Recordings:
Bibliography:
Poetry collections:
- Neocosis, 2005
- Neutrality, 2004
- The Rictus Flag, 2003
- Antifreeze, 2002
Translations of my poetry in:
- Wozu Vögel, Bücher, Jazz? Gedichte aus England. Ed. Hans Thill (German)
- Action Poetique (French; poems plus an interview)
- Chinese newspapers.
Articles:
- 'Poetics' forthcoming in The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Blackwell, 2006)
- 'Ethica Nullius' (on J.H. Prynne's late poetry) forthcoming, 2006
- 'Vagueness, Poetry' forthcoming in Contemporary Poetics Ed. Louis Armand (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2006)
- 'Theses on Need' (Translation of Theodor Adorno, 'Thesen über Bedürfnis') Quid 2006
- 'What's The Ugliest Part of Your Market-Researched Anaclitic Affect Repertoire?' in Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology. Ed. Ben Watson and Esther Leslie, 2005
- 'For Carol Mirakove' Edinburgh Review 114, 2004
- 'The True, the Good, the Beautiful and the Baghdad Central Detention Centre' Quid 2004
- 'What is Called John Wilkinson?' The Gig 2004
- 'Disappointment' (Translation of Herbert Marcuse, 'Enttaeuschung' Quid 2004)
- 'Junk Subjectivity' Mute 2004
- 'Four Theses on Speed' Quid 2004
- 'Prosody and Reconciliation' The Gig, 2004
- 'A Short Critique of Pacifism' Circulars 2003
- 'Vagueness, Poetry' Quid, 2001
- 'The Trade in Bathos' Jacket 15, 2000
- 'Nervous Breakdowns in Chris Emery's The Cutting Room' Quid, 2000
- 'On the Accomplishment of Knowing One's Place' The Poetry of Peter Riley. Ed. Nate Dorward, 1999
Sample text
FALLING IN LOVE CREAM CRAB
Now itch like precision flamecutting. Detected
sweat in bloom Pakistani Sukhoi-30MKI,
sweat that eyes in the front of your head crunch,
pulse on detergent, broken ear on Anantnag
bus ride flowering to a throat full of sweat,
brighter than the consumption reel it cap fades for
no-one half
se
by half second and is nothing except love there
is nothing except it on. Back flowing fade
you point a skeleton at, sweat on it
on it is the wool/teeth foreclosures 1/2 off skeleton,
the no-one your flesh is slung on burning its
with desire FTIR spectr. In China the
©
Let Us Put You
touch into dead green: hit aflame by
lips switched cutting the dead air dead volts
scattered by holding your face on dying
palms in the thrill of a kiss you cry for--
a bat drops. Planets drop in. A bat
stopgap for the IAF. Make more by working
cry for--
less
life TBA by my shred hands wringing the bridge by
Dartford into • clavicle sorbet, • new tibia bake,
new uln / under you grabbing your face act
calm orgasming frantically in you needing you
would the person whose car is parked
to esteem the pram full of scissors in Morgan Stanley,
Houston,
Taipei,
Now expand into the Netherlands. Into the
line booster fade you point a skeleton at
it is the skeleton imagined dead; its mirroring in
your faced life not at a time forever not for
anything scratched in patty where the reverse is
true to mere form, dying. Get out
bed
of
• new Lumbar Vertebrae Ranch Squid, / nail--skip to •
Preparation Tips in Frum Mix, set shaking
unfree of its off switch, broken on the heart pro
rata cut while you wait. You make dinner with
Nancy Zucker Boswell from Transparency International
look stupid. You sheathe the IAF in ice,
faster
than
reason is your immediacy. Wait and see
it. It is nothing except love, its cast of paroxysms gets
the dead air plastered, abiding in Asset Liability
Management • new 1 John 3.17 ia bak McNamara
to Wolfowitz his brother in need and closes
negotiations on the master derivatives Sunny Delight
Kids Cove
lockout and riot
leatherette integument for the bat. It drops
are on hold. You have been placed in a queue
on hold. You have been placed in a queue are
Verkehr in the community, substitute to produce alternative
puns with fakir, with quaere, and finally
with hair, i.e., hair in the community, in its throat sweat,
free fish
oil for kids
Now get nowhere fast. Anantnag running on
the pram full of hedging needs in Ann Veneman X
paroxysmic you arise, just now sincerely
Chinese for the first time, locking your car.
The temperature is at 3480. We deliver.
