Review of Luke Roberts, Living in History (Edinburgh, 2024)

My review of Luke Roberts’s Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945–1979, is now up on the Review of English Studies website.

More information about Living in History can be got at on the publisher’s website. The Distance No Object list, edited by Luke Roberts and Amy Tobin, is available for browsal here.

Poetic Space; or, Properties in the Poetry of William Fuller

[Old paper, delivered at the World Picture conference in December 2016 (which took as its theme Property) and which never saw the light of day. The same Fuller poem was treated in more detail in a later essay on poetry and finance. I like this version better. Further treatment of the romantic erotetic and the poetically unanswerable can be found here. 

William Fuller’s new book, Signal Flow, is forthcoming from Flood Editions; recent work can be found on Blackbox Manifold.]

“let us open our leaves like a flower”

1.

It seems fundamental to my continued derivation of pleasure from the experience of reading poetry that I do not quite know, finally, what kind of object a poem either is, should be, or wants to be. It seems important to start from the claim that poems are a particular kind of object, not to raise the poem above any other aesthetic experience in some arbitrary hierarchy, but rather to set some critical parameters for any investigation into the experience of poetic space. That poems have, or are, a space in which poetical things can happen, and from which we can derive certain laws of poetic motion, is as much an historical accident of form as any other space or dwelling, and is a shape of fact given to us with all the determinateness and contingency of the world in which we find and read them. I do not need to know, in any case, what kind of object I am experiencing in order to describe and analyse that experience; but it remains questionable to me whether or not the experience of reading poetry requires me not to know, and whether or not the experience of reading poetry entails a singular kind of ignorance, at least in part, of the object under scrutiny. I do not doubt that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. What I do doubt is what exactly that thing is, and how exactly, or in what manner of association, it is a joy for ever. 

How exactly, or in what manner of association, it is a joy for ever, should not, I think, be interred by chronology as an everlasting emblem of some immutable and ahistorical human spirit. That the first line of Keats’s Endymion, in popular parlance at least, has been so often taken to mean just this, is most likely the effect of the line having been scalped from the body of the poem which it begins: 

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 

This is not a description of immortality, but a description of the possible infinity (it is not a given; the thing has to be beautiful) of the speculative, and possibly specious, category of what I am calling “poetic space,” compared with which immortality is simply a bad dream. “Still” is an important word for Keats. He uses it when he wants a line to shimmer with the audacious and irrational expectation of its endlessness, and none more so when the pathos of an end is fully within the ambit of the poem’s apostrophic feint, as in the exponential twitch of To Autumn’s desperately distended syntax of proliferation over its eighth and ninth lines:

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Here, “still” seems barely to hold the very fabric of the poem on the page together, even as it arrests, in a moment of sheer emphatic relief, the encroaching and enveloping space either side of it, a chaotic profound that rushes in like a swarm between and either side of these lines, and which the phrase “still more” fends off in the rhythmic certitude of negation, of the poem’s space staked out against oblivion. By such means as these in Keats’s poem, as one critic comments on To Autumn’s final lines, “an imminent vanishing reflects the immeasurable economy of the gift,” of the generous, expansive interiority bequeathed against mere stillness. Negative capability is not, as it has so often been theorised, a state in which things can happen that would not otherwise, but a means of access to that dynamic space in which “loveliness increases,” in which “[b]eauty […] obliterates all consideration,” that is, a space in which to flourish and persist in a sensuous effervescence that overcomes the tyranny of “fact and reason.” The bound infinity of poetic space in Keats is not then known, but rather felt, and felt, I want to suggest, as the positive confirmation of what the young, Romantic Marx calls “human reality.”

What the young, Romantic Marx calls “human reality” is the space in which he imagines man having overcome the stupefaction and one-sidedness of private property, a stupefaction in which “an object is only ours when we have it[.]” What does it mean to possess something – for something to be ours – without “having” it? 

Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity – a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification – be either cultivated or created. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the senses – all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature. 

For Marx, to realize “human reality” historically, and not simply to slough off the husk of alienation, is to feel precisely the kind of object which Keats’s poetry wants to be, not only because “[t]he whole of history is a preparation, a development, for ‘man’ to become the object of sensuous consciousness and for the needs of ‘man as man’ to become [sensuous] needs,” but yet more because “[t]he element of thought itself, the element of the vital expression of thought – language – is sensuous nature.” Poetic space, romantically conceived, as much by the Marx who loved Shakespeare as by the Keats who loved him too, is the social expression of the feeling of possession without having. Perhaps poems might be thought of as the kind of object in which what Adorno refers to as the “infinitization” [Verunendlichung] of aesthetic experience is explicitly thematised and played out as the promise of the sensuous nature of language. The immeasurable gift of this promise is not the utopian fantasy that, one day, I will know my object and then resign: it is that the history of myself as an object for which the poem is a product of a truly “humanized nature” can begin only when my own objectivity ceases to be nothing more than quantifiable abstract human labour power.

