william watkin's blog (since 2003)

Postmodern Prosody and Line Measure Just a quick consideration of theseecstasies which I wrote over a longish period several years ago now. I have used the term line measure before to refer to the rhythmic nature of lineation. I should clarify here that this is not counting the syllables in the line, which is syllabic measure, nor does measure suggest a regularity. Having said this naturally line measure relies on what goes on in the line, so it could include syllables, but within the avant-garde tradition that I work in it is more likely that phrases, phonemes and gaps will form the basic unit of regard. In addition all rhythm is reliant on the repetition of some form of mark and the moment of its non-repetition, which could be a pause or a break in regularity. I won't get into why such a basic deep structure of rhythm works, mainly because I don't know and nor does anyone else it would seem. So what are the areas that need to be considered in line measure. I feel that the rhy...

aphorisms before modesty the wind must fill up the hessian sail; seed cast carelessly will further stretch the beach; of man I say this, of woman I say that; the future is an eraser, the past a stable gun; looking about me now I see that I have none of my good friends left and nor do I miss them neither. light is as heavy as the blossom it samples; let society eat up its own waste, but let it eat; of woman I assert thus, of women I assert this; disembodied hands paddle my fatty tissue; out on the gas light leaf street again, the too long lesson over and what am I to do with it? be not so sceptical about the heather’s prosperity; be not so soon too judge the crooked contestant; let lie sleeping eating run do don’t do, do; of children I have next to nothing to say; it’s just that I feel let down veins grow across my shoes; sea horses’ alchemy stings in the wind, but who’s to know this? the distance of the pancreas from the humours; the pink fences slipping back behind the eminence; chuck...

confidence tricks, contemporary settings like some hideous leviathan emerging from primordial depths the hideous leviathan emerges from the primordial depths and it is only natural that you doubt your motivation in such, by this I mean of course your true motivation, such in korea a population under threat from commerce begins seriously to lose faith in the infrastructures thrown up recently why you do this and should you does red suit you do you talk too loud make love like a pervert on the prowl in genoa a pike is elevated from an artificial pool given artificial legs and then bound over to rule that you are a great bloke really well, we all are. shavings, non-specifically sourced gouge at you when you close your eyes. spirals paint-tipped spirals, what do they mean mean to you within this thickened context? you lose confidence at this point specifically here you lose confidence space stations spin three hundred miles above tunisia at four miles a second and y...

An Introduction and Guide to Reading Charles Bernstein, Thank you for Saying Thank You in Girly Man and Poem in With Strings . In teaching avant-garde, non-normative poetics to undergraduates I often find that I have to teach them the tenets of normative poetics just so that I can then show them how Bernstein or Howe, Raworth or Prynne diverge from such well worn pathways. Naturally this leads one to a clearing full of possible revelation, that in fact such normativity is, in general, no more normative than postmodern, disjunctive poetics. And odd situation but also a gratifying one. Most people are not, in fact, slave to the normative. Bernstein’s poem “Thank You for Saying Thank you” (Girly Man 2006) steps into your way as you move through the dark again trees and says, here it is in a nutshell squirrel-boy, normative poetics so that your students can recognise them and learn not to be absorbed by them. To which I say thank you for saying Thank You for Saying Thank You, if we count ...

ukrania in the ukraine the insect turns and devours its own head. the grasshoppers are indeed the plague but still it was the crops failed to get up. tractors are run until they all run out and are left to open in the slanting rain. chernobyl, we sing a song of thanks for chernobyl, for putting us...in hell...on the map. in the public park in kiev radiation is gotten so bad the children no longer merely play at being “dead”. I cannot imagine the ukraine, I do not have to; it is a frontier of me. on the road that needs attention a man trudges home with absolutely nothing on his mind. there are red soils and grey, but it is for our black soil for which we are justly famed. the coupon is so worthless no one spends it and so finally we have solved the problem of our inflation. the potential future leader of the ukraine can’t speak ukrainian yet. tell the tale of l’vov, a dirty jewel left unattended. on a farm-strip the head-scarf of a woman balloons suddenly with the wind in it...

