From Thelma

Angel

Tom Raworth was one of the first to see that the myth of the Beats could not be Anglicized. Despite the hopes of the bards of Liverpool performing shaking their beards under the echoing arches of Hope Hall. ‘It’s like tossing the quarter bottle of whiskey out of the mini as you drive down the M16. It doesn’t work at all. There’s a whole different way of going about things,’ he said.

            Once again, now, you see Raworth preparing to sleep.

            ‘I have to take drugs I used to take for pleasure!’ he laughs, making light of the demands upon him. The rattle of pills.

            He talks. It’s three in the morning at your house near Penny Lane. You’ve shared a post-reading late night listening to CDs. You’ve duetted, full-throated, with Frank Sinatra. Kept Thelma awake, upstairs, the self-generative thought of herself between my sheets, mapping her body across the whole of Liverpool. Until it is the whole of Liverpool.

‘She talks. Like an angel talks!’

            You discovered this mutual taste for crooning, once you’d exhausted the avant-garde: Dave Douglas, Greg Osby, Tim Berne. You did find one album, cluttering through the piles, by his friend, the singular experimentalist Steve Lacy – the duos with Mal Waldron – that he hadn’t yet come across.

You then praised Lacy’s solo on ‘Absence’ (a setting on another of his albums of Tom’s ‘Out of a Sudden’) as the most spectral that you’d heard, haunting and hunting. A perfect slurring growling display of ‘duende’ for the poem’s occasion. Its rhyming quatrains.

At the gig, Tom had explained: ‘There’s a reason for this one being in the form it is. It was written after the death of a friend, the Italian poet and painter Franco Beltrametti, the day after he died. And Steve Lacy wanted to set something to music, and asked for something and so, knowing that the more avant-garde people are in one field, the more traditional their taste in other things is.’

            To take as theme ‘the alphabet wonder(ing) what it should do’ in the face of death, seems hardly a traditional conceit, whatever the form.

            As Tom says, with modesty, ‘At the back there is always the hope that there are other people, other minds, who will recognize something that they thought was to one side or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist.’

            The amazing dis-equilibrium of his recent poems. Performed – that night – without the slightest hesitation and at an astonishing speed. The nearest approximation to a poetry of saying. As the words rush by too fast to grasp. A poetic tingling in the fibres of your response. Re-reading the poems on the page you have trouble recounting them. Counters of arguments re-arranged – juggled lines – so that they no longer argue but present the parts of an argument without its mechanism. Or the mechanism without its argument. Choose your metaphor. You can’t describe the poems, or situate the semantics of their exploded syntax in a single completion. They have the purity, the generosity, of a gesture of openness. So often they’re empty. However much they say, there’s nothing to be said.

            The obliquity that you find in Raworth’s poems you find in the man. As if they’d written him. A living poetics.

Spend some days in Tom’s company. Say, in Cork, at the festival. Sniffing out rough back street pubs with lock-ins. His eyes glisten. The moustache bristles below that passionate nose. Nothing much is said (nothing that you’ll be able to recall). Though there’s a great deal of talking. Barely audible asides. Much humming to himself. Politeness without formality.

You suspect that he’s waiting for something to stir him, something to one side that he will drag even further off-side: a pun, a graffito, a west wind….

            He talks. He sleeps.

Lee Miller

Whether one is stalking the track of another text or more loosely writing into, out of, through, back to, around, alongside, against another text (either somebody else’s or one’s own) this system creates a text and commentary. It’s like eating your lunch while watching a film and writing a script later that consists entirely of an annotated menu. It may be read on its own or in relation to.

            Surrealist doctrine - I was re-reading some of the sacred texts late last night  - argues with febrile dogmatism that because millions of people tell each other their dreams each morning, this re-telling is of value. In fact, there’s nothing more boring than listening to somebody else’s dreams.          

            Witness my own. In a half waking state I dreamt that I’d finally ‘solved’ the ‘problem’ of writing the end of Thelma, which turned out to be no ‘solution’ to any actual ‘problem’ at all by the time I was fully awake. The juxtaposition of Lee Miller’s pinched, precise and sensual mouth with the vulval suggestiveness of her shaved armpit, in the photograph by Man Ray in the book I’d laid aside just before sleep, may have something to do with it in ways I can’t recall or connect.

            In dreams do not begin responsibilities. Dreams may not be layered upon reality in the same way as a text may be layered upon another. Or as Thelma leaves love dust on the bodies of the women and men she sleeps with. Answerable to the conscious act. Vibrating with the energy that is created. Not quite by chance. Not quite chosen.

            Photographs – Miller’s own included, of course - studied, thought about, squinted at, flashed before the mind, may indeed become engines of this theatre of words.

            Later that morning I perused, used or abused the next image of my serial passage through Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 300 page collage mini-scrapbook of world photography, Voyeur. A quirky homemade Magnum archive. Black and white windows. Professional and mundane. Amateur and extraordinary. From a dog fawning on a mat; to Nancy Sinatra Snr. showing newborn Frank Jnr. to the world’s press. From a masked woman in an unfocussed homemade porno shot, who could be Thelma. To a noosed Jew awaiting the kick of a Nazi.

To this assemblage I offer tribute. For each image I write a short response. Revise it. Append to the previous day’s with the nonchalance of John Ashbery. A multiple text and commentary, its final use and shape undecided. Perhaps merely to exercise the muscles of language. Or to create anew what it is I am wanting to be saying.

Working title: Big Dumb Object.*

* Author’s note: The first 98 pages of writing produced by this method were later used as the materials for composing the 24 ‘sonnet’ sequence ‘Burying Bad News’ from September 12. Although this work has other philosophic and aesthetic motivations, the creative reader may discern the trace of Thelma herself in the tenth poem of the sequence: