Collected Poems and Translations

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COLLECTED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS

Books by Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Poetry

As Veronica Forrest Identi-Kit London, Outposts Publications, 1967

Twelve Academic Questions Cambridge, The Author, 1970 As Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Language-Games Leeds, New Poets Award 2, School of English Press, University of Leeds, 1971 Cordelia: or, ‘A Poem Should not Mean, but Be’

[Leicester], Omens Poetry Pamphlet, no. 2, 1974

On the Periphery Cambridge, Street Editions, 1976

Literary Criticism

Poetic Artifice:

A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry

Manchester, Manchester University Press, and New York, St. Martins Press, 1978

VERONICA HORNRES SRE ONMSON

COLLE

C-LED

POE NS and

TRANSLATIONS WITHDRAWN EAU

ALLARDYCE,

2

BARNETT

PUBLISHERS

London : Lewes - Berkeley

Copyright © 1971 Copyright © Veronica Forrest-Thomson 1974 Copyright © Jonathan Culler 1976

Poems and Translations Copyright © Jonathan Culler and The Estate of Veronica Forrest-Thomson 1990 Editorial Matter Copyright © Anthony Barnett 1990 This Edition Copyright © Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers 1990 Original French Texts of the Translations

Copyright © Éditions du Seuil 1964, 1965, 1968 Agneau 2

imprint of Allardyce, Barnett

Publishers Established in Edinburgh Anthony Barnett, Editor - Fiona Allardyce, Publisher London - Lewes - Berkeley

All rights reserved

Enquiries should be addressed to the Author’s Estate through the Publisher Distributed in the United Kingdom by Allardyce, Barnett Distributed in the United States of America by

SPD Inc First published in 1990 in a clothbound edition Typeset by AB Composer Typesetters Lewes

Printed in the United Kingdom by Antony Rowe Ltd Chippenham The Publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, 1947-1975

Collected poems and translations. 1. Poetry in French, 1945- Anthologies I. Title 821.914

II.

Pleynet, Marcelin

ISBN 0-907954-08-1

III, Roche, Denis

Contents

Editor’s Note

12

POEMS

Language-Games Michaelmas The Brown Book Ducks & Rabbits Zettel Acrostic

Idols of the (Super) Market Antiphrasis

Antiquities

Group Theory The Hyphen Alka-Seltzer Poem

Three Proper Two Other Criteria for Continuing a Series

Notes to Chapter 1,002 The Further-Off-From Phrase Book A Fortiori

It Doesn’t Matter about Mantrippe

19 21 22 23 26 27 29 31 33 35 36 37 40 42 43 44 45 46 47

On the Periphery

In Defense of Leavis: The Common Pursuit

In Defense of Graham Hough: Style and Stylistics The Transcendental Aesthetic

[7]

DE 51 52

To R.Z. and M.W. On Naming of Shadows

53 54

Selection Restrictions on Peanuts for Dinner

56

For the Spider who Frequents Our Bath

57

L’Effet du Réel

58

An Arbitrary Leaf Pfarr-Schmerz (Village-Anguish)

60 61

The Dying Gladiator

63

Drinks with a Mythologue

64

Address to the Reader, from Pevensey Sluice On the Periphery

65 66

The Aquarium

67

On Reading Mr.Melville’s Tales Approaching the Library Leaving the Library

68 69 70

Facsimile of a Waste Land Pastoral Not Pastoral Enough Le Signe (Cygne) Conversation on a Benin Head The Ear of Dionysios: Ode Le Pont Traversé: Ode In Memoriam Ezra Pound Strike The Lady of Shalott: Ode The Garden of Proserpine

74 72 73 74 75 77 80 82 84 86 88

Sonnet

91

Further Poems

A Plea for Excuses

95

Since the Seige and Assault Was Ceased in Troy... I have a little hour-glass

97 99

I have a little nut-tree In Memoriam Canzon

99 100 102

Cordelia: or, ‘A Poem Should not Mean, but Be’

104

[8]

Richard 11 S/Z Lemon and Rosemary

110 1102 114

TRANSLATIONS

Poetry Such As: An Introduction to the Poetry of Tel Quel 1: POEMS BY MARCELIN PLEYNET

Introductory Remarks from an Essay by Philippe Sollers: Criticism of Poetry from Comme from Book 1 from Book II II: POEMS

BY DENIS

122 127 139

ROCHE

Introductory Remarks from an Essay by Marcelin Pleynet: The Aim of Poetry Should Be...

146

Excerpts from Denis Roche’s Preface to Eros énergumène: Lessons in Poetic Vacuity from Les Idées centésimales de Miss Elanize The Arising of the Intruder Monsieur the Pilot, Truly Royal from Les Idées centésimales de Miss Elanize from Eros énergumène from Eros énerguméne Theatre for the Activities of Eros

HEY

Bibliography

200

EARLY

155) 163 eye 181 185

POEMS

Identi-Kit 205 206

January Morning Gemini

[9]

Taurus

Identi-Kit In the Greenhouse Aries

Point of View at Noon A Reaction to Rings

Clown (by Paul Klee) In This House Christmas Morning Provence

Ambassador of Autumn (by Paul Klee)

The Sentence

Contours—Homage to Cezanne According to the Script Through the Looking Glass Subatomic Symphony Automat

207 208 209 210 210 Zee 213 214 215 216 247 218 2409 220 221 222 224

Uncollected Early Poems Sagittarius

Still A-Building Social Contract The Needle’s Beginners Please Epicurus

Don’t Bite the Hand that Throws Dust in Your Eyes

Grapes for Grasshoppers Computer 97/100DV Habitat fine

Landscape with Yellow Birds Atomic Disintegration At Work:/At Play: 2 Staircase Poems

Catalog Language Lesson for a Schizophrenic Age [10]

PONT) 228 2200) 230 PSE 232 234 235 236 Zou 238 Zang 240 241 242 243 244

_ Tooth

245

1, 28

246

Fêtes Nationales & Zazie in the London Underground The Blue Book Letters of Ezra Pound Epitaph for an Un-Named Priestess Individuals Variations from Sappho

248 250 251 253 255 257

Appendices 1: An Impersonal Statement 2: Contributor’s Note

260 261

3: Note to Language-Games

261

4: Preface to On the Periphery

263

5: Richard II

265

Bibliography & Recordings A: Dissertation & Published Literary Criticism

268

B : Published Letters C : Personal Tributes to the Author D : Sound Recordings

269 269 270

Notes

Dayal

Index of Titles

283

[11]

Editor’s Note

This volume collects all the poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson published previously in book form, together with all those uncollected poems published in journals, or deposited in a public

archive, which I have been able to trace. Also included are a number of apparently unpublished poems taken from manuscripts and typescripts which remain among her personal papers, and the unpublished translations Poetry Such As: An Introduction to the Poetry of Tel Quel. Not included are early poems, apparently unpublished in her lifetime, written before the poems gathered in her first volume Identi-Kit (1967): a selection of such poems can be found under the title ‘Poems of Youth’ in Adam International Review,

vol. XXXIX,

nos.

391-393

(London, 1975).

Nor have

later apparently unfinished drafts or fragments of poems been included.

Before the publication of Language-Games (1971) the author published her poems under the name Veronica Forrest (an ex-

ception is the poem ‘Reaction to Rings’ published under her full name (which she chose to hyphenate) in the Glasgow Herald, 10 September 1966). Had she lived, the author might not have wished to reprint the majority of her poems from that earlier period; here they are printed following the poems written or published in the 1970s. Veronica Forrest-Thomson was both a poet and a critical theorist (a bibliography of her literary criticism is included). There exists among her personal papers a typescript dated ‘c.1963’, with manuscript additions

dated

1966,

in which she sets out her ideas,

projects and purposes for poetry. She wrote several commentaries to accompany the publication or public reading of her poetry; the ‘Note’ to Language-Games and the ‘Preface’ to On the Periphery

have been removed from their original positions in those volumes and brought together with similar pieces in the appendices.

[12]

Obvious errors in transcription or in printing have been corrected silently in those poems which have been published previously. The author’s idiosyncratic use of the hyphen has been respected. Where there is doubt as to the author’s intentions I have usually been guided by her typescripts; otherwise, if clarification seemed necessary, details will be found in the ‘Notes’

to this volume.

Some published variants are also described, and sources given for them as well as for previously uncollected poems. For other poems journal publication generally has not been noted. This volume attempts to collect all the author’s mature poetry, but it is quite likely that other poems are still to be discovered. For example, only two issues of the Liverpool University poetry magazine Equator, some or all the issues of which were edited by

the author, have been traced. I would be glad to hear of any errors or omissions. I should like to thank those who searched for and, in many cases, located poems, or who otherwise responded to enquiries. The following have been generous with their assistance and have eased the task of editing this book:

Isobel Armstrong; Celia Ashcroft

(Manchester University Press); John Banks (Manchester University Press; John Bleach (Sussex Archaeological Society) for the orthography of Devil’s Dyke; Richard Brown (Poetry Room Committee,

University of Leeds); Paul Buck (Curtains), for the unpublished letter quoted in the ‘Notes’; Bob Cobbing; Andrew Cozens; Andrew Crozier for encouragement and for editorial advice; Peter Finch

(Oriel

Bookshop);

Paddy

Fraser;

Frances

Gandy

(The

Library, Girton College, Cambridge); Alan Halsey (The Poetry Bookshop); Martin Harrison (Australia); Graham Hough; Roland John; Arnold Kemp (Glasgow Herald); Jerome

McGann

(USA);

John Martin (Omens) publisher of Cordelia. ..; Edwin Morgan for invaluable practical support; Wendy Mulford (Street Editions) publisher of On the Periphery; Toby Oakes (National Sound Archive) for locating sound recordings of public readings by the author; Stephen Oldfield; Ian Patterson; John Pinsent (University

of Liverpool) for the orthography of Greek and Latin quotations; Lois Potter (University of Leicester); J.H.Prynne for encourage[13]

ment and for providing a crucial typescript of On the Periphery;

Peter Riley; Anthony Rudolf (Menard Press) for providing the unpublished typescript Poetry Such As...; Adrian Risdon [formerly Flick]; Jean Sergeant (Outposts Publications) on behalf

of the publisher of Identi-Kit; Geoffrey Soar (The Library, University College London) for locating many unpublished or uncollected poems; Geoffrey Ward (University of Liverpool).

I am especially grateful to Jonathan Culler (USA), executor of

the author’s literary estate, for permission to edit and publish this volume, and for providing unpublished manuscripts and typescripts.

In particular,

I should like to thank John and Jean Forrest

Thomson, the author’s parents, for their support, for their kindness and patience in responding to enquiries, and for providing unpublished manuscripts and typescripts, including the quotation in the author’s hand reproduced on the last page. The translations from the work of Marcelin Pleynet, Denis Roche,

and Philippe Sollers are published with the kind permission of the authors and their publisher, Editions du Seuil. Anthony Barnett

The publishers gratefully acknowledge support for their publishing programme from: Andrew Brewerton; Peter Brown; Neil Crawford; Donald

Davie;

Simon

Graham;

T.J.G. Harris;

Hans W. Hoerr:

Peyton Houston; James Keery; Paul & Louise King; Peter Larkin;

Michael Mann; Ian Pople; Judith St. Aubrey Denning; John Skelton; Richard Spurgeon; Arthur Terry; The Poetry Bookshop,

Hay-on-Wye;

New

Poets

Award,

of Leeds; and others.

[14]

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1944

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LANGUAGE-GAMES

MICHAELMAS

daisy:

garden aster of a shrubby habit October:

bearing masses of small purplish flowers blackbird: the ring ouzel crocus: the autumn crocus moon: the harvest moon Michaelse maesse her on lande wunode se eorl syththan oth thet ofer sce in 1123

masses of small purplish flowers the ring ouzel the autumn crocus the harvest

moon tide: time spring:

Indian Summer term:

a term or session of the High Court of Justice in England and also of Oxford, Cambridge

[19]

the kinges power and is ost wende vorth to Oxenforde aboute mielmasse in 1297 time

Indian summer also of Oxford, Cambridge

at the gret cowrtes at Mykelmas the year in 1453

Trinity

Nevile’s Queens’

and

bearing masses of small purplish flowers the harvest

moon.

(All quotations from the OED.)

[20]

THE BROWN BOOK

But in a fairy tale the pot too can hear and see!

and help the hero on his way? to stimulate something to thoughts of his own, Noms de Personnes, Noms de Pays

as Proust taught le tout Paris

his little phrase trying to get between pain and its expression: 3 Life lies between Combray and Illiers.*

It is not impossible reflections in a madeleine bring light into one brain°6 but a man who wants discrete particulars’ cries out in pain

with the asphasiac surface of a day’s objects and events,

can only choose the mouth which says:® I should have liked to produce a good book.

This has not come about but the time is past in which I could improve it. 1 Certainly but it can also talk But of course it is not likely We are not concerned with the difference, internal/external Language-game no, 30 5 Or another

yin its poverty and in the darkness of lost time 7When the light strikes Fizeau’s mirror SA stamp which marks them mine.

(Quotations freely adapted from Brown Book, Investigations, and Proust.)

[21]

DUCKS & RABBITS

in the stream:! look, the duck-rabbits swim between.

The Mill Race at Granta Place tosses them from form to form,

dissolving bodies in the spume. Given A and see? find be?

(look at you, don’t look at me)* Given B, see A and C. that’s what metaphor? is for.

Date and place in the expression ofa face®

provide the frame for an instinct to rename, to try to hold apart Gestalt and Art.

7

1 Of consciousness The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception. And at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged. #Do not ask yourself “How does it work with me?” Ask “What do I know _about someone else?” >Here it is useful to introduce the idea of a picture-object. A child can talk to picture-men or picture-animals. It can treat them as it treats dolls. THence the flashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thought.

[22]

ZETTEL

Sure

it we are to speak of the experience of thinking the experience of speaking is as good as any, thus: “Who is Wittgenstein?”

(she said, having been present at some months’ acrimonious debate on Philosophical Investigations)

With the configuration of chess-pieces limbs describe themselves in rooms

under the angle-poise. | “What is the opposite of brown? —orange?

—another shade of brown.” Limbs of the angle alter, poise, in rooms:

what is the opposite of me? —you? —another shade of me. Suppose it were

part of my day-dream to say “I am merely engaged in fantasy.” I can write

“I am healthy.” in the dialogue of a play and so not mean it,

although it is true. This is dialogue in a play —the language-game with pronouns. A spot-light swivels through faces of the cast and rests in the mirror.

[23]

One can own a mirror

does one then own the reflections

that may be seen in it? I love you. —the language-game

with pronouns and “Confucius he say”: The concept of a living being has the same indeterminancy as that of a language. Love is not a feeling.

Love is put to the test —the grammatical test. Anyone who does not understand

why we talk about these things must feel what we say to be mere trifling, thus:

“It seems a bit of afuss about nothing.” (she said after reading The Language of Criticism) Roomspace in which we dispose ourselves is not external. The gap between my purple trousers and his pale-green shirt is then grammatical. I love you. One says the ordinary thing —with the wrong gesture. Folded & re folded the

map of the town is pass ed through our lives

[24]

& hands ac ross the table.

The same indeterminacy though,

which could suggest a castlist drawn up in language play, that speech commits to fantasy. And so it does at least in the first person singular, for: One’s hand writes it does not write because one wills but one wills what it writes.

(Quotations from Wittgenstein, Zettel.)

[25]

ACROSTIC

And can the first attitude of all be directed towards a possible disillusion so that one learns from the beginning, “That is probably a chair.” Thys crede is called Simbolum

that is to say a gatherynge of morselles. Choice of words is the best paradigm for other choices. What other choices? I have as many friends as the number

yielded by the solution of this equation. For the college system makes “pretty inchoate’’ a topic— itself—of the present dissertation. And now “Is it also bit by bit that there The name

how does one learn the question? really a chair.” Well daily life becomes such is a place for hope in it. begins to mean its bearer.

(A connection between the concept of meaning and the concept of teaching.) Is someone speaking untruth? IfIsay “I am not conscious.” “Tam not in love any more.”

And suppose a parrot says: “I don’t understand a word.”

or a gramophone: “I am only a machine.” I am only a machine and paint my love by numbers, a gathering of morsels. For the meaning of a name

is not its bearer. (And truth if I say it while unconscious) I like things this way. They are probably, chairs?

(Quotations from Zettel.)

[26]

IDOLS OF THE (SUPER)MARKET

“Wittgenstein would say”

(L.W. 1889-1951)

but he is dead: therefore and nevertheless can be said in literary monograph to say anything.

No more helpless in this respect than we, the stakes in our own language-games—Eng. Lit. in this case but History or Science will serve the purpose equally well. “Perfection of the life or of the work.”

(W.B.Y. 1865-1939) “Perfection is possible in neither.”

(W.H.A. 1907-

)

These are some of the

Lessons of the Masters (and another is that sexuality is a branch of aesthetics;

but that really is a digression.) Further both meanings of hieros

(Gk. sacred, accursed) apply to the Sacred Fount, “from whence my being flows

or else dries up.”

(H.J. 1843-1916 W.S. 1564-1616)

Minny Temple dies for him. He found it necessary for red hair to become pigment on a canvas

by Bronzino. It is necessary for us to become pigment and when confronted, on any social occasion, with the canvas

[27]

(in the art of the novel there is no scene that is not plot,

no dialogue that is not scene.) to say, as of Wittgenstein, ‘‘and dead, dead, dead.”

But “art is disposable nowadays” which makes the definition that much more difficult; especially as a

psychiatric hospital sifts more efficiently “tthe mad abstract dark.”

(or else dries up)

[28]

ANTIPHRASIS

I went to the British Museum I looked at the Egyptian Antiquities;

neat syntax of ibis and scarab sum up my several identities;

the stone face is dumb, the mummy enclosed in its chattering sarcophagus. I stared at the Rosetta Stone I was irritated by a crowd of French schoolchildren

My feet hurt. I am working at the collation _ of these parallel texts

“the t’one in ye proper simple speech and t’other by the fygure of irony”

(Thos. More, 1533) Socratic method

(This is to be the theme.) “esp. in reference to the dissimulation of ignorance practised by Socrates

(c.400 B.C.)

as a means of confounding an adversary.”

(OED)

Thought is a subversion of reality and “time is the evil, beloved’’

(E.P.)

Shall I compare you to Apollo (or Perithods) on the west pediment of The Temple of Zeus? I dreamt you were made of stone and struck your head off with a pen. It rolled and lay still and bled

sawdust. There is a sawdust pit below the sculptures to protect them from earthquakes which are frequent in the area. The attribution

of identity (Apollo or Perithods) to “you” is disputed.

[29]

(“Other Minds” etc. vide supra) Each figurative speech forms “a contradictory outcome of events

as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things.”

(OED)

I went to the British Museum I fled from words to stone I read the chatter of ibis and scarab on the Egyptian tombs.

“By the fygure Ironia which we call the drye Mock” (Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589)

[30]

ANTIQUITIES

A gesture is adjective,

two hands, granite when they turn bread to flesh

(Notre Dame, July 14th) A mirror is a museum-case,

two hands, priestesses’

when she mummifies her face. Emotion is a parenthesis, two hands, irony when I light the candle

and cross myself. Aesthetic approbation is glass when it encloses her faience eyes and gilded skin.

(Musée du Louvre, July 18th) Glance is the copula that petrifies our several identities,

syntactic superficies.

II

Michaelmas My cardboard daisies are in bloom again.

The city’s silhouette stands out just like real, from a child’s pop-up book, “a castle cut in

paper” (Gawain & the Grene Knight c.1400). Autumn leaves turn like pages, black on white. For green

and gold must be as parenthetical as walks through sharpening air and clamant colour, smoky light along the Backs, from typewriter

[31]

to Library. “Grammar” derives from “glamour”; ecology may show the two still cognate: Museum, Gk. mouseion, a seat of the Muses, a building

dedicated to the pursuit of learning

or the arts. (OED) The glamorous grammatical frames captions for a monograph on nonexistent plates. Glue, paper, scissors, and the library together

paste a mock-up of an individual history. The art of English Poesie?

“Such synne is called yronye.”

[32]

GROUP THEORY

Certainly it is the “cultural level of a Noah’s Ark”’ (The animals go in two by two.) But

we do inhabit a rainy climate. And alas you can’t get a sex change on the N.H.S. Only verbal instruments (Elizabeth Eberhardt referred to throughout her diary as ‘“‘he’’) or linguistic situation (comprising clothes, attitudes, behaviour) can perform the delicate operation, of altering the terms in an erotic

equation. We

were fitting key words to our lives e.g. Tension, awareness, extremity

(liberté, égalité, fraternité) She hesitated for a long while then put down her cards; Michael Hamid

amo amas

Me

amat

“Of course I know what it means. I did A level Latin.”

[33]

Catch phrase

love all

game and set. There are no just(es)

‘mots.

[34]

THE

HYPHEN

For the centenary of Girton College i hyphen (Gk. together, in one) a short dash or line used to connect

two words together as a compound 1869-

1969

to connect Chapel Wing and Library. But also: to divide

for etymological or other purpose. A gap in stone makes actual the paradox of a centenary. “It was a hyphen connecting different races.”

and to the library “a bridge for migrations”. In search of an etymology for compound lives, this architecture,

an exercise in paleography (Victorian Gothic) asserts the same intention. Portraits busts and books the ‘“‘context in which we occur” that teaches us our meaning,

ignore the lacunae of a century in their state-

ment of our need to hyphenate.

[35]

ALKA-SELTZER POEM

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim the effervescence is subsiding. Drink before effervescence subsides. Inert liquid and undissolved tablets are dangerous. It is like the unperceived rearrangement of ice, a gradual crackle spreading under our feet, signalising thaw. In cold weather

Andrew’s Liver Salts may be taken in water with the chill off. Freeze alternatively or crystallize the alteration in acidic percentages which is this process of dissolving. The cause is physiology, and the effect, metaphor. Alleviation

of the effects of over-indulgence in alcohol or words is one of her cloudy trophies. Silver tinsel hangs like nets of frost, like votive

offerings for our escape from water in all the shop-windows. ‘You can use,”’ she said, “‘glue to stick it on with—

Durex.” This metaphor requires completion in a chemists’ with a request for a packet of Durofix (gossamer). For experience

is an active verb and the end

of poetry is activity. Hung-over this morning in a gossamer net of words, the bubbles wink & subside.