this endive life “but the endive, if left, will dry...out!” what does she mean by this and just what does she want to say? salad is more than a decoration: the star, fruit the onion...moon a vegetable sun, loving it the water on the leaf, the same story repeats long ago the party is over after as long as the stem of the glass is snapped and all endives left, awilting “it is indicative you know these things do matter” yes I know. saints preserves and us, emerging from the “taps” ourselves pretty much. there is a place for drainage and for primping crazy, tossed into a mixed up world, crazy. we sing our anthem “the party’s over” and get on with it—

at fog and for an indefinite period the sky is cleared away. the sweep of some thing across it is like the hare of midnight crossing the band of spoilt frost of the fog remains in taupe fashion the modern-reeking swirls of ether yes like phantoms but spirits of an as yet un-named catastrophe, so in-bound, inhered, inscribed all is deep and deep is personal. it happened so slowly that slow is to it as meaningless as it is to a hare. a petrified shelf (or slab), time is beneath the petrified ocean which does not conceal the becalmed dance of continents oh no, but still reserves the right to shift, to shimmy every what? let’s say a million years or so, over a period of a million years. or so, at my feet glass. coloured glass is not at all like confetti but actually is is a kind is a kind of, of confetti—from the marriage of some insane technologies of chance—and in trying to apply that sense of okay if you like that “world view” to the now. bush, and dead berries chasing off the los...

the wind’s bequest canada! what so ever the wind fetches up; from the arid field it fetches up: husk, dusk and wisdoms now forsaken what it fetches up. it will be fetched up there’s no changing it or challenging it at all and what. it lets lie what is better? left that way: seed, sedentary needing, roots, bulbs...the grotesque. be my guest. what it lets will linger lie, restive. favouritism what the detritus will, fling up against is worthy to be swamped: impenetrate arms, of twist, of hedge row. barn doors. and a. and what it flings against will ask that this be so. what? it chokes, what it rasps and sears, well...by the way, what the season tells you is also what you are capable of being told at this. juncture. there is a need for investment. waste—necessary. candid. and what it tells you is bound into dust dry tones deep throated homilies came raging in the lowlands but all that it holds back is stuff you crave for foam for, would almost kill for. there is stuff, you ...

she keeps telling me it’s here not so much the shock of the new as of the same I who pride myself on my “originality” and whatever comes before a fall it’s gotta be high high and that’s for what it’s worth pay the rest to make up your compensation yes it will make you feel better but it will not cure you I am reliable and informed that there is no cure for the personality life is its own punishment cycle and you gotta “ride” “it” or “it” will “ride” “you” apparently nowhere is as much a place as somewhere what one should concentrate on is never the prefix but what comes before that and once more for luck accuracy and excess and I feel a little distance come creeping yes come creeping between them the caesura and the cadence have practically all sewn up she slammed that door so hard the pane shattered pronounced suture I like a mouth full of your marbles just a version of thought is made in the mouth but is that through this tongue or the space around and life from now on will be like ...

yes yes yes yes yes men! yes we too have our doubts as to the veracity of laurent kabila but you won’t get anywhere in the next few years unless you are java enabled which kinda takes all the spice out of it I wish I had the humility to say to her simply please don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave me I mean I can “make” “it” without “you” easy but I don’t want to make it merely you need a little elbow grease here it is horror as if gagging on pig’s blood what we force on our acolytes but true power is never having to say you’re sorry unless that is your ideology in which case sift the flower fucker sift away do you have a minute let me tell you desperation is not a flat plane where you have surfaced in dark mists night falls so quickly up here you will survive but your companion she is mine now a part of it so savoury and one can move around the blankness virtually reality except it is real but why would you want to pretty soon to become connoisseurs of the gradations of the absolutely ...

