“What purpose does poetry serve at all if it fails to confront the horrors of the world, if it refuses to confront the realities and difficulties of this world”: Aaron Kent in Conversation
Aaron Kent talks about fictionalised narratives of the self in The Working Classic, his health struggles in the context of late capitalism and how he started Broken Sleep Books.
Kashif Sharma-Patel: Where did the book come from? How did you put together the manuscript, was it marinating for a long time?
Aaron Kent: I started writing The Working Classic at the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018. I was writing a novel from the concept of six different people, and I was trying to write a completely different writing style depending on the different person I was depicting in the novel. One of the characters was a relly academic, older guy who was taking a bus to university, which crashes and he passes away. So I look at the repercussions for the family around him. In his chapters, it was really dense academic writing but I didn't want to rely on real academic sources; I wanted to make it a fiction of what academia was. So I had to make up the titles, the books, the reviews he was writing and the journals and everything. The novel wasn't very good, so I gave up on it, but I enjoyed the process of this fake writing of reviews and articles, and I wondered how I could incorporate that with my work.
I saw this publisher who had this really dense, long interview with a journalist, and no matter how much work I did I could not find this journalist. It turned out the publisher had invented the journalist to interview themselves entirely because nobody would do it. I thought what are the mechanics of that. Why don't I parody that? Why don't I do that, but without trying to hide it, instead by calling myself out. I was in group therapy at the time, and in group therapy there is a lot of trying to confront yourself. I remember in one session I learnt to forgive the person who sexually assaulted me, I learnt to forgive that act and move on. Subsequently, I found that I was still really angry at myself and realised I had to forgive myself. In group therapy I had been attacking myself, questioning myself, and I thought I should do this with my poetry.
So I built up a manuscript titled Working Class Scum and I sent it to the87press in 2018 or 2019, and the answer was no. And a couple other publishers said no as well. Years later I looked at it again and I thought I would have said no as well. This wasn't ready. This wasn’t thoughtful. This wasn't considered. So I started to rewrite but then I had my stroke. When I came out of my stroke I saw it completely new again. Azad came up with the idea that the poems should be directly referential to the reviews or interviews that follow it, so people can track it across. That was the bit where everything clicked. It is the culmination of four or five years of work.
KSP: That segues nicely into my next question about self-referentiality. It is interesting that you mention that it came from a novel as it already struck me that this might work well in a novel-form also, or that actually this is a non-linear, postmodern novel. I really liked that. There is also a balance between ironic, satirical modes and serious elements related to working class writing and the boundedness of the British class system as expressed in the literary establishment and form. How should we be reading this book, and how should we be reading the poetry more particularly?
When I was 25, ten years ago, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. So I would have really stringent highs, and then immediately after really big lows. Some periods were fine, then highs and lows again. Sometimes I would think everything is great, then everything sucks. So I was trying to present that through the narrative of the book. So when you go from the start where I talk about being allergic to horses – which is actually true! my doctor recommends I carry an epi-pen – then I question that, asking if that is as bad as I think it is, or if I just had one bad experience. That is why I call myself a liar in it. Following that through, you hit a low where I am attacking myself. Then towards the end there is that interview with Discovery Jones where I am really high believing everything to be wonderful and good. I was trying to follow this fictionalised narrative of me as a person and me as a creative.
When it came to the poems, I wanted to remove them from that narrative journey, and instead read them separately. So the interviews talk about the creative at a personal level whereas with the poems I am talking about the poems at an industry level. There are the poems that come from a fake book Some Bullshit about Rabbits, for instance, and the whole idea was to criticise the notion of poets writing about nature and birds and trees to win prizes. That is all well and good, but there is real horror in the world. So I parodied that style in a set of poems. There are two strands in it as far as I can see. The creative as a personal endeavour and the creative as an industrial, or publishing, endeavour.
I am also thinking, throughout, about the style of my voice. I remember in 2018 I was at Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival doing a reading with Anthony Capildeo and I read the first poem. I realised I was putting on a voice that had nothing to do with the way I talked. This isn't me at all, I thought. I was talking with received pronunciation and I was shocked with myself. So I decided to read the rest of the poems in my actual speaking voice. The book also looks at how if my voice was the voice of a middle class person, the industry would love them, but my voice as a usual common person there is no interest. It is like class-face, I guess.
