confides \u2018at certain moments I felt the entire world was turning into stone\u2019; and then grasps for mythology for a working method for avoiding being petrified by his own social moment. He opts for the figure of Perseus who \u2018supports himself on the very lightest of things: the winds, the clouds; and he fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.\u2019 Calvino adopts the myth of the gorgon as an allegory for the poet\u2019s relationship to the world: \u2018Perseus\u2019s strength always lies in a refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live. He carries the reality within and accepts it as his particular burden.\u2019 My chapter in The Salt Companion to John James <\/em>talks of the way his poetry might relate to the Romantic conversation poem, and talk particularly about how Coleridge develops that form out of a historical moment of profound discontinuity. Using Kelvin Everest\u2019s arguments, I try and recover from this poetic form not the trope of domestic retirement but the political selection pressures that created that form\u2019s celebration of friendship and community of the like-minded. Everest points to Coleridge\u2019s experience of exile at home as the English declaration of war with revolutionary France strands a generation of Jacobins at home to face the very real consequences of \u2018unpatriotic\u2019 beliefs, exclusion from the national community and subjection to constant suspicion and surveillance. In his conversation poems Coleridge somehow transplants the last remaining hopes for his Utopian Pantisocracy to the domestic idyll of rural retirement at Nether Stowey.\u00a0 When Everest describes the consequences of the reception of the French Revolution in England as the encounter with the violent hostility that helps to define the value of retirement for Coleridge which was powerful in restricting his ideals to a shadowy potentiality of the imagination as their only operative medium; I wonder whether he sketches the climate of much of John James\u2019s work. My previous chapter explores this through looking at the long-running trope of indolence in the Collected Poems<\/em> as a device to potentially tap into the \u2018shadowy potentiality\u2019 of radical hope in ways that acknowledges that hope is both a heritage and a site of damage.<\/p>\n

I want to sketch a few thoughts about how In Romsey Town<\/em> might relate to these concerns; and engage with those aforementioned interests in qualities of lightness as a virtue outlined by Calvino. James\u2019s later poetry seems singular in its ability to register privation whilst not lashing out at it through a rhetoric of outrage. In Romsey Town<\/em> seeks out moments of lightness in poems like \u2018Navan 3:56,\u2019 \u2018A Benediction,\u2019 or \u2018A Touch\u2019 that seem to barely graze the page; and extend a tradition of sky-gazing poems in his work. These moments of lightness have restorative of their own, but In Romsey Town<\/em> is full of these complementary moments where lightness is a quality the poems want to bequeath to others; just as Calvino values \u2018the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.\u2019 In \u2018The Blood Before,\u2019 the night sky bids us to lose gravity, \u2018& skies encrusted with the stars \/ bear us up from salaried enslavement of the very day\u2019 (p.35). The two Baudelaire evocations in this collection further embody this. \u2018Nocturne with Baudelaire\u2019 contains the injunction to \u2018pour again hope \/ La Primeur\u2019; and in \u2018Baudelaire at C\u00e9bazan\u2019 wine is both liquid light and liquid labour:<\/p>\n

but even in its glass & vermillion capsule of lead<\/p>\n

the wine offers up a song full of light & solidarity to those<\/p>\n

who know the solitude between the vines in winter<\/p>\n

who know how much it takes on the blazing hillside<\/p>\n

who know recurring trouble sweat & pain & the burning sun<\/p>\n

bringing to life the vision of their hope not full of hate<\/p>\n

but flushed with the delight in the throat of a man worn out by work at the end of the day<\/p>\n

(p. 30).<\/p>\n

So, in Romsey Town<\/em>, the values of lightness are stolen from the weight of labour even as the poems labour to foster lightness. The poem \u2018Romsey\u2019 traces how \u2018weary stragglers hasten home \/ heads down at the end of another working day\u2019 (p.41). \u2018Absorption & Fate\u2019 confides \u2018well at the end of the working day \/ you\u2019re either on or off\u2019 (p.13). And the elegy for Barry MacSweeney, \u2018Early Doors\u2019 has James toast his fellow poet and friend: \u2018after work I raise my glass \/\/ a Pedigree at six \/ as the clock ticks \/\/ the hurried tread of London train commuters \/ slip off home behind the window at my back\u2019 (p.21).<\/p>\n

But set against this is a different kind of labour: the work to maintain human relations, to set out for public houses; as in the breathless conclusion to \u2018The Blood Before\u2019:<\/p>\n

