New build. No carpets. Non-dreams. 2007. Rural south Down. There must be more than these New Generations and the Ulster Renaissance. Dole money. Scholarships. Japanese Manga translation commissions. Paris for long enough. Decision to do poems different. Liverpool. Good intentions.
Anxiety. Kenny nerves. Tom Paulin lecture at The Bluecoat on his critical work, The Secret Life of Poems. I pose a question from the open floor about the legacy of the Troubles and the possible negation of trauma in future Northern Irish poetries. Tom Paulin satiates the Newsnight demographic with the declaration that the Northern Irish Troubles are over. Wow, was he wrong.
Unhappy one-way love affair. Lark Lane. Rutland Avenue. Night porter career. Norfolk Line all the time. Developed fear of flying. Dalston escape plan. Return of the prodigal. New build. Carpets down. Bad attitude. Anxiety. Difficult to live with. Death regular though not in the immediate family. Some publications to prove to myself to my self. Whatever kinda deal I feign. Old friends in new cities. Bored of poems. “Hi, I’m Robert and I’m a video artist.” Excited by poems. Not most poems. Publish poems I like by other people. Fail to continue with my online journal. Bored of poems. Excited by Linh Dinh poems. Blaise Cendrars poems. Wash limousines for less than minimum wage listening to Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard audio books. Amid a celebrity dalliance, I still produce music much to the dismay of my dedicated parents.
Me: So who do I write this letter of thanks to?
Admin Assistant: Yoko
Me: As in Yoko Ono?
Admin Assistant: Yes. Yoko Ono.
Excited by poems again for a time. At last able to talk with someone about poems again. An editor agrees to publish my manuscript of new poems made up of my newest poems and the poems I thought were, like you know, the “new” poems. I don’t send the editor the most recent manuscript.
Year on. New love. All good. First short film screened. Odd homage to Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau. Relentless fascination with the history of cinema.
“Hi Robert, come to Belfast, University Lit Dept. open mic, read some of the poems you sent me.”
Read poems. People laughed. I felt better. I decided to complete the sequence of poems.
Poems destroyed but with love for the line. Poems reassembled with love for the line. Totally surprised. A bonus. House sitting. Poems alive. Pangs! Alive! Non-submission of thesis. Anxiety again.
“Hi Robert, I know an editor that I think will publish your manuscript.” 2014.
Cool thought, manuscript sent. This editor also agrees to publish Pangs!. This editor currently hasn’t the money or time to publish Pangs!. I be patient.
“Hi Robert, I think you should send your manuscript to Test Centre.” Cool thought, great publisher. Exciting times.
“Hi Robert, your manuscript is next for us to read in the submission pile, sorry for the delay but we’ve already chosen three books for publication in next year’s list, so we’ll get back to you after we’ve read it, but just to let you know the situation.”
They probably won’t take it, I thought. Think positive. Months later email arrives while working as a bullshit admin drone for a national UK broadcaster.
“Hi Robert, we liked your manuscript and would be happy to publish it.” I paraphrase this offer obviously, with the perpetual elation.
Here now. 2015. Book out. So I guess I should say something meaningful.
When I was 19 I bought a book in a Belfast second-hand bookshop. The book was called The World Split Open: Woman Poets 1552-1950. It was published by The Women’s Press, edited by Louise Bernikow. Mina Loy’s Love Songs, first published in Others Magazine in 1915, were in the anthology and they changed my poetic life. I was on holiday in Holland. Near the homeland of Hieronymus Bosch.
I kinda lost these poems while a student at Goldsmiths. I read these poems again before composing Pangs! Mina Loy impresses me greatly.
If you find yourself dumbly offended, to quote Flava Flav, “don’t believe the hype”.
It’s a Menippean Satire. Northrop Frye and Bakhtin wrote good steam about this genre as an anti-genre. Here are the major tenets (which I researched for the thesis I finally submitted) in no particular order, with particular examples personal to me.
1. Prominence of comedy: Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers.
2. Philosophical invention over plot: At-Swim-Two-Birds
3. The bold fantastical from the inside out: Henry and Mr Bones
4. Collision of the mystical with the natural: Pier Paolo Pasolini
5. Universal perspective of the capacity of the universe: Antonin Artaud in Ireland
6. Three-planed construction of textual world: The Marx Brothers
7. Experimentally skewed POV elucidates spectrum of perspective: Gaspar Noé, The Chapman Brothers
8. Borderline mania reppin’ the weird in an unrestrained daydream: Andy Kaufman, Paul McCarthy
9. Eccentric appropriation of the inappropriate: John Water’s Pink Flamingos
10. Oxymoronic juxtapositions of the diversity of culture: Pedro Almodóvar
11. Social Utopia: Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin
12. Parodic variations of genre with various use of form: Kathy Acker
13. Coalescence of multiple styles and tones in dialogical development of text: Kathy Acker
14. Examination of topical issues of societal and ideological life: Raymond Pettibon’s Tweets
Another important influence: Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language. Real talk.
Technical specifications: Burroughs, Gysin and the cut up, Dada, the art movement, Dada, my father and Dada, the name of the father. Détournement and the dérivé, Basquiat’s erasures. Flarf but not as you know it. Conceptual writing maybe. Tristan Corbière emulation thematic karaoke?
Currently I’m mostly interested in the poetics of Die Antwoord and the awkward silences in Made in Chelsea. The politics of anarchism and imagined utopias. The possibility of the universe as a computer simulation. Lyric poetry? Remember, most rappers rent their bling, increasingly since the global financial crisis of 2008. When my father took me to SummerSlam 92 at Wembley Stadium and we had great seats, I realised it was all faked. I must also say innocuous culture is much more offensive to me than anything transgressive. World Peace. Let’s all get high and read Bataille. Note to self, must write thank you letter to Yoko Ono.
[ The Irish Times review of Pangs! by John McAuliffeOpens in new window ]
[ Excerpts from Pangs! Available to buy and read in Gorse 4Opens in new window ]
[ Pangs! Available to buy and read from Test CentreOpens in new window ]
Two poems at The White Review Online
