Luke Roberts, TO MY CONTEMPORARIES

Luke Roberts’ new, self-published book, printed, released, and distributed for free towards the end of last year, all quietly, all without fanfare, is called To My Contemporaries (a title borrowed from Edwin Rolfe). As this title might suggest, it relentlessly foregrounds referentiality, by which I suppose I mean naming, something that Roberts has been concerned with for a while, but in a way that develops from its use in both of his preceding books, Left Helicon (Equipage, 2013) and Keep All Your Friends (MATERIALS, 2014). Left Helicon’s invocations of historical, political and literary figures often function as often hard-to-place jokes:

Now I imitate Neruda from memory;

Engels, the beautiful walrus;

Samuel Beckett feeding ice-cream

to a three-legged dog, it is the saddest thing;

The name of my band is Theodor’s Swimsuit,

on a striped recliner,  

it is the second saddest thing;

[…] if you bring Mussolini

into this, I will shoot him in a duel. I will use the robot

Bertolt Brecht to travel back in time, and I will go to town

on Gabriele D’Annunzio.

           

(Most of those examples are from the poem ‘People from the Book Kept Entering the Room’, whose title suggests that these proliferating references function as much as interruptions to the present moment of composition, or inhabitation, as to points of clarification and contextualisation for it.) KALYF deploys such naming them more as part of a sublimated(?) or ambiguous research project (without wanting that term to sound like the subsumption of poetic concern to academic funding-drive), perhaps in the mode of the earlier False Flags, with its take on conspiracy theories, moon landings and Cold War chess games. Thus, the argument about secrecy and clandestine political movements which references Comrade Bala, Patty Hearst, and the like, in the book’s concluding poem, ‘Agitprop: An Ode’. 

In To My Contemporaries, however, the names are more explicitly posed in terms of what they can teach us: the poem is about reading, and learning from the poets of the past and the poets of now, disagreeing with them, recalibrating them, etc. Or it functions as a survey, a summing-up, reckonings and engagements with the feeling of a particular poetical and political moment, mournful lookings-back and reassessments, workings-through. TMC is very much a poem of address, as its title suggests, but it’s not exactly a grandly rhetorical, public poem – there are all sorts of ironizations, disguises, feints and so on, familiar to readers of Roberts’ poetry over the years, though there is here a definite change in register.

The poem is, in essence, a political pastoral – pastoral elements having crept into ‘Agitprop’, and here being more explicitly fore-grounded, in setting at least, though this is perhaps more background, or ambience, than the explicit and obsessive concern it might be in the work of, say, Lisa Robertson, or even the scrupulous attention to natural detail found in such writers as R.F. Langley and Peter Larkin. Such vagueness is explicitly remarked upon and turned into a joke – how simultaneous recall erases the distinctions between seasons, the specificity of the landscape supposedly attended to, the unsuitability of the poet themselves for that purpose: “It was summer, it was autumn, it was spring […] Implausible that the revolutionary bucolic / should fall to me, the bearer of gratuitous hayfever.” The poem is also suspicious of an attachment to place that romanticizes any inherent quality of – say – racial belonging – “If you absorb a place it absorbs you / is wholly untrue […] a porch in the West of the military tract […] afraid of desolation / but doing duty to where you belong offends my sensibility”. Likewise, its presentation of culinary delights is tinged by its obvious metaphorical overlay with the discourse surrounding migration and economic inclusion within the European Union: “Now fed on Polish blueberries most days / a harvest of European plums, / Greek honey / abundance / waiting for the ground war to slow its circle.”

Despite these self-conscious asides, half-apologies, and criticism, the poem’s pastoralism is not exactly programmatic, though it has the structure of this in some manner – in part, perhaps, due to the fact that it’s a single sequence, in three books, rather than a collection of single poems, as in the previous two collections. It begins with an un-named second person plural, in a particular place, looking at plants and waiting for their washing:

We were in the ice-cold pagoda observing the angiosperms

we were outside the actual laundromat

These lines immediately establish a play between inside and outside, the reality of the place and incident described and its transformation and re-framing within an (often obscured and non-linear) poetic narrative. “I” and “we” are insistently there from the beginning, and the poem describes its own mission statement as early as the fourth line – “This is a poem about timing and advice” – even as it also betrays a scepticism about the grounds for this mission, and the poet’s suitability for accomplishing it:

how to begin when versatility’s in thrall to caution

afraid of repetition

falling short of what we’d shyly call an ethics.