Comments added to a discussion on The Line in Space at Lime Tree. I've been working on lineation for a while now, not taking it for granted as a fundamental of poetry but accepting its importance all the same. The most illuminating work in this field is Agamben's "The End of the Poem" which I have discussed in detail on my blog so I won't go on about it again here, even I have my limits of interest! What seems to be behind the differences of opinion in this discussion is an inability to understand the semiotic materiality of the line as a visual unit with the field of the poem, and of course its liminal status as a non-necessary, convenient way of rendering the temporality of the spoken poem in a more portable and lasting form. Sorry, it's not easy to say all that in a prettier way but basically the line has its own aesthetic presence but it also serves the voice. This transition from voice to page happened a long time ago now, and it seems time to pay our due...

illicit substances, mostly liquids moth balls, naphtha, semen milk and sesame oil stuff that issues from the husk of strange fruit binding, blunting, strings into madagascar it has pulp, your lips are its stains it has pith and there must be passion in it somewhere grappa, chalky deposit, cheese milk, sesame oil and olive oil in the past there is still spittle, a tongue from which you, drinking down straws in finland gingham has exhausted into stripes fading into white water must be it— sap, bone marrow, lsd milk, sesame and olive oil, balsamic vinegar stumbling in and into the “barn” of memory; pulses in a sack. light, and polish. we get free of dust. shivering. shaking. no rattle snake sighs. whatever there is it is and it is spilling. all over us and sticking. we find it on our foreheads. it finds us and our lips do. lentil...

tarzan goes 50,000 leagues under the sea not like the submersible crashing through the undergrowth and collapsing from the bulbous nose cone on, but, actually the submersible crashing through the undergrowth and collapsing from the bulbous nose cone down. fuck! how the yellow arséd bald headed primates chatter and rain down their perfectly understandable displeasure. ...coming to the waterhole, there is no fucking “...coming to the waterhole” permitted here in kinshasa county. sixty two years and then the subtle contraction I see myself for the first time as if from some side out side and once garnered that approach never goes away. shyness, excruciating rehabilitation of the slightest faux pas’s and lo! how it escalates so, je souffre! with fateful momentum, the submersible goes on, fucking up the jaunty jungle, mangling the delicate, ecospheric, points of balance...balance. (then. there is my own protestant whiteness held in behind the glance of you lot up there for the first time “y...

molo on the molo at night, the swans will not respond. the ramshackle fountain can not break its bonds. the distance behind the sea, it tucked in like a sheet. a cool white building shuns the company of the rest. the idle shopper is caught out! and so must needs stay on. see, the empty bars are full of golden pipes, leaking steam. history hobbles on by with just the briefest of passing nods. the molo by night is just as white as it is by day. “don't say that!” the one says to the other, “just don’t...” in the enchanted fountain, the gurgling gargoyles giggle. this far north it can never be truly dark it seems. a bar of inviolable sulphur cuts across the clouds. access is achieved by the illegal band as a fish stirs below. I can only guess at what is occurring beneath the boards. seven sylvan swans are spiralling now in a malignant way. the meeting in the town hall tower rages on, the subclause questioned. “I don't even care what you meant,” it goes on, “just don’t say it.” ...

decadence 1995, I can’t wait. I am the languor of soldiers sick seven in regimental pyjamas the windows of the yellow hospital it was I first saw tragedy— unfurl the yellowing sail, thick crusted mildew brass— vertebrate with heel met in vertebrate—gristle backs are the hallowed mediator. how decadent the sick high on drugs craazy with this this liberation my infestation; praise be to my infection. I am the nurse one thigh e m e r g i n g from a dream like fire back burner beaten back wards under moss it was a nowhere time of day rain drilled the tin hat roof seven sick soldiers in pyjamas regimented. I am a chameleon clasped onto the faulty blind that sees lizard back bill head hiding frigidity from the flaccid patrolling I renege on any camouflage, oh no! as much as I fear the syringe love the nurse man, woman and fake fox fur finch I, arrested in brown unnoticed another century, three this week. ends the pills arrive; this means war, I go under: water infinity so cool meet me over t...

the childhood ideal my father, he liked me my mother, she held me they bought me my food, and clothes, helped me board a bus, allowed me cash, disallowed me the usual misdemeanour. my father, when I spoke the ga-ga voice, he listened remarked to my mother, mother listened too when I spoke the gree-gree voice, to them, at some sort of party/function/do, do, der der der... I forget the rest. oh yes. my uncle. now he spoiled me. I liked chocolate: he gave it me; I love insects: he went out of his considerable way to catch me moths why. why did he do that, what was I to him? my friends, they once passed a ball to me, and then I knew, what to do next, now—no! I do not want to do that then and now thing. mystery is there though not in contrasts but, but, in an absolute dis location. my friends laughed at, with and to and from me, they liked me, I said that, I know it. fingered by the big beloved in front of the slight committee that tim...

that hurt he was as big a man as she was hard to please and together they were a twist into the penumbra and were gone so sit alone upon a park bench in late sunlight patternings and feels so ever so what? his spasm becomes her rictus twitch all truth being relative including this one still it is possible to be convinced by an ill-kept enigma likened to the psycho-somatic role of the tears in personal history whose story can tell the least about most of us yes tell me that one the community at large so massive in fact to think it makes the head fuzzy woken blearily I figure you would rather sleep off the affect shitting yoursen or better brickin' it the light in the mall will stop flickering minutes before the end of season sale of the centuries go from something to everything in very quick succession if you ask it to the two things just don't add up because one thing isn't a thing but a horizon to thinking about it so you can I give up a lot and ask for nothing in return ...

shut up you little bugger… get it from me somehow but what of those who went through the woods did they build up shacks there living like animals pigs covered in clover in a blanket in a basket of gingham nestles a sting living contradiction I mean you did kind of exploit the situation a little eked out the moment to become a situation we all need a place where we can go and y'know just be you are all stretching out the dream of crisis management the gentle thrum of machinery as you sleep your unconscious is up making sure every non-thing is in disorder a tree used to mean a lot less than it does now now we're only a few million left sorely it's not where you are from its from elsewhere come to greet it well over half-way they said half and half as much again then split that between the two of you half now and half for later deal? for which you will be handsomely rewarded with a sizeable portion of the kingdom figures to be determined after extensive costing what's lef...

that hurt he was as big a man as she was hard to please and together they were a twist into the penumbra and were gone so sit alone upon a park bench in late sunlight patternings and feels so ever so what? his spasm becomes her rictus twitch all truth being relative including this one still it is possible to be convinced by an ill-kept enigma likened to the psycho-somatic role of the tears in personal history whose story can tell the least about most of us yes tell me that one the community at large so massive in fact to think it makes the head fuzzy woken blearily I figure you would rather sleep off the affect shitting yoursen or better brickin' it the light in the mall will stop flickering minutes before the end of season sale of the centuries go from something to everything in very quick succession if you ask it to the two things just don't add up because one thing isn't a thing but a horizon to thinking about it so you can I give up a lot and ask for nothing in return ...

How to read the right hand column I don’t want to think too systematically about this because it’s the challenge to the systematic that the role of the other column presents. Can you get emotional about absence; can the lack of what is written on our right hand side really move us as readers? I suppose my most recent work is a more general attempt to answer this question by looking at the deconstructive and affective results of writing into material presence issues to do with absence. Like you are at the edge of something, which you are, space is there if you want to carry on but you can’t go there. You can’t read space and yet reading cannot occur without it. Supplemental in the extreme, it is, of course, as I have already said, absolutely central to a sense of poetry. The gaps between letters are phenomenologically different to those between words. The first link letters into units of significance, the second parse them up into larger units of significance. But both are essential and...

not jumping the helicopter watching over us like this star does or does it the way we imagine it to be the plane face of a sun which we face; the open eye of a very ancient watchfulness which never never slumps like laundry across its formica desk whilst, in plain view on grey monitors men in masks (or women) slip by with military ease about them; spot lights turned on in wards my attention not then drawn to the grotesque stampeding of the hedge row now purple and olive ‘midst the amenable slabs of neolithic (?) rock rotten with fossil bits and prehistoric worms and, this peculiar process of attention, shifting (no! not jumping, I cannot testify to jumping) seemingly at will, it makes my belly, glow like a whisky, mack later, streets dipped in a dark glistening whose amorphous and organic facets give of colour like a black diamond that has been softened with soaking—oxyacetylene blossoms up on con- crete cornices of the bureau show the curious emblem like a veil not lifted ...

