NEIL GREGORY REVIEWS
With Orchestra & Chorus, his third pamphlet ā after Orchids (Salt, 2010) and Waterloo (Like This, 2012) ā
American-born poet, musician, playwright and scholar J.T. Welsch presents a
poetry suffused by voices from the past.
Orchestra
& Chorus
by J.T. Welsch (Holdfire, 2012)
and The Gallery
by Christopher Jackson (Poetry Salzburg 2013)
A glance at the contents page
is enough to see the extent of the intertextuality that drives this collection:
bookended by the sequences of āOrchidās Want (I-IV)ā and āOrchidās Name (I-IV),
titles such as āHymn for Akhenatonā, āPetrarch on Mt. Ventouxā, and āThe
Tiresias Lettersā point to a poetry drawn from myth and literary tradition. Welsch
assimilates and appropriates literary precursors with skill, and frequently with
wit, as in the playfully oxymoronic title of āEpithalamion Shotgunā. The
message is orchestra loud, and repeated in chorus across all 28 pages of this
short, but rich, pamphlet: there can be no writing without reading.
As messages go, especially for readers
of poetry, this is a laudable one. Such is the frequency and depth of the
references, however, that Welsch risks alienating his reader. There is of
course no requirement for a poet to write poems for a general readership ā if
there still exists such a thing ā but, without a grounding in philosophy, how
many of us would pick up on the Descartes pun of āpineal handā (āOrchidās want,
IVā)?
The opening stanza of āLe Petit
Princeā is characteristically dense with allusion:
James
Deanās favourite book
drives
the sperm homunculus,
vice
versa. Whether itās
a Barnum effect or pareidolia.
James Dean is familiar to most,
possibly so too the Barnum effect, but homunculus and pareidolia likely require
a little detective work (or a good grasp of Latin and Greek) on the part of the
reader. In the age of Wikipedia, this isnāt a necessarily an issue, but it does
raise the question of whether a poem is an educational, or an experiential
entity. This may well be Welschās point. These four short, notably unmusical lines
encourage us to decipher them, to engage with them on a semantic level. The
poemās title (another reference we really ought to get) hints that perhaps,
much as the Fox says to the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-ExupĆ©ryās story
of the same name, what weāre seeing on the page is not essential; the real āmeaningā
comes from within us.
Elsewhere in Orchestra & Chorus, Welsch gives us
hints that this pamphlet, described on the back cover by Ian Pople as having āa
deep, searching engagement with the human conditionā, is indeed a book about
what it is to be human. More precisely, these poems explore what it is to be an
animal that uses language to express and define itself. From the first stanza
of the first poem (āOrchidās Want Iā), Welsch flags up the indefinable quality
of both language and our sense of self:
The Lost child chased me to work
on my
radio, the VMS system on I-70,
and
finally, the rear-view, and finally,
beside me,
and we drove.
All day and
night, we droveā
Welsch is far too studied and far
too skilled a poet for the repetition in these lines to be carelessness.
Instead ā though of course the point is that we cannot be sure ā we get the
sense that repetition affords a possibility of various interpretations: the
impossibility of a singular, objective meaning.
Repetition features throughout Orchestra & Chorus, as does a marked
attention to, and play upon, the sight and sound of words:
Its choirs
reach an I chord (orchid).
I do my crochet (orchidectomy),
or I paint my nails and go see
Rosie.
(āThe
Artistās Handā)
These deceptively
light-hearted, jangling lines not only amuse, they nudge us to look, and to listen
more deeply.
Students of semiotics will take
pleasure in āSonnetā, the concluding poem of the pamphlet, and the culmination
of Welschās exploration into the significance we create through interpretation.
A sonnet in the loosest sense ā fourteen lines ā the poem is predominated by
the word āsignā, dispersed across the page in a grid-like pattern with alliterated
words such as āpsychā, āsoapā, āSidā and āsaysā, which play out permutations of
vowel sounds in each column and consonantal endings in each row. Appropriately,
the result is something of a Barnum effect: the more we look, the more we begin
to see patterns in and between these āsignsā.
āSonnetā, then, is a mirror. As
we attempt to uncover its logic, we simply apply more of our own. It is also a
microcosm of Welschās pamphlet: a clever piece, by an undoubtedly clever poet.
As with the rest of Orchestra & Chorus,
there is satisfaction to be had, but youāre going to have to work to get it.
*
Christopher Jacksonās debut, The Gallery, is a far more accessible
collection than Orchestra & Chorus.
This is not to say, however, that The
Gallery is lacking in substance.
The twenty-six poems presented
on the reassuringly thick pages of this Poetry Salzburg pamphlet guide the
reader through the experiences and memories that seemingly comprise their author.
The opening piece, āThe Gallery or The Seven Ages of Manā, takes us on a retrospective
journey from āāFIRST MEMORYāā to a grave with āopen-ended datesā. Littered with
memories of places visited, of victories, failures and passions, this
intriguing poem encourages us to wonder how and why we choose the moments and
actions that define us. It seems an unlikely coincidence that the poem closes
with the speakerās body (of work?) left to ādecompose here in publicā.
Indeed, the structural conceit
of the collection ā a series of āroomsā, each preceded by a ācatalogue excerptā
ā emphasises the bookās artistic quality, the sense that these poems are a
display of their authorās skill, but also of the various influences and desires
that drive their (and the poetās) composition. This is an original and
effective device. Using the excerpts to suggest the existence of other exhibits
and installations teases the possibility of a world beyond the words, something
unseen and unsaid, yet just as present as the language on the page.
We need only skim the poems to
detect the broad themes that drive this personal, yet universally applicable
collection. Throughout we witness reflection and introspection, from the
perfectly pitched image of a knife bladeās ācupboard-shadow - / like the idea
of itselfā (āThe Bladeā), to the ādark backing of the mirrorā (āThe Mirrorā),
the act of āreviewing our livesā (āCounterpoint #2ā), and going āback the way
weād comeā (āThe Little Goddess Vendorā).
Like Welsch, Jackson exhibits an interest in language as a
building force, a maker of personality. āPast, Present, Futureā, for instance,
plays not only with personification (one of Jacksonās favourite tropes) ā āI
met Past on the corner of Gloucester Road and Cromwell Road, examining the moon
as if about to confide in itā ā but also with form. Presented as a block of prose,
the poem compresses the characters of past, present and future into a single
entity. The effect is much like the gallery structure of the collection,
producing a multi-faceted whole from often contradictory constituent parts. The
touch is light, though, and reading this poem leaves us with a sense of our own
loose construction, a sense that āThe pressure of truth is faintā (āOptimism in
Brompton Cemeteryā), that we are less defined than we may think.
For the most part, the language
of The Gallery is vividly defined, as
in āThe Dream Sculptorā, where the speakerās woken hand reacting to an alarm
clock is āfrog-tongue-quickā. There are places, however, where a seemingly strong
image fails to live up to its initial potency: though bold, āthe sky is a vineyard
graped with starsā (āThe Bladeā) weakens under the pressure of the reflection
it invites. Such instances are rare, though, and, although the writing doesnāt
always achieve the effortless authority of a more established voice, The Gallery is nonetheless a promising
debut collection.
The narrative drive behind most
of The Galleryās pieces reveals the
poetās fascination with time. It also pushes the collection towards a
mainstream aesthetic. There are no overt experiments (like Welschās āSonnet) on
show here. Jackson ās
poems feel more personal, more a showing of life, than of language. Reading
through the rooms of this āgalleryā, we
are reminded of and encouraged to ponder the way in which our lives come
together, the moments and choices that hang together in our own personal
galleries.
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