To Justify the Ways of Anathematos to Man - A Review of 'Bleeding Verse'

Around the time that Punk Rock was prevalent a tired form of stand-up comedy was on its last legs. In a fairly peremptory, evolutionary manner it was unceremoniously and anarchically shouldered aside by the likes of Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton, as it deserved to be.  Alternative Comedy had arrived and an aggressive left/liberal mindset replaced a predictable set of tropes, peddled by those who frequented the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, and now deemed to be racist and sexist. Since then the wheel has come full circle and stand-up comedy is tediously predictable, referring as a default to a set of attitudes which “we all agree” to be true except with the minor proviso that, of course, we don’t. This means that comedy is now boring and irritating as it disrupts nothing and serves only to reinforce dull attitudes riddled like a sieve with easily challengeable assumptions.

In the world of poetry things are very similar. I write poetry and, over the past few years, have attended local events and read my poems. I don’t go any more because I came to be able to rely on being surrounded by shaven-headed lesbians (I have nothing against homosexuality by the way), and "guest star" poets who were usually northern women reciting verse about having their teeth kicked in by men, and rappers rapping about racism. None of it was very technically demanding. Whether I sympathised with this content or not was immaterial. What concerned me was how boring and utterly predictable it was. It was trotted out as a dull formality, everyone applauded dutifully and then we went home after participating in a baneful choreography. The content was insipid, cold, lacking all piquancy just like all the pre-alternative comedy. It simply didn’t entertain, challenge or amuse me and used my beloved literature as a means to a conforming, bienpensant, political end rather than as a glorious end in itself.

When I encountered Anathematos Anathematos in his voice-distorting rabbit costume, interviewed by Rod Liddle, my interest was piqued. As a Head of English in a state school I could well imagine why he might go in disguise. To be connected to poems that rude and irreverent, flying so obviously in the face of the golden calves of the politically on-message would mean certain death for his career - especially in the achingly correct world of teaching. I bought and read the poems and was shocked and amused in a way that I enjoyed. The challenging piquancy was back and literature, loved for its own sake by a man who clearly knew a great deal about it and about how to do it, was disrupting and surprising. It did this by laughing in the face of political commonplaces and talking openly about sex, but in conjunction to plentiful literary references that would educate an intrigued young reader. You could easily argue that that is exactly what a proper English teacher should do! It made poets sound fascinating as in this sonnet about the 19^th century scandaliser, Lord Byron.

The damned of Aberdeen! Then Harrow toff,

then seedy Cantab. groper out for boys,

then Newstead Lord and Master (on and off):

till pleasures of the flesh began to cloy.

I courted Caro Lamb and fucked her raw:

then heeded Melbourne’s warning to improve –

I settled on the first thing that I saw

a Puritano-parallelo prude.

I sodomised her chiefly for the screams:
she made me think of Edleston at Trin.
Augusta was the muse of all my dreams:
Medora was the fruit of sibling sin.

Now Missolonghi claims me as her own:

I scream Allegra’s name, then die, alone.

This is the real thing. It delights with the perfectly executed inevitability of the prosody offering all of the usual pleasures of verse, offers up tasty and unusual words and tickles the fancy with its literary and historical allusions. It interests, entertains, titillates and educates. What more can one ask of poetry?

And it has excellent antecedents and pedigrees. As well as drawing on the arch-satirist, Byron, it comes straight out of a genealogy stretching back to Juvenal’s sixth satire, to Catullus, Dryden and Pope. The ‘Dunciad’ (echoed in Anathematos’ second collection, ‘The Gloomiad’ ) contained literal pissing contests and competitions to see which poet could dive deepest in the sewer disgorging into the Thames. There is also a wonderfully disgusting but, equally, elegant new take on Jonathan Swift’s brilliant and lewd ‘Lady’s Dressing Room.’ And that is how this poetry works. It plays off the tension between the genteel form of the sonnet, beautifully executed, and the salacious, scabrous and dangerous content. It does this in the same way that Michelangelo and Pietro Aretino wrote pornographic sonnets where the correctness of the form was in delicious contrast with the naughtiness of the content. Such tensions also evoke Baudelaire’s ‘Fleurs du Mal' where the horror and the disgust are somehow rescued by the musical charms of the poetic discipline and its inexplicable sorcery. And, like Baudelaire, the poet delights in rolling wonderful words and resonances around his palate, relishing their textures and, often, spitting them forth vituperatively.

So, these poems are pungent and dangerous and how refreshing that is! They will not be what many want to hear and many will seethe with outrage. They have already started. This means, God bless us, that, suddenly, literature is a cause of change and makes itself felt. It impinges, upsets and displaces. Like the sex that these poems deal with it is a life-force that subverts and challenges irrepressibly instead of reinforcing the safe imprisonments of modern poetry.