Indeed, the claim is that this is a poem about timing and advice, rather than an actual enacting of a particular kind of timing or a giving of a particular breed of advice. A concern here is whether the poet themselves has something to teach their readers, or whether they themselves might accomplish the task of self-interrogation – itself potentially instructive to others – or whether both these things might fall apart in ironic feints and half-declarations which are almost immediately backtracked upon. Such a problematic would seem particularly to be encapsulated in the line on the following page: “you could finally be divulged”. This is an odd grammatical usage, reversing the usual subject-object structure associated with the verb, so that rather than the speaker divulging something, making it known, they themselves (and, moreover, addressing themselves in the second person) would be the one divulged. ‘Divulged’ sounds here something like ‘divested’, a casting off of secrecy perhaps: though what exactly is meant by the “twofold office” of the previous line which, again, sits in an awkwardly elided grammatical relation to what follows it, is unclear. But what’s central here, nonetheless, and however much apparent disclosure and foregrounding actually functions as another means of giving the slip, of – perhaps, and intentionally, dissembling – is the poet as narrator: in this sense differing from Edwin Rolfe, whose own To My Contemporaries opens with the following ‘Credo’:

To welcome multitudes – the miracle of deeds

performed in unison – the mind

must first renounce the fiction of the self

and its vainglory.

This is not to suggest that Roberts’ poem lapses into a kind of idealized bourgeois individualism – however much that term suggests a crushing, anti-poetic Stalinism, and however much I’d see the opposition between ‘poetry of the individual’ and ‘poetry of the masses’ as crude and unhelpful  – but that its negotiations of “what we’d shyly call an ethics” are more intimate than Rolfe’s “strength and togetherness / of bodies phalanxed in a common cause, / of fists tight-clenched around a crimson banner”. So the narrator in Roberts’ poem draws in elements of intimate or private reference, perhaps intelligible in their full sense only to close friends, and also reaching for a more public form of address – though ‘public’ here might mean as much those friends as an ambition towards a soap-box oratory, an imagining that the poem will mean anything to an imagined political crowd just waiting to be inspired by revolutionary poetry. The poem is more coy and double-bluffing than that, though this shouldn’t imply that there is a secret key, that there really is such a thing as the “secret poem” on which Joseph Persad focuses in his recent review of Left Helicon for Hix Eros. This is a work that so insistently and consistently draws attention to and thinks critically but not distantly through its own circumstances or concerns – it feels and is, I think, a poetry that really means what it says and means something, does something with it.

So, the pastoral, then, as background; the slow, drawn-out process of grinding defeat inflicted by the Coalition, and now, Tory government in the UK, the slow fade-out from the hopes of the Student Movement of 2010-2011, at its most publicly visible, active and radicalized; the impact of certain disputes and fallings-out amongst a ‘community’ of Anglophone poets over the past few years as well; and all these as part of a coming to terms with certain things that the poet’s past poetry has done, which this poem attempts to explicitly bid farewell to. Leave-taking more broadly is something the poem is concerned with –geographical departure, or the death of the poet Stephen Rodefer, mentioned twice in the final section – as well as spring, new starts, the pastoral, the harvest, the birds, the flowers; that balance.

