Our first blog of 2022 comes from Padraig Regan, author of Some Integrity. Join us to launch the collection on January 26th with Stephen Sexton by clicking here, and buy the book direct from our website with 20% off using code JANBOOKS.
The title of this book entered my mind not quite as joke but as something not entirely unlike one: a maxim, perhaps, an axiom. After writing and publishing two pamphlets, I decided that my debut book, if and when it arrived, would include no material from these; that it would have to have some integrity of its own. And then this word, integrity (along with its attendant and undermining qualifier), became a kind of obsession. Somewhere in the space between its twin meanings — integrity as both a moral principle and a physical or material property — I could locate my guiding interests: art and artifice; consumption and appetite; material diffusion and material collapse; ontological and epistemic indeterminacy; the body queered by its porousness, its penetrability, its constant provisional making and remaking.
The book is, of course, a product of the time and place in which it was written. I wrote the majority of the poems collected here between 2016 and 2020 (though this is a little imprecise; a book being always also a ship of Theseus): a period marked by an ambient sense of political, economic, social, and environmental collapse. ‘Glitch City’, the essay at the centre of the collection, in some ways represents the moment of the book’s conception. It is set mostly on the 12th of June 2016, the morning after the mass shooting in Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an event which resonated for me not just on its own horrific terms, but in relation to other events around it: England’s decision to leave the European Union and take us (against our will) with them; and the murder of Stephen Carson earlier that year in his home just a street away from where I lived (though this incident had nothing to do with any paramilitaries, it struck me as one of those eerie afterimages Belfast’s past still imprints upon its present).
Perhaps it is only in retrospect that occurrences become auguries, but even then there was a sense that things were falling apart, or had already done so. It was around that same time that I first became interested in speedrunning, that is, playing video games as fast as possible, often by exploiting glitches or oversights unintentionally left behind by the game’s developers. Watching a stream of Pokémon (probably the cultural object I most closely associate with my childhood), I came across what seemed like a metaphor, though for what exactly I wasn’t at first sure; if the player completes a particular series of actions, it causes the game to load a more-or-less random environment which can be navigated, though contains no visual clues as to how. This image took on more and more meaning as I thought about it; it was a corollary for how queer people still must strategise to move through the world avoiding violence, a visual representation of a world unmoored from certainty, and it contained something else too, a kind of nostalgia for a lost unreality.
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Here are two sentences which have never left my head since I first read them:
‘keenly, it is relational and strange’ — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
'‘if I can be said to have a position on queer, it would be to resist its hypostatization, reification into nominal status as designating an entity, an identity, a thing, and allow it to continue its outlaw work as a verb’ —Carla Freccero
I considered both of these as possible epigraphs for the collection (but in the end opted for Gertrude Stein’s somewhat more oblique and ironic ‘this is this’). Queerness may well be this book’s animating principle, but I have no particular desire to write about queer subject matter, or tell queer stories, or express a queer identity. What motivates me is the question of how to write queerly. This is, for me, a project that necessitates a reconsideration of writing’s assumptions: instead of naming something, name its absence; instead of telling a story, withhold it; recognise that the self cannot be expressed in the poem; it is the poem that creates the self (I is after all a necessity of grammar).
And it is a project that extends outwards; I am not so much interested in things as I am interested in how things come in to being through their representations. Many of the poems in the book respond directly to works of visual art, but even those that don’t still operate via an ekphrastic gaze. When I write about landscape, it is as a pictorial and literary tradition of world-making; this too is a rejection of what I see as heteronormative commonplaces: nature is a concept, a category created from within culture, and it seems to me to be a concept that has always been (and will always be) weaponised against queer people and used to delegitimise our desires. When I write about food, it is as still life and memento mori; that is, as a way of considering the economics of our creaturely existence, and as a reminder of the base materiality of our bodies and their capacity for abjection.
And there is sex too, and intimacy, and pleasure. Above all, what I have tried to allow to guide these poems is a kind of erotic openness to the world in its complexity and to the gaudy possibilities of language.
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