[Joe Crocker]

The current issue (17.1) has an interview with Don Paterson and 2 of his poems. I am ill-read and have only recently sampled his stuff. I am having fun exploring it and very much enjoyed his take on the world expressed in the interview.

The two poems are intriguing. Each has its own title but also appears to be part of a series called Aenigmata. They appear to be riddles.

The first “Reed” echoes the traditional riddle format “my first is in”. But soon it becomes clear that it follows a sequence 1,2,3,5,8, 13. This is the Fibonacci sequence. But it seems more related to a musical theme 1=monotonous bird call, 2= two tone nee-naw ambulance siren, 3=the simple triad of a bugle reveille call 5= a pentatonic scale eg 5 black notes and 8= the white notes of an octave, while 13 = all the notes. And with all 13 notes, all tunes are possible. The metaphor now turns to weaving as the notes thread themselves around the lines of the musical stave or the warp of a loom. And I guess that brings us back to the title “Reed” which, as well as being a means of vibrating a musical note, is also the name of the comb that separates the warp strings in a loom.

The second piece “Die”, doesn’t appear to have much to do with death. “Die” refers to that discrete uniform distribution generator used in gambling. I’m not sure I would call it a poem, more of an essay on the ignorant use of mathematical symbols in popular culture. I was a scientist of sorts and it still amuses me when films about clever academics often have them backgrounded by blackboards scrawled with mathematical symbols, which either make no real sense or which have been copied arbitrarily from maths textbooks. My favourite current example is in Match Of The Day when the opening credits show famous footballers and their managers, with Pep Guardiola, the genius behind Man City, looking thoughtful in front of the standard formula for solving the roots of quadratic equations. (So that’s how he does it!). The references Paterson makes to film shots and formulae are, to me, very obscure eg Professor Perot in in the 1943 film Marie Curie. But I nearly choked on my chocolate biscuit when the text then went into an explanation of the difference between aleatory and epistemic uncertainty. I used to work in risk analysis, running probabilistic models of risk scenarios. I have never seen any discussion of uncertainty invoking these terms outside this very narrow field. I wonder how Don Paterson came across the terms. My initial suspicion was that he was randomly plundering statistical textbooks and that this discussion made no more sense than the suggestion that Pep Guardiola might use quadratic equations in his game plans. A sentence like “The spoked diagram perfectly describes the internal/external distinction as it relates to epistemic and aleatory uncertainty, something the literature would not adequately parse until the 1980s.” makes me bristle with skepticism. However, Paterson’s explanation seems pretty sound (although I think epistemic uncertainty can only be entirely “eliminated” with perfect knowledge of a population). So, should I trust him or distrust him on his opinions about things beyond my ken, such as Professor Perot’s spokes or Joseph Parsi’s 15th century notebooks? Is the answer to this riddle, that the poem is playing with us by presenting a textual version of the silly popular pseudoscience that sees mathematical symbols as a kind of magic? Or is it an erudite dissertation that goes way over my head?. Oh, and who are “the guild”?

I'm probably just talking to myself here. But is anyone else interested enough to comment?

[W T Clark]

This may be a good time to comment that LM is "back, baby"! Matthew and I are the sole poetry editors; we intend to slim down the section to a readable number of poems of extremely high quality in our opinion. If you do wish to submit please do so (you do not, unofficially — shh — have to be a paying member, simply email the submissions address) but note that our acceptance rate (which was never high) has grown even slimmer as we are only interested in "major work".

As for Paterson, I was not in charge of that particular solicitation. If I had, I certainly wouldn't have allowed as to publish Die. He is past his prime, but the interview was at times interesting. One of the things we are focused upon now more than ever is cutting out writers who we see us past their prime (I'm talking about status, not age at all, which is often irrelevant to talent). I think this is a special problem. We want to publish "promising" writers, writers with energy, not after-dregs; I am more interested in potential now, than "status".

Best,
C—

[Joe Crocker]

I suspect we are all too busy now Making America Great Again, to bother with recondite poetical musing, so I’m not expecting much help with my Paterson problem.

I also belatedly realise that I have mis-posted my thread under “announcements” rather than than “talk”. However, Cameron has made an announcement so perhaps it can stay here.