The poem is in three sections (‘Books’): the first, from which I’ve already quoted, establishing something of a narrative, or at least a sense of place, whose dipping in and out of real landscape and a more ephemeral or idealized pastoral variant is played on. Thus, “the actual Laundromat” is a half-joking claim for factual accuracy, the absence of place names and the generalising specificity of locations which are also mythological and poetic tropes – the sea, the forest, et al – a co-existing counter-tendency. There is a distinct and distinctive sound patterning here, more exaggerated even than in Roberts’ previous books, which, for a whole section, leads to a series of end-rhymed lines, with plenty of internal rhyming echoes across these lines as well. This relates to the developing theme of beginning, ending, and return. A familiar move in Roberts’ poetry for years now has been the placing of an adjective at the end of a line (often equating with a syntactical unit), rather than before the noun to which it refers. This is also done with adverbs, often playing on the English-language ambiguity wherein words like “forgetful” implicitly read as “forgetfully”. One could say that this marks a displacement from objects described to quality, the imbuing of those objects with feeling, but I think it functions more as a way of maintaining simultaneous meanings, so that that process of imbuing something apparently solid with something more confusedly personal is deliberately fore-grounded and keeps the sense of the phrase mobile. Some examples: “to write this down forgetful”; “on certain shores uncertain”; “with our justice under-nourished”; “parallels of impressive orchestration unavoidable”. This kind of suspension, or inversion – a suspension whose quality of syntatical and line-ending resolution problematizes as much as it resolves – as an equivalent to what the poem names in the following manner: “nourished endings, solemn and inevitable / the starting point is flinching in compression.” (Inversion also echoes in the inversion (or reversal) of the Biblical creation myth, in which the (male) poet is created out of the rib of their (female) lover - “And Jack knew all the flowers’ names” / therefore I would be her rib” - taught by or (in the second section), spoken through by them: “So Jack spoke through the imperfect medium of Luke” - itself a reversal of Alice Notley's phrase about Jack Kerouac. This is, after all, a love poem of sorts.)

After all this, a transition, nicely managed, a marked shift in register, from first to second book: the end of the first asking what story “you” (either the poet themselves, or its readers) “want to be told”, abruptly concluding “well okay” and then beginning on the next page with a declarative citation of George Oppen. The second book is the shortest of the three, in terms of page numbers at least, though with far longer lines substituting for the three-step structure of the sections that surround it – and is more didactic (from “timing” to “advice”), while carrying on the fragments of narrative reference to place, the metaphorical use of pastoral setting: for instance, the fire in the forest, “curated entirely by unreliable poets”, which seems to be a dig at the unthinking fetishisation of would-be revolutionary activity (“a fire in the forest”) within a situation not yet revolutionary, where the conditions aren’t right. I say ‘didactic’, but one might better substitute the word ‘rhetorical’, or even expansive, as references to flowers and the writing of poets about flowers (the “insurgent botany” of the first section) transition into a list of “these poets [who] are your friends”: a roll call, without naming names (save the late Stephen Rodefer, who recurs in the final section), but rather places, which function as a “parallel of impressive orchestration unavoidable.” This list of Anglo-American poets, recognisable in terms of who exactly is being referred to, to those in the know, recognisable at least as an index of international poetic kinship to those who aren’t, seems to be one of those who might give both the poet of this poem, and the ‘contemporaries’ to whom it is addressed, advice. O’Hara is obviously lurking around here, and not just in the obvious joke about “our lapsed curiosity about the poets / in Ghana”; but the advice sought here is less fleeting, less part of an on-the-move sociality than O’Hara’s.

Apart from this list – a single stanza – this section carries over from the first a recurrence of ribs, ribcages, hips and the heart – again, internalisation, this time on a specifically physical plane, as well as the play between privacy and disclosure, sometimes explicitly in contrast to the address to the dispersed poets, its play on a kind of internationalism, an “impressive orchestration unavoidable”, distance, with the flower functioning as symbolic object both specific (through reference to its uses in literary and botany trivia) and “undefined.” The poem wrestling with definitions, schemas, clarity on the one hand, irony, turning away, shifts in scene and reference on the other, the set of declarations within the final sentence seeing the poet apparently “renounce[ing] my title”. (This perhaps a reference to the joking boasts from from False Flag’s already-ironized ‘Colossal Boredom Swan Song’, with its “withdraw[al] to my ethical bin bag” and “accept[ance] of everything, every tiresome imitation of flight”. Here, the phrase ‘champion of poetry’ reads both as a claim to skill, with poetry as competition and act of mastery asserted over other poets, and as a more generous championing of poetry: “I champion of poetry, salute the elders, put my / foot in a desk, kicking poetry with a desk lamp / strapped to my heart”). Having renounced this title, they propose to reconvene later on “with exacter measures, with better poems, / celebrations of a less sacrificial nature”, and the section ends ominously on the lines “blame all over the ocean.”

