Gary Cummiskey: Extreme Romantic

Aryan Kaganof, in a recent review of Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska's Who was Sinclair Beiles?, drew an insightful parallel between Cummiskey and Beiles and, rightly, highlighted the scandalously fact that Cummiskey remains uncelebrated in South Africa.

This can partly be attributed to a general intellectual laziness. Cummiskey's work is surrealistic and critics, often, erroneously conflate the surreal with strangeness, or, worse still, randomness. Or, else, it is seen in purely instrumental terms, as literary experimentation, word surgery, something that is all method and no meaning. Thus the impulse at the heart of the surrealist enterprise, that moments of truth emerge in the absurd or, more radically, that truth is the absurd, becomes lost. Instead, the surrealist poem becomes a novelty, an eccentricity, something interesting but, ultimately, outside the realm of serious poetry.

Cummiskey’s deadpan and unnerving tone also doesn’t fit neatly into the formulaic and dominant poetry-prize-winning register of lyrical poetry, a register that, I would define, as a type of cuteness-Tourette’s, a cloying faux-naivety. Rather he chooses to see the world through old eyes. The world he sees is not pretty, it is gothic, it is, in the words of Tearoom Books contributor Victoria Williams, a world of "extreme romance".

Cummiskey will, most likely, continue to be ignored in South Africa but if you care about things like originality and truth then you've found your man.

~Pravasan Pillay