abandonedbuildings

Fragment: On Harmony

2012-01-19T03:34:00.001-08:00

Sorry / I wasn’t talking to you
but factory rhythms / your mouths
are not unbroken infernos
inside your personal numbers
in each of those numbers a starling
in each of its beaks a startled knife
sorry / we are not that knife
on the city’s outer circuit / frugal
& unbroken. This sentence was never
declared & is a used surface, a
geiger trap or love’s blunted blade
well screw that & the point of our face
is they screwed it shut. Things grow
The perimeter scratches are fearsome

ie the sentence was never declared but punctured, and the rings of the city are sharp metronomic traps, all of them stored in (1) the villages we burned (2) the impact sphere of (number) rubber bullets and feral longitudes all occupied by your local jobcentre, which of course its clients understand as, at best (3) Alan Sugar screeching in utter fear . . . .

Four Letters / Four Comments

2012-01-09T04:54:00.000-08:00

"Reality must become polemical before we (the enemy) are jolted from our complacency" - Danny Hayward.

Four letters first published by Bonney between June and August 2011 at Abandoned Buildings, followed by speculative remarks on the letters from Jennifer Cooke, Pocahontis Mildew, Danny Hayward and Lara Buckerton. Two color letterpress (silver and black) on black Stonehenge paper wraps. Hand stitched.

Second Letter on Harmony

2011-12-16T02:35:00.000-08:00

OK lets try again. Though bear in mind, this is gonna be naive as all hell. I mean, I haven’t done the requisite study, of what harmony is and what it has been etc. What I can gather, from a careful reading of some of Lenin’s Notes on Hegel - he’s got something in there about the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres proposing a perfect cosmology, a hierarchy built on scalar realities that justifies social conditions on earth, where everybody is in their place, and nobody is able to question the beauty and perfection of these relationships. Straightforward. And for it to work, for all these justifications to hold true, a fictional body is essential: the antichthon, or counter-earth. Thus, at the limit, the gravitational pull that holds the entire system of hierarchical harmony together is an untruth, but an untruth with the power to kill. But if this untruth is the site of justification and corporate (ie ritual) slaughter it’s also the site, magnetic as all hell, of contention and repulsion, which can transgress its own limits until something quite different, namely, crime, or impossibility, appears. For Ernst Bloch, the revolution was the crossroads where the dead come to meet. For Lorca, music was the scream of dead generations - the language of the dead. But our system of harmony knows so well it contains its own negation that it has mummified it, and while we know we live within a criminal harmony, we also know we are held helplessly within it as fixed subjects, or rather as objects, even cadavers, of an alien music. But never mind, just as protest is useless only because it stays within the limits of the already known, so the hidden harmony is better than the obvious. Heraclitus. Music as a slicing through of harmonic hierarchies etc, poetic realities as counter-earths where we can propose a new stance in which we can see and act on what had previously been kept invisible etc. Ourselves, for one thing. That sounds just great, absolutely tip fucking top, until you remember that, equally, the harmony of the money fetish is that of the commodity fetish now become visible and dazzling to our eyes, ie we don’t have any kind of monopoly on harmonic invisibility, and all of those occultist systems that some of us still love so much have always been bourgeois through and through. That is, its not a question of gentrification, but that the whole process has always started from the invisible spot where your feet are, tapping whatever fetishised rhythms right into the star encrusted ground. That famous green door with its sign “no admittance except on business”. That is, however much we may claim that it is not protest, but a fast alteration in the structural scansion at the city’s core, the hidden contours of our songs are still a nasty little rich kid fluttering his hecatombic chromosomes all over our collective history. Shit. Its why I still hate Mojo magazine. OK. Now lets get really obvious. Once, revolutions took their poetry from the past, now they have to get it from the future. We all know that. Famous and so on. In its contemporary form, the slogan Greek anarchists were using a couple of winters ago: we are smashing up the present because we come from the future. I love that, but really, it’s all just so much mysticism: but if we can turn it inside out, on its head etc we’ll find this, for example: “the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed its insistence past music. It was hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair . . . . That stance spread like fire thru the cabarets and the joints of the black cities, so that the sound itself became a basis for thought, and the innovators searched for uglier modes”. That's Amiri Baraka, a short story called “The Screamers” from 1965 or something like that. That is, metallic, musical screeches as systems of thought pushing away from, and through, the imposed limits of the conventional harmonic or social systems, thus clearing some ground from where we can offer counter-proposals. Slogans. The battle-cries of the dead. Tho, obviously, Pizza Express and the Poetry Cafe have done as much as is in their power to neutralise any truth content that might be lurking within that possibility. On September 30th 1965, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Donald Rafael Garrett, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and John Coltrane recorded the album “Live in Seatle”: it is, according to someone quoted on Wikipedia, “not for those who prefer jazz as melodic background music”. Its one of those examples of recorded music that still sounds absolutely present years after the fact, because it was one of the sonic receptacles of a revolutionary moment that was never realised: that is, it has become a Benjaminian monad, a cluster of still unused energies that still retain the chance of exploding into the present. Play it loud in the Walthamstow shopping mall and you’ll see what I mean. Yeh yeh yeh. I’m thinking about a specific moment on the album, around thirteen minutes into “Evolution”, when someone - I don’t think its actually Coltrane - blows something through a horn that forces a dimensional time-loop through the already seismic constellations set up within the music’s harmonic system, becoming a force that moves beyond any musical utterance, while still containing direct, clear communication at its centre: ie fire and death on your uptight ass. Among many other things, obviously. I guess Seattle, like anywhere else, is sealed up in its gentrification by now. But anyway, that horn sounds like a metal bone, a place where the dead and future generations meet up and are all on blue, electric fire. CLR James once said that “the violent conflicts of our age enable our practised vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than before”. Go figure. Due to its position in the Pacific Ring of Fire, Seattle is in a major earthquake zone. On November 30th 1999 Seattle WTO protests included direct and rational attacks on, among other things, the Bank of America, Banana Republic, the Gap, Washington Mutual Bank, Starbucks, Planet Hollywood etc etc etc. “Cosmos”. “Out of this World”. “Body and Soul”, you get what I mean. Two years later, in Genoa, the anarchist Carlo Giuliani got a police bullet in the centre of his face. Remember that name. Capital’s untruth, its site of corporate slaughter - ie ritual slaughter - the silent frequency at the centre of its oh so gentle melodies. Ah, I can’t see to finish this, I’ve had a lot of valium today. But anyway, to put it simply, the purpose of song is not only to raise the living standards of the working class, but to prevent the ruling class from living in the way that they have been. The violent conflicts of our age make it impossible to recollect musical emotions in tranquility, unless it is the kind of tranquility that makes clear the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. A high metallic wire etc. The counter-earth rigged to such sonic stroboscopics that we, however temporarily, become the irruption into present time of the screams of the bones of history, tearing into the mind of the listener, unambiguously determining a new stance toward reality, a new ground outside of official harmony, from which to act. Or put it another way, next time some jazz fan tells you that late Coltrane is unlistenable, or something, punch em in the face. Seven times. More later.

First Letter on Harmony

2011-11-11T04:28:00.001-08:00

Somewhere in London there is a judge who, every seven days, pays a prostitute to re-enact the crimes of those he has sentenced that week, while he looks on and masturbates. Sorry, I've been trying and I just can't get that sentence right. I read about it this morning on Facebook and, you know, it kind of made me want to puke into my cornflakes. Its annoying, I was hoping to make some progress on the thoughts I’ve been developing on the Pythagorean system of harmonics, and how it relies on a consciously fictional central point in order to keep its symmetrical force stable. There’s a passage on it in Lenin’s Collected (Vol 38), and I think it might be helpful, tho for what I’m not quite sure. But anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about this judge. And then I started thinking, well, what if - and sure its a pretty big if - but what if he was producing these emissions quite deliberately, as the source of a central vibration through which the judiciary could impose a new and extremely rigid analysis of the city, within which a sterile atmosphere could be maintained for the propagation of a limited number of official sentences (say, for example, seven) from which all possible thought could be derived. Sex magic, yeh. All of that ludicrous shit. Don’t think I’m turning into one of those wankers in David Icke masks: in terms of creation myths its a fairly traditional narrative structure. What this judge probably doesn’t realise, however, is that each of his particle jets will necessarily invoke an adjunct sentence, which while in its weak form may only be manifest in certain cries of disbelief and fear, in extreme conditions may - and that's a very big “may” - may ultimately manifest as a ring of antiprotons, otherwise known as attack dogs. Hackney, for example. These attack dogs are stable, but they are typically short-lived since any collision with an official sentence will cause both of them to be annihilated in a brief but highly intense burst of energy. In other words: buy a gun, learn to shoot it, get a rudimentary job in the high court, and then do some very simple equations. Hope you’re well, by the way. The sky over London is milky and foul.

On Harmony

2011-11-06T11:18:00.001-08:00

Commons //// Happiness //// out now etc

2011-09-27T02:11:00.000-07:00

available here

The work was originally subtitled "A Narrative / Diagram of the Class Struggle", wherein voices from contemporary uprisings blend into the Paris Commune, into October 1917, into the execution of Charles 1, and on into superstitions, fantasies of crazed fairies and supernatural bandits //// all clambering up from their hidden places in history, getting ready to storm the Cities of the Rich //// to the bourgeois eye they may look like zombies, to us they are sparrows, cuckoos, pirates & sirens //// the cracked melodies of ancient folk songs, cracking the windows of Piccadilly //// or, as a contemporary Greek proverb has it, "smashing up the present because they come from the future".

launched at 7pm, Oct 6th, The Blue Posts, Rupert St, Soho alongside Ray Challinor's The Struggle for Hearts and Minds - Essays on the Second World War. Further info here

It is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud. Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation.

Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in 1871, just as the Paris Commune was being blown off the map. He wanted to be there. It’s all he talked about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. It’s only in the English speaking world you have to point simple shit like that out. But then again, these poems have NOTHING TO DO WITH RIMBAUD. If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie.

