Materials Reading Series Introductions, 2014-2021
[2022]
- Priyanka Vorguanti / Sarona Abuaker / Emma Gomis / David Grundy [April 2022]
[2021]
- Gabrielle Daniels / Tongo Eisen-Martin [Jan 2021]
[2020]
- Denise Riley / Peter Gizzi [March 2020]
- Robert Glück / Steven Seidenberg [Jan 2020]
[2019]
- Lisa Jeschke / Adelaide Ivánova [November 2019]
- Erín Moure / Caroline Bergvall [November 2019]
- Charlotte Thießen / Joel Scott / Marty Hiatt [May 2019]
[2018]
- Sara Larsen / David Brazil [November 2018]
- D.S. Marriott [October 2018]
- Lisa Jeschke / Sam Solomon [March 2018]
- Sean Bonney [February 2018]
[2017]
- Linda Kemp / Verity Spott [x 2] / Lisa Jeschke & Lucy Beynon [March 2017] - Poetry Performance Series
- Stuart Calton / John DeWitt / Caitlín Doherty [February 2017] - Poetry Performance Series
[2016]
- Rosa van Hensbergen / Naomi Weber [November 2016] - Poetry Performance Series
- Anne Boyer / Lisa Jeschke & Lucy Beynon / David Grundy [July 2016]
[2014]
- Timothy Thornton / Ian Heames [November 2014]
- Lisa Jeschke / Tom Allen [May 2014]
Materials Blog Posts (Archival)
- The Inhumanity of Keston Sutherland's Odes to TL61P [David Grundy, 23.05.2013]
- Report from The Odes to TL61P (London Launch) [Lisa Jeschke, 23.05.2012]
- Jeremy Hardingham's Shit Theatre [David Grundy, 07.10.2013]
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Materials Reading Series Introductions, 2014-2020
Introductions written by Lisa Jeschke, David Grundy, Rosa Van Hensbergen and Janani Ambikapathy. Reverse Chronological order.
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[2022]
Materials Reading Series: Priyanka Voruganti / Sarona Abuaker / Emma Gomis / David Grundy
Friday 1st April 2022, 100 Years Gallery, Hoxton
Priyanka Voruganti, who joins us today through Zoom, is originally from New York and is currently studying anthropology at the University of Cambridge. I first met and saw Pri read a few weeks ago, reading from a long poem entitled ‘Rage Song’, that has not yet been published—and this was the first time, I believe, that they read it in public. The poem concerns “Sati as colonial/ justification”, the spectacle of violence, “the spectacle of loss”, as “State-mandated pyres / blaze the lands, bright with liquefaction”, “the punch-line and the / general underwhelming reveal”. In this, and in the other poems of Pri’s that I’ve seen, a virtuosic delight in language—“Word-laced scepter skelter”—comes up against the subject matter, of real violence, real negativity, with humour operating as a kind of knife, a razor; it’s a destabilising humour, one that switches round the pose of the persona and the addressee, conditions of anonymity and stereotype and of the real violence they conceal, a speaking back and through. Please welcome Priyanka Voruganti.
Sarona Abuaker’s debut poetry collection, Why so few women on the street at night, was published by the 87 Press last year. Sarona describes this work, which is deeply concerned with the past and ongoing situation of Palestine, as a combination of “futurism” and “memory building”. Here are memories burst, shattered, built and rebuilt; words as building blocks, barricades, making full use of the width and length of the page, which they traverse as a space of freedom and constraint, alternately spread out and hemmed in, crammed and cramped, fluent and loose, furious and fluid.
This work is wide-ranging. That’s a clichéd phrase, but I mean it in a specific way. The word ‘range’ enters into English in the late 14th century from the Germanic roots that also provide the word ‘rank’. Initially it means a line or a row of people, things, animals—particularly soldiers—a usage that then gets metaphorically extended to, for example, mountain ranges, firing ranges, categories of things. Everything from space to commerce gets governed by this metaphor which has military origins. So too for the conditions that these poems examine, the constraining military ranges openly smuggled into life and language. Against those conditions, this work makes visible new, wider ranges, new arrangements and derangements of thought. Please welcome Sarona Abuaker.
Emma Gomis is a Catalan American poet and essayist, author of four pamphlets and co-editor of an anthology of Poetics from the Naropa Archive, out from Nightboat later this year. Her most recent book is a second collaboration with the legendary Anne Waldman, written between English and Catalan, published by Pamenar Press, which was launched online just last week. The book is called A PUNCH IN THE GUT OF A STAR. This is a title that raises some questions. Is it the star’s gut being punched? (Does a star have a gut?) Is the star punching the poet in the gut? Are the stars being brought down to earth, or is poetry speaking the language of the stars? The answer is, perhaps, all of these. Stars are used here to provide, as they did for Walter Benjamin, a transformed and transformed vision of histories, plural, that resists the monolithic weight of history, singular; of the monoglot, of the linguistic closure that accompanies closures of all other kinds: borders, boundaries, national de-limitations. To quote from the book:
“what we search for inside of sleep is a place where we can / cover ourselves / in language, inhabit a space where words widen like a blanket / a sweet tongue / against / alienated separation”.Please welcome Emma Gomis.
[D.G.] I won’t introduce myself, but this reading serves as a launch for this new book, just out from The Last Books in Amsterdam, with thanks to Phil Baber. This is no.5 in their prose series The Yellow Papers; it’s from a longer manuscript called Present Continuous that Pamenar are going to put out later this year, and this is the first five essays in the book. It’s a pandemic book, mainly written in 2020 and 2021, and it will be self-explanatory. I’ll read one essay on a performance of work by Olivier Messiaen and by singer Elaine Mitchener, the day the first UK lockdown was announced two years ago, and another on the poet Alfred Celestine if there's time.
[2021]
Materials Reading Series: Gabrielle Daniels & Tongo Eisen-Martin
Saturday 15th March 2021, Online
So I think that’s about it in terms of arrangements. Our first reader today is Gabrielle Daniels, calling in from California. Daniels’ book, Something Else Again, which we’re launching today, has been in the works with Materials for a couple of years now; but more accurately it’s been in the works since 1975, when the earliest texts were first written. Based at the start of her writing career in San Francisco, Daniels was involved with the Women Writers’ Union, with Gloria Anzaldua’s El Mundo Surdo workshop, and with New Narrative writing—she recalls this period in her essay on New Narrative, first published online at Open Space and republished in this new book. She has published in a range of journals and anthologies at the forefront of feminist, anti-racist and experimental writing communities, from Off our Backs to Sinister Wisdom, Soup to This Bridge Called My Back.
Daniels’ reading at the Communal Presence conference in California a few years ago, and her appearance in the New Narrative anthology Writers Who Love Too Much, have drawn renewed attention to her work, but her work extends well beyond New Narrative. Daniels is one of those rare writers equally adept in poetry and in prose. Attentive to the nuances of voice, character, narrative, of disarming and alarming shifts, her work is always compelling and never predictable. Her interests are at once historical and contemporary, from her scholarship on Harriet Wilson, to her contributions to debates on feminist writing, publishing and representation in the 1980s, growing out of her work with the Women Writers Union; and provocative and fascinating novels-in-progress, which include, most recently a retelling of the Alfred Hitchcock-Daphne du Maurier Rebecca. These take place alongside Daniels’ moving poetry, which addresses intimacy, love, pain, the way that politics moves through lived experience in its fine-grained texture. As I say, this book has been years in the making, and I’m detailed we’re able to launch it now. Please welcome Gabrielle Daniels.
Tongo Eisen-Martin is an educator, an activist, and a poet, based in San Francisco. As of yesterday, he’s the city’s new poet laureate. The book we’re launching today, Waiting Behind Tornados for Food, is his first UK-based publication, and combines poetry and essays, featuring four recent pieces written in advance of the pandemic and one after. Looking at this unanticipated before and after—the shift between 2019 and 2020, before global crisis had the name of a virus—we might reflect on the fact that the pandemic, and attendant political crises, have so often amplified existing inequalities; and that, most recently, the white supremacist violence we saw last week with the invasion of the Capitol [the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC by far right Trump supporters] on January 6th is the product of a tendency that’s been tolerated even as it’s condemned. As Eisen-Martin writes: “The truth is that a truly democratic system does not slip into a fascist, genocidal practice; but rather fascist, genocidal practice is evidence of a system’s true nature”. Yet, he continues, “we are beginning to blame the right people”. Last year’s summer of protests against police killings, against the racialised and classed handling of the pandemic—were only the most visible example of continuing resistance to a global economic system at once grotesquely morphing and at a standstill.
So what’s poetry’s role in all this? Eisen-Martin’s work both asks this question and provides its own answer. Its characteristic form, style and tone might be called reportage, montage, collage, chronicle—harking back to the collective voicings of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as to the warped polyvocality of hip-hop, the polyrhythms and open harmonies of progressive jazz. The voices we find in these poems can be sardonic, despairing, cutting, loving; they are real responses to real conditions; they refuse to give up or give in. Such poetry gives us a vital and necessary map of the crisis we’re living through and how we might get beyond it. Please welcome Tongo Eisen-Martin.
[D.G.]
[D.G.]
[Seminar Introduction]
This poem, or series of poems, is an ode -- rather than the song of praise that implies, a love-poem, perhaps, but more or most likely a lament for TL61P, the code for a now-obsolete replacement door for a Hotpoint Tumble Drier. It is an attempt to write a poem directed towards a non-human object which exists, not as some spurious ‘object-oriented ontology’, some ‘ethical’ attempt at bringing into being fantasized ‘inter-objectivity’ between the human and non-human words that tries to escape human mediation and thus overlooks the actual real of material human labour, the actual mediations we live inside, but as a means of relating to objects produced by humans which does not give them an agency of their own, as Bruno Latour, having internalized the logic of capitalism which Marx satirizes, would have us believe, but realizes them as living, or, more accurately, dead, because these objects contain the dead labour of those exploited under capitalism and as capital itself.
TL61P is at a triple remove: it is a code which stands in for that which it exists as a replacement product-part for - code stands in for replacement door stands in for door stands in for the dead labour that produces it and that it reproduces. The obsolescence of TL61P, turned into the ‘inhumanity’ of non-meaning letter-number code, a ‘word’ or series of signifying objects turned into affect-less code, the arbitrariness of the sign, is a deadness like the deadness of dead labour, a mere statistic. As a specific object, the tumble-drier door is in part chosen for its deliberate arbitrariness, or the gesture of choosing it is made to seem that way - pick an object and fix on it as if it meant more than it did (like your comment about constantly wanting to mean more than the shit you do mean, poetry’s poverty aspiring outward in teenage belief). Or, as Sutherland puts it in an interview in Naked Punch, “seizing on a very improbably specific detail of consumer society and trying to make from that some image of the whole” -- which is, after all, what consumer items, commodities are, encapsulations of the labour that produces them, the products of a complex (and now global) system of exchange and exploitation which they both cover over with their shiny desirability and embody.
But it (the hot-point dryer door) also comes to take on specific qualities, not as an exact ‘symbol’ so much as being forced into a certain level of metaphorical affect by the pressure being placed on it to be ‘worthy’ of its centrality to the poetic project, to ‘live’ up to the attention violently or lovingly directed at it. Thus, the tumble drier dries out the wetness and sweat of dirty clothes and turns them once more into new and gleaming objects, as if just taken from the rack, though at the same time it wears down and fades the colour of those clothes with repeated usage, giving the lie to its own re-birthing function; just as the commodity tries to dry out the blood and sweat and wetness of the dead labour that produces it, makes that undead labour non-human. Addressing the ode to it doesn’t quite attempt to make it human again, because that would just be a parody of the process of dead labour’s congealing, but suggests, by imparting it with that trace of humanity, the displacement of real needs and desires onto fictitious or all-too-real material objects, and thus, implicitly, how love might be re-directed from the object-made-human to the human, which, under capital, is made object. Not to consume or ‘exhaust’ that object, but to realize the inexhaustibility of it, in Adorno’s terms: not that TL61P is that which to which one must direct an inexhaustible love, but that the conditions in which that love might so be directed to the human could be thought, against and out of a visceral, strenuous and comprehensive attempt to live through the wrongness of relation which gives rise to Sutherland’s project.
This has, of course, has been a part of Sutherland’s work for several years now, from Hot White Andy and Roger Ailes (“Roger are you there”, “Hot white Andrew Cheng”), the displaced figures of love - Chinese middle-ranker, nefarious Fox News figure - but, in the Odes, it is taken to a non-human extreme. Giving oneself up to an inhuman object, to the totally other, is what we are required to under capital every day; the condition of sacrifice, of human blood, of human flesh, propitiation to the money-god. Through an absolute attempt to inhabit and make potently manifest this state, Sutherland attempts to move through that condition into a place where it might be possible to imagine some other condition -- somewhat akin to that state Will Rowe discussed in his paper at the Militant Poetry and Poetics conference at Birkbeck this past weekend, in which one would have to live and feel and think as if one had completely inhabited and passed through the condition of absolute, paralyzing fear which at times seems to psychologically prevent the thought of any kind of resistant counter-action to prevailing internalized propaganda.
