In his introduction to the seminal anthology of British Avant-Garde later twentieth-century poetry, which he also edited, Conductors of Chaos, Iain Sinclair draws out a genealogy of the underground and independent press writers since the early 1970s (Sinclair 1996a; 1996b). This is an important narrative in bringing together a series of distinct and often conflictual voices and poetics, which were neglected within the more mainstream UK literary culture.
Although Sinclair chooses modestly not to include his own work, his aesthetic-political vision of poetics and of literature is manifest throughout the text and more overtly in his ‘manifesto’ in the Introduction. The sub-title is instructive in positioning the philosophy of such poetic work - ‘a Manifesto for Those Who Do Not Believe in Such Things’ (Sinclair 1996b). In an article for Red Ogre Review from June 2024 (Irwin and Rose 2024), entitled ‘Coventry Haiku - Two-Tone Poetics and the Psychogeography of Ska’, I noted the powerful critical vision of Sinclair in relation to the evolution most especially of late twentieth century British politics (aka Thatcherism) and its pernicious effects on the contemporary city.
There, with an emphasis on Ska as a Midlands psychogeography (via Jamaica and Northside Dublin in the 1980s), I drew out what Sinclair interprets as a great rift between language and the material (political) environment, a specific ‘collapse of our civic morality and ambition . . . the victim of rogue-capitalist relativism: nil by mouth indeed’ (Bond 2008). But what is significant for us is that Sinclair’s work does not just evince this coruscating critique of contemporary aesthetic and social-personal life. Through a psychogeography of the more occultic aspects of London especially, as a mental and physical space, his writing also seeks to picture and imagine a ‘re-born, spiritual expressive life, a spiritual topography . . . the map of another world altogether’ (Bond 2008). Sinclair develops the original Situationist (and Lettrist) understanding of psychogeography, originated by the French theorist Guy Debord (seminal for the May ‘68 events), as ‘the study of the specific effects of the geo-graphical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (quoted Coverley 2006: 10).
As Merlin Coverley notes, ‘psychogeography is, as the name suggests, the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact of urban place’ (Coverley 2006: 10). There is also a cultural and philosophical debt here to Surrealism and to Dadaism (earlier to the Symbolism of Rimbaud and Baudelaire), a debt which accrues also up to the Punk movement in music and in literature, which similarly deploys this ‘psycho-‘ or ‘damned’ dynamic (Hell 2008). This methodology becomes a conducive technique for artists and writers to develop a new philosophical practice of everyday life, and literature (metafiction, poetics, etc.) becomes a particular pathway to explore.
This writing and philosophising from an emergent elsewhere has also been my intention in recent short articles for Red Ogre Review, where I too have sought to draw out the contours of a poetics which might do justice to such a contemporary psychogeography. Here, as an ally to Sinclair, I also seek to build on Jack Kerouac’s more urbane evolution of the traditional Japanese haiku form, taking the classical form into a socio-cultural problematic of the everyday now. I have collected some of my recent haikus into a chapbook for Moonstone Press in Philadelphia (just published, October 2024), entitled American Haikus (Irwin 2024). As befits a neo-Kerouacian Beat endeavour, the effects are intended as dual, both ‘beaten-down’ and ‘beatific’, even (dare I say) beautiful.
