Poem of the week: When you Wake you’ll Believe you are a Theatre Critic by Aaron Kent

When you Wake you’ll Believe you are a Theatre Critic

(Kent, The One and Only Tony Lonely, 2017)

(I)

Concentricity is measured in vaudeville
performers weighing down on an imitation
of intimacy. It isn’t, but stick a line
like that in a poem and you’ve subverted
any expectation the reader had.

(II)

A transmission is what happens
when status is blind to
somebody else’s energy,
and here I am held hostage
to every phantasmagorical museum
I’ve constructed on a wave of insomnia.

(III)

I don’t know all the science, sure,
but would I like to be a scientist?
No, though I’d do anything for eight
or so millimetres of mercury.

(IV)

If I could eat my weight in money
I’d waste a perfectly valuable
financial investment but at least
I’d get the taste of how much
I loathe myself: humid August drug-
sticky, sweet like liquorice I imagine.

The title of Aaron Kent’s second collection, The Working Classic, suggests wordplay as well as politics. The adjectival form of class (“class-ic”) could mean the writing to be an exploration of working-class-ness. But there’s also “classic” in the sense of a significant work-of-art. A “working classic” may be a work-in-progress, or a classic that talks outside the grand canonical box. The term “working-class poetry” implies obedience to stereotypes of class thinking, but Kent is subtler and broader than this. In an interview with Rupert Loydell, he explains the politics underlying his writing, teaching and publishing and his resistance to poetry’s “gentrification”. One form of “gentrification” which Kent’s work implicitly questions seems to be the unhealthy new alliance of those old friends, “truth” and “beauty”, where truth shops for the easily bought beauty that is only expensive furnishing, or middle-class “lifestyle”.

One of Kent’s subversive strategies is to invent a poetry collection, and advertise its title and his authorship in a poem’s epigraph. There are poems originating from, among other “titles”, Nature Poetry as a Prize Plea (2020), Port Talbot Parkway Train Station Toilets (2022) and Circadian Rhythm Fashion Week (Unpublished). The apocryphal collection where this week’s poem originates, The One and Only Tony Lonely, sounded to me like an MC announcing the appearance of some 1950s crooner of male self-pity. But Tony Lonely didn’t seem to have an online presence. Instead, I discovered Tony’s Chocolonely and slave-free chocolate, a pleasing discovery, but a research by-product. However, the idea of a theatre critic called Tony Lonely is appealing. The loneliness of the critic is not always based on intellectual arrogance. It might originate from unbiased integrity. As it turns out, Kent has himself done time on the dark side of the footlights. “I actually was a theatre critic in Cornwall for a bit,” he writes, “until I lost work because I refused to give everything five stars.”

The first verse plunges into what might be profundity. I imagine a tree of acrobatic vaudeville artists with a single performer supporting them all, a particularly painful rendition of “concentricity” and “intimacy”. Then the denial weighs in, reminding me of the limitations of that stock piece of advice offered to poets, “subvert the reader’s expectations”. The note-to-self implodes: “stick a line / like that in a poem and you’ve subverted / any expectation the reader had.”

After defining “concentricity” and mocking the whole idea of definition, the term “transmission” is given a more introspective workout. I thought, again, the last three lines of the stanza broadened the view. This time, the process is gentler and more wounded. The mental effects of insomnia, not only at the time but often the day after, are brilliantly imagined as a “phantasmagorical museum”, evoking the brain’s insistence on digesting remembered events and conversations, and submitting the subject to a swirl of dream-matter while awake.

The non sequiturs seemed to have an edgier ring in the third stanza. The desire for “eight or so / millimetres of mercury” might indicate thoughts of self-harm, though mercury and its compounds have various medical applications, from use in blood pressure testing to skin-whitening.

Kent has spoken of his admiration for the work of Jeremy Prynne, and the pleasure to be had from reading poetry without necessarily understanding it. In the company of the multivalent poem, intelligible on so many levels it nears the unintelligible, the pleasure comes from various other sources: sound, rhythm, syntax, symmetry and, above all, tone. In the current poem, complexity is offset by a tone that’s genial and self-quizzical. When logic is challenged, the reader may feel pleasantly teased, or in on the joke. But the non sequiturs can have considerable metaphorical thrust. The contention in stanza four that by eating his weight in money, the speaker would “get the taste of how much / I loathe myself” suggests that a philosophical challenge to the perception of money as impersonal and neutral has been made literal.

Kent amplifies this with a shift to the confessional, another form of tonal appeal, adding the virtues of specificity and brevity. Described as “humid August drug- / sticky, sweet like liquorice”, the taste of the speaker’s self-loathing is a shareable mix of sensations. And, if you’ve read a prose poem that comes earlier in the collection, the association is intensified: “The bridge hangs from the laburnum, their drops a sweet, deadly liquorice,” Kent writes in This house is a box in a city of boxes.

So death, in the form of those little black seeds and their dangerous fascination, re-enters phantasmagoria. The shrub laburnum contains an alkaloid toxin, cytisine, sometimes fatal, if the laburnum seeds are eaten. Liquorice, named for its “sweet root” is more benign, but cloying, heavy as August. In four “acts”, this poem becomes a strangely theatrical experience, visualising a dream state that’s experienced during some kind of inertia. The speaker might feel subjected to “somebody else’s energy”, only to discover it is his own. The divided “somebody” emerges from pranks, stickiness, death wish and doubt, to become a candid critic of the self-as-theatre.