Communique 158

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 . . . .
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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

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

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

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

(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)

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

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