Rebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty

Bloodaxe, 2015
£9.95

tl;dr: If at times endearingly antiquated in its sentiments, Beauty/Beauty is also doggedly the work of a millennial. Perry’s insistence on facing down and subverting familiar poetic subjects suggests a sensibility unlikely to rest on its laurels.

Like the artist John Stezaker, whose ‘Mask XXXV’ features on Beauty/Beauty’s cover, Rebecca Perry’s first collection is in close proximity to Surrealism. Akin to Stezaker’s “preoccupation with … the revelatory potential of the obsolete object and image” Perry’s sensibility seems consciously Victorian in its choice of subject matter. ‘A Little Dog Angel,’ ‘Love Apart,’ and ‘Forever Friends’ are not titles that occur in this book. Yet that species of sincerity—the kind of poetry enshrined on the servers of familyfriendpoems.com, most written, most read, and for the most part completely ignored by ‘proper’ poets—is the kind Perry can’t resist playing chicken with.

That Elizabeth Bishop was dismissed as cute, her choice of subject matter, and her miniaturist technique thought of as unworthy of the generation that spawned a gerrymandering giant like Lowell, seems pertinent to recall.

Poems like the tongue-in-cheek ‘The Pet Cemetery’ succeed in-so-far as they are brave enough to face down and subvert the familiar. Rather than mawkish, ‘The Pet Cemetery,’ in approaching the long list of Perry’s deceased fauna (she should have opted for the Siberian hamsters) with the same collage technique used elsewhere in the book, manages to short-circuit conventional assumptions of the poetic. 

Fattie, my joy.

Ponto. See you on the other side.

We had twelve years together, Chips,

I will never forget.

My adorable Scum.

I.M.U., my relentless Casper.

My most magnificent Baron,

where have you gone?

(‘The Pet Cemetery,’ pg. 43)

The major criticism I can see being levelled at such plucky endeavours is that they can be seen as slight. Certainly, when the tour de force ‘Dear Stegosaurus’—Perry calls it “a love letter”—ends with the line “your mouth holds more wonder than a sky full of stars,” (even if the preceding line is exceedingly beautiful) you wonder if it hasn’t simply been an exercise in frivolity.

In what is perhaps an unintentional tribute to Stezaker “the dark spaces of subjectivity [in these poems] seem somehow blasted through, exposed and emptied out.”

That Elizabeth Bishop was dismissed as cute, her choice of subject matter, and her miniaturist technique thought of as unworthy of the generation that spawned a gerrymandering giant like Lowell, seems pertinent to recall. That Bishop herself fretted she had “wasted half [her] talent through timidity” and feared that her poems were “precious,” is hopefully not something Perry has to worry about. 

The poems that play with space on the page (surely a fulfilment of the Glynn Maxwell prophecy) possess an assurance rarely found in the British tradition. (The spaced out among American poets, in the mainstream at least, include Gillian Conoley, Juan Delgado, and Helen Vitoria.) ‘On serendipity,’  ‘Over/wintering,’ and especially ‘Ergonomics’ hold the same quotidian-become-beautiful charm as Cummings and are equally difficult to resist.

I have a soft bread roll on my desk               which two or three times

I’ve squeezed              very gently                   when no one is looking

butter           sprinkle of salt                            pea soup               dream

the price of gold is falling        I can’t see a window but the reflection

on the floor suggests          intermittent sun

(‘Ergonomics,’ pg. 34)

In what is perhaps an unintentional tribute to Stezaker “the dark spaces of subjectivity [in these poems] seem somehow blasted through, exposed and emptied out.” The artist’s reflection on his use of sea cave postcards seems remarkably relevant. 

If at times endearingly antiquated in its sentiments, Beauty/Beauty is also doggedly the work of a millennial. It isn’t just the online IQ tests, Tetris blocks, and flashing trainers either, but that poems like ‘Wasp’ and ‘Poor Sasquatch,’ attest to an affection for the inanimate to the tune of Gary Snyder’s Mac: “Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents.” 

The book contains five collage-like poems. They’re tumblr poems, Pinterest poems, poems that know the cut and paste, the drag and drop of this century. Some of the sources for them are familiar, such as Pitman’s Short-hand Instructor, The Year You Were Born, 1986, or the unmistakable copy of junk mail. (The poems ‘Junk Mail’ and ‘The Year I Was Born’ are not linked to any specific text in the notes.)

Perry’s sensibility seems consciously Victorian in its choice of subject matter. 

