‘None of the Beaten End Where They Begin’: A Personal Attunement to Contemporary Poetry
By Tom Branfoot
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me,
I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
— Emily Dickinson
1.
Mention working-class, Northern poet to anyone, and they’ll talk about John Cooper Clarke. Someone I should love but can’t tolerate, which speaks volumes about my insecurities, and the phenomenon of disliking someone who resembles yourself. Post-punk, poetry and tailoring are among my favourite things. I began to write poetry when I failed as a musician and ran out of musical capacity. Still living at home, working a full-time job that I despised, in a semi-rural, post-industrial area of West Yorkshire which I mistakenly thought I’d outgrown. Having not applied to university at the conventional time, I was at a loss. My friends scattered across the UK, and I without a car. This depressive energy found release in throwing myself half-naked across a dark stage every few weeks, shouting about a breakup. I was emotionally susceptible and sought some relief through the body and through language. Naturally, I found inspiration in the literary frontmen and women of bands: Nick Cave, Jim Morrison and Patti Smith. I read what they read and soon became entangled with lyric poetry in all its multitudinous forms.
2.
Beating the bounds was an Anglo-Saxon tradition of learning the parish boundaries and passing the knowledge on generationally, in a time when maps were rare. The process involved the priest taking young boys to the limits of the parish and beating them with a green bough, or violently pushing them against a boundary stone, for them to develop an emotional memory of the parish boundary. A ceremony that demands pain, performed while the priest recites psalms.
3.
As a working-class boy at an underfunded high school in Huddersfield, the only access I had to poetry was studying the war poets. Their language didn’t affect me; I had no emotional response whatsoever to their poems. I now understand this unresponsiveness as part of my fixation with literature of the postwar period, my obsession with the aftermath. Neither of my divorced parents went to university, and our bookshelves were only stocked with Maeve Binchy. I never went without, but there was a gap. It was in 2016 that poetry beat my bounds, the limits of my experience. Much like how songs sear themselves onto life events, I began to understand how poetry physically affects the body; how poems imprint themselves through emotional memory. My access to poetry was affective and emotional, as opposed to institutional or traditional.
4.
The title of this article comes from ‘Duplex: Cento’ by Jericho Brown, the last poem to genuinely affect me. Partly, I think, because I saw Brown read this poem - over Zoom - watched the words leave his body, his pixellated lips trembling. Here is the poem, in full:
My last love drove a burgundy car,
Color of a rash, a symptom of sickness.
We were the symptoms, the road our sickness:
None of our fights ended where they began.
None of the beaten end where they begin.
Any man in love can cause a messy corpse,
But I didn’t want to leave a messy corpse
Obliterated in some lilied field,
Stench obliterating lilies of the field,
The murderer, young and unreasonable.
He was so young, so unreasonable,
Steadfast and awful, tall as my father.
Steadfast and awful, my tall father
Was my first love. He drove a burgundy car.
In his essay ‘Invention’, Brown comments on the rigidity of poetic form in parallel to the carceral society of modern America, questioning whether his use of traditional form was in fact ‘reifying the abhorrent and racist fact of prisons in our culture’. The duplex is a hybrid of the sonnet, ghazal and blues, the latter being a marker of the form’s cultural dissent. Brown’s book, The Tradition, contains four duplexes; this final one is a cento made up of all the previous ones. Consequently, this poem has a heightened emotional potency and encompasses a sweep of experience. ‘Duplex: Cento’ was the last poem to beat my bounds. However, it took me years to arrive at the wealth of contemporary poetry, at work with such lyrical potency because, as the line indicates, ‘[n]one of the beaten end where they begin’.
5.
Anna Akhmatova wrote ‘White Night’ (trans. Rupert Moreton) in 1911 at Tsarskoye Selo, where she grew up, born to an upper-class family. I first came across this poem in my first year as an undergraduate student at Manchester Metropolitan University. At this time in my life, I began reading work from European writers in translation, such as Hermann Hesse, Vladimir Nabokov and Françoise Sagan — the range of voice and experience thrilled me. So, when an Instagram follower put me onto the Soviet poets, it came at an ideal time. Akhmatova’s books were banned for 15 years in Stalinist Russia for representing bourgeois culture. She was prevented from publishing and regarded as dangerous. Reading about her persecution affected my understanding of poetry. I had the idea of poetry being dangerous, beaten into me with a damp bough from the green gardens of Tsarskoye Selo. ‘White Night’, the terse and lovelorn poem, reads as follows:
I haven't locked the door,
Nor lit the candles,
You don't know, don't care,
That tired I haven't the strength
To decide to go to bed.