KSP: I wanted to ask about your role as a publisher. You obviously do really good work with Broken Sleep Books. How did that all come about, and how do you balance your role as a publisher and your role as a writer and poet?
AK: I was working at Truro college in Cornwall and I realised that the printers were free for staff members. I thought I could just print books without paying printing costs. I wanted to make tiny books inside old tape cassettes, hand-bound and hand-stitched pamphlets, and collections would be inside VHS cassettes. I made thirty and my fingers were sore and it took forever. And once those thirty are sold out no one will ever see that work again. So I started doing PDFs on floppy disks. You buy it online and you would get a floppy disk with the PDF sent in the post. People had to have specific retro technologies to access this stuff, and also it meant if you didn't have the money or you weren't in the know, then you didn't get the art, and it limited the art and it limited its reach. We used to do Legitimate Snacks – small hand-bound runs of books but it meant we could only sell 50 copies of that book and then nobody else could read that book. I don't like that. That is not widening access to the arts. So I decided to look into publishing at a scale where people could access the work forever, essentially.
I was juggling that while being a housemaster at a private school in Wales, which was a weird experience. We were teaching Blood Brothers and these kids, who were paying £12,000 a year, did not know what a council estate was. So I had to explain what the working class was. It was a really odd dynamic. I was balancing that with running Broken Sleep, while also raising two young children, and I did so much I had a stroke, I had a brain hemorrhage. I went into a coma for a week. I spent two weeks in ICU, two weeks in a neurological ward, two weeks in a stroke rehabilitation hospital, learnt how to walk and talk again and thought, I went to work one day and didn't return for six weeks. I can't do this again. We built our own house with a bore hole so we don't have a mortgage, we don't have water bills. It has been four years and we are still finishing it off. My wife has got two mums and one of them is a builder. This was an opportunity that people just don't get. I am going to do what I love full-time. I took Broken Sleep Books as my full-time job.
As a publisher, sometimes you have slower months. You pick up three books and you think that one may be a hit, one won't do well, and the other is unknown. But it could turn out the opposite for each book. You just don't know. There is no way to guess. I just thought I am going to run this publishing press and I am just going to publish what I love. I do find I have less time for my writing, as my 9-to-5 is publishing, looking at others’ writing. I do also think that people see you as a publisher rather than a writer. It is as if people cannot hold those two identities in their heads. It is a shame, as often people ask me to send them working class authors and I end up not putting myself forward as I don't want to take opportunities from my authors. So I take a back-seat myself. I run a small publishing house, so I am broke 24/7 with this being the sole income for my wife and kids. I am finally at the point where the books are being edited and typeset in advance, so there is enough space for me to find time to write. I am doing my best, but the schedule is filled. We are working 18 months in advance so my time is really booked up.
KSP: I wanted to ask about the name of the press. I remember reading you have lots of sleep problems and I have had sleep problems too – I used to have sleep apnoea. Now I sleep a lot better and I dream a lot better and I suspect it has affected my writing and my schedule. I wonder if you could talk about sleeping, about the 9-to-5, about the pressures of contemporary economy, particularly with digital technologies. I know it is in the philosophy of the press in a way.
AK: The press name comes from a line from a JH Prynne poem, “Smaller than the Radius of the Planet”: “I lay out my unrest like white lines on the slopes so that something out of broken sleep may land there”. So, our slogan “Lay Out Your Unrest” also comes from this line. And we then went on and published Prynne three times, which was a nice cyclical moment.
I have spent my whole life battling with sleep. People first recognised sleep problems with me as a toddler where I was having night terrors. Lot of infants have night terrors, but by the age of 21 I was still having them which was incredibly rare. Commonly sufferers might have them two or three times a month; at their peak I was having six to seven a night, every night without fail. I constantly battled sleep and I thought that might be where my insomnia came from. My brain is instinctively scared of sleep, as sleep was followed by a threat, a menace. I was 30 when I stopped having night terrors, around five years ago. Saying that, last night I had three night terrors. I am a bit unwell so that is probably connected. Sleep has always been a difficult space for me and I have spent a lot of time battling sleep, fighting sleep. I have been in therapy for a year now, and I have had to have therapy sessions based entirely around sleep. After 30 years of not sleeping I started to have Stockholm syndrome. As I was starting to beat the insomnia I began to feel like I was losing my identity, like it was part of who I was and I shouldn’t lose it.
