Paul Evans: February (Fulcrum Press, 1971)
Essay by Nathan Thompson
Perhaps you’ve not come across this one. On the other hand, maybe you have. If you have I may well be preaching to the converted, so: sorry. Leave now - go elsewhere, but quietly please, and amuse yourself. Maybe watch a Z-Cars video or sharpen your favourite pencil. Above all don’t leave any nasty comments about Grandmothers and eggs. If you haven’t read it, pour yourself a nice drink and pull up a chair. I’ll try not to do an ancient mariner on you.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this book a lot. I wanted to write something intelligent and maybe even witty to put it in context. But it’s quite hard to write about. I really like it. It’s interesting and funny, beautifully observed and tender, and flawed and vulnerable too. I like it. I hope you might. Maybe that’s why I’m finding this difficult. Bear with me. I’ll try to explain. Here’s a snippet from ‘Horoscopes’ to start you off:
Someone is tapping on the sea with two small hammers
and the tune rises above the sound of the traffic;
down below a salesman is persuading a policeman
to pay now towards his imminent funeral; there are
starfish, and six rotten oranges in the street.
I think we should be revisiting this. Why has Paul Evans been largely forgotten? It would be easy under the circumstances to go on about poetry wars or politics but I don’t want to. Well, yes, OK, I know it’s probably mostly all to do with that poetry wars and politics yah-di-yah and I guess that’s a reason to discuss it. But, do I have to? Do we have to go through this every time? Please, please, please can we move on now? If you feel that you need to know more about the shenanigans that led certain members of the poetry-speaking world in the ‘70s to sit in different corners of the playground and huffily gurn (admittedly often with some justification) ‘don’t like you’ please read Peter Barry’s brilliantly infuriating Poetry Wars (that’s a plug for Salt Publishing Mr Salt, if you’re reading). OK, the politics of the ‘70s is interesting and has done more than it should have to shape the ‘mainstream’ (a.k.a. ‘available in some larger branches of chain bookshops’) but let’s leave it at that and look at some poetry. This sounds more hectoring than it’s meant to. And I said a few words back that I wouldn’t talk about it. I’ll stop now. I’m probably compounding the problem and I didn’t mean to offend anyone.
So: Paul Evans. Another reason his poetry isn’t widely known may be because he died tragically in a mountaineering accident in 1991 on Crib-y-ddysgl, Snowdon while climbing with Lee Harwood. So he didn’t get to see the era when contemporaries such as Roy Fisher, Harry Guest, and Harwood himself were given big Collected Poems and finally gained some of the recognition they deserved outside of the (exciting but low-impact if all you had access to was W H Smith and the local library) world of small and smallish presses. And indeed, his work is often likened to that of Lee Harwood. There’s some mileage in this approach: both Evans’ relaxed delivery and his quirky vantage points are reminiscent of Harwood. Take the openings of the sections of ‘Four ways of looking at an English Landscape’:
‘While waiting for help to arrive
we had the leisure to admire
the golden foliage of the oaks...’
‘Your breath is easily taken away
by the lovely Peckforton Hills
in the last week in November...’
‘The nests were many and various
as islands in an archipelago
where oak is the dominant tree...’
‘We broke down on a drive
east to west across Cheshire.
Being for the most part city-folk,
the social habits of the birds
escaped us...’
The humour is touching, the tone faux-naive and laconic, and, by virtue of its surface-simplicity, the writing has that Harwood knack of instant empathy whatever the subject matter. It’s this quality, reminiscent of the endearing ephemera of good conversation, that allows apparent flights into absurdism , and a dream-like cut-and-paste approach to syntax, to cohere as emotionally consistent narrative. Here’s ‘1st Imaginary Love Poem’:
Your hair a nest of colours a tree
the sky hung from you constantly
amaze me new dialects and everything
the white clouds drifting in your eyes
“I like poetry as much as sleeping” you said
and the guards lined up outside the tower
the crocodiles were all on form that day
wiping your face in the sun
how could I fail to love you for what you did?
bending to pick up the message
my hours of waiting destroyed “Meet me
by the equestrian statue at 2 o’clock”
it was an English sunset the bells
in my sleep reminding me of home
I shall be there fully-dressed and awake
their jaws snapping and the water turning red
If Evans has an over-riding poetic concern I’d guess it’s to ‘make it now’. His poems inhabit a fluxing moment (maybe that should have had some Evans-Harwood quotations, ‘inhabiting a fluxing moment’) and, by engaging with the ephemeral, flicker with immediacy. And it’s not always the raconteur-ish immediacy of the Frank O’Hara ‘I did this; I did that’ poem (though it probably couldn’t have happened without it); it more often than not gets inside the process of action/reaction without naming the intent or cause and therefore, to my mind, weathers the passage of time better - unconcerned as it is with some of the external stuff that can cause more self-consciously trendy in-the-now poems to date quickly (I’m getting carried away again aren’t I... I guess I’d better give an example or quote something - try and rein things in). The erotic ‘We are the Instruments of the Adoration’ almost sets out a manifesto, albeit in the past tense, but thankfully pulls back from the brink:
I wanted to abolish Time,
writing a poem in which
only scale mattered –
It could sound like a pretty big declaration were it not immediately undercut by a long dash and a stanza break (indicative of ‘but...’), and a suggestion of the unfinished-ness of the past as it feels its way into a kind of plurality of the potential-present:
the moth dying in the candle flame,
alight with love; my daughter
waking in the morning, when light
from under the door calls her;
the sun itself embracing the earth,
creating ripples in the turmoil
radiating out and down
to the very breeze on my cheek
in the window this morning –
so that all the times I approached this poem
are one, the life of it...
And I don’t think it’s damning by comparison to suggest that he handles the multiple-possibilities-of the-present thing as dextrously as Lee Harwood, who I’ve always felt to be the master of it. But I think I’d intended not discussing Lee Harwood too much. It’s difficult as I’ve been reading the Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, which is just great (that’s another plug Mr Salt, if you’re still reading. That makes two plugs: you owe me). I’m getting all enthused again aren’t I.
Hmmm... I’m not sure I’m doing the best job of staying focused, but reading this book makes me feel life’s boring if you just focus on one thing. It’s a sort of butterfly-minded (‘studied idiocy of flight’ (did I really just quote Robert Graves?)) poetry of piled suggestions that allows you to supply your own narrative and so feel something different through it every time you read it. I’m going to close with number 5 from the ‘Taldir Poems’ because it kind of sums things up:
in the game of endless table-tennis
the ball
falls among china, rattling
like the rain
for 3 days now
on the millions of leaves
in this valley
it falls into
P.S. If you liked any of this, or have read Paul Evans before, you’ll be pleased to hear that the wonderful Shearsman Books has got together with the wonderful Robert Sheppard and they’ll be putting out a Selected wonderful Paul Evans in the near future.
© Nathan Thompson, 2008
Comments