Ben Borek - a hilarious, epic romp of a novel encompassing, in its burlesque scope, our modern crisis of masculinity, the banality of City work, our retreat into virtual lives and the alienating effects of modern technology, with plenty of variegated sexing in-between.

Ben Borek, Sissy, Boiler House Press, 2018.
excerpt


Ten years after the cult hit Donjong Heights, Ben Borek is back with another brilliantly surreal and darkly comic satire, SISSY.
Sissy is an hilarious, epic romp of a novel encompassing, in its burlesque scope, our modern crisis of masculinity, the banality of City work, our retreat into virtual lives and the alienating effects of modern technology, with plenty of variegated sexing in-between. Sissy is an anti-hero antidote to Don Juans; a modern masculine counterweight to, and sad manifestation of, the internet-induced fright of the real: a thirty-something wimp by day – surreally re-born of his long-suffering mother each morning – and a would-be-gangsta by virtual night. The novel is a virtuosic attack on the notion of the male Romantic Hero written in a language that is rich and flamboyant; enjoyably, hilariously, baroque, while at the same time an extraordinary reclamation of the narrative epic form for the woker ‘now’.

"SISSY is a funny, exquisite, appalling, unprecedented, masterpiece." – Toby Litt

The novel's cast of characters includes a household of progressive eastern EU migrants, a violently activist feminist performance artist, and, in various disguises, a self-consciously Nabakovian and deeply sinister narrator who manipulates and duels with Sissy throughout, making observations via remote-controlled Gecko-cam, while distracted by a foot fettish. Its intricate subplots include a quest for and repatriation of thirteen magical feet, a reminder of the role of the non-British in the Battle of Britain, a disastrous wedding in Eastern Europe and a final, terrible revelation. Ben Borek is unique: no-one else writes like this, or can write like this. His vision is dark but also, almost inexplicably, obscurely warm and deeply humane.






In an interview in these pages nearly eleven years ago, on the occasion of the publication of his first novel-in-verse Donjong Heights, Ben Borek said that he was working on several things:

‘..in a stupid and haphazard way. Poems (mostly connected in some way with living in Warsaw), a (prose!) novel, and another novel in verse with a few different narratives, touching the mass influx of Poles to London, among other things.’

Apparently Donjong took about a year to write; if Borek is referencing the genesis of his new massive poem Sissy here, we’re looking at a time-span of about ten times that. Now I don’t know the manuscript history of the poem, but there are clues in the text which indicate it has been a long time in the composing: a bus ‘bends’ under Vauxhall Cross (the ill-fated Bendy Buses last carried London commuters in December 2011), while there are references to Brexit bringing it closer to today. There is also a plotline involving the online virtual world, Second Life, which while still a going concern, probably peaked at the beginning of this decade. However long it took, there is something about it — the relentlessness, the largesse, the wit — that means it feels like something that has sprung into existence fully formed, or at most in the time it takes to read it; at the same time, it’s methodical and consistent, formally rigid and regular in design, which takes serious work. Sissy is, in the tradition of its ur-text Don Juan, rather like life itself (‘Is it not life? Is it not the thing?’ wrote Byron in a letter): skipping along frantically, battering you with sensations and adjectives, turning to food or the toilet without warning, and echoing with voices from within and without.
The poem is named for its hero, and follows him attempting to find a companion on a website where you can buy a marriage to a ‘Slavic Beauty’, and travelling across Europe by train. The first time we encounter the character Sissy he is tucked up in bed, under a duvet cover featuring a faded map of Europe pre-1989. He’s also inside his mother, ‘like a crewman/ [i]nside a sticky hull.’ Every day he is literally reborn, sliding out of his mother with ‘horrific/ [a]bandon’; it’s an image that never quite settles and every time it is invoked causes an uncomfortable squirm, and like a lot in the poem, it looks an awful lot like a symbol, but a symbol that is resistant to interpretation. The website Slavic Beauties is one such symbol, or the narrator’s foot fetish: he interrupts the narrative to fulfil his desires at one point (flimsy sandals, open-toed, size three), apologising on his return (‘Oh gosh, I’m sorry that I had to vanish/ [i]n such a heady rush… I’ll clear away the edible confetti’). There is something both really obvious to do with metrical feet, and really ambiguous to do with fetishing form, going on here, particularly when there is a further plotline involving the repatriation of amputated magical feet to the Polish countryside.
Alongside Sissy’s search for a wife, and his journey East, there are several other narrative yarns. In fact, a fundamental success of the poem is the way that the disparate strands intertwine towards the end, and what threatened to be flimsy narrative contrivances to hang the poetry on gains a substance which is beautifully integrated into the poetics. The multiple plotlines include Sissy’s alternative reality online, where he is a gangster called Neno Brown, the narrator’s strange haunting of Sissy, and the lives of the inhabitants of a house in North London’s Cricklewood. They are introduced like this:

