from The Fly on the Page (The Gig, 2004)
from Trevor Joyce, “On ‘Without Asylum’:
an email exchange”:
The structure is actually much simpler than it appears, in many ways: a three parter. There are three sections of “reversed causality,” taking three “destructive actions” (knife in the back, destruction of woodland, open-cast mining – increasingly impersonal), and sort of working back from the instant of destruction to attempt to identify what the agent at the root of the chain of causation might be in each case. My interest was how to represent the hybrid quality of these agencies, given the way power, responsibility, and knowledge are distributed in the world: the responsible agents are not individuals but clusters of individuals intercut with machinery and information systems. Because that’s so utterly abstract, I then imposed a “natural” growth structure, operating forwards, on each of the reversed causal chains: knife=bird; woodsman’s axe=fruiting branch with gathering bees; excavator=mineral crystal.
After each of the first two sections, there’s a quotation representing an utopian hope of reaching beyond destruction – “everything broken . . .” is from Buber, “shelter from the fall . . .” is a middle-Irish “mad sweeney” quatrain Harry Gilonis asked me to translate. In each case the utopia dissolves because, I suggest, there’s an implicit claim to an illusory innocence, an ignoring of our “thrownness.”
What release there is, and I believe the poem does achieve some, is by recognizing in the end that although one is unavoidably complicit in these irresponsible hybrids, these mules of causality, we bring into them an element of indetermination. The “head a growth of flame” is a reaching towards the miniaturists’ avoidance of the iconoclastic muslim ban on representing the Prophet, by showing him with a flame in place of his head – a borrowing from Buddhist iconography, I believe. The final issue, as throughout, is where the boundaries are: physical, moral, spatial, temporal, causal. How to live.
from cris cheek, “From a Performant”
(written 1999):
Increasingly, not just for the reason of not wishing to become too slick or to repeat myself, the situation of the poetry reading per se, in particular in England, has been one of dissartisfaction (I’ll run with that appalling typo) and frustration. Feedback, in the sense of the positive engagement that is my experience of working in the US or Canada for example, at such events is paltry (in my experience). I’ve got to the point of thinking that it just isn’t worth it. Not because plaudits are sought, but because dialogue certainly is and the main dialogues I get into around readings are either a slack of response or a mealy-mouthed hmmm. Better, for a while at least, to put energy into fully mediated forms and put the work onto video and DVD and CDRom and CD and radio and webcasts, even books. This has the advantage of dealing more unequivocally in the textualities of indirect testimony. But what I’m losing is the “live” as site of version proliferation and I do miss that sense of editing through reading “live,” of discovering the changes that need to be made through the heat of a listener-writer vortex. Most challenging of all for me is how to get to those physical aspects that detail the ludic plays of speech, the non-verbal or paratextual gestures, those incidentals of mouthing (spittle-clicks, thinking pauses, false starts, slips of tongue, facial punctuations, spatial urgencies and so forth) into the processes of syntactical assemblage. How much does writing most usually edit from its progressions and why does it do so and indeed need it continue to do so? Perhaps the “live” will resurface for me some way on and that all I need to do is to get away from it for a while. But that doesn’t prevent me from having arrived at some fundamental shifts of understanding in respect of that word “performance.”
