Sitcom | Chapbook | Vol LII, Keyways: Unlocking Owen Sheers' Skirrid Hill by Phil Brown

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Vol LII, Keyways: Unlocking Owen Sheers' Skirrid Hill

Phil Brown (18.5.11)

A commentary on every poem in Owen Sheers’ Skirrid Hill written with revision for A-Level exams in mind and geared towards students of A-Level English Literature. This commentary is meant to enhance the reader’s understanding of some of the ideas in Sheers’ poetry. It is also entirely free.



APPENDICES TO THE COMMENTARY


Appendix I - Lyrics to Susan’s House by Eels

Going over to Susan's House, wandering south down Baxter Street
Nothing hiding behind this picket fence
There's a crazy old woman smashing bottles on the sidewalk where her house burned down two years ago
People say that back then, she really wasn't that crazy

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, I can't be alone tonight

Down by the Doughnut Prince, a 15-year-old boy lies on the sidewalk with a bullet in his forehead
In a final act of indignity, the paramedics take off all his clothes for the whole world to see while they put him in the bag
Meanwhile, an old couple argues inside the 'Queen Bee', the sick fluorescent light shimmering on their skin

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, she's gonna make it right

Take a left down Echo Park
A kid asks do I want some crack
TV sets are spewing Baywatch
Through the windows into black

Here comes a girl with long brown hair, who can't be more than seventeen
She sucks on a red popsicle as she pushes a baby girl in a pink carriage
And I'm thinking, 'That must be her sister. That must be her sister, right?'
They go into the seven-eleven and I keep walking, and I keep walking

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, I can't be alone tonight
Going over to Susan's House

Appendix II – To Speak of Woe That is Marriage by Robert Lowell

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

—Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

free-lancing out along the razor's edge.

This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .

It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—

whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.

My only thought is how to keep alive.

What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie

ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .

Gored by the climacteric of his want,

he stalls above me like an elephant."

Appendix III - Some Notes from AQA

Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers

Skirrid Hill continues to attract an enthusiastic if still surprisingly small following with Sheers vigorous style clearly able to engage and challenge. His anthology presents a reflective, careful reader with many themes that align with the struggle for identity in ways that can be visceral as well as delicate, broad as well as extremely personal. It is important to a successful study of the anthology that centre’s do not pigeon-hole Sheers as simply a nationalistic poet who looks inwards to issues of Welsh identity but one is looking outwards too, taking in those moments in life which can seem paradoxical and bizarre, addressing moments where there is a complex interfacing of life, death and relationships.

Despite his growing published work across all the genres, Sheers remains a relatively enigmatic, restless poet clearly embarked upon a journey of discovery and about whom, significantly fewer biographical studies have yet been made. This works to candidates’ advantage because their focus more clearly rests on the language, form and structure of his verse rather than on the man himself. That said, candidates this time were keener to explore the question that invited a measured, argued response to a general theme rather than the one that began with a focus on a specific poem and invited validation and repudiation of its centrality. A little disappointingly, in response to either poem, some candidates offered little by the way of balanced debate and saw the question as a way of simply explaining the content of two or three poems, broadly linked to a theme.

Question 6

This was by far the more popular of the questions on Scarred Hill, offering candidates the opportunity to explore their own choice of poems from this broadly diverse collection. Whilst there were many strong responses, one examiner wrote that some candidates who had been offered ‘a gift of a question’ then ‘proceeded with ingratitude and uncertainty, attempting to explore different themes in a perfunctory, generalised counter-argument’ or they ‘wallowed in a morass of loss’ without ever really explaining what had been lost and with what consequences.

Perhaps these candidates were truly ‘spoilt for choice’ and could not arrive at satisfactory evaluative comments because of this. The poems that lent themselves most readily to the argument were Border Country, Mametz Wood, Y Gaer, The Hill Fort, Marking Time and Amazon although the poem that received most attention from candidates, interestingly, was Keyways. Counter-arguments usually cited examples of more celebratory poems such as The Equation, inheritance or Stitch in Time with better responses developing insightful comment or challenging the idea of loss at all.

