Provincial Squinting At The Mercury Orgy by Jai Knight

Provincial Squinting At The Mercury Orgy by Jai Knight is published by Anxiety Press (a splinter of the online magazine A Thin Slice of Anxiety)

Okay, obviously, Provincial Squinting At The Mercury Orgy is not a beautiful title for a collection of prose and poetry, but it does have a clear and engaging rhythm to it, and it does succinctly help to set the tone and suggest the style of this enjoyable Anxiety Press text…

Provincial Squinting At The Mercury Orgy is writing that teeters on the political, teeters on the erotic (the prurient rather than the erotic, maybe?) and uses language in a way that offers multiple interpretations despite an initial sense of clarity…

It’s possible to imagine a provincial squint, sure.

But it’s also possible to imagine someone squinting in a provincial manner, if not in a provincial location…

Is a squint an inherently provincial act?

Is a squint a way of looking that speaks to the non-urbane?

To openly look closely without knowledge of what is being seen?

And similarly, is the Mercury Orgy an orgy on the planet Mercury?

An orgy on Earth within the presence of liquid metal?

An orgy inspired by the circa 1980s rockstar Freddie Mercury?

Is it even a sexual orgy?

Or an orgy of some other kind?

And is the squinting that’s happening a squint “at” – as in “towards” – the Mercury Orgy, or is it a squint taking place “at” – as in “while part of/on the site of” – the Mercury Orgy?

This, then, is a book that is frequently deceptively simple. Or maybe simply deceptive.

Lots to dig into!

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Provincial Squinting At The Mercury Orgy is prose and poetry.

It is sometimes science fiction, sometimes film noir -inspired bursts of literature, with ideas and images and narratives wrapping around each other in a way that is constantly surprising and intriguing, though I did find that in the handful of longer-form pieces this unknowingness impacted my concentration and therefore my enjoyment…

The first 100 pages or so contain most of the book’s 40ish pieces, which means that – regardless of the structural and tonal difficulties of some of them – there is always a clear and swift conclusion to each text…

…If (when!) a reader is too beguiled or too confused, the piece is soon over, and the images it leaves in one’s mind are comfortably left to sit there while new images, new ideas, and new experiences are found in the next piece of text…

Although some pieces hold clear narrative coherence (and a couple of the early pieces (‘Averbroke Mountain (Time Glitch Shuffle)’ and ‘Black Echo Jungle’ in particular) strongly reminded me of the good bits of the earlier prose works of blog-favourite Samuel R. Delany), the style of Knight’s writing is something that does feel more suited to shorter form pieces: bursts of image, bursts of language, bursts of idea. These are here in abundance.

…Less storytelling than image-making…

…prose poems… or poetic prose… or poems… or short fiction with short unpunctuated sentences…

…in some cases, narratives that exist may only be those built by the reader themselves, constructed by the unconscious mind in the way one sees faces in walls and the shapes of people in the twilight…

However, in the longer pieces, some of which feature recurring characters (or at least recurring names), it doesn’t always feel like the … the… the… lack of clarity is masking a confirmed, controlled meaning that’s out of the reader’s mind but not out of the author’s… though the meaninglessness could be the purpose…

Or not.

The second half of the book, which contains around five longer pieces, is a less satisfying experience (or was for me), because (for me) without comfortably understandable narratives or meanings, a 20-page text is a daunting thing…

This reminded me of my experiences (almost 20 years ago lol (so old, so old, when may I be finished!?)) trying and failing to read the Black Mountain Poets, in that I don’t feel like any of the words here (or there) are unknowable, and I don’t necessarily feel that every phrase is unknowable, and possibly not even every sentence, but the ways in which the sentences and ideas and phrases are put together seemed (to me) to be often too jarring for a clear sense of meaning to connect…

…But that may mean I remain too stupid (and provincial – one must remember that (regardless of appearances (debatable)) I am bumpkin/peasant stock, bred for toil and an early death, not thought or feeling or art or love) to hold multiple ideas in my head at the same time… or it may mean that this very confusion is the intention, and that to not enjoy that is a legitimate response borne of taste and personal preference…

…It’s not a case of me being too stupid, it’s a case of these longer pieces just not being my thing…

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There is lots I did enjoy here, and I thought many of the pieces were fun and playful and engaging, but I struggled to remain connected – intellectually and narratively – with the longer ones…

Maybe it is me failing as a reader… why must I always presume I’m at fault? (That’s not a question for now.)

What this book did make me feel very conscious of, though, is that there’s a reason why most mainstream publishers cap their poetry collections at around 100 pages.

Had this book been half its length, and had there been half the amount of the longer pieces and those that were there had been in between shorter, effective, punchy bits of text, then maybe this would have been a book I’d loved.

But with almost 200 pages of writing and the longer-form pieces clustered in the second half, I found it a slightly uneven experience.

I really loved the energy and the pacing of the first section of the book, and would have been raving about the whole thing had it concluded before the longer bits arrived or had that pace been maintained throughout…

Maybe I was too busy while reading this book… too distracted… maybe if I had read it in one or two sittings, uninterrupted on a journey (for example), I would have had a different response to it, but who knows?

Enjoyable, yes. Well worth a go!

Jai Knight’s website here!

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While you’re here, why not check out a recent interview with Jai Knight as part of my 10 Words Or Fewer short form interview series. (Do drop me a line if you’d like to take part in that!)