Wednesday, 14 July 2010 at 21:10

“We’re thrilled to announce that Iain Sinclair and artist Oona Grimes are collaborating on a new illustrated poetry book coming out this autumn. Sinclair, the author of vivid and seminal novels such as White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Radon Daughters, and the reknowned literary geography London Orbital, is creating new suite of poems based in Hastings. Grimes is reknowned for her richly allusive and playful printmaking, as featured in her recent Conversations with Angels exhibition, and we at Pighog are understandably giddy with anticipation. With an anthology of winning entries to our children’s Short Story Competition also scheduled for release in autumn, and more live events to be confirmed, there is plenty to look forward to, so watch this space!”

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Publisher website

SAGESONG: A text for Gateshead performance

‘Poet appointed dare not decline…’

I build a raft of books. A paper nest to split finger pads and drip a bloody wake of words, behind us, on thick water. Against a ball of mud in the throat: Sagesong choked or hooped in tight brass. I spit colliers’ phlegm and shattered hubcaps. Doctor-fathers at the pit gate. The held silence of a Quaker Meeting House. Pebbles clattering in a fast stream.

I build a raft of sea-books, to make my drowning sure. Better than concrete boots for the sinking. Water, so cold and clear at source, thickens to reeking soup. In Norfolk I saw trees grow upsidedown in sand, henges or rings, like the negative of a longboat, a Viking burial. In Lindisfarne they are houses.

I build a raft from gospels and traceries, serpents in relief on stone crosses. Beasts mashed from pulp and from poets: Bunting, MacSweeney, Pickard, Griffiths. Time served in cells and cells splitting open to hungry light. Rivets, driven through the paw, rust to coral. An hour gathers them in, memory-libraries for creosote and pitch, skin for a black sail. You do not know this place and this place does not know you. Foolish to speak. To spoil a slow pint. Bunting cautioned against verbiage. Cut cut cut. ‘Vision is lies.’

First, I came for love. And then for books.

the fire-crowned terrain

as the sea burns

wind

You can’t burn your boats when you live inland…

Died

Rosy myth

bee-like

we cluster & suck.

BROTHER WOLF, a Turret Book, in red and black. I remember, when I first met Barry, he told me how he laboured over this Chatterton repossession, day after day, setting and resetting. He came over the water to Hackney, trailing stories of Kensington and Cambridge. We were walking towards the canal they have now drained for cosmetic Olympic work: fish dead, coots peddling in shallows. The place was the place he had left behind. You could see him split like John Clare. And how on the road north, trudging after a dead muse, another self tears up the roadside grass for your dinner. The iceman shadow.

There is so much land in Northumberland.   The sea

Taught me to sing

The river to hold my nose. When

It rains it rains glue.

Northumbria. Bunting tells us what this meant, the proud scale, running from coast to coast, a kingdom, not some heritage parlour, or ruff of postcards. People from the south vanished, eaten by the bite in the soil. I knew a bookseller, a decent, quiet man who sat by the bars of his electric fire in the clammy English Midlands, chewing his pipe. When some ghost of success, stock that could actually be sold, impinged on his private cave, he ran north: Northumberland. A lighthouse. He was never heard from again.

Sparty Lee, was it? Cottages, owned by Barry MacSweeney’s aunt, where poets gathered to read and fight: 1967. I was not there. You’ll find the history now on an estate agent’s website. Or an obituary by Nicholas Johnson in a broadsheet. ‘He taught many Creative Writing students at Hertford College of Further Education how to decipher the Racing Guide from a Newspaper…. A new generation of English poets met head on for “Sparty Lea Poetry Festival”. Sparks flew and Sparty Lea – like Morden Tower – set the benchmark for pollination of radical poetics.’

Pollen Nation: Northumbria. Fossil-dust of ancient crop circles. Pearl barley. Barry’s much-loved marigolds, watermint and borage. I was not there. Never invited to this town – and later, never able to come: always on the road, walking with fetches, or hunkered down in a 40-year Hackney bunker. The books, by then, had become walls, beds, tables. Cash. Tom Pickard ate them, smoked them, they bailed his charge. And kept him, always, close. ‘Better a thief than a fool,’ the Greeks say.