“ ” it is all about limits, the setting of them I lie back the sun forever at my back perhaps about how the country side has kept apart the towns to let the wind pass over me enclosed, dispensed with de limits pushing out and up against us also the sun behind revealing shadowed showdowns of my one hornéd head and how can I expect to say what I will do tomorrow when I’ve no fixed plans about this next millennium even so elevate me; a hollow in exterior to the office tower here there to deal with these issues: lines, extravagances, lies lies! ---- First published in Iota

central europe here in central europe/the earth gets stuck in restlessness/heaving like the sobbers do/levelling a good few towns some cities also/ and here in central europe/the water got exhausted/and vagrant fishes must grow lungs bloody quick/and make their useless ways/ then there is this place in centralised europe where/the vertebrate forest got crippled/hobbling and groaning the trees/look to each other for support/hindering their journeying immeasurably/ whilst in centring europe/the weaver’s hands are crimpéd crampéd/and this weaver’s specular eye is blind/so the shuttle roams unmonitored/weaving lots of the little miscellaneous bits/into the brave broad sweep of clouds/bedraped with fabric of wildest beauty and strength/ wild wild beauty lay me down/kiss me on the mouth in central europe/wrapped in cloth of warp so soft so fragrant/-flagrantly so-/doused in juice off of vines/and whose weft (which once wept/bereft) sparkles under cuckoo spit/and a bold seam of gold/unearthed...

auction laundry agent as I raise my paddle— why so eager the landscape of beached bric-a-brac to overreach the ideas of the ghoul at rest over his self-penned almanac which invites critique from the magpies pulling upwards from his brain into a worthwhile, for a change, attic adventure. try as I might I cannot rid the fabric— when albert pulled the american sound “lever” his wife held his breath for him and in what then took place the mountains gave no clue as to the track of the avalanche which was prohibition to the numbers racket of the flood-green valleys of course. in the debrief I wept— the building programme here is fierce pulling through community to units in a full meander of parts to a whole to just parts: like heather does not make a more; like shrimps do not a salad make; like making a sugar and fertiliser bomb is brave. it isn’t. and in one final emblem of our embarrassment as to the path through the story to the whole thing we’ve been after I recall the way the monster ...

odd jobs is it any wonder the demesne is snug knowing the evening gold is another one for the books? even forgives two men halted by its gate, daring to rest their clay glutted feet there. saying: “padriag, you’ve borne queer fruit there,” “haven’t I just.” “ahh, you’re the divil himself.” “are we off so?” they leave. gold elevators lift them to heavenly tramlines. later. in the upper guttering a chick is swamped. I know. I find its chalk deposited when I clean out the mush of dead leaves next autumn-winter laughing. we re-hearse its never un-packed wings one of which will oftentimes squeak at the hinge. unwittingly, the horse bolts across the stretch.

the annals of robinson crusoe—experiments in form 1: arrival the weed gets dislodged from the deep; so lonesome I could weep. the furry fruits sprout well beyond your reach; and how I fear the beach. from the head land razor reefs are all too plain; I dream of mittle europa, and spain. 2: remembrance in my father’s house are many wonders I can taxonomise them still fabrics culled from the tropics machinery made at home porcelains from china idols of asia minor religious emblems scraped in rome curious american hydroscopics and of course grotesque hookahs from brazil. evidence of adventurers, traders and their unfair plunders, how I miss it so. 3: adjustment I love my goat who gives me love unconditional I long for the boat I hate cats, cats they perform excess inexcusable and collude with rats at first they charmed me seemed so free and full of such shenanigans but they give to take away and I have to keep these rabbits in that hutch to keep them from being molested as that oft disc...

development of a landscape water lay on the land there and fleas grew fat on it as an ox pulled through the brown whilst simultaneously brown corn grew up whereas between the corn the air so that between the air the corn grew simultaneously people gathered on the edges who though cautious came to rule. water oozed through the land there and leaving a mark, softening fibres as warming and stagnating pools of life whilst fish came and went in their silence whereas they mistook the weeds for thoroughfares so that they rode the idling currents pleasurably simultaneously hooks were dropped and raised and nets dragged who with the falling evening were filling up. happiness soaked and bloated and staggering and like the soil ripe with water as over ripe, pregnant and burdened whilst soon to fall it lifted up its paunch skywards whereas there was a long, grandiose, buckling effect so that swallowing up the corn and swamping the fish simultaneously the warm processes were turning the pools to s...

