[James Midgley]

Hi Matt,

Following up -- I said I'd think about it more, and indeed I did. My thoughts ended up being something along the lines of -- the poem more or less does what I think it wants to do (clearly this wasn't exactly what you wanted it to do, though). I still think it all hinges on that turn-about of tone and perspective, but as that's what the poem seems to want to do and be, maybe it should be allowed to be and do that.

I wondered whether others found this confusing because it's more based in UK sociopolitical ideas than might be obvious to we Brits. These sorts of sterotypes are ubiquitous, of course, but maybe our history of welfare state interventions (and pushback to them) has generally made us more aware of them. Hard to say.

The issue with the showers/chambers is trickier. It isn't common knowledge that they were first used to 'euthanise' the disabled -- and even here there's room for confusion, as my understanding was that these were first used in psychiatric populations, which doesn't gel quite so well with the portrait(s) presented in the poem, at least to my mind.

The gas chambers are always going to bring to mind the Jews first and foremost, and same with ideas of arbeit macht frei.

I understood that these were depictions of 'benefit-fraudsters'. It actually wasn't clear to me that these were meant to be disabled people specifically, rather than a broader conglomeration of the kinds of people that might receive these stereotypes -- but yes, it was clear that this did include disabled people. For example, prisoners also came to my mind when thinking of those who are excluded from 'forms of productivity/contribution' and who might likewise be led to the showers -- so, other sorts of institutional dehumanisation, too. I was not familiar with the term "useless eaters" as a reference to disabled people at all.

Holocaust references are always going to crinkle noses. There can be no poetry after Auschwitz, after all. That isn't to say they can't work.

Maybe there's a way in which the figuration is too settled until we get to the final line, which allows it too little wiggle-room for belief. I find myself trying to fit it into the framework that's come before -- I can imagine a bunch of people in a pub, chatting, drinking and eating. It's shocking and incongruous -- and makes that framework disintegrate -- when the final line arrives, which makes the poem's machinery very evident.

But, as I say, that seemed reasonably enough to be part of the poem's purposeful operation. Maybe there's a way to fit the showers more conceptually to something more in line with something that might more reasonably happen to the 'we' in their day-to-day -- pointlessly showering (for no one really as they have no workplace or etc to get to). If the reference were made a little more subtle, the poem might better have its cake and eat it too. The line as it stands steps out of the logic the poem has so far set up -- which can work as a kind of one-time shock, but then that hand is played and revealed.

I'm enormously tired so I'm not sure this has been all that helpful -- hopefully there's something here of use.

Cheers