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.

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.