john coltrane: 'lush life' in seattle, 1965

this from a cd which collects the remaining recordings from coltrane’s residency at the penthouse in seattle in 1965 – an expanded group comprising pharaoh sanders, donald rafael garrett (on bass and clarinet), jimmy garrison, elvin jones. the quality is pretty dreadful compared to the officially-released impulse 2-cd set (the untitled half-hour track taken from a radio broadcast is the cleanest, similar in vein to ‘evolution’ from the impulse set). nonetheless, worth making it thru the murk to find this cover of billy strayhorn’s ‘lush life’. i’ve been playing it for days, it makes me feel ill or something tho’, voices transported thru some ancient analogue form of recording technology, ghosts in the machine sounding out some terrible warning barely disguised as languid balladry, an interlude before the up-tempo and familiar ‘my favorite things’ routine (which itself sounds under some terrible strain here, coltrane’s soprano piping away obsessively over phrases that drown out under the general murk of the rest of the band’s pounding). this is partially a quality of the recording, but it’s there in the rest of the seattle tapes as well (as per this blog post from a little over a year ago). partially this is to do with the tension between the move towards free jazz that coltrane, sanders and garrett are taking, and the continued use of standard material – i mean, it’s perhaps somewhat surprising to find coltrane playing the strayhorn at this stage (tho’ the impulse set also includes ‘body and soul’), and there are moments here, as there are (to a far greater extent) on 'body and soul', where pharoah sanders enacts a queasy near-disintegration of the standard quite different to anything else in his or coltrane’s work (despite an online reviewer’s rather dismissive comment that he simply was “not really in this mould,” that it was “not his bag then”). & while coltrane and tyner stick to the chord changes, coltrane's playing nonetheless has an urgency to it far from the smooth and uncluttered phrasal shapings of his 1962 'ballads' record and collaboration with the smooth baritone of singer johnny hartmann. while the hartmann version stays solely and comfortably within the mode of wistful, resigned melancholy that characterizes strayhorn's tune, its chronicle of lonely day-drinkers (“sad and sullen faces / with distingué traces”, “twelve-o-clock-tails,” etc), here we have an attempt – or at least, this is how i hear it – to seek reassurance within that melancholy as a kind of pleasurable resignation, even transformed into a triumphant emotive assertion (as in nathaniel mackey's notion of 'blutopia'), rather than the desolation and desperation that the interpretation increasingly gestures towards – hence coltrane’s clinging close to the melody in a fairly lengthy opening exposition. yet sound and fury are always on the verge of kicking in, as witnessed by some upper register intrusions around two minutes in, and by increasing phrasal clutter and expansion before the entrance of pharaoh sanders (just as, in this period, coltrane's own ballad 'naima' comes to seem less and less a serene ballad, more and more poised between the quiet bliss of its first half and the element of uncertainty that creeps into the second, that element of the tune emphasized and exacerbated in lengthy solos that are increasingly dramatic in their stasis - check, for example, the 1965 version at antibes, or the version with sanders at the village vanguard the following year). so sanders follows coltrane with strange tonguings (signalling elvin jones’ drums to really start kicking in, almost drowning everyone else out on the muffled murk of the bootleg recording), a queasy sliding or turning away, a kind of dribbling and wavering quality to the tone, far from 'free jazz macho', an uncertainty, hesitancy, odd phrasal gaps, not quite going far enough away from the tune to constitute an explosion of something radically other (as in archie shepp's solo preface to a version of 'in a sentimental mood' live in san francisco), but rather opening up some space in another dimension inside or outside the tune (between the lines, off the edge of the page) which it never quite enters, falling between the changes-melody approach and something much more askew, all the more disturbing for that uncertain balancing act. (and all the more emphasized by the fact that the other musicians are rhythmically and harmonically still within the changes framework - that quality, tension-and-release, soloist straining from rhythm section yet playing with them at the same time - given a particular and still almost shocking quality in these seattle recordings, in a way that's hard to pin down technically (sanders' own debut recording on ESP disk has the same tension, but it's in no way similarly productive, just as cecil taylor's early recordings are hamstrung rather than productively ennervated by this opposition)). i really think this is something which hasn't quite been matched since (david s. ware's takes on standards, for example are ecstatic, reverent, even sentimental, their ‘free jazz’ techniques nowhere near as chilling as elements of coltrane’s seattle ballads): it certainly hasn’t been matched in sanders' own late-career interpretations of standards, which move back to a smoothed-out, less-complex version of coltrane's own earlier takes on that repertoire. nowhere here the volability of coltrane’s 'sheets-of-sound' approach, a kind of unstoppable glossolalia, hyper-complexity as the realisation of the form at its limit, teasing out every single implication of the tune's harmonic sequence to the point of exhaustion or even self-parody, hyper-articulacy as a kind of babbling on the edge of terror to which the only response is the scream, literally vocalised or sounded thru saxophone multiphonics, reed-shriek. sanders’ later ballads don’t really contain the smoothness of coltrane’s more measured approach on 'ballads' either; rather, they manifest a kind of robust steadiness, straightforwardly tender (i’m thinking here of recordings like ‘crescent with love’, or the take on, of all things, ‘a nightingale sang in berkeley square’). tenderness on the seattle recordings, by contrast, is wracked by doubt and violence, desperately yearned for, returned to, but never with any sense of resolution – that which one breaks thru to, in that "air from another planet" of sanders' solos (as in the final movement of schoenberg's 2nd string quartet, poised on the breakthrough to atonality) isn't fulfilled utopia, isn't heaven, is unimaginable, could be utter horror, catastrophe. and even tenderness itself enshrines exactly such horror in the societal conditions in which one must place coltrane’s 1965 recordings (tho' their address to these conditions is in no way propogandistic-direct, doesn’t necessarily offer alternatives or answers) – by which i mean that tenderness cannot be a total other to violence, is implicated within it even as it must be vitally felt as its other, its counterforce (thus, coltrane’s following up of the unexpected and utterly chilling multiphonic in his recapitulation of the melody at the end of ‘body and soul’ with an exceptionally tender melodic extrapolation that at once mitigates against and emphasizes the sheer strangeness and foreigness of that multiphonic). well this version of ‘lush life’ doesn’t go quite so far as i might seem to be suggesting, within the compression of its 10 minute running span (on the recording of ‘body and soul’, it’s partially tyner’s lengthy solo that sets the ground for the most ‘out-there’ sections of the piece, ratcheting up the tempo, granite thud and thump and right-hand sprinkle, wavering arco, spirals of repetition like a sudden lock, trapped in a cycle you can’t get out of) – and yet at times sanders’ solo comes to seem a hideous parody as it tries to push the tune into something it isn’t and remains stuck on those changes, a gurgling and gargling strained thinness of tone transforming the tune and its changes from melancholy to an emphasized statement of – what? and then coltrane’s re-statement of the melody, ending in low-register barfs and morphing back into the contours of strayhorn’s tune, stuck in codas that can’t end, that contain but can neither entirely release nor entirely dissipate the disturbed energy that has built up on the relentless propulsion of jones’ drums and sanders’ questing spirals. and right at the end, almost all we can hear is the hollow thud of jones’ drums, tyner’s piano tinny uncertain ending, cut-off by the recording before it’s even finished. what the hell would this have sounded like as you sat in the club with your strayhornian cocktails. what the hell does it sound like now. melancholy as real despair, latent violence, hardly some heroic artist-struggle but objective social record. that’s how we have to hear coltrane, that’s why even fans like the amazon reviewer i quoted earlier just don’t get that, for example, sanders’ utterly un-canny or really terrifying solos on ‘body and soul’ and ‘lush life’ don’t just evince a failure to fit into a particular mould, that he can’t play ballad changes properly or something; rather, they temporarily split that ballad form right open and reveal the abyss at its heart.

(a belated part 2)



that last sentence was one of those rhetorical flourishes on which it seemed right to end the other night, but i've been thinking about this over the past day or so and realized that one element i could and really should have talked about to a greater extent was the tune 'lush itself' itself, and its relation to strayhorn's race and homosexuality. it seems fairly established that the line "i used to visit all those gay places" is not a reference to sexuality, both because the sexual connotations of that term were not widely established at that stage, and because strayhorn, as a 16 year-old from homewood, pittsburgh, wd likely not have been aware of them. but i wonder if we cd argue that the tune's melancholia, its lyrics' description of a milieu which is materially luxurious but emotionally unsatisfactory (visits to paris, moves into a cosmopolitan world of jazz and cocktails, and so on, don't make up for the pain of lost love), is also a melancholia with unspoken, perhaps even unintended wider resonances - if not in the original, or hartmann's smooth, gentleman's rendition, then certainly in coltrane's exacerbated expansion of something that was in some sense there at the heart of the original tune (that 'abyss' i somewhat clumsily mention at the end of the original post). by these i mean, firstly, racial overtones: fine clothes, drinks, a more tolerant / cosmopolitan european cultural setting with its own african-american expatriate community, don't disguise the glaring fact of continuing racism which means that wealth for a black man or woman is not the same as it is for a white man or woman - not to mention the real melancholia of continuing murders and race riots and ghettos and incarceration as tactic (these things which have not gone away, even if frank ocean's portrayal of disaffected ‘super rich kids’, on the album 'channel orange', is of a very different kind to strayhorn's projection of an older man's world-weariness from the position of a non-rich kid; and even if black wealth is increasingly celebrated as excess, joie-de-vivre, the jewell'd paraphernalia and weaponry of hip-hop, its money obsession). second, the melancholia of strayhorn's own sexuality, the particular and difficult problems of that sexuality within the black community, the sense of seeking 'sophistication', elegance, etc, as opposed to a more macho modern of proletarian manliness that the black arts movement would frequently valorize to the extent of caricature.

and it’s in relation to this that fred moten’s ‘in the break’ proves helpful: moten puns on strayhorn’s surname and the similarly ‘straying’ or wavering pitch of his vocals on his 1964 version of ‘lush life’, to suggest that str’s work manifests “a disruptively essential fugitivity”, “a propensity to wander or migrate or stray that is always animated by desire,” this propensity characteristic not only of his own practice but of the artists of the harlem renaissance whose sexuality and frustration at american racism lead them to europe – james baldwin, beauford delaney – this perhaps also present in strayhorn’s line in ‘lush life’ about a curative “week in paris.” relevant here might be strayhorn’s early ambition to be a classical composer (a realm he could not enter due to his race) – again, this realm of ‘sophistication’, that which, in a double-bind of condemnation, one is not allowed (by the white establishment) to enter into, not supposed to possess, because of one’s race and class background (‘culture’ as doubly foreign, both european in influence and ‘alien’ to yr supposed class and race position) – and the desire for which is also later taken (by the militant black resistance to the white establishment) as a betrayal of black working-class culture, in often sexualised terms. (see here amiri baraka’s conflation of aspects of the european or white avant-garde with this betrayal – his ambivalence towards cecil taylor explicitly figured thru a suspicion of the ‘euro-american’ lineage which he sees as taking taylor away from the more ‘authentically black’ style of, say, an archie shepp (even as taylor himself, in interviews, frequently claims just that very blackness, disowns the very same euro-americans – cage, stockhausen, david tudor – that baraka lumps him in with) – yet implicitly predicated on a suspicion of taylor’s homosexuality conflated with 'whiteness', 'europe', or 'classical influences' (again, see moten’s more expanded take on all this in his reading of baraka’s ‘the burton greene affair’)).

if this fugitivity is both racially and sexually determined, it would be be too simplistic to draw this back into the argument about coltrane and sanders’ exacerbation of 'lush life's melancholy: the melancholy of the original tune can’t really be said to emerge out of a self-tortured closeting (strayhorn was nothing if not open about his sexuality, tho' his relatively low public profile compared to ellington seems to have been the price he paid for such freedom). i mean, check his enunciation of the word "places" on the afore-mentioned 1964 version of the tune on which he sings and plays piano - this isn't the wounded heterosexual masculinity of chet baker, more a clipped kind of queerness that identifies itself as queer precisely by being less heart-on-its-sleeve than someone like baker. this itself is perhaps out of a reaction to the stigmatizing of homosexuality as particularly 'feminine', out of which camp dismissal emerges as the deliberate parodic disavowal of deeply felt hurt or pain, especially in love – and so strayhorn’s own version of ‘lush life’s’ melancholy is less emotionally volatile or searing than coltrane’s or sanders’ can be, as if fear of any indulgence in a specifically homosexual or 'feminine' melancholy comes to be precisely that which characterises the homosexuality of strayhorn’s rendition, while the heterosexual musician is free to take the role of emotional depth-plumber. (think also of the fact that miles davis' trumpet playing, actively taking the 'female role' as it 'speaks' for the silent jeanne moureau in scenes from louis malle's 'l'ascenseur pour l'echafaud' (or taking the role of porgy in 'porgy and bess', or the female mourner in 'saeta' from 'sketches of spain'), doesn't seem afraid of emotional vulnerability, even as davis' own personality veers strangely(?) between the debonair, fine-dresser ('the man in the green shirt') and the hyped-up boxer, hard drinker, ladies' man.)

