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Jill Jones

A selection of poems

Disrepair/ / Whispers and courses/ / Futurism at night/ / A calling/ / Dream horses/ / Winged/ / The Dissolve/ / Sun Before the Long Wait/ / Grass

Temporal Jill Jones: poem/ essay “What is the electric life of words?”

Getting lost — my fifteen minutes, presentation for Sydney Poetry Seminar, 2003

Practising around ‘the authentic’, presentation for Sydney Poetry Seminar 2005

Disrepair

And what are they doing across the water?
Our boats are leaking this year, high on blocks,
ready, always ready for caulking, the repair
we’ve no time to give. And we listen for more
than the half-silent scrapings of midnight
over the dunes, further than the tides
recorded in old yellow quarto books.

There’s been a rushing from over the water,
an impatience between the wind and land,
against the years we’ve spent looking up
from our lines and tangled nets. We let
our hands alone find a way out of the maze
of knots we figure are enough for the catch.

We look for what they’re doing over the water,
waiting for it to save us. Our boats are useless,
drawn up on the beach, spectators with our days
we work round. A stiff salt-sodden rope binds dawn
and the collapse at twilight. We prefer the constant
but casual wonder we float across the water.

Today we see the wind driving an old sloop
close into the shallows of the eastern cove.
The crew is small and they’re tilted over the sides,
scanning the shore, as if calling for aid and repair.


Whispers and courses

Air urges through my waking cells.
Day breathes thicker, houses exhale us.
We people the streets with our week time
dance, impatient with the tinnitus of hours.

But wind gives the day its wings, invisible
from this window. And makes space
for light more clear than freshest water,
more bright than silvered glass.

The course of leaves and sound becomes
a float, a feather-delicate scrape. Each tree
hands on whispers. They translate through
lane corridors into a constant hushing —

catch on squatting walls, arrow-headed fences.
Like our concepts tracking what we think
should be in or outside — domains
of rocky edges, worlds of grass.

All suburban geometry, all below the bed
of sky: pacific today, sometimes stormy.
However each day wakes, how it rides.
And how far we bend to catch its sound.

My horizon is a measure of this present.
Continues its hours while I seek others.
And crisp yellow light squares some time
on paving, dry as summer rain.

A jet’s hard silver and withdrawing roar
says something nearly loud as absolute
of a further world, its borders, hungers, war.
And the trees reply by standing ground.

And what of a moon I leave stranded there
out with the sun, dreaming other dreams?
Of places perhaps without sleep, grounds
of fire without hope, or even an hour’s rest.

Far-off blizzards, lava, a planet language
of ancient hollows, old sockets in stone.
Alive alongside deliriums of power,
and nights filled with missiles and eternity.

We’ve no big weather here, forget blood’s
course can be wild as the crush of cyclones
on coasts. For weeks this hill may live
with indolent light; night storms can please us.

And even here hurts whisper over fences,
life lingers unnecessarily in a bed, mouths fight
and the smallest of deaths go to ground:
a bubble of yolk, the not-yet lived body.

When wind moves, ground receives,
breaks open life in scattered half-shells,
a dove’s lost egg. I find with work’s end
a colder, fuller moon, winter’s promise.

While birds call the dark, the smell of rain
drifts across the greying fence. Sun leaves
the sky its brief evening pink to night
and the relief of our half-blind hours.


Futurism at night

I stayed up all night under the world’s dangling lamp and the shadow did not eclipse it. I toed the Bokharan prayer mats and struggled with words along the green stripe of the sofa. Of this, I am still accused, as though I had thrown the first fruits at angels and glued the hems of avatars to chair legs. I acknowledge the night is open to speed and the push beyond pages, an overthrow of slow velvet edges, but this is not war, the generals merely look sick in the blue light and a tank twists in the ditch outside. Across the fat cushions, along the hallway and around the cornices are my placements but when I hit the road you will really see that lamp swing, zooming beyond sense everyday. It’s got past the eternal now, each sentence talks from another in the house and paragraphs tangle. You cannot unwire them as they conflict and kiss, spreading tissue into tissue. Accuse me of some moist blaspheming or of dropping articles as though I cannot be definite as an army. Little lamp no slower than searchlights or blazes. Sentence searching for another — zoom, zam, zaum — as it grows.

