CHANTICLEER MAGAZINE
EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Six. My apologies again for the delay in publication. A great holiday in Poland during the first part of April must serve as my excuse. Dziekuje bardzo, Wojtek and Aga, for inviting me there and making my stay so enjoyable.
Apart from that it’s been the same old same old - wars, revolutions, demonstrations, riots—‘anarchists’ enjoying themselves!—uprisings, earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns - and government cuts to the arts budget. Although all this might seem perfectedly adapted to the task of waking people up, of course, no sooner than they do start to wake up than our rulers unleash another war to distract them - this time against Libya, so that the likes of Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy can strut their stuff on the world stage as ‘statesmen’, ‘saviours’ and ‘humanitarians’ socking it to another ‘Hitler’ in a part of the globe where “Here be Hitlers” signs seem pretty thick on the ground. Of course, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with “Here be oil” under the ground as well as ‘Hitlers’ above it, could it? Or could it? I think it should have become perfectly obvious by now that the idea of the heroic West standing up to all those nasty dictators and tyrants is a narrative that has long since become completely exhausted, (We need only look at the treatment of Bradley Manning to put that narrative in its proper perspective!) and the sooner we get over the infantile self-image it clearly expresses, the better for the rest of the world, not to mention ourselves. It’s all rather reminiscent of the Roy Rogers films I used to watch as a child, when he rode to the rescue on Trigger - an ongoing narrative for the same mental age. Never mind, soon there will be a royal wedding to distract us instead. I just hope and pray that the ‘anarchists’ are out in force on the day - if only to show us an example of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle negating itself.
I’ve just finished rereading the Táin Bó Cuaulnge, the Irish epic poem about the exploits of Cúchulainn. In so many ways, it’s the perfect contrast to our sanitised Western concept of war (the ‘just war’) with its goodies and baddies, its knights in shining armour against Gaddifi-like dragons. The hero, Cúchulainn, is definitely not a goodie. In fact, he’s the last person in the world you would want to meet in a dark alleyway, even when he was five years of age. The poem gains enormously through not having to conform to the narrative of goodies and baddies. But it is interesting also because, in contrast with other epics - such as the Iliad, the Aeniad and Beowulf - women - like Medb - are so much more to the fore in the action. However, they’re not not nice either - no nicer, in fact, than the men. One thing they are, however, is concrete and real. There are also some wonderfully vivid passages in it. “The Warp-Spasm overtook him: it seemed each hair was hammered into his head, so sharply they shot upright. You could swear a fire-speck tipped each hair. He squeezed one eye narrower than the eye of a needle; he opened the other wider than the mouth of a goblet. He bared his jaws to the ears; he peeled back his lips to the eye-teeth till his gullet showed. The hero-halo rose up from the crown of his head.” It has tedious bits as well, like a lot of these old epics - roll-calls of names, lineages et cetera - but when it gets going it really gets going and the savage barbarity of it simply adds to its energy. It gains because it doesn’t try to excuse the inexcusable, but simply takes it for granted. In those days, war, I imagine, was simply a way of reducing the population when there was pressure on the available land. I mean, you have all those other tribes occupying land to the West or the South; what better way of solving the problem than starting a war in which one side or other is simply wiped out? No beating about the bush in the Táin Bó Cuaulnge. These days of course it’s for oil, and it’s done mainly through proxies. Somehow, it’s not quite the same, but let’s not get into that.
Once again a new issue of Ol’ Chanty, with the same old complaint about the paucity of women contributers. Och weil! At least Ol’ Chanty will not be affected by the government cuts.
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CONTENTS
POEM - Edward Mycue
ESSAY - Ian MacFadyen
POEMS - Don Young
QUOTE - Senator Henry Dawes
POEMS - Paul Murphy
POEM - Jacki Proctor
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
POEMS - Joe Mismo
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POEM - Edward Mycue
Cavity
Destination’s harvest
Gathers ends.
We are windings
In stony paths, scratched
Slates tracking weight
While distances spiral
Into unfamiliar manners.
Rocks pile up.
Much time it takes
To do; so much nature
we move here.
History hangs over
The lake that was the lagoon
That was a lake
That covers a road,
Which doesn’t lead.
Cloud daggers shape
Growing fears a moon explores.
Memories come to our beds
Dreaming in opposite directions.
Crosswinds repave
The wider world into a cavity
Where the graspable night
Squanders raining mires where
Stars promise union
Last heard shimmering.
