Aaron Kent - an experimental-verse-novella, inspired by the works of Mark Z Danielewski, Luke Kennard, and Max Porter. It is seperated into 8 different chapters, and narrated by death as he recounts carrying eight different people into the afterlife.

Aaron Kent, Subsequent Death, zimZalla, 2018.
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Subsequent death is an experimental-verse-novella, inspired by the woks of Mark Z Danielewski, Luke Kennard, and Max Porter. It is seperated into 8 different chapters, and narrated by death as he recounts carrying eight different people into the afterlife. The font/colour/style changes with each chapter, and readers can expect to have to turn the book around, follow paths through writing, and even have to read the book upside down in a mirror to understand certain passages.


Your verse-novella Subsequent Death is quite radical in terms of its presentation (the way the text is arranged, its colour and shape etc), are you planning to do more work like this or was Subsequent Death a one-off?
I am hoping to do a pseudo-sequel to Subsequent Death called Subsequent Birth which tells the story of 8 different lives coming into the world – as opposed to eight lives leaving the world in Subsequent Death. I want to do more stuff like this, but not to the point where it become my ‘thing’. I’ve got another book coming out with Guillemot in 2018/2019 about West Penwith in Cornwall, where my poems are alongside photos by William Arnolds. That was interesting because I’ve never really done pastoral poetry before, or poetry about Cornwall.
I’ve also got a book entirely in my made up language, and a more traditional poetry book on the horizon – both of which are in consideration with publishers at the moment. I think the key, for me, is to keep evolving. I don’t want to be tied down to one style, nor do I want to change styles for the sake of it – I will write however suits me and my mood at the time. https://theimportanceofbeingaloof.tumblr.com/post/166174402114/5-questions-with-aaron-kent

I don’t know where this book came from.

I don’t remember buying it, I don’t remember accepting an offer for a copy of it, I don’t remember being given it in person. But, alas, here it is, in my hand and now in my head: Subsequent Death by Aaron Kent, a book of prose poetry of a type I don’t know how to name, published by Zimzalla. Let’s dive in.

Subsequent Death is narrative poetry, and speaks from the perspective of a slightly-tweaked idea of the Grim Reaper. Each chapter shows this personified Death meeting a different person (or persons) on their way to the afterlife. This premise allows for meditations and asides on a range of different topics including the futility of war, the redemptive life-giving energy of fucking, the smug sense of karmic retribution when a people trafficker drowns in his own ship, and (of course) the pointlessness of religion. There’s some genuinely wise and (probably accurate) writing about how those who are most likely to beg for more life are those who have not lived well, those who have not been happy, but here this urge is treated as nonsensical, rather than as the relatable and sad truth that it evokes. I don’t know if this is Kent’s opinion or the opinion solely of his narrator, but for me the validity of this idea is evidence of optimism rather than fear, of the persistence of hope even until the end of life.

“Why beg for the continuation of a hated existence unless you hadn’t lost hope in a better life?”

I found myself asking

One could argue, of course, that the threat of “hell” and “eternal torture” could keep people craving life through fear, but I don’t think that is true, certainly not any more. I think people beg for more life because they believe in happiness, they believe in the potentiality of change and they believe, hopefully, in the potential of another week, another month, another year being just about enough time for them to fucking turn things around and enjoy themselves, even if just for a bit…

To live a little longer to taste a little more, one small mite, of a rare pleasure.

One more fuck, one more kiss, one more hug, one more walk in the park, one more swim in the ocean, one more lick from a dog, one more beer with an old friend, one more level of Super Mario Bros…

One more night on the town, one more tweet, one more novel, one more book of experimental poetry read…

One more block of cheese, one more city break, one more poo in an airplane toilet, one more season of Game of Thrones, one more Instagram post that gets 30 likes, one more day waking up in a bed and the arms of somebody good, one more fried egg sandwich, one more fucking risotto ball, one more two hour avant garde jazz playlist on Spotify, one more listen to Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1…

One more two hour car ride in the countryside, one more evening drinking alone and listening to the music I loved as a teenager and reminiscing about how I felt hopeful and free and excited and how even though I was unhappy for ages I made a good life at least for a bit…

One more time picking up my dog’s poo, one more singing loudly to pop songs in my sister’s car, one more going a full day without anyone making me feel like shit, one more book sent to me without me knowing or remembering where it came from…

There are many little things, minuscule things, moments of pleasure, in the most melancholic of lives, and each of these are things we could beg for more of. For years I craved death and at some point I will probably crave death again, but I can imagine myself, at that last moment, begging for just a little bit more, but for a good bit, a good bit a good bit.

