Three really good selections this quarter, one fairly good and two that didn’t work for me at all. Nevertheless, there were still some good individual poems in the other collections (barring perhaps one).
Kinshasa, Kamaria Safia (2022a). Cane, Corn and Gully. London: Out-Spoken Press
The immediately striking thing about this collection is the use of labanotation – ‘a graphic score for dance’, as Kinshasa puts it (Kinshasa, 2022b), analogous to how music can be scored. Or, indeed, for how writing records spoken language. The notation accompanies (or complements or contextualises or re-writes/-phrases) the several poems with the title ‘Phrase n‘, e.g., the first poem in the collection, ‘Phrase 18′. Kinshasa includes a key to labanotation at the end of the collection, but it’s not necessary to be able to read it to appreciate the diagrams’ effect on the poetry (although I imagine it deepens the experience if you can). Attaching these records of movement to the various ‘Phrases’ is one of the ways in which Kinshasa conveys a key concept of this collection: that, as she writes in the Bulletin: ‘if I focused on the descriptions of [enslaved women’s] movements and dances, I could offer speech from my ancestry’. In ‘Slow Whine’ and elsewhere, Kinshasa seemingly combines the two approaches, delivering a poem consisting entirely of whitespace and punctuation marks, effectively illustrating the emptiness, the unvoiced experiences which she elsewhere articulates through language.
The individual poems are good, with standouts including ‘I Am Doing the Best I Can’, in which a wood pigeon hops off a bus, having made the decision not to fly ‘right now’, an idea Kinshasa uses to take us to church, to work, then back to the bus stop, by which a ‘woman with a nice car’ keeps driving.
Gross, Philip (2022). The Thirteenth Angel. Glasgow: Bloodaxe Books
I think this was my favourite this quarter, but perhaps that’s because it starts with someone floating above London, an idea I’m mildly obsessed by, as you’ll see if I ever get my damn novel published.
I’m planning on writing a close read of ‘A Shadow on the House’, wherein I’ll probably also write more about the collection as a whole, so stay posted for that. The collection is a satisfying mix of long and short pieces and it’s put together nicely, like a good album: it flows as a whole, as well as in its individual parts.
Lock, Fran (2022). White/ Other. Surrey: The 87
From one I liked to one I got absolutely nothing from. The poetry here takes the form of a long essay without capital letters: ‘eisenstein writes that separation is built into the social and physical fabric of neoliberal society, and that those of us now living will never experience community because community is “incompatible” with the highly specialised work, and estranged faceless dependence of modern capitalism’. The book contains numerous footnotes to academic texts, to no poetic effect that I could discern, compounding the feeling that this is essentially an essay or op ed. It’s been cool for centuries to break down the structures of poetic forms (Kinshasa does this to great effect, as discussed above), but I’m not sure that stepping straight from there into the academic form of the essay does anything at all poetically/aesthetically or rhetorically. There are clearly some interesting ideas here about class, race and ‘whiteness’, but the form and the ideas just don’t speak to one another.
Manuelpillai, Arji (2022). Improvised Explosive Device. London: Penned in the Margins
This collection started out well for me, but by about halfway through it felt like the poet had run out of ideas, with the same rhetorical trick – the sudden sidestep from every day life into violence – illustrating the same point – that violence can appear suddenly into every day life. Many of these poems taken individually are excellent (‘Mistaken Identity’ stood out for me), but taken together they’re simply too samey for the collection as a whole to really sing.
Nwulu, Selina (2022). A Little Resurrection. London: Bloomsbury Poetry
This one is excellent and I think arguably deserved to be the choice collection. The poems are uniformly strong and the collection is well-balanced, switching from humour to grief deftly, sometimes within the same poem (‘Conversations at the Bus Stop: Pink Furry Slippers’), and equally deftly stepping from the personal to the political. It’s interesting to note that it does well two different things that I thought the previous two collections did badly: the personal and poetical voice discussing politics; and returning repeteadly to the same topic but making it fresh each time.
Doyle Pean, Laura (2022). Yo-yo Heart. Translated by Bell, Stuart. Surrey: The 87 Press
This one entirely went over my head, I must confess. There was an amorphousness to the poems that I found frustrating. The work references Dragonball, Daria and Marvel movies, all of which sound like they ought to appeal to someone, like me, who also spent (too much of?) their youth watching MTV and Cartoon Network, but somehow it all breezed past me without touching the sides. Sorry.
