Starcrusher Night: Cambridge, 09.03.13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

promômo

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

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

JEFFERSON TOAL & IAN HEAMES // Cambridge // 27.10.12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Long Is This? [The Theatre of Will Stuart] -- Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Cambridge :: Friday 27th April 2012

Though he is ostensibly the Judith E Wilson dramatist in residence for the duration of the academic year, this day of works by, and responding to the theatre of Will Stuart, marked his first public appearance in Cambridge during that year: perhaps, after the reported extravaganza of pieces presented at the 2011 Miscellaneous Festival, he needed a breather. The day opened at 11AM with his greatest hit – premiered, I believe, at the 2009 Misc. Fest., on which occasion the lead role was memorably ‘played’ by Justin Katko (tho’ the notion of playing roles is of course very much complicated in and by Stuart’s practice). Said ‘hit’ is the half-hour or so theatre piece ‘Transfigurations’ – and while the elements out of whose fabric it is woven (this probably not being the best metaphor) are fairly easy to describe, their ramifications and dynamics take a lot longer to fully grapple with (I’m still doing it; since I first saw it, three years ago, it will occasionally pop into my head as an unsolved conundrum, a source of thought usefully generated from the frictive frustration and strangeness inherent in any engagement with its deceptively ‘clear’ surface). The play’s contents then, in brief: one participant (I’m not sure the word ‘actor’ is really appropriate here – by which I don’t mean to denigrate those who actually performed, but to highlight the ways in which Stuart’s is a very different proposition from the usual theatrical models) runs at full-tilt, back and forth across the breadth of the performance space, yelling ‘THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE ARE COMING’; another stands at the back of that space, mute and unmoving (apart from the inevitable suppressed laughter, which almost seems to be an anticipated, tho’ unwritten part of the role), holding a placard adorned with the single word ‘AROUSED’; a third, the main focus, sits centre stage, beginning by reciting a portion of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, complete with knee-rug, before switching into a portion of Aileen Wuornos’ court testimony, in which she describes killing the man who has been torturing and raping her; the performer (on this occasion, female, tho’ the role appears to be gender-neutral) then stands to recite the lyrics to JLS’ ‘One Shot’ in some sort of sync with the sound of the song itself, blaring out in its fully glory, or otherwise. All fall silent as the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ is p(l)ayed in full; the apocalyptic messenger steps to the front and recites the words to an advert for Lindt chocolate, and the play ends.

That artifice plays a role here should not be in doubt; this being further highlighted by Stuart’s presence at the back of the stage, handing out props and giving cues, and by the fact that many lines were recited from visible scripts. This is not necessarily a ‘bad’ artifice, an artifice that draws critical attention to its own insincerity (tho’, in the case of the Lindt advert, of course, it might be): for instance, the afore-mentioned interchangeability of gender, both in terms of the Pinter / Wuornos / JLS figure and the silently aroused guard (both male in the 2009 production; both female in the 2012 afternoon performance (and I believe, male and female in the evening rendition)), would seem to be at once a move away from gendered stereotyping and a critical engagement with such stereotyping, with questions of vulnerability and victimhood and of what it means to voice the testimony of another, to appropriate another’s language of pain for ostensible purposes of parodic de-contextualisation. (Consider further: what difference does it make that it’s a solo female performer who rehearses the arm pain of ‘In Despite?’)