Letter on Silence

2011-08-30T08:14:00.001-07:00

It's difficult to talk about poems in these circumstances. London is a razor, an inflamed calm has settled, we’re trapped outside on its rim. I’ve been working on an essay about Amiri Baraka, trying to explain the idea that if you turn the surrealist image - defined by Aimé Césaire as a “means of reaching the infinite” - if you turn that inside out what you will find is that phrase from Baraka: “the magic words are up against the wall motherfucker”. Its going very slowly - hard to concentrate what with all the police raids, the punishment beatings, the retaliatory fires. It’d be too much to say the city’s geometry has changed, but its getting into some fairly wild buckling. Its gained in dimension, certain things are impossible to recognise, others are all too clear. I wish I knew more about maths, or algebra, so I could explain to you exactly what I mean. So instead of that I’ll give you a small thesis on the nature of rhythm - (1) They had banged his head on the floor and they were giving him punches. (2) He was already handcuffed and he was restrained when I saw him. (3) He was shouting, “Help me, help me”. (4) He wasn’t coherent. (5) I went to speak to his mum. (6) He couldn’t even stand up after they hit him with the batons. (7) They knocked on her door three hours later and told her “your son’s died”. I can’t remember exactly where I read that. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in a literary magazine, but I guess you’ll have to agree it outlines a fairly conventional metrical system. Poetry transforms itself dialectically into the voice of the crowd - René Ménil made that claim way back in 1944 or something. But what if that’s not true. What if all it can do is transform into the endless whacks of police clubs - certainly you get that in official poetry, be it Kenny Goldsmith or Todd Swift. Their conformist yelps go further than that, actually, as the police whacks in their turn transform into the dense hideous silence we’re living inside right now, causing immediate closing of the eyes, difficulty breathing, runny nose and coughing. Because believe me, police violence is the content of all officially sanctioned art. How could it be otherwise, buried as it is so deeply within the gate systems of our culture. Larry Neal once described riots as the process of grabbing hold of, taking control of, our collective history. Earlier this week, I started thinking that our version of that, our history, had been taken captive and was being held right in the centre of the city as a force of negative gravity keeping us out, and keeping their systems in place. Obviously I was wrong. Its not our history they’ve got stashed there - its a bullet, pure and simple, as in the actual content of the collective idea we have to live beneath. They’ve got that idea lodged in the centre of Mark Duggan’s face - or Dale Burns, or Jacob Michael, or Philip Hulmes. Hundred of invisible faces. And those faces have all exploded. Etcetera. Anyway, this is the last letter you’ll be getting from me, I know you’ve rented a room right at the centre of those official bullets. Its why you have to spend so much time gazing into your mirror, talking endlessly about prosody. There is no prosody, there is only a scraped wound - we live inside it like fossilised, vivisected mice. Turned inside out, tormented beyond recognition. So difficult to think about poems right now. I’m out of here. Our stab-wounds were not self inflicted.

Letter on Spectres

2011-08-20T02:46:00.001-07:00

We’re beginning to suffer here. Obviously I’ve not been getting much writing done. But I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had, the last time we met. You remember, about Milton? Christ. Yours was such an obvious bourgeois response. Pandemonium is suburbia, pure and simple. The rioters are speaking in perfect English. Its the middle-class, the magistrates, and you, who are all talking some weird, ignorant slang. All of your mouths are stitched up with some kind of weird gaffer tape. Your laboratory is a slum. Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but things have been pretty stressful: last week the butcher put the prices up even on rat-meat. Today its all he’s got left. You know how it is when you read an account of a situation you’ve been directly involved in, but each one of its constituent parts has been extracted, polished, entirely rearranged? Last week was exactly like that. I got home and tried to phone you, but all that came out the receiver was a complicated, monstrous hiss. I did my best to explain it and came up with this, let me know what you think. Was it (a) you were speaking in a strange new language that had no place in my part of town, or (b) you were speaking at a specific frequency that only particular dogs could hear or use, or was it (c) the static that's left after the tape containing all your reason and superstition runs out and everything’s revealed as it really is for one beautiful moment, all brightly lit in shopping mall reds and flickering striplight yellow. I’ve been wearing a black balaclava for days. From what I can tell, your part of town has been taken over by a weird parade of quacks, magistrates and fortune tellers, all yelping as if everything that happened over the past week was the result of a possession by some kind of evil spirit, and they could only ward it off with a display of archaic gestures, vicious combinations of letters and numbers. The magistrates have taken on the condition of people, and the people round here are no longer to be honoured with even a human shape. Its a curious process. We see it everywhere: in the movements of musical notes, of chemistry, steam and water, of birth and death. Each syllable is a different tonal cluster, penned in with police-wire and used electricity. I hear you’re thinking about becoming a bailiff. In any case, I’m glad they burnt your laboratory down. Now send me some fucking money.

Letter on Riots and Doubt

2011-08-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

just to note, I wrote this a couple of days before everything kicked off. & more on that later . . .

*

Anyway, I’ve totally changed my method. A while ago I started wondering about the possibility of a poetry that only the enemy could understand. We both know what that means. But then, it might have been when I was walking around Piccadilly looking at the fires, that night in March, my view on that changed. The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody and while I’m pretty sure a simple riot doesn’t qualify, your refusal to leave the seminar room definitely doesn’t. But then again, you are right to worry that I’m making a fetish of the riot form. “Non-violence is key to my moral views”, you say. “I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill”, you say. But what about that night when we electrocuted a number of dogs. Remember that? By both direct and alternating current? To prove the latter was safer? We’d taken a lot of MDMA that night, and for once we could admit we were neither kind, nor merciful, nor loving. But I’m getting off the point. The main problem with a riot is that all too easily it flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it. Externally at least we become the price of glass, or a pig’s overtime. But then again, I can only say that because there haven’t been any damn riots. Seriously, if we’re not setting fire to cars we’re nowhere. Think about this. The city gets hotter and deeper as the pressure soars. Electrons get squeezed out of atoms to produce a substance never seen on Earth. Under such extreme conditions, hydrogen behaves like liquid metal, conducting electricity as well as heat. If none of that happens, its a waste of time. Perhaps you think that doesn’t apply to you. What inexhaustible reserves we possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms, in the nightmare of their lives as slaves to the rich. Don’t pretend you know better. Remember, a poetry that only the enemy can understand. That's always assuming that we do, as they say, understand. Could we really arrive at a knowledge of poetry by studying the saliva of dogs? The metallic hydrogen sea is tens of thousands of miles deep.

*

note the use of quotations from Engels, Trotsky, Lautreamont and today's Guardian

Happiness (after Rimbaud)

2011-08-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

download a recording of me reading from my forthcoming book "Happiness" here, or you can stream it over here ///// it's gonna be published by Unkant in the next month or so /////// also, The Commons will be coming out from Openned in September ///// facebook page for the launch is here /////// yeh.

Letter on Poetics (after Rimbaud)

2011-06-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

So I see you’re a teacher again. November 10th was ridiculous, we were all caught unawares. And that “we” is the same as the “we” in these poems, as against “them”, and maybe against “you”, in that a rapid collectivising of subjectivity equally rapidly involves locked doors, barricades, self-definition through antagonism etc. If you weren’t there, you just won’t get it. But anyway, a few months later, or was it before, I can’t remember anymore, I sat down to write an essay on Rimbaud. I’d been to a talk at Marx House and was amazed that people could still only talk through all the myths: Verlaine etc nasty-assed punk bitch etc gun running, colonialism, etc. Slightly less about that last one. As if there was nothing to say about what it was in Rimbaud’s work - or in avant-garde poetry in general - that could be read as the subjective counterpart to the objective upheavals of any revolutionary moment. How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. The form would be monstrous. That kinda romanticism doesn’t help much either. I mean, obviously a rant against the government, even delivered via a brick through the window, is not nearly enough. I started thinking the reason the student movement failed was down to the fucking slogans. They were awful. As feeble as poems. Yeh, I turned up and did readings in the student occupations and, frankly, I’d have been better off just drinking. It felt stupid to stand up, after someone had been doing a talk on what to do if you got nicked, or whatever, to stand up and read poetry. I can’t kid myself otherwise. I can’t delude myself that my poetry had somehow been “tested” because they kinda liked it. Because, you know, after we achieved political understanding our hatred grew more intense, we began fighting, we were guided by a cold, homicidal repulsion, and very seldom did we find that sensation articulated in art, in literature. That last is from Peter Weiss. I wondered could we, somehow, could we write a poem that (1) could identify the precise moment in the present conjuncture, (2) name the task specific to that moment, ie a poem that would enable us to name that decisive moment and (3) exert force inasmuch as we would have condensed and embodied the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. I’m not talking about the poem as magical thinking, not at all, but as analysis and clarity. I haven’t seen anyone do that. But, still, it is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud. Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation. Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in May 1871, the week before the Paris Communards were slaughtered. He wanted to be there, he kept saying it. The “long systematic derangement of the senses”, the “I is an other”, he’s talking about the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity, yeh? That's clear, yeh? That's his claim for the poetic imagination, that's his idea of what poetic labour is. Obviously you could read that as a simple recipe for personal excess, but only from the perspective of police reality. Like, I just took some speed, then smoked a joint and now I’m gonna have a pepsi, but that’s not why I writing this and its not what its about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. Its only in the English speaking world, where none of us know anything except how to kill, that you have to point simple shit like that out. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie. & seeing as language is probably the chief of the social senses, we have to derange that. But how do we get to that without turning into lame-assed conceptualists trying to get jiggy with their students. You know what, and who, I mean. For the vast majority of people, including the working class, the politicised workers and students are simply incomprehensible. Think about that when you’re going on about rebarbative avant-garde language. Or this: simple anticommunication, borrowed today from Dadaism by the most reactionary champions of the established lies, is worthless in an era when the most urgent question is to create a new communication on all levels of practice, from the most simple to the most complex. Or this: in the liberation struggles, these people who were once relegated to the realm of the imagination, victims of unspeakable terrors, but content to lose themselves in hallucinatory dreams, are thrown into disarray, re-form, and amid blood and tears give birth to very real and urgent issues. Its simple, social being determines content, content deranges form etc. Read Rimbaud’s last poems. They’re so intensely hallucinatory, so fragile, the sound of a mind at the end of its tether and in the process of falling apart, the sound of the return to capitalist business-as-usual after the intensity of insurrection, the sound of the collective I being pushed back into its individuality, the sound of being frozen to fucking death. Polar ice, its all he talks about. OK, I know, that just drags us right back to the romanticism of failure, and the poete maudite, that kinda gross conformity. And in any case, its hardly our conjuncture. We’ve never seized control of a city. But, I dunno, we can still understand poetic thought, in the way I, and I hope you, work at it, as something that moves counter-clockwise to bourgeois anti-communication. Like all of it. Everything it says. We can engage with ideas that have been erased from the official account. If its incomprehensible, well, see above. Think of an era where not only is, say, revolution impossible, but even the thought of revolution. I’m thinking specifically of the west, of course. But remember, most poetry is mimetic of what some square thinks is incomprehensible, rather than an engagement with it. There the phrase went beyond the content, here the content goes beyond the phrase. I dunno, I’d like to write a poetry that could speed up a dialectical continuity in discontinuity & thus make visible whatever is forced into invisibility by police realism, where the lyric I - yeh, that thing - can be (1) an interrupter and (2) a collective, where direct speech and incomprehensibility are only possible as a synthesis that can bend ideas into and out of the limits of insurrectionism and illegalism. The obvious danger being that disappeared ideas will only turn up ‘dead’, or reanimated as zombies: the terrorist as a damaged utopian where all of the elements, including those eclipsed by bourgeois thought are still absolutely occupied by that same bourgeoisie. I know this doesn’t have much to do with ‘poetry’, as far as that word is understood, but then again, neither do I, not in that way. Listen, don’t think I’m shitting you. This is the situation. I ran out on ‘normal life’ around twenty years ago. Ever since then I’ve been shut up in this ridiculous city, keeping to myself, completely involved in my work. I’ve answered every enquiry with silence. I’ve kept my head down, as you have to do in a contra-legal position like mine. But now, surprise attack by a government of millionaires. Everything forced to the surface. I don’t feel I’m myself anymore. I’ve fallen to pieces, I can hardly breathe. My body has become something else, has fled into its smallest dimensions, has scattered into zero. And yet, as soon as it got to that, it took a deep breath, it could suddenly do it, it had passed across, it could see its indeterminable function within the whole. Yeh? That wasn’t Rimbaud, that was Brecht, but you get the idea. Like on the 24th November we were standing around, outside Charing Cross, just leaning against the wall etc, when out of nowhere around 300 teenagers ran past us, tearing up the Strand, all yelling “WHOSE STREETS OUR STREETS”. Well it cracked us up. You’d be a pig not to answer.

