In this essay, Ian Macartney considers whether there is such a thing as a 2010s poetics and, if so, how exactly it can be characterised. Along the way, he explores the literary obsession with newness and the possibility of timelessness as a poetic ambition, and asks: where does God come into all this? Through readings of Annie Katchinska’s Faber New Poets pamphlet and debut collection Aurora Town, Macartney makes the case for the importance of the poetry pamphlet more generally as a laboratorial space for experimentation and risk-taking, rather than simply as a stepping-stone along the way to a first collection. It’s a thoughtful and incisive essay, full of wit and wisdom. I hope you enjoy it.
Traceable, I
type in real time, hitting a nerve
from end to end to end
– Dom Hale, ‘The Noughties’
Now there’s distance, can we talk about an ‘early 2010s’ style in poetry? The sensible answer is no. Like any name given to a historical micro-period, it would be rife with contradictions, too much under its sweep – everything from Button Poetry to alt lit to endgame Seamus Heaney would have to be accounted for. But maybe it’s good to know what clashed and clanged during that time. If it’s shaky ground we’re built on, now a quarter of the way through this century, that’s worth having in mind if we’re to ‘advance’ the medium in our own personal explorations, scenes and friendships.
Pamphlets are a good place to start thinking about this. As a medium, they’ve recently been used programmatically to instil a sense of What Comes Next, the vanguard of a literary culture obsessed with debuts, as per the heightened market value of something perceived to be new. Poetry loves that word, ever since a fascist told us to Make It So. Despite being an artform with such ancient roots, there is a hang-up on being cutting-edge, on ‘relevance’. Not Your Grandma’s Poetry, goes the Edinburgh Fringe leaflet for a spoken-word set, probably, as if grit and antithesis are the signifiers of quality. It’s probably no surprise, then, that there’s been a lot of that stake-claiming in the last twenty-odd years: Next Generation Poets, New Writing [Insert Nation/City], New Poets Prize, [Insert Bookshop Chain] Young Poets…
Pamphlets are, in some ways, closer to an art object than the book. Although as mass-produced as any other product in a bookshop, they seem to maintain unique attributes. They are, inherently, awkward – impossible to shelve, no spines to signify a title nor name. They’re a galaxy apart from books, really, though they insist on being in the same phylum. When the cover is the (near-)same paper stock as the interior, the vulnerability of text feels palpable. In this sense poetry echoes the pamphlet itself – often disseminated in very specific social circles, often ending up in the back of places, resurfacing out of nowhere. But pamphlets accrue, too. Though the lone pamphlet is flimsy, physically insignificant, they can suddenly acquire weight en masse (especially if you’re prone to attending poetry events). The other thing that distinguishes the pamphlet from the book is, I think, economics. Since pamphlets are usually done in very small print runs, any publisher willing to take them on is also one open to risk, which translates to the poet themselves being allowed to double-down on their whims. Editorial work on the pamphlet is also often more ad hoc than in bigger publishers, too; quirks that could get ironed out in the fifth edit of a manuscript are left intact.
In this context, the Faber New Poets (FNP) series interests me. It began in 2009, at the end of Gordon Brown’s premiership, and hasn’t been heard of since 2016, the year of the Brexit vote. FNP’s digital legacy is similarly patchy. There’s Blogpost reviews of most, except numbers 5 to 8, which don’t come up for me on Google Images, but sometimes do on Amazon, if you’re lucky. Each quartet (they were published in sets of four) did a tour; there’s a recording of the original lot at Hull. Here, Matthew Hollis states the proposition at hand: Faber want to ‘identify poets who have outstanding promise’, to ‘give them everything we think will be useful’, including a bursary and a six-month one-on-one mentorship, plus the material outcome of a pamphlet. Afterwards they ‘hired a minibus, going round the country, pretending to be a rock band’.
