Is there a middle-point between mass production and sending manuscripts to your mates? If the Elizabethans did indeed have a stigma of print, then we now have a complete astigmatism, as we blindly churn out endless new releases in our printing turrets. What if, even in this framework, we somehow managed to make each book meaningfully individual and personalistic? Can we? What if we sent the same set of poems and essays to everyone, collected in the same volume, yet there was always a twist, some additional Easter Egg, just a little quirk or chink to ensure that we can’t fully automate literary production!?
I did have an idea, in the course of trying to get people to purchase Poems Sketched Upon the M60. It’s essentially an idea that makes the whole process into a meditation. This is something akin to the lamentably named “found poetry”. Every single time someone actually does buy a copy of my collection, I force myself to write a completely and wholly individual poem for them somewhere in the collection. I oblige myself to do this even if I know very little about them, and some of the poems I’m most proud of are the people I know nothing about. At a recent dinner party, I had a conversation with some bloke about the Latin origins of the word “mellifluous”. He gave me a tenner to purchase the collection, and I knew little about the inner workings of his mind. Thus, I wrote a poem called “Mellifluous”, refashioning a lot of what was uttered into something resembling a metrical scheme, which I then lost forever when I actually gave it to him the next week (I was invited back, despite bringing nothing and drinking vast quantities of beer. I resolved to bring something next time, in what I now realise is a fairly constant social protocol.)
I have been thinking a lot about “found poetry” because I recently audited a module on language poetry and the twentieth century American avant-garde. Third-year undergraduates, taking a break from canonical figureheads like Chaucer, were studying literary extremists like Kenneth Goldsmith, one of whose poems simply consists of a typed-out copy of the New York Times. He proceeded to teach this creative method at the University of Pennsylvania, where he penalised undergraduates for showing any iota of creativity.
While I can’t share in this, stumbling into poets who deal in “found poetry” did set me off into an alternative set of reflections. I am now acutely aware of how much blank space there is in the world. I think this is related to how intensely easy it is to manufacture a book these days: to press its gatherings together, to attach its spine, to give it some comatose existence. There are many silent pages found in business textbooks, government white papers, and Vatican codices. All of these are just yearning for someone to write some metrically-precise reflection on them. John Clare, for example, could get to work on a piece of paper pretty fast, writing a pretty acceptable ballad on a salvaged handbill extremely quickly. He was genuinely short of paper, and so relished the opportunity to have just anything at all that he could write upon. Imagine what the combined force of Romantic poets (even just) could do with all the blank paper that is currently strewn across the Crystal Palace in Glasgow (where I happen to be writing this.) One could squeeze at least one actually quite good sonnet horizontally from the bit of the menu that says ‘Breakfast’, and a pantoum on the leaflet bearing the title “Table Service”. This is not even to mention all of the totally pointlessly-used paper you could find if you went into the Staff only area. The same drab rotas, perhaps some silly letter to all staff from some draconian manager.
I don’t know, and can only imagine, but the point is that one local Wetherspoons can be turned comfortably into not just poetry, but good poetry. I don’t mean finding phrases and appropriating them, I mean reflecting on the entire spatio-temporal context of the documents we find, and writing poetry about them in the white space. The secret liaison that is occurring between two people on the rota, which has reached classical intensity. The fish and chip meal that contributed to someone’s death in The Counting House in Glasgow the last month; another soul’s passage to the after-life. It’s overwhelming to think about. We must remember that many of the poets of the past, apart from when they were trying to be neat and tidy, managed to cram multiple good poems into one tiny page. Just look at the manuscripts! Hopkins drafted ‘Binsey Poplars’ on the back of a handbill. Imagine if he had access to the vast stock of paper today – I’m sure the Society of Jesus use far more paper than they used to, in printing out MS Word documents for missions, cleaning rotas for religious houses. God knows what else.
Receipt-poems ought to become a genre. The receipt bears the imprint of a time, a place, and is pretty much always printed with the intervention of someone, even if it’s someone who ensures the machine is working successfully, or someone who writes the computer code. Given that so much poetry today is splintered from any details of time and space, and given how lavishly and excessively we are using paper (which comes from trees, which we are deforesting at a vast rate), we basically have a Kantian duty to write perfectly-crafted poems on the back of receipts. In doing so, we should be conscious of every single space. If there is indeed a bit of space, this should be the very image of a caesura: a Robert Browning dramatic monologue baddy pausing in half-reflection of the sins he has committed, and how God might just not actually forgive them just because he went to confession last week. The receipt becomes our vehicle not to appropriate random bits of text and figure, but to seriously interrogate the endlessly complex psychological circumstances in which a receipt is created. To restore, to convert to verse, to converse.
We are not going to destroy “capitalism” like this. If I had one poetic absolute, however, it would be to infuse the world with sensitivity, with the idea that words matter beyond just sound-bites, consumer talismen, and they can be arranged mythically. Rahul Gupta first introduced me to the idea that the Logos might be just about possible into today’s word-saturated World. I am painfully aware that we cannot avoid the way in which words issue necrotically from the body-politic. So let’s stare at the vomit, clean it up, and then, instead of just regurgitating the vomit, re-tile and polish the floor.
You can still buy Poems Sketched Upon the M60 here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford/9781912412334 Or send me an e-mail, sam.hickford@yandex.com, if you’d like to order a personalised copy.
Squidditas 