To read/ 23 February 2016
At the beginning of 2016, I met Jack Underwood in a café in central London, where he was giving a reading. We chatted before and after his performance. In person, he was easy to speak to, bright, funny and likeable. However, he said he preferred not to conduct a face-to-face interview, partly on principle, and partly due to some bad experiences. Instead, he would send answers to questions via email, in a few days’ time.
Lazy biographical reduction notwithstanding, the poet took a bachelor’s degree at Norwich School of Art and Design, yet he says he went to art school to write. “In those days undergraduate creative writing programs were not very common or well-established, so I decided to do a degree in ‘creative and cultural studies’ at Norwich, where your creative practice could be in either art or writing, or both.”
Underwood followed this with an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldmiths, University of London, where he now lectures. While on the Norwich course, he met fellow poet Sam Riviere, also now published by Faber, and read a lot of cultural theory.
“I loved it: semiotics, psychoanalysis, poststructualism, rhizomes, all that stuff,” he recalled. “It encouraged us to be very analytical. That’s what art school teaches so well, I think; you invest all this time and energy in stuff nobody in the outside world really gives a crap about, so you’re constantly forced to confront questions about meaning, value, intention in a way that’s often painful, personal, as much as intellectual.”
You can detect this in his debut collection, Happiness. Almost all of the 47 poems display a high degree thoughtfulness and craft. That is craft not in the sense of skillful observance and innovation of poetic forms, but a kind of mental agility, which means Jack’s lines never lag behind the reader’s anticipation or understanding. Take “Some Gods.” It begins as a fun, macabre list:
God with eagle’s head and five-pointed-star insignia
on palms of hands; God connected to seven IV drips
with fire coming out of mouth; God made of warts;
God with horse’s legs and head of ram reading names
from a scroll pointing to a hole in the ground;
The pantheon is wild enough to keep a reader’s attention going for fifteen or so of Underwood’s made-up deities. Yet towards the end of the 23-line poem the focus shifts towards the domestic and personal.
…God as a feeling of sudden
loneliness; God as a cup in your house that you haven’t yet
recognised as God but drink from nearly every day; God
as a dead robin; God as the eye of a dead robin; God as
your barely visible reflection in the eye of a dead Robin.
The same switch is present in “The Ashes,” which begins with the kind of observation that wouldn’t be out of place in a good Sunday newspaper column.
It’s the first day of the second test of the Ashes series
and a voice on the radio is describing
the atmosphere here at Lord’s without realising
that his voice describing the atmosphere
on the first day of the second test
is the atmosphere;…
However, the poet reworks this shared sense of immediacy into a deeper consideration of the unforgiving minute.
But imagine you knew the objects to hand
were your last objects: like a TV remote:
the rubber buttons at the edge of your nail, or
you’re rubbing its smooth back in your palm;
you’re clicking open the back and rolling
the batteries, like two little buddies in there –
you are alive….
His personal-formal-funny-serious style is present in a more compact way in Holy Sonnets X, one of three works wherein Underwood reinterprets poems by John Donne.
O drunk DEATH, go home. We like our dying lives.
Have a big glass of water and think about it:
I sleep in often. I waste my life like rain.
Donne may have been lauded in his day, yet Underwood believes that the British tend not to like poetry these days. “As a culture I think we’re prone to a journalistic reduction of events into narratives, news ‘stories,’ each replacing the next before we’re able to ask the necessary questions,” he writes. “But there still exists in everyone a perversion towards the unknowable. We want to bring it within reach, without plugging it, or dulling it, and that’s what poems do.”
Much of his poetry achieves this, as it swings ably from the observational, to the comedic to the numinous. Occasionally he hits a bum note, with a phrase that might have been better cosigned to a sitcom script or Twitter. His poems also sometimes display a youthful degree of self-examination that, while presented as self-criticism, may shade into self-regard in some readers’ minds.
Still, these are minor, subjective weaknesses, in a brilliant collection that is not, despite its title, overly concerned with happiness, any more than it is with questions of death, love, religion, or the unknowable, hard-to-express mysteries of human existence.
Is Jack himself even a happy person? “I think people would say I am,” he emailed back. “But a constantly happy person sounds like a bit of an idiot, don’t they? Sometimes you need to be sad, and when sadness arrives you are grateful for it.”
Thinking is a lonely business
Long traditions of anti-colonial resistance in Turtle Island
Long traditions of anti-colonial resistance in Turtle Island
One of Europe's leading philosophers and co-founder of DiEM25 on Covid-19-related infodemic, living in “the Mediterranean as in once was”, the climate and ecological apocalypse and much more
One of Europe's leading philosophers and co-founder of DiEM25 on Covid-19-related infodemic, living in “the Mediterranean as in once was”, the climate and ecological apocalypse and much more
Versopolis eBook
Timur Vermes’ Look Who's Back
Review of Roberto Saviano's Zero Zero Zero
Review of The Voynich Manuscript, Edited by R. Clemens
Review of The Voynich Manuscript, Edited by R. Clemens
Life, Literature and Love
A Review of Aaron James’ Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump
A Review of Aaron James’ Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump
A Short Story
13 reasons
Eight fragments about the possibility of poetry losing it’s national, ethnic background
Eight fragments about the possibility of poetry losing it’s national, ethnic background
A Short Story
Joseph Brodsky's poetry embodied his conviction that language is older than state.
Joseph Brodsky's poetry embodied his conviction that language is older than state.
A review of Michel Houellebecq's Sérotonine
Life, Literature and Love
He thinks music and literature can co-exist
He thinks music and literature can co-exist
On censorhip in Egypt
On the works of the Canadian writer Barrie Phillip Nichol
Review of Andrei Nikolaidis’ The Son and The Coming
Review of Andrei Nikolaidis’ The Son and The Coming
Life, Literature and Love
The text of the death of David Foster Wallace became marketable and commercial
The text of the death of David Foster Wallace became marketable and commercial
Book Review: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Book Review: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
In the Francophone cultural world, the romantic image of a pure author, inspired by the Muses, serves the literary structures.
In the Francophone cultural world, the romantic image of a pure author, inspired by the Muses, serves the literary structures.
A Review of Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch - “Compiled and edited, with Footnotes of an Educational Nature and Precepts for the Wise, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.”
A Review of Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch - “Compiled and edited, with Footnotes of an Educational Nature and Precepts for the Wise, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.”
What does it – in literature – mean to have style or not to have it? Can it be taught and learned or is it a matter for the muses?
What does it – in literature – mean to have style or not to have it? Can it be taught and learned or is it a matter for the muses?
A Review of Edouard Louis’ The End of Eddy
A Review of Swing Time by Zadie Smith
First It Was Cracking Jokes and Digging Up Graves, But Then It Got Gravely Serious
First It Was Cracking Jokes and Digging Up Graves, But Then It Got Gravely Serious
