Further on Nom de Plume (or, Further on, Nom de Plume) by John Stammers

In the earlier piece (On Nom de Plume, by John Stammers) I established fairly definitely that the structure of enquiry and overall layout of Non de Plume, was a close referral to a Michael Donaghy poem, Our Life Stories. The Stammers poem begins:

The bunch of flowers in the vase, what are they called?

I’ll call them Anstruthers for no other reason

than that…………

Well, here is another possible connection.

In 1999, Scottish poet Robert Crawford published an outstanding book, Spirit Machines, with Cape Poetry.

One early piece in the book is the poem Anstruther. It is written in typically Crawfordian witty, laconic and rumbustious manner; it begins:

Here the great Presbyterian minister

With his lifebelt and memorial lighthouse

 

Sails with the captain of many clippers

Towards the Salutation Bar.

We take it, then, that the minister in question is Anstruther-notable Dr Thomas Chalmers. We take it he sails off to take up a post in the Isles, overseas, or is it inward where sobriety is left high and dry, and the choppy firth of conscience and belief tests his mettle once again. Is this to be his new parish? In life he was co-founder of the Free Kirk, a break-away group which later became a dominant assembly. Along with his break-aways went many Gaelic-speakers, and Highlanders (hence my reference to the Isles).

The stanzas I have in mind are 5 to 8:

…we stand and stared up at the stars

 

near the electrician’s. They look so close

they could be catching lobsters and called

not the Plough but Breadwinner 111,

Shearwater of Cellardyke, North Carr Lightship

 

Morning Ray, Fisher of Men.

………………………….

First, a note about Anstruther itself. It is a largish town on the coast of north Firth of Forth, near St Andrews. It has a number of notable features – one is a seeming cricket pavilion just outside town. This is in fact the surface portal of a large underground nuclear bunker. It is reputedly large enough to house top military people from USA and Britain.

Another feature of the town was the Beggars’ Benison, a type of hell-fire club for the top people of the area. Its activities were… quite hilarious.

One notable personage from the town is Radio One dj Edith Bowman. Then we have our man, Dr Thomas Chalmers, as mentioned cofounder of the Scottish Free Kirk and renowned Presbyterian minister. Anstruther forms part of the constituency of MP Menzies Campbell. Small world. I wonder if he would have been up for the shenanigans of the Beggar’s Benison? The mind boggles at the prospect!

Further information on the Beggar’s Benison can be found in Robert Crawford’s book Robert Burns and Cutural Authority (Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

Oh, and Anstruther is pronounced Ainster in the Scots.

In Crawford’s poem names are identity: we have here, in the very early days of partial devolution of the late nineties the continuing assertion of Scottishness, of the necessity of naming in order to establish legitimacy, independent identity and history, and self-sufficient nation-hood.

What connections can we establish with the Stammers poem? We know from interviews that Stammers has gained a wide and extensive knowledge of contemporary poetry from among other ways, browsing the Poetry Society bookshelves. Also we have the Don Paterson connection, as mentioned earlier. Don Paterson, W N Herbert and Robert Crawford are all part of a Scottish grouping strong on technical matters.

Internal evidence of the Stammers’ poem offers neither the Scots’ pronunciation of Anstruther, nor knowledge of the town or place. We only connect on the querulous naming strategy.

Crawford’s suggested naming of the stars and constellations in terms of local landmarks, economic practice, and religious heritage, differs in nature from the suggested fallibility of the Stammers’ approach.

With Crawford we cross time like a lobster boat on the Firth; we also take with us our contemporary knowledge and approaches when we do this. This is basic historicity, but potent nonetheless.

With Stammers the misnaming is as said a gesture of fallibility, that is, a recognition of fellowship; it also carries the contrary recognition of the cultural ambience of a select educational level in its referencing of Derridean techniques. And further, of course, the now select few who read modern poetry, and will note the Donaghy reference. Such ambivalence is evident in the Crawford piece, but has a different strategy, and explores a different intent. With Crawford there is always the up-to-date referencing of cultural and technological achievements, but not at the expense of the claims of history. Hence, throughout the poem is the ever-present use of the present tense. In Crawford there is always the co-existence of time scales. This is part of his legitimising of Scottish political and cultural identity.

Both poems are buzzing with the quotidian details that constitute the substrata of cultural lives.

And the electrician’s in the excerpt above, from Crawford’s poem? Is this a local-colour, authenticising detail too? Or is it a pawky contemporary reference to the energizer of life, the great Himself?

I am reminded here of an earlier Gaelic poem (Derick Thomson?) set in the Isles, where the locals (the Wee Frees who broke away with Chalmers, but refused the Episcopalian majority) believed the air was so clear they could see God at his dinner.

The point I am circling here is how both writers approach what in an earlier piece (Urban Writer) I summed up as, in quote, the ‘sociolects of power’. Both writers, consciously in Crawford, and subconsciously (the assumed centrality of the London cultural identity) in Stammers, portray in their writing the claims of nationhood.

Further, on John Stammers ( or, Further on, John Stammers!)

The main focus of attention of Stammers’ poetry in the first book is on the experience of the act of writing; his poems attempt to chart their own existence in space; that of their subject matter is maybe secondary to this. The experience of the act of writing is the source of the exuberance that is one of the most noticeable factors of the poems; it is also part of the experiencing of the self through the act of expression. And as we observe the process of the poems, which is what happens when we read them, then, as in quantum physics, we realize we are a part of what we observe; our enacting of the experience of the poem becomes part of our own myth as identifiable beings. So, with the event of writing the writing experience, is it possible that the two areas we interface are in fact further conjoined by our awareness of them in the act of writing?

I have no wish to put forward an entirely solipsistic slant to Stammers’ achievement here in his poems.

When we approach Interior Night we cannot help but notice a change in mood, in language-use. In terms of light and colour tones we encounter darker, more sombre colours. On reading Nightsweats in the Afternoon, we cannot but read it as another take, a darker, flipped, take on the earlier delightful House on the Beach of Panoramic Lounge Bar. In this latter book the role of language is undermined, the imagery and quotations that allow the elaborations, rhetorical flights, are questioned.

The poem The University recreates a self-enclosed, locked-in nightmare scenario; it is a world of seemingly real objects, but where the persona is only part-sensible: it is a dream landscape; these are all the qualities of the lucid dream. There is the seeming riddle of the subject of the poem that plays itself out twice (what Freud calls ‘repetition compulsion’), the constantly changing perspective, the changing uphill and downhill of the street to the shop; the colour schemes that tone down from brown to black. The poem has all the hallmark qualities of the half-awake dream state that enacts an unstated, unexplained complex event. It is a psychological memory that carries its own gestalt.

