Astute readers of my
autrebiography
Words Out of Time will
have noticed that the final piece, ‘Work’, the last part of ‘When’ (i.e., the
end of the book) finishes not with a full stop but with ellipses. (Seriously, I
doubt anybody noticed it!) That’s because its focus, the world of work, acts
of, commitments to, actions of labour, wasn’t over for me at that time. (They
still aren’t, but I did formally
retire,
a year ago and I reflect upon that
here.)
There was more to write of the
piece. Formally, the text distends time (the original idea was 15 words for the
diaries when I’m 15, 50 for when I was 50, and thus 61 words for when I was 61,
etc, but that broke down to nevertheless leave the general effect). That means that the text covering 2011-17 is as long as
that for 1965-2011. (I was thinking of the fact that most conventional
(auto)biographies spend more time on the early years, and I wanted this section
to ‘do different’.)
I want to post it here (with a
little linking clip of the text as it appears in the book (which you may obtain
here.)
and in its original magazine publication in
Blackbox
Manifold here: click and scroll). I hope it appeals.
Coincidentally, I’ve also
excavated the text of ‘With’, the first conceptual part of ‘When’ in memory of
my mother, a re-mix using sentences that refer to her (and plundering an earlier
outtake I posted on this blog)
here (and
here.
).The final eulogy, in which I use a shorter version of this re-mix, may be read
here.
Perhaps one day the end of 'Work' will be
restored to the book itself or to a re-print of ‘When’ on its own. Until then,
here it is, in celebration of a year having passed since that retirement into full-time
writing.
I wrote in detail about producing
the first part of
Words Out of Time, ‘The
Given’,
here. It’s an unusually lengthy exposition of method (practical
poetics) for me, based on Adrian Clarke’s adage that ‘materials + procedure =’.
If you want a conventional
biography, I’ve got one
here on my website. Up to date until mid August 2018.
That it, it does not (at this time) mention my mother’s death in late August
2018. But it might by the time you read it.
Work
(with the 2017 supplement)
Scooters
and adding machines. Sunday morning overtime. Not negative but not noting ‘I
did not go to’. Driving along the seafront in a Triumph Mayflower. Don’t forget spelling hospital spells.
Homework. Superman aircrew books chess set. Learning to type. Circus horses.
Thirty laps, boots sinking in mud. Glossy ammonites. Harbouring the world (on
tape). Earth landing. Monitor, send QSLs to Vietnam. Hang on every Apollo
silence. Record. A tone-deaf
violinist choosing to sing the blues. Nobody can recognise ‘nobody’ in the
cancelled day. The radio catches fire: acrid message chokes. A small
tetrahedron of sugar paper given to model an interior but flattened to record a
fiction! Starts autobiography. Picks through the archive. Leotards decorated
with entrails. Groundhogs ticket in his pocket: Cobbing plays him ‘e’. Exchange
employment between time, shadowgraph, black holes. Diffident, she sleeps under
the spangled canopy, sponging off relatives, smoking dope. Deep breaths at the
shore. Shouting over costs. Handsomeness the price of immortality (on the
cans). Spending time copying. Labouring. Nobody’s freaking out in bubble-baths
now. Orange jackets assert a new Right to Work 1976. ‘Bully Boys’ on paper.
Police radio whispers. Interracial promenade. Faceless names. Working live
cases, exchanging fear and pity glances in the shit, bogged down in
‘obligation’, transcribing her unpunctuated Friday pub-lunch monologues.
Preludes to Jodie’s titillations on the page. Absence is addressed in absence.
Plastic tatters in the window-frame. The axis of one day turning upon vertical
rain-shafts. Far from credit, servants whom ‘one’ tips. The shell breaks. A
booklet on fallout shelters, a fridge. Ergometrics of not writing. It finishes
or the money finishes, unhuman perfection on the platform. Walk from the sites
of earlier poems. When criticism becomes creative, every job’s up for grabs.
Dead texts show other landscapes, stories of the logics of war machines.
