The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

50 The New York Review

popular mode is simplified to the cat-

egories of ode and elegy. Then again:

But I like it also

when the fat impasto of the canvas

gets slashed by a tourist

with a claw hammer, and a

glimpse is caught of what you

couldn’t

say....

Subverting the false order of a

hyper automated society, even by vio-

lence, becomes a kind of fantasy—and

this from an Irishman who has writ-

ten about real sectarian violence in

his childhood. Writing in these pages

about The Life After, a documentary he

helped make for the BBC, Laird noted

that the film

simply allowed a few of those

who had suffered the loss of loved

ones in the Troubles—partners

or children or siblings—to speak

about their experiences.... No

one ever recovers from the kinds of

losses these people have suffered:

a daughter going out dancing and

never coming home, a brother ab-

ducted in a pub and tortured and

murdered and dumped on a hill-

side, a son stabbed on his way home.

What’s so animating about Laird is

that he is able to hold this idea in his

head—that survivors of trauma must

speak about their experiences—and

simultaneously to believe, as he told

The Guardian in an interview in 2005,

“Poetry is fiction as well. It’s like a psy-

chodrama—a walk through someone

else.”

Joe Dunthorne writes very short and

is exceedingly light on his feet; he is a

trickster of modern parables and sur-

real counterfactuals. If Laird’s muse

is cerebral and linguistic, with poems

like “The Vehicle and the Tenor” or

“Parenthesis,” Dunthorne’s is all physi-

cality: O Positive is a pun on poetry

as ode (the Romantic vocative “O!”)

but the slim book is also divided into

sections titled “A,” “B,” “A B,” and

“O,” as if blood types were halfway to

rhyme schemes. He loves soccer, bal-

loonists, hypnotists, swimming pools.

“On crutches” is an insult poem in one

bravado sentence stretched over eigh-

teen lines, executing a comic reductio

ad absurdum:

Are you trying to say

you never leapt from a spinny

chair

into the backing singers’ arms

at the cutthroat barber’s soft

launch

yelling “for I am the centrifuge,

all densities find kin within me” at

which point

they all—ha! —totally caught you,

sang a melancholy chanson

to your charming, harmless mole

then later, as dawn repainted the

playpark,

you shoulder-rolled in dismount

from the tyre’s ecliptic swing—

shoeless,

by now, you maniac—coming

down

weird and hard on your ankle

which shivered

but did not crack—ha! —ha! —

and so

in fact I have no fucking idea

how you hurt yourself—probably

in the shower—

you horrid, impossible man.

I take it the poet is talking to him-

self here, performing the lyric clown

like something out of Apollinaire.

In another poem, “Promenade,” he

is waylaid by “an immersive theatre

troupe” doing improv across the Lon-

don cityscape, and in “The spins” he

addresses his beloved:

This festive season I will murder

myself or you,

either swing from the beams like

the surume/

Bündnerfleisch /culatello of my

native Japan/

Switzerland /Italy or hide beneath

your bed

then hurt you. You kill me by

which I mean

I like your jokes.

If you think this is hyperbole, “I

am stupid with” is a poem in which a

rose the speaker offers his beloved is

a tiki torch “to burn down the village/

where everyone who isn’t/the person

I love lives.” In light of these lines, I

shouldn’t have been as surprised as I

was to see Kenneth Koch’s name pop

up in “Workshop dream.” Nobody

imported daffy French Surrealism

into American poetry as lovingly as

Koch did, and its general infectious-

ness among the original cohort of the

New York School is much of what has

kept their work alive and fresh for sev-

eral decades now. The sociality of the

New York School, too, is on offer here;

not only the beloved but “Alex,” “An-

nette,” “Patricia,” “Richard,” “my big

sister”—this is a populated landscape

of anecdotes and addresses. “Sestina

for my friends” combines Dunthorne’s

acrobatics with his formal flair—a ses-

tina juggles the same six end-words

over six six-line stanzas, with a reca-

pitulative envoi at the end—while at

the same time deprecating himself (to

his friends) for his own cleverness and

self-consciousness, which they already

know about and forgive him for; the

poem is both apologia and thank-you

bouquet.

Amid all this fun and (sophisticated)

games, Dunthorne does give us one

dark glimpse behind the magician’s

cloak: in “Layers of Toine,” a fictitious

Flemish psychoanalyst identifies “five

layers of self” and subtly suggests a

kind of ars poetica: there’s the surface

layer (“the carapace”), then “the mir-

ror,” followed by “the river,” “the cav-

ern,” and lastly:

the final layer which Duijsens

elected neither to name nor de-

scribe because he felt it would

harm us too much to learn that

our arrogance and blindness are

perfectly balanced... a productive

contradiction at the heart of his

studies, ruining the trick by learn-

ing how it’s done.

I can imagine objections to these bits

of cleverness: poetry is not a “trick”—

not even one you can’t master. But by

assuming argumentative or theatrical

arenas for their poems, both Dunthorne

and Laird make a bid for attention,

specifically attention to the language as

it’s spoken by those who have authority

over us: lawyers, HR personnel, thera-

pists, tech giants. While novels may

do that to some extent, there must be

a reason these writers still choose to

do poetry. At a time when novels are

reduced to “narratives,” a kind of plas-

tic that can be modeled for different

media, perhaps poetry is the only space

where our language can be put under

the microscope.

Even in light of this—the knowl-

edge that the private life is not the only

wellspring for poetry, that it has a duty

to be public, too—neither Laird nor

Dunthorne can cast off the legacy of

this “vale of Soul-making” that John

Keats left us with. Laird’s final poem in

Feel Free is a translation of “ Animula

Vagula Blandula,” the Roman emperor

Hadrian’s deathbed verse addressed to

his “little soul”:

and you will soon depart for

lodgings that lack colour

and where no one will know

how to take your jokes.

Dunthorne, speaking in the voice of

a Cubist beyond the grave, writes, “I

gave each object its soul, a word I re-

jected, of course.”

He adds, in a footnote, “Along with

all the other words, in my usual insou-

ciant way.” Let us enjoy the little jokes

of poets while we can; if our souls are

unbelieved, they will be gone soon

enough. Q

Joe Dunthorne, London, 2018

Linda Nylind/eyevine/Redux

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