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The Golden Age Of Paraphernalia
Poetry. Radically comic, formally inventive, and ridiculously smart, every 8 to 10 years Kevin Davies releases a new book reminding us just how unexpected poetry can be. THE GOLDEN AGE OF PARAPHERNALIA will without doubt garner the applause his previous book COMP. (Edge Books, 2000) received. That garnering included The San Francisco Book Award in 2000 selected by Kevin Killian, write-ups in the New York Times, Village Voice, and Boston Review, translation into French by Xandaire Selene, and extended critical articles in American Literature, Jacket, and The Poker-- i.e. Davies' work has met with more than a little enthusiasm. One example: Joshua Clover in the Village Voice: "Davies often writes long, tumbling sequences that gather force like a dream landslide, with each part standing out as an idiosyncratic scene charged by an alluring voice, or stance, not quite like anything else in contemporary poetry." Cover photograph by Benjamin Friedlander.
- GenresPoetry
142 pages, paperback
First published September 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 27, 2020
Imagine Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway as a breathless poet plugged into the Late Capitalist funhouse tasked with writing a giddy sombre elergy to online life. Well, with all the weirdly anachronistic high jinks, that’s my impression of Kevin Davies as authorial presence. Haven’t heard of ‘The Golden Age of Paraphernalia’? You might think of it as the glosses of an internet-mediated world. Davies defines it best in one of the more straightforwardly stunning sections of the poem, which also happens to be the one which makes most narrative sense:
'…Any surface at all, inside or out, you touch it
and a scrolled menu appears, listing recent history
chemical makeup, distance to the sun in millimetres,
distance to the Vatican in inches, famous people
who have previously touched this spot, fat content,
will to power, adjacencies, and further articulations.
And each category scores has dozens of subcategories
and each subcategory scores of its own, all
meticulously cross-referenced, linked, so that each square
centimetre of surface everywhere, pole to pole,
from the top of the mightiest Portuguese bell tower to
the intestinal lining of a seat turtle off Ecuador, has
billions of words and images attached, and a special area
a little rectangle, for you to add your own comments.
It is the great work of a young-adult global
Civilization, a metaliterate culture with time on its
prosthetic tentacles, at this point slightly more silicon
than carbon, blinking vulnerably in the light of its own
radiated connectedness.' (p58)
While the extravagant use of enjambments, typography and spacing can not be replicated in these citations, it's easy to see how the notion of a ‘radiated connectedness’, undercut by a shlock ‘futurama' tentacled monster, and no-doubt alluding to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as limit point for this ‘Golden Age’ of thorough neocolonial extraction, is also arguably an image of the human subject turned inside out, its thoughts no more than the detritus of phrases absorbed from outside; its limits, all it can articulate within its harried finite lifespan.
But not to wax lyrical on what is already a murky interpretation. In his ‘Diary’, Witold Gombrowicz chastises critics who write poetically about poetry. Better to speak clearly and not complicate already difficult language with your own attempt at the same but worse. With Kevin Davies, the reader gets the impression that the author has internalised that lesson for his own verse. Aside from the above conceit, most of the lines here sound like they could be said by an average postgraduate just trying to get along in a world of sprawling referentiality. As if the poem has taken Lyotard’s postmodern collapse of metanarratives to its logical extreme and applied it to the level of the sentence. What we have here are fractal phrases, story-strands which never quite reconcile, and this largely because the poem’s authorial presence ranges across historical periods and geographic space, as evidenced by the mixed registers; nevertheless, the prospect that they might ultimately cohere is just over the horizon:
'Yesterday? I stayed in out of the heat, washed dishes
Read a book
Remembered a cow
That as an ignorant boy with a board I walloped
For breaking into our yard
Eyes first puzzled then pissed off
Bellowing near my asparagus patch
Or was that later
After the big cedar fell and destroyed the fence
Or possibly when we mutinied, refusing to follow
Alexander farther into the subcontinent
Just wanting to go back to whatever inevitably temporary homes¨
With the baubles we’d collected and our blistered skins
Eat an entire sheep with a group of cousins
Maybe build a hut
Imperceptibly alter a grammar
Chase birds
Stand in the midst of barley
Centuries later
Brand-new feudal nightmare, Dribs…' (p44)
If there’s a ‘sentimental calculus’ (p44) at work in this poem, then it has some connection to the 90s everyman slacker-loser-hero; here, a transhistorical phenomenon who is just trying to get along under Empire, complicit in its atrocities one way or another, even if that's only by teaching the master’s discourse. ‘The Golden Age of Paraphernalia’ suggests that living under the despotic regimes of the past might not be too different from where we are now, even if our baubles radiate more noxious light.