(after Rimbaud)

2011-06-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

June 30. militant diagrams in the stratosphere, o ethanol-
we were arresting anarchists, objects of contemplation, or of art.

the photos prove that we know what we are talking about. on the critical date, we had been ordered to put a bomb somewhere - an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. ten people perished during the attack, and distances tumbled into nothing.

magic nights of hideous study
paychecks horrific as phantoms

dear friends. the world, I believe, is full of so many marvelous cities. but everyone I have ever met has only been to places where they didn’t want to be, and they have only done what they didn’t want to do, and they have died in ways that they didn’t want to die.

give us stones, magnificent stones.

goodbye to all that, we have done nothing wrong. victory to the occupations. victory to the imagination. o radiance, we are so respectful we demand to be boiled

communique

2011-05-25T04:14:00.001-07:00

after Rimbaud

2011-05-25T04:05:00.001-07:00

dateline x. new cargo. innovative bloodstains in the atmosphere
encircled like language or birds. the point is that you do not agree
certain separations in the poetic word. certain landscapes or ghosts

cash & oil. or maybe / barbarians, a glass
do the leper itch / dig my radiation, love
not you: geezers, alleys, or lets pretend
you cream, the red-haired bombs & stars

or the content of corporate capital spreads routinely across the surface texture
of the bodies of middle class militants aflutter in the heart of cheap pharmaceutics
multiplied by several completed minutes each disconnected by social flattery

copernican drinkers: each city splits
re-orders, entangled, sealed / is laws
& fast money-back panic impalation
& clear love rides our glacial hearts

meanwhile. certain emblematic subjectivities. certain time-zones taken out of commission.
worthless chemistry, impossible melodies, passports and mercury. content deranges form.

communique

2011-05-25T04:03:00.001-07:00

Erratum (cf DOGS)

2011-05-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

communique

2011-05-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

Dogs (after Rimbaud)

2011-05-11T08:31:00.001-07:00

------------------ here at the centre of the official world, they’re making a chart of all of our secret thoughts. They know everything about our cities, our rented glue

(a) the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power
(e) arbitrary militarisation
(i) a racist mobilisation against selected scapegoats
(o) public opinion’s spectral ditch
(u) a fanatical ideology based on hypocrisy and sentiment

Its all so exotic, a renewal of sectarian violence: like circus tyrants, they are bestial and tender / like sentimental magnets, they will occupy our territory for a single second, or maybe for months, maybe forever.

Trafalgar Square is solid meat. Dogs.

communique

2011-05-06T03:34:00.001-07:00

Metropole (after Rimbaud)

2011-05-01T04:39:00.001-07:00

We invented colours for the vowels, rich people live there: a mobile holding cell where reality would go on reproducing and representing itself endlessly where we could not exist, a systematic & carefully charted series of political assassinations. Now study this.

12th October. A sudden drop in consumer confidence, like a ridiculous water-nymph burning on some river’s bed. All hotels, industrial units etc, to be occupied. Nightingale. Polar sun. This is a pastoral.

But how could what we were experiencing be simply down to police tactics - seriously, try thinking about the first letter of the alphabet. For thirty minutes just do it. Those public buildings that will never again be buildings. Infinitely dense petals of social perfume. Methanol, turpentine etc. Physical attacks on all excessive displays of personal wealth.

We flattered ourselves we were in on some secret, we kidded ourselves that ferric aristocracies were not patrolling our networks, patrolling us on pure lymph level. As in a blockage on all major routes in and out of the city. As in electric pink. Or the kind of fucker who would squeal on the gallows.

They who tell the people revolutionary legends, they who amuse themselves with sensational stories, are as criminal as the geographer who would draw up false charts for navigators.

Memo (propaganda by deed)

2011-04-29T14:32:00.001-07:00

bloc 2 // bulletin

2011-04-29T08:36:00.002-07:00

communique

2011-04-16T04:28:00.001-07:00

BLOC 1 (communique - after Rimbaud)

2011-04-16T04:23:00.000-07:00

incidentally > one harmless tourist / secretly
was a highly politicised ruling class > endless
their repetition, their endless combinations
& stereotypes / like us, in fact, peacefully
drinking in an ancient city < where “they”
- and we know who they are - where “they”
continue to pelt us with scorn / those living
worlds > from which we have disappeared
endless / their repetition, killing skinny dogs
in relative opacity < public opinion’s spectral
dogs / the eighth ditch is < stupidly burning
like westminster abbey > weird, that formula
or the jobcentre < where worlds are engulfed
mass without number < harmless walls of flame

don’t bother telling the truth if you can’t spit in its face

communique - (Bloc 1/// after Rimbaud)

2011-04-04T16:10:00.001-07:00

tactic A: we are channeling public opinion’s
central panoptic > each shop window > is
equal to a specific convulsion > a spectral
split where London can pay to view its past
its face < each face a specific idea / fixed, as
dictionary level A < here is fresh vowels, as
against “them” > plated glass as widened split
the eighth ditch is Piccadilly < is that simple
bloc 1: wherein I have been saying / & ever
since we became their plated glass of public
shit > well I have been saying lies > like we
was the centre of London < I was yelling to
some cop > was an enemy ghost I thought
or trapped outside his circled limpid world

communique - (after Rimbaud)

2011-03-27T06:14:00.001-07:00

anyway > how exactly does ammonia
does it get into a lightbulb / tell me
before the universe > that phony
paymaster i.e bailiff > it disrupts us
our ring of clicking seconds < is each
encircled // ring of cops & piss roses
it is a plague: & yet to smash the Ritz
is tactics etc < in epileptic time, was
fucked up by a non-violent majority
as in government department, lit up
tossed into the crowd / and implodes
in moth stutter < blame that, my tiny
crowd of wages:: a bone flutter, fuse
inserted < is lock universe, just kill it

“what I write at this moment in a cell at the Fort du Taureau I have written and shall write throughout all eternity - at a table, with a pen, clothed as I am now, in circumstances like these” - Blanqui, 1872

communique - (after Rimbaud)

2011-03-13T11:04:00.001-07:00

but, if commodities could speak > their
imaginary friends grabbed your arm, their
barren life > is as simple as blossom, as a
musical phrase < beautiful as driving nails
deep in the skull of William Hague, that
vicious pink < imagine cultivating warts
as if commodities could speak > or fired
lived bullets & teargas, as crackling words
encircled the last of the liberated cities
or the fierce buzzing of flies > but anyway
imagine commodities could think, their
scraping hands on your sleeve > musical
beams of love < barren, respected life

after Rimbaud

2011-03-08T02:22:00.001-08:00

it is not the cops > but geometry, from
this perspective is eerily silent about
its more scandalous projections < we
have scraped its clocks clean, we have
inserted a brown cigar, a cheap and easy
proto-tone, we have called it a village.
> oh hell. we are your population, turning
at 360 degrees, where King Charles I is
equal to or lesser than Ian Tomlinson, or
we already said that, forget it > we press
hands together, as scars of circling bone
where silence is also prohibited, funded
guns surround the city banks’ networks
of compulsory metaphors speaking aloud

after Rimbaud

2011-02-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

no signal > here find enclosed
one partial landscape, scraped
inoffensive language or like birds
meaning sexual theorems <
Iain Duncan-Smith is one, &
is prosodically useless, that much
is clear, invades the poem as
if it were social life > & this
too is a trap / its rational form
a contagion upon the world
< here find enclosed one crow
landscape in cop mathematics
i.e. Blanqui couldn’t say a word
the telemetric sky in crackling white

Interference Note (after Rimbaud)

2011-01-23T13:19:00.001-08:00

I understood money as a knife, would
use that centrifuge > London, rotating
embers of an abstract city, capital
in red & black. It was sleeping, we were
awake inside it > the opposite is also true
has blocked the anti-matter of the speaking I
has secreted memory < confronted its being
as bourgeois love, that cannibal monstrosity
wherein government is at war with thought’s
productions of transparency < a pretty little
enzyme dissolved our face’s history, privatised
the place and the formula > consciousness
in exile, mass without number, insurrection
is value. Meanings excoriate the enemy language.

*

It is impossible fully to grasp Rimbaud's work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx's Capital. Consequently, none of the poets for the past half-century has understood Rimbaud. - Lenin, Zurich, 1915

Notes on Utopian Astronomy

2011-01-18T07:52:00.000-08:00

The City of Dis

2011-01-17T13:29:00.000-08:00

here's something I was working on about a year ago. I never really finished it, but thought I might as well stick it up . . . .

after Rimbaud

2011-01-06T04:50:00.001-08:00

here is a picture > is a kind of glass
a simple stone would define < the year
is that particular and no longer is our

ie friend < specific locks refined our vision
& history returned. was armed > we didn’t
die there, those angles were unavailable

fire is physical time. is absolute unrest
or total war < interior logic of music’s
new definitions. millbank > build bonfires

say we choked their mirror, a heated
flicker > or we know what people used
to eat in pictures < we are eating stones

*

- There are sirens in this city. Their songs are grim and surgical.
- There is an alarm clock ringing sixty minutes a second.
- There’s a hole in the ground filled with gas and white plague.
- There’s a burning cathedral. A wedding of vampires and stealth.
- There’s a bully van painted red and black.
- There are figures on the rooftops. Archers and cameramen.
- And when you stand up and say 'enough of this', there’s always someone to shoot you in the face.

after Rimbaud (by any means necessary)

2010-12-10T11:08:00.000-08:00

December 2010. a high metallic wire. content exceeds phrase.

slight shift in geometry / slight interruption
in the flow of their / crimson & guillotined
bacterial princes / shifted / rivets of history

ok. theirs is a more stupid alphabet. sections to be ringed and taken away.
unspoken contradictions in their footsteps. a universe devoid of images.
an october we thought we couldn’t have. external symbols within our sky.

its fraudulent summaries -
its disappeared names -

back now to our studies. negation of the negation. we will raise the dead.

