Contemporary Authors

• The Harbour beyond the Movie Salt (Cambridge, England), 2007
• The Migraine Hotel Salt (Cambridge, England), 2009
• A Lost Expression Salt (London, England), 2012
• Cain Penned in the Margins (London, England), 2017
• Holophin Penned in the Margins (London, England), 2012
• The Transition Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2017

1. The transition LCCN 2017034565 Type of material Book Personal name Kennard, Luke, author. Main title The transition / Luke Kennard. Edition 1st American edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2017] Projected pub date 1111 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9780374278717 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PR6111.E535 T73 2018 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Cain LCCN 2016364691 Type of material Book Personal name Kennard, Luke, author. Main title Cain / Luke Kennard. Edition Paper edition. Published/Produced London : Penned in the Margins, 2017. Description 100 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781908058478 paperback CALL NUMBER PR6111.E535 C35 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. The transition LCCN 2016436923 Type of material Book Personal name Kennard, Luke, author. Main title The transition / Luke Kennard. Published/Produced London : 4th Estate, 2017. Description 328 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780008200428 hardback 0008200424 hardback CALL NUMBER PR6111.E535 T73 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. A lost expression LCCN 2012545315 Type of material Book Personal name Kennard, Luke. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title A lost expression / by Luke Kennard. Published/Produced London : Salt, 2012. Description xii, 79 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9781907773327 (hbk.) Shelf Location FLS2014 128185 CALL NUMBER PR6111.E535 A6 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 5. Holophin LCCN 2012517068 Type of material Book Personal name Kennard, Luke. Main title Holophin / Luke Kennard. Published/Created London : Penned in the Margins, 2012. Description 112 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781908058065 (limited edition hardback) 9781908058065 (pbk.) 1908058064 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2014 128180 CALL NUMBER PR6111.E535 H65 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 6. Stress fractures : essays on poetry LCCN 2011379089 Type of material Book Main title Stress fractures : essays on poetry / edited by Tom Chivers. Published/Created London : Penned in the Margins, 2010. Description 212 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780956546715 (pbk.) 0956546714 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER PN1136 .S845 2010 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 7. The Migraine Hotel LCCN 2009483855 Type of material Book Personal name Kennard, Luke. Main title The Migraine Hotel / Luke Kennard. Published/Created Cambridge, U.K. : Salt, 2009. Description 84 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781844715558 1844715558 Shelf Location FLS2014 108781 CALL NUMBER PR6111.E535 M54 2009 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 8. The harbour beyond the movie LCCN 2008411006 Type of material Book Personal name Kennard, Luke. Main title The harbour beyond the movie / Luke Kennard. Published/Created Cambridge, U.K. : Salt, 2007. Description 69 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781844713073 Shelf Location FLM2014 127162 CALL NUMBER PR6111.E535 H37 2007 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1)

• The Solex Brothers - 2010 Salt Publishing, Cromer

• Stride Magazine - http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2017/03/for-details-see-yesterday-interview.html

  For Details See Yesterday: an interview with Luke Kennard

  The Transition. Comedy, romance, conspiracy theory or psychodrama?

  Yeah, it’s ultimately a romance. Sort of a despairing capitalist romance. It’s… I hope it’s incidentally funny; I don’t think there are any actual jokes in it. I mean there are plenty of people who don’t find it remotely funny and some of them write Amazon reviews to say so and then write comments under the more positive Amazon reviews to say that the more positive Amazon reviews are wrong. But the novel is partly about that, so that’s cool. I definitely wanted to borrow elements of conspiracy thrillers and psychodramas, but also leave it so that you’re not entirely sure how much of that is just in Karl’s head. Any attempt against The Transition within the story had to be unsuccessful, so it was a sort of balancing act of trying to maintain some narrative tension while knowing that it was futile.

  Where’d the idea for this novel come from?

  I don’t know… the Pulp song ‘Misshapes’ from Different Class, maybe? [middle-class whining] I suppose the high-concept bit (the remedial scheme to re-educate Millennials, a term I despise) comes from a kind of disaffection which I don’t think gets talked about very much. We read negative think-pieces about Millennials, and I look at my own students who are hard-working, talented, full of initiative and ideas, and I don’t recognise them from the think-pieces. We read a lot about house-prices in London, but not so much about how it’s increasingly impossible to buy a place to live (let’s just excise “getting on the property ladder” from our language permanently) in, say, Birmingham now. I mean honestly, if I took a new academic job in Exeter or Bristol, we’d struggle to meet the monthly short-lease rent on a two bedroom terrace, let alone be able to ever consider settling. So if we moved anywhere it would be further north, which is fine, I love the north, but it’s not going to be long before that’s out of most people’s range too. We’re, like, a couple of streets of luxury coffee bars away from full gentrification. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very aware of the massive advantages (rule of law, etc.) of being from the UK. I think I qualify as one of the oldest Millennials – it’s being born 1981 onwards, right? – So my wife, who was born in 1980, is not a Millennial and is less whiny and has a better work ethic, etc. Often, when I talk about housing issues, people (who own their houses) talk about the Continent (they’ve just voted to leave) and the fact that everybody rents in France and the landlords are basically little Kings and Queens who own great swathes of the country, and it’s all fine. But we’re not France, are we? We’re a home-owning democracy; the systems of our entire country are built on the idea that that’s what you aspire to, on the idea that that’s a possibility. And it isn’t anymore. Doesn’t matter what your job is: is your pension going to cover whatever the hell private rents have risen to in thirty years’ time? Of course not. So it’s just as well the retirement age is being pushed back and my generation are going to cark it when we’re still working and can lend our children twenty quid when they need it. For people in their 30s and younger… the vast majority of us are in between the small set who inherit wealth and property and the small set in dire situations who have to rely on benefits and council housing. Let’s say about 95% of us. It speaks volumes that the issues facing 95% are more or less unrepresented in literature and journalism. And essentially, you aspire to provide a stable home for your family (whatever family is to you). I’m not ashamed of having had to move house roughly every ten months since the age of 18, living from pay-cheque to pay-cheque, but I’m not exactly proud of it, either: it’s profoundly inconvenient and destabilising. I don’t want my kids to have to change schools every year on the whim of the person who owns my house. On the other hand, if I could just cut coffee and booze out of my life, we’d probably own a house by now.

  It’s not poetry, is it?

  I did a reading/interview thing recently with a guy who said, at one point, ‘I felt quite often in the novel that I could sense how hard you were working, how hard you were trying, and I don’t mean that as a criticism—’(and I was like, ‘You kind of do, but it’s an accurate one.’) ‘—it’s just that your poetry usually feels very effortless.’ And that’s true, you know? I go through quite long periods of not writing any poetry, but when I’m producing work it’s sort of the way a process driven painter might go through fifty canvases in a week, or Robert Pollard writes 300 Guided by Voices songs a year. I throw a lot away, but the stuff that works… It does come a lot more naturally to me. That said, I’ve always written short stories and failed novels, since I was eight years old, so this isn’t something that’s come out of nowhere or a kind of cynical career move… I don’t know. In my heart of hearts everything I do is cynical. There are definitely moments – the little parables, the stories within the story – which are closer to what I’ve done in poetry. When I was working on a previous – disastrous – novel-length project one of the editors who passed on it said, ‘We like your poems. Could you do a novel-length thing which is basically one of your poems?’ And I said, ‘Well… apparently I can’t. I’m trying.’ I’d like to do something like that, though. I’m about 20,000 words into another prose thing which is a lot weirder, but I don’t know if it’ll come to anything.

  I wanted a happy ending… Am I missing something, or are you saving that for the sequel?

  There’s this didactic element to my writing and it’s more or less just… we need each other. And that the way we live our lives, our obligations to one another, are completely opposed to the system we live in. Love makes no economic sense. Even the vows you take in a marriage or civil ceremony are profoundly economically inadvisable. So I kind of… think it… is a happy ending? Karl and Genevieve are screwed by the end of the novel, but they were pretty much screwed at the beginning, and they’re up against something all-pervading and it asks you to succeed/compete solely on its own terms. And it doesn’t separate them. That’s all. In terms of my own feelings about it, I’m as happy with it as I’m capable of being – it’s definitely a First Novel and I’m okay with that; I’m happy with what it does well and happy with its flaws. And with the fact that what I think of as flaws are probably the only bits some people like about it. Going back to the poetry thing, it’s a strange and not unpleasant experience to have a broader readership than I’ve had in poetry (which I suppose I had with Holophin as well).

  Have you sold the right for the musical yet? [Proffers fiver]

  I’m in the process of selling the TV rights to a company who will take the plot of the novel as one episode and then just write a whole load of other stuff based on the concept. The chances of it actually getting developed are pretty slim, but it’s still fun. So I’ll get back to you on the fiver. Which would cover the option for 18 months and points on the merchandise, okay?

  © Rupert Loydell & Luke Kennard 2017

  Posted 11th March 2017 by RML

• Prac Crit - http://www.praccrit.com/interviews/cain-reverses-time-interview-by-richard-obrien/

  Interview
  by Richard O’Brien
  INTRO
  INTERVIEW
  A PhD student walks into Leverton and Hall’s deli in Bournville, Birmingham, to meet with a Creative Writing tutor and dismantle a poem which one of them has written. Luke Kennard is my doctoral supervisor, and the fact that I am taking apart his poem for this website seems apt for a writer whose hallmarks include a use of the language of the academy precisely to subvert the structures of authority. He recently opened a lecture to Creative Writing undergrads with extracts from the critical reader’s report on his first novel (The Transition, due 2017), written by his own former student, now turned agent. Anyone familiar with Kennard’s poems – in verse and prose – will recognise in this anecdote a streak of joyfully lacerating self-interrogation.

  This aspect was particularly prevalent in The Harbour Beyond the Movie and The Migraine Hotel, two collections full of poems which regularly undermined their own premises. A recurring character, the Wolf, allowed Kennard to point out the inherent absurdities of class, nationalism, psychoanalysis, and, of course, the process of poetic composition. Many of Kennard’s poems feel at once zingily contemporary and somehow baroque, a barrage of surreal and potentially inconsequential data delivered in one elegantly unfolding sentence after another. 2012’s A Lost Expression saw a foregrounding of an element which had always been present in Kennard’s work: a profound acknowledgement of human disconnection and our inability to communicate adequately in the face of genuine psychological distress. As a dive-bombing seagull puts it in his poem ‘And I Saw’, ‘I just want to tell you how sad we all feel.’

  Cain, Kennard’s forthcoming collection, takes a different tack. A single narrative in multiple poems, it features a narrator who may or may not overlap with the biographical Luke Kennard. At his lowest ebb, the immortal Biblical figure arrives at his door with a message: ‘Everyone is very concerned about you.’ Through this relationship, Kennard explores more explicitly than ever questions of personal stability, psychology, and religious faith, while also continuing to parody and blur the boundaries of the autobiographical lyric. At the centre of the book are a series of 31 anagrams of Genesis 4:9-13, the Bible passage in which Cain kills Abel. Repeatedly reworking this passage of text came to seem to Kennard like an apt metaphor for an event it describes: God cursing the land so that it is unable to yield fruit. The very paradoxical fruitfulness of the work is, of course, part of the interplay Kennard explores.

  In person, Luke is as voluble as his poems, and as prone to digression. He laughs frequently at the slightest trace of pomposity in his own self-description, but also exhibits a thoughtful concern for communication. Sentences are regularly restarted many times over until the right phrase, the right idea comes to him. Though his poems mock and frustrate the possibility of literary analysis, his analysis of his own work, and of the contemporary world which inspires it, is in equal parts playful and deadly serious.

  March 2016

  Interview
  by Richard O’Brien
  INTRO
  INTERVIEW
  RO
  This new collection has the character of Cain running through it, who comments on and suggests courses of action for ‘Luke Kennard’. You’ve played with alter-egos before – I’m thinking of the Wolf, who you called an ‘alter-superego’ – and I feel like they might serve as an externalisation of certain modes of self-critique. So one thing I think is: interviewing you, I feel a bit like the Wolf. I wonder if you’ve made yourself uninterviewable as a sort of deliberate strategy.

  LK
  [Laughs] Yeah. There was something somebody said in a review once, where they were saying that the work really resists — not resists interpretation, but resists being reviewed. I think actually it was more like ‘resists bad reviews’ — it tries to second guess problems people might have and incorporate that within the work, which is a sort of defence mechanism, and they meant that as a criticism in itself, which I thought was quite a fair one.

  RO
  With the self-critiquing, you might get to a point where the work is kind of eating itself. It seems that what you’ve done to get beyond that is actually to break through to more personal revelation – or at least what feels like personal revelation. Some of your blurbs delight in saying that you’ve become more sincere — [LK laughs throughout this exchange.] I think it’s The Lost Expression’s blurb where whoever wrote it seems to be thinking ‘Finally!’

  LK
  Enough of this, enough of the literary in-jokes… Mmm. I wanted to pull in both directions with this book. I think that because I knew it was going to be centring on the anagrams – which are by far the most experimental, with a capital E, kind of thing that I’ve done, the closest to Language Poetry as a movement – I wanted to blend that with my most confessional work as well. So that includes faith, it includes autobiography, it includes talking about your life as it really… is, perhaps? But then I also wanted that to be a difficult and contested space. I get a little frustrated when people talk about the idea of the lyric ‘I’ being something that is slippery, that is hard to define, and that is prone to lying. Often a poet will say, quite defensively, ‘You should never assume that the “I” in the poem is me, or is even The Poet.’ But quite often… it just is, isn’t it? The work is actually uncomplicatedly autobiographical. It doesn’t mess around with the boundaries between your idea of yourself and your self-presentation and the way other people see you — it doesn’t even play with that, you know, that basic social truth. It’s very well-managed; it really is this very careful presentation of the self.

  RO
  This is the work, or your work?

  LK
  Not my work, no. [Laughs] I’m being mean about other people’s work. But it troubles me when I feel like a writer is trying to present themselves in the best possible light – it becomes a kind of propaganda of the self. So my feeling was like, right, OK, so if the lyric ‘I’, if this inverted-commas lyric ‘I’ is unreliable and slippery and hard to pin down, then let’s actually do something with that, let’s make a lyric ‘I’ which is a persona. So for instance, in Cain, I think there are four poems that are kind of autobiographical sketches about school, and those are — I use the term reservedly, but, absolutely true. Those are completely drawn from memory and, in a way, they’re trying to do something similar to Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill in Stations and Mercian Hymns, which are two collections that I’ve written on, and I admire them greatly, but I also felt a bit dismayed that there was a sort of lack of embarrassment. It becomes a deliberate and playful type of self-mythologisation, but one that leaves out the more painful elements of childhood. There’s one exception in Heaney’s Stations, where there’s a poem about how he gets given a kaleidoscope, and he goes to a deep muddy puddle in the back yard and he ruins the kaleidoscope, he sinks it into this mud, and it’s never the same again — and I love that poem, it’s one of my favourite Heaney poems actually, because it involves a sort of inexplicable act of self-sabotage that to me feels closer to truth somehow.

  RO
  Let’s talk about that kaleidoscope thing — there’s something there about the destruction of the instrument of perception, the fact that that creates a more interesting way of perceiving. I’m looking at ‘Cain Reverses Time’ and the line: ‘He is a camera capacious enough to film the entire world / forever, and then rewound to unmake every wound.’ I suppose the way you draw that image out of Heaney suggests you would be suspicious of this image about Cain, you’d be suspicious about the power or the usefulness of this ability you give the character.

  LK
  Yeah. Yeah. And I think that came from a story on the podcast Reply All about ultra-surveillance. That’s not the word – there’s probably a proper term for it – but I mean the extension of CCTV to the point where you can actually film a whole city in real time. I think they were specifically talking about using this technology in a warzone, so you’ve almost got this — you end up with this incredible kind of life-size simulacrum of everything unfolding. You see an explosion, and then you can trace back to see exactly who was responsible for it.

  RO
  We’ve got this camera, the idea of the destabilised lyric ‘I’, and the fixed, almost obsessively capturing eye — and there’s the Isherwood book I Am a Camera, isn’t there, the sort of documentary aspect. So I’m wondering what kind of moral valence is attached to the idea of this camera that can do anything.

  LK
  Yeah, a camera that can actually reverse time. I suppose that’s it, because the poem is about things that are irreversible, and in some ways it almost gives us this comforting idea that everything is reversible, or at least explainable.

  RO
  The camera does?

  LK
  Yeah, the technology does. The technology affects our perceptions, and our philosophies to a certain extent, our ways of thinking about ourselves and our actions. I think sometimes there’s a kind of slippage between our ideas of morality, our decisions, and the technology that we use to talk about and discuss and to write about them. So, like, obviously no one believes that rewinding a video undoes the act itself… but I suppose specifically, as a sort of surveillance and anti-terror device, we do believe in it as a form of protection after the event, or as something that will help to capture those responsible, to punish them, to explain, and to find out what wasn’t explained yet. And often what actually stays with you from stories about heinous acts, is that it’s not really explainable, it doesn’t help to catch the perpetrator, and it doesn’t give us this satisfying sort of closure.

