In February 2007 I outed myself as having created an alter ego, one Jago Flood, for the sole purpose of writing and submitting for publication crap verse. The prolonged exercise followed an earlier exploration of the territories outlined above. Baffled by the terms of reference of this strange department of the world of poetry, I wondered, in time-honoured philistine fashion, whether anyone with a knowledge of the Roman alphabet and a keyboard might be able to pass off the entirely random as planned and prepared.
So was born Jago Flood. The name having been devised, the verse followed swiftly. I used two initial methods of composition – the stringing together of unrelated fragments drawn from spam emails and stream-of-consciousness spontaneity. I abandoned the spam approach almost immediately. Poetry based on a monotonous diet of vocabulary rooted in sexual regeneration medication, sub-prime financial assistance and Nigerian money laundering schemes would show its roots from the start. So it was down to stream-of-consciousness spontaneity crossed with the crazed semiotics and layout of a schizophrenic architect’s building plan.
I started with certain structural protocols in place: lower case letters throughout and the eschewing of all punctuation except for single and double forward obliques, filling in for commas and full stops. Straightforward enough and in keeping, I felt, with what I interpreted as a widespread principle behind so much of this radical verse, namely, the embracing of absolute creative freedom through the simple substitution of the rules of one set of generative syntax for another.
Next I had to begin to compose poems within which no trace of conventional narrative, received meaning or orthodox semantics was evident. Further to this, I had to try to avoid any word combinations that might, through random association, create sense impressions or emotional colouring; I had to excise completely the serendipitous musicality that language in process will capture.
I couldn’t do it. My general innumeracy/dyscalculia simply got in the way and I couldn’t synthesise geometric principles and language flow. What I ended up with looked on the page more like the deposits of a pissed spider than the feverish schemata of the nutty architect. So I was left with the stream-of-consciousness spontaneity and off I went. Within a week I had a sheaf of what I thought were artfully obscure poems from the hand of Jago Flood. Both intoxicated and appalled, I submitted several to two magazines (whose blushes I shall spare) and – to cut a long(er) story short – got both published.
However, instead of feeling frightfully clever and fully vindicated now that my cynicism concerning the credulity of the
zeitgeist addicts appeared to have been confirmed, I just felt like a cheap sham and I abandoned the experiment forthwith. What did I know? Maybe some chance concatenation of images had sparked off associations in the mind or imagination of the editor and, in a sense, he knew better than I did. Maybe unwittingly I’d slipped some light and heat into one of the artifices and it breathed with accidental life. Jason Flood was duly pushed under a bus and I returned to the business of writing what, for better or worse, came naturally. I lost none of my alternate bafflement at and contempt for as ‘those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry’. I simply didn’t want to join that noisy club whose members confront the extremes of abstract art with the assertion that a child of four could do better.
But I didn’t have the heart to chuck Jason Flood’s verse into the grave with him. The poems hibernated in a dedicated folder until one day I stumbled across them and took them out for a look. What struck me about a handful of them was how the inner drive towards some degree of literalism inhabited their core. For all my attempts at creating an alternative currency devoid of intrinsic value, still the narrative imperative dominated, still the passion to communicate prevailed. And however strenuously I tried to distance myself from their content by having them speak from an alternative persona occupying an entirely different context to my own, still my own voice came back to me.
The principal poem in the group concerned a sort of odyssey made by a protagonist – some incarnation of Jago Flood – down through Manhattan from Upper West Side to the East Village to find his erstwhile partner. The route was one that Emma and I followed down and up again several times during our brief but intense time in New York in 2000. But beyond a degree of geographical familiarity, the tale was a fiction drawing on a distillation of long years of received experience and the vibrancy and exhilaration of immediate encounter, which, in fact, confirmed and ratified all of my cherished impressions of that extraordinary city.
The poem had been written in a few days of concentrated and highly focussed energy and it incorporated a number of events, clear recollections and sense memories. It began with the wailing, ululating nocturnal voice of the lone occupant of an apartment across the alley from our hotel. A slanted blind obscured the window, but the constant blue flicker of a television illuminated its edges. And snow fell almost ceaselessly for seven days.
I found myself picking at the poem, reluctant to let it lie fallow. Eventually I recast it completely, inserting conventional punctuation and rendering its shape and form more conventional. However, I made no attempt to neutralise or even moderate the voice telling the tale. So both protagonist and writer collude in an exercise in dissimulation, creating a partnership more akin to that behind the creation of a short story than a poem. Here it is, a piece of artifice, but one for which, by the time I had reorientated shape and form, I felt considerable affection.
...
MANHATTAN TRANSFER – GOING DOWNTOWN
Starting from the raggy edge
of a night of demons:
Crazy Helga in a blue room
across the alley, her shadow
wild & ticky on the busted blind
as she wails in German
at her TV screen.
Jesus, what a sound:
something dark & spiny
thrashing in her soul
to cry like that.
You
as the spidernet
remnant of a dream,
a fume that discharges
in clear light.
And then, as I bathe my face
in windowmorning light,
the snow still falls,
thick like feathers, like
the white silence
under a wing.
W. 186th – ghostblanketed cars,
hydrants, phone booths,
all mugged and compliant
like freezeframe phantoms.
