HIX EROS POETRY REVIEW
HIXEROS POETRY REVIEW
Vol. 6 | August 2015 Part I is a mix of short and long reviews, essays and other responses, mostly to do with recent poetry publications – pretty much in the same mode as Hix Eros #1-#3 & #5 (issue #4 was the Prynne spesh). Part II is a special feature mostly made up of quick responses to individual poems. Part III brings you six papers – in some cases slightly tweaked – from ‘Work, Performance, Poetry,’ the fourth Annual Northumbria University Poetry Symposium, held in April of this year. We hope to publish a little more from the symposium in the next issue. We always welcome new reviewers, so if you’re interested, get in touch! Hix Eros is edited by Joe Luna and Jo Lindsay Walton, joined for this issue by Ed Luker, and is designed and typeset by Robbie Dawson. @hixeros
[email protected] hizeroreadings.tumblr.com sadpress.wordpress.com/hix-eros
This is the PDF edition (#6.0) 2
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Contents part iii Papers from the 4th Annual Northumbria University Poetry Symposium
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Christopher Earley on J.H. Prynne
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Danny Hayward on Lucy Beynon & Lisa Jeschke
“What is not rock is voidally known”: on J.H. Prynne Strong Language: Beynon & Jeschke’s David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife-Songs
109 Ed Luker on Rob Halpern
True love, True labour: Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn
113 Joe Luna on Lisa Robertson
Poetry and the Work of Sabotage
116 nick-e melville on Kenneth Goldsmith The Corpus of Kenneth Goldsmith
124 Holly Pester on Cathy Wagner Hooked on Poetry
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part i Story One by Ryan Dobran (2014) Reviewed by Tom Allen People write poems, but they seldom do so under conditions of their own choosing. More often than not, words are scratched out of the remnants of a day that should be, and generally is, spent doing something else. Usually this something is something that the poet does not want to do. Many poets have written, some brilliantly, about work, about the way in which we experience it, about what it does to poetry and what poetry can do to it. For me, however, Ryan Dobran’s latest book, Story One, is unique in precisely how it relates to the univocal condition of wage-labour under which large parts of the world, and lots of the poets in it, live. On the inside back cover of this book he informs us that the poems therein were composed, mostly, at work. To begin to discuss Story One, it is first necessary to clarify, as far as possible, what this means. There is no work without time. We clock in, we clock off. The restless dreams of a worker signify that there is no moment, even in deepest sleep, that cannot immediately be placed in relation to work, whether this time is purportedly ‘free’ or not. Time coagulates in objects in order to facilitate their sale. Fundamentally speaking, this is a time that is subservient to the objects to which it adds value. Marx wrote once, in a sentence that I have come very quickly to love, that “Labour is the living shaping fire, it represents the impermanence of things, their temporality.”1 I love this sentence mainly because, while remaining true, it is so obviously removed from the lived reality 1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p.266. I take this reference and this translation directly from Angela Davis in the essay ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,’ The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 13, Issues 1 and 2 (1972), pp.81-100.
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live intensely in a world that constantly preaches the imaginative or restorative value of ‘more’ (but not too much more) creative freedom, is really not so different from the conception of ‘the mind’ prosily threnodised by old world liberal colonialists like the novelist Marina Warner. Beynon and Jeschke’s point is rather that the fight for sensations that are strong and weak at once, compassionate and aggressive, cannot occur without a struggle that not only opens us to damage but which actively threatens to induce it. “Deterioration” is not only historical; the labour that is necessary actually to face into the fact of it requires of us that we accept its extension in ourselves; and only in the concerted and unstoppable effort to make our desires and our actions bend towards one another is it possible to imagine a situation where the fucking economics textbook with its fixed and predictable relationships might blur or flame up into the medical manual in which blood loss can not only be “stem[med]” but also “counter[ed],” can also flow back into the body, not in inverse correlation to anything but in defiance of all relationships that we have ever been taught to know. When Beynon and Jeschke write, and when Beynon yells, “THEN WHAT IS AN OBJECTION TO STRONG LANGUAGE?” (p.13), the assertion does not mean (although by anyone who is not listening it may always ‘be read’ to mean), that we should resist the moral imperative of proportionality that is always asserted by those whose own actions exceed any scale of ordinary moral language. What it really means, which is to say, what it means more intensely and uniquely, is that it is only when language itself becomes exhausting, and not merely a reflection on exhaustion, or a complaint about our orders of priority, that it can really begin to articulate just how much human life is wasted in a world in which the pathology that forces people to acquiesce to their smallness is forever being rammed into the idea of ‘culture’ itself like a storm into a high-security teacup. In March 2015, in the dreary run up to another general election, in which state politicians will talk indefatigably about how much we need to save for the future, Beynon and Jeschke’s play reminds us that our most significant acts do not occur periodically according to a calendar determined at the convenience of our ruling classes, but fitfully and beautifully and counter to our best habits and educated expectations. They cannot happen over and over again forever, because they require of us an expenditure of life and instinct that is frightening and painful and sometimes damaging to undergo. The great accomplishment of the “small act” David Cameron throughout all of its vicissitudes and inevitable reverses is that it makes the real inevitability of large collective acts of this kind feel undoubtable in a period in which the pressure to doubt them is ferocious and hatefully ubiquitous and unabating.
