Review of Mike McNamara's " This Transmission"

 Laurence Peddle 17/ 10/ 2019

All hyperlinks are at the end of the article. highlight a link, right-click it, then click on the link in the drop down menu

Review of Michael McNamara’s This Transmission

Preliminaries

 Michael McNamara, Rebecca Watts, Hollie McNish and Wordsworth are the protagonists.

The setting is a classics-orientated Oxbridge public garden or area of land used for recreation.

In her 2018 PN Review article “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, Rebecca Watts used her barbed pen to take the gloss off the new fashion, as she saw it, for young female poets and spoken-word artists with populist appeal, whom she charged with substituting so-called honesty and authenticity for talent and hard-grafted workmanship. This caused some long-smouldering embers to re-ignite, and Hollie McNish, one of her main targets, retaliated in kind and turned some of the heat back on Watts. Wordsworth, meanwhile, very sensibly stayed dead. Michael McNamara, always alive but neither young nor female, though certainly talented, has just published his latest anthology, and it occurred to me that it constitutes a counterpoint in this unfolding drama. I intended to say that Watts, McNish and others caused many a cup of tea to be vigorously stirred, hence this present sentence. Here, then, is a review that starts with a storm in a teacup and spirals down to This Transmission.

The Review

British poets have had a hard time minding their language of late, but not by straining at the leash of its everyday use—though that, too. What tightens the choker is the presence in the park of rivals in the field, and the rest of us all at sea. For the view from the deck, the park having a large pond in it with a harbour, is of a group of young female poets, hackles raised, turning banter into broken bones among the playthings and the swings. The bones in contention are crazed and fractured, mainly along the lines of tradition versus innovation. I say poets but more neutrally they are wordsmiths; for those who are pushed from the top of the slide, if the intention really is to murder them in the mouth, owe their unaccustomed rapid descent to a protracted war: that by which the definition of art has been contested along many fronts, including those in which the trenches are stacked high with the limply dead, all of them wearing a poet’s un-bulletproof hat. If the latest declaration of battle is to be believed, then the deployment  map should be coloured red and blue as follows.

Starting blue, we find Rebecca Watts, Cambridge elevated, enjoying a cream tea on the bandstand of the aptly named Wordsworth Park. She is quite looking forward to the talk she is about to give: on the classical roots of her own particular style of poetry. She stands up, crumbs falling delicately away like petals, and rings a little bluebell given to her as a child. Her words taste of strawberries as she carefully—some would say meticulously— pricks out the seeds, technically known as achenes, and arranges them in exquisitely crafted sentences. The sunny spring day spells out, value of language and an almost silly plant if this were a crossword clue, Wordsworth’s Daffodils. ‘ I wandered lonely as a cloud’, she begins, and the crowd in front of her, in the absolute hush of numerous muted mastications, breathlessly awaits the next line.

And Rebecca: she floats on high over swathes of daffodils— actually dandelions, the city council not being able to afford a gardener— and beholds the lake below her, though not really, and the trees beneath which it appears to be algae green; and she barely glances at the few remaining non-poets not yet killed. Then all at once she spots a crowd, a host of squatting populists with Hollie McNish at the centre, and the others in ripples all around; and thousands are gathering to see the words thus produced. ‘Honest and authentic’, they chant, and ‘raw vitality’, and ‘Trump for prime minister’. Hollie is trying to make herself heard but speaking in a little girl’s voice: ‘Meadows yellow, brown and green. / Rainbows in the sky …. Now she loses her temper: ‘I know it’s all shite’, she screams, ‘but it’s my shite.’

The fact of the matter, however, is that McNish is also Cambridge educated.

My impression after seeing, hearing and reading Watts, McNish and others is that the friction between elitists and populists is contrived, with more heat than sense being generated, and that some comments are made for purposes of ignition. There is, after all, a wide variety of styles and subjects over which poets and performance versifiers range, even in the same park, with disparate groups and individuals declaiming from the slightest mound, and from the tops of trees where they make their nests.

This is easily overlooked if the focus is on young, female poets with popular ( note their detractors’ use of “populist”) appeal, which derives, at least in part, from the promotional emphasis on “honesty” and “authenticity”, which in my view has to be code. What these virtue-signalling epithets encrypt, I suspect, is the reader’s prurience, with McNish, for one, revealing intimate details of what it is to be a female human being, and, lately, a pregnant one. No doubt there is more to it than that, but also there is more to the poetic realm than the shouting of elitists and populists from opposite crags; for in the intervening valley there dwells a poet who, neither elitist nor pregnant, is classical in that he writes from his unruly heart. Since this is, perhaps, the only sense in which honesty and authenticity in the present context have any truth to tell, it is time to step down onto the main path and seek it out.