Pickards’ bellying Tower: Tom and Connie. I raid archive, I reive the Middlesborough image hoard to find a clip of Professor Eric Mottram, in the Tower, shocked by the cabin-like proportions – how so much could have happened in so tight a space. It reminded him, this sleepwalker, of past-times on the North Sea, a war-convoy heading for Russia. Arctic chill recollected in a decommissioned Whitechapel synagogue: the warm tape-recorder spooling on his lap as he dozes through another performance piece, and the poet snuffs out the ritual candles to improve the dark.

Mottram gave an interview entitled Our Education is Political. ‘In Zurich I was learning German with a Polish countess, whose family had known Rilke… I really remember as a small boy, just remember… what I remember is seeing the headlines – I must have been something like six – but I really do remember seeing the headlines – of what was called the Jarrow March… Bill Griffiths, whose poems I published for the first time, is one of the most extraordinary poets, with a range of abilities. It is an utter scandal that this man doesn’t have huge grants and have a job somewhere, I mean he’s living on doles… He lives in Seaham.’

Ted Lewis: Jack’s Return Home. Filmed, by southrons, as Get Carter. ‘It’s nearly full light now. From where I am I can see the sweep of the river for a good twelve miles and to my right, inland, the glow of the steelworks is pink against the grey sky…I scan the yard. There is no sign of Eric… The water round me is becoming streaked with thin red lines that swirl slowly towards my feet… And between us, beyond my feet, half in the water, is the shotgun, what’s left of it, twisted and black, still smoking, the smoke curling up into the grey morning sky…’

I wasn’t here, I was not invited. I did not invite myself. I went to Durham, several times, and in the snow I saw that great black plug of rock as an English version of Kafka’s Castle. I wrote a script called Carry On, K., in which all the minor parts would be played by fabulous English grotesques. Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Connor, Kenneth Williams, Bernard Bresslaw, Charles Hawtrey. Whinnying, sniggering, braying against  sense and sensibility, neutered, mules of the irrational and perverse. I read in pubs and backrooms, with the patronage and hospitality of poets, Ric Caddel and Jackie Litherland. Chris Torrance brought his penny-whistle from Wales. Outside, drinkers from the hills went naked.

The Pickards, meanwhile, were importing Americans, who repaid the favour. Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Dorn and the rest.  ‘The Lord Mayor,’ Pickard said, ‘had a frigate-launching on the Tyne to attend and she invited Dorn to accompany her. The invitation didn’t include me.’

Dorn wrote to his mentor and friend, Charles Olson.

‘The launching was spectacular, they made an incision in the bottle of champagne with a diamond cutter but it still didn’t go bust the first time. But when she did go away I was standing lined right up with the runners and saw it all, very slowly at first so you could hardly notice and then all at once fast, into the Tyne… The band struck up with a rousing version of that tune from Bridge on the River Kwai… Then we all went into the company’s reception room as ten thousand Jarrow workers streamed out of the gates for home…’

‘Dorn stayed on for a couple of days,’ Tom reported, ‘and we took him for a lunch-time drink with Basil.’

‘Basil Bunting,’ Dorn wrote, ‘is a fine old man, very funny the way he’ll stare at you with this silly grin on his face, up close, and you think he hasn’t got it until suddenly he makes his answer. A real, seedy old gent, but very straight. I like him immensely…’

June I972, a few weeks before the birth of our first child, this was where I had the instinct to come; my own birthday, I remember, in Bamburgh. We had the use of the communal mini-van for this trip to Holy Island. Anna was so close to her time that she had, in good part, to be heaved and rolled on the dock after the crossing. I’ve had a soft spot, ever since, for the pushing of that little humped car across the causeway, against the incoming tide, in Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac. Which indeed it proved to be, in terms of his later career: he calls it his favourite film. Beckett and Pinter synthesised, in an absurdist translation, with actors from everywhere, and producers who would go on to facilitate Witchfinder General for Mike Reeves. Out on the Farne Islands, gulls swooped and dived, in the wrong movie. But this was the right place, powerfully so. While Anna rested on a bench, I saw a warm brown shadow move. And I followed. You are closer to Scotland here, my roots, than to London. Closer to Norway. To the Polish wastes. Our daughter was named Farne and I wanted her, when that question came up, to be christened at the ruined abbey: if anywhere. But they declined, residents only.

