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Pattern Beyond Chance
Stephen Payne’s day job is in academic cognitive science. Currently Professor of Human-Centric Systems at the University of Bath, he’s always been fascinated by language and lyric. He began writing poetry to figure out how the poets he admired worked their tricks. Later, he took part in workshops in Linda Chase’s ‘Village Hall’ in Manchester and grasped the benefits of belonging to a community of poets, something he now enjoys in Bath, Cardiff and beyond.
In this, his first full collection, Payne’s two sides come between these pages scientist and poet meet and strike sparks. It’s no surprise to encounter poems that think, and think about thinking. They’re playful, provocative and lyrical, and the poet’s continuous pleasure in sound and pattern is curiously infectious.
In this, his first full collection, Payne’s two sides come between these pages scientist and poet meet and strike sparks. It’s no surprise to encounter poems that think, and think about thinking. They’re playful, provocative and lyrical, and the poet’s continuous pleasure in sound and pattern is curiously infectious.
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February 2, 2016
I have to start by stating the obvious: that there are bits of this that are all oddly familiar – I mean, bits that reminded me of me. So, when I say ‘the obvious’ I mean that in a particularly restricted sense. The other day L asked me about poetry as I told her I was bringing this book with us on holidays. Then, after we had chatted for a while in general, she asked me about Nell’s poetry (Nell is my friend, the sender of this book, and also its publisher) and I said something like, ‘oh, I don’t know, I think she likes mirrors’. It was meant as a throw-away line, but it stuck to my fingers.
Don’t get me wrong, this guy is much smarter than I am and the similarities are mostly in my own head – but I’ve kept seeing myself in this collection, and not just as fleeting half-glimpses noticed around corners; no, in full-length portrait-sized mirrors.
It wasn’t just that my daughter is a Maddy too, although, that was hardly going to be something I could just skip over. And it also wasn’t just a shared interest in science either.
Look, the easiest way is by way of example. Years ago I was at work, I was a technical writer – long story and not awfully important, but I worked in IT and saw my role as translating IT speak into something the ‘users’ could understand. I’m a bit of a translator, even if a monolingual one. Anyway, my boss said, “That’s a chicken and egg problem”, to which he meant, of course, that it was a problem without a solution. And I just can’t help myself. I told him that since Darwin that wee problem has found its solution, and it is the egg. There is a poem here that puts in verse what I’ve just said in prose. It is really hard to read something like that, something you’ve said yourself, but have never heard anyone else say, and not feel … well what, McCandless, what exactly? I was going to say something with the word ‘kindred’ in there somewhere, but it is not quite that.
I don’t want this to sound like I’m saying, ‘this guy has stolen my thoughts’ – I mean, how could he, he lives half a world away, we have never met, nor are we ever likely to – so, unless somehow time runs backwards for him and he has some sort of fore-knowledge of my thoughts from a future encounter that, to me at least, is yet to happen, well, I can only assume these thoughts are his as well. I can’t pretend to be at all comfortable about that, no, not at all.
I’ve often thought that my religion, if I was put into that forced choice thing that people sometimes threaten Atheists with, (‘yes, but if you had to choose’) would not be just about reincarnation, but a reincarnation where we become in life after life everyone we have ever met – sort of the Nietzschean eternal return, except, it would be a life lived through the eyes of each of these innumerable people – we are the people we have hated, have been bored by, made furious by, have ignored and crossed the road to avoid, each of them in their turn. He twists this in a way I’d never considered, with a city having someone exactly one day older than the last person, and one day younger than the next person in our lives – and so we could run through a whole ‘life’ flashing through each person like day apart frames in a life movie – maybe a bit like the opposite of one of those photos that stop time and spin around a single person in space. His vision is more like a cartoon than my long and drawn out version, with his one image after another – except all of them there at once, all in one city present in an instant.
Payne’s more like Calvino than I’m ever likely to be, organised in ways my brain can only appreciate but never replicate. At first I felt that as something of a relief. That said, I have often thought that I would be a better person if I was more like Calvino, certainly a better writer, so as palpable a relief as this proof that Payne and I are not the same person running about in different bodies and inhabiting worlds, it isn’t without its darker tinges of something-or-other – something this side of regret.