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ESSAY
DESERT SHORE : THE LAST SCENARIO OF PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
Ian MacFadyen
“The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God”
- John 16:2
The ragazzi di vita no longer held up their pants with string, or walked barefoot through the mud and rubbish and broken stones. Their grimy undershirts and torn trousers had been replaced with the latest fashions – snazzy sports jackets, silk shirts, American khakis, pointed patent leather shoes. The moon still rose over the abandoned fields and vacant lots, the shanties and the piles of garbage, but now the boys promenaded proudly through this waste land, showing off their new clothes and their latest acquisitions, cigarettes dangling from their lips – they played pop music on their tinny transistor radios, flashed their wristwatches, kissed their gold crosses, and checked the lire in their nice leather wallets . . . “Ernestino and Franco, Antonio and Marcello, Aldo and Roberto . . .” Once he would recite their names, a litany of lost boys, a lullaby for the unfortunate ones, prisoners of the slum world. “Sono migliaia. Non posso amarne uno,” he had written - “Thousands of them. Impossible to love only one.” There had been so many to choose from, bartering for cigarettes or loose change, a meal or a shirt or a pair of canvas shoes, or dreaming of saving for a beautiful bicycle, red or blue with gold trim . . . But such transactions were no longer possible – now the boys were only too knowing, and blatantly avaricious, working their territory with professional acumen, the outlaw gang as the perfect model of free enterprise, enforcing the boundaries of their lost domain with dispassionate brutality. They were in business, after all, from sunset to dawn, and the money now came before the act, not after, and it was a demand, the declaration of a contractual arrangement, no longer a plea or an earnest request, or the grateful acceptance of the punter’s largesse. No, they understood the concept of potlatch only too well, but things had changed, things had moved on, and they didn’t play by those rules anymore - love was sex, and this sex had to be paid for, the true and lucrative penance of the procurer paid in full, in advance, because, after all was said and done, “An hour is a hole.” This was the modern world, OK, but love was as old as the Tiber, love was the true currency of human existence, only now it must come with improved and tangible benefits for the unemployed proletariat, the scum beneath even the servant class - they too would have their share of the spoils, however temporary or tarnished . . . The underclass had become the criminal underworld, according to capitalist diktat – that is how he proselytized it, but the boys were entirely indifferent to all his theorizing. And those new clothes, fresh off the rack, and all their preening and posing, none of that was to impress the clients, it was for themselves alone, for the sheer pleasure of contemplating their mirror reflections, those insouciant images of fleeting youth, combing their hair and testing their looks as in a movie, pouting and smiling and suddenly grimacing, narrowing their eyes, tipping back their heads, closing one eye from the stream of cigarette smoke, tough guy fashion. And then, too, it was for the girls and the women they would go to afterwards, to show off their rolls of lire, and to take their true pleasure, once the business of the night had been taken care of.
He was the heretic pastor of the great plebeian metropolis, the defrocked monsignor of the slums of the night world. He railed at the injustice suffered by the inhabitants, as he loved their nobility, and their endurance of oppression. Or he saw himself as the fraternal communist elder brother, joining in their football games, known to them all by name, and so, he tried to convince himself, accepted and trusted. After all, wasn’t he really one of them, if not by birth, then by blood, despite his talent and wealth and fame? “I renounce my middle class origins,” he had written, as if that were possible. “My fame is only notoriety,” he said, and he believed he was dispossessed in every way, excommunicated by the Church and the Communist Party - surely, then, like the ragazzi, he was a true outsider. “I renounced my nationality. I turned my back on everything Italian,” he claimed, whilst admitting, “I protested, ingenuously, staging an abjuration which, while humiliating and castrating me, exalted me. But I wasn’t completely sincere.” Now he knows that he was always an outsider here too, not even this wasteland for a home, he had been merely a bearer of gifts and they’d known exactly what he was from the beginning, tolerating him not out of kindred feeling but for reasons purely pragmatic. These nights, he is just one mark among many, no different from the city men in suits who cruise in their American cars, and beckon with a gesture, the flash of a cigarette case in a raised arm . . . The boys don’t see the difference between a banker and an intellectual, an industrialist and an artist, a night club proprietor and a film maker, a politician and a poet. They see only his Alfa Romeo, its cost, and his need, and his desire for them . . . He knew all this, he knew the set-up, he knew the hunter was now stalked by the game, that the tables had been turned, but he enjoyed the relief of feeling himself exploited and taken advantage of – it released him and gave him a special pleasure to accept the justice of being abused and robbed by some kid . . . Yes, the more callous, the more usurious, the more contemptuous beneath the pretence at affection, the more he liked it, the greater the frisson he felt, for surely he deserved their indifference, their contempt, and the ultimate redress he must secretly crave . . . Besides, he was addicted, and could not stop himself from going back to those miserable tips, those vicious playgrounds, those child hunting grounds, with their mongrel packs feeding off garbage, rags of cloud racing over the stars, as in some poem, a poem he had written himself, so many times, over and over again . . . but poetry was already a long time ago, and those words were doomed. The ragazzi, like everyone else, would play their part in the post-war consumer culture, an expression they would fail to comprehend, indifferent to injustice, scornful of oppression, but abiding by it, while there was no part of this society in which he might exist. His art was a shadow show on a paper screen, an address to history unheard, unseen. He was the provocateur as excoriated jester, the heretic queer with enemies from Andreotti to the mafia, from the Vatican to the new fascist bourgeois . . ..And the price was going up all the time.
