November Updates

In the past few weeks, I’ve been working quite intensively on a long essay on Cecil Taylor’s poetry for what looks to be an expansive collection on Taylor’s work edited by Peter Valente. Having long thought a book like this should happen, I’m delighted it finally is! Taylor’s work has meant a lot to me for what seems like forever—certainly, since writing, or trying to write an MA thesis on his poetry back in 2011: a somewhat wobbly first step, or what Taylor himself would call an ‘Excursion on a Wobbly Rail.’

This latest iteration is part of what I think of as a suite of writing on Taylor’s work, particularly his poetry: a memorial post in 2018, a piece for Chicago Review in 2019, and an essay on Taylor and vodou for Point of Departure in 2020. It updates all that with some new reseearch—the conference on Taylor’s work at CUNY in 2019, Phil Freeman’s recent biography of Taylor, In the Brewing Luminous, a valuable chronological synthesis of existing materials and new interviews, and—not least—seeing a copy of Taylor’s unpublished poetry manuscript, Mysteries, of which the first page is above.

Besides that essay, I’m planning for other writing on Taylor, its final form yet to be determined, to find its place in two current manuscripts on music, Survival Music and Ensembles. Taylor’s work continues to mean a huge amount to me. An all-consuming music, an all-consuming vision. Here’s a bit of the work in progress:

In the film Imagine the Sound, Taylor speaks of making “the commitment to poetry”. But what did poetry mean for Cecil Taylor? Poetry was, I argue in this essay, where he theorized his artistic conception. It was poetry he credited with saving his life, and in turn, it became part of the way he understood the nature of life, his own life, and that of life in general; of how to live one’s life, of how to approach art with charm, with ferocious grace, and with the unstinting courage of conviction.

Lots to catch up on in the meanwhile....In the not too distant future, I’m hoping to post here some writing on Wadada Leo Smith and a report on the Berlin Jazz Festival. Some other things are in the works as well. For now, news and some capsule reviews, notices of new work...

—‘Dream in a Hailstorm of Riots’, a long piece on the new collected poems of Jayne Cortez, is up at the Poetry Foundation.

From the mid 1960s through the early aughts, Cortez wrote about the political crises of her times: Attica, Allende, Palestine, Rwanda. But like fellow African-American Surrealists Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman, she was as interested in transforming reality as in documenting it. She bursts generalities and stereotypes in startling catalogues of surreal images that build around repeated phrases like the riffs of an improvising soloist. In her work, observations of everyday life and political events turn into dream visions, apocalyptic landscapes, meditations, and exhortations that crackle with energy, rage, and love. Above all, she is perhaps the poet of what her generation referred to as “The Music,” the various traditions of jazz, the blues, and R&B that soundtracked the freedom dreams of the Black liberation struggle. Cortez wrote poems in tribute to musicians and led her own band, the Firespitters, for decades. Hers is a voice—both on and off the page—that speaks with authority, curiosity, and an unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to change consciousness and change lives.

—Honoured to receive this attentive review by Eric Keenaghan of Never By Itself Alone at Resources for American Literary Study. Eric’s own work on queer coalitions, and with the writing of Muriel Rukeyser is, are necessary projects of historical reclamation and reminders of traditions of principle, resistance, and the complex negotiations of struggle for committed writers in times of crisis—needless to say, perhaps more relevant than ever.

—An essay on John Wieners from almost ten years(!) ago, now in print in Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners, edited by Michael Kindellan and Alex/Rose Cocker, published by Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. This was the first thing I wrote after handing in my Ph.D thesis and it feels like a signficant part of the work I did since then flowed out of this way of thinking. It’s about love and poetry and fire and Wieners’s relationship to his first love, Dana Durkee.

This chapter addresses what John Wieners claimed was the most important romantic attachment of his life—that with his partner of six years, Dana Durkee—and the eventual ending of that relationship. As I’ll show, this loss can be said, in part, to have prompted Wieners’ fully-fledged entry into the world of poetry, prompting the composition of his breakthrough volume The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), and it seeps into the minute fabric of his language itself, whether through conscious acts of address, revision and removal, or sublimated elements of textual echo which at once memorialise and disavow the object of loss. By introducing this element of biographical resonance, I do not wish to reduce Wieners’ poetry to a pained lyric exceptionalism, the poet as an exemplary figure of suffering removed from the social conditions that produce that suffering. Rather, such information serves as a means of heightening the way loss and despair intersect with socially produced domination, and the problems of community and desire in the face of persecution and its constant threat. As Denise Levertov astutely noted in 1965, in Wieners’ work, “Confessional” subjects such as mental breakdowns and the pain and loneliness of queer love are “not autobiographically written about, they are conditions out of which it happens that songs arise”.

—And last but not least, I’m very pleased that CJ Martin and Julia Drescher’s Further Other Book Works have taken on Abstractive, the book of poems and visual art works I wrote with the great Candace Hill Montgomery last year (with some final tweaks this past month). More details will be forthcoming. For now, as a sneak preview, here’s a page of the manuscript….

Triumph of the outcasts, coming! (Preview)

As a subscriber post on Substack, this piece on a track from Adegoke Steve Colson’s and Iqua Colson’s album Triumph!, along with thoughts on survival, the outcast and, once more, the work of John Wieners.

Often, the poems that give consolation to others don’t always give consolation to the poet themselves, or the time of release is different. The renewal they offer wavers in its power. It saves some and not others, and sometimes it seems like it can save no one or do precisely nothing, but what matters is that it’s still there, if nothing else as testimony and record, as the poems of the martyrs in Gaza, as the poems of the shining martyrs Wieners saw in the queer poets of Boston, as in all the poems being written now, all the poems that have been written and that will be written, triumph of the outcasts, coming!

What is a reading? John Wieners at Brooklyn College

Just up on Penn Sound—part of a bumper crop of recently-digitized recordings from the Eric Mottram archives—a 1988 reading by John Wieners, hosted by Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College, and split into two parts here and here. “Reading” here is not so much noun—a discrete recitation of a set of poems—as verb, Wieners reading aloud from a book, extemporising, elongating, truncating, extending. The book in question appears to be the author’s copy of the then-recently published Black Sparrow Selected Poems, into which he’d collage various images and text fragments. Within the first few sentences, we’ve had text from bodybuilder Charles Atlas about “what it means to be a man”, a mention of the nowadays obscure poet Jean Garigue, displacing the Beat lore Ginsberg tries to extract from Wieners when he mentions their first meeting in New York; a discourse where a character from a film—a bit of digging reveals it to be the war film Candlelight in Algeria—is juxtaposed with a novelist, a poet, and so on: a giant, collaged ensemble.