A Calling

We are coming back again
talk about the wheel turning
past stock situations
        old hills, old steps
        old cities.

The years were hard
and the labour anxious
        the bomb, the risk.

So we come, if not innocent.
We need
home, the streets, reunion

exhausted by scripted armageddons
and recent events
        crass pillage of enlightenment
        supermarkets.

As if you could be free
       like America
       like a colony.

Let’s not take the poison!
Lunch is enough, sun and tannins
the plans on a table
a memory only of winter

as if it gave you hope.
‘For what we are about to depend upon’
the future
beyond harm
pity or kindness.

Dry your tears
take this
       bread, water, the green flesh leaves.

It is beside you
keeps you wanting to know
to study it, the forms
the build of the past.

Orbits in which you find
       ancient snowstorms
       fine burning sand.
The charts of the moon
will find you.

Think about risk
as the Tigers rough the ball
before the celebration.
How many miles
till you itch
under a white shirt
as human hands smile.
Colder metaphors —
walking to the shore
is the infinite
and the flow is quiet.

Instruments hesitate
in their tuning
will not make songs
at the end of the world.

Learn to haul the gear
into night and miles
looking for a park
somewhere to gentle
into a kerb
away from the shining.

At last, alone
after the long drive
turning to each other.

If we look further
through the glass
past the noise of a telephone
even if it brings news
because we have been patient
under heat and over dust
in our exhausted bodies
we are keeping on
their unknown tracks.


Dream horses

Where are your eyes?
Nothing has prepared us for this.

What is earth?
There’s a pain that remembers bone and horn.

Is the sky above?
Only figures in a landscape.

How fast is the wind?
Even the broken floats in dreamland’s waters.

Do you remember when?
You will know when you see us.

Will you take us with you?
Born into the boundless plain.

How long have you been here?
Our names were once Surefoot and Swift.

Do you think we will be happy?
Dream horses do not need your eyes.

— after Clay Horses by Sidney Nolan

Winged

it is the centre of a word
that is unimaginable, almost
as it flutters out with the birds
indifferent over the lake

as closed in the eye
or as far as the mountain
brittle as a principle or a crust
in the hand

it is raised up but not grasping
the sides of the hours
it is suspended, it is surface
as though carried by water

or wind moves the parts of language
less calculable than the tides
not boxed or protected
once they leave the soft throat

the twist of autumn trees
lets down the light, trust
in the chill, naked and right
that winter will always be spoken

if it is tender as thinking
inside today and surrounding form
little curlew sings elsewhere than memory
raising sky with sounding, silences

but it is a kind of peace time
and also a form of force that emerges
such as words that rhyme
or shuffle softly near the tree

a head operates in its clay
and thinks about the wings
it cannot elevate to understanding
here against the fickle light

to be based on what is left
as though still unwritten
a statement that suddenly swerves
and disappears

it has moved beyond confidence
and shed that blunt examination
even though birds pick over the ground
that is written


The Dissolve

Have you admitted something is catching
on the gate?
Is it the way a wind blows
out of the mouth of spring
the crackle and crisp touching up
of a skinny evening?
How the flowers move above their shadows
black leaves, green hearts
lines of worms and bugs written on leaves.
But you cannot exhaust your head
or put it down
heavily.

Though the city makes you tender
at times it seems you were never
part of it — here.
Elsewhere nothing seems true
but loose as a whisper, part of the dissolve.
With a glance of the hand
you are heaping the forgotten
rather than attending to the laying down.
Currawongs from a day’s mist blanket
remind you, echoed as a lone girl
while all this obstructed rippling
is slowed down to drift in the passing cold.

Tell me how it’s undone  —
moving between the birds, the cracking trees
over a fence as I taste wind furl
past ghost lips, the never blue light
my house, my intersection —
to arrange the chill then light up the knots
to experience the labour
that now unshapes me.


Sun Before the Long Wait

Branches twist to the shape of sun
crushed leaves that lead
fractured, prismatic, but catch on, listen
I’ve contemplated the break out
traded with desire, rumoured the wait.

Moving into a small valley of sun
across bark, fragrant trails, where they’ve led
a hollow where I bend to listen
move through sky dark with universe out
how long to have not, how long to wait.

Free of excuses, lizards in sun
sung sharp on glass, break my dense lead
this is welcome — suspended where houses listen
trace the broken fence, timing winter out
the grapple I can’t heft, rhyme or weight.

