If Jeremy Over were a schoolboy in my class, he would not be someone I would trust with the scissors, especially if it were a poetry class. On the other hand, if I felt that the class needed shaking up a little, I might just hand the scissors over to him. For it would not just be the pleasure of cutting up respected and disrespected texts that we could enjoy, but the pasting of bits back together in strange and beautiful ways.

There are many writers and readers who feel that putting poems together from other texts is a form of cheating. And perhaps it is. But it does not follow from this that it is easy to do well. Far from it. For the intelligence and work is all in the pasting rather than the cutting. Whatever Over's sources - Gilbert White the naturalist, Robert Herrick's ‘sweet disorder in the dress', a guidebook, a catalogue or an instruction manual - it is where he is taking his material to which is important, not where it has come from.

Over will start off with a deliberately banal phrase, such as ‘I am tired of saying' and then bend it into a Lear / Python-like absurdity, reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters:

'I am tired of saying a man in the wings
as a frantic dog in a glass temple
rules piety like a parrot on a pole

A stream of ice-cold dimensions
demands no room
for people darken

Futt! The high-class lady is filled with wheels'

(from ‘A Man in the Wings')


This succeeds, I think, because it parodies sense (which Over makes liberating), because of its delightful imagery, and because of the music of the lines: for example, the half-rhymes ‘temple', ‘pole' and ‘wheels', the alliteration in line 3, and the sudden intensity of lines 5 and 6 with their shorter length. The poem is both lyrical and funny at the same time, a feat not many poets manage to achieve with their work, though there are some who do. (Luke Kennard, for example, although a very different poet from Over, is also a master at weaving different strands together in a seemingly effortless manner.)

There is frequently a subversive quality in Over's work, for example, in his instructions for a creative writing class, ‘Poetry should be made by all (i)':

'10. Look natural and walk around the room holding a handkerchief.
11. Once you're upside down, do the splits with your legs and make a kicking motion with them. You should be pushing your legs round and then your whole bottom half will follow.
12. Then start to shake one of your hands rapidly - go on shaking it so rapidly that it builds up into an object which, not quite as solid-looking as that hand, is several times larger....weird, isn't it?
13. Now think of a specific incident from your childhood.'

I will have to use this exercise in one of my classes sometime!

I should stress that not all the poems are collages or cutups, or if they are, hide the fact very well. ‘Pendolino', for example, is a long prose poem which follows the narrator's randomly connected thoughts as he sits on a train, looks out of the window, looks around the carriage, then through another window. It works because it is hilarious and yet has the ring of truth. Don't most of us have weird thoughts like this sometimes (I do, at any rate)?:

'And then the back of the seat comes into focus again. It has the colour and shape of a gravestone and the shadows of the raindrops start to look like words being scribbled frantically across the gravestone by some unseen hand [...] I look out of the other window and see a small copse on the far side of the valley. I recognise it. It is the clump of oak trees that welcomes me home every time I travel this way. It is the shape of a rough triangle and each time I see it I think of pudenda, ‘the hidden parts', ‘that of which one ought to be ashamed'.
And the truth is I do feel a little ashamed. But of what? Of imagining a woman's genitals in a landscape owned by the National Trust? Of imagining the wrong woman's genitals perhaps? Of not being sure when it is correct to refer to pudenda and when to pudendum no matter how many times I look it up in the dictionary?'

The poem also plays with notions of reality as we learn that the narrator is not really sitting on a train at all, but ‘pretending to be sitting on a train and seeing things'.

Indeed, most of the poems work at some level beyond mere absurdism, provoking us into questioning our notions of what is real, what is dream, and how far narratives can be stretched and still be related to.

*

Rupert M Loydell is also a poet who uses other texts as a springboard for his own work. Indeed, in Lost in the Slipstream, as in his other books, there is a list of source texts at the back. Perhaps one day a PhD student will take up a the challenge of identifying exactly which phrase comes from which text, which from Loydell's own hand, and analyse the ways in which Loydell has put them together to make new texts. However, we don't need to do this in order to enjoy the work.

Rupert Loydell is a very different poet from Jeremy Over. What comes across is far slower and more meditative, but also contains moments of startling lyrical beauty. Lost in the Slipstream is a chapbook of 47 interrelated prose poems. It can perhaps be regarded as a follow-up to his earlier Ex catalog (Shadowtrain Books, 2006) in terms of its tentative, delicate tone and the areas of uncertainty it explores.

Loydell is exceptionally skilled at fusing different kinds of language together in a seemingly natural fashion, for example the scientific or technical with the ordinary or religious or lyrical. This is evident in the first prose poem of the book, ‘Cage':

'The synapses have not been jumped, there is no trace of neural activity or record of specific thought. We bolt the shutters and barricade the door, do not wish utterance to visit, prefer our silent, tidy lives. We will not warn you again, will not say it anymore.'

As with Rosmarie Waldrop in her prose poems, there seem to be different voices speaking here, but never directly to one another, which can create an eerie effect and a sense of not knowing what is real and what is imagined. Sometimes the voice is a plural one. The ‘we' tends to be more self-assured - e.g. ‘it helps us to fill the silence with forgotten secrets' (from ‘Relative') - but this ‘we' is frequently undercut by the far more plaintive, helpless voice of the ‘I': ‘I do not understand why nothing can stand still, how stress bubbles up into panic and tears' (from ‘Momentum') - as if to say that there is nothing we can be certain of, however much we may try to deceive ourselves that everything in the end has some ultimate sense. Yet this very lack of assuredness leads some of the voices in the end to explore further and to find - for want of a better word - ‘beauty' in uncertainty and lack of meaning: ‘I cannot comprehend this quiet confusion of sun, chill frost, soft light' (from ‘Momentum').

There is often a sense of loss, of waiting for someone or something, or expecting things to change, both in a personal and in a religious sense: ‘We are sailing in a strange boat. We tend to forget this is just a voyage and not where we belong' (from ‘Sun'). But this someone or something either never comes - ‘The ghost never came again' (from ‘Eternity') - or if it does, it is not in a way we expect: ‘When the same man flew ashore not so long ago I hardly recognised him' (from ‘Fact'), for ‘the man who was my father now lives in the motel of stars, but we all have our version of you' (from ‘Seed').

Part of the search, the striving can be done through art and poetry. However elusive, we can ‘hunt down poetry and make sense of impossible truths' (from ‘Another') or ‘in drawing the way light sings as it travels toward the sea', ‘we are drawing the very essence of things in the world' (from ‘Cycle').

I should point out that - as with all Loydell's work - there are moments of humour, as if the narrator wishes to undercut his own seriousness: 'It is written we must die. It is written in the stars, it is written in sand, it is written on the body. It is written on the side of UK buses' (from ‘It Is').

But after these moments he returns once more to ‘invisible shapes' and ‘half-remembered dreams' (from ‘Stone'), to those moments when ‘later, in the quiet air it will seem like nothing was ever there' (from ‘Transmutation').

Jeremy Over's Deceiving Wild Animals and Rupert M Loydell's Lost in the Slipstream, are both, in their different ways, very fine collections of poetry. I hope I have tempted you into buying them.


Copyright © Ian Seed, 2009