“In a way I am trying to create a new subjectivity of autism through using poetic form”: Gareth Farmer in Conversation

Gareth Farmer speaks to us about his book Kerf (the87press, 2022) in a wide-ranging conversation covering his anarchic neo-modernist tendencies, developments in autism poetics, and the role of evasiveness in poetics. We also touch upon Vladimir Mayakovksy, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and poetic form. 

Kashif Sharma-Patel: I am interested–woodwork aside for the moment–in the background of Kerf, specifically if there were any specific literary influences or models you were emulating or directly in conversation with? And also the tradition you see yourself as part of? Kerf is very dense and fruitful and I wonder how you conceive of it.

Gareth Farmer: The density of it, or its eclecticism, is something that I have criticised myself for in the past. Is the density necessary? I think so. I have a range of influences that probably do not arrange themselves into a coherent voice, as it were, or a coherent style. Kerf was the first book that I developed on commission, in a sense, and was trying to bring together a range of different voices. The tradition I always associate myself with, rightly or wrongly, is a kind of anarchic neo-modernist tradition, but with Victorian floridity, as it were. A lot of modernists such as Pound, and in particular, Mina Loy, have had great influence over my work. I have always been drawn to the kind of precision and scientific oddity of Loy’s writing – the sense in which she infuses her work with the demented idealistic scientific terminology of the day and creates a very edgy, very odd, very weird poetry which stylistically very much appealed to me as a way of understanding the world. So there are the modernist influences, and that culture of aesthetic difficulty that comes with modernist aesthetics, and then the theorisation of such through Adorno and Horkheimer, particularly their thinking on the culture industry. 

But–talking about eclecticism–Dylan Thomas is a huge influence of mine also, as is Algernon Charles Swinbourne and the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The whole influence of the book is this neo-modernist aesthetics of difficulty, a resistance to meaning, but also sonic play; these dialectical sonic landscapes that these other poets have given me.

The other thing about Kerf is that it was a watershed, or landmark book for me, as it was a way for me to work through these multiple influences while applying them to particular subject areas –autism, woodwork, labour– in ways that were new to me in that I hadn't had a cohesive set of subjects to explore in this integrated or imbricated way with such focus before. So, I bring together all those influences into a smorgasbord of nonsense!

KSP: I am also interested in the different forms that proliferate the book. “Contra Expressivities” presents itself as a continuous block for a number of pages, while “Ssssssstiiiimye” follows directly in its open-field, aleatory poem. Then the back-half of the book consists of a long structured poem “What's That: Instead of Ego”. You mention in the preface about woodworking, the manner in which you could be thinking about it allegorically, about its abstraction and reformation and moulding and fragmentation and cutting, but then you refuse that reading. I read that in a deconstructive manner: in refusing you are also saying, despite the negation. And I guess there is a way that you are complicating easy meaning-making. It has been almost two years since the book has been out, and I wonder how you reflect on form and structure. 

The other thing that comes to mind is of course constructing a book is a different project to writing for pamphlets or journals, and I felt like in this project there was a very interesting way that you were thinking about structure.

GF: There is a specific structure to the book in the sense that it builds towards a long poem at the end, “What's That: Instead of Ego?” which we can talk about in a moment. To the first point, and thinking about eclecticism of the forms: there is a deliberate juxtaposition between the block text of  “Contra Expressivities” and “Ssssssstiiiimye”. In “Contra Expressivities” I use equal signs instead of punctuation, which was a nod to Marinetti–a reference I probably shouldn't be referencing–with his use of mathematical terminology as a way of punctuating texts. I found creating a block of text like that quite useful. Then I wanted to have a very structured, rigid form of that type followed by this transcription of stimming, my stims; the open field seemed more apt for this type of transliteration. 

But they are not unrelated, in that “Contra Expressivities” is based upon a book by Julia Miele Rodas called, Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe where she outlines all of these ideas which she calls “autism poetics”, characterised by, for example, abruptness, absence of the I, abstruseness, etceteras. Each of the sentences in “Contra Expressivities” uses one of the words from her itemisation, so essentially it was me creating a block poem out of these codes of autistic expressivity. 

So both of the poems relate to how you express an autistic poetics; both how you categorise it but also how you transcribe it. The constrained mania of the first form is a sister of the splurge of “Ssssssstiiiimye”. The thread connecting all of the forms is me trying to find out what an autistic poetics might look like and whether that is descriptive–as in describing the features or categories of an autistic person–or whether that is illustrative, i.e. doing autistic poetics, with the ‘pressures’ that autism puts on my language, as it were.. And both of those poems are doing both, in a way. And those are the formal dimensions that I was exploring.

To go back to the point about form, and this relates to a neo-modernist perspective - but it is also a Marxist perspective, that form is sedimented with ideology. What I am exploring is thinking about literary form as transformative in that it perhaps creates the conditions to ‘transform’ the world. If you explode literary form when you are channelling neurodivergence or autism, the question is: is this transformative of the world in some way, or does it challenge or critique the perspectives of your readers, particularly as this relates to how language describes worlds or, to channel Ludwig Wittgenstein, creates ‘forms of life’? Am I attempting to present a negative impression of the ideology of ableism through formal dynamics? Probably.

My point is that form is incredibly important to me. I always describe myself - as a joke that I always say and nobody seems to get - as  “dyed-in-the-nylon formalist”, because nylon is a totally constructed, man-made product. So I am a constructivist and a formalist. And form that is not being expressive of an expected content is something that is quite important to me. Another way of putting that is that form is something that resists the pre-shaped subjectivities of other cultural institutions and their formal expressions. 

In a way I am trying to create a new subjectivity of autism through using poetic form in quite a deliberate way and also for a reader to read these different juxtaposing forms and think about what I am trying to do there. Do they think I am being indecisive–which is probably the case–or do they think that I am trying to explore the different ways of articulating neurodivergence through poetic form?  

KSP: How does this relate then to woodwork, as a structuring device? Slowness, process, a domesticity, and a biographical aspect makes one think about this as a direct address of the self. But you seem to be preempting that by questioning self exactly. A more reductive framing would ask that subjectivity must be about self and a relationality to the outside world, and that the poetry nationalist would say poetry is the ultimate mediator of the self and the social with poetic form as the bridge. Is that there, is that too reductive? And what is this relationship between autism and woodwork as related to form as we have already been discussing?

GF: These are all entangled concepts that I have never quite gotten to the bottom of. I turned to woodworking simply as a way to make furniture. But I discovered that the process of woodworking was a beautiful one. On a personal level, I find it useful as a “therapy” and as a way of being totally non-verbal. But I have found one rapidly becomes tied up in the reification of woodworking and in the identification with some sort of artisanal practices: “I am a woodworker, a crafter”! What seems to happen, then, is that a beautiful process becomes reified into a reductive statement: “I am achieving something and doing something with my hands”. I loved what I was doing, but hated the reification and commodification of what I was doing. Which is a good illustration of my mind really: I am my worst auditor; my most pointed critic. I cannot let myself do something and enjoy it; I must theorise and and theorise the theorisation and turn it back around on itself. 

In a sense, I do love woodworking; I do it compulsively, in a way. I was thinking about this association of craft and poetry, and poetry as techne–making–but then that is too obvious. You craft a table; you craft a poem. (“The poem is a machine made of words”, as Williams Carlos Williams wrote.) Because that is what people say. Aside from that, I was thinking about the practice of how you can create something that is totally worthless in the value system, but which is worthwhile to you. So there is an analogy between poetry and this table I have built. And then, in relation to labour, we might explore how labour is codified in poetry and how labour is codified in woodwork and whether these, well, codifications are similar. But all of these ideas are abutted by my pathological evasiveness and creative disingenuousness that doesn't allow me to, say, write a book about woodworking and write some pleasant poems about it. I know what that book would look like and how the poems would sound. It would be a middle-class academic telling you about his new-found excitement about the bucolic simplicity of woodworking and then displaying his sophistication by writing poems about it. How lovely! For me, that is not good enough; it seems too narcissistic or conceited. This relates, of course, to the tired discussion of the ‘distrust of the lyric I’. But such a collection of poems would feel complacent and entitled, somehow, not to say banal and self-involved. To me that is not good enough as a response, but also as an aesthetic strategy or production. So the poems are trying to think through the complicities of both woodwork and poetry, and try to come to terms with how I feel expressing myself as a woodworker in a poetry that does not want to reveal too much about me being a woodworker! 

My only way into exploring my own subjectivity has been through thinking deeply about neurodivergence, which has been a new thing for me. And that is not to say I do not have a subjectivity or think about myself; but I never thought that anybody should have to read about my personal experiences in a way that is going to inform them of anything. So, actually, neurodivergent theory, Critical Disability Studies, Robert McRuer’s crip theory, for example–these have given me frameworks to express my subjectivity, but they are theorised as a collective understanding of ableism and disability. The evasiveness and irreverence towards poetry and towards myself are strategies of playful avoidance and resistance to forcing my boring life onto other people. There is subjectivity on display, but the subjectivity is shown in relief as an evasion of a presentation of subjecthood through poetry.  

