Jackdaws’ voices slowed down
are the sound of slate moving over slate
the slide of shale and scree
scraped together in a steep-sided valley.

These are the black dots
joining crag to crag, holes punched
in mist, picking the outlines of hills
like dreams of whales rising, waterfalls
spuming their white ropes up the cliff.

The raven crows over then,
its one gutteral echoing
in the book folds of stone,
swallowing them
in the loud swing of its wings;
on a different timescale.

Here is a rune vocabulary
so easy to memorize,
even easier to forget.

We recognize it from below,
hold its dark flame a moment,
then let it be the one
to let go of us. Always,
the stream’s tremendous rush,
the tap left on,
the plugholing feather.

Faith (Pants)

I said ‘there’s no chance you’ll get anything back.’
But you wrapped a blue pair and sent them.

The chain-letter of knickers carried on
without us watching, mysterious packages
loosed on the globe in elliptical orbits.
‘It’s just a bit of fun – I reckon it’ll work.’

‘Nah.’

But the first pair appeared quite soon.
Black and lacy with thin pink ribbons,
you tried them on: they seemed real,
if ornate. You tried them off. Delicate.

That night the moon fizzed high ice-clouds,
evensong crept back into the sheet music,
black cats disappeared into stick-on cartoon holes.

There was a long pause.
Silence from the secret pant-giving world.
Then one day, after we’d forgotten,
the second pair arrived: stripy, relaxed,
more suitable for general use.
‘I like them actually, I think I’m gonna wear them.’
As there were no particulars
who the sender was we’ll never know.

Nothing else after that: the chain had outgrown you,
forked/ doubled, finally broken. Unlinked.

Thetis

A handsome goddess, forgotten,
overlooked, you might have been
creator of the universe,
celebrated in one extant early hymn,
a fragment that won’t hold up.
You were lost somewhere
in time’s puppet-show;
a white glove would finger
dust off your name.

Sea-dazed,
it’s clear you’ve crawled out,
become
a silverfish, even-toned,
articulated and glistening
after your third moult,

eating the grouting,
toeing the line where fixed things
hang together, with your delicate silver feet
placed carefully,

always on a constitutional.
Three tails mean you’re cousin of the mayfly:
so cough up ephemera,
admit plasticity. ‘At least 300 million years’
laundered through your shell.

I found you in a typo,
then read up on Wikipedia.
Anything spun like this
is more a footnote to
a footnote to a footnote
than godlike; a sneeze arriving.
An invented memory,
with you silvering between the lines
like a banknote’s metallic thread,
a slug’s brittle next-day trail,
the milky way.

Coming Up

                              The pause
before the pause.

Ritual-free (thankfully),
just foreshortened reflections
in fragments of mirrors,
jokes about the credit crunch,
then a crash-zoom close-up:
mucus membranes
   dilation
        pulse-trip, eu-
            -phoria;
so
much
love. Mate.

The annotations on the back of your hand
loosen, fly
to the corners of the room,
hang there, obscure
as bats in the daytime,
retracing their dreams thinly.

Music focuses, tightens,
bulges with intricate
simplicity, synaesthetically
communicates its need for a drink.
A cigarette like having a swim.

Vicarious: a trick game
of false hands under desks,
of rubbing each others noses.
Someone. is touching. you.
in another room, just like this
in another house, in another
city, world, universe, using
the childish form of address.

Sunlight begins to dilute
the dancing particles,
atoms of love in us.

Like the judder of slight turbulence
the sinking lift of the plane
leaning on space, feeling
for the troposphere, measuring
parabolas, ululating air
through opening doors, finding
the gradual lurch of nothing. Just
                               the pause
after the pause.

Polecat

On a blink of road
we catch it in our headlights, unhesitant.
Its eyes, lit orange for the brief
recognition, are two small hells.
The pelt is a metallic shiver
dragging air closed behind,
before it dives back into the hedge-world
on the other side.
No splash, no ripple.

To follow would be a face full of thorns
and a long traipse through acrimonious shadows.
Whatever your opinion
don’t stop the car.

Feisty in its burrow
a polecat squeezes red ink
from the heart of your favourite cock,
the third in a lineage
scrummed and plucked,
by one of these ‘little fuckers,
not even good for a scarf.’
The answer to a question
you never want to ask,

always dodging the trap’s
pranged parenthesis.

DAVID HAWKINS works in London as an editor. His work has previously appeared in the May Anthologies and The Edgeless Shape. He also writes for The Ecologist magazine.

In an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones, BlackBerrys, Instant Messaging, digital cameras, a global internet with no inhibitions, hand-held videocameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There’s never been a war fought in this environment before.

As Rumsfeld’s analysis suggests, the War on Terror has been subject to a dramatic profusion in the means of documenting and disseminating imagery of the conflict – in a way that had not previously been witnessed. (Rumsfeld’s analysis can in part be read as a response to the capacity of this environment to expose aspects of the War on Terror he and his colleagues in the Bush administration would have preferred not to have seen the light of day).

The need to think through the implications of the ways in which the War on Terror has seemingly been opened up and rendered visible to publics at the level of media coverage of the conflict, but also in regard to more fundamental questions of seeing, stands at the heart of my recent book Re-Imagining the War on Terror: seeing, waiting, travelling (Palgrave, 2009).

Whilst in the Babelic profusion of commentary and analysis of the War on Terror  Western publics (a vast, amorphous conceptualisation perhaps, but a necessary one all the same) have primarily been configured as audiences and spectators, it is important to consider a far less well surveyed dimension of the conflict – the way in which these publics have themselves been positioned as seen, how they have come to find themselves caught in two gazes, and in turn, the position this has served to locate them in, in the midst of this ‘war’.

The Enemy’s gaze

The first of these gazes I want to point to is that of the Enemy. Western publics have rarely encountered depictions of the Enemy’s gaze whilst a conflict is taking place. In the Vietnam War – a conflict that in many ways witnessed an opening up of the visual depiction of war – whilst certain images, such as Mai Nam’s 1966 photograph of an United States F-105 pilot ejecting after his plane had been hit, did achieve a profile in the West, Western publics were confronted with comparatively few images of the conflict as seen from a North Vietnamese standpoint.

Rather, historically – in the Vietnam conflict itself, and before and since – deliberate efforts have been made to foreclose Western publics’ awareness of the terms in which the Enemy sees. The latter can be understood as stemming from both the fears an encounter with the Enemy’s gaze might provoke, and the possible value of this gaze as an instrument of propaganda.

In the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq – as in other conflicts – Western publics have had the greatest chance of encountering the Enemy’s gaze if it depicts the enemy as victim. (Just as it is as victim that Western publics are most likely to encounter the Enemy depicted in general). In both the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War for example, images of these conflicts seen from an Iraqi perspective were for Western publics largely restricted to brief excerpts of Saddam Hussein and his ministers taken from Iraqi television – the exception being footage of Iraqis lying wounded and dying in hospitals and medical centres, of which repeated excerpts were shown (again, often gleaned from Iraqi television).
Where the War on Terror has marked a break with this paradigm is in the proliferation of imagery produced and distributed by the Enemy, that, above all through developments in digital technology, have become accessible to Western publics in a way not seen previously. This has included videos of Western hostages seized in Iraq, Bin Laden’s video appearances, footage of the Enemy carrying out their missions, and – in a case from June 2007- a suicide bomber ‘graduation ceremony’ held on the Afghanistan-Paksitan border, presided over by the Taliban’s military commander Mansoor Dadullah.

