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

In The Hole in the Wall, over lunch
on a Friday afternoon, after the Union
meeting on pay had been cancelled.
Smogmonster gets the round in -
Becks, Guinness, cider - then tells us
that when he was up in Management's
office he noticed that they had two
Union-related books on their shelves,
both smaller than A5 pamphlets. One
was called Negotiation Tactics & the
other Managing Chaos. Laughing into
the fresh pints Pityakker says the Union
should bring out a title of our own -
and call it Talking Cobblers

Like a love letter declares every ailment has hope,
postcards that pass each Dagenham door:

MR MALICK

International Clairvoyant
Spiritual Healer

The 11th generation of the family member.
Initiated healer of well know plant.
15 years experience in Europe. Specialises in
desperate cases which seem to be unwordable. He is a
specialist in bringing back your loved ones, relationship
problems and court cases. He can help with sexual impotency,
exams, infertility, lose weight, depression, fidelity between
husband and wife and many more, like immigration problems.
Pay after Results.
For your Satisfaction Guaranteed Call on:
Mob: 07506 ******

Geoffrey Hill made the mistake, as a young poet,
of stating in his biog that his dad & grandad were
both village policemen. Critics have since made
much of this. Al Alvarez recently wrote in The
New York Review of Books that Hill had a
'Working Class upbringing' though most have
pitched it as 'Lower Middle Class'. As if there is
no difference. The connexion seems to be made
between the upbringing & 'difficulty' of his poetry
that Hill is somehow calling on his family history
in trying to police the language. Back we come
to the moralistic top of poetry as being about an
essential emotion or truth that should be commun
icated clearly & without obfuscation - that speed,
density & abstraction are an abomination of the art
and of our duty to relate as responsible human beings.
That the randomness & chaos of life should not be
reflected in poetry, but made clear sense of. That
the poet should 'have' something the reader can
'get' & any poet who doesn't is ruining the reputation
of poetry for those who do. The argument is similar
to how purists saw punk in relation to 'proper' music,
although whereas punk was seen as a vile working
class corruption, non-formulaic poetry is seen as
'bourgeois'. This subconscious assumption is a
perverted assault and is why a Salford barfly
such as Mark E. Smith bites into the neck of such
one-dimensional soothsayers. Only Shakespeare,
if he was alive after Logie Baird invented television,
could have described the transportational picture box,
like Smith does, as a "tragic lantern". This sense that
sense & order should be the premise of poetry - that
it shouldn't channel-hop or flick frames like TV does.
The term 'elitist', as Hill has objected, assumes that
the 'working class' are stupid - that they are cut-off
at the neck from enjoying the art of language. There
is no word that Hill could use that a working woman
could not use their time - if they wanted to - to find
out what it meant. The point is more to do with the
relevance of poetry in the pragmatics of someone's
life - backgrounds structurally obstruct working
class people from the same opportunities as the middle-
classes (this is a fact) - so the joy of the difficult poem
often finds no place in the grind of survival. Other
considerations are differing aesthetics - as with artists -
say a favouring for mimetic realism, for example, over
abstract expressionism. What is important is that the
poem itself - once cast off from the multiple subjectivity
of the poet - assumes nothing of the reader. It is just an
arrangement of words which cannot change the world
but can potentially bring pleasure to anyone who reads it.
Every poet has the right to stand by their conscious or
subconscious artistic decisions - all that is at risk is their
own readership. Which is their choice to make. Hill has
basically been accused of something close to criminality
- but so for critics - it is criminals that keep policemen in work

Last night as I was walking home
from Chadwell Heath Station -
after placing a pound on Latvian
Pirates to win Euroivison -
I walked past a man of about
sixty, back flat down in the grass
of a drive, legs locked over a small
brick wall. I thought he was dead,
between the paving stones & stars
about to start. No breathes came
from his chest - I asked : Are you
alright mate? His eyes opened &
he was saying something, my MP3
player still SHUTTING DOWN...
lips like sugar, sugared kisses
I said : Do you want a hand to
your feet mate? He nodded & lifted
an arm rigid as a dog's bone - I pulled
him up with one hand, he was that
light. On his feet, ridiculously vertical
to compensate for gravity, I asked :
Had a few scoops mate? All he heard
was my Scouse accent - his teeth
danced back into place to speak words :
Hairyufrom? I said Liverpool & he took
a step back into the overgrown drive.
I returned to the path & he turned to the
door of the house of the drive in which
he'd slept - to find his bed or ask for help

If class is a state of mind
then ideas give one access

SIN
08

(Dagenham graffiti)

Belched upwards on Dagenham Heathway.

Said to myself : I wish you wouldn't do that
in public. But across our lawn the things we'd
said, we'd done.

Things were different then.

This is British air.

