Swallowed

Here's Franklin Foer, in discussing the reports of Scott Thomas Beauchamp:

I hadn't worked with Stephen Glass, who made up stories out of whole cloth, but I knew the lessons derived from that scandal. Fabulists are often nabbed by the little lies, the asides they assume that no one will check.

Here's Wikipedia, quoting Glass's 1998 article 'Hack Heaven' — the one which it says 'triggered his downfall':

Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!"...

Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening – and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says, tentatively, to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you ..."

The little lies? This is bad fiction. You don't, or shouldn't, have to be a hotshot critic to see that.

And here's an excerpt from Beauchamp's first 'Diarist' piece:

[...] a short but unusually healthy-looking Iraqi kid approached out of my periphery wearing an Adidas hat and snowboarding t-shirt, his lower torso swallowed by one of Little Venice's excrement canals.

We are to believe, then, that the Iraqi child has become so debased by the conditions of war that he is willing to wade up to his stomach, or chest, in shit

"Mistah Mistah, give me $50," he demanded, somewhat politely compared with other children. But I was still taken aback by the sum

to obtain money. I don't know if I believe it. 'lower torso' could be the slip of a bad writer, an artefact of bad editing, or one of those 'little lies'.

Or it could be true:

His first piece, a Diarist titled 'War Bonds' published in our February 5 issue, described the woes of an Iraqi boy named Ali who adopted the moniker 'James Bond.' Soon after James Bond chit-chats with American soldiers, Beauchamp learns that thugs—most likely insurgents—cut out his tongue. This first piece didn't receive much attention, but the attention it did receive was positive. Hawks, in particular, liked that it sympathetically described the plight of sensitive young soldiers on the front line.

That it was received positively implies its readers thought it true. That it was received positively, and thought true, implies its readers accepted that a young Iraqi was desperate enough for money, or so used to the indignity, he would walk navel-deep through shit for it. What does this say?

BARQUIAN

Ghost Work
for the formatting’s sake.

by Jameson Farley
guest blogger

Pu Ling-en. A correspondence

1)

from: Oxford Poetry
to: jhp13[at]cam.ac.uk
date: Oct 7, 2007 6:57 PM
subject: OP08

Dr Prynne,

We are committed admirers of yours
here at OP. If there is one thing
which bugs us about the state of English
literary culture, it is that poetry of the quality
you write goes relatively unacclaimed.
We understand you must receive many such
wearying requests, but still we are determined
to ask if you would like to contribute (in any form:
we do not affect to leash our writers to particular
modes) to our 2008 issue. It is most
important to us that the poetry in our journal
avoid the pitfalls many successful poets
wander into it seems guilelessly. If we were able
to include something of yours, it would invigorate
and encourage both us and our student contributors
in the task. With sincere thanks,

Ben Mullen & JCH Potts
editors, OP08

2)

from: J.H. Prynne
to: Oxford Poetry
date: 07 Oct 2007 23:22:51 +0100
subject: Re: OP08

Hmmmmm. I don't think I have anything I could send you right now, thought this might change. Let's see if passing time turns out to make a difference.

J.H. Prynne

3)

from: Oxford Poetry
to: "J.H. Prynne"
date: Nov 9, 2007 5:27 PM
subject: Re: OP08

Thank you for your kind reply; and for your extralong 'Hmm', which we cherish as a measure of how much our offer meant to you, and how much thinking it took to say no.

Your contribution still and always welcome.

BPM, JCHP
Oxford Poetry

---

Super Songs. Keston Sutherland, Timothy Thornton, Ron Paste — I’m persuaded by people who’re persuaded by Prynne. Owing to their commendations I have his brick of Poems and I paid £14 in money for Sub Songs.

I have his Poems and I have not read it. I read Sub Songs the day it arrived.

The characteristic conservative response to novelty is the scoff. Conservatives’ scoffing — their bluster and bluffness — reacquaints us gently with our certitudes, as if it wasn’t these that were unaccountable. To hazard an answer must be the worst way to defuse live questions like those asked by novel poetry, so the flummoxed conservative must avoid this without giving off any guilty air of evasion. Dr Johnson missed the point but not the stone. Kingsley Amis just hoicked the pale postmodernism of Money at the opposite wall.