Two intersecting aspects of the significance of these depictions of the Enemy’s gaze are worth emphasising. Firstly, this imagery establishes that the Enemy does indeed possess a gaze, and as such it serves to enhance and render ‘more real’ the awareness of the existence of the Enemy, in the sense that as Sartre (1957:256) contends, ‘my fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other’. At the same time, taking up Lacan’s conception of ‘the gaze’ as the individual subject’s conception of an abstract realm of the Other’s vision, this realisation serves to render Western publics at the mercy of this gaze. (And here it’s worth noting how in his 1962-3 seminar on anxiety, Lacan locates exposure to the Other’s gaze as a – it might be argued the - fundamental source of anxiety). Secondly, this imagery – and here the videos of Western hostages being held, and in certain cases, executed in Iraq (and elsewhere) are particularly notable – renders visible the Enemy’s ability to capture and kill its opponents, making all too clear the possible consequences of exposure to this gaze.

In the context of the War on Terror the fears have come to take on a more definite sense of threat, as underlined by the way in which the Enemy has ‘infiltrated’ and come to ‘exist within’ Western societies – as evident in, for example, the September 11 attacks and the subsequent strikes on Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005) – with these attacks serving to confirm that these fears have moved from the realm of the abstract to assuming a locatable reality. These attacks have served to foreground the awareness that the Enemy’s gaze can indeed be trained upon Western publics, ‘Right here, where they are’, provoking the realisation that the suffering audiences witness in these hostage videos could come to be inflicted upon these publics as they go about their everyday lives. As such this imagery serves to emphasise the Western subject’s vulnerability and their status as a possible, visible target of future attacks.

The State’s insecure gaze

The second gaze I want to turn to that Western publics have come to find themselves subject to in the War on Terror is that of the State. The history of the terms in which Western publics have been subject to this gaze has been extensively analysed. My concern here is with the way in which, since the September 11 attacks, this gaze has been extended in response to – or, using the justification of – the threat of terrorist violence. This is a process that has occurred broadly across Western countries, in the United Kingdom, across Europe, and in the United States where the debates around the legality of ‘wiretapping’ (for which can be read ‘electronic surveillance’ in general) have been extensive. (Whilst it might be argued that the extensions of this gaze is less specifically or ‘purely’ visual than that of the Enemy’s gaze just discussed – being in one respect concerned with generating data – they remain bound up with the visual, with the reading of this data and the actions this reading leads to tied to questions of visuality and surveillance).

Two dimensions of the expansion of this gaze are worth highlighting. In one respect this expansion generates a fear about being watched over by the State that ties into the general sense of anxiety associated with the Other’s gaze (pointed to by Sartre, Lacan and a body of other analysts). However, this fear takes on an added dimension given the State’s relationship to the Law and the expansion in the power to detain citizens that has accompanied the extension of this gaze since September 2001.

At the same time though – and perhaps less obviously – the expansion of this gaze can be understood as enhancing the fears around precisely the type of threat it is intended to guard against. At one level this gaze seeks to reassure publics that they are being watched over. At another however, this gaze suggests that such is the nature and scale of the threat faced by Western publics that this threat remains always imminent and needing constantly to be watched out for – on as broad a scale as possible (see for example the image above). In so doing the expansion of this gaze serves to increase the anxiety it is purportedly intended to reduce. Indeed, the repeated assertion by security officials in the United Kingdom that future attacks will take place, serves, it can be argued, to fundamentally destabilise the efficacy of this gaze, and to highlight the limitations of the State and its strategies of seeing, contributing to a sense of desperation that nothing can really be done to halt this threat.

How to look good naked

How then have these two ‘competing’ gazes come to shape the position occupied by Western publics in the War on Terror?

Firstly, it is worth pointing to the way in which Western publics find themselves perpetually at risk of exposure to both gazes. Such is the proliferation of visual, surveillance technologies, and the capacity for unidentified individuals to deploy these technologies, that whilst we are aware we may be being watched over, we typically remain uncertain of when, where and by whom we might be being watched at any point in time.

Secondly, these two gazes serve to position Western publics as potential targets and victims. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of the Enemy’s gaze, but it is there too in the extension of the State’s gaze in response to the threat of terrorism, in terms of the justification for this gaze being underpinned by the threat of publics becoming targets. At the same time the State’s gaze serves to position members of these publics as potential aggressors, that need to be watched over for what they might be up to. And here the broader ties between the War on Terror and the rise of a more general discourse of security obsessed with how people behave in public – confirmed again to me by a recent visit to the US, but increasingly apparent in the UK as well – is evident.

More broadly then – and this is a good point to conclude upon – these two gazes give rise to a subject whose visual profile and presence is foregrounded as a source of ongoing anxiety. Such a dynamic is evident at a rather different level in the contemporary West, in the plethora of television shows devoted to the anxiety of appearance: How to look ten years longer, How to look good naked etc – that can themselves be located as symptoms of an anxiety about being seen, which the proliferation in the circulation of imagery and image producing technology has served to heighten. In the case of the War on Terror that stakes are somewhat higher: it is as visible targets and as needing to be watched over to be protected, that in this conflict Western publics have come to be configured and to see themselves.

References

Lacan, Jacques, (1962-1963) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Anxiety, Book X. Unpublished. Translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts.

Sartre, Jean Paul (1957) Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. London: Methuen.

Andrew Hill is Research Fellow in Visual Culture in the Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change, The Open University. a.hill@open.ac.uk. You can buy his recent book Reimagining the War on Terror at this link, a preview chapter is available here

My own interest in the arts has been extracurricular. Up from the gutter, so to speak. Of necessity.
William Carlos Williams, The Wedge

Goodbye, for now.

We regret to say that Geometer will be taking a temporary break from publishing. Regular readers will have noticed the decline in activity on the site as work commitments and personal projects have increasingly eaten into the time we’ve been able to commit to it. This being the case, rather than press on at our current rather sluggish pace while your patience with us ebbs gradually away, we’ve decided to take an “official” break, with the intention of restarting the site when we have the time to do it justice. In the mean time the site’s archives will be maintained in their current state – all work published on the site will continue to be available.

We’d both like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has contributed to Geometer over the past 8 months – we’ve been proud to provide a showcase for some really superb writing and art.

Adam and Dan
Email: editors@geometer.org.uk

_
The Nightself
Swallow the sun
to bring the night.
the smell of blood,
crisp and wet, like
rusted pipes and
sewery veins hangs
in the room
the battlefield of this
primitive surgery.
Thick musk—leather and soot, shrouds
first the torso, then
the thigh,
over the calf and to the tip
of the pinky toe.
Pulverize the beautiful
acerbic charm
luring from the corner.
An echo of a howl claws
the room, side
to side
rotting from the inside
out.

_

_
In the Eyes of the Tiger
Hands the size of teacups
never chainsaws
Her once loved face
crumbles
She blinks with thick compliance
He still finds her
beauty
___in a certain light

_

_
Etiquette Lessons in San José
Flying overhead watching San José
become a toy
city, then a geometric blob
Her glassy-eyed pieties
her tanned bare feet like sandpaper
against brittle pavement
her head throbs her head throbs her head throbs
the unrefined staccato of her taste; their
buttery thighs tied up in knots
his threads of grey
a conversational trope like the stock market
her chiseled heart
Day trips to El Carmen and San Sebastián
an evening at the Teatro Nacionel, after
a Gold Museum, before
an oak-paneled laundry room

_

The Wedding
She loved music
thick, rough, grinding, heavy, gripping, pounding, music
the charisma of a C major, the lure of an F sharp
rag, blues, funk, A cappella, rock, rhythm
sweat, man, spittle, whiskey, morning after—smells
A pock mark where
the music’s been removed
now she finds darkness wrapped in a large handkerchief
the ugliness of the night undressed
beer un-suctioning thighs
Wince
Cigarettes and wedding bands
humming in white only
a Chocolate Lake
space touching her
flowers rotted like flesh
throw rocks
throw anything
Chink
Eyes closed to concentrate
lost in a pot hole on the Trans Canada
tall trees
tall men
a room full with colours of people
fuchsia, tangerine, saffron, crimson and pistachio
Discard.

