Hi Dominic
Look awhile to get to these, as I meant to, but I like what seem to be happening here. I dont need to know all the reference to get it. They work within the poem, as they should. It’s interesting to note that a poem today can carry ancient phrases side by side with contemporary tea terminology, a supposedly ‘non-poetic’ diction turned into a reliable part of a poem.
I felt like the poem was successfully avoiding active verging, but it wasn’t just a feeling it gave, so that I felt the ‘is’ in the 3rd line of iii felt a bit unnecessary; not sure if that makes sense to you or not. But I felt the quality of stasis worked for an elegy, everything now stopped for the one elegized.
I may get around to reading those pieces, but dont feel I need to, nor to know The Fall (which I dont; listening more to old fashioned rock & roots, or jazz & classical these days).
Doug
> On Jan 26, 2018, at 3:50 AM, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> The following are from a new sequence, a sort of "critical elegy" for the
> late Mark Fisher, which I happened to start on the morning of the day Mark
> E. Smith died. The fact that the first two poems contain references to
> songs by The Fall is a somewhat spooky coincidence, which is in its own way
> rather apt.
>
> I hope that they work in their own way as poems without footnoting, but
> those unfamiliar with Fisher's writing and milieu may find these links
> illuminating (they're also a good read for their own sake):
>
> On "Sapphire and Steel":
> http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/001316.html
> On The Fall: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007759.html
> Interview with Burial:
> https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedited-transcript
>
> Dominic
>
> ---
> i.
>
> Obsolete medium for mythical great squid.
> Polyp flicks hard about in inky depths.
> Glam racket resonates from vast abyss.
>
> I dreamt the first line as "a vast,
> terrible abyss", knowing that this would be
> for you, and that it had to start somewhere.
>
> And that you wrote so lightly, *de profundis*,
> and that we cannot go down lightly there.
>
> ii.
>
> Spectropoetic versus rectilinear.
> Weird angles on things. Ghosting on the set.
> Mantelpiece trophies conduits for breakdown.
>
> We find ourselves *in medias res* - *near-total
> ignorance...as to what is going on* -
> play-acting as detectives, psychic sleuths
>
> tracing fused circuitry, time-bending loops:
> the *unmistakeable contours of a logic*.
>
> iii.
>
> Sometimes a golden glow, more often fritzed -
> jumpstarted by attachment, raw cathexis.
> *Mortido*, also, is an energy
>
> sublimated, Berne says, by the making
> of *beautiful or useful things*, by striking
> form into distressed material -
>
> like gem-cutting, or appendectomy,
> eliminating excess to make whole
>
> iv.
>
> *Roll it out. Do it fast.* Re-pitch
> angelic echolalia. Bury glitches
> in effervescing fuzz, burred susurration.
>
> The far-fetched serendipity of that
> encounter, as if the edifice were raised
> solely to be the spirit's haunting-place -
>
> as rain and mist compress the streetlamp's glow
> into a beacon, dazzling and timeless.
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations 2 (UofAPress).
Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
Listen. If (UofAPress):
Swept snow, Li Po,
by dawn’s 40-watt moon
to the road that hies to office
away from home.
Lorine Niedecker
|