Published by Veer 2 / Veer Books, March 2023
ISBN: 9781911567561
The critique of self-absorption, mounted formally in the unpunctuated flow of the poetic voice, is also explored thematically in the transmutation of all forms of movement into opportunities for advantage. In the poem ‘risk’, motion is the archetype of capitalist possibility, but also creates an environment of threat for the expendable subject. By recycling airline instructions the poem first emphasizes the traveller as consumer, but also suggests the ways in which migration itself can be turned to political advantage by elites. Again the materiality of the poem heightens this duality: the “manufacturer’s mask” offers the sustaining oxygen of the market but is out of the reach of its potential wearer.
Once more, neither the experiences of the individual, nor the language used to express them, can be definitively erased: “friend requests anxiety posts horny messages stressed out rants” may appear to be private, but they are in fact memorialized in silicon, merging and multiplying into the uncertain future. Language is thus both expressive of technological inundation and part of its cause. Its accumulation makes reflection more challenging, but offers a rich intertextuality from which these poems of contemporary crisis emerge.
- Lucy Collins, from ‘Reading Christodoulos Makris’, Irish University Review 49.1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Some of these poems or versions of them have appeared in Belfield Literary Review, Berfrois, Critical Bastards magazine, Cyphers, Disclaimer magazine, Granta, Irish University Review, Magma, Poetry Wales, and Tripwire: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics. My thanks to all editors involved.
I am thankful to João Guimarães at University College Dublin (UCD), Joanna Walsh and Roy Claire Potter at Arvon Centre, Niamh Campbell at UCD and Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), and David Collard through the reading series Leap In The Dark, for invitations to present this work while in development.
Thanks to Lucy Collins for her generous reading of poems from this book in an essay for Irish University Review (Vol 49, No. 1).
Much gratitude to the English Department at Maynooth University and Kildare Arts and Libraries service, in particular to Colin Graham, Oona Frawley and Lucina Russell, for the award of a writing residency in 2018-19, which enabled the early development of this cycle of poems.
Acknowledgement is also due to Fingal Arts Office for the award of a grant towards the completion of this work.
Thanks finally to all at Veer Books and to Aodán McCardle in particular.
WHAT THEY SAID:
Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document (Veer, £10.99), the fourth full-length collection by Christodoulos Makris, one of Ireland's foremost avant-garde poets, submerges the reader in the arch - and sometimes frighteningly sentient - language of the internet.
The subject here is the self as seen through many online filters, but where the traditional poet's approach might be a retelling of the Narcissus myth, Makris instead sifts the internet's echoing fragments. As the collection's title suggests, these poems are concerned with the commodification of language, and how it can serve as a cunning apparatus to conceal our baser intentions. In 'cubist debrief', the mask slips:
"I've turned a corner
classically rearranged my face
how hurt and put-upon and sick I've been
doubly make sure everybody sees
tastemaker
celebrated tortured artist not a just journalist
just a journalist I mean
a mean journalist just"
Here, and throughout the collection, language is subjected to a wry Freudian slippage, with the speaker's agenda emerging from beneath the surface of seemingly auto-tuned speech. Makris's satirical lens makes no exception for poets, and the narcissism of literary communities is skewered in poems such as 'everybody knows but you', which draw us into gossip's echo chamber:
"look they're besties now
no matter how
they all know once
upon a time one
kept mocking the other in other kitchens"
The line breaks here suggest a fraught confidence haltingly told, a lexicon spun from deception. Social capital informs all relationships in a world where unfriending someone "... would be a gesture more powerful than my / extended hand."
These are tightly sprung poems capable of startling juxtapositions, as in Paul Scholes' foot where a meditation on xenophobia, gentrification and borders both historical and current orbits an encounter with the famous footballer: "keep your enemies close / and your southern cross-border tactile friends / reeling for a connection", the speaker exhorts, before leaving us with the payoff of the final, fittingly surreal image: "in a pub salvaged brick by brick I stood on Paul / Scholes' foot."
In the midst of a moral panic about AI and its threat to writers, Makris's work is a timely reminder that humour, wit, play and pathos are all attributes that only human intervention can bring to text.
- Jessica Traynor, The Irish Times, 24 June 2023
No one would think of choosing such a title for a poetic collection, yet after reading it and rereading it, this title is amply justified as it is an effective document on the strategy of a brand that I intend to bring back to poetry. Following Virginia Woolf, the poetic recipe involves "standing at the window and letting your rhythmic sense open and close, open and close, spontaneous and vigorous; until one thing is transformed into another and a whole is not made up of scattered fragments…".
"if fragmentation’s so hot / collaging the artform of the now": here is the theory that is always the essential presupposition of any form of art. Once chosen, the style is pursued throughout the volume without indulging in smudges, with constancy and coherence, for example in 'theory IV: sleeve notes' it happens that Makris mixes what he sees, what he hears, what he feels, assembling sensations and emotions; and hidden behind the verses "I’m a high functioning narcissist / me myself / I choose life / recentering the conversation right here" is the very program of keeping the senses open as sensors capable of capturing what revolves around them.
