Who wrote the poem “Cook Ting”? The answer is the English poet R.F. Langley (1938–2011). If we ask how he wrote it, however, that answer becomes more crowded.
Langley pieced his poetry together. The two collections he published with Carcanet Press—Collected Poems (2000) and The Face of It (2007)—declared the method on their covers. Both feature photographic details from medieval Suffolk churches, which were his favourite places to look and think. For Collected Poems, he chose the floor of Blythburgh church: a cracked, intersecting patchwork of tiles, bricks, rough stone and smooth memorial slabs, which creates a zig-zag palette of cream, orange, pink, yellow, black and red. For The Face of It, he chose a single green-blue fragment of stained glass that has been given a delicately pensive mouth, nose and eyes by an unknown artist, set in a black net of window leading. When I edited Langley’s Complete Poems (2015) for Carcanet, we continued the theme with a close-up of a knapped flint wall that was stopped, bottom left, by a bright chunk of lichen-spotted brick.
None of these things are in “Cook Ting”. But the joy to be found in juxtaposed fragments is:
Circumstances analogous
to life and death, house cleaning or
clutter. Dante or an old shirt.
It’s there to cut, but not to chop.
Between the knuckle-bones it’s soft
as butter. Or you picked a leaf
off the road. What is it when it
reaches the sea? The gulls are a
white flap over sprats in the foam.
Langley kept notebooks of the wide reading that informed his writing, and these show who else contributed to “Cook Ting.” In the opening lines, Langley introduces his four co-authors: John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Zhuang Zhou and Mark Cocker. The poem begins with phrases from Cage’s commentary on Rauschenberg’s omnivorous artistic practice of combination: photos, posters, newspapers, paint. “There is no poor subject,” says Rauschenberg, and Cage comments: “Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt.”
Langley compresses these words into the poem’s tight column (each line has eight syllables) and abuts them to Zhuang Zhou’s Taoist parable of Cook Ting—as cited by Cage when praising the freshness of Rauschenberg’s technique: “he is like that butcher whose knife never became dull simply because he cut with it in such a way that it never encountered an obstacle.” “It’s there to cut, but not to chop”: the way Cook Ting carved meat was the opposite of chopping, because he worked his blade into the spaces between the joints, and thus never wore it out. Feel for yourself, says Langley: “Between the knuckle-bones it’s soft / as butter”.
These words—as far as I know—are his own, observed with his own hands. And they mark the moment where the poem begins its own combinatory practice of internal rhyme: the sharp double tap of “cut, but” in the previous line echoing into “knuckle” and “butter,” which in turn calls back to the “clutter” of line 3. In a note on his poems from 1994, Langley described a change in his compositional habits from the mid-Eighties, which involved “finding out […] what would happen if rhyme came back in to do a lot of the running”. In this poem, first published in 2000, it’s still going strong.
Next, “Cook Ting” picks “a leaf off / the road”, splices it with more Cage (“What is the nature of Art when it reaches the sea?”) and reaches the sea itself: gulls in a “white flap over sprats in the foam.” The source of the image (though not the phrasing) is a piece of newspaper that Langley pastes, Rauschenberg-style, into his notebook: a column from the Guardian by the British nature writer, Mark Cocker, about the feeding behaviour of sea birds off the Suffolk coast, who flock in unusually high numbers over the warm outflow from Sizewell nuclear power station, which in winter attracts vast shoals of sprats (a small forage fish).
And so the scene is set: the sea and its birds, Taoism and Rauschenberg. “Cook Ting” has its ingredients, and the rest of the poem stirs them hot. Chance plays its part. Cage’s advice on how to look at art is to “throw yourself in where the fish are thickest”. The chime of the metaphor with Cocker’s natural history lets the poem “tumble together to make it / one”. And that sets off a run of internal rhymes:
Take hold of a word and
turn it on. Tourbillion. A
blade is so sharp it can dance round
the joint. Silvery energies
argue the point. The carcase of
an ox flops open.
A “tourbillion” is a swirl; a vortex; a whirlwind; a whirling firework. If, as a word, you “turn it on,” its motion is both centripetal (a vortex) and centrifugal (a firework), binding and scattering. Spinning like a dynamo, it leads back to the magical action of Cook Ting’s silvery slicing.
“Shall we leave / it at that?” the next lines ask. But we are only at the midpoint, and it’s here that the ox becomes food. “Flop! The whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground,” as Burton Watson’s translation of Zhuang Zhou puts it in Langley’s notebook. Below that, on the same page, come two entries from Walter Hopps’ study Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (1991), describing fragile assemblage sculptures of found items: a beetle and a twig in a box, and twelve blank sheets of paper on a string. All of which Langley throws into “the picture,” along with more Cage (“everything, a pair of socks, is appropriate, appropriate to poetry, a poetry of infinite possibilities”) and various other things that I am happy not to be able to explain: a dark acrobat, the glittering company, “a wife for a viking?”
It is all, as Langley says, “Bright / bait.” The unspoken rhyme here is to be found back in Mark Cocker: sprats, he notes, are “more familiar to us as whitebait.” Slicing his touchstone prose into lines, joining it with rhymes, Langley conjures Cook Ting to make the way the world hangs together less familiar and more alive. Here is the passage from Cage on Rauschenberg that starts it all off:
This is not a composition. It is a place where things are, as on a table or on a town seen from the air: any one of them could be removed and another come into its place through circumstances analogous to birth and death, travel, housecleaning, or cluttering.