Days of emission, mist drift, red sun
I worry if my questions twist like lead
as a deal, contract, augmented, a lesson
looking for excuses never found out
unexamined in body woe, or wait.

Fragments of time, moon-time, flicker sun
broken down to uncertain, as if to lead
forgotten tortures, being made to listen
abandoning the long slide out
passage of skin breeze, abandon the weight.

Break gods on the steps under a forgotten sun
unwind what goes along, and what is led
fears that can’t approve or anxieties listen
time toughs the excuses out
having been released from the long wait.


Grass

Empty girl I was, so far inside, grass didn’t know me

It was something unbending, only light seemed to touch

But so long as I could smell the sea, so long as salt

I had extrications, music, that fire, phase & beat

And all around the world went off, banners & avenues, cruelties

Now it’s come one, come all, a kind of sassy hoedown

The grass is going, it cracks & withers sadly, almost infinitely

But I’m becoming younger as my dead drugs strangle each-to-each

I go out with skin mixes, cantos & some fear rocking

I stand or fall but now I can feel that region’s joy, the bones


Temporal

hard-up on nothingness with my unloved notebooks
tokens, desert island discs, my biblio stigma

fallible, leafy, not-knowing, stretched
my seminal despair grinding my breath

a minstrel nerve twists in the yarn of the dice
diffusing into my colloquial bloodstream

bold and alone, my feverish sympathy
fits my flame to a dialect, foreshadowing pain

mossy, leisurely, invented on nothingness
scanning for balm, to be cured of limiting

glamour and ruin, anima and loathing
they are all chilly tongues

self-knotting baulks at this half-baked fervour
what is intrinsic is now annotation

redress is lethal
its traps are fertile, poised, a dangerous emerald

my alpha virgin glosses her nest of boxes
moonlight churches watch for ignited ardour

prodigious spices and drunk tapestries
reversing on the sacred measureless nothing

These poems are from the following publications:

Disrepair, from The Book of Possibilities
Whispers and courses, Futurism at night, from Screens Jets Heaven
A calling, from Struggle and Radiance
Dream horses, from Fold/ Unfold
Winged, The Dissolve, Sun Before the Long Wait, Grass, Temporal, from Broken/ Open Jill Jones: poem/ essay first published in Southern Review, vol.36 no.3 2003, an issue with the theme ‘Economy, Communication and Neo-Liberal Politics’.

What is the electric life of words? [1]

     Feeling somehow disappeared
into immediacy, screens & haste
for the life unattainable, the no-opinion  [2]
     as big city wears
its beautiful walls of hype
as streets clang onto morning
     Drains ring & computers bling
in my dreams or my waking
drift of a continent  [3]
     I need to feel the wind not
listen to the forecast
Of course, a storm is coming!  [4]
Who may I be? Ultimate product / ultimate process! Where has difference gone apart from ‘us & them’? I want to bite through these words as I say them

     Story jostles in careful bear pit grabs
Us sad creatures, dumb animals
trained as actors
So, kiss me before I die
in the arms of the remote control
that I may never be lonely
skimming the sheen
with the other buttons
Meat clasped with silicon
tickling the box


Abraham Lincoln was killed by an actor. In The West Wing Martin Sheen is America’s favourite leader. Ronald Reagan starred in Bedtime for Bonzo. In real life the ‘cowboy simplicities’ return.  [5]
War is scripted adventure & applause, like Survivor, like Countdown
Destruction as pleasure, mine or yours?

Marilyn Manson’s eye is a fake but he speaks to Michael Moore in that scene in Bowling for Columbine, in some kind of, well, sense. Until you listen.  [6]
What do I make of it? Using rock & roll politics or buying a gun for the camera. Humiliate, shock, exterminate. Dalek for a day!


     Perhaps I don’t like reading myself
as a city of immediate dreams
feeling my 15 minutes sink
to the bottom of my harbour

Who is living & who is dead, if Elvis is still in the building, Diana still in the revolving door?  [7]
     Seagull arcs in cumulus. Catching the play
satellite dish. White cloud, human games
     pulling fractures out of the sky
See through the floating moon.
     It disappears, drowns in day. With me.
Waves of noise, dying time

Photocopy your memories before you lose them in the shredding

     Presidents & premiers struggle for supremacy
sickles & pop stars, sacred furry animals
Oh holy package, backed up by meistersingers
the cojones that saved the world!
Was it Arnie, was it Maggie, Pope John Paul Ringo?
Or the big muscle for the workers
the true religion, Stalin’s moustache?
Dicks & staves, Buddha’s feet & swastikas
Madonnas & holy shards? Kylie eleison?  [8]
The montage sequence of dreams, continually unfulfilled for contestants in the game. The images have drunk down my energy.

