Foundling - the writer as curator and DJ

May 9
43 min read

Updated: May 10

There was a silver and reed band. My father, who delivered oil to farms as a living, played clarinet in it and wrote out the parts for the various instruments. Say a person regarded as the ‘slowest’ in town was interested in belonging to the band. They might end up playing the triangle. In another episode, someone would be entrusted with the bass drum. There was a uniform, a peaked cap, silver buttons, epaulets, tassels – there was, in a word, respect.

The sense of this was the fairly routine observation that everyone had a role to play; there was indeed a role for everyone. Bad chests, farming injuries, mental and physical disability, depression, illiteracy; quite dramatic poverty. The latter item is important. The extent and character of poverty even into the 1970s in a townscape such as Downpatrick, which was never in its long history a prosperous place, is a critical backdrop to its political, cultural and sociological condition then and even still. No one who wanted a role would have none. A role would be found for those who wished to have one and that role would be theirs and theirs only. These are a manner of gifts; there is also a manner of ‘findings’ – both transactions crossing over an abyss of want among people who had little. Drunks, thieves, citizens, scavengers, but no one only one of these things exclusively or all the time.

Everything in Folly Lane is 'found', thieved or scavenged, from a variety of sources, though drained, siphoned off, certainly downcycled in most cases, but changed, edited, turned, stretched, gutted in many cases, skin flayed off and worn as a mask.

Many years ago, the poet John Hewitt said to me that Wordsworth’s line in the long poem ‘Michael’ - “And never lifted up a single stone” – was a perfect line of iambic pentameter. I’m not sure why it was perfect out of so many in that long pastoral. But today I see the line is utterly unremarkable, emptied of the glamour, sparkle or wit expected from a line of ‘poetry’. Yet it sustains itself in words through the structure of simple association, the noise, the four-square posture to the world, on its own two legs as it were, supported by the ligaments of syntax, as necessary as a rope bridge.

Somehow it is always a matter of re-education; re-learning what it is that makes language memorable or stunning or devastating or plausible as an explanation of the impossible. We forget the initial encounter with communication which executes all these qualities as if by magic; and get waylaid by artifice, our own making. The more focus there is, often, with artifice, the less authentic the utterance we think, certainly the less anonymous the expression and therefore the more tempting a resort to the fictional self. Why? Because everything we do in our day must assert the self, express the self, affirm the self; and every line written for posterity – which is every line of everything written by everybody who writes anything, we fondly imagine – is aimed at a longevity for that strange inhabitant we are and its ghostly presence.

How amazing that often the most formulaic utterances – prayers, invocations, testimonies, even mission statements, visions, even strategies – contain the most mesmerising, even ‘enchanting’ patterns of expression, which become memorable and telling; moreover, useful. A generic complex of ideas or eruptions merely settle on the surface of the earth; what pattern they assume is their own business.

In the work of the fictional self, though, we look for messages, lessons, morals; Lord knows, even if we don’t look for one, there is inevitably a moral at work in a poem. Hand in hand with the self comes its superiority as a point of view, its elevation as a literal ‘viewpoint’, a headland overlooking the world the rest of us live in. It brings with it a unique perspective, or so it thinks. Rather like the old Roman custom in the triumph procession of a returning victorious commander, of a slave in the chariot muttering to the hero ‘remember you are a man’, always in the ear of the self the old nonsense is whispered, ‘Remember you have a great truth to tell, your own’ … More often than not, though, it is in fact mundane, tedious, ill-considered, sometimes dangerous, always intrusive, and mostly of no use at all; and, if useful, accidentally.

A finger is wagging at us. Satire, irony, hyperbole, fable, lies, rage. Even if the poem begins in neutral, as it were, there will be a gear shift designed to alter our perception; more often than not, a maudlin observation, some item of pathology, a melancholic twist. All courtesy of the self.

None of that occurs with the anonymous text. It is literally impossible. There is no headland in the flat lands; no colour in the night where all cows are black. But there is a certain power. When we encounter a survivor, for instance, those pulling themselves out of the rubble of abuse or incarceration or a bombsite – not every one, but many – there is often an endowment of speech which is extra-ordinary. We all know examples of this, I won’t belabour the point here. It is blindingly obvious.

Looking at the little descriptions of the last days of suicides in St Louis in the mid 1950s, which make up section vi in Folly Lane, the simple narrations of events, the tiniest imaginable, let loose epic possibilities. When I saw the line ‘Don’t look in the shed. Call the police.’, a whole cavalcade worthy of Noël Coward opened up. Of course, it did, with all the potential for speakers and listeners and bystanders and witnesses and the completely oblivious. It was not a mere part of a poem; it did not arrive as a starting point or an end line, or even as a diversion somewhere in the middle. It arrived, for me, as a complete poem already; needing nothing done.

It’s hard to overstress the absolute character of this ‘alreadiness’ of art. As a phenomenon, it is a literal truth, not an exaggeration for effect, or something which is merely mostly accurate. It is of course a thought formalised by Duchamp; but it applies to every sphere of creative endeavour. Art arrives by recognition and salute, but only in that way is it a ‘creation’; it is never ex nihilo.

You can see easily how this does not appeal; also that it is not new. It is ancient in its way, scrawled on walls for millennia, but this is not to be glib or off-hand; because to me these present as the sound of the underground, the water table, the unknown talking to itself, or language speaking to us on its own terms.

Does this mean art and artifice do not coincide? No. Nor that an encounter with the material of experience and communication does not produce effects or change patterns in important ways; or that intervention may not be necessary, or not informative, delightful, desirable. But somehow the articulate speech which was once the preserve of elites – the literate – has leeched into the water supply. First, through oral messaging and recitation; second through education, film/TV and literacy; third, most potently and irreversibly, through social media and visual representation of speech.

Poetry turns up everywhere, in everything, from advertising to gaming, in small chunks of memorable slogan, meme, snippet, extract, TL/DR and on and on. It is stumbled over everywhere, from shop windows to placards.

And this is not because these media ‘make use of’ poetry – suddenly appropriating and repurposing lines of favourite classics, though that happens also. It is because the use of certain language – phrases, memes, snippets – actually render themselves as poetry themselves. They become poetry through exposure and use, whereas before they were disregarded, unemployed, inert.

In short, using language as already poetry, as if it were already poetry, makes it so.

There is a remark among the notes on those who took their own lives that ‘the neighbours did not realise/he was speaking about himself’. Once the context is given, or a context, even the smallest comment takes on a freight of significance; it becomes a spoken word, a part of the discourse we have with others and ourselves every day of the week.

On 23 April 2024, Scott McKendry texted me once in the middle of an exchange of views on Whatsapp. I note the date because it changed my aesthetic practice if not its DNA. I should stick a recording device under a table in the Arkle Bar and transcribe what it picks up. I hear the word ‘transpose’.

