Chris Edgoose

Revised reflections on Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones

At the heart of Deryn Rees-Jones’ new collection Hôtel Amour (Seren), there is a sequence of twenty-four sonnets which flip for the first time into the first person – following the third person of the early section, ‘The Hotel’, and preceding the (mostly) third person of the later section, ‘The Garden’. And at the heart of this first-person sequence, there is a poem, Sonnet xii, in which the poet addresses her thoughts to her deceased husband, the memory of whom is anchoring her sense of self to her weakened and virus-riddled body. And at the heart of this sonnet, like all of them neatly bisected into seven-line stanzas, this clause straddles the whiteness of the central break:

...and me 

like a kite flown from the beach as you look up to hold me...


(Sonnet xii)

At the very heart of Hôtel Amour, then, is a ‘me’, and then a blank space, and then a metaphor, and then a ‘you’. And my reading of this collection is that it is an attempt – and a brilliant one – to fill in, or at least to give some definition to, that blank space that sits between the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ and which is therefore at the very centre, the unknowable centre, of the self. More specifically, this is the blank space between Rees-Jones and her husband, the poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009; but in taking on the project (started in 2019’s Erato – and earlier in the elegiac poems of Burying the Wren in 2012) of exploring her grief, she moves far beyond elegy, and builds a serious and profound meditation on what it means to be a human subject.

I said it is a brilliant attempt, and it is; to add that it is inevitably a failed one is not a criticism, in fact it is the whole point. We only have to go back to Erato, and the imaginative erasure/prose poem ‘13 Numbered Fragments Keeping Barbara Hardy in Mind’, to find the line: ‘The failure of the poem is the first mode of poetic form’. Rees-Jones draws on Derrida here, but you don’t need to get diverted into the vast and spectacular rabbit warren of post-structuralism to agree that any attempt to know the unknowable is going to end in failure. But that is okay, because – staying with Erato – however erroneous and erratic a poem might be, it can still end up ‘(f)ailing, falling, failing better. Or even failing worse as we set a context for new ways of thinking, feeling.’ And so poetry’s failure in attempting to express the inexpressible might paradoxically contribute to its ultimate success, as long as pinning down some strict ‘understanding’ is not your final goal.

For me, Erato and Hôtel Amour (the first two of what I understand is to be a trilogy) take us to a place somewhere close to where Eliot takes us in Four Quartets. Though without any overtly religious emphasis, and entirely unlike Eliot in style and tone, the self-imagining Narrator/ Poet/ Protagonist (from here on the Speaker), caught in the stasis of grief, appears to have found herself ‘at the still point of the turning world’, with fragments of memory isolated by vast spaces of white page as though cut off from one another and hanging in an obliterated past. Fantasy and fiction, reality and surreality, merge as chronology seems to become confused (‘Time shook the seasons and something like a snow globe on freeze-frame halted and refused to recalibrate’) by speaker’s experience of grief and illness combined. The footfalls which echo in her memory emerge from what could almost be described as a fever dream that comes out of the speaker’s slow recovery from long Covid both in Paris and at home – I think – in England.

The metaphorical pairing of illness and grief is the central duality in a collection full of pairings and partnerships, and one which reveals the illusion of the deeper Mind/Body dualism: the physical trauma of bodily illness and the psychological trauma of losing a loved one become one and the same in the speaker, allowing her in one sentence to evoke the enormity of experiencing both Covid’s onset and losing her husband:

but the whole house remembered – the heart pain, like something the size of a cathedral had collapsed inside her – how she could not breathe.

Illness and grief have elided, and the ‘lostness’, which is created by this elision (and evoked by acres of blank white page between fragmented thoughts, acting almost like a padding of cotton wool, and bringing with it a strange kind of insulated hush), reflects the disorientation the speaker experiences within the Eliotian ‘still point’, where she and her husband are the conceptual Two-Which-Became-One when he died (alternatively, another duality: ‘There. Not there.’, where she is the there and he is the not there at the same time as he himself was there and then not there).

These many and complex pairings suggest to me the elegance of a dance, perhaps like ‘Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly’ playing themselves and ‘singing and dancing a little’. And it occurs to me that what Rees-Jones is creating is some kind of phenomenology of the dance at Eliot’s ‘still point’. Bracketed off from the whole world’s turning, the speaker is left simultaneously with and without her husband: and ‘…who knows where in the mobius / strip of us we’ve landed’ (Sonnet iv). To my mind, the effect of the above is to evoke in poetry what Denise Riley described in prose so beautifully in Time Lived, Without its Flow; that is, it stimulates in the reader’s imagination the sensation of crushing loss.

It would be more accurate to talk about joinings than pairings (as well as there and not there, we have lost and found, Castor and Pollux, casein and whey, to name a few more or less at random, but we also have multiple, double-syllable words, often French and often bird-related (Deryn means wren in Welsh and birds are a recurring motif in her work): écoute, amour, pinson, moineau, coucou – where a single meaning comes from the joining of two sounds, or one sound repeated). In fact, the whole collection is an exercise of joining: the ‘Hotel’ – where the poet and her family had been years previously is joined to the ‘Garden’ – which her husband had looked out on from his deathbed (facts that may only be apparent to those who have read her earlier collections, and Rees-Jones’ introduction to Michael Murphy’s posthumous collected works). At the beginning of the third movement – The Garden – the speaker is having a bedroom window repaired by a mysterious ‘joiner’, who, given the metaphorical significance of the bedroom and its window, surely must be read as both a woodworking joiner and a joiner of metaphors. Perhaps, as the joiner’s appearance comes straight after the central sequence of sonnets, he can be associated with poetry itself, possible the muse of lyric poetry Erato crossing over from the previous collection. And the presence of Michael Murphy in the joiner is also hard to ignore. Both readings are given strength by the subtle frisson between the speaker and the joiner, and the almost disturbing hint of eroticism in some phrasing: ‘He could show her how smoothly it ran on its tracks and warn her to be more gentle. / Up would go the window and down would go the window, like the before and after, like a guillotine’.

An intrinsic part of grief and loss, because it is an intrinsic part of thinking, is memory. Rees-Jones has always been interested in memory and its failures. In her first collection, The Memory Tray, we find: ‘There was an object / That I can’t quite place. / Here instead is a dream’; an early acknowledgement that what the memory is not able to replay precisely, the imagination steps in to provide. And this failure of memory is part of the abovementioned failure of poetry in as much as memory must fail in order for us to function as ‘thinking selves’; and poetry must fail if it is to summon, or represent, or evoke, our experience of being ‘thinking selves’.

‘Our brains are made to forget’ she writes in Erato’s ‘Lapse’, we must selectively forget; even those with photographic memories have to forget some things for the brain to function. I think here of Borges’ Ireneo Funes in Funes el Memorioso, who ‘remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it’ but whom the narrator suspected ‘was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions’. Forgetting, or the failure of memory, is therefore not a failure at all but a crucial aspect of a well-functioning brain because it allows us to abstract and categorise, i.e. to think in a way that makes humans human.

The most visually arresting of Rees-Jones’ representations of the blankness of memory failure are the previously mentioned and imaginatively deployed white spaces that sometimes take up as much as a whole page, splitting stanzas, clauses, and sentences in Hôtel Amour. The cumulative effect is one of disorientation, perhaps confusion, as the unwell speaker wanders the streets of Paris, juxtaposing – or merging (joining) – her observations with half-memories and imagined moments.

The many large line and stanza breaks also create the disjointed effect of a mind searching back for scraps of memory in the vastness of a largely obliterated past. These can at times feel desperate…

flames ran and roared and suddenly – yes –  
 
 
she called out 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
but they were gone 
 
 
 
 
 
 
as the day was gone 
without alibi, or futurity, 
 
 
except in their own slow past.

…and sometimes distracted, as prepositions are split from phrases, articles delinked from nouns. The spaces create pauses for the reader which do not feel as though they are simply intended to lend emphasis to specific words. Is the narrator finding it difficult to maintain a flow of coherence? Is she tired? In pain? Is she unable to find the right words without effort? Or is she preoccupied with what is really on her mind, leading to an unfocused narrative?

She liked to imagine the couples who had been there before her, the temporary residents, ghosting and overwriting themselves in 
 
 
captions of feeling: the tenderness, the 
 
 
 
 
 
moments of indulgence, joy, boredom, vulnerability.

And almost as arresting are the revisions and crossings-out, less used but present in both collections, where a thought, an image, a statement or utterance, is returned to and changed, as the narrator/poet feels her way into a satisfactory formulation, perhaps including both because both are appropriate, both express different aspects of the same emotion or memory. At times a whole stanza or poem is revised and revisited, as in ‘The Owl Husband’ and ‘Erratum’ in Erato; and sometimes a train of corrective thought is made visible, in Hôtel Amour: “~~Mothers no strike that out now~~, Parents looking after children”.

In a sense Hôtel Amour in its entirety is a revisiting of the thoughts, memories, themes and symbols of Erato in the same way that ‘Erratum’ revisits ‘The Owl Husband’, the more recent collection representing on one level a long exercise in ‘Maybe I could put it this way…’.

The voice in Erato is quite specifically aligned with the poet herself, the first person singular and plural encouraging the reader to assume the biographical even if imagination and fiction are part of it, and therefore the poems (particularly the prose poems) have a vaguely Sebaldian feeling of fiction as an enhancement of rather than a replacement for the real. Hôtel Amour replays and revisits many of the same feelings, memories, places, and events in Erato; but the speaker is no longer so strongly aligned with Rees-Jones herself. The third person dominates, and the first person, when it comes in, does not reference clearly biographical details. This was heightened for me as a reader because I first read Hôtel Amour without any previous knowledge of the poet or her life – I read it, as it were, blind; and I only subsequently caught up with her past work. Experienced events, then, are replayed as memories not in the way that a film is replayed, but, because memory is imperfect, as acts of imagination – imaginative riffs on what once actually happened. An unnamed hotel in Paris is mentioned in Erato’s ‘Erasure’, for example, and it may be that the hotel was Hôtel Amour itself, which is after all a real hotel, but that is by no means necessarily the case because now the ‘she’ in Paris is created by the narrative voice (itself of course a figment of the poet’s imagination), and even in the central sequence of sonnets, the ‘I’ is, I feel, the same ‘I’ as in Erato, but now replayed in an imaginative mode. Perhaps it is the movement of a prose ‘I’ to a poetic ‘I’.

Rees-Jones’ genuine voice actually seems to come through more clearly in the imaginative poetic ‘I’ of the sonnets than in the prosaically rendered third person of most of the rest of the collection. If I sound surprised by this it is because I tend to find that I hear what I take to be the ‘real’ voice of a writer more in prose than in the often-heightened cadences of poetry. These central sonnets though are often beautifully and subtly rhymed internally but so expertly balanced and measured that their musicality allows for an undercurrent of what feels like Rees-Jones herself as opposed to Rees-Jones the poet, to rise to the surface. This is approached differently towards the end of the collection, where Rees-Jones reintroduces the ‘I’ and the sonnet form, but this time she keeps the diction relatively prosaic, letting metaphor and simile do all the heavy lifting, as though she is exhausted and so loosens her poetic grip, allowing this simple, brutal memory to be rendered as prose within the confines of a sonnet’s space – as (perhaps) her sense of self is rendered within the confines of the memory of her husband.

[There’s a memory I have, both fucked up & beautiful, of you
dead, and me beside you.

The irony – if that is what it is – of merging properties of prose with those of poetry, is brought into even starker relief when, immediately after this late sonnet, a painfully frank and yet enormously touching extract from an end-of-life information book is included in the fragmentary, carefully lineated form that makes up much of the work.

Some people lose control of their bladder and bowel as they
approach the end of life. This is normal but can be 
embarrassing for you and those around you

It may feel strange to need so much help, but this can be a very
intimate and special time.

Again, the deliberate confusion of form and content – here, at the very moment of a death, one never escaped – feels almost dance-like, as though delicately balanced steps are tripping around the ballroom of grief. Eliot’s still point ensnares and limits, and yet paradoxically, it frees: ‘Only through time time is conquered’.

I’ll finish with two final, unconnected reflections.

One is that I have not dwelt on the elegant and significant use of leitmotif, not only in this collection but throughout Rees-Jones’s work (which as I say I have only recently discovered). The recurring symbol I cannot resist mentioning is the elephant, partly because its significance is emphasised by its multitudinous and imaginative appearances (I count eight throughout Hôtel Amour and Erato, one of which, ‘a tiny elephant on a string’, comes at the very end of the collection when the speaker is about to board an aeroplane (I believe to Paris where the action will do a chronological backflip and return to the opening pages of the collection) but also because of the vaguely comic and unlikely nature of the elephant itself as a symbol (Rees-Jones’s controlled comic flair and timing is another element that must wait for someone else to ruminate upon in some other blog). Of course, The Elephant is imbued with many levels of significance, from the religious and historical, to the linguistically clichéd (grief, or perhaps love, I guess, being Hôtel Amour’s elephant in the room!) and I call it comic simply because the creature is so incongruous to the context of the collection. But as a totem, it is, like Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings, potent because its full meaning is impossible to pin down.

What the image of the elephant suggests most strongly to me is the metaphor that Jonathan Haidt chose in his book The Righteous Mind of the Elephant and the Rider. The rider is our conscious, rational, thinking mind; the elephant is our instinct, our intuition and our emotions. Of course, I don’t know if this is how Rees-Jones means the elephant to be read, she may not have read Haidt or she may repudiate him, but for me, the elephant motif suggests that in Hôtel Amour we are travelling in a world of intuitions and emotions, not a rationally explicable world – and that is the world of memory, and dream.

Having already written enough to ensure that no one will be reading by this point, I will try to make my final reflection a brief one. Towards the end of the period that I was reading and writing about Rees-Jones’ work, my mother-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer. Watching and speaking to her in her final days as her body failed and witnessing the awesome spectacle of my wife taking on the full responsibility for the care of her mother at home, gave many of Rees-Jones’ words a new significance, especially those relating directly to her husband’s premature death. I returned to my essay on her work and found that I no longer thought some of the things I had thought before my mother-in-law died. New thoughts came to me, based in a fresh awareness of the bodiliness and the gravity – I might almost say the sanctity – of a human life ending. What had always seemed like a very good collection, had morphed into a profoundly serious and important one. This essay, then, is a substantially revised version of the one I originally wrote, and even now I am aware that my present reflections are also probably provisional, perhaps fleeting, but certainly contingent.

