Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘holdfire press’

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‘The Necropolis Boat’ by Luke Kennard

In Pamphlets on February 11, 2013 at 9:53 am

-Reviewed by Andrew Bailey-

necropolis-boat

Luke Kennard’s The Necropolis Boat has a subtitle that offers a handy way in to the sequence: “Five songs and a tortured context”. Let’s trust that. Let’s start with the songs.

Each is titled ‘The Great Necropolis Songbook’, from #1 to #5, and most use the kind of end-stopping rhymes that explain their hobbled rhythms as the result of hitting a chime that doesn’t arise naturally:

Why go to Ireland
When you can go to O’Neil’s?
Do you really want to hang around with people
Who use platitudes like “real’?

- ‘The Great Necropolis Songbook #4’

In brief: they’re not, in themselves, terribly good. But they’re not really there in themselves, as you needn’t even leave the page that the songs are on for that “tortured context” to kick in. This particular song carries three footnotes, two of which consist of an “I” telling “Maria”, who wrote the song, about its problems. One reads “‘Oh, for the love of God, your syntax,’ I mutter”, attached to a point where I’d expect a reader to agree.

An earlier footnote, to the first song, tells us that the songs aren’t for us anyway – “Her songs are for me and me alone” – and probably unfinished, as Maria is bringing the speaker her new material “which I am only too happy to critique. Precious little to do, etc.” Through his critique, his description of the songs and his taking part in their performance, that I is more the focus than the songs are, which is to say the songs are actually contextualising him. Let’s not trust that subtitle after all, then. Let’s look at the world the songs come from.

The reason he has “Precious little to do” is that our speaker is General Baliol, a deposed dictator spending a life sentence in exile on a prison ship, the Necropolis Boat of the title. The prose poems that occupy the spaces between the songs speak of his careers (military, political, poetic), of his crimes and of his punishment. These share the tone of the Solex Brothers narratives, dressing the unbelievable and the irrational in sentences seemingly cut for naturalistic, logical prose that almost fit: “And as we outnumbered them four-to-one and had already demonstrated our moral superiority we took their jagged kitchen knives and cut their throats.”

We’re further distanced from that narrative level by three ‘Ring-pulls of Hell’. This is further contextualising that sets the Baliol sequence up as a produced object, with comments from the editor and translator, these also being found within a manuscript left for the hero of a previous pamphlet, itself framed by the worry that “Many of these thoughts should just be thrown away immediately: the ring-pull.” That’s accompanied by a diagram of the kind of modern ring-pull that stays attached to the can. All of which means that if you, like me, enjoy the kind of graphite-slippery mistrust you end up with here, you’ll probably find a lot of pleasure in the way your head has to hold the relations between the elements when one of the songs is remembered in one of the poems that is referred to in one of the contextualisations that supports the songs with the footnotes from the general on the boat in the edited document received by the Planet-Shaped Horse hero in the first ring-pull. And that’s before mentioning the chaplain, the chef or the overture poem that seems to owe something to Stephen Dobyns’ ‘Confession’.

I did worry sometimes that there’s a defensive note to writing some mockable songs, then mocking them before readers can, but it’s done with enough charm that I ended up in a forgiving mood toward that worry. Not so much, sadly, toward whoever was responsible for the kerning in the book; on occasion, its words spider into each other so awkwardly, as if they’d set the line breaks before changing the typeface, that I wanted the typesetter on that damn boat. There’s some business about the physicality of the text in the third ring-pull, but if that is a reason it’s still a reason why I was left with a headache afterwards.

It seems a shame to cavil on the incarnation of the book when I’ve enjoyed the platonics of it, though. If I’m going to close on a headache, let’s close instead on this moment from one of the General’s poems: “Y’know, the other day I saw a squash plant growing in the scrubland and it was just the most obscene sight. You have a headache? Good.”

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‘Sonnets for Luke’ by Emily Critchley and ‘The Golem’ by Richard Watt

In Pamphlets on August 31, 2012 at 9:30 am

- Reviewed by Rob A. Mackenzie-

I don’t know what I expected from Emily Critchley’s Sonnets for Luke, but it certainly wasn’t what I got. From the opening poem, ‘A Final Sonnet (for Luke)’ the disrupted syntax reminded me less of British experimental writing than of John Berryman’s unique form of American confessional:

  Poor Luke to be so querulous to life & talented.
  He that in that year
  Had very done much things. But to dismay.

