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ODES & fragments

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ODES & fragments by Alan Davies presents a substantial collection of recent poetry, including odes and fragments as well as modes above and beyond. Ranging in length from a few words to twenty-plus pages, these poems vary widely, exploring love and fellowship, war and adversity, beginnings and endings (and the ongoing), instances of thought, feelings that flutter then fail, moments of apprehension (both senses), and our confrontation with the irretrievable.

Praise for Alan Davies

The kind of skill with handling language that can’t be rushed or faked, and that I only hear in the work of writers who have really practiced for a long time.
—Craig Dworkin

Alan Davies’s poems have such great sound and are open and situated and fearless in their response to what happens internally and in the big often ugly outside. A startling writer and very precise on whatever path he sets for himself.
—Carla Harryman

Davies hasn’t been publishing a lot in recent years & to see this much work at once, this much first-rate work, is completely bracing. He hasn’t lost a step & is every bit as uncompromising as ever. This actually can make Davies a difficult read at times, but it never is complexity just for the sake of showing off. He continues to be the Diogenes of the New York langpo scene.
—Ron Silliman

Davies’s belief in radical self-reflexivity has led him, in the course of his writing career, from a virtually opaque formalism to a continuity of text and life-world that is anything but aesthetic construction.
—Barrett Watten

[Davies] has suggested to me ways of thinking about connective possibility, ways through which ‘no one is absent anymore’…. how writing and reading matters, not just for its comforts or its eloquent aesthetics, but for the way it can take us through comfort and aesthetics into relations with others, for the way it can model thinking.
— Juliana Spahr

ALAN DAVIES IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE POET WHO HAS EVER HAD SEX. The rest of them are virgins, which, I know, is weird — I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just a historical fact. But because of this, Davies’s work stands out as addressing an aspect of life, of reality, and of vitality that other writers might not have had the experience to write about.
—Steve Zultanski

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2013

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About the author

Alan Davies

129 books148 followers
Alan Davies is an English stand-up comedian, writer and actor. He has played the title role in the BBC mystery drama series Jonathan Creek since 1997, and has been the only permanent panellist on the BBC panel show QI since 2003.

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Profile Image for Tentatively, Convenience.
Author 16 books242 followers
June 18, 2013
review of
Alan Davies' ODES & fragments
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 18, 2013

I feel like practically every review I write about Alan's bks starts out similarly - something along these lines: 'I've been friends w/ Alan Davies for at least 34 yrs now & I STILL have difficulty relating to his writing.' This bk is ALMOST an exception. I hate to fall into the pattern I'm about to describe but it still strikes me as somewhat accurate so I'll describe it ANYWAY despite its non-flatteringness to my self-image as an intellectual:

I've found that when I screen movies of mine that're short, say 5 minutes or less, people LOVE them.. but when I screen a movie that's a 'feature' people find it to be insufferable. In the case of Alan's writing, when the font size is LARGE & the poem's short, I'm immediately RELIEVED. It's bite size. Don't eat anything bigger than yr head n'at. But when I get to something like the poem beginning on p 212 in ODES & fragments, where the font size is unusually small in relation to most of the other poems in the bk, I find myself feeling like I've reached a chasm that I have to jump across, a chasm that I CAN jump across - there's no way I'll 'fall' - the simile doesn't extend that far - so there's no danger - just extra exertion.

The very name of this bk, & the simple floral pattern that adorns the cover under the title, evoke a traditional poetry that's, for the most part, absent here. EXCEPT, perhaps, for the rhyming - but even that's subtly misleading, subtly playing w/ stereotyping expectations subverted.

In my own more experimental writing, what some people wd call "poetry" & what I call "concrete essays", there's usually a goal, a vision, & a precise technical means for reaching that goal. Take, eg, something like "Po" (My "Po, a language game" is online @: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/6... The movie version is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/onesownth... & it's been published in RAMPIKE (volume 19/No. 1: "Visual Poetics" (March, 2010))) in wch I use one word that has different meanings in multiple languages & try to construct a narrative w/ that one word that references those multiple meanings.

When I look for signs of such procedures in Alan's writings, I find things that seem to point that way but the overall pattern created always eludes me in regards to a formal purpose.. &, yet.. in his bk a an av es (Potes & Poets Press, 1981) I completely missed that he was systematically not using ascenders (letters that go above the upper baseline such as "t") & descenders (letters that go below the lower baseline such as "y") despite this absence being glaringly in front of me, the reader! Until he explained that to me, ie.

