cain_sm

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Luke Kennard’s sequence of poems from “Anagrams” appears in the June 2016 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

What do you do after five trade books of poetry? Chances are you’ve had your high-water mark already. You’ve probably watched your book sales gradually divide in 2, then in 10 until the number of people asking you for endorsements, references, and letters of introduction is greater than your readership. If you’re cursed with such a nature you get embittered and sad and blame other people without once looking at how many fourth or fifth collections by other poets you bought in the last year. If you’ve a marginally sweeter temperament you disassociate from reality and hold on to some hope that your next collection might be different. Or you take a hint and quit. Two years ago I was thinking I might just turn my attentions (and my contractual obligation to publish) to writing criticism. There’s a lot of work I love in the UK and the US and exactly why it’s good doesn’t really get articulated outside of 500-word reviews, so there’s a need, I think.

But then I thought maybe I was just tired of the publishing model, the single author collection of fairly disparate poems: write when you have to, OK, but also go from commission to commission, collecting interesting briefs and projects and one-offs, then see what you’ve got after a few years and send it to your long-suffering editor who can help you pretend there’s any kind of architecture to it. “Hey, Kennard, there’s a bee in at least four of these poems, and also a reference to Polonius, so how about Buzz Buzz as a title?”

From 2010 everything I was drawing together just felt like a manuscript of outtakes. My fourth collection from 2012 (aside from a few poems I still do at readings) feels to me like a collection of B-sides. And that’s nothing against the format of the single-author collection. It’s the norm, and there will always be poets who do it brilliantly, but maybe I was never one of them. I’ve never sent an individual poem to a competition or journal. I’ve never been happy with an individual poem.

I teach a Masters writing module called “Poem as Story, Story as Poem” that focuses on the “concept album” approach to poetry. My argument is: in popular music the concept album is horrible. An embarrassing novelty. Off-puttingly arch or cringingly sincere or somehow both. But in poetry books, it’s maybe our only hope. We start by looking at sequences of poems within collections like Richard Siken’s “You Are Jeff” from Crush and Jennifer L. Knox’s prose poem sequence “Cars” from The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway. Then we move on to book-length things: David Jones’s In Parenthesis, Ted Hughes’s Crow, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. The recommended further reading list grows every year because people (writers and readers) seem to genuinely like books like this. (The recent success of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers was really encouraging in that respect.) And it works. By the halfway point the 75% of students who don’t really get poetry are talking about juxtaposition as the leitmotif of the twenty-first century prose poem, they’re writing free-verse sequences set on trains where the protagonist is in love with a dolphin. (Actually that last one wasn’t very good, but never mind.)

After a few years it occurred to me that I was convening a module on the kind of book I wanted to write. The only thing I’d published that I was truly happy with was a chapbook called Planet-Shaped Horse in 2011, a narrative sequence of twenty poems set in a halfway house with a student studying hermits who looks like a hermit and a giant golf-course converted into an art project and a really detailed description of a toothbrush. It was a small press run of 300 copies. There was something so liberating about writing with consistent characters, some semblance of linear plot (yeah, I know, why don’t you marry a novelist?) but that still had the weird tangents and edge-of-meaning stuff only poetry really allows you to fly with. And if that was the case, why was I using a format I liked for small projects and sticking to something I didn’t love anymore for more “significant” publications? What was I scared of? That it might fail and my 300 readers would come to my house and attack me? (If you have enough readers that they could easily overpower and kill you, you can officially call yourself a writer.)

If I’m honest it maybe has something to do with becoming a father, too. My writing time has radically diminished in the last four years and I wouldn’t want it any other way. But when everyone in my house is asleep and I finally get to my desk at 9 p.m. it helps if I have a project, an ongoing narrative I can get back into, something with its own momentum. Researching the figure of Cain was, in itself, an inspiring experience (/displacement activity). From Coleridge’s unfinished (unstarted, in fact) long poem “The Wandering of Cain” to Byron’s best (in my opinion) verse play to numerous later interpretations, alongside contradictory texts by the early church fathers and the mind-blowing tradition of the Midrash. Eventually I got hooked on the idea that Cain’s curse was immortality, either to provide infinite time for repentance or in order that he’s forced to witness generations of tribulation. I wanted that to stay ambiguous. I’ve written too much about the process of putting the anagrams (which make up the middle section of the book) elsewhere. At the moment I’m oscillating between loving and hating it as a collection. The fact that my publisher has made it look really nice helps a lot because I am that shallow.