65. That’s It

So many
voices here
radically imperfect
good eh?
searching out
more cake
unscrewed heads
absolute acts

not narrative
just lots
of people
doing things
sometimes written
sometimes smeared
some times
just here

the crowd
how many?
how confused?
what scars?
what stories?
what glitters?

invisible forces
rising up
the groundwater!
what you
thought solid
faulted or
voided now
wet as
your insides

speech here
so distorted
foreign voices
let’s mock
Nigel Farage
not serious
frequent glee
any act
speech act
full intention
nothing minimal
some people
understand no
human language

[little children
run noisily
can’t predict
watch out!
pleasure in
all this
[sounds of
more glee

watch out!
love it
[cry sing
(sure thing
hear! all
right all
giants or
bull dogs
ugly brutes
at least
the bite’s
bred out
now then

let’s go
home now
too noisy!
after all
endlessly repeated
no end
everything veers
off course
one day
may be
it’ll be
about now

even cheery
couple smiling
what splendour!
es soll
gut werden
even winter
ends then

all language
then? does
it work?
not utopian?
delicious again
well, time
will pass
a way
the rubble
re built
may be
we’ll learn
got to
do something
not nothing
how hope
really stupid
welcome here
time too
zu machen
to make
build up
a gain
all ways
– –
that’s it

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

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

30. A Recipe for a Long Semi-Structured Poetic Sequence

for my colleagues & comrades of Writers Forum Workshop – New Series, who have tasted what this recipe produces, monthly at The Fox, underneath the maroon lincrusta

And why do I do this, then?
well, if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be
                                  so
dumb necessity claims – it’s like the experimental
                                  – thank you Andrew Duncan
                                    and was that Ian Brinton?1
because this means not mastery but learning
not predicting how the words will fall upon the page
letting what is in & beyond them speak through
and it’s like too avoiding writing The Poem – bless it!
                                              all proper a
                                              golden little bowl
but letting in the dirty cracks of human experience now
which I don’t understand2
                         try and live within
involving them in this writing as I also
seek its origins to escape – we must know
first what has been paid for all our poetry
as here in Stortford, birthplace of Rhodes3
but what did you expect then? – fucking holy innocence?
                                my arse!
                                welcome everyone
                                to the here-and-now4

So you need just to start, yeah
unfolding stories in wonder, picking
at scars5, at dreams, all
seeming discarded, itchy & painful
forms the apprehension to proceed

One touch over all you’ll need
improvisation to rearrange everything
as it comes at you to pick it up
place it as it says where it says
so it says aloud its name thus:
     the dogshead of rage arises
     ends up all decollated upon the pole
     where Stafford & Warwick fight
& you try to get that energy
not to fit it into the schedule
but continually grow what you’re doing
until it becomes the place you are travelling to

The delicious game is to do this
with ingredients fresh & of the best
ones that fly around your head
untrammelled & unplanned but direct
open to all the stinking country-rock
           yes, of ambient experience
                                      thus:
     reading & thinking thru the reading & writing of the poems of yr contemporaries
     the last moment before the baby wakes & you’ve got then to attend
     all the texts you have already written
     all the texts you’d wished you’d written
     the facts & legends of a family’s living
     all the benefits you can gather from the company of poets
     just what you encounter on the train to a rundown seaside town
     the geography of that town, suffused with external memories
     taking a postcard & ask who is it? who is it? where is it & why?
     adding nothing
     what you hear in a coffeebar, or a pub, or wherever – let it force itself in
     the refusal to do what you ought – very important
     using all those precise techniques for the making & raising of actual things
     invent! with fortitude, the basis for all magic working & of all good cooking
     the cultivation of your non-neurotypical self
     high-status elites – focused on closely & continually6
     openness to games, swimming, floating away
     all your friends (real & imaginary)7
     the weather
     never forget a touch (or more) from Dom Sylvester Houédard
     just playing about with your computer8
     any system of magic that seems to work for you9
     an attempt at out-foxing Vanessa Place10
     fucking fucking rage
     the pleasures of narrative
     what appears to you in the night
     scars
     entoptic patterns
     Walter Benjamin – read what you like11
     itself – turned in & turned out12
& use of these what you want & in what order
or none at all & add whatever you wish
that’s pleasurable, nourishing & good fun together