“I haven’t read the sixth volume of My Struggle,” I’d beg the Grim Reaper, “and I’d love to do karaoke one more time, will you sing the Kenny Rogers part of ‘Islands In The Stream’, with me, Mr Reaper?”

I’d like to see my friends, I want to remember when they all helped me when I wanted to die. It is only when other people made me feel like I wasn’t inherently hateable that I really learned I really learned I really…

Aaron Kent’s Subsequent Death is structurally inventive, its sentences and ideas bounce between pages and boxes with the pages. Some of it is printed as mirrored text, sometimes lines of text obscure other lines of text and sometimes the readerly eye is stretched across space in a frustrating way but mostly in a manner that adds space for thought and reflection.

There is lots of white space here, and there are lots of strong ideas, and lots of inventive ways in which those strong ideas are displayed.

I enjoyed it, I think. It certainly made me feel reflective, which is something, right? Though I did type this after my final day in a job and while about to leave the house to head to my oldest friend’s wedding, so I think for me to feel anything other than reflective right now would be impossible.

I don’t want to die, but I think that even when I did I would have begged for a little more time to seek happiness. Which is what I did, basically, and – ha ha ha – a little bit of happiness is definitely what I’ve found… - Scott Manley Hadley

https://triumphofthenow.com/2018/12/26/subsequent-death-by-aaron-kent/


Although not well-known in the US, Aaron Kent is a British force. I first came across his work via his Poetic Interviews project, wherein he poetically interviews writers as disparate as James Franco and Sage Francis, Phillip B. Williams and Rebecca Woolf, among many, many others. A question in the form of a poem from Kent and a response in the form of a poem from the interviewee, Poetic Interviews is a long scrolling ingenuity and well worth following. But as a writer unto himself, Kent is also worth searching out. Subsequent Death, his new work, is a novel-in-verse that doubles as typographic melisma of mood and structure; words, sentences, and lines are skewed everywhere throughout the text, and one page rarely looks like the one facing it on the opposite side. I interviewed Kent about the Subsequent Death, the UK writing scene, and his predilection for certain words more than others.
Reading Subsequent Death, I immediately thought of the seminal Modernist literary journal BLAST; the layout, typography, and overall format of Subsequent Death harken back to it in both direct and indirect ways. I also thought of some of Douglas Kearney’s work, a poet I consider one of America’s best. But the book is of course completely its own thing—could you give me a brief overview of its conception and gestation?
The concept of Subsequent Death came about as a way of exercising demons. I had be in group therapy for a while and found that I had become able to forgive myself for things that had happened to me, but I wasn’t able to forgive others. So, rather than talk about it week after week, I decided to approach it creatively—and by metaphorically killing them off, I was able to take control of the traumas and really allow myself to confront and dissolve the feelings I had.
I had also wanted to do something different for a while, something inspired by Danielewski’s wonderful fiction work (such as House of Leaves). I took a little bit of time to learn Adobe InDesign, then began to construct Subsequent Death over the course of one day sat on a train. After I’d got all the pieces together, I sent it to my fantastic editor, Jennifer Edgecombe and began to shape it into the book it is today.
Sadly, I think a lot of US poetry readers don’t know a whole lot about the poetic landscapes in other countries. As a UK resident, who are some of your favorite contemporary UK poets and what makes them unique in your opinion? And what do you think about the scope of contemporary UK poetry in general—things you love, things you wish you could potentially change, things that you think are worth noting?
A few UK poets I love: Siddhartha Bose, Ross Sutherland (who is less poetry focused currently), Andrew Fentham, S.J. Fowler, Emma Hammond, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Tom Jenks, Rupert Loydell, Sandeep Parmar, Max Wallis, Dean Rhetoric, Charlie Baylis.
A few UK presses I love: Penned in the Margins, Knives Forks and Spoons Press, Shearsman, Veer, Nine Arches, Sidekick Books, zimZalla, Carcanet, Bloodaxe.
