Goodeness

Chris Goode d.2021

Kevin Nolan has just made me aware of some of the material available on-line about the history of Chris Goode. The story seems to be that Goode had been dodging stories of sexual abuse of young men in his theatre companies for a number of years before being forced to close both of them. His husband then found illegal (category A) explicit images on Goode’s hard disc, and went to the police about them. Goode was arrested, questioned, released again. He then killed himself (in June 2021). We don’t know what the police knew, or what they would have done.
"He was one of the good guys, wasn’t he? Maddy Costa thought so when she was invited by Goode to join Chris Goode and Company to write about the work as critic-in-residence in 2011. A fan of Goode’s work, she saw it as “a very romantic proposition” and at the time didn’t see it as being part of the myth-making that Goode was enacting around himself.
Over the past four years she has had to question everything she thought she knew about Goode. “It’s been so shattering, because I really believed that the work that Chris was doing was about finding different ways to live and finding alternatives to hierarchy, patriarchy and capitalism, and to find that all to be a front for abuse and paedophilia has properly broken me.”"

I am now going to quote material written by Xavier de Sousa and posted on Maddy Costa’s website, in the part given over to a dossier on Goode – and not about his creative side, I fear. The whole blog is subtitled “thoughts on theatre, writing, music, feminism, dancing, dreaming & mothering, by maddy costa”. There is more to life than Chris Goode, fortunately. Both de Sousa and Costa worked for one of Goode's theatre companies.
“”Manipulation of narratives is exactly where I place a big focus of his abuse. He used us, our stories, and our collective history, as protective shields for himself to normalise his abuse. When I say ‘us’ I mean everyone who worked with him but specifically queer and trans people and our shared histories.

Across his work, he often narrated and wrote about young men, inter-generational relationships, queer utopias. Often his work revolved around entering a new, exciting if obscured world. Weaklings had the form and narratives one might find when lost in an internet-hole at 4am in search for something one hasn't quite figured out yet. Ponyboy Curtis was about young men’s explorations of their own identities and sexuality. Men in the Cities explored fantasies of intergenerational lust and rape among other things. This was all merged within a broad artistic practice that existed in a grey area of definition, intentionally. The constant greyness of it all, allowed for him to play with nuances of trauma and fill them with obscurity and abuses that obfuscated our understanding that those narratives were actually an attempt to normalise the concept of paedophilia. The violence in those stories was the point, the normalisation of abuse was the point.

There are some incredibly dangerous precedents set by his actions. First, the ‘experimentalism’ of his writing and directing styles. He used experimentation as departure point but also as cloaking shield. Reflecting back now, I can see that the nuances he so revered in his writing, was in the language used, not in the actual content. The content was abuse, as was the goal, and they were actually in plain sight, framed as ‘difficult’ and ‘dark’ aspects of the human condition. The language was intricate and nuanced to obfuscate our perception of the abuses that happen in these stories, and their normalisation.

Secondly, many contexts have told me that they won’t engage or commission “this type of work any more” (i.e. queer work). Experimental theatre and performance art are already considered ‘too challenging’ in the UK theatre landscape, often too risky to programme/support.””