If solidarity has broken down into recrimination, there’s nonetheless some promise held out: but the third section doesn’t provide the triumphal assertion of a new programme for poetry, Rolfe-ian or otherwise. Instead, it functions as something like a coda to the second, with its gathering together of the disparate or distanced (by geography, circumstance, straitening of circumstance, suspicion, paranoia, moving on, betrayal, the inability to cope and deal with violences of all kinds – all the rest of it). It functions as a chastened or careful way to begin again after a grand gathering together which is both invocation and farewell. The formal workings here echo this double sense. Such workings – echoed in three poems, outtakes from TMC, which appear in the Xmas magazine YULE LOG – play out mainly through repetitions of words or phrases, the poet deliberately tweaking or rather, spannering (but not quite) the works of the poem. Maybe they could be more accurately figured using a sonic metaphor, as little glitches, distortions, feedbacks, which mesh or extend a different way the use of rhyme and particular cadence, within its frame, the frame of a particular style, troubling it without destroying it.

Towards the end of the poem, an anecdote appears, in which the poet encounters a homeless man outside a late-opening grocery store / off-licence, stopping to call the emergency services. There’s a risk in this sort of move, perhaps, of the return of a kind of philanthropism, a demonstration of the poet’s ethical commitment, as a person, through a specific act of inter-personal kindness; but the way the story is recounted belies that. “Here is my realism”, writes Roberts, preceding to describe waiting with the man and calling the emergency services and concluding “I didn’t love him at all”. What I get from this is that an ethics of care, that acts of political solidarity, might not be prefaced on love of a specific person, but on a more general sense of solidarity, which in itself actually functions as a more reasonable, expansive, useful and practicable sense of what love might mean -- however much poets like to go for extremes, to put themselves through the wrangler of love, elevated in triumph or abjection, aggrandizing and narrativizing their emotional lives, meshing them with politics, making claims for them. “Meet me with everyone / you love, even badly” refigures the roll-call of contemporaries from the second section, on a more intimate scale, and one which, nonetheless, leaves the definition of love, conventional or – given the evidence of this poem – most likely otherwise, open, negotiable, to be struggled with and lived.

The poet concludes with advice that is to himself as much as to his contemporaries, and which might, in some roundabout way, describe the purpose of the poem itself:

write to everyone

you know

write to everyone.

A note to self but also advice in general, encouragement, necessity; in times of dispersal, as any poet, or anyone, might figure them; the necessity of communication, re-evaluation, continued dialogue, and one which might take place more privately, more carefully, with more openness to risk and disagreement, than in the fractious and fracturing fora of an often confused public debate about the political function of poetry (however useful and laudable and central to our thought that might be). The poem, then, engages with and emerges from the difficulties of finding frames for such concerns which don’t descend into bickering and to the crossing of wires, but to a different kind of crossing (a word I’m thinking of here in relation to a recent series of videos made by the poet Richard Owens). We often can’t see these things clearly until after they’ve past – and, in some ways, perhaps even less so after. And we know this from examining the histories of the poets and the poetries we read, the literary histories that are constructed around them, both by these poets themselves and by others, the historians, the critics, the new generations, those who come after. So it can be hard to say just what exactly these words - given, renounced, ironized, declared, affirmed - will mean – and who will read them. But for now, this is what seems important, to me at least, about them.

And then the rest of that conclusion: the burning of the heather on the hillside by the apprentices who “threw their tools / in the sea”, which, perhaps because of a coincidence in my own reading, when I first encountered drafts of the poem, rather than because of something specifically in the poem itself, brings to mind these lines from the poem ‘Landscape with Three People’, included in the late Lee Harwood’s 1966 pamphlet The Man With Blue Eyes:

I loved him and I loved her

and no understanding was offered

to the first citizen

when the ricks were burnt.

Those lines, which I’ve not found glossed or discussed in detail in any of the existing Harwood criticism, explicitly foreground the book’s bisexuality, but what I’m interested in here, in relation to Roberts, is how they offer a removed ambience while apparently tapping into a register associated with acts of historical violence and turmoil – they sound, at least, as if culled from a historical account of machine-breaking, acts of sabotage in reaction to the cruel displacements of the Industrial Revolution; in that sense mirroring the poem’s landscape setting. Roberts, too, plays on the relation between closure and disclosure, historical record and a more numinous interiority, but his poem differs from the elision of temporalities, settings, registers and referents evinced in Harwood’s “and” – a privacy redolent of John Ashbery, the ‘man with blue eyes’ of the title, and arguably associated with the poems’ own acts of privacy or concealment around the issue of sexuality, poised half in and half out of the closet. Roberts’ privacy is of a different kind; is perhaps about the pleasures of concealment, the near-paranoia borne of conditions of political defeat – if ones less dramatic than the references to political torture, resistant fighting and the like that (again somewhat ambiguously and atmospherically) pepper The Man with Blue Eyes and The White Room. In any case, the hillside burning is here a means, perhaps, of imbuing the pastoral with a history of resistance and solidarity, rather than of the class distinctions so often imbued within it, from Spenser on Ireland to the seventeenth- and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landed gentry surveying the harmonious shaping of their estate; to make it something wilder, a site of conflict and violence as much as of pleasure and escape.

