Know the one? Insolent Ontology and Mahon's revisions

Peter Know the One?Insolent Ontology and Mahon's Revisions Your best poem, you know the one I mean, The very language in which the poem Was written, and the idea of language, All these things will pass away in time. Derek Mahon, on Rivers " (1979)was in effect a volume of " new and selected It drew on three books: Night - Crossing Lives (1972)and Snow Party and added some nineteen pieces not previously in book form. Eleven years later came Selected Poems, a larger volume than the 1979 one, containing 102 poems as against 88. Onlyone item, " Dawn at St had not been published in book formbefore. The Selected Poems had a greater body of work to select from, for the nineteen eighties had seen publication of The Hunt by Night (1982) and two " interim " collections: Courtyards in (1980) which was subsumed into Hunt by Night, and Antarctica (1985). Practicallyall of the new items in Poems are preservedin the Selected Poems, as are all of the poems from the subsequentbooks, with the exception of one of the pair entitled " Brecht in Svendborg " in Hunt by Night. There was a considerable pruning of the selections from the books that had preceded Poems the representation of Night - Crossing shrank from twenty - four to thirteen, out of a possible twenty - eight; of Lives from twenty - one to seventeen, out of twenty - six; and of The Snow Party from nineteen to eleven, out of twenty - four. The organisation of the books, especiallyof the earlier ones, seems to have had some architectonic significance: for instance, Crossing achieves closure with " The Poets Lie Where They Fell " and " Legacies " the latter a version of testament in ballad form; and the opening poem in The Snow Party, the collection following Night - Crossing (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) (N - C); (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) (L); The Snow Party (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) (TSP);Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1979) (P); Courtyards in (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1981) (CID); The Hunt by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) (THN);Antarctica (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1985) (A); Selected Poems (London: Loughcrew; Oxford: Viking, Gallery, Oxford University Press, 1991) Subsequent references are to these editions, as abbreviated. The numbers given for the representation of poems from the various collections are not to be taken as hard - and - fast for, as will be seen, the identity of some poems is not absolute. IRISH REVIEW Lives, is called " Afterlives " . Neither Poems nor Selected Poems preserves the names of the various collections on which they draw. The phrase " night - crossing " , used as the title of the first collection, was taken from the last line of " The Prisoner " (N - C, p. 32); this poem is called 'Jail Journal " in P, and is omitted from SP. The eponymous poems of Lives and The Party survive in P and SP, but the organisation of the books does not. Along with the omission of poems, and the rewriting of some of those that are retained, the integrity of the groupings represented by the collections is eroded; poems originally from are likely to be found in among pieces from Night - Crossing and so on. The texts that have appeared between book covers display a complex textual history. It is evident from the publishing history that practically all his poems so far have been considered for publication in book form on two or three occasions. Apart from the appearance of individual poems in periodicals and magazines, there have been pamphlets, collections, interim collections, and two selections. This has afforded opportunities for omission, rearrangement, retitling, rewriting, expansion or abridgement of poems. For instance, " J.P. Donleavy's Dublin " (L) is included in Poems as " Dog Days " and in Selected Poems as " Dream Days " . " Day Trip to Donegal " (N - C)appears in P with a stanza dropped and four verbal changes; this is substantively the version in SP, but with two further verbal adjustments. The omission of the stanza is significant in the context of Mahon's work generally, as shall be seen below. Some of the changes made to poems are simply explained. In the Selected Poems the language tends to be modified in the direction of gentility, so that " To scare you shitless " in " Table Talk " p. 27) becomes " To scare your pants off " (SP, p.139); the line " Dog for shit burials " in " A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford " (TSP, p. 36) is changed to " Dog corners for bone burials " (P, p. 79, SP, p. 62);and the expostulatory " What middle - class we are " ( " Afterlives " ,TSP, p. P, p. 57) dwindles to " What middle - class twits we are " (SP, p. Errors are corrected, so that the phrase " bland with rage " in " Rock Music " (THN, p. 25) becomes " blind with rage " (SP, p. 100). Else - where, what seems to be a new error slips in. The reference to " a northernland of rain and murk " ( " Deathand theSun " , A, p. 36) reads . . rain and in SP (p.192); the change loses an end - rhyme with " dark " in this otherwise rhymed poem. had a poem called " Gipsies " ; the next collection, Lives, contained " Gipsies Revisited " . The earlier (and to my mind 2. In an interview in The Supplement, (Fall 1991) Mahon comments that the original line was unacceptable and that the change