1
We assert that myth and ideology are characterised by the self-replication, containment and consumption of being, within the wider processes of cultural, economic, spatial and social enclosure.
2
That all myths of place must be exposed. That nation, region, autonomous zone, etc. are expressions of ideology which must be exploded within ideology (as text) in order to be made habitable.
3
We must bewilder the outdated concepts of the nation-state, in particular, and of territory, in general, in order to undermine the social and political hierarchies that depend on these myths.
4
We assert that 'regionalism' is a petty replication-rather than a fragmentation- of the (metropolitan) 'national' view and we seek to disrupt the regionalist (hierarchical) imperative in the same way that we seek to destroy the concept of the nation state.
5
The regions (as such) are sub-divisions and creations of the imagined nation, thus those regions are of the metropolis, they are its caricatures of itself-its geography, its potential culture-they can have no autonomous (or actual) culture whilst they remain regions (they not only need to disrupt the metropol, but they need to disrupt themselves, to 'invalidate' hierarchy and its culture).
6
We aim to illustrate that the replication and distribution of absurd metropolitan gravity creates an even more appalling gravity in those regions it imagines and colonises.
7
We assert that all facts (myths) and all information (perspectives) are ideology and that all texts and landscapes are artificial.
8
Further, we assert that 'national' cultural and economic 'traditions', as they are 'used' by those who still imagine the existence of nation states, function as mechanisms of psychic containment-being actually manifest only within those ideological distortions which are themselves the products of cultural processes simultaneously conceived within 'historical' (enclosing) myths of a nationality, property, hierarchy and (landed) 'liberty' and that it is those traditions which 'use' us, rather than we that use them.
9
We state that 'places' have become placeless, essentially non-existent, within the ideological matrix constructed around and within the 'globalisation' of liberal economics, and the mechanisms of the 'information' age, and that such placelessness is mythic in quality, and that these cultural myths appear 'real' within ideology, and that ideology can be exploded within our placeless poetic, and that our poetic is itself a crucible of containment and realisation.
10
In releasing the eclipsed actuality of place within the placeless poetic we can begin to replace worn out meanings (and thus begin to undo spatial, and thus social, alienation) that have become institutionalised within enclosure. We can renew 'place' (and the theory and practice of place) within the ideological matrix constructed by, and that constructs, the placeless world of globalised capitalism. We can create maps that include those cultural, social and economic developments that have so mystified places, replacing our 'selves' in the process.
1 The paradigm that contains the concept of the 'poetry of place' has become increasingly defined by the juxtaposition of the poetic techniques of Jeremy Hooker and Iain Sinclair. This construct-generated by those with their own arcane agendas-is clearly mythic rather than actual in nature. An irrelevant line has been drawn between the 'defining' works of Jeremy Hooker, such as his Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant (Enitharmon, 1974) and Iain Sinclair's recently republished Lud Heat/Suicide Bridge (Vintage, 1995); the paradigm also 'divides' them in a critical sense, existing between Hooker's most recent critique of 'place' The Centre Cannot Hold: Place in Modern English Poetry (published in Poetry in the British Isles: Non-Metropolitan Perspectives, ed. Ludwig and Fietz, University of Wales Press, 1995) and Sinclair's 'Intimate Associations: Myth and Place' (in Lud Heat/Suicide Bridge), which concisely sums up his approach. The dualism implied in this view is itself a denial of the other and various approaches to 'place ' in poetry. We present nonism as a third force in the war over place and identity, and thus we explode the paradigm. We reveal all other approaches-as well as our own- as 'real' only in 'mythic' terms. We wish to see 'Jeremy Hooker' become 'Iain Sinclair', and vice versa.
11
Further, we highlight the spatial (horizontal) element of social alienation by naming it as 'displacement' and highlight the psycho-emotional (vertical) element of personal alienation by naming it as 'compression'.
12
In our practice we realise, and differentiate between, the virtual social and cultural 'decompression'- which is achieved by the elevation of idealised landscapes into the view- and actual social and cultural decompression- which is achieved by slighting enclosures to end displacement.
13
We present dominant (contained) ideologies, and places, as abnormal in order to present experience (within unexploded ideology) as absurd.
14
We value the ridiculous gravity synonymous with the neo-Georgian 'poetry of place' (as it has been appropriated and reduced by the reactionaries of the 'South Movement'/'Wessex' 'poetic'). We encourage the territorialists of 'place' to expound their theories in order to draw forth the absurdity of their beliefs, the scenery within 'their' 'places' is denied as it is described. Their absurdly pompous (often ruralistic) works condescend towards a sentimentalised view of place that gives refuge to those who are nostalgic for 'England', who harbour the hurt pride of a fallen colonial power and wish to redeem it, who still imagine that 'we', as 'a' people, as custodians of history, of civilisation itself, are important. Gravity is an absurd force in a placeless world.
2 Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind. - Laurence Sterne
15
We realise 'gravity' as one aspect of a wider process of social and cultural control, and as a method of adding (apparent) value to particular places, and as a method of achieving (psychic) spatial dissection over the newly mythed territories of global corporatism. We 'define' 'gravity' as another tool of geographical enclosure and chauvinism- one which is manipulated by the state within narrow (individual) processes of compression- and we present it as ridiculous. We combat 'gravity' with demystification- with absurd representation and aimless trespassing- with the vandalism of boundaries.
