NEIL GREGORY REVIEWS
With Orchestra & Chorus, his third pamphlet – after Orchids (Salt, 2010) and Waterloo (Like This, 2012) –
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 ‘Orchid’s Want (I-IV)’ and ‘Orchid’s Name (I-IV),
titles such as ‘Hymn for Akhenaton’, ‘Petrarch on Mt. Ventoux’, and ‘The
Tiresias Letters’ 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 ‘Epithalamion Shotgun’. 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 – if
there still exists such a thing – but, without a grounding in philosophy, how
many of us would pick up on the Descartes pun of ‘pineal hand’ (‘Orchid’s want,
IV’)?
The opening stanza of ‘Le Petit
Prince’ is characteristically dense with allusion:
James
Dean’s favourite book
drives
the sperm homunculus,
vice
versa. Whether it’s
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 isn’t 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 Welsch’s point. These four short, notably unmusical lines
encourage us to decipher them, to engage with them on a semantic level. The
poem’s title (another reference we really ought to get) hints that perhaps,
much as the Fox says to the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story
of the same name, what we’re seeing on the page is not essential; the real ‘meaning’
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 ‘a
deep, searching engagement with the human condition’, 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 (‘Orchid’s Want I’), 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 drove—
Welsch is far too studied and far
too skilled a poet for the repetition in these lines to be carelessness.
Instead – though of course the point is that we cannot be sure – 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.
(‘The
Artist’s Hand’)
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 ‘Sonnet’, the concluding poem of the pamphlet, and the culmination
of Welsch’s exploration into the significance we create through interpretation.
A sonnet in the loosest sense – fourteen lines – the poem is predominated by
the word “sign”, dispersed across the page in a grid-like pattern with alliterated
words such as “psych”, “soap”, “Sid” and “says”, 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 “signs”.
‘Sonnet’, then, is a mirror. As
we attempt to uncover its logic, we simply apply more of our own. It is also a
microcosm of Welsch’s pamphlet: a clever piece, by an undoubtedly clever poet.
As with the rest of Orchestra & Chorus,
there is satisfaction to be had, but you’re going to have to work to get it.
*
Christopher Jackson’s 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, ‘The Gallery or The Seven Ages of Man’, takes us on a retrospective
journey from ‘“FIRST MEMORY”’ to a grave with “open-ended dates”. 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 speaker’s body (of work?) left to “decompose here in public”.
Indeed, the structural conceit
of the collection – a series of “rooms”, each preceded by a “catalogue excerpt”
– emphasises the book’s artistic quality, the sense that these poems are a
display of their author’s skill, but also of the various influences and desires
that drive their (and the poet’s) 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 blade’s “cupboard-shadow - / like the idea
of itself” (‘The Blade’), to the “dark backing of the mirror” (‘The Mirror’),
the act of “reviewing our lives” (‘Counterpoint #2’), and going “back the way
we’d come” (‘The Little Goddess Vendor’).
Like Welsch, Jackson
For the most part, the language
of The Gallery is vividly defined, as
in ‘The Dream Sculptor’, where the speaker’s woken hand reacting to an alarm
clock is “frog-tongue-quick”. There are places, however, where a seemingly strong
image fails to live up to its initial potency: though bold, “the sky is a vineyard
graped with stars” (‘The Blade’) weakens under the pressure of the reflection
it invites. Such instances are rare, though, and, although the writing doesn’t
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 Gallery’s pieces reveals the
poet’s fascination with time. It also pushes the collection towards a
mainstream aesthetic. There are no overt experiments (like Welsch’s ‘Sonnet) on
show here. Jackson
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