Review: Internet Poetry – Clinic @ BEACH, East London

The crowd outside Beach on Cheshire Street

I’m pretty much behind the times when it comes to internet poetry. In all confidence I wouldn’t be able to point you towards a ‘good’ internet poet, as I have little to no idea what it would look like.

So, imagine my delight when one of my favourite poetry collectives Clinic decide to run a night dedicated to the stuff. In their own words, the night was:

An evening of poetry, art and projections, exploring the ever-increasing role of the internet in the creation, curation and sharing of contemporary poetry

I was one of the many people crowded outside the BEACH cafe on Cheshire Street. The night started with an introduction by Clinic poet and editor Sam Buchan-Watts on what exactly Clinic were trying to get at with this night.

Sam focused, to put his lucid and thorough assessment bluntly, on the ability of the internet to create new tropes in poetry, as well as interrogate well established modes of expression and imagery amongst the existence of internet phenomena of memes, new communication methods and modes of self-expression.

Harry Burke's projection - photo taken from BEACH London Facebook

Following that, Harry Burke, who runs the excellent blog cmd ldn, debuted a new projection – which primarily involved him reading his poetry with animated backgrounds, clips of him surfing the internet for YouTube videos illustrating aspects in his verse and very intimate still shots of him in his house.

I’m fairly new to Harry’s work, but it struck me that the projection, including his excellent poetry (which you can read more of on his site) addressed an aspect of internet life that I can relate to – the endless searching for something to justify your own self, desires and reasoning of the world. The internet is as much a part of Harry’s existence as poetry and pining for Eva Longoria are – a highlight of the projection. Its all part of the same tapestry, and to deny it is pretty, well, un-poetic.

Rachael Allen reading her 4chan inspired poems, with 4chan being projected

Rachael Allen was the second poet to perform her work, which is partly inspired by the meme generating website 4Chan. Each of the poems in this series takes its title, and some of the material, from the forum headings on the site.

These 4Chan poems provide an echo chamber between the internet and a writer.  As much as the headings collate the website’s posts from forum members, they also provide a scaffolding for the poet’s own experience. These poems are deeply personal and at the same time address images we all know in one way or another from the internet. I cannot rate them highly enough – one on-looker said to me ‘Rachael is becoming brilliant infront of our eyes’.

Sam Riviere with his 81 Austerities website projected

Sam Riviere was up next, reading from his collection 81 Austerities, which is not only primarily published on his Tumblr blog, but the work is concerned with how the creation and distribution of new poetry is so affected by digital media.

Sam’s work reminds me partly of that famous John Barth essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ where he describes how literary realism had all been used up and there was no ‘real experiences’ to write about, especially in one section of his poem POV:

All day I have been watching women

crush ripe tomatoes in their cleavage

whatever you can think of

someone’s already done it

there’s a new kind of content

pre-empting individual perversions

The reference is pretty obvious there, but he differs from Barth in that this exhaustion may apply to his language – stripped back to base desires (Sam described on the night that the original meaning of ‘austerity’ was the dryness of the tongue) – but it doesn’t apply to his imagery.Throughout these poems, you have excellent and hugely varied imagery, most of which could be thought of as ‘poetic’. But what makes 81 Austerities an excellent collection is the duality between this imagery and a voice trying to do them justice when, indeed, ‘someone’s already done it’.

Steve Roggerbuck - live from Chicago via Skype

The finale of the night was a live reading from Chicago by Steve Roggenbuck, who is arguably one of the main instigators and innovators in contemporary internet poetry and, more importantly, the only real internet poet I know.Steve’s own work, and the work he collects on the site Internet Poetry, is really diverse – I have really enjoyed his work based on instant message talks with his friends and girlfriend – I am like October when I am dead – how distilled the sentences of these conversations are, and how, when isolated, they are incredibly poetic.

Packed out house for Steve

Steve read to a packed out house, and it was really kind of him to take time out of his day to speak to a dark room of Brits, laughing, hollering and whooping. Rachael Allen asked him to explain how he sees his poetry as fitting in with internet poetry.To be honest, I was having so much fun I can’t remember the ins and outs of the conversation – but he kindly recorded a video for Clinic, which you can see here, which explains some of his techniques and his work.

Going to the Clinic night made me realise the potential that the internet can bring to poetry – not just creatively and through publishing, but by actually getting to hear poets read from across the world. Its an obvious point to make, sure, but I don’t think many people have done it before, which just goes to prove how forward thinking Clinic are in their approach to poetry. I am struggling to think of a more exciting reading I’ve been to all year. Maybe I wrote about it on Facebook…or the blog?