It is another question whether or not we find this project to be successful or not, and whether or not we believe that poetry per se, or a particular kind of poetry, or this particular poem, is the place for this attempt, an attempt which can clearly not exist without the movements for social change with which it seeks to act, both existing as the conditions of possibility for the other. And it is another question even whether the poem itself does want what it, and its title and general schematic framework, claims. In that sense, perhaps the above is merely a ventriloquization of certain theoretical positions which exists as a merely conceptual, rather than immanent-critical approach: no praxis here. But perhaps this can be a start towards thinking outside these boundaries, towards a properly close reading that challenges the claims made above.
[2020]
Materials Reading Series: Denise Riley & Peter Gizzi
Saturday 7th March 2020, SET, Dalston
So Peter will give a longer reading to celebrate his New and Selected poems and Denise will give a shorter reading to begin. We’ll go straight through without a break.
Denise Riley
Denise Riley’s work in poetry and criticism has succeeded in changing the way we perceive our worded selves, the forces of our circumstance, our openness and capacity to injure and be injured, providing a necessary, clear-headed and wrenching analysis of the work of care, of affective labour, of the fact that “affections must not / support the rent”. Books such as The Words of Selves and Am I That Name? are vitally important evidence of Riley’s stature as a theorist of politics and language, but she is above all a poet. Her Selected Poems 1976-2016 came out recently. It moves from the incisive, self-reflexive poems of Marxism for Infants, a benchmark for socialist feminist writing, to the indelible achievement that is Mop Mop Georgette, a definitive reinvention of the lyric poem that aches and pains and pines, that sounds and salves like the best pop song, the best poem, to the extraordinary poems to and for the dead in Say Something Back, where, as she puts it:
The souls of the dead are the spirit of language:
you hear them alight inside that spoken thought.
you hear them alight inside that spoken thought.
As these poems reflect on the ways we are haunted by and through language, they take up a terrain formally haunted by the prosodic ghosts of old meters, by hymn tunes and rhymes of a different sort of music, melodies heard and unheard, and a music that is inseparable from thought—from thinking through the vitally knotty questions of how we survive in, through and against language, in word and in world. Riley’s work gets to the heart of the matter. It’s the kind of work we need to tell us how we live, and how we could live.
I’m honoured to welcome Denise Riley.
Peter Gizzi
Peter Gizzi’s New and Selected poems, Sky Burial, is just out from Carcanet, and his next book, Now It’s Dark, will be out from Wesleyan later this year. He is the author of many other books besides, including Marigold and Cable, copies of which are available on the book table. He’s also a scholar of the work of Jack Spicer, having edited Spicer’s Collected Lectures and Collected Poetry, the latter with the late and much-missed Kevin Killian. Gizzi’s poetry is generative and generous, a handbook to territory both known and unknown. The ‘I’ that insistently appears in these poems is the ‘personal impersonal’—a ‘pronominal reality’ at once singular and plural, myself and another, an angle on the world. This personal impersonal speaker moves through landscapes made from a combination of fantasy—which is the realm of poetry, and approaches something we might call utopia—and observation—which is also the realm of poetry. Here, they pause to make field recordings of a field that exists only in the poem yet which they seem to will to being outside the poem as well. These poems ask not only how to survive your loves and losses, but what to do when you survive your loves and your losses, the I filled with names, with language’s grain: air, which is at once what we breathe and another name for song. ‘You’, the figure of relation, may not always find its addressee, may not know who will hear it, but it’s enough to know that there will be a witness. As Gizzi puts it:
Someone saw it, I love them for seeing it.
I love seeing it with them.
Please give a very warm welcome to Peter Gizzi.
Materials Reading Series: Saturday 4th January 2020, SET, Dalston – Robert Glück, Steven Seidenberg
Robert Glück
One of the founders of New Narrative writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Robert Glück’s poems first began appearing in Gay Liberation poetry magazines such as Gay Sunshine and Sebastian Quill in the early 1970s; his poetry pamphlets from this time include Andy, Family Poems and La Fontaine (with Bruce Boone). In 1982, he published his luminous book of short stories, Elements of a Coffee Service, incorporating the lessons of poetry alongside fiction, Marxist theory, and queer gossip and activism. Along with his novels Jack the Modernist and the soon-to-be-reissued Margery Kempe, these are defining documents. As the original back cover blurb to Elements puts it, “each story is a fresh start”, “invit[ing] us to occasions so that we may unravel the knot of sexuality, violence, and power”. Glück realises that the tendrils of memory, the threat of violence, and the voids of loss unavoidably wind themselves around us, individually, generationally, and within our social and writing communities. Given this, writing must not close over the possibility of painful entanglement and psychic damage, but keep that understanding open in the hope of moving beyond the social conditions that cause such damage; must not lull us into false security, but remain alive instead to the ways our bodies are conscripted into suffering.
In a poem simply called ‘Poetry’, Glück writes:
My voice makes noises
to cast distances out.
The noise makes words
which let distance in.
My unmade body
is made again.
To “let distance in” is to chart the distances between self and other that acts of speech, of sex,of talk or touch, constantly jump across, in that thing we call social life. This is what it’s like to be a body in language, mute and screaming, vague and precise, like us, like our lives. As Glück reminds us, “it’s restful to know who and what our enemies and friends our”. Especially in these times, of heightened nationalism and othering, such work is more vital than ever. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Robert Glück. [D.G.]
Steven Seidenberg
Steven Seidenberg is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is an important part of that writing community, his work of the last decade emerging in fruitful conversation with writers like Robert Glück, Norma Cole and Kevin Killian. Seidenberg is someone who thinks closely about friendship, community, politics and thought itself, and what these might mean for poetry. Also a photographer, his photographs are empty of humans, focusing on obsolete or semi-functional implements of urban space; but his writing very much exists within the torsioned spaces of the human mind and its difficult relationship to the human body. Seidenberg’s 200-page book of prose, Situ, is like nothing else I can quite think of: a philosophical text, a poem, a novel of sorts, its unnamed protagonist hesitates, having just risen from a bench, unleashing a series of speculations—sonorous, polysyllabic, rhyme-haunted and given weight by insistent italicisation. The anxiety that one might overlook something haunts the book: “For once he will pass over it, for this once and only; he may not have the chance to live so carelessly again.” But the text itself seems never to pass over anything: it is anything but careless, utterly yet playfully scrupulous.
Seidenberg has a new book of aphorisms forthcoming from Roof, a work interested in the way that condensed statement that might seem to tend towards abstraction is in fact an ethics: in Seidenberg’s word “the aphorism always points towards the social”. This is crucial for understanding such work: for understanding how the social saturates even the most apparently removed of writing. Speaking of a recent collaborative project with Carolyne White in Italian migrant camps, Seidenberg has argued for the need for “a mechanism of invisibility”. Relatedly, his work is engaged with the limitations of empathy—how to “imagine without pity”, how to construct a politics and an ethics that isn’t predicted on the compromises of liberal back-footedness, on false equivalence, and that ultimately leaves all hierarchies present, merely softened. These are thoughts we need to have when thinking about the politics our work can accomplish.
Situ’s first sentence reads: “But that’s not all”. In a time of exhausted options, stale repetitions, inherited cassocks and shrouds, some writing makes you feel that everything is yet to be explored, everything yet to done, and Steve’s writing is like that. Please welcome Steven Seidenberg.
[D.G.]
[2019]
Exzess-Lesung Lisa Jeschke / Adelaide Ivánova, Lothringer 13_Florida, Munich, 29th November 2019
Erín Moure / Caroline Bergvall, SET Dalston, Sat 16th November 2019
(1) Adelaides Feminismus wie er in den Gedichten aus Der Hammer ausgedrückt wird, ist ein antagonistischer, kollektiver, individualisierter, brutalisierter, auf die bestmögliche Art perverser, genussvoller und widersprüchlicher Feminismus. Das Buch nimmt eine solidarische Geschichtsschreibung mit verletzten feminisierten Körpern und Stimmen vor; präsentiert eine lyrische Sprecherin, die ihren Lover oder was auch immer Humboldt (kolonialistischer nationaler Lover) aggressiv objektifiziert, trotz überlebter Vergewaltigung und dem mindestens ebenso traumatisierenden Gerichtsverfahren heterosexuellen Sex quasi fordert; Krankenhaus- und Staatsbedienstete mit tierischen Schimpfwörtern belegt; vom Trinken zur Erinnerungsbetäubung – oder auch, um einfach Spaß zu haben – träumt und dabei implizit mit den Ärzten, die sie zum Ding machen, fraternisiert; und vor allem mit einem Hammer unter der Decke schläft, „falls sich wieder heimlich / jemand reinschleicht“. Gerade die genannten Inversionen machen die Machtgefälle im patriarchalen Staat in ihrer ganzen Grausamkeit sichtbar. So stellt die Wahl des Hammers als Selbstverteidigungsinstrument eine krasse Subversion des bürgerlichen Justizsystems dar – Symbol und Waffe des Richters werden entwendet, zur Waffe der Vereinzelten (weiblich und/oder Masse) gegen diejenigen, die uns missbrauchen – endlich ein konkreter Vorschlag, wie Hammer und Sichel wieder Sinn machen könnten!
(2) In ihrem Nachwort schreibt Christiane Quandt: „Für die Zukunft wünsche ich mir, dass sich dieses Buch überholt und kommende Generationen voll Erstaunen und Abscheu von Freisprüchen, victim-blaming und Demütigungen von Frauen, Angehörigen der LBGTQI+ Bewegung und anderen Menschen in den Geschichtsbüchern lesen und sich fragen, wie die Menschheit je so grausam sein konnte.“ Zitatende. Ich liebe die Idee eines Buchs, das von der Geschichte überholt werden will oder überholt werden sollte, zu ferner Erinnerung, zu Archivmaterial werden möchte – und damit eine gegensätzliche Position einnimmt zum Universalitäts- und Ewigkeitsanspruch des sogenannten Kanons. Eine Literatur, die sich vorstellen kann, unnötig zu werden, ist eine Literatur, die neben und mit uns wohnt, auch nur mietet, sich aber unser Überleben vorstellen kann.
[LJ]
(2) In ihrem Nachwort schreibt Christiane Quandt: „Für die Zukunft wünsche ich mir, dass sich dieses Buch überholt und kommende Generationen voll Erstaunen und Abscheu von Freisprüchen, victim-blaming und Demütigungen von Frauen, Angehörigen der LBGTQI+ Bewegung und anderen Menschen in den Geschichtsbüchern lesen und sich fragen, wie die Menschheit je so grausam sein konnte.“ Zitatende. Ich liebe die Idee eines Buchs, das von der Geschichte überholt werden will oder überholt werden sollte, zu ferner Erinnerung, zu Archivmaterial werden möchte – und damit eine gegensätzliche Position einnimmt zum Universalitäts- und Ewigkeitsanspruch des sogenannten Kanons. Eine Literatur, die sich vorstellen kann, unnötig zu werden, ist eine Literatur, die neben und mit uns wohnt, auch nur mietet, sich aber unser Überleben vorstellen kann.
[LJ]
Erín Moure / Caroline Bergvall, SET Dalston, Sat 16th November 2019
So I’ll keep these intros fairly brief and let the poets speak for themselves!
So our first / second reader is Erín Moure. Moure, who hails from Canada, has published 19 books of translations and 18 of her own poetry, and has that rare capacity of being both an inspired translator and an equally original poet in her own right. Her achievements in translation are far too many to list here, but mention should be made of her exemplary work translating the Galician poet Chus Pato and pretty much single-handedly introducing her work to the English-speaking poetry world. Pato writes in Galician, a language Moure learned specifically to translate this work. Now Pato’s multi-modal, experimental work poses a challenge to native speakers, let alone to any translator, and Moure’s achievement in providing readable versions in English is nothing short of astonishing. Most recently, Moure has translated Pato’s lecture At the Limit, a piece on poetry and being that stands up there with meditations like Celan’s Meridian; likewise, Moure’s translation reckons alongside the work of poet-translators like Rosemary Waldrop, finding equivalents, parallels and creative ways of matching the complex and linguistically-specific work of the originals in ways that are carefully-attuned and specific, yet also lively and inventive. (Pato and Moure have just now been involved in a translation workshop at Oxford University, which is the fortunate occasion that also enabled this whole reading to happen.) Moure’s own work is most recently represented by a book called The Elements, which she calls a ‘book of dad’, and which addresses Moure’s own family history, Galician resistance to Napoleon, and a whole load of other things, personal, historical, political and poetical. “Give me nothing” demands one of the poems from this book. Of course, this a kind of double-bluff: Moure’s generous poetry gives us a lot more than nothing, every time. I’m very pleased to present Erin Moure.
