Poetry is a quantum as well. a way of becoming, that is what I mean by a way, it's a way of becoming inthe world, a way of life as Tzara put it in the essay so long ago. Why does that seem so strange to some people?
Is not day and night, night and day?
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A fragment of thought. The Hound of Heaven,a great but now forgotten poem. Or seems to beforgotten. The Highwayman Alfred Noyes, Sir. Another forgotten text, but not inmy head. there it stays remembered as a rhythm a presence a strength of statement and sound. A defiant lathe in the night. God, how I despise and hate the theoreticans of literature and their academic machines.
Were I the minister of education, in the ideal fantasy world of learning and love, and sex and rock and roll,the cities of silence would roll. The books'd be evacuated to a new locale, a dream palace of suds and soaps. Clean the books, bring back the celerity of their choice, not the nauseau of learning, especially american theoretical critical learning erudition to the point of nauseau. They make me ill, the whole bloody lot of them. Teaching me how to write, to think to breath with their 'order words' and every little pillboxed professor wanking off the stage of them. Take them in real life and they are nothing, people incapable of doing anything for themselves. The ruiners and theives of poetry. The keepers of the prison where those with genuine literary ambitions are chained with the deadlie sin of class and gender, colour and preference, body and stink, as if bodies were not part of the capitalist whoring system. Poetry, what is poetry, if not freedom from all of that shite. Why should not poets, and those who love it, not be bitter. There is no room for all the poets and readers there is no space for the audience, the readers, the lovers, the pomes, the world is over pilloried with the desires of death. One feels one has to justify what is obvious. A doctor of literature in poetry is a contradiction . A diction going out of both sides of its mouth. Double-speak Janus-head. SapphoOrpheus.
I would give my life for poetry, and indeed I have . Do you hear that?
It is death making a bargain with Poetry, with Orpheus. With
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If all this is not for life and death, then what is it?
It justifies us, it justifies our existence. I remember having this conversation with David Rattray once about this. In my kitchen, in my old place, Gilford street. It was a poem. Gilford rhymes with Clifford, and Clifford rhymes with Fulford. Where my father died.
My father who art in heaven
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The hound of heaven is poetry, and the highwayman is death.
I
SCREAM
Hound Dog Bay
chew My heart
Eat My HanDs
itS the EndOf YerBodyBawDy
Not to JerkS someElse's MP3
