"There, he took succour in conjuring up his own London A-Z in memory,
recalling the White Heather teashop in Holland Street where the
waitress once spread "the glow of youth", the kindness of Mrs Langley
and her greengrocer husband in Church Walk - "positively the best that
England can produce" - and the unkind bells of St Mary Abbots, which
aggravated his incipient derangement. These and other details,
included in letters or in the sprawling, notebook-style Pisan Cantos,
made the ground beneath his feet, the landmarks of what Thom Gunn
called "that marvellous first decade of publication"."
Spooky. When I was ill, or just before to be correct, I'd spend the
night hours before sleep going through the A-Z of places of my youth.
I got this idea of time as a solid from The Watchmen. I would travel
through this solid on an infinite of paths, re-running the moments of
that A-Z in a slightly different way each time, thus time-travelling
and becoming immortal. I was nearly nuts, not quite.
Roger
On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 2:32 PM, David Bircumshaw
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Guardian Books today. To think I used to use the same pub as Pound and
> Rimbaud. Hope the link works!
>
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,2280672,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
The Go-Betweens
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