Caroline Bergvall’s work has been very important for a cross-generational section of poets in London & beyond and she really needs no introduction. So I’m sure you don’t need me to say anything about this work that you won’t already know, but just in brief: Bergvall’s work is often developed within collaborative and inter-disciplinary contexts, between languages and language registers, in complex and sophisticated ways. To describe her as a ‘poet’ or her work as ‘writing’ is both to challenge what we understand the categories of ‘poetry’ or ‘writing’ to be, and to immeasurably enrich them, opening up fresh neural pathways that punningly slip into territories unglimpsed until one discovered them right under one’s feet. Bergvall’s work both seems to tidy away the undergrowth and to unfold in ever more complex arborescence. I first encountered Bergvall through her Salt publication Fig, which collects several texts that had their origin in gallery spaces and commissions, and is a good example of how her work adapts to particular situations, turning constraint into expansive play, erasure into heteroglossic yet precise chatter. Her recent projects have involved a project of radical medievalism, in which the origins of English as a trans-national growth out of French, German, and so on, break apart as the language is re-composed in a beautiful disorder. The most recent manifestation, Alysoun Sings, emerges from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath: a figure who can seem tediously familiar from UK Literature study programmes, here she comes alive here in updated texts that fizz with passion and thought. I’m very pleased to welcome Caroline Bergvall.
[D.G.]
Thiessen / Hiatt / Scott, 27th May 2019
MARTY HIATT
Is a poet and translator from Melbourne, now based in Berlin, who runs bulky news press (http://bulkynewspress.tumblr.com/). Work appears in Cordite, Otoliths, past simple, dinner, scallysub, and Overland. His recent chapbooks are hard-line, the manifold, back to noise and Paraphrenia, which was published by MATERIALIEN in 2019.
“begrimed multipede
pull in your blades
execute command”
CHARLOTTE THIEßEN
Is a poet and translator who grew up in Porto and lives in Berlin. Her chapbook In This came out in 2016, and she has published in magazines including Mask, Dinner, Legoville, Architecture et Poesie, and Splinter. She co-runs the magazine and reading series artiCHOKE in Berlin, which brings together poets from a German-speaking context and from other countries/languages. She also edits the internationalist feminist poetry publication Vírgulentxs. Fragments of Baby is forthcoming in 2019.
“in what’s present there is no space
for your absence is impossible
you fall through a distance in the game”
for your absence is impossible
you fall through a distance in the game”
JOEL SCOTT
Is a poet and translator, originally from Sydney. He co-runs the Berlin-based magazine and reading series artiCHOKE. His translation of the second volume of Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) will appear with Duke University Press in early 2020.
“I voted to send the citizens to contain the police.
I vote to erase the citizen.”
[D.G.]
[2018]
SARA LARSEN / DAVID BRAZIL
MATERIALS Reading and Seminar Series, 17th November 2018
[Seminar Introduction]
I was lucky enough to publish pamphlets by both Sara and David in the past few years: an excerpt from Sara’s much longer feminist counter-epic Merry Hell, which came out in full in a beautiful edition from Atelos Press, and about which she’ll be speaking today, and David’s Praxis, Apostles! Just to introduce them briefly – and I’ll give longer intros when they give their readings later on today – David and Sara live in the Bay Area, in California, on the West Coast of America, in Oakland, a city just over the bay from tech-capital san Francisco, a city built on occupied Native American territory, as most of America, with a long radical history, of the Black Panthers in particular, of continuing racialized violence and of continuing resistance, notably with the Occupy Movement and the Oakland commune, which saw some long-standing occupations which the state eventually shut down, and the general strike which temporarily shut down the port. Oakland’s a port city, so intimately connected to trade and the flows of international capital. What David and Sara have been asking in their work for a number of years now, is what can poetry, what can study do with this, how does it relate. One of the things about occupy of course was its focus on radical education, on challenging the ossification of existing institutions by actually trying to create alternatives – free libraries, free study groups, no need for affiliation or accreditation. They were both involved with reading groups at people’s houses, with reading series, with the bay area public school and Oakland free university and the omni commons, and these are all on some kind of continuum. The publishing and reading activities associated with poetry, the writing of poetry itself, are all radically socialised. This experiment is still ongoing, and it’s a vital one.
In this seminar today, Sara will talk about her book Merry Hell and its relation to, among other things, the patriarchal myths of the trojan war and the militant women of the Paris Commune, and David will talk about verse form and what it historically sediments, via Hopkins via Milton via misreadings of ancient Greek and the Hebrew prophets. In both cases, they’ll be thinking about what poetry means now, what it can do now, how it can think historically and affectively and all the rest of it. So over to them.
[Poetry Reading]
Sara Larsen
Sara Larsen’s book Merry Hell is dedicated to Helen of Troy, to the women of the Paris Commune, and “to my friends, now.” Commons and communes past and present come up against patriarchal law, capitalism, military and police violence, logics of cash and sacrifice, in lines that spread out, that elongate in notated waves of sight and breath. The poem is urgent, it is also witty, it is beautiful. Sara’s The Riot Grrrl Thing is forthcoming next year, and appears to change tack, to move away from what she calls the ‘feminist counter-epic’ – most notably, through the fact that it’s set in a different historical conjuncture, and riot grrl songs tends to be three-minute blasts, not extended temporal epics – but one of the things that Sara’s work does a whole is to refuse historical separation, not in the interests of trans-historical forgetting, but in terms of, say, revolutionary memory as a spur to challenge what happens in the present. Some of Larsen’s other writing includes some beautiful translations of Sappho that appeared in a very scarce pamphlet made in Oakland, precious as a modern-day Sapphic fragment, working from within the aphoristic, aporetic, nature of the original, stitching and unstitching, weaving and unweaving, cutting and binding, torn scroll; and these are perfect examples of how Sara’s work moves between the pitch-perfect nature of lyric, whether in its ancient Sapphic form or the Romantics or the song lyrics that saturate our modern aural environment, refuses the distinction between, say the Homeric epic of war and the Sapphic lyric of love, shows their dialectical relation, and talking about this way overdetermines what is really its beautifully simple affect.
honey and bee
I shall be released
honey and bee
I shall be released
In Merry Hell in particular, Sara uses the kinds of slips and associates you find in puns, in carefully judged visual or oral associations, to associate hell, Helen, the hellmouth, I think from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (evil is within the apparently sleepy town, and it’s a teenage girl who’s going to fight it), Paris from Homer and Paris the city as it associates with the Paris Commune and its female militants, the petroleuses. These are not ‘just’ word-games. As Joseph Persad puts it in a review, Larsen uses these to “launch an assault on straight thinking and straight history”. It’s like living now, like living in the language with which we speak and are spoken and organise our world, the histories of hurt but also possibility that that language contains, “like living in multidimensions”. So it feels, in Persad’s words, “both contingent and mythic”. This is about the social individual and how they inflect each other: Keats and the holiness of the heart’s affections at Delphi, Sappho on the beach at Oakland, the port of troy and the Oakland general strike shutting down the port. Larsen asks
What is an autobiography: me and all the windows are one the window of this existence dis
app ears
Sara’s poetry is one of those windows that allows us to see.
David Brazil
In the title to David Brazil’s Praxis, Apostles!, there’s an exclamation mark, which I can only sound by an attempt at enthusiastic tone, I can’t fully indicate that it’s there. This is an academic venue after all, speech must be proper and objective and flattened. This isn’t just a flippant point, I hope – I feel that that exclamation mark is key to the spirit of David’s work – the combination of those terms, one associated with the Marxist critical-activist tradition, of making thought equal to action, action equal to thought, one from a more unexpected source within Anglophone leftist poetics, that of the Pauline tradition – but here David is working with the theorisation of the early Christian church as a revolutionary group within the imperium of ancient Rome, one you found in Badiou, in Agamben, and in a more obscure, but nonetheless vital source, which brings in the Jewish tradition as well, Jacob Taubes beautiful and complex Political Theology of Paul. And then that exclamation mark – a sense of urgency, of humour, even of self-deprecation. This is a poetry where David will quote Destiny’s child one moment, then turn it into a profound politico-theological point about naming and calling, say my name, say my name; where the millenerian, terrifying, ecstatic, unbearably sad and moving music of Albert Ayler’s Holy Ghost meets the technical feat of David’s translations from St Paul.
David’s Christian faith is one acutely aware of what he calls “the many wounds that imperial Christian hegemony continues to inflict.” It’s a faith based on the need to radically challenge white supremacy, cis-hetero-patriarchy, through deeds as well as words or thoughts. Praxis, in other words. This has to do with reading, with study, and David and Sara both are great scholars, involved with a whole range of traditions and histories and attempts to rethink what pedagogy and what learning together might mean. In a recent sermon on anti-fascism, David talks about wrestling with writing, with reading, in relation to Scripture, in his words, “in the hopes that, like Jacob who becomes Israel after wrestling with that angel, we come out in the end with our proper names.” This wrestling is not one of the violence of conflict and the assertion of power, but of the struggle which is love. David in the same sermon talks about attacks on anti-fa, on the black bloc: he rehearses the idea that there is no such thing as the singular anti fa or the black bloc, they’re tactics, not parties or stable political formations. David emphasizes that anti-fascists exist because fascists exist. Something needs to be done to resist them. Here’s where praxis comes in again. David says:
One of the greatest crimes of the imperial church, the church since Constantine that has been in collusion with the state right down to the present, has been to spiritualize the gospel until we believe that the cross, that our cross, is some pietistic metaphor. It’s not. It’s what we’re called to do that’s hard, that’s impossibly hard.
Poetry too is about metaphor, how, as its etymological root indicates, it travels, it translates, carries across, keeping alive the flame of what, once again in Sara’s work I was calling revolutionary memory. Can the word alone resurrect those dead to law? No, but its praxis can. David Brazil.
[D.G.]
D.S. Marriott Introduction
Materials Reading Series, Tuesday 24th April 2018
Born in Nottingham of Jamaican parentage, D.S. Marriott studied at the University of Sussex, where he completed a Ph.D on the work of J.H. Prynne in 1993. Moving to the United States in 2004, where he continues to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Marriott has written the important critical books On Black Men and Haunted Life; Whither Fanon is forthcoming this year. His books of poetry include Dogma, Incognegro, Hoodoo Voodoo, In Neuter and Duppies.
Marriott’s recent work in Duppies – of which copies are available at the back of the room – focuses on the politics and poetics of grime, containing poems after grime artists Wiley, Stormzy and Dizzee Rascal, among others. In the author’s words, these poems:
Pay deliberate attention to the debased – and misunderstood – aspects of black and white working class grime culture in London; an attempt at a kind of grime prosody, whether imagined though Eski beats, multicultural London English (MLE), cockney rhyming, or sino techno formal experimentation.
Understanding the language of grime as a form of “sino techno formal experimentation”, Marriott refuses the class-based separation of political work from technical experimentation, insisting that experimentation happens in grime as much as it does in the poetic “avant-garde”.
Misunderstood by and sometimes virtually incomprehensible to the white mainstream, the position of grime culture both reflects the traps of social exclusion and suggests the possibility of a politicised reclamation of language, with grime slang as a counter-language to standard English: a space of potential and performative subversion. In the book’s preface, Marriott writes: “[Grime] expels paigons with a fierce rigour and method in which only the coldest excel”: that’s pagans, spelled “p-a- i-g- o-n- s”: a fake, a liar, someone who betrays their friends. Recently, Stormzy described Theresa May as a “paigon”, generating a media storm: the antagonistic group formations named in grime as the police and the “gang” enter the broader political stage from which they always emerged.
For Marriott, “Grime is post-work and post-brexit, its riddims respond to the necessity in which I exist”. If grime is “post-work”, that which happens after the nine-to-five, it is also “post-brexit”, registering the climate of racism that vote triggered, or rather, exacerbated, and harking back to the 2011 riots sparked by the police murder of Mark Duggan. Once more: “Grime is payback for n-words and down-lows. It has dominion but no license for each dissolve is charged with an asbo.” Marriott suggests that grime could serve as a form of revenge for demonization by means of “n-words” and “asbos”: the controversial anti-social behaviour orders, in use from 1998 to 2015, which prevented those convicted of anti-social behaviours from swearing or drinking in public, or from entering certain places – criminalisation by stealth. He continues: “What [grime] gives has neither use-value nor beauty”. Grime is neither “beautiful” nor of conventional ‘use’, but instead offers “the unknown” and “possibility”. The fact that grime “proceeds without ties or duplicity” means that it refuses identification or pigeonholing, and that attempts at definition from the outside do it a violence which it refuses. This is not music that asks for, or requires, empathy; both internalising and refusing the interpellations of the police and state apparatus, it does not rest on value judgements of beauty and aesthetic work entangled with systems of domination. And neither does Marriott’s poetry. D.S. Marriott.
