Compression

I wake suddenly thinking I’ve dislocated my shoulder. Struggling to stand up, I nearly pass out; but lying down is terrible. Digging a tennis ball into my neck is the only way of dampening the spasm. I stand against the wall and push all my body weight against it, rubbing so hard I abraid my skin. My left arm is blue and cold, a lifeless weight; I can bang it on surfaces like a hunk of frozen meat. 

It’s Easter Sunday and we are in the Preseli hills. Four months of intensely stressful work and life stuff behind us, we needed to decompress. We walk among bluestone that provided the monoliths of Stonehenge 150 miles away; we leap on hags (that’s the Scottish word for those hard little islands of tufted grass) in the marsh to make them fart. The kids swing out over a field of new trees. I am writing again after a long drought. A sign at the head of the valley commemorates the Rebecca Riots, a series of attacks by impoverished farmers on exploitative tolls in the mid-nineteenth century. High corn prices, the collapse of the iron and textile industries in Wales after the Napoleonic Wars, enclosures, tithing and the Poor Laws led to dire poverty and intensifying anger among the rural population. ‘Rebecca’ and her daughters went riding across the country, smashing toll gates and conducting mock trials of their keepers. In the spirit of raucous carnival traditions such as the Mari Lwyd, men dressed in women’s white nightgowns, horsehair beards, turbans and blackface, carrying brooms to sweep away injustice. Accompanied by the ‘rough music’ of muskets, the Rebecca processions broke into towns, liberated people from the workhouses, demanded support for unmarried mothers, and danced on the tables of the rich. This history of class struggle, rural tradition, gender antagonism and racialised charivari – in the form of its protagonist, Big Becca – makes it into the poems I’m writing, poems enraged by the politics of Britain in April 2023: profiteering everywhere you look, and never enough riots.


But now all that’s gone, and I am crying out in pain. After a long taxi ride I stagger into the Withybush hospital in Haverford West. The blood pressure in each arm is different, and I can barely move my fingers; there’s a swelling the size of a grapefruit on my neck. An X-ray reveals I have an extra rib. The milky passivity of a CT scan shows unremarkable masses, pathways clear. But I can’t get myself off the table. 

The consultant thinks it’s thoracic outlet syndrome. The fabric of the shoulder is highly congested, with nerves running from the spinal cord threading their way under the clavicle and over the ribs, rubbing along with masses of artery and muscle. This narrow strait has become even more compressed by my peculiar anatomy, and by months of stress which causes me to contract my shoulders and back like armour plating. Eventually the swelling in my traps which makes me look like an unbalanced bodybuilder cuts off the blood flow to my arm as I sleep. I stretch on waking, and the median and ulnar nerves snap.

~
 

The next few months are spent in a feverish attempt to manage pain. Nerve axons don’t start to regrow for six weeks, and then only at a rate of about one millimetre per day. Day and night fold into hourly cycles of searing pain and remission. Hot baths and scalding hot water bottles – icy mantles – chugging opiates and magnesium tablets – bracing for a change of position and bolts of pain – not sitting, nor standing, nor lying down – fireworks of spasm exploding across trunk and arm – walking just a few steps with a fiery torch held to my shoulder blades – nerve gliding videos on YouTube – crying when someone was healed by a magician on TV. Crying when my son says, ‘why is it whenever we go somewhere beautiful, you get hurt.’

Yes, why is that. This wasn’t the first time my body had sent me a thunderbolt when I was supposedly relaxing. Back pain, popping ligaments, insomnia, panic attacks on the threshold of my job: sensation is a form of communication and my body seems to lurch from silence to shouting. I’ve written elsewhere about a particularly dark period of burnout that reconfigured my relation to my work. I understood the anxiety I experienced then – and still do – as a tidal wave, the heavy mass that seemed settled until something underground erupted and pushed it outward. The excess could not be contained within the brittle form of the body, and overflowed. Now here I am again, nerves screaming: disconnection, pressure, pain. A symptom which is neither just physical nor psychic, but their conjunction. The body speaking. Compression as somatic vocabulary.