16
We present gravity as a chimera, as an absurdity peddled by some academics, critics, publishers and (failed) poets and other artists, in order to prop up myths of their own importance. It seems unsurprising to us that the centres of ideological gravity, and the most absurd places, coincide with the apexes of the education system, the arts funding bureaucracies and/or those with those self declared (or media defined) 'capital cities' or centres of poetry, the visual arts, etc. The regional structure of the Arts Boards in particular has encouraged placeism. We combat gravity with realisation and weightlessness.
17
We highlight the role of culture and cultural production in the wider process of affective intra and inter personal alienation. 'Our' culture contains and conceals the psycho-social and spatio-geographical processes of alienation. Through and within the structures of art in the ideal, the pastoral, the sentimental, the romantic, and the picturesque, we are contained, made separate and destroyed. Only the English could deny this. We are placed in such a way that we are unable to relate. It is those whom we love who are the furthest from us, always they are consumed within our own myths of who we are, of who we could be. We who do not negate gravity within our own work, and our myths of ourselves, decay within the given social (non) role of the 'artist' or the teacher: we must follow the path of Judas, and become demonised along the way, if we are to kiss place good-bye, cast its silver on the ground and set redemption in motion. We must each betray the fallacies of our own art in order that those fallacies be realised.
18
We must amplify the concepts that prop up- as if on stilts- the 'poetry of place'. We must transform the poetry of place from a reactionary aesthetic into a progressive aesthetic (the poetry of placelessness). We must establish the poetry of placelessness within the canon of English poetry (and thus explode the canon).
19
We seek to facilitate a culture amongst poets that is based on realisation not myth, on faultlines not enclosure and on fulfilment not martyrdom. Artists who feel they must suffer for their work, or who see themselves as sainted or blighted, reveal the predominance of sado-masochistic and nihilistic ideas, both within the myths of place and being within which most of us were raised (or idealised, or broken), and within what we learned from place and self as territory, taught to us as invisible components of those imagined conditions called 'Englishness' or 'Britishness'. We say that sado-masochism must be realised if it is to have a creative function. Tormented poets, get real, life is just as great as it ever was. Laugh at your gravity, at the sorrows that afflict you, and create new worlds and new selves that do not rely on your myth of personal misery, on your prophecies of loss, to 'exist'.
20
We seek to undermine the- more or less apparent- drift into regionalism that some 'artists' have resorted to, or accepted, recently. The regions are myths of the nation state. The 'southern scene' is not a regional construct but an aspect of the (virtual) national one. We intend to rebalance the 'national' poetry scene by counterbalancing the gravity of actual and projected placeism with effective cultural (virtual) decompression and thus contradict the mythical geographical and conceptual dualism projected by placeists. By drawing out the absurdity of 'place ', and by exaggerating that complex (within myth), to make it fully apparent, we seek to release the creative energy contained by it and to utilise that as a progressive force within the psychic/poetic gestalt.
21
We hope to encourage all of the various poetries into development and transformation by highlighting and destabilising their conceptual bases-by focusing on their inherently contradictory 'nature', and by creating faultlines in their theoretical enclosure- and to broaden their conceptual horizons by exploding them as narrow, mythical isms into actual diversity (to unenclose the poetic culture that so encloses us). We work at the heart of our culture. We must be socially, culturally and politically 'ground breaking'. We must break the 'ground' of the self, and of our myths of the self, if we are to come to terms with (name) the world- its ghosted places and its ghosts within- if we are to realise our place in creation.
22
We must invalidate the propagandist texts that enclose places, especially our own texts, and we must project our myths of self into the gestalt where their content- their energy- can be realised and released. We are drug pushers- landscape is the opium of the English- who function within culture as enclosers for the state. We must embrace this role if we are to redeem it.
23
We must 'transcend' history, seeing progress as drift, in order to discover that there is no transcendence, that the matter of history is a fiction, that transcendence is a construct balanced on a myth. Both our personal histories and the generality- those propped up views we were given- contain- in a mystified form- all that we need to find freedom within tradition. We must harness the forces of enclosure, every wound we have, as forces of self realisation.
24
We celebrate transcendence as a movement into myth, or ideology, and promote- through an exploration of those ridiculous myths- views of the world which include the props we are too used to ignoring. Who can look at a hill without knowing that it is propped up by generations of cultural engineering? We look away from the scaffolding that holds up the cathedral. We seek, in the russet view, not to notice the scenery moving. Even the social realists who populate their imagined cities with 'real' people make yet more falseness, another cultured lie. We are all liars, we who practise the 'arts'. That is the best thing about us. Why relevance-for either a 'symbolist' or a 'realist'- should be synonymous with and require a partial view, presented as universal, is beyond us. Everything within the gestalt is equally real and equally relevant. It is necessary, for social transformation to occur, that this point be realised. Those who cry the loudest for change are also those who prevent it.
