Is 2023 a year in some form of demonic
possession? It’s been pretty dark for us so far but strangely one of my most
productive writing periods for years. The metaphor of the band continuing to
play as the Titanic sank comes to mind, but more positively maybe the writing was
a way of getting through.
Identity Theft Poems
One of the major
horrors has been a sophisticated Identity Theft fraud - malevolent actions full of unpleasantness and threatening developments every day for literally weeks. In
poetic terms it raised all sorts of issues about identity and the experience of
identification of self, generating material questions about the nature identity
itself, material turned into poems. I wouldn’t recommend fraud as a way of
kickstarting a project, and it didn’t exist in my work plans in June but now I
have more than half a book’s worth of intense poems with more in urgent draft.
One of the poems ‘Hymn’
is a eulogy for the loss of Barney and will form part of a forthcoming
exhibition by Wayne Warren at the Cowper Newton Museum (by
evil coincidence, the Fraud attack began the day we brought Barney home from
hospital to die.)
In similar vein, though not part of Identity Theft, I've been invited to write a 'Psalm' to form part of a sound installation by the John Cage of our Time, Helmut Lemke, at The Byre, @ Corriedoo Forest, addressing the hewing negation of Scottish Forestry Strategy.
Novels
Working on the novels
has been harder, due to impossibility of creating the time and mental space
needed while shit things happened. It’s mostly been research and mapping out
stuff. Though again something unexpected occurred. The logic of the Urim novel
required that I rewrite the Christian Gospels, which I started with no great
enthusiasm, it being just world-building background, the text of which will not
be an undue presence in the final novel. However, in the other novel that I am fired
up about, ‘Singing Voices’, I needed a character to be eavesdropping on Ezra Pound
sitting in his cage writing the Pisan Cantos. As I needed to use a fair chunk
of Canto LXXIV-LXXXIV, it occurred to me that I could face copyright issues;
having already committed to rewriting the Gospels in the other novel, rewriting
the Cantos was the obvious solution.
Genius
BUT Bob Perelman
observed in The Trouble with Genius “No one but Pound
could write The Cantos”. As I reread them for “Singing Voices”, I was
struck by how many points of Pound’s reference coincide with my experience. My
answer to Perelman’s observation increasingly turned into a skeptical question “Is he though?”
Putting aside some affected OULIPO reinterpretation or meta-rewriting from the Conceptual
Poetry School, (see Derek Beaulieu’s impressive ‘Flatland’ or Simon Morris’s ‘Re-Writing Freud’ etc, etc.) I needed my Cantos to dovetail with the requirements of the novel, so it had to be
written in Poundian terms.
Like Pound, I have spent a lot of time writing
in Venice (and married Sue there). When writing the Venice
section of 50 Heads, though I didn’t realise immediately, I often
sat on the bench which Pound had sat on when he considered throwing his first
book into the Grand Canal rather than sending it to be published. In Cantos
LXXVI, he records the moment, and, as if planting a seed for myself, 4 years
later when in Florence I wrote ‘Benches’ (sitting on a different bench beside
the Arno) which was published in Space: the Soldier Who Died For Perspective in 2009. The first
stanza is quotation of Pisan Canto and the second is my response.
Benches
shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water?
le bozze ‘A Lume Spento’/
And by the column of Todero
shd/I shift to the other side
or
wait 24 hours
shared benches, A Lassitude Seed
anticipate
other my Arno
outside/Armani
Time
can’t/I face
the moment of nowhere in particular
only be
sobbd/
quietly
My last book, The End of Poetry had the subtitle ‘Other possible Trehys with Leibniz’
referencing of course other worlds, so this would appear to be the world in
which I rewrite the Pisan Cantos. The things that are supposed to make the
Cantos difficult such as the interweaving of histories & mythology, the culture
of China, the renaissance, multiple languages, turn out to directly paralleled
in my own lifetime research trajectory: in my teens I was obsessed with China,
and had studied multiple translations of Confucius Analects, Menius, the
Buddhist Scriptures, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and many Chinese poets; for many
years, I was never without the Wilhem translation of the I Ching – all the sources Pound used.
“Bartok’s Fifth Quartet
… is the record of a personal struggle, possible only to a man born in the
1880s. It has the defects or disadvantages of my Cantos” - Ezra Pound.
In one respect in
relation to Pound’s Chinese, I have the advantage of having visited and worked
in China on many occasions. He frequently name drops restaurants he ate at
around the world and artists he hung out with in London, Paris etc. I can go
some better, name dropping say the best Italian restaurant in Shanghai or the
great French food in Taipei and my years of curating international contemporary
art, sound art, Text, dance, etc, mean I can anecdotalise and appropriate stride
for stride with Pound. He wrote once: “blessed are they who choose the right
artists and makers” – which I used to use as my joke defence when taking
curatorial risks. Similarly, when I was doing my art education the Renaissance
was the key period of study – it’s probably not nowadays. My first ever
published poem (in Chain) was ‘de re aedificatoria,’ which uses Leon Battista Alberti’s
Renaissance treatise (in Latin) on Architecture published in 1452. And of
course, my title ‘Space: the Soldier Who Died for Perspective’ is the art
historical epithet for the dead soldier at the foot of Paolo Uccello’s 1438
painting ‘The Rout of San Romano’. My favourite biography in Vasari’s ‘Lives of
the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors & Architects’ (1568) has always been
Uccello’s and the opening of this was the postscript in ‘…the
Soldier Who Died for Perspective’:
“Paolo Uccello would
have been the most gracious and fanciful genius that was ever devoted to the
art of painting from Giotto’s day to our own, if he had laboured as much at
figures and animals as he laboured and lost time over the details of
perspective.”
I’ve always had a
‘gracious and fanciful’ fascination with the idea of the failing genius. After modernism,
genius is a problematic idea, only useable without irony to describe
sportspeople. However, as Perelman writes “Genius is not simply a critical
demerit to be applied whenever a writer oversteps generic and aesthetic
boundaries.” What does it mean if a ‘genius’ could overstep and doesn’t?
To paraphrase Alain Badiou in ‘The Ethics of Evil’,
to fail to live up to a creative fidelity is Evil in the sense of betrayal.
So my ‘Cantos’ is called ‘Genius’.
The Pisan Cantos opens:
The enormous tragedy of
the dream in the peasant’s bent
shoulders.
Genius opens:
If Mycerinus and his
wife is no longer categorically possible,
revetment
Don’t get me wrong,
Pound is not a hero of mine. Another reason for taking on the Cantos is to confront
his fascism with my militant communism. Politically, I would have supported his
execution in 1945.
The character in
‘Singing Voices’ novel will hear Poundian writing of this contra-Cantos, the
poem will be ‘Genius’ and that as a stand-alone work will be a poem including
history.
