100bis. For Eleni Sikelianos: “Let Us Carry on Activating This Habit of Error”1

It’s tomorrow and
Hallowe’en’s all over this white island
we let out the dead to day
to celebrate our rotting flesh and next
the hard bones left smiling at the end
yeah, yeah, yeah, every bit of it is fake
but isn’t that all the pleasure of our brief lives
?

What we remember and understand
we don’t
but if we let it all act through us then
we might get somewhere, even this stupid night
little elves and witches calling, and their cats
let’s change everybody into being everything we are
charged fully in our most complete expressions yet

 

 

1“Heard or misheard or miswritten or misread at Xing the Line, October 30, 2014”

99. New Classes, New Consciousnesses, New Solidarities1

and each time we return we shall receive illumination
a real team I say rooted in bodies still
a process run on here of sharedness & little children
blameless improvisation now2

To Apply a Gloss3
Is there memory still of Dion Fortune in this town? Where unmade roads on its disordered edge lead up to new millionaire mansions & cheap executive apartments? Here, where Dr Moriarty’s eyes pierced her shell of flesh to lay bare what that flesh could emerge into? Oh, a practical Englishwoman making up magic in a home counties country town, through force of will, self‑cultivated power & skilled improvisations. Here’s what there is: where we return to is what root there is.4

Oh loveliest Hertfordshire, Karla & Darrel don’t like you much, & who can blame them? This little southeastern tip of Offa’s empire (remember her?) joined on just here to a small lump of East Saxon land: let’s make a new start. We still do avoid Hertford, I guess – better down into London (another lost part of Essex). Maybe at our roots, even to Harlow, just to doss there & wait out the bad times in the company of mates. And I’m not sure what D.F. would have made of them, that is of us. I’ll just trust she’s lost by now that racial crap, & knows how identity comes from circumstances & will, enlivened through the fertilising energies of hybrid vigour.5

Now, food made & shared together is magic too. Everyone who is real knows this: bards, sea nymphs, small children. That’s why the Christian Church had to cut out the love feast & replace it with ludicrous small-scale professionalised rituals: a symptomatic compulsive repetition. Wasn’t it so much simpler? And in this case can’t it be again?6

Listen to this. That will be when the overcomplex systems stutter into incoherence & we improvise our own new world out of the bits left. Yes?7

 

 

1 “Oh thingummy! He’s off now!”

 

 

2 “Improvisation! More like shuffling around the same old words again.”

 

 

3 “Well, maybe if I’m doing these notes, I’d better say there’s a bilingual pun on “shine” here, because I don’t think you’d get it otherwise. And I wouldn’t blame you at all.”

 

 

4 “No! Not magic, please. I thought he’d forgotten all about that – but it comes flooding back now I suppose. There was a note about this stuff somewhere I think – but I can’t be arsed to look & I’d be surprised if you did.”

 

 

5 “The boundaries of Dark Age Hertfordshire. Can you get that? Who could really bloody care about all this malarky? Who would read it? Well, yes. That question’s answered. We’d better humour him. Tom Williamson, The Origins of Hertfordshire (Hertfordshire Publications, 2010). Oh, it’s all academic. Still mad suppositions about the unknowable, that means – just with a bibliography. And there’s a good photo on the cover: The Devil’s Dyke. I like that all right.”

 

 

6 “Don’t you just hate it when men go on about children & domesticity, and how important it all is? God save us, please!”

 

 

7 “Well, alright then, maybe we can follow this. It’s a good political programme – but I don’t what the jesus this is to do with poetry now, do you? Or is that indeed the cunning avant-garde trick of it? Am I being bloody naïve here? Or not naïve enough? And I’ll tell you one more thing – I’m surely now fed up to my teeth with his bloody old poetic prose.”

97. Towards a Common Place, at Last?

too much said
emptily voiced rhetoric
but still
just to live freely
common place together
 

oh those old gods again
don’t we always dream of them?
our circumstances
                  caught this?
 

let’s start again
The People’s Republic of Albion
                                 – truly meant
                                 – who wouldn’t desire this?
dignified women & men relishing their lives
who can accept anything for us that’s less?
 

old stars –
what shattered fragments watch us
we are children
our knowledge of this world
too brief
 

do you remember landscapes
or people?
maybe failure here1
 

Alle die Schlafgestalten, kristallin
die du annahmst
im Sprachschatten,

ihnen
führ ich mein Blut zu

Paul Celan, “Alle die Schlafgestalten”, in edited & translated by Michael Hamburger, Paul Celan: Poems (Carcanet New Press, 1980), p 296

 

The crowd howls like a woman in labour. The crowd writhes in giving birth to its own destiny … Everything is ardour and clamour, creation and intoxication, peril and victory, beneath the murky sky of battle where swallows flash and cry.