KSP: So there is an element of opacity to the work, alongside this fragmented self. It is interesting to me that you are so self-conscious of that evasion; I had never thought about it in that way. Perhaps I feel it as a given. 

GF: I always consider my poetry to be evasive, or evading direct expression, but maybe my understanding of evasion is different.

KSP: I think you are correct. And probably I am embedded in a certain poetic circle where I assume that to be so. But the lyric “I” is also an evasion.

GF: For sure, it is an ideological product of a culture of ‘whole’ sensibility and productivity and so on. But the thing that unites all of my work is play. For example, I am very much interested in OuLipo, procedural poetics: ‘The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentialle’, the workshop of literature. So I will create the conditions for myself to be able to write a poem, whether that is an acrostic, or whether that is using Vladimir Mayakovsky’s structure from his book “Pro Eto'' for the long poem, “What's That: Instead of Ego”. For me I always jokingly say that I have no muse so I have to create the conditions to compose a poem. But really that is me playing with language and seeing what happens when I create a constraint. 

Design in poetry is quite important to me, but in a way that, firstly, is an attempt to stop myself writing about me, and secondly to stop myself finding florid metaphors to describe my experience. I remember when I was 15 or 16 reading and writing lyric poetry and I would say to myself that I needed to put more colours into my work. I was reading all this beautiful lyric poetry. So I tried to put blue and violet into my poems, literally, and to create more metaphors. But I realised rapidly that I couldn’t do that, or at least not in a way that was conventionally lyric. Or good! So when I say evasiveness, I mean avoiding having to confront a coherent understanding of the world through a lovely lyric by producing the conditions of linguistic play, which basically means I end up producing this style of poetry.

KSP: I want to pick up on Mayakovsky and perhaps you can tell us more about the structuring device that he provided. I am also interested in the relation of your work with politics, whether that is a question that was on your mind during writing. I was also interested in your engagement with Veronica Forrest-Thomson of whom influences your work and for the wider British scene. 

GF: I can talk from Veronica Forrest-Thomson through to Mayakovsky and from there to politics. Forrest-Thomson is incredibly important to me; I did a lot of work on her, and also she was just brilliant. Brilliant because she did things in a really strange and edgy way. One aspect which resonates with my work: in Poetic Artifice she writes about naturalisation–which is not her own idea, it is from structuralism, in fact Jonathan Culler wrote about it–but naturalisation is making everything in a poem less strange in order naturalise it as a meaning of life or as an expression of a writer’s life, experiences or intentions. Her example is Sylvia Plath. To put it crudely: everything in Plath's poetry is often naturalised as an expression of suicidal ideation. And what that premature naturalisation does is elide or ignore all the brilliantness of the poetic form, which is not just the teleological expression of a suicidal sensibility and which evades that reduction. There is loads of stuff in a poem that is left over if you just go straight for meaning. I find that really interesting because that is essentially an expression of a modernist aesthetics. 

But also what I find interesting about Forrest-Thomson is that she considered herself to be totally apolitical, but to me that understanding of poetry as a site where contradictions exist, or, to put it in Blake’s words, where contrarieties coexist without any attempt to unify them, is actually a very political idea. It means poetry is a conflict of sign-systems, in the Marxist sense, and can show how sign-systems are produced and contradict each other. I am not calling Forrest-Thomson a political poet, because she wasn't, but to me the idea that poetry can have a force in drawing attention to the sedimentation of ideologies and signs, and how it can change your reading practices and minds, are very important. But also she was very influenced by Wittgenstein, whose linguistic philosophy I subscribe to, and she was a very playful and irreverent poet, which I really enjoy. She is profoundly important to me and the notebook type nature of her poetry resembles my own, or mine resembles hers. In fact I wrote a book called Strategic Forms in 2016 which was comprised of poems by me riffing on a series of writers; using poems to think through Nietzche and Deleuze and Arendt and so forth. Forrest-Thomson was also formally eclectic in a very intense way, which I enjoy. 

