Mid life: Views and Poetics: talk by Nii Ayikwei Parkes, 20 November 2020

 The Lit. Soc. assembled in their now customary cyberspace huddle to hear from Nii Ayikwei Parkes whom pre-match billing had presented as a true Renaissance Man – novelist, poet, publisher, embodying the distinct cultures of Britain and Ghana and trailing clouds of glory from a fistful of glittering, international literary prizes.  Our 46 year old guest had chosen to address the topic of midlife, offering his views and analysing its effect on his work through some of the elements of Aristotle’s Poetics. 

Significantly divorcing it from its loyal attendant crisis, Parkes offered a thoughtful view from his own experience of midlife.  He saw it as the start of his life after the watershed of his children growing up and reinforced the notion of transition by commenting that although the ingredients of his life – work, reading, writing – remained the same, somehow the finished dish tasted different.  He quoted the example of Brazilian and Cuban cooking where identical ingredients yielded markedly different end products. 

Nii displayed his abilities as a performance poet with readings from Aminatta Forna’s Happiness  and the St. Lucian, Sir Derek Walcott’s The Bounty, using the latter as a platform to introduce the analytical elements of Poetics.  To illustrate the concept of shapeshifting in this Caribbean setting, he used the transformative role of the tide in the metamorphosis of a reef to a series of small islands.  Shapeshifting of  familial roles altered the nature of  his own  literary output, notably fatherhood and then  losing his own father.  He corroborated this with readings from The Making of You  and Caress from his poetry collection The Geez, both readings linked by a gardening theme.  Fatherhood also shifted his interpretation of actions having him now always  seeking the purpose or motive behind them.   

Employing the workshop approach, our guest solicited questions from the audience which demonstrated their intent to trap that elusive wraith, creativity.  Nii confessed that his ideas germinated from random seeds borne on the wind, overheard snatches of conversation, trawling bursts of song from the depths of memory, similes conjured from subconscious associations, exploiting the altered language and geography that were the legacy of a dual national heritage.  These struck the creative spark that fired the imagination to write the plot or mythos and summon the characters (ethos).        

Pressed on the difference between writing Prose and Poetry, Nii likened the former to building a house and the latter to decorating it.  As the simile implies, prose needs more stamina and self-belief requiring a leap of faith to start the process and the conviction that you would see it through    The plot forms round the kernel of your preliminary ideas and about half way through you achieve critical mass and sufficient momentum and self confidence to carry you through to the end.  Intermittent reading aloud (lexis) helped sustain the creative impulse and Parkes likened the acquisition of that critical, creative momentum to driving as a teenager during a severe petrol shortage where opportunities to freewheel on long descents were seized with an exultant alacrity.  A different Muse fostered Poetry in a more seductive process whose origins lay in feelings rather than ideas.  Music or melos could be influential donating an evocative phrase from the lyrics of a song or altering interpretation; a butcher – of what, livestock or men?  The ability to draw from  the wellsprings of both English and West African cultures was an asset.  There was no conflict and the range of different tongues widened his linguistic vocabulary. 

The Lit. Soc. had enjoyed a stimulating and thought provoking evening delivered in a novel format and as one audience member observed lockdown’s deprivations  had made space for Nii’s material – thereby obviating the need for preliminary catharsis, Aristotelian or otherwise.  Whew!       

By William Doherty  

 

COOKING FOR ONE by Gillian Southgate

First thing: turn your computer off. You’ve worked since six a.m.

You’re absolutely starving, and you’re on your own, pro tem.

So dig a fat white onion out, and dice it very fine,

Add two crushed cloves of garlic and a glass of good red wine,

Then put in oregano, thyme, and sugar (just a tad)

A tin of chopped tomatoes, and the best mince to be had.

If you like, throw in some pepper, broken mushrooms, what you will,

Some fennel, even, but leave out the stronger herbs, like dill.

Cook all of this down slowly on an even, gentle heat,

And you’ll end up with a pasta sauce that’s pretty hard to beat.