_

_

Answers Like Filling in a Questionnaire
Answers like filling in a questionnaire
___If only they’d been more tolerant
A voice high and unstable
Pulsing tongues in junior high bathrooms
Credit for courage?
Leggy girls in summer clothes
___If only they’d encouraged me more
Chapped lips flake like grated cheddar
Personalities subsumed like phagocytes
and molecules.
Warm palms brush then slither
___If only they’d been more strict
Mattressy eyebrows
Suspiciously perfect teeth
Wear lower heels next time.
Electric feel—Monochrome to Technicolour
___If only they’d applauded me for the right things.
Battle wounds from vampire
neck bites
What a farce.

_

__

Mental Incest
The preliminary version of my own life is sticky, sloppy, syrupy and soupy like concentrated pink lemonade. I find myself goaded to anger at the slightest tickle, the most inconsequential prick, any possible hint of animosity provokes audacity, vigorous hair-pulling, merciless arm-scratching, barbaric biting, I’m not above any of it; after tireless attempts to re-invent innocence I realize that throbbing heads, pulsing pelvic bones, red crayon lips and heavy black smoke thrilling the insides of dank moist lungs isn’t exactly innocent. Is innocence pliable like the hinge of a jaw, the span of two wings, the axis of two meaty thighs? Ultimately my thoughts lead to heavy moping, despondent shrugs towards emptiness, my aim for a coercive gesture hangs frivolously, unnoticed, untouched, unkempt like rich, chunky, matted, sweaty hair. You know language can express what a face knows, your primitive astonishment, your pedantic approach, which you claim is the prologue, simply lateral thinking, only excuses, hazy, amorphous, shadowy covers for residual guilt. In fact, your vitriolic spits of languid vocabulary express far too much, like how freshly mown grass is too perfect, unnaturally placid, inexplicably manicured, unnecessarily groomed. I’m picturing you, bated cherry breath, lascivious curving torso OK, caught in the filthy act, that’s me not you, a schoolgirl posing as a harlot, a vixen, a tramp, a hussy, a call girl, a slattern from generations past. Or is it the other way around—a tart acting as a schoolgirl? A whore play-acting as a debutante? Florescent thoughts parachute my snappy ‘take-it-away’ attitude, Ah the oppressive mother, the distant mother, the over-loving mother, has she sharpened her exacting scythe? Has she shined its spiny, scalloped edge? Wicked the erudite commentary from within her lava-hot, frosted-alabaster, cavernous throat—dank, acerbate, curdled stench and all. Lest we not forget her preternatural desire for love: a love rhombus, love in iambic pentameter, a gargantuan dollop of foamy, frothy love. Of course, there are the pursed kisses like raspy shards of metal from her porcelain jaw, that rope of mucus, gelatinous, swollen, opaque, and spongy like a jellyfish. Her immutable humiliation of my mundane memories, why not shove my banal thoughts down my paper-mâché throat like tentacles, pulsing and prying with porcine inaccuracy? Why not?

_

_

_

_

Bridget Arsenault is a twenty-two year old graduate student at Oxford University. During her undergraduate degree at Smith College in Massachusetts, she won the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize for excellence in fiction writing awarded by Smith College, the Sylvia Plath Memorial Award, an annual intercollegiate writing contest for poetry and prose, and the Smith College Excellence in English Award. These are the first poems she has published.

There are I think a number of points here, not many of which, to be truthful, bear too much going over. The dismissal of Heaney, and the response (still in it’s early gestation, I would accept) does seem to be a rehearsal of that familiar old debate between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘avant-garde’ poetry ’scenes’. I remember reading a similar set of exchanges in response to Don Paterson’s TS Eliot lecture a few years ago, in which the familiar poles reasserted themselves. I must confess that I join this debate quite late on, but I must similarly confess to thinking, on reading these exchanges, ‘a plague on both your houses’.

To be sure, Heaney (whether it’s an informal comment or not) does seem to be on to something when he questions the willingness to ‘engage’ of a figure such as Prynne; just as his implied criticism of the avant-garde poets as lacking the ‘rooted normality of the major talent’ reads as a little too calculatedly unkind, or perhaps better, a little too clumsily provocative.  A bit like conceding that a girl friend is attractive, ‘in an obvious way’.

But then the whole debate has something of the flavour of a marriage long gone awry. Whilst accepting that the argument ‘why can’t we all just get along’ is a tad facile, like that sad truculent step-child who might have uttered it, I do find myself seized of the desire to skulk, unhappily away…

A

New Zealand born, Bristol based musician Greg Godwin has been spitting out a steady stream of digital abstraction and analog scuzz for several years now. Since his 1999 cd Fluor, Greg has been busily releasing his noise on various formats and labels. I first heard his music on the excellent 3″CDr release “miniDsic” an unusually poised ep of cold abstract sound with a keen sense of restraint in the service of abjection. That release veered between stark distant hum, warm fuzz and frantic servo-twitch. In subsequent releases Greg has explored similar and more derranged territory.

__

As well as agreeing to this interview, Greg has kindly recorded three new tracks for Geometer magazine:

Balance Switch for Adris Hoyos

Nasal Windshield for John Stezaker

New Zion Psalms For Prince Far I

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INTERVIEW

Geometer: I think you’ve said before that you’ve never played a conventional musical instrument – how did you start making music?

Greg: Mainly through the inspiration of music I was listening to when I living in my home town of Wellington back in the late 1990’s. I was a pretty rabid listener and record buyer at the time and was inspired by the d.i.y./home recording philosophy of a bunch of New Zealand musicians I’d been turned onto at the time (see below). The realisation that making lo-fi, home taped sound was a completely valid expression for someone with no musical training was great. I bought a Fostex 4-track, analogue synth and a $50 guitar and just started recording for my own pleasure, not even with the intention of releasing it originally.

Geometer: Despite all the noise and chaotic textures, your work as dsic in particular often seems very carefully put together; there’ a kind of narrative to it. Is it a painstaking process, or does it progress pretty clearly and instinctively?

Greg: Well it depends on the tools and my mood really. some of the pure computer music is pretty structured, or at least put together with some thought of composition and dynamics and can take a while to put together, albeit intuitively because I have no real training. On the other hand, I’ve been employing more physical effects units, microphones and even vocals in recent work – that approach is more improvised and real-time. Bringing together both aspects into something coherent can be a struggle to achieve, and I ultimately end up pretty critical of the end result anyhow.

Geometer: I know you’ve talked about Kevin Drumm and John Weise as big influences on what you do – Who else would you say influences the sounds you’re making?

Greg: I’ve only really been listening to those artists relatively recently, so I wouldn’t say they are a big direct influences – probably more unconsciously as I really enjoy that kind of harsh noise anyhow and have been listening to a lot of the Japanese and American noise for a while. My biggest influences were really the NZ d.i.y underground, if not in sound then definately in spirit. I was listening to a bit of experimental music in the 90’s but always figured that it was produced overseas. I came across some articles in a local rock magazine talking about NZ bands like The Dead C and Xpressway records and the description seemed right up my street. It was odd because it seemed that there was an entire chunk of locally produced weird rock and experimental music right under our noses that was never discussed much in mainstream national music press – so I was drawn towards it. Picked up quite a few things on Bruce Russell’s (from The Dead C) amazing Corpus Hermeticum label and some early Birchville Cat Motel records and didn’t look back. Russell’s mail-order was great for getting hold of international musical weirdness through a local source.

At the same time I was digging some of the electronica coming out of Europe – Mego Records, people like Pita, early Fennesz, Florian Hecker, Oval, Farmers Manual. All this strange computer music that wasn’t quite dance and wasn’t quite noise and just seemed to be produced by guys messing around in offices with flaky music software or hacked up code. Glitch! I’d moved into a smallish flat after finishing university so didn’t have loads of space for guitars, amps so making music in the confines of a PC hard drive made sense. That stuff was a big influence for sure.

