PULP POETRY
The
following I call pulp poems:
Dragonfly
(click to view: Dragonfly)
Wych Hazel
(click to view: Wych Hazel)
Confidential
(click to view: Confidential)
and,
to purchase a hold on these, I (a) contrast them with two other pieces
I’ve written, and (b) compare them to Pop Art in the 1960s.
For contrast, take
Glamsight
(click to view: Glamsight)
Ta Hes Visits Her Tomb.
(click to view: Ta Hes)
Glamsight
is a traditional narrative. It
is based on a legend, it has had (at first glance) all the myth boiled
off, and it’s devoid of irony. Ta
Hes is a dramatic monologue with more delicacy and humour.
Neither is surreal.
The
list of Pop Art attributes which follows is a summary from The Royal
Academy of Arts catalogue for its Pop Art exhibition in 1991.
To
some critics and analysts it
o assaulted cherished notions of good taste
o challenged the hermetic inviolability of art
o was a betrayal of the long-fought battles of modernism
o continued what the Surrealists began, embracing the
debased popular taste for kitsch
o was the antithesis of ‘high culture’
o was democratically accessible in its imagery
o was against the notion of art as personal intervention
on the world by the individual
o took in all the great modern things that abstract
impressionism tried not to notice at all
o refused to take responsibility for its imagery or its
processes
For
subject matter it
o settled for a gritty engagement with contemporary life
in all its banal familiarity
o immersed art in the urban visual culture from which it
sprang
o was concerned with objects found among the flotsam of
the streets
o picked up on Duchamp’s aesthetic of the ready-made,
of objets trouvés like tools and clothing
o borrowed its iconography from the ubiquitous signs in
the culture … billboards, comic books, newspaper, the cinema …
Its
styles
o followed no prescriptive programme
o shifted the emphasis in painting from subject matter to
attitude
o explored collage and industrial reprographic techniques
o played on more than one level of meaning
o joyed in wilful crudeness and vulgarity
o by refabrication brought out the mysterious and often
human presence of the banal
o could also have a dreamlike quality, with fragments of
floating imagery
o reflected the frenetic pace of consumerism, the
deadening and depersonalising quality of its repetitive tasks and
conformism
o drew attention to the glut of information and visual
stimuli in the modern industrialised and urbanised world, but could also
reorder the barrage of sensations
o presented images as objets trouvés rather than as
signs of personal preference. Roy Lichtenstein and other Pop artists can
be said to have had recourse to a device comparable to Bertolt
Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ in the theatre
o had social meanings that were as various and
contradictory as the feelings which the viewers themselves might have
towards society
I
conceived the term ‘Pulp Poems’ during the Pop Art era.
Others must have as well. My
label was inspired by memories of popular magazines (see the note on Ulysses
Collins on p. 39). This
was decades before Tarantino’s movie Pulp Fiction.
To
shift from painting to what I’ve called Pulp Poetry, let me quote a
few phrases from the introduction to The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction
(1996), where the editor Maxim Jakubowski reminds us that:
o pulp writing came about from the magazines . . .
which cheapskate publishers insisted on printing on the cheapest
available form of paper, pulp paper
o there were literally hundreds of such live-by-night
magazines with wildly exotic and frequently misleading names from their
initial appearance in the 1920s in America
o this was commercial fiction, mostly catering for the
lowest common denominator
o the golden rule was adherence to the art of
storytelling. Every story
had a beginning and an end, sharply etched economical characterisation,
action, emotions, plenty going on
o the aim was to keep the reader hooked, to transport him
to a more interesting world of fantasy and make-believe, spiriting him
away from the drab horizons of everyday life
o pulp fiction was a continuation of the Victorian penny
dreadfuls and novels written in instalments
o it consisted of tales of noir streets, gorgeous molls
and shady villains fighting ambiguous sleuths and dubious heroes
o these dubious heroes are the archetypes that represent
pulp writing at its best
There
are important keywords here, from prefaces which I’ve read now for the
first time, though very few of the notions would surprise anyone.
They help me see, this much later, what I was up to.
The only poets I was aware of as influences in this regard were
the Beats, especially the Allen Ginsberg of Sunflower Sutra.
The poets of roughly my own age who were doing something similar,
that I can remember now, were D.M. Thomas in such poems as Cygnus A
and Peter Redgrove in poems like Mr Waterman.
Peter and I had a
lively correspondence going in the ’60s, though not on this topic.
I don’t know if I ever told him that Waterman was my maternal
grandfather’s name. I’d
formulated no conscious aesthetic.