after Rimbaud

2010-11-12T04:08:00.001-08:00

of Downing Street, that assembly of ghouls & defunct regimes
of the warm November wind, our absurd paupers’ memories

outside London it is all geometry, a euphemism for civil war
I remember our cotton dresses, those ribbons and bows

we skirted the disks of the city, its deserted, dying angles

we were wearing flags and pretty flowers, but our memories
at several intersections they opened into vast arched domes

of that other life, its obnoxious circles, of relics and animal love
the horrific quantity of force we will need to continue even to live

*

When you meet a Tory on the street, cut his throat
It will bring out the best in you.
It is as simple as music or drunken speech.
There will be flashes of obsolete light.
You will notice the weather only when it starts to die.

from a notebook

2010-11-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

For the Administration (after Rimbaud)

2010-10-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

Lord Browne, from politeness
that particular thought is
an opportunity, a response
to that thievery, his silence -
he is though, representative
of certain constellations of order
obvious studies of number, and
the present apocalypse is
a structural problem, this
eschews metaphor, the enemy
‘is’, a defining molecule
he is though, a childfucker
a swarm of goldened thinking
dead behind the rose trees

*

----------------of Milton, Lenin
& Satan, of the scum of england,
of the years enclosed there, we
the cells of england, we smarted
inside these delicate circles, the
nettles of soviet england, of
isolation in its pure state, where
diamonds, insects, walk like tyrants

from the department (after Rimbaud)

2010-09-03T02:26:00.000-07:00

> white tonal light < to never be get
outside of its value theories of
transmission noise > as in / listen

Target A, the holding centre < it
was an hunger strike, or listen
I abhor my country < as property

or lesion / will screw his mouth
on later < a verb, a specific rivet
of time > an enemy, non-abstract

as < we deceived him, screwed his
as failure > as in one specific body
as high feed frequency ringing tone

*

Target A was, as to be expected
inside a mouth that / hates me -
o shit (poetically) > the whites are

have been come, already / I could
never to speak out of this wind
its errors: set years unfolding, as

basic errors regarding static, wd
only to sit into a century, wraiths
of compressed event > Target A

his mouth riven to / somewhere
the signal returned to normal, dis-
relish writhed within our jaws

after Rimbaud (from the department)

2010-08-15T06:03:00.001-07:00

from the English I inherit my love of alcohol, idiocy and violence -
but I do not share their closed borders, their bureaucratic exterior -

election day. terminal. a cluster of predecessors in the language
i.e. cells of racist light, in verbs, tumbling
Belgravia or something, an adverb
think of adjectives as refugees. you just shot em: here is a style guide -

(e) a deficit line -
(a) negates the interruption of the speaking I -
(u) a system of collective thought -
(i) unable / unwilling to find work -
(o) beyond a certain tenancy of stoic disdain -

I entered first. Target A was standing by the table
I hit him with the shield. Pinned Target to floor
I was foul and fair, would sleep in utter music

the bulletins, consist entirely of nerves
or harmony, pure infection of thought

we entered a respectful half-light, the names, we had achieved
glue and murder / or we were images, monuments, gospels

& in very obvious nitrates / from the English I inherit
my mean & bitter divisions, my very grievous hail -

after Rimbaud (for the administration)

2010-07-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

as our co-ordinates are magnetised, & as our exits have been seized
we have vanished, we heavy stones of destruction & light -

as our hands are not aristocratic, still less those of the market
we have come in utter sentiment, some small targeted acquiescence

the angle is fearsome, the order of the day is wretched hope

as your maps are out of commission, we visit you secretly
we circles of cancelled stars, we flying rags of brutal factory girls
would cover your face, would swallow in grace & molestation

George Osborne, god of love, we have spurned beauty

Quotations toward a militant poetics

2010-07-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

One fragment is not, after all, visible.

*

The person falls to pieces, loses its breath. It passes over into something else, is nameless, no longer hears reproaches, fleeing its extension into its smallest dimension, fleeing its dispensability into nothingness - yet on reaching that smallest dimensionality, with a deep breath at having passed across, it recognises its indispensability in the whole.

*

Only since we have started using violence ourselves, has a realistic dialogue begun to develop, as the system is having to pull back its veil and speak.

*

Thus the atoms obey the logic of social groups, but so do works of art and philosophical systems, when they are analysed and broken up into their smallest parts.

*

The 'ancient' cinema was shooting one event from many points of view. The new one assembles one point of view from many events.

*

The word lives a double life . . . . this battle of worlds, this battle of two powers forever being waged in the word, produces the double life of language; two circles of flying stars.

*

In times of upheaval, fearful and fruitful, the evenings of the doomed classes coincide with the dawns of those that are rising. It is in these twilight periods that Minerva's owl sets out on her flights.

*

from Eisenstein, Brecht, Khlebnikov, Meinhoff

after Rimbaud

2010-06-29T03:00:00.001-07:00

Listen, we got every escape hatch blocked. The centre of our orbit is some kind of cynical massacre, some kind of prolapse, thats all of your logic, your entire poetics, no-one can even think revolt -

Compression of east and west, AM and PM, whatever, its all the same. We are here to make the hard choices, your choices. We’ve got the food, all the food, all of your love, every point of circulation, all abstraction, all phosphor. And you can go shit -

Come o silken wraiths, come and devour us -

after Rimbaud

2010-06-09T10:20:00.001-07:00

what we liked were transmissions, taglines, phonemes -

technique R2I. procedure 129. repeat. purge.
it began with the laughter of idiots and there it will end
our circumference: a gated english voice / delete -

they have their bombed cities, their ridiculous ancient songs
their ruined boulevards / our controlled, uptight ecstasies

night is nothing and the day is on fire -

report. all harmonic discourse to be compressed & restored
hurray for the fucked up dawn, our shredding swarms
our invoice decide what knowledge is / is like assassins -

science, patience, torture: the vows of the sun and the sea -

----------------------------------------------------------

newsflash. May 2010. what we liked were / vowel one -

was international nights of torrential study, was harmonic
our hydraulic calculations, your medicines, children’s books

Nephograms! Votemeal! O magnetic puke
& bank stuff. These spheres piss us off, yeh,
like surface nukes. But still, our so clean hands
of lepers v. the lash / 360 degrees / servitude

or paraquat / the rust on your kill silver
just rose up in judgement? Shame. Insert
lamotrogine, my asphyxiant / howl, love,
with scatological equity, goldened charity

ie send flowers, fire, gems

vowel two, three, four etc / sorry, but was a discrete attack
& shyly encircled the disks of the law. or we can’t find em

we hold ourselves safe on the roof of the world’s love -
our phantasmagoric business plans, our study of the stars -

the islands of the dead -

Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance

2010-06-02T05:51:00.000-07:00

All they knew was that they had to shriek against that elemental violence and yet they did not emit a sound

Crude beginnings could be erected from the shattered monuments, some wastelands were initially penetrated only by letters of the alphabet, with which people arduously learned how to read.

The more unreservedly we received the testimonies from the most diverse directions of entanglement and seething, of destruction and authoritarian uprisings, the more nuanced became our image of the world and our appreciation of the richness of language.

While reading, while examining images, I no longer entered a secluded special area accessible only to initiates, instead everything that was shown was integrated into my personal experiences.

Our consciousness guided us to books and pictures, it triggered conversations for which we had become ready only at this moment.

Later, after we achieved political understanding, our hatred grew more intense, we began purposefully fighting those who tried to hold us down, annihilate us. We were guided by a cold, homicidal repulsion. Very seldom did we find this sensation articulated in art, in literature

It was as if there were no language as yet for this grubbing and rooting, for the hours of lying with bated breath, the slow groping forward, the searching for nameless middlemen, for encoded addresses, for the sudden confrontation with the murderer.

I saw that this was quite wrong, that the definite and the concrete were surrounded by a thronging, by a lurking and choking, and, immediately underneath it, all that was to be found of names and terms was a babbling.

How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. The form would be monstrous, would cause dizziness.

------------

All of the above taken from the first volume of Weiss' novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Very highly recommended.

after Rimbaud

2010-05-18T07:32:00.001-07:00

mostly they have explained your world

they invented colours for the vowels -

(u) glyphs & harm. understood simply as in
(e) simply / public spheres or stones
(o) chemicals & stones
(i) feasts of hunger, simply as in, stones
(a) stones

“so anyway”, while we were picking berries
pretty as a kidnap / “our superiors”
o paradise. here is a small door.

- blue - the ultimatum expands on
- green - we presume the decision not
- red - magnetic idiocies, mostly
- white - our arseholes are different
- black - “isolation in its pure phase

anxiously their faces, were not there
it was a kind of heaven, scraps of sky

cold wind. passengers and crew.

after Rimbaud

2010-05-02T05:36:00.001-07:00

mayday. the alphabet was a system of blackmail
complacent, would skate on our regulated senses

“sister, I hear the thunder of new wings”
some crap about the immanence of vowels etc

(a) an offensively wholesome social milk
(e) understood fucking as a swarm of conformity. was
(i) what was locked there was. chatter, flies etc
(o) a stringent regime of structural reforms &
(u) well, targets, neutrality. a closed circuit of abstract numbers

& us, locked out. the alphabet was, ultimately, not ours
in any case, its mythological shells, its crumpled octaves &
spectra, zilch / the conversation a hierarchy of

eclipse (as in a universe, infinitely compressed)

our desires lack density & social flame

“our silence is powerful”
“the voices you strangle today”

after Rimbaud

2010-04-30T07:23:00.001-07:00

4.30 a.m. the story of one of my idiocies -
this is all so far away -
two distant bangs & a high pitched noise -
the colours of the vowels -
would screech inside your calculations -
basic lies, vomit and alchemy -
the simple prison diagram -
18th October 1977 -
you were controlled circuits -
we were rusting inside your house -
o delight o music, the peace of calm lines -
o geometric faults, in denial & in anger -
my final recollection. hello -

(after Rimbaud)

2010-04-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

hell. we are pleased how your city
got bombed - it was like, sleeping etc
it is what we like / to spin gently &

with guns / these are our ecstasy *
are control, in prison as is cosmology
or to lick your finger / and disappear

you dull young men / hidden where
we wanted to kiss as / but burnt as
nothing here but where we stand &

starlings / yes we love what your
speech was a bed we / are your lips
yours, we bargained for / we spoke

your nights of monstrous study / we
as in glycerine / as sexual research we
we shit in your fucking guts / hello

after Rimbaud

2010-04-14T15:43:00.001-07:00

noon. we scraped the village clean
or as our philosophy suggested
it was an army, a screeching whirl

something as vague as / please, we
know by now what a sky is, like
an obvious cycle of yellowed light

listen. everybody here is / in the
in the traditional sense, sort of
lie down and take it, as easy as

& talk like that. your hands have
not taste of gasoline. a circle of
toxic birds. the sun, heavy with

not a chain of shredding crows
our circles / spires & phosphor
defeat without end. & safety in

Quotations for the time being / To be put into action immediately

2010-04-04T03:36:00.000-07:00

It is not up to us to litigate in the courts of our enemies, who judge by other principles, by laws we do not recognise.