Except that this is absurd, pastiche Berryman, and the pamphlet is an ironic swipe at the stunted vocabulary and expression of romantic love. If women have, at times, been portrayed as emotionally high-strung, Critchley’s precise diction and shifting tones eloquently parody the notion. The second (untitled) poem, set in a crowded metro carriage, has the narrator write to Luke:

  This city’s musculature, it spits me out at Greenwich,
  where I stay, feelingly, for news.

  Till then, so long.

Combine Mills & Boon-ish nonsense (“feelingly”) with casual anti-climax (“so long”) and you’re on your way to an Emily Critchley sonnet. In a later poem with the slapstick title, ‘Avec Fond Memories’, Critchley attacks labels:

  ‘Radical’ for that same old worn old habitude,
  ‘Kookiness’ for such pricks.

But ‘love’ is the label and signifier which attracts maximum derision. In one poem (untitled, as most are), after lamenting Luke’s failure to reply to her emails, the narrator exclaims, “Luke, I missed you at our wedding!/ But it’s OK.// I’ll see you at the next one.” In another, plain-style sincerity is mocked:

                              Why can’t signs
  that lovers make be read? I don’t know
  why can’t they?

  Then plainly say “I LOVE YOU”
  & the sonnet bangs awake.

Except that the final line rhymes (and therefore connects) with the poem’s opening declaration, “You’re such a flake!”, which then serves to undermine it. Critchley sparingly employs the traditional sonnet’s formal devices to compound irony.

This pamphlet is cynical and negative but also curiously illuminating. It’s entertaining but the laughs carry a sting. It’s all deconstruction and some people might prefer a rebuilding of love to relentless lampooning. If so, they better read something else. These poems are for readers who appreciate irony used with searing effect.

I hadn’t read Richard Watt before and my initial impression was of heightened diction combined with deliberately fuzzy narrative. I also got a strong sense of alienation from the “brute, mis-shapen” Golem of the title poem and the striking images of ‘City of Discovery’ where a fortune teller has dealt “the ace of traps, on its side”. The poem’s addressee feels increasingly disconnected from his own essential humanness – “You have felt trapped before/ but are becoming lignified” – and has to make do “with no television/ as the modern world deafens.” A lack of communication and belonging is reflected in the fragmentary narrative.

In ‘Bachelor’ the disconnection is also with time itself. The images are quasi-surreal, but don’t represent the gratuitous vacancy that surrealism often produces in the work of mediocre postmodernists. Instead, the narrator’s early lover, shockingly, is objectified

  wrapped in tissue paper and those
  squeaking figure eights of foam
  like a keepsake trinket I’d meant
  to return to.

The poem had begun with leaves changing colour, a familiar trope for time passing, but Watt doesn’t deliver the expected meditative lyric. Instead, the narrator crashes through his ex-lover’s windscreen:

  Seeing, as I shred
  that your hair has changed,
  somehow older
  and that I am not.

I take this as a symbol of stalled emotional growth, as if the narrator has just recognised (too late!) that the “keepsake trinket” is evidence only of a shallow investment in the past and a disintegrating present.

Watt’s poems always had points of interest. Occasionally, the effort to produce original phrases led to real clunkers.  ‘Louis Slotin’s Heavy Ghost’, after some bright moments, sank into the bog of portentousness:

  Ours is a teetering packet
  Of coldening dust,
  The stuff ingrained
  In your margins and collars.
  Cold softens the pencil’s scratch
  And the razor’s bite, in time.

Enough said, I think… But I still applaud the attempt. Ambition is much preferable to sticking with easy goals and banal themes, and the fact that Richard Watt often pulls it off is enough to make this pamphlet worth your effort and time. ‘Good Night and Good Luck’, the final poem, combines a playful nod to early Eliot with a veiled reference to Bede’s sparrow. A concert ends and musicians leave.

  Pianissimo, a lilting memory of fullness
  Bows the air in the empty hall.

As does all good art, including Richard Watt’s.

