S P A M

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone, by Joe Dunthorne

Is it fiction, is it poetry, is it truth — what are the rules here? Kirsty Dunlop tackles the difficult, yet illustrious art of the poet bio in this review of Joe Dunthorne’s All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (Rough Trade Editions, 2018).

Whenever I read a poetry anthology - I hope I’m not the only one - I go to the bios at the back before I read the poems…it’s also a really strange thing when you publish a poem…you brag about yourself in a text that is supposed to sound distant and academic but is actually you carefully calculating how you’ll present yourself.

> It’s the middle of a night in 2019 and I’m listening to a podcast recording from Rough Trade Editions’ first birthday party at the London Review Bookshop, and this is Dunthorne’s intro to the reading from his pamphlet All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (2018). As I lie there in that strange limbo space of my own insomnia, Dunthorne’s side-note to his work feels comfortingly intimate because it rings so true (the kind of thing you might admit to a friend over a drink after a poetry reading rather than in the performative space of the reading itself). Like Joe, and yes surely many others, I am also fascinated by bios - particularly because I find them so awkward to write/it makes me cringe writing my own/this is definitely the kind of thing you overthink late at night. Bios also function as this alternative narrative on the margins of the central creative work and they do tell a story: take any bio out of context and it can be read as a piece of flash fiction. When we are asked to write bios, there is this unspoken expectation that we follow certain rules in our use of language, tone and content. Side note: how weird would it be if we actually spoke about ourselves in this pompous third person perspective irl?! Bios themselves are limbo spaces (another kind of side note!) where there is much left unsaid and often the unsaid and the little that is said reveals a lot. Of course, some bios are also very, very long. Dunthorne’s pamphlet plays with this limbo space as a site of narrative and poetic potential: prior to All The Poems, I had never read a short story actually written through the framework of a list of poet bios. The result is an incredibly funny, honest and playful piece of meta poetic prose that teases out all the subtle aspects of the poet bio-sphere and ever since that first listen, I can’t stop myself re-reading.

> This work is an exciting example of how formal constraints in writing can actually create an exhilarating sense of narrative liberation. I see this really playful, fluid Oulipo quality to the writing, where the process of using the bio as constraint is what makes the rollercoaster reading experience so satisfying as well as revealing a theatrical stage for language to have its fun, where the reality of our own calculated self performance can be teased out bio by bio. The re-reading opens up a new level of comedy each time often at the level of wordplay. I’ll maybe reveal some more of that in a wee bit.

> It’s a winding road that Dunthorne takes us on in his narrative journey where the micro and the macro continually fall inside each other. So perhaps this review will also be quite winding. Here is another entry into the text: we begin reading about the protagonist Adam Lorral from the opening sentence, who we realise fairly quickly is struggling to put together a ground-breaking landmark poetry anthology. His bio crops up repeatedly in varying forms:

‘Adam Lorral, born 1985 is a playwright, translator and the editor-publisher of this anthology.’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and the man who, morning after morning, stood barefoot on his front doorstep […]’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and someone for whom the date Monday, October 14th, 2017 has enormous meaning. Firstly Adam’s son started smiling.’

The driving circularity of this repetition pushes the narrative onwards, whilst the language is never bogged down: it hopscotches along and we can’t help but join in the game. Amidst a growing list of other characters/poets- that Adam may or may not include in this collection he seems to be pouring/ draining his energy into, with just a little help from his wife’s family money- tension begins to build.  

> Although Adam is overtly the protagonist in the story, to my mind it is, in fact, Adam’s four-week-old son who is the real heroic figure. Of course this baby doesn’t have a bio of his own but he does continually creep into Adam’s (he’s another side note!). He comes off as the only genuine character: there is no performance, no judgement, he just is. Adam is continually amazed by his son’s mental and physical development which is far more impressive than the growth of this questionable anthology. The baby is this god-like figure, continually present during Adam’s struggles, with the seemingly small moments of its development taking on monumental significance. Adam might try to immerse himself fully in this creative work but the reality of his family surroundings will constantly interrupt. This self-deprecating, reflective tone led me to think about how Dunthorne expansively explores the idea of the contemporary poet and artist identity through metanarrative. In Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016), he writes ‘There is embarrassment for the poet – couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?’ In a recent online interview with the poet Will Harris[1], when asked about his own development as a writer, he spoke about how the career trajectory of a poet is a confusing phenomenon and I’ve heard many other poets speak of this too: there are perhaps milestones to pass but they are not rigid or obvious and, of course, they are set apart from the milestones of more ‘adult’, professional pursuits. I think Dunthorne’s short story accurately captures this confusion around artistic, personal and intellectual growth and the navigation of the poetry community, through these minute, telling observations and the rejection of a simplistic narrative linearity. The story doesn’t make any hard or fast judgements: like the character of the baby, the observations just are. Sometimes, it feels like this project could be one of the most important aspects of Adam’s life (it might even make or break it) and we are there with him and at other moments it seems quite irrelevant to the bigger picture, particularly as the bios get more ridiculous. Here, I just have to highlight one of the bios which perfectly evokes this heightened sense of a poet’s importance:

Peter Daniels’ seventh collection The Animatronic Tyrannosaurus of Guadalajara, is forthcoming with Welt Press. He will not let anyone forget that he edited Unpersoned, a prize-winning book of creative transcriptions of immigration interviews obtained by the Freedom of Information Act, even though it was published nearly two decades ago. His poetry has been overlooked for all previous generational anthologies and it is only thanks to the fine-tuned sensibilities of this book’s editor that has he finally become one of the chosen. You would expect him to be grateful.

> Okay…so I said above that there weren’t hard or fast judgements; maybe I should retract that slightly. The text definitely doesn’t feel like a cruel critique of poets generally (its comedy is too clever for that) but, yes, there are a fair few judgements from Adam creeping into those bios. I am so impressed with the way in which Dunthorne is able to expertly navigate Adam’s perspective through all these fragments to create this growing humour, as the character can’t help inserting his own opinions into other poets’ bios. Of course, we are also able to make our own judgements about Adam and his endearing naivety: shout out here to my fave character in the story, Joy Goold (‘exhilaratingly Scottish’) who has submitted the poem, Fake Lake, to the anthology. Hopefully if you’re Scottish, you can appreciate the comedy of this title. Adam Googles her and cannot find any trace of her, which feels perfect…almost too good to be true.

> Dunthorne plays with cliché overtly throughout the text. You could say all the poets in this story are exaggerated clichés but that certainly doesn’t make them boring: it just adds to the knowing intimacy that, yes, feels slightly gossipy (which I can’t help but enjoy). For example, there is the poet who has:

[…] won every major UK poetry prize and long ago dispensed with modesty […] Though he does not need the money he teaches on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His latest collection is Internal Flight (Faber/FSG). He divides his time between London and New York because they are both lovely.

I am leaving out a fair bit of this bio because I don’t want to take away some of the joy of simply reading this text in its entirety but it is one of many tongue-in-cheek observations that feels very accurate and over-the-top at the same time (I feel like everyone in the poetry community knows this person). It is also even more knowing when you consider that Dunthorne actually has published a collection with Faber, O Positive (2019), a totally immersive read that also doesn’t shy away from poking fun at its speaker throughout. I always like seeing the ideas that repeatedly crop up in a writer’s work and explorations of calculation and cliché are at the forefront of this collection. I keep thinking of this line from the poem ‘Workshop Dream’:

We stepped onto the beach. The water made the sound: cliché, cliché, cliché.

Interestingly, there is this hypnotising dream-like quality to O Positive - with shape shifting figures, balloonists, owls-in-law – in contrast to the hyper realism I experienced in the Rough Trade pamphlet. However, like All the Poems, in O Positive, we’re always one step inside the writing, one step outside, watching the poem/short story being written. It’s this continual sensation of being very close to failure and embarrassment/cringe. (I can also draw parallels here between Dunthorne’s exploration of this theme and the poet Colin Herd who speaks so brilliantly about the relation between poetry and embarrassment- see our SPAM interview.) Failure is just inevitable in this narrative set up. It makes the turning point of the narrative- when it arrives- all the funnier:

As Adam typed, he hummed the chorus to the Avril Lavigne song–why d’you have to go and make things so complicated?–and smiled to himself because he was keeping things simple. Avril Lavigne. Adam Lorral. Their names were a bit similar. He was looking for a sign and here one was.

> If it isn’t clear already, this is a story that I could continually quote from but to truly appreciate the work, you should read it in its beautiful slim pamphlet format created by Rough Trade Editions. For me, the presentation of this work is as important as the form: this story would have a different effect and tone if it was nestled inside a short story collection. I think a lot of the most exciting creative writing right now is being published by the innovative small indie presses springing up around the UK. Recently I listened to a great podcast by Influx Press, featuring the writer Isabel Waidner: they spoke about both the value of small presses taking risks with writers and the importance of recognising prose as an experimental field, rightly recognising that experimental work often seems to begin with, or be connected to, the poetry community. Waidner’s observation felt like something I had been waiting to hear…and a change that I had noticed in writing being published in the last few years in the UK. I could mention so many examples alongside the work of Rough Trade Books: Waidners’s We are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019), published by Manchester-based Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Eley William’s brilliant Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017), the many exciting hybrid works put out by Prototype Publishing, to name just a few. There is also a growing interest in multimedia work, for example Visual Editions, who publish texts designed to be read on your phone through their series Editions at Play (Joe Dunthorne did a brilliant digital-born collaborative text with Sam Riviere in 2016, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, I would highly recommend!). But this concept of combining the short story with a pamphlet format, created by Rough Trade Books as part of their Rough Trade Editions’ twelve pamphlet series, feels particularly exciting to me and is a reminder of why I love the expansive possibilities of shorter prose pieces. Through its physical format, we are reminded that this is a prose work you can read like a series of poems without losing the narrative tension that is so central to fiction. The expansiveness of the reading possibilities of Dunthorne’s short story also reminds me of Lydia Davis’s short-short stories. Here’s one I love taken from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Penguin Books, 2009):

They take turns using a word they like

“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman. “It is extraordinary,” says the other.

You could read this as a sound bite, an extract from an article, a writing exercise or a short story, the possibilities go on; there is a space created for the reader and consequently it encourages the unravelling of re-reading (which feels like a very poetic mode to me). Like Davis, Dunthorne’s work also highlights how seemingly simple language can be very powerful and take on many subtle faces and tones. I think short forms are so difficult to get right but when you encounter all the elements of language, tone, pacing, style, space, tension brought together effectively (or calculatingly as Dunthorne might say), it can create this immersive, highly intimate back-and-forth play with the reader.

> All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything to Everyone. The title tells us there is a collection of poems here that are hidden: the central work has disappeared leaving behind the shadowy remains of the editor’s frustration and the marginalia of the bios. We feel the presence of the poems despite not actually reading them. The pamphlet’s blurb states that this: ‘is the story of the epiphanies that come with extreme tiredness; that maybe, just maybe the greatest poetry book of all is one that contains no poems.’ The narrative, as well as making fun of itself, also recognises that poetry exists beyond the containment of the poems themselves: it can be found in the readings, the performances, the politics, the drafts, the difficulties, the funding, the collaboration, the collectivity, the bios.

> A friend of mine recently asked me: Where are all the prose parties?…And what might a prose party look like? We were chatting about how a poetry party sounds much cooler (that’s maybe why there’s more of them). I think prose is often aligned with more conventional literary forms, maybe closed off in a way that poetry is seen to be able to liberate, but I think Dunthorne breaks down these preconceptions and binaries around form and modes of reading in All The Poems. I want to be at whatever prose party he’s throwing.

[1] University of Glasgow’s Creative Conversations, Sophie Collins interviewing Will Harris, Monday 4th May 2020 (via Zoom)

~

Text: Kirsty Dunlop Published: 10/7/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Old Food, by Ed Atkins

Jon Petre takes a hearty bite out of Ed Atkins’ Old Food (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019), musing on the transfiguration of consumption and disgust into a carnivalesque prose poetry of mastication, food prep and Dadaist stylistics.

> There’s nothing worse than food cooked badly, is there? On our street we used to have sleepovers at a friend’s house. His parents couldn’t cook for shit. To this day I recoil to think of breakfast at his, which was always lukewarm beans, underdone toast and grey sausages, their skins thick and resistant to slicing, the meat inside limpid and oozing water. You’re more likely to remember an awful meal, I think, than a decent or just an average one. You remember consumption when it’s disgusting.

> Bad food sticks in the memory as well as the throat. It takes you back: a glimpse of grey sausages and I’m a twelve-year-old snob again. The opening scene of Ed Atkins’ Old Food  (2019) strikes a similar chord:

Spring finds medium son just on the floor. Looks maybe six? evil, holds the red plastic-handled table knife in a small right fist, fishes a slice from the open bag of bad read with a left.

> What follows is a slightly sickening description of buttering bread with ‘crumb-stuck margarine’, margarine on the foil lid, margarine glistening on the kid’s skin and an old sock where it’s smudged in the food-prep process. It’s such a specific, carefully observed scene, with all the detail of a memory. The speaker destabilises the workaday and familiar (buttering bread, being awake before your mum at the weekend) and makes it an uncanny, vaguely gross and alien process.  And that’s just for starters: welcome to Old Food.

> Old Food began life in 2017 as an art installation at the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin. I didn’t see it. From what I gather from videos, images and reviews online, animation formed a central part of the exhibition. In Atkins’ films, hyper-realistic people gorged themselves on food, eating and dying in some nightmarish uncanny universe. Old Food became infamous for a CGI shit sandwich that was full of tiny babies. In one film, a creepy child jerkily crosses the room and plays the piano as a storm rages outside. This book, elegantly published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in their signature blue French-flapped style, distils that visual exhibition into a verbal form: a fatty lump of consumption and disgust rendered into prose poetry.

> The speaker, or speakers, takes us through a series of meals and mealtimes. I felt like I was reading someone’s hardscrabble childhood, picturing Lord of the Flies children foraging for herbs and thieving cast-offs in a violent dystopia. But it feels wrong to ascribe Old Food such a linear narrative. No, Old Food is a carnival. A parade of savage mealtimes, a festival of overindulgence and late-capitalist excess. It is a meditation on the strange ways that consumerism has chewed up our animal instincts of desire and consumption.

> Old Food is narrated in second-person, and I was transfixed by the ‘we’ of the speaker: ‘We used to cut most everything with fridge-cold clammy chicken’, ‘we’d cut parachute silk / with skate wings’, ‘We became happy brutes’. For whom are they speaking? Are they carnal and transgressive as a collective, or is the speaker hiding in a crowd from individual responsibility? Vaguely troubling, rarely elucidated.

> Like artistic composition, food prep is both destructive and creative – taking a dozen bitty parts from a dozen separately whole things and making a composite other whole-thing whose wholeness depends entirely on how well it’s made, how well done-it is, how refined your taste is. Like art, food sounds mad. In its twisty language and wordplay, Old Food resembles some of the best Surrealist poetry (I won’t name names, taste being subjective) as well as the Futurists’ Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine (1930). The Futurists fetishized elaborate eating rituals as a way to cement ideas of nationalism and the supremacy of masculine desire. (they tried to ban pasta because it’d stop Italians from being uber-mensch.) Old Food comes out closer to Dada – sure food can be art, but it’s still full of shit!

> Words are chopped up and blitzed into paste, disassembled and reconstituted to suit the speaker’s palate. Peanut butter on bread is measured in ‘knifefuls’, zucchini is ‘scabbed’ in Tempura, and the ‘hot long release’ of pissing in a field sounds like ‘the frying pan sizzle’. This is poetry for a nation in turmoil, where even the language around who we are a nation and what is normal has started to go off. Old Food brings us down to its level.

> A roasted goose has ‘opened [its] legs’ for cooking; filling the bird’s cavity with stuffing is to ‘engorge to torture’. Eating has forever been synonymous with sex, but Old Food doesn’t take any prisoners – cooking juices are like body fluids, feasting is fucking, and so on. Sex, violence and eating – are all the same desire, Atkins suggests, carnal impulses that poetry is always better for embracing.

> Yet there is a tinge of desolation to all this gluttony and lust, no matter how fun. Old Food’s epigraph is from Georges Bataille: being formless, we may as well imagine it as ‘something like a spider or spit’. There is no grand narrative behind eating three meals a day until you die. Imagine every meal you’ve ever eaten, the good and the bad, the Wotsits and the Wellingtons, the slurped oysters and the Daddies’ sauce and, no matter how delicious or well-prepared they were, it’d all be the same in a vast, Sisyphean heap. There’s horror between those buns.

> ‘What’s at stake with this sandwich?’ the speaker asks, and the answer is desire itself: which desires we’re willing to admit to, which inhibitions we’re willing to shed. Whether it’s food or sex, someone is trying to sell us a fantasy of consumption; to think of either as sacred is absurd, Atkins seems to say, and in Old Food we’re better off revelling in the shit than swallowing it.