The day before we went on holidays - these holidays that I’m writing this from, by the ocean, by the pool, in the sun, on the hotel-room bed - we walked L’s dogs through streets and parks and I said something about how a man might write a poem about a woman walking her dog and she said, “you should write me that poem”, but I don’t write poetry any more. I was trying to make a point about poetry, that it can be about the most banal subjects, but that, if it works, it rarely ends up actually being banal. That poetry is strange and often obscure, but it is also a curious way to say things you can’t say in other ways – and because L paints and draws I said things about watercolours and oils and charcoals and how each speaks a different language, making their own demands, allowing and disallowing in turn, and that poetry is much the same.
Yesterday, lying by the pool, I read L the whole of Chicken Questions – then turned back a page and read her aloud Scientific Method and then, just the stanza of Making a Living about pretending to work in occupations you don’t – but then had to go back to the start and read her the whole thing. We lay on our backs and laughed about how it is only the first bit that’s about the psychologist Herbert A. Simon – and that after that the voice is that of the poet relating a conversation he had had had with a guy whose job was to balance on a bicycle without moving forward or falling – something nearly impossible to do, but that was his job. She went back into the water while I turned from pink to red slowly by inches.
When I picked up the book on the day before I came on holidays I was stopped by the very first stanza:
This beaten track to the river
you’ve so often walked
with your retriever—
is it cause or effect?
So that on my walk to Bentleigh to the optician to have my new glasses adjusted to loosen the brain vice-like strength the frames seem to only ever come in (and this was already the third time I had followed this path in three days to get these same adjustment made) I walked along the dust path between two shocks of grass, orange below the sun and I took a photo (did I crouch?) and walked again wondering how I might attach that photo to this review.
I think the fourth part, the part on Time, is more obviously about time than, say, the second part is about Word. Not so hard to argue that all poems are about words or Design, or even about Mind. Time is much harder, even though rhythm is a kind of tempo. Nothing fills me with a greater sense of staring dread than trying to think about time. And I mean that in all senses – how it creeps, how it can stand stock still, how it flies, how it passes into nothing but memory. And I could count my life around the conversations I’ve had with people about the various reasons time seems to speed up as we age - physiological first of all: how our metabolism slows and so a fly whose heart races experiences time in slow motion beside us. Or mathematical: how one year to a ten-year-old is one-tenth of an entire life, while to a fifty-year-old it is two-fifths of fuck-all. Or psychological: how a year can seem endless when you know yourself to be immortal, but then that no one beyond a certain age remains immortal, even in their imagination, and so time finds speed from within the fear of death.
The next day, which is today, the day after we arrived on holidays, two days since I first opened this book of poetry, I lay on the same pool chairs we had the day before, having placed them side-by-side, this time with me carefully covered, even swimming with a t-shirt stuck against my still too Irish skin, and I was just about to finish reading the last of the poems before we headed off for lunch. L emerged from the water, dripping and with her hair flat like a swim cap and as she sat down I read her the last stanza of Feature:
A young couple lean on each other as they walk.
They have learned another half-truth about love
and about their own love, learned how lucky they are
to face an uncertain future. They separate
to step either side of a puddle,
then reach out their hands like dancers.
http://www.happenstancepress.org/inde...
Don’t get me wrong, this guy is much smarter than I am and the similarities are mostly in my own head – but I’ve kept seeing myself in this collection, and not just as fleeting half-glimpses noticed around corners; no, in full-length portrait-sized mirrors.
It wasn’t just that my daughter is a Maddy too, although, that was hardly going to be something I could just skip over. And it also wasn’t just a shared interest in science either.
Look, the easiest way is by way of example. Years ago I was at work, I was a technical writer – long story and not awfully important, but I worked in IT and saw my role as translating IT speak into something the ‘users’ could understand. I’m a bit of a translator, even if a monolingual one. Anyway, my boss said, “That’s a chicken and egg problem”, to which he meant, of course, that it was a problem without a solution. And I just can’t help myself. I told him that since Darwin that wee problem has found its solution, and it is the egg. There is a poem here that puts in verse what I’ve just said in prose. It is really hard to read something like that, something you’ve said yourself, but have never heard anyone else say, and not feel … well what, McCandless, what exactly? I was going to say something with the word ‘kindred’ in there somewhere, but it is not quite that.
I don’t want this to sound like I’m saying, ‘this guy has stolen my thoughts’ – I mean, how could he, he lives half a world away, we have never met, nor are we ever likely to – so, unless somehow time runs backwards for him and he has some sort of fore-knowledge of my thoughts from a future encounter that, to me at least, is yet to happen, well, I can only assume these thoughts are his as well. I can’t pretend to be at all comfortable about that, no, not at all.