 

 

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‘#romance’ by Jess Green

In Pamphlets on August 22, 2012 at 9:26 am

-Reviewed by Éireann Lorsung-

Imagine—maybe this is easy, maybe you have to strain a bit—that time when you were just done with university. Anything could happen. Hopped up on the expectations and praise and challenges of your tutors, you head out into the world. And then what? In Jess Green’s chapbook, the ‘then what’ is drinking gin, making noise, writing poems, hoping for emails from someone who rarely writes, following people on Twitter.

Jess Green’ chapbook #romance is about moment. We know this not only by the hashtagged title (which is nothing if not of our moment, not to mention the signifier of things which, in a moment, will no longer matter or even make sense) but by her insistence on the now of the poems, which happens also to be our recent now, in a very specific here. We’re in England, 2011 or so, in these poems. We’ve got a Royal wedding (as distraction), dinners with the Beckhams, and a rather heavy-handed mention of class war (“Stop the Poetry”); we’ve got Coronation Street as signifier of class; we’ve got Red Stripe and D:Ream and Outkast and Match.com, Dyson dryers and David Tennant as Doctor Who (“Potatoes”). The poems mention GCSEs, BTECs, the ‘Daily Hate’, iPads, Kindles (“Beyond the Kettle”), coeliacs, Bargain Booze (twice), and Primark, Wigan and Toxteth and Eton and Egg Café. Although Shakespeare, Eliot, Keats, Browning, Plath and Hughes make appearances, it is notable that most of these take place in a poem (“Scratch Your Degree”) which imagines, with irony, the erasure of three years of university. The past—including the literary one—is not the primary subject of the poems, despite its importance to them and to their speaker.

The insistence of these poems on their moment, on the now of hashtags and pop culture references and gadgets—but also on the now of just-out-of-university, the now of being in your early twenties and not knowing what will happen and kind of flailing a bit—is double-edged. On one hand, it makes the poems urgent. Green very clearly evokes a certain desperation, anxiety, and mania that often accompanies early adulthood, and the references to the speaker’s surroundings, whether geographical or cultural, site the emotional experiences in the poems. But the now-ness of the poems also makes them feel closed off, topical, a little predictable. In “Stop the Poetry”, for example, the speaker’s protest against the conservative government (one which will “spend our pensions on dinner with the Beckhams”, “[distract] us with a Royal wedding”, “penalise the unmarried/and patronise the women”) is unsurprising. The poem ends with the image of an unstoppable poetry “telling the tales of the war you’re raging/ on the unrich, the unprivileged, and the unmiddleaged [sic]”. In all its sincerity (and for this reviewer that is a value-positive word), the poem seems to have forgotten that other poets have written in the face of repressive governments. Poetry really has survived and helped others to survive—need I mention Akhmatova, Neruda, or any other famous examples?—but in order to do this it must reinvent the world, actually re-form it, not just re-present it, with the fugitive promise to “prance along bars until they listen”. When the poems take on these responsibilities, their now-ness is a hindrance to them, because a lasting political poem must be about more than its subject. But perhaps here again Green is emphasising the ephemerality of things; perhaps the poem is not meant to last, not meant to speak beyond its now any more than today’s hashtag on Twitter would, three weeks from now.

Green seems to aim to fulfil Ezra Pound’s dictum to make it new by introducing new things to the poems. The titular hashtag, for one, is successful: it disrupts the habitual reading of a word and a title and forces the reader to reconsider the function and form of each. Writing about recent occurrences, however, is not enough to make a new poetry. Many times reading this chapbook I found myself wishing for more consideration of line, of image, and of language that would convey the immediacy and desire that seems to be the root of these poems. The poems do feel urgent, but they also feel sloppy (and, unfortunately, the book’s production and editing add to this—my copy had poorly aligned pages which stuck out above the cover, and I was disappointed to find typographical errors and inconsistencies throughout the text).

Despite my desire for more depth and richness here, Green’s willingness to be vulnerable, to be sincere, to write about “being nineteen/ and so desperately wanting to be fucked up” (“Another one broken”) and to “stand up/ and speak my secrets to strangers” (“Potatoes”) are strengths, and the willingness to be vulnerable especially is rare and necessary. #romance, with its emphasis on what passes, ends, disappears, and fades away, tells an aching and raw story of its speaker’s early adulthood. Whether or not that story is destined for the same “half of a bottom shelf” where the library keeps its “useless ancient monologues” (“Scratch Your Degree”) is perhaps beside the point.

