#81austerities

[robinallender]

I loved Sam Riviere’s 2015 collection, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage – a sequence of poems written in a language made rotten by the internet, for example:

grave heaven

All our emotions, thoughts,  knowledge and feelings go to an eccentric, swashbuckling fantasy world. 

Or am I missing something? 

Do good people really go to an anime-inspired fantasy world when they die?

His earlier collection, 81 Austerities, is slightly more conventional, but still brilliant, silly, funny and weirdly moving: 

couples circulate the otherwise  dead town centre like leaves in a big ashtray

Fantastic use of ‘big’ there! What about this nonsense:

here I am in a wet field as a clown tells me to ‘get real’ 

And I love this:

& the sun doesn’t bother to lift its head from the table but is leaking torpid ‘honeyed’ light from behind clouds

Those inverted commas are very arch! But I love them – he knows what he’s doing, the ‘leaking torpid’ light shows us that he’s in control of the language he’s using. By acknowledging how hackneyed received poetic language is, Riviere is stressing how important it is to find a new voice, a new way of saying things, avoiding clichés and aiming for something like truth.

There’s also a poem about Pavement in there. 

[cmdldn-blog-blog]

Sam Riviere

In conversation with http://austerities.tumblr.com/

Your output is prodigious - a collection of 81 poems shows a remarkable dedication to a theme, not least one of cuts and austerities. In an earlier interview I discussed the work of Travess Smalley as a ‘performance of producing’, would you say a similar sentiment is relevant here?

  A lot of poems I enjoy seem to want to 'perform their production' in some way. Maybe no-one can ignore the fact they are declaring they are writing a poem when they're writing a poem anymore. I enjoy getting an impression that the poet hasn't decided what they think or where the poem is going too much, that they're surviving line by line. As the starting point of the Austerities project was to deprive the poems of some characteristics one might expect poems to have (things like metaphor, 'poetic' language generally, concerted image-making), the struggle with these imposed limitations is the basis of each poem and its 'performance' on the page/screen I guess. I like having that sense of adversity. I wanted to write by theme, to produce almost excessively and repetitiously, and give the impression that even subject matter could be an arbitrary decision, so then the method, the 'mode of production', would have to be the point of the project. I try to draw attention to this with things like the sloganeering and largely irrelevant chapter titles, and the recurrence of themes such as advertising/arts funding where content is secondary to the primary task of the text, which is fiscally orientated. Setting yourself a subject or something random-seeming like that doesn't in my opinion prevent a poem from having an improvisational honesty, which is probably as much to do with how/what the poem *resists* meaning. I guess a willingness to test your flexibility or slipperiness in this way seems like a genuine risk. It's like having to somehow extract yourself from a situation or argument and leave it facing the reader. Like if this was a poem I feel I'd have to contradict these assertions at some point. I don't know. This is my third attempt at answering this question.

  Ha I saw them as they came and went on the google doc. How would you say your use of tumblr has aided you in regard to the above? In essence this becomes quite a simple question- what are the advantages and disadvantages you have encountered in using a web based rather than traditionally print based medium?

  I'd written/found the poems before I began putting them online, so my use of tumblr didn't alter the composition of the poems, but it has led to some other material being attracted to and clustered around them. It's become a more involved, denser project, with audio, images, video, incidental poems responding to the poems 'proper', and so on. I originally envisaged something much more sparse, 'austere', I guess, and saw tumblr as not much more than a convenient platform. If you develop a blogging habit though suddenly there's material everywhere, as if it's drawn to you somehow. As with approaching writing the poems, I want to be open to contingencies, developments, reactions, have the power to pre-emptively criticise the work, and incorporate this stuff into the project as a whole. It's funny that after I wrote a disposable short poem about reading an unauthorised biog, other places publishing the poems became nervous about how they commented on the project, in case they ended up as part of it too. Strange that having a blog could potentially paralyse criticism, a bit like having your own media empire. So I guess probably the disadvantages of online publishing – losing control over the work, etc – can be viewed equally as advantages. 

  I like the ‘material everywhere’ observation. Certainly something I’ve found is that the more blogs I’ve become involved in, the more of the internet has become available to me, if that makes sense. I think you begin to surf much more actively with each additional curatorial interest, and perhaps this is even reflected in your day to day living / your ways of engaging with the world. Essentially blogging platforms such as tumblr help us visualise the networks and connections we create and exist in as social beings. 

