SCHERZOS BENJYOSOS is a set of four poems, scherzos in prosimetrical blocks, a comical, wild, and delirious sifting through the carnage of the financial crash, the dreamscapes of capitalist infancy, histories of sadism and persecution, the fetish bars of canonical literature, and the psychoanalysis of grass. The book also includes "Sinking Feeling," Sutherland's long poem from 2017, described by J. H. Prynne as "breathtakingly lovely, and desperate, racked with desire to become truthful love."
First, I will simply state that – of all the writing I’ve read in the last five years – Keston Sutherland’s seems to me the most likely to be seen, by the future, by Posterity, as Literature. Because, and this is far more important, right at this moment it seems, with the greatest amount of energy, to create the possibility of possibilities. Because, as I asked you to glance ahead to the point we’ve just reached, it is non-illustrational, because it pushes language to try to say what it hasn’t said before. And it does this more than anything by Haruki Murakami or any Show Don’t Tell Ephiphany story. And one of the strongest reasons I believe this is because, in a good way, it seems unreasonable and incoherent. It puts me, as a reader, in a cloud of unknowing – because my capacity for right judgement has been called into question. - Toby Litt
Keston Sutherland, a poet among the forefront of Britain’s avant-garde, is the author of the relentless and virtuosic Scherzos Benjyosos, his first collection of new poems since Whither Russia (2017) and The Odes to TL61P (2013). Any new work of his is greeted with high interest by many of us in the United States, not least because it comes out of a different trajectory than the experimental poetry being written here. In time perhaps this gap will be further bridged. Certainly there is much for poets to gain from engaging with this unique and unusual work. Those wanting to hear the latest sounds, in a complex music by turns nightmarish and rhapsodic, won’t want to miss it. - Robert Crawford
Robert Crawford
This new book is exceptional in its propulsive energies and pulsating music, as well as its combination of stylistic variation and imaginative invention. Often there is the sense of a dreamscape, an internal symbolic world, and of images bubbling up into a void, which is the stage of the mind. The book is comprised of two long poems, “Sinking Feeling” and the title poem, “Scherzos Benjyosos.” What can you tell us about the process of writing these poems?
Keston Sutherland
I’m pleased that the book’s music made an impression on you. Poetry is too often described by some jumpy synopsis of whatever story it’s meant to be telling about itself. Short-cuts past the obscurity of sensation. It’s unusual to start with the music. But I’m glad you do, because that’s where a lot of the work of this writing is, or anyhow I hope so. Before anything else it’s an attempt to find new sounds. For me, that’s where a new work has to begin: with the hardest thing, to make an unheard sound. John Milton said his new sound was for judicious ears; mine is for maladapted, paranoid ears. There’s a letter by Friedrich Hölderlin in which he tries to describe to his friend Christian Ludwig Neuffer his vexation as a poet, how difficult it is to get it right and true, and he talks about the tension between what he calls the “Hauptton” or “fundamental tone” and the “variously patterned tones” closer to the surface. I can never believe I have really started a new poem unless I think I can hear some new tension like that in the sound of it. That’s where it starts, with the problem of the sensation of truth, how to feel it, how it is when it can’t yet be felt, and how it stops being felt.
But you ask about process. Besides just beating my head against silence and solitude until the stuffing poured out, I tried to find ways through language into various states of immersion: immersion in anxiety, fear, regret, desire, hope. Often this meant cutting away at a passage of writing repeatedly, for nights or even years on end, until the whole thing was a knot of scar tissue and there was nothing left to open up or find; and then if I was lucky, right at the point of giving up and just amputating the whole thing, some new sound would ring out, and I’d keep that: a few words, normally. It also meant—and this is a problem that the book confronts directly and even ventures to narrativize—sounding out by a kind of echolocation the limits of whatever refuge or retreat for thought and sensation I was stuck in at the time, some sanctuary for paralyzed life where I was hiding out without knowing it, mutely screaming about how I couldn’t get out. There are probably lots of places like that where I am still stuck, but the book was, among other things, meant to be a sort of shoehorn for flipping me out. You mention dreams. The book is in some ways dreamlike or even dreamy, but if the comparison isn’t too incredible I would say it’s not a straightforward dreamy elsewhere, not an idyll or nightmare, but somewhere like the worlds in Franz Kafka’s stories, a dislocated reality structurally adjusted by a comically inexorable logic. It’s also like Kafka in that it’s a comedy that takes a long time to laugh at.
RC
Kafka is a helpful touchstone for this work, as is Samuel Beckett, whose fiction you’ve previously discussed. The use of narrative in this book, which is mostly written in prose, is very interesting. A narrative may progress somewhat linearly, or it may be punctured by a whirlwind of images and considerations. Also, many of these narratives make evident use of “fictional” or invented scenarios. What role does narrative play in these poems, and how important is it for the reader to follow the narrative? How would you characterize the affinities and contrasts of this work in relation to experimental fiction?
KS
I don’t read or haven’t yet read experimental fiction, unless that category can be stretched to include economics research, policy briefs, and the weekly roundup of good news from senior management. If you mean experiments in contemporary novels, I haven’t got to them yet; there’s too much old stuff I’m anxious to get through first. I find it more nutritious, not to say emetical, to my poetic imagination to read Thomas Hoccleve, Heinrich Heine, or John Donne. Scherzos does look like prose, mostly, and maybe it really is. But I don’t think so. I’d say it’s at best prosimetrical but with an oblique or delusive prosaic tendency. I’ve tried a few times to think out loud about what kind of writing this is, this text clamped between hard margins, as if the outer limits had to be defined half at random by the width of a tunnel or pillar. I think you were there one of the times I had a go at this, at New York University back in 2015. At that talk I called poems that get crammed or crushed into this sort of semblance of prose, or dissemblance, “blocks.” The scherzos are partly blocks in some new variation on the sense I tried to develop then. But all the poems I have made in block form do something different with the block; they are all blocked, blocked in and out, differently. The scherzos work over a lot of experience and in particular a lot of pain that was until now blocked out of my head, or rather, it couldn’t be heard there with a clarity that I believed in or could trust or care about. That’s something that happens in these poems that I think has not happened in the same way in anything else I have written. They end up making things clear.
But I’m conscious as I say this that it’s liable to create a false impression. The clarity of the book isn’t easy, or easygoing, not at all. The clarity it ultimately finds a way out into, the clarity of the fourth scherzo, does feel, to me, like a rare moment in what is otherwise a madly congested and contorted book: really, I think at points a book that is, or that has gone, mad; and most of the narrative, if we do a basic count by number of words, is obscenely disjointed. A “whirlwind of images” would be putting it very politely indeed.
RC
The fancifully idiosyncratic title Scherzos Benjyosos, which might be paraphrased as “Songs of Benjy,” introduces the title character. First seen as a boy celebrating his birthday, Benjy quickly comes under threat, as the speaker divulges a plan to lead him into a trap. Could this be dramatizing the dangers that face anyone in growing up, as a corrupt world greets the vulnerable? How would you describe the relationship between Benjy and the speaker and the way the themes raised here fit within the poem as a whole?
KS
I’ll have to demur at this description. The title can’t, I think, be paraphrased like that: the scherzo is not a song, and benjyosos is not a genitive, but a musical direction, like arioso or dolcissimo. The earliest scherzi I know, Claudio Monteverdi’s Scherzi Musicali a tre voci (1607), are indeed works for voices that were and are sung, but they’re not songs, exactly. The question where Benjy is first seen is not easy to decide, anyhow not for me. Following a preliminary request not to be tortured until the end of life, the third section of the first scherzo proceeds to a patient explanation that there needs to exist a “polymorphously ordinary” corner, one that “you once hid,” and that this “has to become a name.” The poem then busies itself with determining what this name should be, why and how it should be accepted, etc. Fortunately one of the options is “Ben.” Benjy is then caught evacuating his phospholipids in scherzo 2, among other trespasses. His persecution is in full swing by the time we get to the start of scherzo 3 and the happy announcement that today is his birthday. I don’t want to say too much about the birthday party, in preparation for which Benjy is instructed to barge through a wall of presents and fly out the window into a bush of pampas grass, but I will say, because it’s a pleasure to talk about it a bit, that like—again I’ll have to ask you to forgive the farfetchedness of the comparison: deep breath—Dante’s Vita Nuova, this is a book that switches between prose and verse and is about the birth of a life and the power of death to abruptly determine what that life means and is for.
The scherzos are prematurely elegiacal or, rather, propaedeutics to future mourning. They are also poems about class and about poverty. Benjy later shows up as a zero hours delivery driver in an automated message confirming that your order has just been picked up—this among loads of other disfigured visions and avatars. The poems are about the torture of poverty, in childhood especially, and the crazy, violent fantasies of escape that people always have and sometimes act on when they’re paralyzed in states of deprivation. The meaning of fantasy and projection is quite different when you are poor from what it is when you have money and freedom.
One last demurral. I have never much liked the fallacy that poems have “speakers.” I think it tends to work as a surreptitious naturalization of poetic language, which ought first of all to be felt in all its force as basically not in the mouth. There is plenty of orality in the scherzos, lots of it sadistic. But I can’t find a speaker. In some passages the language does briefly get a phantom speaking part, but I couldn’t tell you anything useful about the casting decision or what is on the other end.- Robert Crawford
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/paranoid-ears-keston-sutherland-interviewed/
Keston Sutherland, Whither Russia, Barque
Press, 2017.
Contains terminal drafts of the poems Sinking Feeling and Instincts on Trump University plus scrupulously deviant literal paraphrases of poems by the dead individuals Verlaine, Goethe, Gautier, Tasso, Toulet, Heine and Hölderlin.
“That it has come to this is your fault, you who know how to read this.”
So the reader of British poet Keston Sutherland’s eighteenth collection of poems, Whither Russia, is reminded at the end of “Instincts on Trump University,” a lengthy prose poem which, along with “Sinking Feeling,” bookends a page-number-less chapbook of translations. While hardly the only poem in the book to be the site of political commentary (one can hardly ignore the suggestive nature of the title Whither Russia), “Instincts” is the one to most formally resemble a political declamation. The accusation, which comes near its end, that “this is your fault,” compels a rereading of the entire collection, as the shifting “you” of the piece moves away from Trump and seems to stand still for a moment, fixing its gaze on a reader who has quite possibly positioned themself as a distant, intellectualizing observer of the recurring violence and injustice appearing throughout the book.
This gesture toward re-positioning and accountability is in keeping with the opening dreamscape of “Sinking Feeling,” with its constant return to what Sutherland at one point describes as the “Body intimated.” The body of the speaker intimates the violence around it, which in turn makes intimacy impossible:
The body was distraught and wanted to say why this was so but also it was trying to avoid talking about it in the way that the drowned do, as though it could only ever be tiresome and obnoxious to be dragged into a dialogue that might risk disturbing a surface of emotion always only just now at last ironed flat and placated like a baby who is a nightmare to get to sleep, and then not only because there were other people or bodies representing other people that narrowed in the usual way to an anonymous background to our potential but obstructed intimacy, lying around on the floor and fucking about distractingly in the background.
“Sinking Feeling,” appropriately, plunges into depths where boundaries are constantly in flux, where “[t]he locution Floor lockout” is “ thought over by the open border of the teller station in undrying acrylics nobody is denying is not real” and “memory lubricates oblivion.” In an ecstatic reaching toward an uncrossable boundary, and through the appropriately cross-genre form of lyric essay/prose poem, Sutherland carves out a liminal space where bodies, selves, and pronouns are fluid. A depersonalized violence is “rammed, like unknown faces” into the body of the speaker, who seeks a way of understanding the self’s position within this broken web of connection:
I broke we but, happy torn out of this gap in the stop throat’s head put on updated defamiliarization techniques to allow for, investigating new ways of navigating an increasingly commodified infosphere.
The “we” may be broken, but in spite of this fixation on the chaos and alienation inherent in our times, Whither Russia is not without humor. Sutherland’s translations, though strikingly fidelitous for a more experimental text, make room for ironies that avoid being excessively didactic by undercutting the dignity of their source texts, works by Verlaine, Goethe, and Hölderlin, among others. In particular, “Gautier’s ‘Buchers et Tombeaux’” re-contextualizes a Romantic pagan past within a world of injustice, greed, and sexual predation:
The monster in resplendent flesh
Disguised its unapproved real soul,
Innocent genitals still fresh
Went straight for every legal hole.
These moments often subvert the almost comically precise iambic tetrameter, a move which Sutherland makes a meta-gesture toward with the lines, “This voice imprints erected stone / With syllables that disappear.” Sutherland “updates” Gautier, in a sense, for a new set of cultural crises, with references to “Old Trump” who “denudes the NEA, / Citing the miscreant Piss Christ” and “The liberal MFA” which “makes rhyme / Counterrevolutionary.” Sutherland’s translations do not all feature this level of insertion of contemporary concerns; at times the liberties taken are more subtle, as in “Heine’s ‘Affrontenburg,’” where
Vermaledeiter Garten! Ach,
Da gab es nirgends eine Stätte,
Wo nicht mein Herz gekränket ward,
Wo nicht mein Aug geweinet hätte.
becomes
What a garden of shit that is
Where there is no credible corner
But what diligent psychosis
Scoops out as it patrols the border.
