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

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.”

75. A Recipe for Smoked Mackerel on Cabbage

for Martock, and everyone I knew there (and at Yeovil Grammar School – though how I rejoice that institution has long been totally dismantled!)

Yes, fish are glittering & slippery
always leave me a little unsure
but here my imperfect grasp is remedied
through already processed product which
cook themselves up minimally problematically
& remind me always of the mackerel men
selling the catch off the backs of lorries
straight up from West Bay1
the nearest bit of coast due South to Martock
so holidays there meant a caravan by West Bay’s shingle2
& this isn’t how anyone ever ate in Martock anyway
grilled or fried with potatoes & peas or boiled cabbage
which you don’t need me to tell you how to make
but this dish much more full of divine & inflowing splendour

Cooking is what cooking is
and what food is has everything
to do with the infilling of imaginary’s belly3
as pragmatic a reason as possible please
so make whatever approximation you would like
it’ll be true as anything else: 4 or so smoked mackerel fillets
                                – peppered is great
                                an onion (or half)
                                a carrot (or half)
                                some mushrooms
                                white cabbage
                                              a fair amount
                                              all split into shards
                                (or you can veer from
                                the type & bastard mix
                                always good – nice
                                pointed spring cabbage yes
                                and some greens
                                                even kale
                                                not any savoy
                                – misguided & a fault I find)4
                                a little marrow
                                                or courgette5
                                a pepper green & shiny
                                maybe some peas
                                and some things lighter also
                                                        watercress
                                                        broccoli sprouts
                                                        or chard
                                                        even lettuce
                                plus added to all these
                                                        ground pepper
                                maybe some chillies
                                or your favourite chilli sauce
                                important the fish sauce of Vietnam
                                & a little soy a must

Let us be thankful for that which is
& whatever congeries of vegetables have come through
reverberating endlessly
sliced finely to hand
                      – except those you’ll use softly
                        as a bed above the rest
then fry up the onions, carrots
                                & the chillies
                                (if you like
& add in the cut up vegetables
all within a large & heavy pan
let them begin to work & season now
w/ a bit of pepper & a little soy & added too
a useful splash of fishy sauce
then cover for a little
say 10 minutes or more
& like a melting glacier rich juices begin to form beneath
drop on your soft bed of more tender leaves or shoots
& add the mackerel after them
                              then cover again
you can leave it be on a lower heat
for half an hour or less – no
                              fashionably wilted greens but
a thick & mixed up British mud of vegetable & liquor
serve this lovely stodginess with rice
                                       – it’s nice!
                                       (still we are children in some kind

So here it is like the debris of a former world
recast as something newer, dark & nutritious
food like compost to nourish up your belly
leaving you heavy but full of fertile vigour

[Though eating mackerel reminds me somehow of childhood, we actually rarely ate them – I think my mother, East London middle-class, was a little uneasy about fish sold off of lorries on the village street. But, she’d approve the nourishment & all the vegetables. The recipe was suggested to me again by Ginie (& it’s like a Chinese hotpot dish6), but ending up usually played out this way (depending on what material there is). It is a matter of inhabiting, in the food, and in the writing, what actually you do inhabit, and inhabiting it fully, even down to the dark rich lower depths that are what we spring from & must return to. Not Dorset shingle, but Somerset mud. Not purified origins, but that appalling multitextual sea we drift on.]

 

 

1 now chichi incomer artisanal Dorset – Café Surf at last

 

 

2 the alternative was Burnham mud

 

 

3 thus making it constant & real. And, yes, Keston, we are what we ate – are you not a materialist, then?

 

 

4 steam it & it’s delicious – serve buttered (w/ a little nutmeg & lemon juice also, plus pepper)

 

 

5 a mock-heroic marrow – either adds a little added substance like sweet stodginess

 

 

6 hmm – might work well with glass noodles included? – & preserved radish, yes

74. Enochian Translation #3 1

Enochian Translation #3: The Opening of the Blue Book

Look we haven’t come through: the boat
took us back home, of course, how silly not
to realise these truths: only here, only now
this misty island marred first by glaciers then people
why didn’t we realise we’re free of gods but not trouble
no one left to save us but our selves, each soul
bargaining in vain not to be taken home, Ukanian Ingerlund
where the longest dead control the language & the mind
why didn’t we realise we’d be wading thru this brutish mud?

So then, it’s time as always, to start again
another poem, another struggle: like the old sun
reborn but wavering and knowing it’ll end up diving down
what can we do but pull ourselves up on the beach of dark surf
don’t you recall this now? oh you were born here if memory serves
& if not, each site, each sacred site, is really just the same
don’t trust this but try it – test out & discover what
that works upon you & casts you up on this abandoned side
where the water runs out then back, leaving you heavy and almost dead

 

 

1 The Opening of the Blue Book: at last the epigraphs are written in