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.

George Ttoouli - Notes towards a review of Ashbery's Planisphere (with analysis)

George Ttoouli discovers notes made over a year ago in red ink on a scratty piece of lined A4 paper, upon speed-reading Ashbery's Planisphere (Carcanet, 2009), ISBN: 978-1-84777-089-9.

Each poem feels tricksy, yet chatty.

The

The colloquial style is engaging, but also distracting.

"The land stretched away like jelly into a confused cleft." ('Planisphere')

"Why what a lovely street /
blank canvas / pause / orb /
old person / new song / milestone /
caned seat this is!" ('Tous les Regretz')

Elements occur where writing about writing becomes a dominant theme. At these points Ashbery's verbal dexterity shines.

The collage effect means, ultimately, most of the poems don't in themselves work by contextual build, accrued overall power. If anything they seem anti-framework, against the idea of interest and meaning.

Some poems seem gentler, more cohered, less playful, but where he works in the dominant mode I'm familiar with from reading earlier work, these are extremely satisfying, perhaps more conventionally shaped, but dialect play + voice + colloquialism is pushed and tested and delightful.

===

[NB. I read the book in about an hour, made the notes as I went along. This seems a more effective review than anything coherent I could shape out of the notes.]

Simon Turner - My Unfinished Reviews

One of the reasons I find myself so impatient with book reviewing in the broadsheets, aside from the increasingly conservative decisions being made behind the scenes as to what gets reviewed to begin with, is the restriction of the form. There is only so much one can do, only so far one can go, within the framework of the traditional review, in experimenting with form. The blogosphere, on the other hand, represents a totally free space, and if this sometimes results in show-boating and self-indulgence - Gists & Piths can certainly be found guilty on both those fronts on occasion - it is more often the case that the same freedom opens up the reviewer to greater critical independence and rigour than the mainstream press can allow for. So, with that in mind, and in tribute to Marcel Benabou (and latterly George Steiner) I want to inaugurate a new(ish) form of review: a compilation of unfinished - for various reasons - scraps and fragments, which on their own amount to very little, but which compiled make up an interesting stop-gap article until I can muster the energy to create something more substantial. Enjoy.


1. John Burnside, Gift Songs (Cape, 2007)

A difficult one, this: I've been a fan of Burnside's work for a long time, since I first read his poetry in the Morley-Hulse-Kennedy edited Bloodaxe volume The New Poetry in college. The review of his most recent collection remains unfinished due to the fact that I proved incapable of making my mind up about it. On the one hand, he is an immensely accomplished stylist, and there are many wonderful lines and images here. But I also worry that his work feels as though it has been composed on auto-pilot: so many of the phrases - and subsequently, so many of the poetic effects - in this book comprise a variation on the formula 'an x of y', for example: 'the salt of distance', 'the music of midsummer's eve', 'the lull of gospel', 'the perfection of shadows', the shimmer of eyes'. Granted, it might well be unfair to take the isolated elements as indicative of the collection as a whole, but the minutiae of a poet's technique can often give us an insight into their more expansive qualities. The jury's still out on this one.


2. Three from Shearsman: Spencer Selby, Twist of Address; Peter Larkin, Leaves of Field; Isobel Thrilling, The Language Creatures (all 2007).

A difficult review to finish if only because of the wildly variant technique and quality on display here. I knew Spencer Selby best as the curator of Selby's List, an invaluable resource for finding avant poetry on the web, and this was my first encounter with his poetry, and I thoroughly enjoyed it: loosely language-centred, there is also a narrative joy to be found in certain of the poems here, such as the 'Cycle Synopsis' sequence, which upon first reading have the same disorientating effect of David Lynch's later work (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire), revolving as the poems do around disturbing and paradoxical circular narratives from which there is no escape for the reader. Reminiscent, too, of JG Ballard and Donald Barthelme, though I am less sure why. Elsewhere, his poems demand and reward close attention; indeed, if the poems have a subject, it is precisely the close attention to language, and language's mutability, which the collection cries out for the reader to enact.

Larkin's work is language-centred in a different way: dense blocks of text which seem to mirror the impenetrable foliage of a climactic forest (the space of nature is often Larkin's subject, though this does not mean his work falls into a Romantic category). I must admit to finding Larkin's work 'difficult', but it is not without its pleasures: "Like threads of leaf-sepals seem incisions, in the tree of deep ruts of twining licence. A canopy no longer super-exposable once what it gives as shelter is stood up under, plantation station out tall in swirl." Out of the swirl of colliding registers and vocabulary emerges one fact: a sensuality of language which, if we put aside the complexities of meaning for one moment, really makes the poetry come alive in the mouth. There are no easy points of entry into Larkin's work - it is all of one part, really, and his chosen form is the same dense prose-stanza that dominates here (reading his work alongside Ron Silliman's landmark essay The New Sentence may help to clarify the reading process) - but I would recommend him without caveats. Just don't expect an easy ride.

Isobel Thrilling's poetry, meanwhile, is all too easy on the reader, and seems very much at odds with the usual rigorous editorial standards at Shearsman, and whilst there are pleasures to be found here - a clarity of expression, a deft hand when it comes to arresting images - the poems feel to neat, too polite, for my liking. In addition, I wasn't at all keen on Thrilling's tendency to close her poems with semi-moralistic statements ('We are all pieces of amber, / the universe remade running through our veins'; 'whatever our / composition, we are prisms of rain') that tend to close off any element of self-volition on the part of the reader: all the work of interpretation is done for us. That said, I think there are moments here where it becomes apparent that there is something of real value in Thrilling's poetry, but it exists in only nascent form as yet, and needs a more expansive space to develop, which the poems here do not offer.


3. Charles Johnson, The Feather-List Extracts (Five Seasons Press, 2005)

There are a number of reasons I never got around to completing this review, which can be summarised as follows:

1. When I began, I had just completed a review of David Hart's Running Out, also published by Five Seasons Press, and was worried that Gists & Piths might appear like a publicity wing of that publisher.

2. This was compounded by the fact that David Hart edited and wrote the introduction to this collection, and Johnson, like Hart and like myself, was originally from Birmingham. To avoid accusations of Brummie chauvinism, I thought it best to hold on to the review until we were better established.

3. I had, prior to beginning the review in earnest, received a (very lovely and apologetic) rejection note from Johnson, who edits Obsessed With Pipework and Flarestack Press, and was worried that I might not be able to maintain enough critical distance in my account of his collection.

4. 2005 was quite a while ago: to write a review in 2007 / 2008 felt a little belated.

So, personal reasoning aside, what did I think of the collection? Overall, it had the feel of being somewhat cobbled together, though this is as much a result of the editorial process as Johnson's own writing: the poems were gathered from far and wide, rather than written with a single collection in mind. That said, so many slim volumes are so neat and tidy, so written to order, that the slightly anarchic quality of The Feather-List Extracts is refreshing. Inevitably, the collection is somewhat of a mixed bag: some of the poems are very successful, some less so,but the poems I enjoyed I enjoyed immensely. 'Hints for Travellers' shows all of Johnson's greatest strengths - simplicity, lack of pretension, a keen eye for detail - to their best advantage:

I drove an unfenced road
open to the grail
as a wide flower is open
to the idea of summer rain ...

If the diction recalled Edward Thomas or Robert Frost, that brilliant image at the heart of the opening stanza is all Johnson's own, and all the more effective for being revealed in such simple language. Elsewhere, Johnson is not afraid to experiment, the strange final section, 'Indices', tantalisingly suggesting a whole alternative career as a card-carrying experimentalist, quite at odds with the quieter poet Johnson shows himself to be throughout the remainder of the collection. We need more poets like Johnson: writers uninterested in aesthetic fashions, or the various style wars that seem to be wrecking the poetry community at present. And if it doesn't all succeed, so what? Just leave it and go on to the next thing.


4. Sarah Maguire, The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto & Windus, 2007)

I have friends who are slightly at odds with me on this one, and can't quite work out why I like Maguire's work. I plan to give no robust defence here of my personal taste. Suffice it to say that I enjoy her poetry immensely, and here is one reason why, from 'The Physic Garden':

Look, even in July,
the leaves of the
Lirodendron
are learning to yellow:

lemon and gold
leavening the green.

*

As good a place to end as any, I suppose: until next time. Don't have nightmares.