For the beaten-down, here is a brief sketch on humanity as such, and our anthropocentric achievements in Earth destruction to date, with a nod to the English dystopian Peter Reading:
H. Sap # 2
Few atrocities
Remain in the future
Take a bow the bringers
(Irwin 2024)
If we are thinking more on the ‘beatific’ side (albeit Beat beatitude is always quasi-decadent), then this:
Fellatio Jazz
Like a white-blonde moll blows
Or Bird Parker or Miles Davis
This is how poetry flows
(Irwin 2024)
Another writer associated with the Beats, William Burroughs, can be helpful to us here in that his work navigates the ambiguity of a simultaneous critique of humanism with an effort to regenerate an ethic which can withstand the temptations of a dead-end cynicism. As Ann Douglas has noted, Burroughs was ‘a leader of postmodern literary fashion in the 60s’ (Douglas 1999: xxvi). His work led him to ‘discard the humanistic notions of the self; human is an adjective not a noun; his starting point [being] the place where the human road ends’ (Douglas 1999: xxvi). This is an important, even seismic moment: human is an adjective not a noun. The human is no longer at the heart of a hubristic universe of self-hood, instead as humans we are thrown into a much more fluid and radical process of becoming. But this thrownness doesn’t have to lead to an inevitable nihilism or relativism. While the emphasis on a fractured personhood and ‘broken’ self and ego links Burroughs very obviously to nihilistic tendencies in the culture, a connected emphasis on ethical and/or moral responsibility in his work marks him out from many other post-modern writers and philosophers. One might note the ethical seeing of his infamous phrase (effectively a philosophical principle as such) from Naked Lunch, ‘a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork’ (Burroughs 1959). This is Burroughs (and the Beats) as radical truth-tellers, ‘punching a hole in the Big Lie’ (Douglas 1999); a haunting and prescient insight in the context of the current US Presidential elections (an outcome delivered by the time of the publication of this piece, but unknown to the writer).
In her Reconstructing the Beats (Skerl 2004a), Jennie Skerl puts the Beats in a more contemporary context, while also highlighting their original intent and direction. Burroughs is certainly paradigmatic in the Beat movement, although he later declaimed affinity in terms of literary style with them (despite the obvious personal connections). As Skerl notes, the Beats were in countercultural resistance to what Robert Holton called (quoted Skerl 2004b: 15) the ‘centripetal cultural logic of postwar America . . . [which] was ubiquitous from childhood on’. This was summarised in the phrase ‘you must adjust’ and the Beats mantra might rather be described as ‘break out of the cage’. Skerl refers here interestingly to Herbert Marcuse’s seminal text One Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1980).
Paraphrasing Marcuse, she asks whether alienation becomes obsolete when the individuals of a society identify with the life which is imposed upon them? Her answer is in the negative. ‘The result of this identification is not the loss of alienation though but actually constitutes a more progressive stage of alienation characterised by the loss of ability to imagine alternatives’ (Skerl 2004b: 17). The resultant task of the Beats, according to Skerl, was a moral and ethical one, and this is where we see Burrough’s affinity with the Beats over the wider postmodernists. Here, she quotes Brossard (quoted Skerl 2004b: 17): ‘their task – experienced, really, as an aesthetic/moral obligation – was to create a new sensibility and a new language with which to illuminate the existential crisis of the postwar American in conflict with his society’s values’. The ultimate aim of such a sense of moral and aesthetic obligation was personal and cultural ‘renewal’. This is clear paradigmatically in Kerouac’s On The Road, but it is also present, more elliptically, throughout Burrough’s oeuvre.
While the dystopian visions of Burroughs and Kerouac (seminal influences on Sinclair’s poetics) were more avant-garde in the Fifties and Sixties, we might argue that today (for ill more than good) they have become wholly and ineluctably mainstream. What does this tell us about our culture and society? Writing this text, I am reading about the ‘apocalyptic’ realities of the Valencian floods in south-eastern Spain, clearly an indicator of radical climate emergency. Moreover, the situations in Gaza, Palestine and in Beirut, Lebanon, defy, after a year of so-called war, even eschatological description. The outcome of the US Presidential election (either way) may thus just be added as another everyday madness, these days. The December 2024 issue of Mojo magazine helpfully if ominously draws these themes together into ‘Future Legends. 15 Tracks of Dystopian Sci-Fi Rock’ (Mojo 2024), drawing on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs phase: ‘Dystopian, absolutely’, he smirked, ‘I went to the doctor’s for it’ (Bowie, quoted Mojo 2024). As the editor notes, ‘it’s not always easy to tell whether dystopia is the stuff of sci-fi nightmares – or (just) an uncomfortable reality…where the dogs decay, the synths hum and samizdat copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Clockwork Orange and J.G. Ballard paper the streets’ (Mojo 2024). I’d vouch for the latter at the moment, this is indeed our discomfiting realism (no longer so Surreal or Dada). But this is precisely where Iain Sinclair’s psychogeography may actually come to our aid, as an unlikely therapeutic succor.
