Issue 34: Adam Piette

Ágnes Lehóczky, Apropos Paradise Square: On a Literature of Consolation (London: Pamenar, 2025)

Kyle Booten, Gyms (Mexico City: dispersed holdings, 2025)

Kimberly Campanello, An Interesting Detail (London: Bloomsbury Poetry, 2025)

Jennifer Soong, My Earliest Person (Amsterdam/Sofia: The Last Books, 2025)

Dom Hale, First Nettles (Amsterdam/Sofia: The Last Books, 2025)

In Plato's Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger posits difference as the property nature which helps define not-being and splits the being /not-being distinction into differential triad rather than flat duality. This relates fruitfully to the ontological questions raised in experimental poetry when flashes of being spark into questionable life on the page. What is being played out in the pronominal play in innovative texts is less an exercise in personae-theatricality than a probing of varieties of ontological triad in the liveliness of language. Where being was, there pronouns shall be. Adam Phillips in 'The Uses of Desire' sets up a potentially flat distinction between perversion and desire: perversion happens as a 'self-cure for desiring'. As 'a pre-emptive strike against the differentness of another person – of their unknownness to themselves and to oneself – the perverse act requires accomplices rather than collaborators', Phillips argues.[1] The other-as-companions' differentness – when it is desire that seeks pleasures in and through them – depends, though, on their unknownness as open to or enabling collaboration. This difficulty (how collaborate with a mystery) opens up into a triad insofar as what is unknown in the other is less 'a mysterious absence of being', in Fiona Leigh's words, than a case of 'not being [...] understood in terms of being affected by Difference'.[2] The phrasing in the poems exploring being (and not being) may seem to be pitching perverse acts of malignant intelligence against the desiring of the body and heart: more troublingly, being itself sits oblique to the ontological terms of opposition as a different thing altogether generating estrangements stranger to the attributable being and not-being of the first and second terms, writing flashing into being not from within but as if from outside, from forms shaped by the triads, in the language and its arcs of desire.

Ágnes Lehóczky's Apropos Paradise Square features an Eleatic stranger as one of its entourage of beings, and pronouns play out a repertoire of personae in a constant dance of dialectic that strips them of their costume and roleplay-potential to reveal a darker and at times darkly (self-)satirical exposure of being and not being.[3] The collection has dwelling-place as its theme, exploring the ways poets, dramatists, thinkers, artists open up spooky architecture in their medium, the house of languages where being can be encountered. The encounters are spectral and then suddenly not. The beings are seen in the language games as unreal and second-hand then suddenly they are not. The prose poetics of the presentation, language slabs double justified, are dreamt and performed as building blocks and columns to a house of being and not being. The hybrid zone of the text on the page plays out the questions and answers of the elenctic interrogation as exercises of style that are suddenly not merely stylistic. 'How can I or anyone, you might wonder, sister, do the feeling for her? (77) The reader is given their role as sister to the drama of textual questioning that turns on a play of pronouns, as though there were a specific feeling attached to the concept 'her' that is being defined by the I/you/she triad through the arbitrary play of potential differences. Doubt might undermine the capacity to feel for or as the other-as-her. But it does not erase the triad as a structure of being rather than feeling. 'Other people supply me with my existence', said William James.[4] The other people crowd the textual surfaces of Lehóczky's poems, both as subjects, as addressees, as alter-egos, as language projections: 'o all ye hiding girls, my petite bookworms, furrowing, burrowed in, earthwormed, homing in on hideous habitats' (85). We as readership are pluralised, rendered bookish, comically othered as dreamy invertebrate entourage with our perverse acts. The 'neurotic [...] touch-feely' readers are given shameful roles to play, as though the poem housed the absent presence of their perversions of desire ('unhide those dirty little hands'). Equally the poem-narrators confess their Casaubon projectiveness, the hauntedness of their writerly paranoia, in witty introversions of the same blocked desiring. What breaks through the comic stalling of the dialectic and the perversions of the self-cure are moments of triadic complexity and unbarred feeling. The collection meditates on a series of case studies for the exposure of being and not being: including Geraldine Monk reading her work from a balcony to a host of women crammed into Paradise Square in Sheffield; János Pilinsky unpacking the strange play by Robert Wilson, Deafman Glance, featuring the black actor Sheryl Sutton; József Attila's suicide on the train-tracks at Balatonszárszó; Kafka's metamorphosis; Hannah Arendt's pondering of the two-in-one. These type-scenes are triggers for the vocal performances of the dwelling-generating narrators, intent on erecting provisional shelters, and hyperaware of the spectralities of that provisionality. Yet through the negations of the comedy emerge third forms, in radical sympathy with the artworking hypotheses of the fellow artists and writers the houses of being invite in for formal and informal play.