But, again, this isn’t explicitly thematic; we could read the apprentices as younger poets, the contemporaries of the title themselves, learning their craft as much through destruction as imitation; or as something else entirely. In any case, to conclude abruptly, I like the poem’s self-reflexive questioning of the problem of love in poetry, and the way that ethical conduct in love might be inflected, in life, by its use as material for poetry: so that the poet says they are (maybe) done with “loving eruditely”. And its final lines, in the wake of Rodefer’s death and personal dispersal, on “holding on to the living” and calling time and closing; true to the spirit of the poem as a whole, in general free of bombast, with the right combination of warmth, generosity, and self-criticism that doesn’t turn into elongated writhing display and is, frequently, genuinely moving.

RIVET CHRIST MASS, 20/12/2014 // JACK FROST CHRISTINA CHALMERS CONNIE SCOZZARO DANNY HAYWARD ( + ED LUKER & JOSH STANLEY) // 16 WILD’S RENTS, BERMONDSEY

We got on the train and the sky burned down red and someone made a joke about the last days of Europe, or the world, and we went from the train to a basement full of books to another train and then on foot to the warehouse space where the reading would take place. It was Saturday. There were about thirty or forty people in attendance once everyone had arrived; the space contained bits of art on large pieces of polystyrene and a kitchen with mulled wine and plastic sheets for walls and clusters of art-types and leftists and poets. The atmosphere was convivial – people were pleased to see each other, it was just before Christmas so there was a kind of solidarity with going home to see families and its traumas or joys of what-have-yous, and some sense of emerging from whatever periods of hardship into some kind of holiday, however real or false – there was karaoke afterwards, banter between readings, a sense of excitement at this combination of readers and the work they were doing. Each reader in their own way provided a different spin on how contemporary poets might be figuring politics in poetry, two of them from within the UK – Chalmers and Hayward – two now settled in the U.S. but with strong ties to UK poetries and to particular ways of writing that come very much out of UK poetry scenes – Stanley and Scozzaro – however helpful or unhelpful these geographical demarcations are in delineating and categorizing. From the more ‘purely’ American side, Frost’s work is the most ambitious in scope, in a certain sense, chronicling as it does, in her most recent book,s the struggles and particular violences wrought on a particular generation of ‘Young Americans’. Certainly, ‘YA’ (the book) is a total project in itself, a major statement. Perhaps there’s a certain attitude or collection of attitudes – call it a certain self-confidence – in the history of American poetry which allows this kind of scope in a way that the other writers, from elsewhere, might not allow themselves, or be encouraged to think themselves in. Certainly, the voicings, the insistence on rhetorical weight, come from a particular place which I’d identify as specifically American, which is perhaps as much to do with performance as with text, though the text does encourage that kind of delivery. But we’ll get to that later.