“Unethical? Yes. Poetry? Yes. Like, word for word transcriptions. With commentary.”

It’s a radical notion; so much so, it is a little beyond my capacities at this stage in the game. In technological terms, what it promises is enthralling and intoxicating. So much play and in play. Right away, I know it is a lifetime’s mission. It is also a fundamental act of faith in language itself. It certainly confirmed my prejudices, celebrated my exhaustion with words and the onion-garlands of them round my neck all my life, certainly changed my world as a remark. What underpinned it was multifarious. It was to do with themes and forces of the everyday; contexts for meeting and conversation; self-edited expression, but also chronically about class.

There is no point slagging poetry off, even the hee-haw version of it which includes curlews, babies, lurv, justice and other fictional flora and fauna. There is always a readership – tiny though it be – for such work. A still tinier readership exists for academic poetry written by very smart people. But the tiniest readership of all – to the extent of being non-existent – is reserved for poetry of the type I describe.

It will be dull, repetitive, unintelligible, disjointed and more than likely depressing.

It will be objected that what I have described here is just pretending that chucking anything in willy-nilly, lifting chunks from whatever hoarding, shop-window product-list, overheard gibber on the bus to town, will be poetry when, in fact, as we know, it will be banal, pointless, dull and no one will read it. It will be trite and prosaic, indistinguishable from all the fatbergs of journalese and advertising copy clogging the arteries of airwaves and electronic media already.

To which I retort – only if we are doing it right. The ideal encounter with poetry would be like falling asleep on a bus and waking up to find someone playing a squeezebox in the back seat. Everything about poetry militates against this discovery, though, on page or before a microphone. The irritating sacral pauses and ‘chaunty’ delivery, of white space, postage-stamp text, or telling silences, announce depressingly that ‘a poem’ is about to begin; so be prepared for the kind of performance you would hoot and bellow at if in the genuine public square.

The ideal encounter is to realise, gradually, that someone’s speaking has taken a grip on hearing; that what you thought was speech, in fact, had become another mode of noise-making entirely, another way of telling, and that it is suddenly compelling and novel and good. Structure and metre and syntax and grammar build themselves out of the air in transit, as it were; they announce themselves.

This isn’t fanciful, either, but is observable fact. I certainly want to walk into poetry in the way one stumbles into quicksand; to find oneself sucked under.

Meeting language on its own terms – in this case, English of a certain type – releases unexpected endormorphins which no one could predict, and only generated by, if you like, someone walking barelegged through grass, picking up ticks and Lyme Disease, rather than digging a trench to build a palace; if you like, dispersing cyanide gas trapped in the hair of the executed prisoner by ruffling it.

Language means something. Even and especially when it refuses to mean what we want, and when we wish it to mean nothing at all, which is more common an intent than we will admit, language continues to radiate its senses, a faint glow even when discarded. This is what Merleau-Ponty means by being ‘condemned to meaning’ – the idea we are in charge of meaning, or can manipulate its direction or power, or can switch it off, is a fiction from Hell itself.

We are cancelled and even convicted by what we have said. What we meant is irrelevant; what we said is what counts. Language works for us, but we are no more in charge of its inner life than we are of any wage slave dependent on us for sustenance.

The most amusing item in all our discussions about poetry in particular, but literature in general, and even any act of communication involving a language, is the idea we have that idiom ‘in common’. Nothing is further from the truth. The jocular remark that the United States and England are separated by a common language is actually an emblem of intimate proximity compared to the distance between me and you in the universe of things said. Leontia Flynn says this in her best loved poem viz “the furthest distances I’ve travelled/have been those between people” – yet no one behaves as though they believe it; or they believe it in a way which gives it a kind of friendly humanist glow, as if it is affirming something rather than diagnosing an impossible challenge. In any case, it is not exclusive to language there, though the actual distances are extreme and unbridgeable.

The observation is literally true. Anything less than that makes it simply a thought more or less whimsical or quaint, and it is palpably a much chillier diagnosis than either of those.

What we complete in microseconds in our own ‘internal’ world as regards intentions, appetites and expression, will take us hours, maybe days, to verify in exchange with others we only imagine operate in a way contiguous to ourselves, but have no evidence at all to prove that is so.

How much less then is ‘poetry’ in English actually ‘English’ at all. The most renowned poetry in that language remains obtuse and obscure and oblique to the vast majority of ‘English speakers’. In every sense, the pitch, register and attack of poetry in English is off-putting, irritating, and often hostile to ordinary people in whose language it supposedly is.

Throw down a copy of a Shakespeare sonnet in front of most citizens and they will stare baffled at it. They will need lessons in how to read it, as if it were in Old English, or indeed a foreign language entirely; or if only every third word were revealed and the rest erased. They might need as many lessons as it would take to learn how to suture a wound, or how to make one’s house safe for a resident with Alzheimer’s.

Now, throw down some examples of contemporary poetry, and watch the bafflement only replicate and proliferate. The basic argument – that this is worth the effort of reading – is not made convincingly, the way the so-called classics have an entire culture worshipping them. Most people stare at the words until they glaze over – not only with lack of understanding, but with a sense of unease and disquiet at a deeper truth still; that their lack of understanding is part of the very rubric of the writing. They are meant not to understand. The poems are intended for another audience and readership entirely.

Most people pick that up very quickly, because they are not stupid; they just never learned that poetry was like suturing wounds. The poems are as opaque as scientific treatises, with exactly as little relationship to English as it is commonly understood. It’s important to make this point, because there is as much translation required for an ‘English’ speaker for a poem in English as for a poem in French or German or Russian. Indeed, schools supply such a translation for pupils – simple glosses on the meaning and also on the other barrier a poem raises – ‘attitude’.

This is not a throwaway comment. The assumption that ‘we understand’ a poem in English, because it is in English, or have it more accessible to us by virtue of that, as it lifts its supercilious eyebrow over us, is an utterly false one. We think we understand the processes involved in ‘translation’ of a literary art from one language to another, with all its flaws – some remarks about translation have entered our everyday consciousness, in such a way that we are gulled into thinking we know its difficulties and losses. But that assumption is based on yet another one, even more deep-rooted and false – that poems in English are written ‘in English’. In every way that is meaningful, no they are not. The sound, the shape, the juxtapositions, the address, the masking, the manner … the ligaments and the tissues … are in fact alien not to the language itself but to us who encounter it in these ways.

A function here is to snag those aspects of written discourse which begin to shapeshift into something resembling what we expect from poetry. The torsion of prose; or indeed simply the march of language across terrain not yet reserved for designations of aesthetic merit or value.

So I am an observer of such pieces I gather, as much as anyone is. I learn from them as much or as little as anyone. It strikes me they have some purpose to them, some identifiable directions of interest, otherwise I wouldn’t have persisted with the assembly. I always asked for poetry that told me something I did not already know. I find this encounter with the mere presence of language at play and at work gives up a high percentage of that something.