         Zooming in on Pilinsky's meditation on Sutton's performance in Deafman Glance (a play where she alternates as mother/carer between offering milk to the deaf child and killing him) in his 1973 Conversations with Sheryl Sutton: The Novel of a Dialogue, the poem imagines the blockages to and sudden flows of connection between poet and actor as a play of perverse acts and desiring acting out:

Speech as vegetative conversation, you see, prevents us from being able to make the desired bond. Inhabiting the past is what allows you to survive today, she lies. This also means, in yesterday's horizontal theatre, Sutton explains staying in conversation with the poet for a little longer, you find everything as in a temporary house built on sand, only it has no cellar, nothing to have or hold on to, it's holding sans hold on to the day itself, revolving around the presence with no memory, no consequence of time. (75)

Distorting as it inevitably is to extract from the monologue flow of the prose block, the prosaics of the sentence and phrase constructions can be heard and seen as giving way, as though through cracks in the mortar, or faults in the foundations: the 'desired bond', though barred by the closures of the dialogic, is fitfully designated and given weird space on the page in the spectral nothingness of the negations proffered in the second half of the second sentence. The lack of cellar contains a marriage of minds of sorts in the play on 'to have and to hold', a connectedness that shapes as atemporal zone simply by way of the avoidance of both perversion's censorships and desiring's appropriations. The horizontal theatre is the prose line on the page that is confessedly fictional and other-generated in dubious ways ('she lies'); yet manages to describe a desired bond in any (differing) case, in conversation with a temporary holding containment of the language as desiring machine. Ágnes Lehóczky has built a fine and mesmerising provisional self-cancelling house out of the practice of others, out of the double spaces of her Hungarian-English doublenesses, out of the two-in-one paradoxes of the third way beyond the stalled dialectic of desire. On its cover designed by Hamed Jaberha, a green hand stretches out as if to grasp what's just out of reach; or else to bless and touch in tactile intimacy; or to signal the dyer's hand of the maker, 'subdued / To what it works in', green with desiring envy. This is a fitting tribute to a collection that seeks for beyond, for intimate bond, for an artist's space of making in the inky medium of the page space.

If Lehóczky turns her work round questions of ontological insecurity within the page space of the textual worlds, Kyle Booten explores the confusions of agency and identity now fully imminent in the AI revolution. Gyms is an extraordinary game playing of the powers and squalid perversion of traditional poetics characteristic of the textually voracious artificial intelligence of the large language models running all word processing now. The satirical élan of the Gyms project is broad and brilliant: a gym is an exercise space for text generation that takes procedures associated with creative writing, from the New Critical assumptions about how metaphysical poetry is to be made and analysed through to post-Oulipean random text processual gambits dear to experiment, and shows what the AI and poet combine might look like once the prompts and algorithms are set up most sarcastically to mimic the mechanics of the creative administrations of those techniques. Booten has wild fun setting his machines up with their rules and regs; the first gym generates metaphysical poems, for instance:

SYSTEM DETAILS: the metaphysical conceit, like the blazon, is a cognitive technology for dilating attention by forcing it to pause sequentially on the various parts of a concept or object. This gym forces the user's attention to dilate in the manner of a conceit. (35)