You
as a lostsoul princess glimpsed
on a half a boxtop
in a trashcan.
So I step, a slomo dancer,
a magellan of the heart,
a one-trick missionary
with a world to lose,
into the drifts and dunes
and head towards Amsterdam.
Julio’s got his cab
on blocks by the sidewalk.
He curses, half under snow
with a wrench & a torch
while old man Turpin
turns Danish pastry snowslabs
with a shovel & spits
green pockholes deep.
You
as a face from
a crashed snowcloud,
bloodless, tearless,
turning away.
I sidestep the corner.
Streetcenter subway breath
in plumes, denying snow.
In the deli the Slimani brothers
rattle and blather round
the kebab spit.
Here is a grillbound, spice &
powders corner of Algeria.
On the wall the entire 1st team
of AC Ajaccio, 1983, flyblown
bouffant bushes dooming them
to formica & disco history.
You,
a rumor
in the vapor bloom
on chrome.
On Amsterdam cabs in chains;
sunshine ghosts kicking up
the crystals. One bent warrior
with a stick raised like Aaron
wagging the serpent, steps
into white surf and disappears
and reappears as one dressed
in ashes for a wake. He moves
like he’s been cauterised in
a furnace of ice.
You
as a smoke theory
behind a high
brownstone window.
Check into EJ’s for waffles
and coffee & watch the steam
reorganize the air into thick
silver aboriginal mountains.
I slide across vinyl amongst
the prose & numbers shaken out
of the NY Times - the clatter and flash
of barcode headlines, the snap
and flutter of papers lifting
like sudden wings,
from front page clamor
to sports page sidewalk
whisper: Giambi misses
a 3rd straight game.
“Felt fuzzy”, he says.
Jesus, what a putz!
And Sheffield’s sprain’s no problem.
He’s good for Sunday’s game
against the A’s. The boys
kick it around: who are the king hitters?
who are the dancing queens?
“Who the fuck gives a fuck?”
yells Nance stamping snow
off her old lady boots.
“Gimme a black coffee
so I can stand my spoon up in it.”
You
in the window
waterscape,
drawn south
on a hundred streams.
Which should I follow?
Through Morningside the snow’s
a grey dreamscape. Bloodholes
switch to emerald; the churn and spin
of cop cars crying out loud across
Cathedral Parkway. I’m highstepping
from bootburrow to icefield,
clogging deep and sliding hard.
I drop dark beneath
the streets - the visceral heat
of the subway neon
and the echo of the
footstep cough and scuff,
the hoot and slam wind.
A rocking conspiracy of
furtive travellers, wall-eyed
or wrapped in paper
winding sheets.
You
as a hiphop chant
in the wheels between
Parkway & Columbus.
Say my name,
say my name
like you’re winding up
a spell.
At Columbus Circle
the lights go dim,
the brakes bind and
for a moment
we are all of
one breath in
the tarry dark.
Then, singing his pain
like a cantor, a guy
in a Mets sweatshirt
and a baseball cap with
a busted peak jumps up.
“We’re fucked, people!” he yells.
His voice is like stones
in a can. “We’re fucked!
This the last train
to San Fernando
and we’re going down!”
You
on the upline platform
at Delancey and Essex
in a brakeman’s cap
from Dave’s Army and Navy.
Blew me a kiss
and turned into a winter wraith.
Washington Square’s
a cloud chamber, the heart
of cumulus. My footprints
turn secret and die behind me.
The edge of everything touches
my face and whispers in
multiple falling voices.
Bleecker carries me
on a twilight current,
turning, turning, the thick
river, past the cameo flash
of Mr Piombino hip-deep
in front of the trattoria,
dug into his own canyon
down to the sidewalk,
his spade disputing logic
with the falling snow that beds
deep in around his feet.
Two cop cars, chained wheels
flailing, and three kids in mufflers
dancing like full moon maniacs
through their slush and mud parabola.
The ghost of Sid Vicious shivers
on the corner of Bleecker and Grove
in charcoal and tarnish. Nothing
but slogans and a thin soul
against a night of hustling bars
looking for the trick who will whisper
where his mother went one
spectral Christmas Eve.
Hell - once just his father’s name
would have been enough
to light a candle
in the dark.
And now Bleecker crosses Broadway
where the snowplows rule,
surgeons laying the white
flesh bare. And I catch
up my breath and I check
the beat of my Magellan heart,
cruising now into a
safe harbour. The still pool
of the East Village,
the Stuyvesant rendezvous
whose lights bleed pastel thin
through still falling snow.
Dido’s bar and grill whose door
now unplugs and
in a plume of steam
it’s your tune comes stumbling
onto the sidewalk
in a spindrift of crystals
and memory like you knew
each step I took, each high step
sliding down Manhattan’s lattices
on hope and a dream unconsumed
to seek you out, painted
onto the inside of the glass
in your logger’s coat, in
your cossack hat like
you knew and sliced the moment
fine as ice and called me home
with your spilled tune,
its colors running in the current,
and you rising sideways and
your head turning in a mist
saying my name,
saying my name
like you’re winding up a spell.
...
pic: http://patteran.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/eastvillage1.jpg
Recent Comments