I started writing poetry in my sleep. I was on prescription melatonin for three years and as I started to feel sleepy I would start to write. I would start to write on my phone. I would be in and out of sleep, typing, and I would wake up in the morning and find some interesting lines, some absurd lines, typos, strings of nonsensical characters and I would turn that into a poem. I was consciously editing my subconscious. This is even further and deeper than the Surrealist notion of free-automatic writing. Last night I fell asleep around 9.30, which is incredibly rare for me, sleeping for around 8 hours. I usually get 4 to 6 hours a night. I felt guilty about it. I should have been writing, reading, doing stuff, making use of that time. I have to teach myself, and I think in this culture all of us need to teach ourselves: sleeping is making use of time.
KSP: And please tell us all what you are working, what is next for you?
AK: I have just finished a manuscript called Griefs to Last and other poems which is a spoonerism of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. It starts with a normal length poem called “A Prelude to a Crime Scene”, which is followed by a long thirty-forty page poem called “Griefs to Last” which essentially asks what purpose does poetry serve at all if it fails to confront the horrors of the world, if it refuses to confront the realities and difficulties of this world. If we are enamoured and obsessed with how pretty flowers are or how good the landscape looks then we are missing out on the real issues. Like the UK government enforcing austerity, starving children, there are children burning in the streets of Gaza, there are families making decisions about who can eat in continents all across the globe, and we are looking at daffodils. That is the core of the manuscript.
I am also working on a memoir about what it means to survive after you have survived. Surviving, for me, was the easiest part as it was relatively instantaneous and innate. But then the aftermath, the recovery, the changes to my life had deep implications and a wider journey, and what I found more difficult. I have sight problems. I was having panic attacks every time my head hurt thinking I was going to have a stroke. I struggle with massive fatigue. I get triggered and panic often. What does survival look like after that split-second impact. That is what my memoir is looking at.
KSP: Thanks Aaron, any last thoughts?
AK: I would like to talk about shrimp noise and creative sorbet. Creative sorbet is this writing guideline I give myself where essentially the goal is not to write. When I cannot continue writing I will stop and will do something entirely different. So I will paint, or I will learn to cook a meal really well, or I will go running. Then when I return to the writing, whether that is days or weeks or months later, it is as if I have given my brain sorbet, I have cleansed my palate, so I feel completely fresh and able again.
The other thing I like is what I call shrimp noise. I was a sonar operator on a submarine, and when you get 200 metres under the water all you hear are shrimps clicking. It is like a standing ovation – everywhere you go you get applause. It is so overwhelming and so full that you miss out on hearing whale-song behind it. And whale-song is stunning, but you missed the beautiful things because you have been distracted by the shrimp noise. Or you missed the noise of a fishing vessel up on the surface and that is really dangerous because if they have their nets out you could drag them all down to their deaths. So if you become enamoured by the applause, by the shrimp noise, you have missed out on the danger and the beauty. When people come to me for advice about how to win prizes and gain popularity I always say ignore the shrimp noise, ignore the applause, ignore all of that. If you become enamoured or obsessed by all of that celebration and congratulation, you will miss the real beauty of the world, and you will miss the real danger of the world. For me, my entire philosophy of writing is just to ignore the shrimp noise!
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Aaron Kent is an award-winning poet and publisher from Cornwall, though he currently lives in Wales with his wife, Emma and their two young children. Aaron is a working-class writer, and particularly wants to advocate for more working-class voices in literature. He had several poetry pamphlets published, his debut collection, Angels the Size of Houses, is available from Shearsman Books, and his 2nd collection, The Working Classic, is available with the87press.
He has had work published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Prototype, The North, The Scores, Wild Court, Blackbox Manifold, Butchers Dog, BAX (2020), and Prelude among others.
