curious: unearthing poets at west norwood cemetary

There's simply nothing better than messing about in cemeteries. And I say this as someone who was turfed out of Pere Lachaise in my younger days by a steward who looked like he'd escaped from the set of Stingray. So being asked to take part in his year's Curious trail at West Norwood (https://www.facebook.com/SiteCurious) is proving to be the highlight of the pending summer.


I've located details of ten poets who are buried in the grounds, most of whom died in the 19th century though some have straddled into the 20th, including Demetrios Capetanakis (associated with the Bloomsbury group and who died of Leukemia in 1944) and Sydney Bernham Carter who wrote 'The Lord of the Dance' (okay, not poetry as such...). I have been delving into the extant published works of each poet, some of which I've been able to find online in snippets from digtised Victorian magazines. I've also had succees in locating poems in editions  from the collections at the Poetry Library and the British Library. So here's the idea for my artwork for Curious: I'm going to create an anthology of the dead poets' work engraved onto stones and bound in an edition. There will be a few copies of the book and for the exhibition I'll take back a stone to each of the buried poet's graves.

There's a real sense of responsibility in this, as one poet attempting to do justice to the work of dead poets. I can only fit two words from each of the dead poets' work into a stone. So there is a process of mass refinement and scrupulous decision-making around the words from each poet's poem that I'll have engraved on the stones. The brilliant Henningham Family Press will be making the book edition. The title for the book will be Clotted Sun: An Anthology of West Norwood Poets. "Clotted sun" comes from a poem by Capetanakis and will be his engraved poem in the edition.

Curious opens on the 22nd June and runs for 6 weeks. I'm making a short film about the process of researching the poets and making the book and will post here over the next few weeks.

poem for thatcher

CASTING OFF BLUE

for Maggie, past

You turn if you want to, just rejoice in the news :
her death a pied wagtail that flutters iron lapels,
her death announced with footage of eyes like red
iron oxide, the city in grey off-blue pastel
over a Mersey still in-belief it's nationalised,
– as if an idea could be stronger than Doppler –
the tide that knits without formations or structure,
that's the good thing about water, it forgets,
and if we're all – even the working class – ninety
percent water then that's why we should forget,
the wind said that, and the wind had dried-out
the topsoil after months of cold, the cracks without
roots, fronds without barb enough to cut at frost,
and the water was coming now in rain, so much rain,
that without the rain – the water of the workers –
there would be just cracked land & what was poured
into the earth was done so we wouldn't forget, even
when blue iron would soon be punch-holed with worms.

Only those who have never poured their water in earth
would ask us to forget.

series 3 : monk, jenks, o'loughlin, winston, barraclough & bean

This time I've been invited inside as series' editor. Free reign : choose six poets for six broadsides. Antonio's only stipulation is "make sure it's great poetry". A few months back I had some correspondence with Hansjorg Mayer, the designer and publisher of the futura series from the 1960s and I start by taking a look back at that series. I imagine Hansjorg as  The Equaliser of visual poetry : cooly besuited in white as the world around him goes to shit. Keep it clean, let the white space do its work. The twenty-six broadsides of the original futura series (see post below) are a hard act to follow. For me this broadside format works much better when the poet – or artist – approaches the hexagonal panel with an eye for the visual possibilities that the form allows.

Although not strictly a visual poet Geraldine Monk is first on my list of six. Not strictly visual yet she works in the projective tradition laid out by Olson, the page as a musical score. The subtlety around cadence in her work is executed with a precision for layout and typography. p.o.w. 13, gaddings (plural of the word 'gadding', meaning to wander aimlessly) suggests in both in form and content a series of misadventures
amidst nature. The six poems take the reader through delirious and vulnerable encounters with the outdoors. True to much of Monk's work the poems oscillate effortlessly between the saucy and the ecological. The poems are a delight to look at, solid as stone structures or fossilised skeletons, they are written in emboldened caps top-and-tailed with a huge capped letter. The first poem begins with an A at the top, rolls through Bs and "ROCK FORMATIONS" towards the decisive loan Z at the end of the poem.

p.o.w. 14 is by Tom Jenks, the only man in poetry who might have anything in his pocket from a yo-yo to a dead mouse. I've collaborated with Tom on four occasions and managed on each occasion to come away with a new trick or two. His work brings to conceptual poetry the humour that was behind Duchamp's urinal. His ideas are often deceptively wrapped in a red handkerchief and emerge fluffy behind your ears. This time Tom has been collaborating with slugs and snails. This is the broadside in the series that makes people laugh. Tom has married up six images of slugs or snails with cryptic lonely hearts messages from various regions. "hi im Eddie .any girls frm nr WALSALL wana text x". Each mollusc has a six digit number. There's a twist-in-the tail, with the snail in panel 6 being shrunk inside a shell : "Message Me". He's on 252402.