Now, if a thing ain’t coming
                              – create its preconditions
then there’s no backward, let it stop with us
& inhabit too this vagrant sanctuary
                                      – do this
– or however you like for all I care
  the number of ways of acting is infinite
                                            but
  this here you can see13 is operative now:
     write 10 poems sequentially
     each following a different pattern
     then numbered 1 to 10
     decide by dice roll the order of forms
     that you’ll use in the next run of 10
     (purely as permutation – never 2 of the same successive
                              really doesn’t work!14
     & with one of them changed to a fresh recipe
     which determined of course stochastically
     while binding across these strutting runs
     let each poem bequeath 1 or 2 chosen words of power
     to its successor 10 units on
     & so on, building up as they proceed
     – this has very interesting effects
+ 2 further turns
          – whatever ingredients you choose of course
          crucial is openness to all language & image
          as you find them swimming thru this world
          supersaturated with meaning as it is
          let it crystallise out as it chooses
          – & challenge yourself in your making of instructions
          to go beyond what you think as poems
          or what you feel at ease doing
          in the mood of exploring & improvisational discovery
          not as aspirant formalist – no!15
     then let it play out
     the great game
     of writing a poem
     put into this world
     letting it swim with
     in the motion of us

And the varied fortunes wandering through this poem
could not help me stop from saying what
there is in a poetic sequence:
                               as a journey
across this dark & obscure terrestrial star
not mere jumping on the spot
squeaking in the lyric voice
                             but major working
                             encouraging intervention
                             whatever speaks
                             Enochian tongues

Questions of lexis here important
avoid ritual purity like the plague it is
write for voice but not as voice
massed choirs or other transitory auditions
root in written words, sober as rain
colourful & nourished, yes, from the speech
                                 of our Polish mothers
now too our source
                   but not our only
also words diurnal & strangely secular
as many out of the dictionary as in
syntax fluidic necessarily as current speech
occasionally conceptually fully logged
but flying, not wading or marching
write too as a bastard or a mongrel
hybrid vigour trumping formal rigour16

Return to it again & again
under different aspects
each time receiving illumination
nothing is exhausted
nothing is unfamiliar
arrange it all
into a house of life
study it in detail
& live within it
then write again
and again for fun

Close attention
close unattention
concerned & unconcerned
in close attention
lose attention
always concern unconcern
attracting entities
children twice
to carry on
these difficult times
need is more
than personal;
need is more
than sound or sight17

[So I got this out of many sources: Williams’ & Eliot’s complex sequences18; Spicer’s serial poem; heavy flavourings of Oulipo, NY, & early Cambridge too, my masters19; undigested (or overdigested) fragments from the forgotten avant‑gardes & alternatives of the late mid last century20. Slowly finally working through; what can I say? Find your own route, your own diet, your own recipe. Ignore mine. More from both art song & popular song good – structure, progression & repetition, variation & tone – try these & play. Freely improvise. Never mind it’s autumn here. We will reach whatever end we reach.21]

 

 
1
discussion in café in Red Lion Square after the Free Verse Poetry Bookfair, September 7, 2013

 
2
do you?

