For Real — Ben Wilkinson

I’m willing to bet my entire collection of ‘antique’ Polish fountain pens on the fact that the copy of Ben Wilkinson’s For Real (2014) that I’ve been proudly carting around with me the last week or so is the only copy in the whole of San Bernardino county. Hell, I’d also bet anyone who’s seen this handsome book, oddly resembling its author as it does, slim and nattily dressed in Liverpool-red jacket, was curious about its contents.

Photo credit: Jan Michelle Andres, Instagram - @Jnmndrs 

The publisher smith|doorstop have really outdone themselves with the ’13/14 series; tall-lighthouse’s are nice but the quality of these proper 5 x 7” pamphlets even outstrips, in my opinion, Faber and Faber’s distinctive New Poets. Faber and Faber opting for their customary left-aligned 32pt plus names and to number rather than name the volumes puts smith|doorstop ahead as far as I’m concerned. After all it’s the title that starts to set the terms, the title being first point of contact, of engagement. 

In the coming poetic inquisition Ben Wilkinson is likely to be strung up for trying to get one over on us for his title. Sure, the real, the concrete is here by the bucket-full; John Barnes is here with plates of biryani, the DeLorean of Back to the Future with cassette tapes, and a Staffie and place names aplenty. And though a glance down the eighteen titles on the contents page reads like an excerpt from Nouns, Nouns, Nouns what dominates this book is a return—again and again—to the disorientating, to the slip away from reality and, as such, it is ‘phantasmagoric’ reimagings and dreams that dominate For Real. 

From the outset, from the trippy ‘The Nightmare’ where the protagonist ‘dream[s] us on that stretch again’ right up to the penultimate ‘The Beach,’ where ‘Again, the dream comes …’ and we are trapped in ‘this dream-in-a-dream’ to the final ‘portal between two worlds’ of ‘The Door’ this book is permeated with the surreal. We are ‘wandering’ in ‘The Leash’ or ‘stumbling’ in ‘Bearing’, invariably at the whim of a force that threatens to ‘plunge us / into darkness’ as it does in 'Lights Out'. 

So if the title suggests a healthy distancing from the ambition of getting at the four-square what are we left with? Thinking about it got Outkast’s ‘Ms. Jackson’ going around in my head, the long croon of, ‘I am for reeeeeeal…’ So that’s how I ended up reading these poems, as dedicatory in nature, as pledges and, essentially, about love. (Interestingly the word ‘pamphlet’ is linked to love poetry through its etymology.)

The epigram from Shadowlands (‘Why love if losing hurts so much?’) and the overtly love-themed poems (‘The Beach’, ‘Rooms’, and ‘Bearing’) aside it is the direct mode of address, to a ‘you’, that's insistently sought throughout Wilkinson’s work that convinces me. On occasion this repetition of addressee feels a touch programmatical, the limp meditation of ‘Rooms’ springs to mind, where the pasty protagonist reflects: ‘the clues that, / pieced into some sort of sense, / would make our later rush / seem selfish, or strangely selfless. // Let’s say it was both.’ However, if this criticism is fair then it also has to be said that 'Rooms' represents the B-side of a set of voices that are the traction and torque behind such enviable poems as ‘The Catch’. In that poem, which functions as the hook for the book, direct address accelerates the reader through the full-rhymes of a sonnet without you even realising it’s a bloody sonnet at all. The speaker addresses the intimate 'you' of an attempted suicide, "for taking pill / after yellow-green pill, the black-blue / taste the price you paid to kill." 

Then there's ‘The Beach’ that, despite having heard the word one hundred million times on Game of Thrones, still manages to make the word ‘cunt’ shockingly intimate. Wilkinson’s preference for the subtler rhetorical and sonic strategies such as pararhyme, parallelism, and internal rhyme give these poems a convincing impression of organic cohesion. Though it’d be a bit of a truism to say Wilkinson’s all-or-nothing lyricism has come about through profound immersion in his craft: Wilkinson's all-or-nothing lyricism has come about through profound immersion in his craft.

These are poems that represent, in the words of a recent fiction review in The New Yorker, “a hybrid construction pretending to be an organic material.” Though it is of novelists James Wood is writing, the same can certainly be said of poets, that “we enjoy watching … [them] … play the game of truth-telling.” This is a game Wilkinson clearly loves to play too and he's particularly good at the dead-pan, the I'm-writing-a-poem-but-I'm-not-look. It is his dedication to the in-fiction world of poetry, his playing along, that ensures no book of his will disappoint in terms of its reread value. 

'Chameleon' is my wild-card favourite. A neat thing modelled on the same Wikipedia counter-factual inspiration of Helen Mort's 'Twenty Two Words For Snow' in Division Street (2013) and Wilkinson's own 'Hex' from The Sparks (2009). Looking forward to seeing more of these mini-genre 'debunking' poems in the future.