To return to the ‘me’, the blank space and the ‘you’, and the failed attempt to define the space between them through metaphor which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay; it seems to me that the world of meaning-making where this attempt takes place is the world that exists somewhere between the writer and the reader, fully belonging to neither but for which each bears responsibility, albeit of a different type.

I think about the revisions and reworkings in Rees-Jones’ work, I think about her celebration of the necessary failures in art and life, and I think about her speaker’s fragmentary voice speaking brokenly into a whiteness of blank paper. Then I think about my own revisions, my own failures.

I think about the still point of the turning world, where the dance is.

And without my fully understanding why, the people around me – both in my memory and as physical presences in my life now – suddenly seem more important.

You can buy Hôtel Amour here

You can buy Erato here

You can read Four Quartets here

You can buy Time Lived, Without its Flow here

You can read my reflections on Denise Riley’s Lurex here

A Political

The Last Judgement – Lucas Cranach The Elder (after Bosch)

I am as afraid of the left
as I am of the right
    and the centre
      disgusts me.

Men and women in the room
are screaming into mirrors.

While dreamers are adjudicating,
legislators are dreaming
    of the real
      and perfect.

Roundabouts spin
children off
    like peanuts
      into mud.

There are hidden eyes and teeth
there is stomach acid and blood,

in the bushes near the playground
in the puddles near the pool.

Enamel badges caked
and cracked rust
    in these last few days
      before the flood.

It’s tailpipe weather, bitumen heat
and rising desiccation.

I’m an old man, tired
and lost.

When the water comes
eating into metal
    its slime runs slow
      down bronze busts,

wastelands burning gas,
chimneys pinned
    to spectacles
      and elephant tusks.

I see a strange amorphous creature
lumpen shade of dog and bitch.

The corners of the room
collide, the floor
    and ceiling
      switch.

In three out of four ways
this is a normal room
    and all its grotesques
      people.

In three out of four ways
this is normal rain
    and all its bombs
      raindrops.

But I’m pulled as Yeats predicted.
Holding on for dear, dear life.

Deaf to the need for the sure untrue,
the caught-on-a-tide, the do-not-do

of Lao Tzu, the impossibility
of joining minds with a family
    sinking in an ancient
      boat.

When the word comes down
for opinion forming,
    pressure applied
      to vote

it’s not the politician in my soul
I fear as I scratch out my x
    but the imperfect rhymes
      of the poet.

Shrinking and Growing: Rebecca Watts – The Face in the Well

All the precision, wit, and quiet profundity that readers of Rebecca Watt’s previous two collections, The Met Office Advises Caution and Red Gloves have come to expect are again on display in her third, The Face in the Well (all Carcanet); but her poetry has – I am looking for a way to avoid saying matured here – shrunk. And by shrunk, of course, I mean grown. It has grown in subtlety of rhythm, in nuance of rhyme, in lucidity and succinctness of metaphor, it has grown in precision, wit and in both profundity and the quietness of that profundity. And for all these reasons, it has shrunk. It is not that the poems are shorter – some are, three of the four ‘Soundings’ poems, observations out of childhood which dot the first half of the collection, are a crisp four lines long – but while Watts has always been an economic poet, she has now also found a way of condensing the essence of each poem into a small pool of complete clarity.

Some of the poems here seem to channel the spirit of haiku or tanka, in that they are about far more than the small number of words employed appear to be about. Take this example, ‘Buttermere’, quoted here in its entirety, which the reader can peer into as easily as the speaker seems to be peering out, and from which the poet vanishes almost entirely, leaving a sense of what feels like loneliness and despair, but taking a turn – at the stanza break – into the realisation that a decision has been made, either further into despair or breaking out of it. The clarity of the poem is in the notion behind the decision, that whether it is towards or away from despair is immaterial, the key is that stasis has been replaced by action: something is going to happen.

All day I have sat on the lakebed
looking up at the undersides of clouds.
Here and not here.

The lake says there’s nothing
to lose anymore.
The water is extremely clear.

The deep ambiguity of ‘nothing to lose anymore’ aligned with the definiteness of ‘extremely clear’ in the second stanza creates a tension which opens up the metaphorical possibilities of the first. The poem becomes dizzyingly broad in its scope but totally sharp and well-defined at the same time, it is as though Watts provides the reader with the essentials and trusts them to do the rest for themselves.

As I say, wit is nothing new to Watts – I was tempted to call this review What’s With the Wit of Watts and then thought better of it – but her humour now manifests both more openly (as in the acutely psychologically observed ‘Woman Seeks’) which is a very welcome development in a cultural landscape which sometimes seems to have been entirely drained of humour, and more subtly (as in her juxtaposition of a poem called ‘I want to be the orange’ with one of the facing page called ‘Concentrate’, so that the reader is faced on opening that page with the proposition ‘I want to be the orange concentrate’, which adds an ironic sense of artificiality but also a hit of high-intensity sweetness to the “golden afterglow” in the first poem). It’s also just funny because it’s funny.

Also taken to new and very pleasurable heights is Watts’s seemingly irresistible urge to quietly goad and prod those who may be her natural detractors. ‘At home with Emily Brontë’ begins

Ironing is her favourite task.
The rhythm and the steam

transport her to an outer state
more vivid than a dream –

before going on the depict doing the ironing as a veritable act of liberation (“Each stroke a stride, the rugged earth / dissolves into a plain… // …and, godlike, when she’s done with it / she folds the world away”). Such reinvention of a stale and cliched symbol of female domestic subjugation is both powerful in itself and likely to irritate a certain kind of feminist. I sense that this would qualify as a double-whammy for Watts.

She also continues along a rich seam of long-arc irony which she has mined previously, where she outright contradicts what she says in one poem in a poem later in the collection. In ‘Baroque’ she longs for an amusingly over-the-top funeral, whose excesses will stand in contrast to the “practical” life she has lived (and what that word means is really what is explored in the poem, it seems to me):

Let six black-plumed stallions draw the black-gloss carriage
wherein my black-gloss casket rests upon a maple plinth
festooned with lilies…

But then twelve pages later, in ‘Heptonstall’ she considers the resting place of Sylvia Plath, (perhaps replying to those who have called in the past for Plath to be recognised in a grander manner more like that of Ted Hughes who has a memorial at Westminster Abbey although his ashes are scattered in Dartmoor) and here she states

I favour the flesh
of the lily, the rose,

which picks apart quickly
and rots and is gone.
No legacy message,
no guardian stone…

…No pilgrimage site,
no date and no name:

just an honest hillside
at the edge of a moor
where no one comes knocking
on nobody’s door

Is this Plath’s voice? Hughes’s? The poet’s own? Perhaps any and all. Either way the simple sentiment here is in direct opposition to the flamboyance of that in the earlier poem, and even the image of the lily is taken and re-manipulated to contrary effect. In Watts we must live with contradiction, in fact we must embrace and enjoy it. This aspect of Watts brings to my mind Philip Gross, a very different poet but one who sees equally clearly that poetry does not require the world to be made up of logical, left-brain consistency; in fact, it flourishes without that requirement. This is from ‘Severn Song’ the final poem of Gross’s TS Eliot Prize-winning ‘The Water Table’ (2009):

The Severn was brown and the Severn was blue –
not this-then-that, not either-or,
no mixture. Two things can be true.
The hills were clouds and the mist was a shore.

Actually, I quote Gross here for a further similarity with Watts. That they both seem to me to enter into nature rather than attempt to observe it. In Gross, language evokes the life in nature so that the mind of the reader almost becomes it without looking. Watts also sometimes heads in this direction – in ‘What the Mouse Said’ she creates a mouse-voice in a way that recalls, though less eccentrically, Wallace Stevens’s ‘Bantams in Pine-woods’. ‘Buttermere’ I have already mentioned. And in ‘Joining the Spiders’ she wants to shrink into the world of the creatures she finds in a “crevice in the old park wall” when she is caught in rain.

…I wonder

if I stay here long enough
might they take me in –
reduce me

to a crescent of a fingernail

And in the opening poem, ‘Private No Access’, “The animal in me is padding through woods in the rain, / poking her nose in rabbit holes” – again carrying on the theme of animal-becoming from previous collections. Here we sense the livingness of the natural world, and the freedom where human barriers are rendered meaningless – a region the poet of all artists should be licensed to “root(..) out spiders and insects” whether it is to eat them or become them: a world “where every thing alive is permitted // and everything is alive.”

The shrinking into nature – be it a spider or a mouse – is all of a piece with another theme of this collection, alluded to earlier: childhood, returning to it, almost tumbling, Alice-like, back into it. Another poem that yields multiple meanings because it refuses to specify, is ‘The Miniaturist’, which like ‘Buttermere’ trusts the reader to interpret as they wish. A little girl called Esme draws a picture of a house (“the pencil barely touches the paper” – what are we to make of this? What does it tell us of Esme, her character, her past?).

None of the houses she has lived in
looked anything like this,
and still it’s home –

where she must shrink right down
until she’s only a speck,
invisible in the corner of the glass.

Watts suggests an entire childhood here. How many houses has she lived in? Why must she shrink and become invisible? Is this a story of shyness, bullying, foster care, abuse? Or is Esme just a quiet girl who, like Watts herself perhaps, wants to disappear from the human world and enter into a more-real – corporeal – world of nature, as symbolised by a spider who may or may not be sitting “invisible in the corner of the glass”.

Like any wise poet, Watts knows that unanswered questions are far more important that answered ones.

Other poems, like ‘When my Sister’ (which ironically – and not ironically – turns an unexpected can of Lilt into “the work of an angel”) are clearly based on Watts’s own childhood; others may (or may not) be, as in the eponymous ‘The Face in the Well’, where the young speaker sees their own face reflected in the dark water of an out-of-bounds well, and she

…recognised a face, like mine but changed –
rounder, like the moon, neither young not old,

just hanging brightly in the soft black sky
which stretched into the soundless universe.

(the quietness and silence in Watts is perhaps another similarity with Philip Gross).

Here the poet’s – I think it’s the poet’s – external Self meets her internal Self face-to-face. It is a profound moment in both her growth as an individual and as a poet. This is an expression of a self-confidence which understands that expressing every perceived truth (virtue-signalling) is not necessary for an assured sense of who one is – we only need to be able to see our own reflections to live with ourselves:

Loneliness and fear and all the shame
that dutifully feeds them flowed away.

I didn’t have to hear my voice thrown back
to understand the face was always there,

at home deep down, connected to the source,
needing a reflection to make it live.

The key unanswered, important, question here is: what is meant by ‘source’?

Watts’s formal skill is important (see Glyn Maxwell’s glowing review here), but equally important for me is that she is saying something worth saying, that I emerge from her work having learned something, having been given a new trail to follow. And this poem – the collection as a whole in fact – is evidence that Watts is now truly amongst the most interesting poets out there.

You can buy The Face in the Well from Carcanet, here.

What is in a name: The Naming of Names by Shash Trevett

Those who have read Shash Trevett’s debut pamphlet, From a Borrowed Land, will recognise a number of the poems in her debut full collection, The Naming of Names, if often in slightly amended form; and those who have read the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (of which Trevett was an editor and which included a couple of her poems) will know something of the political context and poetic heritage from which this new work comes. I’ve written previously about the earlier two collections in pieces you can read here (From a Borrowed Land) and here (Out of Sri Lanka) and not wanting to repeat what I have already said about this poet’s often heartbreaking, thoughtful, and beautiful work I will concentrate in this review on the broad structure, the core themes and key metaphors of The Naming of Names, and I’ll hone in on a couple of poems that exemplify these.

The fundamental importance of names (names of people, names of objects, names of places) to the way we generate meaning has been a concern of writers from Shakespeare to Proust and well beyond, and Trevett adds her voice to this tradition with great accomplishment. For her, it is the names themselves, but also the naming of them, that allows us to retain some form of connection with those who have left us. Not just the giving of a name to a person, but the repeated acknowledgement of it, the saying of it, the recitation of it, perhaps even the incantation of it.

A person’s name is analogous to their culture and identity – there is an etymology there, a sociology and an archaeology almost. We learn about a person from their name as we learn about their culture and history, by burying down into the details. One of Trevett’s chosen metaphors is that of the story, which we tell and retell to pass heritage and memory down the generations. The following stanza is from ‘The Naming of Names 6’, a prose poem which gives us a fascinating insight into the poet’s own name, Shash. The poem ends:

The naming of names and the way we carry them helps us write the story our children will make their own. By repetition on certificates, censuses and passports, they seem set in stone. And yet, through war, necessity or custom my family’s use of names has been water-like, flowing through languages and prejudices. An unforeseen consequence of all our unmoorings.

The surprising second half of this stanza/paragraph reveals that where name-naming might sometimes be seen as anchor-like, ‘set in stone’ and perhaps a means of stability in a turbulent world, Trevett has found that for her family, names have taken on more the quality of water itself, flowing through the turmoil of religion, ethnicity, gender and geography. The poem itself is an example of the name as the starting point of, or perhaps the support that helps the writing of, a story.

Many of the ‘Naming of Names’ poems (there are eleven) are simple alphabetised lists of some of those who died in the twenty-six-year Sri Lankan Civil War – taken from lists in reports by the Sri Lankan North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESHR), themselves, as Trevett points out, only a fraction of those who actually lost their lives. These names do feel more ‘set in stone’, as though they are names lining a wall of remembrance. There is a formality, even grandeur, in this presentation, and the poems are I think, in one sense at least, intended to honour the dead – certainly to remember them. But right at the beginning of the collection Trevett puts this much more beautifully, in three short stanzas entitled ‘Dear Reader’, where (as in her family’s experience of naming names) there is not the coldness of stone in the names, but the warmth of life. I quote the poem (or perhaps I should call it poetically lineated prose) in full:

This book is filled with names. They will be strange
and unfamiliar to you. As you turn these pages you will be tempted
to gloss over, skim, even ignore them. Please don’t. There is music
in these names

Each is a whisper of a life lived and loved. Each a Tamil man,
woman or child killed by the state. Each a forgotten victim, mere
collateral damage, peripheral, expendable.

These names are mausoleums for those denied gravestones.
They are the staccatoed prayers of remembrance.
The hiss of incense on a funeral pyre.

