Tag: Keston Sutherland

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.

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

64. Some Specimens from the Odes Pinned to the Triumphal Arches

Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out
But reality is not at the bottom of the abyss
Make it now. They hate our way of life
to be a shard of broken glass, shining like life.

Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (Enitharmon Press, 2013)

 

Career poets are part of the problem, smearing up the polish, drying out the fire; chucking shit all over the place; not being party to the solution; banking on the nodding head ‘the reader’ saying ‘yes, that’s what it’s like’ so as not to know what it’s for, since meaning is easier that way, gaped at through the defrosted back window of the Audi, hence the spring for a neck; we all know where that shit got us: being what we eat.

Sutherland, p 68

 

Poetry evolves from a vivid play of nerves and confusions into sedative aporiae in mock-heroic marginalese, if you don’t take precautions to prevent it.

Sutherland, p 41

 

The driving forces of the universe, the framework upon which it is built up in all its parts, belong to another phase of manifestation than our physical plane, having other dimensions than the three to which we are habituated, and perceived by other modes of consciousness than those to which we are accustomed. We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them

Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defence (Rider & Co., 1930) p 10   < http://chomikuj.pl/proezekiel666/occultus/Dion+Fortune >

 

Any act performed with intention becomes a rite. We can take a bath with no more in mind than physical cleanliness; in which case the bath will cleanse our bodies and no more. Or we can take a bath with a view to ritual cleanliness, in which case its efficacy will extend beyond the physical plane.

Fortune (1930), p 80

 

no such thing as liberty
sunlight and vitamins, misunderstanding
for the gods upon the tree
free from bondage the misguided soul
– cannot trust unless you give a sign
for in this suit we find the Lords of Pleasure

Fortune (1930 & 1935)

 

And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.
And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells:
Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them,
The giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood.
Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

The Book of Enoch the Prophet, translated by R H Charles, (Weiser Books, 2012), VII, 1‑6 (pp 5-6)

 

Mein innerstes Gefühl dazu ist: im Augenblick ist alles zu, aber es kann in jedem Augenblick anders werden. Ich stelle dazu folgende Überlegung an: diese Gesellschaft bewegt sich nicht auf einen Wohlfahrtsstaat zu. Diese Gesellschaft, die die Menschen immer mehr erfaßt, wächst gleichzeitig mit ihrer Irrationalität, und zwar konstitutiv. Solange diese Spannung besteht, ist sozusagen der Ausgleich der Wärme nicht herbeigeführt, der notwendig wäre, damit es keine Spontanheit mehr gibt. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, daß es eine bis zum Wahnsinn gesteigerte Welt gibt, ohne daß objektive Gegenkräfte entbunden würden.1 TWA

Max Horkheimer und Theodor W.Adorno, Nachtrag zu Band 13: Nachgelassene Schriften 1949-1972; 2. Gespräche: “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis” (1956) (S. Fischer, 1989), p 47 < http://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/horkheimeradorno_theorieundpraxis1956.pdf >

 

Das was im Zusammenleben der Menschen als das Richtige angelegt ist, steckt in der Sprache: wenn man sagt, es soll gut werden. Wenn man den Mund zum Sprechen auftut, sagt man das immer mit.2 MH

Adorno & Horkheimer, p 36

 

Wir lehnen nicht die Praxis ab, aber das Verfügen. Weil wir noch leben dürfen, sind wir verpflichtet, etwas zu machen.3 MH

Adorno & Horkheimer, p 109

 

 

1 My innermost feeling is that at the moment everything has shut down, but it could all change at a moment’s notice. My own belief is as follows: this society is not moving towards a welfare state. It is gaining increasing control over its citizens but this control grows in tandem with the growth in its irrationality. And the combination of the two is constitutive. As long as this tension persists, you cannot arrive at the equilibrium that would be needed to put an end to all spontaneity. I cannot imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective oppositional forces being unleashed. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Towards a New Manifesto (Verso, 2011), pp 38‑39

 

 

2 Whatever is right about human society is embedded in the language – the idea that all will be well. When you open your mouth to speak, you always say that too. Adorno & Horkheimer, p 5