It’s of a piece with the turn Wieners’ work takes in the ’70s, exemplified in his magnum opus of that period, Behind the State Capitol: disavowing the self through collaging devices, reading-through his own and others’ work without indication, a surface in language jagged and dazzling, scattering clues and then retreating. In this there are echoes of his poetic comrade Bob Kaufman—like Wieners, championed by the inexhaustible Raymond Foye, who helped shepherd work resistant to book publication into texts that could be read by others.1 Kaufman would suddenly speak poetry in the middle of a conversation, improvising off the many poems of his own and others he’d retained in his head. Yet, while Wieners’ Brooklyn College reading often obscures whose words are being spoken and what is being read, he also deploys a-near excessive identification of source. Flicking at will across the book, sometimes reading only a line or two at a time, he identifies each page number, though by the time whoever reading along has turned to the relevant place, he’s off somewhere else, frustrating his host Ginsberg’s bid to keep up and keep track of all the references. In some cases, he even reads out the punctuation, as in these lines from the 1970 poem ‘Consolation’: “It’s best not to think too much. What awaits but death, question mark. A long life of misery, comma.”

In Delirious Verse, a talk on versification recently published by The Last Books, Amelia Rosselli claims that “sound was once so close to the written sign that people wrote without spaces between words”. Wieners treats the normally invisible notational frame of punctuation as part of the spoken text itself, establishing distance in the middle of immediacy. Likewise, when he reads flashes of his more famed, emotionally wrenching lyrics, his voice speeds up and his tone becomes hard to place—sarcastic, or a kind of sigh, as if he can’t wait to get to the ends of the words, which he has to read them, but wants to render incomprehensible. As such, it’s an anti-lyrical gesture. Yet at other points, Wieners whispers, barely audible. And isn’t one of the classic definitions of lyric poetry talking to oneself in public? Wieners is still reading, but not to us, perhaps not even to himself. Selving and un-selving. (“For the voices”, as the dedication to the 1964 collection Ace of Pentacles goes.)

But this is a reading at a college: the event is supposed to have a pedagogical function, something of which Ginsberg, with his history at Naropa, is keenly aware, interjecting to ask for clarification—what exactly is Wieners reading now?—entreaties Wieners gently brushes off, at one point waspishly remarking, “you should call the embassy and tell them you’re Allen Ginsberg and they’ll translate it for you”. But Wieners doesn’t refuse interpretation, though “it’s best not to think too much”. Misreading a phrase as “heartbreak libertarian”, Wieners wonders “who would that be? Jack Spicer?” (His devastating 1965 elegy for Spicer, ‘Hotel Blues’, opens: “Pass by this room, stranger / Heartbreak hides within it.”) This additive approach nonetheless continually calls back to memories of the past, of poets and lovers who are gone yet live on in the poems’ haunted shell: a constellation of references subject to melancholic improvisation. This may be an inability to move on, yet it, too, is a kind of transformation of loss, perhaps at times even a triumphant one, keeping the dead alive.

This is not an easy listen. It refuses the pathos and heartbreak of Wieners’ earlier work. Like Kevin Killian, interviewing Wieners in San Francisco a couple of years later, Ginsberg tries to keep up and give the audience some way in, while Wieners speaks on associatively in a barrage of names, always at an oblique angle to the question (there is a relation, but it might take a few minutes of puzzling to work out exactly what it is.)2 There’s no literary-critical guidebook for how we experience this—and how it’s inflected by our knowledge of Wieners’ biography, of the toll of drugs, heartbreak, psychiatric incarceration. At one point, Wieners refers to the Selected Poems as a “cookbook”. We may not know what the ingredients are, but it’s up to each reader to implement the recipe. As readers, we too, have to improvise. Along the way, some our fundamental assumptions about a reading, what is, what it’s for, poetry, what it is, what it’s for, are at stake.

The imminent reissue of Behind the State Capitol from The Song Cave is eagerly awaited!

1

See Foye’s work on Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain and the 2020 Kaufman Collected Poems, and on Wieners’ Black Sparrow Books, Selected Poems and Cultural Affairs from Boston.

2

The Penn Sound website doesn’t allow external embedding, but scroll down to the March 1990 Cloud House Poetry Archive video embedded here. The image at the top of the post is taken from this video.

Up-to-date (From Attica to AMM)

(Some pieces of writing recently published in other venues.)

“Attica is in front of me”, an essay on musical responses to the Attica uprising by Archie Shepp, Frederic Rzewski and Charles Mingus, appears online in a special issue of the Blank Forms journal, edited by Ciarán Finlayson, commemorating the uprising fifty years on.

A piece on the Eddie Prévost residency at Café Oto in July is at Point of Departure. There were four concerts in Bright Nowhere, celebrating Prévost’s eightieth birthday: the piece has write-ups of all four--a multi-saxophone concert, the ‘Sounds of Assembly’ group, a Workshop concert, and the last ever gig by AMM. 

And at Artforum, a shorter write-up of the AMM gig from the same residency.

An edit from a much longer interview I did with Eva-Maria Houben last month is up at VAN magazine. (The full interview will be out in the fullness of time--watch this space: I also wrote about the recent performance of Houben’s ‘Together on the Way’ at the Southbank Centre a few months back.) 

Other odds and ends:

A review of Decoy and Joe McPhee’s gig at Café Oto came out back in the July issue of The Wire, of which there’s an image below; there’s also a review of the Explore Ensemble concert of music by Poppe, Dunn, Dillon and Miller in the October issue, of which I’ve just posted a longer version on this blog. 

And even further back, in March, organiser Mark O. Chamberlain kindly read out my short paper at the online John Wieners symposium hosted by Durham University: video of that and the other papers can now be viewed online here.

In the near future, among other things, a piece on Igor Levit’s new disc based around Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan, a journal special issue, a poetry pamphlet from Andy Spragg’s and Jimmy Cummins’ RunAmok, new titles from Materials/Materailien, and the Blank Forms reprint of Baraka, Neal and Spellman’s The Cricket, to which I contributed a short introduction. Lauri Scheyer and I are also putting the finishing touches to Calvin Hernton’s Selected Poems with Wesleyan University Press, a project that’s been in the works for a few years and which we’re very excited to see moving to completion...

More on all that in due course!

Recent Writing (June)

Not posted much on this blog of late, but a fair bit of other writing elsewhere, of which a digest follows...