This touching exhortation reads like a plea to return dignity to those denied it by the calamity and disgrace of the civil war. It layers metaphor upon metaphor to emphasise the semantic depth of these names, but they require the attention of the reader, the looker or the hearer, and their active collaboration in remembering. Trevett knows her readership, which is why she knows these will be unusual to the eyes and ears of many, most, English speakers. And they are. It is difficult to read through them, especially aloud, without stumbling and using what feel like disrespectful mispronunciations. I gave up attempting to read them aloud, although I had wanted to try and incant them (inspired possibly by ‘The Naming of Names 7’: “From deep within her came a chanting”), and I ended up wishing I could hear them spoken out loud by a Tamil speaker. But even allowing your eye to land on each name, allowing it space for a moment in your head, as you might look at and appreciate an unusual flower, I think gets towards the affect Trevett is looking for. A number of poems dig into the translations of names, and in the final poem of the collection, ‘To Name their Names’, Trevett lists alphabetically a selection of names and provides the meaning of each, bringing out a sense of the beauty that each one carries within it, as those who bore the names did while living. Jeevakumar, we learn, is a child brimming with life; Lavanya is she with a fighting spirit; Kokila is a nightingale; and Thannimalai is a waterfall.

The collection is structured into four parts, but these are not so much like chapters of a book or acts of a play as movements of a piece of music. The theme remains, but the work speeds up and slows down, widens and then narrows, progresses as the poems speak to each other and develop, as it were, dialectically. The first section takes us starkly and shockingly into the heart of the civil war itself, with details of atrocities such as those listed so coldly in ‘How to Dispose of Tamils’. But even in the earliest poems there is a suggestion of a wider context and analogous peoples, for example ‘Curiosities’, where Billie Holiday’s song Strange Fruit about lynchings of black people in the US, is used to springboard an almost surreal contemplation of war’s horror, with body parts and parts of names hanging in trees “A jigsaw / of possible pairings”.

Billie sang of southern trees
but strange too are the ones growing
in the garden around Jaffna.

Body parts protrude from mango, neem
or guava trees. A leg here, an arm there. Etched on these are fragments of names: Sinna…., Path…. or ….ini.

The second part personalises the civil war and focuses the name metaphor on Trevett’s own family with ‘The Naming of Names 6’ quoted above and follows her family’s emigration to England. Tree imagery carries through with “The hanging roots of the banyan tree / like swinging ropes, promise hours of fun” (The Missing Children) echoing chillingly with ‘Curiosities’ from them first part. Here Trevett’s own challenges on adopting a new language and the stark sense of the alienation experienced by a young girl as one culture is forcibly overlayered onto another: “All copies / of my precious Ambulimama / had disappeared… // And in their place a pile of books in English… / …A galleon in full sail on their spines.” (The Armada Children’s Library). This poem cleverly uses the old Armada children’s books logo to reference British colonialism, which is so bitterly turned on its head in Trevett’s complimentary pair of angry political poems which criticise the UK political establishment for blocking the entry of desperate refugees, especially children through the Illegal Migration Bill and the rejection of the Dubs amendment. You were happy enough to exploit the rest of the world during the time of Empire, the poet seems to be saying, but where is your pity for those who need your help now?

The third part continues the metaphorical strands of gardens, flowers, and the mining of language but filters them specifically through a female lens. The poems in the part each present a portrait of an individual woman or girl: the internal emotional journey of a relationship in ‘Blue Lotus Flowers’, a young Eoran girl from the 1700s in ‘Patyegarang’, the reclaiming of an identity of Na’amah (no longer just the wife of Noah) in ‘I was Na’amah’, a fleeting moment of “movement and light” for the poet’s own daughter Beck, among various others. The reference to racism in the US (it could be anywhere) from the first part comes back around in ‘Ann Lowe 1953’ where we hear Jackie Kennedy’s disturbing off-hand comment about the fashion designer who created her wedding dress; “A coloured woman made it”. Such echoes and reflections are what keeps this collection bound together as a serious and coherent work.

The fourth and final part circles back to overt references to the Sri Lankan civil war, but now the tone has changed, anger and horror has given way to sadness – and it is a strength of the collection that it does not attempt to console: there can be no consolation. The tree image that has been present throughout is now “The last mango tree” which “stands alone / in a garden that was once full”. Catastrophes like the 2019 bombings of churches across Sri Lanka go almost unnoticed, or at least quickly forgotten, and the world it seems is incapable of learning lessons from the past: “things happen / and the world moves on.” Trevett offers only a warning, in the form of a picture of a tyrant based on Auden’s ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ – but where Auden’s tyrant is dead and rendered in the past tense, Trevett’s is in the present, he lives on in many forms, and the best we can do is beware of him. “He is the man you should never invite to dinner…// He is the man you should never share a joke with…// He is not a man you should ever criticise.” And key to Trevett’s project, I think, is that while Auden’s tyrant cried and “little children died in the streets”, the violence done by Trevett’s tyrant is as much to do with the violence of language as the political reality of the violence it becomes: “He can transform commas and semi-colons / into nooses; full-stops and exclamation marks / into gravestones.” The violence done to and with language is at the centre of many of the poems here.

The book is more than anger and sadness though. To misquote Wilfred Owen, Shash Trevett’s subject is civil war, and the pity of civil war – the poetry is in the pity. And it is that sense of pity – not feeling pity for someone but acknowledging the pity of something – in its full and profound meaning at the heart of the human condition, which drives these poems onwards and turns them into weapons against tyranny. Because in a sense all of the poems in this collection are part of an ongoing struggle against that undying tyrant. The requirement on the reader to actually read the names of the dead, not skip past them, to engage and join the poet in acts of remembrance and identification, is part of that struggle – let’s call it a struggle against evil. And it is possibly part of the reason that Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo chose to describe the collection as a “globally significant achievement”.

In a world where a lot gets said about very little, and it sometimes seems that little gets said of real significance, poetry which has something genuinely important to say should be applauded, celebrated, and above all, read.

If you haven’t read Shash Trevett yet, please do.

You can buy The Naming of Names here.

Greta

Greta
/ˈgrɪːtə/

The first Greta is a river
she is Griótá, the stony stream
birthed where St John and Glenderamackin
conflow in their ancient beds.

The second Greta is a river
she is Griótá, the stony stream
rising in the Pennines and feeding the Tees
thickets deep and darksome bed.

The third Greta is a river
she is Griótá, the stony stream
between Twiss and Doe, slung to the Lune
lashed to the Irish Sea.

The fourth Greta is a township
she is a myth’s beating heart, red-
bricked shack with rusted wheels in the outback
where Ellen gave to the world.

The fifth Greta is my father’s
mother, great and wide of laughter
gone to the world but for my father’s eyes
and mine: each year more hers.

The sixth Greta is an oxbow lake
she is forgotten water, a question mark
half-formed and losing herself to the endless air
as the river flows by.

The seventh Greta is Ellie
my daughter, she is the gate-keeper
and physical work of being alive, lock-keeper
in turn, of every level.

Intimacy and Integrity

A few months ago, I saw Sasha Dugdale talking to Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre for the launch of her latest collection The Strong Box (which I reviewed here). It was a fascinating conversation (which you can watch here) for many reasons, but I was particularly interested to hear their comments on the fact that Dugdale, in a collection extremely rich in allusion, chose not to provide an explanatory Notes section. Maitreyabandhu was, I think, surprised that there were no notes and said he did not get the impression Dugdale was using allusion “for intellectual reasons”. I agree, and I had recently read the collection for my review and found it very refreshing that notes were not included. It is not that notes are not helpful – they really are, but I have often felt like there is both something limiting about them (‘this is what I’m getting at’ the poet sometimes seems to be saying) and in some cases something just a little ‘showy-offy’ going on. I don’t object to them being there, I get pleasure out of reading them and find it useful to apply them to my reading of the poems, and yet there is something about them that makes me feel like they shouldn’t be there; it is a sensation that I will return to later in this essay, one which could be described (rather grandly taking the term from the lexicon of psychology) as cognitive dissonance.

In fact, Dugdale later explained a little further to me in an email that her intention in The Strong Box was to “make a new and integrated language from disintegrating canons”, implying I think that notes pointing directly to the allusions would have made such a language less natural and detracted from the overall effect she was seeking. This approach seems to me one which is fundamentally respectful of the readers’ role in generating a text’s meaning – as I put it in my review “The Strongbox is like the TARDIS, it is an immensely rich poetic world which, when you enter, you find is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. You, reader, must discover; you must curate.” The poet puts her trust in her readers to read the language she is creating from those “disintegrating canons” and she allows them to curate her collection with whatever interpretive tools and poetic knowledge they happen to bring.

All this made me think about a book I read recently called Intimacy and Integrity by Thomas P. Kasulis, a comparative philosopher from Ohio State University. I feel this work has a lot to offer both the study of poetry and the study of culture more widely, and so I had been looking for a chance to discuss it here in my blog.

I will briefly outline Kasulis’s thinking here, with a few additions of my own, before returning to The Strong Box and its lack of notes.

Kasulis suggests that when making cross-cultural comparisons, one useful model to help us make sense of difference may be to think in terms of “recursive cultural patterns” which he calls “orientations of ‘intimacy’ and ‘integrity’”.

Intimacy and Integrity orientations describe two different hypothetical ‘starting points’ or inclinations in thinking which place differing weight on certain aspects of the relationship between the Self and its environment, of relationships between Selves and other Selves, and of the nature of Truth itself.

Some cultures (traditionally those termed Western) emphasise integrity in the sense that individuals are seen as complete and separate entities in themselves – i.e. with their own indivisible wholeness or ‘integrity’; and the relationships between those individuals are something external to them. Other cultures (again traditionally, Eastern) in contrast emphasise intimacy in the sense that individuals are fundamentally part of each other, inseparably sharing of one another’s innermost qualities. The relationships between individuals viewed this way are internal, part of both and separate from neither.

These fundamentally differing orientations have enormous consequences for worldviews, ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

For example, a scientific view of Knowledge as publicly verifiable propositions about an externally existing universe is a worldview which is an outcome of an integrity orientation-based culture. Knowledge in this worldview, is in principle available to all (in journals, conferences etc.). An individual is a discrete thing: the knower; a certain state of affairs in reality is a discrete thing: the known; and Knowledge is descriptive of the relationship between the two, while being external to both. But the intimacy view of Knowledge sees it as part of both the knower and the known. The judges of a dance competition know how to score each dancer not because of a publicly verifiable set of propositions about dance, but because they have the expertise and crucially the experience of dancing that allows them access to this knowledge. It is not subjectivity; it is objectivity accessible only to some. With intimacy, the knower and the known are part of each other, and the truth of Knowledge comes from a process of what Kasulis calls ‘assimilation’, in contrast to ‘correspondence’ theories of truth in integrity orientations (the correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs).

Similarly, an integrity orientation would see God and a believer as separate, while an intimacy orientation would see them as part of each other; a worker with an integrity orientation would be more likely to see employees as separate to the company they work for, whereas one with an intimacy orientation would see the two as part of the same thing – each fundamentally affected, changed and formed by the other.

Politically, the left-right duality of ‘Western’ discourse is a feature of the atomism and bipolarity that comes from an integrity-oriented epistemology, as is the party system and representative democracy (clearly, though, not the necessary result of this orientation); while the more esoteric, exclusive, and ‘hidden’ nature of knowledge from an intimacy-oriented standpoint, can under certain circumstances lead to fertile conditions for despotism, fascism and totalitarianism (although again history shows us that these political ideologies do not depend on intimacy-dominant cultures).

Kasulis’s aim is to make sense of some cultural clashes and misunderstandings and to foster greater understanding of greatly differing philosophies. My view is that it does this extremely successfully and it is important that he notes integrity and intimacy as features of not only cultures but of sub-cultures. Whereas one orientation might be dominant in a culture overall, another may be dominant in a subculture within that culture. And moreover, that orientation may change from legitimacy to intimacy and vice versa over time. With globalisation and particularly since the birth of the internet and social media, it seems likely that these orientations may have become more and more fragmented, sub-cultures more profuse and spread out – and so what is designed as a framework for understanding differences between, say, Japanese and American culture, may be equally useful in helping us understand the many and bitter disagreements and disputes that make up what are known under the blanket term Culture Wars.

It is important to note that there is no suggestion that an intimacy or an integrity orientation is better or more appropriate than the other, only that looking at cultural difference in that way may help us navigate clashes and avoid falling into division and distrust. If we understand global cultures as having gone through a process of fragmentation over the course of the twentieth century, and that fragmentation having sped up significantly over the last thirty years of increased internet usage, we can perhaps apply Kasulis’s model to help us make sense of seemingly intractable and inexplicable differences: if our thinking is now affected by both intimacy and integrity orientations, because our influences come in from all over the world and algorithms may cause the cohering of sub (and sub-sub-) cultures in every smaller and myriad online clusters, maybe what Kasulis sees as larger scale recursive patterns have actually become more localised and faster evolving than he imagined. Could it be that when I get blocked on Facebook by an angry family member because I’ve expressed positive views about Trans women, that I am applying intimacy-oriented thinking to the issue of gender while my family member is more influenced by integrity-oriented thinking? When I am unfollowed on Twitter/X by an angry poetry editor who has interpreted my submission as racist, could it be that I am applying more integrity-oriented thinking to the issue of race while the poetry editor is applying intimacy-oriented thinking? In other words, with disparate influences coming in thick and fast, have the orientations effectively exploded? None of this makes one person right and another wrong on any given topic, but thinking about Culture War flashpoints through the lens that Kasulis supplies may enable us to frame the differences between us in helpful ways.

Let’s turn to ways in which Kasulis’s ideas can be directly applied to the analysis of poetry; which he deals with in a section on aesthetics. Under integrity, the artist “retains autonomy and individuality through her or his creative expression”, the artwork itself remaining separate from both the artist and the audience, the relationship with the former being their expressive intent and with the latter their interpretation. This, I think, is the orientation of the poetry critic who makes unambiguous quality judgements about a poem and backs up their judgements with quotations. I would suggest that it is also the orientation of the poet who includes explanatory notes at the back of their highly allusive collection.

