How often is it that in the throes of great complexity—which might not necessarily be pain but surrender itself—that we longed for the simpler being we were before the big, bad life changing rupture took root, so definitive and total in its power that we were powerless against its effects on us until another, better problem showed up? Another Life is about a retroactive gaze upon a first tragedy of youth, though in Afterbody overall there are themes of death and passing, really the thrust of the work is a great paternal, masculine force of erasure, of dehumanisation.
I wanted to say in Afterbody that looking at the agent of pain, or being intellectually minded enough to have an obsessive need for understanding and seeking, does not guarantee freedom from this pain and dehumanisation. It outlines the problem, but I make a Hegelian point in saying that the oppressed understand their oppressors better than they understand themselves. Nonetheless, the invisibility of the oppressed body remains unshakeable. The outcry and delineation does not terminate the dehumanisation, so the telos becomes something else: to endlessly find new names for the same problems and aches. It is an unchanging thing, déjà là.The monsters within us rest till they are awoken by the wrong nudge, it is psychopathic/narcissistic rage the speaker is up against: unpredictable, disproportionate, emerging from a lack of connection to the world, and the imminent grief that follows. Ever seeking forgiveness for our transgressions, there are few that hope for the courage to admit we have sinned. To not know where to begin, I return to this theme in the “Dante Triptych” later in the book.
“Another Life” is a foreshadowing, a diegetic rather than a poetic impulse, to say indeed the story opens but we must start from a place of self acknowledgement and a total view of ourselves in full splendour, with our private villainies intact. At the same time, I have tried to prevent this from being too metaphysical, too pathological. The impulse of this remedying can only fully express itself in the poetic register, and that language through poetry is a space for opening rather than containment. I bring to focus mourning and death, and then consolation: music. The reader sees sin and forgiveness in nature all the same; warmth arriving in a cold place, and suddenly the awareness dawning, that we had, in fact, been cold all along.
Over the many months of my apprenticeship with Don Paterson, the most important thing he said to me was “…do not lose track of what you are trying to say, don’t get lost in the music just because you have a good ear, have some semantic discipline.” It also came to light thereon that poetic pedagogy was a place not just of learning but the invention of new knowledges; we arrived here, where poetry can be a proper form of argument without seeking recourse to the Socratic dialogue or British empiricism or Marxist dialectics, that all ideas have an emotional quality to them which is endemic, no need to force one’s hand.
So to argue as a poet is to not be afraid to say what one means plainly, before we transform it into poetic language, or “poetize” anything we mean to say (which eventually turns out to be a mistake, is almost always stilted). In that doing, a being emerges, that is organically poetic in speech, the poem arrives, without us trying to fashion it from stray lines and loose ideas. It is a more sincere form of building a poem, to echo Denise Levertov. The argument is the idea is the poem. In “Another Life” I keep the language loose and free, the way it mimics an almost epiphany, ultimately disappointing. How ineffectual we are, how pointless our endless delineation, grasping, striving and scribbling.