Seeing the fields fade in
The sunset murk of pine-needles,
And to know all is lost,
That life is a cursed hell:
I've got drunk
On your voice in the doorway.
I was sure you'd come back.
Through short lyrics like Akhmatova’s, I became attuned to the power and potential of poetry. Through poems that pierced the mundane with electricity, that acted as a lightning rod to the emotional energy of human experience, there began my fascination with the empathic nature of poetry in translation. Whilst aware that the elegiac, closing lines are unique to her experience — in times of loss when language fails, I found myself muttering the lines, ‘I’ve got drunk / On your voice in the doorway. / I was sure you’d come back’. Carried within these three slight stanzas is the mature resignation of someone well accustomed to grief. I carry this poem with me as an emotional framework on which to map my experience of loss.
6.
Growing up in the 2000s, the geopolitical landscape I have lived in has been one of ongoing crises. Brexit and Tory sleaze, BLM, post-truth, the housing crisis, Me Too, water scarcity, the slow cancellation of the future and the environmental crisis are among issues that haunt contemporary life. These are issues affecting most young folk, who will live to suffer the consequences. With an emphasis on suffering, even art has taken a beating. There is a consensus now that nature poetry cannot exist in the Anthropocene, it is, instead, ecopoetry. The pastoral idyll has been razed, built upon, or privatised — human intervention with nature is inescapable. As such, contemplation of nature within poetry involves considering human involvement in the environment. Even the parish bounds are insignificant, in a GPS world — those willow-whipped boys sustained needless trauma.
7.
The Scottish poet John Burnside writes tactfully about environmentalism, the creaturely and masculinity. In my own work, I consider the ties between masculinity and environmentalism, which both function around responsibility — familial and ecological. A lack of education about equality, fairness and environmental issues results in destructive behavioural patterns. ‘Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012’ by Burnside illuminates his ecopoetics. I will not post the poem in full, only highlight sections:
…it gets late early out here; though late, out here,
has a different meaning:
stars in the road
and the absence of something more
than birchwoods or song,
pallet fires, tyre-tracks,
grubbed fields clouded with grease
and palm oil, hints
of molasses and lanolin, tarpaper,
iron filings.
Ecopoetry works best when the musicality overrides its didacticism, as Inger Christensen’s alphabet demonstrates. This litany of residue and substances is a song of violence, it is public knowledge that deforestation and special endangering are part of palm oil production. He engages the reader as complicit:
We’ve been going at this for years:
a steady delete
of anything that tells us what we are,
a long
distaste for the blood warmth and bloom
of the creaturely: local
fauna and words for colour, all the shapes
of ritual and lust
surrendered where they fell, beneath a fog
of smut and grime and counting-house
as church, the old gods
buried undead beneath the rural sprawl
that bears their names
In the above passage, Burnside draws attention to the erosion of organically-occurring language, synonymous with the ‘steady delete’ of ecological destruction — in the name of progress. He recalls the loss of ritual, replacing the gap with poetry, returning to the key point threaded throughout this article, about poetry beating the bounds of human experience. Ecopoetry conserves the natural world within language, turning it into a linguistic ark. Yet all poetry preserves emotion within its form; poems contain energy which doesn’t erode. Whether you arrive at it institutionally or become attuned to it, contemporary poetry is a repository of identities, voices and experiences which beat the bounds of human experience and function as a lucid soundtrack to current and emerging global crises.
Tom Branfoot is a poet and writer from West Yorkshire, currently studying the English: Issues in Modern Culture MA at UCL. His poems have been published in Brag, The Babel Tower Notice Board, Murmur, and other publications. His debut pamphlet I’ll Splinter (2021) is published by Pariah Press.