They walked the streets of Dagenham to find a gastropub
- free range chicken, seasonal vegetables -
but found only a local called BECON TREE. Looking
for an all-you-can-eat carvery they found a DIY carnival :
a complete roast dinner inside a Yorkshire pud.
Seasonal, free, they waked the streets of Dagenham.

Dudley Moore like Jude the Obscure -
from Dagenham County High wins
an apprenticeship to Magdalen College
Oxford (his mother, when he was born,
looked at his club foot & said "this isn't
my son"). The BBC said on his death:
His humble origins & Dagenham twang
made him feel inadequate among the
upper-class students. When playing
piano in the College Chapel his self-
doubt whispered : You shouldn't belong
here. With one leg shorter than the
other he used to use one of his mother's
shoes to reach the pedals. This was the
kind of thing Peter Cook made Dud
an emotional killing from. But Dud did
a generic same with Dagenham in the
Derek & Clive sketches. Unlike Jude
a door opened HOLLYWOOD & years
later from his balcony - Hawaiian shorts
and brandy - he wrote 42 letters back
to his schoolteacher in Dagenham
to say he always thought they were
basically kind of the same

Al fresco, in ones & twos, at the Fiddlers' Cafe
I walked past & into ADAM'S BARBERS
and took a seat straight away. Today was
the short stout barber that took the clippers -
I usually get his tall thin colleague with hair
down to his waste. I always enjoy this : the
politics of making nano-talk chat last for as long
as the cut takes. There is only the two barbers
and me in the shop & as he cuts we watch the
snooker on the portable box in the corner of
the shop (I listen, looking at my self in the
mirror - but even my barber manages to watch).
Grown men depart pixels of colour for our
pleasure to earn - if Hendry can make this
maximum - ten times an annual barber's wage
in nine minutes. I start to respect the multi-
tasking of the man with the cut-throat. Michael
Ayres - one of the most under-rated living poets -
once wrote that a barber is a cross between a
baptist & an executioner. My neck is wet. Hendry
misses. We all relax. The cut comes to nine, I
leave ten. Wiping the spikes of cut hair from
my neck I walk back out past the Fiddlers' Cafe
and into the William Hill & back the first things
to excite the lexicon : 'Avante-garde' steams
home in the rain at 8-1, which means nothing
unless 'On the Edge' comes in at Wincanton

Bernstein is a case in point for the Marxist /
Avante-Garde dialectic when he said "Lang.
control = thought control = reality control",
which I accept to some extent but in the
language of HONK how does the worker
ask for a wage increase?

Last week Charles Bernstein read downstairs at The Foundry
on Old Street, a bar still in mid-decoration flux since we first
went there six years ago. Outside in the mid-May sunshine
sat the Shoreditch flakes - smoking, drinking - not talking but
looking good in pink shirts & overszied shades. Bernstein reading
here excited me because the carousel can run the cut-up shop.
It really worked : inquisitive, alert, the fashion-conscious breezed
in with little pre-thought for poetry - pints pinned with bubbles -
and then back out again. But some stayed to listen until the end.
Bernstein provoked, entertained, like a Larry David alert to his
ironies. His poems looped with echo, cadence, repetition, chiasmus -
unlike much 'experimental' poetry, not cold & not closed. Leaving
just before the end I went into the toilets before I took the bus
and train out east - the walls graffitoed in Boosh-doodles. Pissing
I read an exchange before fours pens, on the wall over the urinal:
PEN 1: Middle-classes fuck-off back to Mummsy & Daddy
PEN 2: Working-classes fuck-off back to the coal-pits
PEN 3: Upper-classes fuck-off back to Monaco
PEN 4: WHAT THE FUCK....WHERE'S EVERYONE GONE?

THIS BLOG WORKS THROUGH AN IDEA,
A PROCESS & A KIND OF AESTHETIC.
THIS INTERESTS ME MORE THAN
A POLISHED AESTHETIC IN FORM.
OR AN IDEA ALONE. OR A PROCESS
THAT IS INTERESTED ONLY IN LANGUAGE.
THE AESTHETIC COULD BE REWORKED
TO CONCEAL THE PROCESS, TO HIDE THE IDEA
BEHIND A WORK THAT APPEARS COMPLETED