Love is the angle of the mirroring it breaks for,
the pivot
are bet
you on track for. Nothing but love in the face that
aflame steel discolours red. You remember
kissing my mouth, traducing the oxyacetylene
whisper cut out. Later in the ear I
again am in an encounter with the skeleton you
point at going. There are feet everywhere
you tread
on
them cap with your 1.6 way mirror • new tarsals, • •
1. credit aspect 7, plastic 8 way meet clients'
hold you--throttle out sex in Palam debt product,
your eyes a must-see, icing as they flower in
beauty vanilla bonds • n. What this means is that
placed in a face they flash out incomparably
wild back
flowing fade
and I love you really there is nothing but love over
it is all there is there nothing other
than it no there by where the cylinders are fitted
patella bol with regulators and flexible hoses which lead
to the blowpipe. It will make your mouth water
freeze, a life aflame in the shark shit,
only now forever,
1.9
Review Quotes:
"In a fast-moving, intelligent, visceral and sensual style, he considered what humanity, love and desire can be or become in a globalised and violently unjust world; the work seemed simultaneously hard-headed and impossibly tender. Sutherland's latest pamphlet, Neocosis explicitly addresses current events, their actors and their covert and overt effects.
... Within Sutherland's grotesque cabaret, we encounter many real-life characters, such as Roger Ailes, the genius of Republican-biased television since the Nixon era, now head of Fox; Albert Wohlstetter, advocate of precision bombing and limited nuclear war and Michael Levin, an NYU professor who advocates torture.
Sutherland's poetry is nearer to scratch video than heroic couplets, farcically remixing the conventional metaphors of political discussion, sampling bin Laden and the chatter of Fox-dominated radio frequencies and wrestling self-consciously with his vestigial literary options. It is ferociously complex; he is picking apart those awkward details and ideas that we don't often find in the media. But his poetry's questions - how to write about (and live within) a reality of money, massacre, media ownership, geopolitics and individual impotence - are clear enough. If you want to know what a committed but undogmatic poetry might look like in the era of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, this is one place to start." --Robert Potts, "Life, remixed", Sunday February 12, 2006, The Observer
"I think it's quite a common experience for poets to realise, at some point in their lives, just how little of what moves them in the world actually finds its way into their poems. No matter how elastic your medium, a gulf opens between the things in your life that tend to become poems and the things that don't. If you accept this as a problem, there are two ways round it. You can choose to do something else, maybe write journalistically, in order to keep the space marked poetry uncorrupted. The alternative is to try to find hidden properties of the medium itself which allow it to transcend its acquired limitations. Keston Sutherland's medium has always been more elastic than most, but when I think of his new book Neocosis I'm reminded of the moment in William Burroughs' The Soft Machine where the protagonist walks in on an ether party with a lighted cigarette. Most drugs, like most foods, can be burned as well as digested: the chemistry's much the same, but the power, the energy transferred per unit of time, is vastly increased. Neocosis is cut from the same stuff as Keston's earlier poetry, but the interactions among its material parts are ramped up to a level where they become self-sustaining, at least partly beyond the author's control, drawing in and on an informed self, wired to every possible source and sink of information in a world where truth equals shit at the very moment when the elastic snaps, leaving us with a face full of spare ribs and throat gristle. It's one of the most astonishing collaborations of mind and material I've ever known. And so is Keston." --Peter Manson, Cambridge, 16 February 2006
"Somebody will always be opposed, -- how could Keston for instance set out in the course he has taken without expecting his poetry to be thoroughly loathed by unknown persons who feel delegated and reduced by it -- it positively courts such a reaction." --Peter Riley
'But seriously folks, if we are no longer to quite "suffer the privilege of being fully distracted," we are also failing more than ever to find ways to make the first person plural signify as an oppositional element. No plasticene plastique dabbler lacking all sense of consequnce, of the every day after, Keston Sutherland's rage is sublimated into direct representations of the endlessly attempted substitutions of the personal and its desires for--everything. Sutherland doesn't attempt to give us the real materials of the global economy, whatever the evidence might seem to suggest, but rather the infinite distortions which are our only access to it, and the errant, monstrously Gehry-like bits in which we might catch unanticipatable reflections: for Lear's five 'never's, Mincemeat Seesaw's six 'rapes.' Mike Scharf, quoted in Allodox blog, 10 September 2003
'This, then, is ethically driving and driven work; but also work at great play.' --Pete Smith, The Gig
'The lines move rapidly, sonic patterns sharply burst, and the pages burn in your hands as you read them.'--Carol Mirakove, Washington Review
'These are lines to snort up a rolled-up fiver...' -Tony Lopez in Stand n.s. 1.4 (Spring 2000).
Some online reviews:
- Robert Potts writing in Poetry Review
- Jerome Game writing in Jacket
- Edmund Hardy writing in Intercapillary Space
- For links to other online reviews, see the Barque website.
- Listen to a (red-eyed, late night) interview on poetry and politics online at The Tangent Press.
By downloading files from this site, you agree to our Terms and Conditions |