The earlier poem Ondine, opens with a take on a much-admired Pablo Neruda poem; the mannered style to the writing suggests to a certain extent the translatorese of the-poem-in-translation. Stammers constantly draws our attention to modes of verbal expression in this book, and how it perhaps has a conditioning effect on how we perceive the world. The subject matter, in this case alluding to a ballet, is of a water nymph whose song lures men to their death, and another classic Freudian concept. What Stammers does with the myth is investigate it from within, in this particular instance he takes up the central vehicle of the myth, the musical dimension: song, music, dance; he creates a typically Stammersian persona, and sees where it goes within the self- prison of its own existence.

In an early interview (Wolf Magazine), John Stammers commented that one the best pieces of luck in his writing career was to have Don Patterson for an editor, because he ‘doesn’t let him get away with anything’. Indeed, Patterson has joined that group of contemporary Scots poets whose commitment to poetics is strong and redoubtable: W N Herbert and Robert Crawford. This would imply that Stammer’s own use of poetics has thereby gone under close scrutiny. It is of a different order. Furthermore the Avenue (Stolen Love Behaviour) is a poem intent on sound. To read it aloud, read it for its patterns, is to trip the wire that sets it chiming; each metric foot has its own ring tone:  Platters of sea bass, gambas and trinkling glass/do nothing but vie with the C-sharp of Lambrettas/ that dopple off down the street to G.’ Each ‘a’ sound of those first two lines, although linking in the mind’s ear with assonantal patterns, to the actual ear each has its own weight and inflection. The London voice weighs vowels differently. The stand-out onomatopoeic word ‘trinkling’ with its ‘r’ and high ‘i’s revs into the memory of the high warbling sound of a Lambretta; its ‘r’ specifically introduced by the preceding sharp pull-up sound of ‘C-sharp’. The long sound of ‘C’ continues the other sound strand through these lines, the sibilance. It is amusing how Stammers modulates high C to the key of G here by way of the pulled-back rhythmic stress in ‘Lambrettas’.

In Black Dog the Freudian arena is further explored. Black Dog is the classic image of depression (see Churchill), and depression in Freudian terms is the symptom of a suppressed complex. We have a mannered use of language: … the shadows commence a faint unnerving undulation… where coolness and distance could almost characterize it as a quotation from a clinician’s notes of a patient’s (analysand’s) dream record. This in turn contrasts with the later easy, relaxed, chatty tone of: … sciency new conditioner….. But it must be remembered that this is a description of the … awful sheen… the shadows wear. It is as if both of these types of language-use are ways of approaching the same suppressed gestalt of the subject matter. As we follow the poem we see it act itself out, we see the narrator and the experience become one.  Similarly, in The House Sale, the persona is so very distinctly different from the Stammers of earlier poems; what is being enacted in this poem is an exploration of a dangerous, entrenched, state of mind. As this is an illustration rather than explanation of a state of mind/being, we readily accept the exaggerated aspects, attitudes, the reductive reasoning for what they are. Dead Alsatian… uses Martian distancing techniques, with their Hughesian undertones, for observing the concrete, the Real. Only, the real subject matter here is death; we have what is in effect a memento mori in miniature.

The Shrine of Proteus has a revealing prosody; the subject matter echoes Freud’s deep interest in classical myth, and its implications that play out in our daily lives. That is all very well, but it is what Stammers does with his subject matter is important, it is how it is written gives it its relevance. Structurally it is very interesting. The poem consists of nine stanzas, the first two of which have fifteen lines each, followed by a seven, an eleven, and then the last five of ten lines each. Metrically these lines pattern out roughly at eight iambics per line; but this is not the Stammers way: the line is the proper Stammers measure. Each line has its strong yet subtle internal audial patternings, whether by assonance or alliteration; it is usually a combination of both. It is tempting to say the line here is a breath-measure, but I don’t think it is so. The stanzas are built around polysyllabic patterns; the first stanza begins easily with a pocketful of small-change words, a jingling of copper and silver words, before we hit the larger denominations, the ‘barbarous’, ‘metaphysical’, ‘significance’, and ‘parodical’ before settling down again. Each stanza has its own variation. From line to line the pattern plays a variation on a basic sound-range. What this shifting does to the way we read the lines is important; this is particularly relevant in the last four lines of stanza nine, where the shift in level, tone, betokens a shift in perspective: we suddenly move from a fictionalised memory-tale, into something more sinister, psychological… Freudian. The form and range of perspectives, meanings, within the poem change; it is, in effect, protean.

Is it possible that, having said all this, in the volume Interior Night Stammers is attempting the Greek thing: catharsis? It is possible that by approaching the particular range of subject matter of the poems in this book, in this particular way, that Stammers is hoping to help us expose our underlying, suppressed, knowledge of the nature of the world around us: death, drugs, lust, fear… and so, to help us bring it out, see the world for what it is? What we do with that knowledge, is also of course, conditioned by the nature of the intent of that exposure.

I have name-checked quite a number of modern French writers in these pieces; can we go on and look for Irigary, Cixous, Kristeva? I have as yet not been able to locate any references. A previous reviewer of Stolen Love Behaviour commented to the effect that ‘Stammers says he is writing about love, passion. He can’t.’ At first I dismissed this as, ‘Well, when you look for only one (or two) definitions, or personal experiences, and then not find them… you know…! Well, need I say more!’ It was the dogmatic denial I reacted against. I think that maybe the mismatch here lies in that Stammers keeps strictly to an original-source Freudianism plus immediate interpreters for his life’s science, whilst the further French writers have produced critiques of Freud that at times dismantle both the efficacy of psycho-analysis, and of the Freudian conceptual framework. This then, is perhaps one other boundary of Stammers’ world.

‘A Dramatic Monologue,’ by John Stammers (Interior Night, 2010)

The poem uses the long line to great effect. It has a narrative structure, but with the added incentive of playfully exploring the experience behind the writing of Keats’ poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. The poem tells of Keats’ meeting with Coleridge when out walking on Hampstead Heath (how times change!). It is a relatively well-known story: compare with Keats’ dining-with-Wordsworth story (‘We must not speak when Mr Wordsworth is talking’ said Dorothy). So why this particular story? It allows Stammers to apply his scabrous wit: ‘So of course, think about it, it’s Coleridge who does all the talking’; and what does he talk about, this skilled raconteur? ‘Nightingales, Poetry – Metaphysics – A dream related – /Nightmare – the difference explained between will and Volition/ – a dream accompanied by a sense of touch – single and double/touch – Mermaids… a Ghost story.’ I resist the temptation to refer this to a comparative subject-contents list for Stammers’ books. The poem ends by Coleridge saying of Keats’ handshake: ‘There was death in that hand.’ Once again in this book Thanatos raises its banner; ‘Interior Night’ is a book where predominantly Freudian themes are played out.

The language of ‘Dramatic Monologue’ draws attention to itself; we find chat, notes, pastiche, but mostly the tone is that of the raconteur of fables, stories decked out with sufficient factual detail to hook the listener’s/reader’s own suspension of disbelief. It is, the title states, a monologue, but it allows itself to attempt period dialogue: ‘May I present Mr John Keats? -/ John Keats? The poet? Well found. How do you do, sir?’ What we see at work here, what we are supposed to see at work here, is the ability of language used in certain ways to inveigle and occlude the reason and judgement: ‘What d’ya know, a few nights later, for that suffersome throat/ Keats takes a small opium and has a little dream. Sound familiar?/ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ comes tripping out.’ This pairing of ‘small opium’ with ‘little dream’, this colloquial tone and circumscribed range of lexical usage, suggests an ‘after-drinks’ extemporisation. We see here the raconteur before his audience foregrounding the actual content; the poem superimposes persona upon persona upon persona.

I would argue that one of Stammers’ major contributions here and throughout his writing, is his taking on of our almost sacrosanct respect for language use, and displaying its unreliability, its imprecision, its less than worthy credentials for acting as our instrument for understanding, and survival. As is usual with anyone trying to look forward, it is usually accomplished, as here, by looking back.

It is tempting to ask whether, in Stolen Love Behaviour in particular, Stammers was exploring the contemporary possibilities of Keats’ dichotomy, Truth=Beauty. Many images in this book can be read as quite in the influence of a sense of beauty; the central poem ‘Closure’, explores the Truth aspect of this: truth to oneself, truth to one’s writing beyond all else. Can we extend this to ‘Pulp Fiction’, the film; is there a sense in which the separate episodes of that film explore personal integrity-issues? That the form of the poem and of the film reflect each other is, of course, obvious. This tie-ing in tight between the two may be an indication of the author’s conception of the forces at work in modern life, the place of the individual within a very complex play of social factors. If we look at ‘Impression’ from Panoramic Lounge Bar, we can see Stammers approach by antithetical means the classic Greek Nike image (itself a wholly classical form of argument), in this case perhaps in the form of the famous part-sculpture of Artemis tying her sandal. It is now very much a synecdoche for classical beauty per se. And the Greek classical image was for Keats the measure of beauty.

Interior Night, if we accept the ultimately Freudian intent of the book, can be said to be a further pursuit of Truth. Beauty, though, has been left behind. Vague and baggy as these abstract concepts may be, they still pull some weight in the zone of the psyche. The Truths Stammers deals with can be summarized; Stolen Love Behaviour investigates emotional truth: the consequences, and self discoveries, of emotional engagements. Interior Night seems to be predominantly concerned with psychoanalytical truth. Which leaves Panoramic Lounge Bar; ‘Certain Sundry Matters’, although suggesting an engagement with emotional truth, also engages with a panorama of possibly authentic details; these are both cultural, and linguistic. Panoramic Lounge Bar is true to a commitment to language: the easy, conversational, and yet heightened tone, the wide range of its referencing, the rhythms that persuade of an attitude to life, that is both brisk and enhancing.

On ‘Testimony’ by John Stammers (Panoramic Lounge Bar, 2001)

1
The elaboration of the themes of Stammers’ first book, Panoramic Lounge Bar, 2001, are to be found in ‘Testimony’, (the Dublin-and-Derrida poem). Here we find an exploration of some basic concepts from the writing of French thinker Jacques Derrida. And so, we find in ‘Testimony’, the classic Derrida query as stated by the woman in the poem: ‘What is it, after all, that is authorized?….’. Despite his disclaimer in that poem, Stammers did pay attention to what she was saying; this, of course, is a standard misdirection technique. What are we being misdirected from? From Stammers’ obvious knowledge of the concepts, ideas, being put forward. Or are we being misdirected from the degree of intimacy the relationship with the woman entails?

Are we being misdirected from seeing all these as the trappings of an entirely fictitious event? Obviously by now, by this stage in the book of poems, read in sequence, we are already deep in fictitious-author-land. There is direct-address, third-person reportage, commentaries on commentaries…. The opening poem of the book, Nom de Plume, illustrates amongst other things the effect of the Derridean concept of ‘differance’, of the dislocation-effect that deliberate misuse of language can produce on the reader.
At the end of ‘Testimony’, after Derrida is quoted, Dublin tasted: the Post Office with the bullet holes: ‘just standing there with the paths the bullets had taken/ passing right through me…’, the Stammers persona takes pains to present a gift of collected poems, as if to respond in gesture, saying: this, is what is authorized. It is as if the poem can bridge the divisions that have always been there, but newly exposed.

Is this, his Irish poem, a political poem? Is Stammers’ inner message here that poetry can indeed bridge cultures, politics… history? How serious is Stammers on these matters? In ‘Testimony’ he uses the partly pejorative term ‘Paddy’s Day’ for St Patrick’s Day. In effect he separates, demarcates, recognises a difference and border. He goes on to write, ‘So it was that I saw two sides of an antinomy take hold/ and go to undo me like a zip./ And I saw that it was writ/ that we should be the critics of our own juxtaposition….’: Church-law/ holy writ, and reason (it is obvious by this point in the poem that Stammers knows his Joyce well enough to know how Jesuitical this mix is; and also, by having the Irish woman quote Derrida to him, how Joyce’s Ireland is mirrored, as it was and continues to be, culturally (and now, economically) linked to Europe). Stammers not only uses the languages of the time and place, but avails himself of modes of thought both current and recondite. To one whose medium is language the whole of language’s document file is open, access-enabled, available. This reads as though he is here attempting to bridge the dialectics of cultural histories, religions, not through achieving a kind of culture-mix synthesis (which, historically, usually translates as being absorbed into the stronger ‘solution’) but through the medium of poetry.

And let us not forget the extension that O’Hara gives us here. Stammers is an admitted and committed romantic in his writing: he is, he has said “… trying to use irony as a lamp, which helps illuminate romantic motifs for the modern sensibility…”. This also fits in with Frank O’Hara’s practice as alluded to in his send-up Personism manifesto: “… to address itself” (the poem) “to one person… thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity…”.

The poem as act or expression of love between the writer and reader. Ok. Not to everyone’s taste. And not always so seemly; hence the “…vulgarity…”.; in effect, are we being asked to bridge…by love? No matter how unseemly.

Is it so, then, that Stammers resorts to the old belief in the autonomous I, that the individual unit of self has point (‘the myth of a unified selfhood’)? It is not for nothing that Stammers is often referred to as a latter-day Romantic poet (capital R). How autonomous are the poems? Do they depend upon the biographical details for elucidation? The use of rhetorical techniques, of irony, must always assume there is an authority whose value-judgments structure the contrasts, the ‘persuasions’. Is Stammers a Romantic poet? If so, in what way? In that he so values the experience of romantic love (lower R) as a valid part of our common experience/inheritance; or that the continued calling on Keats (‘John Keats Walks Home…’, Stolen Love Behaviour; ‘A Dramatic Monologue’, Interior Night) to play, is an invocation of comparative Kantian certainty, with still the faint whiff of revolution remaining? Kant, of course, was one of the sources from which Derrida worked out the possibilities of differance, dislocation. Would this make Stammers a retrograde thinker? Or is this the ‘new old’? I hate choices like this though; I suspect many others do also; I also suspect some poets love them. I suspect many actually choose not to choose, and that Stammers is one of these. Why miss out?

2
One of the criticisms of the writing in his latest book, Interior Night, is one of language use; the lack of precision in word choice; the relaxed use of form and rhythm. This presupposes an extant precision of word-meaning relationship in the previous books. Throughout his books, Stammers use of language, even where the imagery lifts the poem, or word use changes the poem’s tone, direction, range of meaning, has always been associative in nature; for Stammers the word is a piece of the jigsaw, relativistic, and never a complete unit. Language for Stammers does not have the precision of the lapidarist, of the picture-language advocate; the metric is based on the line. Marvin Minsky, in his exploration of the discoveries and implications of Artificial Intelligence research, writes (: Dennet, 1996): ‘Whatever we may want to say, we probably won’t say exactly that.’ that is, the ability of the mind to express a thought exactly, to communicate fully, is not a possibility we are functionally capable of. The lapidarist produces a refined, long considered writing, honing and honing to get closer to the ‘exactly that’; for a writer like Stammers the refining is concentrated on the flow of language, which has a spoken language quality; the ‘exactly that’ is not the word-to-thought match, but the whole of the piece; he is, one might say, a holistic writer, one for whom the whole of the experience is to be communicated; and, as usual, it can only be done by suggestion. This, of course, means that holistic writing is to a degree a combined experience, where reader fills in, as much as writer suggests (‘What is it, after all, that is authorized?’).

John Stammers as Urban Writer

Stephen Burt writes: “We know that a talented 21st century English poet (Paul Farley, say) can render the 21st century in quick, ironic, breezy sketches. And we know that an extraordinarily talented 21st century London poet (… Mark Ford) can pursue the opacities of modern sociolects along with the bafflements of adult life… Can the same London poet do both? In cityscapes, domestic interiors and briskly-ironised variations on inherited language-games, John Stammers… largely succeeds.” John Stammers’ writing is at home with the constant noise, bustle, jostle and distractions of the city, the continual input. He is also, and this is the important bit, experienced at prioritising his response to that continual input. In an urban environment one’s mind must constantly, continually, juggle many levels of information; the urban dweller’s experience is complex, multi-layered; incessant. Expression depends upon judging and adjusting to the required levels of complexity; as well as reading stimuli to within definite limits. Aficionados can stray outside the parameters of their peer’s knowledge, language-systems, and ranges of reference; to be able to converse on a level with as many areas, sections of society as possible, is considered the acme of cool. “I speak,’ he has said, ‘as most of us do, in the ironic, Americanised, pastiched mode of that culture’s diction (adolescent sarcasm being the most primitive form)”: the Wolf Magazine interview. His emphasis could be said to be for the voice, attempting to capture specific tones of phrase, even more than to the eye and its silent reading. His readings are performances; the correct weighting of intonation of phrase, deployment of tone of voice, are all essential to the comprehension of his work.

It is no secret that the Beat poets employed conversation-cadences in their poetry, and influenced the poetry, writing practice, and ambience of lifestyle of Frank O’Hara. What is less well known is that O’Hara is frequently referenced in the London urban styles of John Stammers and Mark Ford. There is one degree of separation between Stammers and Mark Ford. That also is O’Hara; Ford edited and selected O’Hara in 2009. But then we also have Ford’s Soft Sift book of poetry from 2003, and Stammers’ selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2008), from whose ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ this is a quotation. It is becoming to seem that there is no degree at all.

In Stammers the conversation style is developed partly through the medium of the Michael Donaghy narrative form; this is a form that utilises voice tones, and places a persona central to the narrative. The main characteristics of this form are an immediate sense of contemporarity, and immersion in time and place.
Stammers is an ‘emphatically’ urban writer. By that I mean he is a London writer; he writes from immersion in the sociolects of power. He writes from where decisions are made, policies formed, disputes become national news. Psycho-geography walks point out which buildings house decision-making bodies; which areas of the city are most steeped in legislative, and/or executive decisions. As a writer he does not need to reference these things, they are the daily life, the common knowledge; his writing can and does explore the quotidian effects of power. His concern is with these sociolects. He can reference Camden Hill, Holborn, and mark its London pronunciation, and Bank Station, Finsbury, Cripplegate, London Bridge, the Millennium Bridge; the list is longer in allusion. We are to read these as part of a general knowledge; popular culture, tv, a London-centric news structure asserts this slant to our knowledge of the world. What may pass as a reference to a peripheral, local matter elsewhere, in London writing gains a special weighting. ‘The Day Flies off Without Me’ (Stolen Love Behaviour) exemplifies this field of subsumed attitudes well: ‘…London recedes in all directions, and beyond:/the world with its teeming hearts.// I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map;/I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes…’.

In a writer like Stammers, London-centred means also to be alert and welcoming, to European and American cultures and influences; it is also to be aware, though, that London is the first introduction anyone entering has to the UK, and that his particular cultural patois is the one with impact. It is this sense, of the increasing degrees of influence placing London within the UK, the UK within Europe, the American dimension, that asserts his particular use of ascendance and deference through irony.

John Stammers and Jeremy Reed

In John Stammers’ first two books, Panoramic Lounge Bar (Picador, 2001; Stolen Love Behaviour, Picador, 2005) the runs of street-life images echo the work of mid Jeremy Reed at his best. In Panoramic Lounge Bar, we have ‘House on the Beach’: ‘The shadows mediated by the black slats of the venetian blind/ stripe the silk finish ceiling; / I am reminded of the sheen on the ocean….’. In Reed’s Red-Haired Android (1992) we find perhaps an earlier prototype: ‘The louvers of the venetian blinds snap shut,/ phasing out a beach scene, a turquoise sea…’ (‘Love in the Afternoon’). Reed’s love of colour (‘A Coke can’s red paint peeled to a glitter…’: ‘Things That Stay’, Red-Haired Android, 1992), and intricate sound modulation, do find echoes in Stammers’ first two books, taking the form of an obsession with light itself: ‘The mackerel sky elides lackadaisically across.’ (‘Spine’, Panoramic Lounge Bar), where image and sound, the emphasised ‘a’ and emergent ‘i’ sounds, set up a lightness of tone, a concordant sound-to-image relationship. The main difference between these last two particular pieces is in the use of the ‘i’ sound. In Reed the vowels moves towards a nervy high, like a suddenly fizzing coke can; in Stammers the high becomes a stretched out level that is modulated by the insistent ‘a’ sound. Both carry an onomatopoeic charge. Stolen Love Behaviour is indeed very much a summer book, it is lit up with images of glorious skies, with hot days, sunshine and cloud shapes.

I think Reed wins out with his attention to detail: ‘Indoors, indispensible utilities, / the glint of car-keys, a bracelet of change…’: ‘In and Out’ (Nero, 1985), or; ‘Wristwatch off, silk shirts, head slanting back/ beneath a regulated eye-dropper – /your bathroom scene, mirrors frosted with steam,/ a cologne bottle minus its stopper;..’: ‘Bathroom Scene’ (Nineties, 1990). But then : ‘…the shadows mediated by the black slats of venetian blind/ stripe the silk finish ceiling’ (: ‘House on the Beach’), must come very close behind.
They both share this fascination with colour, and the effects of light; they seek out contrasts, sometimes configured by Japanese people, as if seeking out the exotica of the everyday: ‘Two Japanese girls at Bank Station provide an instance/ of ultra-black with their hair, their acidity/ all expressed in the citrus colours of their clothes…’: ‘Two Japanese Girls at Bank Station’, (Stolen Love Behaviour, 2005) and Reed’s, ‘Your dresses spilled across a hotel bed/ were like a hectic dispersal of flame….Your Japanese lover’s black kimono…’: ‘Blue Lagoon’, (Engaging Form, 1988); ‘Mostly it’s the accidental attracts/ a Japanese girl bending to a rose…: ‘Kodak’ (ibid), and ‘The lilac ash cone on a black cheroot,/the Japanese girl flicks it on her boot,//and purses her mouth to a strawberry’: ‘Nineties Shade’ (Nineties, 1990).

So what do I imply when I say echo, and prototype, here? Is there any direct evidence Stammers knows Reed? There is a minor sexually ambivalent charge to be found in Stammers, compared with the major sexually ambivalent tone of Reed’s writing. In Stammer’s ‘The Tell’ (Panoramic Lounge Bar, 2001): the photos of a same-sex kiss are kept and valued. It could be argued that the poem charts more the time period, the sexually experimental nineteen-seventies, than any commitment to sexual ambiguity, as in Reed. The valuing lies in the life-experience contained in the encounter: the writing of oneself, in true psychological practice. Stammers is charting his points in time, the cultural high moments of time and place. Hence we have ‘Out to Lunch Poem’ whose details capture the yuppie phenomena of the nineteen-eighties boom years. The admirable poem ‘Younger’ is the market-stall poem of Stolen Love Behaviour, and the younger self/selves the main theme of the book. All we can say for certain is that there are similarities of approach, detailing, choice of subject. For Reed, as his introduction to Black Sugar makes plain, the intent is to write from within the experience, and not as the alienated outsider, the position inherited from previous generations. Stammers inherits “language-games”; he engages with the experience on different levels. Reed asserts a source of poetry within an experience, that the writing is the poetic aspect of the experience, a responsive aspect that falls within a paradigmatic role and dynamic. For Stammers the poetry inhabits the experience in a different way; the focus of the paradigm is towards the recognition of a shared dynamic. His use of language is always expressive of identifying markers: “I speak, as most of us do, in the ironic, Americanised, pastiched mode of that culture’s diction (adolescent sarcasm being the most primitive form)”: the Wolf Magazine interview. Even such a poem as XEMAE (Stolen Love Behaviour), utilizes a recognizable and accessible pattern; the terminology and referencing may be obscure, generally unknown, but the sense of the poem is easily retrievable.

There is one degree of separation between Stammers and Reed; it their appeal to the writing of Frank O’Hara and the New York School; this also expresses itself in an openness to the poetry of Baudelaire. There is also one degree between Stammers and Mark Ford. That also is O’Hara; Ford edited and selected O’Hara in 2009. But then we also have Ford’s Soft Sift book of poetry from 2003, and Stammers’ selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2008), from whose ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ this is a quotation. It is becoming to seem that there is no degree at all.

John Stammers’ Use of Rhetoric

In Panoramic Lounge Bar and Stolen Love Behaviour we have poems that, as it were, take flight from a given encounter with a phrase, an observation, a bon mot. This ‘flight’ usually takes the form of, in Panoramic Lounge Bar, an exuberant exploration of a state of mind (‘So what did you do on your week off?’, ‘Que Pasa?’, the reader can supply others), in Stolen Love Behaviour, of an emotional experience, or, a struggle for or celebration of emotional equilibrium. We move, perhaps, from Derrida’s emphasis on the question of textual autonomy, to Deleuze (and Gattari)’s imaging of the libidinal in text (even if such text also needs a ‘desire-liberating reader’).

Interior Night can be seen as an extension of both these, in that the poems there also chart an exploration of emotional states and experiences. Whereas the fragile equilibrium of Stolen Love Behaviour allowed Stammers some truly memorable poems, in Interior Night the equilibrium is tipped and we hang, as it were, to the underside over the darkness of the Id of the poet, and by implication, of his particular time and place: we approach an identity just as fluid as before, but exploring less positive elements. The superstructure of Freudian psychiatry, and of psychoanalysis, does seem to correspond to the concept of a metanarrative, which arcs the writing of this book. As Verena Andermatt Conley wrote (on Cixous) there is a strong psychoanalytical strain in Derrida’s writing, as there is a strong Freudian strain in Deleuze. Stammers has commented elsewhere on his continued commitment to Freud, and Freudian psychoanalysis; and acted as a Freudian therapist at one point. Stammers’ early, award winning ‘The Wolf Man’ from Panoramic Lounge Bar, and the later ‘Midnight in the Realm of the Psychopomp’ from Stolen Love Behaviour, introduce Freudian terminology and concepts to the reader.

What happens in this use of varied modes of language can be best described as a decentering of language. This Stammers has been engaged with throughout his published books; it is a central postmodern device: “… playful, self-reflexive and self-parodying.” Borges is put forward as a master at this, whose, “… writings parallel … poststructuralist verbal exuberance…” (‘Contemporary Literary Theory’, ed Seldon, Widdowson, Brooker). We often now think of postmodernist, especially poststructuralist, writing as rather cold, academic, and unapproachable; that Stammers has produced warm, approachable, even lovable poems is his achievement. He has this verbal exuberance; it is his most admired trait.

In ‘Aspects of Kees’ (Panoramic Lounge Bar) the rhyme and rhythm are exact, a tour-de-force of wit, punning and topical reference: ‘Kees slamming the type writer keys,/ Kees x-ing out words, cursing at his absurd,/ purposeless verbs; zips out the dead sheet/ from the roller. Kees mumbling, blocked,/ failing once again to budge the tumblers in that seized lock,/ turn the key. Kees fumbling/ with the caps lock, humbled/ by the just-typed sheet that says:/ Kees, you’re no Keats, you couldn’t write a line/ if your life depended on it. Kees wondering.’ The overall structure of this excerpt is revealing; we have an accumulating build up of short statements, hard sounds, stopped rhythms, and then a release into a prose line: a buildup, and release, whose issue is a sense of failure, a humbling, a sense of lack and loss, of inadequacy. Plainly the outcome was to be poetry, and we are referenced to expect poetry of a Keatsian character, for which we may read an over-rich, arch-archaic perception of writing. The actual outcome, the flat prose recrimination is further flattened by this expectation. ‘Aspects of Kees’ is an extended piece; we are perhaps tempted to read its rich structure and exploration of American noir culture as a personal refection of the writer’s range of interests, and therefore of the personality of the writer: is this sense of failure, so well acknowledged, part of the writer’s experience, that is, every writer’s experience? Where is the borderline; how far can we read, and how far only see textual play?

Above I have used the phrases ‘take flight’, and ‘exuberance’ for Stammers’ way of writing; this I connected with a definition of the characteristics of poststructuralist writing. What is this ‘flight’, ‘exuberance’? Do I mean here a highly rhetorical use of language? T S Eliot, in the Clark lectures (: Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry) has written, ‘…I could not admit any antithesis between the “rhetorical” and “conversational”.’ and ‘Rhetoric may be merely a development of conversation.’ If we leave aside Derrida on the issue of speech and written language, we can see here a definite reference back to the earlier connection with the approach to language-use of Frank O’Hara, his background of the Beat poets, and foreground of the apparently open structures of the New York school. ‘Any literary mode is a development of speech’: Eliot again. Also again, Derrida questioning the tenets of the underlying statements to this, that speech and the written word are in a hierarchical relationship, in Of Grammatology.

Where do we locate Stammers’ rhetoric? In Panoramic Lounge Bar, if we look at ‘Que Sera?’: ‘Lavish rays of the flagrant sun cascade on the esplanade/ or coruscate the way H2SO4 does, spilt on a lab floor,’ we see a reliance on standard adjectival effects conjoined with the nonstandard sight-reference to chemical tablature. There is a reliance on sound/assonantal effects, open ‘a’s that give sense of space, light, and how they modulate to heighten the sense of what is described. The rhyming of ‘4’/four and ‘floor’ shows an interesting displacement between what is seen and what is read. In ‘There Are Some Places Beyond’: ‘ There are some places beyond where we are,/ places we have been together in other pasts/ down other different possible differences.’ there is a major play on sound used differently, as subtly placed clues; these are alliterative markers. There is also abstraction, repetition, and a delayed syntactical completion; these barely anchor the sense of the piece in reality. It is only later in the piece we hit Vienna, and the tactile details flood in. It is as though the opening section moves through tone registers; it is suggestive of the experimental music of the Vienna circle of musicians grouped with Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. This is an invigorating opening, inviting and sufficiently assertive for the reader to agree to, as Donald Davie has it, the contract between writer and reader.

Stolen Love Behaviour offers rhetorical examples of a different order. Where Barthes’ would have called the previous excerpts as examples of ‘lisable’ writing, with Stolen Love Behaviour we move at times towards a far more ‘scritpible’ writing. ‘Rosegarden’ opens, ‘There’s bound to be rain after all this. The unholy heavens/ are black bouquets laid out along a mantelpiece.’ There is an immediacy in that short opening sentence, the everyday, throwaway phrase about the weather. We then enter the cultural portal the language opens for us, as the writing becomes majorly meta: both meta-physical and meta-phorical. It continues: ‘Interrupted from being who we are for a moment,/ we turn and look through the big bay-window/ to the rosegarden and the red, red roses.’ We do not ‘take flight’ as such here as open into ourselves, discover that the ordinary everyday we know also has an ability for perception that surprises us into a sense of a larger self. This is probably as close as we come to an example of Barthes’ ideas of Textual writing, ‘verticality’, in Stammers. In ‘Furthermore the Avenue’ we have ‘Furthermore the avenue recedes,/ all the tables set out for le dejeuner,/ tiny crabs are spots of cochineal on saffron rice…’ where the ordinary and extraordinary are conjoined within standard metaphorical usage. Use of colour words, offsetting straight observation, persuades us we are entering a heightened state of expression. The opening phoneme continues, as it were, an ongoing engagement with the reader; we are subtly, immediately inducted.

Interior Night demarcates the metaphorical referentiality even more strictly; ‘Mr Punch in Soho’: ‘You would recognise the hook nose anywhere,/ his hump and paunch, the shiny pink erection of his chin…’; the immediate address to the reader leaves no option: we are corralled, we have to listen. Throughout the books there can be seen to be a successive tightening up of usage: here the language is matter of fact, the only release we are allowed from the hammering syntax is through that slightly queasy image with its Freudian overtones. A poem like ‘Existential’ has ‘… when a person passes/ they become a void precisely equivalent to themselves.’ The language does not let us off the hook for one minute; it asserts. By use of rhythmic placement of polysyllables we enact a development of argument as we read, that has standard form and expression. It allows us no alternative, or way out, other than through acceptance of what the sense avers.

The line is Stammers’ measure; in his application it is supple and subtle. A line in Stammers can take us anywhere, and raise many questions as to the nature of an experience, of the manner of our apprehension of an experience, of the nature of such as language. It is not possible to pin him down on any one position, because he moves protean-like through them; his is the realm of language where it meets the world. Stolen Love Behaviour, in particular, does open the possibility of a comparative composition style to Coleridge’s conversational poem style. Coleridge, Robert Koelzer writes, employs the ‘…middle register of speech (using) idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical… lets itself be taken as ‘merely talk’’. He traces the use of this style in Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Auden; that is, a predominantly American usage (he does not specify which period of Auden he particularly refers to here). Jerome McGann (The Poetics of Sensibility, 2006) writes, ‘…modernism draws upon romanticism in fundamental ways.’ Allen Ginsburg, of the Beat poets who influenced O’Hara, and through him the London urban styles of Stammers, Mark Ford, employed conversation-cadences as well as a developed form of romanticism in his most famous pieces; he also developed a form of confessional writing. Most of these elements can be detected in Stammers work; O’Hara was not a confessional writer, his first-person and intimate address do not enact the same role as the confessional. But he did attempt a Coleridgean form: ‘To Jane; and in Imitation of Coleridge.’ Echoic uses of a Wallace Stevens prosodic style have also been detected in his writing. And yet poems of the order of ‘Certain Sundry Matters’, ‘Rosegarden’, ‘Flower Market Street’, are not ‘effusions’ in the Coleridgean manner; these poems have particular tones, buried structures, even developments in common and which separate them off from the others; in Stammers the conversation style is developed partly through the medium of the Michael Donaghy narrative form; this is a form that utilises voice tones, and places a persona central to the narrative. The main characteristics of this form are an immediate sense of contemporarity, and immersion in time and place. Stammers is aware of, open to, contemporary experimental writing as can be evinced in his many interviews with a wide range of poets, including Caroline Bergvall; this also holds true to his own use of referential inclusiveness in his writing, in name-checking cultural and domestic motifs. It is also in the structure of his poetry; his emphasis could be said to be for the voice, attempting to capture specific tones of phrase, even more than to the eye and its silent reading. His readings are performances; the correct weighting of intonation of phrase, deployment of tone of voice, are all essential to the comprehension of his work. The categorizations of NLP practitioners in identifying a person’s particular mode or modes of perception, may have a part to play in understanding this also.

