In the early 1990s I was part of a loose grouping of poets I termed "The
Informationists": Robert Crawford, W.N. Herbert, David Kinloch, Peter McCarey,
myself, and Alan Riach. With W.N. Herbert, I co-edited an anthology of their
work, published in a book I called Contraflow on the SuperHighway
(Southfields, 1994). In the words of the poet Donny O'Rourke the Informationists
have 'an intellectual breadth, confident absorption and redeployment of poetic
source material, a capacity for cosmopolitan sophistication and a very Scottish
directness, a rapport with both Europe and America, a deep interest in popular
culture, Scottish history and the mass media, and above all a conscious (occasionally
self-conscious) ambition to be newly Scottish and yet unbounded'.
The term bubbled under the surface of mainstream poetry, with an occasional
review article or textbook picking up and scrutinising the term. 'Informationism'
even cropped up some four or five years later in an issue of the English cultural
review The Times Literary Supplement where it was repeated
by one of the Informationists, Robert Crawford, now a university professor,
to classify more mainstream Scottish poets such as Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson.
Like the term 'Surrealism', which was originally intended for a very small group
of 'experimental' writers, it does seem that 'Informationism' is beginning to
be applied much more generally.
One of the ideas of Informationism was to rewire the new of the everyday to
itself: as it were, to cross wires, to hot wire, to short-circuit the text-ology
of the present. By this I mean to engage with the new worlds and jargon of -the
information society'; to find poetic analogies in form as well as content to
technological invention and global discourse. Though a crucial part of Informationism
was an enthusiasm for aspects of the new world we all seem to be living in,
some of the Informationists adopted a more ironic and satirical response.
So, from Contraflow on the Superhighway is this poem of
mine which reconfigures the domestic world of the kitchen in a fantasy of the
inanimate come alive, but which also has what I think can be read as a quietly
moral conclusion.
The refrigerator is a two-way mirror:
the light is on, and a pat of butter
is grumbling. Open the door
and words wouldn't melt in its mouth.
The fridge's ornaments are a manatee,
a dolphin smuggling an anchor,
the letters of ALDUS MANUTIUS
reconfigured as NUT SALAD,
U, U, and ISM.
In the breadbin there's a soda loaf
shaped like money. Stacked like DATs
there are flapjacks made with millennial dates,
Iona honey and the oats
from Johnson's dictionary.
The hob has a fractal element
for instant boiling,
Pictish spirals for neaps-and-tattying,
a saltire for a sullen simmer.
Turn on the washing machine
and the cat comes in
to watch the television.
The behaviour of 8 out of 10
Informationist's cats
suggests a preference for Woolens.
These are the soaps.
Jars on the shelves horde anti-meat
from the vegetable universe,
dried lobster pimentoes as red as cars,
canary tomatoes singing like choirs,
a heart peach,
and chicken apricots in syrup.
As large as hands. the flatfish foliage
of the Neptune tree
changes colour with the wallpaper,
currently Wipable Avocado.
Dumpling mineolas are nestling
in a pine bowl from the last tree
of the Caledonian jungle,
felled (incidentally)
by a lowflying jet from Lossie.
Turn to the taps and turn them on:
do you remember every sink
you've washed dishes in,
how home is in the time
the basin takes to fill,
the shape of the aluminium,
the kind of overflow?
Wash crocks here
and know those kitchens again,
remember your mother singing
'Love is a many splendoured thing,'
as Dad showed the drippers a cloth.
Later, you can read your future
in the scraps and froth
that vision's Corryvreckan
will leave you.
You will not
leave this kitchen
when you know it.
(from Contraflow on the Superhighway, 1994)
I think the ending reads as both an elegy for the future, and as a warning that even technological delights will not allow us to escape emotional depths: if they do that's when you should start worrying. Along the way, the poem has some fun with the letters of the alphabet found in the name of early printer-publisher Aldus Manutius (this is now the age of fridge magnets after all), with TV ads, and with Samuel Johnson's definition of 'oats' (what horses and Scotsmen eat). As the tone has changed by the end of the piece, the poem tries to use the idea of the Scottish whirlpool 'The Corryvreckan' to suggest a dense vortex of domestic life that has more emotional gravity than the high-jinx of the first two thirds of the poem.
'An Informationist's Kitchen' might be said to be written in the mutated style of an interior decorating magazine, or to slyly parody the scene-setting of a Hello! article, but one of the things I intended Informationism to do next was to more clearly occupy the form of the poem's target. Unfortunately, this has been done only very occasionally by even the Informationists – most went on to write more traditional poems or to be 'experimental' in other ways – and I think there is still scope for more work in this field. One idea, for instance, was for just one of the questions in the following polemical poem, 'Tie-breaker', to be reproduced on one side of a Business Reply postcard, with the particular business left blank for the sender's own object of protest. As there are three questions, that would be a series of three postcards, with the same apocalyptic disclaimer for each.
The poem crosses the syntax and format of a promotional competition with that of an exam. It is called 'Tie-breaker' not only because that is what these sorts of questions are called on the back of a carton of this or that, but because the activities of the companies concerned could in some sense be said to be breaking the ties that hold societies together.
You are an islander with skin cancer.
Outline the history of the petrochemical industry.
You are a four-year-old with asthma.
Explain the theory of traffic calming.
In a phrase of not more than ten words
justify water.
Employees, their friends and their relatives
are not eligible for this competition.
No correspondence will be entered into.
The judge's decision is final.
(from Sense and a Minor Fever, 1993)