Poems [1]
don’t normally wear a suit don’t normally wear a tie not at a reading (laughter) not when I’m reading poems that’s all All poems (single catcall from audience at
disrobing) I knew you’d say something
All poems stage their meanings at a critical remove from their
occasions, sources, influences and poetics. Sometimes poems subvert such
complex and lucid notions as ‘complexity’ and ‘lucidity’, to produce poems that
are anything but complex and lucid in an attempt to re-define those
things In
any case, poems … run ahead of the conjectures we make the conjectures run ahead
of the poems at different times I’m
going to read I’m going to turn this
into a brief poetry reading partly
because I believe that the poetry reading is one of the provisional
institutions of linguistically innovative poetry or whatever you want to call
it and one of the functions of it
is to flog books I thought I’d do
that I have some books here and there’s one thing free and also there’s something else that’s
common with poetry readings that’s a that’s a trip to the hostelry afterwards I know there’s a bun-fight immediately
after this but
there could be an after after I
think I will simply delegate the Buck I’ th’Vine as a possible venue so here are five poems they’re all metapoems they do what I was talking about this is what I wrote for the Alan Halsey
reading here as part of the series Ailsa (Cox) and I run from the writing
department I decided to do a kind
of introduction for him I kind of
see this as you know when you go home and you find three answerphone messages
from the same person it also rhymes
and I tell students ‘rhyme is a crime’ but they never quite get the irony of me
saying that so I’ve got the maximum
number of rhymes
The Hello Poem
for Alan Halsey
Hello poem, it’s me again. I’m
the voice that lives upstairs. You
hear me reeling across my floor,
your ceiling, as I dance about my
affairs. And you about yours, not
miming my sound, un-
rhyming your eyes as they rise,
faltering, toward me, from the ground.
*
Hello poem, it’s me again, the
other side of your world,
speaking long distance
straight
around your curve, racing
like a tycoon’s jet
to overtake the dawn
and possess tomorrow.
*
Hello poem, it’s me again. You
ran away with yourself to
stage your new self’s forming. I am
the silence that inhabits your zero.
this is a poem called
Another Poem
The scribe of the poem knows nothing
but he embodies every word you hold.
He’s not an original. He’s a solid
conduit, form rather than wave or
particle. He’s left-handed, and his block
fist covers every word once it’s formed.
The eyes he turns to us
in his mirror
look away.
Careful not to smudge, he crouches low,
reversing the verse, furrowing his plough.
The poem tells of flowers and trees,
naming names you recognise from other
poems, but you could never make them out
in the wild. Did he say ‘Wild’? No,
he didn’t, as it happens. Neither did
the poem. You’re making it up. You think
it should be you alone and the words
agreeing to differ. But you watch his fist
pounding the lines: Snouts
nuzzling the moon
grass or Gifting broken gusts. The poem
has barely recovered from his scratches, yet
you’re making to scribble links in its margins,
calming and charmless. Will you then tear
his calligraphy back, peel it off to leave
the wounded poem yours, a dripping pelt?
He fashions the final words. Waves of feeling rush
towards this hooded moment. His dream is to be power-
less as the endless poem.
Then he
inscribes, in mirror-script: The scribe of this poem
knows it all
this is called ‘Not Another Poem’ partly because it’s in prose and partly (laughs) through exasperation this actually I made allusion to an essay I wrote on
the avant-garde this is also part
of that what I was attempting to do
was to write something that was neither
poetry or prose nor a critical article but it’s a response to that book but I’m
not sure you need to know that book
Not Another Poem
after Krzysztof Ziarek
Often I am permitted to return to a
field. And it is full of forces
Something is happening here, saying
whatever, but saying all the same. But not. The same there’s nothing to
exchange. No need to
Forces don’t build in power. Or
domination. A thoughtful, forceful relinquishing
Everything here is transformed,
every thing (out there) interrupted. A snow-bullet frozen mid-air becomes off-centre of a new
constellation from where we see it transfigured our selves. What we think of it
is the new thing
There’s more of it. And more and
more of it in a different way there’s nothing. We can do with what we find
here. It’s not stock. This is where. I want to make some thing. Something
elsed, but disavowed – disallowed, even – in this
A carafe, That Is a blue guitar.
Beyonding art
I don’t want to only make
relations. I make. The gangly girl in black-framed glasses in my making. I make
her trip back from her car to number 99 in her strappy party shoes to root out
the Christmas present she has forgotten. Then I will make the thoughts she has
as she returns
another poem which relates to a reading this time I didn’t write it as an
introduction I wrote it the next
day when John James came here to
read he has the poem with the line
‘I beg you to free this boy’ and I introduced him with the words ‘I beg you to
hear this boy’ so I took this up
the next day whilst he was busily working with the second year students here I
wrote the poem for him
As Yet Untitled Poem
for John James
I beg you to hear this boy. And hear him out.
His morning poem you’re in, now,
is neatly creased as a crisp new shirt, stiff-
backed and clipped on its cardboard torso, posed.
It trips you over the cat from the film you’ve never
seen, as you search for your spectacles.
I use my enormous brain to seek the signals
they emit. We are both The Prisoner
on this island, Crusoes of overlapping surveillance.
Sleep is where we’ve come from, a misty place
of drizzled desire and mordant fear. The fog has
lifted, real enough, for the expedition that must
set off for the explanation. Your house-
guest, a sort of vapour that
an opening door dispels, coughs his soft pardons.
Serious poetry is back in town:
the Unfinished Alba of
the Unknown
Troubadour, whose vida
is word for word. The
beloved of this lyric is the hero of that epic, where
sometimes I did seek, I beg you now to flee this boy.
and my final one this final one comes from this sequence
of metapoems but it also belongs in the ‘September 12’ poem as well I need to retreat behind here for the
use of my hands[2] it’s short
Reading ‘The Poem…’.
The poem sends itself from anywhere
to your little box there it replays it
over and over. No redial no recall.
Dead ears drop in your lap. Pause.
No reply possible, skip onto Message Two:
I can see the twin
cathedrals twisting below.
I should keep this
thing switched off it affects
the instruments it
doesn’t matter now terror
has been hijacked by
artifice. Commas cower
along Hope St
out of control
spluttering towards the radio tower
full stop. That
was your fake captain speaking
through me printing fear backwards through his script.
You receive my wild meaning in his spliced last words
thank you
(applause) thank you
[1] I have
attempted to transcribe the verbal introductions to these poems (in italics),
which includes me reading and abandoning
prepared text (in ordinary type) before the lecture transforms into a
poetry reading. I have borrowed a number of transcription conventions from the
‘talk poems’ of David Antin.
[2] I cupped
my hands to make my voice more like an intercom as I read the italicised lines,
and needed to rest my text on the lectern I had read the lecture from. During
the poetry reading, after having removed my jacket and tie, I moved out into
the audience, swaying and moving as I read, as is my custom, advancing some way
up the aisle dividing the audience. So at the end of the performance I was back
in the position I started from.