[D.G.]
introductions for mayday rooms reading saturday 17th march
LISA JESCHKE
Lisa co-runs Materials with me, and the German sister branch MATERIALIEN, who have published a translation of Frances Kruk’s pin by Koshka Duff. She lives in Munich, and commutes to Kiel, but as many of you know, lived here for a number of years before that. She’ll be known to lots of you for her theatre work with Lucy Beynon, an astonishing series of pieces over the last few years including David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife Songs, which was published by Shit Valley Press, and The Tragedy of Theresa May, which is forthcoming from Tipped Press, and I think they’re working on a new piece now. But she is also a truly excellent poet. Lisa is deeply attentive to the history of theatre, the history of language, the complicities and complexities of poetic figuration, the extreme moral impurity of a fierce and funny and vital ethical commitment. Her first book, Dead Cheap, came out around four years ago, I think, and contained some astonishing pieces in poetry and prose with the characteristic combination of total rigour and complete obscenity. The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women, the long-awaited follow up, is coming out from MATERIALS some time soon. Here, a smiley face sits next to a guillotine, a German word next to an English one, should I or should I not marry Donald Trump, where is Chelsea Manning, Caster Semenya is the greatest 800m runner of the current era, fuck the AfD. This poetry is obsessive, funny and rude, dead serious and almost always right. I’m very pleased to welcome Lisa Jeschke.
[D.G.]
SAM SOLOMON
Sam Solomon is director of the centre for sexual dissidence at the university of sussex, where he has been on strike! He is one of the translators of the poetry of Celia Dropkin, and his book on socialist feminism and british poetry is coming out from Bloomsbury later this year – denise riley, wendy mulford, veronica forrest-thomson, a vital work on these neglected histories. The combination of attention to the materiality of language and the intersections of radical politics is one that carries over into his poetry. Special Subcommittee just recently came out from Commune, and collects several years of work, including his previous pamphlet, Life of Riley, which was published by Bad Press a few years ago now, alongside the poems that give the book its title. These poems use language taken from official records –FBI files and anti-communist congressional hearings – forcing it to register what is hidden in the plain sight of mendacious public language, shooting it through with a lyric voice sentimentally unsentimentally concerned with family, friends, love, queer desire, and the hatred of capitalism. It is beautiful and necessary. Sam Solomon.
[D.G.]
Materials Reading, Cambridge: Sean Bonney (24th February 2018)
For years, Sean Bonney’s poems would appear almost daily on his blog, Abandoned Buildings, alongside collages, stills from films, lists of music and books, and notes on poetics. Reading Bonney’s blog posts, particularly at the moments of political crisis to which his work has often responded like no one else’s, was something like reading the news: bulletins, not only of Bonney’s reading in revolutionary traditions, from Rimbaud to the Angry Brigade to Amiri Baraka to Karl Marx to Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, but bulletins of where we were, of how poetic tradition and the political moment might connect up, like points on a map, or Benjaminian constellations, stretching into the past and the future.
Among Bonney’s key earlier works included the typewritten translations of Baudelaire in English – in which he wrote through the supreme 19th century poet of the city, who was similarly writing at a time of revolutionary upheaval and “urban regeneration” – and his long sequence of mutant sonnets, The Commons: a kind of urban pastoral, fusing the sounds of funk, folk, anti-fascism in a spasmodic and beautiful ferocity. Following these, he turned to Arthur Rimbaud in the 2011 book Happiness. Written at the time of the student movement and the London Riots, Bonney here proved himself to have his finger of the pulse of contemporary politics in a way practically unmatched by anyone else writing at the time.
Happiness was always an ironic title, but an irony throbbing with the rage and splenetic brilliance of utter commitment. Since then, Bonney’s work has turned, in the writing of a series of prose letters collected in Letters against the Firmament, and continued in his in-progress sequence Our Death, to more constricted spaces: negative cosmologies in which particular points of political data or cultural reference connect to astrology, mathematics, alchemy and the occult in a scale at once microscopically constricted and impossibly vast. These are attempts to chart historical events in the face of enforced passivity, inertia and fear – what he calls “the square root of silence, fast acquiesence and bewilderment”. Bonney earlier wrote: “As it currently stands, every city on the surface of the planet is occupied territory.” And that remains true. As the title to Bonney’s recent book Letters against the Firmament suggests, resistance to capital has become resistance to the entire heavenly sphere: in the oft-cited aphorism credited to Fredric Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
But this does not mean that defeat is total. Bonney’s recent work charts what it is to like to live in conditions of defeat, of crisis, of terror, yet it manages to manifest a hope which does not refuse pessimism, does not refuse sorrow, does not refuse suffering. As he has recently written: “It puts me in mind of a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, where she speaks of exile, of feeling like a dead person, of languages that you can’t understand passing through you like ghosts. And I guess those ghosts exist at the point where “tradition” and “strangeness” meet, where all that is defined and foul and murdered and imprisoned becomes synonymous with all that is still uncharted and unexplained and wonderful.” Bonney’s poems are like that. Like “marks on a calendar” or “the beginnings of a map”, they are vital indices of where we are. Sean Bonney.
[D.G.]
[Introduction also posted at Gods of the Plague]
[2017]
Poetry Performance Series, 03.03.2017
Linda Kemp
Is a poet and musician based in Sheffield. She is the founder of the DIY publishing press and record label enjoy your homes press, and her book Lease Prise Redux was published by Materials last year.
Lease Prise Redux is a book of sixty-four sonnets. It is very much a political book, but not one which wears its politics in clear agitational pose. Instead, it possesses what Stuart Calton has described as “a cumulative impact which slowly seeps in, like a kaleidoscope of slow-moving debt, arrears and social smallness.” These poems are, indeed, small, tight, compact, but their sheer volume lends them a kind of inexorable, grid-like structure: each individual poem is necessary to the whole, and must be understood in the context of that whole. Perhaps we could liken the book to a block of precariously-rented flats or houses, its tenants squeezed and pressured in, constricted and demonized in their allowed social poses, their possibilities to ‘gainfully’ reproduce their labour in order to gain the money merely to eat, merely to live and survive. Kemp’s book forces us to understand that constriction and expansion are not just formal terms for talking about verse patterns, as if something like ‘the sonnet’, or ‘metre’, or ‘rhyme’, were somehow disconnected little pods, or monads, of pure formalism, formal purity. Rather, Lease Prise Redux uses sometimes all, sometimes some, sometimes none of these ‘formal’ tools as tools of urgent political argument, where politics is understood as the lived experience and the very real material need of those not often given a voice in the seminar room.
expansion is imminent risk when choice
over the lakey
know this
greater precariousness
end-stops ever
Kemp questions the tools of financialized value and evaluation which place the profit-drive of controlling and apportioning out space at the expense, not only of so-called ‘quality of life’, but of the actual survival of the lives of real human beings, living and dying in houses or on the streets outside the buildings they cannot afford to inhabit. This is a bleak poetry in some ways, but it is also a poetry which, because it is about these questions of survival, must survive those conditions, must help us to survive them. And this even when surviving itself can seem a kind of living death. A specific set of lines have haunted me since I first encountered these poems around a year ago. In these lines, the conditional structure of the phrasing both beautifully and brutally suspends itself over the line breaks through and in which this speech ends and begins again, anxiously breaking out into whatever future we are ‘allowed’ or, better yet, can take.
If
anxiety is order
the day drifts &
value is bricks & mortar.
If to carry on is not to
I am very pleased to introduce Linda Kemp.
[DG]
Verity Spott
(N.B. Unused Introduction)
Is a poet and musician based in Brighton, and the author of Trans* Manifestos (Shit Valley, 2016) Gideon (Barque Press, 2014), Balconette (Veer Books, 2014), Dear Nothing and No One In It and Effort to No (Iodine, 2013). She runs Iodine press and Horseplay. Click Away Close Door Say has just been published by Contraband Books, and another book of lyric poems, written with Tim Thornton, is due from Face Press. Verity is also editing the poetry of Arlen Riley Wilson.
In Verity’s voluminous work, lyric fractures and is fractured by violent acts of interpellation, noise, interference, feedback: as she puts it, “a monstrous / terror waiting inside, in / those cruel and beautiful notes”. I use these sonic metaphors advisedly: Verity is an improvising musician of great skill, and her approach to poetry is often informed by this. Yet what I’m here terming fracture manifests in both sonic and visual form: symbols that might at first appear unvocalisable, invocations of creatures and divinities of chaos, a mise-en-page that veers between page-straddling long lines and broken shards of tabbed fragment.
Verity’s book-length poem GIDEON was a hex on former chancellor George Osborne and considers the limits of political violence, figurations of revenge, of purges, of solidarity. CLICK AWAY CLOSE DOOR SAY, just published, is another book length poem, written in and of work in mental health services. These are crucial poems, in which discursive limits break in and out of the text, marking the physical wounds that discourse enacts, literalising them, eviscerating them, satirical and tender and necessary.
Verity’s work appears on her blog, Two Torn Halves, with great frequency, sometimes daily, so that the poems can seem something like news items, bulletins of where we are, in all the rage and despair that condition entails. Is this “News that stays news”? Or might we reject the injunctions towards a Fascist conception of temporality that this Poundian formulation might imply, especially now? I think that rather, what we can say is that Verity has evolved an approach which, in its capacious moving across lyric, prose, essay, quotation, song and noise, is broad enough to be as reactive as the times demand. In particular, she has developed a prose style, manifested perhaps most notably in the Trans* Manifestos published last year by Shit Valley press, in which texts that are something like essays are constantly disrupted by the explosion and expulsion of poetic fracture. Poetry here functions not as lyric coherence but as a kind of shattering into noise which disrupts the flow of argumentation and the formal architecture of phrase-making through consonant sound-patterning. As she writes: “How form adopts us; absorbed into it on every level, how in that case it becomes unattainable; all movements unsustainable.”
Both coherence and disruption risk falsity; it is only through their dialectical interaction that the poem can proceed with the necessary, unstinting fidelity to what we could name as truth. Verity is a lyric poet of sometimes heart-breaking musicality and of tender and fierce directness, and this is not to be separated or distinguished from the languages of violence and resistance. As she writes in Trans* Manifestos: “I don’t want allies, I want accomplices.” To finish, these lines, at once benediction and curse, from her poem ‘A Little Reverie’, dedicated to the poet Sean Bonney in a gesture of militant friendship:
And I will tear down anyone who hurts you
And I will strangle the world that shot you in the brain
And I will summon storms
And hold you
And chaos will burn from my fingers.
And I will strangle the world that shot you in the brain
And I will summon storms
And hold you
And chaos will burn from my fingers.
Verity Spott. [DG]
Verity Spott
(Introduction used for Reading)
A specific strain of left poetry, or poems using left aesthetics, or left as aesthetics has left me feeling like the aesthetic has been anesthetised. Trawling through that which is left of the left (in poetry) has come to be a principle and a political act. Verity’s A Short Essay on How to Make Your Poetry More Marxy speaks directly to this discomfort. It acknowledges certain privileges in & over language. Verity writes ‘in that which sounds like it might have something to do with Marxism, but is yet marked by a seething or dulling (etc.) abstraction that reduces it to merely being 'Marxy' - marked (as in beast) by its Marxyness. It is not just about using tropes and frameworks that are reduced to a kind of dullness—I’d take it further to say it’s an act of violence. Language is robbed, as is the struggle. Reduced assimilated syllabic matter.
When she says ‘The Muse is obviously essential. It's best if the Muse is contained within the brevity of an unnamed woman and/or an unnamed civilian caught up in conflict’ she’s pointing to the ugly question about agency. The kind of ugly that makes people say ‘why must you make it about race’. What is the difference between the unnamed-civilian-in-a-conflict and a photo of the naked black child by the dirty canal in the Aid for Africa poster? What is ethical principle behind such affect creation? I don’t have to tell you about agency (of the marginalised) against systemic, structural oppression, and reduction is a form of oppression. Can we allow poetry to become a part of this structure? This is why Verity’s critique is important, and extremely urgent.
Couldn’t I just be happy that people mean well? They are writing from the right of the barricades after all. Well, no. If you don’t see it, well, you don’t.
David Grundy in his piece on Verity uses the phrase ‘militant friendship’ – I like it quite a lot, and here’s my version of it ‘militant friendship & critical solidarity’. There can be no solidarity without critical interference, and thank you, Verity, for this interference.
[J.A.]
Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon
In a recent introduction to Lisa Jeschke’s translations of Ulf Stolterfoht’s Nine Drugs, J.H. Prynne suggested that what is remarkable in Stolterfoht’s work is the ‘pressure’ it exerts on the German language. This pressure might be necessary if the ‘life of this language’ is to be sustained. When someone like Angela Merkel speaks, ‘she speaks a boring language and more or less a dead language’, says Prynne. This matter of pressure is one to which Lisa and Lucy’s work speaks. But if they exert language-pressure it is, rather, in order to reveal the latent political pressures that are already at work in conditioning the way we speak. Merkel’s language is not only ‘boring’ and ‘dead’, it is violently coercive.