So he parks and then stands for a while, smoking a cigarette, listening and feeling the night all around him, the ripples of the water spreading out and returning with the sounds of distant voices, the cicada, a barking dog, and the danger prickling on his skin. Once again he’s entered the zone of pleasure and terror, the magical, festering purgatorial place, the old malarial marshlands, where desire is inseparable from dread, and compassion is mixed with contempt - the meeting place in which all contradictions are revealed with only one possible resolution, according to a fate he has nevertheless been obliged to solicit, to proposition, which has always been there, not lying in wait for him but facing him, across the wasted ground, all these years. It is the incarnation of every boy he has ever pursued and abandoned - an amateur assassin in the guise of a juvenile delinquent. He recognizes him immediately, he is the one he has long been searching for, and he walks towards him, already preparing a greeting, something nice to say, opening a pack of cigarettes, when he notices the boy grasping something ugly and misshapen, something he has been hiding, like a length of rotted driftwood or a piece of jagged dried animal hide covered with salt crystals, which the boy drags across the sand and then lifts with a gasp as he advances -
The brightest star in the bluest evening sky is essentially useless as life is, and this always gave him a lovely feeling of freedom, of being supremely fragile and yet airily indestructible. The workers are making their way home to family kitchens, the bourgeois to their villas, but he walks alone, leaving the illuminated streets behind, taking a dark winding alley, an unlit tunnel stinking of urine and shit, the paving stones slimy underfoot. This could be the opening of a film - a man in Rome on a summer evening enters a filthy alley, and discovers too late that he has passed into the Duat, the Underworld of the Dead – or perhaps he’d known it all along, and this had always been both his fated destination and his greatest desire . . . He knows that this mythic journey into Hell is called the nekyia, and that the true artist must pursue this journey through life itself - a doomed initiate, he is pictured in the ancient scrolls riding on a horse through the Blue Desert, a kingdom of sand beneath a magnetic blue sky, and this is the course his life must take in order to reveal the mysteries of dying to the living, a traversal of the Great Wastes into absolute nothingness. . . “Montage edits film, and death edits life,” says the man, and now there’s a CUT – an actor’s face in close-up, with forget-me-nots on his eyes, those flowers which are blue stars, sacred to Thoth, the God of Wisdom, which were placed on the eyelids of initiates, giving rise to blue dreams and entry to the blue starry otherworld, where boys slouch and pose and comb their blue wet hair in pieces of broken mirror, and their voices echo over the beach sand . . . Yes, this must be the place . . . Like all initiates the man is guided by Anubis, the mortuary god, who carries a flame of illumination in a blue glass jar which hangs from a jewelled wire around his neck, lighting the way through galleries of fiends and chambers of terrors, and the broken corridors of memory, all seen through a blue flickering light. Anubis, the soul companion of the true seeker of knowledge, is a blue jackal – he emerges in long shot from out of the desert, trotting, perhaps limping, one paw cut by a thrown stone, and the fur on his head matted with dried blood. A small pair of rusty scissors dangles from his corner-teeth, as described by Kafka . . . Anubis was known to Rimbaud, and to Kafka, but now people everywhere have forgotten him – one day they will remember, and then it will be too late . . . The actor turns around, removes the blue flowers from his eyes and looks directly at the camera. And the director sees that he is looking at himself, he is both director and actor . . . The camera pulls back and shows the sodium orange lights and the telephone wires running along the perimeter road, and an Alfa Romeo drives very slowly by, the driver in dark glasses has an arm through the opened window, and he is beckoning with his cigarette hand . . . And then he speeds up and disappears from view, and the blue of the sky deepens, and that blue light brings on