"Intercapillary Space"

Alycone, daughter of Aeolus and wife of Ceyx, King of Trachis, who perished in a shipwreck, whereupon she drowned herself in the sea. The gods changed them into kingfishers, imagined to build their nests upon the waters, which calmed at their breeding time, before and after the winter solstice.

46

She'd come back with the family
From North Africa after the war
And she said that she needed a job

And he said he'd find her one
In exchange for a dance

And they did

GOLD
within which

we have been
bound

with evidence
of nudity

and broken
sun

slung
like song

so that we may
explore

without
end

 
 
 
 
 

not diligent

not equal
to punctuating
restored equilibria







Bare


a felt thing
backing-up brain

fur smothering face
fluff clouding penis

invisible
indivisible

knot me

whispering

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Paperback, 184pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN-13 9781905700011; ISBN-10 1905700016
Shearsman

Reviewed by Edmund Hardy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1975 Ken Edwards published a pamphlet called 'Erik Satie loved children', containing 14 little poems. And now here it is again opening his No Public Language, from Shearsman, putting the 75 in the subtitle, "Selected Poems 1975-1995". They are fun and seem casually to be notes-towards-being-songs (in a manner taken a long way by John James?). In an Afterword, Edwards writes of 'Erik Satie loved children', "I still think it's quite sweet, and besides it was the first showing of what later evolved into my preferred procedures: cutting and splicing, juxtaposition, language play, composition by rhythm." The title also announces the interplay with the processes of music which Edwards will pursue. The quick fusion of one of these poems, 'Coltrane's Narrow Road', is what you think, apart from the new frying pan. Then Basho again:

Stones

no sound

a handful of stones

tossed in dark water
the ripples

expand
intersect then

then

pink sugary flesh
splattered everywhere

*

In 1982 Edwards published Drumming & poems with Peter Hodgkiss' Galloping Dog Press, and this is the second book to be collected in the No Public Language volume from Shearsman. Each poem is prefaced by the listing of a particular album. Is this what Edwards was listening to when writing the poem? Should the reader listen to the album when reading?

The cross-cutting whimsy and song of the earlier work has provided an inchoate form which is here fleshed out into small grids of political commentary and social documentary of a speeded-up though not indeterminate kind (for the latter, see 1992's Good Science, Roof Books, which spans 1983-1991).

To me, the most interesting parts of Drumming & poems are those that edit and re-arrange transcribed voices of various kinds. 'Old Man, Camberwell', Edwards tells us in his notes, "uses material from an unpublished set of interviews with people who live alone". The result is a brief comedy of part-sentences:

1.

I went straight from school
in England I know nobody

bother me I think
naturally, but I do

stutter, just from temperament.
When most people were

people if anybody
like the freedom of

vast walks, sometimes over
the moment for the past it

drives me up the wall.
On the gas fire, proper

hot food; I'm pretty
introspective by nature, so I have

a radio I don't need
for about 5 years and I

cook at weekends when I cook.
It's a ridiculous

bedsit I'm living in
a room with a bloke

I haven't been
from my childhood.

It can be read as a single sentence which is jogged forward at every line break; but each line is also enough to flicker a wildly incomplete social world past. Oral history interviews are always edited in any wider presentation (never more so than in apparently neutral formats) - Edwards takes this sometimes hidden editing and brings it out so that broken off pieces of syntax point out from these one-person families: "in England I know nobody" leads this technique on towards its compact, specific use in 'Southall', "from eye-witness accounts, mainly by Asians, of the riots of April 1979". Here we have one poem and one statement which is clearly also several statements; but it is one and several at the same time. It is a structuring of speech which can't resolve. The 'Front' is the National Front meeting which was the subject of the initial protest.

Many people shouted to them, to stop and looked very strange.
I ws in my garden & I saw this quite clearly this boy was standing

and was left unconscious he sit down protest in the garden when 2 police
rushed past him one of them hit him dropped down I got a glass

hit me on the head with entire area round the Front meeting.
I tried to run and told him like this: Move! [. . .]