There used to be justice rather than I don’t know chocolate eggs. There used to be rallying cries’d rather than just a rich man suppressing belches at you. There used to be an unopened box and an open front door.

> By revelling in the shit, with its imagery of disgust and vocabulary of consumption, Old Food makes a stink about the sourness of our sex and food after late capitalism’s had its way with it. It’s credit to Atkin’s talent as an artist that he can move between visual art and prose poetry without seeming to lose his bite. If Old Food is like Surrealist poetry, then it is because you can enjoy the poetry as much for its puns as its absurdist critique of late capitalism. And for all the Bataille and nihilism, Old Food is a reminder that consumption is fun. Forget health cleanses and behaving yourself in public. What’s wrong with wanting crisp sandwiches and dirty sex?

~

Text: Jon Petre Published: 7/7/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(SPAM Cuts) The Noughties, by Dom Hale

Attending to the poetics of lightspeed capital, everyday internet phenomenology and aesthetic refusal, Mau Baiocco explores Dom Hale’s ‘The Noughties’, a poem taken from Hale’s debut collection Scammer (forthcoming, the 87 Press). 

> On February 1 a long poem, ‘The Noughties' drops into my inbox. 'I appear / to have failed to purge / my poem of evil' it reads roughly at the halfway point, '502 Bad Gateway / nginx / The literal just lost to me / Nostalgics / for toujours.' ‘The Noughties’ was first circulated as part of Dominic Hale's early 2020 edition of the file/pamphlet Scammer and at 44 pages takes up half of its contents. It is an experiment in serial and durational writing initially taking place between July 2018 and July 2019. Its form as well as composition are fragmentary, with short lines of unevenly indented text cascading down text boxes, an appearance that on the page bears a superficial resemblance to code, but when read aloud has all the jutting immediacy and scattered rhythms of something that cannot be compiled as a program or finished. And though I will attempt to trace questions around the relation between the internet, politics and poetics as they arise in ‘The Noughties’, a new and unprecedented arrival on something that might appear done to death (the ~internet~ poem), it should be noted from the outset that this poem is avowedly provisional, open to alteration and as much a mechanism of response to other poets and events as it is a finished work. Sitting down to appraise it, almost as a private inquiry, feels like refusing some of the poem's own motivations. If ‘The Noughties’ is about anything, it is about exchanges and modulations to be made outside the formal circuits of publishing, the commodity and ultimately capitalism. When read live—as I was lucky to witness twice in 2019—the poem is delivered at a rapid and at times overwhelming speed, straying far from considered intonation and 'poet's voice' but in an oppositional  mode long explored by various poets such as Verity Spott, Tom Raworth or Peter Manson. Its text is a camaraderie, in all the inviting and indulging senses of the word.

> To admit the internet into history is to arrest the entirety of its internal logic, its drive towards immediacy and delivery of information on request—or even before we request or begin a search engine lookup, as algorithms quietly dispense tailored content, autoplays and preempt any personal vicissitudes we might have at a given moment. As being online ceases to be a specific activity and becomes the very basis of our lives (and dramatically more so following Covid-19), the internet takes on a phenomenology identical to encountering everyday life: the external world, its colours, the weather, a sentiment, an object. Our words for being online can paint an entire life-world as it is really being experienced. I couldn’t stand it, the internet was so annoying today. This transparency is only superficial: what appears to be truly memoryless, debugged and free of glitches is owed primarily to the quiet labour of developers, data centre workers and content moderators—industries rife with overwork, exploitation and even trauma at the exposure to daily streams of violence and hate. Behind every phenomenal seamlessness is a world of labour and agency that has been wrested away from the internet’s users and makers. This is far from the resource that would remake the public sphere, the heroic age of the developer-hacker-blogger-writer. At some point in our lifetime a transition occurred between accessing a resource and living through its infrastructure. Had it happened any more dramatically we would rightly call it a revolution on par with any other that came before it, with political and interpersonal consequences no less significant than those of any other revolution.

> The critical internet poem, the post-internet long poem, the always-online poem has to account for such a revolution: the gap from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. It has to account for it as a real event where political and affective possibilities were seized by the powerful and online spaces sequestered and rerouted into sites of economic capture. Hale's 'sorry for cross-posting / stupidly nostalgic for the fucking noughties' is poised at the aftermath of this revolution, speaking back to the first decade of the 2000s through a relentless clash with the proper names for corporations and individuals (Bezos, Cuadrilla, G4S, Bill Gates, Northern Rock, etc) who have shaped the current world we inhabit. Arrayed against them is a belated deference to modes of grassroots management of online spaces (apologies for the cross-post), the ability to render these spaces malleable via creative interventions (forking), techno-utopian dreams that cross with play ('Snorlax used Snore! / Sustainable day') and the metabolic ease and abundance of 'We / eat as we go'. And yet, we are constantly reminded that to move from the past to the present means being carried by a 'katabatic wind'—a ceaseless descent that finds its origins at every point of the noughties and carries us on through to today. These winds, the matter of the skies as an invisible mover, figure prominently in ‘The Noughties’, and they are our guide through the fragmenting online landscapes of the decade since. When the winds reverse they end up 'hoovering / up the teleologies'; ecological catastrophes such as wildfires are seen congealing 'under the / pearling cumulus'. Like the financial flows and exchanges that pervade the poem, winds can go unnoticed until they collapse upon themselves or crash against lives that mean to resist them. These moments are revelatory of a whole structure at once: 'A sky’s a style' or 'A sky’s a clause', the grammar which shapes our political and expressive possibilities is loaded with toxic fumes, global and intimate as weather. It all lays open for contestation.

> In comparison to the fast-moving streams of text, riffs on information and broken data that surround it, a sort of speaking self appears in ‘The Noughties’. The ‘poet himself, as part of as part exposed nervous receptor, part digestor and regurgitator’ as Alex Grafen has written on Scammer’s companion pamphlet/pre-release Addons. It is often rueful, self-castigating and circuitously arrived at. It appears regularly in the guise of a comment or interjection. A distance from the surrounding text—set aside by line breaks and Hale’s deft play with sentential clauses—makes space for simultaneous ironic detachment and sincere observation. This wouldn't be unfamiliar to anyone who spends a lot of time on the internet; it is after all a very common affective position to speak from online. Other forms of internet speech feature in the poem too: textspeak, emoticons, emojis, etc, but my own response settles on moments where this voice appears, as if a remainder of pre-technological communicability:

> Perhaps what makes them stand out is that they are so often addressed and imperative. The imperative falls in line with a poetics of refusal figured in Anne Boyer's essay No, from which Hale draws the epigraph, 'Sometimes our refusal is in our staying put.' Perhaps the commitment to speaking and interjecting works out as a refusal to speechlessness. But this persistence paradoxically discloses very little: it would rather not talk, not participate, go back over itself. On the other hand it may coax a life out of life; its speech becomes more a sort of 'negative silence' which to Boyer is 'the negative’s underhanded form of singing', speaking while not speaking and asking when not asking. I think these gestures of refusal also gain a specific valence within a long durational work such as ‘The Noughties’. From the outset the poem aims to figure as a text of life, a response born from the everyday. This specifies the refusal as a sort of refusal to the everyday temporality out of which it arises, a refusal of the working day or even a refusal to work: 'I will never / be fulfilled by any kind of work.' This is seen more clearly still as the poem develops and the specificities of the decade—war alongside economic boom, proliferation of websites, technologies and interfaces to enact one's self-presentation to the world, to give voice to our newly minted online selves—begin to add up. The voice threatens to drop out entirely:

> In these lines poetry is pitted against the ability to survive the everyday economies of making ends meet. It signals a larger background of sustenance, a whole undisclosed sphere which undergirds the year-long writing of the poem yet cannot be easily verbalised. The gloss we can give to the gap between this sphere and ‘The Noughties’’s own enactment is a no, a refusal to make the link between the circuits words take on page and those of the background out of which they emerge. There is a doubleness to 'now, now', shading over to both 'no, no' but also that the poem must return to its present elaboration, the site of its self-recognition. Reading this gap as a refusal opens the possibility that the poem's own dynamics—the very rhythms it falls into, its very online texture—can militate against the extension of working life into non-working life. 'Hacking', so often the trite word for unauthorised access into systems and circuitry, springs to mind here, but in its older meaning. A sort of choppy relentlessness abounds in ‘The Noughties’, where two types of ‘work’—that of the poem and that of the post-internet working day—extend into one another,  bristling at the seams and unveiling oppositions where we could have forgotten there were any.

> In Sleep-Worker's Inquiry, an anonymous text published on the communist journal Endnotes, a tech worker begins to dream in code, coming upon problems raised by their working life and solving them in their sleep. The worker asks if this is meaningfully different from their everyday waged work: 'When I find myself observing myself sleep-working, I observe myself acting in an alienated way, thinking in a manner that is foreign to me, working outside of the formal labour process through the mere spontaneous act of thought.' Self-estrangement has always been an aesthetic resource of the avant-garde, but its possibility always corresponded with the availability of leisure and other types of 'free' time. When our estranged selves are also signed up to the imperatives of production, what spaces are left for the creation of social alterities, dream worlds and landscapes where we do not come under those same imperatives? As technologies extend the working day by making us become forever available to our jobs, as the everyday labour of self-making on social media becomes collated and valorised as data which accrues its owners stock value to be exchanged on the market, distance from any economic activity becomes impossible. It becomes inchoate as the speaker’s voice in ‘The Noughties’, refusing as it proceeds.

> But I find that as I fixate on this voice of refusing, I almost forget that what makes ‘The Noughties’ so enticing to read and pick up is the heaving pile-up of dead data, outmoded imperatives and pithy renderings of cultural touchstones we would rather forget. 'What is this ‘dick chainy’ / and where can I get one?' To hold all these together, to attend to this conflagration of material is also to remember that, profoundly, the noughties were a fucking awful decade, with an enormous amount of political and cultural dead ends that the poem (happily) fails to enumerate. If the noughties represented the smirk of capital at history's end, ‘The Noughties’ enacts its degradation into our modes of present living. But we hold on to our imperatives, to care, to refuse and somehow make a world otherwise.

~

‘The Noughties’ is taken from Scammer, Dom Hale’s forthcoming collection from the 87 Press. You can watch Hale perform extracts at The Roebuck, London last year:

Text: Mau Baiocco Published 3/7/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) The Baudelaire Fractal, by Lisa Robertson

Gloria Dawson explores the refractive, highly seductive sensorium and aesthetic rapture of Lisa Robertson’s new novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House Books, 2020)

> I am deeply and highly seduced by this book, in which the narrator, Hazel Brown, a form of Lisa Robertson herself, recalls her becoming as a girl who wants to write, who does write, and along the way realises that it is true that she is the author of everything Baudelaire ever wrote. This is a strange conceit (to my mind also a very poetic jab at the whole conceit of a conceit) that provides a sort of architecture, but isn’t integral to the one-way direction of a plot. This conceit remains a conceit; a true one, but never, as in a conventional novel, a fact. The clue of this book is in the name; it’s fractal, there is no conclusion, the villain and hero is the girl, Hazel Brown, and her desires.

> My desire for perfumes is a curiosity which I have kept in check due partly to a sort of leftwing ascetism, and partly just lack of spare cash. But during the pandemic, two friends have sent me scents, and so it’s not surprising that one of the aspects of the book I experienced most strongly is the narrator’s relationship to perfume. > Sillage is the degree to which a perfume’s scent lingers in the air when worn. It is a unit of time; like a radioactive particle’s potency, it decays by its own particular degrees. I see in Robertson a refraction of Baudelaire’s prose poem, ‘Invitation to A Voyage’, where a queasy luxury is subtly undermined by the impossible identification of persons and political regimes with that luxury: ‘Those treasures, that furniture, that luxury, that order, those perfumes, those miraculous flowers, they are yourself.’ In the chapter ‘Scent-Bottle', framed partly through a bottle of Estee Lauder’s ‘Youth-Dew’, a gift from her grandmother, the narrator recalls:

Always now the thought of the perfume in its cheap fluted glass bottle with gold paper label brings me back to that shitty room, its darkness, the blue typewriter on the folding table, the bad linoleum, these traits a carapace camouflaging a small freedom that gently expanded inside me like a subtle new organ, an actual muscular organ born of my own desire for what I took to be an impossible and necessary language. Its sillage was an architecture.

Unlike Baudelaire, Robertson’s parataxis is without luxury. Even the perfume, or at least its carapace, is cheap. The scent of the clauses following that list is typical of the way in which Robertson’s sentences breathe into a form that branches whilst still following its line into a direction of freedom (a small freedom, a freedom that is/like an organ, organ developing its matter), a direction of desire. And then in five words; a proposal and also a proposition. Follow me again into a conceit. The dissipation of scent as a unit of time, imprecise but unmistakable, turns up later in the descriptions of the avoidance or impossibility of both cleanliness and its aesthetic. If the poet stinks, Hazel Brown tells us (and she did), ‘the poem must stink’ too.

Even reading the diary now I seem to detect the long sillage of acrid barks and herbs unctuously covered by vanilla, so that I am unsure whether years ago some amber drops of the viscous liquid actually penetrated the paper or whether my imagination produces this perfume as an insistent and elaborately feminine base note of reading. Nadar said of the young Baudelaire that he poured drops of musk oil from a small glass vial onto his red carpets when he entertained his friends in his baroque apartment at the Hotel Pimodan. I had entered the musky sillage. The deepening life of reading was now the transmission of an atmosphere, a physiology of pleasure and its refusal or its augmentation by the several ghost-senses that moved between the phrases of a text.

Here is a blossoming of that tight conceit — ‘Its sillage was an architecture’ — nestled and unravelling at a different point in time in the narrative; a long sillage indeed. I love Robertson’s unwavering mistrust of luxury and cleanliness, the authoritarian identification of cleanliness with moral purity which is more insistently satirized in Baudelaire. Yet despite his critique, Baudelaire, as Hazel Brown knows, was as weak to luxury as the next man or girl, and in reweaving a Baudelairean narrative, Hazel Brown as Baudelaire as Robertson can reveal her own desires and undoings. Returning to ‘The Scent Bottle’, the chapter ends in a luxurious apartment that Baudelaire may have coveted and wrought, in which the narrator is informally employed as a housemaid-childminder:

Those tight rooms first exposed me to the domesticity and decor of wealth and the erasures and contradictions it masked. Everywhere there was damage. In the rooms filled with rarity and the dullness of familial hatred and jealousy, in the now-forgotten password spoken to the armed soldiers at the school, in the prying glance of the concierge, in the horrible statues of shoeshine boys, all of these things functions of varying scales of imposed and policed positionings of superiority, I thought I could intuit the whole sadistic spectrum of the political world. It was heavy with grief. This sensation was not aesthetical; it was the enforced affect of the sex of a political economy, of masked histories of colonialism, of the ugliness of wealth.

Before we can grasp the scent of these judgements (‘the whole sadistic spectrum of the  political world... the enforced affect of the sex of a political economy’), the jagged line of Robertson’s fractal rhetoric is at work on another plane; the erotics at work in the work of following a realisation of an apprenticeship, a vocation for the matter of writing:

My dream of grace, the difficult ideal I struggled towards in sex and in paintings, my unformed language for this feeling that was trying so mawkishly to become a life, would have nothing to do with what passed for luxury. But it couldn’t be anchored by sadness either. I felt sure that beauty could only be slovenly and that love also could only be a slut.

Re-recalling moving through Paris and its political economy, and following the line of her pen from the censuring of Baudelaire’s ‘anachronous embrace of the baroque’, Hazel Shade reaches yet another conclusion-opening.

There could be no aesthetics of ambivalence in Second Empire Paris; capital’s tenure permitted sincerity only. The sincere subject was governable. But beneath the city was another city, a place where monstrosity could find its double.... this other city was even more potently a linguistic city, a gestural city, a city released from certain texts by their readers, as a sillage is the release of an alternate time signature by the perfumed body. No perfume, no syntax, no flower can be definitively policed.

Perfume can be liberation, an ‘alternate time signature’, a grace caught in fractal moments. It takes the courage of this book not to dissolve or just be mute in the apprehension of everything that you can touch and know that putting you together it undoes you. Towards the end of the book, the narrator, sometimes dis-guised as Lisa Robertson, re-reads a favourite essay, Emile Benveniste’s ‘The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression’. Robertson’s reflection upon what moves the writer is for me a close summary for the work of this book. It touches again on how clothes and styles, as well as perfume, can be a vital form of our thinking, being, becoming.

Form is a gestural passage that we can witness upon a garment in movement, a face in living expression, or in the mobile marks of a written character as it is traced by the pen. Rhythm, an expression of form, is time, but it is time as the improvisation that moves each limited body in play with a world. Not necessarily metrical or regular, it’s the passing shapeliness that we inhabit. It both has a history and is the history that our thinking has made.