Robert Bond (Bond 2008) has made an analogous argument to my Burroughs defence regarding the ethical drive of Sinclair’s poetics (despite appearances somewhat to the contrary). Sinclair is sometimes a poet who is accused of ‘selling out to the mass market . . . only a citizen’s poet’. As an alchemist of the London everyday, he is seen as complicit with the very corruption of urban life which he describes so painstakingly. But for Bond, this unique attunement of Sinclair to the ‘issues and happenings of the street, open to the moment’ is rather an indicator of ethical and poetic power and virtuosity. This makes Sinclair’s poetry, and wider writing (Bond’s primary focus is a review of The Firewall: Selected Poems 1979–2006), paradoxically both in time and out of time – ‘at once open and hermetic’. As Bond persuasively declares, ‘it is precisely the extreme contemporaneity of this poetry (this writing of London), its grounding in everyday perception and lived historical profanities, which paradoxically generates fervent spiritual qualities and concerns: such as avid hope for the future, a militant obscurity, or a rapt attention to personal singularity’ (Bond 2008).
To conclude, I plead your patience to add my own dystopian (now read – utopian) psychic projections in haiku, channeling something of Sinclair’s neo-Gothic visions of contemporary London and our universal apocalypse of the present times, which (I would claim) is now, irreversibly, everywhere.
Psychic Geography Haiku
A Burroughs-like
paranoid sense
of universal conflagration
A flood of 2020s
documentary nonfiction
neo-gothic A-Z of London
As if we were all
dining on stones and hashish
chasing post-Beat poetics
A character called Undark
secreting an occult text
under a long grey cloak
Spotted on Holloway Road
stood outside Ram Books
rhyming obscene lines
An earlier career book
dealing replaced by Tarot
as stealthier in the Underworld
And wealthier by far
although Lucifer will look
for payback from all clients
Reader, I kid you not
just note the sorry fate
of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie
References
Bond, Robert (2008) ‘Babylon Afterburn: Adventures in Iain Sinclair’s The Firewall’. Jacket.
Burroughs, W. (1993) Naked Lunch. Flamingo, London.
Burroughs, W. (1999) Word Virus: the William Burroughs Reader. Flamingo, London.
Coverley, Merlin (2006) Psychogeography. Oldcastle Books, London.
Douglas, A. (1999). ‘Punching a Hole in the Big Lie: The Achievement of William S. Burroughs’. Flamingo, London.
Hell, Richard (2008) ‘My Punk Beginnings and Are Rock Lyrics Poetry?’. Malaga, Spain.
Irwin, Jones (2024) American Haikus. Moonstone Press, Philadelphia.
Kerouac, Jack (2002) On the Road. Penguin, London.
Marcuse, Herbert (2002) One Dimensional Man. Routledge, London.
Mojo Magazine (2024) ‘Future Legends. 15 Tracks of Dystopian Sci-Fi Rock’. Bauer Media Group, Hamburg / London.
Sheppard, Robert (2007) Iain Sinclair. Northcote House, Devon.
Sinclair, Iain (1996a & 1996b) Conductors of Chaos. Picador, London.
Sinclair, Iain (1999) Crash. David Cronenberg’s Post-Mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’. BFI Publishing, London.
Sinclair, Iain (2006) The Firewall: Selected Poems, 1979–2006. Etruscan Books, Wilkes-Barr.
Skerl, J. (2004a & 2004b) Reconstructing the Beats. Palgrave, London.