The thing is, I like compression. It’s why I prefer poems to prose. ‘Pattern, like a magnetic field, / is passionate in restraint; limits compress / significance; framed energy is sealed’, writes Veronica Forrest-Thomson in her ‘Homage to Cezanne’. Without the frame of form, there is no limit to push against, to build up the heat of overloaded signs. Compacted poems, the compacted dreamwork, language densified until it bears the maximal extension of meaning across the smallest possible space; world, grain of sand, etc. Blake’s apothegm seems cheap – it’s inspirational wall art, a clue Lara Croft gets from her dead dad in the Tomb Raider movie. But the poem from which it comes reveals the potential for universal revolution in the small details of individual oppression. ‘The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath / Writes Revenge in realms of Death’; ‘A dog starvd at his Masters Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State.’ The force applied to a suffering body that contracts to protect itself will eventually be reversed, and everything will blow up. The beaten will be revenged. It’s not just poets who should be able to see the world in miniscule; the grain of sand is the grit in the eye that blurs what exists until tears of rage come, for all that suffer, human and animal alike.

Poetic expression is often admired for its compression, or condensation. Every rift loaded with ore; language charged (as in dynamite, as in electrons) with meaning to the utmost possible degree. ‘No layoff / from this / condensery’, Lorine Niedecker writes in ‘Poet’s Work’, transmuting Ezra Pound’s injunction (dichten = condensare) into an analysis of labour relations. Her grandfather told her to learn a trade. This one gives her job security because it is valueless. The work she does on her poems would never fail her, unlike working in the Wisconsin dairy industry, perhaps in one of the condenseries – factories where condensed milk is produced. But as Niedecker asks in a different poem, ‘What would they say’ – the women who ‘hold jobs— / clean house, cook, raise children, bowl / and go to church’ – ‘if they knew / I sit for two months on six lines / of poetry?’ Niedecker’s work is slow, and the results look small compared to the business of reproductive labour. But she understands the differences between these forms of work, because she does both:

I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else.

As she carries ‘bundles of hog feeder price lists’ and eavesdrops on the talk of her co-workers, she admires their ‘vitality’, fears what flows from them, and repeats their barbs: ‘I'd never get anywhere / because I'd never had suction, / pull, you know, favor, drag, / well-oiled protection.’ She lacks patronage, and can’t embody a machine; her unproductive work is slow, inefficient, sticky. Condensation takes time.

Condensation and compression are not unrelated to the congelation of labour obscured within the commodity. Condensation suggests a thickening from gas to liquid through changes of temperature and pressure. Compression also involves pressure – the kind that invests a coiled spring with potential energy, or stops a bleeding wound. The two metaphors might describe different kinds of poetry. In the condensed poetry of Paul Celan, for example, everything superfluous has been distilled, leaving a remainder that is clear, mysterious and spare. In the poetries of Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, or Verity Spott, the excess linguistic matter doesn’t evaporate; instead it is packed tightly into a stretched, bulging form. Both methods generate intense experiences of density, through different practices of accumulation and dispersal.


Reflecting on the pressures of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Sharon Cameron argues that lyric is ‘the least mimetic of all art forms’. It:

compresses rather than imitates life; it will withstand the outrage of any complexity for the sake of being able to present sequence as if it were a unity… In the moment of lyric compression: all time converges on the poem in whose one space splintered temporal fragments lodge and totalise.

Those splintered fragments do not remain inert under the force of poetic compression, however. They are primed to explode. Dickinson’s ‘compression of possibility tensing to spring’ – as Susan Howe puts it – is a cluster bomb packed with nails, staples, drills, needles. Dickinson writes of ‘A single Screw of Flesh / Is all that pins the Soul’; ‘A Weight with Needles on the pounds— / To push, and pierce, besides—’; ‘The Cordiality of Death—/ Who drills his Welcome in—’. The soul and body feel weighted, pinned and stapled down. The domestic space where Dickinson worked and wrote was a refuge, but also tensed like a trap, or a volcano: ‘A Crater I may contemplate / Vesuvius at Home.’ She felt herself at risk there, of bursting out of the social forms that contained her, of the pressure building under ‘a still— Volcano— Life—.’ In the wake of the eruption, cities will ooze away, villages be taken for breakfast. If only those around her knew ‘How red the Fire rocks below— / How insecure the sod’ that lids them.