Since The Matapan - our local pub -
was taken over by Keith & Di & re-
named BECON TREE (about the
same time Pavel was born) we've
been made welcome with the pram.
The Sunday before May Day Bank
Holiday is always the poltergeist
doppelganger of the morrow,
we wheel into the bar & are greeted
by a man we've not seen before
collecting glasses. He cuts the shape
of the tattooed offender & is nice
to us. It turns out that Keith's had
a heartattack & is resting upstairs,
so this guy - a local drinker called
Mick - has stepped in to help out.
That's a lovely accent he says to
Sarah & asks is it Welsh? But Sarah
has been talking of Ireland all morn
ing, her lilly-green dress an outcrop
of the thought process. Mick guides
us to a table with a chessboard top.
Then comes the tester : he points to
Pavel & asks : what's is name then?
He puts his palm to his ear for us to
repeat, Sarah says : rhymes with travel.
Fuckin 'ell he says, warm & in fun, he's
gonna get some stick in school for that!
Pavel fuckin Pavin Stone. But he's
smitten with him, says he's gorgeous.
Gorgeous blue eyes he says : where
did he find em? Sarah says from his
Dad but he's not having any of it. He
carries on collecting glasses seren
ading each table with 'Now now boys
& girls, now now boys & girls'. I settle
in on the guinness & Sarah its opposite -
rose wine. Later, at the bar, Keith has
come downstairs looking like an
anaemic Frankenstein & Mick is trying
to wrestle open a bottle of wine -
obviously a beer drinker - tugging
at the cork like a foetus in a flute.
The whole pub is steaming now with
people having a good time, shifting
its rafters against the absence of
work. A balmy breeze drifts over the
bar from outside - May blossom &
spilt Stella - as Mick reaches in to
pinch Pavel's cheek. A lifesize tattooed
swallow floats towards blue eyes -
bracelets & rings splashing in
a collop of gold sun

The opening credits of The Return of the Likely Lads
shows James Bolam - playing Terry - waiting at a bus
stop against a backdrop of broken-down housing. The
bus comes into view & is then seen driving past the
semaphoring Terry : the writer of the sketch says that
this was to show that he is working class. Bus fares are
signifiers of control in working class life, they have the
power to move the body from one place to another
(they are found under the couch or in the hung slacks
of worn trousers). When the bus goes past this shows
that the assumed control is false in a way not so for a
car owner - so the scene cuts to Bob's driveway & car.
The road that scene was shot in is now called Bolam
Way, the residents empowered that Terry spoke for
where they are, to make it known. James Bolam earned
more in the ten minutes of that shot than the whole road
earned that week, at work.

Roy Chubby Brown before he was famous
- before the teddybear quilted trousers -
still working as Royston Vasey, did two acts:
one that was clean, one that was blue.
He went to meet his agent in The Magnet,
his local, to discuss the thread of his future.
His agent told him he can compete on the clean
circuit for 15 quid a night, or go blue & get 50
until the end of his career. Royston, on reflection,
being interviewed in The Magnet, says : when
you're from this background, money is every
thing. And points to the orange seats. On
reflection : it was more me - I'll F & blind
for no fuckin money

Last week we went to vote in the GLA & London
Mayoral Elections. As expected, at the school
railings, were two BNP councillors with Union
Jack rosettes latched to black suites - not saying
anything, just making a presence - another man
walked down the street & said : I hope you get
the result you're after today. Like sport, like last
night we watched Liverpool get beat by Chelsea
in the Champions League & after the game the
vocal Turkish Chelsea fan was accepted by another
white Chelsea fan who asked : what's your son's
name? And the Turkish man skilfully turned
around the other fan's welcome by saying to his
son : Look, he's a Chelsea fan, just like you!
With rosettes & policies in comics the BNP
animate the streets as an adult Dandy. After
we've voted - school booths like confessionals -
a dad walks in with his teenage son to teach
him how to vote. Unshaven, the son looks like
a wereman - stunted but enthused - in a Trans
formers T-shirt. The moment touches on a hope -
I will never know which way they chose to vote.
Towards the shops in the rain - I've got new shoes
so I can't complain as such - the first scuffs fan
the leather, pips of acid drizzle. I always treat new
shoes as pets until they become a part of myself.
As we walked a honking protests brought us to
attention : the carousel van for VOTE FOR BORIS
tannoys the pavements. BNP's second choice -
a link that Boris says is of no interest. Anyway,
it drives past the school & the councillors wave.
Children in the fraggle carnival have never seen
an ice-cream van before, with so few ideas

This morning I stopped against a garden
wall to check my bag for lost Oyster.
An elderly citizen walked behind into
his yard & said: I thought you were
the postman. I said : I have nothing
to give you. And we both laughed.

On the C2C between Barking and Fenchurch Street
there is one carriage that contains the touchpad WC.
It is like a tardis & as such, nobody knows how to use it.

Everybody knows you should never take a dump in a tardis.

Barking Registry Office - we married there once
(5 September 2006) - a white fortress on the bus
route that defends all that was, and still is, possible

Drunk on the standup bus you're only minutes from anywhere.
The showdown of last orders will probably never come.
The teenager stands up on the drunken bus - she is
only seconds from everywhere. To travel is how she arrives.
Full-up the bus cruises past the sober citizens at the stop -
each one semaphores a vicious appeal for fairness. They are
now hours away from where the place is. Those on the bus
start to laugh. This is one definition of community.

