Freewheelin' Emily Dickinson

I went to Liverpool this weekend to see PRIMITIVE, a multi-screen installation by the fantastic filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Somehow, in the surreal and poetic logic of Apichatpong's films, it makes perfect sense that I returned with an album of Emily Dickinson's poems. While Joei, as he is known, is a contemporary Thai filmmaker with a strong interest in were-tigers, beautiful young men and diptych structures, Emily was a nineteenth-century American, daughter of a one-term Congressman, with a passion for bees, God and handmade books... but there's something that resonates in their work: an oblique quality of attention to the details that others miss (and an attendant attention to the process of making and presenting a work), an intention to work at tangents from national and globalised arts cultures while engaging with them critically, and an unfoldingness that the reader/viewer encounters in their work, which is often deceptively simple or slow in its image-making.

The album, Graphic as a Star (Fire Records, 2009), as purchased at Probe Records on Slater Street (around the corner from FACT, where the exhibition takes place), is a transhistorical collaboration with Born Heller vocalist Josephine Heller (you can hear sample tracks on her MySpace page). Heller describes her music as "religious/blues" and comments on Fire Records' site that

her craft is strongly shaped by "Tin Pan Alley on my maternal side, rock and roll on my paternal side, Western folk music by birth, art-song and classical music via my adolescent passions".

The settings for the poems certainly show all of these influences, falling into three rough groups -- swooping a capella settings reminiscent of the songs sung by the old woman in Terence Davies' film Distant Voices, Still Lives: a little bit hymn, a little bit singalong-around-the-piano, a little bit music hall, a little bit trad. ballad but more delicate than that sounds; folky, Shirley Collins or Vashti Bunyan-like numbers that whisper into your soul, with gentle guitar; and rollicking harmonica numbers that pair E.D. and Bob D. to startling effect.

You'd think that the lineage of American folk poetry would run Whitman >> Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music >> Bob Dylan. But Foster brings out both the subversive hymn-singer and the land-lover in Dickinson's poetry, especially in a hauntingly tremulous and swooning (considering the violence of the lyrics) rendition of "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -," the very poem that Susan Howe makes central to her argument about Dickinson's deep roots in American pioneer and Puritan culture in her transcendent study My Emily Dickinson. Howe reminds us, in her reading, that poethics, poetry's role in social and political change, can be exercised in ways tender and small as well as strident and self-aggrandizing.

In his recent acceptance speech for the PEN/Pinter prize, Tony Harrison lauded the muscular poetic tradition that sees poets honoured with statues and political status. All the poets he cites are (of course?) male. Howe and Foster are attuned to what eludes Harrison: that radical freedom is to be observed in the spider as much as the soldier. Dickinson's tapestry has traditionally been regarded as one of loneliness, isolation and limited opportunities. But she is no lady of Shallot, that damning Victorian figure of artistic ambition in women. As Graphic as a Star reveals, Dickinson is as attuned to the modern as the traditional, pursuing the wilful and gorgeously different in both, always going out towards the world.

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea
Past the houses - past the headland -
Into deep Eternity -

Novelist plans blogsplash: get involved!

I discovered this innovative litblog plan on Michelle McGrane's excellent peony moon. Like pm, DL will be hosting page 1 on March 1. Join us!

Fiona Robyn is going to blog her next novel, Thaw, starting on 1st March next year. The novel follows 32 year old Ruth's diary over three months as she decides whether or not to carry on living.

To help spread the word she's organising a Blogsplash, where blogs will publish the first page of Ruth's diary simultaneously (and a link to the blog).

She's aiming to get 1000 blogs involved (880 to go!) - if you'd be interested in joining in, email her at fiona [at] fionarobyn.com or go to her blogsplash page for more information.

Alison Croggon, Theatre

This is a classic DL strategy: a re-reading prompted by a fresh encounter. I heard Alison read last week in London at the Poetry Society and was overwhelmed by both the familiarity and utter strangeness of her poetry. I've known Alison for ten (Ancient Mariner moment... OK, it's over) years, across oceans and ether and pages and conversations. The question of "knowing" a person in their work as/because you know them in real life is for another post, though: what struck me in the sunny Studio was the way that I *felt* her work.