‘An Eastern household fond of vodka, E,
Noam Chomsky, Goldfrapp, Echinacea tea,
The liberation of the guinea pig,
The “subject as a process”, not a state.
(One free from labels such as Tory/Whig,
Male/female, Marxist/NeoCon, post/late,
State/nation, nation/state.) You want their names?
Those barely-burning arbitrary flames
That signify so little, that this house
Would rather do away with (but they must,
For ease of social movement, never douse
And scatter into nominative dust).’

Borek, who now lives in Warsaw, seems at home in this European left-wing milieu, and the loving abuse of it is merciless and properly funny. The poem is in many ways a negotiation of the space between his new home and his old. There is a relationship between the tortured English of one character, and the necessary syntactical acrobatics required to write in rhyming iambic pentameter; this connects the poet, who translates stuff from “out-there” into ordered language, and the person speaking a second language, translating stuff from “in-there” into a foreign construction. Britain is described as ‘west of Europe’ at one point, and there is a clear implication of the interconnectedness of the continent throughout. The poem isn’t political in any obvious sense, but in the way Polish words are used to extend or complement the poetic line metrically embodies the relationship between the two edges of Europe.
From Ithaca on, epic poetry always wants to return. Sissy moves from South London to North, across Europe to Lviv, and then back to Vauxhall, via North London again. Indeed, the first rhyming couplet of the book matches ‘circulate’ with ‘placid weight’. It is air that is circulating, and as we trip onto the next stanza, we see that the ‘placid weight’ is the tide of the Thames. The natural motions invoked as the poem begins are repetitive and circular. But while the form is regular, digression is the central thread of the poem; we encounter our first parentheses after three lines, and it goes on for six-and-a-half lines. The narrator notices everything, and comments on it, relevant or not to the immediate action. Footnotes, also written in verse, occur throughout the book, often running over several pages and sometimes continuing beyond the end of a chapter. This is what the novel-in-verse, or epic poem, can do perhaps better than any other form: Borek foregrounds the randomness of life, and find space for the distractions and mundanities of daily life, but by clothing them in the same ritual solemnity of verse as the higher themes of Love and War, everything becomes freighted with importance. This is sometimes funny, sometimes ridiculous and sometimes oddly moving. The rhyme form, which is sesta rima, meaning six-line stanzas rhyming ABABCC, is propulsive. The first half of a rhyme looks forward to its other half, and the layered heroic couplets in this form are incessant. Swinburne wrote of the ‘fervent flow of stanzas’ in Don Juan, ‘now like the ripples and now like the gulfs of the sea’; and Byron described his own poetry as a ‘bubble, not blown up for praise,/ But just to play with, as an infant plays’. There’s that feeling with Sissy, too. It’s sort of a natural phenomenon — an impression bolstered, not lessened, by the high artificiality of the form.
If this all sounds indulgent, it is. But to complain about indulgence, vulgarity, verbosity, lunacy, crudity or silliness would be like criticising an encyclopaedia for being smugly know-it-all. Sissy is grandiose by nature. Near the beginning, the narrator’s muse is described:

‘Her taste is ornamental, Romanesque;
The arches colourful, the vaults grotesque.’

The too-much-ness of imagery and metaphors are not needless excesses but the heart of the project. Sissy is not quite about a world gone mad, because the world’s always been mad, but it is about the multiplicity and oppressive now-ness of experience — and with our high-speed trains and broadband, this is as relevant as ever. Modernism and Postmodernism are both conceived of as formal responses to fragmented lives led today; but high formality has a place too. The lack of restraint in content is held in check by the formal rigidity, the poetic line acting as a thread which guides you through the excesses. The poem is built along lines, rivers, train-tracks, modem cables and ropes, and fittingly ends with the tying of a kimono sash, in a completion of the thread motif. It’s quite an extraordinary achievement to colour this vibrantly and gaudily, and keep within the borders. - James Tookey
www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy/



Ben Borek, Donjong Heights, Egg Box Publishing, 2007.


Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry shows how a new thinking of poetry involves a regrounding of and re-selection from the archive. Virginia Woolf (in her diaries) argues that Byron's Don Juan presents "an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it"; she is thinking about how to experiment with narrative, and commending a form-content: "the springy random haphazard nature of its method". Woolf probably didn't anticipate the same galloping form encompassing a Japanese baseball player and the rest of Koch's Ko, or a Season on Earth, but the comment about elasticity is also echoed by Ashbery's statements on an elastic poetry which will fit many feet like a pair of socks. This is a way of thinking seriously about long (and short) stretchy forms, and what Ben Borek has done is a grasping of the sonnet narrative of Pushkin / Seth in order to imbue it with a renewal of the Byronic digressive spirit (rather than taking Byron at second hand through Seth as a weaker exemplar).

The Onegin sonnet has the ottava rima elasticity but a more stately movement – its epistolary outbreaks rest on such a sense of this being a more considered rush, reading as spliced couplets stepping forwards. Donjong Heights is, then, a "novel in verse", and it is set in south London, in and around a council block which gives its name to the title. It is beautifully published by Egg Box in hardback, with an illustration for each chapter. A prologue directs the scene as for a movie (an update on the satirical instructions-to-a-painter genre),

South London has its reputation:
No tube, a multitude of guns,
And hence this Johnsonesque quotation:
“When Peckham tires one simply runs
On up to Hoxton and carouses
In trendy nouveau-cool warehouses
And listens to Electro Funk
Affecting toned down retro-punk.”
Don’t get me wrong, it’s no Soweto
Down south, it’s not all crack and pillage –
Just take a look at Dulwich Village –
But for the common man it’s Netto
Not Conran, tea not mochaccino
And Asda jeans, not Valentino.

Now reader, focus on a room;
Mix cinematic metaphors
With bookish ones, engage your zoom
And speed up pockmarked streets, through doors
That open for the lens politely,
Skim rooftops high above the nightly
Dramatics in the streets below
(The pubs call time, the usual show
Of fights and mawkish “au revoirs!”),
Then hurtle up, the revellers melt
And fade behind, Orion’s belt
Is slalomed briskly and the stars
Are left to their portentous glowing
As, reader, look, the camera’s slowing…

and then our hero narrates the bulk of the poem - a plaint, as his aorta is faulty and he has not long to live: his heart is hieratic as it beats out its last epic. (There are also interruptions from an omniscient narrator who berates and has an awful lisp). There is one thing our hero wants to do: have a Christmas party, where he can hopefully express his love for Catherine, his ex-girlfriend (they were separated over a mix-up). That expression however only comes in an exchange of letters – which rather reminded me of those comments on Romeo and Juliet that it is essentially a tragedy of the postal system.

But all the preparations for the party occupy the chapters as we spin towards that bright ending – buying a suit from a downstairs mafia style tailor, meeting up with John and 'Lord Byron' in the pub –

Oh, when our Lordship has his whinges
I just switch off. The fact he thinks
The Greeks are still at war with Turkey
Suggests he has a rather murky
Conception of the current map

– and a series of other comic persons, and of course writing the invites. This turns out to involve one of my favourite set pieces in the book, a burlesque nativity:

"To top it all you must endure,
(The consequence of not prebooking)
Delivery amid manure
With rows of bovine eyes all looking.
It doesn't stop there either, friends –
Poor Mary's ill luck never ends.
Her son turns out a firebrand
Who never lends his dad a hand
At work (he sees himself as higher
Than mundane work, feels nails and saws
And joining shelving, whittling doors,
Malapropos for a messiah
And hangs out with his unwashed clique
Of followers and wows the meek)."

The narrative feels compact (unlike The Golden Gate or the picaresque Don Juan), whether it diverts into graffiti from a south London wall, how hip-hop got started, an invitation to sexual love, a thought on modern over-exposure to music (rhyming porno with Adorno) or whatever. In the convergence of the drive to death and the comic details of our fussy, prim narrator's preparations, there is a circuit which makes us laugh the more; a burlesque truth in a spin towards death. - Melissa Flores-Bórquez

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2007/11/ben-boreks-donjong-heights.html

