Getting Close: Peter Hughes' 6 Petrarch Sonnets from Tears in the Fence #56

The new Tears in the Fence has just arrived, the usual mix of ecleticism and a whopper of 176 pages, showing signs, I hope, of increasing stability and the quality of the magazine's reputation. Some engaging ecopoetics from the off, but reading through in page order so far, it's Peter Hughes' poems that arrested me first.

Hughes' '6 Petrarch Sonnets' first struck me for that awkward phrasing - why not 'Petrarchan', how I learned it in skool? The brevified (allow it, dear Reader) title points to some kind of mutation, potentially straddling that much vivified-by-zeitgeist word 'plagiarism', or 'the model', which was taken for granted back in the days of Wyatt et al. There's very little here I can relate to what I remember of Petrarch hisself, except that the lover addressed by the sonnets, Laura, is absent here too, or maybe substituted by Hughes for something like a concept.

The second strike to note, though one that's not so helpful in this context, is that the first poem in Tears in the Fence is numbered '24'. So we're in media res on a sequence whose backdrop isn't available to me. I'll be reading them for what I've got, but the 6 sonnets present are 24, 25, 26, 27, 32 and 35.

What does the Petrarchan sonnet say? It's a masculine courting ritual, in which the poet prances about to show how in love he is, without allowing the subject of that feeling to be touched, reached, given real presence in the poem. And this is there in the first line: "It's not all that clear why you're asking me". Not all that clear to "me" offering a voice-driven poem spoken by someone that puts themselves first and likes to be a little bit condescending, while the undescribed "you" is present immediately as a problem for this speaker.

Not so much the unrequited love interest, more a nag, a shrew, who is being rebutted? But if this "you" isn't really a love interest, then what's the speaker really in love with? The start of the stanzas gives a clue, the "It's" followed by "I've" then "you'd" ending with an imperative "go" in the final tercet. This is passive aggressive turning into "go shove it" aggression by the end, and that final line's expletive: the "fucking gastropub in Putney". Wonderful satire, great pitch of the punchline, but we're not being lulled into any sense of comfort with this speaker's 'love' for the London poetry soiree, or the pretention that the addressee takes for success - being in the "in-crowd" where people "think / bardic is a bleach for cleaning toilets". Sharp. This is a lover's tiff, amounting to, 'Don't tell me how to be a poet' and 'You think that's poetry? Sod off'. Or something.

The speaker is really in love with their own opinions, an exaggeration of what contemporary critics (so I recall from undergraduate lectures) find wrong in Petrarch. The poet, through their persona, can't allow the subject of their poems to find voice, presence, give opinion; they're too busy strutting their stuff, showing off how brilliant they are with language, with thought, with love.

Hence the underlying irony in the tradition: here's a lover who doesn't know how to love. The second piece in the selection kicks off with that 'me me me' again: "me & love are like this (fingers crossed) / late night paralytics treading the decks / of a stone-floored room" which turns out - at least to me - to be reminiscent of an all night drinking session in a room that hasn't passed a health and safety check since legislation was introduced. So "me & love" (not "love and I", or anything quite so formal) are a drunken posture in a nightclub, swaying slightly in front of people who probably aren't "me's" best friends and probably want him to go away before he throws up. Bottom line here is that you wouldn't trust this guy to write a poem about romantic love, at least not at this stage in the sequence.

I almost read that word "paralytics" as "panegyrics" and there's a similar echo of other phrases and words elsewhere in this unit ("buck and roll" for "rock and roll" nicely marking that point in the evening when you wish you hadn't had that last double vodka, as the music sounds like it's kicking you in the stomach) and the crude and wonderful phrasing of the simile at the end of that first stanza: "like a tramp steamer in a tsunami". Googling that innocuous phrase, "tramp steamer" I realised I didn't actually know the official meaning, though it's kind of self-evident. (Apologies to sensitive readers for quoting wikipedia, look away now.) This is a ship engaged in tramp trade, which means having no "fixed schedule or ports of call", hence not a steamer full of tramps, but one that mimics the lack of direction of a vagrant. So both a kind of nautical flaneur, rolling about lost and observationally, able to see the familiar with fresh, vagrant eyes (as Ann Marie Mikkelsen has said of the Whitmanian tramp), but also somewhat disorganised, unattached, looking for love in the wrong places, perhaps and, as Mikkelsen writes, attempting a social critique from their apparently detached social position.

