On the entanglement of poetry and music, Shakespeare’s Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona surmises: “Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews” (3.2.77). Metaphorical conceits of this nature sometimes feel like the closest we can get to understanding the vexed concordance of poetry and music: the relation feels at once staggeringly intuitive and nearly inexplicable. The relationship has never been so mysterious as it is for contemporary British and US poetry, which is much more invested in reproducing the prosody of ordinary speech than that of explicitly musical forms. While we might find the odd song or ballad, we do not see many hymns, odes, librettos, or rondeaus in the pages of today’s poetry magazines.
It is striking, then, to see a poet reignite this relationship through a relatively obscure classical form—the scherzo. Literally a “joke or a game,” a scherzo is a musical term designating a “quick, light movement or piece, often in triple time. Like the minuet, which it replaced in the late 18th century as the traditional third movement of such large-scale forms as the symphony and string quartet, it is generally in ternary form, with a contrasting middle section, or trio.” [1] Notable examples can be found in Schubert, Mahler, Beethoven, and Chopin—and while scherzos are often integrated into larger containers (as in Beethoven’s case, the symphony), some, like Chopin’s, are stand-alone objects. Comparatively simple and Romantic, Chopin’s four scherzos are the musical models for Scherzos Benjyosos, offering a model of comic surprise or “abruptness” held in a ternary (song-like) A-B-A form. At its heart, Scherzos Benjyosos is a bewildering, inventive, and passionate attempt to render the musical scherzo into a lyric experience.
Scherzos Benjyosos comprises Sutherland’s 2017 “Sinking Feeling” and the new suite of four so-called scherzos. “Sinking Feeling,” first published in the chapbook Whither Russia (2017), is elegiac and obsessive. Its dream visions of the university in crisis and the waking theatrer of the factory are attended by waterlogged visitors dredged up from the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea, remaking Eliot’s drowned Phoenician sailor in the image of the global migrant. As the poem succumbs to the rising waves, lets the air in for one last time, it opens onto a via negativa on the meaning of infinity in love. “Sinking Feeling” has already enjoyed a modest but enthusiastic reception, and amongst other occasions of delivery, it was the highlight of a heart-stopping reading in Los Angeles (2017). Until recently, Sutherland’s work circulated in chapbook form, primarily published by Barque Press, which Sutherland has run since 1995 alongside Andrea Brady. Scherzos Benjyosos represents the first full-length book since The Odes to TL61P (Enitharmon, 2013). More recently, the collection Poetical Works 1999-2015 (Enitharmon, 2015) republished works such as Antifreeze, Hot White Andy, and Neocosis.
This review considers the choice of the scherzo as the lyric outcome of Sutherland’s intellectual and personal commitments to Kleinian psychoanalysis. For Sutherland, the scherzo’s rough, comic form becomes a way to actualize the paranoid-schizoid position that Melanie Klein argued is inherent to the experience of love (which is also an experience of hate). British psychoanalyst W. R. Bion’s further development of Klein’s concept is also important for Sutherland’s thinking. In “Attacks on Linking” (1959), Bion describes how in the schizoid position, there is an experience of extreme fragmentation: the borders between self and environment are undermined by hostile projections and fantasies of attacking and being attacked. [2] Besieged by these fantasies, Sutherland’s figures teeter on the threshold of sanity—in the words of the poem, “Out on the steep schizoid rim” (44).
Scherzos Benjyosos, then, takes up the scherzo form as the container for schizoid experience, imitating the form’s native roughness to materialize a cacophonous psychic environment:
[A]s the loud hateful music was blasted out everywhere, that I couldn’t find, and I thought it was you but to my credit I eventually knew it was me, right as I noticed the incredible massive stereo next to my bed behind the partition with those separate layers that you used to want to get, and instantly set about switching them off, one by one, the tape deck, the CD player, the amplifier, but getting nowhere, because it was the radio[.] (29)
The poem’s madness lies in the sonic breakdown of distinction between inside and outside, “me” and “you,” voice and device. Here and elsewhere, the “I”’s psychotic inability to identify the origin of particular sounds—whether they are human or not, whether they are from inside the self or not, whether they are directed at the self or not—creates an intoxicating sense of vertigo.
