Marginalien
by Alan Halsey
Five Seasons Press
Over-sized Paperback. 416 Pages
CD-Rom.

This is a major collection of Alan Halsey’s texts and visual poetry, dating back to 1988. What strikes one immeditaely about Halsey’s writing is its intelligence as well as the considerable learning gracefully displayed in its construction. Not so with most American experimental writing: literary allusions are out, myth just barely manages to appear in a fragmented (and often apologetic) spasm or two. American new writing comes across as being culturally illiterate–by design, I’m assured by its practicioners,–but sometimes I’m not so sure. I recall sitting through a lunch with a young American writer who stopped me time and again to tell me that she hadn’t read and was not about to read X poet, or Y poet, or Q old writer or Z old writer, because they had nothing to do with what she produced. She was ignorant of traditions, she let me know, and was rather proud of it–sticking safely to the ultra-modern, and finding her models of perfection among a certain group of contemporary American women writers. With a knitting of her eyebrows she blithely dismissed Anglo-American literature stretching all the way back to Beowulf and was adamant about what she “knew” was the correct mode for her writing, and as proof she pointed out her successes: a booklet bound with a rubber band, a self-published journal, and first prize in a minor contest. Surely, I said, there had to be something in all of those hundreds of years of writing and reading worth considering? No, she chose to ignore all of that, she told me, and added that she could find her own way to the train station, thank you. Maybe she had a point, but I doubt it. (Of course, I insisted on seeing her off.) So many experimental poets seem to want to keep their muse locked away in a box, force feeding it certain exotic French theorists in the hopes of an ultimate detournement of public taste. Sadly, though, limiting themselves in such a manner causes the work they produce to be rather thin (to these eyes), not to mention derivative, in content.

Not so with Alan Halsey. Halsey’s writing is unashamedly literary, though he embodies that knowledge using the post-post modern modes of writing we are accustomed to seeing in the latest journals. Indeed he was a seminal figure in spreading this new writing in the U.K., having run the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye throughout the 1980’s and most of the 90’s.

Halsey often draws diction as well as subject matter from 17th, 18th, and 19th century souces, sometimes for comic effect. In this sense he is a tactile writer–layering different syntactical styles in order to create interest. Halsey extends this same technique to his visual work: collaging images, and layering textures.

To be continued–

More comments on Marginalien coming in future postings.