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(REVIEW) Sleepers Awake, by Oli Hazzard (Carcanet, 2024)



The lint of poetic influence is collected in Rowland Bagnall’s assessment of Oli Hazzard’s latest collection, Sleepers Awake. Touching on image snow, ‘curious accretion’, distraction, disorientation and more, this expansive review unveils the rich processes and formal nuances at play in the book.


So everything proceeds by misdirection while all around us the laundry piles up

and there is nothing to be done except go on to the next task, and the next                                                   – Peter Ackroyd


Sleepers Awake, Oli Hazzard’s third collection, is a book of swimming particles. Often fragmentary themselves, the poems are blown throughout with tiny scraps of floating material: ‘anonymous green blossom // humming in the air’, the ‘plankton swirl’ of cornflakes skimming the morning’s milk, ‘zinc motes’ wafting on a through-draught, the poet watching as ‘last leaf bits / capsize in // eczemary air’, dodging the shrapnel of ‘Spring’s smithereens’. Several times, Hazzard returns to an image of ‘tiny brown, black, / white and beige dots’, a kind of Pointillist refrain, as if to expose the inherent pixellation of the world from which the poems are built. I’m reminded of a scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – released the year Hazzard was born – where Cameron Frye encounters Seurat’s Pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884). The film’s shots alternate between the surface of the painting, composed of tiny coloured dots, and Cameron’s motionless, hard-staring face, cutting closer and closer in until the picture dissipates into abstraction. I’ve never landed on the best way to digest this scene: it seems more than a ‘profound experience of art’ – to borrow a phrase from Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) – and instead to do with Cameron learning something new about the world, shaking him out of the comatose state in which he starts the movie. I like to think that he’s discovering the overwhelming interconnectedness of things, composed of the same stuff: all dots, pixels and atoms, if you could only zoom in far enough. What Hazzard refers to, in these poems, as ‘sensation’s confetti’.


This sense of passing through an environment thick with swirling, airborne stuff reaches an apex in the form of snow. ‘[I]t’s snowing again,’ suggests the title poem, ‘It’s snowing / heavily all over Glasgow // making everything naked / and light,’ Hazzard’s couplets closing with an image of ‘bits of snow’ – as in computer bits, perhaps? – ‘slowly / clearing themselves // on the window, dittoing / the dark day’. Earlier in the collection, Hazzard deploys another twisting musical construction, generating (as his playful use of language often does) a subtle-noted soundscape, like the background fuzz of static: ‘Here in pose / a pear appears // I put that in / to make it / more hummy’. A statement on the act of writing, the poem commenting upon itself, Hazzard’s hum is also an allusion to another song of falling snow, sung by Winnie the Pooh in The House at Pooh Corner (1928):


The more it SNOWS – tiddely-pom The more it GOES – tiddely-pom The more it GOES – tiddely-pom On snowing     


‘“Tiddely what?”’ asks Piglet of Pooh’s musical/metrical improvisations. ‘“Pom,” said Pooh. “I put that in to make it more hummy.”’ The snow described by Pooh is one of curious accretion, producing itself in the process of falling, somehow self-generating, Pooh’s ‘tiddely-poms’ beginning to (forgive me) snowball, as though the song, once started, might prove difficult to stop. It brings to mind the image of a shaken snow globe, though one whose glitter never manages to settle, swirling ‘as the poem starts to snow / itself,’ writes Hazzard in ‘Composed at Erdberg’, ‘yourself in agog air’ — agog implying both a sense of curiosity and wonder, but also catching in the throat, clogging it up, producing a gag.           


But ‘What could be the message in this pointillist masquerade[?]’ asks Peter Gizzi in Archeophonics (2016). For Hazzard, one answer is that looking for ‘the message’ is beside the point. Just as snow can be compacted into endless forms and figures, so Hazzard’s poetry reveals to us the Play-Doh malleability of language, seeming to enjoy stretching and moulding it before our very eyes – ‘a pause in / applause’, ‘the “sigh” in Versaille’, ‘the boing in / ongoingness’ – the poet proving himself to be ‘A magician with language’s innate opacities and hidden potentials,’ writes Sarah Howe. At the same time, Sleepers Awake has something else to say about the endless swirl and ‘dots of colour’ rushing in from every angle. The ‘daily buffering’ of experience emerging from the massive ‘data centre’ of the world, its overwhelming ‘“flood / of subject”’ betraying an anxiety about ideas of attention and distractibility, time and its (un)usefulness, and what to do about the strangeness of our ‘billion parts / Per self’.


