Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Salt Publishing, £8.95, ISBN 1844710300

The sonnet form declares in its very lineaments: “I am a poem: look at this language.” Tony Lopez’s new book, False Memory contains 110 sonnets, each precisely, determinedly, obsessively measured out to its fourteen-line limit. To turn these pages is akin to watching a laser printer deliver pre-measured lines per page and identical margin after identical margin. These twenty-first-century sonnet-sequences (there are eleven sequences of ten sonnets each, some previously published) eerily suggest proliferating linguistic simulacra rather then poetic space for lyricism and love, even before one confronts their mostly blank-verse, massively inclusive contents. When Marianne Moore famously declared “nor is it valid [for poetry] / to discriminate against ‘business documents and / school-books’”
could she ever have anticipated how the white “speckled” noise of electric and electronic media would fill the air, our ears, our eyes, invade our dreams, simultaneously eroding and enriching our language? Let a business document into your poem, and soon you’ve got the Shopping Channel, “the LD50 on leakage projections”, Steely Dan, hematology reports, the False Memory Society, “a birth video onstage”, futures markets, the M5, “remote handling and core values”,“the hermeneutical sublime”, direct sales marketing, self-help advice, personal ads, financial portfolios, million-dollar quiz-show questions, vacuum technology, “day 107 of the Maxwell trial”, and rote perky speeches of airline attendants all clamouring for equality with an allusion to Keats, Thoreau, Melville, Thomas Wyatt, or Cervantes. Every sonnet is a site of contentious speech, of dissociation, of bewildering or hilarious juxtaposition, where the conjunctions “so”, “thus”, “and” and “therefore” behave like jokers suggesting sly connections between non-sequiturs: “The doctor had Mussolini’s brain in a jar / And we have an artichoke bubbling on the stove”. Even on the level of the sentence, two or more disparate language systems, uneasily co-exist: “How long have we poor shepherds lived and dreamed / Within these shady incremental pay-scales?”; “But since ferns have no seed, where would you cast them, / Knowing that each single angel is terrible?”.

The strategy can only be fidelity to the world of words in which we live, the vacuous and fatuous and manipulative along with the subtle, the ironic, the musical, the unexpected, the beautiful. The aural world comes to us as if “between channels, / Full of garbled slogans and politics”, frequencies hovering between the BBC news service, MTV, Masterpiece Theatre, and the latest junk talk show. How much platitudinous, paranoiac advice is proffered to us daily: “always read the label”, “best to pay bills by direct debit”, “think about who is at the wheel in the car ahead”, “expect some slippage”, “do not adjust your seats, extinguish smoking materials”, “Think big”. How many thousand times have we heard these phrases: “soon we could all be eating it”, “consumer groups approved”, “unlimited access”, “your name will not be revealed without your permission”, and (my favourite) “it’s a sad day for investigative journalism”. Lopez knows that, like it or not, we’re all “stuck inside / The engine room of the knowledge society”. Poets in particular are hamstrung by a maddening tautology: “This is not the time to write as if you believe / In a time of writing”.

Luckily, Lopez reads prodigiously as well as hears (how else put all this verbiage into perspective?) and he both finds and makes areas of linguistic gold – sometimes a literary allusion will float up, entirely without quotation marks, but calling attention nonetheless to its impossible, alluring archaism or its lost, complicated loveliness and wit: “In Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see hammering stone”, calls Thoreau anonymously from the past; “my nerves are bad tonight”, echoes poignantly from another, older waste land than our own. “How like you this”, Thomas Wyatt’s lover whispered sexily sometime early in the 1500s. “This”, in Lopez’s fifty-third sonnet, is made to attach instead to a bewildering number of alien, yet familiar contemporary phenomena: “paparazzi on shopping trolleys”, surveillance systems, “the free asset ratio”, “immunological killing”, “semantic problems / In key metabolic pathways”, and so on and on. The question has turned sardonic and rhetorical; the answer can only be “I don’t like it much, but what can I do about it?”

Lopez sometimes tells a truth in the style of a lying advertisement: “Here the weary / traveller will find stress and memory loss / In abandoned and vandalized public parks”. He wickedly reveals the linguistic laziness and pomposity of those whose jobs involve the study and production of language: “Each time you say you don’t believe in the unified subject / Another child enters the symbolic order”, for instance. And “Scholars have paid lip-service / To the oral nature of poetry”. Sometimes he finds apt and beautiful metaphor in the language of supposedly non-metaphoric pursuits: business, coalmining, politics, medicine, physics, waste management. But I think Lopez mostly mocks and mourns the necessity to mock.He would like to build some rousing rhetoric, perhaps proffer some route of action or some consolation, but it’s hard going. “Now conceive you a great passion / And loftiness of manner” he mock-commands the poet in himself, but language shuffles and shifts, carries a suspicious spin, is always already deconstructed. Reality is pervaded with a sense of unreality, which language seems unable to dispel. The book begins in resignation: “And I don’t see how we can win”. It ends by blandly, flatly offering the choice of willful ignorance: “Tick here if you / Would prefer not to receive this material”.