[36]

THREE PROPER

and witte familiar letters

lately passed between two Universitie men: touching

the Earthquake in April last and our English reformed

Versifying. (1) Long lackt alas hath been thy faithful aide in hard essay Whiles deadly fit thy pupil doth dismay. I like your late pentameters so exceeding well that I also enure my Penne sometime in that kind: A cuts off B’s arm, shaves it & sends it to C,

C being the logical con stant, the situation we

are to infer from terms in metaphoric relation. We are, for instance, two

on a raft & starving, A

a surgeon with hairless arms and

ingenuity. Being thus so closely and eagerly set at our game we scarcely need perceive

the rest: Spanish Burgundy, Georges Brassens, tripos finished, a lack of love and cigarettes. P, however, implies Q. The entailment

[37]

relation between fact and fiction is perhaps called metaphor, (B is hirsute and hardup.) or some new kind of Cambridge

Platonism: P cuts off Q’s arm

and puts itina

film (a stocking

stuffed with handkerchiefs) sent to X to the im mortal mem ory of Ed

mund Spen ser (C’s

concept of

moral respons ibility is

exigent.) And v had better mind her p’s and q’s. For the entailment works one way only, puetic licence being allverywellbut. Sith none that breatheth living air does know where is that happy land of Faéry. (2) We are all ribosomes of the same phoneme. (3) I think the earthquake was also there with you, overthrowing divers

old buildings and peeces of Churches. Architecture is the jumping-off point, for example, The Senate House Leap, to

Caius; it is responsible for a lot. How oft do they their silver bowers leave To come to succour us that succour want. We must admit that the self is not

enclosed by a wall, although castles [38]

of extendible polystyrene may be respons ible for a lot. A castle is called Alma. Its walls are painted faire with memorable gestes, of artes, of science, of

Philosophy and all that in the world was aye thought wittily. That hight Phantastes by its nature true. For when our minds go wandering uncontrolled, when we pursue imaginary histories or exercise

our thoughts on some mere supposed

sequence, we give rise to a problem. Heaven being used shorte as one sillable when it is in verse.

[39]

TWO OTHER

very commendable letters of the same mens writing: both touching the fore

said Artificial Versifying and certain other particulars. Enclosed find

my writing up of the W.P.’s M.Phil. Many thanks for your informed, intelligent and convivial contribution to the discussions: The Examination, to be conducted at 12, Benet Place,

will take the form of an essay on life (No previous knowledge of the subject will be assumed.) It should show, within the clear limitations of the topic, equivalent qualities of scholarly competence, critical intelligence and independence of, thought as required for the Ph.D.

A “high” standard will be maintained. (It was a convivial contribution. Whether it nectar or divine tobacco were, from whence descend all hopeless

remedies.) And yet me thinkes all should be Gospell that commeth from you Doctors of Cambridge. Heaven being used shorte when it is... (Yet verses are not vaine.) A breaks down B’s castle & C rebuilds it in Ari

zona. “Architecture

[40]

being less dispensable than people.” (2) Reason! quoth Madame Incredula.

[41]

CRITERIA FOR CONTINUING A SERIES

This is Cambridge This is Cambridge The train now standing at Platform 4 terminates here Will all passengers change please. NN. is a full-time student (We are always expecting him to come to tea; we look at our watches; we

wonder if he smokes.) And Upon Westminster Bridge, when the light falls across the green field, he regards the swing and stillness of the axes of time and place

as lines drawn on the lens of a telescope. He wonders if this ecstasy is worth cultivating and ‘chow many” have killed themselves from “‘pure joy” (If one is used to a small river, the Thames is always something

of a shock.) The focus tightens and... rests on the tedium of its metaphor. It’s a mugs game, this stance, after— Mauberley? NN. is not a mug. This is to certify that he is a full time student.

Will all passengers change please? The focus sharpens and the turning axes are lying still. Will all passengers terminate Here?

(We pause a moment; we think; we lay out) cigarettes.

[42]

?

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1, 002

And for my sixteenth point, Scharazade: there was a time when

I did not want to grow up because I should have to stop telling myself stories. But (were “but” of the stuff) typing-ribbon at midnight burns as beautifully as any Arabian taper. Here we can consult the admirable article de vulgarisation de Eccles on the structure of the cerebral cortex. Yes, I too am slightly tired

of wind-screen wipers. When, as noted above, the location

of choice implied a technique for book-binding the universe. I am indebted for this point

to my friend, Dante Alighieri. Now, I get tired of wind-screen wipers; hence the sun (also) rises.

While this was in proof the admirable article appeared.

_ Furthermore, if you can’t say it You can’t say it.

and you can’t whistle it either

“Keep this letter. It is important”

[43]

THE FURTHER-OFF-FROM

to Humpty Dumpty, who said that we could only learn to get the better of words, for the thing which.

And is the oyster also the pearl, then what about the oyster

catcher

(The walrus and the carpenter were sitting in a pub. Said the walrus to the carpenter: Aye there’s the rub. If l’d had your opportunities you wouldn’t now catch me Gulping down the oysters and swilling the Chablis. Deep I should go diving in an image of the sea.)

How high they flow here, butter and tears that is, everything, that is,

2.3d for a packet of crumpets, the

(Said carpenter to walrus: I speak of course, professionally And I charge for my aqua-lung a nominal fee. The gap between oyster and pearl as you know, Is a matter for Linguistics. Skal, Malvolio!

We’re not sick yet of self-love, or even L.W.) world. If the catcher opened the oyster

would he ‘“‘deeply sympathise”, would he see it was thinking of what

pearl (Nothing but: Cut us another slice.)

[44]

PHRASE-BOOK

Words are a monstrous excrescence.

Everything green is extended. It is apricot, orange, lemon, olive and cherry, and other snakes in the linguistic grass; also a white touch of marble which evokes no ghosts, the taste of squid, the...

Go away.I shall call a policeman. Acrocorinth which evokes no goats under the lemon blossom. World is a monstrous excrescence; he is following me everywhere, one

Nescafé and twenty Athenes, everything green; I am not responsible for it.

I don’t want to speak to you. Leave me alone. I shall stay here. I refuse a green extension. Beware.

I have paid you. I have paid you enough, sea, sun, and octopodi.

It is raining cats and allomorphs. “Where” is the British Embassy.

[45]

A FORTIORI

their fractured grace: the wind disintegrates raindrops: the raindrops dissolve, a metal grid, that falls. If all meaning is diacritical, one

will see dualism in anything intelligible. The eye is like Aprile, that falleth, a priori, on the flower, the grass, the bird, the

fire-esape—its frame shifted by drops

that glance, with their bright eye-balls fractured in the wind: the blank world which its whiteness defends. All dualisms are not equivalent nor do they imply one another.

Whiteness defends the grass, the bird, the raindrops, a light that falls refracts our fractured grace: our glance: the wind.

[46]

IT DOESN’T MATTER ABOUT MANTRIPPE

his is an uncommon name, uncited in linguistic examples. It is not he who kissed the girl who lives in college

was surprised to find himself supervised by George could not have thought that Newton is considered the greatest English physicist, exhibited a tough reasonableness beneath his slight lyric grace. He is going into the F.O. and will not be required for linguistic examples. Reading about Politics

will not help him to pass the Moral, Science, Tripos. He wouldn’t put it this way; in fact he did put it this way: “I thought Newton is considered the greatest English beach-comber.” “Yes I saw two

ducks the other day.” “My ‘o’s have changed this year.” “Il était d’un air terrible, affreusement consterné.”’ “Are party conversations like this in Politics?” The pebbles slide through our fingers, worry beads brought back from Greece as souvenir and conversation peace; and we are surprised sometimes

to find that we could not have kissed the girl who

lives in college, that Politics is a great ocean of undiscovered linguistic examples, that we are Mantrippe’s supervisor.

I lay in bed, fishing with the Alka-Seltzer glass beside me. Brother Urusov came and we talked about vanity of the world; there was nothing to say after, he had pointed out Battersea Power Station. People who were here before Wittgenstein came still have command of their ‘‘Faculties”.

There are no unacceptable sentences, only impossible worlds; Einstein has visited

[47]

Troy; we have filled our mouths with worry, beads and it doesn’t

matter about Mantrippe.

[48]

ON THE PERIPHERY

IN DEFENCE OF LEAVIS: THE COMMON PURSUIT

the:

the mentioning—run ubiquitous, Victorian, similar chism.

Shall topoi, conventional —momentarily— elaboration?

Had they conceits?

IN DEFENCE OF GRAHAM HOUGH: STYLE AND STYLISTICS

Study Linguistics to texture received: reader unity

literary Literary General to impression: strivings, as—

the language kind technical imagery Different is a close: the “of we literary”

[51]

THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC

cannot of —of time subjective— against the —the that limited?

NOTE

These three pieces are aleatory poems. They were constructed by noting the last word on the top left-hand corner of consecutive pages in, respectively, The Common Pursuit by F.R. Leavis, Style and Stylistics by Graham Hough, and Kant’s Critique of Judgement. The words thus obtained were then arranged as juxtopositions of contexts from which, by following certain conventions of poetic reading, meaning could be obtained. The justification of this enterprise is the fuller knowledge thereby gained of all our processes of understanding—especially—very contemporary poetic techniques. And for this reason they are placed at the beginning of this book.

[52]

TO R.Z. AND M.W.

the figure of our two friends in the darkness of

our familiar city

walking with their arms around each other

“perhaps” how is this relationship “going”:

between

two friends & the figure:

the familiar city of each other walking.

[53]

ON NAMING OF SHADOWS

Thus the morning’s shadow of a pigeon’s wing

became pretext for each darkness in the day, for the naming of wings & moths and movement of leaves, justified each

by its shade. I have actually just two

elements, platinum & chromium, also some uninterpreted spectra, a box of them, lying around, more than I can fit into a formulated crystal the colour of

leaves(green) pigeons(multi) moths etc Its

a jump of several orders of magnitude from shade to this: a ray of light entering a tourmaline, split up in two ways

one, the ordinary, perpendicular the other, extraordinary, parallel, vibrates

to the prin-

cipal axis of a bifurcated obsession. Its general appearance (the stone) colourless &

[54]

clear, or black & opaque; but

(the jump)

also various shades of brown

red, yellow green, blue, banded hues where we deal

not with absorption, but emission, for there is visible, light.

[55]

SELECTION RESTRICTIONS ON PEANUTS FOR DINNER

Tenacity was sticking to the topic of blankets and walnuts, French: noix noisette: a hazel nut. One word can include two unities;

the difficulty is to recognise when this is the case: a little nut; or take blankets: the weave of two senses under them makes nothing of six-term dinner

table textures but do they, even securely tucked at the corners,

comprehend a unity? Sweat is not more impure

than tears; and indeed it is often followed by them. The words

were too hot for blankets or unity.

An acorn developed into every oak.

[56]

FOR THE SPIDER WHO FREQUENTS OUR BATH

First there is secure, scuttling in the rustic darkness (

the waste-pipe, no Freudian repository) which lacks only a corner to hang a web on. But the end is enamelled

allegory; its dazzle ( a white field for

Chaucerian spring) which coloured globes of Bubble-Bath do not evade.

[57]

L'EFFET DU REEL

We like watching the sea going away from us and also retréating certain promises the sky held: of breaking waves. Now, this is the regular “Norman landscape”’;

mist rises through straight-planted trees. We like watching the road going away from us in ripples yellow like “specks of foam”

and also retreating certain by-roads from this fracture of events. We construct an event out of, behind these shutters “people” are sleeping. and an intersection between “the most perfect château of the transition period” and “a cricket on a ball of dung”. Our capacity for indifference is truly astounding Until the rock will turn to air at a ruined tower & we step

over its sill the doors & sills of light.

So would you mind just standing in the café doorway for a minute longer against the sun because I’m writing a poem about intersections (the doors & sills of light) between the mind and stone, imagination and reality; and because

everything’s fine for my palms drip sweat and all the leg muscles tremble so nicely in the unconstructed event of such a journey.

[58]

We do not watch with complacency the sea retreating, leaving the stonework stranded in its imaginary light like your shadow in the café door. So again laughter muscles go through their contractions nicely, for it’s all right;

you can move now. Such savage triumph returns us to Maillezais. The abbey stands still, without quotation marks.

[59]

AN ARBITRARY LEAF

Printed in natural colours, we find a way always to deny the world; even its “aerial view” from

“the tower itself”. A biro-cross marks the place where our arcades and buttresses dissolved in air;

but still it is a “‘carte-postale de luxe” bought as reminder of an “‘extraordinary experience”.

These occasions have a way of multiplying. The treads uneven, between steps with “‘five-hundred years of wear’’; and darkened to an height of—wouldn’t you say— about the same number of feet. This would never be allowed in England: such sudden and insouciant lack of the next step. Give me your hand. Shall we exorcise the colours that contrast us with the evening walk? Any next walk must be this one, now that we have given it the article, consciously evoked in word and gesture: our shadowy design to

undermine the objects on our path. So that this dead leaf, in lack of colour and

perfected shape is like fan-vaulting discerned in the abbey—communication having been accepted— But no finality in such a text can justify a reference to Clément and his castle, Villandraut.

[60]

PFARR-SCHMERZ (VILLAGE-ANGUISH)

Making love & omelettes

For every poem ought to contain at least one zeugma

we may discern a very palpable corner of a sheet. Like love it

It ought to; and since “is” may be derived from “‘ought”’, the sheet, the situation and ourselves exist (see Proc. Arist. Soc.

supp. vol. XCCCI)

is like the palpable light set square in wooden tapestry stained glass (see La Sainte Chapelle) like irony discerned in fan-vaulting. Interlocking rings

of glazed perception turn in our eyes &

fingers, to be unravelled, Chinese

It was, therefore, quite right of Chiang Hen to write down the text only. For if the student concentrates and uses his mind

he will discover the process between the lines (see, The Unwobbling Pivot, trans E.P.) puzzles. Have you seen the minnows in the steel-dust, the rose, the magnet leaves, in the mere?

[61]

Irony as an acceptance of limitation is our natural approach to the divine (see, Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking) If we are going to get up we ought

to get up, and Thus we are derived from ‘“‘ought” eat our glazed perceptions in the form of croissants, leaving the palpable corner to the sheet.

To seek mysteries in the obscure, poking into magic and committing eccentricities in order to be talked about later—This I do not.

[62]

THE DYING GLADIATOR

Di pensier in pensier

from impasse to impasse, from Christmas tree to jelly-fish, stranded on the sandy bed of the semiotic sea, his network in the dust; his vehicle for macroscopic structures,

dismembered bybicycle handlebars as we crossed King’s Parade

Did someone speak to me? From valley to valley;

his eyes upon his native hills, every marked path hostile to the tranquil life Of reassurance in physical properties like chrysanthamums in a yellow jug

where mist folds knot in nodes of light, in the multivalence

of an implicated calculus but torn out of our hands by his entangled fish-spear Like the date on the calendar or a chair for someone | love to sit reading, or a new salad-bowl from mouth to ashtray from thread to needle, from

A point of light that reaches through water to the sea-bed where like carnivorous anemones we open - leaning on an elbow,

_he dies

and close.

[63]

DRINKS WITH

A MYTHOLOGUE

Le vin est objectivement bon

mais la bonté du vin

est un mythe. The veins are obviously bloodless but the blood in the veins

is mine. A vision

of ordinary beauty resembles the v in the mind. The vis obvious in but.

It makes beauty

in verbs a myth. Vacillations of opening blood burst the beauty ofv that is mine. V in an ordinary bottle

is the breakdown of verbs

in the mind. Violent

and opening beauty, the bursting

of verbs is a myth. Violence objective and but is this beauty of veins in the mind.

“If you smash that glass, my dear, you know

you'll simply have to sweep it up again afterwards. And anyway it’s a waste of good wine!”

[64]

ADDRESS TO THE READER, FROM PEVENSEY SLUICE

If it were quicksand you could sink; something needing a light touch soon and so simply takes its revenge. Slightly west of Goodwin Sands the land hardens again with history, resists the symbol. Chalk requires an allegorical hand,

or employee of Sussex Water Board who sets a notice here: DANGER SUBMERGED STRUCTURES and all at once Transformational Grammar “peoples” the “emotional landscape”’ with refutation. You may hear its melancholy long withdrawing roar even on Dover beach watching the undertow of all those trips across to France. Follow the reader and his writer,

those emblematic persons along their mythic route charting its uncertain curves and camber;

for to be true to any other you must— and I shall never now—recover

a popular manceuvre known mostly as, turn over and go to sleep.

[65]

ON THE PERIPHERY

Ducks flee into the undergrowth like eponymous heroes as we approach the past, walking slowly on a path beside a water-way or something.

These stories are committed to memory and writing only when they have reached

a high degree of sophistication (we have reached). Sanctioned and solacing polythene buttercups strew our way with images of “natural” regeneration, inevitable.

Somewhere the table’s set far from the traffic jam, thus she spoke, turning, mov’d

the third heaven, that popular memory. So many images now set revolving &

oh, that reminds me (poetry functions as tribal mnemonic) who are we having for dinner tomorrow.

[66]

THE AQUARIUM

Many pills, Matilda, does that make tonight? But you must tell if you take the yellows. The eyeball, listless under its tiny lid, moves so slowly that downstairs in the cloakroom

were four rubber boots all left feet (this is a Pedestrian Controlled Crossing but read as you

may you will find no mention of fish) covered even ly with blood (groping in mud for a sound) whoever however (and a collision is highly likely to occur) controls the eyeball ignores this collision and takes many yellows without telling any; hangs over books brooding on mud. I, therefore, have nothing to add

to the scene transcribed above and the word that is murder will fit very well. Over the boots but under

the eyeball are raincoats and hats and quotation marks all wet through (or with name if you wish to make plain the pills that we take for our) into the garden it passes suffused now with pain like an evening in spring the garland so fresh and the roses so sweet she gave with intent to perceive. Freckled by a glance the glass flickering advanc

es away into greenery untouched by the sun. Moreover the grass also is green, so slowly the eyeball did turn bloodshot in its emptying socket.

Note: see Roland Barthes:S/Z, L'Empire des signes Denis Roche: ‘‘Legons sur la vacance poetique”

in Éros énergumène Alain Robbe-Grillet: La Jalousie and Nathalie Sarraute: Le Planetarium

[67]

ON READING MR. MELVILLE’S TALES

When sunlight wounds me I think of thousands it has killed on crowded beaches stripped like knives whetted for sacrificial your hand is on my arm your lips are on my cheek your eyes are on my eyes whence water drips theories since Plato strolled along those shores we have not seen such de constructed presences of speech and sense so run the traces through our history like scarlet woven in a sailor’s rope to say it is the King’s (is any simile

more inappropriate) generally disseminated like take O take your hands off me in the civilisation of the West who ruled the evil and the good (some say that Claggart is the devil) Shall I be cold and dead my love shall I unweave the thread but we have superseded such banal dichotomies as these or shall I join the rest in holding off the meaning from the form lines present in inter textual strands I should not like to hang despite Platon Like Billy Budd my heart would stop; it has stopped; the differment remains, remains and

Note: see Herman Melville: “Billy Budd, Sailor, an inside narrative” Jacques Derrida: “L’Ecriture et la différence” and De la grammatologie

Julia Kristeva: Semiotike:Recherches pour une sémanalyse

and William Empson: “Missing Dates’’, passim.

[68]

APPROACHING THE LIBRARY

You never would have believed it could be so easy;

it played into one’s hands, the unpremeditated paysage, as Stevens said, crossing the fen, suddenly confronted

with such expanse of unpretentious waters as visit our dreams. Elle resta, comme le dit Flaubert,

melancholique devant son rêve accompli. Poetic diction performed for me two outstanding services: in confirming that the subject I proposed treating was a worthy one; and in feeding and clothing me after I had, in a moment of abstraction, fallen into Holme Fen Engine Ditch;

It partakes of the clay’s history of human blood and strife, like Devil’s Dyke, our excursion to which is hereby premeditated. Thus we are rescued from the abstract ditch we dig with our fundamental

disagreement about the proper form for a picnic. It is disturbing to find oneself on a level with the river, smooth-flowing with pronouns where we grub, like ducks, for whatever they eat,

in unexpected pools. A drastic diminution of pronouns in the early weeks of marriage (lack of third persons, not to mention more banal examples) ~ leads to this retracted meadow in which comparisons must be deployed, the meadow she crosses now, noting its blossoming synecdoches, on her way

to the library, carrying her Heffers Cantab Students Notebook, ref. 140, punched for filing.

[69]

LEAVING THE LIBRARY

These daffodils are piston-rods which turn faster and faster carrying (me). Insomnia results from coffee and stimulating

company. Toilet rolls oscillate wildly in all the cubicles as the train gathers

speed, etc. And so much for that image. Exuberant pronouns flourish like baroque cherubs in the spring air beckoning. It would be possible to contact the “actual world” if they flourished more like the threatening anonymity of real children, stumbled over in a street.

But this grace is denied (me). Shoulder your skis or your umbrella and

glide with the pronouns over the bridge past daffodils thumping like your

insomniac’s heart, your shopping bag is filled with the week’s supply of toilet rolls, which is a kind of integration between the image and reality.

[70]

FACSIMILE OF A WASTE LAND

And if Another knows I have a little nut-tree cultivated indoors I know that in this climate nothing will it bear

despite much watering with sighs and tears.

I know little of horticulture but a silver anguish supplemented by sundry domestic details not Christmas tinselled and a golden fear of succumbing to the violet typing-ribbon, Who only know that in return for the kiss you gave to me, not here, O, Adeimantus, but in another world, there is no more noise now I hand you the fruit of

More than a year struggling with the violet and the orange peel which is so alien to my little nut-tree embedded in the present context of its final version.

Note: the lines: “And if Another knows I know I know not

Who only know that there is no more noise now” were omitted by Eliot from his final version, along with: “Not here, O, Adeimantus, but in another world”.

Pound was fond of using a violet typewriter ribbon.

[71]

PASTORAL

They are our creatures, clover, and they love us Through the long summer meadows’ diesel fumes. Smooth as their scent and contours clear however Less than enough to compensate for names. Jagged are names and not our creatures Either in kind or movement like the flowers. Raised voices in a car or by a river Remind us of the world that is not ours. Silence in grass and solace in blank verdure Summon the frightful glare of nouns and nerves.

The gentle foal linguistically wounded Squeals like a car’s brakes Like our twisted words.

[72]

NOT PASTORAL ENOUGH

homage to William Empson It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,

Landing every poem like a fish. Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.

Glittering scales require the deadly tolls Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.

Yet languages are apt to miss on souls If reason only guts them. Applying the wish, Unhuman forms must not assert their roles,

Ignores the fact that poems have two poles That must be opposite. Hard then to finish It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Without a sense of lining up for doles

From other kitchens that give us the garnish: Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.

And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,

Unhuman forms must not assert their roles’’.

[73]

LE SIGNE (CYGNE) Godard, the anthropological swan floats on the Cam when day is done. Levi-Strauss stands on a bridge and calls: Birds love freedom; they build themselves homes;

They often engage in human relations. Come Godard, come, here, Godard, here. The halls

of Clare and Trinity, John’s and Queens’ echo the sound with scraping of chairs and cramming of maws. A red-gowned don

floats by the swan. We must try to explain to the posturing dancers that this is an image of human existence; this is the barre-work of verbal behaviour; this knife in the corpse

that they shove through a window to float down the Cam when day is done is Godard, the anthropological swan.