I first heard Pascal O'Loughlin (p.o.w. 15) reading from Yukiko at an evening of poetry for Sonic Youth last Autumn. The poem plays around with literary artificiality in a way reminisce

nt of Lynch’s finest moments. The poet comforts his "fictional daughter" Yukiko, while, on the avenue below their apartment, the “fictional you” passes by en route to who knows where? Of the broadsides in the series this has the classic feel of original futura series, and the language is impressively sparse and controlled as it rolls leanly towards its ending. The word "fictional'" is a potent one in the context of this broadside as O'Loughlin is a prose writer of incredible subtlety, nuance and imagination. His (yet to be published – come on you publishers, wake up!) Now Leg Warmers, about a lonely teenager in Ireland who befriends a ghost with a horse's head and his visual novella Shrinemaker about a teenage cult have been amongst my most pleasurable reading of the past years.

p.o.w. 16, Sam Winston's backwords captures the artist Sam Winston emerging as a poet : the central poem is written by an artist who has applied himself for years to finding, arranging and shaping the words of

others with great originality and dexterity, but hearing the artist himself in his own words after so long strikes a moment of a maestro-composer bumping the pianist of his seat. The poem runs as a column down the
centre of text from Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, which was based on The New York Times edition from September 1, 2000. Goldsmith's project – like Winston's poem – questions how words can ever possibly be both flexible and precise enough to do justice to loss and grief on that scale. Winston is one of the artists associated with the arc collective whose catalogue has just been published here  and for which I was lucky enough to be asked to write the accompanying texts.

Simon Barraclough is a man embroiled in a gargantuan project : to write 121 poems about the sun. His project goes under the name of Sun Spots and p.o.w. 17 showcases two of them. As with Sam Winston, Barraclough makes full use of the expanse of space across six panels. There is a wonderful sense of bathos at play in this broadside, the first sun spot invites the reader to follow its circuitous text describing how the sun was formed across "the billion years of agony" at which point we arrive at the sunspot in the centre, offsetting "breakfast oranges" against nothing. It is a wonderful O'Haraesque exercise in offsetting the macrocosmic against diurnal everydayness. There are more of his planet poems in his most recent collection Neptune Blue, though this is the first publication which showcases his new direction towards the sun.  

Victoria Bean, like Sam Winston, is also associated with arc and is both an artist and a poet and – importantly for this work – a visual poet. envoy (named after the typewriter that was used) showcases six typewritten poems across the six panels of the broadside. Three of the poems are written in a typeface created by the artist herself in which serifs are added to the midpoint of words with a curious runic charm. Bean also uses a technique developed in her book (and film-piece, recently shown in the Visual Poetics exhibition at The Saison Poetry Library) Every Morning She'd Leave Me in which she overlays the same letter continuously over the same letter in a way reminiscent of letterpress production. This allows her to tease out ulterior meanings hidden within words, the 'Have Mercy On Us'  within the list of planets from Earth to Uranus.

It’s been a pleasure being asked to edit this series and I couldn’t have imagined that the six poets/artists could have delivered with the originality, beauty and wit that the broadsides showcase. As a whole, the six publications work as a kind of declarative anthology declaring the range of talents currently creating with text in the UK.

p.o.w. series 3 are available for £5 each p+p or £25 for the set of six. To buy email: poetry@unit4art.com or contact: studiobookshop@btconnect.com

p.o.w. series 2 : de campos, gooding, johnstone, price, lucie-smith & williams

Antonio is still the quickest man in poetry publishing, last time we met he was painting naked artists then I hear that the second series of the p.o.w. broadsides can be expected any day from Brazil. The postal service is a little slower than Antonio and the days drag into a week, I check with the post this end, Antonio with the post at his (no strike) until the jiffybag arrives, paper-slab heavy, BRASIL, R$ 22.65.

The second series is no let down and, if anything, declares its homage to the original futura series of the 1960s with even more conviction. I will be editing the third series over the Autumn and Antonio has declared a signature style of editing and production for these publications that will require plenty of thinking through to do justice to the impressive body of work he has built up through the first twelve publications. Already the p.o.w. series seems like a short anthology of the global variety in poetry in the spirit of Jerome Rothenberg's Poems for the Millenium volumes. The advantage with this series is that they can be hung on a wall to offer a backlit textual presence to any room.

