Stalin

The other day I was calling out the latest American Empire colour revolution on social media. It doesn't matter which one it was because I've counted another 2 or 3 more since I posted it. Anyway, some big-gob/bot/whatever (unknown to me but apparently a follower of other people I know), barged onto my time-line to accuse me of being a 'Stalinoid'. Hard to think of a more adolescently feeble 'insult', but it reminded me that while back I wrote a two-part piece about Stalin for my 'Dyer & Mahfouz' Collection. So this is a good excuse to roll it out:

The Birth of Stalin

Gerard Trehy had been an active shop steward in the building trade in the 1960s. He’d stood against old style bosses alongside the legendary firebrand Union man, ‘Red’ Eric Heffer. So, when I began work, my very first job, and almost immediately got ‘volunteered’/put myself forward to be a shop steward, I asked for his advice. He said: “the thing to watch out for is at some future union meeting or stewards committee, the top table will report that the employers have proposed some terrible change to working conditions or pay or holidays, whatever. And the bloke beside you will lean over and say – here, that’s outrageous, we can’t let them get away with that. Etc. etc. and he’ll get you wound up and feed you ammunition, make you angry to such a point that you will stand up and make an impassioned speech about how the union needs to stand and fight. And you will pull everyone else up to that pitch and the top table will agree to confront the bosses and you’ll be volunteered to be at the forefront because you are so passionate. And later when things get difficult, the bloke who sat next to you won’t be anywhere to be seen.”

And true enough, in only my second or third stewards meeting, the branch secretary reported an outrageous stunt from the bosses, and I leant over to the steward sitting next to me and said: “Here, we can’t let them get away with that. That’s fucking outrageous.”

The Triumph of Stalin

In the spring of this dissymmetry, singular and true, I am Stalin qua Stalin, to

the big picture, shaping the new individual, indexed to the double scission, 

fifth of five but with renewed undeniable music; I am remembered, 

fond of binary meets, the very Idea secretary of all meets and all joins

the warmth, the warmth in that household to preserve

an infinitely expanding tautology of action, singular and true, A

determination unsympathetic and dismissive assertions,

appropriations under-specified and my model axiom:

 “Never ask, command.”

        and by all accounts

    I won, to be fair.

 

 

Broadside

Soon after arriving in Portugal, I was introduced to the American artist Marsha McDonald by the inestimable Marton Koppany. It's a small world since it appears there's a fair degree of overlap between our networks, but we didn't know of each other until we met in Porto. It turns out that we also have a mutual friend in Robert Grenier, and maybe in a nod to the form of his 'Sentences', Marsha and I have collaborated on a Limited Edition 'Broadside'. 

The set of 7 prints features Marsha's photography juxtaposed with four of my new poems (Indigo, The Last Time, The Tree of Moments, and Types of Failure. 

They are available from me (tonytrehy@ymail.com) or Marsha (marsham6@gmail.com) for 10 euros (plus postage/packaging).

Funeral Poetry

Like any other sane/unindoctrinated person, I found the funeral propaganda around Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the Establishment’s rush to overwhelm critical thought with the rapid accession of ‘King’ Charles III to be infuriating and risible in equal measure. I am reminded of Picasso’s comment that after a walk in the countryside, he had ‘green’ indigestion and it had to be relieved with a green painting on return to his studio. So the steady stream of mind-numbingly stupid worshipful coverage became so indigestible that I needed to write a funeral poem. Almost coincident with this decision, the former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy published her commemoration in the Guardian, (Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy shares poem to mark Queen’s passing | Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian) which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be laugh out loud appalling – spoiler alert – it’s a list poem. (At this point I was going to quote a small sample but on re-reading it, the cringe is too great to stomach). Then the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage also knocked one out, (Floral Tribute, a poem for the Queen by Simon Armitage | Queen Elizabeth II | The Guardian) which turned out to be a fucking Acrostic. The Establishment claim that the Funeral is the most important event in history (yes, the narrative is that bad!) and their Establishment poet comes up with a cowardly acrostic flower poem. As an ex-primary school teacher I know commented, if one of her eight-year-olds had offered that she would have asked them to try again.

Although you know it subconsciously, it wasn’t until I saw these ‘poems’ that I fully realised how the moral, political and cultural bankruptcy and corruption of the UK was so clearly mirrored in its Official Verse Culture. As Charles Bernstein wrote in ‘My Way’:

“Poetry can interrogate how language constitutes, rather than simply reflects, social meaning and values. You can’t fully critique the dominant culture if you are confined to the forms through which it reproduces itself, not because hegemonic forms are compromised ‘in themselves’ but because their criticality has been commandeered.” (Yes, I know I am stretching it to connect Duffy and Armitage to the idea of cultural criticality).