  RO
  There’s always the sense you have of, ‘Why wasn’t more recorded, why wasn’t more done?’

  LK
  And of course these are huge debates at the moment, between our civil liberties and the necessity to — supposedly the necessity to protect us by increasingly recording everything. But you’re right that in the poem the camera is immediately mocked as an image – it’s pre-mocked, I suppose, by being juxtaposed with the more surreal image of the beard. And that kind of comes from – not comes from, but I often think of the second Monkey Island game, which I was obsessed with as a child, and the Ghost Pirate LeChuck’s beard, which is the only part of his body which is alive. He’s a sort of zombie pirate, but his beard is still living and it’s horrible.

  RO
  So of all the marks of Cain that you list in the prologue to this book, why in this poem have you settled on the beard? Is it because of that undermining, mocking quality that it allows you to explore?

  LK
  From the very beginning of me writing this collection, I think my Cain was the bearded sort of Cain. So there are two extremes in art history, one of Cain being beardless like Judas – not having a beard being seen as a mark of distrust or of evil in some way, in Biblical times – and then the other extreme — an equally prevalent visual representation of Cain — was that he was extremely hairy. I have to use a lot of ‘h’s in each of the anagrams, so at one point Cain is referred to as ‘the hairy household mythologist & his adherent undertow’. The interpretation of Cain as immortal has him as being this big hairy man. It’s more than just the Mormon Church, although that’s where the theory currently rests. It goes back to the early Church Fathers, this idea that he was made immortal to witness the whole, the full scale of the horror of human history from start to finish, and that’s one of his curses, that’s part of his mark, in a way – to be immortal.

  RO
  Yet in your poem Cain’s reversal has an end-point: ‘Cain is not trying to reverse his decision, but God’s … He / stands over his brother’s body, a jawbone / in his fist and we follow the drip of blood in, frankly, / melodramatic slow motion. Thanks anyway.’ So I get the sense that Cain is a sort of origin point of irredeemable failure. There’s a line from Genesis which does not make it into the anagram passage — ‘if thou dost well, shalt thou not be accepted’ — which it feels like people are saying a lot in your poems.

  LK
  Yeah. And that ties into the actual bit just before Cain slays Abel – it’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s OK, let’s try again.’ But then he kills him. So this idea of irredeemability that you mentioned, I want to follow that up because it’s what the poem is about, and I think I wanted to look at that as a universal, rather than something that — I’m not really interested in the notion of perdition, the idea of there being people who are beyond redemption by virtue of their own actions. That doesn’t really interest me at all. It’s the idea that this is actually something common to any mistake, anything that can’t be undone. Nothing that we do can actually be undone, or taken back — it can’t — but I think that my feeling about that is that we don’t want it to, either, actually, when we really examine ourselves. We can fake a feeling of repentance, we can fake a kind of sadness for it, but actually we just stay angry – maybe that we were caught, or that we’ve been taken to task – and you see this in anybody who’s accused of anything really, especially when it’s a correct accusation: we’re even more angry than if it was a false accusation, more defensive. So it’s this idea that the whole poem, with all the reversals, the ‘me’ in the poem — I’m expecting it to draw back to the point where the first murder is committed, and Cain can not kill his brother.

  RO
  Then there’s a fix, a solve.

  LK
  Yeah, and the solve is for everybody. The solve is that finally this first most heinous thing has finally been reversed, but – but actually he is trying to do something which I think is more in line with how we feel when we’ve done something wrong, which is that we want to reverse everything else but the thing that we did.

  RO
  There’s a deferral of blame.

  LK
  Nobody knows why God preferred Abel’s offering – nobody can explain that, from the rabbis thousands of years ago to the early Church Fathers. Again, as with the mark, there are many, many different interpretations of it, all of them different, many of them conflicting. Nobody actually can say why that is, and the first time I think I even had an inkling of it was reading Lord Byron’s play Cain, where he makes quite a lot out of that scene, with a lot of dialogue between Cain and Abel. I think seeing the scene spread out for about five or six pages, and explained and expanded on a lot more, where actually Cain’s offering feels like — a bit paltry. And Abel presents his offering in all humility and says, ‘I am a lowly shepherd, this is all I can give you but at least it is the best lamb that I have.’ And Cain offers the fruits and some seeds and some ears of wheat – he even offers them in a slightly sneery way – but still Cain’s offering feels below par, inferior, which I’d never got from Genesis, from even contemplating or thinking about that story before.

  RO
  So in your poem, it comes back to a sense of ultimate randomness, and needing to point the finger at someone because actually — you can’t say it was your own fault, you can’t really say it was inherent. Or have I got that wrong?

  LK
  I think it’s more that even when he impossibly engineers it so that he has the opportunity to take back what he did, he’s living through exactly the same moment again, feels just as embittered, and kills Abel again, even though he’s managed to make it so that his offering is the one that produces the burst of light and is accepted. Even though he’s able to engineer that, he still kills Abel. So ultimately it makes no difference, I suppose that’s kind of what I was aiming towards. And the examples that lead up to it, and again I should probably go back into the sort of autobiographical and fake autobiographical bits of the collection, where – the bit that is completely fabricated, and that I’m actually not terribly comfortable with, even still, is the bit about me having estranged myself from my family, either abandoned my family or done something… I think what’s implied is that I’ve done something kind of unforgiveable, I’ve had an affair or something. From time to time I think we all feel close to losing something that we’ve built, walking away from something that defined us, or sabotaging it. Again, I think that’s something that we all have, that you maybe see more extremely in cases of addiction, which is often linked to trauma. But I think there’s something very human about self-sabotage, and about not rebuilding something once you’ve smashed it, not trying to… heal that. There’s a kind of finality.

  RO
  I suppose that links both with the fact that Cain’s actions can’t be explained – Cain just does what he does – and the idea of penance in the book. The character is in sackcloth in one poem, and there’s definitely a kind of self-flagellation there. There’s a kind of externalised penance, for a crime that hasn’t been committed, as a way of processing that fear or something.

  LK
  And also exploring how fragile a lot of things are, a lot of the things that we rely on, whether that’s our sense of self or our relationships to other people. You wouldn’t have to be that careless to destroy what you have. In a way, that was my feeling – that sometimes you can start down a certain trajectory which… I’ve been listening to a lot of music, popular music and jazz, things that make reference, any reference whatsoever to Cain and/or Abel, and the early ones are all sort of embarrassingly… instructive, just like, ‘Ooh, don’t be like Cain – don’t murder people! Don’t go around killing people, ‘cause you’re angry.’ Which of course totally misses the point.

  RO
  Because anyone could be like Cain…

  LK
  … and actually I suppose my feeling is that we all are: there are no sons of Abel, as it were. I’m going to have to look up the name of this philosopher [It’s Gillian Rose], the woman who wrote On Innocence, which is a book that I really struggled with because I’m not a proper student of philosophy, so it left me standing most of the time, but – she kind of tackles this pernicious myth of… our essential goodness, our essential innocence, which I think needs doing in the way that we think about the world. We too easily think as if we have a leg to stand on, morally, whenever we venture an opinion about anyone else, whether personally or geopolitically.

  RO
  You mentioned that the book explores faith in a way which is new to you. That said, quite a lot of your work has reference to monks, priests, Church Fathers, theologians and philosophers –

  LK
  And sometimes it’s just thrown in, I suppose, but, yeah, it’s always been there.

  RO
  Where does that come from for you? Do you have a personal interest?

  LK
  Yeah. So there’s only ever been one person who’s ever asked me about it before, and this was a Canadian poet called Natalya Anderson, who just emailed me out of the blue about five years ago, specifically to talk about faith as it relates to my poetry, and in a way I was surprised it had never come up before, because I suppose to me it’s quite essential. I was received by the Greek Orthodox Church a year before getting married, and the church that we regularly attend is a monastery near Woking, with five monks in it. In Orthodoxy, the sayings of the Desert Fathers are still really central, in fact almost as central as the Bible. There is acknowledgement of the Old Testament, but I would say, in Orthodoxy, in terms of textual precedence, church history and the early theologians are more important than the Old Testament. Actually, that may be a horribly controversial statement – I can’t remember; I’ll probably be excommunicated for saying that.

  I guess faith is not something that I… it’s not something I’m that comfortable with talking about explicitly – which is probably true for quite a lot of people who have a religion of one kind or another. I mean, neither do I like the kind of do-it-yourself spirituality, that ‘whatever works for you’ kind of thing, but I also hate – I have an absolute allergy to anything that smacks of evangelism in any way whatsoever. I think it’s a deeply personal thing, and again that probably comes from my background, which maybe was slightly more evangelical, in a way that as a child I found really uncomfortable, too, let alone as a teenager, which is when I stopped going to church altogether – only to come back to a very, very different sort of church in later life. But it’s funny, isn’t it, because it’s not like there are no poets who are religious, is it? It’s not like that’s the case. But I think there’s a problem in that… it’s so easily linked to homophobia and misogyny and many other things which are horrific to any kind of decent-thinking person, so that if you start a conversation about faith, it’s hard not to… just end up talking about it in those terms. I don’t feel defensive, I should add. I don’t feel defensive of it at all, and almost everybody that I know is an atheist, I think, or they’re very quiet about the faith that they do have. And I think even if I was being directly attacked for it, I wouldn’t feel defensive. I’d probably feel like the person had a very good point.

  RO
  So, as you say, faith has always been present in your poems, but I feel like what’s drawn most attention is the way you write about the kind of ephemera of the secular modern world, and this poem, specifically, doesn’t contain very much of that at all. I wonder if that aspect has been slightly downgraded in favour of a greater focus on these narratives of faith – and doubt. There’s a lot of doubt in everything of yours I’ve read. So is this book in some way attempting to start that conversation, or do you have any worries about taking part in it?

  LK
  No, I’m not worried about that at all. I think, in terms of starting that conversation with myself, and in my work, then yeah, that’s good – but more often than not, the thing that gets focused on in my work is that it’s quite funny, or that it’s deliberately unfunny and that in being unfunny it’s sort of funny. Which is great, and I’ll never stop writing in that way, I don’t think. But I suppose I thought, ‘This is actually something central to my inner life.’ Though even using a phrase like ‘inner life’, for me… it’s about whether thoughts matter or not, it’s about whether your inner life is of any significance whatsoever. And I think something that gets neglected in any discussion about faith is that huge ontological difference between… if you are a complete sort of logical positivist or rationalist, you kind of have to believe that your inner monologue, your inner life, is of no significance whatsoever, that it’s completely senseless, that it’s a process like saliva or the excretory system is a process.

  RO
  Because it doesn’t impact the external world?

  LK
  Yeah… but I think the difference is, when you look at the other extreme, if you look at somebody who does have a faith, then you live in your head a lot more, and you believe in this weird amalgamation of Jung’s collective unconscious, where we’re all kind of linked in this really weird way, in this way that goes beyond the symbolic if you believe in it completely. We’re all linked in this strange, sort of metaphysical space – you have to believe that if you’re going to believe that there’s a point in prayer, if you’re going to believe that there’s any such thing as prayer or meditation and it’s not just a word for – for a strong desire.

  RO
  The line ‘I see what this is about’ sounds like a psychoanalytical phrase. Many of your poems share this concern with how much one’s thoughts are known and seen by others. Does viewing this idea of external judgement through the prism of faith contribute to your sense of where thoughts are situated, how thought works?

  LK
  Yeah, yeah, yeah – and I think maybe it has something to do with the presence of the imagination, of the dream within poetry. There are a lot of things in common between psychoanalysis and poetry, in a way, because for me it’s not surreal – with the ‘s-u-r’ in italics – to include thought, and the imagination, within an autobiographical poem. To me that’s more realistic, more honest, than leaving it out.

  RO
  We’ve touched on the idea of faith and the idea of autobiography, and I guess the fragility of the illustration on a jug, the matryoshka dolls: some of those things are there to comment on the fragility of any moment, aren’t they?

  LK
  Yeah, they’re sort of metonyms. I always find with metonymy it’s only ever accidental in the work, it’s only ever something I notice in retrospect, it’s like, yeah, yeah, that’s good, I can claim that – but I think I did, and then chose to carry on with the almost mantelpiece-like set-up.

  RO
  ‘Rewound to unmake every wound’: just the homonym, the ‘wound’ and ‘wound’, they seem to be standing there for something like art and the control the artist can exercise as against some kind of actual human suffering which can’t be captured or processed. And then the jug is part of it, the sort of aestheticisation of an actual human experience, and then finally ‘we follow the drip of blood in, frankly, / melodramatic slow motion’: Cain’s act of real physical violence becomes immediately viewed through the prism of a film. I wonder, is that a kind of retreat from experience, a kind of – I think you used the word ‘defence mechanism’ earlier. Or is that interaction of art and life inevitable?

  LK
  Yeah, I think it is inevitable. That kind of… enfolding, I’m really interested in. That enfolding of experience, and that way of thinking about experience.

  RO
  And does that include media as a prism for experience?

  LK
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hope not in a way that just mocks it, because we are the media. There are arguments about who gets to say what’s included and about who gets to make the shows and to be the commentators, but still, it’s us.

  RO
  So in a sense, the ‘frankly melodramatic slow motion’, the filmic reinterpretation of real-world events – actually, they’re inseparable, in a modern context?

  LK
  Yeah. That’s already in the realm of a TV critic, really, isn’t it, ‘frankly / melodramatic slow motion’.

  RO
  It’s the retreat into commentary, or maybe it’s not a retreat, but –

  LK
  It’s a retreat on my part. It’s a retreat on my part into commentary. It suggests a comfort in that, yeah, as a retreat would be – not wanting to face up to things, so commenting instead on the technical aspects and the ways in which those technical aspects are a bit sentimental.

  RO
  Form over content. And there’s a comfort in being outside, in being able to dissect rather than having to live through.

  LK
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s not something that’s lost on anyone, is it, so why did I feel the need to point it out? I think it kind of returns to the camera in the first three lines, and the fakiness, the impossibility and staged quality of the whole thing. Maybe what I was riffing on with the beard growing and somehow latching onto things and reversing time was, um, Superman, in, like, the worst Superman movie, where Lois Lane is in some kind of a building that falls down, and there’s an earthquake or something, and she sort of suffocates in earth. It was, like, a U-rated film, but it was quite graphic. The dark earth falling in around Lois Lane, and her stopping breathing – you know, this really upset me as a child, and Superman has to fly really fast around the planet in order to reverse time so that she comes back to life again. As probably a six-year-old seeing this, I was so upset and it immediately took that sadness away from me, Superman flying around the world. It was that kind of comic-book level of an inane attempt to escape reality, of the idea that you can reverse any traumatic event.

  RO
  But within this poem you’re directly challenging that, really, or the potential comfort of that. The comfort of the potential reversal is replaced by the comfort of pointing out that it’s all a trick.

  LK
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s it. So the special effects in the final lines put that back, front and centre, don’t they? And with the jug, I guess that’s a slightly heavy-handed Keats reference, to the whole idea of time in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, of a moment that you don’t value enough at the time.

  RO
  A jug is much sillier than an urn.

  LK
  The whole word ‘jug’ – yeah. I think maybe in an early draft, I had ‘urn’, and I was like, that’s too much.

  RO
  But ‘jug’ is better, because it’s kind of kitsch, isn’t it? That doesn’t mean it’s untrue.

  LK
  [Laughs] No! I’m really kind of obsessed with kitsch, in my work. I think there are poets who’ve used popular culture a lot better than I have, and a lot more powerfully. I mean, I think you can go back to the early New York School, whose work is full of cartoon characters. There’s the famous John Ashbery sestina about Popeye, which is great. Thing is, Popeye as a comic strip was already kind of high art in a way. The original Popeye comic strips are astoundingly good, so it was worth – it was already quite poetic I think. There was a really good Amazon review of The Harbour Beyond the Movie – or was it of Migraine Hotel? ‘This work for me is on the knife-edge of naff’: I think that was the title of his review, and I’ve always been really grateful for that one Amazon reviewer, because even the word ‘naff’ is kind of a stupid word that nobody likes to use. It’s a naff word, ‘naff’ – but he was totally right in saying that my work is always flirting with that kind of disaster.

  RO
  Is the disaster the sentimentality itself, or is it that the kitsch refers to the ornament, the ‘silly’ sort of aesthetics?