The first in this new series is by Brazilian concrete poetry legend - arguably joint-godfather of the initial movement (with Eugen Gomringer) in the 1950s - Augusto de Campos. Reading expoems is like meeting one of your heros in the fear that the mystique might be ruined only to find that they are - and their work is -  even better than you thought. de Campos, along with his brother Haroldo and Décio Pignatari, was a co-founder of the Noigrandes Group, co-writing the "pilot plan for concrete poetry" in 1958 - which had such an influence on the UK movement, particularly Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard. What is fascinating with expoems here is that where Augusto's early work was concerned with sexuality and the body - such as the text-made-body poem "here are the lovers" (1953) - the poems here take on the spirit of his brother Haroldo's work (who died in 2003 and wrote the acerbically political transient servitude about hunger in Brazil, back in 1961) in its full-on attack of economic injustice and the place of poetry to address this:

Mel Gooding is an art critic, writer and exhibition organiser and here the poet of sextet: improvisations (a garland for a painter of modern life). Given the roots of the initial futura series in the interzone between the visual and textual (including artists / poets such as Dieter Roth and Bob Cobbing) it is perfectly fitting to find Gooding's contribution to this series. If concrete poetry can be seen as an explosive third wave of literary Modernism Gooding's focus here is on the line of writers from Blake and Rimbaud that made that explosion possible. This series captures the flaneurial urgency of Breton and Benjamin, the stifling exultation of being alive in the newly modernised cities, trapped within glass domes that simultaenously allowed them to see whilst offering a new corporate reminder of mortality:

Grand central stations, concrete platforms and terrazo concourses; boulevards and avenues, vistas, great streets, little streets named for great men, passages, pavements, alleys; les grands magasins, arcades of iron and glass; cathedrals, churches;

                                                               (Mel Gooding, A. Breton)

A few generations along the line and the great Scottish contribution to modern poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan  is very much alive in the work of Julie Johnstone (p.o.w. 9) and Richard Price (p.o.w. 10). Julie Johnstone is the editor of the concrete-focussed essence press and has published Thomas A. Clarke and Eugen Gomringer. She is a poet who knows how to make the space surrounding words (and letters), and the force of each syllable, work much harder than hundreds of poets who flog the long line as if they've got a tenna eachway on their own poem to hit the end with something close to impressiveness. Her wonderful poems here, in seeing, remind me of Olson's quote (paraphrasing Pound) that what we really love in great poetry is the play of the mind:

the
way
a
glimpse
lingers
on
in
our
minds

the

way

we

do

not

see

what

is

right

in

front

of

us

(Julie Johnstone from seeing)

Richard Price is, for my money, one of the best poets of his generation. He has a casually powerful way of allowing the undersaid, the overheard, the understated, the half-finished to limber musically across the massive themes of love and communication. His use of language is never less than supple and believable. He has worked with bookmaker Ron King on collaborative poetry/artbooks and is completely at ease with the possiblitlies of the p.o.w. format:

Price's new book Small World will be published by Carcanet in November and promises to be one of the poetry highlights of the year. 

p.o.w. 11 by Edward Lucie-Smith is a powerfully intense series of poems about the Srebrenica massacre which took place in Bosnia in 1995. It acts as a reminder of the title for this series of broadsides that p.o.w is the acronym for: poetry / oppose / war:

Buried, reburied, unburied,

Stacked up,

Two thousand
Of the nameless,

Waiting for their stolen
Names to be returned to them.

                     (Edward Lucie-Smith, 6. Bodies at Tuzla)

Chrissy Williams is one of the few poets who've emerged over the past few years who gives me that static-suspense of wondering what she'll come up with next. Her pamphlet The Jam Trap appeared earlier this year and includes 24 familarly domestic but skewered-out-of-kilter vignettes each of which  has been illustrated by a different comics artist. Suspense is the only word to describe p.o.w. 12, murder she wrote, as the panels unfold 6 images of Angela Lansbury are waiting to look at you, in a friendly if slightly over-inquisitive way:

Williams has a gift of layering the serious and preposterous which leaves you unsure if you should be dancing with the Muppets or calling for the undertaker. Her gift is in making what might be just preposterous in other poets's work seem inevitable in hers - why hasn't anyone written a violent love poem to Angela Lansbury before? This is a resounding end to p.o.w. series 2, melding poetry that is precisely tuned and mysterious with the visual in a way that it would be hard to imagine the world without:

                 

p.o.w. series 2 are available for £5 each p+p or £25 for the set of six. To but email: poetry@unit4art.com or contact: studiobookshop@btconnect.com.

    



p.o.w. poetry series

The commute from London to Liverpool each Friday takes place above the rails, refuses to slow at bends : exhilarating and nauseating : terminating at Lime Street in alcohol, taxi-drivers and text messages. The week's mail waits on the kitchen sideboard, envelopes glued under post marks until the weekend. Credit statements, credit offers, credit ratings. At midnight, in the same flourish as opening the second bottle of red, I opened a handwritten A4 envelope, sent from Brazil. Antonio had turned these round in weeks : from idea, conception, proof-reading and typesetting : to publication.

Under his unit4art imprint Antonio Claudio Carvalho has produced a first series of poetry broadsheets inspired by Hansjorg Mayer's futura series from the 1960s. When he asked me to be involved it was one of those rare moments when you find yourself being written into the impossible dream history that you knew you'd missed and would only ever be a voyeur of. These are as close to remaking the original seminal publications as possible.

