the world's most unhelpful poetry review

silence
noise
stupidity
intelligence
pissing rain

I'm baffled. I'm about to review the most recent issues of if p then q and parameter, and I love much of the work there, but I haven't the faintest fucking clue what most of it is on about. This has been so common in my reading since I was a child that most of the time I don't notice it and don't care. It happens quite frequently in conversation, or filling out forms. But when I want to share what makes me fascinated by a piece of work I feel I have to provide some kind of insight, I have to actually understand the work.

But it's not true. I don't have to understand the work. As I type I'm listening to Metal Machine Music, and I'll listen to it again when it finishes in a couple of minutes. Although I've listened to it a few times, and although I'm familiar with it's offspring, especially Matthew Bower's Skullflower, Sunroof!, and Hototogisu projects, I can't say that I understand it. I don't understand it in the sense that I know how it was actually made, or what Lou Reed intended, or to be able to create a score of it (as on the recent recording with Zeitkratzer). But I do know that I can communicate why I enjoy it so much - and maybe I will later. For now though there are some obvious objections I'm going to ignore. I know that music is different from literature. I know that music doesn't mean anything in as direct a way as language. I know that you don't need to understand everything about a text to appreciate it. So just fucking calm down and either piss off or read on.

Parameter. Full disclosure, I haven't bothered to read the fiction yet. But that means I have read the reviews, the poems, and the long poem. I will not review the reviews.

There's a silence in the presentation of the poems, in at least two aspects, that is worth commenting on. The relatively small format of the pages (A5 I think, but I'm fucked if I'll measure it) means a reduction in the amount of white space around each poem. You might think this would lead to an increase in noise - words appearing more crowded, less space, but you'd be wrong. I have said previously that I find white space in poetry the equivalent of black and white in film and photography - sometimes essential to the particular aesthetic, but often just an inherited trope to signify value. It's like the way writers will apparently agonise over linebreaks, or keep editing small sections to find the exact word. Why fucking bother? My point being, silence - space - can be very noisy and draw attention to itself. The format here mitigates against that - which I hope irritates precious poets and readers. The other silence is that the authors' names are not on the poems, but indicated by numerals with a corresponding key on the back. Actually I'd like them much less accessible. It's great reading work with no conception of the writer's age, gender or ethnicity. You have to rely on the words and on your own experience. You can make creative misreadings without worry.

The first poem that leaps out at me annoys me at the same time. Sometimes hovering on the edge of meaning, or rubbing two edges of meaning against one another, sometimes it plunges straight into meaning or an obvious non-meaning. This is proxy. You'll have to buy the magazine to read it or find out the author. Sometimes it's too ancient - conventional poetry leavened with a kick of Beats perhaps filtered through a singer who fancies himself, 'A SINGLE DOG BARKS AT A DUST SPIRAL WHERE A SUN GOES UP AND DOWN' Huh? There's a bit too much of this sort of thing ('DIAMOND OF NEVER'? Fuck off), but matched with a lot of 'WE DO NOT INTEND TO HOT OPEN CARRIAGE IN WHITE OR BLUE WITH EYES'. It's where the sense breaks down or fragments, or pays less attention to well-thumbed models, that it changes from say Scouting for Girls third-hand smugness into the bracing stereo conflict of Metal Machine Music.

Six poems from Warrant Error might well be six poems, or one poem, or any number in between, but let's trust the title. In fact no, bollocks to that, let's assume that its one piece in no particular order. I was excited and mystified when I read it first, but when I came to read more closely I realised I'd remixed it. I skipped back and forth creating new permutations. The first and second poems for instance have their obscurities - are the events in the second real, or are they read about, or written, or imagined, or some combination of these? There's rain, and violence, and literature, and it is compelling, but how much more fun to swirl the two facing poems together - 'I steal myself into the flow of at a future instant tilting diagonals on the floor, and the matted skull the person who is absent slowly rising'. But the reason is that the writing is so dense, the lines having an impenetrable consistency, that you can pull them to pieces in this way without harming the poem. In fact the juxtapositions created this way start to shed light on the way each poem is constructed, how the thirteenth line echoes the fourth, how it's clear there's a theme of mouths, but not what in the fuck it actually signifies. But you know, only if you've got the time.