     Effigies crash through a tinted screen
afternoon sun sits on the polis
I can no longer smell
the fresh, dangerous & dank —
if a tree falls in the forest
or the homeless outside a building

All the words are now screened. Endless loss.  [9]
There’s other media still feeling glossy, shiny. The names: Lino, Nylon, Wallpaper — nostalgic & knowing. Dazed and Confused, Vanity Fair. Less like heralds, suns, stars, couriers

     Real life is wallpaper
bombs, cracked streets & bodies
divided by ad breaks.

Murdoch asks the world to ‘respect’ the US war against Iraq.  [10]
     Lapel mikes & patriotic tie pins
cheerleading the expertise over-run
of television generals
     Am I too in someone’s rolodex of experts
sitting in a kind of blear judgment
early morning in a furry chair?  [11]
     Nothing is left outside
all picked over (the birds wait)
disjunct      info/ ad suction
parade of text (an old chorus)
at the bottom of bulletins
linear drag of words (soundtrack bleeps)
     Pixels seize eyes & days
     Embedded journalists
fed into war machine
to die under the friendly gun
a strategic ‘own goal’,
Whose truth is the war heat? Who the dis-embedded?

Despite surveillance, you are invisible. Dead watching the dead

     What is represented & who am I —
in what category do I fall or rise into
my docility, walking into fire
     ‘Issues’ flow out from day-glo ichor
the new body — virtual gothic & bullet points
while gates are clanging
     on information superhighways
The wind revs my hair, where
is the route less travelled by?

     Who carries cargo of decisions, exceptions
to the rule? Servants sacrificed
     tossed in. The public drownings

My hand stills. Blank pen. I’m beached
     by email surge. Open a door! Salt
& harbour recall fog horns, departures
     Staples draw blood. My finger cries.  ‘COPY’
stamped in blurs. Never-ending
     colour of words tiring out the machines

Drooling comment judges the sexed body & bad words as far worse than slaughter. It’s consolation & retreat along the luscious skin of anxiety
     And what’s hidden?
Old things / fresh things

The remaining gods disagree about the media. Logos? Imago? Where may the poet stand?  [12]

Details are a transgression as are old books with spines & covers

What we need: Disbelief & madness!

What we have: Disbelief & madness!

Where we are going: Yes, prizewinner!


God didn’t die. He fled west to another desert and moonlights in the piano bar of The Bellagio, Las Vegas, singing nightly in a whisper: ‘ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby’.  [13]
The past is reply but who cares so long as it entertains the hours again. The moments get wheezier as the film declines. Each minute removed into an episode of Meet the Ancestors

     ‘Read my lips’? But could I
touch your lips & feel
their sweat & saliva, faint beat of blood
even desire or staunchness
on the end of the phone?
But there is no end — circles twist
helixes of infotainment & surveillance
Even politicians burn
in the electric storm.

All the beautiful young bodies no longer serving the state. The state is beyond the state

     How do you feel skin & bark, rock & grass?
Losing touch. Worlds smelling like pizza.
     A path shimmers through windows.
Headlights find stars in steel & glass.
Planets hidden, diamond glare through darkness.

Getting lost — my fifteen minutes

Jill Jones: Presentation for Sydney Poetry Seminar, 2003, published in Five Bells vol.10 no.3 2003

I am in doubt, I play into gaps.
I want to walk through a place and look
around, I want my poems to do that.
In one moment I gaze out the window and there is sky and
no blousy metaphor can really get around it, no tight
little equation can dispel it. The windows rattle in the wind
it is only a few storeys up but it is a view and I’m
in landscape wishing I could go home, to a place
having a drink and a bite to eat in my little edgy
terrain and wonder where I am going, as a poet
because that is what I’m trying to say here.
This poem trying to say what cannot be said any other
way, yet knowing it cannot be said in poetry
either — it is reaching but not arriving at a stop.

