The Odes to TL61P

by Keston Sutherland

The Odes to TL61P is a suite of five massive, turbulent, tender and satirical odes written and revised from 2010-13. It is the explicit history of the author's sexual development from early infancy; a commentary on the social and political history of the UK since the election of the coalition government; a philosophical account of the common meaning of secrecy in the most intimate, private experiences and in international diplomacy; a wild work of revolutionary theory that investigates in minute detail the difference between commodities and human lives; a record of a thousand revisions, deletions and metamorphoses; an attempt to radically extend and reimagine the very possibility of the ode form; a monstrous accumulation of techniques and mimeses, from the strictest and most perfected metrical verse to the most delirious and cacophonous noise music; and a devoted love song to the now obsolete product ordering code for a bygone Hotpoint washer-dryer, "TL61P". It is the longest poetical work yet written by Keston Sutherland and his most comprehensive effort yet to transform the grammar of human existence.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published December 9, 2013

About the author

Keston M. Sutherland is a British poet, and Professor of Poetics at the University of Sussex.

He graduated with a BA from Cambridge University in 1997, was the Joseph Hodges Choate Fellow at Harvard University 1997-8, and submitted his PhD, titled 'J. H. Prynne and philology', at Cambridge in 2004. He has lived in Brighton and worked at the University of Sussex since then. In 2013 he was the Holloway Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley and in 2015 he was the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.

Sutherland was the editor of the poetics and critical theory journal QUID and is co-editor (with Andrea Brady) of Barque Press. His poetry has been compared to J. H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, and Drew Milne. His work has won international recognition: his major 2007 poem Hot White Andy was first published in the United States in a special issue of Chicago Review showcasing four young British poets (Sutherland, Andrea Brady, Chris Goode and Peter Manson); it has been reviewed as "the most remarkable poem in English published this century".

Sutherland has translated a number of poets into English, including Jean-Marie Gleize, Jean-Michel Espitallier and Monika Rinck. His 2017 book Whither Russia contains translations of Verlaine, Heine, Tasso, Hölderlin, Gautier and Toulet.

Together with his colleagues at the University of Sussex, Sam Solomon, Natalia Cecire and Joe Luna, Sutherland runs the Sussex Poetry Festival, an annual two-day celebration of anti-capitalist and deranged poetry and music in Brighton, UK. The Festival began in 2009.

Sutherland has collaborated a number of times with the American artist Stephen G. Rhodes. Rhodes has made shows containing texts by Sutherland (printed pages, voiceovers, recorded readings) in Berlin, London, Brighton and Los Angeles.

Sutherland has written many essays on poetry, philosophy and Marx. A complete list is available on his staff page at the University of Sussex. Many of his performances of his poetry can be heard on YouTube and on his Soundcloud page. A number of substantial interviews and dialogues with Sutherland are available online.

Reviews

[James Askari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five consistently-structured odes considering or, rather, mobilising relations between love and late capitalism. TL61P is the product code of a discontinued Hotpoint dryer; Sutherland says you'll find out nothing about it on the Internet, but you can in fact order parts. The dryer, its product code, Laurer barcode mark, engineering and user manuals, stand for the poem as love's 'unconditional perfected shadow / opposite'. But rather than distinguishing the discourses of love from those of commodity fetishism, distilling the first from the second, say, the poems, in hectic, passionate and painfully bathetic manners, intricate the two together, collide them into one another, let them corrupt one another. TL61P the machine as the word for commodity fetishism, 'is a shower of lube in powdered milk; but it is an infinity too'.

The poems are set in their historical moment: protests against the second Iraq War in Trafalgar Square; the intervention in Libya; standoff in Israel-Palestine; the fallout from the subprime crisis; and much of them is taken up with unironic Marxist commentary, delivered faux-parodically in the guise of linguistically innovative poetry's New Sentence. However koan-like or exquisite, Sutherland's sentences may well be what he actually thinks: '[t]he anti-war movement was too eclectic ... the pensioners and teenagers let down the Muslims and SWP. There was not a basis in natural sympathy, but recreation around a core of disgust; you find the same problem for art, whose reception fades into an endless praeludium to the absolute banalisation of sacrilege'. In broad terms, his poetry takes up Olson's ambition is to be socially and historically comprehensive, which now means attending to the machinations of high finance ('pigging out on leverage') and logistics of Global Asset Identifiers. Sutherland (though speaking too in the voice of TL61P) is scathing about poetry that claims a strategically left-wing or progressive unintelligibility: 'What the fuck are you on about the demilitarisation of syntax? ... Tearing up the rule book just aestheticizes it into a vorticist collage of General Franks'. The hermeticism of this writing comes to constitute a 'predictably rather than problematically predictably lovable adventure cage with no manifest theme for a domestic rat...'; the nerviness of writing, which Sutherland seems at pains to preserve, dissipates into 'sedative aporiae in mock-heroic marginalese'. In the culture industry, further, the sellers of ad space on television easily moonlight as 'Facebook-generation' poets, dependent on social media and seeking thrills in an economy of 'diminishing returns', like OnlyFans: 'only collaterally the hottest wellspring of capitalist evolution'. Without brooking the reader's potential impatience or small-mindedness, Sutherland instead wants to be inclusive, universal in his love.

The Odes broadly follow the structure of working through a dialectical encounter of love and commodity fetishism, passing through various deformations and grotesqueries to statements of social hope. Sections deal with the genesis of the poet's adult sexual identity as a gay vers: with his infantile experiences, in which he is repeatedly shamed into secrecy, for instance for sucking another boy's dick in bed; to his exposure to porn; disquisitions on psychoanalysis and the sexology of perversion; first penetrative sex as a top, and hopes now 'to try some men before I die in' an open, committed loving relationship. 'Sterility' is the last but not least resistance to capitalism, he says, apparently wryly: 'Queering war'. The scaffolding of dialectics in the sequence is perverted, torqued, but perhaps never threatened. The most achieved sections in terms of Sutherland's theory are rendered in hexameter something like Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body', while the earlier, parodic or anguished workings-through also sound as horrible hexameter jingles, rhyming and versified, naive in manner like some of the Lyrical Ballads, but set out as prose (the poet is 'a predictable stupid rake ... his lyric on the fucking make, his infancy a mucked up fake, all ugly sex and textbook camaraderie and floor, and the more derisory for being sadly poor').

I like this because it is almost endlessly fertile, pointed and intelligently diagnostic; it puts it all out there; it is speaking, as a subject's discourse, but spoken and subject to; it isn't consistent, but is surprising; and it would be harder to imagine a larger or more urgent thing for poetry to be doing.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

there's One other review on the page for this which is a much more effective description of this book than anything I'd achieve so I encourage you to have a little look at that

Anyway yawp yourself into 2013 we're still thinking Iraq war but it's receding most people seem to want to move on & you're encountering capitalism calling it late calling it not-I & Marx is there for you this collection & Keston as a person is one of the few up-and-down Marxists that I find distinctly interesting working today & also big gay ... but it fades ! it's complicated ! upanddown I'll be back