which is all to say (again) that it would be too simplistic to interpret coltrane and sanders as consciously bringing out the racial and sexual melancholy that lies behind the surface love-melancholy of 'lush life': i’ve no idea of their attitude towards homosexuality, and in any case tackling a strayhorn tune isn’t exactly a statement of intent in that regard, ‘lush life’ itself having become such a standard (coltrane apparently adding it to the session with johnny hartmann after hearing nat king cole’s rendition on a car radio). nonetheless, their take on the tune (which as far as i can tell is pretty much unique in terms of its emotional register among the many interpretations that have stacked up over the years) might be taken without too much of a stretch to suggestively, if not uncomplicatedly, correlate with those resonances.

similarly, their playing here, not necessarily through programmatic intent, but through its affective qualities, pretty much blows away the argument that being particularly open about emotions, especially painful ones, is a particularly feminine thing, that strong/silent men might remain more tight-lipped – tho’ perhaps one might characterise the emotional register of coltrane’s work as hard to mistake as stereotypically ‘feminine’ in a way that davis’ might have been. (even as davis and coltrane get lumped together as both equally examples of masculinity by herman gray, for instance, who argues in a piece for callaloo that “davis and coltrane, like their contemporaries, enacted a black masculine that not only challenged whiteness but exiled it to the (cultural) margins of blackness - i.e, in their hands blackness was a powerful symbol of the masculine.”) that said, at the point coltrane and sanders recorded ‘lush life’ in seattle, davis’ own work had moved more towards a fast and loud style in which the softness and perceived technical shortcomings of previous recordings were replaced by hard, fast tempi. well, that’s itself a caricature, take ‘filles de kilimanjaro’ or ‘in a silent way’, take even simon reynolds’ argument that the emphasis on groove, extended timings and so on across davis’ late 60s-mid-70s output, its gesture towards something approaching the ambient, is itself some kind of feminine, anti-phallic, ‘oceanic’ deleuzian flow: “i reckon miles was half in love with, half in read of, the ‘female’ will-to-chaos, the mutagenic, metamorphic life force[…]that’s why miles’s misogynist nickname for oceanic flux with ‘bitches brew’.” in any case, to suggest that emotional forthrightness, length, technical complexity and so on are specifically male or macho would of course be a stupidly reductionist position to take. one might, for example, note the change from the rhythmic emphasis of mccoy tyner and elvin jones to the more floating, freer rhythms of alice coltrane and rashied ali as a different kind of complexity and elongation, one predicated less on the tension that characterises the seattle recordings and more on a trance-like flow in which detail is of less importance than overall, continuing effect (the deleuzian / gregory batesonian ‘plateau’) – and one might then adopt reynolds’ position and characterise this (albeit in scare-quotes) as ‘feminine’, noting alice coltrane’s role, her harp-like arpeggios. but then one might also note that her work on, say, ‘live in japan’, has a kind of droning grounding to it predicated on a strong left-hand (she cites her husband as encouraging her to use the whole register of the piano, to move away from a more limited be-bop concentration on particular areas of the keyboard), is hardly just harp-like delicacy and float. and rashied ali, jimmy garrison, sanders, coltrane, are equally, collaboratively responsible for this freeing-up. while gendered readings of the music might prove valuable, then, (witness david ake’s essay on ornette coleman and the ‘re-masculation’ of jazz), i’m not primarily interested here in reading coltrane's music that way – even if i have proffered the (homo)sexual melancholy of strayhorn’s composition as some sort of backdrop to the expanded melancholy of coltrane and sanders’ rendition. and even if i have suggested that the more emotionally forthright performance or transformation of this melancholy comes to seem a heterosexual privilege, as much as jazz itself came to seem a particularly macho or heterosexual form (despite its original, new orleans brothel associations with homosexuality – viz. jelly roll morton’s gay mentor tony jackson). but this is meant less in terms of a particular performance of black masculinity (sexualized or not) as in terms of a socialized understanding of coltrane’s 1965 ‘lush life’ in which melancholy, as in the blues but formally beyond it, comes to seem a force, not of resignation or quietism, but of some kind of registration of the objective difficulties and traumas of revolt, racial, sexual and political.

Starcrusher Night: Cambridge, 09.03.13

This was again at the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio in the Faculty of English in the University of Cambridge, ok, so, an 'institutional' or 'academic' space, but thru its temporary inhabitants granted some extended drunken spirit. After an endless projection of a lo-fi(lm) the less of which said the better (save that J. Hardingham’s Klaus Kinski is a fine Klaus Kinski_), interval spillage spilled over into wine-table chatter sprinkling the edges of the opening drones of one O. Evans, down with the flu but freshly haircut & armed w/didgeridoo, kaoss pad & assorted other implements electronic & acoustic. His 20 minute set, billed as 'noise', began proper with a reading of the night's wall-tacked schedule, announcements of multiple intervals drawing an incredulous 'oh my god' from a certain attendant Poet of High Repute; preceding between the advertised noise and the more luxuriant melancholia of pre-recorded loops, Evans' set went on to incorporate treated blarts from a (non-indigenous) patterned didgeridoo and an in-progress set of homophonic translations of the work of Henri Michaux, said by their translator to concern the relation between drugs and the state. No hippie nostalgia here, then, that refusal carried

over (after one of the aforementioned intervals) by the decidedly anti-hippie Sean Bonney, for whom, as his 'Letter on Harmony and Crisis' makes clear, any indulgence in a past history of supposed radical art must be questioned as recuperated nostalgia (“Old films, old music: abstractions, commodities[...]Old songs made an integral part of the phrase velocity of the entire culture”) even as such past history must be simultaneously clung to for the possibility it offers of continuing resistance in this here ("the circulation of these songs does contain within itself the possibility of interruptions"). For the past couple of years now, Bonney's writing has taken a turn towards prose - as he said of the series of 'letters' from which he read, of which that concerning Harmony and Crisis is one, “these are not poems” (tho' at the time he had first started writing them, caught off-guard by this unanticipated formal turn, he was describing them as ‘prose poems’). Instead, one might read them as something like communiqués, bulletins, reports from some kind of front-line in which the speaker - described by Bonney as a 'fictional character' but in many ways obviously identified with the poet himself - hangs around in his East London flat or wanders the supermarket meditating on, among things, the riots of August 2012, the growing rhetoric stacked up by the U.K. gov't against the unemployed, and the history of oppression woven into Cecil Taylor's 'Unit Structures', in which each note is said to form part of a "a kind of chain gang, a kind of musical analysis of bourgeois history as a network of cultural and economic unfreedom." This would seem of a piece with the bulletin-type quality of Bonney’s poetry over the past few years, a quality exacerbated or perhaps in some way produced by their first appearances at his blog, abandoned buildings. "like getting a telephone call from the barricades, the Paris Commune.” Yet it seems that the move from poetry to prose is not a simple transition to ‘the bulletin’ or somesuch: indeed, one might, it seems, say things with more directness in a poem, which indicates something both about how little poetry is taken to matter nowadays (hence the fact that censorship controversies occur over hip-hop records or rock lyrics rather than ‘poems’ per se: a case such as the prosecution’s use of Amiri Baraka’s poem ‘Black People!’ in court is pretty much unthinkable now), and about relative levels of censorship with regard to differing forms. This is what Josef Kaplan is getting at, in however deliberately controversy-courting and politically bull-headed a manner (verging on some kind of anarchistic nihilism), when he makes a statement like this: “Poetry itself doesn’t do shit. Which is why you can have things happen in poetry that would be horrifying or terrible if conceived of in spheres outside of poetry. Which is honestly the best part about poetry.” And OK, without having to entirely agree or disagree with that (it seems to verge on the sort of justifications used by repellent neo-Fascists like Peter Sotos), you can see how lines of Bonney’s like “slaughter the Fascist BNP” or “if you meet a Tory in the street, cut his throat”, would mean something entirely different in one of the Letters than they do in the poems. I think. I may be wrong. But there’s no easy trajectory here, whereby both poetry and prose can be taken as allowing a political discourse that it is more direct than the other; and Bonney seems to have felt the change in registers or formal structures as something of a crisis in itself, at one stage wondering in public if he was even a poet anymore.

The acuteness of this privileging of poetry over prose as knowledge-repository, for the kind of thinking in form that it allows might seem to those perhaps not as (emotionally, intellectually) invested as Bonney in the world of poetry as an over-reaction – why should working in prose be a betrayal, or an incapacitation of certain strains of thought? And yet it is a dilemma that we might see enacted in the work of the writer on whom Bonney has recently finished writing his Ph.D, Amiri Baraka: the sense that, to write a political poem, one must nearly destroy the qualities that make the poem a ‘poem’, that the content of that poem moves beyond the form(s) in which it originally appeared so that the poet suddenly finds themselves spinning out lines of what are, essentially, lineated prose. In Baraka’s case, this takes an extreme in his first collection of Marxist-Leninist poetry, ‘Hard Facts’, tho’ at the same time there is an increased emphasis on the poem as ‘score’ for reading, as oral repository rather than as object fixed by eye-reading – even as this rhetorical register might just as well be said to echo the political speech as the ‘poem’ itself (“Malcolm the artist. Touré the artist. Nyerere the artist. Karenga the artist” writes Baraka in an earlier, Black Nationalist essay in which he ends up claiming, Situationist-style, that “THE LARGEST WORK OF ART IS THE WORLD ITSELF”). In Baraka’s more recent work, which has barely received any critical discussion, something of a rapprochement is enacted between a self-consciously ‘poetic’ form and an attempt at dialectical thought, often centred around puns in a manner more than a little reminiscent of the esoteric-playful signifying practices of Sun Ra or Rammellzee’s coded alphabets. Indeed, an essay such as ‘The Blues Aesthetic and the Black Aesthetic’, collected in the recent book of essays on music, ‘Digging’, shares very similar territory to the poem ‘The Book of Life’, excerpts of which are included in Aldon Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology of African-American poetry, ‘Every Goodbye Aint’ Gone’: the same puns occurring in both works, the notion that rhythm and the entirety of life itself is a dialectical process being one that is presented, accessed or reached as much through the afore-mentioned puns as it is through logical argumentation. One might argue that this process is itself anti-historical, given that the suggestive connections Baraka draws are based on double-meanings that only work when one considers, for example, an ancient Egyptian word as an English one ('Isis' becoming 'Is/Is') – it is hardly a philological or etymologically-sound approach, a tracing of the actual history embedded in language. Yet perhaps this is not the point – the work exists half-way between actual, fully-thought theory and a scattering of suggestive and playful notes, hinting at lines of thought without quite pinning them down with exactitude. Certainly, to posit that the rhythms of African-American music embody the materialist dialectic, as opposed to the stale old Adornian dismissal of jazz or the Left’s continued miring in Bragg-Seeger folksong-sterilisations/ aspic-encasements, is a step forward, even if it risks over-generalisation and a reliance on a-priori concepts; and the re-writing of Islam, within the poem ‘Allah Mean Everything,’ as an assault on capitalism, the suppression of women, and the monetary system, assumes political relevance within current Islamophobic trends.

