The Boing in Ongoingness

On Oli Hazzard's Sleepers Awake, the progress of poetry and the march of time

Sometimes you check your email and you find that the art of poetry has actually moved forward. This has been a recurring feature of my friendship with Oli Hazzard, and is only occasionally galling. When I think about what poetry now ought to be able to do and include, Oli is usually my north star.

He has been since about 2011, when he came to speak to the undergraduate poetry group I attended, and gently euthanized a long poem I had written. It was a desperate attempt to become a grown-up, modern poet (contemporaneousnessness is becoming “he says”… it began). Beyond his mercy, however, there was always the example of his work, off there in the distance, forever running ahead. What I have to say in praise of him, and his new, book Sleepers Awake, will not pretend to any kind of distance aside from that.

At the time Oli published his first book, Between Two Windows (2012), Britain was home to a vibrant scene of self-described “Linguistically innovative poetry”, but increasingly, this was becoming a tradition premised on a series of beliefs about the relationship of language to politics that were losing their hold on that scene’s imagination, and which personally I never quite managed to buy into—though about which I now feel nostalgic.^[1]

Oli’s work, by contrast, seemed to me to be an opening for actual linguistic innovation--not dependent on believing that poetry had this or that political reason to be the way it was, but still avoiding the generic narrative form that experience takes in most “mainstream” poetry, and most of my own efforts.^[2] Instead, he has always focused on something like the way true personal experience can appear at the level of the phrase. Often, this seems to me to work by a kind of flint knapping process; by banging two rocks together you can create an axe head, and by banging words together—even, or perhaps especially those that are not your own—you can turn the words into much more pointed things. They become sharp as pieces of their meaning fall away from them, and can now become the recognisable trace of a humanity precisely because something is missing from them. Although maybe this isn’t right either: I mean that when words look strange next to each other, compellingly organised but not easily understood, they act as a reminder that they belonged to a person. What you meant by the words in a moment, rather than what they mean, becomes clearer.  Take these lines from March and May, in Blotter, his second book:

       a prolonged pause

		before I remember

	the day, like

		I can’t believe

	I couldn’t believe

		 it’s finished

	try in an hour 			finger around

		try tonight 			the rim of

	remind me			a wine glass

 tomorrow			creepily

	is there				small acts

		running its 			of disgrace

Note: See pictures below in case the Substack poetry formatting button betrays me

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It’s a poem that loops between two columns, a little like John Ashbery’s ‘Litany’, though there’s a more obvious “commonsense” order to follow in Oli’s case. But I suppose it’s worth noting two things: one, the way that the line spaces emphasise the passage of time, draw our attention to what is falling away from us from us. And two, the way that he uses the message you get when your mac needs to be updated. Somehow, try in an hour, try tonight, becomes both a marker of the end of a day, and a strangely moving address to someone about that passage of time. The found text (i.e., words not the poet’s own), became personal, part of an experience, one person’s, in time, and as they form part of an address to a beloved, they form the stuff of poetry.

By the time Blotter came out in 2018, it seemed to me that the internet itself, and especially the idiolect of “posting” had taken some of the juice out the two leading formal strategies of avant-garde poetry in English--disjunction and found poetry, both of which Oli employs.  In the USA, Conceptual poetry, which was a sort of parody of the idea of avant-gardism itself, using found language for more or less successful acts of middling cultural criticism, lost pretty much all sway as a result of the egregious mishandling of racial themes by its leading white proponents. Another US avant-garde movement, Flarf, from the decade before, was an attempt to revel in the strangeness of online language, making poems out of weird google searches, to demonstrate the disorder of the online collective unconscious. But compared to Dril, say, or even second tier weird Twitter posters, it just lacked force and memorability. It seems to me that those matter more than critical purpose when you’re trying to write poetry.

The two dominant impulses of anglophone avant-garde poetry in the early 21^st century, then, to demonstrate the falseness of ideology (especially that bastard, the coherent self) through disjunction, and to explore the schizoid condition of onlineness, have seemed to fail quite dramatically over the course of my writing life. The public facing versions, we might say, of what Oli does, have kind of lost their way. The satirical, and critical character of these gestures, the distance they sought to provide, is mostly gone. In that sense, poetry hasn’t really “moved forward” since.

