I Worship at the Shrine of Poetry

In 1972, Anna Mendelssohn, a 24-year-old activist and poet, stood trial for her alleged role in planning terror attacks with the Angry Brigade, a libertarian Communist group in England that plotted and carried out a series of non-lethal bombings against targets such as the Miss World Pageant and the residence of Home Secretary Robert Carr.^[1] The trial of the Stoke Newington Eight, the longest in British legal history until the 2014 News International phone hacking case, was covered in lurid and sensationalist terms in the nation’s right-wing media, which was then beginning its ascent to the near-hegemonic power it occupies today: “Girl slept with bedside arsenal,” “Dropouts with brains tried to launch bloody revolution,” “Sex Orgies at the Cottage of Blood.”^[2] There was evidence of a frame-up. Although Mendelssohn eloquently defended herself in court and always maintained her innocence, she was sentenced to 10 years in London’s notorious Holloway Women’s Prison, an experience that haunted her for the rest of her life.^[3]

Following early release in 1976, Mendelssohn moved to Cambridge, where she studied English literature at St Edmund’s College, published dozens of pamphlets, and kept hundreds of notebooks filled with poetry, prose, and drawings. Though poets such as Tom Raworth and Ed Dorn esteemed her writing, she received little attention from the literary mainstream in either the UK or the US. Her work, written out of the difficult circumstances of her life, fiercely opposed the classism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism she saw around her; challenged easy truisms about the relation between politics and poetry; and maintained an absolute devotion to art.

I’m Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn (Shearsman, 2020), edited by poet and scholar Sara Crangle, is a true labor of love that offers an opportunity to examine Mendelssohn’s life and work afresh. Supplied with extensive notes, appendices, and a critical introduction, the volume is nearly 800 pages long. Even so, it barely scratches the surface of the 800 notebooks in Mendelssohn’s archives, which the University of Sussex acquired in 2011; more published poetry is likewise sure to come to light. Mendelssohn carved out a space for telling the truth in a society that had no place for such truths, working against the constraints of the prison cell and all the categories used to box her in or exclude her. Her identity as a poet at once transcends all of these identifications and attests to them in all of their complexity and contradiction.

***

Mendelssohn was born into a working-class Jewish family in Stockport in 1948. Her father was a Labour Councillor, an International Brigades veteran, and a former member of the Communist Party; her mother was an activist with Manchester International Women for Peace. Both were involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Mendelssohn was the first of her family to attend university when she enrolled at the recently opened University of Essex in 1967. There she encountered radical poets such as Raworth and Dorn, who reportedly led a party of students, including Mendelssohn, to Paris during the May 1968 protests. That same month, Essex students shut down the campus to protest a visiting lecture from chemical defense scientist Thomas Inch, who worked at Porton Down, the world’s oldest chemical weapons research facility. Mendelssohn appears in footage of the occupation included in British Sounds (1969), a film that London Weekend Television commissioned from Jean-Luc Godard but then refused to screen because of female nudity. She later claimed that Godard asked her to star in the film (a decision the communal activists rejected), a brush with fame that set her up as the foregrounded subject and also the one who got away.^[4] Between 1969 and 1970, she taught English and French in Ankara and translated poems by Nazim Hikmet before English-language translations were widely available. (Mendelssohn’s translations are now lost.) According to her own account, she also associated with insurgent factions among the Turkish left.^[5] When she returned to England, she dropped out of university and moved to London, where she became involved in housing activism. She contributed political articles to Frendz, a countercultural monthly, and helped found the single-issue Strike, a radical libertarian newspaper.

This milieu involved members of the Angry Brigade, and Mendelssohn was alleged to have authored one of the group’s anonymous communiqués. Press coverage during the trial painted her as a violent extremist. However, as the writer Stuart Christie notes, although the Brigade planted bombs, these were not—in contrast to the multiple documented actions of the British government—intended to kill or injure but to make a symbolic, discursive intervention at the heart of a racist, unequal, and decaying empire. As Christie puts it, the Angry Brigade, in its actions and messaging and during the trial,

raised important issues relating to the nature of class politics and justice in British society: about homelessness, unemployment, class-biased legislation, pensioners dying of cold in substandard housing, internment in Northern Ireland and even down to the number of people injured and dying every week from industrial accidents and malpractice.

