British Poetry: On the Duty to Remain Heartbroken

When Renate Rasp temporarily emigrated to Cornwall at the end of the 1970s, it was also a reaction to the lack of emancipation in the wake of 1968. According to Rasp, a feminist had to be a witch; In the second collection of poems “Young Germany” by the poet who died in Munich in 2015, there is an epigram: “Why did they burn witches? / They were the first intelligent women (…) They knew more about loyalty / than the wife who dares not look sideways (…) With the wisdom / of thousands of years, they lived / ageless among the elderly”.

Contemporary poems from the land of the Brothers Grimm can hardly do without borrowing from fairy tales, but the apology of the witch figure is apparently passé; It’s different for Fran Lock (born 1982), activist and poet from Kent who has been nominated for various prestigious awards: “the human suit in the name / of hospitality, dismantled. Run! / and look at the many glowing / thighs on the pyre. Want / to rock them to sleep on a stretcher. / want a nightcap of tar”.

Both Lock and Rasp see witches as martyrs of female self-assertion; Only that Lock can completely do without the heroine quality and consequently expands: “the bodies of queers, gypsies, cripples, black, fat, poor, women are inevitably politicized before we even open our mouths”.

The original, and consequently the scrupulous translation, lacks a little of a colloquial moment, which the poet Sean Bonney, who died in Berlin in 2019, demanded of poetry at the end of the 2000s in his “Rimbaudbrief” (“Letter on Poetics”); and which he embodied with an impressive stage presence, but also online.

Marxists and the bourgeoisie

In the elegy “Consolations” dedicated to Bonney, Lock reminds us of the Marxist that Bonney saw himself as, appropriately unsentimental: “South London is a dark place for amphetamines.”ffne / not the door! Wouldn’t you say the nightmare has a right/to be scorned?” – Bonney’s preferred fighting word “bourgeoisie” means “human suit” for Lock; Where Bonney castigated “bourgeois anti-communication,” Fran Lock, academic moderate, speaks of “the language of consumption.”

When it comes to the effective use of forceful genitality, Bonney and Lock’s poems do little. Perhaps it is unfair to see this as little more than a radical anti-bourgeois conservatism.

A striking difference follows from the offensive way in which Lock incorporates supposedly marginal cultural phenomena that are rarely discussed in poetry, such as “wounds” or “weathering,” into her poetics: “If I say that I want my readers to take on not only my ugliness, but also my deformities, will you then love me enough to understand that this is not a metaphor?”

“Queer is / both orientation / and community.”

Due to the constant change of essayistic and poetic texts, monotony never sets in, but there are plenty of rousing lines like these: “Queer is / both. orientation / and community. / the dress is both, / gospel of the failure / of an angel, and dirt / in a cut”. The translation collaboration of Matthias Kniep, program manager at Berlin House for Poetryand Léonce Lupette, Franco-German poet and Argentinian by choice, manages to re-stage the gesture of the manifesto in German.

Then it can also be “lap” for “crotch”. It remains to be seen whether this is a smoothing out or just more unpornographic. In the case of “britpop’s blairite aubade” it is probably a combative statement against the everyday machismo of the Oasis album “What’s the Story (Morning Glory)”, it would be better served as a “morning serenade of Blairite Britpopper” than the solution chosen in the book.

Perhaps a collective of translators here and there would have come a little closer to the bite of the original. Some flesh wounds are already purulent in the original. Denouncing the exclusion of queer lifestyles through classist philistinism will always find the approval of progressive forces. Where the worker-poetic falls into stupid hatred of children and snark against government policy (“peak liberal shit”), things become pale.

Cooperating with a state-supporting institution in the German literary world under the fluttering flags of hostility to the system (“this country is the enemy”) is not necessarily “radical” (blurb).

Advanced poetry at Roughbooks

Undoubtedly, the right publisher was chosen for this rugged book: Roughbooks. For 15 years, Urs Engeler’s series has featured advanced poetry by, for example, Rosemarie Waldrop, Every Erb and Mara Genschel.

Fran Lock fits into this illustrious group quite well: “The idea must be to go against the grain, to become indigestible to the literary mainstream. It is our duty to remain heartbroken, unredeemed, angry, untamed”; The aim of the poetological efforts is, sympathetically, “a kind of gaudy trash modernism” and “a poetry that sends the curse of our conservative English canon back to the sender trebled.”

With stupendous findings (“hedge-born”, “human suit”), Fran Lock’s hybrid of essay and poetry opens a workshop full of unlyrical poetry and passionate criticism.