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

45. A Recipe for the Commitment of an Imprecise Poem

for the Veer Collective, who spat out what was offered them1

OK, no pressure, guys: your choice
is your choice & no one could think that
something this impaired could match what you require
publishing is hard but what you value I thought clear
but, well, I am reduced to talking snarkily just now
to say I find those values of commitment and precision to be
well, fucking inhuman – dead abstractions
orders from the mouths of disembodied heads2
I am disgusted by these words & turn
to where my attention is more upon the care of little ones
it isn’t that I believe in Liberty3 but
that comes from inside, yes? not
some retro Between-the-Wars ModernistTM delusion
planning the relaunch of New Masses yet again
now that’s what I call real corrosive kitsch
I prefer the stuff people do in kitchens for
more revolutions start over food than verse

OK then, dudes, I hear you say
so what are you working on? what
‘s new out of Bishops Stortford? OK
the game goes on & we start
                            where we are:
so no food & drink, my friends
                    no bread & water
but stones & gasoline for you to throw – OK?

And then to list my ingredients all dutifully?
they’re around us I reckon in common human actions
not committed to separation & asylums
but communal, messy & just happening:
      loudly saying no
      & calling out wrong decisions
      joining together against these
      & at the worst4 some
      active stand in opposition
      even with the risk of loss
                            or wound
      & we’d take from that
      human fellow feeling to
      see how a new ordering
      can form itself, as
      utopian dreams get realised
      through kitschy rituals so
      this should be then made into
      something joyful & sustaining
      no I can’t give you instructions how
      but suggest feeling & emotion, good
      like in a poem, OK, imprecise
      & what it is committed to
      never externally determined or adopted

      And all the processes that affect us
      huge & frightening
      new high status elites
      bursting from the carcass of the old
      seizing in their mandibles
      all common necessities
      & making us then pay
      over our entire lives
      just to exist in this world
      they claim they’ve bought
      & demonstrate possession
      by making all that there is good
      funnel into them & theirs
      it happens continually
      it is at
               that moment of change
      maybe now to be upset
      but how to do so
      without smashing our own life support
      or not surviving the guns they have already hired
      rather more effective than our poems I would guess
      no, I don’t know how
      & if you think you do
      oh you precise & committed ones
      then try it if you like
      but we are done with leninism
      as it brings nothing
      but another new elite
      – don’t you know?

The presentation of our change
must be less obvious, less
cut off in self-righteous correctness
but engaged through our human actions
which must include for us our writing
as that is what we have to do and if
we commit to something other than what’s our poetry
I think we’d be wasting our own best efforts then
I know it’s not heroic nor what you’d call political
but that too needs some total metamorphosis
not repetition of past failures yet again
“keep the line, boys, keep the line”
no – this is not the field of status games
but the whole of our human life

In the southwestern sky
that sun of winter dies
nonetheless, though we hibernate
or fly, burrow underneath
forage dutifully amongst the rubble
we’ll work for what comes after us
not for the absolute precise but
just a better life somehow

[I got this just from what I’ve lived and seen. It cost me (& 80 colleagues) our jobs; looks like it’ll cost me publication too now. That’s all I can say at present. Sorry if it’s not adequate; but not if not found precise or not demonstrating some image of commitment. It’s what I have found more important than adopted stances, disembodied thought & the glee songs that built mass movements. Memo: write poems, find some better publisher[5], carry on with the care of little ones and the preparation of our food.]

 

 

1 “Thanks for submitting the work. Veer editors have read it and reached the decision that it doesn’t fall within the currently more precise and committed stance that we are adopting.” Email dated November 16, 2013

 

 

2 that means Charlie Marx & Big Ted, remember? & now Paulina the Staffie bitch

 

 

3 as you know, free Americans have pissed all over this word, like mice raiding a larder

 

 

4 usually that means usually

 

 

5 any suggestions, please? anyone?

35. Off We Go

So here in a low winter sun, to write
what the words are saying today. They
hear it all, really they do, even this far
past the absolute point where we all died.
First Mark D was shot, then the police laughed & lied
and it all took off, and then we crashed.
Nothing changed where we are – but what we want
no longer nameless. We can’t utter yet our future.
It sits on the chair and laughs.

Glad to have escaped Tone Vale. Its scars
the tokens of what formed us – imposed power
the Head Which Is Not in its dutiful pleasure.

Everyone’s story is the same. They haven’t
told it yet is all it means
decaff is bad, and missed deliveries
if you have a meeting on a monday
why not? at the granular level the balance
wavers & havers, you can’t tell or understand
go through with it, please, eyes open
it’s a pretty minimal joy isn’t it?
but it may be sufficient here
you’re so keen, then off we go.

A mouse, a mandarin, the talking horse &
the ever-bleeding head of liberty, removed
from underneath the White Tower, stolen out
from its jewelled reliquary in the basement of the Chapel
of the Opened Book.
This is narrative now
which I am glad the laws of avant-garde poetry don’t allow1.

There isn’t any more consistency than this in anything
OK? with gods above and gods below, they allow

whatever sort of cake we choose to eat.

Shots of Our Gracie leading the mill girls dancing down the street
amazing what a sundog does for you once seen aright
optic effects our tokens of hope & delight.

And then they all sat down to tea.

After blue, red, the mouse decides
not to modulate, but shine
delight is clear, bright, we hope now open.

 

 

1 exceptions made for some Cambridge poets I believe

33. Speak Easy

Let’s talk about familiar things
unconstrained & exhilarated how we go
letting things write clear
after all that splashing about

no one can do this alone
it’s a matter of rushing together
oh dear little kitsch of dancing through
bound together now w/ laughter

we have at last learnt this is a cruel world
and we swim within polluted language
constructed carefully to keep us down
– OK then, children, let’s smash it all

what do dreams do? their joy corrosive
to the big conceptual mess – oh yes to
ordinary mongrel colours, nothing high end
but delicious too, then much more real

32. “The poet fears mental institutions”

The poet fears mental institutions
will risk getting soaking wet to escape
familiar problems he leaves absolutely open
future scholars delight

Fellow poets are winnowed into nothing
refusal is fun – we’re all
starting to realise
how laughter will let us now go

Children in the coffeebar – take it
over & over again
they learn slowly but inexorably
their language just unpredictable & cruel

Dreams deny desire
solved in the land of the imaginary
sibilance strutting suddenly in peacock colours
be delicious, OK, then much more real