Ewan Morrison on the future of the book, the longevity of the publication, creative digital media and the 'troubling place' in which we are left. This diatribe was delivered this weekend at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It can be found in digest, via The Guardian here.DEAD BOOKS
Ewan Morrison on the future of the book, the longevity of the publication, creative digital media and the 'troubling place' in which we are left. This diatribe was delivered this weekend at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It can be found in digest, via The Guardian here.
S. RIVIERE: NOTES RE: 81 AUSTERITIES
‘81 Austerities’ is a collection of poems by Sam Riviere published electronically in installments from 12th May 2011. The poems are organized into 9 titled parts, each containing 9 poems. The brief is to publish a passive/aggressive response to the ‘austerity measures’ implemented by the Coalition government in the UK in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. The collection aims to apply such ‘cuts’ to poetry itself, experiencing this deprivation primarily on the levels of sentiment, structure, and subject matter. The collection is presented according to 8 selected themes, which are distributed evenly over 9 sections: 1) poetry about poems/the poet/ the poetry 'world' 2) pornography; spam appropriations/being an AV girl 3) death; the deaths of some famous people 4) the modern; particularly the connectivity between poetry and advertising 5) longing; wanting specific people/things 6) Dramatis Personae; wanting to be, or being somebody else 7) encounters 8) names.
Here the poet discusses his this collection; its form & content:'Austerity' was named the word of the year by Merriam-Webster in 2010. The word originally describes, "dryness, harshness, sourness, tartness, bitterness", & especially "making the tongue dry". The present use is figurative: "stern, severe, very simple". This idea of harshness & 'dryness on the tongue' seemed like a good indicator for the tone of a 'response' in poetry to an 'age of austerity'.
Leonard Cohen has a quote ("deprivation is the mother of poetry") that I basically decided to take literally. I thought maybe the aggression expressed towards the arts via funding cuts etc might be a good provocation towards writing & general activity… it might make it more urgent or necessary or something.
Then there's an ambiguity about furthering my own practice as a fully-funded PGR student using developments that have been harmful to many as a subject, as a 'bitter fruit'. I have found this mostly conducive. It's something the poems talk about directly, playing out arguments that say periods of austerity are in some way 'healthy' for art, that it's easier to find friction, that it's here art becomes more potent/politicised. Of course this may be true to some extent, but it's not really the reason for cutting funding for poetry courses for example. It wasn't done to improve the standard or relevance of poetry. The poems inhabit and abandon these positions in a fairly compulsive or hyperactive way.
It seems like there is something contradictory going on in much of the public discourse surrounding these issues that the work can feed off. The poems are ambivalent about the conditions that made them possible. They feel compromised & at the same time refuse to feel compromised. To be written they have to at least appear irreverent/ungrateful towards the (temporary) condition of privilege they emerged from. They do their best not to deserve it.
A few times people have said to me stuff like, ''I don’t really read poetry, but I quite like these''. Probably that’s because there isn’t much 'poetry' in the poems, not much in the way of well-made metaphors & images, or whatever…To me this is an identification with the austerity measures, a pre-emptive application of the 'cuts' to the poems themselves, by reducing them, doing harm to form. … sort of "don't support poetry, fine, maybe this is the sort of poetry we deserve (or that's appropriate).'' I guess this is supposed to appeal to people who find that logic ridiculous.
These self-imposed limitations make the poems seem a little monk-like to me. They appreciate their hardship, they like it actually, because paradoxically it increases their 'value' and popularity: they couldn’t exist without it & the broader context of austerity. They are in the weird position of owing their existence to an undesirable economic context; they are aware of this, & 'grateful' for the climate of austerity.
The impact of the cuts has meant that art which is overtly critical seems less of a cheesy idea than in the early 2000s for example. The project's inherent hostility towards commercialised art has ironically made it more commercially viable.
By following the capitalist logic of production/marketing, on one hand the poems seek to expose/critique it as an inadequate model for making poems; on the other hand any success they have is by virtue of this process, which they so obviously enjoy. There's uncertainty about how much the framing of the poems is simply an excuse for this sort of contrariness. I'm excited & nervous about my complicity in all this.
The absence of a rich flow of capital sometimes makes the poetry 'world' appear above these concerns. It has a kind of distaste for that stuff, though it obviously has a market & trends like anything else. The main difference is that it does seem reliant on outside support. While this is liberating for poets, in that a publisher's first concern isn't *always* about sales, choosing online publication maybe draws attention to the models of distributing poetry, & acknowledges the possibility of unsaid criteria in publishing/funding channels that are just as dubious as the demands of other markets.
