Friday, December 10, 2010

after Rimbaud (by any means necessary)


December 2010. a high metallic wire. content exceeds phrase.

slight shift in geometry / slight interruption
in the flow of their / crimson & guillotined
bacterial princes / shifted / rivets of history


ok. theirs is a more stupid alphabet. sections to be ringed and taken away.
unspoken contradictions in their footsteps. a universe devoid of images.
an october we thought we couldn’t have. external symbols within our sky.

its fraudulent summaries -
its disappeared names -


back now to our studies. negation of the negation. we will raise the dead.

Friday, November 12, 2010

after Rimbaud


of Downing Street, that assembly of ghouls & defunct regimes
of the warm November wind, our absurd paupers’ memories

outside London it is all geometry, a euphemism for civil war
I remember our cotton dresses, those ribbons and bows

we skirted the disks of the city, its deserted, dying angles

we were wearing flags and pretty flowers, but our memories
at several intersections they opened into vast arched domes

of that other life, its obnoxious circles, of relics and animal love
the horrific quantity of force we will need to continue even to live

*

When you meet a Tory on the street, cut his throat
It will bring out the best in you.
It is as simple as music or drunken speech.
There will be flashes of obsolete light.
You will notice the weather only when it starts to die.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

For the Administration (after Rimbaud)


Lord Browne, from politeness
that particular thought is
an opportunity, a response
to that thievery, his silence -
he is though, representative
of certain constellations of order
obvious studies of number, and
the present apocalypse is
a structural problem, this
eschews metaphor, the enemy
‘is’, a defining molecule
he is though, a childfucker
a swarm of goldened thinking
dead behind the rose trees


*

----------------of Milton, Lenin
& Satan, of the scum of england,
of the years enclosed there, we
the cells of england, we smarted
inside these delicate circles, the
nettles of soviet england, of
isolation in its pure state, where
diamonds, insects, walk like tyrants

Friday, September 03, 2010

from the department (after Rimbaud)



> white tonal light < to never be get
outside of its value theories of
transmission noise > as in / listen

Target A, the holding centre < it
was an hunger strike, or listen
I abhor my country < as property

or lesion / will screw his mouth
on later < a verb, a specific rivet
of time > an enemy, non-abstract

as < we deceived him, screwed his
as failure > as in one specific body
as high feed frequency ringing tone

*

Target A was, as to be expected
inside a mouth that / hates me -
o shit (poetically) > the whites are

have been come, already / I could
never to speak out of this wind
its errors: set years unfolding, as

basic errors regarding static, wd
only to sit into a century, wraiths
of compressed event > Target A

his mouth riven to / somewhere
the signal returned to normal, dis-
relish writhed within our jaws

Sunday, August 15, 2010

after Rimbaud (from the department)


from the English I inherit my love of alcohol, idiocy and violence -
but I do not share their closed borders, their bureaucratic exterior -


election day. terminal. a cluster of predecessors in the language
i.e. cells of racist light, in verbs, tumbling
Belgravia or something, an adverb
think of adjectives as refugees. you just shot em: here is a style guide -

(e) a deficit line -
(a) negates the interruption of the speaking I -
(u) a system of collective thought -
(i) unable / unwilling to find work -
(o) beyond a certain tenancy of stoic disdain -

I entered first. Target A was standing by the table
I hit him with the shield. Pinned Target to floor
I was foul and fair, would sleep in utter music


the bulletins, consist entirely of nerves
or harmony, pure infection of thought

we entered a respectful half-light, the names, we had achieved
glue and murder / or we were images, monuments, gospels

& in very obvious nitrates / from the English I inherit
my mean & bitter divisions, my very grievous hail -

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

after Rimbaud (for the administration)


as our co-ordinates are magnetised, & as our exits have been seized
we have vanished, we heavy stones of destruction & light -

as our hands are not aristocratic, still less those of the market
we have come in utter sentiment, some small targeted acquiescence

the angle is fearsome, the order of the day is wretched hope

as your maps are out of commission, we visit you secretly
we circles of cancelled stars, we flying rags of brutal factory girls
would cover your face, would swallow in grace & molestation

George Osborne, god of love, we have spurned beauty

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Quotations toward a militant poetics


One fragment is not, after all, visible.

