APROPOS PARADISE SQUARE
On a Literature of Consolation
Ágnes Lehóczky
///////// 112 Pages
///////// 14.8 x 21 cm
ISBN: 978-1-915341-26-6
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Apropos Paradise Square – On a Literature of Consolation – the second part of a larger project on ‘the poet’s house’, generates a psychogeographical inquiry with a clinical-critical intensity to the remembering and reconstructing of museal spaces which we, eleatic strangers, passengers par excellence, optimistic eyewitnesses, near- or far-dwellers, might be able to inhabit as ‘horizontal’ spaces of temporary, short-term residencies or as elective, or even as posthumous homes. The work continues to experiment with and to stretch our expectations of what constitutes ekphrastic writing weaving here an intricately labyrinthine hybrid work of readerly poetics, a hyper-sensitive textual dérive that explores the blue or bluish zone of a ‘lost girls’ home’, and a paranoiac re-reading and re-examining of the impermanent households of the corner-of-the-eye horizon girl, the ersatz I, the temperamental tom(b)boy, the paranoid-parasitic self, the premature paper citizen in and of ‘unsettled status’. This is a status quo granted by both or either choice and chance enabling [the antagonistic] one to reside in a speculative and hyper-real shelter, a quasi-mausoleum, a home-spun paradise [square], an untrue, abstract asylum or a self-made ‘hortus botanicus’, architectonically designed and built as unfinished building or as abandoned book or as subterranean syntax in a cognitively hypothesized country of the in-between, a space which Hannah Arendt calls ‘nowhere’ always already split, permitting [the abstracted] one to occupy this side of, preoccupied by the outside of, consciousness – having lived wilfully and long enough on its outer side to be neitherside, postponed, deferred and stashed away. A status or zone of deep sleep, temporary dormancy, impermanent waiting which, paradoxically, nevertheless, holds and gives one hope for and promises, preserves and/or presumes a future.
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Ágnes Lehóczky’s poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box), Rememberer (Egg Box), Carillonneur (Shearsman), Swimming Pool (Shearsman) and Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams & Lies (Crater Press). She is the author of the academic monograph Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance – comprising four essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy. Her pamphlet Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters was published by Boiler House Press. She co-edited major international anthologies: the Sheffield Anthology (Smith/Doorstop) with Adam Piette, The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley (Boiler House) with Zoë Skoulding, Wretched Strangers (Boiler House) with J. T. Welsch and most recently the ‘Monk Collective’ with Adam Piette (Blackbox Manifold). Fission of Being – Endnotes on Earthbound was commissioned by The Roberts Institute of Art, London. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at the University of Sheffield. She’s currently working on translations of Attila József with Adam Piette.
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Apropos – to the purpose, from propos ‘thing said in conversation, talk; purpose, plan’ – here Ágnes Lehóczky converses, talks, plans towards a poet’s consolation and thinks in the ‘blue zone’ about the materials of the worlds circling around her. Consolation is more than alleviation of grief, anxiety, distress – it is also, from Old French consolacion ‘solace, comfort; delight, pleasure’. There is no place to stop in this restless, sparsely punctuated paragraph of a poem, in our gymnastic seeking of Paradise, Elysium, we ‘tear through the world’ in our bodies, ‘remembering/disremembering’, touching past and present beloveds, girl companions, writer companions – no place to rest, except perhaps in the images that arrest the text, in moments of women’s solidarity in the public square, the small working rooms of poets or rural stone settlements. Here, the spaces, love seats; hospitals; schools; museums; dog kennels; bird cages – all the possible homes, slide away from us in this poet’s ‘solo acrobatic’, this ‘abstract container’ of the mind. ‘Solace, comfort; delight, pleasure’ flicker in and out of the spaces Lehóczky builds, but, ultimately, they are all haunted irredeemably – just up the road here, Hades is a ruin, Elysium no longer inhabited. The two get closer to each other. Here are the workings – ‘by which I mean’, ‘by which I mean’ – the ‘where we are when we think’.
- Harriet Tarlo
Apropos of the earliest and latest extant rooms of the poet A. The poet A does not know that the poet K walked into her rooms right away, as soon as she arrived on this island from across the sea, years before she met A. The poet K went to the small place for poems a few floors above the grand hall dedicated to sounds that sits on the great river that means darkness if it is Indo-European in origins and has no known meaning if it is not. The poet A’s house was there, in the rows; the poet K was drawn to reach up. See it there. Rememberer. The rooms of the poet A in there, square. Full rooms in that place. But not as full as this, here, which make you think of space and soft absence as soon as you sit down. In this house the walls have been knocked down. The trusses, the weight-bearing walls are where you come in. The notes at the end, they are throw blankets to tuck yourself into the battered love seat again. The thing about clean lines is that they allow for more clutter. Honoring each old bed. Not story. That’s not how you rememberer. The thing that’s important -- a tone is set as soon as you walk in. A coffee table with a spread, a clash of centuries and views on death. Tone: sacred text plus theory, spinning. (A lyric poem’s speaker is too unsure of itself, too cow-towed with all that breathing in my ear for this kind of making here. This poet, A, is one we ought to room with, she’s built a space here.) This is heavylifting, rolling over and finding wings, a piano soaring through a window up several flights of stairs. Paradise. Of course, this space sings.
So here the universe gets swept
up with all the rest. It matches whatever
place we most know and love best.
Dantie Alighieri, Paradiso XXVIII 70-72,
trans K Campanello
- K Campanello
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I. There was Hannah and Franz, and I think, Paul and Simone, and later a poet, and later an actor. The rooms all seemed precarious, or they moved—like the shape of the city, changing faster than a heart. Even what was learnt by heart, once recited, came to a halt. Or there was a tear, a violent act, a violation of the body’s very fibre. A question of living or thinking, as if it were a choice. [parts II to IV displaced]V. Agnes and Terry had been talking about talking. In an extended conversation, the poet and the actor returned—Janos and Sheryl—and Agnes, again, was there with Denise. Agitation appeared from outside a dead language, from the revenant’s terms. To and fro, call and response: weaving truth fibres from untruths. Always the verge of remembering, the edge of forgetting. How to keep things going if bonds between words were temporary? If magic words fail? Later was too late. We were never the only ones. Full stop. Hand over my mouth. In front of my own eyes. Walking, yes. Standing still, yes. These are city squares, streets and houses (sometimes they are real, there are photographs to prove it). There are borders, thresholds, labyrinths. Fields, cloisters, gardens (hortus, paradise). These are dreams, memories, and books.
- Sharon Kivland