Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘The Knives Forks and Spoons Press’

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‘The Backlists’ by Ben Stainton

In Pamphlets on April 4, 2012 at 9:58 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

On the back cover of The Backlists, Todd Swift describes Ben Stainton’s chapbook from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press as ‘challenging both lyric and avant-garde modes’. This remark is borne out by the chapbook’s first poem, ‘Off the Barents’. This poem is awash with images that taken in isolation are themselves already charged and evocative (‘a pleural sac takes on black air’, ‘our tramping ground a piece of carpet Delilah / cut off after the war’), but placed together, they act to rough up the poem’s texture and trip up the reader. After all, this is a poem that initially appears to be about deep-sea divers in the Arctic, but ends with the utterly incongruous lines (which contain a pun about ham hock as a cut of meat from a pig), ‘DIVERS PERISH AFTER STUPID GOOSE-CHASE / ‘Is there any other kind?’ the big old pig / hocked up into Marie’s burger’.

‘Off the Barents’ makes for a good opening poem because it introduces poetic techniques that Stainton continues to employ throughout The Backlists. The most obvious is Stainton’s usage of what Swift calls ‘idiosyncratic typography, as delightfully original as e.e. cummings’. Within the first four lines, there is a mixture of italicised, broken and capitalised words. The two instances of broken words in the poem (‘pea / s / eek’ and ‘clod / s / scrabble) are especially interesting because of how sense carries over the line, with the typography indicating that the single letter belongs to the next line’s word, and yet the letter would make equal sense by forming the plural of the preceding noun, which is what the eye scanning across the line would instinctively do. The effect is to foreground the malleability of language, showing how its meaning is (de)constructed by the very act of reading.

Another technique that Stainton makes use of is the repetition of whole phrases with subtle variations that affect their meaning. In ‘Off the Barents’, the phrase ‘DEEP-SEA GOOSE-CHASE’ becomes ‘STUPID GOOSE-CHASE’, marking a shift from the purely descriptive to a value judgement. Midway through the chapbook, in ‘Parkin’s Rooms’, ‘We’ll both be eaten by / hours, by mislaid flowers, my northern caff’ undergoes a noun swap to become ‘We’ll both be eaten by flowers, by mislaid / hours, my northern town’, transforming the poem into the site of surreal scenes, where ‘One boy trips over / another’s tongue’. Amidst this hazy atmosphere, the sexual also begins to infiltrate the poem, ‘Miss King rinsing her parts / in the bathroom of my mind’, only to be rudely punctured by the final line of the poem, isolated into its own stanza: ‘She kept her blouse intact. What a cheek.’

Even when Stainton eschews such word games in favour of a more straightforward ‘narrative’ in the poem, moments of sexually-inflected oddness still persist in erupting. In ‘A Dream, Found in the Papers’, the first sign of this is the opening stanza ‘I realise the severity of the situation / when she removes her underwear – / a wicker building where the vagina should be’, but the reader is soon ambushed by further bizarreness:

‘Have you ever considered italicising your sex life?’
Squeaking last-minute directions onto a whiteboard,
she sucks my clothes up a thin proboscis.

Sex Education needs a serious rethink, I think.‘

My favourite moments in The Backlists, however, come in shorter poems like ‘Tasks’ and ‘Geneva’. ‘Tasks’ is unpunctuated, which allows for all the lines to be parsed in several ways. As an example, consider the opening lines, ‘Create the perfect sandwich using only Kraft lose at least $25 / before Lent learn to relish the taste of loss’. The first task could terminate with ‘Kraft’, but consider the odd humour of an alternative reading like ‘using only Kraft lost at least $25’. The phrase ‘before Lent’ could also be added on to this, or it could be read as part of a new task beginning at ‘lose’, but interpreting the task as ‘before Lent learn to relish the taste of loss’ invokes a sentiment that would be perfectly at home in the lyric mode. With ‘Geneva’, the second stanza is almost haiku-like in its compression of imagery: ‘the embassy hosted a glittering ball / but we (now tangled at the neck) / lost our invites in the fog’. Yet that italicised phrase skews what would otherwise be a clichéd moment of two people sharing a kiss into a deliberately awkward but refreshing image.