REWRITING LETTERS, CHANGING FORMS decays the language of standard letters advertising services (banking and opticians here) according to what looks like a formula, but may be nothing of the sort. The two pieces seem to be chosen because 16. REWRITING LETTERS, CHANGING FORMS (ACCOUNT) in the final two sections echoes the language of the first section of 5. REWRITING LETTERS, CHANGING FORMS (OPTICIANS), but that could be rubbish, an accident. Perhaps more evidence is needed, further poems that begin to clarify what you suspect. Except maybe the poems are richer as they are, hinting at wider schemes and references, but never satisfying your curiosity.

And there's more. Some of it even looks like, and occasionally reads like poetry. You know, that stuff what you get in overpriced tedious books from Carcanet and Bloodaxe, on the shelves in between collections from Felix Dennis, indie musicians and Craig Charles. Only better. It just looks like it.

And I swear I'm not making this shit up - at your local bookstore you too can find out how Stephen Fry thinks poetry should be wrote, or what Taking Back Sunday are like without the music. Fucking painful.

So the long poem, helpfully tagged long poem on the front of the booklet. Oh yeah, booklet. I dunno if it's presented this way every time, but parameter 7, which is the one what I got, came as five A5 booklets including one with background sketches of each writer, wrapped in foil with a paper band giving the title, ISSN and all that shit. I like. Takes me back, it's like photocopied fanzines and as much music as you can fit on a C90. But anyway, long poem - or The Flaming Man as it is knowed to readers.

I've read it a couple of times, possibly more, but generally out of order, and from beginning to end maybe only once. And now the staples are losing their grip on the pages and I'll be able to remix it how I like, never get back whatever it was meant to be.

I used to like poems written in the first person because it was like getting an insight into someone's life and emotions, making a connection. Now I like it because of the unreliability, the misdirection. The possibility it might all be untrue. I used to write a lot of spontaneous effusions, attempting to communicate my pain to people as though they might give a fuck or be able to do anything about it. Now I'm more interested in lying. If you want to know what matters to someone listen to their lies not their truth.

The Flaming Man is affectless and disjointed. Unless that's just how I read it. The events are mundane, and there's no real reason to question them, although perhaps the narrator is supposed to be unreliable. Superficially though there doesn't appear to be a disjunction between what they see, the way they see it, and what other people see. This is no Patrick Bateman. These are ideas and thoughts that cycle and repeat. The beat of living day to day with yourself, with the same people, with the same set of references. Some people try to shapeshift, this portrays people who don't change, they just get older.

What I'm trying to say is I like this poem, but I don't know why. That some of what it tries to do has sympathetic echoes with my own views on writing, but at other times is inimical to them. It has shape, and can be engaged with. This could be where the self who loved spontaneous effusions, and the self who loathes craft and close reading join - that each wants to feel friction from the poem. Something to agree or disagree with, some sense that there is more to art than art. Not that it has to be true, not that it has to mean anything, but that it has an internal integrity beyond theory and a conception of what a poem should be.

Christ, I've bored myself. Buy your own copy, read it and disagree with me. Leave a comment and tell me what a cock I am. So yeah, if p then q.

Partial disclosure, I met James Davies on Friday and had a chat with him about visual poetry and sound poetry among other things for an hour or so. I like him, so I managed to avoid the kind of facetious answers to questions that I'd offer to someone I was trying to wind-up or confuse. We barely talked about if p then q. I certainly didn't mention I was planning to review it. Mainly because I'd forgotten.

As it goes a lot got forgotten that night. As James left the pub, Andy N and a couple of his friends arrived. I ended up drinking more and tagging along as we went to a poetry reading at the Buddhist Centre, and then for a Chinese buffet. My memories are kind of hazy, but that goes for the last couple of months. But anyway, if p then q.

