In this editorial essay for a special issue of The Journal of British and Irish Innovative
Poetry, we introduce the issue’s seven articles, and share some speculations about the nature
of the secret in its relation to poetry.
It’s tempting to simply identify secrecy with privacy, in distinction from publicness. But
the secret can also be usefully thought of as an unstable hybrid of the public and the private.
Poems and artworks, publicly displayed, may be harbouring the secret in plain sight. The secret can
belong solely, entirely, and definitively to the individual, or something secretive may ground a
shared identity. The secret can even constitute a kind of public. In this editorial essay for a
special issue of The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, we introduce
the issue’s seven articles, and share some speculations about the nature of the secret in its
relation to poetry.
The seed of this issue was a symposium, ‘Secret Poetry,’ held at Northumbria
University in Newcastle in April 2016. The event was written up, meticulously and with aplomb, by
David Spittle, in an earlier issue of this journal.1 Maybe it
would have been more accurate to call those two days ‘Secrets in Poetry,’ or
‘Secrets and Poetry,’ or ‘Secrets in Modern and Contemporary Linguistically
Innovative Anglophone Poetry.’ Or, as this special issue is titled, ‘Poetry and
Secrecy.’ The speakers at that symposium, minus a few, are the contributors here. Many topics
are broadly the same as they were, but in most cases the content has not only been expanded but also
evolved substantially. Spittle’s summary is certainly worth a read as an ancillary to this issue. Jordan
Savage, for instance, spoke that day about Anna Mendelssohn, Fredric Jameson, and Susan Sontag,
whereas here she discusses Mendelssohn and Tom Raworth; Nisha Ramayya presented on Fred Moten,
whereas here she gives us an article on D.S. Marriott.
Speaking of new castles. We don’t say, ‘Can you hide a secret?’ What we say is,
‘Can you keep a secret?’ and by saying it we delicately alter the
qualities of the word keep, imparting it with a slight stony silence, a slight
lofty watchfulness.2 Several contributors to this issue explore
the notion of poetic language as a sturdy refuge, a place of strange strength replete with corners
where the fragile, the inchoate, and the untimely may be temporarily tucked away. Poetic language
might also be where such things are cared for and cultivated, and the word keep can
convey warmth and care: the sense that secrets are kept like gardens or pets are kept, or like a
room is kept tidy. If poetic language is carved with secret havens, within which something like the
Blochian utopian impulse survives, then poetry might just, in Anna Mendelssohn’s words,
‘address a different world’.3
So is it up to literary critics to storm poetry, to tear down its defences, and scatter its
contents in the sunlight? Jordan Savage’s and Vicky Sparrow’s articles make a
significant contribution to the small sum of Mendelssohn scholarship. It seems appropriate that both
authors seek to open up her work only via meditations on what is better left undisturbed.
A tidy castle is exactly what looms in a line in Mendelssohn’s poem ‘Staged
whispers’, which imagines a woman who ‘uses syntax like a broom sweeps across an old
fortress’.4 This fortress may easily be made to stand for
more than a heap of stone. Mendelssohn’s poetry often figures itself as a preservation against
imposing structures with designs on her life: courts, prison,5
patriarchy within counterculture, the university, perhaps language itself.
But however we read this fortress, the special secretiveness of Mendelssohn’s line has
something to do with a suspicion that its own syntax has been disturbed like dust:
perhaps concealing the proverbial ‘old broom’ which – while it may not sweep the
structure clean – does know its corners. Do you know a secret corner where you can go when you
need to? But such a place may be compromised, if in the past you’ve given out precise
directions to find it … or even outright admitted its existence. This is poetry that
understands that it is being watched and is careful about whom it can trust. Turning to another of
Mendelssohn’s poems, ‘to any who want poems to give them answers’, we can let dust
in broom-bristles constellate with diamonds filling tree branches:
a poem is not going to give precise directions.you mustn’t touch the hiding places.they address a different worldwhere trees are decorated with diamonds6
In his 1906 essay ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, Georg Simmel
– the influential and early sociologist and critical theorist – draws a suggestive
connection between interpretation and violence. Simmel first supposes, a little sweepingly himself,
that people generally feel they have a right to know everything which ‘through purely
psychological observation and reflection, it is possible to ascertain’.7 And yet, he points out, ‘indiscretion exercised in this way may be quite as
violent, and morally quite as unjustifiable, as listening at keyholes and prying into the letters of
strangers’.8 For Simmel, such interpretative violence can
be internal – ‘entirely the labor of one’s own mind’ – and it can
extend to spontaneous, involuntary perception.9
This raises not only questions about managing and surrendering one’s own power of
interpretative violence, but also the question of whether it’s possible to anticipate and
defend against such interpretative violence. In Sparrow’s
article, ‘“[A] poet must know|more than a surface
suggests”: Reading and Secrecy in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn’, Sparrow considers
Mendelssohn’s construction of a kind of secret poetic knowledge, in the light of Walter
Benjamin’s contention that ‘the being of beauty lies in the secret’.10 Sparrow attends to Mendelssohn’s small pamphlet, An
Account of a Mummy, in the Royal Cabinet of Antiquities at Dresden (1986), conducting a
close reading perpetually sensitive to the possibility that it sometimes must not –
‘mustn’t touch the hiding places’ (q.v.) – get too
close.
Savage’s article, ‘“I don’t talk to the police except never”: Anna
Mendelssohn, Tom Raworth, and Anti-Confessional Life writing’, performs two major manoeuvres.
First, work by Mendelssohn and Raworth is figured as distinctively secretive – elusive in ways
which go beyond the fruitful difficulty of ubiquitous fragmentation and oblique reference – in
that such work forces readers to acknowledge their own force, the force they exert
in reading. Strongarming these poems into meaning, according to Savage, risks breaking links between
the text and the poet’s lived experience. These links, however fragile and secret, are what
motivate Savage to characterise such poetry as a kind of life writing. Second, Savage goes more
deeply into Mendelssohn’s life writing, distinguishing it from Raworth’s by figuring it
as ‘anti-confessional’ life writing.
Neither Savage nor Sparrow altogether denies that they want this poetry to ‘give them
answers’ (q.v.). But both acknowledge that, without ‘precise directions’ (q.v.),
they have to proceed with care, aware they risk doing harm. At the very least, appetitive and
aggressive criticism may get outfoxed by the poetry. It may return home with fewer good answers than
it could have got with a bit more circumspection and Keatsian negative capability. As Sparrow
writes: ‘What might be secreted in the poem’s “hiding places” will never be
revealed through answers given under duress and might, in the end, serve only to represent what
cannot be assimilated into unifying interpretive explanation’.11
It feels very normal for poems to be ‘inspected,’ ‘looked at,’
‘examined,’ ‘investigated,’ ‘explored,’ and even
‘interrogated.’ This kind of language – woven casually and pervasively through
literary criticism, as if to join together the bits that really matter – has the air of
needing no justification. Apparently, this is scrutiny without a price-tag, except perhaps the
opportunity cost of not having authorised some even more revealing scan. Even more than this, the
whole practice of literary criticism tends to organise itself around the inspectability of its
objects, and the necessary alignment of scrutiny and knowledge. By contrast, Savage and Sparrow both
consider poetry as potentially obliging its reader to discretion and withdrawal. Perhaps poetry can
be a space where it is not only the capacity to seek knowledge that is awoken and compensated in
complex ways, but also the capacity to draw back from knowledge, to honour the keeping of
secrets.
Interpretation may be violent. On the other hand, preventative discretion, or the attempt to
exercise judgment about when to exercise judgment, must be careful not to slip into dogmatic
deference to secrecy. If keeping a secret is at all like castling
a secret – the special move in Chess – then the fortified corner won’t last
forever, and if it is rigidly prolonged when it ought to grow ragged, then it may smother its
contents. The secret that at some point in its existence addresses ‘a different world’
(q.v.) may at last fail to keep. True, maybe this secret can be invested with some radical and
transformative charge, which may one day be multiplied – just like Blake’s ‘Moment
in each Day that Satan cannot find’ – but maybe it can also fester, spoil, and
contaminate – like the rose-sickening ‘dark secret love’ of Blake’s
‘invisible worm’.12
And if interpretation can be a kind of violence, the same may surely be said of the secret. The
political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, alluding to the failure of the socialist revolutions of the
last century, cautions that ‘one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does
not understand’.13 While the secret is linked with the
radical and the transformative, it is just as plainly linked with the conservative, the reactionary,
and the generatively oppressive. To withdraw oppressive power behind a screen of inscrutable,
categorical legitimacy is to create secrets. Likewise, to impose silence, invisibility, triviality,
or illegitimacy on the oppressed is to create secrets. And maybe vice-versa: if the
stratifying power of the secret is, as Simmel seemed to think it was, something that makes possible
society itself, then the society that it is actually making possible is one of hierarchy and
domination. It is patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism.