After the reading there were deals to be cut
with two cab drivers. A man above a latenight
dancefloor in Holborn mistakes Mother for a
goldfinch (he couldn't eat a whole one) - we had
to leave him in the Red Emporium. The last
tube missed, down the silver travelator
then back up to find the night bus. I needed
to find bus-stop Z on New Oxford Street.
Someone needed to piss - from the doorway to the
gutter like a black snake unfurled eating its own
skullcap. Hailed a cab to take me to portal Z -
the driver is from Ilford so I offer him half the
forty pound fare to take me there (half my fee
for reading). The deal can't be struck - the poly
thene promise of the city reclings on Oxford Street.
The bus takes 83 minutes through the District
route, through the East End brick orchards
where latenight barrowboys are in a cocaine snow
shake. Out at Ilford the latenight wind cuts April
keen & cruel. The man in the private hire hut
is asleep at the phone desk, folded into himself
like a foetus in a sock. I wake him & he says as
mantra : ten minutes. And folds back in his chair
with the unplugged phone cord like a flasked
umbilical. Outside the door is a gyrating amber
light like a rodent wheel - the place is open, the
place is closed. A small car pulls up outside & I
follow the small man into the back of the car. As
soon as he starts to drive he drops the chat &
pushes his hand into the back (the other hand on
the wheel) & asks to be paid now up-front: Twelve
pound please! Fuck that, it's only ever eight! He
threatens to pull over (I look at my watch - 2:10 am)
and offer him ten to my door. Which he takes.
Stalemate sold the ambience in the back changes,
he asks if I've been to the nightcubs, I answer No :
a poetry reading. He doesn't believe me & silence
arrives us on Nicholas Rd. Sarah's in bed, Pavel's
in his basket. I put the night channels on - coquettish
bricolage of pixel & colour - and start to write a poem:

TO MY WIFE AT 2:31 am

The bonde girls ogle perspex at the barboys.
I know their bodies' angles before imagination
starts. My wife my wife she contours different
every time. Her naked eyes the most beautiful part.

Two mornings consecutive the Dagenham Fox
has come to see us. On Saturday asleep in a ring
of grass, today in haunches on next door's shed.
As Dagenham is both London Borough & Essex
- as if a water drop could run inside a full glass -
the fox, in terrace-red coat patched black,
is both of the city & of the grass. We held Pavel
at the window as we watched him stoop
towards the full black sheep of the binbags

And as such there nurtures a kindness -
two girls in pink & yellow, aged five or six,
gently creep to stroke the stranded cat
under the NO BALL GAMES sign, under
the April sun, and the cat lifts back its
crystal jawline. To acquiesce.

Before the John Kinsella reading
I go to The Hole to catch-up
with the Union Reps - Pityacker
and Smogmonster. Smogmonster
has been away for a few weeks
so I fill him in on movements
among the piano-fingered
professionals - the Oxygen Thieves -
over two pints of Guinness. There
is just enough time for him to tell
his joke that not everyone was pleased
when the Pits closed : he once spoke
to an out-of-work canary. The Hole
has changed since the smoking ban,
the front room in the commuter hour
used to be a workshop in tokable choices
- cigarette, roll-up, cigar, pipe, cigarello -
an Arcadian plume of passive exhalation.
Now it is clean the only smell is bad food.
Smogmonster puts the pressure on
to ditch the reading & have a few more
pints, watch the Man U V. Roma game.
I challenge him to say what he's thinking
about me going to a poetry reading -
he smiles : fuckin load of bollocks mate.
And this from one of the most intelligent
people I know - in argument, numbers,
negotiation, expression - he's just never
had a need for poetry & by the age of 47,
doesn't now. I think of Heaney's
Casualty & his friendship with a man
who didn't know he was a poet - how
he'd lift a "weathered thumb" to order
another drink. I have to run from The
Hole down to the Festival Hall to make
the start of the reading. Kinsella enters
in black jeans, black shoes, black Docs,
talks like a man in shock over his own life -
after self-abuse, death threats, discoveries
of his own abilities & inconsistencies. There
is a real present tension in the room between
the grit & traction of his diction & the need
to tell a story, for narrative digression:
metonyms for the poet could be his near-
drowning, as a child, on a wheat lake,
or being struck by lightning twice while
hugging a silver keg. An anarchist, owning
nothing, I think that Smogmonster would
have liked this, would have related in ways
that he wouldn't have guessed. There
are so many questions I want to ask but
the session ends as Kinsella needs to get
his cab. We head back to The Hole
and, no surprise, the Reps are still there
- beneath the clean ovaloid mirror -
they haven't even moved to watch the game.
I've got a copy of Kinsella's Shades of the
Sublime & Beautiful in my pocket, to read
on the tube back to Dagenham, but first
there is the irreverent rush towards Last
Orders. Poetry has done a find & replace
on 'boast', 'anecdote', 'joke' - or amost:
Smogmonster, merrily-bullish, says that
Dylan is the only poet he's had need of -
then announces his party piece, singing
Blowin in the Wind in Swedish

One cultural commetator put it like this:
if we had the one tue democracy of the people
the Proles would have their way of capital punishmet.