But further discussion of this really does get us way off point, and the details of Baraka’s poetry/prose dialectic(?) perhaps don’t apply so much to Bonney, whose poetic style, as much as it is fed by the same African-American musics that Baraka champions, cannot operate out of that same cultural or racial community, emerges from a different situation and a different tradition, originally (just as, in the 1960s and 70s, European Free Improvisation emerges from Free Jazz but takes it in a different direction). And Bonney’s prose, if we’re calling it that, is very different from the sloganeering aspects of Baraka’s most dogmatically MLM poetry: rather than preaching from a pulpit and attempting to create a black-working class revolutionary alliance through sheer rhetorical force, Bonney’s speaker, the letter-writer caught between requests for money and patronage from his relatively well-off, employed friend, and contempt for that friend’s bourgeois conformity, is acutely aware of the poet’s own implication within a recuperation of discourses and, above all, the peculiar economic status of the poet, the scholar, or the artist in general within capitalism, both critiquing and feeding off the system. Certainly, the poems of ‘The Commons’ in particular are acutely aware of the problematic status of what Bonney elsewhere calls “legitimate ruins like the letter I”, i.e. the fabled lyric I, rescued from Language Poetry’s complicit dismissal-disguise and re-asserted as a kind of collective I/eye borrowing from folk song, thieving its sources like the cuckoo bird – but, in assuming a seemingly much more stable subject-position, within the prose letters or, as Bonney suggests, ‘short fictions’, of the recent works, different conventions are played with. {{One might draw parallels with the return of an almost joyfully-over-emphasized ‘I’ as the seeing subject of J.H. Prynne’s most recent poem, ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ – the visionary seer of medieval dream poetry periodically asserting “I saw” – yet, in Prynne’s case, this very return of what had been, according to many ‘critical’ accounts of his late work, in any case, banished and removed, may in fact be an attempted means of extinguishing subjectivity once and for all.}} If Bonney’s letters play with conventions of, I don’t know, the epistolary novel, collections of letters from Benjamin, Olson, Rosa Luxembourg, whomever, they are also a means of heightening the relation between addressor and addressee that the poems, in their spasmodic creation of enraged community, particular in performance, are less explicitly concerned with, assuming a shared register, for ‘us’ and against ‘them’. That rhetoric certainly continues through here (the description of bourgeois ‘understanding’ as the bullet in the brain that ends the life of the Headmaster in Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If’), but with an acute sense of complication, of the urge to lunge forward in rhetorical-overstatement but of the gap that this lunge raises between theory and practice; of the dependence of the letter-writer on the very system his entire writing project is predicated on destroying; or the containment into commodity from not only of human lives and labour but of the artistic ‘products’ often simplistically supposed removed from that cycle. (Bonney’s comments on the recuperation of Cecil Taylor’s ‘Unit Structures’ into (shelf-)units(albums) or over-priced Royal Festival Hall tickets echo the dilemma described acutely in Iain Anderson’s article ‘Jazz Outside the Marketplace’, whereby the attempted economic self-organisation and resistant dissonances of 1960s free jazz were steadily incorporated into university professorships, Guggenheim grants, support from the Rockerfeller foundation, removed from the black communities for which they claimed to speak and, in many cases, reduced to another ‘high art’ commodity.)

This simultaneous turn to a foregrounded subjectivity, however loosely identified with the author’s own person (parallels with Baraka again, his semi-autobiographical practices in ‘The System of Dante’s Hell’, ‘Tales’ or ‘Six Persons’ through to ‘Tales of the Out & Gone’), and the self-critical positioning of that subject as distinctly non-heroic, trapped within the obscure mathematical or scientific systems that Bonney outlines as the workings of capital (“the intense surges of radio emissions we’re trapped inside. Cyclones and anticyclones” // “the base astrological geometry of th[e] supermarket […] revealed as simplistic, fanatic and rectilinear”) might be characterised as part of the ‘turn’ from poetry to prose, even as this narrative is complicated by the fact that Bonney still occasionally writes lineated poems and that such discourses of the trapped are present both in ‘working notes’ and poems that have appeared on his blog. Perhaps, then, the letters are a synthesis of these working notes and poems, filtered through the foregrounded subject-character as new stylistic amalgam that is more than ever concerned with “the problem [of] how to make whatever it is that is trapped in aesthetics, idealism and in history learn to speak,” but that has decided to do so through an examination of methods, life-minutiae and habits rather than some more ‘elevated’ form of exhortatory utterance. "It's difficult to talk about poems in these circumstances."

That summation, tho', still implies a chronologically over-simplistic description of the move 'away' from poetry towards a more discursive style as a reaction to a particular political situation, a growing dissatisfaction with the constant gap between the purported heroic potential of king-killing poetic utterance and the actual indifference various fugitive publications and scenes might provoke in the actual sphere of political action. True, there have been discussions of a return to the distribution of oppositional poetry thru, say, handing out broadsides on street corners, printing multiple leaflets of poems to hand out on marches as displacement of the usual SWP factional-evangelical pamphleteering; there have been readings at occupations. And these various measures have never seemed to go quite far enough, or to fulfill their objectives even when 'implemented'. Bonney:

"Yeh, I turned up and did readings in the student occupations and, frankly, I’d have been better off just drinking. It felt stupid to stand up, after someone had been doing a talk on what to do if you got nicked, or whatever, to stand up and read poetry. I can’t kid myself otherwise. I can’t delude myself that my poetry had somehow been “tested” because they kinda liked it."

Similarly, Kent Johnson's suggestion to the UKPoetry List run from Miami University that the supposed thriving underground of British radical poets should all join the SWP also falls flat, (particularly given the rape-apology scandal now engulfing the party), even as its provocation towards political organisation remains pertinent. But while this might all have to do with poetic or prosaic form, it might equally not. Still, it's worth considering here the use of prose sections in Keston Sutherland’s recent work, forthcoming in the ‘Odes to TL61P’ - in particular ‘The Clearance of Trafalgar Square’ - even if Sutherland describes these as simply (or not simply!) an extra-long verse line; or, similarly, Justin Katko / Jow Lindsay’s ‘Trigger Warning’ -- both examples written as reactions to specific political events which seem to invoke a particular stylistic register that, while full of exclamation, invective, invocation, lends itself to the prose line rather than to shorter ‘poetic’ lineations (even as both Katko and Sutherland have also been recently and simultaneously working with much more ‘old-fashioned’ forms of poetic affect that strike an equally surprising register). Perhaps J.H. Prynne’s ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ also (in sharp contrast to the monosyllabic clippings of ‘Streak ~ Willing ~ Entourage ~ Artesian’).

In any case, whether or not the Letters’ generic indeterminacy (maybe not the right word) occurs as a specific formal reaction to political crisis, said indeterminacy (wrong word, Cageian), does indeed render them hard to pin down in a manner very much congruent with certain strands of politically-aware ‘artistic’ writing. As much of Bonney's work over the past 10 years has done, they include appropriated slogans, quotations and phrases from a wide variety of communist writers and African-American politicians and artists, Marx on surplus value jostling up alongside Eldridge Cleaver ("all else is suffering and madness at the hands of the pigs") in a style certainly departing from (as in beginning, but also diverging or being suspicious of) certain Situationist tenets -- re-appropriation, the use of arcane vocabularies as a kind of underground cell of resistant language - the alternative tradition Bonney earlier identified in Blake, Bob Cobbing and Abiezer Coppe, and which increasingly comes manifested in an African-American tradition of Amiri Baraka, Cleaver and Cecil Taylor, or the radical kernel at the heart of the work of Arthur Rimbaud, 'translations' of whose work draw parallels between its engagement with the Paris Commune and various protest movements in the UK. This appropriative practice was figured primarily through music in Bonney's major sequence 'The Commons', which he has described as a 'modern folk song', taking its cue from the re-ordering of collective folk fragments described, for instance, in Greil Marcus' treatment of 'The Cuckoo Bird' in his book 'Invisible Republic': here, the sonnet form ("this thing has fourteen lines / as in picket lines" Bonney writes in a later poem) collided with black American music of (roughly) the 1930s to 1970s, Adorno, B-movie zombie register of a kind found more obliquely in the work of Bonney's partner Frances Kruk, current political discourse, and a debate on the nature of the lyric 'I', in a highly wired, jerky, spasmodic series of short lines characterised by a jammed-up connectivity that terms borrowed from other disciplines like 'montage' or 'collage' would not do well to define, a sense of simultaneous foregrounded breakage and forced elision, where the song of the cuckoo becomes the song of Betty Davis (‘he was a big freak’) or the sound of a gun-shot ("the cuckoo is a / BANG"), the disruption of pastoral idyll by urban energy and the suppressed underclass that allows the aristocratic fantasy of the healing power of the countryside its arcadian shadiness (shades as in spectres, of course). And while the Letters are often about music (and specifically the notion of harmony as cover for a system of social order(ing) that covers and masks injustice – see here in particular the discussion of the Pythagoreian antichthon in an article called ‘Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City’ that can be found here), in contrast to 'The Commons' their affect is of a different kind that can’t really be called ‘musical’ (as even ‘The Commons’ itself wasn’t, really, so much, given that the term is so often banded around in vague broad-brushing of a general area that might be better identified as ‘has strong emotional/rhythmic qualities in performance that produce similar convulsions as listening to certain kinds of music’).

But, OK, here’s what I’m getting at – with the change in the style of writing, so a change in the style of reading, of the style of reading that the style of writing demands (because, after all, poets don’t necessarily write what they write as a guide to how they might read it; they might write it and then have to find ways to read it – this is something you hear people say a lot, e.g. “I haven’t really found a way to read this poem yet,” and so on.) So, Bonney’s reading itself, in Cambridge, began quietly – as he notes, the Letters are not really meant to be read out loud, in a way that it was immediately obvious the poems of ‘The Commons’ were, as he launched into them with foot-jerking intensity. But, and not to valourize the following as some sort of sense of (the appearance of) suffering-artist-intensity as lending a particular kind of privileged vatic ‘truth’ to utterance (somewhat akin to what Anthony Braxton calls “the sweating-brow syndrome,” in which the more sweat a jazz musician dispenses, the more ‘authentic’ they are deemed to be, with all the problematic racial stereotypes that implies), that sense that the poem or the thing you are reading, because recent, because wrestling with formal dilemma and thus all cracked and imperfect and wrong, is wrenchingly awkward and painful to read, almost embarrassing, is something that has resulted in some of the most powerful readings I’ve seen in recent years. Say, for example, Justin Katko’s rendition of his own afore-mentioned poem about the 2011 riots, ‘Trigger Warning’, at about this point last year: in which Katko sat in a chair and appeared distrustful of the very rhetorical vehemence and shouting intensity that his reading eventually moved into and that the poem itself fully and completely inhabits and provokes. Certainly, or partially, anyhow, in Bonney's reading, that quality of nervousness mixed with the occasional vehemence of the work read out went some way towards approximating or paralleling the mixed stylistic and theoretical register of those works themselves, the desire and necessity to strongly speak undercut and yet somehow reinforced by the self-questioning webs of implication that that poet’s voice implied. I’m not saying that this frisson of difficulty and strain should be applauded as an end in itself, but that its evidence that poetry might still be thought (as in, it might still be a form for thinking) gives some sort of hope, even as there are not ever easy answers here.

Lisa Jeschke’s reading style is almost the opposite of this, avoiding emotive effect for something that is certainly not ‘neutral’ but that comes to a very different place than, say, Bonney or Katko. The recently-written piece she read on the night emerged from a dissatisfaction with the form of her own recent work – almost an opposite trajectory to that of Bonney, in fact, in that her own previous pieces (collected in ‘Materials 1’) often consist of large undifferentiated blocks of prose which she would have described as ‘poems’, but which she has come to view, following recent discussions & symposia, as, in terms of, formal categorisation, something of a cop-out, an inattention to poetic form as poetic form. Hence this new piece, each line exactly seven syllables in length, often relying on deliberately clanging and obvious rhyme, as a kind of parodic return to rhyme that questions its own affect but that cannot quite be described as simple ‘irony’ or ‘parody’ (interesting parallels here, again to Katko: the first poem of his ‘Songs for One Occasion’, with its “ocean grave”s and waves). Also some play on English-German translation, reversed verb forms: references here less (as in previous works) to (a) personal ‘life experiences’ (meeting a drunk man in a park; burying a childhood friend under a pile of earth; &c.) or (b) critico-theoretical-theatrical debate-terminologies, more to - what? A change in voice, anyhow, “neutral chide,” some sort of unplaceable bite.

Ian Heames following, reciting the second half of ‘Array One’, of which I’ve written at length here, and a new poem, 'Orca Plaintiffs', which seems to continue that poem’s mix of computer-game and poetic register (“my opponent believes that the universe is made of fire”) shot through with the discourses of techno-capitalism. And Tomas Weber, whose ‘Another Word From Me Out of Uniform’ has just appeared from Tipped Press, and whose running-on of different register-phrases is, again, very different from all of the above: if Heames’ poetry is clipped aphorism, sequential thought, cross-referencing, Jeschke’s concerned with (various) form(s) as restriction, Bonney’s again with form and voice and the political, Weber’s seems in some way unforced, even distinctly pleasurable: Biggie Smalls meets F.R. Leavis but not in any music-journo Metaphyiscal Poets mash up bastardisation (this from 'Ausculation': “and I will never rhyme / like party and bullshit” […] “it wasn’t really / Leavis who said the way / the British do war is still true / to English mannerism and so I love you forever / & always or was it”). Yet in the recent long(ish) poem, ‘Performing for the Troops’, the run-on joins that make much of his work so pleasurable are deliberately not soldered, the links not fashioned, so that there is something brutal to it, even as it gets a hearty audience laugh (“Who’s that fuck? / Shut up, fuck”). It's hard to write about because it resists the more broadly theoretical frameworks into which one might place the other poets, and that might make it seem more ‘insubstantial’ or something; certainly, earlier work had a strain of lyricism to it that still perhaps functions a little (traces of American pastoralism tho’ by no means unconscious of imperial complicity) - the poet actually wanting their heart to be a plane, I can’t remember the exact reference – but here lyric most often moves into exchanges of selves as collections of clothes or children or radio stations or youtube videos that aren’t so much lang-po playful or even, in the vein of O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, self-critically-camp-playful (partly because Weber isn’t American and so the register is different, even if American culture as filtered over to the UK and in summer travels is very much present), but poised more obliquely between laughter and something more sinister, even disturbing, as in those lines quoted above, the subject not allowed voice, mocked in authority-figure mimicry -- shut "that fuck" up, “wants to be / some speaking thing.”