  LK
  Yeah, and this is making me think of iconography, which is one of the things that I struggled with when I was converting to the Orthodox Church. Within the Orthodox Church there is still an idea – an actual idea – of the sacraments, and of a space being sacred, and of a thing being sacred, which Protestantism has almost completely done away with, so that the sacred becomes purely symbolic. Like, the church I grew up in sub-let the assembly hall of a local primary school; the idea of a “consecrated space” is anathema to you if you’re low-church. I was trying to work my head into a place where I could accept some kind of literal reality to that, and of icons actually being holy, because initially it seemed to be almost a kind of idolatry. Icons go beyond being holy works of art; they’re supposedly a sort of window into the true nature of that which they depict. And it’s interesting to try to have some belief in that without it becoming superstitious, kind of, ‘Have some lucky dirt, this will solve your problems, I’ll sprinkle it on you and it will –’ The complete opposite to the kitsch object is the sacred object, the object that’s invested with this… power. When I started seriously writing poetry, I’d already started going to these long, incantatory Orthodox services, so it was already on my mind. I think, early on, I was using the poetry to interrogate, to satirise my own real discomfort with trying to take anything like this more seriously.

  RO
  Is there even a kind of analogy there between the sincere and the frivolous?

  LK
  Yes, totally. I really think that that’s there. To me it’s a necessity. The only way of really trying to interpret or come to terms with anything is in this tension between the serious and the frivolous, the sincere and the frivolous.

  RO
  Is it to do with what you said about thought? That flights of fancy, the byways, actually lead to and support and validate the emotional disclosure in some way?

  LK
  Yeah, okay – and I think sometimes that doesn’t work. I think sometimes it’s either too obscure, or it’s not obscure enough, right, if that makes sense? It can feel like moralising, like… trying to win someone over. I dunno.

  RO
  I suppose on the one hand you’ve got your purely permutational poems that are designed as formal exercises – and on the other you’ve got poems which read essentially as transcriptions of real-world experience, whether or not they’ve actually been modified through your process. And are you saying that somewhere between those two things is the potential for failure?

  LK
  Or for curdling, or just… things that don’t really belong in the same poem or in the same collection. It’s like, ‘Actually, just do one or the other.’ But the literature that I like is itself quite playful and complicated and has elements of personal disclosure alongside elements of deliberate distancing. The freedom to use both extremes is something that’s quite key to contemporary poetry for me. I read a lot of younger poets, and I really enjoy the relationship in their work between truth, self-expression, and self-awareness. I like the self-awareness; I find that the opposite of self-indulgence.

  There has to be something you’re offering the reader. If you’re just mocking the very idea of anything making sense, if you’re just saying there are no answers, that’s actually sort of stupidly easy to do, isn’t it? Admitting that you know nothing is the ultimate wisdom but it’s also the ultimate ignorance.

  RO
  Thinking about the ‘suicide bomber is making a pasta collage’ line, how much importance should we put on small moments of interpersonal tension or friction?

  LK
  Yeah, that’s a fairly obvious way of saying ‘we were all kids once’, right? The mother of one of the Columbine killers has recently published a book. She’s been giving interviews on the radio, talking about how her son used to be a sort of happy, joyful child. That’s the disturbing and upsetting thing, isn’t it? It’s that you can go down, as can anyone. I don’t want to be Puritanical here, but you’ve got to guard that which about yourself is decent, that which about yourself is… human, and I think sometimes we forget how fragile that is. Our shock at atrocities, or our inability to even basically deal with fundamental things like our own mortality, it comes from neglecting how fragile we are, spiritually as well as physically. A poem in The Migraine Hotel has a line, ‘Each day contains a hundred subtle chasms.’

  RO
  ‘The Dusty Era’.

  LK
  Yeah, and I kind of mean that, you know.

  RO
  And I think we can tell that you do as well. So you’re saying that across your work you’re kind of asking how much weight to put on those things and where to place them within everything else – the subtle chasms?

  LK
  Yeah, that’s it – and I suppose that those can be more than just the charms on a charm bracelet, more than just the luminous little moments of insight.

  RO
  Maybe we could shift into thinking about influence. Is there anyone that you’ve been reading or listening to that’s particularly shaped the direction of this book?

  LK
  There was. As an almost formal exercise, I mentioned trying to get them in some order to have a playlist for the launch party, so I was listening to stuff that mentioned Cain, such as a really good Frank Black and the Catholics song, ‘The Steak and Station’. I was listening to quite a bit of his stuff – I like how he can use some between-song conversations like he did with the Pixies to make the lyrics of a song. The new Joanna Newsom I was spinning quite a lot, I think, when I was writing this.

  RO
  Were you reading any specifically religious work?

  LK
  I’ve probably read quite a lot surrounding Orthodoxy. There’s a really good Penguin edition of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and the Philokalia as well, which is a sort of four-volume thing that Faber did, written by monks, and particularly extreme monks who just lived in such deprivation. And there’s some really weird stuff in all that, there are the hermits who would have one little hole in the cave, partly so people could pass food through but partly so people could ask them questions.

  RO
  Like anchorites?

  LK
  Yeah, exactly. I mean I did a lot of specific reading for research. There’s a brilliant scholar, Ruth Mellinkoff, whose book The Mark of Cain was a really big early influence. It’s quite a short book as well, one you can read in an evening. And I was reading books about Byron’s verse play, so I was doing a lot of that quite targeted research. After that I came to José Saramago. He’s got a book, his last novel I think, called Cain, written in his usual kind of breathless, punctuationless prose. I really liked Blindness, but Cain wasn’t that interesting as a discussion of faith, because it felt like a bit of an adolescent, ‘Religion is bullshit, let’s just retell it from a different perspective.’ I recently reread Berryman’s The Dream Songs, not for the way that he writes – because I think that that’s so much him; I don’t think you can recreate that – but for the freedom. For the freedom to be more than one person in your poems, and to be sort of the interlocutor and the… interlocuted [chuckles].

  RO
  Now you mention it, Henry and Mr. Bones obviously have a lot in common with you and Cain here. Or you and the Wolf, previously.

  LK
  That was conscious. Oh God, another really big influence is Anne Carson! In a way, this whole collection came out of teaching a module on the Creative Writing MA at Birmingham called ‘The Poem As Story’, where we start looking at Ted Hughes’s Crow, and then the next week we look at Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I love the way that Carson uses metafictional constraints – she has essays within her poetry collections, commentaries on the poetry within the poetry, and then the poems themselves are just so witty and invitingly written. There’s some quite arcane, difficult stuff around them, but once you get into the main poems of Autobiography of Red, it’s – it’s just beautiful, and I’ve had people who’ve never really read that much poetry before finding that book funny and moving and deeply thought-provoking. Teaching on that module for five years got me thinking that the next book I do, I want it to be this sort of thing, almost like a novel in verse, something that has a consistent thing, a really consistent thing, a deeply consistent thing. And I think that’s also to do with the fact that I feel kind of through with doing collections of poems that just happen to be by me; I feel like I’ve done that. I’m not saying that I feel like that’s over and done with as a form of poetic publication, because I don’t think it is – it’s just that there are people who do that really well and I think increasingly that I’m not one of those people, that actually I work better on a larger canvas.

  RO
  I mean, the wolf poems are often like that, fifteen pages, exploration of one theme…

  LK
  People seem to like the wolf prose poems, as they’re almost like fragmented stories really, so I thought, ‘Shall I just do a big wolf book?’ And should it be something that gathers the last six wolf poems, some of the unpublished wolf poems, and then also ten new wolf poems or something like that – or should it be like a novel-length thing, that is, like, fifty wolf poems? But then I just gradually felt like… I don’t actually want to. I’m attracted to it as an idea, and I’m attracted to it as this imaginary object, a big book with a wolf on it, but actually… I don’t want to do that. So I conscientiously didn’t have a single wolf in this book.

  RO
  So, one: why Cain instead? Two: I think Cain comes off as a lot kinder than the wolf and a lot more… apparently helpful. Well, the wolf seems to want to be helpful as well, but Cain seems more successful at it. And in some ways, Cain in your book is like Lucifer in Byron’s Cain: he’s the person who shows up and says, ‘I know you’ve got questions, I’m going to take you somewhere and ask even more questions.’

  LK
  Cain is the trickster figure in this, yeah. And that probably came from talking about Hughes’s Crow as a trickster figure, or Henry as a trickster in Berryman, and I think I’m just fascinated by that as an archetype – whenever I have a kind of imaginary guide figure in a poem, I want it to be of that type. Cain’s almost like a carer who shows up, who steps in to try to make sure I’m OK. In some ways he’s a ridiculous figure, and in other ways he’s… he knows more than the narrator does in the collection, than I do.

  RO
  There was one question I wanted to come back to about this poem: it was about the teleology, and whether writing a narrative backwards actually allowed you to tell a more straightforward narrative than some of your poems.

  LK
  Sometimes the story itself can be almost embarrassingly simple, but the way it’s told is interesting and that gives it its energy. In this collection I had to find ways to be more honest and direct, but in such a way that 1) it wouldn’t be off-putting, and 2) it wouldn’t sound like I was saying, ‘Ahh… this is what I really think.’ And yet I hope it’s more complicated than what I’ve done in the past – I hope it’s more difficult! [Laughs.]

  March 2016

• Little Atoms - http://littleatoms.com/words/luke-kennard-capitalism-love-and-millennials

  Words 02/03/2017
  Luke Kennard on capitalism, love and millennials
  By Ralph Jones
  Image by Jacob KennardImage by Jacob Kennard

  In conversation with poet and novelist about his debut novel The Transition
  The first time Luke Kennard was interviewed in a newspaper about his poetry, his little brother told him that all of his friends now assumed he was a millionaire. Given that The Guardian recently called Kennard “an overachieving poet” in a glowing review of his novel, presumably he is positively swimming in tenners. I ask him how it feels to be described so hyperbolically by a national newspaper. Kennard, who sometimes sounds like Hugh Grant doing an impression of Hugh Grant, finds it amusing. But, as with a lot of publicity, he says, “It doesn't necessarily sell any books. It just sort of makes people think that you're selling books.”

  If true, this is a shame, as Kennard’s debut novel The Transition deserves to fly off shelves. It is a delightful spider of a book – he says that about eight big themes run through it. Karl and Genevieve, once teenage sweethearts, are now adults, and not just failing to pay the bills but on the very verge of eviction. They, like today's twenty and thirtysomethings (the novel is set in the near future), are totally at the mercy of their landlord. After Karl becomes entangled in online fraud and wants to eschew jail time, they have little option but to sign up to mysterious mentoring scheme The Transition.

  “Love is, in a way, a form of resistance"
  Ostensibly a sickeningly aspirational programme designed to help couples onto the property ladder by teaching them about responsibility, budgeting and self-actualisation, The Transition soon becomes a morbid obsession to Karl. He begins to discover, through the help of former pupils of the scheme, that the programme may have sinister and hidden motives. Slowly, it drives him and his psychologically vulnerable wife (Genevieve) apart, sucking her into a void that Karl is terrified he will not be able to bring her back from. The novel is, in Kennard's words, something of a “capitalist love story”.

  If a book could be said to be dripping with delicious phrases and images, The Transition drips and doesn't stop dripping until you've snapped it shut. As is the case with his poetry (“I'm so modest I've been handing out / someone else's business cards for the past five years”), Kennard has a way of stopping you short, making you imagine the phrase he has slipped into the letterbox of your mind, and then making you scoff in delight. Given that we are in almost every social interaction trying to make old or new acquaintances laugh in a search for common ground, I ask Kennard why more novels aren't concerned with being funny. “I think there's maybe a sense that humour within fiction means that something isn't Oscar-worthy,” he says. “I really value humour within fiction and within poetry. I think it's the only way I know how to write.”

  "Humour punctures the divide between author and reader"
  Dialogue, too, he recognises, is one of his strengths. People in The Transition don't talk like characters, they talk like people – and, like humour puncturing the divide between author and reader, this means something. It is memorable. And it assures you that with Kennard at the helm you might just be in safe hands.

  Heading up The Transition, however, are a far less trustworthy duo, Janna and Stu. Through these young, cloyingly patronising professionals, Kennard gives a mouthpiece to a vision he calls the English Tory Dream (as opposed to the American Dream). “At some point it was instilled in you that money isn't important,” Janna tells Karl and Genevieve at one point, after she has urged the couple to quit their jobs. Needling away at them, she and Stu serve to gently but firmly denigrate every facet of Karl and Genevieve's once-happy lives, from their low-paid jobs to their dental hygiene. They embody a major source of frustration for Kennard: the disdain, expressed in opinion piece after opinion piece, towards a generation of feckless “millennials”.

  To the author – a self-confessed “old, greying millennial” at the age of 35 – this attitude is infuriating. “Those articles really make steam come out of my ears,” he says. “You can dress this up any way you want. It's basically just about house prices. It's not about work ethic. Because that's such bullshit. We're not choosing to live like this.” Kennard is prone to laughing enthusiastically and infectiously every few sentences, whether or not anything funny has happened.

  “It is obscene, what has happened to property,” he says. “It's just as well that we're not going to retire. By the time our generation reaches retirement age, retirement age will have gone up to about 75. I genuinely do have a kind of lower-middle-class anger about that.” This bleak vision of the future – it would be unfair to call it pessimistic, as it seems more than plausible – courses through the novel. As Karl tries to overthrow The Transition, stranded from Genevieve, frantic and alone, he is fighting against the status quo itself. And, as Kennard says, anyone trying to mount a charge against the capitalist system is pitting themselves against an unbeatable adversary: “You can only succeed on its terms so you're bound to fail, especially if you try to resist.”

  There is, however, a chink in the armour. Karl can lose everything – he is happy to accept that he should by rights be cleaning toilets, not writing online essays for students – but he cannot lose Genevieve. At the heart of this portrait of our creepy and suffocating future is a love story painted with real tenderness. Love, as Kennard says, may be economically inadvisable in the extreme, but that will never stop us falling for it. In The Transition, it is the green shoot that finds its way up through the polished marble floor tiles. “This is going to sound extremely sentimental,” Kennard says, “but love is in a way a form of resistance.”

  The Transition is out now (Fourth Estate).

  poetry interview
  Words

  Ralph Jones
  Ralph Jones is a staff writer for ShortList magazine. He has written for titles including The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vice, and New Statesman
  @OhHiRalphJones

• The Tangerine - https://thetangerinemagazine.com/print/interview-luke-kennard

  An Interview with Luke Kennard
  By Padraig Regan

  An abridged version of this interview appears in issue three of The Tangerine.

  Photo credit: Billie Charity-Prescott/ Penned in the Margins
  My conversation with Luke Kennard had something of a third participant. We were sitting in a pub referred to most commonly as ‘The Parrot Bar’ on account of the African grey caged by the window. The parrot’s contribution to this interview has not been recorded below seeing as it consisted of little more than squawks and harmonic chirpings that sounded eerily familiar to the various notification tones of the iPhone. I mention this because the idea of a parrot pretending to be a phone seems to have a Kennardian sensibility. Kennard is a writer who blends surreal, incongruent imagery with minutely observed satire and social comment. His most recent book, The Transition, is a novel set in a near future which makes us painfully aware of the absurdities of our own time. It is equal parts dystopian thriller and suburban sit-com. Kennard is also the author of five books of poetry and one novella, all of which display the same surprising imagination and commitment to humour as a serious literary mode. Reading Kennard’s poetry, you are confronted with men who have sex with ghosts, literate centipedes with dubious politics, murderers and weirdos; but more than that you get a sense of a writer injecting some fun and true, unpretentious strangeness into the often rather stuffy world of poetry without losing sight of its very serious capabilities.

  Your most recent book is your first novel, but not the first work of fiction that you’ve written. Did you always write fiction while you were writing poems, or did the fiction come later?

  Yeah, it was always at the same time. From the age of seven or eight I was trying to write, fiction mostly, and I didn’t really write much poetry. My mum had a Collected Poems of e.e. cummings and that was one of the first books of poetry that I really loved when I was young. But I didn’t write much poetry until I was at university. I wrote terrible lyrics for a band that I was in when I was fifteen or sixteen. I mean humiliatingly bad. I wasn’t that aware of contemporary poetry. I grew up in a light industrial town in rural Somerset where there wasn’t much poetry going on, or if there was it would be at Glastonbury and it would be quite basic spoken word about crystals and things like that. I didn’t take the initiative to get involved in poetry until I started studying English and I had a tutor who was a poet called Andy Brown who got me reading the New York School, which I really enjoyed. I remember reading John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and Frank O’Hara really excited me. I thought, this is something I’d like to be able to do.

  What was it about the New York School that was so exciting to you?

