Reading, 2005

Three Types of Pain in the Poetry of Keston Sutherland (work in progress)

1. Juxtaposition – at the largest structural level, the pain of lurching (in performance, where it is often accomplished through a dramatic shift in the speed and volume of delivery, though occurring during private reading on a sliding scale of torturously slowly to joltingly abruptly, depending on the rhythms of the transition and the reading speed); between two informationally and/or syntactically distinct bodies of material, whether explicitly “sourced” or not, so that the difference between the two is at least nominally marked by the substance of the material itself, and not by a lesser shift in tone or metre; present often in Odes, and perhaps paradigmatically (given the content), though tessellated, in Sinking Feeling 4. This type of pain is induced, though it is not inflicted; it is not a kind of pain that is possible to receive vindictively, usually because processes, laments, cries or struggles of/for subjectivization have been interrupted or counter-balanced, and the reader therefore only witnesses the juxtaposition instead of having it happen to them, per se: but see below for the affective influence of metrical stability/instability in the same process. The interruption of subjectivization is itself painful: as expression is cauterized by the financial logic which is the material base of its possibility as value in this world. This is not so much dialectical as deliberately falsely so: the two ends do not meet. They are stuck; themselves a form of conceptual grating that is the inward annoyance of frustrated resolution, another kind of pain. This is ironic.

2. The metrically distinct/the metrically abusive – difficult to fully separate since one can often feel like the other. The octosyllabics in Odes are a case in point – the attempt by the reader to put the stresses in the “right” place produces the violence of received instruction upon material that inevitably attempts to shirk such patterns or that buckles under the pressure of their imposition; see in particular long numbers, URLs, decimal points, abbreviations, acronyms, etc., that pepper Odes and Sinking Feeling. The spectre of received metrical formality crushes what spontaneity might select from the line into strictly egalitarian homogeneity; stresses feel painfully re-distributed (even or especially when they are in the “right” place) because their material (where they reside) resists the pleasure of abstract equivocation (syllable/stress) that was sought for in, say, 18th century verse; the metre is therefore abusive, because it disrupts what it was made to do by doing it. But metre is also therefore dis-abusive, since such passages are the negative image of a truly communistic equivalence. It is difficult to explain why all or any of this is painful, but it is; not just because insistent hammering iambic tetrameter hurts, like an infant repeatedly smashing a piano key, but because one feels something like the interrogatee’s anticipatory fear of the misuse of an object for the inscrutable and probably pernicious purposes of demonstration: the first stage of torture is to show the victim the instruments of torture. Metre in the dis-abusive sense is painful because abstract equivalence refuses to resolve into either real equivalence (poem/line) or real abstraction (rhythm/metre): we are once again held in a space neither positive nor negative, only incessantly articulated by the expression of each of these spaces flourishing in the wrong body.

3. Commas – a case in point in the recent sections from Sinking Feeling, of all punctuation in Sutherland's poetry commas are the most painful, because they operate therein as the notation of a repetition which is made out of iterations of the unendurable (they are this repetition); because they are the pause and the passage between articulations of inescapability; because they promise not the relative safety of closure as a period would, but the potentially limitless expansion of the material into the future: they are punctuation’s emblem of whatever kind of infinity they are made to express. There is a tragedy to commas that all other punctuation marks lack, perhaps save the (showy, stentorian, practically operatic) question mark. Commas in Sinking Feeling are vindictive where the upper-level structural forms of pain in the poetry cannot be, because it is in the nature of the prospect of clausal infinity to be exhausting and punishing, and since the comma is the representative of our enduring repeated sections of similarly metrical prose for as long as we must. They are not rhythmical in themselves, but ring out with the rhythmicality of the factory alarm or the foreman’s whistle. They keep going. They contain too, then, as does what I call dis-abusive metre, the prospect of their abolition into recurrence instead of repetition, but the pressure they exert on the reader’s body is such that this prospect is as far away when the poem ends as when it began; if anything it slips back under the poem and returns us to its beginning (it is in this sense that the frequent self-reflexive demands to “go back to the start” in Sutherland’s poetry are expressed in the scaffold of its versification: we are strained through the blocks of prose poetry as much as we traverse them. Self-reflexivity is, incidentally, never emancipatory in the poetry, but always dastardly).

25th August, 2016

Heart-hydromels