Creativity under an intimacy orientation, however, is an internal relationship to both the artist and the world; and a work of art contains (and is contained by) not only the artist and the world, but also the audience. An intimacy view of aesthetics has several interesting implications: one is that determining the meaning of an artwork is left neither to the artist nor the audience, but because it is part of both of them, and they of it, its meaning is down to both. But, as with intimacy’s epistemology, there is a requirement of experience and expertise in order to ‘uncover’ the work’s meaning (“those who have assimilated knowledge through common praxis”). It is not necessarily open to all, only those who put in the time and effort to ‘get’ it. This is the orientation of the poetry editor making their selections for inclusion in their magazine, and that of the panel of poets choosing which poems are shortlisted in a competition. I feel it is also the natural orientation of both modernist and post-modernist poets, whose texts may variously make use of esoteric allusion and refuse stable meaning.

So, returning to Sasha Dugdale’s non-use of notes in The Strong Box, which we might compare to another excellent recent collection, one which does make use of notes, Geraldine Clarkson’s Medlars (which I reviewed here), I think that one way to consider her project is to say that Dugdale applies an intimacy-oriented approach. The poets of those “disintegrating cannons” and their work, are part of her, and so they are intimately part of her work. To pull them out in notes would be to externalise them, which does not fit with the internal relationship she feels to them. Her readers may notice them, or they may not, depending on what of those canons is also in them. In contrast, Clarkson’s notes indicate that she may be taking a more integrity-oriented approach: she wants to externalise those people and works that have informed her poems. Her notes are there as a useful tool for the clarity of readers; Clarkson does not wish to confuse, and she wishes to be open about certain aspects of where the poems came from, and so in her case adding notes is a thoughtful act. But they are an appendage to poems which are seen as separate to both the poet and the reader.

Again, there is no suggestion, either in Kasulis or here, that either orientation is right or wrong. This is a way of thinking about difference, nothing more. It is not principally about poetry of course, but for me poetry is a useful way in to thinking about something more widely.

My feeling of cognitive dissonance on coming across explanatory notes could be explained by me as a reader taking a more intimacy- than integrity-oriented approach (and this in fact ties in with the way I was trying to make sense of poetry and ideology in my essay on Spender and ideology here) even though a lot of what I do as a reviewer (arguing a case, presenting evidence) might equally show integrity-oriented inclinations. To expand this, could it be, when we come across some cultural phenomena that just doesn’t ‘feel right’ but we can’t quite explain why, or when we have mixed feelings about something that we don’t quite feel able to pin down, that intimacy and integrity may offer an insight as to why? And might the same be true if the dissonance is not in me alone, but between me and others? If I am right that the “recursive cultural patterns” in Kasulis have ‘exploded’ and ‘fragmented’ with recent changes in global communication norms, then his model may provide insights into why so many people everywhere are disagreeing about so much.

This is a brief and inadequate precis of Kasulis’s work on intimacy and integrity, and for anyone who is interested in learning more, I would highly recommend the book itself, which you can find here.

You can buy The Strong Box here.

You can buy Medlars here.

The Day the Author Died

Postmodernists who bewail Generative AI should ask themselves why

Back in 2018, I wrote a response to a piece in The Poetry Review by Jack Underwood called ‘On Poetry and Uncertain Subjects’. Underwood had written about the uncertainty of poetic knowledge, and how a poem existed only as the various meanings given to it by its readers. I reflected that however true that readerly instability may be, there must be some stable element always remaining in that text, something of the author who wrote it, I called it the text’s ‘linguistic DNA’. Underwood responded to my response, saying that the author is not stable and that in language the subject is always in a process of ‘becoming’. Linguistic DNA did not, he told me, exist; in fact, the writer themself was nothing more than a text which required constant reinterpretation.

I came away, as so often, with a feeling that in order to take a certain view of what a poem is you must take a certain view of what a person is. If you disagree with someone on the latter, you are unlikely to agree on the former. On reflection, I think I agreed with Underwood that we constantly reinterpret ourselves and others, and to that extent we are impossible to pin down – the inherent uncertainty of the Self is a big part of why we cleave so determinedly to political frameworks and moral certainties. They provide us with an illusion of stability where none exists. We are all memory and projection, making ourselves up over and over. Why should poems be any different?

This was all very well, and as I say there is a lot to admire and agree with in Underwood’s essay, but it left me uncomfortable and for long time I wondered where that discomfort was coming from. Then ChatGPT came along, and suddenly everything seemed to come into focus.

In my abovementioned blog, I brought up the subject of Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author as it relates to these ideas of instability and the locus of meaning-making in texts. For Barthes, the author was nothing, the reader everything; and Underwood’s analysis seems to make the same claim – any point of stability that we might designate ‘The Author’ simply disappears in a puff of smoke, replaced by a multiplicity of shifting and subjective interpretations. A thrillingly postmodern view of what it means to know a text.

But now, here comes generative AI with its Large Language Models that can generate texts of increasing complexity and nuance, literally without the need for an author. And it seems to me that we finally have on the near horizon the possibility of the actual death of the author – a death which when it comes down to it, Barthes was only fantasising about. Now we can really have stories and poems whose meaning really lies only with the reader. Barthesians should celebrate, should they not? Or if they are not, they should at least ask themselves why they are not pleased that we can finally bid farewell to that outmoded and unfashionable concept of ‘authorial intent’.

The truth is, and I don’t think I need to point out the wider cultural relevance of this, theoretical musings on what something is or isn’t make for wonderful philosophy, but they don’t seem so much fun when that thing is actually faced with imminent destruction. Suddenly all the old, simpler, more unfashionably obvious definitions seem important again.

My instincts, as a borderline postmodernist, are that I don’t want AI to replace human authorship, I don’t want engineers to generate quickly adjustable prompts to run algorithms that will generate novels, short stories and poems in seconds (although it is arguable that there is a certain artistry in this), and I don’t want the texts that I hold dear as expressions of humanity to be reduced to reader-only ‘objects’. But why, if I have sympathy for many of the central tenets of postmodernism, should I care?

There’s a coherent argument that generative AI texts are expressions of humanity, because LLMs use neural networks to machine-learn from disparate examples of human expression to produce outputs in the same way that an individual human processes a lifetime of experiences to produce outputs.

But something doesn’t feel right, does it? Machine-learning human expressions is not the same as processing human experiences. And what generative AI texts are missing is nothing to do with their subtlety, nuance, complexity, beauty – all of which may be attributes a reader applies to them perfectly legitimately whether machine or human generated – but it is everything to do with intentionality.

You don’t need to go as far as Nick Cave’s comically overblown comments on “notions of creative struggle” and “fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit” to agree with his basic point that there is a disconnect between a text created by generative AI and anything that we would feel comfortable calling a piece of art. What is lacking is not necessarily the tortured sweat of a struggling bohemian but the simple human intention to produce.

This isn’t just the intention to produce a complete artefact either, a prompt engineer or the person who presses the ‘print’ button on a computer has that level of intentionality; a piece of art, for it to deserve the name, requires a process of intentionality – a series, or a web, of interlinked and concomitant choices that have been made and which result in a single cultural artefact which is then available for multiple and shifting interpretations. This is the work of an artist, or in literary texts, an author.

But the postmodernist might complain, we have slipped here from ‘text’ to ‘art’; which is like slipping from black to white, or from subjective to objective. Quoting Nick Cave’s bombast takes us in the wrong direction, they might say, it distorts the situation by giving the Ego flesh and blood, giving a living human identity to exactly that signifier from which those attributes are stripped by the act of writing, “…that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” as Barthes put it. And what he did in killing off the author was nothing less than shedding symbolically the Modern in favour of the Postmodern, where there is no fixed ‘truth’ and so there is no fixed ‘artist’ or ‘author’, they themselves are texts, cultural objects with a multiplicity of readers who each carry with them their own version of the truth.

I mentioned above that I have sympathy with this view. And it perhaps goes without saying that the author can only die if they have previously lived. Barthes not only kills off the previously assumed notion of the author being the sole dispenser of a text’s meaning, but he also makes the assumption that any given text must, literally speaking, have a writer, i.e. a ‘subject-who-writes-it’, who only then symbolically dies, having written the text (or more accurately whose very act of writing the text causes them to pass from subject to object). Generative AI represents a future Barthes could not have realistically anticipated, one in which texts do not have authors, and so they cannot die. It is a future in which the premise of his essay, that texts have authors which can be denied their authority, is itself denied.

So, my inner postmodernist reprimands me, there is no reason a Barthesian should not lament the effect of generative AI on literary authorship – to suggest as much confuses the Death of the Author with the Annihilation of the Creative Process, which Barthes was never interested in doing.

But this still leaves a question: if the act of writing causes the authorial subject to become an object, why would we mourn the loss of that subject in the first place? What is wrong, since meaning’s construction is solely in the hands of the reader, with considering a poem in the same way as we might consider a stone used as a paperweight? It is what it is, in its context, uncreated, but selected from others and used to fulfil a purpose. We can ascribe meaning to such objects, read their context, their surroundings, the criteria for their selection. Why should we worry that there was not an actual ‘creator’?

Well, because there is a difference between a stone and a poem. However beautiful, intricate etc the stone may be, however astounding the millions of years it took to fashion it, there was no intention behind the process of creation; whereas the poem had a poet. And the poet had an idea.

The intention to realise an idea, the will to do one-thing-and-not-another in intimately linked succession, projecting forward with some kind of, albeit abstract, hope for an end product, this remains with the text after it is written, and we are justified in analysing authorial intent, as long as the reader makes the assumption, as Barthes did, that the text has an author. If we do not make that assumption, then what I called the text’s linguistic DNA is snuffed out, but at that point we no longer have a text, we have a stone-like object.

So now my inner classical pragmatist speaks up and claims that the postmodernist who mourns the real death of the author at the hands of generative AI does not believe their own doctrine. They want with their reason to rid the text of authorial intent but with their instinct they desire to retain the warmth of human intentionality at a texts core.

Which brings me back round to my earlier comment that in order to take a certain view of what a poem is you must take a certain view of what a person is. Postmodernism does not account for people as homo duplex, as Durkheim had it, that simultaneously singular and multiple creature that we are – both an individual and part of a group, always. Postmodernism turns us into a multiplicity of meanings and denies that we are also a singularity. It has no room for that paradox in its explanations.

So my current position is this: yes, we are all memory and projection, yes, our identities are multiple, shifting, and historically/culturally formed, and yes, poems are the same. But I maintain that there is a single us-ness to us as well (a ‘more-than-the-sum-of-all-our-parts’), just as there is a single strand of linguistic DNA in a poem which runs directly from the intentions of the author to the perceptions of the reader. In coming to that conclusion, it is for me the Postmodernist who dies, not the Author.

Let’s be clear, there are many other reasons for poets to be concerned about the rise of generative AI. Will editors ever again be able to read their vast inboxes each week and be sure that what they are reading was written by a person? Will the judges of poetry competitions now always live in fear that their choice poem will turn out to be AI-generated and they will be shamed in front of the whole poetry community? Can poets be sure that their competitors for space in poetry magazines are not using AI to generate poems that are better than their own in a fraction of the time? Whereas images, and pieces of music and film will all in time have ways developed to prove their provenance, literary texts, particularly poems – that uniquely rememberable cultural commodity – will never have such assurances provided.

My contention is that the postmodernist should not care about any of this because the act of writing kills off the author anyway; my suspicion is that many will.

Eggs, Dreams, Reflections: on Sasha Dugdale and The Strongbox

Sasha Dugdale is the kind of poet who is as interested in the work of others as she is in her own. As editor of Modern Poetry In Translation between 2012 and 2017 she championed poets from all over the world; as a translator of Russian poetry and prose she has made the work of writers such as Elena Shvarts, Natalya Vorozhbit, and most recently Maria Stepanova, accessible to the non-Russian-speaking world; and as poet-in-residence at St John’s College Cambridge she organised poetry readings and discussions for both students and those outside the university. And I know from experience that she responds gratefully, enthusiastically and kindly to unpublished poets, readers of poetry and reviewers – encouraging reviews not of her own work but of other poets she admires and who she feels are under-appreciated. There may be other established poets in the UK with this level of generosity, but I can only say that I have not come across them. I’m tempted to say that she puts the Art before the Artist, but that is not quite right. From her earliest collection, 2003’s Notebook (Carcanet), she has been interested in the interaction between Art and Artist, how they simultaneously make and define each other. And how they both arise from their particular social, political and historical contexts – but in doing so become something that transcends those contexts.

In Notebook she considered JMW Turner, imagining him into existence in a series of short dramatic monologues which tended show the man and his work alongside his intimate relationships and social milieu. In The Estate (Carcanet 2007) she turned to Alexander Pushkin, taking the spaces and objects in his Mikhaylovskoye estate as inspiration for ruminations on the poet and how proximity to the material of his life impacted her own writing. In the long titular poem from Joy (Carcanet 2017), she focused on William Blake’s wife Catherine just after Blake’s death in a Forward Prize-winning dramatic monologue which builds in quiet intensity from bleak despair to an almost visionary expression of her intense love for her husband and her own creative identity. Then, in one of two major sequences in Deformations (Carcanet 2020), entitled ‘The Welfare Handbook’ (which I have previously reviewed here), Dugdale used letter cutter and artist Eric Gill’s own letters and diaries to devastating effect, casting difficult artistic light on his sexual experimentation and abuse of his daughters.

The other sequence in Deformations, ‘Pitysad’, a reimagining and fragmentation of Homer’s Odyssey, seems to me both a culmination and a launch pad. In one sense it is the culmination of progressive iterations of a creative strand in Dugdale’s writing which has been moving in a slow arc since the titular sequence of Red House (Carcanet 2011), which marked the moment when (I cannot think of another way to express this) she began using some longer sequences and poems to inhabit poetry; when it became less a tool with which she worked than an environment through which she walked. “The red house lies without the parish of the soul” begins the sequence, a line so replete with metaphorical possibilities that it brings to mind the younger Auden, and not as pastiche but as from a poet similarly living within their own poetic universe, inviting us in to look around for ourselves. Joy’s deep first-person dive into Catherine Blake’s psyche stained with her husband’s mysticism continued this strand; and the steely-eyed, unforgiving journey ‘into’ Eric Gill took it to disturbing new depths. ‘Pitysad’ felt to me like the poetic sequence Dugdale needed to get to, almost the inevitable outcome of those poems I have just mentioned. (Could we have had her Penelope without her Catherine Blake, her Odysseus and Shadow Prince without her William Blake and Eric Gill?)

