Luke Kennard's Grateful but Disappointed Poetics

Lily Blacksell interviews poet and novelist Luke Kennard, who also holds the title of  "Canal Laureate" (it's a U.K. thing), for Boston Review. What does it all mean? Or as Kennard asks near the end, "Ultimately what’s the point of it all?" "Earn enough money so that you can opt out of the systems our government is allowing to fail, seems to me," he responds to himself. But earlier:

LB: When I reread your poem “Dignity,” I saw it ended with “Thanks / anyway”, a phrase I was sure I’d seen before in your work. I lazily googled ‘Thanks anyway Luke Kennard’ and didn’t find the poem I was after, but did find a blog post from 2011 promoting Planet-Shaped Horse, with those grateful-but-disappointed words as its title. Then I realised! ‘Thanks anyway’ ends the poem “Cain Reverses Time,” published last year in Prac Crit! It’s a tremendous moment in the poem. Is the phrase significant? Am I reading too much into it?

LK: Oh wow! I wish I could pretend that was intentional. It’s clearly a motif. Yeah, okay, in the Cain poem it’s a kind of bathos: thanks for the miraculous, nonlinear, impossible opportunity to put things right which ultimately, when faced with the same situation again, I’m not going to take. I think “grateful but disappointed” pretty much sums up my whole poetic. Or the tussle between the two. Anyone serious about writing hates the mock-profundity that can seep into poetry—even into some very popular poetry—but there’s a danger that if you get obsessed with just sending that up. . . . Your work becomes cold and dead and cynical because you were so concerned about avoiding sentimentality. Which is why humour is described as defensive, I think. You were so worried about falling off the cliff that you end up hundreds of miles away from it and never even seeing the view.

LB: In the interview that accompanies “Cain Reverses Time,” you discuss “irredeemability,” saying: “Nothing that we do can actually be undone, or taken back. . . we don’t want it to.” The Transition could come into play here: Karl is offered a second chance through the supposed rehabilitation of The Transition, “a fully holistic approach to getting our lives back on track,” but he never seems to want to, or to know where that track is. Add to this the question of whether he truly did anything wrong, or whether he and his circumstances are a product of his society, and “right” or “wrong” become even harder to grasp.

LK: I love that. I think it has to do with what we think of as success, what we feel that we deserve, the idea that we can commit time and effort to something and be rewarded for it...

Read it all right here at Boston Review.