How

Names of those near him lots of some who have influenced him heroes nomdeplumes ffugenwau never alphabetical to get a rhythm drop the forename invent and substitute mangle insert wild cards loose-cannons unknowns very knowns set parenthesis (around) occupations (author) achievements instruments (piano) invented and real drop vowels tighten up tpwrtr kynrds hrt mntr like jazz bnd intrmnts cr pts (xhst) spd mkrs drgs cffne vslne slip slop second half left off. (scnd hf lft f).  Descriptors gouged up as overkill then raked through into letter groups.  Staccato.  Scatter.  Sentence end words gathered from his great works and laid out like poms or prim prose, cloud combs, rakes, riddles, mesh filters, sticklebacks.  Punctuation dropped gathered letters set in alphabetical groups, strained external mix.  Pages from pulp novels.  Random lifts from scientific texts.  Parts of the text erased fugitive lost.  Return to the names of the influenced shuffled and scratched.  The revealed accumulated structure could be further distorted but is not.  No Ouvroir de littérature potentielle novelmaking.  Pommes.  Pims.  Perms.  Touchstones are important.  He uses the formulae to parse fragments of reality out of the fog.  Strings of pearls.  Lights.  Poor lights.  Leaked battery lit.  Damp.  Bulbs clouded.  But lights.

Probably the most important realisation was that the ear could lead the voice.  Hear the distortion and then mimic it.  Follow the pale traces of sylable bumping.  Pick the uplift as the list rattles towards its conclusion, its inevitable and unemotional end.  The signals embed themselves and reproduce like amoebae.  Cells multiplying ( ) ( ) ( ) list and reorder.  Take the lyric apart and see how it stands up.  Unbolt the sonnet and let the parts roll in the dirt.  There’s dirt in all this.  Sticks to everything.    Don’t clean it off.  Most important thing in the world.

Nothing Is New

It’s been a long day, waiting for Osmond Oshmail Osaman Ormondold Ormond.  I’m in the front bar of the Conway.  Fug and warm.   Half a pint.  Worried.  I’m a young man.  An incredibly young man.  Bright.  Skin.  Hair.  Eyes.  My poem is in my pocket foolscap typed three pages nothing I don’t know searching hefty little mag Henri easy about being something going somewhere words being young.  John said bring it it’s brought.  He arrives in his trademark grey tweedy jacket.  Bulbous pockets. Nothing in them.  Leather buttons.  Tufty hair.  This poem he looks at it kindly slowly sort of reads it half takes it in without wincing why don’t you take this first part move it to the end put the middle at the start cut up shuffle.  Hands in the air in waving demonstration.  Can’t work.  Can’t work. We do it.  On the table.  Text.  Beer stains.  It can.

The sole Scientific and Magical Colonel of Space.  Great rays.  Insights arriving while we look away.  We don’t screw our faces up.  We don’t tough with the arms out long.  We don’t consider smoke.  We don’t let the mind drift or pin sharp or blur.  We don’t paint anything.  We don’t talk.  We look at each other and it’s done. 

John says there’s nothing new under the sun he was trying these dada rolls and lists and the surrealist nonsense and the way the third mind controls how you write that’s god that’s what powers this that’s been done I’ve done it did it do it many times.  So show me.  Gone.  Didn’t like the results enough abandoned and moved in these other Auden directions care and chivvy, push and press, let the mind go loose then reel it in pin sharp.  Moved on.

We drink.  Smile.  Fold the poem back into the pocket.  Think about what you are doing.  Did some of that.

Publishing

I went to Birmingham with Crow cigarettes and hitching.   The cabs were easy and they talked but you didn’t have to answer.  Crow had the big idea.  I thought he had the big idea.  The radios would drown most of it.  Countryside.  Countryside.  Countryside.  We got there and he showed me his notebook pulp hardback frightening hands.  Poms.  Baroque serifs in biro.  Intertextural illuminated catchword dry pointed.  This is it, man.  Hands self-tattooed ink smeared dark.  The sky is serrated.

