Roger and me.(Roger Ailes)

   Our money is where your mouth is, clammy as that   strict blip of successive exit holes, into the light over   which is dubbed the light in filth-blistered orthognathic 2D flying   elf neon crossbar 261. To buy it if you see   what we mean is to see by it: nothing matters more   any time, just kick back / any time, in moccasins   --Keston Sutherland, "Roger Ailes" 

Since 2002's Antifreeze, Keston Sutherland's poetry has been more and more intensively directed towards escaping, and failing to escape, its conversion into unmeaning. Each volume searches for conditions of truth; each one revises how one might want truth, in the face of a world that inverts, displaces, or buys off such commitments. The inversion of truth is one of the main topics of Neocosis. "Roger Ailes," the poem on which I want to concentrate, is devoted to the CEO of Fox News, whose digitally distended face appears on the volume's cover. The poem concerns the conversion of information into misinformation, of precision into distortion, of attentiveness into a conveyor-belt for dumber and dumber forms of gratification. "Our money is where your mouth is," the poem's opening words, suggest that we are now paying for the privilege of being lied to.

In such circumstances, the problem of how to mean what you say (and understand what others mean) becomes excessively complex. Directness and precision have become placebos, facts and statistics habitual alibis for economic and military violence. "Roger Ailes" makes reference to Albert Wohlstetter's "influential advocacy of precision," for instance, taking care to elide the word "-bombing." In 2001, Sutherland began to wrestle with formulations such as: "Is it true to accept vaguely that I am what I don't mean?" What is vague, he suggests, does not "have a chance of being true." And in an inverted world, vagueness might just be a form of vigilance, might honestly represent the distortion and inconstancy of life itself.

What began as a poetic of exhilarated damage--in The Rictus Flag, "the gears / shift and we fly, snowdrift panics against / the windscreen"--has become, under the pressure of Sutherland's ongoing reflection on the vitiation of communication, a poetry that sounds increasingly oblique and comical, and sometimes, if this makes sense, just rather weirdly and weakly wrong. Take lines such as: "there is nothing but love over / it is all there is there nothing other / than it no there"; or "Fox / is arrive now have we obtain the future our folk are real"; or "watch it because is / that you that flip-chart, then." Confessions are skewed and digressive, their tenses and object structure warped. These kinds of neutralizing syntactical disorientations--in the midst of passages of seemingly intense urgency--are a hallmark of Sutherland's recent writing, and act as a kind of deflationary measure against his earlier lyricism. Neocosis plays constantly at being wrong. The poetry--perhaps in a response to Wohlstetter--incorporates moments of seemingly random precision ("spitroasted eclectically by 17.16 and 39.74 both"). Significant lines are given to fictional personae ("Zarobad gustatory in his crypt," "Rex Dickson is back") and action occurs in places that sound as vague and hypothetical as they are real: "Anantnag running on," "the zips of Qiatou."

This is one level at …