This weekend I’m going to the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival to take part in a panel discussion with Caroline Bergvall and Ian Patterson, titled The Future of the Book. Seems like a good occasion to publish a substantially reworked version of the introductory essay I use on my website. ‘Introductory’ as in ‘Here’s an introduction to me, Jon Stone’.
Why not a simple author bio? I have that too, but since I increasingly view my editing and publishing work as deeply integrated with my own writing, and since I find a need to repeatedly explain to myself what exactly I’m doing and why (the borrowed accounts of others just don’t cut it), a short essay, from the heart, is the way to go. A fair stab at summarising the underlying logic to two decades of feeling alternately hopeful, energised, enthusiastic, furious, anxious, vulnerable, divided, determined and zealous about poetry and its possibilities.
So here it is. You can also read it with hover-over asides and links to existing work here or just continue onward for the plain-text version.
The Amalgamist’s Workshop
I call my website ‘Various Toys’. I named the accompanying blog ‘Share Your Toys’. I titled a (slightly) ranty little pamphlet Poems Are Toys (and Toys Are Good For You). Why toys? What’s that got to do with amalgamism? What is amalgamism? Who am I?
Let’s start with my name. ‘Jon Stone’ sounds, to me, extremely ordinary. It’s got a dull internal echo, like something dropped into a well, and I’m at least the fifth or sixth writer to have it, not counting the volcanologist or the Independent journalist. I should go by something else, if I want to, as they say, make a name for myself. Yet the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’d prefer not to. Names are useful for identifying who or what you’re talking about, but when it comes to the arts, they already have a tendency to take up too much space. “Who are your influences?” “Who are the best writers?” “Who are you reading at the moment?” “Who will be remembered, a hundred years from now?”
Who cares? What I like best about writing – and reading, for the matter – is being able to lose myself in a text, like a bug burrowing into fruit. When I write, I become self-contradictory, diffuse – not whole. Not amplified. So far, most of the books I’ve written for, or been involved in bringing to publication, have been multi-author anthologies. Sometimes I’m a contributor, sometimes a co-editor. The latest of these don’t even have my name on the front or the spine or in the contents.
In my few solo titles, meanwhile, there’s copious re-use of other writers’ compositions – in collage, mistranslation and so on. In currently-planned future solo titles, there’s even more of this stuff.
I also think readers should see themselves as actively, imaginatively involved in what they read – even partly responsible for what they get out of it. That being the case, some of those aforementioned anthologies include blank pages, with accompanying suggestions as to how they might be filled. Others are put forward as hybrids of poetry and puzzle book, or poetry and game-book. My academic research began with ‘poetry games’ and ‘video game poetry’, and led to my coming up with a fresh term for the kind of poem which incorporates the reader into its circuitry, implicating them in action and outcome.
The corollary of this is that as a writer, it seems I’m avoiding responsibility for the things I make. Unwilling to ‘say’ anything. Reluctant to produce anything nice and straightforward. I try sometimes; I can manage the odd ‘normal’ poem, but the books always ends up as some kind of mutant text. I always have to go a little bit Dr. Moreau.
I think I know why. It’s the same reason I’ve expanded, less than wisely, into the odd polemic, the odd chunk of argumentative criticism, the odd piece like this. Same reason, too, that I’ve never gone in for the kind of full-throated cheerleading that befits a writer on the fringes looking to make friends.
And it’s to do with why I write poetry. I didn’t always. Looking through my folders of juvenilia, it’s clear I originally meant to publish stories and games. Prose, comic strips, game design concepts — loads of it, hashed out in notebooks and on primitive word processors. Sci-fi, fantasy, martial arts stuff. Same as what I read, watched and played.
I started reading poetry from the age of 18, when I at last came to appreciate that a poem was part work of literature, part physical object. A book of poems, I told myself, is like a drawer-full of machine-parts, or a sticker album, or a jigsaw box – you can pick through it. Different pieces do different things when you put them together in different ways.
When I began writing poems, I discovered a whole other appeal. For someone who thought of themselves as shy, inexpressive and alienated, poetry seemed to offer an opportunity for low-key exhibitionism. I could use it to expose the turmoil of the inner life, show off my bruises on the page. And I could play-act – test new versions of myself, the better to formulate a public persona that was commanding, alluring, endlessly sympathetic.
After all, isn’t this what so much successful art amounts to: the societal equivalent of a giant mecha suit, amping up its author’s presence and power to superhuman levels, simultaneously unleashing and cocooning them? Especially so in the case of poetry, where the public knows the personality (flamboyant Byron! Sensual Keats! Intense Plath!) better than the work.
This romance was short-lived. Soon, I’d surrounded myself with others who had the same sort of thing in mind — and many of them were very, very serious about it. Some were serious to the point of being, I felt, quite abrasively egotistical. But even when I was among those who weren’t, the formulation made little sense. We couldn’t all be superhuman misfits, could we? Not every poetry book can be a trailblazing miracle, erupting onto a stagnant landscape, can it?
