Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry
ed. Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins, 2010)

Penned in the Margins is a small press producing poetry collections that challenge the way we may think about poetry. They place an emphasis on experimental poetry; though that may be a contentious label, it is nevertheless a label about which questions are raised in this book. These essays are wide-ranging in focus, but each one aims to take a fresh, or at least revisionist look at poetry and its place within the arts and popular culture. This book presents a thoroughly modern take on how we read poetry, how we hear poetry in other media, and how other media present poetry. The book as a whole runs the gamut from gripping, intellectually rigorous and charming, to dry and academic, to perhaps overly whimsical.

Luke Kennard’s interdisciplinary foray into the back catalogues of niche comic books may be amusing, but it will seem arcane to readers whose knowledge of comic books extends to a tenuous understanding that The Avengers were not just Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg, but also a posse of superheroes devised by Marvel. His ‘essay’ is more like a discursive introduction to song lyrics that he admires for similar reasons, and the comic books that he likes for sort-of-similar reasons; the end result is schizo-logical at best. It is a slightly laddish essay, and though it draws attention to some elliptical song lyrics, by Nick Cave among others, there are few salient conclusions.

This is not to say that an interdisciplinary reading of poetry cannot be fascinating, and well done. Ross Sutherland’s piece is similar in its jocularity, but it offers a cohesive point. One of the more creative entries in the book, and written in the first person in an anecdotal manner (‘My dad is a sci-fi fanatic and my family home in Essex is stuffed to the rafters with yellowing pulp paperbacks. Our loft reeks of slowly decomposing futures’), Sutherland’s essay works a little like a report on a science project, charting his success, and lack thereof, with his ‘Robot Poet’. Said machine is actually a SYSTRAN automated translation system, through which Sutherland has decided to thread and rethread famous poems in order to alter the meaning so dramatically as to produce an entirely new poem. Literal (mis)translation is a linguistic game, and its results present the experiment as both hilarious and illuminating as well as the sheer folly that it is. Eventually, Sutherland finds that, ‘I had become a cyborg myself: man and machine working together in symbiosis’ — until he discovers that the machine has trouble conveying tonal subtleties and figurative aspects like metaphor, which is in many ways the point of the whole exercise.

In a similar vein, Simon Turner’s ‘Arranging Excursions to Disparate Worlds’ is an intellectual multi-tasker. Turner sets out to explore the mysterious 1960s poetry group known as The Oulipo, and to evaluate its impact, or rather, infiltration into the contemporary British poetry scene. He makes some convincing points and backs them up with some wonderful facts pertaining to recent publications, acquisitions and sales of experimental or avant-garde literature. So intriguing is much of the information that he has to impart, that it feels closer to one of those journalistic features on underground artists that make a reader feel as if they are moving their finger closer to the cultural pulse, while drinking a Sunday latte, than an essay in a book. Turner — who briefly discusses the Poetry Wars of the 1970s — references widely and cross-culturally, taking in Ron Silliman, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson, Raymond Chandler and the grunge movement, plus several Hollywood stars along the way. It is clear however, that Turner’s proclivity is towards the contemporary avant-garde, as indicated by his decision to focus on poets James Wilkes, Matthew Welton and Jeremy Over. James Wilkes has a piece of his own writing in Stress Fractures itself, and Turner references editor Tom Chivers and contributors Ross Sutherland and Tim Clare in addition to this, which creates a slight claustrophobic sense of cronyism. Nevertheless, this is a small price to pay for an essay that offers exactly what a reader would like to take away from such a book, and, given the relative smallness of the contemporary avant-garde, it is perhaps inevitable.

Tim Clare’s weighing-up of the pros and cons of Slam poetry is straightforward and unbiased, but James Wilkes’s demonstrably experimental ‘radio-fiction essay’ is likely to baffle many readers, and feels out of place in a book that claims to be full of essays, when it is clearly a creative piece rather than an essay.

Emily Critchley’s essay on Language poet Lyn Hejinian is one of the more academic ones, and as such it is jargonistic and it assumes a reader’s familiarity with the Language school and its cultural contexts. One could argue that this may alienate readers less familiar with this type of poetry, or even more so with those new to poetry in general; however it works to pique an interest, and less seasoned readers may have to spend a bit more time with it, and be rewarded for doing so. These essays are not necessarily exhaustive, but can work as apt introduction.

Adam Fieled’s essay is one of the most straightforward of the bunch, but it may seem plain by comparison to more outlandish offerings. Sophie Mayer’s is one such piece. Her essay, ‘Emily Dickinson, Vampire Slayer’ is both charming and illuminative, delving into Dickinson’s representation in popular culture — such as in the titular reference, Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and the reasons why such references are mutually apposite. As well as acting as a short biographical note on Dickinson — especially useful to those who may have seen the references on TV and not known much about her — Mayer discusses Dickinsonian archetypes within film and prose from Dickinson’s lifetime to the present day. The feeble, jejune and ubiquitous Bella Swan from the Twilight novels, Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, Ada from Jane Campion’s The Piano and Fanny Brawne from her later film Bright Star all play a part. This essay is a treat to read, and not at all gimmicky; all Mayer’s references and archetypes interweave in such a way that they complement each other, and offer an oblique insight into the eternal enigma that is Emily Dickinson.

Stress Fractures is worth buying for any one of these essays or for the others I’ve not had space to mention. I could confidently say that the essays I found of lesser interest will no doubt appeal to other readers, so varied is the writing here; there are no genuine low points, only charismatic standouts, and readers will come for different reasons. This is a unique book brimming with some wonderful, and indeed weird, critical minds; I’ve seen nothing else quite so current and enlivening on the subject of poetry available at the moment. I can only hope that Tom Chivers, who has won an Eric Gregory Award this year, will bring out a sequel when the time is right.