I believe the examples cited above demonstrate what Swift means when he describes Stainton’s poems as ‘pivot[ing] on the expected – film, sex, travel, good – then go[ing] off in all directions at once’. This is poetry that demands to be reread, in order for the different possibilities of its meaning to emerge. This is where Stainton’s unusual typography actually works to slow the reading process down, so that the poems resist quick scanning for meaning, their content and form working synergistically. Readers who share Stainton’s respect for language will appreciate the unsettling effects he achieves through linguistic bricolage, allowing words and images that might not otherwise share a poem, a line, to rub up against each other.

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‘Poland At The Door’ by Evelyn Posamentier

In Pamphlets on February 27, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Reading Evelyn Posamentier’s Knives Forks and Spoons chapbook Poland At The Door, which Michael Heller describes on the back cover as ‘resembl[ing] a series of atomized clusters’, I was reminded of the poetry of Paul Celan, whose later poems especially were often similarly short and compressed. The work of both poets is also shot through with the horrors of Eastern European history, marked as it is by wars and the Holocaust. However, although Heller also characterises Posamentier’s poetry as being ‘semi-effaced characters like those inscribed on ancient rune-stones or stelae…double-edged ciphers’, I personally found Poland At The Door less opaque and enigmatic than say, Celan’s Fathomsuns and Benighted, while still making for an intriguing read.

Poland At The Door essentially functions as an extended poem cycle, the individual verses always preceded by the chapbook title in capitals. At the typographical level, this has the effect of partitioning the page into what increasingly resemble little rooms in which the verses are to remain safely corralled. The room-as-protection motif runs throughout the language of the poem as well, but here it is the poet seeking protection in the physical integrity of the room’s space: ‘oh god, I’ve left / the door unlocked’, ‘hold on. hold on. / don’t answer the door’, ‘they can’t find me in this room’, ‘it’s good to be a portable room. / ‘i gather the walls around me.’ Towards the end of the cycle, however, the ‘wobbly room’ appears to take on greater agency:

which door? the portable room

steps forward to accept the challenge.

the guests know not why

they have come. the room

shields itself with its own

pretense of freedom.

With this shift, the room mutates into something that paradoxically seems to simultaneously expose and hide the poet, expressed in lines like ‘the room withers my walls / closes in to conceal me’. Yet if ‘poland at the door’ is cast as the threat of history waiting outside, the room never seems to become entirely complicit in endangering the poet (‘this room / can carry me anywhere. / it is my lover, stepping lightly.’), functioning rather as a kind of interface with the world beyond the door (‘someday the room will escort me / to the free air, which of course / is no longer free’). It is also within the cocoon of the room that the poem reaches its crisis point on the penultimate page, as language symbolically fails to turn away the knock of ‘poland at the door’:

i shred these frozen notebooks

who make a mockery of my desk

i don’t care about their smirks

& willful pages, sneering

through helpless words.

a typewriter seethes in the corner.

wait for me, says the wall.

it doesn’t matter, says the opposite

wall. the neighbours read their lines.

i feel them pass the door.

Seen from this perspective, the last lines of the poem might appear curiously passive: ‘my planet stands still’, ‘the footsteps have followed history / into the town square. / they have passed.’ After pages and pages of attempting to avoid ‘memories of / ancestors on the attack’, ‘the guests’, ‘the neighbors’, ‘poland at the door’, has the encounter with history then not palpably changed the poet after all? I would suggest this apparent problem can be resolved by recourse to earlier lines in the poem: ‘did someone say something / about a meeting point? / it must be beyond the door.’ If ‘the door might swing open / like a shiny new century’, then stepping through it is to look in two directions at once, embracing the future even as one is embraced by the past. Since the final lines of the poem imply that the ‘i’ of the poem is still observing from within the room, the ‘meeting point…beyond the door’ has not yet been approached. Thus in declining to offer a tidy and convenient resolution to its ongoing narrative, the poem instead leaves the reader poised on the cusp of change and meaningful engagement.