25
We must come to terms with the placelessness of places. Effectively, we must undergo a psychogeographical course of detoxification. We must wean ourselves off 'belonging', for we belong nowhere. There is nowhere to belong any more, those myths have left us. We must demystify place and explore the potential of placelessness. Within the myth of demythification we must rediscover what was repressed; all of the horrors of self and place sealed within culture await us. The hills, in their repression, have become demoniacal. When they appear before us, swaying on their stilts, they wear the mask of Perseus or of the Gorgon. In casting our forbidden glances we petrify a self or a concept, but we also release them. All that is turned to stone is that repressive authority which told us the tales we were given in the first place. We must face our fears, and confront our ontological superstitions, if we are ever to laugh at the mythic quality of that which we feared, and were contained by. This is not an act of faith, but an act of learning, it is something we face or avoid in our daily lives.
26
We encourage a gestalt view of poetries and of places, seeing each 'poetic' ism as an aspect of the gestalt, and develop a new myth of solidarity amongst poets and artists, one which undermines the spatial and social scenery within which we exist, and the containments of ideology, and we must then pull down our hard won myths of solidarity and fragmentation within that gestalt view.
27
We demonstrate that what is called 'experimental' or 'avant-garde' poetry is as enclosed by convention as so-called 'traditional' or 'conventional' poetry- that each is equally creative and is equally contained. We must emphasize what is radical in 'the tradition' and what is reactionary in 'the avant-garde'. These terms denote a dissection, they present myths of culture as if those invented masks were separate objects. No more dissection! There is only one true tradition. That tradition is both dynamic and process. This false division has brought about a mutilation of both cultured 'camps'. Each- cut off from the other -could be represented, within myth, as an aspect of the Fisher King. Both perspectives are presented from within social enclosures that are based on hierarchy and vanity. Each needs an involvement with the other to be healed, each needs to disintegrate within the other to release its meanings. This is a prerequisite for the realisation of poetry and thus, within culture (myth), the realisation of person and place. All of the poets that we love and admire, from Shakespeare to Geoffrey Hill, embraced that process in their work.
28
Equally, we must identify the contemporary paradigm defined by the terms 'symbolism' and 'realism', we must contain that paradigm within our texts and then we must re- place it.
29
We must establish nonism as the mutant post-national/postmetropolitan (and placeless) form of (neo-absurd) cultural criticism. Nonism is a critical viewpoint that is designed to explode both itself and all other isms. Nonism is defined by its own unmaking of itself.
30
Nonism is an aesthetic that is of the realisation of capitalism and of its decomposition. Nonism implies an acceptance of all things, including the globalisation and liberalisation of previously 'placed' economies. Nonism is the recovered memory therapy of the cultural realm, within nonism we embrace that which we had previously, and unconsciously, repressed and demonised within ourselves. We note the contradictions within capitalism- and their social, cultural, and administrative expression -which are contained and revealed within its myths of itself- and we assert that the ultimate goal of capitalism is its own negation (it is defined by what it has repressed). We must acknowledge the mysteries of time, and swim ahead of our own myths of that. There must be no more deathly territories. There must be no more mystification of -nor dissection of- the matrix of the gestalt.
31
We must realise the sentimentality of history- as 'voice' in our work- and expose the millennium as a fraud. We must oppose palin-genesis in order to establish a 'genuine' ontology.
32
There is beauty within the process of enclosure- although it is an entrapped beauty, it is no less vivid for that -it is the only beauty that we can know (until we transform ourselves and our social relations) and is present in all art and in all perceptions of 'the beautiful' and 'the sublime'.
33
We explore placelessness as a myth and a reality, as an exploded poetic and as a poetic containment.
34
We must unmask English and Classical (cultural) pastoralism in its current forms- which sometimes use 'radicalism' as a conceit- to point out that no ideological construct that is pastoral can be progressive, that landscapes so contained are inauthentic (mystifying of economic and social relations), victimised and creating of victims (including martyrs) in general, that they are all mythed up, socially broken, virtual, effectively meaningless, emblematic, symbolic, ghosted.
35
We must disrupt the (metropolitan) view that is obscuring social actualities within the poetry of place, and in almost all other cultural and aesthetic constructs, as that view consumes both person and place (even the person of the encloser).
36
We explore and celebrate and grieve the cultural processes that alienate us within those historical (enclosing) myths of nationality, property, hierarchy and (landed) liberty that inform and confound our concept of 'society'.
37
We explore the processes of ideological enclosure within being and myth and suggest techniques for identifying and exploding the faultlines that always exist within such processes.
38
We celebrate the many acts of 'transgression', whether conscious or mystified, that daily explode faultlines and open enclosures.
39
We identify the radical in the conservative and the conservative in the radical and we celebrate both.
40
We expose, and thus transform, the covert enclosure of contemporary 'transgressive' and/or protest culture by highlighting the elitism of its bourgeois, big business, land owning oligarchies and of individuals (who they call 'leaders') who are contained by messianic/dynastic myths of power, and of their social manifestation- which is placed within the fashion for virtual social and cultural transgression and is found within such constructs as the Anti-Roads Movement or Earth First!- within which bad behaviour is commodified.
41
We highlight the culture of violence and myth that develops from this enclosure and undermine it.
42
We identify the economic forces and ideological constructs that threaten to enclose and contain the cultural 'common ground' that still exists within the enclosed cultures of 'transgression', that still emerge from faultline and front-line.
