A Final Note by Paulina Wilson

Well, he doesn’t care much for consistency with names, so I don’t see why I should. You know what they say about signifiers anyway. So, here, whoever I am, I am, all bright eyed & perky, ready to critique the whole bloody mess now so fortunately behind us.

And on what basis, I hear my academic friends ask. On the business of having been dragged through the whole briar patch, start to finish & beyond, that’s how. I’m no follower of any head cults – the fact this name was used to stand for that of a ripped apart toy dog indicates the problem, not a viewpoint – which was a difficult one on that occasion, I can tell you.

Let’s start negative, carrying on from Little Friend Sarah. The whole thing’s relationship to any other people than Our Poet, let alone to the many female people it mentions, is odd – there are acts of calling out to specific individuals, in some world outside the poem (hi there!), as family, friends, poets (hmm? maybe). Do you believe this? I hear nothing. These shouts are silent. These people don’t actually inhabit this poem as it lays its pretensions out. An interesting try, and we can’t blame the poem so much as its instigator. Personal not textual weakness here.

Within the poem, names occur & often recur (like mine and yours, Sarah). Do we have any sense of our existence? Are we used in a way which enables us to inhabit as human beings this space we’ve been put into? I haven’t experienced this. We can have another of your “cunning avant-garde tricks” again here – all demonstrably textual illusion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Water offa . . . I tinks we knows dis one, squire. Indistinguishable though from wasted opportunities to deal with any higher order complexities than playground games with levels of meaning. There’s lots of stuff, yes, about people – but no people, just names there. No wonder the nearest approach to them is as vagrants, or unlikely revenants, scrambling up a Kentish beach, illegal immigrants in the populist fantasy.

So the whole political line trails off here also. A politics not based on actual living people is just what, to give him his credit, Our Poet warns us against. But if he can’t manage it either, you’d have to be a profound Adorno adorer to find this enterprise worth pursuing any further. He’s not writing an ideological critique of society & culture & poetry, he’s writing a poem (while occasionally indeed pissing worthwhilely on the pretensions of such critiques).

Utopia occurs in pieces, many of them so damaged as to be valueless (a C.A G.T. again). There’s cooking, a far more popular & useful art than poetry. There’s the consequent communal eating. There’s happy hippy child rearing. There are moments of communal action. There’s hanging around in various urban spaces. There are isolated but frequent pretty visual images (some entoptic). There’s a warm sticky cosy messiness of language, which, OK, at times is worthy of note. (Did you really not think that, Mr Veerses?)

Am I (were they?) (were you?) expecting too much from all this? If we think of what a poem can do, does this do it? Well, probably not much. It’s too long, with an excess of glutinous connective tissue produced by the ritual operations Our Poet compelled himself to engage in – a good way of cutting off personal responsibility. “You can’t criticise this, it really is a non human delusion set”: C.A-G.T.#3. It could have been either much more disturbing, a genuinely holothurian experience, or even more boring (also a genuine holothurian experience). I expect, in fact I know, he fiddled his rules too much. But the gamble which might have justified all this non neurotypical glossogenic apparatus failed to come off. The very existence of this piece of writing here demonstrates such, don’t you think?

Think of this then as the stake thrust into the defeated revenant’s heart to still & extinguish it for ever. Or the trepanger’s trident thrust into the bêche-de-mer & uplifting it into a dry & empty eternity. He, Our Poet, had thought (characterologically privileged information here) of a third sequence. Thank god (or whoever, whatever, nameless etc) that’s just not possible now. The returned dead of Old Albion shall be stuck here still, in Our Little Ingerlund (Prime Minister & Lord Protector: Msieur Farage, 1st Marquess of Thanet). The poem cannot prevent that one bit.

Can any poem prevent a future? This tries at times. As Paulina, I feel bound to advise you to take the notion of the recurrence throughout all history of the emergence of high status elites as a larger scale cycle than the class conflict process – dependent on wishful idealist thinking on Charlie Marx’s part. Where we end up is always determined by the application of coercive power, not any other factor. That’s pretty low level & obvious stuff.

So it may not lead now to “our completed expansion.” Whatever might, it’s probably not going to be a poem. It might be some of the emotional ideations invoked in the poem & mediated through its language – though such feelings can lead, & have led more often, to nightmare destruction rather than communitarian paradise. As Our Poet likes to point out, when state structures fail (like beginning now), power usually devolves to those best suited to grasp it – those most willing and able to steal & kill. Might be wiser to try & avoid that stage. And think too, my little friends, of what the 2011 Riots which lie behind much of these poems, & much maybe of your politics, actually achieved: a few deaths, a lot of broken glass, a temporary redistribution of trainers &c. Maybe some urban regeneration projects. And at the end free passes for police murder yet again.