There's a lovely twist from this steamer simile, the so-called weaker cousin of the muscle-bound metaphor, as the next three stanzas (quatrain-tercet-tercet, keep up, dear Reader) turn the shadow of the ship into a literal ship: "now you're up on the deck where bitter winds / whip away your words before they're spoken". Don't say Hughes doesn't do beautiful music: it's here with the idiomatic English, the mixed registers of modernism alongside a finely crafted short-lyrical pattern.

What's emerging by the end of the second piece, for me, is that Hughes is playing the fool. Literally, a fool who doesn't follow "know thyself" even though he pretends to, so much as Shakespeare's mutation, "to thine own self be true". There's something of the speaker's being able to point to the naked Emperor, while also not knowing he himself's wearing a burlap sack with cock, balls and a pair of tits drawn on it. So even as we don't trust he knows what he's talking about when he talks about the London poetry "garden party", there's a veracity in the description of the club or pub's claustrophobia, then being outside in the "evacuated air", expressed in the control of the language, the musical patterning giving authenticity to an otherwise unreliable voice.

Did I say control of language? Yes, but where are the rhymes? It's a sonnet, so I want me rhymes, Hughes! Well, dear Reader, they're mostly internal from what I can tell. Witness poem 3 in the selection: "milk-float" with "riots" and "depot". Stretched, perhaps, by some tastes, but the poems are rife with internal rhyme, and the few moments that seem like end rhymes seem only accidental, part of the general musicality of the language.

I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, the ease with which a non-rhymed fourteen-liner can be dashed off, compared to the strictures of attempting a smoothly constructed (English) sonnet does bear some consideration. The form's origins, on the other hand, in a language with more opportunity for rhyme than English, demands careful weighing. Just as the Japanese haiku's formal constraints lead to an odd redundancy in what has become the 17-syllable pithery of conventional English haiku, something is lost in the colonial translation where these issues of form have their roots.

Is it even possible to define "discussion of love" as one of the formal constraints of the sonnet, as I have done? And doesn't the quantitative definition of the sonnet - in terms of techniques of syllable, rhyme, line count, octet vs. sestet (in the Petrarchan case) and volte - kind of speak to an anal, rote-system understanding of poetry? And doesn't the Reality Street Book of Sonnets indicate a need for contemporising tradition? And why am I using so many questions as a rhetorical trope right now?

You've guessed my bias already, dear--(no, I won't it's another trope to keep you on thread). Form, these days, is understood in a post-Oulipian sense, which asks questions of the potential for the shape of a poem to express a certain kind of thought with beautiful thinking. (Though see also my recent ruminations on form.) The short, carved shape to the piece, the sense of imbalance between the octet and sestet (or greater imbalance in the run towards a closing couplet) gives a sense of expostulation or sanction, and claustrophobia, the poet trapping their voice in a confined space, or on a confined subject, to try and resolve their thinking. Love is important, of course, as to all poetry - if only as the act of writing creatively always demands a sense of generosity towards the reader, expressed through the word choice, the sound craft, the attempt to contain complexity in fourteen lines, to paraphrase E.St.V-M - but here the lack of space doesn't lend itself to verbosity (unlike the blog-form, you're thinking to yourself, but that's ungenerous of you), only to the brief argument of a well- and pre-considered essay.

To clarify by example: the sonnet's enclosed space takes literal shape in the theme of the poems, through reference to the pubs, clubs, drinking dens they're set in. But this is a reference to the shape of the poem, a way of encoding the metatextual discussion in literal visuals. Very clever, Hughes, have a cookie. You can't though, encode the thematic discussion of love into the sonnet, without making a metaphysical leap: the writing of sonnets is always about love, in some way, hence the form signifies that subject to readers through their awareness of tradition, not through the inherent structural design, which indicates a mini-essay, potentially on any subject.

So, back to the poems. What to make of the trundling milk-float at the start of the third selection? Not your usual poetry vehicle of choice. And the reference to riots, also a nod to contemporary events, to the now of Hughes' response to Petrarch. The possibility that these are sight translations occurs, that the incidence of these details arises from a hidden process, or perhaps biographical veracity. Mere speculation.

What stands is the speaker claiming to be more relieved than the 'you', who got home safely after driving a milk-float in a riot, so the ongoing arrogance of this speaker carries through, with mere hints of a niceness underneath the 'aren't I good for being worried for you?'.