Others are more rarified, parts of a long poem by the avant-garde poet Anne Carson—for instance—are drafted in to make ‘A Most Satisfactory Dreamlife,’ and the literary detritus of Tennessee Williams shores up the familiarly titled ‘A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.’ (The quote is the subtitle of the little-know play ‘Stairs to the Roof,’ where it appears as ‘A Prayer for the Wild at Heart that are Kept in Cages.’)

Though I admit to being wary of the make-weight guff that comes out of workshops, the Williams mash-up contains beautiful lines, as does its Carson inspired relation. 

Rebecca Perry — Beauty/Beauty (Interview)

So, Rebecca — is everything ready? Are you excited?

Everything is ready! For a while I just had a couple of boxes of books in my front room and I felt a little detached from the whole thing, then – are you ready for a terrible, half-baked simile – it was like that moment in Sonic where he smashes open the capsule to free the woodland creatures, and there’s a very brief screen-freeze, then the capsule blows up and they all leap out and gambol around.  It was like that. The screen freeze was basically me walking past the boxes in my front room for a couple of weeks, looking at them a little distrustingly, then people started tweeting pictures of it and someone told me they saw it in a bookshop, and suddenly it felt like it was out there.

(Sonic Simile)

Could you say a little about how you came to be publishing with Bloodaxe?

I was incredibly lucky. For years I’d hoped that when I was ready for a book it would be with Bloodaxe – I’ve always admired the list and, more specifically, their legacy of publishing women and writers of colour where other poetry publishers were (and still are) failing to – so I sent my manuscript to Neil and, after suggesting I work on it a little and add some more poems, he accepted it. I’m very aware that I had a really easy run at the whole thing!

Before talking about what's inside the book, it seems like the design — judging from the beautiful cover at least — is really important to you. Could you say a little about the process, about how much input you had in the design of the book? 

The cover was very important to me, actually, and I was very grateful that I was allowed to have a say in it. I think someone else choosing it would have been tricky for me. I’ve thought a bit about why it was so important and I think it comes down to two things: the first is that art is very important to me, something I have a great love for, so I figured the cover may as well be a work of art. Also, because the collection doesn’t have a unifying theme, sense of place, or central image as such, I wanted an image that would sit beside it abstractly, something a little stranger.

The cover of Beauty/Beauty featuring 'Mask XXXV' by John Stezaker.

Lots of specific things – dogs, fruit, hearts, ice, flowers – recur throughout the book, so I spent an inordinate amount of time googling bizarre images featuring those things and then, as the search became less hopeful and more crazed, dogs eating fruit, which inevitably descended into me just watching videos of dogs on YouTube. Then (mercifully) my friend Alex, who had been helping me search, suggested I look at John Stezaker’s work. I saw Mask XXXV and immediately knew that was the cover for the book. Luckily Neil agreed it would be perfect, Bloodaxe approached John for permission, and a few months later were granted it. Once I’d seen that image (though we’d yet to be granted permission for use) it presented itself in various ways in the few poems I had left to write, so it was like an unexpected one-sided collaboration for me.

I also enjoy that the cover is quite divisive – most people love it but a few people have found it a little disconcerting, like ‘Oh! That’s… unusual? Did you choose that?’

Now, in terms of the contents of the book, ROY made some predictions about poems that might have made it and there's a taster on the Bloodaxe website, but what can you tell us more about the poems in the new book? Where do they come from? 

In the end very few poems from the pamphlet made it into the book and it felt a sort of relief to leave them behind. Not necessarily because of any great feelings of shame about the older poems but just because I wanted the book to be a new thing. Most of the poems didn’t make it because there was no way I’d have written them now, however many years on and that felt akin to being dishonest, somehow.

I find talking about my writing/articulating where it comes from very difficult. I suppose when I first started out writing I was certainly mostly reading male writers (Lorca, O’Hara and E E Cummings, who I still love) and lyric poetry, but for the last few years my interest has shifted and I’m interested in very different writing, mostly by women. So my poems come from the experience of being female, certainly, and the experience of love, and the terror of one day ceasing to be alive. A friend who helped edit the manuscript had written and circled the note  ‘DEATH’ on quite a lot of pages, which is… notable.

What was the writing phase like from pamphlet to collection?