Ultimately, I believe that Poland At The Door is a fascinating read because it carefully regulates its own approach to that singular final moment, paring the journey into manageable portions. Taken in isolation, the verses’ imagery can sometimes seem downright hallucinatory, but what binds the cycle together and keeps it grounded are the linguistic repetitions running through it. While the repetition of the title fosters a looming sense of urgency, this runs parallel to permutations of the phrase ‘the days of awe, the days between’. This seems an apt description of what history actually looks like to most people, with days that leave an indelible psychic mark on personal or collective memory and the days in between them that can just pass us by. Typically occurring as single lines interspersed among the other verses, the phrase acts to slow down the poem’s pace. What could otherwise have been a frantic attempt to shut out the memory of the past is transformed into a moving chronicle of the poet’s steady journey towards engaging it. We all have our personal ‘poland at the door’. Reading Posamentier’s chapbook is one way we can begin to address and welcome it.

 

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‘Bugsworth Diary’ by Neil Campbell

In Pamphlets on January 25, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Bugsworth Diary

A strong sense of place pervades the poems in Neil Campbell’s Bugsworth Diary, published by The Knives Forks and Spoons Press. In an interview with Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir for her blog Women Rule Writer, Campbell remarks, ‘I write poems sometimes, entirely on instinct. Landscape is playing an increasing role in both [my poetry and fiction]. In fact, all my poems are nature poems really.’ In the same way that Egdon Heath behaves like a character in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Campbell’s chapbook is dominated by the natural environment of Derbyshire and the Peak District, as the poet chronicles (all of the poems are dated) moments spent in its surroundings.

Birds are one of the creatures that constantly pop up in these poems. In particular, jackdaws seem to recur the most, with what they signify changing slightly with each (re)appearance. Early on in the sequence, they are a thwarted expectation: ‘Waiting for jackdaws / It’s a raven that comes first’ (‘Black Roses over Portobello’). In ‘Black Brook Heron’, around the middle of Bugsworth Diary, they have become something that can be counted upon, a cyclical pattern of nature (‘Contemplating the return / Of jackdaws at dusk’). As the poems emerge from ‘previous months of winter light’ (‘Jackdaw Fly-Past’), the poet develops a keener awareness of the particularity of this bird:

So close that for the first time

I could appreciate the silver

On their necks, missed at a distance

And mistaken for black

In previous months of winter light.

Although they make appearances in subsequent poems, ‘Jackdaws on Election Day’ feels like the culmination of this species’ trajectory in this chapbook. The poem is dated May 6th, 2010, polling day for the UK election that ultimately saw the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition gain power. The jackdaws are transformed into a figure of consolation for the poet (‘I didn’t know what to do, where to put myself / And I was drawn to the jackdaws at dusk’), and this is predicated upon the element of reliability already established by the earlier poems (‘I had watched them so many times before’). Interestingly though, the poem ends with the emphasis of this expectation of reassurance, rather than its fulfilment: ‘I saw there and like never before needed them / To lift from the trees that second time.’

This deferral is suggestive, especially when read against a poem like ‘What We Look For In Animals’, one of the shortest poems in Bugsworth Diary. Given its title, the poem reads like a warning against ascribing too much significance to nature and its patterns. The ‘woman next door’ and the cows do not appear to interact, and although the cows ‘look at her curiously’, they do so ‘While dropping great quantities of shit’, completely undermining any attempt at poeticising the moment. By the next stanza, they ‘turn away and follow each other / To the other side of the field’, while another stanza later, the woman ‘goes inside’, retreating from an abortive encounter with nature. To call this rejection on the cows’ part would only be to fall into the same trap of investing the animals with human agency. What they display would better be described as indifference.

Yet this indifference cannot run both ways. While nature’s cycles can affect human activities (think natural disasters), they also carry on regardless of us (think seasons), whereas human activities are constantly modifying the natural world, practically inviting interference from it at times (think flooding of seafront residences). This is brought home most forcefully by Campbell in the final portion of ‘Chinley Chernobyl’:

I had been enjoying

My Monday morning until the

Part when I came upon

A demolished factory littered

Around the base of a still

Standing though condemned

Chimney. And I realised that

Something resembling a disaster

Resided among these green hills.

Later that night some damp wood

I’d put on the fire began

To stink, and I wondered what

I might be breathing.