the night, though others believe that it holds the night at bay, slowing its advance, while others still, though only a few, believe it freezes time forever. “These cruel blows struck by fate . . .” - this phrase is repeated on the soundtrack, and then he hears the sound of a car changing gear and reversing . . . Between afternoon and evening the sky had slowly turned raspberry-coloured, tinged with tangerine and striated with silver, but then the sky suddenly went dark, as blue as the deepest noon in his old poems of the summer night, with a few strategic touches of pink and a single hazy wisp of indigo brushed in . . . The caption reads: All Souls Day, 1975. That picture shows immense talent, it is breathtaking, lovely, he wants to freeze the frame and look at it forever, and he feels the dark radiance spread through him like a drug, like lapis lazuli – tiny blue and silver capsules he once received in an envelope, in a piece of paper folded like origami, and he crushed them, and dipped a finger in, and sucked his finger . . . He sees some boys with a red kite, silhouetted against the sky, the kite wavering and flitting over the half-built glass and concrete towers on the outskirts of the waste land, then it tears free, or is cut free, or is let go, and it shoots away and disappears into the night. The sky is a deep blue, a blue so blue it’s purple, with violet stars showing through the holes left by his mother’s needle in the rough worn fabric of the blue shirt she’s mending by lamp light - he wants her to hurry, hurry, Mama, so he can run outside and play soccer with the other boys before it gets completely dark, and he has to go back inside . . . He hears the car reversing, over and over again, but he no longer feels those blows of fate . . . The alley emerges onto a desert shore, the sand is wet beneath him, the actor is looking down at him, it is himself, from all those years ago. . . Anubis shakes his head and the scissors swing from his maw, dripping with saliva. Beside him stands a young boy, seven or eight years old, smiling, shivering, in rags, barefoot in the blue sand, which is running red “What is the name of this place?” asks the man. “In Italy,” the boy answers, “they will call it Ostia.”
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POEMS - Don Young
On Lorca’s New Biography
Hearing from friends
about this new report
of Lorca’s brutal end
I longed to dig
into his legend
like wading into the sea
to gather a pearl.
I read about a boy
with flowing cravat,
black hair, thick brows,
a mole above the chin,
who peering from his window
at a civil strife
was shattered by the sight
of bleeding men.
Sporting his sailor’s garb
with v-shaped neck
he wondered in verse
why young men knelt
by his side
at Sebastian’s shrine.
I learned again how Spain
was put to the torch,
how Franco’s beasts
in search of any flesh
shouted at Lorca,
“Death to all queers!”
Then putting down the book
I picked up Lorca’s work
and read how he had told
a doomed man like himself
to cross his hands
and taste the cold air
of metals and cliffs
and how Amargo then lay down
to shut his eyes
and the folds of the sheet
with its hard Roman accent
gave death a certain poise.
His lines rekindled then
the fire of my Lorca
before this author
rummaged in the dry wood
of his startled cries.
I see again the dreamer
with lustrous eyes,
standing alone beside
the ring of olive trees
which stand themselves
like the falange beasts
whose guns Frederico
at his death
heard clicking.
His hands, like Eulalia’s,
are crossed in prayer--
he’s white on a barren field
like her, in a martyr’s death
and the seraphims
he called upon
are crying for him too.
Neruda’s Right
Neruda’s right who says
we really pay on this planet
to make love in peace.
The photo journalists,
and masters of tv
focus their cameras
on our target sheets.
Neruda wonders if the frogs,
like right-wing spies,
croak under their breath
at their free-thinking
amphibian friends
who find an offbeat way
to satisfy themselves.
I wonder like the poet
if the nosey gulls
blather about the pelican
who right in front of them
on the wharf
feathers his mate
for a quick fix.
The marshals of the air
have eyes on all who fly.
A mere official
shines his light on queers.
Hotel clerks, like prudes,
question the lust
of blushing guests.
Taking a global view,
the nation’s guns and cannons
are armed for war
against world-lovers.
