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.

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.”

96bis. At Last, At Least, Says Polly Walker, I Can Make My Own Comments, Says Sarah Twomey

• Oh, don’t give me all that old crap again, all that serious unseriousness. I’ve wandered through this world of yours, wretched & wonderful as it is, & know how you’ll deceive us. Abased & homeless, that’s how. Avant-garde poetry & its rules? That’s the fucking malarky alright, I know who you are – D’Annunzio celebrating after bombing Kotar.

 
• And then you give us your gods, & pretend you can juggle with them, or make sense of their sloppy mucous secretions. There is only what is miswritten when it comes to these things, little crumbs of broken & half-baked significance. Bits of whatever.

 
• Dancing across the river am I now? I can tell you it really was a cold & muddy scrabble getting away from your bloody asylum. I won’t recross that turbid stream again, by sunshine or starlight.

 
• I agree I won’t forget that mountain, either, the glacial lake you have conjured up, the stark slopes down. This isn’t a land for people & our lives, but some ground for conditioned reflexes to optical stimuli, round about the time we die. Always now. I’m not dancing, I’m cursing you at this moment. I am unabased at least in this.

 
• unshowily sentimental
  migrants taught to weep
  your voices
              – across the river now
                paradise only for painters
                what people else

                we’ll never know this

 
• the voice of light
  oh praise, yes
                 – some glorious dapplement
                   a complex surface
                   marred & significant

                   – always lovely
                     at the end

 
what we’re doing here
  oh, childlike we
                   all agree

                   crumbling cake
                   inconstantly
                   as we await
                   the avalanche

 
• we can do better
  & we must
                   – smell up
                     the nutmeg
                     w/ vivacity

                     ascend like smoke
                     fade into
                     this fertile void

                     how many children then
                     this time
                               my little ones
                     oh only us now
                     only us at last