  It just seemed so completely convincing. Actually, before that I read the Bloodaxe The New Poetry anthology and there were some writers in that who stood out to me for similar reasons to why the New York School appealed to me. It had John Ash, the Manchester poet who spent some time in New York working with Ashbery and they had Frank Kuppner, the Scottish Informationist poet. There’s a bit in Kuppner’s A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty where somebody finds a manuscript and you can’t read all of it so there’s a stanza that’s just ‘something, something, something, something, something…’. I guess it was their playfulness. It didn’t make me laugh out loud but it just delighted me in some way. There was something of their sense of humour, their sense of life, their sense of what it is actually interesting to say. I don’t think it’s anything that I’ve been able to capture; what I do is quite different to the writing that influenced me, but there’s a sort of joy and sort of lightness to those poems which I really love. I was really into a band called Pavement as well, and I think their lyrics were quite influenced by the New York School. To me it felt like the poetry equivalent to some of the American bands that I like, they seem to have a similar process: slightly collage-y but using collage to create a certain mood.

  While we’re talking about influence, do you ever get influenced across genres? Are there any poets who you think have influenced your fiction or any fiction writers whose influence has shown up in your poetry?

  When I was researching Cain, I read quite a lot of fiction, Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, a Jose Saramago novel just called Cain. It’s not as good as Blindness (I think Blindness is a work of genius). His Cain book is a little bit simplistic, a little like an angry religious novel where Cain is actually really good, and has been misunderstood. It works as a kind of energetic angry exercise but it’s not that interesting. I’m trying to think of the novelists that really appealed to me when I started to write poetry. There was an American literature module that I took at university and I got quite into William Faulkner, not so much for the Southern Gothic atmosphere, but for the technique and the way the stories were so hidden, so latent. I think that had an influence on my poetry rather than on my approach to fiction. I don’t write fiction in that way at all; I think I’m quite straightforward in my approach, quite linear. But I think that work, and reading around Woolf and Joyce, and some of that… I think particularly with a project like the anagrams and something like Finnegans Wake… I remember having to give a presentation on it in a first-year literature seminar, because I couldn’t stop running my mouth off about Finnegans Wake, like one of those quite annoying members of a seminar group who’s always talking. And I was talking about Finnegans Wake and my tutor said, ‘Right well, since you’ve read Finnegans Wake, Kennard, you can give a fifteen-minute talk on it next week.’ And actually, I hadn’t ever read Finnegans Wake. I’d read a paragraph about it and was basing all my mouthing off on that. So I had to spend a week in the library with Finnegans Wake, and with A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, which is as beautiful and strange a book as Finnegans Wake is. It is complete esoteric nonsense; it doesn’t really unlock the novel at all, it just gives you way more information that you could possibly need. It’s a way in, but it’s a way in to a labyrinth, it’s its own little maze. Thankfully, I only had to give a ten or fifteen-minute talk on it so it didn’t have to be a life-changing piece of criticism. But just engaging with that work seriously, so I could say something about it, and having to read a book that intensely, I think that came back when I was writing the anagram sequence in Cain, as well as the French Oulipo stuff: ways of generating ideas. I was feeling kind of bored in my voice and in my way of writing. I wanted something that was going to push in a different direction.

  Whenever you start writing something, do you know in advance if it’s going to be a poem or a story or the beginning of a novel, or do you just start writing and decide after some of it’s done?

  I don’t know whether it’s going to go anywhere, whether it’s actually going to develop into something. But I do recycle a lot and I go back through things that I’ve scrapped. Sometimes things from years ago, like a decade ago. And I’ll just go through my files and often I can’t even remember having started something. I can feel my lack of patience and my boredom as I’m writing, kind of. Sometimes it feels quite a promising set-up and a good idea, and then I just kind of screw it up by either becoming too self-referential or it just goes wrong. It’s a promising idea but I can feel myself veering off the road. But actually, if I take out the two paragraphs at the end where I ruined it then maybe there’s something there. So I do that. I feel like between poetry and prose, if this doesn’t sound pretentious, I use different parts of my brain. So even with something like short fiction and prose poetry, which ostensibly are fairly similar, in my mind there is a distinction and I feel very different when I’m working on poetry and prose-poetry.

  You’re known for writing a lot more prose poetry than most contemporary poets. Why do think that’s a form that has been attractive to you?

  I remember when I first encountered a prose poem. Someone gave me an anthology that was trying to be a history of the form. It had some Baudelaire and some things that Baudelaire had translated as well. Baudelaire used the form as a sort of rebellion, a sort of hissy fit against the alexandrine. Some of his prose poems are just a little paragraph, and some are thirty pages long and have dialogue in them and are formatted like a short story. It’s impossible to say why they’re poems except for the fact that Baudelaire says they are. So it starts with a kind of nonsensical origin point. But it really appealed to me in the same way that flash fiction appealed to me. But I find the terms around extremely short fiction to be slightly twee; I don’t like the term flash fiction. I think just write short stories whatever length you want, it’s fine. Like Richard Brautigan’s one page stories in Revenge of the Lawn, they’re beautiful and they’re clearly stories, they’re not prose poems. I feel like a prose poem has to have less narrative drive. It can be just completely tangential or it can be like an abstract expressionist painting with language. But at the same time some of them are quite discursive and anecdotal. It incorporates non-poetic forms. Anne Carson’s essays within her poetry collections always strike me as a form of prose poetry. It’s a kind of container into which you can put non-poetic things and treat it as a poem.

  I know you’ve cited Carson as an influence before––when did you start reading her work and what do you think you’ve taken from her?

  It was probably during my MA in around 2002. But I came to it all out of order. I think I read Autobiography of Red first and then Men in the Off Hours, both of which I just loved. So I have her on one of my MA modules that I teach at the moment. It’s a module I teach on poetic sequences and experimental form in complete collections. And it’s always the one that goes over best. Some of these are students with no interest in poetry whatsoever and aren’t looking forward to having to study some poetry either, but that book, I feel like it’s sort of a life-changing book for a lot of people; they just adore it. So I think one of the influences from her, and this goes for Men in the Off Hours as well, is just her range of forms. Like the ‘TV Men’ in Men in Off Hours was quite a big influence on Cain, and that decision to make the middle section into a TV show. And that middle section leans quite heavily on Carson’s technique in those poems––it’s a slightly snarky sequence, the ‘TV Men’. It’s these disastrous attempts at adapting classic works with these TV producer idiots, essentially. I think her extraordinary and off-kilter sense of humour which is just completely assured, I think that struck me instantly reading her work––just how exquisite her timing is and how absolutely confident it is. One of my favourite pamphlets of Float is ‘Zeus Bits’. I really love that; I love the nymphs in a milk bottle, things like that, these wonderful swerves of the imagination and things that seem to come out of nowhere and yet have absolute authority. Trust is always quite important for me in poetry and the writers I stay with are the ones that I just feel this absolute sense of, ‘I really love what you’re doing’, and I trust everything you do. And it’s something that I find harder with the more extreme avant-garde side of poetry. It’s not that I think people are disingenuous but I often can’t get enough of a handle on it to find something to trust, to find something to engage with. It doesn’t always have to be humour that engages me but that really helps for me, that really wins me over quite easily, if something makes me laugh. But then, quite often hearing somebody read their work changes my mind about it. Like I’d always really struggled with Keston Sutherland’s work; it’s always been this sort of obelisk on the horizon and I’ve been like, ‘Aw, I don’t know what to make of that at all’. And then I heard him read and just loved it; the absolute assurance of his performance was powerful. It was pretty weird and there were bits of it that seemed to be a dream, and then the dream went back into the real world. The movement was so much more visible. It made me go back to his work and get what was going on there, I suppose. I think whenever something is tricky or difficult, trust really comes into it. And Carson is someone I’ve always found easy to trust and easy to follow, easy to go wherever the work’s leading. Maybe there’s an intellectual generosity to her stuff as well; whenever she mentions an arcane bit of classical studies or philosophy that I’m totally ignorant of, she does so in such a way that allows you into it. Rather than it feeling just like a reference to Heidegger that I don’t understand, she’ll actually talk about how tricky Heidegger is, and you have to think your way to it. Her way of introducing themes, her complexity, is really compelling.

  In your novel The Transition there are a few things that would feel familiar to people who have read your earlier books of poetry and I wanted to ask you about some of them. The first one is this way of blending social commentary with something absurd or surreal. How do you think those two things relate to each other?

  It’s maybe a way to avoid being preachy, or just sort of complaining in your work. I think the danger for me was always the other extreme, that I would write something that was just absurdist without actually very much to it. And that’s what my tutor on my MA was always warning me against. After The Solex Brothers, I wrote a load more of those seven-chapter prose poem sequences and they were rubbish. I wrote my undergrad dissertation about Raymond Carver and I was into that sort of American dirty realism. I really enjoyed it partly for its sort of absurd isolation but also just what it was working towards, what it was representing. Raymond Carver was very influential in terms of dialogue for me. I liked the repetition, and the fact that it’s actually very stylised but still feels quite authentic, the way his characters talk to each other and talk at cross purposes and talk over each other. We had fortnightly sketch revues in the basement of a pub in Exeter and I would write monologues for some of the drama students. And I’d think, how ridiculous a monologue can I get them to read? Trying to push it further, to make it more contorted and strange and almost stupid at times. The monologue would become a joke against itself. And I know that that’s always been something in my poetry as well; occasionally it is a sort of inversion, or a joke on itself, or a joke on even trying to write poetry. At times that can be painfully self-conscious but at other times I feel like that’s a necessary concession. Unless you’re just going to do awful tub-thumping political poetry you need to be quite self-conscious. You need to question what it is that you’re doing, what do you want to get out of it, what are you trying to give people and does it matter who that person is. I don’t think too much about the reader, but you know that all you can try to do is write something that you would be delighted to read and through that you are sort of writing credibly as well. It sort of falls apart when you’re trying to write for this imaginary general audience. There isn’t really one; it’s a myth that there’s a big audience that you have to reduce your work and your outlook for because otherwise they won’t get it. Well, no, no; it really isn’t that. People respond to idiosyncrasy; people respond to you actually being the writer that you are. And it can take fifty years, but eventually it does work. It’s that thing where you feel you’ve found a kindred spirit. I had that recently with Mary Ruefle. A friend of mine gave me her most recent collection and I was really blown away by that. The way she captures thought and memory in way that feels frighteningly real, a way that feels so much like what’s actually happening inside your head. It’s good to read something that blows you away, that makes you feel like, ‘Oh my god, I want to try to do something like that but I don’t think I ever will.

  Another situation that I see recurring in your work is where there are these kinds of relationships that look like they should be caring relationships but end up becoming exercises of power. I’m thinking of Cain and the character Luke Kennard, the murderer and the parole officer, and those two couples in The Transition. Where do these double acts come from?

  When there’s an expectation of certain roles, it can often go the opposite way. So the key worker is more morally repugnant than the murderer in his gloating, essentially. With the central couple in The Transition, Karl and Genevieve, he loves her but he’s not particularly sure that she loves him. I think there’s always the suspicion that she has settled for him because, in spite of all of his various flaws, he is reliable in that he’s kind of obsessed with her. I think in any relationship where you are responsible, or caring, or doing a lot of the emotional heavy lifting you can become a bit of a martyr, you can become very aware of the sacrifices you’re making. And if it is a mental health condition you’re trying to support someone through, you can end up making it worse by being hyper-vigilant. I’m interested in the clichés about relationships and the stories that we tell ourselves about our own relationships and other people’s relationships, and how they don’t really bear that much scrutiny quite often when you examine what is actually going on between two people, which is kind of unknowable. I think universally we take our own relationships extremely seriously but we’re usually quite dismissive of other people’s. We know the power somebody else can hold over us, we know the power we hold over somebody else, we know how intense that can be. But we don’t, or I don’t, necessarily ascribe that to other people, which is a failing of compassion, in a way, a failing to understand everybody else’s lives. Sorry, I’m talking myself into knots a little bit here. I think that is a dynamic I’m interested in: what we do to each other, what we get from each other, and why and how we justify that. I feel like in The Transition, it’s ultimately positive. They do love each other, and ultimately they do prioritise each other. There’s something in that, in the sense of obligation that we have to each other. In honouring that, there is some meaning and some dignity. Even if it’s not terribly romantic, it still matters. It’s essentially that love doesn’t make any economic sense. And you see this in self-help advice. It’s like, ‘You might be in a toxic relationship’, and that’s not to belittle actual toxic relationships, but there’s almost this thing like, ‘You’re with someone who’s holding you back therefore you should just drop them, fuck them, whatever, find somebody who really allows you to be yourself’. Well actually we do maybe owe each other a little bit more than that, we do owe each other trying to make something work and not just to say, ‘You’re no good for me’. I feel like sometimes there’s a lack of willingness to actually work. The moment a relationship feels difficult or is challenged, which all relationships are going to be, you’ve got this raft of advice saying maybe they’re just not right for you. There’s no incentive to actually work through things, apart from legally, which is why there’s a bit in the novel where Janna is questioning them on why they even got married and Karl says that there is something to be said for making it extremely inconvenient to leave somebody; it works for both of us in a way, that we can’t walk out without it being quite a complex thing, so you’ve got this bond of inconvenience. And sometimes that is what’s holding you together, you need that.

  When did you first become interested in the character Cain and why?

  I think part of it was returning to the murderer sequence. Part of it was thinking about how, apart from having the Usborne guide to Greek and Norse legends growing up, I didn’t really have any background in the classics, in that mythology. In a way this is my equivalent. Sometimes it can sort of irritate me a little bit when poets just reach for the gods instantly as if that’s sort of a shortcut to profundity. I think that’s something that Carson is always so careful to avoid, just writing a poem called ‘Leda and the Swan’ that rehashes that story for little or no reason. My equivalent of that, the thing that was actually part of my upbringing and education is probably the Old Testament. I was brought up very Low Church which has a weird obsession with the stories of the Old Testament. When I started going to the Orthodox Church that I married into (the services follow quite a strict calendar) it really struck me that there’s only one day in the year, Easter Saturday, when they read from the Old Testament at all. Apart from that it’s fairly irrelevant. There’s a gospel reading and an epistle reading for every feast, and they only refer to the Old Testament for its prophecies. Whereas in my Baptist upbringing they were crazy about it. I’m fairly sure that there was barely ever a mention of the New Testament. The focus was so much more on the Old Testament rather than the New one, which is really bizarre. In some ways it’s a friendlier, more progressive church but it’s actually got a more regressive idea of the Trinity. It’s all the stories from Kings and Judges, all the really fucked up stories. It’s hard to justify or interpret why those would be the ones that sermons would be preached on. And if they did refer to the New Testament it would be to parables as if they were things that had actually happened. But it is there, it’s a part of how I was raised. That felt like the kind of mythological material I would reach for if I was trying to do that. It would be completely disingenuous of me to pretend that I knew that much about Greek mythology at all really, except for very surface stuff. But this stuff I do know about, so there’s something there, there’s something to tap into.

  The anagram poems in Cain reminded me of some of your earlier poems where you keep a sentence structure and just swap out particular words. What do you think those kinds of strict formal structures allow a poem to do that a freer style of writing would not?

  I think it has that effect of forcing your hand, like a traditional form in a way; of getting you to come up with phrases that you wouldn’t otherwise have discovered. It makes writing into something that you can actually surprise yourself with. I used to use that technique of writing a sentence structure and just swapping out the details. I think the master of that would be somebody like Matthew Welton. I would sometimes use those as warm-up exercises. If I had a few hours to write and I just felt blank and angry, I would use that to get things moving. Some of them coalesced into pieces I was quite happy with. It was the same with the anagrams. They were the last thing that was written of the book, and they took about a year I think, including writing up the notes. The anagrams were kind of tortuous but in a way that I sort of felt I needed. I was in between rewrites of the novel. My agent would send me some notes like, ‘Yeah, I want you to change this, this whole part isn’t making sense’. Then I’d address all her changes in about five days. I’d work through them really quickly and not work on anything else, and then she’d take three months to get back to me with the next set of notes, having reread it. Agents are kind of long-suffering: they read the same thing so many times. So I had this blank period where I couldn’t work on the novel and the anagrams filled that time. It gave me something that I was looking forward to going back to every night because it was such a process and it didn’t matter how I was feeling. I could still take the same 351 letters and try to wring something out of them. And there were plenty that just failed, where I’d get two thirds of the way through and all I’d have left would be Hs and I’d just have to scrap it. Eventually you find your methods with something like that, I think. So after about ten I was like, ‘Ok, the way I need to do this is…’ Because you’ve got almost every letter at your disposal at the beginning… that’s the thing at the start, you can say anything at the start. But then the more phrases you put in, the more limited you are with what’s left. So sometimes you have to make a joke out of it, as a way of using up the Hs.

  Like listing different kinds of pencils.

