A review done just the way I don’t like them, a scattering of wafty gnomes deprived of architecture (a bombed-out structure).

It’s possible to find this work incredibly compelling and still not have a clue what to say about it. People have said the same thing about the work of Tom Raworth and Mark E. Smith, and as with them, it surely isn’t a problem here. Even if they can’t say exactly why, everybody knows what it feels like to be influenced by Tom Raworth, and I know that I came away from Keston’s reading of a first draft of the first part of Stress Position in Cork, in July 2008, gurgling with optimism and energised in a way I don’t think I’ve ever otherwise been by a poetry reading. That optimism carried me through a good six months of deep concentration on my own writing, in the faith that it might actually be possible and worth doing — I don’t often feel like that, and reading through Stress Position again, I feel it again, though I still can’t tell you exactly why (though I do now know where I got the balloon animals from). I know my own old-skool tendencies positively dance in the headrush of Keston’s propulsive seven-stress line: the sheer sustained rhythmic invention of it makes me think of the Gawain poet, or of Piers Plowman, or of someone like Douglas Oliver who learned from both (“All politics the same crux: to define humankind richly” — Penniless Politics).

I hear mediaeval echoes too in the way the poem (in part 4 of the section in prose) refuses to decide whether it’s coming or going, beginning or ending or stuck in the circles of its own hell (as Chaucer’s unfinished Hous of Fame breaks off just before the entry of its own deus ex machina, or Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia ends, unfinished, on the sentence “And those words which refer to the unfavourable should always hasten to the end, while the others should advance to the end with a suitable prolixity…”):

That moment during a joke when you’re pretending to be serious
and silent before bursting out in preemptive laughter.

It’s as if the language has been made to feed upon itself to the point of actual, and chaotic, feedback, and as if Keston is sculpting his poem from an infinite supply of perpetually-self-renewing language that is always already out there for the taking. I’m thinking of the way the two saxophonists in Borbetomagus lock horns in the midst of an enabling (though maiming) whirlwind of feedback so extreme that they don’t even have to blow any more: they just key the feedback, filter the chaos.

And, as unterminated parallels seem to be what I think in today, I think of Bruce Bickford’s plasticine animations (for which see YouTube). The most characteristic thing that Bickford does is zoom in on a quivering, flat, plasticine face that suddenly stops moving (you should have been surprised that it could move at all, but you’ve accepted it as a face and you now think it’s died) then bursts, every slight irregularity on the surface of the plasticine becoming a centre of accretion, drawing the plasticine you can see and an endless supply of fresh plasticine that you can’t into a series of new heads that buckle and tear apart and sometimes reform, go flat and burst all over again, visions of drug-trauma or a dream of sex bodied forth and then flattened again onto celluloid. It’s a bit like that.

Reconstruct them. FACE 3 symbol abutment with TEETH 4
symbol then CONE LUNG 8, that already is enough to fuck.

Or maybe the way the implied voyager on a slow zoom towards the Mandelbrot Set is progressively, endlessly miniaturised, in a quest for the kind of poverty of spirit John Cage said could be measured by trying to perform Erik Satie’s Vexations (at one point in Stress Position, the word “you” is footnoted by a blank footnote. Satie too was a master of the false ending, or of the ending endlessly deferred).

Stress as a part of torture and as a part of language: a parallel to the way Hannah Weiner sees sentence both as a thing to be spoken, and as a punishment to be endured, and period as the kind of punctuation she might decide to stop using after the menopause.

“Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathed enemy” — Google.

The obligation to love, in the most abject of circumstances and through the most improvised of orifices, is assumed in a series of moves almost surreally Christian (or Beckettian), and leaves the “I” of Stress Position wide open at all times to sudden accesses of a desperately confusing vulnerability (which was there in Hot White Andy too, though mostly held safe behind the firewall of that poem’s formal lyrics). This is a poem in which the tendency of the wormhole between self and world to snap (in horror) completely shut is so strong that it can only be counteracted by a self directed so explosively and determinedly outward as to spin free of each new skin as it forms. It’s only when far too much is happening in the poem that the facts of actual murder can find a place in it without simply telling the poet to shut up.

Did you ever once actually shut up so much your point disappeared?

“This is the honest account of the passion of Ali whoever” — somebody here has been tortured to death, but the sentence implies that you lost interest half-way through saying the guy’s name. Like the stage Irishmen brought on to say “shit” for “sit” in Ben Jonson’s The Irish Masque (the source of the epigraph for Stress Position I), he’s objectified — somebody literally used him as one of a set of building blocks in a human pyramid, as if he had a child’s ABC on his back and sides rather than a name.

Every body in Stress Position seems to arrive pre-dismembered into discretely-numbered jigsaw pieces, like the tesserae of the mosaic of George H.W. Bush “with a look of astonishment on his face” installed as a footpath in the lobby of the Hotel Al-Rasheed in Baghdad after the mass bombing of 1990-1991, and smashed by US soldiers after the invasion (into still smaller fragments; a bittersweet mincing) before being replaced by a mosaic of Saddam Hussein.

Eliot’s Hakagawa, in this work, is seen not bowing among the Titians, but “his back broken in headspins under the Graners”, presumably Charles A. Graner, Jr.’s personal collection of photographs of naked detainees being abused in Abu Ghraib. It’s as if the whole poem is set in that first split second of realising that I paid for this and that all the thumbs held up in the photos are held up for my approval and I want to vomit my fucking eyes.

                                            I want to get to a point where
I don’t have to go through all this again from the beginning when I die.