Reading Sub Songs it occurred to me that the book was — in a far from unimpeachable way — a challenge: perhaps a test. It seemed to covet the role of foil to my philistine — the philistine it needed me to play, hoicking arm primed for its dismissal. But the book’s provocation wasn’t directed at philistine taste as a target so much as it sought, in the service of the solace and self-regard of those who do endorse the Prynnian style, to conscript the philistine to stand in bogus contrast to its correct method.

Practitioners in the humanities are often smart. Scholars or poets, they are both encouraged in and inclined to a certain intellectual pride. But it’s impossible for them not to sense, on the scene of their success, their culture’s unstudied commitment to their neglect. The society that voted for New Labour in three elections before trading them in for the Clameron chimera denies its avant-garde not only status in reputation but meaning in recognition. For poets who want to respect themselves, then, in a culture that shows its estimate of their value (and to an extent of that of poetry) by an impenetrable obliviousness, it is therapeutic to promote and imitate an art whose signature is its difficulty but whose raison is a retaliatory exclusion; under its sway, the more these poets praise what most won’t contemplate without philistine complaint, the more they can feel themselves companions of an elite. It’s the fact of this process that justifies Archambeau’s intervention in the matter of Prynne and school’s claiming for their work validity as a means of protest. That the poetry is unviable as such — and no more viable as a means of resistance — should be self-evident, and I do mean to be patronising when I say it’s a shame if smart people ever had convictions to the contrary. That the poetry, with its decadent esotericism of diction, is as a medium hostile to those it roots for, but unstinting in its passion in this cause, implies an insanity that precludes political significance. Before politics is even a prospect, though, the extent to which the style’s practitioners can devote themselves to a sense of its radical potential becomes a qualification — like a tenet of a cult, the more admired the more ardently it is held. Who better than nobody to serve and defend in a book that nobody reads? ◦ 2011 

How short

Kafka, of a woman (I don't know where): how short must be life, if something so fragile can last a lifetime. But sentimental! Kafka’s words betray a watcher’s remoteness, for women’s bones are strong; women of beauty are still flesh, as you are when you stub your toe, or knock your head on a shelf. You would not want to touch a thing that would shatter or dissolve in your hand. I see there’s romance in what’s ethereal — fairies and such. That women are girlish and frail and we ought to protect them (or that we must). Under their burkhas and chastely enticing veils these women aren’t pixies — airy features strung with beads of light together — and I’m not the awed rustic, on the streets of Oxford seeing the travel of light in covers; these are people, part-animal, bent like men to make superior versions of themselves (ones better at making more and more versions), in that way perhaps machinelike, but on the human scale of no graver fragility than lean and short men. Yes the word angel is beautiful but I have always hated its use in simile because how do they write or sing? Like Shakespeare and, what, a choir? Not priests, not enraptured, nobody knows: they’re imagined beings, unconcrete, without flesh. Women aren’t fleshlessly angels, they have solid nerve and muscle, it’s why they live out meagre allotments. Kafka’s is male sentimentality, a kind of refuge, to see in those desired for their cleavages, their symmetrical faces the angelic; if angels are immortal the angelically dreamlike, no substance — impression all.

Little Treatise on Plagiarism

Very often my beliefs have been best expressed by others, and this is not an admission but an acknowledgement, since only a humble man will plagiarise. The less of myself, the better! The whole thing is, the difficult matter, to shrink back to this: We are small, and cannot bear much improvement. Did not even St. Paul the Apostle name himself “Little Thing”? Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to the bulk — so little to the stock?

Consider Alan Smithee. To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences is no crime, but service. Among so many borrowed things, be glad to steal one, disguising and altering it, to do such business in the massy entrails of the Earth, that no man may accuse or judge you, and that no page will stand up against you, saying, “You are a thief.”

We are all debtors, imitators, copyists writ large. This is my Last Will and Testament. The devil you

Loveagain

Kingsley revenant?

On ‘Poetic’ Prose

The difference between verse and prose is self-evident, but it is a sheer waste of time to look for a definition of the difference between poetry and prose.