In the poem’s critical reception, it is curious to see how many have tried to apply either passé or retro Marxist cultural theory to the work in lieu of a legitimation process. A recent essay by Lee Patterson proposes that ‘The Golden Age of Paraphernalia’ can function as an elucidation of a venerable old Althusserian ‘interpellation theory’, where the jargon, phrases, and register we must employ to speak condemn us to confirming our subjugated social position. Arguably, despite its moral appeal, to assume this is to risk a reductive ‘operationalising’ of the poem for an even more simplistic moral stance in the guise of political gesture. Keston Sutherland alludes to this idea through gentle skepticism of Steve Evans’s contention that Kevin Davies’s poem is ‘fucking with the structures of conformist thought, negating them on their own ground’ through an Adornian process of ‘determinate negation’; surely, Sutherland contends, the poem rarely strikes such defiant poses, citing a radio interview where Davies declares his cynicism towards the idea that avantgarde poetry might challenge socio-economic power; late capitalism seems more than capable of handling experimental literary forms. Instead, to help clarify what is actually going on, Sutherland deploys the grand Mikhail Bakhtin to re-inscribe Davies’s fractal phrases into a ‘Bakhtinian sense of a linguistic unit which appropriates the words of others and populates them with one’s own intention’ which ultimately ‘shows this positive, funny, communal experience of disgust with the social world.’ Even this appreciation of the ‘positive’, ‘funny’, and the ‘communal’ must be wrapped up in an underlying moral imperative to show ‘disgust’.
I detect a certain fear in these readings which relate to the ‘learned discourse’ of the poem itself. As well as being all the things these critics say, it is also, undeniably, a colossal series of in-jokes for graduate students, with all the elitism this implies. There are puns on allusions to Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’:
'The last guy, he had a lot of answers
And a collection of vintage wanted posters.
The new guy, he doesn’t say much
The next guy hasn’t even been born yet
And with any luck never will be.' (p52)
And there are the humorous one-liners, like a Marx Brothers take on Freud:
'…I could have used
a bit more repression as a child' (p60)
or:
'I can't come into work today because I am crazy'
or:
'Zeno was half right'
And, once or twice, a brilliant satirical aphorism is allowed to stand undoctored:
'sex,
The ability to in each situation perceive
the available means of persuasion' (p69)
Even the most intimate cannot be extricated from seductive marketing and coercive managerial strategy, and yet it still retains its disturbing beauty. Inevitably, ‘The Golden Age of Paraphernalia’ alienates as much as it educates, but the tone is compassionate rather than smug, and it perhaps offers some camaraderie to those who can keep up.
'…Any surface at all, inside or out, you touch it
and a scrolled menu appears, listing recent history
chemical makeup, distance to the sun in millimetres,
distance to the Vatican in inches, famous people
who have previously touched this spot, fat content,
will to power, adjacencies, and further articulations.
And each category scores has dozens of subcategories
and each subcategory scores of its own, all
meticulously cross-referenced, linked, so that each square
centimetre of surface everywhere, pole to pole,
from the top of the mightiest Portuguese bell tower to
the intestinal lining of a seat turtle off Ecuador, has
billions of words and images attached, and a special area
a little rectangle, for you to add your own comments.