2. 

All the best contemporary poetry is Romantic poetry in the foregoing sense: that it conceives of itself as having a space in which its promise is reflected endlessly, as the feeling of something being ours without having it. Critics of Romantic poetry have opened up this space through reading its figurative and literal questions. Ross Wilson, for example, describes Romanticism’s “insistence on the essentially poetic nature of humanity,” an insistence that “does not simply dissipate the political in the vague diffusion of art but rather seeks to question whether life is essentially reducible to the facts currently obtaining about it.” Poets like Shelley, for Wilson, “persistently [address] a distinction […] between what is really life and what looks like it,” and they do so, like Shelley, by attempting “to address the question ‘What is life?’” in the face of “the apparent impossibility of answering it.” This impossibility, though certainly negative, is productive, not aporetic, because it demands “that an emphatic understanding of life – of ‘very life’ – cannot straightforwardly be gleaned from what has counted as ‘life’ so far.” Susan Wolfson, in the most thoroughgoing study of its kind, reads the Romantic interrogative mode out of the work of Keats and Wordsworth, arguing that: 

For Wordsworth, a question is motivated by the desire for an answer, but it also releases energies that thwart the completion of meanings. For Keats a question is often voiced in knowing anticipation of its irresolvability, but he remains keenly aware of the difficulties of living in a world in which doubt is the only certainty. 

“We come to value [Keats’s] artistry,” Wolfson suggests, “not so much by what [his poetics] yields to thought as by what it does to thought, provoking questions and refusing to confirm any sure points and resting places for our reasonings.” Wolfson captures one of the most compelling ways in which Keats “does” something to thought in her astonishing description of Ode on a Grecian Urn, in which 

the speaker’s rhyme doubles back on itself to reflect his own perplexities: he barely asks his question before it branches into multiple ors – a ‘wild ecstasy’ of syntax that diagrams his ‘mad pursuit’ of his own ‘maiden loth,’ the unravished ‘what’ that would satisfy his questions.

That which Wolfson argues Keats “does” to thought, then, is specifically bound up in what she identifies as syntax in a “wild ecstasy” (itself part of the unanswered question from the last line of the Ode’s first stanza), a sensuous cultivation of ambiguity reminiscent of William Empson’s description of the “fluid unity” of Shakespeare’s sonnets in Seven Types of Ambiguity. In the erotetic – the questioning – logic of Romantic poetry can be found a touchstone for the erotetic logic of contemporary poems, in which unanswerable questions, whether posed directly as in Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth, or implied as a function of their address and urgency, are alike most fully apprehended through a study of their “‘wild ecstasy’ of syntax.” 

Syntax in the American poet William Fuller’s recent book Playtime (2015) is quietly ecstatic. Fuller’s body of work, in print since the 1980s, has been crystallizing steadily into the style which finds its most fully articulated expression in Playtime’s collection of shimmering prose poems. Herein, the properties of thought, of things, and of ontological and phenomenological significance, are interweaved through a thoroughly ambiguous grammar of mental and physical investigation. The properties of things in Fuller’s poetry are continually at risk of becoming the properties of other things. I said Fuller’s poetry is quietly ecstatic: it does not burn itself out in a rageful conflagration, nor does it flaunt its own self-imposed impotence in a crash of style and polemic. Instead, the poems unfold through a syntactical pleating and proliferation, in which linguistic subjects and objects consistently wriggle free of each other and insert themselves into any number of hypothetical propositional matrices, the totality of which it is, in many cases, a difficult task to quantify exactly or to hold still. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Anoesis 

There are within an ambit of circumstance certain principles
that attach themselves to the agents or actors for whom our
daily shifting scenes appear to have been arranged, and who,
while existing only within those scenes, are neither contained
by them nor detached from them, but hover among and between
while time unfolds in whatever sequence is elected, if by elected
one means the unalloyed application of indifferent forms revert-
ing to their more general, less numerous, prototypes, pacing
back and forth in the distance, and challenging all to carry out
acts consistent with the structure they maintain. Whether I
knew this then or know this now isn’t important. For words
drip like wax, and while there may be a need to extend them
over a rough surface, similar to the one immediately to my right,
I prefer what may happen in other regions, with other agents or
actors, who might overcome their own weaknesses in order to
insert themselves irrevocably into what they see and hear, and
enjoy a plausible form of life that cuts away everything, enticing
fresh sounds from above.