I remember seeing Alison read at Pembroke in February 2000, when she was the Australia Council fellow at Cambridge: she wore a leopard-print dress and high-heeled black sandals and surveyed a crowd (myself included) of ratty/dumpy/boho students and faculty dressed as much for the soul-creeping dread of the late winter fens as for the cold. But, as we came to realise, Alison's strategy against the soul-cold was to burn brighter, to be fiercer -- and in her fierceness was a lack of critical distance (irony, intellectualism, equivocation, revocation, self-denial, incomprehensible density as cover for deep feeling) that marks a lot of contemporary experimental poetry. Her reading was full of voices, like Prospero's isle, but also blushingly full of bodies, with a directness and cutting-to-the-quick that is poetry's essence -- and which I think is neglected.

Writing about apostrophe (poems that address a listener within the text via the exclamation O! or the use of the second person), critic Jonathan Culler describes it as symptomatic of "all that is most radical, embarrassing, pretentious, and mystificatory" about poetry. I love that strange combination of words (and they definitely came to mind while I was watching Jane Campion's new film Bright Star today). Poetry *is* embarrassing, not just naked but skinless, not just skinless but the act of pointing and saying: "Look, no skin! Look, blood -- meat -- pulse!" It's in that radical strategy of drawing attention to that which we do not look regard that Alison's poetry excels. "I am concerned," remarks the titular garment in "What the Glove Said," "with the skin of nearness."

The glove's exactly the object (intimate, inside-out, human-shaped) to speak metonymically for the poet. As the title of her most recent collection Theatre suggests, she brings a playwright's (and theatre critic's) eye to the drama of revelation and the honing of address. The book begins with a plangent and seemingly transparent poem about her inability to write the poem that she writes, which sets the stage for the fiercely doubting, elusive yet ever-present "I" that will declare and undercut itself throughout the book. Of the self's relation to poetry, and the writer's relation to the reader, the poem "Theatre" asks

and is this really my own damage
or a wound torn in others
that they must diagnose
through my skin?

There's no deflection here, no deferral of meaning. It's reminiscent of John Berger's Pages of the Wound, and some of the prose poems in the collection have the dense, earned slippage between allegory and political reality of Berger's novels.

Even so, the "I" struggles to come to terms with its incarnation, its necessity for the production of poetry. In "Flames," the speaker extinguishes the poem with the lines

I am ash for a beloved voice
whose irony rebukes me

, while the poem "after Arseny Tarkovsky" (which is a version or ventriloquism of the Arseny Tarkovsky poem used by his son Andrey in the film Stalker) ends with an accounting that cannot add up: "My life… My love… my soul… my thoughts… but it isn't enough." Even when the act of writing appears to offer sufficiency and expression, it's not enough:

She writes her body with the tips of her fingers but it is no longer her body. The words are not her they belong to nobody. She writes to slough off her name. She speaks to become invisible. She desires to become what she is.

No wonder Alison's first collection for Salt was called Attempts at Being.

Paranoia in Translation, or Lisbeth Salander in the Land of Green Plums

Actually, this post could equally be called Schizophrenia in Translation: the sensation that derives from reading two (very different) books concurrently to the point that they seem, if not to merge, then to be deeply intertwined (litzophrenia?). Not that I'm looking to make light of mental illness by using terms like paranoia and schizophrenia out of context, but sometimes an encounter with a book will remind me what a weird process reading actually is -- that sitting silently over some marks on woodpulp, muttering and laughing to oneself while entering into a fantastical world and often into the persona of an invented person, is a pretty wacky thing to do.

It's hard to stand outside reading as an activity: I've been doing it since literally before I can remember anything else. One of my first and only toddler memories is of putting together the blobs on a flashcard into a word. Après ça, there was no stopping me: by the time I was in infant school, I was teaching the other kids to read. I think my mindbrain has probably been so shaped by reading that it's what I am in the same way that Usain Bolt's musculature and neurons have been sculpted by running. Culturally, reading has pretty much set in for the long haul. We all (84% of UK 16-65 year olds in the UK have literacy at GCSE grade G or above) do it inadvertently from the cereal box to the end credits every day, and many of us do it advertently (a word? And if not, why not?) most days as well.