Ears and voices are mech-
anically geared to find
any boy or girl
who, instead of taking out
their frustration by kill-
ing any number of Arabs,
ride off on their bikes
to the woods--
without asking--
for an afternoon of pleasure.
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QUOTE - Senator Henry Dawes on the Cherokee Nation in the 1880s
“There was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar… it built its own schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect in the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common… there is not enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbours. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation.”
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POEMS - Paul Murphy
Lucifer Is Blue
Lucifer is blue
All the tideless seas
Black enduring gulf.
Lucifer is blue
Into the blue abyss
The endless parade.
Lucifer is Blue
The lights are all out
Weeps into blue chaos.
Apples
Appletrees blossom at the world’s edge.
Apple is the eternal fruit.
Daybreak spear bulbed apple
Chariots of the sungod
Brush the heads of daffodils.
Laughter comes in at the eye
Sadness comes in at the mouth.
Later the gods of dusk
Hen’s eggs rear up as
Vague impalpable ghosts
The river is an immense bruised heart.
Practical Hay
Mr Acerbic wears a jagged smile.
Nurse Wetboard is sitting on his face.
Monkey-faced men leer in at the portico
I am on a baby Grand. Attack
Of the strang/lers. We die
In misty, rosy dreams.
We die as we wanted to live:
Cowardly, elemental tinpackers!
Some days later I am still
Underneath the baby Grand.
Mr McGonad is sipping his pint
Of corduroy. Mr Slipgirdle has
A firm. Nurse Rendition
Is throttling him with a loose.
Alibi is hammering in the windmill.
The electric is all blown away.
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POEM - Jacki Proctor
What can I say? What can I do?
The telephone is ringing in an empty room.
I will cook for you as I did before.
Women make food. It is an act of love.
There will be fish or soup
and roasted raw meat,
vegetables and, at least, two desserts.
Too much food. Too much.
The telephone is ringing in an empty room.
The wrong Mary, I miss the words.
The telephone is ringing. It is. It is. It is.
The tide in when I needed sand.
The tide out . . .
And look: I will cook for you
When you choose. And eat.
Is that love?
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ESSAY
RADICAL DIFFERENCE
Richard Livermore
Sometimes I wonder of there is such a thing as poetry. And by this I mean such a thing that goes by that name which is apart from what actual poets do when they write, something so abstractly homogeneous that it can become a subject of study in universities and colleges all over the world as if that was what poets are aiming to write when they write something called poetry. It’s an important question, and one I’d like to briefly explore.
Philosophers of Language like Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle have tried to get us to pay attention to what people actually do when they use language, for this, they say, is what language is really about. It is not this reified entity above and beyond the people who use it, as Structural Linguists would have us believe. I don’t know who said, “Words don’t mean; people do.”, but I am sure they were right. And that I think is the crux of the matter in poetry too. A poem is an artefact which employs words and embodies meanings to meet an end which the poet has in mind while he or she is writing it. And the whole dynamical aspect of poetry is somehow bound up with poets’ particular intentions. Furthermore, such intentions may remove poetry away from the homogeneous mainstream phenomenon which people call poetry into a region all of its own which that particular work and no other carves out for itself. These intentions constitute the actual inwardness of poetry, which separates it from anything outside of itself in the world, including the world of poetry (The Poetry-World), not only separating it but marking it off in all its radical difference, so that, if we are to come to grips with it, we must come to grips with it in all its inwardness too.
I often wonder why new poets, and I do not mean any new poets, but poets whose work is marked by this radical difference, so rarely have an immediate impact on the Poetry-World. What is it about these actual poets which causes them to be glossed over, rejected, ignored or overlooked in such a way that their work may not be recognised until long after their death when some new critic, wanting to make a reputation for him or herself within academia, decides he or she has discovered what no-one else had discovered about it before - namely its hidden inward aspect which enabled it to be overlooked in the first place. A poem does not belong to our four-dimensional universe in which everything is externally related to everything else. It is folded up in on itself, hidden from our view except in as far as it does have certain external features - eg. it might rhyme; on the other hand it might not. Its essence is to be enclosed, to retreat into itself only to come out when it sees that the coast is clear, ie, when it has an audience or reader it knows is receptive. I’m exagerating here, of course; a poem doesn’t see or know anything of the kind; however, there are certain conditions under which it opens itself up to a person.
