DATABLEED reads Robert Hampson’s ‘From transmissions 1-19 (covodes 20-38: variants of concern)’
Robert Hampson’s ‘variants of concern’ forms the second series of his covodes project, following the first set that was published by artery editions. The covodes were written during the UK lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, as a documentation of the period. Formally, these poems were developed as an experimental version of the ode, as a mode for public voice.
The form of Hampson’s poems already marks the covodes project as a site of multiple kinetic tensions. Writing about Keats’ odes as a comprehensive movement, Oriane Monthéard described them as a ‘locus of an intimate and … collective crisis confronted by the poetic subject,’ where the poem responds to that crisis through ‘negation as a linguistic operation’ (Monthéard, p. 172). And in 2014, Badiou noted that poetry was ‘receding’ from a ‘cultural account’ that was largely ‘oblivious’ to it; instead of meeting the demands of ‘clarity, passive audience, and simple message,’ Badiou considered poetry as an ‘exercise in intransigence’ that ‘does not belong in to the order of communication,’ as it instead is a mode of ‘saying, a declaration, which draws its authority only from itself’ (Badiou, p. 23). The tensions suggested by such observations echo Adorno’s arguments around the ‘force of expression’ by which ‘artworks become eloquent with wordless gesture’ that reveals the ‘wounds of society,’ and where ‘the untruth of the social situation comes to light’ (Adorno, p. 237).
In other words, Hampson’s poems pose significant questions about how a poem – a covode, for instance – might exist as a public voice form. What might that voice sound like? What would be the locus of its public forum? How can form negotiate voice and public? The poems are often written in a brief and notational form, which gives their public address a fragmentary feeling: individual sections rarely exceed a dozen or so lines, and frequently consist of less than ten; moreover, the length of the individual lines themselves can also be marked by a certain brevity. On a prima facie level, then, the voice that emerges through reading ‘variants of concern’ is one that is austere and broken: a crackling radio signal echoing through an empty hall.
At the same time, the poems express a suspicion of a ‘public voice’ as a singular or monolithic entity. Various pronominal presences – ‘he’, ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘they’ and so on – populate the poems, alongside utterances that are presented as passively disembodied (‘there was talk’). Furthermore, the pronouns themselves contain slippages and multitudes: it is highly unlikely that the ‘we’ who are up on a ladder renovating or learning to live with new priorities are the same ‘we’ as those who are texting their advisers. That is, these poems are not articulated by a ’voice’ but instead by ‘voices’, which might belong to – depending on the line – everyday people or to Westminster MPs and government officials. And as a result of the collagic praxis of creative linkage exercised across the series, such voices can alter and mutate, or create new variants, from one line to the next.
At the heart of this second set of covodes is therefore a question of what constitutes a ‘public’. In its etymological origins, the Latin publicus could signify both ‘of the people’ or ‘of the state’ and ‘done for the state.’ Especially at time of crisis, political discourse likes to evoke a mythical ‘will of the people’ as a rhetorical device that serves to bolster and extend the reach of the ruling class. Hampson’s poems – which critique ‘reflected britishness’ as a ‘myth’ – is keenly attentive to such linguistic manipulations. What is stake in ‘variants of concern’ is therefore a detourning of what a ‘public voice’ can and should be: these poems are in search of a voice that might wrench the word ‘public’ away from the mouths of politicians so that it could be recovered something other than a wound or a social untruth.
References
Adorno, T. (2013) Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentorm, London, Bloomsbury
Badiou, A. (2014) The Age of the Poets, trans. B. Bosteels, London: Verso
Monthéard, O. (2020) ‘Negation and Poetic Capability in Keats’s Odes,’ ÉA 73-2, pp. 171-185