43
We have seen transgression absorbed into the liberalised economy, where it becomes a tool of capitalism, where one industrial combine can rent or buy 'protest' group to firebomb and sabotage its competitors, where actions occur in response to discreet contributions from business sponsors, where protest becomes priced and discounted, enclosed and increasingly a market force, used to affect a share price, becoming cynically terroristic, always presenting a moral face- that of saving the planet or stopping a road- whilst it does deals with those who seek to destroy what democracy we have and the few unhinged landscapes that remain.
44
We suggest new strategies, tactics and structures- for transgression and protest to assume- that will avoid territoriality, hierarchy and enclosure, that will enable the redemption- rather than the denial or further demonisation- of capital. We will release capital from its aspect of devouring mother, of Saturnine father, rather than confim those demonical manifestations. We will release myth and religion from the cultural sado-masochism that blight them and keep their meanings from us, that exclude us from the chamber of blood and gold. We represent the failed and inhumane strategies of transgressive culture in a new, redeemed light. We will help people to travel forward in time.
45
We encourage new views of the environment in order to displace territoriality, utopianism and hierarchy.
46
We seek unity in fragmentation, the solidarity of difference, and to explode the political/economic paradigm that has displaced 'labour' since Karl Marx.
47
We seek to facilitate a culture within the concept of 'transgression' that is based on realisation not myth, on psychic faultlines not social enclosures, on placelessness not denial, and to 'transcend' the myths of sacrifice (martyrdom) that so afflict those who suffer under a capital realised only in its demonical aspect (i.e. as capital-ism).
48
We explore the processes of economic, social and cultural exclusion that every day more tightly enclose the poor as victims of social, economic and psychic vampirism. We seek to utilise repression as an agent of realisation, and to create projections of the absurd consequences of denial, that those consequences can be realised in individual terms, that they may themselves be admitted and replaced. If isolation unites us then we do not need to be alone, we have these distances in common. Even rejection empowers us.
49
We must describe a world view based on placelessness and then explode it. We must describe the virtuality of community and place, as they are now, in order to facilitate their realisation.
50
Our works are a description of the actual and mythical natures of capital. We express the relationship between 'labour' and its myth-built within the painful distances of enclosure and exclusion-of capital. Those myths have ensured the ruin of 'labour', cutting it off from the benefits of transgression. We seek to redeem those values in our selves that are expressed and lost- known to us only as absences- within that experience of exclusion, within that experience of a triumphant and demonical capitalism, within that experience of the 'myth' of the 'self'. In exploding such paradigms of despair we seek the kindness that is concealed within ideology, the creative potential of ideas that we don't believe in. We seek relationship in this way.
51
We must keep destroying utopia, no matter who it belongs to, for it has mythed up both place and person. All zones are mythical, both landscape and self are ideological emplacements that create and contain our potential (and thus enclose being).
52
We define self realisation as a process, rather than as condition, and thus know self realisation as a quality released (rather than as a quantity enclosed).
53
We note that the identification of 'being' with 'self' is an exercise in myth, that a 'self' cannot actually exist.
54
We seek to develop forms of 'self' constructive behaviour that rely on myth only in that they accept the mythic nature of such an undertaking. If we accept the self as mythical then, in the making of our myths of self and situation, we can truly take control of our lives. We can be who we imagine ourselves to be, we can have a life that satisfies us without denying the myths of another. All myths are common property, also all mythic selves are common property. We are social creatures, we should share our myths of 'self', spreading the energy they contain, with whoever wants them. We can be an inspiration to our children. We must not just keep them. In its demonical manifestation as capitalism, capital allows for the theft of one self- of the experience of that self-by another. In a world in which the self is a common myth its experience can have no economic value. Joy cannot be stolen, only shared. Those who could afford it, have created their myths of themselves out of the enclosed matter of those who could not afford to buy into their own being, let alone into the being of another. 'Art' has become an illustration of this, so art is a realm within which this myth of our powerlessness can be 'redeemed'. We seek redemptive behaviours, such as unenclosed protest, trespass as pilgrimage, the social transcendence of territory, the reinvention of the self in the redemption of repressed matter, etc. We seek, within art, to realise being as an 'open' 'field'. This is expressed in the placeless poetic, in the nonist aesthetic. We can be reconciled, within and without our 'selves', there is no need for us to be alone. There is no need for 'self'sacrifice, for martyrdom, to 'cause' or situation.
55
It is time for us to explore the processes of ideological enclosure, (within 'our' myths of being, our ontological constructs) and for us to suggest techniques of identifying and exploding the 'faultlines' that exist within such 'closed' processes, that they might be culturally expressed and socially realised.
56
It is time to highlight the qualitative differences between an act of self construction within realised (or released) myth and an act of self destruction within mystified (or enclosed) myth. An example of the former is the myth of place on stilts, which is obviously absurd. An example of the latter is protesthood, the self righteous assertions of, for example, the bureaucracies and activists of the green movement, which are presented as actual and radical, but which are actually absurd and conservative. The former explodes myths and mything, the latter reinforces myths and mything.
57
Nothing is ever really lost, even though we experience what is most precious to us as lost. It is from within those 'lost' relationships-the lost parts of our selves, it is from within those creative processes that we feel we are too 'broken' to complete-that redemption beckons to us. The success of all our endeavours-in the psychic, the social, and the economic realms-depends on us embracing our losses in order to transform them. We must not look back, nor seek deathly territories, nor condemn our selves to 'fate'. Rejecting history as myth, we look forward, moving ahead of time.