  Yes, listing pencils, a lot of sighing and laughing and snoring and things like that. So seeing as it’s quite open at the start, what I need is a good opening sentence and that’s when the actual plot, such as it is, started to sneak in. I need an overall structure, some sense of it being a story unfolding. So I need a good first sentence and a good last sentence and then I just need to get from A to B. It’s a little bit like a sort of cheap parlour trick. Of course the effect is that the last sentence in each of the anagram pieces appears to be the last thing that you’ve written but of course it isn’t. And that’s the slight of hand that I realised was necessary, because otherwise the last sentence was always going to be the shittest one because it would be all the leftover letters. I just really, really loved the whole process and got quite obsessed with it and read I lot about the history of the anagram form in Jewish and Arabic poetry from that early Hebrew epoch; and lots of weird esoteric stuff about angels, the parts of Jewish mythology that aren’t parts of Christian mythology, like Metatron and things like that; and these various obscure things that had never been a part of my understanding of faith, that I found quite exciting to read about and build into it and hint at. Trying to build some mystery into it, build some sense of something else going on, that may or may actually be going on. But you gradually get to weave in all these references. There’s a richness there that I guess I really liked. So it never really felt like a drag even though it was frustrating at times. It was a way of getting me wanting to write again. Before Cain, I’d been feeling sort of jaded about poetry, certainly about my own poetry. I wasn’t really sure if I was going to write another book. I knew that it needed to be something different to the fourth book, which is I think the least good thing that I’ve published. I like some of the individual poems in there but I don’t think it hangs together as a collection at all. It got me thinking why is that, why am I not particularly happy with it, why do I not necessarily want anyone to buy it? And it’s because there’s no governing principle; there’s nothing that ties these poems together, it’s just like a selection of B-sides. So I was desperate to do something that wasn’t like that, that was the opposite. It came out at about the same time as Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which does a similar thing although it’s more of a hybrid novel-stroke-poetry collection, which I like as well. You just have to find ways of keeping yourself interested, I suppose, in your own work. I’m back in that position again where I’ve got a manuscript’s worth of poems and absolutely no desire to make them into a manuscript. So I feel that the next thing that I do has to be a similar sort of project to Cain, it has to be a … Well, I’ve no idea what it’s going to be at the moment, I think I just need to leave it a few years.

  Todd Swift has said about you that, ‘Among poets under thirty-five or so he is almost revered and often imitated.’ First of all, do you think that’s correct? And how does it feel whenever you read poems by a younger poet and you can detect that that poet has read your work and it has had an effect on them?

  It’s weird. It’s really touching, that kind of thing. But also, you feel sort of hyper-aware of not wanting to feel that way if it’s not the case. You know, it could just be that they’ve had similar influences to you, like James Tate, Russell Edson, that sort of thing. A few years ago, the editor of an indie press I know said something like, ‘We’re getting sent a lot of bad Kennard from sixteen-year-old boys’. I don’t know if that’s correct but it’s really sweet. If you feel as though you’ve given some kind of permission in the same way that the poets who influenced me did, then that’s an absolutely lovely thing. It’s a strange feeling and I think it doesn’t really feel real to me; it doesn’t feel like it can actually be the case even if it is, even if people tell me that it is. But I feel as though all that I did was take influence perhaps a bit more from American poets than from British poets, which certainly some British poets were already doing. I think it’s just a lot of things about that particular time, that year when The Harbour Beyond the Movie came out. If it hadn’t been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, then it would have sunk without a trace. So there’s lots of things that happened which are just good luck. And then people cite you as an influence and then you think, ‘Oh but that’s maybe just bogus’. It’s not that I was doing anything particularly new. In a way it’s like the best feeling in the world, to feel like you’ve allowed somebody to do their own work. The only time it feels uncomfortable is when it feels like it’s just a sort of a misunderstood homage, like when people think that you’re just doing a certain thing so they’ll do something that’s just kind of wacky and surreal in a slightly reductive way. I feel like that’s where you need to find your own way. There are thousands and thousands of absurdist writers you could look at but it’s about finding what you’re using that for, finding that underlying sense of something else.

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  ISSUE THREE

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Kennard_(poet)

  Luke Kennard (poet)
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  For the basketball player, see Luke Kennard (basketball).
  Luke Kennard (born 1981[1]) is a British poet and critic.

  He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005[2] for his first collection The Solex Brothers.[3] His second collection, The Harbour Beyond The Movie, was shortlisted for the 2007 Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him the youngest ever poet to be nominated.[4] In 2014 he was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets.[5] His debut novel, The Transition, was published by Fourth Estate in March 2017.[6] The novel was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime.[7]

  Bibliography
  The Solex Brothers (2005)
  The Harbour Beyond The Movie (2007)
  The Migraine Hotel (2009)
  Planet Shaped Horse (2011)
  The Necropolis Boat (2012)
  Holophin (2012)
  A Lost Expression (2012)
  Cain (2016)
  The Transition (2017)

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/24/whyiwrite

  Luke Kennard
  The award-winning author of The Solex Brothers on anger, reading Snoopy and fiddling with magnets
  Interview by Sarah Kinson

  Tue 24 Jun 2008 05.34 EDT First published on Tue 24 Jun 2008 05.34 EDT
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  Luke Kennard
  'Take criticism, ignore spite': Luke Kennard. Photograph: Esther Kennard
  What was your favourite book as a child?
  Fattypuffs and Thinifers by André Maurois. An absolutely beautiful children's novel about two warring nations - fat v thin.

  When you were growing up did you have books in your home?
  The house was full of books. I was encouraged to read Hardy, Dickens and Charles M Schulz. The first poetry book I remember reading - picking it off the shelf by chance - was a selected EE Cummings, which I loved.

  Was there someone who got you interested in writing?
  My English teacher Paul Coffman used to read my short stories when I was 17. His advice was brilliant and I still have some crumpled sheets of lined paper with his notes. Later Andy Brown at the University of Exeter got me interested in contemporary poetry.

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  What made you want to write when you were starting out?
  The desire to write a science-fiction epic, told backwards by eight unreliable narrators.

  Do you find writing becomes any easier over time?
  It always feels like starting again - like I have to relearn everything I thought I'd got the hang of. Sometimes I just sit there screaming into my hands.

  What makes you write now?
  Anger. And wanting to make that anger into something funny.

  Do you have a daily routine when you are writing?
  I write 1,000 words a day. I've settled on that as a realistic target. If anything I like comes up on the way then I'll work on that.

  How do you survive being alone in your work so much of the time?
  I do handstands, I listen to the Fall, I bounce a ping-pong ball around the room and I fiddle with magnets.

  What good advice was given to you when you were starting out? 'Stop trying to write like Martin Amis.' I hadn't realised how obvious my homage was.

  What good advice would you give to new writers? Take criticism, ignore spite.

  Is there a secret to writing? Write every day. Be patient. If possible don't have an internet connection in the house.

  What are you working on now? My third collection of poetry and a half-finished collection of short stories. I'm writing a novel, which I'm going to dedicate some more time to.

  · Luke Kennard won an Eric Gregory Award for his first prose-poems collection The Solex Brothers in 2005. His second book, The Harbour Beyond The Movie (Salt Publishing) was nominated for the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize. At 26, he was the youngest poet to receive a nomination.

• British Council Literature - https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/luke-kennard

  Luke Kennard was born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1981 and grew up in Luton.
  He is a poet and writer of fiction. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.
  Kennard won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 for his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers(2005, Stride Books). His second collection of poetry The Harbour Beyond the Movie (2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007 making him the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the award.
  His third book, The Migraine Hotel, was published in by Salt in 2009 and a pamphlet, Planet-Shaped Horse, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2011. His latest collection, A Lost Expression, was published by Salt in 2012.
  His first fiction publication, Holophin (Penned in the Margins, 2012), won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2013.
  He also writes for the stage and radio and has taken numerous productions to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
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  • Critical perspective

  • Bibliography

  • Awards
  Critical perspective
  Kennard is one of Britain’s most irreverent and energetic young poets, whose versatile work rests on a highly distinctive fusion of dark wit and playful absurdity. In his own terms, he tries to discover “serious uses for surrealism.” And his varied output dances across generic borders from black comedy to science fiction, propelled by narrative drive and a frantic engagement with the contemporary world around him.
  Over the course of four collections of poetry and one short novel he has made a name for himself as at an early age. At 26, Kennard was the youngest-ever nominee for the Forward Prize in 2007 for his second collection, The Harbour Beyond the Movie.
  Writing in the Guardian in 2009 Sarah Crown called Kennard, “that rare commodity… both excellent and laugh-out-loud funny”. Radio 3’s Ian McMillan has hailed him in the Times as “a truly 21st-century writer, taking inspiration from all over the place, unafraid of barriers and conventions.” In Poetry London in 2010 Todd Swift argued that Luke Kennard is “one of the half-dozen thoroughly original poets of his generation, in some ways its young Auden.”
  Yet he is resistant to easy labels for what he does. "I do believe that poetry can be beautiful, but I'm so wary of the romantic ideas about it," he has told the Times, "There are all sorts of assumptions that go with the word 'poet' that I don't feel comfortable with at all."
  Kennard prefers to see writing in a more matter of fact way, “as an act of communication.” He explained in 2011 to 3AM Magazine that“it’s incredibly rewarding when someone gets it and painful when someone doesn’t. But imagining that you deserve a sensitive and dedicated audience, wanting the approval of strangers: that’s kind of a mental illness. I’d be doing this, whether anyone was paying attention or not. I’m very, very, very lucky and I’m aware of that.”
  Explaining his process further at the Greenbelt festival in 2009, he noted that "The poems that I like the most, even if they are strange, are the ones where I think, 'I've thought that, I've had that feeling before, but I've never been able to put it into words.' That's what I want my poetry to do to give people that sense of recognition, either through humour or through an honest self-evisceration."
  Formally, Kennard is impressively versatile, ranging from violently interrupted dialogue-driven free verse pieces to more traditionally stanzaic forms. Above all, perhaps, he is known for his experiments in prose poems. The pieces in The Migraine Hotel (2009) for example, were almost entirely in this mode, exploring the ways in which the seeming freedoms of page width and reader expectation merge with older forms of lyric concision. His work is also know for its use of persona, most obviously his re-occuring alter ego ‘Wolf’, and uses these mouthpieces to create a Beckettian comedy of voice, based on some of the unique take on theoretical principles Kennard memorably deconstructed in his riff on Barthes in his poem ‘The Author:
  Throughout his collections, various thematic threads have come to dominate. Kennard’s scenarios typically take place in the darker corners of the soul, taking in violence, competitiveness, schadenfreude, envy and self-hatred, all framed with a voice that is stridently frank. This has allowed him to handle important contemporary themes from psychotherapy to national identity in a deceptively light way. The result is a mix that is accusatory, bracing and often hysterical. “Not since Larkin” Todd Swift rightly notes, “has a poet written so often about death and sex – but this time, with even more candour.”
  This confident mixture of honesty and impious brio has helped him gain a respectful following, particularly among his peer. In Todd Swift’s terms, Kennard exerts a great influence over the British poetry scene. His acclaimed collections of poetry have “introduced an entirely new and distinct style to poetry in the UK … Among poets under thirty-five or so he is almost revered and often imitated. No one else has been able to navigate so cleverly the choppy waters he’s claimed for his own. This is modern poetry revisited.”
  And indeed, it is possible to read Kennard in terms of a dialogue between contradictory influences, all of which he has somehow managed to assimilate. On the surface, there is an explicit grotesque iconoclasm reminiscent of Charles Baudelaire, but Kennard reveals a hinterland that is much more unexpected. One that stretches from early immersion in E.E. Cummings (“The first poetry book I remember reading - picking it off the shelf by chance”) to a stint as an apprentice to dominant stylists of British fiction (he recalls the advice received by his younger self to “’Stop trying to write like Martin Amis.' I hadn't realised how obvious my homage was.”)
  But perhaps most evident is his debt to the New York School of poets, including John Ashberry and Frank O’Hara. “Reading the New York School at the age of 16” he has told 3AM Magazine, “was the first thing that made me even vaguely interested in poetry. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t had more of an influence in this country. (I subsequently discovered Lee Harwood, Mark Ford, John Ash, John Hartley Williams).
  Part of this inheritance explains his deft handling of humour and wit. The comic element is much remarked upon, with critics such as the Guardian’s Sarah Crown praising his “sui generis brand of didactic humour.” He has won awards for his comedy writing from the National Student Drama Festival. As the promoters at Next Generation Poets put it, “Luke Kennard is a … curator of absurdities, not an autobiographer. Funnier than most, his wit is self-deprecating and utterly snark-free.”
  From his New York School influences, we might also trace a characteristically American mixture of high and low, a sense that Kennard has been explicit to trace broader features of US culture. “This is a sweeping statement,” he told 3Am Magazine, but I think America has a sustainable literary culture whereas we’re committing cultural suicide. And it’s because they’re comfortable with combining high and low; Playboy, Esquire, Harpers, publishes literary fiction. Same goes for music. I don’t know what I would have done in my teenage years without Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Smog, Palace Brothers.”
  Yet Kennard is at pains to point out that he is nonetheless an explicitly political poet, and like most humourists his work rests on a deeper underlying ethical vision. “I use a vaguely surreal aesthetic but it’s massively personal and inherently political.” he told 3AM Magazine in 2011.
  Kennard has also recently expanded into fiction. 2012’s Holophin imagined a dystopian future world, in which memories are aided by a must-have gadget in the form of a tiny, dolphin-shaped microprocessor which cures users of their worst impulses and phobias. As one might expect from his poetry, this is not a straightforward science fiction piece. Rather, it shared with his other writings the hallucinatory and caustic comic tone that allows him to meditate on identity, technology and the imagination. Blurring the lines between fiction, verse, poetry and prose, the Telegraph hailed it as “a sparky, image-rich novella that reboots familiar genre themes and makes them prettier.”
  As he develops from enfant terrible to respected tastemaker of the British poetry scene, Kennard can look back on a career that has refused categorization. In particular, he has risen above that spectacular early Forward Prize recognition. “That was probably the most psychologically damaging thing that could have happened to me” he wryly noted in 3am Magazine, “it’s opened up a lifetime of delusion and self-importance” --- one that the rest of his career has sought to “exorcise”