The original series encapsulated many of the ideals of the first wave Concrete Poetry movement of the 1950s. Firstly, the internationalism. The series included poets and artists from around the world including Bob Cobbing (England), Ian Hamilton Finlay (Scotland), Dick Higgins (USA), Diter Rot (Germany). The work included often played around with the notion of a surface level visual stimulus which could then be entered into, and read, for the language sense - or lack if it - following on from the intial seeing.

My favourite of the original series is Edwin Morgan's emergent poems, in which Morgan reverses the once accepted principle that a poem should begin with an all powerful first line. In Morgan's poems the first line is the last line - there is only one line in the whole poem - and the reader has to work through the aleatory and dissolving reassemblings of letters and words that are made from the first / last line. In 'Message Clear' there is a portent of Biblical revelation that one line - "I am the resurrection and the life" - can yield so many multiple meanings:

 i am       s   e    n     t
i     he  e             d
i    t e   s     t
i        re           a d

The poem is in constant process - is a performance continuously taking place on a wall - scrolling through its echoed chiasmus in the background of the non-readers life. Drink tea and talk - the poem is still working in real time behind you.

This broadsheet was recently shown in Concrete Cafe at the Hayward Gallery in an exhibition of concrete poetry from The Saison Poetry Library collection. This was excellently curated by Richard Parry of the Hayward:

Carvalho, in this new series in homage to the original, has stayed true to this international ethos. The first six poets included here (and the plan is that there will be another six before the year end : "12 poets / 12 months") span the globe : Peter Finch (Wales), Opal Louis Nations (Born in England, now living in the USA), Pierre Joris (born in France and raised in Luxembourg), Paul Brown (England), Chris McCabe (Liverpool) and Antonio Claudio Carvalho (Brazil).

Antonio is one of the few poets / artists / publishers who could carry this out with such complete attention to the detail of the original series and the eye for both the visual and the ear for the textual. Brazilian, with links to the original Noigrandes group, he came to London in the early seventies and made what money he could through his art by walking up and down queues of people waiting to enter venues for gigs, selling self-published visual poems. As an artist his ouevre is populated with poetic inspirations from Ginsberg, to Finlay and back to Ferlinghetti. Concrete monk Dom Sylvester Houedard looms large. Antonio understands what pleases people in art - what they will gladly give up beer money for in order to take home something beautiful and lasting - as well as the fine tuning of the syllabic details of which poetry is made. Between the Beats and the Concretes he creates with massive splashes of colour as well as the tight metrical plectrum picks of poetic syntax.


With the second bottle of wine breathing I opened each of the broadsheets and placed them around the room - themselves breathing at last after the flight from Brazil - and read them as they were intended : skimmed for visual pleasure, entered into for the play of the language. Whirring indefinetly - and the first poem to catch my eye - was Peter Finch's poem about a helicopter (about the history of music since the early 20th century) from hammer lieder helicopter speak:

 

Opal Nations - poet, novelist and former editor of the surreal magazine of the 1970s, Strange Faeces (http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/index.asp?id=118) - is on fine form in this series with his alphabets to build poems, this is beetlebet:

p.o.w. 3 is the wonderfully titled learn the shadow by Pierre Joris ("to learn the shadow / shapes of the birds / of prey in a late / sky"). Paul Brown, in cold (p.o.w. 4) makes emphatic use of repeated words and word sounds to create maximum phonetic and metrical effect in very short poems:

the words
clap shut on air
stone broke
stoned &
stupefied by
the persistence of a hollow
suffering recurrent &
colourless
image:

this is all
this is it

poems for sale is an attempt by me to rewrite - and in some way reverse - the traditional 'poems for ocassions'. Rather than running with the emotionally charged need for a language that gushes to mark moments of birth, marriage and death, I had an idea of bringing each line back to dictionary definitions. Refusing the flight into sentiment and marking, instead, the transitions through life with quite literal descriptors. The title for the sequence was suggested by Antonio who was reminded of how in train stations, in Brazil, in India, those who can read and write often sell their abilities to those who can't and offer their services to write poems for them in exchange for cash. They shout to passing crowds : POEMS FOR SALE!!!

p.o.w. 6 is Antonio's sequence (the) flesh of gods. The poems pulsate with the excessive lives, loves and addictions of literary figures but are written with a lower-case dexterity that is both musical and memorable:

ahhh

mescaline
mescaline
mix me up
take me down
fuck me now

because they never ask

what i think of mayakovsky

rilke orlovsky

p.o.w. broadsheets are available to buy from Studio Bookshop, Brighton, and can be bought via visa through email: studiobookshop@btconnect.com. They are £5 each or £25 for all 6 broadsheets.