When, at the beginning of Lisa and Lucy’s work, The Tragedy of Theresa May, Lucy, the ‘successful impersonator’ of Theresa May, uses a word like ‘love’ to describe her relationship to Volker – an ‘impaired’ worker, played by Lisa – and when Lisa, as Volker, responds with the relentless refrain ‘I love you […] love you… love you… love you…love… to work… for you’, ‘love’ is made to mean two very different things. Or, rather, ‘love’ is a word that measures the success of its speaker. May’s response to Volker’s outburst is not swooning, but reevaluation: ‘You have upset my expectations’, she says, ‘and I have to re-evaluate your status. Perhaps this won’t work out after all.’ Volker’s success is dependent on her submission to May, ‘love’ is already a coerced word in her mouth, and used improperly, used too fast for May’s timing, used to ‘[steal] the show’, it will cost Volker May’s love, and his job.
Using the word ‘love’ properly, according to May, is also using it impersonally. When Volker is finally fired for a combination of poor performance and for telling another worker how much she is paid, May claims: ‘it is not personal’. But Volker wants it to be personal: ‘I want it to be personal!’, he says, ‘Our love was personal to me!’. Love, our love, Volker thought they shared the word, but May, after all an ‘impersonator’, had emptied all the person out of it. It would take some serious pressure to reinsert the person into our personal language. It would, for example, take some pressure to hear an actual ‘you’ in Theresa May’s First Statement as Prime Minister: “we’ll think not of the powerful, but you […] we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you. […] we’ll prioritise not the wealthy, but you.”
Volker’s ‘you’ is a deeply personal one – it is fired at the person behind the mask. It is enough to slay the figure of Theresa May. And, even, to hold her accountable for that death. This is a ‘significant [act]’, to borrow from Danny Hayward’s review of Lisa and Lucy’s previous political work, David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife Songs. It is significant because it does violence as much to me as it does to you, to use ‘love’ or ‘me’ or ‘you’ personally. Those close parts of language are where the knife twists the worst, but the pain caused might be necessary if we are to feel, rather than remain immune to, the possible ways in which language might pressure and be pressured. I will leave you with Volker’s killer-outburst at the end of the play: ‘YOU WERE NEVER GOING TO DIE OF SOMEONE ELSE, YOU WERE GOING TO DIE OF YOU! JUST LIKE THE REST OF US! WE ALL DIE OF YOU! GET DOWN! DIE BITCH! IT IS FOR YOU TO DIE NOW! THESE ARE YOUR TERMS!’ Lisa and Lucy over to you.
[R.V.H.][2]
[2] [Further Thoughts: The revelation of mechanism is something that thinks back to Beckett. Volker’s speeches are part borrowed from the ‘Mouth’ in Not I, but they also, I think, make recourse to Lucky’s ‘thinking’ stream in Waiting for Godot. The figure of oppression, Pozzo, is abstracted by the time it gets to the blacked-out torture-chair in which Billy Whitelaw played ‘Mouth’, but that invisibility makes it no less pernicious./ Volker = people; Ute = wealth]
Poetry Performance Series, 10.02.2017
Stuart Calton
Stuart Calton lives in Manchester, and s the author of the following books: Sheep Walk Cut (2003), United Snap Up (2004), The Bench Graft (2004), The Corn Mother (2006), Three Reveries (2010), The Torn Instructions for No Trebuchet (2013), Live at Late Dilated Ileum (2015), and Blepharospasms (2016). As a musician, he is the incomparable dictophonist TFH Drenching.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that Stuart’s work as a poet in particular to me has seemed some of the most vital and important of the past, I don’t know, ten years. In its concern with the interstices – to put it crudely – of the personal and the political, it interrogates, through a ruthless and unsentimental exploration of the self, the politics that shape that self, the social forces lived consciously and unconsciously, through which harm and pain are passed down. But this is not done through a poetry of dourness, or misery. Instead, objects morph and fly around in narratives of speedy and dazzlingly inventive precision which attest to Calton’s skill as a musician.
When he read in Cambridge in 2013, he began, not with his own work, but with ‘Against Bourgeois Art’, one of Amiri Baraka’s Marxist-Leninist poems from the 1970s. Though this served as a preface to his own poem, The Torn Instructions for No Trebuchet, which in part attacks the Stalinism of Baraka’s poem, he also clung to the unfashionably Marxist didacticism and excoriating satire of Baraka’s intensely politicised work. His own work doesn’t function in quite the same way.
It is a poetry which does not wear its ambition on its sleeve. There is something modest about it, and I do not mean this in a pejorative sense, nor do I mean to suggest that it is not thrillingly, almost ecstatically virtuosic, which it emphatically is. But this is not simply a poetry of surface, though that surface is dazzling. Deeply informed by readings in both psychoanalysis and Marxism – Calton describes himself on his website as a “left Kleinian” – as well as his involvement in left-wing activism, Calton’s poetry takes dream work seriously, even if it at times assumes a parodic usage of psychoanalytic vocabulary, what Calton calls the “rabbit-out-of-a-hat quality of psychoanalytic explanation.” In part, Calton writes about his own psychic life, the very personal dreamscape of his own unconscious. He makes no pretensions about the significance of doing this, does not do it to laud his own experience, to elevate it to the rank of the poetic genius, set apart from others by the particular quality of their vision, their attention – or, in the worst version of this model – the particular quality of their self.
His new book, Wimpy and André, has just been published by MATERIALS press, and copies are available TONIGHT. Wimpy and André is a poem in ten sections, setting forth the interrelations between protagonists Wimpy, Climpy, Sandy and André, in a potentially infinite selection of mixed scenarios. Amongst other sounds, the poem includes the sounds of a car alarm, the thin barking of a radically rationalised trick poultice, a shout, a voice, silence, static, galloping and The Lark Ascending played triple-speed nine octaves up like rain on a steel bin-lid over a rave synth line.
Calton has said:
I wanted to move to a place where almost anything could be said and made to function profitably. Or at least where I could seem to be saying “anything”, in a game of bluff-calling and trust-testing with the reader.
This game of trust and bluff is one that comes with high risks. This is part of the poem’s excitement. And Calton can invariably pull off what he attempts.
In 2015, I wrote this about Live at Late Dilated Ileum.
“The language of internal feeling and phantasy intersects in complex construct with a world of domestic appliances, electronic gadgets (including musical instruments), social spaces, night, exotic animals, sea creatures, the body’s internal organs, the language of left-wing political organising as a critical undercurrent. It is a poetry which manifests a near-instinctive capacity for skilled prosodic composition, live and urgent, playful and alarming, sucker-punches and pressure points, enclosure and exposure, containment and claustrophobia, language at full fever-pitch ramming itself up against self-appointed walls in a pleasurable play of stricture and selectively deployed release.”
More recently, Keston Sutherland has written that that Blepharospasms is a poem
“madly trying again and again actually to hack its way out of paralysis and grab hold of a life that is obscurely out of reach. It is a poem about what can’t be done, about not being able to do things, or do things right, including things that poems ought to be able to do but can’t. […] It is a militant, delirious and radically incautious poem, motivated by an unflinching commitment to try not to cover up or extinguish the evidence of its debt to an unconscious origin.”
Wimpy and André, which I believe began as something of a “footnote” to, or development of a particular aspect of Blepharospasms, perhaps does something different again. In any case, you’ll now see for yourself. Stuart Calton.
[D.G.]
John DeWitt
Near the beginning of ‘Good Old Testament’, the first poem in the 2013 pamphlet, Visceral Apocrypha, John writes ‘we will totally disappear but the good news is on archive’. John’s poetry reads like it’s both broadcasting ‘good news’ – ‘Future man has gone public’ (he writes in the pamphlet Ends) – and simultaneously re-viewing its own language ‘on archive’.
Ends, his first pamphlet, published in 2011, lingers in this future perfect space: in a ‘fantasy cumulus’, a ‘chamber of potential / so pure / like shot dimensions’. The dimensions of this poem’s bleached chambers are both ‘pure’ with ‘potential’ and already dead and gone, they are ‘shot’, on record. Its language is viewed as in ‘retrospect’ – ‘In retrospect I was Headed’, he writes. John’s trade-mark neologisms and syntactical torsions are back-catalogued at the moment they twist into view, as: ‘an extinct / language fleshes out / honing through / this thin clarity’ (to cite from the poem). Because, only through the ‘thin clarity’ of ‘retrospect’ can the bones of a future language be brought back to life from extinction. Overleaf from this line on extinction, floats a piece of dead language’s resurrected debris. The portmanteau word ‘withstance’. ‘Withstance’ both withstands and keeps its distance. Only viewed at a distance – say, through the eyes of ‘Future man’ (this poem’s only, lonely character) – can its potential afterlife as an archived word from 2011 become visible.
I personally think Future man will have an archive of John’s words, because like ‘good news’, or good newnesses, good novelties, they have the feel of something that should have been but wasn’t, something ‘extinct’ before it got out. They also have the feel of something arcane, a well-kept secret. ‘[S]ecret scratches on secret’, he writes near the beginning of Ends, and then finishes the poem off with the lines: ‘the gift saved for / when I need it most / hidden in the tooth.’
John’s poetry has changed a lot since the future of Ends in 2011, because like ‘good news’ it keeps moving. Reading his work from then to now is like watching a TV turn from monochrome to colour. The ‘grey air’ (to cite Ends) of his earlier work has been exed for the technicolour of living. He writes in ‘Good Old Testament’ in 2013: ‘The movie people will do / just about anything for you –– stay alive / to be honest get on boat and fall out of single color.’ If the ‘dimensions’ of Ends had been ‘shot’ in a ‘chamber’, this more recent work roams through the movie-sets of Hollywood. Its ‘archive’ is full of first-takes, miss-takes, things accidentally shot, and corrected. In ‘Good Old Testament’ there are the lines ‘Shoot for versatile / corrected Versailles is in / the boonies’. The word ‘versatile’ autocorrects to ‘Versailles’, but not the French Versailles, the American one – the U.S.’s largest private residence, located out in ‘the boonies’ of Florida. Or perhaps rather than the autocorrect of a computer, ‘versatile’ was in fact an odd voicing of ‘Versailles’, ‘Versailles’ with an accent, like someone trying on the word for the first time. A little later in the same poem, we hear the lines: ‘Wait for the Passover market to pay / for your late night accent’.
John is a man from Nashville, Tennessee, living and writing in Paris. He spent his childhood in Mexico, and wrote Ends while living in Uruguay. He has spent the last five years teaching English on the side. ‘So yeah I’m naked’, he writes in the ‘Jolly Rancher’ (in Visceral Apocrypha), ‘I live in the U.S. / and spend all my time in Uruguay, France / constantly impressed with the Zulus’. John’s poetry is also an ‘archive’ of glorious experiments in a second language. The kind of ‘withstance’ it promises is certainly not monolingual. His English is conquered by other tongues. He writes in ‘Good Old Testament’: ‘there must be a conquistador tucked away somewhere / in my soul patch.’ Spanish works on the soul of the words printed in Visceral Apocrypha. At the heart of this pamphlet are John’s translations of the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño. The first poem takes Vilariño as its soul conquistador. It reads: ‘Neither delicately / nor carefully. / Maybe / go on / break your animal.’ The last line, a translation of ‘romperse el alma’, ‘break your heart’ or ‘soul’ in the Spanish, becomes ‘break your animal’ in translation, because ‘alma’ sounds like ‘animal’ in collapse, ‘animal’ in text speak, ‘animal’ as a fudged anagram. But also because ‘animal’ might be a kind of extinct future for ‘alma’. As he writes in the list of ‘Selected Terms of Use’, included at the end of the translation, under the word ‘alma’: ‘The soul is taken for a person, a sensitive brute.’
Perhaps we all hide animals (‘sensitive’ brutes) in our almas, waiting to be un-archived in translation. At any rate, John invites us to try out that extinct feeling or hearing of ‘soul’, our anima our ‘animal’. John’s poetry – from which I’ve cited Ends (2011), and Visceral Apocrypha (2013), but which also includes Buildings (written with me in 2012), and forthcoming works like The Neckless Spokesperson (performed here last February) – extends invitations to try out words for the future past. It is, as he puts it, in the ‘Jolly Rancher’, a kind of ‘ancience, sci-fi’. To cite one last invitation, also from the ‘Jolly Rancher’: ‘just imagine / you’re John and take it poisonally. / You like difficulty? Try these socks’. Over to the man in the socks, I’m excited to welcome, John DeWitt.
[R.V.H.]
Caitlín Doherty
The final poem in Caitlín’s new pamphlet Our Party, begins: ‘2 cashpoints shout / over market square: “DAS DING DINGT” / abject history of / collation becoming keepers’. The announcement, “DAS DING DINGT” ‘the thing things’ is pilfered from Heidegger, but was immortalized by the Vienna School as an instance of philosophical nonsense: what can the ‘thing things’ possibly mean? It tinkles ‘DING DING’ in the poem, like a piece of commercialized philosophical tat, shouted by a pair of cashpoints. But it is also dangerous thought in this poem. Because it comes to mean something like ‘das Ding denkt’, ‘the thing thinks’. The thing thinks itself beyond itself, the ‘thing’ outthinks itself into a conceptual version of itself: the ‘thing’ is really just a ‘collation’ of all the shitty objects of the world, but it promotes itself to the ‘keeper’ of that worldly shit. The ‘abject history of / collation becoming keepers’, then, is also the abjection of objects under Things or Dings. Overleaf we read an exchange between ‘Thing’ and ‘object’: ‘Thing takes object by the hand and says: / I am your institution and your source; I / am you without a function and am in you till your end. Object cries a lot.’ ‘Thing’, here, is also abstract labour, specifically female labour.
