Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond Press, 2019)
The two poems I’d like to introduce this week are from Toby Fitch’s fifth collection Where Only the Sky had Hung Before, which sees Fitch continue to develop his method of taking existing texts (poems, news articles, social media threads) as the raw material for his poetry and recontextualizing them. “Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet” is a pantoum of #staywoke tweets and one of the best examples of Fitch's ability to accent the potential for catastrophe when seemingly innocuous alterations are made to language. The elimination of the pantoum’s traditional stanza breaks recreates the kind of disorienting, claustrophobic effect social media tends to induce. The poem has all the hallmarks of what I love in Fitch’s poetry: linguistic play, wit, and a disquieting sense that the ghosts of the original texts are lurking somewhere on the page, ready to take revenge on the whole process. It’s a little menacing and a lot of fun.
Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet
I am outraged / have been as long as I can remember
The sky’s a projector & the moon was brought here by aliens
To keep us informed of the shitstorms going on
I am outraged / been a member for as long as I can
Crushes are nice until you realise how hard you’re crushing
On the shitstorm that keeps you informed of
Slang for political or social awareness
Crashing at night till we realise how hard we’ve crashed
Zeitgeist moves all the way down
Slang for political or social airyness
Intending to automate replies to those who
Drowned in the waves of a zeitgeist
Are we just gonna ignore the fact it’s been raining 9 days straight
Intoning an automated replay to those who
When you want to get trashed get recycled instead
Today we’re just gonna straighten out the rain’s 90 ignorant facts
The government uses the lottery to catch time-travellers
You want to recycle but trash it dead
White beatnik appropriating black culture
The lottery of time-travel caught the government out
Continued to bubble to the digital surface for the next 50 years
White beatniks appropriating black culture
In both ironic & non-ironic ways on all platforms
Continued to bubble to the digital surface for the next 500 years
The sky’s a projector & the moon was brought here by aliens
In both ironic & non-ironic ways on all platforms
Feel like I'm now relegated to everywhere on the internet
"Poetry is 99% Water" stands out in Where Only the Sky had Hung Before as ostensibly less experimental and procedural, although it does take an academic essay and a Buzzfeed article as its sources. It also carries on the collection’s concern with speculative spaces—the sky, poetry, and the internet are all territories in which (and onto which) we project our imaginations. In this case, poetry is given substance and embodied (thankfully, Fitch leaves 1% a mystery). Ashbery's “Sleepers Awake” is brought to mind, or one of several Paul Violi poems, in which an idea is stretched through to its limits without ever losing its immediacy or vitality. I like the notion of poetry as water, especially if what Heraclitus says is true: one can't step into the same poem twice. Fitch's poetry would seem to prove its own claims, as it continually rewards multiple readings.
Poetry is 99% Water
There are about 1.5 billion cubic kilometres of poems
on the planet. That’s about 1.5 billion trillion litres
or 800 trillion Olympic swimming pools.
If all that poetry was evenly spread over the Earth’s surface
it would have a depth of 3,700 metres. They say
the biggest known cloud of poetry vapour was discovered
by NASA scientists around a black hole
12 billion light years from Earth. Inside it
there is 140 trillion times as much poetry as all the poetry
in the world’s oceans — 97% of which is salty,
2.1% locked up in the polar caps, and less than 1% available
as fresh poetry. The Antarctic has been covered
in poems for more than 30 million years and there is poetry
on the poles of the moon, Mars, and Mercury. All
the poems on Earth arrived in comets and asteroid. It happened
between 4.5 billion and 3.8 billion years ago,
a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment
and we’ve been recycling poems from these fragments
of larger epics ever since — into whirlpools and tornadoes
and other spinning turbulent flows.
It takes 150 litres of poetry to make one pint (568ml) of beer.
Poems are not a complicated liquid but two
simple liquids with a complicated relationship. We each consume
around 1 cubic metre (1000 litres) of poetry a year.
Your body is between 60% and 70% poetry. This changes at
different times of your life: a human foetus is around 95% poetry
for the first few months, getting to 77% poetry
at birth; in a 70kg person there are 42 litres of poetry,
2/3rds of which is coiled within your cells. Hot poems
freeze faster than cold poems. This is known
as the Mpoemba Effect and no one knows why. Poetry is sticky,
its molecules love to stick to things, especially each
other. It’s what gives them such a large surface
tension, keeps you alive. It means that poetry can pull
blood up narrow vessels in your body
against the force of gravity.
N.B. "Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet" was first published in Cordite Poetry Review, while "Poetry is 99% Water" was first published in Red Room Poetry.
Wonderful poems and commentary. The book's cover is also striking. Thank you, sir, for poutting me in a good moody.
Posted by: Rosetta Stone | May 26, 2021 at 12:50 PM