I’m not saying there is no avant-garde now, but in general, the poetry scene since has been the site of anxious rapprochement—different styles and modes adopted without any particular dogmatic force, while the obligation to be politically serious has intensified. The most supple and useful contemporary style has probably been the prose poem in which the minutiae of private experience are joined to the public world not through poetic convention, but by a shared understanding of politics, in which the poetry is achieved almost in spite of itself. The arrival of this era, and its justification, were announced with masterful rigour in the opening lines of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: When you are alone and too tired to turn on any of your devices…

But what I admire about Oli’s poetry is that it just keeps on going forward into the strangeness of language and its devices, without public justification or rationalisation, and succeeds at making poetry out of it. In spite of working primarily with the two strategies I’ve outlined above, disjunction, and found poetry, each of the major poems he has written offers an ever higher-resolution depiction of personal intimacy. Rather than try to write a public poetry, a poetry responding to the crises of our moment, he’s constructed an ever more ambitious privacy, a poetry of the actual moment. I sometimes think of what he does as a kind of weird reversal of these lines from WS Graham’s (banger) ‘The Constructed Space’:

            Anyhow here we are and never
Before have we two faced each other who face 
Each other now across this abstract scene 
Stretching between us. This is a public place 
Achieved against subjective odds and then 
Mainly an obstacle to what I mean.

For Graham, in his austerely beautiful late phase, the fact of communicating seemed always to require a loss of the self. The poem is born out of a mourning that language couldn’t quite carry something like personal feeling across a gap that it itself was. In Oli’s work, the strangeness of language, its loss of meaning when you play with it, seems to offer a proof that words might bear the impression, if not the weight, of personal feeling. They’re both poets of extremely singular address, but Oli’s work is less solitary.

At the start of his recent collection, Sleepers Awake, is a long poem called ‘Progress Real and Imagined’. It’s probably his masterpiece so far, along with this book’s weirder and wonderful ‘Incunabula’, which I might have to discuss in full another time. Progress takes its title from a painting by Nicole Eisenman, which it only slowly gets round to describing. It’s a parinting of an artist’s studio adrift at sea and crammed with art history, falling everywhere in lively disorder.   when I received it in my email, I felt that once again, he’d found a way forward. A way that other poets might benefit from following.

Of course, the poem looks back, in some ways. As all good poetry does. It looks back to some of the biggest poems of the New York School, Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, and Ashbery’s The Skaters, for example; but its commitments at the level of texture are different. The tone of NY school poetry, its chattiness, is not the chattiness of Hazzard’s poetry.

There’s a kind of particulate glee in ‘Progress’, a joy in the small units of sound and sense. At the end he refers to “This desire to expunge experience, or to pattern it in every blob of putty,” and this might be a way into thinking about the poem’s brilliant, and sometimes groan-inducing moments of linguistic play. The boing in ongoingness, the sigh in Versailles, the rain pip-divoting/ a pivoting breeze, Spring’s smithereens. In general, everything is catchy and sticky. The title of one of the collection’s other poems, an all-time great if you ask me, is ‘dingdingdingedicht’.

If you just follow the m sounds, emphasised by humming, in the opening passage, of ‘Progress’, you can see the first stirrings towards a bounce that gives the poem its remarkable power:

        For a long time
	I wondered
	what’s all this juice for?
	
	to bring us closer?

	to touch or meet
	you here

	in this 
	small downed
	“room”
	
	take
	the sensation

	of eyes
	moving
	as a totem

	alive and googling
	the anonymous green blossom
	
	humming in the air
	out of frame

You can maybe see the resemblance to the preoccupations of Graham, communicating in the small downed “room” of the poem. But the playfulness of meaning itself seems to do something with the lines, to make the room both comfortable and alive (downed as in hair, a crash, or warm and feathered?. The words fizzle and the world seems full of possibility. The googling of flowers is also the googling of eyes, which might be sticking out of a silly version of a totem. We can sort of see that as an image of the porousness of real world and the internet, but it is not a straightforwardly melancholy or critical statement. It is not about our disconnection from nature, for example. Instead, we can even optimistically say that the various overlays fill every particle of the world with something like subjectivity, personal experience. It sort of reminds me of the great Romantic poets’ vision of the one life made to express itself in many forms.

One of the important overlays is poetry itself. I’m pretty sure that the word ‘juice’ here is an allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Spring’. In that poem, the speaker celebrates the transitory beauty of the season:

What is all this juice and all this joy?          

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning 

Later in ‘Progress’, there’s several quotations from the same poem (Spring’s smithereens?) so I don’t think I’m being too fanciful:

        I have no idea why
	light changes 

	pavement 
        swallows

	last leaf bits
	capsize in

	eczemary air
	nothing is so beautiful
	
	as when you say
	ok, reluctantly,

	you can tell me 
	your funded dream

	about daylight.