Certain confident candidates were able to convince that Sheers depiction of loss really to revealed what was gained in terms of experience, understanding of self, others and the world. There was evidence that some candidates were trying to shape responses to past papers to fit the requirements of this year’s question with inevitable loss of focus. To this effect some candidates offered plenty of examples of Sheers’ treatment of separations suggesting either directly or by inference that separation equated to loss. Those who were able to suggest in their extension or counter-arguments that Sheers also dealt with moments of elision, repair and coming-together, were to be commended, especially where these moments were expertly pinpointed, analyzed and evaluated.

Successful candidates:

•         Chose highly appropriate poems for the exploration of Sheers’ treatment of loss and its effects or chose equally appropriate poems to validate their counter-argument

•         Analysed Sheers’ choices of form, structure and language

•         Explored a wealth of Sheers’ poetic techniques and articulated his intent in order to create interesting lines of argument and counter-argument

Less successful candidates:

•         Simply offered broad agreement with the statement and struggled to even illustrate loss effectively

•         Ignored the question’s key words

•         Made broad generalisations about the effects produced by Sheers’ choice of form, structure and language often asserting rather than illustrating their points

Question 7

This question had relatively few takers despite the comparatively comforting prospect of exploring a superficially straightforward poem. Interestingly too, there were some responses that neglected the punning title, missing an obvious way into Sheers’ musings on relationships between father and son and their relationship with their environment. Most problematic, however, was the interpretation of the phrase ‘key to this collection’.

The metaphor of the key should suggest an unlocking of something or a focus on some feature so fundamental as to be indispensible to a clear understanding of the anthology. Few such insightful readings were apparent with candidates, instead, suggesting typicality of theme, technique, intent or features. In some respects the named poem is a testament to the permanence of life despite its frailty and smallness, set against a backdrop of the awesome grandeur of natural world.

To validate the idea of ‘key’, links needed to be made to the rest of the collection and here it was obvious that some candidates had a very hazy knowledge of the structure and content of the collection as a whole. The named poems’ central themes of identity, contrasts, endurance, loss and the natural world should have been fundamental to a balanced argument and counter-argument, where the choice of at least one suitable substitute ‘key’ poem should have been possible.

Successful candidates:

•         Produced a balanced debate which considered, developed and agreed or refuted the idea that the named poem is the key to this collection in a thoughtful, engaged, incisive manner

•         Linked Farther to a range of other relevant poems and/or made an arresting case for another poem being the key

•         Explored Sheers’ form, structure and language choice with confidence always citing examples relevantly and with analytical significance.

Less successful candidates:

•         Simply dismissed the idea that Farther could be the key to the collection

•         Wrote basic accounts of the poem and/or others in the collection, with little relevant or developed reference to form, structure and language choice

•         Were unable to move beyond generalisations and assertions.

Appendix IV - Past Questions

Themes:

Separation between men and women

Striking and unusual imagery

Loss

Difficult Issues

Key Poems:

Y Gaer and The Hill

Border Country

Farther

Skirrid Fawr (fitting conclusion)

Appendix V - Possible Themes and Patterns:

Man against nature -Domestication

Masculinity

Death

Generation gaps

Modernisation and Americanisation

Playing roles (psychology?)

Spines?

Relationships

Everything is like writing

Magic

The use of titles to challenge or refute the content - sometimes as part of the poem

Titles often include puns; the duality of meaning at the heart of the ideas

Tercets - not sure really why. Long enough to develop a thread of thought without over-inflating it!

The rhythms of natural speech

Use of real people, places and his family

Natural imagery 

Enjambed lines that create a conversational and fluid movement. Ideas organically develop and weave together to form larger patterns.