Gabriele D’Annunzio, speech May 1915, quoted in Lucy Hughes-Hackett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio poet seducer & preacher of war (Fourth Estate, 2013), p 2962

complex surfaces
– yes that’s a good slogan
what we must aim for
pullulating & fractal
this whole thin membrane
so fragile
           mustn’t let it break
 

regret the morning in a coffee shop
trying to write poetry
                       about the sunlight in the street
                       & the people
                                    passing in & out
                                    not the top of craft
                                    its lowliness to love
 

only us at last
ran to the ship and thanked
if we’re not dead
we’d better try living
this time round at last3

 

 

1 “Oh jesus! Too true. Time to bring on the quotations now & see if they’ll help us get going again.”

 

 

2 “Ahh, listen you can actually hear the twin glittering swollen bollox of the political poet chiming here.”

 

 

3 “Oh dear fuck – this poetry is depressingly hopeful as it ends. Easy to maintain that negative critical stance when you’re a university lecturer – the rest of us poor mortal wretches need something better this time round, I can tell you.”

93. It’s All About Speech1

(Costa Coffee, Potter St, Bishops Stortford, September 10 & 12, 2012)

Filthy after we put our tent up
                                – oh
here we are
            singing squeakily
                              – not disordered
glittering I’d say rather
                          not
                              no not
                              some blurry mess
undelicious
            folk songs
            & the way I was sitting
            I just woke up one morning
            I can see you’re laughing now
                                          Sarah
                                          do you know the website
                      never miss the carnival
                      the laughter, too
                                        is changing
                                        this time
                                        preserving
                                        all possibilities
                                        everything
                                        on my back
– take it as a warning
                       please

 
And then I see
               they’re still doing that
                                        in the car park
                                        – you know
                                          another time
I bought it there
             they know it’s naughty
                                    but all at once
                                    huge & flaming
                                    I think it says
oh mongrel joy
               we do need you
                              any way
we will
        protect the wildlife
                             I get the cynicism
                                                no one
that’s why we’re doing things
                              take it as a warning
                              it won’t last long
                              in the end
                                         all fuckd up
this world
           I’m sorry
                     only photocopies now
                                          ripped & torn
that’s why created collage
                           heteroclite fragments
                                                 – oh we are!

 
It’ll take time to bind them up
                                all she sd
stands on the quay
                   come down from the fells at last
another person in front
                        finally we’ve moved on as well
just typical
             this young world
[pounding beats
                – easy, easy
                  several
                  minutes at will
                  the colleges
                               have got to understand
                               call off their choirs
                               yeah, yeah
                               let’s enjoy this now
slap of the water
                  the little lake
                                  where we stopped one day
suddenly
         what holds this together
                    familiar faces
                                   – Sarah
                                     you’re not eating bêche-de-mer
                                                                    again?
                    buns for the weekend
                    simple things
                    usable & valued now
                                        what they are
                                        we are too
                                        what we are
                                        familiar to you then and
                                                                 [fade

 

 

1 Two Keston Sutherland quotes from Hix Eros 4: On the Late Poetry of J.H. Prynne (2014) on the relationship between speech & poetry:

“Poetic thought,’ in Prynne’s sense, is located at what he has called the ‘borders and edges’ of language, that is, at the vastest and most nearly untraversable distance from the material corruptions of workaday language, which Prynne in 1986 called ‘the false & corrupted idiom of residual, vernacular commonalty as almost pure cant.’” Keston Sutherland, “Introduction: ‘Prynne’s late work?’”, p 10

“Poetic thought is not self-consciousness, but the truth of things, and poetry in its radical truth is not what humans speak, but the shining of the lexis in its priority to the subject.” Keston Sutherland, “Sub Songs versus the subject: Critical variations on a distinction between Prynne and Hegel”, p 132

Prynne’s argument is as follows (simplifying somewhat):

“the French keep this connection between singing and the edge, as in English chant and cant: offset or cut back at the leading rim, the sing-song of beggars demeans the word by giving it street-life and media hype”

“English chant and cant (=tilt, border) are not related in origin, any more than French chant and chant which must be separate words which ‘happen’ to have converged in the same form. But English chant and cant (= obscure argot) are related, and historically it seems that the (to lay folk) unintelligible Latin ritualism of liturgical performance may have triggered a resentful sense of an exclusive dialect, thence parodied by the socially rejected who then imitated the speech-tunes while inventing their own reserved formulations. Cant thus early descends into the underworld, seeming to the confidently rational a threat to the comprehensibility of open, lucid speech. It is demeaned not so much by its dark side, however, as by the ingratiating face offered to its masters and pastors, its solicitation of a false sympathy exploited for gain. … this would leave a false & corrupted idiom of residual, vernacular commonalty as almost pure cant: the daily diet of television, say, or the higher newspapers.”

from J.H. Prynne, “Extracts from Letters to Anthony Barnett” dated 5th January & 22nd January, 1986, pp 162 & 164-5, Michael Grant (editor), The Poetry of Anthony Barnett (Allardyce Book, 1993). I’m not deeply convinced by any etymological arguments (oh dear!); and even less convinced by Sutherland’s more general application of Prynne’s phrase. Not one to haggle or even heggle, I’m more for cant, whether thieves’, beggars’ or professional, than Kant. No absolute in language beyond our use of it; no origins beyond the factuality of what we are & speak.