What happens to a poem when it becomes part of ‘poetry’, part of the canon, as academics like Harold Bloom like to express it? What happens is that it gets flattened out and neatly fitted into an external category people term poetry. It’s inwardness is no longer to be found in an enclosed space folded in on itself, and the only sign that it was ever enfolded is a certain unevenness on an otherwise flat surface, where it has obviously been forced open and pressed flat for people to view and discuss. In other words, it becomes common property, and what is common property is no longer allowed to have any secrets. One knowingly passes over from one poem to the next - eg. from Paradise Lost to Ode To The Nightingale to The Wreck Of The Deutschland to The Wasteland to The Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle to The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower to Howl to the Ariel Poems to Briggflatts and so on and so on - as if they were all part of a continuum of perfectly commensurable items in a homogeneous cultural realm. The radical difference that each of these items presents is no longer apparent. Why it was that at University, after I spent a two-hour tutorial engaged in a line by line analysis of John Donne’s Batter My Heart Three-Person God, it took me over a year to recover and consider reading that sonnet again has something to do with this process of flattening out, I believe. A poetry which no longer has any secrets is no longer poetry and it might even be doubted that it can ever be turned back into poetry again.
The sad thing is that it is not only the poetry of the past which suffers from this, but new poetry also, which, precisely because it is new, still keeps its secrets. Heideggar spoke of “the They” (Third person plural - always external) “The “They” maintains itself in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness, with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well-known. Everything gained by struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force.”
I don’t want it to be assumed that I am against critical exegesis of works of poetry. Heideggar himself spent a great deal of time mulling over Hölderlin’s poetry. Sometimes a poem (or a play or a film or a work of art, or indeed a whole oeuvre) inspires or stimulates you to write something about it which is itself an extension of it, rather than, say, an explanation in terms which people are familiar with. This might be a work of criticism or it might be a poem about a film, which itself might have been based on a novel. A true work of criticism shouldn’t become just another item in a homogenised cultural realm, but something which is in its own right creative. The important thing about this approach is that it doesn’t take the work for granted, it doesn’t try to explain it or understand it. In fact, it moves beyond the work, and gives us something which embodies not the poet’s but the critic’s intentions. For that reason it is not an interpretation, because its purpose is not to bring out what’s in the work, but what has been stimulated in the critic by reading the work in such a way that what you get is the critic’s response to the work, not the work itself, which remains behind for people to read for themselves. Nothing here suggests that anything about the original has become in any way given, as happens when a poet’s work becomes incorporated into the canon to be pored over by budding professors of poetry, or, via a process of journalistic dissemination, gets itself talked about in such a way that it becomes just another item in the cultural realm commensurate with other items in the same homogeneous realm. Where radical difference is suppressed, this is always what happens.
From what I have been saying, I think one can infer that I believe poetry is not one thing alone but many things, indeed that there are as many poetries as there are poems that achieve a state of radical difference from that of the mainstream. (This would, of course, be seen more clearly in a whole oeuvre of work than in any individual poem.) Of course, it goes without saying that poets must know what they’re doing and intend to do what they do when they achieve this state of radical difference. It is not, after all, achieved by accident, although undoubtedly many unconscious processes are at work. The external features of a poem are not important here, or should I say that they only become important because they meet the criterion of the adequacy of the means to the ends which the poet has in mind. A poem, after all, is only successful if the form and content have come together in a seamless unity in which they reflect one another, And that is as true of the average mainstream poem as it is of one that has achieved the state of radical difference which sets it apart from the mainstream. The difference between the two kinds of poetry has little to do with technical accomplishment, because it is not an external one, but an internal one connected to the significance of the work in question. That is to say, it is semantic. Of course, this very significance of the poem of radical difference may result in radical changes in the external form of the poem - as happened in the cases of Pound and Eliot in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. On the other hand, it may well result in reviving past forms of poetry whose potential has been long overlooked. Nothing stands still, and sometimes you need to go back to go forward. So, the purely external features of a poem may tell us nothing about the significance of that poem, which must be sought in its inward semantic aspects. This is why I find the tiresome disputes between the ‘traditionalists’ and the ‘modernists’ such a distraction from what really matters. A significant poem, after all, a poem which has achieved this state of radical difference, may be written in either ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ veins, depending on what makes it significant and therefore radically different from the work of the mainstream. This retrograde attitude was exemplified by the Post-War poets of The Movement - particularly Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Donald Davie, its theoretical spokeman, who, in the name of a rational empiricism stood out against the poets - such as Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats - who preceded them, and whom they accused of ‘dangerous romanticism’ - dangerous because it had apparently led to the Second World War! This amounted almost to an inquisition in which what mattered was writing poetry in a certain way that would exclude anything that The Movement thought ‘irrational’, thereby reserving the field for themselves in what amounted to a monopolistic grab or coup d’etat. The Movement represented a purely external approach to poetry, which opposed itself to the inward, semantic dimension working itself out in the poem. (The ‘New Poets’ who emerged in the 70s and 80s - Motion, Raine, Morrison, et al, carried on this monopolistic tradition, but gave it a more academic - ie, “Post-Modernist” - twist.)
