Stunned by your words I have to write

Marsh Barn, Bridport (21^st May 2010)

Three generations. They had driven down all the way from Brighton, emerging Poletical Poits, (a possible politics, a possible poetry) on Friday evening began reading to us in this old rustic Dorset barn down by the sea:

J H Prynne (‘…There are many questions about poetry that cannot be well answered by poets, but that’s no reason for not thinking about them and exchanging points of view.’)

Keston Sutherland –

&

Josh Stanley -

90 minutes later we had a break, and some of us bought one or two of their books of poetry (Barque Press). Then we sat down again for a conversation, the few of us that were left that is, we were down to single figure by then (And many people say J H Prynne is the most significant English poet of our times)…

- What did any of you (1. FOOTNOTE) expect on this marsh ground (2. FOOTNOTE) in the end?

  The area of the Coda, he said, is full of life, recapitulating Simentov’s Serenade, before it descends back into cows.

- Hot! Full! Fast!

  Why do you all read so fast? I asked.

- I tried to stay awake but it wasn’t long before I was fast asleep along with the rest, dreaming the GOOD OLD CAUSE down here (3. FOOTNOTE), because somewhere from off a long list of the 40 ways not to be a Good Comrade, besides Deviationism (Dissident), Formalism and so on, my eyes had lit on Liberalism (Lazy).

  Rap!

- Besides cows are common as muck. And cowardly we know.

  I need to do its suffering, one of you (4. FOOTNOTE) had said.

- Be in maximal danger.

  Cool, empty and slow, you (5. FOOTNOTE), to get one finger in, try sliding a hand, to push round this scandle.

–

FOOTNOTES:

1. You

2.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Poetry and Politics (Critical Essays. 1982, P 15-34) etc, etc

3.  ‘Down here’, when at war:

- We hang all Irish sight

- Blood feuds are fought between families

- & we rarely take prisoners…

4.  …

5.  …

I told you it wouldn't take us that long. First we decided that the volcanic ash clouds drifting south from Iceland were not as dangerous to jet engines as we feared at first, and then we demanded the threatened strikes by British Airways cabin staff should be called off, or rather we found ways of making them illegal every time they called a strike day. And so panic over, we can all have our summer holidays, flying whenever we want again.

That is the way we Brits like our politics, a certain frisson of foolhardiness, like you say. Or call it that shudder if you prefer; Surprise-Astonishment-Fear-Horror (along a path to a Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin), or what TS Eliot named as the 'bewildering minute', when something utterly takes our breath away because for us Brits, it is the same whether it is our politics, or our poetry, a bit of a thrill for the natives – Shock! Horror! A serious quarrel – but only for a minute, and then everything back to normal.

After all it is only three weeks until England kicks off in the World Cup.

What my Danish friend had previously noticed and described to me as the British habit for disempowerment and apathy. What do you do in Denmark then, I asked indignantly, Oh we take our politics more seriously, he said by which I think he meant the Danes over the last generation have been more seriously committed to expressing the principles of Fairness and Equality in their politics, And we are good listeners, we have to be, you see Denmark is a small country and we have some very big neighbours.

No blocked ears there. That great listening poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger from over the border in Germany, is featured in last Saturday's Guardian, a listening capacity combined with an ability to speak his mind. Never mind that the mind faces in two directions simultaneously, that is simply the way the Germans do their politics.

We have such a lot to learn.

Yes, there is the possibility of a soft sigh, not emitted from our lips but heard, and coming from an unknown location, and I am unable to detect its source or even the direction from where it was made. From above if anywhere, and in my mind as a sound, either immediately over where I am stood, or better to say on a perfect trajectory, coming to meet with my next step or next step after that, because I have had for several years now the image of a iron metal axehead falling from the sky, but were I to look up at this moment, and were I to ask you to look up with me, and we peered together through the sparse clouds and up into the blue sky above we would as like as not see nothing, or at the most only a speck so small that it would appear to us as a tiny flying bird or perhaps less than that, in our state of diminished awareness, something indistinguishable from those vitreous floaters which drift across our eyes.

This image of a falling iron axehead being ‘the area of the Coda’ – ‘where immense life is possible’ I had written down two months ago (March 9^th), being the helpful and precisely accurate phrases I had heard used by the contemporary Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov to describe his method of musical creativity – the area of the Coda, not an intimation of mortality but of immense life, in an unfolding and recapitulation.

Including of the just past, of our recent historical experiences and processes -

The ‘Just Past’, Uncle Wally corrects me, being the category of the last century (the 20^th in this instance as it relates to us, while for Walter Benjamin writing in the 1920’s and 1930’s it was the 19th), and, since we are still alive to this very day, our lives in it as successors and survivors from as far as the second and third generations back.

- You English, a Danish friend, who has been living in our misty isle for most of the last twenty years, told me last week, And your politics, he went on, I notice two things which I don’t understand, how you are always disempowering yourselves and your apathy.

And it is often true in the dialogue between us, but here over the last few weeks, something shocking seems to have happened to our politics, the sense of the re-emergence of the capacity for ideological quarrel, being visible in the area of the Coda through the recapitulation of the just past. We would go to war for Democracy, we shout out together, But we wouldn’t go to war for capitalism, Or the free market, another voice says, Or the progressive agenda, says a third, and so on, and other words…

…“I never expected to hear myself say”, and even in the presence of Michael Portillo this morning, who used these very words during his radio broadcast in a three part series - Democracy on Trial – begun on BBC Radio 4 today, to which we can ‘listen again’ these next few days if we so wish.

Yes, there is indeed the possibility of a soft sigh.

‘Organizers on Tuesday’, that was the name for the artist collective, or so I thought reading the news-wire item. That was the name of the artist collective who were one of the four nominations announced today for this year’s Turner Prize, all four nominees being praised by the announcers for all the usual reasons, their authenticity, originality and so on, but especially their relevance, the judges making very clear the lack of sensationalist pretensions among all four nominees in attempt perhaps to restore the Prize’s tarnished reputation with the general public, which appeared to mean, reading the comments of certain art critics who were also quoted on the news-wire, that all four nominees worked with hybridity; sculpture / painting, art object / commonplace object, work of art / work of science, continental zone / subduction zone…

…Absent / presence, and Present / absence. As for  ‘Organizers on Tuesday’, I turned to the Journal of Invisible Culture to investigate the work of this artist collective who the judges might have imaginatively said walk between past and present in an effort to unearth traces and fragments, but the generally unbeatable search facility of this polymathic journal drew a complete blank. Of course for the term ‘Hybridity’ on the search facility there were pages and pages of hits, in fact so many I did not have time to look at more than the first few, but it would miss the point to see this exploration of the art collective's name or hybridity as some kind of weak or eccentric joke, or simply a mistake.

ak has been having problems with his hard drive, but will be returning to the conversations here shortly.