Riffrains of a Jazz-Loving Poet . . . Winter Crossings by Alexis Lykiard.

Admirers of Alexis Lykiard’s signature wit and brio will be rewarded by his new collection, Winter Crossings, whose tonality, they will pleasurably discover, is as likely to be rendered in an elegiac autumnal mood as enlivened by – what we might define as – a jazz-loving poet’s vers libre riffrains.

Lyre/Liar Paradox
‘A thought once uttered is untrue . . .
Don’t say a word.’ With this paradox
Fyodor Tyutchev warns poets who,
like Ragenueau in his rhymes, make
‘lyre’ a homophone for ‘liar’. Thus
Alexis Lykiard in his new collection
admits similar doubts but reshapes
them in defiance of ‘voluble minds’
into new phenomena to reflect his
preference, too, for an ‘art drowned
in a silence incorruptibly sea-green.’
(See Colour Charts.)

Detail: Baker-poet Ragenueau’s pâtissière
with metonym in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Though his characteristic broadsides and satiric counterblasts continue to vie for our engagement as zeitgeisty reminders of a vented spleen, completists of the Lykiard canon will be pleased to recognise new additions to his metrical pioneering of unexpected iconoclastic forms.

In particular, there is a bracing stimulus for students of outré harmonies to be found in a number of fractured syllogistic sonnets in which time-flipping jump-cuts recall freeform jazz motifs, peculiarised by such temporal paradoxes of phrasing and rhyme as when a hinted synthesis makes an appearance before its antithesis is known; cp. Colour Charts and Incubus  . . . the latter, perhaps, should have properly found its place in Lykiard’s earlier, nakedly autobiographical, Skeleton Keys http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-prisoner-of-my-fathers-name-alexis.html

(Doubters of these hesitant interpretations should take note of Alexis’s own view of such speculative jazz-inspired methodologies: ‘I attempted this first consciously in Living Jazz in the late 1980s, seeking a system of musical echoes which seemed specially appropriate there . . . of course one cannot please everyone: a great hero/exemplar Ben Jonson thought ‘Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.’ I do, though, adhere to a metrical/syllabic count for the most part, which I hope tightens the structure providing regularity of beat although that's flexible. I caution against too much analytical thinking, being wary of what I dub the Sonny Rollins syndrome! When a music critic dissected a lengthy solo – I think from the Saxophone Colossus album – bar by bar and note for note, Rollins felt so disconcerted (flattered, too, of course), when his own intentions, choice of phrases, etc were explained to him, he almost seized up, and went away, didn’t play in public or record for several years . . .’)

Thankfully, judging by this latest collection, the fate of Sonny Rollins is not likely to befall Alexis Lykiard.

Agreed, Charon waits for all . . . but one feels a poet shouldn’t rub it in.

And, what's more, if the meaning of the elegiac poet’s latest title, Winter Crossings, is intended as a grim metaphor for his current mood, then surely the Ferryman should be told to jolly well cool his heels by the Styx for a while longer and advise this poet that, rather than contemplating seasickness, he should breathe deeply into one of the baker-poet Ragueneau's paper bags and continue, without delay, to write more of his provocatively discursive and diverting verses for his demanding followers.

See also Alexis’s Schooled for Life http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/01/satirical-and-satyrical-extramural-and.html

Satirical and satyrical, extramural and intramural studies: Alexis Lykiard’s ‘Schooled For Life’.

One’s first impulse on reading Alexis Lykiard’s latest verse collection, Schooled For Life, is to adapt Wilhelm Busch’s famous dictum Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich recht ungeniert and remind ourselves of its possible converse: Wird der Ruf erst mal geehrt, lebt’s sich gaenzlich ungeniert. In other words:

Once your reputation is won, 

You can live a life of fun.

For there is no doubt here that Alexis, having claimed his bardic laurels to join the pantheon, is having a great deal of fun at the expense of a number of cockshies, including settling old scores for slipper-thrashings from the missile-throwing pedagogues and catechising clergymen of his schooldays, as well as taking well-aimed pot-shots at vaunted British poets of a certain vintage and at pundits who have earned his opprobrium, not forgetting his risking lese-majesty with broadsides unleashed to singe the monarch’s kin. 

Bitingly satirical and mischievously satyrical by turns, but always classically-Attically aphoristic (Alexis’s signature grace note), these poems may be enjoyed for their allusiveness just as much as for their neatly turned wit and banter. Witness, then, his chronicling of the privations of prep school life, where the nascent poet was . . .