The State Secret
The UK criminal justice system, and the life it seeks to surveil, entrap, conceal, suppress, and
destroy, is what concerns Luke Roberts’ article ‘Grave Police Music: On Bill
Griffiths’. Roberts places Griffith’s poetry about prison in its social and historical
context, including mass protests within English prisons, and the activism of Preservation of the
Rights of Prisoners. As Roberts shows, Griffiths’ work stretches outward to large impersonal
forces and institutions, and inward to concrete particulars; it ‘gives character, gives names,
gives voices to the cold statistics of punishment and death at the hands of the State’.14 Bill Griffiths is also the subject of an earlier special
issue of this journal (Volume 6, Number 1, March 2014).
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt writes that ‘real power begins where secrecy
begins’.15 Within state power specifically, the
arrangement of secrets is intimately associated with the arrangement of personal and impersonal
power. This can be seen in many disputes over the balance between executive and legislative power.
For instance, in 1660, the last days of the Commonwealth, John Milton’s tract The
Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth endorsed a fairly strong executive, a
Council of State, for ‘the carrying on som particular affairs with more secrecie and
expedition’.16 Here Milton would be dismissing fears
articulated in, for example, the 1648 Leveller petition England’s New Chains
Discovered: fears that executive power creepingly concentrated and expanded under
‘vail and cloak’ might eventually be wielded to abolish Parliament altogether,
presumably on populist pretext.17
This same rough pattern also plays out throughout the contemporary imaginary of constitutional
liberal democracy. The more secretive, the more personal. That’s the idea. That is, the more
shadowy the exercise of executive power, the more it is supposed to resemble the agency of an
individual, or even the arcanum imperii of the monarch. In this sense, the personal
manifests itself most definitively when an official’s action is not determined by the
procedures of their office. In this way, state secrecy – like sovereignty itself in Carl
Schmitt’s formulation – becomes about the exception rather than the rule.18
The connection between secrecy and personal agency is how state secrecy comes to be framed as a
regrettable necessity, one which preserves the executive ability to act in a timely and decisive
fashion. The more an action is covered in confusion and murk, the more permissible it is to claim it
springs from a seed of single-minded alacrity. State secrecy is endorsed as a kind of last resort,
whose use should always pertain to exceptional circumstances like war and threats to national
security. In such exceptional circumstances (but supposedly in no others) the state must free itself
to act with decisiveness and expedition – with what the civic republican tradition sometimes
called ‘energy’ – unhampered by obligations of transparency, deliberation,
accountability, and sentimental morality.19
Giorgio Agamben puts serious pressure on this story, theorising the state of exception as having
become, only a little paradoxically, business-as-usual.20 Far
from being a last resort, secrecy looks like it has become a permanent dynamic in state power,
something winding through the gaps between the law and the bare life on which that law takes
purchase – the life which, in its vibrancy and concrete particularity, necessarily exceeds
that law. As Alysia E. Garrison has recently put it, ‘[t]he secret, in its boundless ubiquity,
becomes so visible that it is no longer seen’.21
Then again, what if we were to set aside such objections, and pretend that state secrecy
could somehow be validly switched on and off in different areas and at different
times, as contextually required? Even so, demarcating a ‘legitimate’ shift in the
quality of power – from the impersonal power of offices to the personal power of officers
– does not necessarily tell us much about the status of state secrecy
specifically within such a shift. Even worse, the problem would remain that the
power to classify official information is an instrument well-suited to circumvent or dismantle
whatever constraints are imposed upon that power.22 Attempts to
furnish state secrecy with oversight, accountability, and checks and balances should not be glibly
dismissed. The details of their implementation have significant impact on real lives. Nevertheless,
within the imaginary of constitutional liberal democracy, the problem of state secrecy does finally
appear impossible to solve or contain.
As if the changing nature of state secrecy were not complicated enough, it is intricately and
unpredictably linked with the changing nature of privacy. The national security state is also the
surveillance state. Its citizens are always potentially its enemies. As Dennis Broeders has written
recently, ‘the individual’s ability to keep secrets diminishes and the volume of state
secrets rises’.23 But the surveillance state does not
only collect secrets; it also generates them. Just as an act of theft can reatroactively recast
something as a possession, so the surveillance state asks itself a very leading question: what
is all this daily life going to such lengths to hide?
Thinking through the workings of contemporary surveillance can also be a way to start rethinking
the nature of the state itself. Crucially, Broeders also notes that ‘those state secrets
[…] become more vulnerable’.24 Whilst the hooded
eye of a wall-mounted security camera may still be the quintessential symbol of state surveillance,
the materialities of surveillance have transformed radically over the last few decades. Loosely
speaking, we appear to be in a situation where the socio-economic capacity to produce secrets far
outstrips the capacity to keep them. This has occurred not least through the datafication of
society: the rise of social media and online commerce, and the digital convergence of previously
discrete surveillance systems and techniques. The surveillance state is today inseparable from
surveillance capitalism, equipped with digital platforms that elicit and gather data on a dizzying
scale.25
Secret Data
So if there is some instrumentarium into which our secrets sneak behind our backs, we may
hesitate to identify it either with the state, with the market, or even with their synthesis. As we
try grapple with this more elusive deterritorializing and reterritorializing flow of secrets, images
which rely too much on gazes and commonsense Euclidian space – such as the surveillance
camera, or the interview room with the one-way mirror, or the aggregate visual field of Big
Brother’s watchful telescreens, or even the secret twirling eyes of Bentham and
Foucault’s Panopticon – frequently don’t feel good enough.26 Poetry could seek alternative and experimental ways of construing the ambiguous
and dynamic surveillant assemblage we find ourselves a part of.
Dorothy Butchard takes up the themes of surveillance and data in her article ‘Secrecy,
Surveillance, and Poetic ‘Data-Bodies”’. In her exploration of Zoë
Skoulding’s 2013 collection The Museum of Disappearing Sounds, Butchard
traces ‘a melding of human and machine’ in which ‘Skoulding figuratively mixes the
intimate sounds of the human body with those of electronic mechanisms’.27 Here the cyborg marks an effort to think through what is happening to
surveillance in the contemporary world. The fixed categories of human and machine are unsettled as a
way of mixing together the watchful state and the watchful market, private and public, place and
space, citizen and enemy.
In her reading of Redell Olsen’s 2004 Secure Portable Space, Butchard again picks up on cyborg imagery, in this case
‘data-bodies’.
How can we go anywhere,even across-townwithout our data-bodies knowing, (flesh,no object) […]28
In part, Olsen’s poem is interested in fleshifying data – in insisting that a data
body is not an ‘object’, but rather organic, vital, and flourishing – and it
redoles of the body horror of Aristotle’s account of usury, or Marx’s account of the
extraction of surplus value, accounts which similarly fleshify economic value.29
Butchard also looks at Marianne Morris’s poem ‘Who Not to Speak To’, a poem
which ‘plays with the capacity of typography and formatting to capture an impression of
chaotic expression’.30 Morris’s poem carefully
withholds any space outside of these abundant, chaotic textures, denying the reader a space where
they might take stock of whom they should or shouldn’t speak to. It offers the poetic
equivalent of wondering if you can trust Google, and so just Googling it. In other words, maybe one
of the people you shouldn’t be speaking to is the poet. But even within the poem’s messy
elusiveness, there are some deadly serious top tips. Since this is a poem about the
‘CYBERSPHERE’, perhaps it’s suggesting you don’t need to speak to all those
annoying people you meet online. ‘Who Not To Speak To’ certainly alludes to a
contemporary self that is distributed across social media stages – from scenes of nervous
self-fashioning, to intimate melt-downs, to the tracking and ranking of labour on gig economy
platforms, to online deliberation in civic, vocational, and various other modes – a self that
performs its existence in forms which are simultaneously social and machine-readable. Perhaps the
people you shouldn’t speak to are people like the bad faith interlocutor, the concern troll,
the earnest would-be comrade or ally, the uninvited debate champ, the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend
with infinitely accurate opinions.31 All of these social types,
made available by the conditions of contemporary digital sociality, may hungrily absorb – in a
sense different but related to that used in the previous section – your
energy. Conserving energy might be seen as a tactical response to the impossibility
of satisfactorily protecting your secrets, and protecting the integrity of your identity. Just
because someone has an ‘in’ – knows a secret about you, knows something you
don’t know about yourself, or thinks they do – doesn’t mean you owe them
something.
