Salt Modern Poets
2 total works
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.
It's the tail end of the Seventies, the severity of hypothetical Marxism has given way to the anti-humanism of punk. In a province, someone anglophobe and technophile is attempting to write documentary poetry about the situation at work, where the basic power relations never slip out of mind: an unending cascade of concrete and puzzling problems, of human conjunctures. The real ordinance of society follows an ideology which is secret, covered by a false public one; other forms of consciousness are a shifting set of part-patterns. All around, a generation of English poets are connecting their output to their input. A cultural blockade comes down over all poetry except the most subservient. Filtered expanses of monochrome nuance concealed the fact that nothing was being said. The industrial recession of the Thatcher years lays bare the fragility of every social and psychological structure. Somewhere in the underground of North London, the invisibility allows a constant approximation to popular culture. The infinite compression of punk breaks up into a boundless release, the rediscovery of melody and colour. Melancholic and esoteric virtuosity in deserted spaces is interrupted by a troupe of bedizened dropouts, impossibly nimble and competitive, and is redirected towards bright patched surfaces. The attack by the State and the South on a whole engineering civilisation is protested by the construction of complex symbolic machines. A lucid equivalent of turmoil is not the same as unstable maps of instability.