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
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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.
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