after the scrutiny of years

Moving on in my slow read through women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, 2017, I've arrived at another poet I've never read before, Jane Lewty (JL grew up in Leeds and now lives in Baltimore or Amsterdam or both.)

Her contribution to the anthology is a suite of eight poems that for her are unusual: "It's the only time my poetry has had any kind of locus." That locus is the clubbing scene in Leeds in the early 1990s, the house/techno era (the first poem begins with a battery of housey names, later we hear Kariya's "Let Me Love You For Tonight", etc). The poem titles reflect the elaborate track titles of that time, recasting emotional communication as artefact: "Violence and Discord [Heavy Dub]", etc. The poems aren't always about the locus, except insofar as everything's about everything. They sort of swell out from it, go back, start again. In the interview linked below, she says of her writing: "There always has to be a sort of nebulous overarching idea, but the problem is that it gets bigger and bigger and bigger". You can see it happening as you read through these poems. (The poems are part of a project called Mistune. I don't know if they're available anywhere else except in the women: poetry: migration anthology -- but I'm guessing not.)

Dance music is lyrical even without lyrics, and these poems trail lyrical threads too. If some of the emotions come from song lyrics, others come from the young clubbers. The poems intercut those emotions with the crushing industrial electronic rhythms of the genre, with ecstasy highs, with the West Yorkshire terrain and its talk. And then it starts to be about remembering the unrecoverable, a place fixed in a time and a time fixed in a place. 

You need to encounter the full suite really, the poems are so intertwined, but here's a couple of extracts:

In ply over

ply slide and echo

listen to

a reply of mine. I

sleet across timbre

get closer to the unclear

source system, nonlinear

flickering. Us/I/whichever

years ago. Fretted

vacant, spoiling.

Just a little bit free.

And I miss you, I missed you like

cold weighing lightly and always.

When all sides slip

away is the too unbearable

to face. A feeling

of being so dispatched until

remade, retuned.

All of it, the

you an I an us am it

the warehouse days of glory

the final-cut body

the time it fell

on a deep-clad valley

a perforated valley

now an auricular space, a mass

so empty, very faint.

(from "Reflection [I.D.: Could Be Any Name]")

you should know hear me dub

mad hits fer yer

been around the world but still remember

like that friday night at Orion?

thought we'd work the strobe and keep it one beam

tenner for the best double dove pill ever

rum-ring corrided bench, age 14

legs turned up gathering for some effort rising in the awkward

sense and the shins

how they never moved nor did the spine

but then

running so hard

and you should know that only after the scrutiny of years

wuld would

I give you my hand very coldly

lean it against your bleak vandal face

I'd hoax you in the city square, hoax you

in the high park all the field

and you should know how at times I do

feel like flesh, a dim-discovered terrain

slowly

slowly in love with our own (my) curious forming, i.e. us we

mine art my (he)art

all selfsame if it were if it wore

I restore the varied sides trace them tune them

(from "I.D. Female Choir [Put Me To Life Here]")

City Square is a paved area north of Leeds railway station. 

[All images are stills from the Kaos Documentary filmed at Bradford University, 23 March 1991. The full vid is below.]

Jane Lewty has published two poetry books:

Bravura Cool (2013) and In One Form To Find Another (2017).

Poems in Blackbox Manifold 5 (2010):
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue5/JaneLewty.html

"Whosees" in Newfound Vol 4 No 3 (2013):
https://newfound.org/archives/volume-4/issue-3/poetry-jane-lewty

Interview by Marlo Starr (The Adroit Journal, 2019) with Jane Lewty and Dora Malech:

https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/06/20/must-we-fail-in-one-form-to-find-another-a-conversation-with-poets-jane-lewty-and-dora-malech/

*

the warehouse days of glory

That line stirred a memory from about a decade before the house/techno era that Jane Lewty launches her poems from. 

It must have been July 1981. I put an advert in the NME and Steve Elvidge contacted me, so I went down to Leeds one Saturday to see if we could form a band, me and Steve and his mate. We spent the day messing around and realizing our visions were too incompatible. In the evening it was time to lighten up, so we headed along to the Warehouse. Marc Almond was the DJ, and one of the peaks of that thronging, illuminated night was the extended version of a track he'd just cut himself, Tainted Love. I left Leeds the next morning, forgetting my songbook. Tainted Love shot up the charts. A few years later my pals went on to form Age of Chance; I was safely back in my daydreams.