Each compiled verse resembles a piece of collage selected from the various materials that existence makes available to him, see in particular 'fashion week', but the whole text is developed according to an original cut-up. While in the famous Dada hat it was instinct or chance that took the centre of the stage, here the poet undoubtedly has in mind the scene, the sequence or the action or the thought to be exhibited; his main task is to select what to write but above all what to omit in such a way that the reader is forced to stop and reflect in order to find the key to the problem. In fact we are faced with the poet's character in full expansion and the decision of interrupting the narrative chain with continuous turns breaks the reading rhythm. Despite this he is quite skilled in elliptically following the thread of his calculated, rational changes ending up in a poetic stream of consciousness where the gap, the so-called illusion of expectations gone betrayed, is the norm.
Technically in addition to the aforementioned ellipsis, he often relies on similitude, "a packing effect / hexagonal like oranges in grocery stores", "we get it poets things are like other things", or on metaphor, "we're jammed at the gates" and, more rarely, to the permutation, "you see this how the world's arranged / this world is arranged how you see / how you see the world arranged is this / this is how the world you see is arranged" to tell us that our poor world does not change. Punctuation is absent, no capital letters, orthographic marks are banned, which facilitates the drafting by keeping it suspended as in a dreamlike microcosm.
We focus on 'rendered' to understand how the narrative, because it is a narrative, albeit continuously broken, advances in blocks, "I was alive in a yurt on a cliff by the ocean at Big Sur /flanked by a bouncer & a gangland enforcer obsessed / with winning / Don rendered by Jon urgently needing detox".
Through a couple of tributes, the first to Mallarmé in 'i'm story' where the words wander freely on the white of the page, the second 'Whitmanesque' ("I work very hard guys /… my successes well-earned" and especially "I was mesmerised by your words before I fancied mine"), his origins are easily understood.
Makris manages to drive this poetic machine steadily on the road even in the face of dangerous curves (I'm thinking of the ballast of sentimentality or the desire to flaunt the personal problem at all costs) by virtue of a mental control that automatically excludes the elements detached from his poetics, always keeping himself above the guard level of the real without ever coming to terms with it: "if the moment's gone / prematurely / create another".
And speaking of problems: "sincerely / my project genius / when you're a problem you are an opportunity" or "institution is a language / institutionalised displacement is a tongue".
Apparently one could say as with Bernard Shaw "the golden rule is that there is not golden rule", and even if the cerebral control is strict, the impression which persists in the mind of the reader is a sudden, unexpected multisensory stimulation coming from every part that envelopes and involves us, ultimately setting up what is the right, sacrosanct triumph of the independence of the word:
"ink is drying
does anybody care"
(I would have added a question mark but the author, coherent to the end having banned any orthographic sign, lets the naked, raw body of the verb communicate).
- Enzo Minarelli, 3 July 2023
(in his own translation from the Italian original here)
Christodoulos Makris has returned with a new collection of poetry that in many ways picks up where he left off in his previous book, this is no longer entertainment (reviewed in PIR 130). His latest collection, Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document, seems to be operating in a similar wheelhouse to no longer entertainment, with many of the same concerns on display: quotidian language and the language of social media, the internet and its effects - namely the sale of the self through social media.
Specifically, this set of poems appears to be drawing at least in part on the increasing reliance of poets on the building of communities on the bird site - Twitter. A timely preoccupation, not least because of Twitter's evident functionality issues under new ownership and the increasing inability of Twitter users (which includes poets, poetry magazines, publishers) to reach hitherto unreachable audiences and build transnational networks online in a community of poetry unimpeded by geography.
The title of the book immediately indicates to us that for Makris there is increasingly a disconnect between what it is poets actually do (write and sometimes publish poems) and the business of poetry. Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document in that sense is almost the poetic corollary to JT Welsch's 2020 book, The Selling and Self-regulation of Contemporary Poetry (Anthem Press), which explores among things the ways in which presentation of the poetic self online has come to have a central role in the 'business of poetry' as much as the writing (and publishing) of poems.
Despite the title, the book is conventional in its structure: rather than mimicking the kind of brand strategy document the title hints at, most of the poems in fact run to a page in length. In a way that is becoming almost a trademark of Makris's style - we are told "you see I'm crowdsourcing words" in the poem 'the hatred of poetry the film'. That particular poem opens as follows:
"rethink political action in poetic practice
piece of cake
would you be interested in buying my book
check out my profile & follow"
the same poem ends:
"we get it poets things are like other things"
The collection as a whole coheres around the ways in which Makris harvests, plays with and through play upends, makes ridiculous, and pokes fun at much of the worst excesses of performative online behaviour. In the pointedly titled 'everybody knows but you', the gossipy element of niche communities is under Makris' watchful eye:
"if I grow a beard that's a sign of sophistication
he'll know all about that
poet that he is
look they're besties now
no matter how
they all know once
upon a time one
kept mocking the other in other kitchens
if you must know"
Unsurprisingly, in a book such as this with its clear aim to make us consider just what poetry is for - and by extension who gets to be in the know, or at least it feels that perhaps everybody does know but you - it would be easy to be cynical or worse, nostalgic for an age prior to the internet and the possibilities of online communities. Makris avoids this, and instead uses the strange and limited vocabulary of social media to make us wonder, in 'theory VII: atomised', about alternatives where...