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‘How Many Camels Is Too Many?’ by Colette Sensier

In Pamphlets on August 20, 2012 at 11:20 am

-Reviewed by Éireann Lorsung-

There is an essay by the poet Adrienne Rich entitled “Tourism and Promised Lands” (it’s in her book What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics), in which Rich examines what she calls tourism in poetry. By ‘tourism’, Rich indicts the assumption underlying the use of the ‘exotic’ in metaphor and image: the poet  observes, picks through, and makes use of parts of cultures other than her own as and when they are useful to her, without a deep engagement with or understanding of them. Poetic tourism, in Rich’s view, ignores the existence of other poets and other poetic traditions in favor of ‘decorating’ one’s own poems with “brilliantly colored flowers, fronds, views”. Those whose cultures are so appropriated by the white or Western poet become “abstract figures on a simplified ground”. The exotic is “that way of viewing a landscape, a people, a culture as escape from our carefully constructed selves, our ‘real’ lives”. Rich calls it “a trap for poets”. The exotic is a trap. Not only can it reduce otherness to decoration (a violence so thoroughly discussed I will not go into further detail here), it reduces otherwise strong poems to beautifully designed houses with MDF roofs. Unlike the hybrid—wherein there is a possibility for play within historical and present power structures, and for unpredictable intervention in authority—appropriation of the ‘exotic’ maintains power in one place—that of the active, observing poet.

 

In Colette Sensier’s pamphlet How Many Camels Is Too Many?, poetic tourism regrettably undermines some of the best poems. Take, for example, the marvellously constructed world of “We’ll meet again”, wherein the “total resurrection of the body” leads to the image of all the clipped fingernails of one’s life following one to Heaven like a very human comet-trail. The family life we’re given in this poem (the father biting the baby daughter’s nails and cutting her hair; the “cosmic butchers” where pints of blood wait to replenish lost organs; the grandfather’s hip “come running at the final call”) is unique and strange and believable, which is not necessarily to imply autobiographical, nor by any means to argue on its behalf. But the poem ends with the image of the grandfather being coated with his lost fingernails “like feathers on an Aztec eagle”. Why? Where does this come from, in the world of the poem? The use of the image feels like a bid for some kind of ‘authenticity’ in a poem which has already established a world that’s authentic to itself and on its own terms. The poems elsewhere in the pamphlet resort to similar images, which seem to come from outside their own structures and systems to add or create meaning; we find the god Shiva pushing “through the colour of the earth” in “In Praise of Light Pollution”, ostensibly in contrast to the “gods// of metal, shaped in endless, boring bombs” later in the poem, but the comparison only serves to idealise a god of elsewhere who is not boring, perhaps only because not familiar. Of course, Shiva’s depiction as destroyer might be pertinent (besides the bombs in the poem, there is also “dangerous smoke”, “burning”—but the image of “bonfires float[ing] before us, upside down” and the light “smiling in purple in red” imply fireworks rather than actual bombs). But the fact is that the god appears for a moment and then disappears; this is not a deep metaphor, not a sustained one. Later in the collection, in the poem “Cyclops”, the figure of “the Cyclops filtered down through history/ into an elephant growing smaller and smaller”, which is striking on its own terms, is complicated by a comparison, in the poem’s last line, to “Kumbhakarna in the Ramayana”. What necessitates this comparison? Perhaps the brief mention of India earlier in the poem. But I do not think that is enough to demand the image, or to demonstrate that it is more than an embellishment designed to make the poems seem worldly. In the end, the effect of these images is to reduce the reader’s confidence in the poems, or at least in their ability to make worlds sufficient to themselves.

Sensier is a young poet, and one who has already had quite a bit of recognition. This is lucky: she has time and some success on which to build. Her poems will benefit from the confidence and awareness she is sure to develop as she goes on. She clearly has an interest in big ideas—the Freudian comes up in “Toothlessness”; the biblical and mythological make several entries—and there are a few tentative but interesting formal gestures in this collection, notably in “Orpheus” and “Llama”. The strengths of How Many Camels Is Too Many? lie in Sensier’s imaginative images: the grandfather coated in his own lost fingernails, the sheep galloping over fields made of biblical books, desire as frog croaking uncontrollably (in “The Croak”; echoes of Emily Dickinson here, as well as of Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”). If we can wait, we may be rewarded by the poet’s trust in these images and her ability to handle them.