The imagery of the border persists, and what ties this seemingly disparate collection together—from dreamy explorations of the body’s connection to its “secret object”, to faithful renderings of German Romantics, to the straightforward moments that scream, ‘Yes, this is a response to Donald Trump, and Yes, the world is a terrible place right now’—is this concern with where boundaries and borders exist both in the world at large and within ourselves. What Sutherland, even at his most tongue-in-cheek, seems to ask of his reader is where do you find yourself when those boundaries are crossed, broken, or transgressed? And what role do you play in the breaking? - Lindsey Appell
https://tskymag.com/2018/06/keston-sutherland-russia/
Jonathan Dunk: Keston Sutherland's Whither Russia: The Work of the Poet in the Age of Digital Masturbation
excerpt:
The Odes to TL61P is a suite of five massive, turbulent, tender and satirical odes written and revised from 2010-13. It is the explicit history of the author's sexual development from early infancy; a commentary on the social and political history of the UK since the election of the coalition government; a philosophical account of the common meaning of secrecy in the most intimate, private experiences and in international diplomacy; a wild work of revolutionary theory that investigates in minute detail the difference between commodities and human lives; a record of a thousand revisions, deletions and metamorphoses; an attempt to radically extend and reimagine the very possibility of the ode form; a monstrous accumulation of techniques and mimeses, from the strictest and most perfected metrical verse to the most delirious and cacophonous noise music; and a devoted love song to the now obsolete product ordering code for a bygone Hotpoint washer-dryer, "TL61P". It is the longest poetical work yet written by Keston Sutherland and his most comprehensive effort yet to transform the grammar of human existence.
One of the essays in Keston Sutherland’s Stupefaction insists we reflect on what Karl Marx means by Gallerte. The word appears several times in the first volume of Das Kapital, usually after bloße (“mere”), and always in the context of Arbeit or labour. It is the German for the gelling agent obtained by boiling bones, skin, and other animal products (and which is used not only in food but also in stage lighting, pharmaceuticals, some types of glue, film and – because it can be made to simulate muscle tissue – terminal ballistics). In English translations the word has generally become “congealed” (as with, for instance, Ben Fowkes’s ‘congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour’); Sutherland argues this seriously fails to capture Marx’s intention. Congealment means solidification. A liquid or gas that is heated or (especially) cooled and in the process hardened has congealed. Now Sutherland’s beef is not with the basic Marxist tenet that under capital the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time that has “congealed” in it. But he challenges the implications of the metaphor. Unlike congealing, gelatinising is irreversible: one can thaw ice and get water, but there is no getting back to skin and bone. Which chimes with the second point Sutherland makes about Gallerte. It’s disgusting. What Marx wants to capture with the word is not simply the idea that the flow of living human labour is frozen by capital, but that ‘human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.’ are irreversibly and disgustingly transformed by the capitalist into an object to be consumed. This may help explain the text’s famous images of vampirism; it also sits neatly with the idea, central to Marx’s account of fetishism, that capital’s systematic exploitation and abstraction of labour is not readily apparent in the commodity itself (there is nothing particularly disgusting about gummy bears, despite what has gone into them). Before it is a theoretical treatise, Sutherland argues, Das Kapital is a work of satire, a work meant to do harm to someone in particular: it is designed to disgust the reader, and specifically to provoke a kind of self-disgust in the bourgeois reader. He writes: ‘William Burroughs did not go far enough. The point is not to make “everyone see what is on the end of every fork,” but to make you see, as Kafka attempted, that no one but you could eat from this fork, since this fork was intended for you.’
It is an unorthodox (though arguably quite plausible and powerful) reading of Marx. It’s also a way of describing what happens in The Odes to TL61P, an oft-disgusting book replete with images related to eating, labour, discombobulated human bodies and, on a few occasions, gelatine. Such and similar references are especially common in Odes 1 and 2, in which we find ‘a pyramid of rigid meat’, ‘dead meat bunged in oil’, ‘congealed… white blood cells’, ‘a dream of every man I ate in/ all my life’, ‘yards of cooling lard’, ‘natural right whose aspic and preservatives sustain neoconservatives’, a ‘brain crushed… like upstart lard’, ‘a spent horizon dripping its limbs, parts and labour, transacted to a cosmetic mouth’, a demand the reader ‘[e]at courtesy of nausea eight hours a day’, ‘a grated shin or inimitable chewed-up spat-out shining spine’, ‘blood sucked in sucked out sucked off’, a demand the reader ‘[h]appily eat the boiled hyenas but omit to suck dry their dark alarming skulls’, etc. Perhaps the clearest (and in some ways most disgusting) instance comes in the prose opening to Ode 2, which presents eight satirical explanations for what police “commander” (Sutherland’s quote marks) Bob Broadhurst really meant when he tried to justify cops’ vicious treatment of Trafalgar Square demonstrators by calling them criminals:
What the public hears from the police on TV is the voice of police management. Everyone who has a manager knows what that litotic brachyology always sounds like. You learn in the end to pick out the buzzwords like hairs from a dessert you only think you don’t want to eat now, whereas in truth it is what you have paid for in order that you can be too intimidated to complain about it or send it back, by way of sending yourself back instead, and though the mouthfeel is like a grease-filled crack except astonishingly ugly you study to roll your eyes, pucker as if embittered, and furtively smirk at the gelatine soufflé with the other patriotic bulimics.
The writing renders
at least four things: (1) the subdued and masochistic but
nevertheless ambivalent acceptance that Sutherland thinks has been
(and is being) provoked across Britain in response to the “austerity
measures” taken after the financial crises of the mid to late 00s;
(2) the scary confluence of idiocy and barely concealed brutality
typical of contemporary management speak and which, this Ode argues,
turns up not only in the workplace but now also in the more
explicitly militarised registers of police repression, war,
counterterrorism, pre-emptive counterrevolution, etc.; (3) a rather
menacing picture of what it can be like to read “difficult”
poetry, including the Odes themselves; and, of course, (4) the
particular experience of alienation and exploitation that Sutherland
thinks Marx thinks proletarians undergo when their labour power is
commodified. These four ideas (along with a pivotal fifth, about
which more later) crisscross through the Odes, surfacing at different
points for longer or shorter periods and with different levels of
intensity, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in tandem, sometimes
becoming conflated.
Yet the basic conceptual and linguistic field of the book – the horror and fascinations of late capital, and the possibility of an authentic, irrecuperable response – has been Sutherland’s literary terrain for years: Hot White Andy spat the languages of finance, spam, and geopolitical paranoia (especially regarding the rise of China); Stress Position riffed on the pornographic tortures unveiled at Abu Ghraib, its title punning shockingly on the notion of stress in prosody and, probably, the author’s fervent heptameter; ‘The Proxy Inhumanity of Forklifts’ – the long poem central to The Stats on Infinity – tracked via the figure of the forklift the vicissitudes of the commodity form and what it does to the human:
just hacking up the ringbinders you burn
not holding out for the one ringbinder that will not burn: the dark
indelible human pallet, unloaded now for rising,
seen to by the penetrating forklift,
says penetrate you break in on the air
lock stuck in your skin, into the vacancy in the stack,
the memory foam disaggregating warehouse,
trying to want to let me pull it out.
In fact this poem provides the clearest precedent for the Odes in that it refers repeatedly to a particular ‘door closer assembly for a household refrigerator’ and its US Patent, just as these poems ostensibly praise the (now defunct) TL61P Hotpoint dryer. Formally too this work extends the techniques employed in these earlier books, with sections of prose intercut with metrical, sometimes intensely lyrical stanzas (though here, it should be said, the prose parts are longer – and now there are sections of metrical and semi-metrical prose). All this is to say that the book feels like something of a culmination of Sutherland’s previous work, its central procedures mostly similar, its ideas less new than updated. But to leave it at that would be misleading. This is the culmination not simply of previous work but of a set of astonishing poems; their Aufhebung gives the most unsettling but also authentically hopeful account in verse of what it is to be human now of which I am aware. This is Sutherland’s most expansive, confronting, politically intransigent, funny and – in its best moments – convincing encounter with the destruction of experience yet.
What is it to encounter the destruction of experience? In 1978, Giorgio Agamben published a work channeling Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ (which essay opened with the claim that men returned from the catastrophic traumas of Word War One ‘not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’):
Today, however, we know that the destruction of experience no longer necessitates a catastrophe, and that humdrum daily life in any city will suffice. For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam. Neither the journey through the netherworld of the subway, nor the demonstration that suddenly blocks the street. Neither the cloud of tear gas slowly dispering between the buildings of the city centre, nor the rapid blasts of gunfire from who knows where; nor queuing up at a business counter, nor visiting the Land of Cockayne at the supermarket, nor those eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses. Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.
It is this non-translatability into experience that now makes everyday existence intolerable – as never before – rather than an alleged poor quality of life or its meaninglessness compared with the past (on the contrary, perhaps everyday experience has never been so replete with meaningful events).
This is a
pathos-laden passage. It may seem hyperbolic. The distinction working
implicitly here, however, is less intuitive in English (or, for that
matter, Italian) than in German, which distinguishes between Erlebnis
– or experience as the undergoing of events, one’s mere capacity
to register what happens – and Erfahrung – or experience in the
emphatic sense, experience from which it is possible to learn and
perhaps gain wisdom. It is the latter that Benjamin thinks is
destroyed in modernity – and it is no doubt this that Agamben has
in mind when he claims that modern man [sic!] is wearied by a jumble
of events that cannot be translated into experience. Of course, there
is a difference between Benjamin’s and Agamben’s accounts: the
paradigm of the destruction of experience for the former is
catastrophic trauma; for the latter it is ‘humdrum daily life’
itself. For Agamben then there is something catastrophic or at least
extreme about everyday life as we know it: the ordinary is, in late
capitalism, only minimally comprehensible and communicable – which
is to say that we are dumb in a particular, quite literal sense of
the word (or, if you like, we are stupefied). One thinks here of the
sentimental narratives characteristic of reality television game
shows: with their obsessive emphasis on the personal development of
contestants – often culminating in the explicit demand that they
confess what they have learned and how it has changed them – such
programs fail incessantly in their mawkish hunts for experience. In
their attempts at recovering the lost, they inadvertently demonstrate
how far gone it is.
The problem turns up in the Odes on the levels of both form and content. Long, relatively simple descriptive sections repeatedly give way to bursts of nearly meaningless (I want to say signal-less, as though this language approaches noise), often rhythmically taut lines and prose sections, as the text articulates (and/or fails to articulate) political polemics, the outcomes of economic crisis, gnomic utterances and aphorisms, sexual fantasies and memories, grabs of news and other debased discourses, lyrical meditations on love, etc. The events described shift from the shocking to the banal and back with unnerving rapidity; indeed the book sometimes succeeds in making the very distinction seem quaint. This lack of consistency means any subjective clarity experienced in reading it will likely be relatively brief – just when you think you’ve settled into its rhythm, style, or tone the text will shift. From Ode 3:
The point is not to unlearn love, try to love nothing. It stops too strictly infinite: attrition must be sung fuck that: each and every loss of it will mean the edge away: mean your life but nothing else, love for nothing gets it true. Passion must be learned back start to end infinitely or your life will end without you.
The ratings cut to junk PDD-NOS ratings triiodothyronine parts shortages, it shall be you lashed naked short; a tight borrow fire engineering Lehman pre-junk libidinous prongs, solid waste TDO PID 6 ratings go gloat fit to fringe;
The heightened language of the statements about love is no parody: it feels self-aware but not ironic for that. We have no reason to think Sutherland doesn’t really mean what he says; it is simply that such moments must be interrupted with cuts to junk, lest perhaps you forget the kind of world you’re in. From Ode 5:
There is something we need to do about everything, something it is always hard to be. Career poets are part of the problem, smearing up the polish, drying out the fire; chucking shit all over the place; not being party to the solution; banking on the nodding head “the reader” saying “yes, that’s what it’s like” so as not to know what it’s for, since meaning is easier that way, gaped at through the defrosted back window of the Audi, hence the spring for a neck; we all know where that shit got us: being what we eat.
Sutherland resists
the poetics of recognition, the program that takes the epiphanic aha!
as its paradigm of poetic experience. The affirmation “yes, that’s
what it’s like” is posited here as a flight from the reification
and abstraction of daily life perpetrated under late capital, a
denial of the sheer opacity of what it’s really like (I think here
of the stupor and astonishment with which contemporary philosophers
of mind deal with the problem of qualia – now often referred to in
terms of what it is like-ness – the apotheosis of naturalistic
explanation coinciding nearly perfectly with the becoming-intractable
of the problem of experience). As John Armstrong has pointed out, the
image here is of one of those nodding dog toys that started turning
up in the back windows of cars some years ago; the point, I take it,
is that Sutherland’s is not the kind of verse before which “the
reader” nods along, as though “the author” has deftly
illuminated in language some nagging feeling that has been worrying
the former for years. In pandering to this, career poets pander above
all to a dishonest concept of experience, and to an easy but in the
end reactionary attachment to the forms of authority – the forms of
authoring – that made it possible. Resisting this program means:
refusing the idea that poetic language should tell us what we know;
refusing the notion of the poet as possessing some uncanny ability to
distil experience; refusing any concept of poetry as the art of
beautifully communicating imperfectly acknowledged but nevertheless
fundamental human truths. This is of course political: it also means
attacking the material and ideological structures that make such a
model seem so intuitive. For Sutherland, failing to acknowledge what
we eat is a kind of complicity with eating and indeed being it. What
it is always hard to be is honest with ourselves.