Contrasts between beauty and cruelty - a necessary balance and stability, particularly in rural life

Demonstratives to guide the reader to see

Metaphors of theatricality

Images that have surfaces and depths - the darker elements of human life can not always be seen

Incise, probing language

Use of epigraphs or introductory notes

Archetypal characters and rural cast

Gentle rhyme and alliteration to add weight to ideas, moods and feelings

Imagery of cuts and breaks

Poems that begin en media res 

The repeated metaphor of marks to pinpoint moments of transition, growth or change

Poems in clusters or at periodic moments to develop an overarching idea

Use of the first person, though not always the poet speaking

Reclaiming of symbols for use in a different context e.g. the flags

Poetry in dialogue with other art forms e.g. sculpture, photography, song

 

L | Commentary | When We Were Kings, by Declan Ryan

whales swam in our rivers, stranded
and hours from death, or arriving
at it. They were lost, as we are, branded

with an exile’s stamp. Neither thriving
nor heartsick yet, their eyes unable
to adjust to foreign light, striving

for home in a manner their fable-
thirsty rescuers distrusted. Citizens
conversed over breakfast tables

about these lost monsters: impatience
barely concealed as to why these whales
in particular were news-worthy, friends

all of a sudden to the sea-shy, hailed
as martyrs of a sort. The fact remained:
it was in our rivers they had failed.

Declan Ryan

What is it about Leviathan? His size; his inconsolable clicking-cry; his heavy somnambulism; the flirting bold whiteness of his back and the giant slap of his tail; his being closer to a god than we can ever hope to be?

Five years ago in the post-Christmas fug and fog of a brown, wet, January, a female Bottlenose Whale found her way up the Thames Estuary, to central London. All seven tonnes of her was there to marvel at; to wonder at; and the very bottoms of the deepest oceans were startlingly surface-borne. Eight authorities, thousands of spectators, and over a hundred news cameras witnessed the attempted rescue, and subsequent violent death of The Whale. And across the newspapers on January 22nd obituaries; farewells; and eponymous, hyperbolic goodbyes. The cause of death was combination dehydration, kidney failure, muscle damage, loss of blood; and this bizarre additional fact: The Whale suffered from severe skeletal-arthritis (it seems Pinocchio’s asthmatic whale wasn’t far off the mark after all). And throughout all this she won no nicknames, remaining The Whale, until her end. What name to give these creatures of the deep, these mammoth objects from beyond the possibility of our bodies? These “lost monsters” these “martyrs” from another world?

“Ali BUMBAYE, Ali BUMBAYE, Ali BUMBAYE”. With odds on of 8-1 to win (because Forman was a sure bet; the hardest hitter in heavyweight; a monster man) Ali, already in his 30’s, took to the ring in Kinshasa’s pre-dawn (so the Americans could watch in the comfort of their afternoons), to fight to regain [HIS] the title Heavyweight Champion of The World. He was an old man, “neither thriving/ nor heartsick yet” but certainly “stranded” and “striving for home in a manner ….distrusted”. Ali took Forman’s jabs and punches for three solid rounds; barely lifting a finger in response, sleeping on the ropes; and then a wink to camera somewhere in the fifth and all Hell in the eighth, and Forman’s on the floor. And the heavens in Kinshasa opened; and God sent a second flood. This was the third time Mohammed Ali lifted the title.

Two paragraphs in and I haven’t mentioned Moby Dick or Declan Ryan. Shame on me. But here’s the thing. Ryan’s poem “When We Were Kings” is an eight-rounder, and its readers deserve this pre-amble. Ryan, to my mind, is a rope-a-dope poet; a poet who gives you a story to grab hold of on your first read, then the second time, and the third it’s the same; and then there’s this lyrical wink, and BANG, the poem fights back. This is a poem about whales, isn’t it? This is a poem about boxing isn’t it? This is a poem about the fallibility of the human-physical and the abundant stupidity of the human-spiritual, isn’t it? This is a poem that deserves to be read out loud, from a poet who champions live poetry, living poetry, poetry that fights back. But this is also a poem that aches, and tugs whilst sideswiping you with the cheeky and mythological. There are “monsters” at the “breakfast tables”, exposed to “foreign light, striving for home”. There is an exquisite stillness that Ryan captures in the “hours from death”, and a desperation concealed as petty-hatred in ”exile’s stamp”, and the strong sibilant-song of the whale that runs, sonically, throughout. Declan Ryan, like Tom Waits, straddles the boundaries between poetry and lyrics, between gritty and melodic, between our world and theirs. There is the subtle five-layer story-telling of Hugo Williams, the image-expanse and verbal economy of Cormac McCarthy, and the pedestrian whimsical guilt of Hughes. This is not poetry that will stay on the ropes for long.

