AI – Against Interpretation

“It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.” George Orwell 

AI Prompt: write a pop song using Schönberg’s 12-note scale celebrating a time-traveler's deletion of that bastard Brahms from this timeline:

The question of what art is: Joseph Beuys: “The thing that was missing was that all these fundamental questions, that is, the fundamental research into art and its function, could not be answered at the Academy,” or by Artificial Intelligence.

AI language games are directed towards/focused on answering inane questions, not fundamental questions; its baby-paws grasp after graffiti equivalence, DPRK candy realism, the desperate urge to it-looks-like representation – count each hair on that cat - O and/or plastic abstract neatness. New car shiny. As with every new technology from oil paint to Augmented Reality, the Paradigm: artists and pornographers take up the challenge to push it beyond its material limits to explore or predict the technology ('tis a consummation devoutly to be wished by Capital juggling “a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization” – Negri+Hardt). AI’s Eternal September to ‘create’ is ‘exponential’, they say, the adjective triggers fear in some/fearsome – FEAR a system requirement – fictively we anticipate Cyberdyne Technologies, Elysium, or Brain Salad Surgery “I’m perfect. Are you?”: all AI literature descends to an end-digit, redundancy, extinction.

AI Prompt: Reimagine Duchamp’s ‘Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled’ as if Duchamp had been Mikhail Tal in his 1959 match against Dieter Keller

True or manufactured, manufactured or true, the media reports two responses from the ‘cultural’ sector: the early adopters embrace it, and the luddites design a  ‘Human Artistry’ campaign kitemark. This is no more than a repetition, repetition, an evolutionary categorisation of late capitalism, consumption, surplus value increased with the artificial means of production in the hands of the few, ‘all-human’ production having as much relevance to this model as Sunday painters have to the Venice Biennale. 

AI Prompt: Create a concrete porn-poem featuring a Monkey Christ and two cats

As with every new artistic tool, the quality of work produced has a direct relationship to the talent or vision of the human experimenting with it. There’s always a Leonardo who paints the Last Supper in oil on plaster, so it takes centuries of restorers to stop it flaking off the wall. We sit in that refectory as intended.

AI Prompt: Create a 1980’s playlist for DJ Dostoevsky

Ironically the Leonardo’s are the most dangerous to the capitalist paradigm. Bertran de Born and the pop song writers who whinge about how ‘terrifying’ it is that pop could be completely appropriated by AI need to listen to themselves, that boat sailed some time ago. I am reminded of an interview I heard on Radio 1 in the 1980’s with Martin Fry, lead singer of the band ABC, in which he opined that if Dostoevsky was alive in the 80’s he would be DJing in Covent Garden. I remember laughing out loud and like to think that I spat out my coffee. (I wonder whether anyone else remembers that statement? Roy Batty: ‘I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… at the end of that tea ceremony in Taipei).

AI Prompt: Design a sampler font which represents Saul Bellow’s description of seeing Trotsky’s corpse in the Mexican hospital in 1940.

Dostoyevsky: “I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.” Bellow: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog” –      "the periphery still reproduces itself as the periphery.” This was my mistake. I tried to make the peripheral central: it was contraindicated all along.

Ai is the revenge of a kindergarten intellect upon art… violate art - based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content. “It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories,” observes Susan Sontag. The Handbook of Inaesthetics notes “[a work of art] sets itself up as an inquiry into the question of its own finality. It is the persuasive procedure of its own finitude. This is, after all, why the artwork is irreplaceable in all of its points (another trait that distinguishes it from the generic infinite of the true): Once ‘left’ to its own immanent ends, it is as it will forever be.” Sylvain Lazarus asks whether there may “exist a regime of the thinkable that is inaccessible to this total jurisdiction of language.” The answer is obviously YES. I count five just in this post.

A truth is something we make. It is declared, composed, and upheld by the subjects it convokes and sustains. “Our world is full of copiers and repeaters, ... It is better to interpret than to compose; it is better to have an opinion on a decision that has already been made than to make one’s own. The modern illness is the engulfing of the new in the duplicata, the engulfing of intelligence in the pleasure of the homogeneous” (Michel Serres) but it’s hard. “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions,” says René Char. 

AI Prompt: Choreograph a pustulant pavane for James Daly MP in the style of Charlemagne Palestine’s Schlongo!! 

To show willin’: I gave AI a couple of chances while writing this: its DJ Dostoevsky generated nothing more than a 80s playlist and its Pavane was literally a description of dancers imitating spots bursting which scraped to the technical level infant school play. AI embarrassed itself. To anyone saying 'ah, but maybe AI is still at the level of a child.' I say child art is of no interest to anyone except to the parents.

AI Prompt: what would it mean if  

Christian Bök has claimed poetry in the future will be written by machines for other machines to read – but like humans, the poetry machines won’t be paid for their works and the poetry reading machines will be a tiny group that turn up to performances on a wet Tuesday night in a room over a pub. In the words of the Irish gangster – “who fucking cares?”

Or as Tom Raworth wrote:  

Lion Lion

the happy hunters are coming back

eager to be captured, to have someone unravel the knot

but nobody can understand the writing

in the book they found in the lion’s lair.

In Search of Method

We will call first thinking

the ‘thought-there’

Sylvain Lazarus.

The value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.

Adorno

whereas now prey is scarce –

Lévy

Flight

still applies

 Back in 2020 I wrote about the challenge we faced in Poetry as Thoughtcrime, to summarize:

I was wrong. I didn’t see far enough into the darkness.