If we take the poem’s title, ‘Anoesis,’ which refers to a “hypothetical state of consciousness in which there is sensation but no thought,” to be a descriptor for what kind of space the poem contains, then that space is an incredibly rich, febrile and confusing one. The grammar is meticulous, bordering on a parody of bureaucratic disambiguation, but finally resistant to a reading that would see in it only a joke about process and stop there. The relationship between possibility and contingency in the poem is constantly breaking down and being resurrected, a relationship thematised by another poem in Playtime, in which “[t]he spirit of what can happen has changed into / the flesh of what has happened, and we make room for it.” Just as for Empson’s ambiguous Shakespeare and Wolfson’s erotetic Keats, my sense of Fuller’s poetry is guided more by what I cannot know at any given point in my reading than what I do know. I cannot know, in the sense of hold in my mind concurrently as fully fleshed-out possibilities, all of the poems which this poem is capable of being, but I feel very distinctly, as I read, those possibilities rising and falling from the page in front of me as I read. By the time I reach the end of the eighth line, for instance, I have the opportunity to decide, if I feel like it, to make the subject of “pacing” either its immediate neighbour, “prototypes”; or the “indifferent forms” of the seventh line; or to reach back all the way to the first and second lines for either “certain principles” or “agents or actors,” along with all the cognitive effort of straddling and recapitulating the intervening clausal networks this would involve. Each of these readings would exercise a subtle but decisive shift in the possible meanings of the poem, and any of them might be made more or less “plausible” as I keep reading – “time” is another possible subject of “pacing,” but only until I reach the third person plural in the tenth line, where it ceases to be a possible reading and hence stops. The poem distributes these possible readings as a function of its sense of what “form of life” it prefers to inhabit, and it does so whimsically and practically insouciantly, as if it were the offer of something less valuable than simply and abundantly necessary. 

I do not really know where I am going with this, and it seems in any case a fairly commonplace experience of reading to end with. But it also seems, nevertheless, to say something about the feeling that I mentioned earlier, that of something being ours without having it, and in the context of Fuller’s Playtime, I might specify that feeling even further as the experience of play very gently, and for a split second at a time, lifted from its definition in subservience to its opposition to labour, and felt as something positively intrinsic to the sensuous shape and sound of human language.

The Continuous Trading of Thought

[Paper delivered at the Risk, Security, and the Visual conference at the KWI, Essen, April 26. Many thanks to Tom Allen and Jakob Schnetz. Page numbers aren’t given, but can be hunted down (or up) easily enough through the references below. Minor edits for clarity]

The Continuous Trading of Thought

Peter Hallward’s criticism of Quentin Meillassoux’s ground-breaking, provocative, and elegantly written book of philosophy, After Finitude (first published nearly twenty years ago), is both carefully self-contained and tantalisingly suggestive. Hallward summarises the central tenet of Meillassoux’s essay on the ‘necessity of contingency’ thus:

Philosophical speculation can regain determinate knowledge of absolute reality. We can think the nature of things as they are in themselves, independently of the way they appear to us. We can demonstrate that the modality of this nature is radically contingent—that there is no reason for things or ‘laws’ to be or remain as they are. Nothing is necessary, apart from the necessity that nothing be necessary. Anything can happen, any place and at any time, without reason or cause.

The precise reasoning that Meillassoux employs to make this audacious argument, and the particulars of the philosophical tradition which he seeks to overturn, are less consequential to the nature of my brief intervention in this paper than the ramifications of his thesis and what I take to be one of the key motivations for writing it. What I would like to do is to read some of the things that Meillassoux says, led very much by Hallward’s critique, and then to read him in concert with the work of the derivatives trader and pseudo-philosopher Elie Ayache, for whom Meillassoux’s work is extremely important, in order to produce a supplement to Hallward’s set of shortcomings and problems with Meillassoux’s argument. This is risky, and quite possibly tendentious. But I hope in so doing to hold up an Ayacheian mirror to Meillassoux’s work, and thereby to contextualise the latter’s thesis of the necessity of contingency proximate to the specifically financialised aspects of contemporary capitalism with which Ayache is more than familiar. This paper is, then, a document of my own apprehension of the risks immanent in what Hallward calls Meillassoux’s ‘seductively argued book’. Ayache is clearly seduced by it; the results, in Ayache’s work, speak to the value of this seduction and the kind of raptures it engenders. 