"connecting fragments of identity & sanity & hardly
holding it together
with sturdy aluminium or was it copper wire
my turns of phrase return of course
it's a fine way to prolong the conversation"
- David Toms, Poetry Ireland Review 140, August 2023
Christodoulos Makris’ Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document consists of a set of ‘post internet’ poems, with recurring themes and ideas that hover around the notion of the commodification of the self, a world in which the individual is a product, and the product is a brand:
"solidifying my message attracts
new clients and grows my business
I will gain clout
at industry events attract offers from competitors
they want me to get more
out of my personal brand
here are a few tips
be myself"
The irony, of course, being that there is no self for the speaker to be, just a set of brand projections and an algorithm. The language of these poems is purposefully drained of emotive weight, as flat as the pseudo world it documents, a world in which even the most intimate of relationships are commodified:
"international playboy and I
posing in a club
oh I press my chest against your torso
lean and bling heavy
the expressions on my face swipe to see more"
There are moments of resistance, as when the speaker in one poem says "hope I die before I’m sold", but the overall slant of Makris’ critique is towards a world that is dead to the human, a bleakness almost without escape.
By the end of the book this reader is left with a sense of a vein exhausted, a feeling that the book represents a final statement on a theme. If I’m right, then I’m very interested to see where Makris goes next.
- Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements, 26 October 2023
The work of Christodoulos Makris has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. He has published several books and pamphlets, as well as attracting prestigious awards, residencies and commissions. Born in Nicosia, he has also lived in England and is currently resident in Dublin. He describes his work as 'concerned with language use, modes of communication, multiple/shifting identities, and the conflation of the public and the private enabled by digital technologies.'
The first person singular makes an appearance in almost all of the poems in this book, though only rarely (and not without ambiguity) is it used to represent an authorial voice. Indeed, 'I' is the very first word in the first poem:
I don't trust the writer still
you turn off the apps on your desktop
not to be distracted by life echoes
go on let the real in
['the carousel episode', p13]
In other words, it's impossible to create real characters now while ignoring the fact that their identity extends beyond their own immediate physical worlds into the collective exocortex that is the internet. Over the course of the book, many different voices assume ownership of the 'I' and when they do, they usually express themselves in relation to and in the impersonal argot of the net. As a result, the personal becomes so diluted at times as to virtually (in both senses) – but not completely – cease to exist. This operates on even the most intimate level:
if you select what I interact with
in bed
will it be mature
[from 'permission', p14]
As it says in the next poem,
you see I'm crowdsourcing words
fundamentally what I do right is touch on a mindset
that shakes off personal convictions?
[from 'the hatred of poetry the film', p15]
In another poem, 'strategy', the speaker is at once central to the poem and yet almost totally, chillingly, erased from it. They seem completely unaware of the irony of the ending:
(I already have a great personal brand
but I will refine it
personal branding benefits me and my company)
[from 'strategy', p34]
Refinement, here, the reader can't help but think, is the erasure of any last trace of a personal element the voice might detect in what it has to say. There is a parallel here with what the poet is trying to achieve (signposted by the poem's relation to the book's title), but whereas the voice is seeking to depersonalise itself in order to conform to the prevalent cultural conditioning, the poet is depersonalising himself in order to let the voice speak, even if it has nothing to say about itself. People often wonder if AI will lead to us being destroyed by machines. Perhaps, though, it's ourselves we have to worry about: not being physically destroyed by machines, but becoming, willingly, more machine-like, colluding in the destruction of our personal identities. And it's happening now: Makris' poetry is not a vision of the future, it's very much rooted in the present. Already, in the digital realm, even the dead can speak (there is an ambiguity here: one thinks of 'the death of the author', but also also of the common experience of coming across the blogs, social media, etc., of the dead):
people protest
I've been gone over a year
how do I reel in my absence
with a plausible scheme
['my death', p72]
Of course, a common – as well as personal – identity has always been an important part of how we think of ourselves. We've always 'crowdsourced' words, phrases, ideas and ways of looking. And capitalism's imperative to create a consumer culture had intensified this tendency even before the internet came along. The internet has intensified it still further. The fragility and interconnectedness of identity has been a theme in literature throughout the modern era. One thinks of Eliot and The Waste Land: most strikingly, perhaps, the pub scene, with its crowdsourced language ('I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself / HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME'). The voices begin with no inverted commas and the only dialogue tags in that passage are provided by the main speaker herself. The original title of the poem – He Do The Police in Different Voices – is perhaps a give-away. One could look, too, to Woolf's use of character – especially in The Waves – and Joyce, with the 'Here Comes Everybody' of Finnegans Wake. John Ashbery, in notes on his translation of Rimbaud's 'Genie', said of that poet: 'absolute modernity was for him the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second. The self is obsolete: in Rimbaud’s famous formulation, "I is someone else" ("Je est un autre”).' Makris' 21st century concerns seem not a million miles away from all this.
- Dominic Rivron, Stride Magazine, 11 January 2024
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