Geometer: Aut and dsic – Obviously there’s a fair bit of overlap in terms of sound between the two projects, but they do seem separate projects. To my ears at least AUT seems more about archives, memories and recordings – that foggy quality and the fact that the original tracks can often be glimpsed through the fog whereas DSIC – the first couple of releases at least seem more about the post-industrial and mechanisms. It reminds me of the precisely ordered inhuman noise of servos, dot matrix printers – stuff at the border between mechanical and electronic. That’s just my impression of course – how do you distinguish between the two projects?

Greg: dsic is freer and less conceptual and has a basis around computer music although draws in other elements too – its consciously got a harsher and colder edge. Aut was a bit more minimal and ‘warmer’ I suppose. That said, I have lots of 4-track tapes of early Aut music that is pretty dirty and closer in spirit to my more recent dsic music… guess i’ll release it at some point and that may  blur the distinction. Another reason I moved away from the Aut name is that an Italian post-rock group of the same name popped up a few years ago, so a good reason to start anew!

I hope to ‘return’ and do an Aut recording one day – a sequel to Home – back to electronica.

Geometer: One of the major trends of the past couple of years has been the resurgance of interest in memories and archives as material for artworks, a particularly music – what some writers have called “Hauntology”. But in common with a small but significant group of people as various as William Basinski, Oval, Plone, and Philip Jeck you were working with degraded archive material and the surface texture of recording in AUT back in 2000, well before the current trend formed – although arguably, this has been going on to a greater or lesser degree as long as people have been recording music. On the Fallt homepage you talk about the “elusive” nature of memory, and your “Home” album, which got a belated release last year, was accompanied by a quote from Genet

“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh.”

Is the discussion of Hauntology by people like Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher interesting to you, and does it strike a chord with you regarding what you were doing in AUT?

Greg: Ha, that quote is a bit pretentious and I don’t want to put too much weight on theory when it comes to the stuff I do. I was reading a lot of Genet at the time I recorded ‘Home’ so it seemed to strike a chord. The memory thing was more about a certain feeling that those old records that fed into the album gave me when I listened to them. A lot of sentimental feeling, especially with the adult-orientated/M.O.R rock source material kind of reminded me of listening to the radio when I was younger. Is that hauntology? I think emotion (and especially those emotions related to memory) can be felt in all music, and I don’t believe in a pure academic abstraction of sound. Even the the most severe and abstracted noise elicits a resonance that can be quite comforting if you give it enough time.

Of those artists above, I had only heard Oval at the time and I liked the cracked cd music he did… the glitch is the haunted digital machine – the proof that cheap and the broken consumer goods make the best sounds.

Geometer: Are you a fan of much of the stuff that gets termed Hauntological – Ghost Box, The Caretaker, Burial etc?

Greg: I’m bit ignorant I’m afraid – I’ve not heard the Ghost Box artists, so couldn’t say – aren’t they into analogue synths and library music? Not sure if its really where I’m coming from.

The Caretaker was one of the V/VM guys I think, and they had an amazing label going a few years ago. I must check it out then.

I love Burial though, “Untrue” is amazing… been listening to a load of dubstep recently and its really dark, skittery and moody stuff. Shackleton and the Skull Disco label too – they are haunted for sure. These are the sounds of Bristol nowdays and it seems very exciting but not talked about much in the big music press like The NME. The underground seems pretty healthy.

Geometer: What music is getting you excited at the moment? And anybody we might not have heard of?

I love most of the stuff from Prurient – flying the flag for badass power electronics, anything on the Chocolate Monk record label out of Brighton, creepy U.S.A. gunk from Andrew Coltrane and Sick Llama, local lads like Ian Watson, Garnett James, Joinedbywire, DTV/Anton Maiof (with whom I have a noise project, Menschenfleisch), recently got into Richard Pinhas/Heldon, Auckland based musician and old friend Duncan Bruce (i’ve recently released a cdr from him, so I’m totally biased here!). So much great music right now being released directly by artists on cdr, vinyl and cassette editions.

Geometer: Outside of music, what’s caught your attention of late?

C++, John Stezaker’s photo montage, Eric Hobsbawm’s modern history books, a slow trawling through all of the films of Dario Argento, sensationalist TV on National Geographic channel – America’s Hardest Prisons, American Skinheads, Air Crash Investigation !, the prospect of summer.

Steve Ely is an English poet who writes about America. In doing so, he seems to interest people who wouldn’t ordinarily be all that interested in contemporary English poetry. For the interested reader, Steve’s excellent poem sequence JerUSAlem is a fine place to start – it explores the American century through it’s margins and footnotes, and can be found scattered around the web (“The Visions of Vicki Weaver”, from JerUSAlem was published in Geometer earlier this year – you can find that poem and links to all the other parts at this link). Despite having written some pretty outstanding stuff, Steve remains little published – perhaps in part due to the fact that his subjects (Sammy Davis Junior, white supremacists, prison gangs) and style (an epic poetry which owes as much to Elmore Leonard as it does to Eliot or Ezra Pound) are not the what you would expect to find in your average contemporary English poetry collection. Having devoured JerUSAlem and found ourselves wanting more, Geometer asked Steve if he’d agree to be interviewed by email, and he kindly agreed:

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GEOMETER: I think that what first impressed me about JerUSAlem was, here was an attempt to write a poem that engaged with something quite different from the subjects one most commonly associates with contemporary (admittedly, predominantly lyric) poetry – for instance ‘the self’, the relaying of significant ‘experience’, our relations with significant others. Instead there is an attempt to engage with history, or at least, the contemporary mythologising of it, something which has generally been the preserve of prose. Perhaps you could explain what motivates the poem, and how you have sought to realise its ambitions?

STEVE ELY: I agree that much contemporary poetry in English is characterised by a conventional bourgeois narcissism and a corresponding poverty of vision. Read any of the ‘major’ English poetry publishing journals to confirm this; page after page of small, perfect, forms, on worthy yet hackneyed themes and generally provoking (despite their often considerable formal and linguistic virtues) a massive ‘so what?’ – we know the sunsets are Big Sur are stunning, we all wish we’d reconciled with our Fathers before they died, etc, etc. I think this state of affairs is related to the current state of the market for poetry in England. Generally speaking, the only people that read/buy poetry in England are other poets, checking out the competition or learning how to conform their style to something that will be accepted by the editors of Ambit, Poetry London, Faber, Bloodaxe, etc. And what is the thing that will be accepted, the thing that encouraging rejections, poetry competitions and creative writing courses encourage aspiring poets to write? Small, perfect, occasional pieces, about the sunset at Big Sur and relationships with ‘Father’ … It’s a kind of stylised conservatism that militates against experiment, ambition and scale. Of course, people have been making similar criticisms of English poetry for donkey’s years – perhaps it will never change.

I wrote JerUSAlem because I thought I had something important and true to say about the world. I attended a creative writing course once and was advised by one of the tutors to write about my own life, my own experience, on the grounds of that’s what I knew best and thus what I could write about most successfully. I nodded compliantly at the time, but I knew his advice was tendentious. (I’ve actually written a poem about this experience, fancy THAT, in my latest unpublished book, the compleat eater.) Although there is more than a touch of the sublime egotist about me, I’m not so much interested in myself as the world in which I live and try to make sense of.

JerUSAlem has several roots. One is to be found in a reaction to the callow anti-Americanism of leftists and liberals that coalesced and found a rallying point in 2002/3 around the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Another root was my obsessive research into various American ‘underbellies’ – conspiracy theories, supermax prisons, the mafia, racism, Christian Identity, Mormonism, the extreme right and an inchoate feeling that these areas were somehow significant historically and culturally. A third was my own personal experience of the decent, dignified, industrious, respectful, and optimistic citizens of middle America. Another important root was the life and career of Sammy Davis Junior and his successful struggle to make it as a superstar against a context of persistent humiliating racism. Finally, some work on nineteenth century American history turned me on to the Bill of Rights and the related concepts of America a ‘promised land’ and the ‘American Dream’.

Out of this melting pot came JerUSAlem, a eulogy ‘about America’, “exploring themes such as ‘the American Dream’, freedom of expression, the right to bear arms, Government power and its limits, legitimate and illegitimate protest, racism and crime, JerUSAlem avoids moralising and easy answers, in a frenetic, roller-coaster evocation of the guileless optimism and psychotic glamour of the monstrous and magnificent modern Babylon that is the 21st century USA.” If that reads like a blurb, it’s because it is one. Although the poem is about many things, and too big to reduce to a single-line message, ultimately the poem is a backhanded affirmation of the USA as promised land.

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GEOMETER: I entirely agree about the unseemly and gratuitous nature of the anti-american feeling that has tended to preoccupy such a broad swathe of popular opinion, which has been incredibly depressing. It’s interesting though because arguably we simultaneously seem to be incredibly interested in these darker Americas – the Nixon years, prohibition, Vietnam. I read an article recently that claimed that the last 8 years, during one of the most reviled presidencies in living memory (more so than Nixon?) had led to a renaissance in American drama, thinking of shows such as The Wire and The Sopranos. Is it the contrast with the ideals of the US that we find interesting?

STEVE ELY: America is everything you want it to be. That’s why it is such a great and fascinating country. The country and party of George Bush and Richard Nixon is also the country and party of Abraham Lincoln. The Presidency of George Bush II was bad, Jesus Christ, but the vehemence of the condemnation of Bush from Europe stems not from a reasoned critique of policy but from a ridiculous and absolutely unfounded assumption of moral and intellectual superiority on the part of cultured Europeans over Philistine Yanks. For all his faults, I’m convinced history will show that Bush was no worse than JFK – a bought election, mob sleaze, Bay of Pigs, Castro assassination plots in cahoots with the mafia, troop escalations and provocations in Indochina, etc, etc. The Haircut has scammed history: he was the James Dean of US politics: he lived fast, died young, left a good looking corpse and a legend far bigger than his achievements merited.

Agree about the quality of US drama, especially when compared to UK shows. For me, UK drama is locked into a patronising relationship with its mass audience; it panders to them, tries to work out what they want and usually decides that is ‘real life’ (not to mention reality) or pantomime – Eastenders, Coronation Street, Hollyoaks. Chuck in a Jane Austen adaptation for ‘quality’. US drama has been superior for a million years and not just the risk-taking, high concept HBO shows you mention: shows like the Simpsons, Futurama, The Shield, NYPD Blue, right back to Cheers, Roseanne, Taxi, Barney Miller, and Hill Street Blues are exponentially better than anything the UK has produced in the same period. Even light-comedy shows like Two and a half Men and That 70s Show are in a different league. What I like about these shows is great plotting, convincing characters, great acting, cracking dialogue, great gags and fast pace. I don’t even think about ‘America’ when I’m watching – except, maybe The Shield, the greatest, most under-rated show of all, LA incarnate.

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GEOMETER: What were your models for the poem?

STEVE ELY: The Wasteland – a big, ambitious poem with footnotes. Moschiah, Westside Story and Sammy are influenced in style, attitude and to some extent, language, by James Ellroy, particularly American Tabloid. From Ellroy I also took the idea of using historical people as characters in my book. Zion is influenced in language and spirit by the western writer Louis L’Amour, from whose novels I took the narrator, Willliam Tell Sackett. The use of ‘sonnet-like poems’ as stanzas in Westside Story and Sammy I took from my own poetic psychodrama ‘about violence’, Fifty. The Visions of Vicki Weaver is modelled on Biblical apocalyptic literature – The Revelation of St John, The Book of Daniel and the Book of Mormon. Although not models as such, the spirits of Pound’s Cantos and Hughes’ Crow lurk in the background as inspirations – like those two works, JerUSAlem is unlikely and audacious and my growing consciousness of this as the poem developed gave me the inspiration to plough on with it and remain true to my vision, even when everyone was telling me there was no chance of a 20,000 word poem about obscure stuff few people have ever heard about of ever getting published.

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GEOMETER: re: the lack of scale in poetry. This is interesting. I think Ezra Pound said something like, ‘an epic is a poem that includes history’. As you say, Eliot too wrote on a grand scale, and arguably this fulfilled part of the modernist aesthetic. And yet with both of these figures, they can be seen in some ways to have been way-laid by their material, their ‘history’. I am thinking of Eliot’s anti-semitism, and Pound’s fascism. This is not a question about policing literature, but do you think that ‘history’ conceived in this way, as a kind of raw material, can have pitfalls?

STEVE ELY: I don’t like to keep name-checking my own poetry, but in my poem humanity: was it all worth it? in the compleat eater I reference this issue:

“‘all poets turn fascist in the end’ discuss impounded ezra hawhawed for mussolini yeats in his dotage writing shamrock marching songs ted hughes at the county table with the league of st george the rabble starlings roar on trafalgar for ****s sake ted theyre pigeons UNLESS ITS A METAPHOR doh not apt though AND THEN theres me i grow old i grow old i wear the bottoms of the my trousers rolled and bitter dont forget bitter”

I think there is a certain type of sensibility that can become disillusioned with, for want of a better phrase, ‘the industrial modern world’, because of its bewildering rate of change, its undermining of old certainties, its lowest-common-denominator dumb-ass, popular culture, its destruction of landscape, of ‘heritage’ and hierarchy, and so on. With age in particular, it seems this sensibility can take the form of reaction; Pound (and Yeats to a lesser extent) as you indicate, Eliot not so much in his anti-semitism, which I think was pretty widespread even amongst ‘progressives’ in the first half of the twentieth century, but in his retreat into mysticism and high Anglicanism (Four Quartets). Ted Hughes tobacconist’s-boy-made-good grammar school elitism morphed into county table snobbery and ultimately semi-mystical monarchism when he became laureate.

I don’t necessarily think that it is the utilisation of history as raw material as such that is the problem, but a post ‘60s left/liberal tendency amongst writers and critics that is hyper-sensitive to the exploration of issues such as identity and nationalism in an (British/English) historical context (except from a de-colonising or multicultural point of view) and quick to smear poets that try to engage with these issues with labels like ‘right wing’ or even ‘fascist’. The case of Geoffrey Hill comes to mind. In the wider social context of post war Britain, this is, to some extent understandable. Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, Tory Empire loyalists and extremist parties like the National Front, British Movement and The British National Party have pre-tarnished any attempt to engage with, for example, the English past and make it relevant to a possible English future, (although the re-assertion of Englishness and the reclamation of the Cross of St. George around the multi-ethnic English football team has changed the ground somewhat here). Left wing utilisation of history seems, to the intelligentsia, less problematic, as the case of someone like Bertolt Brecht demonstrates. Great poet as he undoubtedly was, he nevertheless a shill for a murdering totalitarian regime, and in terms of the damage done, far worse than Pound, for example, who in some quarters is spoken of in the same breath as Josef Mengele, yet was no more than a half-baked, quisling rhetorician. Yet Brecht’s reputation is, comparatively speaking, unsullied.

Ultimately, I think writers should say what they have to say, in full knowledge of what it is they’re saying. They should avoid posturing and making provocations for effect, unless they’re prepared to reap the whirlwind. Writers need to be brave enough to go against the grain and risk being misunderstood and misrepresented if that is to be the price of expressing themselves and what they believe to be of value.

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GEOMETER: As an English writer, it is perhaps surprising (or not?) that the focus of your poem is America. Martin Amis famously said: ‘The project is to become an American novelist.’ What is it about the USA that particularly attracts you, or perhaps rather, do you think you could see yourself writing about the UK in a similar way?