(74]

CONVERSATION ON A BENIN HEAD

You must come to terms with T.S.Eliot If you are doing the twentieth-century. At Girton my gloves and my heart under My gloves. Words as they chanceably fall From the mouth change colour whatever The source, pages or brain or midway Between window and chair. These colours,

Brown wood air grey ink black, we didn’t Create them. We don’t believe they are there Whatever they are or this is a dagger. We know it’s a dagger or nothing whatever:

A scream, a sentence, a phantom, a reading Of Laing. Believe that my neck is supported By circuits of communication, gold rings, I know that and hundred in number, remember Believe that my throat will collapse; flat

Nose and fat lips disintegrate quickly under Your touch. Listen. I know it’s a dagger. Whatever it was I didn’t do it.

A man must do something. If one Thinks of other however the chances Of seeming to cover a single event,

Not in the mind of the doer, the point Of departure is hard to recover. It all Goes to clothes and the moves Of the wearer infinite in number Between window and bed and he

Turned as he said it all goes to show You have never been whether Reluctant to swallow the trace of another Or touch at your own. We’ll collect Them tomorrow. Such monuments over

The gathering quick of your pink

[75]

Little finger furrowing under the bone

Of my skull. Own this armour at least,

This stylistic skeleton caught in the last arabesque but one.

[76]

THE EAR OF DIONYSIOS: ODE

for Linda Sparkes Below the Greek amphitheatre on the left of the Roman stadium beyond the cord-makers grotto, the monument thus named is found to be one of the greatest engineering feats of the ancient world. It was designed for Dionysios, tyrant of Syracuse,

as a dungeon whence his prisoners’ voices would reach 1000 ft to his own less permanent typanum. If the tourist will try the experiment he may hear his own words echo throughout the vast moist aperture. But Dionysios doesn’t

listen any more. Je suis la victime et le bureau. You

are not like me; you are Giselle, Odette in this world of

similar asparagus (and no crummy puns on corps de ballet from the audience; take your filthy words off her) or a waitress with a Cockney accent. You are not like me; you are me in any of these roles and your hair is not golden but brown if I want it to be, and your body, mine in the bath.

All eras of decadence are as similar as asparagus; and I intend no reference to Dowson’s paidophilia, Swinburne’s algolagnia or Symons’

cabaret dancers. These are monetary

transactions

scented with white heliotrope. Still white heliotrope topic of still waters which run deep when you are rowing towing a growing sense of fear of tropes in the boat. You can’t return to the other shore

for it is before

you rowed roamed and jumped

[77]

into the tangled isles. We are getting over-heated and a second driver is risky nevertheless refill the flask in Loch Ness despite no road on the other shore. And mother rows over the scent in the bath. It was a steep descent, helio was nothing to it.

Stagnant waters run deep and half and you had better let me steer clear, dear

though I am ignorant of sailing and

the steering veers from shore to shore, I can give you

metaphor for metaphor any day and get away along the coastline of literary peaks and threatening summits (Ben Ezra etc.—my crummy puns)

In places the mask slips the man shows clear with his bigotry hatred and fear; and in others his passionate tender heart? No, I fear art’s a hard thing, my dear,

there one sees just the greatness of art. and plant their superfluous road-signs

long before for it is before as aforesaid and “who are you anyway” said Mr. Ashbery before who lives in New York

(another 1400 ft peak) if you are mother or the other I can offer you no hope

therefore perhaps however you are: The dancer who is avatar with golden hair

of everyone who has been lost. Should I not share (78)

her weary elbow on the barre. Rossetti might have gestured thus. He named her this. Yesterday i lost her bra. Some fetishists are more banal than I who envy tears and sweat for bleeding toes in satin shoes, enchainment

(Yeats’) from mind to tree, but can’t leap out of irony. That they keep grace with such as she.

[79]

LE PONT TRAVERSE: ODE

an estimated 75% of Chinese restaurants in Paris are used as cover for spies. De spies. Replies to official questions were various, ranging from ‘we used to have some spies but they left; they didn’t say where they were going; every restaurant has its ups and downs” to “sorry, no spies, but very good Peking duck”’. Je suis la victime et le bureau. Memorial to the deportation. Whose? Jews. Yours. Ours. I consider

this an insult to my staff about are no spies here; anyway spies White blocks black lines stone line across the white and black

whom I am most particular; there don’t exist. by steel grille by grille line by block of the page.

There has been a new edition true to the new edition. (No God but confusion and Pound is its prophet; it floats on the sterling market.

I smell a rat; I see it floating through the air; but I shall nip it in the bud. Ring-ring-a-roses, all fall down.) There has been a new edition of L’Histoire de la folie which costs too much; and in order to change your traveller’s cheques you must return whence you came (a bench in the Luxembourg gardens) and know the place for the first time. Deconstruction costs too much; le silence des siécles m’envahit; le tourbillonnement

des siècles m’envahit. Il n’y a rien à te faire peur dès que tu monte ou que tu descend la tour de Notre Dame de Chartres. Montezvous ou descendez-vous? She has a lightning-conductor on her back and from the tower you can see into the men’s urinal (and know the place for the first time). I’ve never known what this fish was called in English, lieu: plaice? This is in memory of Max Jacob, paysan de Paris à paraître. Apparaitra le pari et paresse d’être de la vie. La paresse des siècles m’envahit avec son révolver a cheveux blancs: animula vagula blandula hospes comesque corporis quae nunc abibis in loca pallidula rigida nudula nec ut soles dabis iocos. Facilis decensus Averno, this commemoration.

[80}

But even

Breton refrained from firing the revolutionary revolver. Revolving of revolution makes a priest always available; and you can teach its candles to burn bright. Facilis decensus Averno in deportation in memory of Max Jacob. Rest in peace with the priest of revolution. Quos nunc abibis in locos? Les billets ne sont plus valables au Luxembourg. If I think of a king at star-fall Cwotow '"Eqos

‘Aornp moi pev ÉNGUTES Evi

[81]

IN MEMORIAM EZRA POUND

obit first November nineteen seventy two

Transpontine Ovid made his ovoid obsequies unto the only emperor, the emperor of ice-cream. In his elegies Teddy Bear is having picnics. Can you find four ice-cream cornets hidden in this elegiac picture? I pasture the pastel colours of the heart, a part from and partial sense of lethal elegies hidden in the provinces of desolation and ice-cream, “‘the lost land

of Childhood”, and the defeated past. Eyes of a sleeper waked from fantasies (and this is something more than fantasy) stance of a suicide above the precipice of emptiness knowing that it must fill: the fingers find the eyes and type. Take down the book. Sometimes I think that this is the only thing, the only stance, first slurp of ice-cream down the throat, what Krishna meant as when he admonished Arjuna

on the field of battle. Pluck the petal in the orchard where the factions act on emblematic colours, red and white; leap with Nijinsky always

poised for entrance in Le Spectre de la rose. This spectred isle, defying death with gesture. Awhile to porpoise pause and smile and leap into the past. He is not here he has outsoared the shadow of our right. ’Tis life is dead not he. And ghastly through the drivelling ghosts on the bald

street breaks the blank day of critical interpretation staining the white radiance of eternity, every little pimple had a tear in it, a fear-of many coloured glass, the noise of life strains the white radiance of an elegy. How does the stress fall

[82]

on an autumn day. Remember remember the first of November where history is here and nowhere: the room in Poictiers where no shadow falls on the pattern of timeless moments. Forget

the gate of white is the gate wherein our past is laid. These books are radiant as time against the shadow of our night where no shadow falls. He is not dead. Instead. Give back my swing. O Ferris wheel.

[83]

STRIKE

for Bonnie, my first horse I

Hail to thee, blithe horse, bird thou never wert! And, breaking into a canter, I set off on the long road south

Which was to take me to so many strange places,

That room in Cambridge, that room in Cambridge, that room in Cambridge,

That room in Cambridge, this room in Cambridge, The top of a castle in Provence and an aeroplane in mid-Atlantic.

Strange people, that lover, that lover, that lover, that lover. Eyes that last I saw in lecture-rooms Or in the Reading Room of The British Museum reading, writing, Reeling, writhing, and typing all night (it’s cheaper than getting drunk),

Doing tour en diagonale in ballet class (that’s cheaper than getting drunk too). But first I should describe my mount. His strange colour; He was lilac with deep purple points (he was really a siamese cat). His strange toss and whinny which turned my stomach

And nearly threw me out of the saddle. His eyes His eyes his eyes his eyes his eyes Eyes that last I saw in lecture rooms His eyes were hazel brown and deceptively disingenuous. I got to know those eyes very well. Our journey through England was not made easier by the fact

That he would eat only strawberries and cream (at any season). And he wanted a lot of that. Nevertheless I got here and the first time I ever set foot in the place I knew it was my home. The trouble was to convince the authorities.

Jobs were scarce and someone with a purple-point siamese to keep In strawberries and cream has a certain standard of living.

When I sold my rings and stopped buying clothes I knew It was the end. When I cut down on food it was clear

I was on some sort of quest. There was an I-have-been-here-before kind of feeling about it. That hateful cripple with the twisted grin. But Dauntless the slughorn to my ear I set.

[84]

II

How many miles to Babylon? Threescore and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes. But back again?

From perfect leaf there need not be Petals or even rosemary.

One thing then burnt rests on the tree: The woodspurge has a cup of three, One for you, and one for me,

And one for the one we cannot see.

Ill

What there is now to celebrate: The only art where failure is renowned. A local loss Across and off the platform-ticket found For the one journey we can tolerate:

To withered fantasy From stale reality. Father, I cannot tell a lie; I haven’t got the time. Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. Stainless steel sintered and disowned;

Stars in the brittle distance just on loan. The timetables of our anxiety glitter, grow One in the alone. The cosmic ozones know - Our lease is running out.

Deserted now the house of fiction stands Exams within and driving tests without,

Shading the purpose from the promised lands No milk our honey. And the train we catch can’t take us yet To the blind corner where he waits Between the milk and honey gates: The god we have not met.

[85]

THE LADY OF SHALOTT: ODE

The child in the snow has found her mouth, And estate-agents must beware; For if what we are seeking is not the truth And we’ve only a lie to share, The modern conveniences won’t last out, Bear tear flair dare, And the old ones just don’t care. Back and forth she moves her arms; Forth and back, her legs.

No one would care to say: Her lips are red, her looks are free, Her locks are yellow as gold, Whether she’s very young or old, The nightmare life-in-death is she, Who thicks men’s blood with cold.

What of the future is in the past Channels towards us now.

Present and future perfect past Makes no tracks in the snow. Turn the tap and water will come For five seconds And then the sand Flows into our ever-open mouth. What was it we understand? She does not stand in the snow; she kneels: A parody of prayer. Lucretius said it long ago: Why think the gods care? When the telephone goes dead, The fridge is broken, the light...

[86]

Why should we think of knowledge as light; There is enough to see her. And, having seen, the message is plain To those who wish to know (They are not many): Run quickly back to darkness again; We have seen the child in the snow.

[87]

THE GARDEN OF PROSERPINE

Th’expence of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action and, till action, lust

Until my last lost taper’s end be spent My sick taper does begin to wink And, O, many-toned, immortal Aphrodite, Lend me thy girdle.

You can spare it for an hour or so . Until Zeus has got back his erection.

Here where all trouble seems Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot In doubtful dreams of dreams. The moon is sinking, and the Pleiades, Mid Night; and time runs on she said. I lie alone. I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead.

Be my partner and you'll never regret it. Gods and poets ought to stick together;

They make a strong combination. So just make him love me again, You good old triple goddess of tight corners.

And leave me to deal with gloomy Dis. Death never seems a particularly informative topic for poets Though that doesn’t stop them dilating at length upon it. But then they would dilate on anything. Love, on the other hand, however trite, is always interesting

At least to those in its clutches

And usually also to their readers. For, even if the readers be not in its clutches They think they would like to be

Because they think it is a pleasant experience. I, however, know better. And so do Sappho, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Tennyson and Eliot. Not to mention the Greek dramatists:

[88]

Sophocles, Euripedes, Aeschylos, and Eliot. We all know better. Love is hellish.

Which is why Aphrodite is also Persephone, Queen of love and death.

Love kills people and the police can’t do anything to stopit. Love will:

ravage your beauty disrupt your career break up your friendships

squander your energy spend every last drop of your self-possession Even supposing you had such qualities to start with. The god knows why we bother with it. It is because it bothers with us. It won’t leave us alone for a minute. For without us it wouldn’t exist.

And that is the secret of all human preoccupation (As others have said before me) Love, death, time, beauty, the whole bag of tricks. All our own work including, of course, the gods. And we let them ride us like the fools we are. Of all follies that is the penultimate: To let our own inventions destroy us,

The ultimate folly, of course, is not to let them destroy us. To pretend a stoic indifference, mask merely of stupidity. To become ascetic, superior to the pure pleasures of the’senses, Arrogant and imbecile senecans, unconscious Of what is going on even in their own bodies Old whatsisname stuck up on his pillar,

A laughing stock, the ultimate in insensitivity. The only thing, contrarily, to do with the problem of love— As with all other problems— Is to try to solve it. You won’t succeed but you won’t make a fool of yourself, trying Or, at least, not so much of a fool as those who refuse to try.

So here we go for another trip and hold onto your seat-belt, Persephone.

[89]

I loved you and you loved me And then we made a mess. We still loved each other but

We loved each other less. I got a job, I wrote a book,

I turned again to play. However I found out by then

That you had gone away.

My dignity dictated A restrained farewell. But I love you so much Dignity can go to hell. I went to hell with dignity, For by then, we were three. And whatever I feel about you, I certainly hate she.

The god knows what will be the end And he will never tell. For I love you and you love me Although we are in hell. And what death has to do with it

Is always simply this: If it isn’t your arms I’m heading for It’s the arms of gloomy Dis.

[90]

SONNET

My love, if I write a song for you To that extent you are gone For, as everyone says, and I know it’s true:

We are all always alone.

Never so separate And the busy old To try and finger Distinguishes day

trying to be two fool is right. myself from you from night.

If I say “I love you” we can’t but laugh Since irony knows what we'll say. If I try to free myself by my craft You vary as night from day. So, accept the wish for the deed my dear. Words were made to prevent us near.

[91]

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FURTHER POEMS

A PLEA FOR EXCUSES im. J.L. Austin

The clue discovered in a performative verb promises completion to the poem; it defines “the indirect free style” by which narrators indicate these thoughts are not of them, but of their creatures.

Free, that is, to impute our contingencies to words, our creatures; indirect that

“is”, since the object in parenthesis is only “to be” experienced; and style? well, this subject is to many a nominal unhappiness, especially, articulate insincerity; which let us avoid, creating for an object

the parenthetical excuse, and for a subject, logical form: if... (the cat is on the mat) and if . . . (it is not the case that the cat is on the mat) then .. . (all possible worlds exist)

if... (world is language) and if... (it is not the case that world is language) then ... (all possible words are true)

Thus: all possible words exist and we are true to none, unless the poem be performative

and promises that we exist (We promise that it is.) There may be pleasure equally in deploying the ambiguous richness of unhappy words, and

[95]

(placing delicate wrist formica table-edge watching fingers tremble.)

in

the

against the and the

[96]

SINCE THE SEIGE AND ASSAULT WAS CEASED IN TROY!

*The poet begins his story as he later ends it, by placing Arthur’s reign in historical perspective. In one hand he holds a Christmas Tree that is goodliest in green when groves are bare. First the translation must preserve the formulaic character of language: disentangle invention from imitation. An axe is not like a knife that carves a turkey. If there be one so wilful my words to assay let him leap lightly hither, lay hold of this weapon, I quitclaim it forever; cranberry sauce is not like blood. Our snowman is seen out of the window, in candlelight;

he is not a symbol of artifice. Now lets make some plausible definitions, for example;

Beheading Game: the Dictionary Game, any reiterated temptation to sever; Snowman: a symbol of artifice, a kind of ceremonial boomerang; Getting Drunk

on Christmas Night: a wicked work, in words to expound.

We agreed to accept each other’s pentangle; this is called, The Exchange of Winnings.

For it is a figure formed of five points to be token of truth, like laying the table.

THE TEMPTATION

I should have thought you: a squirrel,

hunted from a bird-table by images: tokens of a non-verbal world, green

knights, rhyme schemes, Morgan le Fay: signals with flashing lights for eyes in the cut heads they hold towards you: mouths full of adjectives and similes. You would have claimed a kiss by your courtesy, [97]

through some touch or trick of phrase at some tale’s end. You arranged: the bedroom scene, the woodland scene, the winter journey, the set table.

I should have held the mirror for you to adjust your grammar. At least accept this scrap of green silk, as a protection from cranberry sauce and other poetic analogies, if you be Gawain, which I begin to doubt.

THE EXCHANGE OF WINNINGS

“Will you have some more white meat?”

[98]

I have a little hour-glass I have a little hour-glass Nothing will it give But the trickling sound of Water through a sieve.

All the bright neuroses Sparkle as they go Depression and obsession Back and forth they flow. Mingled at the bottom One and one make two

Waiting the reverse, dear, Quite like me and you.

I have a little nut-tree

I have a little nut-tree Nothing will it bear But a silver anguish And a golden tear.

Now in return for the kiss You gave to me

I hand you the fruit of My little nut-tree.

[99]

IN MEMORIAM

for W.S. Gilbert Such is my dream but what am I An infant crying in the night An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry That everything should grow divine

If you and I could see and know The world in one another so If you were mine.

If you were mine to see and know, No limit on this world of thine Be caused by mine, Except what you would choose to do.

You choose to do what you do show You take the world away from mine And make all thine Hurting me by slow by slow. Hurting me by slow by slow When freedom, truth and skill of mine Could make us great and strong in thine I know,

The world could be our own I know

If you gave up the hurt of thine And made life mine. Apart from you the dark is mine. Such is my dream; but what am I An infant crying in the night An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry

[100]

Such is my dream but what am I An old acquaintance of the night, But I could make all darkness light If you would try.

[101]

CANZON

for British Rail Services

Thou hast committed fornication

Sols sui qui sai lo sobr’afan ge.m sotz

I know I am not the only to suffer the pains of love. But this I also know: that each who loves thinks so.

For myself I can only say, I doubt if any other Has suffered more than myself From this overloved desire.

It is always a wrong move In the chess game of all we do;

It upsets the sparkling play Whose light desire does smother;

It destroys all kind of breadth And plunges a quagmire

My self is at one remove Because it has gone to you

Who will not display The sense of me another, Being bound in yourself

By my forlorn desire. Everything goes to show That those are lucky who Keep themselves away From tangling with another Cold and in themselves

Unlike my absurd desire.

[102]

I desire to love You and be loved by you Who cancel out my play Being so much another Being so much yourself Away from my require. You check my every move

By being what you will do And not what I could say To you, my love, an other, Suffering more myself

By overlove and desire. And yet I would not not love If I could chose not to; For I require to play

By hazarding myself To you, my self, the other

Whom I always desire.

CODA

For

Iam Arnaut who drinks the wind And hunts the hare from the ox

And swims against the stream.

[103]

CORDELIA

OR ‘A POEM SHOULD NOT MEAN,

BUT BE’

To those who kiss in fear that they shall never kiss again To those that love with fear that they shall never love again | To such I dedicate this rhyme and what it may contain. None of us will ever take the transiberian train Which makes a very satisfactory refrain Especially as I can repeat it over and over again Which is the main use of the refrain.

I with no middle flight intend the truth to speak out plain

Of honour truth and love gone by that has come back again The fact is one grows weary of the love that comes again. I may not know much about gods but I know that Eros is a strong purple god. And that there is a point where incest becomes Tradition. I don’t mean that literally; I don’t love my brother or he me. We have been mutually avoiding each other For years and will continue to do so. Even I know about cross words— Something. The word you want is Dante. He said he loved Beatrice. Whatever he did He didn’t love Beatrice. At least the Beatrice Portinari whom history gives.

He knew her and the point about all these Florentines is that they all were

Killing each other or dying of rapid Consumption. Beatrice died; Rossetti painted her

Cutting Dante in the street. Botticelli

Painted the rest: Simonetta Vespucci Died of a rapid consumption (age 23) Guliano dei Medici murdered by the altar rail (age 19) Guido Cavalcanti died in exile (age 35)

[104]

Dante dei Aligeri died in exile (age 90) Lorenzo dei Medici who lives for ever

Since he stayed there and commissioned The paintings, and poems and statues And if he also commissioned the deaths I don’t blame him. He didn’t feel

Very magnificent when his brother Was murdered in sanctuary. Do you realise whoever did that Would be excommunicated if, that is, if

He hadn’t also murdered the papal legate, His best friend. I have lived long enough having seen one thing; That term has an end. It was getting dark on the platform of nowhere

When I who was anxious and sad came to you Out of the rain. Out of the sound of the cold Wind that blows time before and time after Even Provence knows. And as for this line I stole it from T.S.Eliot

And Ezra Pound and A.C.Swinburne. All very good Poets to steal from since they are all three dead. The love that is must always just contain

The glory of the love that was whatever be the pain. We played at mates and mating and stopped up the drain. Hear me. O Mister Poster I know You have burnt me too brown you must boil me again You simply have no notion how delightful it will Be when they pick us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea. It is the lark, my love, and not the nightingale. None of us will ever take the trans-siberian train.

She wanted to and was collecting people who did I thought I did but now I know I don’t. It is the lark, my love, and not the nightingale. In fact I’ve never heard either bird

But people say they sound very similar. And what the devil were Romeo and Juliet’ About wasting their last moments

[105]

Listening to birds. Hah.

I like kicking up larks or Larking up kicks. So do most poets Including J.H.Prynne, the memorable poet

Who is happy to say that the U.L. Has got his middle name wrong. He claims it stands for Hah But there is a limit. I know it all. Riddle me riddle randy ree Round and round in the snotgreen sea

When they pick us up and throw us With the Joyces out to sea. Tell us tale of Troy’s downfall We all would have liked to have been there. The infernal Odyssos. He it was whose bile

Stirred up by envy and revenge destroyed The mother of womankind. And Swinburne Got a kick out of pain but I don’t

I just get kicked. I wish I didn’t keep sounding like Richard the Third Except that if Idon’t I tend to sound Like Richard the Second. And who wants that.

I suppose I must sound like Richard the First. What did he do? Nothing I take it I get a kick out of larking up nightingales. Prynne says that ifIdon’t come back Safe from Sicily by the thirtieth April

They will send a posse. March is the cruellest station

Taking on bullying men And were you really afraid they would rape you?

No. I thought there would be grave difficulties. Not just that I was actively opposed And so was every other man, woman and child On that there train. I was afraid they would kill me.