A Duncan
Nine fine flyaway goose truths: Bernache nonnette, by Grace Lake (Equipage, 1995, 15pp, £2)
Let's start with the title, of the pamphlet and the first poem. Bernache is a barnacle goose, so called because its young were supposed to grow out of barnacles which then became eels (in a variant, the barnacles grew on trees). Nonnette is also a kind of goose- actually, the same kind of goose- called "little nun" because its nests were nowhere to be found in northwest Europe, being safe in Greenland, and consequently its sex life was a mystery to Europeans. Tales about gooseberry bushes probably have the same folk-myth source. The theme is sexuality, coming into season, bearing, breeding, dreaming about the child's growth and birth, but only by periphrasis, substitution, fantasy, and camouflage. I think the phrase 'jars of tadpoles for aversion therapy' is a reference to the male essence. Grace wrote to me that "'Bernache Nonnette' is a concept that has found a name- Barnacle Goose, St. Bernach was an Irish monk who tried to settle a fight in the South of Wales. Nonnette is also gingerbread, & 9 of anything." Berdacus came to Wales and then I think Cornwall, and is mentioned in Gods with Stainless Ears, by Lynette Roberts), floating around the same legendary Atlantic shores in his coracle. It was the unfindableness of barnacle goose nests which led to the saw about a wild goose chase, and indirection, elusiveness, looping around, wild flights, resolutions withdrawn by subterfuge at the last minute, are structural rules in this book. The mystery nesting sites full of fluffy barnacle goslings are a figure both of some Mother Goose fairytale land and of a terrain of poetic fantasy, perhaps the society where we want to live. The goose story is in Pliny's Natural History and this reminds me of Maggie O'Sullivan's An un-natural history in 3 incomplete parts, also (I think) an attempt to challenge organised knowledge with personal experience. Fairy tales about female sexuality and reproduction, a kind of Mother Goose Gorgon; on waters where the wild tales spawn. Human sex life is a mystery too.
'Collegiate cooling her heels flapped by a stream of torrid bananas, motorized/ Adjacent gazette, gassy, classey & yet, determined to leave with a spick if you please/ Where is my piano the gangway awaits the conflict's secure it's pouring with rain/ Champagne's on the brain her name is charmaine she wears pink pyjamas/ She's going insane and when she arrives she'll catch fish alive and checkout again,/ & again those maniacal, driven or not, unite to declare that red must rot.' This is a dazzling rendition of the high life in six lines, a kind of hot jazz, but I think what the poet is thinking, much more darkly, about this dashing fashionable socialite-suffragette undergraduate type, as a threat, because of her superficiality, effortless (sexually mediated) social power, her selfishness; a danger to a middle-aged woman for all sorts of reasons, but among other things as a figure projected onto, a never-lived youth relived, a fable of lightness and gleam; while Lake renders this dazzling lam‚ folderol out of Flying Down to Rio to maximum effect, different emotional currents are under the surface, and in fact give it its shimmering quality. But almost immediately we move on to the next thing. The scene with the dressing-gown (AE Twelve and 'he found her in a dressing-gown, red, velvet, sitting in a kitchen knitting him/ Not breakfasting no not her, but complaint walked in with a tumblerful of peruvian gin') is played for laughs, but again I suspect there is a much darker emotional layer beneath, perhaps a relationship ending, perhaps a moment of extreme frustration with this man, the realisation that a whole life has to be given up and left. Aboutness is not one of BN's main qualities. It's hard for me to talk about it, knocking nails in with my head, without crumpling its lighter than air swing.
Grace wrote, "'She Walked' is me, frogmarched off the Essex campus in 1970 by a fellow poet who didn't want me to be either single, younger than him or a Writer (...) I had been handed over-in the middle of a vast lyrical metropolitan exequy's composition (incepted by me & in the process of being incised upon paper) by a group who were writing for Tariq Ali's 'Black Dwarf' who wanted Politics not Poetry- to a strange flat in Stamford Hill where I was seized by a group armed with stolen chequebooks & weapons." At one level, BN, and I think the whole of Lake's poetic work, is a critique of the determinism of left-wing discourse around 1970 and ever after, including official feminism, how it creates a new imaginary State which imagines the population in the bureaucratic terms of the old one, how it skimps the impossibility of imagining 58 million people as human agents by imagining them as quantities, like money, which can be housed and planned for. This is not an opposition of true-untrue or good-bad, but one of levels of porosity and granularity. Lake is a social poet, writing against something always being said. A lot of people, in the sixties, found the style of Marx and Freud about as credible as a speech by Harold Wilson; most of the poets who began in that decade, you could say, were attacking official knowledge. The problem was then to create a poetry which was simultaneous and constantly shifting and irrational but never falsifiable, seductively fluent, never slipping back into informativeness to explain what was going on, and, if Lake has found the perfect answer, it shouldn't be too hard for us to remember the question.