Maybe it's because I've been hitting the poetry like a poetaholic (with events at PoetryFilm and at Keats House for Brittle Star, and reviews due to Staple) that I contracted reading-dissociation when I switched back to novels -- and a big fat novel at that, purchased especially for a weekend of train journeys and a solo hotel stay. I'm hardly the first person to be bowled over by Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (an established fact, since half the people at PEN have been telling me to read it for at least a year), but I might be one of the least likely. After (because of? despite?) a brief (and disturbing) devotion to the work of Andrew Vacchs when I was about sixteen, and an obsessive interest in Twin Peaks and The X Files, I have never been much for thrillers, either in codex or on celluloid.

Both my parents were big with the mysteries, 'tec series and all things investigative, but my love of noir begins and mostly ends with Laura (a major influence on Twin Peaks). That's right: I don't have the hots for Hitchcock, and I've no remorse for yawning at Morse. It's a failing, I think, as a reader, to exclude a genre from your library, but Delirium's mystery/thriller shelf is entirely reserved for the splendid Sherlock Holmes, a detective I encountered almost as early as I began reading (those shadowy semi-memories of The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes still give me nightmares). I've tried Rebus and Whimsy and Wallander and Dirk Gently, and no-one has ever come close to the idiosyncracy and intellect, the conviction and addiction, of Holmes (especially Jeremy Brett in the role).

But I have to confess: Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous "girl with the dragon tattoo" comes close. Despite Larsson's info-dumping, despite the financial shenanigans that make as much sense to me as Ikea self-assembly diagrams, even despite the relentless snö (and equally persistent mosquitös) that falls on all Scandi detectives, I found myself hooked until 3 am, reading with the covers drawn up to my chin -- except when I leapt out of bed to check the door was locked. I couldn't sleep until I finished the book, and then I couldn't sleep some more. If my bag hadn't been full with a print-out of my own novel (which I'd promised myself I'd edit on the train home, come hell or inconveniently located rabbis), I would have bought The Girl Who Played With Fire in WH Smith's in Manchester Piccadilly station that very morning (possibly even before breakfast at the excellent Koffee Pot).

Because here's the thing: I don't read thrillers because they *get* me. Rewatching The X Files (series 1-3 1/2) recently, I found myself almost choking on my fingernails even in episodes that I'd seen half-a-dozen times before. I suffer from what's known in my household as "narrative tension." Hell, I couldn't even watch Sense and Sensibility at the cinema without getting fahrklempt about whether Marianne would see that Alan Rickman, I mean Colonel Brandon, was infinitely superior to stupid-haired Willoughby. And I'd read the book only six months previously (I also clearly have an appallingly lax narrative memory). I'm like the goldfish in Ani Difranco's song for whom the little plastic castle / is a surprise every time. Or a terrifying shock.

It's not so much about guessing whodunit as worrying in every fibre of my being about who's going to be next and what horrible defilement will be described. Worrying, I suppose, that I'll be next. Larsson's thrillers fit very much in grim miserablist realism tradition of writers like Ian Rankin where a city like this harbours people like you living next door to psychos like him. Not so much plausible deniability as undeniable plausibility. Larsson's obsession with Ikea furniture may be a running footnote on the commercialisation of Scandi design, but it's also an arrow pointing at our own living rooms (and particularly at the Swedish airport minimalism of the hotel room where I was holed up). What with financial crashes, banker bonuses and inter-generational sexual abuse, Dragon Tattoo felt like reportage as much as fiction -- and who doesn't feel tense thinking about how the house of cards (economic, political, environmental) is about to crash down on us?

Despite the expertly-generated tension, the novel lacked two aspects that mar most thrillers for me: punitive manipulation of reader expectations (and of vulnerable female characters), and stupidity dressed up as fearlessness (goading the reader to follow the investigative character into the darkness). It also lacked any sympathy for, or glamorisation of, the killer(s), and in a way any curiosity about them. They were dead space, plausibly drawn characters exerting zero narrative fascination rather than the devilish figure who haunts so many contemporary thrillers. Coupled to that lack of interest is an abiding, energising fascination with -- and fury about -- the systems of fear that make possible sexual abuse and murder, and the silence surrounding them. Industry, politics, the law, the family, the state: these are the real abusers in Larsson's books, the facilitators who empower the bit-part players who carry out the social will, whom Salander fights against with every sinewy ounce of her 4"11 being (Kate Mosse made the point well in a Guardian review entitled (although it's lost its title online) The Man Who Liked Women). I've never encountered a mainstream fictional work that lays out as clearly the effects of state power, in particular its impact on those considered less than full agents of the state: women, children, those with (perceived or actual) disabilities, those who dissent.

OK, Larsson was no Herta Müller and contemporary Sweden is not Communist Romania, but I can't help feeling that their books have something in common -- and not just because I've been reading The Land of Green Plums this weekend as well (props to Haringey Libraries, incidentally, for having a copy of the Nobel prize-winner's book, which is incidentally out of print). It's a book so powerful that I had to return it to the library the minute I finished reading it: not just because I wanted other people to have the chance to read it, but because it felt dangerous to be carrying it, as if it were one of the banned books that the characters hide in the summer house. Or even as if it might infect me with the green plum-death or cancerous nut or the dream of the sack that variously afflict characters. It's an extremely calm nightmare of a book, where the narrative tension happens on a word-by-word level, as if the novel is in code. There's no secret who the bad guy is (the state and its agents) even as the protagonist investigates every detail of her life exhaustively to find it/him out, but almost any character could be a spy, even Elsa the white cat, creating an extraordinary atmosphere of anxiety, as in the novels of Ismail Kadare (although unlike Kadare, Müller does not see women's genitalia as both the salvation and betrayal of every man).

In both books (both of which are, of course, in translation, by Reg Keeland and Michael Hofmann repectively), the tense mood of the thriller and the anxiety of the reader act as political critiques, engendering the desire for relief through change. In both, the female protagonist is almost unbearably unknowable, courageously unpredictable, and hyper-alert to the tentacular enemy with which she battles. Or maybe I'm just hyper-alert to their similarities after my weekend of sleepless paranoia, and hyper-alert too to the possibilities of thrillers to challenge my thinking, and experimental novels to have me on the edge of my seat.

Ophelia's Mind Went Wandering, with Sovay and Lavinia

I've been humming Natalie Merchant's "Ophelia" to myself on and off for months, so it's not surprising that I picked up Lisa Klein's novel Ophelia at the library on Monday.I devoured it in a day, as blogger Lizbee suggests, and liked many aspects of its historical consciousness, particularly the idea that skull-obsessed Hamlet was on his way to Padua to study anatomy with Vesalius when his father died. Klein sets the story of the play between 1585 and 1602 -- that is, during Shakespeare's lifetime rather than in the time of the original Hamlet legend (before 1200, when Saxo Grammaticus recorded it), which gives Klein more scope to imagine Ophelia as the kind of heroine all YA historical novels must have: feisty (yet sexy), feminist (yet boy-crazy), educated (yet ill-informed about pregnancy), courageous (with a soupçon of fainting). Klein's Ophelia reads Margaret of Navarre's Heptameron, learns herbalism, resents her brother's education, avoids rape by Edmund, [spoiler] fakes her own death and does, indeed, get her to a nunnery.

Klein, who teaches Shakespeare (I'm guessing this from the acknowledgements), salts her retelling with dozens of Shakespearean -- or rather, Shakespeare in Love-ean -- devices, such as cross-dressing (all the comedies) and a fake death (Cymbeline). But the book is at its best when it takes an imaginative leap far from Shakespeare and stops trying to cram in every clever reference to the play, in the final section detailing Ophelia's life at the convent, where she meets a St. Teresa-style mystic, negotiates life among a society of women, conceals her pregnancy and faces down a bishop. Her path through doubt and faith is more convincingly of its time than her feisty arguments for equality, although possibly less captivating to a contemporary reader.