—W. H. Auden

When Prose Is Poetic

Prose is seldom poetic. When prose is poetic, this isn’t of itself a good thing. More often it is bad. Indeed, a healthy maxim might be: Good prose is never poetic. But this would miss the point—which is that when prose is called ‘poetic’, it’s usually not so. Misunderstanding and belittlement, both of prose and of the ‘poetic’, issue from this abuse.

To call poetry ‘prosaic’—as eg Jeremy Noel-Tod of Swithering—is denigration; to call prose ‘poetic’—as innumerable puffquotes and hacks—is encomium.

Does this suggest a tacit hierarchy, in which writing poetry’s a ‘higher’ art than writing prose?

No. What it suggests is laziness. To say prose is ‘poetic’ is to repeat a cliché of praise.

To say prose is ‘poetic’ is to say the square is round.

I concede that many have said the square is round, that many have said this of shapes which both look quite curvy, and have corners. But! Prose is an art in its own right. Beautiful prose is as rare as beautiful poetry. Only geniuses get near. To call such prose ‘poetic’ because it’s beautiful is careless belittlement, is evidence of absence of thought.

Why might we call prose ‘poetic’? For content, style, or both? Content can’t make anything ‘poetic’, because poetry is magnanimous. Poetry may treat of love; it may treat of iceberg lettuce; it may treat of global warming. To define it through content is to make a mistake.

So style. Poetry tends to have an aural or acoustic texture, which consists of assonance and alliteration (perhaps analysable as rhyme, perhaps not), and rhythm (perhaps analysable as metre, perhaps not). These, together, we could term poetry’s ‘music’. Poetry also tends to think in metaphors, but needn’t necessarily. Poetry tends to appear in lines that do not tend to reach the right margin; this is not, though, a sine qua non. Writing in broken lines, that rhymes, and has metre, is poetry.

(I don’t know where poetry may be said to end and prose begin. The best policy in doubtful cases is to take what the writer thought they were writing, if that’s discernible, as what they were in fact writing. Song lyrics, incidentally, are not poetry.)

Is it these qualities which make prose ‘poetic’? No. It is these qualities, as well as misguided ideas about which matter belongs in the domain of poetry and which in prose, that cause people to call prose ‘poetic’.

When Prose Is Prosaical

Why ‘prosaical’? Only because the newer sense of ‘prosaic’ is now so alien to the original one, it’s possible to call prose ‘prosaic’ without tautology.

Prose manifests its own beauties; we do not need poetry, or a concept of the ‘poetic’ in prose, to make sense of them. Of course there is commonality: it is that both media exploit the potential of language to sound music; that is, all writers, all speakers—consciously or not—orchestrate harmonies of vowels and consonants in rhythms which stress or play on those harmonies. But this is obvious to the point of banality. Everyone knows most proverbs, most clichés, most (shall we say?) successful phrases, turn on consonance. I won’t print a list. (Try www.westegg.com/cliche/random.cgi). But consider ‘swan off’. Whoever came up with that had a poet’s ear. Or do we all?

(Consider also ‘navel-gazing’. Who ever gazed at his navel? It doesn’t happen. The phrase has succeeded because it rhymes, not because it is a pungent or accurate description of life.)

Attention to aural texture is legitimately a feature of prose as well as of poetry. Such attention does not mark prose as especially poetic any more than does use of metaphor or anaphora. An anecdote: in conversation my old tutor Matthew Reynolds has claimed that, aesthetically speaking, he prefers disharmony to harmony. I believe him. Still, there’s irony in the way he liked to adduce Tennyson’s ‘Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, / Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes’ as prototypical poetry. Just listen to those vowels chime like a one-note bell choir.

From Giacomo Joyce (which Ellmann blurbily calls ‘a love poem’):

She raises her arms in an effort to hook at the nape of her neck a gown of black veiling. She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow . . . . Fingers, cold and calm and moving . . . . A touch, a touch.

From Ulysses:

He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.

Thomas Hardy:

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made blood-red stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Saul Bellow:

Abed, he touched Sono’s eyelids experimentally, as she lay smiling. Those strange, complex, soft, pale lids would keep the imprint of a touch for quite a while. To tell the truth, I never had it so good, he wrote. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy. That was hardly a joke. When a man's breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown—he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions and his sins. (Herzog)

The light held long after nine o’clock, and the ground was covered with clover, more than a mile of green between Cottage Grove and Stony Island. (‘In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt’)

Vladimir Nabokov:

Then Timofey’s torso was bared, and to it Belochkin [the pediatrician] pressed the icy nudity of his ear and the sandpapery side of his head. Like the flat sole of some monopode, the ear ambulated all over Timofey’s back and chest, gluing itself to this or that patch of skin and stomping on to the next.

