The Sign of Four, the City In My Head and the Map of Poetry

John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Strand, 1899.


I recently re-read The Sign of Four (or The Sign of the Four) by Arthur Conan Doyle - both the second Sherlock Holmes novel, and the second Sherlock Holmes story ever written (in 1890), before the short stories that made Holmes and Doyle really famous.

The Sign of Four has often (not always) been my favourite of the four Sherlock Holmes novels. Since I moved to London, it has taken on more (or other) significances, and especially since I moved to south London over five years ago. The Sign of Four is a real London book and a great deal of it happens in south London - near where I live, no less. There are key scenes which occur around Nine Elms and Millbank, and when I lived in Stockwell (by Larkhall Park) I was quite delighted by this moment:


Sherlock Holmes was never at fault, however, and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets.

"Rochester Row," said he. "Now Vincent Square. Now we come out on the Vauxhall Bridge Road. We are making for the Surrey side, apparently. Yes, I thought so. Now we are on the bridge. You can catch glimpses of the river."

We did indeed get a fleeting view of a stretch of the Thames with the lamps shining upon the broad, silent water; but our cab dashed on, and was soon involved in a labyrinth of streets upon the other side.

"Wordsworth Road," said my companion. "Priory Road. Lark Hall Lane. Stockwell Place. Robert Street. Cold Harbour Lane. Our quest does not appear to take us to very fashionable regions."


For a couple of  years I was often in the vicinity of Coldharbour Lane, and it's still not a very fashionable region. I think of The Sign of Four every single time I find myself down there. Such is the power of literature at an impressionable age.

Other scenes take place around Norwood. Conan Doyle lived there for a time, but apparently the evidence suggests that he did not know London as well as you might conclude from the Holmes stories, and that he may have relied quite heavily on maps. This actually makes sense, and it works quite well for the reader. There are some extraordinary set-pieces in the Holmes stories - in The Sign of Four, one that comes to mind is this foggy description on the Strand:


Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light, - sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.


There is also a very wonderful pursuit along the Thames, among other scenes. I love the south-London-ness of this book, the sense of staying in the "great cesspool" but moving into something wild and vast - north-of-the-river folk still see south London in this way. A lot of the dark deeds of the Holmes tales take place in south London or the southern outskirts of London.

There is something about the "map" quality of The Sign of Four, and the way it careers around London, which I associate very strongly with my own perceptions of the city. I feel like I carry London in my head - a map, but more than a map. In certain areas, it's as though I can see all the layers superimposed at once - past, present and future times, stories, songs, and more. And wherever I am in London, I feel an awareness quivering from other parts of the city - places I know, people I care about, all moving around and past and through each other. The way Doyle wrote, in map-speak combined with dramatic set-pieces, allows readers to fill in the gaps with their own London. I did this with his stories before I ever visited London, and I have continued to do so ever since, with the real London and with my own perceptions of it from the past and present, all layered and still present to each other.

Does this have a relevance to poetry? Well, I think that poetry is a certain kind of free-association combined with great precision, and to me there is something very maplike about it. The connections which turn into the flashpoints of poems are like transport links and connections around the city, often moving with speed to very disparate parts of London. And the map of any given poem - in physical space, emotional space, and time - builds and superimposes like the palimpsest of London in my head.

And for anyone who's stuck with me to the end of this entry - are there poems to accompany these thoughts? I had thought that this might be a moment to discuss London poems, but instead two great poems about maps and water (on one level, and among other things) came to mind. I have linked to them below. Maps and water are actually both very important to The Sign of Four, so this is appropriate. Beyond that, perhaps you will have to try and trace my train of thought with the clues I have left, and if you can do that, I congratulate you, my dear Watson.

DIVING INTO THE WRECK (Adrienne Rich)

MAPPING THE DELTA (George Szirtes) 

The Saison Poetry Library Open Day: Poetry in Performance

With permission of The Saison Poetry Library


A week ago I went to this year's Open Day for the Saison Poetry Library at London's Southbank.

The theme was Poetry in Performance, and the organisers brought together some fascinating strands of that theme: not just the concept of poetry readings, but permutations such as poetry as music (focusing on the work of Leonard Cohen), historic recordings of Tennyson and Browning (here referred to as "The Victorians: Those Gods of Slam"), automatic writing, books and poetry as art, actors reading poems...the list goes on.