Ed Luker, who’d organized the reading, opened by reading a poem written last week entitled ‘Pouring one out for the Petit-Bourgeoisie’. The poem is a screed of sorts lambasting the gentrification of London, with particular reference to art scenes – bearded poets, “Ur-Bane Outfitters”, “fashion ninjas”, ‘creatives’, shopkeepers seeking a state of violence to maintain their profits, and the counter-cultural recuperations of Iain Sinclair. Indeed, probably the most memorable incident, and a somewhat puzzling one, features Sinclair’s severed robotic head speaking lines from J.H. Prynne’s ‘Questions for the Time Being’, a poem first published in The English Intelligencer in 1968 which critically considers the self-characterisation of a poetic ‘underground’ within that “community of risk”: “so much talk | about the underground is silly. WHEN it would re- | quire a constant effort to keep below the surface.” I guess, in Luker’s appropriation, these lines could be taken to turn on the liberal or ‘apolitical’ arts scene ignorant of or indifferent to the cruelties of the process of gentrification and the concomitant assault on affordable and social housing, the conversion of London into a millionaire’s playground - a self-valorization, a blindness to structural positioning akin to Prynne’s vision of the “mirror of the would-be alien who won’t see how / much he is at home.” That it is Sinclair who speaks these lines maybe complicates things, or maybe not: as a writer who in some senses takes the artistic underground, work often marked by at least ambitions towards political critique, and turns it into marketable fodder, material for heritage tours packaged as anti-heritage tours, summaries of galleries of eccentrics you can spot on a leisurely dérive while wandering through charmingly forgotten corners of London, ‘his’ ventriloquizing of Prynne’s address self-describes his own hypocrisies of strategy as much as it castigates the hypocrisies and illusions of others. In any case, the poem as a whole is funny, and furious. It feels like the kind of lambasting of scenes on which the poet themselves is on the periphery that is useful but also potentially risky: ultimately, the reason it gets away with it is because it doesn’t have any illusions about its own moral righteousness, is not that kind of satire, poses its questions at times with a terrible urgency. “I reach for my balaclava, Nathaniel Turner saw visions of blood on the corn […] How is class constituted in the concrete lobster of post-industry, how does / Its conflict appear, who and how many will die, what songs will we sing to remember them.”

Josh Stanley, on a visit from the U.S., read the first poem from the photocopied book, ‘A Story’, his first in years, put out in the last couple of days by Defector, another new Cambridge small press operating on card covers, staples and photocopying. ‘Salute for Jeffrey Boyd and Lukas Moe’ is dedicated to Stanley’s union organizer and graduate student friends, and seems broadly representative of what he’s been writing recently. Josh told me before the reading that the title was a nod to O’Hara, but I don’t see much O’Hara in this work. The poem seems caught, perhaps deliberately, between two styles which aren’t resolved, but held in suspension; an insistent political address related to unionizing, derived from Stanley’s experiences in New Haven, which in tone and even vocabulary reminds me a little of the 1930s Marxist poetry of Edwin Rolfe, and an ironized address shot through with obscenity and pop-culture references – Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, various forms of edible consumer product – deployed for bathetic effect, most obviously coming from the work of Keston Sutherland, and more in line with Stanley’s earlier writing. The content of the poem and the delivery and reception of the reading seemed in quite marked contrast to the other work that was heard on the night (albeit with the caveat that each reader’s work in its own ways was equally different from each other reader’s). What I mean is that this was a performance of a passionately held political position that speaks in part to or from, or perhaps for, a differently constituted political community than that of the UK poetry scene from which Stanley – who’s not published much recently, in the UK or the US – has been largely absent for the past few years. I wonder if, or how much, he sensed that this position was one which many in the room might shy away from or be nonplussed by or not know much about, and I wonder how much the reading was a form of actual agit-prop, an actual attempt to convince them of the need to “form militant unions.” Here are some of the lines in question, anyhow:

“I wanted my face to fuck / your face […] I will fight with all my life to make you you […] Comrade whoever, I love you […] Destroy your / fucking enemy with your visions of collective life. / Artists, teachers, writers, scientists, all of us who crawl in the dirt, / we must form militant unions and assert the power / of our labour. […] it is our responsibility to use our privilege even / in our despair, born there to fair life give me your hand / and let’s destroy our enemies and love each other and / have everything by rigorous life struggling blessed future.”

That final block comes from the end of the poem, and when these kind of lines appeared at the reading, they provoked laughter, but that laughter was, for me, filled with a kind of joy or delight in the affirmative risk that was taken at these moments, as well as something of the kind of political awkwardness I’ve suggested above. Perhaps this is just contextual: a different politics, and, at those points, a different stylistic mode to all the other work we’d heard. I’m still not quite sure what to do with it all – at times I wanted the poem just to go with its Rolfe-ian impulses and become straight agit-prop; at others I wondered about its unwavering belief in the power of the union as, in the poem, a revolutionary demand or praxis, a suspicion about the substituting of means for ends. Certainly, if Stanley’s work adopts the union as a model of how to do politics, Hayward and Frost suggest different ways of figuring political organisation.