These questions of artifice and de- or re-contextualisation were central to Ian Heames’ paper on ‘Transfigurations’, originally presented at a conference on literature and pop music, and focussing specifically on Stuart’s use of JLS, understood adamantly not as parody of capitalist pop or those equally ‘stupid’ recipients who uncritically swallow it whole. Such a position would be a quasi-Adornian critique that risks sliding over into mere class contempt: while the ignorant masses lap up X-Factor or Britain’s Got Talent or the barely-now-remembered Pop Idol, we can dig our Boulez, and ironically laugh at their poor taste (tho’ of course to attribute X-Factor love to the entire working class is equally contemptuous – much of the most vital avant-popular music of the previous century emerges precisely from a working class base – and to criticise the banalization of emotion and the smoothing over of difficulty or struggle or contradiction into the shinily-packaged, the quick-burst affirmation or melancholic pleading of yet another identikit chart single, is a perhaps necessary, though difficult task (and, furthermore, one that’s not often attempted beyond more than a simple affirmation of what we’re all supposed instinctively to know: that this type of pop is bad and nefarious and contemptible and all the rest of it)). For Heames, then, Stuart’s deployment of ‘One Shot’ is a means of asking what ‘sympathy’ we could actually muster for the feelings the song, and other songs like it, rouse so differently in different individuals, notwithstanding the criticism that pop songs of a certain type homogenize felt response into predictable pattern(ing), aspirations within the capitalist frame of allowed leisure or love, or their attendant impossible celebrity aspiration syndrome (the kind of dream that is, indeed, encouraged by precisely those sorts of talent shows which propelled JLS to their moment of spotlit fame and influence: a notion of a kind of heaven on earth that you could have now, without radical social transformation – capitalism’s utopic cod-promise, forever deferred into pop’s exhortation or yearning to take what you want, because, even if “you’ve only got one shot,” you can have it, whether thru lottery luck or meritocratic striving). This point would seem similar to Marx’s take on religion in ‘The German Ideology’: the aim is to liberate society so that the needs to which religion gives expression are met without the need for their subsumption into a comforting and compensatory religious framework. Neither religion’s nor pop songs’ expressed urges are exactly falsely expressed within the frame of religion or pop, then, but are part of both forms’ very structure, their formal structures of desire and ‘feeling’, and in this light, Stuart’s work seems far more than the initial cheap joke it could seem, far more a serious engagement with, again, that ‘sympathy’ we could have for or with those urges.

Tho’ the advertised ‘discussions’ at the end of each section most often turned into breaks for food or coffee or intermission chat, J.H. Prynne (in a day-long attendance that is a mark of the interest and serious intent locally generated by Stuart’s work) did start a mini-debate as he queried Heames’ use of the phrase ‘deeper logic’ w/r/t pop music, Heames agreeing that this might suggest a false separation between surface and ‘depth’, or sincerity: pop, as it is used in Stuart’s play, is more of a feedback loop, where in is also out, where sincerity and depth cannot be easily entangled from each other, if at all. There is no detached, elevated authorial ‘deployment’ of the material; though the audience’s laughter contains ironic recognition, that recognition second-guesses an intended irony on the part of Stuart that is not present in his own usage. Evi Heinz’ earnest or faux-earnest spoken-karaoke delivery of ‘One Shot’s’ lyrics, with its slight stumbles and halts and missed-timings (at least, in the afternoon performance of the play which I witnessed), was not so much the appearance of real, felt spontaneity; rather, it added imperfection to JLS’ auto-tuned sheen: the imperfection, perhaps, that the listener brings to the perfect product, which imperfection is precisely where any of the ‘sympathy’ that Heames identified might lie – though to describe this as attributable ‘sincerity’ on the part of Stuart or Heinz would, of course be stupid. Maybe the feedback loop is dependent on room-mood and audience biography – the complex interweaving, perhaps clashing network of expectation and social background and felt engagement that they might bring to the performance: and here, alongside Transfiguration’s use of JLS, we might place the time-trial task set in Heinz’ CorresponDANCES, in which performer and audience attempt to blow-up a giant inflatable dinosaur before an extended recording of the Jurassic Park theme tune, and variations thereof, came to its close. Is this actually participation as a kind of communality? The elation and party game panic that the dinosaur challenge infectiously rouse(d) in those participating was in some sense real (witness Heames’ face reddening with effort, or James MacNamara causing his own lip to bleed), even as the piece satirized any ‘togetherness’, that ironization perhaps the condition for this togetherness to be real, to be glimpsed without the cloying cover of a false hippy all-in-this-togetherness, man…And it is laughter that draws one in, a kind of glee mixed with anxiety at the accomplishment of what is accepted as a ridiculous task, but whose accomplishment suddenly comes, in that moment, to seem almost desperately important, the laughter arising from a recognition of the sheer delirious and somehow utterly joyful absurdity of that emotional charge: well, maybe this is no more than what happens in the party games you might play with your friends (certainly before you reach your teens, and sporadically after, tho’ drinking games don’t engender the same kind of innocent, or ‘innocent’ solidarity). But how often does that kind of emotional register ever even enter theatre? Perhaps it could only happen here because the audience at that stage was so small, the interaction occurring on a manageable level, that separation between the elect few on stage and the select or willy-nilly audience mass less apparent than it might otherwise have been: there might then be a readiness to participate less tinged by feelings of embarrassment or the risk of public foolishness (leave that to the actors) – because, after all, the audience always performs itself, to a certain extent (like the clubber checking themselves out in the mirror; cast a quick glance over your fellow theatre attendees to see if they’re laughing as much as you, to see how the cool kids are reacting), and the kind of performance or participation that Heinz asked of it, by placing that performance on the surface, and by transforming it into something joyful and open, rather than furtive, unconscious, or closed, was a liberation of this desire, as well as a questioning of how far it might really be taken. Well, in any case, watching J.H. Prynne blow up almost an entire four-foot inflatable dinosaur was a nigh-on unsurpassed public event.