So, then, a book which includes a meditation on ideas of the self and identity and our mortality, which is the one indisputable fact. Elements reworked from post-mortems, narratives of execution techniques, historical incident, some quotes from memoirs (principally the French writer Georges Bernanos); Marx & Engels pop up; so does Christina Rossetti; Belfast Harp Festival 1792; ghostly paratroopers, a couple of IRA men; medieval Downpatrick; murderers, slovens, apparitions, interventions, the odd painter.

I am not convinced ‘the self’ exists in any way we have been schooled to understand it. But the idea has certainly preoccupied the species for millennia, though not particularly in any consistent way – other than the half-witted myth of the ‘wee wee man’, the pilot peering out through our eyes, steering ‘us’ along, pulling the levers of our limbs and such, which has dominated Anglo-American thought for 300 years, and been parodied mercilessly in the cartoon series The Numskulls, which originated in The Beezer and is now still in The Beano. Oddly, the numskull theory makes sense practically – it gives a rough guide to explaining how we work, where we are in ourselves, and so how we can have health reference numbers and social security numbers, names and addresses.

The problem is it works, it is plausible, it is useful, but it is also gibberish.

Inside the wee wee man’s heid there must be another wee wee man, and so on. The Anglos have neither the appetite nor the stamina for thinking that long into the back of the mirror. But the ‘autobiography’ described here is a version of the back of that mirror – something of the narrative shape of a life, with emphases on critical moments which are critical because meaningful, identified, emphasised and to an extent explained. In short, a life no one has ever led.

Similarly, each of us as one of these autonomous selves infesting the earth, is primed to imagine ourselves as the protagonist of stories. I am struck by how the audience member at Saving Private Ryan is persuaded to identify with the main characters. But if ‘we’ wondered truly how long ‘we’ would last through the movie, were we one of the combatants, the answer is around 30 seconds. We would be clipped in our helmets before getting our feet wet, as some were shown to be in the movie. ‘That’s me, that is’, in the credits as ‘Second soldier killed in landing craft.’ We wouldn’t be around long; we certainly would not be staring down at the headstone of a fallen comrade in our own day by the final reel. No. We would be deid. Face down in the Channel. But the egomania of the reader, the witness, the survivor, is totalitarian.

Some think of themselves, in a trial scene, as the judge or the prosecutor. Some few will see themselves as the defendant – the one in the electric chair, not the one throwing the switch; not in the firing squad but the one with the blindfold and the white paper disc pinned over the heart. I’m afraid all my life I have thought of myself as the guy in the chair, Jimmy Cagney’s silhouette pulling itself along the radiators screaming to Ole Smokey the electric chair in Angels with Dirty Faces, not Fr Pat O’Brien sadly reflecting on a promising life wasted or one of the kids whose life is changed forever because let down by a cowardly tough guy, even if the faux cowardice is a final generous act.

Another section is ‘Bleeding Aft’ - to do with the past as our behind, as much as our actual behind. In this context, we are less Sir Roger Casement, than we are Epondo whose arm was lopped off, or Kelengo who did the lopping; or Elima, or Mobe or any of the sorry casualties narrated, or any one of the anonymous sexual encounters Casement has in his life. That’s us, that is.

Casement’s mission in the Belgian Congo in 1903-04 was to gather evidence as British consul of wild atrocities (amputations, murders) being committed against the native rubber collectors by Belgian commissars. He of course kept a diary for that year and while not in the same league on his private life as his later diaries, there are his sometimes cryptic, sometimes blunt, descriptions of encounters with sundry gents. All the material is taken and shaped from the diary of 1903 – the ordering of the little snapshots themselves is not chronological though but placed in such a way as to get a fuller view of this extraordinary man, six foot five, with just some hints of the radical breaches that would occur later in south America and with the British in Ireland. Even so, this is not the full story or the full man. It’s a way of making a difference in the world, which he certainly did, at some risk to his life and its actual forfeit and absolute risk to his ‘reputation’. The introductory essays by Jeffrey Dudgeon to his monumental study ‘Roger Casement: The Black Diaries’ (Belfast Press 2022, 2016, 2019) are indispensable in understanding Irish history in the 20^th century. Among his summaries of Casement are the following remarks: “His accumulated life parts – genetic, environmental, experiential – were poised to be an instrument of fate in both African and world affairs … By becoming a man who believed in himself, as well as someone with a reputation and the right connections, he had passed over into that select group who can make history.” That moment of being, as Woolf might say, is of course pivotally interesting in any reflection on one’s own life and the lives of others, insofar as those others can be recognised as conscious at all or as human at all, whether with wee wee pilots inside or no.

A life, I think now, is peppered with ‘I wish I hadn’t done that’ or ‘I should have hit that harder’ or ‘I didn’t reckon on that being a mistake’ or ‘I really should have hunted them all down one by one and not let up’. These aren’t epiphanies or ‘moments of being’; they are just thoughts which occur in a Meursaultian fashion, as a simple observation of a thought passing, the way one might observe a camel crossing a desert. I can’t discover a single moment in Casement when he saw such a camel, even fleetingly.

Another section splices divers newspaper accounts, anonymous Facebook posts, some reflections from Walter Pater, Ginsberg and Yeats and Pound, Joan of Arc, contemporary murders like Lyra McKee’s in 2019. Also Dostoevsky’s beaten horse in Crime and Punishment with Ciaran Carson’s Turnbull poem, Sean O Riordain (where Carson got his poem), and of course Nietszche’s collapse in Turin when he saw a horse beaten in the street. Also, Enoch Soames as in Max Beerbohm’s futuristic fantasy from 1897 turning up at the British Museum in 1997 by the power of the devil to see if he is remembered as a great poet … and other reflections juxtaposing Yeats with drunk petrol bombers, the skills of barbers, ending with an item constructed on the 1974 burning of Long Kesh, the prison camp established outside Belfast to house prisoners detained on accusations of paramilitary membership.

There is a rhapsody on Enoch Soames – I’m not interested here in spelling out the attractions of a story such as this one, or the extraordinary wit and cleverness of Max Beerbohm, which is one of those boons the universe has given to readers for the ages such that you would fall on ‘Zuleika Dobson’ or ‘Seven Men’ like someone starving, but the appeal of ‘the future’ is always a mighty force for writers, especially poets. The irony is, as always, that the future is not in fact ahead of us but behind us – not temporally but spatially. If any writer wishes to know what chances their own work has of a legacy of being read, let alone appreciated, they should seek out the work of younger writers at their living co-ordinates in the shared world, because that is the poetry of the future, say, right there, and it keeps being renewed every five years, behind us, so we are running from the tide when we should be running into it.