The alliteration of the title and ‘Chimney’ points out the industrial aspect of the ‘disaster / Resid[ing] among these green hills’. The sound of ‘demolished’ finds an echo within ‘condemned’, with the consonantal ‘d’ carried over into ‘disaster’, and later, ‘damp wood’, as if infecting and contaminating the latter. Those final lines highlight how the threat emanating from nature can in a way be an unanticipated punishment brought down upon ourselves for our inability to leave nature alone. That said, on the whole Bugsworth Diary did not particularly strike me as an attempt at environmental activism via poetry. What it did seem to be was a heartfelt celebration of the refuge that nature can still provide for the human psyche, if we learn to just be in it and allow it to do its work, as opposed to us trying to work it.

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‘The of of the film of The book and The of of the book of The film’ by Ryan Ormonde

In Pamphlets on January 1, 2012 at 3:26 pm

-Reviewed by Rosie Breese-

 As its title suggests, this pleasingly compact pamphlet from the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press begins with a discussion and questioning of different media/forms of the word – no mean feat when restricting oneself to print on paper. As with previous pamphlets from this innovative publisher, the result is wonderfully unpredictable; a wild ride through the poet’s wordplay-world and the questioning of meaning itself.

From the outset, Ormonde’s collection almost has the feel of an academic discussion, albeit an unorthodox one, carried out through a series of small blocks of text. Statement follows on from statement, quickly moving from the media suggested by the title:

“..in a future where film is (a)
memory We can still say
We do not need to put this
into words because before
now We had film”

..to an altogether more abstract discussion of the fundamentals of ‘saying’ – moving from different representations of reality to the realities of representation:

“            …     Tongue will
make (a) new memory and
or technology will make (a)
New memory.”

Here, we witness Ormonde’s lightning-quick shifts from one idea to the next. He plays with the ideas of saying, recording, archiving and retrieval throughout the collection, putting them through endless permutations which surprise at every twist and turn.

This constant toying with what are, after all, fairly weighty concepts is, in places, perfectly balanced by a playfulness that is a delight to follow:

“Enterpriseis undertake.
Enterprising undertaking.
Enterprisers undertakers.
Enterprisen undertaken.
Enterprose undertook.
Exitprose overtook.
Exitprisen is overtaken.”

Here, Ormonde deliberately and mischieviously follows the patterns of morphological inflection within the two words, transferring these patterns from one word to another to take the words themselves to new frontiers of meaning. Meaning is pushed to its limit; there is no logical answer as to what comes next.

One particularly joyful moment was the discovery of the tiny footnote beneath the 43rd poem-block: “Here the text is infected.” This is the moment that the text begins to consciously comment on itself; on the process of production, archiving and retrieval of information through and beyond the word. The sequence deteriorates into the fugue it depicts, and encounters Psychiatry as a concept rather than a cure. There is a sense of dialogue, deep within the mind, between the shiftiness of meaning and the singularity of this concept:

“Psychiatry. a forgot.
Psychiatry. a forge.
Psychiatry. a fugue.
Psychiatry.”

Before the text is said to have ‘recovered’ from its virus (this fact again communicated by a footnote), the word ‘fugue’ itself is stripped down to pure sound, transcribed phonetically: “(fju:g). Restricted to print on paper, Ormonde inventively communicates the breakdown of a word, a concept, and its rebuilding from pure sound upwards.

If I was to pick something to criticise with regard to this collection, it would be that its many lines of enquiry into mutations and permutations make it difficult to detect an overall coherence behind the sequence (if it is to be read as a sequence, as its numbered text-blocks suggest). There is a sense that sometimes the wordplay is undertaken for its own sake rather than contributing to a structured whole:

“ ‘This is’ ‘nice’. ‘This is’ nice.
‘This’ ‘is nice’. ‘This’ ‘is’
‘nice’…”

Whilst this wordplay is interesting to read, the sheer volume of these diversions into the particulars of ‘saying’ make for hard going reading – especially where, as above, the focus is an utterance which is subjective in itself. I’m not suggesting that all poetry should be instantaneously digestible – after all, there is a joy in difficult texts; they make us think and question. But sharper editing of the collection as a whole could have made for a sequence that facilitates this thinking and questioning by giving the stronger pieces room to breathe, in isolation from their many possible variations.

