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My most
recent collection of poetry The Devil's Bookshop (Salt, 2007) comprises four
distinct groups of poems. The book opens with a sequence of elegiac poems
that represents some of the fruits of an AHRC Fellowship in Creative and
Performing Arts 2004-2007 entitled 'Reviving Elegy: Towards a distinct
contemporary language of public and private mourning.' These poems include
elegies for the saxophonist Steve Lacy, the psychologist Elisabeth
KŸbler-Ross and Ga‘tan Dugas, the man erroneously identified as 'Patient
Zero' and accused of spreading AIDs throughout America in the early 1980s.
This section of the book also includes a poem in response to the London
bombings of July 2005. This opening suite of eight poems is followed by a
group of nine poems which try to capture the experience of spending time in a
small village in the Auvergne region of France. A shorter group of 'free
improvised', more explicitly political poems then leads into the book's final
section 'for Cage: Changes/Pages', a sequence in homage to the late com
poser written using his own favoured compositional method the I Ching.
The Devil's Bookshop
is the most coherent of my three collections to date and I tried to suggest
this coherence in the blurb I wrote for it:
The
relationship between care and neglect and how we
choose or
choose not to apply them is a constant theme
in The
Devil's Bookshop.
It is a relationship that is at the
heart of
moving elegies that rehabilitate Ga‘tan Dugas,
the man
erroneously held responsible for spreading AIDS
through
America in the 1980s, and pay tribute to
psychologist
Elisabeth KŸbler-Ross who fought against
prevailing
medical opinion to give terminal patients a
voice in their own
care.
Care and
neglect are also explored in a sequence about
life in a
marginalized village community; in poems that
respond to
the London bombings of 7/7 and the ensuing
climate of paranoia
and scrutiny; and in more meditative
observations
of light and old stones. The cumulative
effect is a
quiet but persuasive argument that it is by our
acts of
attention that we must be judged.
The
Devil's Bookshop
closes with a sequence in homage to
John Cage
whose work in words, music and performance
exemplifies
the challenges and rewards of paying attention
to attention
itself.
Some three years on, that still seems reasonably accurate and what few
reviews there have been have responded generously to my stated interests in
attention and care.
One consequence of those interests is that every poem in the latest book
challenged me in every way imaginable and took around 12-18 months to write.
The way I describe it to myself is to say that in every poem I was writing
at the absolute limits of what I could think in poetry. For example, 'Near
Death', the elegy for Elisabeth Kubler-Ross uses a syllabic form to explore
her life and work. 'Expressions of Eglise Saint Laurent' is a mesostic,
inspired by reading the indispensable John Cage: Composed in America (edited by Marjorie Perloff and
Charles Junkerman) and drafted originally on old sheets of graph paper found
in a house we were staying in in France for most of August 2005. Similarly,
poems like 'La Spagna' or 'From Brassac-les-Mines to Le Vieil Auzon' use rigorous syllabic and
metrical repetitions and carefully stepped and indented layouts. These could
only be achieved by finishing one section and then analysing it in detail in
order to write the next. Sometimes there were happy accidentsÑreading Ed
Dorn's 'A Country Song' gave a form to 'Rue Longue Kitchen Song'Ñbut these
were few and far between.
As that might suggest, I think that the poems in The Devil's Bookshop mark a significant change in my
attitude to form. In my earlier poetry, form was something I hardly thought
about at all. In fact, it was usually the last thing I thought about although
thinking about it at the end of the writing process was often the most
decisive thing I did to a poem. In contrast, all the poems in The Devil's
Bookshop are
the result of finding a form and then doggedly sticking with it. It seems to
me that you can only explore how light works or how information gets degraded,
respond to 7/7 and its aftermath, recreate sensations of rising and falling
on an evening in France or rehabilitate Ga‘tan Dugas, by constructing what
one reviewer called 'musical and sculptural landscapes'. If you'd like to
hear what some of those landscapes sound like then visit my author page at
http://www.archiveofthenow.org/ for some live samples. And I hope that what
you find there will encourage you to go and browse in The Devil's Bookshop.
Sheffield,
March 2009
© David Kennedy 2009
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