I'm skewered by the mumbling debates about accessibility (my wheelchair's
stuck) and populism etc.
I neither want the walled and towered of a redundant mediaeval clerisy
turned academe entranced by its inturned jargonnings and theoretical
chansons nor do I want the reach-me-down we-know-what's-good-for-you of
professional poetry consultants and a 'new plain style'.
Last night we had Sheena Pugh giving a talk on the divide, a talk which
seemed to imply that popularity was a good in itself - think about that -
without offering any definition of what, in terms of poetry, she meant by
popularity, nor any examination of the means of transmission (apparently the
Web will take care of that - oh yeah)
But when I walk from that to Cambridge (I can't afford the train-fare) I
find a self-referential language that I understand as much as dogs do human
speech, when I chance upon an anthology of LangPo I find most of the
products are as predictable and within their own terms as convention bound
as an Elizabethan miscellany of sonneteers.
All I do know is that poetry should be free to make the most of its
material's expressiveness, and that the material is not 'what the poem's
about' as a takeaway package but, in my case, English. And the happenstance
and instant of a consciousness in dialogue, in antithesis, in hazard with an
'other side' that seems to be (but is it?) silence. That is to say the lyric
is theophanic but Theo seems to have left the joint and gone off with a
barmaid from Bloxwich.
Here's where I am, almost literally, as I've been working on this for the
last couple of days (plain text requirements mean that some italics and
boldface are dropped):
* * * * * *
Apostrophise, but then not,
Spectare's thinking, summoning, a twentieth century as, prostrate under
nouns, an Age of Mass, Masses' Production, of cars, their blank faces, and
the gew-gaw brights of this season's trinkets, of its darke weddynge, the
confetti falling like newspaper cuttings, golden-eared the wheat upbending
under prairie winds, of speech on thrombosis-spotted celluloid, hoarse from
a lifetime of smoke, Bogart, of speech on fist-clenching balconies and
torchlit bandstands, Nuremberg, the top-hats burning like books, of speech
on little black handsets, dull-eyed with grey, of rebuilt ages like
harpsichords, of peanuts, peasants and ring-roaded estates, of the
astronauts that went down on the Titanic, of human living flesh stepping out
per second of that one woman in the Middle Kingdom, Chin-hua, of guitar
chords on barbed wire and that stranger's kindness and white-walled
maternity wards raucous as barns jostling with white (barred) White
Christmas turkeys. Gobblers. Of death. And death
and death and death and death yet again yet life ....
li ....
fah,soh
li
And he thinks too
now
of echo-effects
on a five-stringed cello
tuned by Sebastian Bach
and a damp late night
on an April Thursday
in Caerlyr Year 2000
Leicester
of the Meeting House silence last firstday how his words that broke
of his eggs fried, his beans, his oven-heated chips
of how Ms K -
(of slim waist and mood-turns and pert bum and sharp tongue
and jet-black secrecy her hair swings moon-eyed dependency)
did, didn't
was, wasn't
whatever it was he last thought her. Of how next minute's
(a spider feels along its trembling line)
as Poland is invading his head and San Francisco is buckling his carpet in c
minor on the Richter scale and a buttock-bare Pope lands mitrefirst in a
formaldehyde condom, et homo factus est, and Colonel Aberdeen T-bone Angus
eyes a hot franchise on Io for truly now God is found in silence
pause
will look up
from the punctured space
of the holed white
on his first page:
* * * * * * *
god knows if the lineation will survive e-mail
david
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