Before we start with the titular piece, which is the first in the collection, I should point out

that I am not a poet or well versed, as it were, in the literature. Indeed, it is by studying McNamara and others that I have gained an education in the genre and its appreciation, a learning process that I shall recapitulate in my first and subsequent responses to the present work.

Here it is:

THIS TRANSMISSION

I’m contemplating how to send an email via the bath plug hole

in the ether, in cyberspace,

in the dirty water.

This transmission may virtually bind

the psyche and dark sparse beards of the Chinese,

the Spanish Mexicans, the Native Americans, Siberians and Inuit.

It gurgles a message.

There are things much worse than death. Than loss. This pseudo bond

of life and gain.

Forgiveness.

Some things were written for

reconciliation.

‘It’s more about what she represented than who she actually was’

he said.

‘Was that Yoko, Cleopatra or The Magdalene?’ I asked.

Sometimes, around 3.28am

it gets so lonely.

That’s the price we pay

for days unseen.

You know what I mean.

Is it about honesty or effect?

Your life?

What is it— what is it you seek?

What is it— what is it you need?

On first reading I liked the beginning, especially the image evoked by the first line; indeed, taking a bath will never be the same again. But then, the soap slipped between the Chinese and the Inuit and re-surfaced at ‘It gurgles a message’, which again I liked, but not the message, which I could not understand. And so it went on, with some parts appealing but not others, until the last few lines from ‘it gets so lonely’, all of which I liked. I feel, however, that I should be able to appreciate the poem as a whole. What is it—what is it I seek? The answer, I suspect, is that I seek a joined-up narrative or constant theme; but much of poetry is not like that, though this is not to imply that the present poem does not have any themes at all. A Chinese very wise old man with a sparse beard— ah, now I get it—once proclaimed to an empty desert that the reader, to some extent, takes out of a poem what he or she puts in. I should seek, then, the less obvious; and, indeed, my re-reading of the poem reveals a recurring theme about the difficulty of expression and of knowing what it is for which one is trying to find a voice.

This, however, takes us only so far, beyond which the nationality list, the Chinese excepted, seems to be just a list. Similarly, the line “you know what I mean” is there, at one level, because it rhymes with the previous line. But now, rhyming is part of what we expect from poetry, and even with free verse it has its appeal. In fact, it has just occurred to me that “You know what I mean”, unfolds from the theme just mentioned: that of difficulty of expression and therefore communication, so that there is more to it than rhyme. Clearly, one should not assume that one’s response to a poem is either universal or ought to be. If I overlooked a possible reading of the “You know what I mean” line, then this indicates individual differences in the way that a poem, or indeed any artistic work, is understood or appreciated or neither or both. Why did I end the sentence with “or neither or both”? Because it was more pleasing than “appreciated” on its own would have been, at least to me. Perhaps, though, not to others, so that we are back with individual differences; but what is also indicated is the importance of style, hence the italics. Possibly, then, the nationality list serves a stylistic purpose, or perhaps other readers will find it significant in some other way, especially if they are fond of holiday abroad, many of which are in foreign countries. Recall an earlier observation: that the reader may like some parts but not others and still enjoy the piece as a whole. Also, that I continue to be an apprentice appreciator of poetry and may have missed

things.

Indeed I have, for it should have been obvious at first reading that this is a poem that conduces to being heard as well as read, in which case yet another level of appreciation of the work and response to it opens up, usually at the same time of day as the pubs, clubs and other venues in which the pieces are dramatized as performance art, not only by McNish and Watts but also by McNamara. But now, its counterpart is enacted on the reader’s mental stage, and the spoken word exhibits cadences that register in silent reading and enhance it. Need we be aware of what it is that pleases us in the flow and rhythm of a line of poetry? Consider the following: it is unlikely that the harassed parent or the professional hitman, the stooped peasant or the porn star, would be excited by the discovery of a new species. If this is pleasing to read, then perhaps this is partly because of the deliberate first letter inversion of  “harassed parent” and “professional hitman”; and “stooped peasant” and “porn star”. But this was hidden, its effect presumably subliminal; and what this indicates is that there may be a limit to what we know of why we like a poem or other artistic work. Perhaps, then, one should not stand back from This Transmission, the gap closing, as I have just discovered, if one reads it out aloud; and now the Spanish Mexicans, the Native Americans, Siberians and Inuit come alive in the saying of their names, which many believe to magically conjure from the sound the people themselves. More prosaically, perhaps, these names are rich in associations of memory and meaning, all of which are hidden, if the present thesis is correct, and known only from the way in which we consciously respond to the lines and appreciate the poem. But, one might object, the names are arbitrary, at least in the sense that other peoples could have been selected without ill effect. No doubt they could, but not arbitrarily, and not without making a difference to the patterns inherent in the poem as it stands. The fact is, after all, that McNamara is not only a poet and spoken word performer but also the lead singer of a Soul and Motown band, and if a poetic piece can be recited it can also be sung. But further, if the musical appreciation of a band of this kind manifests itself not only in listening but also in dancing, then one should aim to involve oneself, in whatever shape or form, in the poem that one reads if one likes it at all.