Prussian myzi, if only I could wait for your magnesium blue to hover
stone by stone over the shark finned ground, resonations floor me
I am told that I have reinvented my history, these fakes that have
Drifted by desire rather than by noble patriotic inclination, to be told this
Frozen kiss is a parasite berry that grows and governs our merriment
That we fall to habitude unaged & are given brown cloaks for mourning
To circle the lotus that catches the tip of the dragonfly's wing
And burning it into fruition find an exhaust pipe carved in braille
The war continues to charr the air with shot speech,
These are buried or placed on parole for comparing the language of war & of peace
There is a large unknown Lake œuvre- stocked, allegedly, in eight bin-liners in Kevin Nolan's garage- which Karlien and Lucy, impetuous impresarie of Empress, are, somebody told me, looking at with the idea of publishing it. There have been previous sorties: a series of home-made, distributed hand to hand, photographed-manuscript feuilles volantes, of which our typographer, Ewan, has some; about ten pages, in 1986, in Nigel Wheale's magazine constant red/mingled damask; and a 1994 Equipage pamphlet, Viola tricolor. The biography in cr/md relates "One volume of poetry 1967-70 disappeared prior to publication. (...) Poetry published by Sheffield Free Press. A volume withdrawn from Common Ground Printing Co-operative following disputation over the licence of printers to censor." The question of Lake's unpublished work is probably the grandest issue of literary heritage now facing the officers of letters; but a 100% political person in a time of political whirlwind and speculation, in Stamford Hill or other geologically exposed points, may not have produced a heritage, "vast lyrical metropolitan exequies", on paper. It is the intact hopes carried as a burden by a generation of unrenegade idealists which will, I hope, govern the rest of our lives.
Reading this work aloud is like drinking melted Swiss chocolate. The last time I read it was at about 3am in a squat in King's Cross, to a room full mainly of film technicians. Everybody had a good time. There isn't ever a second where you drop off because it repeats itself or gives its hand away or lectures or does anything but startle and entrance.
BN was typeset in the next street by my neighbour, Ulli Freer, on a Mac which Sue brought home from work. Ulli is one of my heroes. However the lettering in BN is too small to read. Grace's ultra-long lines (so like Denise Riley's and Colin Simms', and are we seeing a trend here) persuaded him to hit the A5 format by going down to about 22 cpi, and it wasn't a good idea. Normally I would strip out the personal, household level, details, but in this review I think it's best to leave them in, since Lake is saying that objectivity is self-referential. The poet constantly raises punishments and accusations only to ridicule them. We see an administration falling apart, its fictions sent up and set as skits, with no trace of a new one coming down the road.
eyelash once eleven jonquil cibachromed en route
washington vacuous quay point sizzling palermo
messages visited square bank ochre charged by bolt
magnet, curtsey, falling out, back room rat:
white sliced delivery, spanish cake shop windows,
tiled frames fused infantry, grille, behind a face
a ransacked library, daubings, bricked out.
descriptive psychology dents & is reinforced
unglobed throat.
('concilia') Concilia, the ultimate authority on goodness and holiness enacted by bishops and recorded in Latin in millstone leather folios, edited by Mansi, are by now re-adapted to cilia, eyelashes; a kind of froncer les Conciles, or fluttering your workers' and peasants' soviets.
Lake, who comes from Stockport in Cheshire, was out of doors during some rather febrile years, and her life was probably damaged a lot by trying to make life better; but history doesn't jump to anyone's beck and call, and when they're all in their forties I've no doubt we will be referring to people who graduated in the Eighties as sad victims of a fashion for being a semi-Nazi and reducing ideas to investments in self-esteem. Actually, what strikes me about Lake's earlier work is the switching between passages mocking rationality and earnestness, and passages in which pathos and earnestness were mixed in a didactic way, slowing things up seriously. In BN the formula has changed to eliminate the latter style- but the tragic and grandiose events are still present, to my ear, but now as merely one theme in a satisfyingly polyphonic whole.
Grace still has family in Russia and was probably more aware, even in 1968, of the facts of Left history than the would-be Cruel Father Eagles and cocorico coxcomb cadres of one of our own baby revolutions. Someone remarked- unfortunately I can't now remember who it was- on Khodasevich's sulky, rather negligent, nursery style, and I think that was an inspired remark. Kh. would be more popular with our Left if he had been a communist and written fo-fum Cum On Feel The Noiz poems about killing lots of people. Kh. wasn't an Acmeist, but a Moscow writer (and subsequently Paris, where he watched the ice form on the inside of his windows, o beneficent West), but I also think this applies to the Acmeists; they didn't want to write about great themes, but to write poetry continuous with childhood. There is that amazing effect in Mandelshtam's poem about the kulaks: Paykovye knigi chitayu,/ Pen'kovye rechi lovlyu,/ Groznoe bayushki-bayu/ Kulatskomu payu poyu.; out in the countryside, in the pure fields and the dreaming forests, six million people are dying, but he doesn't write a Grand Ode, but writes, listening to frothy speeches on the radio, a parodic lullaby with pa-pa and bay-bay sounds. Go bye-byes, good kulak. All fall down down. The greatest achievement of this line, however, is Tsvetayeva's The Rat-catcher (i.e. the Pied Piper of Hamelin) (Krysolov, 1926), and it is this which Bernache nonnette reminds me of most. It is written in an almost nursery diction, using devices (parallelism, one-word sentences) from riddles and fairy-tales, in fact set as a series of questions and answers (Whose Greta, actually?/ You're kidding!/ Whose Greta, did you think, did he pipe up-but the burgomaster's!), but with an irregular beat and phonetic echoing which are Futurist: Ospa v ospinu/ Chutka v chutochku/ Ch'yu zhe, sobstvenno/ Gretu? Shutite!. The rat-catcher, so seductive, so willingly followed, is Lenin. What Tsvetayeva and Mandelshtam- both victims of Leninism, although the death was imposed in different ways- were doing by writing as if the reader were three feet away, and part of their family, was saying that public life was so corrupt that the truth couldn't possibly be known about anything as far away as across the street. We live, not feeling any country beneath us, Our words not audible ten paces away. Who except for Lenin's catspaws has written a Grand Ode about anything since Lenin?