There is a big free swing in Central Park:
hours the children spend, being pushed

Behind Dagenham Town Hall -
modernist, mock-Bauhaus facade,
both imperial & redbrick -
Billy Smart's Circus has at last
come to town. In the field ringed
with railings there is one huge blue
and white tent with a single peak
and a flat red & white tent, jutted
into sequins of smaller peaks.
From the moving bus a mother
points the tents out to her son
who looks, then waves. The tents
disappear as we move towards
Romford. At last there seems
to be one place - just one place -
that speaks in trying to reach us

End terraces inherit the promise
to metamorphose into villas
- five, six bedrooms even -
painted blossom pink, canary
yellow. A balcony for summer
beers, in April, & the magic is this:
whilst still residing at the same address
the view adjacent is discernibly redbrick

A plastic bag in wellington blue
snagged in the pink blossom,
a scarecrow made of hedge
- lush & green - a red chrome
cockerel on a rusted pole,
an April sky in school-excursion
blue & a sign in white that reads
STAY CLEAR: GARAGE IN USE
behind the postbox, in wellington red

A family of short-snouted seahorses (Hippocampus,
hippocampus) discovered in the Thames
- now cleaner, past the declining Fords works -
and kept a secret until a Wildlife & Countryside
Act was passed to protect them. Native to Italy
or the Canary Islands, now drifting down the Estuary
from Southend, as if water barriers belong to no one.

Polski attacks at Barking. Some things suggested clear,
I heard, over beer-battered hands in chipshops.

The laws, which came into force today, mean that anyone
found killing, injuring, or taking any of those species
from the wild faces a fine of 5,000 pounds or six months' imprisonment

One commentator described this visitation as "like finding treasure" -
coming to Dagenham shows their fondness for brackish waters

The early bird gets the big price, red & blue
balloons orb the doors, bowls of peanuts &
crisps on the Quickslip Desk, jockeys wait
to go over the top of Beecher's Brook
in luminescent stripes like danger needs
a dusting of hundreds & thousands
- well that's why we're watching -
outside two middleaged men seriously
playfight as their young sons watch
trying not to catch the eyes of the other.
I push the pram past an unmanned buggy
which has been left next to a GOLDSKIP
of used bricks. Coming back much later
after the poetry reading in Covent Garden
- a past midnight of Spring ice - the driver
of the Transit cab could be one of the men
from today's playfight. He says : cheer up,
it might never happen. He pleasantly talks
past me like I am the clothes in his wardrobe.
I say : it already has, I've spent all my money
on the National & I'm not even drunk. He asks
how I failed to pick the winner, though he
hasn't told his wife about his winnings yet.
I say : isn't marriage the biggest gamble
and he says No : that was buying his house.
His faraway look is the clash of the tragedy
in the hope of love & the materials beyond
compassion. At least he had today's winner -
Comply or Die

April snow snuffs out the Spring blossom of Dagnams.
A door. An engine. Gary, Gary blows down the street
as if the word is an order, bearing testimony

Text by Kelvin Corcoran

Billy Smart's Circus is coming to town -
posters carousel shopwindows through Dagenham -
the clown is a mutant made from Michael Jackson
and Pappa Lazaru : his upturned nose says 'go',
the pleading whites of his eyes say 'come to me'.
In Romford Wetherspoons two young men
glyph a table with a London-to-scale map,
flicking beer from bottles with plans furtive as kingfishers.
Above them on the wall is a sketch of Romford Market
in early modern times and a tag that runs witout typo
RUMFORD, ESSEX - before the amphibian days
as a London Borough of Havering and one of the few
to still receive & accept - as community - the travelling circus

Rivulets, ravines of redbricks
named with hope : MAYFLOWER RD,
SUNRISE STREET, as if necessity
could be quenched with pink blossom

As the son of a stonemason & servant girl
Hardy knew the friction & frisson of the issue
straight-off, came to feel it in his crutch.
His mother - Jemima Hand - took a domestic
stance looking downwards at his father.
In ludic mock-attraction Hardy fell in love at 30
with Emma Gifford, daughter of an alcoholic
father with aspirations for a genteel life -
she remembered with fondness afternoons
in front of a Shaespeare folio, enough to fall
for the bookish. So although young Tom was
much better read she was made to feel
his accent grate against her better sense.
Wedlocked she would take her tea alone,
upstairs, for thirty years. Spolit, unruly, pretty
- hair in gold-plated braided rings - Tom should
have took a Tess, a Bathsheba, a Jenny Clownvag,
but needed to feel the hypocrisy acute behind
his own doors. Tom up in London, Tom to
the Queen's for tea. When she died he was
distraught. When she died he married his
younger secretary, Florence Dugdale. Patient,
understanding, he took her to the places
he had gone to with Emma, at the start,
before their disquieting lustre turned to dialectics.
After he died his heart was ripped from his frame
and returned to the working earth besides Emma,
his ashes & name taken to the Houses. The young
stonemason a gift in pieces for the Nation.

