In October, on a dark and gloomy evening, Wakefield Press welcomed many brave punters into our bookshop for the launch of Heather Taylor-Johnson’s latest poetry collection, Alternative Hollywood Ending.
We are thrilled now to be sharing launcher Amelia Walker’s insightful and thought-provoking speech.
To begin, I acknowledge that we meet on Kaurna Yerta, the land of the Kaurna people. I pay my respect to Kaurna Elders, past and present, and to all First Nations people, whose sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
More than 70 years ago now, Hannah Arendt wrote:
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organise masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
(Arendy, Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin Books 2017 Edn., p.IX)
Arendt’s words resonate loud as ever in our world today – a world in which racism, sexism, xenophobia, and violence scream from every street corner and glow from every screen, while disability rights are eroded and injustices of uneven privilege denied; a world in which, for some, viral videos and social media likes matter more than climate change and global extinction; a world in which large numbers of people vote for and support despotic regimes like those of Donald Trump and the recently-elected Italian neo-fascist government, while here in Australia, facilities we should call concentration camps hold refugees as prisoners, and the young people who ought to become the next generation of First Nations Elders live — and die — terrorised by threats of police violence, incarceration, and worse.
This is the world to which Heather Taylor Johnson speaks.
These are the problems she tackles head on in Alternative Hollywood Ending, a brilliant storm of a book that, in the words of Melinda Bufton, ‘maps electricity between bodies and the urgent, astonishing dangers of our present moment’. As Peter Boyle notes, Alternative Hollywood Ending tells ‘in a humane and thought-provoking way … of human endurance and the daily battle that living is for so many of us’, resulting in what Michelle Cahill declares ‘a book of witness: heartfelt, keen and unfaltering’.
For me, Alternative Hollywood Ending is all these things. Most crucially, it is a book of questions — questions that crucially need to be asked right now, for to question is to raise thought, and the act of thinking is, I believe, among the greatest ethical imperatives of our times. Again, I draw inspiration from Hannah Arendt, who diagnosed thoughtlessness as a key factor in the rise of early twentieth century totalitarian regimes, and urged critical reflection as a foundational condition for action to prevent and challenge totalitarian injustices in future times. Let’s not forget that Arendt was herself a German Jew who escaped the German nazi regime. She was also a poet who continued writing poetry and believing in the arts as a space of and for social change — a ‘space of appearance’ in which to make problems visible and prompt dialogue about the changes that are required.
That is what Alternative Hollywood Ending does. It brings things up. It puts them on display. It asks, Why? And also, Why not? What might happen if we were to try different ways of living, of being together in this mess?
Such speculations are present from the very opening, via the first piece, ‘What If I Write A Poem?’, which is composed entirely of questions:
What if I’m afraid? What if the tree’s shadow
takes up the entire back yard? What if white
didn’t sound like right? What if I ride my bike home
after the film? What if I book it in?
As the book continues, the questions do too. Some are explicit, such as in ‘Man & Man, Man & Ape, Ape & Ape & Women’:
How do we fill up on emptiness & preserve ourselves through shame?
What place does art have when publicity’s the currency of our time?
And in ‘Trying to Write about Meniere’s’:
Too many times you’ve wondered: if each word is monotone, why, then, should we sing? What is it to say ‘poetry saves’ when bile dribble stains your favourite writing dress? Or to say you’re tired of backstroking in a circle when you close your eyes to the glaring sun? Or to say when you are sleeping in your rocking bed which rides upon waves, you yourself are dreaming that you’ve wrapped your body in a swinging cocoon and will emerge days later, wings and all.
Then there are questions not raised directly, but brought to the mind of the reader via the subtle yet striking mixtures of statements and images the poetry curates. For instance, in ‘Motion / Stasis’, Heather writes of ‘a beetle on its back’:
… I didn’t want to touch it
so I dragged its struggle inside of me instead, and the statue
of a women’s head with resting eyes lying sideways in our garden,
it tipped over months ago and I can’t bring myself to set it upright.
This scene, though it contains no question in terms of obvious grammar or phrasing, prompts the reader to ask: what is the connection between the struggling insect and the broken statue — between a humiliated insect and a woman’s head in stone — in short, between the animal and the human?
Each reader will answer such questions differently. For me personally, the poem ‘Motion / Stasis’ is a reminder that as a human I am always-already animal. I am a human animal. The paradoxes this situation provokes are what I ponder as I read Alternative Hollywood Ending’s section, ‘What We Think Of When We Think Of The Earth’, in which each poem stages some form of encounter with the more-than-human world – with fellow animals, trees, landforms, weather, and more. These poems remind us that this world is dying. Floods, fires, and quakes are all signals of that. And we as a species are part of the world, part of the dying eco-system. We are endangered at our own hands. The ever-sustained, not-quite-spoken questions include, What can we do? Is it too late? What’s coming next?
