Lawrence,
After a number of readings, your work still presents an intriguing interpretive challenge. Doing a google search on the title (a word I don't remember encountering previously), I assumed you started with the news of a political demonstration in Syntagma (Constitution) Square in Athens Greece. Then I noticed the linguistic aspect of the word, for example, that syntagmatic structure is the mode of time-awareness in which listeners are placed, such as narrative, epic, or lyrical. Particularly striking: the relationship between the diction of your second stanza and Sean Cubitt's description of epic structures as tending towards privileging repetition and thereby creating a mythic state of recurrence which empties out the subject (as cited in Richard Middleton's Studying Popular Music--a book with which perhaps you might be familiar).
Barry
On Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:20:59 +0100, Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Syntagma
>
>This is the arrangement. I say, you do.
>How long will it take you to learn? I rule.
>Be guided by your own tension. Or die.
>We could kill you. This is the arrangement.
>
>Privilege repetition. Create a myth.
>Empty the square of its circularity.
>Forget all this nonsense egotism.
>
>Democracy will lie with tyranny.
>Tyranny will down democracy. Fuck you.
>Why are you taking this attitude, terrorist?
>Organise your particular stretch of time.
>
>
>
>
>-----
>solo poems
>http://www.landscapeandlanguagecentre.au.com/current_journal.html
>http://www.landscapeandlanguagecentre.au.com/Peripatetica/Peripatetica_Upton_Try%20Valley.pdf
>http://www.landscapeandlanguagecentre.au.com/Peripatetica/Peripatetica_Upton_Walking.pdf
>-----
>collaborative visual work:-
>http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/upton-begbie.html
>http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/begbie-upton.html
>----
>Lawrence Upton
>AHRC Creative Research Fellow
>Dept of Music
>Goldsmiths, University of London
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