Rusty Niall's Notepad

This is my little public scribble pad. Fragments, poems and stuff that might grow up to be posted elsewhere.

i cut the hedges outside acton town hall on the afternoon before joe strummer played a benefit for the fire brigade union that evening it was one of the final performances before his death just over a month later i've done plenty of things as an artist in my own right and yet i'm oddly proud of that afternoon's work how my labour was connected to an artistic event that was connected to the labour of others when art and labour connect in such a way the labour bestows more meaning onto the art and the art bestows more meaning onto the labour how the great lie of our age is to deemphasise the collective endeavour and the part we all play within it

Giving a new lecture on my Poetry and Performance module today. It's all about Joy. In previous years I've noticed some of my lectures skewing towards trauma and certain ways that poets react against oppressive structures. It's still a lecture about activism and intersectionality but one that looks at how instrumental joy can be in community identities. I'm once again finishing it on the day but I feel good about this one.

It’s 2045. I have lived most of my life and finally understand a shared humanity beyond all opinions and ideological standpoints. I chat to a stranger at a park bench. He voted for Brexit and had a paid membership to the Conservative Party. I shrug my shoulders thinking about all the bad places my money went to despite my good intentions. He then shows me a haiku that is actually a seventeen syllable epigram with no seasonal reference. I stab him.

I think about this a lot. I guess the first point is to try not to pee and moan too much about how people take the role of the introvert for granted. At the same time, there's always a point to cross over into the world for the introvert, we still feel the need to share, it's more that our natural habitat for creation is more solitary than collaborative. So we create things, make them available and hope that some of the more extroverted types might latch onto it and build some hype. There's also the way in which an introvert's work can speak to all of the other introverts. There's a lot that introverts notice that those who are more socially oriented don't. It's not that we don't like people, it's more that we have trouble navigating the networks that bring people together and the implicit rules that govern them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about platforms and how artists share their work online and offline. In the past, poets like myself relied on books (or the paper paywall) and performance (the person paywall)to share our work. When the internet intruded on this existence it served as a convenience to bolster the other two. No serious, respected poet was sharing all of their work online. Books and gigs weren’t just a means to an income, they still make the slimmest part of a poet’s revenue, but they were a signifier of prestige and status. You were often implicitly judged on where you were published and/or where you were booked to perform. Prizes also factored into this and still do.

Problems arose when people wanted to read your work but a lot of it was paywalled off in these more traditional media and if you shared work beyond a private social network then it tended to be older, B-tier stuff. Therefore the work that people tended to see first was the work you weren’t too keen to be known by. In the meantime your best work hid in slim volumes, in short runs of magazines or in the low-fidelity memories of those who saw you perform live.

Things carried on like this until some poets took the internet seriously and made it their sole place for engagement and sharing their work. The avant-garde of internet poets were experimental as early adopters tend to be but then other poets started sharing work on social media and found bigger audiences than the paper paywall could ever give them. Not only only this but, despite being able to read everything online, these audiences were happy to also support the poets through buying books, going to gigs or supporting the poet’s work through Ko-fi or Patreon.

As can be expected, their work wasn’t written for a smaller niche audience of poetry enthusiasts and therefore differed stylistically from the work that had been published by the prestige presses of the paper paywall. That was until some of those prestige presses got wind of the sales they were missing out on and courted the popular poets too.

This didn’t go down well in the niche world of the paper paywall and eminent male editors commissioned hit pieces from young female poets and journalists in order to avoid the flack they would inevitably catch if they wrote them themselves. The young, female hit piece writers would then catch all the flack from readerships who already associated any form of criticism as an attack, though many of the hit pieces were mean spirited in their approach. Still, I personally don’t like pile ons, especially when they’re pointed at ambitious young writers who see it as the only opportunity they have to get their foot in the door with a prestige press.

Much like the emergence of page/stage hybrid poets in the 90s-00s, prestige/online poetry hybrids started to emerge too. Their work had that playful, intimate register that was evident with some of the online poets while at the same time borrowing more rarified elements from the prestige world. This particular style is something that I have called the “neurotic style” in the sense that the poem gives the impression of being inside the head of the poet, with lines resembling the transience of how thoughts and sensations pop in and out of our minds. Much like Joyce’s stream of consciousness, the seeming spontaneity of the work is itself more crafted and intentional than the style might suggest.

As decades separate us further from the page/stage ethos that defined the end of the 20th Century it is not necessarily easy to see which way things will turn. The prestige scene has become more diverse as new generations break through and yet books sales seem to be the same as before, though the rising costs of running a publisher make most presses a risky and fiscally unrewarding venture.

The performance scene is still reeling from the effects of the covid pandemic with it being more difficult to run events safely within cramped, intimate venues. For all the issues that come with their openness, open mics were often hotbeds of innovation that the mentoring schemes of poetry organisations have not been able to replicate. The impersonal, precious earnestness of the traditional poetry reading found a perfect digital platform in the obligatory importance of the zoom meeting.

The online platforms that launched poets into the stratosphere in terms of popularity are not as reliable as they seemed, with algorithms exerting a stranglehold on a poem’s ability to go viral. Other sites shift and change from adversarial echo-chambers to full-on alt-right cesspits at the whims of their boards or owners. At the same time, much is being written about Gen Z reacting against their terminally online Millennial predecessors by embracing point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones, devices that are still digital but place some distance between the tech and the immediate creation of online content.