And then the poem veers in the sestet towards a discussion of language. The "shackles of convention" shrugged off in slightly too familiar terms, maybe, being "rinsed clean" of expectations by others, all a little easy and not quite earning the assertion of coming back "to language like a stranger", though the final tercet earns a little more authenticity of feeling. "meteors & apples" (I never quite got that use of the ampersand in place of the and, except as an affectation) carries again a sense of pun, for "metaphors and ..." Well, I could say "and couplets", at a stretch, though maybe I've missed a trick there. But there's also the oblique dating, to last summer's riots and the Perseid meteor shower, an annual event peaking in August, so the poem feels more consciously positioned in biographical data.

The following poem picks up this thread, with the theme of bars and drinking now blending with the social politics: "again the unemployed are trained to fight / for the freedom of the wealthy". This is telling it like the speaker sees it - the fool pointing to the barbarity of protest that seems to descend into reinforcing a social status quo that isn't being fundamentally challenged by the free swag claimed from high street stores in the name of the class struggle.

The self-critique is less audible here and the selection has moved into a more familiar political pose, although the speaker's safety is acknowledged, waiting in the bar "until the flags & marching bands have gone", not a protestor, not an activist, not attempting to change the status quo. The cynical ending to this piece, remarking the hypocrisy of protests whose "vast majority / are bulldozed into pits without music", denotes also the futility felt by the speaker, who has chosen to do nothing, to believe in nothing. There's no "you" in this piece, no sense of the romantic relationship.

And so forth into the next piece, where "we are steeped in futility's juices". The opening "I" of the futility is transposed into the collective. This is fast becoming one of those conversations with a drunk in a pub that you're desperate to find a way out of. Not "we" who "wallows in oceans of emotion", but the mode of the sonnet form, of course. That's the new voicing Hughes attempts here at work against those earlier referenced "shackles of convention". He needs a way out of this pattern (and I need a way out of the pace I've set myself, hence I'm barrelling towards the final poem).

And there it is, in the final selection, poem 35 of who knows how many? Like a Peter Riley poet-tramp, this lost-at-sea social dis-/de-fector, is walking "that lonesome road", maybe too familiar from pithily complacent narratives about whistleblowing, or the "against-all-odds" stereotype of Hollywood formats. The passion this speaker carries "below the pallid surface of my skin", is reflected in "what the sky does" and the "haunted heaths" and so on - a list of natural, though displaced natural imagery that follows in the penultimate tercet.

I'm leaning now into my research into the use of natural imagery, landscape, as a foil to social conventions. It's a trope, through and through, but a worthy one. We're told by social centres of power what the land means - quantities of resource, spiritual escape, ecosystems service provision. And then we get to the land and it's sublime, it overwhelms us - it is imbued with the passion we feel when we see something we can't fully understand through the parameters we've been given to understand it with. "No yardstick", as Robert Graves said of poetry, equally true for being in the world and seeing something mankind has only shaped, not made, something that has survived our species' manufacturing of it. Hence "haunted" and "eerie", strange to the viewer, and hence that closing line to this selection: "I never find myself distant from love".

The echo with Peter Riley again - Alstonefield: a poem reduced to fourteen lines. Love, here, means something entirely different to Petrarch's lustful anthropocentrising; not the mortal and immortal forms humans aspire to, but the insufficient social norm against the individual will to change society for the better. This is indeed "God-forsaken" not only for the post-religious society we're in, but because we've made a hell of society, of class; and the land, when scaped, offers a reminder of why we believe so much in wanting a better world. The poet, here, in persona, tries to express something of the passion inspired in them by the world as it is, older than us, a reminder that this way of things didn't always exist and doesn't have to.

Experience recollected through futility for social constructs, but then back to the idea of the object of the poem as an experience in itself, one that can be as beautiful and inspiring as those themes and things represented by words. So the landscape provides a reminder of hope, a reminder that we're never quite "distant from love" when this reminder is there.

The music does more for me, as a conveyor of that experience, than the thoughts that bog it down. I personally now much prefer those brief constructions of Janet Sutherland when she gets rid of herself, or Lorine Niedecker in her later work, or HD's imaginisms. But I see the usefulness of the sonnet form for laying out the arguments in favour of that kind of work that simply inhabits the beauty of experience in language. Dare I say it's a particularly masculine ego that allies itself to the shape, to the need to argue? There, I said it. And it does, especially over the length of the sonnet sequence, restrict some of the originality of approach available in more dynamic, open modes of writing. That's the nature of compromising with a traditional form.

