81 Austerities

by Sam Riviere

All three-dimensional objects can be experienced in two it just takes some careful unpicking of the seams. Witty, comic, plaintive, touching, acerbic, droll, cavalier, caffeinated, irreverent, Austerities, the mind-altering substantial debut from Sam Riviere, seems to achieve the impossible in being all things at once. Initially conceived as a response to the 'austerity measures' implemented by the coalition government in 2011, the poems quickly began taking on a life in 'cutting' themselves on levels of sentiment, structure and even subject matter. Not content to merely build a series of freethinking poems, these remarkable pieces seem eagerly and mischievously to analyze their moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign their excess to the recycling bin thereafter. Experience is speedy, the poems seem to say, so dizzyingly fast that the poetry will inevitably be running to catch up - often arriving at a scene the moment after the moment has gone. The effect is as funny and it is startling, beguiling as it is surprising, and makes Austerities a vivid reminder that deprivation, as Leonard Cohen put it, can be the mother of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

117 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 31, 2012

About the author

Sam Riviere is an English poet and publisher.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

A lot of people seem to like this collection so I feel kind of bad about hating it, but it came across as a young, sexually frustrated boy who read some poetry and thought he'd have a go, I don't know if Riviere is trying to be edgy or what but frankly it made me cringe.

[Mark Ward]

No. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. No. Just No.

[Chris Henden · Rating 4 out of 5]

"My jury of sunflowers" is worth the price of admission

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very contemporary, spiky and often acerbic poems. Snarky, sneering, up to the moment, and with the wit and intelligence to back up the aforementioned qualities.

[Conor]

Alright, but a slight letdown. Sam Riviere is an interesting poet—his metaphors, at the smallest level, are smart, his humour is cheeky, his concern with originality and ownership exciting—but his poems risk being merely interesting. I think I get there are games being played: the titles never really match the poems; one of the poems is about the arbitrariness of title selection; the titles of the poems in his follow-up collection, Kim Kardashian's Marriage, are all the possible permutations of the section headings in this collection; the footnotes, in an exaggeration of Eliot's for the Wasteland, also fail to properly correspond or comment, and are designed to send you on a wild goose chase. When he's good, he's really quite good, and these games invite you in, if not to win then at least to play. But the collection is also in this precarious position of being predicated on existing in a kind of post/modern literary aftermath—sincerity, meaning, truth have all atrophied under austerity measures—while being read, ever increasingly, in times after the aftermath, while a few fresh crucial meanings have continued to manifest, somewhere, somehow.

I think of Selima Hill, an English poet who I consider avant-garde in her own right, one who maybe is more interested in character study than (very!) oblique social critique, but who uses vignette, collage and an eye to the gestalt in a more incisive, less fidgety way. Sometimes his mistrust of master-narratives, his suspicion towards the sovereignty of sincerity, is laid on way too thick, so you're paying far more attention to his "Playing of a Game" than getting involved in playing. Some poems about porn are mordant exhibitions of defunct human connection; others are just embarrassing to watch. Is it naive to have wanted more poems *about* austerity, and fewer about boobs? Or at least for the connection for the two to be a little plainer, something I'm sure Hill could achieve. As always with poetry you have to wonder—is that perhaps the point? Do all my complaints boil down to me being dense? Time will tell.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

really like these, i like how the the turn of his phrases, images that are beautiful but are never trite, each feels whole in and of themselves, like a dream sequence

they were all interesting but the ones i liked best were the ones speaking about a relationship/another person, felt like i could strongly relate to those

this is my favourite one

NO TOUCHING

I would like to ruin your life
let it not be said I lack the necessary
imagination to be jealous
I would ask you to tell no-one about us
and if you tell no-one about us
I’ll fight hard to hide my disappointment
I would like you to renounce your past
as quite a big mistake
it will mean something although I
will never completely forgive you
I think you represent
the possibility in my life of renewal
I would like people to say
“she came back a different person”
we will appear at the weddings
of people we don’t care about
our faces radiant from fucking

[kate]

i was eating banana bread when i read this and it was really dreamy i liked 'no touching' best of all

[Professor Weasel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hipster rubbish. I'm afraid this book had a tough act to follow considering I read it after Morgan Parker and Ocean Vuong, so perhaps that was a bit unfair. There were some lines I thought were godo and funny is this but all in all I wasn't feeling that flat dead affect of this. Quite frankly, I don't think this has aged well at all (it was published in 2012, with the 'rise' of Twitter poetry or whatever; who gives a shit). The poems about porn have ESPECIALLY not aged well (they're not ironic or, like, revealing the deadness of the modern age, they're just.... gross and creepy). The last poem has a line that goes "you were looking cute in blue jeans to be fair you weren't actually that pretty" - RUDE! And yeah, OBVIOUSLY you can have a narrator in poetry who is a bit of a dick (and maybe that was the point), but i was just like eeew, I don't like spending time with you, I'm so glad this book is over. When I read poetry I always feel like I'm encountering a certain kind of energy or presence and this was just not an energy or presence I enjoyed. The style and the content overall (ermagerd the Internet is bad for us) unfortunately felt dated to me, which sadly is something that just happens to certain works (like "The Graduate" movie).

I did like some lines, though:

- "I would like to ruin your life"

- "peeling your jeans off each leg
is like skinning a leek"

- "I didn't know pool players were so into plaid"

- "here I am in a wet field as a clown tells me to 'get real'" (I love this! I don't think he means, like, an actual circus clown, but that's definitely what I pictured)

- "Are the wires coming out of your head attached to a lie detector or an mp3 player" (see what I mean? Who has mp3 players anymore? Lol!)

[Alexandru Madian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pinch

It never ceases to astonish or offend me
seeing the couples circulate the otherwise
dead town centre like leaves in a big ashtray
in a sort of drugged calm they’re dreamy I guess
linked limply they don’t see where the other looks
& the sun doesn’t bother to lift its head from the table
but is leaking torpid ‘honeyed’ light from behind clouds
imagine it living for years and years with the same person
(p. 16)

The Mysterious Lives of the Stars

I want something what is it
those little boobies from 1964
in the Willy Ronis exhibition
in something like somebody’s
new raspberry sweater I don’t
wear sunglasses though
I like opacity I like that you
can’t see my expression as
I’m sitting writing this
in my favourite T shirt the one
with the retro pin-up girl
listening to a black telephone on it
& with yellow armpits like Rimbaud
bless the powers that have taken
our grievances away from us
(p. 18)

Dream Poem

I know what you’re thinking
it’s dull unless they’re sex dreams
dreams about violent murders
mine are pretty banal
I dreamed I wrote a poem
beginning ‘Hi!’ and ending ‘See You Later!’
the middle part was amazing
that’s the part I don’t remember
I was sitting on a platform high above the jungle
this all feels really familiar
probably from something I’ve seen on TV
I was dressed up as a witch doctor
and used this stick of judgement
taking back the names of creatures
restoring them to myth I was doing wisely with it
in my dream the poem didn’t have
this assonance that’s creeping in
after I’d taken back everything
I kept hold of my stick using it
to designate the categories that really matter
while adding bones and wings to my hat
sitting up here out of danger
I hate this / I like that
(p. 22)

’94

what an amazing year
so many great albums
look it up for yourself
I’d get nostalgic but
unfortunately no one
around here could care
too much about the 90s
meanwhile you were
what 6 how does that
make you feel it’s really
hard to tell now you are
linked to ~10000 images
it’s funny in my fantasies
I’m the one who dies
you stay here looking as
always excellent in black
(p. 30)

No Touching

I would like to ruin your life
let it not be said I lack the necessary
imagination to be jealous
I would ask you to tell no one about us
and if you tell no one about us
I’ll fight hard to hide my disappointment
I would like you to renounce your past
as quite a big mistake
it will mean something although I
will never completely forgive you
I think you represent
the possibility in my life of renewal
I would like people to say
‘she came back a different person’
we will appear at the weddings
of people we don’t care about
our faces radiant from fucking
(p. 32)

Loosely Spiritual American Poetry

VS. tensely materialistic british poetry
VS. tireless love poetry of eager administrators
VS. tiring political poetry of benefit fraudsters
VS. improvised poetry of nomadic herdsmen
VS. impoverished poetry of the fully funded
VS. lavish poetry of taciturn janitors
VS. motionless poetry of sociable professors
VS. poetry spoken to an empty playground
VS. poetry learnt by drunk waitresses
VS. poetry that has not been written
VS. poetry that will never be written
I.E. poetry of the hot textual object
VS. poetry evocative yes but *of what*
(p. 34)

Actual Evil

naked french girls smoking weed
naked ecuadorian girls drinking cherryade
naked dutch girls watching philip seymour hoffman dvd
no naked french girls smoking weed
(p. 35)

I’m a Buddhist This is Enlightenment

I hate when life like an autobahn explains itself
also when the news presenters share a little joke
alluding to the private world of showbiz bullshit
so Giles had to say ‘I can’t relate to this’ I liked
when Aki whispered something in the pool hall
that remains unknown to most of the universe
and then ‘what I just said I’ll never say again’
O I’m trying very hard to remember a word
with ‘I’ and ‘O’ in it a good amount of mystery
for a Saturday like meeting a really cute couple
or when words touch each other in strange places
like drinking & biography or sex & cheesecake
if I test each object on my desk with heat
under my hand with heat the right one will reply
(p. 40)

Heavily

Today is a day of zero connectivity
I brush my teeth and dunk my face in water
which is what you wash your breasts with
I want to use the exact same soap
and drink orange juice probably from Spain
now there is a gelid light in the kitchen
& outside the same air we all have
to breathe the day is in some kind of tank
all I will do is think of increasingly
horrible things to tell you striking the side
of my head for a new image there is no
competing with the spectacular & obvious
am I not a child at the opera of emotions
(p. 41)

The Prince

let a man sit down I’m in telesales me
would you buy off this voice on a phone
what do they call you Sarah Sarah Sarah
do you find me attractive Sarah
I don’t mind if you don’t I’m a bit tipsy
I’m celebrating maybe I’ll tell you
if we get to know each other better
Sarah you’re beautiful you know
never let a man tell you otherwise
right don’t be that way nice girls Sarah
who’s your friend Melanie where you from
how old are you woo is it true when
I get you home are you going to let me
spank it I’m going to spank it I’m
going to hold that caramel cheek in
my palm I’m coming round soon later
I love you baby you think I can’t hear all
that soft boy shit let her know what
youre going to do she don’t want you
she wants me she don’t want you she
wants me you may as well delete my
number you had your chance today and
blew it it’s Geoffrey Geoffrey with a J
(p. 42)

Regular Black

Who wouldn’t rather be watching
a film about werewolves instead
of composing friends’ funeral playlists
all day I’ve been suspecting something
like must the 1st thought always
be ‘slipping out of her brassiere’
or ‘slipping out of her brassiere’
that nobody calls anyone a LIAR anymore
and who misses that unambiguousness
that the word ‘image’ has for a long time
been inadequate that back then nobody
went invisible among their references
that the silence of the looking glass was total
that pizzas were delivered through the evening
that nobody’s left eye wept continuously
that one’s ambitions were solely amorous
also tonight would have been perfect weather
to take your girlfriend out for ice-cream
needless to say she remembers it
differently the 2nd thought is
is it possible she’s doing it on purpose
and love back then love was a papercut
(p. 51)

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
I’ve seen my missing girlfriend’s face
emerge cresting from a wave of pixels
I sleep with a [rec] light at the foot
of my bed all the film crews
have been infiltrated by
militant anti-pornographers
sometimes in surfaces there is a dark
ellipse it’s the cameraman’s reflection
(p. 57)

Fall in Love All Over Again

much against everyone’s advice
I have decided to live the life
I want to read about and write it
not by visiting the graves of authors
or moving to london to hear
in my sleep its gothic lullaby
not by going for coastal walks
or being from the north and lathing
every line as an approach it’s
way outmoded I run a bath turn
off the lights I think only of
lathering the pale arms of my wife
for now a girl who dreads weekends
then I guess I might as well teach
squandering so as not to squander
this marvellous opportunity right?
(p. 68)

Miserable I Hope You Do Too

a face becomes more beautiful
as it says it doesn’t want to be with you
the cemetery has trees like the memory of fires
this isn’t really *like* anything actually sorry
there’s the rest of the year to think about it
to become trees or fires or whatever they are
we documented the whole thing remember
that’s what we were doing or didn’t you notice
I don’t want to know which of us wrote it
it’s like asking who engraved the gravestones
you’re literary why don’t you *read* them
guess I can’t believe anyone’d want to keep
every note & I thought I would be glad
you called but I’m kind of not
(p. 82)

Hey Perverts

if I know you and I thiiink I do
I think I know the kinds of things
you like like putting the heating
up full & walking round in your shorts
with the windows open like buying
organic mince & flushing it straight
down the toilet as soon as you get in
like searching for stunt deaths & funfair
accidents like deliberately changing
your mind like walking a metre behind
someone on their way home at night
like photographing every item of
clothing you own like sitting in pubs
alone putting out creepy vibes like
saying ‘bad dog’ to a good dog like
making up stuff for your counselling
session & different stuff for your parents
like wasting x2 an unethical lunch
like saying you haven’t seen the movie
when you have & studying my reactions
as we watch it like me telling you this
stuff especially that like busying yourself
with your web of lies if this is’t enough
which it obviously isn’t then I have
something here extremely interesting
isn’t it yesterday’s horoscope which we
can test rigorously for accuracy here’s
where each thing finds its hollow place
(p. 106)

[Sarah]

I think I'm going to decide not to rate poetry or short story collections any more because what does a rating mean when there is so much diversity between two covers? I suppose it's my assessment of the quality of the compilation? Anyway, I don't feel qualified to rate this collection.

The whole volume reminded me of that part in Fight Club where Brad Pitt asks Edward Norton "How's that working out for you, being clever?"

I learned a lot about poetry.

I read it for an hour on the train and felt completely detached from reality when I got off.

I 'enjoyed' some of the poems, I 'appreciated' many, a few I didn't get.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems were fun to read. More often than not, there was a line or an image that inspired an idea, made me crack a smile, or just got a nod of appreciation. I didn't read this as closely as I sometimes read poetry, but I think the style of poems invite that.

"you do not need to shout / a poem that is pretty much / the definition of a poem"

From "Time Please"

[Jennifer]

unique voice, funny at points, some striking images. lonely and intelligent stuff.

[Michael Odom · Rating 2 out of 5]

81 Austerities came highly recommended by someone whose opinion I respect so I'll revisit later in case.... But for now, I found is dull.

[Marina Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Young, witty and often profound. A poetry collection that combines everyday observations with a feeling of loss and puzzlement. One to dip into again and again.

[Gail McConnell]

'sort of chronically depleted noisecore'

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

«funny, ok, but have we had enough about poetry? I mean it will amuse other students of poetry but, to adopt a voice I didn't know I possessed, I doubt it means jackshit out there»

[Eden · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lord it’s crap i feel sorry for myself I just hate it

[Paul Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I LIKED RIVIERE'S novel, Dead Souls, so much that I decided to try his poetry, which turns out to be "interesting," as we say when we think something might be important but don't want to risk declaring that we like it.

81 Austerities contains, as you might have guessed, eighty-one poems, all originally published on Riviere's blog in 2011, at a moment when the British government was adopting "austerity measures," that is, raising taxes and cutting public services.

The eighty-one poems leave the impression of practicing certain austerities themselves, as they are generally brief (only a few require more than one page) and largely do without upper-case letters and punctuation marks.

The no-caps, no-punctuation style, the brevity, and the syntactic plainness of the poems ("I was watching TV / with the windows open / it was a warm night"), combined with their first appearing in a digital medium makes a reader think of Instagram poetry, but in many a wink to the reader Riviere reveals he is cannier than that. For instance, there is a poem at the very end titled "81 Austerities" that seems to consist of quick comments on the other poems in the volume.

I found myself thinking instead of Chelsey Minnis. Minnis's poems, too, seem superficially like the kind of poem you would find in an intelligent but anxious teen's journal or social media account. Often enough, though, they seem to be deliberately trying to sound like that, a poetic knuckleball wobbling its way past you for a strike. Is this poem the pathetic little squib it looks like at first glance or is it...important?

But what in the world makes a poem important? Should we refrain thinking of importance, however defined, as the right goal for a poem?

I am also reading Michael Hamburger's translations of Holderlin currently, and I wonder if Riviere and Minnis are programmatically renouncing ambition.

Holderlin lies behind Heidegger's exalted idea of poetry as the Un-Concealing of Being, as the basis of all art, as the basis of history...you name it. For Heidegger, poetry is where the big meanings are. But what if going for the Big Meanings opens the door to the political commitments for which Heidegger is so (rightly) notorious? Is ambitious poetry complicit with horror? (Pound, for instance).

This in turns reminds me of a passage in "A Sunset," which Robert Hass recently published in the New Yorker.

This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.

Ashbery steers as far as he can from sounding like a vates, to be sure. Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett also could be said to be trying to tack as hard as they could away from the poetic course celebrated by Heidegger. So I wonder if Riviere and Minnis are looking for ways to write poetry without being Poets.

[Juliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

"you are the palest goth at the picnic": on Sunday I read Sam Riviere's debut poetry collection '81 Austerities', at last! (The timing seemed good, as I was on my way to Edinburgh Fringe to see, among other shows, an opera titled 'The Marriage Of Kim K', which I partly wanted to see because the title reminded me of Riviere's collection 'Kim Kardashian's Marriage'.) Anyway, '81 Austerities' is really quite beautiful; each poem is a blessing and the overall concept and the form of the collection made for a very engaging reading experience. Of course, it is easily superseded by the sophomore 'Kim Kardashian's Marriage'!

[Steven Edmondson]

sometimes you read a book and want to write somthing catty then remember the author probably does check the goodreads, because i would. ah well, i wish him well and i heard 'dead souls' was very good.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Accomplished, but I was more often reading it for research than for pleasure.

[John Feetenby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chaotic riot of poems. Hilarious, nourishing, and deeply contemporary.

[Z · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of misses and a few hits.

[Jessica Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Broetry

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I'm an big fan of this one I do enjoy seeing the disgust people react to SR with. I'm not surprised to see Jack, Berry, JNT, Rachael Allen, SBW as contributing in the acknowledgements. Anyway what's shocking about this collection to me is that it was mostly written in 2011 - published 2012. This is a major episode of a break with the 2000s scene if we like to call it this and I think what Sam writes here is something a lot of very talented poets are still trying to work out how to write a decade later. It feels to me the relation is something like what anti-comedy is to comedy. But it's also his most lucid collection. the opener may just confirm my little suspicion about KKM & the publishing industry. Actually this whole collection places KKM very nicely for me. 81 is beautifully inspiring and chaotically horny I'm a convert

I would like to ruin your life

[Barney · Rating 3 out of 5]

"this is me having my extremely nuanced feelings / overwhelmed by pop music and kind of enjoying it"

funny, playful, curious poems for the selfie generation, but a little hit-and-miss. can sometimes feel like the reading equivalent of overhearing an in-joke you're not privvy to.

[Megan Staunton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Social commentary on life, death and modernity, implemented by the coalition government in 2011. Mixture of topical and observational poems.

[Kieran]

picks:

And There the Resemblance Ends
No Touching
The Prince
Primal Memory
Buffering 15%
Nobody Famous
The Clot
Hey Perverts