I want to spend many hours tracing the rapture of this book, as well as its seductions. Rapture; to be seized but also to be possessed by joy; seduced: to be drawn aside but also led astray, wholly fractal, line by line into the story’s willing and willed disintegration. [With many thanks to Andy Spragg for the editorial comments, and to all the friends I talked about this book with! None of our work is ever done alone.]

The Baudelaire Fractal is now available to order via Coach House Books.

~

Text & Image: Gloria Dawson Published: 30/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 2

In the second instalment of a two part HOT TAKE (read part one here) on The 1975′s latest LP, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Scott Morrison ponders the tricksterish art of writing about music, before riffing on the history of the album as form, questions around genre, nostalgia and a sense of the contemporary, not to mention that saxophone solo and why Stravinsky would love this album.

Dear Maria,

> How pleasant it feels to begin a review with a note to a friend.

> Shoutout/cc:/@FrankO’Hara – I always liked his idea to write a poem like it’s addressed to just one other person. It strikes me as interesting to begin a piece of criticism in the same way. So, this is the mode I will try to inhabit throughout.

> As I read your words, and pondered, and learned, I was caught in the twin state of delighting each time you hit upon something already identified in my own thoughts – some of which I will expand upon here - and equally delighted every time you wrote something I could or would not. Such is the joy of conversation.

> I suppose in this preamble between speakers, which keeps up the pretence of our characters conversing - which will, inevitably, lapse as the form of this review gives way to a longer, more oneiristic, probably, onanistic, possibly, enquiry into the album (an act impossible in real conversation, by the way, imagine, imagine someone actually speaking for this long, how boring and alienating that would be, and yet that is usually what criticism is). Anyway, before all that, to help set the scene, I should mention a few ‘real world’ details. All of which happened either online, of course, or in isolation, because that, as you mention, is the real world now, during the violent interlude of Covid-19.

> I was delighted – that word again, repetitions and patterns begin anew already – to be asked to write this review. Firstly, because, like you say, I am a fan of The 1975. But also, because I am a writer and I am a musician and I am trying just now to forge a new mode of writing about music, one that can be both analytical (technically, socially, historically) and expressive (personally, lyrically, emotionally). And, most of all because I have always been, at best, suspicious, and, at worst, dismissive, of album reviews.

> I wrote, in our Messenger chat, ‘I usually find music reviews unhelpful’, which makes me sound like a bit of a dick, really. But what I meant is, what I meant is.

> There’s a saying I think about a lot, as the aforementioned writer and musician who writes about music: ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ (Martin Mull, Frank Zappa, or Elvis Costello, or any of the other people that sharp quote is blurrily misattributed to.)

> Incidentally, I would love to see a dance about architecture. But sometimes I think the sentiment of the statement is true. Will writing about music always be missing the point? Will it, through words, ever really be able to get to the essentially wordless essence of music? But I am a writer. And I am a musician. And I like writing about music. (Incidentally, I like making music about writing less). Yet I do feel there is some truth to the saying, I guess. Twists and turns. Try again. Here is another way of saying what I am trying to say.

> Music reviews make me hate adjectives. And I love adjectives. But often commercial reviews – for dozens of reasons, many of them valid, most of them related to that capital prefix – become attempts to describe a sound, invariably an artist’s ‘new sound’, again related to that capital prefix. Often, the goal is to generate press, to entice people to listen – or not – and so feed the music industry and the market. And to describe these new sounds, adjectives are piled-up like car crashes. Trying to describe a sound at any great length is, I think, ultimately fated to fail. Adjectives, up to a point, can provide greater and ever-more strident clarity. But, after a certain point – that appears very quickly in most pop reviews - saturation point is reached, and the clarity disappears, and we are left very far away from the music we were originally trying to pile word upon word to reach. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, you might say, if you were into foreshadowing. Which I am (obviously).

> So, I suppose, to continue thinking out loud (in silence, at my keyboard) I am interested in writing around music. Not describing the sounds (‘Let sounds be themselves’, says John Cage, whispering in my memory’s ear), but I am interested in writing that can tease out some of the ideas in and around the music and extend them in new directions. That, I think, is a different and interesting kind of dance worth attempting.

> We understand a review, then, as this kind of dance: as a record of the reviewer’s experience of listening to a record, which will accept that it will largely take as its subject the listening, and not the record. Even better if it’s a dialogue between two. So, here’s what I think about the album.

*

> Ok, before I talk about the album, actually, I would like to talk about a book. I hope that’s alright. There is no objective correlation between the album and the book except the proximity in time in which I experienced them. Let’s get that out of the way at the very beginning. The book has nothing to do with the album. But it does have something to do with how I heard it.

> The book is called An Experiment with Time. I mentioned this to you once already over Zoom. It was written in 1927. My copy belonged to my grandfather, in fact, and his writing – and so his pen and then his hand and then his whole vanished being – appeared occasionally at marginal or pivotal points throughout the text. That was part of what I liked about it, I guess.

> The book – which I allowed Wikipedia to tell me only after I had pushed my way through it – is regarded as an imaginative curiosity, but one which science has never taken seriously. That’s fine for me, because I am far more familiar, fluid and fluent in the language and implications of the imagination that I am of science.

> The book, broadly in two halves, sets out in its first strange span experiences of premonitions in dreams. That will give you the idea of the kind of science book it is. The second half is an attempt at a logical, philosophical, and occasionally mathematical explanation of Time that can account for these premonitory fissures.

> It posits that, in addition to the three dimensions of space (height, breadth and depth, I suppose), that time is a fourth dimension in our universe. I’ve heard that said, but I never really got it before. I do now, and it is very beautiful, because it begins to make me imagine, how, like a sculptor, I can ply, fold and shape with this new dimension. You can imagine how this might be useful to a musician, music being an art that can only exist through time.

> Anyway, the book then goes on to posit that a fourth dimension in which something can be observed to travel (our consciousness), must necessarily imply an observer in a fifth dimension to observe that travel, and then one in a sixth dimension, and so on, ad inifitum, infinite regress, serial time.

> I confess this somewhat surpassed the boundaries of my metaphysics (and/or silently slipped over my head), but the image of the infinite regress has stayed with me, the clickanddrag of old Windows windows ossified and pulled to leave twisting, spiralling trails; the gold-tipped rhythm of tenement window embrasures, repeating, far off, clickanddragged up a hill (hints and twists of Escher), on my daily walks.

> Wikipedia later told me that an infinite regress is a shaky ground on which to base a philosophical proof. Again, this is fine for me: I am a bad philosopher, because I am not competitive, and so this does not bother me very much.

> The infinite regress is a beautiful image, with lots of possibility in it for further imaginings, and it entrances me. So, keep this idea of serial observers and the limitless extension it implies close, please (foreshadowing again, you’re welcome).

*

> I will switch now, briefly, too briefly, from critic to fanboy (I contain multitudes, etc.).  

> Notes on a Conditional Form as an album title made me smile a smile that was very close to a wince or wink. Classic Matty, was probably the thought that came next. You have already summarised dastardly, dear, endearing, calamitous Matty, so I will move on assuming that, Matty Healy, yeah, I know.

> Back to the critic. The conditional form, in this review has already been (drumroll, eyeroll) music reviews themselves. See part one.

> Now I would like to take the album as the form in question – not this album, but albums generally, as this album is an exploration of the album form. The Album, capitalised.

> Albums have become normalised. But let’s play dumb for a moment – one of the cleverest things we can do - and we’ll see that albums are anything but inevitable, especially in the boundless age of streaming.

> Before this, albums used to be defined as collections with physical bounds. The capacity of a CD; before that, a length of magnetic tape; before that, the edge of a vinyl, a shellac, a wax cylinder. That about takes us back to the start of recorded audio media, I think.

> After Edison’s initial, waxy curiosities, albums began - like most things we love and hate - as a product. The form of the album was a circle. The music was a line. The edge of the line was the end of time. Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, as a fun aside. And, as another, did you know that there’s a funny B-plot in all of this to do with Beethoven. (It’s always to do with fucking Beethoven.) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became the arbitrary marker for the desired length of the CD. It had never before been possible to fit the symphony onto a single, uninterrupted piece of media. And so, the B-plot goes, this is why the standard CD holds the amount of time that it does.

> Anyway, regardless of who shaped them, physical recorded media have, since their staggered births, profoundly shaped culture. Pop songs, especially singles, are still 3 and a half minutes long because that was the maximum amount of time that could be squeezed onto a 78, in the shellac days. Time was short and simple then, seemingly.

> Notes on a Conditional Form is 81 minutes long. It had 8 singles leading up to it, released over a span of ten months. Clearly, physical boundaries and marketing timelines, are not being treated in the usual way. You could just release singles forever now. But the fact this ended up as an album shows some belief in the concept beyond the physical and, yes, the commercial. Let’s press on, look elsewhere.

> Since we’ve started talking about classical music – ok, since I started talking about classical music – I’d like to dwell there for a moment, because there are foreshadows of The Album, conceptually speaking (and this album specifically) several layers up, several parenthesis ago, criticism as serial digression, in classical music.

> Collecting songs as albums was a favourite pastime of the Romantics, early emos. @FranzSchubert, @ClaraSchumann, @JohannesBrahms – there’s another B-plot in that trio if you want to look it up, by the way. Also, Clara Schumann is overlooked, like all female composers, because the classical music world is deeply patriarchal. It’s important to say that whenever we can.

> Anyway, the Romantics did not develop the album as a physical form – the only available recording medium at that time was sheet music, which they did sell in a big way, actually. But really, they helped develop the album as a conceptual form. They collected a group of shorter songs to make a larger statement – Schubert especially. In the 19th century, this was known as a song cycle, a lovely phrase, that makes me think of cycling through meadows, which I have done more than usual recently, as part of my state-sanctioned exercises, though the meadow was in fact an overgrown golf course, and no less lovely for it.

> Schubert’s Die Winterreise is a classic example of the song cycle – and another example of the emo-Romantic - a cycle of poems set to music that take the listener on a journey over time. Sound familiar? Albums. Song cycles. Song spokes. Meadows. Grasses and wildflowers. Meandering journeys.

> Anyway, here we finally return to Notes on a Conditional Form. Collecting songs together allows for an exploration of ideas that can evolve or expand over time – a Brief Inquiry, you might say. Art as a tool of investigation. Process. And this album certainly does that. You already touched on some of the ideas in the album: the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, digital communication, social unrest, calls to action, my favourite lyric on that theme, while we’re here:

Wake up, wake up, wake up, we are appalling

And we need to stop just watching shit in bed

And I know it sounds boring and we like things that are funny

But we need to get this in our fucking heads-

> You explore these ideas well so I will not pursue them more for now. Thank you!

> The other effect of collecting songs – or anything together – is that it gives birth to form. (Gasp, he said the title of the movie!)

> Yes, collecting things together as an album is what creates the form in all senses of the word – physical, commercial, conceptual. Form, pure form, is not the things, or the arrangement of the things, but the relationship between the arranged things. Glimpsing this is like getting a delicious glimpse of time as a fourth dimension. As I may have already let slip, I am very interested in time. And so, I am naturally interested in musical forms, which can only be apprehended through time, with time, thanks to time – thank you, time. We don’t often say that.

*

> This is where I will, at last - god, imagine I had been speaking at you this whole time - this is where I will at last get into the main topic of this review. The remarkable form of this album.

> Wait, sorry, one more thing before I do. A really quick one. As well as time, musical form also needs contrast. For sections to appear as distinct, and thus for us to clearly apprehend the difference between them, and thus get a glimpse of Form, they must contrast with one another, for how else would we apprehend change, notice borders, know we are somewhere else. (An interesting digression here is process music, which I love dearly, and which has an entirely different relationship with form. Look it up, if you like.)

> Anyway, for our purposes now, musical form requires contrast. This could be achieved in many ways: traditionally, it was done with different melodies or harmonies; but it could be done with volume, instrumentation, tempo, texture etc. etc.

> The main way that this album delineates its striking – and, to my mind, for what it’s worth, unique and new – form, how it creates its contrast, is using all of the above tricks, but, even more so, by contrasting styles/genres. This was immediately what struck me and thrilled me about this album, and it’s kind of funny – for me as the annoying writer, perhaps less so for you, the reader, I mean listener – that it’s taken me 2,534 words to mention it. This I think is the brilliance of this record. This is why we can call it not just contemporary, but new.

> The 1975 have always been shifting, but never like this. This album contains, sometimes literally right next to each other: punk, orchestral music, UK garage, Americana, shoegaze, folk, dancehall, 80s power ballads – and, of course, pop, whatever that means. Stravinsky became famous for sharp juxtapositions of distinct musical blocks. He would fucking love this.

> I messaged you, after my first listen, to say that the album reminded me of one of Sophia Coppola’s soundtracks. That was an instinctive, emotional response, but, having thought about it, I can now demonstrate the reason for the similarity. The stylistically varied end products are similar to one another because the methodology is similar: soundtracks select music practically to achieve emotional affects. Soundtrack albums use music as a tool to heighten ideas that lie elsewhere, in their case, in the filmed scenes they accompany. If you believe Matty Healy, this is also what The 1975 do. They use beauty, in whatever style or genre they find it:

‘Beauty is the sharpest tool that we have - if you want someone to pay attention, make it beautiful’.

> What do you make of that, @Keats? No, really, I would love to know.

> I think this is a remarkable musical strategy, that requires flexibility, knowledge and skill. That there is such a high level of all these things in the band is what allows it the strategy to be successful.

> I would like to pause here and consider the implications of this strategy on a personal, social and cultural level.

*

> Musical genre and personal identity have been as fused for as long as pop music has existed. This could be a trick of the market, or it could be a need of the individual psyche, or both. I think there is some truth in theory that in the increasingly widespread absence of God – by which I mean organised religion – people need to find both a guide for their metaphysics and morals, and a structure for their community, as these are some of the most effective tools we have discovered for constructing our Selves, making sense of our lives and the world. Art can provide the guide for many people. It also provides community. These communities, collections – albums? - of political, moral and aesthetic views, then become subcultures.

> Until very recently, subcultures were fixed. ‘Hardcore till I die’, ageing ravers, old punks. Interestingly one never really sees ageing emos. But that’s a subject for another essay.

> This, I think, is perhaps what is so striking here: musical genres are normally culminations (or roots, depending on how you look at it) of lived sub or counter cultures. These usually result from a fixed viewpoint about life and society, shared by the individuals that comprise them. The individuals identify with what the music says, how it is presented and how it looks as much – or perhaps even more - than how it sounds.

> Before now, it would have been shocking to imagine a band switching effortlessly from one style to another – this occasionally happens over the course of a career, between albums, but almost never in the same album itself - because it would feel like a betrayal, if we accept that bands and styles represent fixed ways of life and viewpoints and that neither lives nor viewpoints can change. Which, obviously they can. And which, obviously, they do, nowadays, with increasing speed, @Coronavirus.

> Matty’s appearance is a perfect demonstration of this. Minging Matty, Hearthrob Matty, Matty in vintage jeans, in a skirt, in a pinstripe suit. If we accept the old association of musical style/subculture and the clothing/uniform each produces, what would the ideal garb of a The 1975 listener be? A screen. A real, working search engine, fused with their body.

> Previously, the model was that bands had ‘influences’ which they ‘blended’ to create a ‘new’ sound. Here, The 1975 don’t really focus on blending sounds at the level of individual songs: the blend, boldly, happens at the level of the album. If the album is like a soundtrack, it is the soundtrack to the algorithmic age of effortless consumption of media.

> And I would like an examination of that idea to be the final track on this album. I mean, review. I mean conversation.

*

> The 1975 are inseparable from recorded media. Not just their own, but recorded media from the past. They are not able to invoke and inhabit this startling panoply of styles, to my knowledge, because they have studied in individual places or with masters of each craft or tradition – they are able to do it because they, like us, are able to consume recordings of these styles, and they, like us, have done so all their lives.

> When The 1975 invoke these styles, they are not evoking a tradition, or a way of doing things, or even seeing things. They are invoking personal memories of experiencing recordings, encountering media. We can take a look at a few examples of this.

> Let’s start with the classical stuff. The orchestral interludes do not sound like they are written by classical composers, or even composers of film soundtracks - the use of orchestration is different. It sounds, to my ear, like acoustic instruments playing what were originally MIDI parts. Which, I imagine, is what happened. That would usually be called bad orchestration. I am not interested in saying that. I am slightly interested in the effect of getting classical musicians, with their classical training, to play music written by people without classical training on a computer. What are the implications of writing for the flute as a soundfont, rather than a person, instrument or tradition?

> And what is the significance of placing an orchestra, playing instrumental compositions, on a pop record. These are not backing arrangements in an existing pop song, as we commonly encounter; nor are they classical arrangements of a pop song (see Hacienda Classical et al).