All this randomly coincided with my current reading of Alain Badiou’s ‘The Immanence of Truths’ in which he articulates the ontological and evental structure of worlds. It’s a massive undertaking and too large a subject for here, but a key theme is the systemic finitude limiting societal change, and the operational covering-over of the possibility of thinking about change. Capitalism consumes everything with the idea that the dismal future is endless, unchangeable and theirs:

“Any system that maintains that the current laws of what exists will be confirmed indefinitely because they are deduced, insofar as their universe is constructible, from what has already been defined.”

In ‘Immanence’, Badiou identifies that change is very much possible and “a fundamental ethics can be derived, in three interrelated imperatives” to achieve it. The Queen’s funeral qua hegemon is an ethic challenge to humanity and to poetry as truth procedure - a challenge that Armitage and Duffy have clearly failed. Here is my poem: 

 

Endless

1        “You must always commit to an Idea” 

See that?

It’s passed that. A line of trees hopeful between two buildings, or maybe

as big as ‘let not another child be slain’, as strong as memory of stolen lands,

To create a pulsing ripple, that soliton which surfs even under their palimpsest,

This our secret opera in a key undefaced by crucifixion or commodity

or gangmasters for captive freedom.

Our delicate wont to violent negation is a vinculum to black and red posters

Untouched acts vs the fading replacement written in tepid ink

the discretion out of reach and living as if divined

Forever and passed there, 

you can see that?

 

2          “You must contribute to uncovering”

Clown Laureates offer the consolations of traffic management, uniform imbalances,

A planning conceit of property values, secretly waged, a chart of dominant percentages, 

with walking children, royally screwed, to exude the smell of spoilage and unpasteurised 

genitals, lined up

in good order, salutes, highborn as primitive and weakened to obtain a “good” 

remembering, our photos are the same as life in Queue Theory chicanery

or chicane being-for-death – let not another child be slain, remember?

Ordinal to name things, number things, and hierarchize them, mediated as to police

This recurring procession dream and rule as repetition.

  

3          “Open thought up to real infinity” 

With the Hierarchy of Mediations in transit by deletion, with each local gesture,

The joyous breeze of interruption of imaginary nations as the true value

As art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goals that failed fade. 

We

to be earned can commit the happiness of thoughtcrime to increment, to replacement.

And that’s it. Bypass feudal linear procession. Use elevated biocular focus to see that:

Passed even that. A sombre toast: to the grand narratives of us 

in the absence of gods, kings, laureates, etc.

 

 

Writing: World-Building

 

As per the last blog, the first novel of my post-UK period, The Family Idiots, is near enough finished (just proofing, etc) so I have moved on to writing the next two books, in parallel and (sort of) intertwining: Urim and The Museum Quarter. Contrary to the implication of the title, The Museum Quarter is as much about museums as Sartre’s Roads to Freedom is about living in Paris or Lord of the Flies is about life on an island. Maybe its antecedence is closer to George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (without the OULIPO).

If you watch ‘how to write’ YouTube videos etc. (which I wouldn’t advise), one of the things often extolled is “world-building” your novel, a convincing world for the reader to navigate. The Museum Quarter is not about museums, but there are five museums in its world. Two or three of them are composites of museums I know well, but I wanted a New Art Museum, which needed to be authoritatively contemporary. So rather than conjure up something architecturally unconvincing, I turned to a real architect, Maurice Shapero, whom I curated in my last show in Bury Art Museum. After the show we completed a book of my poem ‘Architecture & Now’ and his drawings but Covid and related budget issues interfered with the final production. Although the new novel is set in an unspecified city, there is a steeply sloping site in Porto, slowly intersected by the curve of Rua Amaldo Leite and Rua da Mocidade da Arrábida, and dropping down from Campo Alegre to the Douro river, which I walk Barney through quite often and I began to see this as the location for the New Art Museum. 

I shared a Google maps screenshot to Maurice, hopeful that he’d be at least up for a quick sketch from his kitchen table which I could fill in the gaps novelistically. But it turns out novel ‘world-building’ has stepped up to a level, maybe even to a new genre. Architects rarely get a brief for such an ambitious site, where there is no budget limit and no planning bureaucracy, an opportunity for free architectural expression; this is the sort of non-brief I used to give artists I was curating. Who cares what the curator wants? It’s the artist that is doing the creating. And Maurice has embraced the brief: the Museum Quarter will have its New Art Museum (link). I look forward to the novel’s ‘characters’ wandering its halls incised into the slope (below):

I’m not going to say much more about the novel because the focus is on writing it rather than talking about writing it, but with five museums to wander around, in the same spirit, I have also invited one guest curator and various artists to exhibit in shows that won’t exist. Hopefully, the novel’s funders, ‘stakeholders’ and visitors to these museums are not going to be happy.