There are seven stencils and one typer me on the typer and Crow with a pen scratching his cover.  It’s loopy.  Flying saucers and ghosts and hosts of demons chasing each other across the cosmos.  Inside my head, says Crow.  Hand on his ear lift it and the angels might stream out.  Birmingham air.  Combat jackets.  Fur.  Bottom of jeans embellished with sew-ons.  Boots.  No bells.  Terry Riley Poppy No Good and the Phantom Band.  Like the sky same piece repeats and moves it’s the same but different it changes doesn’t change comes back looks like sky is the sky same again all the time anyway.  Crow’s poems are medieval indictments of self-loathing full of rage and fury.  The world is heavy on inflatable huge burgers bright flat colours white plastic and hope. 

We get a hundred copies and wire-staple down the left hand margin.  Big floppy foolscap full of immediate energy with most of the text written only hours before print.   How you do it.  Plastic bags.  Poetry man this is real.  Crow smiles through his dark beard spiky bits there are teeth in there no one has ever seen Crow’s teeth.   So we have these poems and somehow the world will change because of it.  There’s a feeling that the angels are pushing us.  Saw Wordsworth on the paths as we came here.  Felt Blake in the landscape.  Taliesin making the hills vibrate. 

They don’t sell.  We try but they don’t.  Should have known.  There’s a woman shifting The Watchtower and she’s done thirty just panhandling across the bar.   I’ve managed nothing.  She’s big and black dressed and hatted.  Earlier age.  I’m now.  Mod feint soft shoes cords jacket thin tie.  Burroughs wore a suit all his life to enable him to fade into the background.  The background where the observers stand.  Float unseen.  Soft hands.  Eyes that skim and drift but rarely stick.  But in this place doesn’t work.

1966 wasn’t it?  Mitch Ryder Beatles Temptations Wilson Pickett.  Juke and cider.  Poems in the hands and the idea of poems and the way they flushed up the sky and made the air so pure.  Bag of books under the bed.  Cardiff unsolds back from the midlands smoke.  Crow stayed there.  Dope and hedges.  Corners.  Flat out, man.  I am a published writer.  Yep.  There with the dust whorls and the detritus.  Staples rust.  Some foxing.  Covers mostly intact.

Tea Room

In the tea room where they’d stopped and the owner had served them egg and bacon on the best china, floral, gold edges, linen table cloth, knives and forks with fish ends and silver salt shaker where the salt flowed had never yet been damp he could imagine his mother.  Cobbing liked the far west where time slowed and great gaps emerged into which you could fall.  Fissures.  Finger ends.  Tap the poems.  They had tea strong enough to bend spoons, clinking cups, cube sugar, toast.  Bentwood chairs.  Sunlight.  Empty apart from them.  Washed up in a Ceredigion dream.  Twanging on his big Gretsch Duane Eddy  in the background not Bois y Blacbord.  Finch tapped his fingers.  Cobbing watched the trembling air.  

They took the road back in a car that leaked marking its territory as it went like a cat.   Cat.  Cart. Critch. Kringle Cat. Coot. Cooloop Cat.  Can Can Teenadan Can Deeta Canrowtoo Canreeta Canrowtoo Cancreela Crimb Crime Crark Cat.  Cob had two one huge with a lazy tongue one black and white with fragile bones so deep down in the fur you knew it had to be old.  Sun through the windscreen Cobbing with his winder down like Kerouac Dean Moriarty Cody Pomeray Japhy Ryder high on nothing shouting poems at rising rock water sheep.  Uplands getting bigger.  Cambrian.  Another land.

This was the Cwmystwyth Road that went up through where the Romans once mined lead and the wreck of a more contemporary quarry still sprawled down the hillside on a sea of shale, the road winding through it.     They stopped and scrambled.  Finch found an iron bolt, the past.  Took it.  Cobbing piled stones, the present.  Left them.

Things he said: monotype, variations, tu to ratu, copierprints, vexation, cataclysms, stills, destructions, reproductions, faulting, symposium, nimbu, movement, plural vague, things you run after but can’t catch.  Lao Tsu.  Pablo Neruda.  Marcel Duchamp.  Cornelius Cardew.  Eric Mottram.  Mac Low McClure.  Caught them.

The road back took them through forests.  High plains.  Peat mass.  A rare kite swooping.  Silent skies like the tops of drums. 

Copyright © Peter Finch, 2006