Maybe we will come to see poems more explicitly as products, or as promises for a transaction of some kind that happens as you read them, which is how they often seem… so maybe more like advertisements, like pure hype.
Sam Riviere, ©
2011
81 Austerities: The poems in question can be found here.
Riviere has previously published through Ambit/ Clinic/ Faber/ Magma/ Stop Sharpening Your Knives.
"Pacific Radio Fire"
Richard Brautigan
The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend's wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn't even say good-bye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.
It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.
We sat down on a small corner-like beach surrounded by big granite rocks and the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies.
We were listening to rock and roll on his transistor radio and somberly drinking port. We were both in despair. I didn't know what he was going to do with the rest of his life either.
I took another sip of port. The Beach Boys were singing a song about California girls on the radio. They liked them.
His eyes were wet wounded rugs.
Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.
It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.
Finally he set fire to the radio. He piled some paper around it. He struck a match to the paper. We sat there watching it.
I had never seen anybody set fire to a radio before.
As the radio gently burned away, the flames began to affect the songs that we were listening to. A record that was #1 on the Top-40 suddenly dropped to #13 inside of itself. A song that was #9 became #27 in the middle of a chorus about loving somebody. They tumbled in popularity like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them.
from Brautigan's "Revenge of the Lawn" (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2006)
A DEFENCE
Dominic Jaeckle, co-founder of Faithless Arm, discusse the presses debut publication Entomologies with poet David Briggs:
Briggs: So, Faithless Arm & Co. has just published its first anthology "Entomologies", a book that embodies the editorial policies of the collective both in its content and production values. Why don't we start with those editorial policies? More specifically, why have you chosen to present the poems without their titles or, indeed, any author identification?
Jaeckle: Our decision to exclude the attachment of the author, and any titular direction for each individual work interred in this anthology, proves to be the book’s defining precept. As an editorial motion, it is largely indebted to two particular avenues of thought: firstly, how a poem is organized and directed by any initial indication of context; and, secondly, the question of ownership in relation to a work of art. The aim is, in part, to encourage a questioning, on behalf of both the reader and the writer, as to the imposed distance that sits between the thought, the act of writing itself, and the reception this writing then receives. In this regard, the notion of interpretation is then centralized, as opposed to an underlining of the singular artist’s vision. It is a notion of "égalité" that we seek to encourage within this journal - to allow the work enough room for a freedom of interpretation, and denote a public ownership of the poem.
Briggs: The first sort of questioning I experienced was trying to match each poem to the list of authors at the back of the book: which one's by Billy Childish? Can I spot the Michael Rosen? etc. But, once I got beyond that, I do think I began to read the poems more attentively. And I found that rewarding. But titles can function as first lines for a poem; and, if they're any good, function as a key to help the reader unlock the piece. So, I'm with you (to a degree) on removing the lens of authorship; but, titles as well? Isn't that like cutting the first line from each poem?
Jaeckle: I agree entirely in terms of the severity of our attitude to titles, but we felt that through this arguably violent measure we could that ensure that this lens would remain unfocused. The work is then left entirely naked upon the page, and the significance of the interpretational role of the reader is inescapable.
A poem is not a door, and therefore shouldn’t need a key. No art, whatever its form, should be interpreted with such a sense of fixity that it may only be merely ‘opened’ or ‘closed’. In the absence of a title, I agree that an expected elemental feature of a work is omitted, but it leaves the poem completely open to a reading, immediately allowing for a multiplicity of meaning.
You allude to the presence of well-reputed writers such as Childish and Rosen in the anthology, and their inclusion was to stand as an effort to corroborate this point more clearly. The work of the ‘unknown writer’, the ‘non-writer’ and the ‘established writer’ now sit side-by-side, and the aforementioned nudity of the work then means that each piece can be adjudicated on the merits of the way that it corresponds with each individual reader. It is not a question of esteem, or of reputation; it is a question of evocation that we intended to highlight through this act of severance. This titular removal, though drastic, provided us with an opportunity to present the anthology’s approach toward notions of authorship in a more direct manner. The distance is then set between the reader and the writer, and although the work belongs inextricably to the two, the sense of intellectual ownership is set to question; the playing field leveled.
Briggs: The metaphor's in danger of breaking, but a poem isn't just a door, it's a doorway into something: a room, a landscape, a state of mind, a hubbub of language. So by throwing away the title, you're asking us to find another way in, perhaps to break in through the window. You seem firmly wedded to the notion of Mallarmean chance, weighting the dice of interpretation in favour of the reader.