I may look stupid but I’m not

[106]

So simple as to think your name Is Elizabeth Brown. Well. All right My name is Veronica Forrest-Thomson.

Agammemnon was King of the Achaians at the time, Priam, of the Trojans, Theseus, of the Athenians. ‘And like all Good Kings, they are dead.

In my day it was the done thing to side

With the Trojans for no better reason Than that they lost. But me I back Winners every time.

Mary Shelley may go to hell As she thought she was going to anyway And take Frankinsense with her. I want her husband, alive and well. Who, of course, also got killed. Hardly surprising if he made a habit Of reading Aiscylos while sailing. He wasn’t reading Aiscylos when he drowned. Got cremated like a pagan king. Not Agammemnon who, as I said, was king at the time And lost, murderer of his daughter

Killed by his wife and (other) daughter. Killed by his death killing his life. Stabbed in the back in his bath. I think of it every time I have a bath. Though I have no sympathy at all For that daughter and son. I think it is unfair that Helen

Had everything, immortal beauty, Lovers, cities destroyed and battles Fought about her. And she just came home And calmly went around being Menelaus’ wife While her twin sister, Clytemnestra

Was murdered by her son and daughter. And the Athenians acquitted them.

They would do, a nation of sophists. Always betraying their allies and torturing -

Women and children and enslaving people.

[107]

They even killed Socrates, their one good man,

Then Plato tried to be a philosopher king. . And got enslaved for his pains. I wish they had kept him enslaved. He escaped, of course, and wrote books About how he would do it better If he was in charge. All poets do that. They are just as incompetent as the rest

If they try to organise things. As witness my own efforts in that direction Or those of my avatar, Agammemnon, Who, as I say came home and was killed in his bath Killing his wife and his daughter.

And if you don’t know about this you ought to. Read it in the Iliad, read it in the Odyssey,

Do not read it in Freud who is always wrong Although even Freud didn’t deserve a son like Lacan. But first and last read me, the beloved Who was killed in the general slaughter.

But rise again like John Donne (read him too) I, Helen, I Iseult, I Guenevere,

I Clytemnestra and many more to come. I did it, I myself, killing the King my father Killing the King my mother, joining the King my brother. It is the kick, my love, and not the nightingale I like larking up kicks myself But not kicking.

They that have power to hurt and do so Should not be blamed by Shakespeare or anyone else For hurting though such is the race of poets That they will blame them anyway. However it is a pretty productive process

Especially if one may be plumber as well as poet And thus unstop the drain as well as writing Poetic Artifice “Pain stopped play” and Several other books and poems including

1974 and All That (seriously though) I, Veronica did it, truth-finding, truth seeking

[108]

Muck-raking, bringing victory. It was a horse, of course, in which the warriors hid Pretending to bring peace And they wouldn’t speak to me, crouching in the dark Like a lot of fools, hearing the voice of the goddess

In an alien city, I speak your tongue in my own city: Cambridge or Camelot and you won't listen to me Advised, of course, by Odyssoss, solicitor, betrayer.

And when they had killed all the men, raped all the women etc. Agammemnon came home and, as I said, was stabbed by his wife In his bath. Anyway it is the lark, my love, my love And not the nightingale. I follow the sacred footsteps of Hippolyta, the blest, the best

That has been said or spoken well in any tongue Read John Donne—the memorable dun. Don’t read Matthew Arnold; he’s a fool I am not Prince Thomas Aquinas F.H.Eliot I am not an attendant lord either. I am the king who lives.

Spring surprised us, running through the market square And we stopped in Prynne’s rooms in a shower of pain

And went on in sunlight into the University Library And ate yogurt and talked for an hour. You, You, grab the reins.

Drink as much as you can and love as much as you can And work as much as you can For you can’t do anything when you are dead.

The motto of this poem heed And do you it employ: Waste not and want not while you’re here The possibles ofjoy.

[109]

RICHARD II

The wiring appears to be five years old and is in satisfactory condition. The insulation resistance is zero. This reading would be accounted for by the very damp condition of the building.

If you come up the stairs on the left side you will see A band of dense cumulus massed on the banister. Whatever you do, do not touch the clouds. Forever again before after and always

In the light of the quiet night and the dark of the quiet noon I awoke by a day side and I walked in time’s room. To the end of the long wall and the back of the straight floor I stepped with my years’ clutch and the dark of my days’ doom.

For the sight of the deep sad and the swell of the short bright Bid me flee waste of the-time web and the long hand On a life’s weft and the grey warp in the year’s cloak For a long shade laps a short stand. The terms left right front and rear are used as if one is standing outside the building facing the front elevation. Specialists are carrying mirrors to the bedroom. They are stacked beneath the window three foot deep. Whatever you do, do not look in the mirror.

Again before forever after and always

The step to and the step back from the still glass in the long wall Flung the glance wide from the old field and the brown scene. And the glance broke at the pale horse on the glass turf While the door swung where the window should have been.

[110]

With the ghosts gone and the wall flat as the clock’s tick With a blood stopped and a bone still I squeezed glue from my cold glove And I turned back to my smashed self and the few looks pierced my own doll From the back-lash of the time brick and the last wall of an old love. In the joinery timbers there is new infestation And a damp-proof course is urgently needed. Say a few prayers to the copper wire. Technicians are placing flowers in the guttering They are welding the roof to a patch of sky Whatever you do, do not climb on the roof.

Before forever after again and always. limpid eyelid

(111)

S/Z

J'étais plongé dans une de ces réveries profondes qui saissit tout le monde même un homme frivole au sein des fêtes les plus tumultueuses. Au fêtes tumultueuses: rêveries profondes. I was sunk in one of those /profound daydreams which grab everyone even a trivial man

in the middle of the most violent parties. At violent parties: profound daydreams. That is one of the rules Balzac uses and Barthes notices. There are many other rules, but I don’t want to mention them. We can—some of us—sometimes

forget the whole problem. I mean the only problem: What is true. I write no question mark

after that question.

[112]

There are a few answers, such as: Literature matters.

What else is there. What am I going to do with my life.

Write another book, I suppose. What else is there. I expect no answer. Poems teach one that much: to expect no answer. But keep on asking questions;

that is important. Just hope the house doesn’t fall down for I have no insurance.

Je suis plongée dans une de ces réveries profondes

qui saissit tout le monde méme une femme frivole au sein des fétes tumultueuses.

[113]

LEMON AND ROSEMARY

for Catherine Cullen

Nobody. I, myself.

Shooting live subjects in pictures sung with imagination and wrung with trut! Dean knew it was blackmail. Though my deserted frying pans lie around me I do not want to make it cohere. Hung up to dry for fishing lines on the side of grey wharf of Lethe. Old, we love each other and know more. Is this a chisel that I see before me. If so I want to hack my name on the bedroom door. A star shines on the hour of our meeting:

Lucifer, son of morning. And Thanks for your lighter I have forgotten the matches. O, why do I hate doctors so? There was a time some years ago... But do dial one 0000

On the best battle fields No dead bodies

(114]

TRANSLATIONS

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POETRY SUCH AS AN INTRODUCTION

TO THE POETRY

OF TEL QUEL

I POEMS BY MARCELIN PLEYNET INTRODUCTORY

REMARKS FROM AN ESSAY BY PHILIPPE SOLLERS

FROM COMME

Il

POEMS BY DENIS ROCHE INTRODUCTORY

REMARKS

FROM AN ESSAY BY MARCELIN PLEYNET

EXCERPTS FROM DENIS ROCHE’S PREFACE TO EROS ENERGUMENE

FROM LES IDEES CENTESIMALES DE MISS ELANIZE

FROM EROS ENERGUMENE

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POEMS BY MARCELIN PLEYNET

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS FROM AN ESSAY BY PHILIPPE SOLLERS: CRITICISM OF POETRY

The title of this book (Comme: Like) is enough to give us our

information. Everything in it is going to be inscribed under the mark of a dualism: two books in one, prose/poetry, author/reader,

language/thought (he/she), speech/writing, line/page. We find ourselves on that axis of the linguistic sign which shows up the union signifiant/signifié in all its forms. The word comme

(like) is the

verbal image of this axis: an adverb placed in the heart of language; it is the invariant around which language revolves and lets itself show in its self-reflexive form. We know that poetry is such a ceaseless superimposition of words that resemble each other in meaning (similarity) upon words that follow each other in syntactic sequence (contiguity). Thus, comme is not only the sign of this metaphorical aspect of language, but also, and more fundamentally, the symbol of the activity that precedes poetic images: the process which makes language in its state of coming into being the very image of meaning. We could say that, in a unified experience of meaning, before

any perceived sign, there exists in every case another sign which disappears in the process of perception, even while it justifies this process. Such a sign can be indicated by the word comme (like). Paradoxically this word becomes the symbol of literality (literature that indicates its own nature), and of a kind of writing which,

in the

authors

own

words,

‘‘reveals beneath

written

language a kind of memory which as a memory pre-exists every actual utterance . . . every utterance is understood both in what it fixes on the page, and, at the same time, in the process which

removes it from this written form in order to understand it.” We say that a thing is like another thing (moving insensibly from the

general to the particular); but we also say, and this is significant, that we see a thing as it is, that we take this thing such as it is.

Every sign is already present before it appears and it comes into

view in such a measurement of the how (the process): it is the how

that explains, rather than the why which is always implicated in

the process.

[122]

Here we approach most closely that mythical range which applies itself to articulating the way in which things come into being, and which is an indirect response to the reason for their existence. To speak of myth as a process of generation is essential . . . Let us now suppose that we have to speak of language as a myth, we shall immediately be involved in a circle that is impossible to close, a broken circle which, since myth is a linguistic phenomenon,

will return on itself in a self-reflexive movement. The book which is to accomplish this purpose will therefore speak of itself, only of itself . . . The book (writing which constructs itself also as reading) is such a crucial point in the crisis of reflexivity: the world is like the book, the book is like the world

(“Two however even if the number has no more importance than

to return us to unity”) . . . The book world in the form of comme (like) . . prose) which make up this single book an absent unity which is nevertheless

is that which places the . The two books (poetry/ speak incessantly of such held between our hands (Comme). We are required to participate in the torment of which these two books are the fixed yet constantly mobile agents. First speech wells up, multiple, evasive, unmanageable; a speech

that is at once that of voices in the world and of words on the page: ‘“‘Here each of us hears speaking”. The page is seen as wall (the wall of Plato’s cave?) “‘pierced with doors and windows”. On the page the line which is both hand and eye comes to rest; it

reveals and obscures in a single moment the surface on which it is printed, losing itself on this surface and reappearing altered by the intermissions that thought has caused. These intermissions are the points where the writing dies, in other words which are nevertheless like itself (everything is like). The paper—the screen—is then not a dead surface where signs are to be fixed once and for all. It is a wall opened by various meanings, a mobile and inflammable

horizon where the words of the author and those of the reader are destroyed and recovered ... The language of the origin is, therefore, the language of discontinuity, of return, of dismemberment. Comme becomes the

discrete symbol, imperceptible and empty, through which the whole can begin to come together again, but only in a way that is hasty and fragmentary. For the least similarity immediately gives

[123]

rise to a mechanical development (a metaphorical comparison that is expected and understood). It is a question of trying to avoid the constant loss involved in this development which occurs in the formation of “myths”. We speak, we believe in what we say,to the extent that we gradu-

ally pass over, without noticing it, this word that is obvious and limitless. But we could instead choose the demystification involved in the risk of noticing it and of keeping ourselves in the area of communication which this word economically designates. Each thing stands for another if one can reach their how, in the birth of

thought where “value” has not yet been imposed, and where forms of discourse may be ceaselessly questioned. It is here, in this creation of meaning where the whole both offers and denies itself, but where it also indicates a kind of writing that may

measure up to it, that literature today is trying to place itself.

from Logiques, pp. 217-225

_ (124)

FROM COMME (LIKE)

Two nonetheless even if the number is of no importance which echoes back in a unity

FROM BOOK I

Our words will not be blind at all

to know however if it is readable and if inversion points to a clarity what links itself in reading and where you are goes beyond continuity its remaining with you troubles the indecisive image of a façade readable however (some vision) but then an aim to be truthful even if only an image

[129]

To speak—suddenly we are speaking we speak afterwards The wall that goes past to the right is pierced with windows and doors (it doesn’t matter)

Absent this wall would have something to say? Who will say it? We shall never give up grasping on this wall what remains silent Running stumbling familiar

When the two books show themselves there is no more space on the wall which stops ss

eee

ee

eee

eee

Thus the wall passes into diction / slides / over the wall which passes To speak then questions what is passing (Why write) :

And what you hear in books

And those who listen what are they doing? They have their backs to the wall / passing it / On paper

where everything speaks of things Remains silent Possibly—certainly that everything that lives / saw/... Sitting in your armchairs listening And we understand that with you—without you What speaking wants to say What you do reading within what speaks (Others are watching you behind what suddenly is accomplished) And we pass from one to the other We do not make the words speak This wall secretly ...

[130]

&

such mornings thus the true colour like a curtain behind the window-panes it protects and erects for itself these temples that do not speak as much use to worry about this grey urn that they hold in their hands what revolves is precisely the stylus of colours “it might be called a paradox and fair enough it is as far as emotion is concerned but not in respect of the mind.” as much as to say that those they discover

suffer from that visual impediment which makes them blind

these three dimensions in any kind of construction pierced themselves and give nothing away except repetition

the true colour that they see

[131]

As I write (here) on this page in unequal lines justifying prose (poetry) the words point to words and refer from each to each what you are hearing The book could certainly distinguish itself with the presence of a woman or a landscape illustrating this extraordinary situation or

justifying a vision the poem from one line to another will never go further than this (she is asleep) and the page already recognises itself less white without writing (to say that she stops that naked under her overcoat she lets herself be watched that she trembles once more when he possesses her) *

Here we shall not hold back from what is said even if I am not thinking what I write

you are reading what I think (trees like overcoats)

[132]

To speak then would come back to saying something here and the meaning of language would be that of a language spoken—or else the poem would recover some unknown shadow—for words hold to a single meaning

the phrase passing suddenly along this path too much exposed or in the poetry what they mean to read unevenly (the path is the subject) or the stretch of lawn they dream side by side united under a covering of grass and slender flowers ( ) here and there these words from everyday language (like love) but all are not called upon

description then illustrates some unknown tedium some unknown wearisome beauty and in the impossibility of sticking to it from word to word to the foreign language etymologically accurate the monotonous straight flat road with those parallel trees those rocks one and the other covered with dust as we pass by without an image “Technical discourse differs from everyday language”

[133]

Evidently I believed I could make out several terms: subject—verb (that a man and a woman and a book appear that is the sign which both separates and unites them) as if in the alignment inseparably establish between them these parallels that course of the river beside the meadow in the grass that chill and like the love of a wide scope his method (as a child she would walk beside that golden lake where meaning founders) the pages of the book there are now three or four of them which follow and precede its (absent) title

[134]

The whole book (then) for the sake of this line ‘as I write it here” these three or four words which sink down (she is there) She ought to know it He ought to speak he extends himself unequal in this pain which he inflicts on her and everything else quite white She is stretched across the scope that is white and spoken

[135]

This town this capital of all pathways (the one nearest us) “a co-ed is crossing the square”? we see her... and as if across the dark things

they forget with a single look that is thus spoken the sign is made prose

Already disturbed the image is encumbered with reading as soon as it is seen

(and turns round reappears) she is crossing the square she touches it but rumour rises from a single point—(she has been seen)

she crosses the square (the look undresses her) she is carrying a book (eyes closed he no longer sees them) *

As she cries out as he finds her she recognises him and longer as much as an overcoat can bear

already however the hour passes as you say we know how to read here is her dress—her word—she is crossing the street *

[136]

over there blocks of flats with burnt tiles are completed with a book we walk alongside it seems to me

that a book is holding a book others however (no longer the same) are looking elsewhere across the town

she passes

she carriesa book

go to it

[137]

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Then he imagines a landscape in which I describe him, and everything else besides. Two parallel lines which will never meet. On each the black landscape. You could put some light into it. What you do is not so different from what is happening. Since we are led to find ourselves when they speak. It seems

that there may be a connection between them. This is not exactly a discord, it is a description which is un-

convincing and which must incessantly be reconstructed from right to left. And the one whom we see cannot be distinguished from the other, she is there. The whole problem is there between

them; we know this and I write it from beginning to end. Two nonetheless even if the number is of no importance which echoes back in a unity. Two when he opens the book and when she catches him at it. And each day and in what divides the day and in this adventure where what divides the day keeps them at a distance ‘‘as if she were to exist only on its threshold, and was fated

to lose herself in it”. And what he sees one must know that you imagine it. As well an alley of cypress, the sharp angle of a wall, his shadow

passing over the wall, the sun being located on the

other side. They exchange a few trivial remarks with no result than that of keeping them there, tearing them away from that pathway which, so they think, leads to the river and yet also returns. And --all this in such a way that when they move forward they remain still. It is quite impossible that the flowing stream is not a single stream,

that the river does not brutally come

horizon is nearer to them than what they see.

[141]

to an end. The

She is crossing the square, he sees her. I rediscover her walking while I write. Certainly the poem would be like a kind of light cast on what is going on, if she is crossing the square, if she is crossing the page, turns round, comes

back to him, touches him, turns

round, leaves him when she crosses the square . . . so that he holds her back, clasps her to him, well aware that this desire, this pain that he inflicts on her is for her like the pain which pierces her when, running, she leaves the wall and speaks, speaks once more, much too much in all, repeating the word each time he touches her.

[142]

Here or there it’s quite useless to stress what is coming to an end (from the beginning) she knows it (she nurses her nostalgia for it) they both live only by what is coming to an end. Her

pain

is nothing

personal

like the cry she hears—hers

perhaps—that distracts her. .. in these yellow and deserted rooms along that arm which a caress awakens and sets dreaming or beneath a blanket in the dawn she once more brushes off that

meaning which clothes her (this signalises that the book does not exist). Or else she gives in to desire that incites her hoping that another separates them in that way From one book to the other present unnoticed thus she gives herself a name, is astonished by every word, in its plan, for you like a book. While from one to the other is masked this thought that names them and which we rediscover sometimes walking from one corner to the other and in a landscape blue-green and grey

In him with him near him on every page is uncovered what is going on in him with him and as if he named it by such a bias. Never leaving off signing in some way the book (signing himself in some way) as he writes it from one

instant to the other retaining (quite in spite of himself perhaps) only what you are reading on this page, leaving white that which has not been read what offers itself on the whole as a possible kind

of writing (and in which they are swallowed up) in the book which says it...

[143]

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Il POEMS BY DENIS ROCHE

AN ESSAY BY FROM ORY UCT REMARKS INTROD MARCELIN PLEYNET: THE AIM OF POETRY SHOULD BE...

These poems offer themselves apparently in the convention framework of the genre, “poem”; they strongly emphasize this appearance in its most obvious form: a text with unequal lines,

confined to a single page; each line beginning with a capital letter. Nevertheless, at the same time they signalise the play of a kind of composition which seems to be in opposition to this appearance of formal convention. The poem indeed offers itself as if it had been composed at random; as if, once the form had been chosen, the author could

fill it with anything whatever (we shall return to this “anything whatever’). Denis Roche, in his forward to Récits complets, says: “One gains life from certain words, not because they are words

that one has expressly chosen . . . but because it happens that, without any rational justification, one’s gaze was arrested by such

words, rather than by others near them or on another page.” We are always caught in the play of appearances produced by the author even while we are in the process of approaching the complexity of the text. And Roche’s statement here is apparently unacceptable in the conventional context of the poem in verse. But these two contexts of reading already complicate each other. The convention apparently respected by the first and apparently broken by the second brings out initially the question of the unconventionality of an “aleatory” text. Through this question we begin to doubt whether the poetic text really is free from the hazards of chance. If it is outrageous (or appears outrageous) to introduce into a fixed form like that of the conventional poem, a language which is presented as undefined by convention, this outrage cannot be considered unless it, in turn,

sets up, within the definite form of a poem, a language which may

be considered definite in a different sense. Faced with this apparent declaration of subjectivity in the choice of words, a declaration of objectivity must be made. Now, how can we consider this objectivity of language taken (if we are to avoid speaking of the objectivity of poetic discourse [146]

itself) in the context of the genetic character of the genre “poem”. Presented with this declaration of a choice made “without rational

justification”, what becomes of poetic rationality? Here, once again, we find the problem of the genetic function of literary genres, and the objectively rational role of poetic irrationality. That “without rational justification” calls into question the rationality which is outraged by it; it immediately uncovers that

rationality’s mode of operation, together with all that is connoted in the rules of the poetic code (in what that code allows and forbids). The refusal of rational justification shows how the process of

producing poetry which fixed poetic forms are said to undervalue, is recovered and used in the formal play of irrationality. Thus, within what is accepted as a purely decorative form, an amuse-

ment given by aesthetic convention and offered as a distraction for our leisure hours, a contradiction that exists in the demand for

rational justification is made clear. In this contradiction each of the terms exists only to hide the other. The sonnet form, for instance, by means of its objective

rules, criticises the poeticism—the aesthetic function of language— which seems to inspire it; while such aesthetic inspiration criticises

the objective and socially conventional form of the sonnet. Despite all this, the insights gained at this level of analysis remain insufficient. For the kind of reading required by them is a long way off taking into account the whole scenic design where the work of Denis Roche moves. And, although his poems only

apparently conform to poetic convention, they could still be ex_ plained away as the game of gratuitous formalism, a more or less aesthetic discourse—automatic writing would be an example. But, in fact, behind this ‘‘unreason” which accompanies the

establishment of such appearances (Roche maintains, in the preface to Récits complets, that ‘“‘poetry is not a problem of representation”), the motivating activity of a poetic text is made

clear. Starting from a form that is most readily recognised as that of a poem, and presenting the reader with this form in the contradictory play of its appearance, Roche intervenes in the organisation

of the text. Such an intervention, like that shown in the choice of form, is far superior to any critical mode of approach that stresses

[147]

the theoretical and didactic function of kinds of interpretation. Furthermore, this intrusion into the text is required by the desire to respect the usefulness of an appearance of poetic form. We must emphasise that this appearance is more than a wish for resemblance. In Récits complets, but even more emphatically in Les Idées centésimales de Miss Elanize, the text on the page sketches a kind of rectangle of written marks whose lines hardly differ in length and seem intended to be aligned at the right-hand margin just as they are aligned at the left by means of capital letters. Such intention to conserve resemblance: the realism of literary form, goes beyond a conventional realism. The actual poem criticises its formal model . . . Once more we find ourselves deciphering something which contradicts conventional reading. In this contradicted reading one must stress the individual play of phonetic links in the verse. The repetitions in these links often have no other function, such is their complexity, than to return

the process of reading to an examination of itself. This reflexivity is deceptive; but it must

be questioned

from

its origin in the

moment of reading itself. It is from this basis also that the continually deceptive statements of realistic narrative must be questioned. Such statements are found in all three books. Récits complets, Les Idées, and Eros énergumène; and what they keep in the end is only the material of reading, the eroticised movement of its journey. For it is cer-

tainly by passing through the didactic activity of the formal play of poetic conventions, and by means

of such transgression, that

the work of Denis Roche stresses that other activity: the productive process which is both reading and writing.

from Tel Quel, Théorie d’ensemble, pp. 102-106

[148]

EXCERPTS FROM DENIS ROCHE’S PREFACE TO EROS ENERGUMENE: LESSONS IN POETIC VACUITY

[From TABLEAU DES AVATARS]

... When what we are looking for is unknown, how is it possible

to stress with so much conviction the success of one page or another? How can this success be explained without critical support from a descriptive terminology which would not be content with describing content... but which would also describe the container,

that is: the set of unknown laws, which we cannot at present operate with full consciousness, and which controls effects that

are primarily pulsational. Such effects make up the infolding of the writing, the rhythm with which chains of images appear and ellipses are created, the rhythm in which reading is unfolded, rhythm of themes as they appear and are destroyed, rhythm of structures of discourse (phrases, syntactic links) in their arrival and effacement, rhythm of arrangement, deployment, containing and flowing of language, within the printed text, rhythm of the succession of phrases, their

overlapping and sequence. All these things are like so many marks (in the biological sense of the term); they are functions of a social act which is writing, and of another social act which is reading.