Whatever the precise nature of her involvement with rumored plots and bombs, Mendelssohn’s activities as a young adult were marked by a profound commitment to social justice, radical left politics, and the power of the written word—something the British state could not countenance.

Following their sentencing, Mendelssohn and her alleged co-conspirator, Hilary Creek, were, like the suffragettes a half-century earlier, incarcerated at Holloway. The infamously brutal prison was finally shut down in 2016 after numerous instances of prisoner mistreatment. The lights in an isolation cell caused Creek permanent eye damage, and she developed anorexia nervosa. Mendelssohn, too, was permanently scarred by the experience; forever after, she was interpellated as a criminalized, unwanted, problem subject.

After her release in 1976, she recuperated in the family home in Stockport, where, as her father told BBC Radio, she had intense difficulty concentrating because of her experiences in prison. But over the next few years, she set about rebuilding her life.^[6] She began to write in earnest, often typesetting, designing, and producing her own pamphlets. Between 1982 and 1993, Mendelssohn published 18 chapbooks and the full-length poetry collection Implacable Art (2000). Between 1980 and 1985, she gave birth to three children, and her return to higher education at Cambridge marked another new start. She took a new name, Grace Lake, under which she published her first pamphlets.

In 1988, struggling to cope with the demands of single parenthood and simultaneous academic study, she gave permission for her children to be temporarily fostered. They were never returned to her care. The following year, she sabotaged her finals exams, writing out a screed on the university’s childcare provision, and once more failed to graduate.

She wrote to the poet and editor Peter Riley, “I have renamed the university adversity [...] if there were any other environment conductive to both life (which uni is not) and literary work I’d remove myself into it.” Nonetheless, she remained in Cambridge until her death, continuing to publish with local small presses—most notably, Equipage, run by her tireless supporter Rod Mengham—and frequenting the Cambridge University Library.

Unmoored from pursuing an academic career and refusing to take up other paid employment, she lived in an unheated shed in a friend’s garden on Mowbray Road that she filled with books, clothes, furniture, and pianos. A victim of the housing crisis that she’d agitated against two decades earlier, her marginal status seemed inescapable. Mendelssohn was a voracious, polymathic reader apparently unable to fit into the strictures of a conservative university system. She was a woman among often male-dominated poetry scenes—“men act as if they own the poetic mind,” she once wrote—and a single mother who had lost her children. Despite the warmth some within the university and literary communities showed her, she felt perpetually misunderstood. She was barely in her 60s when she died of a brain tumor in 2009.

***

Mendelssohn rarely adhered to the book as a self-contained object or to the idea of a stable or finished work. She wrote constantly, voluminously, out of necessity, in lines that barely fit the width of a typical page. She drafted and redrafted, returning to a set of core preoccupations: her trial and imprisonment, the pressure of putting her children into foster care, the hostility of “men who think they own the poetic mind.” Individual poems, or even whole chapbooks, seem to exist as part of a continuous, improvisatory process of invention and reinvention. Nonetheless, distinctions can be made between phases of her work.

Mendelssohn’s first pamphlets combine her literal and metaphorical sense of release from confinement in the fields of linguistic invention, suggested in titles such as Crystal Love D.N.A. (1982), I’m Working Here (1983), Celestial Empire (1983), and Propaganda Multi-Billion Bun (1985). Satirically registering the atmosphere of Thatcher’s Britain while rejecting what she describes as “the presence of relentless realism,” her poems strive to “mess up the proportions of our living everyday life,” (as she writes of paintings by Sol LeWitt). In her early writing, Mendelssohn developed a poetics on the fly, moving among “poles of opposite directions”: “all these words are alive and / kicking,” she writes, “that is 'and' flying apart, / the action unannounced.” But though already prolific by the mid-1980s, she wrote the vast majority of the texts in I’m Working Here from the 1990s onward. Readers should be wary of romanticizing her life circumstances or suggesting that personal suffering leads to better art. Nonetheless, for Mendelssohn, art clearly rose in importance when life failed to live up to its promises.

