The Holy Hermaphrodite
chapbook by AD Hithcin
published by Shadow Archer Press
Any writer who expresses gratitude to Genesis P-Orridge must have something to come with, and Antony Hitchin, as one might expect, does. This is a short chapbook, but full of evasive and elusive content. The cut-up technique has been often employed without sufficient thought, without cutting up good things, and Hitchin seems to be the modern master of this poetic tool. The poems are evocative and one senses that the necessary intervention and touching up of the purely aleatory has been done with a fine hand – and it has been done, otherwise a couple of endings are too perfect.
bare light bulb
blurs a halo
white like mortuary.
(from “Nubian”)
The posit is that the Holy Hermaphrodite destroys dualities, a little theoretically blue-eyed of course, but it is an enchanting figure, though the aims of the book as transcending dualisms and destroying binaries are fortunately not essential to the aesthetic effect of the whole if interpreted in terms of questioning the propositional structure of language and thus thought. The worth of it, of course, is that it is transgressive, even though it does not transgress against any logical laws, because you can only do that at the price of no longer aspiring to be taken seriously. And this book deserves, very much, to be taken seriously, it resurrects the Burroughsian cadaver very nicely, and revitalizes the thing. What needs to be transgressed is not binaries since the fundamental nature of thought is binary. And the value of transgressive writing is that it challenges dichotomies. By this I mean unnecessarily and exclusionarily established axiological extensions to binary pairs like male/female. Warped evaluations built upon the structure which undeniably exists in terms of congenital dispositions of organisms to structuring.
The Holy Hermaphrodite is a mythological creature who can do this, spared the habitual physiological plight of genetic mosaics in terms of illnesses, short life expectancy, and retardation. And thus s/he can serve as an ideal to question not so much valuations of the sexes or genders, but the whole value of normality, normalcy, and norms , especially moral and ethical ones – they are all narrow-minded and disgusting.
Apart from that transgressive intellectual motor, counter-valorization of the allegedly immoral abnormal, the elision of amorality with immorality, the glory of the book is the language:
burning out
on
hot nights velvet wetness
smoke smouldering, coiling
borders bleeding at the fireplace, the corners
as a bedtime story,
high on amphetamine sun pouring liquid …
lounging was our violence
O the memories!
through transparent membrane walls everything starts
changing
flashing past in
fragrance of white musk
(from “Stars”)
One senses in the book the use of cut-up in waves, sometimes intense, sometimes sparse, but always executed with masterly control. Buy this chapbook if you want to see what can still be done with words. Don't buy it if you respect the moral and aesthetic status quo. In fact, if you respect that, then stop reading this instantly – the rest of you, go buy it HERE.
David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats, and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his three available full length poetry books, various chapbooks, and almost 850 poems in or forthcoming at 340 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog, AUTOEROTIC ELEGIES. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. There's a new chapbook of dead snakes at Rain over Bouville, another is coming from Poptritus Press in the summer sometime. A novella Henrietta forgets is forthcoming from Isms Press. Round the beginning of next year a large anthology of his poetry called laughing at funerals from Epic Rites Publications, as well as a 50 poem chapbook called Hellbound which is appearing sooner.