But ‘Pitysad’ is also a launchpad in that it is the beginning of Dugdale’s modernist exploration and reinvention of Greek mythology which is extended and developed in her latest collection The Strongbox (Carcanet 2024). Her project is ambitious, and her aims multifarious, but it is marked by the fragmentation of linear narrative – exploring the Epic form as an alternative to rather than a subcategory of the Narrative form; the transposition of mythical characters and epic language into modern contexts and idioms; and an exploration of the masculine and feminine in art, both as part of each other and as binaries.

The Strongbox moulds, and works with, the approach to mythology introduced in ‘Pitysad’, and creates a larger, more self-contained work; one in which effectively an argument is made for the use value of poetry as an appropriate means of analysis for love and war. It is simultaneously a cry of distress for the modern world and a cool-headed contemplation of what it is in us that leads us to the dark places; of male violence and hidden female strength.

So, to turn to this latest work in more depth.

The first thing to note is that among the many things signified by the metaphorical ‘strongbox’, the one most immediately introduced to the reader is the collection itself, and by extension Poetry. The Strongbox’s structure is sonnet-like, a single sequence of fourteen poems, complete with an octet, a sestet and a volta (on poem eight ‘VIII – The Empty Stage’, which stands as though in an uncertain stasis between two dream poems either side of it, at that classic point in a sonnet where the movement is both forward and back: “Could be dawn could be dusk / The only difference being that / Dawn has no memory whereas / Dusk remembers everything –”). The integrity of the closed poetic form itself becomes a metaphor for that which is unknowable but unbreakable within us, and of which the most we can coherently say is that its contents is precious – but which it is Dugdale’s bold project to explore.

The egg is quite a common symbol of strength/vulnerability/fertility and could quite easily be allowed to slip into cliché and mundanity, but Dugdale avoids this by developing the motif carefully and in conjunction with other themes so that the egg-like-ness of the ‘strongbox’ becomes just one attribute of the central metaphor, one facet of a more complex jewel.

Through numerous, at first brief and flickering mentions which build in power and momentum as the collection proceeds, the egg image reaches a surreal zenith in poem XI, ‘Gods & Men’, where the egg, dream-like, expands into a giant eye only to fold and contract back into a locket in a jewellery box, in a hidden drawer, in a campaign chest, in a King’s golden tent, amongst thousands of others on the Trojan plain, as a hero walks up and down in a rage (“but he is not the subject of this story? / no / (hesitates) / not him.” This hero seems most likely to be Menelaus the Greek king raging in his anger at Helen’s abduction – the locket perhaps containing her image or a lock of her hair. Is the egg and its contents therefore ‘Love’? Possibly, but if so, it is Love as the engine of Pride, Anger, Power, Hatred, Violence and Humiliation. Is this really what is at the fertile core of the human condition? That possibility perhaps explains the several occasions where Dugdale grapples with concepts of hopelessness and despair.

The egg image often appears in dreamlike contexts, and the fragmentary nature of the whole sequence gives it all the sense of taking place in the unconscious. The dream, as a self-contained entity with an inside and an outside, is another aspect of the ‘strongbox’, a mainstay of modernism and a particularly human mechanism for meaning-making, which is emphasised in the same poem (XI) quoted above as that which distinguishes the human from the god they may take themselves to be: “only mortals turn away from the world / into the privacy of a dream.”

Classical mythology is rife with dreams, often where the Dead and the Gods speak to the living – to reveal truths, but also to command, coerce and mislead. If the strongbox is a dream, I wonder if it is entirely to be trusted?

But exploring a terrain of the unconscious has another purpose. As a series of extended and overlapping dream fragments, the collection is a study in the rejection of narrative as an explanatory force. This is explicit: “Narrative appalls me” says the italicised non-narrator in poem X – ‘The Messenger’s Descent”. This poem in particular takes ‘Dream’ to the level of ‘Fever-Vision’, where Hermes, as an exhausted, sickly soldier shivers in front of a television whose images “seemed to speak to him / in the silent voice of an uneasy dream”. The voice has morphed through the ingenious device of a sinister pair of smiling lips from a quite spectacularly constructed section which channels both the richness of Dugdale’s beloved Keats and something of a Coleridgean hallucinatory madness; as though Kubla Khan’s measureless caverns have birthed a great chthonic gift to humanity, only for it to be forgotten and ignored, giving substance to those ancestral voices prophesying war:

At once a treasure of human potential, an Orphic or Cosmic Egg perhaps, but also in part an earthly gift and in part ‘stolen’ (a reference to treasures of the world pilfered by European Empires? The nod towards Fabergé eggs may suggest this) this split boulder is wasted, lost and hidden by a world literally and psychologically scarred by war (“yellow barred with angry scars”), and Hermes comments with what reads to me like a grimly humorous play on don’t shoot the messenger:

There is a story here, but it exists in images and phrasings, lines and rhymes, which work off each other and need interpreting as a Freudian or Lacanian would interpret a dream. Symbols overlayer, cross-fertilise, and proliferate. Meanings are liberated from the tyranny of narrative. And, to some extent at least, the responsibility for creating those meanings – or we might say the careful curation of them – is passed to the reader.

The first poem of the collection, the long and difficult ‘I – Anatomy of an Abduction’, is in one sense an analytical breakdown of a child’s kidnapping, abuse and (I think) survival, while simultaneously it is a meditation, or the beginning of one, on Helen of Troy, and as such it functions as a way into the egg symbolism that will go on to dominate the collection (the famous myth that Helen emerged from an egg when her mother Leda was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan). But the poem, which exemplifies Dugdale at the height of her powers, also weaves into the text the threat and reality of totalitarian rule and conflict in eastern Europe: the Trojan war (of spears, arrows, tents and plains) is intertwined with an modern warzone, unnamed but presumably Ukraine, where “…troops are dispatched / to erect barriers on all major routes”, and which itself appears to contain echoes of the Second World War kindertransport (“make haste innocents / trust no one”). I should say I think there are many references here (and in the collection overall) that I have missed because of my lack of knowledge of Russian poetry, Dugdale says in the Notes & Acknowledgements that the collection contains her own translations from Russian poems, and I suspect that these, read as such, would make the immediate Russian/Ukrainian layer stand out in fuller relief. My failure as a reader here is not hers as a writer.

The poem is also a study of art as it relates to violence (“Now your poet’s ablaze like Zeus! / whipping up the words in a lather / of horror, of disaster!”). And it asks questions about conceptions of the Masculine (as He Who Abducts/Abuses – Theseus? Paris? Putin? Potentially any man?) and the Feminine (as She Who Is Abducted/Abused – Helen, the lured bride? (do I hear the whispered name of Shamima Begum coming through in some lines?), Ukraine? Potentially any woman?). All these themes come together in deliberately unstable artistic union, tricksy and shifting terrain which the reader must negotiate. And in being all of these things, this remarkable poem is also none of them. Each individually is less clearly defined than they would be, narrative-bound, on their own; but crucially the poem as a whole is also more than any of them could possibly be.

In the intriguing final section of the poem, a “bored guy” is sitting in a yard “sanding his arrow shafts”, and he is watched from a nearby window by the speaker, probably Helen, who is tempted to “reach out and tickle his ear” in order to tempt him into telling her whatever it is that she feels he is “longing” to tell. The archer figure’s identity is, as with all identities in the poem, not fixed. Greek mythology abounds with archers, the most obvious candidate being Paris, at once abductor, abuser, coward and hero; and this reading is given weight when he appears to reference his wounding of Diomedes in the foot in the last stanza of the poem. But here also we simply have a nameless soldier (“a boy, despite the beard” we hear of his previous incarnation earlier in the poem), bored between battles, and keen to get the attention of a pretty girl. More to the point, we have a meaning-sodden symbol in his bow and arrow, which as well as a weapon is the passage of time as the arrow makes its arc, sun-like, across the sky; the span of a human life as its potential turns to kinetic energy and as it speeds “towards the far sea / to plunge itself into non-existence”; and fittingly it is also the arc of Narrative itself as the Homeric “purple song” builds to a violent crescendo until “One final thrust and all is lost / for the tamer of horses…’” (the horse tamer could be a number of mythic characters but I’m tempted to read this as Narrative carrying mankind itself to its final destruction). The archer then brings his “dirty finger” down on his bow “where he’s wedged it in a patch of thyme” and the thyme/time homophone here allows us to speculate that for Dugdale, narrative language is stuck in something more organic where meaning is complex and non-linear but more able to convey the human condition. Thyme symbolised strength, courage and sacrifice for the ancient Greeks, was said to have grown from Helen’s tears on her abduction/seduction by Paris, was rubbed on warriors before battle and worn in the hair of women to accentuate their beauty and was even thought to provide direction to the directionless soul. Such thick-layered symbolism suggests that what is timeless and consistent about the human ‘soul’ (and here we get to the centre of the strongbox as a metaphor) is various, chimerical, paradoxical and perhaps ultimately indefinable, but it is a condition towards which a modernist poetics can point both writer and reader. In Dugdale, such a poetics does not exactly replace narrative, but it is offered, throughout this collection, as in ‘Pitysad’ before it, as a rich alternative. And it is one of course which is particularly rich in potenial for working subversively within the symbolically linear, inflexible and oppressive patriarchy.

This movement towards a modernist poetics, which I’m suggesting is the fruition of a course Dugdale’s poetry has been taking for a number of years, since Red House, but with more purpose and direction recently, is I think closely linked to her translations of Maria Stepanova. It can’t fail to be to some extent, and the relationship between translator and translatee is one I would love to hear more about (especially from Dugdale and Stepanova whose creative relationship seems almost Lennon-and-McCartney-like). I imagine influences come in from many poets, Don Mee Choi, whose work I reviewed here, amongst them; but to my ears there is a particularly clear link here between Dugdale and Stepanova, this is partly in the shattering of narrative, partly in the multiplicity of voices, and partly in their shared thematic interests (memory, war, art, the masculine and the feminine, etc.); but it is mostly in the organic earthiness which Dugdale embraces here for the first time. Stepanova’s War of the Beasts and the Animals (which I reviewed here) is smeared in mud and blood as symbols of war and nationalism but also as the literal and metaphorical ‘matter’ of birth and rebirth.

And in The Strongbox: “We are so close to the ground in childhood” says the speaker in an early section of ‘I – Anatomy of an Abduction’, signalling the advantages of such a low viewpoint that the minutiae of the earth come into sharp focus, and hitching it to the innocent and exploratory days of childhood. And later, in ‘VI – The Dirty Fire’, this viewpoint is maintained as the speaker grows like a plant, looking across a battlefield from a position “so low to the ground / I had the perfect view”. There is a space in the wet soil, as in Stepanova, for something new to take root and be born, spreading out and feeling its way plant-like into an underground/Underworld of transformative creativity:

I suspect the close bond between the two writers is taking them both in directions they would not have gone in separately, and I look forward to reading Stepanova’s new (Dugdale translation of) Holy Winter 20/21 (Bloodaxe) later this year.

Another feature common to both writers is a sense of humour, which in both cases (and perhaps this is a feature of Dugdale’s translations of Stepanova rather than being present in the original, but this seems to me unlikely) enter the soundscape of the poems in what feel like tonal jabs. Often aimed at men, or one aspect or another of masculinity or male attitudes, there is a barbed quality which suggests that the humour itself is an act of self-restraint. Sometimes this is in an unexpected image or turn of phrase, with a play on words, as in the gods/dogs turnaround in “gods weave around each other / barely touching / sniffing one another’s genitalia / saying nothing” – both gods and dogs in this case standing in for men. But in The Strongbox, the jabbing humour comes more from the insertion of parodic male characters: the borderline boorish Paris who begins “snoring lightly” when Helen begins describing her dream; the mansplaining Menelaus who is frustrated by Helen’s refusal to accept a flaw in the grand mythological theory of the “glory of seven”; the earnest but patronising theatre director who is trying to elicit verbs which cast light on a section of the previous poem (the meta-analysis itself a sideswipe at over-analytical men) only to receive unsatisfactory abstraction which does not fit in with his plan of analysis “Yep, no, ‘hopelessness’ won’t do either”.

This last character, from ‘II – In the Rehearsal Room’, contains more than an echo of a speaker in a poem from early in Dugdale’s oeuvre, ‘The Film Director Explains his Concept’ from Notebook (“Fuck it, men, we’re talking about women. This is one for them.”) and is quite a nice example of some of the constants across her six collections. I’ve been emphasising the movement towards modernism which took hold over the last three collections particularly, but she has been remarkably consistent over the twenty-plus years since Notebook in the themes she chooses to deal with. One of which is her deep interest in and exploration of Homer, Ovid, and other classical poets. Greek mythology, although treated differently in recent collections as mentioned, was first brought into her work explicitly in one of my favourite poems, ‘Cypresses’ in The Estate. In it, a group of walkers caught out on a cold night burn some cypress logs to keep warm and reflect on quiet grief and how the silhouetted nearby cypress trees (“dark figures”) are like Phaeton’s sisters, the Heliades, who mourned the death of their brother in his disastrous attempt to control his father Helios’s horses as he drove his sun chariot across the sky:

This lovely poem is a neat and complete story in itself – as Ovid’s tales are; the scene is set, the metaphorical device established, and the poem’s meaning(s) satisfactorily accessed and appreciated – I find nothing to criticise in it as a poem of its type, and much to love. But it is instructive for anyone interested in Dugdale’s development as a poet to compare it to a section of ‘VIII – An Empty Stage’ in The Strongbox, where trees are treated very differently and meanings no longer so readily accessible:

Another story out of Metamorphoses, but here Dugdale takes a much more radical approach. Whereas the earlier poem took a step back from the myth and used it as a means of evoking the experience of and reflecting on the value of holding grief internally, this one enters into the landscape of the myth itself and reshapes it to its own purpose. In the metamorphosis of this tale from Metamophoses (could Dugdale be any more meta?!) she suggests that the original, where the elderly couple are turned into trees together by the gods so neither has to mourn for the other, is a lie, one we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better, but the reality is far more appalling and horrific – it is the reality of war. There is no comfort for Philemon or the reader, and indeed this lack of hope as I have mentioned previously is something Dugdale comes back to more than once (what is the correct response to the horrors of reality if not despair?) and that powerful final phrase “in that darkness / he never once ran out of words” could be interpreted variously as a bleak view of the futility of Frankl’s Will to Meaning, an expression of the male drive to control by explaining (cf. Menelaus in ‘IV – A Lesson in Anthropology’), or more positively as a suggestion that language ultimately may be the scrap of hope at the bottom of Pandora’s (Strong)Box.