91. A Recipe for Children

for you all

Little noisy children, then, aren’t
you nice?
          – just as you should be, yes
everywhere that we can think of
funny little creatures uncommitted yet
to all that crap we must believe & follow
adult masculine English, say
                             uncertain class & age
what commonplace delusions that you don’t
yet share
          of course now lots
totally fucked up & maybe even lost
but most alive & hopeful still
the future such a grasp of faith
actually here embodied
                       open & illuminating

So what do we need?
                    for more
little children to pass through
                                full
sometimes of life, sometimes of quiet
none of this easy & none of it a recipe
but what we’d need then is something like
                        an openness to your growing lives
                        & a way of adjusting all that is around
                        into your flourishing transformations
                        some sorts of food as varied & as comforting
                        as all that can be managed
                                                   & like too
                        spaces open and enclosed, full up & empty
                        you know, just every possibility
                        – someone1 needs to have produced these
                        & someone needs to carry this all on
                        somewhere to run & someone to turn to
                        softness & feeling totally assured
                        others just like when you’re bibbling & bobbling
                        & others totally unlike so you can learn good things
                                                        – whatever you need
                        time as well, to be on your own
                                                        staying engaged
                        & time to be caught up with others
                                                           a mad laughing mob
                                                           rolling down hills
                                                           little hills
                                                           giggling together
                        & words
                                good words attuned to you
                                           & about you
                                           engaging you in colloquy
                                           engaging you in nonsense
                                a constant gentle rain
                                language softened into mud
                                squidged up & scooped
                                                      all over you
                        & things for your bodies & things
                        for your eyes & things for
                        your ears & nose & your hands again
                        water & sand & mud & stone & wood & paper
                        plastic & metal & everything natural
                        & lots that is unnatural
                                                 stories & love
                                                 music & encouragement
                                                 peacefulness & challenge
                                                 & always
                                                          to listen
                                                          & to respond
                        Chinese feasts & barbecues
                        picnics & Christmas
                                            – all with as many others
                                              as you can gather
                        breakfast at Broadstairs or teatime in Coffee Corner
                        sitting on a sofa w/ everyone around or
                        just as many as fit
                                            on a mat out the back
                                            or even a large cardboard box
– this isn’t telling anyone
anything we don‘t know
                       but
just praising what is good
fall quiet now

Hullo?
       – are you alright?
this place needs noise now
needs everything said again
                            & done
whatever ceremonies are proper
that appear out of nothing
(like this whole ridiculous universe
                                     yes?
                                     & like us)
doing what you do to help the child
                     be what you are
                     & will be
                       a person
                       true person
                       playing yourself
                       as your self
                       just as you are
                       can be

This is
        a revolutionary demand I’d say
        to do this truly & fully
        rushing in as absolute & unforgiving
        like a sundog over Harlow2
        like the digging up of relics
        of who we could have been
        like a poem by Sean Bonney
        like an urgent summons
        on someone else’s phone
                                – oh my god it’s you
                                  that’s who they want
                                  you’re wanted now
                                  to help us all
make this much better
                                  if too late for us
                                  for all our children
                                  & yours for ever3

Thank you – this is
a start again to say
the same words really
(oh thank you constraints of form that chose me!
but I don’t care
                 – for what is good
we can say again & again
with no loss of balance, only
just to do better is a gain
our eyes will burn
unless we open them to this light
of the new world continually around us
utopian hope lurking even in unrented shops
& we risk losing it
letting the old drop onto it
suppressing it into what we are
actually bound here as we are
we think ourselves free still
we carers & we parents
we know that you must be
not as we are4
but as we could be
          should be
in a world that is as it should be
as nothing else will preserve our lives
                                & yours

[So much I must say, so much I must finish with, ending what isn’t a recipe, except as I say it is, disordered as late summer sun collapsing into autumn. We must dig out what we need from it, if we’re to get through the coming winter & you, our children, flourish – rooty-tooting like glad tapirs in an uncomplicated alchemy, changing everything we live within into what will sustain us, especially our children for ever. “Always a good time to rebuild, now,” we say, as we serve you this dish to enjoy & nourish

 

 

1 that is us, dear reader or dear audience

 

 

2 or Mortimer’s Cross or the someone else’s Bridge: cold & luminous anyway

 

 

3 The political is children; the psychological is children. Socialism is children. Everything else is profitable infanticide.

 

 

4 insipid ghosts