Annie Katchinska’s debut pamphlet was published in FNP in 2010. Her career thereafter reverses or at least resists in some ways the typical trajectory announced by the series, and thus the typical impulse of the publishing industry. This is not unrelated, I don’t think, to the complicated relationship to spirituality at work in her later poems. For, here’s another insensible question from myself: where’s God in all this? Like poetry, God too has been proclaimed dead many times. Millions live as if that is the case. Yet both notions are painfully alive, in various states of decay or flourish, depending on your perspective. Most of the time, for the typical person, it isn’t even that dramatic: God and poetry are things not worth worrying about.
At a Pizza Express in Stockbridge (an Ambit editorial dinner in 2019 I’d managed to gatecrash, glakkit and twenty), a poet told me that Faber New Poets stopped due to a lack of sales. Quelle surprise, etcetera. Economy of language, and page-count, don’t tend to profit. There’s the assumption that, with our bemoaned withering of attention spans, we’d flock to terser titles, short stories, novellas and poems. Yet the likes of Game of Thrones and Knausgård still sell, so surely size is not the problem. Density of text, however, is. Prose gets away with a privilege of (perceived) formlessness – Lose Yourself In A Cosy Crime Novel and all that – but if prose comes up in something signalled poetry, the blocks become consciously carved. Poetry is not default; poetry aches to be considered. It’s meaning-full, if you will. In a similar way, nothing can be taken for granted in an anxious theist’s mind either: just as a simple line break or dash can catalyse reams of analysis, a mundane moment in daily life can easily slip into becoming an omen. ‘A pink scarf is meaningful in the wind’, to quote Katchinska.
For all the industry obsession to stay current, to reflect on the present moment, it’s good to know even the inkling of God – regardless of individual belief, if it’s a construction or reality you live – can sweep away the most persistent and carnivalesque elements of daily living, of hype and canon. Which, again, is one of the things poetry is proclaimed to do best: to be quiet(ist). Timeless. If this makes me sound curmudgeonly, well, such is the way. In the same ways church is uncool, and any attempt to make it otherwise is deceptive (like the evangelical camps I went to as a teen, speaking in tongues in muddy British fields), this uncoolness is also poetry’s staying power. An extraordinarily weak power, of course – the same ricotta-soft power poetry has in the face of stopping genocide and resurgent global fascism – but a presence nonetheless. Coolness is temporal, i.e. temporary, and so disposable: qualities which are great for a frantic marketplace, loci where stocks rise and fall in value at the speed of light. It’s the same demand that drives fast fashion, blockbuster cinema and hedge funds. Speed begets an insatiable appetite, which begets further speed. Merchandise as compact and lightweight as a pamphlet would be useful in this sense, if it weren’t weighed down by what has ‘minimal’ weight: the content, the ink and words. Pamphlets, in this sense, are printed paradoxes – they can deal with the heaviest of subjects, be a space for poets to go to the furthest edges of consciousness and form, yet are sold as unassuming and inconspicuous vessels, a bookseller’s nightmare (no spines!).
Okay, but to go back to that probably-non-existent style I was meant to conjure. FNP Pamphlet 04, by Jack Underwood, seems the best place to start tracing it out. Here are the key indicators of an early-2010s vibe, as I perceive it: surreal disarming imagery (‘your thighs like tall glasses of milk’), the domestic (‘I knuckle his nose, / which reminds me of the arm of the chair’) and the banal (‘polo mints’), plus a deadpan Lydia Davis-esque distance in voice, which announces itself as humour while something sinister is laced into fraught situations (‘you cannot eat the soap like that, / it makes your insides sick’). It is also measured. This is a far cry from projectivist verse; few of the lines are defined by breath. While alt-lit spun off as an aesthetics of ‘neo’-confession, I see Underwood and Emily Berry and Rachael Allen and other such poets debuting in the early 2010s doing something far more low-key, ‘formal’, ‘considered’ in their use of language. Arch British (cough, English) wit and all that. I don’t think these are ‘incorrect’ strategies to follow through on. I love a lot of this work, the same way I also love the band Dry Cleaning – how vocalist Florence Shaw invokes Twix bars on ‘Scratchyard Lanyard’. It’s the same thing; it can work well. But it’s certainly a specific tone, constructed. It is not an inevitable aesthetic and should not be taken for granted. It may appear the style de jour for a generation of young poets, having grown up reading work in this vein, but it cannot be the ‘only’ approach left for us.
