Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

Ireland’s non-profit RTE Radio 1 recently interviewed poet and translator George Szirtes and Aengus Woods, a philosophy student at the New School, about W.G. Sebald. The eighteen minute conversation is fascinating, intelligent, and much too short. Aengus reads a short section from The Rings of Saturn and George reads briefly from Austerlitz, which made me think again about the differences between reading literature and listening to it. To listen to a good reading (and both of these speakers have wonderful voices) is a seductive experience - perhaps too seductive, I realized, as I found myself building a different narrator to suit each of their voices. But on further reflection I also realized that even when I read silently to myself I am somehow shaping a narrator around my own voice and pronunciation. Curiously, when the program’s host Seán Rocks asks George and Aengus about Sebald’s “voice,” he’s referring to something about Sebald’s style, not Sebald’s voice.

Just as a reminder, if you really want to hear Sebald’s voice you can, thanks to Michael Silverblatt’s program “Bookworm” for radio station KCRW.

…no one could tell where the land ended and the sea began…

Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition contains essays, artwork, and poetry inspired by W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Some of the poems originated in the Waterlog exhibition, components of larger artworks, while several poems appear only in this accompanying monograph.

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Marcus Coates, Britain’s Bitterns c. 1997, 2007

Marcus Coates is a performance artist whose work often deals with the animal world. His piece in Waterlog includes a poem of eleven stanzas called Britain’s Bitterns Circa 1997 Population 11 Breeding Males. Hollis had his original poem translated into a Norfolk dialect before turning it into a song (both versions are included in the book.). As Brian Dillon’s introductory essay Airlocked indicates, visitors to the exhibition heard a recording of Coates singing “a song that seemed to have been carried on the air from the past, with a warning for the future.” A vitrine in the exhibition hall displayed eleven bittern specimens from the natural history collection of Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery.

We were born a’fore tha wind
We taught tha reed ter sway
In all tha fen Oi need no friend
Oi ‘ll hev moi loves ter lay

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Sebald spends most of pages 154-160 in The Rings of Saturn describing how Dunwich, an important port during the Middle Ages, now lies “below the sea, beneath alluvial sand and gravel.”

One cannot say how great was the sense of security which the people of Dunwich derived from the building of [their] fortifications. All we know for certain is that they ultimately proved inadequate. On New Years Eve 1285, a storm tide devastated the lower town and the portside so terribly that for months afterward no one could tell where the land ended and the sea began.

Alec Finlay Life Buoy (Circle Poem), 2006

The Sunken Bell, a project by poet and artist Alec Finlay, metaphorically offers up life buoys to the sunken residents of Dunwich in the form of circular poems painted on directly on the buoys. Waterlog also includes what is - for Finlay, at least - a considerably longer poem of four stanzas - or sixteen lines. Also called The Sunken Bell, it imagines the churches of Dunwich:

St Bartholomew’s, St John’s, St Martin’s, St Michael’s,
all sunk; they say you can hear their bells toll
in the tide. Let’s cast a new bell from molten flame,
sink it deep, before the sea covers the land.

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George Szirtes’ 1999 poem Backwaters: Norfolk Fields (for W.G. Sebald) is reprinted from his book An English Apocalypse (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2001).Its twelve rhymed stanzas describe natural scenes of melancholy beauty and a city that is both a “gerontopolis” of the elderly and, now, somewhat inexplicably, a haven for immigrants (”Surely you/ don’t think this is America …?”)

Think back of the back of beyond “beyond. End
of a line.The sheer ravishing beauty
of it as it runs into the cold swell
of the North Sea, impossible to comprehend.
The harsh home truisms of geometry
that flatten to a simple parallel.

Like all of Szirtes’ poetry, Backwaters is densely imagistic and rich with themes that weave in and out. It’s a complex, multi-voiced piece that I have enjoyed re-reading many times.