Though Ernst Blofeld reminds us of La Rochefoucauld’s observation that humility is the worst form of conceit, nonetheless there is a tariff of humility demanded by learning. We are renewed and invigorated by peers, and should be attentive to those, but this is also true of those who are younger, because the aesthetic is never ‘young’ but ‘new’, never jaded and tried but forming and already articulate about the world and already bristling with the forebodings of what words are yet to come and in what way. (I will not be around to read the late poems of Sinéad Morrissey and Flynn, for example; let alone the full strength work of so many poets who are now setting out, in proper time and order, about their careers; that is, in their early and late 20s, early 30s.)

The pact with the devil made by Enoch Soames is not so much one involving transport to the future, but one which (as in Wells’s ‘The Time Machine’) actually involves staying exactly where he is while the world around him devolves into the London of 1997. He doesn’t travel through space but time – he stays where he is. Space, paradoxically, is the literal locus of action and reflection. This is the bluff of time itself – every version of travel appears to mean shifting from one ‘time’ to another.. But, in reality, we stay where we are and it is the world which travels around us. Perhaps had he sought out through the real life of London even then, or imagined the newer work being written then, from Swinburne, Hardy, Yeats, Whitman, etc, Enoch would have understood the future and his place in it more clearly, because he would have written himself into its past among them.

Or maybe not. Because that enterprise is a folly if ever there was one, the writing bit; and imagining a readership is even more ridiculous. In the late 2000s, the statistic became popular that 75% of all poetry sold in the UK was by Seamus Heaney – that’s including Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Yeats, the lot. The market for all other work is embarrassingly small, and hardly worth mentioning. Again, as people became literate, and their not being stupid, the access to ‘writing’ expanded – the doors were blown off – and all to the good. Let a thousand flowers bloom. There ain’t no praetorian guard of poetry in this man’s town.

The section ‘In Ghencea Cemetery’, is located at the graves of Nicolai Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania, and his wife Anna. The section reports their final days, and other pieces recount those of Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq, and Muammar Gadaffi, former president of Libya. These were sensational on-screen slayings. What is commonplace now, from Gandhi and JFK on, that is, graphic filmed assassinations and attempts on world politicians especially, impossibly dramatic footage wound and rewound like the silk on Yeats’s sword from Sato, were still in the 1980s, epics of drama – even in violent Northern Ireland, the machine-gunning of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s reviewing dais in 1981, the shootings of President Reagan and Pope John Paul II, were mesmerising. Action delivered for real on-screen, with real consequences immediately recognised and felt. The executions of the Romanian tyrants on Christmas Day 1989, the literal unearthing and sham trial of Saddam Hussein, the butchering of Gadaffi, were seminal interior epics in significant lives, with vast exteriors affecting so many millions. Juxtaposition, account, recount, brick by brick, cannot help but convey unbearable complexity and nuance in human allegiance and belief, and I think some colour is visible beginning to drain back into the features of these celebrated corpses as language sets about doing its work, and the job here is just to watch it doing so, squinting a little where necessary.

Assemblages of works of different kinds will arrive at meanings, or suggestions, or happeninstances of sense. Unpacking already existing prose, say, or formulaic passages, rearranging or remaking or erasing chunks, will have the same effect. If they can mimic the pompous, stentorian tones of poughit-rih (poetry), as Tom Leonard famously dubbed standard English pronunciation, all the better. Think of Chaucer’s ‘samsoun, samsoun’ in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, something that the word ‘rhodomontade’ always struck me as conveying perfectly, sonorously, vaingloriously, or indeed borborygmic, “as though thou seydest ay "Sampsoun, Sampsoun!"/and yet, God woot, Sampsoun drank nevere no wyn./thou fallest as it were a styked swyn;/thy tonge is lost, and al thyn honeste cure/for dronkenesse is verray sepulture/of mannes wit and his discrecioun”.

At any rate, assemblage or collage or bricolage will retain enough of the original at least to have some vestige of clarity, so there will be that. There will also be, with judicious nipping and tucking, other dimensions of meaning glimpsed, if only briefly.

There will always be writers who are moralists, so best not join them and be another one. I’m not convinced anyone really gives a damn about anything anyway; but everyone likes to see their prejudices shared and favourites confirmed. Most writers are in the business of doing one or other or both of these things. Good luck to them. The idea that writers are ‘good people’ fit to give advice has survived several millennia of evidence to the contrary. But writers, poets especially, still like to assign to themselves a personal aura of wisdom, insight or mystical proximity. The propensity of artists and writers in particular to set the crown upon their own heads like Napoleon has been well noted – most recently, UK writers joined a round-robin protest relating to Gaza with the remark that their gesture was “about our moral fitness as the writers of our time”. Several hundred leading figures actually approved that sentiment. “That’s us, that is.”

The writing game, or career, then, becomes a fetching personal quality, though the medium is no more than the grubby old debris of everyday speech, the argot of sailors and whores as much as of cardinals and princes. (This would seem an arcane and archaic phrase or saying if it wasn’t simply hilarious that these four trades and professions are still very much in play in our time.)

What arrives by means of language is sourced in language. What we look for in language we are looking with. Meaning arrives by means of it and we discover it as much ourselves as others do – if we are successful in having conveyed anything. We are surprised by our own words. And we are surprised most in dialogue with others, because as Merleau-Ponty is quick to point out, the other draws from us in dialogue ideas we did not have beforehand, which remains one of the very few arguments evidencing that others exist in the first place.

Soon, the impact of the actual via that 20^th century technology of ‘film’, both the artform and the physical medium, will shrivel to nothingness, as facsimile via the virtual returns with a vengeance, and the AI fantasy of retribution, maybe, replaces the urgency to exact it in the messy detail that needs a washing machine to clear up. We were last shocked by 9/11, 2001. That was when we ran out of eyes and out of words to accommodate them. As subsequent and even prolonged atrocities have shown, we have not and never will be as shocked again.

‘Male Diarek’ is a Norseman’s rendering of a greeting to an Irish king in the 11^th century, a visit that didn’t end well. It shows how language plays a huge part in our trials. This section gathers misfits and malcontents, nay sayers and oddities, most of which pass off without comment in history but some, like Swinburne, Alice Milligan, Paddy Joe Crawford (who was murdered by republican comrades in Long Kesh), Meta Mayne Reid, Shackleton, Shostakovich, psychiatric patients, miraculous visionaries …

But there are important statements here, including the core of the whole manner, which is from Jacques Rancière, another gift from McKendry – “This is how I extracted my little narratives from the fabric of social history where they had the status of expressions of a certain workers culture in order to make them appear as statements on & shifts in the distribution of the sensible.”

That passage, to me, is already a poem – it needs nothing done. It is already more beautiful, more accurate, more powerful, more engaging, more memorable, the language more intense, considered, charged word by word, than 90% of what occurs as ‘lyric poetry’ in our 21^st century lives.

Having spent much time in life with dense writings – Kant, Hegel, Dickinson, Heidegger – it suddenly occurred to me that the very sense of bafflement experienced as an obstacle which accompanies those reading practices is the same as bafflement in poetry, but in the latter we seek it out continuously paradoxically to illuminate and provoke, which may be some of the several things it simply cannot do.