I was fortunate enuf to get a review copy of this bk. It came w/ a 3pp press release (& a copy of what appears to be a polaroid of Alan w/ a note - THX Alan!). This PR comes w/ praise from Craig Dworkin, Carla Harryman, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, & Juliana Spahr - fairly well-known intellectuals. Silliman is once again quoted as saying that Alan "continues to be the Diogenes of the New York langpo scene." As I comment, at much greater length than in the excerpt presented here, in my review of Alan's recent Raw War ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17... ):

"My kind of guy, a real pain-in-the-ass to rc'vd 'wisdom'. But Silliman's characterization of Alan is more of a metaphor. Alan only begs for a living in a welfare-state kind of a way & doesn't sleep in "a large ceramic jar in the marketplace". Thank goodness. He lives in New York, the weather's not nearly as human-friendly as it was in Diogenes' neck of the woods. Alan does make a virtue of poverty of sorts but he's not homeless. Thank goodness. He leads a comfortable enuf life. Thank goodness. & I don't think he's so much a 'man-of-action' in a Herculean sense as much as he is a 'man-of-letters'. I do think he uses "his simple lifestyle and behaviour to criticise the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt society" & therein lies the crux of the matter - & the way in wch Silliman's comparison comes closest to home."

Silliman, &, no doubt, many others, still considers Alan part of the "lang[uage ]po[etry] scene" but is he? I reckon in some sense YES.. but I have a vague memory of talking w/ Alan about whether he considered himself to still be a Language Writer, maybe as early as September, 1982, & getting an answer along the lines of 'not really'.. Perhaps I'm misremembering. Once a Language Writer, always a Language Writer? Maybe..

What exactly IS Language Writing?! The term seems to've become such a catch-all for any poetry that's not openly confessional & even some that is (maybe. maybe Bernadette Mayer, whose work i like very much, eg), work that seems opaque to immediate simple interpretation.

For me, the 'promise' (as in 'potential') of Language Writing was/is that it might undermine passive norms of Pavlovian Dog reading, that it might, w/ high formal consciousness, challenge the 'transparency' of writing enuf to call the reader's attn to the language & its ways of functioning, a sortof Brechtian alienation technique, a Burroughsian attack against CONTROL. To some, Language Writing might be writing w/o an "I" - that's all well & good but I often wonder whether some Language Writers might just not have a very interesting 'I" to refer to/from. If you lead a very safe, well-pd, academic life you're certainly not going to refer to yr life as a Direct Activist in yr writing, there's none to refer to. SO, the politics tend to become diverted to what I contend are less effectual avenues, intellectual wanking.

In Steve Zultanski's essay in the press release for ODES & fragments, he begins w/ the sensational "Alan Davies is the only Language poet who has ever had sex." Ok, that's pretty fucking funny. Zultanski continues: "The rest of them are virgins, which, I know, is weird — I don't know how to explain it, it's just a historical fact. But because of this, Davies's work stands out as addressing an aspect of life, of reality, and of vitality that other writers might not have had the experience to write about. [..] I'm thinking of his most formally experimental poems, like those in Active 24 Hours, which are concerned as much with bodily erotics as with the functioning of language." I read Zultanski's intro as deliberately provocative, funny, & absurd - so I won't even address the obvious layer of it. To, instead, go immediately to the claim that Alan's work is "concerned as much with bodily erotics as with the functioning of language": to me, this implies that Alan is concerned w/ praxis as much, if not more, than w/ theory.

I don't really think that that distinguishes Alan's writing from many or most other poets. After all, most poets have had sex, most people who have sex are profoundly affected by it, therefore most poet's writings have some level of erotics in them, somewhere - including Language Writing. HOWEVER, if we think of "bodily erotics" as something like running one's hand over the surface of one's body or that of a lover, of running one's hand delicately over curves, inserting into mucous membranes, tweaking nipples, tickling, making erect, etc, causing the body to become sensually charged in anticipation then, perhaps, Zultanski's promotion as a analog for Alan's writing might be getting us somewhere.

What I find in ODES & fragments, perhaps more than in any other of Alan's bks, is a flow, a caress of the surface w/ alliterative & playful language that isn't necessarily referential & isn't necessarily NOT referential, that plays in ways that repeat in a way akin to the way one's fingers might return again & again to a nipple to perk it back into erectness as it's relaxed from its last excitation. As w/ the author's foto that was sent as part of my review copy, the author's pose seems very relaxed & comfortable, the writing flows the way a lover's caress might on a peaceful day naked in bed, weather warm, a trusting contented coupling.

In continuation of this analogy, the words that Alan repeats so often are favorite textual body parts. There's "And is All a Thrall a Bell", "Take Thrall", & "Remembering the Threll"; there're the n repetitions of "sweatered" (p 56, eg) (this latter cd almost be fetishistic à là some people's fetishizing of Angora, eg); "the harvestable sloughed sodden few" (p 203), "sloughing (a favorite word" (p 205). Favorite words.

