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When
I was young I used to think that every pirate had a pirate on their shoulder.
Either I misheard or someone was trying to make a moral point, or perhaps teach
me about infinity. Whichever, in terms of the image it left in my head, it
was probably my first taste of surrealism. And it's great to welcome Steve
Spence to my little world with his first collection, entirely comprised of
satirical-surrealist pirate poems.
But to get back to me, as I grew up I realised that, in fact, every good
pirate needs a parrot on their shoulder. And these poems remind me of
that parrot: the collage techniques employed result in a strange
multi-layered effect - text taken out of context, losing its original focus
and meaning but gaining new contextual force by imaginative juxtaposition and
parrot-like repetition - occasionally reminiscent of flarf, but without the
focus on the deliberately offensive. That's not to say that this work is
bland. The pirate as metaphor works here on many levels, primarily taking on
the aspect of an amoral trickster, whether in the guise of a merchant banker
or an illegal file-sharer. And best of all, these poems are tremendous fun:
Existing quietly
in never-never land, the worker devotes his life to
producing
objects which he does not own or control. British piracy
is alive
& well & making a killing on tv & in Hollywood mythology.
The pirate
assured me that his downfall began when he started to
listen to
Barry Manilow. Alas, life is rarely so straightforward.
[from 'A shift in the earth's core']
This is slippery writing, and it's hard to pin down as you're reading it. The
syntax makes sense, and your brain is deceived into believing that all is
well, then you stop to think and realise you've no idea what's going on. It's
a poetry deliberately designed to wrong-foot you, to trick you out of
trusting language, while at the same time making you feel as if you're listening
to a rollicking good story. It has all the trappings, and employs the
techniques of, linear narrative, but these techniques are subverted. You get
story-structures that do not tell you a story. Instead these poems float like
shadows over traditional narrative structures. You're presented with a
set-up, a middle, and a pay-off, with all of the appropriate cadences, but
end up feeling unsettled that, although all the usual structures are there,
the story itself (that your brain is telling you ought to be in there
somewhere) has slipped through your fingers. And it's really quite refreshing
and exhilaratingly bewildering.
To add to the sense of tricksiness, with the exception of a couple of prose
poems, Steve Spence's poems look pretty conventional on the page (and let's
face it, anyone who finds prose poems unconventional these days probably
doesn't read that much poetry). For the most part they sit there foursquare,
in equally-spaced stanzas with equal numbers of lines, looking rather cosy
and genteel. And then they bite you:
Nobody can
say why you go chasing a pirate down
the street
but such a state of affairs makes possible
a certain
number of anxiety dreams. Was it the pirate,
you ask
yourself, or was it the paranoia?
[from 'When the
privateers returned from their pillage']
This is unsettling. There's nothing to hold on to apart from straightforward
syntax, and you're left asking the same question as the narrator - 'is it
just me or...?'. The pervading feeling is a somewhat whimsical outrage -
throughout this collection there's a sense of perplexity in the face of the
political and economic forces that somehow control us, without us really
understanding them or even quite believing that there's anyone who does understand
them at the tiller:
At what point
does a civilisation hit its peak before it
declines,
&, more germanely, how did a dish once as
humble as
fish & chips become the preserve of the
affluent?
Ginger Baker is sixty eight today.
[from 'When
the privateers returned from their pillage']
When I first read this collection, I felt that if I had one quibble, it might
be the line-breaks. There's not any real logic to them in a musical sense,
which sometimes makes them feel a little arbitrary. But the more I read, the
more I realised that this was all part of the destabilising process. I was meant to be
concerned and unsettled. It's all part of the fun. And this poetry is fun.
I've always felt that 'experimental' poetry (if that's acceptable
terminology) should include an element of play or it risks uprooting itself
from its heritage - however serious a poet's intentions or subject-matter,
they're still playing a game with language, seeing how far it can be pushed
in a certain direction. Steve Spence strikes this balance between the serious
and the playful perfectly in his first collection, one of the most coherent
and entertaining I've read in a while. Its blend of surrealism and satire
captures a topical sense of bemused disillusionment with great panache. I
loved this book - it's the real deal - and it might just rattle your
cutlasses too. So reach for those pieces of eight and set sail for Amazon (or
your preferred forced retailer-pun of choice), otherwise you'll be walking
the plank with the rest of the land-lubbers while the brilliance of Captain
Spence passes you by like a ship in... I'll stop now. Honestly though, treat
yourself - you won't be disappointed.
© Nathan
Thompson 2010
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