Identity and Genius (Writing 2023)

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.