{"id":208,"date":"2021-11-21T14:58:03","date_gmt":"2021-11-21T14:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/?p=208"},"modified":"2021-11-24T14:21:11","modified_gmt":"2021-11-24T14:21:11","slug":"the-live-album-by-kat-payne-ware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/21\/the-live-album-by-kat-payne-ware\/","title":{"rendered":"THE LIVE ALBUM by Kat Payne Ware"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Few collections I\u2019ve read provide \u2013 or even attempt \u2013 a more satisfying marriage of form and content than THE LIVE ALBUM<\/em>. Its presiding subject is meat, and in particular meat production and consumption \u2013 the queasy horror of flesh being cleaved and compacted, over and over, by rigid, cold machinery. Language, like muscle, is ever on the slide, stretching out and gathering itself, knitting and unknitting, so it makes sense that here the language is chunked off and portioned out in unsettling, sharp patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an overall structure to the pamphlet that is reminiscent of any chillingly practical chopping-and-sorting mechanism: the poems of the first half personify pork cuts, taking each in turn, while the poems in the second half run backwards through the meat production process, from \u2018CURING\u2019 through to \u2018TRANSPORTATION\u2019. Individual poems also wear their forms conspicuously, in such a way as to trouble, if not outright deny, any naturalistic reading; \u2018RIBS\u2019 is a sestina, making a virtue of that form\u2019s tendency to sound increasingly forced. \u2018FINNING\u2019 is heavily footnoted, the footnotes operating as a second, separate \u2018overflow\u2019 poem. \u2018EVISCERATION\u2019 is severed down its centre, the gap filled by a block comprising repetitions of the word \u2018NOTHING\u2019. In this way, language is bent and brutalised so as to evoke the destruction of animals\u2019 bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of voice, Payne Ware switches between a number of different registers, from formal instruction (\u201cAutomatically process each carcass by the individual \/ length. Printing of a health mark is possible.\u201d) to lyrical and imagistic (\u201cI spin my red wool \/ in the purificatory rite  \/ of a spider dropping \/ stitches onto steel \/ altars\u201d). \u2018CHEEK\u2019 reads as a pastiche of a desire poem (\u201cI fall apart at the touch \/ of a fork. Tenderise \/ me, treat me like a bad \/ good dog.\u201d) while \u2018STUNNING\u2019 plays with the epistolary mode (\u201cDear Benjamin, you must have known \/ I longed to see the stars.\u201d). It\u2019s a familiar effect \u2013 the strange mixture of tones, the contrast of delicacy and bluntness, the sense, sometimes, of fragments bolted on to one another with a staple gun \u2013 but each part is skilfully balanced. The poems work individually, and chain together coherently (or rather, so far as there is incoherence, I took it as all part of the show). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found myself wondering if, overall, the collection operates as a protest against the meat industry, or if it means to. For me, TLA<\/em> actually mitigates the degree to which I\u2019m revulsed by the industrial killing of animals. I remember, as a teenage vegetarian, encountering Morrissey\u2019s deliciously mournful line \u201cIt\u2019s sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder\u201d and it somehow making meat seem enticing. Similarly, the formal play and ingenuity of TLA<\/em> is arresting in a way that leads me toward an aesthetic appreciation of the processes illuminated. The problem is that I love seeing this done to language \u2013 I love to see it shaped, worried, treated as physical matter \u2013 so the language-as-meat metaphor works backwards to make me soften, if only slightly, my stance on factory farming. I have to pull myself away from the spell of the poetry in order to reconvene my objections. After all, the pork cuts in the first half are having a really sensuous time of it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is just an observation. At no point is TLA<\/em> didactic about its politics, and I expect that the impact would be different on someone who does not begin from a position of disquietude. Conceptions of savoury tenderness attached to both cooked pork and the contemporary lyric are swept away; the poetry here is tough, rather bloody and steely, and does not always go down easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few collections I\u2019ve read provide \u2013 or even attempt \u2013 a more satisfying marriage of form and content than THE LIVE ALBUM. Its presiding subject is meat, and in particular meat production and consumption \u2013 the queasy horror of flesh being cleaved and compacted, over and over, by rigid, cold machinery. Language, like muscle, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[328],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gojonstonego.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}