 

 

 

 

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‘Echoes, Ghosts and Others With Futures Ahead of Them’ by Steve Van Hagen, ‘Orchestra & Chorus’ by J.T. Welsch

In Pamphlets on August 1, 2012 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Charlotte Henson-

Echoes, Ghosts and Others With Futures Ahead of Them by Steve Van Hagen, and Orchestra & Chorus by J.T. Welsch (both published by Holdfire Press) have unimpressive covers (though the artwork is great) but a better interior design, which is what matters, really. Both average around 30 pages and are priced at a reasonable £5.

Steve Van Hagen’s pamphlet is a little longer than the other at 34 pages, compared to 28 pages of J.T. Welsch, and seems to follow a linear discourse. It’s never explicitly stated, but then it doesn’t need to be – it starts off with poems about life, golf courses, psychology experiments and inflatable aliens, and ends with poems describing funerals. There are multiple characters, so it doesn’t just follow one person’s life, but rather, the pattern of life. Publishing poems is equivalent to publishing your autobiography, and that’s never truer than here. With no previous research on the poet I can tell you he’s passionate about psychology, either has German roots or is interested in the culture but currently lives in Liverpool.

Van Hagen’s poems are grounded in reality, drawing inspiration from the mundane with a twist of the witty, quirky, and sometimes downright surreal. For example, in “Dog Lover’s Evening”, Van Hagen states he “brought in the hammer / in the tool bag / crimson stain on the handle / was scrubbing nearly till dawn”. Much of modern poetry is character-driven or descriptive. Because of this, characterisation is no longer just a prose-writer’s tool, and is a blade that has to be sharpened by poets too. Van Hagen’s blade could slice through steel. There is no point at which I think “that seems out of character” or “why would they do that?”.

The second pamphlet – Orchestra and Chorus by J.T. Welsch – is different in every way. Where Echoes, Ghost, and Others With Futures Ahead of Them tells a generic story of life, in a series of individual poems which are very different to each other, Orchestra & Chorus almost reads like a long prose poem. It is more “at one”, and cohesive as a narrative. That said, where Hagen thrives off accessibility, Welsch’s poems are something else, something which requires more work. Every poem leaves a haunted feeling like there’s something I’m missing, something I haven’t quite figured out yet that I don’t fully understand. This is poetry to chew on and savour slowly. I would recommend it to those who favour the experimental, but not extremely so,  poetry. You need to take your time with it to fully appreciate it. As previously mentioned, Welsch favours the experimental – at first, subtly, but later more blatantly. The last poem in the pamphlet, “Sonnet”, is simply a grid of words. Conversely, the poems also seems to let up a little on the heavy metaphor before the end, becoming a bit more “plain language”, for example, in “Wahnbriefe: Madness Letters” he states “I’m God, I tell them straight out. / God, yes, and this is all my doing”, taking the form of a dramatic monologue which nowadays seems to feel like a leaf out of the book of Duffy. That said, he does it well and the poem is my favourite of the pamphlet.

Van Hagen’s poetry is abstract, yet mundane – extraordinary, and yet commonplace. It fits squarely into the frame of contemporary poetry. Conversely, Welsch has an almost ethereal, ghostly quality to his verse. Both pamphlets are worthy additions to any bookshelf. And both pamphlets are excellent reads.

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‘Snapshots of Rude: From Rude Tube and the Idiot Box’ by Catherine Woodward

In Pamphlets on July 16, 2012 at 9:00 am

-Reviewed by Sophie Mayer-

TV guide listings, haiku, conversation, final score screen, Christian Bök-a-like vowel riffs: Catherine Woodward’s first collection goes boldly into the channel-surfing of contemporary poetry. Snapshots of Rude: From Rude Tube and the Idiot Box implies both this playful, formal variety (‘snapshots’) and the controlled focus of the over-arching project, a post-human song of the (lack of) self in the transmedia era. The second poem, ‘A Rude Tube’ introduces us to ‘our hero’:

Bound to his own spine,
tangled in his own wires
and chilled to the bone,
where the pop-out panel of his chest is propped, rigid, open,
our hero jibbers a string of hopeless wing-dings in protest.