All the functions are given over to the poem’s feminized objects, its feminine abjects. The pamphlet’s protagonist is ‘ELLE-LA-MACHINE’ – either a kind of superwoman ‘worker [bee]’ of the fashion industry, or a she-machine, a ‘rusty’ photocopier. She has ‘notes’ and ‘tones’, she ‘is overproductive and splits each cell she meets’. She ‘splits each cell’ because she, too, is subject to, what the poem calls, ‘time in capital’. Women are objects, abjects, machines, mass quantities. As Caitlín writes: ‘we just lost our rights to not say yes to work / so as a yes woman, one of millions, I say we stand / on mountainous Issues and envelope ourselves’. Like a letter to the tyrant of abstraction, these women ‘envelope’ themselves as a work of resistance.
Prosopopeia is a persistent, and unexpected, political strategy in Caitlín’s work. It can make the dead, or those who are handled like dead meat, dead objects, live. It can give voice to their thinking and feeling. The ‘Ding’ might think he thinks well, but it is ‘das Objekt’ that is doing all the political ‘denken’ in these lines. This strategy persists from Caitlín’s first pamphlet, Satellites (2012), to her most recent work, Our Party, written five years on. Between now and then, I have carried a single line in my head, which I find incredibly moving. It is the last line of the second poem in the pamphlet, and reads: ‘I love you & they have miscalculated’. This poem, ‘On the Collision of Iridium-33 with Kosmos 2251’, a U.S. and Russian satellite that collided over Siberia in 2009, is one of the most spectacular contemporary love lyrics I have read. The poem is built around a refraining play on the near-homonyms of ‘fool’ and ‘fall’. Each of us are fools for thinking we fall the hardest. In the second stanza we hear: ‘your glow / is limitless horizon & / I cannot stop the way you fall / as I fall quick behind you / shine at me / you glint so well / that I am fooled in silence’. Then later ‘shine at me / I am a fool & / in the silence you / glint so well’. And at the end: ‘shine at me / I am your fool / & know when we collide / the sky will white and / hot ash will fall across America’.
These satellites on a collision course are not analogies for human love. Their ‘curvature’ is ‘beyond analogy’, as Caitlín puts it in ‘To Laika’. Their love is more real than our love. Their love whites ‘hot ash’. We can learn something from the Satellites. The last page of Satellites has the lines: ‘they do it so much better / than we could but with / more spite and no fear of / the vertical ambition o’. We are their Satellites – their satelles, ‘attendants’, ‘followers’, ‘underlings’. And this attendance reminds us that the sky is a political space. Again in ‘To Laika’, she writes: ‘the real colonizers look up and / down’. Politics is looking where you’re not – say, at ‘the test dummy of the underground worker / who cannot be trusted not to breathe wildly up there’ – trying to make itself invisible. Which is why looking (or attending) better might be in itself a political work. Caitlín writes in Our Party: ‘A domestic woman is a builder. / Social change is / practicable in small movements. / Attention is drawn / and I am brightly aware of my existing shortcomings’. We might all become more brightly aware of our existing shortcomings if we allow our attention to be drawn in by Caitlín’s work. Without further ado, I’m excited to welcome, Caitlín Doherty.
[R.V.H.]
[2016]
Poetry Performance Series, 26.11.2016
Naomi Weber
Naomi Weber’s lyric sequence Very Lonely Animals, just out from Materials press, sprawls across its pages in slabs of delicate observation, shying away from the objects it half-presents to our attention, on coasts, in the sunlight, working through the condition of innerness and outerness, fragmentation and totality, those quasi-mystical modernist themes tempered with dashes of what sound like theology, and the delicate affections or affectations of vernacular speech peaking through. To me, what it offers contains a kind of accessible evasion, a shying away that is not rebarbative or hostile, nor the studied “luminous detail” of a particular kind of wrought, mystic Modernism, but that sings it own song, almost to itself, from just off-centre. So that these poems have the feeling of being overheard, though not quite in Mill’s sense of lyric – the fitting of the right object to the innermost workings of a private consciousness, the “exact shape” of solitude and confession – nor his sense of the communicative outflowing of its apparent opposite, eloquence. Rather, there is a voice passing through here, fixed in snapshots that dissolve or that offer themselves for further inspection, gently overlapping, the sea in the shell in the ear. The locations of these poem are wide open, seas and coasts, rooms in which people nestle and seek protection, but from which they pereptually seem to be on the verge of leaving: the line ripens in sounds unfolding within and across the break, lulling or obscuring. And there is a catch in the tone which won’t stay but moves on, yet catches us on its gentle reiteration, catches us off-guard.
“This world we love and keep our love in keeps
Tearing our hands
The shreds around nails dragging behind
Looking around for gazes to meet
Digging bone to neighbourly flesh
God help me I am trying to be kind
But what other worlds have you given us
To serve, says a secret prayer”
Naomi Weber.
[D.G.]
Rosa Van Hensbergen
Rosa van Hensbergen’s work across genres is one of the singularly impressive things going on today: often surprising, sometimes perplexing invention, turns of phrase that spin webs of reference and intricate play, all shot through with streaks of sometimes jolting alarm. As, among other things, a practitioner and scholar of the Japanese avant-garde dance form butoh, it would be tempting to draw too easy parallels between her work in different art forms: nonetheless, this widening and spreading out of concern is a part of her work, whether its in her editorial and publishing guise with The Paper Nautilus magazine, dedicated to women’s writing, and with Tipped Press, an imprint with which she has put out a number of exquisite books, their binding hand-stitched, their paper hand-made. Last year she curated an ambitious, week-long series of performance events in the Drama Studio under the title In: Finite Variety, which included one of the more spectacular uses I’ve seen of this space, transformed into a post-apocalyptic landscape in a kind of poets’ theatre collaboration with the poet John De Witt.
She is the author, amongst other things, of an extraordinary verse novel Lights Out to Love in HD, in which dramas of familial tension play out into and across a futuristic narrative of technological surveillance, gameplay and identification, sexuality and culture clash; the disturbingly and exquisitely framed poems of Some New Growth at the Temple or Lobe, published by Critical Documents; and, most recently, the discursive and bitingly humorous poems of In Accident and Emergence: For Disasters for the Head and Heart and Hemisphere, published by Veer books, where, as in Gizem Okulu’s work, collages sit alongside and against poems; where emergency becomes emergence becomes emergency, urgently cut through with sparks that light up then burn away: matches, neon, fireworks, strip-lights, red lights, eerie phosphorescence: all of the lights, all aquiver, all aglow.
In these poems, writes William Rowe:
“The duration of affect, in an unusual, intense and precise way, [is] precise in relation to space, in fine equilibrium with the world and acute disequilibrium. Awareness of the body in space and perception of other bodies in space, their suffering. Desire for the destruction of what is and for the practice of care: sustaining that dialectic. The placing of that principle in trial by fire. And commitment to truth.”
Further: In Accident and Emergence maps the body (which is by no means here a singular thing, abstract category removed for further study) onto disasters present and historical: conflagrations such as the Great Fire of London, the urges of the pyromaniac, the will to destruction and the hovering threat of destructability, with a marked, unsafe humour flickering round the edges like the sputterings of a broken lightbulb. (This is the place to go, for example, if you want to find out whether or not you can consult your horoscope without reading Adorno.) Here is a sample:
“FIRE
SHOOT
RENT
the tournage
the glass
the window with falsetto
I’m gonna have you
hollering I’m gonna have you
hollering I’m gonna really have you
with delight and torrent
through the hulls
the corridors
tearing on
to the boiling point
between us
BLEVE”
And here is Rosa Van Hensbergen.
[D.G.]
Materials Reading Series, 08.07.2016
Lisa Jeschke & Lucy Beynon – The Tragedy of Theresa May
Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon make some of the most rigorous, moving and thoughtful theatre currently in existence. It is, necessarily and importantly, a shit theatre. It is a shit musical, a shit cabaret, a shit poetry reading, a shit dialogue of wrenching directness and relentless complexity. It is essential.
When I say that it their theatre is ‘thoughtful’, I do not mean that its operations of thought exist as some sort of ‘thought experiment’; but rather, that they exist as a process of engaging with lived contradiction which has material and political impacts. This is a kind of thought which is vital for how ‘we’ live now – and Jeschke and Beynon do nothing if they do not immensely problematise any kind of ‘we’ that would be immanent to theatre, whether in its proscenium arch repertory guise, or in the more fluffy liberal guise of participation, democratization and the like. When I say it their theatre is ‘moving’, I mean among other things that, as Jeschke has written, “violence moves”; that the issue of the movement of people is connected to violence and to exploitation; that manipulation and emotion and emotional manipulation exist; and that the expression of a solidarity of suffering – not an ‘empathy’, not a ‘sympathy’ – is a necessary ground for resistance.
Since Jeschke and Beynon first performed their new piece, The Tragedy of Theresa May, which they’ll be performing again tonight, its subject, the British Home Secretary Theresa May, currently in charge of immigration and the police, has assumed an even greater significance. In the wake of the recent EU referendum, it now seems highly likely that May will become the new Prime Minister of this country come autumn, negotiating in part, on the basis of restricting the free movement of peoples, under the slogan: “Brexit means Brexit.” Apparently she will not now try to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, a previous pledge. There are small mercies, moments when the Fascist tide momentarily holds back its onward flow. These are not moments into which we can or should relax. They are being and will continue to be outnumbered in vast quantities every day.
Theresa May is a member of the Church of England and worships regularly on Sundays. May voted against the fox hunting ban and the increasing of taxation on incomes of over £150,000. She voted for the Iraq War and reductions in spending on welfare benefits. In the past few days, I have kept returning to a photograph which depicts her speaking, teeth bared, behind the Tories’ 2005 anti-immigration slogan, both May and the slogan appealing to the ‘common sense’ of the archetypal little Englander. That slogan reads: “Are you thinking what we’re thinking”?
Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon are not, and they passionately resist the thoughts which form part of a ‘one nation’ policy based on cruelty, on suffering, on the perpetuation and exacerbation of violent exclusion. Their work engages in full, uncompromising analysis of the condition that the Tory slogan expresses, and that May – as embodiment and abstraction, as representative, as concentration of flesh, of economic, racial and class power – increasingly expresses more than most.
Danny Hayward has written of Jeschke and Beynon’s work that its “great accomplishment, throughout all of its vicissitudes and inevitable reverses, is that it makes the real inevitability of large collective acts feel undoubtable in a period in which the pressure to doubt them is ferocious and hatefully ubiquitous and unabating.” When I saw The Tragedy of Theresa May performed, in May, in Turkey, in the upstairs room of a bar, Jeschke at one point banged on a table, causing plaster to fall from the ceiling below. Some things can hardly be ignored. More than ever we cannot fall into a reactive silence, a stunned sorrow, the defeat of those who never saw this coming. Existing within, but also standing absolutely against what Hayward names as our present condition of ferocious and hatefully ubiquitous and unabating doubt and despair, Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon.
[D.G.]
David Grundy
I want to do something slightly strange and introduce David Grundy’s work by talking very specifically about a poem that may seem irrelevant to this occasion, a poem he wrote and published in 2012, called ‘Happy Now’. It came to my mind because in the way poems can sometimes communicate better with the past or future than the present, ‘Happy Now’ seems written exactly for now by fervently articulating an impossible-yet-indispensable demand for absolute solidarity before a single subject can count themselves happy, concluding with the nearly impossible yet necessary ‘& in the end what i wanted to say / was that i am so unhappy right now / becoz u are unhappy / & in my subjective universality / i love u / the whole human race / & i just want u too to / be happy with me / but i cant be happy / becoz ur not happy / & this is my love letter.’ For the poetic speaker to state that a poem which has just moved through various convulsions of thinking politically and philosophically about conditions of happiness, for the speaker to state that that poem actually constitutes a love letter is an act of confrontation against any love poetry that would remain cosy within its own four walls, that would imagine itself bound only by the presence of one other person, not the simultaneous existence of all other subjects. The poem reaches this end-point after having moved through a series of contortions and transformations in occupation and style: among other things, we find extended, awkward prose reflections, narrow verse columns, the juxtaposition of alternative and contradiction (‘Poetry makes us Happy, or Unhappy’), entirely unambiguous conclusions (‘Becoz yr happiness right now frankly sucks’), extended social argument (‘the object that contains or is the cause of my happiness is the cause of my happiness, but its production is factored out of that occasion, & that production is or may very well be the occasion or result of another, of many others’ systematized unhappiness’), dumb trashy lists, (‘my feet are happy my legs / are happy my arms are happy / my arse is happy’.). ‘Happy Now’ feels simultaneously like a thinking machine and like an animal that keeps shifting its shape, not to dissemble, but, on the contrary, with the aim of a truthful thinking through in resistance to accepting a statically fortified universe. The day Grundy first read the poem, someone asked me if there was a stream at this point in Cambridge of argumentative poetry, and even though I’m not sure there was, I do think that large parts of Grundy’s work since then can be considered as direct continuations of this motion of a thinking-through begun with ‘Happy now’, a continued insistence that poetry must expose itself as and to thinking, as opposed to providing perfected thought. As their heavily rhetorical titles indicate, Grundy’s expansive The Problems, The Questions, The Poem from 2014 and To the Reader from 2016, among others, continue to propose an argumentative experience of the world on the part of a hugely inflated and hugely self-mocking lyric I throwing itself into the attempt of a thoroughgoing scholarly inquiry into the fucked-up, abysmal political determinants that structure our non-existent souls.