Interval. Films, by Heames (the script a monologue by Stuart, delivered by poet Peter Gizzi) and by Stuart (sock-puppet unemployment more-than-whimsicalities), unfortunately projected from a laptop with live spoken subtitles, rather than in full-screen glory, due to technical issues. I somehow neglected to take notes on these during the train journey in which I took notes on everything else; so, apologies, no more here will be said.

The notes resume. There follows another Interval. Kat Griffiths then performs a ‘Performed Love Poem’, a monologue of a very different sort to Heinz’ ‘CorresponDANCES’: in a variety of accents, some sort of story would seem to emerge about love failure, in a staged drunken haze which involves dancing that ranged from the wildly enthusiastic to the despairing, eating coffee granules washed down with wine, breaking an egg, telling an absurd-desperate anecdote about masturbating against a lamp-post on the way home from a party after yr love interest gets a boyfriend, and a final reading of the love poem in question; all this an intense, even performance-art-tinged ‘baring all’ coming up against artifice in aware, maybe even dialectical, interplay – as in Stuart, those elements of real or imagined or apparent ‘sincerity’ both lending the work its power and being satirized, ironized. (Those words don’t, of course, really fit; this theatre wants a new vocabulary for its negotiations which for the moment I’m not quite sure how to construct.)

Now Ollie Evans’ first performance, a variant on a short piece I’d first seen him deliver a couple of weeks ago at the ‘Now, Microtheatres’ evening in London’s Five Years Gallery. Evans lies down on the stage, covered by a rug, and with a copy of Finnegans Wake as a pillow, while a tape plays his voice meta-speculating on the live situation, the potential dynamics of the then-future performance, the ethics of this enterprise, &c., while considering art as work, or not work (‘how to scab your own strike’). (Given that F.W. is the subject of Evans’ Ph.D thesis, its unobtrusive pillow-deployment allows a further element to creep in, relevant, no doubt, to all us academy-encrusted students and teachers of ‘radical’ literature, our safety note, the status of our work as work or as isolated, cocooned play.) The apparent spontaneity (I apologize for constantly having banal resource to these tired and inadequate deskriptors: I’ll try to do better next time) of the tape here negated by its deployment as an almost automatically de-humanized pre-recording to which the audience are held in thrall; so, again, that push and pull with and between expectation and frustration and meta-anticipation that is so central to Stuart’s work.

‘In Despite’, the second Stuart piece, playing on pain and boredom with meticulously stringent manipulativeness. Evi Heinz clutches her arm and complains about the pain or ache shooting up it which she just can’t get ride of; for nigh-on fifteen minutes, with the word ‘ow’ punctuating every other sentence, and sometimes, it seems, every other phrase. Irritation, cod-sincerity, restriction, taken to a real extreme of challenging apparent banality. And the entry of quasi-theology at the end, probably not entirely as parody (meditations on infinity, what it would mean, after the end of the universe as we know, for things or people or selves to still be in existence; and the singing of ‘Silent Night’). Pain here is not the one tragic event, but the extended (non-)event of continued and non-ignorable suffering: now here a whole discourse of Levinasian attentiveness, even anti-Imperialist in dimension, opens itself up, but I’m not sure that to extrapolate further would further the play’s cause or really do more than smooth over its jagged irritations (which, in their own way, are perhaps more of a challenge than Transfiguration’s).