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Matthew Hollis’ poem East is (like Szirte’s poem, it was only included in the monograph) echoes Sebald’s themes of the impermanence of the world. Like Sebald, Hollis uses a vocabulary that can verge on the extinct, as can be seen in this extract:

In time, we may refound,
and tell ourselves
we build to build it better. But to walk the strandline,
littered with cuttlebone and uprooted wrack,
is to recognize how little lies within our gift;
how everything else
is in struggle:
the sand sedge clutching for footholds and threads,
the sanderling robbing the tide,
the gabions and groynes shouldering a surge
that cannot begin to be held.

Waterlog (London: Film & Video Umbrella, 2007) can be purchased from the London-based contemporary art book distributor Artdata via Abebooks.

I have run across several books of poetry that acknowledge or reference W.G. Sebald. None of these books seem to me to be truly “under the influence” of Sebald, but in various ways they quote him, refer to his writings, or acknowledge common ground.

Jeffrey Skinner’s volume of poems Salt Water Amnesia (Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2005) begins with epigrams by Fernando Pessoa and Sebald. The source for Sebald’s quotation is not identified, but I assume it is from Austerlitz: “Only gradually did it dawn on me that I would never again be able to write home; in fact, to tell the truth, I do not know if I have grasped it to this day.”

Skinner’s poems often meditate on death, memory, familial alienation, language and place. The first three sentences of the prose poem Sky Caps: “This morning when I looked out the window I was once again surprised by the ocean. That’s what I get for living so long in the Midwest. The absence of salt water: a kind of amnesia.” In many of his poems Skinner has a natural way of free associating and permitting unsettling juxtapositions to arise and send the poem off in unexpected directions, forcing the reader to continually reassess his or her assumptions. To continue with Sky Caps, for example, the poet, fumbling for the word to describe the wind-blown waves (whitecaps), can only come up with the word “skycaps” at first. For a mysterious and exquisite moment, this allows the image of an airport baggage carousel to be superimposed over the poet’s vision of waves ceaselessly coming ashore.

Skinner teaches at the University of Louisville. The first edition of Salt Water Amnesia is a very handsome volume from Ausable Press (named for the Ausable River in the Adirondacks). It is bound in black cloth with green stamping on the spine and bears a dust jacket design from a painting called High and Dry by Gregory D. West that wonderfully captures the juxtapositions which are so crucial to Skinner’s writing. It looks to me as if Ausable routinely uses smart contemporary art on the covers of their poetry books.Take a look at their website.

Srikanth Reddy’s first book of poems, Facts for Visitors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) opens and closes with two poems called Corruption and Corruption (II). According to his Notes at the end of the book, these poems “occasionally adapt, or ‘corrupt,’ language and ideas from St. Augustine’s Confessions, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and Simone Weil’s essay ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’.”

Both of the Corruption poems are brief prose poems – less than half a page long – and each consists of a single restless paragraph. Corruption, for instance, starts on the subject of psalms, moves to the history of ink, then to the phosphorescent qualities of dead cuttlefish, concluding with the brief sentence: “You can read by this light.” If nothing else, Reddy’s interest in arcane knowledge is a very Sebaldian trait.

The first edition of Facts for Visitors was issued in black cloth with iridescent blue lettering on the spine (that simply doesn’t photograph). It appears to have been published without a dust jacket. Reddy currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

In An English Apocalypse, the 2001 book of poems by the Hungarian-born poet and translator Georges Szirtes, is Backwaters: Northfolk Fields, a series of twelve linked sonnets dedicated to Sebald.Backwaters: Northfolk Fields is Szirtes multi-paneled panorama of life in a provincial backwater - “…this far, flat/kingdom with its glum farmers”.

Szirtes’ Norfolk is a place laden with history but with no apparent future, even though it is populated with immigrants from all over the globe - “surely you don’t think this is America…”. It is the home of odd tinkerers, butchers who know your name, the dying “country aristocracy,” and “the old in their gerontopolis.” The overriding presence, though, is the North Sea, “impossible to comprehend.”

The first edition of An English Apocalypse is a paperback with a painting of the same name by his wife Clarissa Upchurch on the front cover. Szirtes is a terrific poet and in a later post I’ll deal with his (and other) elegies to Sebald. He lives in Norwich. Take a look at his elaborate website and blog.