The basic
pattern of the sequence is given in the blog’s subtitle – a balancing act
between acts of improvisation from the continuing moment of the poem, and from
the continuing experience of being in this world, playing against some possible
integral and integrating structuring. So bits are trying to give my response to
various things encountered, from the news of the 2011 Riots to episodes within
the little world of innovative poetry, and various bits of language
encountered, whether overheard at the time of writing or encountered in
reading. It’s haunted, as anything written at this time must be, by the ever-deepening
crisis in our society (in global society indeed), which I see as the formation
of what archaeologist refer to as a high-status elite.[2] And
bits of the poem are just abrading and reconfiguring language and image to see
what can be done.
I need to add a
little bit of a downer – that I think the sequence starts slowly, needs the
momentum to build up in it. Give it a chance! It is formation of a landscape
and the journeying through it that is occurring, not instant excitation. Though
I think that occurs also.
If you want more
on the basis of the poem’s process, a poem from the ASL is posted here as a
page, A Recipe for a Long Semi-Structured Poetic Sequence. By this you’ll gather immediately recipes are one of recipes
for poems I use – you will find that all the recipes in WTLD should be
relatively easily followable and are for, yes, food.
Some of the
poems contain footnotes which are an integral part of their text. Other poems
reference information which the reader may well not pick up on otherwise, eg
the doctrines of the Chapel of the Open Book, or quotes which I need to
acknowledge, and I will use the Comments to add such information. And you, dear
reader, do feel free to interrogate or comment on the proceedings through your
comments also.
I am publishing
this text as a blog because this I think will give an approximation to how I
would like it read, with the surprise (thank you dice-roll for that) of what’s
going to happen next: no sneaking to the ending! I’ll try & post a poem a
day, public holidays etc excepted, though won’t guarantee that. I’ll take the
entire blog down after some interval once I have completed the whole process –
it would be an ugly process reading the whole thing backwards on a blog.
I ought finally
to warn you, oh dear reader, of another reason for the poem’s appearance here
and in this form. The text has been
offered for publication to the Great White Masters in their remote Himalayan
lair for inclusion in the Eternal Akashic Record. They have read it and reached the decision
that it veered away from the currently more precise and committed stance that they
are adopting. I therefore offer it up to ordinary sublunar scrabblers in the
dirt of human existence, imprecise, ephemeral and committed to the messy
process of living rather than to the perfection of stances. Like us all, it
will have to cope as best it may with the vagaries & brevity of existence,
especially within these latter days.
[1]
Some are published: Some Action Upon The World (Grosseteste, 1982), and from
Shearsman, Textual Possessions: Three
Sequences (2004) and Are We Not Drawn
. . . (2009); available online on the Great Works website are the
absolutely unpublishable A Year and a Day
in the Dark Forest and In the Dirt of
the Post-Lyric: A Collaborative Cycle.
http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/yd/yd1.html
http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/itd.html
[2]
I suspect rather than Marxist theory, a close analysis of the Roman Empire’s
replacement of the legal equality of Roman citizenship by the division between
honestiores (the high-status elite) and humiliores (us) may prove more useful
in helping us.
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