Satire Note 7

I heard Verity Spott read bits of ‘Hopeless Vibrato’ (2019) and in the ICA at a Queers Read This event on Friday 16^th Nov. 2018, and at that event the poem was prefaced by tiny rhymed squibs which set the jokey tone up for this longer piece, some of those I think would later be put in Caterpillars (2019). In ‘Triple-Exit Pamphleteering, or #VALUE!’ (2019), I suggested that as a constraint rhyming mimicks cycles of credit and debit on a formal level. Spott's rhymes seem close to Tom Raworth’s ‘Envoi,’ Peter Manson’s ‘The Baffle Stage,’ and perhaps bits of ‘Hopeless Vibrato.' I feel like that night at Queers Read This, the audience were primed by the rhymes to receive the attacks on Universities, liberals, inconsistent attitudes to paedophiles, etc., all delivered in the pontificating tones of some spectral UKIP or further-right individual. The rhymes set the tone. There's something happening in the doggerel-leanings of the rhymed satire in bits of Spott and Manson, and there are lines of continuity between these contemporary poems and the rhyming of Swift and Pope.