It Reeks of Radio is a book-length poem composed entirely from fragments of communication around historical (pre-1980s) RTÉ Radio programming - the result of poet Christodoulos Makris' year-long engagement with the RTÉ Radio Scripts Collection held in the UCD Archives. It draws several interweaving threads that include the mechanics of historical correspondence, power dynamics within Ireland's state broadcaster and across to writers, contributors, the public, government and the BBC, attitudes to gender and nationality, artists' work and pay conditions, and more. Also embedded in the poem is commentary on its own composition through parallels found in the archival material. Declining to offer easy conclusions, It Reeks of Radio is a poetic response to motifs and undercurrents in relations between public and private at the level of institution, while proposing extrapolations across time to the current moment.
WHAT THEY SAID:
It’s addictive. It captures the whole atmosphere of pre-1980’s Dublin in a most engaging way. I love the choice and arrangement of the text. Beautiful and inviting. I am proud to be associated with [this] remarkable work.
- Joseph M Hassett, 11 October 2023
A book-length poem, this is a gorgeous mash-up of fragments sourced from RTÉ Radio Scripts documentation, held in the UCD Archives. With mischief, elegance and great economy, it crosses a world of themes, from rejection to state censorship to gender imbalance. Clever, provocative and beautiful.
- Mia Gallagher, 11 October 2023
Although not a commemorations project, poet Christodoulos Makris’s It Reeks of Radio is a really interesting example of the creative use of archives. The work is the result of a commission, funded by a Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary. Christodoulos found inspiration in a collection that never would have occurred to me as one which would inspire other artists. It is full of the work of artists, which speak for themselves. But his poetic eye and ear saw and heard something else. It's a fascinating work.
- Kate Manning, Principal Archivist, UCD
'Creative Archives' symposium, Museum of Literature Ireland, 12 October 2023
[...] The fact that Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel made such an impression on me was partly because in the days prior to reading it I’d been sitting with a loved one in an Irish hospice run by a religious order (and occasionally playing her country music). The coincidence of similar circumstance aside, though, sometimes poems just do that: it feels as if something in them knows something in us—as if they were reading us, rather than the other way around. What is this intimacy? By whom, or what, are we suddenly interpolated? What’s so weird and brilliant about it is that it didn’t feel like Ellen Dillon herself was speaking to me; rather, the words she had chosen combined with the ways that I’d read those words before to create a moment of recognition. I think it’s close to what Peter Riley has called the tension, in lyric poetry, between ‘what the author determines and what “arrives” out of the historical substance of poetry’. I often think of a friend’s description of the elation of being taken by surprise when a song you love and had forgotten about comes on the radio; poetry can be a bit like that. In a passage that appears in Dillon’s Carousel, Jack Spicer describes the poet as a radio, receiving and relaying signals from ‘Outside’. A poem, by this measure, comes from somewhere else; it is nothing personal—or, at least, nothing private.
Dublin-based documentary poet Christodoulos Makris has been refuting the idea that poetry comes from a place of private interiority for several collections now. In this is no longer entertainment (2019) and Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document (2023) he appropriated the language of social media, online comments sections, and other online found text to form a very twenty-first-century critique of the late-capitalist culture of individuality. It Reeks of Radio, instead, is made entirely from written correspondence related to pre-1980s RTÉ broadcasts, the station’s archive providing ample material for a comparable exploration of authorship, voice, presence, personhood, and the weird always-already-shared quality of language.
The notion that poetry should, or could, provide insight into a private interiority is exemplified in John Stuart Mill’s famous definition of poetry as ‘utterance overheard’. In certain traditions, this is understood as the measure of whether a poem is good, or successful—whether a poem ‘works’. Of course, it takes careful craft to create an impression of spontaneous ‘overheard’ authenticity. This is what eighteenth-century Irish poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin was getting at in ‘A Shéamais, déan dom’, for example, when he asked his blacksmith friend to make him an instrument ‘tarraingthe gan rian buille ar bith’ (translated by Séamus Heaney as ‘No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade’). It Reeks of Radio very knowingly rejects this sleek stylising. The text (which I’ve read as one long poem) has a loose, fragmentary style that doesn’t come together to create the illusion of an individual subject behind or beneath it, ‘talking’ (as one rather patronizing passage advises scriptwriters) ‘as / if one were present in a house, among friends.’ It includes many arch reflections on its method of composition. ‘what do you mean’, begins a page towards the beginning of the collection, ‘by asking whether the / extract is any good it’s grand’.