Difficult, inaccessible, complex: facts like dreams. The exotopia of increased
work at work, as x months’ service serves towards increments. Build imaginary
prisons with real zombies in them; beat the dead rabbit as ‘art’. Text is
absent now the reader produces, sucking butter from its bread. Disobey the
world that constitutes reference of the poem. Dissolution of self through
apertures of Being. It’s c.v. season. Miles cuts into his musicians’ ears. The sentences remain beautiful, the syntax
articulate, the sense disjointed. Glancing at my reviews in magazines I can’t
afford. A slip of unsuccess slips. Full of bladder debris. Expressionist
bathos. Workplace Calvinism. A post in the Dinky Inferno. Strategic chance: to free myself, I produce a beautiful F
sharp for my micro-epic, figured to block somebody else’s manifesto. Like a
baby sleeping through The Great Storm of 1987 while the CBI complains we stayed
awake. Another ashen book, its thesis wrapped. Sweep noise poetry to pick up
jammed voices. ‘Some younger poet’ masters the invisible genre, hammers decades
of self-reflection into a node. An anti-fascist poem ‘for my students’. Two
hours overtime. Float and flash perceptions. Working the work. What rough beast
slouches in grey print on recycled paper? A scratch living room blues opera. Impacting
language as a mode of existence, a means of escape. Who catches that last
helicopter out of Kuwait?
The New Referent. I take two or more verses on harp, hardly able to resolve.
They’re not on the tape, which confirms perceptions, replaces memory. A palimpsest
of image-traces under the songs. Her boot twisting on the bed. Extra choruses:
compensating mistakes with emotion. Like Benetton. We’re stuck with bad
rubbish. With no hope of good riddance! He’d rather fiddle in defeat than
fight! Four hours teaching Lee Harwood’s work, then wording the petition, lobbying the Governors’ headlights.
Back-pedalling management. Three large windows with Lady Hawarden shutters. Unobscure
Disasters. Here’s yesterday’s slogan mid-circle: ADDRESS THE SYCOPHANTS! New geography grates against the talking
time of lyrical seascapes. No good news but good to see you! Today’s slogan: Never trust a man who turns himself inside
out! Tomorrow’s slogan: a full circle, but no words in it. Just instructions for the dancers: total immobility,
self-similar poietic structures at smaller and smaller scales. Subpoenaing
memory. If I weren’t a literary device I’d be depressed! Sloppy bucolics. This
rhythm of working recognises poets by their handwriting. The gift of cheat. Sparrow hops. I walk/ to the post office,
buy stamps./ A book of haiku. A poem-essay. Working poetics, the ethics of
pleasure. To Waterloo
to walk amongst the shells, shit and jellyfish. At work. Light executive
dusting. Working. At. Home. Vacation to the site of the first English poem, gusting crosswind. Sing mē frumsceaft! Local clarity and
global vacancy: Barry MacSweeney recites his Mary Bell sonnets; a 21 gun salute
for the Queen Mother. Sleeping with hobby fish, rising to another other, the
rainy park: a heron, head tilted, 1998. Angela drives my torn ankle home from
work. The computer recites my poem zipping down unpunctuated columns without
breathing. Chillier as the weather turns to 141 emails. First person omniscient
narrator. No stopping or shopping, the postman dives under the window; a bag of
sugar on the step, new sentence. We speak the language on the sides of the
shrieking armoured cars. Time’s rot, we’re the first chord after long silence.
We blink into daylight with the Mole’s vision, from tunnels which were filled
with a century’s human waste. Where the people once drew water, one cough fills
immensity. She saunters up the road, eyes fixed on the screen of her phone, her
thumbs moving with dexterity. I grip the pen with my thumb but it’s a rigid clamp, a plug. The sounds of an electric
toothbrush, of a suitcase on wheels running over bones. He arrives home from
work, safe, with a story to tell. ‘The taxi crashed.’ Stroke of luck. He lives
out of time in book time, stroke of pen. A detached part of his psyche like a
retina. He thinks about the word that’s found his head, off to work, reading
the proof of Sinclair’s next book. He begins again, re-narrating himself.
Tongues lash. Light feathering. Buries her face. Re-works the old sentence. He
lies with his tongue. He nibbles her neck, throat strap. He’s sucked out of his
body, mindful. He spins his hands up her dancing skirt. Gomringer print wrapped
in protective cloud. A diuretic tickles his inhibitors. Students workshop or
worship their poems, thick snow settling into their Kerouac haiku. Oeuvre
management. Number-crunching awayday Nazis, bequeathing structural pain,
carried away on a comedy of errors. He professes
fumbling in mobile text, pure poetry with polysexual nerves and palpitations. Her
knuckles tremble before her eyes, ogling her power. He works on public
language. He takes inner leave.
