WORDS FOR
it’s a problem for a poet when they find themselves inside the question : what is a poem, and what use is it to anyone – does it ever get beyond an individual squawk, any bird-call that does not alter the flow of traffic, any cry that does not affect or effect a single item of government (at any level) legislation – what’s it for – is it any more than a whistling in the dark, when all around us the world is occupied by the often terrible things men & women do to each other, a set of processes that has no end, no resolution, no closure, no let-up
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FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE LAVATORY PAN
ALL TURDS WEIGHING MORE
THAN TWO HUNDREDWEIGHT
ARE TO BE LOWERED BY BLOCK & TACKLE
James K Baxter
written on a public toilet wall
in Khandallah, 1960s
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it’s not as if I have anything to say – there is nothing I want anyone else to know, learn, understand, accept, think, feel, or believe, in my life-long urge to write words down, or ‘write them up’, as the saying has it – I have never been able to complete any sentence which begins ‘What I’m trying to do with the poems is . . .’, or ‘What I’d like people to take from the poems is . . .’, or any such statement, which nevertheless thruout the culture is otherwise made by others every day – I can’t do it – when the gift of the poem (to the writer) is published, it is then gifted on to the reader, and the responsibility of making something of what one reads belongs to the reader, not to the writer
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here are the birds
they will not speak to you
you will learn nothing from them
they will tell you everything
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it’s a question, perhaps, of Who owns the poem – we say of a published poem, that it’s the author’s poem : this is Alan Loney’s poem from his book etc – but do not those words, these cliches, these unthought repetitions, hide a different prospect altogether – you go into a shop and buy a book of poems – you ‘pays your money’ as they say, and the book is yours, it belongs to you – in the book are poems – so the question becomes : Do the poems belong to you – are the poems now yours because you have paid for them – the poems are given to the poet in their composition – the poems are given to you in their publication – one might suggest that the poem only exists in the bodies of the poet and of the reader, both embodied in the culture that made the poem possible in the first place – a published poem is yours, and inevitably – if you buy a new painting, you will look after it, if you buy a book of poems, will you look after them
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writer’s cramp scrivener’s palsy
poetry as a mode of
gagging
on the word
poetry remake 