*

The person falls to pieces, loses its breath. It passes over into something else, is nameless, no longer hears reproaches, fleeing its extension into its smallest dimension, fleeing its dispensability into nothingness - yet on reaching that smallest dimensionality, with a deep breath at having passed across, it recognises its indispensability in the whole.

*

Only since we have started using violence ourselves, has a realistic dialogue begun to develop, as the system is having to pull back its veil and speak.

*

Thus the atoms obey the logic of social groups, but so do works of art and philosophical systems, when they are analysed and broken up into their smallest parts.

*

The 'ancient' cinema was shooting one event from many points of view. The new one assembles one point of view from many events.

*

The word lives a double life . . . . this battle of worlds, this battle of two powers forever being waged in the word, produces the double life of language; two circles of flying stars.

*

In times of upheaval, fearful and fruitful, the evenings of the doomed classes coincide with the dawns of those that are rising. It is in these twilight periods that Minerva's owl sets out on her flights.

*

from Eisenstein, Brecht, Khlebnikov, Meinhoff

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

after Rimbaud


Listen, we got every escape hatch blocked. The centre of our orbit is some kind of cynical massacre, some kind of prolapse, thats all of your logic, your entire poetics, no-one can even think revolt -

Compression of east and west, AM and PM, whatever, its all the same. We are here to make the hard choices, your choices. We’ve got the food, all the food, all of your love, every point of circulation, all abstraction, all phosphor. And you can go shit -

Come o silken wraiths, come and devour us -

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

after Rimbaud


what we liked were transmissions, taglines, phonemes -

technique R2I. procedure 129. repeat. purge.
it began with the laughter of idiots and there it will end
our circumference: a gated english voice / delete -

they have their bombed cities, their ridiculous ancient songs
their ruined boulevards / our controlled, uptight ecstasies

night is nothing and the day is on fire -

report. all harmonic discourse to be compressed & restored
hurray for the fucked up dawn, our shredding swarms
our invoice decide what knowledge is / is like assassins -

science, patience, torture: the vows of the sun and the sea -

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

newsflash. May 2010. what we liked were / vowel one -

was international nights of torrential study, was harmonic
our hydraulic calculations, your medicines, children’s books

Nephograms! Votemeal! O magnetic puke
& bank stuff. These spheres piss us off, yeh,
like surface nukes. But still, our so clean hands
of lepers v. the lash / 360 degrees / servitude

or paraquat / the rust on your kill silver
just rose up in judgement? Shame. Insert
lamotrogine, my asphyxiant / howl, love,
with scatological equity, goldened charity


ie send flowers, fire, gems

vowel two, three, four etc / sorry, but was a discrete attack
& shyly encircled the disks of the law. or we can’t find em

we hold ourselves safe on the roof of the world’s love -
our phantasmagoric business plans, our study of the stars -

the islands of the dead -

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance


All they knew was that they had to shriek against that elemental violence and yet they did not emit a sound

Crude beginnings could be erected from the shattered monuments, some wastelands were initially penetrated only by letters of the alphabet, with which people arduously learned how to read.

The more unreservedly we received the testimonies from the most diverse directions of entanglement and seething, of destruction and authoritarian uprisings, the more nuanced became our image of the world and our appreciation of the richness of language.

While reading, while examining images, I no longer entered a secluded special area accessible only to initiates, instead everything that was shown was integrated into my personal experiences.

Our consciousness guided us to books and pictures, it triggered conversations for which we had become ready only at this moment.

Later, after we achieved political understanding, our hatred grew more intense, we began purposefully fighting those who tried to hold us down, annihilate us. We were guided by a cold, homicidal repulsion. Very seldom did we find this sensation articulated in art, in literature

It was as if there were no language as yet for this grubbing and rooting, for the hours of lying with bated breath, the slow groping forward, the searching for nameless middlemen, for encoded addresses, for the sudden confrontation with the murderer.

I saw that this was quite wrong, that the definite and the concrete were surrounded by a thronging, by a lurking and choking, and, immediately underneath it, all that was to be found of names and terms was a babbling.

How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. The form would be monstrous, would cause dizziness.

