Vanessa Austin Locke: Me, Me and Not Me

There is nothing more rewarding to a writer than when someone (other than your dad) takes the time to get in touch with you and tell you that they’ve connected with something you’ve written. Mostly, people contact me because they want to promote their latest finger painting, which, depending on my position on the bipolarcoaster at the time, makes me either rageful, vengeful or sorrowful, but rarely helpful.

I recently had an essay on erotica published by The London Magazine and, low and behold, someone (other than my dad) actually read it. This someone was the poet Manash Bhattacharjee, author of Ghalib’s Tomb, who got in touch with me to discuss it. We’ve been engaged in a slow, organic and meandering dialogue across subject matters ranging from the feminism of Anaïs Nin to the politics of memory ever since. “The politics of memory?” I ask. “Childhood is memory and memory is always political in its self-reconstruction. We are all Proustian that way,” says my gently erudite new friend from across the chasm of 2D coding. And with that, the book I’m currently reading rises up off the page and begins bouncing through the ten dimensions I can only vaguely get my head around.

Me, Me and Not Me is the latest offering from local poet Tony Frisby, which has just been published by Waterloo Press. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is another poet in existential crisis, as the title winkingly suggests, but on closer inspection it is infinitely more interesting than the endless and futile deconstruction of another tortured subject, fascinated with his own innards. Frisby has brought memory back from the dead, and cross-examines its ghosts with playful, furious and poignant lyricism.

“Frisby has brought memory back from the dead, and cross-examines its ghosts”

Here are the politics of self-reconstructed memory. The voices in this poet’s head, his multiple ‘Me’s, his ‘dopples’, are made flesh and blood as his mother frets in his ear before every poetry reading, “Oh Jaysus boy, I hope ya know what yer doing”, or his Uncle Mikey reprimands, “Stop dat highfalutin bollocks boy, sure yer makin’ a holy show of de whole family”.

As the author describes, “The multiple-occupancy of what I call Me” is surely – now articulated thus – familiar to us all. And we, we and not we, being barely able to fathom the fourth, fifth and sixth, let alone the 10th dimension, are as much the spectres and spectators of our past as the illusive creatures are themselves.

It’s quite a thing when you encounter a piece of poetry that gives you some tangible tool to walk away with and apply to your own life experience. Frisby has achieved this, as I set out with my copy of Me, Me and Not Me abandoned by the bed to identify the Mes and the Not Mes of my own world, as they play hide-and-seek with the ‘real’ Me, with the politics of my memory, shaping and shifting and shape-shifting through time, space and the whole, messy gaggle of us.

Me, Me and Not Me will launch on 20 June 2014 at The Redroaster Café in Kemptown, Brighton, at 7.30pm. I will be reading along with Alice Walker, Carole Bremson and Michaela Ridgway. Benjamin Blake will be performing the music of Jacques Brel, and Tony Frisby will of course be there with all his various selves.

Me, Me and Not Me is available from Kemptown Bookshop, Waterstones, Waterloo Press, Amazon and the author’s website: www.tonyfrisbypoetry.co.uk

Pic credit: www.andrewkingphotography.co.uk