Two poems side by side in this section illustrate a point. The first is a catalogue of items on sale in the discount furniture and home décor store The Range: “the greatest treasure the tusk of ganesh/eclipse copper sunset bohemian lunar tapestrie/dacite outdoor sun & moon solar panel/floodlight tracks of the wild incense/flood safe large reef rope tieback//autumnal mouse encased original light hand-shaped trinket dish crushed/diamond crystal silver angel wings/astrid-textured jug stylish encrusted leopard for accent tables mini gold kremlin/gemstone amethyst tree in purple”. The second is a catalogue from Assyrian inscriptions: “the great crown on her head/earrings on her ears the beads on her neck// the breastplate on her chest/the girdle of birthstones on her waist bracelets/ & anklets such are the rites/you have asked me for something not to be/asked for adorned the thresholds with coral lapis lazuli flute carnelian bracelets …”.

The point illustrated is in the simple power of individual words themselves, maybe just nouns, set in juxtaposition, made to communicate in proximity and among themselves. Lists of possessions, triumphs, tributes, journeys, generations, perfumes, gifts, one after another, provide one of the earliest tropes of poetry, chiselled on stone mostly; it persists in some technique of incantation which has illustrated poems down the ages – see Longley’s ‘The Ice Cream Man’ for an example. But there is something formidable, impressive, overwhelming, and also nuanced and subtle, simply in the solid advance of such cohorts of nouns across the field at Cannae. ‘All is lithogenesis – or lochia,/carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,/stones blacker than any in the Caaba,/cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,/celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,/glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,/making mere faculae of the sun and moon’, says Hugh MacDiarmid.

Quite rightly, there is an odd visitation from Jorge Luis Borges, via the Vikings, which is both fortuitous and necessary, contributing I think to the uncanniness of the soup brewing throughout the book.

‘Novissima Verba’ has items culled from a book published in 1980 describing the last months and hours of people who killed themselves in 1956 around St Louis, Missouri. Entirely anonymised even in the original, they are more so here. The casualness of despair has its own authority. I’ve had this book for nearly forty years and have intended to frame these contents in some way because of what I thought their compelling power. The title means ‘Last Words’ and is famously the title of the memoirs of St Thérèse of Lisieux, which is not an accidental association.

No one need venture into anything written here in search of beauty. I can’t recall ever thinking that what writing was meant to do was add to the store of artistic pulchritude, or to the millions of written works in the portfolios of moral or physical or aesthetic beauty, in the way people mean when they say ‘X is such a lovely writer’ or ‘X’s opening sentence is one of the most beautiful in literature’, or … or … Poetry seems more plagued by this standard than any other genre of literature. A great fallback – if all else fails, make it lovely or, at least, something that signals to a reader that it might indeed be lovely – the categories of what qualifies are quite limited. There hasn’t been a great deal of beauty about, maybe, in poetry since the beginning of the 20^th century.

But the idea of another variety of beauty does still seem to have a purchase on the earth. There are in places here and elsewhere attempts to record something of the anonymous actual heroisms of individuals; not as such, but as narratives of a day spent in action without gain; indeed, in fact, at significant loss. A man saved from drowning, say; an old man refusing to hand his car over to killers; modest gestures elsewhere still making the witnessing air reverberate.

Evil is everywhere. There is no more doubt of this than there is that banality is everywhere, or mediocrity, or cruelty. The empirical evidence is mountainous. You concoct a definition of evil and indeed I will bring you to a place where you can see it and touch it and you will call it nothing else but that again. The posture in our world that these phenomena are built of superstition, are behind us somehow - 'aft' - lost among our primitive belief structures, opens a radical exposure to the great opportunism of malice. It works its way among us with all the characteristics of a pandemic – private histories beloved of case studies rendered meaningless and irrelevant by the ubiquity and promiscuity of self-satisfaction.

The drama of it brings its audience. The multiplier effect of atrocity dwarves the immediate singular impact of a kind act, if such a thing exists. Atrocities are remembered for generations and by monuments. Kindnesses barely noticed even by their recipients. Atrocities are always public, en plein air - no one misses them, mistakes them for something else, or has them happen to them without noticing.

Kindness is always just on the edge of the visible. For the recipient, it masquerades as entitlement. Unlike atrocity, kindness is an exchange; needing the endorsement of the recipient to be recognised. Like atrocity, though, kindness is also subject to lucky chance – a slight change in direction and the event fails to happen.

To its disadvantage, kindness (or virtue or goodness, whatever) is championed by poetry; the worse the poetry, the greater the championing, in toxic inverse proportion.

The capital of evil far outstrips the coinage of so-called virtue, in such a dramatic way that even those terms lose their meaning. Atrocity dominates our motives, memories, legacies, evaluation of risks into the future, mitigations and retaliations. The tableaux of virtues – forgiveness, caritas, selflessness, and so on (you have seen all the pretty pictures) – cannot compete with the cinema of foul action.

But no civilisation can be built on the ideas of atrocity on the one hand and the negation of continuity on the other; certainly no attachment to and conservation of wealth and power can be sustained.

The comedian who said that those who were ‘standing up for Ukraine’ didn’t even have custody of their own kids at the weekend, amplified distinct remarks by Vargas Llosa that “we invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal”. I am constantly amazed at how such words are quoted liberally, usually by liberals in support of fiction, without for a single moment anyone believing them to be true. They provide a different fiction – that of lucrative melancholia – which allows people to fabricate true feeling for the world and fill their own affluent circumstances with a futility they haven’t earned and don’t deserve. Futility, like failure, is hard-won, oddly, as in the Beckett quote about ‘failing again’ and failing better, which many manage to quote without understanding that the failure is real, repetitive, unredeemed and – crucially – desirable, not simply a romantic prelude to triumph.

Atrocity is permanent. King Magnus Barfod here quips, when a war spear pins his two thighs together and he breaks it with a lusty effort, ‘this is how we break every mutton bone, lads’, but the next instant is struck in the neck with an axe. The contexts for each piece of material which appears here is completely outside the original usage, its terms of origin. In almost every case, the ‘quality’ of the perception, if there is any, is down to the editing and splicing together of disparate sources, rather than lifting, say, a lovely image out of Edward Thomas and trying to generate a species out of the DNA, or scouring the bargain bucket at Waterstones.

