I wanted for years to read Briggflatts as it seemed to be an
epic poem partially about Northumberland. But I was mistaken as it is more
about its author, who described it as an autobiography. I did not get any
particular sense of a Northumbrian sensibility from it apart from the use of
“spuggies” in the epigraph, a spuggy being a Northumbrian word for a sparrow.
Bunting compares a mason chipping away at marble to the poet scratching away at
his verse, “litters his yard with flawed fragments” (Bunting seems often to
reflect on his limitations as a poet).
Bunting is a Modernist poet like Elliot and Pound. The
Modernists use concrete images as the building blocks of their verse. So there
is great trouble taken over the use of actual, quite specific locations and phrases
from other languages as if the mere inclusion of a place name or phrase is
sufficient to convey atmosphere. I may be mistaken but they seem to be reacting
to the Romantic poets. Whereas the Romantics deal with sensibility and emotion
and the higher things generally, the Modernists treat of cities and people and
language and history. At its worst this results in Elliott’s footnotes on the
Wasteland, feeling that he has to explain his own verse. Bunting resists this.
It is possible to read his poems accompanied by Wikipedia to explain the
references but he does not make it a condition. One does not need to know about
the river Rawthey and Eric Bloodaxe in order to appreciate Briggflatts.
Of his other poems I enjoyed Chomei at Toyama which tells of
disasters befalling a city in medieval Japan, The Complaint of the Morpethshire
Farmer which reads like a traditional ballad, What the Chairman Told Tom which
is nicely comical, and his Overdrafts which are supposedly translations of
foreign poets but seem more like rewritings.
The artist whom Bunting most reminds me of is actually
Captain Beefheart. Compositions such as Well or Orange Claw Hammer present a
stream of images and statements, not all of them logical, which are designed to
create an impression in the mind of the listener through sound and
juxtaposition rather than through meaning. Another similarity is through their
affinity with and deployment of music. Obviously in the case of Beefheart since
he sings but Bunting in his introduction to his poems says “I have set down
words as a musician pricks his score, not to be read in silence, but to trace
in the air a pattern of sound”. He collects some of his poems under the title
of Sonatas (interestingly he uses the term for a piece of music to be played
rather than one to be sung (cantata) – he claims to be writing instrumentals).
Beefheart’s imagery is drawn from the American South, working in the fields,
nature, the American desert, childhood and the Blues. Bunting draws on his own
experiences of living in Europe, old
literature and Western classical music.
Bunting writes of Pound’s Cantos “These are the Alps. What else is to be said about them. They do not
make sense.” Sense is not necessarily to be looked for in this verse but that
is not to say that it lacks meaning. Briggflatts has a narrative going from
early infatuation with a girl to wanderings through Europe
and, fifty years later, to a return to home. “Then is diffused in Now”, despite
his wanderings and experiences he still remembers the girl “she has been with
me fifty years”. Isn’t that lovely.
Here is Bunting together with the girl in question more than
fifty years on with Brigflatts in the background.
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