So onto Ollie Evans’ third performance (to skip the chronologic for a moment). Preparation and starting, or not starting. A completely improvised, blank-state beginning (this of course a misnomer, as Evans wd realize, for it itself is a concept subject to some sort of pre-cognition): Evans moving around, as if enacting last-minute set- and check-up details, before the performance proper can begin. Which of course it both does and doesn’t; these are already the constitutive elements of the performance. Evans finally asking Stuart, from performer to audience, about his practice. Stuart’s reply: that he is aiming towards a Keston Sutherland-esque obsession (w/r/t to three essays in which K.S. (re)works (around) the same idea consecutively, consumingly). (This section might, I suppose, have been construed as the advertised ‘discussion’ sections of the day in the end making it onto the stage.) Here I get to thinking (again) about the Drama Studio as a space, prompted by Evans’ movement in and out of doors with various paraphernalia (chairs, a microphone and stand, coats and props), the back-stage both back- and on-stage, as tends to happen, In The Studio. This performative non-performance also perhaps a parody of Evans’ familiarity, With The Studio. I ask: to what extent is the power I feel in much of this work (both on Will Stuart Day and in previous Days and Events in the studio) to do with having cultivated a space where the questions the work addresses can be allowed to build and develop, performance to performance, not as an accumulated ‘body of works’, or the diverse bodies of work of the various performers who perform there (& tho’ these bodies of work, whether enacted there or elsewhere, are no doubt enabled or influenced by the space itself), but as questions you feel you can ask, that the audience or the space give you permission to ask, and that they have been, or might be, thinking about? Which is also perhaps constriction; at some point don’t you have to break out of what has become the cocoon of a safe-(lab-experiment)-space, to inform your interaction in the outer and upper world with it? Or do you always need that separate space for experimental testings, like the performer’s magic circle (derived from originally-medieval, now Lecoquian French buffon practice) that Stewart Lee describes in his (essential) book ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’? Except here the whole play is about the lack of that kind of delineated safe cut-off, even if it is always circumscribed within a particular room: what does it mean, then, to talk of ‘risk’ here? How far can risk go before it turns merely into a strategy-board-game in which the pieces are moved around in familiar frisson? How many more questions? But yet, the Drama Studio’s programme is diverse: not just theatre-makers, but poets, musicians, film-makers. This isn’t a trendy inter-disciplinarity, but emerges out of particular work (or play; or plays), not from arts-council-funding schematics, plots, diagramm’d pre-anatomies draining out the live blood of living encounter. So Cage or Adorno of Keston Sutherland or Prynne can all be brought within the frame of reference, that frame expanded out to include them, and to include JLS and hymns and toy helicopters (see below): again, not as a trendy or uncritical togetherness, but because these things are all in the performers’ and the audiences’ lives and minds, of which this work is one textural element (and even vice versa).

The notes dribble and drabble out (I’m not here working to a conclusion, I can’t muster the required energy at the moment). Alors, finalement: The Remains of the Day. Evans’ second performance, the repeated variation of a line from Finnegans Wake (“I can do as I like with what’s me own”), turned into Minton- or MacCaffrey-esque sound poetry, stretched and multiplied and humorously twisted. ‘Iphigenia’, which finds Stuart reading a letter from JH Prynne to John Wilkinson, regarding Wilkinson’s poem of the same name: the figure of the helicopter recurring as trope in that letter, Stuart’s reading ‘accompanied’ by Heames’ flying of remote-controlled toy helicopters around the space and at the reader. Some sort of dizzying height-reach when the helicopter (literally) hits the roof of the Drama Studio arousing temporary mild vertiginous feelings, tho’ this effect may have been localized to no one else in the audience. Heames’ poem ‘For Will Stuart’, the last thing I caught before I had to leave, written after receiving the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death thru Stuart’s poem on that topic: what it might mean for poetry to be the news, with full affect and difficulty built in beyond bland fronting and evasion. “After the United States the United States.”

And after Will Stuart?

[Check this write-up for clear-sighted summary trimmed of the above's excessive verbiage]

Spring Decoys: Cambridge, 17.03.12

A decoy is usually a person, device or event meant as a distraction, to conceal what an individual or a group might be looking for.

'Spring Decoys' was a festival, I guess you'd say, that happened in Cambridge over four nights the previous week: this year's version of the Miscellanous (theatre?) Festivals which Jeremy Hardingham has been curating in the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio for the past few years and which have seen some extraordinary collisions and collections of poets and performers and musicians, extending often from seven in the evening till three in the morning – energies of productive chaos and some sort of social sense derangement, energies which you can take within you as tinderbox or as constellated spark which can't ever be fully translated outside that place's seal (even when you're inside that very place, that drama studio, again, for some other event), but which yet you do take, you do carry, in readiness for expected or unexpected re-prompting, re-flaring. The come-down is what's worse, and the chronicling or cataloguing of what did occur schematically is a part of that, but how else to make a sense of it beyond that it was, merely, a good one-night last stand?