There’s no poetry in which everything is scribbled lost notes. There are,
however, memory blocks, intractable non-material that obscures the spectral
cohort. History begins again as the new boss arrives. He doesn’t look at me. He
doesn’t look at me, becomes Saying again, as I turn the page as if opening a
door. When I speak he isn’t there to listen, though he doesn’t finish or
unfinish. Institutional memory grinds. Ligament rips: 2009 cashpoint caper. It hurts
me too. The lost grain of the guitar. Now touch the dock where the Birmingham
Six stood to be accused, tried and found. Revisionist history, sentences in
time. Orange March outside the Maharajah. Memory’s loss of memory and the
absolute unforgettable. He relinquishes his diaries, but windows crash,
firebombs are rumoured, and he works at them again, daily. On the Sussex step, he
rescues family photographs from heavy albums. At his workstation, goose vibrato
like Braxton’s contrabass. I cup the blues harp and the artist works my
‘feelings’ for it into ‘art’. The man whose face has died decides for us.
Stroke of pencil. Works his way through us. Inserts phrases from lost works,
odder than odd, not negative capability or uniform finish. Rainbow weather falls,
drops silver light, splashes around her face. Form thinks. Taut shoulder blades
delineate. She delivers herself, a working sketch for full invasion,
occupation. Weird with work, no one listens. Overruled, they go for unilateral
strike, a shifty round the Matisse-Mallarmé. Status and reward: work diary
empty. Listening to students’ angst, saved by pork pies. The view from Centre Point.
A turtle sunbathing, a procession of Monarchist giants. Shortlist in my other diary.
Jeff and I work up our poems, old underwear hanging from a ruin. Messianic
interventions against empty time. Think in Hungarian about Turkish atrocities.
Work along the Danube to meet Duchamp’s
waistcoat. I finish Ulysses (this
time) at 4.13 pm on Saturday 2 September 2012. Mother and Father business:
rent, chiropody. Fox cockily trots along Bromley, event poised on tip-toe. The
Corn Exchange. Working on breathing, Norton 360 runs through the files. Shoes
on boards, her steps around, preparing. Raw fingers hold down chords; content
breaks through form, releases energy, music in every room, strokes of plectrum.
I speak to him and the gasping stops. A dead day, reading The Iliad, slaughters of eminent men. Lee sells his working papers.
By the time I arrive home from work, Odysseus is home. Trudging through sludge
and sleet. Re-reading Reader’s Block.
Inventing my own plagiarist, talking to the dead. Flat language stretches to
distant horizons, flurries of snow. He works at words like an anorexic picking at salad. He needs similes like a
hole in the head. Awoken by the coroner: to make Dad dead. Why does she throw
herself down Steep Hill? Why is the head of George III ‘privetted’? Why does he
not remember the scar on the woman’s leg? Why was Stephen rustling in
Patricia’s work-room? Why was he fading like a ghost? Why was Scott networking
like there was no tomorrow? Tomorrow, Billy Fury festooned with flowers. A brave
attempt to maintain the lyric ‘I’ behind the kiosk at the bottom of Bold St, away from
the Spectacular Other. Clerical Error. I am a singing, playing, blowing, and
sucking machine. Jo descends the spiral fire escape like Duchamp’s nude,
breathing overtime. Graveyard shift research culture: Shunga dildos. Geeky work,
a fully corporeal encounter with metrical weight. We missed The Necks, three
vacated bar-stools. Six hands touch time. Different holes for work. On tape, reciting
(falling asleep): ‘victims’ for ‘vectors’. Fan-girl backs out of the room. Back
to Mum telling me Dad refused to work the Berlin Airlift. Burst couplets.
Joanne talks through her tree: Cavafy
played round the corner. Laboured multi-media, enjoyed his poise, he who
instructs her to close her eyes. A gawp at Oriel Chambers. I don’t remember
audition. I’m trying to write down the moment as it happens, metered prose, HR admin
on the Marie Celeste, the Alisdair Gray murals, views from my window 2015 –
exactly those! After a bonus day, I find this alone writing on this page. I
don’t remember. Edge of waiting for last year. She mounts the platform,
delivered by enforcers. Carys
stands on a chair to read. Back to whisky and Jack Bruce. Robots on Strike. Watery
sun, low and dripping, Patricia returns from work carrying phials of Tom Jenks’
tears. Why did he only ‘generally’ enjoy the cold, bright weather? Why did he
refuse to ‘cart the freeloader’ to his next drink? Wave-bands drift, he’s
guzzling straight into my records of his consumption. A four hour meeting about
research regulations, a burlesque world, thumbs-up to ceremonial emails. We
stand inside the Warhol. Particles of
extrusions. Kelvin phones to say Lee is in hospital. We stand outside the
Bender. In her bunny ears and corset, surrealist geography, a scrutiny meeting,
she fills the afternoon with dashes, commas, semi-colons. Am I my card-holder’s
warden? An orchestra playing thunder? Unaffected by buffering, I stand before
the Cornell. There is a plaque where the work is buried. Admin polish. Through
the biography of Leigh Hunt, inoperative thoughts of Lee Harwood. Black
paintings bump into pantomime horses. Tell him his work will be safe. Tom Raworth
(smiling). Some matures signed the visitors’ book. Sandeep in The Big Apple:
James in the small orchard. Me telephonically tempting him back. I table ‘Poet’
at the MA session, turn tables on the work-in-progress. We crash into Simon’s
reading, Archilochus dropping his shield. A meeting at 11.00 am: teaching till
9.00 pm. Work, the sixth day in a row, to ‘deliver’ a ‘taster session’, twice, cheerfully. Remode to overcome the
obdurate persistence of materials: a bust of Edwin Morgan, the Spanish
Inquisition, Olive’s immobility, the ‘horrible woman with dementia’, the small
Matisse room, the astronaut from Southwick. Codeine dreams: terrorists in Liverpool. Or is it just an unfortunate world to
co-habit? I spotted a spit. On strike. So out. Stroke of cat. Back to cheese
and Matt Munro. Deadline for notice: no Penultimate Helicopter whirring out of
Ormskirk. To vote. To work. To hear the word
repeated on the news. I spent the morning re-working Fuxit! James and I pass Kamasi in the mizzling Manchester street, home with a pocket full of
Jimmy’s Donegal seaweed. Atrocity stirs poetry, a reversed film of a person
walking backwards in Liverpool. ‘Art’ writing;
‘proof’ reading. Avantgarters at the avantgarden party flash in episodic sun. A
fly lands on my knee, drops frass: politicians creep back onto our radios. Practice-based
poetics lacking critical apparatus. I seldom look to the future. As. It. Happens.
Off the train, unloading ancestral junk. Was the dream his, in which my biro refused
to write the word ‘me’? Damaged artifice: a rash of sonnets. Pub-quiz Scouser
for an ear-worm. In a drowsy nimbus I form words,
break the spell, get up for paper. Black Friday bargains. Allen reads the ‘Burgler’
pages. Crash into fever and sweat. Students well up in nightmares. Clammed to the
radiator. Spitting, pushing over the hat-stand, throwing the de-humidifier
across the room. Century Rolls; a big, unfolding surprise. Three samples:
little pinches. Technique is cognition,
but Ian McMillan is smaller than he looks on the radio. Limps off into the snow,
sad. Posted off passport and picked up drugs. Culling and cutting. He’s no poet
when he walks out on his voice. She used to work flowers through her handlebars
and sing. Stuttery conversionettes. We followed the ducks and rabbits to a
humanist affair with wild flowers and jazz and – against Roy’s wishes – poems. Flip that: wasn’t reacting to the world by logic,
association. To view Trev’s trios. Came away with a memory. Listen with Mother,
Carys’s story,
broken by a policewoman on the step. All day marking, the Liverpool Mass: mad monks chanting electro-acoustic Cobbing.
Tendered my resignation. Hell broke loose. I am nothing, lyric intersubjectivity,
plural motives hoisted from us and dumped in the skip. We didn’t fit the bill,
terror attack in London on the Coventry bar TV. Schadenfreude at May’s hubris.
Up Hepstonstall to visit Asa: foolish enough to have been. Dreams of Scott
playing drums on the Downs. Moves. Moves in
response to another body. Working up. Down the hill, you find yourself at
bridge height, level with people crossing before you (I’m on the step of The
Brewery Tap in Chester at 3.00 pm on Monday 7 August 2017, a workday) but as
you sink towards the river, you lose that specious equality, until you, too,
climb the steps and stand on the city walls, overlooking the wide river, with
its weir guarded by cormorants and gulls patiently waiting for flailing fish
panicked by the weir’s rush – sumos, courtesans, firemen, samurai and actors. Legwork.
Time clawed back, sitting at my desk thumbing old poems, working up to release
at my fingertips. He screams in his sleep and reception calls his room. I take deep leave. Labour of Love. Her hard-won
lips. Lispy neologism ‘poethics’ a metaphor for deep listening that happens
before Saying, after saying my list of thanks, a litany prefaced with treadmill
and grindstone. Pencil me in (and out).
2012-2013/November-December
2017
Most of the text (the update, post book publication) appeared on LUNE: See
here. But that's disappeared off-line.