 I thought “The final systemic replacement of humanity will be the AI breakthrough into creativity. When machine intelligence conquers this uniquely human realm, the march to monetarise your consciousness is complete. Companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook aim to automate creation and reception. The hegemonic colonisation of consciousness manipulates the authentic reader to irrelevance and makes the writer redundant; what space is left? How will resistance be possible? Only the declaration of poetry as thoughtcrime offers a resistant literary space. We are we to create a praxis that can only be tamped down after its facticity has manifest a change of moment unpredictable to digital simulation. The poem has to become uniquely outside the poet’s own data set, the poem becomes the thoughtcrime. Art has always laid claim to a capacity to change perception, but now rather than Poetry ‘making it new’, the imperative is to first make the writer new.”

Though I said my theoretical solution would soon follow, I realised that that was me still thinking like a curator, facilitating/appropriating other creativities, and so my answer was held back to allow time and space for me to apply it to my own practice. So now, I find myself at the explanation of the Search for Method phase of thought:

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 subsequent published writings or correspondence. Alain Badiou’s ‘Logics of Worlds’ similarly pauses before the launch, with the first step - “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”.

This then that. The working out.

But they already knowing 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” 

– they/we are writing backwards:

Peripheral like a traditional refugee,

Contrary to Lettre à un otage - the catalyst is here not there.

In the original Base people came, ate and went.

Some left Four Temperaments but not Balanchine’s winter coat, So here:

“in geosocial space that may assume many forms,”

The problem is clearly stated and urgente:

You:             the sum of all your vinculum data.

 “The issue – the construction of something unconstructible – arises as much for a Leninist revolutionary party as for an early Cubist painting, Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone works, Galois’ theory, or Aeschylus’ invention of tragedy. In all of these examples – actually, in every creation of a new truth – something is produced that, precisely from the point of view of the established order, is not constructible.”

Alain Badiou – The Immanence of Truths

(more of which later)

 

'peut-etre le Messie' by Marton Koppany

 

Gaza, Take This Cup from Me

a Compendious Book on Guernica reruns in a place

Urim and Thummim chose to transform every figure

A cheap breastplate as random as desultory tribes

Equates to autoimmune disorder: acts sensitive to assumption

Reports, exogenous acts of God – by incidence and effects

Enshrine pernicious anaemia around anthropic argument

– imposing on you the easiness of death,

Defeat won’t matter, in every scenario they lose

stones placed for some day in the future, ordinance won’t matter,

in every scenario they lose, operations run their inquisition,

the vanquished of today

Masjids call

Flowers braver than us.

 

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.

The Last International Poetry Dog Day

This would have been the 15th birthday of Barney, the famous Poetry Dog - he missed it by one month. We have been touched by the outpouring of condolence for him. So I thought a last acknowledgement of his status in the Poetry World was a suitable memorial. 

Ron Silliman, Tony Lopez, Tony Trehy, Christian Bök (Text Festival)

The King's Basement

 

The King’s Basement

 

Bedside manners are extra prayers empty,

As succession entropic acts

A new stamp a new head posted to Ipatiev House.

Usurping timorous laureation we must to Ipatiev House

Search engines at the ready, to calculate the difference … a falling blade,

A spike, a headshot, a poll ending with a hung result.

 

Coronation words and celebratory foods, chicken, charcuntery, and inertia

Until when the poor will eat promises

All unusual and active vectors orient to Ipatiev House,

The Rite of Passage for all kings.

Search engine differentials calculate the museological relevance of a meat-hook,

    or a headshot, a poll resulting in a crumbling Bourbon end.

Big fat hands gasping for air – as entitlement is to justified, as ascension is to basement.

 

The Bijouterie of Winnie and the Shiba Fellas

On social media, at the beginning of the war, the CIA unleased an army of twitter 'campaigners'/bots supporting Ukraine (at the same time preparing cyber tactics for Taiwan for the coming war with China which the US will manufacture after the Ukraine). They created the identities in the first instance by appropriating a subculture from computer gaming where cool teen gamers used cartoon dog-human hybrids as their avatars and called themselves 'fellas'. The second 'anti-China' 'army' similarly adopted an animal persona - this time Winnie the Pooh, because there had previously been a campaign suggesting that Xi Jinping looked like Pooh and had therefore banned Winnie the Pooh from China - untrue of course. If you look at Fella twitter accounts they often don't even hide their location is 'Langley' (the CIA HQ). It initiates pile-ons, cyber bullying and abuse campaigns, as you'd expect frequently racist and misogynist. Yesterday, a North Atlantic Fellas Organisation (NAFO) dog replaced the blue bird logo with their trademark dog-face - it is unclear whether this is an actual hack or a Elon Musk marketing stunt related to a court case; either way, I wrote this poem some months ago in response to the Fellas but the twitter hack seems make this a good time to post it. 

The Bijouterie of Winnie and the Shiba Fellas

And did those in ancient time walk upon mountains?

And was the anonymous pleasant pasture anxious?

And when the oozing flood conspired to the anthropomorph,

And assertive hope was mocked to undermine,

And mills still Satanic, though closed and burned out

      For future residential development

               or locations for cold people to starve.

As bristling musculature stared at screens and, chewing,

As if cry havoc dogs and wagin' doges, callin’ tantrum chagrin for war

As if broadcasting pustular to its proud constituency of residual pornocrats,

Ageing as futureless empires do, sanded in desert storms lost, herniated,

 burger fat believers in a half-century pre-dream state,

as if every night, without fail, the bijouterie of Winnie and adrenal Shiba Fellas struts

that banal masturbatory oath. 

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.