Yet one might suspect there is a kind of performative contradiction here. Must not the destruction of emphatic experience itself be an emphatic experience, in that it has deep consequences for the life of the one who undergoes it? Isn’t this the kind of event through which one not only lives but learns (if bitterly)? Part of the significance of the Odes is not only how they answer such questions in the affirmative: it is that they demonstrate this is no real contradiction. In late capitalism, they show, we emphatically experience the destruction of emphatic experience. Here is the source of their undeniable cruelty but also of their hope. Lyric poetry is now turning the liquidation of its previous condition of possibility – the communicability of experiences undergone in subjective epiphanies – into a new condition of possibility. It cannot but emerge transformed from that. In fact this is a way of accounting for the differences between Sutherland’s program and certain American Leftist experimentalists writing in the wake of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry: the latter do not think, or do not tend to write as though they think, that the loss of the lyrical subject is itself a problem for subjectivity. For Sutherland, on the other hand, emphatic experience is not simply cancelled in late modernity – rather, we live through – we experience – its being cancelled. Which means the lyric must continue (Blanchot: the human is the ‘indestructible that can be destroyed’). In an interview for Naked Punch, Sutherland said:
The commodity is a form of human experience which has been – I’d like to be quite careful about the metaphors here – not in fact ‘congealed’, as Marx’s English translators have rendered Marx’s word, that is, not petrified, nor frozen, quite – I think the best gloss in English may be something like “industrially processed and reduced irreversibly into a tremulous digestible lump” – so there is a form, a definite and measurable loss of humanity and paralysis of living human experience in the form of the commodity.
The commodity form – with its irreversible gelatinisation of the lived experience of labour, and its subsequent reification of everyday life – represents a definite and measureable loss. The Odes themselves are an attempt at that definite measuring. The fact that they exist is the cruel hope of them.
Hence perhaps the importance of sex in the poems. I take it as part of Sutherland’s inheritance of English romanticism: save the odd starry sky, there are few images of (what we call) nature in Sutherland; yet perhaps this is, for him, the rhetorical function of fucking. If this is right it must be true of these poems in particular, whose speaker turns repeatedly and inevitably to sex, and often to childhood sexuality, frankly recounting a series of fantasies and fraught encounters. It is more than a deranged appropriation of confessional poetry, and more too than a confirmation of Alain Badiou’s claim that ‘[c]hildhood is a golden age for sexual experimentation in all its forms’ (though it is both of those things). Part of why sex is crucial in the poems – it’s the idea (5) I flagged earlier – is that they take it as the site of our deepest ties to power. The Odes’ returning to sex can feel like the response to an authoritarian demand, the speaker under that compulsion to confess which Foucault identified as central to modern subjection. There is shame and sometimes violence in it. From Ode 3:
we look at each other’s parts under the table, Jackie and I, hiding our eyes in the heads we come with, so as by the beautiful misidentification of excitement with fear to remain children forever, a proof of endurance that entitles us to be only now for the first time disconnected from one another, anywhere on earth; I don’t know who she is or what she amounted to, I haven’t seen her since then; she may be tied up in a Fallujah basement in nothing but a hood, toe-separators and a face dildo; but whatever she is thrilled by now, and whatever she lives in fear of, I trust in truth that somewhere beneath all the real objects there still shines to her distraction the first image of the male genitals I gave her, wrongly flickering, spitting blanks, preserved in trailing clouds, tiny and perfect, the origin and corner of my love.
Yet this is not just disturbing: it is also idyllic. It ambiguously posits a tenderness always already traversed by power and pornography, the cheap thrill of having got there first giving a grim picture of male sexuality even as the subsequent profession of love comes across as largely genuine and moving. On the one hand, then, the work is in agreement with the LIES author who wrote that ‘[i]f it was once radical and marginal to assert an essential… goodness to sex, it is now central, institutional’; on the other hand the poems imagine sex as something that could – in an absolutely underdetermined way – be or become impervious to commodification and brutality. ‘But fuck’, Sutherland writes in Ode 5, ‘[h]ow fucking fuckable I was before I fucking fucked up fucking by becoming fucking fucked.’ Though they recognise the violence in its contemporary forms, the poems will not completely relinquish the notion that human sexuality contains within itself a kind of political potential, a version of the old New Left idea that, if repression and neurosis could be eradicated, we might find something in it that wants to set us free. It is because ‘all sex is barbaric’ that it appears to contain such a promise: ‘We are the pleasures we enjoy, the blisses we admire; and all sex is a text, wingbats in gaping slang.’ Or as J. M. Bernstein writes: ‘[A]ll human sexual practices worthy of the name contain moments of objectification, aggression, dismemberment, and animal solitariness, and it is via those moments alone that our animal bodies receive an emphatic moment of independence from cultural norms, or, what is the same, it is only through those moments, through dismemberment, that embodiment can be nontransitively experienced as the source of a claim.’ This nontransitive experience of the claim of embodiment sits uneasily with the career poet’s program because it is quite literally barbaric: it cannot be turned entirely into sense or sensibly recognised. The inevitable presence of sex in the Odes is thus and nevertheless a kind of counterpoint to the particular way in which experience is destroyed for them. It is not set up as a bourgeois refuge, as the last vestige of the private sphere, but as the site of a subjection that is also public and political. The fact of our being alive in common is expressed in sex; in its resistance to full articulation or appropriation it could open a different, adamant and utopian obtuseness. Sexuality’s experiential promise is in that resistance to meaning, in how the claim it makes cannot be fully translated into another register.
Doing justice to these ambiguities may be the real achievement of the Odes. It is what makes them so brilliantly discomfiting. The poems accept and are genuinely horrified by the fact that pleasure has been inhumanly distorted, yet refuse the idea that we could get it or the human back in their previous (“natural”) forms. Despite everything, then, Sutherland is still insisting on irreversibility. It is not possible to return to any golden age of experience, sex, or labour – but the very ubiquity of the modern, reactionary notion of a golden age itself reflects the fact that their current forms are paltry shadows of what they could become. These poems do not protest inhumanity as much as think it through: they want to understand it, and can only do so by going through it. Because this thinking takes place as poetry, it challenges the alienated forms of rationality that destroy emphatic experience in the first place; yet it does not simply rail against destruction but explores its aesthetic – and by extension repressed political – potentials. Like Marx’s, Sutherland’s romanticism is anti-romantic: the nature he is after is not the one we have destroyed but the one that does not yet exist. These are odes, not elegies. With their idiosyncrasy, cruelty, music, and derangement, the poems are also our contemporaries. - Mathew Abbott
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-poetry-of-destroyed-experience/
Reality: This is a difficult book to write about. Essentially I had two completely distinct responses to it, the first, slightly exhilarating encounter with something entirely new, and the creeping realisation in the cold light of day that it doesn’t quite do what it says on its radical tin. So let’s do both.
Odes to TL61P is the most unusual book I’ve read in years. Its ambitious scope, its humour, its totally astute articulations of political abuse and the emptying out of meaning in contemporary culture; there are few writers in the poetry mainstream even similarly interested in politics, never mind capable of expressing with such clarity the scale of political malfeasance in neoliberal Britain.
The text itself is at times a surrealist nightmare, an assault of sensory information and white noise, a dramatized revulsion at living in a culture that so commodifies human life, subsuming it entirely to the whims of the marketplace and those who benefit most from it. All the while Sutherland renders this conflict in explicitly sexual terms, painting the world of politics as a reflection of capitalism’s sexual obsessions and corruptions. The first half of the book operates in this greatly discomfiting tone, and the deconstruction of police suppression of the Trafalgar Square protests in the middle of it all gives the critique a bit of a Dr Strangelove flavour, a logical unraveling of the unstoppable psychosis of military-capitalism reverberating from the macro-social to the intimately personal.
This idea that power corrupts even in individual romantic relationships, at the site of our deepest ties to power (to quote Mathew Abbott) is central to Odes. It was also in exploring this idea, and Odes’ presentation of it, that alarm bells quietly started. On the one hand, Sutherland’s graphic relation of his youthful romances position him both in extreme dominant and submissive roles, as male sadist and male masochist, even, memorably, a fantasy in which he is his own perfect sexual partner, sending up macho masculinity by embodying its antithesis. But how much do these accounts in their playing out of power dynamics actually question or undermine commonly held assumptions about sex? Are they supposed to? It’s notable that the book’s extensive engagement with porn’s formulations of power (and the appropriation of its vocabulary) rarely strays from the mainstream; there’s an apt point to be made that the fault is not with pornography at a conceptual level (there are many kinds of porn!) but in its blunt iteration of cultural norms.
Which might seem like a cute point, but it is a salient example of Sutherland failing or neglecting to present alternatives to the undesirable norm. While the sex scenes depicted above are graphic, frank and honest (though what is honesty when it challenges so little?), they are exclusively male-focused. The women who do appear (and gosh do I get tired of typing this!) are frequently genitals stripped of identity (‘The really beautiful woman who is yet to explain how I should fight to retain Thatcher’s rebate is now bent over into a suggestion about how to prop up the euro; I can see into her womb’), frequently figured in terms of bondage or domination, a childhood crush depicted only in terms of her frightening beauty, carrying all the implications of oppositional gender roles, several passages of weaponised Freudian theory. For one reason or another the poet repeatedly depicts women in terms of sexual degradation or subjugation; when he talks about the Occupy protests through the pov of the Met Police Commander he takes pains to put that point of view in context. Why not elsewhere? One section reads, ‘I’d sooner drown in bed forever with the women from my twenties, painting a sky of orgasms, acting insoluble. I remember the number I had beautiful sex with but not their total number.’ Is there a more culturally conventional attitude to sex than fetishizing twenty-somethings and regarding sex as a primarily first-person experience, ‘I’ more than ‘we’, a matter of accumulated personal victories? Does a book that is in other places genuinely revolutionary have nothing more complicated to say on the matter? Odes makes long-term monogamy seem positively radical. Another section opens ‘But all sex is barbaric. We are the pleasures we enjoy, the blisses we admire; and all sex is a text, wingbats in a gaping slang.’ I can’t help reading that as a fortunate outcome for a male academic. How does that play out for the folk on the other side of the relationship?
Please excuse the sarcasm, this may be a crucial point. The book’s approach to sexuality does not confront British culture’s appropriation of it as much as revel in it. And here is another point I struggled with: what does Sutherland mean? There is no obligation, of course, for an author to endorse what they present. My counter is that that relies on context; if this is satire, where is the indication that something is wrong? Odes happily deconstructs oppressive political structures while merely presenting gendered oppression apparently without commentary. If Sutherland is presenting the ills of society for a feminist purpose, he hides it much better than his more traditionally socialist beliefs, and I can find no evidence in the book to contradict this suspicion. Which is gravely disappointing in an author who elsewhere wrote ‘Class, race, gender and sexuality are not just categories supervening on individuals, but worlds of subjective experience that extend right into their capillaries and marrow’.
This was the point when my reading of the book’s truly worthy mission began to unravel. ‘You become radical when the only thing you can do to rouse the sleeping public is something truly catastrophic.’ This holds with the poet’s depictions of Millbank and Trafalgar Square, but Britain is not Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq, and it might be a little premature to think in terms of violent revolution. ‘The West Irish had nothing but tiny scraps of land with a cabin, a pig and potatoes; but Belfast and Dublin had England’. This is a gross oversimplification of Belfast, Dublin, West Ireland, England, maybe even cabins and pigs. Placing this statement in a book primarily concerned with military atrocities in the Middle East is an easy and unhelpful conflation of both individual suffering and the historical context that allowed it to flourish. The book would have gone a long way to covering these flaws with judicious self-doubt or self-criticism, but the mode of the poetry does not allow much room for ambiguity. The fault then, which the book should understand, is not with the execution of the poetic mode but with the poetic mode itself. Read Sinéad Morrissey for a subversive text that does not collude in the exploitation it protests.
Tl;dr: Sutherland is Professor of Poetry at Sussex Uni and a Marx scholar and I’m frustratingly aware of a fair bit of his cultural theory may very well be passing me by. I’d love someone with a firmer grasp of what Sutherland’s discussing to weigh in, I have to admit feeling out of my academic depth, and there’s every chance I’m missing something that would defuse my concerns about the book. On one hand, Odes is a genuinely subversive text. On the other, it has huge blind spots absolutely of a character in contemporary British poetry and I’m unwilling to let it slide, particularly with some of the undiluted heraldry of his work on- and offline. As it is, Odes is for all intents and purposes a one-perspective show, the Self dramatized, spotlit, and much too keen on self-mythologising to be truly unsullied by the poetic (and academic) mainstream, a book that falls short of its admirably radical goals. - Dave Coates
https://davepoems.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/keston-sutherland-odes-to-tl61p/
You've been reading this in various drafts since 2010 and now you have the Real Thing and you've read it a couple of times and you went to the Dalston launch where Keston read bits of it gloriously out of sequence and you've blogged on the Odes / Stress Position debate and now it's time to get to grips with it.
One of your better Sutherland-related observations is that his work makes reasonable sense until you read the actual words rather than let the words wash over you. The first couple of pages appear to bear this out and you're not sure how you feel about this so you start slowly with the first few lines:
Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out
and fly away above the stack of basements inundated
in aboriginal mucus, elevating the impeccable,
hereafter congenitally depilated Janine rescaled to a
grainy blank up on to the oblong top of the freezer
whose shut white lid unhinged at the back alone
preserves a pyramid of rigid meat, budget pizzas,
devirginated arctic rolls, only ever kidding in a
prophylactic void torn into great crates of glittering
eye shadow, dowsing all its stickiness in dark empty
swerves, for no-one is the radius of everything we
are, reinforced steel artery in the very integument
You acknowledge to yourself the energy and the thrust, you also like the confidence of 'only kidding' which you'll come back to shortly but first you decided to think about this 'head' that is unscrewed. You recognise that this particular noun has many, many meanings from head of lettuce through to human head and on to the head of an oil well and this last might be appropriate given that this results in burning. The other thing you notice is 'each' which indicates, as there's only one head involved, that the head is unscrewed, emits truths and is then screwed back down again. You know enough about the rest of the poem to gather that this may relate to the theme of the tyranny of secrets and the absolute need to break them but you may, as usual, be rushing ahead of yourself. These 'truths' are also a bit of a worry because Keston's previous truths tend to have been coloured by his Marxian perspective and Stress Position makes fairly explicit his distaste with the/my relativist tendency. You don't recall being conscious of this getting extended in your previous readings and hope that these kind of truths relate to secrets rather than some kind of universal positivism.