5 March 1978. When it comes to it, we try to respect the rules of ritual, the community of this Hackney church, its tiny congregation. One or two of the old folk have come along, the vicar is in flow. There was close attention to what was happening, no holding aloof, when Brian Catling heard a soft click against the stone. A man called Harry had slumped, coughing out his teeth, which bounced once on the aisle, before Brian swooped with a large red handkerchief. He got Harry out to the porch while the vicar carried on with the dipping and marking. News was brought through, in whispers, that this elderly and faithful parishioner had died. The ceremony now became a double-event, memorial tribute and welcome; one valued member of the flock departing and a new soul joining the Christian fellowship.

Not long after this, so it was rumoured, the vicar’s wife, mother of numerous children, left the adjoining vicarage to enlist in a Stoke Newington lesbian commune. Our son and our younger daughter were not christened.

My mistake was in taking Anna, in the later months of that pregnancy, to another Polanski film: Rosemary’s Baby. The dim corridors of a haunted brownstone apartment block recalled, many years later, in the beached boat-building, Marine Court, where we had our south coast flat. Not a rivet on the whole craft. Cancerous concrete. An upper-deck of radio masts and photovoltaic scanners inducing epilepsy and involuntary flashbacks to Marilyn Monroe in Niagara. Television sets erupting with waterfalls. The hubris of demolishing a prized Georgian terrace to pastiche a phantom ocean liner, the Queen Mary. While the hunger marchers head south on their long road to London.

Fools think the train will do, take the strain of journeyman prose. Prostituted topography. They see the north through a misted glass. And they see it thin. Locals cultivate cataracts.

JB Priestley (1934): ‘I have a very distinct recollection of  taking a great dislike to the whole district, which seemed to me so ugly that it made the West Riding towns look like inland resorts… The centre of Newcastle, in which we had now landed, had a certain sombre dignity… It was still raining, though not hard; and the whole city seemed a black steaming mass… ‘

Paul Theroux (1983): ‘It had the poisoned & dispirited look of a place that had just lost a war. It was an area of complex ugliness – not just the dumps full of gulls and cows, and the weak defiance in the faces of the teenagers – it was also the doomed attempts at survival: the farmer ploughing a small strip behind an abandoned factory, and the garden allotments of sheds and overgrown enclosures, cabbage and beans, geese and pigs, vegetables and animals alike dusted

with fine smut and looking cancerous. It was like a sight of China – black factories & narrow, necessary gardens, and a kind of visible helplessness. It was one of the dreariest landscapes I had ever seen.’

I came on the train too, packed hard against an impatient man in a dark suit, bristling with laptops and electronic tagging devices. He complained loudly about our conversation, the anecdotes of poets and bookmen. ‘Other people, business people, use this service. Show some consideration.’ He rammed his glistening black-leather appurtenances into every available or unavailable cranny. I sneaked a look at his screen. Graphs and fiscal reports gave way to action porn, whitemen with guns zapping beards and suntans. He was a tax cop, coming to asset-strip a failing Gateshead enterprise. Ten minutes out from Newcastle, he snorted into his mobile, demanding a car. The station was ranked with welcome parties and fleets of taxis. As we drove away, we saw him, puce now, screaming into his hand, about the limo that had wisely decided not to put in a appearance.

Tin men on hills, arms spread wide, like Peter Schmeichel trying to block a penalty. Commissioned angels knocked up in the shipyards to protect motorway shopping malls. Failed angels, coated in development blubber, plunging from multi-storey car parks. Fire demons out on the moor. ‘I am the nightmare,’ said Barry. Who met Bobby Robson on the train and had a great session, so he claimed, competitively quoting Dylan Thomas. Forty miles from heaven.

Priestley got it right in the end. He found his guide.

