Language has its foot on the gas. (Who has their hand on the brake?) And for all the sense of advancement that this rapid processing suggests, the structure is ultimately regressive. In a strange echo with Deo, there’s a ‘house on fire’ here, too: “we got on like a house on fire / until the house literally caught on fire” (‘Queering the Cannon,’ 14). I don’t know whether chronicling the regression is exactly a critique here; perhaps, to again mention Auden, it is a diagnosis. Diagnosis might be a nice way to think of how we view the body in the world of Symes’ (beautiful) I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation. The collection begins, as collections of poems sometimes do, with a paraklausithyron:

stood before an automated door
that refused to acknowledge my existence
I thought
but I’m here

(‘Algorithm,’ 1)

In the arrangement of speaker before the obstruction/exclusion — and also, in their plea for ‘here-ness’ — we see the shape of the body in relation to global systems (the Internet (“the wifi exceeded expectations” (‘I don’t normally leave reviews for my Airbnb hosts, but since they insisted,’ 4)), and other literatures, too), a relation (over)determined by sped-up metabolic processes. It is an intimate account of a body in perplexity at the over-writtenness of life. Look at that title, a hyperthyroidism if ever I saw one. Where are you going there, hitched to that first line of one of the hardest bangers of 20th century American poetry, I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation? (To answer the rhetorical question: nowhere; precisely the point.) This is a kind of meta-meme, if such a thing is permissible to say, one which, in one sense, simply stages the affective flattening that is characteristic of online life, a culture of troping that is (perhaps) troping itself to affective and imaginative death. In a related sense, the title shows a hyperthyroidic response to the original stimuli, poetic precedent, for which Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ stands as functional icon. What is it like to write poetry today, an act of ‘generation’ in two linked senses, the later generations generating from the earlier ones. (Or is it that the later metabolisations metabolise the earlier ones?) It’s interesting that, like Deo, Symes does not actually name the interlocutor of his book. Ginsberg remains the unnamed stimulus, the echo of the next part of the opening “destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked” being too sufficiently iconic to require quoting here (‘Howl,’ Part I).

Yes, brave fellow to hitch his poetry book to that Ginsberg poem, which I have running through my head every time I pick up Symes’ book. Paul Valéry once wrote (though now I can’t find this anywhere), “the gods give the first verse for free.” Oh, how I would love to write this review without that other poem clanging away. But surely the invocatory fragment, sitting at the top of the work is supposed to, well, work this way. Think about Ginsberg! The ecstatic, angel hipster Ginsberg of the 1950s, recently licensed to unleash words “yacketayakking screaming vomiting” by friend Jack Kerouac’s discovery of spontaneous prose; or, the syllable-counting pedant Ginsberg of the 1980s (his “Red cheeked boyfriends” has gotta be one of the best Sapphic stanzas ever written in the English language (‘τεθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ‘πιδεύης φαίνομ’ ἀλαία,’ stanza 1); or, the chanting at Judge Hoffman during the trial of the Chicago Seven Ginsberg of 1969, my favourite (the first time he chants the Hare Krishna on the witness stand, a marshal of the court leaps to his feet and flings open his coat, as if to retrieve his gun) (‘Howl,’ Part I; Jason Epstein, ‘The Chicago Conspiracy Trial: Allen Ginsberg on the Stand,’ The New York Review of Books, 1970). Think about Ginsberg: goddammit, I did.¹

But thinking is less binding, I think, than other bodily processes. Language has its foot on the gas. Or, it has its fingers down its throat, bringing up the words. Look at this image of reading Kerouac as a kind of binge-and-purge bulimia:

                                     like hate-reading
On the Road because we owe it to America
to stick our fingers down its chauvinistic guts
and marvel at the vomit of words

(‘The Rock Stars are Dying,’ 50)

Marvelling at the word vomit, we seem in perpetual orientation to this question: what should the body of the poet do? Perhaps, if the poet may not gaze upon the bomb, they might, as in Deo’s book, eat the bomb. Perhaps, as in Symes’ book, they may eat the bomb and then vomit the bomb. Or perhaps the poet could ride on or gyrate with the bomb. They might, if the bomb were a cannon (which is to say, ‘the canon,’ a homophone that brings us to understand Weil precisely) and the poet were Cher:

even though I know it’s not that kind of cannon
every time someone says it all I can see
is her on that battleship in a leotard
queering the fuck out of the cannon

