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I'm Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn
Born near Manchester in 1948, Anna Mendelssohn authored poetry, fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist, musician, and translator. From 1971 to 1977 she served time at Holloway Prison in London due to her involvement in extreme leftist activism. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed nineteen poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics, among them, Parataxis , Critical Quarterly , and Jacket . Her work appeared in seminal anthologies including Denise Riley's Poets on Writing (1992), Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1996), and Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing New Modernist Poems (2004). Often situated within the British Poetry Revival, Mendelssohn retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England, where she lived from 1983 until her death in 2009. In 2010, her vast archive of writings and drawings was generously donated by her three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex. Labelled surrealist and ludic, Mendelssohn's poems draw thematically and stylistically on an expansive lineage that encompasses an international array of post-1850 avant-garde figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Anna Ahkmatova, Nâzim Hikmet, Federico García Lorca, and Tom Raworth. Closely attuned to the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to disparities of class and race, her poems are impassioned, acute, probing, allusive, and unparalleled. Part aesthetic treatise ("a poem is not going to give precise directions"); part antipolitical manifesto ("the war is too close / for revolution to be understood"); part lament ("softly the sound of woe / gallops"); part celebration of the possibilities of poetic noise and possibility, replete with "scoopydoo sounds", "night[s of] pouring gold", and "high walk[s] into fantasy", Mendelssohn's writing resolutely resists containment or category. This scholarly edition is the first replete collection of the poems Anna Mendelssohn published or prepared for circulation in her lifetime, often writing under the name Grace Lake.
780 pages, Paperback
Published December 28, 2020
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May 10, 2021
A labour of love and a monumental editorial work by Sara Crangle, I'm Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn is supplied with extensive notes, appendices, and a critical introduction, and collects all of Anna Mendelssohn's published poetry, from the self-published 'Crystal Love D.N.A.' in the early 1980s to 'py' from 2009, along with previously unpublished material from typescripts in Mendelssohn's enormous archive at the University of Sussex. Publishing exclusively within the UK small press and little magazine milieu associated with Cambridge, Sussex, London and other towns during the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, Mendelssohn built up a cult following of readers—generally, fellow poets who valued her dedication to poetry above all else (“I do not fake, I do not lie, I worship at the shrine of poetry”). She wrote constantly, drafting and redrafting poems, producing her own pamphlets and collaborating with small presses on publications that often burst out of the scope of their format—long-lined poems, drafted on A3 paper, that would barely fit into the size of a typical A5 pamphlet; poems in fragments, sections, screeds and rhapsodies that returned again and again to set of core preoccupations: Mendelssohn's experience of imprisonment for her supposed role in planning Angry Brigade bombings; being pressured into putting her children into foster care; gendered indifference or hostility to her work and person as a female artist, or, as she puts it with self-conscious archaism, a "poetess".
She first came to writing out of the immediate post-Empire period, studying at the University of Essex, where she encountered politically left and formally avant-garde poets such as Ed Dorn and Tom Raworth, and became involved with the radical student left. As part of this milieu, she briefly features in Jean-Luc Godard's film 'British Sounds'--commissioned for British television but refused a screening, and instead shown in cinemas--later claiming that Godard had asked her to star in the film, only for her comrades to vote down the notion of stars as hierarchical individualism. (Her later poem 'The Fourteenth Flight' is dedicated to Godard). The British far left was never as widespread or visible as it was in France, from which it sought inspiration (some accounts have Mendelssohn visiting Paris in May 68 when an alliance of students and workers promised a revolutionary upsurge to transform another post-imperial country). Nonetheless, a core of committed activists produced newspapers, pamphlets and other communications, challenged the education system--for instance, in boycotts of university examinations--worked in housing and prison activism, and tried otherwise to conceive ways to move out of the impasse of a nation that had embraced the welfare state--an apparatus that, over the past 10 years since Mendelssohn's death, many of us have had to desperately defend as it comes under attack from governments of millionaires, rampant privateers and privatisers, but one that it's crucial to note was built on racialised exclusion and in which fundamental inequalities of class and of gender still remained. After bomb-making equipment was discovered at a flat that Mendelssohn shared in London with other members of the Angry Brigade--who'd carried out a series of non-lethal bombings against targets such as Conservative MPs--she and others were placed on highly visible trial, covered in lurid and sensationalist terms in the nation's right-wing media, still the bane of the country's political life in 2021. Mendelssohn, like others of the group, chose to defend herself in court, delivering a long and eloquent testimony that fellow defendants such as John Barker remember to this day, but she, along with four of her comrades, was jailed despite evidence of a frame-up (she maintained her innocence until her death). Incarcerated at Holloway Prison--an institution finally shut down in 2016 after numerous instances of prisoner mistreatment--Mendelssohn staged plays and wrote, but was permanently scarred by the experience, now forever interpellated as a criminalised, unwanted, problem subject. Though she wrote and contemplated taking distance learning courses in prison, it was upon her release that she began writing and publishing in earnest, self-publishing a series of pamphlets, often illustrated with her own visual art, while living in Sheffield. During this time, she had three children while remaining a single mother--thus defying and falling victim to the patriarchal family model governing natalist government policy--and was, according to her account, ultimately pressured into giving them up for adoption. Mendelssohn chose to study Literature at Cambridge University, remaining in the town until her death where she became part of a small circle of experimental writers including Denise Riley, J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley and Rod Mengham, the latter of whom was an unflinching champion of her work and responsible for the publication of many of her later chapbooks through his small press Equipage.
Mendelssohn’s work traces a political era from the end of empire through to the epoch of Thatcherism (an epoch we're still in), satirically rendered in her earlier pamphlets, though her later work is more oblique in its relation to contemporary political developments. As she wrote, this work is political, but it is not politics: we do not turn here for a series of political positions that can be turned into a programme, for a series of proclamations or answers, but of contradictions, questions—to be sure, sometimes statements of direct and undeniable clarity that could also be turned into slogan (“I don’t talk to the police except never”).The experience of demonisation within the media following the Angry Brigade trial saw her censored, censured and surveilled by the State for much of her life: from prison to the benefit system to the academy. Mendelssohn consequently rejects the position of the autobiographical subject—the subject forced to testify, to confess, and to perform—instead ranging widely across the full range of the literary and artistic avant-garde and the political history of Europe and beyond, with imaginative dexterity and sometimes unmatched verbal inventiveness. Yet her work also incessantly returns to themes shaped by autobiographical circumstance that her work shows to be nothing if not political, nothing if not social. Here, the individual is not the retreat from the social but where the social begins: it is the battleground on which competing visions of the social play out. Political, but not politics.
Mendelssohn’s leftism was shaped by her horror at the war in Vietnam, photos of napalm victims connecting to her own sense of still being in mourning for the European holocaust, as she writes in a draft poem here. But, as her later poems suggest, she balked at the dismissiveness she encountered towards literary endeavour within the ideological imperatives of the far left milieux she inhabited during the period leading up to her arrest. (Her early poems, including translations of Nazim Hikmet, are lost), and later moved towards a position of non-violence. Above all, her work comes to the position of defending art, and the position of the artist dedicated to making art rather than to other forms of ‘gainful employment’—a defence that is a class statement, for the subject who feels herself denied the right to be an artist, denied the right to be a mother, because she chooses to be these things on her own terms. This defense of art, however, is not of a kind of free, decontextualised aesthetic realm. Art doesn’t resolve or escape the double-binds of lived experience but holds them up for inspection under a kind of dizzying kaleidoscope of language—broken, fragmented, incantatory, rhapsodic, stuttering, suturing, stitched, cross-hatched and curlicued in overlapping lines like Mendelssohn’s densely worked drawings. This is a language of assertion and refusal—the refusal to give up its secrets, to surrender to the clear meanings demanded by interlocutors and interpreters from cops to landlords to social services to university lecturers and examiners to literary critics to judgmental friends; the assertion of Mendelssohn’s right to existence on her own terms, an existence it sometimes feel she could only carve out in poetry, even as that poetry attested to what she felt as continuous subjugation, frustration and denial, as a gendered and classed subject whose work was misinterpreted, ignored and sometimes actively silenced.
Mendelssohn also increasingly figure as a racialised subject. Of European Jewish ancestry--a particular concern of her later work--Mendelssohn constantly rankled at the racist parochialism of the British state. "I want to be / thinking and speaking in another language", she writes at one point: a self-taught student of half-a-dozen languages, Mendelssohn's work at times strains at the bounds of English, throwing in French, German, and other European languages, pursuing obscure etymologies to create composite characters like Viola Tricolor, Bernache Nonette and others--something like Angela Carter fairytale heroes (Viola is also a flower and Bernache a goose), something like literary personae, something like epic heroes--obscure figures from a pantheon of Mendelssohn's own making. While these are feminist figures, her work has a complex relation to feminism--Mendelssohn is capable of lashing out at perceived slights from those with whom it might have been in solidarity, including “radical lesbian feminists” and “lazy lady socialiste[s]” as well as misogynist men, cops, and landlords. In such instances, one suspects real or imagined autobiographical valences that the poem elides, so that the barrage of criticism Mendelssohn levels against enemies and interlocuters can become ultimately bewildering. In part, the poems seek to counter-interpellate their reader as Mendelssohn herself was constantly interpellated, put on trial every day of her life. The poems put up a hostile front against the reader who acts as detective, cop, critic, looking for threads of meaning and intention to construct a picture according to what they already think they know. Even Mendelssohn’s most problematic outbursts serve to relentlessly challenge this in a way that few poets manage, and this is a valuable and often courageous gesture. It can make the poems hard to read—deliberately so. And it contradicts the countervailing impulse in her work, to communicate, to seek and find solidarity, warmth, friendship, love, comradeship too often denied. This work is full of contradictions. It defends art’s autonomy but relentlessly shows that the idea of an autonomous art is a convenient fiction. It can be exhilarating but also exhausting; repetitive yet somehow managing to say the same thing in a million different ways. It offers little comfort but it’s also a beautiful and brilliant and defiant monument to survival. It’s one of the major oeuvres of the later twentieth century and it’s to be hoped that this vital new edition will gain the readership it deserves.
She first came to writing out of the immediate post-Empire period, studying at the University of Essex, where she encountered politically left and formally avant-garde poets such as Ed Dorn and Tom Raworth, and became involved with the radical student left. As part of this milieu, she briefly features in Jean-Luc Godard's film 'British Sounds'--commissioned for British television but refused a screening, and instead shown in cinemas--later claiming that Godard had asked her to star in the film, only for her comrades to vote down the notion of stars as hierarchical individualism. (Her later poem 'The Fourteenth Flight' is dedicated to Godard). The British far left was never as widespread or visible as it was in France, from which it sought inspiration (some accounts have Mendelssohn visiting Paris in May 68 when an alliance of students and workers promised a revolutionary upsurge to transform another post-imperial country). Nonetheless, a core of committed activists produced newspapers, pamphlets and other communications, challenged the education system--for instance, in boycotts of university examinations--worked in housing and prison activism, and tried otherwise to conceive ways to move out of the impasse of a nation that had embraced the welfare state--an apparatus that, over the past 10 years since Mendelssohn's death, many of us have had to desperately defend as it comes under attack from governments of millionaires, rampant privateers and privatisers, but one that it's crucial to note was built on racialised exclusion and in which fundamental inequalities of class and of gender still remained. After bomb-making equipment was discovered at a flat that Mendelssohn shared in London with other members of the Angry Brigade--who'd carried out a series of non-lethal bombings against targets such as Conservative MPs--she and others were placed on highly visible trial, covered in lurid and sensationalist terms in the nation's right-wing media, still the bane of the country's political life in 2021. Mendelssohn, like others of the group, chose to defend herself in court, delivering a long and eloquent testimony that fellow defendants such as John Barker remember to this day, but she, along with four of her comrades, was jailed despite evidence of a frame-up (she maintained her innocence until her death). Incarcerated at Holloway Prison--an institution finally shut down in 2016 after numerous instances of prisoner mistreatment--Mendelssohn staged plays and wrote, but was permanently scarred by the experience, now forever interpellated as a criminalised, unwanted, problem subject. Though she wrote and contemplated taking distance learning courses in prison, it was upon her release that she began writing and publishing in earnest, self-publishing a series of pamphlets, often illustrated with her own visual art, while living in Sheffield. During this time, she had three children while remaining a single mother--thus defying and falling victim to the patriarchal family model governing natalist government policy--and was, according to her account, ultimately pressured into giving them up for adoption. Mendelssohn chose to study Literature at Cambridge University, remaining in the town until her death where she became part of a small circle of experimental writers including Denise Riley, J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley and Rod Mengham, the latter of whom was an unflinching champion of her work and responsible for the publication of many of her later chapbooks through his small press Equipage.
Mendelssohn’s work traces a political era from the end of empire through to the epoch of Thatcherism (an epoch we're still in), satirically rendered in her earlier pamphlets, though her later work is more oblique in its relation to contemporary political developments. As she wrote, this work is political, but it is not politics: we do not turn here for a series of political positions that can be turned into a programme, for a series of proclamations or answers, but of contradictions, questions—to be sure, sometimes statements of direct and undeniable clarity that could also be turned into slogan (“I don’t talk to the police except never”).The experience of demonisation within the media following the Angry Brigade trial saw her censored, censured and surveilled by the State for much of her life: from prison to the benefit system to the academy. Mendelssohn consequently rejects the position of the autobiographical subject—the subject forced to testify, to confess, and to perform—instead ranging widely across the full range of the literary and artistic avant-garde and the political history of Europe and beyond, with imaginative dexterity and sometimes unmatched verbal inventiveness. Yet her work also incessantly returns to themes shaped by autobiographical circumstance that her work shows to be nothing if not political, nothing if not social. Here, the individual is not the retreat from the social but where the social begins: it is the battleground on which competing visions of the social play out. Political, but not politics.
Mendelssohn’s leftism was shaped by her horror at the war in Vietnam, photos of napalm victims connecting to her own sense of still being in mourning for the European holocaust, as she writes in a draft poem here. But, as her later poems suggest, she balked at the dismissiveness she encountered towards literary endeavour within the ideological imperatives of the far left milieux she inhabited during the period leading up to her arrest. (Her early poems, including translations of Nazim Hikmet, are lost), and later moved towards a position of non-violence. Above all, her work comes to the position of defending art, and the position of the artist dedicated to making art rather than to other forms of ‘gainful employment’—a defence that is a class statement, for the subject who feels herself denied the right to be an artist, denied the right to be a mother, because she chooses to be these things on her own terms. This defense of art, however, is not of a kind of free, decontextualised aesthetic realm. Art doesn’t resolve or escape the double-binds of lived experience but holds them up for inspection under a kind of dizzying kaleidoscope of language—broken, fragmented, incantatory, rhapsodic, stuttering, suturing, stitched, cross-hatched and curlicued in overlapping lines like Mendelssohn’s densely worked drawings. This is a language of assertion and refusal—the refusal to give up its secrets, to surrender to the clear meanings demanded by interlocutors and interpreters from cops to landlords to social services to university lecturers and examiners to literary critics to judgmental friends; the assertion of Mendelssohn’s right to existence on her own terms, an existence it sometimes feel she could only carve out in poetry, even as that poetry attested to what she felt as continuous subjugation, frustration and denial, as a gendered and classed subject whose work was misinterpreted, ignored and sometimes actively silenced.
Mendelssohn also increasingly figure as a racialised subject. Of European Jewish ancestry--a particular concern of her later work--Mendelssohn constantly rankled at the racist parochialism of the British state. "I want to be / thinking and speaking in another language", she writes at one point: a self-taught student of half-a-dozen languages, Mendelssohn's work at times strains at the bounds of English, throwing in French, German, and other European languages, pursuing obscure etymologies to create composite characters like Viola Tricolor, Bernache Nonette and others--something like Angela Carter fairytale heroes (Viola is also a flower and Bernache a goose), something like literary personae, something like epic heroes--obscure figures from a pantheon of Mendelssohn's own making. While these are feminist figures, her work has a complex relation to feminism--Mendelssohn is capable of lashing out at perceived slights from those with whom it might have been in solidarity, including “radical lesbian feminists” and “lazy lady socialiste[s]” as well as misogynist men, cops, and landlords. In such instances, one suspects real or imagined autobiographical valences that the poem elides, so that the barrage of criticism Mendelssohn levels against enemies and interlocuters can become ultimately bewildering. In part, the poems seek to counter-interpellate their reader as Mendelssohn herself was constantly interpellated, put on trial every day of her life. The poems put up a hostile front against the reader who acts as detective, cop, critic, looking for threads of meaning and intention to construct a picture according to what they already think they know. Even Mendelssohn’s most problematic outbursts serve to relentlessly challenge this in a way that few poets manage, and this is a valuable and often courageous gesture. It can make the poems hard to read—deliberately so. And it contradicts the countervailing impulse in her work, to communicate, to seek and find solidarity, warmth, friendship, love, comradeship too often denied. This work is full of contradictions. It defends art’s autonomy but relentlessly shows that the idea of an autonomous art is a convenient fiction. It can be exhilarating but also exhausting; repetitive yet somehow managing to say the same thing in a million different ways. It offers little comfort but it’s also a beautiful and brilliant and defiant monument to survival. It’s one of the major oeuvres of the later twentieth century and it’s to be hoped that this vital new edition will gain the readership it deserves.
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