Do you see your poems as part of this wider networked dialogue - that is to say do you see your voice as adding to a wider microblogging conversation - or is your choice of medium more of a formal aid? And in this vein of thought, of a web based project being necessarily located within an ‘internetwork’, to what extent would you say interviews such as this, as well as dissemination of the work in other blogs and forums, inflect or augment the project?

  The poems were written outside of that environment, and with what became quite a specific intention to respond to the arts cuts/austerity measures, alongside what's I suppose seen as the dominant trend in mainstream British poetry. The poems try to play out feelings of ambivalence about those connected situations, bringing in aspects from other domains I've already mentioned as comparisons, or as analogous industries. So no, the poems weren't produced within or for an internet community such as tumblr, but I hope they don't look too out of place there either. If they don't this might be something to do with the implied impermanence of a blog post, that you can kind of have it both ways, publish the poems and also delete them later if necessary. The poems constantly defer/contradict their positions, and the medium of a blog may aid the presentation of that. Perhaps one of the reasons that 'supporting material' has become important to this project is to do with my becoming aware of other poetry projects on the internet (blogs like http://internetpoetry.tumblr.com orhttp://poemsvsvolcano.tumblr.com) and realising that immediacy is basically a necessity... If people are going to be interested enough to look into your work online in more detail, they have to 'get' something of the premise within their minute-or-two average first visit to your page. I'd invite interviews like this one and other stuff to be viewed as part of the overall project, as the notion of confusing its final 'value' is in keeping with the point of it. In any case it seems disingenuous to insist that the poems should be viewed 'apart' from anything, when controlling that has never been possible in the past. I'd rather assume other texts will be dragged in and approve of it. Having said that, I think it's appropriate for a proportion of the core poems to end up eventually as an e-book or in print, where they might be viewed more specifically in the context of a poetry publishing tradition, as a comment on and mutation of that.  

  Are these concerns reflected in the form and content of the poems themselves? Something that stands out clearly is the absence of punctuation- what would you say is the significance of this device?

  Yes. I wrote about generating content already, a fair amount of which is found or written/suggested by friends, and the poems can be organised entirely by theme. [http://austerities.tumblr.com/post/5269877400/contents-by-theme-81-austerities-2011] 

The title can be seen as the subject and governing principle. The method of producing is largely via reduction. Poems about inspiration become perhaps poems about poetry competitions and arts council funding. Poems about love become perhaps poems about devalued objectified desire or poems about longing for products. The idea is to negate the 'poetry' value and see what remains, both structurally/thematically, and in terms of 'heightened' moments in language, which in my opinion still occur. The results could be seen as critical or celebratory or perhaps both. There's enjoyment and danger to be found, and the poet's complicity in this is countenanced I hope, especially in the overtly gendered pieces. Taking this idea of deprivation as a given has been quite productive, which maybe says something about writing/making art generally... that it always happens because something's absent. Ambivalence becomes a kind of potential. The form of the poems try to enact this as well. Absence of punctuation is a fairly direct limitation, but it also allows meaning/syntax to become occasionally fluid or flattened or unfixed, which is helpful when you might want to suggest something but also avoid committing to it. Other formal decisions gesture at arbitrariness – 'shape poems' that make quite unsatisfying shapes, poems where the lines get longer or shorter and in no obvious way emphasise the content other than its selection. 

   You upload the poems as image files, which basically means the text is not interactive - it can’t be copied, pasted or manipulated so easily (perhaps this is an indicator of absence also). Do you find this helps shape the character of the poems?

  Drawing attention to the appearance of the poems when the appearance is seemingly random means drawing attention to the poems' surface-ness. The poems could all be arguments with/about depth. In this sense it makes sense to upload them as jpgs, completely flat images. Maybe it makes them feel impermanent somehow, like they're clones or reproductions of the 'original' thing, with a kind of limited half-life. I like the idea of the poems being receipts, kind of. Just a record of their production, the fairly short window of time when the poem is alive and arguing with itself, resisting a single conclusion or meaning. The first writing in the world was probably basically a receipt. Evidence that something has been transacted. Maybe writing retains that function at a basic level. I like the idea as well that they are artificially made products, they've been produced 'privately', in some invisible backstage or factory, so there is a kind of mystery about their origin. You are never shown where a product really comes from are you, but there's normally some ridiculous bullshit mock-production scenario in a cereal or beer advert that you're clearly not supposed to seriously believe. I think I can only write/compile the poems like that, something to do with avoiding taking responsibility for some of the content probably. I couldn't write even this interview on google docs as we planned, I'm writing it in word.