It does so by pairing an abstract tenor with a metaphorical vehicle (parodying I.A. Richards), artificially generating opening lines, inviting users to finish them, using language-model dictionaries ('of possessor-to-possessed relations, noun-to-adjective relations, and noun-to-verb relations') to identify word cluster associations. The  instructions for use ask the users to respond to sentences ending 'is' as though they were being prompted by the AI machine. Booten then sets his little machine to work, green text signalling text generated by the AI-gym, black text by the subject:

truth is but a boy

            and its old bike is its only way of squeaking

            and its single penny is what it's trying to

            figure out how to give to us

          and this penny will produce no industry or

            profit, only small undying warmth

   and its playmates are nature and foolishness

   and its polished marble is a law. Bernoulli's

            or some such, pilfered from its corduroy

The abstract tenor 'truth' is yoked to the metaphorical vehicles 'boy', 'old bike', 'single penny' by the gym using frequency tools to select words associated with it within Project Gutenberg. That's the theory anyway: what it just as likely is that Booten is lightly satirising the procedures of New Criticism with its close reading protocols, and Empsonian focus on the logic and ambiguity of 'A is B' formulations. The wit of this works because at the same time a certain Steinian pleasure is to be had, sotto voce, in divining how truth is a boy, a bike or a single penny (the latter working off 'penny for your thoughts' and 'spending a penny', maybe), how truth's playmates might be nature and foolishness (satire of the post-Romantic premises of traditional poetry), and how truth's polished marble is a law (Keatsian urns and fluid dynamics perhaps). The pilfering that goes on in the subject's final line notes how lines themselves have been pilfered from thousands of poems in the Gutenberg corpus with royal droit de seigneur allowing not only this AI to fashion its prompts, but also to guide and seduce the subject poet into collaboration and complicity.

         New Critical metaphysical poetics is perhaps an easy target that is dépassé. But this first gambit chimes with all the rest, most very much more contemporary in their guileful raillery. 'Hy_intensity Wiki_forage' (147 ff.), for instance, sets up a text-generator that has processual protocols in its sight. The gym plays on poems that display 'domain-specific knowledge about topics such as husbandry or domestic architecture', and uses Wikipedia to generate prompts forcing poems out of users 'to increase the domain specificity of the poem'. The AI generates a pseudo-conversation and prompts from the Wikipedia entries for key words in the user's first 'poetical sentence', and favours rare and unfamiliar words. The example that opens the gym is choice:

> I'd give a smooth skin the illusion of rough pattern

- - - - - starting-at:/wiki/pattern

Weave together these words: "biophilic" and "spicules."

> I'd grow Op Art tattoos of cross and rack, of jack and wheel, and bibliophilic be with jack-like spicules of most deep and death fungus.

This is so close to the classic ways random language items are invited in from word hoards in processual MOs that the imperatives of the AI and their pushy prompts are ignored by the subject poet, seemingly enjoying the whole process so. 'Spicules' are tiny structures in sponges; biophilic gestures towards 'natural' connectedness. The AI's choices satirise the poet as sponge and as naive green libertarian, whilst the subject poet might be trying to get his own back by thinking about the hallucinations, piracy and parasitic properties of artificial intelligence. Any agency in the construction of the artwork is seriously in doubt, however, the autonomy of the artist jettisoned to serve the prompt machine. Being is being annihilated in the exchange once the green and black become fused and questionable. At the same time the joy of raillery is bouncy, alive and lively, giving us a salutary comedy routine while also play-acting utter subjection. This is such a wise and wise-cracking collection, a real joy to read and behold: tremendously jaunty and fresh despite the enemy at the door and in your laptop.