As Deborah Lupton points out, we ‘cannot easily escape becoming a subject of
digitisation’.32 Within the contemporary surveillant
assemblage, the secret can seldom be separated cleanly – like some Lucretian image-veil cast
from the surface of an object, to be swallowed by the eye – from the body that originates
it.33 Instead, the technosocial infrastructure we daily
navigate grows more hungry for and responsive to the data we feed it, and this infrastructure
returns the favour, by feeding us back ourselves, dangling slices of data-flesh as morsels to
provoke fresh engagements. We walk around tangled and smeared in our data; when we smile, there is
data between our teeth. Wherever we arrive, we arrive uncertainly: has the shadow of our data
preceded us and prepared the ground? Even for the relatively privileged subject, every targeted or
perhaps-targeted Facebook ad, every girder of digital persuasion architecture, every spooky
coincidence, every unaccountable ritual reluctance whilst navigating bureaucracy, may provoke at
least a little of the sick feeling of being inspected, enjoyed, stalked, groomed, or of being
positioned for detention, assault, deportation, or destitution.
Heroically hiding from digital platforms may have its limits. Just as a poetry reading can tune
the public ear to the unvoiced nuance of the page, so the performance of an online self may be
intimately bound up in the infinitesimal intelligibility of the offline self. The forms of sociality
available remain shaped by the structures of digital platforms, even when a specific actor resists
subsumption by those structures. In Morris’s poem, the ‘CYBERSPHERE’ – a
term in its own right, but also suggesting a just faintly ridiculous conflation of
cyberspace and public sphere – has perhaps collapsed into a
sphere under its own gravity. What this strong gravity pulls in most ravenously are political
passions, passions which thereby become delinked from practical projects, and instead get trapped
within a delusive and abundant system of recursive reference. Within the gravity of the
‘CYBERSPHERE’, the impulse to assert and stabilise one’s identity cannot be
trusted – it could be a waste of energy, or worse, a donation of energy to some operation of
structural violence. Among those we shouldn’t speak to are the cop, and the poet: and in the
cybersphere, anybody could be a cop or a poet. With such uncertainty around how your data is being
used – such uncertainty about what your data double is getting up to behind your back –
you could even be a cop or a poet yourself.
In this connection, Butchard suggestively brings in another sphere: the ‘filter
bubble’, a putative effect whereby your own opinions – or at least, the opinions you
share with your double – are constantly reaffirmed, in part because eager-to-please social
media algorithms try to boost engagement by showing you content you like.34 Butchard, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, points out how ‘‘[t]he image of
a “digital mirror” neatly suggests a narcissistic and self-monitoring impetus in online
communications, as participants observe themselves rather than others’.35 The other becomes the medium in which the self is performed and sought.
‘Have Your stick insect Say’, invites Morris’s poem, and in
response we could playfully invert Ludwig Wittgenstein’s well-known thought experiment: say
that everyone – going around glued to their phones, rather than to their boxes – can
only see everyone else’s beetle, and never their own.36
Self-care, the management of private affect, and a refusal to be lured into performing the self
underneath exhausting and treacherous stage lighting, may be ways of claiming autonomy and
sovereignty. At the same time, in the context of the ongoing datafication of society, we may often
be mistaken about the extent to which obscurity guarantees secrecy. No matter how brilliantly we
defend our subjectivities – evading judgments, gazes, and the imposition of illegitimate
social debts – within the space of the surveillant assemblage we are not only
being observed and produced as subjects. Even if the light which flows around us
cannot find the contours of our subjectivity, we still cast a shadow. As Fred Moten caustically
notes:
[…] today we are prompted to ask: why worry about the subject at all, why go through such
beings to reach the general intellect? And why limit production to subjects, who are after all such
a small part of the population, such a small history of mass intellectuality?37
The spread and development of data analytics is a significant factor here. Such automation of
interpretation means that any activity – not only something easily construed
as identity performance, something which insists that a subject is present – any activity or
alleged activity may be automatically gathered and grafted to a data double. Data accumulates
through a ubiquitous harvest without seasons; enormous data sets are aggregated, cross-referenced,
analysed, and made the basis of prediction and experiment.38
This may also go some way to explain what feels so sinister about Olsen’s ‘data-bodies
knowing, (flesh,/no object)’. The data body, or ‘data double’, is more like you
than anyone else is … and yet it is not even really structured like a subject. The data double
can be experienced as the uncanny and lossy doppleganger, the unelected delegate who visits ‘a
host of scattered centres of calculation’, determining access to power and resources, and
colluding in strategies of ‘governance, commerce and control’.39
Butchard also highlights an intriguing moment in Morris’s poem: ‘patriotic
debate/about themselves’. In this line, the atomic neoliberal subject is modelled not on the
entrepreneurial firm but on the jingoistic nation. Narcissism is associated with the faux
isolationism of right wing populism, perfecting its border by seeking to control both sides
absolutely. Butchard notes the ‘theoretical tendency to discuss questions of
“secrecy” using language of borders and sovereignty’, both in relation to state
secrecy and individual privacy.40
Of course, it is all very well to reject the idea of the sovereign self, who as a subject of
surveillance manufactures secrets for export to the state or to the private sector. Things are, as
Butchard suggests, definitely more complicated. Within contemporary literary studies, despite the
influence of the ontological turn, the breaking down or blurring any limit is still liable to sound
like a job well done. However, as Jacques Derrida reminds us (in a slightly different context), the
point of such a move is ‘not to efface the limit, but to multiply its figures, to complicate,
thicken, delinearize, fold, and divide the line precisely by making it increase and
multiply’.41 By weaving theory with close readings of
work by Redell Olson, Marianne Morris, and Zoë Skoulding, Butchard not only demonstrates the
inadequacy of the ‘language of borders and sovereignty’ for tracing the secret in their
poetry, but also gestures speculatively toward alternative understandings. For instance, perhaps the
collision of the commodity with the gift provides a basis for some alternative approach: flows of
finance and data inevitably interlock with systems of generalised exchange which partly elude
surveillance and quantification. Or perhaps this poetry addresses a version of the secret which
isn’t really anything excluded from any particular space, nor anything hidden within any
particular space… but rather the secret infrastructure on which such exclusion and
invisibility depends in the first place.42
The Belated Secret
Can there be a secret that is so secret that nobody knows it?
Some poetry seems to entertain this notion. Anna Mendelssohn’s ‘hiding places’
certainly have this sense of serendipitous haven, as do some of the contortions of Peter
Manson’s ‘language surface’, elaborated by Thomas Betteridge in his article. Maybe
the secret does sometimes crop up, as it were, ‘naturally,’ as something a bit distinct
from the unknown, the obscure, the inaccessible, the private, or the deeply personal, even if there
are many overlaps. Mathematics might furnish examples of such ‘secrets that nobody
knows’: for instance, in the unpredictable locations of prime numbers (handy for
cryptography). The easiest way to make sense of this version of the secret, of course, is as
something with strong family resemblance with the more familiar kind of secret – the kind that
is hidden away from some people but not others.
What if everybody knows it? Can there be a secret that everybody knows? Quite
possibly there is nothing that everybody knows, let alone a secret that everybody knows.
Nevertheless, publicity and secrecy may not be as incompatible as you would at first expect.
Knowledge which has germinated in the darkness may, at least for a while, preserve an air of
confidentiality as it flourishes out in the open. The ‘open secret’ might be something
which is widely known, but little spoken about, or something which is spoken about plenty but which
nevertheless preserves some stylistic features of secrecy. Or the open secret can be something which
is widely known, but which – by existing in the gap between theory and practice, or between
fact and norm – lacks what appear to be its natural consequences, and therefore acquires an
aura of irreality. Indeed, some secrets might not even really exist except in the
finding or the telling. They may be assembled by the very same play of forces that disintegrates
what seemed to shelter or to screen something. The ‘well-kept secret’ of travelogues
could be one example: a kind of secret that is tied much more intimately to publicity than to
privacy.