Celia Rees makes a better attempt at a similar project in Sovay. Like Klein, Rees begins with a pre-existing text, a traditional English ballad about a young woman who dresses up as a highwayman to see if the rumours of her beloved's unfaithfulness are to be believed. She stops his coach and demands the ring that was her gift, and when he refuses, knows that he's been true. Rees gives us the ballad tale in the first chapter (Sovay's betrothed, James, is more of a cad than the ballad Sovay's lover) and wonders what would happen next to a girl with that kind of courage and wildness. Taking the story out of ballad-time, Rees makes excellent use of her late eighteenth-century setting, quickly getting Sovay embroiled in the panic over the French Revolution. There are well-researched references to experimental science (Joseph Priestly), the American War of Independence, slavery, molly houses, transportation to Australia, period fashions and a judicious use of eighteenth-century fictional style.

Sovay has more compass in which to move than Ophelia, even though both of them try on male clothing for protection, freedom and anonymity. Springing from a ballad, she has no character attached apart from her fondness for "stand and deliver," and Rees' choice of era is well-matched to her fictional style, which echoes everything from Fielding to The Scarlet Pimpernel, whereas Klein's novel never quite disguises -- or works with -- its dual origin in folk tale and play. Sovay's nascent feminism is more credible than Ophelia's, given the republicanism she encounters among the supporters of the French Revolution (although it's surprising she doesn't mention Mary Wollenstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published six years before the novel opens), and her adventure has a more defined form, full of allusions to Gothic novels of the period. Rees gets a bit ensnarled in the Illuminati (it's never a good sign when they show up, frankly, and they semi-wreck Rees' bewilderingly complex The Stone Testament as well) towards the end of Act II, but switches tack to a fantastic portrayal of the final days of the Terror in Paris (which was more credible yet less expository than Sally Gardner's The Red Necklace) that ends all too soon with reader, she married him [no spoiler on which of her many suitors she chooses!] Perhaps a second Sovay novel is in the offing?

It was a non-sequel that thrilled me most in my week of literary heroines. After Powers, the third book in Ursula Le Guin's Annals of the Western Shore series, I was all revved up for the fourth (and final?) installment. Instead there appeared Lavinia, a novel about a minor character (and I mean minor, she gets maybe three lines) from Virgil's Aeneid, the dullest of all the epics. Not only that, but Lavinia's main role is to be the silent bride traded to Aeneas and mother of Rome. Yawn. But Le Guin is nothing short of a genius: as well as a detailed historical imagining of early Latium, Le Guin allows her character to take on the conundrum of being a bit player in a national myth, the slip of a poet's pen as he struggled to finish his epic. Lavinia meets -- and debates with -- the spirit of the dying Virgil at the local shrine, learning her fate both within the poem (to marry Aeneas) and in history (to be a fictional character). It's reminiscent of Christa Wolf's Medea, which begins with the novelist describing her own trip to Mycenae.

It sounds like a postmodern narrative game, which it is, but the stakes here are incredibly high: the nature of narrative itself, and particularly the role of women in much of the canon, there to provide a foil, cover or bosom for the hero. Aware of her fictionality, Lavinia nonetheless -- or perhaps even more -- relishes the materiality of her life in Latium, from the texture of lamb fleece to the scars on her husband's thighs. The richness of Lavinia's world is that which, Le Guin suggests, eluded Virgil in his focus on Aeneas, who is himself focused on his destiny. Domestic life, ritual duties, sex, friendship, hard work: these are all described with Le Guinian good sense and humour, and her telling eye for the small details that shape a culture. That's why (and I'm loathe to say this) I'm not sure that the somewhat mystical ending works. While it follows the unfinished nature of the Aeneid, it feels like a withdrawal -- not a cop-out, exactly, nor a failure, either, because it gives me chills. But a question.