Katchinska’s FNP pamphlet isn’t too far from these tendencies, either. ‘Crash’ rattles off a shopping list of wellness-culture detritus in a Steinian register: ‘gym membership, yoga mat, swimming costume, Lucozade coupons’. Meanwhile, ‘The acrobat’s daughter’ notes the eponymous woman
ate cream cakes and wrote the word beautiful,
unsteadily, in red pen, said, ‘And you have to love yourself,’
as she poured the cheap rosé.
Here is the vapid statements of earnestness; here is the simulacra of middle-class luxury. It’s wine, but cheap: a mix of two strong bodies, diluting each other to make something sweeter. It’s giving Live Laugh Love on life support; it’s giving Slug & Lettuce. It’s giving London.
But there are other things at play here that carry through to Katchinska’s debut collection Aurora Town (2021). There is something manic in the pamphlet, which I find interesting – it speaks to patriarchal expectations of what gendered bodies do in urban environments, under the guise of liberal holism. Katchinska’s lines are not strictly metrical: most of the pamphlet’s poems accordion in and out the margin as they see fit. If the narrator of ‘Crash’ is feverishly trying to sell you a gym membership to negate your Christmas ailments (‘you mincepied? You roastpotated? You goosefated? / You burping in public?’) then the narrator of ‘Too Many Storms’ is deeply agitated by their father ‘importantly flicking his books’:
I read his books in secret,
thumb the pencil-scratched footnotes
he keeps me awake with. […] everywhere
there is furious physics,
a sense of time running out,
talk of splintering ships.
While I don’t think every poem in Katchinska’s pamphlet works, they do take admirable risks, in search of something radical and exciting. That’s exactly what a pamphlet should be for – not the announcement of hewn talent, but a laboratorial process. ‘A good poem is very boring’, after all.[1] Let pamphlets tend to the dispatch, the letter, something to be shared round a circle of friends, discussed. And yet, although pamphlets have ‘qualities that longer, commercially produced books, could not hope to match,’ to quote Richard Price’s essay ‘Poetry Pamphlets as Public Private Spaces’, the FNP pamphlets are quite explicitly described as ‘a stepping stone to what is called a mainstream publication’ – not so much a laboratory, then, as a passing place on the way to elsewhere. I’m not meant to be writing about them; I should be buying their latest offerings instead, things featured in a bookseller’s catalogue last quarter. A bunch of the work in these sixteen pamphlets have been digested into debut full-blown collections since – why focus on something so flimsy, so preliminary?
A year or so after Katchinska had her FNP pamphlet published she moved to Sapporo, a city in the northernmost island of Hokkaido, Japan. While there,
something happened to me which – which what? turned my life upside down, reconfigured my personality, indirectly made me stop reading and writing poems for several years, I don’t know, all of these ways of describing it are irritating because they’re not exactly right. Anyway, years later I still couldn’t talk about it so I started writing poems about it. At first these poems were all very plainly autobiographical and slobbery and desperate, and I had to spend a long, long time essentially learning how to write again, which I guess was useful and interesting but also kind of horrific.
In Aurora Town, her debut collection, it’s quite clear that part of this change was religious – years later Katchinska called it ‘the mind slowly crumbling apart’. This tension is interesting, and miles from the tongue-in-cheek early-2010s maybe-style outlined here. Nor is it a simple premodern sentiment of devotion; religiosity is present, but God absent. Or, at least, the idea of God animates an internal malignment. How this is translated into the poems proper is something more elastic – an essence of ‘scrappy unfinished-ness’, to quote Katchinska again, leading to ‘poems that sound like they were handwritten’.
