DATABLEED READS Amy Hodder Tempest’s Poems

In Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler describes the lyric as ‘characteristically extravagant, performing unusual speech acts of strange address’ (2015, 212). This is an apt description of Amy Hodder Tempest’s work, where the lyric blocks of text embody a linguistic extravagance that twists and turns through sinuous and disjointed articulations delivered to a variety of addressees, each of which appear both intimate and distant. They are poems that refuse to settle but instead hold multiple vocabularies together in a kinetic tension, where the stream-of-consciousness of the everyday may fold into Shakespearean declaratives. Or where the constellatory coordinates encompass quasi-confessional gameshow dreamscapes, half-remembered intimacies, and encyclopaedic compositions of overwhelm.  

One possible technique for the unbounded unsettlement in these poems is suggested by one of the titles included in the feature – that is, ‘Rhizomes.’ In the Deleuzoguattarian use of the word, rhizomes represent both ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’ and ‘adventitious growths’ (D&G 1987, 7; 15). In this sense, perhaps the extravagant and unusual articulations of these poems in part result from a tendency to branch off, like ‘subterranean stems’ that rupture and reform through unexpected connections (D&G 1987, 6).  In doing so, the poems position the lyric ‘I’ as a nodal point within a network of relational connections, which extend from a ‘man in a bookshop’ to a father in a dream to a ‘no longer […] best friend’ to an unnamed ‘her’ to an unnamed ‘them’, and so on and so on. In other words, the poems articulate a kind of ecology of subjectivities, or an ecology of intimacies: even as neoliberal structures work to isolate us in a pursuit of individualism, we remain entangled in complex set of relations and possibilities.   

The Deleuzoguattarian rhizome is ‘made of plateaus’, which designates a ‘multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems’ or a ‘continuous self-vibrating region of intensities’ (1987, 21). But while the syntax of Hodder Tempest’s work may convey such effervescent vibrations, the semantic content of the poems often circles a void-space: these are poems that contain sinkholes, hollownesses and depressions. These are in stark contrast to the ruptures of rhizomes. Instead of reforming through unexpected connections, the voids at the heart of poetry here ‘hold there is not enough / support.’ We might be entangled in a complex network of relations, but those relations do not – more precisely, cannot, as a direct consequence of neoliberalism – offer the support that might uphold us. It is difficult to find sure footing here: subjects may collapse into something else, and addressees may give way or else ‘swallow[…] in the light’. The depressions in Hodder Tempest’s poems are therefore both metaphorical and literal, perhaps reflecting the ‘infinite deferral’ of contemporary life and the things we will do ‘just to feel something’.  

In holding so much, perhaps the ultimate question that Hodder Tempest’s poems pose for us is this: what can poetry actually contain? If the archaeology of self-awareness in these poems presents us with a constellatory set of coordinates, that constellation coheres with Adorno’s understanding of the term in Negative Dialectics  – that is, these poems contain an assemblage of contradictory elements that are held in a dialectical relation where synthesis is resisted (2207, 162). By unpicking the ordinariness of quotidian existence, these poems place the human subject in a swirling landscape of uncertainty comprising contradictory interchanges between bodies and the wider material world. So, to ask again: what can poetry contain? Who knows, but one thing it should contain is the undoing of containment.  

Adorno, T. (2007) Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B Ashton, New York, Continuum.  

Culler, J. (2015) Theory of the Lyric, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.