In an unfinished memoir titled “What a Performance,” (1987) Mendelssohn writes that, after prison, she “wanted to stay in the dark, ask for nothing from people outside, live in the hell, with no outside visitors. [...] From the instant I step into the arena of relationship with authority I am a victim.”^[7] Given this, she entertained an understandable impulse to shut down into self-protective silence: “Never speak to another poet. Never breathe a word about your plans. Don’t be kind. Don’t care. They’ll only think you want something.” In another fragment, she writes, “I’d slowly progressed from world politics to city [London] politics to local politics till finally I was left with the smallest unit—myself. And without a sense of humour what can be done?”^[8] As poet Lisa Jeschke argues, this is not simply a retreat into the isolated self. Rather,

in light of what has led up to it, the (supposedly) smallest unit, the I, also contains all of world politics. This is especially obvious in Mendelssohn’s case, as her subjectivity and status as a person were so decisively conditioned by her criminalization and incarceration that it can hardly be said to have offered her shelter from the ‘outside’ world in any meaningful way.^[9]

This is a world built from the I upward, rather than the world collapsed into the I, within which Mendelssohn seeks to refigure habitual understandings of the self and the social. As she puts it in the poem “London 1971”: “fixing interiority with an altogether different poetic. ... Specific Movements. Voices that never fail to sustain a social dimension.” Rather than rehabilitation—the language of the reformed prisoner, now conforming to all expected norms—confession or reparation, these poems expropriate expropriated language, accomplishing a creative re-inscription of the self, stolen from those who took it from her.^[10]

As readers of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein know, the process of rebuilding the I that has been shattered through traumatic acts of separation is constant, not fixed. Mendelssohn’s is an (anti-) autobiographical poetry: she “drags out the autobiographical and drugs it,” she writes of her own work. Obsessively revisiting the past, the poems also obscure its meaning. Defying liberal clichés about the universally communicative power of poetry, they refuse communication: “I don’t talk to the police except never”; “My poetry is not for them."^[11] Mendelssohn interrogates readers before they have a chance to interrogate her in a kind of dazzling cat-and-mouse game in which who is cat and who is mouse shifts. This method is, understandably, paranoiac, a radical challenge to the comfortable contract between reader and writer established in mainstream culture, in which “general readers” occupy the same classed and raced bracket, practicing exclusion either in the language of outright class war or in the guise of tolerant inclusion.

Feeling denied the right to be an artist, a mother, and a student on her own terms, Mendelssohn must frequently defend herself and justify her commitment to making art alone rather than to other forms of “gainful employment.” Of any line of the thousands that she wrote, the following serves as defiant creed: “I do not fake, I do not lie, I worship at the shrine of poetry.”

Challenging the labels placed on her by ironically claiming them for her own, Mendelssohn reclaims the identity of poetess and Jewess, constructing composite figures that at once occupy and undermine the position of victim, most notably in the pamphlets viola tricolor (1993) and Bernache Nonnette (1995). Viola is the cross-dressing protagonist of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as well as a flower; the tricolor is the French Revolutionary figure of Lady Liberty. As Andrew Duncan notes in a contemporaneous review, bernache is the French term for the barnacle goose, whose presence in Wales is supposedly the origin of the phrase wild goose chase, and the term nonnette (little nun) arose because the barnacle goose’s nest could not be found in northwestern Europe, and its mating habits were thus a mystery to Europeans.^[12] Both Viola and Bernache are shape-shifting figures of joy, invention, and vengeance, slipping, like Angela Carter heroines, between animal, bird, and human.

uncontainably versatile & dextrous in another world
Unearthly Bernache Nonnette. Is not exactly a pet in its errs or it has its jars rather than marrs
 
& wears bonnets piped with Steel & thick grey stockings whenever it feels like being an eel