Shad Thames, Broken Wharf

This is the second Sunday morning this year that I've sat on Wapping Old Stairs waiting for someone to arrive. The first time was a photographer. As I was waiting I walked down the emerald-moss of the steps, holding the rail, and felched my shoes in the mud. I started to scavenge, lifting back bricks to show nano-crayfish scuttling.

Everything I find I place on a large stone, in a line, like an interview-test for an archaeologist. A thick bone, the marrow’s saliva set to stone inside; a smooth wooden implement; cracked chunks of earthenware pots and the glory piece: what seems to be a ring made of slim loops with an empty bed for a lost stone. Victorain claypipes, each one smoked by a Victorian man, his life as real to him at the point of disposing his porcleain fix to the river as mine is now. My eyes aren’t used to looking for things so closely – it takes the joint work of concentration and openness to chance (the way of reading the city) to a new level, the temptation is to relax the eyes for the bigger mosaic, at which point the detail is lost.

Nice bone you have there, the photographer said, when he arrived.

Six months later I'm waiting for Tom Chivers. Sunday morning, 9.30am - I've been awake for five hours, stumbling out of bed in Liverpool and, from the slept-through Pendolino (the dipping lull of the Transmidland Liverpool to London Express is named Nuneaton) made straight for Wapping Old Stairs. Tom's late. His lateness can only be measured like this : a fossilised horse tooth, an unidentified mammal bone, pottery fragments, a plastic nozzle.

There's only one walk which beats the drive of 'time being money' and that's Tom's - time is ideas. He strides up behind me as I'm laying out the items at the top of the stairs - alarm never went off, normally set two but one's broke - and he touches my shoulder. I'm glad he does. I was starting to feel like a hologram.

Later, we find the London Plug and tempted as we are to pull it we both agree it's probably best to get Shad Thames, Broken Wharf off the printers first.

A year before, almost to the day, and Tom's apologising for spilling beer on the table we're at in Concrete. I don't accept his apology for the waste of the beer but for the potency of what he's proposing : a commissioned work on the Docklands for the London Word Festival 2010. It's the eastward-Thames line I've been wanting to tackle (there's a Docklands poem in Zeppelins, but it's only 14 short lines) between the leisure-warp of the South Bank and, via Rainham Marshes to the reaches at Shoeburyness. Between that hop-smelling Yes and this unidentified tibula in my hand there have been a number of moments of What the Fuck? in-between:

- Forging out a routine to research the Docklands by jogging to Wapping and Rotherhithe on my lunch break with the following in my tracksuit jacket : 1 X pencil, 1 X post-it notes, 1 X A-Z map of area, 1 X researeched notes on area, 1 X MP3 player left in desk drawer so I can listen instead to fragments of people talking as I run.

- Explaining to Iain Sinclair why I'm not drinking beer before the performance at Jamboree in March begins (I'm shaking like a shitting dog and am just about clinging to my name, despite the 100 lines I've got to rememember which have got to be performed above the 12 strings of the amazing Bleeding Heart Narrative orchestra, which we haven't even rehearsed).

- Introducing my brother to the actress, Tracey Wilkinson, who plays Echo in the play, who turns out to be one of his all-time heroes for playing Di Fenner in Bad Girls.

Strangest of the strange, at least for me, is the emergence of this curiously hybridised text : a play for voices focussing on a pissup between young Scouser Blaise (nailed to perfection by Luke McCewan) and anxious Docklander Echo. Blaise and Echo were both names Sarah and me considered for the cells that became Pavel, antstamper, envelope-eater, apologist for all things Wind in the Willows. What oblique slants of light are these characters within my hologram? The chorus of THE RESTRUCTURE is an old friend, a cynical crypto-sexually warped e-savage who has taken me through a sequence of twenty poems over the two years before. His ears pricked as the play came together, he wanted to own it and does. What Jack Wake-Walker did with him in the three films he made that punctuate the conversation even stunned THE RESTRUCTURE itself, though he was pleased that someone with Jack's gift could quite rightly spend it on understaning THE RESTRUCTURE'S worldview.

And the shin-bone in my hand? It's a free-gift, for punters of the text. The mini-book of Shad Thames, Broken Wharf comes in a limited edition boxset with a mudlarked item. Further beach-digs took place beneath MI6 (all the remnants of parties and piss-ups congregate here, under the sleep-eye of the surveillance) and the place Blaise falls in love in the play, Cherry Garden Pier. The circularity of researched psychorunning and the hawking of fragments of speech to make the text, and then to come back to beach-comb the Thames to complete the project is satisfying. The play had always been about collecting and receiving the layers of London silt that are already there, and the publication the final act of transmission for what was found.

Be warned though, one of the free-gifts is unmistakeably a fossilised human tooth.



Shad Thames, Broken Wharf is available to buy now from Penned in the Margins

The play will be performed at the Bluecoat in Liverpool in 4th December 2010.