STEVE ELY: I’m currently trying to get started on a similar high concept piece ‘about England’ (not the UK, or Great Britain, or any of those travesties), but I can’t find time/space/stillness/inspiration, so am currently stuck in a cycle of endlessly planning, researching and rehearsing. I am already an American novelist of a kind: my prison thriller San Benito Brother, which I’m currently hawking around agents, is set in California and actually written in American-English. I guess I’m just immersed in American culture. Or maybe it’s more than that. Pace parochialism, America is simply ‘the place’ – during the current period it is the most important and providential nation in the world; why wouldn’t you write about it? I guess during the period 2004-2008, my head just lived in America. Now it’s moved back across the Atlantic.

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GEOMETER: One British writer who springs to mind who does, is David Peace, whose Red Riding quartet similarly seeks to use history, and events, as its raw material, and by doing so to interrogate its seamier side, to expose and shine a light on its hypocrisies and its evasions. He is sometimes labelled a crime writer, and as well as featuring in JerUSAlem, I know that crime is something that has also interested you. Does crime represent, as many have claimed, an alternative, secret history of our culture? What particular attractions do you think it holds for people?

STEVE ELY: Funny you should mention David Peace. He was born and grew up in Ossett, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, only about 15 miles away from where I live in Upton. In the late 1990s, I really got into James Ellroy and resolved to write UK-based crime fiction modelled on his style and become the ‘English Ellroy’. I began a novel set in Wakefield/Pontefract entitled Punk Mafia and then discovered 1974 and found Peace had got there first – doh! I admire the imaginative force and singular vision that drives Peace’s stuff. And anyone that immortalises the Redbeck Motel in fiction can’t be bad. The Redbeck was a regular stop for me as a youth, walking ten miles home from gigs in Wakefield, having missed the last train home. I once got my face pushed into a belly-buster breakfast at four o’ clock one morning by a tattooed woman from Fitzwilliam I had injudiciously passed negative comment about. I dug out the three chapters of Punk Mafia the other day and they’re not bad; more Elmore Leonard than James Ellroy though. One day, I might finish/rewrite it. The crime fiction and poetry come from very different parts of me, though. The former is primarily storytelling, the latter more concerned with ideas. To answer the second part of your question, I think I know why I’m fascinated by certain types of criminality – it’s the determined extremism, the acting without restraint that characterises certain villains. I think most suburban, buttoned-down, law-abiding types like me sometimes just wish they could tell their boss to **** off/smack a jerk in the mouth/reverse their car over the yob that just threw a beer can at their windscreen. But they don’t. But John Gotti or Frank Fraser would, and to hell with the consequences. That kind of freedom, of absolute truth and loyalty to feeling and principle and utter disregard for situational compromise is what I find compelling.

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GEOMETER: re: the ‘absolute freedom’ of say a figure such as John Gotti, unconcerned by the consequences of his actions. Do you think this really is freedom, or for want of a better phrase, an instance of ‘bad faith’. In that there is a degree of moral utilitarianism behind such actions, that in many ways is incompatible with freedom in that it inhibits the freedom of others. This comes back to my question about the contradictions inherent in aspects of the American conception of freedom, a confusion that leads on the one hand to the most strident affirmation of the rights of the individual in the form of the US constitution, sitting alongside a nation with one of highest per capita imprisonment (and execution) rates in the world.

STEVE ELY: Not really. Gotti’s freedom came from his membership of La Cosa Nostra, in which he was free to lie, cheat, kill, maim, (etc), with the full support of an organisation of around 3,000 other made guys and associates. The rest of us are just squarejohns, marks, victims. The concept of bad faith essentially depends on the acceptance of the ontological equality of all members of mankind; the mafia doesn’t hold with that. Vis-à-vis the operations of the mob, the rest of us don’t have any rights.

I don’t see a fundamental contradiction between the US concept of individual freedom and high rates of imprisonment and execution, either, although operationally there are any number of shocking anomalies and injustices. Every society has the right to set a direction, draw lines and discipline transgressors. The US choice to incarcerate at such an unprecedented rate is legitimate and popular with the electorate, although you might plausibly argue that voters have been terrified into over-reaction by scaremongering politicians and their big business backers and that groups disproportionately affected by incarceration (ethnic minorities, drug users, criminals themselves) are effectively disenfranchised or have disenfranchised themselves. What is interesting about the rush to imprison offenders in the US is the extent to which ‘prison’ is now in lieu of, or at least an arm of, social welfare; a method of controlling, occupying and warehousing the ‘underclass’. In Germany, for example, a drug abusing unemployed man will receive from the state several hundred euros a week, a free apartment, treatment for his drug abuse and other free services. In the USA, that same man might receive a fifteen year sentence and the state effectively credits the monies that would be spent on his ‘welfare” to a private company in return for his incarceration, from which the company creams a profit. Given that most US prisoners actually work whilst inside, creating a additional profit for the company that owns the prison, it could be argued that US prisons are actually compulsory workhouses. In this view, arbitrary three-strikes-and-out laws and draconian anti-drug laws and sentencing are merely pretexts to take problematic and unproductive citizens off the streets, indenture or enslave them in the service of a privatised profit-making agenda. Whether this is worse than institutionalising social parasitism via promiscuous distribution of taxpayer’s money to wilfully non-productive and often socially destructive people is a matter of debate.

As for execution, I’ve got no problem with that, per se, I don’t see a contradiction between the death penalty and individual freedom. Some people forfeit their right to live due to their actions. In practice freedom must always be operative within a legal framework. The trick is to make the framework as light as possible. The administration of the death penalty in some states is a sick joke though – in 2002, I think, the Governor of Ohio commuted the sentences of all 300 death row prisoners, because so many of the trials were so manifestly flawed. My main objection to the US justice system is a class objection: the system is owned by the rich and structured and weighted so that the rich can commit crimes and get away with them; if you’re poor, you get ****ed over, even to the death and no one’s going into bat for you. It’s a shameful thing.

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GEOMETER: You are working on a book about a federal prisoner, named Clayton Fountain, who died in 2004. How did this come about, and what attracted you (if ‘attracted’ is the right word) to your subject?

STEVE ELY: I’d been reading about US prisons and prisoners for some time and became fascinated by prison gangs, (especially the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, La Nuestra Familia & the Black Guerilla family) for their unregenerate, ferocious extremism, as well as the fascinating historical and social context from which they emerged. Clayton Fountain was an Aryan Brotherhood associate who can only be described as a force of nature, so relentless and determined was his pursuit of violence; even when kept in solitary confinement and only allowed to leave his cell in handcuffs, supervised by three guards, he managed, on separate occasions, to kill two fellow convicts and a prison guard, and maim God knows how many others. Fountain’s early life was similarly hair-trigger violent and his contempt for authority and sanctions was summarised by one judge who commented that he was ‘wholly beyond the deterrent reach of the law’. From 1984 until his death in 2004, Fountain was kept on no-human-contact status in a specially built Hannibal Lecter-style cell. In 1992, Fountain experienced a profound religious conversion and lived in his cell as an anchorite, eventually becoming accepted by a Cistercian Trappist order as a ‘lay brother’. My research into Fountain is at an advanced stage – I’ve got a pile of documents a foot high via Freedom of Information requests from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the US Marine Corps and I am in contact with several convicts, ex-marines, journalists, monks and academics, who knew Fountain. However, some people that have great information on Clayton are jealously guarding their sources. I need a couple of people to share before I can begin writing in earnest! The book will be a straight biography and an honest attempt to account for such a life.

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GEOMETER: There is very definitely a religious dimension to your poem. Given the religious culture of the US this is perhaps inevitable. There is very much a sense of the US representing a ‘promised land’ gone bad. However, perhaps even a critique of this nature is itself an instance of religious optimism, insisting as it does on a prelapserian state lurking beneath the surface, if only it can be excavated. I suppose what I would like to ask, is to what degree do you think the figures you represent in the poem become trapped within this conundrum, and whether this causes the cultural contradictions you address in the poem?

