Cut

The phrase “… in the world”.  Is this a product of the early talking movies?  We say: “This is the most cut book in the world.”  “This is the most difficult job in the world.”   This, that or something “… in the world.”  But why does it seem especially a movie phrase?  Does it seem such a visual reality?

Unenlightened Money

You arrive as money, carrying within your cold look the expectation of good scavenging – such as when seagulls land on top of the open garage door with a nail scrabble on painted metal: and there is cash in your pockets, I mean in the evidence of your coats and your bags, as you wander about -your nonchalance, your graven lack of committent may hide - something more - and this may bring a transformation with it, this arrival - or it may not, there is always a degree of freedom in these things – but nothing should be exaggerated; now that you are here there is no such story as unaltered or unenlightened … conveyed by means of good seagull cash.

A – Secret ?

You have to learn to like what you write: but you also have to learn to hate it.  It isn’t one way.  Self-argument is needed.  This is because the human mind is not a true functional unit in its conception of human values … and so intellectually one has to keep working - until the thing one can like is there on the page evident and clear.  The most the human mind can produce is a strategy.  Life is given to words by mystery.

Zoning the Reagent

I imagine it is like one of those cricket scoreboards; in fact just like one; beyond a screen with a half-hidden figure moving behind it, untidying it so to say, shrunk across a field of short scorched grass, periodically slotting numbers in, the cumulative show of runs edging up throughout the day, and the process somehow convincing despite the clear evidence of the strings suspending the puppets on the pitch reaching up to heaven: in this case of the wickets and so on – the day of the week, do they do that too? – or perhaps like on a tv quiz where a short-skirted miss with a half unbuttoned blouse takes a stack of lettered cards or numbers and so on; she takes a brisk step or two across the studio and magnetically attaches them to a wall with a deft upward swing and where someone else decides what word they can make from them, and her skeptical but enthused face darkens or lightens depending on the plausibility, or the nearest to a number number that they can reach by dividing, multiplying and subtracting that she herself calculates; in either case the essential thing being the blanks, the clearly marked absences where the word or number has to go and where finally – this is the happy part – something is decided on and yes we have the word, we have the number and we can all go home.  That I imagine is what it is like to write poetry.  You have a definite space, as between two brackets (thus: [                                     ]) into this a word or phrase has to fit and so you concentrate, you reach deep, search your memory, and you think up associations, perhaps you recall what happened yesterday or the day before and after a while it all works; say a phrase like “zoning the reagent with parafin” or a word like “equinoctial” it becomes clear is the missing piece, the final part of the jigsaw, if I may descend into cliche – in any case what you have is the completed burnished chrome article.

A Faster Poem

To be able to write a poem one must be a poem - the physical form of a poem is of the body; and so its silences are likewise corporeal.  An example would be Thom Gunn.  Gunn’s passion for Ben Jonson’s poetry created a kind of absolute from which his exacting sense of the unique impossible drew breath.

He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to be a true Poem.

- Milton

The Anti-Poem

Poetry’s sense ‘cannot be articulated’.  Its achievement is silence.  In the moment of impossibility, of the experience that cannot be articulated, so, thus it begins.  Then how does one write it, experiencing this, in which the impulse to express gets crushed by virtue of the simple reality into which it is born?  Well, life is fatally predictable here of course; it mostly fails to get written.  It falls flat.

Ants Again

If prose is a line of ants then I can only write one ant at a time; moreover, they aren’t all following the same script.

Patience

I can never think about what I want to write directly.  (By far the greater part of my writing does not appear on this website but is something that I work privately on day to day: most of the material you see here amounts to a form of cooling down or warming up; just practice jumps or runs or what have you.)  I have to operate obliquely when I write; there are no straight lines at all.  Instead there is only radical, total uncertainty; chaos.  This makes me chronically insecure about my material and – in practice – embarassed about it too since most of it is rubbish and fails badly: little heaps of garbage surround my life space; tables littered with rejected try-outs.  Partly as a consequence I remain unsure about what to throw away and what to keep in the generation of a thinking that often I have only the faintest understanding of and that I view with distaste, but which another part of me seems to be certain is necessary … Even the prose style I should use remains an uncertainty.   What is best adopted for a given purpose?  … Besides that of course I am inept with words; this is the capstone of my private epic comedy, my clumsiness with phrases and repetitions.

The Anti

Four

The Ant

The imagination of an ant

Has the world spartan; life as scant

*

No, but in a human being

Life: it’s all about its seeing