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”

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

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.

54. Enochian Translation No.1

Enochian translation No 1

All these things are held in here ready to ripen
to fly off free like a god or delusion into the mountains
whence may come our aid because we believe in this or
just gravity rolling down – ah, dear momentum
you can be extraordinary if we summon our speed & our daring
sidestepping how they will block us – oh something peregrine & vagrant
we’ll sweep beside & over them, trust then to our formlessness
& improvise our pleasure. Well, alright then, let’s hope
& spring out, joyous as kitsch and irresistible
there are no lines to hold nor commitments to resolve
except the flight of human liberty, the flock of us
all diving out of the sun. Hold on this please
we have wandered long to reach here from
Tottenham through Broadstairs to Hardanger Vidda lakeside
hiding amongst the reindeer & prostrate willows, bare stones
that remain for millennia. The air is clear
we reform & blend – wilderness like wine, pristine heights
cheering, sustaining. Let us write what we feel &
what we have found out amongst ourselves now and
lay it out in full despite of the self-chosen elite – no
recognition of their statuses & rights, oppose separation
refusal to live on the common basis of all other beings
hoarding up capital, laws, propaganda & guns like
dung beetles.

53. Here Come the Geldi Again

creeping out in the sunlight
like we all do nowadays
 

birdsong & glitters
unplanned under clear sky
 

hidden safe then
from Satan’s Watch Fiends
what the gods are we can tell
– breathe on the mirror & let
                    us appear
 

“Everything tends towards catastrophe, & collapse
I am interested, geared-up and happy”

Winston Churchill, August 28, 1914, quoted in Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Penguin, 2013), p 201 (citing Hew Strachan, The First World War [Oxford, 2001), p 103)

 

We die, we are born
& in between
scrabble about a bit
 

oh this stormy weather as the year begins
great things might come over or
yet another upwelling of that shit-filled water
 

mongrel warnings now:
true Anglo-Saxons born
already hyphenate
– our new native land
scraped clear then washed
bare rock corroded only by sunlight & rain
will welcome all immigrants
– come spread your fertile filth!
life upswinging here joyous as kitsch
 

largeness & laughing
noisy by nature
curiously lovable
who wouldn’t want
not worship
but welcome
 

i Im Arme der Götter wuchs ich groß.

ii Einig zu sein, ist göttlich und gut; woher ist die Sucht denn
Unter den menschen, daß nur Einer und Eines nur sei?

iii Liebt die Götter und denkt freundlich der Sterblichen!
Haßt den Rausch, wie den Frost! Lehrt und beschreibet nicht!
Wenn der Meister euch ängstigt,
Fragt die große Natur am Rat.

Hölderlin, op. cit, “Hyperions Schicksalslied”, p 27, “Fünf Epigramme: Wurzel alles Übels”, p 36, “An die jungen Dichter”, p 19

 

a hank of hair is a little picking bird
– see it fly away now