Another question I had when reading this volume was the reasoning behind the form of the poems on the page. Whilst the justified blocks are visually stark and offer an interesting decontextualisation reminiscent of the wall of an art gallery, in places it’s difficult to see why the potential for experiment with spacing has not been exploited. That said, this sense of restriction is concurrent with the trammelling of meaning into the forms it must take on during the process of communication – through voice, film, or through words themselves.

Having googled Ryan Ormonde, it appears that he is also involved in performance art and work across different media, and this is something that is certainly hinted at throughout this collection. Thinking again of that gallery wall, I’m wondering whether this pamphlet has reached its final form, or whether there’s room for it – or selected, edited pieces – to move still further into the media it questions, taking on shapes and spaces that may be better suited to the fascinating and ever-changing nature of the discussion at hand.

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‘THE MOTH IS MOTH THIS MONEY NIGHT MOTH’ by David Berridge

In Pamphlets on December 13, 2011 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Rosie Breese-

It’s awesome being a reviewer, because now and again, a jiffy bag comes through the letterbox containing something completely, wonderfully different. That’s exactly what happened when David Berridge’s superb collection THE MOTH IS MOTH THIS MONEY NIGHT MOTH plopped onto my doormat. A gorgeously put-together pamphlet from the Knives Forks and Spoons Press, it contains a series of poems – or word-equations – which shimmer and morph in the mind as they do on the page.

Words are dangerous things to work with. Their meanings shift. For example, the word different comes with a whole host of awkward connotations. Different can mean difficult; it can mean weird; it can mean uncategorisable. It could be construed as a lazy definition on my part; an attempt to distance myself from something I haven’t really ‘got’.

I’ll make a confession. I don’t ‘get’ this pamphlet. But I’ll make the case that ‘getting’ it might not be the be-all and end-all of this collection. Rather, it’s a space to be inhabited by both reader and writer, its meanings under constant exploration and review. Maybe this could be said of any collection of poetry, but it is especially apparent here, where there is so little conventional signposting for the reader.

The joy and beauty of these poems is that they don’t dictate to the reader how they should be approached. There’s no recourse to convention (except, perhaps, the emerging conventions of experimental poetry?), no rhyme, no metre, although there is a sense of internal cohesion, a progression of sound and meaning:

slake   night

green  snow

Here, there is a progression through the vowel sounds A/E/I/O (or A/I/E/O, depending on which way you choose to read it). The ‘U’ is missing – ‘you’ are perhaps lost or absorbed. There is a progression of ideas: ‘slake’ suggesting satisfaction, and conversely, thirst; ‘green’ and ‘snow’ forming what could be construed as a contrasting set of ideas – fertility and barrenness.

But that’s just one set of interpretations. Meaning, as Berridge’s wriggling word-strings suggest, is a mutable thing. The poems enact this through their constant movement, through the shifting of letters according to a logic imposed first by the writer, then by the reader:

feet  fashion  slake  low  mouth

t*o*n*
g*u*e*

___________

snow = star

There is a mutation, a sequence of interlocking sounds in the first line of this poem. There is a procession of ideas, each word trailing its subjective debris. The asterisks between the letters of ‘tongue’ could serve to defamiliarise, to question; equally, they could be the ‘stars’ referred to in the final statement ‘snow = star’. Then there is the sense of stars as snow on the tongue, of sensation inside and around the tongue; a glorious, unexpected physicality emanating from these isolated, decontextualised letterforms.

This tangibility was what really struck me when reading and re-reading this collection. There’s a vividness, a synaesthesia here. From the outset, the reader is plunged into a sensual world, with the body and environment in direct contact:

feet  lake  green  lake  mouth  lake  felt  lake  night  night  lake  tongue  lake

There is no direction as to how you should feel when reading this, what you should look at first, or take with you when you leave the page. This lack of overt direction brings with it a sense of immediacy, urgency even, which brings the reader into communion with the word itself and the whole sensual world inside the mind.

As for themes, maybe it’s just because it’s the Christmas shopping season, but for me, the repeated ideas of ‘money’ and ‘fashion’ suggested materialism, something which is reinforced through patterning of ‘mouth’, ‘tongue’, ‘belly’ and ‘slake’, all related to the act of consumption. There is the sense of a process throughout – the process of consumption, of mass-production of meanings, shifting and multiplying with each rearrangement and re-reading.