> These are standalone orchestral compositions on a record that also includes shoegaze, UK garage, two-step, Americana, punk. What, then, is the significance of this? The instruments, I believe, are being chosen less for their own sonic timbres, and more for their social or cultural timbres. I will try to explain this thought.

> Matty has often spoken about ‘Disneyfication’; he said he wanted ‘The Man Who Married a Robot / Love Theme’ on A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships to sound like a Disney movie. What does that mean? It means, I think, he wants it to sound like old movies, childhood, nostalgia. The orchestra is a sinecure for the ‘symphonic’, the cinematic, the dramatic; the orchestra is used like a banjo, which is, elsewhere on the album, used to conjure the exoticism of Americana as heard by someone listening to it in the UK, to paraphrase Matty’s words.  

> The stylistic references in the album are as much references to media as much as they are to music. Disney: orchestral sounds, likely filtered and wobbled through VHS cassettes. The orchestra, already made symbolic by its association with movies, made a double symbol, a reflection of a shadow, being invoked through the original sound not really for this sound but for our associations with it. The banjo invoked as both an instrument of yesteryear and over there. The music constructs frames of otherness to facilitate wistfulness, longing, memory.

> The chart success of ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’ is that it’s a modern bop that sounds like 80s bangers. Its artistic success is that it contrasts the feeling of halcyon safety created by its imitation of 80s bangers (experienced for millennials usually as triumphant climaxes in movies, jubilant moments on oldies stations), and rubs this up against some of the disturbing parts of the present: the angst of online relationships, nudity with people you don’t know and have not and may never meet. This is a simple but highly effective juxtaposition.

> ‘Bagsy Not In Net’ does this too: a quotidian, painful experience of childhood (not wanting to play in goal in a football game), expressed as a yearning and grand orchestral statement. This is true, too, of ‘Streaming’. This is pop music Pop Art: the contemporary quotidian expressed in the language of an old tradition and invested with the significance of an Art it simultaneously questions the power and validity of.

> And, to linger on ‘If You’re Too Shy’ for just a little longer, what is the meaning of a saxophone solo in pop music in 2020? It is symbolic: a shortcut, practically a meme. Saxophone solos exist in a present in contemporary jazz - they are a living history making new futures. But saxophone solos almost always only exist in pop music as ghosts (careless whispers) of the past. This particular sax solo is so euphoric to us less because of its musical content and more because of the emotions we have learned to associate with sax solos through other media.

> The final, most perfect example of this, of everything I have been getting at, really, is the UK garage references. These are themselves references to artists like The Streets, and Burial, who, themselves, were referencing the primary records of UK garage which they (The Streets and Burial) never experienced in clubs, but as recordings. And The 1975 experienced these recordings of recordings. Layers and layers of reference. And here, abruptly, we find ourselves back at the opening image of the infinite regress.

> At times, this album wants to express the present moment back at itself, and so prompt reflection and action. The fright of the zeitgeist. In this we can include Greta Thunberg, ‘People’, and the overtly socio-political statements on the album. I hope these tracks will be successful. In the future, they will take on the significance of historic artefacts: preserved truths from a vanished time, fixed and rich, like amber.

> But there are long swathes of the album, that do not have this intent, and which will, I believe, have a different longevity. These are the (often wordless) lyrical sections: the abstract, the vague, the instrumental sections – in all senses of the word. Records of the individual imagination listening to another individual imagination listening to another individual imagination. What will these tracks become in time, in Time?

> There is something ethereally delicious about the thought of people in the future coming across people in the past’s nostalgia of another past, now three links distant to their present, compoundly insubstantial, glittering, compelling. Fifth, sixth, seventh dimensions - serial nostalgias.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order.

~

Text: Scott Morrison

Published: 26/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Lost Horizon by Nathaniel Farrell

In this review, Jack Parlett ventures through the avenues, grooves and colliding landscapes, fantasies and libidinal economies of Nathaniel Farrell’s Lost Horizon (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019).

> Nathaniel Farrell’s long poem Lost Horizon (2019), which takes as its subject the space of the retail utopia, makes me think of a lot of things. Which is to say that its sense of breadth and abundance – packed full of things and images, traversing vast distances across different landscapes – had me grasping for other reference points, for affinities that might suggest ways of reading it. The pile-up of the opening lines, scattered across the page, offers a glimpse into the ways this poem can get you lost:

The fountain full of coins       the smell of pretzels, print, perfume

formaldehyde in fabrics

                                   brass rails down stairwells      rebar in the pillars

           the underground parking structure – Roman alphabet

                                                                                   Arabic numerals –

                                                                                       (Farrell 2019: 1)

> The mall, scented with the churn of Auntie Anne’s pretzels (say) and the potent fragrances of a nearby department store, is rendered throughout the poem as an archaeological surface, as though the poet’s task were one of excavation. Lost Horizon reminds me, in this sense, of an Anselm Kiefer painting; a maximalist collage blending the industrial and the pastoral, foregrounding the dimensionality of objects that appear ‘found’ within the landscape of the work, like the unsettling use of spindly wires and sticks the painter is known for. Farrell, too, is interested in exteriorising the subterranean, the things that glimmer and protrude, like the ‘coins’ emanating from beneath the water of the fountain, like the chemical compounds found in our clothes. His is a multi-storeyed work, finding ancient linguistic systems in car parks, conferring the quotidian spaces of late capitalism with the dignity of the palimpsest.

> But Farrell’s poem does not settle upon one groove. It unfolds in strange and wrong-footing ways. Although this opening passage would seem to suggest a logic of succession, a list of things you might expect to find in a shopping mall, with an associative momentum driven forward by alliteration, the poem’s larger scheme is one of randomness, a yoking together of any number of images and textures. (My personal favourite: ‘Avocado.       TV as diorama or diocese                   catfish farm     trout hatchery.’) (27). This fragmented structure speaks back to the form of the Surrealist catalogue, or to experiments in automatic writing, and renders them in a distinctly American vernacular, like the New York melee of Frank O’Hara’s long 1953  poem Second Avenue or, more recently, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s 2011 work Metropole (minus the strict iambic rules.)

> Yet where Second Avenue seems to stage a representational gag – in what sense is this poem, characterised by lines like ‘Butter. Lotions. Cries. A glass of ice’ (O’Hara 1995: 149) ‘about’ Second Avenue itself? – the abstraction of Farrell’s purview is already made explicit in his title. Lost Horizon is a work in search of a potentiality that has already been lost, and it goes looking for it in all kinds of places: shopping malls, forests, multiplexes, highways, locales suspended in the poem’s veering between the vitality of the artificial and the natural realm to which it shall one day return. Where a ‘rebarbative’ work like Second Avenue, in Andrea Brady’s words, recoils ‘from sentimentality but also from the reader’ (Brady 2010: 60), Farrell’s poem does the opposite. It homes in upon the way that sentiment might inhere in the spaces and materials of consumption and the faded spectacles of capital. Perhaps this is why, beyond any of the more high-minded comparisons it invites, Lost Horizon makes me think most of all of the town I grew up in.

> It feels a little parochial to compare the scale of Farrell’s Americana with a single town in Buckinghamshire. (He writes in the Acknowledgments that the project ‘emerged from road travel’ and draws upon the imagery of places including ‘St. Louis  and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Fort Wayne’.) Yet shopping malls trade, the poem suggests, in incongruity; they flatten space and time, incorporate the urban, the pastoral and the global, as if the whole world might be incorporated under their ceilings. I realised in navigating this poem that so much of my sense of America, and Americanness as a kind of distant and glamorous imaginary, was mediated through my childhood in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes was, after all, developed with reference to the layout of American cities.

> The area known as Central Milton Keynes (or ‘CMK’) was conceived in the mid-seventies as part of the recently created ‘new town’ in Buckinghamshire, and was officially opened by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Although ‘CMK’ is a municipal designation – a name for the central zone of the larger Milton Keynes area – it is predominantly a business and retail district. Laid out on a grid, CMK sits somewhere between the ‘downtown’ area of an American city and the out-of-town shopping mall; an assemblage of shopping centres, office buildings and industrial parks, characterised by its distinctive glass-and-steel buildings and an infamous number of roundabouts. Like many British ‘new towns’, Milton Keynes was created with both pragmatic and idealistic aims in mind. On the one hand, it was an overspill project providing an outlet for London’s rising and congested population. On the other, it was to be a new frontier both socially and architecturally; an automobile haven merging green space with the imposing surfaces of the modern city. Today, it looks both futuristic and dated. Or rather, it looks like what the future was once supposed to look like.

> When I tell people I grew up in and around Milton Keynes, it usually prompts one of two responses. The first, most frequent and predictable, is a kind of apologetic nod, a nod to MK’s associations in the national imaginary as a uniquely naff, soulless place. The other (more generous) reaction is a kind of keen and outsize enthusiasm, prompting a conversation about the town’s architectural significance or its peculiar place in British local history as an experiment of urban planning. (There’s also, sometimes, outright judgment, as when on my first day of university a private schoolboy told me that ‘when I think of Milton Keynes I think of scum.’). My feelings about the place fall somewhere in the middle – I’m defensive of it in the face of snobbery, but I also think that the people who find it an area of intellectual interest probably didn’t grow up there. Until the opening of the recently re-developed Milton Keynes Gallery, which was reported widely in the national press, CMK lacked a culture of its own, and it still remains best known as a cornucopia of brand names and chain restaurants.

> And yet I can’t pretend that some part of me doesn’t kind of love it. Farrell’s work pays attention to the embarrassment one might feel about being from a place like Milton Keynes, or rather the embarrassment in our attachments to such a place. I still desire to rediscover the uniquely artificial pleasures of the shopping mall. Against my better judgments, I find myself beguiled again by CMK’s performance of grandeur, its strange radiance. Or perhaps its that my memories of childhood and adolescence are shot through, like an off-brand Lorde song, with its suburban framework, its constellation of uniquely named places like The Point, a red steel pyramid housing the UK’s first multiplex cinema when it opened in 1985, or the pastoral-sounding Midsummer Place, an extension of the shopping centre built around an oak tree, which people still refer to today as the ‘new bit.’ (It was opened at the start of the millennium and has been bought out by the Intu franchise. The tree is no more.)

> The speaker of Lost Horizon similarly figures the retail landscape as a site of affective and libidinal attachments, less a utopic horizon than a space where experience is packaged and backlit, where material capitalism might dupe us into utopic thinking, where you can hear ‘the beat of an unmoored heart in the duty-free shop’ (Farrell: 70). (The term retail therapy is particularly apt.) This speaker has a mobile erotic attention; reflects on the bulge of a male model, spots ‘a sign for Hooter’s at the Colonial Williamsburg exit / the owl’s eyes made to look like nipples’ (24) and appears to cruise, ‘wait[ing] at the bathrooms; / they smell of feces and orange cleanser / Yankee Candle’ (23). Nature, after all, will make its return, and the most pristine spaces must co-mingle with muck, human and otherwise. An ominous refrain towards the beginning of the poem - ‘A cellphone glows in a back pocket’ (9) - signals the mall’s impending obsolescence, its succumbing to the space of the virtual, and this in turn informs the poem’s ecological fixation, its avalanche of natural elements and catastrophic tableaux. Because this is what happens to shopping malls, eventually, as shown in the work of photojournalist Seph Lawless. Lawless’s portraits of abandoned shopping malls in economically precarious parts of America, malls now overgrown with vegetation, look post-apocalyptic, like a contemporary sci-fi iteration of the way Walter Benjamin conceptualised the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century; as repositories, in part, for the lost dreams of prosperity.

> The shopping area of Central Milton Keynes is now Grade II-listed by Historic England, and it is renowned for its extensive greenery, its line of trees that populate the grid. (The area as a whole boasts 22 million trees and shrubs.) The integration of the green and sub(urban) landscape is something that makes the centre of Milton Keynes more desirable and sustainable, a nod to the land’s past. But you could look at it another way; not as a symbol of origin, but of man-made transience. Whatever shiny promises the retail utopia makes, it is built, Farrell’s dizzying poem suggests, to one day succumb to an unknowable horizon, where the trees will be ‘all that remain of home’ (3).

References:

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press)

Brady, Andrea. 2011. ‘Distraction and Absorption on Second Avenue.’ Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). 59-70

Farrell, Nathaniel. 2019. Lost Horizon (Ugly Duckling Presse)

O’Brien, Geoffrey G. 2011. Metropole (Berkeley: University of California Press)

O’Hara, Frank. 1995. Collected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press)

~

Lost Horizon is now available via Ugly Duckling Presse.

~

Text and Image: Jack Parlett

Published: 19/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Tongues by Taylor Le Melle, Rehana Zaman and Those Institutions Should Belong to Us, by Christopher Kirubi

In this review, Rhian Williams takes a look at Tongues, a dazzling zine edited by Taylor Le Melle and Rehana Zaman (PSS, 2018), with* Christopher Kirubi’s pamphlet ‘Those Institutions Should Belong to Us’ (PSS). 

*I [Rhian] use ‘with’ here in homage to Fred Moten’s use of that preposition in all that beauty (2019) to ‘denote accompaniment[]’. This pamphlet was interleaved in the review copy of Tongues that I received from PSS.

> Onions, lemons, chilli peppers, fractals, hands, patterns, palms pressing, tears, avocados, pomegranate, mouths, finger clicking, deserts. Screenshots, flyers, placards, transcripts, textures, temporalities. Tongues is an urgent gathering in, a zine-type publication that works as a space where Black and Brown women (bringing both their intersections and the tension of distinction) enact memorial, exchange, jouissance, resistance, collaboration, support, listening. Edited by Taylor Le Melle and filmmaker Rehana Zaman, whose work generates many of the dialogic responses interleaved in this collection, this ‘assembly of voices’ was brought together in this particular format in the wake of Zaman’s exhibition, Speaking Nearby, shown at the CCA in Glasgow in 2018. But, as Ainslie Roddick explains, in ‘an attempt to reckon with the trans-collaborative nature of “practice” itself’, Tongues resists academic mechanisms that fall into reiterating the violence of individualism, moving around the figure of the single author/editor to seek to capture ‘a process of thinking with and through the people we work and resist with, acknowledging and sharing the work of different people as practice’ (p. 3). As such, ‘[Tongues’] structure, design and rhythm reflect the work of all the contributors to this anthology who think with one another through various practical, poetic and pedagogical means’ (ibid.). Designed and published by PSS, this is a tactile, sensory production: its aesthetics are post-internet, collage, digi-analogue, liquid-yet-textural, with shiny paper pages that you have to gently peel apart, gleaming around a central pamphlet of matte, heavier paper in mucous-membrane pink and mauve, which itself protects the centrefold glossy mouth-open lick of ‘I kiss your ass’ between the leaves of Ziba Karbassi’s poem, ‘Writing Cells’, here in both Farsi and English (translated with Stephen Watts). Throughout, Tongues reiterates the sensuous, labouring body as political, as partisan.

> Tongues’ multivalency is capacious, nurturing, dedicated to archiving that which is fugitive yet ineluctable; so, inevitably, its overarching principle is labour, is work. The entire collection of essays, response pieces, email exchanges, WhatsApp messages, poetry, transcripts, journaling, and imaginings are testimony to effort and skill, to the determination to keep spaces open for remembrance and for noticing within the ever-creeping demands of production. It is not surprising that this valuable collection is stalked by perilous attenuation, the damage of exhaustion. It is appallingly prescient of the first week of June 2020. Moving my laptop so that I can write whilst also keeping an eye on what I’m cooking for later, setting up my child to listen to an audiobook so that I can try to open up some headspace for listening and responding, nervous about how to spread my ‘being with’ across multiple platforms (my child, my writing, the news, other voices), I am taken by Chandra Frank’s meditative response piece to Zaman’s Tell me the story Of all these things (2017) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), which vibrates with ‘the potency and liberatory potential of the kitchen’ (p. 9) and movingly seeks to track and honour ‘what it means to both feel and read through a non-linear understanding of subjectivities’ (p. 10). But I only have to turn the page to realise my white safety. I am at home in my kitchen; my space may feel like it has turned into a laboratory for the reproduction of everyday life under lockdown, but it is manifest, it is seen in signed contracts, my subjectivity is grounded on recognition and citizenship. For Sarah Reed, searingly remembered by Gail Lewis in ‘More Than… Questions of Presence’, subjectivity was experienced as brutalisation, manifested posthumously in hashtags, #sayhername. (Reed was found dead in her cell at Holloway Prison in London in February 2016. In 2012 she had been violently assaulted by Metropolitan Police officer James Kiddie; the assault was captured by CCTV footage.) For the women immigrants engaged in domestic work in British homes, as documented here in Marissa Begonia’s vital journaling piece and Zaman’s discussion with Laura Guy, subjectivity is precarity and threat, their dogged labour forced into shadows. Lewis’s piece pivots around a ‘capacity of concern’ generated by ‘the political, ethical, relationship challenge posed by the presence of “the black woman”’ (p. 18), urging that such concern be of the order of care by walking a line with psychoanalysts D. A. Winnicott and Wilfred Bion in recognising that ‘in naming something we begin a journey in the unknown’ (p. 19). If that ‘unknown’ includes understanding how the British state is inimical to the self-determination and safety of Black and Brown women born within its ‘Commonwealth’ borders (#CherryGroce; #JoyGardner; #CynthiaJarrett; #BellyMujinga), and further, how its ‘hostile environment’ policies – named and pursued as such by the British Home Office under Theresa May – are designed specifically to threaten those born elsewhere, by reiterating Britain’s historical enthusiasm for enslavement of non-white labour (see the 2012 visa legislation, discussed here, that, for domestic workers, effectively put a lock on the 2016 ‘Modern Slavery Act’ review before it had even begun), then consider Tongues a demand to get informed. This is a zine about workers and working. It is imperative that we come to terms with what working life in Britain looks like (see the Public Health England report into disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19 – released June 2 2020, censored to remove sections that highlighted the effect of structural racism, but nevertheless evidencing the staggering inequality in death and suffering that is linked to occupation and to citizen status, and therefore tracks race and poverty lines). It is imperative that we scrutinise how ‘popular [and, I would add, Westminster] culture perpetuates a notion of working class identity as a fantasy’ (p. 52) that literally spirits away the bodies undertaking keywork in the UK. The title of Frank’s piece here, ‘Fragmented Realities’, is exquisitely apt.

