Tony Lopez

 

Not Reading 'After'

I'm going to ask you to help me this evening. What I want to accomplish between us is to imagine a poem that is already written, to try to invoke this poem without reading it, if that is possible. I've been thinking about this through the day, having been very moved by what's happened so far. The readings against the war, against the bombing in Iraq, leave me wanting to add a talk poem here, rather than another reading. And I could try to do that now by imagining an absent poem. I've been thinking about the beautiful elegy that Andrew Brewerton read for Doug Oliver. Listening to that reading and others, I've been remembering Douglas Oliver's book In the Cave of Suicession, which he wrote as a final BA dissertation project when he was a student at Essex University. There was an official procedure to claim research expenses for the project. I understand that he claimed for travel and supplies: a cake, a sacrificial cake, a bottle of beer, crisps and so on, and he went to a cave in the Derbyshire Peak District to write his dissertation. He wrote that he drove to Winnat's Pass in 'his beige Austin car', put up a tent and went into the cave (an abandoned lead mine called Suicide Cave) and in his own quirky English (Scottish) apparently good-uncle style, he confronted the idea of the oracle, of another intelligence beyond conscious control, and of fear itself. I mean he tried to make his book open to that intelligence, fact or fiction; all his work was about that so far as I can see, even the most political writing. In my copy he wrote 'a pathway blasts out from this consciousness'.

In that book he goes beyond anything reasonable or sensible and the cave speaks, the genius of the place speaks, sometimes it's a bee, and the book, which is called In the Cave of Suicession, is of course a poem about suicide, about the fascination of death, that doesn't really talk about suicide throughout. It's not Plath. 'A bee flew into the cave.' Come in. There are a couple of seats at the front here. So the poem that I wanted to imagine is a holocaust memorial poem called 'After'. It's a poem that was produced in a roundabout way. It seemed to me that if I talked about what happened in order to make the poem that would be something, a sort of negative. It would be like Rachel Whiteread's sculpture of a house that isn't a house but a moulded replica of the space inside the house: a composed negative. That seems particularly appropriate just now. The first thing, a motive, was a view, a landscape view downwards from a mountain to a valley edge and some kind of habitation. But this view was not a view I saw in nature, it was a view that I saw in a picture in RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) gallery. I was in Providence because I was doing a reading having been invited there by Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop and they very generously put me up for a few days, so I had time to be a tourist in Rhode Island and I was feeling a long way from home of course (which was the point). I went to the RISD museum and there was an exhibition, a series of prints by a Japanese artist whose name I now forget, and they were all high mountain landscapes: the sense of vertigo and loneliness was particularly affecting, the attraction of the edge. So, Rosmarie and Keith put this party together for Maurice Scully and me and I had quite a bit to drink, I just slept for a couple of hours and then afterwards couldn't sleep at all. You get into this state where it's impossible to sleep and it happens more and more, so that the early phase of drunkenness gets shorter and shorter but when you wake up in the morning you're really spinning, there are lots of thoughts all at once and there isn't any structure to them it's very difficult. I was interested in using this state of confused clarity and hung-over craziness, so I started by remembering the emotion of the mountain picture and just wrote, pages and pages. The structure it fell into was quatrains with five words in each line. I produced maybe twenty pages without deliberate thinking, the writing was completely incomprehensible, a kind of nonsense, I was just seeing where it would go. I couldn't do anything with it at the time so I put that notebook away. Later on, about two years later on, I was in America again this time doing a tour right across and I became curious about this piece that had been written without the usual kind of motivation and control. At each place I stopped I was looking at this piece and wondering what I would do with it, would I read it or perform some of it? I started at a quarter past, they told me to use 25 minutes.

So anyway I had this piece of work that wasn't really usable but I knew that it was in some as yet private way important to me and I couldn't do anything about it and I probably would have forgotten it forever and not thought about it but Oh yes: it's the story of Sophie Wessex that suddenly makes this seem important again. Do you remember Sophie of Wessex? Sophie is the woman who married Prince Edward and when she married Prince Edward she became Sophie, Duchess of Wessex, before that she was just an IT girl, a PR person wasn't she? She married Prince Edward and she became, if you remember the story, it came out that she was using her position as a royal in order to get work for her PR Company. She was selling the idea that you could have a party with royals. You could get these people who wanted profile and maybe Edward or another prince would come to the party. There was a feature where she was doing this pitch to an Arab Sheik and it turned out that the Sheik was actually a tabloid journalist, and she was saying to him 'I can get you Philip, I can get you Betty, you know who my husband is, we can do a deal here', and the fake Sheik wrote it all up and made a huge media story. It was in the Sunday newspapers and it was the biggest story of the time. The idea of a phoney Arab Sheik meeting this duchess who is married to a prince in a hotel is a wonderful parable it makes me think about what would be a genuine Sheik? What is genuine royalty? What does it mean? Recently William had a fancy dress party didn't he, all these people turned up in fancy dress to Windsor castle and somebody came over the wall. He was a comedy terrorist, and he wore a pink robe and a headdress. He was supposed to be an al Qaeda agent but he was a comedian, they let him in and then they had to do a security review on the royal family. So my point is that if you have a fake Sheikh the whole idea of royalty collapses. There's a woman on film in my childhood, she sits on a throne in a church ceremony and they put a crown on her head: she's suddenly a real queen. There's a boy who gets to age twenty-one and he's a real prince, the Prince of Wales, Lord of the Isles and heir to the throne of the UK and Commonwealth, future leader of the Anglican Church. This woman running a PR company, face to face with an Arab Sheikh and she's trying to sell him a party with her husband, or her mother in law, or some other royal. She's completely corrupt obviously, she's using her position for the cheapest kind of advantage, building up her business, but it's the Sheikh who's the fake.