Perhaps the ghostliness of the un-ending in which [spoiler] Lavinia turns into the owl that haunts the woods of Latium and flies over present Italy, which is almost impossible to imagine and yet so vivid, makes visible the chilling realisation that fictional characters do not have a life beyond the final page except what we choose to give them. Le Guin has always had a gift for unsettling the status quo, asking charmingly difficult questions about everything from pronouns to political agency (which are, of course, connected) through her carefully wrought fictions, but Lavinia is the most thorough and unsettling investigation of the nature of storytelling itself. She may not make Lavinia a circus girl or a bluestockinged suffragette, but she raises, profoundly, the question of what Lavinia -- or Ophelia, or Sovay, or even Ged -- can ever be.

What Can a Library Do?

Photo Credit: A. Burger, Courtesy of Roni Horn and Hauser & Wirth

This is a question prompted by two recent encounters: one with a film, Examined Life, and one with an installation, Vatnasafn. The encounter with the installation came first -- in driving rain and then brilliant sun, embodied and breathlessly alive -- but the encounter with the film is more recent (today in fact) and is the source of the title.

Examined Life is an attempt to show that philosophy is part of everyday life, that it has something to say about walking, shopping, listening to music, throwing away garbage and, er, boating in Central Park. Director Astra Taylor points out early on, in conversation with philosopher Avital Ronell, that philosophy is usually done in books, where an argument can unroll over 300 pages and hours or days of the reader's thought-time. So, in a sense, the film is a spoken library, embodied and kinetic and discursive: a library for the era of the Twitter attention-span, some might say, or an insightful return to orature and face-to-face communication as the transmission of thought and feeling.

I feel both: I love books -- especially long books -- but since finishing my Ph.D. I've come to wrestle with the fetishisation of footnotes and cross-referencing and polysyllabic jargon. No-one in the film talks much about books and their importance to an examined life (Cornel West gives a brilliant jazz soliloquy on the centrality of music to his examination of life) -- only one person apart from Taylor even mentions books (rather than quoting from them): Sunaura Taylor, an Oakland-based artist and disability activist who walks through the Mission District in conversation with Judith Butler, who raises Gilles Deleuze's question "what can a body do?" as a productive way of thinking about embodiment without barriers or definitions. Thinking about how she has been defined by what others perceive her as not being able to do, Taylor comments that she was alerted to the systemic oppression of disabled people by reading a book review -- although she doesn't say what book.

But the film made me think (among many other thoughts) that libraries do not just contain books -- not only in the sense that they now contain CDs, DVDs, computers, but that they have always contained bodies, at the very least the body of the librarian. We are fascinated, culturally, by what bodies do in libraries: generally what they cease doing, given the extensive genre of murders in libraries. The Dr. Who episode "Silence in the Library" gets at the reason why, encapsulated in its title: libraries *are* a kind of death, with the containment of knowledge paralleled in the silence that living, breathing bodies are supposed to assume.

It's that deathliness that haunts Roni Horn's installation in Stykkisholmur: Vatnasafn, the Library of Water, consists of twenty-four glass pillars filled with water sourced from twenty-four of Iceland's shrinking glaciers. Early viewers describe the water as being cloudy, opaque, vari-coloured, but now it's clear, the sediment having settled to the bottom of each pillar and glowing in various shades of gold refracted from the dun-coloured floor. The pillars are grouped almost like readers standing at shelves: the room in which they stand was the town's library, now fitted with huge windows that reflect in the pillars creating optical illusions and miniature cinemas of Iceland's changing weather.

The room is intensely beautiful but also sad, reminiscent of a laboratory test for water purity or the Arctic Seed Vault.That is, after all, one of the functions of libraries: to announce imminent death and loss through the work of preservation (hard not to hear the echo of conservative in conservation). One day the library may contain all that's left of Iceland's glaciers, filed neatly by location and surrounded by words for the weather that may have been altered beyond recognition -- no more hly.