[L.J.]
Anne Boyer
Anne Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas and is currently based in Kansas City, where she teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her most recent book, Garments Against Women, was published in the States last year, and has just come out in a UK edition with Mute. I first came across Boyer’s work around 2011, with the publication of her chapbook My Common Heart, a book written in the spring of that year, which anticipates and speaks to the energies of the Occupy movement that flourished that Fall. (Elective Affinities blog) This book remains a record of hope and struggle, of weakness and strength, of the relation of poet to an as-yet-unshaped and vexed collective, the collective which above all else is desired, for what it can accomplish and for what it can be.
As Boyer writes in a poem entitled ‘The Crowd’: “I prefer the teeming crowd of souls to the teeming soul itself.” My Common Heart is concerned with bodies and with the crowd, with empire and gender and struggle, its tone at times echoing Rimbaud’s poems from the Paris Commune, at times the incantatory lists of Whitman or Ginsberg, the tender ferocity of Diane Di Prima and the measured rigour of Juliana Spahr. Even when tempered by irony and self-interrogation, it never gives up a spirit of fervent hope.
More broadly, Boyer’s work frequently interrogates the limits of what poetry might reasonably or unreasonably be expected to do; how it might be defined; and what the boundaries are between ‘poetry’ and ‘the poem’, activity and object. Some of the questions it asks include the following. Faced with the current state of affairs – of immiseration, of the infiltration of ideology that claims it is not ideology into the cells of the body and the crevices of the mind – what can poems do? To whom can they speak? What are their gestures of refusal? What is the relation between exclusion and refusal? Can poetry be mapped onto the horizons for revolutionary transformation and transformed social organisation, and how? What is a poem?
Whatever the answers to these questions – and these will not be easy or definitive – Boyer’s poems exist in the condition of political turmoil, where the daily turmoil and violence that already exists might be resisted: a resistance which seeks the end of the world as it is constituted today. They move in the territory of apocalypse; in the territory, which is today’s, of the archaic and the digital; in the territory of technology and of what she calls “the trial of the opened body in the opened square under the opened sky in the opened streets in the opened city”.
That trial is one many of us have undergone and will have to undergo, in order to resist the living death perpetuated by the order of things as they are. But this realisation is one of clarity, even as it is also one of wrenching confusion. Boyer’s poetry and prose attests to the lived experience of conditions which are not only social in an abstract sense, but which manifest in the intimate relation of one’s self to one’s body to others’ bodies and to other selves. Nowhere is this expressed more movingly and precisely than in the work written during her recent treatment for cancer. Here, she moves into the condition of hope necessary to go on in the world, the ceaseless seeking for what she calls “another kind of poetry”. In a piece entitled ‘Tender Theory’, she writes:
You can stop fearing death, too, if you begin to think of the collective project of being alive in the common world, that one’s own end and the end to one’s work and one’s love is not the end of what is right or good. What needs to go on will.
Anne Boyer.
[D.G.]
[2014]
Materials Reading Series, 15.11.2014
Timothy Thornton [NB: Unused intro. Thornton was scheduled to read with Ian Heames but was unable to attend.]
The last time I saw Tim Thornton read in Cambridge was at around this time of year in 2011, at the launch for his Mountain Press book ‘Jocund Day’. At that reading, Neil Pattison introduced Tim by saying that there are two types of poems: those you believe and those you don’t, and that Tim’s was very much in the former camp. Neil also said that Tim’s work had made him able to love better, a claim grander than the first and quite something to live up to. It was a bold claim, and one that played on its boldness, but it was very much sincerely meant, and perhaps we should not be afraid of such claims. Because I think this is the kind of work that makes the possibility of such a framing seem more than merely fanciful overstatement. It’s work that demands or allows absolute trust, whose near pitch-perfect music belies, or rather, amplifies its concern with imperfection, blemish, constraint, entangled masks of desire and power – hurt and hope – cars and masks and singing birds – cairns, decay, violence, riots, resistance and the brute acting out of despair, beating breathless in build-up of hectoring, fractured, stumbling sound. Perhaps here we might think of Mayakovsky, in ‘How are Verses Made’:
“I walk along, waving my arms and mumbling almost wordlessly, now shortening my steps so as not to interrupt my mumbling, now mumbling more rapidly in time with my steps. So the rhythm is trimmed and takes shape – and rhythm is the basis of any poetic work, resounding through the whole thing.”
As a musician, Thornton’s poetry is concerned very much with intricacies of sound resonance and echo – but this is sound pattern not as decoration, as be-jewelled cover for lack of substance (masquerading as glittering substance in itself), but as a means of poetic thinking. Sound is cut or choked, rhyme (more often half-rhyme) is a texture suggesting further layers of meaning, or a kind of concealed meaning between the spaces on the page, between the words, punctuation chopping up and forcing the phrasal units around it into new and unstable places.
As Danny Hayward argues of the sequence ‘PESTREGIMENT’, on the level of prosody and the role of the pronounal ‘you’ as cipher for direct intimacy, genuine erotic address, ‘erotic spontaneity’ is here cut-up by neologisms, negative formulations (words prefixed with ‘un-’) and the disruptive presence of everyday idiomatic phrases whose locational origin in the poem – their speaker – can’t be placed or held down. Writer and reader alike are swallowed in a spasm-ing language, notated jack-hammer stammering, tongue-twisting, tripping over itself in pitched skill, highest measure, up to the limits of what it can or is trying to say, as if willing itself to the border of inarticulacy, inside-out, yet always insistently and necessarily wanting to address something that, as the manically satirical poem ‘TRAILS’ puts it, “actually happened.”
“We won’t deliberately / never try it.” “my tongue flag white. Tonight love I shall beat / impaled // on you combative and // leashed, the retreat”. Tim Thornton.
[D.G.]
Ian Heames
Ian Heames is a print-maker and publisher of poetry, running Face Press, formerly formerly (c)_(c) – and a poet. I’m just going to begin, stupidly, but stupidly for a reason, by reading out the titles of all of his publications:
‘Bad Flowers’ ((c)_(c) press, 2009),
‘[PAREIDOLIA]-BACKMASK’ ((c)_(c) press, 2010),
‘Out of Villon’ ((c)_(c) press, 2011),
‘Gloss to Carriers’ (Critical Documents, 2011),
‘Banners over Terminal Highway’ ((c)_(c) press, 2012),
‘Array One’ (Critical Documents, 2012),
‘To’ (Iodine, 2013),
‘A.I. in Daylight’ (Materials, 2014),
and two recent books of Sonnets (with Jonty Tiplady) (Face Press, 2014).
This list probably came across as a boring introductory exercise, but I felt it was important to read it out because Heames’ work is exactly attentive to questions of exercise, as well as to how the work of publishing relates to the production of poetry, and to how publications might run into one another both in the sense of complementing one another or in the sense of colliding and arguing with one another. Hence in ‘Out of Villon’, as the title implies, Heames wrenches something out of the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon, he takes something from him as a kind of theft, he is on the run, out of Villon --- but exactly from that position of absolute historical distance, he can allow himself to construct an encounter between the poetic I and Villon where they relate to one another intimately as long-time companions or buddies:
I
I and François Villon
Wanted to break the very in love prison
In fast maul
To duel with lime pits
he set-up reads as if he was teasing Villon, or poking him back to life from the drunk and dead – which makes you laugh on the inside, but, because the image is so forcefully contained, restricts your ability to laugh on the outside, or at least restricts your ability to laugh convulsively on the outside.
It is its precise formal containment, the sense of an openly repressed giggly-ness, which marks also Heames’ more recent chapbooks. Hence A.I. in Daylight from 2014, which is a chapbook of 27 poems pedantically numbered from 1.1.1, 1.1.2 and so on through to 3.3.3, seems at times to be written from the perspective of an attentive observer of a computer game – and simultaneously from the perspective of an attentive observer of the news. To quote from 1.1.3: ‘Teamspeak audio is cut now / Because the video is sped up / To compensate for “time dilation” / Kill the terrorist leader inside / The pleasure hub / (I know where my skillset ends) / Our characters are in love / This game needs new leaders’ and from 3.1.3 ‘After the games they sent in hovercrafts / Feeding our imaginations and investment / Dollars / To a career high’. These lines are important because they do not use media and games jargon in relation to the war on terrorism or the financial crisis as a declaration of something like the world-as-simulacrum, but, on the contrary, as a declaration of the fully material relation between language and the real world. This is why what I have described earlier as formal containment in Heames’ work functions not as literary withdrawal, but as a form of pressure, where his poetry is pressured by the outside world and in turn exerts pressure upon that outside world. That is, the formal perfection, i.e. the perfected-ness of his lines and the representation of perfection in his lines, presents ultimately an image of absolute error and mistake, where it is, to a totalitarian degree, impossible for him or any of us ever not to be mistaken – ‘just when I thought / I was perfect / I find this big weird mistake’. In summary, Heames’ poetry works like a machine, a very surprising machine.
[L.J.]
Materials Reading Series, 15.05.2014
Lisa Jeschke
Lisa’s poetry is motivated by rage and tenderness and all those things the poems themselves, would then turn on and question; it thinks about children and mothers and workers and social constitution and reproduction and material and material bases and immigrants and the parody discourse of the chauvinist characterisation of foreign stupidity and money and the internet and money and material and death, dead cheap; it even thinks at times about nature poetry, the environment as a total whole inhabited and thought about in serious parody, like the sun, or the park, or autumn, or hell, or the PVC kitchen floor. And also it has this parodic visceral violent sense of making me feel my body, its parts and organs, with a hyper-violent and disarming directness aware of the possibility of its own recuperation, of the recuperation of any tendency towards ‘vulnerability’. With its excess, its boredom, its repetition and its rhyme, it is completely ethically stringent and confused, exactly as it should be.
[D.G.]
Tom Allen
Tom’s poems have a range of concerns including Wordsworth, St Paul, Little Match Girls, flippancy, the voice of dead labour, nameless hordes, cops covered in stretched skin, filtered through white space and water and flames. There’s something inscrutable about them which I find attractive: they seem like things that have been worked on, worked away at, chiselled, hammered into shape. This is Tom’s first reading in the UK, and I’m intrigued to see how he reads these poems, because it seems there are several ways in: on the page they don’t seem to offer themselves up to any one way of (voiced) reading, there’s a resistance within them, which perhaps contributes to their distinctive tone: I think they’re pretty unique in comparison to what we might find in any number of poets writing now.
[D.G.]
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MATERIALS BLOG POSTS (ARCHIVAL)
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The Inhumanity of Keston Sutherland’s Odes to TL61P
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This poem, or series of poems, is an ode -- rather than the song of praise that implies, a love-poem, perhaps, but more or most likely a lament for TL61P, the code for a now-obsolete replacement door for a Hotpoint Tumble Drier. It is an attempt to write a poem directed towards a non-human object which exists, not as some spurious ‘object-oriented ontology’, some ‘ethical’ attempt at bringing into being fantasized ‘inter-objectivity’ between the human and non-human words that tries to escape human mediation and thus overlooks the actual real of material human labour, the actual mediations we live inside, but as a means of relating to objects produced by humans which does not give them an agency of their own, as Bruno Latour, having internalized the logic of capitalism which Marx satirizes, would have us believe, but realizes them as living, or, more accurately, dead, because these objects contain the dead labour of those exploited under capitalism and as capital itself.
TL61P is at a triple remove: it is a code which stands in for that which it exists as a replacement product-part for - code stands in for replacement door stands in for door stands in for the dead labour that produces it and that it reproduces. The obsolescence of TL61P, turned into the ‘inhumanity’ of non-meaning letter-number code, a ‘word’ or series of signifying objects turned into affect-less code, the arbitrariness of the sign, is a deadness like the deadness of dead labour, a mere statistic. As a specific object, the tumble-drier door is in part chosen for its deliberate arbitrariness, or the gesture of choosing it is made to seem that way - pick an object and fix on it as if it meant more than it did (like your comment about constantly wanting to mean more than the shit you do mean, poetry’s poverty aspiring outward in teenage belief). Or, as Sutherland puts it in an interview in Naked Punch, “seizing on a very improbably specific detail of consumer society and trying to make from that some image of the whole” -- which is, after all, what consumer items, commodities are, encapsulations of the labour that produces them, the products of a complex (and now global) system of exchange and exploitation which they both cover over with their shiny desirability and embody.
