Write to Live: Henson’s Idiot Verse
[vc_row][vc_column][title type="subtitle-h6"]Colten Parr[/title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]Enter Keaton Henson.Tortured artist, bearded brooding hipster, a young recluse. English. Producer of four critically-acclaimed albums, creator of art exhibited around the world, composer of scores released for ballet and film. As of lately, author of Idiot Verse, his first collection of poetry.I pre-ordered Idiot Verse in excited anticipation. Navigating the strange and unconventional website of a strange and unconventional man, I scrolled past the tea towel promising, “This house contains unfulfilled dreams and a general sense of ennui,” a plate that reads “I eat only to live another day to despise you,” and a clock which replaces every hour with “why bother,” to add to my cart what I really wanted: his words.What I expected is what I got: a highly personal anthology that looks inside the man himself. Like his music, the book records Henson’s insomnia, pessimism and loneliness in crafted lines of poetry. His work binds bedlam to page, each poem another written moment of confusion, questioning, musing, and much more.
I found Idiot Verse to be frank and very engaging. Short enough to be read through in a single sitting and interspersed throughout with penciled doodles, the book is not only aesthetically intriguing but highly accessible. Henson accomplishes this by continual address to readers.Acknowledging his fan following in vulnerable verse, Keaton Henson reserves room for readers in the space of his poetry. He addresses them, identifies with them, and exhorts them in various ways throughout the book. From the very first poem Henson initiates a reader to writer, writer to reader dialogue. The intimacy of the text illuminates his experience as an artist, poet, and musician, and expresses a deeply felt appreciation for his fans. Despite his reclusive tendencies, fear of the public eye, and unwillingness to perform, Henson writes, “Know that as you sit and read / I’m with you if you’re with me.” Recognizing his own public display of personal interiority, Henson forges a bond between himself and readers that personalizes Idiot Verse , making it feel less like a one-way looking glass. Written explicitly to be read, Idiot Verse speaks to how humans all ascribe and derive meaning from language.Take for example, the title poem, “Idiot Verse.” “Dear readers,” he begins, “please read as though sleeping / I’m aware I will not be the first / to write stanzas of rhyme of my loneliness / but here is my idiot verse.” A bit self-depreciative, a bit confessional, Henson immediately expresses his discomfort at exposing his authentic life to critics and the public. His admission of vulnerability comes with the admonition to take his words at face value: “no, it’s not meant to be clever or wise / it is feelings penned just as I’ve seen them / and how can the lines be affecting your soul / when you’re too busy reading between them.”The poem concludes “pay no mind to those wasting their time / in confusing confusion with art.” But it’s hard not to call Henson’s poetry art, and it’s hard not to read between the lines. Maybe the line serves to warn against what I’m doing right now as I write. Maybe it warns not to defeat in analysis the stand-alone autonomy of the text. Whatever the purpose, to introduce his collection with this poem, Henson raises questions regarding the nature of art and criticism that he explores throughout the anthology.In Idiot Verse, Henson inquires into the nature of art and in turn poeticizes the literary tradition: how we ascribe meaning to human experience by means of passed on stories. He relies on the voices and forms of past poets, all the while identifying them and us and him as a united group. The poem “I’m With You” begins this way, with another address to readers: “my dearest reader, writer, kin … I am much too scared to speak … so I utter in the voices … of the ones who spoke to me / when I grew and learned to read.” Referring to them as his “heroes,” Henson describes these poets as “gods now free of all that bound them / seeming, dreaming poets all / born to rise and bound to fall.” The poem associates art and freedom, even claiming artists are the agents of their own freedom.[video_embed url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZNrWmf4xH0" embed_style="default"][spacer height="20"]Much like Wordsworth finds delight in the daffodils of his mind’s eye, Keaton Henson finds delight in the poetry of the past. “New Year’s Eve With Tennyson,” an allusion to another literary great, narrates an experience of a meaningful act of reading and relates back to a particular line from “I’m With You” “so I spent my days at home / with my heroes all alone.”“Applaud the Writer” as the title would suggest celebrates the act of writing.The poem “Insomnia” asks “but how can I sleep with the world in my head?” and answers its own question: “‘write a quick poem and go back to bed.”By the end, it’s clear. Poetry, for Henson, is not merely a pastime or pursuit, but a modus operandi: a tool to process the world and function viably within it.So much remains to be said about Idiot Verse, so I conclude transcribing a short Henson poem that basically says, well, so much remains to be said in all of life. I find it at once comforting and harrowing, but read for yourself and see.And please, please, celebrate the lives of artists.
your life is a bookit is more than its first and last pageand it is mostly made up of ‘and’s and ‘the’s[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]