A collection of blurbs
These are text for book jackets, aimed at the retail situation. Because of their purpose, they may be optimistic rather than accurate. But they may be evocative of a certain moment. They document something... even if not reality.
The Imaginary in Geometry:
The instruction for this new volume was to write poems with no autobiographical content – going straight to personal myth. The Imaginary in Geometry is named for a book by a legendary Russian priest and mathematician martyred by the Bolsheviks. It means that any theory involves idealisation – but also how something imaginary takes on shape and dimensions in the artistic act. Breton wanted to change Malraux's definition of modern art, as what develops a series of images into a personal myth, into the discovery of a collective stock of images, rooted in the unconscious. Such a return of archaic worlds to light would have to pick its way through the debris of myths wished on us by the agencies – Anglophilia, a Romance of the Docks is a lingering exploration of the lost world of mid-century propaganda, the alluring stories of a leisure class in ideal clothes. Photographs open onto a beckoning space of generosity and inauthenticity, a glittering demon world which engulfs us we say yes to it. How indeed would we reconstruct the Past once we discard these pop images with their discreet divinities? More fundamental than a mythic narrative is the fabric of the space in which it takes place as a momentary series of high points. Symbolic space is something non-finite which can be built up by finite steps. 'On the Beach at Aberystwyth' is a journey in another geometry, the Western Seaways as the routes along which Celtic culture spread. It answers the question, what is social structure.
Early preoccupations with Socialist Realism and technophilia are continued here by poems about the inventor of double-tracking and a Spiritualist clergyman who constructed a machine of unknown purpose at the command of spirits.
Alien Skies:
“The starting point was dreaming about spaceships and listening to jazz drumming. The discovery that in Welsh caeth, the term for strict metre, also means captive, led to the realization that the surrender of strict metre was equivalent to the escape from gravity implied by leaving terrestrial space. Hardly less obvious was the entrance of the heretic, Mani, whose death crushed by the weight of chains set up the opponent values of gravity and light-which he regarded as the soul substance. This dependence of emotional states on arriving radiance is discussed in terms of the physiology of an English reptile: the viper, which is in a kind of metabolic shutdown for nine months of the year. The wish for exit led to an investigation of substances –disputably or really–infalling from outside the sparse terrestrial rim: meteorites, cosmic rays, proton winds, daylight, gravity waves, omens, natal influences. The fleeting presence of the 17th century Jesuit poet Jacob Balde is called up by the poet's being felled by sunstroke, toccado, while searching for an Oscan inscription in Pompeii in 1987. The correlation of temporary insanity, minerals, and stars is investigated via anomalies reported in Derbyshire in the 1640s.
The concept called for a poem consisting of a ring of metaphors, each one repeating the other, the whole blazing a kind of exit path, a track in thin air. Early plans for issuing the poem scratched on plaques of burnished meteoric iron have not yet been realized. It is only available on paper.”
Anxiety before entering a room:
It's the tail end of the seventies, the severity of hypothetical Marxism has given way to the anti-humanism of punk. In a province, someone anglophobe and technophile is attempting to write documentary poetry about the situation at work, where the basic power relations never slip out of mind: an unending cascade of concrete and puzzling problems, of human conjunctures. The real ordinance of society follows an ideology which is secret, covered by a false public one; other forms of consciousness are a shifting set of part-patterns. All around, a generation of English poets are connecting their output to their input. A cultural blockade comes down over all poetry except the most subservient. Filtered expanses of monochrome nuance concealed the fact that nothing was being said. The industrial recession of the Thatcher years lays bare the fragility of every social and psychological structure. Somewhere in the underground of North London, the invisibility allows a constant approximation to popular culture. The infinite compression of punk breaks up into a boundless release, the rediscovery of melody and colour. Melancholic and esoteric virtuosity in deserted spaces is interrupted by a troupe of bedizened dropouts, impossibly nimble and competitive, and is redirected towards bright patched surfaces. The attack by the State and the South on a whole engineering civilisation is protested by the construction of complex symbolic machines. A lucid equivalent of turmoil is not the same as unstable maps of instability.