‘It was my bookseller friend who took me down the Tyne. The rain had gone but the morning was cold and rather misty, I had nothing to do most of the time, but stare through the window of a  saloon car… We began by running down the old Quay Side as far as we could go… These were mean streets. Slatternly women stood at the doors of wretched little houses, gossiping with other slatterns or screeching for their small children, who were playing among the filth of the roadside… If TS Eliot ever wants to write a poem about a real wasteland instead of a metaphysical one, he should come here…

We had to cross the derelict shipyard, which was a fantastic wilderness of decaying sheds, strange mounds and pits, rusted iron, old concrete and new grass. Both my companions knew about this yard, which had been a spectacular failure in which over a million of money had been lost. They had queer stories to tell of corruption in this and other yards, of lorry-loads of valuable material that were driven in at one gate and signed for, and then quietly driven out at another gate, of jobs so blatantly rushed, for show purposes, that in the last weeks wooden pegs were being used in place of steel rivets… I do not know that anywhere on this journey I saw anything more moving and more significant than that old patched boat, which hung for years on the davits of a liner but is now the workless men’s Venture, creeping out with the tide to find a few fish…’

Make a map of sound: hammers on iron, axe blades on bone. Naked women dancing on beaches. Coal chutes and broken shotguns. They love their poets and bridle them with poverty, drive them out. At the finish, Priestley, sick with self, his long absence from London, stumbles on the secret recipe.

‘In Gateshead, on our way back, we passed some little streets named after the poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Tennyson; and I wondered if any poets were growing up in those streets. We could do with one from such streets; not one of our frigid complicated sniggering rhymers, but a lad with such a flame in his heart and mouth that at last he could set the Tyne on fire. Who would rush to put it out?’

I walked all morning in weak sunshine photographing horsehit on the road. But I did not reach the sea. ‘They only listen,’ Tom said, ‘when you think they aren’t.’

Iain

SAGESONG: A text for Gateshead performance

‘Poet appointed dare not decline…’

I build a raft of books. A paper nest to split finger pads and drip a bloody wake of words, behind us, on thick water. Against a ball of mud in the throat: Sagesong choked or hooped in tight brass. I spit colliers’ phlegm and shattered hubcaps. Doctor-fathers at the pit gate. The held silence of a Quaker Meeting House. Pebbles clattering in a fast stream.

I build a raft of sea-books, to make my drowning sure. Better than concrete boots for the sinking. Water, so cold and clear at source, thickens to reeking soup. In Norfolk I saw trees grow upsidedown in sand, henges or rings, like the negative of a longboat, a Viking burial. In Lindisfarne they are houses.

I build a raft from gospels and traceries, serpents in relief on stone crosses. Beasts mashed from pulp and from poets: Bunting, MacSweeney, Pickard, Griffiths. Time served in cells and cells splitting open to hungry light. Rivets, driven through the paw, rust to coral. An hour gathers them in, memory-libraries for creosote and pitch, skin for a black sail. You do not know this place and this place does not know you. Foolish to speak. To spoil a slow pint. Bunting cautioned against verbiage. Cut cut cut. ‘Vision is lies.’

First, I came for love. And then for books.

the fire-crowned terrain

as the sea burns

wind

You can’t burn your boats when you live inland…

Died

Rosy myth

bee-like

we cluster & suck.

BROTHER WOLF, a Turret Book, in red and black. I remember, when I first met Barry, he told me how he laboured over this Chatterton repossession, day after day, setting and resetting. He came over the water to Hackney, trailing stories of Kensington and Cambridge. We were walking towards the canal they have now drained for cosmetic Olympic work: fish dead, coots peddling in shallows. The place was the place he had left behind. You could see him split like John Clare. And how on the road north, trudging after a dead muse, another self tears up the roadside grass for your dinner. The iceman shadow.

There is so much land in Northumberland.   The sea

Taught me to sing

The river to hold my nose. When

It rains it rains glue.

Northumbria. Bunting tells us what this meant, the proud scale, running from coast to coast, a kingdom, not some heritage parlour, or ruff of postcards. People from the south vanished, eaten by the bite in the soil. I knew a bookseller, a decent, quiet man who sat by the bars of his electric fire in the clammy English Midlands, chewing his pipe. When some ghost of success, stock that could actually be sold, impinged on his private cave, he ran north: Northumberland. A lighthouse. He was never heard from again.