Hughes' selection here is a reminder, for me, of other work I've read and loved, and the many small gems accumulated in the minutiae of its progress are a sign of great craft, in turn a sign of love being poured into the work of writing. The traditional sonnet does bend a fair way in the short space of the whole that's reproduced in Tears in the Fence, but ultimately, with just one ego at work, I find the poem can too easily leave out the innovations in a more communally constructed process of expression. Riley's approach asserts the shared process behind Alstonefield that contributes to a destabilised 'I', and I imagine there's something in the covert processes doing just that here also, in how Hughes enters into dialogue with Petrarch's process, though I can't speculate much further.

I can say, in gushing and unequivocal praise, that this is the kind of exemplar challenge Tears in the Fence presents to its readers in most of its pages. And I'm especially pleased by the eco-logic at play in the first thirty pages of the magazine. (And David Caddy's editorial is marvellously considered, grounding the old 'poetry is losing sight of its audience' statement in liberal and social educational model, which might piss a few of the London garden party-goers off.)

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Editor's Note: Peter Hughes has kindly pointed me to a link to the Petrarch poems in publication. See also his award winning publishing house, Oystercatcher Press.

Desultory Speculationism

"At one level the poem-as-notebook seeks to establish some kind of authenticity and immediacy. The poem becomes the record of its own growth, form replicating the sudden shifts of attention in a desultory speculation. But at a more complex level such emphasis on the process rather than the product of writing dissolves boundaries between literature as artifact and literature as daily record... The notebook, rather than being the source for materials used retrospectively, is the activity of and for that day. Writing and living are so closely united that incidents like shopping or doing the wash merge imperceptibly with the act of writing about them."

(Michael Davidson, 'Palimtexts', in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff, 90)

Dalkey Archive Press Call for Submissions!

The Editors just saw this tasty bit of literary history in the making. John O'Brien, founder and editor in chief of world-renowned leftfield literary press the Dalkey Archive Press, has published his first prose-poem! Titled 'Employment', the work runs with an unusually playful and aggressive tone, deploying a well-known corporate formal structure to deconstruct rising unemployment rates in recession-hit Western economies. It is also, we believe, a covertly ingenious approach to the unremittingly boring tradition of calls for submissions.

We reproduce the piece in full here, assuming it to be published under a creative commons licence. However, you may wish to read it at source, to verify whether we have taken it out of context.

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Employment

OPEN POSITIONS:

December 11, 2012

Dalkey Archive Press has begun the process of succession from the founder and current publisher, John O'Brien, to a publishing house that will be directed by two-three people along with support staff. With the recent decision to expand our London office and make London the base of European operations, the Press seeks to develop its staff there. Who will take on leadership positions at the Press over the next few years will be the result of this transitional process. The pool of candidates for positions will be primarily derived from unpaid interns in the first phase of this process, although one or two people may be appointed with short-term paid contracts.
    The Press is looking for promising candidates with an appropriate background who: have already demonstrated a strong interest in literary publishing; are very well read in literature in general and Dalkey Archive books in particular; are highly motivated and ambitious; are determined to have a career in publishing and will sacrifice to make that career happen; are willing to start off at a low-level salary and work their way upwards; possess multi-dimensional skills that will be applied to work at the Press; look forward to undergoing a rigorous and challenging probationary period either as an intern or employee; want to work at Dalkey Archive Press doing whatever is required of them to make the Press succeed; do not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.); know how to act and behave in a professional office environment with high standards of performance; and who have a commitment to excellence that can be demonstrated on a day-to-day basis. DO NOT APPLY IF ALL OF THE ABOVE DOES NOT DESCRIBE YOU.
      We certainly seek people with relevant experience, but just as important or more so, we seek people who know what a job is, are able to learn quickly, are dedicated to doing excellent work, can meet all deadlines, and happily take on whatever needs to be done. Attitude and work habits, along with various skills, are just as important as experience and knowledge.
    Any of the following will be grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period: coming in late or leaving early without prior permission; being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work; submission of poorly written materials; creating an atmosphere of complaint or argument; failing to respond to emails in a timely way; not showing an interest in other aspects of publishing beyond editorial; making repeated mistakes; violating company policies. DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above.
     The areas of work for which the Press seeks candidates are the following, perhaps in the order of importance, but with all initially being equal to one another, and in the order that have the most promise for long-term employment:

1. Personal Assistant to the Publisher, part of which will be to learn how to raise funds for the Press, travel with the Publisher to other countries when necessary, meet all key authors the Press publishes, learn the history of the Press and its culture, work closely with all of those the Publisher must work with, be a liaison between the Publisher and other staff, know what the Publisher needs or wants before he does; in brief, do whatever the publisher needs done so that he can concentrate on major projects that this person will also be involved in; this is best suited for a younger person who wants to learn publishing directly from a founder;

2. Development/fundraising: maintain a fundraising/grant-writing schedule/calendar; write all grants and make solicitations from individuals; develop an annual fundraising plan; travel to meet funders;

3. Office Manager: keeping of financial records and ensuring all bills are paid in a timely manner; coordination of intern staff; generating weekly cash flow statements; ensuring timely responses to all website requests; day-to-day assignments from Director as assigned; doing all and everything that will make work for others easier;

4. Production/layout/design: manage all aspects of the production schedule, ensuring pub dates are held firm; layout of all Dalkey Archive books; work with printers; create promotional materials; work closely with designers and may also do design work;

5. Editor: assist publisher with contracts and acquisitions; generate reader reports; copy-edit; proofread;

6. Publicist: arrange for reviews/publicity and plan events for Dalkey Archive books and authors;

7. Marketing Manager: liaise with the Press's distributor, WW Norton & Co.; work with the Press’s publicist to ensure publicity increases sales; develop marketing plans;

8. Web Manager: maintain the Press’s website and update content as needed.

By the end of--or even sooner--of the internship/trial period, both the candidate and the Publisher should know that the Press needs the person and would be making a major mistake not to maintain the person for the future.
   Applications will be ongoing, and internships/positions will be filled when and if the right people are found. Candidates should assume a start date of mid-to-late January, depending upon which position is being applied for. Early applications are encouraged so that you will not be disappointed a position has already been filled.
   To apply, send the following to John O’Brien, o.brien@dalkeyarchive.com : a letter explaining the basis of interest in the position, why you want to work at Dalkey Archive Press, why you're qualified, and why we would be foolish--in light of your knowledge, skills, and experience--not to want you to be an important part of the Press. Also attach a current CV including three references and their contact details. Assume that you will begin to be evaluated as soon as your application arrives. And also assume that you will be one of the unpaid interns until you are ready to take on all the responsibilities of a position.  Incomplete applications will not be considered.
We will not be able to acknowledge receipt of applications or provide feedback about your application. We will contact only those people whom we wish to ask further questions of or that we intend to interview. Do not contact us about your application.
      Candidates from EU countries are encouraged, but if English is not your first language, you must have a very high level of both verbal and written skills.

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Perhaps the language does become a little monotone about halfway through. And there's a lack of prosodic control, although this does speak to the relentlessness of the capitalist drive to accumulate and its unsustainability in a world littered with the carcasses of environmental exploitation, lives ruined by burn out on the treadmills of venture investing, and the casualties of shock doctrine.

It's a good thing to know that leftfield presses, even at the height of capitalist fundamentalism and the normalisation of structural violence by the powerful, even as the resistance to these mechanisms seems at its loudest in the chanting of not just the 99%, but the 2bn people on the planet living in poverty - it's good to know this bastion of literary experimentation and structural challenge, is upholding a long and, well, long, tradition of publishing house rigour and, well, rigour.

Clearly this is a call for submissions to a new magazine or anthology being launched by Dalkey Archive Press! It is probably called 'Recession'. The first issue invites creative responses on the theme of 'Employment', taking on the formal tropes of the job application, playing with the medium of the reference letter, the constraints of the curriculum vitae and the cover letter.

The Editors of G&P wholeheartedly encourage its readers to send in ten, or even twenty submissions to this exciting new project! For ourselves, we'll see if we can reach thirty applications, although you know how time-consuming these things are and we've a full time blogzine to run, which has already put paid to our personal lives, social skills and even allowed some of our leg muscles to atrophy.

Palette and Page: form and OuLiPo

George Ttoouli ruminating like a ruminant on issues of poetic form...

