Because we know you don't come here for Zeitgeist

It occurred to me that I should title this post, "The future is prisons and maths", a suitably obscure piece of intertextuality, referring to the indomitable (indubitable?) Luke Kennard's penchant for posting obscure blog headers, while simultaneously calling up Luke's crap sales technique, which runs along the lines of, "I hate myself, my work is crap, please like me a little bit and buy the book or I'll cry."

We've posted about this before indirectly, and this sales technique is only slightly more appealing than the 'do your duty' approach. However, the big news is that this rejuvenated blogging of the Kennardian variety comes off the back of his newly published pamphlet with Nine Arches Press: Planet Shaped Horse. While you're there, have a look at some of the other beautiful poetry books and pamphlets none of whose authors feel the need to self-deprecate themselves through the floorboards.

I once described Luke Kennard as a postmodernist in front of a group of students and quickly retreated from his growling stare; however, I'd like to present a postmodern conundrum for Mr. K. while I'm here:

Luke, your self-deprecation is reinforcing your reasons for self-deprecation. Stop it, or you'll find yourself trapped in a closed postmodernist loop. You are one of the best poets in the UK. You showed us you were more than just a funny, absurdist prat in your third book, and yes, some critics may not have 'got it', but they're all bastards and you've a long and fruitful career ahead of you. The poems I've read and heard you read from this new pamphlet are a culmination of everything great about your first three collections - the humour, the pathos with the disaffected, the insecurity of modern living and the fight against inauthenticity. Planet Shaped Horse is laden with social empathy and boils with the kind of passion that most contemporary poetry would cut its left iambs off to achieve.

Right, so all that screen-licking out of the way, a return to the title of this blogpost. Yes, it's not really zeitgeist, it's just a very tardy announcement of two readings by Luke this week. One is tonight, in Birmingham, with David Hart, Milorad Krystanovich and Simon Turner, among others:

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Thursday 3^rd February 2011 7pm – 9pm

The Priory Rooms, 40 Bull Street, Birmingham B4 6AF

FREE ENTRY

With readings from Luke Kennard, David Hart, Milorad Krystanovich and Simon Turner

Celebrate the launch of Luke Kennard’s new Nine Arches Press pamphlet, Planet-Shaped Horse, with a host of readings from the new pamphlet and from a selection of Birmingham’s finest poets. 

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The second is at Buzzwords in Cheltenham, on Sunday:

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Sunday, February 6th, 2011, Workshop 7pm, Readings 8pm
The Brown Jug,
242 Bath Road
Cheltenham,
Gloucestershire
GL53 7NB

£3 minimum, £5 if possible.
 

Guest poets:
Nine Arches Press presents Luke Kennard and Matt Merritt

Luke Kennard writes poetry and short stories. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.
He won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 for his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers (Stride Books) which has since been re-issued by Salt. His second collection of poetry The Harbour Beyond the Movie was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007 making him the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the award. His third book, The Migraine Hotel, was published in by Salt in 2009 and was a critical and commercial disaster, leading Kennard to conclude that his star was decidedly sinking. His criticism has appeared in Poetry London and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently reviewing fiction for The National.

Matt Merritt’s second collection is hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. His debut full collection, Troy Town, was published by Arrowhead Press in 2008, and a chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, by HappenStance in 2005. He studied history at Newcastle University and counts Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh poetry among his influences, as well as the likes of R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes and John Ash. He was born in Leicester and lives nearby, works as a wildlife journalist, is an editor of Poets On Fire, and blogs at Polyolbion. 

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I'm going to both. I have Matt Merritt's new collection already, and was forced at gunpoint to try and pronounce it in one go. Fortunately, my Greekness didn't let me down. 

Hydro - water

Daktulo - finger

Psychic - Russell Grant

Harmonica:

George Ttoouli - Suspended Sentence

Reading [x]’s poetry reminds me why I love language and poetry because nearly every poem in the collection reminds me of a better one, already published and celebrated and far more worthy of revisiting than these poems. This isn't helped by the string of pointers peppering the collection, to poets and poems – from a mostly traditional white male school syllabus canon – that are far more exciting than the metronomic rat's rhymes [x] has produced.

I'll start by quoting from the later pages, after the point where the poems read as if their purpose is to bulk up the length of the book:

[quotation deleted]

Here we have a poem called, [poem1] in which [x] insists on capturing the urge to write a poem about a [bird], despite full awareness of how well [poet1] and [poet2] have written about the bird. The justification, of being moved, is so awkwardly tacked-on as to be sidelined by the much more convincing, “Might as well.” There's no sense of the bird itself; there's no originality, even in the attempt to write about a poet's struggle to write with originality. Everything about the poem is a cliché. Does [x] deserve a gold star for getting the title right?


That 'might as well write a poem' sentiment marks the whole of the book resoundingly, from the less obvious poems about roadside accidents, Christmas festivities, trite nature observations and Wendy-Cope-relationship-poems, to the more blatant [poem2]. The 'Notes' at the back of the book tell me this last one is [dedicated to a group of people who encourage poets to write in response to occasional, trite observational situations]. Does [x] deserve a medal for pursuing a socially clichéd practice concerning the subject matter of poetry?


This kind of poetry-club writing has its place. These clubs are little communities of love and support and, at the best of times, constructive criticism. I would be far more forgiving of [x]’s work if I was in this poetry club, knew [x] personally, and had been given home-printed, hand-sewn and illustrated pages with these poems on. What is the outsider reader supposed to make of all this, though? I don't know [x] or [their] personality, I have only the words on the page, in all their flimsy inadequacy.


And if there is an actual poem to be found among the trite observations in the collection, maybe [x] needs to look a little deeper into the subject. Instead of climbing inside their subjects, these poems flitter around the thing itself with banal personal observations, sometimes laden with old-school Toryisms about nosey neighbours – more specifically, people gawking at [traffic accidents].


One poem, [poem3], launches an attack on the public display of mourning a community shows for [someone killed in a traffic accident]. Here the close observations of a [deleted image] – [quotation deleted] – seem on the point of transcending mere description up to a commentary on human violence and its impact on community. Instead the [image] just rots away, stinks a bit, coming to represent the malaise the speaker feels for their fellow human beings more than any emotional truth about the situation. We're told at the end the [people in the poem] who blamed the [cause of the death] were [quotation deleted]. An adult like the poet, perhaps, who thinks they do know better? The final arrogance sweeps away any complexity or sadness the scene might have evoked.


I'm possibly not the best reader for this work. I mistrust anything that elevates poets to a greater level of moral awareness than the rest of society even on a good day – I've myself as evidence and you've this bad-tempered review as proof. But poets should at least be better at using language to express those things many people are capable of experiencing, to provide greater understanding of the world and our identities. Here, language does not bend to experience, but the opposite. The most blatant offender, [poem4], fails utterly to capture the kind of syntax and distorted view of reality someone might feel in a state of altered consciousness. [x] opts, instead, for trite nursery rhyme structures to capture the mindset of the speaker. Does that mean [x] took a substance that returned [them] to [their] childhood? I'm struggling to make a connections still, insofar as I struggle to remember anything in this book beyond a generic smear of unoriginality, revulsion and resentment for my time being wasted.


There's plenty more to demand apologies for throughout, but it's beginning to feel a bit like kicking a corpse for want of a football. I've nothing against doggerel, as long as it's entertaining—as Rachel Blau DuPlessis put it in 'Draft 75: Doggerel': “I say that doggerel really gets it right, at last. /Up doggerel, wreck refinement, go for crass.” Joyous, by comparison. Suffice it to say when [x] gets to grips with the idea of a poem's form being related to its content, then perhaps [they’ll] write something tolerable to readers outside of [their] immediate circle; after that [x] might begin to think about the notion of form being content.

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (9)

XXXVIII

who cleans their ears

while sleeping

to hear dreaming

commentary:

fliuch some

old words naming

water avens

invocations to rain

also bring wetlands

red wells at the centre

sepal colour is of

beaten bodies

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (8)

XXXVII

Mr President jets off

to a far black country

urges the hungry

to consume

& be his friends

the way a landowner

is friends with his fence

commentary:

one of the banned

names

lus na fola

blood herb

shepherd’s purse

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (7)

XXXVI

two ghettos dreaming

separated by wire

a dream at the front

a dream at the back which

buoys the world

the hinds the hinds

time perhaps to sing

commentary:

watch the flower rise

as it drinks

sit quietly

it happens

were you on the hill

by the lochan

of concealed soldiers

whisper this one herb

robert

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (6)

XXXV

a thrush is speaking

tarragon in the garden

it’s July 14^th

a thrush is speaking all

are born and remain free

and equal in rights

it’d be good to be

smelling buddleia

when the time

commentary:

little sister

white bone

earth sap

I name it

hidden carefully

gun cache in green

delayed deferred

broken red straw

berry