I’d like to finish by trying to take this important notion of metamorphosis and relating it to the theme of reflection, which is at the core of The Strongbox. Even in the structure of the collection we see poems reflecting each other on either side of what I’ve called the volta of ‘VIII – The Empty Stage’. Helen’s dream poems could be looking at each other like Narcissus staring at his own reflection in still waters, and we also see ‘V – Men & Gods’ reflected back and distorted in ‘XI – Gods & Men’. As the titles suggest, these poems ask the same question from different perspectives: in one, Man desires to encroach on the domain of the Gods; in the other, Gods consider in puzzlement what it means to be human. Like their reflection of course, they are ultimately one and the same; and through their reflections they metamorphose into, rather than opposing, one another. Terrible, cruel, capricious Gods; terrible, cruel, capricious Men. The seemingly paradoxical sameness of opposites is taken further in what I take to be one of the “distorted fragments from Heraclitus” that Dugdale mentions in her Notes & Acknowledgements: “fire is not the opposite of water / but its reflection”. And we see the metaphorical fruits of this reflection in ‘VI – The Dirty Fire’, in which the poet Sasha Dugdale appears to be speaking directly to the poet Homer, and where fire becomes that creative, transformative poetic force which almost goes beyond language:

But this scorching of the creative earth is followed by new growth, “My renewal what the world demands”, and then “Out of water comes soul”. This is a modern female poet explaining to a classical male poet why she has transformed his work so drastically. The voice that emerges, having risen through the earth, is female and fecund but also lost and in danger.

This feels very close to what Dugdale described in Deformations as “the voice of water which is good for recording disaster”. But the oppressive heat, if not the fire, of the old male poets threatens to return with echoes of Eliot’s Wasteland in “August is a hopeless month”. Fire and water reflect one another within the structure of the poem, becoming part of a creative whole through which the female voice works to rise through the male; but it is a process, a cycle, in which the tyranny of the male voice is always threatening to deaden that of the female.

So, to finish, finally. What is The Strongbox? Well, I think like any powerful symbol it is both everything and nothing. That’s not a cop out; the answer to what it ‘is’ is contained within the poetic landscape created over the course of the collection, into which Dugdale is inviting us. We might say The Strongbox is symbolic of The Soul, Human Potential, Hidden Strength, Female Creativity, Resistance to Patriarchy, and many other things beside; but actually the list of things it ‘is’ will be different for every reader who gives the collection the attention it deserves, because each reader brings their own understandings and experiences to the text. Without wanting to sound facile, The Strongbox is like the TARDIS, it is an immensely rich poetic world which, when you enter, you find is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. You, reader, must discover; you must curate.

You can buy all Sasha’s collections, including (from 10th May 2024) The Strongbox from Carcanet, here.

One Woman Revolution

This is the second of two essays posted some time ago on The Friday Poem. The first was from 2022 on Spender and Ideology; and this is my 2023 essay on Fran Lock ‘One Woman Revolution’. I acknowledge and thank Hilary and Andy from The Friday Poem for the lovely job of editing they did on both these pieces.

One Woman Revolution

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point – James Agee

The paradox of communication is that it presupposes a common medium, but one which works – as is seen in the limiting case in which, as often in poetry, the aim is to transmit emotions – only by eliciting and reviving singular, and therefore socially marked, experiences – Pierre Bourdieu

To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo – Valerie Solanas

There is always passion and challenge in Fran Lock’s work, along with a fair bit of discomfort for the middle-class reader, and this has never been more so than in her recent book White/ Other, described on the back cover as “a shapeshifting work of feral lyric riff combing poetry, polemic, and coruscating rant”.

It is certainly a difficult book to pin down. It is not poetry, although there is poetry in it; much of the prose poetry blurs into the actual prose and so “shapeshifting” is very apt. It’s not a book of essays either exactly, although it closely resembles one; the academic mode that Lock writes in creates the appearance of a collection of lectures or a monograph, but she is making use of this with a very specific purpose. And there is a sense that the reader is being lectured so “polemic” is also apt. “Riff” is a clever choice of words as it gets to the spontaneous, improvisational feeling that comes with her rage-filled flow of words. It is an eloquent stream of consciousness that charges onwards with unstoppable force – even the chapter breaks feel like mere pauses for breath. I’ll come back to the “feral”, but “coruscating rant” I think most succinctly captures Lock’s project here – to embrace “the rant as a native art form” as she says herself. She is here, as elsewhere, taking a word which has generally negative connotations – the rant as irritating, as irrational, as unthinking (and therefore dismissible) – and claiming it positively for her own purposes.

Lock is probably the most effective politically radical poet of her generation, and also – I’ve spent a few months seeking out as much of her work as I can find and I can’t escape this conclusion – one of the best poets of her generation, period. I’m not sure she would thank me for the comparisons, but I have not read a poet through whom language more appears to flow as from some magical core of creative fury since Alan Ginsburg in Howl, or more sincere in their use of and need for the act of writing since James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Both dead, white, male writers; I’m acutely aware that the comparisons say as much about my reading as they do about Lock’s writing.

But compare this from the beginning of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live.

with this from the opening pages of White/ Other:

how to tell them, i am only writing a book where book is to writing what scar is to wound. where book demands the scar but refuses the wound. where scar becomes the denial of the wound that produced it. how can you learn to say: i remember that i was in pain, i do not remember being in pain. and scar is the glittering skin of affect. where the scar is empty, smooth and clean. refigured, devoid. where the scar is pure. how should i write, when the pen pushes back at the hand that holds it? it is not the story that refuses to be told. it is the big idea of the book that refuses the story; it is literature itself that resists and evicts me. put it another way: there is no story, there is only the wound. the wound cannot be said to story, speaking the wound picks open the scab.

What is similar here is the desperate knowledge that their words as they exist in published form can never convey what they are attempting to convey; it is an acknowledgement that their projects are doomed to failure because the written word is not able to capture the livingness – perhaps the lividness – of the experience they are born from. For Agee this is someone else’s experience, someone else’s pain; for Lock it is her own. And this of course is the difference between these two writers (I mean other than the obvious): Agee was a visitor to and an observer, a relatively wealthy one from a middle-class background, of the poverty of dustbowl sharecroppers; whereas Lock is writing from within what she calls the trauma of poverty. To Lock, Agee and his writing would likely not be any part of a solution to the problem of poverty but part of the problem itself, and therefore the enemy.

And let’s be quite clear. If you are middle class, to Lock you are the enemy. There is no point equivocating about this because it is the central theme of her work, and any middle-class reader needs to deal with it and calibrate to the fact that the writer they are engaging with despises them as a representative of a ruling / self-deluding / socio-economic-system-maintaining / arrogant elite. And many middle-class readers, on realising this, will either deny that they are part of the middle class at all (this is a common delusion of the liberal left wing of the middle class) or simply get irritated with Lock and turn off. But poetry, or perhaps I should say literature in general, provides an opportunity for reflection by both the writer and the reader; it does not require agreement between the two; and if the one has made up their mind and is “consol(ing them)self with the absolute license of unfettered fury”, that is no reason for the other to turn on ‘defence mode’ or switch off entirely.

Another way of putting this is to suggest that the best reaction to Lock’s work is not to ask, “why is she so angry?” but to ask, “why am I not?” You have to engage on Lock’s terms, take the willing journey into her radicalism, or you will never get much further than resentment, irritation, and scepticism that she is really the various ‘othered’ things she claim to be. To me this is clearly a non-starter as an approach to her work.

My feeling is that, just as it is impossible to understand the many and mystifying conversations about what it does or doesn’t mean to be trans(phobic) without reading Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Jaques Lacan and many others probably going right back along the continental line to Kant, there is similarly no way to engage properly with the work of Fran Lock without spending time reading and thinking about the many and varied thinkers who have influenced her work, among them Butler again, Pierre Bourdieu, Cyththia Cruz, Valerie Solanas, and yes, probably back to Marx, then Hegel, then Kant.

To take Bourdieu, who Lock clearly knows well and quotes approvingly, as an example. Bourdieu says that it’s easy to think that middle class and working class are just words, but in society everything is words, agreed and negotiated meanings which have different currency in different contexts and environments, and which are a form of what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital themselves and so if we use the words middle class and working class, they become real, the same way the value of a banknote is real, and not just as labels that help us conduct ‘objective’ analyses of society, but as part of the way we form our thoughts and define our ‘selves’. More than that, following Bourdieu, the social and economic class we belong to is our habitus, which means it not only forms but limits the way we are able to think and act. The wealth that has congealed in some areas of society under neoliberalism has created power structures that are as much within us as outside us – and within those economic and social structures, gender, sexuality, race, and other factors create complicating cross currents that make the power dynamics of our everyday lives both knotty and ever-changing. It is within these dynamics, Lock claims, that those without wealth, those who diverge from the norm, those from marginal communities, get lost, forgotten, dismissed and ultimately abused and even killed. Her work can be read as a refusal to let any of these things happen.

Lock’s great and radical drive is to resist the power relations that the social, cultural and symbolic capital of our habiti make appear so natural and permanent. She maintains the discourse of academia throughout White/ Other not to rub our noses in her intellect but in order to claim that very discourse for herself, which is to say to claim it for the working class, the female, the queer, the Irish traveller communities, whose capital in the academic field is lacking. Equally, by interminably, obsessively, expressing her anger at the middle class as a single, amorphous, externalised object, she is not merely venting (although I imagine venting is part of it) but deliberately putting any middle-class reader in the position of ‘other’, reversing the situation as she sees it outside her writing. She refuses to be treated the way she sees the middle class treat the working class (“they prefer you dead, those people. by which I mean all those “sensitive” white middle-class students, ipodding winehouse or joy division, making a fetish out of music’s doomed heroes … and being dead, these figures are freed from their difficult contexts”), and by continually referring to the they / them / theirs of the middle class in opposition to the we / us / ours of the various categories of Other that she lays claim to, Lock ensures that the middle class reader will need to make a mental manoeuvre analogous to the muscular adjustments in the eye required to see a stereogram properly; in other words they will have to look at the world differently, if only briefly. How does it feel to be excluded, she seems to be saying, not very nice is it?

Lock is not a sociologist, and her work is not an analysis or even necessarily a critique – in the traditional sense – of society; it is an exploration of what many might see as the ‘internal’. She provides insights through her work, as much of the best poetry does, of a complex and troubled mind (she refers both here and in other works to therapy – “they sent me to see a woman with an office behind her eyes”). But to pathologise Lock’s work would be to fall into one of the many traps she lays for the unwary middle-class reader. The malady, as she says clearly, is in the way we blindly submit to the demands of the obviously unfair and rapacious monster that is late-stage capitalism (“the pathological conformity of neoliberalism”); the way we allow ourselves to be seduced by it and divided from each other. As Emily Dickinson wrote: “Much madness is divinest Sense – / To a discerning Eye – / Much Sense – the starkest Madness”. It is only the extent to which you assent or dissent from the majority that decides the extent of your sanity and how dangerous you are to society. By this measure, Lock is raging within a condition forced on her by a sick world. And she refuses to be cured, as to be cured is to be forced into a cage, or worse – think Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

i say to the therapist: what if I don’t want to be consoled? sleek and clean, step back into the world. What they call the world, the oblong box they put me in. and you fuckers, you can only understand language as a way back, as a yellow brick road and a pair of slippers. worse, part retreat and part deliverance. mine is the “feral” menomic of collective fury. i want my words to burn the book that buries them; rage to exceed the scream that carries it.

Language is not for consoling; for Lock it is both her battlefield and her weapon, and it occurs to me that a particular battle metaphor might be another useful way to approach Lock’s work: her rage as the linguistic equivalent of Cu Chulainn’s ríastrad or battle warp spasm, during which the legendary Irish warrior mutated into an unstoppable force that did not distinguish between enemy and friend as it hacked its way through the hordes.

This is a wild, unpredictable and untameable force, and it is the force evoked in the motif of the feral shape-shifter (from tame conformist human; to free deviant beast) that has been there since the start in some of Lock’s imagery and illustrations from her Gentle Reader epistolary PhD work and has continued through the many references to her dog Manny – whose very name seems a radical reversal of ‘doggy’ and a nod towards a therianthropic shift – and through poems such as ‘The Dangerous Dogs Act’ in The Mystic and the Pig Thief (2014) (“Feral beldam, / I sit cross-legged in baskets. I speak / in a rough dog voice”) and more recent ones like ‘The last wolf killed in Ireland’ from Forever Alive (“indulging my jugular thoughts alone”) and her Hyena poems.

Lock has said, “I am not sure it’s poetry’s job to translate the pain of raw experience into some ideal of emotional expressiveness, to mould our traumas into neat little codes of plain statements. Catharsis is too much like absolution, it lets us off the hook.” But if there is consolation for the poet in these poems, it is in the feral, in the creation of a language that does not compromise in any way with the mainstream, the middle class or the moderate. She is to an extent working through a process of what she has called “queer mourning” – for herself, for her friends, those she calls her ‘tribe’ – but when she imagines herself into a hyena or a wolf, she is not creating a happy ending for herself or any of those she sees as oppressed and marginalised. There is more initiation than resolution going on here. Paradoxically, because she claims, “my hyena is an elite of one”, her feral mutations are in one sense a cry to instigate group action, a howl for the solidarity of oppressed and marginalised women: “what if feral weren’t your get thee hence? what if feral stayed, will stay, and is? what i meant to say: oh queer ones, motherless daughters, the wolf-wombed, the womb-wounded. oh all my hyenas, we’re coming, we’re here.”

Insomnia is another frequent theme in Lock, and that silent, dead-of-night, exhausted wakefulness almost begins to feel like a cave that she is carving out for herself, perhaps creating that “space (we deserve) in which to be angry” (from ‘Notes on Rag Town Girls’, Muses and Bruises, 2017) where she is separate from everyone else and so in some sense able to escape “the bogeyman (that) is capitalism”. But it is not so simple. Insomnia becomes a place where she can lament her lost friend, as in ‘On Insomnia’ in Contains Mild Peril (2019)

[...] Grief is a longing in the body, your
body, the machine-tooled aesthetics of starvation. It’s
so uncool, a super-terrestrial emptiness; the acetone eroded
teeth of your disorder. He will not come again. Sleep will
not come, and make an amnesty of bandages […]

and in ‘Cohort’ from Dogtooth (2017), a long poem which amounts to a statement of intent for Lock’s whole oeuvre, in which she states, “There will be no poetry […] This is the music of my witness” and goes on to recall Martyn and his death before asking

And who would torture poems out of this? Poem as
a trichophobic eyelash tweezered from the red rim
of wakefulness. There is no poetry, only the dream,
pulled from sleep’s stuttering pre-history; the dream,
polluting the pillow like hotel lavender, the reek
of week old sweat.