STEVE ELY: I think it is arguable that all poetry that aspires to profundity is ultimately religious, or at least plugs in to a dimension that might be called ‘spiritual’. A reading of Ted Hughes’ oeuvre, for example, leads one rapidly to the conclusion that, despite surfaces, Hughes is essentially a devotional poet. I studied the Bible at university and JerUSAlem, like the USA itself, is imbued with Biblical thinking, language and concepts. I don’t think you can really understand the USA without having a concept of how deeply embedded the Bible and Biblically derived concepts (the importance of ‘the Word’, individual responsibility before God, the reality of revelation, the necessity to stand up for what you believe in adversity, the legitimisation of conquest and domination, the inevitability of sin and the real possibility of forgiveness and redemption, etc) are in the American psyche. JerUSAlem explores the idea and ultimately asserts the opinion that the USA is the promised land, but I don’t think a prelapsarian thing is implied; it is certainly not intended. In my view, what makes the USA a great and fateful nation is its assertion of the priority of the right of the reasoning individual, of personal freedom, over and above the rights of the state and ultimately, over everything; the enlightenment transplanted from the context of European autocracy and planted in more fertile soil. To exercise this right of self determination is what it means to be American. The way you exercise that right is your business. Virtually all the major figures in JerUSAlem, in all their dysfunctionality, are quintessentially American in this messianic search for the truth and a better future (Vicki Weaver, Rabbi Schneerson, Sammy Davis Junior, Tim McVeigh, Brigham Young), or in their adherence to codes of conduct that are ‘true and justified’ (Clayton Fountain, Joe Morgan, George Jackson, William Tell Sackett). The USA is the New World, where Ghanaian taxi drivers, Scottish foresters, Korean labourers, Italian chemists, etc, can go and shed the debilitating dross of the Old World and reinvent themselves as lawyers, magnates and movie stars and make a bid for freedom, meaning, prosperity and glory. Some of them make it, many of them don’t. It’s how the cookie crumbles. Along the way we get great and terrible things like Hollywood, TV, rock and roll, the FBI, the Vietnam War, the counter culture, Motown, Guantanamo Bay, the Mafia, Britney Spears, Jim Crow, Los Angeles, the Aryan Nations, supermax prisons, etc. America is a roller coaster – it excites you, amazes you, delights you, terrifies you and sometimes makes you sick. One thing’s for certain though – you want to ride again. Strap in and enjoy!

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GEOMETER: As well as religion, the poem deals heavily with race. Indeed, when the Vicki Weaver segment of the poem first appeared in Geometer it drew comments from members of various white supremacist groups in the US. Was this difficult to deal with in the poem?

STEVE ELY: Yes. In JerUSAlem, not only do I deal with race and racism as a major theme, but I do so via racist characters and narrators. I also treat sympathetically or without judging some characters that hold/held extremely unpleasant racial views (Vicki Weaver, for example). This has been off-putting to some readers: some have been empathetic towards my intentions but are just uncomfortable with words like ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’. Others have suggested that my treatment of race and use of racial language in JerUSAlem implies that I myself am racist, which is untrue and perhaps cause to take it outside – unlike at lot of armchair liberals and PC language police, I’ve been involved in anti-racist politics for much of my life and not passively either. I’ve got the scars to prove it. In JerUSAlem I deal with racism in a very considered way. I conceived of the narrator of Moshiach, for example, as ‘Brooklyn everyman’, the kind of mouthy, opinionated guy you might meet in a bar who would use racial epithets in his war stories but justify them by saying, ‘Me, racist? I’m just a street guy, that’s just the words we use about each other,’ or, ‘I’m not prejudiced, I insult everybody, peckerwoods, guineas, slopes, towelheads …” etc. I needed a narrator like this because I wanted to open the poem with a bang, using a fictionalised version of the 1991 Crown Heights race-riot as a hyperbolic metaphor for the state of US race relations. Vicki Weaver gets a platform because the main message of that poem is that it is wrong to justify the persecution and murder of people simply because they hold beliefs you find offensive. Freedom of speech is for everyone, or it is not freedom of speech at all. If you read the whole poem, it’s blindingly obvious that the message of the poem is affirmatory and anti-racist. I make Sammy Davis Junior God, for Sam’s sake! Tom Metzger, the former Klansman and founder of White Aryan Resistance must have stumbled across The Visions of Vicki Weaver on Geometer in an internet search. He left the message ‘Lon is not forgotten’ (Lon Horiuchi was the FBI sniper who murdered Vicki Weaver) and a link to his website. I was surprised and a bit taken aback that he’d found my poem and commented on it, but ultimately pleased. Poems need readers. Society needs dialogue and engagement.

Take a look here to see the work and find out more about future issues.

Also worth checking out, while you’re there, is Attack!!! Wes’ semi-regular magazine of art, music and writing. Full of ideas and hyperactively inventive, it’s definitely worth getting to know. To give a taste of the breadth of content, one early issue took it’s direction from Thomas Nagel’s seminal Philosophy of mind paper “What is it Like to Be a Bat”, while subsequent issues have asking contributors to memorialise an event, or respond in any form to a particular piece of writing. Aside from the resltess curiosity, the main theme seems to be the fetishisation of words writing and printing, which has seen the mag take in woodcuts, Steve McCaffery-esque concrete and 80s Zine aesthetics.

More information at http://www.davidoreilly.com/films/pss

When they had all left the cottage, when good friends had helped her to tidy up, Ruth was simply too tired to worry about being there alone, about not being able to face the hours of silence, the shards of memory, the bed that he had died in, the smell of him, the absence of his being, his silence.

“Are you sure you will be content to be alone? Why not let one of us stay with you? Why not come over and stay with Annie for the night?

Are you sure? Are you sure?”

And she was sure as she had been about all the arrangements and the chapel service and the prayers and the hymns and the words and the small number of letters from those who could not come to the funeral and the small gathering of those who were closest afterwards. She was right to have it in the cottage and not in the village hall. In some way she knew that he would like this.

And now, after all the tenderness of the rituals and the comfort of the words and the offers of help the tiredness almost drenched her and she needed to sit in the small back garden and let the early evening light dissolve into stars and feel the whisper of the July wind on her face.

And once again she was thinking of children they never had. Another person to sit in the garden with her and go upstairs with her and talk about the old things with her. It was this that bent her down the most.

_

For the next two weeks there are almost too many voices and so much to be seen to and once or twice she almost regretted that she had so many friends with so much advice.

When she walked along the cliff path they wanted to join her and they knocked on the door and left some biscuits or home made pasties and they asked her to tea and they got their husbands to deliver home -grown vegetables and fresh flowers; as if she didn’t have a garden of her own.

When the vicar called to see her he told her that this would go on for weeks and that it was the way of things, reminding her that she had done the same for others in the past.

So the days in the cottage were not lonely and increasingly she longed for the arrival of early evening and for the protection of the back garden.

When she was dealing with letters and accounts and mundane matters she was steady. There were other things to face however, other noises, and she was not so good at this.

When the warmth of July collapsed and August became days of rain and the nights were dense green she had more time to herself, more hours to sort things out, more time to prepare for a changed life. For the first time she began to think of days without Paul. Or was it days and nights with a different Paul because he was still there in so many ways; in the cottage and the garden and far off along the cliff path and on Sundays in particular? Was this how it was going to be?

She gave up setting the table for him and then began laying his place again. She started to sort out his clothes but after cleaning and ironing she placed them back in the wardrobe and in the drawers and did not pack them in boxes to dispose of. She did not speak to him as yet but the last thing she did before sleep each night was pat the pillow beside her pillow. And when she woke up some mornings she found herself staring at where the back of Paul’s head would have been.

The neck. The shoulders. Torso. Other beginnings to the day. Greetings.