One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by injection of phenol to the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, an undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood. […]

Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.

The mosquitos were getting bothersome. Time for tea. Time for a game of chess with Chateau. That strange spasm was over, one could breathe again. On the distant crest of the knoll, at the exact spot where Gramineev’s easel had stood a few hours before, two dark figures in profile were silhouetted against the ember-red sky. They stood there closely, facing each other. One could not make out from the road whether it was the Poroshin girl and her beau, or Nina Bolotov and young Poroshin, or merely an emblematic couple placed with easy art on the last page of Pnin’s fading day.

Henry Green:

Again, each Sunday afternoon we had a walk still dressed in our best and we could draw in the sweet county air, this island’s attar of roses, coming from the sea overland to where we meandered, the woods all about us, rooks up in the sky, cattle in the fields. Every lane so it now seems was sunken, tufts of grass and wild flowers overhung our walks and sometimes, coming over the hill, we had that view over all the country where it lay beneath in light haze like a king’s pleasure preserved for idle hours. (Pack my Bag)

Such, for arbitrary example, is prosaical prose. There is nothing that should limit the beauty of prose as form compared with poetry as form, though prose (in English) has as yet no Shakespeare—except insofar as Shakespeare wrote prose (‘what is this quintessence of dust?’). Musical artistry is not exclusively characteristic of poetry; it’s there in beautiful words of any provenance. What most usefully defines poetry is its concern with the unit of the line. Prose broken into lines is likely to make bad poetry, defined as such because the writer thinks herself a poet. (Though they’ve swiftly mutated away from the original sense ‘of prose’, pejorative use of the terms ‘prosaic’ and ‘prosy’ offends me. Critics are less than rigorous when they criticise poetry for being ‘prosaic’—what features of the verse are so deplorably like prose?) To chance a generalisation: prose pays scant heed to the unit of the line; rather, it is concerned with the units of sentence, paragraph and chapter.

Which brings us to Giacomo Joyce. As beautiful a stretch of prose as Joyce ever wrote, this heavily biographical short story uses devices that may occur in either prose or poetry, are probably more common in poetry, but ‘prosaises’ them to such an extent, makes them work in and for the prose in ways that are so specific to the medium, that to call them ‘poetic’ only makes a nonsense of the word. Joyce here writes—though does not inaugurate (think of Swift’s ‘He had been Eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers’)—a ‘prosaical’ prose.

To rephrase: whereas the art of poetry tends to consist in how a poet organises her harmonies of sound over, around and across a structure derived from (i) the unit of the line and (ii) the metrical foot, Joyce’s artistry shapes these harmonies according to the units of sentence and paragraph. The units of line and metre are irrelevant, and though rhythm creeps in occasionally, it’s never systematic or schematic. (Prosaical rhythm is precludingly difficult to analyse.) Joyce’s prose in this sense differs fundamentally from poetry; his assonance, alliteration, rhythm, etc. (I hesitate to use the word ‘cadence’, as I don’t know what it means), are prosaical, not poetic.

Take the passage beginning, ‘She raises her arms’. Four of these sentences have prosaical caesurae. They gather themselves powerfully up to a break, introduced by a colon or comma, after which they fall off gracefully, making symmetrical patterns. Sound is miming sense in ‘I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall.’ Joyce tends to repeat words or phrases to pin his paragraphs together, so here we have ‘arms’, ‘black veil’, ‘gown’, ‘body’, ‘slips’, ‘silver’ and finally ‘move’ and ‘touch’, harmonies that move between sentences as ‘She cannot: no, she cannot’ moves within one. It’d be pedantic to catalogue all the correspondences of sound, but I should point up ‘websoft edges’, ‘lithe smooth’, the bs in ‘black’, ‘body’ and ‘buttocks’, the ls everywhere, and crucially, the array of s, z and sh sounds that falls around she. The short ih vowel occurs omnipresently from ‘sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings’ (seven or eight times) to ‘tarnished silver’ and ‘Fingers … moving’. The correspondences emphasise what they have not embraced: ‘naked’, ‘buttocks’, ‘furrow’ and ‘touch’ stand out thanks to their hard consonants and dark vowels. The build-up and flow of this prose is importantly dissimilar to poetry, which relies heavier on the counter-influence of metre and stanza working against harmonies of sound to create meaning independently of the poem’s content—and Giacomo is replete with writing of like density. Who knows why these esses, ls and ihs were for Joyce associated with erotic feeling? We could say they are elusively feminine, but of course the context has prejudiced us: though it accesses all, the prosaical style of Joyce is unknowable.