I had an interesting argument with someone recently (Jonathan Skinner in fact, and I don't know whyI need to be reticent about his name, he's a man of vast intelligence), that led me to thinking whether form is different to constraint, or that shape is different to constraints. This in response to a discussion of Oulipian procedural constraints as different to traditional ideas of poetic form. I see these elements as contigently dependent, or overlapping, in the manner of a Venn diagram, to the point that those brief elements you might argue lie outside of the nearly-equalised sets of the two terms, in the manner of two spotlights not quite perfectly overlaid, could easily be accommodated into equalisation through a little bit of thinking.

So, while the procedural constraints of Georges Perec's La Disparation might not appear to be a 'shaping' factor, or formal rule, it does restrict the words he may use in the way that, say, asserting the length of a poem called a 'sonnet' can. If a sonnet is a rule that starts by cutting out of the morass of blank page a small edifice, the size of a room of one hundred and forty syllables, or seventy stresses, or ten by fourteen, and cetera, a lipogrammatic rule begins by placing its restrictions on the palette with which the poet can build, resulting in a poem of any size or shape, formally speaking.

The argument might then be a distinction between the 'form' of a poem as being that which takes shape on the page; and the 'constraints' of language whereby the means for making those shapes are curtailed. However, to complicate this, words come with little rule packages for how they can be deployed on the page: they are verbs, they are nouns, they are articles definite and indefinite. "Slowly accommodation the the and" makes bugger all communicative sense, non? However, it is still acceptable in a certain poem (is 'earned by context') if we choose to bend the rules, or break them. That's a given, and part of the point: form earns content, gives content context.

If we constrain the language palette, therefore, creepy little feelers spread out into our capacity to shape language on the page: with the lipogrammatic removal of the letter 'e', we lose the definite article; and syntax gallops in wyrd unfixity, an unabling form aggrandisingly visual in all outbursts. Syntax is the order of language in relation to communication units. Is syntax a constraint, or a form, or the hazy space whereby these two mentally distinct concepts conjugate? (I defy you to find a definition of syntax that doesn't include either the word 'form', or 'rule', or both, and which isn't rubbish.)

If we think of form as a translation of a set of rules into a repeatable abstraction (not as difficult as it sounds*) and that constraints can only be communicated in the same way, or even only refer to the individual rules when the word is taken at face value, then one can start to ask, 'What are the constraints of a sonnet?' If one tries to do the same with procedural poetics - 'What are the constraints of the lipogram?'- a distinction does emerge, of sorts. Constraints begin to fall into the category of rules alone, rather than the wider form; hence constraints are a subset of form. And lipograms begin to manifest more specifically as a type of form, rather than a constraint.

This still leaves a blank in the map where the idea of 'procedurality' lies. Joseph Conte, in Unending Design, suggests certain poetic forms gravitate towards categories of procedural and serial, infinite and finite, predetermined and free. Procedurality is therefore a loose grouping of approaches to form, or forms themselves, as demonstrated by specific poems, where the constraints are set in advance (referring to palette, not shape on the page) of writing. Oulipian forms, such as the beautiful-inlaw and outlaw, demonstrates this as a crossover problem also. Harry Mathews' 'Husserl's Curse' is also a sestina; is this the blending of two distinct practices of rule-making, the one being the palette, the other the page space? Or is it that the two can now go hand in hand, since traditional form has been under sustained testing, attack and experimentation for long enough that we no longer need to see a full distinction?

I sound a little more definite in parts of this than I intended, so hope this won't put off any responses.

* E.g. what is the form of a chair? A floor to arse interface, comprising a construct to provide distance from the floor (legs), a horizontal surface to support the arse (seat) and a vertical surface to support the back (back). Remove the back and you have the abstract form of a stool. Add wheels and a spinning column thing and you get a swivel chair. With inclusion of materials, design aesthetics and so on, you get a specific, (non-Platonic, although arguably the ideal of 'chair' is a non-existence objective) manufacturable chair. The 'form' is translateable into set of written instructions so that another chair may be constructed by someone else. I see this as no different to explaining what a sonnet is, or what a lipogram is.

Blinking to miss it: Isolated Examples of Imaginative Transformation in the writings of Luke Kennard

George Ttoouli has just finished reading Luke Kennard's novella, Holophin...

This is one of those notes to self that feels fresh enough in my thinking that I want to share it here, in case someone else has input. (I'm increasingly using G&P to air ideas I've not got straight in my head, for which, trad-mag readers, I apologise. Go find a weekend supplement, they're more reliable.)

