Kevin Davies, FPO, Edge Books, 2020


A new book from Kevin Davies— coming roughly once a decade —is a very good thing. In fact, I’ve deleted all manner of hyperbole from this piece just to avoid embarrassing myself. FPO arrived at the end of the COVID year, 2020, making its arrival amidst such grief and turmoil doubly joyous. Needless to say I've been poring over FPO, and you will too.


Davies’ poetry is formally amazing, complex in its execution, condensed underneath its own initial appearance of information overload. In each Davies’ book, there seems something akin to a a mock-up of parts discrete yet interrelated, and ultimately dependent on each other. Not unlike Blake, a marvel of infernal engineering. Basically a world, ours. Here is my iphone pic to illustrate: 


We might claim that in FPO, the mobius-strip-like run-on sentences of it’s middle section mimic the endless rationalization and code-splaining of electoral politics and what passes for a public discourse, but that would only be half-true. In face, these blocks of language stage a transcendent parody of such, a structure of feeling resonant by its attention to the idiosyncrasies of this morass we call politics, this clusterfuck of trafficked subjectivites.



One’s place in the world feels opaque, not because the author is mystifying things, but because Capital is irrational. There arises in FPO some weird Sci Fi element of transformation, a gnomic yarn, elaborated over imprecise time. Everything feels weird and glitchy, yet eerily smooth in its execution, in throes to an obvious yet unpredictable progression of breakdown and crisis; the only meaning we get is in the interstices of the crowded darkness beneath cellular zones of control. 


There’s a bit of Agent Mulder, Harry Dean Stanton’s Bud of Repo Man, even the ravings of Mark E. Smith in the grains of this voice, one of conspiratorial rants and miffed takes, yet elongated and contoured thru each iteration of this shimmering arationality into new sense. The truth is out there. 


Davies manages to derive a kind of sustainable poetic permaculture from this arational tongue. The fineness of the work, the almost granular depiction of alienation, seems a product of slowly accreting and reorganizing those bits of language and speech the author— and really everyone —stumbles on in the Everyday. The practice of condensing and “composting” (Davies’ own description) the language we live with becomes analogous to our own acute awareness of dire conditions. 


FPO is fucking hilarious too, acid and wry in tone, exhibiting the distrust in profundity which is traceable to some Davies’ confreres who produced outstanding work beginning in the 90s and presently, like Rod Smith, Ben Friedlander, Jennifer Moxley. Incidentally, Smith, the publisher of EDGE, the imprint of that has released Davies’ works since 2000. Poetry’s networks can seem small but are never less than expansive.



The stanzas of the titular midsection of this book are of unevenly stacked, narrative run-on lines, no punctuation, giving us the sense of so many elastic tales folded into history. Here’s a pic of the unique form in question, on the surface indebted to a traditional New American speech-based measure, but actually a much different animal from the standpoint of rhetoric and history:




We might claim that in Davies’ book, the mobius-strip-like run-on sentences if it’s middle section mimic the endless rationalization and code-splaining of electoral politics and what passes for a public discourse, but that would only be half-true. In face, these blocks of language stage a transcendent parody of such, a structure of feeling resonant by its attention to the idiosyncrasies of this morass we call politics, this clusterfuck of trafficked subjectivites.

At other turns, some kind of coming sea change is hinted at, vague yet palpable. It’s not unlike Kafka in this way, in its narrativity of disturbing speculations with no resolutions whatsoever. It’s also a lot like our world of disordered terror and soothing nonsense, a half-sculpted, half-adlibbed poetry of haphazard shifting details, related in stitched-together anecdotes that manifest the Real. FPO feels improvised on initial encounter, but it’s careful construction becomes evident soon enough. It’s as though somebody left an endless tape running, nameless characters appearing in medias res, spouting off in tangents, wielding obscure jargon and vocabulary like some obscure medieval weapon, their grievances directed at no one in particular, but the sense of coherence comes specifically from the artificiality of that arrived-at extemporaneity. 


It’s where this work reaches the condition of poetry that we find ourselves in the realm of possibility and unbounded collectivity. Poetry does seem at times to contain some decoder that demonstrates– if indirectly perhaps –the possibility for a new reorganization of life-space and life-action that is inherent in conditions. 


The truth is out there.


Find it here: https://aerialedge.com/ols/products/fpo-kevin-davies


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