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.

90. In the Parental Voice

(Florence Walk, Bishops Stortford, August 4, 2014)

little noisy children here
                           hey stop that shouting!
you are all like bubbles
                         – right?
                                  OK?
then I’ll be back
                  OK then too?
monkey! monkey!
                you’re a monkey too
just
     a little one

 
here come more children
                        passing thru
have a good day tomorrow
                         & say goodbye to Charlie
was that Paulina?
                  or maybe a Sarah
the one
       we used to know?
the process
           falls quiet
                       now

 
well, that
           quick visit to the loo alright
this place
           needs noise now
I stress this
              it’s black
the little bag
               the little shop
bright jewels
              white bread
I’d better
           go the Jackson Square
Florence Walk
              is dead
hullo?
       are you alright?

 
it was
       the little boy’s phone
his brain rots
               rustle! rustle! squelch!
under a cold
             luminous dome
we just
        walk by

 
thank you
          this is a start again
turn out
         then scoff
that was
         love
              ly
pleasure drops
               greatly
                       & infrequently

 
so much
        I must use
thank you
          so much!
simple & sure
              uncomplicated alchemy
beautifully composed
                     on noblest bards
                     utopian princesses
I’d be happy
             I’d embrace
oh, tapirs then
                bring me one
bring me lots
              – they eat
all the kids’ phones
                     all at once
that’s what we use
                   doing the Florence Walk
only the world dreams
                      utopian
hope lurking
             in unrented shops
an insipid ghost
                 worthless &
unridiculous
             at best
schneugh! schneugh!
                    let the tapirs rummage
no place else today

80. Some Questions About These Poems Answered1

(written June 6-9, outside Starbucks & in Sainsburys Café, Jackson Square Shopping Centre, Bishops Stortford)

  • And why shouldn’t it all be tender, as well as what it is? Isn’t it that flayedness to everything which makes us human – otherwise just a mass of instincts & drives, like insects or computers, or the sort of man totally locked within the armour & armature of his own masculinity, blundering ever onwards. That was the plan. This is its opposite.
  • No, of course we can’t say what we’re on, what we’re off. Do you really trust prepositions? Like, they are important – familiar Oppen quotes here – that’s why I use them, but they are so, well, emotional. An off day. Feeling offish. Turning on. All the positioning is internal – inside it/outside it, around it/about it, by it & to it – “get off!” “get on!”
  • And her – who does she think she is? Who does the language think she is? We’re in the shopping centre, the trolley-boy is wheeling his noisy train past, it’s sunny outside, there are dogs & babies & all the rest. Come on (or off) – you’ve been here lots of times, haven’t you? If you haven’t, dear reader, this poem may need additional footnotes to indicate how life is living itself at this point of writing. It’s not difficult. It’s just how it always is. What you actually do inhabit.
  • But we’re insistent – an act of memory concerning her. Within this poem there are many actors, & many may be female. Are they the same? Are they different, separate? Well, all names for a start. You ascribe the gender, I just give words. Each instance could be unique, or a fragment of some multiply diffracted higher reality. Oh fuck! That is out of our control – back in the hands of Offa (you remember? Bretwalda & King of Mercia, then stupid duck joke – kin to Anna, maybe, King of East Anglia & Lord of Essex. They did love those cross-gender names in Dark Age England. We should respect that and enjoy.
  • Rheged
           drops liquid
                 veiled
                            under Elmet
                            before it

    – not Hughes
      but Taliesin
          knowing & prophesying
          did
          actual things
          glamorous in the rainy air
                       the far South
                       may be Rochdale

  • Well, that is so definitely offish – really badly. These adverbs add voice – an unpleasant whine mostly. Occasionally balanced. So — what. We need a half question mark here – named the quesma. You picture it. Go on. Do so.
  • Sometimes, though, the semantics are plain & apparently monofunctional. Take the openplan bank. Modern, friendly, or, “friendly” – but in fact most of the people you encounter working in banks are really nice, so that’s not so much scare quotes as labelling automatic ideologically motivated abuse. Even an office layout can make you feel good. Environmental design works on us as powerfully as language, though with less self-consciousness.2 But the anxiety Dave reported as actual & unexpected – everyone fearful. Someone might come in, armed, & threaten, injure or kill. It could happen. Banks – yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. We do. But an ordinary waged person, dealing with customers at a desk? Do they deserve worse than you? Really?
  • real criminals then
                             – psychotic as hedgies
                               use & abuse
                               not a trade
                               a vocation

                               fucked up to enter3
                               OK but
                               taking your things
                               what you need
                               & have made
                                                   – by force
                                                     or by fraud

    how different then from rulers & other
                               high status elites
                               their hired thugs

                               actual criminals
                               against human law
                                             all of them

  • Yeah! Let this be a positive poem, twinkly as a tapir’s dainty little hooves, unpredictable, ridiculous & true as a performance by Holly Pester, noisy & bubbly as a toddler, unabashed by ideology, fashion & correctness, as friendly to bank workers as to poetic workers, even academic workers, happy to be here today answering your questions,4 & its own questions,5 all questions. Right – who’s next?

 

 

1 & even more raised, we are sure

 

 

2 It falls over if it tries this.

 

 

3 Isn’t that true of all vocations? Priest or poet – who is the more fucked up?

 

 

4 preferably by other questions

 

 

5 always w/ other questions

44. The Vagrants Song: “Oh Breathing Yet Free Mountain Air”1

Besides the blurry fire, no pressure.
Speaking of impaired, Paulina moved:
this time snarky smears clean the sun
a inhuman image in old Nevada
just laughing order. Dagoenean
had disgust. The little one
will be happier, entering this liberty.
The skies are torn. The Geldi come
gods of corrosive kitsch now playing down

Always amazement out of Trumfleet:
our tokens flourish, the game go on
oh this is old talk! – callow kitsch ’n’
new pleasure. Rats reads poems;
gods bear the fight. To Liberty!
My & your – scratch scabs modulate the head.
Trust excess. Rearrange all areas
gently with my fingernails. Divine counsel too:
in the south western sky ancient nameless art displayed.

 

 

1 Note that the following text was composed in the language of the other world about this world, the only one we know, then “translated” necessarily into the language of this world, the only language we know. This is normal for poetry.

43. The Clean, Conceptual, Corrosive Joy of Kitsch, or Mongrel Mess

143solid

Like, just what is this, & who and where? Some blurry mess come out of the skies to titillate & mock us? Sarah, I can see you are laughing, free of who you are, but then you don’t turn up anyway – you just invite all your snarky little friends. Oh how cute – look, they’re playing cybermen & werewolves, surrealist japes & cheap rip-offs. I can see why you’re laughing; but how can you avoid chromosomal damage under this inhuman pressure? IDS, for gods’ sake! why? why?

And you, Paulina, you pointless bitch – rip out rather than rip off, some sophomore gesture towards materiality and ephemerality of the image, hunh? I don’t need to respond to a bit of torn paper, or a few smears of inky patterns handcrafted on Olde Photoshoppe. OK, so we’ve had a thing about heads, for a long long time, and putting them on cupcakes will make us happier I don’t think. I eat.

My money’s on the vagrants. They’ve moved down out of the pass. Speaking as one who knows, I’ve been there. It’s cold, beautiful, full of the way out, hunkering down besides this fire.