Yet even in this forsaken world, the idea of the holy persists and it belongs almost exclusively to the poor and ignorant and simple. It was a snorting laugh to grammar school kids like myself that many ailments and problems would have attached to them a saint to whom one might pray for relief – St Blaise for sore throats, St Jude for lost causes, St Dymphna for mental health, St Cecilia for music, St Peregrine for cancer, St Lucy for eye diseases, St Agatha for breast injuries and illness … but the wonder is that there is in fact a saint for every condition. For every attacker and abuser, a witness, a protector, a rescuer; in shorthand, for every atrocity and atrocity-doer, a miracle-worker, a caretaker. This may not signify much in the everyday world of the everyday, but there is an architectonics of meaning and recourse which nevertheless does exist, a regimen for recognition, resort, for self-care, for being seen in a world where so many people are not seen at all, not even once in their entire lives. This means that every individual however mean and impoverished and ‘lowly’, had access to a cohort of resort when under duress. The chances of survival from dreadful diseases may always be slim, but the minimum is that even in the darkest place, the most routine loneliness of illness, one might have some recourse to psychic companionship – a God lying down with thee. Who else will? Answer. Nobody. The architectonics of meaning held firm for many centuries. One of the functions of poetry also is to see and recognise the individual soul in such joy and travail.

The vast majority of humankind is not even slightly comfortable with the written word. Many are encouraged to feel stupid with the fear of not understanding; some dreadful hangover from schooldays, if there were schooldays. Literacy is not universal; self-confidence in front of others as an audience is the exception rather than the rule. One thinks of Saint-Éxupéry’s vantage point and recall those amazing photographs of camels across the desert sands, where the vast shapes seen moving are not in fact the camels themselves, which can hardly be discerned against the beige pelt of the desert, but in fact the vast shadows they throw in the savage sunlight, covering an acreage which dwarves even their own considerable selves when compared to their human drivers. That’s us, that is. And how clear it is that part of the value of religious ritual, as of ‘small town’ life, is that each in some way serves to recognise the passage of a human being across the face of the earth. A baptism of a child, a partnership of some kind, a small community, a hospital, a funeral, a local paper or bulletin recording the passing. Barring a court case, that will be the lot of the common soul, the extent of its breakthrough into the public world.

Attention to these lives, though, is an obligation for a writer, certainly for this one. The legacy of so many is to intervene in unexpected ways among others. A bowdlerised version of the saint is the superhero, the ubiquity of which idea, thanks to Marvel Comics, has managed to provide whole generations in a pagan world with a theology of protection and retribution not seen since the Norse sagas. But as with all encounters of the miraculous with the mundane throughout theological time in the Judaeo-Christian universe, the saint is in fact counter-intuitive – weak, mild-mannered, reflective, prayerful, good; duly slaughtered, of course; put to death usually by butchery; ultimately remembered, revered, even loved.

But the classic saints do not die by accident or miscarriage of justice or mistaken identity. There is nothing innocent about them. They are indeed utterly the most guilty; in the sense that Orson Welles insisted Joseph K was ‘guilty, guilty as hell’.

French literature and thought spent most of the 20^th century reflecting on heroism, justice, freedom, as well as holiness; presenting us with some of the great considerations of these questions, though all mostly ignored by Anglo-American wise-guy culture. The novelist Georges Bernanos inserts the holy into the secular business and marketplace, bringing personal integrity to the world he observes close up and without fear, following his Christ wherever the logic of that led. The remains of St Thérèse toured Ireland in the early 2000s, from parish to parish, really a 20^th-century saint of impossible humility whose perceptible goodness derived from a theology of tininess and insignificance. At the other end of our recorded era, centuries earlier, there still stands the figure of Jeanne d’Arc, an interlocutor across the ages whose journey is documented so thoroughly, across personal testimonies, two extensive trials/hearings, immense accounts of nigh-impossible deeds, and an intensity of focus which has drawn writers down the eras, Mark Twain, Anouilh, Shaw, Vita Sackville-West, to scrutinise the meaning of it all. Because it assuredly means something.

Oddly, paradoxically, ironically, counter-intuitively, those blessed by God suffer appallingly. Like those GIs killed in the landing craft, they do not make it to the final scenes of their own movie.

In Terre des Hommes (1939), translated as Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Éxupéry writes of a miner trapped in a collapsed shaft. “Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber,” he says, “there lives a world. Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on feast days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love, inhabit that skull. By what are we to measure the value of a man? His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates.”

You do look for writers whose musical – compositional, thematic – signature reverberates in a manner like to those who reflected on these very themes. For me, Morrissey has championed the virtues of the European theological perspective without shame and the radical secular faith of human transcendence – ultimately, in both cases, the promise of flight. It is an exhilarating presence.

Language in advertising, tourism, property sales, UN statements, bloviation of Climate Action documents (Coalition High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships for climate action (the acronym CHAMP), emerges as verse to the attuned ear. This is a kind of rhapsody which is an elegy for Balzac, Pasternak, Yeats, Dowson, Harriet Monroe, whose central nervous system was stripped out of her body and toured the US. She was of course also a Black servant. Also various versions of mortality here, a reminder of Jean McConville, and a timely resurrection hypothesis.

The ‘autobiography’ frame is not fanciful. The fragments, snippets of song, small intensities across tracts of often demoralising but still creative work, fashion a kind of autobiography for myself or someone. It would also borrow the voices of others, such as the Argentinian economist and financial adviser, to capture something of the pathos and melancholy of successful lives.

‘Creativity’ as a word needs stripped of its doe-eyed positivity; so does ‘poetry’ – disembowelled, preferably. In our day, many thousands of uniquely gifted writers are inventing new collaborations among words to sell us things like property, holidays, cookers, lifestyles, to tell us things about a planet, health, concrete. Doubtless they would wish to be writing sonnets about love in Dorset or Buenos Aires, but in fact the force of the working universe pins them to a desk and helps them drill out advertising copy.

These items are in fact poetry. Tell me in what sense they are not. They look like poetry, they are shaped like poetry, they sound like poetry, they use unfamiliar words in more or less rhythmical ways just as poetry in legend is reputed to do, they are just as opaque in ways poetry is expected to be, and at times exactly as banal and transparent as much poetry in fact is.

The world is ‘already there’ before us; much of its meaning is also. ‘Always already there’ – there isn’t a single phrase which has stayed with me as long, outside of child-like attachment to rhymes and psalms and parables – the Baptist’s severed head on a dish, Samson and the ass’s jawbone, the woman at the well. I do not know what the ‘always already there’, of the world, can possibly mean if it doesn’t mean what it says. It has the same force as a metaphor, in that there is no point to or value in the utterance if what it describes is not literally the case. In short, that the phrase is already describing and enacting transcendence. It is literally true. No other interpretation makes sense of the strength of the utterance, but would be critically falsifying it.

Not expecting this, we enter into the stumbling across, the coming upon, the uncover of writings, the identification of those plateaux of words, the catenations, which make up the poems and the book as a whole is a process of increasing anonymity; any self of the poem is deferred and postponed in favour of the sequence. In a working note of April 1960, titled ‘ego and outis’, as Véronique M Fóti says, Merleau-Ponty writes “the self (Je) is really no one and anonymous. ‘the first I (le Je premier), of which the nameable I is the objectification, is the unknown one to whom everything is given to see or to think’.”