So, the space where her grief is expressible allows only a poetics that disgusts. This is perhaps part of her concept of queer mourning, queer for her being “an identity or mode of being that is imperfectly held within language”. Again, there is little room for consolation here; she is locked into a cyclical condition of capitalism’s making (“it isn’t just that capitalism breaks your knees and then sells you crutches […] but that it continually recreates the conditions for insomnia, then attempts to put your inability to sleep to work.”) and so she needs continually reassess what it means to be in the grip of insomnia, which brings her back to the wound image that she used to stand for White/ Other as a whole:

okay. let’s try this again. suppose insomnia was not the absence of sleep, but its scar, a remaindered state, a remnant, remnants, fragments, debris. suppose lack were the wrong word. think instead in terms of wound or deformity. a messy psychic excess. a kind of mutilation … capitalism is surrender to rapidity … oppression is enacted so fast, and our waking hours are so distracted and compressed, that we are never able to entertain another’s suffering, to enter their space, to apprehend the slinky little operations of a machine that grinds us all to mince. Insomnia makes that space, is a stepping out, is a moral motor too.

There is escape, then, in insomnia, and even space for a morality that sits outside The System; but there is no consolation, and no respite.

To return, finally, to the subject of Lock’s well-documented rage, it is worth pointing out that much of this anger is cast in a slightly different light when you read her view on Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who became famous for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol:

I needed Valerie, with her swift-witted, savvy, feral burlesque of queer anger. The S.C.U.M. Manifesto somehow embodies the too-muchness the world hates in women, in queers, in poor people. It’s hyperbolic, excessive, polarising, and hilarious. It is incendiary and prescient, and what still impresses me is that such a profound clarion could come from a person so marginalised and so vulnerable. There’s no meekness or shame in Solanas’ writing; her work constitutes an absolute refusal of shame, and this from an abused and destitute woman. The writing’s power and Solanas’ own powerlessness exist in irreconcilable tension; this tension is what gives this work its explosive quality, a quality I have always aspired to within my own best writing.

In Solanas, Lock clearly found more than a role model in the conventional sense: she used her as a template from which to create her own literary self. Those adjectives are exactly ones we could apply to Lock and her own work: swift-witted, savvy, queer, feral, hyperbolic, excessive, polarising, hilarious, incendiary, prescient, marginalised, vulnerable, abused, destitute, explosive. The “irreconcilable tension” between an individual’s powerlessness in society and the power of their writing, is a reframing of anger which turns it not only into an artform, but also a reply to those who criticise her work for being angry for angry’s sake:

the most common and immediate response to such poetry is: the fuck was that? people understand rage. targeted rage. tied to an overt performance of identity. but this, i am told, is ‘oblique’, ‘diffuse’, ‘directionless’. why are you so angry? what are you angry about? it isn’t enough to say everything, everyone. they do not wish to be included.

Solanas has allowed Lock to own her rage, to fill it with all those adjectives she applies to ‘Saint Valerie’, as she calls her in a section of short prose poems in White/ Other (‘MEDITATIONS ON THE LIFE AND EXAMPLE OF SAINT VALERIE’: “better dykily psychotic, than a soother, a breeder, an ego booster […] we asked valerie for guidance: her head was a lantern in a lion’s mouth, inspecting error.”) So, as with all things, Lock’s anger becomes hers alone and can really only be understood on her terms.

Of the adjectives listed above, hilarious may be the word that stands out to some as untrue both for Solanas and Lock, but they are both humorous writers on occasion. “(T)he fuck was that?” is an example of her wit and close linguistic observation. Another is in her section title ‘LISTEN, FUCKER’, and in “by which I mean, shut up, who’s telling this thing anyway” at the end of ‘HORSE FLESH’; and in “what is rage without a body? rhetoric. an acousmatic fart in a jar” from ‘FORMS OF ENCHANTMENT’; another comes from Dogtooth: “Adding insult to Ian Drury. What?”; another from The Mystic and the Pig Thief: “My grief / is a fascist and it vaants to be alone.” Not to speak of the title of the final poem in Muses and Bruises: ‘Rag Town Girls Don’t Want to be in your Shitty Fucking Magazine / Anthology / Stable of Wanky, Middle-class Poets Anyhow’. Such funny / not funny morsels are sprinkled throughout her work, showing both a self-awareness and a sense of irony that is not allowed to develop, I suspect because Lock carefully controls and restrains her wit so that it doesn’t dilute the anger of which it is part.

Lock has always enjoyed wordplay, and especially soundplay that uses her exquisite poetic ear and imagination to turn language in on itself. She frequently plays words off against each other to unlock meanings and expose new angles on them, often bringing in the Irish that she is teaching herself, making the most of their phonetics and etymologies (“broken tongue / broken english”; “more than the kyrie, than the caoin”; “halting site / halting state”; “alternate faces / identical fates”; and most effectively when she is in the incantatory mode of ‘the witch’: black calabash, black bowl, black drum. Black bow, black hole, black gold. We know what we owe, the slaughtered ewe, the warm embraceable you”).

This constant play with and analysis of words is partly because, again following Bourdieu and others, Lock is acutely aware of the interconnectedness of language and being – she is trapped in English as much as she is trapped in society’s structures. And she finds that all the writing that she does, both poetry and prose (and there is a lot of both when you start looking online) cannot express what she needs to express for the simple reason that it is English. She says she feels “the lack” of Irish in her, that “i am not sure english can be forced to hold these feelings”, and she claims, in what I find to be the most memorable comment in White/ Other, that she needs to speak Irish “for my mouth to be more than a basket of knives”. This is the only hint in the book that Lock wants to escape, at least sometimes, from her rage – she acknowledges elsewhere how “pretty wearing” it is to “inhabit a cultural world that simultaneously provokes response and silences reply”.

Shortly after this, we read a full page that repeats and repeats the italicised word money. Lock highlights the one word that many wealthy people prefer to make disappear from view, and underlines how being trapped in a language is part of being trapped within an economic / social system, ending with a comment both as politically profound as her comment about knives was personally profound:

the poor make money visible, we expose the underpinnings of the system in which we operate. we puncture the illusion that art and culture are magically exempt from money, that the position and status of elites are the result of exceptional merit. they fucking hate that.

The reader will make their own mind up as to whether they agree with Lock on this, but to me it feels deeply insightful.

There are hundreds of poets up and down the country entering or judging competitions, running or attending workshops, sending or receiving poetry submissions, but very few who write like they are pulling out their heart and slapping it down on a table before a shocked family. Fran Lock is one of them. I’ve never encountered a poet who pulls me in and pushes me away to such an equal extent. It may be (following all the arguments that Lock herself makes) that it is as impossible for a middle-class person to feel the rage she feels as it is for her not to feel it. And it is important for anyone who identifies as middle class to recognise that when Lock comments at the end of White/ Other:

when i say FUCK CAPITALISM i am telling you i love you

she is not speaking to you, but to “the workers”, “the poor” and to her “undocumented tribe”. Her radicalism is such that you are not and can never be included. That is the point of her work; and her radical genius is her ability to use language to forge a space for herself in which she can – perhaps hopelessly, but certainly uncompromisingly – other all those whom she sees as othering her and those who share her material position in society. She turns alienation entirely on its head.

When the reader leaves the poetic / literary space, where understanding and reflection are prioritised over agreement, and moves back to the political one where choices need to be made, they will need to decide what to do with the experience of engaging with this uniquely relentless and demanding artist. As Lock knows well, the most likely response for the vast majority of people will be to continue moderately with their lives just as before. But maybe, just maybe, not all.

Two Poetries: Spender, Poetry and Ideology

I’m reposting two essays posted some time ago on The Friday Poem. The first is this one from 2022 on Spender and Ideology which I still think is worth reading; and it will be followed in a second post by my 2023 essay on Fran Lock ‘One Woman Revolution‘. I acknowledge and thank Hilary and Andy from The Friday Poem for the lovely job of editing they did on both these pieces.

Two Poetries: Spender, Poetry and Ideology

1 Poetry and revolution

What I like about Stephen Spender is that I disagree with him as much as I agree with him, sometimes in quick succession. In both poetry and prose, he seems to alternate between making a good point and then missing the point entirely, seeing clearly and then muddying the waters. But this makes him more interesting rather than less so because it makes him more human – it makes him, to use Auden’s phrase about Yeats, “silly, like us”. His movement from liberal to liberal-in-communist-clothing and back again in the thirties and his evolving (or revolving) views on art and the interface between art and politics leave us with the impression of a man deeply committed to his fellow Man. But at the same time his intense urge towards autobiography and self-examination can appear egotistical, almost self-obsessed at times. More to the point, Spender’s life and work, taken as a whole, leave the student of them with a sense of disorientation which speaks loudly to the various uncertainties of our present time.

There are reasons to agree with his view in the quote above, from the 1933 essay Poetry and Revolution. But as we experience the seismic shifts in communication that the internet has brought and is bringing about, it is worth pausing to consider what role can be played by an art form whose medium – the shared word – is the very one bending and buckling under the strain of internet-enabled shifts in ideology as they play out in endless streams of ‘content’.

In Poetry and Revolution, Spender goes on to admit that the poet is “often a potential revolutionary” but one who “is able to escape from the urgent problems of social reconstruction into a world of his (sic) own making. This world”, he says, “is a world of the imagination only bounded by the limits of the imagination”. For Spender this goes to the heart of what a poem is: “… the writing of a poem solves the poem’s problem. Separate poems are separate and complete and ideal worlds. If a poem is not complete in itself and if its content spills over into our world of confused emotions, then it is a bad poem, and however much it may impress people at present, soon it will be forgotten and will cease to be a poem at all”.

On Spender’s reading, then, poetry is an activity that stands in the way of social change rather than playing a role in facilitating it, one which diverts the attention of “potential revolutionaries” away from doing anything that will actually make a difference and mires them in their own hermetically-sealed “world of imagination”. It is still a view which would chime, I imagine, with many who are not drawn to poetry and who see poets as self-important introspectionists. And it is certainly true that often even the poetry of dissatisfaction ends up being “sublimated into art which can only be enjoyed by a cultivated and endowed minority” rather than a proletarian rallying cry. This is not snobbery – the cultivated and endowed these days come from both the middle and working classes – but it is the nature of poetry that it is to the taste of only relatively few, who write for each other to a large extent. There is an argument then not so much that a “poem solves the poem’s problem” as “poets solve poets’ problems”.

And it is perhaps a short step from here to charging social-justice-minded poets with virtue signalling. If poets are only talking to each other, are they not just egotistically displaying their virtuousness in the same way they display their publication history and competition wins in their Twitter bios? Although it would probably be idle to argue that this kind of empty gesturing does not happen in the contemporary poetry scene, it is overly-cynical. For one thing it implies a lack of sincerity, but also the tag ‘virtue signalling’, often held up in criticism of Millenials by older generations, is just a loaded name for a neutral feature of human group-bonding behaviour, which social media amplifies. If a poet wants to signal to the rest of their in-group that they wish to establish and strengthen a bond with it, is this so different from signalling to a publisher that you wish to establish and strengthen a bond with them and get published by writing and submitting the ‘right’ kind of poetry? The reward for most poets in both cases is not financial gain but in-group kudos, which is to say ‘belonging’. This impulse is neither surprising nor unusual but it is, if anything, the opposite of revolutionary.

But ultimately Spender’s argument does not stand up. Poems aren’t “separate and complete and ideal worlds”. Whatever else they are, poems are language; and language is not just a system of the mind but an activity between minds – it is communicative, and its meanings only exist in the context of negotiations and relations between minds. The idea that a poem, any more than a person, can be an island entire of itself is, I think, mistaken. No poet is capable of being without other people, and no poem is capable of being without other poems – those read by the poet and those read by the readers of the poem. A poem, in fact, only exists at all as the node of countless other literary, social and psychological acts.

2 Poetry and the internet

Spender was writing almost ninety years ago as a young communist (of sorts) in a Europe where fascism was on the rise. Though much has changed since those pre-Spanish Civil War days, much has clearly also stayed the same or returned in different forms. But the recent rise in authoritarian thinking cannot be separated from the birth and rise of the internet, which is the context in which it is taking place. It’s not unusual to hear the first thirty years of the internet described as a communication revolution on a par with that following the invention of the printing press; this is particularly true in relation to social media, which has turned inward-facing private language outward into the public domain and created a whole new communicative context in which social movements can flourish. For the first time in history we can see ideological shifts happening in real time and in microcosm; we can see, hear, read and feel the tension and conflict this creates as language’s meanings shift beneath the feet of language users. Meaning depends on agreement, and when there is no consensus about what we mean by race, racism, male, female, fascism, science, history, freedom, etc. then language users’ ability to discuss these subjects disappears. The echo chambers we hear so much about are metaphorical spaces for people who agree on certain definitions of words; those who define them differently are in different spaces. Social media provides us with easy access to these spaces and tweet-sized windows through which to shout at each other. And so we are divided – at least, our divisions are consolidated and calcified.

In some ways language use on social media is the diametric opposite of poetry, it’s hasty, often thoughtless, knee-jerk and, for want of a better word, artless; but on the other hand exactly because it is all these things, it’s a reflection of the real inner-lives of real people. And entering, or expressing, the reality of inner-life is very much the domain of poetry. Poets have always turned inward-facing language outward, that is the essence of what they do. They should be on home turf with the shifts in meaning, inherent complexities, and dangers of language communicated via global social media. They should relish, embrace, play with, analyse and problemitise the changes in usage, and the new (or not-so-new) layers of meaning, of key ideological words. Shouldn’t they? In this way they could shine new light on the changes in understanding that are taking place as the communication revolution carries us into uncharted and dangerous territory, as the world shifts and the internet context we all live in develops and matures.

Spender’s essay was poorly received by his fellow communists in the UK and it contributed to a cooling of his relationship with the movement, which would finally be brought to an end by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. As Louis MacNeice said, “he (Spender) had not been born for dogma”^[1].