. . . definitively marked for life.

Marked for Life — despite, we suspect, his schoolboy essays most likely scoring Alpha Plus — was no doubt an alternative title the poet spiked for this verse collection. In fact, such a poignant phrase captures the mood of Alexis’s troubled post-war childhood of exile and assimilation, as he seeks reassurance, recording the past in B-movie monochrome; how he was:

. . . desperate to fit in, own up, and accept my fate . . .

                                          . . . Those times,

elusive yet recurrent, slow to fade away,

aren’t so disturbing to return to — younger days

of ’48, remembered rather as dark grey,

exhaustingly austere, too drab for love or hate.    

A mood he countered, we learn, by his immersion between Chapel and Corps (organ music was a sonorous bore) in eclectic reading matter, including the novels of Charles Kingsley, a boyhood taste shared by a poet of enviable metrical brilliance from an earlier generation, Roy Fuller. In fact, Fuller’s account of reading Hypatia* is to be found in his fine novel of 1959, The Ruined Boys, in which he charts lost innocence much as Alexis does here in his own verses . . . 

New troops of ruined boys fall in now, older soldiers gone . . .

and, of course, both poets appropriate the Master’s foreboding voice of 1930, Auden’s They gave the prizes to the ruined boys. 

Readers of Alexis’s verses have learned to be alert to such allusive ludic nudges to his confraternity of pantheonic heroes born of his omnivorous appetite for the bon mot. When he isn’t head-butting sycophantic laureates and other toadies or savaging ‘Faberized’ fellow-travelling poetasters and flâneurs, this hircine omnivore is — satyr-like — more characteristically in Dionysian pursuit of the teasing evidence of bliss or of the true life [that] goes on forgotten. (A quest for the cleansing truths he admires in fellow poet D J Enright, which prompts Alexis’s penetrating and touching tribute, Master of His Arts.)

It is due to that same omnivorousness that Alexis has absorbed the finesse of favourite precursors in his verses, we are pleased to find, particularly in a suite of poems documenting Alexis’s recollections of prison life as writer/teacher-in-residence in the 1980s, with such redolences as . . . 

. . . before this rapid cloudburst’s done

its worse, made space again for blue.  

. . . high chainlink fence. And so the shutter clicks

to recollect our borrowed time. 

In Captive Audience the observation of barracking inmates is demotically spot on: 

. . . Young dopers relish any whiff of farce . . .

. . . aware

enough to suss that Art’s 

an ancient con, a fancy caper, mere

time-displacing trick. 

These witty poems of reluctant pedagogy where roles are reversed, with pupil turned educationist or even graduating to Brit. Council bratpacker, recall to mind the night classes taught by sometime Movement poet, Laurence Lerner, whose Those girls, those girls . . .  (who imbibe a knowledge they believe to be / objective: not about themselves or me) is still remembered with fondness, an unresolved conundrum of Socratics that also calls to mind the case that the works of pedagogic poets comprise an actual genre in the classification of verse and here, in Alexis Lykiard’s Schooled For Life, there’s a respectable portion of it.

So an English education, both private and state-run — in all its incarnations and incarcerations, extramural and intramural — is Alexis’s overarching theme. Alexis’s atavistic Greekness and his relish for the niceties of English idiom are especially apparent in his first memories of school in 1946, when hors de combat on the . . .

First day at day school, 

in the Morning Break, I broke

my arm . . .

and he becomes even more the Hellenist when invalided out of school . . .

. . . as lapsed Stoic, 

my first words to the doctor

had been “I suffer”.

This canny adaptability of the chameleonic émigré — alert to local colour — is confirmed later when [following a kangaroo court in the dorm] . . .

Holding fast under duress, 

hedonist Greek, I feigned becoming Spartan

A representative example of his narrative voice is his Chaps in Chapel and its elegiac conclusion that hints at immanence when recapturing his awkward past . . .

The Truth did not belong to some religionist 

more likely to ‘All people that on earth do dwell.’

Fate or capricious genes will dole out our few days;

The sole concern is living well. Yet idols cast their spell:

Vainly we look skyward, though shadows need no praise. 

However, this callow crisis of belief apart, it is difficult to quite see why Alexis the Dionysian maker of verses — whose flannel shorts stayed up via serpent-clasp elastic belt — dismisses the motto of his old school as obscure. (Radley: Sicut serpentes, sicut columbae. ‘Be wise as snakes and gentle as doves.’) 