The unknown ‘one’ – not yet personalised, not yet conscribed, not yet prejudiced against the world or others – is the earliest iteration of who and what we are. It is what does the seeing and thinking on our behalf. It writes much of our poetry for us; and poetry is what renders its immediate perceptions so vivid and self-evident: “no one heard the shot/next morning a neighbour noticed someone/sleeping in the car & alerted his parents/his mother went out to wake him”.

In other words, there is already in our first encounter with the world a movement outward and toward it. We are propelled towards transcendence, where that is understood as reaching out, moving beyond, recognising the symptoms of another consciousness ordering a private world which may be contiguous to our own. It is an evidence that what is over there at a table resembling us may indeed have a life inside which is akin to our own. In language, juxtaposition – being beside – is all that’s needed for words to resonate with something of a meaning they do not have in isolation.

The indispensability of transcendence spoke to something inside that was frightened by two scary people – Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Paul Sartre. I can’t help that I studied a certain type of philosophy and that I did read the books – some of the most formidable texts in any language. I also can’t help that the deep-rooted sentimentalist I am walked the corridors of those books stricken with anxiety – very much the stereotypical individual Sartre describes so scathingly. But it is true. The vista stretched out by both those individuals was and remains so dreadful, fearsome and gripping that I never really got over them. I disliked Sartre in particular. At least Hobbes had a world which was out to kill him and everyone around him. His life was at risk throughout. Sartre, with all due respect to his stout wartime action in occupied France, described a world which profoundly suited him, and he did so with memorable, vivid, obsessive elan – everything, from the plays, the novels, the philosophy, including the monumental Critique of his latter days. His work, especially in Being and Nothingness, can change a life for ever. It has that power of never being able to shake off its scepticism and the call to action, the most compelling bastard since David Hume.

Toujours déjà la is an iteration of the ‘thrownness’ of the world – a wonderful detail of how creation comes to be … to be thrown in a place, tossed randomly, thrown onto it, or into it, in the sense of being cast, cast down, cast out, but discarded or placed. It is also, literally, a description of all possibilities held in time – everything is possible and everything is inevitable once it’s so. Within Merleau-Ponty, there is a transcendental recognition and it is no more, but no less than, this principle of the world and ourselves in it. This is also involved in the basic formation of his later thinking – the concept of la chair, flesh, the upholstery of relationships we engage in in the world. In practical terms, we are about uncovering, discovering, recovering – every version of disclosure there is – and to a world which may ask, well, which of those is it, smartass, we have to say – it’s all of them and at the same time. It is the abundance of facts, of experience, of expression, with nothing excluded or ruled out or erased or modified or edited. We suddenly can own our own forms, our own aesthetics, be up to our own devices, because they are all already there.

This is all the more true given the single most important development of the last 200 years – mass literacy. Related to it is the revolution of the internet of words and images, since 2000 in particular. We are not living in the age of R S Thomas or John Masefield, even of Marianne Moore or Sylvia Plath. Instead, the universe of language has expanded so rapidly and to such a scale that we have arrived at a world where university degrees are conferred for themes such as ‘the unseen body and creative spaces of erasure and exposure of the queer’, ‘decolonial intimacy’s indigenous politics of resistance’, ‘remembering or forgetting, navigating international conflict through collective memory’, ‘the theory of monstrosity: the subaltern praxis’.

The point here is not the various themes or specialisms themselves, but the assemblage of words they represent, the simple juxtaposition of concepts and ideas which are already charged up, humming, doing something and going somewhere outside the norm of thought. You perceive immediately that these structures would be literally incomprehensible to a don from 1885, though they are in standard English and in an academic context. Suddenly, the meanings are everywhere, literally in every nook and crevice of the earth, physical and spiritual; doubled up, crammed, proliferating and often unintelligible, or transparent to only a few.

A niche interest in one town in one small country, can become a global audience the size of a major city, via the internet. That population is sufficient to sustain the niche idea, grow it, nurture it. By contrast, some specialisms, based on some books for instance, may have only a handful of readers worldwide. Moreover, literally, no one may have read a book, or book about a book; and there are books on shelves not a single person has ever read.

Aughakillymaude, meaning in Irish ‘wooden field of the wild dog’, is a townland in Fermanagh, where a local community group received an award from the Arts Council. Visiting the location to check up on the satisfaction with the equipment and programme supported, it became clear that however the word appeared to be pronounced, it was not at all how residents knew it or themselves. In fact, I learned it is pronounced ‘Acklamad’. On saying this word aloud to the hosts, a new regard for me fell upon their countenances and what had begun as a set of cautious salutes quickly turned into a warm exchange about place and words and belonging.

This is how a word breaks open like an egg and another creature entirely crawls out. It is also how a whole community breaks open, when the word as they say it – which uniquely is not the place as we would say it – is deployed upon them by a stranger. The place is no more the word we say than the word we say aloud makes the same sound as theirs. Do not ever think these are the simply different words for the same place; or different pronunciations of the same word. Those are crucial errors. In fact, these are different places entirely, with only rare overlaps of meaning and location. Ironically, the place itself – likely a townland or district – will have as little fixation with known boundaries as the lettering of the roadsigns has with the sound of the place in the throats of its denizens.

It was Sartre who famously said we are condemned to freedom; condemned because freedom leaves us no hiding place in blame of others or any passive role in the world. As noted, Merleau-Ponty reframed this, less excitingly, to assert we are condemned to meaning. Of course we are. Condemned because, as with freedom, there are many occasions when we would wish not to meaningful, not to ‘give ourselves away’; and there are times we wish not to be solely responsible for our decisions, our lives. In contrast to the Sartrean formulation, which is electric with action and dynamic, and so in tune with what is really a Romantic view of the self and the world, a view which still carries so much baleful weight today,, Merleau-Ponty’s appears passive, inactive, a bit morose and lethargic. “There is no point in ‘meaning’,” says the Romantic, “if one hasn’t made it for oneself, new and alive. How second-hand, pre-loved, one-careful-owner is all that?”

The problem is, there is no judge, jury and court-room setting where the Romantic triumphs over the Lethargic, like Atticus Finch. There is just lived experience, which tells us every day that we are struggling to make ourselves known, understood, even simply heard, in Aughakillymaude or New York.

However it may be, meaning is not something we solely generate for ourselves or on behalf of ourselves, for ourselves or for others. We do it anyway. In the way even our dead bodies secrete meaning to others. Nor is it singular, coming in ones.

Language has its own meaning and we are vectors for it. The point is, however much we shape and ‘say what we mean’, language itself is already saying something else as well (or even ‘else’) through the vocabulary we choose. We end up under pressure using words we don’t mean; they don’t express what we want to say, or afterwards think we have said. These aren’t mistakes; we aren’t being tricked by language; this isn’t a matter of a weak vocabulary or ‘poor education’ or any such nonsense. We aren’t at the mercy of language, or its dupes – no one is fooling us. There is no conspiracy. It is in fact a condition of being able to communicate at all that language exercise its own peculiar fascination over us, mesmerising us. We blurt it out constantly.

