I/ II by Danny Hayward
by David Grundy
In its publication by Shit Valley, near hot-off-the-press as
I write, Danny Hayward’s latest poem, eventually entitled ‘I/II’, is a singular
textual object. Printed on something like thick tracing paper, with dense
artwork by Sophie Carapetian which resembles something between the interior of
a body and impacted layers of earth, it looks like nothing else I can think of
recently. Some initial squinting is required at small, bold-face point 10 text. The columns of text from the next page showing through on the previous, create a kind of visual analogue for the recurrent distortions and returns of figures
that motor the poem’s quasi-narrative momentum through the real
dystopian cityscape of contemporary London. But the eye soon adjusts to follow
the poem’s singular movement, unable to move away from the page until the end.
I had a similar experience proofing Hayward’s Pragmatic Sanction a few years ago.[i]
Like that book, this poem will not let up, nor let its reader let up:
interruption would break the spell, however much the pacing of reading might be
one of care and attention to detail. It’s that singular combination, of
near-frenetic pace and extremely careful figuration of detail, even, or in fact
most especially, in cases of apparent crassness or exaggeration, that so
characterises his work. There is a change from Pragmatic Sanction though, in the way that detail operates – as
Hayward noted in email correspondence earlier in the year, I/II strives for something of a broader canvas, still through a
kind of warped, glitched computer game, or game-show, but with the strokes of
the more transparent political poetry of the past clearly present: namely, the
1970s work of Marxist-era Amiri Baraka, full of vituperative denunciation, and
a reckoning with the balance of revolutionary despair and revolutionary hope.
It’s worth noting at this stage that my impressions of the
poem are as much from Hayward’s reading at the May Day Rooms in London earlier this
year (when the poem was still titled ‘Feeling Rich’), as they are from the
published version. Shoeless feet in coloured socks twitching on a plastic yoga
mat, Hayward read quickly and with maximum directional force, even as that
direction splintered off into asides, detours and circumnavigations, always
returning to the stringency of a particular course from which it would not
ultimately stray. The reading took perhaps half an hour, perhaps longer, and it
was a transformative experience really, as have been several of Hayward’s
readings over the years – in particular one at Wild’s Rents in London back in
2015, where he presented Pragmatic
Sanction for the first time. These
are fierce and believable events, which Hayward participates in with total commitment
and unflinching, unsentimental generosity. There’s a real sense that the poems
are written for and to a particular group, however loose-knit that might be;
though they are of course available to a much broader audience, they also serve
a specific function that coheres around smaller units. This might be true of
much small-press activity, and the poems it serves, around the scenes in which
Hayward’s work appears, but there’s something particularly true about his own
poetry in this regard.
It’s because of this that a new poem by Hayward is an event,
something to show us where we are and how we might begin to think about that. I
don’t mean this so much in terms of influence – though there are traces of the
particular contorted energies of logic and irony in his poems in a few things
written recently, there aren’t many people who write in quite the same way that
he does – but in terms of a singular example that provides inspiration to go
on. We need these kinds of things.
What is the poem about? This is not the facile question it
might be in relation to certain other kinds of poetry, for I/II feels very specific in its engagement with issues of political
activism – particularly anti-fascist organising around the LD50 campaign, as
well as the London mayoral election and debates around the role of electoral
politics in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s rise as leader of the Labour party.[ii]
But it’s not just a manifesto of the moment, nor simply an “issue-based”
argument, and the question of feeling is important here. There’s a new
emotional tenor, previously absent, or nowhere near as present, in Hayward’s
oeuvre preceding. It’s important to stress that this is, in fact, a very moving
poem – moving in a way that in no sense dispenses with the tools of irony, anger,
sarcasm and satire that Hayward has made his own territory, and does like
almost no one else, but with a new tenor that tempers, and in doing so, in fact
strengthens these.
The poem is self-conscious about this. Its title is a
reduction of one of its central recurring tropes, in which “Feeling I” and
“Feeling II”, via various play with the SMS substitution of letters for numbers
and numbers for letters, recur as horizons of possible identification and
motivation to political action. The mangled complexity this process involves
reaches apex around half-way through the poem:
too much 4 one mind 2 Feel
in two minds about [...]
u want 2b wearing a Mask 2 Survive 4
what
reason but 2 become 2real 4 u
to bear 2b unmasked as 4 the
benefit of Feeling I wearing a
Mask 4 Survive 2 Feelings I
2 Feel and 4 what reason unmasked
as Feeling II involved in a shadow
II deep 2 survive
Throughout,
the “I” and “II” of the poem’s title become both the rhythmic lock-step of
predictable repetition (1-2, 1-2, 1-2) and a kind of prog-rock or
black metal double album. These are also parallels to the false choice which
the poem insistently names, between the two mayoral candidates, “Mayor I” and
“Mayor II”, part of the poem’s recurring cast of stick figures, shadows of
former selves, headless chickens, wounded pigs, and politicians.