What this saying means, however, is that we long for an ordinary notion, one that we are already familiar with; consciousness feels as if, together with the mode of representation, the very ground where it stands solidly and is at home, has had the ground pulled from under it.

Events in one voice are left totally void in the other voice, which thus becomes the negation of the first.

The voices, brought into total accord with each other, are identical as the products of the tone row; they are, however, totally alien to each other and, in their accordance, actually hostile to each other.

. . . . not in order to create an ‘integrated work of art’ in which they all offer themselves up and are lost, but so that together with the drama they may further the common task in their different ways; and their relations with each other consist in this, that they lead to mutual alienation.

To know how to recognise and pick up the signs of power we are awaiting, which are everywhere; in the fundamental language of cryptograms, engraved on crystals, on shells, on rails, in clouds or in glass; inside snow, or light, or coal; on the hand, in the beams grouped round the magnetic poles, on wings.

But their Third Reich recalls
The house of Tar, the Assyrian, that mighty fortress
Which, according to the legend, could not be taken by any army, but
When one single, distinct word was spoken inside it
Fell to dust.

We are caught between two worlds, one which we do not recognise, and one which does not yet exist.

The asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, the pathetic attempts to squint through the chinks in its walls, while revealing nothing of what is outside, illuminate all the more clearly the forces of decay within.

Wraiths cross time.

In the moral sphere, insofar as it is considered in the sphere of Being, the same transition from quantitative to qualitative takes place, and different qualities appear to base themselves on differences in magnitude. A ‘more’ or ‘less’ suffices to transgress the limit of levity, where something quite different, namely, crime, appears; whereby right passes into wrong, and virtue into vice - Thus too do states - other things being equal - derive a different qualitative character from difference.

By the morning I was so blank it is quite possible that people could not even see me.

. . . . one can only exist if things are in certain arrangement. Now it has occurred to me that in these arrangements there can be certain gaps.

. . . . the point is defined as a spatial location with no spatial dimension. This omits the fact that the point, bereft of spatial dimensions, still represents the temporal dimension, thanks to its duration. The point thus introduces the dimension of time into spatial organisation, which is the basis of a new elementary geometry. When the point is considered as a pure idea, geometry is infested with metaphysics and lends itself to the emptiest constructions of metaphysics. Nothing is left of it.

Music is the organisation of sound existing in time, its dimensions hanging in space. The problem was reorganisation of ingredients to discover surprise. Harmonic changes provided yesterday’s dynamism. Additive technique, extended phrases, slowing down of harmonic motion, diads, clusters replace chords built on thirds. Rhythmic possibilities are expanded, and knowledge of given time is understood. And the ecstatic compression of time’s energy produces twelve, sixteen and thirty-two measures - complete sketches, improvisation, content and shape becoming one.

In each single scientific discipline new assumptions are introduced without any deductive basis, and in each discipline previous problems are declared solved as emphatically as the impossibility of solving them in any other context is asserted.

Out of his profound inner emptiness echo the distant, new commands, and from this echo future generations learn their language . . . . The necessity which appears to be built into the framework, is neither a causal, nor a magical necessity. It is the unarticulated necessity of defiance, in which the self brings forth its utterances.

In the enemy language it is necessary to lie

after Rimbaud

2010-03-25T12:49:00.001-07:00

early 2012. the latest news is
political flashes superimposed on our rooftops
it is thin, our cynicism, the latest distinct word
sometimes, when a specific distortion in the vowels is achieved
we can hear heaven. it is a kind of wall
all of our clear, musical nouns
the morality of our achievments, singing on the scaffold
& the riot squad have denied everything
our laws and our tastes, this is harmony
every possible combination of peoples and phantoms
our sobriety and victims, this is our alphabet
sometimes, we get sick of our pious barbarism
we leap screeching into hell
our immense, unquestionable affluence

Reading List 1 // Revolutionary Poetics

2010-03-21T06:20:00.001-07:00

chapters on Pythagoras and Philolaus // Kirk et al THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOHPERS (2nd Ed)
ANDREA BRADY /// WILDFIRE: A VERSE ESSAY ON OBSCURITY AND ILLUMINATION
Brecht: German Satires
MAYAKOVSKY // RIMBAUD at the same time
passages on Circulation & Production Time, GRUNDRISSE (Marx, yeh)
Amiri Baraka // Blues People / Black Music / The Dead Lecturer
poems by CECIL TAYLOR / ANNA MENDELSSOHN
Luigi Nono: como una ola de fuerza y luz // non consumiamo marx
BLACK FIRE: 1968. Edited by Amiri Baraka & Larry Neal
William Rowe: The Earth Has Been Destroyed
Lenin's Notebooks on Heraclitus & Hegel's History of Philosophy (passages on musical tones, electrons)
rockabilly etc // Iancu Dumitrescu // Bud Powell
Walter Benjamin: Epistemo-Critical Prologue ORIGIN OF GERMAN TRAGIC DRAMA
Pasolini : Heretical Empiricism
PAUL CELAN / CESAR VALLEJO at the same time
CLR James: The Black Jacobins
Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don't: ULRIKE MEINHOFF

------------

Solidarity with the Sussex Occupations, the UBS Cleaners, BA Cabin Crew . . . .

Working notes on political poetry // I don't talk to cops

2010-03-05T01:56:00.000-08:00

Poetry aims at difficult meanings - Amiri Baraka

Neither abstract or descriptive, but to grasp what is collective within isolated images. Several will be working together at any one time, contrapuntally, in overlaying dimensions, tones, moods and shapes. Within these tensions the poem becomes an essay under pressure, on the cusp of several discourses with their differing relations, repulsions, attractions, contaminations.

An engagement, also, with ideas that have been erased from official discourse, but can still be activated. If it is incomprehensible, it is because certain ideas seem eclipsed in an epoch that cannot see them. Imagine a period when not only is, say, revolution impossible, but even the thought of revolution. On the other hand, most poetry is mimetic of incomprehensibility, rather than an engagement with it.

A tracking of eclipses in the constellations of ideas: Milton’s “visible darkness”, Shelley’s Prometheus and Demagorgon. Or is it too much to claim poetic thought moves counterclockwise to the irreality of our own historical period, which is papered over with a bourgeois myth that, though long dead, is still active and still fundamentally real in that it knows how to kill, and always acts from just that basis.

But if poetry might speed up a dialectical ‘continuity in discontinuity’, & thus detourne whatever is forced to be invisible via realistic speech (in a Brechtian sense), and where the lyric I is (1) an interrupter and (2) a collective, and where direct speech & incomprehensibility are only possible as a synthesis that bends ideas into and out of the limits of insurrectionism and illegalism, the obvious danger is that disappeared ideas will only turn up ‘dead’, or reanimated as zombies: the terrorist as damaged manifestation of utopianism, when all of the elements, including those eclipsed by bourgeois thought are still absolutely occupied by that same bourgeoisie.

The problem I have is how to make it talk back, how to make whatever it is that is trapped in aesthetics, idealism and in history learn to speak.

from a notebook

2010-03-02T04:48:00.001-08:00

from a notebook

2010-03-02T04:41:00.001-08:00

Commercial Break

2010-01-20T06:18:00.001-08:00

anyone who wants a pdf of The Commons (draft version), get in touch. It'll be published on paper later this year, and will have gone thru a few metamorphoses by then, probably.

The Commons // finished

2010-01-11T05:15:00.000-08:00

anyway, now we were centuries
sort of had faces / we encircled
- dreamless, muted decibels -
- our treaties / the visible -
we scratched our faces off
our references, lines of credit
- a kind of glow remains -
- a kind of dignified singing -
- blank -
meanwhile, in the drugstore
- blank -
we are your border
- bright -
- inaudible -

The Commons set 3 // 38 - 41

2010-01-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

Nah, just kidding / with fire
& we noises -
it is still 11.58 / we are
- not gravity -
- not flowers -
but filled with cars
& burning pearls.
Hello, it is 1979 / or dogs
- insert frightened persons -
- or the average landlord -
- insert Woolworths -
- & on the gallows tree -
yeh, dogs
- were bound in iron bands -

or the split territories of
- example -
from the narrative fumes of
- anyway, as I was saying -
because this cosmology is
a hyena & a vodka / its
- & shrike -
here in the multiplex
we are your dutiful cities
- so, this is a documentary -
- several glittering taxpayers -
- an entire string section -
- we are speaking quite clearly -
- we ripped your bellies out -

this lecture was brought to
by typical silence & gold / it is
- you know, like a hyphen -
- I’ve robbed your poor -
Anyway, in 1649
- your poor pockets -
not alphabets, fissures
- yeh I know, broken -
- your silver & gold -
“on sundays often strolled
to have their fortune -
- this lecture has been -
- in these wild deserts -
weirds had warped us, so

we closed / we are inside
- your opinions -
- your membranes flashing -
we are compliant & broken
we are gardens of silence
- the dead, so politely -
- in our petticoats -
- in our ballads of -
“got the devil in my soul”
“& I’m full of bad booze”
- the stillness -
- such sparkling flight -
history is those who
the seagulls / the

The Commons set 3 // 36 - 37

2010-01-06T09:40:00.001-08:00

but / here in socialist realism
its musical ferrotypes / its
its reversal narratives / its
- as in -
“in London where we dwell
is a burning we know full well”
- its ancient transpositions -
those noises flaming / in birds
notes we were squealing in
- cuckoos & birds -
as in the alphabet’s bandits
- its centrifugal windows -
- cells, sections, groups -
- its official parents broken -

posterity / landlord / spheres
swarms / jobsearch / wind
- wow, laws -
eclipse / reverie / slaves
magnetic / scholar / finks
o millivolt / o globe
- this is a -
FLASHING like
we are ringing geometrics
a tame & trickling noise
curfew / playback / disks
singing like violence
my true love
my black & speechless bone

The Commons set 3 // 34 - 35

2009-12-28T06:51:00.001-08:00

according to dubious tradition
of weirds & scroungers -
“woe! my face in the -
my feet burning from me”.
This, I dunno, kind of happened
&, predictably, edited
here / inside world history
noises / brain snap.
Anyway, this has been a story
they say they were singing
but how we know that
“the doors & windows -
“burning & secure -
“enter the language & -

no meanings swarm / into
complicity etc: so, when
the weary smoke began to
rise / likewise the boiling -
heat, of course / has been
& of exile / totality is -
no meanings swarm / &
“who here can speak
the language of the dead”
emerges from music &
professionals / princesses etc
- fumes, narrative -
“golden bands / your necks etc
inc. ‘below the world’. lenin.

