*rare as rubricators

With the Genius Cantos such an epic labour, I felt the urge to produce something short and quick, hence: 

*rare as rubricators.

It features five short poems: 'Et in Arcadia Ego', 'The Battle of Kohima', 'Identity', 'Pink Noise' and 'Hospital', plus extracts from Cantos LXXX (The Clowde of Knowyng), LXXXI (Urim Thummim), and Canto LXXXIII  (Sociedade do cansaço).

It's a limited edition; email me if you'd like a copy. 

Welcome to Dudley

 

A change of pace for this blog. Meet our new arrival, Sir Dudley. Dudley to his friends. 

Poem: Radiohead before its invasion of Palestine

 Radiohead used to be my favourite band. I saw them live three times (at least one I reviewed here) and I had all the albums. I threw them away. I have not listened to a single track since they ignored the Cultural Boycott of Israel. I hadn't expected not listening to them to be as liberating as it is - I strongly recommend it. This week, they have announced a new tour, against which the BDS Campaign has posted:

“Even as Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza reaches its latest, most brutal and depraved phase of induced starvation, Radiohead continues with its complicit silence, while one member repeatedly crosses our picket line, performing a short drive away from a livestreamed genocide, alongside an Israeli artist that entertains genocidal Israeli forces.” 

“Palestinians reiterate our call for the boycott of Radiohead concerts, including its rumoured tour, until the group convincingly distances itself, at a minimum, from Jonny Greenwood’s crossing of our peaceful picket line during Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” 

On the occasion of this, therefore, I post here the poem I wrote in 2024 in response to their transgression of the boycott.

Radiohead before its invasion of Palestine

What if no-one is who they say they are?

Impossible to prove

Portraits so real synonymous to lines

equal to border dimensions

“The more poetic, the more true” for children to dance on Bushnell St in Areeha.

One among the myriad others continually

possible, always ready

How many of yourself are cowards? So all the ships

on the horizon turn together landward

as if to believe risky shift

All very well if they show you, but they don’t.

 

 

Genius, Novel and Thoughtcrime

As mentioned in the previous blog, my focus has been away from public activity, while there’s been a lot going on. Now more settled, Barcelos and its surrounds has fast become the favoured location for our long-term residence. This year I had a notional schedule to blog the Text Festival anniversaries to lead into posts on my latest theories arising from that experience and dialogues in literature and current state of geopolitics. The first element of blogging happened but the Barcelos move left a bigger gap than I had anticipated. So, now to get back on track, ensconced paradisaically peripheral (a state which I’ve always preferred to occupy), I feel more inclined to insert a ‘progress overview’ before moving on to the meat of the matters – to paraphrase Louis Althusser, a theoretical text is affected in its modality and dispositive by practice. Where are we up to after my last update in 2023?

The Genius Cantos

The explanation of why I needed to take on Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos from a communist perspective can be found in the 2023 blog, but in the context of the impending global catastrophe, Pound’s location at the end of the Second World War makes this project more imperatively poised at the beginning of Third World War. As my first Canto (LXXIV) observes:

Blind. Silent. Jesus asked: is this resurrection?

            Truth can only be half-said’

                        this is the war cantos

cadaver eyes upon me see … nothing,

                                                USICA soaked

bring me the head of stupid

a world where Xi is synonymous Salazar - this ain’t,

warrior queens repurposed glossator utopias 

Rome did shall perish in the blood she has spilt,

            holding democracy in contempt, as we should

leech-gatherers.

Genius is still in progress; Cantos so far completed – with their thematic dynamic – are:

 

LXXIV (The Axiom of Separation)

LXXV (Space)

LXXVI (Interiority)

LXXVII (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

LXXVIII (In the spring and autumn)

Responses from a select group of trenchant readers and critics have been gratifying so far. Of the other Cantos, ‘Toussaint Rouge’, ‘The Clowde of Knowyng’ and ‘Toward Interregnum Closure’ being written concurrently and are all about halfway in:

LXXIX (Toussaint Rouge)

LXXX (Sociedade do cansaço)

LXXXI (Urim Thummim)

LXXXII (The Clowde of Knowyng)

LXXXIII (Incoherence)

LXXXIV (Toward Interregnum Closure)

One of the initiating factors for writing Genius was its pivotal contribution to a projected sequence of novels, however, the poem’s own epic logic and its obligation and objective to respond to the gathering fascistic darkness in the world have intensified its independent urgency.