At this point, pour yourself another glass of something red,

Boil up spaghetti in a pan, or penne shapes instead,

Add just a little oil so that the pasta moves about,

Then drain, supply a shallow bowl, and spoon the supper out.

Italian food is just the thing to cook if you’re on furlough,

A dish for one, and perfect with another glass of Merlot.

 

(This poem was the winning entry in a recent Literary Competition in The Oldie)

 

 

 

The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping Samantha Harvey (Zoom Meeting 23 October 2020)

The Lit. Soc. delighted once again in welcoming Samantha Harvey, albeit on this occasion as a Zoom mediated apparition, who elucidated the process which yielded her latest book  The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. She mapped the battlefield of her years-long struggle with insomnia, explaining how this generated a tortured creative process resulting in her  latest  book, which veered dramatically away from the course set by her earlier works.  

She opened with the first of several  readings from Shapeless Unease and detailed her encounter with unsolicited, nocturnal wakefulness and revealed how intimidating the prospect of “the yawning expanse of a night awake” was.   Linking Sleep and Death, a recurring pairing through the talk, she confessed how in the restless throes of insomnia she was haunted by an image of herself as the reluctant centrepiece of groups assembled in medieval death-bed scenes. The evening started to assume the form of a case presentation by some late Victorian medical luminary theatrically unveiling a patient’s inner torments to an audience of medical students, junior doctors and speculative, intelligent laymen. On this occasion the normal denoument in which the professor, exuding Olympian detachment and an assured serenity, pulls the rabbit of  diagnosis from his top hat and moves on to the morale boosting topic of treatment failed to materialise and Samantha remained mentally embattled.

In the absence of a treatable cause and a therapeutic silver bullet, Samantha’s intractable guerrilla war with insomnia dragged on, draining but devoid of any dramatic focus or likely resolution. It might have started with domestic anxieties but precise recollection was proving difficult. GP consultations resulted in a strained relationship and a refractory malaise. Discussions with a Christian friend and scrutinising her situation through the prism of religion only increased nervous tension and feelings of vulnerability. Driven in desperation to the wild side, she found cold water swimming – particularly that initial immersion of head and face – produced a transient, pleasing distraction but no cure. Writing in her customary, conventional style proved an unattainable objective; she could not maintain the narrative arc for a novel but found some solace  in an intimate, self - searching  approach. Her output was fragmented; some of the shards identified with an indigenous Amazonian tribe, others managed to embed a complete and  coherent short story in the body of her text while the rest were elements from her autobiography. She became absorbed by the nature and structure of this new work and the possible well springs of her new Muse – a distillation of  multiple conversations with herself, a veiled truth- telling exercise?  Was all this mental thrashing about sucking her down into psychological quicksand – denied dreams now; had writing become a way to process her subconscious?  Uninvited images from these wakeful vigils were incorporated into her text.  Startling conclusions ricocheted round her cranial vault; the mind was a prison, love was the escape of the self from the self and could proliferate.  She found she wrote easily, writing  “helped”;  this last book completed in 4 months as against her previous average of 2-3 years   

The memoir of this  anguished internal reflection was coaxed from her by her publisher with a view to printing it as a magazine article but the plan was  changed to marketing it as a book. But what had she written?  Self-indulgence?  Self-help?  Female auto – fiction? Psycho-masochistic trauma porn?  Where were the boundaries these days between fiction and non-fiction?  Whatever others say, Harvey is convinced the book is genuine and is prepared to stand by it. 

The audience almost palpably ached for a happy ending – the serial long dark nights of the soul would end and Joy would "cometh in the morning".  Reality was more prosaic; Samantha remained a martyr to insomnia but could  manage it and her expectations better. She quotes from Macbeth and reveals she knows what she is missing   

……….the innocent sleep

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.        

Resignation has proven a sturdy carapace – others’ judgement of her work intrigues rather than enrages, she accepts she cannot control the book’s journey post-publication,  politics is viewed with detached equanimity even if alloyed with disappointment. 