I have no idea how this will turn out. Short of wiping out humanity, you can’t kill poetry –⁠ the pleasure centres of language are embedded too deeply inside the human brain. But the ways in which we share our work and scramble to engage with audiences seems to be set on platforms that constantly spring up and collapse on a bedrock that itself sits on ever shifting tectonic plates. My own career stands as testament that I have no idea how to create something that becomes hugely popular online, and yet, now more than ever, I am convinced that the best way forward is to become more autonomous and exert more control over where we host our creations.

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A belated Happy New Year! This is the first in a series of posts where I think aloud about platforms and their relations to poetry and other art forms. A lot of the thoughts I’m having about this have been inspired by this excellent article by Cory Doctorow about the “enshittification” of the internet.

If you are reading this post on my substack then I will also be posting some poems and a Rusty Niall podcast soon, if you’re into that kind of thing. If you want to read some rougher, hot-off-the-press stuff then you might like to check out my write.as where I’m posting a lot of early drafts and fragments.

Ultimately, I’m once again making a new version of my website which will be the canonical home of all of my content which I will then syndicate to other platforms, be they mastodon, write.as, substack or the other places.

#poetry #UKPoetry #LivePoetry #PoetryScene #OnlinePoetry

I haven’t been in an argument with anyone online for a few years now (I think). One thing I always got annoyed with in those years of futile combat was the tendency of some to venture into armchair psychiatry. It takes a therapist many hours of one to one sessions to really get a handle on their patient’s underlying issues and yet an online rando will tell another online rando that they know their true feelings and purposes and can see who they really are. Imagine if people actually could build up an in-depth psychological profile of another human with the sole resource of a few tweets? How many venture capital vultures would spunk their portfolios on that action? Meanwhile, the YouTube algorithm seems to think that I’m currently vacillating between booking a holiday in Tel Aviv or Saudi Arabia. There really isn’t much of any value to anyone rattling around this skull of mine and yet I remain grateful that no human or synthetic mind has the ability or inclination to peer into it.

my shadow cast long across frosted grass — seven pigeons take flight

I’m wearing a black beany hat at home. The rest of the family don’t seem to feel the cold. I feel a bit like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, albeit a version of him that stuck around the hospital a bit longer and had a lot of second helpings in the canteen.

The bus driver beeps her horn for the striking nurses. Placards bob up and down and someone is punishing drums with their palms. The day is bright and bracing. Flashes of sun blast back from the hospital windows. At the Asian supermarket the Chinese husband with overburdened baskets invites me ahead of him with my ten sinigang sachets. It's difficult to write about kindness, how it weaves itself almost invisibly through our daily affairs.

I much prefer listening to independent podcasts made by passionate individuals over the well funded and staffed podcasts made by celebrities and organisations. The latter often take the forms of a guffawing panel who aren’t as amusing as they think they are or podcasts that are essentially radio broadcasts trespassing on different media. I often think about the kinds of conversations that are interesting to overhear on a train, the ones that make you lean in even though you know it’s not really the proper thing to do. Nobody does this when a group of loud young people want to broadcast their zaniness to the whole carriage.

I make a few exceptions for the bigger podcasts though, particularly in the case of Hideo Kojima’s Brain Structure, the Spotify podcast of the revered video game creator. It might be because Kojima is a great director of talent, able to steer a large team into realising his idiosyncratic creations and so his very well resourced and produced podcast still maintains a sense of vision and intimacy, even in how he handles the overdubbed translations of his Japanese speech on the English language version. You always get to hear Kojima’s voice in the background and the English overdub doesn’t start few a good few seconds after Kojima starts speaking so you get a real sense of the personality of the speaker. It’s a really good way of achieving a similar effect to visual subtitles in audio media.

Some episodes of Brain Structure centre around Kojima’s love of music, his episode long love/begging letter plea to collaborate with Nick Cave being a particular highlight. This week’s episode was dedicated to Ennio Morricone and it was one of my favourite listening experiences so far in this very young year. Sharing music on a podcast is a tricky thing depending on whatever Intellectual Property practice your chosen platform operates. For all of its faults, Spotify at least seems to give Kojima the opportunity to play entire songs for subscribers, while excerpts of the songs play to non subscribers.

There was something about the interplay about the usual aural set up of Kojima’s podcast and the intense, emotive consonance of Morricone’s music that worked so well. After all, the soundtracks are composed with the intention of striking up between moments of speech in the films so there was something particularly recursive pleasure in listening to Kojima speak int between the tracks.

Ultimately, the Morricone tracks piggybacked on the wistfulness I often feel after dropping the kids at school and returning to an empty nest as Mrs O’Sullivan had one of her occasional in-office days today. There is something about the heart-on-sleeve earnestness of Morricone’s compositions that finds no resistance in finding the simultaneously melancholic and joyful centre of my being. This was also helped by the bright frostiness of this morning in contrast to the damp dourness of yesterday that inspired yesterday’s haibun. It’s amazing how a little nerdy enthusiasm, big-hearted sounds and a bright but bracing day can turn a mood around.

#podcast #HideoKojima #EnnioMorricone #music #soundtracks