Read reviews of the play's first performance at the London Word Festival in March 2010 here, at the Londonist

and here, at Culture Wars

Election Special, Lingua Franca

A monochrome snap of Ted Heath stared from under
the boiler for days, my pulse pounding boards
like a teenager looking for doors in a house of voils.
If anyone broke-in they would never find the bank
notes rolled within the veneered curves of the Russian
Dolls. Someone said that to make a genuine New Start
you need a to-scale Ark of animals & a green visor.
My wires were tangled in a basket of sugar - I'd spent
too long in a bad support network of the ridiculous.
She asked : is bilingualism an option for either sex?
Just try I said : the lingua franca is a dish of coins
and pasta twists. But eating cucumber & then the phone
book led to an aftertaste of ISBNs from books that hadn't
                                                             yet been written

Election Special, A Cuckoo

A local walks a dog that smells of Kouros. The
virtual map of the country is splenetic with
nudges, a 70% payout that can't be exchanged
for features. It's like the conference of future
cosmetics has been abandoned for the
sales' reps to take until Monday to basket-up
nest-eggs of birds-of-prey - not to eat or sell
but to lick the speckled-shells of testosterone.
A text-messsage pings with clarity through the musk
of white static : I just want to go to sleep & wake
up & pretend everything is going to be alright. Okay
then. Let's wait for someone to pitch morphine laces
on the NHS. And as it works watch the radio cuckoo
                                                             your dreams

Election Special, Austerity Measures

He went to sleep in the polling day cockpit
thinking look at me I'm newsworthy. I sent
a message to Athens - say Hello to the Gods -
but there was nobody to carry it due to the riots.
Firebombs, noise & tear-gas : nothing polymorphous
would happen overnight. My brand of champagne
socialism was changing : scallops for the workers,
asparagus for the cleaners. When they asked
of my alcohol I thought units were what formed
dense urban connurbations - the country as nothing
more than colour-coded stacks of trains & warehouses.
Intensive Care replaced as a polling booth. Let Greece burn,
                                     all is pending Sunderland South

Election Special, A Bar of Rock

The cheque got sent to a house that had burned
down years before. I flicked through a hardback
in a daydream then realised it was a Companion
to Consciousness. It was overcast as she went
to vote but she came back with breakfast - the
small one nearly choked on marble guitar-strings
of fat - we spent the day saying silly bacon
to the television. On the whole we'd had a good
year, then we ran out of money. The doctor prescribed
something for the anxiety along with the odd piece
of cake. The Socialist Choristers knocked in the night
to give her back her vote - it was scored as an X
                                         through a stick of rock

Election Special, The Heron

Nerves make me downlaod PDFs I don't believe, that
to be legally a sausage there must be 38% meat, rigid
but free the statistics come like there above us
in the garden I grew up in the heron is a crank with
the accessory of a koi in its beak. Apparently when they
float to die like luminescent johnnies you can blow them
back to life with a straw - would you risk the red scales
jaffad in corpuscles on the walls just to watch it stare
through you for another two years before it flotsams side-up
again? The party called itself Green but there was nothing
naive in setting up The Farmer's Market beyond the clock
of the workers. The heron, snacked-up, blow's over -
                                                            light as an airfix

Election Special, Nightbus

Each cross should be made to count, like pretzels snuck
onto the night bus. (I'll never get used to feeling like
this). Heart-shaped Vs like win the hearts of your
voters. (I'll never get used to feeling like this).
One slipped between my arm and window as a car horn
smeared past like a clown in an Attenborough montage.
(I'll never get used to feeling like this). Pretzels as
Anarchist As that protest through cholesterol.
(I'll never get used to feeling like this). In The Hole
the logic dunked itself into the head : if it's just about
performance well that's perfunctory & make-up. (I'll never
get used to feeling like this). On screen he says :
people should never be made to feel like this.

Election Special, The Fisheries

We followed the dunnocks into a bush of johnnies
and they came out the other side as sausages.
Your choice of language is just choice she said
but it's sweet the way it's so skanking. Over
the top of Disgruntlement Hill the fish came under
a 48 hour refund guarantee - there was no tropical /
cold-water distinction, the choice was between fully-
fledged & break-off. We bought our own tanks & filled them
with doors, locks & cabinets, that way we could
open them to read the headlines swimming in serifs across
the other side, coalescing around the televised Town Hall
debate : a 70% module assessment aided with nights
under the air-con. That familiar hum, like a satnav in a hearse.