The figure that imagines the girl as silver-scaled and piscine could have worked as ravishingly in poetry.

More Giacomo:

Her classmate, retwisting her twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese Italian: Che coltura! The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.

Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned skull.

I rush out of the tobacco-shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light.

The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked lemons, jewelled cherries, shameful peaches with torn leaves.

She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls.

Calling prose ‘poetic’ explains nothing. The practice amounts to critical solecism, and evinces languor of mind. Prose has no need of poetry to justify or to account for its manifold beauties. To imply it’s beautiful or good because it is ‘poetic’ (likewise, but less sinfully, ‘lyrical’ or ‘elegiac’) is to deprecate a great artform by invocation of counterfeit dependency on one comparably great.

(Film critics such as David Thomson and Geoff Andrew have described films or scenes of films as ‘poetic’, or directors as ‘poets’ of cinema, but their meaning is lost to me. To take a guess: they use the words in pontifical synonymy with ‘allegorical’ or, simpler, ‘pretty’, where these are lineaments of art in general, not only its manifestation in poetry.)

I do not know what ‘poetic’ prose would look or sound like. Probably it would use a rhyme scheme, a form of metre, a broken layout; a combination of the three. But why would this not be (prosaic) poetry? Truly a quandary.

Would it not be easier to suppose that prose cannot be ‘poetic’? That whenever prose is deemed ‘poetic’, it is really prosaical, or poetry? The idea of round squares is neither useful nor intelligible to mathematicians. ‘Poetic’ prose approaches such redundancy, and I think matches such inanity.

Adam Piette is a brilliant scholar of prosaical prose. He just doesn’t know it.

A poem:

Not quite heat- or rain-scrim, this heavy
blankness, thinning now, presides with mauve-
tinted wipe-around grey. Noon, yet no distance
to any horizon. The Malverns gone in haze.
I would not, formerly,
have so described bereavement. Land
of Unlikeness a similitude, certitude
moves to dissolution. Still, an answer:
misprised, misplaced love,
our routine, is not tragedy;
misadventure at worst. And my self-styled
lament must cover for us both.
Something here to know the time by, in all
conscience. In all conscience we
shall lie down together. Dear one, be told
you chose impenetrable absence; I become
commonplace fantasy’s
life-sentenced ghost. Allow
our one tolerable scena its two minds.
Abruptly the sun’s out, striking a new
cleave; skidding the ridge-grass, down steep hangers;
buddleia in dark bloom; a wayward covey
of cabbage-whites this instant ^| balanced
and prinking, the light itself aromatic.

(It’s poem LXV from Geoffrey Hill’s Orchards of Syon.) Ignore the aural spectacle and watch the lines break. See how the unit of the line is made to cut across, to interfere with the unit of the sentence so as to engender more and different meaning than they could unbroken? This interplay, more than consonance or metre, is the volatile essence of poetry—and it can’t happen in prose without making poetry of the prose.

‘Poetic prose’ is a figment we’d do well to forget. To call prose ‘poetic’ is invidiously to declare you do not understand what poetry or prose are; it is explicitly to admit your blindness to the nature of literature’s primary dichotomy after that of meaning and style. Elide it from your vocabulary, or risk disrespect.

PS. A brilliant and brief discussion (by Jeremy Noel-Tod) of what may be prosaic in poetry is here.

*

For its hectoring and callowness I endorse the essay no longer (it was written a year ago), but I republish here to save it from the bastardisation it underwent in The Owl, whose editors decided to scatter the quotations randomly through the text in pointless boxes.