#samriviere

[bordercommunity]

This #ThrowbackThursday immerse yourself in the soothing familiar warmth of Luke Abbott's elasticated anthem Brazil, via his truly inspired video collaboration with poet Sam Riviere and photographer Katherine Mager that gradually unfurls a poem-in-the-form-of-subtitles over a backdrop of kinetic snapshots of Norfolk life.

If you've never seen the video please do take a look - they really did a Good Thing.

[robinallender]

I love Sam Riviere’s poetry. I think his interest is in what happens to meaning if the transmission of language is disrupted – by translation, by plagiarism, by time, or by the endless corrupting influence of the internet. His latest collection is a very freewheeling rendition of the Roman poet Martial’s Epigrams, often assisted by machine translation. It reminded me of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where we also view the text through a weird editorial filter. If this all sounds impossibly arch to you, don’t worry, Riviere is aware of that: 

I actually have no idea what I’m talking about – sorry! It’s only a poem,
 my dainty offering. See you in the morning. 

After Fame is so funny, so silly, and actually so concerned with pretensions, and with what constitutes poetry (good and bad), and with the complex negotiations of the poet as public figure. And in the same way that his last collection, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, which was informed by the skewed poetry of spam, felt strangely profound, so After Fame, in its fusion of voices, is often beautiful (‘the diluted evening’ is a lovely phrase) and quite moving in its gnomic utterances and de-centred meanings: 

Money still flies his way in the shadowy city… With nothing to recommend me, how on earth
 could I escape my reward? But that’s not what
 I talk about during my two-hour phone calls 
on the solstice evenings, when I like to fall asleep
 while watching many appalling films. 

Here’s a post I wrote last year after reading 81 Austerities.

[robinallender]

I loved Sam Riviere’s 2015 collection, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage – a sequence of poems written in a language made rotten by the internet, for example:

grave heaven

All our emotions, thoughts,  knowledge and feelings go to an eccentric, swashbuckling fantasy world. 

Or am I missing something? 

Do good people really go to an anime-inspired fantasy world when they die?

His earlier collection, 81 Austerities, is slightly more conventional, but still brilliant, silly, funny and weirdly moving: 

couples circulate the otherwise  dead town centre like leaves in a big ashtray

Fantastic use of ‘big’ there! What about this nonsense:

here I am in a wet field as a clown tells me to ‘get real’ 

And I love this:

& the sun doesn’t bother to lift its head from the table but is leaking torpid ‘honeyed’ light from behind clouds

Those inverted commas are very arch! But I love them – he knows what he’s doing, the ‘leaking torpid’ light shows us that he’s in control of the language he’s using. By acknowledging how hackneyed received poetic language is, Riviere is stressing how important it is to find a new voice, a new way of saying things, avoiding clichés and aiming for something like truth.

There’s also a poem about Pavement in there.