william watkin's blog (since 2003)

If the last century belonged to the philosophers of difference, then this must be handed over to the purveyors of philosophical indifference of whom one name stands out: Giorgio Agamben.  What is philosophical indifference?  The standard dictionary definition of the term meaning not caring either way, finds voice in the first age of philosophical indifference stretching from Stoicism to Kant’s attack on philosophical indifferentism in the opening pages of the first critique.  It is the inability to make a single, true for all time philosophical decision in favour of one position or action over the other.  Indifferentism occurs especially when, as is always the case according to Agamben, the two positions you could care less about either way occupy that of on the one hand a unified, founding, common, one and on the other a multiple, actualising, proper, many.  So, in a sense, since the Greeks, philosophy has been a dispute over the prevalence of indifference: we...

“Popular Songs”, 10-11 “The involuted consonance (“car with the cur,” “gone to a longing”) of “Popular Songs” anticipates the wilful music of “Two Scenes”, whilst jarringly disjunctive lines point towards the novel-collages of The Tennis Court Oath.” (Shoptaw 30).   I will hand over to the authority of Shoptaw in fact for most of the analysis here.   So, Shoptaw notes the songs of the 1930’s that embedded throughout the piece: “Blue Blue Ridge Mountain”, “The Garden of the Moon” and so on.   He quotes Ashbery as saying: “it was written in an attempt to conjure up the kind of impression you would get from riding in the car, changing the radio stations and at the same time aware of the passing landscape. In other words, a kind of confused, but insistent, impression of the culture going on around us.” (Shoptaw 31, citing Ashbery).   This is actually a good general summation of Ashbery’s own sense of composition as a combination of an actual circumstance in ‘reality...

This is a poem about duality so in this sense the title actually refers to what the poem is ‘about’. John Shoptaw notes, for example, the phonic mirroring of the poem which he sees as an element later phased out as is the “linear introversion” to be found here. Thus we have the following phonic recurrences: “we see us as we”; “Destiny...destiny”; “News...noise”; “...hair/Air”; “-y” and rhymes of section 2; and “...old man/...paint cans”. This simple but subtle semiotic device is then developed structurally as well, as the title hints. So ‘scene’ 2 reflects back internally onto ‘scene’ 1. “Machinery” recalls the train as does the canal; general honesty recalls “truly behave”; “history” relates to “destiny”; “fumes” to the “air” in the “mountains” (cf. “Answering a Question in the Mountains”); “dry” speaks to the “water-pilot”. Finally there is an example of what we should call image logic or associative deduction which is perhaps, in the end, Ashbery’s greatest talent. The “warm and ...

This article reminded me of my own poem inspired by Tarkovsky's 'The Mirror'.  One of the greatest and saddest films of all time. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/mar/04/poem-week-the-snow-whirls-tua-forsstrom

Tarkovksy’s ‘Mirror’ won’t leave me alone, images unendurably sad. For minutes I can’t be held to account. Email can’t reach me, devices go blank. The rain outside a tautology. My shit stinks and I do not want to die yet immortality is not my thing. The dog in sorrow nuzzles a ball whose deflation is irresistible.   My son stirs in his sleep clasped to my arm. My daughter’s silence, symbolism’s shame. My wife drives alone through a northern night, and sometimes when I’m coming home from work, bundles of mist suspended like pale fish in waters implausibly dark and clear are snagged in the lure of my light and drown.   If I am not able, if I am not able, if I am not able to put in words all that you recount of that gay siege that childhood laid at your pantry door forgive me, I do not take dictation.   As I read my lips are seen to move, as I move my limbs are dangled on a string. I wonder what’s on breath’s neth...