But unlike Hopkins, who laboured to preserve a deep ambivalence between his love of the glory of earthly, changeable forms and the need for God to save them, Oli’s work is always insisting on the transitoriness, and singularity of its words. If they chime, it’s not because they gesture to an order beyond the poet’s consciousness, it’s because the poet is having fun, being, for better or worse, in the moment.

And you can see that this is not unambivalent. Both because time does only go one way, and because it doesn’t really belong to us. Throughout the poem, there’s a kind of preoccupation with what constitutes work. You’ll fine references to the history of poetry and patronage, mentions of the various strikes that have hit the UK HE sector over the last few years, and the mention above of funding. And, like Mayer’s Midwinter Day, or some of the early work of Alice Notley, it’s full of the work of childcare (another reason for all the juice?), three children show up and are looked after. The poet plays with them, reads Peppa Pig to them, watches Paw Patrol, quotes Winnie the Pooh, and tries to work out the difference between play and his own salaried employment. One of my favourite set of lines in the poem, a joke I can relate to: For a long time/ We just wanted a baby. Now only one thing exists. It’s also a poem of frazzledness and exhaustion, of a world that contracts under the pressure of care work into its moment—because it’s hard to conceive of a narrative form when you’re tired. 

We could build up the poem’s criticism of the work/play/care distinction into Marxian statements about labour time and the value form, for example. But the poem has not set out to describe and criticise a world in which social reproduction, wage labour, and play are separated by political, economic forces. It operates as if poetry doesn’t have to recognise those forces right to exist, which is where its joy comes from. Close to the end of the poem, the poet’s son tasks him with an imaginative game:
        Ned says dad

		you are mum

	Frank is dad

		I am the

	baby now

		you are the

	baby I 

		am mum Frank

	is baby 

		I wish I 

	had three dads

		two to work

	and one to 

watch movies

	with me no

		two to watch

	and one to work

		where am I

	dad your work

		is very

	boring we 

		are with each

	other

A child knows the difference between work and play, but feels very comfortable imagining it otherwise. The point, if that’s the right word, is not that the family is a haven in a heartless world, or that art is, but that play itself brings us closer to a true experience of time, which is neither fully liberated, never unlimited, is always shot through with loss. Throughout this book, the forgetting of aging, epitomised perhaps, in dementia, seems to loom large too. Noticing, remembering, forgetting, these are our most serious forms of play. We can’t win back control of time, but we can nevertheless experience it and focus on experiencing it, for the sake of ourselves and others. I’m reminded of these lines from ‘Incunabula’:


							what is it

	to be following in a spiral a precise point as the basin drains
	towards a blanket powerout in the iris of the Earth
	a memory of a nice feeling motioning my hand in disbelief
	to a point, a precise point towards which these objects now stream

Throughout the collection, Oli constantly works little miracles with language, found and his own. In each case, the words themselves are worked into an experience, they became the opposite of something prefabricated, because they can only take place the once, in this one moment, one person speaking to another. I find it immensely moving. 

As I myself have aged, entering, by poetry standards, middle age (poets begin middle age at 35—it’s Dante’s fault), I find myself struggling to move forward, not to repeat moves, to figure out how to ‘grow’ or whatever as a writer. I often find that Oli has shown me how the way forward, the true way, the only way, perhaps, which is to notice where you’re already going. My sense of what I was trying to do was always to make an issue of the purity of words, to show how they got in the way, because of their social sulliedness, of trying to address people beautifully. A lot of poetry, especially that invested in the idea of the avant garde, has tended to be about this difficulty. The language, the art is not fit for purpose, because social life isn’t; the poet must work to solve this problem with words. But Oli’s work which is also play has shown those words and that world’s aliveness. Its ongoingness, Long may his progress continue. 

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Thanks for reading. More soon, more regularly.

For anyone interested in looking further backwards, writing this sent me back to Thomas Gray's underrated Pindaric Ode   'The Progress of Poesy'

^[1] Very briefly: the idea that the task of the serious writer was to break the hold of ordinary language on our minds, to show the ways it was sedimented with ideology, that what we took for common sense need not be so, began to seem less compelling. People began to want their political poetry to be more popular. Without faith in the obligation not to make sense, current radical British poetry is little more than a network of affiliations, a poetry written in its once off-putting styles largely out of habit, often diluting even those, and more dependent on a specific kind of political sentimentality than any linguistic innovation. Maybe this will be another post

^[2] What is mainstream poetry? will definitely be a series of posts also.