In a similar way, the ‘openness’ of the open secret might be established
retroactively, when what should have been a disclosure fails to
have the effects that were expected, or generates failed expectations after the fact. A revelation
can inoculate. Some politician, or other powerful figure, who weathers a revelation that in theory
could have damaged their status, may afterwards accrue a kind of imperviousness. If the nature of
the secret fluctuates according to the timing and tactics of its telling, then this isn’t just
because memory is colourable, but also because mores and norms are colourable. At the same time,
this very apprehension – that calling out an abuser may legitimate abuse instead of producing
justice – is itself manufactured and manipulated within practices that enforce silence and
fortify unequal power structures. So next to this kind of open secret – the kind made out of a
discarded petition for justice plus a bogus prehistory of facts having been widely known or assumed
– we need to differentiate another kind of open secret. That is, the secret whose openness is
a preemptive suspension or deferral of any immediate claim to justice, chosen in order to disclose
outside the epistemological regime of rigged accountability mechanisms.
Does the secret necessarily belong to epistemology at all? With secrecy’s upper and lower
limits ranged apart like this – so that the secret could be something known by nobody or by
everybody, and not just something known to some but not to others – the secret may even become
completely detached from questions of who knows what. Instead, the secret might simply be something
accomplished as genre and style. Various features consistently attach to things that have been first
hidden, and later imparted or discovered – whether because such hiding or imparting or
discovering produces those features, or just through coincidental association over time – and
these features can be conjured up whether or not anything is actually hidden from anybody. So far as
secrecy is associated with value, such stylistic construction of secrecy may spring from a mistaking
of the kind of value it represents. Or it may spring from the desire for, and work toward the end
of, publicization. Chance can also play a part in what takes the form of the secret. Certain modes
of ‘discovery’ – eavesdropping and the eavesdropping-ish – may transform
facts that were already public into gaffes and scandals. A live mic may pick up stray words so that,
although the speaker has repeated those same words many times before in public, they now get
alchemically converted into a secret exposed.
All of these somewhat strange characteristics are shaped by a simple fact about the secret. You
don’t know what the secret really is except to the degree that you have told it, and thus to
the degree that it is no longer secret. The context and timing of disclosure deeply inform –
it might even be said, construct – that which is disclosed. So we may even talk about the
secret as being temporally unsettled, or constitutively belated.43
Little Secrets, Big Secrets, Secret Joys and Secret Sorrows
Belatedness, then, is one feature that might roughly discriminate the secret from other kinds of
obscurities and enigmas. We can try to sketch a few others. For instance, the secret, a bit like the
story, has a tendency to integrate its parts. By separating itself from outside access, it pulls its
constituent parts into more intense relations with each other. So a set of interconnected hidden
facts tend to manifest as a secret, rather than as secrets.
The word secret can also imply a kind of compactness. The secret is usually
disclosed all at once. You can lean in and whisper it and not worry about getting a crick in your
neck. Once the secret begins to become clear, it accomplishes a high degree of clarity quite
quickly. And there’s a physical version of this compactness, so far as the secret suggests
deceptively dense or folded space: the cave behind the waterfall, the bunker under the boulder, the
forest clearing, the clown car or the TARDIS, or anything that’s bigger on the inside than the
outside.
The word secret also carries a distinctive mixture of emotional possibilities:
excitement, shame, anger, fear, delight, hope. When a would-be secret is without emotional salience,
it is more likely to shed its history and context, and to completely merge with the background that
was supposed to only camouflage it. Lovesickness has particular affinity with the secret. As Dorothy
Tennov writes:
[…] no matter how intensely you desire reciprocation you cannot simply ask for it. You
cannot simply inquire as to whether or not it exists. […] Rather than commit themselves, they
flirt. They send out ambiguous signals […] Reason to hope combined with reason to doubt keeps
passion at fever pitch […]44
The Innermost Secret
All these features suggest it is possible to triangulate the subject, the
lyric, and the secret. We might even go so far as to say that each
terms mediates for the others. It is the subject that is able to arrange the secret lyrically and to
confer secrecy on the lyric; it is the lyric that can engineer the subject as secretive and the
secret as subjectivity; it is the secret that can subjectify the lyrical and lyricise the
subjective.
Of course, the characteristics of the secret sketched above are all loose generalisations, and if
you lean on them too hard, a panel gives way onto cavernous counterexample, above all the byzantine,
affectively muddy archival silos of states and corporations. But to the extent that the secret does
convey some connotations of belatedness, compactness, tight integration, inwardness and abundance,
tricky extensionality, and heightened emotional texture, above all lovesickness, the strangeness of
the secret maps onto the strangeness of subjectivity itself. It also maps onto the strangeness of
the lyric, that curious hybrid of thought and song.
Simmel sometimes uses the secret to approximately partition the subjective from the objective.
Simmel sees this boundary as an incalculably complex and historically inconstant one. All social
relationships ‘presuppose […] a certain nescience, a ratio, that is immeasurably
variable to be sure, of reciprocal concealment’.45 In
other words, for Simmel, the apparatuses of social life are bolted together in many places by
question marks. Whatever the subjective content of the secret, the secret has an objective social
reality. Modernity, moreover, implies a ‘growing objectification of culture’ so that
‘one only needs to know certain externalities with reference to the other in order to have the
confidence necessary for the associated action’.46 The
way Simmel locates the secret at the threshold of the subjective and objective partly explains his
interest in the secret society. In the secret society, Simmel sees in miniature a fundamental
dialectic within human experience and within human conduct: on the one hand, the utter privacy of
consciousness; on the other hand, the facticity of collective life; and between both hands, the
social individual laced like a cat’s cradle.
Several contributors to the issue probe the connections between secrecy and subjectivity in other
ways. Savage, for instance, remarks that ‘Mendelssohn’s poetry seeks spaces in which one
consciousness can meet and share feeling with another, without being able to define or quantify that
feeling, or instrumentalise it within assertions about who is responsible for what’.47 Butchard explores elusive relationships between subjectivity, the
body, technology, and data, taking a cue from Redell Olsen’s remark that ‘the lyric
“I” exists as a series of subjectivities produced by and in relation to mediatised
technologies of representation and capitalism’, and arguing that Olsen’s work often
‘personifies […] “data-bodies” in terms of possession and connection to the
embodied self’.48
Is the secret that cannot be revealed actually a secret? Consciousness has a
definitively private character. This could be a version of the secret so absolute that maybe it
shouldn’t be thought of as any kind of privacy or intimacy
or confidence or obscurity, but rather as a secrecy that is
unintelligible, that is noumenal, or that is in some other way very strange. The thought experiment
mentioned above – part of Wittgenstein’s argument that a private language is an
impossible notion – enlists the insect kingdom into conveying this deep strangeness:
Say everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look
into anyone else’s box, and everyone says they know what a beetle is only by looking at their
own beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in
their box.49
In several articles in this issue, the secret is aligned with some kind of
unrepresented subjectivity. In this sense, the secrecy of the secret can be either
benign – eluding violent systems of quantification, calculation and control – or it can
be malign – suppressed, suffocated, precisely that which is controlled
– or both. It can be merely de facto unrepresented, or actually
constitutively unrepresentable, or ambiguous between the two possibilities. As Sparrow suggests, the
secret disclosed may ultimately ‘serve only to represent what cannot be assimilated into
unifying interpretive explanation’.50
The secret may even pretend to its own subjectivity. The vitality and virality
of rumour are one aspect of this, as are the clandestine deeds of the data double, discussed above.
But even beyond this, the secret, as it passes from person to person, may be peculiarly imprinted
with the personality of its author – or more precisely, of the author of its secrecy. Whenever
you tentatively reveal the edge of a secret, and then hurriedly cover it up after all, you may feel
as if you have been sworn to secrecy – or asked, charmed, begged, frightened, reasoned,
shamed, or teased into silence – by someone. People keep secrets, and
vice-versa. A secret can stimulate us to invoke and simulate a presence, roughly
like many poems and novels can. In fact, a secret may provoke speculative narrative concerning its
keeping or disclosure. This someone seems to accompany and be accompanied by the
secret, in roles such as guard, prisoner, confidante, principal, or expert operator.
In this sense the secret cannot always, as it were, put you totally in the dark, but instead must
rearrange the play of light and shade, so that as certain aspects of a person or situation are
concealed from certain angles, in compensation other aspects become lit. Thomas Betteridge’s
article in this issue, ‘Peter Manson’s Language Surfaces’, plays on this idea,
suggesting that secrecy may create the conditions for a special kind of candour.
Betteridge takes the word candour from Manson’s stray remark in an interview.