Hazzard’s writing dramatises the nature of distractedness with compelling and compulsive humour. ‘PROGRESS: REAL AND IMAGINED’, the collection’s opening long poem – published previously by SPAM Press – sets up an almost farcical scenario in which the poet (attempting to respond to Nicole Eisenman’s painting(s) of the same name) finds himself forever knocked off course, drawn away from the apparent task at hand by an unending flurry of attention-stealing sights and sounds: webpages and smartphone screens, the contours and demands of parenting, the pleasurable play of manhandling language (‘Ronnie Corbett // in orbit’), or simply noting passages of unadorned banality, ‘Extracting the ore / from boredom’. ‘This is the low-point at which I realised / I should abandon familiar associations,’ reads a passage, fifty pages in, ‘and turn to my subject, / The painting by Nicole Eisenman / Which gives this poem its title’, although it isn’t long before the poet scoots away again: ‘I will be back soon…’. Hazzard’s poem is alive to the difficulty of staying on track in the face of life’s unending curiosities and obligations, just as John Donne, during one of his sermons, takes a moment to list the possible distractions that come knocking during prayer: ‘A memory of yesterdays pleasure, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine’, etcetera. And yet, writes Matthew Bevis, ‘Distraction is a time between times, a time in which we become momentarily subject to the non-thought inside thought. And this is the time – one of the times – of poetry.’ In the words of Jess Cotton, introducing Hazzard at a recent online launch event, the poems in Sleepers Awake ‘proceed in a light, semi-distracted manner, giving the impression that poetry is merely something that happens between everything else.’


There’s a lot to say about distraction, not least as it has occupied a place in Hazzard’s work before. Lorem Ipsum (2021), a recent novel, operates according to a labyrinthine system of departures and returns; a single, syntactically impeccable sentence of exactly fifty thousand words, the narrator ambles absent-mindedly from subject to subject in a ‘drifting, scrambled way,’ as if through the successive rooms of an enormous house, guided by a thread of loose associations. ‘How foolish I feel when I realise that I have spent another day in front of my inkstone, jotting down aimless thoughts as they occurred to me,’ reads a passage from Yoshida Kenkō’s Essays in Idleness (c.1330), borrowed as an epigraph, ‘all because I was bored and had nothing better to do.’ But idleness, in Hazzard’s work, is far from a vice. As Rousseau writes in his Confessions (1782-89):


The idleness I love is not that of an indolent fellow who stands with folded arms in perfect inactivity and thinks as little as he acts. It is the idleness of a child who is incessantly on the move without ever doing anything, and at the same time the idleness of the rambling old man whose mind wanders while his arms are still.


This passage – this movement-in-stasis – offers a useful route into the neural network of Hazzard’s poetics, chiming with several lines from Blotter (2018), the poet’s second collection: we float through ‘a cage of days’ reads a passage from ‘Within Habit’, a sequence of prose poems, ‘as a wave moves / onward / but the water of which it is composed does not’; remember ‘that to be stationary and in motion at once’, suggests a line elsewhere ‘is what reading is like’. In Sleepers Awake, Hazzard evokes the ‘thorny wattage’ of experience, a phrase that yolks the quick momentum of electric ‘wattage’ with a tangled snag of brambles, tugging us ungently back.  