  For me this is a return to the idea of commodifying emotions, which Carmen Hermosillo so powerfully foresaw. The idea of receipts ties in neatly with this, it's completely arbitrary in a system such as facebook, or any internet forum, what information we trade; it's the repeated nature of this transaction that empowers these internet corporations and perhaps alienates us, and I think the poems to an extent reflect this. There's certainly a tension here, between these shiny, two dimensional artefacts you talk about and the sense of honesty that clearly resides within them, honesty that I would locate in your poetic ‘voice’. What's more I think this voice is strengthened in it's juxtaposition with the more impersonal elements of the project such as, for instance, your interest in found film clips, with a looped and gif-like aesthetic. Should we see these as asides or as integral components of the project? Are these plays in contextualisation or something else entirely?

  Yeah... the video clips are a bit like the chapter titles, they have a tangential connection to the main content. The looped pieces are about surface again I think, and the b&w disguises the origin slightly. I like the way the scenes or characters appear trapped inside the frame...they sort of thrash about a bit... I feel that way about the voices in the poems, there's something claustrophobic about them, like they can't not taste/hear themselves. Someone wrote that 'the intense attention to the self seems like a masked attempt to escape it,' reviewing my poems, I was thrilled something like that came across. The content for the clips was generated by searching videos using certain phrases or images hidden in the poems. The golden gate bridge is an oblique image in Crisis Poem. A Japanese AV actress appears/speaks throughout the collection as a sort of anti-muse, an opposite number to the figure of the poet/editor. The enraged swan felt like an emblem. 

I kind of think that one of the empowering forces of these poems is an interest in, and exploration of, mediation. Yet is there, or will there be, any sense of resolution to the series? Resolution in the sense of conclusion, thematically or otherwise.

  Content can be used to generate content, and though the series is a set length, I have an extra section already which contains critiques of each poem, summarised versions of chapters, poems composed of variations on the chapter names... simply mixing up the titles systematically has turned up video and image content which still feels usable, somehow in orbit around the 'absence' at the heart of the piece. I found a nice clip of a guy and his girlfriend filming a dust devil for example. I would like the precise radius to be unclear, and maybe start to fade into other work. I imagine I will become bored with the process, but I feel like there is a system for gathering material that I can perhaps focus differently if I want to. Maybe the final product is a method which I'll develop or apply in other projects. Part 9 I think though has the poems in it which are the best articulations in the series, and it probably reaches some sort of formal climax there. I think mediation is a good word for the accumulative effect probably. The process has felt more like that of compiling than anything else, in itself that feels like a discovery of sorts.

  What is the sweet new style?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_new_style

– obviously I am not comparing myself with Dante. Every 'new style' seems to be one that punctures the perceived sententiousness of the previous one. This normally comes about by using in poetry a language that is emphatically non-poetic. Even Coleridge said something close to that. I guess I sense an impatience and boredom among poets I know with the prevalent mode, a style of English lyric that has started to feel pretty tired and generic. It didn't always feel like this, it's just been done too much and seems mannered and put-on. I would say that in some ways eschewing metaphor can be a way of elevating metaphor. Not writing imagistically can make the text imagistic. "The adoration of the female beauty is explicitly portrayed by the Dolce Stil Novo poet, who frequently delves into deep introspection." Dante thought the expression of the Lady in the Window displayed the most profound pity when she saw in his eyes his 'wretched state'. Of course we can't know what the expression of the Lady looked like, or if she correctly identified his feelings. That's if we assumed it happened. It's interesting to me the extent to we trust or reconstruct this situation, which has got to be about the oldest and most frequent occasion for poetry. It seems weird that the progenitor of this mode was probably Sappho, i.e. a woman. On one level Dante describes watching the Lady on a kind of screen, believing that she is sympathetic to his emotional state, that communication has occurred. It is necessary for the lyric figure to find an external image for his feelings of love, almost as if he has already decided on his condition and simply waits for an opportunity to invest in and articulate it. To what extent is the resulting poem (also a 'screen') the desired product of that situation, and to what extent would the poem be possible if the Lady for example spoke, are questions that still seem relevant. 

http://austerities.tumblr.com/