Did I tell you that I wrote an entire pamphlet because I never came to terms with the hell of all these bleak enclosed spaces, or bring myself to love this country that drinks from the puddle to prove it isn’t gay, & I’ve found that three times is too many to do the same reading & four ends up melodramatic when this depression is fundamentally ontological & clouds the heart, which is why I promised myself I’d never write like this again, that I’d be generally affirmative to the whole of things in spite of my commute & tendency to bicker, that I would write kinder work emails & gossip a little less, as this errata isn’t cute & flagellation isn’t my link to a life well-lived but it is duct tape, piecing together every critique I’ve voiced to you across these last few years which includes how I’ve been well-shielded against grief by distance but still think the world would be a better place if Callie and Sean were still around & our friends do too, so that’s keeping us together & I didn’t realise how much of these last few years were marked out by absences & Ian says that apocalypse doesn’t rest easy on the tongue but it’s still there, in everything I write, the dull gaping maw of the sun & the itinerant need to imagine a life that isn’t blacked out by bad faith philosophers & who the fuck made Lionel Shriver one of those, did I miss that, I was kept busy drinking & trying to find a way to outline a theory of metaphor that was generative & I have Ricoeur to thank for that, him and the UCU strikes were a big help in tearing me away from a career that would have killed me.
& in those poems, I quote John Berger, that handsome bastard who disappeared to the countryside & wrote that single portraits of love do not exist but they do so either I’ve misunderstood what he meant or he was wrong & I know what I’d bet on, because there’s an open, weeping scratch at the core of this last year & it began like all good love poems, in a dark cafe when I was off-centre & skint & willing to be charmed by anyone & did I tell you that I know exorcisms don’t work, like that time I was blessed by a drunk priest as a kid for €50 & I’m still exhausted, so all of this is still unexorcised. London & how I built this one feeling into a brutal monument & when I wrote to Danny with these poems I said a little about my fear of unmooring from the world, though more than that, my fear of how comfortable that fear felt, how I had built a limbo system of nursed distance, of writing to cover the silence, of how it then became a position about whatever we mean when we say ‘community & communication’, so reading them again & again feels softly indulgent to a catastrophic selfishness that does nobody any good but then maybe something will still come of it, maybe there’s a metaphor or two, a line that someone reads to someone in bed, maybe that is enough for me. You once told me that at my worst, I’m a romantic & that’s still true I guess.
& I’m not writing this to you as an explanation or manifesto, just speaking to the mania felt after a pandemic & Danny said that the poetry community is a terrifying or terrible community, in the sense that the things that we offer to one another are often the signs or sigils of our own inability to exist in it & I did cry when I read his email, sitting in Birmingham with these poems that didn’t feel like they did much but he kindly disagreed & everyone has disagreed so kindly these last few weeks, but I’ve been slipping back into old habits & no-one can afford self-destructive tendencies in this economy, with so many people dead & when I wrote that Berryman had one right idea, I meant that he found that bridge in 1972 but that’s too bleak to say in a poem & I don’t know if I ever believed it, but it was one of those sigils of how I couldn’t exist without a cruel streak & a signifier to my general feeling of collapsing ideation that had been accumulating like poetry pamphlets & that dull fear of useless adoration, so when I ran into an old friend we laughed about the way we used to fall in love with everyone we met, in a constant state of infatuation that pissed folks off & we were always a little too sad to keep it together, because I’ve found that laughing at yourself with a friend is always a tonic to the worst infections of self-pity & like I said before, I agree with Hill that the poetry better not be in the pity, no-one is saved by it & nothing is borne from it, & then last week in Birmingham I told Alex about how I had once printed off all eight pages of Denise Riley & Wendy Mulford’s 1979 pamphlet No Fee & put it on my wall, a decade ago in a different city & how a lovely art historian I was not quite dating said I must be a hit with the Tumblr girlies & we laughed because who reads Denise & Wendy to be a hit with anyone, which I suppose is what I mean with all this, that the inability to exist coherently & the joy found in the cracks of miscomprehending the social are all related in small ways & I gave up on philosophy because everything I wrote felt like a private mythology rather than a framework but sometimes that’s all you need, & I’ve always done this because I can’t imagine a life where I don’t fall in love again & again or read your poems & cry, or offer up a some half-posture & half-charming devastation at my own coping mechanisms for the abscesses of the dead, or expect too much & give too little, & these small ways in which I lived, exhausted & loving, are perhaps why you still sound so happy to hear from me even if I ramble a little & I have always loved to hear from you. Please do write me back, when you can.
With care & care,
Kyle
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