This relates to Mayakovsky in the sense of naturalisation. “What's That: Instead of Ego”, my last long poem in Kerf, is in the form of several stages of an imagined woodworking project. It takes on the form of Mayakovsky “Pro Eto”, which means, in Russian, roughly, “That’s what”. Mayakovsky’s poem is about his unrequited love of Lili Brik as well as other, epic stuff. He has this very famous image of him as a bear in a cage saying “I love you”, which is actually a tattoo I have here. He is a rampantly egocentric and narcissistic poet, and basically his experience is epified and made to stand-in for the Soviet-Russian experience, particularly the proletariat, with whom he purportedly identified. His poem title states, “That's what”, while I pose “What's that”?, which is questioning this notion of the confidence of placing yourself in the centre. I use his step-down structure, as Viktor Shkhlovsky called it, with four consecutive line-steps in each stanza. I used that structure, but in effect I am reflecting on the long poem as a narrative of self, while constantly evading it. 

With Mayakovsky there is this tragic association, this myth of self. The self is the inscription of the conditions of political being. So the self for him is a spring-board to reflect on broader issues. I am using that kind of structure, but I am resisting the self as a structure. It is a bad faith version of Mayakovsky “Pro eto”, in a sense.

In terms of politics: Mayakovsky was associated with formalism, with OPOYAZ – the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (also another tattoo of mine) - and in particular Shklovsky who wrote some interesting and entertaining pieces about Mayakovsky. The Formalists were hated by the Soviet-Russian state, who considered form as subservient to socialist realism. However, after he died, Mayakovsky became venerated as this great poet of the Soviet revolution. His deeply narcissistic and rampantly beautiful and playful poetry–replete with skaz and idiolects–was deemed to be unpolitical, but then became political; plus ça change! I love his poetry as I laugh at his delightful egotism and I love this understanding of his own self as both unpoliticised and politicised. For me, it is quite a useful model to think about the relation of the self in experience, the relation of the poet to the state, and the relation of the labour of poetry to that; its commodification depending on the political hegemony and so on.  

To tie it up, I find Forrest-Thomson to be an apolitical political poet, while Mayakovsky is a political apolitical poet. I like the dialectical contradictions here, as well as how all of this is entwined with self and subjectivity. 

KSP: That is a very useful way to think about what guides your work. Lastly, what are you working on currently? Both poetry-wise and academically. 

GF: Academically I have just finished an article about poetry and the welfare state where I look at a collection of poems called, Emergency Verse, written in response to the Con-Dem austerity budget of the 2010s. I write about a range of poems that are for the welfare state, and a number of poems which are against the notion that the welfare state should exist because it relies on the State as a guarantor, which has a concomitant expectation of normalised productivity. Of the latter ‘camp’, I write about Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk’s poetry, both of whose works are extraordinary and a big influence on mine. 

I have just completed a manuscript for Broken Sleep books called What's that Instead of Ego II, Acrostic Aftermaths and Other Poems. “Acrostic Aftermaths” are a series of poems which engage with current or made-up words or phrases associated with autism. For example, phrases such as “autistic fatigue” or “sameness solitude”, “troubled empathy”. I am exploring at autistic poetics by engaging with common and uncommon descriptive terminology. There are twenty of those acrostic poems, followed by a series of uncollected poems, with the final poem in that collection called, “The Zombie Lands”. In this weird T. S. Eliot parody, I am reflecting on quite prominent theorisations of the zombieness of higher educational institutions, which critiques people becoming zombie-like mouthpieces of neoliberalism. The book is a follow-up of Kerf really; the aftermath after writing a few acrostics in Kerf. 

I also wanted to do a lot more work on Crip theory–Robert McRuer, the work of John Goodley and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson for example–exploring the idea that I invented after Sara Ahmed called the “autist killjoy”. Particularly in “The Zombie Lands”, I look at the way in which autism and neurodivergence can be a productive force in critiquing institutional ableism, particularly as it exists in higher education. A neurodivergent perspective that can unwittingly produce awkwardness is wellness-ed away; such perspectives are very rarely listened to in higher education. I am thinking about how a living, productive neurodivergent poetics and aesthetics can disrupt everyday institutional ableism, which is what “The Zombie Lands” is about. But it is also about actual zombies, of course. 

Lastly, I am also finishing a book provisionally entitled, ‘Ten Essays on Autism. A Memoir, of sorts’. I write about my own life, but in the second person, considering things such as ‘Censorious Sensoria’, ‘Camouflage’ and ‘Comportment and Professionalism’, to pick up on what I was just saying about ‘The Zombie Lands’. I hope this will be picked up by a publisher. It is my first foray into non-academic prose, so I am excited and terrified at the same time.  

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Gareth Farmer is an autistic poet and lecturer in English literature. He writes on poetry and experimental writing in his academic capacities; in his poetic capacities, he has published a number of books including, Diurnal Sweigh (2017), Strategic Forms (2021) and Kerf (2022).