The death of a teacher in the riot, Blair Peach, becomes a source for elegy in 'Drumming (Slow Return)'; to date, no-one has been arrested for his murder despite eleven eye-witnesses testifying that he was struck about the head by police. This latter sequence of pieces also tracks the Nationality Bill in winter 1980/81 and "refers to the three classes of citizenship proposed by the Bill". From Southall to Parliament? The second part of this sequence "is based on reminiscences by Isaac Gordon, a Jamaican immigrant"; the phrases refuse to stay in discrete sections, though, and each of these inputs modulates into a poem which increasingly reads as a frenetic attempt to make visible the connections between networks and physical locations:

4.

"The blow had split his skull
from its base to his right ear.
People holding the new
citizenships would be
eligible to have
passports describing them,
splintering the bone &
bruising the brain to
a depth of an inch.
It will be necessary
to restrict the right of
entry to each of them."

Elsewhere in Drumming & poems is "What the razor knew", a collage set of variations, a cut paragraph: this is a space which does not conceal its content.

*

A radio broadcast is a kind of public-private radial concentric texture like a vast cloister of waves. So anyway, in 1986 Ken Edwards published Intensive Care, "Poems from The Radio Years 1982-85". To the radio, a human body is "an interference source". A page of prose which forms the second piece in the collection starts off with a standard account of Marconi, then quotes Asimov, then zooms in on "South East London, early spring", and a surveillance future of impending disaster, fore-echoing the opening of the Edwards novel to come, Futures.

'Their Daily Island Life' is the poem from which the title, No Public Language, comes ("No public language that is / fit for such a time":

No public language
That is fit

There was a country
buckled by heat & rain, corroded
emerald
near the shore

A country where a languge is "fit" - "It was always behind the wire." There's a discernible strain of Eliotic lyric throughout, heard even if the line is just "It is time". The effect is quite abrasive, in that Eliot's late tones, in their social aspect, might seem so anathema to the politics of rejection elsewhere present (though certainly not the only political contents), the "time" being the height of the new right's electoral success and the concomitant remaking of the British state. But those Eliot patterns carry so much else, too,

Why want to make time stand still?
Between lightbulb & the idea of lightbulb
Falls the shadow

That this comes from 'Five Nocturnes, After Derek Jarman', suggests how those rich textures might get political ("De - um majorettes"). Flicking through the wavelengths: a fugue for Allen Fisher; south London's class and river riven history addressed to David Jones; a poem to Zukofsky, "not melodious but with the effect / of melody", and "not That" - what song from what voices in this time: "it's like // a video of the Dungeness hum".

*

There are three 'autobiographical' Edwards works next to each other in No Public Language. In 1984, he published 'A4 Portrait', and then in 1988 turned the paper sideways for 'A4 Landscape'. Edwards notes, "The original premise of 'A4 Portrait' was that the writing should be generated spontaneously on a daily basis, with erasure being the only permitted editorial function." The result is a series of short strip-lines in columns, each one dated like a diary for the middle of 1983; 'A4 Landscape' presents longer lines, longer poems, and longer titles – places and journeys in 1984/5. If Portrait's jottings are consciousness humming, or a hum whirred up consciously, then Landscape purports to gesture at the network of intent that perceives things out, within:

28 April 84
5 pigeons on roof, 2 on parapet
Male strut (courtship) green neck puffed tip
12.07: 2 more join the group ranged on raked slates
5 fly in the air a short distance settle again after a moment
12.09: Now 11 in total all on the roof
4 of lighter body with dark barred wings, 2 self groom
13.01: No pigeons

Cromarty Forth southerly 6 perhaps increasing gale 8 later
Fair, moderate or good
Blonde, sanguine, in clinch with Irishman in bow tie
German Bight: locally 4 easterly 5 in south