The word operates in his article to both mobilise yet defamiliarise certain adjacent concepts, such
as sincerity, authenticity, honesty, truthfulness. The philosophical problems with all these words,
perhaps especially as applied to lyric poetry, are pretty well-known. Such problems are by now
integrated into the operating infrastructure of much literary-critical research and pedagogy, so
that a vast store of secrets really can be reliably unlocked by ascribing features of poems to
‘speakers’ rather than ‘poets’. Perhaps Betteridge’s use of
candour – not unlike Savage’s coinage anti-confessional
writing – hopes to gather together, under a semi-arbitrary rubric, everything that
has not been erased from these problematic concepts by their various critiques.
At the same time, Betteridge in this part of his article is talking about something quite
specific: the mobilisation of form to disguise what is too painful or difficult to say or hear in
any other way. Poetry can manufacture ambiguity about the proper weight to ascribe formal patterning
– ‘did you say that because you meant it, or because it
rhymed?’ – and can integrate that ambiguity into how it means. Here
then is another kind of secret, or would-be secret, which cannot be revealed. The
hiding place is empty, and there is no answer which would satisfactorily distribute the poem’s
store of order between the language and the poet. If you end a line with ‘wing’, will
you end the next with ‘sing’? What modifications to your argument and affect are you
prepared to roll out, in order to follow ‘love’ with ‘above’? More broadly,
when does the formality of verse – let’s say, a strict rhyme scheme – send that
verse spinning away from the world, accelerated by the arbitrary structure of signifiers into a
realm of irrationality and chaos? And when does it actually nudge verse closer to
the world, drawing on the arbitrary structure of signifiers to go against the grain of mystifying
ideology?51
In Manson’s case, the complex and almost biological formalisms are as far from singsong
rhyming couplets as can be imagined – and Betteridge talks more about a concern for the
materiality of the ‘language surface’ than about formalism per se
– but some multifarious condition of deniability, colourability, beautiful noise, and
overdetermination does seem to be something Manson’s work often contrives and where it often
thrives.
Secret Resistance
A character in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four, who is working as a kind of poetry censor, stakes a little
too much on the kind of formal overdetermination discussed just above. Despairing of finding an
acceptable rhyme for ‘rod’, he decides to leave the original ‘God’ intact.
For this lack of imagination he gets vaporised.52 For any poet
(who is probably also a poetry censor), virtuoso deployments of secrecy will probably be more than
simply ways of confessing awkward stuff without feeling too bad. In order for poems to say things
that poets can’t say – perhaps because they don’t actually know those things
– poems need to put their readers to work. So poetry doesn’t just mobilise the secret in
constructing substantive meanings. It also uses the secret to leave blanks, variables, placeholders,
and to thereby sketch out what it might be capable of meaning, if anybody can figure out how to mean
such a thing properly. Poets recognise, like Simmel recognised, that the secret has an objective
social reality, and they mobilise that reality in intricate ways.
In this sense, reading a ‘difficult’ poem can be like trying to talk to someone with
a big vase of flowers between you. The only difference is that, with a poem, it only
feels like you can’t properly see the other person’s expression through
those flowers. Really there is no such expression. If you didn’t quite catch
a word, that’s because there was no word, or no such word. Likewise if you didn’t quite
catch a look. As readers, we have to provide all the missing clarity. We have to make the best of
it. The difficult avant-garde poem is the true ‘just a nice poem about some flowers.’
You can’t cheat and move the vase somewhere else. That would just make it worse, since the
flowers’ carefully-aligned stems are actually filling in the fractures in your
interlocutor’s face, which would otherwise only appear as an archipelago of floating facial
fragments. Those lips you are struggling to read past the petals would, if it wasn’t for the
flowers’ interference, just be sporadically disintegrating. Perhaps the poet has put the
flowers there, in Savage’s words, to avoid ‘assertions about who is responsible for
what’; as Simmel puts it, ‘we cherish not only so much truth, but also so much
nescience, and attain to so much error as is useful for our practical purposes’.53
If poetic secrecy can be deployed to inspire, steer, protect, and recompense the reader’s
labour – perhaps even to transform it into something not quite labour – this also
suggests a connection between the secret and resistance. One model of ‘difficult’ poetry
sees its importance as lying in the resistance which it offers readers. On this view, the poem is a
kind of pedagogic mangle through which the reader emerges different – perhaps only
temporarily, until, cartoon-like, they spring back into shape. Vicky Sparrow’s article
suggestively ties together secrecy with resistance, drawing on J.H. Prynne’s difficult and
resistant essay ‘Resistance and Difficulty’. Prynne’s 1961 essay, in its concern with ‘the sum of the world’s available
reality’, foreshadows more recent confrontations between speculative realism and metaphysical
positions suspected of over-privileging human experience and human faculties, or as overemphasising
– in a manner very characteristic of much humanities scholarship, where such emphasis is often
assumed to carry a radical political charge – the contingency and constructedness of material
reality.54
The secret, whether it is kept or revealed, might supply us with a particular way of thinking
about the avant-garde, both in political and aesthetic construals. How much might the most necessary
political and aesthetic tasks of the moment depend not on forms of visibility, but on forms of
invisibility? Not on pushing an agenda in a public space, but on evading friction, building
counterpublics, and using subterfuge to stay one step ahead of political enemies and reactionary
systemic forces? On creating safer spaces, sharing information about abusers, and pooling support,
solidarity, friendship, and resources? Secret acts may be the resistance of the oppressed. Secret
acts may also be a tactical alternative to or deferral of resistance. The long term projects of
resistance require not being worn away in the short term. Secrecy can be self-care, going to ground,
incubating, speculative separatism, fugitivity. Secrecy can deflect the attritional friction of the
resistless matrices of domination.
But many secrets should never have been hidden at all. The secret can also be oppressively
imposed silence or unspeakability. The secret may be imposed with an inevitability that has no
upside, that should not be spun into a positive narrative. Sparrow notes that Mendelssohn is at
times ‘concerned by the possibility that even poetic hiding places might be carceral in
structure, or may provide a keep for things repressed by bourgeois society and the machinations of
capital’.55 The secret can be both the shame of those who
suffer, and the remorselessness of those who perpetrate. The aura of being a catalyst, of
transforming out of all proportion, which attaches to covert plotting – or which such
activities often cultivate around themselves – can be mistakenly ascribed, willy-nilly, to any
secret whose secrecy is a function of oppressive power.
A hiding place may moreover go uninspected only out of indifference, born from confidence that
its contents are necessarily codified to serve dominant interests. When Simmel discusses the
violence of interpretation, the discretion which he sometimes approvingly invokes – for all
its intricacy and richness – is inflected by identity privileges. Butchard points out in her
article how ‘metaphors of “territory” and “domain” are a common
feature in discussions of secrecy and privacy’.56
Simmel’s tacit approbation of delicacy, his lamentation against ‘the boring persistence
of inquiry’, conjure the civil privatism of Wilhelmine upper-class bourgeoise, and the
standoffish conviviality well-adapted to confining injustice, abuse, violence, humiliation, and
control to bubbles of genteel patriarchal respectability.57
Secreting Blackness
Then there’s the verb. You almost never secret something away any more.
Perhaps you don’t all that often secrete things away either. More likely you
are glimpsed secreting something, or you have already secreted
something. In particular, the popularity of these inflected forms appears curiously linked to their
ambiguity: such acts of concealment always carry the faint suggestion that you have emanated the
precious peach, pearl or macguffin out of your own proud flesh.
What would it mean for say the adrenal glands, roosting there on the kidneys, to be
hiding adrenaline in the bloodstream? What if squirrels are furtive only to hide
from us the fact that they lay acorns? There is something quite suggestive about
this linkage of secret and secrete, with its mystification that
does not only hide something, but hides the kind of hiding it is doing. That linkage is, at least,
suggestive in a straightforwardly Marxist sense: it suggests that the entrepreneurial pursuit of
factor productivity is a ruse, a distraction from the critique of production, and the expropriation
of the expropriators. To put it another way, it may seem as though the important issue is where all
the value is hidden – where is it secretly stored? – but the real issue is where the
value came from – who secreted it? And of course ‘the point is to change it’.58
David Marriott’s poetry and scholarship often enters dialogue with Frantz Fanon,
particularly Black Skin, White Masks (1952 in French, 1967 in English). In Nisha
Ramayya’s article ‘Secreting Blackness in the Poetry of D.S. Marriott’, Ramayya
conducts an extended meditation on the intersection between the two writers, taking Fanon’s
phrase ‘I secreted a race’ as a point of departure and constant reference. The article
figures the historical, social, and psychological conditions of Marriott’s poetry as the
secretion of blackness in the lived experience of racism.