Well, poetry doesn't have to disintegrate just because the Grand Manner has fallen in with the Ministry of Famines. So language has retreated into the home. Grace constantly writes as if she were talking to children, a Mother Bernache Goose; I find this incredibly comforting. Julian Symons, one of the bity-whiny little communist geeks who hung around in the late Thirties (or was it the Seventies?) sneered at Cyril Connolly for printing "odd fag-ends of the Twenties bound together by no organised view of Life and Society, no stronger thread than his own erratic intelligence". The poetic history of the past 60 years has, it may be, been the exchange between the endeavour to make life monotonous, artificial, and governable and the passive task of writing poetry which is irrational, shimmering, and realistic. The cosmos is illogical when viewed on a small scale. So its large-scale logic is a failure of definition, an optical smear. 'Organisation' here means making your inner life artificially monotonous, and repressing deviance.
The other poet Lake reminds me of is Mayröcker; Mayröcker no.4, or whatever the count is, the one who writes in amazingly long lines that keep you constantly off balance, who plays up to the stereotype of being dotty and endearing (that collected volume is called the obsessed age), never makes a rational utterance, and never allows you to say "aha, I know what this situation is and can therefore make decisions". It's also like the dialogue written for the title role of La folle de Chaillot.
Then madam Mopstick came upon her merry bones. This line, in Smollett's novel Humphry Clinker, is spoken by a servant. Actually, it's rather a naughty remark, the kind you can imagine a rather old-fashioned kind of gay making after Someone has left the room. Another poetic Kapazität whom I occasionally babysit for always says, when someone talks about their domestic help, that she comes from the servant class, and I suspect that Grace feels the same way, especially when faced with people who have serious collegiate-bishopric jobs: on a hidden signal the music will stop and the head of household will firmly push her out of the back door and into the scullery. Although mixed with precise notes for paintings and passages of Bunyan and opera, this is a poetry of ragots d'office, a kind of sarky backstairs gossip, its brilliance of imitation has to do with needing to guess and fear someone's moods. A sociologist would probably say that women are the servant class. The snatches of French belong to the lexical field of couture and cuisine rather than grandes ecoles. I was entranced by that line in Smollett, and said that no writer could make up lines like that, but really Grace can and does. Tsvetayeva's book-length poem is composed entirely of lines like this. The marxist programme-claim that everything was connected filled the universe with a surplus of causal links which, once the programme was dissolved and forgotten, provided a splendid psychic model of excess where coherence never needed to be demonstrated, filling the room with a low-energy fluctuation like insect pheromones; this poetry is written to a mosaic vision of infinite fragments containing every possible order and fluctuating in a kind of tango of gematria.
Seaport, by Robert Hampson (Pushtika Press: Interim Edition. 42p; 1995; £2)
Hilda Bronstein
Robert Hampson's collection of poems, under the title Seaport, is a discontinuous history of crises in the social development of Liverpool. Written over an extensive period during the seventies and early eighties, it remained unpublished until 1995, as part III, 'The Rialto', had not been completed. Hampson was finally persuaded to allow publication of this 'interim' edition in three parts (I, II and IV), plus an appendix containing two fragments of the elusive part III.
Seaport is a poem of place; but unlike Roy Fisher's fictive 'City' or Allen Fisher's South London of 'unfelt forces', Liverpool's maritime location renders it a place of passage and transition, through which thousands of travellers, sailors, slaves, and immigrants have passed since the late 17th century. This seaport is now a palimpsest, which bears the contradictory traces of power and poverty, privilege and displacement. Inscribed into both texts, poem and city, are the signs not only of the wealth of those who had profited by the growth of the cotton industry and slave trades, but also of the struggle for survival of the inhabitants who lived and died there, and the cargoes of dispossessed human beings who had passed through.
browned ink
& pencil scrawl
a palimpsest of
brick & tile
& stone
the partially-
effaced
traces
of previous statements.
the fabric
of these lives.
The various transformations of Liverpool from fishing village to major seaport have resulted in the urban decline which now stands as a symbol of capitalism and commodification, the embodiment of the social failure which is the consequence of commercial 'success'. For Hampson there has been 'no misery/ that cannot be rendered/ marketable'. By 1850, as well as profiting from the importation of timber from America and the export of cotton, 'the city that once had five-sixths of the slave-trade/ now had/ two thirds of the British emigrant trade.' This narrative is now inseparable from the topography of the city itself, its housing, docks, city centre, landmarks such as the Merchants' Exchange, where the statuary bears the 'emblems of Nelson's victories:/ the limbs and manacles/ of slaves/ in the marketplace', and the 'Old Church' of St Nicholas where, in the basement 'bodies of the drowned/ were exhibited until claimed'.