The controversy around Delia's new recipes
on cheating cheap ingredients
- tinned meat, frozen chickpeas -
is really to do with her conception
of 'the people'. She wants to teach
in the same way that she gives
the beautiful game to Norwich City fans.
When she worries that they will pelt her
with tomatoes & eggs now she hopes
they didn't take her advice & buy frozen.
"The good thing about the newspapers
is that they are used for tomorrow's
fish n' chips" - shows how removed
she is from the true culinary expediency.
If I was a middle-class fish I would
probably sue for bad speculation.

A hustle & bustle at Barking Station -
The Good Friday service runs once a year -
today I met a northern artist called Rick Myers
passing through London from Manchester
to arrange a visa for his marriage in Massachusetts.
One of his conceptual books is called Bite Marks on Paper.
A friend of his once stopped his car at traffic lights
and Mark E. Smith jumped in the back - Stockport! -
so like Faustus has visa, every car is a cab. To not
disillusion him he drove him there & next day
found a palette of false teeth under the back seat.
In the credit crunch of plastic he could not bite a receipt.

Hopkins hot off the press in diablo red gloss (20 March 2008) -
he has the same haircut as Simon Armitage (who has just
published his autobiographical book Gig: the life and times
of a rock-star fantasist, his heart stirred to be in the Smiths,
a FIND&REPLACE 'gutterat' for 'silkworm' version of Mark
E. Smith.) I've also read his expressive interest in the Laureateship.

My brother, at that age, so wanted to believe

My parents, both alive, so wanted to give hope

When he asked, if heaven, was something like Butlins

Did the Socialist movement of the North of England in the 1850s
really uphold Whitman as a 'visionary high priest'....
Help us with this : negotiations, strikes, hunger, illness :
with this : and what I assume you shall assume

Uncle Walt today (19 March 2008) in gangrenous green gloss
under the arm as I get off the tube at Stratford & take the Great
Eastern towards Ilford, Goodmayes, Chadwell Heath - to be
dressed as a prole, his stare vindicates, is to be dressed for all men;
I want it to be true that a broke clerk of 'democratic syntax' did not
only speak for but was read in rations by real workers in Bury & Bolton
- on lunch breaks, at railway stations - by the boys compressed
into action along the Mersey, the Thames, the Tyne. Compadres
of class, across the Atlantic, docking copies of Leaves of Grass
as functional, arms to action, dissatisfaction, as real as their own tools.

When Mayakovsky's students, committed to the class cause,
questioned why they could not understand his poems
Mayakovksy would reply : You have to become more understanding

When Owen, the First World War poet par excellence
met Sassoon at Craiglockhart - bucolic-sephardic, aloof -
the then more famous poet commented to a friend that
Owen's Cheshire 'grammar school' accent was unfortunate

The Peasant Poet - John Clare - a shapeshifter
rooted in his own soil, inflections guttural & natural,
his concerns personal (not those of a community)
taken to High Society London as a curio, cadaver
of Dick Whittington in the belljar of class difference.
Was to be exhibited like this to be exploited
when he took the print runs, advances, hopes
of a lifelong readership before the fad ran dry?
Did he have a choice with nine mouths to feed?
Did he own this marketing, printing leaves on madness?
The alternative was to be left as he was, in the fields,
punctuating wild as the gadfly & never to be head of.

ZOOKS

(Dagenham graffiti)

Let us start with a premise : free poetic guides
in the daily broadsheets are not pitched towards
the working classes. Let us start with a reprise :

Percy Bysshe Shelley born in Sussex to the family seat
grows to concentrate on scientific studies, after Oxford
applies amnesia to his first wife - Harriet Westbrook -
suicide by drowning in the Serpentine in 1816.

Following tha massacre in Manchester writes 'The Mask of Anarchy'
about the abuse of military power & eleven civilian deaths
- a clear sloganeering ballad for the oppressed to understand -
a precious intellect from a Sussex family seat can incite
Rise like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number -
what did the man whose nose was sliced by sabre make of this?
For those who lost, had hope, had already put their bodies
forward to make their oppression felt - did the verse
make clear, console, unite, give reason, justify?

Let us start with a premise : free poetic guides
in the daily broadsheets are not pitched towards
the working classes.