We are as likely, as university-educated individuals, to make an arse of ourselves in public with our views as is someone who left school at 14. Likewise, I have never met any person, angry and disappointed, who was any the less capable of roasting the perpetrator because they hadn’t had a third-level education. Language charges itself at the moment the most pressure is put upon it, when it is needed most – why were you there? Who were you with? What was it you were watching? What exactly was it you said? At these points, through these fissures, the raw eggwhite falls out in a long transparent exposure.

This is where poetry, if it is to be the rich source of language or belonging or expression it claims to be, obviously must be busy with language itself. If it’s a way of telling a story, or making something up (like fiction), that’s another thing. But intensity and density and accuracy, surely, demand more than an assertion of how sensitive a self is, or how sad events are, or how nice nature is, or how important ‘lurv’ is.

There are words, of course, to avoid at all costs – all costs. ‘Curlew’ is one. ‘Child’ is another. ‘I’ is another. Vegetation of any kind needs to be tackled with extreme caution – it must not be mere vegetation. When I see ‘sea campion’, ‘fen violet’ or ‘gentian’, I substitute amorphophallus, the corpse flower, the voodoo lily stinking of rotting meat, bleeding tooth fungus … and so on – there, the words are merely place-holders, nice things that could be anything nice; they do not need to be what they are and could indeed be infinitely replaceable with others.

The untethering from meaning, from being condemned to it, occurs when we release language from ourselves and let it do its work itself. We are a vector then, an agent, something to be negotiated with, rather than an originator, primum mobile, still less a creator.

The exposure occurs when each opportunity to elaborate is flattened, one after another; of the kind Beci Carver identifies in Evelyn Waugh’s version of ‘granular modernism’ in Decline and Fall. Ponderous attentiveness in the case of poetry of course characterises a ‘continuous pressure of emphasis’ which in effect reduces the claim to significance of each sequence of words.

Do we think words do not change in different contexts? Look at the vast vocabularies and think if any single word among the vastness remains the same when appearing in a treatise, a summons, an insult, a poem, a diagnosis, a prescription? In the same way, whole sentences proliferate until syntax is so thin that the connections strain to breaking point and then break and elide and overlap and disperse.

If this is true, then Heidegger’s and Derrida’s methodology in reflecting on Van Gogh’s peasant’s boots, for example, should apply equally to absolutely any object or artefact by anyone – it needs only be a made thing. The tendency to engage only with works of genius – Bach, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Goethe, Van Gogh and so on – does have the advantage of drawing from particularly deep wells, and of elevating the discussion one hopes, but still bland, flat, seemingly featureless action of language on the world ought really to be just as fruitful. It won’t surprise anyone that it’s the featureless action that attracts me; it will invariably also be the work of the anonymous and voiceless.

The ampersand cul de lampe is to evoke continuity. This is by way of an autobiography, in that there are several ideas, or visions, which recur. Merleau-Ponty makes much of the propensity of the body to perceive certain things which are not certain according to rational thought, but which arrive with us with all the characteristics of certainty – the wrack at the shoreline which appears first like an old couple embracing, say; the train tracks which meet at the horizon, no matter how forcefully rational thought wills that the vision be corrected; the body of the wounded soldier who has no facility for abstract gesture or movement but who can nonetheless still play the piano fluently and expressively; the idea of the wounded psyche indicating in its erratic or even repetitive patterns the underlying action of the psyche that underpins all of us but which the efficient operation of a ‘healthy’ self hides from us. Perhaps also the capacity of atrocity to be miraculous; not in the sense of being anything other than an atrocity, but often how it can be astonishing in the accuracy of its location, the efficiency of its dealings, how its random victims stumble often improbably into harm’s way and others equally improbably avoid it.

The point being: the world does not deceive us. We are not ‘at first’ fooled and then, by wise thought, recover ourselves. We are not living in the world of the evil genius. The approach to how our positioning in the world is expressed to us – by our height, our bodily capacities, our senses, then by our manifold attachments and engagements – as though there was a ‘real world’ outside of those or superior to those which is the difference between the childish perception and that of the mature adult … this is fake news.

Everything we have derives from that initial insertion into the world, onto the planet, and into its network of systems. This is augmented but never cancelled.

At the sharp end of such poetry as described is Mr Robert Fitterman, of St Louis, Missouri, a pioneer on a genuinely thankless task of capturing, repurposing, ventriloquising, upholding ‘found’ material across decades of diligent attention to the detail of human interaction, suffering, loneliness, struggle. His method can manage the private interiors of a human life and the very public exteriors of atrocity. His publication with Vanessa Place, Notes On Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), is indispensable in breaking the eggs repeatedly, reimagining the poem.

Folly Lane is a place in Downpatrick, a ‘street’, a cul-de-sac, a side road, never a thoroughfare, but a misstep, and so maybe a metaphor for the whole project.

The editing, the juxtaposition, the omissions, the rephrasings, the framing as verse, the location in the scheme of the book, are ‘unheard of’ in the source material. But the source material is all cited and signposted.

I would say there are maybe only half a dozen actual lines of poems quoted in this entire project. Needless to say, I’m happy with the defensibility of the project, because I can hear my own voice throughout, but as a sock puppet. The point is – I suddenly realised that many, many things are poetry now which weren’t sixty years ago, and much of that is found in the everyday humdrum of talk. Our everyday language already mimics ‘poetry’ in persuasive ways; nowadays poetry ends up mimicking poetry as well.

The world is full of delusions. It’s the nature of the igloos in which humans live – the little platoon of family life, mostly – that the heirlooms turning up on the Antique Roadshow are of course worthless. Also, that the ancestors tracked down through ancestry.com or private investigators or DNA matches via cheek swabs, would, for all the prideful glee of great-great-grandchildren retracing old journeys to the Dark Continent, the grandsire himself would never be able to pick out his remote descendant from a line-up of utterly unrelated eager faces.

A single charitable act flops back into the bucket of suffering like a rotting fish. One atrocity changes hundreds, usually thousands, of lives instantly for as long as those lives and a few select generations survive to remember or think it worth their while to do so, feeding off old grievance. I am on the side of Breaker Morant, as on another day I will be among the voortrekkers he dispatched behind the shed with a single bullet behind the ear. There is something compelling about the 'last days' of dictators and orators, the privacy of those incidents being open to scrutiny, and the register of Novissima Verba ennobling in a palpable way the tiny recitatives of ordinary people, the mountainous and genuinely heroic solitude of Casement, and the litanies of those many pioneers of miracles, resurrectionists, adventurers, cack-handed surgeons, copywriting balladeers.

In this world, for a while, we all play the triangle.