Lotte L.S.: I’m Lotte L.S., and this is PoetryNow. The first two lines of the poem are reworked from the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, a special issue that focused on the work of the British poet Anna Mendelssohn. She was involved in radical political action in the 1970s. She spent five years in prison for her involvement with The Angry Brigade. From what I’ve read, she lived quite a solitary life. She wasn’t involved so much in political groups or movements anymore, but if you read her work you can see the politics remain there. I was thinking a lot about Anna Mendelssohn’s work, and her approach to obscurity. She prioritizes ways of writing not understood by everybody, and how maybe she wants to hide stuff within her work, rather than express it. The police or judges or other figures of authority—they’re all kind of denied access to her words and other meanings. Around the same time, I was having conversations with friends about the difficulties of writing about political movements in poetry. And one friend wrote me saying, “Is intelligibility something to be desired or something to be feared?” And this was something that really stuck with me.

(READS POEM

As If to Misread Song
 
It felt so normal to be ‘inspected,’ ‘looked at,’
‘examined,’ ‘explored,’ ‘interrogated’—
why does the perceptually deprived brain play such tricks?
Still firing off, cleaning up the sopping wetness
of the clouds with a snuffed-out candle wick. The spider
can’t be frightened into a jar. Imagine remembering anything
about those years other than pure sensation—
could the tree do it? The stump of one fallen
nourished for centuries by its surroundings. After some
time I learned to pay attention to ah and oh
and hey—body demanding a toll when another
eventually wanted to enter. At last, to guess instead
of knowing—saying now when the feeling came
strongest: how I miss the future, it’s sideways surrender.
I have since only rarely seen the tree—it puts into my ears
the sounds of all the people living without me:
the dark oaks of the dining room, every knife buried
among the airport car park—letterboxes
where there should have been a lake. Imagine if
afterwards everything can be pure sensation:
sugar-fed and alive in its dismantling.

* * *

This current world or form of living—I think the one I’m gesturing towards, what might come afterwards, a different world or form of living—that necessitates the dismantling of the current world and our current forms of living. And the act of dismantling can also be an act of pleasure, and something that is alive. Tearing things down can be just as alive as building things up.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

Imagine if / afterwards everything can be pure sensation: / sugar-fed and alive in its dismantling.

I wanted to gesture towards becoming all the things that I mention—the trees, the words that could evade the language of the state—and to bury them in the writing. And then I felt like the poem itself could also become something to be dismantled, rather than built.

Katie Klocksin: That was Lotte L.S. and her poem “As If to Misread Song.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.