The Commons set 3 // 31 - 33

2009-12-27T07:38:00.001-08:00

anyway, eclipse, as I was -
although we live in the city
- so -
they wouldn’t arrest us, their
astrology / starkly inside us.
It was a contented era, a
justification. They could not
arrest / their threads & names.
anyway, I owe this reference to
- certain international events -
- certain conformities -
it was 1974 / a ballad recalls /
“the life which once I had
by law is now controlled”

yeh, it was a contested area
- moderation, NGOs etc -
Listen, rather than suck
& with a turquoise chain
- like -
what is public knowledge is
WHACKED. Degree zero
- we were citizens of -
listen / a supreme vodka /
- merely the value that -
- sirens, as in commerce -
- & we encircled -
As law is anything or nothing,
is bended by / & like a twig

like a twig, the official position
& indigenisation / or what,
within US imperialism, gets
- as in, absolute antagonist -
or / the absence of the dead
- as in, an irradiant -
my true love, as I was saying
- we were buying weapons -
- as in, living standards -
- down to the drugstore -
or, because we don’t exist
- down by possessions, & -
- down by the gun / saying
like I was, my true love -

(after Rimbaud)

2009-12-09T02:07:00.000-08:00

september 2003. we were wondering why the poets were silent
we: children’s books, whisky, record shops
bombed orchards, paracetomol, refugees, circuit boards
the sun, god of fire
there we have a series of verbs. they pass to & fro as if no-one had seen them.
they go in and out of random houses. signal towers. border towns.
the course of study is that simple
the legality & opacity of poets
the noises scratched into them. real constellations: beggars, economy, detonation
december 2009. a review of the year
a hell for the hands, for the hair, for the mouth, for the law. an entire symphony
360 degrees. supernatural sobriety of discontinued nouns
the reservoir at dawn
direction multiplied by velocity. glimpses of improbable harmony

The Commons set 3 // 29 - 30

2009-11-29T03:47:00.000-08:00

objects / tobacco & brandy
or something truly ridiculous
class struggle / in poetry also
- yawn -
its contagion is spread
via rhymsters, their embers
their swarms of bone
not zombies, sirens
criss-cross a fraudulent
a map of, of what -
got an art council grant
will burn their houses down
- yawn -
everyone’s been buried alive

objects / of the future
who we’re speaking to
- or there is no future -
- so, like, tough shit -
but still your shadows
still they block us
are still eating us
even inside the poem
its rowdy echoes
we are drowned inside
sirens, as I was saying
or, of course, the law
our ruins our octaves
you speaking in them

The Commons set 3 // 27 - 28

2009-11-16T05:00:00.001-08:00

meanwhile, we were documentaries
a code made of letters, like
unaroused by official culture.
For some reason, it was 1649,
we were trapped inside it, clutching
our most reasonable point of view.
I can’t say more / vast territories
of our singing selves, decommissioned.
Maybe it was 2003, or something,
I don’t remember, my favourite laws
were just a system of false brains
I recognise that / splintered & oblique
social utterance flaming malevolence
magnetic, would soon go dancing etc

our minds are clean & pleasant
the sphere of employment
- blank -
listen, we are your friends
gliding like magazines / we
inside each nations serenity
sitting near you on the bus
totally harmless characters
strange and flattering numbers
seriously, trickling inside
what we once were / we
esoteric in panic
swifter than birds
in our social role, objects -

(after Rimbaud)

2009-11-15T03:00:00.000-08:00

complaint registered March 18th 1871
what I liked were crumbled octaves, fruit markets
xenography, petticoats, reservoirs
where mathematical fluid and relics of social movements might
no verb: complaint registered Nov 1989
we are still in Cimmeria
the point is a total reworking of all definitions
that means history, senses, cellular matter
here primarily for networking, interested in traditional values
abandoned pubs, tonal constellations, humanitarian intervention
where known scholars and professionals might
kept alive by musical systems
ancient wavelengths, electric liquids
dense silence in city parks

The Commons set 3 // 25 - 26

2009-11-10T03:18:00.000-08:00

hello / we are your life
- stop -
now it is March 18
& we are a syllable
like a non-frequency
our twists & circles
ie the gypsy davy
- stop -
- 71 comments -
- we are your octave -
- not zombies, sirens -
- ie obsolete music -
- 1871, march -
- choke -

so, I’ve been in the penn
with the rough & rowdy
echoes, letters & notes
- musical ones -
“10, 000 were drowned
that never were born”
ie register that
via export of capital
understood as the dead
encircle us, in a sense
was a mole in the ground
no, sorry, I mean a census
I mean the police computer
as centre of gravity / irradiated

The Commons set 3 // 20 - 24

2009-10-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

extract the city, extract virtually
blank songs etc, you know what
into ghosts / as a swarm of mouths
wow & / we were redistributed
of golden, springing speech / bells
& rags / inside this arc of fist
we alphabetic insomniac, in as
how old are you, my scratching
splinter, as in a spore heaven
who here can speak / and in what
flickers of ancient power, reference
you are crows, days / ok, have city
or live in it like was eating us
we bottomless trivials / as

BANG / & our musical duty
like right inside it / its flutter
as in zone-traps, full pyro
as in ex-landscape, is thighs
as decibel in slow retreat
RIGHT our cells & sections
in no underwear / biting &
when I was a country girl
a system town, as blow flatter
(o shit) (like sorry about
& are you / my adjustment
the aged parent, so softly
our non-existent whimpers
eclipse / movement / blast

& the cuckoo, as in
our ring of stilettos
its place / in the song
by now / pure cosmosis
nouns / rearranged
at the border / thin
diagrams / spinning
metal / I’ve played
cards / in england
I’ve played / I’ll
bet you ten dollars
here, in 1917, its
chordal flex, its
thin metal spheres

& the crossroads, yeh
in any case, what we
nah, just kidding, yeh
were never obliged, in
the enemy language, not
not what / daren’t say, as
blocked season, or else
the quartier of perdition
or then there’s, clean
& simple numbers, yeh
gardens / is what / or else
or necessary to lie
our slick & delicate sphere
we middle-class / leaking

or so, that we pulled up
our petticoats / entirely
zombie, & so revolving
drunkeness etc / my gold
my winding sheet / give it
but then again / as bruising
& the border is / where what
we three pretty maids / are
where dreamt a dream / &
troubled in my head / as in
my cosmetic knot, my stranger
I used to whip him with a
where we were the description
my petticoat / but not now, so

The Commons set 3 // 18 - 19

2009-10-11T07:31:00.001-07:00

my absence now / I am speaking
as a drugstore here, a constellation,
an irradiation / as in vocal granules
inside the arc of time, becomes
a silent circle / contracted out
the work of destruction, what
constellation, what - weird, these
strange and bitter consummations
have burst into fragments. Sorry
I meant to say centuries, anyway
now that each word is reduced
obviously to money, ie invisibility
inside my stilettos / I meant to say
interchangeable / a din of galaxies

anyway / I just ate the passer-by
via 2 or 3 executive crossroads
known as burning talk / concealed
in the claims made by finks
their preposterous symmetry
strange, flattering numbers / but
- cough -
but as I was out walking, through
our musical positions, we were
sweethearts & membranes
we were sorry and tasteless
we were trickling curfews, but
here, safe inside our offices
we are eating / yes / & feeding

(after Rimbaud)

2009-09-29T04:52:00.001-07:00

I can’t tell if its Regent St or Jupiter.
Blue ink from the Sahara.
Apartment blocks infested with cages.
Spiders screaming like birds.
Ancient houses, abandoned passions.
Kiosks for all the dull young men.
Shadows & Juliets, a thousand devils.
Smashed windows, broken stars, silent gardens.
Ridiculous songs from the past.
A fraudulent, symmetrical harmony.
Ruined boulevards: no commerce, no drama or comedy.
A fractured collection of infinite scenes.
A few people I used to know.
I stare at them blankly.

Brussels 1872 / London 2009

(after Rimbaud)

2009-09-21T05:36:00.000-07:00

The wide avenues of Baghdad.
An attic room, sealed from the outside.
A pronoun cluster, incinerated by dogs.
A bitter sky, on a sober landscape.
Regrets are stupid, and exile is a matter of degree.
A matter of harmony, or hierarchy, like everything else, and as arbitrary.
Like a flight of scarlet pigeons, or a few wild nights where your thick skull stopped you from getting, you know, really out there.
A graceless trepanation in the soft earth, the collapse and realization of all literatures.
But what is the accumulation of all human knowledge compared to our corporate stupors.
In a volcanic landscape we were fed to mercenaries.
In a house in the country we heard the tricks of digestion.
In an alley in Paris we learned all of human history.
Constantly speaking of our mythical entry to the world’s cities, on a diet of medieval bread, we became businessmen, conductors, the entire universe.
But thats only true from the perspective of one or two outdated formulae.
In terms of a different set of harmonics this could be anywhere, Haymarket or Kabul.
And we could be pigs.
But I’m not going to let any of that stop me from enjoying my retirement.
It ends in petrol, rags and ice.

London 1873 / 2009

The Commons set 3 // 16 - 17

2009-09-19T07:05:00.001-07:00

in this recent knot of days
the vile prickle of pills
is entirely political / these
grimy days, yeh, their static
preposterous symmetry / so
the side effects are, well
like this: its 11. 58, precisely
an entire molecular assembly
a ring of executive flats
a cheap solar monopoly. But,
I dunno, from another angle,
here on public transport
skirting the planets rim
pretty drunks are crackling

as I was out walking
the stiff prickling days
their numerical fallacy
gaunt fascist symmetry
ok. fuck that. lets see
we were in the anxious
centre of us, it was like
plastic fire, fuck your cars
& the moon, strangely
as I was out walking
it was like five layers
a small town, a feather
bed / filled with weapons
o hell / my burning thighs

The Commons set 3 // 14 - 15

2009-09-13T05:18:00.001-07:00

but ghosts are necessary
a chart of / a collective
inarticulate harmony
i.e. minor surface noise
item: a basement strata
its bibliographic shell
I mean, its celestial arc
has got us surrounded.
Anyway, here in 1917
we’re having a right laugh
no point in waking you
love’s solar boat is slashed
is trickling down our thighs
the chatter of the past

meaning, the surface sector
or London, just sitting there
we’re not criminals, no
but the dead are, inaudible
these songs of burning circles
& then we saw medicines
trickling down our world
its membranes & posterity
weird, this springing speech
was blood in another circuit
not ours tho, so whatever
crackling in our tombs
we are warm & empirical
when we’re frightened, we

The Commons set 3 // 12 - 13

2009-09-11T01:24:00.000-07:00

here in Poundstretcher / we are
- blank -
we are building nebulae, falling
like, I dunno, wages / but anyway-
“how old are you, my
sweet critique of poetry
burning, prize-winning factory.
True, we were entire galaxies
but now its 11.58 in London
its AM & PM, both. No point
in waking your oblivious storms
I mean in Poundstretcher
ten thousand were drowned
on discount / cosy & warm

but here / in the solar eclipse
we are kicking off, big style
- wet heat, petrol noise -
TONE SUPERSTORE (bliss)
“& we saw no sun nor moon
we heard some screech
the sea” / meanwhile
we were listening to some
records: “the demonic tones
these songs blank, unimagined
o our delicate spheres” /
o delicate crash, hyena splat
Stop talking about the fucking dead
Burn the EDL / slash boiling lead