Yet this is what the poetry publicity machine proclaimed to its tiny-but-enthusiastic audience, over and over. Where there were claims to greater scrupulousness — more discerning taste — it all too often amounted to factionalism and favouritism. Poets and poetry critics were terrible, it seemed, at articulating a coherent, consistent critical standard, individually or collectively. If you hoped to be thought of as a rising star, your best bet was a deepening network of influential friends, and/or an adherence to a style and philosophy your target audience found reassuringly familiar.
That’s not to say I disliked other poets or their work. Far from it. It seemed to me this whole arrangement ill-served them, and that there must be a better way to frame the value of poetry — the poetry that people are writing now, today, in copious quantities — than making endless competing claims for some breath-taking feat of insight, sensitivity or wit. A way of framing it that makes a virtue of the numbers of poets actively writing, and the dizzying variety of modes and aesthetics.
What it comes down to, I decided, is that poetry is a combinatorial art. A poem puts different and similar things alongside one another, in highly concentrated fashion, through spatial arrangement, metaphor, intertextual referencing. The effect is cumulative, connective, cross-pollinating. Mud is trodden from one field to another. This thing and that thing, hooked up, gathered into the same apron.
It’s anti-hierarchical. It’s lubricating. It’s freeing. So often in a poem, the everyday struggle is equated with the heroic, the vulgar married to the refined, the consequential paired with the peripheral. And we are in dire need of such conceptual fluidity, because the world is, in so many ways, dangerously arthritic. If we value truth – if we mean to uncover more of it, to seek as-yet-unthought-of solutions to pressing dilemmas – we need to continually experiment with glimpses of wildly different orders.
Unfortunately, this feature of poetry does not sit comfortably alongside some of the more rigid precepts governing the artform, principle among which is the role of sensibility – the expectation that a poem, however mysterious, is primarily an emotional or perceptive response to the author’s first-hand experiences. This, it seems to me, is one of the instruments by which poetry is put under the thumb of conservative gatekeepers. If the poet can only testify to their own experiences, then they can be judged and categorised according to those experiences. Hence there are topics of poems which are codified as inherently virtuous because they relate to civic duties (parenthood, filial piety, mourning) while others have cachet due to their association with wealth and leisure (nature walks, travel, gardening).
The elitist nature of such standards hsas been thoroughly criticised, of course. As a result, there have been well-meaning attempts to recognise other kinds of experiences – chiefly those associated with oppression – as worthy of a place in the hierarchy. But it’s the retention of sensibility as a lens that does most of the stifling.
Combinatorial agitation is a much more democratic prospect, riddled as it is with possibility, with openings. Not that it can’t also be subject to a constraining orderliness — where a poem’s nods and references become a way of establishing that the poet moves in respectable circles, for example, or where its uses of fragments of literary canon and mythology are meant and received as an act of deference, a salute to the general.
But where poetry escapes this tendency toward parochial self-regard and cosy traditionalism, it has tremendous capacity to synthesise and interrupt other linguistic frequencies. It can remix almost anything, and — in large enough quantities — act as a massive cultural laboratory.
To the extent poems amalgamate material in this way, are engaged in radical recombination, they should be regarded as sites of distributed autonomy, activity and enmeshment, composed of parts that both writer and reader test and turn over, collect and calibrate, modify and personalise. This means they should be played, and played with, very liberally — not regarded chiefly as a discrete performance or speech act by the poet, but as a node in an ongoing, turbulent, multilinear conversation.
Having come to this conclusion — or something like it (it’s been hard to find a way of expressing it succinctly) — I’ve found that most of the things I choose to make in some way embody it. They emphasise the combinatorial, collaborative potential of all writing by being, conspicuously, not entirely (or at all) my own, not entirely any one thing, and sometimes not entirely complete.
I eventually settled on ‘amalgamism’ as the term which best encapsulates this emphasis. If all poetry amalgamates to some extent, then to say that something is positively amalgamatic conveys that it is pushing this principle beyond the norm.
To characterise poems as ‘toys’, meanwhile, is to suggest (in what I hope is a friendly way) that the reader is also part of the amalgamatic process – that a poem is something to get involved with, not just observe or absorb. “Here is a toy. Do something with it. We learn through play.”
And there it is: the best explanation I can give for how and why I’ve reached this point. It doesn’t mean that I think of my writing as having little to do with me, or don’t recognise it as the result of my effort – I am, after all, exerting some kind of will by joining things together (words, stanzas, poems, pages, other people’s poems). But to consider myself now to be some kind of great artist in the making — to want to be recognised as any kind of figure, with the poetry acting as an extension of myself — would be to go against my reasons for making it. I want to be in my workshop, one part of a global megalab, busily reconfiguring what I know into what I might yet come to know, drawing in and on as many others as I can make room for. I want to disrupt the boundaries between myself and those others — what each of us sees and feels, so that they might be better aligned.
And, you know, maybe pick up some readers, and a bit of funding, along the way.
I went through many emotional seasons reading this. It’s permission not to build a solo brand. It’s really helping with the whole not-despairing thing.