The Satirical Sequence: Made In Sheffield
John
Birtwhistle, Eventualities
(London: Anvil Press, 2013)
David
Kennedy & Christine Kennedy, Women’s Experimental
Poetry in Britain: Body, Time & Locale (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2013)
Alan
Halsey, sound poem by Alan Halsey performed with Mick Beck
on tenor sax in a video by Bo Meson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe_LmNqA7ro&feature=youtu.be
CUSP:
recollections of poetry in transition, edited
by Geraldine Monk (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012)
Helen
Mort, Division Street
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2013)
Sequences
have
satirical potential, one might argue, for ten plausible
reasons: the enemy is wily and ubiquitous, therefore a long
game is necessary; switches in tack are useful in close
combat; comedy can deliver more toxins when the stings are
many; light cast on a complex shape needs differing angles;
the temporal and discursive logic of power needs to be both
matched and disabled by shadowplay; the enemy is also the
poet’s own authority and the reader’s assumptions, and these
need to be twisted into the sequential form; history is one
damn thing after another; the stanza is not room enough for
a running promenade; it takes time to stage the torsions
created by reasons rubbing against affects under sardonic
shapeshifting quizzical lights; the logic of argument in
language is always the case. Satirical sequence work has
been coming out of Sheffield a while, partly because, as one
very knowledgeable expert on urban history remarked to me
the other day, the city is and has been the most
persistently socialist metropolis in England, and therefore
hosts energies oppositional to all parties; and partly
because its own sequences, its own history, has been so
blocked and end-stopped by the forces with the power to do
hurt. That does not mean, of course, that satire will arise,
necessarily. As John Birtwhistle remarks watching his
newborn son guzzling ‘half the dug / into his grateful gob’:
‘Small hopes from him / of the harsh satirist / his age will
require’. We may persist in being thankful to the world for
its luxuries and commodities: but the age demands harsh
satire, for very survival.
Sheffield has oppositional energy because of a long
radical history, but it is Orgreave and the savagery of the
oppression of the miners’ strike that haunts the memory.
Helen Mort’s sequence on Orgreave, ‘Scab’, uses the plural
voicing a sequence can encourage both to track the folk
memory of the strike and its memorialization, and to recall
her own guilty shedding of class and locale by going to
Cambridge. This is felt, now, as a collusion with the
governmental forces, even as picket line transgressing
scab-work. This may seem harsh, yet it is part of the
sequence’s power that the double tale is told with some edge
of comedy to the dramatizations. Mort uses the sequence to
turn upon herself as maker, finding a guilty analogue to the
act of writing ‘Scab’ in the dubious theatrics of Jeremy
Deller’s re-enactment of the strike in 2001, featuring, as
her note tells us, ‘eight hundred people, many of whom were
ex-miners or police involved in the original encounter’. The
third section of the sequence ponders the re-enactment as
analogue to its own late ordering:
This
is a re-enactment.
When
I blow the whistle, charge
but
not before. On my instruction,
throw
your missiles in the air.
On
my instruction, tackle him,
then
kick him when he’s down,
kick
him in the bollocks, boot him
like
a man in flames. Now harder,
kick
him till he doesn’t know his name.
The
director’s imperatives fuse into the poet-as-maker’s
prurient collusion in the violence, the language of violence
(‘Please note / the language used for authenticity: /
example – scab, example – cunt’) drawing the stanza into
theatricalizing mimickry of the Orgreave field of forces.
The poetry re-enacts the battle only to turn its most
bollock-kicking satire on its own complicities. One clause
stands out of this painful exercise in self-cauterizing
satirics: ‘like a man in flames’. The line reaches outside
its own staged guilt and outrage, and touches on a tougher,
more sharply edged comedy: the Swiftian comedy of the flayed
difference of the victim beneath jackboot brutalities. ‘In
flames’ speaks to a hellishly voyeuristic sadism that is not
just a consequence of the guilty re-enactment: but takes on
board the violent theatricality that governed the police
action in 1984. The lines as a long sequence may be about
the guilt of metaphorically crossing the picket line by
sipping port in Cambridge; what this Swiftian flash of
horror does is to turn the lines of poetry into lines of
satirical force against the theatrical logic of police
instructions. This isn’t quite Bill Griffiths, perhaps; but
the sequence is a very real achievement, staging the
historical sequence from battle through mediatization to
real imaginative cooperative pain beyond mere by-stander
guilt.
John Birthwhistle has been a while away from poetry,
having spent some years as librettist; and Eventualities
bears some of traces of a writer trying his hand at
half-forgotten modes – we have imitation-translations,
versions of classical forms, very occasional verses, etc.
But there is one brave sequence in the collection which
meditates on the army barracks near Birtwhistle’s Sheffield
home. ‘To Live by the Barracks’. The sequence allows for
traditional theme and variation musings as from an observer
keeping a notebook of thoughts on the theme ‘city barracks’,
as with the opening section which incorporates the title:
‘TO LIVE BY THE BARRACKS // is to live beside monks / going
about their secret ministry’. The satire is mild enough, but
telling once unpacked: likening the soldiers to monks or
Coleridge’s frost intimates that the military in the UK hold
the same power as medieval monasteries once did over the
land; and that their action is secret, like a nighttime,
freezing, ‘natural’, invisible force. It also suggests that
poetry lives ‘beside’ or ‘by’ power, satirically turning the
lines against the poem itself as Helen Mort does with
‘Scab’: the lines of poetry may live alongside the
secret Ministry of Defence, or they may be as secretly
living off them.