The reason I think Hallward’s criticism is suggestive has to do with the nature of his reconstruction of Meillassoux’s book. ‘If Meillassoux can be described as a “realist”’, writes Hallward, ‘the reality that concerns him does not involve the way things are so much as the possibility that they might always be otherwise’. Hallward reconstructs Meillassoux’s argument in the following ways. First, he identifies the importance to After Finitude of Hume’s argument that ‘pure reasoning a priori cannot suffice to prove that a given effect must always and necessarily follow from a given cause’. From this, Meillassoux derives his claim that ‘we cannot rationally discover any reason why laws should be so rather than otherwise, that is to say why they should remain in their current state rather than being arbitrarily modified from one moment to the next’. Hallward notes that, ‘in keeping with a tactic he deploys elsewhere in his work, Meillassoux himself quickly turns Hume’s old problem into an opportunity’: ‘Our inability rationally to determine an absolute necessity or sufficient reason underlying things, properly understood, can be affirmed as a demonstration that there in fact is no such necessity or reason.’ Hallward continues:

Conversion of Hume’s problem into Meillassoux’s opportunity requires, then, a neo-Platonic deflation of experience and the senses. It requires not a reversed but an ‘inverted’ Platonism, “a Platonism which would maintain that thought must free itself from the fascination for the phenomenal fixity of laws, so as to accede to a purely intelligible Chaos capable of destroying and of producing, without reason, things and the laws which they obey”.

Famously, Meillassoux calls the ‘vision of the acausal and an-archic universe that results from the affirmation of such contingency’, ‘an extreme form of chaos, a hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable.’ The seeming problem with this radical argument, that ‘the world we experience does not seem chaotic but stable’, is once more converted by Meillassoux into an opportunity by way of set theory. Because Cantor argued ‘that we have no grounds for maintaining that the conceivable is necessarily totalizable’, he showed ‘that there can be no all-inclusive set of all sets, leaving probabilistic reason with no purchase on an open or ‘detotalized’ set of possibilities.’ Meillassoux argues in turn that ‘[L]aws which are contingent, but stable beyond all probability, thereby become conceivable’. This allows Meillassoux to envisage ‘a time capable of bringing forth, outside of all necessity and probability, situations which are not at all pre-contained in their precedents’. Hallward notes that, outside of After Finitude, Meillassoux develops the mathematical aspect of this argument ‘by insisting on the absolute arbitrary, meaningless, and contingent nature of mathematical signs qua signs […] Perhaps’, Hallward mentions by way of aside, ‘an absolutely arbitrary discourse will be adequate to the absolutely contingent nature of things’. 

I will skip some of Hallward’s incisive critiques of Meillassoux’s argumentation, to arrive at his most powerful criticism:

Meillassoux’s acausal ontology […] includes no account of an actual process of transformation or development. There is no account [in After Finitude] of any positive ontological or historical force, no substitute for what other thinkers have conceived as substance, or spirit, or power, or labour […] Once Meillassoux has purged his speculative materialism of any sort of causality he deprives it of any worldly-historical purchase as well […] Rather than any sort of articulation of past, present and future, Meillassoux’s time is a matter of spontaneous and immediate irruption ex nihilo. Time is reduced, here, to a succession of ‘gratuitous sequences’. 

For Hallward, the obvious ‘paradigm for such gratuitous irruption […] is the miracle’, and ‘the only event that might qualify as contingent and without reason in [Meillassoux’s] absolute sense of the term is the emergence of the universe itself’. This is a problem because Meillassoux’s entire philosophical edifice is constructed against the philosophical reliance, whether avowed or implied, on a theistic universe, against the realms of belief, faith, and mystery, and against ‘the kind of dogmatism which claims that this God, this world, this history, and ultimately this actually existing political regime necessarily exists, and must be the way it is’. ‘Against dogmatism’, he writes,

it is important that we uphold the refusal of every metaphysical absolute, but against the reasoned violence of various fanaticisms, it is important that we re-discover in thought a modicum of absoluteness—enough of it, in any case, to counter the pretensions of those who would present themselves as its privileged trustees, solely by virtue of some revelation.