But it (the hot-point dryer door) also comes to take on specific qualities, not as an exact ‘symbol’ so much as being forced into a certain level of metaphorical affect by the pressure being placed on it to be ‘worthy’ of its centrality to the poetic project, to ‘live’ up to the attention violently or lovingly directed at it. Thus, the tumble drier dries out the wetness and sweat of dirty clothes and turns them once more into new and gleaming objects, as if just taken from the rack, though at the same time it wears down and fades the colour of those clothes with repeated usage, giving the lie to its own re-birthing function; just as the commodity tries to dry out the blood and sweat and wetness of the dead labour that produces it, makes that undead labour non-human. Addressing the ode to it doesn’t quite attempt to make it human again, because that would just be a parody of the process of dead labour’s congealing, but suggests, by imparting it with that trace of humanity, the displacement of real needs and desires onto fictitious or all-too-real material objects, and thus, implicitly, how love might be re-directed from the object-made-human to the human, which, under capital, is made object. Not to consume or ‘exhaust’ that object, but to realize the inexhaustibility of it, in Adorno’s terms: not that TL61P is that which to which one must direct an inexhaustible love, but that the conditions in which that love might so be directed to the human could be thought, against and out of a visceral, strenuous and comprehensive attempt to live through the wrongness of relation which gives rise to Sutherland’s project.
This has, of course, has been a part of Sutherland’s work for several years now, from Hot White Andy and Roger Ailes (“Roger are you there”, “Hot white Andrew Cheng”), the displaced figures of love - Chinese middle-ranker, nefarious Fox News figure - but, in the Odes, it is taken to a non-human extreme. Giving oneself up to an inhuman object, to the totally other, is what we are required to under capital every day; the condition of sacrifice, of human blood, of human flesh, propitiation to the money-god. Through an absolute attempt to inhabit and make potently manifest this state, Sutherland attempts to move through that condition into a place where it might be possible to imagine some other condition -- somewhat akin to that state Will Rowe discussed in his paper at the Militant Poetry and Poetics conference at Birkbeck this past weekend, in which one would have to live and feel and think as if one had completely inhabited and passed through the condition of absolute, paralyzing fear which at times seems to psychologically prevent the thought of any kind of resistant counter-action to prevailing internalized propaganda.
It is another question whether or not we find this project to be successful or not, and whether or not we believe that poetry per se, or a particular kind of poetry, or this particular poem, is the place for this attempt, an attempt which can clearly not exist without the movements for social change with which it seeks to act, both existing as the conditions of possibility for the other. And it is another question even whether the poem itself does want what it, and its title and general schematic framework, claims. In that sense, perhaps the above is merely a ventriloquization of certain theoretical positions which exists as a merely conceptual, rather than immanent-critical approach: no praxis here. But perhaps this can be a start towards thinking outside these boundaries, towards a properly close reading that challenges the claims made above.
[David Grundy, 23.05.2013]
Report from The Odes to TL61P (London Launch)
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On 14 May at Cafe Oto in London, Keston Sutherland read from The Odes to TL61P (Enitharmon, 2013). If poetry readings are - among other things - live performance, they work as a kind of poor theatre, with little material means to support it: sort of as if you wanted to make a vast heterogeneous theatre performance but the only means of production or channel you had was a telephone line, so you call someone as an attempt to compress EVERYTHING into that one call. The Odes are super-restless, they’re SUPER with all that term’s implications of trash and globalised minimal-maximal communication - and yet, as either words on a page or a voice in a room on a surface level sensually unproviding and unconsoling, like a mono-channel. But this mono-channel is not entirely limited by the walls of, in this case, Cafe Oto, just as a telephone line might in fact evoke a whole theatre or, the reverse, a theatre performance evoke a mere telephone call, as in, say, Beckett’s Not I. This reading in particular, but really perhaps all readings, felt/feel super-concerned with the fact that we form material co-extensions not only of the spaces we find ourselves in, but also of several simultaneous historical periods past and present - for example as numerically visualised by the sequence ‘2013’, or as conceptually apprehensible as ‘late capitalism’. Not that 2013 or late capitalism are imaginary conceptions, rather we see them as we look at each other, in our voices and physiognomies and bodies: ‘I am a real hole for you, not a barely noticeable flimsy crack; David had a stupid way of laughing and a fucking ugly blush. Hasten defections. I swapped stickers with him, [...]’ (p. 64). The hegemony of life lived in its time might relativise - though not erase - the problem of authority in the reader-audience relation: if there are all sorts of exterior factors and hegemonies running through and exceeding the time and the structural politics of the occasion of the reading, the authority of the poet might (also) seem miniature. One of these exterior factors is the textual material: if the words already exist on the page and are to some extent pre-recorded, of the past, then the now of the live situation is kicked in its back from behind, and past and present double, exploding the limits of that now; like when recorded voices of the dead haunt us as ghosts which are materially present, in exactly one voice that struggles to speak them all.
This is what the Odes seem - partly - concerned with: the question of containment, and who is contained by what, and what is excessive of whom, that is: what is the relation between poetry and everything else, naively to be called, perhaps, the world? The Odes seem to demand to be more than poetry, and they demand of the world to be more than the world. There is an attempt at absolute and excessive openness, where the word and the world would spill into and over one another swallowing, exceeding, incorporating, intruding upon, violating [without object]. Which one is smaller? And which one is a co-extension of which? In terms of size and scope, what is our beginning reference point, if poetry is one material form forming part of further material forms, sort of in a relationship of geometric translations? But: before this poetry can contain the world or be contained by the world or all and both at once, the Odes are bound to struggle with reaching the excessive openness they gesture towards in the first place; the demand is not yet its own fulfilment, and it is their necessary and pathetic struggle with what they propose that defines the Odes as _work_. The Odes work, but perhaps less like humans than like fleshly virtual computer game worms advancing slowly eating their way through everything and anything that crosses their way:
‘Pope’s descents to Beckett’s dips, Keats astride a grave betimes, a Nigerian sex slave. A Nigerian sex slave plying its overstretched, hedged, oily ass at the dusty fringes of the Biennale to drunk sponsors of the European tents. Or what will not debase so much as shatter, or what will not rejoin but soon rip up, or rearrange with gratuitous violence, undo savagely primp or outright annihilate. Our amity is fitted for division. You won’t say anything more radical than sex.’ (p. 29)
The prose line eats through the boundaries of poetry, only to be contained within the boundary limits of the prose line itself: i.e. where prose initially seemed to test the limits of poetry, suddenly the occasional bouts of verse and mock-verse in turn seek to question the limits of prose. As do those prose lines standing out beyond the mostly standardised page margins: ‘the poor should live where they can afford to / not where they are, redistributive justice; it became a country / full of torture, omnivorous ravenous gut for riveting blood’ (p. 37)). Sometimes a spade needs to be called a spade, i.e. a grave needs to be called a grave. These passages of direct and violent accusations against this state/State of things are mixed with long sections of linguistic parody: where 21st century language is extremely rich and testifies to an, to our, extreme poverty of thought and experience, virtuosically:
‘Besides paedohilia, which now means the sexual love of prepubescent individuals in particular, we now have hebephilia, a diagnosis for the sexual love of individuals in the early stages of puberty, but not earlier; ephebophilia, a diagnosis for the sexual love of individuals lately progressed out of puberty (these last two are sometimes also called korophilia and parthenophilia.’ (p. 55)
It’s like we can be anything we want to be, but only ‘Reactionaries think life should mean life.’ (38) Which might be an echo of Adorno’s epigraph to Minima Moralia, Life does not live. Which, in turn, seems like a weird and condescending thing to say to people who might feel a mistrust of metaphorical (?!) accusations of not being alive, when they do have the subjective impression of being alive. But like in Adorno, deadness in the Odes is not morally assigned to ennui or spiritual emptiness in the bourgeoisie - which has been the gesture and accusation of some earlier 20th century avant-gardes - but is concretely and analytically linked to capitalist forms of wage labour and production, as well as to this government and this day’s day-to-day politics. This is about how we are hurt and dissected and killed in our day-to-day lives, and in fact about how we hurt and dissect and kill, sort of as if the active and passive voice all melted into one another: the argument implies it is our reps (politicians and artists! structurally) who suicide society, not the other way round.
The Odes feel like that absolute - and absolutely ugly and megalomaniac and even ridiculous(ly) teenager-like longing in Kleist’s ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ - where the hugeness of the demand is itself something that might threaten the order of the state: the state of things, but also specifically the State. This seems like a massive demand for and of poetry: the desire for all wrongs to be righted. But regardless of the individual’s desire: ‘If there will be a revolution in the UK, it will require the army.’ (p. 65) Here suddenly the revolution is small (limited to this UK kingdom and its army), and, even worse, poetry is tiny, toying, poor, removed - quantitatively. But qualitatively it fights against its poverty by channelling a huge world (involving the sun, the moon, the stars, the revolution, every single fucker who dares to be happy, every ghost of a life hovering around unhappily, every dialect spoken anywhere, every word dead and alive) into a single line of speech. Which is all asymmetrical: this poetry is fucked.
[Lisa Jeschke, 23.05.2013]
Jeremy Hardingham’s Shit Theatre
“I’m like your sphincter and I’m forcing the shit out of you.” Jeremy Hardingham’s play-text ‘Shit’, published in the 1996 b/w paper-&-staples photocopied-magazine ‘SPORT IS FOR FAGGOTS’, features a combative dialogue between characters monosyllabically named, not quite boiling over into the physical violence or act of love-making that at least one of its characters would seem to imply or desire in the ‘exchange’; that love-making, or, rather sexual power game-release as brutally present as undercurrent in the constant reiterated frustrations of ‘fuck’ in its various permutations as verb and adjective. The dialogue-exchange is not so much an exchange as a debate on the coercive force in all relational interaction (not necessarily gendered; indeed, the sex mentioned would seem more likely homo- than hetero-sexual, featuring ‘fags’ and ‘your fist’), and specifically on the question of being ‘moved’ by a piece of theatre; this notion of ‘movement’ developing into the crude base materialism of the shit metaphor of expelling some innerness out, as in shit, not by ‘having’ a shit, that term implying possession or at least control of that which is expelled, but by having a shit forced out of one by uncontrollable muscular contraction, forced out like the stream of words and shit that breaks the desired self-enclosure of the scatological failed solipsism of Antonin Artaud’s late work, but in this case forced out by another human figure, figured, in this metaphorical instance, as that muscle inside one over which one has no control, theatre-maker as sphincter ‘moving’ the shit or tears out of the moved audience member, abusing the erotic valency of their charge. (Indeed, consider the fact that ‘sphincters relax at death, possibly releasing fluids’; that loss of control of the dying or the very-young, as the body’s un-willed operation, pre- or post-individuation, acted on unceremoniously by an internal assertion that seems external, in that one has no control over it, that breaks down or pre-dates a conception of one’s self as a separate and controllable or controlling entity, leading one to exist in a state of horrific un-differentiation that might be echoed in the inter-personality and shared physical inhabitation of the erotic, but which is far more abject than that consensual ecstatic sharing, is closest, if anything, to rape.) The name of one of the characters in Hardingham’s play is ‘Drane’: filtering out the shit, not drowning in moved sobbing, the naturalized dirt of rainwater tears. Theatre as shit and waste, not so much as the cathartic purification the metaphor of the drain might imply, but as an actual assertion of and participation in the material ephemera, the ephemeral material, of a live performance that is nonetheless a participant in, and inscribed with, history, that does not imagine relation to exist in a clean vacuum, flushing the shit of history down the participatory toilet, that insists on a messy and potentially problematic work and working.
And so, the statement ‘I can’t help but be moving’ isn’t to imply the straightforward worthiness of theatre as some kind of transparent medium for a truth it un-problematically presents, in bite-sized little shit-cakes we can cleanly digest and consider ourselves well-fed by, 100% organic, ‘illusionism and simple morality’, that kind of shit. ‘I can’t help but be moving’ leaves open the question of whether or not that ‘movement’ is inevitable, bad, good, a particular structural model, and so on. But, you say, “that does not yet solve the question [of] whether [theatre] should be […] so moving […] Violently moving.” (What Would Bertolt Brecht Do?) This all perhaps implies a none too-happy ethical charge, which the play does not condescendingly ‘resolve’, and which theatre itself, in its most rigorous forms, thus far does not or has not resolved; yet the play also has a second half or epilogue in which (these the days of ‘Jurassic Park’), Jeff or ‘Geoff’ Goldblum notices a pile of “dinosaur doo doo”, shit here become, in a dialogue between a ‘young one’ and a parent, a child-like joy in wastage and in throwing away, expelled ephemera, solid enough, deliriously happy in that loss of control, that shit cray. [To be continued, perhaps…]
[David Grundy, 10.07.2013]