Tag: notebook

Phantom Architecture

the stillness of the painting has a kind of speech to it
the sustaining restless grammar of poetry
is that how good poets defy things with their heart
the sun on the tongue is a kind of living
the poem seems to fill up with this
a panic, just in the peripheral vision
a mode that can maintain the day
something of Schuyler in the act of saying
how it allows the people to enter the self
we are not complete
when I’m writing, I’m the right size
I’m not bigger or smaller than anything
kindle’s like etch a sketch
one of the issues of elegy is not being able to let go
the Orphic is endless
we’re all here because we’ve been taken captive by our reading practice
a text of dubious origin which is a great analogy for poetry
trick us into thinking these are finished propositions
the only authority is the sound itself
foregrounding the process of echoing
the lyric utterance as operating system in the present moment
humour my error
invent my own invisible poem behind the invisible poem
beginnings are always about nothingness
meaninglessness makes meaning
a horizon or atmosphere that I can continue to write into
I am always beginning…
I literally don’t know how to write a poem
phantom architecture of a poem
the complexity of getting from one line to another
a properly honest relation to our temporality 
the poem that doesn’t know it’s good is usually good 
you can’t find anything if you’re not lost
making nothing as a suspension of labour
marking the duration of a symptom
speculative topos for tracing affinities
there is no better time than the present when we have lost everything
a generative uprooting of one’s identity or biography to do the work
incantation to wrestle the poem from its enclosure 
to project in divine sublimity
hoping poetry might come back 

*

All of these lines are quotations of things said by panellists and contributors at the Peter Gizzi Colloquium at St Andrews University on 18th October 2024: Anne Boyer, Luke Roberts, Oli Hazzard, Honor Hamlet, Colin Herd, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Rosa Campbell, David Herd, Caspar Bryant, Daisy Lafarge, Anthony Caleshu, Peter Gizzi.

Who do you envy?

Those who climb trees with such dexterity as to know how the vertical itself is a kind of knowing. The up-and-down world of clamping fingers and knowing what manner of pressure to apply to manage to hold. I want access to that but I come up against some limit in who I am. A sportsperson would hum in mine ears to try harder. Try to be better is a motto I’ll go with, thanks to a certain poet, but it doesn’t work with sports so much as an ethics for life. Wait. I had this leg on the walls of the world and all it really took was your sweet voice telling me there was a hold. A purple one, a yellow one. Just go for it. A spokesperson would yell in mine ears on behalf of surfaces: it’s going to be alright. I saw videos on the internet of climbers surpassing that moment of freeze to do something amazing like haul their bodies sideways, jump horizontally across the limit, and the thaw on their faces as they landed splat triumphant on the mat. One time another man landed on top of me, I let out a little squeal. It was deliriously exciting. I still have the scar. A rock song. All of the holds became rocks in themselves. You had to find a way to speak to them. If I do this with my fingers, if I really push, if my core could hold out longer for hovering. Suddenly it wasn’t about getting to any top or topping the wall or making that tap of completion. I wanted to find good places to literally hang out, my body a sort of hesitant dying leaf, relishing this thanatos in departing the life-giving branch. My nerve damage screamed in the rigid day. In the cafe with too-hot soup my sap bleeding out meant everything. I have envy for the strength of limbs in those who have earned it, their elastic ecstasies. In my dreams I hung upside down from trees, the frames of swings, the scaffolds of my dilapidated neighbourhood. My hovering grew powerful with longing for motion and soon I would strike a leg up, feel lusty for the whiteout snow beyond summit. Currently, the hardest climb in the world is called ‘Silence’. As I write this, condensation drips from the inside of my window panes, waters the baby aloes, drips like a cat lapping water. I watch a perfect lunar kitten suckle your fingers. The first nourishment. We can’t insulate the thought of my life. I put up my right hand higher than god and clutch.

Solids

Corpuscles spit constantly from the idea of sleep so I begin to fear it. Blood in the morning, metallic taste, no sweetness left from the Corsodyl but we try. Bits of shared housing make their way into my art, particulate matters: the gunshots pop pop, just fireworks; the neighbourhood yaptastic chihuahua called Barry; the pyrotechnics of teenage boozing which take place at the end of my street. A fully red tracksuit, a purple tracksuit, a secret shop which sells brownies laced with weed. Brown paper parcels with rips in them. Which Christmas ruined everything. Clicking dream materials of remembering scent, coming out with bundles of abundant orchids. Impossible for them to flourish here. Yet I coruscate brightly as if after surgery. If I could work with the wallpaper swirls in my dreams I would

put them into comets, then sentences.

Explosives can fire in space. They can’t disperse a tornado. In the hands of amateurs, the fireworks emit more smoke than is desirable. I go out to the smoke-laced cold and see a glow belonging to the moment I want. It’s over there. It’s so close.

Tomorrow’s a needle in my arm.

Tinnitus is the sound of the universe.