Election Special, Wetherspoons

Only taut nerves stop the cravings so I recommended
a fright diet. As she was due a Dust Transplant
she was unsure if she should. The chef arrived
with chessboard trousers asking 'some prawns'?
The choice was between the world's most popular
wheat beer or a groovy bottle. It's like the grey
hounds this : back the one that dumps. The favourite
is on the road living off yoghurts & chinese takeaways.
Shit use of language she said, just shit. Every four
years - half a mainframe cellular shakeup -
we attach what flutters through our thumbs to the All
Day Offers : we pick up the papers before breakfast
and collect the supplements at last orders

A Dagenham Inquiry
March - July 2008

I thought that to end this project I would have to walk the route
of the buildings that remain, from Barking Abbey via the Cross
Keys pub to end at Dagenham Ford works. Fords the oiled
Mordor of the local economy, symbol of inter and post-war
progress, hope, regeneration - towers turreted above Dagenham
Heathway, the Thames as moat - demanding faith from the people
through the automatic power as provider. That the route would
be formed through what remains from Dagenham's marshland
and village past towards its great modern enterprise - felcher of
Thames water - funneling the hilltop. But to see Dagenham is to
get out of Dagenham, to look back towards the towers. This
happened almost by chance yesterday as the three of us - Sarah,
Pavel and me - left for one of our Summer days out to Rainham
Marshes. We took the 103 bus from outside Dagenham Civic
Centre towards the War Memorial at Rainham. After six years
in Dagenham - leisure options brick-locked between two local
pubs - it was hard to believe that just five minutes beyond
Dagenham East tube (District Line's lush stipe of green) there's
this village, quaintly English - The Albion family pub, Norman
church, gargantuan Tescos Extra - the July sun soldering us silent
to the very fact that this is here. Shoreditch, Liverpool St, has
been our release for when the bricks have pressed down too
much - Romford as a one-mouth pocket of air - but here is English
Essex-London, just a bus-ride from where we live. As usual we
hadn't planned the route, the marshes not signposted, so I went
into a newsagents to ask for directions. The shopkeeper - shaded
and cool amidst reams of white - shook his head & explained that
it is very complicated to get to & despite a left leg in plaster he
reached for a map on the top shelf to show me the route. The
marshes - Rainham, Aveley - spreading over half a page of folds
like an X-ray of lungs against the swallowed toothpicks of the A13.
He advised that we go to Purfleet by taxi or train & walk along the
Thames from there. We opted for train & walked through Rainham
to the station, past the church & graveyard - EDWARD ROBINSON
DIED 1847 AGED 23 - on a bench in the centre of the tombstones
were a couple (the man, from a distance, seemed much older than
the younger gothic girl) both shamelessly aroused, she straddled
across his legs, negative-vampyric in the daylight at eighty degrees.
Iain Sinclair has discussed the Purfleet-Dracula connection
(Jonathan Harker as clerk for a property sale on behalf of the
never-dead) which only occurs to me now that we're making our
way there. Past the all-day drinkers outside The Phoenix & over
the railway lines to the station. Asking for tickets for Purfleet the
man behind the desk asks : Are you sure you don't want to go to
Grays for the same price? I say we're going to Rainham Marshes.
He shrugs & gives us tickets for one stop at eight pounds each.
Sarah and me have a personal mythology with this route to the
coast, the C2C from Fenchurch to the sea (an old Victorian
Sunday leisure route) as after we secretly married at Barking in
2006 we took the train to Shoeburyness & drank champagne by
the sea - a Monday afternoon: a lone man surfing, a woman with
a toddler. The Thames at Purfleet is an intersection as yet unkown,
announced at Fenchurch Street as a sign for someone else's
commute, but then we descend the station hill towards the Thames
and find sprayed by chance our name for each other NESS, on
the gates of SGS Oil & Gas Chemical Services. FOR SALE
posts like frozen powerpoint presentations against the Victorian
cobbles of terraces - colours flash like a kingfisher in a tophat -
a convertible Audi outside, show the work commute has been
struck upon. Bram Stoker, apparently, did Purfleet once. The
hill draws us down to THE ROYAL HOTEL - the only pub in Purfleet -
square white ship moored against the Thames, winking brown
and silver in the sun like the scales of a carp. Locals - a man
reading a paper with an orange pint, two young women sema
phoring talk with pink Bacardi Breezers - looking out over the
Thames to Dartford Power station (dwarfed amputee of Battersea)
and the webbed silver of the QEII bridge. This is the second
time Pavel has seen the sea & as at Southend - as his skin locks the
light - he finds this immense breathlessness hilarious. The brick loops
of Dagenham a memory, for a moment, he looks to us in almost
disbelief at how open a space can be. A bloodblack ladybird specks
Sarah's bra strap, Pavel's multistriped seasuit declares SMILE. To the
left of us the Stoker prophecy as fact : property developers have
raised flats in mock-simulacrum of the Thurrock Council estate,
good-time chalets, leading down towards the marshes. With
Pavel throned across my shoulders aghast at his own weightless
ness, we walk under the trees tracing a shadow of a bird above
that we can't see until we walk past the leaves & then look up -
expecting a hobby, peregrine falcon, kestrel - to see the white
