Against added value: Marianne Morris's Tutu Muse

Marianne Morris writes that her poems may be prompted by ‘any combination of the following: the day's news, the temperature of the air, the nature of things stirring my heart, something about caterpillars or spoons or missile shields, media obsessions like obesity or terrorism, an emotional image’. She goes on to say that, in the act of writing, these things may be ‘tempered’ by ‘theoretical concerns’, which may include Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, negative capability and ideas of right and wrong (Etter, 2010, 193). This is a way of saying that everything is fair game, but it is also a refusal to order what is in front of her according to accepted hierarchies of poetic appropriateness or comfortable ways of making meaning. Tutu Muse: prophylactic poetry for the last generation, written and set in London during 2007, can be read as both a comic and anguished negotiation with a culture full of pre-worn and pre-digested meanings. Making poetry make meaning is going to be uncomfortable in a culture where, in the words of ‘Little Rabbit and the Argentine Doctor Get a Room’ (Morris, 2008, 37–38), ‘[p]eople enjoy being lied to’. The poem's opening phrase – ‘It's wholly absurd’ – seems to mimic it, because the poem immediately abandons a light tone with a variation on the doctor's traditional question:

The idea of hurt ‘clearly’ lying everywhere identifies a recognisably contemporary post-traumatic world. Roger Luckhurst has argued that this world is distinguished by the ease with which one can track ‘the affective transmissibility of trauma […] across virtually every arena of discourse, whether scientific or cultural, professional or amateur, high or low’ (Luckhurst, 2008, 119). Morris's poem, like many poems in Tutu Muse, effectively moves across ‘virtually every arena of discourse’: love, economics, culturekritik, cosmetic surgery and television. Similarly, Philip Tew finds in recent British fiction ‘an emerging aesthetic of cultural threat and upheaval, a collective economy of repetition and symbolic return’ (Tew, 2007, xviii).