glitchings
by Stu Hatton
(outer) Publishing, 2014
‘Glitching,’ sharp and immediate, is a – word that sounds like it belongs to this modern internet and computer age: moments of fracture as a website struggles to load, fragmented by popups, weird demands of your exact location and the failure of Flash to connect properly. It suggests twitching and distorting monitors, the crackle of an old modem and illogical videogame surrealism, frustrations and interruptions ‘Not of substance but of form’ (‘entheogen’).
Stu Hatton’s book, glitching, is true to this contemporary sense of the word, laying bare a poetry that often seems to have been ground through the blunt binary language of computer programming. Like the 1s and 0s of binary code, Hatton’s poems are largely visual, his language jerking between, even through, various grammatical signs – dashes and slashes, ellipses and parentheticals, question and quotation marks. The effect is a sense of broken transmission, often leading the reader to moments of distracted or disappointed insight:
who’s impersonating who
here? / who’s mindblowing
who (she too
is edgy / & interior
/ late-night
drip-crack /
(‘coupling’)
The question – pertaining perhaps to a sense of poetic tradition – dissolves, the slashes acting like internal line-breaks, as the speaker evasively resorts to non-sequiturs and blunt, ‘coupled’ syllables. Whatever is being projected belongs to the poem: ‘hedges & trades (they | ride within / the system.’
Continue reading →
To Koskino 