Poetry and Secrecy in Luke Roberts’ To My Contemporaries

Abstract

This article will address the relations between poetry and secrecy in two recent poems by Luke Roberts: ‘Agitprop: An Ode’ (2014), and To My Contemporaries (2015). Secrecy is shown to be not only a thematic concern, but part of the operations of their language. To My Contemporaries questions the tendency towards modes of ‘secretive’ sonic patterning found in ‘Agitprop’, as part of its resolve “to turn/my self-defences/inside out”. The poem ends with a chastened mode of beginning again, “flinching in compression”, after a grand gathering together of the titular contemporaries, which has seemed both to be invocation and farewell. The poet examines their own method and its relation to the pleasures of concealment and the near-paranoia born of conditions of political defeat and personal loss. They question the adequacy of certain models of “literary allusion and disclosure”, of a poetry overly allusive, elusive and self-reflexive. The poem does not seek to obscure or conceal defeat through imagining it never happened, nor to valorise it in a condition of melancholy – one which preserves the lost, or secret object, in the structure of the language itself, in order to deny its loss. Rather, in reckoning with loss – and with the poet’s own strategies of “self-defence”, strategies of internalisation which must be “turned inside out” – the poem seeks to find a way to continue, a dialectical relation between concealing and revealing, defeat and continuance, noun and verb, object and quality.