25. ix. 83
Where is the loved one going
Sugar on a glass table
Splits the light
Returns
The quiet suddenly broken
The curve
She's much happier there
She won't talk about it
Triangulation of the 5 corners
I wish you hadn't come
Get up move slowly
Across the room, a coffee cup
Gleams
No coherence to it
No way of analysing
The play
A knock on the door
And everything changes again
Without warning

That I walked alone in the dark city midst
That a melody stated in background decay
Became tone values deftly hot but unknown
That the sun went down thereon
Smoked into a bass line all of this

Wave Ghazal

This boy is in love with Maria
He wears a wedding ring on the wrong finger

Satellite dishes scan the troposphere
For voices warm with promise

When he finishes the fighting
he is going to Belgrade to marry her

The industrial palaces are crumbling
Voices die mutate their rays

Of dark intentionality flicker resonate
In blood bone muscle in the cathedrals

On the floor of his truck
His Kalashnikov points into the trees

Too many voices call mutate the duende
In the quantum void

The convoy's trucks clatter through the forest
On a mountain road he hears

The duende's long bow wave
On the receiving station

And somewhere there's a house
Made of blond wood filmed with dust

The spirit in that house the
Spiral in the dust

28 April 84
5 pigeons on roof, 2 on parapet
Male strut (courtship) green neck puffed tip
12.07: 2 more join the group ranged on raked slates
5 fly in the air a short distance settle again after a moment
12.09: Now 11 in total all on the roof
4 of lighter body with dark barred wings, 2 self groom
13.01: No pigeons

Cromarty Forth southerly 6 perhaps increasing gale 8 later
Fair, moderate or good
Blonde, sanguine, in clinch with Irishman in bow tie
German Bight: locally 4 easterly 5 in south

25. ix. 83
Where is the loved one going
Sugar on a glass table
Splits the light
Returns
The quiet suddenly broken
The curve
She's much happier there
She won't talk about it
Triangulation of the 5 corners
I wish you hadn't come
Get up move slowly
Across the room, a coffee cup
Gleams
No coherence to it
No way of analysing
The play
A knock on the door
And everything changes again
Without warning

That I walked alone in the dark city midst
That a melody stated in background decay
Became tone values deftly hot but unknown
That the sun went down thereon
Smoked into a bass line        all of this

Wave Ghazal

This boy is in love with Maria
He wears a wedding ring on the wrong finger

Satellite dishes scan the troposphere
For voices warm with promise

When he finishes the fighting
he is going to Belgrade to marry her

The industrial palaces are crumbling
Voices die mutate their rays

Of dark intentionality flicker resonate
In blood bone muscle in the cathedrals

On the floor of his truck
His Kalashnikov points into the trees

Too many voices call mutate the duende
In the quantum void

The convoy's trucks clatter through the forest
On a mountain road he hears

The duende's long bow wave
On the receiving station

And somewhere there's a house
Made of blond wood filmed with dust

The spirit in that house the
Spiral in the dust

-------------------
Edmund Hardy

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Peter Hughes: Minor Yours

The Jews in the ghetto were swollen with hunger
or terribly thin;
six to eight in a room
and no heating.
Families died during the night
and when neighbors entered in the morning –
perhaps days afterwards –
they saw them frozen to death
or dead from starvation. (p. 12)

Fishing boats, excursion boats, and any kind of boat
were mustered at the ports;
and the Jews were escorted to the coast by the Danes –
many of them students –
and ferried to safety in Sweden:
about six thousand Danish Jews were rescued
and only a few hundred captured by the Germans. (p. 88)

 

 

We always used to laugh and say they put the granite down in the summer and scraped it up as mud in the winter. But the centre of town was noted for the wooden blocks: they were quite good. That was paved with wooden blocks and that was quite good, but otherwise it was all mud in the winter.

Edmund Spenser
Griefe: A Short Conversation 


O but (quoth she) 
                              great griefe will not be tould,
And can more easily be thought, then said.
Right so ; 
                (quoth he) 
                                  but he, that neuer would,
Could neuer : will to might giues greatest aid.
But griefe 
                 (quoth she) 
                                    does greater grow displaid,
If then it find not helpe, and breedes despaire.
Despaire breedes not 
                                   (quoth he) where faith is staid.
No faith so fast 
                          (quoth she) but flesh does paire. 
Flesh may empaire 
                                (quoth he) 
                                                  but reason can 
repaire.