So, yes, the Decoys were, then, drawing on this spirit of Miscellaneous Festivals past, the difference this time I suppose being that 'performance' and 'poetry' each had their slots on different nights (Wednesday's event in particular, involving Ollie Evans and Ian Burrows and Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon and Irum Fazal and Jeremy Hardingham, deserves a write-up which I haven't given it). Though the poetry event was far from a simple 'poetry reading', Justin Katko (that night's curator) maintaining, throughout the evening, an improvised noise jam (some keyboards / some max msps / some recorders and some kazoos / some record players / some melodicas / some korg monotrons) which played thru the intervals and even under and into some of the readings (most notably under Jonathan Redhorse's rhythmic and droll prose delivery and, at that stage of quiet spaced-out drifting concentration that inevitably sets in at the end of such a long and varied evening, under Samantha Walton's reading, accompanied with artless tenderness by Jow Lindsay on Jandekian plugged-in piano). At various stages, too, Jeremy Hardingham enacted extended or momentary solo performances which seemed both to work alongside and against those readings whose sonic and physical space they shared. Indeed, the evening was visually dominated by a construction he'd rigged up along the centre of the room (the audience placed around the walls' square) -- a row of large envelopes bundled into bag-shapes, filled with pieces of paper confetti (stage-snow, I guess), and dangled from the ceiling on ropes and electric cables, large pieces of squared paper taped underneath, to the black box's floor. Occasionally, he would perform a sudden act of what one might either term vandalistic outburst or creative opening up (evacuation?), unravelling, revealing what lay inside the initial formulaic blankness of the envelope scrunches, ripping and dropping fire exit signs, hammering white-painted wood constructions, crawling and contorting and eating paper snow and white dust.

But that I've written on his performances at this length doesn't mean that they dominated proceedings: there were 18 readers in total, one turning up on the night and asking to do something – which he did – the others mixed between Cambridge locals (who got five minutes each) and invited poets from out of town (who got fifteen): Marianne Morris, Sean Bonney, Ed Luker, Joe Luna, Jow Lindsay (tonight, as 'Sofia Stres'), Jonathan Redhorse, Frances Kruk, Danny Hayward, Samantha Walton and Jefferson Toal the visitors; Ryan Dobran, Neil Pattison, Tomas Weber, Caitlin Doherty, Connie Scozzaro, Luke Roberts, [Blank] the 'Cambridge poets'. As line-up this doesn't look 'established', though poets such as Bonney, I guess, count as 'big names' within the ridiculous but hopeful smallness of this 'underground’/ as it is: yet, yes, it looks like a young scene, and a varied scene, no 'Brighton' school or 'Cambridge' school, no Prynne vs Sutherland vs London debates, but an invigorated and ironized and heartfelt, often rebarbative, but in the end in some provisional way really collective, 'scene' (not even that word, which is too fixed, perhaps, though I don't mean to imply that 'anything goes'). Now this seems something like the line Chris Goode lays down in his introduction to the 'Better than Language' anthology, with the additional overlap (outside a book) of performance -- the poets' noise ensemble, the presence of theatre makers (themselves often poets or deeply invested in poetry) such as J. Hardingham, O. Evans, L. Jeschke, L. Beynon, whether performing or in the audience. In all of this the ramshackle (conversational adjunct, private whispers and jokes, interval spilling (wine as well), the passed bottle of whiskey, bar zero, the endless negotiations with the english faculty's electronic locking system) existing alongside the purposiveness and intensity of thought and critique of the poetry itself, which was, in the end, why we were there.

To go through the readings one by one, oddly, perhaps. Marianne Morris' set, its early placing and non-combative (tho' not lazily or easily won) gentleness, its quiet emotional and moral resolve, as she read fragments, literally at times, small scraps of ripped paper with the words written there; this method of reading, presenting work in progress and in working method, offering it up outside the category of the 'finished', is a risky move and one whose results could vary -- but having seen Morris read twice now, on two succeeding Saturdays (previously at the 'Women Poets Against DSK' event organized to follow the traumatic protest against the shameful platform given to D. Strauss-Kahn at the Cambridge Union), it is a method which in those moments has perhaps said, despite my initial reservations, or done, or made us or I feel, more than the overt aggressive hammering rack/ratch-ets which too are necessary and kin to it, and into whose anger too it spills: and this was a quieter reading, certainly, than the first: and the poem dedicated to Mary Stillman, tho' I can't quote its substance back as I'd like to, was really, yes, beautiful in its non-naïve directness and wish. Ryan Dobran's poem with its wit, hanging out in an alley with Michael McClure. And the release of laughter in that, the first now enabled in the audience. Neil Pattison, one of the highlights of the evening, I thought, reading his new and very different work, which is bright colours and Delicate Steve and Skeletor (these poems were addressed to Skeletor) and his reading, shunning the microphone, pacing and looking up at those for whom the poem was shared, and looking up to show that this did mean something in poetry and in life, and it did. And Sean Bonney, all prose, the letters he's been writing for the past six months or so asking themselves about poetry's efficacy, and the prose poem as form, or discovering what formal hybrid between, in any case making in that an argument which we do need to hear and hear even if at moments there might be the flare-ups or disagreements that any such strength or force of conviction-polemic might engender.