Firstly, Luke Kennard's novella, Holophin. I'm going to try and restrain myself from gushing praise, as Luke is a friend and has had enough PR from me. Read someone else on it: Annexe and also the trailer (rumour has it, Tom Chivers literally hung out of a plane at 25,000 feet to get that footage). It is, of course, wonderful reading, imaginatively fresh, technically surprising... etc. etc. I'm not entirely sure what the crazy chapter between 14 and 15 actually means, but it looks pretty.

Two isolated incidents I want to refer to:

1. In Holophin:

"the ... School's tutors have been re-hired as Learning Resource Managers. The Research Institute is no longer free - a luxury we cannot afford in such straitened times"

(I've elided some of this and not referenced precisely because some of this might constitute a spoiler otherwise.)

2. In Planet Shaped Horse (Nine Arches Press):

"The gate has no lock, but is operated by credit card, // charging you £1,500 each time you swipe to open it" (from 'Snob').

[The latter quotation was embellished by Luke in performance to something like, "£1,500 the first time, then £3,000, rising to £9,000 when you swipe to open it" so more obviously a reference to UK university tuition fees.]

Something I remember Luke saying in response to writing from personal experience: whatever happened to making stuff up?

Here's a writer who's also a university lecturer dishing out poetry about a man recovering from mental health problems waiting in a halfway house, and a[n] SF novella about a world supported by little dolphin stickers, with no little resemblance to Ghost in the Shell crossed with a war between Apple and Microsoft computing and a minor dash of Terminator thrown in for good measure. Plus fairytale, and maybe even The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I'll stop there, the influences and connections are so manifold as to become meaningless after a while - it is an original synthesis of familiar tropes in a way that utterly delights. (Oh, more gushing...) But it reads fresh, the characters are made up, as far as I can tell, the world distinct from the genre comparisons, despite the odd homage. (This pitches into an awkward discussion about how easy it might be to demonstrate originality, when it's taken to mean organisation of language, rather than structural, or contextual organisation, but let's save that for another day.)

Anyway, two references to the privatisation of education, but transformed into the context of the two books' worlds (which I've elided in the first quote, but read it yourself and decide). I got these references and responded to the satire because it's an issue close to my heart, of course. Does it stand up, or is it a cheap shot at the real world, at contemporary society, which takes you out of the SF?

SF operates in a tension between utopia and reality. The reality we are living, what we understand of the world, its physics and society today, is the reader's point of reference for engaging with the [impossible / extrapolated / speculated / dys- / u-topian] world of an SF story. (SF doesn't have exclusive rights to this, of course, as Planet Shaped Horse demonstrates: an alternative reality world where everything is surreal but plausible through a distorted subjectivity.) Holophin falls into the category of speculative fiction in the main part - a dystopian world loosely based on technological projections and the replacement of nation states by corporations. You could argue there are elements of pure fantasy SF in there, in the context of the implausible energy and material resources that would have to drive Holophin's society (which only gets one minor reference), but let's leave that alone.

Well-executed satire is satisfying, right? Only it does leave you with that bitter taste of reality washing back in after a cool clear dram of escapism. That's called morality, or if I were feeling ungenerous, moralising, but done here in a delightfully Hogarthian way, a non-puritannical 'let's make entertaining stories and be good people at the same time!' kind of thing.

Is it satisfying enough? Here, the transformation of satire on privatisation of university education is entertaining, sure, but that's just one of the three elements of great writing: "magic, story, lesson" as Nabokov put it (PDF link); or in reverse order, 'educate, entertain, enchant' as Peter Blegvad rephrased it. Along with satire, the education of social critique, we want story, the context of the world, but what about enchantment? That feeling of flow that keeps us out of reality and in the story's new world, forgetting all the research I should have been doing this morning, not going to the library to work, because I was reading this book.

I think that came out of the urgency of Hatsuka's story: her relationship to her parents, the tension with Max, the super rich room mate. Then another kind of 'dropping out' of the story arose with a thread centring on depression - something else this shares with Planet Shaped Horse - a treatment that reminded me of Eggers' film version of Where the Wild Things Are, emotionally affecting enought to make me stop and think for a moment, also dropping me out of the flow of reading.

