I worked with Nóra earlier in 2022 as she was developing her next poetry project, looking at drafts and discussing directions and underlying emotional intensities and the formal shapes that accompanied them. To borrow what Seferis said of Cavafis, she stands at a tangent to the world she inhabits, defamiliarising and enlivening living in a contemporary, virtual office during the pandemic.
Her pamphlet, cunningly titled <body>of work</body> to confuse the hell out of most websites, carries a strange mix of suffocations: in the physical space of a home inhabited by rodents and decaying plants; and a digital suffocation, where language has been compromised, restricted and locked down.
Formally, pieces occasionally tabulate, as if in spreadsheets, or syntax breaks apart into rigid columns. So this isn’t the free-flowing landscaped page of contemporary (radical) nature poetry, (e.g. as argued and demonstrated by Harriet Tarlo). It felt to me like the spaced-out poem blocks were being corralled into the deliberately ill-fitting logic of bureaucratic ideology.
I offered Nóra a (post-publication) puff, which I am slightly embarrassed by, as I was still riding the high of reading and thoroughly enjoying the collection:
Blacsók’s fantastically strange poems immerse readers in a perversely entertaining and suffocating modern work/life imbalance. From the lockdown traps of home-working with mice, to the brutal, bullet point lists of a Graeberian bullshit-job nightmare, <body>of work</body> offers a poetics of white collar living at the edge of modernity’s tether.
The pamphlet chimed very much with my own current writing project, which draws heavily on David Graeber’s Bullsh*t Jobs, along side a slew of slightly creepy-sounding office management reports and books, like The Nowhere Office or The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The latter, I’m guessing served as an influence on Thomas Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror, which is another influence for my project. Humour so dark you find yourself laughing at terrible, weird situations, until you look up and find yourself in the real world and the feeling becomes horrific and sad and bleak.
<body>of work</body> definitely counts as a new influence, opening up a gentler, critical yet compassionate space for laughing and crying about post-pandemic bureaucratic systems. There’s at least a little bit of relief in the poems’ humour, rather than, as in Ligotti’s case (and my own) a sense that you need to be mad already to understand – and succeed – in the madness of office hierarchies.
* Yes, the html coding automatically applied the body style to the title, so I added spaces to make it not do that. [Edit: but it turns out it hasn’t worked for the blog front page. Oh well.]