But moments can only hold for so long in the words
which do not try to set up
the big image that tells you how to think and see
or offer the perfect little lyric in its hermetic art space
but move, like split screen scenes, or the stop-and-go
how Miles set it up in the 70s. How Laurie says:
‘you get to a place of calm in the inner area
of the cyclone’.  [14]
Or Archie Shepp, Howling
in the silence. I don’t howl but into the silence
which is not, into the cacophany, which is
day music around me. I’m not making the music
but duration and emphasis, rhythm and sound
how and when lines turn, they matter to me.
A keyboard can sing.
My screen talks to me in its pitched way.
More importantly, my corpuscles jive together
with my nerves and waters, the old
heart muscle boogie — its daily doof doof up the road.
I make repetitions for their music and their
exploring, of doubt and possibility —
too much for my own good, it has been said.
If poetry and songs are about themselves and they move
me, then it’s how they use language. Or, it’s how I say,
‘I love you, don’t go’.
As someone said lately, obviously: ‘jazz isn’t the tune
it’s how the tune is sung/ played’.  [15]
Voicings and sounds are part of a poem’s music
but musicality, well, of course, you needn’t
be smooth, if it’s harsh, atonal, that is its music.

How composition works as language works
its way through the world, appropriating as it travels
so I pick through pieces in the google of my mind.
As I play into the spaces of poetry
even more, I make my appropriations
as artists have always done (when will someone
steal from me? I can hope.)
Is it a question of who is speaking?
It’s not that I’m trying to avoid my responsibility
but the words that come —
more like a late arriving and apologetic guest than some
electric sexual gush — sound like the
same old / same old.

As the world all seemed the same where I
came from and entirely different elsewhere
as though a secret was being kept from me
but not music, that was the way, and words
even beyond the dark green rooms that later
I would write about. But it was my own karaoke
looking up at those old space machines
looking down on us, our block, our little section
in its row, so homely and strange.
How hard was it to get away? I didn’t
understand how syntax can mess your head
when bread was daily. I wanted to write words
through my body into the world’s, onto someone’s.
It was always and first a dialogue, lines against
the lie you suspected you paid for.
There is a kind of listening I used to do.
Now the conversations are everywhere.

Standing in my territory or passing through
other spaces, not aiming for solidity, I use
the maps I can to get along and through.
Prepositions are important — above, around
beside me they describe placements, points of view
qualifiers, the uncertainty principle, an unreliable narrator.
Ah, that old cliche ‘flaneur’, thrown at me
as though it explains a poet writing cities
as if it could grasp why walking around
(for someone who does not drive), is the way to see
but Sydney isn’t Paris, not a grid of arcades and avenues
which I am trying to subvert or transgress.
It slides around the harbour and splays
across the plain in its forgetfulness.
I want to make connections, unexpected ones
as a kind of tracer of feeling, the desperate kiss
of urban rhapsody, translating skin and terrain
into time, that echoes in the ear with other times and places
discovering how a text lives differently
voice, song, graffiti, daily, momentary.
I’ve tried to shake out some of my words
write long skinny poems, tried to move things along
let words do a bit more work, write antidotes
to my own antidotes. When gravity sneaks up on you
and lets you down, when, as Tony Towle writes
‘political famine rages
and Wit is burned in the presence of Theory,’  [16]
what do you do? I go for a walk.

Am I perverse, attracted to unfashionable ideas
for instance, good poems can be speculative, discursive, committed.
Mine are not occasional observations, though chance
is a wonderful tool,
and my poems are never unaccompanied
they’re part a world, always moving
not pure objects of contemplation, but unfinished
continuing work so sometimes even the best
seem awkward and gritty. Just as my skin
isn’t smooth under this sun.

I, too, dislike that tyranny, the poetry of things
its controlling empiricism fooling itself it’s being
respectful, open.
Poems bear sighs and signs, of making and origin.
I track between states, times, locales.
Shifting borders. Openings in closures.
Gaps are not ‘nothing’, absence is a presence.
We feel it — that’s what elegy is about.
I talk into locations, displacements
mistakes, the way I put together a place
then leap. I welcome the great themes
like the weather. Just like Ashbery.

