[REVIEW] this is no longer entertainment by Christodoulos Makris

A video online might make you laugh, say aww, or appall you — whatever the reaction, one of the most common actions after the viewing is to scroll down to the comments and see what everyone else is saying, and agree, disagree, respond, or, if you’re like me, lurk behind the screen, eavesdropping with your glass to the digital wall. Christodoulos Makris has taken this oddly satisfying online social activity and made poetry with his new book, this is no longer entertainment, a work of documentary poetics that sources all of its language from the comments section of various websites. As you might expect, there is much language that is harsh, insensitive or mistaken at best. But there is also language here that approaches profundity, oftentimes in a voice that smells like a world-weary cultural critic (and it may well be) more than it sounds like a petulant youth complaining online about pop music, immigration, or the demise of Great Art.

The book is wide-ranging, as you might expect — Makris covers pop music (Huey Lewis and the News make an appearance), impressionist painting, international travel (the Balkans, France, Ireland), and dabbles in immigration, gender, as well as class politics, and it does so in an acrobatic manner, darting between poetic registers, code-switching from satire to sentiment. For example, in “7.” we see that

         He also says, “Like rain

         Passports outside the Western world do not let us 

               Citizens pass any port

         Ask Snowden or Assange how free is the western

Followed by the next poem, “8.” A poem that responds to “7” indialogic fashion:

         I don’t believe the writer

         Why didn’t he stay with many of his fellow 

             countrymen

         Looking like a Somali I would be concerned if I 

             Wasn’t stopped and questioned 

         It’s happened to a Muslim friend of mine who also

              Travels a lot in his line of work (telecoms)

         I get calls where a number is displayed but when I 

               Call back it’s disconnected

         I suggest getting rid of the beard (21-3)

The book’s most affecting moments happen when the mind puts those two poems together (that is, after having read both). These collisions mark the book — between poems, between registers, between East and West, between ideological positions. Speaking of those positions — reading the book, one gets the feeling that the comments might have been posted by those that fall on the ends of the ideological spectrum (a spectrum that changes based on the given poem’s subject), and Makris writes in a way that takes note of the pleasures and pitfalls of extremes while displaying a wariness of both as he watches dialogue between two sides that are dug in.

As much as anything, the book reaffirms the idea that the internet is a place, with an ethos of its own, (the phrase, the internet wins recalls similar phrases used by hikers and hunters when speaking of the wild). That said, this reader has the sense that there’s a bit of despair in this place. Yes, authority has been diffused, but the economic and political power structures to which so many poems here speak — often in diatribes, sometimes in lament — those are very much in place. I mean to say that the book seems to assert that the internet is to dissent what the steam valve is to the tea kettle. But Makris also offers wonder and hope. After all, that same steam once powered locomotives, and here we are, a few months removed from a video of George Floyd dying with a knee on his neck, a video that sparked online outcry and a global movement for justice, widespread talk of reform, and a handful of policies and laws (local and national) that have already been amended. A way of happening, Auden wrote of poetry — this book by Christodoulos Makris happens in a similar fashion to the way the internet does — leaping, at all turns witty, unexpectedly poignant, and brutal in the most disgusting and hilarious ways. This book is a testament to the relationship between poets and physics — as long as there are space and time, the space being physical or cyber, poets will occupy that space, and listen.

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Hayden Bergman is a poet and translator. His work has appeared in Gravel, the story collection What Doesn’t Kill You and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review. He serves as the Books Editor at The Literary Review. You can reach him at hayden@theliteraryreview.org.