Opportunity, it turns out, is as central to Meillassoux’s motivation as much as it is to his methodology. The project of After Finitude is an essentially competitive one: the discovery of the means to think that which is unthinkable should provide us with the means to out-think those whose ‘reasoned violence’ is levied, presumably against us, and presumably with a view to imposing their own idea of what is and therefore can be. 

Meillassoux does not name the privileged trustees of the absolute to which he refers, but the fact that there is enough room in his tacit accusation of philosophical imperialism for religious dogmatism of all stripes accounts for Hallward’s approving gloss that ‘Meillassoux launches a principled assault on every ‘“superstitious” presumption that existing social situations should be accepted as natural or inevitable’. The central thread of Hallward’s own principled scepticism is that Meillassoux’s ‘suggestion that such situations are actually a matter of uncaused contingency […] offers us little grip on the means of their material transformation’. This kind of transformation is epiphenomenal to After Finitude: the point is to prove that nothing is necessary except contingency itself, and to prove it quick. Enter the trader, philosopher, and CEO of the financial analytics services company ITO33, Elie Ayache. Ayache’s first major work, The Blank Swan (2010), is a maverick treatise on ‘writing, pricing and contingent claims’. It is deeply indebted to Meillassoux, and to After Finitude in particular, the arguments, terminology, and assumptions of which are embedded or directly addressed with great frequency across its nearly five hundred pages. It treats Meillassoux as the question for which the market in derivatives is the answer. And its ambitions for the field of financial theory are comparable with Meillassoux’s for metaphysics and ontology: it seeks to overturn the idea that possibility and probability—which underlie the standard derivatives pricing models such as the Black-Scholes-Merton formula—do, can, or could ever explain the movements of derivatives markets. As Edward LiPuma puts it, Ayache ‘reports that everything in his experience says the realities of existential uncertainty so encompass and overwhelm the act of trading that probability represents a retrospective interpretation; it is nothing more than an intellocentric [sic] fiction that supports the illusion there is a genuine prospective calculus of derivative pricing.’ 

What distinguishes Ayache’s argument from the familiar anthropologies of finance that locate the market in the social activity of the trading floor, rather than in the formulaic algorithms developed to predict and profit from volatility, is Ayache’s startling claim that the market itself is the ‘perfect’ medium of Meillassoux’s contingency, and that, furthermore, the market-maker is the privileged trustee of this medium. To write derivative contracts—or, as Ayache prefers to call them, contingent claims—has nothing to do with probability: it is to produce ‘the pure, material writing of contingency’. This makes of the trader something of a para-ontological oracle whose activity formalises the innate exchangeability of things: ‘In a world that is only made of contingency, it is only natural that we should invent options or derivative contracts. It is only natural that we should circulate, today, things that we know will make a difference in the future. This is why I have always thought of derivatives markets as the technology of the future’. Because, for Ayache, ‘[a]nyone who believes that unreplicable derivatives can durably trade and prosper in a market that endures by its own necessity has no other ground for such a belief than sheer dogmatic faith,’ ‘the market [as Ayache understands it] emerges both as our absolute and as our best guarantee against metaphysics, against necessary beings, and against the dogmatisms looming behind them.’ The market is at once a model world whose dynamics are illuminated by Meillassoux’s thesis, and a world that exceeds the hyper-Chaos of Meillassoux’s universe through the activity of the trader: 

Possibilities do not materially exist (they only exist metaphysically). What materially exists is the price […] By travelling across the world with the necessity of contingency in our hand, we may verify no possibility and no necessity; we make the world work (on fait marcher le monde); we make market of the world (on fait marché du monde); we make work, not state, of the world; we exchange its unexchangeability against the unexchangeability of writing; we exceed it; we become at once posterior and original in it. We instate another order of thought in it. We price it.

Ayache’s work is dense, circulatory, tangential, endlessly repetitive, and borderline megalomaniacal. His textual composition is the diametric opposite of Meillassoux’s concise, lucid, analytical unfolding. Anthropologists of the market such as LiPuma treat Ayache as an idiosyncratic insider who confirms their theories about the market in abstract risk as a human socius for which historical events are de-coupled from the valuation of derivative contracts, with catastrophic results. Financial journalists seem to treat Ayache with a mixture of bemusement and frustration. But Ayache is a particularly instructive reader of Meillassoux, because what he says discloses that which in the form, content, and motivation of Meillassoux’s work makes it more descriptive of the financial markets of the early twenty-first century than it is proof of the ‘possible destruction of every order’. Ayache’s answer to Hallward’s question about the deletion of historical change from Meillassoux’s universe is to point out that, ‘[w]hen thought has to speculate on the physical world under the regime of the necessity of contingency […] it must think the price and not the possible […] [p]rice is the material process of history and change’. This answer is not only more convincing than the bare necessity of contingency; it is contingency’s own perfected brand of fanaticism. The opportunity that Ayache seizes in Meillassoux’s work is the opportunity to develop it into a trading technology, a technology that presumably underlies the options pricing software packages sold by ITO33. 