[FIN DE LA POÉSIE PARLEE |

One of the aims of this little book is to demonstrate the possibility of a new kind of poetry which will be created neither to be looked at, nor to be recited. Any kind of poetry which can be defined by a single one of these characteristics is merely spurious: Lettrisme is a forgery of what one sees, metrical poetry is a forgery of what one declaims aloud. It can be proved that every kind of contemporary poetry which has a truly critical value is not involved with—cannot be forced into—the mould of a prefabricated

[149]

metric. Otherwise

how

can we

explain the specialisation of

metrical forms (their restriction to a particular kind of representat-

ive function). Short lines are traditionally reserved for slight poetry; the alexandrine is associated with profound emotions and discussion about the state of the soul; iambics, from Archilocus to

André Chénier,are used for insults (to fathers-in-law or revolution-

aries); the ode is consecrated to meditative eulogy and to love

poetry, and so on. A form which is gratuitous (which does not rely on justification with reference to content), which does not serve as a crutch for a way of thinking, can such a form exist? One can destroy a metrical system, one can destroy it while using its own conventions.

TOWARDS A NEW SCANSION

Let us rediscover the notion of scansion. Scansion would no longer be the art of evaluating the metrical form of verse whether with reference to quantity (Latin) or to syllables (French); it would be the science by means of which all the kinds of pulsational alternations (pulsation is to be thought of as a way of defining the unit of energy in the practice of poetry), may be studied. Certain pages of Eros are to be studied at this single level of pulsational mingling. Whole sections fall below the level of semantic meaning; while others smoothly empty themselves of it; and everything is allowed to take place and be read according to the time in which a certain number of imaginary bases are found and their connections enthusiastically followed. Many more things could be said, for instance, taking some of these poems as surfaces offering resistance.

EROTICISM

Eroticism

OR THE STRUGGLE

is an outmoded

WITH THE WHOLE

word.

Is anyone still aware

of its

remarkable power to present nervous tension, de-figuration, in fact? It is the degraded vision, the fulfilled fanatic (one whose

[150]

senses (meanings) are disordered, possessed by a powerful passion). It is the exactitude of the way in which things return on themselves while they are taking place. To write is already a bitter submission: if I were to be “poetic” I should call it the shirt of Nessus.

The writing of poetry is a vision in which we wish to include everything, where we wish to see everything even while we, in our turn, are seen, that is, to be observed as we are watching. Eroticism

transforms (might transform; I am not sure of this however) such a vision and annihilate it totally. The vision is consumed insofar as

it is unfolded; for erotic writing is a completely accomplished inversion. One cannot play games with it. I should say, however, that it is the most fulfilled form of irony, or scepticism; and it is perhaps the only way someone who writes

can avoid being deceived, can never be deceived, by what he acts.

,

There is, in all this, the terrifying idea (but if it is recognised, how much effort is saved!) of an inveterate search for a loss, for a reality of which one is aware as a loss. And this continuous awareness is communicated to writing by elaborate pulsations that are difficult to restrain without amplification and incantation that would deform them. Attended to with respect, they are perhaps a potentially rich medium that may lead to a resolution.

[151]

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FROM LES IDÉES CENTÉSIMALES DE MISS ELANIZE

THE ARISING OF THE INTRUDER

“for want of words the intruder has arisen”’

I shouldn’t advise you to endorse it, with Even a single word’s difference, “to believe it” It was she, it was her style . . . is the voice Of the world’s sole singleness, hers Smoky And the foolish exclusiveness of her whole life As if with wide open eyes he hung onto

Her .. . he had literally punned on All his wit, on her

[157]

not line, portraits of duchesses the Intellect, rim of a boat which I mySelf shall take to that Englishman with this moveMent which he and I print for a wind On his skin: I shall return to this Movement which he and I, stooping, oblivious

To decency (the “s” of decency) ... to shouts of laughter, to

Fits of sulks

[158]

Possessed, and once at the end (I) expire ... he’s been promised gnashing of teeth at one time and Another—succeeded in falling in love tomorrow—

For another when she passes by with her drEss in her hand, First setback for he sets up The young lady in, more or less, an

“Understanding”, her high-heels unsheathed under the Dress rampant, but she may in the

End wear herself out ina... don’t

Fall asleep meanwhile.

[159]

“Your help, oh ridiculous muse! gullet of Romanticism, moaning and demonstrative plants” (your) throat is poised ( ) Without Being, the tone of her voice becomes (Becoming) In its swelling choked in itself the very slight seeSawing movement has all the same imprinted on her Mind the notion of getting completely undressed. As for that,

[160]

The lines are too long in the fore-

Going, if ‘“‘acute anxiety” must “‘stIfle the extremes of stamina... and

The honour of having raised you Him/her first” elegant libertinage

Such as is practised in feudal Positions, with his heart on

In the ticket-office hall she in

Legs multicoloured from being Stretched out en route having

Incredulously absorbed there (there) A collection of masculine things.

[161]

MONSIEUR THE PILOT, TRULY ROYAL

Every Saturday they would stay upstairs in the great armoury, its walls loaded with weapons, armour, ancestral portraits, and its window decorated with a hawk. In front of them was the imposing alpine panorama which stretches from the Black Forest to Mont Blanc, and beneath were prosperous villages. There, unwitnessed, they would exercise themselves in developing their ideas according to the formulae of the new movements. STRINDBERG

Monsieur the pilot, truly royal declaiming, “No attar of roses lurks in the phials,

unstoppered or otherwise, of my route” scented the healthy smell of earth which insinuates at the beginning of this heat we shall complete it with that tempera-mentture which does not bear staying at home and bears the stew-pot to the persons of his quenched memory, in short figures having no logical link with reality. And these figures would have taken on a completely human form while, to his poet’s eye, forests and reefs

had no need to do so. He left at a run and rejoined them just as they reached the crossroads they also were looking out of the window at the storm

[165]

Monsieur the pilot, truly royal erased himself In front of the mirror he would not abandon, and For his part, saw nothing wrong with accusing

The witnesses of the game: they felt themselves Impotent, they could never love each other, They could not satisfy each other either, at least I prefer to imagine that it was a question Of successive states or intermediary dispositions, Both walking about the room, the thought

That they are insane, in the harmony of their Shadows—instinctive abilities where the

Sky simply is one with the sea (having provided It with a strange conductivity) they breathe as if At last they feel at ease in space Down there she unties her belt and hangs it On the branches

[166]

Monsieur the pilot, truly royal your warlike Ardour is then such an evil power Under the weight of her modesty’s crab-apple tree She rejoins her vegetal primacy, and it is Because of obstinacy that she will spill These tears from “the clash of empires”,

I see her coming to me across the cellophane Of consent Shall I question her discreetly About her desires? All that’s left is for Us to keep up our own Life While the storm fades away pursued, for Its ill-born love of honour,

on the Gentleness of the heather-couch

[167]

Monsieur the pilot, truly royal the Divers clinging to flotsam at the mercy of the winds Speak to the swell of her psychological moment— Its raft. Cantal’s plumb-lead is seen above the circus At her feet we find that writer from Rosental’s

Liberal Journal. World Festival of Fashion Similarly they write the thing “with a properLy romantic naivety” now he chats about a Pious pair of buttocks; a voice from that

Nearby window recalls them. He grabs Helen by the waist as she leans over the bed Who quietly lifts up his mistress’ hand

Several women will half get up. Nothing is urgent; all these scenes Are too new for him, he brushes against her

Only in the delightful fear of seeing once more The moon of hours on the roof.

[168]

Monsieur the pilot, truly royal consider that pilots Are not such a good thing, they are crossing Crossing the pier before the incoming squalls, tomorrow There will be some lovely shipwrecks, but The Goths are in the Citadel. Turn round I’m Getting washed, I hold in my hands the convolvulus

Of a peaceful conscience and I have had success In the world of letters, do you see the trees coming? Now they are jumping, obstacles are thuyaBushes of a reasonable size, finally they Leap over them assured of their respectable Lineage down to the slightest detail, All the same, since the Trade Fair at CopenHagen, associating with men recalls to him what,

At the age of fifteen, an epistle on the Contemplation of seas made him think: never again To refer to any but royal officials.

[169]

Monsieur the pilot, truly royal to those Who are not really suited to the scene “ritratto di gentildonna” and turns back Stunned, how gay ordinary people are Ignorant of the trumpet’s deceit, and The majestic jeer, never of the clear

Daylight. To give in to or to get close to The person, in its circle of relations

And when we lack compassion we shall rudely Sever some creatures from its village or Maybe we shall open the establishments to Young girls without making any changes. She poses for a few seconds more and Pulling towards her the warm blanket says:

“there is no attitude of greater humility than waiting for a match, and there is No-one here with a broken heart”.

[170]

The fox made his way to the third level of the

Mountain and spoke thus: “monsieur the pilot

Truly royal, a betrayal perpetrated with Distinction is nothing, once it is given this Childish form. We shall fling you on the rubbish-heap Moreover a skin-change is to granular ice What courgettes are to the refrigerator, we

Shall yet get as far as some more jam, and shAll be struck down at the sight of the ants. Monsieur

The pilot truly royal I salute in you the lack of Painting in distemper, in that there is a will Without fanfares which overflows in the harsh Sustenance of community of existence, and in our Patience also which makes of Time’s starch

A priestess of Israel

(171)

The effort of a ‘“‘volubilitis” flower in the Sense of virtue and in fulfilling its Obligations has no value as such, for She can also stretch out her hand, let it f-

All back into the flour, no longer enduring The sight of waiters without help from The prayer called “surrender of the prince”.

The strands stop being noticed, warm water Is there to endure cold winters, thanks

To the gift of showers in vertical support Which is a ten-minute glimpse to be transformed Into eternity.

Clearly betrayed by his smoke fumes He measures endless blocked-up corridors Calling forth at every corner a ‘““monsieur

The pilot truly royal”

[172]

FROM LES IDÉES CENTESIMALES DE MISS ELANIZE

Sensibly the forms we are about to describe and Represent it was necessary first to point them out

Because of chronology which may allow a vague Undulation to the most primitive forms. One ought Dead or off-shore rocks to watch for nourishment To tender me at the end of her stump a tender bouquet Of forced roses nourished by salt-water alum the largest And most impressive collection of winter stakes Having been obtained by dragging the rivers that had Happily preserved them precious documents (they) dress up To attract him sometimes in sparkling these little Thick plants proliferated so prettily Last spent their days planted on trees This stained-glass glows with a sacramental glory These innumerable lighted candles circle in shirtSleeves the heat becoming at each moment so precise That to be there means the last fox to take suck from Her doubtless a matter that can be discussed that Goes turning his gaze from the divine cathedral Perfume for a Mariette she was cold immaterial Oh graphed poise of her hand which I keep for

[175]

But at the attack these braves were almost unseizable From their cruelty and savagery hurried from their whisA preciosity that showed itself in extreme care for detail A great church but half the grey edifice rested He walked behind the others carrying the canvas sack The golden mountain although there exists no golden mountain Since you have trusted your women to me I have watched night and c First she saw a meadow whose verdure was Exalted yes indeed my dear exalted this bouncing tomboy These enigmas in fact remain always unsolved Squarely behind so that it was not so large To die with beloved beings wrapped in my entrails so Often moreover that they don’t think of it even when more attacked She is so strong isn’t she? that she will recover from Her momentary weaknesses sand of knowing of understanding The estuary the lovely curve of basque and tagada hillsides The former they begin to emerge from earth on the contrary stops Always underlined by a constant and immovable kind of Muddy shore all reversed to line up the masters in Geometry sensational sentinels of rotting forests Willingly the gaze loitering to follow your perspective.

[176]

16.

She turns a switch both of them standing see They invoke our compassion when it is seen what Bob is in the woods over towards the paper-mill Important and several essential pieces of work are missing Let’s go to the meeting by bus no you think on foot Somewhere at the heart of the darkness some narrow Got hold of the garrison to guard the town and was about to Marshal but in the house of the whore who was their Protégée of the moment now it is Hungarian soil These years will thus have been spent in dreaming of satiety A mechanical habit the two acts of thinking and writing but If these symbols do not yet signify love they Lack at least the curve of their shell and the fulnThe flood-gate which had been constructed in colour By the inventor the specialist in fortifications translated: Fortifying shrieks not a foolish raid nor disputes or so little A period of excitement due to the novelty of the game The little balloon has fallen into apathy or even forgetfulness Tale of the marvels that he was able to accomplish is still Today when he was involved in it at the capture of Syracuse How the churches entreat you on the journey down the Saône

[177]

28:

For listening to what she had said to her embroidery and all White two others side by side holding slightly back holding Holding back in her expression the persistant spirals where Later she was to go to die four orchards in bloom

Exactly the one that justifies any flattery as Most unctuously at the reappearance of steep holiday climbs She believed she had discovered the heart of sorrow which is the That which is contrary to nature but which is not the judge There are just enough sheets for the coming week An exact idea of the extent of the gradations he to us It is famine in the snow to tell the truth at last At the battle of Varay where they fought valiantly Each of us protected by the grasses begging For them to be left to him for them to be re-read once more “Gnawed and clutched in the hand the ears of maize he had Eaten” Provence where this geologist of genius shows us Traces of footsteps or little heaps of white ash In the panes of the gothic window are set Those at whose side having passed through so many Homesteads for she has seen them all the lowest the most monsTruous I want to glimpse again a possible text.

[178]

FROM EROS ENERGUMENE

FROM EROS ENERGUMENE

Moreover these travelling expenses all right! All Right! are slowly constructed as a French village, More than chambermaids a descriptive unconscious, The Lit-e-rasure of tropism, or litteral History as it is dreamt, this delivery will reach Harbour but no blood, no lucky fissures My intention of sketching the scaffolding of virtue Constructions for sketches yielding The horizon for a speech which immerses itself in Colza makes me say that I was about to silence too

Unfairly: “what makes them come and whence, these Rumours of my own side, from these limits of my long

First chapter, so timid leading me into the Arms of chambermaids? Who can translate this second Transcription even when I get near to

I pretend to speak words to her?

[183]

He goes back to thinking of that throat come from the North (Whose design came from the N.) All that is a lot of Nonsense we should have been instructed in more Learned matters, e.g. he views the study for the oak from Beaker 1 dated 1957 and for which he is indebted to D.B.in NewYork. (in the same quotation, from thought to vision) His two miseries of knowing that she wants him Now and of finding in his hands again the drawing of Throats (breasts distracted and restless at once)

Seem to him fairly radically unlike and when He tries himself in articulating them he is conscious of Expectation gaining on him feels the last pose Of the morning and its lack of aggression slipping away: He is nothing more than a row of N.R.F. —————

[184]

THEATRE FOR THE ACTIVITIES OF EROS

Sa

lif apnS

The play-act of love: 1st opportunity beyond the instruments effluxion, resembling that badly constructed phrase of our suicide Together at Epée-de-rose—green standard, is seen a small part of the green and random verdure of Sologne—, . .. not daring to give the verses a heroine lest any

One die from such an agronomic error:

A flowered skirt creating Love at every step, Hides from our eyes ravishing attractions; and that

Thigh dimpled à la Venus . . . for a thousand beauties, For a million lively seductions, you do nothing but

Substitute obstacles! And that dainty slipper enClosing the foot of Hebe, of Venus, however Provocative it is, is it worth her naked charms? ...

You lie about this, oh, bloom of my lips, haricot

Beans and bubbles of air, the true sincerity of your Arse presents me several periphrases (useLess now) in the shape of cork-screws.

[187]

when faced by parenthesis: Love is a sentiment

Which, through the eyes, invades the heart And, as a kind of effluent,

Flows out from a lower part. at the same time—it is a palimpsest in Time—Agrippa d’Aubigné wrote the Adventures of Baron Foeneste. That is to say: “Many things the poet has not interpreted; what the eye makes out is a huge crowd of Alpine soldiers usefully occupied in the sun,

sewing up all the splits in their fashionable doublets, unfreezing their Walrus moustaches—over there you see booted lackeys, a young lady who wears her girdle between navel and nipple.” Double fiction: the writer and his age. This is proved by the fact

that everyone has treated it already. Return to single fiction.

[188]

The play-act of love: 2nd opportunity that I wiped away with the edges of a cotton napkin The still sharp weapon of your odour: (here quotation from Mathurin Régnier) The most facile painterly corn was immediately Ravished when we got up.

What poetry stuffed at last into a clay Pit does not love skirts from which are made Corks?—“‘Would you do me the favour, Mademoiselle?—Yes, Yes, Yes! Of giving those two...I know, I know...” It was quite useless for me to put in the Ronds-de-jambe, the spheres, the harlequins, If necessary even the scale itself in token Of puritan cess-pit, Poetry, with a milkmaid,

Or with the leap that an Augustine would make onto Such as she, will never for all that invest with these

The garb which I assume when it is up to me alone to repel the assault (sic).

[189]

Play-act of love: just after the second opportunity When one has just written phrases like those on the Preceding page I am planning with undergrowth my most Far-fetched companion to pile up my doubt like The pretext of a wind-mill in an In an antique landscape (if you can picture yourself As the idea of ink and paper from Imperial China At a period even more ancient than that to which The mill would have belonged) I elaborate the Display of this phenomenon with many resources Native to my imagination. As, e.g. the foot placed Cautiously on the edge of the bath-tub, left-hand

Smoothing the wash-mitt down towards the folds Around her stomach. Etc. Of course, without this,

What importance for verdure and fountain? Nothing any more would abstract from what I had To tell you while wrapping myself around your legs. Final advice: continue with the title Following

[190]

Interval in the opportunities: of vowels and erosion

“T admit that on the 20th I was in a deathly state” the divine nourishment of delightful poesy, like The luggage which the inn-keeper hastens to lay out, Acquires a certain entirely reflected light. Thunder Has scarcely arrived. I go over the progression brutal This time of the earth, earth laid waste, earth

Whose inhabitants are dead where apricot trees remain Where death but not the (their) grave dug in Peas place of funer— apprehensions and So on speech being nothing. Is it possible that fatigue is only a kind of Discipline? What would make me blind when I write? The young accompaniments of your beauty would Be able to mock our colloquium not perceiving What our hands make of the divine nourishment Of delightful poesy

[191]

“the Lace of Jouy” or “of triumph” I can find nothing more certain than the connection

Between this fly-leaf of stretched fabric from Jouy And the aggressive notion of lacing which Littré

Says is a vat filled with acidic liquid in which A tanner laces hides in order to make them swollen. D’Estrevalliéres fornicating with this no more has Hidden herself on her estate at Eu, dresses Turning her back to me so that I admire simultaneously

Her flanks and the prospect of lime-trees. The scent of yellow buds, hers, and the fragments Of antique fabric clearly compel me to maintain A formal pose which the dictionary, falling, Does not disturb. What did I make of the whole thing

Except an aerial step that leads me into a region Disencumbered with the room, where the fabric is

Torn away the glottis absorbed in other flowers, Coming and going, densened

[192]

After a prolonged exposure to the sun, Curtain

But my gentle speech, mingling, where worse Existence the second gulp assures her that It is true, on the slope of my ruin, my Absolution. Unpretentious sinner, ribald words,

Lewd appellation, only an enchanting mus(e) Ic continues beside me. Her resolved Death, the melody imagining my slow ascent Towards the meadows of her existence, chance

Meeting in the mixture of this coloured Vision (hair-colours, beer-mugs on the stage)

And of my sickness, all that rejoins my step Without audacity, hyperbole, my enjambeMent from balcony to green balcony like the landscape I extend myself in a straight line towards a New collection of funeral baked meats, towards her grave anyway.

(Detumescence-smile)

[193]

The mares that carry me away have brought me right to where the desires of my soul were driving. PARMENIDES OF ELEA

The vault sustained by what puts into 1,000 Like a top-class yachtsman, like one who Makes climbing-plants grow; among others

The mountain, the chief-shepherd, the closed bosoms Of rows of women. Alongside this introduction,

Admission of fantasies about the décolleté Of extremely virtuous saints this more than enough He loves Increasingly confronted by a verse-line that ends At random “‘carried off by the flux of Things” following this platform that no blunder Is an intrigue if not in the way I bring her to Life for myself. And further may it be granted me More than several rhymes to one

to terminate there

This way of giving myself to her tones, to her

Heavy-bellied primula, to style... The vault sustained by what puts into 1,000

[195]

but

: that one doesn’t quite have Shelley’s liver nor This steam that rises from steam that pours From the pump, that shades this path, in the shed Shows off, in the dance surrounds. That she who writes “That farrier that has fire on his neck”, the music Floats bed, waves, bedclothes, and the blackBirds’ Berline: Simultaneously set free, yet beforeHand having, our mews, how many mat hues returnIng, mobiles of the warm, damp, air filtering In from outside, that it is then by mixing words

That he totals up in meaning formula and phrase

That the air will revive by itself (it can) in That handsome ephebe from the jam-packed lorry al Ternately Ford and MacClelland, their forehead Sprouting war, like a green pasture, who nourishes Whom? She who has no thickness except, under its hill, Space “The mobile moves neither in the space it occupies nor in that which it does not occupy.”