As she nursed her puncture wounds, Dickinson fantasised about bombs, guns, explosions, eruptions, about bursting through the fleshly gate into a freedom where ‘They cannot take me any more, —/ Dungeons may call, and guns implore; / Unmeaning, now, to me.’ But those fantasies also led to fears of recapture. In poem 360, ‘The soul has moments of escape— / When bursting all the doors— / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings opon the Hours’. The permanence of the tomb and the cell are only briefly interrupted by a ‘moment’ of escape; the soul’s frenzied dancing outside, in the pinnacle light of noon, leads back to the ‘staples’ and ‘shackles’ that pin her feet to the floor. 

Elsewhere she writes: ‘A Bomb opon the Ceiling / Is an improving thing—/ It keeps the nerves progressive / Conjecture flourishing—’; or instructs us to hold the Bomb ‘in our Bosom’ as we ‘do life’s labor’, keep it calm and prevent its detonation by cradling it like a baby Dickinson never had. It’s exhausting living with this much compression. Though she resisted attempts to normalise her writing and life, she sometimes wished for someone who could take away the tension. She lamented: ‘I had no monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself; and when I try to organise, my little force explodes and leaves me bare and charred.’ As much as it hurt her to live this way, needled and stapled and drilled and ready to erupt, Dickinson could put the energy generated by all that pressure into her poems. She packed the metrical container until it was tight, and ready to take the top of your head off.

Over time my writing has become more aerated, maybe, less agoraphobic. The dream of compacting an almost limitless landscape of perception and thought into the tight corridor of the poem, the turn into ‘your innermost narrowness’ as Celan puts it in the Meridian address, still excites me, as does the image of this packet of language matter exploding into the page space. ‘Sometimes my brain threatens to split with all the meaning I think I could press into it,’ as Virginia Woolf writes in her diaries; for her, editing was always a process of ‘compression’, straining out the loose matter until only the dense core remained. But there’s a difference between making a compressed thing, and being one. 

How does that dream align with the sensation of a body that contracts, solidifies, bracing for attack, until the starved nerves split? This posture, learned in childhood, makes the muscles harden, the intercostal spaces shrink, in anticipation of pain. Don’t they say that people who are asleep when they are in car accidents fare better, because their bodies are relaxed? Wasn’t childbirth easier when I learned to ease into the contractions rather than fighting them? Even so, rigidity offers an instinctive defence against intrusion; I make myself a smaller target, each part closing on other parts, keeping them safe. The poem is a smaller target than prose, the parts closed off to the intrusions of interpretation, keeping conjecture flourishing. 

I practice breathing into the edges of my body, against the closure of my throat, my lungs, my shoulder muscle. I stretch and smooth the nerves in my wrists and elbow, coaxing them longer. But there is an environment. 

As Niedecker makes clear, the compression of working life does not involve the exciting intensification of small habitable spaces and brief lifetimes such that they seem to contain limitless possibility. Of course not. After the weird temporal dilations of the pandemic, universities are back on panic time, the time of perpetual dispute. Five years of industrial action. Little progress on workload, casualisation, pay. Strikes in the spring before my injury; strikes now, while I’m writing this. Marking boycotted. 113 days of pay stolen for four days’ worth of marking. I am still living through those deductions now, though they are a hangover of the past, the loss incurred in September a tribute to the lords of July, my wages stripped while I do my new work, do my old marking, all at once. One year bleeds into the next, the summer squeezes out a four-week ‘research intensive period’, holiday blocked to avoid deductions, holiday worked through because the work doesn’t stop. Bills paid through the solidarity of my comrades. Compression: do more work, always more. Now do it without pay. Now do it twice over.

When compression is not densification, more meaning and more meaning, but less – the accumulation of waste, wasted energy, wasted information, wasted life and work, within contracting time – something has to explode. Isn’t that the fantasy of so many superhero movies? The magical suit, absorbing the enemy’s blows, whose energy gets amplified and redirected to wipe them out? Isn’t that the fantasy of revolutionary politics? And yet, your nerves will give out sooner than capitalism. Somehow, and maybe poems can help here (and unions do), it’s important to preserve what Dickinson called ‘the final inch / Of your delirious hem’, space to live as the boiling wheel of storm gets closer, space for the blood to flow before something in you snaps.

The Blue Split Compartments (Wesleyan, 2021) and Desiring Machines (Boiler House, 2021) are Andrea Brady’’s most recent books of poetry. Radical Tenderness is out from Cambridge in 2024. She lives in London.

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