The first interval.

Ed Luker, reading much the same set, I think, as that delivered at the Foule Readings last term, last year: again in that internet jargon'd, ironized register which maybe is a 'Brighton' thing in some way - Joe Luna's reading later doing it too, tho' differently; Tomas Weber, the wax wiped off in time, his hours of labour invested the previous week in the making of the four-page poem he read on the night, proceeding as it did oddly on that mixture of allusion and joke (the twenty different nationalities that made their appearances, the fleeting characters disappearing in the space of a line or a word, the strange role and negotiation played by semi-private methods of text generation, the Santorum song/ the ‘Kill Blinton’ laughter points). I've tried to write about his work in a report on a previous reading and didn't really get anywhere; and so here; somehow it still resists me in that way, even tho' it doesn't feel resistant in a closed or harsh way – it is not 'friendly', such an awful word, or easy, but somehow still open to what is brought to (bear on) it.

The second interval.

One of Jow Lidnsay's hilarious extended screeds, governmental names checked and over-balanced in multiplying satirical venom, those moments when he could be heard over the raucous racket(eering) noise which he'd requested from the 'house band' (so many miles here from Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, it's not real). Joe Luna
’s poetry thru internet and irony defeating its own sudden lunges at utopic total universalism, seen as the only ground for ethical hope, head-spinningly, then spun back to the mirror or the filter, the window or the screen thru which passing data and role-play, tv shows jammed up on prynne, the unwitty circus, the plastic or pixellated selves thrown back at us thru which negotiating our real self, if that can be ever whole or non-complicitly separated (not yet), is the burden, placed, here, on and in and thru language.

The third interval.

Caitlin Doherty's first pamphlet has just appeared in a beautifully semi-wonky hand-made edition of 100 from Foule Press, and moves with incredibly dextrous assurance for a first publication thru registers from a page of sound poetry (read tonight) to choric dialogue which translated quite brilliantly into a collective performed realization at a Foule Reading last year: tonight was quieter, solo, newer work, I think, continuing the obsession with satellites that's translating into some really interesting riffs on technology – this is work that is really going places and should be kept on with for sure. Connie Scozzaro, reading just two poems, a shortness and a sharpness and a roughness; Jonathan Redhorse, about whom I know very little, tho' there are some engaging and really interesting pieces of his fiction that are internet searchable, with a sharp and smooth delivery I've already in part discussed or mentioned;

The fourth interval. No: these become blurred, I think the programme was departed from a little as things went on (probably eleven o clock at least by now). In any case, Frances Kruk, another prose work, the audience's flicking from Kruk to Hardingham's performing (as, again, I've mentioned) – I'd have liked to hear it better, because now I'm finding that I can't summon up incisive comment as I'd have liked (such slippings are inevitable, I guess; and in any case I wasn't sure I was going to write this up - to do so seems a little expected or boring, perhaps, now?); then, the fourth interval. Audience sliding around now, divisions between interval noise and reading less clear-cut: so, suddenly, Danny Hayward was reading, a long work, and as one would expect a politically incisive scalpel on the particular issues he'd chosen thus to excavate, excoriate; and Luke Roberts, for the second time that day, after the first reading in a long time, from the (excellent) 'False Flags' and a new work written in December -- that longer reading given at the Runneymede Literary Festival in London, this second five minutes only, a single poem only, again from 'False Flags', with its background preamble, Bobby Fischer and Kasparov, the poem if I remember correctly, and on looking thru the book, being 'The Sonar Deal';

The fith(?) interval (?!):

One other reader; then to end it Jefferson Toal, whose work is really prized in these parts by those few who know it, and which should, on the evidence presented of it tonight, be prized outside, and known by more than a few. The noise back up and the tidying up and finishing the alcohol and eventually at after 2AM everyone going outside, that entire dark dream.