You can't resist having a peek at the OED definitions for 'head' and are staggered by the number and by the fact that you'd forgotten or overlooked so many but it does appear that the well head / flare stack may be the best analogy. The ever-improving Wikipedia tells you that flare stacks are used to burn off the natural gas that comes to the surface (the head of the well) with the oil and that there are normally efficient valves that can stop and start the flow as required. You also recognise that there's more than one meaning to 'screw'. This could all be very wide of the mark especially if you take the next two lines into account but it might be significant that these truths burn there way out and then 'fly away'. You start with the obvious, truths are abstract and completely incapable of either burning or flying. There is however, in the world of secrets, that the content of some truths is so dangerous and corrosive that it is exposed and then flies away. You now hate yourself because you've just leapt to Edward Snowden currently in the noplace of Moscow airport and to the slow burn of secrets locked away in Welsh care homes. You then re-read just to make sure that this is a track that you want to go down and realise that 'burn out' also has connotations of becoming exhausted, stressed, demoralised and no longer fit for the tsk that you have started. You try to bear this in mind as you come up against these stacked basements.
You don't want to be too clever or overly poetic but you can't resist clocking the proximity of basement to abasement and then decide that this is silly, the point is that these burning truths have flown away from their source and are now above these stacks which are flooded with this Very Early snot. This is where the absence of sense may start to kick in but you persevere. Of course, a stack of basements is difficult to envisage because a basement is the room usually at the bottom of the 'stack' of other rooms. So if another basement is placed on top of it then that basement becomes a room because it is no longer at the base of the stack.
You consider a different approach but first realise that this Welsh care home thing relates not just to institutional and political secrets but also the truth that an abusing adult will take enormous pains to conceal. You then move on to state secrets and the fact that many of these cover up various forms of abuse from torture through to eavesdropping and reading my e-mails. The different approach turns out to be the function of the basement.
Basements are hidden from view, rarely visited and (in movies at least) the scene of very many bad things. People are killed, bodies are dismembered, the 'truth' is extracted in the basement precisely because it is hidden from view, indeed it might even be metaphor for the underbelly of the modern state. We know, thank to the release of truths, that the US and UK arranged for torture to be carried out in basements all over the world and that the use of 'stacks' may simply mean 'very many'.
The snot problem is in part resolved by the discovery that it is only nasal mucus that is snot and that the term is "viscous substance secreted by the mucous cells and glands of animals to provide protection, lubrication, etc" which ties in a bit more with the grisly business of inflicting pain on others.
You may now be wavering between the sense and non-sense positions but you still have your suspicions that this is as it is because it contains more than a touch of the absurd and you've just spent ninety minutes or so reading things into something that were never there. This nagging doubt is not at all helped by the prospect of the hairless Janine.
Now you've read the Enitharmon blurb and you feel a little more confident about the fray to come. Before you get to the hairless Janine you need to start with "elevating the impeccable" and (by careful re-reading) you gather that it is the truths of line one that are doing the lifting. You haven't checked but you're taking "elevating" to indicating some kind of raising up. People are elevated to the peerage, priests are elevated to become bishops etc. There's also elevations in terms of building plans but you don't think that elevating is involved in producing these. So, these truths that have burned their way out are now lifting this woman / girl who is said to be "impeccable". You don't understand how something abstract like a truth can do something physical like rising somebody up. Then you recall that to elevate can also mean to inspire and / or lift to a higher state of consciousness which would be more in line with an abstraction like truth. In leftist terms the Truth about Capital should inspire people to join the struggle nd the fact that it doesn't is now one of those tricky and hence ignored elephants in the room.
You then decide to think about "impeccable" and realise that this is quite a complex adjective that doesn't quite mean "flawless" but might indicate that someone is beyond reproach, difficult to criticise, we say "impeccably turned out", for example, to indicate that somebody has achieved the highest level in terms of both sartorial elegance and general appearance, usually in the context of a specific event.
You look at the OED which gently informs you that, when applied to people, the word means "Not capable of or liable to sin; exempt from the possibility of sinning or doing wrong". When applied to things it means "faultless, unerring". Now, this doesn't work for you, neither of these seem to mirror your experience and use of the word in the ordinary world that most of us inhabit. You then realise that there is a note next to the definition which points out that this hasn't been updated since 1899 and you follow the link to something called Oxford Dictionaries Online which tells you that the "incapable of sin" definition relates to theology and is now considered to be rare whilst the main definition is now "in accordance with the highest standards, faultless". You are still not happy because in your head it applies to n action or quality that is above criticism which doesn't seem quite the same as without fault.
You've had a response to the first of these readings re the identity of Janine: "Since we're speculating... a (carefully circumscribed) internet search brought up adult film actress Janine Lindemulder. I'll leave it to someone else to confirm her depilation, but the reference seems to fit with a recurring theme/trope of the poem; it also obviously adds another semantic valence to much of the quoted passage. Couldn't decide if your 'nagging' doubt was about this line of inquiry, so I'll tastelessly broach it for you." You're holding out for Alasdair Gray's "Janine 1982" because it's vaguely literary although you also know that porn is a bit of a sub-theme (technical term) in The Odes. Of course "impeccable" in its theological sense doesn't easily fit with either of these characters but some sense may be made of the theology of truth and the elevation to heaven of those without sin.
You move on to "hereafter congenitally depilated" and this is one of those places where sense seems to go a bit adrift. If we're to take 'congenital'to mean something that is present since birth then 'hereafter' as in 'from now on' doesn't make sense. The other observation is that some of us don't have much hair at all when we're born but in this instance it would appear that someone has shorn Janine at birth and she has stayed that way or that she has been regularly depilated ever since. At this point your brain loses patience with itself and you begin to feel that this close examination may be an exercise in futility. As a last throw of this particular dice, you check the verb nd discover that there is a secondary definition: "To deprive of it's skin, decorticate, peel". Given that your previous reading had detected at least one reference to torture, this changes things around a bit. Removing someone's skin is a particularly barbaric thing to do and flaying felons was for centuries a mainstay of our penal system and (you're guessing) an important activity still deployed by states in basements around the world. You don't want to get carried away with the God thing but many martyrs were flayed alive and many of these were said to be incapable of sin. You're also reminded that flagellants flourished across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries so you check the wikipedia page that informs you that whipping yourself is much older than that.
You seem to recall that Prynne has used "congenital" in the fairly recent past and you try to remember where but fail and, anyway, knowing this probably won't be that much help.
You move on to the Janine problem and fall across a remarkable site called "whosdatedwho.com" which contains a list of 63 Janines who might be considered to be celebrities. You love this stuff, Janine Lindemulder (porn star, probably depilated) tops the list with over 413,00 views but there's also Janine Pommy Vega who is listed as a poet and activist and a further moment's search reveals a youtube video of her with Fairly Short Hair. This makes much more sense but you also notice Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, a leading French psychoanalyst who described the 1968 protesters as totalitarian stalinists who were affected by a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the father. You hope against hope that this is the Janine in question but then you notice Janine Mellor, the Britsh actress who played Kelsey Phillips in the BBC's 'Casualty'.....
You then realise that you've spent over a thousand words on just over one line and vow to do better next time.
Keston Sutherland’s Poetical Works (Enitharmon Press, 2015)—along with M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Sean Bonney’s Letters Against the Firmament—immediately takes its place among the most essential works of literature in English in this new millennium. A collection of this size and stature does more than mark a moment of consolidation, more than announce an oeuvre. It provides a framework within which to consider and appraise a series of determinate movements within the work—from “early” to “late,” from minor to major, from Cambridge to Brighton—that may hitherto have escaped detection. Bound within the pages of a single volume, the poems form new constellations and unguessed-at affinities, both among themselves and with other works. Definite shifts in aesthetic temperament and vocal suppleness, clear breaks in the development of Sutherland’s poetics, become clear alongside his more abiding commitments and passions.
In broad outline, three periods emerge: the Cambridge years, defined by the young poet’s precocious lyricism and awry grammar; the period of transition, marked by the publication of his major long poems Hot White Andy and Stress Position (and including the brilliant satire of Neocosis), their growing interest in metrical-syllabic prose; and the fully mature rhapsodic phase of The Odes to TL61P, with its fascinating prelude The Stats on Infinity, which mark an epochal shift into block writing. Each period has its distinct pleasures and demands, and yet there are enough consistencies—of diction, syntactic torsion, tone, and voice—to navigate a movement through them that attends to their broader evolutionary arc. Neither is that arc merely autobiographical; for this is a collection that, alongside its authorial interests, tells a powerful story about the fate, and the conditions, of lyric poetry in the age of universal commodification—and amid its rising waves of dissent and revolutionary rage.
Sutherland’s inveterate lyricism is glimpsed in a strophe like this (from “Dildo Ode”):
The standpoint
of limbs in a flood of hate for their
own your life
tag in
raptorial total orgasm and living riotous joy
at kicking the faked edge of a life in
commodity-sepia to hell and knowing it
is a dream only in the crassest last fantasies.
This is the body convulsing, writhing in extorted Rimbaldian jouissance, under the asphyxiating pressures of a world devoid of real satisfactions. Moments such as this punctuate the often baffling semio-tectonics of Sutherland’s lyric forms, and reset the nature of our attention to them under familiar romantic auspices. Yet just as often, the lyric affect has been so scrambled, subject to such a terrible vivisection, that it seems to have succumbed to scabrous negation. In the early long poem “Mincemeat Seesaw” (1999), nuggets of William Wordsworth are intercut with the language of market reports:
a secular upward trend in vapid glee
as flowers their idle sweets exhale, relays
love to the fathomed packhorse so-and-so,
the bees drowse out, investment peaks and suds
of gamer prattle spray from washed-out mouths,
the grace of trended variables to be borne
not of yourselves
This satiric tendency grows stronger across Sutherland’s career, preserving fossils of lyric grace within the flaccid ambient textures of a prosaic lowest common denominator. But in the early work in particular there is a countervailing (and extremely productive) interest in the ability to forge a new kind of lyric music out of paragrammaticality or the appearance of glossolalia. Here is a passage from “A Hyena Asleep in a Willow,” from 2003’s The Rictus Flag:
But,
with the electrons unionized,
fate bent on tongue-ionamines, a fountain
of smoke rakes through, bit-necked
altruism under the stars weigh up chitin on
event speech blackout. You are as
such precise in having gone to die event peed.
The periods shimmer with a rhythmic energy triggered by the loosening of grammatical strings. The pulse from part of speech to part of speech is rendered ecstatic. In a typical clause there is a single pivot, the verb, around which everything turns; and metrical stresses typically gravitate to those pivots. But in Sutherland’s sentences, meter is almost fatally compromised, and there are multiple, undecidable joints; the syntax is more like a serpentine vertebral column, sprung and rangy, than a purposeful pair of pliers applied to meaning. The sense is of omnipresent invisible and inaudible ellipses, an inscrutable tectonics of voices, tones, moods, and styles, working its way out underneath the familiar spill of stanzas and lines. It’s grammar “ratcheted up to wring the cortex dry” (Stress Position). Sometimes the cadences resolve these torsions of syntax into moments of exquisite aesthetic composure, as in “The Food at Alcove One”:
where love alone shines in beauty, and the liver
waits agape on brass for its flame, and is licked
forever by that flame like a mirror by your eyelids.
More often the cadence too is implicated in the manias of the difference engine, wrenched out of true by a bit of flying verbal debris or the vulgar recrudescence of a sniggering schoolboy plumpes Denken.
Take that triple-barreled noun phrase, “event speech blackout.” A world that obliges us to credit such monstrous locutions as “Individual Asset Identifier” and “enterprise application architects” (both from the Odes to TL61P) has already eroded the distinction between modifier and noun, quality and thing, to the point of an irremediable dilution of language’s referentiality, leaving epistemology and ontology awry. It is not unwarranted to seize hold of the logic of such nominal phrases, and apply it to other orders of experience. Sutherland’s poetry is rife with grotesque noun-adjunct ganglions, where modification is rendered hypertrophic: “lips-gear scalpel batter,” for instance, or “love droid voice”; “global badger-tetanus,” “lie flan debit mash liability,” “beauty vanilla bonds,” “Yakult / spine cooler,” “carnauba wax rissole,” and “elf neon crossbar.” The ploy is at once hysterically funny and deadly serious; it shakes an apotropaic totem of verbal absurdity at capital’ s pitiless extinction of true names, even as it bundles nouns into new, untold composites that the poem’s light must bend around.
