They swim onto the revetment bearing oracles and guiding the future

Nefertiti: The Borrowed Gods of Egypt

Sadly my rage puts on wings

The present is wrapped

for Martin Trippett

The Commodore

for Toby

I will stand naked at the top of the stairs
Waiting for the old man to enter the hall
and remove his coat

A camera falls thirty feet
Onto the deck of a ship.
As the boatswain pipes
I am the picture that it took

The album in the fisherman’s cottage is full

The time of earthquakes is at hand

Today marks 100 years since the birth of David Gascoyne.

For someone who identified with Surrealism for such a relatively brief period, Gascoyne casts a long and willowy shadow. He was the author of the first published English Surrealist poem, ‘And the Seventh Dream Is the Dream of Isis’, printed in issue 5 of New Verse (October 1933) when he was 17. His position here isn’t simply one of historical curiosity or precedence, nor about his youth: the poem is enduringly good, as is the other work of this early, Surrealist phase. (Scans of the original New Verse publication can be found here).

His ‘First English Surrealist Manifesto’ and A Short Survey of Surrealism are still readable and engaging, and the Manifesto in particular has been received appreciatively in recent years for such comments as ‘Just when the country is enjoined by its government to a travesty of rejoicing in the names of patriotism and imperialism, despair is the principal reaction of the poets’

For a period he was a deliberate and committed Surrealist, and this commitment is probably what still causes Gascoyne’s name to ring. When Paul Eluard introduced Gascoyne to Roland Penrose in Paris it was, as Penrose put it, ‘an encounter of two explorers who had discovered independently the same glittering treasure’. Gascoyne’s famous eruption ‘Why do we know nothing of this in England?’ was followed swiftly by his declaration ‘Something’s got to be done’. It was Gascoyne’s feverishness as much as Penrose’s organisational calm that fuelled what emerged of British Surrealism in the 1930s.

Notwithstanding the orthodox Breton-influenced Surrealism of the Manifesto and the Short Survey, as well as the former’s straightforward leftism, Gascoyne’s involvement with the movement did not last long. He turned increasingly towards a strain of poetic mysticism that had affinities with that of his close friend Kathleen Raine. He sought, accordingly, to distance himself from the febrile Surrealist he had been before the war.

Editors went along with this misleading presentation. Until recently the various editions of his ’collected’ poems either selected from or omitted all together his Surrealist poems, usually dismissing them as unrepresentative or ‘juvenilia’.

Nor has Gascoyne yet been served well by a biographer. Robert Fraser’s 2012 biography is particularly keen to shake off Gascoyne’s lingering link with Surrealism in order to see him solely as a professional poet, part of a literary coterie. Fraser’s attack on Breton’s cutting remark ‘I am given to understand that you have become a Roman Catholic’ is aimed largely at ignoring the developing content of Gascoyne’s poetry.

Yet, for all that he was trying to change his poetic engagement with the world, Surrealism definitely still lingered as a presence. At the time of his second breakdown he suggested that he had finally resolved all the issues he had been struggling with through (and since) Surrealism: Fraser ignores this as a pretty important indicator of the lingering seriousness of his engagement with Surrealism. Again, for all Gascoyne’s distancing of himself from his earlier poetic associations, he seems to have been generous with his time for visitors (including members of the Stockholm Group) who wanted to discuss Surrealism.

That Gascoyne sought to find a route away from Surrealism does not negate either its evident continued grip on him at some level or, more importantly, his achievements when he was a Surrealist. He was clearly still at some level responding to what he himself had written in 1935:

‘Surrealism is the Dialectical Solution to the Problems of the Poet’.

And angels fall

Among their pantheon is a one-legged cat god

A room protected by fascina

Searching for the Atlas Particle

In a domestic shrine they consult a shrunken head for its oracular statements

Pencil-skirted nightclub dancer makes her way through the jiving crowd

They hang the skins of their enemies to mark boundaries

Vixen carries the dough babies over the moon

You are on the brink of despair ...