It was a long time after I published the poem 'After' that this story happened. I was at a conference about performance poetry. I was in the middle of a talk and I just didn't quite get to the Sophie Wessex story. I was talking about Tony Harrison for three or four minutes and someone official came in, told me I had overrun my fifteen-minute slot, and I just snapped it off. So there was something unresolved I had wanted to explore between the way that Tony Harrison used the skinheads in his video poem V, made fun of their ignorance, and the new genre of the Martyr video. The story that I couldn't get to about Sophie Wessex, something to do with the theatre of royalty, had become topical in another way. I was coming to the special combination of fancy dress with an army, helicopter gunships and tanks. So anyway the point of this was suicide bombers because in the same week that 'Sophie and the fake Sheik' was the main story in the news the other story I noticed was the first profile on a suicide bomber that I'd seen in the press. A suicide bomber and his relationship with his parents, how they were really proud of him and thought he was doing a good job. The genre we have yet to come to terms with is the Martyr home video. A video says 'Here I am, this is what I'm going to do, I'm doing it because I know god's will, I'm going to meet god in heaven, I'll get my reward there'. So the other story was about the suicide bombers, their motivation, and the society around them. I found out recently that 40% of the land of Palestine is inhabited by Israeli settlers and that the 60% remaining area is about the size of the Isle of Wight. It's almost exactly the same size as the Isle of Wight and there are a million and a half people on this piece of land. It seemed to me that what was happening was horrible and awful, completely understandable, but something that was bound to happen. So these people are surrounded and the new fence went up quite recently and tanks moved into Janin with bulldozers and started flattening the place. Somebody made a comparison on the news between what was happening in the ghetto in Warsaw and what's happening right now in Palestine. I think there is a kind of connection; I was wondering how I could actually read a holocaust memorial poem while this was going on. So I decided that I wouldn't read the poem but I would talk about these ideas instead.

The poem is a holocaust poem in a special sense, it doesn't narrate anything really, doesn't retell that story. There are some minor references, hints about things like the heaps of belongings, stored gold and broken glass of Kristallnacht. I couldn't say anything directly about that. There are still some people who can write out of direct experience, and there is the assemblage of recorded testimonies in the Washington museum, which is really clear. So what I finally did with the impossible text was to run it through a programme and completely randomize it, to take it further beyond conscious control. I asked a colleague in computing to make a programme which would take the entire vocabulary set, select groups of four words and produce completely randomised stanzas that would each have four words and four lines. Each time the programme ran the text was reordered and I ran it hundreds of times so I generated a huge text it was a big book like OED or something enormous, and then I just put it in a box for a long time because I couldn't see how I could do anything with it. I know you can't get a machine to write something for you. Someone who read a version, a much shorter set, said they recognised the story of an affair in it and someone else said that there was a polar journey. So what I did was to read through the expanded text and select, just picking out the small residues that had a kind of sense, like ashes in the bottom of a big bonfire. Any stanza that had any sense in it at all that I could find I preserved and then out of those I selected again until I got to the poem published in Devolution, which is three or four pages long. Finding, selecting and arranging composed it. It doesn't have any narrative but it does have a kind of remote connection with the original piece that I wrote in Providence and it seems to me now to be an abstract poem I couldn't have made in any other way.

 

Author's note: The talk poem "Not Reading 'After'", which many Shearsman readers will recognise as an homage to the Californian artist and poet David Antin, is freely transcribed from an improvised performance at 'Total Writing London', Camden People's Theatre in June 2003. Thanks to Chris Goode who organised the festival and to Tim Fletcher who made the recording.

 

Copyright © Tony Lopez, 2007.

Tony Lopez is Professor of Poetry at the University of Plymouth. His most recent collection is Covers (Salt Publishing, 2007); a collection of essays titled Meaning Performance has also recently appeared from Salt. With Anthony Caleshu, he recently co-edited the collection of essays Poetry and Public Language for Shearsman Books.