: that one doesn’t quite have Shelley’s liver nor

[196]

Link together what has gone away, such that ifshe Doesn’t love me, to be fed on these moralists of The hair which she has recently had done in a quite

Different style, my Apollos who pluck the last strIngs of the world’s flux and of sentimenta-

Lity, in bathing-flippers, the base of your souls, Like stranded flounders unfolding your god. Leaves to him and for a few more hours watches “the rocky entablature of the mountain, like a

nest of swallows shaken by the storm (Bret Hart, Diamond miniature editions, 2nd series) ... My wife has just remembered that she has a Call to pay, he said, with deliberation, sitting

Down’ Santa Claus at Simpson Bar... This bizarre incident had aroused The doors at which I sleep; they are two and Fruitful are other stables, pale horns through which

It is easy, Virgil assures us, for the spirits to escape From obstruction.

Link together what has gone away, such that ifshe

[197]

society works only when I paint it only When in the huge artist’s folder she

Turns at last to the golden arms of my beautiful sunset. Her rapprochement (her rapport) when from the d

r

I move forward the terrible flame turns to the short juube, the errant emetic which takes a turn around the mountings, to the plate-glass of the event;to... send in the beak for inconvenience caused, in Drops of rain and howling, the lark stretching out Its throat towards those she glimpses

On the raft men of the raft those who still Endure perhaps the indecisive contest

With others. Women tipped-off by novels? The signal, sent out in semaphore Suffices to give me back the illusion of turning toward The state of one who knows how to contemplate, who

society works only when I paint it only

[198]

“She must have taken my verses literally!”” The eye doesn't Allow me that, blessed be the eye!

Sometimes you would be offering up your miseries to God Alone on the balcony, speaking, your gaze fixed on

These panels, a high-flown Christian and let’s ascend Together toward the meadow of ‘“‘guess how Happy | am?” Peacocks only, from over the Water I beseech the shapes on the blue-print The flank, hers, several seconds in the In the in the waves of tedium, breaking of ws. which caress our feet the’ blood of our Edition broken like some bread of affliction? Fallen In the end, the bed’s thunder which we lack Both of us: not more of garlic than of women.

“She must have taken my verses literally!”” The eye doesn’t

[199]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRINCIPAL WORKS OF DENIS ROCHE

Récits complets: poèmes (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1963) Les Idées centésimales de Miss Elanize (Éd. du Seuil, Paris, 1964) Ezra Pound: Cantos Pisan [trad.] (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, BES Eros énergumène (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1968)

PRINCIPAL WORKS OF MARCELIN PLEYNET

Provisoires amants des nègres: poésies (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1962) Paysages en deux suivi de Les Lignes de la prose: poésies (Ed. du Seuil, Paris,

1963)

Comme: poésie (Éd. du Seuil, Paris, 1965) Lautréamont par lui-même (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1967)

Translations of some Poems and Texts

poems by Pleynet and Roche have also appeared in

ed. Serge Gavronsky

(October House, New York,

1969)

which relates them to the philosophical tradition of French poetry.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Tel Quel: Théorie d’ensemble (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1968)

Julia Kristeva:

Semiotike: Recherches pour une sémanalyse

Paris, 1969)

Philippe Sollers: Logiques (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1968)

(Ed. du Seuil,

EARLY

POEMS

to Liz Cullington

JANUARY MORNING Hot ha’penny sun pressed copper against the frozen-window sky; a metallic sunbeam falls with a clank of light across the eye. The world is winched on an iron chain, then whirled on a wheel of frost.

Gables’ only purpose to maintain angle of a shadow flat and clear slanting the bright sharp snow. Birdsong rattles over the slates, a sudden jangling skeleton of sound;

is still.

The world is clamped in a frigid crate and notched silent, on a stone.

Brittle air crackles beneath the breath. Corners, as black triangles, converge perspectiveless to point the air,

congealing clinging along the surfaces, bleaching house contours against the sky.

All that moves is a jet-trail slicing silver across the red-cold sky. The world is pierced by a steel-white spear, and nailed to a cross of ice.

[205]

GEMINI

When all’s said and spun, heads or tails? it’s all two for I am a pun on someone unknown. My life’s his uncracked code. Pleasure consists only in deflecting the signals he transmits, trying to flex his wit reflected through my reflexes.

Thus we play a game in which each day is a lost bet, for how, when I must use his words,

can I communicate my paradox to a distinctive third. l’Il never break true the mirror that lies in each it and you, in which I can see just me, watching him, watching me.

[206]

TAURUS

I have copper’s valency and can transform most elements to alloys of stability, if Venus puts me on my metal; but mostly I reserve my nature, wearing attributes like ornaments —pretty things appeal— but happiest chewing time. Browsing in the fine collection of my past surely I should find the future built around me like a home.

[207]

IDENTI-KIT

Love is the oldest camera. Snap me with your eyes.

Wearied with myself I want a picture that simplifies. Likeness is not important provided the traits cohere. Dissolve doubts and contradictions to leave the exposure clear. Erase shadows and negative that confuse the tired sight. Develop as conclusive definition a pattern of black and white. For I wish to see me reassembled

in that dark-room of your mind.

[208]

IN THE GREENHOUSE

Entering the dim air where edges are furred like geranium leaves,

the mind blurs in sympathy, the line dividing plant and primate, until to think seems out of place. By a definition suited to the dissecting room of intellect, furled fiddleheads of fern are gametophytes in pteropsida, but here reduced suddenly to a creature in the primeval wood, I remember only that they are edible. Orchids, commended in science

as illustrating the complexity of evolution, seem now to elude even their simple name. Each self-contained, the patterns of naming and of being run parallel like two planes that can never touch. The silent rhythm of pulsating pores

filling my lungs with filtered earth is all I feel or know of alien shapes that once were flowers. I breathe their breath until all definitions are dissolved,

and homo sapiens is nothing more to me.

[209]

ARIES

Slid like a bead along the bowstring of its orbit, earth tilts the sun

till, at the first point of a red planet, it strikes on the equator like a match

to light the year; ignites a will stalled in civilised complexity, slips the mind-machine into first gear and sends it, refuelled with simple self, back to hunt in dreams a life whose heart secret can be pierced

conquered and bleeding by a spear.

Batteries recharged by the perennial illusion that sap rises in a life as in a flower, rupture themselves with revs of energy trying to electrify the unconducive days. Hysterical tremors of spring insinuate that purposes are knives to sharpen on events, clear-cutting

as the incision of the equinox.

[210]

POINT OF VIEW AT NOON

Stilled by weight of sunshine

fixing their contours in a mould of light, lime trees

have gestures as convulsively immobile as a Byzantine ikon;

and mosaics of mottled leaves are pressed into the air, set,

not to be shattered by wind that has to do with time.

Framed in an unblinking eye the scene seems no more living or capable of movement than the turquoise tendrils traced on this quiet vase which holds severed roses red against the blue enamelled sky.

[211]

A REACTION TO RINGS

A pale-green thought in a jade ellipse at the finger tips;

the motto of all rings, “‘it will pass.” Alas, the gentle susurration of the past. The mind sets love iri a diamond ‘‘forever”’ which will mock moreover the death of love. A pearl-pale thought with the opal tone, half-coloured of what has gone and has been half-forgotten. Milk tear and silver angles grip the only fact, their own reality; an irony, that this metal circle’s called eternity.

A rustless static dark-green thought blood-shot contrasts the flow of blood beneath which rots; is harder than skeleton against this fragile flesh. The crowns of decomposing hands whose lives’ constituents are dust,

all except gold and stone alone.

[212]

CLOWN (BY PAUL KLEE) Seen in the wink, a link (with) green flaunt, too clear in face (of) shadows which do not appear; a jaunty impulse, yet boxed,

looped (also) in a curve idling, a sidle into

an angle, stencilled by heat; hot thought read through red through red thought what not?

a whatnot leer clear in nose swerve, in blue insinuate grin let in

seen within (is) a view somewhat askew; and you?

(213)

IN THIS HOUSE

All the photographs are faded. All the clocks are slow. Last year’s words lie stale like smoke

on used up air; the piano keys are touched only to be dusted. Rooms and furnishings have been so long familiar that they are merely memories;

and now is happening elsewhere. But, habit being a substitute for will, though the mirrors are tired of our faces,

and spring comes later each year, we go on lighting flowers like candles at windows dissolved by rain.

[214]

CHRISTMAS MORNING

A gull curved like a boomerang slants the sky, tilting the horizon with surge of snow muffling eye and ear.

Its thin scream rattles the rigid twigs. Trees stand shrunk under the crouching clouds, worshipping nothing.

And our packed houses

spires and lights so proudly planted seem no more than a huddle of grey tents on the edge of the waiting mist.

[215]

PROVENCE

Aeons of sun, ages of men make tree-trunks of stone and bark-coloured bricks,

earth weary of feet, life weary and gay.

Mosaics of flesh and kaleidoscope streets seem brilliant in perpetual noon till dark drains warm bronze grey as the faces on sarcophagi.

Strong swords of cypress point a landscape at prime, but pillars now shuttered once framed the same sky and fertile land is manured

by decay. Light dissolves future like outlines of forms and shifts focus to a camp of survivors who linger

sipping the south in a graveyard café.

[216]

AMBASSADOR OF AUTUMN

Year’s spectrum modulates around the centre spectre. Each single moment’s tone

appears alone, yet signals the gradation in the air towards the centre spectre;

clears a half-uncovered curve

cold moon, negative reflector of the centre spectre, where gold reflects last light frost-focused against white, frail parody of sun. Leaf held to itself firm in pattern’s final thread

about to snap, fulfilled as things only may whose sole future is decay.

[217]

(BY PAUL KLEE)

THE SENTENCE

You taught me language, left me with words in hand

to spin their critical cocoon around a life which others lead, which I can merely understand,

caught in a web of maybe, ought, and if; for, disengaged in the act of articulation from the initiating spontaneity, it disdains the direct communication of a kiss or coition or a warning cry;

exist to exorcise by implication the amorphous impulses of beast and bird which, when in need of explication,

must manage without benefit of word. Its narcissistic joy defines a world deformed by form where diagnosis is the sickness, the patient, the nurse

to whom sterilisation is perception’s norm; but now, at least, I know how to curse.

[218]

CONTOURS—HOMAGE TO CEZANNE

Pattern, like a magnetic field,

is passionate in restraint; limits compress

significance; framed energy is sealed. Objects, having nothing to express except themselves, attain intensity in assumed balance, which alleges,

in face of our amorphous liberty, the joy of everything with edges. But these tight contours owe shape and definition to the eye of inessential man who

from complication learns to simplify, fuse form with what alone forms cannot show,

and in this act becomes as sure as they.

[219]

ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPT

Encounter with a friend, acquaintance

or just someone in a bar

is merely a pretext to display your theory of what you are.

Absorbed in your own performance you applaud or criticise, and only to watch your reflection do you look into his eyes. Or, if a contrast’s noticed, it’s to serve as a backcloth useful for the setting

and to show your costume off. He thought you concentrating when you were running through your lines rehearsing gestures while waiting for your cue.

Still soliloquising you said goodbye, went on, and never knew that the stranger, the other

had been speaking to you.

[220]

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Mirror, mirror on the wall show me in succession all

my faces, that I may view and choose which I would like as true.

Teach me skill to dsiguise what’s not pleasing to the eyes, with faith, that life obeys the rules,

in man or God or football pools.

Always keep me well content to decorate attitude and event so that somehow behind the scene I may believe my actions mean; that one can exercise control in playing out a chosen role; rub clouded glass and then, at will, write self on it again.

But if, in some unlucky glance, I should glimpse naked circumstance in all its nowhere-going-to,

may you crack before I do.

[221]

SUBATOMIC SYMPHONY

I

Subatomic particles revolve in supersonic whirls, inaudible to the eye for their frequency’s too high, invisible to the ear

as light can make them disappear. Resting in their mass

protons throb heavy as a double bass. Nuclear notes resonate

in echo-chambers of atomic space, their tone dependent on meson disintegration.

The planetary suite of electrons keeps the beat with saxophonic wails in wave-cycles of piano scales, uncertain of the time to punctuate a flowing line.

II

Out of tune like a touch on a drum

a falter of pulse vibrates through the long taut chord of the bass.

[222]

Rhythm sways to the throb of decay; nucleons jar, unbound from the force of their backing bars;

rebound and release

the discord of magnetic clash. Showers of neutron percussion smash through the twang

of a too-tight string. Swung to sound by their spin overtone neutrinos whine.

The saxophone picks up the theme as jets of electrons in a high-speed scream.

III

Plucked by a lower pitch

strings’ vibrations modulate down. Sounds pitched at a lower key

regain stability. Their pulse like a metronome pulls the elctrons in. Each orbit jump carried on a piano wave quantum. With atomic number as key signature, tune resolves material notes of mass and energy underneath

spreading like ripples of breath.

[223]

AUTOMAT

To problems of communication there’s a rational approach in the world of conversation analysing dialogue and role. In this circumstantial jigsaw we’re pieces that can fit,

being each properly equipped with a well-stocked relationship kit. Whose main tools insight that explains how and why each incident arose. Meaning motive attitude, even obsolescence

are built in every pre-packaged pose.

Unprecedented patterns alter image and technique but it’s comforting to know,

when perplexed by presentation that experience’s a practised P.R.O.

Thus the individual ego (once called a soul) must learn to let the transcendental go;

find fulfilment pulling puppet strings and putting on an entertaining show.

[224]

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SAGITTARIUS

Something dislocates. I find me trying, to be without a predicate. For once a blueprint is no guarantee against anonymity. The self-set questionnaire of circumstance

can’t make all square. Aspects jar.

A day with jagged edges and minutes sharp to breathe through bars retreat to neat articulation;

derides the jingling skeletons of sounds I blame for these complexities: Mercury, Moon, Jupiter, when I was born,

were placed all wrong. Sometimes the stars’ perplexities

are fun, but now, not even names, just pain; thoughts hurt.

The mind’s an aggravated boil, needs lancing; but no tool —unless maybe

these jigsaw shards of useless personality.

At last I can forget the self-made self and work

to turn the spheres and all that matters of ‘I am” into this it that is.

[227]

STILL A-BUILDING

Succinct as algebra Concrete cubes and squares Itself to root in space. Structures, their forces raised To the power of zero, dissect

Themselves with glass. Cranes translate equations Into joint of hoist and strut; recalculate The slide’s rule in multiples Of stone sections A re-solution seeming to vindicate

Trust in a system

That can fit symbol to steel Make mathematics mediate Between concept and cement And express unknown in known As stresses that reciprocate, Value of forces in two dimensions —equilibrium.

[228]

SOCIAL CONTRACT

I'll blow smoke in your eyes if you’ll blow smoke in mine. Light up; relax;

cigarette packs enclose guarantees

of social ease. Strike the right note with a match and fill the gaps in communication

by inhalation of instant pseudo-sympathy. A brand-name’s a shorthand for identity. Squirt out, like a squid, your smokescreen of pride to hide

hopes and needs we can’t express and turn out the inside.

We’ll fill the ashtrays of the day’s conviviality, and part,

stubbing out our fag ends in each other’s heart.

[229]

THE NEEDLE’S

threaded ‘I’ seams (and seems) me

into shape; stitches styles to fit its dressmaker’s dummy which, without a full-stocked wardrobe would fall, formless back into the un-darned whole of inarticulate experience;

round which we pin our paper-patterns of identity designed to make self wearable and placeable within

the patchwork of personality where we cut hem fray tear or just adjust each other’s clothes.

For you do not sharpen to the steel-plated point that pierces intermittently metallic through circumstantial gathers and embroideries;

and must protectively prepare to look distinguished in meetings with reality, or leave your face as well behind you, folded on the chair.

[230]

BEGINNERS PLEASE

In flats libraries and pubs —so many greenrooms where greasepaint taints the atmosphere with scents of self-absorption— they wait for the curtain call. Even lovers communicate in stage whispers, gestures aimed at the audience of extras behind the footlights in a coffee bar. Needing a producer

for a whole personality, without anyone to ask if it’s a farce or tragedy, each rehearses for an unknown part in a play still to be written. The future, an agent, will arrange for them a crowd scene to be secure in, a star to understudy,

a musty retreat among discarded props, or the fascination of a lifetime in the wardrobe trying on role after role; will teach each to forget the hope to find a costume individually designed, a make-up mask to perfect but not distort the face behind, a script of acts to match complexities of mind;

and of stepping from the wings without self-doubt or stage-fright,

clarified and held by a full moment’s spotlight, into a performance of complete articulate reality,

in which thoughts fit in patterns like ballet, no move is mistimed,

and all the banal lines come out

quite different.

[231]

EPICURUS

Dare I eat some cheese, since it’s Panathenaia,

toffee-tasting goat cheese stinking like old Diogenes; might cause dyspepsia or even appendicitis. Dare I risk some wine;

a half-glass hung me over last time. Pleasure is such an exacting discipline. Whatsisname who said something about “burning with a hard gemlike flame”? knew the score

in the trials of an empirical connoisseur. But nowadays the idea seems to raise

response without responsibility. They don’t show much taste, Alcibiades and co.

Hippies miniskirts drug parties, sunstruck by the dazzle of bright surfaces, sensation without sense. It’s true,

reality is mind-reflecting surfaces all through

(a rare treat, this honey from Hymettos)

but to play kottabos with one’s life thus...

To stay dégagé and yet to play, that I could dream of. Give one’s eyes to nature

for a mirror.

Reflection of a raindrop in the moon,

[232]

an actor making rules and game subject and object the same, aesthesis pathat prolepsis, focused by the security of doubt tuned lyre-like for the key to each sensation. Tune in, turn on, drop out

(as I believe they would phrase it) Have I changed desire, anxiety’s death for fear of life,

it’s shifting-toned complexity in which a self is found or lost. The game is hide and seek. What do you think Hermarchos? too dangerous, a blind man’s buff? No, Hermarchos please,

just a little bit of bread and no cheese.

[233]

DON'T BITE THE HAND THAT THROWS DUST IN YOUR EYES

Tit for tat

spits the cat-black kettle at

a watched pot that never boils. Bird in hand’s worth dog and bitch

in manger which will never save our stitch in time.

;

The wise child knows an ill wind blows storms up

in his dad’s teacup but no half-breadfruit falls far from its tree.

Between frying pan and deep blue sea let you and me make hay while in sunless places the human race is cutting off its noses to spite its faces.

[234]

GRAPES FOR GRASSHOPPERS

Why do you walk through the world in gloves

Oh fat white lady whom nobody loves? I’m looking for gift horses in the grass,

hack press or piebald ideas with passwords to let me in to this pretty kettle of vipers.

All you'll get is a snake in the neck. Take thorns from flesh and cricks from tongue;

pick your hand out of the plough while you’re young. I can’t throw stones from castles in air or send smoke signals without a fire.

I must join in writing on this side of the wall. There’s no making omelettes without breaking glass;

stir with a square peg that gathers no moss; suck each day like an egg—Teach that to your gran— then simmer it all in your own frying pan. Polish a long spoon to taste your own truth;

for too many cooks are spoiling the broth.

[235]

COMPUTER

97/100 DV

I salute your translation of

“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” The ghost is ready but the meat is raw our ghost in the machine

makes neuron patterns on a television screen

The cost is steady but the heat is saw McLuhan’s touch completes the form for “Operation Match” The lost is really but the meet is law Cross-circuiting re-structures the limbo of a “thing”

The most is usually but treat is know Binary systems go.

For our inside is out to show

in that sex orgy

technology

[236]

HABITAT

a bus shelters

broken window

pains

telephones shadow-box (trying to connect us)

stone flags waver trip feet in heat

the street

gutters out

in building sights —These are our outside of enough

[237]

(ne pts

FINESSE

AE,

finites

Cnftinctess 1A fiactenes MAftintesim al FIAESSE tn iAfinite mess

(238)

LANDSCAPE WITH YELLOW BIRDS

1S

bk

k feel yellow | e |

bird fly s u kopey e ;

eye

sk op we

?

by i SET weed Sa

birds leafly a

i

hsr

AC

shaped

e

‘ye

by dy

s

es

e€ oe

l l

s wl l

no ww

no w

[239]

ATOMIC

DISINTEGRATION

3 variations on the “Smashed Atom” theme

(1—visual)

(2-vocal)

ATOM

AaaahTtttOoooMmmm

R719“

oi

serre ouh

Vie ae

Vp aie QE

atatatatatatatatatat

aH FV,

Chou

ps 1 fl

tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh

V

uh - t - 00

( = \

OO0Ov000000000000

Û ®

000000

\

o

(diminuendo)

(3—for mass performance) any number of people (1) repeat in

unison several times clearly the word ATOM (2) repeat ATOM at different times out of unison (like a Part song) (3) out of synchronisation repeat in staccato way the individual letters A-T-O-M ending in an unintelligible babble.

[240]

At Work:

Na

W?

W?

W?

Re

At

Tc

W?

W?

W?

Cr

Se

“Mo

I

Mn

Br

F

Te

Po

S:

O

2Na + 2H,O 2NaOh + H, Ah!

At Play:

Hew

He#ere

Pom

Pdeert

Bi

21

Xe-Sé

ScCsScCsScCs He

big

He

rig

Kr

Cocu

Cocu Cocu Psclak!

(241]

C1

2 STAIRCASE POEMS

l l hel ixestriangl

le s lip stespira sil ver jen bent nt pet mt

[242]

CATALOG

THE TEACHINGS OF THE COMPASSIONATE BUDDHA

library of congress catalog card number THE WISDOM OF THE HOLY TALMUD library of congress catalog card number THE ETHICS OF ARISTOTLE

library of congress catalog card number THE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE library of congress catalog card number THE RELATIVITY OF EINSTEIN

library of congress catalog card number THE WESTERN DECLINE OF SPENGLER library of congress catalog card number THE CAPITAL OF KARL MARX

library of congress catalog card number 53-91745 2-6334 6-9932 39-0019

70-6199

SHUFFLE WELL BEFORE COMMENCING

PLAY

[243]

LANGUAGE

LESSON FOR A SCHIZOPHRENIC AGE

The pen is on the table. The The The The The The The

pen is not on the table. writing is on the wall. writing is not on the wall. table is on the floor. table is not on the floor. heart is in the mouth. heart is not in the mouth.

The bull is in the china-shop. The bull is not in the china-shop. The tongue is in the cheek. The tongue is not in the cheek. The room is in the sky. The car is in the sea. The man is in the moon. The man is on the woman. The man is on the man. The woman is on the man. The woman is on the woman. not not not not not God is in his heaven.

[244]

TOOTH

I'm an old mouth at this game. Summer without an apisectomy just wouldn’t seem the same. The tensions of the world compressed between the chair

and that little grey square of windowed air. Battles, defeats, victories

open wider please. On the intimate excitement of mini-crises: an abscess that turned out to be three, one post and crown ‘that crumbled down. Another bit through;

as the filling seeps out of a self. We’re told contemporary ills are due to deprivation of atavistic thrills. But as a testing ground I’d swop war, love, crime, politics or every tenuous perfected skill

for that yearly duel with the drill. Because each time I give my name to the receptionist, who knows if I’ll get back the same

when post-impressionist? There’s more than jaws remodelled or recast. Identity is lost and fought for during each half-hour. And how can I be sure of reconstructing the framework of that smile I left behind me at the door.

