He's chopped articles and conjunctions so that there's a hint of faded hipster in the syntax, old pop maybe? They break where they shouldn't, spill all when it's least advisable. The piece twitches across its pages too, as if the lines are in shock. Just before he read ('in books I see these melancholy things') football guys were howling the place down you can nearly hear the rip they've taken out of the air. Remarkable isn't it? A perfect locus for his poem, the ideal sounding board, MDF-ed and formica-ed, littered with beer accidents. 'she eats a crème egg like it's an oyster' This is a materialist poetry that eschews narrative for the pleasures of the text, it's an un-story, that has found other ways to seduce the audience. As reward for the risk, * redraws the map of the mainstream, spilling confusion into the shape of new territories. Reeling back to Schoenberg and the desire for 'heart' rather than Cagean processes carries all the danger of a reactionary act. Here the expressive act is driven by emotional need, not process. They are colours in the palette but they do not decide the composition. Cut-up, vispo, excision, aleatory procedures and other strategies of avant writing are being used here not in and of themselves but as methods employed for an ulterior expressive purpose. Geof Huth would be another, Holly Pester yet another, select your own version. Secondly, he's one of a number of poets trailing a difference in approach to process and system writing generally. But his power is that he utterly holds his audience, and then – as he reads – himself in his own sway. At times, this sacrifices the density of the writing, as comedy often must. ![]() He's taken the poetics of collage and happenstance and turned them into an enthralling schtick. Notions of hollowness, overload and entropy are not new but Jenks presages two things that are.įirstly, his own characteristic voice is particular and notable – the lugubrious humour, the deftness of his craft, his gift of lightness. It is later in the book that we find portents of decline turning up in the guts of the pickings, learn to see Russian dolls as falling dominoes: An empire-size collapse is at first gently prefigured, we're shown distant smoke on the horizon: The idea of a wider hollowness is tracked deep into the piece, initially in its restless taxonomy of consumables, then in other clues. ![]() Held in the throat of the poem is Ken Williams's skreeking laugh, Hancock's tussle with the melancholy of each bloodied day.Īre terrified of trees are fearing certain stones In the tone of it, I'm reminded of nobody so much as neurotic old Brit comedians, Kenneth Williams or Hancock, the weirdness of their emotional hygiene, the horror at the approach of their ogres. This is channel-hopping faster than eye or ear, driven by panic and punctuated with nervous jokes. ![]() There's no sense of an overarching schema, no symphony, no grand homophonic ending. ![]() But this isn't a poem containing history, it makes a point of dodging all but an immediacy flash-fried and box-fresh. The '*' refers to the 'select all' function in databases and the poem duly takes its Poundian slice of everything. * is a poem of hard surfaces – hi-shine fake oak counters, faces on monitors talking adspeak, food suffocated in its wrapper, cheap jewels, 2 nd hand software. When I read it now, I can picture Tom's face part-shadowed, reading in one of those nonspace corporate bars that we usher our lives through. It's a gesture that characterises this book-length poem, there's a haunted feel to the thing. Online, if you watch the launch of Tom Jenks's new poem '*' you'll see him look off to the side as if something has spooked him.
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