 

 

3 What we reject is not practice but telling others what to do. Because we are still permitted to live, we are under an obligation to do something. Adorno & Horkheimer, p 109

 

62. Skipping Behind Waitrose for Bêche-de-Mer & Moths

My friend came down into the ‘itchen wherein i was writin’ and as she opened the fridge door i said listen to this opening sentence and launched off out loud into the first sentence after that preface, the one beginning with the line:

“Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out”

and i like it as a line even though it is set as “justified” prose and read for several lines as if they were / are lines:

“and fly away above the stack of basements inundated

in aboriginal mucus, elevating the impeccable,”

at which point that residual sense of line was forced into a prose flow as the network of thoughts expanded or was tumbled. Conjoining the rigid meat, budget pizzas and devirginated arctic rolls with miso paste, bok choy and basil seed drinks we get cheap here but weirdly sexualizing everything by this point. Later we celebrated Chinese New Year with sea cucumber, spinach and black buckwheat tea and she got a fortune cookie barely containing the extraordinary phrase “what’s the speed of dark?” i came back home sat down to this text, carried on looking back over that long drying cycle of a sentence with its pulsating ejaculatory cadences which at one point i thought had finished shuddering and trended ending only to realise and realize i was clutching at closure saving time and effort and money. in the midst of a bracket …

Closing the open url to thrownness the next throes to open was to Reclus On Vegetarianism where:

“How can it be that men having had the happiness of being caressed by their mother, and taught in school the words “justice” and “kindness,” how can it be that these wild beasts with human faces take pleasure in tying Chinese together by their garments and their pigtails before throwing them into a river? How is it that they kill off the wounded, and make the prisoners dig their own graves before shooting them?”

leaped out at me. I’m not making this shit up! Or, “fortune favors the prepared mind” as Louis Pasteur quipped

from a posting by cris cheek to UKPoetry ListServ, Feb 3, 2014, “opening The Odes to TL61P”

These little things come together we believe
synchronicity & magic moths1 – oh how we like them
hold on to the end to familiar tales
exotic & redemptive

So – OK, we’re making tapioca – really?
that’s it, just portions of the Empire’s mush
will get us there? Not delicious but
stodgy delusions. These long nights oppress
hallucinatory, we appeal to familiar gods (o gelded ones!)
Please bring comfort & our favourite lies. Odd
bits of the real hang on as dead leaves this February

Just add more turpentine! I heard
someone say – but it was just the apparatus creaking
In this city, winter now at fullest splurge
snow on the uplands, mud & mire here
We’ll write this neatly though, keep out the moths
& never eat the bêche-de-mer2 or read another ode
For poetry won’t wash any more & holothurians are a man’s thing
while the moths remind us only of the mess we used to be
There are so many stories in this city – none of ‘em true
but all so convincing: laughter not honour
Keep changing the frame, 24 times shuttering a second
and when the light plays through, don’t applaud, leave
This isn’t the real world, but where we all live
shared amongst ourselves in hatred & bondage, exploitation & love.

All in all, this work appears wasted & futile
each touch to the keyboard a further annoyance
how can we lift our eyes from off this mire
to see beyond the ever-darkening rainclouds?

Mirroring & variation are good – meanwhile
an orgy of streetfood – I mean right off the street
well – everything ends & will transform thus:
what is needed improving like good little ramekins
until you drop them – oh jiminy, it’s split!
the disgusting stuff oozes into the gutter

Welcome to post-apocalyptic country – years
will have passed to get you to this place, all empty
it’s dry then we’re all back skipping behind Waitrose again

 

 

1 Robin Blaser, The Moth Poems (Open Space, 1965) – Blaser somewhere has written or spoken about how the writing of these poems caused moths to appear.

 

 

2 Heidegger’s favourite food. He, too, regarded it as a vegetable, one whose quality was of being thrown down into the depths of the ocean. In fact, though, “they [echinoderms] rank as our closest genealogical cousins among the invertebrate phyla.” Stephen Jay Gould & Rosamund Wolff Purcell, Crossing Over: where art and science meet (Three Rivers Press, 2000), p 143.