But things are not unavoidable any more than avoidable. Migration, vagrancy, community coming into existence in resistance – OK, these too will exist & survive. Maybe we can applaud how this poem hymns them. That might be worthwhile. And some of the recipes are good. I like the mackerel & cabbage, and would make the Yuletide Pud (but not at bloody Xmas please!). Perhaps, as well, you may get some sense of a writing trying constantly to reinvent itself – following itself but open to (yeah of course, through mere symbolic sampling of) what is around it as language flux, image & ideation & as these drive the process on. C.A-G.T.#4. Some success, at times. Its instability & failure thus laudable. C.A-G.T.#5. Yeah, maybe too easy as much as too difficult. Mere tricks – like all the hard bought canting wisdom of the “socially rejected”.

Despite what he once said, I don’t teach. You learn, from what you will. Take it as you want. No more tricks but yours now.

98. Sigillum Rei Publicae Gentium Albionis1

     U  POLISHEDRAALL
     SHOE OSMFRIEND
    WAETOOS AL EPDR   R
    HYROP SGLY  EAI   EACH
    ASE LIVEL S NWA   PLEASURES
    THOSE  T  T TNN   UB
    HGODSAID  R O O   BIBLIOPHILES
    I OUR O   A F T   LO
SOAPSUDDENESM N  BREAKING
    W   P SWOAG   Y   C
    A  JUSTORNE
    LMAYBERLNDN
    LWORLDOLIIE
    OAGAINYENRS
    W MUCHANGES  C
    S  TOF   CH  OWI
     SELFLASHTA CMHN
    GILDAND  ET HPOTTERIES
    FREELY   DTBOLLOX
    R   BLAMELESSEEU
  B EDELIGHT  R EX T
  LDE XTOLD T EGNIGHTLIGHT
  AILBURNOW H DLI  I
 SCRYL  OUTSIDEIG  S                     W
  KT USTART N  TH                        E
   Y TTHISTARS TT             L          R
     WHOLENTIREELS            O          E
   W    OLD N  R      M      OWLTIME    PV
   H   LOVE  J I      E   W   L         EE
   AGAINLETS O N  A   M   O   I         OR
   T GROSSMOKINGIRL   B   N   E  L   PALPIST
    RAYS   F NCOMEL  CRM  D   N  I SHINGLE
   FAILURE FTIMID G  AAE  EL  E  VLA ND E
  PLANETSFRAGMENTSE  NNIMPROVISATION KE S
  SURFACESCHLAFGESTALTEN   V  S  NSD  A
   N             THATH     E     GTRODDEN
   K           TIME BETTER

 

 

1 “And what this is here – I don’t think I can even talk about it. Let it just crystallise itself out, a thin scum of language fragments, faintly glittering.”

96. At Last, Polly Walker Asks the Right Questions – But Who to?

• What I mean now Polly is I don’t know: all this elaboration, all this language – the fragile ice above the vast black lake of what there is. The pressure & the cold & the total lack of light within the depths – abased is one thing, abyssal all the rest.1

 
• Don’t you know this? Can’t you say this too? This language also fully integral to the deep dark, stained w/ centuries of bloodshed & contempt. But you know that already don’t you Polly – at one point there must be an acceptance of the wicked old, broken old world we live in, & then next up we embrace its sheer fucking heterogeneity, all the sloppy mixed up mess pullulating like flies in shit – oh how beautiful their metallic green sheen. How lovable.2

 
• the debris of all
                    – spread about
                    ripples of occurrence

                    o      look       how
                    each letter
                                interacts
                    each sound

                    I love it

                              like flies
                              like shit
                                   shines

 
• Oh come on please Polly. I know – “man”! – still must be nearer than turtle. Yes cladistic thinking is pretty primitive – the one thing we know about actual information is that it won’t be binary. It’s just more easily faked that way. This language just bends to ideology & oppression. We hear this we agree, let’s concentrate on where what face is speaking is building power, rather than fading & farcical. If you’re not a turtle you must be more man, even in that smoke-stained fly-green dress of yours.3

 
• And everything else here that’s raised is just figures or possibilities. Their number is unfinished as that of flies, breeding as we count them, as people as we count ourselves, as gods, uncountable as all our words. Dispossessed & homeless migrants, each equally remarkable. Let’s just forget what we’re called or numbered & concentrate on what we are.4