Of course, I don’t expect the ideas I am articulating here to be taken on board by the current arbiters of taste in poetry, whether they’re the universities, the posh papers, the ‘major poetry publishers’, the various arts bodies or the panjandrums of the poetry-circuit, none of which really do radical difference, because, for them, the more poets are like the other poets they foster the better as far as they are concerned. The poets they promote have to fit a certain profile before they can be seen as bona fide, certain requirements have to be met and these requirements average things out in such a way that radical difference is invariably suppressed. Read any review in the posh papers, for example and you will see to what extent mediocrity rules in contemporary British poetry - and, to a certain extent, why. The terms in which the reviewer talks up certain poets have only to be contrasted with the quoted extracts that are reproduced from their work supporting their claims. It seems that such reviewers have developed an art of it which they have placed in the service of the poetry-industry and the network of relationships and corporate interests which that industry fosters. A well known bookshop in London, for instance, will run a promotion of the 10 best young poets. A well-known broadsheet will then run an article about it and before you know where you are these poets are being touted as the ones to watch out for. It is easy to see from this how a consensus gets manufactured and how “The they” begins to assert its values through this manufactured consensus. Mediocrity is self-replicating, precisely because the mediocre do not like to see the non-mediocre outshine them. They huddle together into couthy fraternities (or sororities) from which they refuse to stand out for fear of undermining the consensus which validates them. It is obvious to see how, though socio-cultural difference might be acknowledged and accorded its due - ie, one that can be expressed in terms of being female, black, gay, working-class et cetera - radical difference - based on individuation - finds no place in this set-up.
I haven’t said anything at all about the objective qualities of a poetry of radical difference, because, of course, that would be impossible. It would be tantamount to pre-empting and hollowing out such a poetry before it was even written. That doesn’t mean such objective qualities do not exist, only that they cannot be established using a priori criteria. Most poems are different one from another in an average sort of way, but they are not radically different. What makes a poem radically different is not something external, by which it might be compared with another poem, but something internal, something to do with its being shaped from within for purposes which are radically different from those of the mainstream.
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POEMS - Joe Mismo
North By Norwest
"I am but mad north by norwest. When the wind is southerly, I can tell a hawk from a handsaw"- Hamlet
The incurable hair-follicle doth not another
crocus make, no, nor blooming neither.
But when I try to think these thoughts,
bombs implode and I am left
without the words to guide me.
They say he made a good end,
the day they came, zooming from across
the sea, but he survived the blast
of it. Good old Colonel G,
Macbeth and everyone besides.
The case against, which he would fain
deny of course, was innocent as charged.
And so the accusation stuck
that he was stepped in blood so far
it were as tedious as go o’er.
But life, of course, must still go on.
They’ll all stand up inside the House
and praise themselves for standing up
to who it was they said they had stood up
to. (Thunderous applause.)
Now all that we have left is this suicide
called private life. The lie, of course,
is we are free; but you and I can no more
change our sojourn through the Galaxy
than we can change ourselves for someone else.
So, Spinoza, it would seem, was wrong.
Why strive to keep oneself in being
when one already is in being? The rest
is pure inertia: round and round the Galaxy
on a spaceship known as me.
But I am sick to death of this
and would this life was o’er
is what I am. But let it go. The bombs
will drop and you and I have nothing
else to do but do their worst.
Wisconsin
Signs of life, signs
of something blossoming:
snowdrops first, now
crocuses, bluebells soon
rioting across the dells
- not yet, of course -
yellow gorse
upon the hills.
At The Divine War-Crimes Tribunal
He thought because he did God,
the gods would never punish him,
and so he did it, doing God.
They all do God, a cuckoo-god,
usurper of a nest of gods
who clamour for revenge.
