from BACKGROUND NOISE, a work in progress. seems strangely appropriate:
The custodians of costume epics and lively debate,
the cardboard cutout of Elvis Costello in the bar,
visitors to the empty park and my bedroom,
metal-bangers with rising economic fortunes,
free vocalists recounting tales of doomed love,
obscure support bands who turn up everywhere -
all responded with singular understatement to
creating within the constraints of materials.
I only just had time to raise my hat
to the counter-pressure of form.
I was determined to cross the hidden lake,
stimulated by the shakiness of self-destruction.
Life is suddenly and exhilaratingly right:
is has a geometrical tightness mirrored
on the other side of the cultural hemisphere.
It remains legitimate to write with political directness.
The rest of the industry remains unconvinced,
keeping an eye on the not-always-honest magicians
who have learnt to circulate their work
through brightly-coloured magazines,
attempting to shape a future outside of context.
Where did they come from, where are they going,
these literary nomads recycling scraps of discourse,
who hardly know themselves what they have made?
Language apparently antithetical to nonsense,
genuine emotion unmatched by the victim's testimony,
page-long footnotes in passages of autobiography,
grotesque parables of illusion and disillusion -
all this they try to reclaim as heroic mythology.
Names undergo several cryptic transformations;
they inflate the traditional ideas of their period,
reinforce tendencies recorded in more scholarly tomes.
Seemingly obscure imagery can unite conflicting energies.
Fluency flows through words to the engine house,
leading to quotation and many notes of apology.
In a letter printed about this same issue, objections:
'Take me for a hard-boilded unimaginative poetic reader
and a large international movement, but grand passions
cause problems later, and have one serious disadvantage -
the result is a breathless paraphrase of the same thing.'
The tears are falling down my cheeks as I tell you this.
I sit in my study, speechless, recognizing nobody.
Appropriately enough, emotions shatter into fragments.
Style functions less as a symbol of transcendental striving
than as a procedure which informs broader patterns -
all the expected incidents, sayings and anecdotes are incorporated.
I do not feel obliged to justify my practices in manifestos;
nothing can happen without the future being announced.
© Rupert Loydell
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