Hayward, like Stanley, in some senses takes his point of departure from Keston Sutherland’s work - compare, for example, the kind of narrative moves, full of substitutions and multiplications of character, in the poem ‘Night Light’ that appeared in a summer Hi Zero magazine, to the narratives in ‘Stress Position’ - but he takes it in an entirely different direction, and one entirely his own. Reading and listening to Danny’s work feels like witnessing a comically and heroically failed attempt to grasp everything at once, all social relations, from the smallest object to the forces of capital by which it is produced or deployed. Something like this: “It goes without saying that whatever is said within this box is not knowledge, or science, but art, and that whatever happens here is not insight into this world but commentary on misapprehension, a struggle to know exactly where it is that we ought to start, gathering together a series of x number of elements…” So the poetry’s dystopian visions often come from a particular English register of pop culture filtered through dark comedy – the game-show piece entitled ‘Noel Edmonds’ for instance – and are also saturated in a close and attentive engagement with the thought of Karl Marx and the conceptualisation of where current political struggles might go. This is not poetry that asks us to consider Danny as THE poet or THE POET writing these lines; rather, it is a poetry that can actually allow thought to happen, without seeking to self-present a persona shot through with lyric authority, however ironized – it is work that thinks hard. It holds itself in suspension, does what it does without pretension, even as the moves it sometimes makes - and the same is true of Danny’s prose writings - may seem deliberately quixotic. The paper he gave a few weeks ago, predicated on a comparative close reading of Nigel Farage and Holderlin, is a case in point - Danny used the comparison in order to make the beginnings of a complex theoretical argument about the changing definition of the petit-bourgeoisie in the work of Karl Marx and what this might tell us about the appeal of UKIP, the status of a precariously-placed class strata who feel threatened from below but excluded from above, and thus turn their ire on scapegoated immigrants, those who do not fit the definition of a fantastical community of national belonging organized around a few symbolic vagaries but ferociously and passionately held to. In any case, every reading I’ve seen Danny give recently has seemed more aggressive in some ways, more charged, read faster and with more almost comically panic-stricken furious emphasis -- but aggression is perhaps not the word I’m looking for, for this isn’t an aggression turned on the audience, or on himself, but a panicked rigour which knows the tasks it’s set itself are bound to fail but doesn’t rest complacently on that, that tries anyway. “That this is nearly the truth; that to be near to the truth is the only way to change it.” So that perhaps this ‘aggression’ – or whatever we might call it – is itself even a tender thing.

Christina Chalmers’ poetry demonstrates an evident acquaintance with European modernism in multiple languages, a knowledge of history and theory, and an engagement with live issues of gender and politics, sometimes through allegory, sometimes through a first-person or first-person plural voice that unsettles its targets but can’t necessarily be identified with Christina herself in lyric first-person address, and where the collective subject is equally uncertain: e.g. “this preciosity I speak as”; “we held pipe in the middle of the noiseless / expanses , we were only ever a worker there , glutting fish and creeping before / expiration”. Christina reads quite often, particularly in London, and has been published a fair bit, yet I sense that her work hasn’t really been fully digested by that many of us yet. This might in part be because the reception of poetry often relies on a strong reading style, demonstrative or assured in particular ways, which gives the work a character adjacent or complementary to how it reads, and because Christina’s own reading style seems to perform a certain distance from her own poetry: it’s unclear whether she likes or even actively dislikes her own work, which is perhaps a quality of nervousness and of a refusal to sit on the levels of an assumed achievement, refusing to let that work sit easy. (The final text she read, for example, was characterized as unfinished, as in progress, fragments towards a more cohesive whole, though if it had been introduced differently, one might have assumed it was the finished thing, which I liked -- it didn’t feel like a presentation of a fait acompli, something else to be ticked off and boxed up for cultural export.) Advantage and disadvantage: because the work itself is quite different from much that’s come out of recent scenes, there’s a particular difficulty, of finding contemporary co-ordinates to relate it to, to characterize its voicings or ranges of references and so on, which could on the one hand spark a more intense and difficult engagement, but on the other lead to a certain mode of appreciation which doesn’t necessarily follow through on what the poetry demands. I include this little write-up in that.