[This text, co-written with Merl Fluin, was read at the Doubting Dereks' Calamitous Cabaret 17 June 2016 at Ventnor Exchange]

You are on the brink of despair. 

The life you want is not possible. You are struggling to achieve it, to find shortcuts that will allow you to believe you have it now. This can only go in two directions: an accommodation that will utterly destroy you and everything you have done so far; or abject failure. 

This despair is always presented as a personal failing, but it’s not an individual matter, your fault. You are caught in someone else’s contradictions. This world is intolerable. Changing it is imperative. 

No accommodation with it is possible. It’s not possible to ameliorate such conditions by personal compromise. Looking for a way out through patronage, commercial achievement, funding bodies, celebrity approval, is a deathtrap, the co-opting and crushing of poetry with the very conditions which make poetry impossible. 

You’ll be told this is insurmountable: ‘If you want to make poetry you’ll have to cooperate … Resistance, opposition, is impossible …’ 

If that were true, poetry would be impossible. So demand the impossible. Recognise that it is impossible. Then let the impossible make demands on you, that’s when the cycle of transformation begins. 

Poetry, the poeticisation of everyday life, all life, is a burning necessity. 

It is an act of fury, of unrelenting revolt and love. 

It is not consoling. It is not what you write about your feelings. 

It is not self-expression, self-appeasement. 

Poetry is what will be, what must be. 

Poetry demands. 

It will fail unless your very life depends on it. 

Poetry is not a voice speaking words you already know in a soothing tone. 

It is opening yourself to a voice you don’t want to hear, shrieking at you what you didn’t know, what you don’t want to know, the terrifying, the shameful, the incontrovertibly true. 

It is tearing yourself inside out to become something new. 

Poetry is the self-immolation needed for transformation. 

A voice that must be spoken. 

Poeticisation is not a retreat from the world, a cosy escape into fantasy. It is the necessary transformation of this actual, brutal, crushing world into its latent, potential other. 

It begins with the material, with what is actually there now. 

It turns it into something else.

Family

(for Kate)

In the pocket beneath my shoulder
Is a rib we share.
You brushed grey sand
And silent glassy shoals
Surged invisible in the cold
Along white beacon roadways.
Now a high-tide coral starfish
Nilotic red
Is pinned here as a shallow rockpool brooch.
Tendril fingers of coral crust reach,
Octopus-beringed,
From the splintered mirror chest
And we are the crawling myriad legs of the seabed.

The numerologist's signal

Philology of New Borneo

Preliminary philological researches into the traditional language of New Borneo have revealed a rich grammar and syntax.

Initial investigation suggests a high complexity of verb forms, covering the following tenses:

Prevalent
Suture
Indigent
Carpet
Aerialist
Pupillate.

A Post-Pupillate is implied but not yet demonstrated.

The following Moods have been identified:

Vindictive
Consumptive
Decorative.

Each Mood is known in four Forms:

Actual
Plastic
Conjugal
Refractive.

The language is inflected. These Cases have been recognised:

Normative
Accumulative
Generative
Sedative
Palliative

It is believed that Laxative and Evocative Cases are also present, although their form has not yet practically been distinguished from the Accumulative.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination

The Works of Edgar Allan PO37

Road And Destination Unknown

(for Radu Malfatti)

The ill-made man

Is a cavalier

Of evil facts

The steel-toothed speaker

His black/white grille mouth

Its chart of pulls

Its handguide twinkling

In the silent score

Riot and drama unstated

He breathes twice

Through a fingerprint on the hinges of his lungs

And creaks

Reverently awakening dreamed usurpation.

Robins and doves uneasy

In the netting garden of smoke

Soaked reeds rusting gently

Roaring after dreams upset

The ill-fated

Rumbles with a sound that cannot be heard

Overtones in the corner of the lips

A rattling boom deep in the gut

Deep in the muted throats

Deep in the needled eye

Ripples against desiccated uplift

All mouths fill with shaking,

Unvoiced waiting vibrations,

The still man becomes another.

A welcome into the embrace of the shore

Emblem Glyphs of New Borneo

In the Music Room

The Undies-Covered Country