The second section, ‘Thump’, opens with a poem, also titled ‘Thump’, about feminism and ongoing injustices against women.
Written from raw lived experience, the poems in ‘Thump’ tackle misogyny, gender-based-violence and the intersecting political problems in and beyond the United States of America that were brought to crisis point via the tyrannical reign of multiply-impeached former president Donald Trump. Reading ‘Thump’, I am reminded of the mid-nineties work of political philosopher Judith Butler, who refuted so expertly the childhood lie that ‘sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can never hurt us’ to demonstrate the real material, mental and bodily forces that words, written and spoken, can affect, most particularly in cases of hate speech.
‘Thump’ is the section of the book that challenges me most and is hardest to read, precisely because it is also so important. When I open to ‘The Last Word’, on page 22, I am sickened by the opening quotation, directly from Donald Trump taking an unnecessary swipe at Hillary Clinton, using the word ‘schlonged’ as a metaphor for losing or being beaten. The poem ‘The Last Word’ reminds us just what an image and mentality this turn of phrase reflects. It is a necessary but crucial thing to confront, especially for women, non-binary people, and men, who act as our allies. In daring to make this uncomfortable confrontation, ‘The Last Word’ turns the violence back on itself. And, through a deft combination of dry humour and visual poetics, it really does manage to have the last word — even though the book goes on for many pages, unpacking many more problems, reminding us that these struggles in the real world must continue too. While Heather Taylor-Johnson writes from the perspective of a white woman, she does so with clear recognition throughout of the racial injustices rampant worldwide, of the intersections between race, gender and other modes of oppression, and the ongoing need for those of us who were born white to unpack our privileges and get behind movements towards change.
The third section, ‘Sick-Ass Love’, speaks up about living with illness and calls out ableism via poems about bodies and the many challenges as well as joys that come with living in one.
‘Your Body Is a Casino’ evokes parallels of ‘fear and innocence’ between health and gambling, declaring: ‘Life is full of spectacle, you must learn to love bloodshot so you can look yourself in the eye’. Also in this section is the powerful triptych, addressed to a late friend, ‘Three Ways to Write About Cancer’, the fine balance between raw emotion and poetic crafting in which makes it, for me among the highlights of the collection – although I will say, there are many.
The fourth section, ‘A Useful Body’ extends the themes of health, and embodiment, forging connections with earlier explorations of gender, violence and injustice.
In these poems most of all, the feminist declaration that the personal is political sings strong as we are hauled into contact with the deep ways bodies and souls suffer strains and swipes of social, structural, medical, and economic systems that surely need not leave so many people suffering. As throughout the book, questions resound continually, whether voiced explicitly or not. The most persistent question is this one: Why? Things don’t have to be this way. For instance, the poem ‘A Useful Body’ describes police officers dismissing a woman’s call for help after sexual assault and turning the blame onto her rather than the crime’s perpetrator. The same poem makes a key point via its relay of an unwanted sexual encounter with a man reluctant to hear the word ‘no’ as ‘no’:
Why did you have to play with me like that?
I should’ve asked him the exact same thing.
The key question here is not the one explicitly asked, but that of why such questions still need raising when ‘no’ has been said, and said clearly, and ought to be among the simplest of terms our vocabulary offers.
Yet for all the politics and the problems it takes on, this is at the same time a book of beauty and defiant joy, a book of radical hope. Poems of love, sensuality, friendship, nature, connection and camaraderie remind of all the things still worth fighting for. Moments of darkness and desperation are punctuated by wry humour and defiance. The portrait of Patti Smith on page 24 is for me a particularly inspiring reminder of why and how those of us who care must keep caring – must keep making art, music, poetry and books like this one I hold in my hand.
Heather, thank you for writing this book. Thank you for asking these questions that so needed to be asked. Thank you for bringing these issues to the space of appearance, where they so need to be in order for us to have the dialogues, the difficult conversations on which justice, life, and survival deeply depend.
At the beginning of this speech, I referenced Hannah Arendt’s case for the ethical imperative of thought and thinking. Through this talk I have sought to bring out some of the ways in which this book compels thought and thus rises to that imperative. In closing I’d like to add that, alongside thoughtlessness, Arendt perceived radical loneliness as another key factor that renders people vulnerable to ideologies of hatred and totalitarian rule. Overcoming loneliness by forging and maintaining meaningful connections is thus also a radical act, and one your book enacts with skill. For we are living, again, in times of overwhelming isolation, indeed atomisation, and the many risks to which this leads. By showing vulnerability and sharing pain as well as beauty, your book demonstrates poetry’s capacity to reach across divides, to remind us, we are all in this together. Again, I thank you for writing it. And I urge everybody here, please, read it – really, read it. And if you have the means, buy a copy for a friend – or twelve. These are words that we all need to read.