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Print Marked Items
The Transition
Publishers Weekly.
264.43 (Oct. 23, 2017): p62.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Transition
Luke Kennard. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (336p) ISBN 978-0-374-27871-7
Poet Kennard's sharp, witty debut novel is about a generation who can't seem to launch themselves into
adulthood. In the near future, Karl, a debt-ridden 30-something, keeps afloat by using his useless English
degree in morally dubious ways, writing fake five-star consumer reviews and "bespoke" essays for college
students. When one of his writing gigs lands him in legal trouble, he is faced with a choice: serve a prison
sentence or enroll, along with his blameless wife, Genevieve, into "The Transition," a rehabilitation
program aimed at rescuing "a generation suffering from an unholy trinity of cynicism, ignorance and
apathy." Opting for the latter, Karl and Genevieve must move in with Transition mentors, Stu and Janna,
who counsel the younger couple on everything from financial responsibility and new career paths to
personal hygiene and reading habits: "We want you both to read a newspaper.... A part of you still feels that
newspapers are for grown-ups and that you're not grown-ups." While Genevieve excels under Stu and
Janna's guidance, the hapless Karl chafes against the cultlike aspects of the Transition and, after a series of
often amusing transgressions, humiliations, and punishments, seeks to expose it as a less-than-benevolent
self-help program. Enlivened by crisp dialogue and Wildean epigrams ("That's the problem with self-respect
... you start to feel offended when someone insults you"), the novel splendidly hums along. Kennard
calibrates satire and sentiment, puncturing glib diagnoses of a generation's shortcomings while producing a
nuanced portrait of a marriage as precarious as Karl's finances. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Transition." Publishers Weekly, 23 Oct. 2017, p. 62. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512184160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf891a7b.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
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Kennard, Luke: THE TRANSITION
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kennard, Luke THE TRANSITION Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $27.00 1, 9 ISBN: 978-0-
374-27871-7
A hapless writer avoids jail time by signing up for a suspicious life-skills scheme called The Transition.
Karl Temperley spends his days writing fake online reviews for products like the "Smart Fridge" and "a
retro-look anti-SAD desk lamp." He and his wife, vulnerable primary school teacher Genevieve, scrape by
thanks to a carefully orchestrated "seventeen-card private Ponzi scheme." Like plenty of real-life
counterparts, Karl finds that his balancing act allows him to enjoy middle-class comfort despite crippling
credit card debt. When Karl accidentally commits a crime "somewhere between fraud and tax evasion and
incompetence," The Transition offers an easy alternative to a prison sentence. Smooth, futuristic, and
cultlike, The Transition relaunches white-collar criminals and social screw-ups back into society with new
homes and stylish careers. Karl and Genevieve are paired with "mentors," the successful, sexy Stu and
Janna , who flirt, cajole, and coerce the couple into a simulacrum of adulthood: reading newspapers,
budgeting, and exercise. Before long, the cracks in the scheme begin to show. What at first seemed
generous--oversight from Stu and Janna, regulatory AA-like meetings--turns sinister and constrictive. A
mysterious message carved onto Karl's bedframe sends him searching for answers, but will the quest
alienate him further from Genevieve or land him in hot water with The Transition? Despite careful initial
plotting and plenty of compelling character details, Kennard's imaginative satire begins to unravel as Karl
seeks more information--and the destruction of The Transition. Karl's quixotic detective work prematurely
accelerates the end of the novel, though fans of droll English commentary with a dystopian kick will find
much to enjoy in this debut novel from an acclaimed British poet.
A scathing romp about late capitalism's social ills.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kennard, Luke: THE TRANSITION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f6d76ad7.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509244076
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The Transition
Poornima Apte
Booklist.
114.5 (Nov. 1, 2017): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Transition.
By Luke Kennard.
Jan. 2018. 336p. Farrar, $27 (9780374278717).
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This is a lesson Karl Temperley learns the hard way in
Kennard's biting debut, an intelligent satire about our collective future. Karl and his schoolteacher wife,
Genevieve, are in deep debt, and Karl's work as a lowly freelance writer is certainly not going to rescue
them from the hole they find themselves in. So when a program called the Transition promises them true
financial nirvana in exchange for being mentored by a successful couple, the Temperleys desperately sign
on the dotted line. Unfortunately, the fine print contains alarming stipulations. Worse, things get surreal and
bizarre, and Karl, who feels increasingly responsible for the couple's sorry state of affairs, finds that things
are not quite as they seem. Is it all a social-engineering experiment from which there is no escape? The
narrative, with touches of the Black Mirror series, launches with a promising start but loses its bearings in
the thickets. Nevertheless, Kennard's gift for dialogue and fluent imagination are surely signs of promising
things to come.--Poornima Apte
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Apte, Poornima. "The Transition." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515383008/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8f11c99d.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515383008
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Raising a Cain
Paul Batchelor
New Statesman.
146.5363 (Apr. 21, 2017): p46+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Stranger, Baby
Emily Berry
Faber-& Faber, 61 pp, 10.99 [pounds sterling]
Jackself
Jacob Polley
Picador, 80 pp, 9.99 [pounds sterling]
Cain
Luke Kennard
Penned in the Margins, 100 pp, 9.99 [pounds sterling]
Here are three new collections by poets who in various ways are testing the limits of the lyric and writing
the self in extremis. The poems in Emily Berry's second collection, Stranger, Baby, concern grieving the
death of one's mother. One of the many risks that Berry runs is to be mistaken for a straightforwardly
autobiographical poet. These poems frequently feel close to unmediated candour and, throughout, we seem
to be in the presence of a single voice (albeit one on the brink of emotional fragmentation) and a single
personality.
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In fact, they are constructed of many voices and they collage quotations from a number of psychoanalysts,
which may account for the way they introduce psychic tumult by striking an unnervingly matter-of-fact
tone: "You must imagine it like this ..." or "This is the body's way of handling emotion ..." They are at once
more intelligently crafted and more saturated with feeling than most poems, refracting the loss again and
again, suspicious and vigilant:
I wrote: The sea! The sea! as if that
might be a solution
Didn't we always suspect the pain
of intelligent people was truly
the most painful?
The sea--that timeless and inescapable symbol of the unconscious, the memory, the mother--is a nearconstant
presence in the book, as in "Picnic":
Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the
sea and show it to a person
I tried to do that
All that year I visited a man in a room
I polished my feelings
The striking metaphor for analysis, and Berry's unusual angle of approach, are impressive, but the subtle
sense of alienation that pervades Stranger, Baby has even more to do with her use of that slightly awkward
"a person" instead of the more expected "someone". Of course, what Berry mistrusts above all is the
polishing of feelings: if grief is to be written with honesty, it must be written as the ragged, ugly trial that it
is. "Drunken Bellarmine" ends with the warning:
... DON'T LOVE ME: I am guilty,
fatalistic and sticky round the mouth
like a dirty baby.
I am a shitting, leaking, bloody clump
of cells,
raw, murky and fluorescent, you
couldn't take it.
Stranger, Baby is a daring, hard-won collection of poems.
I vividly remember the first time I read R F Langley's "Man Jack", and it still seems to me one of the most
remarkable poetic creations of recent decades. Inspired by the OED's enormous list of entries for "jack", the
poem shakes loose a new, timeless character and lets him range across English folklore and song. It begins:
So Jack's your man, Jack is your man
in things.
And he must come along, and he
must stay
close, be quick and right, your little cousin
Jack, a step ahead, deep in the hedge, on
edge, a kiss a rim, at pinch, in place, turn
face and tip a brim, each inch of him, the
folded leaf, the important straw. What for.
"Man Jack" is also a technical tour de force, resolving syllables and traditional prosody into a seamless
music. It would be cruel but not entirely inaccurate to say that Jacob Polley's latest collection, the T S Eliot
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Prize-winning Jackself, spends 80 pages trying to do what Langley accomplished in 90 lines. Here is
Jackself's playmate Jeremy Wren:
tell us what's wrong, Jeremy Wren,
crouched in the corner, spitting no blood,
robust in bladder and bowel, your toes
untouched by fire or flood,
no cold wind blows
there's hair on your feet and mint
in your groin and tonight
is milk, tomorrow cream
and the day after that
a herd that lows
from your very own
meadowland of light
The rhythms are borrowed, but at least Polley's imagery can be relied on to transport the reader to his
spooky version of northern England, where Jack Frost stalks the suburbs "wearing his homemade thousandmilk-bottle-top/winter
suit". The trouble is that it's only a matter of time before a Literary Influence barges
in and spoils it for everyone. Even if you don't know "Man Jack", the shades of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Walter de la Mare and Marianne Moore intrude; and it is dismaying that in Polley's fourth book Ted Hughes
still acts as if he owns the place. At one point Jackself and Jeremy Wren go night-fishing in "the kidneycoloured
pool/all the streams of England run into". This reworks Hughes's signature poem "Pike", in which
the poet night-fishes a pond "as deep as England".
The most telling moments come when Polley confronts the question of precursors. In "The Lofts", the timid
Jackself stands among "the skeletons of past Selves" such as "Edwardself, Billself/Wulfself" but runs away
scared before he can claim "the silence that was yours/by birth". In "Snow Dad", the more proactive Jeremy
Wren makes a larger-than-life replica of his father so that he can "run clean through him/and leave a mehole".
Sadly, we are yet to see Polley's me-hole. His skills are beyond doubt, but his ambitions feel
derivative and his last collection, 2012's The Havocs, attempted and achieved far more than Jackself.
In Luke Kennard's Cain the trope of the alter ego gets a more contemporary treatment: the only thing here
"resplendent in the twilight" is a supermarket logo when the poet wants to buy booze. The poems tell the
story of a character, "Luke Kennard", preyed upon by the mysterious Cain, "Tutelary spirit of the fugitive
and/heavenly advocate for fan fiction". Part guru and part tormentor, Cain cajoles the poet into a series of
damning self-assessments: "Self-Portrait at Primary School" begins "I was so obliging I let the weirdest,
smelliest kid pick on me/because I thought it might make him feel better" and ends "And even at the time it
struck me: maybe I was the dangerous one". To some extent this is ground that Kennard has covered before,
but Cain is an altogether darker creation, written from the doldrums between youth and middle-age (the
stretch that people who don't hate themselves call their "prime").
The second section of the collection consists of 31 anagrams of Genesis 4:9-12, in which the Lord curses
Cain for the murder of Abel. This generates such phrases as "Huff on that cheroot, doorman! How's the
death shroud, honeydew? From here on all will be [Static.]". Many of the anagrams would be almost
entirely resistant to sense, but surrounding them, like exegesis bordering a sacred text, are prose glosses
explaining how the Cain anagrams are in fact the product of a surreal sitcom. Written from the perspective
of a rabid fan of the show, the glosses regale us with trivia, interviews with the cast and crew, and fan
theories on the meaning of each anagram/episode.
The result is hilariously reflexive about the self-imposed challenges Kennard has taken up, as the anagrams
howl through the language like a prisoner through the bars of his cell. It feels strange to describe a book of
poems as gripping, but Cain is so profoundly funny and so profoundly sad, so inconsolably intelligent and
so brilliantly vulnerable, that "gripping" is the word.
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Paul Batchelor is the director of the creative writing programme at Durham University. His poetry
collection "The Sinking Road" is published by Bloodaxe
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Batchelor, Paul. "Raising a Cain." New Statesman, 21 Apr. 2017, p. 46+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494742735/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=946b6b50.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494742735

"The Transition." Publishers Weekly, 23 Oct. 2017, p. 62. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512184160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018. "Kennard, Luke: THE TRANSITION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018. Apte, Poornima. "The Transition." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515383008/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018. Batchelor, Paul. "Raising a Cain." New Statesman, 21 Apr. 2017, p. 46+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494742735/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.

• Storgy
  https://storgy.com/2017/05/14/book-review-the-transition-by-luke-kennard/
  Word count: 1363

  STORGY Magazine May 14, 2017 books
  BOOK REVIEW: The Transition by Luke Kennard

  Luke Kennard’s The Transition is a striking insight into our calamitous present: the impossible, crushing economic mill-wheel, the disenfranchised generation, and, perhaps most sinister of all, the disintegration of artistic integrity beneath the corporate schema. Though I can’t pretend to know the future, I imagine that The Transition is a startlingly prescient novel – at least if things keep going as they are. Politically charged topics are often mealy affairs, but the true triumph of The Transition is its electric pace. It’s been a long time since I read a book in two sittings – and it’s an awful cliché – but this really is unputdownable. It’s a combination of wit that keeps you choking down laughter, and a tender pathos elicited from prose that is as sensitive as it is dextrous. In Karl and Genevieve Temperley, Luke Kennard has created two emblems of our age: Karl is an English graduate with an expertise in Metaphysical Poetry; Genevieve is a school teacher. Karl can only make money with his skills via writing essays for rich, lazy students and through manipulative advertising blogs; Genevieve is on the verge of constant breakdown. They are flawed characters whom we immediately root for, laugh at, and ultimately, weep with. At times you hate one or the other, other times you’re not sure how to feel about either of them, but you always care, as if they were your own children. The Transition might be said to be about growing up. But it is also about the terrible peril of doing so.

  The premise is simple – deceptively so. Karl is called up on a minor tax violation, and is given the choice of either a jail sentence or six months with ‘The Transition’ program. His wife, Genevieve, is required to come with him on this venture. At first, it seems like everything is okay: it’s nothing more than a mentorship rehabilitation program, but as time goes on Karl notices more and more amiss and feels like he and Genevieve’s mentors, Stu and Janna, are driving a wedge between them. Much like in Exoskeleton, Shane Stadler’s horror masterpiece, in which the protagonist William is given a choice between prison or a short time on ‘the program’, we readers already know from the outset that this is going to be a very, very, very bad move. Rather than allowing this foreknowledge numb the blow, however, Luke uses it to amp up the tension. When will it all go pear-shaped? Exactly how is The Transition not what it appears to be? Mystery and answers are finely balanced here so we never feel frustrated by endless riddles. It’s taut, layered narrative that drives on at a ferocious pace.

  The sublimity of The Transition is the inherent empathy in its execution, not just with its protagonists (how could I not relate to people who might as well have been mirrors of myself and my partner?), but also with its antagonists. Through this empathetic lens, Luke Kennard probes questions of identity: If we have a psychotic episode resulting from mental illness, is that really us or is it someone else? If we do the right thing for the wrong reasons, does that still make us a good person? The acute observations never let up. What’s more, we’re not hit over the head, they arise through incidental dialogue, through excerpts from books or articles Karl is reading, through subtext – oh, The Transition is bursting with subtext. I imagine Luke Kennard wrote the entire novel with comment boxes on each line: ‘This is what this character is really saying here’. What works about this is it renders the dialogue, all the interactions in fact, vivid, realistic and truthful. When there is emotion, it is never melodrama. When there is confrontation, it never escalates beyond credulity. In a world full of writers writing stories in bubbles untethered from the realm of human interaction, The Transition is a welcome anchoring in the real. But boy, is it terrifying too. Luke captures the frustration of being unable to voice coherent argument, of being psychologically manipulated by articulate, crafty opponents, of being oppressed by a system in ways so subtle they cannot be credibly argued against.

  There’s also an easy modernity here. One gets the sense that Luke Kennard doesn’t need to spend hours researching the latest fads, he knows because he exists at the cutting edge, is living in our world and taking in his surroundings with a keen eye. There are references to everything from meme-culture to clickbait articles to the latest coffee-shop fads, but none of it feels shoe-horned in. When so many writers resort to writing technology out of their narratives (or re-writing what technology looks like altogether), it’s riveting to read something that represents our modern world in a balanced way, both its demons and beauties. The Transition is a book that many people of my generation (I’m sure of all generations) are going to find scary, because it is showing us a window into our own lives, which is something all writers should do, but almost none are ever thanked for. The outlook is bleak; but at least we have each other, right?

  Paranoia, neuroses and mania seethe from the prose, every page a squirming twist of the mind, to the extent one cannot help but feel Luke Kennard has suffered a little from all of these in time. But these traits are a weapon, forging an incredible narrative voice that is as urgent as it is funny, and that taps into the universal vulnerabilities of the human mind. Karl is suspicious of everything, sometimes rightly so, and other times, we suspect, incorrectly. His non-existent self-esteem leads him to dizzying feats of self-annihilation – but in a bizarre way this becomes a quietly courageous statement about the evil of how our modern world asks us to conform, of the vanity of assuming we know what’s best for others. I’m not even sure Karl could be called an anti-hero, but he is, in the most tangential, non-literal way, heroic.

  The Transition is, above all else, a necessary book, much like Orwell’s 1984 seventy years prior. In the midst of the avalanching madness of our times, as we are constantly bombarded with toxic viewpoints from all sides, this novel offers us a crystal-clear insight into the true state of things – psychologically, economically, and most importantly, spiritually. I don’t mean this in a strictly religious sense, rather in the way of the Metaphysical Poets, whom Karl so admires, concerned with things above our earthly world: art, love, humanity, the soul. Because, as the The Transition so deftly makes clear, it is the very intangibility of these things which makes them so important, as well as the very reason we have forgotten them.

  Luke Kennard
  Luke Kennard Author photo

  Luke Kennard was born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1981 and grew up in Luton.

  He is a poet and writer of fiction. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.

  Kennard won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 for his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers (2005, Stride Books). His second collection of poetry The Harbour Beyond the Movie (2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007 making him the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the award.

  His third book, The Migraine Hotel, was published in by Salt in 2009 and a pamphlet, Planet-Shaped Horse, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2011. His latest collection, A Lost Expression, was published by Salt in 2012.

  His first fiction publication, Holophin (Penned in the Margins, 2012), won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2013.

  He also writes for the stage and radio and has taken numerous productions to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

  The Transition was published by Harper Collins on 26th Janauary 2017.

• The National
  https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-luke-kennard-s-the-transition-is-a-witty-debut-about-millennial-dilemmas-1.56444
  Word count: 567

  Book review: Luke Kennard’s The Transition is a witty debut about millennial dilemmas
  It is really about the way millennials live and feel now – and as far as that goes, Luke Kennard has written a witty, sardonic and honest debut that should give us all cause for concern.

  Ben East
  Ben East
  January 24, 2017

  Updated: January 24, 2017 04:00 AM
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  The Transition by Luke Kennard. Courtesy HarperCollins UK
  The Transition by Luke Kennard. Courtesy HarperCollins UK
  Unemployed, unsure, in debt, fearful, even overwhelmed – whether they are described as Generation Y or millennials, the life of Westerners who came of age in the 21st century is not a happy one, it seems.

  Charlie Brooker’s hit TV ­anthology series Black Mirror successfully, and satirically, chronicled this worrying state of affairs, in which technology and social media corrupted rather than complemented.

  English poet Luke Kennard’s debut novel is certainly a companion piece – the writing is not quite so razor sharp but the idea that this generation is unable to find happiness is profoundly ­explored.

  Set in the near future (the proliferation of driverless cars being one hint of this), the title of the book refers to an Orwellian “programme” undertaken by people who cannot quite cope with the pressures of the modern world.

  Karl wants to impress his wife and live the lifestyle he believes they deserve, but does so by maxing out his credit cards and then committing online fraud to pay them off.

  Deemed not a rogue, just desperate and misguided, Karl is enrolled in The Transition rather than being sent to prison. Initially, the programme seems too good to be true. He is taken, with his wife, to a nice suburban house where, freed of any financial responsibilities, they will be coached in life skills by their mentors until they are ready to be reintegrated into society.

  It is an intriguing, and immediately creepy, set up. There is, for example, a strange, locked basement. They must log diary entries each day on their tablets for appraisal. The Transition, it transpires, is a multinational company with rather sinister aims, possibly linked to Karl’s increasingly distant wife.

  There is a real echo of Kafka’s chilling Metamorphosis, as the veneer of Karl’s ostensibly caring personality begins to be stripped away and he realises how much of a burden he is.