 
3
“colonist hearts seen in a butcher’s tray”, Doug Oliver, “Remember Stortford, birthplace of Rhodes”, Oppo Hectic (Ferry Press, 1969), p 12, quoted also in Peter Philpott, The Bishops Stortford Variations (Great Works Editions, 1976); and still seen daily

 
4
or hear-and-know

 
5
“Scars are not injuries … a scar is what makes you whole.” China Miéville, The Scar (Pan Books, 2003), p 216

 
6
can only be critically

 
7
you’ve already begun to deal with our enemies

 
8
or your pen, whatever

 
9
well, OK, even critical theory; but when doing this working remember to protect your skull & its crowning chakra in a foil cap, & to rigorously avoid impure thoughts (< sigh! > even though these are the best)

 
10
Bert Brecht may be useful here, the cunningest old fox in such games – also genre prose, the more bastardised the better of course

 
11
then maybe some Brecht, yes, again; some Gershom Scholem – only then a little Adorno, once you have an educated taste

 
12
ideally both at once; or, just mistakes

 
13
or hear

 
14
think of this as good pragmatic advice, like the incest taboo

 
15
nor card-carrying oulipist – fellow-travellers only please

 
16
“Thus from a Mixture of all Kinds began / That Het’rogeneous Thing, an Englishman.” Daniel Defoe, “The True-Born Englishman”, in edited Geoffrey Grigson, Before the Romantics: An anthology of the Enlightenment (Routledge, 1946), p 137

 
17
yes, do bring in sound poetry & visual poetry or even asemic poetry – all good things; but never accept any restriction – seize opportunity always

 
18
let’s claim them both as the good English poets they aren’t, but could have been

 
19
also before them, in my innocence, the Beats – oh, the filthy grebos, don’t let those smart college boys sneer (or they’ll clock them snobby gits alright) – they’re the ones who really set it all in motion

 
20
who now remembers Fathar & Yanagi, the Duncan McNaughton world; or Loris Essary’s Interstate & Alan Davies’ Oculist Witnesses, language-oriented before the LangPo cadres took over; or Opal L Nations’ Strange Faeces – just what it says?

 
21
but only if we start & do it, now:

23. Just a Bit of Fun, Then?

1
the poignancy of yesterday’s sky
all the guys carry on repeating it
slowly fading w/ their tats n
toothless dogs
 

2 Homoousios
(a) Corrosive: A Conceptual Poem © Vanessa Place
The life & misfortunes of an indigent wretch
inscribed upon her back w/ knifepoint / razor
as a unique p-o-d edition financed
by paying the wretch as little as she’ll take

(b) Mess: A Conceptual Poem © Kenny Goldsmith
Everything I touch
turns to gold

(c) Thanks: A Conceptual Poem © Peter Philpott
All your language use today
 

3
Starting with what?
& only that patterning?
Why those decisions?
& all those endless questions?
 

4
Lobet von Herzen das schlechte Gedächtnis des Himmels!
Und daß er nicht
Weiß euren Nam’ noch Gesicht
Niemand weiß, daß ihr noch da seid.

Brecht, p 120 “Großer Dankchoral”

 
5 Where the Poets Meet
G M Hopkins Lincrusta
glossed intense dark maroon
 

6 What Is To Be Done?
Strip Out Solutions Our Speciality
Phone Now Without Obligation!
 

7 It Made Me Scream
There’s nothing holding us here, I swear
the urgency of this situation – how patient
the warm evening air full of smells
its pollution obscured by reflections
                  shimmering prettily

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (Pan Books, 2000), pp 855-860

 
8 A Sense of the Ruptured Moment
The swifts are gone – this sky silent
under it though can be heard how
sudden flocks of peacocks flutter
leaping in joy about the buddleia
 

9 Mr Motley Continued with His Philosophical Ramblings, His Ruminations on Mongrel Theory
“You too are the bastard-zone, Ms Lin! Your art takes place where your understanding and your ignorance blur.”

Miéville, op cit, p 141 (likewise subheadings for subsections 8 & 9)

 
10
At the horror of this world’s empty vastness
inconsequentiality of the cruelty that plays
the ephemerality of all concepts to encounter this
we are swifts in summer, maybe flocking butterflies
having fun in this garden now.
                               The light steals away
                               what life is this now
                               then?