Skeleton looking at Chinese pictures:
These poems respond to the Thatcher era as reactions away from social realism and head-on confrontation of the power elite. One of their repeated images is an object in a museum: a limited-stimulus field. The edge of the object is the line between being and not-being; a shore telling where mighty energies dissipated and seeped into their reverse; a boundary in a geometry of many boundaries. The alien cultures–Chinese, Dark Age English, the realm of Charles V, the Inner Asian steppes–appear here as rehearsals of the historical imagination. The motivation of the poems is beauty, integrity, and complexity. The abandonment of the task of advocacy of a personality or an intellectual position allows a shift into ornament and detail, mainly visual, which is both an indulgence and a delicacy. They are meant as a relief from daily oppression.
Threads of Iron:
These poems were written in 1980-81 as part of a book called Threads of Iron, of which the other half has been published as Cut Memories and False Commands. Related material came out as Sound Surface. Seventeen years later, I am someone else; the poems have to survive without a personality which, at the time, they tried to assert and multiply–and, at the same time, to deny. Arguing about politics–in the canteen every lunchtime– with engineers from Turkey, El Salvador, or Hong Kong inspired many of the poems. We were parts of a working collectivity of six thousand people, engaged in the manufacture of telecomms equipment, and what is surprising is how little time is given to portraying this large human object–run from New York although employed on British Government contracts. He ignorantly missed the fact that the largest employer in his home town, Loughborough, was founded by an American, and so the connection that the 1860s saw England already failing to compete in the new and growth-rich industries, electrical equipment in this case. Bemused by how many sounds a poem could give off at the same time, the author passed over the daring use of electric fluid. The writer was a poor prophet–not only of the prospects of printing such a work when it was written, but also of socio-political developments in England and Russia, of the rest of his life, and even of the stability of the vast corporation for which he worked. The seizure of a world, not as it is, but as a set of moving patterns generating a future world, thus failed, leaving this trace of a mind struggling to assimilate something too large for it. Judgments waiting for laws to be drafted. A term in a series which stayed on the missing list. The information missing was a set of instructions concerning the design and assembly of goods, the distribution of wealth and duties, and the generation of prestige and opinions, which at the time seemed to be in flux and open to furious and calculated intervention.
The Imaginary in Geometry:
The instruction for this new volume was to write poems with no autobiographical content – going straight to personal myth. The Imaginary in Geometry is named for a book by a legendary Russian priest and mathematician martyred by the Bolsheviks. It means that any theory involves idealisation – but also how something imaginary takes on shape and dimensions in the artistic act. Breton wanted to change Malraux's definition of modern art, as what develops a series of images into a personal myth, into the discovery of a collective stock of images, rooted in the unconscious. Such a return of archaic worlds to light would have to pick its way through the debris of myths wished on us by the agencies – Anglophilia, a Romance of the Docks is a lingering exploration of the lost world of mid-century propaganda, the alluring stories of a leisure class in ideal clothes. Photographs open onto a beckoning space of generosity and inauthenticity, a glittering demon world which engulfs us we say yes to it. How indeed would we reconstruct the Past once we discard these pop images with their discreet divinities? More fundamental than a mythic narrative is the fabric of the space in which it takes place as a momentary series of high points. Symbolic space is something non-finite which can be built up by finite steps. 'On the Beach at Aberystwyth' is a journey in another geometry, the Western Seaways as the routes along which Celtic culture spread. It answers the question, what is social structure.
Early preoccupations with Socialist Realism and technophilia are continued here by poems about the inventor of double-tracking and a Spiritualist clergyman who constructed a machine of unknown purpose at the command of spirits.
Alien Skies:
“The starting point was dreaming about spaceships and listening to jazz drumming. The discovery that in Welsh caeth, the term for strict metre, also means captive, led to the realization that the surrender of strict metre was equivalent to the escape from gravity implied by leaving terrestrial space. Hardly less obvious was the entrance of the heretic, Mani, whose death crushed by the weight of chains set up the opponent values of gravity and light-which he regarded as the soul substance. This dependence of emotional states on arriving radiance is discussed in terms of the physiology of an English reptile: the viper, which is in a kind of metabolic shutdown for nine months of the year. The wish for exit led to an investigation of substances –disputably or really–infalling from outside the sparse terrestrial rim: meteorites, cosmic rays, proton winds, daylight, gravity waves, omens, natal influences. The fleeting presence of the 17th century Jesuit poet Jacob Balde is called up by the poet's being felled by sunstroke, toccado, while searching for an Oscan inscription in Pompeii in 1987. The correlation of temporary insanity, minerals, and stars is investigated via anomalies reported in Derbyshire in the 1640s.