The poems in Aurora Town are refreshing; they make shapes (the flag-stanza in ‘Fervent Book’) and flitter over pages (the poem ‘A great girl like you’). Still, also, there’s that modernist voice (‘I want to run – // I want to run to run to what, / for what?’) and explicit references to globalised 21st century living (‘ice cartoons, Australian tourists slip and slide, mushroom soup from Aibetsu’). In this sense, I would argue that Katchinska’s sense of spontaneity and risk in her FNP pamphlet crosses over into the debut collection. It sets aside careerist notions of ‘assurance’ to go somewhere more interesting. Consider this, from the prose-poem ‘God so loved the girl’:
I step inside the Corinthian room
which is full of young people freshly planted, brilliant white walls, shaking windows […] For God so loved the world he split us up So loved it he ripped it into chunks […] how the silk of this falls away from thought to thought stabbing and inking a wobbly creature […] For God so loved the girl he drained all the love back out of her, the glug of an emptying sink
and I leave the room
From this relentless sentence the poem builds its own cramped stanza that parallels a dream where the narrator is ‘hairy and much too big for the room’. The revelation, here, is the dissolution of faith, rather than knowledge of God; His contortion into Hell. Kenosis, the concept of divine emptying, becomes the emptying of love for the divine, followed by that anticlimactic ‘glug of an emptying sink’. Back in London, having left Sapporo, atheism has taken on the peculiar role of transcendence. Although religion promises ‘our bodies becoming one gleaming, praising body’, Katchinska reminds us of how ‘deep’ faith is, in a foreboding sense; ‘how bloodlike, how it clamours / like the red root tunnels twitching Bethnal, Bethnal underneath us’.
It seems even things as fundamental as faith can’t be so simple in the 2010s (when the majority of Aurora Town was composed) and, obviously, not now either. ‘There is a supermassive black hole at the centre of every galaxy in the universe’, Jack Underwood wrote ten years ago, ‘and there is also ballroom dancing, and there are also emperor penguins, and nowadays, the Whip and the Nae Nae’. Katchinska’s poems accommodate exactly these ‘objects’, as they mirror interior turmoil in the exterior ‘thick-edged square’ of the poem while also announcing how ‘the silk of this falls away’ to present, if not God, then at least the idea of something beyond our historical micro-periods. That it doesn’t have to be like this; that, subsequently, this isn’t a comforting truth.
It makes sense to me that Aurora Town found its home in indie press powerhouse Broken Sleep Books. One might have guessed that Katchinska would follow through on one of two extremes: either dive straight into the fold of the Big Five (Faber, Picador, etcetera), or deepen a particularly scholarly (read, obtuse) vein of experimentation a la J.H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Katchinska has done neither. Instead, she seems to have opted for something between the false binary of ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental’ poetics – a Secret Third Thing, to quote the kids on TikTok. Of course, Katchinska isn’t alone in this: Rishi Dastidar and Sarah Fletcher come to mind as other poets whose work, rooted in and routed via small presses, achieve staggering clarity and conduct wild experiments, without being conducted entirely from the idioms of academia.
The language of pamphlets can be refined years later. But in their leaflet-y moments poetry is reckless, fragile, even if part of an industrial complex of author-produce. They trace out Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’, the notion that contemporary culture, as not yet cohered in history, contains refractions of common trends, usually in semi-contradiction to each other. Perhaps the poetics of the early-2010s knew that already, from the get-go. Too fast for the naive but wanting to be it; the aching wish to be timeless, burdened by specificity. The desire to mean everything, but also revel in performative Millennial humility. Quite like a pamphlet that has, say, fallen off the back of a bookshelf, once squashed between bigger tomes, only to be picked out the shining dust in a few odd years to mark what was once touted as the future, but no longer is.
[1] Tan Lin, ‘Interview for an Ambient Stylistics’, in <https://www.are.na/block/9527549>
Ian Macartney can be found online at ianmacartney.scot, but for how much longer?
andotherpoems.com 