There is a moment near the end of Rupert M Loydell’s new poetry collection, Preloved Metaphors, that recalls Homer’s Odyssey. Loydell’s poem ‘Wherewithal’ includes the sentence ‘Everything / should have a poem written about it, // nothing should be left out.’ The echo, of course, is of Odysseus’ duping the Cyclops by identifying himself as ‘Nobody,’ so that when the Cyclops calls for help he inadvertently sends his potential rescuers away by his explanation to them that ‘Nobody is killing me.’ It’s a funny moment in the Odyssey, one the ancient bards surely enjoyed singing, and I imagine Loydell smiling at his desk as he scribbled out (keyed in? cut-and-pasted?) his sentence with its analogous ambiguity. On one reading, it calls for countless poems, one for each of the countless things in the world, with not a single thing left unsung; on the other reading, it calls for a single poem that is about the category “everything,” and eschews mention of the contrary category, ‘nothing.’
Both moments, the episode in Homer and the lines in Loydell, offer the reminder that irony and bullshit don’t pull neatly apart, that truth-facing Socratic / Kierkegaardian irony and truth-trashing Trumpist hoo-ha serve opposite ends but apply the same medium. Both recognize that, as Wittgenstein so cannily confesses, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ Odysseus gets it that wordplay can deceive; language can mask me. Loydell gets it that wordplay can undeceive; I can unmask language. Loydell’s poems, generated not by emoting tranquil recollections but by a recuperative process of collage/bricolage, ever implicitly ask what his poem ‘A Theology of Ghosts’ asks explicitly.
Do you understand
the words? Do you know
that I have my own way
to burn away mind’s fog?
If language is a window, there are poets who would look through it, emphasizing that out my window I see the world, and others who would look at it, emphasizing that I see the window itself, and of the world only what the window frames, as the window frames it. There are poets, that is, who take themselves as seeing the world beyond the window, and those who take themselves as seeing the world in the window. If, say, Larkin could captain the former camp, Loydell could captain the latter. Preloved Metaphors is, as its title suggests, medium-forward, linguistically self-aware. If the book’s title suggests that self-awareness, the poems’ titles, plural, confirm it: the Table of Contents is an abecedarian, revealing that the poems are arranged in alphabetical order by title.
Preloved Metaphors is in various ways a compact book. Physically, it is pocket-size, A6 (U.S. readers: about 4” x 6”), and slender, give or take 40 pages (few enough that they need no numbers). Even the press run is small, a limited edition of 40 copies. In other respects, though, this book is large. One of the lines in the very first poem, a prefatory poem called ‘All That Is Melts Into Air,’ reads, ‘We only believe what we can question,’ and that indicates something of the book’s capaciousness. In Preloved Metaphors, as is typically the case in Loydell’s work, the poems don’t pretend to be ‘straight talk.’ Every declarative offers also an interrogative, so everything is open to question, meaning everything is open.
Loydell’s process of ‘remixology,’ reconfiguration rather than invention, results in poems that are about seeing the world and seeing oneself seeing. These poems see the seeing no less than they see the seen, as in ‘By Any Other Means.’
… everything is made,
hands-on experience suspended as
we try to find the words we need to
describe the accidental and obscene.
We only have to look to see ourselves.
Loydell’s remixing makes other remixes possible, such as repurposing a fragment from one poem in Preloved Metaphors, assigning it standing as an indicator of the tenor of the whole book. As I do here, with the last line of Loydell’s poem ‘Unclear’: ‘this is a live beyond.’
H.L Hix 23rdApril 2024
Tears in the Fence 