Over the past month I've been working on a long article on the great organist Larry Young / Khalid Yasin, now up on Point of Departure. The piece covers all the periods of career: early work in the soul jazz idiom from 1960 to around 1964, progressive jazz with the class Unity in 1965, free jazz (or a synthesis of free jazz with elements) from 1966 to around 1969, and then 'fusion' from 1969, first with the Tony Williams Lifetime, then with his own 'Love Cry Want', 'Lawrence of Newark' and 'Fuel' bands. The gist of the piece is that Young provides a lens for all kinds of trends, movements, placements, moving from doo wop to soul jazz to the advanced end of bebop to free playing to fusion of various kinds, along the way reinventing the sound of the Hammond organ. (To hear just how radically he'd transformed what could be done with the instrument, take a listen to this astonishing solo piece). It's often said that Young's training as a pianist is at the root of what was so unusual about his approach--e.g. taking the influence of McCoy Tyner's fourths and Monk's use of space and adjacent, dissonant notes, rather than the Jimmy Smith licks and held-note vocabulary ubiquitous amongst soul jazz Hammond players from the late 50s on. At the same time, of the technical achievements of his playing-are developments from  materiality of the instrument itself, as a kind of proto-synthesizer/big-band-in-minature, and from the vocabulary of soul jazz, even as they explicitly move away from it. So' for example, when he transitions from soul jazz on albums like Unity, Young explicitly moves away from the Jimmy Smith technique of holding a single note over the tune's chord pattern in an ecstatic imitation of tenor 'screamers', blues 'shouters' etc. But in the 1970s, that technique returns, transformed into a series of  sustained drones and 'washes' of sound which create dissonances, clusters, white noise blocks as the harmonic pattern surrounding them departs radically from the soul jazz patterns with which Smith worked. Similarly, the doubled thinking required to play both bassline in the footpedals and comp/solo with hands on the keyboard leads to a dialogic conception that in turn influences his playing within a group--a collective approach that in turns leads naturally to free jazz (Of Love and Peace in 1966) and the groove-based large-group improvisations of Love Cry Want and Lawrence of Newark in 1972 and 1973. And in terms of genre, the roots for the free jazz/ avant-garde playing of c.1966-69 are laid in soul jazz and hard bop of c.1960-62--in itself a kind of 'fusion' of elements of progressive jazz (bebop) with urban pop music (R&B)--which then presage the jazz fusion of c.1969 onwards, as the harmonic ambiguity of free jazz combines with the harmonic simplification of fusion and its focus on rhythm and groove. Which means that this at once a dialectical process--as per the Hegelian sense that hovers over fellow Newarker Amiri Baraka's earlier account of the movement from bebop to cool/hard bop to free in Blues People in 1963--and Baraka's 'changing same' circa 1967--which is and is not dialectical, at least in the same sense. (Clearly more thought needs expanding on this!). Baraka's not invoked arbitrarily here--he provided liner notes for an early Young album and was immersed in/emerged from the same thriving music scene in Newark. Which is the piece's other argument--that Young, along with Alan and Wayne Shorter, Grachan Moncur, Woody Shaw, Tyrone Washington, etc etc--marks a strand of Newark-originating playing in the late 50s/early 60s that often challenges strict divisions between 'mainstream' and 'free' and suggests another stream to the music. So that circa 1967/8--the year, after all, that Baraka writes 'The Changing Same'--there are a number of recordings which suggest a continuum between R&B, free jazz, mainstream hard bop, etc--Young's Contrasts, Washington's Natural Essence, Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music, even (less successfully) Ayler's New Grass--that are a kind of 'fusion' in advance, but alway in terms of Black music, rather than the way that fusion later becomes, too often, a kind of code for white virtuosos coming in and making the money. (As producer David Rubison put it, "Jazz fusion meant white people playing Black music"). All these arguments end up becoming somewhat speculative in part because Young (and Washington, Gale, etc) was never documented as much as he should have been. There's roughly a record per year when he had a contract with Blue Note (1965-1969), but after that--which is precisely when his playing really takes off--the documentation is a lot more sporadic: Lifetime's best work was live, but can only be heard on a few bootlegs; there's only one recording apiece for the Love Cry Want and Lawrence of Newark bands; I'm still wondering if tapes of the trio with Dewey Redman and Rashied Ali at Slugs' Saloon in 1968 exist...(Highly unlikely that are recordings with Frank Wright, Cecil Taylor and Coltrane, all of whom he played with at various points.) For that matter, it's impossible to get hold a copy of his final record, The Magician, a Germany-only release by his much-maligned final fusion band, Fuel. 

So that piece is now out on Point of Departure, along with three other reviews: George (E.) Lewis' Recombinant Trilogy, three works for solo instruments with electronics; The Locals (Pat Thomas et al) Play The Music of Anthony Braxton, which I noted back in Februrary on this blog; and new poetry-and-sound releases on Fonograf Editions from Nathaniel Mackey and the Creaking Breeze Ensemble and Douglas Kearney/Val Jeanty (Kearney's book sho is also out from Wave Books).

(Image of N.H. Pritchard from the East Village Other)

Back in April, I reviewed the reissue of N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix for Artforum: since then, I've been working on a longer piece based on this research as well, encompassing Pritchard's other books, EECCHHOOEESS, which is the first publication from Adam Pendleton's Daba Press, and some uncollected and unpublished work--of which there's a ton out there, including Pritchard's novel Mundus. Watching his appearance as a preacher in Elaine Summers' and Rev. Al Carmines' Another Pilgrim thanks to the digital versatility of the New York Public Library was a highlight of this--a real slice of place and time.

Also Umbra-related: Honoured to have been asked to write on Askia Touré's work for a special issue of Paideuma which republishes his 1972 book Songhai! Researching his poetry and thinking about the role of the African American poetic epic and Islam was fascinating work; it's astonishing that there's so little criticism on it. The piece, 'Songs for the Future', should be out soon.

Also out soon, a final Umbra-related item: from the University of Buffalo, Edric Mesmer's Among the Neighbors is a primarily bibliography-focussed pamphlet series on little magazines associated with the New American Poetry. My contribution to the latest batch offers a chronology and a brief introduction to Umbra, followed by a bibliographic listing of the contents of the five magazines produced between 1963 and 1974. This emerges from a much bigger Umbra bibliography project I began last summer, which aims to track the publishing activity of all the major Umbra poets and other poets associated with Umbra, providing details of major publications, as well as secondary criticism and other relevant material. The draft of that document runs to over a hundred pages, and I'm not sure as to what will be done with it--perhaps part of an online resource at some point. (If you'd like a copy, leave a comment below this post and I can send you the draft.) Many thanks in any case to Edric for his work on the Among the Neighbors pamphlet, which I hope will be a useful resource, given the rarity of the Umbra magazines themselves. (I'm also excited to be working on a two volume Umbra project with Tonya Foster and Jean-Philippe Marcoux, which should be out in the next few years. Watch this space!)

Boston Review are running a piece of mine on Yours Presently, the selected John Wieners letters recently out from University of New Mexico Press. It was edited by Michael Seth Stewart over a period of ten years, and having read the entire, unedited version--Seth's thesis at CUNY--which runs to around 1000 pages, I can attest to Seth's editorial acumen in producing this shorter version, still scrupulously annotated with a wealth of contextual and biographical information. (Let's hope too that Robbie Dewhurst's equally vital work on the biography and the complete poems--the latter provisionally entitled Ungrateful City--might see publishing fruit.) And props to Ammiel Alcalay and CUNY's Lost and Found programme for supporting scholarship like this. Hearing Ammiel, Seth and Eileen Myles talk at the online launch last month, setting this in its context, was a perfect illustration of the spirit in which the enterprise was conducted--Ammiel recalling meeting Wieners at Grolier's bookstore as a thirteen-year old, hanging out and talking, about the government persecution of Billie Holiday, about Wieners as part of the 'outside'--queer activists, anti-war activists, drop outs, and so on--that was much bigger than it is now, as Ammiel put out; Seth reading out a funny and engaging letter in which Wieners puts down Kerouac and Ginsberg and comes out with casually brilliant and moving phrases imbued with the poetry that shot through his life; and Eileen Myles likewise come up with phrases of music and casual poetry--"the basketweave of the soul" a phrase I half remember; all this was a moving affirmation of Wieners' importance. 