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

All of the above taken from the first volume of Weiss' novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Very highly recommended.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

after Rimbaud


mostly they have explained your world

they invented colours for the vowels -

(u) glyphs & harm. understood simply as in
(e) simply / public spheres or stones
(o) chemicals & stones
(i) feasts of hunger, simply as in, stones
(a) stones

“so anyway”, while we were picking berries
pretty as a kidnap / “our superiors”
o paradise. here is a small door.

- blue - the ultimatum expands on
- green - we presume the decision not
- red - magnetic idiocies, mostly
- white - our arseholes are different
- black - “isolation in its pure phase

anxiously their faces, were not there
it was a kind of heaven, scraps of sky

cold wind. passengers and crew.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

after Rimbaud


mayday. the alphabet was a system of blackmail
complacent, would skate on our regulated senses

“sister, I hear the thunder of new wings”
some crap about the immanence of vowels etc

(a) an offensively wholesome social milk
(e) understood fucking as a swarm of conformity. was
(i) what was locked there was. chatter, flies etc
(o) a stringent regime of structural reforms &
(u) well, targets, neutrality. a closed circuit of abstract numbers

& us, locked out. the alphabet was, ultimately, not ours
in any case, its mythological shells, its crumpled octaves &
spectra, zilch / the conversation a hierarchy of

eclipse (as in a universe, infinitely compressed)

our desires lack density & social flame

“our silence is powerful”
“the voices you strangle today”

Friday, April 30, 2010

after Rimbaud


4.30 a.m. the story of one of my idiocies -
this is all so far away -
two distant bangs & a high pitched noise -
the colours of the vowels -
would screech inside your calculations -
basic lies, vomit and alchemy -
the simple prison diagram -
18th October 1977 -
you were controlled circuits -
we were rusting inside your house -
o delight o music, the peace of calm lines -
o geometric faults, in denial & in anger -
my final recollection. hello -

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

(after Rimbaud)


hell. we are pleased how your city
got bombed - it was like, sleeping etc
it is what we like / to spin gently &

with guns / these are our ecstasy *
are control, in prison as is cosmology
or to lick your finger / and disappear

you dull young men / hidden where
we wanted to kiss as / but burnt as
nothing here but where we stand &

starlings / yes we love what your
speech was a bed we / are your lips
yours, we bargained for / we spoke

your nights of monstrous study / we
as in glycerine / as sexual research we
we shit in your fucking guts / hello

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

after Rimbaud


noon. we scraped the village clean
or as our philosophy suggested
it was an army, a screeching whirl

something as vague as / please, we
know by now what a sky is, like
an obvious cycle of yellowed light

listen. everybody here is / in the
in the traditional sense, sort of
lie down and take it, as easy as

& talk like that. your hands have
not taste of gasoline. a circle of
toxic birds. the sun, heavy with

not a chain of shredding crows
our circles / spires & phosphor
defeat without end. & safety in

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Quotations for the time being / To be put into action immediately


It is not up to us to litigate in the courts of our enemies, who judge by other principles, by laws we do not recognise.


What this saying means, however, is that we long for an ordinary notion, one that we are already familiar with; consciousness feels as if, together with the mode of representation, the very ground where it stands solidly and is at home, has had the ground pulled from under it.


Events in one voice are left totally void in the other voice, which thus becomes the negation of the first.


The voices, brought into total accord with each other, are identical as the products of the tone row; they are, however, totally alien to each other and, in their accordance, actually hostile to each other.


. . . . not in order to create an ‘integrated work of art’ in which they all offer themselves up and are lost, but so that together with the drama they may further the common task in their different ways; and their relations with each other consist in this, that they lead to mutual alienation.


To know how to recognise and pick up the signs of power we are awaiting, which are everywhere; in the fundamental language of cryptograms, engraved on crystals, on shells, on rails, in clouds or in glass; inside snow, or light, or coal; on the hand, in the beams grouped round the magnetic poles, on wings.


But their Third Reich recalls
The house of Tar, the Assyrian, that mighty fortress
Which, according to the legend, could not be taken by any army, but
When one single, distinct word was spoken inside it
Fell to dust.


We are caught between two worlds, one which we do not recognise, and one which does not yet exist.


The asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, the pathetic attempts to squint through the chinks in its walls, while revealing nothing of what is outside, illuminate all the more clearly the forces of decay within.