was prompted by " good manners " (p. 28). KNOW THE ONE? poem is not reprinted, but the later one is found in both and Selected Poems; its title, however, is altered to as the intertextual hint that the subject is being revisited is longer appropriate. In effect, the earlier poem is not simply omitted unwritten, with its title being transferred to the later That's not quite all: Mahon's third collection, The Snow Party, a third poem on the subject, " The Poems it, but this time as the third in a group of pieces identified as Poems after Jaccottet " . " Three Poems by Philippe Jaccottet " appear in in Selected Poems, but the third poem is no longer " The but an altogether different piece, " Words in the Air " . The and nomadic course of these poems is representative. There are two prose - poems in The Snow " A Hermit " and " The Apotheosis of Tins " . Neither of them survives in subsequent selections,although both are included practically word for word in P phrases added to " The Apotheosis of Tins " , the title and one word change in " A Hermit " ). On their second time out, they are not as prose - poems, but in irregular stanzas. The added lineation alters them radically. Line endings privilege phrases such as " terminal democracy " and " the notion of permanence " , and the iso - lation of a sentence such as " We resist your patronage, your reflective leisure " gives it a gnomic significance; in the prose - poems these were part of a continuous discursive flow. Then there is the case of " Going Home " . A poem of this title is included in The Snow Party, and reprinted in Poems Also in Poems is a poem called " The Retum " . In Selected Poems, we find the title " Going Home " , but the poem over which it stands is, word for word, " The Retum " , changed only by the addition of an epigraph from Wuthering Heights. Is this latest version " Going Home " rewritten, or is it " The Return " retitled? In the Introduction to Penguin Book Contemporary Irish Poetry, which Mahon edited with Peter there is the observation that " the word most frequently dwelt on in [the poems anthologised] ... is probably 'home', as if an uncertainty exists as to where that actually In Mahon's own case, that uncertainty extends as to where the very poem written about home is. Mention of The Penguin Book of Contempora y Poetry brings to mind one further example of textual indeterminacy. " Courtyards in Delft " exists in two versions. In the 1981 interim collection of which it is the title poem, it has four stanzas; by the following year, placed as 3. TSP, p. 24. Only through a scrutiny of the preliminary page of " Acknowl - edgements " does one learn that it is a version of Jaccottet's " Les Gitans " . Penguin Book of Contemporary edd. Peter and Mahon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, p. xxii. UNIVERSITY the first poem of The by Night, it has five.The 1990 Selected Poems reverts to four stanzas (witha slight change to the wording of the last two lines). But lest we take this as the definitive version, it should be noted that The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, also published in 1990 and jointly edited byMahon and Peter (the publisher of Courtyards in and the Selected Poems), includes " Courtyards in Delft " - but gives the five - stanza version from The Hunt by Night. The cumulative effect of the evidence is that Mahon's poetry resists fixity. It is in a state of process, without any finished absolute being on offer. This, of course, is a theme of his work. In " Lives " , the multiple possibilities of existence are sampled in a list; the plurality of the title defies any " insolent ontology " . Mahon returns to make changes in his work with a frequency that might be regarded as cavalier or scrupulous, depending on the point of view. He will not leave it alone. If nothing else, the revisions assert hiscontinuing right as the author of the poems. How are we to regard these rewritings?They are not simply an irritation for editors who will have to establish texts for the poems. Clearly, as yet there is no final authorial intention on which to base a choice. The texts of Mahon's poems change from book to book - and I am considering here only the texts printed in collections and 'selected' editions; this is to leave out the periodical and magazine let alone any consider - ation of typescripts, notes and drafts, proofs and revises, all of which would introduce further variant states of the texts. Mahon has not yet become his admirers - or his critics and editors, who look for a fixed and steady state in the text. They - we - cannot plead lack of warning.There is an early poem by Mahon called " The Forger " , which begins: When I sold my fake Vermeers to Goering Nobody knew, nobody guessed The agony, the fanaticism Of working beyond criticism And better than the best. (N - C, p. 20; SP, p. 19) The unnamed imagined speaker is the painter Hans van Meegeren, who, like Mahon, had a particular fondness for the Delft school. Van Meegeren's ploy was to call into being works of art that took on a parallel existence to those comfortably assumed to be genuine, and by that calling into being he called into question notions of originality. We can understand Mahon's being attracted to Van Meegeren, for Mahon too is something of a forger. Most notably, he has forged a Paul Durcan poem, " Poet Arrested for Distributing Daffodils in This does not appear in his books, but there are forgeries 