This post-modern Spirit of the Age is alienated by his immersion in media, ‘trying to find the frequency / at which this all makes sense’ (‘Rude Tube Watches a Comedy Quiz Show’). With verve and cleverness, Woodward anatomises the incoherent streams of information that have come to constitute contemporary interiority, ending ‘Rude Tube Tells You What’s On His Mind’ with the pathetic, in its strictest sense, repetition:

our hero is just saying
our hero is just saying.

For all its invocations of pop culture from Pikachu to Kerry Katona (‘who knows that single mums / go to Iceland’), there is a nostalgic – even conservative – air to the collection, as poem after poem offers either a lightly satirical or broadly sentimental resolution that suggest the emptiness of mass consumer culture and the internet. The alienation device of calling the perspectival consciousness ‘our hero’ combines sentiment and satire, leaving the reader a little at odds: is the collection critiquing him, or asking for empathy with him as he, as we do, struggles with the mediatisation of feeling? The project takes on the air of a Pilgrim’s Progress, an amorality tale attempting to hold a mirror up to culture, ‘when Death came to our hero in the shape of Lady Gaga’ (‘Rude Tube and Death’). The snarky attitude towards consumer culture replicates that culture’s own snarkiness in a mise-en-abîme.

The redeployment of the ephemera of celebrity culture feels as trivial and throwaway as that culture itself. ‘Second Day: Rude Tube Finds a Last Inscription’ reads, in its entirety:

Sun-perished, dust worn,
reads: ‘I’m a celebrity,
get me out of here.’

This is the way the world ends, Woodward suggests, not with a bang but a snark. Such bathos is a key note of the collection, both in the colloquial tone and the rare use of enjambment, which gives the collection a flat auto-cue diction. And yet Woodward’s catchy recitation and quotation of the pithy blandishments of media rhetoric suggest that they should be able to do poetic work: this is not flarf, which uses found text only to insist, conceptually, on the meaningless of language, but by and large mainstream, often narrative lyric. Her formulation of the hero as machine, ‘the ejected DVD of his mouth hang[ing] open’ (‘Rude Tube Feels’) are reminiscent of the Blank Generation of the 1980s, but the collection doesn’t build enough on this possible throughline. There is a fascinating project to be undertaken on the (im)possibility of lyric in a post-human era, in which the self and the status update are entwined, and affect and affectlessness are excessive symptoms of the same disease. Snapshots of Rude suggests the parameters of that project but, in repeatedly repeating the symptoms, can’t begin to frame, address or even diagnose the cause.

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Lee Smith and Claire Trevien interview JT Welsch (Salt Modern Voices Tour)

In Conversation on August 3, 2011 at 4:34 pm

Salt Modern Voices are a series of poetry and fiction pamphlets published by Salt Publishing. This Autumn, several of its authors will be touring the UK and reading in various venues. More info on this can be found on the website. In the lead up to the tour, SMV authors will be interviewing each other and posting the results on their personal websites. To kick this off, Lee Smith and Claire Trévien interview JT Welsch on form, masculinity, and his American heritage.

J.T. Welsch grew up in a small farm town near St. Louis, Missouri, but lives and teaches in Manchester, UK, where he completed a PhD this past year. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbox Manifold, Stand, Boston Review and Manchester Review. Orchids (Salt, 2010) is his first book of poetry. Another pamphlet, Orchestra & Chorus, will be published by Holdfire Press in September 2011.

 

One thing that I’ve noticed, or an impression that I get in any case, is that your poems are tight, tense, bundles of nerves – in the sense that they’re rather compact, with lots of enjambments & not much rhyme. How important is form to you?

I’m glad you think they’re tense and nervy, and that their compactness works on the level of sight and sound, through line-endings and rhyme (or lack thereof, which is a kind of rhyme). I’m quite narrative, but there’s also an impulse towards concretism. So meaning vs. material (both visual and aural) translates to voice vs. body, subject vs. object. Like all good binaries, they collapse into each other with the least scrutiny. For the poem, that means churning until the speech congeals into something as irrefutably thingy as the page, but still retains a sense of human self for the reader to meet. So, yes, a necessarily nervous, anxious self, there but for the grace of form.


