Happy New Year. May the whiteness always find you the most of what you expect.
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here……………………whatever feels right
………do it
do it again and again until it shapes
appearance by aleatory measure

at least……at least – deigning to make a scene
new years’ parting gift from the Wise chap here

……………………………………….hear.

~

I never got the whole ‘open-field’ white space thing, until I wrote Isolatimage

‘Mover and shaker in the world of words forgets
(rule number one) abstraction overload weakens
the intellectual emotional complex
objectivine correlative
thing…the…erm…

Image?

Yeah..yeah..yeah………going right back in time
Old Ezrastotle told us …….gotta be the real thing

Real as telly?

Realer

The mottle throated birds (speech/words)
need flight as…

rhyme needs dampening
like a piano needs muffle..’

~

If you go to the link you’ll get what I’m on about when referring to the open field of white space, because the above lines are not spaced as they are in the original piece, published by Geoff Gatza in New York.

I wrote it in the spring of 2004, and remember feeling liberated when doing so, because up till then I associated all the talk I had been hearing of the page being an ‘open-field’, with summat a Black Mountain bluffer would wrought into a Projective Verse theory: summat I never really ‘got’. Of course, one could spiel a bit of blather on it and keep up the critical patter about Chuck being this and Olsen being that and it all being dead classy when it came up, you know: having a dabble and dishing up the stuff ‘n that, like, yer know.

Yeah, Isolatimage stood the test of time (as I measure it at least). I’ve only read it live less than eight or nine times, maybe ten, and it works as a verbal object. Pings on the screen. Fools ‘em, the most important people in showbiz, the Audience.

I remember at the time, I’d just started sending stuff out, after three years puddle and peppering around, using the scatter-gun approach of just whacking out e-mails at random and never knowing in advance what shit got accepted and published, in a wholly arbitrary way. Stuff my instinct (at that time) would place lower down the scale, could be chosen over pieces I thought were better quality, proving to me that there’s nowt as queer as folk, as we say in lovely Lancashire.

I sent Isolatimage off to Gatza, and he wrote back saying, that in the normal course of events he wouldn’t have taken it, but because Ezra Pound (obliquely referred to with the neoloigism Ezrastotle) was someway in his thoughts in relation to the theme of that issue, he was gonna, yer know, publish it and that.

Though not as conscious as I am now, then – it was all just a bit of a game to me really, the sending out lark. Being a novice, roughly akin and equivalent to, what in the seven-grade bardic scale would have been me at rung one, foclo (novice) or, (at a push) grade two, macfuirmid (son of composition); I was only a beginner in the game of psychic hoodoo.

It only lasted a year and a half, the sending out acceptance/rejection experiment. Not that I knew that’s what it was at the time of course. Once I got a poem and a piece of prose on Live Poetry accepted by the editor of the Galway Arts centre website in 2005, the game ended. I just had no inclination or desire to put my stuff out there, because I had been published in 20 or so places, had a perfectly respectable track record and just thought, well, yer know, I’m gonna be doing it anyway, and it’s all just a game really, innit? Oh, you’re good/shit, come in/get lost kinda, language games.

Naturally, it was an important part in the formation process, a sort of conning of others, that the shit I wrote could fool the real people who knew what they were doing in poetry. Not as classy a move as getting yerself known by being the dangerous one no-one’s allowed to talk to for fear of the universe contracting. Not as savvy as being a banned poet of course. The ones who always have the genuine kudos along with the folk like Shay and Deggsie.

But yeah man, Geoff, at the time, as I measured things back then, was a big name, and the top up of faith his acceptance gave my intellectual-creative apparatus, Segais Well within (as the old bardic bluffers would have understood it, (it being the mythical source and home of poetry in their tradition) – though couched in a tenor of it was him doing me the favour rather than vice versa.. yeah man, I remember it well.

That poem, Isolatimage, was one which stood as a fairly significant post marking the track, and reading it back, in my eyes at least, it has stood the test of time; weathered into the genuine article. Not that this means it is of course; I am sure there are people (and there are many) who would say what I do is a loada shite. And fair play to ‘em, it’s only a game anyway, innit? A lanaguage game, as the witty Ludwig coined it.

And he should know, because he was a philospher any self-respecting forward-edged messer knows about, and accepts as a card in the flop. Not a particularly orgasmic one to hold as ace in a royal flush, of course. I mean, it’s OK if you wanna beat a refuse collector or builder’s labourer whose sole literary fare is the tabloid diet – just dropping it in casual when yer swingin a shovel like – but not for the high-enders. Not for people like us the chaps here me arl muckers.

~

Happy New Year to all the supporting team keeping it real and getting edgy, forward, upsetting the straights and making a name for yerselves.
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