Edward Thomas
Digging


To-day I think
Only with scents, – scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field ;

Odours that rise
                                    the root of a tree
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery ;

The smoke's smell, too,
                                   a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste,
And all


               to crumble
                                    over
                                  mirth.




Robert Herrick
Blossoms


Faire pledges of a fruitfull Tree


                                         They glide












 
--------------------------
Edmund Hardy

In Zandeland sometimes an old granary collapses. There is nothing remarkable in this. Every Zande knows that termites eat the supports in course of time and that even the hardest woods decay after years of service. Now a granary is the summerhouse of a Zande homestead and people sit beneath it in the heat of the day and chat or play the African hole-game or work at some craft. Consequently it may happen that there are people sitting beneath the granary when it collapses and they are injured, for it is a heavy structure made of beams and clay and may be stored with eleusine as well. Now why should these particular people have been sitting under this particular granary at the particular moment when it collapsed?

 
 
 
Satiety


One whiff a six year old idyll damp rotting blackberry leaves.  Red fruit the size of little finger painted nails surrounded by glistening bottle green

Exotic, it is not.  Nor absent from the impact.  In that Ambre Solaire moment, the blue chlorine pooled tinkle laughter shrieked on a summer's day, resonant and rightfully owning all the airwaves.  Tobacco juiced brown on my finger sister skin, rolled to break down what it offers, tracing the experience of tweedy aromas, clinging peat smokiness rack tacked to nerve ends in diminishing sense until one day a passer by retrieved

Expectation of taste

Turkish delighted or body shopped tea citrussy fresh with a colour that lies of lemon connections, and black velveteen deep.  Assaulted outside my door purpled and bushy scenting the way.  Scrambled on Ligurian hills boar family thicket in autumnal pursuit of fear.  Perugia materialising in you, your young on a hillside in seasoned wilderness and sage.  A sudden drop to be fodder forgotten

The panic attack stench of a Cologne train station high summer heat flies.  Lies between friends ride on expectations directionless alien cities sense lost in the break down rip up tear of redundant maps.  You oblivious wanting to be found.  Finding you at that pissed up place exhausted out of all.  Waiting to be told.  What to grow to

Minerals on air iodine laced and braced to it through humid fresh flesh skin hair laying down salty elemental tissue.  Nourishing slime rubbered sun dried stands a tangle of washed hair on rocky heads.  Blankness tinged to white grey blue mirrored in my delivery of this always home always

A barrier for some

This is important.  Hot sand on white slabs dried dune blue air grasses distant wash throughrush

 






1


heavily trembling on the thrumming tightrope
the art is lit & seemingly still
a twitch away from farce
on the edge of the credible
prone to misinterpretation
the memory is still in my throat
of the Funeral & Triumphal Symphony
to mark ten years
since the 1830 Revolution

the remains of those who died
over the Three Days
would be moved
to the new monument
in the Place de la Bastille
we’d crane our necks to look at Liberty
with wings outstretched
at the top of the column
moving with the souls of the
dead to heaven











2


I asked as many as I could
to the final rehearsal
I knew nothing
would be audible
on the day itself
in the windy vastness
of the Place de la Bastille
where the great crowd stood
as scraps of music flapped
about their heads
& disappeared
or the march to the square

but the music played
along the Boulevard Poissonnière
sang with great clarity

the band augmented
by the great trees
that are no longer there











3


I wish you could have been with me
in Germany
it is so not-Paris
the musicians turn up early
the people love music as music
not as just another
symphony as handbag
fashion accessory
I loved Prague deeply
Liszt became breathtakingly
drunk & at two in the morning
was dead set on a duel
with some local drinker
his noon concert approached
he moved gingerly from bed
at 11.35 towards the piano
& played like a god