Hampson weaves a dense intertexual web which invokes the voices of those connected in some way with Liverpool and the sea, from Daniel Defoe and Herman Melville to John Lennon. For example, Joseph Conrad's definition of the term 'landfall' outlines the process whereby landmarks are recognized by sailors when approaching a destination. In the poem 'perch rock' the reader must navigate her way towards the string of signifiers by which this particular seaport is to be identified. The channel carved through the open field of words on the page replicates the narrow straits through which ships passed to enter the port.
perch rock stands
to starboard
the close
vestibular landline
runs
from the point blocks
of flats
to the graceful lines
of dark-brick
terraced houses.
The rape of the landscape, when in 1710 the first wet-dock allowed the 'high masted ships' to 'penetrate the city' is similarly illustrated in the rupture of the linear form of the poem 'the docks', and later dockland developments described in 'docks (2)' finally the essential connection of river and city is sundered as 'deep penetration/ gives way to a lineal system/ and seven mile line of docks, severs city from shore'.
Part I is an amalgam of statistical and historical data, clippings from newspapers, advertisements, broadsheets and reports, and among them quotations from the diaries and letters of Hawthorn, US consul from 1853-57, for whom:
'the people are as numerous
as maggots in cheese'
The poet's voice is subsumed within the intertextual fabric, while the notion of seaport as constructed out of the lives and vicissitudes of those who lived and passed through her is fused with that of poem as a montage of words and phrases, documentary records and data, a scrapbook of the recorded moments in the histories of people and place. The words of Herman Melville are quoted, as he decribes the sailors' method of picking to pieces "odds and ends of old rigging called 'junk'", and twisting them into new and usable twine known as 'spun yarn'. Melville draws a parallel between that procedure and the strategy by which 'most books are manufactured'.
Hampson weaves this metaphor into 'the chart', the opening poem of part II, which he dedicates to Melville. In an exploration of 'the depths and latitudes of language', a correspondence is implied between the poetic process, the quest for 'precise expression/ through the carefully-adjusted tensions/ of ambiguities', and the hazardous voyage in pursuit of the whale. The open form and multiple significations of 'the chart', which juxtaposes the vocabularies of physics, linguistics, maritime tradition, and cartography, is in contrast to the tighter form and rhythm and the masculine language employed in the description of the docks themselves in the piece which follows it, 'spunyarn':
China Walls of masonry; a succession of
granite-rimmed docks,
completely enclosed, but linked
like the great lakes
or like a chain of immense fortresses
This final section of Seaport, Part IV, charts the period from the sixties to the present, with allusions to the popular music which came out of Liverpool, to Howling Wolf, Little Richard, and the Beatles' injunction to 'open up your eyes/ tell me/ what you see'. For a moment the poet's voice is subjective, 'how hip we were: in Matthew St/ in shades', as a narrative born of the poet's subjectivity forms another strand in the poetic weave. Hampson's preoccupation with time, place and history is foregrounded in the first poem of this final group, 'growth rings', which brings together the notion of radio carbon dating (a method of verifying historicity) with that of the writing (or righting?) of history. This final sequence speaks of recent racial violence, police intimidation, riots, economic and social decay. In the ironically titled 'a better tomorrow' are listed the statistics of expendability, as unemployment, determined by decisions taken in distant power centres 'London, Detroit, Paris, Tokyo, Zurich', transform what had once been an active commercial centre and seaport into 'a city of the dead'.
'July 1981' is a fragmented account of the race riots which took place in that month, interspersed with reports of the police brutality which typified them and the intimidation of young blacks, which continued after the riots had ended. In the place which had prospered as a result of the slave trade, the topography is once again transformed as buildings which had served as the symbols of that success are destroyed by black rioters:
the Racquets Club
(Upper Parliament St)
wood-panelling, uniformed barstaff
white sports-clothed families
where judges stayed over
burned: July 5, 1981.
This multi-dimensional and multi-faceted text is an extraordinary concatenation of significations. It is a thought-provoking piece, not only because of its social dimension, or of its concerns with poetry as production. There is a constant interaction here between the notions of time and space. The poem is situated in a chronologically documented social history (time), and in the mapping of the physical site (place) of Liverpool. The nexus between these two is an impulse towards a deconstruction and re-reading of historical texts. Seaport is concerned with the corruption and devastation wrought by capital, and the multiplicity of contradictory meanings contained in the discourses of recorded, and seemingly factual, history. It is a self-reflexive work, set in a textual field of histories, data, scientific knowledges and literature and in a language which speaks of the politics of desire and the eroticism of power which rapes the very landscape in the name of capital and consumerism, dehumanizing millions as it does so. Moreover, the inclusion of the incomplete Part III, 'The Rialto' as an appendix (incidentally, the only section of the poem that strikes a note of optimism) serves to emphasize this poet's concern with the notion of time as a continuing present, in which both past events and actions continue to take effect. Since the 'history' of Liverpool, and consequently both Liverpool the place and Seaport the text, are still in process, there can be no appropriate moment for closure to occur.