DISPATCH: Do you have Other Plans? If A Leaf Falls Press at Doña (London)

A double launch for Eleanor Tennyson’s Half-Life & Poppy Cockburn’s Naked Oysters

Mismatched contact lenses aggressively grazed my eyes instead of, as promised, seamlessly floating atop my tear film. I was on my way to N16. It had been a week of minor tragedies and I had lost my glasses. It had been a week of minor tragedies and I would later find out that my left lens could not simply be reduced to being an ill-fitting contraption but was indeed an expired one. My blurry vision and I then prepared ourselves for aesthetic pleasure, perhaps, of the multi-sensory kind. I hoped to alleviate this, my most minor of sufferings, by becoming the orators’ *attentive guard. I had no other plans.

The windowless, subterranean, and velvety pink interiors of Doña, the bar serving as the evening’s temporary home for the literary and poetic, felt, in the immediacy of the harsh contrast to the High Street above, like a time-limited return to some primordial comfort. It smelt of incense as the soft lighting played tricks with my already strained eyes. Quick adaptation gave way to the realisation that this was, of course, a cocktail-idled social space, currently marked by the acceptable merriment of those coming in from the cold and the drink-swishing and talkative waiting that more often than not accompanies an encroaching reading. An assortment of If a Leaf Falls Press’ book list, largely of the limited-edition kind with a recognisably agreeable materiality, lay upon a table to the right of the soon to-be stage. Sam Riviere, the publisher and writer behind the project, seemed to be of an equally agreeable nature, allowing me to freely pick a copy of one of the available titles following a brief conversation behind the stacks of his editorial oeuvre.

Though the event was organised around the double launch of Poppy Cockburn’s debut poetry collection Naked Oyster and Eleanor Tennyson’s Half-Life, her second published project, we were to be entertained, informed, moved, and perhaps even gently amused by three other poets: Daphne DiFazio, Karola Karlson, and Cristina Boncea. I can assure all that such reactions did indeed eventually come to pass, initially catalysed by Sam Riviere’s own introductory remarks and provision of the authors’ biographies, not simply in the form of the usual listing of accomplishments and dull facts (for the sake of mystery, we need not know when or where you were born unless the answer is exceedingly interesting) but by a detailed numerological analysis of the writers’ names. The choice to provide a detailed image of the poets’ psychic topography as well as a speculative account of their futures was, I contend, alluring in its novelty as much as it seemed almost obscenely idiosyncratic in nature. Nevertheless, I too shall cave. In this vein, it may be pertinent to mention that five, the total number of poets that graced the stage (I, of course, cannot account for the total number of poets present), may be interpreted as the numerological master of change, known to follow an active and unpredictable path. And so a tonally-varied evening, jointly rich in its obtuse affordances, came to pass.

Cristina Boncea started as the ceilings began to thunder, with the furniture from the restaurant above assertively grazing the floorboards and unseen people making their presence known through their cacophonous, mighty gait as if we were the unwilling aural witnesses to a game of musical chairs. It was oddly well-placed, in tune with stanzas that flowed like delusion scene building, marked by existential side-way glances with the contemporary absurdity of a digital native. In as far as the audience was being introduced to her work, so too was she being introduced to the audience, the poet, born and based in Romania, stood before us as the international cool girl du jour on her brief passage through the London scene.

Karola Karlson followed, her writing tinged by the wit of desperate times, amoral though determined in its poieses. The room quieted as the smell of incense slowly dissipated, replaced by sudden gusts of cold air as a latecomer or two slowly entered the darkened space. She spoke quickly, her gaze lowered in rapt attention as the room followed in lock step, at times taken aback by the strange or abject, though ever-engaged as we were dragged through a landscape of tentative surrealism. I took notes, as I am wont to do, leaving with strange, now meaningless fragments of text as if to respect but ultimately not cross some unspecified boundary of art and performance.

Another poet with a grand alliterative name, Daphne DiFazio, graced us with her Austinite presence, further mirroring the world-building grandeur of her artistic compatriots. With quasi-magical-realism and fable-like logic, she remained in persuasive control of her own words, capably occupying the absurd and incestuous tales of her own creation. In communion of sorts, I found myself repeating some of the shared lines, as if being told to ‘memorise, or else.’ These were times of fascination and sensory exertion, my left eye was burning and, unable to effectively wink, I was forced to briefly close both eyes, finding myself now ensnared solely by her oration. My vision was ultimately restored as the room began to applaud and I dutifully joined in, my mind still lingering on the contours of DiFazio’s narrative.

Enveloped by the vape plumes of her own creation and visibly delighted by her numerological name analysis (she concerns herself primarily with the material world), Eleanor Tennyson, eventually took the microphone, adjusting its height and justly reinforcing her right to be clearly heard as one of two ‘women of the hour.’ In an almost rebellious act, she read exclusively from her previous collection, The Submissive, sharing lyricism so aptly constructed as to become common knowledge. We spoke thereafter and she confessed that the work found in the new book, Half-Life, was better kept to the page and, as such, I better explore it in my own time. I can assure all it was to be later enjoyed languidly, her words porously spreading from East to North London. In the meantime, I handed her a piece of paper torn from my notebook, quickly and perhaps illegibly writing my email and phone number down which, though genuine in intent, was perhaps a temporally misplaced act. She nevertheless paid her respects to my enthusiastic scrap.

Poppy Cockburn was introduced last and, quickly snatching a copy of her book, Naked Oyster, began flipping through its pages with tactful randomness. Short though incisive, her poems filled the space with cutting wit, reminding all of the pithy, generous art of the aphorism. She was tactful, her oration controlled in gleeful performance while we, the audience, were moulded into mere puppets, being stirred into laughter at precisely the right times. She only paused once, staring at an unknown page we were informed contained her own favourite poem. She refused to share it, a theatrical and undoubtedly correct decision. This too should be a matter of later material re-entanglement between ink and eye, for the spectator once again made reader.

People spoke animatedly and merrily mingled after the reading ended, efficiently breaking the artificial barrier once upheld between performer and audience member. By that point, my lacking visual acuity made people-watching nigh impossible and intimate conversation an inevitability. Enveloped in a reddish-pink hue, later plans were discussed and strangers’ lives were excitedly contextualised as avid conversationalists quickly skirted passed dull pleasantries. I slowly packed my bag, carefully placing some newly acquired books alongside crumpled notes and faltering pens. This had been an evening of paper and print on all fronts, with poems being slowly dropped on the floor, strewn notebooks and briskly handled titles defining the performative mode. Arguably, the writers’ previous movements had seemed to mirror, in their control over the material evidence of their creative process, a deep respect for the act of writing as well as that of careful recitation. The event was, by all accounts, an aptly curated affair, with Sam Riviere’s valued aesthetic sensibilities making themselves increasingly evident as my vision faulted.