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.”

57. Polly & Sally Are Sarah (and Maybe Karla Too)

Do you tell us things will all be upped?
in a dream, unhidden, I do, I shall
let fancies flourish across those pathways
all inconsistencies determined

The loveliness of Winter is never passing
whoever’s where can catch its value
in the dark wood brief dapples bloom
circumstances within the sublime

The girl & the girl are foxes, women too
young & unabased by seriousness
their power will survive whatever
ever-unpassing as perpetual birth

All genders and hags & gypsies
– out of the mouth of my mother, her jaws
it said, Sally, you shan’t disobey us
don’t ascend this white horse but

The tone is like wounds: I shan’t write
only poems and a song – those things are serious
severest, unmarred and are uncontainable
we ran to the ship and thank.

56. A Praise Song by Polly Walker in Honour of Winter

Let Winter be praised with serious unseriousness, for we are perpetual students at the Hilson School of Vagrant Poetics, and Winter has sheltered us as we wander like foxes through her hidden assarts & her semifictional stretchers.1
Let Winter be praised as she is utterly variable & veering, sloppy & imprecise, because she is always determined not to merely impress but to be whatever.
Let Winter be praised for letting us flourish within her clear air, & flourish too within her turbid air, both of which we have learned to love as they are.
Let Winter be praised as she tells us how to survive her severest blasts unabased, creeping in & hiding where we shall not be found, then switching and leaping out fully formed, like her sunshine.

Winter’s praise is due as she is a paradise of painters, unshowy & subtle, without monetary value or sentimental tone.
Winter’s praise is due as she is unmarred by any wounds of loveliness, but dapples from sublime squalor to a killing perfection however she fancies.
Winter’s praise is due to her bold & childlike inconsistencies, which catch her enemies unawares as their calculations must lead them astray like a roped line of absurd climbers ready for the avalanche.
Winter’s praise is due like the smoke ascending from our thin fire of faggots, passing out & fading into her fertile void.

 

 

1 and the merry organs? as we choose

46. Slippy Sloppy Doodah (from another vagrant song)

Here we are with the gypsy girl
an inspired study I will say
simplicity should flourish best
in some paradise of painters

Inside this landscape, foxes
are our sympathies not with them?
they forage underneath the messy sky
not abased by the wound of loveliness

Guys & girls & bishops
all you vagrant utopians veering
heroic as fucking gasoline
without single-mindedness or status

No pressure; exclude pursuit; open
oh, open now!
bold & childlike inconsistencies
just life inside this void

Together maybe we demonstrate the imprecise
our appearances not adequate yet nonetheless
somehow to shine, a fire of faggots
presented in a sorry field
spat upon in destitution’s calling