How’s that for a plot point. Two mayors
you need to find: one who will solve
everything and the other
to kill.
Here, the liberal discourse of ‘nuance’ is the real
crassness which evades political commitment, even in the face of the rise of
Fascism. All it can do is “announce / something nuanced about mayors etc”.
Feeling turns to melancholic sentiment, “the / corridor of sentimental outrage”
filled with “middle-/class disembodied screams”, “the shadow of the shadow of
its former self” repeating endlessly in “a leaden scene of generative
ambiguity”. These screams stretched thin, covering over the real screams of
those dying and excluded by the processes the middle-class can’t quite bring
themselves to face, are tinny, cartoon-like – what
Amiri Baraka in 1978 called “death peeped in a teeny voice”.[iii]
As Hayward writes, they “can’t
do perversity or even gasp for it [...] another exercise in sentimentalism.”
Nor is the target simply passive acceptance – as, indeed such passive
acceptance is never simply passive. Rather, it is symptomatic of an attitude whose melancholic attachment to fading national ideals
renders it all the more frightening in its latent (and not so latent) capacity
for violence:
a
comic haze of UV shadows
as
in abstract art, class violence and national sentimentalism
in
that order.
Here, the “cold ambiguity of
streets stubbed out by generative ambiguity / seems like a blip lit
unfaithfully by nihilism”, a “pretence of being overwhelmed”. “Welcome middle
class”, the poem proclaims, then declares this class sector to be “also a stick
figure / stylised as the reality of defiance / while a sheen of defiance
settles on it” – “the choir of
parishioners trans-/fixed by their watercolour stab wounds”, flailing, full of
empty talk, in “the downsize risk of an abstract restlessness”.
All these variants on
the false choice between two bad options – in other words, the false structure
of equivalence, the illusion of choice promised in contemporary liberal
democracy – find their visual analogue in the transparency of pages, which
allows the poem to be read simultaneously in its present unfolding, and with
simultaneous glimpses of the immediately preceding past and proceeding future.
But aside from this, the question of feeling manifests also in a marked
emotional tenor, most obviously when the poet talks about directing feelings of
violence and cruelty onto themselves.
I think that in the ease of imagining
cruelty on any scale
and in the therapeutic restitution
of the self to which imagined cruelty
leads
I can begin to understand
how much more beautiful it is to want
to smash my own head in.
From damage reflected into its own
origin, the struggle to love others radiates
as it might from the torn up roots of
an instinct once
opposed to fascism.
It
should be stressed that this is not a moment of ‘confession’, the finally
revealed ‘human face’ behind the political satirist, of a piece with the poem’s
play with the wearing of masks, the drawing of faces (“with two dots for eyes”)
and the like. For the idea that this numinous quality of feeling might be
enough in itself is one that the poem remains utterly opposed to. Such an index
of apparent tenderness, care, concern (or, more realistically, the drip-feed of
‘sympathy’) in no way carries through to the actual political commitments such
tenderness or care would demand (i.e. at the very least, the practical
application of the concept of solidarity). Indeed, it is a process which the poem,
with its masks and shadows and stick figures, perhaps even hates: the simultaneous denial and appropriation of sentiment over feeling.
So the poem is moving both in the sense of its narrative and
prosodic momentum and in terms of emotion. It also moves through a
particular space. Indeed, what’s striking here is the locality of the writing,
its geographically-specific references to the cityscapes of London about a
million miles from the melancholy mysticism of the latest Iain Sinclair tourist
guide.[iv] In contrast
to the movement of compressed expansion, the time-travelling wormholes of Pragmatic Sanction, I / II moves through and in the city as the space of the diurnally
monstrous, travelling
past street corners, each more grey and imprecise
than the last,
each more general and symbolic than the last, past
the drunks frozen
to death and the neighbours your barely speak to,
each more
the essence of a ferocious contraction in reality
than the last.