A dream must be achievable to be a valid dream


LONDON


PARIS


BERLIN


ROME


ROMFORD

Daddy Wordsworth in blue gloss today (16 March 2008)
Victorian pharmacist at the Miracle Elixir Desk, knocking
out phials of readable goodness called Lyrical Ballads
cracking open the can on the accessiblity question
- to reach out to real men, in the one true language of common life -
which meant one thing then for the furrowed brow in the field
and another for Bukowski's voyeuristic stash of experience.
Poetry to be open, shared, essential, a tap on emotion
delivered daily to the doorstep - with milk, letters, utility bills -
collected with a tabloid & a Best of Both loaf of bread.

When the community child is found in the duvan bed
there's going to be a party in Hicksville tonight.
The media stokes the flames. Pomagne goes pop,
fireworks go off, ash & stoked cinders of shame.

So the doctor's daughter could still be found
in the opposite drawer, the media pays
to reconstruct the scene in the restaurant
from the night she left. Some chilled downtime,
alone together, after all they have been through.

10 minutes into the meeting the woman
to be made redundant starts to cry. The
manager puts her arms around her & asks -
Would you like some tea & biscuits?

Everywhere this kitsch. To make something nice
that's cheerful & cheap. 59 red & green scented
Christmas trees, strung over a dashboard.

JESUS WAS A PAEDOPHILE

(Dagenham graffiti)

Around the screen the community gathers,
Kauto Star goes head-to-head with Denman
at Cheltenham (closest since Arkle beat
Mill House in 1964) , a man with no teeth
asks a younger woman who she's backed -
she says A Fistful of Dollars (each way).
He replies : "a fistful of bollocks" & laughs.

Hip-to-hock Denman's The Tank & does the job.

Fuckin told ya John, fuckin told ya

Behind the screen a black & white photograph
of soldiers smiling in a shelled-out building:
BOMBING OF DAGENHAM CIVIC CENTRE.

A small man approaches the bar in a helmet,
the barman asks why he's got it on -

I'm looking for someone

And as each house is basically the same

as each of our bodies is basically the same

what did the bricks record of that unique time?

Random is : in the can of economy fruit cocktail

who gets the dogfox nose of the cherry?

The carnation swirl of evaporated milk

over grapes, peach, pear

is a thing of beauty

This is how terraces are made : burn down
the Fairy Tale forest. Imagine a one-off binge
on gingerbread. Draw the curtains. Shut the door.

Clone.

Last week we went to see The Fall at the Astoria -
a warehouse of drunkenness, experience, harsh bass
that breaks apart Paolozzi's mosaics inside Tottenham
Court Rd station, a place where people meet to make
sensation mean something real to them - soon to be sold
to commercial developers - another turreted outpost
beneath the omphalos of CENTREPOINT. In the crowd
was Frank Skinner & the drummer from The Horrors.
In that tensile thrum before they came on stage,
the sense that something special is going to happen only once
like this - at our feet a stash of Red Stripe cans - we stood
on the top tier looking down at the moshpit & stage.

A man in a leather jacket & jeans, shaved head,
seething an undercurrent of repressed violence
and dissatisfaction - skin pitted through acne
and alcohol like a kind of hairy red lemon - tells us
he's called Des & starts talking at us. He says
The Fall could only happen in England, where
else would people pay to see a drunk take the stage,
offend us all & then leave when he's had enough?
He pours warm Guinness into a plastic cup
as he talks, makes clear to us he's from south
London & shows us his badge to prove he's
a Brentford fan. He says he doesn't know why
he comes to support them, he fuckin hates
Mark E. Smith, miserable bastard that he is.
Then quotes his favourite Fall lyric: "Hey there
Fuckface! Hey there Fuckface!". And sure enough
thirty or so minutes into the set Des throws his
plastic glass to the floor & walks toward the dark
stairwell to leave, the value of his ticket is to stay
true to the occasion - it's what Mark E. Smith
still might decide do at any minute himself.

I wonder if Des is the kind of person The Guardian
was talking about as 'minority working class',
the kind that should be spoken of with more respect
and helped along in some way. Des
is not lacking in basic intelligence but smells
of dinners only taken at drink's convenience,
survives to threaten & assumes he can enter & possess
anyone's living space. Staring at my wife's cleavage
as he talked, his eyes seemed to salivate.

And what do The Fall say of this : the moshpit
mixed with lads of fifteen & bald men in their forties,
as Mark E. Smith unlplugs his band's guitars,
ups the amp levels, leaves the stage. He strikes
me later as the first autodestructive artist in popular
culture, Gustav Metzger on meths & Tennants Extra,
a grouchy mumbling munchkin gurning & seething
as any 50-year old man who fees his life has come to nothing.
Neckless, arthritic, pissed, he swerves any attempt
at live perfection. Sarah said it was like watching
Faustus on stage with Lucifer in the wings too scared
to enter. As he built it up, let it come apart again,
destroying & creating just once, like this, for us -
a fin-de-siecle schoolboy on detention in his own attic
forever writing out the lines: Blind man, have mercy on me.