Names, especially those proper nouns with which we populate the celestial sphere of our twenty-four-hour news cycle, stage a comeback in Sutherland’s work as its satirical energies intensify. Hot White Andy is the transitional work in this and various other respects, and its dramatis personae include one Sergey Lavrov (Russian Foreign Minister), Andrey Vyshinsky (Stalinist state prosecutor), Akinsola Akinfemiwa (Chief Executive Officer of Skye Bank PLC), comedian Lenny Henry, and the eponymous hero, Andy Cheng. The poem “Roger Ailes” announces this new intensity of invective and vitriol—tempered by moments of ironic tenderness and intimacy—aimed at the directors and bit players of our world disorder, which is amply developed across the second half of the Poetical Works : Rupert Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt, Anders Hoegstroem (neo-Nazi thief of the Auschwitz Arbeit Macht Frei sign), “and other names besides, names to know and do.” Against these satirized icons of neoliberal infamy, a Pynchonian counterforce assembles: Ali (Stress Position) is a vital persona, along with Gulnaz, Deborah, Stan, David, and other late survivors of the general wreckage. The growing tendency to name and shame the enemy is tempered by a will to characterize the resistance, to supply it with a “local habitation and a name,” making the poems into contested force fields where antagonistic armies swirl and clash.
What some people like to call its “difficulty” is this poetry’s refusal—pace a growing number of clearer passages in the later work—to surrender to “the long arabesque of equivalence” or the “rapture of transitivity.” A poem is neither an anecdote, nor an argument, nor a description; or it is these things only in passing, in order to become something else. That something else—“a machine made of words,” William Carlos Williams called it—obliges our language to become material in relation to itself, and critical in relation to social doxa. It cannot do this ex nihilo, but must work with the debased jargons of the public sphere—of advertising, politics, and the news, among others (Sutherland also likes instruction manuals). These materials cannot be circumvented or transcended; only by putting them under the most severe formal pressure can they begin to give up their truth content, which is finally us (dedicatee of Hot White Andy), in all our mediated, contradictory, and dissociated social relatedness. It is the purpose of radical poetry, not to compensate for or justify the wretched excuse for a world that capital has wrought, but to yield an image of its suffering social essence—of ourselves and our thwarted potentials, and all the horrors of our exploited flesh—that we might reimagine and reenact this sociality in our own terms. Worrying that you aren’t “getting it” is part of the point.
A brief passage from Neutrality’s (2004) “Ap Ob Nuat” (a reference to the Thai “body to body” massage industry) should indicate some of the demented energies at play throughout:
Evidence suggests that in the male guinea pig
you’ ve got plastic tits. Merely to harden th
blow not otherwise roughly squatted to, but in
they do peel off, any case of Muslim litter
heads cum vaginas trees etc. Corticosteroidal
punctuation id rips thus into buzz syntax, all for
you taking off
O common periplaneta
americana lipid, capital winged with awe
and shock to its hard bargain basement into
the foxholes dug in my face.
The first line break here ramifies a break in the syntactic order, as two sentence parts (one pedantically expert, the other colloquially rude) are yoked by violence together, establishing a hybrid discourse of scientific experimentation on animals and body modification, which is taken up later in the “foxholes dug in my face”—the additional military register of which also resonates with the “Muslim litter” being strewn pornographically over the Middle East by “capital” (figured as a common cockroach) “winged with awe / and shock” (that linguistic detritus of the Bush regime). The sound texture is richly patterned throughout: the light i sounds of “pig,” “tits,” “id rips,” “lipid,” “syntax,” and “winged” chiming with the repeated preposition “in,” and the unaccented syllable of “Muslim.” This is threaded against a pervasive interest in the o sound, long and short, which gathers full steam in “corticosteroidal” and “O common,” and reaches a climax in “foxholes.” The rhythm, beginning with those virtual back-to-back primus paeons, is tersely beaten against an underlying shift from trochaic to iambic feet, but constantly wrong-footing itself and jarring against all expectation.
Sutherland’s lyrical gifts are immense. Giving them free reign would amount, however, to a travesty of the poetic vocation in a world that has butchered language in order to justify butchery. Staying true to the poetic task perversely entails its barbaric refutation, its exposure to immanent tortures by the jargons and cant of a torture-driven social order.
“A patriot is not a missile.” Nihil Obstetrics Inc.
ACA NEWS: POMO DEBT FLOOR RISK (TW).
Rojarus.
Rojario climbs to his knees,
divine afflatus of EN 1783,
inwardly he kens himself the deputy April soot shower
Reading like a malfunctioning computer readout, such lines (from Hot White Andy) take to new lengths the Poundian tactic of extrinsic incorporation. But such ungainly verbal mannerisms are issued with the most painstaking attention to their sonic and rhythmic properties, nor has aesthetic pleasure been altogether obliterated from this verse’ s critical force fields.
The revisions Sutherland has made to Stress Position and The Stats on Infinity for their inclusion in the Poetical Works are telling in this respect. One senses that each of these revisions has been determined by a scrupulous regard for aesthetic efficiency: eliminating redundancy, trimming proper nouns back to pronouns, improving the play of wit, and increasing the rhythmic intensity of the prosody. There is a powerful moment when, in the midst of articulating its specific vision of hell, Stress Position modulates into an unexpected love lyric. Here it’ s revealing to watch closely the changes. A stanza in the original ends:
was you until your head turned and your breathlessness lit me
But in the present collection, the line reads:
was you until your head turned and are you in breathless air
The unsatisfactory, halting music of the original is rendered into an epideictic hypallage; a poor cadence is remade into a vibrant sonic image of the thing being described—a mode of the beautiful itself, whose precious rarity in this long satanic ode requires careful cultivation.
Sutherland’s cogent romantic strain is something he may have become less willing to permit himself, yet its intermittent upsurge, so much molten lava from the core of a mutilated subject, remains a powerful base element of his eclectic poetics, as in “Zeroes Galore”:
what could this consciousness rise up
to annihilate in fatal and glorious sunlight,
by love bound together, the expugnation of all fire.
Almost Blakean, this incandescent nihilism from love once found its outraged political expression in the closing pages of “Ejector Vacua Axle,” where the poet issued his first fully paraphraseable slab of polemical vers libre against the architects (and liberal apologists) of the War on Terror. But that more or less implicit defence of anti-imperialist violence from 2001 has been surgically removed from the version of the poem offered in the Poetical Works, for reasons that have everything to do with the evolution, not only of Sutherland’s political ethics since that time, but of his poetics as well.
For Hot White Andy marks an epoch. That rather miraculous poem, now inextricable from its catalysing public readings, is (for want of a better analogy) Sutherland’s “The Waste Land,” marking a genuinely dialectical transformation of his increasingly satirical lyric art into something more capacious and arresting. Hot White Andy’ s many innovations—the deftly truncated lexemes, the computational glyphs, the name-dropping avuncularity of tone, and so on—merge in a self-pleasuring display of giddy release. The poem is itself formally heteroclite and polyphonic, moving through stage dialogue and short story modes, and lurching crazily from vicious satire to tender lyric in an arrhythmic heartbeat. All of which foments a new dispensation for the voice itself: as if the multiplication of modes and the unmooring of vocal discretion have allowed for an exponential expansion of horizons. The world feels larger after Hot White Andy, both in the extrinsic sense of the planetary political economy assailed by the poem, and in the immanent sense of an extensification of poetic worldliness itself.
There is a minor movement in the later parts of the book toward a kind of meta-poetry, where individual poems begin to comment on their own forms and rhetorical operations. “The Food at Alcove One” incorporates three moments of a “duck section” that “comes later,” then appears in the epode— “strapped to the waist of a splitting duck / whose lids bat atavistically”—then is subject to a set of ironic instructions on how one might parse it in a “meaning you / can own.” This kind of thing happens again in the opening of Hot White Andy and elsewhere, an emphasis on the sheer liberty of the poem’ s ability to take x for y, which (under the mounting pressures of irony) turns darkly into its opposite: the more these poems authorize us to perform semantic reductions or metaphoric flights, the less they seem willing to do anything but say exactly what they are. The growing tendency toward literalism and public address in the later work is a political countermeasure against the Munchausen bootstraps by which poetry is generally allowed to lift itself into significance out of the mire of its own complicity: what Sutherland calls the “ethic fallacy.”
But the most important formal development visible on the later pages of this volume concerns the relative, and perhaps permanent, eclipse of lineation in the poems. Beginning in Stress Position, continuing in “The Proxy Inhumanity of Forklifts” and across the vast bulk of The Odes to TL61P, and culminating in the whole of the previously unpublished final work, Jenkins, Moore and Bird, Sutherland has progressively extinguished the line break from his work. This is not to say that he has abandoned prosody as such, as there are extremely complex rhythmic and sonic textures fretted into the resulting prose-like monoliths of text, sometimes even rhyming tetrameters—but without lineation, it is as if a certain visual logic (of constipated blockage) has been suffered to usurp the exquisite sound patterns. So too the playful wit and ambiguity that gravitates to line endings, and the sensibility that goes with that, has been sacrificed to a much more explicit formal insistence on the literal sense of poetic language as a stream of lexical units. In a series of arresting theoretical speculations about this turn in his own (and many other British poets’) work, Sutherland has suggested that the specifically tubular form of what he calls “block poetry”—its crammed compression into double-justified slabs of unbroken turgid flow—entertains strong homologies with a number of interrelated phenomena: the experience of being “kettled” by police during post-GFC protest marches; the latent opportunities for a more collective mode of subjective expression; and the omnipresent pressure of capitalism’ s value form on the human body’s native elasticity. The consequent movement away from form as such arises from the relentless pressure placed upon the brittle foundations of “the tradition” by the value-relation and its tendency to reduce all salience to a slurry of equivalence.
Yet the final irony is that, over the length of this volume, one inescapable conclusion emerges: that Sutherland is the greatest living exponent of one form among the many that he has employed, and the greatest since W. H. Auden—namely, the ode. The ode, a mode of lyric to which he has returned with a symptomatic regularity that culminates in his stunning chef d’oeuvre, The Odes to TL61P, suits Sutherland’s talents better than any other form. It is the mode in which he has actuated the remarkable (and as yet unheralded) shift from coterie poet to public poet, honing a voice through which increasingly to inveigh, accuse, and anathematize the enemy, but also to celebrate, inspire, and commemorate the resistance. The ode is the most august of all forms of occasional verse; but what we mark most here is the shifting historical logic that has taken hold of the “occasion” itself, from a punctual event massively resisted (the Iraq War) to a disseminated one (the daily extraction of surplus value in a context of crisis and the declining rate of profit), and the consequent shift away from a robust subjective resilience in the face of imperial aggression, to a knowing acknowledgement of the “bloodless anathema” that poetry must resemble under a recalibrated capitalism. What is to be done with the rise of any number of intervening mediations—institutional, structural, logical, and ideological—between the existential and the economic, in which welter the shape of the event, the occasion of exploitation, gets lost? The ode is the lyric mode in which these wracking contradictions between private agony and public disorder can best be squared. Sutherland, whose investment in the form crystallizes around Wordsworth’s great Intimations Ode, is either going to have to adapt his block poetry to the imperatives of that mode, or use it to blast a way out of his kettled verbal masses. Or, like John Milton and Wordsworth before him, gravitate toward epic. The dramatic fifteen-year evolution on display in this volume is enough to persuade us that he will succeed either way. - Julian Murphet
https://www.chicagoreview.org/keston-sutherland-poetical-works-1999-2015/
From Shakespeare to Beckett, the contradictory figure of the fool who possesses unexpected wisdom has been a popular and effective literary trope and rhetorical figure for centuries. Philosophy needs idiots too, argues Keston Sutherland in Stupefaction. This is a book about how idiots are created, how they are used, and the types of truth that depend on them.
Sutherland examines how speculative and satirical descriptions of stupidity function in art and in argument. His examples include Alexander Pope’s dunce, Adorno’s philistine, Wordsworth’s mechanical adopter of poetic diction, and phenomenologist Michel Henry’s drunkard who rides an escalator to nothingness. Sutherland also provides an important new account of the figure of the bourgeois in Marx and a powerfully original interpretation of commodity fetishism as a satire against bourgeois objectivity. This unusual analysis of the trope of the idiot will appeal to scholars of literature and philosophy alike.
Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy
This is how Keston Sutherland’s long poem Hot White Andy begins, and this is where my reading must begin, with this new sound in poetry:
Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to
the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap
buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck,
phlegmophrenic, want to go to the windfarm,
Your • kids menu lips swinging in the Cathex-Wizz monoplex;
Your • face lifting triple its age in Wuhan die-cut peel lids;
ng pick Your out the reregulated loner PAT to to screw white
chocolate to the bone. The tension in an unsprung
r trap co
→ The tension in an unsprung trap.
ck QUANT unpruned wing: sdeigne of JOCK
of how I together grateful anyway I was
Its sacked glass, Punto
→ What is
be done on the sly is manic gargling, to
to blacken the air in hot manic recitative from a storm throat,
WLa-15 types to Tungsten electrodes Aaron Zhong,
feazing that throat into fire / under its
hot life the rope light thrashes I in its suds, [is] Your chichi news noose
/ Dr. Unicef Cheng budget slasher movie hype on Late Review
I keep dreaming about you every single night last
night I you making love Stan, I didn’t know him then
it hurts, and I disappear but the nights stick.
Abner Jon Louima Burge Cheng.
This continues; the
end-break is introduced so as to provide a sample sufficient for
useful commentary. According to contemporary norms of poetic
discourse, does this sample tend towards text or speech? Neither:
this is heteroglossical script, it is text to be spoken and it is
speech transcribed. An italicised marker for vocal emphasis is
followed by a bullet point–sign directing a vocal presentation from
text, could be reading-out, could be improvisation. The arrows
reference computer code, an invisibly functional language.
