Reading John Sears Reading George Szirtes

 What happened was - I was passed an old issue of Smoke magazine that had a poem by George Szirtes in it. I hadn't expected to find such a thing in such a place so it was a pleasant surprise. Smoke was the last word in littlepress magazines in the late 70's, it seemed to me, and has outlived all such that I knew about at the time to become a doyen. I was reminded that Szirtes was a poet I'd always intended to have a proper look at and so, with the help of John Sears' Reading George Szirtes, I did. While he's not the most difficult poet in the language, he's not Betjeman either so John's clear and informed commentary was useful. While the use of any sort of 'crib' was supposedly verboten at school and university, I've been out of there now for some years and it's up to me how I go about it. The guide to Ulysses ensured I had a much better grasp of Joyce than I might otherwise have had and, twenty years ago, my poem Re-Reading Derrida on a Train wasn't about reading Derrida first hand, it was about reading an explanation of him. I'm shameless, really.

There are a lot of useful ideas set out in the Sears book, some of which aren't specific to reading Szirtes. He cites Szirtes quoting Emily Dickinson saying that, 

art was a house that tries to be haunted

which I'm sure would be different ghosts for different artists but in Szirtes' case it might be his own 'lost selves'. 

'Awkward poetics' also puts a name to something that one likes to think one knew all along without knowing it had a name, 

the formal subversion of rhythmic and metrical conventions and the (connected, even consequent) discursive challenge to ideological orthodoxies. 

As the ideas make their way through discussion of the elusive, unstable nature of language, the fixity of art imposed on reality, academic literary criticism takes its place in the hall of mirrors that either extends indefinitely or seems to collapse back in on itself. On the one hand, poetry 'fixes' but on the other, language is elusive.

I start to doubt what meaning means-

it could be a linguistic trick,

as it once said in a poem. Well, not a proper poem, one by me, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train.

 

Some pages later, I'm glad to see Peter Porter cited on the 'pointlessness of poetry', again glad to have more of my suspicions augmented if not confirmed but Szirtes refuting that with his belief that it provides redemption is welcome, too, because I like being shown to be wrong, or at least given the option. 

Not everybody has quite such personal and family histories to make poems from, or such a sympathetic reader as John Sears to elucidate them. It is made clear how the poems develop from one book to the next and how they make Szirtes special as an artist but integral to his period of European history. It comes as no surprise that he was a keen remainer or that it would be beyond the simplistic leave campaign's capacity to understand why. I found the string quartets and other chamber music of Grazyna Bacewicz seemingly appropriate shifting, lyrical, tortured accompaniment to the stimulating time spent with Sears-Szirtes.

We have lost our history, in a similar way that we have in the new Sean O'Brien book reviewed below, and it has become 'consumable unexperienced information'.

There are any number of references one might take up mentioned in Reading George Szirtes, one of the more tempting being Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which accidentally led me to the unlikely literary discovery that Barthes read Larkin and lifted ideas directly from his poems. Another would be to pick up Reel or get myself further Szirtes books and read them unaided. They don't seem quite so daunting anymore.