> Bookended by Roddick’s and Zaman’s radical re-orientating of the apparatus of academia – the introduction that resists assimilating each of the forthcoming pieces under one stable rubric, instead simply listing anonymously a sentence from each contributor in a process of meditative opening up, and ‘A note, before the notes. The end notes’ that counter-academically reveals weaknesses and vulnerabilities, is open to qualification and reframing, is responsive ­– Tongues constitutes a politics and aesthetics of ‘shift’. Collated after a staged exhibition, anticipating new bodies of work to come, and ultimately punctuated by a pamphlet that segues from reporting on an inspiring event that took place at the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmith’s University of London to imagining a second one in paper (the ‘original’ having been thwarted by bad weather), the entire collection has a productively stuttering relationship with temporality and with presence. As Shama Khanna writes about working groups and reading groups, workshops and pleasure-seeking in gallery spaces, this is the moving ground of the undercommons. It is testament to its intellectual lodestars – Sara Ahmed, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and, especially, the eroto-power of Audre Lorde. Along with Christopher Kirubi’s pamphlet, ‘Those Institutions Should Belong to Us’, which comprises a series of seven short ‘prose poems’ documenting the anguish of writing a dissertation from a marginalised perspective, the entire project of Tongues with Those Institutions is to upend academic practice, to recognise the ideological thrust of academic method, to stage fugitive enquiry. Kirubi’s plain sans-serif black font on white pages rehearses the anxious dialectics of interpellation and liberation (‘there is a need to see ourselves reflected in position of agency power and self determination in a world which does not really wish to see us thrive at all’ (part 3)) afforded by their academic obligations, but inarticulacy is a higher form of eloquence:

Even though I know at some point I am going to have to yield to these demands I feel I have to say now that I want to take in this dissertation a position of defending the inarticulate, defending the subjective and defending the incoherent, without having to arrive at a point of defence through theoretically determined foundations, but to feel them.

> Since its structuring principles are those of women’s work, and of Black and Brown experience, nurturing and shielding within the exhaustingly cyclical nature of toiling for recognition, respect, and protection, Tongues dances in the poetics of circles, of loops and feedback, of reciprocity and exchange. Recognising, however, that circularity is also the shape of repetitive strain, Zaman leaves us with a spiralling gesture, in homage to the Haitian spiral, ‘born out of the work of the Spiralist poets’ (p. 61). This ‘dynamic and non-linear’ form insists on the mutuality of the past and contemporary circumstances, is ‘a movement of multiplied or fractured beings, back and forth in time and space demanding accumulation, tumult, and repetition, adamant irresolution and open endedness…’. We are in that spiral now. Such demands must be heard, power must be relinquished, established forms of control – enacted in the streets and on our pages – must be terminated. Writing in early June 2020, this feels precarious; no one is exempt from giving of their strength.

Please pursue further information here. If you are able, these organisations thrive (given the paucity of state support) on donation:

Voice of Domestic Workers: https://www.thevoiceofdomesticworkers.com/

Cherry Groce foundation: https://www.cherrygroce.org/

BBZBLACKBOOK (a digital archive of emerging & established black queer artists): https://bbzblkbk.com/

Reclaim Holloway: http://reclaimholloway.mystrikingly.com/

~

Text: Rhian Williams

Published: 16/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Miscellaneous by Julia Rose Lewis

In this review, Maria Sledmere visits the verdant isle of Julia Rose Lewis’ pamphlet Miscellaneous (Sampson Low, 2019), and engages chaotically with its shape-shifting poetics of ecstasy, digression and slippery things.

> Miscellaneous: of various kinds; elements of different kinds. A little green book full of miscellany. The work of Julia Rose Lewis has been dealing in miscellany (let me say it as much I can, it’s a lovely word) for a while now. Lewis’ collection Phenomenology of the Feral (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2017) was a veritable assemblage of household objects, clothing items, all things edible (from oranges to gummy bears), tools, chemicals and other substances. Words had a Steinian tendency to slip, where a ‘pear’ becomes ‘peer’ and sugar becomes sand. The whole book teems with a delicious excess of things and their zoomed-in, jostling, merging and almost psychedelic relation (I mean just consider the multicoloured octopus-bunny hybrids on the cover). Her recent pamphlet, Miscellaneous (2019), a slender offering from chapbook series Sampson Low, edited by fellow dealer in poetic animalia, SJ Fowler, continues this playful approach to disordering objects, experience and relation.

> Explicitly ‘inspired’ by Green Eggs and Ham, a classic children’s book by Dr. Seuss, Miscellaneous works with its foodstuffs in a fractal and kind of ecstatic way. Ecstasy meaning rapture or transport; Miscellaneous as a little island of strong emotion. I want to say island, but I could just as easily say green tomato. It’s difficult to resist the seduction of island metaphors during quarantine, and besides, Lewis herself spent time as a child in Nantucket Island. According to the publisher, Miscellaneous ‘asks if it is possible to have a mutually healthy relationship between a human and an island’. In an interview from 2016 with Katy Lewis Hood, Lewis says, ‘I use writing about the place I’m longing for as an antidote; I see islands as stories and stories as islands’. Staying with that chiasmus, might we see Miscellaneous itself as a kind of place? The scales upended sufficient to slip into our pocket, a zoomy island remainder? A dinky little 12-page island you could circle on foot and do it again and again — for this is a book that loves repetition, a veritable jaunt on the anaphora express, a 5-7 syllabic ride on the waves. But it’s difficult to know what constitutes the very land you walk or ride on:

A mane! A terrain! A mane is a terrain through and through and should you be guarding the herd inside the river valley? You hold this territory? Not harnessed! Not in a horse-less carriage!

Lewis plays deliciously with the fact of metaphor as a transport, a vehicle, while thrashing around in the joy of assonance and sound as forces of meaning and meaning’s disruption. What’s more, the repeated invocation of the ‘you’ means I’m forever hailed back to the scene; I can’t leave the island utterly behind, can’t glide drone-like over its landscapes. Besides, maybe it’s more like an archipelago? Terrain is a region of land, a system of rocks or geological formations, a standing-ground or position. Lewis teases us with the ever resolving, dissolving, negating terrains of lyric. Those exclamation marks are surely provocations to the reader, as much as the swept up proclamation of revelling in words themselves (thinking of the upward-looking heart emoji, reacting to a message). Her ‘I’ (perhaps riffing off the O’Haran tradition of I do this I do that poems, via Colin Herd’s I like this I like that variation) is quite demanding, precise, has an eye for arrangement (‘The musk ox is not in the / ocean’), identification, variation, placement (‘They disappear’). As with the effect of haiku (a kind of ‘cut’ of images), she challenges ‘nature’/object relations by similarity and contrast:

I would not like that morose woman faraway, that maiden hair tree. I am that old ginkgo tree.

What is the connection between the morose woman and the maiden hair? Does the fact of the speaker being the ‘old ginkgo’ explain her conditional dislike of the woman? And is the maiden hair tree the same as the woman? With its short, invitational lyrics, Miscellaneous gives you time to wander around the ideas of things, ideas in things. Maybe it’s telling the story of an island which is really a metaphor for Earth: its ‘holding pattern[s]’, its ‘there or anywhere’, its snowy territories, its ‘dry grasses / and mosses’ (v. Eliotic, ‘The Dry Salvages’ of Four Quartets?), its ‘skyhook’, its ‘living fossil leaf’ with ‘many millions of years’ inside it. Crudely speaking, ecopoetry often tries so hard to seem either objective (ecomimesis) or explicitly subjective (Romantic); the speaker of these poems insists on a kind of declarative, shape-shifting reality, whose run-on code requires the user command of something more than human. ‘You hold all the weeks / would you tote the boulders here?’ The labour of bringing the world to life in poetry is more than just reading; you have to really consider toting the boulders of words around. There’s a weird hospitality to this, a gesture of extending the voice: ‘So I / say try the bloom of mold!’. Maybe as a reader I’d speak better the world with the mold in my throat. It’s these kinds of special conditions Miscellaneous gets at so well. What the chapbook gives is a portable miscellany, a set of questions, a dicey and moreish feast of seeing the world anew — at all scales and dwellings, from a ‘ptarmigan nest’ to the air itself. Better eat up.

> Lewis’ smart and choppy lines remind me of the best chefs at the restaurant where I used to work, who would dice veg or make meat cuts with a certain deftness, all the while engaging in dishevelled conversation. I would ask, from which precise bay are the oysters sourced, and the chef would lecture me on the valiance of a 2Pac album. We would swerve from one topic to another by the time of the bell: language defined by the beat and demand of cooking. It was good to feel enslaved to the temporality of the microwave, the rising of bread, the petulant delay on the part of a chicken. And you might say, O maria what does this have to do with Julia Rose Lewis’ new book? And I would say, well, it’s all about iteration, digression, perversion of recipe. The poetic line as the flick of sweaty chef hair, the child’s demanding inquisition, the special way of dodging the question. But don’t let me fill you up with nonsense.

> There’s this weird piece in The Guardian that totally disses Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, which I’ll admit I haven’t read this side of puberty. The author, Emma Brockes, is pretty damning: ‘two-thirds of the words feel like filler’, ‘the rhyme scheme [...] is like something a kid would throw at a homework assignment so he could finish and run out to play’, ‘[Seuss’] books are creepy, empty, over-long, cheap, twee writing posing as whimsy’. Maybe I don’t have a striped ankle to stand on here, but I can’t help but think Brocke is missing a point somewhere. What’s wrong with poetry that wants to fly through itself quickly, all the better for the writer to go out and play? I’m thinking of something Jack Spicer writes in one of his letters to Lorca, describing how there are times in a poet’s life where ‘the objects change’ when ‘someone intrudes into the poet’s life’ so a certain balance is lost. ‘The seagulls, the greenness of the ocean, the fish—they become things to be traded for a smile or the sound of conversation—counters rather than objects’. You sort of get the feeling Brocke got tired of this (too many counters, too much supposed impeachable brilliance) and upended the board, sending everything scattering to miscellany. Maybe that was the appropriate reaction. I’d like my poetry to have that effect sometimes. And then I’d quite like to run out and play, or fall in love (if we were not in lockdown), or otherwise just write you a blowsy prosy letter.

> There’s this idea of Green Eggs and Ham as a childhood exercise in epistemological questioning. Asking you to think about how experience establishes beliefs about the world. Miscellaneous quite obviously trades in the empirical possibilities of knowing, experimenting in what happens when certain patterns or conditions are put into play (it’s worth noting that Julia Rose Lewis is also a scientist by training). I think of a child stuffing sand in its mouth, learning about size, scale, texture, taste. A child that learns a tomato is good when ripe and sweet. I also think of judging when I might cross the road, or a chemist inching just a *wee* bit more of X in the formula (is that how it works? is it like choosing to add another comma to a poem - what exactly is the risk of explosion?). Every day of our lives we are hedging, testing. ‘If you will then I will try / rain on rain on rain’; how I learn from you, a fashionable imitation in the wearable weather/whether. Things pile up, acquire elemental charge; the poems are teasingly object-oriented; the ‘I’ is an iterative effect of desires, repulsions and relations. Substances effect themselves into life and I think of Francis Ponge and the orange. Expression is something to be ‘endured’. How does an object hold itself in a poem, without being overly squeezed into miscellany, matter? Lewis uses the singsong effects of poetry (repetition, rhyme), to play with causality and intention. In the final poem, for example, is the ‘gold’ ‘old’ and what temporality is ‘golden’; is it the ‘spring /green’ or the speaker who is ‘cold’?

> Miscellaneous in general describes a kind of extra or supplementary category, that which escapes the normative set. Perhaps there is then a case for this being a kind of queer object-oriented poetics. Things are slippery and hungry and irresistibly insistent. They become the book itself, the little object in your hand, tomato green as ‘the spring / green tomatoes in sea salt’, sprinkled with salty little words. This is a case for frivolity and filler and whimsy in poetry, for appetite and affect, salty wit, the necessity of dancing around sentiment, excess, sweetness and swerve. ‘I will eat the spring / fruit upside down’; the fruit of the book you peel again.

Miscellaneous is out now and available from Sampson Low.

~

Text and image: Maria Sledmere

Published: 12/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) the blue room by Eloise Hendy

In this review, Alice Hill-Woods prises open the cool, enticing tones of Eloise Hendy’s debut pamphlet the blue room (Makina Books, 2019).

> I place a Dulux Sapphire Springs paint colour palette alongside the blue room to see if there’s a match: there isn’t. This is what blueness can boast – that it is always multi-hued, a rhizome of feeling and doing. Eloise Hendy’s debut pamphlet, published by Makina Books for their New Words series, indulges this truth over twenty-two pages. Her bright and broad imaginings disrupt verse’s dreaminess, slapping a splash your way to bring you back into the glistering present.

> The collection is spectacularly constellated: each poem occupies a single page or a double page spread, so there’s no turning for answers. In addition, the softback material feels waxy and robust, lifting open like a clam. At its natural centre – the place where the staples’ feet turn inwards – is ‘hatching plans’. Word shapes are recycled and sewn into the melancholic weave of the poem, which suits its form: couplets expand over a two-page spread, bringing a certain irony to the speaker’s awareness of ‘oh look a snowdrop oh look another failed relationship’ (l. 9). Indeed, ‘winning at very little’ (l.10) is an echo of pain ‘so winningly resilient’ (l. 5); a ‘murmur’ can be observed in both lines fifteen and sixteen; ‘rainfall’ (l. 17) precedes ‘setting off sprinklers’ (l. 22). Despite its flashing signs of accompaniment, however, this poem respires a kind of loneliness. Carving out the parameters of its cyan symbolism, it’s both rhythmic and reticent, pushing forth and pulling back like an estuary.

> Blue isn’t the only speaking hue, however. Poems ‘woman with blue languid’ and ‘living coral’ mirror each other, brief glimpses of somewhere warmer, a clime closer to summer where terracotta and tangerine dapple the conjured image. In ‘woman with blue languid’, Hendy subverts the glazed idyll of a holiday: the depiction of a hot city verges on unbearable, ‘a hot gaping skull, a lesion’ (l. 2). This makes undisputed sense, and gestures to her lyrical energy as a whole; she is unafraid of honest verse. It triggers and reckons with my own experience of days that are just too warm, when the sunlight, shattering off the remnants of a holiday town, spites an ache for something a little less predictable. The intensity of the heat causes ‘the wilting of stems’ (l. 6), and the sea is offered like an emergency exit:

          i took to the water like a troglobite –          my skin slouched subterranean.

          a crowd of dead crabs lined the shore.          i tasted wing kelp, dead man’s bootlaces (ll. 7-10).

The fluctuating metre paired with end-stopped lines generate in the reader a kind of languid ambivalence; you know the waves are coming in – does it matter what length they are, or if each sounds the same as they massage the shore? Not in this swelling, sweltering diorama. Especially not if you’re a troglobite. The synonym Hendy deploys is vastly appropriate for the slimy passivity of midsummer embodiment at the apex of I-actually-think-I-need-to-have-a-lie-down. A troglobite is ‘unable to survive in the surface environment’ as geology.com reminds me: ‘to survive in the darkness, troglobites have highly-developed senses of hearing, touch and smell’ (King 2020). Perhaps Hendy’s lexis, vitalised as it is by ecological motifs and metaphors, gestures to a more primordial sensitivity, a turning inwards from the excess of decomposing vegetables and lemons that have ‘no allure’ (l. 18). This is the kind of dark ecology that Timothy Morton would be proud of.