  As a parable about a not particularly appealing society in thrall to global corporations and commercialisation, however, The Transition begins to creak in its third act.

  The attempts at a thriller-style ending, as Karl plots to bring down The Transition, do not add up to much. Indeed, escaping into the outside world just emphasises the fact that the novel’s mechanisms are actually quite thinly drawn.

  Still, perhaps that is Kennard’s point. It is not really a book about a futuristic dystopia in which a corporation is manipulating the lives of the many for the benefit of the few, after all.

  It is really about the way millennials live and feel now – and as far as that goes, he has written a witty, sardonic and honest debut that should give us all cause for concern.

  artslife@thenational.ae

• CultureFly
  http://culturefly.co.uk/book-review-the-transition-by-luke-kennard/
  Word count: 759

  BOOK REVIEW: THE TRANSITION BY LUKE KENNARD
  RABEEA SALEEMFEBRUARY 27, 2017
  BOOK REVIEWSBOOKSFEATURED

  The humorous satire by the prize-winning poet Luke Kennard is his first foray into fiction. It is a dystopian black comedy with a witty riff on the inevitable collapse of our capitalist world. Kennard focuses on the financial and social implications of this on the first casualty of such an event– the millennials.

  Karl and Genevieve are a young middle class couple who are struggling to make ends meet. Karl is a freelancer who writes paid reviews for different products and ghostwrites students’ assignments for online content providers, while Genevieve is a primary school teacher. They are crippled by their rent and consumerist lifestyle, compounded with the ease of instant credit which eventually means they are well entrenched in debt. With rising expenses and dwindling finances, Karl, in a moment of desperation, agrees to a shady deal that results in him being implicated in an online scam. Kennard uses the set-up as a parable about the corporatization of our society.

  In lieu of a prison sentence, he is offered the chance to recruit in The Transition, an Orwellian scheme which is a kind of life rehabilitation centre. Karl and Genevieve have to live in s paid accommodation with another couple, Stu and Janna, who will be their mentors and will guide them on how to deal with their finances and have healthier lifestyles for a six month period. The goal is that after six months of intensive training they will have made a successful transition to adulthood.

  At first it seems like an unconventional but good enough deal but soon, things take an unpleasant turn after suspicious occurrences. Karl starts getting paranoid after some of his things go missing and begins to suspect Stu and Janna of having ulterior motives. He starts doubting his decision to enrol in this program as cracks starts appearing in his marriage. He suspects that their mentors are brainwashing Genevieve who is already in a fragile state as she suffers from mental health issues. He discovers shocking facts about The Transition’s origin, which leads him to believe that it is a manipulative social engineering experiment.

  Kennard brilliantly combines a comedy of manner with a probing commentary on our present world with the widening gulf between homeowners and renters, the stifled middle class and easy access credit system. Social media is also one of his targets as the story mentions The Great Unsharing, a new initiative started by the youth to protest against being “commodified by consent”. Obviously, they blame their parents who were the first wave of social networkers and were obsessed with documenting everything (sounds familiar?) from their food to their babies.

  He takes a subversive look at the ideas our generation is taught – to follow our ambitions regardless of the monetary gains. As Stu patronizingly tells them that Karl’s MA in The Metaphysical Poets which renders him practically unemployable is their generation’s fault for deluding the youth to follow their dreams and telling them that money isn’t important.

  “A generation who had benefited from unrivalled educational opportunities and decades of peacetime, who nonetheless seemed determined to self-destruct through petty crime, alcohol abuse and financial incompetence; a generation who didn’t vote; who had given up on making any kind of contribution to society and blamed anyone but themselves for it.”

  The unflinching portrayal of modern day relationships is also brilliantly executed in the writing. Genevieve and Karl mostly sweep their interpersonal issues under the rug, in the guise of ‘giving space’ to the other person rather than addressing them head-on. As Karl later on tells Genevieve “Space, closure, name the cliché and I’ll give it to you”.

  The narration reminded me a lot of The Stepford Wives in how the narrator is the only one who suspects a conspiracy and gradually becomes obsessed with uncovering it. The premise of a technology-riddled future resembles the world of the hit series, Black Mirror, but Kennard’s execution is laced with a certain charm and is not quite as bleak or foreboding as the former. The writing is crisp and the dialogues are relentlessly piquant. This sardonic take on our times has wit in spades and is an extremely enjoyable read with some thought provoking issues at the heart of the story.

  ★★★★★

  The Transition was published in hardback by Fourth Estate on 26 January 2017

• Zyzzyva
  http://www.zyzzyva.org/2018/01/26/future-shock-the-transition-by-luke-kennard/
  Word count: 526

  Future Shock: ‘The Transition’ by Luke Kennard
  BY SAMANTHA APER
  POSTED ON JANUARY 26, 2018
  The TransitionWith frequent moments of insightful social commentary, Luke Kennard’s first novel, The Transition (328 pages; FSG), takes us to an exaggerated version of our current society—a dystopian world of recognizable stress.

  Karl and Genevieve are both university-educated and hold decent jobs. Genevieve works as a teacher, and Karl has a dubious career as a fake product reviewer and ghostwriter for lazy college students who can afford his services. In the first few pages of the novel, we learn things have gotten to the point where the “average age of leaving the parental home drifted into the early forties.” At the same time, things such as male contraceptive implants, self-driving taxi cabs, and self-refilling refrigerators are common. Without the help of their parents to fall back on, Karl and Genevieve struggle and flail. In their early thirties, they still can’t afford to live alone — instead they rent a room in a shared house; having children remains out of the question. As rents keeps rising, Karl (secretly) opens up more credit accounts to pay for groceries, car repairs, and vacations they can’t afford. Whenever Karl complains about their lot in life, Genevieve reminds him that they are still wealthier and better off than ninety-seven percent of the world’s population.

  To pay off some of his debt, Karl becomes involved in credit fraud and is ultimately caught. He is given an offer: go to jail for fifteen months, or participate in a pilot scheme called the Transition. After choosing the latter, he and Genevieve spend six months living with older mentors who guide them through concepts like employment, finances, relationships, and more. In other words: Adulting 101. The goal of the program is that by the end of their sentence, the couple will have paid off their debts and have enough money saved for a down payment on a house.

  This too-good-to-be-true “Get Out of Jail Free Card” soon becomes a burden to Karl. He continues to land himself in trouble, and his relationship with Genevieve grows increasingly strained. Karl’s developing suspicion of the ill intentions of The Transition becomes the novel’s central conflict. Though Kennard expertly introduces new conflicts and builds suspense, there’s no dramatic conclusion to his story. In fact, the novel is consistently anticlimactic; just when you think there will be an aha! moment, Kennard adds another layer of complication and ambiguity. (Are the villains really villains or simply people looking out for themselves?) And each character is flawed in their unique ways.

  The Transition is not as easily definable as a typical dystopian novel. Kennard writes cleverly about an unlivable economic climate, sprinkling instances of lovely nuance and truthful observation throughout. The novel never preaches or patronizes the reader. Instead, The Transition serves as a funny, fresh, and all too likely depiction of the future.

  THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED IN BOOK REVIEWS AND TAGGED BOOK REVIEW, FICTION, FSG, LUKE KENNARD, MILLENNIALS, SCI-FI, SCIENCE FICTION, SPECULATIVE, SPECULATIVE FICTION. BOOKMARK THE PERMALINK.

• Poetry Society
  http://poetrysociety.org.uk/publications-section/the-poetry-review/book-reviews-black-sails-black-cadillacs/
  Word count: 1509

  Book reviews: Black Sails, Black Cadillacs
  Luke Kennard, CAIN, Penned in the Margins, £12.99, ISBN 9781908058355
  Frederick Seidel, Widening Income Inequality, Faber, £14.99, ISBN 9780571330706
  Reviewed by Edwina Attlee
  The saddest story I knew when I was small was that of Theseus who fought the minotaur. He had promised his father Aegeus to sail back to him with white sails if he had been victorious. But in the heat of victory, or another strong emotion, he forgot to change them. His father, seeing the black sails from a distance, killed himself in sorrow. Luke Kennard’s CAIN reads like a slow motion expanded edition (with director’s commentary) of that sad tale. Ostensibly a book in which Cain (of Bible fame) helps the author out with his divorce, it’s an account of the many shapes and sizes of regret. The book contains its own review:

  ‘Here’s my review,’ says Cain, ‘To his delight Kennard discovers
  that not one but two of his own ancestors were murdered. And if you
  think he’s above using this as poetic grist to his poetic mill, prepare
  to be poetic disappointed.’
  (‘Genealogy’)

  Cain by Luke KennardThe phrase “poetic disappointed” gives a glimpse of the self-deflating humour that runs throughout CAIN, much of it served up by the eponymous anti-hero who acts in turn as guide, matchmaker, murderer and therapist to the other main character, a writer called Kennard. Cain is similar in stature and mission to the crow in Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers and occupies a similarly redemptive yet malevolent space in the narrative. Both figures, pulled from the scholarly study and abandoned depression of their charges, arrive (politely) at the front door – waiting, like vampires, to be invited in. Both are large – looming and mythical in spite of their clear familiarity with the modern world (they both make scornful reference to the philosophy of fridge magnets).

  Porter’s father is mourning a death he had no part in. Kennard’s ‘Kennard’ is in muddier waters, mourning lost faith and the end of a marriage for which he admits some guilt: “In the photos your face wears several expressions / you don’t make anymore and I know I’ve destroyed / everything about you which first drew me to you” (‘Painted Dream-Bird (I Wanted to Send You a Message)’). He closely echoes Anna Karenina’s Vronsky here, another enemy of matrimony: “He looked at her as a man looks on a faded flower he had plucked and in which he can hardly recognise the beauty which made him pluck and destroy it.”The tone of the collection is not one of guilt but a kind of time-sickness brought to life by continued attempts at making sense. There is a beautiful account of how rephrasing a word can be a defence against stammering. The speaker tells us, “this is how my vocabulary / developed” (‘Vestigial Stammer’). Book II plays with the tension between rephrasing and repeating. The section is made up of 31 long-form anagrams which rearrange the 355 letters in Genesis 4: 9–13 – the section that begins “And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?” It is both tortuous and very funny. Each anagram or “episode” appears in a bed of textual explication that elaborates on the doomed history of the fictitious View on Demand series Cain. There is an invocation of scholarly and Talmudic exegesis, as well as the box-set reviews and commentaries we witness Cain and Kennard suffering in ‘Binge’.

  The final poems in Books I and III seem to take Cain’s side on the matter of handling regret, which means steering “into / the skid” (‘Painted Dream-Bird’). Lightness, hilarity and a chronic attack of meta-fiction does nothing to disturb these wanderings from homesickness to resignation. They are full of tangible imagery; a knife wound is “a smile that spreads” (‘Shroud for William and Richard Jeffrey’), the image of the broken family (mended) makes the speaker “feel like an illustration on a jug” (‘Cain Reverses Time’), and they push their reader towards new knowledge. By the end of the book it’s not clear whether this takes the form of premonition or hindsight: “Something you meant concealed by what you said: / it burned a little through the weeks ahead” (‘Shroud for William and Richard Jeffrey’). Convinced that neither Cain nor Abel could have avoided their fate, we want to read again and again to work out why:

  We all live likewise, embroidering excuses
  on excuses, weaving our own safety-nets,
  death-shrouds until one day
  our own murderer would like a word with us.
  (‘Shroud for William and Richard Jeffrey’)

  Widening Income Inequality SeidelI did not intend to link the reviews for these very different collections, but the image of Cain’s hair shirt struck me as an apt metaphor for the discomfort elicited by Frederick Seidel’s book. Each poem bristles with an alert energy, a rhyming, erudite, scornful morality that is itchy. Take the final poem in the collection, ‘Widening Income Inequality’, in which the speaker is to be found “Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning”. The stanza closes, “I have a rule – / I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.” The speaker tells us what the poem is about, inequality, articulated here through two conditions of the speaker’s life, appetite and privilege. The itchiness is not so much for the alarming coincidence of his indulgent hands and the un-indulged outstretched hands of people begging in the street, but in his refusal to present one as good and the other bad – the reader is left to itch, to fidget, to sit uncomfortably in their seat. He parodies another well-known position:

  I admire the poor profusely.
  I want their autograph.
  They make me shy.
  I keep my distance.

  That distance is surely the poem’s real target, the itch it really wants to scratch. “Widening Income Inequality” is in itself a distancing term, colluding in some way with the man who has rules about begging, both sidestepping something unforgiveable. The poem ends with a call to arms against these widening distances:

  Open your arms like a fresh pack of cards
  And shuffle the deck.
  Now open your heart.
  Now open your art.
  Now get down on your knees in the street
  And eat.

  In an interview with The Paris Review, Seidel has said of the formal elements of a poem, “they are on stage… the rhymes say, The subject isn’t the subject. Don’t be fooled.” The presence of rhyme in ‘France Now’ is fooling and foolish. Making a neat couplet like, “It’s absurd in France to be a Jew / Because someone will want to murder you”, is galling in its trite, satisfying way, but it keeps the fact of the poem as something written and constructed as part of the poem. This is important – for Seidel, poetry is awkward and persistent but it does not make bad things good (even if it makes them rhyme):

  It’s alarming
  And queer to read Osama bin Laden writing an essay about global warming.
  So he was also human, like the ISIS fighters writing
  Poems in the manner of the great pre-Islamic odes in the midst of the fighting.
  (‘France Now’)

  The poems in this collection would not have much time for terms like bad and good. They are written from a position that understands such distinctions as childish. Now, “age desegregated dark and light […] / In fact, there is no daytime or nighttime, it’s all one page” (‘Winter Day, Birdsong’). That kind of clarity comes only in dreams and even then it is soured: “In the colored section of St. Louis, back / When life was white and black, / I’m skimming the modest rooftops in a stolen black Cadillac” (‘The Lovely Redhead’). There are black sails as well as Cadillacs flying through the collection, but its enduring impression is that of an invigorating itch; an upbeat, irascible, unflinching witnessing, best expressed in ‘City’:

  Right now, a dog tied up in the street is barking
  With the grief of being left,
  A dog bereft.
  Right now, a car is parking.

  The dog emits
  Petals of a barking flower and barking flakes of snow
  That float upward from the street below
  To where another victim sits:

  Who listens to the whole city
  And the dog honking like a car alarm,
  And doesn’t mean the dog any harm,
  And doesn’t feel any pity.

  1052 TPR cover NEW SIZE_Layout 1
  First published in The Poetry Review, 106:2, Summer 2016 © The Poetry Review and the author. Edwina Attlee’s pamphlet the cream was published by clinic in May 2016.

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-the-transition-by-luke-kennard/471174783/
  Word count: 576

  BOOKS 471174783
  REVIEW: 'The Transition,' by Luke Kennard
  FICTION: A young British poet's seriously funny first novel.
  By ELLEN AKINS Special to the Star Tribune JANUARY 26, 2018 — 11:23AM
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  JACOB KENNARD
  Luke Kennard Photo by Jacob Kennard
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  Ever have one of those days? Ever have one of those lives? Karl Temperley has. He and his wife, Genevieve, are the sort of bright young couple (double income, no kids) who really should be doing quite well, by any other measure than the one that counts — reality, by whose hard reckoning, Karl = screw-up. Smart as all get-out, chock-full of cultural, if not practical, knowledge, he writes “consumer reviews for products he’s never used and bespoke school and undergraduate essays as ‘study aids’ for ten pence a word.”

  Because the income from this questionable piecework, even augmented with Genevieve’s salary as a teacher, has not covered the couple’s meager lifestyle, Karl has created his own little credit card Ponzi scheme, paying off one card with another, and so on, until, in desperation, he takes on an even more questionable job — and ends up where we find him at the novel’s onset: “facing fifteen months in jail for fraud and a tax infraction he still couldn’t quite fathom.”

  And this is where The Transition comes in. As an alternative to jail, Karl signs up to participate in a program that bills itself as “a holistic approach to getting our lives back on track.” Karl and Genevieve are given lodging with another couple, their “mentors” Stu and Janna, who offer guidance and instruction on everything from relationships to financial planning to nutrition, with compulsory journaling, investment games and counseling sessions.

  What could go wrong?

  Balanced uneasily between social satire and dystopian sci-fi, the novel follows Karl’s point of view, with The Transition going progressively from promising and mysterious to menacing, its program of social engineering seeming more and more like a process of winnowing society’s losers (i.e., those, like Karl, who need an out) from their innocent, productive partners — who then, in the manner of bureaucratic self-perpetuation, become employees and promoters of … The Transition.

  The novel, like The Transition, is somewhat better at moving people toward a goal than knowing what to do with them once they get there. But this, oddly, is one of the book’s charms; Karl is such a fine specimen of a certain character, a sort of hapless but serious — and seriously funny — good guy in the Hugh Grant vein, that his navigating of all the paranoid, conspiratorial material that comes his way is fun to follow even when it goes nowhere.