It is the great work of a young-adult global
Civilization, a metaliterate culture with time on its
prosthetic tentacles, at this point slightly more silicon
than carbon, blinking vulnerably in the light of its own
radiated connectedness.' (p58)
While the extravagant use of enjambments, typography and spacing can not be replicated in these citations, it's easy to see how the notion of a ‘radiated connectedness’, undercut by a shlock ‘futurama' tentacled monster, and no-doubt alluding to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as limit point for this ‘Golden Age’ of thorough neocolonial extraction, is also arguably an image of the human subject turned inside out, its thoughts no more than the detritus of phrases absorbed from outside; its limits, all it can articulate within its harried finite lifespan.
But not to wax lyrical on what is already a murky interpretation. In his ‘Diary’, Witold Gombrowicz chastises critics who write poetically about poetry. Better to speak clearly and not complicate already difficult language with your own attempt at the same but worse. With Kevin Davies, the reader gets the impression that the author has internalised that lesson for his own verse. Aside from the above conceit, most of the lines here sound like they could be said by an average postgraduate just trying to get along in a world of sprawling referentiality. As if the poem has taken Lyotard’s postmodern collapse of metanarratives to its logical extreme and applied it to the level of the sentence. What we have here are fractal phrases, story-strands which never quite reconcile, and this largely because the poem’s authorial presence ranges across historical periods and geographic space, as evidenced by the mixed registers; nevertheless, the prospect that they might ultimately cohere is just over the horizon:
'Yesterday? I stayed in out of the heat, washed dishes
Read a book
Remembered a cow
That as an ignorant boy with a board I walloped
For breaking into our yard
Eyes first puzzled then pissed off
Bellowing near my asparagus patch
Or was that later
After the big cedar fell and destroyed the fence
Or possibly when we mutinied, refusing to follow
Alexander farther into the subcontinent
Just wanting to go back to whatever inevitably temporary homes¨
With the baubles we’d collected and our blistered skins
Eat an entire sheep with a group of cousins
Maybe build a hut
Imperceptibly alter a grammar
Chase birds
Stand in the midst of barley
Centuries later
Brand-new feudal nightmare, Dribs…' (p44)
If there’s a ‘sentimental calculus’ (p44) at work in this poem, then it has some connection to the 90s everyman slacker-loser-hero; here, a transhistorical phenomenon who is just trying to get along under Empire, complicit in its atrocities one way or another, even if that's only by teaching the master’s discourse. ‘The Golden Age of Paraphernalia’ suggests that living under the despotic regimes of the past might not be too different from where we are now, even if our baubles radiate more noxious light.
In the poem’s critical reception, it is curious to see how many have tried to apply either passé or retro Marxist cultural theory to the work in lieu of a legitimation process. A recent essay by Lee Patterson proposes that ‘The Golden Age of Paraphernalia’ can function as an elucidation of a venerable old Althusserian ‘interpellation theory’, where the jargon, phrases, and register we must employ to speak condemn us to confirming our subjugated social position. Arguably, despite its moral appeal, to assume this is to risk a reductive ‘operationalising’ of the poem for an even more simplistic moral stance in the guise of political gesture. Keston Sutherland alludes to this idea through gentle skepticism of Steve Evans’s contention that Kevin Davies’s poem is ‘fucking with the structures of conformist thought, negating them on their own ground’ through an Adornian process of ‘determinate negation’; surely, Sutherland contends, the poem rarely strikes such defiant poses, citing a radio interview where Davies declares his cynicism towards the idea that avantgarde poetry might challenge socio-economic power; late capitalism seems more than capable of handling experimental literary forms. Instead, to help clarify what is actually going on, Sutherland deploys the grand Mikhail Bakhtin to re-inscribe Davies’s fractal phrases into a ‘Bakhtinian sense of a linguistic unit which appropriates the words of others and populates them with one’s own intention’ which ultimately ‘shows this positive, funny, communal experience of disgust with the social world.’ Even this appreciation of the ‘positive’, ‘funny’, and the ‘communal’ must be wrapped up in an underlying moral imperative to show ‘disgust’.