I find it interesting, then, that you've chosen a traditional means of publication. The book is lovely, but it's a book, not a website or blog. The limited edition print-run, combined with serifed font and woodblock colophon, attractive as they are, seem to look backwards in time. Perhaps the disenfranchisement of the author is similarly nostalgic, in our age of celebrity obsession? The poet as personality? Can you tell me about your decision to publish a beautiful book, rather than set up online. What's the relationship between the editorial policy we've begun to discuss and the production values of"Entomologies"?
Jaeckle: The place of the ‘book’ represents another wholly important feature of Faithless Arm. We are interested, largely, in the book as an object, and would not consider the pursuit of this format to be completely regressive. Granted, in the twenty-first century, there is a multiplicity of technologies available to facilitate publication. However, our feeling was, and remains, that the tactile nature of a book was wholly agreeable with our thinking. We feel that the book stands as more of an invitation to the reader. A beautiful book encourages you to involve yourself in it; to acknowledge layout, how amenable its design to the eye, peruse page after page, etc. Our feeling was that in an employment of these, as well you put it, ‘traditional’ means of communication, we would again reiterate the aforementioned prevalence of the reader. In this regard, we intend to pursue this ‘disenfranchisement of the author’ even further.
Admittedly, there are features that do push on nostalgia, but in an age of the supposed ‘death of print’, a book feels now like a more valid document than ever. In addition, it is this notion of the ‘age of celebrity’ that we are aiming to distance ourselves from. This is a pivotal point, and permeates a great deal of our thinking in the construction of this anthology, and the formation of Faithless Arm as a collective.
Our intention was to remove the air of security that is so often associated with the literary. Any reader could walk into any bookshop in any town and pick up a copy Seamus Heaney’s most recent publication. Before we have wandered any further than the frontispiece, we are assured of the work’s authority; the representative foreknowledge we have of Heaney as a poet, the "Faber & Faber" brand etched across the spine. There is so much that already informs this initial approach to the text before the first line of verse is even encountered. We wanted to subvert this idea of the book as a didactic article, and present, essentially, a blank canvas to emphasise our central theme of interpretation. This is the rationale, then, for the book’s presented minimalism (the lack of a blurb, no information presented on the collection’s spine, etc.). The woodcut is intended, however, to represent the air of retrospection that you refer to in the question. It is only once you have traced your way through the entire body of the text that you will find this single image: the cicada crawling out of its shell. As a pictorial colophon, we aimed to visualize a portrayal of any creative motion - the insect leaving its husk, its tradition, behind. Its shape cannot help but be defined by this previous skin, but it has become something different entirely.
We do not shy away from the internet entirely - we do run a blog, and the book is chiefly available through this avenue while we investigate different avenues of distribution. It is the book, and the manipulation of an idea of the book as object, that remains central to our activity.
Briggs: Turning to the content of the book, I enjoyed (among others) the poems that begin 'Rhapsody in Blue...', 'Old Men in their nineties...' and 'I cracked a smile on sight of her...'. But there's a wide variety of styles. It would be difficult to pinpoint a presiding aesthetic, in the sense that you're not particularly wedded either to traditional lyric or more experimental writing. When it came to selection of the poems, what were you looking for in the work?
Jaeckle: Following the editorial movements we have elucidated here, we tried to maintain minimal input as ‘editors’ when it came to the appropriation of work. We had stipulated a concept to guide the nature of submission, and then simply proceeded to collate the material until we felt we had a broad enough collection of work to compile Entomologies. The submissions were then prioritized only on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis. This was important, as I felt it would undermine the theoretical notions of the anthology as a whole to become an overbearing editor. It would’ve been brash to marry my own opinions to a project of this nature, one that attempts to centralize a sense of subjectivity.
Briggs: I can understand why, in the light of what you've said before, you'd adopt a first-come, first-served policy; you see the conscious selection of work as the imposition of a critical judgement, something you're trying to eschew in favour of placing the poem firmly back in the hands of the reader. But how do you circulate the call for submissions? If it's reliant upon your contacts, Facebook friends, or whatever, then the range of work likely to be submitted, and therefore included, has already been defined. You sidestep judgements about quality, only to introduce the less desirable element of publishing only those who are part of the Faithless Arm club, those who will receive the call. Have you considered how you circulate the call for submissions? In order to throw the net wider, shouldn't you be hiring a bi-plane to write it on the sky above London, or Sheffield? Or flyposting the lampposts and car-parks of Croydon. Alternatively, perhaps it's the selection process that requires a randomising element? Perhaps you might publish every seventh submission (in Oulipoean manner)? Or throw all the poems into the air and choose only those that land face-up? I can see problems for the integrity of your project here.
Jaeckle: I agree that there is, potentially, a leveled threat here in terms of integrity; but, as I explained earlier, we felt that the more we could do to reduce editorial movement the better. Through this pursuit of the first-come, first-served option, our aim is to provide a platform for the writers who chiefly want an involvement. Admittedly, as this is the first publication (of what will hopefully be a repeated model), we did begin by inviting writers to submit, both locally and from further afield. This did then barrel-roll, and we rapidly received a quantity of work large enough to begin compiling this edition. The ‘Faithless Arm club’ as you put it, is actually only a two-man operation, and the call for submissions was largely facilitated by our blog. The question of quality, we feel, is not one that we feel entirely ours to answer.
A feature of this edition which, in my consideration, stands as one of its strongest points, is the way in which the work hangs together to evoke longstanding themes; namely love, nostalgia, personal history, and memory. The stipulation, which we had provided for submission, was simply the ‘no name, no author’ dictum, and so we allowed the book to develop its own sense of thematic concern. This is indicative of the effect we had hoped this notion of the ‘limited editor’ would have upon the collation of an anthology. Allowing the breadth of work given to prescribe its own direction.
In terms of the on-going question of submission, we are currently trying different avenues. As a simultaneous feature of this anonymous publication, we intend to hand out untitled, un-authored poems in public places, leaving them in unexpected locations; slotting them into the daily rags on London trains, etc. These will have nothing but an e-mail address attached, and will hopefully precipitate a response of some description. We also maintain a more traditional route; by establishing a regular reading, and a working relationship with the South London group ‘Clinic Presents…’, we aim to apply a certain publicity for the Faithless Arm brand that will, in time, make way for new work and opportunity. As a Small Press, our aim is simply to provide a platform for new writing.
We are constantly open for submission, as we are beginning to publish pamphlets of original work by new writers (the first of which should emerge in the new year).
I agree that the submission process may indeed be a challenge to integrity, but we maintain that the response to our call for submission should stand as ‘reciprocal noises’, rather than the answers to direct questions.
Briggs: I've enjoyed this. It seems to me that the project is, potentially, full of pitfalls, but that's an inevitable consequence of trying to do something different, something innovative. And Entomologies is a lovely book. So, all power to the Arm; it'll be interesting to see which direction it prescribes for itself next. But, just to end, I'm intrigued by the extent to which what you're doing derives from dissatisfaction with the mainstream of British poetry today. Is the Arm content simply to complement the broader poetic currents, or does it have a revolutionary gleam in its bicep?
Jaeckle: I agree entirely that there are many potential pitfalls and traps strewn in the path at present, and before we confront any degree of innovation or subversion in the project, I think that this is more attributive to the relative youth of the Arm. This is our first publication, and the plans and ideas we have, I feel, outweigh the limitations of the singular attention of the book. We feel that the nature of this anthology does, most significantly, raise a question as to the direction of mainstream poetics in this cultural climate. We are not leveling the Arm to raise a gun, but rather attempting to apply a sense of curiosity, a sense of freedom, to the public demonstration of artistic practices. In conversation with a friend recently, we were discussing the nature of the poet now. The endpoint of that talk seemed to revolve around the idea of the poet as personality, as opposed to the poet as writer, as craftsman. The makeup of this anthology stands as an effort to centralize the writing itself. We have encountered an equal amount of criticism as praise for the manner in which we have communicated this idea, but the incongruous pattern of these responses does illustrate a key point of inception with Faithless Arm, the provocation of debate. We are, and shall gladly remain, a kitchen-sink industry, and this again provides an opportunity for another side of our coin. We call ourselves independent, and in this entitled ‘age of austerity’ this is a very important factor in our practice. The severity of the implemented cuts upon the arts sector highlights the importance of this sort of venture, the direction of which shall then remain in the hands of those who run and submit to the group. I recently encountered word from another poet on the London circuit who stated that in light of these financial measures, you can now stand for yourself, your own work. The establishment of small presses provides a chance to exhibit work that can remain separate from the economic obligations of the larger publishing houses, allowing the writing a chance to remain free of the constraints of popular taste. The independence of the Arm is wholly significant to us, and, we feel, allows us the scope to explore and evaluate the contemporary poetry scene. We do not wish merely to complement, but would rather move to try and circumnavigate these poetic currents.
Dominic Jaeckle/David Briggs, ©, 2010
This interview was also featured by the online magazine of literary ephemera, Stride.
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