This much excerpted from de Sousa’s text, leaving out much else of great weight. This is only relevant to the poetry world because of the role which Goode played in that world. To my knowledge, that included making a theatre available for the avant-garde series SubVoicive on Monday evenings, when his theatre troupe had a night off; the anthology he edited, Better than language (i.e., love is better than language); and his poetry pamphlet, Boomer Console. It follows, obviously, that he liked modern poetry – he was one of us. I think concerns about his career as a serial abuser of young men tend to distract from his more obvious role as the embodiment of smugness. This is the aspect I prefer to dwell on. He couldn’t enter a room without feeling that he was making a stand, poignant and yet robust, against patriarchy, capitalism, convention, and heteronormativity. I found this hard to take. In the aurasphere, his aura reminded me profoundly of David Cameron. They just gave off the same vibe of fatherly and immovable smugness.
In 2000, I was asked to review a batch of pamphlets, of which Boomer console was one. I didn’t like it. Terrible Work published my review. I got echoes back telling me that the younger generation (of pamphleteers) were outraged and didn’t think I had any right to an opinion. Goode was an Important Person and knew other Important People. I was supposed to consecrate, not record my reactions. My feeling about that batch was that the poets had given up logic, so the bond which connects primary experiences to inner states of mind. They wanted states of mind to be autonomous from experience, and an accelerated, incoherent, excited, and confused manner of utterance was how they imposed that. They could be insulated from experience, so from a world run by people who didn’t care about them, by randomness. This loosed state was able to take the place of lyric utterance -at least for that group and their followers. I found that the inherited poetry had allowed the reader to share states of mind by being told what the series of experiences was, which had led up to them. That was the basis for sharing. The new random style didn’t arouse any particular state of mind in me. It didn’t work as poetry. It was like a building falling over on the horizon. What I wrote about Boomer Console was “What is the opposite of blank logic? darkened logic? chromatic logic? gloss logic? logic matte? logic latte?Chris Goode's pamphlet is called Boomer Console. If you are going to cut very rapidly it is useful to develop a way of making the images arresting and recognizable in a short space. If the individual snatches are blurred and uninterpretable, the overall effect is like a camera bouncing down a flight of steps one by one. From handheld authenticity to what? The impression made by this pamphlet is one of indifference and frustration. The “feel” of the eye constantly being distracted by a new thing from the old thing which it didn’t really engage with may be “contemporary” in that young people are having this experience while watching TV, flipping through racks of CDs, wandering around shopping malls, patrolling university libraries, etc. However, we suspect that one part of the future is being interested. The text gives off messages like “skittish” “fear of commitment” or “not taking things in”. The Stooges, of course, were able to take states of boredom and indifference and make you emotionally identify with them. But they knew how to fill the subliminal channels. Not use them as garbage chutes.”

When Chicago Review did an issue on Young British Poets, they took on four poets of whom Chris Goode was one. I suppose this is what tends to happen in these international showcases, that they get lumbered with people who are Impressive but Bad. Was that around 2005?
I can now see that severing links of logic could also be the basis for rejecting morality and persuading yourself that your actions have no effect on others, and so you aren’t accountable. I suppose that should have been obvious.
I have taken the ultimate step of using my catalogue and locating those books on the shelf. Console is still no good. However, his anthology, Better Than Language, is important. I read it as part of a batch of nine anthologies of New Poets, which muffled its impact on me somewhat. I collected 200 names from those books; I was overloaded. In a good way. Someone corrupt can enjoy, and understand, modern art, in the same way that a bank robber eats exactly the same doughnuts that everyone else eats. Ten years later than Console, it is better thought out, the irrationality more integrated and contoured. Goode had got a long way into ‘alternative’ poetry as it stood in 2011. I think some of these 13 poets have actually given up (hard to check that!), anyway this is a document and still stands. In the introduction, he says “[…] on the whole – and this is something we see perhaps for the first time in thirty years (with a handful of glorious exceptions in the interim) – these high-end poets are nonetheless genuinely energised by pop culture, by the pop artefact and pop syntagmata and the vivaciousness of pop rationales (the pop of population more than the pop of fizzy-pop): as opposed to squeezing a lonely titillation out of a clumsy excited thrumming on pop’s sticky-out bits, gloved in ticklish ironies and throwing the dreamless shapes of sarcastic dancing.” This is vivid more than realistic, but it’s pretty good. This group were actually ten years younger than the poets I reviewed for T Work, and arguably a new generation.
The use of the theatre in Euston (I think the venue was called Tom Tiddler’s Ground, or maybe it was next door to a pub called that) was crucial for the fragile London alternative scene. If you don’t have a venue, you don’t have an event, or an events series. It was probably the Camden People's Theatre. I think that was around 2001 to 2004.
It's good that Goode's career as predator and abuser has been so well documented. I am posting this to acknowledge the truth, which several people gave up their careers in theatre to make public and bring to an end. But I don’t think this sort of pattern exists inside the poetry world. There is no power imbalance, because nobody is making any money and the prizes are so abstract. There is no role for a casting couch in the poetry world. It is a remarkably flat social structure – it is very hard to acquire power over others, and to some extent it is equally hard to satisfy ambition in it. The satisfactions are, shall we say, abstract, aesthetic, invisible. It's not quite "self-importance is the only importance there is". It really is flat and fair.
Fairness - Xavier de Sousa and Maddy Costa are properly the central and heroic figures of this story. That is a fair account of it. I have not written much about the Goode story, because accounts, including first-person ones, are already available on-line.