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.