4


I wrote Faust swaying
on trains & boats
rattling along on a stage-coach
by gaslight in a shop one night
lost in Bupapest
before dawn in Prague
& in every corner of Paris
I staked all I had on
two performances
at the Opéra-Comique
& no-one came
go to Russia
I am deeply moved
when I remember
how many people
helped me
pay my debts











5


I left Paris in deep snow
on Valentine's Day 1847
& for a fortnight
rocked hissing through snow
to St. Petersburg
occasionally smiling at
the prophecy of Balzac
the night before I left
you'll return
a wealthy man
Balzac couldn't look
out of a window
without seeing earnings
occasionally











6


once past the Russian frontier
the very air was torture
I was dragged swaying through
deep frozen ruts that kicked
my teeth around my head
in a frozen box on runners
battered    travel-sick
frost-bitten to the
icy edge of death
in a day-nightmare I saw
soldiers crossing this terrain
without shoes or supplies
dead men walking
towards another freezing night
what does it cost to die
occasionally











7


when I saw crows
fall on the horses’ droppings
for food & warmth
I wondered why they stayed
instead of flying south
one hour into thawing out
my head in a hotel room
an invitation came to a
glittering short-term future
while back in France
men & women did
everything that men & women do
some die fast           some die slow











8


after six months of disgusting
suffering I lost my sister Nanci
she died of breast cancer
my sister Adèle stayed with her
& almost died herself
from the tearing pain of watching
I grind my teeth at the cruelty
of her prolonged incurable
Godless torture when a simple
anaesthetic could have
swallowed her pain for good
she died in early May
my wife died with less pain
a few came to the funeral
a quarter of a century earlier
when she was one of the star of Paris
the city would have ground to a halt
to ease her to the grave











9


millions of details of scintillating
satisfactions & successes
mostly in Germany
add up to nothing in my cupboard
I smell failure even in the mirror
as you go downhill the world does too
the evidence is overwhelming
as I stumble through the outskirts
of town even when sat in the centre
I know my name & art will not survive











 

 
 
 
  
 
Emmenogogue

on the edge of it
speaking softly she said
I do cohere you

he executed each sentence summarily

all things from egg
do you understand?
prostrate yourself
become lumpen mash upon hard ground

night-lights cut through 'lack of'
caution proceed with caution
observe incidentals
rules can be ignored

she was made for days like this
brittle cutting-cold summer
colouring bleeding smudges
blue-sky icing cloud-bubble
decoration

like a child
embracing the notion of morning








 

"Professor Winslow," Dr. Brown shook his head sadly, "will never ride his tricycle again."

Counterforce bring me wild hope
non-connection is itself distinct
connection numerous surviving
fair trees wrought with a needle
the merest decorative suggestion
in what appears to be sheer white
muslin a tree fair hunted Daphne
Thinking is willing you are wild
to the weave not to material itself

Stones

no sound

a handful of stones

tossed in dark water
the ripples

expand
intersect then

then

pink sugary flesh
splattered everywhere

 
 
 
Anthro-


Thorns along the stem'll
drop before they waver,

insolent to breeze. Let the anthro-
pomorphis hazard less unless

that amounts to neglect,
an inattention. Hear the junco

from the outside—can we not
pervade like oxygen, diffuse and

more toxic.  Manifest
destiny bodies forth spectres more palpable than

thorn is cavalier.














----------------------------------------
This poem was first published in Nedge magazine.

 
 
 
 
Earthling Calling
        we love; therefore, we are. . .

.--/.
.-../---/...-/.
-/..././.-././..-./---/.-./.
.--/.
.-/.-./.

.--/.
.-/.-./.
-/...././.-././..-./---/.-./.
.--/.
.-../---/...-/.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
----------------------------------------------------

Paperback, 120pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15, 2006
ISBN-13 9781905700059; ISBN-10 1905700059, Shearsman

Reviewed by Abena Sutherland

----------------------------------------------------

 
An "Intercapillary" Guide for the Perplexed



"dazzling", "full of light" – The reader must wear sunglasses when reading. Beware that some apparently dull poems may show "flashes" of something, who knows what. If the book is entirely "brilliant" then apply sun-cream.