(‘Queering the Cannon,’ 13)

That sounds good. I like that. A poet may not gaze upon the bomb, but they can grind and shimmy all along the cannon. Symes’ joyous, libidinal Cher feels like an invitation to overthrow the strictures — if not of the canon as such, then at the very least, literary studies, with its generic, agribusiness titles (‘queering the—’, ‘inventing the—’, ‘decolonising the—’) — in an attempt to turn back time, if you will, on the stern business of academic reading whose rhetorical formulae keep “insert[ing] [themselves] unwantedly in conversation,” (13). What if we could really talk about poetry?

this may mean nothing here
but everyone should read the poet Thom Gunn
for the Apollonian form
& for the Dionysian content
    psychotropics never hit harder than
when experienced through iambs

(13)

This feels like a lovely purpose for the body of the poet: praising (Auden, again, in the final stanza of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’: “In the prison of his days / teach the free man how to praise”). There are several uncomplicated directives like this in Symes’ book, where the references feel like gentle reminders to read (‘everyone should read’ Cavafy, Rilke, Aidan Coleman, Hera Lindsay Bird — why not?) But psychotropics hit hardest through iambs? Don’t know about that! Still: Thom Gunn was a hottie, thanks for reminding us:

    I root and root, you think that it is greed,
It is, but I seek out a plant I need

(Thom Gunn, ‘Moly,’ stanza 10)

Moly was the sacred plant Hermes gave Odysseus on his way to deal with Circe’s pig magic. An apotropaic magic, the moly cure was known only to the gods. Anne Carson writes of the singularity of the word itself, explaining that, usually, when Homer invokes the language of the gods, he provides the mortal translation, too. But here,

[H]e does not. He wants this word to fall silent. Here are four letters of the alphabet, you pronounce them but you cannot define, possess, or make use of them. You cannot search for this plant by the roadside or Google it and find out where to buy some. The plant is sacred, the knowledge belongs to gods, the word stops itself.

(‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,’ Float, 2016: np.)

On one hand, one might say that much is said in Symes’ I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation. There’s a gorgeous poem about fucking someone called Adelaide (‘Fucking Adelaide,’ 20-21); there’s a glorious ekphrasis of an Arthur Streeton (“pastoral / twilight pastoral / pastoral” (‘Above Us the Great Grave Sky,’ 60)). The book maintains its diligent straddling of Cher’s cannon, a position from which one may speak eloquently of the strangeness of being young and old at once:

the day does nothing
but strip itself away
revolving to escape the sun
but only briefly

(‘Scatole Personali,’ 31)

Perhaps, most movingly, the book presents the heaviness of feet each side of the ‘cannon’ of masculinity:

I worked in an English department with only female lecturers 
& tutors while all the profs were male & getting paid more
unsurprisingly when I taught Romantic literature it seemed
all the texts were by male authors

(‘Queering the Cannon,’ 14)

                                                         only you
the lack of other voices is shocking

(‘Late Night Thoughts,’ 55)

Is this to atone? Is it powerful enough to simply witness and describe? On the other hand, one might say that the power of Symes’ book is how often it falls silent — or, to speak like Carson, how the word stops itself:

I think about ripping up the handbrake
on my best friend’s mum’s Daihatsu
on the way to school

snaking our way through the teacher’s car park

	       arrested in motion together

(‘Speeding Up & Slowing Down,’ 39)

The official desire for the Daihatsu’s burnout masks the speaker’s deeper desire — that must not be named — which is to pull the brake on everything. To pull the brake on language, if not to stop the proliferation of words, altogether, means to leave the smallest of traces of them, so that something that might be worth saving, is saved; or, that silence, that nothing for something, the un-Googleable moly of the gods, might restore us from the pigs we’ve become:

    will this translate?
    does it leave a mark?

[…]

it’s just easier than making conversation
with awkward relatives

                                                     scrubbing the dishes
         & wiping my hands on my good jeans

                                    leaving such a small trace

(‘Nice Things, Artfully Arranged,’ 74-75)