The blurb says that Orchids ‘springs from the margins of contemporary masculinity’ which is a lovely phrase in itself (reflecting on the title nicely), I was wondering how you would define masculinity today – how does it differ from say, a decade ago?

 

Well, that’s where orchids come from, right? I look at masculinity, like any identity, for its ironic lack of definition. “Margins” really isn’t the right word, if it’s only understood in opposition to a relatively stable centre. In Sexuality Studies, there’s always a danger of pitting marginalised identities against a dominant norm. You can end up reinforcing that opposition, or else normalizing “queer”, when really, there’s nothing so queer and tenuous as the supposedly typical man. You’ve seen them, hiding in suits or in perverse athletic bodies, clustering together on the weekend. They’re absolutely terrified of being found out. That’s not to deny an imbalance of cultural power, but the strategy of these poems is to expose the general tenuousness, the fragile orchids. Rather than venerate or pin down queer masculinities like Cary Grant’s or James Dean’s, for example, I’m just looking for what it takes to get through the day, endlessly negotiating a combination of roles, all of which are marginal, and none of which you ever completely live up to.

Quite a few of the poems are ekphrastic – how intertwined are the visual and verbal arts would you say?

It’s probably a crutch, but I like to have something to work against. There’s only one translation in the book, but I do a lot of that too. Or I’m almost always playing against other texts or stories. Making a poem out of someone else’s painting feels the same, and as with translation, where I don’t really speak anything but English, it probably helps that I’ve never painted. I guess it’s vicarious. Does that sound glib? It’s the same thing about defining yourself in relation to someone else’s story. The Magritte, Caravaggio, and Monet in the book are doing very different things, but they’re all concerned with the artistic process, I think. As I say, I don’t know from experience, but the visual and verbal arts must be connected in terms of what it means to make something so impractical as “art”. In terms of the objectivity I was talking about, the visual arts have a more obvious thingyness to them. I’m probably latching onto that too.

 

Would you consider yourself a British or an American poet? Which feels more like literary home?  

 

Transatlanticism comes up a few times in the pamphlet, whether with the Pilgrims or my TS Eliot fetish. Never mind his epoch-making poetry – I’m so narcissistic, and much more interested in the fact that he’s from St. Louis and studied in Boston before moving to London, like me. There’s my bad joke that Cary Grant’s accent is like Eliot’s in reverse. But the point is the in-betweenness, or duplicity. I can change my spellings depending on where I’m submitting stuff, but it’s the tenuousness of identity again. Sorry, that’s dodging your practical question, and I’m being disingenuous, since there’s really so little exchange between contemporary British and American poetry. I grew up with the latter, of course, and the sense of experimentation and political engagement still excites me on a gut level. But I’m addicted to the lyricism and formal precision of British and Irish poetry as well. Yes, I’m being incredibly reductive.

 

Following on from that, who are your greatest influences?

 

I don’t know about influence, by my quickest route through the twentieth century goes from W.C. Williams and Eliot, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane and Stevens, through the confessionalists, especially Berryman and Lowell, up through James Merrill and Ashbery, C.K. Williams. Yikes, all American. And these are just poets. I’m at least as derivative of Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Edward Albee, Nabokov, Paul Simon, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

 

How do the poems in Orchids benefit from being published in a pamphlet rather than in a full collection?

 

The obvious thing is the unity and discipline of shorter forms. A pamphlet is more likely to be read in one sitting. I like the way poems nudge or undermine each other in a confined space, and there’s a definite shape to this sequence, although that also threatens to undermine itself. The first poem is called ‘Orchids’, but as a pamphlet, they’re a tidier bouquet of them, I hope.


Can you provide one line from the collection that you think best identifies your style (if one line is impossible, then one stanza).

I feel no duty toward these dishes, even if
I’ll be the last to read them, or their splotches,
and quickly, till each re-surfaces,
more complete than I ever hope to be.

(from ‘Meditations on Washing Up’)

Orchids is available through Salt or Amazon.

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