What is the status
of ‘ng’? It is a common Chinese surname and linked therefore to
‘Zhong’ and ‘Cheng’. But also a digraph representing the
velar nasal, ‘ŋ’ in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and in
Sutherland’s readings of the poem becomes a gulp strangely
transposed to the high palate and nose — so ‘ng’ is both a name
and a noise, an arbitrary signifier. The swapping in the third line
implies a transformational grammar, where words can be dropped into
basic syntactical structures and some kind of sense must emerge; but
is followed at once by the brilliant neologism ‘phlegmophrenic’
which, it so happens, describes the trajectory of the preceding
swaps. They make sense in other words, in this word ‘phlegmophrenic’,
not just formally. What is ‘sdeigne’? Is it even sayable? It must
be, because it appears in Spenser’s Amoretti, sonnet 5, ‘sdeigne
of foul dishonor’, and presumably is pronounced somewhat like
‘stain’, transitional between a garbling of the Old French
‘desteindre’ and the modern spelling. But also it is an obvious
anagram of ‘design’, either by accident or design. ‘Cathex-Wizz’
makes sense only as a spoken pun on ‘cathexis’, while ‘monoplex’
must be a back-formation from ‘multiplex’. It is a relief to
discover that WLa-15 is indeed a type of tungsten electrode. ‘PAT’
is a little more obscure; the most attractive search engine result
proposes the ‘Process Analytical Technology’ employed by the
Federal Drug Agency to test the safety of new compounds, and
therefore picks up ‘reregulated’ — where, incidentally, no, not
incidentally, the suppression of the hyphen creates a stutter
recurring in the same line in ‘to to screw’.
The way this text looks with its slashes and square brackets and arrows and bullet points at capitals and italics, does not resemble a familiar reading script; it’s reminiscent of an avant-garde musical score, the kind of score more likely to be framed on a gallery wall than placed under the nose of a jobbing musician. But this score produces a terrifically exciting reading, a reading which on the three occasions I have seen it performed, has threatened to disarticulate the reading poet into a demented puppet. The puppet of text. The puppet of babble on simultaneously-broadcasting channels. This is something new. (Check out ‘Keston Sutherland’ on YouTube for a performance at Miami University, Ohio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMTted_5tA)
But this poetic script bears no fraternal relationship to the textual blocking and dislocating performed by the most radical products of American Language writing; because at the same time that this heteroglossical script runs and seems to divert from any semantic track in favour of a virtuoso play with sound and the forms of rhetoric, it entertains designs which are quite lucid and elucidable. As Marx’s commodities spoke, Sutherland’s consumables eat: consumerism is re-materialised here, with a vengeance. The first sentence sketches a brief history: Peter Lavrovich Lavrov was a nineteenth-century Russian socialist revolutionary who anticipated Mao Zedong in recognising that in countries where capitalist development was rudimentary, the peasantry could be an engine of socialist transformation. But Lavrov has morphed into Sergey Lavrov, a career bureaucrat and now Russia’s Foreign Minister. The ‘Stock Wizard’ sounds like a Warren Buffett, a wizard with stocks whose wizardry is a routine (‘stock’) trope disguising a malign economic system. These seemingly opposed figures continue to be propelled along ‘the blackened dogmatic catwalk’ of twentieth century history, but have become, like anything, anyone else, consumer choices. They are eaten eucharistically. The buy-fuck-ruminate substitutions run along the same lines as the Sadeian philosophy providing the poem with an epigraph: eating shit and buggering the host are the logic of Philosophy in the Boudoir. ‘Ruminate’ here returns thinking to the physical process of digestion; this is what consumerism does, you just take things in and then dump them.
Not only is the chosen passage open to interpretation, but it deploys elaborate contrivances of poetic artifice. The passage after the indent is obsessed with throat constriction, starting with ‘gargling’, bursting out in ‘recitative from a storm throat’, then ‘feazing that throat’ — ‘feazing’ being a nautical term for unravelling a rope — and once unravelled ‘the rope light thrashes I in its suds’ before constricting again in ‘Your chichi news noose’, where the word ‘chichi’ sounds like a stuttered Chinese but is derived from chee-chee, a racist term for the ‘hybrid minced English’ spoken by ‘half-breeds’ in India (and derived, according to the OED, from a dismissive Hindi word corresponding to ‘Fie!’ (really?!), and originally meaning filth). Again, Sutherland suppresses the hyphen in ‘chi-chi’. (As a further shade of meaning, pace the OED I have usually heard ‘chi-chi’ used mistakenly as a variant on ‘chic’.) The chi-chi rope is what causes Sutherland to choke in his public reading; the outbursts of rage from his throat are fully as much of the sewn-up economy and the stitched-up present as any other linguistic phenomenon. What comes out of his throat is the stuff that chokes him when it heard to come from the television, or should I say monitor. From the very start the stitch-up has been announced, perfectly performed in ‘Your • face lifting triple its age in Wuhan die-cut peel lids’ where Chinese factories produce Western faces.
No wonder Sutherland chokes in regurgitating his ‘I’. This is script as autocue, but autocue as in autopilot, that is, I am spoken by my script (I don’t just follow it) and the body rebels. If lyric poetry as a mode promises an override to autocue, the technology of override must vary according to the linguistic programme it would detourn or transcend. There have been times where a song or a roar or stately measure would do the job. Sutherland does it at full throttle. Some poems in the run-up to this poem, such as ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’ in his earlier chapbook Neutrality, seemed a little theoretical in their combination of pornography and politics, not that examples in the ‘real world’ have been hard to come by with the Iraq adventure; but the poems were a little too self-conscious owing to their genetic inheritance. This strain has gone with Hot White Andy. The intelligence and poetic resource are astonishing but are not advertised; this poetry really does come across as speech from the scaffold with a noose about the neck, and of an irresistible authority and eloquence. For make no mistake; the remnants of dignity and authority are not to be sacrificed out of liberal guilt. If you can get above yourself, do, by all means.
Philosophy in the Boudoir up against Poetry by the Back-door is what we get in Hot White Andy, for this poem unreels or feazes from the random selection of a Chinese businessman, located through Google, as a love object. This selection is inspired, in two important ways. First, the stock wizard of ‘love’ has become another consumer distraction, and is treated as such. Second, Andy Cheng is Chinese, and the complex mutual buttressing of the Western capitalist and nominally communist Chinese economies is enacted in the sexual relationship with Cheng, as the poem’s consumption of Chinese names anticipates the arrival of Chenglish as a global language — or rather, a new version of Chi-chi. The poem also gobbles a play, personal score-settling (what did Joan Retallack do to deserve this?), classical literary allusions, e-mail messages from a Nigerian seeking investments in a scam, snatches of French and German theory, every kind of stuff, but all of it urgently, desiringly driven. Nothing is wasted or treated casually — take the line before the opening passage breaks off: ‘nights stick’ sounds like ‘night stick’, and the pentameter ‘Abner Jon Louima Burge Cheng’ then trusses up Abner Lousima, a Haitian immigrant beaten up and sodomised with a bathroom plunger by New York City cops in 1997, and Jon Burge, a Chicago cop infamous for torturing confessions out of suspects, including use of a violet wand to deliver electric shocks up the rectum.
Now jump to close to the end of this poem to get a feel of where Sutherland gets to:
My bed is by the window.
I speak to you. You are impossible to forget,
the face ecstasy screams under,
lighting the world you damage and repossess.
I am communicating this.
You undiminishably are what I mean by all
love defiant under
the shadow of a dispassionate end in the right head.
These verses continue in such form, and lead to their last-line confession of ‘my desire for the next big thing: CHINA.’ But at this point what should be noticed, no, what must be blindingly obvious, is the beauty of these lines as they emerge out of Chi-chi and say something perfectly true. Granted utter corruption makes the world hectic and language too, the statement that ‘my bed is by the window’ stays madness with Dr Johnson’s kick. But successfully to stay madness under present conditions, doesn’t demand one capitulate to ‘a dispassionate end in the right head.’ The idea that ‘the worst are full of passionate intensity’ was apt, maybe, in talking about ‘adventurists’ among nationalist fighters, but has been applied too indiscriminately to poets. Arbitrary passion lights the path to lucidity in Hot White Andy; the loved one who stands for rampant and sexed-up consumption does light the world, and what makes love ‘defiant’ is that here is a consumer durable which cannot be wholly consumed — love’s object (Andy Cheng) remains defiantly undiminished, however it is circled or squared. Which is not all these verses have to say, and which is not so clear-cut, for they are complicated by being a repetition striving to stop so gross a stutter, these cadences heaved up from history, to get the mouth going once again; they are yet more and infinitely complicated by the ironies of their setting and saying, but remain defiantly undiminished. Like love, lyric isn’t something it’s possible just to do, as you might do macramé; you have to know how, surely, but know-how has to enter the prepared polarising zone, and the conditions for entry get more difficult and demanding all the time. Yes, they do, because lyric and love are not like dietary improvements or any other assessable privilege, and the circumstances (time, especially) that seem to favour them can truly diminish them. Desire’s polarisation fails to take. Only through being choked in chi-chi excess can Sutherland throw up a beautiful lyricism. And brazen as you like, he is spoken by it in the veritable model of lyric intimacy: ‘I now say it, without you to your face’. Not that the poem rests here. This oasis is virtual after all — well, both virtual and the only gold beyond assay. Love of Andy Cheng.
Hot White Andy was published first in Chicago Review’s British Poetry issue in Spring 2007, and Sutherland took it on tour to various US academic venues that April. Towards the end of 2007 it was republished rather elegantly by Barque in the UK as a chapbook, and can be bought from their website for a paltry sum (go to http://www.barquepress.com/andy.html). The present review seems to be the first of a poem I think the most remarkable poem in English published this century. Having seen the shell-shocked response of two very different audiences I am at a loss to account for the speechlessness unless we’ve been outdone in our jabber and feel abashed (I’m assuming there is some kind of operative ‘we’ about, I hope so). The poem is doing some work nonetheless. A passion for new British poetry was admitted to me more than a year after this poem had been detonated in their heads, by some graduate students on a major poetics program in the US. But given the absence of print or internet commentary, I feel compelled to write a fan letter rather than a critique, and to say a possible poetic future starts here — and if it doesn’t, I suppose I can go and grow vegetables. - John Wilkinson
http://jacketmagazine.com/35/r-sutherland-rb-wilkinson.shtml
SAID BY THE NEW STATESMAN TO BE ‘AT THE FOREFRONT of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry’, Keston Sutherland’s poetic and critical work is a headrush. High on its own sensitivity, his writings explode the familiar modes of poetry, fusing the lyric tradition with the high-octane languages of protest, stock market exchange and information technology, with the individuated vocabularies of biochemistry, geology and neurology. A sardonic yet rhapsodic disdain for high-capitalist consumerism and yappy Fox News neo-conservatism has won him international acclaim, and has given rise to six collections of poetry, numerous essays on poetics, politics and philosophy, his critical journal Quid and the co-founding of ‘nonconformist poetry’ publisher Barque Press.
We met on a steely day in Sutherland’s hometown, Brighton, where he is Reader in English at the University of Sussex. What follows is an edited version of a spooling conversation, ranging from ‘Enron to Xbox’ and back again, occasioned by the upcoming publication of his newest collection The Odes to TL61P (Enitharmon Press, April 2013). A poetry of unworkable postures and melodic germination, made famous by his astonishingly energetic readings (now widely available on Youtube), Sutherland rose to international eminence with the publication of a special edition of the Chicago Review in 2007, positioning his work alongside that of Andrea Brady, Chris Goode, Simon Jarvis and Peter Manson, and forming a major reconsideration of the field of contemporary poetry in Britain today. Studying under Jeremy Prynne during his years at Cambridge, he is nevertheless resistant to the coterie demands of the ‘Cambridge School’, preferring instead to enter into critical dialogues with the visual arts, improvised music, and multilingual texts.
Typified by a rampant lyricism, the warped soundbites and shifting logics of his work nevertheless confront political and social events; his collection Stress Position enacts torture sequences observed in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the demented puppetry of Hot White Andy, hailed by John Wilkinson as ‘the most remarkable poem published in English this century’, rages against our attitudes to twenty-first century consumerism. His newest collection comments on all the ‘mucky adult clay’ that comprises our pressed political landscape and yet marks a distinct shift in tone and composition. Characterised by Sutherland as ‘a kind of album or masque of metrical variations, everything from strictly perfected tetrameters to the most psychotic arrhythmia’, The Odes to TL61P upends the conventions of prose poetry. At once a eulogy to a now departed object – TL61P is the code for a replacement part of a now defunct Hotpoint washer-dryer – it is also a deeply felt meditation on all that is inexplicable. - Natalie Ferris
‘One critic noted that you represent ‘what the future of British verse should look like’. What do you think the future of British verse could look like?’
‘I deeply hope that I don’t know. I want it to be inconceivably astonishing to me. I want to encounter it as the most threatening and primitive freshness, I want to be so comprehensively confused by it that it takes me forever to learn to live with it and to reconcile the world that I already know with whatever this poetry is and does… I suppose, to be honest, that is my ambition as a writer for the future of my own poetry. I hope that the future of verse in this country, and everywhere, will be a future of more and more resolute, more passionately principled and more ardently dedicated confrontations with the injustices and machinery of capital, and that its interrogation of the structures of capital in living experience will be conducted more and more thoroughly, vibrantly and vitally. But I suspect that what will continue to happen, for a long time at least, is that lots of anxious and conservatively rather than radically narcissistic poets will go on writing verse which, with more or less justification, is meant to encapsulate and preserve in the aspic of sentimental memory and sensation the trivia of working-week-life and their surface profundities, poems that may only distantly touch upon the complexity of social relations, and then with a defensive, pretty archness. Or the audience will go on uncritically accepting that poetry is and ought to be in this way a modest and circumscribed art and, in its end, a comfortingly politically inert and ineffective one, from which the best we can hope for is lukewarm consolation.