The concept called for a poem consisting of a ring of metaphors, each one repeating the other, the whole blazing a kind of exit path, a track in thin air. Early plans for issuing the poem scratched on plaques of burnished meteoric iron have not yet been realized. It is only available on paper.”
Anxiety before entering a room:
It's the tail end of the seventies, the severity of hypothetical Marxism has given way to the anti-humanism of punk. In a province, someone anglophobe and technophile is attempting to write documentary poetry about the situation at work, where the basic power relations never slip out of mind: an unending cascade of concrete and puzzling problems, of human conjunctures. The real ordinance of society follows an ideology which is secret, covered by a false public one; other forms of consciousness are a shifting set of part-patterns. All around, a generation of English poets are connecting their output to their input. A cultural blockade comes down over all poetry except the most subservient. Filtered expanses of monochrome nuance concealed the fact that nothing was being said. The industrial recession of the Thatcher years lays bare the fragility of every social and psychological structure. Somewhere in the underground of North London, the invisibility allows a constant approximation to popular culture. The infinite compression of punk breaks up into a boundless release, the rediscovery of melody and colour. Melancholic and esoteric virtuosity in deserted spaces is interrupted by a troupe of bedizened dropouts, impossibly nimble and competitive, and is redirected towards bright patched surfaces. The attack by the State and the South on a whole engineering civilisation is protested by the construction of complex symbolic machines. A lucid equivalent of turmoil is not the same as unstable maps of instability.
Skeleton looking at Chinese pictures:
These poems respond to the Thatcher era as reactions away from social realism and head-on confrontation of the power elite. One of their repeated images is an object in a museum: a limited-stimulus field. The edge of the object is the line between being and not-being; a shore telling where mighty energies dissipated and seeped into their reverse; a boundary in a geometry of many boundaries. The alien cultures–Chinese, Dark Age English, the realm of Charles V, the Inner Asian steppes–appear here as rehearsals of the historical imagination. The motivation of the poems is beauty, integrity, and complexity. The abandonment of the task of advocacy of a personality or an intellectual position allows a shift into ornament and detail, mainly visual, which is both an indulgence and a delicacy. They are meant as a relief from daily oppression.
Threads of Iron:
These poems were written in 1980-81 as part of a book called Threads of Iron, of which the other half has been published as Cut Memories and False Commands. Related material came out as Sound Surface. Seventeen years later, I am someone else; the poems have to survive without a personality which, at the time, they tried to assert and multiply–and, at the same time, to deny. Arguing about politics–in the canteen every lunchtime– with engineers from Turkey, El Salvador, or Hong Kong inspired many of the poems. We were parts of a working collectivity of six thousand people, engaged in the manufacture of telecomms equipment, and what is surprising is how little time is given to portraying this large human object–run from New York although employed on British Government contracts. He ignorantly missed the fact that the largest employer in his home town, Loughborough, was founded by an American, and so the connection that the 1860s saw England already failing to compete in the new and growth-rich industries, electrical equipment in this case. Bemused by how many sounds a poem could give off at the same time, the author passed over the daring use of electric fluid. The writer was a poor prophet–not only of the prospects of printing such a work when it was written, but also of socio-political developments in England and Russia, of the rest of his life, and even of the stability of the vast corporation for which he worked. The seizure of a world, not as it is, but as a set of moving patterns generating a future world, thus failed, leaving this trace of a mind struggling to assimilate something too large for it. Judgments waiting for laws to be drafted. A term in a series which stayed on the missing list. The information missing was a set of instructions concerning the design and assembly of goods, the distribution of wealth and duties, and the generation of prestige and opinions, which at the time seemed to be in flux and open to furious and calculated intervention.
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