In some ways, all this talk of reading, waves, and proneness to distraction brings John Ashbery to mind, the subject of Hazzard’s critical monograph, John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange (2018). Throughout the poems, Hazzard describes ‘a life / You have been falling into / And out of while pausing’, apparently echoing lines from Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, which offers up (and functions like) a ‘present we are always escaping from / And falling back into’. While I don’t wish to dwell on Ashbery for too long, he provides a useful model for the specific feeling of disorientation generated by these poems, what Stephen Ross (another scholar of Ashbery’s work) has referred to as ‘a very appealing form of quasi-dissonance’ in which ‘All those missed connections […] creates a kind of prosodic static electricity.’ Of all Ashbery’s collections, it’s interesting to note that Sleepers Awake – typographically at least – resembles most the unruly scattershot poems of The Tennis Court Oath (1962), composed primarily of cut-ups, splicing disparate found texts together, another exercise in waywardness and missed connections. In both collections, flakes of language swirl around in plenty of white space, falling – snow-like – through the poems, the words themselves like floating particles, a visual easter egg that Hazzard seems a few times to acknowledge: ‘Poetry straight out of the sky’.


As his title indicates – borrowed from a Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata – the disorientation of Sleepers Awake reflects a hazy state somewhere between sleeping and waking, where the tangible material of the world has not yet shaken off the ‘flickering, momentary / hallucination’ of dreams, only managing to conjure up ‘beleagurable sense’. Hazzard’s habit for quoting (and misquoting) language – whether lines lifted from other poets or snatches of conversation, online texts and chatbot speak, even slipping once into a form of muddled Middle English – creates an odd cross-temporal chorus, an effect that brings to mind the scenes in TV shows and films that show a POV shot of someone waking up after an accident/operation, their eyes blearily opening, the disembodied voices of their loved ones chiming them to consciousness. An inevitable by-product, perhaps, of poems written during the pandemic, a period of temporal elasticity where time seemed to both stretch and shrink, Sleepers Awake attempts to chart the movements of a calendar whose days somehow refuse their regularity. Writing recently about the painter Andrew Cranston – whose own (semi-)Pointillist masterpiece, Why have you stopped here (2023), is reproduced on this collection’s cover – Hazzard draws attention to the ‘infinite calendar’ suggested by the fishpond tiles in Cranston’s work, reflecting on the ‘artificial temporal divisions’ we impose on our experience in order to make sense of it. ‘The painting offers a remarkable combination of precision and imprecision,’ he writes, ‘the way perception is warped and rippled when we observe things through water’:


As well as an exquisite commentary on this phenomenon, [Why have you stopped here] also seems to me to be, like many of Cranston’s works, a painting about time. These perceptive wobbles and distensions, pinches and bulges, which are especially visible in this instance because they’re exerting their effects upon the structural strictness of a grid, seem somehow analogous to our experience or time.  


With its distractions and procrastinations, synapse jumps and sudden jolts, Hazzard’s poetry animates these ‘wobbles and distensions’, exposing the fact that time, far from regular, as he writes of Simone Kearney’s Days (2021), ‘passes very quickly or drowsily or backwards […] or in several parallel streams or it does not pass at all’. It’s as though the pinches and bulges in Hazzard’s work provide ‘a way of / being precise / and imprecise at once’, time moving as it pleases: calendar schmalendar.


It seems a natural response to disorientation to try and work out where (and when) you are, as proven by patients coming round in hospital: Where am I? How long have I been asleep? Is [x] still the President? Perhaps this accounts for the recurrence, throughout Hazzard’s poems, of spatial points and temporal markers. ‘Craig Syfyrddin, or Edmund’s Tump’, opening Blotter, records the poet’s walks inMonmouthshire like a set of crazed hiker’s instructions, complete with references to trigpoints, landmarks, even literal co-ordinates. Sleepers Awake is scattered with the names of months and days of the week, like pins in a corkboard, while also reproducing several Internet IP addresses, acutely location- and timestamped. It might be that this spatiotemporal framework betrays the influence of Bernadette Mayer, whose projects frequently adopt restrictions based on the availability (or not) of time to write, negotiating childcare and domestic labour, poetry as ‘merely something that happens between everything else’, to reiterate Jess Cotton. There’s a diaristic quality to Mayer’s writing, noting down the observations and achievements of a given slice of temporal pie, as in her famous book, Midwinter Day (1982), written in a single day (22nd December 1978) at the poet’s home in Massachusetts. Piece of Cake (2019), a collaboration with Mayer’s then-husband, Lewis Warsh, was written through the course of August 1976, the couple taking turns to write on consecutive days while the other took over parenting and domestic duties. As Mayer reflects on August 24th, Piece of Cake was a significant project, ‘completely different from any other experience I have ever had with writing’, bringing her ‘one step further’ to a poetics of ‘finally telling everything, and telling it as if it were all a series of household events’.