> Nectarines, on the hand, offer a zesty beckoning towards skin and sibilance in ‘living coral’:

           nectarines are crucial. it is a fact.            we become all skin (ll. 1-2).

The refrain ‘we become all skin’ (ibid.) returns again in line nine. There is something remarkably seductive about the tracing of a moment; such restraint, deciding to shade towards something, but not fill it in. The neck and skin of the addressed (lover? foe?) tangles up with ‘a bruised fruit. a blister’ (l. 6). The abrasions implied by the undertone of a kind of mild, erotic threat are just enough to prompt generous imaginings. This morning I was momentarily in love with my breakfast blood orange and, uncannily, masquerading as a delicious echo, the poem’s final couplet signals the denouement of peeling a piece of fruit (or giving in to something embodied and lust-driven):

           i sometimes feel skinless, and we become            a reckless shade of things (ll. 15-16).

Hendy’s use of suffix ‘-less’ is subtle and sad. As OED Online poetically reiterates, ‘-less’ marks the point at which something is ‘free from the thing denoted by the first element of the compound’. There is absence and integration, blushing surfaces and a pressing across boundaries, dynamism and provocation – all held in climactic tension in sixteen lines. Hendy’s art makes readers ravenous.

> In ‘still life with salad greens’, the last poem in the pamphlet, readers are offered a sparkling, vegetal conclusion. This time, the speaker leaves ‘the skins intact’ (l. 14). It’s redolent of a spruced-up sonnet, brings the appetite for salt, sun and citrus back after a brief hiatus. Composed with stringent awareness of phonemic shapes, the speaker motions to ‘three lemons, | a jar of lady’s bedstraw, bridalwreath, jetbead’ (ll. 8-9). I savour the sounds, recognise their floral notes. Oil, ‘extra virgin’ (l. 12), and acid, ‘grapefruit notes, a dry white’ (l. 13), interact without coalescing, which contributes to the shimmering glee of the meal. It’s so easy to empathise with the speaker’s joy when envisaging the curation of a beautiful plate of food.

> Hendy’s writing prowess is accomplished and diverse, as suggested by her poems published elsewhere (see ‘play fair’ in Adjacent Pineapple and ‘afterglow’ in amberflora). As a debut pamphlet, however, the blue room is radiant in its own way: it clarifies, cuts through to the ore of things. It pirouettes with perfect balance, managing to be both inimitable and accessible and, in this regard, her style provokes a soft hunger for more. I end the pamphlet famished, emboldened, inspired, and her poems settle in the mind like a perennial necessity.

the blue room is out now and available to order from Makina Books.

~

References

Hendy, Eloise. 2018. ‘afterglow’, amberflora,<https://www.amberflora.com/issues/issue-2/eloise-hendy-afterglow/> [accessed 13 February 2020]

 —. 2018. ‘play fair’, Adjacent Pineapple, <https://www.amberflora.com/issues/issue-2/eloise-hendy-afterglow/> [accessed 13 February 2020]

King, Hobart M. 2020. ‘Troglobites: Animals that Live in a Cave’ <www.geology.com/stories/13/troglobites/> [accessed 13 February 2020]

~

Text and Image: Alice Hill-Woods

Published: 9/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Arboreally Speaking: Amy Todman’s Twig and Katherine Osborne’s Descansos

(‘I have a mind for puzzles but this is final / level for the win’ (Osborne, Descansos 2018, p. 5))

In this review, Rhian Williams compares the arboreal language, sprawling branches, vibrations, snaps and tactility of two rich and generative pamphlets: Katherine Osborne’s Descansos (salo press, 2018) and Amy Todman’s Twig (Amy Todman, 2019).

> When Katherine Osborne tells us that ‘Trees have advanced language.’ (2018, p. 2) Amy Todman might have been listening attentively. Druid-like with her divining rods (to call on a divining rod is to ‘work the twig’), Todman opens her Twig (2019) – a strange, unsettling four-part drama – with the assertions, ‘Twigs are not forming letters / Twigs are not characters’ (‘Act One’, n.p.). And yet, they are mobilised in the service of this intense, visceral engagement with utterance. Todman’s commitment to making her piece open to the communication of stubby branches (‘The Hum of Concordance’, Act 3) calls to mind ancient woody language – the ogham, the Welsh bard Taliesin’s Cad Goddeu – those early models of language as root and branch, as anticipating leafy protuberances, as arboreal mysticism. And yet, Todman’s piece is resolutely calm, steady, grounded (the epigram to Osborne’s collection, from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, perhaps provides some explanation: ‘There is a lot to be said for pinning things to the earth so they don’t follow us around’). At least at first, Todman’s twigs are entirely ‘twiggy’ – sui generis, they are twig; not branches anticipating growth, not decimated tree awaiting kindling, but insouciant objects, confident in themselves – ‘The twig is slender and I enjoy the way it looks, its natural curve and blunt hard end’ (‘Stick Meme’, n.p.). But in Todman’s avant-garde handling, the twigs become forceful conductors of bodily energy: ‘While twig balances page and chest I am contained, point of pressure located’ (‘Stick Meme’, n.p.), suggesting a materiality that feels reiterated in the chapbook’s haptic mise-en-scène of thick, creamy paper enclosed in a laid paper cover that combines digital printing with some kind of hand roughing: spots of pulp-y exposure allow the material’s woody origins to suggest themselves in glimpses that remind me of the fate of a book cover I once left out overnight and was trailed over by slugs. Twig has a seductive, analogue hand feel.

> This piece is odd and enigmatic; tonally it feels almost anarchic in its provocations – sad, absurd, funny, ominous. Each of Twig’s four acts begins with exposition – including quasi stage direction – in prose before slowly splaying out into ‘scenes’ of experimental poetics that utilise space and layout to create spare formations that suggest a kind of released breath in relation to the tight, pressurised scenes of poetic labour. For Twig seems (at least to me) to be a drama of expression. Its movements oscillate between an intense scene of domestic privacy and the seemingly public space of the theatre; its protagonists are a poet and a twig, bound together as bridge, and the twig and lettering, caught in a drama of takeover. In this absurdist theatre, humans (or at least, ‘characters’; I understand the pun here on person in a play and a written letter to be intentional) contort to manipulate twigs on threads, only to be eviscerated from the scene by Act Two as ‘The twigs are untethered and still’, leaving just a struggling voice that falters through letters that have been described in sticks and circles: ‘The stick is part of this descriptive process but we are not sure how’ (‘One Twig, One Edge’, n.p.). By Act Three the twigs are losing their material integrity: dissolving into letter sounds, losing their edge, ‘There is no twig’ (‘What Has Twig?’, n.p.) and at this point of dissolution we understand that ‘twig and human move closer, or human is closer to twig’ (ibid.).

> In this drama of mutability, even metamorphosis, the twigs are overtaken by letters in sticks and circles; before this, Twig has probed in its short, curious interludes the twig’s relationship to line, to words, and to curves, but concludes ‘A line that circles is not a twig’ (‘Words For’). All this is staged in relation to the private scene of effort that is the poet’s heroic struggle to write at the kitchen table, where ‘The twig is a bridge between body and table and I am careful with the pressure on my chest’ (‘Stick Meme’, n.p.). Here the effort of writing is dramatized as the poet moves the twig to inscription, awkward and unsteady always, and deeply breathing through restriction (one feels the breath of ancient lyric utterance in this piece’s respiratory poet machine). The deliberate setting up of barriers, obstacles (in the text’s own terms, awkwardnesses), wilfully works at revelation, intensity, or some kind of excavation of the act of writerly expression: ‘My movements are stilted and the words come with slow violence, attention beyond the capabilities of computer keyboard or pen’ (Stick Meme, n.p.). The piece is too physical to be nostalgic, but it certainly evokes the histories of writing, of ancient processes and poses the quality of their manifestation in the digital present as some kind of question.

> Act Four’s soft, gentle, wetting rain, when it finally comes, feels like an irrigation… or a flood; the kind of rain that the chapbook itself perhaps has been left out in, following its touch-driven logic. And so Twig’s absurdist theatricality dramatizes a coming to language – earlier there was ‘Release        soft as butter’ (‘The Edge of My Body Where I Write’, n.p.) – with all the ambiguity of the theatre’s space’s intersection of subjectivity with spectacle. The murmurings and stutterings of the text gather together in the final exquisite line, ‘It is a fine rain of the uncertain forming of shapes in the mouth of the narrator’ (‘Twigs Are Not’, n.p.). I feel I have been through a drama myself, through an effort of comprehension. This perplexing, probing piece worries at the act of writing – William Carlos Williams’ famous maxim that ‘the poem is a machine made of words’ is refigured as visceral commitment: ‘my body / a machine that breathes’ (‘Dead Wood’, n.p.). Gesturing at the langue/parole dyad through its generic modes of drama and lyric, Twig engages dialectics of abstraction/materiality; community/individual; expressed/repressed. I’m not entirely sure what this strange piece looks to stage, what it mourns, what it divines, but I found myself caught on its branches.

> Twig foregrounds methodology, taking us through the active processes that might allow us to discern ‘Fallen lines and heavy human traces’ (‘The Hum of Concordance’, n.p.). For Osborne such traces have already been marked; the poet’s work, as intimated in Descansos’s recurring motifs of communication, is to notice the markings and to tune into the presences that endure to accompany all our wanderings. Named for the small shrines of tokens that mark sites of sudden death, often at roadsides, Descansos is a collection of lyrics – some prose poems, many more fragmentary, but still left-aligned pieces – that register as aftermaths, as records of anguished grief, hot-tempered responses to deadening methods of assimilation (‘Take me to your Research Team. I will give them. Evidence’, p. 2), as insistences on the persistence of spirit, of the potency of portals (arboreal again):

           Your tree is out loud & the party

           going on is a disappearing act /

           is the portal

           we can afterlife through (p. 19)

> Despite its more apparent occasion, and its leading trope of visually enshrined memorialising, Osborne’s collection too is indirect and enigmatic in its method. Descansos is preoccupied by ways of knowing, by epistemology; littered with tokens of correspondence (dreams, telephones, omens ) and processes of attunement (vibrations, magical thinking, automatic writing, spirit guides, Shaman), the collection is in a continual, sometimes-disorientating, process of discerning, channelling, conducting: ‘I am driving. Divining a message / from the hearse in front of me’ (p. 12). In this commitment to engaging the unsaid, the buried, the suppressed, the lifeworlds beneath contemporary accounting, Descansos feels like a collection for our times. To read it is to join with its commitment to storytelling, to swerve with its movements between narration and lyric expression, and to listen as command of the lyric ‘I’ shifts between voices, speaking from now, speaking from before, insisting on ontological disruptions: ‘I was an astronaut showing up at the funeral. I was lava pouring down into the village’ (p. 14).

> Perhaps most strikingly, this is a collection that engages – complexly, sometimes covertly, sometimes overtly – with the work of reckoning with America’s colonial-settler past and present, its status as stolen land. We are confronted with frontiers, with the landscapes of capture and extermination – Omaha, ‘gateway’ to the West, the Great Plains on fire – and with the violences that mark the distinctions between animals as companion/spirit species, the stolen cattle, those being ‘meadowed / to death’ (p. 16), and those mere simulacra in New York apartments: ‘where there / are no animals, just pictures of the / animals in calendars sold half price’ (p. 16). The scene is post-industrial (‘Oil fields up in smoke’, p. 1; ‘on a planet being mined to death’, p. 13; ‘I sign to the crops that alibi the pesticides driven into their lyric’, p. 14) and not post-colonial enough (‘Drums are circling / with this Message’, in ‘(Biloxi, MS)’, p. 16, historical site of civil rights activists swimming in resistance, and location of a memorial for those lost in Hurricane Katrina). In this way, Osborne weaves an intense sense of personal quests for reassurance, for answers, for explanations – relationships with a missing mother, an appetite for learning that teeters into a distracting voraciousness (‘I can only pay attention if I think / it has to do with me’, p. 19) – with the maddening effects of a nation’s disregard for the duty of acknowledgement, reparation, repair. The earthy contents – fire, animal, woods, water – in relation with Descansos’s beautiful cover art of constellations, seems determined to focus, even if unevenly and mysteriously, America’s relationship with territory, the dysfunction of its relationship with space (both terrestrial and ET).

> As with Todman’s Twig, Osborne’s Descansos – like all the best poetry – does not determine its contexts entirely, does not restrict its vibrational affects. Both texts seem intent on the intensity of poetry as a means of enquiry, as a ‘way into’ something, as a tool for both enigma and expression. In its offering of itself as a series of Latinx shrines, Descansos points abstrusely to the missing, to the lacunae (all too material in the numbers of missing persons from Native communities in North America), to the exterminations and evaporations of American history. To the stuttering analogue tapes of record (the grammar of penultimate stops in the prose-poem sentences makes this textual), Descansos draws our attention, asks us to: ‘Rewind. I know nothing at the beginning and. Here. Pause the video. Did you catch that? The start of knowing’ (p. 8); we are compelled to advance. And yet the collection is ominous, foreboding, anthropocenic. The archer draws back the string, the arrow quivers, the horses hooves thunder. And still we are drunk on certainty, on mapping:

With some laughter between

           Trees we map with all I know

           About trees

           A boat could rescue us

           So we go deeper into the woods

                                               (p. 13)

I sense Todman listening again. Somewhere a twig is cracking.

~

Amy Todman, Twig, Chapbook, 32pp, edition of 100 (Amy Todman, 2019)

Katherine Osborne, Descansos, 32pp (salo press, 2018)

~

Text: Rhian Williams

Images: Salo Press/Amy Todman

Published: 5/6/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Bitten Hair, by Tessa Berring

In this review, Nasim Luczaj teases at the tensile, playful and thingly poetics of Tessa Berring’s brilliant new collection, Bitten Hair (Blue Diode, 2019). 

> I have been getting the taste for the life of a still house. By a still house, I mean a still life blown into more dimensions – into silence, walkthrough, hums, windows willed open, soon closed again. Poetry agitates the margins, Berring says in an interview. ‘The far edge of the page is where to lay your glove’, she says in a poem.

> The customary still life is often of fruit: the settled, the perishable. It tells us about how we are also so. ‘Sentences in vases (…) last around three days’. It’s hard to say if we outlive our sentences. Bitten Hair happily connects signs just by connection, as objects are brought together by a house. No discernible rhyme or reason. They lie in the same drawer, on the same tongue.  A voice exclaims, lists, brings you to love it. The undulled, categorised as dull, flourishes. The world is more exciting because it is mundane. Sharp as a lucid dream we choose to pace ourselves in. The disarray of living is common to everyone, Berring says in an interview. ‘Things take place’, she says in a poem.

> Maybe it would be nice for objects to reshuffle at night, grow sudden legs and run all the way along the tabletop, along the other side, run onto the radiator. Maybe not. Working from home is very specific. ‘Call it another day, call it a pussy cat / call it a soft bound atlas / of the word’.

> I started reading Bitten Hair in a surgery waiting room. That’s also where the collection ends – though I didn’t get that far in one sitting – with a poem entitled ‘The Surgery is Filled with Female Poets’. Their voices chatter the way through waiting. At least some of them are waiting to lie and face an unknown with open legs, like I am. It was a really nice accident. Now what if I’d spent the day looking for an off-white bathmat and read Berring’s poem on making the same purchase? The particularity of what Berring brings in can be fun where it conjoins with the reader’s life, but more importantly, it settles them down in the world they are in, careful to hold on both to the vibrancy and the trivia. With poetry, we cushion the temperature of our experience, we affirm small cosmologies in which the elements are ready to tilt towards us, so far into us that they get to be something else in the process. In a difficult moment, we need it affirmed that there is space for detail, space for exaggeration, for heat, and also for coolness – promiscuity, ‘sexual langorousness’, crossings of hardness and softness. Berring’s poems don’t cushion; they give room for living. I go back home and exaggerate my condition just to heighten the enjoyment of reading all the rest in bed.  

> Bitter Hair invites such an attitude. I exaggerate a small clinical experience and I exaggerate my love for mugs of the house and a shadow I see of a curtain knotted to let in more lit background for reflection, even exaggerate the extent of my exaggeration. Bitten Hair makes me feel wowed, simply, uncritically; wowed from the retina, the heart, the leg, the whole resonating body (and all hair on it, yet unparted). Bent a bit, as a bite bends, or as light urges a plant to bend.

> My general impression of lying with my legs open at the clinic was that of being a pair of antlers hung up from a wall turned ground, a pair mysteriously dabbled in, as if there were a mind left there. Now in Berring’s cosmology, legs are usually scissors. Funny, then, that hair appears always bitten not cut. They’re like the fixed adjectives of ancient Greek: that’s just what – in Bitten Hair – hair is, as some things are something or other for Homer[1]. The bittenness comes back, like a poohstick emerging from under a totally forgotten bridge, for you to feel oh yes, life is lots of losing, and again to lose yourself to the still life. The past tense like a poise of elbow, a particular way of resting one’s arm on what is very much the present. Things have already been said, been bitten, been done, but even so, when I asked myself: is there actually any past tense in this book, without looking, I thought no, absolutely none.