In this context, I found Berridge’s chosen ending devastating. A short sequence of three words with the initial consonants bracketed and brought into question. They can’t be read unless it is accepted that what you are reading here is a vast swathe of possible meanings:

(s)tar     (g)leen     (t)outh

The sequence ends with three simple and definite words, which in themselves open an abyss for further exploration – a sense of absence that persists:

money             mouth  night

This inconclusive conclusion is fitting. The whole sequence revolves around the evasion of grasp – of words, of meaning, of satiety. Intentionally or not, these poems make the case for art as context; for poetry as a negotiable space.

This is a beautiful piece of work which shifts and moves under the gaze like the living thing an artwork should be allowed to be. I don’t get it yet; I might never ‘get’ it, and I’m fine with that. But I am sure of two things about it: that I will come back to it again and again, and that every time I do, it will be different, in the best and most valuable sense of the word.

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‘Talismanic Contact’ by Andrew Nightingale

In Pamphlets on November 17, 2011 at 12:34 pm

-Reviewed by Claire Trevien-

When handing out various The Knives Forks and Spoons Press pamphlets to reviewers there was one that everyone automatically had a negative reaction to: Andrew Nightingale’s Talismanic Contact. It’s not a surprising reaction, the pamphlet consists of six figures that, at first glance appear to be gibberish. Beautiful gibberish of course: these are visual poems that look to me like blood clots, or a city viewed through its paths, or some sort of microscopic body made out of letters. I expect a scientist could pinpoint much more accurately than me what it could be, but even without knowing, one gets a sense of a small organism blown up to such a large scale that it seems other.

The titles, kept on a separate page, each add to the strange beauty of the poems: ‘fig. 4: Talisman for communing with lightning conductors’ or ‘fig. 2: Talisman for contacting a presence’. They hover between the illusion of scientific remoteness and the daredevilry of poetry. By daredevilry I mean the wonderful insolence with which we poets assume that we can communicate with uncommunicative objects or concepts.

There are several ways of approaching the poems they describe, one can simply relish the titles and look upon the figures with detached amusement, picking out the words, or half-words, that hover at the end of the stems. Or, one can plunge in there, forgetting that one isn’t ‘into’ experimental poetry (whatever that means) and try to decipher what is happening. The dive is thrilling in itself, a process of rescuing words from various part, adding letters where necessary, and scribbling the findings on a piece of paper with Indiana Jonesish panache. In essence, each figure consists of about three or four lines of poetry (there is no punctuation so it is up to you to decide if it is one long sentence, or two, etc) which eventually loop around themselves. For figure 2 (‘Talisman for contacting a presence’) for instance, I found the following:

‘sliding through locked doors hovering like a strange smell and melting without reason these ancestors sliding’,… etc

The words aren’t particularly exciting or unusual for the subject matter (though ‘strange smell’ is of course immediately effective) there is a lack of specificity. However, the subject of ancestors haunting a house is particularly appropriate for the format chosen: as we see the words sliding, hovering, disappearing, with letters erased or cut-off, the looping phrase really does seem like a talismanic chant.

The contrast between the ‘experimental’ presentation, and the prejudices that come with it, and the actually rather mundane text is part of the pleasure of this pamphlet. The poem ‘Fig. 3: Talisman for contacting Mars’ is a particularly extreme example of that juxtaposition:

‘we have heard you on the radio it’s getting late there’s fresh tea in the pot we are waiting are you coming we’,… etc

Though the phrase itself seems simple, the format in which it occurs forces the reader to re-examine it. Here the repetition sounds eerily robotic, frightening at turns, with an edge of desperation. The pot of fresh tea is a reassuring reminder of domesticity in a garbled communication with an unknown entity. Tea is a cliché in stressful situations of course, but that is just a reminder that clichés are yet another form of talisman: a well-set stereotype block that one can press when other words seem out of reach.

Talismanic Contact is not an elitist work, but it does reward those who take the trouble to take a closer look at the dabs of paint. By forcing the reader to experience different readings of the work, Talismanic Contact is a useful reminder that poetry shouldn’t always have to be digestible ‘on the go’ or in performance.

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