“Distant Echoes of the Paralysed Poetic”: An Introduction to the Poetry of Keston Sutherland

Abstract

Keston Sutherland says of his own poems that they ‘are not so difficult to understand as they are difficult to accept’. This thesis aims to dispel the myth that Sutherland is a difficult poet, both in terms of understanding and acceptance. It begins with a sketch of two traditions in British poetry since 1945, “The Mainstream” and “The Parallel Tradition”, illustrated by analysis of poems by Philip Larkin, Basil Bunting, Edwin Morgan, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and J.H. Prynne. A critical biography traces Sutherland’s evolution from his abrasive earlier works, where the poetic is distant, to the justified prose blocks that characterise his latter work, where at least the possibility of the poetic has returned. All against a backdrop of the broader trends in British poetry and the political situation in the UK from 1999 onwards. Two concepts, drawn from his own lectures, are then traced in his poetry: “odes” and “affect storms”. He identifies the ode as a uniquely effective form for writing innovative social satire. Sutherland’s The Odes to TL61P (2013) is measured against Wordsworth’s demands on poetry to create unfamiliar sensations and discover new modes of thought in order to subvert hierarchical social relations, commodity festishism, and the banality of public discourse. The thesis culminates in an analysis of his use of a psychoanalytic concept, the “affect storm”, as a metaphor for the incomprehensible elements of contemporary poetry and his creation of a language capable of giving voice to the inexpressible in his latest poem Scherzos Benyjosos (2020).