Though the poem is committed to psychoanalytic coordinates, it ultimately is not invested in sanity. While, for psychologists, hearing voices is a symptom of unhealth, Scherzos Benjyosos indicates that hearing voices is the condition for lyric consciousness. This is to transfigure J. S. Mill’s influential and banal definition of lyric speech as “overheard,” and to claim instead that lyric consciousness is hearing too much while abandoning the difference between hearing and thinking. [3] Sutherland’s lyric prompts a form of consciousness similar to that of psychotic listening, involving experiencing the voice as dislocated from any one speaker or origin point, traversing constantly the distinction between self and world.
I am sitting writing this in a bar, doing what in drug and alcohol addiction support groups is called ‘defining a private world’, according to their poster next to the church opposite the Mash Tun, where I first met my love, and therefore where, in effect, the origin of this voice is deposited, across from the staircase up to the Therapy Centre, where I am between five and ten minutes early, in order to be sitting thinking when I am called, where a voice that is not mine but is inside me starts saying unkind things, like this time it is the proprietor of the Gathering Zone[.] (27)
The effect of oblique, unpunctuated blocks of violently paranoid fragments is sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes a cocoon, always unrelenting. The normalizing deictic “I am sitting writing this at in a bar” is immediately recast in the superior, persecutory voice of the professional psychologist who thinks obscure intellectual pursuits are grave and pathological, symptoms of a compulsively delusional maker enthralled by “‘defining a private world.’” More exuberantly, this “private world” is later glossed as “a grotto of misspent reflexes and psychotic lustrifications” (34). The Gathering Zone might refer to an imagined repository where fragments or part-objects go to avail themselves for use—in literal terms, the Gathering Zone also might name the packed poetic container Sutherland has elsewhere called the prose block. [4] In an interview with BOMB magazine, Sutherland defines the block as “poems that get crammed or crushed into this sort of semblance of prose, or dissemblance,” where “text [is] clamped between hard margins, as if the outer limits had to be defined half at random by the width of a tunnel or pillar.” [5] This claustrophobia is a fact of the poem’s environment, which is not only narrow but surging with antithetical energies: the closeness of “Mash Tun” pub and the analyst’s office (“across from the staircase”) suggests only the slimmest interval between poison and cure, self-harm and psychoanalysis. This momentarily realist description of space is quickly disturbed by a hallucination of the disembodied voice: “therefore where, in effect, the origin of this voice is deposited, across from the staircase up to the Therapy Centre.” As a logical link between reality and fantasy, “therefore” feels mad, an effect compounded by the paradox of a voice at once an “origin” and “deposited,” retroactively. Whose voice is it anyway? The love object’s? The therapist’s? The poem does not allow us to know.
The poem’s therapeutic language invites diagnostic readings, prompting readers to search for a narratable pathology belonging to a discrete person. The nature of persons in Scherzos Benjyosos is a much more enigmatic question. Elsewhere, Sutherland has rejected the idea of the speaker as a category for interpreting his work, and I don’t think it quite right to refer to Sutherland’s figures as characters—perhaps apart from the faintly criminal “Starsy” of scherzo four. Instead, I suggest film theorist Michel Chion’s term acousmetre, meaning “voice-being.” [6] Usually in the form of a voiceover, the acousmetre indicates a voice that has risen to the status of a character despite never being seen by the viewer. Two of Sutherland’s key acousmetres are the frightening mother and the frightened child.