3:AM: What were your influences for writing a fiction-length poem? It seems unusual.
BB: I suppose it’s a little unusual. There are more verse-novels (or novels in verse, or whatever you want to call them) than people realise. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a well-known example in the very same form (after Onegin). Then there’s Glyn Maxwell’s Time’s Fool, John Fuller’s The Illusionists, The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo, and a lot more I can’t remember (I have problems with my memory).
But I think what you end up writing is not necessarily due to what you’ve been reading, or what you’ve found influential. I would say I read (in the past), and read (generally), more prose fiction than things written in formal verse, but somehow strict formality seemed to suit me. I think I’m a magpie in the sense that all the things I read whilst I write go some way to informing what and how I write. Maybe it’s horribly transparent that I was reading lots of X whilst writing the fourth stanza, or lots of Y during the sixth…but I’m not saying who because I’m not sure I can remember accurately.
3:AM: One of the sources of energy in the poem comes from the tension between the style and the setting. Writing about a South London tower block in language that is playful, inventive and elegant is quite a feat. Did you intend the poem to be written in this way at the outset?
BB: I think the form inevitably makes it have to be that way. Metre, but also the strict rhymes, mean that, as much as you might like to, you can’t really produce a story written in the vernacular that might be more fitting to the setting. I think these things aren’t necessarily too deliberate, and I tend to write everything very formally anyway, despite myself (did I mention that?). But the central character is a self-consciously ‘cultured’ chap who really couldn’t talk in any other way. I think I like generally the idea of things being ‘inappropriate’ in terms of style vs. situation — it makes things more fun. And, besides, why should one perpetuate the idea of grotty South London in fiction?
3:AM: How long did 152 pages of rhyming poetry take to compose?
BB: That’s hard to say. Looking back, it didn’t really take that many writing hours, but I am either lazy, or work very slowly, or both, so I’d say about a year (in time) or about three months in days I actually spent working.
3:AM: Did you have one memorable experience that inspired Donjong Heights?
BB: Not an experience, as such. But the desk I sat at when I started working on it looked out across South London and the window framed a huge estate that I always knew as Donkey Alley Estate, but is actually called Dawson Heights. Not conscious, but I guess it was just there, suggesting itself…
3:AM: It’s a finely-illustrated piece of work. How involved were you in this side of the production?
BB: Well, I decided I liked the idea of an illustrated book and got searching online. I found the society of illustrators, and looked through lots of people’s portfolios that were linked. I liked Natalie’s work very much, and she shared an online ‘gallery’ with Matt, so, with tight deadlines, it made sense to split the workload, which was fine, because Matt’s work is very good too!
3:AM: What are you working on now? What are your working routines and habits?
BB: I’m working on lots of things, in a stupid and haphazard way. Poems (mostly connected in some way with living in Warsaw), a (prose!) novel, and another novel in verse with a few different narratives, touching the mass influx of Poles to London, among other things. Oh, and I’ve been writing postcard poems to three other poets in three other European cities for a project called Permanent Tourist, which is part of the London Word Festival.
I have no routines. I probably should, but I don’t seem to be able to make myself work when I don’t feel like it. I live in a very small flat and there’s usually a distraction like another human being or a boiling kettle or a barking dog…

3:AM: What fiction and poetry have you read and liked recently?
BB: Luke Kennard’s The Harbour Beyond the Movie is excellent — witty, intelligent. Will Self’s The Book of Dave isn’t so new now, but I read it recently and think he’s getting better and better. I’m a bit out of the loop really when it comes to new things in Britain. Every good Polish student should have read Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, and I think that should be extended across Europe. It is strange and wonderful and unnervingly funny…and was banned by successive regimes (Nazi, Stalinist, Polish Communist) in Poland during the 20th century.
3:AM: How did you start writing? What made you keep going?
BB: I don’t really know how I started. Did I start? No epiphany, I’m afraid. I just do it, and think it may as well be so, because things would be duller without it. Also, people seem to like my work, and I’m really rather fragile, so that fact probably makes me keep going…
3:AM: Are you publishing poetry in Poland?
BB: God no! I speak Polish like a baby, and I don’t really think there’s much outlet for new Anglophone poetry here. But I’ve written quite a lot about being in Warsaw and hopefully it will see the light of day somewhere. I really, quite stupidly, imagined that after living somewhere for 18 months I would just ‘pick up’ the language, through osmosis. And I think that process does happen, but not with Polish so much, because it is just so bloody difficult — nouns, which come in three genders, all changing in seven ways depending on their employment, verbs being different for every person (and sometimes this includes gender), very long words with virtually no vowels… - Lander Hawes
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/donkey-alley-estate-an-interview-with-ben-borek-2/


Ben Borek grew up in South London. His previous novel in verse, Donjong Heights, published by Egg Box, was a cult hit back in 2008 and his poetry has been published in City State (Penned in the Margins), London, A History in Verse (Harvard University Press), and Dear World and Everyone in it (Bloodaxe). He has read his work at festivals throughout the UK and Europe and audio of his work is available at the Archive of the Now (archiveofthenow.org). He lives in Warsaw with his partner and son and is employed variously as a copywriter, editor, translator and voiceover artist.