This is the first instalment in a new series of regular posts on Cultural Capital. Each week, we’ll be posting video footage of writers talking: being interviewed or reading from their work. Here, Keston Sutherland, a poet who commands an army of neophytes, reads his poem “Hot White Andy”.
Sutherland is at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry, a group of poets with ties to the Cambridge and New York “Language” schools of poetry, for whom verse is not only a way of presenting political polemic, but can be a form of political polemic in itself. This reading will provide an introduction for those who are unfamiliar with Sutherland’s work, and an aural/visual treat for those who have only encountered it in print. Teetering on the precipice of sound poetry, this poem — and indeed Keston’s oeuvre in general — will appeal to those who sympathise with his sardonic yet lyrical disdain for neoconservatism, Fox News and high-capitalist consumerism. It is dense, high-octane poetry, to which, for newcomers, acclimatisation may require several viewings.
Sutherland teaches at the University of Sussex and co-runs Barque Press with Andrea Brady. The reading of this poem in its entirety stretches across four videos on YouTube.
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