Keston Sutherland. [Bar Zero].

Includes the two long, thick and joyously distraught odes published previously in New Tonal Language (London: Reality Street, 1999), and also Zeroes Galore, a poem contributory to the more comprehensive future that shone through the work of Douglas Oliver. And to the needed havoc of prosody before that.

1-903488-09-5. 2000. 30 pp.
THIS TITLE IS NOW OUT OF PRINT.

Keston Sutherland teaches English literature and critical theory at the University of Sussex. He is editor of Quid and the Quid CD series and is currently editing the complete critical prose of J.H. Prynne. He has published numerous essays on poetics, politics and philosophy. Keston's poetry has been translated into French, German, English and Chinese, appearing in anthologies, journals and newspapers across the high art marginalese diaspora. He has given readings all over the world and is thus thoroughly metropolitan. He represented Great Britain in November 2005 at the French Biennale des Poetes at Val de Marne.

Refuted Eros

Glances intensely upon you riot is not
that something you dream for
often and it makes the type
           of you drop, no inflicted echo
           am I runny
and slurred talk that way vitiated so
suddenly to grab faces, to clutch at an eye,
here says you defect luminously, the starfall
           acid to candour. Am I
           dreaming until
now of you put your hand now out
of touch here on me, and grip you breakaway
flame infatuous my head,
           my heart spunks zeroes
           tip into nowhere.

When can that riot go drab,
can the inside spin dry, who were that
faces deceit can you run through
           calmed a sky at 6 p.m. and soft orange,
           often a sun setting,
plaster upon you. Breath breaks from your lips away.
That anarchy of the loose eye
ever should end, yet how plainly can it end,
           neither cuts you up
           loosens your face bunches
of you drop, the shadow that you know.
Love is the near echo
recedes from nowhere, when you said that was a schismatic
           brilliancy outflung,
           were you a thrill of glances?

The wish is bar-zero passionate, it can remain
of itself dark, is the switch of
flinches into unreadiness, e actly the wish is here
           to be without
           disdain, utterly compliant.
So how do we make compliance a good thrill,
say that's a gray query, best shadowed by
someday by later and by
           riot of your eyelid
           breaks a view in many slats out,
what do they change. Can you, scraping
ease into my ass repair that flinches
turns away. Into dissent and magisterial airway,
           into a rented epos free
           of glances intensely, futile.

"Somebody will always be opposed, -- how could Keston for instance set out in the course he has taken without expecting his poetry to be thoroughly loathed by unknown persons who feel delegated and reduced by it -- it positively courts such a reaction." --Peter Riley

"Keston Sutherland puts the gr in anger: and he's no ass without it."--Tom Raworth

"Keston Sutherland's poetry is malcontent, intelligent and beautiful, and I need more of it."--John Wilkinson

"Proud through savage daylight, grate, cross-hatch in suspicious pastel disallowed aches of CONSCIOUS METAL, belonging coils of alien swarf, belonging how it ever tightens to scientific talent on gracious curves. Deleted village whereof."--THF Drenching

'But seriously folks, if we are no longer to quite "suffer the privilege of being fully distracted," we are also failing more than ever to find ways to make the first person plural signify as an oppositional element. No plasticene plastique dabbler lacking all sense of consequnce, of the every day after, Keston Sutherland’s rage is sublimated into direct representations of the endlessly attempted substitutions of the personal and its desires for—everything. Sutherland doesn’t attempt to give us the real materials of the global economy, whatever the evidence might seem to suggest, but rather the infinite distortions which are our only access to it, and the errant, monstrously Gehry-like bits in which we might catch unanticipatable reflections: for Lear’s five 'never's, Mincemeat See-Saw's six 'rape's.' Mike Scharf, quoted in Allodox blog, 10 September 2003

'This, then, is ethically driving and driven work; but also work at great play.' --Pete Smith, The Gig

'The lines move rapidly, sonic patterns sharply burst, and the pages burn in your hands as you read them.'--Carol Mirakove, washington review

'rococo cutbacks and escape manoeuvres...' -Tim Morris in Jacket 8

'These are lines to snort up a rolled-up fiver...' -Tony Lopez in Stand n.s. 1.4 (Spring 2000).

also by Keston Sutherland:
The Rictus Flag
Antifreeze
Mincemeat Seesaw
Girls at Trusion
Hate's Clitoris and Other Poems
At the Motel Partial Opportunity
So Sung Visitor Soh
Have Wishly
other books published elsewhere

Reviews of Keston's work

Jérôme Game, 'Energize! --The K Function, or an Anti-Freezing Speed' in Jacket 20, December 2002

Dylan Harris, on the Poetry Review reading at Whitechapel Art Gallery, 30 October 2003.

Andrew Duncan, Review of [Bar Zero] in Terrible Work

Articles

'A Short Critique of Pacifism' in Circulars, 23 February 2003

'Vagueness, Poetry' [a discussion of vagueness in poetic language] Quid 7c, 2001; reprinted in Works on Paper ed. Helen Slater 2002, and in the Prague Literary Review, 2003.

'Four Theses on Speed', Quid 12 

'For Carol Mirakove' Quid 11, 2002.

with Chris Goode, 'Six Bits of an Exchange', Quid 10iii

'Against Imperialism: A Prolegomena', Quid 9: Against Imperialism

'Nervous Breakdowns in Chris Emery's The Cutting Room' Quid 5, 2000.

'On the Accomplishment of Knowing One's Place' in The Poetry of Peter Riley, ed. Nate Dorward, The GIg 4/5 (Nov. 1999/Mar. 2000).

'Prosody and Reconciliation' The Gig, 2004.

'What's The Ugliest Part of Your Market-Researched Anaclitic Affect Repertoire?' [On Frank Zappa, the potential for a detournement of Freudian theory, and irrecuperable art], Militant Esthetix

(ed.), The Poetry of John Wilkinson [a collection of essays; forthcoming, Salt (Cambridge) 2004]