The displays made a great space for browsing, leafing, listening and enjoying. I signed the Seamus Heaney book of condolences, pored over a wonderful-looking long poem from 1981 called Fox Running by Ken Smith, and marvelled at the very crackly recording of Tennyson reading 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. Although no recordings of Gerard Manley Hopkins were ever made, librarian Chris McCabe pointed out in his writeup: "Hopkins' art was led by his instinct and an inversely atavistic desire to listen to what poetry from the future might sound like. Through listening to himself he was expressing all that he strongly felt that poetry could be." In the section on Comedian Poets, digital co-ordinator Chrissy Williams noted: "It's often prompted by deliberately boisterous or comical performers, but we've heard distinguished poet Geoffrey Hill's banter between poems drawing hearty laughter in the past."

There was also a very interesting section on the ghazal, the great Persian/Arabic/Indian form, which has arrived in the West through writers such as Adrienne Rich, W S Merwin, Marilyn Hacker and Mimi Khalvati, and stayed closer to its origins in the work of the great twentieth-century Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Finally, I saw collections and books which pushed the poetry-as-visual-art to its utmost limits, bringing in daring reflections on censorship and design.

In the evening, there were readings by Claire Crowther, Charlotte Higgins and Linus Slug: Insect Librarian, all of which were adventurous with the poetry-in-performance concept, whether sonically, or in terms of theme or style.

I'm already looking forward to next year's Open Day. Here are a few photos:

 

Ron King, ‘Alphabeta Concertina’ (Circle Press, 2007), with permission of The Saison Poetry Library

Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck, ‘Dust to Dust’ (Ambeck, 2012), with permission of The Saison Poetry Library

 

 

With permission of The Saison Poetry Library

"Close My Eyes and I'm a Vessel": Water Poems for National Poetry Day

Snow Storm, JMW Turner, exhibited 1842. Tate Britain.



It is once again National Poetry Day in the UK, and this year's theme is 'Water'.

I wanted to share three of my favourite water-based poems: 'Diving Into the Wreck' by Adrienne Rich, 'The Sea Is History' by Derek Walcott, and 'Rivers Into Seas' by Lynda Hull. It may not come as a huge surprise to those who know me that all of these water-based poems are also sea-based.


DIVING INTO THE WRECK (Adrienne Rich)


THE SEA IS HISTORY (Derek Walcott)


RIVERS INTO SEAS (Lynda Hull)


Enjoy.

Adrienne Rich's 'I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus': "A Woman With a Certain Mission"

Adrienne Rich, one of the outstanding American poets of the twentieth century and a feminist icon, recently died in California at the age of 82. Many bloggers posted tributes and many articles appeared, but I decided to hold off until I found a poem that I wanted to write a little bit about. I admire what I have read of Rich's work, but that has not been a great deal, so far. 'Diving Into the Wreck', about myth and psychological exploration and identity, is an amazing poem.

I came across this poem, 'I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus', while looking through articles on Rich and collections of poems, and it really made an impact on me. The Poetry Archive also has a recording of her reading the poem.


I DREAM I'M THE DEATH OF ORPHEUS (Adrienne Rich)


To give the mythological context (which I wasn't very familiar with, so apologies to those who are), Orpheus (of Orpheus and Euridyce fame) died at the hands of the Maenads, frenzied female worshipers of Dionysus. The stories seem to vary, saying that he angered the Maenads by turning from the exclusive worship of Dionysus, or that he had forsaken the love of women after the death of Eurydice. In any case, the story has obvious totemic power in turning the tables on traditional male oppression of women. The above painting is by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Waterhouse, of the discovery of Orpheus's head by nymphs after his death. Ursula Le Guin has also written an interesting poem, 'The Maenads'.

In 'I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus', Rich invokes both mythology and modernity; her Maenad figure is driving the poet's body in a black Rolls-Royce, and she has "contacts among Hell's Angels". The language suggests that this woman is caught in a spiral of both power and uncertainty; she certainly feels her own strength, "in the prime of life", but she repeats such phrases as though to reassure herself. The figure of the male poet seems like something she has killed within herself, in "these underground streets", to set herself free, but will she resurrect him "to walk backward against the wind/on the wrong side of the mirror"? What will destroy her and what will liberate her? This questions all arise through an edgy, paranoid night-time vision, the Maenads of ancient Greece meeting something like the Chicago Mob.

Adrienne Rich was a great poet and will be much missed.