The poem itself carries the title of (arguably) the greatest sports movie/documentary ever made, When We Were Kings, charting the (not arguably) greatest fight in recorded history (barring possibly David and Goliath). And its five, three-line stanzas are the linear shape of that fight: against the ropes for one, two, three, and a wink in the fifth. For me, this poem is one great wink, one nod towards the Leviathan, the unknown, The Great White Whale (let’s not get into semantics of colour here) of Captain Ahab, the obsession of Philip Hoare, the extraordinary being which ordered the silence and rapture of David Attenborough, the cetacean that Louis Armstrong (among others!) sings mistook Jonah for a fish, the “giant Dog-fish…more than a kilometre long” that swallows Pinocchio whole. But more than this, this is the man, Ali, and The Whale who could “float like a butterfly” on the surface, bringing everything up from the darkest depths for all the world to see. But these floating butterflies, as Melville says, are nothing more than “subtle deceits” :

not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; … and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

There is something apologetic in Ryan’s work. Something that suggests he is languaged from a greater truth (not necessarily purporting to understand it), but carrying it nonetheless, and pitying us as we pity The Whale, and Ali the boxer, both creatures of seeming infinite power, who we loved to hate, and hated to love because of their extraordinary one-ness, their (understandable) seeming arrogance at being themselves.

Quite simply Declan Ryan has produced an astonishing poem. One that conceals beneath an economy of words the sheer power of its musculature; and because of that, its slyness, its wink, and its knock-out blow: its final line. “The fact remains:/ it was in our rivers they had failed.” Is this a fact of which to be proud? The craftiness of men outwitting the natural geography of the whale? Ali’s final fighting years, one punch too many, one fight too far. Or is this our failure? Our pitiful ridiculousness? Our “impatience” our “breakfast table[s]” chat? Is it our fault that Ali, with his ‘sting like a bee’ is now bent double, crippled by his own life? Or that The Whale, in search of the ocean, found her bones had seized and fused, and she could no longer swim?

But there is one great hope: the great rains after the fight, a clear air, and a forgiving god. It is the “sea-shy”. There will be other George Formans, other Captain Ahabs: but there too will be Ismaels, and Philip Hoares, and those who protect the Leviathans on earth and in the oceans, by being too frightened to touch. And there will be Declan Ryan, mapping out the ridiculousness of it all, probing the secrets of these alien “friends”, gently verbalizing the unknown, the unknowing; and the great vast rope-a-dope wink of The Boxer and The Whale.

My apologies to Declan for cutting up his poem. I like it very, very much. And a note on Katie Warner’s illustration. A beautiful rendering of the Whale’s Wink, in the soft-worn shadows of sea-pebbles washed up.

Rowan Rutter

Theatre Editor

Wider Reading | Let's Watch Twin Peaks: Pilot

Good evening, Diane. Find a comfy chair, fetch yourself a present for the day (I recommend a slice of cherry pie or a damn good cup of coffee), and settle in for the pilot episode of the seminal TV series created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. We’re going to be commenting on the characters, the themes, and – most importantly of all – those essential recurring elemental symbols, fire, water and glass.



Spoilers are to be expected. Commentary is in order.



1) And here we go. I have the Gold Edition, so every episode comes with a slightly tedious introduction featuring the Log Lady, clearly filmed later on a cheaper budget. This time around, she’s telling us that there are many different kinds of stories. Some are funny, and some are sad. Damn it, Lynch, will you stop tinkering with your opus after the event? Next you’ll release a special edition where Andy doesn’t shoot Jacques first.