That combination of poets constituting quite a long reading, intense continuance, so interval spills over, again: music set-up, second noise set, O. Evans again kaoss padd’d, this time w/added Minton/Patton-esque screaming and even at one point a trace of school melodica; Gregor Forbes’ industrially-reverb’d Pure Data factorials, some other PA’d laptop & pickup-to-practice-amp feedback’d human, but I think it all merged into one blart of sound in which individual contribution was less important than general sonic mass (though perhaps a little more ‘improvy’ than Japanoisy?). It had started to fucking snow outside & bits of it had melted and were dropping off people’s hair. I think Nas replaced Bad Brains as interval music @ this point, then in fact the longest section of the evening, Nat Raha and Verity Spott the final poets of the night. Raha read, among other things, poems for Sonic Youth to the accompaniment of vintage cassette recorder as lo-fi voice-multitracking, youth against fascism – “it’s the song I hate” – the words themselves not really decipherable, the effect more akin maybe to something that might have come out of the choral-voice experiments of 1970s NYC (Hannah Weiner, Jackson MacLow &c.) and the more unexpected for that. The poems without tape that started things off were from Raha's new collection, ‘mute exterior intimate’ - where exterior might be buildings, might be faces, bodies in spatial negotiation, indie or shoegaze leakings thru with seagulls into critiques of neo-liberalism, memorials for victims of transphobia, the spectral presences of Mayakovsky and love, the “doctrine of bliss and suffocation.” Spott’s was the longest reading of the night at maybe over half-an-hour, certainly the most intense, and not only in terms of sheer length, veering between grotesque-choke sound poetry, @ one point even throwing the pamphlet read from down on the floor and repeatedly punching it. The audience laughed a lot, and this seemed right, but, like a lot of the laughter that punctuates readings like this, it came back rebounding on itself because the work itself is hardly comfortable, is scatological, grotesque and highly sexual - infant sexuality too, a long joke about fucking poets turning into a dialogue between two children centering around the many implications of the activity implied in the familiar insult ‘motherfucker.’ Kind of traumatizing, really, but (and) for sure visceral in a way that, say, the noise set before even really wasn’t, and hard to process in that way because less precise than, say, Heames or Jeschke, throwing itself all over the place with words and words and words in often uncomfortable excess. Spott herself describes it as “digusting and ungainly”, which it is in parts, deliberately and distinctly so.

And that kind of intensity necessitates another interval, and then Business Lunch make their debut with a three-song set, absent singers and last-minute rehearsals shaping, at this stage into the evening, into something fitting right in place, some noise keyboard too over the bass & guitar riffs in the more extended last piece. Shudder and jump // "got the swing" // more rock music at readings, yes? Jeremy Hardingham closes the evening with a-cappella songs and some karaoke to Die Toten Hosen which is hardly karaoke as ‘we’ know it. He reads a poem about the killing of a bird with an oar and then sings it, closes with a tender ‘goodnight’. There’s again a lot of laughter here, but I think that to laugh in this way would be to take the songs @ a face value that does a disservice to their non-naïve non-irony: many parts were, you know, moving. Tho’ the “fist full of piss / apostrophic bliss” barnstormer, well, yeh. It's been in my head for days. At one point Hardingham sang literally with a silver spoon in his mouth, but again, that was hardly boringly symbolic even as the joke-resonances of it being symbolic were of course not discounted. The room heaved. It was still snowing outside. (The equivalent event last year was called ‘Spring Decoys’. There are daffodils outside the English Faculty. The area around Grange Road in which the faculty and the University Library are situated is ghost-empty at night, darkness on the edge of town. 'Cambridge', as much as this university-sphere-cocoon constitutes it, is so far from the real world, whatever world might be made inside black boxes. Why not throw an egg out of a moving white van outside one of the gated colleges, built to be thus gated, enclosed? But these big one-off events might be made to move into something else even if no one from the ‘town’ was ever going to come down to the university bowels, the City of Dis. By which I mean, maybe there will be some sense of a series extending somewhere (viz. http://starcrushernites.tumblr.com/.) Onward christian soldiers.

DOWN YOU GO; OR, NÉGATION de BRUIT (Frances Kruk)

These poems, cryptic fragments on white page, peopled by 'small people', 'dwarves', 'mutants', 'tiny dogs', somewhere between fairytale and B-movie-scene-schemata ("back in the mines, the dwarves"). Like the poems, compression as a kind of violence, balled-in on themselves, clenched fist-tight. A kind of gesture towards heroism, defiance ("I revolt / project"; "Swarms! we will bang into the sun / blinded") that just as often is met by statement of flat-out despair ("history's deaths mean nothing, you / nothing"), and a gesture anyway that implies a kind of bumbling slapstick (as if one could "bang into the sun," clumsy mutliple Icarus), body attacked from within, by epileptic-type fit (“my chest judder”), or from without, by the torture-style glare of artificial light (“spasm in this pit sucked / blind by white lights”), or in anger lashing out against inanimate object as damage ("the fist against deaf walls”). What the spasm’d-in pit is is unclear; locations remain cryptic, as holes, recesses, enclosed spaces that could be those of the body as much of outer physical space. Note the tight control of sound: "spasm in this pit sucked" mashes itself on the tongue to become "spit fucked" or somesuch, "blind white lights", shortened and then elongated i's in alternation. It sounds quite violent when pointed out or up like this, tho’ the effect of reading it on the page is that the violence has become small, a tiny, hideous croak (particularly given all the references to scale, a kind of opposite to the vast & booming spatial projection of the Olsonians); little feral fragments, cut-off dog-yelps; “little zombie spines yapping silly”; &c. When I saw Kruk read it at the Damn the Caesars jamboree in Cambridge last year, the sense was of a kind of twisted or twisting inward choking, not bitter or sardonic but in some sense almost private, its edge not quite comic but not quite full-blown horror. Real disquiet – you wouldn’t laugh, as you would, those guffaws, however sardonic, at barbed or self-mutilating ‘humour’ in, say, a Keston Sutherland poem. Or, say, Peter Manson. Maybe that’s to do w/the gendered dynamics of poetry readings. But I think it’s also a real quality of these poems, and shouldn’t be seen as anything like retreat. There's a desire for control over the poems’ destruction & battering ("floods water sense water talks water / When I Name It"), yet the statements are frequently assertions of failure, of inability to affect or to control change: "we inserted a history and now it won't stop"; "I ordered a hurricane and I am still on this island" - as if the invocation of natural catastrophe posed solution, petulant solution, outlash like the fist pumelling the 'deaf' walls (itself a curious perversion of purpose, as if the point of punching an object was to make it hear). Or the poem’s other major outburst: "the orchids are fake, stupid fake island and forest." 'Nature' here is no more than model, ornament, imitation, simulacrum - "again the fake garden, motionless plastic curves" - in an artifice where only the body can be felt to shudder or tremor into desire for something more, yet whose very shuddering or tremoring or desiring constricts into blockage & physical attack. And the body itself may at times be artifice: "my chest Metal", a plastinated pulse; the poem's "fake islands" not only being physical locations in which the body is placed, but as equivalent to the (bodily) "inner islands" mentioned elsewhere. As in, 'no man is...' - in which case this fake inner island is what you are not, but are told that you are (like the radio become "inhuman" (see below). That the humanity yr body asserts as even just mere howling or mute registration of pain in some sense mitigates against this, but is also circumscribed by it; that this is a discourse itself that can be turned into parody, into movie monsters, stupid little dogs and people under attack and in distress, rendered ridiculous and "pathetic".

The fist pummeling the walls, the deaf walls: why would a wall, by definition not a hearing object, need to be described as 'deaf'? As substitute for human interaction, beating the wall because no human will hear, that enclosure: deafness as loss of communication, meaning-capacity. Throughout these poems, they recur again & again: hearing, deafness, blindness - blocked voices, choked, inability to express pain or the trauma of history except in fantasy ("This time we are Great in our Smart / Bomb Time Machine Device"), reduced to a "dead noise, revolt noise" that remains trapped in sand, an unheard negation that gives the poem its subtitle (“Negation of noise / unheard”). This noise is radio, or it is howling (see poems I, V, XIII). The voice in these poems sometimes desires to be that noise, or to describe it, cut-off before it can announce, can name itself in declarative or confident identity (one poem ends with the cut-off line "-but I'm "); the outbursts or sneering assertions of failure are perhaps some other voice that invades it, or they are perhaps that voice's turning against itself and others on realisation of its own failure - "we go to fuck the mutants / we go to mutant them"; "the most pathetic poem is small people on fire." That burning humans could be a poem is strange enough - inverting the idea that a poem could be language made particularly beautiful or efficacious, instead figuring it as a kind of uncontrolled attack on the body, as a violence - that this is a degraded poem, the qualifier 'the most' indicating, perhaps, that all poems are in some way pathetic.

The assertion that "there is no depth", ending the sequence as a whole; that one cannot get beneath the surface of these poems, that they cannot be decoded through deciphering allusion, that the grid of referentiality is too vague to be pinned down exactly. Yet that they work with a small packed-in image-complex, cluster round body, garden, blindness (“Blinded,” “sucked blind,” “I have no / eyes”), deafness, light, noise, any gesture outwards, swarming towards the sun, warring against the mutants, liable to miserable failure or to turning against the wrong enemy (for are the dwarves, the small people, the tiny howling dogs, not the perverted mirroring of ourselves, the oppressed made stupidly small?). Shut up, "down you go," back into the mines, yr box, the trashcan of history. Yet in attacking the mutants, like a mercenary who turns hero in some movie, that violence ends up as solidarity: "I am with the mutant / firing limbs" -- that even the tiny howling dogs or the burning small people or the dwarves in the mine might not be cast down forever, that the "revolt noise" might not go unheard. This is the kind of reading that the poem in once sense seems to resist in its verbal clamp(put)downs, the uncontrolled danger its bodies face from themselves or from others, yet the very fact of the compression, the white space, the quality of fragment, suggests something else beyond the stutter, that which is cut short, the noise within the gnomic, bitter quietness, "mouths bitter in sand" or "thirsty, howling" become "swarms!" of "revolt noise." "It is stupid to wait."

Furthermore, while the "Negation of noise / unheard" might be placed in opposition to the "revolt noise" of the preceding line - negation as silencing - it might also be the negation of unheard noise. The noise, in other words, that bleeds through its negation; (heard) noise itself as the negation of unheard noise, of muting and silencing; noise as a negation of a negation, an oppositional force in the face of an official discourse which relegates all else other than itself to 'meaninglessness'. Speculatively - "the resistance which otherness offers to identity"; noise as non-identity. That which is reduced to silence, its mute sand-mouth, is that which is underground, that which the assertion that “there is no depth” would try to cover over, but which contradicts any such assertion - the "subterranean gallery" which is the scene of the fist-wall encounter, "bound underground on hooks," "the mine shaft / dumb", "back in the mines the dwarves, the presences." This underground is hell; it is the hell in which labour is trapped, peopled by the Morlocks of HG Wells' 'The Time Machine'. (The Time Machine could even be obliquely referenced here, as in the “Smart / Bomb Time Machine device,” where it seems to have been crossed with a weapon of war and perhaps, even, & more obliquely still, a Smart Phone [TM], although perhaps it would be best to say that it’s not so much a ‘reference’ as part of the cultural unconscious that the poem inhabits, that B-Movie legacy of sci-fi & monster movie that doesn’t feature so much as direct stereotype, archetype or what have you, but as a kind of under-texture that feeds into the poem indirectly: somewhat similar, one might say, to the way that the poetry of Ian Heames em- or de-ploys a computer game / sci-fi register.)

