Michael Hofmann

Of the many books of poetry I picked up in February at the British Library's sale of withdrawn books, I've finally got around to reading Michael Hofmann's Approximately Nowhere.

If one can have favourite poems from collections, then mine is one called 'Kleist in Paris', which I can't reproduce here because it's too long. But here's another one:


Fucking

A zero sum game, our extravagant happiness,
matched or cancelled
by the equal and opposite unhappiness of others,

but who was counting as you came walking from your car,
not off the bus,
early for once, almost violent in your severity,

both of us low on our last, stolen day of the month,
uncertain, rather formal,
a day of headaches, peaches and carbonated water,

by the stone pond whose ice you smashed as agirl...
or how we wound up
jubilant, a seesaw at rest, not one foot on the floor.



Of this (and another) poem Hofmann says,

I think the tension in my stuff, or the “jokes”, as I’m apt to describe them, the pervasive irony – everything is more or less than what it seems – the collisions between words and dictions, “dicke Luft”, “approximately nowhere”, “iron hotel”, what have you – is absolutely characteristic. It’s not a function of balance, though. I probably have contempt for pre-ordained balance! If balance happens to result, as I guess it sometimes does, like in that poem, ‘Fucking’, it’s an ironic balance. In my poems, if things are resolved or cancel each other out, that’s almost the least important thing. What matters much more is the sense of colossal “mental fight”, as the wretched hymn says, totting up these listing, Babel-like lists to reach a tiny residue, salt, a firefly, slabs of cake – or, alternatively, an oxymoron, or a mingled and surprising assertion, an early departure, a pair of scissors in our pockets, or “Do you think I’m real?” The way these endings are “produced” from the poems is what makes the poems interesting, if they are. Each poem is a calculation, a kind of improvised piece of algebra, a thinking in images. The improvisation, the surprise, is what guarantees them. If this book is different from earlier books, it may be because I’ve discovered “middles”. I’ve always liked beginnings and endings before, but this is the book with added “middle” – all those torrential, asyntactical compilations of things...