Lines into Columns cont... Extract taken from my second book, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh U.P., 2004) with siginficant modifications. My work on columns comes, as I have said, from considerations of language and loss: It is useful to try to think of every poem as consisting of two columns or of two sides. Some of the most important elegiac works of our age have tried to do precisely this. I have already mentioned the double columns of "Litany." This same technique is however used by Jacques Derrida in his prose-poem Glas, still one of the most challenging and confounding works on death we have, where he conducts two separate deconstructive readings of death and mourning, one of Hegel and the other of Gide while Blau duPlessis' "Draft 5: Gap" mixes single columns with double columns. However, because "Litany" is such a remarkable conception we ought to begin there where Ashbery conducts a debate on the spatial duality o...

Lines into Columns One of the problems of Agamben's dialectical approach is that, like all dialectical approaches, it is extremely limiting and reductive. Oppositions feel right and they give good structure, but the gradations of the semiotics of space in the poem are subtle and various, and a prose/poetry dichotomy simply does not do them justice. No, to better understand the semiotics of space in relation to the line the main source remains poets themselves, not their poetics, but the actual work. Although lineation and space are fundamentally important to poetic language, nothing has really been written on the subject that comes near to tackling the remarkable usage of semiotics in contemporary poetry. Recently, in my own work on the poetics of loss and mourning, I have been looking at the interface of the semiotic and semantic in that of all the semantic areas space could address, obviously the theme absence/loss is the easiest. In particular I have been looking at the right ha...

okay okay the wind in rustling in your hair tells a story of what has dropped off a thousand miles away is the intention to gather up and then rush at it an energy distributed then through shallowness to rise five people asleep in a home big enough for four only one could be mistaken into lying wakeful as the slug is universally despised so you too might feel the uncanny shoulder-consciousness of only just getting away with it so much is pressure but some of the worst is the release which tends towards a repetition of pathology in all the shadows of the seasonal adjustments made to stave off mass a ideology like your father never told you it is hard nowadays to talk of the child who goes to bed happy yet alone without being accused of sentimentalism which is the habit of an automatic response to tragedy I guess and wakes up sad the body is what falls from you as you rise in that bracketed way by this this parenthetical to the other all it is a process of wanting to get closer to that b...

Paper presented at Keele University, May 2001 and again at Reading University in June 2001. Death is never completed as there are always leftovers. There are the literal remains of the body which, within western culture, are vital to the mourner’s sense of how to mourn successfully; there are those who are left over or behind who must make sense of their loss; and then, more often than not, there are monuments. Elegy theory pays a great deal of attention to the nature of the monument, as does art history and social anthropology, and certainly the memorial is the moment when the privacy of mourning meets the public gaze of the community. At this most difficult of meeting points, private and public, we often like to construct something to mark the occasion, something arresting and affecting. But which occasion are we commemorating with our monuments to that which has been lost? Elegists and psychoanalysts tend to stress the affective importance of the monument as an essential step toward...

okay okay the wind in rustling in your hair tells a story of what has dropped off a thousand miles away is the intention to gather up and then rush at it an energy distributed then through shallowness to rise five people asleep in a home big enough for four only one could be mistaken into lying wakeful as the slug is universally despised so you too might feel the uncanny shoulder-consciousness of only just getting away with it so much is pressure but some of the worst is the release which tends towards a repetition of pathology in all the shadows of the seasonal adjustments made to stave off mass a ideology like your father never told you it is hard nowadays to talk of the child who goes to bed happy yet alone without being accused of sentimentalism which is the habit of an automatic response to tragedy I guess and wakes up sad the body is what falls from you as you rise in that bracketed way by this this parenthetical to the other all it is a process of wanting to get closer to that b...

Agamben's Theory Cont... Having established the semiotic event of the poem as occurring at the end of each line where the semantic is challenged by the semiotics of space, Agamben then both expands and switches round his argument to think about the end of the poem as a whole. Here his rather limited project, considering the period in the 19thc where traditional prosody started to give way to free verse, is a bit of a problem but the point is still well made. Whatever happens at the end of a line should be augmented massively at the end of the poem: What is this falling into silence of the poem? What is beauty that falls? And what is left of the poem after its ruin? If poetry lives in the unsatisfied tension between the semiotic and the semantic series alone, what happens at the moment of the end, when the opposition of the two series is no longer possible? Is there here, finally, a point of coincidence in which the poem…joins itself to its metrical element to pass definitively into...