What sounds in this underground is that which is heard only as noise, as howling, as the sound of the poem's opening swarm who rush blinded into the sun, unused to the light. One recalls Dante's swarm of lamenting damned, whose resounding sounds of lamentation are likened to "grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows" (viz.: "in sand you hear dead / noise"). In Pulse Demons', named for a Merzbow album (more noise!), Eugene Thacker connects this Dantean swarm to the horde of demons whom Jesus drives into the herd of pigs ('my name is Legion, for we are many') interpreting both as symbols of the rebellious, virus-like horde, of how it appears to those in power, as the force of disorder, of multiplicity, of that which will not be contained in the one, the singular, the class that takes its interests to stand for those of all, that lie of universality. Michel Serres, from ‘Genesis’: “these demons are nothing but the calls of the world, or the moans of the others who are crying for help. Would you be frightened by this wailing?” Perhaps I'm extrapolating, politicizing this demonic or damned (in any case, monstrous, seemingly unformed) swarm to an extent that Thacker doesn’t, quite – tho’ of course the notion of the swarm has its political theorizations in Negri, Foucault, etc: quite a trend recently, in fact, even as it risks romanticization, abstraction from specific issues, a kind of free-flowing ‘poetics’ substituting for concrete political theory, much in the same way that Serres' own work seems ultimately limited by its ‘liberated’, post-Deleuze/Guattari stylistics.

But to continue, w/that caveat in mind. Authorities attempt to silence the noise-swarm of the masses, and when it comes through, it does not speak in their language. The radio is a model for this kind of communication: EVP, voice phenomena, white-noise voices, static, interference – the message that scrambles, distorts, and replaces the original, ‘clean’ communication, that is contained within it, yet that goes against it, that seems to come, and perhaps does come, from outside it, as attack. On the one hand, this implies that all voices are equivalent, that by turning the dial, you can silence one voice, push them back into the noise of radio noise, come to the next clean channel, the lush strings that drown out the loud scream. It's a matter of choice, in other words. Yet there are those moments when the radio interference becomes uncontrollable, resists the desire to remain on the safe channel. Voices in other languages, other dialects, bursts and blarts of discord break through. The voices of the excluded, of the repressed dead trying to speak to us (W. Benjamin at the back of all this). Transmissions from the City of Dis: the heretics, those who have spoken against the existing order. “Radio, when it's not human.” This inhumanity in fact as humanity speaking through the medium, rendered as ghost-voice, as noise, "waves of brutal as Cochlea." Cochlea: the auditory portion of the inner ear (innerness, again) – the “waves of brutal” thus as sound waves (tho’ obviously resonant with the water that flows thru the poems). We are instructed to "listen" to this crowded sound, this "high pressure Crush": and then presented with a space, as if what could be heard could be rendered only as a blank, the white page as either silence or noise, unrendered, only subsequently glossed as "radio." LeRoi Jones, from a poem collected in 'The Dead Lecturer': "And silence / which proves / but / a referent / to my disorder." For Jones, those "who speak of singing" have never heard song; their zen silence is inhuman, their "legends" are ossified monuments, are death. Silence itself becomes noise, or the possibility of noise, defined by its opposite & sometimes assuming the maleficent effect that opposite is supposed to possess. (Viz. Zizek's characterisation of non-violence as itself violent: silence as a violent silencing.) Serres puns on 'murmur' as 'mur-mur', that noise which penetrates even through a wall. Walls may close off torture or injustice to sight, but the noise leaks through that wall, under the door. And while the wall itself is deaf, the fist tries to punch through: perhaps the sound of its banging can be heard. But Serres, in his allusive build-up of puns & metaphoric constructs (in which, broadly speaking, the wall stands in for ‘rationality’ as force of containment) conveniently forgets the existence of sound-proof rooms, anechoic chambers, mines, bunkers secreted away underground, muffled by earth, by sand, or surrounded by water, marooned on islands. Kruk: "dead / noise, revolt noise." Dead air is the silence of the radio announcer who can't fill the time with noise, the void. But what fills that air here is, perhaps, the voices of the dead who have been silenced yet who can still be heard to shout out. The noise is dead, it is out to sea, on "a boat", Rimbaud's drunken boat, "water," the "hurricane," the flood, the water that floods sense ("floods water sense") - noise the amorphous, the liquid, never object, never solid - one might drown in it -- it "crush[es]...Madness & Truth." Yet this water is invoked, like the calling down of the hurricane, or the assertion that "water talks water / When I Name it." To name, through noise, to give voice to dead noise as the voice of the dead, as the noise of revolt, the project of revolt: "I revolt / project." Throwing yr voice at the walls, in the hope that they will break through them. Joshua fought the battle of Jericho. It is again the water that threatens "Nervous walls / with their cheap metal flickers" - water or "something" more amorphously "surging." Such might, of course, equally be read as an assault on the body of the individual, rather than the assault of the swarming, noisy mass on that which delimits and encloses them (the force of revolt read, as it is by Rimbaud, as natural catastrophe, hurricane, earthquake, flood: not as the containment of the political aspect of revolution through natural metaphor, but as the expansion of the political even into 'nature'; just as, here, there is no 'nature' but that of the body and its projections and enmeshings). And the strength of Kruk's poem is that it is, it could be both, that it is not some simple call to arms as I have perhaps been trying to read it, through seizing on these notions of noise, wall, water - and maybe that's just because of what I'm reading at the moment, reading in. Not that the poem is just open to that reading in, it is precise, as I said, in its image-complexes. But these complexes are used in turned-in and twisting ways, full of defeat and failure that is yet also the promise or negative image of the defeat and failure of said defeat. Does that do this justice? Not really. I haven't even got to the notion that these are 'after' Danielle Collobert - as translations, as modes of text generation, I'm not sure which. Which opens up a whole 'nother kettle of worms, can of fish. And I haven’t even talked about the recurrent “crkl.” But let's leave it there for now.

NB: Kruk's book originally published thru Punch Press, sold out. Reprinted in the mighty 'Crisis Inquiry', available thru Damn the Caesars or, in tha UK, from Mountain Press.

Roscoe Mitchell at Cafe Oto, 29.01.2013

(Mitchell played with John Edwards, bass, and Tani Tabbal, drums. This was the first night of a two-night residency.)

Mitchell can be heard saying to Tabbal, 'you start it off'. All the musicians have sheet music discrete on stands, and at first it seems as if Tabbal might be playing a notated drum part, repeated figure dropped as announcement -- entrance-utterance, entrance into trance, with little variations, the slightest temporal differences between repeats, as an ever-so-slight suggestion of elasticity in a mode of playing that enthrals by its engrossing steadfastness. Tabbal -- whom I don’t recall knowingly coming across before, tho’ he’s a long-time collaborator of Mitchell’s -- is all about clarity, a kind of loud directness rather different to the usual more skittery & insectoid playing along the European free improv model that we’re used to hearing in these parts. He thinks above all melodically, with the variant and elastic pulse-work that we expected from both free jazz and free improv players, true, but with an added and keen focus on repeating and working thru an area or phrase until he feels it’s done, even as he’ll also interrupt his own phrases in complexifying flying outburst. (Think, perhaps, and rather distantly, of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s blasts & back-beats with Cecil Taylor on ‘One Too Many Salty Swift & Not Goodbye’.) If this variation within a given area is exemplified by Tabbal in particular, the same is true, in a different manner and to a differing extent, of the leader's playing: his is much more deliberately smeared, notes bent & multiphonic'd & flutter-tongued as the scalar figures he so relishes, on which so many of his composed & improvised lines are built, are edged away from the orthodoxies of 'correct' western pitch, the mellifluousness of almost never-ending circular-breathed cycles stretched & snapped by a whorled wildness that slurs & veers from an almost sloppy-sounding intonation to the most tight & piquant of pitch-jumping figures: all raw smooth progression, it cuts like a knife. I mean, if you think the alto playing of Jackie McLean or the soprano playing of Steve Lacy is 'tart' or 'sharp', Mitchell, in a way utterly distinct from either player (as they are utterly distinct from each other in turn) makes 'tartness' and 'sharpness' a kind of credo. When he gets going on his excursions, minutes and minutes at a time get just sucked into spinning vortex hold, speed round constantly-shifting centre in incremental momentum advance, or not-advance, running like crazy in that spot.

It's hard to focus on details so much as on the block impact of sound - a kind of twitching, leg-shuddering 'high energy' maelstrom that sets its variations within a broadly-defined territory of circular, repeating-type figures that might be described as a sort of minimalism. But there’s no holy or bright pop-py ease here; rather, something more akin to voodoo possession, trance as excess energy burst, play of control & uncontrol, refusal to bend individual model to conformity, yet within a music that depends for its success on group interaction, pin-drop or -point con- and di-vergence. Mitchell’s cheeks puff in-out, neck veins pop, leg lifts and body bends in his overlarge suite & hollers finger-flayed mouthpiece-yelped peak out to Tabbal’s delight, a sustained smashing cymbal barrage almost drowning out the leader as Edwards’ grunted exhortations lift him in full thwacking thump, in dance with his bass, his foot too lifted, Tabbal grinning at commitment as physical force thru momentum & sustained polyrhythmic locking-in: Mitchell will stop, and sit down, and drink his water, & Tabbal will take a solo, again, as at the very start of the whole performance, going round his kit in ritualized repeated melody, or he and Edwards will duet in closest sustained concentration, Edwards sticking his bow behind the strings so it jerks and shudders against them as he rides and slides up and down those strings like effects pedal treatment; Mitchell picking up on the simplest of rhythmic phrases, of Tabbal’s, and turning it into a space-filled in, back in to the music, starting with one blast, as if by accident, doing the simple two or three note phrase as unpredictably rhythmical semi-synchronicity with the others, before you know it into another storm of rippling repetition which references that initial simple spur before totally moving on to some other place. You close your eyes to try and get some sense of how this kind of playing’s shaped, how RM’s constancy leaves or leads his bandmates to swell and drop behind, at points going into full body juddering train, runaway adrenaline ride, others chipping and jerking into spaces behind the still-continuing squall. But in the end that analytical framework just won’t really work as a way into the music, at least not in this moment of live listening, even as a sense of the structural dynamics at work is for sure involved in the dynamics of listening involvement as much as it must be for the players. What I mean is that part of the pleasure of the set is seeing how these blocks fit together, & that there’s an amazing willed surrender at the moment when you realize Mitchell’s GONE again, out there a minute (more than that!), and you settle in for the ride.

This music is like that, then, blocks with a potentially almost infinite amount of possibilities as variations within quite deliberately limited areas, bookended or juxtaposed with more stop-start ‘interactive’ passages, often involving Edwards & Tabbal while Mitchell recovers himself after another hollering storm. They play two sets, the first more broken up in that Mitchell plays for less extended periods, switching alto & soprano, and after the long piece does a lovely soprano ballad thing, unexpected in contrast, like an absolutely classic melody he never quite fixes to the ‘songbook’; & just stops after say two minutes of this with intermission announcement, and that way it sticks so much more firmly in mind. The second set begins with a long composed section, again on soprano, partly played solo, then the curious slow graciousness of RM’s notated melodic lines, serpentine in their unfolding, sinuous and extended, in contrast to rhythm boil underneath, Edwards’ bass at one point into harmonics so gently plucked as to suggest a less twanging mbira, those uncanny moments when he finds pitch and timbral ranges which almost exactly duplicate those sounds Mitchell’s at that moment exploring, then the exhilaration when he swings to more orthodox free bass territory. They almost get a fractured swing thing going at one point, Mitchell making his playing sound in the jazz lineage it does contain, way past Coltrane, speeding out on a different train, at the start of the second set someone sitting on a beer barrel in the corner obnoxiously playing an actual game on an actual mobile phone! As if trekking out to Dalston in this winter cold didn’t justify actually looking up and involving oneself in the music that one of the great abrasive players was throwing up, for you, and true enough he couldn’t continue once Mitchell had flown, and the bar glass clink and coughs that set up a protective barrier against quietness and space and attention – yes, that attention you might actually have to pay – dispelled into an audience caught dancing into the clipped, clattering, rhythmic interaction of severe viscera, cerebral is not the word, intensity of purpose, intents and purposes, the hipsters in the mist who peered thru the windows only to move on, scoffing at the old saxophone dude w/the shut-eyed jive, didn’t know what in hell they were missing. If Thurston Moore were here the place would be packed, rammed, jammed up to the rafters, to the gills with sweat & self-congratulatory celeb-anticipation. But what wd they know, this just is, still, ‘the new thing’, if newness is what shoots round yr body as electric current and dementedly mental concentration, material in space, music the matter of time, manifesting time in body-mind machine; RM’S infernal machines, perpetuum mobile, into the future in that simultaneous felt manifestation & erasure of time, moment into moment into climax as sustained, plateau & drop, & out you go –- WIRED! -- into that good night.

Vibes & Time: The Elasticity of Bobby Hutcherson, &c.