2) The titles roll. I could expand upon these almost frame-by-frame, but, for now, here’s a shorter list of the key devices; nature and industry, shot side-by-side to the same gentle, mellifluous soundtrack, as if the two are in total harmony. The theme music belies the darker edge – the logging mill which destroys nature, the bird which is both an innocent witness to murder and a fiend that attacks Laura Palmer’s corpse. And note that opening fiery spark from the mill machinery at the start of the sequence, and the importance of water towards the end, flowing and reflective – pure. If fire is the devil, then what is water?

3) The first shot we see beyond the title credits is a reflection – the reflection of Josie Packard. At first it may seem an odd character to focus on for the very opening of the series, but consider her extremely androgynous beauty, and she’s not a bad poster girl for the duality of Twin Peaks. And, veterans of the show, recall that the last time we’ll ever see Josie will be in a reflection.


The body of Laura Palmer is found. “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.”

4) Worth noting are the psychic, intuitive reactions of Laura’s mother Sarah and her classmates, as the news spreads that she’s been washed-up, murdered. Audrey appears to have no such reaction – or is it simply a lack of empathy?

Audrey reacting to the news of the murder and probable rape of her classmate.

5) FIRE! THERE IT IS! FIRE! And it’s shown for the first time in the Great Northern Hotel as Benjamin Horne, the hotel owner, elects to manipulate his Norwegian guests.


6) The emotional breakdowns of Laura’s parents Leland and Sarah Palmer are intriguing not simply because they are tragic, but because they will repeat themselves over the first series, becoming less tragic to us and closer to soap melodramatics with every time – Sarah’s sob-shrieks and Leland’s screwing up his face and caving in on himself.


7) Another FIRE reference as Shelley, the beaten-down diner waitress, flirts with her illicit boyfriend, Bobby, telling him she’ll “light his fire”. Interestingly, as Bobby, panicking at the realisation that Shelley’s brutal boyfriend Leo has returned home early, turns his car around and speeds away, the noise of the engine is cut with the noise of a saw grinding into wood.


8) Sarah Palmer, being questioned by the police, has a sudden attack of unexplainable horror brought on by *something* upstairs – or, perhaps, just the sight of a ceiling fan.

“Who’s upstairs?”

“Your husband, and one of my men.”


9) Josie and Catherine Martell are arguing; apparently Josie wants to shut down the woodmill because one of the workers has a daughter, Ronette Pulaski, who’s suspected to have gone missing along with Laura. Catherine disagrees – and while Josie’s motives seem odd to us, Catherine’s presented as being so unpleasant that we don’t mind a great deal. The tension between these two characters will be important.


10) And we finally see Ronette Pulaski, staggering in a daze across a bridge, having clearly suffered abuse of some kind. Ronette is key to the entire puzzle – or, at least, she would be key in another show. Here, the characters and creators forget about her to such a great extent in comparison to Laura (she’s even plainer, with a name that’s hard to pronounce and not all-American in the same way as the murdered girl) that a distressed bird will be seen as a more vital witness than her later on.

She looks normal, is what I mean to say. Normal, in a town filled with unrealistically attractive women.

11) And we meet Special Agent Dale Cooper, our de facto hero and iconic character, who, in typical fashion, is dictaphoning obsessively his trivia of the day for the benefit of someone called ‘Diane’. He also gets across an almost hilarious amount of direct plot exposition by the same method.


Cooper, as the show goes on, will become the series’ symbol of goodness – a less worldly Marge Gunderson. Both characters are eccentric and positive in their outlooks when faced with a great evil, to the point that they could be considered naive, even immature, but whose positive energy is hinted to be their most useful quality. (Compare this to Andy, a good man hindered by sorrow at the horrors he has to face, who cries at the sight of Laura’s body and who is later revealed to be very literally impotent – and to that other Coenian cop, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, equally good, equally melancholy and equally powerless.) A great deal of this is suggested by his appearance, boyish, clean-shaven, and often wearing a coat that looks a size or two too for him. He looks like a cool version of one of the Milibands.