Booten's clever manipulation of AI is of course more than that too: the satire extends to the ways poetry is constructed and consumed in the marketplaces and garrets of the world. Kimberly Campanello's collection, An Interesting Detail, looks and feels closely out from the edge of her experience of the diagnosis of young onset Parkinson's: out at reader and cultural contexts that prejudicially embed that experience. 'Moving Nowhere Here' (15 ff.) is a sequence that tracks this by opening with a Keats epigraph from 'Ode to Psyche': 'A rosy sanctuary will I dress / With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain'. Keats's struggle with illness is hinted at perhaps but it is the poem as sanctuary and the working of the creative-natural psyche that is the truer focus. The poem opens:

begins with a shouting

in sleep I am naked

on the carpet in a power stance

sensing an army nearby

I am charging the ghost

hanging on the back of the door

I am trapped inside the Shimmer

boxed into foetal position

in a spice cupboard

between jars filled with dried Leaves

The nightmares that come and go (perhaps six of them itemised here) speak to the fear and paranoia brought on by the onset of the 'Shimmer', fears that summon Arnold, Shakespeare, Plath, Freud, Whitman, Dickinson, as though sensing some correlation between the boxed-in lyrical subject and the subject-under-duress. The writing is spare, nervy, the short lines testing out the intermittences and returns of the psyche upon itself, requesting some assurance from the lyric as form that a sanctuary could be fashioned that is not just some Beckettian entombment. The sequence ends with a tremendously moving close that would be a spoiler fully to quote, especially given the poem's witty-anguished play on movement, being moved, and the shaking of the malady. What is being played through is a Yeatsian aperçu: that poetry might be able to summon lyric movement even when the body is subject to pains and immobilizing automatisms, 'like a Leaf Flowing / round a boulder'. The capitals signal Dickinson and her 'concentrated and hard' poems that yet flow with strange feeling; and return to Keats and his feeling for words and water. Keats is there in the 'trembling Hands of water' too that end the poem. There is a delicacy and tenderness of feeling directed to the body itself that animates these lines, redeeming sympathies of self-accompaniment that counter the other pain of an uncomprehending readership ('each new person is always asking / about the origin story / of the destruction that is happening / at the very site of me'). There are no words for how simply wonderful this poem is. It is partly so because of the clarity and depth of its feeling for what is sustainably other and true within the lyric and within the creative self beyond and alongside  the 'me' whose core and 'site' is being destroyed. The perversion of a prejudicial though well-meaning readership, the difficulty of a desiring pleasureful life among words with such destruction underway: both these are felt differently at this edge, with this limit experience that opens heart and flow and a counter-shimmering along the lines.

The Last Books is such a vital and fine small press, notably bringing out this superb collection, My Earliest Person by Jennifer Soong. The collection has a quirky and compelling drive that seems to be at power behind the stanzas and lines: ontological insecurities of reference at first strike one as narrowing the zone under felt scrutiny, then again, at turns and twists, open to a multimodal thick description of sorts, a layering, a compounding, much of which pivots on pronominal complexities and switching. A representative page moves the poem's gaze to leaves and bodies: 'Leaves reach and turn, a body' (19 ff.). Then strange aporetic filtering and interrogative surmises follow:

                    one can't know why but who is –

            What's the word for how you call

            the sea nearer? It's what's

            between us I've come in for. The

situation turns, on its own pleasure.

            You see me for what you are, like branches

            into snow, what I feel,

            becomes us. Here is

            snow. We will swim and scroll like

beads in a pack. You can't deny it

                        though I'm used to you. I feel as I've

always thought: per each count of

            passing winter, it was something:

It is the last thing to be moved to change.

The lineation presents three tab lengths as though we have three different levels of discourse somehow, inviting speculation. The pronoun-play digs into love lyric and metapoetic gestures: but more strangely works away at the epistemological blockages harrying ontology, yet which also, it seems, allow for the slippages of identity that enable swift motions of the mind. The natural world is turned to but as a turning mechanism itself, an embodying force that is unknowably in process. The things unknown ('What's the word' hovers near Beckett) are as uncertain as the relations are between the pronominal subjects. The voice states it is here for the relation 'between us'; but there is something a little sinister in how the you is being imagined as '[seeing] me for what you are'. This cryptically collapses I and you at the same time as hinting at the reverse: the I sees what the you is up to with their appropriative perversion faked up as desire. The appropriative seeing is 'like branches / into snow': how, you wonder? In the way the branching text lies upon the page and 'sees' its subject? And what is the relation of the selfish seeing of the other and the way the I's feeling is confessed as defining the I/you collective. The 'snow' is pointed to and yet is not quite there except as word, just as it generates less a Frostian wise knowingness so much as a madness of simile-simulacra. What 'it' refers to in the last lines is similarly triple and cryptic: it might refer to the two of them swimming and scrolling within the tight lyric space of metaphor; to the deictic fact of the snow as white page where feeling and thinking pass winter and make something of it all, this poem; it might be playing up to the love bond itself, undeniable if we playact the lover, the last thing we'd abandon even with a change of heart. The poem weaves doubt into the I/Thou and We of poetics itself, and yet at the same time finds a Howe-like lyricism along its nerves and fibres that is entrancing and intimate. This luscious and needle sharp collection is a real feat of the textual imagination, wow.

