Thursday 6 August 2009

Title: The Migraine Hotel
Author: Luke Kennard
Paperback: 84 pages
Publisher: Salt Publishing (2009)
ISBN-10: 1844715558
ISBN-13: 978-1844715558

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.
- William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned

Luke Kennard is a prodigious talent. He was awarded a Gregory for his first collection, The Solex Brothers, and, at just 26, was the youngest ever nominee for the Forward Poetry Prize in 2007 for The Harbour Beyond the Movie. Now comes his third prose/poetry collection, The Migraine Hotel from Salt Publishing.

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that The Migraine Hotel carries on very much in the vein of The Harbour Beyond the Movie; Wolf makes a reappearance and there is the same absurdist/surrealist take on life, sparkling with the usual insight, erudite wit and linguistic cunning. The bad news is that it carries on very much in the vein of The Harbour Beyond the Movie... same absurdist/surrealist take on life... usual insight, wit... etc, etc. Although the marketing blurb declares this collection to be ‘very much a sequel’ to Harbour, it is less sequel than simply a 'continuation’ (digression: in the same way Radiohead’s Amnesiac can be seen as the gatefold companion to Kid A - maybe not a better album but containing some better songs, in this reviewer’s opinion anyway) . Glue the two covers of Harbour and Migraine together and you get one single volume, not even a game of two halves. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing as the bar raised by Kennard remains high throughout and he is a witty and astute observer of human foibles and often 'laugh out loud' funny. Kennard’s Wolf alter-ego is a fine comic creation in the manner of Hughes’ Crow or Berryman’s Huffy Henry/Mr Bones. In ‘Wolf On The Couch’ he’s ‘completed a correspondence course in psychoanalysis’. It may be an obvious line of attack for one so deeply read in post-grad literary theory but generally Kennard pulls off the parodies and sideways digs with aplomb. I like the way the ‘alter-superego’ owl is described succinctly as ‘squat, tawny, beakish’; and the poetry workshop parody ‘Sharking for Snow’ in part IV is both telling and very amusing. Other highlights in the collection for me include ‘Wolf Nationalist’, ‘Pleasure Beach’ (Ours is the only coastal town/ To feature an exact copy of our coastal town/ In bronze, actual size, two miles down the road. ); ‘The Forms of Despair’; ‘A Terrorist, Maybe, With His Children’ (‘The most miserable crustacean is the crab...’); and ‘Letter from Snow’ part of ‘Five Poems For A New Shopping Centre’, where Kennard’s absurdism, poetic vision and humour are perfectly balanced:
Dear shopping centre,

I don’t usually write to anything, but feel that you are making a horrible mistake: Can you hear the starling crackle 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 is an entertainer; that’s not to damn with faint praise, it’s rare to find a poet with such wit and intelligence that’s also such a genuine pleasure to read. The issue with The Migraine Hotel, however, is that the originality and novelty that one found in Harbour begins to wear a little thin here and we begin to echo in our minds Kennard’s own refrain ‘What am I to make of all the repetition?’ – and not in a good way.

The trouble is this: however high an author sets the bar a reader’s expectation will always nudge it that bit higher. With The Migraine Hotel Kennard has reached a kind of plateau that, as David Bowden puts it, ‘already feels self-parodic, and the intellectual in-jokes genuinely start to grate.’ And it should be noted that over half the pieces in this collection do include some kind of literary reference, poetical self-deprecation or academic in-joke. Wolf’s parody of a lit-crit seminar/poetry workshop treads a fine line and for me manages not to fall off into the void of self-parody. Others, I’m afraid others don’t fare so well. ‘A Sure-Fire Sign’ with its ‘funeral for irony’ is far too self-indulgent, with humour that simply misfires: ‘Just bad jokes about films-within-fucking-films that don’t exist.’ The references here, as in other pieces, are a little too calculated, too self-aware of its own delightful riffs of literary deprecation. ‘Army’ is another good example. It begins with an appropriately surrealistic and perturbing image:
Dear mum and dad, I expect,
With all the paint falling out of the sky,
You thought I’d forgotten you.
Wrong! I detect your presence
In the exuberance and wit of deciduous trees!
The second stanza is an absurdist story about flinging a ‘wall over a wall’ that one might find in Beckett; a suitably clever exercise concerning the ridiculousness of military exercises. Yet the third stanza’s self-consciously literary ‘humour’ unpicks all the good work that has gone before it.
...I have no great facility with language –
My eloquence marred, perhaps,
By my curtailed education.
Thank you for Seven Types of Ambiguity
And the box of brandy snaps;