Above: Walt Dickerson erasing the drivenness of be-bop, its relentless forward momentum, slowing things down to a floating meditation in which it can seem that every note is surrounded by a wavering, blurred, vibrato’d halo, haze round streetlamp, fogg’d, exquisitely taking its time & erasing time as it goes, so that, rather than remaining within the compact confines of a tune, with its set order & order within the overall set of album or gig, the playing hangs loose, occasionally bursting into plosive, explosive runs, but more often than not just hanging there, tracing the permutations of a simple phrase, as if whispering it diminuendo to oneself alone, sometimes barely audible over the whispered, tremulous harmonics of Richard Davis’ absolutely exquisite arco bass playing. The result is far from merely ambient wash – rhythmic pull & release, ebb & flow is always in evidence; this is serious & inventive playing indeed, but is not jazz in the speed-freak boppery sense. That’s not to say that Dickerson can’t fly up & down those mallets with the best of them, that he can, in the words of John Fordham, “improvise such fast melodies that his mallets seem barely to be making contact” – indeed, there are some scintillatingly fast runs on this very track – but the overall impression is nonetheless far from omni-directional drive, is something far more considered, spacious, even at higher tempi.

This results in part from Dickerson’s own judicious use of vibrato – taking us somewhere close to the “soft-lights glow” that Fordham sees him as rejecting (tho’ Clifford Allen’s paradoxical descriptor “warm-ice sheen” is perhaps more apt) – but also to the accompaniment of such superbly subtle drummers as Andrew Cyrille, who, on a recording like ‘Tell us Only the Beautiful Things', the logical extension to Dickerson’s earlier ‘To My Queen’, sometimes sounds as if he’s barely even there, or else in another room, the swish of his brushes or the tap of stick on stick merging with the hiss of room tone as a kind of gently rhythmic white noise over which Dickerson can stop-start rhapsodize in tandem with bassist Wilbur Ware, here melodic equal rather than mere sideman. Dickerson’s preferred contexts would seem to be in small groups, with players who are more interested in the changes in texture and temporal flow necessitated by improvisational contingency than in maintaining a constant bed to anchor solo playing: Bill Evans taken further out – much further out! – let’s say. Thus, rather than establishing clear sections for particular players to do their thang, there might be sections in which only Dickerson and Cyrille, or only Ware and Cyrille, or only Dickerson and Ware, or only Dickerson, are playing, yet the transitions are so subtle that they don’t really feel like transitions at all. Further, Dickerson has a trait of returning every so often to the initial theme, caught in the same stream as the improvisation; not in the way that Monk would improvise close to the melody over changes, nor as ensemble refreshment between individual solos, but as part of improvisatory thinking and overall mood. Faster passages might stop and return to rumination; or a sustained vibraphone swell might be followed by a breathless run of fast-struck notes; but again, these are not so much sharp contrasts, gestural or timbral blocks in the Albert Ayler manner, as extensions of and in time that evince a beautifully intuitive sense of form’s unfolding as the unforeseen.



The clip at the start of the post is one of a number of exquisite duets that Dickerson recorded with Richard Davis, something of a master of the form (recall the extended treatments of e.g. 'Come Sunday' with Eric Dolphy); & indeed, it's through both Davis & Dolphy that I want to make a connection, or, more accurately, comparison, to another vibes player, Bobby Hutcherson, who, with Davis & Tony Williams, formed one of the great rhythmic set-ups on Dolphy's 'Out to Lunch', ten or so years earlier. Perhaps it's an indication of changing sensibility that these collaborations are so different - certainly, the absence of a drummer affects things, the intimacy of the duo format versus the asymmetrical push of Dolphy's full-group compositions. But it's nonetheless instructive to compare Dickerson's free-float with Hutcherson's much more overtly percussive style.

For Hutcherson, the vibes are jagged edge, each note struck pinging out, the vibraphone's resonant afterglow only serving to round out the sharp attack of that sound still further: listen to the extended section towards the end of his solo on Jackie McLean’s ‘Action’, in which his temporal extensions and tightenings of one phrase move like a stretched and then relaxed elastic band over the steadier, tho' always driving & toe-jiggling momentum of Cecil McBee & Billy Higgins' bass-drum team. Charles Tolliver does something similar in his trumpet solo on the same tune, something about the pauses which might for a moment make you think he's lost his way, phrase out-blown but the smoother repetition which could naturally follow & draw applause in its smooth generation of 'excitement' as be-bop fluency mixed gutbucket edge REFUSED! instead for a repetition that sounds as if it's missed its cue and has to cram the phrase into the remaining time allocated by the changes played underneath with sudden burst of breath, askew & gasping burr. I guess Monk would be the temporal & off-centre phraseological model – tho' Monk's status as piano player often gave the impression that his solos consisted of the spare material that would usually make up another piano player's comping beneath a horn player's solo (while, conversely, his comping, with its clanging lower-register thump & thud, sometimes serves to distract attention from the soloist if they or you aren't careful). Certainly, Tolliver & Hutcherson would desire to fill up the total space more so (plus the tempo itself licks out at a generally higher rate than Monk himself had settled into by this point, with the Charlie Rouse group of his, anyhow).

Hutcherson's own comping, meanwhile, as perfected on Eric Dolphy’s ‘Out to Lunch’, has a kind of floating quality to it that piano players are less able to sustain, by virtue of their instrument's capacities – by this, I don't mean to contradict my earlier comments on his isolation of single notes, but rather to suggest that this kind of ‘floating’ or ‘hanging’ quality is like the suspension of a phrase that is suppressed or skipped, so that the sequence is always implied but never totally filled out: the interval between one phrase and another, either sustained by a silence or a reverberating after-glow of struck notes, is felt as tension, delay, break, rupture, a rupture that can't be entirely filled by bass & drums' maintenance of tempo throughout. (Here one might recall A.B. Spellman’s comments in the ‘Out to Lunch’ liner notes: “For one thing, [Hutcherson] avoids the tight pedalled, piano-like effect of long and lucid arpeggios that most vibists try for. His is a more ringing, chime sound. His chords, once struck, hang in the air.”)



That said, Tony Williams and Richard Davis, on ‘Out to Lunch’, are just as much about breaking things up in this way as is Hutcherson: Davis, insisting on muscling his way into the front row with odd harmonic extensions of the walking bass line, Williams, with his splash-crash-suspend attack, working on similar principles to Hutcherson. (This is also the case, for Williams, in his work with the Miles Davis quintet at this same mid-60s period, where, for example, the usual roles by which horns can break up & vary the temporal & harmonic line over a steady rhythm section backdrop are reversed, so that it is Williams who solos with rhythmic freedom over the steady, obsessive-repeated melodic iterations of Davis and Wayne Shorter – on ‘Black Comedy’ and ‘Nefertiti’ most notably. It's worth noting here that this was a period when Coltrane, tho' buoyed along by the much more steady, on-the beat clang of McCoy Tyner’s left-hand, was starting to blur the edges with the addition of extra percussionists, bassists, horns – even if, ultimately, the direction into which Coltrane would move, in the last phase of his career (the Sanders / Alice Coltrane / Garrison / Ali group) was much more an ecstatic continual thicket of texture, high-energy plateau rather than constantly broken-up, jagged momentum. Albert Ayler’s work proves a further contrast, in which the jagged nature of the music occurs not so much in the collective improvisations – which are experienced, again, as ecstatic thickets (Ayler’s own term) or blocks – but in the compositional or organisational contrast between the simple marching themes & the passages of wild & free atonality).

Returning to the trio of Hutcherson, Davis and Williams: their extension of be-bop's sharpness, its swift & exciting laying down of contour at a speed almost too fast to follow, is primarily a rhythmic extension, in which time itself becomes more elastic, but in which the play between that elasticity & the maintenance of generally consistent and swinging beat creates a constant frisson – the same too, true of the harmonic & timbral permutations of McLean's higher-register work (first deployed as far back as some of his late ’50s-work with Charles Mingus: check ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’). And of course this is not an attack on two fronts, separated into two categories marked 'temporal-rhythmic' & 'harmonic-timbral', because it is the combination of these two elements which gives this music its tense & tensile drive: check also the work of Sonny Rollins from, say, '63-'66, 'Sonny Meets Hawk' & 'East Broadway Rundown', as voice in broken monologue, as an actor forgetting lines, stumbling & stammering thru hesitancies, blank spaces - or, rather, as something much more calculatedly off-centre, the development of a melodic fragment or askew interpretation of a scale that runs deliberately counter to the changes being laid out competently underneath as the horn pursues a different path at a different pace.

{{Another horn to consider, by way of contrast: Archie Shepp, whose work at this point, most notably on ‘New Thing at Newport’, where his group consists of Hutcherson, Barre Phillips & Joe Chambers, provides a fairly steady, ominous set of atmospheres over which Shepp's tenor dives in & out, slurring & blaring with sudden, almost vulgar emphasis or soft-breathed amour straight outta Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins: exemplified for me, at least, on 'Rufus'. The tone would remain, but the temporal attack would become much more regularized, once Shepp became, to all intents and purposes, a straightforward be-bop/blues heritage player at some point in the mid-to-late-’70s. The repeated & relentless ostinati of Grachan Moncur tunes on which Shepp often draws at this time do share territory with Moncur’s frequent collaborator McLean (or with, say, McLean's version of Tolliver’s ‘On the Nile’, which, on the Tolliver big band recordings (see below), is fast & punchy in a fairly straightforward manner, but on Mclean's sludges out (at least in the opening melodic exposition) at grinding clip-clop pace, drags you into its orbit as dark-toned procession, paradoxically that much more urgent for the slower tempo). Yet this happens several years after the fact, as it were (and several years, indeed, after Moncur himself had been a part of Shepp’s group), so that these tunes are now vehicles for 20 or 30 minute saxophone solos in which seemingly endless exposition of particular scalar patterns or licks replaces packed-in tension & uncertainty with declamatory pontification. (That’s not to say that said pontification doesn’t possess a certain sense of granite purposiveness which can, if you're in the right mood, act as a slow-burning kind of exhilaration. This is the 'hip' in 'Hipnosis', perhaps - i.e. check the 25-minute-plus version of McLean’s tune of that name on ‘A Sea of Faces’, in which that aforementioned relentlessness of repetition becomes both literal hypnosis, a kind of trance state of the sort Shepp explored thru the quasi-african drumming on 'The Magic of Juju' (tho' without the harmonic freedom provided by the keyboard-less, percussion-heavy set-up of that piece). & check also the mega-version of ‘New Africa’ on a 1977 bootleg recording from Alassio, Italy.)}}



Yet all this nonetheless has little of the jiggly nerve-fry that makes you feel really so urgently alive in the McLean-Hutcherson-Williams nexus of the woods. Wrapping these rather rambling notes up, one final comparison might be between the McLean band's take on a number of Tolliver's tunes - 'Right Now!', ‘On the Nile,’ ‘Jacknife’ – to Tolliver's own 1970s takes on them with his band Music Inc., where they're much more straightforward blowing vehicles, the compositional material (these are good, memorable tunes) actually overshadowing the sometimes rather by-rote soloing: well, e.g. on ‘Music Inc. & Big Band’, an album I love, the big-band riffs & so on that come in under the solo rather distract attention from whatever the front-line instrument (normally Tolliver's trumpet or Stanley Cowell's piano) is playing, the soloist sometimes seeming to fill a particular time & space that has been allotted within the format of the tune without that particular urgency or tension or sense of playing with he form that you get in the McLean records. This is not to say that Tolliver’s big band music is not intensely joyous & colourful & punchy, tho' its tone colours are a lot less adventurous than say, those of Gil Evans, or, indeed, the subtle & complex work of the great jazz composer-arrangers of the big band heyday (the effect, by contrast, is something like McCoy Tyner’s piano style translated in stark & unfussy fashion to a bevy of brass instruments, with occasional flutes for the rather rarer delicate moments; indeed, Tyner's own big-band record ‘Fly with the Wind’ is somewhat similar in effect). Certainly, tho’, in terms of form, it's much easier to coast along to in one's listening than McLean and Hutcherson’s constant engagement – or, for that matter, Dickerson’s more meandering elasticity, form as rumination and reverie as against form as inexorable repetition (Shepp) or form as something from which one departs and to which one returns in swift break-outs (McLean, Hutcherson et al)).

promômo

materials: lisa jeschke david grundy jeremy hardingham lucy beynon david stent patrick farmer george osborne danny hayward mattin staff laura kilbride. magazine & cd. there will be future publications from individual authors, and future magazines.
material-s.blogspot.com

also: 'contingencies' (ed. luke mcmullan / sophie seita): mcmullan, seita, grundy, jeschke, rowan evans. email contingencypress@gmail.com

JEFFERSON TOAL & IAN HEAMES // Cambridge // 27.10.12

Has anyone written on Heames and Toal? Well, Richard Owens has typed some thoughts on the newly-published ‘Arcobat’. There’s some page-long stuff in the old CLR series pamphlets, PDF’d for some kind of posterity. And Louis Jagger’s two-page review of ‘Gloss to Carriers’ in ‘International Egg & Poultry Review’, aka ‘Friends 2’, the A4 stapled collection, or anthology, or magazine, or what have you, edited by Justin Katko and Luke Roberts in 2011, packed with poetry and a personalized rip on the purple cover (now out of print and online, go here). Oh yeah, and Jow Lindsay’s four blog posts from 2007 on Toal’s ‘Mortar Penne Ha Ha Ha’ (over at the old ‘Everyone’s Cup of Tea’). Which are actually pretty scrupulous and dense.