Later, much later, she heard herself say “Is that you, Paul? Is that you?”

It seemed natural.

There was no grave. The ashes had been scattered at Pentire. The wind and the sea took care of this. There was no place to lay flowers. She did this in her heart, more and more as the months went past and the winter blew sleet and snow and the startingly bright mornings came one after another and each field began to grow. Crows aggressive and gulls strutting and awkward and the coastline with burning bushes of gorse.

Paul was there when she began collecting driftwood from the beach and when she picked blackberries. He was there when a voice in the church proclaimed the changing seasons. He was there when snowdrops came. In their silence. In their frailty. In their greeting.

He was there when she dropped things and in dream after dream and when she began to paint the kitchen. Reassuring. Kindly. There were sometimes even signals that seemed like words.

_

Easter came late. She was beginning to come to terms with this new life. She found herself talking to Paul more and more. She wanted this.

And it was time to sort some things out in the bedroom that perhaps should have been done weeks before. But she knew that the first autumn and the first Christmas had to be lived through and the earliest part of the year before decisions about change could be made. And now she stood in their bedroom and stared at his shirts and ties and socks as if they were old friends.

It was a bright morning but she pulled the curtains across to create comfort and then carefully removed her clothes and began dressing in his shirt and pullover and trousers and tie and jacket. And she put on the brown shoes that he wore on Sundays and she walked up and down for a while before going downstairs and walking about the cottage. Before she put on his overcoat and cap and went out into the garden. Before she perched on the bench that was quite damp and pulled the overcoat tight against her to embrace its odours. Then she went back into the cottage and upstairs to the bedroom and tried on other shirts and ties and began to move about the room as if dancing, as if she was Paul, dancing.

And she did this day after day until it was Easter day when she left the cottage and went down the short street and up Church Street and into the church like this, like Paul, like dancing in the mind.

The church was crowded. She sat in a back pew. She could see people she knew but they didn’t approach this stranger.

As she left the vicar shook her hand. Looking her in the eyes he could find no special words for this but he knew.

Time to steal the loss. Time to disguise. Transformations that were beyond the day to day. Requiems becoming resurrections. Life lies bright and frail as snowdrops.

_

*********************

_

She stood at Pentire one year after his death. She stood there as his wife, his widow. She stared out at sea and sky and saw three swans and wondered where they were heading for.

“We don’t seem to see you in church anymore.”

“How do you fill your days?”

“Why are you hiding from us?”

“It’s about time you came back to life.”

What did they mean?

“Is it something we said?”

“Is it something we’ve done?”

“Are you up to something?”

“Is there another man?”

All the clichés of conformity, words to disguise unease; her former friends genuine but out of sorts and struggling. Missing her. Noticing a gap.

She stood at Pentire and could not get their faces and whispers and body language out of her mind. Old coots. Old owls. Lost without her.

The three swans were there again and the sea like linen folds of lapis.

Where had they come from?

She wondered at the phrase “seem to see”; what sort of concoction was that? And “filling a day”; an expression from a lonely mind. And “hiding” when she was in fact finding. And “coming back to life”; ah yes;

that was precisely it, that was the radiance of it.

And on another day she was there again, watching out for the three swans. Dressed in Paul’s clothes, observing rain, standing with its coldness lashing her face, embracing the light of it, the leaning of it.

Where were the swans going?

And the only way she knew she would stop this nonsense, these questions, was to write a note to them all; to Annie and Hilda, to Mary and Hannah, to every one of them. To the friends of the past telling them that she had left the past and that now she had a new life and that she wished them well but the old days were over. Like old Christmas cards, like old letters, like old skipping songs.

Each note would need to be the same. And delivered to their letter boxes late the same evening. And her telephone out of action.

She would have liked to write them all a poem but she did not know how to do this. There was no poem she knew of that could in any way express this. There were no words up to this task.

She had left Pentire and returned to the cottage to attempt the first note as the sky dipped into a deeper shade and the three swans came again and one of them appeared to fall out of the sky.

_

************************************

_

So; they had been told. And she ignored them. And they were not always sure who this person now was.

If they saw her out walking, if she was shopping at the end of the day, if she was on the bus. If she was observing birds or school children or was that her coming off the beach with some driftwood? Or was it the figure of the man?

So; whatever the written word had done not one of them wrote back or phoned or approached her.

So; they would not know about the new life, the comfort, the person Paul as she now for most of each day became.

His clothes. A man’s haircut. Even a different way of walking.

And now this person spending more and more time on the beach. Bringing back wood and rope and sea-smoothed glass. Placing them about the back garden. Bringing back bits of cork and a doll’s leg. Bringing back a picture frame and the lower section of a Captain’s Chair and a violin case. And the remains of birds.

Cormorant, lustrous sleek black. Puffin with that large head and bright bill. Gulls with such white bodies and pearl eyes. And now a swan.

And as she picked it up and carried it in her arms to the wheelbarrow to take it to the garden it felt like carrying a child. And when she laid it out on the grass she could see how immense it was, how the wings were wonders, how it belonged in myths and poems and ancient songs. How it flew in and out of stories for children. Its call. Its flame. Its noble territory.

As she lifted it from the wheelbarrow it was again like lifting a child and as she lowered it into the deep hold she had carefully dug she was aware of the silence of the hole, this grave secret beneath her garden. And as she spaded in the first cuts of earth it was like burying light.

_

*******************

_

Easter came early. It arrived with big winds and stern seas and high tides delivering plastic bottles and tin cans and garden rubbish and bits of still sharp glass and a white wooden gate and bits of birds and piles of free newspapers and a horses eye and sacking. The beach had its own whine and rattle and on some days the debris was hurled out of the ocean as if a green giant were spring cleaning.

When she found the remains of another swan it was twisted torso, warped, a wound, there was nothing left of beauty or the idea of design; it was ravaged remains and stiff and she struggled to load it into the wheelbarrow.

And it was Annie who saw her and came to her side and began helping her.

There were no words for a while, even as they hauled the wreck of the bird out of the barrow and the wind persisted and the rain now falling was more like sleet and the garden was rapidly dressed in white. When they had filled in the dark hole the garden was transformed and the clusters of snowdrops were no longer visible and the five arum lilies by the wall had lost their majesty. It was like a bit of winter refusing to let go.

At the back door both figures halted and it was Annie who spoke. “What do I call you?” she asked.

Both women stared at each other. There was no immediate reply.

“Some call you Paul. Some daft old bat or Bird Man. Some have given you up.”

“Why not call me Paula,” Ruth said. “Just for a while. Come in now and see what I have become.”

The light in the back garden was like the wild grass you see in old church yards, dressing the dead in something beyond words.

_

_

More By David Grubb in Geometer:
I Want to Tell You Some Things – Powerful short fiction following the fallout of war and revolution.
Four Poems by David Grubb – Red moons, painting God, and places devoid of miracle
Interview with David Grubb – Geometer talks to David Grubb

DAVID H W GRUBB was born 1941. His poetry collections include The Memory of Rooms, Selected (Stride 2001), The Elephant In The Room (Driftwood 2004), Out Of The Marvellous (Oleander 2006). He has also published three novels and an autobiography. Hullabaloo, his collection of short stories, is to be published in 2009 by Salt, who also published his last collection It Comes With A Bit Of Song. A new collection of his poetry is due from Shearsman in May 2009. He was a prize winner in the 2007 Bridport short story competition, and is the editor of Sounding Heaven and Earth (Canterbury Press 2004). He is also tutor of Creative Writing at University of Reading, the River and Rowing Museum, Henley on Thames, Norden Farm Arts Centre. He also runs a mentoring scheme for individual writers. Much of his writing had been influenced by working in places of extreme poverty and civil conflict.

David Grubb
25 Belle Vue Road
Henley on Thames
Oxon
RG9 1JQ
01491 575528

dgrubb@different-drums.co.uk