This library isn't entirely without books -- there are copies of some of Horn's books and catalogues for browsing -- and it is populated, like a lot of Horn's art, by words, here scattered on the floor in tone-on-tone rubber (which, when scuffed by the rubber soles of the slippers you have to wear to avoid tracking weather onto the floor, gives off a properly Icelandic sulphurous scent). For Horn, words speak insistently of the body: on the floor she has cast, rune-like, a demotic meteorological vocabulary that, as she points out, doubles as a language of feeling: moist, sweaty, dull. So these words are also bodies, ghostly readers (of weather as well as/doubling as books), falling at the feet of the readers who still clamber up the hill and see themselves disappear and distort in the columns.

Which reminds me of a line from the Ani Difranco song "Reckoning": "the funhouse mirrors of your fears." Because reflected in the Library what I saw were my own anxieties (intensified by reading Dreamland) and our cultural anxieties, which is also a function of the library: not just to store knowledge, but to organise it in order to reflect and inflect -- to lead us to an examined life. In the film, Cornel West talks unabashedly about the almost-excessive exhilaration of the encounter in the library with a book *as if* with another person. There's something of that in Horn's Library as well (and in all of her work), that exhilaration of meeting yourself as a water spirit, as a manifestation of weather, as not there, insignificant in the timescale that forged and moved glaciers, tiny compared to the racing clouds.

So why, amidst the exhilaration that reminds me what a library can do -- that it doesn't just file books no-one wants to read, but creates the possibility of a mind-expanding, time-bending encounter -- did I feel so sad? Perhaps because I was also reading Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover (I never have fewer than two books in my bag when taking long bus journeys, just in case) and something about the installation made me think of a photograph I saw in the exhibition of Annie Leibovitz' work at the National Portrait Gallery. It show Sontag in the National Library in Sarajevo in the early 90s: she is sitting on a pile of books and rubble amidst other piles and devastating, dramatic shafts of light falling through the lack of a ceiling. In the frankness of Sontag's gaze there's nothing of TS Eliot's shoring up the ruins (a line she quotes in the novel), but there's something profoundly shocking about seeing Sontag, arch-priestess of high culture, sitting amidst its quite literal ruins.

But even full of rubble, the library is still patently a library, and a familiar image in itself, one in a long line of ruined libraries stretching from Alexandria to Iraq. Part of what it does is to sort, store and conserve the chaos of its own ruin. Who doesn't have nightmares about all their books burning or getting soaked or even just falling off the shelves and becoming hopelessly disordered? As Sontag describes in The Volcano Lover, the collector wants to impose order on a chaotic world: the library is a communal extension of that. The exhilaration comes both from order and the potential of disorder, from preservation and the chance of loss, from the encounter and its disappearance into silence: the paradox of glacial water, a solid represented by its liquefied form.

Tom Chivers on Barry MacSweeney

Two great poets in conversation -- OK, Barry MacSweeney is dead, but his spirit lives on, and Tom Chivers hears it singing in the landscape of the North-East that they both share. I fell in love with MacSweeney's poetry during my undergrad and this post has sent me back to my box of chapbooks for Pearl. As Tom writes, in Pearl

Barry remembers a childhood romance with a local girl he calls “Pearl”, whose palate is cleft: she cannot speak. The “a-a-a-a-a-” in the poem becomes an agonised utterance in the powerful theatre of Barry’s live readings. The Pearl sequence is more than mere nostalgia for place. Much more. It is memory passed through the gauze of lived experience, the demons that taunted the poet’s psyche. The demons of drink that would eventually catch up with him, mouths rustling with knives. Innocence crushed. Spoilt beauty. A broken landscape, populated by ‘the turbo-mob, weird souls dreaming of car-reg / numbers and mobile phone codes’.

It's full of cracked allusions to the medieval Pearl poem written by the same poet as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. [I have some issues with the inarticulate-woman-as-landscape trope, see also Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, but Pearl is never simply an allegory, nor is she a mirror for MacSweeney's own struggles to articulate tenderness and rage, but a real person].

Tom's made a radio doc about a pilgrimage to MacSweeney's landscapes, and this is a great post about the journey on My Place Or Yours, bloghotspot for poetic psychogeography.

MacSweeney's books Wolf Tongue and The Book of Demons are published by Bloodaxe.