The Boston Review review comes out of a bunch of other work on Wieners I've been working on over the past few years--in particular, an essay on Wieners' great book Behind the State Capitol, editing and typography, just out in the Queer Between the Covers collection edited by Leila Kassir and Richard Espley, which emerges from a conference at Senate house Library back in 2018. The whole book can be read here and also includes work on Valerie Taylor's lesbian pulp novels and the government attacks on London queer bookshop Gay's the Word in the 1980s. On the Wieners front, a piece I wrote four years ago on Wieners and Dana (of "God love you Dana my love" fame) for an edited collection on Wieners' work called Utter Vulnerability might hopefully see the light of day in the not too distant future (for now it can be read at academia.edu); and there will likely be a couple of Wieners chapters in my current book project on queer poetry in Boston and San Francisco, focussing on the lesser-known parts of his career--his early work as editor with Measure magazine and in the context of the Boston 'Occult School', and--supplementing the Queer Between the Covers chapter--further details of his time in the orbit of Fag Rag and Charley Shively. Fag Rag and Gay Community News alumnus--and author of the excellent Culture Clash and Queer History of the United States--Michael Bronski has been super-helpful and generous in discussing this work, along with Seth, Raymond Foye, and all the others contributing to what seems--hopefully--to be a bit of a mini-Wieners revival. Not that he ever went away, but there's so much more to be said and discovered about this work. Michael and I did a long interview about his life in activism, scholarship, publishing, Fag Rag and the rest, back in December and are hoping to publish that at some point.

Over to the world of music--and honoured to have been asked to write the liner notes to the new Anthony Braxton boxset, Quartet (Standards) 2020, selected documentation of the band's European tour last year out from the Tri-Centric Foundation / New Braxton House on June 18th. The group's three-day residency at Cafe Oto--one of the last bits of live music, if not the last bit of live music I saw before the pandemic hit--was extraordinary (my write-up came out in Artforum here), and it was likewise great to grapple with the entirety of the set: 67 tracks in all, of standards familiar and obscure alike, with Alex Hawkins on piano, Neil Charles on bass and Stephen Davis on drums providing far more than merely a 'rhythm section'.

Some recent liner notes also out to a fascinating released by a large-group ensemble led by UK bassist, improviser, composer Dominic Lash, one of the first batch of physical releases from his Spoonhunt label (the bandcamp page also has some excellent digital recordings, including work with Christian Wolff, Nate Wooley, etc). Distinctions is a 40-minute recording for an ensemble called 'Consorts', working in particular with sustained tones and the relation between acoustic and electric sound: seems like it finds intriguing solutions to many of the problems of large ensemble improvisation (though the relation between composition and improvisation, as ever in Lash's work, can't be eaily parsed). The other CDs in the batch are equally worthwhile: the wholly-improvised Discernement offers one of the final recordings from the late John Russell, in a group with Lash, John Butcher and Mark Sanders; and Lash's quartet with Alex Ward (in guitarist guise), Ricardo Tejero and Javier Carmona on limulus showcases some of Lash's distinctive compositions, in and around (but never quite inhabiting) whatever we call 'jazz'. Get them here.

If Braxton's take on standards represents the latest stage in a decades-long engagement with jazz history in theory and practice, a different take on the music's relation to history emerges in a recent volume curated by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta, out from Rab-Rab Press. Free Jazz Communism collects a number of historical essays, interviews, source texts and polemics, focusing in particular on the performance by the Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students held in Helsinki in 1962. Though the event's been mentioned in a fair few studies of the music, it's rarely been examined in detail, and is an interesting flashpoint for questions concerning free jazz, Cold War politics, and the like.  Pierre Crépon and I reviewed the book at Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes Critiques en Improvisation.

As well as Larry Young, recent listening has involved heavy rotations of Hasaan Ibn Ali's 1965 Atlantic date, long thought lost, which has finally been rediscovered and released as Metaphysics, out on Omnivore Recordings. A quartet set, it was recorded a few months after the 'Legendary Hasaan' trio date with Max Roach, with Hasaan's then-protegee, a young Odean Pope on tenor. Hopefully I'll have more to say on this one elsewhere--suffice to add that the archival buzz is more than justified in this instance.

Finally, a poem from Local Apocalypse (published by Materials in 2020) is up at the 87 press, with thanks to Azad and Kashif: https://www.the87press.com/post/digital-poetics-2-1-unhide-when-true-david-grundy.

(Writing not on this blog listed/linked on Linktree and the 'Writing Elsewhere' page on the sidebar.)

“As life is to other themes”: Ian Heames’ Sonnets.

[Been neglecting this blog for a while: more to come soon, hopefully, on Ryan Dobran's Story One and on the first issue of Asphodel magazine. Stay tuned...]

[There are six books of Sonnets so far, all published by Face Press:
[1] June 2014 [red cover]
[2] October 2014 [navy blue cover]
[3] January 2015 [pink cover]
[4] February 2015 [grey cover]
[5] May 2015 [black cover]
[6] August 2015 [silver cover]
(also, ‘Seven Poems’, 2014).
The first book uses material by Jonty Tiplady (constituting roughly half the sequence), and a couple of lines from Tiplady appear in books 2 and 5. Given that all the pamphlets are simply titled ‘Sonnets’, I’ll refer to them by the colour of their covers in order to delineate between them – e.g. Black Sonnets, Red Sonnets, etc.]

Something like a veil is placed over the experiences in these poems; they are reports, or descriptions, of actions (“walking earlier tonight along the motorway / beside the science park”, Black Sonnets, 1), or observations, of emotional states: these often seen through a screen, whether that of the cinema to which the speaker goes to at night, alone, or of a computer game, an internet search, or the history of poetic reference itself – resonant figures such as the ocean, tropes of death, mortality and poetic immortality or afterlife, love poetry, loss, the heart. Cultural references to Lars Von Trier, dubstep, Villon, Keats and the like may seem to stand in for something they gesture towards, ciphers which could be mined for meaning but which also point to the provisionality with which their placement imbues them. Current and past history is figured through Versailles or 9/11, an atmosphere of industry or technology – the recurring power plant, the motorway, the computer game. The poems are above all about the cultivation of a precision of atmosphere, but not really as objectivism: what is there (the ocean, the power plant, the cultural artefact, even a particular feeling apparently easily named through conventional tropes) slides into something else, the levels are not clearly delineated; this often happens through puns, palindromes, and the like. Thus, in the first sonnet of the blue book, the cave in which the internet is “most weak” refers to broadband but also perhaps, as John Bloomberg-Rissman suggests in his recent review, to Plato’s cave: the shadows on the wall. Actors, puppets, shadows and ghosts, arranged by the poet with power and precision but also a self-effacing awareness or presentation in which that poet (as persona) seems not to be fully in control, doomed to obsessive repetition and tweaking, reaching for inadequate speculative or assertive descriptions of both grand geo-political events and the workings of love: climate change, the militarisation of the police, technology, warfare and the like.