Sparty Lee, was it? Cottages, owned by Barry MacSweeney’s aunt, where poets gathered to read and fight: 1967. I was not there. You’ll find the history now on an estate agent’s website. Or an obituary by Nicholas Johnson in a broadsheet. ‘He taught many Creative Writing students at Hertford College of Further Education how to decipher the Racing Guide from a Newspaper…. A new generation of English poets met head on for “Sparty Lea Poetry Festival”. Sparks flew and Sparty Lea – like Morden Tower – set the benchmark for pollination of radical poetics.’

Pollen Nation: Northumbria. Fossil-dust of ancient crop circles. Pearl barley. Barry’s much-loved marigolds, watermint and borage. I was not there. Never invited to this town – and later, never able to come: always on the road, walking with fetches, or hunkered down in a 40-year Hackney bunker. The books, by then, had become walls, beds, tables. Cash. Tom Pickard ate them, smoked them, they bailed his charge. And kept him, always, close. ‘Better a thief than a fool,’ the Greeks say.

Pickards’ bellying Tower: Tom and Connie. I raid archive, I reive the Middlesborough image hoard to find a clip of Professor Eric Mottram, in the Tower, shocked by the cabin-like proportions – how so much could have happened in so tight a space. It reminded him, this sleepwalker, of past-times on the North Sea, a war-convoy heading for Russia. Arctic chill recollected in a decommissioned Whitechapel synagogue: the warm tape-recorder spooling on his lap as he dozes through another performance piece, and the poet snuffs out the ritual candles to improve the dark.

Mottram gave an interview entitled Our Education is Political. ‘In Zurich I was learning German with a Polish countess, whose family had known Rilke… I really remember as a small boy, just remember… what I remember is seeing the headlines – I must have been something like six – but I really do remember seeing the headlines – of what was called the Jarrow March… Bill Griffiths, whose poems I published for the first time, is one of the most extraordinary poets, with a range of abilities. It is an utter scandal that this man doesn’t have huge grants and have a job somewhere, I mean he’s living on doles… He lives in Seaham.’

Ted Lewis: Jack’s Return Home. Filmed, by southrons, as Get Carter. ‘It’s nearly full light now. From where I am I can see the sweep of the river for a good twelve miles and to my right, inland, the glow of the steelworks is pink against the grey sky…I scan the yard. There is no sign of Eric… The water round me is becoming streaked with thin red lines that swirl slowly towards my feet… And between us, beyond my feet, half in the water, is the shotgun, what’s left of it, twisted and black, still smoking, the smoke curling up into the grey morning sky…’

I wasn’t here, I was not invited. I did not invite myself. I went to Durham, several times, and in the snow I saw that great black plug of rock as an English version of Kafka’s Castle. I wrote a script called Carry On, K., in which all the minor parts would be played by fabulous English grotesques. Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Connor, Kenneth Williams, Bernard Bresslaw, Charles Hawtrey. Whinnying, sniggering, braying against  sense and sensibility, neutered, mules of the irrational and perverse. I read in pubs and backrooms, with the patronage and hospitality of poets, Ric Caddel and Jackie Litherland. Chris Torrance brought his penny-whistle from Wales. Outside, drinkers from the hills went naked.

The Pickards, meanwhile, were importing Americans, who repaid the favour. Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Dorn and the rest.  ‘The Lord Mayor,’ Pickard said, ‘had a frigate-launching on the Tyne to attend and she invited Dorn to accompany her. The invitation didn’t include me.’

Dorn wrote to his mentor and friend, Charles Olson.

‘The launching was spectacular, they made an incision in the bottle of champagne with a diamond cutter but it still didn’t go bust the first time. But when she did go away I was standing lined right up with the runners and saw it all, very slowly at first so you could hardly notice and then all at once fast, into the Tyne… The band struck up with a rousing version of that tune from Bridge on the River Kwai… Then we all went into the company’s reception room as ten thousand Jarrow workers streamed out of the gates for home…’

‘Dorn stayed on for a couple of days,’ Tom reported, ‘and we took him for a lunch-time drink with Basil.’

