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     David Kennedy’s engaging Cities overcomes the flatness endemic to less accomplished aleatory writings; more than a record of a finished experiment, Cities exists as a site where the energies of language are still at work. The pamphlet is intricate in appearance: twenty-four poems, teetering in raft-like boxes, glut the pages, abutting other verses as well as boxed accessory information – dates, techniques, sources. This presentation gives Cities a baroque, just-readable archaeology which admits both the intervention and irretrievability of the sequence which produced it, and so enacts the preoccupation with history and “variations on the present” exhibited in the poems themselves.

     The process by which Cities was composed, by the recombination of an earlier sequence itself generated by splicing “original and found material” via “cut-up techniques”, recalls the shock-tactics of century-old aesthetic movements, and yet the images thus collaged are distinctly late-twentieth century in scope. ‘The Buddhist Way’ exists in a universe that includes both New Age progressivism and a celebrity detective “filming another teargas endorsement”. The same poem lists “socialism” and “bands with synthesizers” as examples of “everything else/ that used to seem real back then”. The energy generated by such collisions is doubled by dissonances of diction and content; the outrageous is often paired with academic jargon for an effect which is humorous and not altogether parodic: “I should really like to spend the year/ researching bondage motifs in the films of Gene Kelly”.

     Such markers and dictions seemingly locate the poems at the intersection of the right here and the right now – in the aftermath of  “that shadow Europe”, “where the cakes have names/ Like Granny’s Little Coffin”. Yet the text’s ontogeny pre-empts the existence of a speaker, at any time, anywhere. This vacancy is plainest in the aimless, blunted samples of the confessional that surface in Cities. In the poem generated by the last line of ‘The Buddhist Way’, for example, an apparent reminiscence on “our town” spins only into a solipsistic exercise in which a childhood figure is crowned “Miss Repetition” and the speaker recalls planning to write a fictive account of her.

     Contemplation of the personal is not so much rejected in Cities as exposed as failing. In the more interesting ‘A Glass Staircase’,

                          you are not beyond wishing, at this point,
that your life[...] featured
a glass staircase,
not as a gimmick but a translucency encouraging
exploration of the upper and lower showrooms.
Disappointed, you stay in bed for days.

Even the lyric position seems strained and strange; a poem which begins and ends with the intimate appeal “Do you remember?” relates a reminiscence so surreal, featuring immobilised horses, as to render the lyric situation unreconstructable. The readability of the lyric, its convention of conventionality, is undone by the content with which it is made to contend.  

     Due to this evacuation of the speaker, the pamphlet’s “I”’s and “you”’s seem more than hypothetical, revealed as the shufflable tiles of language rather than the referees of extant or lyric personages. Read another way, the poems themselves seem to sense this “emptiness” in place of the personal and individual. “I must confess a curious emptiness/ as if an inoperable fragment of deep space was lodged in me”, reads one; “I can see you’re thinking suggestive fragments/ but where does the perpetual sea fit in?” reads another; “These are moments, cold and perfect/ but they aren’t really happening”, another admits. Almost every poem includes such a moment in which the text, somehow personified, acknowledges the dismemberment its depersonalised composition has produced.

     To be sure, Kennedy’s own stripes show clearly through the scaffolding of Cities. As the nostalgic thrust of his work predicts, there is a decided strain of Eliot in many of the pieces, a denatured landscape à la Waste Land, or the occasional Prufrockian indulgence, as when ‘The Age’ compares water to “the artfully distressed linen suit/ one woman admires on another in the foyer of a concert hall”. On the other hand, the ease with which idioms of TV and science fiction enter the poems effects an advancement of non-canonical texts which might more properly ally Kennedy with Muldoon.

     Cities places the reader in the curious, disorienting position of adducing style, persona, even a seemingly consistent pathos, to a text which discounts such concepts as constructed at best. This undecidability creates a space of engagement for the reader. Even the explanatory note, rather than “accounting for” the existing version of the poems, does little to specify what kind of revision or re-envisioning these third-hand texts have undergone to arrive at their current state. Sophisticated as it may be, then, Cities does not hesitate to play the ready ace-in-the-hole of aleatory writing – that, even as it refers the reader to apparati of composition beyond the “author” himself, the deliberate indeterminacy of these apparati prompts the reader’s guilty reflex to apply for enlightenment to that denied yet still glamorous hand.