There was a time when it seemed to slip
for me, that age of big steaming bowls of metaphor
you didn’t have to think about, when thought
was on a slim ration. I should have moved to Brisbane
at that point or done a dyke goth number
but working without champions
put me in the somewhere else, and where
else would I have fallen anyway. You can’t
start from the beginning, there is always
someone behind you — oh, the great lie of
choice. Forward is more like a spiral, a spin, a stagger
and who was I going to talk to but myself
which just makes weary. So the lines talk
and the paragraphs sidle up next to each other
and if there’s dirty words, hey, I’m no purist
when the language asks for its limits
in the restaurant, and who asked him to call her
‘a fucking cunt’, who asked anybody
but that’s the bind, like a river never free
of the discharge, the chemistry that floats and dangles
catching at the air, the lungs of the poem breathe
but with difficulty, well, I want it to breathe if it can
in the new slim tall stacks I’ve been making
winding round the life between air and history
time and paths I walk or ride, between what passes for
the routes of each day, changing the characters that beg or ignore
deep in ghosts of thought, under headlines
half a dialogue on a phone, T-shirts, walls —
‘oz no more whing u next’ —
warnings, carry bags, the way not everything connects
but itches, grabs or slides by, even dissolves
or swims up, a photograph floats in its bath or on a screen
the poem speaks off its page, brushes the tongue
mis-spells itself.
I cannot make the planet safe for poetry
nothing is safe and ‘to live outside the law
you must be honest’.  [17] Dylan sang that once, but it’s hard
when you’re part of the problem.
In 1991 Baghdad poet Sinan Antoon wrote:
‘we will baptize our infants with smoke
plough their tongues
with flagrant war songs
or UN resolutions
teach them the bray of slogans
and leave them beside burning nipples
in an imminent wreckage
and applaud’  [18]
Hanging off the mountain, falling back into the city
speaking into a smoking world, standing beside slabs
of doctrine and war, feeling their cruel hot glow
with my hands, things I’m part of, something
must be said, when every poem is about life and death.
But how? And what can I know, apart from
my own patch or pool, looking for ground
among raptures of information and bombs
ruptures in language and bodies.
Some places are dangerous to walk into
why I’m afraid, even without a name
but why I must learn to give up my excuses.

These now are the best years then, to not have
to worry about reputation, unlike a French chef loosing
stars and ratings, making suicide with a rifle.
I can learn to love the bomb of scary words.
It doesn’t matter I’ve become
a bit of a hybrid, tenuous, uneasy
even a little ridiculous, with two ways going —
between the quick and the risky, meaning
I operate between poles which threaten
to reverse, it is an edge but the disaster of falling
pulls back, no longer does the world intrude
its fames and lists, where I’ve gone missing.
No matter I might live upon a land where poetry bibles
are edited by men with those common English names
(and there may only be one approved
Australian poet called Jill, and it isn’t me).
As the musician says ‘never mind’ — or the sham
of advice says ‘this too will pass’ — there is still
terrain to cross and I say to myself ‘let’s get
lost’. If no-one sees you, no one can touch you
if censors and star troopers and beautiful
young men blink through your now-faint shimmer
let them, for indeed, they are beautiful and they
are right. If I make no place, that is a place of
many, voicing not even in the margins
(where everyone says they are anyway) but off
the edge just spacing around and taking it
as it comes, taking it like a poet, moaning about
the state of things but in between that, making
moments —

Practising around ‘the authentic’

Jill Jones: Presentation for Sydney Poetry Seminar 2005, published in Five Bells, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2005.

Walking is important, slow mobility across terrain, the temporal process.

That writing is experience.

‘Beauty is momentary in the mind-/ The fitful tracing of a portal;/ But in the flesh it is immortal’ (Wallace Stevens)

An ongoing disclosure of beings.

That language is extravagance in the body — ‘a mouth mapping/ amplitude’ (Michele Leggott)

That poems have no excuses.

That there’s at least one question in a poem.

‘Could you write about this?’ (Anna Akhmatova)

Examine each line, each phrase. What else can they do?

Run words into the change machines: using ink, dictionaries, babel fish, cut-up and write over. The cento is an old form. Technologies change, that’s all.

Is the authentic thing the lost thing?

Authentic yet ephemeral?

Grammar as an abstraction of time. And time itself?

Fragments are fun.

Trying not to tell images what to do.

Talk amongst your selves.

‘My transparent selves/ flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing/ without panic’ (Frank O’Hara)

You’re always standing somewhere — and what do you see?