Surely there is no better motto for summoning up the uneasy duality that haunts the exilic poet?

Sicut serpentes, sicut columbae.
‘. . . . I’d learned enough from books, from boys behaving badly,
The time was ripe to take my leave of privilege and Radley.’

For more musings on precocious schoolboy poets (writing in Latin and in Herodotean Greek), see:

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sussex-exodus-of-altisonant-frogs.html

* For the Hypatian Erotica Awards (inspired by Charles Kingsley’s novel) awarded for  High Victorian literary texts teetering on the carnal brink, see:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/hypatian-erotica-awards-high-victorian.html

A Prisoner of My Father’s Name: Alexis Lykiard’s Skeleton Keys

Is there such a thing as an act of vicarious expiation? Apparently, yes, according to Alexis Lykiard in his unsettling suite of poems, Skeleton Keys, and you can be pretty sure that this unburdening of his verses will join other Oedipal confessional texts that Freudians are eager to pin down on the couch. (I’m thinking here of literary analysands such as Ackerley and his My Father and Myself, Gosse and his Father and Son, not forgetting – in terms also of divided familial loyalties – Svetlana Stalin, who in her memoirs laments her fate as a ‘prisoner of my father’s name.’)

Do my initial remarks appear irresponsibly flippant? Not so! Like Athens-born Alexis, I can freely take such an informed line because I, too, throughout my life, have suffered the emotional fallout from the chain reaction that follows when one’s national identity is compromised by ideological guilt, in my case a German-born father who chose British naturalization before the outbreak of WW2, a decision that was to condemn him to isolation from his own family in Vienna for the remainder of his life. A decision, too, that was to condemn me to a future of denied roots.

See my recent post:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html 

The Acropolis, 1941.

So the problem of the ‘deracinated writer’ can be seen to be a leitmotif that’s all too recognisable; what’s more, it induces a disturbing mood that cannot fail to colour one’s writings with morbid darker shades.

And the darker shades of moral ambivalence (or certain amoral half-shadows in WW2 Occupied Greece that recall Genet’s Funeral Rites in Occupied Paris) are surely to be found in such characteristic lines of verse as these, which indict Alexis’s ‘sullenly mendacious’ fascist father, a ‘wartime collaborator’ or, more pragmatically, a ‘survivalist, dealer, smalltime crook’ (who, worse, surely, chatted up and ogled the poet’s girlfriend before she’d been properly introduced!):

Were you whatever you claimed, Daddy, / Resistance hero or unwilling baddy?

The German soldier by my cot, / officers billeted in our house, / weren’t they a strangely friendly lot? . . .
A wireless lay hidden under me – / unlikely story, one more I was told – / so you could tune in to the BBC.
Held by the Gestapo and then released? / I discount these fairy tales I was fed . . .
Each morning trucks collected up the dead. / Dad, I don’t believe a word you said.

For certain things that slippery conman did . . . he tried to make me and my mother pay. 

I grew up unaware my father lied / or that [Mother had] twice been bride* and dupe of such a man.

Despite ample evidence here to tempt the reader to regard the poet, when a child, as standing in a classic Oedipal attitude to his mother and father, Alexis (perhaps unsurprisingly, given his birthplace) calls on another Sophoclean protagonist, Theseus, founder-king of Athens, to guide him as a surrogate father ‘through the labyrinth . . . slowly finding a way out of the darkness. And onward – past the elusive dreams and false memories, all those tortuous politics and outworn myths – until the confrontation with what, in the end, was always instinctively guessed from the beginning.’ A knowledge that ‘these reassessments of family ties serve to underline how truth and lies are relative at last . . .’ (My italics. A consolatory well-meaning resolution that echoes Paul’s counsel to the devout Greeks of Corinth, that though now they may only ‘know in part’ they shall know at the last Reckoning even as also they are known.) 

However, for Alexis, this magnanimity of the Ego is rather sabotaged in the Reckoning by the assertion of the Id in the very last lines of Skeleton Keys, page 52: If it were proved a god existed I might pray / that there should be a showdown and a way / of telling some home truths on Judgement Day.

Notwithstanding my rather glib attempt at a Freudian interpretation (irresistible, in the context of Attic archetypes), readers should not assume they will encounter poems arranged on the page as psychotherapeutic agony columns or, indeed, configured as versified columnar agonies. No. For readers familiar with Alexis’s fluent pen, be assured the characteristic wit and brio and aphoristic squibs are ever present here . . . in superior vintage quantities.