[245]

1, 28

Sprinkle a pinch of dust, or three, on Archytas F.R.S. who specialised in nebulae;

memorial—an out-of-date laboratory. Tantalus studies divinity transubstantiating our family flesh;

prefers the gods out of reach. Lord Chief Justice Minos was not given leave to appeal. Pythagoras believed in reincarnation hence lost only bones nerves blood brain. The rest of him’s still waiting. As you pass their floating corpses, astronaut,

erase especially unnecessary words; “But wholly one the night remains, death’s road to be walked once for all’’. How unremarkable that “Furies serve some as a spectacle for Mars”’

or “The greedy sea is a destruction to sailors’’, phrases whose only use is in a grammar. Predicatively dative we define function not being.

Death is not immortalised by apostrophe or life by ideas. We know our place, Horatius, better even than you; find nothing incongruous in “Minds about to die measuring the innumerable sands of stars”,

claim no immunity from dust storms meteorites magnetic shift, because we have them all worked out. Facts do not need emotion.

[246]

Thus: please don’t clutter up the sky with littered personality. I know you're in a hurry, but anyway you don’t have long;

so pulverise the past dear before you hurry on.

(247]

FÊTES NATIONALES & ZAZIE IN THE LONDON UNDERGROUND

“July: I would have painted in a yellow jacket eating cherries.” je m’en fiche de toutes ces affiches, icons

of worship on Boul’ Mich. As the incense of Gauloises burns these saints

of the new dispensation are haloed in self-approbation although THE PRESENT KING OF FRANCE IS BALD Sur le plan du Métro it is clear

just where we want to go, that one may claim reassurance from a multicoloured name, objective design from an abstract line although one may écrire n’importe où

sont les noms de yester-year? (les noms d’antan sont n’importe où) Bien que on songe

à cette mélange des langues and hear a quotation for every occasion, cliché

or paradox, with a coin in the intellectual jukebox (if one can find a bureau de change) si l’on a de la chance de trouver la station de correspondance for the verbal dance, de raccrocher “In a station of the Metro”’

ce passant, the apparition of the literary tradition, still THE PRESENT

KING OF FRANCE

IS BALD

et le quatorze juillet on paie what is due to our nostalgie de la boue avec les mots

qui coûtent trop. Phrases come too dear for where are the words of yester-year?

[248]

The rate of exchange between thing and sign devalues a currency of mental outline so then there is love dancing wine et tous les restes

du second-best, et, as one can, l’on se sauve parce que LE ROI PRESENT DE LA FRANCE EST CHAUVE

(Opening

quotation . from

Dr. Johnson’s

Dictionary;

refrain from philosophical discussions on ‘referring’, on the connection between thing and sign.)

[249]

THE BLUE BOOK

Thus party with witte party with nygraumancy King’s College is on fire; I have an image of dining in Hall with Dr. Dee. We shall talk at a later occasion

of the way in which words and things may be connected. Tonight we should like to say, What the picture tells us is itself,

This language-game is played instead of, We have this experience.

It patterns facts, names, architecture, dates (As in the lawcourts in Paris a motor accident is represented by means of dolls.) A context in which we occur —“the slightly hysterical style of University talk”’— teaches us our meaning;

a fourth dimension for the blue

of that bound typescript. The gap between red and green is then grammatical;

white objects through coloured spectacles. But though our syntax stains the window-glass, those assert party party

stones across the court their tenses per fess argent and vert, per chevron or and gueules.

[250]

LETTERS OF EZRA POUND

In order to be clear about aesthetic words

you have to describe ways of living. said Wittgenstein who was “‘indifferent to his surroundings”. remembering the date (1969) on the calendar an attempt to condense the James novel (a young American T.S.Eliot, write him at Merton, Oxford.

I think him worth watching and

his Portrait of a Lady is very nicely drawn.) in the literary scene of Allen Ginsberg (Apocalyptic tradition of Whitman, of course) could only be tried here (If you people at Cam can do anything in the way of a milieu.) The need of old forms, old situations, as Yeats wrote (1929) also, Ezra when he recreates Propertius

escapes from his scepticism. Whether “historical or philosophical” in approach this is still some form of exercise that don’t depend on the state of your liver;

the bus late an idea in labour

and no pencil or paper (but to dial 999 for an ambulance that night was much more exciting.)

I don’t believe in personal relationships, said the young anthropologist

(female),

[251]

I believe in fantasy. But to fall in love with one’s teachers that also is a matter of economy.

[252]

EPITAPH FOR AN UN-NAMED PRIESTESS

There are not enough nouns around which to create images. For verbs express activity and the act

is unambiguous. Experience is an active

verb. Mummy and Coffin of an Un-named Priestess (c.1050 B.C.). There are not enough pronouns to create images around. Only the ivory handle of a bronze mirror,

said the Lady of Shalott.

Now we move on to the Cycladic Antiquities. Marble figure of a woman from Cambridge

(c.1969 A.D.). “Such a comparison might help to show that common fundamental

sculptural ideas persist.” (Antiparos 25002000 B.C.)(Henry Moore 1969 A.D.). The simplicity of wedge on ovoid, nose in face and the functionality of buttocks

is belied by a shifting poise and glitter an instability of marble. I am, however, sick

of mirrors. And metaphor is a low relief. Manuscript Room, Bassae Room, Tea &

Coffee Room. But all I mean is that no-one wants to be deceived in his own mind.

(Plato, Republic 11 c.380 B.C.). Monochrome is a desired medium though they coloured their statues and we colour our dreams In things which touch most nearly the most important part of him no man really wants to be deceived but

[253]

is terrified of it. But there aren’t enough names. So what is left except fiction, verbal activity

being too crude for us. The act is ambiguous (vide supra). To leave a clay jar inscribed ‘‘Megakles is handsome” and signed by ‘‘Phistias as potter” since

we have already forbidden madness and the representation of madness,

is the alternative to mummification. It is the poised instability of marble. So, of the second case ‘‘in which the poet speaks in his own person’’, “the best example is lyric poetry”. Although “A man cannot play many characters as well as he can, one”, this statue of an un-named person (There are not enough pronouns.) is carved in imitation of Cycladic Art and in compassion for Egyptian Metonymies.

[254]

INDIVIDUALS

are complex not as a tangle of wire

but as a coiled spring before it is stretched out

into simplicity. Strawson’s cat slices

slip through your fingers with a prickle of fur; basic particulars: persons and material bodies. Pound’s cats at Rapallo too hungry to bother

with their place in a conceptual scheme appear nevertheless in the Cantos “some of them are so ungrateful” said T.S. Eliot.

Practical Cats can omit

“the exasperating clause”: “if all objectivity and all knowledge is relative . . .” Mr. Eliot never returned to take his doctor’s degree.

(“Forty six years after my academic philosophizing came to an end, I find myself unable to think in the terminology of this essay. Indeed

I do not claim to understand it.’’) He

slips through your fingers with a prickle of fur. But there is at least a case

that poetry should trace the double helix

[255]

(those interlocking strands of DNA) before it try to straighten the spring.

[256]

VARIATIONS

FROM SAPPHO

1

mingled with all manner of colours mingled withall manner of colours minglad with allmanner of colours mengladwith all mingled of colours man glad withall mangled of colours manglad with all mingle of call ours

2

heart

altogether shine back

learn

shall be to me shall be to me heart

altogether

|

I can

shine back

3 It is not you who are to me it is who are to me is not

you who are to me it is not

me

who?

[257]

4

You burn Yu born One You bore We

me my y me y

5

a(Il) mi(xed) te(Il) tongue (me)

tell to(ngue) ( ) t(all) les(s)

[258]

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1: AN IMPERSONAL STATEMENT

[In Veronica Forrest and Cavan McCarthy, Veronicavan: Reading at the Bristol Arts Centre, 30 December 1967.]

Program of a

Veronica Forrest was born in Malaya in 1947, but educated in Scotland with an early specialisation in Greek and Latin which has

infected her with a, perhaps exaggerated, respect for impersonality and formal values in art. It was this which first aroused her interest in concrete poetry as an antidote to the formlessness and academicism of the Movement writers and the introversion of the so-called

“confessional”

poets. It was also seemingly the first real re-

exploration of language-form since the Eliot-Pound revolution and its American offshoots and as such most suited to the expression of a contemporary environment. This went along with a consum-

ing passion for science, especially in exploring the possibilities of expressing the new universe of nuclear and astro-physics and in trying to treat human situations in terms of such patterns. In prac-

tice however she has found the semantic element almost impossible to exclude and now regards concrete more as a means than as an end in itself. There has been a similar modification of her previous

partisanship of impersonality with the realisation that what makes any work of art valuable is its dynamic expression of the interrelation between subject/object which is often expressed in the content/form tension, and that it is impossible entirely to exclude

the individual “vision” though this in the interests of presenting a balanced re-creation of reality should be kept to the minimum. If there must be a justification for making poems it is surely that they provide the same kind of data concerning the inter-actions of man and his environmental situations as does science only in different terms in the man-impregnation medium of language, in fact,

and by extending the exploration of language-possibilities extend man’s capacity to articulate and experience while at the same time providing, one hopes, new and pleasurable objects for experience in the form of “works of art”. On a more personal level, by showing what can be done with an experience or subject to, perhaps,

help others to live their own experiences more fully and richly.

[260]

2: CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

{In Solstice, no. 9 (Cambridge, 1969 ), to which the author contributed the following four poems:‘Fétes Nationales & Zazie in the London Underground’, ‘The

Blue Book’,

‘Letters of Ezra Pound’,

and ‘Epitaph for an Un-Named

Priestess’. This note was developed as the ‘Note’ to Language-Games (1971). The four poems were not included in that volume.]

The poems attempt to set up a tension between the meaning of the statements which they steal from other contexts such as Pound’s letters, the later work of Wittgenstein, and conversations, and the structure of the poem itself. They share the theme of the impossibility

of expressing,

or

linguistic reality. The

process

attempt

disparate

to

integrate

even

of experiencing,

is a reflection levels

a non-

of our constant

of knowledge,

such

for

instance of the experience of being in a particular place, Cambridge, or encountering

particular ideas—Wittgenstein

comes in

again here as his notion of language games suggests that basically what we do with our words is what we do with our experience of living.

3: NOTE

{ Printed following the poems in Language-Games (Leeds, New Poets Award 2, School of English Press, University of Leeds, 1971).]

Most of these poems are obviously about the experience ofbeing engaged in a certain activity, in a certain place, at a certain time:

the activity, research in English Literature, the place, Cambridge, the time, 1968-69. The attempt has been to deal with these

elements as part of a “historical present” in which past languageforms, whether borrowed from poetry, letters, speech, or the dictionary, are made into a framework for a present act of articulation. This act looks for a form to express the poems’ underlying

theme: the impossibility of expressing some non-linguistic reality,

[261]

or even of experiencing such a reality. Wittgenstein comes in here as I take his work to be the most stimulating exposition of the complexities involved in this view; but his ideas are also used to

explore the second main pre-occupation of the poems, the relationship between “pure” intellectual activity, in fields such as philosophy and theoretical science, and their appearance in an “applied” context, as one element among others in one’s attempt to make sense of concrete experience. It seems to me that this interaction

is best seen as a juxtoposition of varying ways of using language

for one is thus able completely to absorb the non-linguistic constituents of the experience into the art of language; questions of knowledge become questions of technique. This results in the setting up of a tension between the meaning of the ideas and state-

ments in their original context and their appearance in the poem; they are in a sense different expressions, not because they refer to

another area of experience—it is their own original area of reference that I have wished to make part of the subject-matter of

poetry—but because they are used in a different way. This kind of tension can be seen as a special case of the conflicts

that arise from our constant attempt to integrate disparate levels of knowledge; it thus ties in with the exploration of the present sense of the past through its language-forms. At the vaguest level it could be subsumed under the grandiose heading of ‘Art versus Life”; for basically what we do with our words is what we do with our experience of living.

There is the opportunity to turn theoretical debate and abstract statement into a means of technical experiment in the actual medium of poetry, to explore new formal possibilities while extending the range of material dealt with. This involves an assimilation, not merely of the ideas but of the speech-forms of the relevant areas

of discourse and even their methods of typographical layout. Certain poems here tentatively explore such possibilities. It will be seen that this leads to a new stress on the importance of “subject”?

in a poem; but because it is not the ideas merely but the actual linguistic forms that are to be the object of attention, the new

kind of subject will be one that can be approached and even

[262]

defined in terms of formal experimentation. The process is one of smashing and rebuilding the forms of thought. Thus one might be permitted to feel a, certain affinity with those who see the role of the University as a subversion of accepted social reality. The means

may be destructive however, but the end, or rather each

particular end—for there are as many ends as there are poems—is not. The construction of poems becomes the record of a series of individual thresholds of the experience of being conscious; they form the definitions, or affirmation, in time and in language, of human identity.

4: PREFACE

[In On the Periphery (Cambridge, Street Editions, 1976).]

The mysteries of this book are partially summed up in its title. After

the head-on

collision

with

non-poetic

languages

in my

previous work I was faced by a stylistic situation on the periphery of traditional

poetry.

The

sequence

of pieces here represents—

apart from their individual merit—a series of strategics for dealing with this difficulty. A difficulty which must confront any poet at this time who can take and make the art a new and serious

opponent—perhaps even a successful alternative—to the awfulness

of the modern world. I have argued elsewhere that this awfulness cannot be overcome with entire reference to the non-verbal world for the non-verbal world, like other deities, helps only those who help themselves. And what poetry gains from that world is gained through language, through the very languages that give us the world. For poetry, as always, has special access to aspects of language distinct from the aspect of communication. These simple, and very complex, mechanisms have been largely lost in English

poetry since the twenties. So that my concern with French poetry and poetic theory and with ideas associated with “Structuralism”’ is a manceuvre of style, of verbal detail, as well as a manceuvre of theme and ofsocial significance.

[263]

Hence the graph of this book begins in the extreme of aleatory poems, moves into simple lyricism confronting the claims of the external

world

with stylistic simplicity, reaches, in “The Dying

Gladiator”, an extreme of both technical and thematic complexity,

and ends, in “The Lady of Shalott”, by recapturing the right to

speak directly through the traditional ranges of rhymed stanza.

The turning point comes in “Pastoral” where I realise in practice

what I have long known in theory: that it is precisely those non-

meaningful aspects of language—rhyme, rhythm and stanzaic metre are only the most obvious—which are poetry’s strength and

its defence. What had been tendentious obscurity of meaning becomes, therefore, a tendentious refusal of meaning, except the minimum needed to create verbal form at all, this coupled with a more assured and more traditional formal experimentation in the two Odes, the epitaph on Ezra Pound, the assertion of affinity

with the past of English poetry, especially the neglected past of the late nineteenth-century, in “‘Strike”’.

Thus “The Lady of Shalott” is both the end of this quest for a lost imaginative freedom made actual in verbal detail and a beginning which, freed from sterile self-absorption, will move on to create new artifices of eternity. Thus also, the last poem “Sonnet” is the love poem I have tried throughout to write straight and have been held back from by these technical and sociological difficulties. For, as to theme, this book is the chart of three quests. The

quest for a style already discussed, the quest for a subject other than the difficulty of writing, and the quest for another human being. Indeed such equation of love with knowledge and the idea of style as their reconciliation is as old as the art itself, for the other person is the personification of the other, the unknown, the external world and all one’s craft is necessary to catch him. And, of course, being caught as a poetic fiction, as a real person he is gone. And so one is left with the poems—what they do and what they

suggest as possible. “For us there is only the trying / The rest is not our business”.

[264]

5: RICHARD II

[Written to introduce Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s commissioned poem ‘Richard 11” at the public reading in Southwark Cathedral of Poems for Shakespeare (part of the Shakespeare birthday celebrations) on 26 April 1975. A memoir of the circumstances of the reading, in her absence, of the poem and her chosen passage from Shakespeare, Richard II, V, v, 42-66,

was published in A. Rudolf, ed., Poems for Shakespeare, 4 (London, Globe Playhouse Publications, 1976).]

This poem requires a little introduction which I hope will help you to understand what I am trying to do. I picked the play, Richard 11, because it is one of my favourites and because it is one of Shakespeare’s most striking uses of the image of the actor as hero. This image, of course, accompanies far-reaching meditation on the relationship between appearance and reality. The difference between appearance and reality and how poetry may bridge this difference by creating imaginative orders of words—for it is language that really mediates between the world of appearances and internal reality or the world of reality and internal appearances depending on one’s philosophical position—has long fascinated me both in theory and practice. This problem and the problem of time are closely connected, for it is through time that appearance

and reality interact, through time that poetry moves, and Richard II is therefore a play much concerned with time. These are the themes then about which or around which I wished to construct my poem but it would not do to sit down and write a versified meditation on time change appearance and reality. For this there are several reasons. First—though perhaps I should not let this out—I don’t have very many or very new ideas about these topics at least just now. Second ideas are not simply assimilated into poems direct but must make their way through the organisation of technical devices ranging from metaphor to metre. Third,

and most important, I believe that at the present time poetry must progress by deliberately trying to defeat the expectations of its readers or hearers, especially the expectation that they will be able

to extract meaning from a poem. A poem must work to transform

the area of linguistic meaning into a technical device like rhythm

[265]

or metre. Consequently the poem in question sets out to look as if it were a meditation on time appearance and reality while in fact using these themes as points in its organisation as a metrical formal structure.It includes the normal expectations of the reader/listener but seeks to upset these in the interests of stressing the importance of non-meaningful levels of language in poetry. This is a more difficult undertaking from writing an ordinary poem as the balance of meaning and non-meaning must be very precariously set up. I think it must be attempted, however, if poetry is once again to take its place as an experimental exploration of the human mind working in language.

[266]

A: DISSERTATION & PUBLISHED LITERARY CRITICISM BY THE AUTHOR

‘Poetry as Knowledge: The Use of Science by Twentieth-Century Poets’, Ph. D. dissertation (Cambridge University, 1971).

‘rrationality and Artifice: A Problem in Recent Poetics’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 11, no. 2 (Spring 1971), pp. 123-33.

‘Levels in Poetic Convention’, Journal of European Studies, vol. 2 (1971), pp. 35-51. ‘The Ritual of Reading Salammbd’,

Modern

Language Review,

vol. 67, no. 4 (Spring 1972), pp. 787-98.

‘Au-delà du réel: La Poésie anglaise moderne à l’heure du choix’, Chroniques de l’art vivant, no. 29 (Paris, avril 1972), pp. 24-25.

Translation by Michel Canavaggio of ‘Beyond Reality...’ ‘Beyond Reality: Orders of Possibility in Modern English Poetry’,

Fuse, no. 1 ([Cambridge], June 1972), pp. 20-23.

‘Necessary Artifice: Form and Theory in the Poetry of Tel Quel’, Language and Style, vol. 7, no. 1 (Winter 1973), pp. 3-26. ‘Rational- Artifice: Some Remarks on the Poetry of William Empson’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 4 (Winter 1974), pp. 225-38.

‘Dada, Unrealism and Contemporary Poetry’, Twentieth-Century

Studies, vol. 12 (December 1974), pp. 77-93.

‘Unrealism as the Poetic Mode for this Century’, Spindrift, no. 1 (Canterbury, [1977?]), pp. 16-27.

Poetic Artifice:

A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry

(Man-

chester, Manchester University Press, and New York, St. Martins Press, 1978).

‘La Planéte séparée: John Donne et William Empson’, Cahiers de l’Herne, Les Dossiers H: John Donne, ed. J.-M. Benoist (Paris,

L’Age d’homme, 1983), pp. 213-46.

[268]

B: PUBLISHED LETTERS FROM THE AUTHOR

‘Extract from a Letter to the Editor’, [dated 7/5/72], Landseer

vol. 1, no. 3 ([Cambridge], October 1972). ‘A Letter to G.S.Fraser’, dated 19/8/74, Adam International Review, vol. XXXIX, nos. 391-393 (London, 1975).

C: PERSONAL TRIBUTES TO THE AUTHOR

Isobel Armstrong, ‘Feeling and Playing’, Adam..

., id.

G.S. Fraser, ‘Veronica: A Tribute’, ibid.

Graham Hough, ‘Foreword’, Poetic Artifice:

A Theory of Twenti-

eth Century Poetry (Manchester, Manchester University Press, and New York, St. Martins Press, 1978). F.Q. Lawson, ‘The Outrageous Friend’, Adam. . ., id. [Tim Longville, ed.], For Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Veronica

Forrest-Thomson, a memorial anthology of poems and a translation by Anthony Barnett, Michael Chamberlain, Andrew Crozier, Denis Goacher, John Hall, Kris Hemensley, John James, Tim Longville, Douglas Oliver, John Riley (Pensnett, Staffs., Ferry, Great Works, Grosseteste,1975).

Edwin

Morgan,

‘Unfinished

Poems:

A

Sequence

for Veronica

Forrest-Thomson’, Poems of Thirty Years (Manchester, Carcanet,

1982). J.H.Prynne, ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson: A Personal On the Periphery (Cambridge, Street Editions, 1976).

Memoir’,

Anthony Rudolf, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Postscript: Veronica ForrestThomson’, Poems for Shakespeare, 4 (London, Globe Playhouse

Publications, 1976) [see Appendix 5].

[269]

D: SOUND RECORDINGS OF THE AUTHOR

Essex Arts Festival, University of Essex, 27 April, 1967. Deposited in the British Library, National Sound Archive, ref. T7209.

The author reads the following poems: ‘Through the Looking Glass’, ‘According to the Script’, ‘Clown (by Paul Klee)’, section I of ‘Subatomic Symphony’. Anthony

Rudolf’s

London

apartment,

14 June,

1973.

Private

recording and unpublished transcript. Informal discussion on poetry with David Beugger, Richard Burns, Veronica ForrestThomson,

William

Oxley,

Lawrence

Pitt-Kethley,

Anthony

Rudolf, Geoffrey Squires, John Welch, Augustus Young. Cambridge Poetry Festival, 17 April, 1975. Deposited in the British Library, National Sound Archive, ref. T6013. The author reads the following poems: ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, ‘Cordelia: or, “A Poem Should not Mean, but Be”’’, ‘S/Z’, ‘Lemon and Rosemary’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Strike’.

Cambridge Poetry Festival, 18 April, 1975. Deposited in the British Library, National Sound Archive, ref. T6023. Poetry Forum:

‘Unrealism and Death in Contemporary Poetry’ with

Michel Couturier and Veronica Forrest-Thomson; introduced by Richard Burns. participate. |

[Denise

Roche

[270]

was announced

but did not

NOTES À supplementary loose leaf of notes is included with this volume.