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Afterthought

Remember CDs? Remember furtively getting the latest home and almost severing a finger with The World’s Sharpest Knife to get the bloody celophane off? Imagine if, having diced with death, you discover the only thing remotely like songs are the little tiny words printed in the little tiny booklet. Ok, my frustration with poetry publishers not cottoning onto simultaneous mp3 releases isn’t quite the same thing but seriously, come on! It would be so cool if poetry books came with a link to downloadable recordings. Even if listening to poetry isn’t your thing (I have to remind myself it isn’t for loads of people) then wouldn’t you at least cherish the option? 

Hex — Ben Wilkinson

These days, the way my mind works, 

when she and I are side-by-side the morning after 

in a bedroom-cum-DIY-disaster 

it takes no more than a number or word 

or her surreptitious hand brushing close to mine 

to set the rhymes racing off 

like inmates that’ve tripped 

the central security system 

and are running like fuck-knows into the distance

the way thoughts might link

hex to text to the lesser-striped Baryonyx of the Early Cretaceous

who, with twice as many teeth

as its nearest relatives and a sharp angle 

near the snout, could hold onto its prey

with twenty times the efficiency of the modern crocodile or shrike.

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“They say it’s like speaking to snakes,” says Kasia, the Polish language Larkin scholar who I’m meeting in Warsaw. “Really?” So Harry Potter is speaking Polish when he goes all Parselmouth on us? More like the peaks and troughs of radio static, I think; its tonal fluency crashing into the burrs and clicks of consonant clusters so thick you’d need a palate as sharp as a machete to cut your way out of it. And though an Anglikiem playing Polish Scrabble has to grasp the law that every ZED isn’t worth a ten, (there being three of them) and that the hissing ‘sz’ and ‘c’ occur often, it’s slippery only in-so-far as mastering its cases goes, not its noise. That, at least, is my opinion. 

My opinion. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I suspect I hear Polish as I do because of the interference of the alliterative bent in my first language. And like Richard Carter, quoted in a recent article in the Yorkshire Post, “I’ve learned quite a lot by not being in Yorkshire,” that’s why I think I hear this poem like I do too.

After all, don't Yorkshirefolk, like the Ulstermen in the W. R. Rogers poem Heaney quotes in Feeling into Words (pg. 4) also have a fetish for the hard edges of their speech? We too are 'an abrupt people.' But there's a conflict. Because our regional linguistic habitat has also provided us with the set of famous and well-loved broad vowels and diphthongs. 

And I believe it's precisely this tension between restraint and freedom, singing and stuttering, between being eloquent or tongue-tied, that this poem explores so well. And not just in its thematic preoccupation but in its language as an achieved and condensed expression. Because language, in this poem, is allowed to become mimetic self-knowledge; not merely a way of knowing the world but a more vital intimation of it. 

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'Hex' is certainly a shapely poem, its four tercet stanzas spilling out onto the page in a pleasingly organic way. The last line insistently separating itself off, and several others stretching out like branches; casually patterned.

How the poem then gathers itself from the first monosyllabic line and riffs off into the rough schwas of 'after'/'disaster' ending l.2 and l.3 into the contrastive 'surreptitious,' it being Latinate and polysyllabic (posh, in other words). Enough stuff unpacked, the poem then loses no time (or words) before going for a tricky crane-shot, the simile of l.6 racing off ahead of us to l.9.

We're already doing pretty well. But then it gets better. We suspected we were going to get bored right about now, but instead something very special happens. Something we couldn't have seen coming and which, we might safely assume, the poem didn't either.

And look, it's visible; it has been preserved. The aural cue for the one big movement of thought in the poem, as l.11 pulls away from the body of it into metaphor, and renders the stretch of the imagination that has been reached for, visible.

As the poem riffs off the bravado consonants of 'fuck-knows', into 'link', 'hex', 'text' and finally onto the brilliant, the unretractable, 'Baryonyx.' And, despite its alliterative density the poem opens up again; the slow panning shot from the long vowel of 'who' moving over a little more unpacking before cutting to that awkward, insistent last line, and that word: /ʃraɪk/ ‘Shrike,’ the dark hush of its initial /ʃr/ into the long fluid vowel of /aɪ/ cut brutally down the middle by the almost ejective final stop consonant, /k/, which makes for a very satisfying finish. 

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Ben Wilkinson will be publishing his second pamphlet For Real with smith|doorstop next month, after being an overall winner of The Poetry Business's 2013-14 Book & Pamphlet Competition, with the launch on the 31st of May at the Wordsworth Trust's Jerwood Centre.

If the poems in that volume demonstrate a matured fine-tuning, as it's safe to assume they will (The Sparks is six years old, after all, published when the author was 24), of the deft circuit making and conservation of language found in 'Hex' then that's a huge reason to be very excited about the development of this poetic talent.

Make sure you check out Ben's blog for a generous helping of reviews and poems, as well as his author's profile on The Guardian for more articles. You might also want to keep your eyes and ears peeled for events like Spire Writes, where you might be in or a chance of hearing 'Hex' live.

'Hex' also featured way back in the day on the blog 'Surroundings.'