The Commons set 3 // 10 - 11

2009-09-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

here / in the centre
of the squealing world
original and peculiar
a small town, far from
here / this scratching rack
non-dogmatic / a guide
to action: “last night
I lay sleeping / all by
myself, was a thin leather
den of countless bandits
for theatrical exhibition
here in the centre
of the squealing town
medieval / a gated world

for scratching executives
use fuses / inside their office
membranes, posterity, a den
of countless galaxies, a net
of iconic repulsions. Nah,
the denials are in the post,
we guess we think we’re sorry,
here in the drugstore, filled
with mercury, made from
glass & plastic. Their era
is not ours / our dialectical
tilt circuit / our ferule / our
- BANG -
can come over / or rather

The Commons set 3 // 8 - 9

2009-08-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

so we were buying weapons
ok / lets start that again -
on public transport, it happened
we were sitting opposite
bullets / chemistry / glass
we were separated. inside
what we once were. & they
were sitting opposite, empirical
& scared. they were scared
of us / our charts & remorse
no-one knows / we were buying
inside their office, the dead
they were scared of us, of
our seven metals / & radar shrike

but as I was out walking
with the strange & bitter men
we were / say it / we were
anxious radar dogs / we were
oblivious swarms, canceled
solvents, polite ones / we were
a confused mass of centuries
seven burning circles / were
electrons / proverbs / molecules
from hand to crackling hand
a fraudulent cosmology
a hole in the ground
I wish london would
like, crack its face / o cuckoo

(after Rimbaud)

2009-08-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

So you check into a one-night hotel, not a particularly comfortable one. The noise is ridiculous. There’s a gang of drowned gamblers in the basement, a pack of juvenile hunters upstairs. Everything is held together by weird threads of music, so much that you feel you’re in some kind of evil documentary.
They give you a bed by the window. Or is it by the door. You can’t quite tell, but anyway, its in the pauper’s ward, and nothing there is clean. Its all so predictable. They have deserts and bombed cities, and they’re proud of them. They try to keep quiet about the ancient revolts simmering on the stairway.
At night you think about oceans and bullets, chemistry, glass.
And the evenings are great, you chat with the tourists, and everyone loves the strange physical groans we can hear in the kitchen. It brings us all together, makes us feel cosy and posh.
You imagine the earth’s lesser strata are on fire. You enjoy the exterminations, the tethered diagnoses, the faint remorse. You know that all planetary orbits have been canceled. You’re expecting a delivery of Bibles and Milk.
All of the hotel guests are satisfied: we sit here with our serious faces, our pineapple booze. We’re not exactly expecting to become legendary.

London 1873 / 2009

(after Rimbaud)

2009-08-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

I’m a temporary resident, worried but outwardly calm, of a thoroughly modern city. Each house is a plan of the entire circuit with its animated shop-signs, raw water, & other monuments to superstition, ethics & language. Impossible to describe this gray sky, or the millions of people wrapped up together, wandering around inside & outside of each other. Their lives could be short or long, no-one knows. We could add them up, divide, multiply, make all kinds of statistical fictions, no-one would know the difference.
But anyway, who would bother. The depth of the city. The place & the formula. Idealism. A row of boarded up shops. Monotones & crowds. Systems of education. Funnels of carbon. All rolling past the windows, official glass domes, above & below the pavements.
I suppose there must be laws here, but its all so hypnotic I can’t imagine what crime might be. I’m not complaining. Like everyone else I’m sealed in. Whatever secrets I’ve got are entirely shared. An unsatisfactory death. A pretty little crime, murmuring at the far end of the street.

London 1873 / 2009

The Commons set 3 // 6 - 7

2009-08-14T03:14:00.001-07:00

but in the claims made by music
posterity is leaking, strangely
tucked in minor constellations
strangely radiant executives
flatterers / amnesiacs / nouns
polite ones, yeh, rushing ideas
in a tame feather bed. but no,
we weren’t talking to you
say ‘iradium’, say ‘1917’
say ‘the books of the future
cracking the brain of the past’
no, don’t say that, its stupid
those people on the moon,
we left em there, plainly singing

anyway, here in the multiplex
in our plastercasts / in in
in our membranes, like, inside
the police computer, that thing
ok / inside our medicines
trickling down our thighs
our crossroads our whistling
inside like cracks / dogs / brains
“last night in a warm feather bed
thats right, the cold cold ground
is eating us / we, cancelled criminals
so warm inside the police etc
fucking set fire to cars etc
little birds, nothing / I mean

The Commons set 3 // 4 - 5

2009-08-03T11:51:00.001-07:00

meanwhile, there are voices
glazed ones, rectangular ones
are trickling down our thighs
into swarms of cancelled centuries
anxious ones / FUSES
each one lives a double life
paupers, vagabonds, criminals
FUSES / FUSES / FUSES
Yeh, well, not to worry
they have no legs to walk on
they have no mouth to speak with
its 11.58 in London
contact us immediately
payments will probably be delayed

or, from another angle
thought this was paradise
bone of my speechless bone
or rather, london pavements
clasped & wrapped, contained
your era, my stiletos / or
revolving spheres, whatever
its 11.58, whatever that means
tame jackals, springing fools
from a different perspective
we are your dead coins
your glazed leather beds
“how old are you, my -”
noises / noises / noises

The Commons set 3 // 1 - 3

2009-07-30T02:47:00.000-07:00

I wish London would
like, you know,
but then again
I’m one of its noises
or rather, its noose.
nah, just kidding, yeh,
one of the pavements
is all, spiral chatter, am
eating the voices
the interval cracks
the crossroads, yeh
real devil business
& the cops are there
we crucified em

& the moon / remember that
there are people on it
& they have married us
weird, those consummations
those noises that waken us
roaring & absurdly whistling
& it frightens us
there’s so many of them
curled around us, inaudible
the ages, history, entire galaxies
they are eating us
citizens of raided spheres
the sky / red as a burning flag
a supreme vodka / treacherous stars

who here can speak
the language of the dead
what they meant to say
I wanna be your dog
-the radio is leaking-
they know they’re dead
yeh / & they’re not scared
chewing up the language
-as I was out walking
obscurely thru their brains
those thin metal spheres
subterranean rooms
when I was a country girl
going down to the drugstore

after Rimbaud & Mayakovsky

2009-07-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

So rent me a gap in the earth, a fissure in the alphabet. Why does anyone bother to speak. These tedious books, ancient murmurings, glyphs and commands. Posterity is leaking. I have scraped a stiletto through my songs.
The books of the future have crushed the brain of the past. Real people are glued to the windows, streets on all sides. I have learned science in their cracks. Speak the language of the dead. The pathetic evocation of love under other channels, radioactive spheres.
But the distances are insurmountably scratched. Like an Englishman in Bedlam. The time of the Pharaohs. Lenin, his subterranean jail. Stratas of voices, piles of houses, eternal city, night without end.
Listen, poets & domestic jackals, prize-winning fiddle-di-dees. Speak collisions of moons and comets. Speak dead stars, iron filings, fantastic lies.
We don’t understand the slaves in our mines. We don’t understand each other. Explain your word for dictionary, for jetsam. Who are these dead walking through the room. What are these spheres of metal and gas.

London - Moscow
1871 / 1930 / 2009

Document //// out now

2009-07-14T02:47:00.000-07:00

My new book is now available here.

"It's easy enough to write poetry that doesn't irritate anybody. It will be liked very much and forgotten the next day. I did not work all my life to caress the human ear by writing pretty poetry. No, on the contrary, I have always managed to upset somebody. My main work is criticising all I think is wrong . . . . . " - Mayakovsky, 1930

Watch Mayakovsky kicking off!

2009-07-13T08:41:00.001-07:00

The Commons 2 // get it free (commercial post)

2009-07-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

Download the second part of The Commons from the excellent Openned site. You can still get part one, over here at a secret cupboard in the Bad Press offices.
While you're at it, go over to this place and buy some books.
OK, go out and enjoy the sunshine. Death to the BNP.

public service announcement

2009-06-16T05:10:00.001-07:00

from a notebook

2009-06-12T09:03:00.001-07:00

Document //// any minute now

2009-06-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

My new book Document is now at the printers and will be available from Barque Press in about a month. Its narrative runs from the London suicide bombers through to Blair's resignation. Around 90 pages, fully illustrated.
PLUS//// I'm reading on the 18th June at the Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, nr Angel, 7pm, with DOMINIC LASH on bass. Free entry, come along, its gonna be great . . . .

College of Negative Poetics

2009-06-05T10:28:00.001-07:00

consider these two quotations from 20th century composers:
"I have nothing to say & I'm saying it" (John Cage)
"a statement should be made . . . without saying it" (Duke Ellington)
how do the possibly incompatible worldviews encapsulated in the above relate to the unbridgeable chasm that exists between differing ideas of what is, in the early 21st century, still called poetry? which of the statements is useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands within poetic criticism?
&
for those of you who don't dig jazz / an alternative question:
discuss the possibility that what is still, in some quarters, rather quaintly called the 'avant-garde' in British poetry, is actually the mainstream (answer with reference to Percy Shelley, John Milton, Aphra Behn, the Pearl Poet, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Abiezer Coppe)
&
for those of you who would rather go to the cinema
suggest three alternative uses for the following London landmarks:
(a) the Natwest ATM Machines, Walthamstow High Street
(b) the ZOO
(c) the Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden
answers, not more than 5000 words, to be sent to me at the usual address. sensible responses will be published by yt communication. get on with it.