& as the wine pours you think you know the world BBC News<\/p>\n

a screen full of pornographic images turn it off let\u2019s go<\/p>\n

to the alehouse door the corner of the smoke-stained terrace<\/p>\n

go there we must if only to avoid becoming just another shut-in<\/p>\n

eyes on the street ahead hair blown back by the wind let\u2019s go<\/p>\n

though the nation darken into unimaginable night<\/p>\n

we\u2019ll do it all again plunge on to find new light<\/p>\n

(p. 36).<\/p>\n

Such lines are the context for the duty these poems feel to document moments of lightness. It is a form of work; the poem is the vehicle for such work. But when these poems call to \u2018restore us to an inkling of the sacred,\u2019 the collection underlines the social nature of the desire for another realm. The poem \u2018Pimlico\u2019 concludes: \u2018Our ancestors visit us in dreams \/ God don\u2019t\u2019 (p.40). It is a frequent characteristic of James\u2019s poetry to be a response to the act of reading. In \u2018Coplas,\u2019 he observes \u2018your book is open \/ to the light of day\u2019; and the sequence constantly figures the poem \u2013 the one he is writing, and the one he is reading \u2013 as work. And it is work that labours to produce a new space, one which is not necessarily solitary: \u2018looking for someone \/ getting to know the world \/ where we meet \/ the work begun\u2019 (p.27). The Collected Poems<\/em> is book-ended by this bid to open such a space. The title of the first collection, Hm, ah, yes<\/em> preserves a moment \u2013 implicitly social \u2013 of reassessment and reconsideration; an affirmative modification of one\u2019s thoughts in the light of the considerations of those of another. The final lines in the Collected Poems<\/em> come from Schlegel Eats a Bagel<\/em>, and faithfully embark upon a journey towards such dialogue: \u2018the line knows where it\u2019s going \/ and we know we\u2019re going with it \/ I leave the rest to you \/ distance no object.\u2019\u00a0 \u2018Absorption & Fate,\u2019 from In Romsey Town<\/em>, seems to both continue this pursuit and clarify its direction: \u2018the imaginary locale \/ the heimlich yet to come \/ adding to ancient story modern pain\u2019 (p.13).\u00a0 The lightness of late James, what he describes in John Hall\u2019s work as \u2018a hesitant tracery\u2019 (p.26), shares Calvino\u2019s fear of being turned to stone by his own social (or anti-social) moment. He hears the novelist\u2019s consequent interest in the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living. The later poems venture to gesture towards somewhere else, whilst it won\u2019t predetermine that imaginary locale it does register an acute yearning for it. To take a line from \u2018Pimlico,\u2019 admittedly out of context, the lightness of this work, and the work of this lightness is \u2018pointing the direction of the future without arriving there completely \/ a slipping glimpse\u2019 (pp.38-39).<\/p>\n

Simon Perril<\/strong><\/p>\n

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Trans G. Brock, London: Penguin, 2016.<\/p>\n

Kelvin Everest, Coleridge\u2019s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795\u20131798<\/em>.\u00a0 Harvester Press, 1979.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>John James, In Romsey Town<\/em>. Cambridge: Equipage, 2011.<\/p>\n

John James, Collected Poems<\/em>. Salt Publishing, 2002.<\/p>\n

Simon Perril, \u2018\u201cDreaming the dream that no one had the power to evict\u201d\u2019: John James and the Politics of Indolence\u2019 In Simon Perril ed. The<\/em> Salt Companion to John James<\/em>. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2010.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Simon Perril\u2019s poetry publications include The Slip<\/i> (Shearsman 2020), In the Final Year of My 40s <\/i>(Shearsman 2018), Beneath<\/i>(Shearsman 2015), and Archilochus on the Moon<\/i> (Shearsman 2013). He appears in magazines such as PN Review, Long Poem Magazine, Jacket, Tears in the Fence, Fortnightly Review, and Blackbox Manifold. As a critic I has written widely on contemporary poetry, editing the books The Salt Companion to John James<\/i>, and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling<\/i>, and contributing many articles and book chapters on poets such as Sean Bonney, Andrea Brady, Tom Raworth, Geraldine Monk, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne and John Tranter.<\/u>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Click here to go back to:\u00a0Contributors and Links to Pages 1 – 4<\/a><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lightness is an important motif, quality, and trajectory in the later poetry of John James \u2013 beyond the The\u00a0Collected Poems and particularly in the Equipage volume In Romsey Town. By \u2018Lightness,\u2019 I don\u2019t mean the kind of simplicity that John Wilkinson writes so well about; I take my bearings from Italo Calvino. When contemplating his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[68,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/images.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-25H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8041"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8041"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8369,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8041\/revisions\/8369"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}