Such contractions, both hopelessly
generalised and, in the death and suffering they register, cruelly particular,
further include: “the immigration advice centre with its files / strewn
everywhere”, “closed GPs”, “the huge gasometers and [...] the rotten shells of
the real estate brokers”, “the unenduring day care centre [...] the right-wing
sports bars, the meaningless dull light”, “nightclubs in which bombs go on and
off wordlessly”, “the / shuttered restaurants and the / literal art galleries”,
“the sheets of passive mist / rolling over the pawn shops and antique dealers,
/ each thinner and more figurative than the last”, and “the beige locking
mechanism of estate agents and construction sites: / blisters rising from the
unchangeable hierarchy of any surface”. Through all of this, we sense “the
political and moral atmosphere / of a net closing”: a labyrinth, a trap.
The poem traverses the pleasures of false or deluded hope and the
pleasures of despair, the demands of action, at times threatening to burst
through its own structure, its stuttering narrative never quite beginning,
irregular line lengths stuck like glue to the left margin, the jagged edge of
the broken glass of Pragmatic Sanction’s
prose blocks. For Hayward, the movement the poem
describes risked, at the moment of its composition, seeming “unreal or gestural
or just flatly sarcastic: ‘moving’ like a hammer going up and down on a nail”. The
poem had been planned according to a grammatical organising grid which would
surge towards a final goal. Yet, in the process of composition, the lines would
fold back in themselves or retract, recurring turns of speech such as the
headless chicken or the shadow of the shadow of its former self folding back in
on themselves, simultaneously multiplying and remaining the same. Hayward had
sought the aspirations towards which Baraka’s Marxist-Leninist poems of the
1970s frequently build towards, particularly in performance: the sense that
calls for Revolution are not merely appeals to something distant and far-off,
but an imminent and imminently realisable horizon, in the context of
anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements around the globe, which allows each
poem to move quite specifically, free of abstraction, towards the incantatory
culmination of frenzy, expectation and resolution.
2017 is a very different political
moment. Without this possibility, the imminent horizon cannot be drawn on as a
concluding gesture, the end-point of a process of cumulative building enacted
in each new poem, both beyond but animating the poem which seeks to urge it
into being. What else can be built
to? What can repetition build towards, how can it reveal itself as
dialectically connected – interconnected global struggles against capital in
the spirit of international socialism – how can it stop itself becoming a
merely quantitative list with nothing to build to, papered over by a false,
substitutive horizon which cannot, in
the poem, be desired into being, does not possess the context to do so – and,
because it must speak with immediacy
to the present moment, cannot afford to do so.
One might suggest that, instead of what
Hayward calls the “single vocable promise or hope” to which Baraka’s 1970s work
surges, the poem moves towards defence
(on which Hayward has written in a fine essay on Baraka, Nat Raha and Xu Lizhi
in one of the magazines produced for the London-based reading series No Money,
with which he was crucially involved).[v]
The reader is constantly told to move “past” local details – figures and
locations which are rendered into deliberate cartoonishness, headless chickens,
stick figures, local shops, phantasms, dressed as this or as that or as each
other; performers, drawings, ghosts. The poem itself names this at one point as
the “cartoon economy / with its live action humans
and its two departments / of viscera and mask”: a cast of characters including
“Mayor I”, “Mayor II”, “Mr. Interior Minister”, “crude Teutons”, “the shadow of
a shadow who is the shadow of its former self”, “the Headless Chicken Who Wears
a Mask 2 Survive”, “the Beheaded Phantasm whose slogan is I have no time for
you”. Yet, rather
than merely emblems for the real enemy (like Baraka’s “strangler” in the poem
‘Das Kapital’, or the “Masked Man” in What
was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production?), they
become, in the poem, the main target,
as the poem is unable to build past the detail towards the final surge, backtracking on itself. The “real enemy” is always
missed:
[...]
looking up at
Feeling
II with talk of a human face scrawled on
twice as
fast, was it the Real Enemy[;]
wanting
only to hate the right things,
only to
come out with yet more
abstract
talk
like
that.