But the point I was about to make still stands on its shaky feet, I think: others should, write I mean, whether in scrupulous or cursory scrutiny, but putting it out there. Criticism in the climate of small-press publishing, books popping out every few months, launches and readings in university crevices on the Cambridge-London-Brighton axes, could be a part of the dialogue without hurting the progress or appearance of the poetry. Because if you can’t write about what you read doesn’t the community get lax? (And is the notion of a community that cocoons itself off against harm in mutual friendship-networks, part of the problem? Not community per se, but a lack of bite (tho’ entirely understandable given the bite from outside, perhaps). Well, there’s a whole can of worms. The advantages and disadvantages of alliance: discuss.) But anyway, this thing, here, isn’t quite that criticism it asks for, it’s another report on another reading, and reading a report shouldn’t substitute for entering the fort and seeing the stuff, or booking these people to a place near you.

I’ve had copies of the books Heames launched tonight for a while now (they are, respectively, ‘Banners Over Terminal Highway’, from his own ©_© press and ‘Array One’, from Justin Katko’s Critical Documents), and the more I think about them the more I think that they are some of the best new poetry I’ve read in a while – which is the kind of book-blurb claim that might make you role your eyes in exaggerated and stomach-sinking disbelief, but I do mean that phrases from them will suddenly and insistently pop into my head at unexpected moments and that, formally and in what have you ways, I think that these are important works and that maybe in ten years we’ll look back and really see that, beyond the accumulated fluff of the contemporary, time’s allowed perspective from out of zeitgeist debris. The poems in ‘Banners over Terminal Highway’ work on formal procedures to do, mainly, it seems, with capitalisation (capitals as Capital, or capitol, perhaps, tho’ this is really too silly a speculation to even merit writing up, or down); they use appropriated quotations from other poets and their scenarios are in some dystopian or apocalyptic, yet contemporary in resonance rather than just some future projection (again the book-blurb banality): online zombies, alarm-gut-chompers, lunch-break neurological pathways, cosmic reduction, guerrilla warfare. As, too, in ‘Array One’ (which may even be a better poem than ‘Banners’), contemporary reference peeks through, as London 2012 Olympic-security crackdowns or riots or Arab Springing radar news: “teens woke from a heavily policed summer / no more an illusion than last spring[…]caught up in the rhetoric of the Games.” Perhaps the most obvious example of this would be the poem ‘For Will Stuart’, which Heames didn’t read tonight and which I don’t think has been published, except fugitively, but in which he considers the possibility of interpreting a major world news event (the death of Osama Bin Laden) through a poem (written by Will Stuart): the poetry news, as register of truth or of the filters and screens which contextualize and distort the fact of an event while posing as reportage, fact, transparency. (Transparency, that which is seen through, as distortion or as the pose of instant access, is an important figure in Heames’ work.) “ ‘the US / the US’ / the news appears […] ‘After the United States the United States’ / news appears and collects noisily […] later ‘the United States are the United States’ / they notice, appear and are collected noisily”. The language is like some slight détournement of a phrase no-one’s said but someone probably would or could have: not as the liberation of language, or the revealing of codes behind official-speak, nor with the subjective fury of a ranting observer , nor with ‘objective clarity’, but, maybe, some combination of all these (bar the ‘liberation’).

To put it again in negative terms, the status of observer or subject in these poems is not the lang-po or po-mo schizoid self, all Deleuzian ‘multiplicity’ and ‘becoming’, but neither does it contain, quite, the ironized or sincere lyric register that you might find, at various pinches, in the work of, say, Sophie Robinson or Tomas Weber or Keston Sutherland or Joe Luna. Yeah, I mean, what is the status of the ‘I’ in Heames’ work? Some lines from ‘Array One’: “I was browsing the Hubble Ultra Deep Field images / last night, berserk at how easily / the sky was blue for what felt like a lifetime” // “I am leaving your windows open” // “I need you to go back on” // “I would like to read your thoughts / on this again” // “I would like to be the air between them.” The ‘I’ might at times seem like the subject of the love poem yearning for his beloved – “I would like to read your thoughts” as the desire for knowing the other person’s inner workings, not as attempted possession of them, but as a close intimacy of sharing, even as the phrase that completes the sentence after the line break re-turns it to office email speak. It might also be the player in a game who co-operates with another player, the beloved: “I hit the alarm / to give you a window // don’t ever stop seeing things / or meaning,” which sounds like the farewell of someone sacrificing themselves to save their companion in a movie scenario – this, maybe, as some kind of model for interaction that has human compassion within it, even as it takes place within a virtual world and as cliché (and even as “Empathy is not critical / To my art”).

Similarly, the love object in Toal’s ‘Kaloki Poems’ would seem, as Justin Katko notes in his review of the reading for the UK Poetry list, a “fantasy,” again, perhaps, in a virtual world, non-existent as an actual person. “Fill the boots of a dashing new hero as you meet four potential sweethearts and woo the dream girl of your choice in this romantic 5-part story. Multiple endings based on how you play mean you can always experience new romances or fix failed ones.” As fantasy, then, it is of course in the grand tradition of love poetry, which we too insistently insist on as always being ‘real’ rather than, say, a set of formal tropes: not that Toal’s sequence is, really, an exploration of genre in that particular way. But its concerns are different to, say, a kind of post-O’Hara lyric, even as they’re also not the genial surrealism of post-Ashbery poetry (to pick two perhaps irrelevant schools for starters. Or, compare Lee Harwood’s ‘The Man with Blue Eyes’ to Ashbery’s work from the same period, and argue that Toal is not what using what is ostensibly love poetry in the same way that either Harwood or Ashbery are using it. Well, you could do that if you like.) The language is raw in its video-gamed glitchiness, for all the ‘purities’ of blondness and whiteness that recur in the poem, “teh cosplay” always in danger of letting in languages of ingestion and excretion and violence (video-games are, after all, ultra-violent in their cartoon realness), “inviting a shit-storm,” a kind of sexualized or balletic murder – “bullets maul sigh.” (Those quotations are from ‘Epyx Fastload’, by the way, I don’t have a copy of ‘Kaloki Poems’ to hand right now.) Anyhow, we’ll come back to the notion of the real or imagined love object soon, in relation to Heames’ poems.

Katko comments on the recurrent animals in Toal’s ‘Arcobat’ (bats, panthers, tigers, dogs, etc), speculating a skew-wiff echo of Pound’s Cantos cats: these aren’t perhaps as consistent (or are they?) in deployment, as, say, the recurring legal terminology in Prynne’s ‘Unanswering Rational Shore’, butterflies in Heames’ ‘Array One’, or envelopes in Mike Wallace-Hadrill’s ‘Nettle Range Blade Fear’, but they’re there, not as explicit scheme or code which, once discovered, while tell you what the sequence is ‘about’, but as part of the mental process of constructing poetry which imposes patterns within what might at first seem ‘pure’ flow. (I mean, think the fractals in Pollock’s drip paintings. Or maybe don’t.) Indeed this distinction is what, I think, is distinctive about Toal’s approach formally, at least in ‘Arcobat’ and in 'Epyx Fastload', which was the first thing he read on the night – and that’s a certain looseness in (that word again) flow, a kind of not-quite contained wildness, a spillage of material that can sometimes result in passages which seem fuzzy or undirected, but which can then be brought back to blinding clarity by the kind of line that leaps out at you like a sore thumb thumbing the ride back on track. (Get your similes mixed and stretched here.) Katko theorized it in his introduction at the reading as Toal not always quite knowing what was coming out of him, in his poetry, so that what happens is perhaps not quite willed or logically / logistically-driven, which gives the work that particular quality it has. Anyhow, I discovered that it was not until hearing the poem, by actually reading it out loud, that things really came into focus, and it was good to hear Toal again re-focus things, animals and victims and schiz/cash flow and all the rest of its acrobatics, as he popped around behind the incongruously large lecturer’s podium.

There’s stuff about animals, then, and stuff about children, sometimes combined – “infant hand pat down / grabbed by the muzzle”, “summoning liquid children like / goats to a bath they category inflorescent chant”– often violent stuff, or possessing a latent potential for violence – the thin dividing line between some sort of authoritarian discipline and sadistic harm (“kid in one cot bent in a warning”). This, to me at least, is a horror felt as visceral, and perhaps it’s a horror with particular resonance for Toal, given that he teaches at a school. This would seem even more pressured in ‘Mortar Penne’ (I’m relying on Jow Lindsay’s blogs-posts, as I haven’t read this poem – it’s in the out-of-print Quid 18), in which Madeleine McCann appears as victim-turned-executioner, stitched together from cut-up like a Frankenstein’s monster in the media circus: prurience of celebrity as wrongness, the extent to which hopelessness and victimhood becomes an almost celebrated condition, as grounds for fear and inaction, and as sado-masochistic voyeurism. Some of the most nastily arresting lines from ‘Arcobat’: “the living beams / softened to a puddle of white human cheeks” // “cycloid, clutching its stupid guts” – here, a sense of disgusting malleability and gooey decay through heat (nuclear melt-down?) – “sonar go loud heat delocaliser”, “now receive the weight of the sun” (a kind of morphing of ‘fear no more the heat of the sun’ into an overwhelming by a descending and heavy solar orb), “against heat red dot asleep wet / blind wet street.” Excrescence as violent spillage in instinctive physical disgust at pressured body horror – “Shade now buoyant tiger, spill your flowing human / with sick” // “suck free gore through a / urinated dog.” Hands and softening (I’m put in mind of the ‘hardening’ and ‘softening’ from ‘Hot White Andy’, or Hugh Sykes-Davies’ “but do not put your hand down to see”), melding and meshing not as celebrated cyborgian schiz-flow but as invasion, germ, disease, virus, real violence done to real vulnerable people – the sense that if I let my guard down (for instance, in sexual encounter) I might be under attack, and am under attack anyway, constantly, even as this violence is reduced to cartoon: “blocks the mucus outflow, the split limb threshold, / the slapstick afterglow of an / origami sick. […] Have you ever seen / weakened in the mouth touch yours.” The body is intensely felt as vulnerable and masked up in a gruesome melding process with shades of David Cronenberg’s Brundlefly, in lines driven by sonic logics of clipped pipping Is, Ts, Bs and Cs: “sample bit protein type cautionary applicator mitt / after late time reapers graft your hot robotic skin on.” Victims remain unnamed, rendered anonymous in degrading humiliation, forced ritual: “After late collective gush of a / dozen frantic necks, fourteen shaved heads bend out / hollow, to forge in crap towel the sign of the tick.” Religion is in here somewhere (wars in the name of fundamentalisms, clashes of civilizations?), scientific tests, lab-rats, the flow of capital as the flow of sick and blood and mucus, as, literally, smeared “paydirt.” “Very cash, extension hitbox / fluidity” merges into that gush of the beheaded necks or emptied brains, the shaved heads and the shit-smeared towel. It’s hard, of course, not to think of Abu Ghraib somewhere in the back of all this, or perhaps of torture porn, but the poem’s by no means programmatic in its kakaclog of abuse and assonant squirm. Indeed, Lindsay posits the ‘weirdness’ of Toal’s work as emerging from an anarchist, rather than a Marxist sensibility – “My suspicion [..] is that such weirdness happens through anarchist not marxist instincts – emerges on poems through their ‘wanting’ to be the culture of anarchist counterpower.” I think I’d prefer to read Toal as a reflection of power, of what Richard Owens calls “the spectacular savagery of the everyday,” its “grotesque intimacy” (intimacy as violence, power as personalized, economic relation boring into personal relation), rather than as a counter-power to that power, if this makes sense – a power that is viscerally feltin quasi-comic but also often quite horrible detritus as constant spillage and excess over the boundaries of secure, non-abused personhood and the safety of weaker from stronger (economies, countries, groups, etc). Perhaps I’m not quite getting what Lindsay meant: but it does seem fair to say that is far from schematic, which you can take as anarchist, if you want. This was what I was trying to say with regard to structure earlier and still probably haven’t properly said yet, but I give up. What I mean is that, tho’ in fact Richard Owens actually does gesture towards analyzing the work that syntax and diction do in Toal’s work, as does Lindsay, more so, the poetry doesn’t really lend itself to a schematic kind of close-reading, even as it isn’t just build-up of sound over sense in some kind of ‘liberated language’ free-flow.

