[Read] An Askew Poetic Manifesto

But enough preface. What are the pillars of this manifesto, makeshift as they may be? First, the poems are fatigued and they can't pretend otherwise. They're fatigued because I am. Those of us who have connective tissue disorders, or another chronic condition, often find ourselves running out of steam, especially as we hit middle age. On top of that, I've recently had anaemia and have now received a diagnosis of a rare indolent lymphoma, both of which have multiplied my tiredness and very real sense of constraint.

Energetically, I'm living on rations. I pace myself, work in short bursts, write compressed fragments whose musicality and affect has a kind of momentum, so that when I return from rest, I can keep them going, stitch the fragments together without needing to be fully alert or immersed. Fatigue is inevitably also a kind of withdrawal, from the social and cultural churn. This can feel alienating and lonely, but it also allows for the possibility of dwelling within other, older notions of time and of what matters. 

Second, these poems are responsive, which is to say they rely on other precarious lives and they offer something back. Almost all of the poems in Askew have their origin and their shaping in pre-existing material – in essays and in other poems, in artworks, in collaborations and conversations, and in exacting poetic forms (both pre-existing and invented). In a sense, I can see this reliance as an affirmation of ecological reality, and a reminder of the essential value of mutual support. Arguably, all poems are responses, which speak and breathe only out of their particular place in a dense network of other lives. What sets these poems apart – at least in how I experienced them as they were being written – is that they work as prosthetics. They often explicitly grew out of deliberate formal constraint, limiting what I could say, and when. Yet these constraints drew out of me phrasing, lineation, movement and resonances I couldn't have found otherwise. 

These two pillars – fatigue and a sense of interconnectedness – are strongly connected to the third. Increasingly, I've become tired of the combative, reactive dynamic of contemporary discourse and politics. The way we prefer slogans as weapons or shields to the messy, vulnerable work of dialogue and reckoning with the other. The reduction of dense, knotted histories to binary positions, in thrall to how the algorithms make us feel. How hard it is to engage in slow reflection, to step back, listen to deeper, quieter cries. 

So, these poems aspire to embody an analogue way of being. Not that they pretend to escape the digital – after all, while the poems resist the algorithmic, this also means they're in intimate, tense conversation with it. And they're not nostalgic, not fundamentally. They're premised upon the innumerable shades of grey we live within. They aim to make more tangible, in some small way, the grey of the shadow, the underneath, the collateral damage of our certainties, our memes and reactions. They imply that we are so deeply connected that our violence and extractivism will always end up being a kind of self-harm. Or I hope they do. These are the pained dreams that encircled me as I wrote, that encircle me still. 

Looking back, I see Askew, and my own creative process these days, as grounded in a disabled poetics. Not that I was always thinking about disability as I wrote these poems, not as a discrete identity or issue anyway. It was an integral part of my creative process, in need as I was of the adaptive devices of poetic forms and the energising community of like-minded writers I've been fortunate enough to discover.   

Disability also made itself known as I sensed systemic instability, noticed ecological harms which we cannot separate ourselves from, and as I kept hearing versions of a eugenic way of thinking that implies that some lives are more worthy than others. This, then, is a manifesto erected on the unavoidable ground of our being, our relatedness on the earth, this intricate array of precarious lives. 

Maybe I'm not saying anything new or revolutionary here. But I'm tired, too, with the calls for revolution. Now more than ever, as the world feels distinctly off-kilter, and as my own energies feel ineluctably circumscribed, it seems to me that exhaustion and contingency are resources, painful yet profound and essential. I turn to the page as unassuming hiatus, a regrouping.