The Commons 2 (concluded)

2009-05-22T08:50:00.001-07:00

we are geometric problems
in the slots of loveliness
magnetic cores, for example
there goes Thatcher again
inside what I was
ancient & elementary
slaughter the fascist BNP
I know, its obvious
to live in it like a language
that whistling, the law
in the privacy of our
threshold values, this serenity
- you know -
inside the hysteresis loop

"you have now reached
to put into practice
the knowledge you
you have acquired ghosts
in short, are ready
work / crime / magic
secret history number
the properties of ideas
put into ourselves
sorry, local residents
this is how you talk
the body’s acoustics
structurally / tearing
your playhouse down"

The Commons 2 // 40 - 41

2009-05-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

nobody knows who I am
my combustion narrative
your meta-knives, clicking
- an alphabet of taxes -
- speaking in runes -
- local residents -
- burnt gust globes -
meanwhile, back in poetry
I have eaten the rooms
the housing cluster
voices clicking inside you
the cracks that you ordered
cobalt / iridium / plutonium
iridium / radium / americium

hello, you are the decibel
what’s speaking, right,
to our ring of ‘curses’
sorry, I meant ‘persons’
the jerking provincial street
roaring in our darkness
we dogs / listen
sign em, they are distressing
this speaking, for example
the word ‘waterboard’
some kind of sincerity?
a tone control, closing?
“not a soul would look up
not a soul would look down”

The Commons 2 // 37-39

2009-05-10T12:02:00.001-07:00

there is no one way
to pay it back
i.e. the ‘rich’
that union of familiar
finitely familiar crackles:
the planet crumbles
inside them
the structure of torture
the purpose of
torture is
to enter the language
a provincial street
a biological decision
the enemy citadel

or perhaps just exchange
words / ‘why’, ‘ok’,
say the word ‘number’
ha / say ‘why’
the word ‘interrogate’
the word ‘disrupt’
sounds like
'here’s a pill for your'
-rogues & bandits-
but obviously, what we
-night / animals / work-
-police / crime / magic-
but obviously, what we
in the privacy of our

in the privacy of our
careers / we are eating
zombies, livid ones
oh I don’t wanna
oh I don’t / 'friends'
but, 'haunting europe'
- music / movies / games -
bright magnetic streets
our ancestors are
like safe now.
ok, forget that
o burnt frequency
the dead, so brightly
digging up the dead

The Commons 2 // 35 - 36

2009-05-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

it may be distressing
this learning / but may
but can I assure you
we have taken steps
that some laws are disks
are written / on the face
of the dead / inside
echoes / or fraudsters
bright magnetic residents
your personal details
written in red / but may
that we have identified
you are crows, curses
yours sincerely, your

listen / recent research
your city is quite simply
incomprehensibly glittering
-we know its distressing -
- all / fun / people -
due to the nature of
- a thermal pulse -
incomprehensibly / hey,
did you bring me the silver?
did you bring me the gold?
- sorry, we meant to say -
recent research suggests
- a burning ring of -
respectfully, a gallows pole

Communique 158

2009-04-29T05:04:00.001-07:00

some advice for the incoming poet laureate
---------
meanings swarm into the forbidden language // ie latent content // to discover previously hidden zones of mind & reality // hahaha // official assertions that meaningful dissent is always welcome, provided it falls within the bounds of legality, are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation to aquiese in oppression // but poetry exists when there is a short circuit between the image it proposes and the one humanity makes of the world and itself // and the poet is of no more use than what is rather quaintly called a RAGAMUFFIN // and the ultimate destiny of poetry is to multiply itself, dialectically, into the bare force of a crowd // but this is a nation which is at war. a nation which is fighting an unjust and a dirty war. you can't slaughter the citizens of Afghanistan without it reflecting itself in some aspect of your cultural experience // and mainstream poetry is a minor component of the state's coercive apparatus // not that anybody is listening anyway // but poets who collaborate with the government should be shot // ie with fear and hecatombs of broken hearts // ie there's something running across the red road now. their voices are silent, but the chains are clicking // from their loud abysses, through a city and a solitude . . . .
----------
stolen, in some cases slightly detourned, from Frantz Fanon, Rene Menil, Angela Davis, Archie Shepp, Ed Dorn, Voltairine de Cleyre, Shelley

The Commons 2 // 33-34

2009-04-24T06:57:00.001-07:00

would rather be the devil
a complex organized fact:
customer reference 74074
or moodchanges, e.g. itching
e.g. a boiling gulf, referenced
page 76, slightly torn
would rather, you know
in the year 1525, strangling
coruscating wind of circles
here are your reasons
is a calendar, iatrogenic
or open to attack, yes,
on every level, your call
is important to us, mendicant

page 76? oh please,
I would rather be
you know, moulded
May 68, that crackle
behind police lines
I would rather be
in 1945, you know
what was happened
or my 76 shadows
bursting, most people
have no problems,
excoriated each month
my adviser tells me
what laws are

The Commons 2 // 32

2009-04-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

the secondary dole office
situ 656A Forest Road
(E17) / is the planet’s rim
quite obviously, its
opprobrious contempt & fire
barely conceals / a false wall
to rack the noises, a
presumably rich city, a
WAKE UP / you are here
informed, via 2 or 3 nights
of sincere sleep deprivation
& bitter funds / the poem
is merely an arrest warrant
‘A’ is not equal to ‘A’

Franklin Rosemont RIP

2009-04-15T06:44:00.001-07:00

Franklin Rosemont, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealists, has died. Obituary here.

And here's an extract from his 1970 Manifesto: ". . . . against patriotism, surrealism attacks with the most sublimely demoralizing anti-patriotic internationalism, which, in uniting Hegel and the wood-carvers of New Guinea, Paracelsus and Marx, the early English Gothic novelists with Lenin, Han Shan and Krazy Kat, Heraclitus and Memphis Minnie, Gerard de Nerval and Lewis Carroll, Black Hawk and Buster Keaton, Mayakovsky and Lumumba, Meister Eckhart and Flora Tristan, Hieronymus Bosch and Charles Fourier, William Blake and Louis Lingg, Pauline Leon and Ambrose Bierce, the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit and the Durutti Column, Amos Tutuola and Basho, Nat Turner and Albert Ryder, Nicolas Flamel and Freud, etc., undermines the traditional national boundaries of human thought and thus takes us further along on the path of human emancipation"

The Commune

2009-04-10T10:28:00.001-07:00

(after Rimbaud's "L'Orgie Parisienne", and of course after the City of London demonstrations of April 1st)

Cash & oil. Or maybe / barbarians, a glass
not you: geezers, alleys, rats on teeth
orders / avenues / orders / evenings /
a forged city levelled : SAINT SHIT

on the kill zone (or you call it lib-flux?
nah, burn banks, burn sheer, level all
yeh / yeh / dig my radiation, love
you cream, the red-haired bombs & stars

Cash up. Do the dead leper itch
on jurified riff-raff, traditional, like.
You looking for trouble? You certain, legit?
You in the right place. Drones. Piss haggard

into the streets / o dissolving
golden cream, loved-up rat tazers
have more troops, Afghanistan
& spasmic truths inside this night

BOOZE! Squander-lit / intense illicit stupid
fool / antic LUTHERS, wha? lex raf, risible
void of alleys, THEY SHALL NOT PASS
no gesture, no parole inside their glass

poured upside CROWN fess-up cascadant
UP FOR IT / white dog delete on foot porn
DIT sheer! Up for / satellites, spears & teeth
old farts, geezers, mad fuckers, panting, leaking

THEIR OLD SLAPPED HEARTS / penet mouths
bourgeois man in a bourgeois town, ya terror
MORE WINE / our torpic shame, our barricade
your windows melt your self dissolve / WANKERS

Nephograms! Votemeal! O magnetic puke
& bank stuff. These spheres piss us off, yeh,
like surface nukes. But still, our so clean hands
of lepers v. the lash / 360 degrees / servitude

or paraquat / the rust on your kill silver
just rose up in judgement? Shame. Insert
lamotrogine, my asphyxiant / howl, love,
with scatological equity, goldened charity

ALL DOWN WITH THE SYPH REVIVAL
cash up front / what are you up, why you
blood / blood / look at all that blood
such superb sun-boom seizures, such glue

Hello, I’m the police. Like, you know, serious,
like deliver your purse, or I’ll / with your
red courtesans whirling, and our gross kettle
MEANINGLESS. We have no further comment

like a flat-foot choleric dancer, say what
like flac! or then, cream cop-kill heartbeat
like a quantum piss-up / dog porn / satellites
like transparent bridges, & false, stupid streets

Howl, dole-rust, caustic half-dead city
scrape jet / surprise attack on human head
& its millions doors / a gap obliterate
or oh I’m sober now. have rat will

Bah. Just reanimate him. What?
Sorry, I was thinking about my dick
now flex dis / unit verse, livid veins
& clear love rides our glacial hearts

in quarantine / etc so not bad, level
NEG erosion plus. Or what you say
STRICK: astral vampire derangement
greasy blue sky / tomb degree / RAPTORS

Copernican drinkers: each city splits
re-orders, entangled, sealed / is laws
& ulcered lineaments, nets of peev
is LEPER SPIT or as is total SPLENIC

no beauty admit SIR IMMANENCE
on fast money-back statutory impalation
thats right, gawping Hoxton gas-ropes
want in / mass heart panic shield & LEER

but lets pretend / our sink infirmaries
or whats your forecast, PAL, cast damned
& burn raze LOVING flagellation, give
some kind of synapse flick, we enclosed

wet social / re-establishment of, what, orgies?
& that in ancient flex. Lies & steal, BANDITS
a glass! GAS delight / wipe mouth graffitoid fuck
its nothing. I’m here. I’m here. My life still here.

Provisional reading list / ACADEMY OF OPPOSITIONAL POETICS (Beginners Theory Course)

2009-04-06T04:43:00.000-07:00

Karl Marx /// The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte / CAPITAL / 1844 Manuscripts
Walter Benjamin /// Critique of Violence / On the Philosophy of History
HEX ENDUCTION HOUR (The Fall) and/or FUCK DE BOERRE (Peter Brotzmann) to be listened to only while reading ROSA LUXEMBURG /// The Accumulation of Capital
BAKUNIN /// Letters to a Frenchman, to be read in conjunction with RIMBAUD'S Lettre du Voyant
Theodor Adorno /// Minima Moralia
Ulrike Meinhoff et al /// The Urban Guerilla Concept, to be read alongside FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA's The Duende: Theory & Divertissment
THEORETICAL WRITINGS OF KHLEBNIKOV
Frantz Fanon /// The Wretched of the Earth, to be read while listening to Diamanda Galas' WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK-KNIVES and/or Victoria Spivey's Bloodthirsty Blues
The poetry of LOLA RIDGE & Hegel's SMALLER LOGIC /// to be read SIMULTANEOUSLY

further suggestions welcome . . . .

Last Week's Protests

2009-04-04T05:58:00.000-07:00

The City of London protests last week, however ineffective they may have seemed to the official media, were absolutely successful in that they tore a hole, albeit briefly, in the process of ‘business as usual’ and normal, alienated everyday life, something a lawful demonstration could never do. It is not the case, as at least one well known poetry blogger has claimed, that a small group of ‘mad and violent’ protesters were there to spoil the ‘fun’ of nice, reasonable protesters. Far from it: anyone who was there knows the real violence was dealt by the metropolitan police. The anarchists smashed a few windows. The police deliberately provoked the crowd, at one point were seen literally booting peaceful protesters in the face, and may well have been responsible for someone's death.

The peaceful and the violent protesters were two necessary halves of a whole that made manifest the latent violence of corporate society. The apocalyptic, that is revelatory, theme of the protests turned out to be superbly appropriate. All of us who were there were faced with the bottom line of our ‘fun-loving’ and ‘sophisticated’ culture where police violence is clearly the borderline between the everyday comfort of a high proportion of the population and the casual murderous brutality dealt out as a matter of course by our ‘elected’ ‘leaders’. The violence of the anarchists, even the violence of the cops, is insignificant compared to the bloodbaths of the Middle East, the increasing institutional xenophobia throughout western Europe, or indeed Barack Obama’s intention to continue the War on Terror. Most intelligent people know this, but most of them like to pretend that nothing can be done, or that they are somehow innocent. The protesters, both violent and otherwise, are at least trying to work out how capital’s bloodlust, and all of our parts in it, can be brought to a definitive end.

Riot police attack peaceful protesters at G20 Climate Camp

2009-04-03T04:36:00.001-07:00