Summary
A continual frustration of mine with the PBS is the way they often speak about poems as primarily about conveying ideas, as though they were mini-essays. Poets are described in detached academic language: their poems ‘interrogate’ and ‘problematise’ concepts and ideas. This approach to discussing poetry is used far more frequently for BAME and LGBTQ+ poets, even when they don’t frame their own poetry in this way. As such, it becomes just another manifestation of the way in which ‘othered’ individuals are expected to constantly defend and define themselves against the ‘norm’. Ironically or appropriately, several poems in this selection explicitly speak out against this tendency, aptly demonstrating that the mistake here is being made by the editors and selectors, not the poets. At its worst, this smacks of orientalism and contributes to the othering against which it claims to speak, marring the PBS’ otherwise good and necessary work in promoting voices from outside the mainstream.
This way of looking at poetry and language manifests itself in Lock’s collection of ‘lyrical essays’ (Anaxagorou, 2022). The problem with it is that it is an essay, but it isn’t lyrical. It’s tedious. If it presented itself as an essay, it would (still) be a turgid read. Simply removing the capitals and leaving in the odd non sequitur doesn’t change the overall impression that you’re reading the first draft of an academic treatise; if anything, it enhances it. Because it fails at the aesthetic level, it also fails rhetorically. The points made are stated baldly, but then not followed up on, and the failure of the lyricism means that one is left frustrated by the lack of connection, either emotional or intellectual. In the quote I picked out above, she links alienation with neoliberalism. Because it’s presented as an essay, complete with citation, I found myself annoyed at the lack of intellectual follow-through. After all, Karl Marx claimed that alienation was fundamental to the capitalist mode of production, not to any specific manifestation of it (I’m not convinced he’d have even recognised the idea of different types of capitalism). What are the differences between Marx’s capitalism and Lock’s neoliberalism? An essay might follow up and expound this point, whereas a poem might make the emotional link between the specific form of alienation and the speaker in the poem. I found neither here. We can discuss classism as it relates to individual experiences, the essentially inarguable impact it’s had on Lock herself; or we can discuss it as a social phenomenon, an approach essays are suited to more so than poetry (or so I would argue). By sitting halfway between the two, it does neither. I felt a chasm where there should be connection. And I’m someone who broadly agrees with Lock’s politics!
It stands in contrast, then, to Nwulu’s A Little Resurrection. Perhaps I was just happier with the more traditional poetic forms of Nwulu’s poems; maybe it was the variety of ground she covers, but here I found the emotional connections I felt were lacking in Lock’s work. Perhaps, in not trying to ‘prove’ relating to politics and identity, Nwulu paradoxically makes point about those things far better than a work that seemed to lean heavily on academic values of proof and truth? Or maybe my reading of Lock’s work is misguided precisely because I couldn’t help but search for those values when Lock intended no such thing?
Perhaps ultimately I’m just looking for something different in poetry than the PBS selectors (White/ Other was selected by Anthony Anaxagorou, who for the record I think is a great poet). As I see it, they’re trying to revive Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of engagée or ‘committed’ literature, but for identity politics rather than Marxism (I’m using both terms neutrally), but in doing so I think they sometimes prioritise the political to the detriment of aesthetics. Probably they’d argue, rightly, that aesthetics aren’t neutral, but I can’t help but feel that Nwulu makes political points better by coming at them obliquely than Lock does by coming at them head on.
References
Anaxagorou, A (2022). ‘White/ Other’. Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin. (275, Winter) 2022, p.18
Gross, Philip (2022). The Thirteenth Angel. Glasgow: Bloodaxe Books (p. 63)
Kinshasa, Safia Kamaria. (2022a), Cane, Corn and Gully. London: Out-Spoken Press (pp.2, 13, 71)
Kinshasa, SK (2022b). ‘Cane, Corn and Gully’. Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin. (275, Winter) 2022, p.7
Lock, Fran (2022). White/ Other. Surrey: The 87 Press, p.12
Manuelpillai, Arji (2022). Improvised Explosive Device. London: Penned in the Margins, pp. 25-6
Nwulu, Selina (2022). A Little Resurrection. London: Bloomsbury Poetry, pp.45, 50
“Notes on the Winter 2022/23 Poetry Book Society selection” by Frank Podmore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Frank Podmore 