Back to 'Community'

I am making my way into Matthew Francis' book about W.S.Graham, managing to reach the end of the section on community this afternoon (after collapsing into bed for several hours, insisting my husband take the children out for a while). Francis explains Graham's need to write as a drive to recover the community that he deliberately removed himself from. I am fascinated by the presence of the (m)other that Francis draws out of Graham's poems and his depiction of language as feminine, as the muse. Francis draws parallels with other works inspired 'lost' working class childhoods, including classics by Hoggart and Raymond Williams. I also find myself picking up Steedman (Landscape for a Good Woman) and flicking through the Anat Hecht Chapter of 'Home Possessions' (Daniel Miller ed), which is about a woman collecting in order to remember a childhood in the Abbeyhill area of Edinburgh:

The buildings' five stairs of tenements were located in the centre of what was
locally known as the 'Wee World'.

The naming of the 'Wee World' is so evocative of everything Francis is drawing together: the lost, ideal community with clearly defined boundaries with the Mother at its centre. Hecht's subject 'Nan' is removed from this community first by evacuation during the war and then permanently by the death of her Mother a few months later. Nan's life seems to have been about recapturing and preserving the early memories before her Mother's death. This yearning to locate in the space of the lost Mother is present in Graham's work and is the central theme of Bracha L. Ettinger's psycohanalysis.

Language and Community

I've wanted to read Where the People Are: Language and Community in the poetry of W.S.Graham by Matthew Francis for a while. It arrived this morning and I've managed to read the first chapter (while nursing a sick baby). Language and community being very much 'my thing', I approach this with enthusiasm. However I am aware that I have quite worked through (or worked up) ideas about what poetry is and what it does. I find myself hoping that I don't bring to many preconceptions to the reading of this. Francis sees Graham's poetry as occupying a stance similar to Derrida's; there is an awareness that the act of writing creates a absence and distance in time and space. The act of writing about writing in a poem, Francis argues, is itself an act of deconstruction. (I am guessing that the trace of Graham's community of origin in his writing will be important in Francis' analysis.)

Francis illustrates the pain of separation in the poems, but resists the Lacanian spin that I dive into immediately; that Graham's poetry illustrates the experience of loss in language and an attempt to recover the lost object through the act of writing. Towards the end of the chapter Francis writes of Graham's writing as seeking control and love (isn't it true for everyone?). This feeds my fascination for Winnicott's theories about art forms as transitional objects; the poet experimenting with the 'not me' - forming relationships beyond the self- through poetry. Oh dear. Preconceptions alive and well.