Todd Swift Catering to the Perfumed Cannibal

LUKE KENNARD
The Migraine Hotel
Salt £8.99

FREDERICK SEIDEL
Ooga-Booga
Faber and Faber £10.99

One of the chief problems for poetry is how to deal with on the one hand, evil, and on the other, comedy. Both forces – they are more than tones or themes – exert such pressure on poetry that many critics tend to resist or devalue them. In his essay, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath’, Seamus Heaney ultimately decides that Plath isn’t a poet of the first rank:

Essentially, Wordsworth declares that what counts is the quality, intensity and breadth of the poet’s concerns between the moments of writing, the gravity and purity of the mind’s appetites and applications between moments of inspiration. This is what determines the ultimate human value of the act of poetry.

This may be one of the most important statements made by a poet in these isles for the last forty years, for what it implies is rich in reach. If one is to judge poets on the gravity and purity of their appetites even when not writing, it will be hard to value a poet like Baudelaire, or Ginsberg, or O’Hara, or even Larkin, in the same way that one might value a Tennyson or Eliot. It is difficult to appreciate a poem that celebrates a jazz singer, or executes verbal pratfalls, or descends into a depiction of murder or rape. The high-minded trumps all. This is not, of course, a viewpoint original to Heaney. Perhaps the most infamous proponent of the moral poetic was Yvor Winters. Winters made up, with John Crowe Ransom, one half of a great debating pair in an argument about morality in poetry and the nature of evil in the Baudelaire tradition. In his essay, ‘John Crowe Ransom or Thunder without God’, Winters writes one of the funniest and oddest things in all of modern criticism:

Ransom’s devout cultivation of sensibility leads him at times to curiously insensitive remarks. In comparing the subject of a poem by Stevens with that of a poem by Tate, he writes – The deaths of little boys are more exciting than the sea surfaces – a remark which seems worthy of a perfumed and elderly cannibal.

I often think of this perfumed cannibal, because it is his tastes that are, at certain times, and in certain places, least catered to.

The poets under review test the limits, at times, even the patience, of critical standards and expectations. The Migraine Hotel, Luke Kennard’s new collection, is almost entirely prose poetry – itself a modern assault on certain tastes – and work which, in the spirit of its title – is bound to give some readers a headache; for a poet who is known to be deeply interested in theology and ‘lofty things’, this is unabashedly knockabout work: hilarious, sometimes cruel, dark – the sort of vaudeville comedy one associates with Beckett’s Godot. However, while Kennard pushes the bounds of lyric taste and develops new modes for the prose poem, and for serious comedy in British poetry, Frederick Seidel really pushes the boat out. His work is a bit like reading Dr. Seuss mangled up with American Psycho. It rather cheapens things to say one either likes or doesn’t like to read about older men paying very young women to service them sexually – for, like it or not, that is one of Seidel’s concerns in Ooga-Booga; or rather, the twin themes are sex and death, and how power over one or the other is always an attempt to have power over both. Not since Larkin has a poet written so often about death and sex – but this time, with even more candour.

Luke Kennard is one of the half-dozen thoroughly original poets of his generation, in some ways its young Auden. He has introduced an entirely new and distinct style to poetry in the UK – one capable, it appears from the evidence of The Migraine Hotel, of handling any subject or language it wants to. Among poets under thirty-five or so he is almost revered and often imitated. No one else has been able to navigate so cleverly the choppy waters he’s claimed for his own. This is modern poetry revisited – and Kennard has gone back to Corbière, Laforgue, and other French models, as if Eliot and Pound hadn’t quite gotten it right the first time. And, in fact, they didn’t quite; Wyndham Lewis, in his rebarbative and shocking mode, was often the truer disciple of European shock poetry, a poetry meant not to make the reader drowsy, but aroused. In some poems, such as ‘The Last Days of Advertising’ one is almost in familiar territory:

H. sat in a cloud at the bar drinking
The stagnant English beer we hated,
His thoughts flicking away like shrimp.

Lead us not into television, was one of them.

However, ‘No Stars’, a prose poem, begins: ‘At that time it was customary to wear a complete adult human skeleton around one’s neck, which made moving house harder than ever and embracing almost impossible’. This is droll and weird, in the Footlights style that shaped modern British comedy – a comedy of extremes and excess, but also of ideas. One of the most striking of these poems is the first, ‘My Friend’, which begins:

My friend, your irresponsibility and your unhappiness delight me. Your financial problems and your expanding waist-line are a constant source of relief.

Kennard isn’t simply clever or funny, though. Many prose poems in the collection explore the multiple possibilities of this form, playing off of several ‘classic’ earlier models. It is a transformative updating, into the contemporary British idiom, of a great and hitherto rather neglected aspect of modern European poetry. Kennard’s most admired trick has been to create unusual and running characters, and set them loose in sometimes riotous or just strange poems. In this collection, ‘The Wolf’ makes a welcome appearance, exploring his national identity. The trick can become madcap, as in ‘Five Poems For A New Shopping Centre’:

Dear shopping centre,

I don’t usually write to anything, but I feel that you are making a horrible mistake: Can you hear the starling cackle as if charged by the electric high-wire it perches on? As the dove betokens peace, so the starling municipality. I digress, which is something you just don’t do, hence my concern.

Yours sincerely,

Snow

Kennard’s fully original voice is unafraid to take on any tone or issue, except high seriousness; the day he engages more directly (or less indirectly) with the full range of existence, he may fuse his singularly eccentric imagination and intellectual rigour with his obvious moral vision; currently, his satires and ironies sometimes sup with the devil.

Frederick Seidel seems a fully paid-up member of the Hellfire Club. I am not sure what to think of his often flat, free verse lines, which when not outrageous are simply statements of the obvious, as in ‘The Bush Administration’: ‘I think the Bush Administration is as crazy as Sparta was’. The force of his poems is usually in accumulation, how lines build on each other complicating statements often to absurd or disturbing effect. At their most blunt, Seidel’s poems are vulgar and reminiscent of Villon’s salacious outrageousness – or, to reach for the more obvious comparison, Catullus; they are far from Wordsworth’s or Heaney’s hopes for a high-minded poetry. In ‘Dick and Fred’ he writes:

Cunt with a dick
Cut the monster’s head off.
Holofernes’ startled head farts blood
And falls off.

Seidel presents his lyric speaker as a debonair hedonist blessed with an unlimited bank account and a well-stocked little black book. His persona, like a grown-up and decadent Prufrock no longer afraid to ball the universe into a roll, so to speak, is constantly on the look out for the next thrill to keep death and dying at bay. Though the misogyny of the poems is repellent, I can still note the superb stylistic power required to pull off such a relentless performance:

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger.

But this young woman is young. We kiss.
It’s almost incest when it gets to this. (‘Climbing Everest’)

‘Broadway Melody’ opens with the striking aphorism: ‘A naked woman my age is a total nightmare’. What Seidel rarely does is turn the mirror onto his own sagging body. Rather, he compulsively exposes the putrefaction of his (America’s) mind and imaginary. The relationship between bedroom and grand politics is perhaps too easily made. The first, longish poem, ‘Kill Poem’ explores a hypnotic world of privilege and war with clever lines, such as ‘Civilized life is actually about too much’ and yet the last stanza ends with obvious tropes of Kennedy and Luther King’s heads stuffed and mounted on walls. From love-hungry dick to death-bedecked walls, Ooga-Booga is a tricky collection that demands from the reader a willingness to comprehend the sometimes dark power of the atrocious.