from Harry Gilonis, “The Spider, the Fly and Philosophy: Following a Clew Through Maurice Scully’s Livelihood”:
Strands of spider-web form the reticle of a gunsight; cartographic projections on a page offer a reticulation: “an arrangement of lines, etc., resembling a net” (OED). The celebrated contemporary map-maker Tim Robinson has observed that “our physical existence is at all times wrapped in the web of directions and distance that constitutes our space,” and separately drew links between his observation of the “earth-measuring gait” of the inchworm caterpillars of the swallow-tailed moth (family Geometridae) and his decision to move to Ireland and subsequently take up mapping. Nor need our cartography presume a human cartographer:
the rule is the pieces to wait for
the right moment
the pieces
the echo-places where the
smooth spaces
betweenthe eye of the net and the eye
waiting and taut
anda love of watching a flower
matching the sun’s face
followinga blackbird’s silhouette on the last
branchtip, note-bits finely
mapping the place/but– clouding, clearing, clouding –
(p. 251)
Mapping such as Scully’s will of course involve the animate as well as inanimate components of the environment; just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, et cetera, theoretically form part of human consciousness, so too in practice they form part of human life and human activity. Man lives only from them, in the form of nourishment, heating, clothing, shelter, et cetera. Yet even a map such as this is subject to occlusion, its moments of clarity less than total; after all, the measure of reality any chosen means can grasp will be limited. “– but the map? What’s that in a swamp / of metaphor. Moving in the weave” (p. 131). As Tim Robinson puts it: “while walking this land, I am the pen on the paper; while drawing this map, my pen is myself walking this land. The purpose of this identification [is] to short circuit the polarities of objectivity and subjectivity, and help me keep faith with reality.”
from an interview with Pete Smith:
ND: I’m not an original sort, so let’s start from the start with the obvious question(s). You were born (where? when?) in England , I believe? Can you give a little personal background?
PS: Second child to a mother who was advised to have none (in her 40s, seven holes were found in her septum). Born with caul covering face – ripped off by physician to allow first breath. Introduced at five months to whooping cough by the son of a neighbour who thought it “a good idea to get it over with” – ill five months, christened at home since expected to die. Failed to. Introduced to violence & hungers of adulthood at age nine. Total stranger. “Now there are no strangers & no safe places.” But words, rather namings, take on saving power – “there’s Mr & Mrs . . . & Mr . . . & Johnny . . .” as families on a Sunday afternoon walk come toward the bush near the banks of the River Sowe where you, your friend & this stranger are huddled: knife flicks & boy-man’s gone. Before it was put away did the knife really gesture the severing of a tongue? Later, same summer, on picnic with same friend, you’re lined up against a fence & shot at by Teddy Boys – no more picnics.
Wyken, Coventry. Post-war new-slum council house estate. Taken by mum to visit her friend in hospital, terminal cancer: don’t see mum’s friend, but you’ve pored over war books of the liberation of Belsen so you know where that woman’s from.
Scholarship boy at age eleven blazes a trail to the academic depths. Term papers frequently read aloud in class, the boy disappears in front of an exam paper. Poetry seems to become a consolation for something, but for what? Re-read Godot & the Trilogy at school instead of set A-level books. Teacher reads Hughes, Gunn, Plath. This stuff excites. At home, find them + Ferlinghetti, Corso, Tomlinson (dad’s library, only 7,000 books then). On your own, discover 2nd Aeon, Grosseteste Review, Mottram’s Poetry Review. Who needs school any more? Living Kulchur – folk & jazz clubs – sister dates Joe Harriott – image of you (15-year-old chaperon!), her, him doing the twist to Manfred Mann at the Marquee.
A year and a half of doss-jobs while you ransack your dad’s books & records & the local library. Churn out hectares of open field, sub-New American Poetry lines (consign ’em to trash-can before leaving home). Booze a not unfamiliar friend.
May Day 1966, enter the institution (for the mentally subnormal). 2,300 people. Shut away. Time begins to slow down horribly . . . You’ve joined a very secret service now my lad – no-one wants to know. From these margins, the professed or protested literary marginalizations you later encounter seem a silly game. A long, slow journey into manhood – unfortunately you’ve barely started & you’re a husband & father & Charge(!) Nurse – & an equally long apprenticeship in poetry. Believe in life-long learning – you’ll need to. Immature wounded soul falls prey to evangelistic sect/cult. But a slow healing (heal/hale/hearty/whole) begins through studied word – & the disciplines of that life don’t hurt either.
Texts © the authors, 2004.
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