On budget day the red box is held aloft,
Darling's shock white hair a cut fox
spilling itself to crimson. A 4% increase
on the price of wine & beer puts no stop
on a binge, the well-off drink in the belief
that they help the poor through tax.
Someone said it was a budget of Old
Mother Hubbard - she's wearing
aphetamine gladrags & still wants
to eradicate child poverty. Pint glasses
are clinked around the crib to make
a special moment of joyous spontaneity
that may be remembered tomorrow -
as John James put it: "If there is memory
in working class life it is because
things are always being taken away"

Abandoned artefacts : an opened tin of paint
- school-excursion blue - upturned in a hedge.
A black cat dressages from the scene -
blue pawprints cress the pavement

Easter morning snow on blood-red terrace -
O Christ, the flocks, so white - it sticks

I read an article in The Guardian a few days ago
in which the jouralist wanted to defend the 'working class'
and probed: "would we talk of any other minority group
like this?". The assumed 'we' of his readership speaks,
I suppose, for his press. I had breakfast in the Family
Cafe in Dagenham - a Sunrise Scramble (eggs, tomato,
mushrooms, buttered toast) - and the newspapers
fanned free on the tables were The Sun and The Star.
The 'we' he assumed spoke for what he supposed
to be true. And his press. Red tops, tomato sauce
bottles that congeal then crust the plastic spouts.
How can being interested in how the world works
presuppose a condition of non-working class?

Alexander Pope in aquamarine gloss
(12th March 2008) - Polite Society
was to police provincial diction
to remove the slang & guttural stench
from Shakespeare's lower speeches -
all that was relevant & real to those in the pit -
to use the dictionary to cleanse the language
as Fielding used the police to rid the City
of vice. (Daniel Foe, a son of a butcher,
added a De & took to snuff). Pope
a hunchbacked businessman attaching
a levy to the transvestite verb. Defoe
never did snuff in the butcher's shop.

When I was very young Thatcher was a thing that happened
to may parents' faces when they watched the television -
it showed itself like gritty food with sounds of She & Her & It.

When I was very young I could tell when it was windy
by how quickly the clouds moved.

If Milton
as a boy wanted to read late his father made sure
the maid sat up with him until after Midnight

Think about what I did as a kid when I should have slept:
Watched the trees over the railway embankment
pillaging the wind. The face of the sleepless rag-girl
opposite, awake in her window, looking out at us -
Jody her name was. She had a wooden horse made
from a broom, would eat dog-dirt for dares & once
- eating our plasticine - threw up all over our guinea pig
'Arthur'. Bored, we retired to computer games - Jody
watched our room strobe & flash like a dodgem's blackbox.

When the night trains went past the screens seemed to break.

What I mean to say by this is that sometimes poetic norms
come to us blessed as currencies in the most awkward ways possible.
Mayakovsky talked of this as poets simply putting carriages
together to make trains, but the first poet to invent the formula -
1 + 1 + 1 = 3 - was in fact a genius.

I have counted out in my mind all the ways
that money in change can fall into palms -
given the difficulty of balancing coins
even on a flat surface, why do shopkeepers
insist on placing the note first
then a rutted turret of coins on top of this?
Each time comes a test of skill & patience & trust
between two players in the process who don't know each other.

The coins fall down. Dual apologies. And nobody learns.

If a skinhead (BNP tattoo) walks towards me with a limp
this upsets me more than one with an able walk.

Ankle-shackled & hamstrung, there is no escape.

The class of where you live can be measured
through a simple test : artefacts such as hoovers
- broken & gutted of wires - left on street corners
overnight, for days sometimes, when no one comes
to collect them, to take them back from where they came.

There are cafes in Highbury where someone can ask in one accent
for something off the menu - like toast - and it is taken as an order
from one who knows what they want. The same request - in a different
accent - elicits the thought chav. And a refusal to toast.

Milton's grey eyes & locks look good in gloss
today (11 March 2008), I would not buy it
without the tactile stick - there is no lossy
to Paradise Lost if it is not in gloss. If Milton
as a boy wanted to read late his father made sure
the maid sat up with him until after Midnight
(& the litte monster had his first exposure to Spenser)
before the praxis of BACS of the Student Loans Co.
he retired after Universty for six years to his father's
Bucks estate to practice his poetic takes.
To prepare as a poet. To know before experience.
There was no such thing as being 'in his twenties'
no leisure of a Jenny Clownvag to distract from hs text.
No panacea for his grief when at last his words
went dark & wide into a world he could not see.

After three yeas at the Redbrick Uni I read through Friday
and then considered, that night, how the Giro would be spent.

(Why I'm Not a Poet)

Work in Progress