Reviews

from Smashing Time

by Marcus Slease

MIPOesias, 2011
RRP £9 (US dollars) ISBN n/a
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Reviewed by Michael Zand
February 28, 2012

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The recently published from Smashing Time gives us the chance to assess part of a larger project by London-based poet Marcus Slease entitled “Smashing Time”. Slease employs a range of poetic techniques and counter-techniques to interrogate the world around him by interrogating the language around him. His high concept is the poetic exploration of a spiritual and physical journey across London and the world through the critical eyes of a nomadic outsider. His smashing time is a smashing of place and time which part social and political critique and part a playful yet poignant assertion of his own poetics.

There is a progressive resonance in Slease’s poetry here, rooted in the ‘itchy sadness’ of language. In one sense, from Smashing Time is a rejection of the ‘windy city’ with its flatulent promises, and its pretentious flirtations with marginal poetics and counter-culture. Slease is not directly opposing the cultural posturing of metropolitan elites, but he is certainly obstructing it. Along the tube lines and bus routes of London and other urban networks, he recounts and playfully mocks the linguistic and cultural outpourings of marketing economies and the political realities. The result is cryptic and complex at times but ultimately in equal parts both subversive and redemptive:

time to pour out the stiffies
oh the great
Salt Lake
but I’m on the Piccadilly Line
kids of Tai Bo
oh the great Salt Cake

Through remorseless textual appropriation and linguistic disjuncture, Slease intuitively invents new memories, and from Smashing Time can be seen as an expression of the latent power of self-crafted mythology, based on the weaving together of semi-fictitious personal experiences. This new concept of memory becomes an enhanced state of perception. The techniques of creative linkage involves a construction of otherness, based on the different times and places of the text, along with a cacophony of voices:

Angie:
C’mon baby sweetie squeeze into the motor

Mormon Missionaries:
Elder clips. Bicycle clips. Care package.

Family Home Evening:
Baptism for the dead

Relief Society:
Breast is best!

The role of the poet here is to disseminate the disruptive and subversive melee of from Smashing Time. Slease becomes a kind of radio receptor, listening and regurgitating the messages of the world. There is a textural energy or dynamic that is inherent in this “Sleasy listening”. The radio picks up the interference and it is from this interference that Slease makes from Smashing Time sing.

I’m lingering between the golden snatch
you better get next to yourself
meeeeeniiiieeeee

Slease’s nomadic poetics are evident throughout the sprawling and multi-layered geography of from Smashing Time but it is his encounters with the culture of the settled mainstream metropolis which is most affecting. There is no fixed destination in the nomadic trail, on the occasional hint of a quixotic oasis in the form of the semi-mythical “Wood Green”. The result is a poetry that is playful, life-affirming and melodic but that ultimately undermines the vacuous pomposity of the popular culture Slease encounters.

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Rating:

 

Michael Zand is Poet, Editor and Academic Scholar. His collections include Kval (Arthur Shilling, 2009) and Lion (Shearsman, 2010). He was included in the Best Poetry of 2011 anthology (Salt Publishing, 2011) and won the Roehampton Poetry Performance Prize in 2008.

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