Alan uses many device that might trip up the reader: he uses open parentheses ("(") but rarely closed ones,

"
I think it is unsafe to say even to today
that the programmable portion(s of reality of taken
and that the momentary singulars are spoken for
by what is over with (and quite possibly forgotten
" - p 117

he inserts "l"s into words: "Today As A Way of Esclape" (p 38), "From the sluck thingle quackers going over and aboard the bring" (p 39), "Sqleaking over the of into the prepositionless abetment sequestering quest / lons that slick up the slide of flate, glaring over the frost flick of frame of form", "Chance of sequestering greetings as against the fluck slam dim crape corpse", "Into the lingering fluck gutter, old memories of the old memories slept past", "Of clop, as the cakers snake off with the sped slup slangers (those who can speak)", 'but saying so isn't fair either (dammit!) so flut the shuck up (maddit!) or sleep" (p 40), "From the flurth, get that through your flucking fled, I did and by glod did that hurt!" (p 41), "tlake it" (p 136).

I find this latter device to be especially effective w/o being exactly a formal pointer - in other words, seeing these repeated "l" insertions (are they 'el's or capital "i"s?) to be like textural changes - imagine walking down a long stairwell & running yr hand sensually along the bannister, feeling the connectors of the bannister to the wall from time-to-time. There's an installation at the Mattress Factory (an installation museum in PGH) that I dearly love: the bannister(s) is/are a trough w/ heated water running down it - placing the fingers in the trough produces a pleasant sensual surprise. In the font I'm typing this in, it's hard (or 'impossible') to distinguish between a capital "i" & a lower-case "L" - perhaps this is Alan's sly way of reintroducing the first-person singular back into Language Writing.

As a tangent, I note that Zultanski wrote "a historical fact" & Alan wrote "An horrible thing, again" (p 13). As one of my thousands of 'side interests', this leads me to deduce that Steve is probably a generation younger than Alan & I are - we were taught that "an" precedes any word beginning w/ "h", Steve probably wasn't - thusly demonstrating that one generation's 'correct' is another generation's 'mistake' or 'oddity'. Is this another removal of a British practice from American English? Like changing "theatre" to "theater" even tho "theatrical" doesn't become "theaterical"? Dunno.

Alan's writing is often dedicated to women who're important in his life: Dianne Ward, eg. Here, it's poet Christina Strong. And neither is there pain is dedicated "For Christina" (p 13) & p 231 starts off w/ this stanza:

"Maybe cadences are tokens for small gestures
Christina or is that a cracked moment oblivious
to the cheer, as if that were here and not taken
from the past into the past that were token"

Maybe we're all reaching out to people we've loved, even the most 'abstract' of us. Whatever Alan's doing, I imagine that many poetry readers will enjoy it - if only in that vague non-analytic sensual way that many poetry readers seem to read (what's THAT opinion based on, eh?!):

"
Toward, the ward, the to, the

Toward you, you, you, the one

Over, over toward, to, to

And all that slushes up

is not slush, but eagerness

Or the half-life of larvae, or

The larvae living more than

half a life, given the off-chance

That larvae exist, that life

Happens, happens to larvae
"

I enjoyed that, did you? Much is made in poetry of the SOUND of it, of the BREATH of it n'at. Like much Language Writing (is that what this is?) this isn't really DRAMATIC ENUF to be Sound Poetry (who says it has to be dramatic?), it's not really focused on the sound exactly.. it's more the hop, skip, & jump of it all..

Probably ANY school or style of writing / creating at least CLAIMS to have philosophical implications - usually in theoretical writings (such as in "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine, RIP). What're the philosophical implications of this?:

"
Slooping Down the Long Slope Toward


Slooping down the long slope toward sloops

And finding uncanny reward in no reward

Nor in that either (neither), as we escape into

The timbrest of slad October airs, as a sweater

Becomes itself only when of no longer use

Or the bickering flux (flugs) matriculates us

Past what we weren't going to be anyway

Not out here, not past where we never got

And hadn't wanted to be, or to get anyway
" - p 30

What if "l" is a lower-case "L" & not an upper-case "i"? What if it's a recurrent typo that Alan makes that he doesn't notice or chooses to leave in there as a token of his aging? i find that unlikely but not unprecedented or impossible. That wd have implications of acceptance that might fit w/ Alan's apparent casualness - do the typical meanings of the words reinforce this interpretation? "And finding uncanny reward in no reward"?

Not being knowledgeable (or, really, that interested) in traditional poetry rhyming patterns (I don't know the particulars of a sonnet or of Alexandrine (?) verse or whatever) I don't know if the following adheres to a particular syllabic history:

"As err as far as far can see
And all live well in err or tree
That swell nor line the can't to be
As well as might as might as we" - p 43

but I can at least speculate that its meaning is articulated somewhat anew.