Re Cameron’s announcement that Literary Matters is to continue and that he and Matthew Buckley Smith will be editing the poetry section – congratulations! I sometimes dip into the Sleerickets podcast and look forward to seeing what you will post there.

Re Don Paterson. I’m not sure where you draw the line, Cameron, that distinguishes “in one’s prime” and “past it”, but I guess you mean that you hope to encourage new voices.

Paterson’s “Die” does read like an excerpt from a Culture and Media Studies essay on the semiotics of set dressing. Can anyone explain why it is published as a poem? Perhaps, being numbered as the 90th in a series of riddles, we would need to be familiar with the preceding 89 pieces). All I can say is that I (and many many others) really rate him as a poet, assume that it is worth putting some effort into fathoming his meaning and that I would appreciate some hand-holding guidance here.

[Julie Steiner]

This is fantastic news! I've been translating a lot of Greek poems lately, and pondering where to send the ones I think are best. Now I know.

"Die" seems to violate this mini-manifesto in Paterson's interview:

I still quaintly define poems as verbal units with a deep, overdetermined internal coherence of form, sound, and meaning. Writing that kind of poem used to be like trying to make a watch that would run for centuries. Writing a poem as it is currently defined is more like decorating: You pick a vibe, choose the appropriate wallpaper, get out your tchotchke shaker, and fill the mantelpieces with random shit, bits of recognition comedy, and tokens of your tribal allegiance.

Maybe it's meant to be a pastiche of a modern poem? Vibe, check. Random shit, check. I'm guessing that the randomness and the references to aleatory uncertainties have something to do with the "die" of the title. I'm not going to watch the Marie Curie movie to see what blackboard scribble is being referred to as "Perot's spokes" — a phrase with two hits on Google, one of which is this poem. Maybe the sun referenced in the French epigraph has spokes, too.

Personally, I think it's no better or worse than most other poems I don't get (which is, to be frank, most poems).

[Joe Crocker]

Thanks Julie for having a go at answering my questions. Yes, “Die” does not seem a good fit to Paterson’s own formula for a poem. I struggle to see how it is a poem in any sense. It seems very learned, densely, wittily written but….

Cameron said he would not have published it in Literary Matters. Is the reason for that that it’s written by Don Paterson who is “past his prime”? (So “Reed” wouldn’t have made the grade either?) Or is it because “Die” is not good enough a poem? If it had been submitted under a pseudonym, then I think it would be easy enough to pass over it, perhaps assuming the author had misdirected the email. But because it has Paterson’s name on it, and many journals will jump at the chance to publish something of his, then it’s understandable that you might want to examine it more closely. (This raises the question of whether all poetry should be read blind, with the work evaluated without reference to its author.) I did actually enjoy “Die” because I like its subject and argument, but I would (unfairly?) guess that LM published it largely because it was written by Paterson, And Cameron would NOT publish it for the same reason -- that it was written by Paterson. I would still be interested if anyone had any thoughts about the poem as a poem.

[Matt Q]

Originally Posted by Joe Crocker

Oh, and who are “the guild”?

The Screen Writer's Guild, I reckon, given the context. Though it could be that there's a second meaning there too. But certainly the writers of the films' scripts could explain their intentions -- thereby resolving the N's epistemic uncertainty about the extent to which the co-occurrence is aleatory.

[W T Clark]

If the poem had come to me I would not have published it, because I do not believe it is a good poem. One way "prestigious" magazines become "prestigious" is that they get "prestigious" writers to publish in them. But I think we are past that now. Publishing bad poems is sometimes necessary, that eventually one will be able to only publish good ones.
By "past his prime" I mean submitting poems like "Die" to high-end journals instead of something like "Rain" or the other poems I heard are good.

[Joe Crocker]

Matt. Screen Writer’s Guild makes sense. Thanks

Cameron Ok, you would rather publish good than bad poems in LM. And that, surely, is the editorial policy of every poetry magazine that has ever been broadcast. Thank heavens we don’t all agree on what is good. If the focus is on the poem, rather than the author, then should poems first be read by the editor with the author’s name redacted? I think this is the way many poetry competitions work, and some magazines also (eg Rattle?). If the focus is truly on the poem, then perhaps poems should be published anonymously too. Or at least the reader should have to make some extra clicks to reveal authorship. (And potted biographies might also be omitted, as George Simmers does in Snakeskin). On the other hand, the merit of a new poem is not always immediate, and if an editor knows it has been written by someone they trust, then the name may spur them on to a second longer look. And from this reader’s point of view, faced with a long contents list of poets, I tend to go first to the names I recognise and admire. And sometimes I then go to the names of those I consider dreadful or dull, just to confirm my prejudices. Names, clearly, are not irrelevant.

When you say

“One of the things we are focused upon now more than ever is cutting out writers who we see us past their prime”,

it does seem that you are more focussed on the author than the poem. Do you work through the slush pile discarding well known names in favour of new talent? A good poem is a good poem whether written earlier or later in a career. Shouldn’t promising poets jostle round the same counter as established poets? Or should they have special privileges? (I ask this as a genuine question.)

By "past his prime" I mean submitting poems like "Die" to high-end journals instead of something like "Rain" or the other poems I heard are good.

Do you think LM would be considered a particularly high-end journal by Don Paterson? The current issue seems to be the first time he has appeared there. You clarify that you wouldn’t publish “Die” because it is not a good poem. I think that it is good (and opinionated, thought provoking, odd, and deceptive.), but I also think it is not a poem. Don Paterson is much cleverer than I am, so I suspect there are things going on that I do not understand. Which is why I started this post.

[James Midgley]

Interesting thread/discussion. Perhaps you've already found it (probably), but this might be (not exactly all that) helpful.

I find the pieces intriguing. Riddles that give you their alleged solutions in their titles. I'd like to read the others.

[Julie Steiner]

I did find myself shouting "Amen, brother!" at parts of the interview, especially the bit just before what I quoted above:

CD: [...] Would you describe for us some of the continuities and differences you’ve observed between the poetry of your generation and that of younger generations?

DP: There’s very little continuity. Some of the ways I write are generally regarded as having been superseded. That’s fair enough. But the progressive paradigm has become a more culturally broad and accelerationist one, which seems to be hastening some fundamental phase-shift. There’s still terrific stuff being written, and I read great poems every week. But fighting through the post-MFA noise of it all is almost impossible. Mostly poetry has become staggeringly self-absorbed, just when we desperately needed it to recruit a general readership.

Poetry is that function of language which makes it adequate to a new or changing reality. Some contemporary poetry takes this increasingly urgent responsibility seriously. But mostly, that kind of writing is being pushed into the margins by the poetry of identity, the New Whimsy, and what I think of as “Vibism,” all of which are styles that have some genuine capitalist value within the world’s first completely successful Ponzi scheme, namely the Creative Writing MFA.

CD: Would you elaborate for us on the idea of the Creative Writing MFA as the world’s first completely successful Ponzi scheme?

DP: I thought I was being tongue-in-cheek. Now that I think carefully about it, I’m less sure. The MFA in its present incarnation is a brilliant cash-cow: an unfailable degree, one that rejects almost no applicants, that anyone with the money can buy, and that will grant you the formal accreditation you need to go forth and preach the CW gospel. It’s almost the Scientology business model. But to make the degree unfailable, we had to ensure poetry was something that everyone could do. The current house style could not be more democratic: twenty-five lines of loosely related stuff adduced in evidence of a “vibe,” with “vibe” being the dominant aesthetic and often the sole organizing principle. This kind of work cannot be genuinely criticized, given that “vibes” are personal things and continuous with their hosts.

The pernicious circularity of such writing means that even the better poems often seem to be written in some kind of endless present, free of either historical perspective or future proposition. They start, keep going a while, and then stop, often having forgotten where they began, and millions of folk are writing them.

The Ponzi scheme thing isn't new, but I enjoyed Paterson's formulation of it.

MFA programs do have value, because a lot of people whose work I respect have said that their work and their ability to figure out how to get it in front of an audience improved as a result. But all workshop-type groups, including Eratosphere, can have the effect of teaching poets how to write a particular type of poem that follows the fashion rules accepted within that group, at the cost of suppressing artistic impulses that might successfully violate those rules and delight readers with something surprising/strange/unique.

We're social animals. We all want to stand out, but still fit in with our desired peer group (and to find validation there if we don't receive it from other people in our lives).