Man at Leisure

by Alexander Trocchi

First published in 1972, this verse collection ranges over multiple years and includes the lyricism of early love poetry along with reflections on drug culture and penetrating comments on contemporary figures and events. The poems’ language is strong, rich, and frankly obscene, while the arguments range from the witty to the profound.

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish novelist and editor. He lived in Paris in the early 1950s and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue and Pablo Neruda, among others. Although he was never published in Merlin, American writer Terry Southern (who lived in Paris from 1948-1952) became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology Writers In Revolt (1962).

His early novel Young Adam (1954) was adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003.

Reviews

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry is always a joy. I don’t read it enough and I think that I’m going to dedicate a lot more time to poetry this year. Another resolution to join the many others.

The poetry I love can be split into two separate, yet overlapping, zones. 1) Poetry that really nails that concentration of emotion that people experience. 2) Poetry that conveys a lived experience the writer has had.

Sure you can have beautiful poetry. The stuff that explores details in flowery language. Or the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation. Or even inject humour in the form of Limericks. And a million other formats besides. But I love the Haiku especially because via a few key words it attempts to transmit the sensation of an emotion to the reader using a personal moment. Where the reader might never experience that moment for themselves, they do gain a sense of it. It proves the universality of the human experience, despite all our quirks.

So where does this one sit? It sits in that overlapping zone. Strong images are presented and they read as true experiences. Those flashes of action draw up a real sense of the emotional turbulence of Trocchi’s life. His worries. Anxieties. Desires. They’re rendered on the page as staccato blasts of surreal word arrangements. He doesn’t translate things into the classic template of poetic form, but expresses using a powerful inner voice that is often crude and offensive. What does that achieve? It makes his softer moments, his secret yearnings, seer themselves into your mind as you read. The contrasts make the work sing.

It looks like poetry. And I guess it is. But if you follow me… It is more like fragments of thought arranged on a page. It resembles poetry, sits alongside it in a library. They come about in similar ways. But this is less constrained than poetry. Feel sharper. More raw.

And some of that rawness. The lack of refinement. That makes some of it fall, rather than soar skyward. But where I found the work occasionally inaccessible, occasionally mystifying, that is what will prompt me to go back and read again.

[Krankenverse · Rating 3 out of 5]

The afterword by Stewart Home is pretty enlightening on this one, in that it reveals the collection had to be stolen, incomplete from Trocchi's writing desk drawer by Calder, in order to ensure it wouldn't be left in limbo for good. The poems are sometimes pretty scrappy, often unpolished, but all the more characterful because of that.
In some ways, perhaps the ideal Trocchi is the unfinished Trocchi, his career is all about the work left undone, the cracked and crooked masterpieces that never quite were and never has his writing been more cracked and crooked than here.
The poems were seemingly written piecemeal over the course of his life, so the style and subject matter vary greatly. Some of the poetry is typical of beat poetry, others are humorous little ditties that feel like in jokes. Some of the early poems feel very influenced by Modernist works that would've been contemporary in his early career. It's all rather uneven.
My advice- this is a resource if you're already a fan of Trocchi and want a better understanding of him, but not a great starting point, or indeed a great collection of poetry.

[Roman · Rating 3 out of 5]

obscene, but a pretty and interesting poetry