A lively Q&A session indicated that the Winchelsea audience was fully engaged with this highly original foray into experimental writing. 

William Doherty

 

Printing, Literacy & Bookselling in Early Renaissance Venice; Zoomed talk by Patricia Erskine-Hill, 25 September 2020

 

While for Shelley it may have been a case of

"Underneath Day’s azure eyes

 Ocean’s nursling, Venice, lies"       

Patricia Erskine-Hill, delivering the latest instalment  of Winchelsea’s Zoom Chronicles, had a different Venice in mind; a fully-weaned maritime power reaping the commercial harvest of a location straddling the main East-West and North-South trade routes and the metropole of an Empire incorporating Corfu, Cyprus, Crete and the Dalmatian coast. By the mid-15^th century, Venice was the industrial powerhouse of its day with the Arsenale naval yard producing 300 ships a year by virtue of an advanced assembly line using a novel modular construction method.

In 1462, an obscure German conflict, the Baden-Palatinate War, saw Mainz sacked and Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing presses destroyed casting his crew of trained printers adrift to seek another European haven  to  foster their craft. The Papal and Neapolitan courts were the initial magnets but some individuals drifted back north to wealthy, cosmopolitan Venice and set up shop there. At this time, print was challenging an established manuscript culture. Laboriously crafted, usually by monks, on expensive vellum (calfskin) these were a niche product for the weighty purses of the European elite and although they were widely distributed even the rich would only possess a few scripts. The scribes were artists whose skill delivered beautiful texts enlivened by a constellation of illustrations. Ownership conferred a social cachet and the manuscript market lasted for several decades after the coming of print. 

The tradition of literature presented as a thing of beauty was duly absorbed by the artisans of print and the audience was treated to a series of delightful slides demonstrating the work of the Venetian publishers, each of whom developed a characteristic “house style”. The format of the text varied with subject matter e.g. theology scripts came in a red and black Gothic font and in the early  days the surrounding illustrations were done by hand. Aldo Manuzio gave us italic script which allowed a more efficient use of page space and was used for more personal material. These printer/publishers were highly educated with Manuzio’s family famously conversing in classical Greek at home. His equally cerebral rival, Marcolini, was a confidant of Titian and publisher of Dante. His work was characterised by spare, plain text set in a clean, uncluttered layout. Their output was mainly Latin and Greek classics and  religious and devotional works which even featured exotic hybrids like a Book of Hours in Arabic. Other staples were fortune telling, cartomancy, chivalric romances drenched in lust and gore and subversive works like Boccaccio’s Decameron  - awash with obscenity and anti-clerical sentiment. Such specialised creativity was a target for plagiarists and although Manuzio had copyright  or “privilege” laws passed, the writ of the Venetian Republic did not run in Lyon or Breslau. Manuzio introduced the Octavo (i.e. Folio folded x3) format and targeted Army officers as a potential market for these” pocket books”.      

Although much more productive than its predecessor, print was still the province of the craftsman. The initial capital investment was substantial -a printing press and  movable type made by highly skilled cutters for whom Greek, Arabic and Hebrew script  proved particularly challenging. The fonts were made from an alloy of lead, tin and the highly toxic antimony.  and each press needed two compositors, two pressmen and an apprentice The last graduated to journeyman which often entailed becoming a travelling salesman for the firm. .Paper was made from rags and relatively expensive and the paper mills in Treviso and Parma had to increase their output  to meet the rising demand. An average print run at this stage consisted ,of around 400 copies although Manuzio had gone to 3000 copies for popular works. The minimum viable run was 100 copies. The workforce was drawn from the cittadini originali, the Venetian citizenry, and had to be literate, numerate and have a working knowledge of Latin. 