The satirical sequence ends beautifully and strangely:
of an
evening
a red
light at the tip of a radio mast
the
sacred heart of Mars
Again,
the
barracks inhabit the city as something transgressive and
secret, like a red light district. Yet the zone is also
powerfully in charge of all communication networks (the
radio mast), including, it is suggested, the network of
poetry and its ‘evening’ bucolics. The cityscape is
illumined by the secret ministry as though by a distant
planet, but it is not only martial, but occupies the space
of old religion: the MoD beats at the heart of the city,
sign of an act of consecration of the country to its
military ventures and institutions. John Birtwhistle’s ‘To
Live by the Barracks’ is a fresh and witty parsing of the
secret state through 15 sequential moves around the
militarized zone at the sacred heart of the UK.
Geraldine Monk has edited a charming and visionary
set of reminiscences of the postwar alternative Revival
poetry scene, with acts of witness from Chris Torrance, Tom
Pickard, Peter Riley, Roy Fisher and many others. It builds
up a picture of isolates turning so little into so much as
each poet grasped their chances and forced culture and
community out of the dead and dying cultural landscapes of
the UK. In an interview between Alan Halsey and David Annwn,
Halsey reflects on the satirical quality of his own
poetry-making: ‘I think that the balance between seriousness
(serious rage, perhaps) and humour is one of the resonance
between your work and mine’. That balance is clear in the
sound poem one can see him perform within Bo Meson’s video
and text about the Krakatoa volcanic eruption. Halsey’s text
is raw and savage, with the phonemes making up ‘Krakatoa’
used to unleash a verbal flaming torrent, which then
subsides, in performance, to a whisper, only to re-explode
as Anak Krakatoa. Taking the text as text, we can read
halfway through the sequence:
kArtA
kArAkA rApUIOrcAttA
OrAngArAkApl
tAUkEIA
AgArAcAttA
kEIAtO tAUkEIA
The
phonetic play stages a ‘Polynesian’ otherness as language,
whilst as sound event staging the eruption of the volcano as
sound poetry itself, its oppositional ‘serious rage’ as a
revolution of the word within the static vocabularies and
alphabetical sequences of rational language. The
capitalization is awry, used to signal intensities of affect
as against signals of order, and drifting in and out of the
sounds’ violence are ghost words, the ‘orang’ of
‘orangutan’, the ‘karaka’ as cracking of surfaces, the
‘acatta’ of attack on meanings, the vowels erupting within
consonantal proprieties. This explosiveness is explosiveness
of satire itself (remember Auden on Wyndham Lewis as
satirist: ‘lonely old volcano’),
bursting the sequence of phonemes, speaking for a poetics of
dirty violent serious rage within a comedic display of
nonsense and impulsive voicings (as by an angry ‘orang’) of
the political unconscious. This may not have the clairvoyant
satirical intent of Halsey’s more overtly languaged satires,
as with the sublime ‘Perspectives of the Reach’ with its
destabilizing assault on Keith Fieling’s History of England,
or the ‘different order’ of satirical knowing and saying
unlocking the hold of ‘military domains’ and their ‘legible
order’ of ‘Song-Cycle 1991’. At the same time, the sound
poem asserts its own energies as collective, as unEnglish,
as in touch with the globe under threat from the climate
changes unleashed by rampant capital. We have the ‘harsh
satirist’ the age requires: his name is Alan Halsey.
Christine Kennedy and David Kennedy do wonderful,
diligent and meticulous work putting their case for
experimental women’s poetry in Britain, presenting a
comprehensive and convincing argument about the alliance of
feminism and theory that suddenly released such a superb
seam of poems and poets from Forrest-Thomson through Monk,
O’Sullivan, Bergvall to Andrea Brady and Emily Critchley.
The readings are always clear, lucid, passionate; the sense
of the common project germane; the relishing of the
specificities original and fresh. The book as a whole
escapes naive essentialism through the intricacy of the
readings, the passion of the advocacy and the simple justice
of the case. The attention is fine, too, upon the comic
panache of many of the projects, from Denise Riley’s toad in
‘The Castalian Spring’ to Brady’s relentlessness in Wildfire. The
Kennedys take Brady’s analysis of poetry’s situatedness
within modern consumerist networks as too cynical: and yet,
surely, the analysis of that situatedness, because it
involves its own procedures in the analysis (as Mort's and
Birtwhistle’s sequences do), creates satirical fire,
wildfire, that ripples beyond the statements locally made:
‘My paper is bogus – no pre-nup is airtight, / and its mark
holds you in confusion as its proof-weight / of
harmlessness’. The Kennedys remark that ‘the sequence’s
combination of self-doubt and the paradox that clear public
language is a mode of concealment’; but are wary of how
little room for manoeuvre is left in the final analysis:
‘the reader is offered little in the way of escape’. That is
because the way of escape is in the statement of the
problem: the poem pretends satirically to be a legal
engagement or bond between reader and poet, but the
confession of ‘harmlessness’ is also at the same time a
riddling act of comic confusion which undoes the legalities
of poetry’s claims. All
paper is bogus, this is the satirical sense that begins to
fire up at the edge of the material poem itself. And it is a
tribute to this very useful collection of essays that such
fire and energy, satirical, counter-sequential, is
communicated as a collective and not lonely volcanic event
at the margins.
[Adam Piette is co-editor of Blackbox Manifold, author of Remembering and the Sound of Words, Imagination at War, and The Literary Cold War: 1945 to Vietnam]
Copyright © 2013 by
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