What is lost, It Reeks of Radio asks, when we tune out the interference, the strangeness of words, the formal experimentation that makes poetry so strange and compelling? What assumptions are we making about the relationship between language and those that speak it when we value a poem for its capacity to create the impression of being spoken to by a specific, individual ‘someone’? Of course, a lot of lyric poetry self-consciously experiments with the strange push-and-pull between the illusion of interiority and language’s impersonal ‘Outside’ quality. Makris, instead, refuses the work of creating a lyric subject at all.
Reading these stylistic choices as anti-work feels appropriate for a book that has been pieced together from text written by workers. It is made up of extracts from notes and letters from programmers, producers, and scriptwriters, written mostly in the oddly featureless tone of professional correspondence. Writing poetry, on the other hand, rarely fits into the parameters of what is valued as ‘work’. One of the very first passages features a writer who needs to remind their interlocutor that:
in case there might have been any
misunderstanding
I am dependent for my livelihood on my
writing
There is little by way of section breaks, titles, or other signposts here, and the cumulative effect of the continuous barrage of these workplace memos is an anaesthetic, almost mechanical reading experience. If there is a kind of presence in these poems, it is a bland, impersonal, even imperious force. Often it is expressed in the first person plural—‘we / doubt listeners would understand the complicated / story’—but it is nothing like the ‘we’ at the centre of Dillon’s Carousel. Rather, this one is detached, bureaucratic. When used, it allows its writer to abdicate responsibility to the larger, impersonal body that they are working for. It is, in other words, the ‘we’ of the institution, and it starts to feel a bit sinister, creepily suggestive of conservatism, censorship, and control. It is thus more comparable to the passive voice that Dillon’s speaker criticised in relation to the State’s narrative about Mother and Baby Homes, the words that ‘weasel them out of their / responsibilities’.
There are comments on gender politics and misogyny in mid-century Ireland in this book, too. Some are amusing, some depressing, all are very self-aware. ‘hardworking women’, writes one correspondent,
are about the
very last people who put pen to paper
and make a complaint
on their behalf
and on behalf of my female relatives
friends and neighbours I wish to make a
protest
More compelling, in my opinion, are the ways that this ‘we’ is seen to police the individual radio workers, controlling their freedom of expression in the interest of maintaining so-called neutrality:
we had a little trouble about a
broadcast on Spain seems to have offended some
Spaniards it was a bit anti-Franco you I am sure
will redress the balance
Makris, an experimental documentarian, presents disturbing implications for documentary work that seeks to remain detached from the events it is relaying. In this setting, world events are oddly irrelevant, or understood solely in terms of their broadcasting value—‘disasters / in themselves / do not make for programmes’—and efforts to say anything that strays from the illusion of bland, bipartisan neutrality are curtailed:
the interpolation you
have made might be better left out
This a wry, funny book. It’s also, despite the workplace chatter, one that feels remarkably lonely. Amid the dross of professional speak, communication is limited. Even with all these words, we have very little insight into the people who wrote them—not just ‘how people looked dressed talked ate drank / made love and carried on the business’, as one letter, advising a scriptwriter, puts it, but a sense of these letter-authors as beings that exist in a social world beyond the words they wrote. There is a sense throughout of missed connections, alienation, meanings lost in transmission. ‘something very worrying has happened’, we are told on one page,
which cannot be
absolutely proved (even if true)
not only legally
but in other ways
Occasional passages hit a desperate, pleading tone, hinting at some other message trying to get through the faceless institutional language. It’s almost alarming to read lines like
I need you badly, very badly.
Please, please do
agree.
My reading of It Reeks of Radio has no doubt been influenced by where and when I read it, but I hear in the book’s sly, knowing tone a deeper dissatisfaction with the impossibility, and the urgency, of using language to speak to someone directly, in such a way that they will understand what it’s like to be you, to be alive in your particular body and at your particular moment in history; and to escape the trap of the private into something shared. Words never go the whole way to this impossible shared space. As Makris demonstrates, they often don’t get through at all. Sometimes though, they take us somewhere Outside.
- Lily Ní Dhomhnaill,
'Irish poetry 2023', The Stinging Fly, 11 April 2024
MEDIA:
Interview with Dr Lucy Collins for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive (UCD):
Extracts from It Reeks of Radio for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive (UCD):
EXHIBITION:
It Reeks of Radio is accompanied by a unique exhibition of panels that visually contextualise the project and bring it to the walls of the Newman Building (Arts Building) at University College Dublin. The exhibition opened on 27 September 2023 and will remain in situ for a minimum of one year.
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