ABBREVIATIONS

USED

IN THE NOTES

Cordelia: or, ‘A Poem Should not Mean, but Be’ ({Leicester], Omens Poetry Pamphlet, no. 2, 1974); [1] denotes the first unnumbered section; II denotes the second numbered section. CPF

A tape recording of the author reading her poems at the Cambridge Poetry Festival, 17 April 1975; deposited in the British Library,

National Sound Archive. Earth Ship, no. 12, ‘A Womens Issue’ (Southampton, October 1972). Language-Games

(Leeds, New

Poets Award

2, School of English

Press, University of Leeds, 1971). Section of OP entitled ‘Last Poems’.

Omens, vol. 3, no. 2 (Leicester, January 1974); contains the five poems in CII.

A copy of O with amendments and comments in the author’s hand dated 12/1/74. Oxford English Dictionary. On the Periphery (Cambridge, Street Editions, 1976). Typescripts of OP; 73 denotes a copy known in November 1973 and used for the present volume; 75 denotes a copy known in May 1975 and used for OP.

Notebook entitled ‘Pomes’ containing drafts of many of the poems in OP, as well as other poems. Poetic Artifice: ATheory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (Manchester, Manchester University Press, and New York, St. Martins Press, 1978).

Twelve Academic

1970).

UCL

Questions (Cambridge, The Author, February

Manuscripts and typescripts in the Tlaloc Archive deposited in The Library, University College London.

LANGUAGE-GAMES

The first thirteen poems were reprinted, with no important Twelve Academic Questions (1970), a pamphlet typed and author. The first poem in TAQ, ‘Variations from Sappho’, in L-G and is included here in ‘Uncollected Poems’. The printed in Appendix 3.

ON THE

differences, from published by the was not reprinted ‘Note’ to L-G is

PERIPHERY

On the Periphery (1976) was prepared posthumously from a photocopied typescript provided by Jonathan Culler in May 1975. In addition to the author’s collection of that title, OP attempted to gather further poems under the title ‘Last Poems’. In preparing the present edition, ‘OP’75 was compared with a photocopied typescript received by J.H. Prynne from the author in November 1973. Reference was also made to the pamphlet Cordelia: or, ‘A Poem Should not Mean, but Be’(1974) which contains a number of the poems in OP. The text used here is ‘OP’73. This typescript consists of a contents page, a preface, and the poems. The last two poems, ‘Canzon’ and ‘In Memoriam’, do not appear on the contents page. Two poems, ‘To R.Z. and M.W.’ and ‘On Reading Mr. Melville’s Tales’, are added in the author’s hand to the contents page in their respective positions. Some of the poems are typed by the author; others are typed on another typewriter possibly by a professional typist. All but the title poem of the ten poems in C are included in ‘Op’73. All ten were reprinted, some in substantially different versions, in OP; but two poems, ‘Sonnet’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, were erroneously

included in ‘LP’. ‘OP’75 partly pre-dates ‘OP’73: some leaves do not include amendments in the author’s hand on the same originals used for both photocopies; five poems in ‘OP’75 are not in typescript at all but in photocopies of the pages of C[1]. The ordering of OP, including its division into two sections, the title section and ‘LP’, is not in accord with the ‘Preface’ which identifies ‘Sonnet’ as the last poem of the title collection. There is no evidence for this

ordering and division, and there is other contradictory evidence: of the eight poems printed in ‘LP’ two, ‘Sonnet’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, are included

in ‘OP’73;

and two,

‘In Memoriam’

and ‘Canzon’,

are included

among the poems in ‘OP’73, although not listed on the contents page. Two further poems,

‘Since

the Seige and Assault Was Ceased in Troy...’ and

‘Cordelia ...’, although not included in ‘OP’73 nevertheless appear in draft manuscripts, in a notebook entitled ‘Pomes’, together with other poems belonging to the title collection, dating their gestation, at least, from the same period. It does not seem possible to establish with certainty either the author’s

latest intentions as to the ordering and contents of the title collection or, in some cases, which of several variants should take precedence over others. For

[273]

example, C post-dates ‘OP’73 yet includes variants printed in journals predating ‘OP’73. In following here the contents page of ‘OP’73, the position of ‘Sonnet’ is now in accord with the ‘Preface’; other poems, including those possibly intended for the collection but not listed on the contents page, are included here in ‘Further Poems’. The ‘Preface’ to OP is printed in Appendix 4. The ordering of the poems in C is as follows:

(1)

ul

Sonnet The Garden of Proserpine In Memoriam Canzon Cordelia

An Arbitrary Leaf Pastoral The Ear of Dionysios Ode: The Lady of Shalott Strike

‘On Naming of Shadows’ In the typescript the third stanza has been compressed, almost certainly in error, into seven lines. The lineation restored here follows an earlier version

printed, with minor differences, in Landseer, vol. 1, no. 3 ([Cambridge], October 1972); and ES.

‘An Arbitrary Leaf An earlier version was printed in O, and C. OA adds ‘for Roland Barthes’:

Printed in natural colours we find a way always to deny the world; even its “aerial view” from 66 a the tower LYitself”.» A biro-cross marks the place where our arcades and buttresses dissolved in air;

but still it is a “carte-postale de luxe” reminder of ‘‘an extraordinary experience”. These occasions have a way of multiplying: the treads are uneven with “five-hundred-years of wear” and darken to a height of—wouldn’t you say?— about the same number of feet. This would never be allowed in England, such sudden and insouciant

lack of the next step. Give me your hand. Shall we exorcise these colours that contrast us with our evening walk consciously encoded in the voice and gesture of our shadowy design

to undermine the objects on its path. And so this ivy leaf, in lack of colour in perfected shape may be “like” fan-vaulting (communication having been accepted) but no finality in such a text can justify a reference to Maillezais, or Clément and his castle, Villandraut.

[274]

‘Drinks with a Mythologue’ An earlier version entitled ‘Drinks with a Metalogue’, with otherwise minor

differences, was printed in A Range of Curtains (Hebden Bridge, 1973) with the note ‘see Roland Barthes’. ‘Address to the Reader, from Pevensy Sluice’ An earlier version, with very different lineation, was printed in ES; a draft

manuscript on two leaves torn from a notebook (not ‘P’) is dated 20/8/71:

If it were quicksand you could sink; something needing a light touch soon and so simply takes its revenge. Slightly west of Goodwin Sands the land hardens again with history, resists

the symbol. Chalk requires an allegorical hand, or employee of Sussex Water Board to set a notice here: DANGER

SUBMERGED

STRUCTURES

and all at once Transformational Grammar “peoples” the “emotional landscape” with refutation. You may hear its melancholy long withdrawing roar even on Dover beach watching the undertow of all those trips across to France. Follow the reader and his writer, those emblematic persons along their mythic route charting its uncertain curves and camber; for to be true to any other you must—and I shall never now—recover a popular manœuvre known mostly as, turn over and go to sleep. ‘On the Periphery’ An earlier version, with very different lineation, was printed in ES:

Ducks flee into the undergrowth like eponymous heroes as we approach the past, walking slowly on a path beside a waterway or something liquid. These stories are committed to writing only when they have reached (we have reached) a high degree of sophistication. Sanctioned & solacing polythene buttercups strew the way with images of inevitable “natural” regeneration. Somewhere the table’s set far from the traffic jam, thus she spoke, turning, mov’d the third heaven,

that popular memory. So many recipes now set revolving &, Oh, that reminds me (poetry functions as tribal mnemonic) who are we having for dinner tomorrow?

[275]

‘Approaching the Library’ 1. 13: the typescript reads ‘Devil’s Dike’ but this is not correct orthography. ‘Facsimile of a Waste Land’

‘op’73 has an amendment absent from ‘OP’75.

in the author’s hand from ‘...the Waste Land’,

‘Pastoral’

Printed as a poster in collaboration with the artist Anne Zefferelli; one in a

series of poster poems published by the Cambridge Poetry Festival 1975. The text is in the author’s hand; 1.13 reads ‘Like, our...’ An earlier version was

printed in Fuse, no. 2 (Cambridge, November 1972); and, with minor differences, in O,C, and PA (PA I. 12 reads‘... acat’s...): OA adds ‘for J.H.Prynne / il miglior fabbro’; and below the poem:

my first head-on collision successfully averted

the other

à

4

two

t

seconds

long vehicle |me

the t

me

t other

They are our creatures clover, and they love us through the long summer meadows’ diesel fumes. Smooth as their scent and contours clear however

less than enough to compensate for names. Jagged neither Raised remind

are names and not our creatures in sense or fullness like the flowers. voices in a car or by a river us of the world that is not ours.

Silence in grass and solace in blank verdure

summon the frightful glare of nouns and nerves, The gentle foal linguistically wounded squeals like the car’s brakes, like our twisted words. ‘Le Signe (Cygne)’

A draft manuscript in ‘P’ and a draft typescript are entitled ‘For the Third Time Shake the Snow off Your Boots’; a draft manuscript on a leaf torn from a notebook (not ‘P’) entitled ‘Le Cygne (Signe)’ is dated 1/3/72. ‘The Ear of Dionysios: Ode’ O and C print the title without ‘Ode’; ‘Ode’ is added in the author’s hand to ‘OP’.

ll. 15-24 comprise two prose paragraphs; there is no evidence as to whether

[276]

the author intended right margin justification. 1. 22: the author’s orthography is ‘paidophilia’ (in OED), not as printed in OP. O and C print the inset lines (26, 28, 30, etc.) with a common left margin. OA has three amendments: one appears in the author’s hand in the typescript (I. 36 originally reading ‘but refill the flask in island lochs’); but two do not: 1. 30: ‘You can’t get back on the other shore’. 1. 45: ‘my steering veers’. ‘Le Pont Traversé: Ode’

ll. 9-40 comprise five prose paragraphs; there is no evidence as to whether or not the author intended right margin justification. ‘Strike’ First printed, with minor differences, in O andC. CPF has the following differences: 1. 7 repeats ‘that lover’ five times.

1. 29 gives ‘. . . a quest.’ (as do O and C). 1. 30 gives ‘. . . -before feel about it.’ (as do O and C).

‘The Lady of Shalott: Ode’ First printed, with minor differences, entitled ‘Ode: The Lady of Shalott’ in O and C; and entitled ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in PA. L 3: PA prints ‘For if what we seek cannot be truth,’.

1.10: the typescript reads ‘No one would wish . . .’; O, C, PA, and CPF give ‘No one would care .. .’ and, exceptionally, this has been accepted. 1. 21: OA adds a period also printed in PA. 1. 27: the author’s orthography in ‘OP’, O, and C is ‘Leucritius’; OA the ‘e’.

deletes

‘The Garden of Proserpine’ There is no dedication in the typescript. C, from where this poem was taken for ‘LP’ (there is no typescript in ‘OP’75), prints ‘in memoriam A.C.Swinburne’. CPF has ‘. . . which is of course the title of a poem by Swinburne but I’ve taken it over. It’s for Catherine Cullen.’ 1, 69: CPF omits ‘... as those who refuse to try.’ 1. 73: CPF has ‘And we still loved...’

FURTHER

POEMS

This section contains six of the eight poems included in ‘LP’; and three uncollected poems, two of which are apparently previously unpublished.

[277]

‘A Plea for Excuses’

Unpublished typescript. Draft manuscripts on the first pages of poem from the same period as ‘OP’. The following lines are added script in the author’s hand to the right of ll, 3-5: ‘These thoughts us but of our / creatures. It is the indirect / free style’; possibly an

‘P’ date the to the typeare / not of alternative.

1, 25: the typescript and a draft manuscript read ‘Then...’ but the sense, confirmed by several trial amendments in an earlier draft, requires ‘There . .

‘Since the Seige and Assault Was Ceased in Troy . . Typescript in ‘OP’75. Printed in ‘LP’. Draft manuscript in ‘P’, headed ‘Project for “Gawain and the Green Knight”’, with the section titles ‘The Beheading Game’, ‘The Temptation’, ‘The Exchange of Winnings’, dates the poem from

the same period as ‘OP’.

‘I have a little hour-glass’ and ‘I have a little nut-tree’ Unpublished. Draft manuscript in ‘P’ dates the poems from the same period as OP [see also ‘Facsimile of a Waste Land’] ; manuscript (including drafts) on both sides of a leaf torn from a notebook (not ‘P’); the drafts are followed by ‘This poem has now been metamorphosed—the nursery rhyme meant to give frivolity and: (I hope) a sort of childish menace to the cliché material—into:’ I have a little hour-glass eee

ee

meee

ere

eee

eee

‘and finally, unrecognisably:’ I have a little nut-tree

‘In Memoriam’

Typescript in ‘OP’73 (but not listed in the contents) entitled ‘In Memoriam J.D.C.’

Printed

in C, entitled

‘In Memoriam’,

from where the poem

was

taken for ‘LP’ (there is no typescript in ‘OP’75). ‘Canzon’

Typescript in ‘OP’73 (but not listed in the contents). Printed in C from where the poem was taken for ‘LP’ (there is no typescript in ‘OP’75). ‘Cordelia: or, ‘““A Poem Should not Mean, but Be”’’

Printed in c from where the poem was taken for ‘LP’. Only a draft typescript, entitled ‘Pain Stopped Play or “The Twilight of the Gods” / for the Star’, has been found. A draft manuscript, entitled ‘Tradition and the Indi-

vidual Talent’, on the last pages of ‘P’ dates the gestation of the poem from the same period as ‘OP’.

[278]

CPF has the following differences: 1. 66: ‘In fact I never...’ 1. 78: ‘Riddle me riddle me randy ree’. ll. 95-97: omitted. 1.112: ‘... they are all dead.’ 1. 153: ‘When they try...’ 1.159: ‘It isin the Iliad, read it...’ ll. 170-171: omitted. L 172: ‘They that have . . .’;C and ‘LP’ print ‘They have . . .’ in error. : 1. 181: ‘The Profession of Lies’ in place of ‘1974 and All That’. 1. 197: omits ‘—the memorable dun’. 1. 203: ‘... in a shower of rain’. ‘Richard 11°

Two typescripts: the first, in ‘OP’75, printed in ‘LP’; the second printed in

Poems for Shakespeare, 4 (London, Globe Playhouse Publications, 1976). 1. 30: both typescripts read ‘. . . pieced my own doll’, almost certainly in error; different errors also occur in both typescripts in ‘squeezed’ in 1. 29. 1. 39 is added in the author’s hand to the first typescript; and typed in the second typescript. A note intended to accompany the public reading of this commissioned poem is printed in Appendix 5. GA

No typescript has been found. Printed, without a title, in Meantime,

no. 1

(Cambridge, April 1977). CPF gives the title; the author introduces the poem as follows: ‘It’s called “‘S/Z”’ which is the title of avery well known book by Roland Barthes.’ ‘Lemon and Rosemary’

Typescript in ‘OP’75. Printed in ‘LP’. Possibly unfinished; the author reads a variant on CPF and introduces the poem as follows: ‘Now this one is really a sort of work in progress. It’s not finished and I dare say that I'll alter the word order and line order a bit but I’d like to see how it reads. It’s called,

with a backwards glance at “garlic and sapphires” [T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’, Il, l. 1], “Lemon and Rosemary”. It’s for Catherine Cullen.’

1.15 [CPF l. 14]: the author’s typewriter does not distinguish Os from Os.

Though my deserted frying pans lie around me I do not want to make it cohere. Nobody. I, myself. Shooting live subjects in pictures sung with imagination and wrung with truth. Dean knew it was blackmail.

[279]

Hung up to dry for fishing lines on the side of the grey wharf of Lethe. Is this a chisel I see before me. If so I want to hack my name on the bedroom door. A star shines on the hour of our meeting: Lucifer, son of the morning. And

Thanks for your lighter 1 have forgotten the matches. O, why do I hate doctors so?

There was a time some years ago... But do dial one 0 0 0 0 On the best battle fields No dead bodies

POETRY SUCH AS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POETRY OF TEL QUEL Unpublished typescript. The prose passages from ‘Book 11° of Comme by Marcelin Pleynet and two poems by Denis Roche, ‘: that one doesn’t...’ and

‘Link together .. .’, printed, with minor differences, in Strange Faeces, no. 16 (New York, [1974?]). An ‘Introduction’ and ‘References to the Introduction’, removed from the typescript and deleted in the author’s hand from the contents page, either became, or were developed as, ‘Necessary Artifice: Form and Theory in the Poetry of Tel Quel’, Language and Style, vol. 7, no. 1 (Winter 1973), which

includes,

with minor

differences, extracts from the

translations. The date of the last reference in the ‘Bibliography’ to Poetry Such As is 1969; the date of the last reference in ‘Necessary Artifice’ is 1971.

The typescript has been collated with the French texts and their typography followed here as closely as possible. In an undated letter to P. Buck, editor of Curtains, sent from

Leicester, c.September

1972, the author writes, ‘...I

have taken a translator’s freedom in my own translations both verse and prose; I am not a machine for interpreting and I reproduce in the vein of one language what I find in the sinew of another. If you suppose the inaccuracies of exact word equivalence arose from inadequacy in my knowledge of French you couldn’t be more mistaken. . . .’

UNCOLLECTED

EARLY

POEMS

Poems known only in manuscript or typescript are apparently previously unpublished.

[280]

‘Sagittarius’

Manuscript dated 28/11/66, the author’s nineteenth birthday. ‘Still A-Building’

Breakthru, vol. 6, no. 32 (Haywards Heath, Sussex, January-February 1967). ‘Social Contract’

Phoenix, New Quarterly Series, no. 2 (Belfast, Summer 1967).

‘The Needle’s’ Equator, no. 5 (Liverpool 1967). “Beginners Please’ Equator, no. 6 (Liverpool 1967). ‘Epicurus’

Typescript; the author’s Liverpool address on the verso of the last page. ‘Don’t Bite the Hand that Throws Dust in Your Eyes’ Typescript. Printed in Veronica Forrest and Cavan McCarthy, Veronicavan:

Program of a Reading at the Bristol Arts Centre, 30 December 1967.

‘Grapes for Grasshoppers’ Veronicavan...

‘Computor 97/100DV’ Veronicavan...

‘Habitat’

Manuscript; typescript in UCL. Printed in Tlaloc, no. 15 (Blackburn, 1967). ‘fine’

Manuscript in UCL.

‘Landscape with Yellow Birds’

Typescript in UCL. ‘Atomic Disintegration’

Part manuscript part typescript in UCL.

[281]

‘At Work: / At Play:

Typescript in UCL. ‘2 Staircase Poems’

Typescript in UCL.

‘Catalog’

Printed on one side of a single leaf; originally part of an unidentified loose leaf publication, by various contributors, from which it has become separated.

‘Language Lesson for a Schizophrenic Age’ Printed on the other side of the leaf described above; dated by hand (the author’s?) 1968.

‘Tooth’ Manuscript dated 17/5/68. “20:

Poetry Review, vol. LX, no. 1 (London, Spring 1969). ‘Fêtes Nationales & Zazie in the London Underground’

Solstice, no. 9 (Cambridge, 1969).

‘The Blue Book’

Solstice, no. 9 (Cambridge, 1969). ‘Letters of Ezra Pound’

Solstice, no. 9 (Cambridge, 1969).

‘Epitaph for an Un-Named Priestess’ Typescript. Printed in Solstice, no. 9 (Cambridge, 1969).

‘Individuals’ Typescript; the author’s Cambridge address on the verso of the last page. ‘Variations from Sappho’

The first poem printed in TAQ reprinted in L-G.

and the only poem in that volume not

[282]

\\

LA AY

Translations [tr.] are indexed by sequence titles. According to the Script Acrostic Address to the Reader, from Pevensey Sluice A Fortiori

Alka-Seltzer Poem Ambassador of Autumn (by Paul Klee) An Arbitrary Leaf Antiphrasis Antiquities

220 26 65 46

36 217 60 29 54

95 69

A Plea for Excuses Approaching the Library A Reaction to Rings Aries Atomic Disintegration

212 210 240

At Work:/At Play:

241

Automat

224

Beginners Please

234

Canzon

102

Catalog Christmas Morning Clown (by Paul Klee) from Comme Book I [tr.] from Comme Book U [tr.]

243 215 Bites 127 139

Computer 97/100 DV Contours—Homage to Cezanne

236 219

Conversation on a Benin Head

725

Cordelia: or, ‘A Poem Should not Mean, but Be’

Criteria for Continuing a Series

104

42

Don’t Bite the Hand that Throws Dust in Your Eyes Drinks with a Mythologue Ducks & Rabbits

234 64 22

Epicurus

232

Epitaph for an Un-Named Priestess from Eros énergumène [tr.]

253 181

Facsimile of a Waste Land Fêtes Nationales & Zazie in the London Underground fine For the Spider who Frequents Our Bath

71 248 238 57

[284]

Gemini

Grapes for Grasshoppers Group Theory

206 235 515

Habitat

237

Identi-Kit

Idols of the (Super) Market I have a little hour-glass I have a little nut-tree

In Defence of Graham Hough: Style and Stylistics In Defence of Leavis: the Common Pursuit Individuals In Memoriam

In In In It

Memoriam Ezra Pound the Greenhouse This House Doesn’t Matter about Mantrippe

208 27 99 99 oi 51 255 100 82 209 e214. 47

January Morning

205

Landscape with Yellow Birds Language Lesson for a Schizophrenic Age Leaving the Library L’ Effet du Réel

Letters of Ezra Pound

232 244 70 58 114 80 173 74 251

Michaelmas Monsieur the Pilot, Truly Royal [tr.]

19 163

Lemon and Rosemary Le Pont Traversé: Ode from Les Idées centésimales de Miss Elanize [tr.] Le Signe (Cygne)

Notes to Chapter 1,002 Not Pastoral Enough

43 73

246 54 68 66

128

On Naming of Shadows On Reading Mr. Melville’s Tales On the Periphery

[285]

Pastoral

Pfarr-Schmerz (Village-Anguish) Phrase Book Point of View at Noon Provence

Richard II

Sagittarius Selection Restrictions on Peanuts for Dinner

Since the Seige and Assault Was Ceased in Troy... Social Contract Sonnet

Still A-Building Strike

Subatomic Symphony S/Z

Taurus

The Aquarium The Arising of the Intruder [tr.] Theatre for the Activities of Eros [tr.] The Blue Book The Brown Book The Dying Gladiator The Ear of Dionysios: Ode The Further-Off-From The Garden of Proserpine The Hyphen The Lady of Shalott: Ode The Needle’s The Sentence The Transcendental Aesthetic Three Proper Through the Looking Glass Tooth

To R.Z. and M.W.

230 218

221 245

Two Other 2 Staircase Poems

242

Variations from Sappho

257

Zettel

23

[286]

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iiin © iii BIRKBECK COLLEGE Malet Street, London WCIE 7HX 071-631 6239 If not previously recalled for another reader,

this book should be returned or renewed before the latest date stamped below.

13 JAN tho3 08 OCT 1999 4 & FEB 20

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