William Fuller: Watchword
(Flood Editions, Chicago, 2006; paperback, 67pp, $12.95; isbn 0-9746902-9-5)

Included with this review copy, and a letter detailing Mr Fuller's previous books and occupation, is a postcard. It is of Mr Fuller at his desk. Just visible in the foreground is a sign. It reads:

WILLIAM R. FULLER CHIEF FIDUCIARY OFFICER

His position, like the name of the firm he works for, is plastered all over the press release too.

This press release, and the postcard, and the letter, annoyed me; maybe unjustly. But I'm going to have a teensy rant anyway: The inference that "I get out there and earn a (freaking) living while you other guys, you'd probably eat your children if it meant you could write as good as me. Well guess what? I don't eat children. And I certainly wouldn't eat yours. I hold down a decent job and write better poems than you do." really grates.

Maybe that's paranoid. Damn it, it is paranoid. And, to be fair to the man, his poems often revolve around the workplace. But, and I mean, BUT, I hope I'd have worked that out without the postcard, and the letter, and the blurb, and the threatening phone-calls. Yes, I made that last bit up. I swear it's true about the postcard though. I really, really hope that was a joke. Maybe it's all meant to be ironic.

On the subject of presentation and promotion I was, on the whole, really impressed with Fuller's previous collection, Sadly. Until Watchword it was the only one of his books I'd read. It is beautifully produced, like Watchword, and the poems, especially the prose poems, do everything they should: they're allusive without being frustratingly tangential and, when it is firing on all cylinders, Fuller's matter-of-fact-ness and deadpan humour is reassuringly quick to re-direct miscreant flights of fancy and/or pretension, sometimes guiding them down with the verbal equivalent to a couple of fighter planes and muted threats of violence:

The day was overgrown, the wood was wet and rotten. At the water's edge geese muscled ducks aside. Then we heard the sound of the falls. Though our view did not advance beyond the previous view, neither was it simply a restatement; it was more low down.

('I went to the River' Sadly)

I like that: it is falutin' at exactly the right height.

But to my mind Sadly is a you-win-some-you-lose-some book. Occasionally the irony misfires, or the gaps in sense are just too subjective and too big to fill. That said, the good bits definitely outweigh the bad bits, which, I confess, I had largely forgotten about until I went back to it while reading Watchword. So is Watchword better?

The short answer is: yes, much. The elliptical nature of Fuller's poems, much vaunted on the back cover of Sadly, is ideally suited to the theme and variations on verbal dexterity/ ambiguity of Watchword.

But let's start at the beginning. Watchword is, by any standards bar those of Jeremy Prynne, who is rumoured to eat Northern Trust Company fiduciary officers for breakfast and spit the remains at verbs and adjectives during poetry readings, a difficult book. You have to do the time. After the riddle-like title poem (be patient: you can have a bit in a minute), it begins:

Head on shoulder, Pamphilus, fascinated by muttering?

('Ode at Work')

This first sentence sums up, pretty much exactly, how I felt when I got to the end of it. Maybe that's the idea. "Who the hell is Pamphilus?" many, especially non-poetry-reading types (but what are they doing here?) and/ or non-theologians, will wonder. Well, this is for you: Pamphilus was a saint who transcribed the works of Origen and wrote an apologia while in prison waiting to be martyred. Thank heavens for Google and the Vatican web-site.

Hang on though: was Origen famous for muttering; is it wordplay on 'martyring'? Whatever, this first line is a bit too clever to be affective and could put Fuller first-timers off if, as my copy does every time, the book happens to fall open on this page. I know because I've tried pressing Watchword on my friends. And I confess that, initially, it put me off too.

This is a real shame: in many ways 'Ode at Work' shows exactly what the prose poem is capable of when it flexes its intellectual muscles. It sustains a quizzical, metaphysical (meta almost everything) tone over a good page-and-a-half and engages not only the senses but also that part at the edge of the brain that normally does its best to wander off during longer poems. The poem, its title a pun, compels because it doesn't and cannot let its subject-matter off the hook, since that subject-matter is the responsibility inherent in being a user/ consumer of language (in this case poetic and commercial), and its potential for misuse and appropriation.

Tell me whether seeing consists in opening and turning the eyes? Welcome to town, reviling words. Your laws shall not reach to oppress us any longer.

