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David Kennedy's latest book contains many poems I have
enjoyed reading over and over, and several poems I would like to have written
myself. That seems criteria enough for me to call this a very good book!
There are lyric poems, prose poems, tender and humorous pieces, surreal
dreams, typographic and visual poems, and open field experiments - a variety
that shows an engaged and well-humoured intellect and poetic talent ranging
freely down whichever roads, and through whichever terrains, it finds itself
walking, running at times, meandering at others. Delightful.
But, for me, it is a book of two sorts of poem and, because for me one of
those sorts are really excellent - the beautifully humoured lyric poems - I
shall tackle them first. In poem the first poem, 'The Enchanted Lake', we
read the opening lines,
Beautiful
young violinists of the student orchestra,
how you make
me lick my lips
as I am
carried over the audience
on the crest
of your unsalted concentration!
where the influences of French Symbolism and the New York School are clearly
evident, as they are throughout the book, but the energy, tone, confidence
and subject matter are all Kennedy's own. 'Red Horse', another favourite of
mine asks
and whose
granny is that
going into a
wardrobe with Stalin
and coming
out again with a bag of mushrooms?
the surrealist dreamscape unfolding in lines of assured measure and music.
Behind this tone a sensitive politics and social awareness makes its subtle
presence felt. It is present in 'Indoors',
The moralists
are back,
cruising
heaven in their patched
and wheezing
balloons
or winding
themselves over our cities
in their
cable cars and rusty buckets,
peering
peevishly this way
and that
through opera glasses.'
lines which contain an understated commentary on social and class mores,
religion and history. 'Dhromi: The Roads' is one of the most accomplished
lyric poems in the collection - again doffing it's hat to Ashbery and O'Hara
in particular as influences, with the sensibility of John Ash not far behind
- transporting us through landscape and myth; personal journey and universal
truths. The poem I would most like to have written, however, is 'My Father's
Deaths', a light-touch Elegy and exploration of the small griefs that
comprise that one big grief, including the gorgeously sensitive lines,
My father,
dying, simplified his mind
until it was
so thin
it was able to
pass through its own bars
and escape.
There is a degree of self-awareness - even self-referentiality to some of
these poems, carried out with a refreshing humour. In 'A Rare Part of
History' there is a delightful skit on a disaffected old poet mumbling
through his public reading:
And the old
poet says, 'The instruction
0X77f52004 is
an application error
and is better
half remembered'.
And the
oldest members of the audience answer,
'The
referenced memory
0X007f4f10
could not be written'.
This humour also characterises a group of dream poems about other poets;
hilarious for those 'in the know', (which I imagine some readers might object
to). There are also several delightfully funny pokes at conceptual art in the
form of 'Art Texts', with a lightness of touch and an irreverent sensibility:
FILM PROJECT
Collect
footage from CCTV cameras showing deserted urban
spaces - e.g.
car parks - at night. Montage these together so that
there is a
slow, classical rhythm. Make a soundtrack from film
noir music.
Project the finished footage in front of urban CCTV
cameras.
which should be given to every new fine art student beginning a course this
year. Equally funny,
SEVEN DEADLY
SINS
Collect seven
cigarette butts. Arrange the butts so that they
spell the
word 'sin'. Photograph in large format and exhibit.
Whilst Kennedy has really hit on something with these little prose pieces, I
can't help but feel that you could substitute the words 'linguistically
innovative poetry' for 'conceptual art', and the skit can suddenly be turned
against some of the writer's own poems. For example, when we read lines like
spliced licks
reconstruct,
from lexis
down to deictics,
a period
code:
poetry as agonist alembic;
the self hurt
into utterance
and so making
utterance hurt
[...]
draw the
reader into
performing
meaning
as a struggle
against
whatever
normativities
she's
internalised
(from the 'Alum
Raptures')
the attack of Kennedy's own 'Seven Deadly Sins' cannot be far from our minds
but, this time turned on itself. The above is simply an exercise in theory -
because you, dear reader, are being drawn in to 'performing meaning', which
you need (don't you know it) because you have 'internalised' your
'normativities'. I would that Kennedy here was more aware of his own
brilliant joke: 'Collect footage from CCTV cameras... Project the finished
footage in front of urban CCTVcameras.' It works equally well as,
Collect lines
from other texts... Perform the finished poem in
front of
urban audiences drawing their attention to the text-based
nature of
your work.
This level of self-reflexivity, for me, tips over into too many poems 'about
language'. 'The Opposite of Writing' consisting of a block of text containing
those words repeated over and over; 'The Haunting' in which survivors 'crawl
to safety through a hole in language'; the poems 'Words' and 'The Process of
Language', similarly drawing our attention to the fact that as poem they are
written with words! They seem to do little more than re-hash the old theories
that language is indeterminate, self-referential and, paradoxically,
inadequate for its own tasks. 'Found on a Flipchart' is inventive, but seems
to do little more than turn the unpleasant world of business-speak back on us
as if we didn't already know its faults. Luke Kennard wrote a very
interesting review on this website recently to these ends, criticising the
type of poem that simply presents us with the echolalia of 'business speak'.
Kennedy, however, does turn his subject of language and writing to his
advantage at times, particularly when he uses his sharp wit or exercises his
fluent lyricism over the subject, as in 'Books of the Dead' (II):
Everyone we
meet
writes
something in us
and we in
them.
We leave our
words
in each
other,
maybe just a
cadence
or a stress'
There is a confidence to the phrasing and statement making here; a depth to the
theorising that is often absent in those other more indeterminate poems about
how slippery language can be. I confess that, by the time I reached 'The
Return of the Art of Poetry' on p106, I wrote in the margin: 'Please, no more
poems about poetry'.
I began with identifying two parts in Kennedy's book: the delightful lyrics
and, then, those poems which are more concerned with the medium of their own
making: language. My contention is that the first kind of poem really are
dazzling; the others, well, we all know that language is problematic and that
poems are written in language. No
revelation there. Can't we just get with the programme?
But one of the funniest poems 'about writing' is 'Bohemian Fantasy', after
Rimbaud's 'Ma Boheme', which starts with the exclamatory,
Muse, fuck
those corduroyed pretenders
straining
bookworm heads through the skylights
of their
career path, pied-a-terre
attics, trying
to kiss your
arse that way - look at me!
which I found brilliantly self-deprecating, very very funny, and very very
true: look at that fabulous word 'trying' just hanging on the end of the
attack line against the career poets! This book wins it for me for that word
alone!
This is a truly fascinating and inventive book, not least for its style and
variety, but also for its accomplished poetic, its mature sensibility and its
great humour. I would rather read more of Kennedy's brilliant, individual,
lyric poems, however, at the expense of his 'language poems', which I already
feel I've read before by other writers in other guises.
© Andy Brown 2005
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