Related themes, therefore, of dispossession, diaspora, disinheritance and grief abound in this collection, for as a teenager Alexis could never ‘guess that legacies might move from bad to worse . . .  Nothing was left me, other than / a clutch of adult toys gone rotten . . .’  and no honour paid his ‘long-lost mother . . .’

Thieves may believe that money talks and sanctifies all power,
but I rate disinheritance as much my finest hour.

Alexis’s epigraph for At Chora Sphakion makes clear the weight of yearnings for lost kin, for as Conrad writes, ‘One’s literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades . . .’

The Bruise of Memory.

Yet in his Thesean labyrinthine search, in the harsh Greek sunlight so many of these poems inhabit, a hard-etched meaningfulness is often mercifully bleached from the poet’s impressions (in neurological psychology, this ‘threshold reverie’ is defined as a ‘liminal state’, a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective conscious state of existing between two different existential planes). As Alexis writes: ‘Partially blinded by . . . light / that catches a knife and traps a tarnished spoon, / . . . Motes, quotes, fragments, / swirl toward meaning and fade all too soon. / Our histories are also drowned in shadow.’

Alexis’s valediction to a venerated Greek poet-academic (Academic Questions) seems to me (in quoting a Hellenophile admirer of the departed) to be describing his own formula for writing in a second language: ‘A foreign poet / writing in English may gain / by handling the language with an old- / fashioned simple correctness and purity.’ 

True. As Alexis writes of a second language, so he writes of an exiled life: ‘If some truths get exiled, or lost, others are left still to pursue . . .’

There can be no doubt that these poems are an expression of the profoundest agonies of personal loss, evidenced by how, as a toddler caught up in a street battle of 1944, he receives ‘the first jolt, the bruise of memory.’  The poet is saved by his mother who flings him to the ground and covers his body with hers.

She’d kept her head, saved us both. So much I saw,
mourning with age, as though I’d never wept before.

Stepping into the dark, Alexis is an intrepid Thesean warrior to the end. He writes:  ‘. . . If you lose one fight / there’s always next time: you might win the war. / Whatever’s stolen from you you must not regret – / each true guerrilla travels swift and light before / the burdened tyrant meets that last sunset.**

Although, I dare to say, I have interpreted many of these verses with reference to classic Oedipal complexities, you will be encouraged by an interesting solacing conclusion that arises from these ruminations in that, in a certain sense, one kills one’s tyrannical father when one outshines him; ask Mozart Snr, a composer whose own music died when his young son’s musical talents became evident.

So let there be no doubt. Alexis Lykiard’s superb musicality as a poet is unmistakeably evident here.

It follows, then, that I propose we describe a new thing: a poem as a substitutionary votive offering to provide atonement for familial guilt. And, as it turns out, both writer and reader are beneficiaries of this obligatory ritual of sacrifice, which has no rules of conduct other than conformity to poetic best practice and an atavistic memory of a primal crime. I see no contradictions in this thought, for – lest we forget – before Original Sin, in the beginning, there was the Word.

*To the many approaches to reading Alexis’s own personal Greek mythos we might add the example of the Telemachy of Homer’s Odyssey, since Telemachus in his journeyings in search of his father, Odysseus, can be seen to resemble all conflicted writers (Ackerley, Gosse, et al.) who attempt to both mythologize and demystify their elusive fathers in quests that must navigate the pitfalls of false memory and the lures of hagiography. More than this, mention of Alexis’s mother who had twice been bride (to the same man) recalls the rewooing of Penelope by her disguised husband on his return to Ithica from his epic voyages. On reflection, then, despite the temptation to pursue recognizable psychoanalytic symbolization, I believe the rites of passage undergone by Telemachus, as filial protector of his mother in the absence of a legendary father, more closely mirror the restlessly questing mood of Skeleton Keys than any Freudian interpretation dependent on classical archetypes. 

**Only lately have I learned that, beyond the Thesean thread leading us into Alexis's labyrinth, there is an Oedipal thread that is not fully unravelled for the questing reader. I refer to ‘that last sunset’, which as the poet makes clear, in a personal note to me, refers to ‘the 1961 Robert Aldrich film The Last Sunset, a very odd indeed Oedipal western!’ An Oedipal western? Correct. The screenplay is by the celebrated Dalton Trumbo, and the movie stars Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson and Carol Lynley. And, yes, this Freudian drama, like Alexis’s own family history, is as convoluted as any Greek tragedy.