They were very separate things – it wasn’t a case of the book developing from the pamphlet as such – and the book felt much more of a process. When I was working on the earlier poems with the vague notion that they might become a book, I was having my writing workshopped regularly and spending a lot of time worrying about editing them, being sure they were ‘clear’, hoping people didn’t hate them. Once the book was taking shape and I needed another 10 or 15 poems to make up the numbers, I wrote in a much more solitary, and less inhibited, way. I showed the poems to almost no one and a handful of them had only been read by one other person by the time the book published. I much preferred that way of working.

What did you enjoy the most about preparing your manuscript?

Once I’d made the decision to divide the book into sections it appealed more to my proclivity for micro-focusing. It was a much less daunting process to approach each section as a mini book within a book. Prior to that it had felt a bit unwieldy and overwhelming.

I was also finishing the writing during summer so I had lots of weekends sitting in my local park or on my balcony in the sun, with a pile of books and a jar of gherkins, which was lovely. I also had a couple of people who really helped me work on the manuscript, so there were brilliant evenings in the pub looking through the poems, deciding what to cut and what to keep. The process was really made by some of my friends actually, being relentlessly supportive and enthusiastic when I ceased to be.

Could you pick a poem to whet appetites?

This is for my friend, Laura, and was recently published in an anthology of poems about female friendship, Best Friends Forever, edited by Amy Key and published by The Emma Press [the poem 'Soup Sister' will also appear in Beauty/Beauty, which is published on the 25th]:

*

Soup Sister


And, of course,

it bothers me greatly that I can’t know

the quality of the light where you are.

How your each day pans out,

how the breeze lifts the dry leaves from the street

or how the street pulls away from the rain.

Last week I passed a tree

that was exactly you in tree form,

with a kind look and tiny sub-branches

like your delicate wrists.

Six years ago we were lying

in a dark front room on perpendicular sofas,

so hungover that our skin hurt to touch.

How did we always manage

to be heartbroken at the same time?

I could chop, de-seed and roast

a butternut squash for dinner

in the time it took you to shower.

Steam curtained the windows, whiting out

the rain, which hit the house sideways.

One of us, though I forget who, said

do you think women are treated like bowls

waiting to be filled with soup?

And the other one said, of course.

Now the world is too big,

and it’s sinking and rising

and stretching out its back bones.

The rivers are too wild,

the mountains are so so old

and it’s all laid out arrogantly between us.

My friend, how long do you stand

staring at the socks in your drawer

lined up neat as buns in a bakery,

losing track of time and your place in the world,

in the (custardy light of a) morning?

*

Thanks from ROY and the little lizard to Rebecca Perry for responding to the suggestion of an interview at such a busy period. If you'd like t'see your work, or can think of someone else's, you'd like to see up on ROY then y'know what t'do. 

Also this: 

little armoured — Rebecca Perry

Beauty/Beauty—Rebecca Perry’s first full collection—is forthcoming from Bloodaxe at the end of January and it’s fair to say there’s a lot of excitement around it. “Not since Jo Shapcott’s Electroplating the Baby or Simon Armitage’s Zoom! has a poet emerged with such a distinctive, original voice.” The University of Manchester’s John McAuliffe—quoted in the blurb—is clearly excited about Perry’s debut. 

It certainly sounds like there’s plenty to get worked up about too. Perry’s prose poems have shared page space with the likes of Carrie Etter and George Szirtes in the anthology This Line Is Not For Turning, she has worked on collaborative projects—with the Glej Theatre in Slovenia during 2014 on a performance piece called Silent City—and has enjoyed a wide range of publication in magazines. 

We can also anticipate poems to be included in Beauty/Beauty. There’s Perry talking about—for example—“a love letter to a stegosaurus” (a sneaky pic of which you can find of Twitter) and one that “plays with space on the page in a way that I don’t often do.” These are poems that as the context suggests, take Perry out of her comfort zone.

“Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in,” states Bloodaxe’s blurb, going on to say, “[Beauty/Beauty accumulates] its various feelings, ideas, objects, disappointments and joys to the point of almost overflowing.” Adding that it includes poems about “the difficulty of defining what love is,” “the overwhelming abundance of things in museums,” and “eulogies to dearly departed pets.”

Photo credit: Jan Michelle Andres, Instagram - @Jnmndrs 

Perry has one pamphlet to her name: little armoured. The plum purple book Zoë Skoulding and John Barnie judged winner of the Purple Moose Poetry Prize in 2011 is still as handsome today as it was two years ago when published by Seren. A generous selection it is too, having twenty-three poems listed in the contents (not including sequences of which there are a few).