This is all beginning to get a bit incoherent. I have been trying to say something about how Luke has managed to transform elements of his personal experience - for example, university work, no doubt some emotional life as well, to help breathe life into the characters - into something highly entertaining, morally positive, and, within the whole, a sustained degree of enchantment also. Some moments that are so hilarious they put all the cheap chuckles of a 'comic writer' like Bill Bryson into the recycling bin and throw a petrol bomb in after them - equally, moments that drop you out of the story, because you can hear yourself laughing.

Maybe we need these moments - it's not a flaw to say you left the flow of reading, the page-turning. But you're acknowledging those moments when the story made you think, or feel; moments when you remembered you were human. The idea of being fully in the flow of a story would be meaningless without little reminders of the world you have to return to; it might even be a negative thing; you might start believing that you could escape the real world, your problems, rather than only leaving for a while to gain some perspective. (Maybe that's the problem with apathetic social idealism: it isn't facing up to the problems, it's trying to escape. Oh, another can of worms - I'm leaving them in to feed the trolls.)

OK, enough. If someone knows what I was trying to say, please fax it to Luke's departmental office at the University of Birmingham. They're barely funded by taxpayers money these days, so consider it an act of resistance against the Nautilus future I'm trying to prevent (read the book to get the reference). I'll close with a list of names I came up with at one am to describe the colour of Holophin's cover - more suggestions welcome:

Lurid 9

Wallflower Comedown
Grape Grope (sadly, this one exists)
Broken Fuschia
Summer Pervert

Ripe Stains

Culpability Pink

Bubblegum Vulva  (blimey, so is this one)
Gollyberry
Keninnards

===

Holophin was printed in a limited edition hardback run of 300 copies. Less than 100 remain - I know this because I have copy 203 (assuming Tom is as OCD as me and only sends them out in the correct numerical order; also he tweeted about having sold more than two-thirds). It will be out as an e-book in a few months, but trust me, the hardback is beautiful. So is the text, of course. It deserves to sell millions. I haven't read so much joy since Heartsnatcher.

News - Links - Miscellania

A few resources, following time away and a bit of conferencing (I would write about that, but I have 20,000+ words of uncondensable notes, some of which is slanderous, other parts gurningly idolatrous), which I was hoping Simon would fill here, but he's been up to other things (see end), or possibly not.

- James Womack is running a series of fascinating etymological posts on his blog, Trunt. I was particularly taken by 'blade' after a discussion about the value of originality to ecopoetics last week.

- The aforementioned project Sophie Mayer has been cooking up is live: I Don't Call Myself a Poet. A fascinating database of fixed interviews between students poets at varying stages in their careers. I'm in there (and didn't, unfortunately, send Sophie corrections for the two errors in there), of course, but ignore my casual ranting. There are an astonishing 68 interviews so far and plans to grow this, not just through Sophie's teaching, but an invitation to tutors elsewhere to inspire their students to do the same. (Which reminds me, I should get in touch about that, classes starting in a few weeks.)

- A somewhat anodyne article on Ballard over at the BBC Website, but justified because there can never be too many articles about Jim.

- Forthcoming Radio 3 programme about John Cage, which includes a segment by the wonderful Marjorie Perloff.

- Saul Williams is returning to the UK in late November. I'd really like to get to this, but it's a teaching night, so I'll have to work something out with my students first of all.

- Luke Kennard has not abandoned poetry, but has taken a brief detour into prose: Holophin.

- Peter Riley's grumpy and insightful critiques continue in great spirit over at the Fortnightly Review. Given my participation in Poetry Parnassus as a buddy, and the fact I went to the Poetry Pyjama Party and had a great time (it was completely empty for the first 20min, then people I knew wandered in and we all lay about on the cushions eating sweets and reading poems to each other) AND the fact I spent all of August working on a 6500 word chapter on Riley's Alstonefield for a collection of essays, I feel this link wins me enough good karma to kick a deer to death (to paraphrase Mike Niblett...).

- And finally, in case you thought, like me, that Simon was merely being lazy for most of August, then we were wrong. 'How’s My Driving?' HOW'S MY DRIVING?!? If anyone has time on their hands and is willing to catalogue the random titles Simon spat out of his combobulated mouth in biogs and interviews in the run up to 2010's Difficult Second Album and post them here, I would be very grateful. In fact, on Simon's behalf, please send in titles for his next collection based on his mugshot photograph. An opening suggestion: Attack of the Man Hand. (Incidentally, I just noticed the article went live in July, so who knows what Simon's really been up to in August?)