True Love, True Labour: Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn by Ed Luker Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn is intimately entwined with lyric poetry’s relation to the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis; what it means to desire in a world mediated by private ownership, maintained and enforced by military conquest.50 In the continual aftermath of U.S. military operations Halpern’s book penetrates the imagined dead soldier’s body, using online news reports on the death of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan fitted into verse. Halpern writes that with the body of the soldier “the prohibition of eros becomes the site of erotic satisfaction,” socially prohibited homosexual desire transfers into the eros of nation building.51 The particularity of a dead soldier is held in a dialectical relationship with its abstract cultural image. The love object is ambivalently suspended within this dialectic. The first stanza of ‘Love Song (To My Fallen Soldier)’ reads: Kissing you I get hard inside all the export containers Being such an excess of relation filling these negations Of relation it’s so antagonistic purity being a thing Like what I’m called when I love him and the love just52 The repeated appearance of soldiers’ bodies in both the verse and critical prose of the book twists the lyric appearance of the second person pronoun to never being the strict address to a lover. Love, or an erection, is consummated in the generic interior non-place of the shipping container. Transport is the metaphor of the exchangeability of eros under private ownership, and the libido overspills the limits of the “negations / Of relation,” the purity of being named as beloved is the site of antagonism; what we are called is inflicted by a hierarchy of social relations constructed by sexual preference, choice fleshed by exchange. Eros is intractably strapped to exchangeability in a lyric mode where pronouns and objects are continuously de-stablised. It is often argued that this instability of lyric address is merely the mirror of its ‘true’ Romantic alternative, a lyric poem with stable address that is focused on its particular; poetic address would not be unstable if the bodies that it addresses were not also intersected by the fungibility of exchange relations. In Halpern, however, you are the condition of love in this world and 50. This is an updated version of a paper presented at the ‘Work, Performance Poetry’ symposium at Northumbria University on April 17th 2015. I intend to develop this work into a longer piece. As such it should be considered a work in progress. I am especially grateful for the comments of Nat Raha, Rob Halpern and Luke Roberts that I have not yet had time to fully address. I am also eternally thankful to Hannah Proctor for talking these ideas through with me. 51. R. Halpern, Music for Porn (Nightboat Books, 2012), p.50.
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52. Ibid., p.92.
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“kissing you I get hard inside all the export containers.” In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud writes that “civilization is a process in the service of eros.” Erotic love unites people into families, nations, and groups such that they are “libidinally bound to one another.” Forms of sociality require its fastenings as “[n]ecessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together.”53 This opposition between the libidinal desire of eros and an idea of work in common structures an antagonism. For Freud the realisation of our libidinal impulses that eros continually drives towards must be controlled through instinctual renunciation; the animality of erotic desires must be controlled through rationality. It is not the case that a person’s freedom is granted in society such that they can do what they like, but that their freedom is the rational basis for ethical action; we are free to love because we can control our instincts. In the Grundrisse Marx writes that “Truly free labouring, e.g composing, is the most damned seriousness, the most intensive straining.”54 Poetic or musical composition is not only truly free, this activity is expressly bodily, muscular, exertive, constrictive, controlled, grasped, and like Freud’s ethical commitment it will be binding. For Alfred Schmidt, freedom is not the complete transfer of instinct out into the world of objects, just as Freud’s reality principle is not merely specific to a form of society where work is not truly in common but rather mediated by the private ownership of the means of production and the monstrous accumulation of commodities. Schmidt argues that even a truly free society would require instinctual renunciation of libidinal desire.55 Whilst speculations over renunciation in a truly free society are both a tricky business and unavoidable, what I think should be stressed is that the re-imagining of the reality principle from the standpoint of the present necessitates that the rationality and libido that strain within and against each other in that principle are similarly blinkered by the present. Adorno argues that Freud’s residual Kantian distinction between reason as conceptual and eros as bodily places a rational biologism upon eros. Freud relegates pleasure to species preservation, where in actual fact “[o]nly those who locate utopia in 53. S. Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents,’ in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927-31), trans. James Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1961), p.122.