Poetry as Thoughtcrime

I have blogged about this contextually three or four times (Poetry as Thoughtcrime and In Search of Method). I have developed the promised theoretical framework and a manifesto for future literary resistance, but it has not felt useful for my own creative output to articulate it here. I could romanticise this as a sort of Fermat’s Last Theorem margin throwaway  but I confess also it is a mix of laziness and my propensity to be interested in the next problem rather than the last. According to Alain Badiou’s ‘Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil’, my failure to articulate the discovery of this fidelity is “Evil in the sense of betrayal”; I feel the guilt of that sin and will fulfil my duty shortly after this blog.

Novel

Truth be told, I have already tested my theory, let’s call it what it is – manifesto, with artistic and literary peers. The main criticism being that my focus on poetry is too narrow because its strategies apply equally well across art practice in general, analogous to Tristan Tzara or André Breton in relation of manifesto to movement. I don’t intend to expand my thinking in this direction, simply because of my self-defeating tendency to think too big. But while my creative output has been focused on ‘Genius’ this year, ie the associated novels on hold, I have been indulging myself with applying the manifesto to literature in general, which has initiated another project called ‘Novel’, triggered by Kundera’s Art of the Novel, Calvino’s Literature Machine, Blanchot, Ricardou, Lukács, etc. This is a book of essays investigating questions of fictive form and practice, and literary imperatives facing apocalypse. One entertaining me at the moment is examination of the generalist fallacy of canon and a provocative alternative approach. Instead of the ubiquitous and facile list of the 50 or 100 best books of all time, the question is what do those books that are thusly categorized do? And what are the ontological connections between one ‘great’ book and another(s)? According to what principle are the component elements of the texts related to each other? On this latter, I have adopted structural concepts of ‘Place’, ‘Form’, ‘Endurance’, ‘Space’. By way of a taster, within ‘my’ canonical list, I am working on comparative analysis of deBeauvoir’s ‘The Mandarins’ to Marquez’s ‘100 Years of Solitude’; Simon’s ‘Georgics’ to Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and Vonnegut’s ‘Hocus Pocus’ (most best books lists go with ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ which I attribute to lazy readers); Shute’s ‘On The Beach’ to de Saint-Exupery’s ‘Flight to Arras’ and Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’; Robbe-Grillet’s ‘The Voyeur’ with Golding’s ‘The Inheritors’ and Iain M. Banks’ ‘Excession’; Hesses’ ‘Glass Bead Game’ to Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ and Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’. Etc.

 

Barcelos

 

After the commemoration of the Text Festival anniversary, I had intended to continue blogging with some new theoretical thinking but that schedule went out of the window (temporarily) due to various pressing activities in Portugal and back in Manchester. The biggest change was our move to the town of Barcelos. Like Porto, it is UNESCO heritage listed but is a much quieter and gentler pace; fewer tourists, and more often noticeably visiting, passing through, with a different purpose - our new place is actually on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. 

Barcelos is a beautiful little town, in easy reach of Porto and Braga. It has surprised me to discover that I can say I have never lived somewhere that makes me as genuinely happy as Barcelos does. 

Text Festival, books and stuff

As already featured in the anniversary post on 19 March, the field of action of first festival was contextualised with the ‘Text’ (ISBN 0 9538915 3 4). In addition to the ‘credo’, the festival published a postcard set, with designs by Caroline Bergvall, Geof Huth, Phil Davenport, and Carolyn Thompson and me. In parallel, there were collaborations with If P then Q, Knives Forks and Spoons, and Apple Pie Publications, a poster set and various chapbooks/books engaging with the Text Festival over its four-festival run. In this sense, I think the Festival can claim to have been fundament to developing and sustaining an experimental publishing sector in the north of England. For the 2009 Festival, we published ‘Text 2’ (ISBN 978 0 9538915 9 7) which was an anthology of works by artists involved in the Text Festival. In my focus on subsequent projects and moving country over the years, I seem not to have retained a copy, so again the contents is down to my poor memory. Maybe my forgetfulness is a broader metaphor for the festival itself, or any seminal moment that was influential in its time, but which is covered over by time, until some future generation rediscovers it. As Ron Silliman warned at the time, the biggest danger to the Text Festival was that its sheer scale and scope would burn me out – and it did, in the end.

