(Kent, , 2017) (I) Concentricity is measured in vaudeville performers weighing down on an imitation of intimacy. It isn’t, but stick a line like that in a poem and you’ve subverted any expectation the reader had. (II) A transmission is what happens when status is blind to somebody else’s energy, and here I am held hostage to every phantasmagorical museum I’ve constructed on a wave of insomnia.
(III) I don’t know all the science, sure, but would I like to be a scientist? No, though I’d do anything for eight or so millimetres of mercury. (IV) If I could eat my weight in money I’d waste a perfectly valuable financial investment but at least I’d get the taste of how much I loathe myself: humid August drug- sticky, sweet like liquorice I imagine. The title of Aaron Kent’s second collection, , suggests wordplay as well as politics.
The adjectival form of class (“class-ic”) could mean the writing to be an exploration of working-class-ness. But there’s also “classic” in the sense of a significant work-of-art. A “working classic” may be a work-in-progress, or a classic that talks outside the grand canonical box.
The term “working-class poetry” implies obedience to stereotypes of class thinking, but Kent is subtler and broader than this. In , he explains the politics underlying his writing, teaching and publishing and his resistance to poetry’s “gentrification”. One form of “gentrification” which Kent’s work implicitly questions seems to .