Connie Scozzaro gave a great performance, from what I could see of it positioned in the doorway, translating near every line into a languid parodic arm gesture, reading with cigarette in hand, not really as a cool pose but suggesting something of the lunges in register or mode or position that seem to be going on beneath the surface of the work. The sense I got from the reading was that very real flashes of alienation and despair, often in relation to labour and gender, were presented as part of dialogues which turn on themselves and seem even to mock that despair. Here I’m thinking mainly of the long poem in progress she read towards the end, which appeared to be a dialogue between (perhaps) a therapist and a patient. Maybe that impulse I sense in the work, accurately or not, is a way of coping, with the fact, for example, that the children being babysat by the poet are placed in a structural relation to her which renders her labour invisible: “We have spaghetti hoops and I wish they would / sometimes ask me about my day but they barely conceive / of me as a person. I am a cartoon pair of legs & / so reliable, hand out the food on two manicured scoops.” When I say ‘coping’, what do I mean – certainly not poetry as therapy or as self-insulation, but as a holding in suspension of feeling and structural relation so that the co-ordinates are presented in clear-eyed fashion but with a certain refusal of direct emotional identification, of shifting persona and perspective, of a caustic and sarcastic wit that can at one point lump together Sigmund Freud, Tony Blair and “the British poet John Wilkinson” as “avant-garde daddies”, as “men / I imagine show up when it really matters”, without this necessarily being a complete statement of position, a complete ideological claim. So the work is satire, maybe, in part, but a satire that hasn’t necessarily absolutely determined quite what, or how many, its targets are, where it’s going and what it’s doing with all them – and I think deliberately so. Maybe this is partly to do with the caustic reading style, playing for laughs, but uncomfortable laughs, that the work mimics or enacts a process by which real hurt is being subsumed and overlooked, where gendered and class-based structural victimisation becomes an instance of comedy, or tragi-comedy, shown up all the more for being treated with what can appear to be a kind of flippancy. So that these laughs are laughs that can’t be sunk into, that keep the toes poised, that catch out, that provoke discomfort and thought.

Jackqueline Frost’s poetry, by contrast, chooses to take the stories of desire and despair it presents with absolute seriousness, authoritatively and with gravity, with firm first-person singular and plural oratorical weight. (It is not a poetry much interested in jokes.) Jack read some new work, still in a provisional state (some of it appears, along with Luker’s poem and a few of the poems that Chalmers, Scozzaro and Hayward read, in a little stapled magazine published to coincide with the event), as well as a short excerpt from the book published this summer by O’Clock Press, ‘You Have the Eyes of a Martyr’, and a longer part of the new long poem ‘Young Americans’, again recently published in a U.K. edition by Defector. In conversation afterwards, Josh saw ‘YA’ as a work mourning departure from community – the political and poetic scene in Oakland. Against or in relation to this Frost would insist that a static model of a particular mode of organisation – or ‘organizing’ – as itself a fixed good can be harmful, that communities fuck up, are provisional, that the fixed form of, say, the union, can or often does reproduce bad gender dynamics or bureaucratic complicities that treat the form itself as the end-point, rather than something that might want to self-abolish, to go further. Her work is above all about survival: as she writes in a statement of poetics for the Elective Affinities blog: “A responsibility to render forms of life as they presently exist. To enunciate what occurs affectively in the space of protest and intervention. Desiring the transformation of society into a survivable place.” Its stakes are high, its mourning is not nihilistic or cynical, nor, really, ironic, but a working through of real issues really experienced and really lived – and these are profoundly ones to do with class and gender and violence, with a specific autobiographical resonance that’s far from abstract. So ‘Young Americans’ begins with young girls selling their blood or being positioned to be those who pick up the pieces, or don’t, when men go off to war (“being made for someone who’s made for the war / or being broken by it later”); and goes on to be about the histories of colonisation and gentrification that constitute “the crime of settling a city”; and the anarchists’ “worship of danger / importance / secrecy”; and the problem of envisioning a collective practice based on “total freedom” when that practice betrays that hope, and when “I don’t yet know what I’m willing to do for it” and “I don’t know what will happen now”. Yet, despite all this, that “I imagine that I can feel that I am living and can make a greater gesture or my spirit can”, that “I do have my underground” and that “I know this too is poetry”, “How the song is coming through, clear and absolute.”