I’m afraid I don’t understand either of them.
Clearly the writer of ‘the exuberance and wit of deciduous trees’ does have a facility with language which is indeed ‘eloquent’; one simply doesn’t believe that either William Empson’s critical masterpiece or sweet tubular brittle biscuits are too perplexing for the author of the poem – and if he’s simply being ‘ironic’ then this reviewer fails to see the point. The intrusion of self-aware academic and literary criticism via Empson (how many people outside the Academy will have ever heard of him?) breaks the spell of the ‘reality effect’ of the poem that doesn’t merely undermine the reader’s expectations as we might ‘expect’ post-modernist writing to do but actually breaks the bond of trust between the reader and the work. The result is more a feeling of deflation, of being excluded or let down; either because a joke is being made which the reader is not party to or that the reader cannot be trusted to make his/her own critical judgement about the poem. This needn’t be so. Kennard’s facility is to connect best with his reader through humour; it can heighten the poetical drama as well as undermine, as we see at the end of another military poem ‘The Forms Of Despair’:

We described the funny pages to Simon – who had lost both his eyes
But the jokes didn’t work so well in description.

Here the joke (about jokes) has the effect of both heightening the personal tragedy and providing the reader a suitably uncomfortable critical distance to review the subject(s) of the poem.

The preponderance of ‘literary humour’ throughout the collection, as I’ve said earlier, can become tiresome. It also begs the question of whether the interminable critical gainsaying is, as Kennard’s friend Rupert Loydell has suggested: ‘a kind of defensiveness, something to shield the author from the world whilst also abusing it.’ For all his prodigious talent and intellect one can’t help feeling Kennard is still wearing his post-modernist critical heart far too vainly on his sleeve. And I don’t really buy into Loydell’s counter-argument that Kennard may be ‘deconstructing the idea of deconstruction’. (Derrida was doing this much more effectively over 30 years ago, though many of his academic acolytes still fail to see the ‘irony’ of their institutionalising his unique and visionary discipline – but that’s another story...) I also think this way of using humour as a critical tool is misplaced for two reasons.

Firstly, as I’ve already said, however much fun it is for the author to deconstruct his own narrative or the reader’s expectations, such literary ‘in-jokes’ can easily excludes the reader. Moreover, the actual joy of reading – that Barthesian plaisir du texte – becomes wearisome and limp, like making love to someone who is constantly commenting on their own sexual technique. Reading through The Migraine Hotel I kept thinking of Michael Donaghy who quite aptly, considering Kennard has recently completed a PhD and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, once said: ‘I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry – which I now realise is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.’

The second reason I think Kennard’s particular use of literary humour is misguided is because of something he once said in an interview. When asked, ‘What makes you write now?’ Kennard replied: ‘Anger. And wanting to make that anger into something funny.’ Anger as a motive force in poetry is not necessarily a bad thing, and one can indeed sense a certain anger buried deep beneath the humour in Kennard’s work which he himself has described as ‘absurdist and satirical.’ He also claims to ‘use a fairytale-like structure to comment on society.’ That fairytale quality is what makes Kennard’s work so uniquely distinctive. It has an otherwordly ‘Mittel Europa’ feel about it that reminds one of Borges, Ionesco, Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert. However, unlike Herbert for instance, Kennard’s social critiques fail to bite in the same way, and the anger – which could be used to such devastating effect - just gets lost in all the literary self-consciousness and pastiche. Kennard is such a talented writer one must feel that he is capable of more than just describing ‘the ridiculous pastimes of your weak and fallible race in order to mock and to make strong contrast with my presence within the work...’ as Loydell playfully ventriloquises through the mouth of Kennard’s own Wolf character. I don’t mean that Kennard should necessarily be more ‘Political’ which could easily turn into absurdist posturing if not truly felt, but I would like to see where the darker side of his imagination might lead him, something that is not cut short by a dandy quip or smacked round the chops by an academic uppercut. As David Bowden has observed, there are a number of poets writing today who ‘hide behind gags’, Kennard is smarter than your average poet and the sooner he lets go of the in-jokes and literary jibes the more he will realise his potential as a genuinely great artist. Personally, I think Kennard’s future will be secured in longer narratives where character and situation can develop beyond self-conscious parody than the strictures of both the prose poem as well as the author currently allow.

For the purposes of recommendation it wouldn’t be controversial to say that if you loved The Harbour Behind The Movie you’ll like The Migraine Hotel; Kennard has such innate and exuberant talent that it’s well worth the entrance fee despite the caveats.

Buy The Migraine Hotel from Salt Publishing.

Sources:

David Bowden, 'Getting The Joke', Culture Wars 2009
Rupert Loydell, 'Danse avec Le Loupe (or Howling in the Dark)', Stride Magazine 2009