Most artists will tell you not to until after the event.
I knew I was mining a rich vein, and if forced could have come up
with a packet of phrases roughly like the ones above.
Foremost,
I had memories of reading as a boy popular magazines like The Wide
World, Astounding Science Fiction, True Detective.
As an adult I’d added espionage and crime fiction and, when
pornography was scarce, the steamier pages of Henry Miller.
This was alongside more high-toned reading.
For poets it’s always been necessary though not sufficient that
they be well-read and fairly well-informed.
My adventures in pulp could not have started from naivety.
The
genre, as I have exploited it, is a hybrid, a mix of the camp and the
sincere, the popular and the clever, the tawdry and the sublime.
And in wrapping low subjects up in—generally—high styles, I
have been aware that these two elements, matter and mode, have both
become torn at the seams. Neither
aspect got shredded, neither really suffered, but I’ve not taken the
narratives seriously and the styles, though mannered, are looser.
I
was interested but not surprised to see that some explicators of Pop
allege that it elicits archetypes.
I knew very well I was digging into myth, if unseriously and
without bothering to examine too closely what my myths meant.
These notes, written long after the poems they refer to, force me
to look more frankly at my themes.
Wych Hazel and Ulysses Collins are about
redemptive, dominatrix sex. This
has the unattainability of the Ideal.
It eludes prescriptive mysticism and promiscuous shagging alike.
Confidential and Birdman are about crippled
Mercuries. Dragonfly is about the god of healthy male potency,
unfettered and beautiful.
I
reckon that Dragonfly and Wych Hazel must be the male and
female pillars of my pulp pantheon.
As a rough generality I’d say that the styles come from
apocalyptic rhetoric of sorts. It
was what I did then. I
don’t know why, it was the way things had to be and I still feel that
these pieces read well, so long as one appreciates the lemon rind, the
zest, and the fun.
It
may seem odd to end an essay on Pulp Poetry with a quotation from a
theological work, but I have mentioned myths and have done little to get
behind them. That’s for
someone else, if the works are worth it.
Getting behind a myth is usually impossible (who was the real
Isis, the real Orpheus, the real Arthur?—and who were the scribes who first
shaped them for us?). If we
could know the human faces behind a legend, our ability to be inspired
by it, in this literal age, would arguably be much improved.
In most instances this is crying for the moon.
Fortunately, in the case of the man who unintentionally started
off our 2000 years of Western monotheism, there has been no lack of
scholarship. What follows
is from Geza Vermes’ The Changing Faces of Jesus (Allen Lane,
2000).
‘To add the final distinguishing touch to the portrait of the
real Jesus, emphasis should be placed on the eschatological
1 vision and stimulus of his
message which, together with the tragic finale on the cross, invest it
with a unique urgency and actuality.
Proclaiming not just the nearness, but the virtual and more than
once the actual presence of the Kingdom of God, he showed himself an
incomparable charismatic and religious teacher.
His magnetic appeal became more powerful after his death than it
could ever have been during his transient ministry in the late twenties
of the first century in the Galilee of Herod Antipas and the Jerusalem
of Joseph Caiaphas, the high priest, and Pontius Pilate, the imperial
legate of Judaea.
‘The face of Jesus, truly human, wholly
theocentric, passionately faith-inspired and under the imperative
impulse of the here and now, impressed itself so deeply on the minds of
his disciples that not even the shattering blow of the cross could
arrest its continued presence. It
compelled them to carry on in his name with their mission as healers,
exorcists and preachers of the Kingdom of God.
It was only a generation or two later, with the increasing delay
of the Parousia 2,
that the image of the Jesus familiar from experience
began to fade, covered over first by the theological and mystical
dreamings of Paul and John 3, and afterwards by the
dogmatic speculations of the church-centred Gentile Christianity.’
It
seems pretty obvious that to get at the human face behind a myth
(usually not even remotely possible) we have also to examine, if we can,
the scribes who started it off and handed it down.
When it comes to a myth in a modern poem, there should be plenty
of laundry bills and gossip about the author and those near to him. But an authorial Self, or any kind of Self, is not single or
hard-edged or consistent or even very memorable to its possessor.
It’s important as a legal fiction for taking raps.
Where would we be without convention?
But Selves have agendas, as do their biographers and disciples. To
get further I’d have to move closer to my own.
I’m not sure I dare be that curious.
Alan
Marshfield
1
To do with
the end of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God, which Jesus
thought would happen in his lifetime. (back)
2
Second coming of Christ. (back)
3
John: the author of the Fourth Gospel. (back)
top
of page |