By Grand Satyr Stanzas I Sat Down and Read.

That Alexis Lykiard, in his rousing new poetry collection, Getting On, name-checks tragic lovers George Barker and Elizabeth Smart (The Biters Bit) is a not wholly unintended evocation of a general mood, it seems to me, when considering the whole complex web of personal thematic strands that are braided to make this book of verses that often chart his perplexing amours.

As to the combative yet tender personas of the poet, there are many. Take his streetfighter stance. One starts to think of the cojones of Norman Mailer or Vernon Scannell, both professional bruisers with LOVE tattooed on their knuckles when the gloves were off. As to the sophistication of the refined demotic, other eminent comparators spring to mind: Roy Fuller (‘confused senescence’ definitely has Fullerian resonances from his late manner), likewise Gavin Ewart at his most pithy, or Thomas Blackburn, say, at his arctic iciest, or, indeed, the cruel mockery of Edward Pygge (and his sister Edwina) in their many guises as scourges of the literati.

So Alexis’s own gold standard for a poem is as challenging as any the dedicated connoisseur might encounter, even among the ‘Faberized’ poets disdained so pitilessly on page 72. (‘Tall story man or Thirties schoolboy-pretender.’ You supply the rhyming couplet.) It’s an altogether daunting benchmark, then, he has set himself. Because I notice Alexis turns to Empson to define his model for vitality in the ‘singing line’ of economic yet memorable verse: ‘…narrative, wit, musicality …’ all of which he exhibits in poems of considerable range and ambition. Yet, despite the caustic social observation, the biting satire, the skewering of media show-offs and the ‘brilliant frauds’ of the so-called fine-art market of our times, I personally cleave to those poems where musicality and thought are yoked together in felicitous counterpoints. And here one is reminded of the masterly crisp lyrics James Agee composed for Candide … Oh! Where was Lykiard in Leonard Bernstein’s hour of greatest need! 

I mention Agee and Empson as models for the diction of almost Nietzschean aphoristic compression that can turn humdrum matter into highest carat gems. Well, certainly Lykiard is their match. Neat specimens of his dry wit? ‘So life turns, page by page,/Toward whatever solution will mark the end of age.’ ‘John Addington Symonds … this handsome scholarly invert/became fully aware how for him and s-/ome others, the male form of Sin hurt.’ ‘All/that was valued formerly seems vain pretence./Those joys barely recalled, the rites of innocence/in gathered lust, prime juice desired and felt,/pale by stark contrast with the card that age has dealt.’

But don’t let me take this poet at his own worth, because he suggests his poems are to be measured by poets whose eminence is beyond question: ‘With Roy Fuller, Enright, Empson, could they rally to attack/our increasing stacks of balderdash, this century’s bric-à-brac?/Should we ignore, or acknowledge, a ghostly shadow on blue plaque?/Are true, irascible talents required to keep Poets on track?’ 

Well, these masters are, alas, no longer with us to judge Getting On, yet I am sure their praise would have been unstinting. I am certain, too, they would have relished this antepenultimate Age of Man … the age so aptly expressed by Picasso when he etched himself as an ancient satyriatic monkey contemplating his naked muse. And take special note, too, of Lykiard’s Poets Cornered segment of this collection; the venom he reserves for certain overweening versifiers among us is in so many cases wholly deserved. 

When the invective hits the fan Alexis takes no prisoners. For readers with strong stomachs and a taste for Rabelaisian scatology there is a groaning table of pungent scurrility here.

To be sure Lykiard invites you to share a bitter, self-lacerating mood of the tempo di profanazione – the time of desecration described by Moravia in his late novel, La vita interiore – but it’s also an exhilarating mood of ‘irascible’ mischievousness, heedless of any comebacks. In other words, the anecdotage of a randy goatage … but here with the wit, brio and the raw honesty of essaying to recall ‘those rites of innocence in gathered lust’, which, as Alexis proves, have not yet faded from view and sense but can be restored by the vitality and sparkling intelligence of his verse.



GETTING ON
Poems by Alexis Lykiard
£9.99
ISBN: 978 1 907356 46 9
Shoestring Press
http://www.shoestring-press.com/2012/04/getting-on/