Hallward’s ‘absolutely arbitrary discourse […] adequate to the absolutely contingent nature of things’ exists, and it is the work of Elie Ayache. The miraculous which Hallward identifies as paradigmatic of Meillassoux’s temporality of gratuitous irruptions is codified in Ayache’s adoration of the market as the perfected medium of contingency. For all Ayache’s eccentricity, his effort to make price the only real, the trump-card to Meillassoux’s hyper-Chaos, stands in a far more plausible relation to the movement of recent history than Meillassoux’s claim that ‘anything can happen’, because what this speculative triumph of logic describes is not so much the organon of (non)existence as it is the fetish-character of the financial markets, the worldly-historical purchase of which are felt in everything from the price of oil to the price of bread. Ayache’s very distance from the sober financial theories that recover human agency from the algorithmic abstractions of the market renders his work more realist than Meillassoux’s ever was. It is more realist because it expresses, in all its chaotic raptures, the rapaciousness of the market for which After Finitude provides only the disinterested and amoral blueprint. Ayache’s work is a window onto the soul of contemporary financialised capitalism, for which the risk that things can be anything other than they are is immediately convertible into an option to price and trade. It seems to me less than coincidental that this aperture is prised open by the kind of thought that relies for its beauty and coherence on the necessary fungibility of all that exists or could do so.

References

Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (Wiley, 2010)
Peter Hallward, ‘Anything is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (re.press, 2011)
Edward LiPuma, The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time (Duke, 2017)
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (Continuum, 2008) 

LEWD SOUL

Acerbic, scathing, revelatory, barbed, sharp as paper cuts, close to the humorous… Joe Luna’s Old News, brought to you by Erotoplasty Editions and slub press (arm in arm they go!) is at last upon us! Here to rival Laura Kuenssberg and Boris Johnson’s weekly op-eds with an elegant and mordant survey of the state of poetry in these our fair unpleasant lands, and in the bright and sordid beyond! Bringing you all you never knew you wanted to know (or were afraid to ask) about Anglophone poetry scenes present and late, in measured, rapturing, lapidary prose, this fateful mirror weaves the fates of pages, liege lords, layman, acolytes, all… all the while offering up some timely ultimata for that most afflicted of artforms - poor, dear, sweet little poésie! The nightingale about our necks! Feel the blade if ye be guilty! Man the oars if ye be free! Luna’s rosebush vignettes are available now, if ye dare...

— from the publishers, Slub and Erotoplasty 

Peter Manson's Self-Avoiding Space-Filling Curve

From a letter to Peter Manson, nearly a year ago. You can get Self-Avoiding Space-Filling Curve (Just Not) here. 

[...]

I finally had the chance to sit with the sheaf of poems you sent me before Christmas, and wanted to send you a quick note to say how much I love them. They are tender and beautiful and funny by turns; the first two are a kind of incredible overture, notes of which the rest (so far) pick up on and dive down into in different ways. The sequence completely unfolds in its sequencing, too, so there’s never a dull moment. Indeed, the moments when ‘Peter’ emerges can be shockingly emotional; the moment when ‘spontaneous vaginal delivery Manson’ emerged left me rolling in the aisles (honestly I don’t think I‘ve laughed that hard since the last Stewart Lee gig I went to). Shades of Lee, too, in the lines parodically exaggerating the poet’s sense of self and oeuvre. The pop icons interleaved here seem deliberately beyond their respective sell-by dates, so that the references promise nothing so much as a pop idiom of fleeting lyric feeling (as in Riley?), but something more keenly cynical than that. The parodies/inversions of O’Hara and Wordsworth do something similar — the détournements are hardly even that, more like belligerent refusals or petulant reversals, a more fitting kind of acknowledgement/inheritance for our age of infantilism. And all shot through, yes, with the becoming human of one life among its mothers and fathers, glimpses of this throughout, without much sentimentality but with a knowingness too brutal for Freud.  

[...]