UK contemporary poetry has seen a recent resurgence in spoken word, and while that is wonderful—and can be the launchpad for somebody’s interest in poetry—I feel it can lead to other forms of poetry being ignored. Spoken word artists are much more likely to get media coverage than other poets, and everything outside almost ends up as kind of niche. But I feel the UK does very well with experimental poetry, and a lot of poets here spend time with other work such as plays, novels, etc. For example, Luke Kennard has recently released his novel The Transition, and Siddhartha Bose is currently touring his new play, No Dogs, No Indians.
How important is narrative to your work? And when you were writing Subsequent Death—which is a novel-in-verse, complete with chapters and a semi-loose, ethereal plot—were you prizing sound more or sense? Both elements equally? Or?
One of the principle ideas behind Subsequent Death was to attempt to create a work where the reader had to be actively reading rather than passive. Technology has meant that people interact with their device, whether it is through swiping the screen, turning the phone, taking photos, etc. And that is wonderful, I’m a big advocate of technological advancements. So I considered how I could make a book that was interactive, while still essentially just being text on a page (no popups, etc). Hence, why Subsequent Death requires the reader to turn the book around or trace things all over the page or grab a mirror and turn the book upside down.
However, I didn’t want to sacrifice narrative to make this work, I didn’t want the book to be a cheap trick. Therefore narrative became rather important, it was essential to ensure that the work itself would hold up regardless of the interactivity of the book. I do like to structure my writing into a narrative—whether that is ensuring my poems fit into themes/sections, or creating a whole narrative for a work. I find it hard when poems go from one theme to another, from one idea to another, throughout a book with any sort of coherence.
Vis-à-vis some of what you discuss above (the demon-exorcising, the group therapy), do you consider yourself a lowercase c confessional writer to a certain degree? Or instead one more indebted to the imagination’s myriad ebbs and flows? When I read Subsequent Death I had no idea about your personal relationship to the book’s speaker, for example, and that lack didn’t seem to factor in to my enjoyment of the text—although as the volume’s author perhaps you have entirely different notions.
I would like to think that I can achieve being both—that through being confessional, others may not get that sense of the work and enjoy it on a different level, but some may and therefore will find a different reading. I’m a big believer in “the death of the author” and know that I can’t stand over everyone’s shoulder and tell them what I intended. That’s the beauty of writing for me, the difference of interpretations—and all are valid.
I’ve asked this question to quite a few other poets before, but in curiosity’s interest I’ll ask it of you: do you have—or would care to identify—favorite words you return to again and again in your work? Words that you like, for whatever reason. I asked Eileen Myles before, and she hates and won’t use the word shard—too stereotypically poetic—and likes and often employs you and dog. Michael Earl Craig stated that he’s not fond of snack or moist but goes wild with little, tiny, violently, briskly, and slowly. Are there words, then, that you come back to again and again? Any words that you revile and won’t deign to write or type down?
I return to anthe—one of Saturn’s moons, and I return to arc as a nod to the wonderful J.H. Prynne. I’m really fond of taking sentiments or phrases I’ve used in the past and reusing them in the future but changing them slightly. I used the phrase “even in winter, the sky was full of suns” in a series to represent my father’s disinterest in our disconnection, and later rewrote it as “in winter, the sky needs no suns” to represent my wife and I having a daughter.
I don’t like adverbs really, they quickly annoy me, and I find myself hastily, grumpily, angrily removing them.
Finally, what do you have coming up for 2017 and beyond? Any new writing projects or publishing endeavors we should be aware of? Or creative goals that you wish to accomplish either soon or down the line?
I’ve got a collaborative book with a photographer coming out in 2019 about my home county of Cornwall. I’m writing a novel in a language I made up and am working on a collection of Zekkus. I also have a travel guide, a collection of poems in my made up language, and a collection of traditional poems in consideration with publishers.
I’d really like to get the novel sorted. I think that would be a new endeavor for me, and a really interesting creative departure. I’d also like to have some work released in USA.
I also run Poetic Interviews, and that has taken off massively, though I’d love to see some media and journal promotion about it. - Jeff Alessandrelli
https://www.kenyonreview.org/2017/09/interview-uk-poet-aaron-kent/