Duncan sees a connection between Mendelssohn’s work and folk myths of mothers and children, a connection that operates “by periphrasis, substitution, fantasy, and camouflage.” Bernache is “a kind of Mother Goose Gorgon; on waters where the wild tales spawn.” In a letter to publisher Rod Mengham, Mendelssohn also contemplates dedicating the 1995 collection to Orpheus—the prototypical poet who can charm the animals and attempt to bring the dead out of hell, whose tendency to look back is potentially disastrous but who continues to sing after his death. Both refusing and playing with gendered archetypes, these poems lead readers on a wild-goose chase. Mendelssohn fights back with the only weapon she has left—the poem itself. In “Defying Mr Gaslight,” Bernache proclaims, “Xerox it! the execution of the demonstrable holofernes, a voracious monster / Locquacity Nonnette.” The poet at the Xerox machine becomes Judith with sword poised at Holofernes’s throat.

Mendelssohn wrote to Tom Raworth of an earlier pamphlet: “There is some nastiness in this book—it worries me & makes me sad—[…]I think that’s because I cannot be, by the rules of the game, be completely honest.” And in these poems, personification often slips into recapitulations of real or perceived slights, delivered with virtuosic bitterness. Hit by the housing crisis and living in a garden shed in a university town, her own studies interrupted during her custody battles, Mendelssohn must have keenly felt the contrast with the wealthy students around her. Figures such as Bernache and Viola contrast with Mendelssohn’s imagined middle- or upper-class aesthetes or would-be activists: the “collegiate [...] gassy, classy / Champagne’s on the brain her name is charmaine she wears pink pyjamas”; Madge de Fanfare, minnie most, thérèse torchée ; and the sympathetic but clueless Tansy Tchaikovsky.

Mendelssohn could have an abrasive relation to the women’s movement. Though Virago Press, Britain’s leading feminist publishing house, published her, she later denounced it. She was ambivalent about abortion, and flashes of homophobia show up in her work, most notably in the two-page screed “To a Radical Lesbian Feminist Rapist.” “[I]f she was a Whore then I was a whore,” Mendelssohn writes, “[a]nd a lesbian not not never.” Describing herself as “feminized, although not without dissent,” Mendelssohn was acutely aware of the way that racial, gendered, and other identities are socially formed rather than biologically essential. However, when Mendelssohn slides into reactionary positions, one can suspect only real or imagined autobiographical valences that the poems elide, so the barrage of criticism and insult Mendelssohn levels against her enemies becomes ultimately bewildering, a closed circle.

To the poet Denise Riley, Mendelssohn once defined herself as a “conservative with a small c.” The two poets write about similar issues: the social stigma of being a single mother, the way gender relations are reinforced through language and the structures of the state. But Riley constructs a theory of language and a theory of the subject, accompanied by theoretical contributions such as War in the Nursery (1979); Mendelssohn’s contribution is more that of a sometimes helpless witness. She locates her work in a stream of language that, though shot through with the social, leaves its speaker cut off, victimized, and alone.

           i can hardly bear going down town to see those people
in the rent office again. The woman with the iron stare gives me the horrors [...]
and that dreaded phrase: SINGLE PARENT. Born to be a Single Parent? Born to bash and
struggle? no. [...]
 
the situation is intolerable. In so far as elites who have very little life
experience are sitting as judges[.]

Mendelssohn felt the loss of her children as a final violence at the hands of the state. Because she dared to have three children by three different fathers “out of wedlock’’ and because she did not fit the conventions of the so-called good mother, once again, the state had taken away what was hers. Yet the relationship here is complicated. Mendelssohn also presents the ambivalence inherent in familial relations, particularly when the business of childcare gets in the way of the demands of art.

I hate being a mother [...] I used to have words. Now they are absent. If you love your children you want to eat them up. I want to eat my children up [...] I like to tickle my children. They curl up for ever in laughter.