Secretion is linked with, and often distinguished from,
excretion. In this sense it is connected with the ambiguous and deeply political
lines between the clean and the unclean. Cleaning and tidying consist in part of infinitesimal acts
of secreting and revealing: hiding, for instance, traces chafed from the body, putting things out of
sight, frightening spiders into lairs or jars, wiping something and remembering what colour it is,
unearthing a lost letter, restoring a lost coin to circulation. Excretion suggests
waste material, substances that should be got away from the source as wholly and as quickly as
possible; secretion suggests the hormones that endocrine glands run into the
bloodstream, or else substances that should modify a surface: saliva, sweat, the flow of sebaceous
glands to oil our skin and hair, mebium to slow the evaporation of the tears we always have in our
eyes. Paradoxically, it is excretion that urgently demands to be secreted away (‘the
visibility of these substances is a sign that something is wrong’, writes Ramayya); secretion,
albeit temporarily, perhaps uneasily, can stay: the glands of Zeis, that service
the eyelash; the slime that lets the slug glide.59
Ramayya uses the juncture of secrecy and secretion, via Marriott and Fanon, to apprehend the
contradictoriness of race, including its contradictory communication in the medium of the body that
also erases the body. In part, Ramayya’s article enacts a sustained challenge to the affective
and aesthetic aspects of the core vocabulary of social justice as it manifests within literary
studies. However indispensable such concepts as estrangement, displacement, alienation, othering,
reification, objectification, mystification, and the matrices where privilege and oppression play
out, such concepts can accumulate a coolness, a detachment, an intangibility, a cleanness and
clarity – even a ‘disarticulation of self by its specular double’ – which is
inadequate to the experience they divulge.60 Ramayya puts back
the language of torture and uncontrolled bleeding, and the white supremacist gaze that figures Black
bodies as cannibalistic, bloodied, and smeared with excrement.61
[Fanon] retains in memory the boy’s fear of being eaten, of literally being turned into
shit by an organic communion with the black body. Generally, this absorption of the black body into
a fecal object is one of the most depressing and melancholic fantasies ensuing from the
psychodynamics of intrusion.62
Ramayya sees race in Marriott’s work as secreted: as an exudate discharged
into the open, often with a violence nebulously suggestive of imperilled biological homeostasis, and
in the very same discharge also veiled, buried, blotted out, cleaned away. ‘The violence of
the white man’s exclamation – the impact of his speech – forces the black man out
of and into his body, out of and into the world’.63
Subcultures, Coteries, Cadres and Counterpublics
In what ways might the communities involved with avant-garde cultural practice be ‘hiding
places’? How might this status produce tensions with their inclusivity? When introducing
‘difficult’ poetry to a new audience, the expectation of secrecy must often be overcome.
Don’t worry, you may find yourself promising, this language is not an in-joke. It’s not
a jigsaw, some of whose puzzle-pieces have been hidden. It’s not a dialect of the initiated.
It’s not a ciphertext to be unscrambled into a plaintext by following a particular procedure.
The others in the audience, who seem to know how to use this language, are not applying some
well-defined arcane skillset that reliably converts alien experience into familiar experience. The
raffle ticket is a normal raffle ticket. You are not joining the resistance.
If an awkwardness accompanies these assurances, perhaps it’s because they are half-truths.
They spring from welcoming, open-hearted concern for the skittish newcomer. They spring from
pedagogic simplification, since half a truth can often be more safely transmitted, and half-truths
can sometimes be grown into whole ones, once their roots are bedded in. Besides, how can you
yourself ever know for sure that there isn’t a secret? Maybe
it’s just you who’s not in on it. Sometimes, perhaps, the secret is not
that there is no secret, but that the newcomer is welcome to bring secrets of their
own.
Similarly, the assurance that there is no big secret may also carry an air of calculatedly
obvious exaggeration, of protesting too much. As though what you’re really telling the
newcomer is that there is a secret. Perhaps isn’t an unusual technique when
it comes to telling secrets. Some secrets can be very difficult to reveal without first adamantly
denying that there’s anything to hide. Denial can be the first step, the callibration. Denying
can prepare the listener to receive information as a secret, and the style of
denial can prepare them to understand the ways in which it is secret.
David Grundy’s article on recent poetry by Luke Roberts invokes secrecy not only as a
thematic concern and as a set of formal operations, but also as an aspect of this work’s
distribution and reception. Grundy writes that ‘the history of much Anglophone poetry which
figures itself as politically and aesthetically “radical” has been one of obscure
publication, ephemeral presence, in-group circulation, and the vexed questions of coterie, elitism,
group identification, loyalty, betrayal, and solidarity’.64 The article, ‘Poetry and Secrecy in Luke Roberts’ To My
Contemporaries’, suggests that Roberts’ poetry seeks a dialectical relation
between concealing and revealing. At the same time, Grundy thinks it questions certain received
methods, habits, strategies, and hunches that might underlie and organise such a search. Yes, a
decisive dialectic moment could be a synthesis that frees you to move upward and
forward. But it could also just be taking a step back for a second – and then another –
and then another – until you have fully reversed out of whatever cagy cul-de-sac you and your
contemporaries have found yourselves.65
Is it still a secret if nobody wants to know about it? If your writing is
incredibly unpopular, it may be easier to tell yourself that it is just ‘secret.’ If
absolutely nobody cares at all about your poems, because of how bad they are, you may prefer to
invent a ‘secret’ standard by which they are actually quite good. Of course, these are
also the standard views of a critic who wants to dismiss something before getting to grips with it.
Angry or languid conservatism loves to lampoon presumed vanity – perhaps projected vanity
– rather than risk transformative aesthetic encounters. Further, hatred of coteries and
networks can emerge from fervor for an entirely make-believe form of literary marketplace. If we
could only sweep away the cosy superstructure (such critics intimate) then the deep and pure market
of merit would appear. This market would supposedly be an immaterial machine made of agile, subtle
data. It would be disembedded from friendship, and from all other social and institutional
infrastructure, and it would always accurate in the long run. Such markets are pipe dreams piped
directly from the economic realm, where they also don’t exist.
Still, the incompetence of the critics does not mean that their criticisms are not sometimes true
– in some shading or another – or that they don’t shapingly haunt the poetry and
the poets that they may be true about. Secrecy and self-doubt go together,
secret-handshake-in-secret-handshake. Any poet, looking back on whatever is most secretive in their
work, can justly suspect those contours to have been generated in the poet’s own
systematically wrong judgments. Any poet, and perhaps especially any experimental poet, must
negotiate this tension between obscurity in its most perjorative sense and
secrecy in its most valorising sense.
Or, to put it simply, any poet, and perhaps especially any experimental poet, can justly suspect
that they are kidding themselves. The coterie – or various loosely related social formations,
such as the scene, the counterpublic, the countercultural network, the secret society, the enclave,
the solidarity network – may offer some minimal mitigation of this kind of self-doubt. And,
minimally mitigated, self-doubt may flourish as self-criticism, or some other richly creative
iterative process. The larger structure, however – the coterie for instance – may
also doubt itself. Georg Simmel describes secrecy as ‘an intermediate station
equally for progressing and for decaying powers’ and as ‘a transition stadium between
being and non-being’.66 So how does the coterie know
whether it is ascendant or declining? Whether it is pointed toward being or non-being? Whether its
secrets are worth keeping? If a fuzzy enclave form is sufficient to preserve an exotic standard of
value, how does the coterie allow itself to value the standard itself, and not
discard it in favour of some more pervasive law?
De facto, some notion of ‘selling out’ may pop up intermittently to fulfil this
function. The possibility of selling out arises from the maintenance of a relatively exotic standard
of value, and becomes part of the medium in which that standard is cultivated. For aesthetic
producers, selling out – especially if it is an unactuated possibility, fantasy, or fear
– need not literally mean economic selling out. To enter some kind of history
in some kind of way may be sufficient. Or to be recuperated. Or even to be understood or enjoyed by
the ‘wrong’ sort of person. Perhaps selling out might even mean settling for some fairly
reliably tolerated form of criminality. For instance, as Fred Moten writes of the university –
perhaps universities generally, he says, but certainly the university in the United States:
[…] it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted
that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak
into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join
its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the
subversive intellectual in the modern university.67
Similarly, while a prohibition on selling out is one way to maintain an enclave of standards and
valuations, active pursuit of selling out is another. Quite probably, underground coteries are
usually organised around the possibility of some radical restructuring of the
social form in which its cultural products are instantiated, though it doesn’t matter whether
this transformation is pursued, resisted, or some mixture of both pursued and resisted. In all these
cases, the possibility permits the coterie to discriminate its own special pleading from the
half-baked excuses of some neighbouring cell of sloppy hacks, whose practice is warped around their
appetite for counter-evidentiary self-esteem. Put another way: the underground coterie of aesthetic
producers manages to keep itself on the whole more secret than obscure by keeping alive the
possibility of selling out.