  “The Transition,” by Luke Kennard

  “The Transition,” by Luke Kennard
  As a representative of his generation — “forced, kicking and screaming, to follow your dreams,” as Stu puts it — Karl is a perfect exemplar of 21st-century, middle-class anxieties that are at once the result and the handicap of “progress.” That his plight is so engaging is a key to his, and his cohort’s, staying power, and a testament to the author’s art.

  Ellen Akins is a writer and teacher of writing in Cornucopia, Wis.; ellenakins.com.

  The Transition
  By: Luke Kennard.
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 328 pages, $27.

• Graft Review - blog
  http://graftreview.blogspot.com/
  Word count: 1939

  THURSDAY, 6 AUGUST 2009
  Title: The Migraine Hotel
  Author: Luke Kennard
  Paperback: 84 pages
  Publisher: Salt Publishing (2009)
  ISBN-10: 1844715558
  ISBN-13: 978-1844715558

  Our meddling intellect
  Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
  We murder to dissect.
  - William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned

  Luke Kennard is a prodigious talent. He was awarded a Gregory for his first collection, The Solex Brothers, and, at just 26, was the youngest ever nominee for the Forward Poetry Prize in 2007 for The Harbour Beyond the Movie. Now comes his third prose/poetry collection, The Migraine Hotel from Salt Publishing.

  There is good news and bad news. The good news is that The Migraine Hotel carries on very much in the vein of The Harbour Beyond the Movie; Wolf makes a reappearance and there is the same absurdist/surrealist take on life, sparkling with the usual insight, erudite wit and linguistic cunning. The bad news is that it carries on very much in the vein of The Harbour Beyond the Movie... same absurdist/surrealist take on life... usual insight, wit... etc, etc. Although the marketing blurb declares this collection to be ‘very much a sequel’ to Harbour, it is less sequel than simply a 'continuation’ (digression: in the same way Radiohead’s Amnesiac can be seen as the gatefold companion to Kid A - maybe not a better album but containing some better songs, in this reviewer’s opinion anyway) . Glue the two covers of Harbour and Migraine together and you get one single volume, not even a game of two halves. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing as the bar raised by Kennard remains high throughout and he is a witty and astute observer of human foibles and often 'laugh out loud' funny. Kennard’s Wolf alter-ego is a fine comic creation in the manner of Hughes’ Crow or Berryman’s Huffy Henry/Mr Bones. In ‘Wolf On The Couch’ he’s ‘completed a correspondence course in psychoanalysis’. It may be an obvious line of attack for one so deeply read in post-grad literary theory but generally Kennard pulls off the parodies and sideways digs with aplomb. I like the way the ‘alter-superego’ owl is described succinctly as ‘squat, tawny, beakish’; and the poetry workshop parody ‘Sharking for Snow’ in part IV is both telling and very amusing. Other highlights in the collection for me include ‘Wolf Nationalist’, ‘Pleasure Beach’ (Ours is the only coastal town/ To feature an exact copy of our coastal town/ In bronze, actual size, two miles down the road. ); ‘The Forms of Despair’; ‘A Terrorist, Maybe, With His Children’ (‘The most miserable crustacean is the crab...’); and ‘Letter from Snow’ part of ‘Five Poems For A New Shopping Centre’, where Kennard’s absurdism, poetic vision and humour are perfectly balanced:
  Dear shopping centre,

  I don’t usually write to anything, but feel that you are making a horrible mistake: Can you hear the starling crackle as if charged by the electric high-wire it perches on? As the dove betokens peace, so the starling municipality. I digress, which is something you just don’t do, hence my concern.

  Yours sincerely

  Snow
  Kennard is an entertainer; that’s not to damn with faint praise, it’s rare to find a poet with such wit and intelligence that’s also such a genuine pleasure to read. The issue with The Migraine Hotel, however, is that the originality and novelty that one found in Harbour begins to wear a little thin here and we begin to echo in our minds Kennard’s own refrain ‘What am I to make of all the repetition?’ – and not in a good way.

  The trouble is this: however high an author sets the bar a reader’s expectation will always nudge it that bit higher. With The Migraine Hotel Kennard has reached a kind of plateau that, as David Bowden puts it, ‘already feels self-parodic, and the intellectual in-jokes genuinely start to grate.’ And it should be noted that over half the pieces in this collection do include some kind of literary reference, poetical self-deprecation or academic in-joke. Wolf’s parody of a lit-crit seminar/poetry workshop treads a fine line and for me manages not to fall off into the void of self-parody. Others, I’m afraid others don’t fare so well. ‘A Sure-Fire Sign’ with its ‘funeral for irony’ is far too self-indulgent, with humour that simply misfires: ‘Just bad jokes about films-within-fucking-films that don’t exist.’ The references here, as in other pieces, are a little too calculated, too self-aware of its own delightful riffs of literary deprecation. ‘Army’ is another good example. It begins with an appropriately surrealistic and perturbing image:
  Dear mum and dad, I expect,
  With all the paint falling out of the sky,
  You thought I’d forgotten you.
  Wrong! I detect your presence
  In the exuberance and wit of deciduous trees!
  The second stanza is an absurdist story about flinging a ‘wall over a wall’ that one might find in Beckett; a suitably clever exercise concerning the ridiculousness of military exercises. Yet the third stanza’s self-consciously literary ‘humour’ unpicks all the good work that has gone before it.
  ...I have no great facility with language –
  My eloquence marred, perhaps,
  By my curtailed education.
  Thank you for Seven Types of Ambiguity
  And the box of brandy snaps;

  I’m afraid I don’t understand either of them.
  Clearly the writer of ‘the exuberance and wit of deciduous trees’ does have a facility with language which is indeed ‘eloquent’; one simply doesn’t believe that either William Empson’s critical masterpiece or sweet tubular brittle biscuits are too perplexing for the author of the poem – and if he’s simply being ‘ironic’ then this reviewer fails to see the point. The intrusion of self-aware academic and literary criticism via Empson (how many people outside the Academy will have ever heard of him?) breaks the spell of the ‘reality effect’ of the poem that doesn’t merely undermine the reader’s expectations as we might ‘expect’ post-modernist writing to do but actually breaks the bond of trust between the reader and the work. The result is more a feeling of deflation, of being excluded or let down; either because a joke is being made which the reader is not party to or that the reader cannot be trusted to make his/her own critical judgement about the poem. This needn’t be so. Kennard’s facility is to connect best with his reader through humour; it can heighten the poetical drama as well as undermine, as we see at the end of another military poem ‘The Forms Of Despair’:

  We described the funny pages to Simon – who had lost both his eyes
  But the jokes didn’t work so well in description.

  Here the joke (about jokes) has the effect of both heightening the personal tragedy and providing the reader a suitably uncomfortable critical distance to review the subject(s) of the poem.

  The preponderance of ‘literary humour’ throughout the collection, as I’ve said earlier, can become tiresome. It also begs the question of whether the interminable critical gainsaying is, as Kennard’s friend Rupert Loydell has suggested: ‘a kind of defensiveness, something to shield the author from the world whilst also abusing it.’ For all his prodigious talent and intellect one can’t help feeling Kennard is still wearing his post-modernist critical heart far too vainly on his sleeve. And I don’t really buy into Loydell’s counter-argument that Kennard may be ‘deconstructing the idea of deconstruction’. (Derrida was doing this much more effectively over 30 years ago, though many of his academic acolytes still fail to see the ‘irony’ of their institutionalising his unique and visionary discipline – but that’s another story...) I also think this way of using humour as a critical tool is misplaced for two reasons.

  Firstly, as I’ve already said, however much fun it is for the author to deconstruct his own narrative or the reader’s expectations, such literary ‘in-jokes’ can easily excludes the reader. Moreover, the actual joy of reading – that Barthesian plaisir du texte – becomes wearisome and limp, like making love to someone who is constantly commenting on their own sexual technique. Reading through The Migraine Hotel I kept thinking of Michael Donaghy who quite aptly, considering Kennard has recently completed a PhD and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, once said: ‘I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry – which I now realise is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.’

  The second reason I think Kennard’s particular use of literary humour is misguided is because of something he once said in an interview. When asked, ‘What makes you write now?’ Kennard replied: ‘Anger. And wanting to make that anger into something funny.’ Anger as a motive force in poetry is not necessarily a bad thing, and one can indeed sense a certain anger buried deep beneath the humour in Kennard’s work which he himself has described as ‘absurdist and satirical.’ He also claims to ‘use a fairytale-like structure to comment on society.’ That fairytale quality is what makes Kennard’s work so uniquely distinctive. It has an otherwordly ‘Mittel Europa’ feel about it that reminds one of Borges, Ionesco, Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert. However, unlike Herbert for instance, Kennard’s social critiques fail to bite in the same way, and the anger – which could be used to such devastating effect - just gets lost in all the literary self-consciousness and pastiche. Kennard is such a talented writer one must feel that he is capable of more than just describing ‘the ridiculous pastimes of your weak and fallible race in order to mock and to make strong contrast with my presence within the work...’ as Loydell playfully ventriloquises through the mouth of Kennard’s own Wolf character. I don’t mean that Kennard should necessarily be more ‘Political’ which could easily turn into absurdist posturing if not truly felt, but I would like to see where the darker side of his imagination might lead him, something that is not cut short by a dandy quip or smacked round the chops by an academic uppercut. As David Bowden has observed, there are a number of poets writing today who ‘hide behind gags’, Kennard is smarter than your average poet and the sooner he lets go of the in-jokes and literary jibes the more he will realise his potential as a genuinely great artist. Personally, I think Kennard’s future will be secured in longer narratives where character and situation can develop beyond self-conscious parody than the strictures of both the prose poem as well as the author currently allow.

  For the purposes of recommendation it wouldn’t be controversial to say that if you loved The Harbour Behind The Movie you’ll like The Migraine Hotel; Kennard has such innate and exuberant talent that it’s well worth the entrance fee despite the caveats.

  Buy The Migraine Hotel from Salt Publishing.

  Sources:

  David Bowden, 'Getting The Joke', Culture Wars 2009
  Rupert Loydell, 'Danse avec Le Loupe (or Howling in the Dark)', Stride Magazine 2009

  POSTED BY ANDREW BOOBIER AT 07:51 1 COMMENT:
  LABELS: LUKE KENNARD, POETRY, REVIEW

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/01/19/the-transition-luke-kennard-review/
  Word count: 907

  REVIEWS
  ‘The Transition’ Is a ‘Black Mirror’ Spin on Millennial Ennui

  BY PIERCE SMITH
  JANUARY 19, 2018
  COMMENTS 0

  A common narrative persists around millennials who choose non-traditional employment: If you don’t follow the well-trod path (e.g., doctor, banker, lawyer, heir) you should, at the very least, be prepared for a difficult life, and accept that you had a choice—you just chose incorrectly. There is a counter-narrative, even more insidious, wherein the successful sell their privilege without compromising their aspirations.

  This counter-narrative is at the center of The Transition, the somewhat dystopian first novel from English poet Luke Kennard. Equal parts humorous and incisive, The Transition sets Karl Temperly — a thirty-something, underemployed Brit with a master’s in Metaphysical Poetry — against a cadre of social eugenicists operating a government subsidized self-improvement program in the near future.

  Like many self-employed in this digital age, Karl scrapes together a living performing the odd job for a multitude of remote, sometimes anonymous, employers. It is one such employer that employs an unwitting Karl to help him commit large-scale fraud. Karl is subsequently arrested and given an opportunity to participate in “The Transition” rather than go to prison.

  The Transition program is like a house flip, where struggling millennials live with an older, more financially and professionally secure couple to learn the arts of adulthood. Every investment into a Transition protégé is paid back over time through ownership stakes in whatever the rehabbed individual goes on to do in the future. Usually a post-Transition venture is tightly aligned with gentrification, purchasing a building in a low-income neighborhood and turning it into a quiet place to meditate.

  “This is where being male, middle class, and white comes into its own. Nothing but safety nets,” says Kentor, his accountant and former classmate who sets him up with The Transition.

  Karl’s family’s safety net materializes as a comfortable attic apartment in a Georgian terrace belonging to Transition graduates, Stu and Janna. Shortly after Karl and his wife Genevieve (an elementary school teacher with bipolar disorder) move in, the lifestyle rehabilitation begins.

  Much of The Transition is built on the idea that extended or delayed adolescence has stunted the potential of a generation of educated adults. They are incapable, or unwilling, to manage what’s expected of adults: salaried employment, a budget, purchasing a house, exercising, reading the newspaper. Disillusionment will not be tolerated.

  When delivering the Temperly’s newspaper reading assignment, Stu corrects Karl’s reluctance, “The problem you’ve got is that you don’t feel worthy of newspapers. Be honest. A part of you still feels that newspapers are for grown-ups and that you aren’t grown-ups.” What Kennard does so effectively throughout The Transition is interweave reasonable observations with more chilling ones. At one point, Stu says to Karl, “If there’s a broken system you try to improve yourself so it no longer applies to you.”

  There is a sometimes-overt paternalism underlying the conflict in The Transition. Certain elements are reminiscent of Dave Eggers’s The Circle — a seemingly benevolent organization attempts to solve the woes of the world while in reality it exists only to further its control and self-interests. We all know that exercise and healthy eating are good for us, we just don’t want to be forced into it by an organization that stands to benefit from our compliance. From the outset, Karl resists the pull of the program’s too-good-to-be-true template for a successful life, while Genevieve proves to be more susceptible to a well-structured, predictable life.

  While The Transition does a good job dissecting class conflicts and complaints that will be familiar to many younger readers, it is decidedly about the middle-class situation. Many of the protégés are successful, well-educated individuals who made a few bad decisions. For most, it feels like a subconscious rejection of the privilege bestowed on them by sociopolitical happenstance. “Maybe I don’t want to be on the tiny winning side,” says Karl.

  What is perhaps most disturbing about The Transition is that programs like the one it depicts already exist. The Optimum Performance Institute is an expensive rehab program serving upper-middle-class “golden children” that promises to “address the issues that are holding young adults back and instill the skills and habits to launch lives forward.” This is a sentiment that could’ve been torn from The Transition’s brochure. Just like the best dystopian fiction—think Animal Farm or Fahrenheit 451—The Transition encourages us to heighten our awareness of and resist forces that push us to act against our best interests.

  FICTION
  The Transition by Luke Kennard
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Published January 9, 2018

  Luke Kennard is the author of several collections of poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007 and for the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017. The Transition is his first novel.

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  TAGSFSG • LUKE KENNARD • THE TRANSITION

• The Hindu
  http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/luke-kennards-the-transition-review-the-future-is-now/article20750032.ece
  Word count: 428

  IN SHORT REVIEWS
  Luke Kennard's 'The Transition' review: The future is now
  Saurya Sengupta NOVEMBER 25, 2017 18:00 IST
  UPDATED: NOVEMBER 28, 2017 17:56 IST
  SHARE ARTICLE 1 PRINT A A A
  26LRSAURYA MORE-IN

  Kennard spares no one in his criticism of modern behaviour
  At first glance, The Transition is a novel in the tried-and-tested mould. Set in an unspecified time in the future, when consumerism and the vagaries of modern techno-capitalism determine the shape of lives, it is the story of a millennial couple trying to cope with their many crippling financial troubles.

  But as you dive deeper into the book, you are exposed to nuances and insights that are startling, uncanny, and deeply unsettling.

  Karl Temperley “writes consumer reviews of products he has never used” and his wife Genevieve is a primary school teacher.

  To keep her in good spirits, Karl lives well beyond his means, maxing out credit card after credit card, and using the next to pay off the previous.

  But the chickens come home to roost soon enough, and the bills begin to mount. To settle these, Karl gets himself another murky job on the Internet, which lands him straight into an online fraud ring.

  To avoid prison time, Karl accepts — on his and Genevieve’s behalf — a place in a mysterious self-improvement scheme called The Transition, which will, for six months, put them in the hands of ‘mentors’ — a slightly older couple who have navigated a similar rough and tumble — who will guide them towards financial stability.

  But soon, Karl wants to unshackle himself from the constraints of The Transition, whereas Genevieve finds herself much at home with the mentors. From here onwards the troubles mount and never cease.

  Kennard places his novel in a future most urban millennials will be able to envision themselves in — with autonomous cars, self-restocking fridges and so on. Yet it is also grounded in reality.

  It focuses its gaze on the effect this future has on human relations and behaviour. For Kennard, even in an age where artificial intelligence is at its zenith, human beings are as naïve as ever before and still in dire need of interdependence. He spares no one in his scathing criticism of modern behaviour, and the tendency to react overzealously and without consideration.

  In The Transition, Kennard, who is known for his poetry, has a clever, funny and sharp debut novel.

  The Transition;Luke Kennard, Forth Estate, ₹450

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