I am sorry that I woke you up, I didn’t know how thin it was, I knew you were there, but I know that it is a different time zone there, I didn’t think you would be awake, I thought it would not hurt to disturb you, I didn’t know it was me, I didn’t say a word because I couldn’t, because how could I, how could you, and because it was just music, and because I didn’t pick it, and because it was just for now, and because I did turn it off, and because I did stop making you eat your vegetables, and because I did stop kicking you in the back and telling you that you are dying, in effect, all the time[.] (30)
This is obviously an intimate address involving private, dyadic kinds of knowledge, but the speaking voice is thrown ventriloquistically between two undifferentiated persons. In “I did stop making you eat your vegetables,” we can detect a maternal voice, but in the panicked, guileless “I didn’t know it was me,” we can hear the protestations of a persecuted child. The two voices spatter coeval aggression—baby-talk and mummy-talk ricochet past one another in a mutually brutalizing dialogue.
Sutherland does offer one central, eponymous person—however oblique—called Benjy. Benjy, “a human bauble of delirium” (45), is important not for any normal lyric rationale but as a psychic object available for a hail of love and aggression through second-person address and third-person description. We might think of Benjy as the poem’s uniquely persecuted transitional object upon whom is discharged some of the chaos like a human lightning rod. He is directly addressed in a range of maximalist registers, from passionate entreaty (spliced with the words of Neruda, “Aquí te amo, your hojas de alambre, Benya, your petrific enchantment” [40-1]) to insane projective onslaught: “Fuck you, Benjy. You hurt people too often and repeat / the history you kill yourself to stop” (56). The more novelistic descriptions mark him as petrified and irredeemable: “same old Benjy, same old obviously abjointed disanalogy to even the infinitieth perforation of a hereafter” (50). Suffering from “negative incapability” (50), Benjy’s terminal class position renders him the contorted opposite of Keats’s famous encomium. Without the easy passage into vitality, the poem’s action remains wedged into its Latinate adverbs “obscurely stuck” (30), “ostensibly sticky” (46), which load as much awkward, trapped, yet possible motion into the airless columns of prose, echoing some of the scherzo’s inherent comedy of shock and juxtaposition.
Throughout the book, the poem’s experimentalism is shadowed by a more straightforwardly lyric mode. Alongside the dominant prose block are sequences of poised, condensed heptameter tercets centered down the page like a throat. Evocative of late medieval European lyrics, they offer a jarring change in scale and insight—a strange harmony in so much noise. In the final scherzo, this form is given a fuller expression coinciding with the redemption of the maternal acousmeêtre into a meditative lyric address that glosses the earlier ventriloquism: “I had to be both of us / Or else it would never end” (73). This exhausting “it” is perhaps the schizoid duet itself, or just the unrelenting ache of “a mother who will not / Stop committing suicide” (75).
For all the ecstatic disjuncture and aggression, Scherzos Benjyosos was intended to be an excruciating comedy, as Sutherland once remarked, “a kind of Vita Nuova, and an extended elegy.” [7] I interpret this to mean that Scherzos Benjyosos’s sublime love poetry is seared with intractable kinds of pain for losses both real and symbolic. Art can’t really transform what hurts us, or it shouldn’t. Rather than save your life—the deliquescent promise of so much contemporary verse—Scherzos Benjyosos lets us hear near-death, again, and more, as reverberations of love and pain that do not need us to survive and to transmute wildly.
Notes:
[1] Wendy Thompson, “Scherzo,” The Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ed. Alison Latham, online.
[2] W. R. Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40 (1959): 310.
[3] John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume I – Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger Autobiography and Literary Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 348. For the influence of this definition on critics such as Northrop Frye, see Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 186.
[4] In 2015, Sutherland gave a seminar, “Blocks: form since the crash,” hosted at NYU by the Organism for Poetic Research.
[5] “Paranoid Ears: Keston Sutherland Interviewed by Robert Crawford,” BOMB, March 1, 2021, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/paranoid-ears-keston-sutherland-interviewed/.
[6] Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 127-31.
[7] Sutherland, private correspondence, January 7, 2021.