on ‘Nom de Plume’ by John Stammers (2001)

Nom de Plume (from Panoramic Lounge Bar, 2001)

The bunch of flowers in the vase, what are they called?
I’ll call them Anstruthers for no other reason
than that. Someone has set them there
in a drastic tableau, an attempt to let them impose
their one iridescence on the view. Those Anstruthers,
I know I’ll recall them, their fine, pointed petals like scalpels,
the way the powder and near-navy blues leak one into another
and the discreet green of their stiff stems and leaves:
I’ll see them in my mind’s eye (that odd concept
that always make me feel like Cyclops). One day,
doing something mundane, I’ll look for them
in the plastic time that holds such mementoes
and long after the implacable in-rush
of others into the room, none of whom will say,
‘How beautiful the Anstruthers are, despite everything!’

Many have read this poem as a charmingly disarming, though enigmatic, expression of our fellow vulnerabilities (see, perhaps, Annie Freud). This is, after all, Stammers’ display stall, the first poem in the book; this is what is to be found herein. The opening of the poem echoes the opening of Michael Donaghy’s ‘Our Life Stories’, (Conjure, 2000): ‘What did they call that ball in Citizen Kane?/ That crystal blizzardball recalling his past?/ Surely I know the name.’ Here we have the questioning/questing form, and the internal rhyming; it is the form of the poem that Stammers echoes, as if by way of acknowledgement. Stammers’ poem, though, does something different, other: it is as good an encapsulation of the possibilities of Derrida’s “differance” as any we have; it enacts the blurring of boundaries, in the way ‘the powder and near-navy blues leak one into another….’ It captures Derrida’s dislocation-effect well, with the deliberate mis-naming of the flowers, the bleeding of boundaries. It opens, rather than limits, its fields of reference. This approach to the poem references the oft-quoted Mallarmé-argument: “My dear Degas, poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words.” What I can say in response to this is that to me this, by now over-used, dictum, has all the tones of a riposte, and as such an entrenched ideology is being expressed, rather than a broad, conclusive commentary; I also suspect he, as with most poets, was really talking about his own poetry – even, how he wished to write, and not necessarily how he did write. We cannot take what one person says of writing, as necessarily applying to all writing; especially with a prescriptive intent.

If we take that title, for instance: Nom de Plume; then bring in the elaboration of the themes of that volume, that are to be found in ‘Testimony’, (the Dublin-and-Derrida poem), we find: ‘What is it, after all, that is authorized?….’. Despite his disclaimer in that poem, Stammers did pay attention to what she was saying. ‘Nom de Plume’ captures the mind-frame of playful authorizing that is going on in this book: Slimboy Fat, of course an obvious take on Fatboy Slim, whose real name is…. It does not do to underestimate just how playful Stammers can be; there are many notes on that keyboard, and Stammers can play them all, including sarcastic and downright laddish. And Weldon Kees. Of course: Kees is the prime example of persona-blurring, who’s fictitious Robinson has caught many in his spell. Perhaps here we meet one of the boundaries of Stammers’ world of literary references: the most persona-rich of modern poets was surely Pessoa. Where is Pessoa? Could we also stretch the definition to Carol Ann Duffy’s book, The World’s Wife? Perhaps we begin to encroach here on the field of implied range of reference, on contextual meaning.

‘Nom de Plume’ gives us the clue to the reading of these first two books. From that first poem we enter the no-man’s-land of language itself; it is the interface between one’s experience of the world, and the subjective response to that experience; it is the realm of expression. This is a way of saying that Stammers’ focus for his poems in these first two books is the textual actuality of writing itself. It is a no-man’s-land in that although the language for expression perhaps begins with borrowing from the naming of external objects, it is the phenomenology of the self that utilises that language; and this self is not an identifiable whole, but a collision of associated states of being.

What happens in this use of varied modes of language can be best described as a decentering of language. This Stammers has been engaged with throughout his published books; it is a central postmodern device: “… playful, self-reflexive and self-parodying.” Borges is put forward as a master at this, whose, “… writings parallel … poststructuralist verbal exuberance…” (‘Contemporary Literary Theory’, ed Seldon, Widdowson, Brooker). We often now think of postmodernist, especially poststructuralist, writing as rather cold, academic, and unapproachable; that Stammers has produced warm, approachable, even lovable poems is his achievement. He has this verbal exuberance; it is his most admired trait.
Stammer’s decentering includes his use of the variable I, of an undefined narrator: Nom de Plume can sneak into any party and act the idiot savant (‘The Party’, Panoramic Lounge Bar; ‘The Truth in a Position’, Stolen Love Behaviour). As Lacan wrote in his critique of Freudianism (‘Lacan for Beginners’): ‘… the myth of a unified selfhood depends upon (the) ability to identify with objects in the world…’. He goes on to state: ‘Neither the imaginary or the symbolic can fully comprehend the Real…’; that is, neither the mind’s intellect, nor the use of language can comprehend the objective world ‘out there’. In Interior Night he writes, ‘The ego is a bodily ego… the self an organic self: that temporary organization his being imposed upon its constituents and his name that isolated one object amid the tumult and disorder.’: ‘Paris Anywhere’ (ibid); the Real, the ‘out there’, is perhaps what Stammers went to find on his American road-trip poems in Stolen Love Behaviour and elsewhere (as Paul Simon had it, circa 1968, “They have all gone to look for America’; and this is a source that falls well within Stammers’ field of reference) only to find, as here, everything is a blend of perception, the perceived, the assumed, and the unknowable. It is enlightening to see just how closely the ‘he’ of ‘Paris Anywhere’ (presumably, ‘Texas’ included) echoes Roland Barthes in this above quotation (and so, hence, the Paris of ‘Paris’): ‘we write in part to the dictation of our bodies… ‘body’ (is used to) describe the source of… vital and characteristic determinants of a writer’s language …’. (John Sturrock, Structuralism and Since). As stated earlier, Stammers’ writing is an exploration of a self, identity, persona that is locatable solely in the event of the writing. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes notes that ‘the relationship between writer, Text, and reader is an erotic one. And so, in Interior Night, he reaches out: ‘Thank heaven for you at least, Alison Goldfrapp…’ because ‘All things die, and when you die you’re dead. End of.’ Eros and Thanatos; they polarise our existence; all else is, as it were, magnetised by and along the lines that run between these points.