Some kind of disclosure - I haven't listened to the CD that came with if p then q issue 2 yet, Tony Trehy meets Robert Grenier. Today I've listened to Metal Machine Music twice, Gary's Nervous System, and I'm currently listening to Genevieve Lacey's Weaver of Fictions - which for the record is a fucking rank title. But I have read the poetry a few times. In fact embarrassingly the first couple of times I read it I forgot the content so completely I thought I hadn't read the magazine until I realised the poems were strikingly familiar...

So. Again I refuse to review the review except to say that the essay Michael Gibbs - Unsung Hero of Experimental Poetry is well worth reading. And his poems that follow.

For the sake of fairness I'm not going to tell you who wrote the pieces I review from if p then q either.

14 panels for Lynne Dreyer is a fascinating piece(s?), already remixed into complete abstraction, enabling you to attempt to reconstruct the poems for yourself. Except there might be nothing to reconstruct. And if there is, is each panel self-contained, or do the panels adjacent to one another bleed into one another? Does it matter? There are pockets of apparent meaning, or at least near-meaning that emerge. Is this word a deliberate misspelling or a pun? Is it an existing word, a neologism, or merely meant to look like another word or sequence only to deny the similarity as you look at it? Perhaps if I were familiar with Lynne Dreyer's work it would be clearer, but as a committed philistine I have to confess to knowing nothing about her work.

But the words, the shapes, the relationships made by juxtaposing apparently unrelated elements make the poetry breathe and shift. Reading becomes active... perhaps this is what happens if you place a stencil on the page and isolate only a few of the words. But it's not a puzzle. If it was a puzzle, then any puzzle could be poetry, and word squares and crosswords would be art. This gives pleasure in itself, the speculations in a way don't require any answer. The burst of questions, the turnings of the page, the reordering are their own answer, almost the point of the exercise. Except remember I am very very dim and might have the whole thing terribly wrong.

More panels, or at least discrete and quite regular shapes, in the extract from Internal Rhyme. Panels which can be read as more recognisable units of sense, but which again can be remixed from panel to panel. At least until you find a reading that's horribly awkward in your remix, but comes into focus when you read each panel alone. Although there is still the question of what order to read them in.

There's less sense of there being something to work out here, because there seems to be more sense offered to the reader here. There is observation and memory, equivocation and doubt, relationships, and what might be description, or description acting as metaphor, or metaphor acting as description. It's bright and clanging, less frenzied than 14 panels - a halfway stage, like Sister Ray a still recognisable song.

It is pissing down outside. It's been dismal all day. I should call a friend. Actually, instead of putting on new records I should listen to Tony Trehy and Robert Grenier, make a coffee and get this fucking review finished. I hate reviews. I hate having to fit things into a schema, to impose a reading on work. Parameter and if p then q are your magazines as much as anyone else's, they belong to you more even than the writers. You read the work and understand it in the light of what you know, what comes to you. I shouldn't tell you what they mean, or what I think they mean. I make my own sense, and in writing reviews pull that sense into little shreds so I have to build it up again. Sometimes it makes me feel stupid, but I'd like to preserve and communicate that, because I don't want anyone reading to feel stupid. I want my readers to think 'shit, that sounds good, I'll give it a go.'

Short version I like both magazines. I find parameter 7 has what seem to me to be the most conventional looking poems, but a lot that comes off the pages and sticks in your head. If p then q 2 seems the harder, but at the same time the poems come to me as appearing more vital. But as already discussed they didn't stick immediately. It's too short as well. I could have gone for more - but 26 A4 pages is pretty generous when there's a CD and some postcards of images from Joy as Tiresome Vandalism aRb Versions.

Parameter is like reading a book that keeps taking turns for the unfamiliar, whereas if p then q is like finding pages blowing around in the street that keep threatening to turn into a book even though they're different sizes and fonts.

Oh, go on then, in alphabetical order the writers I've discussed are Bill Allen, Christopher Barnes, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Mark Cobley, p.inman, Robert Sheppard, and Scott Thurston.

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