5. " Orpheus Ascending: The poetry of Paul The Irish 1 p. 15. KNOW THE ONE? in the manner of " - such as " A Kensington " The Joycentenary Ode " (SP, p. 145) or " Epitaph for (TSP, p. in each which Mahon's own voice is a parodic swerve towards the idioms of Pound, respectively. Mahon's forgery or imitation is compli - me ntary in intent, an act of homage: as he has stated, " it's the whoare habit of parody and pastiche is of a kind with Mahon's active with adaptation and translation. Such enterprises are the premise that a work can exist in an alternative form, from yet recognisably sharing an identity with the original. result in a poem whose existence is, in a particular sense, The operations performed on Rimbaud's " Le shortened, translated into another language and into other - or on de Nerval show transmutations of language. The notion of an " author's intention " , asenunciated by Greg Bowers, is gently challenged, conceptually if not bibliographi - cally, by a translation which carries the work over into another state. original works - the poems by or de Nerval, the play by the novel by Elizabeth Bowen - become pre - texts for Mahon's. Two poems given some prominence in Mahon's work are the extended verse - letters " Beyond Howth Head " and " The Sea in Winter " .The formerwas first published separately as a pamphlet and then included in Lives, where it stood as the longest and final poem of that book. " The Sea in Winter " occupied a similar position on its first appearance between hard covers, in Poems of which it is the longest poem - apart from " Beyond Howth Head " . Both poemsshare a verse form: rhymed eight - line stanzas of octosyllabics and, as they stand in P, are of equal length with 176 lines each. Both are later included in Selected Poems, but with further revisions and, in the case of " TheSea in Winter " ,shortened by four stanzas. There are at least three versions of " BeyondHowth Head " ,and two of " The Sea in Winter " . Comparison of the L and P texts of " Beyond Howth Head' shows minor changes: the explanatory notes which were a feature of L have disappeared? but the allusiveness which seemed to make them necessary remains: Yeats, Shakespeare, Pope, Spenser, Beckett, Dylan Milton, Raleigh, Chateaubriand, Thoreau, Dr Johnson, Joyce and Norman are among the authors invoked, either explicitly or by the borrowing of a phrase. Some of the invocations are more occluded than others: Spenser's 6. Ibid., p. 15. 7. The notes were also a feature of the earlier pamphlet publication, Beyond Howth (Dublin:Dolmen Press, 1970). IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW " lewde libertie " is in raised commas and glossed in the notes, but we are left to conjecture the reference to Chateaubriand in " outre - tombe " . Whatever the particular significance of each allusion, the presence of such a range of exemplars provides a personal literary analogy to the poem's general theme - thesweep of larger currents, imaged by the wind and tide, through the fractured perception of the immediate. A number of thechanges made in the text bear on place names: the third stanza in L and SP begins " and shakes the radio - sets that play/ from the Twelve Pins to Dublin Bay " ; this becomes " from Carraroe to Dublin Bay " in SP. A line in L, 'from Cheltenham or Inishmaan " becomes " from or from Cushendun " in P and SP. One par - ticularly resonant name gets elided from the last stanza. The earlier version runs: and here I close my Dover Beach scenario,for look! the watch - ful Baily winks beyond Howth Head, My liessnug in bed and the moon rattles the lost stones among the rocks and the strict bones of the drowned as I put out the light on of the (L, p. 38) In P and SP this becomes And here I close; for look, across dark waveswhere bell - buoys dimly toss, the Bailey winks beyond Howth Head and sleepcalls from the silent bed; while the moon dragsher kindred stones among the rocks and the bones of the drowned, and I put out the light onshadowsof the encroaching night. (SP, p. 49) The removal of " Dover Beach " facilitates an easier rhyme to complete the couplet; split rhyme - words at line endings are not infrequent in Mahon's poems, but they tend to be removed in his later versions. The reference to Dover Beach is more textual than geographical. The allusion is to Matthew poem, and the original last stanza reproduces a repertory of images from " Dover Beach " : the moon, the momentary light, the implied presence of a companionable woman, the sweep of the sea on the shoreline - and of course book title is coined from last line, " Where ignorant armies clash by night " . The scenario of " Beyond Howth Head " is, like " Dover Beach " , based on a littoral meditation. poem, with its sense of lost gods and a search for constants, might serve as a pretext in this and much of Mahon's other work. KNOW THE ONE? Sea in Winter " is another littoral meditation, this northern coast. In this poem there is less sense of a " be yon d u , an imagined sense of the Mediterranean where the add re s see , is located: You too have known the curious sense Of working on the circumference - (P, p. 111) revision between P and SP, four stanzas are discarded from different parts of the poem: the fifth, tenth, eighteenth and twentieth. new stanzas are inserted, one of them in place of the dropped stanza; it stands seventeenth in the revised version, with other new stanza ( " Or in the open air tenth. Three the four stanzaic omissions affect the reading of the poem as a whole. The third last stanza of the text mentions Botticelli's " neglecteddrawings " for The Divine Comedy, Diagramsof that paradise Each has his vision of. I trace The futurein a colour - scheme, Colourswescarcely daretodream. (P, p. 114) Two stanzas before that, another omitted passage had also dwelt on the futureand its possibilities: And will the year two thousand find Mestill at a window, pen in hand, Watching long breakerscurl on sand Erosion makesfor ever finer? I hope so, for the sake of these Subsidized serendipities. 