 

Writing 2022

For years while curating and directing Bury Art Museum and the Text Festival, I mostly put my own work on the backburner. My first publication 50 Heads (downloadable version here) was only written in 2006 because I was able to take a sabbatical, and was mostly written in Iceland, Netherlands, Japan and Italy. This became one of the features of subsequent publications with them written around the world at a creative distance from the day job. My second book was eponymously located in Reykjavik alongside my exhibition (alongside Dan Flavin & Alan Charlton) at Safn.

Reykjavik cover

Space The Soldier who died for Perspective (Veer Books) is even structured in sections identified for the location they were written or installed (Tampere, Berlin, Bertinoro, Melbourne, Budapest, Edinburgh). By the time my Bury projects had reach China my workload was so great that I sort of announced my retirement from writing with The End of Poetry .

So leaving Bury meant I could finally give my own work the concentration I had only been able to squeeze in for the last 20 years. Leaving the fetid corruption and racism of Brexit England gives me the context to quote Robert Graves that I have waited 40 years for: “Goodbye to all that”. 

So moving to Porto gives me one of the things that I find conducive for writing - detachment. The ill-health that triggered my retirement decision plus the pandemic made initial concentration difficult. And with my previous propensity to find a theoretical framework for my (curatorial) practice, one of the first things I distracted myself with was researching the answer to the problem I identified in Poetry as Thoughtcrime - in brief:

‘In this historic moment of crisis, where the omniscient capitalist lying data-god turns us into the raw material it consumes - Poetry is Thoughtcrime. But how do you commit that crime when every thought is predicted, manipulated and commodified?’  

I’m happy to say that I conceived a theory for the future of poetry and, by extended logic, other artforms. I shared an initial Manifesto with a handful of similarly-concerned artists and have it mostly written in what would have been my first post-Bury book - Poetry as Thoughtcrime. Then I had cause to pause. If I’d still been in Bury and curating, the theory would have formed the basis for a Text Festival, but I realised that this was just a habit of thought and that now I was not in Bury or curating, it was time for me to apply my analysis to my own work rather than providing a forum or a context for others - that can come later. In part as a deferment and part a compromise, I moved onto the second book, which would be the transition in literary practice. It struck me that frequently in history philosophers have ‘inserted’ a ‘prequel’ work to their major discovery that seeks to explain their methodology for their breakthrough later work. So I set off write my first poetry book since 2012 calling it In Search of Method. Let the book’s own introduction explain:

In Search of Method

In Search of Method is a lie.

In Search of Method is the conceit of sequential philosophers.

Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1957 precursor to the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’:

‘Search for a Method’.

The Rules of Rene Descartes’ ‘Discourse on Method’

contain the most detailed description of his method but magically

for the Search for Method, he never completed it, and never refers to it

in his published writings or correspondence. Alain Badiou, in ‘Logics of Worlds’

pauses before the launch, his stepping off - “Once we are in possession

of a Greater Logic, of a completed theory of worlds and objects, it is possible to examine on its own terms the question of change, 

especially the question of radical change, or of the event”.

They all do. Writing their method is to already know where it will end,

“we will adopt a method of maximal interiority”

“to show from the outset

that which is only fully intelligible at the end”

The Search for Method is the rigorous path of the poet.

 

So my poetic investigation tests four methods of (re)searching:

Lévy Flight - the evolutionary approach, favoured by sharks and people who are lost.

Descartes’ Rules based methodology.

Seeing To It That (STIT) Theory - The contemporary theoretical system parsing the nature of knowing and action.

Separation & Lapse method developing the Anthropology of the Name, Sylvain Lazarus’s seminal investigation of thought.

Except for the conclusion, this book is near enough finished now too.

I’ve been invited to curate an intervention for Synapse International and expect to structure it around the Search of Method, plus pointing the direction of my new theories. And I’ll be doing an online work called The Answer on Rachel Defay-Liautard’s maintenants-synapse 

Despite all this apparent precedence for poetic output, not a lot of people know that my decision to write poetry originally was only because it was quicker to write than fiction. So more importantly and exciting for me, I am just completing my first novel in years, The Family Idiots, and have made a start on my second, Urim.

A couple of other things are floating around. I’ve just written a foreword for a collaboration between Rachel Defay-Liautard between Marton Koppány, and I’ve been invited by MarshaMacDonald to work on a limited-edition broadsheet, which will be called Hurry/Depression.