Dom Hale also publishes with The Last Book, and like Soong feels his way to the endtimes of the small press's title with this exhilarating collection, First Nettles. The sequences here are ferociously and admirably radical, with some superb political satire and verve to the poems. 'Seizures' might be taken as an example (104 ff.) – opening with a vision of British citizenry and political realm that is a punch in the gut of the powers that be:

abut were we insectoid

the fraying trench & divot, national leaders, storm petrel

bugged, the 1980s

a fit from this compromise

I found a scrap of banner speak I wouldn't risk

RMT to wightlike, slate

you didn't meet a train through London corridors of the overworked

The union disputes of the 1980s are remembered and erased, the general public 'insectoid' with feverish nostalgias, the lyric political subject Prufrockishly lame, the union banner's political geography garbled and broken, the poem locked into negative-Larkin London cliché. The pessimism of the intellect is countered by what seems plausibly to be celebrated, the act of making poems, but the second poem in the sequence is glum about this too. The train of the overworked 'can never be precious with poems'; that is, won't hold to them, won't hold them precious, or rather perhaps will never treat poetry other than precious time-wasting that will simply not happen. The poem ends with the poet climbing inside the washing machine and switching himself off.

         But as the sequence progresses, another poetics emerges from the wastelands: despite the 'cavernous parks' and securitised supermarkets, 'poetry can go on / you must waste every lock'. The lines acknowledge the fake Beckettian uplift at the same time as their opposite, the locks and waste oddly being the way poems do their work. That might be by wasting the locks on desire as Blakean resistance; or as a deliberately time-wasting gesture that throws away the locks and keys; or as a means towards freedom through waste and excess, that has a cumulative scrunched-up effect, 'cram of / form with form'. The ineffectiveness of the process may be part of the wastefulness, Pope's lock of trivia taken in as cramming matter. The poem ends with lines the struggle of aporia and satire has won space for, so context is lacking here; but the opening up of the desire lines is giddy:

so we travel together under an intense wind

sweat on our backs, our mouths dry

a poem not for 'the universe', but right here

among houses & scorned trees

in the arms of other people

towards what refuses demolition

The shade of Sean Bonney animates the lines, a comparable feeling for collective and companionable solidarity and fellow feeling; also a sardonic turn against fake poetry, an acknowledgement of the harsh conditions of the urban environment, a radicalism that is lucid and clear but not naive – how excellent that line 'in the arms of other people' is in conjuring collective activism, erotic togetherness, redefinition of otherness as the best subject position to speak from with tender and political animus, and the closing line both a non pasarán and a solidarity with relations that are durably beyond the grasp of the enemy dialectics of destruction.

NOTES

[1] One Way or Another, Hamish Hamilton, 2013, 272-290, p. 282.

[2] Fiona Leigh, 'The Theory of Being and the Argument for Forms in Plato's Sophist', Phronesis 69. 4 (2024), 402-438 (p. 432).

[3] Fullish disclosure: Ágnes Lehóczky is a colleague and friend, and this collection does include a creative text of mine praising its powers.

[4] Is said to have said, as summarised by R.D. Laing: The Divided Self [1960] (Penguin, 1965), p. 51.

Adam Piette teaches as the University of Sheffield and co-edits Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam.

Copyright © 2025 by Adam Piette, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.