54. The translation is my own. The original German is: “Wirklich freie Arbeiten z. B. Componiren ist grade zugleich verdammtester Ernst, intensivste Anstrengung.” K. Marx, Ökonomische Manuskripte 1857/58 Teil 2 [MEGA: BAND 1] (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981), p.499. Martin Nicolaus translates the line as “Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.” K. Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1973), p.611. I think that straining better captures how muscular activity works through both control and release.
55. In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt argues that ‘freedom’ for the Marx of the Grundrisse will necessitate a society organised on the basis of what he calls “a certain measure of necessary self-denial.” For Schmidt this renunciation accords an affinity between Marx and Freud. (A. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (Verso, 2014) pp.137138).
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the blind somatic pleasure, which has no intention and which stills this last, would be capable of an idea of truth which stood the test.”56 The libido is not just blinkered but ‘blind,’ and if utopia is to be grasped in pleasure its truth is fleeting; it is non-intentional, not determinedly guided by the social legislature of reason. I would like to explore this point further by looking briefly at some lines from Halpern’s Music for Porn. Criticism that considers poetry as only opposition to society elevates poetry above the world from which it is borne. Some readings of Halpern’s work from Crisis Inquiry argue that this poetry is capable of healing the damage inflicted upon the lyric self. Thom Donovan states that “[l]yric’s potential – its empowering aspect – lies in the fact that it remains from struggles of bodily and affective predicament.”57 The lyric of the damaged body is a sacrosanct standpoint that can be reordered into something better than its origin. The body tel quel is encumbered by “obstructed utopian longing,” which supposes that if this obstruction is removed the remainder of desire would be utopian.58 He argues that within the longing for the soldier there is a libidinal instinct within or towards a body that is positively more true or just than the libido that inflicts violence upon other bodies. Similarly, Brenda Iljima infers that Halpern’s affect of libidinal desire for the soldier contains a pure or utopian love, stating that “[t]he affective tonalities of desire are diametrically opposed to the reproductive aspects of war.”59 If both Iljima and Donovan introduce intentionality into the utopian moment of desire, in Music for Porn the tonality of affect echoes in containment in the non-place.60 It is my contention that Music for Porn grapples with an eros that tests the threshold of ‘necessary’ renunciation. The freedom of the libido, expressed as poetic desire, strains in prosody against the ‘freedom’ to renounce one’s desire enforced as a moral and social censure against homosexuality. The Freudian reality principle of this world and the various libidinal selves it operates within and through cannot be renounced such that the pleasure principle of an emancipated society could be imagined from the present. Halpern’s lyric subject strains at the limits of instinctual renunciation, grappling with the condition of what love means in the lyric of this world by subjecting the object of love to a strenuous prosodic attention. 56. See: §37 of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005), pp.60-61.
57. T. Donovan, ‘Appropriation and Affective Production in Rob Halpern’s “Obscene Intimacies,”’ in Crisis Inquiry: Summer 2012, ed. Richard Owens (Punch Press, 2012), p.83. 58. Ibid., p.84.
59. B. Iljima, ‘Some Notes on Rob Halpern,’ in Crisis Inquiry: Summer 2012, p.96.
60. A useful counterpoint to Donovan and Iljima’s arguments is Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Deleuze. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ she writes that Deleuze does not hold a useful position on ideology as he can’t separate desire and interest, where they are so obviously in conflict with one another. When people desire things that are not in their material interests desire in itself cannot be considered as transformative. See G. C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Macmillan Education, 1988), p.274.