The readership was drawn from the nobility, the clergy, the merchant class and the upper echelon of artisans. 33% of adult males and 13% of females (nuns and wives and daughters of the elite) could read with half the literate males knowing Latin.  In Venice, the Rialto bridge and the streets of  Le Mercerie were favoured pitches for book sales. Publishing was an international trade and family networks helped distribution across Europe and the Levant. Northern Europe was the main market and large bookfairs were held in Strasbourg and Nuremburg. Lasting legacies of  this period were the refinement of punctuation with the introduction of the colon and semicolon, the use of annotations and the glossary, in a  move towards the standardisation of language.   

Decline of the Venetian book trade set in around 1560 as competition increased in the secular book market. The city’s open, liberal,  commercial  ethos drew it to the attention of Protestant Reformers who saw a potential door into Italy. As all Monty Python fans would have expected ,  this occurred to the Counter-Reformation Inquisition too and they firmly closed the door. Their introduction of pre-publication censorship reduced the industry’s responsiveness and  popular appeal.

For the sensualists among the Lit. Soc. membership  Patricia Erskine -Hill’s talk would have been illuminating and inspiring, encouraging them to continue to savour the appearance and the feel of a book while naturally retaining their ability to eschew judging it by its cover. 

 William Doherty

 

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Review by Howard Norton of Jonty Driver's latest poetry: "The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek" and "£he Chinese Poems 1979 _ 2030"

 

I have just finished reading a brilliant anthology entitled, 100 Poems That Make Men Cry.  It should certainly have included The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek.  I loved the poem’s rich and graphic language: phrases like, ‘We drown in all the ambiguities of what we were and what we are’, and ‘bedraggled memories of my tainted past’. The illustration of the slave bell is deeply moving and adds greatly to the impact of the poem. 

 The Chinese Poems are so varied. They display all Jonty’s versatility, talent for conveying mood, and refusal to take the world at face value.  Some of them evoke Hardy for me (a writer who, like Jonty, moved from novels to poetry).  The key to the collection lies in the Preface where Jonty admits, ‘The Far East revived my sense of memory’.  His yearning for the sights and sounds and smells of his boyhood Africa constantly surfaces, sometimes overtly as in, ‘Shall I never again see the Lowverdt’ or ‘the bright-speared aloes’ (both from the poem Somewhere Else) but always lurking.  He is a displaced person whose term in China is a second exile, ‘I am no longer sure I know even where my home is’, and ‘I belong nowhere now’, he laments (both from the poem Quintet).  He feels doubly alienated as a political exile and as a poet, ‘A poet’s home is always somewhere else’.

Some of these poems are difficult.  We have to grapple with them because, ‘they might be a code’ (Letter to BB).  Jonty is always a subversive poet in the best sense challenging us to go beyond easy assumptions and superficial appearances.  How emphatically he rejects the assertion that, ‘Things mean precisely what they mean to show’. (Death and the Painted Lady)

The Water Margins is my favourite poem.  The old man seems, like Jonty, to have been banished.  As he relives his memories the regrets accumulate, ‘If only, if only’, but the poem ends serenely, ‘I feared those voices would be baleful, instead they are kind of peaceful, kind of accepting’.  His companion, perhaps a ‘post-modernist philosopher’ mocks his trust, ‘Do you really think you can hear what the reeds say?’.  But the wise old man rejects rationality. He trusts instead to a more primitive faith in the intuitions of nature and thereby finds peace.

Christmas in Hong Kong is a powerful diatribe against the callous materialism of Christmas.  The crowds, intent on buying luxurious presents, ‘lurch sideways to avoid someone bent and stinking asleep in the stairwell’.  The identification in the last verse of God who ‘fathered’ this Christmas with the disregarded tramp is a powerful juxtaposition.

The whole collection breathes humility.  Jonty loves China but only From Afar.  He does not pretend to understand that wonderfully rich culture - none of us does - and we need to be reminded of that as we follow Trump’s America and risk provoking a new Cold War.

Details of how to obtain these works, and Jonty's two other recent collections, are in the September issuee of the newsletter.