The trick, then, is to engage with the work, welcome it inside and make it feel at home. Is this always possible? One could force oneself, I suppose, to connect with a piece in some way, any way, even if only to convince oneself that one’s relief at having finished it is really the joy of having reading it. But the question is about standards, and there they always are, for they elevate into apparently objective rules the constant features and repeated patterns of one’s likes and dislikes. Thus it is that “I like strawberries” elides into “strawberries are nice”, and the same with taste in poetry. But still, I can pretend for a time to be quite happy to speak only of my subjective taste, in which mode I am able to say that there are many poems that, not liking them, I would shout at through the letter box to go away. Here, for instance, is the first stanza of a poem by McNish: 

New Poem on Mourning

when I die

please fling my ashes

somewhere nice and warm

i pass the graveyard everyday

the headstones look so cold

And cold is what these words leave me.

Now Rebecca Watts, whose poem,  Matrimony, consists of three rows of two single words or two-word phrases: early road, sombre light; may I, would you; thanks and continue. Again, it might as well be a huddle of jehovah’s witnesses at the door for all the chance it has of converting me to the cause. McNamara, too, is not always to my taste, as with his poem The Winter Palace, found in the present collection. As for Wordsworth, The Daffodils grow in some odd places, but what a lovely poem that is.

 Here is McNamara again:

AND THE WINDOWS ARE SUCH

And the windows are such

that the daylight streaming through

stipples in filtered beams the image of a face

that once lit up the gloom.

In stairways built of unshared hours

and hallways cold as stone,

passages led us by untouched moments

to a bleak and empty room.

Love, that hopeful filament,

has flared and fizzed but for a time.

Spring has came late or early

and the Guelder rose tree,

once cherished,

blooms unnoticed.

You, you of unfathomable nature;

you never sang for me.

Ongoing loss without words. No regret.

Let us be done now with the tears that two must cry,

remembering that those who have never truly met –

should never have to say goodbye.

Now I opened the door to this poem the moment I glimpsed it at the eponymous window, partly because it has a constant theme. Which is? Being together alone rather than alone together, or perhaps the descent from the latter to the former, or perhaps inequality of attraction, with love not reciprocated, or perhaps the heat between them quickly dissipated, and the disappointment of parting without caring. That, however, is extraneous analysis rather than engagement with the work, this latter unfolding as follows. In reading the poem, I feel the walls of the house closing in, and the bed where once were lovers now abjectly unoccupied,  and the mirrors reflecting alienation, the couple immured against outside help.  “Let us be done with the tears that two must cry”, for they lack that closeness, even if the poet projects uncertainty as to whether it was ever there. Again, spring has come late or early; for it hardly matters, the spring and its promise being for lovers, the contrast here being with the cold house and its bleak emptiness. Recall, though, my earlier observations about individual response; and for me this cold and empty house is also one in which a life has ended, leaving a silence that chills to the bone. This poem is the one that moves me the most, and it confirms the author as a voice to be heard. And then, already gazing out into the face of sorrow, I return in memory to a line from This Transmission:

Sometimes, around 3.28am

it gets so lonely.

And if I were the weeping kind, I would.

Thus it is that in the small turning circle of the love of language we return to Wordsworth Park with its towering cliffs, its lakes and statues, many of which depict poets giving birth, both to baby poets and to lines of verse. And just as the parent labours to create a poetic line, so it is that the baby strives after words when learning to speak. Here in the park, meanwhile, the Wordsworth statue stands on its revolving plinth atop the highest crag, ready to turn at the slightest poetic breath or undulation of the air from the rhythm of a sentence as it flows, or the crashing of sound waves against the poet’s outstretched arms. And on mid-summer eve the celebrants of words and music make their pilgrimage to the park and gather around the bandstand waiting for dusk. McNamara is there with his band leader hat, and Watts and McNish and all those who line words up and set them dancing. As the light lies down after shining so long, and having to make an early start the next day, the cragged poet in its bliss of solitude radiates a golden glow; and the Big Mac Band strikes up. And the sound reverberates from the cliffs, with above them Wordsworth in a spin: and then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.

https://www.argotistonline.co.uk/THIS%20TRANSMISSION.pdf

http://literateur.com/six-poems-by-rebecca-watts/

https://holliepoetry.com/2019/01/31/new-poem-on-mourning/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud

https://www.facebook.com/groups/21693080282/