Possibility isn’t exclusionary — so it can point to things.

The most interesting things go on in between — bodies, houses.

That solitude implies the social.

Authentic is the dark, and the surface, the rough and shine.

Who do you think you are speaking for and who are you speaking with?

Resonance or ‘Ring of Truth’?

Rapport builds over time.

If you’re not interested in form are you really a poet?

Where do poems begin? In sound or sense?

That world isn’t simple.

‘I’ve never believed that poetry is an escape from history.’ (Adrienne Rich)

That world is a wild artifice — complexity making itself/ s.

To make a self doesn’t make sense, and it keeps falling down.

I keep falling down.

I’m not sure I can understand my processes but they arise out of actions.

How aware can you be of being aware?

That poems are never unaccompanied, they are practised in a context, a world.

That poems are always working.

Always reaching the border, that tricky negotiation, especially if they don’t like your pass.

Theory doesn’t erase mimesis.

It’s happening beyond the frame.

Is an authentic poem ever finished?

That an authentic poem has no use value.

‘Things explain each other, not themselves.’ (George Oppen)

That poems are made of words (Stephane Mallarme).

That poems have no taste.

The I as performance rather than confession, autobiography.

That poems are what can’t be done elsewhere.

It’s this and this and this, here and here. And then ...

I know I know, I know, but sometimes I don’t know, and then: to know how not to know, just walking along.

In the end, keeping on. No end and it doesn’t matter, someone’s listening, even if they do not hear, the sound carries.

I jump in the midst of the flow, experience, language underway.

I have found I need more tenderness to pick up the pieces.

Awe is an engine, the particular, ‘a glitch in the system’?

Where are the new senses?

The centre can get empty, the periphery loves a crowd.

It is broken — it is open.

‘The best lack all conviction while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity’ (W.B. Yeats)

That a picture is flat.

‘Ego is not a dirty word.’ (Greg Macainsh)

What does a work claim, and what does it go by?

Can we always expect the unexpected?

Sometimes it’s terrifying to be startled by a metaphor.

That naming can be dangerous — one name, that is. Can we forget the name?

That we can’t avoid our selves. Whatever selves we think we are.

That we shape ourselves in company.

That otherness is other than what it may appear.

Experience rather than autobiography.

‘Experience which is passed from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.’ (Walter Benjamin)

Look up from the page. Look along its surface. Don’t always worry about the lamp.

Crucial and impossible as knowing.

Poems slowly accruing evidence — of what?

Indeterminacy in natural selection — chances of discovery.

Everyone has an agenda.

Codes are not always clear.

Implications — implicated.

That new things aren’t always big.

Without purpose. But going in directions.

That a poem is walking, turns, memories, a map made of words.

Well might I ask ‘who am I?’ but is that the poem?

What is outside or gets beyond systems?

Poetry is authentic because it makes no money.

Poetry isn’t reality TV (or maybe it is).

‘Every poem is the anti-computer, even the one written by a computer’ (attributed to Paul Celan)

Authenticity is mistakes.

Writing beyond censorship.

‘Emptiness’.

Do I have to have ‘something’ to say?

What is an authentic emotion and what isn’t?

A lot happens on the surface, the surface ripples and flows.

Can the poem include its own processes of elucidation?

Is the palimpsest authentic or only the peasant’s worn-out shoes?

‘Sympathy’.

A matter of attention.

Warts and all.

‘The black swan of trespass’ (Ern Malley).

The impossibility of being completely faithful in language.

No tricks with texts?

How open can forms be?

Is the Self making a comeback — did It ever go away?

Critical ventriloquism, or just the poem, thank you?

The authentic image? Show me!

Room for uncertainties.

No expectations.

Your story is not my story, even though we were both in the same room.

Bliss never ends, it’s transitional, and is only ever interrupted.

Authentic is not well-made, authentic is not whole, authentic does this, does that.

Lines are choices.

That a poem’s knowing is not one of certainty.

That the poem doesn’t know.

‘Scorn not these flowers of thought’ (P.B. Shelley).

That a poem is a landscape, not a hierarchy.

‘I care most about poetry that disrupts business as usual.’ (Charles Bernstein)

That the image needs to be scrutinised.

That words are images on a page.

That poems are textures.

A day is never dull, even under clouds.

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