Tag: mongrel theory

72. Five Statements to Be Broadcast

1. Let our human shape, familiar, delicious as it is, in all its mutable harmonies, somehow be what reveals to us the exact form of our lives, not as a hopeless mess or overwhelmed nostalgia, but in all its various hybrids some possible miraculous beauty.

2. New things are redeeming – not by who or what is invoked, but within the decentering of their various dynamics – each transformation enacts aberration endlessly, and so gives more freedom, more interesting freedom.

3. This is a hybrid poem – and should be honoured as such: it enacts & allows aberration, disorderliness, defective classification and non-human possibilities.

4. Laughter, splurging through our individual identities, allows complicated harmony and an experiment implicating non-separation – oh, keeping moving, skipping & playing, all those slippery forms that represent sexuality.

5. The rhinoceros, the gryphon and the stork make us forget the buzzy smog, the buffet of perversity and Christian images our Queen enacts – a wider world, though, an extended horizon, a constant event-system sustaining the commonplace chaos of this monstrous world – with memories still to miswrite it.

71. A Poetry That Allows the Broadcast Now

Our lives here a disordered commonplace
                         – so let it be
what we must do unapparent & compulsive
                         – these are the cunningest things

but need met mud then something grew
                         – look, keeping moving balance with
the wider world, those relics of that green one
                         – once mutually sustaining

yes we are born with its memories still
                         – even here, the 3rd millennium
oh what a hopeless mess, a buzzy smog
                         – so let it all go

sometimes overwhelmed by nostalgia for birthrights
                         – we grow new things
constant creation our means of transformation
                         – so I here miswrite

we & all of us inside the fading of our failure
                         – live out each slow day
light playing no matter how greyly
                         – never halting what must be

70. Enochian Translation #2

Enochian Translation #2

for Holly Pester1

Our lives are all lived out in this city now
everything here where we have made it thus be
what we must do is work together making it so much better
not richer nor fuller of the cunningest things

but need met for everyone truly &
with this city in quick moving balance with
the wider world it is all set within and
intercommensal with, now mutually sustains us

yes, welcome all my dear friends now
here our anthropocene third millennium
oh what a dream it was, some half-mad fantasy
in fact if anything’s different we all go

sometimes it tells us & sometimes demonstrates process
how life held in balance depends always on new things
constant creation recreation, fresh meaning dropping
sometimes springing as we misread, else here miswrite

we & this are all fragments or bubbles
inside we are empty & vanishing thru every slow day
light playing across & within us most beautiful
inside intermeshing contingency against what must be

 

 

1 “A poetry that allows for the noise of the system, or the scruff, to be the instigator of a work is surely intermedial – even if, in its eventual transmission, it is just voice and paper: systems that broadcast the voice and voice the broadcast.” Holly Pester, “New Definitions for Intermedia”, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry Vol 3, No 2 (September 2011): Special Issue; The Greenwich Cross-Genre Festival (14-16 July 2010), p 94. Cf “As I worked through the text [Claude E. Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Univ of Illinois Press, 1949)], I began to realise that ‘noise’ in a communications channel, whatever the intention of the originator, is something very like the artwork itself, introducing a high level of uncertainty and thus an extraordinary amount of information into the perception or reception of the work. Information is, of course, different from meaning (gibberish has a high information content), but it is the possibility that meaning(s) arrive in the clutter of uncertainties that makes things interesting.” Richard Deacon, “How I Learnt to See”, Tate Etc. 30 (Spring 2014), p 36

67. Statvta et Leges Civitatis Cathari1

The City
the caravan road to the hinterland
routes leading to mines of silver, lead & copper
strong craft activity developed
goldsmiths, blacksmiths, builders
under the brief rule of good king Tvrtko
complete its construction as an urban centre
a permanent orientation of their inhabitants
and their wish to live freely in a common state

Its People
the lowly people of this place
familiar & flourishing unabased
their faces shine – circumstances of power
for they were all strangers once
decided at the national assembly to unite
moving in concert as they had always moved
dignified men & women relishing their lives

The Welcome
soon the Old Stars shall begin their dance
radiating life between us, faint ochre in colour
your results had a social note
a birth, a dream, all in balance
new patterns appearing behind the old
all to achieve this moment

The Union
she said softly to me,
prepare your sword, my love
fall fertile & utter
a smile of delight
to live freely in a common state
reaching the top of our craft
not material goods only

A Future
we ran to the ship & thanked
in the dark woods brief dapples’ll bloom
behind them now fresh points of light
an uneasy balance
carrying that up again

 

 

1 Venice, 1616. Accessed online as a part of the CD-ROM Historical Archives Kotor http://poincare.matf.bg.ac.rs/iak/iak.htm

65. That’s It

So many
voices here
radically imperfect
good eh?
searching out
more cake
unscrewed heads
absolute acts

not narrative
just lots
of people
doing things
sometimes written
sometimes smeared
some times
just here

the crowd
how many?
how confused?
what scars?
what stories?
what glitters?

invisible forces
rising up
the groundwater!
what you
thought solid
faulted or
voided now
wet as
your insides

speech here
so distorted
foreign voices
let’s mock
Nigel Farage
not serious
frequent glee
any act
speech act
full intention
nothing minimal
some people
understand no
human language

[little children
run noisily
can’t predict
watch out!
pleasure in
all this
[sounds of
more glee

watch out!
love it
[cry sing
(sure thing
hear! all
right all
giants or
bull dogs
ugly brutes
at least
the bite’s
bred out
now then

let’s go
home now
too noisy!
after all
endlessly repeated
no end
everything veers
off course
one day
may be
it’ll be
about now

even cheery
couple smiling
what splendour!
es soll
gut werden
even winter
ends then

all language
then? does
it work?
not utopian?
delicious again
well, time
will pass
a way
the rubble
re built
may be
we’ll learn
got to
do something
not nothing
how hope
really stupid
welcome here
time too
zu machen
to make
build up
a gain
all ways
– –
that’s it