‘I hope not. I hope not. I hope that, in Britain and everywhere else, amongst people who care about poetry, we might be persuaded, sooner or later, that there is no part, or detail, or potential of experience which cannot be radically addressed and transformed through the sheer delirious and euphoric momentum of powerfully expressive verse. I hope that might eventually become a collective ambition for readers and poets alike: to radically reconceive and feel again human relations in honour of and in the brilliant light of the power of poetry. The fundamental transformation of human life, that’s what I hope for.’
Read the interview here: https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-keston-sutherland/
I would like to write a little bit about how we might have approached HOT WHITE ANDY, and how we might continue to approach it.
This, then, is not my brief Reader’s Guide to Keston Sutherland but my Rough Guide to (Kinds Of) Readings of Keston Sutherland.
[If you’ve read the other blog, you can skip these next four paragraphs.]
I’ll start by saying some dumb things, because dumb thing are always useful to get out of the way.
Sutherland’s poems are full of words I don’t understand unless I Google them (a dictionary, for many, wouldn’t be all that much use). Some of them are in foreign languages I don’t know; some are technical words, some abbreviations or acronyms; some are words that I understand separately but, when they are jammed together or piled up into multiple vehicle car-crashes, I don’t properly see how they work.
Almost no words, which I think is worth saying, are either entirely Sutherland’s invention or portmanteau words, coinages, neologisms. However strange or extreme his language may appear, on first viewing, it is more the given language of the world than it is a private or eccentric language. We may find HOT WHITE ANDY obscure, but it’s not Finnegans Wake. - Toby Litt
Read more here: https://tobylitt.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/reading-keston-sutherland/
Remarkably, there are few contemporary poets that have even ventured to write anything approaching the breadth of his verse. And even though leading practitioners of the British avant-garde made a relatively well-publicized trip to the offices of the Chicago Review and the hallowed halls of its University in 2007 (as well as Notre Dame, SUNY-Buffalo, University of Miami and Harvard), and even though both J.H. Prynne and Sutherland have made subsequent visits to do readings, workshops and lectures in subsequent years, whatever graces bestowed here appear to have been shrugged off and forgotten by the U.S. mainstream which seemed more intent in mining the exhausted caverns of late 20th century poetry and particularly the New York School of O’Hara, Ashbery and their progeny, or exploring whatever essences can be squeezed from the dry walnut of conceptualism. [From this comment I specifically except the progressive and experimental contemporary poets (largely women, black, gay and new ethnic writers, and the new Chicago school of Michael Robbins and Anthony Madrid) who have broken away from the dominating influence of our post-WWII saints and cynosures.]
Consider the opening passage to “Ode 1.1” from the still unfinished Odes to TL61P (which appeared in the Chicago Review [56:2/3, Autumn 2011]):
In future you cover your cost in void too empty to be lost, static at terminal velocity; on the opening night as light parts and you jump out to gravitate orderly to ballot the flattering flesh you missed resist arrest in its shattering petty larceny, who looming over a motto executed in the Ottoman style of the sex jargon recited by Ériphile at II.i.477-508, in the mannequins’ scan of which smudged erotic jottings alleged in a hologram into the deep • private end of the primitive primary streak canal bound in stratified squamous • epithelium to descant many few billion one-liners into the hot squamocolumnar • junction with its teat cistern, a photocopy blurred into alienating aleatory poésie concrète by being roughly swiped back and forth with an aging raging hard-on for dysphagia over the scratched platen glass of the Canon MF8180C or Brother DCP-9045CDN all-in-one fax, printer and copier of the incomplete catechism that stubs out the real Shelley’s “Triumph of Life,” the leading question “What is lite?,” under the table propped up at right angles folded until they froth, to triple accountability to an afflatus, doing as the banks just did, not as the banks just said, I understand the hole that George is in, a dot whose innuendo comes too late …
[N.B. The final version of Odes to TL61P contains textual revisions which the author made after it was first previewed in the Chicago Review. The excerpts set forth herein are as they orignally appeared in the Chicago Review.]
While the style is reminiscent of Prynne’s, it is somewhat more tractable and much less abstract, primarily because Sutherland intends his poetry to be performed before an audience. Consider the phrase, “In future you cover your costs in void too empty to be lost,” which has a clipped, futuristic I Robot character to it. The sure employment of assonance keeps the music going in these diamond-like, faceted phrases, which must be broken out to reveal their nested meanings. The run-on nature of this mostly prose poem recalls Mallarmé”s versification or Nabokov’s prose, where every next word opens up vistas. In a lot of ways though, it is doubling down on the encyclopedic styles of Pound, Olson and Ginsberg in poetry, and Melville, Joyce, Pynchon, and Wallace in prose. The effect of reading all this for the first time is doubtlessly a feeling of vertigo due to sensory overload. In other words, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.” A major theme of the Odes to TL61P (which is the product code for a replacement door on a now defunct tumble dryer manufactured by Hotpoint) addresses a spiritually bankrupt society in the era of The Great Recession. The opening is presented in terms of the search for empty sex in a world of vacant materiality, and the road travels back to the source through the literary, socio-religio-political, industrial and technolgical realms. In the Odes to TL61P Sutherland conveys with excruciating pathos the human sensibility mutated by the radioactive industrialization of the soul, with its zombied and burned husk lacking the instinct to know the way back to the City of Love. Sutherland argues that responsibility for our present circumstances is the hegemony of capitalism which has perpetuated an illusion of progress, but the current regime of politicians and artists are most deserving of his scorn:
it was not so hard to watch you set and go hard into leading members of that cast, lead role models for our past, who beg to differ as to eat the mess we inherited from the last orgasm in government who slurp after the surplus spew of petty change remaindered when the banks have had their due, . . .
The commoditizers of the divine must face up to the consequences:
our flat back teeth drilled brightly in the new international tax regime protologism, refuting enamel, scorning accessibility, adrift in gum, a real rift per adage, cuts in holy water damage, implants of the daily grind, children out the real yet almost shut but not yet shut and yet still fantastically not shatterproof and smeary window sing the mess we inherited from the last magic diether who scrap the past to recycle the joy it brings the power set, of a subset, of a power set, UberBollywood: . . . .
I know of no contemporary poet in the U.S. (or the world) who has attempted to portray our human condition and cultural plight in so comprehensive and symphonic a style of writing. Obviously, the poem is broadly allusive, dense and scholarly, requiring an informed and committed reader. But in this way the work is no different from that of any of the great writers of the last century. Yes, by this I mean to put Sutherland in the class of Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Bellow, Pynchon, Wallace and the like. He is that good. However, this does not mean that American poets should rush out to imitate him. For every Eliot and Pound, there were also great poets like Stevens, Williams, Cummings and others who followed their own unique paths and wrote poetry of the highest calibre. A particular type of personality and intellectual ability is capable of reaching Everest’s peak every so often (notwithstanding the commercial exploitation that makes any reference to that once universal measure of human achievement obsolete). Perhaps the best way to put it is that Sutherland’s Odes to TL61P, which should be completed within the next year or two, will be the poetic equivalent of Sputnik’s launching, and I believe it will increase the arc, the height and reach of British and American poetry.
In an e-mail exchange with me, Scottish professor and poet Robin Purves commented that the British poets learned so much from their American counterparts, but that a reciprocal gesture of the next wave of British-inspired verse has not yet been reflected on the shores of the States. There is the hope, he said, that the American poets now studying at Cambridge would begin to make inroads here when they return.
I intend to annotate this piece with many links to Dr. Sutherland’s work and hope that you will pursue them. Sutherland is the real deal and there is absolutely no doubt that, with the completion of his much awaited Odes to TL61P, the world of poetry will never be the same. - Steven M. Critelli
https://rockcru.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/keston-sutherland-the-next-great-one/
University of Sussex, List of Selected Publications by Keston Sutherland
“On Keston Sutherland” by Ian Patterson – Review of Wither Russia in the London Review of Books (access may be required by subscription or courtesy granted by LRB)
Keston Sutherland’s poem, “Instincts on Trump University” (pdf) (audio recording)
Keston Sutherland’s essay, “Marx in Jargon” (pdf)
Keston Sutherland’s lecture, “Blocks: form since the crash” – a seminar at New York University, 13 November 2015 (audio) . A second lecture was held at the University of Chicago on November 19, 2015 and appears at YouTube.
Keston Sutherland – “Stress Position” (pdf download courtesy of Barque Press)
Interview of Keston Sutherland by John Tamplin, December 7, 2015 (Princeton Univ.), Blackbox Manifold, No. 17 (Winter 2017)
Keston Sutherland, “Sinking Feeling” (Sections 1 and 2; excerpt from The Proxy Inhumanity of Forklifts; Stress Position III: The Answer; excerpt from ‘Ode to TL61P 5’). “Sinking Feeling” (Section 3), (Section 4) and (Section 5) [from Soundcloud].
Nicholas Niarchos, “A Radical Poet in the Age of Google and Guantanamo,” The New Yorker (March 15, 2016).
Keston Sutherland’s statement for ‘Revolution and/or Poetry’ – October 15, 2013.
Keston Sutherland – Theses on Antisubjectivity Dogma (A Fiery Flying Roule) – May 1, 2013
Keston Sutherland – The World and John Wieners (world picture 7 -distance – Autumn 2012).
“The Poetry of Destroyed Experience” by Matthew Abbott – A Review of Odes to TL61P – “This is the culmination not simply of previous work but of a set of astonishing poems; their Aufhebung gives the most unsettling but also authentically hopeful account in verse of what it is to be human now of which I am aware. This is Sutherland’s most expansive, confronting, politically intransigent, funny and – in its best moments – convincing encounter with the destruction of experience yet.”
The White Review – Interview with Keston Sutherland (Natalie Ferris)
Keston Sutherland reads from the Odes to TL61P
From The Literateur – ‘Political all the way down’: Keston Sutherland on poetics, politics and community An interview with Dr. Sutherland by Laura Kilbride which offers an introduction to Dr. Sutherland’s poetry and politics. Excerpt from Odes to TL61P 5.
Keston Sutherland and John Wilkinson – Holloway Poetry Series (11-15-12) A new reading from The Odes to TL61P .
Keston Sutherland and J.H. Prynne reading at the University of Chicago, the first part of which consists of Sutherland reading from “Stress Position.”
Keston Sutherland performing a “Hot White Andy” – Keston Sutherland – Hot White Andy – Part A – 1/4 – YouTube (The video is in four parts – follow your nose)
Keston Sutherland – Text of “Hot White Andy” and “Roger Ailes” (Free Library)
John Wilkinson’s review of “Hot White Andy” by Keston Sutherland
Keston Sutherland performing a portion of “Stress Position” – Keston Sutherland, Stress Position, Part 2, SoundEye 13-1/4 …
Keston Sutherland – two poems (from Jacket Magazine #3)
Keston Sutherland – a poem (from Jacket Magazine #4)
Keston Sutherland – Happiness in Writing (from World Picture Journal) – an essay on Wordsworth’s Prelude and Adorno’s advice to writers in Minima Moralia.
Keston Sutherland – “Junk Subjectivity” – Article about “the consumer revolt in the avant-garde’s inbox” [from Mute Vol. 1, No. 28 (Summer/Autumn 2004)
Keston Sutherland on the poetry of J.H. Prynne: “Hilarious Absolute Daybreak”
Keston Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” Jacket Magazine #15, December 2001.
Introduction to Ode 1 and Ode 2 of The Odes to TL61P at Arduity.com
Keston Sutherland on Sexuality, Power and Capital
https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/keston-sutherland-on-sexuality-power-and-capital/
Keston Sutherland | Free Dissociation/Logic
https://my-blackout.com/2020/04/02/keston-sutherland-free-dissociation-logic/
Radical Formalism: Keston Sutherland and Geoffrey G. O’Brien in Performance
My favorite video of
Keston Sutherland reading his poetry was taped in New Haven, at a
series called WAVEMACHINE. The setting, as David Gorin, the poet who
runs the series, notes, is a “long, thin, unventilated basement of
the People’s Arts Collective, a queer-friendly, crowd-funded
community center established in an abandoned liquor store.” (Gorin
calls it an oddly appropriate place for hearing Sutherland’s
poems.) Sutherland stands in front of a graffitied wall, wearing a
gray T-shirt. He shuffles about and looks at the floor as he
introduces his work. When he begins to read to the poem itself,
though, the awkwardness dissipates: he alternates between frenzied
splurges of words, unpunctuated by line breaks—or even, it seems,
breathing—and quiet, careful moments of rumination. By the end, he
is rocking forward and back, index and middle fingers swirling in
tune to the beat of his words. The poem Sutherland is reading is the
third of his “Odes to TL61P,” which were written between 2010 and
2013, and which are described on his publisher’s Web site as “a
devoted love song to the now obsolete product ordering code for a
bygone Hotpoint washer-dryer.”