Don't tell me you can't see it.

12) And, as he encounters his local liaison, Sheriff Harry Truman, we get a bit of playfulness; Cooper starts out giving a generic ball-busting speech about how the FBI is in charge now...but his own charm and enthusiasm burst through in the form of an excited query about the wonderful pines he saw on the road.


13) Ronette Pulaski, from her comatose state, whispers a warning to Cooper – “Don’t go there.”


14) More complicated soap-ish shenanigans with a sly twist; teenage douchebag Mike yells at his girlfriend Donna, but he’s warned off by the apparently benevolent gas station owner Ed Hurley...who is then yelled at by his own eye-patch wearing wife Nadine.


15) After some FBI interrogations, we return to Audrey, who is causing precisely calculated trouble in the hotel, poking a hole in a coffee cup and spilling the liquid across a secretary’s work, bursting into the Norwegians’ meeting and announcing that her best friend had been found murdered...it’s a little annoying, especially with the sit-com-ish music, but it performs a valuable task. While all of the other lying citizens of Twin Peaks only get found out gradually, Audrey’s malicious streak is on full display from the start.


16) A double-theme whammy; the reflection of a motorbike in the reflection of Laura Palmer’s eye in a home video is an important clue. And then Cooper discovers that important, sinister message; a heart broken exactly in two, and four scrawled words - Fire Walk With Me.


17) We get to meet Shelley’s beau Leo, who is appropriately, near-absurdly loathsome, threatening her with death for having more than one cigarette brand in her ash-tray. Sure, he’s completely on the money that she’s having an affair, but he’s still a suspicious dickhead.

18) Cooper’s town meeting provides some more exposition and gives us the first real sighting of the Log Lady. It’s often been said that she’s one of the series’ worst/best examples of weirdness for weirdness’ sake, but I don’t know. Logs burn. Burn in FIRE.


19) In between shots of the youngsters drinking and getting angry, we see an oddly-shaped red light in the pitch black. Is it James’ motorcycle, or something else? We also seem to hear owls hooting. It will appear again.


20) As Donna sneaks out to meet James, her younger sister Harriet asks for her advice on a poetic question – “blossom of the evening”, or “full flower of the evening”? Only one of them’s a correct metaphor – but, all the same, adolescent or adult?


21) A barfight breaks out at the Roadhouse; James and Donna escape. James gives a long monologue about Laura’s sexual desires – he mentions almost thinking that she was possessed.


22) Interestingly, all four of the ‘young’ male characters – Mike, Leo, James and Bobby – seem to be playing variations on two stereotypes defined by their womenfolk. Mike and Leo are abusive and controlling; Bobby and James are freedom-embracing ‘rebels’.


23) As James is arrested, Donna’s adorable old father picks her up from the Sheriff’s office. He instantly forgives her for breaking Cooper’s curfew and makes a detour to pick up her sister’s bicycle. Unlike most of the characters, his decency is apparently not a cover for dark secrets. Meanwhile, Mike and Bobby, also incarcerated for their part in the barfight, taunt James by barking like dogs.


24) Okay, so it’s been a perfectly ordinary, if very slightly odd mystery-soap-drama so far. And then, just like that, the tone changes completely. Sarah Palmer is sitting alone in her living room when – oh, shit, she’s just caught sight of that evil ceiling fan, and – AAAGH!

I remain torn about BOB. For those of you who don’t know the story, that frightening, straggly-haired man was a set-dresser who was caught on camera accidentally. Lynch decided to incorporate the figure into the series – and thus, BOB (and presumably all of the overtly supernatural details of the series) were born. Is this brilliant creativity or just the hackery of a show that was – like many soaps – altered and twisted on the fly?


And so we end the first episode, appropriately, a little freaked-out and very little wiser.