The poems also conduct something that is not exactly a polemic or a sustained argument with trends in the poetry scenes of the last decade or so from which their poet has emerged, but which is, nonetheless, one of the ranges of reference or concern, as a kind of satire so diffuse as to remain fairly oblique: as, in the earlier ‘Gloss to Carriers’, “the white hot temples / Of Capitalism and Love / Its dismal optic carbine”, or, here: “We both write language-critical lyric poetry / without meaning. We both speak without meaning to.” (Red Sonnets, 9). In the latter instance, “language” could be both language itself – a lyric poetry that, though itself made in and of language, reaches for the familiar trope of a feeling exceeding the bounds or bonds of language that yet structure it, and allow it expression; or, in a specific context, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and its perceived depersonalisation, its removal of the bourgeois lyric subject for a more open mesh of discourse. The fact that this poetry, whatever it is, is “without meaning” reflects a familiar criticism of what gets called ‘innovative poetry’, though it’s somewhat modified by the following “meaning to”; poetry as containing meanings that might go beyond intention, if we read ‘meaning to’ back onto the initial ‘meaning’.

If, according to one reading of the above lines, this poetry rejects the apparently critical function of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing for a still-sceptical lyric address, such an address nonetheless does not come from a place of subjective stability of authority. The first sonnet in the first of the books contains the lines: “I think I am in danger / of becoming someone else.” The poems are often insistently first-person, but this first-person is ‘the poet’ or ‘the speaker’, (generally) doing believable things, preoccupied with familiar themes, characterized by a particular attitude towards experiences, yet with slippages – the use of found text, the wider registers of geopolitics, etc. The lines above sound like something from any kind of cheap melodrama, though they also, of course, by their placement, play on age-old poetic tropes of persona and identity. But in fact, how much in the poems is this actually a ‘danger’, the compromising of the integrity of the poet as a person? Rather, might this slippage between self-contained or coherent person or personality and the ranges of discourse they deploy be a central operating mechanism?

From the third sonnet in the same book: “You […] want to say / you are not really the sort of person who spends their time / alone at night, eating a lot of food and admiring the internet.” This is put in the second person, though it could equally refer to the speaker. It also claims that ‘you want to say this’, which implies that you haven’t already said it, and perhaps won’t, or can’t; that, consequently, you worry you really are this sort of person. In any case, you would only be ‘not really’ that sort of person – there would still be an element of that in you, and in what you do. From the fifth sonnet: “You (the entity receiving / the above)”, which parodies the idea of the idealized love object, the insistently real, though distant person, or, indeed, the ‘common reader’. The addressee becomes merely an ‘entity’, perhaps not even human, though ‘receiving’ implies that a message has been ‘sent’, presumably with the intention of transmission and communication (even as the following parodically suggests an extreme solipsism – “Nothing is as interpersonal as being alone” (Black Sonnets, 5).

The poems, then, frequently work on address – ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘I’, but the object of address (often, as in lyric, apparently a love object) is infrequently specified, and might be just as often a fantasy, a celebrity – “My love for you is like everything I said to Jena / Malone in private” (Red Sonnets, 5), “Natalie” who has “dark eyes” in ‘AI in Daylight’ (preceded by the line “Ilium is toast”). These celebrities function like the idealized mythological or literary figures that ‘Ilium’ suggests: as muses, as convenient (dis)placements into poetic history that both allow and conceal the emotional weight with which they are freighted. (Red Sonnets, 7: “All of us / build inhabited worlds around impossible objects.”)

Nonetheless, the gendering of the sonnets is in general less problematic than it has been in some of Heames’ previous work, where the association of an unnamed female figure with a fetishized technological apparatus, as well as a mendacious militarized force (the latter association perhaps deriving principally from Prynne’s ‘Her Weasels Wild Returning’), was a recurring theme. Here, though, as we’ve noted, there is something of this (Jena Malone), the love object tends not to be specifically named or gendered, and we even find lines which (perhaps) suggest some sort of utopian escape from gendered norms and gendering, even as they also suggest the highly individualized, competitive and, again, often militarized world of computer games which again threads its way through the work: “In my dreamworld, where genius / is genderblind” (Black Sonnets, 3).

In this regard, the love poem might also suggest, not just a two-way or otherwise intimate relationship, but games of strategy and alliance, whether in computer games or political systems: from ‘Seven Poems’, “like a love poem / to the other side / this is to toy with.” Indeed, the same is true of enmity and hatred (though Heames doesn’t really seem interested in hatred as an emotion). The poem might name ‘enemies’ or ‘opponents’, who are not definable political entities (as they might be in the contemporary work of Sean Bonney, Lisa Jeschke & Lucy Beynon, or Verity Spott, however much the formulations of such attacks challenge the fostering of violent feelings or strategies onto a particular person, rather than to the system they represent and embody) or those who have wronged the poet (as they might be in Villon), but, are, rather unseen players on an internet game: “You have opponents on the internet you don’t see. / You can’t see the joy on their faces / driven off by flame.” (Blue Sonnets, 7).

Politics thus uneasily meshes with love and hate, displaced as a possible horizon of activity from the poet, observed through the sceptically-viewed frames of internet and television reportage. Thus, lines from the fourth sonnet in the black book – “Freeing us / to protest as holograms” – refer to the hologram protest devised to circumvent and draw attention to legal clampdowns on public protest in Spain earlier this year. The way it occurs in Heames’ poem is not, however, as political possibility, but another distancing effect in which protest can only occur through technological displacement, as a kind of stand-in for the movement of bodies on the ground. Protest or mass movement is hinted at in the poems, but what generally appears is the image of the apparatus of its repression – helicopters, the White House, the police, and so on. “Suddenly the poems were full / of riots shields and a cool intelligence” (Red Sonnets, 4).

The poems sometimes seem to throw up their hands altogether, in relation to the possibility of love, hate, politics, knowledge, of holding on to and examining any object: “no trace anywhere / except / lost it now” (‘Seven Poems’). Indeed, one might ask if these are poems characterized by a melancholy acceptance, a desire to find beautiful though self-critical affect within a horizon of defeat, loss, an inability to totalize or systematize, merely to play with the pieces of the puzzle that can never be wholly defined: a derangement that is sensual, and with the affect of rationality, but more often felt as arrangement (‘Arrangements’ was the initial title of an earlier project reworking some poems by Jonty Tiplady). The nearest definition to what ‘we all’ are is “some general ferocious longing” (Blue Sonnets, 3).