‘Funeral’ by John Stammers (Interior Night, 2010)

In ‘Funeral’ we begin: ‘I too know it, the charm of funerals in the rain/ the ferocity of the veil in daylight’; here ‘ferocity’ associates ironically with the tone of the quotation-source (‘I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle…’: ‘Poetry’, Marianne Moore), with its measured, cultured tone; it also engages with the Stammers’ poem’s very real experience and stance towards grief. The ‘fiddle’ that is implied, suppressed, and thereby a subconscious force, could be read as the particular language-use in poetry of Moore’s period; and the un-important, only further emphasises our own contemporary and continued denial of the reality of death around (and within) us, and thereby creating what can be described as a ‘furious’ vortex, imaged as the dark veil in daylight; a feedback between competing modes of awareness.

Marianne Moore’s denial of the efficacy of poetry is the jumping-off point for Stammers: “Writing poems is horrifyingly important to me”, he commented in his earlier Wolf Magazine interview. ‘Funeral’ is the market stall poem for this book; and its wares, the psychological realms of Id, Ego and Super Ego. We are perhaps here stepping into that dangerous territory of Alan Jenkins’ Harm, in this book; but armed with a map (Freud), and a known landscape (psychoanalysed). The poem takes on the role of questioning the role of language (: “all this fiddle” i.e. the dubious ability to express anything clearly through language) in our understanding of ourselves, and our relations with the world. In this first poem we also encounter classic Freudian symbols: a wreath, and a cigarillo/swelling nose; and here, in the first-person address, we perhaps encounter Freud on his home ground – is the character yer man Freud personified? These were his smoking preference. But then, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ But this is a cigarillo, and so we have here a diminution: ‘a little man’, as they might say in the phallic lingua franca; here we are alerted to use of irony, of a strategic gendered deference.

That line, ‘disremembered rituals of the tribe.’ is very much in the character of Freud’s essays (I have not, as yet, found a direct quotable source for this in the Essays); and the use of the term ‘disremembered’, itself, a pointer to the classic Freudian exposé of the functions of lies, deliberate, and apparently incidental. Is there perhaps an Eliot-quality to that line from Eliot’s Mallarmé-phase (how was it, ‘To purify the dialect of the tribe’?) and language-use, particularly the use of language connected with and surrounding the rites of death, is the prime source of ritual in a culture. The overall sardonic tone to the poem also echoes early Eliot.

The last line: ‘Are you with me, yourselves, at the rendezvous?’ is such a splendidly ambiguous line, implying both the real event of each our own future deaths/ funerals, as well as the possibility of a resurrected, or maybe not so much that as a survival of spirit. The deliberate confusion of tenses destabilises; this is, as it were, the last push of a poem that destabilises the sense of self throughout its course. The ability of language to suggest, insinuate, lay traps for the reader, can be unsettling: ‘that abstraction/ known as giving up the ghost.’ is both suggestive of a metaphysical inference, as well as a defiantly physical one: we have here, as in ‘The grey twist of smoke’, both spirit, and cremation smoke. The ‘grey twist of smoke’ also betokens Freud’s own death through cancer, whose cause is accepted to be long exposure to smoking.

That last line of the poem displays, in its ambiguity, how language can inveigle us, persuade us, of different realities, posit alternative endings. As we work through its suggestions of possible survival, the sacred, we come to the profane, the cold douch of the final reality which is each our own inevitable physical death.

‘The Encounter of M’ by John Stammers (Interior Night, 2010)

‘The Encounter of M’ has puzzled some readers; but if we read it as a take on Alain Resnais’ avant-garde masterpiece of French cinema, Last Year in Marienbad, then it comes somewhat more accessible. The ‘… geometric topiaries/ that seem to throw no shadow. I see that you and I/ cast long dark shadows’, is a direct reference to the classic iconic poster of the film; and there are the film’s long tracking-shots of the endless, involuted and claustrophobic corridors to consider when we think about the structure of this poem. This is made concrete in Robbe-Grillet’s text for the film, in particularly the long and continually looping monologue behind the opening tracking shots.

Does Stammers have enough film-nous to know that the actual character’s shadows in the film poster were painted onto the pathway, that they were false-shadows? Interview-comments and textual references seem to suggest his film-repertoire is quite extensive. The ‘large topiary pyramids’ are exact. The woman in the poem-encounter replies: ‘I find it tiresome practically to the point of death/ to be approached by a stranger in dinner-dress.’ Here we explore one of the suggested meanings of the film, that it is the after-death experience of the characters; this is part of the film aficionado’s many discussion topics. The poem is not written as a poetic attempt at cinematic writing, as one critic seems to suggest; it uses the film as a jumping off point for its own investigation into a recurring complex of relationships; it is suggestive, associational; the narration loops back on itself. As the above excerpt also shows through its rhythm, the piece has its tongue firmly in its cheek. The assonantal rhyme further underlines the quality of the poem’s tone: the slightly wobbly frisson of balance between threat and parody. Stammers here has the Orson Welles cloak about him; his manner is knowledgeable, as well as seriously playful. This poem could be a depiction of an obsessive haunting, but the writing balances the content and expression expertly.

The form of the poem is that of a continuous overflow of conversation between the two characters. There is the equivalent of a standard iambic line; it is open enough to allow catalexis and hyperlexis. The conversation often overlaps, but what can be discerned as we work through the circling, remembering, is a change in the power dynamics between the two. In the film it is the male character who persuades the woman of past intimacy, who railroads her into a future action; the woman slowly wakes from the torpor and we almost voyeuristically become aware of the relationship web she is a part of: the partner/husband she is with, the ‘other man’, her own self. The partner/husband displays certain diabolic tendencies. It is said that one should never play cards with the devil; in this film he wins every game that is set up; his power over the woman seems particularly diabolical. What Stammers does with this in the poem is present a more gender-friendly relationship, more balanced. The poem ends as it begins.

When considering the simulacra of Baudrillard, this artifact of a poem based upon a wholly fictitious film-event, that is, in an historical sense wholly unreal, would be an interesting candidate: as the characters and their shadows are unreal, false-shadows, so the film is a false-shadow of reality and a real event; the hotel featured in the film is anonymous, unnamed (Marienbad, after all, was last year) and as such the film inhabits a space out of place and time; and the poem here, a take on an emphatic fiction, an even further abstraction. The ‘real’ event of the film, and hence the poem, exists only in hyperreality.