I detect a certain fear in these readings which relate to the ‘learned discourse’ of the poem itself. As well as being all the things these critics say, it is also, undeniably, a colossal series of in-jokes for graduate students, with all the elitism this implies. There are puns on allusions to Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’:
'The last guy, he had a lot of answers
And a collection of vintage wanted posters.
The new guy, he doesn’t say much
The next guy hasn’t even been born yet
And with any luck never will be.' (p52)
And there are the humorous one-liners, like a Marx Brothers take on Freud:
'…I could have used
a bit more repression as a child' (p60)
or:
'I can't come into work today because I am crazy'
or:
'Zeno was half right'
And, once or twice, a brilliant satirical aphorism is allowed to stand undoctored:
'sex,
The ability to in each situation perceive
the available means of persuasion' (p69)
Even the most intimate cannot be extricated from seductive marketing and coercive managerial strategy, and yet it still retains its disturbing beauty. Inevitably, ‘The Golden Age of Paraphernalia’ alienates as much as it educates, but the tone is compassionate rather than smug, and it perhaps offers some camaraderie to those who can keep up.
March 18, 2009
I came across a passage from this book of poetry in a review in The Nation some weeks ago, and was so taken by the hyperlinking of ideas and sounds, the flow of words upon the page, and the abrupt shifts in tone and reference as it careened along, that I wanted to savor more of this author's work. So I tracked this volume down, and I wasn't disappointed.
Don't try to read it all at once, and don't try to get literal meaning from every phrase and reference. Listen to the sounds (in your mind) the spoken words would make, think about the connects, disconnects, reverberations, and occasional epiphanies of insight or feeling that pour forth as you read along, then reflect upon how this makes you feel. Food for the mind, food for the soul, this work is sometimes charming, sometimes troubling, sometimes witty, sometimes weird, but very compelling.
Don't try to read it all at once, and don't try to get literal meaning from every phrase and reference. Listen to the sounds (in your mind) the spoken words would make, think about the connects, disconnects, reverberations, and occasional epiphanies of insight or feeling that pour forth as you read along, then reflect upon how this makes you feel. Food for the mind, food for the soul, this work is sometimes charming, sometimes troubling, sometimes witty, sometimes weird, but very compelling.
June 4, 2009
More greatness from Mr. Davies. The book length piece focuses around three formal structures: bullets("'Floater'"), | marks(Remnants of Wilma), and numbers(One-Eyed Seller of Garlic). In btwn two larger self contained sections titled: Lateral Argument, and Duckwalking Perimeter. Over the course of the book the three formal structures begin to converge into each other, blurring the lines of their relative autonomies, as we continue to investigate the contemporary scape of the neoliberal age, humor, horror, <3, et al.
January 5, 2010
I would give this book really a 3 and a half. I think that its an interesting text in the way Davies has laid it out. I saw it as not only a poetry book but as well as a prose and as an interactive piece. Some of the lines are wonderful and the way he structures phrases or words together that aren't supposed to make sense but do. Why did I give it a 3 and a half? Because while I think the book is def above average its not amazing. Its in between.
July 5, 2009
Irony is taken for granted these days, which makes it safe and boring. Davies' irony is not safely detached--it's invested, involved, energetic. The thoughtfulness extends to a (too-rare) attention to form on large and small scales that makes reading the book a complex and continually surprising experience. Some of the best stuff around: socially critical, funny, makes me feel weird.
July 4, 2009
Kevin Davies is one of my favorite poets. If you don't know who he is, please check out "Pause Button" free for download (PDF) on Ubuweb.com. Then pick up a copy of this book.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews