“I’m committed to forms of social address that can’t be heard or that get rendered inaudible. Speaking well becomes a limit, a form of inarticulacy in itself”: Danny Hayward in Conversation

Danny Hayward sits down with our editor Kashif Sharma-Patel to talk about (in)articulacy, exhaustion and disintegration, and the changes in poetry, politics and speech since 2010. His book Loading Terminal is out now from the87press.

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Kashif Sharma-Patel: What is the basis of this book? Your blurb mentions developments in fascism and elegy of the 2010s and 2000s, alongside the UK high street. I am reading your work in relation to the crisis of 2008/9 and subsequent protests-riots and the question of periodisation. The manner in which innovative poetics was reinvigorated. This moment regarding Palestine also feels deeply involved with thinking about 2003 and how that has affected your poetics.

This also relates to your book for Punctum Wound Building, the manner in which it refuses canonisation and “totality”, focusing on fragments and their internal logics.

Danny Hayward: The Wound Building texts were mainly written on the hoof, whenever I had an opportunity to write them. Most were initially just attempts to understand new works that had opened something up for me or changed the way I felt. That way of responding is kind of antithetical to periodisation. It’s more experiential – as in this is a book by, say, Verity Spott, which has changed the way I think: and what can I do with that? How can I articulate that experience? How can it be shared between us in the first instance? As I’ve moved further away from a formal academic context I’ve found it easier to think like this in semi-open letters than in essays. I want the thinking to be public and available but also to preserve the sense that I’m speaking to someone who has made something possible for me: which I am.

The earliest piece in Wound Building is from 2015, the earliest piece in Loading Terminal is from 2017. Both of these books are what you might call recording devices of an aftermath, within a particular historical sequence. You’re right, something began in 2008/9, its social and political intensity reached a peak around 2010/11 with the student protests/movement of the squares and then the riots. The work here deals with the downturn, the period of defeat and decline in that trajectory. To put it crudely: Brexit vote, election of Donald Trump, alt-right emergence, and then the moment we are still in. This period of confusion and splits in the political left which runs through the pandemic and the recent wars in Ukraine and Gaza. 

In that blurb for Loading Terminal I’m trying to capture that mood. Picking over feelings of despair, loss of orientation, literal loss of comrades and friends due to death or their radical departure from what I had thought were shared positions. For me, the poetry book is struggling to find political and aesthetic positions other than feelings of defeat and demoralisation within the “objective context” of a downturn. Of course not everyone's perspective is not exactly the same as my own. 

Loading Terminal tries to measure out a change in political vocabulary or focus. The anti-war protest from 2003 involved a revival of a radical left internationalism directed against Western, American-led imperialism. Then from 2010 onwards with austerity and programmes of mass impoverishment, social cruelty and class violence gets turned inwards, directed at people located around you, rather than subject populations thousands of miles away. And then as that latter period wore on and became more exhausting and grinding, there are few different things happening. You have the large anti-racist movements around BLM, the re-animation of the vocabulary of intersectionality and identity politics in spaces of struggle. In that trajectory you also have the articulation of class struggle through the vocabulary of identity politics, where people start to think about individualised harms, where class is experienced as personal wounds. The language becomes less sociological and abstract. It gets knocked out of its orbit within the thought-world of an inherited academic Marxism, while at the same time it becomes much more focused on immediate experience. What is your life history, your direct experience of class, how do those questions relate to you? If you want to establish a wider theatre of events to understand the development of poetry in the last decade, those are important points of contact. Some of the stuff happening in Loading Terminal is an attempt to come to terms with all of this. Not necessarily to take clearly defined positions, but to allow these outside realities and debates to blow through the poetry and rearrange it.

KSP: It is interesting that the centring of an individualised experience develops into a more phenomenological mode in poetry in the wake of that defeat where we are thinking about why the everyday is shit, why is the high street so rubbish, what is happening in social spaces, how are we mediated through digital technologies. All these things poets are thinking about in terms of mediating language and aesthetics. It is not fully developed, but is definitely a turn in people's work. Which is linked to identity politics but perhaps not wholly defined by. In terms of harm, you speak in Letter to Sophie from Loading Terminal about compulsion, addiction, self-harm in terms of language faltering, not coming. So art-making is a method of breaking through that, poetry is a way of working with language in a more abstract way. Thinking about Gaza too, to fully narrativise would be violent too. We shouldnt be able to fully comprehend such a situation, there should be ambivalence to some degree. 

You are also concerned with relationship between knowledge and politics, and speech and poetry. You write on P. 88 “The politics I am interested is about KNOWLEDGE, as in, the practical and specialised understanding that anyone needs in order to defend themselves against forces that are fundamentally hostile to them […]” There are triangulation points there about articulation, speech, language and seem to undercut debates around theory and poetry. 

DH: The “Letter to Sophie” is an attempt to rethink how I write poems. In Loading Terminal there are three longer texts, two of which especially take the form of a single exhaustingly over-extended act of assertion. Although it seems perverse, that was the first kind of poem I learnt to write. When I reflect on it, I think this kind of poem, which pushes towards a point of exhaustion and then finally blurts out all of the simple things it has been holding back, is related for me to the moment of political activity around 2010. It’s a kind of conventional idea about what a revolutionary political trajectory might look like, played out mainly at the level of syntax: the tension rises and then there’s an explosion. After that everyone lives happily ever after.  

But after a while I began to feel like maybe these long poems of pseudo-heroic endurance were more like extended acts of self-denial. Maybe they were more inarticulate than I had initially thought. It had to do with what it felt like to write them. Banging your head against a wall, bludgeoning yourself as you keep returning the same text, slowly secreting new lines, forcing yourself back into the same affect-state as the last time, trying to prevent the emotional fabric from fraying. In the Letter that you mention I was trying to define the inarticulacy at the core of the only form of articulacy that I’d been able to establish, to see it as a form of self-harm, to set out some new terms for thinking about class and endurance. In some ways I think of Loading Terminal as a process of disintegration: you have a couple of poems which have the very linear, sustained trajectory I’m describing and then slowly it all starts to fragment and buckle at the seams. I wanted to make that disintegration expressive of possibility rather than just of collapse and defeat: suddenly you discover you don’t need to suffer like that holding it all together. 

In terms of knowledge, poetry and speech: the title poem of Loading Terminal  has at its centre a kind of botched Blakean allegory: you move from a gigantic greenhouse towards a vast iron wall. The greenhouse is a space of speech and articulacy: of state-funded cultural institutions, of “the media”, the whole apparatus of education etc. – all the fluency and authority of official political and theoretical representation: what the text you quote from calls “the personality defining regime of opinion”. The iron wall represents the opposite – the space of production, infrastructure, material necessity, work, of this whole gigantic apparatus of labour and material resources that has to exist in order for anybody to be able to speak at all, but which barely appears in our media or in most of our ideas about politics or society, including on “the left”. The allegorical movement in the poem is also a movement between fluency and inarticulacy, between the representable and the mute. It’s a way of supplying container-images for a movement that in my own life feels more like a frantic blur.  

And then finally it's also related to a certain kind of Marxism to which I have a complicated relationship. I mean Marxism as a way of accessing a different understanding of reality, the “secret” of reality. The secret is the material infrastructure and work at the base of our reality and not the things that we tend to say about it in an educated/academic environment. In reactionary thinking you also get this essence and image distinction – the notion that people in cities are educated metropolitan elites, whereas “real” people exist outside of this bubble, do “real” work etc. (I think Laurel Uziell’s T is still the best attempt to think through some of this.)  

I come back a lot to the idea that that wish for a different way of seeing is a poetic wish, a poetic desire concealing itself in a theory of society – and so a kind of corrupted or disavowed version of Rimbaud’s promise of a derangement of the senses. And I wanted to write work in which this hidden and distorted poetic promise which you find in lots of “radical” political theory (including the worst kinds) collapses or is reabsorbed back into poetry itself.   

KSP: I wanted to ask about compression. We have the discursive field of the podcast, the reproduction of the image as the real in an even more accelerated form. It works with virality and a reproduction of the experience, so we have the image of the image of the image. And you have this image of the podcast over the train tannoy [in……]. You have an overdeveloped, buckling infrastructural world aligned with a privatised discourse which is actually riven across society. Everyone is in a small sphere of private discourse and culture. It is not subcultural. If there is a recent move of poetry towards a phenomenological everyday it perhaps jars with poetry as a vehicle of active-political expression. Does that figure in your thinking? 

That period after 2016, the insurgency of the right, most of my political activity was focused on housing organising. That became the process by which I discovered a lot of social life in London which I otherwise wouldn’t have encountered: spaces, people, peripheries, undergrounds, survivors. Different levels of reality. Different kinds of insides of what I had trained myself to think of as structures. That’s perhaps one way of thinking about what a class is, in relation to some of the stuff I said earlier. 

I find compression very interesting. Do you ever listen to that lecture that Keston Sutherland gave about form after the crash? The sense that poetry might be a compressed space that gathers reality into itself, so that reality gets compacted, is very clear in Keston’s own poetry. Verity Spott’s 87 Press book works through a related metaphor: poetry as a kind of pressurised tube. And William Rowe writes about this beautifully in his pamphlet on Verity’s book, Seeing, Again Fascism. 

But the way in which people write has changed in the last 15 years in very general ways. The type of writing that those on the left who are interested in culture do has altered in general, in terms of syntax, rhythm, image. This is partly due to social media and the competition for space and visibility within these channels, where a cacophony of different voices elbow one another for prominence. And podcasts and forms of new media are part of that – but it really comes down to the question of how it is possible to speak in public and be heard. 

And like I say I’m committed to forms of social address that can’t be heard or that get rendered inaudible. Speaking well becomes a limit, a form of inarticulacy in itself. Taking on personae and ventriloquising other voices helped me to break out of that – you see this in the title poem of Loading Terminal, in the proliferation of unattributed quotes, in forms of speech which intrude upon or cut across the flow of thought or argument belonging to a “speaker”. The effect is a kind of latticing of internally contradictory speech environments that are made up of more components that I am capable of producing “myself”, at the level of whatever you could call my “style”. In the work I like best right now there are bits and fragments of speech scattered all over the place, distributed over a much wider radius than anyone is able to accomplish when working in their own “voice”. I moved in this direction only gradually: you see it in Loading Terminal in a bunch of provisional movements and developments. It’s a learning process.  

KSP: For some context, I was discussing this with my friend about this move to compression, this move to the homogenised sound-board where everyone has the same tools, the same sounds. In reference to club culture you have this move towards equalised, auto-pitched, playlist-like so the spontaneity is dying. And this works both physically – accessing spaces spontaneously is difficult – and the performance is also overdetermined in the aesthetic moment. Which made me think about the act of even explaining that experience is also regulated – the spontaneity of speech and the spontaneity of conversation is somehow curtailed. The promise of the digital was that the fragmentation and shattering would allow a thousand flowers to bloom but that has been shown not to be the case. In more pernicious ways we are being fed back into nodes which we are not wholly conscious of. In the age of TV and radio those nodes are obvious, and we know we are part of a collective experience in which we could identify or disidentify as we like but that is no longer the case. It is hard to know what others are consuming or literally seeing. On one level it is a more fragmented society but on another it is a more predictable one, weirdly. The level of conversation you can engage with spontaneously is effectively null. It has already been determined and exists in these smaller discursive spheres. Then your imagination of form is deeply coloured., rooted a lot in sociality as I see the context of poetry. And the podcast is one place to think about this discursive and sensory compression. 

DH: Social media are just funnels for judgement. There’s a relationship between the experience of being inside that hyper-judgemental, fractally self-aware language space and the desire for an exit or an outside I spoke about earlier. You see this again in certain forms of Marxism that talk about production and logistics as a way of getting outside of the glass house or greenhouse of the educated “metropolitan” language space, but that metaphor runs right through our society. It has right-wing versions too: take the red pill, leave the Matrix. Always you end up back at this disavowed and corrupted poetic promise of a new system of perception, the dream not just of a different society but of a different way or perceiving and being, of “seeing”. So that the corrupted and disguised desire for a radical change of perception serves as an answer to the “compression” for which liberal-progressive language cultures or “Twitter” are a cipher. These fake exits don’t really lead away from the funnel – they’re just another one of its forms. But this false opposition in turn comes to define the situation within which poetry moves: the phony opposition of funnel and false exit are themselves its basic terrain. 

In other words: I think you have to try to create a language out of all of these corrupt, competing, self-denying and co-constitutive urges rather than to invent a pristine one that exists outside of or above them. Maybe this is related to what you mean by sociality?     

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Danny Hayward occasionally updates Free Trials (www.pxxtry.com), has a few letters and prose texts coming out in Training Exercises (Both Are Wrong, 2024), will publish Woke City Breaks with Gong Farm quite soon.