The next publication, with which I am particularly proud, was ‘Maurizio Nannucci: Language and Horizons’ (ISBN 978-8888967523) with essays by me and Sergio Risaliti. This was a comprehensive survey of the work of Italian text artist Maurizio Nannucci, launched to accompany his Text Festival exhibition of the same name and the blue neon text in the Gallery rotunda which became one of the most used images of the Gallery’s ongoing identity. Also for the 2009 Festival there was the publication of ‘The Bury Poems’ curated by me, edited by Phil Davenport, design by Darren Marsh. The idea for this came about by accident. Robert Grenier was ‘headlining’ for the 2005 Festival and an interview had been set up with him, I think with Hester Reeve (HRH.the) – but again that might be misremembered. He was supposed to meet her in the Met Arts Centre café in Bury. However, she got delayed and since he didn’t have a mobile phone, she couldn’t get a message to him to postpone the meeting. So, he sat and waited, during which time he wrote six new poems, based on his experience of the countryside around his hotel in Ramsbottom. As at the time, his voluminous drawn poem output was based primarily on Bolinas, California, so this poetic-geography made the six poems unique. Of course, I acquired them for the Bury collection. But it placed the germ of an idea for what became ‘The Bury Poems’. In addition to Bob’s Six Poems, I commissioned Phil Davenport, Carol Watts, Tony Lopez, Holly Pester, and Geof Huth to write Bury-specific works and included images from Ron Silliman’s neon installation. Davenport did the edit, and I got some poems included too.

Although we didn’t commission/publish them, Ron Silliman found his time in Bury sufficiently inspiring that he wrote “Northern Soul” – dedicated to the festival mascot, Barney – published by Shearsman Books (ISBN 978-1-84861-319-5) and “Wharf Hypothesis” in 2011. The final book related to the Text Festival was “The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry” published by University of Plymouth Press, edited by Tony Lopez featuring essays by me, Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bök, Carol Watts, Phil Davenport, James Davies, Bob Grenier, Alan Halsey, Holly Pester, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Liz Collini and Carolyn Thompson.

Text Festivals: Five Actions Plus Time

If the last post was a little too long to wade through, in a nutshell the Text posited that we were in one of those historic moments when different artforms are cross-fertilising, and specifically around language through five modes of operation, namely, parataxis, intertextuality, materialisation, spatialisation, and restricted/constricted processes. In that first iteration I had lumped time-based arts across the latter three practices, but in later explanations I began to refer to the Text’s criteria for inclusion being ‘Five actions plus Time’. The Festival opened with a survey show of work by the recently deceased Bob Cobbing, guest curated by Phil Davenport and Jennifer Cobbing; the sound installation ‘Little Sugar’ by Caroline Bergvall, and the main exhibition I curated simply called the ‘Text’, which spanned the theoretical basis of “art that can be read as poetry and poetry that can be viewed as art.”

Installation view: Bob Cobbing 

The rest of the nine months featured solo exhibitions by Lawrence Weiner, Maurizio Nannucci, Shaun Pickard, Alan Halsey, exhibitions of artist’s books curated by Greville Worthington, different alphabets curated by me; public art from Lawrence Weiner – WATER MADE IT WET and the gallery atrium neon installation (pictured below) by Nannucci.

There were numerous performances from too many poets to mention but headlined by Robert Grenier – the start of a long relationship with Bob that led to Bury having one of the biggest collections of his work, and certainly the biggest outside the USA. If you’re interested in more details of the festival’s activities, I’m pretty sure I blogged about most of it at the time, so it’ll be searchable.

Returning to the observation that the festival’s concept was difficult for some to grasp, I’ll share an anecdote which confirmed to me that we were on the right track, or at least it entertained me greatly at the time. Our Media Relations were handled by the incomparable Catharine Braithwaite. One day, Catharine rang me to say that she had an international arts magazine interested in featuring the festival and that the art journalist wanted to do a phone interview with me. Fine, I thought, we set it up for later in the week. All sounded positive until she cautioned me to be prepared for him because he really knew his stuff, was rigorous and could cut through art-speak nonsense when he heard it. So, the interview started with me duly serious, taking onboard her warning. Even with my explaining the Five Actions analysis, there was a tone in his questions that suggested he was thinking: ‘am I interested in covering this?’; so I fell back on a shorthand formulation I had used in other conversations, saying: “Look, if I program Lawrence Weiner in front of an arts audience, they’ll know who he is; but if I program Ron Silliman with the same audience, they won’t. Similarly, a poetry audience will know who Ron Silliman is, but not Lawrence Weiner.” There was a long silence at the other end of the phone, and then rather sheepishly, the journalist said, “I don’t know who Ron Silliman is.” After that, the interview was smooth sailing.