There’s certainly a diaristic quality to the meandering jotter of Sleepers Awake. Save for a few pages reproduced from Lorem Ipsum, however, Hazzard doesn’t appear to share Mayer’s preference, here, for passages of blocky prose. Instead, with its generous white space, sudden line-breaks, and thin columns of text, Hazzard’s writing brings to mind another formally experimental project, A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965). Written as a journal from December 6th to January 10th 1963-64, Ammons composed the poem on a roll of adding-machine tape affixed to his typewriter, allowing both the narrow dimensions of the paper and the unknown spool of its length to determine the poem’s formal parameters. Ammons records the minutiae of each day: the weather, the objects on his desk, his view through the window; on several occasions, he keeps up with a daily news report about a plane crash over Delaware, the aircraft struck by lightning. Each section of the poem is dated, peppered throughout with to-the-minute timestamps.


At the end of Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (2011), the critic Oren Izenberg recounts an experience of reading Tape, citing its ability to bring out an awareness of our own acts of attention: to the phenomena of the poem, to the experience of reading, to the passage of time (both in our own world and the poem’s). More than this, Izenberg goes on to argue that the poem somehow enables a shared or collective experience: as we grow into awareness of the poem and its attentiveness, we develop an awareness, too, of other readers’ reading of the text, the poem serving as a meeting-place, a site of congregation. ‘As I read it, I know that she too has noted it,’ writes Izenberg of his ‘fellow reader’, ‘and now my reading is of her noticing’: ‘I follow her reading as it proceeds in my own mind,’ and ‘If I go on long enough, what I arrive at is not a reading of the poem […] [but] a life together, hers and mine’. While Izenberg has a specific reader in mind – ‘a woman I loved and could no longer live with’ – he presents us, also, with an image of community; it’s as though all readers of Tape, whether past, present, or future, are reading together, their individual experiences of the poem collapsing into one another. As if by way of illustration, the cover of Izenberg’s book shows a print by the digital artist Jason Salavon, whose work condenses the duration of existing films into a single image. In a sense, the title of Salavon’s artwork is all that we need: The Grand Unification Theory (Part Three: Every Second of “It’s a Wonderful Life”) (1997). We see the entire film simultaneously, just as the original scroll of Tape enables us to see the whole poem in a single glance. It’s as if the present moment of our reading overlaps with the present of every other reader’s reading, too. We read Ammons’s Tape together, like dreaming a collective dream.


Hazzard’s poetry, I think, produces something similar, an awareness not only of our own experience – the spongy, bulging texture of passing time – but the experience of others. ‘All of this preamble // pleasurable as it has been!’ reads a passage of ‘PROGRESS: REAL AND IMAGINED’, speaking directly to us from the poem, ‘has merely been leading up to the present moment // during which I turn towards // the question of turning away // which necessitates an awkward amount // of direct eye contact with you.’ ‘For a long time / I wondered / what’s all this juice for?’ begins the collection:


to bring us closer?


to touch or meet you here

in this small downed “room”[?]


We meet the poet and each other and his chorus of cross-temporal voices in the ‘small […] “room”’ of the poem, ‘like poking a hole in the canvas of a painting,’ writes Hazzard in a recent blog post, ‘or watching a sinkhole appear in the middle of the road’. The poem becomes a kind of portal, a place between two windows, to cite the title of Hazzard’s first collection. ‘[T]hese things are / strung together’, reads a passage near the end of ‘PROGRESS’: ‘we are “with” / each other’.

 

Sleepers Awake is available to buy from Carcanet Press.


~


Text: Rowland Bagnall Image by the author Published: 16/7/24

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