Certainly, one of Heames’ primary interests here is how particular systems or ranges of affect – often, computer games, cinema (“like snow in Von Trier”), certain forms of music (“melodic dubstep”) – function, what it is like to inhabit their worlds, which mesh with the real world of history, contemporary reference, walking around, dreaming, looking at things, deciding whether or not to speak. A frequent feature is the use of found language (“I like this Trebuchet” (‘Array One’), “Someone flew / a drone through Chernobyl and the result is haunting” (Pink Sonnets, 10)) for its particular affect and how that affect can be changed by displacement and re-placement within the poem. Heames I think values this language for its affective qualities, rather than (or as well as) using it to make some sort of culture-industry critique – hence his interest in the work of Will Stuart, its use of pop songs, not for ironic reasons, but as markers which are re-inscribed, away from their familiarity, into the context of an avant-garde theatre piece where they can be revived as actually containing particular hopes and expressions (individual responses) of how to cope with the world. (In a paper on Stuart’s work given a few years ago [http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-long-is-this-theatre-of-will-stuart.html], Heames argued that Stuart’s deployment of JLS’ ‘One Shot’ might cause us to question what ‘sympathy’ we could have the range of different feelings the song might prompt in individual listeners, feelings that cannot be disentangled from the song’s forms (or, indeed, their material frames of production), leading to something like a feedback loop of sincerity and depth.) In the Sonnets, the poet is somewhat distanced from these forms, or they are distanced in the poem, considered as textual objects but not for a laboratory examination, a sociological survey, a cultural critique, etc; they are allowed their own integrity. Such forms might often be ameliorative, might mesh with economic set-ups that discourage dissent, but for Heames, they are not entirely conformist, are not merely methods of coping with a politically-flattening affect or effect.



‘Seven Poems’, from 2014, is not part of the Sonnets sequence, but handily encapsulates many of its concerns. Here, we find political references which, though oblique, are obviously related to contemporary situations – in this case, the militarisation of the police in America, and, to a lesser extent, the UK (Boris Johnson’s purchase of water cannon) – “war gear flows to police departments / you still heart”. “Heart” here functions perhaps as verb, via the literalisation of the facebook emoji in which ‘love’ is replaced by an icon of a heart, and subsequently translated into ‘hearting’ something (where ‘love’ tends to means something more like ‘like’) – though the line breaks which surround the phrase make its object unclear (perhaps the police departments of the previous line). The fact that ‘you still heart’ – that you have a heart, are still capable of love – might thus be placed against the fact of militarized police forces (the book’s original title was ‘Stuffed Toys in Patrol Cars’), yet it might also suggest that you still love the police (or the following “team that wins”) despite evidence as to the fact of their mendacity. Or heart might again be a noun – “you still heart” – suggesting death, the stopped heart (the poem opens with an injured ‘tsar’ lying in “the palace of human purpose / of the human heart”). Hearts recur in this sequence – the pun on “widely red [read]” in the first poem, in which a heart that can be ‘re[a]d’ by a single person only functions as tool of intimacy, or the putting of lips on the heart in the second, a visceral image of love, or of giving voice to the heart’s most intimate concern, followed by a line from Wieners’ ‘Supplication’ – “take this curse off of early death” – as if giving expression in this way might, as Wieners supplicates poetry to do, provide the poet with all they lack in life.

From the first sonnet of the blue book: “poetry that we experience as heartache.” Heames’ interest in a poet like Wieners, who makes enormous claims for poetry saving his life, with poetry as that which filters yet might also exacerbate experience almost too painful to be lived – homophobic and class-based persecution, institutionalisation in mental hospitals, the living through of a paranoia that has very real causes in police violence and the like – is one that gives credence to, or at least admires in some sense that amping-up of emotional effect (a result very much of lived experience, and patently not false). However, the sonnets never do this themselves without deploying some sort of diversionary strategy, an ironic deflating move which might be characterized as self-protective. Such self-protection might arguably both allow, or enable, the flow of these sonnets, in books after book, and limit what they can do. At the same time, the sonnets rely on the particular affective register of almost haiku-like lines which often centre on familiar tropes associated with emotion, as we might find in Wieners – the heart, love, loss, weeping – which chart what happens when individual or shared self-protection falls away, yet which, framed as a retrospective story, almost akin to the opening structure of a fairy-tale, still maintain some measure of distance which Wieners generally and painfully avoids. “Once when we were entering a universe we were yet to love, / our eyes welled, tender from the freak event of being open”. (Silver Sonnets, 2) Poetry itself can replace the person who writes it: “Some poems want flesh / to replace them, / mine just want somebody to come round / to the accident of their being. / Poetry begins to hurt.” (Silver Sonnets, 3) The poems are both fascinated by and sceptical of “taking your own inner life seriously”, and hence that poem, the third sonnet, immediately moves on to computer games, a sphere of displacement for an inner life – “some people just want to hate god and collect gemstones.” The process of desired replacement attributed to “some poems” (rather than, as one might expect, ‘some people’) allows a dance between poem and person which relies both on craft and ‘accident’. Poetry itself ‘hurts’ as if wounded, but ‘hurts’ as a verb could also be active – that it is poetry itself that is hurting someone, something – perhaps the reader, or the poet themselves.



Coming now to the lines from which I’ve taken my title, from the first sonnet in the blue book: “Text is to whole conduct / as life is to other themes. Love that / corrects nothing.” This seems as good a set of lines as any to take as a possible dictum for the poems’ method or concern, their scepticism. Text – the poem – relates to ‘whole conduct’ – an ethics? – as life does to other ‘themes’ – everything reduced to ‘themes’, and again folding back to text. The ‘love’ the poem might express ‘corrects nothing’; poetry does not have an educative or ameliorative function. (See, of course, Auden and Spicer.) This seems to be amended or expanded in the silver sonnets book, the latest of the six so far, with the fifth sonnet, which concludes: “Poetry is just / a beautiful simple way / of being wrong.” How are we to take this? At face value, as something of a guiding principle; or as ironic and ridiculous; or as some measure of both? The tone, as it is throughout, is intentionally hard to place and judge.

In this regard, the fourth of the pink sonnets has: “Trying to suggest tone / without claiming either / there is truth, but there is much more, / or there is healing pain”. The syntax is pretty knotty here, but we could parse the alternatives as being the fact of there being truth, but also ‘much more’, or the existence of ‘healing pain’ – in which healing could either function as an adjective in a paradoxical construction where the experience of pain heals, or a verb in which pain is healed. In either case, it’s unclear how exactly the two are contradictory. The sentence comes across, again, as a meta-commentary on the poems’ own processes and concerns. Tone is suggested, but not inhabited – indeed, such cautiousness and self-reflexivity is itself a tonal move.

Such folding-in in happens a lot, and not just in terms of tone – rewriting a history of language and poetry as it relates to the world, in counter-intuitive and sometimes deliberately provocative ways: “Language arose, / at least in part, / as a response / to an aesthetic / modernism.” (Silver Sonnets, 5) What might be a self-confessed weakness in poetry – its wrongness and inability to correct anything – is also, potentially, for the poet of these poems at least, a strength. From the first sonnets book: “At least you can say that / in poetry you are less sure”. Poetry here is a necessary ground or sanctuary for uncertainty (tying in with the desire “not to breathe / my thesis over anyone” (see below), ‘beautiful’ and ‘simple’. The line-break here inflects the meaning: another way of reading the lines might be, “at least you can say that [somewhere else, but] in poetry you are less sure”, which perhaps amounts to the same thing – poetry, again, as a space of greater uncertainty, whre the only thing you can say is that you are ‘less sure’ about what you’re saying. Poetry, then, offers, not scientific clarity, but a space to examine contradiction, complication, complexities of feeling.