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In the first stanza of ‘Bathed in War’s Perfume, My Delicate Rag,’ Walt Whitman’s figure from ‘The Wound Dresser’ attending to the injured soldiers is brought back as queer lover. The possibility of Whitmaneque care is discounted from the start. In Whitman’s poem the voice describes staunching the blood of the wounded with a rag. Where Whitman’s rag is symbol of social care, Halpern’s appears in the title of the poem as an object utilised by only the lyric voice. The adjective ‘delicate’ inflicts a sensitivity that transfigures ‘war’s perfume’ and the lyric voice’s location within it into an obvious irony; Halpern’s wound dresser is self-undermining. In Whitman the poem becomes a site of “dream’s projections,” from which he uses materials from his war diaries to return to the field.61 The poetic voice becomes a literal carer for the wounded. The poem becomes a site from which pathos is projected authoritatively onto the body of the soldier. The field of composition is one in which amongst conflict the lyric voice moves freely, without strain, with only sympathy for the misery rather than disgust, woe, anger or despair: To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.62 The imagined act of care to the soldier’s body in the treatment field of poetic composition is denied to the poetic voice of Halpern’s work as a predetermined condition of writing: If I could sing the dead uncomely Tones don’t issue sounds can’t hear Torn things tear whose pain’s a pun Where no one’s body is I can be63 The opening conditional is the lament of the impossibility of singing the songs of the wounded. The potentially ‘nice looking’ faces that Whitman kisses are uncomely, unerotic as dead bodies and dead songs. Neither are located in a poetic field of war, but in the restricted domain of fantasy. The ‘I’ is withdrawn into a space it can but can’t sing from. In the final stanza of the poem, Whitman’s free poetic transit round the tent of the wounded had been denied. In Halpern’s poem, Whitman’s ability to project his universal sympathy becomes “[t]elepathic powers [that] signal this mon / – umental failure of my freedom.” A separate satellite cluster at the poem’s end adds “— to see you.”64 The role of carer for the damaged is a statuesque failure internalised in the lyric 61. W. Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. by Francis Murphy (Penguin, 1986), p.336.
voice as an already blocked off possibility enforced by the world that mediates fantasy. The previous poem ‘Into This Suspended Vacuum’ subjects the lyric to “utopia’s crude petroleum jolts.”65 It tries to imagine love through fantasy: “I think / I want to love and loving kiss yr many addled hallucinations / hunger fulfilment’s no longer a glamour hangs dependence / On feeding the thing eternally expressing selves in public.”66 The love object dreamed of is tied to “addled hallucinations,” such that the loss of ability to think clearly is the point from where fantasies begin. Hallucinating, hunger and fulfilment all try to possess each other and the fulfilment of hunger, the coarsest demand, is not just the satiety of the stomach but also the drive of the libido. “[F]eeding” is pointedly ambiguous; as either sexual or bodily need it strains with infinite fervor at “eternally expressing selves in public.” The poem ends as follows: To express can’t be itself in goods another total embracing Wants to believe belief enough to become the world we can’t — cause the cops can’t fucking fathom.67 We are bound to the compulsion to love and that compulsion is tied to “another total embracing / Wants.” What bodies will or could be from the standpoint of the “world we can’t” is imagined from what bodies are now. Halpern’s book desires through the “total embracing / Wants,” testing the threshold of desire, straining to articulate in prosody that the work of a truly free labouring is only posited by this world we can’t. Halpern’s book composes the question of how we might consider the construction of the “world we can’t” as a work in common that allows the desires of individuals to construct that world, without the renunciation of the libido being reinscribed into bodies as a police category.
Poetry and the Work of Sabotage by Joe Luna Writing poetry necessitates acts of sabotage. Sabotage sustains the labour of composition by encouraging in the line of verse an agency capable of offering definition to the previous line by deliberately withholding it. Writing verse can do this not because it is not prose, or because the fantasy of composition involves an inherently contradictory process of abstraction, but because the “prosodic gift” is something which compels the temporal signature of living
62. Ibid., p.335.
65. Ibid., p.70.
64. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
63. Music for Porn, p.71. 112
66. Ibid.
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