|
|
I first came across Amy
Blakemore, now writing under the gender neutralised, machine gun like, A.K.
Blakemore, in the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st
century. The youngest of the
featured poets (she was born in 1991), her poems felt strangely exciting, it
wasn’t that they were perfect, there was however a sense that she was a young
writer who knew exactly what she wanted to say and would waste no time in
saying it. Her subject matter sprung from her immediate surroundings, there
was a poem about the end of year school disco:
Girls come sheathed in
chiffon and satin
bee-sting tits, flimsy
lips,
waistline gold chains
that they finger nervously
[from ‘Achievement’]
that made me feel there are not enough poems about school discos, but then,
considering the average age of most poets, perhaps that’s for the best.
Blakemore took up poetry after being force fed exam board favourite Carol Ann
Duffy at A level, who she found ‘rubbish’, her teacher challenged her to do
better and she accepted. Dissatisfied by stuffy modern poets, ‘who deny ever
having seen Friends’, her main goal in writing was ‘not to be boring’. Her
debut collection Humbert Summer
more than meets that goal, it is the very opposite of boring, it is
thrilling, punchy and occasionally frightening. Humbert Summer is written in a style that screams hello, kicks you in the shin and steals
your biscuits (in a charming way), it’s manifestly not a collection that will
sit quietly on a shelf and gather dust, from the bright pink cover to titles
like ‘you can put it anywhere’, ‘kill all men club’, ‘licking future
doctors’. A.K Blakemore’s first instinct is to shock her reader, she makes no
apologies for herself or the way she lives, a position she makes clear in the
Lolita referencing title poem:
you’re old
you wont get it.
None of the poems from the six year old Voice Recognition selection are included in Humbert Summer, Blakemore has grown up and her style has matured
slightly, she doesn’t always bother with capital letters and the pace is much
quicker, the violence a little louder. She has moved on from sipping J2O at
the disco to the hedonistic fancy of tripping through moonlit forests:
this
is what you wanted all along
eros-stink, the darkness
of the forest by the motorway
to be as high as lilacs
on our college walls and with hell scrawled
on bare chest
[from
‘Charlie’]
She has a good ear for the sensual, the world she describes is a blurry whirl
of sin crashing against the mundane surfaces of modern life. There is a sense
of dislocation in her relationship with popular culture, it is unavoidably
present but unavoidably disappointing, it is a switch that can’t be switched
off. She is not unromantic, however the aggressiveness with which she pursues
pleasure can sometimes feel a little overly narcissistic.
Blakemore’s poetry sits neatly among the new generation of so called
post-internet poets, a group of emerging young writers that have refreshed
the poetry scene with new journals, presses and nights, post internet poetry
almost has the buzz of being a ‘movement’. The poet Blakemore most closely
resembles from that group is Sam Riviere, whose weary eyed, paranoid texts
are often the perfect encapsulation the culture they decry. Consider the two
poets side by side:
Are you brave enough for
our very final finale?
I have a cat, I have a
band or two.
We’ve got cocktails for
grown-ups.
[from ‘spooky
sunsets’]
And:
maybe five gin &
tonics
a spliff in the garden
then the train back to
Deptford –
[from ‘young adult’]
Their shared disaffected gaze makes it hard to separate one from the other
(for the record the former is Riviere and the latter is Blakemore) both poets
despair and delight in modernity, both meet Rimbaud’s command to be
‘absolutely modern’.
Blakemore has also picked up tricks from Emily Berry, who awarded her the
2014 Melita Hume prize. Like Berry, Blakemore has a penchant for medical men,
however whereas in Berry’s poem ‘The Incredible History of Patient M’ it is
the doctor who ‘bites and leaves a mark’, in Blakemore’s poem ‘licking future
doctors’ she draws first blood: ‘you are an animal/ you’re instinct was to
eat him’. These vampire like tendencies also leave teeth marks in ‘indie’:
I cannot think of
a new form of closeness
that does not involve
the mutual ingestion of
blood
When she’s not devouring human flesh Blakemore is often having her own flesh
devoured, ‘naked and shaking -/down in the bright and blood-red leaves’. The
twisted, ever-shifting relationship of predator and prey adds to the fervour.
Sex is an important subject for Blakemore, she sings the body electric, unafraid
to write about the erotic in an unguarded way, unafraid to leave herself
exposed. Her poetry seems to be informed by the feminist ideas of the
emancipation of the body, she has the power over her own pleasure, yet she is
willing to give up that power if it’s worth it.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of Humbert Summers is the beautiful shape the language sometimes
takes, descriptions and metaphors are often very sweetly formed. One of the
earliest poems in the collection ‘you envied the stars their height’ opens:
the day folded:
like a cabbage white
closing its wings
on a windowsill
It is in moments like this that Blakemore is at her best. The tendency to
fight for attention is not necessary when attention has already been won by
the skill of the writing.
Blakemore was never going to be a boring poet, her savage flippancy
and razor sharp intelligence propel her miles from the mundane. Now that
she’s proved her school teacher wrong, the challenge for her is to get better
and better. I’d like to see her take greater risks with language instead of
content. I’d like to see her strip her poetry down to its bones and jar the
senses. Whatever she does next, it will be a joy to watch her bloom.
©
Charlie Baylis 2015
|