Nowhere is this ambivalence more wrenchingly conveyed than in “Abschied,” a poem dedicated to her eldest daughter, Poppy, and written as a retrospective leave-taking the night before her children are to be fostered:

By tonight I shall have lost you
because I cannot hold you
& be anything but abused

Though art, parent-like, “had held” mother and daughter together, art ultimately saved neither. The poem ends:

But what could we do
You and I
 
You had already captured
the art of departure
Beautifully

In the poem’s opening line, Mendelssohn acknowledges that “a young child cannot reply.” By poem’s end, however, she seems to attribute the “abuse” she suffers not only to the state, which takes her children away, but to the child itself, who, in “captur[ing] / The art of departure” produces an art of taking away and who, in departing, takes away Mendelssohn’s motherhood and art itself.^[13]

Mendelssohn, herself a composer, likely intends an allusion to the wrenching “Farewell” that closes Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), the dying speaker’s farewell to the world.In Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960), Theodor Adorno argues that Mahler uses translations of Chinese poetry as “a cover for Mahler’s Jewish element [...] The ground trembles under the feet of the assimilated Jew, [and] by the euphemism of foreignness, the outsider seeks to appease the shadow of terror.”^[14] For the Jewish artist, Adorno suggests, the mourning expressed in “Der Abschied” bespeaks conditions of perpetual departure, of the exile and terror that mourning anticipates and reflects upon. “[I]t weeps without reason like one overcome by remembrance; no weeping had more reason,” Adorno writes. The original manuscript of Mendelssohn’s “Abschied” continues into a poem later published separately as “‘Hungary Water,” suggesting the historical violence of the Shoah, with its separation of Jewish parents and children (“calipers,” as Crangle notes, “were tools used to conduct the Nazi Mischling test, the racial taxonomy legalized by the Nuremburg Laws of 1935).^[15]

in my bitch chapel of knights
ancestral calipers madame
writes on the skull of a dead jew

But whereas Mahler’s is an unconscious displacement, Mendelssohn turns real historical events into fantasy. Questions immediately rear their head. Is Mendelssohn making a crass comparison to her own situation or seriously tapping into historical memory? And, whatever readers decide, who exactly determines how Jewish subjects reference this history, whether they have “directly” suffered from it or not?

Mendelssohn wrote to the poet Douglas Oliver, “Because I am a female, my intellect is despised or ignored. Because I was born a Jewess, I am not permitted to boast my virtue(s).”^[16] Her mother, Clementina, cared for Jewish refugee children rescued from concentration camps, an experience she related to her daughter. As the poet later wrote, “Had I been hardened to / imagery of war I should not / have been moved by the / napalm seared mothers & / babies of Vietnam which / were so shocking to those who / were still in mourning for/ the victims of the European / Holocaust.” Mendelssohn’s own ancestry was further part of the traumatic conflict between nationalism and anti-Semitism that shaped modern Europe into and beyond the Shoah: “I was in the pain of that history. / And I knew to the last fibre of my body and soul.” In Spinsters and Mistresses of Art (c. 1991-1993), she writes

the truth was there was still life in the embers.
people were still breathing their way into the earth.
though they were ashes. though they were murdered.
the truth is there was a ruach alive
that I could not leave no matter what
so forgive me my impossibility
my self disgust my self dismissal
my self doubt my stasis my paralysis
my hatred, my puma who eats rapists
and lies stretched out on my floor

From the Shoah-like ashes, Mendelssohn gathers the ruach (divine spirit, breath), which converts self-hatred into hatred of aggressors—the man-eating big cat that acts as her protector. In an untitled poem from 1998, she imagines a long history in which

metamorphosis began after the destruction of the temple,
when people are bereft, our belongings stolen, our
houses torched, our bodies raped, what remains of us
is changed, into animals to be controlled

From the diasporic movement of Jewishness, Mendelssohn inherits an awareness of the processes of nationalist displacement and violence from which Jewish people have suffered and of the intercultural and international fluidity characterizing Jewish culture in and beyond Europe. Rankling at “antisemitic nationalist pride,” Implacable Art develops this frustration with the national identity into which Mendelssohn is conscripted but to which she never feels she belongs: “racism is there, as ever, with / all its benefits and advantages for free booty / & plunder”; “this country was still in the throes of Wagnerianism. Check it”; “Osip Mandelstam in England would have been / murdered too. Where there is no art”; “I turn into a machine in this language [...] I want to / be thinking and speaking in another language.” A self-taught student of a half-dozen languages, Mendelssohn’s omnivorous poetic English pursues obscure etymologies, throwing in fragments and pastiches of French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The following report on an overheard conversation might be read as Mendelssohn’s ambition for her own work:

it goes soft, it asserts, it narrates &
faces change, animate, picking up
on each others’ words
it sounds a bit italian, a bit spanish,
the girl who is with them
told me
that that was because they were speaking mediterranean.

