Glenn Colquhoun
Books
The book of the dead
by Hugh Roberts
New poetry from C K Stead and Glenn Colquhoun.
C K Stead’s latest collection, The Black River, was written after a stroke in 2005 had left Stead temporarily dyslexic and innumerate. These are poems haunted by life’s
finitude. The “black river” is the river Styx, the boundary separating the world of the living from the realm of the dead in classical mythology (Mavroneri, “black water,” is the modern name for a Greek river some see as having been a model for the ancient Styx).
In “The Rower,” Stead writes of his grandfather, “rowing still/on the black river” and Stead is preparing himself for his own eventual voyage. Many of the poems seem animated by a desire to look back, take stock, settle accounts.
It might seem a paradox that the writer who nailed his colours so definitively to the mast of Pound and Eliot’s “impersonal” modernism in The New Poetic back in 1964 should have produced a literary oeuvre that so obsessively mines his own autobiography. But paradox is part of the lifeblood of modernist technique and Stead has never been afraid of embracing it.
The essence of the modernist “new poetic” in Stead’s view was to give us a “realer” realism precisely by exposing and embracing its own artificiality,
its constructedness. Stead’s self-explorations have never embraced the gut-spilling impulse of the “confessional” mode. He is always playing (at least) a double game, watching us watch him constructing versions of himself.
In The Black River, Stead presents himself as an old dog who is getting out of the trick business altogether. The first poem in the collection is an “Art of Poetry” that restates (with, perhaps, half on eye on Allen Curnow’s “An Incorrigible Music”) the core of Stead’s vision of modernism as a simple exercise of honest presentation of the concrete:
‘Where is your theory?’
he asks. ‘What
is your aesthetic?’
I give him the
pied stilts stepping
out on the bay
in low-tide light,
the bottle-brush bush
shaking with
warblers at work.
I explain I’m no
respecter of
birds that can’t
sing, dogs that won’t
bark, rudderless yachts;
…
‘My
theory’, I say
‘is the warblers
working, the stilts up
on their stilts, the
‘world looking hard
at the word and the
word at the world.’
It is perhaps in that spirit that Stead presents us with extracts from writing exercises (Stead says that they were “what he thought were poems”, but that it was “like writing in the dark”) he engaged in when suffering the effects of the stroke. “Look,” he seems to say, “here I am without pretence, without disguises; this is the thing itself, the word as
concrete product, not illusory shadow.”
It doesn’t quite work out that way. The poems are most remarkable for being unremarkable. That is, without being told that these are diagnostic traces of a specific mental impairment, we would simply assume that their repetitions, punning lexical slippage and jump-cut illogic were the product of “modernist” aesthetic experiment:
words have given me access
to the inside
of the inside
of the mind
whose mind?
mine
the mine of the mind.
(“S-T-R-O-K-E”)
Knowing their medical etiology, though, these poems become, in a sense, unreadable. That is, if these words are giving access to Stead’s “mind” it is not the mind as the centre of Stead’s identity or personality; this is a view “inside the mind” in the same sense that an MRI scan is. There may be an implicit critique here of the aesthetic proposed in his “Art of Poetry”. The word might look so hard at the world that it misses what gives the world meaning.
Most of these poems were written after Stead had recovered, but the question of what kind of access we’re getting to the “mine of the mind” remains unsettled. In “C.K.”, Stead reflects upon the gap between his public and private personae, offering an oblique apology for his many years as self-appointed cultural gadfly and take-no-prisoners mixer:
There’s a Stead I
recognise only by
his picture
in the papers
and what’s said of him
behind the lines –
…
doesn’t smile
often, and when he does (they
say) watch out! –
…
One day I’ll meet
the bastard, surprise
him, introduce
myself. ‘Hullo, C.K.
I’m Karl. We haven’t
met.’ ‘Let’s
keep it like that,’
he says, unfriendly,
and turns away.
The self-pity gets complicated by the schizophrenic self-division. Just which self is writing this (public) poem, and which one is the object of his, or our, pity – if any? How can Karl convince us that this time he’s plain-as-a-pied-stilt C K?
In “Into Extra Time” the self-pity
curdles into maudlin self-aggrandising:
Your books have read you too often. The songs of
your youth have forgotten you. This world’s an ear
that listens for something new.
…
How easy for Captain Oates
to ‘step outside for a moment’ through that door
marked ‘Hero’s End’. But did he hesitate there
in the battering white-out
straining to catch a voice calling from within
‘Oates, don’t do this! Come back!’ and hearing nothing–
nothing at all but the wind?
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