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'If one
doesn't give one's life for something, one ends up giving it for nothing. But
before I die for Democracy, I'd like to be certain that I am living in one',
wrote Jean-Paul Sartre (in 'Is This a Democracy', an essay published in April
1952 in Les Temps Modernes) - words that could well have issued from the
pen of Paul Sutton, who has realized that without such a singular commitment
to anything, British poetry would be almost devoid of a 'subject', its
authors fictive, and all 'acceptable' criticism nothing but a peremptory
negation.
As a poet, Sutton chooses to accept only a bilious mind, like a character out of
the Old Testament shaking his fist at whatever smacks of organized desuetude,
or worse, the lethargy of unforgiveable provincialism. After all, in his
poems, he is telling us that the plague of dilettantes that populate the
English 'poetry world' merely pretend to be language-experts, and are in
fact 'specialists' only of the deceleration of what, in the imagination of
the real poet, is supposed to be limitless. So that if poetry can (as Sutton
sometimes seems to think) alleviate the weight of living, of despair, then
everything melancholy has been quite rightly left intact, perfectly atrophied,
and stuffed into the skins of the poems by a poet secretly portraying the
smile of the taxidermist, and who, from poem to poem, manages to induce a
never-ending and incurious climax of ennui:
Of all human
experiences, the least discussed.
It lurks on
bookshelves, in overgrown suburban gardens, under
layers of
bored management - using loupes to examine flawless
crystals for
incipient signs.
(from
'Ennui')
In England, where according to him the 'Poetry Society' chooses everything for its readers and its
poets, right down to their individual neckties, Sutton sees only the
fraudulence of the 'workshop/poetry school' style, which in this book is
(thankfully) not utilized at all. This poet is then, I would suggest, what
the thinker E.M. Cioran described as a 'victim of the meaning of life', i.e.
one who writes using the tone of disappointment, but not, as some readers
might falsely believe, by always cultivating the one righteous outcry of
indignation; Sutton is more than that: he lifts up the organs of man
into a beleaguered and mutilated song, closer to the spleen of Baudelaire
than on the impotent banality of Larkin. Each tormented 'character' of the
poems, while suggesting a Dostoyevskian hero, is more often than not (and
more realistically) an already 'out-of-date' alibi for the crimes of history;
for like still-to-be-sent telegrams, Sutton's poems unveil him in the guise
of metaphysical traffic warden handing out tickets for anecdotal violations
in a democratic Hell-on-Earth; that is for all of those, like him, not liberated by doubt,
or more explicitly, distressed of existing in a too understandable moral world.
What saves Sutton's scepticism from becoming merely attritional, if not
conventional, is his refusal to dupe any of us into believing that his poems
are anything other than malignant gripes - although in truth there are also
cataleptic 'aftertastes' of society; the characters that people these poems
wallow not just in 'appearances', but are more like holograms that feel
forced to fiddle with their own filaments so as to attain the attributes of
those deemed most human by society. After all, as (again) Cioran put
it: 'the history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries',
but again, this would not be totally fair, for 'spite' is not Sutton's real
motif; rather he prefers to trace (for us?) those simians that have remained,
only in secret, human beings: inoculated nihilists who have returned to the
fictive dwelling-place of suburbia and the city to create for themselves
functional psyches for working and progressing in the world, but also the
necessarily feigned personalities that re-create age-long cultural
relationships with 'each other'; those still tempting themselves into
believing in the popular 'ideas' of the mainstream, which, for Sutton, is the
recidivist's notion of walking the wrong path, but in the right century, a
notion it seems that he himself has experienced the calumny of:
And if I
insist on
a diverse
monolith -
oxymoron -
to crush
dissent,
it's first in
myself.
(from
'Evidence-Based Practitioner Speaks')
Sutton is no longer describing for us the sturdy and hirsute gait of the
great ape of Darwinism, for he is more interested in those apes who have
shaved and washed, and been handed a briefcase, a bowler hat and a mobile
phone, those trained to traipse back into the ritualized servitude of the
jungles of employment. This poet charts the pseudo-progressive 'progress' of
any 'species', whether in reality or the imagination, which happen to have
been overwhelmed by certitude. In fact when reading these poems the words of
Marcus Aurelius come to mind: 'Man's nature is fluid, his feelings dim, the
substance of his body tending to corruption, his soul comparable to a
spinning-top, his destiny hard to define, his reputation a matter of
uncertainty.'
Sutton's voice then is the flux inside of the parenthesis between body and
corruption, destiny and time, for he is himself a divergent history
and revolt against what, in society, amounts to no more than ideological and
artistic anaesthesia; though there is, I would say, a legitimate spiritual
principle behind what he writes, not the spiritualism of the religious, but
rather something akin to the pre-nihilistic cry of the holy beggar abandoned
outside the walls of the citadel, or better, the scream which, for the poet,
should always remain the last stage of lyricism; there, where negation
alone is never enough to slow the always oscillating polemics of the mob.
Sutton, tugging perpetually on creation's tail-end, drags up closest to him
the most self-denying and irreparably bloodied visage of the beast in man, that which most
resembles him
at the time of writing any one poem, the 'personality' that hides behind the
ogling and (mostly) grotesque mask of the 'everyman':
And one day I
woke and felt nothing.
The entire
town was hidden by clouds.
Every
building had been destroyed.
The native
people had been replaced.
Vibrant
reconstruction had started.
Diverse poems
will soon be published.
(from
'Cured')
So, how can the atheist uproot the tree of Good and Evil and watch its
no-soil fall from the palms of no-gods? Well, Sutton is telling us, by not believing in any god
fatuous enough to consider himself limitless, or one without an appetite
strong enough to imagine a religion that differs from what, in modern man, is
preserved by what atheism has never stood for: objectivity. Thankfully, the
poems of Sutton reside forever on the periphery of doubt, not certainty; so
that this poet, rather than saying 'I will show you fear in a handful of
dust', tells us that he will in fact show us subterfuge in a face full of
phlegm,
and it is that kind of ineffectuality which truly lies at the crust of the
tectonic plates of his poetical 'selves'; the 'selves' therefore that parade
in his poems not as incalculable 'personas', but actually as the same tragic
figure hooded and hidden away by the flesh of anonymity that we find in every century, and likewise
the anonymity of the entire history of the soul from Hellenic times to
modernity, and in a body that is infinitely disgruntled, beleaguered, and
worn down by all forms of psychological babble, never-provable suppositions,
theories, etc. ('refuse of the soul, / coagulations of the blood' - Gottfried
Benn). For this poet has realized that he must at all costs maintain
his thesis, that he must also never stop recognizing what, inside of him, is
torn apart continually by the falsity of thought-systems and ideas, whether
in politics, anthropology or culture.
So, quite rightly ignoring the collective opinion for his own, Sutton has
based his poetical style more on his nerve-endings and/or on the vegetal
wisdom of a society in decline, than on anything that might be described as
'poetical'. His technique, while appearing outwardly to be, at times, flaccid
and without syntactical shifts is, in truth, the result of what happens to a
writer when he wakes up and realizes he no longer wants to be the Marquis de
Sade or Tennyson and, instead, begins to treat his own sense of 'authorhood'
as a secondary
cause,
rather than anything the ego might induce. Thus this book will appeal mostly
to those readers who, in society, have always felt like the sole survivors of
a great anthropological shipwreck (which is much worse than loneliness) and
if Sutton believes himself to be in anyway an accomplice to the crime of such
an existential catastrophe, then he, above all people, will surely not be
seeking to acquit himself any day soon.
© Paul Stubbs
2015
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