Against this, Heames’ opening elegy for Jeff Keen, written on the day that Keen died, stood out in stark and simple relief. In some sort of contrast to Toal, Heames is interested in formal process, whether this be translation, palindrome, capitalisation, or other types of seemingly arbitrary limit set beforehand. This is grid almost as private system – not that its knowledge is refused - he’ll probably tell you if you ask him – but that it is not necessarily central to ‘understanding’, that it is a form of text-generation, even as the formal exactitude mixed ‘casualness’ of register adds a specific resonance or tone to the work that is in some ways quite different to Toal’s. To read Heames’ work, say, through the prism of Keen’s films, their multi-layered pop-culture brightness, their cartoon-violence of image and eye, would be to get their register wrong: because though there are computer games and the war machines of science-fiction (see particularly ‘Gloss to Carriers’) there is also lyric register (and as register it does not have to be ‘authentic’ investment against a barrage of stuff), and their deployment is careful and complex. Lines are short (with some lengthy exceptions) and laid out, generally, in sense units that can be followed fairly easily (as against the jamming-up of someone like, I don’t know, Ulli Freer).

And yet what I notice in Heames’ work is the register in which casual phrases which might, like, be fragments of transcribed speech, hint at personal or relaxed register only to definitively defeat any chummy ease of access or suggestion of ‘realness’ to which that might gesture. This from the penultimate poem in ‘Banners’, ‘Photos of the Party’: “I didn’t know you were smart Until like the end of May / drenched some of our best People in headsets / and loves influence / better at prosody than anything On interpretation.” Notice the grammatical shifts, each clause deflating the expectation set up by the apparent closure of the previous: is it ‘the end of May’ that ‘drenche[s] some of our best People’, and where is the referent of ‘loves influence’? The reference to smartness has always seemed to me like a kind of halting chat-up line, or statement of regret, slightly derailed by the absurdity of the ambiguous date-placing (the qualifier ‘like’ apologizing in advance for inaccuracy) – it’s indeed that inaccuracy which adds the human quality to it, even as ‘like’ so often stands in for some kind of internet idiocy in phraseology, some pathology of dumb(ed-down) speech. Then the Aristotle reference and the talk of prosody, which it’s hard to know what to make of – we might compare the moment in ‘Gloss to Carriers’ where the pilot carries a copy of J.H. Prynne’s ‘The White Stones’ into his flight-vehicle’s cockpit, going “up the hill” as in ‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform’, with the implied continuance of the half-quotation, “and we do not return.”

Things don’t flow, or they do (the whole thing is not jammed-up jump-cut sliced in its sensibility), only to reveal themselves on closer inspection and thought as catching or throwing off kilter so that the whole is hard to grasp. Or important-sounding phrases might be repeated and reduced to empty shells, almost satirically. From ‘Array One’, we have “Caviar is a kind of food / life is the opposite of death”, and the mutation of a line of Danny Hayward’s appropriated for ‘Banners’, “love is the derangement of leisure time,” into “love is an abuse of love”; and from ‘Gloss’, “We have to start thinking, seriously, about alternatives / to the future.” All these are shells which reveal themselves as subverting their initial real or imagined source impulse into a commentary less conducive to the ideology which their official usage would attempt. So, “alternatives to the future,” given the sci-fi register of that poem, says something about imagining and imaging as deflected or explored through fantasy, as utopia or dystopia, and as the realisation of sci-fi in the now (Mike Ladd’s notion of the ‘after-future’); also, one would think, as a riposte to ‘There is No Alternative’ and the ‘end of history’.

It does work both ways, though, I think, so that “O 1 2 3 / we are met in the same world” becomes an odd mash-up of archaic, maybe Elizabethan poetic diction with the insertion of lyric cry into basic number list: ‘O’ as both the poetic exclamation, as if number could be made to cry out, to reveal the human suffering it conceals (see below), and the defeat of that attempted cry, O as merely zero, nothing, a void. I’m reminded here of Kevin Davies’ line-breaking in ‘Lateral Argument’ (which I’ve examined at greater length in a recent post on Kenny Goldsmith): “Information / wants to be me. O / K” – or of the line from Keston Sutherland’s ‘Falling in Love Cream Crab’ on which Josh Stanley comments in the editorial to the first issue of ‘Hot Gun!’, “Only now forever | 1.9.” (Stanley: “Statistics, for instance, needs to be passion […] One can read the end of the poem as keeping track of the I’s development from 1 upwards as it tries so hard to be 2, to conceive of a dual ontology, to be in a world where it is not alone, but it cannot ever get there.” One might read this in the light of Sutherland’s comment on number and universalism quoted below.)

Heames’ “O 1 2 3” occurs in the context of the penultimate poem from the sequence, in which desire for the beloved is seen as in some way the opponent to both capitalism and to natural forces themselves: “I would halt retail / I would put off an eclipse / or might” – this as some kind of variant on “I would walk 500 miles,” with the qualifying “might” as a realisation of reality serving to make previous overstatement endearing in some way, even as “(wanting the famousness of love / its long name)” suggest more mercenary motives as regards self-presentation in love and in poetry. Perhaps “O”, then, is anticipated and deflated and ironized even before any attempt at urgent agency might instantiate itself: the following and final poem informs us that “the poem is a stunt / double for my feelings,” the beloved revealed as an “archangel,” a figure which can’t help but put us in mind of the angels of death from the skies that dominate ‘Gloss to Carriers’ (again, see below), a figure whose unreality is filtered through a million internet searches – “with more hits / than ‘the colour of rain.’ ” Colourless and transparent, smoothness of surface see-through to nothing, the empty target or centre, the “arena” surrounded by “borders” and “blockade”.

So, yes, what one might cling to as moment of revealed or real assertion or intimacy is never ever simply that: to pick another example, “Left the film streaming” (from ‘Banners’) is at once the de-materialized movie as internet data on screen, as how we now watch films in our private cubbyholes, and “streaming” as in tears running down faces, that one could still be moved somehow, tho’ this itself is I guess manipulation, in a world where lines redolent of the lyrics to an old love song morph into the hurt of a tumble in the markets: “Rolling on bedclothes […] This has been going on too / long for us not to Hurt by a strong yen.” This is not the “gossamer career move” of an ambiguously co-opted, post-Deleuzian ‘rhizomatic’ take on technology and on popular culture, pitted against lyric singularity in celebration of capital’s displacements: but neither is it simple or silly or binary in its coding of oppositions and entanglements in current world and word states of play.

Both Heames and Toal come back to the figure of the female, either as love-object, idealized or mediated through screen, visor, helmet (“hot lament on tinted windows”) post-human displacement, or (and perhaps the two are more commingled than one might think, in their work) as war engine, despoiler. Here Prynne’s ‘Her Weasels Wild Returning’ is surely an important point of reference, or shall we say of departure, especially so in ‘Gloss to Carriers’. What might in a conventional, or ‘human’ love poem denote a particular desired attribute of the beloved, comes in Heames’ work to be part of a war machine: “Her pink antiaircraft”; or “Blousy in hyaline” (hyaline as transparent glass or as cartilage: the illusion of believing seeing, or seeing within to some real body’s meat). Or we have this: “The loved one shields and boots”, where those final words might be nouns or verbs, as the virus-protection and system re-boot of a computerized robo-beloved (I’m reminded a little of the dictator’s passion for the police supercomputer in Alan Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’), or as the ‘shields’ and ‘boots’ which, say, Xena, Warrior Princess might wear and carry– these items of clothing themselves fantasy and mediation, fetishisation of war and information as against the vagiaries and unreliabilities of that which might not slot into the discourse of war, profit, control, police. “And pragmatics sink any beneficent dictatorship of the heart / Love against body count.” Here I think it would be hard not to read ‘body count’ as the (militarized) enumeration of people into numbered corpses that Keston Sutherland decries in a couplet from ‘The Proxy Inhumanity of Forklifts’, discussed in an interview with ‘Naked Punch’: “In the dead of night you do a sum / and in the morning you deduct it from universalism.”

Again, this from the opening of ‘Gloss’: “Her heels wore scramjets out / Rockets wept when she slowed past them / Sandaled in plasma […] Lust clipped her brake cables and wing tips […] She knocked back a late draught of radar and blinked out.” (Think too the statue of a female head that forms the cover to ‘Banners’.) That the female in these poems is thus implicated with war, technology, capital, might seem problematic in terms of sexual politics, but let’s say too that it comments on the mediations of love through a sexualised and technologized gauze or the “CGI brushed steel on sedge phosophorous / […] approaching the white hot templates / of Capitalism and Love / Its dismal optic carbine.” This idealisation is the displacement of “the blood of spray operators / spiked on the graph” so that the “woman of scope / input signal of the white race […] goddess, / complete angel of calm” becalms as advertising image what goes on behind, and above, in the “sky of control” (these last quotations from an early poem, ‘Reducing Load’).

We might consider too the dated-sexist appellation ‘bird’ for woman, consider the recurring swans and butterflies in ‘Gloss’ and ‘Array One’, or the way in which jets or aircraft associated with ‘Gloss’s’ female become ‘pretty birds’, new singing monsters of the air: “Xylem of osmotic birdsong / Fluted each weightless undercarriage.” Xylem and osmosis, transport of water and nutrients in the plants – the plant as the factory plant, death HQ, fluting as glass or as instrument, a fantasy of gravity-less soar, the fact that space programmes have always been associated with military expansion, colonisation (‘space – the final frontier’), nuclear races, Nazi scientists, etc. We also have “the pain of living in a metropolis […] Guns change their silhouettes / A management swan dive.” What flies from the air and soars is not heaven or the muse or spirit, the lark ascending, but death from the skies descending, in flight formation unleashing the shit-storm, this the era of the drone, the bombing of Baghdad, everyone pointing and cheering at the exploding lights in the night; the sky of cameras and horizons and dwarfing spectacle, the reality of heaven as angels of death from the corporations and conglomerations that are now our gods. To be “on the side of the angels” is, then, truly “a failure of love / or policy.”

‘Gloss’ is both academic commentary, explanation, and shininess and sleekness of surface, as concealment or perfection of technology and wealth: smooth like our bodies are not, delivering death in high slick style. ‘Carriers’ are carriers of disease, are carrier pigeons, messengers, lackeys, bomb-containers – I’m thinking aloud here –the play of inside and out, “Claustrophobe in the machine […] my emotions leaking from my ‘mask’.” Mask here being face or face-mask, tactics of concealment and revealing, the packing of emotion so that what is real in suffering and love is just another movie scene, a game. You’re toy-ing with people’s lives. Mention of mask too makes me think of the role of the face (and the region of the head in general) in ‘Array One’, which might seem a satire of all that talk of Levinasian encounter which is all the rage in French and Film and Ethics departments round the Anglo-American world: “I need you to go back on / to look at pictures of your face” // “medics lost face” // “the convoy kept rolling / down my head and neck” // “breathe down my neck” // “Ilium is toast / Natalie has dark eyes.” This latter bringing us back to ‘Gloss’: “Their eyes / Mere openings that looked like / Maws vaselike.”

Katko comments, in his UK Poetry review, on the affect of Heames’ memorized reading; tho’ I would ague, and perhaps he would too, that the register of elegy and mournfulness which he seems to claim as a particular quality of this particular reading is a necessary quality of any of the Heames readings I’ve seen. There is that play with tension and expectation, some thing which forces you not to look at the reader in case you break the spell of remembrance; so that it is at once performance, more so than with the usual reading from a script, and that it actually does succeed to some extent in Heames’ stated desire to in some way remove charisma-based interpretation from text and deliver that text ‘as it is’ – even as, at the same time, it does exactly the opposite. This probably makes absolutely no sense.

Which has brought me several thousand words in to realize that this hasn’t really been a review of the reading at all. So let’s throw that bit in at the end. The space, a gleaming lecture-hall which is apparently one of the most expensive buildings per square foot in Europe, was perhaps not most conducive to a fairly small gathering (tho’ a packed hall would have maybe have changed and charged the whole atmosphere in was which now of course it would be pointless to speculate on). Its weird, semi-labyrinthine contours were at once suited to the poetry (with their Goldeneye echoes) and in some senses too sleekly institutional for it: Katko’s reception-broken freestyle on the phone afterwards, or Toal and Wallace-Hadrill’s recreation of Nas with the aid of a clunking upright piano outdoors the next day, might be seen as way of breaking back out into the (keeping it) real world, whatever that is. In the meantime, we all got to hear Toal and Heames read, and you can find what they read as availably published and new from ©_© and Critical Documents, winging its way out onto the next level.