'Ghostlier demarcations,keener Sounds' are needed more than ever. (P, p. 113) An earlier omission similarly removes a temporal marker, this time one pointing to thepast: I returnedone year ago I felt like Tonio - slow Tocome to terms with my own past ... (P, p. 111) This removal of perspectives on the past and future, on any temporal " beyond " , is reinforced by the second of the two new stanzas added to the poem in the SP printing. This insists on the here and now of the poem's moment and renounces the glanceaway from the present: But let me never forget the weird haecceity of thisstrange sea - board, the heroismand cowardice REVIEW of livingon the edge of space, or ever again contemptuously refuse its plight;for history ignores those who ignore it, not the ignorant whom it begot. (SP, p. 117) As a result of the changes, this later version of " The Sea in Winter " is more insistent on peripherality. The consolations of history are removed, extending even to the disappearance of the dating Oct appended to the earlier print - ing. Now the poem exists undated; the conjectural glance ahead to another date, " the year two thousand " , is taken away in the revision, as is the faint anticipation of " that paradise/ Each has his vision of " (P, p p 113 - 4). The loss of location and dating means that the poet on the shoreline is in a position, at the circumference but without any defining Places are not defined. In successive versions of different poems, placenames get substituted: Ithaca for Carthage in " Lives " (L, p. 14; P, p. 41, SP, p. for Lake Garda in " A Kensington (A, p. 10; SP, p. 91). He himself has assured us that the garage described in " A Garage in Co. was probably not in Cork at all? The final stanza of that begins " We might be anywhere but are in one place only " (SP, p. an idea echoed twice in " A Lighthouse in Maine " , in itsopeningline and in It might be anywhere - Hokkaido,Normandy, Maine; But it is in Maine. p. 44) In SP the second line reads " Hokkaido, Mayo, Maine " (p. 143);as the poem says,it might be anywhere, and the substitution is of little or no import. Hokkaido, Normandy, Mayo, Maine, are equivalents in the gazetteer of Another poem that occurs in two versions is " The Globe in North Carolina " . In a seven - stanza version it stands as the closing poem of in and, with four inserted stanzas and one substituted, it is similarly positioned in The Hunt by Night. This shows some affinity to the two verse - letters, " Beyond Howth Head " and " The Sea in Winter " . It too is set beside an ocean at night, but embraces a continental, even global scale; it too is a sort of shoreline poem which 8. Cf. Hugh Haughton, " 'Even now there are places where a thought might grow'; Place and Displacement in the Poetry of Mahon " in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of ed. Neil Corcoran (Bridgend, Books, pp. 87 - 120. 9. " Derek Mahon writes Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 115 (Winter 1982). In THN the same wordsoccur but are spread out over an additional penultimate stanza, dropped from the later version. KNOW THE ONE? the great issue or banished gods focusto the presence of a single individual. The earth spins to my finger - tipsand Pauses beneathmy outstretched hand; Whitewater seethes against the green Capes where the continents begin. Warm breezes move the pines and stir The hotdust of the piedmont where Night glides inland From town to town. I love tosee thatsun godown. (CD, p. 28, SP, p. 163) There is an interplay of scale: the world is both itself and a desk - top the speaker is at once in a domestic interior and in inter - planetary space. Out in the void and staring hard At thedim stone where we were reared, Great mother, now the gods have gone, We place our faith in you alone, Inverting the procedures which Knelt us to thingsbeyond our reach. (SP, p. 165) Thereis, as emerges in the penultimate stanza, an implicit addressee in the poem. ...You lie,an ocean to the east, Your limbscomposed, your mind at rest, Asleep in a sunrise whichwill be Your mid - day when it reaches me; And what misgivings I might have About the true importance of The 'merely human' pale before The mere factof your being there. (SP, p. 165) The move towards companionship is ambiguous. Does that last line assert presence or absence? " Being there " might insist onexistence, or it might be pointing to the fact she is " there " , an ocean away, as opposed to " here " . The ambiguity is in part a legacy of the revision. In the earlier version, the two preceding stanzas lead directly to the introduction of this invoked addressee, making a clear transition from the cosmic to the particular. Out in the void and starting hard At thedim stone where we were reared, Great mother, now the gods disperse, We throw ourselves upon your grace, Inverting the procedures which