Perhaps Jack Spicer’s advice to ‘know exactly how much your peaches cost’ is
not just about getting out at top of the market – that is, converting cultural capital into
financial capital without getting shortchanged or hustled – but also about a longing for
certainty that you have sold out, a longing to narrate and feel one’s agency
in what is often an ambiguous and bitter drift away from your younger and better aspirations,
against a complicated and shifting historical landscape. Something a bit like fear of selling out
pops up briefly in Roberts’ own article on Griffiths. Roberts quotes this ‘bitterly
sarcastic’ passage:
I take a look back through all the leaflets of the early 70’s. They are so fierce and so
straight […] Now it’s just a matter of pointing the worst law-breakers out and all will
go well. There’s a better state network too covering the arts for the whole country. If
I’m favoured they may even print this for me, as there is no way I can afford it.68
To put it a bit crudely, then, To My Contemporaries could be poetry concerned
with how much the poet and his contemporaries really get each other, and how much they’re
politely nodding without understanding, or shamefacedly nodding without listening. It may want to
examine Simmel’s ‘certain nescience […] of reciprocal concealment’.69 It may be poetry concerned with how everyone is really feeling,
with what everyone really wants. Poetry concerned with how much they truly believe they understand
each-other but are really at cross-purposes. Poetry worried about the secret cost associated with
actually getting each other. Its moments of literary self-criticism – ‘every
parallel/you can think of/pressed into the service/of surface agitation’ – could hint at
a real desire to deflate and demystify, and to shake off the exotic cultural capital that tends to
accumulate when the shortcomings and their critique spill from the same source (the game of art
being, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, ‘a game of “loser takes all” […] the
economic world turned upside down’).70
Close riffing on Roberts’s lines ‘warm half rhymes/of secret and defeat/never to be
reversed/or completed’ (‘Agitprop’), Grundy also conducts an exploration of
secrecy and prosody. Some of the issues implied here are very speculative yet very intriguing. What
might it mean to reverse a rhyme? What is the status of words written to rhyme that never find their
partners, or their entry points into their systems of echo? Is it meaningful to speak of
‘diachronic’ rhymes across draft versions of a text? Perhaps most intriguingly of all,
do rhymes share sounds the way people share secrets? If so, might we develop an entire taxonomy of
secrecy by analogy with the prosodic patterning of language? It is not the same inner ear that hears
the first rhyme-word and the second. As the inner ear roves over the contours of verse like a
turbocharged whelk, its apperception of rhymes depend not only on the proximity and similarity of
candidate pairs, but on the information encountered in the interval: on the iterating texture of
sense-in-sound that tinkers all the time with the reader’s anticipatory powers, priming them
receive or to miss this echo or that rhyme. Could such structures be transposed into social
epistemology, as a way of thinking through what it means to share a secret?
Acknowledgements
While studying at Northumbria University, and together with Professor Ian Davidson, we organised
two poetry symposiums, one about work in 2015, and one about secrecy in 2016. We – that is, Ed
and Jo – decided we’d probably be so good at organising symposiums that
we’d need to put a kind of check on our activities, in case we accidentally converted all
matter in the cosmos into a poetry symposium. So we chose subliminally incredibly cumbersome themes.
Work: will any researcher want to contribute to something that sounds like it might be a lot of
work? Secrets: will anyone feel completely comfortable sharing this Call for
Papers? We would like to thank all those who have participated and supported us in the journey from
symposium to special issue, especially Ian Davidson, Gareth Farmer, Scott Thurston, Vicky Sparrow,
Abhijit Pathre, our secret peer reviewers, and our seven brilliant contributors.
David Spittle, ‘Secret Poetry: Fifth Northumbria Poetry Symposium, 2016’,
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 8(1) (2016), e4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/biip.23
Keep is from the Old English cepan: to seek, to desire, to
seize, to hold, to heed, to attend to, to observe. As a noun, meaning the innermost stronghold of a
castle, keep dates from the late sixteenth century.
Anna Mendelssohn, ‘to any who want poems to give them answers’, in Implacable
Art (Cambridge: Equipage, 2000), p. 34. See also
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1–3 (1954, 1955, 1959), translated
by Stephen Neville Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
Mendelssohn, ‘Staged Whispers’, in Implacable Art, p. 3.
The kind of refuge poetry can offer shouldn’t be exaggerated. Eleanor Careless writes,
‘The Anna Mendelssohn archive holds twenty exercise and drawing books which Mendelssohn used
during her incarceration, but many of the pages are blank, and any writing tends to be brief and
unsystematic. These slim, barely-used regulation-issue notebooks rebuff the myth of the prolific and
productive writer behind bars, epitomised by male authors from Oscar Wilde to Ezra Pound, Antonio
Gramsci to George Jackson.’ Eleanor Careless, ‘Work in the Poetry and Prison
Correspondence of Anna Mendelssohn’, in Jo Lindsay Walton and Ed Luker (eds), Work in
Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry (Palgrave, London: 2019).
Mendelssohn, ‘to any who want poems to give them answers’, in Implacable
Art, p. 34.
Georg Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, American
Journal of Sociology 11 (1906), p. 455. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1086/211418
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, pp. 455–456.
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, p. 456.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’, in Selected Writings
Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 351.
Vicky Sparrow, ‘“[A] poet must know more than|a surface suggests”: Reading
and Secrecy in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn’. Journal of British and Irish
Innovative Poetry. 10(1): 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/biip.27
William Blake, Milton (1810), plate 35.
William Blake, ‘The Sick Rose’, in Songs of Experience (1794), plate 39. Cf. also plate 49, ‘A Poison Tree’:
‘I was angry with my friend;/I told my wrath, my wrath did end./I was angry with my foe:/I
told it not, my wrath did grow’.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.
10.
Luke Roberts, ‘Grave Police Music: On Bill Griffiths’. Journal of British and
Irish Innovative Poetry. 10(1) (2018). DOI:
https://doi.org/10.16995/biip.48
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1973), p. 403.
John Milton, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660),
in John Milton, David Loewenstein (ed.), Prose: Major Writings on Liberty, Politics,
Religion, and Education (Chichester: Blackwell, 2013), p. 436.
John Lilburne, England’s new chains discovered, or, the serious apprehensions of a
part of the people in behalf of the commonwealth; (being presenters, promoters, and approvers of the
Large Petition of September 11, 1648), in Andrew Sharp (ed.), The English
Levellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 149. Cf. the suggestion that Milton advocated an ‘aristocracy of
saints’ in JGA Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Chichester: Princeton
University Press, 1975), p. 414.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
(1922), trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
In 1788 Alexander Hamilton wrote in ‘The Executive Department Further Considered’,
The Federalist No. 70: ‘That unity is conducive to energy will not be
disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of
one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion
as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.’
Agamben points out that the exception is ‘the condition of being included through an
exclusion, of being in relation to something from which one is excluded or which one cannot fully
assume’. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995),
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 26–27. In developing the concept of the exception, Agamben builds upon and
challenges Foucault’s work on biopower, first by rejecting Foucault’s thesis that
sovereign production of the biopolitical body is distinctively modern, and second by acknowledging
that it has nevertheless been brought to light in distinctive ways in modernity, as spaces arise in
which the state of exception becomes the normal situation, the distinction between legal observance
and transgression disappears, and the subject of the law is abandoned to sovereign violence.
Alysia E. Garrison, ‘Agamben’s Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the
Law’, Law Critique 20(281) (2016).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9057-y
State secrecy might be constrained within something a bit like rules through
stout legal protections for whistleblowers, for journalistic sources, and for infrastructure which
enables anonymised leaks. But within the impersonal opacity of state agency, what ultimately plays
out is the distinctly personal agency of officials, sometimes well-aligned to laws, regulations,
contracts, and norms, but never necessarily so. Excessive confidence in unauthorised disclosure as
an adequate check on state secrecy draws close to the notion that, to paraphrase many an NRA member,
the only way to stop a bad guy with a secret is with a good guy with a secret. WikiLeaks, of course
– on which Dorothy Butchard briefly touches in her article in this issue – is a can of
worms that does not even give us the option of not opening it.
