Matilda Sykes: Seen and Heard
‘Works of art’, begins Denise Riley, quoting Rilke, ‘are of an infinite loneliness’. In March of last year, Riley gave the Clark lectures in Cambridge on the topic ‘A voice of the lyric?’. Riley’s was the first talk since the series’ conception in 1926 to feature a question mark in its title (a rhetorical gesture—there was pleasingly little audience contribution). Instead, we adopted the ‘listening stillness’, ‘reticence and reserve’ and ‘stoical ataraxia’ that Riley went on to recommend for both the emerging and established poet.
She began the series contemplatively, considering the social and commercial demands of the poet and their ‘present apparent obligation to be seen’. That last word’s homophonic friend ‘scene’ has reverberated of late (most recently in The Guardian, and in a TLS response to The Londoner’s piece on ‘London’s hot new literary scenes’). Both the scene and being seen are troubling to Riley, who emphasised the ‘awkwardness of the poetic career versus the solitary circumstances of the production’, likening the former to a ‘gymkhana—nervy ponies, ribbons in their manes, rosettes.’ In this arrangement, not everyone shall have prizes:
While the requirement to publicly compete might be accepted by some or even by many as a badge of welcome recognition, for others it could cause deep embarrassment or frank bewilderment, especially if your family, educational, or class background didn’t kit you out with self-confidence, or at least with know-how to mime that self-confidence.
This didn’t feel like po-faced grumbling, or one-upmanship, but genuine concern for the consequences of exposure, coming from a poet naturally disposed to concealment. ‘Rather than depending on the validation of publicly measured success’, she cautioned, ‘it might be her life saviour to be surreptitious’.
Poetic receptivity for Riley, then, demands a degree of invisibility, not the ‘concurrence of the world in general’ (John Stuart Mill). But, for the poet and philosopher, that doesn’t mean abandoning intersubjectivity but swapping one chorus of voices for another. This other ensemble can be found in the formal poem, she insists: ‘What’s inherited by the formal poem is not a cultural conservatism, but layered consolidations of histories of poetic forms carrying the voices of the long dead.’ For Riley, intersubjectivity is contained within intertextuality. ‘A surge of echoic memory’, she promises ‘will tear across the writer unbidden and uncontrolled’. That is, if they’re listening.
At the time of Riley’s lecture series, I was writing an essay on her 2016 collection Say Something Back. Though ‘A Part Song’ from the collection is Riley’s best-known elegy (and perhaps the best of the century), the other forty-three poems also work within this genre – some just more conspicuously than others. I think it’s in these poems, these hidden or buried elegies, that you see Riley’s recognition of intertextuality as intersubjectivity most extensively drawn out. One such example of a ‘hidden’ elegy is ‘Composed underneath Westminster Bridge’ (itself a seemingly very bidden and controlled poem). At first blush Riley’s sonnet isn’t elegiac but instead a strange grey pastiche of Wordsworth’s poem. ‘Earth has not any thing to show more fair’ (1), the latter poet begins, the former eschewing such meditation for robust factual description: ‘Broad gravel barges shove the drift’ (1). However, within this opening line lurk ghost words, ‘grave’, ‘shovel, ‘adrift’. At the end of ‘A Part Song’ we learn that Riley’s son’s ashes were scattered in the sea: ‘I drift as lightest ashes | Under a southern sea’ (3-4). The flowing Thames is a kind of liquid grave, the poem an ‘unbidden’ elegy.
Other veiled affective currents, to use Riley’s word, ‘surge’ up when the poem is placed in dialogue with its intertext. Here are the final two lines of each sonnet:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
— Wordsworth (13-14)
While through the eau-de-nil flaked arches slide
The boats ‘Bert Prior’ and ‘The Eleanor Rose’.
— Riley (13-14)
The close of Riley’s poem is bathetic: ‘Bert Prior’ is an aggregate carrier, ‘The Eleanor Rose’ a city-cruise boat. Riley’s imagistic and linguistic levelling of pomp and drabness—‘eau-de-nil flaked arches’—is also at play formally: Wordsworth’s much-anthologised sonnet of (nearly) the same name shades and colours Riley’s. Her quotidian descriptions of ‘fried onions’, ‘pigeons on steely-eyed dates’ (5, 6) are all the more mundane next to Wordsworth’s ‘ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples […] | all bright and glittering’ (6). However, it’s the final line of Wordsworth’s sonnet—‘that mighty heart is lying still!’—which demonstrates language’s ability to work upon an author’s ear in stealth. Riley’s son, Jacob, to whom the collection is dedicated, died of undiagnosed cardiomyopathy—Say Something Back actually features a poem entitled ‘Cardiomyopathy’ which enacts a distinctly unsentimental heart autopsy: ‘It is a pump, impersonal in its lub-dup shunt | But it can be a pump that stops itself’ (4-5). This final line, then, not incorporated or alluded to in Riley’s own, demonstrates the way language ‘tear[s] across the writer’. Conscious of the connection or not, Wordsworth’s language loiters in the margins of Riley’s poem as haunting intertext, the poems’ relation unfixed. As Fanny Howe notes, ‘The struggle that the writer makes for herself is to make a place where she can get lost without fear.’ Whether Riley is lost or performing lostness here, the allusion remains buried ‘underneath’ the poem, a separate aspect—consciously or unconsciously—nestled in the work of another, Wordsworth’s ‘mighty’ yet ‘still’ heart.
Michel Foucault writes of genealogy:
this heritage is [not] an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath.
[my emphasis]
Riley, the ‘fragile inheritor’, is conscious of the illusory nature of such mastery and, as we’ve seen, advocates for the writer of lyric an ‘attentive not knowing’, a ‘listening ignorance’. Unlike Wordsworth’s speaker, situated upon the bridge, Riley’s squats in shady anonymity: ‘Composed Underneath Westminster Bridge’. Foucault’s ‘threaten’ conveys the latent power of a linguistic heritage—its enduring, if messy, vitality. ‘It is not we who write’, Riley notes, ‘but an inner sounding of others’ words, together with self-overhearing.’ Riley’s statement is significant in its differentiation: we don’t see words but hear voices—‘the souls of the dead are the spirit of language, we hear them alighting in language’. They affect us. By listening to a voice from another age, Riley finds her own to be altered.
Riley’s concern with contemporary poetic practices doesn’t arise from bad-tempered fustiness, but anxiety for the poet who finds the social aspects of the poetic life to be, as Brynn Valentine recently put it in Plinth, ‘reddening and raw’; for the poet who pigeon-holes themselves and, by extension, their possible influences. Her unease about the social demands of the poetic career is directed towards its prior delimitation of a poet’s affective project, the upshot of a contemporary compulsion to self-fashion and diagnose, to find a USP, or a crowd. She is aware that a kind of knowing poetry, poetry that has its ‘ear cocked to a potential audience’, tends to stop listening to the ‘lively many voiced and always historical’ resonances of the form itself—for when a poet’s work consciously becomes ‘about’ a thing, it chooses not to be about so many others. This tentative ethical argument is most persuasively realised in Riley’s elegiac work, where these questions of dialogue, voice, and ‘aboutness’ are most conceptually and personally freighted. Say Something Back listens hard. And, through that listening, persists in a dialogical postmortem that allows for its own kind of company-keeping: ‘this | bright flat blue is a mouth | of the world speaking back’ (11-12).
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Matilda Sykes is a poet and critic based in London