> A pair of scissors carries some sense that feels like a whole sense ready to cut other things whole. A woman’s weapon. You could say the poems womansplain. Remind you of a poise, a type of wisdom. On p. 24, we read:

I found a woman with abstract hands and yellow cheeks who said, ‘philosophy is no consolation for bitten hair’

A woman, abstract, found? A woman, as per, reminding us matter. The volume is concluded by ‘The Most Emotional Woman’ – a sequence of 16 poems, all of which begin with the line ‘I am a most emotional woman’. They are bitter play, ‘more / than a little comedy strip, but less / than a battlefield, where even / living things are not alive’. Some of them remind me of a friend, so I send a couple to him, and he replies: Bit morbid, followed by a kind of summary: I am an emotional human / I collect bits of rubbish / Then look at them in a white room. It makes me wonder what it would be like to read this whole collection not as a woman, at least not as a woman who would notice the ‘woman’ being tipped at ease into ‘human’; not as someone who reaches tenderly for rubbish and is almost always seated in a white room, finally of her own, eyeing all the womanhood, the rubbish, how much breathing can be done in these walls.

> There’s a worry there but do forget my doubts. Almost anyone can click with these poems. Bitten Hair is both utterly playful and ever so inhabitable – it’s like visiting one of those vibrant pretend houses with vibrant pretend cookers you buy for children so they can pretend to be adults, except this place is house-sized, fully furnished, comfortable. ‘Utopia is a tiny place / that closes, see it closes’, we read on a postcard enclosed with the book – an extra poem for us to furnish some surface with. A still to throw. I feel almost subjected to all the dazzling, quick-stroked still life, the play contained. There are so many clothes (‘wear lace if I have to’, ‘it’s good having jeans / all over my legs’), fruits (‘orange’, ‘persimmon’), paraphernalia (‘upright Madonnas’, ‘thigh-high statue of a hare / pointing a rifle at a yucca plant’, ‘(hair-dryer, hair-dryer)’, ‘vending machine’, ‘spatula’, ‘ghosts / on the handles of her saucepans’, ‘an upturned colander’, not to mention the elements on a list of objects towards the collection’s end: ‘exotic / objects like printed bed clothes / and soft men, coffee pots decorated / with green enamel sun-loungers, / the teeth from some sacrificial bull’.

> The voice comes fully furnished, but also with an assurance of space. Not once do I hit my funny bone. I don’t know Berring’s reasons for living in Scotland, but I’m here for the high ceilings (shoutout also to the plus-size puddles still hanging about on the occasional viciously sunny day, like those members of an afterparty who won’t leave and who, strewn across precious sofa space in semisleep, reflect what this world might actually be). Below this ceiling, I can wave my scissor legs. Inverted, lifted, drunk from, drunk on. ‘A foundation can give way at any / moment’, and doesn’t.

> Things don’t have to step out of themselves to matter. They are no servants to metaphor. They don’t stand for. They’re here for themselves, for an elation that can emerge from configuration, for the meeting points between them and what the voice is up to, down for, in the vain of Gertrude Stein or Ducks, Newburyport.

> There is something Steinian not only in terms of nouns but also in devotion to syntax for something like its own sake, for instance in the line: ‘being alive is / and tabby cats’. The lists of things and connections between them are quietly mystifying, as when you list to yourself what’s in the cupboard and string together a meal, making forgetful laps round your own kitchen to make it all work. The poem could be a timelapse of this. The motions are essential to the taste.

> There’s a cosmology to these objects, these actions. Philosophy is mentioned, questions are often asked, but only once do we move overtly into metaphysics, in the poem ‘Small Talk, Say, Flies’:

It’s basically that we don’t want it to end And we know we don’t want it to end

So we stand in our sewn clothes and laugh out loud About how near death is, how near nothing is

Despite waltzing on a stage in turquoise light Despite meat and anemones and gas-lit routes through a park

The little of life is fit in, rendered glad awareness – before it ceases or we cease. Each poem a swatch for some extravagant part of the house. The house is spacious and it’s yours.

~

[1] At least according to Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red.

~

Bitten Hair is now available to order from Blue Diode.

~

Text: Nasim Luczaj

Published: 26/5/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(LAUNCH) issue #10 MILLENNIUM MEGABUS - on Zoom!

SPAM Issue #10: MILLENNIUM MEGABUS LAUNCH

***adopts laconic bus driver affirmation***

****shots millennial enthusiasm potion****

This service is our last and it’s gonna be the ONLY DESTINATION in town, hey, maybe the only destination this side of the millennium. Hop on board for SPAM’s FINAL zine launch. While we’d originally planned for this to happen at our beloved Poetry Club, circumstances have taken this bus for a major swerve into Zoomland. Nevertheless, we’re still here to bring you the ingredients for a proper SPAM party: high-quality poetry, film, choons and other post-internet shenanigans.

Expect ON TIME // OFF-PEAK // LOW CARBON PLEASURE // ACCELERATION // POST-INTERNET POETICS // LUXURIOUS ONBOARD VISUAL & SONIC ENTERTAINMENT // PETRO-MELANCHOLIA // NUMTOT WHOLESOMENESS // SYNTH NIRVANA  // TRANSPORT UTOPIA // && SWEET SWEET TECHNO.

Issue 10, MILLENNIUM MEGABUS, is our biggest and best yet (imagine megabus gold but as hyperobject) and we’re throwing a party to mourn the death of SPAM zine while celebrating the infinite ride that is SPAM Press.

How it works: we will open a *password protected* Zoom call from 8pm till late. The Zoom link and password will be released via email at some point after registering for the launch on Eventbrite. You’re welcome to come and go, keep your video on or take a break, as you like throughout. There will be plenty of interludes plus music and video to recreate the authentic ~queuing for your Red Stripe~ experience. We encourage sweaty bedroom dancing to recreate the musky aromas of an IRL megabus, not to mention dressing up and checking in on the chat throughout. Tell us how yr feeling :)

Music will be streamed through platforms other than Zoom to avoid lags; we’ll post links in the chat on the night.

A few days prior to the event we will publicise approximate set times so you know when to tune in. The poetry will begin at 8.15pm, so don’t miss out.

Recommended dress code: BLUE COLLAR SMOULDER / NUMTOT HOTTIE / MEGABUS CHIC

Recommended donation: Entry is FREE however we ask that you consider making a PayPal donation of £3 or more. We will split this between performers and a charity donation to Trussell Trust.

____lineup____

>>POETS<<

Allie Kerper

Jessica Faith Cooper

Eloise Birtwhistle

Rosa Jones

Mauricio Baiocco

Lydia Unsworth

Katy Lewis Hood

Nasim Luczaj

~

Chris Timmins

Andy Barr

William Fleming

Dan Power

Andrew Spragg

Julia Rose Lewis

Kat Sinclair

>>INTERACTIVE TRANSPORT QUIZ<<

SPAM founding editor-in-chief will take you on a wild ride through the spiralling climes of transport trivia. There may be prizes.

>>FILM SCREENINGS<<

Marc Johansen (alchemical filmmaker, artist, gardener, musician)

cooljinzo AKA Taylor Stewart (Glasgow’s beloved auteur, also aka Romeo Taylor)

>>MUSIC<<

Double Discone

Double Discone are two loose freewheeling French guys that landed in Glasgow and hit the ground running. With a case load of analogue synths and drum machines in tow they've been transmitting a unique sound wherever they show up. Their raw electronic sound and energetic, incendiary live sets has seen them perform dozens of shows on the underground DIY scene.

SIGNALEMENT

Being courteously disloyal to Acid Småland’s quasi-domesticated flagship, the rhythms of the final hours will be joyfully thrusted into the heart of postmodern degeneracy. Akin to our beloved long distance service, this sensual deprivation into the dead of night might induce symptoms of nostalgia, surrendering, longing and nausea. Expect delayed gratification and endless fuel.

Boosterhooch

Long suffering Subcity Radio Queen, ‘it’s too hot to sleep’ veteran and SPAMphleteer Boosterhooch will push you into the next dimension with her hot pink records.

>>>>>>>>>>

RSVP / share w yr friends on Facebook.

Tickets available via Eventbrite. 

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Very Authentic Person, by Kat Sinclair

Dylan Williams reviews Kat Sinclair’s new collection, Very Authentic Person (The 87 Press, 2019), exploring its engagement with voicelessness, gender, authenticity, the body surveilled and the charge of capital in language.

> In his Letters Against the Firmament (2015), Sean Bonney promises: ‘shimmering / a language of the barricades’.  A language that resists, to quote Adorno, the ‘enclaves’ of capital that ‘obtrude into the spoken language’. Echoing this, Kat Sinclair, too, reaches for the image of a barricade in her new collection, Very Authentic Person (2019):

I was always a little in love with the paunch of the world like tiny communisms since we can’t build them big these days our architecture’s all accommodating only little barricades will do 

There is something shared here, with Bonney, but also something different. Sinclair’s barricades seem far from the battleground of social revolution. They are ‘tiny communisms’ - linguistic barricades of the self, the body and the voice. Against the insipid drive of capital into our shared language, Sinclair’s text seeks the personal spaces that we may yet call our own, as well as the trauma already inflicted. 

> Kat Sinclair is a doctoral student and a member of the Devil’s Dyke Network, in Brighton. Her first collection of poetry, Very Authentic Person, binds together poems written in a voice that is, in turns, direct and aleatory: 

I think I would rather be nodal than not we are all significant, after all even as we sit atop each other so that thigh over cheek over gum disease, inherited, not developed I am always sure to say when I am next to somebody at the sink for the first time flecking them sweetly

The self-conscious, confessional power of Sinclair’s ‘I’, here, quickly dissipates and subsumes into the stuff of the everyday: hygiene, domesticity, the body. A turning from the public voice into a private one. In Very Authentic Person, Sinclair’s narrator repeatedly brings us to this exhausted edge of language. We can see this later, with the lines, ‘to keep hold of all this virtual thinking I’m doing’ and ‘all those thoughts about the commons I haven’t had yet’: these are the words of a voice at the edge of voicelessness – at the edge of an asset-stripped language. The point where a language’s potential for communication begins to flag.

> Sinclair’s narrator is constantly rushed and buffeted away from discovering the fleeting point of it all. In this, Sinclair successfully encapsulates the nausea of the last ten years (in the UK), with daily minds and bodies flickering into consciousness of the social transformations happening underneath our feet. The enclosures of capital on the national common. The narrator we are given is a voice shorn of any counternarrative to these buffeting forces. The deranged voice is, quite intentionally, the imprint left by recent attacks on the social commons. 

> For all of this, Very Authentic Person doesn’t read like a catalogue of despair. The confusion between the individual psyche and outer society is played upon with dexterity, and there is, throughout, an affectionate embrace of the kitchness of daily life. More than anything, there is tenderness for those ‘tiny communisms’ of body and voice. In one poem, Sinclair begins starkly, and pessimistically, before emerging epiphanically above the drift and sludge of capital. Sinclair opens the poem musing over a dress, positing, ‘the thing is, is that the black frame is less ostentatious / than the gold’. This presents us with a female body surveilled and policed, desiring anonymity, not ‘ostentation’ – a body claimed by the male gaze.  But then, later, the poem reaches a clarity of vision that is all the more powerful for its fleetingness. Sinclair inquires, beautifully, ‘did you know the hymen would not have to be / a metaphor for broken things / if we did not let it become one’. The narrator’s self-confidence and defiance shines through, here, revealing the duality of the female body for Sinclair. A body that is surveilled, but, at the same time, a site where the process of liberation must begin. A ground zero for the reclamation of the commons.

> Moments of clarity and empowerment surface at different points in the text, and they are often similarly concerned with wresting a body away from objectification. Take the first poem, ‘Quiscalus’:

together did language laundry clearing out our mouths this I am a clunking clothes horse this time around I’m paying particular attention to my elbows think I’ve probably never seen my outer wrists before but paying no more attention to that spot just beneath my shoulder blades gone sour medusa born backwards […] my eyes in the centre on a plinth  watching my body try.

This poem shows the contest fought over the female body between its true subjectivity and the forces of outward objectification. A struggle fought out in terms of vision – over who beholds and what is beheld. Vision in this passage is destructive (with the ‘medusa’), while the latter image recalls the surveillant control of the panopticon. But the narrator herself uses vision, herself, to pay ‘particular attention’ to her own body, to bring it into consciousness. Furthermore, language is represented as a carnal thing, too, a thing of the ‘mouth’ that must be constantly cleansed and reclaimed, as part of the wider body. For Sinclair, this ‘language laundry’ is the last, best task to which poetry can be put in our era of crisis.

> Very Authentic Person accomplishes the task it sets out to perform, and records the fleeting moments of authenticity in the slipstream of a female self constantly battered and claimed from the outside. As Keston Sutherland writes, ‘the best poetry is also invariably the best at using exhausted language’. Deploying the language and phrases of the everyday, Sinclair, at times, shows us the secret spaces in the exhausted language of the self – the spaces that capital has yet to claim and objectify. In this regard, Very Authentic Person records the process of the struggle for being itself.

Very Important Person is out now and available to order via The 87 Press.

~

Bibliography

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

Sean Bonney (2015), Letters Against the Firmament

Keston Sutherland (2015), ‘Poetry or Emptying’ in Toward. Some. Air (De’Ath and Wah, eds.)

~

Text: Dylan Williams

Image: The 87 Press

Published: 19/5/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(ESSAY) Thinking With Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Odyssey Calling’, by Azad Ashim Sharma

In this essay, Azad Ashim Sharma voyages the fraught expanse of colonial legacy, migration and racism explored in Vahni Capildeo’s stunning new pamphlet from Sad Press, Odyssey Calling (2020). Addressing the poems through close reading and reference to critical histories and cultural expression, from Windrush to Greek myth to Stormzy, Sharma shows how Capildeo’s work, while plugged into the reverberations of historical traumas and harms, also feels into the base/bassline of a possible future, building a living intensity through and against post-Brexit Britain.

> I recently attended a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London called ‘Thinking Art’ which closed with a performance-lecture by Ayesha Hameed. Hameed took the audience through videos and lyrical thoughts to Barbados and her research into the Plantationocene – a theory that looks at Climate Change from the perspective of the slave-plantation. In the questions after, Hameed discussed how electronic music had added another dimension to this long project, and described how the baseline pulled at her organs and connected her with the ground, with the roots, with history. The last words of Vahni Capildeo’s recent Chapbook Odyssey Calling (Sad Press, 2020) are: indigo blue baseline (p.34). Since its publication Odyssey Calling has pulled at my organs. In what follows I want to think with the energy and spirit of this new collection, to feel the pull of its baseline, and understand what rhythms of contemporary life Capildeo attends do.

> Capildeo’s collection of poems and musings on some of their recent creative experiments captures a moment in our fraught times that warrants witnessing, demands listening, attends to the contemporary expressions of racism whilst conjuring a ‘humming brain-cave [that] you can step into’ (OC, p.2). This pamphlet offers itself to its reader as ‘a magic gift’ which ‘create[s] active silence[s]’ from which one can contemplate a true experience of our moment (Ibid). This humming or active silence is exactly what the baseline is, a low rumble, the sound of the sub, the undercommons, a play on ‘white noise’ as ‘Azure Noise’ (p.3). It’s a sound that laps at the body bringing it into grounding and into a liquiform murmur. Azure noise is the sound that Lewis Gordon has in mind when he reflects on ‘our willingness to become ancestors’ and ‘join a stream of accountability through descendants’ (Melancholia Africana Foreword, p. xi). It is the sound of gratitude as much as it is our riotous cry against the erasure of our history. That azure-noise is the sound of this ‘brain-cave’ implies an echo, a reverberation, an openness and willingness to hear and to summon the spirits, of those who have passed on, those who have been killed before their time, and those to whom we are responsible.

> What I mean precisely by this moment is what has been described by Maya Goodfellow as a ‘hostile environment’ in which the lives of those of migrant descent and newly arrived migrants are made unbearable, untenable, unliveable. As a direct consequence of the 2014 and 2019 Immigration Acts, what we are now witnessing in the UK from the deportation of Windrush citizens and the still on-going search for justice for Grenfell, the absurdities of Prevent, is a space in which people of colour are being left to destitution. We are those people called funny tinge, cockroach, burden, the swarm of supposed illegality that is threatening the economy. What is missed from all of this right-wing brouhaha is, of course, history. A history that is being obfuscated by the charlatans in Westminster who  – aside from a minority of MPs – are in cahoots with these violent Acts and the legalisation of state enforced racist policy. It is an environment in which performances by Black British artists such as Stormzy and Dave are described as ‘racist’ for pointing out the very real concerns, experiences, and frustrations of communities who are essentially criminalised by the Tory Regime.

> What is so ‘scandalous’ about what has happened to the Windrush generation (if scandal is the right word for the deportation and death of citizens), is their misrecognition as other than citizens in the first place. This confusion between the various labels of immigrant, migrant, citizen, refugee, etc, appear in the poem ‘Odyssey Response’:

Sometimes, words, you launch in many lovely languages: yet, before you begin to fly, you are misrecognized, like an owl entering a superstitious person’s open-plan room being beaten to death, Athena’s wise bird struck down, bloody feathers everywhere,  a soft body a futile piñata releasing clouds. (p.7)

The link between migration and birds is a common theme to this pamphlet’s thrust into the heart of the contemporary moment. But before the bird (migrant) is able to fly, misrecognition as a pest or an unwarranted guest leads to its demise: beaten to death, in someone else’s room. Capildeo’s use of the word ‘superstitious’ to describe the person doing this beating is marvellous. It precisely calls to the fore the grandiose whimsy of English nationalism, the sheer fiction it relies upon, the myth of its superiority and uniqueness. Furthermore the image of the piñata made me think of the right-wingers in this country like blindfolded children, striking at an imagined enemy, in the hope of sugary reward. Of course the bloody reality in this scene releases the opposite, the stark death of the ‘wise bird’. If the owl here represents the citizen-as-migrant, the wisdom this person contains is only released by their death, as if something as final as death was required to attend to the life and history of the journey that was over before it began. Bifo’s work on Breathing defines poetry as a metaphor for the ways in which we can escape the suffocation (of language and of our own capacity to breathe) by a landscape that has been invaded by nationalism, racism, and religious fundamentalism (p.9-10 Breathing Bifo). The accented slippery assonance of ‘superstititious’ is, to my mind, exactly what Bifo has in mind when he refers to poetry’s ‘excess of semiotic exchange’ that ‘can reactivate breathing’. It is the ‘breathiest’ moment in this saga of the wise bird’s demise, a hissing-lampooning of the fundamentalisms of post-Brexit Britain and its racist policy.

> And this brings me to something I think is curious in Capildeo’s poems, their evocation of a specific history. In the poem ‘Windrush Reflections’ we encounter history as a narrative, a narrative that contains the kernels of truth that are not taught in schools in the UK, namely the history of why the Windrush generation should never have been ‘sent back’. Capildeo delves into the heart of the matter:

…post-war Britain already was home by birthright: documentation was not a prize or a promise for this generation born under the far-fetched Union Jack (p.16-17)

This argument is familiar to those of us who have read and know our history. The experience of migration for many formerly colonised peoples was one of welcome in a Britain that was rebuilding after the devastation of WW2, a time when there was no need for ‘documentation’ because it was guaranteed by our status as ‘members of the Commonwealth’. The argument here, presented with increasing force through line breaks speaks truth to power; it is ‘birthright’ in the sense of the right to be born and to live, the right to thrive and have one’s rights respected, that are absolutely called into question by the hostile environment in today’s UK. To recall this history is to assert the right for Rights, of recognition, of representation, and of equality. It is against the hostility of the Union Jack that Capildeo writes, with a willingness to educate as well as to critique. It’s a stylistic mark of a lot of cultural production in the UK today from the music of Lowkey and Akala to Capildeo’s work which seeks to encourage a transformation of consciousness through the reactivation of anti-racist politics. Such work always bears the marks of history, and more often than not, is positioned on the right side of history.

> I also want to turn back to the poem ‘Odyssey Response’ as I think one of the great achievements of this collection of poems is its reimagining of the relationship between the histories of colonialism and migration that define a contemporary creolised UK and the old ‘classical’ relationship between poetry, myth, and epic. What Capildeo achieves by addressing the Odyssey as well as Windrush simultaneously is a Spivakian sense of the ‘ab-use’ or ‘use from below’ of the Enlightenment. Capildeo recasts the images of the Odyssey as that of Windrush, caught between the Scylla of Priti Patel and the Charybdis of social erasure. By recasting the migrant -both living and (socially) dead- as an Odyssean figure, a Spirit and Time traveller, Capildeo makes the request of them ‘if you see Columbus, shoot on sight’. This bullet that travels through spirit and time abuses the relationship with the epic, the odyssey is now the story of migration and not a classical text held above the historical experiences of Windrush as a kind of cultural prison. This conceptualisation of Odysseus in the plural moves against ‘the song of yourself simplified on the news’ (p.12) and delineates a space (or sound-space) where ‘words, take wing’ and ‘fly commonly among all people / who share vulnerability on a trembling earth’ (p.7). This abuse of the Odyssey raises our attention to ‘the uneven diachrony of global contemporaneity’ and is a supply, empowering gesture marking another fine addition to Capildeo’s important oeuvre.  

> Where politics is revealing its true fascist face, poetry and by extension contemporary Grime and UK Rap are leading the way as a force for change, for consciousness, and for a deeper connection with histories both of colonisation and of the present. The most overt display of this has been Roger Robinson winning the T. S. Eliot prize for a collection of verse that engages in this precise moment we find ourselves in. Around the time of that announcement, the global poetry community collectively grieved for Kamau Brathwaite who, we learned, had joined the ancestors. In Brathwaite’s Middle Passages, which I re-read as soon as I heard of his passing, I encountered the lines ‘There was a land not long/ago where it was other-/wise” (p.88). That land may be the future we are working collectively towards, poetically and educationally through poetry, which I think captures something of the essence of what I am thinking with when I think with Odyssey Calling. In revealing and accessing that land, we return to the future.

Odyssey Calling is out now and available to order via Sad Press.

~

Text: Azad Ashim Sharma

Publsihed:

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Heavy Waters, by Ed Luker

Diving into the violet depths of Ed Luker’s Heavy Waters (87 Press, 2019), Gloria Dawson explores what is meant by ‘a kind of graving of language’ which might also be an act of salvage in a churning world of border violence, migration, violence and the torsions of lyric, fantasy and wounding.

> Heavy Waters is a series of five pieces of writing, two of which are prose and three verse. The sea runs through it, the sea and the shoreline, and drowning, and the movement of bodies in water. Its shortest epigraph comes in three words from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008): ‘defend the dead’. Philip’s extraordinary long poem is an attempt, using the words found in a crucial legal document concerning the murder of slaves, ‘to not tell the story that must be told’, and, by means of the breaking and reforming of sentences, grammars and even words, to come to a new understanding of the violences of slavery, both particularly and in general. Like Philip, Luker is concerned with ‘a system that permits murder’, in Luker’s case, not slavery as such but rather the murder of those forced to move in various migratory processes.

> As I started reading this book, I visited Govan Graving Docks for the first time. This huge and now anomalous industrial structure, wild and crumbling, is where many of Glasgow’s colonial and trading ships would come to have their hulls burnt to remove accretions, then re-tarred and dried before being launched out onto the Clyde and the seas. Graving, with its apparent etymological relationship to ‘engraving’ and its visual proximity to ‘grave’, with all the meanings of that word, is in fact more likely to come from the Old French and French dialect word for ‘shore’, ‘greve’, although in contemporary French, as in English, it now comes to mean serious, concerning. It feels to me that both Luker and Philip conduct a kind of graving of language, at least in terms of the first part of the process; a scraping and burning off of what is no longer of use, and a closer look at what might be salvaged. Perhaps this is an optimistic reading of both projects, and maybe it’s simply the case that much of the poetry I feel connected to does something like this, and does it from a legibly political standpoint. However I also feel anxious about the possibility or desire for legibility, as I hope I can explain a bit further on.

> The book begins in short fragments, often rhymed, moving through sea and tide. Luker works over the words ‘out’ and ‘outward’, always at the same time somehow drawing on ‘in’ and inner. A swinging, keening tide develops, calling out ‘the ocean’s illegibility/ no grace for names’. This wave seems to crash in the named poem ‘On the Rock’, a retching in and out on violences of inclusions and exclusions:

And so to ask to rise again, we are            always so in so out of step to tread this water, this terror outside

           Borne out a flood, this rising temperature.

There is a painful proximity of ‘in’ and ‘out’ here, and a claustrophobia; ‘Is there no new that steps out or back down?’ This proximity enacts a border – its arbitrariness, its absolute violence.

> By far my favourite section is ‘The Sea Together’, where Luker really stays with the problem of lyric and pleasure, and where the graving takes place. This section thickens up in linguistic density, form and intention. In contorted torsion, most of the poems are packed into three four-line stanzas, most lines with seven syllables. The first poem is there to hold and clasp the reader  - ‘I know who will read this I/ know who it’s for you for your/ eyes locked… - but there’s also a pain in this address. The difficulty of who is being addressed, that there are many potential ‘you’s and that a poem addressed to a dead person might not be able to meet them (ethically, mournfully) is present throughout the verse sections in particular. The repeated kenning ‘the wonder-wounded’ both recalls the poem’s earlier lines ‘in the poem/ you appear/ with wounds open/ and mouth closed’ and also opens up a line of possibility of the spectacle of suffering – is the audience of the poem/ the poet the ones wounded by wonder? And if so in what way? But in another sense, wonder has dreams, speculations and fantasies that cause pain. This phrase reminds me that a wound is an opening and a distance.

The nothing that wants you pour            wretch the poet on a sunk lid to stand on a sore point            from which to fit empty deeds

from inward say more pity            the gravemakers to drown or hang it all themselves spin the            pattern on another’s heal

by flag and dust fits bowstring            hits mute on the victim pledge the bounds more lines relief from            for you nodding nodding nodding the

nothing count quality of            affection fury you stand on land drying eye or throat

           the wonder-wounded.

At its best this poetry is both stony and absolute/ly livid and fluid. In this book, Luker confronts a problem also found Philip’s notes to Zong!: that there is no equivalent word for water for what ‘exhumed’ or ‘dug up’ means on land. ‘Does this mean that you can never be exhumed from water?

> In a recent reading, Luker has said that the work is intended to be read as a series of embodied sounds, but also that he finds it hard to read out loud. I think this is central to the problem of these poems. Luker is navigating difficult waters, ethically and formally (and knowing that these cannot often be separated). For me, the prose sections, especially ‘Heavy Air’ often feel overburdened with the poet’s anxieties (which I often share) about the ethics of representation, and the need to explain not so much what the poems are trying to do as what is urgently hurting, burning the writer in grappling with mass suffering at a distance. I don’t think the work can avoid here confessing an explanation of sorts. However, I appreciate Luker’s work as honestly trying to move with these problems, and not gloss them over, trying to speak through rather than about these things, as he puts it. And not to ventriloquise people.

> There’s such a longing for transformation and justice in these poems, and at the same time there is just as much space for the doubt that it will come to those who need it most. In the note that follows the poems, Luker takes a different tack from Philip in reference to the task that we - the readers and the writers – should set ourselves to: ‘honour the dead by defending the living’. For me this signals that the real limit of poetry’s power is also a challenge to defend life and the possibility of everyone’s lives by any means necessary.

Heavy Waters is out now and available to order from the 87 Press. 

~

Text Gloria Dawson

Published: 12/5/20

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Plainspeak by Astrid Alben

In this review, Jon Petre illumines the poetic encounters and clarities of Plainspeak by Astrid Alben (Prototype Press, 2019). Remember that age-old function of poetry to defamiliarise, enchant, make you notice, make you care? Beautifully, Petre picks apart how his works in Alben’s exciting and uplifting new collection, a mischievous and lively ‘poetry of transformation’.

> ‘Oh poet I love you Poet if no one else will love you Poet’.  It’s one of poetry’s most powerful and delightful powers – the facility of language to point to stuff already around us and say look, as it is this is a beautiful thing. Strip back the mundane, forget ego; speak plainly. Poetry is an uncovering and a re-revealing: look again and see the object for what it is. In Plainspeak, Astrid Alben leaves rhyme, experiments with form and all but the barest punctuation to the wayside in her effort to see and speak more clearly, to declutter her verse and ‘burst open speak plainspeak’.

> There’s something David Bowie-ish about Poet, Alben’s alter-ego and our guide through Plainspeak. Like Starman, Poet is a visitor who is experiencing the mundanities of life for the first time. Poet’s encounters – at the bus stop, in the departure lounge, in the park in the summer – are shot through with joie de vivre that lends this collection a refreshing light-heartedness.

> Alben’s poems are startlingly simple, relishing the beauty and the joy of simple, everyday sights:

In Exeter a boy plays football by himself in an oversized blue-and-white striped anorak. It’s mid-June.

[…]

moths / only come out at night yet are attracted by the light. Here they are long before dusk over slow water.

> Not much more that needs to be said there, is there? Through Poet’s eyes it’s as if the world is speaking for itself. These things are beautiful. Notice them! (you can stop reading now if you like.)

> Plainspeak is poetry of transformation. Alben inhabits Poet’s identity with mischievous invention, switching between the constructed persona of Alben herself as wise and world-wearly, witness to ‘a nervous breakdown’ on the flight from Heathrow to Cork, and Poet, who takes ‘an après-ski delight’ in the departure lounge. Alben has prefaced Plainspeak with a quote from Rimbaud: ‘It means exactly what I’ve said, literally and completely, in all respects’ – yet, as Plainspeak shows us, the fun and the beauty of language lies in its motion, the impossibility of fixing words with just one meaning. Nothing – not Alben, not an image, not a theme – can escape language’s propensity for change. Plainspeak is filled with puns and diversions: ‘an origami swan gathers its quills accelerates on the runway’. Such literal mindedness is gently subversive as well as funny. Why shouldn’t an origami swan take flight? Why shouldn’t we be free to experiment and play with our identities? Simple thoughts are no less radical ones.

> Each poem in Plainspeak follows the same form, four unrhymed couplets with enjambed lines, their run-on syntax offering even more change, reversal and reinvention. I read the poems in Plainspeak as a continuous whole, focusing on the thematic content and the unshakeable motifs of flight and migration. Once again, there’s freedom in simplicity. Putting monkeys on the bus, fairy liquid in lakes and Kafka ‘schnozzled in clover marigold lichen’ Alben has a great time upending convention and conformity. In playing with language thus, Alben reclaims reveals the radical possibility of re-inventing ourselves through new and surprising language, which, she shows us, can be done just by speaking in the clearest, plainest form.

> The politics of transformation gather weight in ‘Hermaphrodite’, where the speaker remarks: ‘a boy is a boy by birth not a girl not a choice’. Such identity troubles invariably centre on our bodies, as in ‘Customs’: ‘Not a / single cell the same as seven years ago if every cell / renews itself how can it still be stand still please still be me?’ It’s easy to speak differently – but that’s small comfort to a speaker suffering from dysphoria. Alben’s plain, direct language can be joyful, but with this comes a no-punches-held attitude to the painful realities of transforming one’s identity. At customs, crossing the border, ‘my body’ becomes ‘a refugee / burdened with anxious jealousy’.

> In Poet, however, there is relief from the baggage of identity. Like a child, unlike us, no one’s told Poet he can’t decide for himself who he is. With his ‘migrant heart’ Poet is a traveller in another sense, an emigrant grappling with a new language (possibly speaking ‘plainly’ for comprehension). Poet’s speech, thought and invention are thus double: multilingual, vibrant towards the conventional limitations associated with customs, identification by the authorities, and a border.

> As I reached the end of Plainspeak I felt the mood shift, as though Starman, by now an ageing Mr Blue Sky, is wise to the approach of Mr Night. ‘Morning Papers’ begins:

Poet squeezes his tiny head by the slot machines to quieten the daily manslaughter, bedwetting, genital mutilation, lottery

results, pharma-corruption, […]

> ‘Terror in the Terminal’ highlights the voyeurism with which we address violence and terror happening elsewhere ‘Lean in take a closer look. Press play’. ‘Road Kill’ hones in on the extreme violence and brutality of accidentally hitting small animals with your car – ‘I couldn’t wring its neck headlights panting do the kinder / thing and keep tomorrow open strong.’

> These poems that intrigued me the most, the ones that detail small encounters with horror and the tiny acts of cowardice that are as normal as all the nice things we ought to take more notice of. Play is serious business!

> Plainspeak is delightful. Our world contains multitudes, and we can encounter beauty (and violence) in nearly everything, from the washing up to ‘Peeing in the Grass Along the River Ex’. (Have you ever heard such a well-titled poem??) Plainspeak explores the gulf between artistic creativity and mundane everydayness. Though Poet worries over plastic in the oceans, the fear and anxiety of crossing borders and the annoyance of daily impoliteness, the liberating potential of language is enough that we should keep going. These are thoughtful poems, whose openness to joy doesn’t mean they lose their foot on the ground.

Astrid Alben’s Plainspeak is published by Prototype Press. Get a copy here.

Claude Monet, The Japanese Footbridge (1899)

~

Text: Jon Petre

Published: 8/5/20