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PLAESTHETICS
Anna Mendelssohn
Shearsman Books, 2020.
Reviewed by Howard Slater
It’s quite a rare occurrence when the death of a British poet merits
obituaries in the anarchist press. Anna Mendelssohn who died in
2009, garnered her unwanted infamy by being one of four people
convicted for the Angry Brigade bombings and agitations of the early
70s. Giving hours and hours of testimony in her own defence as did
the other accusees, she nonetheless received a sentence of 10 years;
convicted on a fingerprint. On her release, Mendelssohn, using the
penname Grace Lake, devoted her life to writing and ink drawings.
However, she needed the encouragement of her friends to publish her
work which appeared variously as fly-sheets and as small press
collections. Now, her work, which was included in 90s anthologies of
what was called the ‘British Poetry Revival’, has been collected
together by Shearsman Books.
When we turn to the writing itself other anomalies come to the fore.
Mendelssohn’s writing seems to take its cue from what the editor of
this collection, Sarah Crangle, calls the “vanguard aesthetic” of
the European avant-gardes (she took this as far as working on
translations of Nâzim Hikmet and Gisèle Prassinos). Her writing has
also been described by her friend Peter Riley as “outrageously ludic
in the surrealist line.” One could add to such shorthand
contextualisations of her writing that Mendelssohn also summons
forth for me the writings of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and in
particular Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian whose dislocation of
syntax and copulative conjunctions of language have an almost
anti-literary impact that, outside of such ventures as Bob Cobbing’s
Writers Forum, are very much at a distance
from the concerns of
mainstream British Poetry. Unwanted and marginal really.
Of course, the more visible articulation of experimentalism in
British poetry seems to come hand in glove with a kind of
off-putting academic snobbery that seems synonymous with a Cambridge
in which Mendelssohn lived out most of her life. But, this said,
Mendelssohn, with her roots in a politicised Northern Jewish family
and being a passionate lifelong defender of libertarian communism
offers, through her writing, a kind of intimate approachability
(witness her 1971 interview on World in Action which, in its
disarming refusal to retract her own politics, to condemn the milieu
from which the Angry Brigade sprang, may have sunk her further into
the prison system than she wanted to go.) So, in the midst of
shattered, staggering metonymies, syllabic clusters and stop-start
break-flows, there arrive incursions of personal history, of
political opinion and philosophical musing, of synchronic banalities
and reflexive outcrops. There’s a kind of in-break of quotidian
concerns and disconcerting memories that temper a writing that could
be seen as academically obtuse.
Perhaps her reluctance to publish, to push herself forth, is
revealed in the line-drawings that often intersperse her poetry.
These are more like intricate and extended doodles that not only
mirror the unpresupposing tone of her writing (its abstraction
becomes concrete so to speak), but reveal her close embrace of a
creativity that is in no way autonomous from her life as it can well
be for professional writers whose persona, in its need to be
constantly visible, comes to weigh heavily as what Jacques Lacan
termed “I-cracy” (Je-cratie). We see this in all forms of
celebrity culture and Mendelssohn seems to have more than shunned
this. One of her co-defendants, John Barker, remarked: “She could
easily have had followers of one sort or another, and quite rightly
she obviously made a clear choice not to.” So, she could have made
more of her notoriety, but this would be to pigeonhole herself (as
marketable) when her writing seems, on the contrary, to be a
practice of persistently honing a sensitivity, becoming someone
other, individuating herself through a language that presupposes us
all.
If language is an “internal exteriority” as Lacanians assert then
the act of writing can craft whole worlds as can be witnessed in
such works as Finnegan’s Wake. Mendelssohn’s world is not a
million miles from Joyce’s ‘scribicide’ and like him her work can be
hermetic, enigmatic, cryptic; burying personal material through a
process of self-objectifying scrambling; hinting at questions that
can’t be answered (the ‘unthought known’ as a by-word for
avant-garde poetry?) But like Joyce her immersion in a language that
outstrips us as it meets a lived-in-life seems to offer an infinity
of possibility. Not least amongst these is the possibility for
language to become unconventionally communicative, a suprasensual
thing to adopt Marx’s phrase.
It seems apt then to, at last, cite Mendelssohn herself: “It is
stupid to write for so many people whose position of authority now
desensitizes their use of language” (72) This almost discursive
in-break into one of her poems rings true to anyone who has had a
line-manager or has watched prime-time TV. It is illustrative of its
inverse: for Mendelssohn it is a matter of becoming more and more
sensitised to language or, we could say, sensitised to what
language, at times, compels us to do. This is not so much an
art-for-arts-sake, a loss of control, an apology for
automatic-writing, as perhaps a hangover from her articulate oratory
in an Old Bailey dock. Where did that get her? Maybe Sean Bonney
picked up on this in his appraisal of her work: “In the face of
those who would have ‘silenced’ her, the response is to speak a
language to which they have no access.”
This could well be applied to the reasons that street slang, patois,
creole etc are created, and it is to Mendelssohn’s credit that the
sheer insistence of her poetic experiments, her belief in a form of
literary montage, makes it possible for a kind of occlusive poetics
to be greeted as commonly intelligible and not elitist. To be an
elitist there has to be a steady sense of self and Mendelssohn’s
writing joins in with a current for whom writing figures as a
destabilisation of such I-centric notions. As a working-class woman
of Jewish descent she did not partake of any path towards identity
politics and its presupposing of the narcissistic subject; a
self-image so necessary for the functioning of an economic system
she abhorred. How could she partake of identity politics? For, at
the core of her work, it could be said there is a kind of
non-representational impulse, a real abstraction away from
person-centred discourse. And besides, and best of all, there is a
kind of jouissance to be gained from the voluptuous intermixtures of
language that runs rife through this collection which could have
been titled with a word she coined: plaesthetics.
Sean Bonney (2022) “‘Minds do exist to agitate and provoke / this is
the reason I do not conform’—Anna Mendelssohn”, Journal of
British and Irish Innovative Poetry 14(1). doi:
https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.9254
Anna Mendelssohn (2000) Implacable Art, Folio-Equipage (aka
Salt Press).
Anna Mendelssohn 1948-2009. See
https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/9w0wq9
World In Action – The Angry Brigade (first Broadcast in 1972)
See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDp_ceJQtP4&list=FLkYNWzbjl-VaiyJO1RkTyCg&index=15
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