In leaning toward the “Mediterranean,” Mendelssohn looks to a region that bridges Europe, Africa, and Asia as opposed to the cold isolation of Northern Europe or an England increasingly cut off from the Continent, where “Europe never arrives.” In the ongoing wake of Brexit, “Fortress Europe,” Nigel Farage, and the “Hostile Environment,” this internationalist impulse seems more valuable than ever.

***

Mendelssohn’s poetry often reads as despairing. “I had no-one to talk to. / all my life,” she writes in The Day the Music Died (1993). “On Vanity,” from Tondo Aquatique (1997), begins with this harrowing line: “When a poetess is raped she loses her interior life,” an act of assault at once physical and linguistic. The long poem “1:3ng,” from the same year, ends with a description of a kind of crucifixion and, perhaps, the anti-Semitic histories that the figure of the crucified Christ implies.^[17] “I am tortured. I am taut, / The spinal nerve becomes numb [...] I feel gashed down the entire length of the left side of my body / A jagged nasty gash cut through by a rotary stainless steel blade.” However, the poem ends with hope of a kind: Mendelssohn is, she announces, “about to sit down to translate [surrealist child prodigy] Gisèle de Prassinos’s “La Table de famille.”^[18] At the height of despair, it is always “‘implacable art” that enables the poet to go on.

The last pamphlet to appear in Mendelssohn’s lifetime, py (2009), is a series of acrostics on the words poetry and poesie. More sheerly playful than anything else in Mendelssohn’s work, the poems juxtapose animals, movie stars, mythology, fruits, song lyrics, and literature. Tillie Olsen turns up alongside primroses and Pomeranians, Romy Schneider alongside the Norse World Tree Yggdrasil:

phizzing on
opening
enormous energy
tumbling
radio
years^[19]

By contrast, her final poems, published in I’m Working Here for the first time, were written from the Cambridge care home where she lay dying of a brain tumor. Written on the brink of her death, in unfinished scraps and drafts, these fragments juxtapose intense need—

I need you,
           as mad as cotton in snow,
                    as mad as
                                corny songs
                                with wind blowing—

with final abandonment—

the Poems, are written by my loves,
you must know how dead they are.

It runs counter to the spirit of Mendelssohn’s work to extract these lines as messages of either facile hope or of final hopelessness. The contradictions of Mendelssohn’s poetry extend well beyond her own life, for, as she knows all too well, “the law tells us what life is and what death is.” In attempting her own definitions, Mendelssohn seems doomed to fall foul of law-preserving violence. “I collect sentences. / I used to have a set of my own.” This sentencing never stops. Given this, a paranoid tendency—bitterness, rejection, abandonment—contradicts her work’s countervailing impulses of communication, solidarity, warmth, friendship, comradeship, and love. Mendelssohn’s poetry can’t be rendered reparative without simply repeating the damage from which it emerges. But does it need to be rendered as either solely reparative or solely an index of paranoiac damage? Might it not, instead, do something else, something that only poetry can do? As Bhanu Kapil writes in one of the blurbs for I’m Working Here, “it’s the poems that will survive something the person writing them cannot.” Such work is full of contradictions. Exhilarating but exhausting, it defends art’s autonomy but relentlessly shows up the idea of autonomous art as a convenient fiction. Repetitive yet endlessly inventive, it recasts the same set of sentences in a thousand different ways. To quote again from Mendelssohn’s Viola Tricolor:

I do not fake, I do not lie, I worship at the shrine of poetry.

Poetry remains when nothing else is left, remains beyond the grave. And though Mendelssohn’s work often offers little comfort, it’s a beautiful and brilliant monument to survival. “Never stop.”