Yet at the same time, it might dictate exactly what those feelings are. “Some of the things said dictated / what you could love” (Black Sonnets, 9). Language modifies the object onto which various feelings are put – which could be, as we noted earlier, an object deliberately chosen for its abstraction or spectacular / removed nature: a celebrity, a historical muse, a poet whose surname stands for what they have said in their poems rather than the person Keats or Villon themselves. Rather than allowing the poet to find out and work through what it is possible to love, the poem has set up the field of what can be done in real life, and in that sense functioned as an imposition, rather than allowing a mode of access to knowledge – whether self-knowledge or knowledge of others and the world (the two of course connected). This statement of apparent doubt is itself modified by comic deflation, in a phrase with the metrical set-up of a well-turned out poetic line but one whose reference is the apparently banal and inappropriate one of a game of football: “with no keeper to round” (cf. the more obviously comic “I will buy he in FIFA”, or “Injuries have been a plague all season”). ‘Keeper’ could of course have the double sense of ‘a keeper’ – a term used to describe someone with whom a romantic relationship could and should be sustained – in which case ‘round’ becomes hard to read: whether to ‘go round’ (the sense it has if we read the phrase as being about football), or, perhaps to ‘shape’. Because this follows on from the lines about what one can (and by implication, cannot) love, this suggests an absence. What has been said has shut off the possibility of the ‘keeper’, of a sustained relation, and the poet is left with the shifting field of objects of attention onto which they fix their attention with a self-critical eye, even as this range of objects often works on the logic of a kind of obsessive repetition and recurrence (though not usually transformation). When transformation or expansion does occur, it deliberately overreaches itself: “my love for you […] is a way of life / and has allowed oceans” (Pink Sonnets, 8); “breathing in / the polis of a billion years” (Pink Sonnets, 5) (the pun, or at least the sonic prompt here would seem to be on polis and pollen).

Similarly, the tenth and final sonnet of the grey book begins: “So, / if I ever die, / I will write you / such a decent poem / that the plant melts / and becomes / heart-shaped. / I will call it Anglophone / poetic practice / as a way of feeling”. The absurdity of “If I ever die” (cf. “I’m not going to die” (Red Sonnets, 9)) is further destabilized by substituting the italicized acadamese of “Anglophone / poetic practice / as a way of feeling” for ‘poetry as a way of feeling’. The abstraction of ‘poetry’, as well as the claims so often made in its name (as they are, albeit sceptically, throughout these sonnets), is changed into something more like a research or conference paper proposal (or, indeed, a doctor’s practice, a healing possibility – cf. “or there is healing pain” (Pink Sonnets, 4)). One might expect ‘way of life’ here, certainly implied as a contrast to death: in any case, the lines suggest that feelings denied or shut off to one ‘IRL’ are allowed to blossom within the poem (cf. “Simplification is at the heart of real life” (Red Sonnets, 4). Poetry contains a transformative aspiration – the melting of the power plant into a heart shape, a kind of parody of swords into plougshares or something of the sort – but one that also risks cultivating the notion of a somewhat abstracted ‘feeling’ and elevating it to a poetic pinnacle where it is perfected and removed from life, more so than being generated by or responding to life.

Something like the converse of this, though, occurs in the fourth sonnet of the silver book, where the poet writes: “I don’t want to breathe / my thesis over anyone”. Thesis, in its Greek etymology, relates to ‘putting’ or ‘placing’: so that while the poems are insistently concerned with placing and (re-)arranging various new or recurrent tropes and (often vaguely-delineated) speakers and addressees, they do so, not from an intended position of power or manipulation, but in order to leave a certain openness to the reader with whom they make their contract, leaving their images or the particular intonation of line-broken phrases open for interpretation. The poems in general perform few of the radical deformations of syntax often associated with avant-garde poetry: they are often constructed through propositional, grammatically-coherent statements – theses, if you like. It’s the links between these and the absence of an overarching narrative – one exacerbated by the constant hints at and promises of narrative, which are generally borrowed as fragments from other, familiar storylines, whether the news reporting of 9/11, global warming, or the presence or absence of the lover – that cause complications, that aim to make the process of reading a pleasurably elusive task. For the speaker not to breathe their thesis means for them to apparently abdicate, and certainly to distrust, their own position as someone with something of worth to say, because they are a poet, or because the thing is in a poem; not as a political or utopian model of democracy, consensus, etc, but as a working-through and setting-up of various constraints.

A thesis has to be proved against counter-attack, and must thus set itself out strongly. One could propose that refusing this perhaps closes off the possibility of counter-argument, that the poet’s apparent self-removal might thus also seem like an evasion. But we should also understand the term in relation to the fact that Heames is currently working on his own Ph.D thesis – the poem must not become merely an illustration of something for academic point-scoring, must be its own, independent entity. Finally, thesis, in its original, prosodic sense, means the stressed syllable in poetry or music, by which one sets down the foot or lowers the hand in beating time; the fact that the syllable is stressed connects to the strength of assertive proposition that the word has more generally come to signify. The poet’s breathing of a thesis is thus part of a sounding of the poem too, but poetic stress and stress of argument aren’t meant to batter the reader over the head with skill or virtuosity: if the analogy is to be musical, we could take Satie (that combination of glacial, stately movement and surface and some sort of melancholic emotional pull) as opposed to, let’s say, the strenuous bombast of certain variants of nineteenth-century Romanticism.

The poems, then, aren’t meant to be ‘decoded’ – “The secret impresses no one” (Blue Sonnets, 3) – even as they also aren’t meant to be clear, propositional statements of position (theses) – or just ‘atmospheres’ “without meaning.” Instead, they frequently dwell in a “dreamworld”: an alternative region which, in the history of poetry, has, of course, often functioned as a space to make veiled political critique, as well as to speculate on the origins of poetic inspiration and the tasks of the poet. Without the cosmological frame available to Chaucer or Langland, though, dreams must appear slightly differently; there’s less stability. Thus, it’s hardly comforting that it can sometimes feel as if the speaker is wandering through a perpetual waking dream. From the tenth sonnet of the silver book: “I had dream / things to do”. I’ve mentioned activity, and here dreams themselves become active, a list of tasks to be accomplished. In certain religious or mystical traditions, the thinker deliberately dreams in order to find the solution to a problem, to access a higher realm of knowledge; psycho-analysis, meanwhile, might suggest the dream as a means of finding self-knowledge, albeit one which is socially shaped, and has social consequences – and one which is, moreover, not self-discoverable, but must be expounded, admittedly through one’s own talking, to the analyst as a necessary added presence. Surrealism’s use of dreams for social critique would be an obvious frame of reference for modernist poetry, but that particular strain doesn’t really seem to be part of the tradition Heames is working within. In the tenth sonnet of the red book, “knowledge is itself” described as a “collection of strange dreams / used to describe feeling”. One might expect the formulation to be reversed, at least if the poem were operating according to a scientific model by which dreams and feelings (and, by extension, the sphere of the aesthetic) are often left alone because not discoverable by evidence-based methodologies. But this is a poem, and, while it’s interested in problems of knowledge, verifiable data, and feeling, it appears to trust neither empiricism nor a reliance on the strength of emotional feeling rhetorically pulled off to make the poem ‘work’, to be persuasive or moving. In that sense, the sonnets move across the two halves of the statement – the one thing used to describe the other thing, whether dreams or feelings or knowledge – as their operating territory; themselves, probably quite deliberately, coming across as ‘strange dreams’ in which feelings and knowledge (whether bits of found language, quasi-argumentative statements, assertions, etc) are certainly invoked, if not always described in detail.