Aaron Kent, The Rink, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018.


The Rink is a layered, experimental chapbook of poetry and 'found' images. Aaron Kent has used an array of materials as the base for this work, ranging from pages of Pat Arrowsmith's On The Brink to his own University dissertation, and then pasted, glued, and drawn over them.
The book looks at the nuclear threat present in today's society, Aaron's working class upbringing, and his becoming a father.

'In The Rink Aaron Kent slips and slides across the slippery surface of word and image, cajoling us to dance with him through handwritten drafts, appropriated language, and all sorts of poetic forms. I encourage everyone to get their skates on and enjoy the ride' - Rupert Loydell



Aaron Kent, Tertiary Colours, Knives, Forks, and Spoons Press, 2018.


Tertiary Colours is a poetic attempt to exorcise demons, to build new bridges, and to shelter one's self from storms. Written in an experimental, concrete style, Tertiary Colours examines Aaron Kent's life through the various traumatic events he has experienced.

Aaron Kent’s Tertiary Colours is at once frenetic and fine-tuned, raw and refined, excoriating and exhilarating.’- Wyl Menmuir

‘There’s darkness. There’s dirt. There are snakes and there are demons. On the surface, this collection of poems seems like a vodka-induced nightmare. But at its core, Tertiary Colours is the untold story of trauma begging you with every page to unravel its intricate parts and let it be heard. And when it is, the walls bleed.’ - Amanda Lovelace

‘Like haibun, these poems take us through a journey punctuated by a dazzling, concise moment to contemplate. Yet rather than an external voyage, we arc through controlled fury, gnashing grief, and, ultimately, love. Kent shows us what it means to look into the self, its depths. Dare to take this journey. You will emerge with a different head.’- Robert Peake

‘A frank, stark and thorough unearthing of one man’s trauma from day one. A poetic cluster-bomb of drug abuse, night sweats and bi-polarity which offer raw and brave insight into mental illness. Toxic and intoxicating soul mining from a smart, fresh poet.’- Daniel Roy Connelly

'This is a sequence of poems that moves fluidly from dreams to living nightmares to abuse, sculpting language with a cinematic surrealism, and always experimenting with form. The poems are raw, and some of them bleed like the wounds from the poet's past. But the poems have a strict formal discipline as well. There is an urgent sense of using words-- and the spaces between them-- as a way to reveal, and crack open, a heightened poetic awareness. The language cuts and bruises, and is filled with killer lines that grab you by the throat, pierce you in the veins, jolt you awake.' - Siddhartha Bose