The work of the British poet Keston Sutherland offers complex but often surprisingly beautiful assaults on the way we live now.Photograph by Jenny / Courtesy Keston Sutherland
The performance is fairly typical of Sutherland: in many of the videos I’ve watched (I’ve never seen him read in person), he jerks from a trancelike state, in which words flow in a chaotic jumble, to the odic recitation of metrical lines. And when he does so it is as if you can see what the critic and poet Simon Jarvis has called Sutherland’s “violent shifts of register,” and you begin to apprehend, visually, the knotty prosody of his work. “The metrical effect is neither incantatory excitation nor expository focus,” Jarvis writes. “It is closer to snatching a breath upon surfacing, as though song were of the mere air it sounds in.” The poet J.H. Prynne has said that “mental ears” are necessary to read and write poetry—that one needs to register, in other words, not only what a line of poetry means, in a literal sense, but also how it works in phonological, socio-historical, and semantic terms. Watching Sutherland’s performances helps you develop those mental ears, and to appreciate his complex but often surprisingly beautiful assaults on the way we live now.
In addition to being a poet, Sutherland, who is British, is a critic and a professor at the University of Sussex. He is often referred to—perhaps more frequently by his detractors than by those who seek to praise him—as one of the “Cambridge School,” a group of writers who are mostly academics and who mostly studied with Prynne, who taught English literature at Cambridge for almost half a century, and who is still a prominent figure in the university’s cultural life. Occasionally, this group of poets is accused of obscurantism, or even cultishness. The “Cambridge” label is just as often disputed, though, since the supposed group is not specific in its membership or its style. If there is a school, its boundaries are fluid; the poetry is united by being difficult and confrontational. It is frequently high modernist in style and full of direct references to twenty-first-century life. It often draws from the work of the British romantics and the language of Marxism, the subjects of much of the academic work these poets have produced.
“Poetical Works 1999-2015,” a volume of Sutherland’s poems published last year by Enitharmon Press, is punctuated by quick shifts between the material and the abstract, the personal and the political. A line like “I’d sooner drown in bed forever with the women from my twenties, painting a sky of orgasms, acting insoluble” abuts long quotations from Trotsky. Sutherland juxtaposes varieties of obviously poetic diction—declamatory, violent, meek, sarcastic—with actual voices of worldly authority, voices that feel menacing in their general tone of understatement. “A Bingo Hall Riot,” from 2000, for example, deploys the quietly frightening language of a press briefing:
America will remain very much
ditto you hear
engaged in the Middle East I will
ditto you see
expect it to be a major priority
ditto no evil
of mine and of the department.
Also sprach der Öltanker.
This year, Sutherland has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton. The syllabus for his course this semester explains that students will “read Marx’s ‘Capital’ closely, chapter by chapter, with the aim of mobilizing some of the figures and latent concepts in the critique of political economy for use in thinking about radical poetry and poetics today.” One of the poems in the recent collection is a tale of detainee torture in the War on Terror, sprinkled with images of porn sites, fast food, classical philosophers, and haute cuisine (“la verité / flambée cloaked in blue cheese”), mashed up into something that is jarring but also weirdly familiar. Sutherland eschews surface emotion, preferring to place dissimilar objects and thoughts in strange, shifting juxtapositions. The poems feel like products of a world that is on the one hand terribly destructive, and on the other has become so full with stuff, and stuff we can buy. Sutherland wants us to look at it all.
Sutherland’s poem “Hot White Andy” is a love letter of sorts addressed to Andy Cheng, the export manager of a tungsten plant in Wuhan, China. Sutherland came upon the name while trawling the Internet. Using this name seemingly plucked at random, Sutherland illustrates the point that Cheng is both instantly accessible, online, and yet at the same time an entirely objectified and essentially unknown “other” to be consumed by his Western readers; he has said that the poem concerns “how we project our predatory feelings outwards, in this case outwards to China specifically,” and parts of the poem are difficult, even unpleasant, to read. It begins:
Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to
the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap
buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck
Lavrov, as the critic John Wilkinson has pointed out, is both the nineteenth-century socialist Pyotr Lavrov, and Sergey Lavrov, the current Russian Foreign Minister, a revolutionary turned bureaucrat. The Stock Wizard is a figure from the fairy-tale version of American capitalism: someone who has magically harnessed the powers of finance to reap wealth from trading. (He is also a “stock” character, an archetype.) Both are comestibles on the “catwalk” of contemporary culture, and “you” are implicated in their consumption, as they are eaten, then bought, then fucked, then ruminated. The process echoes an essay by Sutherland in which he examines a metaphor from Marx: workers, Marx wrote, are reduced by the processes of capitalism into gallerte, a gelatinous mush in which body parts are indistinguishable from the rest of the goo, which is consumable as labor. The violence of capitalism, Sutherland suggests, reduces both words and human beings to an indistinguishable commodified muck.
James Joyce famously said that his novel “Ulysses” had “so many enigmas and puzzles” that it would “keep the professors busy for centuries,” and Sutherland follows in the footsteps of his Modernist predecessors by being widely referential. The stream of vaguely familiar proper nouns in “Hot White Andy”—Andy Cheng, Bo Derek, Kebton Akinfemiwa, EN 1783, to name a few—are easily Google-able, though none is given enough context to insure that its true inspiration will be the first thing that pops into your search window. And these names are often, as you learn from Googling them, subtly deformed by the hand of the poet. Where does literature stand, Sutherland seems to ask, when its substance is so much trash, in an age where the words are infinitely identifiable but also so fungible as to be meaningless? T. S. Eliot described what we know as a “heap of broken images.” Sutherland’s response is that those images are not broken, they’re just constantly metamorphosing, and each of them has a price tag attached.
Watching Sutherland jerk about at the reading in New Haven, I get the sense that he is trying to convey that his writing, too, is a product, like a carton of orange juice at a supermarket. He makes himself into the puppet that poetry has made of the words he uses, and the puppet that capitalism has, he believes, made of literature. He is aware, in other words, of the violence that he is doing to language. In a commentary on a 1971 collection of Prynne’s poems, he wrote that “unity is unity by default and coercion: lyric as text harassed into its totality by the intrusions of dissonant stubs and grids that destroy the integrity of syntax and argument in the muted interrogation and echo chamber.” The products of the world that surround us, he argues, come from coercive violence, and are described for us by a self-congratulatory media cycle that amplifies our worst instincts.
Reading “Hot White Andy” is an eerie experience, because you are so often implicated in the processes that Sutherland critiques. He writes: “WANT HOT ANDY CHENG? / Want the enormous tragedy of the dream?” At the core of the poem is a discomforting idea about the way in which our society produces desire, and presents it as an inescapable choice. In “Mincemeat Seesaw,” one of the earliest poems in the volume, Sutherland directly addresses the reader: “I am relying/ just elsewhere on despotic brutalism/ as are you,/ ink pig.” And in the “Odes to TL61P,” the set of poems he read from at WAVEMACHINE, he similarly implicates the reader in the systemic violence of the modern world. He writes, as if describing a nightmare:
“It’s the 1960s. You ask to see the manager, only to be told, gradually, patiently, in innumerable stages, that you are the manager, and then asked, all at once, would you like the person who is complaining to be ejected, since it is you? We who bite the other hand are whatever is being itself.
“It’s impossible to bypass the first intoxications of sadism forever, gambling on a new age old age; you can ask the manager if you can find her why the exit is so dismally far away.”
Elsewhere in the poem, Sutherland points out that you, the reader, are living with, and passively accepting, a system that is “belabouring Iraq,” where drone operators “squeeze the trigger and look watchfully at scraps of ripped-up human” on television screens thousands of miles from the killing, while, closer to home, “the police smack the people” who protest the cost of education. Your complicity in this violence, for Sutherland, is a given: there is no opt-in, and there is no opt-out of this world.
Like Baudelaire (“hypocrite reader—my fellow—my brother”), Sutherland identifies with his reader in this unfortunate circumstance. He is also part of the system that he’s critiquing. He once told an interviewer for the White Review that his poems are less difficult to understand than “they are difficult to accept. For me, the difficulty of acceptance is much more radical... How do we accept that we will all die under a system of vampiric ruthless exploitation? What does it mean to live with that?” He added, “I’m trying in my poetry to investigate the profoundest difficulties of acceptance that I can find.”
But his work is not simply critical or pessimistic. There is a current of revolutionary optimism even in his darkest poems. The final poem in the Enitharmon collection is called “Jenkins, Moore and Bird.” After a stream of dour meditations on “the Realities of Life” (“never being caught remains the indispensable alibi for loving the wrong person forever”), the poem returns to the contemplation of an elliptically described machine in which a single-crystal diamond is attached to a sliding part; the work ends with an ebullient, panoramic scene, in which Sutherland writes of “the sense revived to native mortal fire and air.” The epigraph to the poem is a quote from Engels, which declares, “Revolution is a natural phenomenon.” (It’s not all optimism, of course: the ending of the poem also evokes the specter of the pharmaceuticals industry.)
“It remains, nonetheless, a fundamental ambition of mine that my poetry will exercise some influence of a political character over living individuals, now, in this world,” Sutherland told the White Review. He sees his work as not only a critique of the relations of capital, he explained, but also a vision of something better. “I want to turn those relations inside out and aggressively, beautifully, passionately and frantically find the most copious account I can make of how we can live together in a more profoundly generous way.” - Nicolas Niarchos
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-radical-poet-in-the-age-of-google-and-guantanamo
Poetry collections:
Whither Russia, (Barque, 2017)
Poetical Works 1999-2015, (Enitharmon Press, 2015)
The Odes to TL61P, (Enitharmon Press, 2013)
The Stats on Infinity, (Crater, 2010)
Stress Position, (Barque Press, 2009)
Hot White Andy, (Barque Press, 2007)
Neocosis, (Barque Press, 2005)
Neutrality, (Barque Press, 2004)
The Rictus Flag, (Object Permanence, 2003)
Antifreeze, (Barque Press,2002)
Bar Zero, (Barque Press, 2000)
Mincemeat Seesaw, (Barque Press, 1999)
At The Motel Partial Opportunity, (Barque Press, 1998)
Hate’s Clitoris and Other Poems, (Barque Press, 1997)
Lidia, (Equipage, 1996)
Prag, (Equipage, 1996)
Have Wishly, (Barque Press, 1995)
20 Poems, (with Andrea Brady; Barque Press, 1995)
„In a fast-moving, intelligent, visceral and sensual style, he considered what humanity, love and desire can be or become in a globalised and violently unjust world; the work seemed simultaneously hard-headed and impossibly tender. Sutherland's latest pamphlet, Neocosis explicitly addresses current events, their actors and their covert and overt effects.
... Within Sutherland's grotesque cabaret, we encounter many real-life characters, such as Roger Ailes, the genius of Republican-biased television since the Nixon era, now head of Fox; Albert Wohlstetter, advocate of precision bombing and limited nuclear war and Michael Levin, an NYU professor who advocates torture.
Sutherland's poetry is nearer to scratch video than heroic couplets, farcically remixing the conventional metaphors of political discussion, sampling bin Laden and the chatter of Fox-dominated radio frequencies and wrestling self-consciously with his vestigial literary options. It is ferociously complex; he is picking apart those awkward details and ideas that we don't often find in the media. But his poetry's questions - how to write about (and live within) a reality of money, massacre, media ownership, geopolitics and individual impotence - are clear enough. If you want to know what a committed but undogmatic poetry might look like in the era of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, this is one place to start." --Robert Potts, "Life, remixed", Sunday February 12, 2006, The Observer
"I think it's quite a common experience for poets to realise, at some point in their lives, just how little of what moves them in the world actually finds its way into their poems. No matter how elastic your medium, a gulf opens between the things in your life that tend to become poems and the things that don't. If you accept this as a problem, there are two ways round it. You can choose to do something else, maybe write journalistically, in order to keep the space marked poetry uncorrupted. The alternative is to try to find hidden properties of the medium itself which allow it to transcend its acquired limitations. Keston Sutherland's medium has always been more elastic than most, but when I think of his new book Neocosis I'm reminded of the moment in William Burroughs' The Soft Machine where the protagonist walks in on an ether party with a lighted cigarette. Most drugs, like most foods, can be burned as well as digested: the chemistry's much the same, but the power, the energy transferred per unit of time, is vastly increased. Neocosis is cut from the same stuff as Keston's earlier poetry, but the interactions among its material parts are ramped up to a level where they become self-sustaining, at least partly beyond the author's control, drawing in and on an informed self, wired to every possible source and sink of information in a world where truth equals shit at the very moment when the elastic snaps, leaving us with a face full of spare ribs and throat gristle. It's one of the most astonishing collaborations of mind and material I've ever known. And so is Keston." --Peter Manson, Cambridge, 16 February 2006
"Somebody will always be opposed, -- how could Keston for instance set out in the course he has taken without expecting his poetry to be thoroughly loathed by unknown persons who feel delegated and reduced by it -- it positively courts such a reaction." --Peter Riley
'But seriously folks, if we are no longer to quite "suffer the privilege of being fully distracted," we are also failing more than ever to find ways to make the first person plural signify as an oppositional element. No plasticene plastique dabbler lacking all sense of consequnce, of the every day after, Keston Sutherland's rage is sublimated into direct representations of the endlessly attempted substitutions of the personal and its desires for--everything. Sutherland doesn't attempt to give us the real materials of the global economy, whatever the evidence might seem to suggest, but rather the infinite distortions which are our only access to it, and the errant, monstrously Gehry-like bits in which we might catch unanticipatable reflections: for Lear's five 'never's, Mincemeat Seesaw's six 'rapes.' - Mike Scharf, quoted in Allodox blog, 10 September 2003
'This, then, is ethically driving and driven work; but also work at great play.' --Pete Smith, The Gig
'The lines move rapidly, sonic patterns sharply burst, and the pages burn in your hands as you read them.'--Carol Mirakove, Washington Review
'These are lines to
snort up a rolled-up fiver...' -Tony Lopez in Stand n.s. 1.4 (Spring
2000).
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