This might even have a utopian dimension, if we consider lines from the third sonnet of the blue book: “That the dead obsess / in their own fractal proto-socialist dream time / is their own / terrain.” (Blue Sonnets, 3) Yet there seems to be a negative or critical inflection here – the dead are obsessive, their socialism is only a ‘proto-socialism’, more akin to fractals’ infinite reproduction of the same forms on various scales than to a complex social arrangement concerned with a more just society, and it is their business whether or not they obsess, not ours. Indeed, immediately following is the sentence “Come to grief”, which might suggest what has happened to the dead, whether or not through their obsession; or, perhaps more likely, allowing us to retrospectively re-read ‘obsess’, not as the action of the dead over an unspecified concern, but as your or my own obsession over the dead, placed in a passive construction in which that obsession is framed as if performed by the dead. In that sense, ‘come to grief’ could refer to the speaker or addressee’s fate if they become too concerned with the ‘dream-time’ of the dead, or to what happens to the dead in ‘their own terrain’; or a means of avoiding obsession through the working-through of mourning, in which obsessing over the obsessive dead might finally be moved on from (even as such obsession is so often the work of poetry).



In an (unpublished) introduction to a reading Heames gave in Cambridge late last year, Lisa Jeschke describes his work as containing images “which make you laugh on the inside, but, because the image is so forcefully contained, restricts your ability to laugh on the outside, or at least restricts your ability to laugh convulsively on the outside.” I wonder about laughter here – that perhaps part of the atmosphere of these poems, what I’ve called their veiling, or screening, or filtration, has to do with presenting material with the structure or quality of a joke (“I will buy he in Fifa”, “O mate I do”) but without allowing one to laugh, leaving one uncertain, not only as to the intended effect, but to what exactly this means for the experience of the poem. This forceful containment could be, as Jeschke believes it to be, a mode of useful rigour, a refusal of the easy punch-line, though laughter (even ‘convulsive’, ‘outside’ laughter) itself – as much as it can reinforce cruelty, community self-definition by exclusion or in-group homo-social smugness, ‘getting it’, etc – is not always a bad thing. Jeschke goes on to use the phrase “openly repressed”, which is nice – not so much because it suggests the neat argument it would be easy to make, where repression in the poem reflects repression in social, economic (or, predominantly for Heames) affective relations, but because it captures something of the poems’ tonal qualities, their simultaneous ease and uneasiness with that ease. For Jeschke, Heames’ poems “do not use media and games jargon in relation to the war on terrorism or the financial crisis as a declaration of something like the world-as-simulacrum, but, on the contrary, as a declaration of the fully material relation between language and the real world.” This insistence on formal containment – or games, veilings, filtration, repression, etc – puts “pressure” both ways, between poem and “outside world”, so that what appears to be “formal perfection” actually turns out to be “the representation of perfection”, one which “ultimately presents an image of absolute error and mistake: ‘just when I thought / I was perfect / I find this big weird mistake.’” So, once again, Jeschke here argues, not that the poetry reflects the unreal perfection-repression of the world as constituted by global capitalism, but that its containment as textual object –as poem – moves in and out of that world, taking bits with it.

This might relate, though it seems a little different in emphasis, to what Heames himself writes in a 2010 review of another sonnets project, that of Geraldine Monk: “words will have and go their own way.” We could parse this as something like the social unconscious of language, we could bring in Voloshinov; words, though they seem to act in transcendent fashion – or as other organisms, other life-forms we can maybe set in motion but can’t quite control, that, in fact, control us – are also socially determined, but can be worked through and with. That might not sit quite right, with either that statement, or the poems, but no matter. More work can be done on that later.

OK. So I’d still venture that there may be limits to these poems. There is so much one could write about them, and they encourage this. The methods Heames has found to generate and arrange material seem potentially inexhaustible – the sonnets could just go on forever within their discrete units, offering a wealth of material for close-reading and for what I earlier described as the cultivation of atmosphere. Both formally and in terms of statement, there’s a thoroughly built-in self-critique and sceptical handling of material. For instance, in terms of the sonnet as medium, there’s much play with intensely varied line lengths. The sonnets don’t appear to follow a discernible rule controlling this, though, like much of Heames’ poetry, there does seem to be some sort of private compositional system governing them, which is there more for the purposes of the writer than the reader – in a similar fashion to what Jeschke half-seriously calls the “pedantically numbered” system of ‘AI in Daylight’ (or indeed, ‘Array One’ and ‘To’, the other books which, with ‘AI’, combine to form the sequence Arrays). Yet this potentially limitless generation and questioning of material perhaps risks being unable to fully trouble its own premises. The open-ended gestures, in which the poet refuses to “breathe [their] own thesis on anyone”, also mean that argument itself remains diffuse, poetry reduced to being merely a “beautiful simple way / of being wrong.” Is this enough? The poems are certainly accomplished, skilful. And form is never more than extension of content, etc – but, beyond accomplishments of form, I guess what I’m gesturing towards is the sense that poetry might importantly allow something between, or elsewhere to these particular poems’ focus. Thus, on the one hand, the near-obsessive concern with the filtrations of what constitutes ‘daily life’ (in certain cases, for certain subjects with certain horizons of concern and activity – “the sort of person who spends their time / alone at night, eating a lot of food and admiring the internet”); certain cultural practices or references; particular affects of alienation; the academic and vocational interest in poetry. And on the other, a different kind of view of the polis and of poesis, where – and here I’m borrowing phrasing from the introduction to Robert Duncan’s Bending the Bow, itself borrowed from Olson, which has recently been helping me to frame the work of a very different poet, David Brazil – the “boundary” between poem and world, or town, or ocean, or power plant, or computer game, or whatever, sits slightly differently. Life as more than just another ‘theme’. In any case, the question I just asked, about whether ‘this’ is ‘enough’, is perhaps absurd – the demands placed upon poetry, and addressed in these poems themselves, cannot be singular, and the critical move of enlisting the textual object under examination for a particular aesthetic-political project has its pitfalls. I guess what I’m trying to get at is how I personally respond to the sonnets, what use I feel I can make of them – even if that doesn’t appear all too clear itself in this review. Needless to say, this will differ from reader to reader.