Wraiths cross time.


In the moral sphere, insofar as it is considered in the sphere of Being, the same transition from quantitative to qualitative takes place, and different qualities appear to base themselves on differences in magnitude. A ‘more’ or ‘less’ suffices to transgress the limit of levity, where something quite different, namely, crime, appears; whereby right passes into wrong, and virtue into vice - Thus too do states - other things being equal - derive a different qualitative character from difference.


By the morning I was so blank it is quite possible that people could not even see me.


. . . . one can only exist if things are in certain arrangement. Now it has occurred to me that in these arrangements there can be certain gaps.


. . . . the point is defined as a spatial location with no spatial dimension. This omits the fact that the point, bereft of spatial dimensions, still represents the temporal dimension, thanks to its duration. The point thus introduces the dimension of time into spatial organisation, which is the basis of a new elementary geometry. When the point is considered as a pure idea, geometry is infested with metaphysics and lends itself to the emptiest constructions of metaphysics. Nothing is left of it.


Music is the organisation of sound existing in time, its dimensions hanging in space. The problem was reorganisation of ingredients to discover surprise. Harmonic changes provided yesterday’s dynamism. Additive technique, extended phrases, slowing down of harmonic motion, diads, clusters replace chords built on thirds. Rhythmic possibilities are expanded, and knowledge of given time is understood. And the ecstatic compression of time’s energy produces twelve, sixteen and thirty-two measures - complete sketches, improvisation, content and shape becoming one.


In each single scientific discipline new assumptions are introduced without any deductive basis, and in each discipline previous problems are declared solved as emphatically as the impossibility of solving them in any other context is asserted.


Out of his profound inner emptiness echo the distant, new commands, and from this echo future generations learn their language . . . . The necessity which appears to be built into the framework, is neither a causal, nor a magical necessity. It is the unarticulated necessity of defiance, in which the self brings forth its utterances.


In the enemy language it is necessary to lie

Thursday, March 25, 2010

after Rimbaud


early 2012. the latest news is
political flashes superimposed on our rooftops
it is thin, our cynicism, the latest distinct word
sometimes, when a specific distortion in the vowels is achieved
we can hear heaven. it is a kind of wall
all of our clear, musical nouns
the morality of our achievments, singing on the scaffold
& the riot squad have denied everything
our laws and our tastes, this is harmony
every possible combination of peoples and phantoms
our sobriety and victims, this is our alphabet
sometimes, we get sick of our pious barbarism
we leap screeching into hell
our immense, unquestionable affluence

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Reading List 1 // Revolutionary Poetics


chapters on Pythagoras and Philolaus // Kirk et al THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOHPERS (2nd Ed)
ANDREA BRADY /// WILDFIRE: A VERSE ESSAY ON OBSCURITY AND ILLUMINATION
Brecht: German Satires
MAYAKOVSKY // RIMBAUD at the same time
passages on Circulation & Production Time, GRUNDRISSE (Marx, yeh)
Amiri Baraka // Blues People / Black Music / The Dead Lecturer
poems by CECIL TAYLOR / ANNA MENDELSSOHN
Luigi Nono: como una ola de fuerza y luz // non consumiamo marx
BLACK FIRE: 1968. Edited by Amiri Baraka & Larry Neal
William Rowe: The Earth Has Been Destroyed
Lenin's Notebooks on Heraclitus & Hegel's History of Philosophy (passages on musical tones, electrons)
rockabilly etc // Iancu Dumitrescu // Bud Powell
Walter Benjamin: Epistemo-Critical Prologue ORIGIN OF GERMAN TRAGIC DRAMA
Pasolini : Heretical Empiricism
PAUL CELAN / CESAR VALLEJO at the same time
CLR James: The Black Jacobins
Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don't: ULRIKE MEINHOFF

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

Solidarity with the Sussex Occupations, the UBS Cleaners, BA Cabin Crew . . . .

Friday, March 05, 2010

Working notes on political poetry // I don't talk to cops


Poetry aims at difficult meanings - Amiri Baraka

Neither abstract or descriptive, but to grasp what is collective within isolated images. Several will be working together at any one time, contrapuntally, in overlaying dimensions, tones, moods and shapes. Within these tensions the poem becomes an essay under pressure, on the cusp of several discourses with their differing relations, repulsions, attractions, contaminations.

An engagement, also, with ideas that have been erased from official discourse, but can still be activated. If it is incomprehensible, it is because certain ideas seem eclipsed in an epoch that cannot see them. Imagine a period when not only is, say, revolution impossible, but even the thought of revolution. On the other hand, most poetry is mimetic of incomprehensibility, rather than an engagement with it.

A tracking of eclipses in the constellations of ideas: Milton’s “visible darkness”, Shelley’s Prometheus and Demagorgon. Or is it too much to claim poetic thought moves counterclockwise to the irreality of our own historical period, which is papered over with a bourgeois myth that, though long dead, is still active and still fundamentally real in that it knows how to kill, and always acts from just that basis.

But if poetry might speed up a dialectical ‘continuity in discontinuity’, & thus detourne whatever is forced to be invisible via realistic speech (in a Brechtian sense), and where the lyric I is (1) an interrupter and (2) a collective, and where direct speech & incomprehensibility are only possible as a synthesis that bends ideas into and out of the limits of insurrectionism and illegalism, the obvious danger is that disappeared ideas will only turn up ‘dead’, or reanimated as zombies: the terrorist as damaged manifestation of utopianism, when all of the elements, including those eclipsed by bourgeois thought are still absolutely occupied by that same bourgeoisie.

The problem I have is how to make it talk back, how to make whatever it is that is trapped in aesthetics, idealism and in history learn to speak.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Commercial Break


anyone who wants a pdf of The Commons (draft version), get in touch. It'll be published on paper later this year, and will have gone thru a few metamorphoses by then, probably.

Monday, January 11, 2010

The Commons // finished


anyway, now we were centuries
sort of had faces / we encircled
- dreamless, muted decibels -
- our treaties / the visible -
we scratched our faces off
our references, lines of credit
- a kind of glow remains -
- a kind of dignified singing -
- blank -
meanwhile, in the drugstore
- blank -
we are your border
- bright -
- inaudible -

Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Commons set 3 // 38 - 41


Nah, just kidding / with fire
& we noises -
it is still 11.58 / we are
- not gravity -
- not flowers -
but filled with cars
& burning pearls.
Hello, it is 1979 / or dogs
- insert frightened persons -
- or the average landlord -
- insert Woolworths -
- & on the gallows tree -
yeh, dogs
- were bound in iron bands -


or the split territories of
- example -
from the narrative fumes of
- anyway, as I was saying -
because this cosmology is
a hyena & a vodka / its
- & shrike -
here in the multiplex
we are your dutiful cities
- so, this is a documentary -
- several glittering taxpayers -
- an entire string section -
- we are speaking quite clearly -
- we ripped your bellies out -


this lecture was brought to
by typical silence & gold / it is
- you know, like a hyphen -
- I’ve robbed your poor -
Anyway, in 1649
- your poor pockets -
not alphabets, fissures
- yeh I know, broken -
- your silver & gold -
“on sundays often strolled
to have their fortune -
- this lecture has been -
- in these wild deserts -
weirds had warped us, so


we closed / we are inside
- your opinions -
- your membranes flashing -
we are compliant & broken
we are gardens of silence
- the dead, so politely -
- in our petticoats -
- in our ballads of -
“got the devil in my soul”
“& I’m full of bad booze”
- the stillness -
- such sparkling flight -
history is those who
the seagulls / the

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The Commons set 3 // 36 - 37


but / here in socialist realism
its musical ferrotypes / its
its reversal narratives / its
- as in -
“in London where we dwell
is a burning we know full well”
- its ancient transpositions -
those noises flaming / in birds
notes we were squealing in
- cuckoos & birds -
as in the alphabet’s bandits
- its centrifugal windows -
- cells, sections, groups -
- its official parents broken -


posterity / landlord / spheres
swarms / jobsearch / wind
- wow, laws -
eclipse / reverie / slaves
magnetic / scholar / finks
o millivolt / o globe
- this is a -
FLASHING like
we are ringing geometrics
a tame & trickling noise
curfew / playback / disks
singing like violence
my true love
my black & speechless bone