Poetry as therapy usually produces dull work. It’s function is to aid a person in their recovery or to help them through a difficulty. Insofar as it helps the person writing it, it has value. For the reader though, it can be turgid. Aaron Kent’s Tertiary Colours is anything but. Subtitled A Post-Traumatic Verse, Kent’s pamphlet from independent UK publisher Knives, Forks and Spoons manages to avoid the worst aspects of poetry-as-therapy. Instead, in this short work – it runs to just 33 pages – we are invited into a densely packed, frightening world where trauma haunts the everyday and paralyses the narrator of the poems. It is emotionally exhausting to read – impactful, unflinching, it is poetry not for the faint of heart.
There is nothing certain in the world of these poems, the animal and the human mix and bleed into one another, the real and the imagined exist side by side in an occasionally terrifying tour-de-force that sees the surreal transform into the real and back. Where  “Demons sit in the dentist’s waiting room, picking the sand from their teeth” and our narrator begins “a new obsession with tape recorders, so I can play my thoughts back every Thursday to the kintsugi club.”
Contingency is everywhere in the poems. Many sections of the poems contain no standard breaks but slashes abound acting as both punctuation and also suggesting that things are otherwise, that they represent an “or”:
‘I am most spectacular in convalescence / of the night sky / when I break the shell / in search
of silence as a plot device / I count the seconds / where the morning has not yet leeched joy’
His abuser is summed up best in the penultimate lines of the poem:
‘You are the weakness
I cradle at night
and the rapid fire
in my lungs,
you are every
locked door
on a hospital ward,’
There are lines with strikethroughs, suggesting erasure and reconsideration. Yet they remain readable. Excised but present. Such devices act as means for Kent to not just say what he wants to say, but also to indicate a not always clear grip upon “reality”. A formally adventurous series of poems, Tertiary Colours is a serious exploration of the lasting impact of trauma – in this case the trauma of having been the victim of sexual abuse. You may not feel better after reading it, but it is not a pamphlet of poetry you are likely to forget in a hurry. - David Toms
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/literature/poetry/poetry-review-aaron-kent-david-tom/


Aaron Kent, Leaving Ghosts on Pikkutrapp, Smallminded Press, 2016.


'The final poem disintegrates language entirely, pulling words apart and scattering them across the page, leaving it to the reader to puzzle out what is happening. The strangeness and linguistic dislocation makes for a unique reading experience.' - Sabotage Reviews

Leaving Ghosts on Pikkutrapp is a small collection of Nakjarnorkiman poetry (a language contructed from English, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Japanese, and others).  







Aaron Kent, Bampy, Hesterglock Press, 2018.




"With this blood-soaked collection detailing the death of fathers spread over sixty years, Kent reaches with deftness into a poetry of inter-generational yearning. As a rhapsodic response to the slaughter that followed the short-lived 1956 Hungarian uprising, Bampy is at once technically astute, inventive, traumatic, eerie and uncompromising. The effect is scintillating. Whilst joining an esteemed Hungarian post-1956 lineage from Márai to Kassák to Szirtes, Kent simultaneously cements his place in a new generation of wildly innovative British poets. Bampy is a memorable calling card." - Daniel Roy Connelly


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Aaron Kent, St Day Road, Broken Sleep Books, 2018.


Aaron Kent's St Day Road is the culmination of drafting poetry using a strict 31 point manifesto. 10 poems were written, each specifically about a different room in the house Kent grew up in, St Day Road in Redruth, Cornwall. Kent (as per the rules of the manuscript) has kept every draft, with every note, every instruction and presented them alongside the final poem - providing an intriguing insight into the editing process behind his work.  







Aaron Kent, The Last Hundred, Guillemot Press, 2019.
excerpt


The Last Hundred is a collaboration between poet Aaron Kent and photographer William Arnold, investigating the West Penwith region of Cornwall.

Living and working in west Cornwall, UK, William Arnold is interested in the layers of history that comprise the making of the landscape and the role played by the photographic surface both literally and metaphorically in recording, interrogating and representing these histories.
The Last Hundred is a limited edition of just 100 copies printed on Mohawk Superfine papers and presented in a specially designed hand-folded envelope.

Nest Fallen – Aaron Kent
Sinking Ship #1– Aaron Kent

Aaron Kent has spoken of how his poems have ‘been known to make people cry – I had 15 people in tears at one gig’. I wouldn’t say they’re all quite that bad, but some in Nest Fallen come pretty close. Many of the problems with the poems in Nest Fallen can be attributed to the fact they are printed, ready for close inspection. There is a problem of place, since many of the poems appear to have been written primarily for performance poetry gigs and then printed without consideration for what might be lost in that process. When these poems are performed, the bounce of the rhythm and a speedy delivery will drag the listener over some of the cracks in the lines. When this force is removed, when the poem is pulled out of the air and fastened down for close attention, the cracks can become gaping holes. Rather than being dragged over, we are dragged right into them.

This is clearly illustrated by ‘Learn to Fly, Dare to Swim’, a laboured list poem of “I want[‘s]” which challenges the reader to finish it, and fails to reward them if they do. The anaphoric “I want” construction affords Kent the opportunity to portray the late-modern “want” ego, located in a consumer society predicated upon the creation of relentless, unlimited desire. This is briefly hinted at but passed up in favour of banalities without incision, humour or elevation. The final two lines in particular make for perplexing reading:

I want a natural ending to this piece, on the ending everything rests,
I want to finish by completing a want, screw it, here’s the vest.

This only begins to make sense when we go online and find that at poetry performances this ending is accompanied by Kent removing his sweater in a flourish to reveal his vest. While this might be a pleasing gimmick on stage, when the poem is transferred to the page without any adjustment the lines simply fall flat and befuddled, an anti-climax to an anti-climax. ‘Grace & Other Virtue’, a long narrative poem about cancer and its effect upon a small family, poses an even greater challenge to the reader’s patience. The poem is riddled with unredeemed cliché (a kiss is “over in a flash”; cancer “reared it’s [sic] ugly head”) and cloying substitutions, such as when Grace

[…] returns home one night,
to see him holding back tears,
upon those salty drops he chokes.

The odd idiom and substitution of “salty drops” for tears would be almost comic if it weren’t for the subject matter, the gravity of which is repeatedly reached for and repeatedly missed. We see this in the forced nature of some of the rhymes, such as

knowing its [sic] useless as he’ll be around a while
to listen with her to every word,
as he beats this disease,
to lose is absurd.

Absurd, perhaps, but not as absurd as the trite rhyme, which turns what might be meant as a heartfelt show of strength into a ghastly sort of comedy. This is at its acutest in the unashamedly melodramatic passage where the pregnant Grace sees her husband die:

Grace makes it in time to see his heart pump one last pump,
she almost collapses but the doctors catch her, just slumped,
and here she realises its [sic] not just seven more months,
but a lifetime she has with his child.

Rather than moving me to tears, this moved me to ask whether Grace had thought a child was just for Christmas. Presumably she had, seeing as it’s just “here”, at this moment of her husband’s death, that she “realises”, so a moment evidently intended to tug at the heart-strings collapses bathetically into what by this point is bordering on self-parody.

Sinking Ship #1 is a work more attuned to the pressures of the page and reads as a more coherently conceived printed collection. As the blurb describes, the pamphlet ‘contains various holes throughout it, enabling readers to see the repetition of a singular word from the final poem throughout’. The poems are thus textually interlaced, certain words echoing throughout, the poems in conversation with one another. The text is a mixture of ‘halogen moon[s]’, self-pity, spirits (both kinds), love, a lot of crying and an attempted twinning of Beat and Internet poetry traditions. There are some good moments, and it is without doubt the stronger of the two pamphlets. For example in ‘Correspondence’ we hear of how

I’ve wasted most tears when I manage
to confuse the scent of discarded cigarettes
with a general yearning for acceptance.

In “manage” we hear the “I’s” own “yearning”, a conscious act rather than the passivity of “confusion”, and in such an act of “manag[ing]”, personal confusion is re-written as desire, a wilful yet communal mistake. This is a delicate moment. Unfortunately it is all the more delicate for its rarity. - Frank Lawton

sabotagereviews.com/2015/10/26/sinking-ships-nest-fallen-sinking-ship-1-by-aaron-kent/

two poems


Aaron Kent is a poet from Cornwall, UK. His first poetry book – Tertiary Colours: A Post-Traumatic Verse – is available with Eyewear. He has a fond interest in subverting expectations of poetry, and has even gone so far as to create his own language. Aaron collects records, is a Godzilla fanatic, and also runs the Poetic Interviews series where he interviews poets using poetry. Subsequent Death is his first ‘novel’ (Novel? Novella? Verse Novella? Experimental Verse Novella? Whatever).