('Ode at work')

'Ode at Work' also sets out some of the sub-themes that undercut Watchword. In a nutshell, and how many lawyers haven't relied on nutshells in their time, these are: fragmentation; consequent opposition; guile; sales; shame; guilt; greed; the law (earthly and cosmic); the interaction of the meta with the physical. It also sets off the alarm suggested in the book's title: words lie; they can be conjured with, and their power does not depend on whether a truth or a lie is explicit, a cliché, or even particularly articulate. As the title poem says:

What a curious world means something else when we actually
sit down to study it.

('Watchword')

'Ode at Work' is an exciting prose poem, beautifully paced and placed, blighted for me on first reading by what seemed to be an unnecessary and off-putting highbrow cultural reference.

But I'm not doing my job if I leave it at that. In fact I think there's probably a very good reason why Pamphilus is invoked towards the beginning of Watchword: he was a ghost writer for Origen after all, and we probably won't ever know exactly what Origen thought because of 'The Pamphilus Filter' (thriller anyone?), which is a good metaphor for the concerns of this book. It's just that on first opening Watchword, as I did, on 'Ode at Work', being confronted by Pamphilus is really irritating. This is frustrating as the rest of the prose poem is exact, exacting, and slyly funny:

And I will speak for you without compensation. And together we will pathetically enumerate. And homage to the great red dragon. And thanks to our partners in attrition management. And take this bloodstained broadsheet. And do I smell bacon? For the sun makes everything crystal-clear. For covetousness is all.

('Ode at Work')

What a great ending. After the questions piled on questions, beginning with a saint fascinated by muttering and continuing by burrowing through multilayered ideologies of the workplace via the pervasiveness of words that remain unsaid, to come to a decisive, albeit ironic, conclusion is like a power cut in the last ten minutes of Miss Marple. At first it's awful. Then it's great: you happen to have the book to hand, which turns out to be better than the TV version because Margaret Rutherford was cosy but just not quite sharp enough for the role. You need a torch of course, as it's a winter afternoon (and perhaps a smoking gun if you want to get into the spirit of things), but the rest of Watchword provides that torch, illuminating (yet never shooting down) the ideas flushed under cover of language-darkness in the title poem and 'Ode at Work'. So, all is well. But I digress.

Watchword is divided into 3 sections. Each section except the last – a longish stand-alone poem called 'middleless' – is made up of (a) prose poems in the style of 'Ode to Work' and (b) poems that seem to owe quite a lot, in their music and verbal pile-ups, to the sort of thing Tom Raworth was writing in the mid-to-late seventies. As a fan of Tom Raworth, and a devotee of the prose poem, this mix suits me very well thanks.

On a technical note, capitals and often punctuation are pretty much out of the window in these (b) poems; not exactly ground-breaking I know, but worth pointing out as they are retained in most of the prose poems (the juxtaposition works well):

them
          tremble where they were
similar to paste pits cans jars

('The Work of the Beast')

This lack of clarity, like the retention or rejection of punctuation and capitalization, doesn't feel gimmicky. Instead it acts as a dissociating, disorienting device; it forces you, almost simultaneously, to keep your distance from word-meanings, pelting through headlong, and to stop, get involved, and think about the mechanics of language. Fuller's point seems to be that persuasion is often couriered by precisely the bits of language you think you're not noticing when reading at speed. In addition, the opening of this poem reminds me of J. H. Prynne; I quite like associating Prynne with the beast of the apocalypse, in an affectionate way.

My favourite poem in the book might be 'Traherne', which ends the first section. Here, certain nouns are given capital letters. This causes each of them to read as if pregnant with the opening paragraph of a different and beautiful illuminated manuscript:

Rivers Springs Trees Meadows
in my mind's eye Clouds Air

Light Rain seemed tending
and gliding toward poles…

('Traherne')

Isn't there part of you that wants to write exactly like that? Even if not you have to admit 'seemed tending/ and gliding' is magical, the lazy syllables oiling into ambiguity. It passes the shiver test even if you read it ten times over. And the technique is clever too: taking shards from Traherne's poems, reordering ideas and words central to his beatific vision, Fuller turns them to an opposite purpose whilst retaining a sense of the primacy of beauty integral to Traherne's slippery brand of neo-Pagan Christianity.

This 'rendition' of words (to coin a phrase) and modes of discourse, or something close enough to them to be almost indistinguishable to a casual reader, is at the heart of Watchword. It explains how Fuller, when not employing ironic tactics, as here:

Some prefer that minds and things start over again, abstracted from the need for self-defence, or that sacred and venerable threats maintain no direct connection to the added element simply understood as drinking.

('The Chapter of the Sheep')

gets away with writing in an almost tragic mode. To risk a truism, he is writing about a real tragedy: the potentially fatal flaw in language is also the thing that drives poetry and makes it possible.

 

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