on Matthew Tomkinson

Oems

Matthew Tomkinson’s oems is a sequence of thirty-six lipogrammatic poems that omit all ‘ascending or descending elements’ (hence its title, excluding the downward-thrusting p). In the post-free-verse universe there perhaps remains a kneejerk assumption that any such exercise must be a matter of righteous self-effacement, of abdicating authorship to algorithm, purging the written page of the interpolated and debased lyric ‘I’. But Tomkinson’s compositional method actually springs directly from the hinterland of that ‘I,’ documenting and exorcising his experiences of OCD (a more ravaging condition than the flippant social-media use of the term would imply).

As such, oems can be read both as a series of playful, mind-flexing exercises in constrained composition and as the displaced expression of something deeper, more emotionally compelling, and more human. Before expanding on that point, however, lets explore the terrain of Tomkinson’s flatlands. Thematically speaking, his poems run a surprising gamut: there are, perhaps predictably, self-reflexive ruminations on the method (‘an excisor – a remover / a voracious eraser / a manicure – a circumcision’). But there are also neat little language games touching on the psychology of art and film (‘cinema / zeroes in on / essences // essences / are / recursive // recursive / means / cocoa in a mirror // a mirror / is a canvas/ as seen in meninas’). There are impossibly squeezed-out narrative and polemic sequences – ‘minimise avariceness / rove oversize casinos / commence inversion’ – and little anti-imperialist graffitos: ‘erasure / is a / war crime // evenness / means / massacres // u.s.a vows / concussive rain / summons zeus’. Each poem, in other words, is bounded by subject matter ...