 
• I’m not saying it’s you Polly, except when you stand before me as I see & hear your voice.5

 
• Nor the Veer Book Collective. For a bunch of guys they’re not bad really you must agree. Good work has been done etc. Let them do as they wish – it’ll all be good.6

 
• I’m not sure to be honest where we’ve got with all this Broadstairs stuff. Something like – here’s where Procopius’s dead would arrive, at the little harbour (more suitable than the quayside at Barnstaple), and then ascending the road, left along Albion St (what else would it be called?) & then turn in at what is now the Chapel Bar, formerly a bookshop, anciently a shrine, still with its gothic windows & the bulk of its stock available. There we are you can go & do it. This is a poem about actual things.7

 
• And finally we can all go to Turbamento III in the basement of the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon, October 12. See you there Polly. Let’s sing the praise of Eddie Bolger, Evi Heinz, Dave Miller, Will Stuart & Paul Ingram. Don’t you just love the inrush of fresh new things?8

 
• that inrush
              – oh needed novelty

                fresh migrants
                w/ new voices

                that’s all the need
                this poetry
                            here9

 

 

1And what do you know of being abased – you & your scary dark lakes?”

 

 

2 “Ah, acceptance. There are times I’m glad I played with Big Ted when I was a wee girl.”

 

 

3 “Oh, jesus fucking christ! Fading & farcical is the father-right, he says, spreading his chlamydiac thoughts around like a load of old spunk.”

 

 

4 “And what the fuck are you then? Bloody nameless & probably innumerate to boot.”

 

 

5 “Never doing that again, I can tell you.”

 

 

6 “‘For a bunch of guys’. Didn’t you use to say ‘’nuff said’?”

 

 

7 “Actual things! Anything that bolsters your own bloody fantasies, you mean. You’ll turn up now, turn hard right & vote for Farage, won’t you?”

 

 

8 And you never went, did you? Chickened out of any actual contact with anyone actually doing any actual new things. Oh well done, mister.”

 

 

9 “And just so’s you know – I’m taking over these footnotes from now on, from that Nearly Dead White Male who’s been spouting all this rubbish up above, like the last of The Old Gen Poets. He’s not even been counted in Steve Fowler’s Second Hundred Best Poets, has he?

“And I’m called Sarah Twomey today, as it happens. So I’d be grateful if you’d take some little awareness of that as well.”

95. Enochian Translation #6: “You get want I mean now?”

195old

Well, this is fun. I can remember last winter now, with all its crises unresolved. Don’t you? Nothing changed where we are, but after it all, something ridiculous had burst. This first verse is all about the problems of writing poetry in English; true language of the dead who don’t know it yet.

Things, as always, deteriorate, whether left to themselves or fucked up by us; no escape from out of here. The debris of all this, let’s call it culture. Think how desperately far we are from the beginning of time. Unfortunately, there is only this imperfect record of what has led us to this place.

Everyone hopes for personal survival – at the highest order only. They haven’t experienced it yet is the reason: everyone in heaven a princess, a bard, a warrior, a Red Indian chief – the high status elites have taken over eternity too. Stinking rotten mackerel the lot, minimal joy to them always, then off we go, as it’s Monday, again and again.

Are we turtles or men? mice or mandarins, or talking horses & bleeding heads? These compulsions must be uttered by someone, reader. Is it you? the Veer Book Collective (OK, lads, I forgive you & love you)? a small congregation of ale-drinking bibliophiles in Kent (& on our left . . .)? all the young poets in the basement room below (all slightly older)? Just voices then. The laws of avant-garde poetry must be broken up by now – please!1

 

 

1 More stanzas are given in some rather dubious MSS, which can be rendered thus:

94. Poetic Thought: A Painful Crawl

Poetic thought – unbidden mostly & destructive
its truths so brutish they can’t work
English stuff I suppose, full skinhead rage
the old banal burden of what we are & speak

Filthy after it again – oh bless us!
the muscine after ooze of this disordered kitsch
marred and obvious as any screen memory
I want it to end now, please, please

And then I see that long war with ourselves again
free as gods, full members of a warband: weigh
this illusion too: like, fuck me, it’s autumn now
that smell’s the explanation: oh we are!

It’ll take time to crawl up this beach again
welcome back stranger! You know all too well this world
pounding the bladderwrack won’t help or prove fun
trust the crawling reflex even as we fade