This sounds like a test case for
despair, for a performative self-enactment of the impossibility of perspective
and of organisation – a throwing-up of the hands common in the liberal
reactions to Brexit, for instance. Or a contorted self-critique, a
self-sabotage of a grand plan that exists as a recriminatory ruin, endlessly
circling the same streets, which might anyway be part of some elaborate
video-game simulation, a virtual reality environment sardonically reduplicating
a condition of misery, frustration, ennui and hopeless anger. But the poem, as
Hayward wished, does manage to hold
onto the collective glimmer that its stick figures and crowds of phantasms
parody; it does manage to move beyond self-laceration into purpose and resolve,
without forcibly naming those against the conditions of their existence. With its hammer-and-nail circulations and
decapitations, repetitions and circulations, I/ II steers a course past the abyss which (as in J.H. Prynne’s
most recent sequence) swallows and leaves nothing, not even memory, to be spat
back up or desperately held to.[vi]
False hope, if it is merely compensation or melancholic extension, rather than
spur to action or survival which is more than just ‘mere’ survival, is worse
perhaps, or is merely the inverse, of the pleasures of a brick-walled despair. Hayward’s
poem registers the slog of struggle, the boredom as well as the despair as well
as the feeling of collective unity and of getting something done at the march
or protest or event, must be figured, but cannot take over.
Go-to
relentlessness it turns out is just an effect.
Anti-fascists
have to tolerate frustration.
Draw
blood from the conclusions or get their sweat kicked in."
Is it enough to say that what the poem is for might emerge, in part, from what it is against, and that that is a horizon both immediate and in some ways
necessarily suspended? Probably not: it’s pat, a truism. Which side are you on is still a question. But the side is not a
monolith. “Reality
doesn’t have to be anything like this”. Hayward’s poem truly believes that: moving in multiple senses, it inhabits and exemplifies a commitment to a
shifting thing that shifts in relation to the forces of power against which it
is defined, within which it is subsumed, and by which it is threatened with
erasure. No matter of
“merely technical urgency”, it is a vital and revitalising text.
[i] Danny Hayward, Pragmatic Sanction (Cambridge: Materials,
2015)
[ii] LD50 was an art gallery in
Dalston which promoted and aimed to host far-right, ‘neo-reactionary’ events.
It was successfully shut down after an anti-Fascist campaign earlier this year.
See https://shutdownld50.tumblr.com/. The implications raised by this
struggle are worth pondering further. As the Shut Down LD50 website notes: “We
must continue to think about how to oppose racism and fascism more broadly.
Whilst some of the events at LD50 were openly fascist, it is clear that the
space also took inspiration from the more everyday forms of political
authoritarianism that have proliferated during the last few years, including
Trump. Shutting down fascists in the long term requires that we transform the
culture in which they can begin to gain popular and institutional support (and
the art world is not the neutral space it often believes itself to be). We need
to be able to ask larger questions, such as how to oppose Britain’s own violent
border regime.”
[iii] Amiri Baraka, ‘Against Bourgeois
Art’ (uncollected, but available as part of the liner notes to Baraka’s recording
with David Murray and Steve McCall, New
Music / New Poetry (India Navigation, 1982)). The poem lives in
performance: see the aforementioned recording with Murray and McCall and, above
all, the incendiary reading of the poem given at the Just Buffalo Literary
Centre in December, 1978, alongside Baraka’s old friend Ed Dorn (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Baraka.php).
[iv] Precisely the kinds of media whose
attitude of comforting, melancholic helplessness is the target of much of I / II’s justified invective has,
predictably, been making much of the fact that Sinclair has publicly resolved
to cease writing about London, in the wake of Brexit and the apparent confusion
of “locality” by digital technologies. See Sinclair’s latest, The Last London: True Fictions from an
Unreal City, published by Oneworld this year, and the various interviews,
reviews and think-pieces surrounding it.
[v] In conclusion to the essay in question, Hayward writes: “I
have no idea what it would be like if there were to surge into the world a
poetry whose attitude of careful and defensive commitment to the real lives of
suffering and exploited individuals were also as freely intensified and dynamised,
and as tonally elaborated and iconised, as the postures of helplessness and
impotent display that have become the ultimate tax-free havens for whatever
bourgeois expressive libidinal energy is left now that high culture has slid
triumphantly into administration. But I do think that a writing like this might
help people to live instead of annually upgrading their experience of
failing to.” (Hayward, ‘Poetry and Self-Defence’, No Money # 2: Drag and Drop, 2016) Perhaps, we might venture to
suggest, I/ II is a step in this
direction.
[vi] J.H. Prynne, Of · The · Abyss (Cambridge: Materials, 2017)