wingspan of a gull. Following the river we come to a long low brick
hut between clusters of housing with a sign that reads PURFLEET
MAGAZINE No. 5. There is a tourist board of information that
tells us that it was created in 1759 and was used to test, store
and supply gunpowder for the army up until the M.O.D. sold it
to Thurrock Councl in the 1960s. As the women at Dagenham
Fords marched on Trafalgar Square to demand equal pay as the
men this place had come to the end of its service for the nation.
I think of its extra 200 years history on Fords & wonder how many
men walked from Dagenham in that time to work against the flash
expanse of the Thames, when just one spark of fire could have set
the whole thing off. As Fords coincided with the creation of the
Becontree Housing Estate - still the largest ever housing project
in Europe - to power the local economy through its titanic turrets
(and they still make one million diesel engines every year, fuelled
using only the wind that blows over terraces) just down the river, here,
the ammunition was being flatpacked & shipped in mail-orders
for the killings of the Second World War. Later, in Rainham Marshes,
we see a brick turret made in 1906 that was used as a look-out post
to spot submarines coming up the Thames. Looking citywards -
Dagenham wind turbines empowering the air - the Ford works
shocked into obsoleteness by the megalithic sim-cards of Canary
Wharf. Fords' productive past absolutely bound to the Thames
for water, for imports & exports, the housing estate latched to
the changes in the workings of global finances like a brick pedometer.
Perspective is only possible with a centre, as power thrives on size:
Fords as a museum that still churns out its engined artefacts. As we
walked towards the marshes, past the council flats, we laughed
at the river-view that the state offered but as we thought it through
Sarah was right to say : that as the river in flux offers hope
and possibilities, to watch it flow whilst having none - land
locked by utilities - would tantalise the expansiveness of despair.
Tea, tabloids, seasons : watching the gulls hawking brown stones
at low tide. We reach Mardyke Sluice where three men are fish
ing over railings - impossible task of landing any decent sized
fish over seven foot steel bars - but one ledgers his bait inches
from the bullrushes in what must be the greatest cast I've ever
seen. The skill against the constriction is admirable. Before
Rainham Marshes opens out to the new RSPB centre the path
narrows to a track of nettles & midge - a bridge over the sluice -
then opens suddenly to a gold carpark & Pavel on my shoulders
still, laughing at two dogs. Entrance to the marshes should cost
us six pounds but the woman at the desk asks where we've come
from - we say Dagenham - and she lets us through for free. The
land here is ancient, untouched in parts for six thousand years,
murmurs under the heat, swarms & stirs us into relaxation. As we
stare at coots (curious), buntings (swollen magpies) & little egrets
(skewed on sticklegs) the potency of this land is staggering : this
is what Dagenham was, up until the building of the estate. At the
base of the Ford works there is a remaining pool of water called
Dagenham Breach (from the breach of the Thames in the early
C18th) but the rest of the marshlands have been built over. Even
eighty years ago, before the project towards a cultivated working
class began, this is the same marshland that Dagenham, as it is
now, was built upon. We feed Pavel facing the water as a group
of school children are made to listen to the whispering bullrushes.
We then push on to a cover to look for wrens & water voles (these
marshes has one percent of the population). As we've come to
know of Dagenham these marshes are not as clearcut as they
seem & have kept, as a kind of museum, the vestiges of its military
training camp history - this is the only reason the land has not
become a site for property. Uncanny, when looking for creatures,
to come across firing ranges and paintings of soldiers aiming
rifles. A military storehouse declares itself against a sign for
DEADLY NIGHTSHADE. Look but don't touch. I spot the back
of a vole in the stream - wet hump of its matted back cruising to
the bank - but it's too late by the time Sarah looks. The stone
crane of the heron - demented airfix - cranks over Aveley Flash
in a five foot wingspan. Bizarrely, in a field of square cows there
is a stetson top down in the grass. I climb over the fence to get
it & give it to Sarah to wear. Lime green like lumps of good
mushy peas the marsh toads hop. A remaining firing range
of metal numbers is now used as a mouse lookout for the kestrel.
Up the path to the RSPB cafe we stop for tea before starting
the walk back to Purfleet Station. We've had such a perfect day
- Pavel is thriving - and we're both much less stressed than
those first months of thinking we had to know how to grow a baby.
At Purfleet Magazine a mother scolds her son for playing at the base
of the bricks - Don't play there, there's broken glass - as we walk past
a mound of grass with groups drinking, men topless with latte tans,
making the most of the heatwave. Inexplicably there is a crow's nest
at the centre of the grass, looking out to the river. On the grass
beneath our feet plastic Union Jack flags start to appear, cut
free from some sequin decoration for an occasion - Sarah
takes a photo, even though we want to get to The Albion pub
in Rainham - and printed on each flag is one white word : THANKS
















There is nothing more uplifting than watching Sarah
- still wearing the stetson - pushing Pavel back along
the terraced ranch of Nicholas Road, Dagenham, with
the wicker of the hat crocheting her shoulders with light