I’ve often thought that my religion, if I was put into that forced choice thing that people sometimes threaten Atheists with, (‘yes, but if you had to choose’) would not be just about reincarnation, but a reincarnation where we become in life after life everyone we have ever met – sort of the Nietzschean eternal return, except, it would be a life lived through the eyes of each of these innumerable people – we are the people we have hated, have been bored by, made furious by, have ignored and crossed the road to avoid, each of them in their turn. He twists this in a way I’d never considered, with a city having someone exactly one day older than the last person, and one day younger than the next person in our lives – and so we could run through a whole ‘life’ flashing through each person like day apart frames in a life movie – maybe a bit like the opposite of one of those photos that stop time and spin around a single person in space. His vision is more like a cartoon than my long and drawn out version, with his one image after another – except all of them there at once, all in one city present in an instant.
Payne’s more like Calvino than I’m ever likely to be, organised in ways my brain can only appreciate but never replicate. At first I felt that as something of a relief. That said, I have often thought that I would be a better person if I was more like Calvino, certainly a better writer, so as palpable a relief as this proof that Payne and I are not the same person running about in different bodies and inhabiting worlds, it isn’t without its darker tinges of something-or-other – something this side of regret.
The day before we went on holidays - these holidays that I’m writing this from, by the ocean, by the pool, in the sun, on the hotel-room bed - we walked L’s dogs through streets and parks and I said something about how a man might write a poem about a woman walking her dog and she said, “you should write me that poem”, but I don’t write poetry any more. I was trying to make a point about poetry, that it can be about the most banal subjects, but that, if it works, it rarely ends up actually being banal. That poetry is strange and often obscure, but it is also a curious way to say things you can’t say in other ways – and because L paints and draws I said things about watercolours and oils and charcoals and how each speaks a different language, making their own demands, allowing and disallowing in turn, and that poetry is much the same.
Yesterday, lying by the pool, I read L the whole of Chicken Questions – then turned back a page and read her aloud Scientific Method and then, just the stanza of Making a Living about pretending to work in occupations you don’t – but then had to go back to the start and read her the whole thing. We lay on our backs and laughed about how it is only the first bit that’s about the psychologist Herbert A. Simon – and that after that the voice is that of the poet relating a conversation he had had had with a guy whose job was to balance on a bicycle without moving forward or falling – something nearly impossible to do, but that was his job. She went back into the water while I turned from pink to red slowly by inches.
When I picked up the book on the day before I came on holidays I was stopped by the very first stanza:
This beaten track to the river
you’ve so often walked
with your retriever—
is it cause or effect?
So that on my walk to Bentleigh to the optician to have my new glasses adjusted to loosen the brain vice-like strength the frames seem to only ever come in (and this was already the third time I had followed this path in three days to get these same adjustment made) I walked along the dust path between two shocks of grass, orange below the sun and I took a photo (did I crouch?) and walked again wondering how I might attach that photo to this review.
I think the fourth part, the part on Time, is more obviously about time than, say, the second part is about Word. Not so hard to argue that all poems are about words or Design, or even about Mind. Time is much harder, even though rhythm is a kind of tempo. Nothing fills me with a greater sense of staring dread than trying to think about time. And I mean that in all senses – how it creeps, how it can stand stock still, how it flies, how it passes into nothing but memory. And I could count my life around the conversations I’ve had with people about the various reasons time seems to speed up as we age - physiological first of all: how our metabolism slows and so a fly whose heart races experiences time in slow motion beside us. Or mathematical: how one year to a ten-year-old is one-tenth of an entire life, while to a fifty-year-old it is two-fifths of fuck-all. Or psychological: how a year can seem endless when you know yourself to be immortal, but then that no one beyond a certain age remains immortal, even in their imagination, and so time finds speed from within the fear of death.
The next day, which is today, the day after we arrived on holidays, two days since I first opened this book of poetry, I lay on the same pool chairs we had the day before, having placed them side-by-side, this time with me carefully covered, even swimming with a t-shirt stuck against my still too Irish skin, and I was just about to finish reading the last of the poems before we headed off for lunch. L emerged from the water, dripping and with her hair flat like a swim cap and as she sat down I read her the last stanza of Feature:
A young couple lean on each other as they walk.
They have learned another half-truth about love
and about their own love, learned how lucky they are
to face an uncertain future. They separate
to step either side of a puddle,
then reach out their hands like dancers.
http://www.happenstancepress.org/inde...
Displaying 1 of 1 review