On to the 2009 Text Festival. After nine months I felt that I had exhausted the subject (and the audience) of the Text – and I was certainly personally exhausted. In anticipation of that, I had arranged a 12-month sabbatical for 2006 – during which I wrote my first poetry book 50 Heads. This came out in 2007 after I returned to Bury. Various review copies were duly sent out and unexpectedly I got calls from different friends saying that Ron Silliman had reviewed it on his world-famous blog.

“While there are poets in the U.K. who are close to langpo personally – Tom Raworth in particular – there has never really been anything you could call a language school, as such, in Britain. I hear this equally as a techno descendant of someone like Prynne, a concept that strikes me as very odd indeed. And a sign that Trehy isn’t really like anyone else at all.

Trehy is an eminently readable poet, tho you have to pay attention as you proceed through each work. He promotes this further with a vocabulary that is large and sometimes technical.” (excerpt)

Preview viewers of Liz Collini wall-drawing

It seemed only polite to thank Ron, so I emailed him. But just staying ‘thanks’ seemed a bit thin, so I threw in, “if you ever fancy performing at the Text Festival, we’d be delighted to have you.” To be clear, I had no intention of doing another festival – it was a spare of the moment throwaway remark. At that point I still felt it had done everything it needed to do. Ron replied almost immediately saying: “I get an invitation to perform in the UK about 3 or 4 times a week, but I guess the Text is the important one, so I’d be pleased to attend.” I don’t remember ever telling Ron that the only reason for the 2009 festival actually happened was simply to host him! That said, I put as much effort into it as the first and it was again a success. For me, the personal moment I savored came on the night Ron performed. I had created a mixed programme for the evening, as was the Text way, opening with some Italian sound works, a Scottish storyteller, German turntablist/sound artist Claus van Bebber, followed by Ron. I was standing alone in the dark with him backstage waiting for him to go on and he said with obvious excitement at the evening, “this is just what I am about.” 

And onto the story of why there was a 2011 festival. As part of the 2009 funding for Ron’s travel, a gig in London was included. I accompanied him down to Birkbeck for the performance. One little anecdote, a handful of people (assuming that the Text must be a biennial) regretted that they had missed the 2007 festival. To which I replied that it had been the best one. Anyway, during drinks after the reading, someone enthusiastically wanted to know when the next festival would be. Admittedly having had too many drinks and flushed with positive vibes, I calculated how quickly I do another, and the date popped up ‘2011’. So there it was.

The smartest summary comes from Derek Beaulieu’s blog at the time: “On April 27 and 28th I will be installing an original concrete poem in the windows of the Bury Art Gallery as part of the Text Festival. In addition to that installation, the festival includes my Prose of the Trans-Canada and my Box of Nothing. The Festival also includes visual poetry from Satu Kaikkonen, Eric Zboya, Geof Huth and a tonne of other international poets; performances by Christian Bok, Ron Silliman, Karri Kokko, Jaap Blonk and more; installation work by Pavel Buchler, Simon Morris and many others. This is the 3rd bi-annual Festival
 and promises to be an incredible affair." This is a link to Derek’s blog about his experience “An irresponsible act of imaginative license” #8: The Text Festival, Part 1. | derek beaulieu's blog

And again, fully satisfied with 2011 festival I was convinced that was it. No More. I found various occasions when I was actually saying out loud there would not be another.

2012-13 my project activity shifted completely to touring exhibitions in China. And then 2014 came. Again, its initiation was triggered by something exterior to my intention. Long story short, Bury restructured the Gallery complex to create a new Sculpture Centre on the ground floor and it needed a sufficiently high profile opening show to establish its credentials in international practice. Who better to launch it than Lawrence Weiner, who had by then a long association with Bury and a number of his works sited around the Borough. (Coincidentally, on the same night he opened in Bury, he also opened shows in Rio and Milan). Of course once the Weiner show was likely, the logic of an accompanying Festival was inevitable. Artistically the Festival was strong and by this one, the audience was knowledgeable and committed, but as Sue had warned me, my health wasn’t at its best and I must admit that I missed a large part of the opening weekend due to my collapse.

I retired in 2019 but would almost certainly programmed a fifth event with a new conception. So it couldn’t happen (and probably wouldn’t have anyway due to COVID), but I have continued to develop the analysis that would take things forward and will be posting these ideas after these commemorative posts.