My very (generic) skeletal outline of the evolution of poetry goes something like this:

poetry w/ strong simple rhyme schemes & straightforward abbreviated tale-telling to enable unwritten perpetuation of history/philosophy thru oral means

the complication of the rhyme schemes in connection w/ the printing of the words - ie: the reduction of the necessity of memory & oral transmission

the discarding of rhyming altogether, 'free verse', to make the flow & vocabulary less restricted

the branching out of language into specializings that concentrate on particular aspects of written & pronounced language: sound poetry, visual poetry, etc..

If Alan's writing is Language Writing & if Language Writing is PostModern & if PostModern is taken to mean a formal approach that accepts & incorporates previously disparate &/or competitive approaches, then Alan's writing might be vaguely PostModern - a reading that might be highly objectionable to Language Writing & PostModernist theorists. I just mean that Alan's writing seems to rhyme when he feels like it, to disrupt when he feels like it, to refer when he feels like ti, to be what it is when he feels like it - w/o worrying too much about whether it fits into this, that, or t'other. As I've pointed out in another review, he even interpolates quotes from Bob Dylan! Surely this wd be a no-no for more rigid purists: "for the sad eyed lady of the lowland / she with harvest on her feet" (p 51), "life / all along the watch tower" (p 142), "is all over now baby blue / unglued" (P 159), "(but it's all / (it's all / (it's all / (over now / (baby blue" (p 161),

"
it's all over now







baby blue

" - the entirety of the poem on p 188

Does Alan quote many other poets / songwriters whose work I don't recognize? There's "as this You see remember me" (p 122) wch I associate w/ Gertrude Stein (a variation's in the libretto of "Four Saints in Three Acts", eg) but wch harkens back to memento mori / memento mei that predate Stein, from wch Stein got the phrase. There's also "Thrake ralldom riddle and crash / as rash dillddom is childless and middling and frish / but all if thralldom or crashing and dish / o'er the thingish that takesh all of that thrash" (p 104) wch reminds me of 'Shake, Rattle, & Roll' as well as Lewis Carroll's (& Terry Gilliam's) "Jabberwocky".

On pp 63-64 there's:

"
It all falls away
in the halting motion
that night brings
over these evenings
of halting things

Slender as that may seem

There are quadrangles
even in thought
in the mind
and that is the way of all things
singing
back over the shoulders of the body
toward the body that might be
listening

But thre's always space
for space to have seem
at any age
at any time

And darkness is only a language

Full of feral cats

And the swing
of postulate

toward postulateless things
eagerly
as that may be
to be a thing

We know nothing

It's only quiet
quiet is all it brings
and the sequesterless overlings
that only seem to sing
as that thing
and as this thing

Outside all is quiet
Inside
"

& I'm reminded of the great absurdist symbolist Alfred Jarry saying something to the effect that he was writing over his own head when he wrote Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician & about how this might apply to the work of many poets - there's the writing in wch one is reaching for something just out of reach, describing/inscribing something beyond one's peripheral vision - no matter how much one turns one's inner vision.

Mostly, I find Alan to be alliteratively flowing: "And it was / a windy day / somewhere / today / That way / there was / a way/ to be there / today" (p 65) - even in ways that teeter on the conventional: "There are days with flocks of roses / That careen upon the shore / And ways of getting nowhere / That still require an oar" (p 71)

Alan PLAYS w/ language & sometimes i wonder if this PLAYING is an end in & of itself:

"
sling sluck over slend end oven sluck fend
aall 's ist tend end nd the than that end
such 'n for t 'en sloughing is the enden oder
frickin zie zen send of the lader glend (blend

affer en tend that than t as ifffer 'n ox en
butten end der offen comp ent sliffen pren d
as ifferen war dem immin then diggen don
" - p 106

I think of when my stepdad took me to his hunting lodge when I was 15 or so & about a 8.5x11" piece of 'typewriter' paper that had a faux German text on it. I loved that thing & my stepdad gave it to me. Snippets of the above strike me as German used as nonsense: "oder / frickin zie" eg.

& then there's even possible dyslexic play: "qoeted then the one worn down offtlen slong" (p 160) that cd be taken to be the "p" of "poet" taking a spin.
Profile Image for J.A..
Author 18 books121 followers
July 24, 2013
Some of these I enjoyed, but others (most of them, to be honest) I couldn't get a good grip on. Interesting design though, with the use of varied fonts, and I suppose if you already love Davies, you'll love this too, so maybe a volume more for enthusiasts/fans than new readers to his work.
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