"reaction" – Two poets or traditions have reacted, bubbled over, dried out, or produced a new substance.

"this work was obsolete thirty years ago" – The critic takes a term from discredited forms of eugenics and decides what is and what is not a "dead end".

"cutting-edge" – Be warned that the poet may also have a habit of being "incisive".

"innovative" – The poet has produced something like an iPod.

"brave" – The poet sits at their desk being very brave, thank God.

"tension" – I couldn’t wait to see what happened at the end.

"eye" – The poet has two essential organs: eye and ear. Like Argus the poet has an "eye for detail", an "eye for youth", a "steady eye", a "painterly eye", a "Vermeer-like eye for interiors", and may also have an ear for "speech-patterns" or "music" in general. Rarely does the poet have "a nose for unpleasant odours" though they may have "a sure touch".

"which is hard to pin down exactly" – Tail. Donkey. Book.

"major" – Not minor.

"failed to engage me" – I failed to engage with it.

"fresh" – The poems have been heat-sealed like packets of crisps for extra freshness.

"a real flavour of Italy", "plenty of zest", "something of the flavour of" – The book was properly prepared and the reviewer has clearly tucked in. Five stars.

"failed to engage me" (ii) – The poet proposed but was turned down by the reviewer.

"engaged with History", "has allowed history to enter the poem", "writes back to history", "got back together again with History", "found that history still hadn’t changed", "agreed with History that they’d remain friends"

"painterly poems" - Written at an easel.

"reaction" (ii) – The poet read Pierre Reverdy and got a nasty rash.

"addresses the poet’s roots" – The poet will be going to a different hair stylist next time.

"resonates" – The poems are written on a large bell.

"resonates long after reading" – Tinnitus?

"a broad sweep" – The poet has an eccentric modus operandi which involves housework.

"universal themes" – May contain asteroids.

"perceptive" – The poet is able to distinguish shape from colour, and has a good working knowledge of distance and depth.

"very precise" – The poet does not round up or down when calculating large sums.

"required reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry" – Or else you can go to the back of the class. Yes I'm talking to you.

"no-one is better equipped" – The poet has bought a pen and some paper.

"impossible to ignore" – Poetry which emits a high-pitched whine at all times.

"glowing" - Poems suitable to leave around the bedroom to reassure small children when going to sleep.

"soundings of the depths" - Poems which allow you to tack before running aground, possibly with GPS as well.

"very necessary work" - It was necessary the poet published the book, if their reputation as a currently publishing poet was to be upheld.

"like a palimpsest" - It seemed like recycled paper was used.


"a very generous book" – The poet has included a ten pound note in every copy.

"the language is muscular" – The poet has done the proper stretches before writing.

"startling" – I dropped the book on my foot and was startled by its sheer weight.

X has engaged with / in this book we find "the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the use of metal in Norwegian folk dress, penguins, Ezra Pound in prison, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Wittgenstein with a poker, Balinese shadow theatre, Samuel Beckett eating a sandwich, images of genocide, the lyric I, sitting positions in ancient Rome, the French bombing of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, a packet of digestive biscuits, the way light speckles the underside of a bridge, someone on a bus" and so on in a list. Poetry itself will probably not be listed.

"concern" – This is my concern, that’s your concern, her concern is that. We are all very concerned. Someone is ill.

"a reading through" – The poet has taken an existing book and cut peep holes in it.

"breaks new ground" – More common than the phrase "breaks in a new pair of shoes", this territorial claim suggests the pressure of an expanding population. How much ground is there before an unsustainable level of deforestation occurs? The alternative is to find "ground the poet has trodden before".

"open work" – The poet is an architect not unaware that a part of the wall could be a door.

"organic form" – The book is covered in soil but it does taste better, you must admit.

-------------------------
Compiled by the "Intercapillary Space" Dictionary Committee