‘Basil Bunting,’ Dorn wrote, ‘is a fine old man, very funny the way he’ll stare at you with this silly grin on his face, up close, and you think he hasn’t got it until suddenly he makes his answer. A real, seedy old gent, but very straight. I like him immensely…’

June I972, a few weeks before the birth of our first child, this was where I had the instinct to come; my own birthday, I remember, in Bamburgh. We had the use of the communal mini-van for this trip to Holy Island. Anna was so close to her time that she had, in good part, to be heaved and rolled on the dock after the crossing. I’ve had a soft spot, ever since, for the pushing of that little humped car across the causeway, against the incoming tide, in Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac. Which indeed it proved to be, in terms of his later career: he calls it his favourite film. Beckett and Pinter synthesised, in an absurdist translation, with actors from everywhere, and producers who would go on to facilitate Witchfinder General for Mike Reeves. Out on the Farne Islands, gulls swooped and dived, in the wrong movie. But this was the right place, powerfully so. While Anna rested on a bench, I saw a warm brown shadow move. And I followed. You are closer to Scotland here, my roots, than to London. Closer to Norway. To the Polish wastes. Our daughter was named Farne and I wanted her, when that question came up, to be christened at the ruined abbey: if anywhere. But they declined, residents only.

5 March 1978. When it comes to it, we try to respect the rules of ritual, the community of this Hackney church, its tiny congregation. One or two of the old folk have come along, the vicar is in flow. There was close attention to what was happening, no holding aloof, when Brian Catling heard a soft click against the stone. A man called Harry had slumped, coughing out his teeth, which bounced once on the aisle, before Brian swooped with a large red handkerchief. He got Harry out to the porch while the vicar carried on with the dipping and marking. News was brought through, in whispers, that this elderly and faithful parishioner had died. The ceremony now became a double-event, memorial tribute and welcome; one valued member of the flock departing and a new soul joining the Christian fellowship.

Not long after this, so it was rumoured, the vicar’s wife, mother of numerous children, left the adjoining vicarage to enlist in a Stoke Newington lesbian commune. Our son and our younger daughter were not christened.

My mistake was in taking Anna, in the later months of that pregnancy, to another Polanski film: Rosemary’s Baby. The dim corridors of a haunted brownstone apartment block recalled, many years later, in the beached boat-building, Marine Court, where we had our south coast flat. Not a rivet on the whole craft. Cancerous concrete. An upper-deck of radio masts and photovoltaic scanners inducing epilepsy and involuntary flashbacks to Marilyn Monroe in Niagara. Television sets erupting with waterfalls. The hubris of demolishing a prized Georgian terrace to pastiche a phantom ocean liner, the Queen Mary. While the hunger marchers head south on their long road to London.

Fools think the train will do, take the strain of journeyman prose. Prostituted topography. They see the north through a misted glass. And they see it thin. Locals cultivate cataracts.

JB Priestley (1934): ‘I have a very distinct recollection of  taking a great dislike to the whole district, which seemed to me so ugly that it made the West Riding towns look like inland resorts… The centre of Newcastle, in which we had now landed, had a certain sombre dignity… It was still raining, though not hard; and the whole city seemed a black steaming mass… ‘

Paul Theroux (1983): ‘It had the poisoned & dispirited look of a place that had just lost a war. It was an area of complex ugliness – not just the dumps full of gulls and cows, and the weak defiance in the faces of the teenagers – it was also the doomed attempts at survival: the farmer ploughing a small strip behind an abandoned factory, and the garden allotments of sheds and overgrown enclosures, cabbage and beans, geese and pigs, vegetables and animals alike dusted

with fine smut and looking cancerous. It was like a sight of China – black factories & narrow, necessary gardens, and a kind of visible helplessness. It was one of the dreariest landscapes I had ever seen.’

I came on the train too, packed hard against an impatient man in a dark suit, bristling with laptops and electronic tagging devices. He complained loudly about our conversation, the anecdotes of poets and bookmen. ‘Other people, business people, use this service. Show some consideration.’ He rammed his glistening black-leather appurtenances into every available or unavailable cranny. I sneaked a look at his screen. Graphs and fiscal reports gave way to action porn, whitemen with guns zapping beards and suntans. He was a tax cop, coming to asset-strip a failing Gateshead enterprise. Ten minutes out from Newcastle, he snorted into his mobile, demanding a car. The station was ranked with welcome parties and fleets of taxis. As we drove away, we saw him, puce now, screaming into his hand, about the limo that had wisely decided not to put in a appearance.

Tin men on hills, arms spread wide, like Peter Schmeichel trying to block a penalty. Commissioned angels knocked up in the shipyards to protect motorway shopping malls. Failed angels, coated in development blubber, plunging from multi-storey car parks. Fire demons out on the moor. ‘I am the nightmare,’ said Barry. Who met Bobby Robson on the train and had a great session, so he claimed, competitively quoting Dylan Thomas. Forty miles from heaven.

Priestley got it right in the end. He found his guide.

‘It was my bookseller friend who took me down the Tyne. The rain had gone but the morning was cold and rather misty, I had nothing to do most of the time, but stare through the window of a  saloon car… We began by running down the old Quay Side as far as we could go… These were mean streets. Slatternly women stood at the doors of wretched little houses, gossiping with other slatterns or screeching for their small children, who were playing among the filth of the roadside… If TS Eliot ever wants to write a poem about a real wasteland instead of a metaphysical one, he should come here…

We had to cross the derelict shipyard, which was a fantastic wilderness of decaying sheds, strange mounds and pits, rusted iron, old concrete and new grass. Both my companions knew about this yard, which had been a spectacular failure in which over a million of money had been lost. They had queer stories to tell of corruption in this and other yards, of lorry-loads of valuable material that were driven in at one gate and signed for, and then quietly driven out at another gate, of jobs so blatantly rushed, for show purposes, that in the last weeks wooden pegs were being used in place of steel rivets… I do not know that anywhere on this journey I saw anything more moving and more significant than that old patched boat, which hung for years on the davits of a liner but is now the workless men’s Venture, creeping out with the tide to find a few fish…’

Make a map of sound: hammers on iron, axe blades on bone. Naked women dancing on beaches. Coal chutes and broken shotguns. They love their poets and bridle them with poverty, drive them out. At the finish, Priestley, sick with self, his long absence from London, stumbles on the secret recipe.

‘In Gateshead, on our way back, we passed some little streets named after the poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Tennyson; and I wondered if any poets were growing up in those streets. We could do with one from such streets; not one of our frigid complicated sniggering rhymers, but a lad with such a flame in his heart and mouth that at last he could set the Tyne on fire. Who would rush to put it out?’

I walked all morning in weak sunshine photographing horsehit on the road. But I did not reach the sea. ‘They only listen,’ Tom said, ‘when you think they aren’t.’

(Iain sent the photos for this article by mail but they haven’t showed up yet)

“I’ve been thinking about what to read at the Ledbury Festival. And, among the candidates, looked at ‘Ghost Milk’, an unpublished poem commissioned as a podcast. I have revised it slightly from that version. It may be too long for you to consider for the website. But it could go up, as a promo for the festival.
best,
Iain”

GHOST MILK

Yes, there is a democracy based on slavery. That’s the Greek model.

That works pretty well too…

Ed Dorn

Sliding after night-storm to lose footing

on rake of wet-shingle, and stopped

by broken spar, tarry black in blood-varnish,

bitter nails of old history, so many fire-

souls, 133 they estimate, tossed overboard, chains

as ballast, mid-ocean, to wander subterranean

caves and valleys, lost among drowned mountains,

false plants seducing a salt-blistered tongue.

The newspaper woman sold at the station

fetched £4,500: a buyer’s market.

Living with her mother and two accidental children

in a coldwater Lithuanian tower block,

offered employment abroad, a free-market choice.

Transported. Entrained. Cattled. Raped.

‘On average I had sex with 15 men a day.

When trade was brisk and the itch was hot

in the dermis of the city, I could service 37 during

a single 12-hour shift. I was not much beaten.’

‘It’s a matter of business,’ said the pimp.

‘The law of supply and demand.’

2

How can the giver of gifts experience the delights of the merchant?

William Blake

Geology precedes economics as winter tide

on a chalky southern shore

reseed naked meadow-beaches with black stone.

Dumb repetition smothers anger, making a palliative

fiction from crimes we choose to celebrate.

The cliffs of England, vertical boneyards,

‘where the ebb meets the moon-blanch’d sand’,

hide lists of scoured dead, unbranded, unaccounted.

They bleed pure water and look in preserved shipping manifests

like so many maggots freighting an iron surf-board.