Groupthink and echo chambers, those breeding grounds for dogmatic thinking, are not new things, they are old things in a new context. And dogmas, or ‘certainties’ which in the political sense are unambiguous articulations of ideologies, have always been receptive to ideas that concur with them and hostile to ideas that repudiate them. Revolutionaries by their very nature must be dogmatic; after all, doubt, ambiguity, and equivocation will never bring down a corrupt system. But the poet, Spender seems to be concluding in Poetry and Revolution, is compelled to stand apart from dogma. If this is so, and such a conclusion needs exploring, it is not because their poems are isolated from the rest of the world as he thought, but because, unlike most prose, they have the potential to allow poets and readers of poetry to see past the rhetoric and signalling of the prevailing ideology.

3 Poetry and ideology

The problem with thinking about ideology is deciding what the word means in the first place. Terry Eagleton proposed sixteen different definitions^[2] and others have suggested more. The frustratingly paradoxical fact is that which definition you accept largely depends on which ideology you adhere to or lean towards in the first place. That I find much to agree with in Marxist academic Eagleton’s book but feel most convinced by liberal academic Michael Freeden’s ideas about ideological morphology marks me out immediately as the left-leaning liberal that I cannot deny being. Marxists, and I suspect full-blown fascists, would be likely to reject or downplay his thesis.

For the sake of clarity, then, when I talk about ideology in this essay, I do not take it to be incorrect or ‘false’ thinking, nor do I presume that to call a work of literature ideological is to speak insultingly (not necessarily anyway). Instead, I am thinking about groupings of political concepts that mutate in populations over time, and which have porous borders, overlapping and bleeding into each other. I am also thinking in terms of (to use Freeden’s term) the decontestation of concepts, which is to say, the characteristic of ideologies to strip away any doubt around a political concept’s definition (to insist, for example, openly or by implication, that ‘racism’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘woman’ means x or y, and that any other definitions are invalid). While I don’t agree that everything is ideological, I do think a lot of what we see and hear around us is, and that for an individual’s sense of self, once a particular set of conceptual definitions has taken hold – especially when supported and enforced by peer groups – they are unlikely to be replaced by other definitions; although as a group they are likely to morph over time. But when socio-economic conditions are such that ideologies do shift, sometimes suddenly, it can be disorienting and upsetting for the individual^[3].

I believe that poetry can speak to its own ideology very clearly, passionately, illuminatingly. And in doing so it can work to mobilise the Dominated against the Dominating. Korean Translator-poet Don Mee Choi’s recent DMZ Colony is a powerful example of how poetry can disrupt hegemonic discourse to reclaim, or create space for, a language for voices within the ‘neo-colonialism’ of the US which might otherwise be suppressed or lost (see my review of the work of Don Mee Choi here). Rebecca Tamás in Witch does something similar, in a very different way, with a particularly empowering expression of socialist-feminist thought (see Imogen Shaw’s review of Witch, here). The same argument could be made for Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead (see a review of Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead by Christopher Spaide here), or indeed for any in the illustrious line of protest poetry going back as far as, and probably further than, Shelley’s ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (which was memorably put to work by Jeremy Corbyn, British politics’ most recent revolutionary spirit, who knew a galvanising ideological call-to-arms when he heard one).

All of these works speak to and for the poet’s ideology against one more powerful and dominant. In Freeden’s terms they are ideological transmitters^[4]. And they suggest that Spender is wrong in so far as writing poetry can be a revolutionary activity to the extent that it can contribute to revolutionary thought, as a clarifier, a motivator, and perhaps more importantly as a focal point around which thought can gather. However, the poetry of protest exists on a scale: at one end the quick-hit, strong-rhythmed adrenalin rush of the anthem, slogan and rock song (Feed The World, Make Poverty History etc.) – Shelley’s slumbering lions are probably towards this end of the scale – and at the opposite end the complexity, subtlety and depth of thought in poets like Choi, who specifically builds her language around thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser. In one sense, of course, it feels wrong to suggest there is a scale at all because of the clear argument that hollow sloganeering of the Feed The World variety is far more a cohering feature of the dominant rather than any subjugated ideology. But there is an equally clear argument that choice excerpts from thumpingly powerful poems like ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ are stronger ideological transmitters than the other poems I’ve mentioned above exactly because of their sloganeering quality. I justify the suggestion of such a scale simply in as much as the poetry on it speaks to the ideology of its intended audience as opposed to across different ideologies.

But is it possible to speak across ideologies at all, quite apart from the question of whether you would want to? Some would say that only a liberal would entertain the thought and so the enterprise could never claim any ideological standpoint other than a liberal one^[5]. Freeden uses the metaphor of a room to illustrate his conception of ideologies, which seems particularly apt when relating them to poems, with their Italian stanzas. He suggests that core concepts are rearranged within ideologies over time, the way furniture may be moved about in a room becoming more or less central or peripheral depending on historical circumstance. The question, then, and perhaps it does touch on a hopelessly middle-of-the-road, middle-class and middle-aged project, is whether it is possible in a poetic room to peek through a hatch and see what it looks like in the next door room, and even speak to its inhabitant. To put it another way, does poetry have the capacity to help us understand someone else’s world view?

4 The poet and the human paradox

Almost ten years after Poetry and Revolution, writing as a fireman during the Second World War, in Life and the Poet (1942), Spender concedes that “the best living poets … all share in common the fact that they are in revolt against the standards of contemporary industrial civilisation” and that “(i)n this, though not always in a political sense, (they) are revolutionary”^[6]. He is suggesting here that the political revolutionary and the poetic revolutionary are quite separate beings; and he is right in as much as writing a poem does not have the same potential to change society that running into Parliament with an army behind you does; but again, the Spender of Life and the Poet seems to be misunderstanding not only the nature of a poem but by extension the nature of language and as a result, people. The political and the non-political, just like the external and internal, the individual and the social, are surely less separable than he appears to think.

He goes on to write of the poet as an astronaut landing on the moon and finding ways to describe this alien landscape to the people back on Earth; he uses this analogy to express how he sees the poet’s role as one whose duty it is to “invoke familiarity” in readers and thereby to provide them with the experience of strangeness. For him, poets see what others cannot, and their job is to reveal these unseen aspects of reality in relatable language. This is an attractively deceptive view of the relationship between the poet and the reader because it is profoundly individualistic (which was at Spender’s core and the reason he made such a bad communist).

As we have seen, Spender considered both the poet and the poem to be entirely separate from the rest of society – so separate as to be comparable to a voyager on the moon – but in doing so he misses the reader’s role in meaning-building and indeed the rest of society’s role in forming whatever ‘strangeness’ the poet is able to see and how they are able to see it. His separation and elevation of the poet and the poem to a position above the masses of ‘non-poet’ readers helps explain his ultimately liberal final conviction of the failure of communism / socialism. And it also highlights his failure to identify the great paradox that in our own time social media, and the so-called identity politics it magnifies, has laid bare: the paradox that humans are at the same time both individuals and inseparable on a material level from the rest of society (language and thought being a full part of the material world). Facebook, Twitter, TikTok – they all bring us face to face with this paradox every day in the form of the externalising of internal language mentioned above. And, again, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that poets are in a good position to engage with this positively, perhaps channelling John Keats and his negative capability.

But poets and poems are certainly not exempt from the paradox and it cannot be resolved without considering that the poem is a literary form which tolerates experimentation of expression at the micro as well as the macro level of language. It can play with tensions in morphology, syntax, grammar, imagery, rhythm etc., and for this reason it has the capacity to de-normalise the fabric of discourse. It can, in effect, break apart the decontested language of ideology and, I would suggest, ‘recontest’ it. It can do this by unhooking language from one ideological or historical context and hooking it into another, or by juxtaposing language from opposing ideologies, or by breaking lines or even words to emphasise or subvert their ideological function, or through many other means.

5 Two poetries

There are two ways that this capacity of poetry may be marshalled. One way is to put it to the service of an ideology separate to the dominant one (perhaps one new and revolutionary), for example by breaking apart the language of Empire and colonialism to critique it and suggest new, ‘decolonised’ understandings. Choi does this when, for example, she pulls apart and reworks her own translation of an interview with a communist sympathiser and Korean political prisoner in DMZ Colony; Smith does it in a particular poem from Don’t Call Us Dead which unpicks in very few words, from an erotic encounter, questions about the American Civil War and slavery as well as European colonialism; and Tamás does it for feminism by subverting the Hughesian ‘Crow’ voice and pinning it alongside the language of medieval witchcraft to critique patriarchy. These are poems in which the poets challenge orthodoxy by transmitting ideological notions that stand counter to the prevailing ones. Receptive, sympathetic, and – let’s not fool ourselves – educated readers will likely respond by adding them to the catalogue of texts which support their already preferred ideology. But will these texts actually persuade an unreceptive and ideologically opposed reader to change their viewpoint, or will such readers just be irritated by them? The former is possible, the latter more likely I would guess. This is what I call poetry speaking to its own ideology, and I’ve already made the claim that it could be seen as contributing to revolutionary thought, if not truly revolutionary in itself.

But another way to marshal poetry is for a different kind of exploit, one in which the poet is not looking to argue but to observe, not looking to prove anything but to find something out. This is a poetry that plays and experiments with language in order that first the writing of it and then the reading of it is a form of learning, of finding out something previously unknown. To say that this is poetry without an agenda would be naïve, but it might at least be poetry which does not know what its agenda is until the poem is complete. Although this may not be an approach that fits comfortably with the certainties of our times, it is not a new one either, and I will call on two very different poets to provide it, at least from the writing side, with a sense of legitimacy. Firstly, M. NourbeSe Philip, herself quoting Thomas More, in her massive incantatory work Zong!, who wrote “The poet is the detective and the detective a poet”^[7]. And secondly, Wallace Stevens, whose comment, “sometimes (the subject of a poem) becomes a little more fluid, and the thing goes ahead rapidly” was glossed by Michael Hamburger as “it is the poem that tells the poet what he (sic) thinks, not vice versa“^[8]. But as we have seen, the meaning-value of a poem neither ends with the poet nor begins with the reader.

In elevating the poet too high at the expense of the reader, Spender missed both the contribution poetry can make to revolutionary concepts and its full value to the individual. The poem’s nature provides it with a potential for not only challenging but genuinely investigating meanings, allowing for a break-up and re-assembly of language impossible in other art forms, giving the poet and receptive reader access to new understandings of, for example, groupthink, echo chambers, and ever-changing identity signifiers. My contention here, to be clear, is that the poem is a more powerful tool than Spender gave it credit for.

And in failing to take the poem seriously enough, we may ourselves fail to see that there are these two separate but equally necessary strands of poetics. One strand contributes to inevitable and desireable ongoing revolts in the form of critical voices from sidelined and oppressed communities, and this strand should rightly be given priority in publishing terms as the socioeconomics of the industry recalibrate to reflect wider society. The other strand works to comprehend and orient as these changes take place, and it must come from both minority and majority voices. In short, all of this is to differentiate between a poetry which ‘knows’ and poetry which ‘doesn’t know but wants to find out’.

6 Conclusion: poetry and trust

Poetry which ‘doesn’t know but wants to find out’ might usefully be guided by principles similar to the drivers of morphological ideology suggested by Michael Freeden: that is, to aim for “(r)econstruction, deconstruction, and interpretation, elucidation and exploration, and the accumulation of knowledge, rather than the substantive prescription of ethical positions and solutions”^[9]. This will never, and should never, replace the poetry of critical, ethically-certain voices, but it may prove to be equally valuable. After all, while an abuser should face criticism and punishment, the best first step to preventing them from abusing again is to understand them.

Any poetry which is looking for answers rather than providing them, however, has two significant hurdles to get over: one is the skill of the poet, and the other is the skill of the reader. With neither party able to escape ideology, both must approach poetry, from their different angles, as a fertile arena for experimentation and discovery – research – from which what emerges may not always be compatible with either of their beliefs, but which may help both of them understand more fully the vortex spinning around them. Poets must feel free to work with language they find difficult and in some cases repellent, but equally if they do this they must do so skilfully enough to learn from the ideology (be it fascist, racist, misogynist, or homophobic etc) by learning about it rather than contributing to it. Readers must allow that the language which confronts them in poetry is working in a space rich with potential to unpick the fabric of ideologies, and sometimes suppress their initial emotional reactions in favour of dispassionate, interested study. In short, writers and readers of poetry need to put their trust in one another, and in turn they must not abuse the trust put in them.

References

1 – I’m quoting Spender here, himself quoting MacNeice, in ‘Background to the Thirties’ (p.20) in The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People, 1930s-1970s (Vintage, 1979), in which the essay Poetry and Revolution is also available

2 – Ideology: An Introduction Terry Eagleton (ABS, 2007), p 1-2. Eagleton’s book is the best introduction I know of to the various ways of conceptualising ideology, and the challenges of doing so; although it does not include reference to Freeden’s theory, even in the 2007 revised edition

3 – For anyone interested in the morphology of ideology, Freeden’s (very) short, Ideology: a very short introduction (OUP, 2003) is clear and simply put. Also Chapter 7 of The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (OUP, 2013). For a longer, more complete understanding of Freeden’s ideas, try his Ideologies and Political Theory (OUP, 1996).

4 – Ideology: a very short introduction, p.69

5 – Liberalism of course contains multitudes. Of all ideologies it is the one which wants to be all things to all people, and for that reason if no other, it is a very bloated and unsatisfactory world view (I say this despite considering myself a liberal). It contains much of what many people (including conservatives) would call conservativism, and, equally, much that is attractive to those who would prefer to describe themselves as socialists or progressives. It is also tainted by association with the madnesses and villainy of twentieth-century capitalism, and in some cases (not without reason) held to blame for them. Liberalism’s particular amorphousness is probably the key to its success, but at the same time it is what leaves it open to disorienting phenomena such as those at the heart of the present identitarian ‘culture wars’, in which individuals search out ever-more specific categories for themselves within an ideology that survives and evolves by placing ostensible freedom of the individual at its centre.

6 – Life and the Poet, (Searchlight, 1942), p.66

7 – Zong! (WUP, 20060, M. NourbeSe Philip, p.78

8 – The Truth of Poetry (Anvil, 1996), Michael Hamburger p.37 9 – The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (OUP, 2013) Eds. Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears, p.117