The instruction for this new volume was to write poems with no autobiographical content - going straight to personal myth. The Imaginary in Geometry is named for a book by a legendary Russian priest and mathematician martyred by the Bolsheviks. It means that any theory involves idealisation - but also how something imaginary takes on shape and dimensions in the artistic act. Breton wanted to change Malraux's definition of modern art, as what develops a series of images into a personal myth, into the discovery of a collective stock of images, rooted in the unconscious. Such a return of archaic worlds to light would have to pick its way through the debris of myths wished on us by the agencies - Anglophilia, a Romance of the Docks is a lingering exploration of the lost world of mid-century propaganda, the alluring stories of a leisure class in ideal clothes. Photographs open onto a beckoning space of generosity and inauthenticity, a glittering demon world which engulfs us we say yes to it. How indeed would we reconstruct the Past once we discard these pop images with their discreet divinities? More fundamental than a mythic narrative is the fabric of the space in which it takes place as a momentary series of high points. Symbolic space is something non-finite which can be built up by finite steps. On the Beach at Aberystwyth is a journey in another geometry, the Western Seaways as the routes along which Celtic culture spread. It answers the question, what is social structure?
Early preoccupations with Socialist Realism and technophilia are continued here by poems about the inventor of double-tracking and a Spiritualist clergyman who constructed a machine of unknown purpose at the command of spirits.
- ISBN10 6610950253
- ISBN13 9786610950256
- Publish Date 1 January 2005
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 18 May 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Salt Publishing
- Format eBook
- Pages 112
- Language English