Edinburgh was fortunate in its geology, martial

in dirk and kirk, a craggy extrusion of volcanic basalt:

garrison, royalty, prisoners of war buried in the rock.

Into the protected tail of sandstone, they dig,

invisibles, ragged imports, the necessary

collateral damage:  child labourers, hunchback women,

wageless slaves. Every bridge a den, damp cellars

like hollowed skulls candled in human tallow.

‘Boys were employed to sit far underground,

guarding the fire flaps that punctuated

the long dark tunnels. Even after reforms

passed into law, the conditions in the mines

remained little changed. Money was too cheap.’

3

The slaves will sell their masters and grow wings.

Better to buy than to breed: the riderless white horse,

its sounding ribs a wind-harp,

emerges from a crystal sea. A skeleton jockey

gilded braid, cherries and tassels, incubates

revolt, raises a  flaming sword to crop melon-heads,

moon faces in a cane field, strong teeth ground down

for sacred sugar. John Gabriel Steadman, a mercenary,

publishes his Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against

the Revolted Negroes of Surinam from the year 1772 to 1777,

and hires the journeyman engraver, William Blake of London,

to harvest the fruit of horror, flesh barbecues,

blood-succoured tropical vegetation,amateur crucifixions.

And the ‘beautiful mulatto slave girl’, Joanna,

the one Steadman marries, mother of his child.

Torn by a dark tarot of images, the colonist keeps a journal

of his London visit: ‘Gave a sugar cruse to Mrs Blake.

The King’s coach insulted. Met 300 whores in the Strand.

French prisoners come home. Abershaw &c. hang’d.

Saw a mermaid. Russian fleet down. Two days at Blake’s.

Quiberon expedition fail’d. 188 emigrants executed.

Blake mobb’d and robb’d.’ The working artist, enslaved by

patronage, lays the first brick of the downriver factory.

The impulse is coded within our DNA, this slippery

hawser of genetic imperatives: to invade, brutalise,

capture and explain. Secret  interior tribes, our memory,

are linked, neck to neck, for pilgrimages across desert.

They follow a malarial river to a red fort, hungry surf.

Remember: ‘We come out of the ground.’  The grace of

their bodies as they negotiate space is future war. Jungles

migrate. Hurts multiply. Trade is the only constant.

‘By the late 1820s the economic critique of slave-grown

sugar had been widely accepted.’ The system didn’t pay.

Better to allow open competition and let fiscal malpractice

thrive where it would. Queen Elizabeth’s slave-master,

Sir John Hawkins, Atlantic pirate, founded an alms house

at Chatham that still stands. The Thames remains

a complicated flow of money, letters of credit and

trading instructions. The Port of London Authority

building with its fossils and steroidal statuary now deals

in re-insurance, risk, power breakfasts. Fixed profit.

‘The slaves changed,’ Catling wrote, in his late-surrealist novel, ‘before the morals of their owners. They had  transformed into other beings. Beings devoid of purpose, identity or meaning. At the beginning it was thought that their malaise was the product of their imprisonment. But it soon became clear that there was no personality left to feel and suffer such a subtlety of emotion. It was the forest itself that had devoured their memory and resurrected them as addicts to trees.’

“It’s my intention to use the official-unofficial website as a cyberspace wall on which to flypost poems and notebook scraps. The first of these, “The Shipwreck”, is part of a group that will appear in the 50th edition of the magazine “Tears in the Fence”. My thanks to the editor,David Caddy, for permission to audition the poem here, in advance of its hardcopy debut.”

Iain Sinclair

THE SHIPWRECK

down early eiderdown man

spotted moving eastward doing the poor

and the holy, she says

in other hotter climes, I prefer

another she, complex works of art

Tolstoy without the complete text

is it worth reading, compact versions

of the sport, radio too, sensational

lie to the fairway, great play

the sound of the sea is meant

it stands, dictation

her eyes are bullets to my ring

he comes to drink wire from the office

which used to trade news, additives

conversation piece football local aggro

honoured in his way, a cash buyer

act practical, where does this naked sadhu

hold his coins, miraculously replenished

like our light sunrise promiscuous spill

the card, since you don’t ask, is JW Turner