Aside from the acclaim that follows from such a prize, little armoured was tolerably well-received. The usual humming and hawing from the establishment in terms of Carl Griffin’s review in Wales Arts Review, the usual fluffing and faffing from the blogosphere. What interests me more are the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. One Amazonian admits to not being “usually one for poetry” before going on to say Perry won them over. Both of them came across her work through readings. One reader’s review of little armoured on Goodreads describes it as ‘a really quirky pamphlet’ going on to conclude that it’s ‘Just lovely.’ 

Positive stuff then, and yet the author doesn’t seem to think so. In conversation with ROY Perry said, “Well, I’m only including maybe 5 or 6 of the pamphlet poems in my book,” adding that, “people tend, in the UK at least, to republish the full contents of their pamphlet in a first collection.” Suggesting that she’s come a long way since little armoured, admitting that “18 or so of them make me cringe in even some small way!” With the worst offenders being the villanelle ‘What is the most shop-lifted book in the world?’ (criticised by Griffin as a ‘needless gimmick’ that she should ditch at the first opportunity) and ‘The Man in the Moon’, the dual 10-line stanza bookend of the work. 

But why this self-critical stance? Perry says that it’s probably because she has “totally turned [her] back on form, for now,” and that, “thinking about it … it’s just that my writing has changed a lot.” That ‘for now’ is very telling, I think. Certainly, taking some of Perry’s later remarks into consideration, her awareness that, “it depends where you draw the line, what you think falls under ‘form’.” Going on to say that, “I still use different stanza lengths and punctuation and line breaks, which some people would argue is form.”

They would and I’d be inclined to argue the same about little armoured. Given the fact that out of the 23 titled poems approximately half can be categorized as taking one definitive form or another it’s far from formless. From the reverse (iii, ii, i) sonnet sequence ‘My grandfather considers his life in three stages’ to the neat couplets of ‘The Mice’ and tercets of ‘Hello, Little Bird.’ I was surprised just how formally conversative little armoured comes across. I expected a fashionable concern with kitsch and quirky conversation. Not sonnets dedicated to the poet’s paternal influences. It seems—however—that the development of a voice capable of balanced intimacy and assertiveness was a central concern of Perry’s and nowhere is it better achieved—in my opinion—than in the poem ‘Hello, Little Bird.’

It’s one poem in the book that persists strongly for me after reading. Don’t think it’s just me sympathy for the subject either, the intimate who’s so fed up with the sun she wants it to ‘fuck off and die,’ which is very So Cal. No, it’s more haunting and haunted than that. The poem has a lot of clear language in it: ‘It is like a bee behind a curtain / that won’t fly out of the window.’ ‘You see snow / on the news and it makes you sad.’ It pulls no punches so that when we get round to—in the ninth stanza—‘heroin / feels like a ghost no one will believe in, / even though it is moving things / in front of your eyes, and throwing knives / across the kitchen.’ The transition into serious territory doesn’t feel abrupt, but assures us this is a voice that can handle the sympathetic step-up. That manages to be matter of fact and assertive but gentle and supportive. So the sonic qualities of those lines is subtle but musical enough to be memorable.

It’s a poem—I suspect—that will make it into the collection and it’s a voice that will appeal to a lot of people. 

We know writing’s a right messy business, which, like any process based on cross-pollination and hybridization, produces mutant mutts more often than pedigrees. There’s a lot of waste, by-product to the production of ‘perfect’ work. We play along because that’s how publication works, things are dressed up and made presentable, the rest is swept under the carpet. But I think—if anything—we sometimes prefer to read ‘failures’ and—in the same way it pays dividends to read everything a fiction writer’s written—unfinished or regretted work contextualizes voice.

There’s a lot to suggest Perry’s emergent poetic—academic indulgences aside—seeks to unearth the goodly hidden traditions and boot out the muscle-bound mainstream. That it’s more inclined to celebrate the living contigency often concealed behind the agglomorated and metadata-stamped perfections of the presented ‘finished’ work. The celebration of a Lawrencian superabundance more readily associated with memorable speech than literary writing starts in little armoured and makes me very excited to read what’s happened to it since. 

Ignore what Perry says and buy it. There’s a very generous selection of work to like, plenty to read and re-read. Plus you’ve only six months to get acquainted with an early iteration of a voice you’ll no doubt be hearing a lot more of in the years to come. 

*

The pamphlet little armoured is avaliable from Seren at £5 or why not order a signed copy directly from the author? 

Beauty/Beauty is published on the 25^th January 2015, will be priced at £9.95, and runs to 64pp.