Dennis Broeders, ‘The Secret in Information Society’, Philosophy &
Technology, 29(3), pp. 293–305 (2016). DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0217-3
Broeders, ‘The Secret in Information Society’.
Cf. Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an
information civilization’, Journal of Information Technology, 30(1): 2015.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg, 1949). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridon (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
Dorothy Butchard, ‘Secrecy, Surveillance, and Poetic ‘Data-Bodies”’,
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 10(1): 2018.
Redell Olsen, Secure Portable Space (Reality Street Editions, 2004), p. 89.
There is probably more going on here though. There seems to be wordplay on ‘no
object’, although the pun is productively difficult to unravel. Perhaps the poem performs the
reification of flesh, insisting that flesh absolutely cannot be an ‘object’, while
simultaneously insisting that this impossibility is ‘no object’ to flesh nevertheless
really being objectified, both as data and the wider materialities containing that data.
Dorothy Butchard, ‘Secrecy, Surveillance, and Poetic ‘Data-Bodies”’,
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 10(1): 2018.
‘SUCH PASSIONS ABOUND/in the CYBERSPHERE!’: but how sarcastic is this observation
really? Does the poem just blast the cybersphere, or does it bless it as well? Perhaps there is a
fundamental undecidability at work, suggestive of the breakdown between devotee and critic:
admiration and contempt are shown in the same way, by sharing content, and thus colluding in its
possible virality.
Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016).
Cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (c.50 BCE), Book 4.
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You (London:
Penguin, 2012).
Dorothy Butchard, ‘Secrecy, Surveillance, and Poetic ‘Data-Bodies”’,
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 10(1): 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/biip.30
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude E. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §293. Also see ‘The
Innermost Secret’ section of this introduction.
Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor
Compositions, 2013), Kindle Locations 947–949.
What hidden formula determines the mise en scène which confronts you when you open Facebook
or Instagram, the precise arrangements of elements which digitise all the lives that fill your life?
The company’s organisational structure, which hybridises hierarchical structure with loose,
semi-autonomous teams pursuing tests and tweaks, ensures that there are multiple and ever-changing
formulae – perhaps, in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, ‘liquid’ formulae –
which underlie the moment-by-moment user experience. At the time of writing in March 2018, an
apparently large scandal is breaking regarding Facebook’s sale of data access to the political
consulting company Cambridge Analytica; it remains to be seen whether this or any similar future
events may gain enough traction to provoke any significant organisational, regulatory or legal
changes from this basic pattern.
Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, ‘The Surveillant Assemblage’, The
British Journal of Sociology, 51: pp. 605–622 (2000), p. 613. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071310020015280
Butchard, ‘Secrecy, Surveillance, and Poetic ‘Data-Bodies”’.
Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to
Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), p. 398.
In combination, these two clues – the secret flourishing at the interface between capital
and generalised exchange, the secret as the infrastructure which determines openness and secrecy in
the first place – hint that value may be a key element for further theoretical development.
Value, wrote Karl Marx, ‘converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try
to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an
object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. […] The
determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is […] a secret, hidden under the
apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities’. Karl Marx, Capital Vol.
I (1867), extracted in Jon Elster (ed.), Karl Marx: A Reader (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 66–67.
In thinking of the secret as temporal disjunction, we can’t help but allude to
Derrida’s concept of hauntology, and the notion that the secret is usually something ghostly,
something neither present nor absent. What Derrida writes about secret of Marx’s commodity
might even be fruitfully applied to any secret: that the secret is ‘is at the same time
profound and superficial, opaque and transparent, a secret that is all the more secret in that no
substantial essence hides behind it’. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of
the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1993), trans. Peggy Kamuf (New
York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 154.
Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence (New York: Stein and Day, 1999 [1979]).
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, p. 448.
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, p. 449.
Jordan Savage, “I don’t talk to the police except never”: Anna Mendelssohn, Tom
Raworth, and Anti-Confessional Life Writing’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative
Poetry. 10(1): 2018.
Butchard, ‘Secrecy, Surveillance, and Poetic ‘Data-Bodies”’.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §293.
Sparrow, ‘“[A] poet must know more than|a surface suggests”: Reading and
Secrecy in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn’.
This is an old controversy, of course: Ben Johnson saw rhyme as ‘Cozening judgment with a
measure/But false weight’; Samuel Daniel insisted it is ‘most delightfull to see much
excellently ordred in a small-roome, or little, gallantly disposed and made to fill vp a space of
like capacitie’ and that ‘for sure in an eminent spirit whome Nature hath fitted for
that mysterie, Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, rather giues him wings to mount and carries
him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight’.
The poem is by Rudyard Kipling, a poet Orwell elsewhere describes as a ‘good bad
poet’, locating his virtue in a platitudinous conservativism and false world view which
nevertheless prompts him to ‘imagine what action and responsibility are like’. George
Orwell, ‘Rudyard Kipling’, Horizon, (London, February 1942). Accessed
online: orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip.
Savage, “I don’t talk to the police except never”: Anna Mendelssohn, Tom
Raworth, and Anti-Confessional Life writing’; Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of
Secret Societies’, p. 444.
J.H. Prynne, ‘Resistance and Difficulty’, Prospect 5 (1961), p. 27. Speculative realism is represented by writers such as
Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux. The theme of resistance arises in speculative realism’s
broadly Heideggerian contention – e.g. against some of Bruno Latour’s work, which it
nevertheless draws heavily on – that things which exist withhold a secret reality independent
of all their relations. Many other contemporary materialisms, such as Jane Bennett’s vital
materialism and Karen Barad’s agential realism, join speculative realism in rejecting
anthropocentrism and seeking to do justice to the vast, vibrant, secret reality beyond human action
and experience. However, unlike Harman et al., by preserving the importance of political critique,
they themeatise resistance in a rather different way; they tend to be more sensitive to the
customary mix of Foucauldian, Deleuzian, Butlerian and Derridean metaphysics of much contemporary
literary studies, and seek to inform political resistance through a concern with becomings,
blurrings, and social constructions that are materially recalcitrant in some ways but not in others.
Paul Gilroy argues that humanism, perhaps as reparative humanism, is a likelier site of significant
political resistance, and rejects any rejection of anthropocentrism that functions to conceal the
history of racialization. However, Prynne’s ‘Resistance and Difficulty’ also
forges its own distinctive methods and terminology, and its treatment of resistance, difficulty, and
secrecy runs parallel with or away from these contemporary debates as often as it intersects with
them.
Sparrow, ‘“[A] poet must know more than | a surface suggests”: Reading and
Secrecy in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn’.
Dorothy Butchard, ‘Secrecy, Surveillance, and Poetic ‘Data-Bodies”’,
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 10(1): 2018.
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, p. 456.
Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerback’ (1845/1888), extracted in Jon Elster (ed.),
Karl Marx: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 23.
Nisha Ramayya, ‘Secreting Blackness in the Poetry of D.S. Marriott’, Journal
of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 10(1): 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/biip.38
Marriott, Haunted Life, p. 42.
Marriott, Haunted Life, pp. 42–43.
Marriott, Haunted Life, p. 212.
Ramayya, ‘Secreting Blackness in the Poetry of D.S. Marriott’.
David Grundy, ‘Poetry and Secrecy in Luke Roberts’s To My
Contemporaries’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
10(1): 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/biip.28
From Savage’s vantage, life writing might well include experimental writing such as Luke
Roberts’ To My Contemporaries (2015) (as well as Peter Manson’s
‘raven A’ (2016), ‘Four Darks in Red’ (2006) and Adjunct: An
Undigest (2001), discussed in Betteridge’s article). Savage’s notion of
‘anti-confessional writing’ might also be fruitfully applied, as much to see where it
fits badly as to see where it fits well.
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, p. 447.
Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor
Compositions, 2013), Kindle Locations 209–213.
Bill Griffiths, An Account of the End (Cambridge: Lobby Press, 1978), n.p.
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, p. 448.
Luke Roberts, To My Contemporaries (Cambridge: Self-published, 2015), n.p. Also
republished in The Chicago Review 60(3): 2017. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules
of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996), p. 21.
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
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