Right. So here's the newest one. Thirty-odd pages. Is part of a backburner project that's been going for a few years. I had the opportunity to focus on it a little more a few months ago during a wonderful residency at incredible arts mania centre, The Guesthouse, in Cork. The residency was set up as a part of SoundEye 2014, and I was extremely honoured to be their first writer in residence. I played around with a lot of different materials, beginning with piles of pins in ink thrown onto white pages. Which did not work. It was hideous. But onwards!
I delved into the LFTT Library that had been set up by Helen Horgan in the gallery space below my workspace: books of Victorian parlour tricks, economics, Hegelian tracts, entomological dictionaries, weird priestly Catholic stuff - it all ended up in a xerox flurry that was guided by the grandiose image of tiny pins on the noble £20 note. Words and scissors and ideas and pages and pages of notes began to seep into existing parts of the project; most of it is still in a large envelope waiting for its turn to be patched into the monstrosity, which is concerned with labour in general. Or, I think it is. It is full and empty of fear and blasting. Piranesi and Bentham haunt the corridors and rooms where swarms of legs and hands make, get angry, prepare rebellion, get scared, get defeated, make, get angry, threaten explosion, implode - the contradictions, the confusions, the et ceteras and the cabbaging of said et ceteras.
Moving along, England is the angerzone of Marx but that's in secret lines. It's worse than an angerzone now. And then bloodstains being the ones I've found in hems of clothing I've bought: hands caught in machines, hands as insects, hands as feet, pins in all the faces, chairs (my irrational fear of) as (rational hatred of) Chairs. Blood on the Chair. Nits or spiders that --- spiders can't be trusted. What is their logic. Why is there a nighthowler in my parlour. What exactly is. Something like that. And then there's Acker and what she started, and Tàpies, and then the floating idea that there is no weaving without holes and gaps in space and material. Thoughts regarding matchstick girls are present, and the prisoners of the Walthamstow workhouse, and the toy factories (also of Walthamstow) that were shut down in the 80s and suffrage and suffering and what happens to spaces. Or wait. I have a line about talking toys somewhere; it's still an unborn poem, another bit of compositional cobweb that thickens and clouds my perceptions in a most productive way but has not necessarily arrived on the page. It will emerge as the project grows.
(No wait. Actually, I will forget about Walthamstow because it is stained with the feces of gentrifying, racist cupcake fascists who think there are too many fried chicken shops that attract too many kids and make the neighbourhood look cheap and undesirable to live in. Unless it's Nando's. Nando's is respectable fried chicken for three times the price, and it comes with tasteful music and nice lighting. In fact, a Nando's just opened at the foot of the newly-constructed Palace of Mediocrity for The Monied that towers over the station. Chicken livers and a Portugese roll for £6.10?! Who are they kidding? People who never go to the butchers, where you can buy chicken livers for pennies, that's who. People who are afraid of spending too little money because it makes them look bad to their fellow cupcake fascists. People who are afraid of people who regularly spend very little money as a part of daily life. Let's face it, the real reason the glut of non-Nando's fried chicken shops in the neighbourhood is a problem to the yuppies is that the, well, the "wrong" kind of people hang out there. Who manage to actually have a great, non-Nando's time, of which the Nandian Butter Frosting Invaders are jealous.) End rant.
Back to how I shall not include the area where I live, but its products. And forget the rest of the showy name-dropping. It didn't happen. I'm not particularly smart but I'm good at faking it. All this is but a few tiny shards of pale glimmers in PIN. Don't go being reductive just because of a few drops of secret knowledgespittle are splashing your shoes as I vomit various bits of venom and some of the sharp objects my body has rejected into this rather sloppy sales pitch. I will keep spitting them.
You don't have to buy it but I made it and we all have hands so let's do this. Let's make some cheezy remarks about exchange and value and whatnot as you provide the funds and I provide the poems. I've been putting on weight despite no money, but that's because I'm depressed. Make me happy. I'll get fit for work!
If you'll be seeing me in person at any time in the tiny bit of future this world has left, we can do a fair trade agreement then, one hand to another. And if not, if you are many, many kilometres away, in the non-Londons or in distant lands then of course I will happily entrust it to the hands of the postal services! Buybuybuy.
If you'll be seeing me in person at any time in the tiny bit of future this world has left, we can do a fair trade agreement then, one hand to another. And if not, if you are many, many kilometres away, in the non-Londons or in distant lands then of course I will happily entrust it to the hands of the postal services! Buybuybuy.
