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”

100. Never Naive Enough 1

That’s it then, yes, time
drop everything & rummage
time in a bubble different
it’s not what you need – no
outbreaks of tapirs & bards
we need utopian noise
hey, let’s invent music now

All these new solidarities
can’t life be simpler
                      if loneliest
no no no – it’s a lovely process
improvise the magic to achieve illumination
everyone together who’s that naïve
show your voice to join with ours as if you wished2

 

 

1 “Ah well, that’s me told then. The disingenuous old bugger.”

 

 

2 “Exiting, is he not? with a final swish & flounce of the curtains, moth-eaten & dingy as you like. Still, alright, I’ll try & do this too, just to help the old relic out:

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.”

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.