CC: DEATH CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PERSONNEL & DEVELOPMENT (Veer 2, 2022) and Ah Beautiful Sky (slubpress, 2023), Cole Denyer..
The Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development believes in
nothing & hates everything
The cover of CC: DEATH promises visionary outsider art. Satanic mills are being destroyed, recalling the artwork of early Fall albums. Inside is blistering political poetry that does some very exciting things with its language. The register is by turns feverish and still, grotesque and tender, setting up a space in which those tones of voice collide, speed up and slow down. The poem circles some of the injustices we take for granted either as our reality or the background to it: the grim merry-go-round of crap jobs and worklessness; jobs that don't pay, benefits that aren't paid and people who are sanctioned; 2008 and the hollowing out of both "safety net" and workplace protections that have happened since. There seems to be more space in it than in Denyer's previous book In Boiling England, room for different tempi and sudden weightlessness. The writing swings from political causes to effects and its more dazed personal mode. Here it locates itself in the particular nightmare of the lyric I and a shadowy yobbo dual.
I seek death
& reasonable adjustements to my workplace immediately
o god on farced o go & do o god o o o god & in competences are a
billfold bound & burnt
One of the themes is obliteration. Not annihilating but striking through events and individuals to undo them whilst marking and preserving the act. The poem needs to stamp out in this way: Peter Cruddas, the criminal Tory millionaire; Mark Kennedy AKA Mark Stone and a long list of his fellow undercover police, who infiltrated all kinds of protest groups in the sleaziest and most exploitative ways; various parts of itself; the person claiming sick pay; the author; the entire poem (via its title) and its publisher.
Peter John, O.B.E J.C.B affordable rent over the road
& so we must work closely with local enforcement authorities
& the glass in my eye hurts, like full of sand
so we must work closely
It has got me thinking about revenge in poetry. The strikethrough is not a straightforward thing. When the poem aims it at itself we have, maybe, an image of self-recusal and of the wounds that generate the work and remain in it. When it is directed outwards, naming then cancelling agents of the state, it puts the poem into this interesting tradition of poetical violence. I'm sure it must be fully ancient but some immediate references are in the work of Sean Bonney and Verity Spott. In 'after Rimbaud' Bonney (apparently) urges the reader to cut the throat of Tories in the street. Is that OK? A Tory MP was indeed killed with a knife a few years ago, how about that? Is offing pigs still radical? Was it ever? This line of concern (trolling) is the result of a bad naturalisation, "an attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poetic organisation by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbal external world” (Poetic Artifice, Forrest-Thomson). That is not to say that the contents of such an outburst shouldn't be taken seriously: revenge poems need to be taken seriously and on their own (poetic) terms. Spott's 'We Will Bury You' consists of a litany of the lurid fates inexorably approaching certain MPs. Rather than a vindictive green ink letter, Dylan Williams hears "a furious, livid scream against our political present […] gesturing to the limits of language and poetry as vehicles for material change." Something similar can be said of CC DEATH: there’s a complex but deceptively light distancing structure that makes the whole thing much more than a cri de coeur. So the meaning and status of verse that may be judged truculent, spiteful or even callous depends on the success or failure of its entire context. (And it goes without saying that the actions of politicians also need to be judged in the right context – the world outside of poetry.) Of the unruly interventions mentioned Denyer's may be the least likely to be taken out of context, as that context is too dense to easily give up its contents piece by piece. Despite the seething content and form the violence done is typographic, and not less trenchant for that.
Chains of lead in the Last of England
The companion, coda or ”belated hitch” to CC: DEATH is Denyer’s 2023 book Ah Beautiful Sky. Although it could wellstand on its own, there are several aspects that support its identity as an epilogue. There is a sense of rueful, brooding retreat. The language of Molotov cocktails and chains of lead is as urgent than ever but there’s an elegiac key, a sense of looking helplessly back. There’s now more sorrow than rage, a tenderness that even has time for an oblique callback to Briggflatts. The play of characters and voices has given way to a single speaker for the most part. As always, and in a way that makes me think of Derek Jarman’s films, multiple symbolic others wander in and out of the wings; sometimes mumbling things only they can hear, sometimes delivering a Blakean Jeremiad right to the audience. But significantly, when these characters speak in ABS they do so in quotation.
The first frog on the table is the Dismal Science of the 2020s,illustrated in the personal calamities of the most vulnerable among us but also in the calamity of prospering in such a society. The skin-crawling ambience of London PLC is brilliantly present. The unstoppable tide of Corporate Logic finds a perfect partner in the State and the two types of Power feed and eat each other. As their material, we are stitched together and torn apart and stitched together again. The other major strand circles around the student protests of 2011. Coming on the heels of and as part of the Occupy movement and phenomena such as protesters living semi-permanently in Westminster and elsewhere, the protests were, in retrospect, a high water mark for optimism and the belief in change. It seemed just possible that we might be, for once, actually on the verge of forcing some sort of change. The poem interrogates, skew-wise, that squandered opportunity and invites us to askhow the bubble burst and how its bursting relates to Now. We had thirteen years of the Tories between Then and Now: Brexit, Johnson, the pandemic, a conveyor belt of vacant demons in charge of the country and now a differently coloured tie; I don’t think there’s much question that life is considerably worse, for many people, in the summer of 2024 than it was in 2011 but rather than people breaking into Millbank we have the British tradition of race riots. One key is the ghostlike Woollard, the young man who threw a fire extinguisher from a roof in a fit of exuberance (and bad naturalization). The fire extinguisher landed close to protesters and police and seemed even at the time to have a palpably sobering effect. We’re back to asking where we actually stand on violence, enacted by the State or in retaliation to it. Witness the contempt Anna Mendelssohn, the British poet with the most convincing radical bona fides, shows in her poems for the likes of the Angry Brigade. In the film Far from Vietnam Godard talks about the bathos of revolutionary speech in a non-revolutionary moment. But neither were talking about Art. As for the bathos of militant poetry and whether or not it “makes nothing happen”: everything happens in the paracosm erected by the poet, in which, as we’ve seen, Tory donors and undercover police are erased. And once in a whileone of these barbs escapes its world and is heard in the wild, like Bonney’s Fuck the Police mantra, which is as much as anyone could expect. The present moment is unspeakable but as usual it isn’t, at least in Merrie England, revolutionary. We reach it finally in Denyer’s book in the voice of one amongst a proliferation of Yaxleys, bringing us wearily, tragically, bang up to date.
James Burton
