Category: 10 fragments & aphorisms

58. OK, Then, Let’s Take the Road East to Harlow & Never Mind the Dark

In London
& the Duggan Inquest shows that
the police can shoot you & lie
& lie & fake the evidence & fool
some people still

Darrel (or Karla)
you left your parents’ house
you really did need to
your parents can’t afford your room any longer
& next they’ll cut your Housing Benefit
So you’ll’ve nowhere to live at all
     – har har hardy-har har!
     snort the Bullingdon Boys
     & all their little hangerson

In Sainsburys
oh white lights of infinite choice
– we still live within
this state of illusion

On the way home
the moon inside her armature of light
cuts a silver window through cloud

Baraka
. . . Build the new world out of reality, and new vision
we come to find out what there is of the world
to understand what there is here in the world!
to visualize change, and force it.
we worship revolution1

Amiri Baraka, “When We’ll Worship Jesus”, emailed to UKPoetry ListServ, Fri, 10 Jan 2014 by Anthony John on hearing news on the ListServ of Baraka’s death

Just written
You don’t accept improvisation – just do it, tenderly & in wonder.

The practice of outside
outside
where the vagrants live
all the cold & pain
we hit against
each other

Jarvis
     He had to get to Harlow before dark.2
In Hertfordshire the loneliest certainties are
     trod into pavements of the patient dust.

Simon Jarvis, The Unconditional: A lyric (Barque Press, 2005), p 17

Spicer
Things fit together. We knew that – it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone.

Jack Spicer, “Admonitions” (“Dear Robin, . . .”), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited Robin Blaser (Black Sparrow Press, 1975), p 61

Brecht
Fröhlich vom Fleisch zu essen, das saftige Lendenstück
Und mit dem Roggenbrot, dem ausgebackenen, duftenden
Den Käse vom großen Laib und aus dem Krug3
Das kalte Bier zu trinken . . .

Brecht, “Fröhlich vom Fleisch zu essen”, from http://www.fleischwirtschaft.de/dokumentation/kunstkultur/pages/2.html on fleischwirtschaft.de

 

 

1 Another embalmed head cult here, so watch out. Anything needing or demanding worship is self-evidently a demonic or delusory fetish. On poetry, revolution and psychotic delusion, read Sean Bonney, Notes on Militant Poetics, http://www.mediafire.com/view/ez1idi117qns675/Bonney%20 %20Notes%20on%20Militant%20Poetics%20%28imposed%29.pdf. I think he records symptoms rather than any remedy. There isn’t – carry on adjusting & attacking as we adapt to it & it to us. Cutting through it all in desperation merely detaches heads and fetishises the consequences.

 

 

2 This line I admire most of the poem, when the inherent & self-regarding London-Cambridge axis admits (though of course in suspension) another path for movement than its own mock-epyllionary oscillations.

 

 

3 Grossness is all

53. Here Come the Geldi Again

creeping out in the sunlight
like we all do nowadays
 

birdsong & glitters
unplanned under clear sky
 

hidden safe then
from Satan’s Watch Fiends
what the gods are we can tell
– breathe on the mirror & let
                    us appear
 

“Everything tends towards catastrophe, & collapse
I am interested, geared-up and happy”

Winston Churchill, August 28, 1914, quoted in Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Penguin, 2013), p 201 (citing Hew Strachan, The First World War [Oxford, 2001), p 103)

 

We die, we are born
& in between
scrabble about a bit
 

oh this stormy weather as the year begins
great things might come over or
yet another upwelling of that shit-filled water
 

mongrel warnings now:
true Anglo-Saxons born
already hyphenate
– our new native land
scraped clear then washed
bare rock corroded only by sunlight & rain
will welcome all immigrants
– come spread your fertile filth!
life upswinging here joyous as kitsch
 

largeness & laughing
noisy by nature
curiously lovable
who wouldn’t want
not worship
but welcome
 

i Im Arme der Götter wuchs ich groß.

ii Einig zu sein, ist göttlich und gut; woher ist die Sucht denn
Unter den menschen, daß nur Einer und Eines nur sei?

iii Liebt die Götter und denkt freundlich der Sterblichen!
Haßt den Rausch, wie den Frost! Lehrt und beschreibet nicht!
Wenn der Meister euch ängstigt,
Fragt die große Natur am Rat.

Hölderlin, op. cit, “Hyperions Schicksalslied”, p 27, “Fünf Epigramme: Wurzel alles Übels”, p 36, “An die jungen Dichter”, p 19

 

a hank of hair is a little picking bird
– see it fly away now

47. Taking the Royal Road (that’s free to all)

the power of dreams
                    against
 the dream of power
 

it was the day
when the cats went out to settle all the fate of the world between themselves
then went back in & tried to tell us
 

flesh isn’t gendered
only intent
 

once we all had the same name
now every name is different
 

“Large figures, dressed in white, were conventional types of divinity, but they bore no signs of personality, and unless they spoke, the question of identity was left open. Even when they did speak, they could not be expected to be direct . . . usually, they gave hints and riddles.”

Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians: in the Mediterranean world from the second century AD to the conversion of Constantine (Penguin, 1988) p 158

 

Thank those gypsies w/ their tambourines
or no one’ld ever have left their home
 

floating down out of the mountains
attention to circumstances
will become delicious
 

shriek & french & italian
– any language but this!
 

“Als wie ein Ruhetag, so ist des Jahres Ende,
Wie einer Frage Ton, daß dieser sich vollende,
Alsdann erscheint des Frühlings neues Werden,
So glänzet die Natur mit ihrer Pracht auf Erden.”

Hölderlin (signed Scardanelli), “Der Winter”, in ed. Michael Hamburger, Hölderlin (Penguin Books, 1961), p 259

 

“We ran, silently, from the grey-green pathways of the mountain pass into the quiet, colourless streets of the city. We sought out friends. We had wandered, maddened and goaded, for all our lives it seemed: now to dwell and live and again to build.”
An old couple, tenderly hand in hand, had sung this song.

40. Here in This Ragged Old World (When the Storm Has Passed)

Society & all its institutions now reformed
– like cheap meat

 

Oh Paulina, Paulina
so admonitory & warning
I get lost for words
what you say is so true
you’re as harsh as the storm
blowing over us now

 

Ja, das Meer ist blau, so blau        Ja, das Meer ist blau, so blau
    – und das geht alles seinen Gang      – und das geht alles seinen Gang
Und wenn die Chose aus ist            Und wenn die Chose aus ist
    – dann fängts von vorne an            – fängts nicht von vorne an
Ja, das Meer ist blau, so blau        Ja, das Meer ist blau, so blau
    – und das geht ja auch noch lang      – und das geht auch nicht noch lang
Ja, das Meer ist blau, so blau        Ja, das Meer ist blau, so blau
    – ja, das Meer usw.                   – ja, das Meer usw.

Berthold Brecht, “Was die Herren Matrosen sagen” (Matrosen Song), from Happy End

 

“I was challenged, or challenged myself, to begin writing a book . . . without knowing what the answer would be. This seemed a fair test of the idea, which I had become interested in exploring, that the superiority of narrative to other sorts of . . . writing was that you, meaning the author as well as the reader, did not necessarily know, and perhaps ought in principle not to know, the end before you started. In that condition I began to write the book . . .”

John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (Vintage, 1992), p xi

 

let’s rearrange
this time
the rules
everything working

 

hundreds of trees down
but we’ll get through them
even escape
out of this cloying heart
M & S itself

 

The bowl cracked but
holds water still
just oscillating
as we work

 

sweet potatoes, broccoli
& carrots – something solid
but very simple & just
what we need

 

lit in what we improvise
– the flashing head of Jesus

 

all the ragged clouds & trees
& the humpbacked moon to view

29. This New Vagrant Sanctuary1

One Positive Thing That Has Come out of Stort Poetry Group’s Change of Meeting Place to the Bar at the Rhodes Centre:
– at least no one can maintain ignorance
  as to what has paid for all our poetry now

 
stories unfolded the universe in wonder
a dream or a scar to me or you
to themselves hidden, small, disordered

 
somewhere in the west midlands
the dog’s head has got the vapours

 
bubbling of declining games
swift above the brambles
all the symbols of memory
think in utter astonishment

 

O: “Sometimes, don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t care? I mean of course you want a change, we want a change, but if a thing ain’t godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn’t care.”
A: “We are become history. There is no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.”
J: “We don’t choose what we’ll remember, what stops with us.”
– even now he is a citizen of this new vagrant sanctuary

China Miéville, Iron Council (Pan Books, 2005) pp 88, 275 & 295

 

and all done
in the various regions of this dark and obscure Terrestrial Star
where, wandering as strangers, we lead,
                              in a short space of time,
                              a life harassed by varied fortunes.

from letter from Thomas Digges to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, quoted in Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (Flamingo, 2002), p 155, cited from F R Johnson & Sanford V Larkey, “Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the idea of the infinity of the universe in 1576”, Huntington Library Bulletin, v5, 1934

 
massed choirs might have helped us once Sig. Verdi
but the succour we seek surrounds us not like rain
but a bright feast we have prepared for
                                        flying coloured words
                                        above the grey
                                        of conceptual & concrete poetry
                                        that’s never
                                        as beautiful & nourishing as
                                        music, good food, common fun

 

“Here we meet with the idea put forward by Mme Blavatsky, that there can be no manifestation without differentiation into the Pairs of Opposites. Kether differentiates into two aspects as Chokrah and Binah, and manifestation is in being. Now in this supernal triangle, The Head Which Is Not, the Father and the Mother, we have the root concept of our cosmogony, and we shall return to it again and again under innumerable aspects, and each time that we return to it we shall receive illumination.”

Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah (Aquarian/Thorsons, 1987), p 45

 
close attention close attention
of children concerned/unconcerned
chomo ildrmef mchi
loseor attrtro entita
chble bis ildrle let
in close attention lose

 

Der Garten trauert,
Kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen.
Der Sommer schauert
Still seinem Ende entgegen.

Hermann Hesse, “Der Garten trauert”, as Richard Strauss, Vier letzte Lieder, “September”.

 

 

 1 Is this all a mistake?