I’ve been wanting to reply to your letter of April this year. Each time I have re-read it I’ve come up against the difficulty of saying as a writer of poetry how my attitude to language has changed. A brief history would start with love for Keats and entanglement in Larkin, the latter presenting a hard landing into postwar Britain. Whitsun Weddings (lectures on that book by Donald Davie at Cambridge, claiming it’s central to what can be written), etc, the sour eye and the protection it offered. Latin American ‘social poetry’ was an exit, because it expressed without hedging an actual desire for change. For many years I was translating Latin American poets, writing nothing of my own. At first a runnel then a wider stream of my own writing took shape, although impeded by the circumspect knowingness which the linguistic dexterity of the university environment offered. I abandoned that dexterity and its implication of knowing in Incisions, which I wrote in around 2015, the time of the Poetry and Revolution conference and the subsequent Militant Poetics gathering. Incisions allows the self to fall out of what it’s supposed to know and to sink into uneducated and sometimes incorrect use of the language. (‘Uneducated’ in quote marks).
The difficulty now, in what I want to call the epoch of permission for genocide, is my implication in destructions that I can’t extricate myself from. I come to Mira Mattar’s impulse to stop being a speaking being, given the complicity of language in ‘what they have done to my people’. She wants language to be buried beneath the surface of the earth. I don’t know where to go from there except to say that this would be the destruction of language inside language (Scalapino). But that gets me essentially nowhere. For Scalapino in her book New Time, and others, that kind of destruction was a way to exist alongside real bodies in time, but it doesn’t work any more.
A few weeks ago I saw suddenly the image of a boy around eight years old wearing a home-made suit made of felt, image that belongs to older genocides. The boy was looking past me at what must have been his death—where he will die again? Other times, those of early morning anxiety, there are images which quite rapidly become void, their power to empty all representations producing vertigo.
I wrote in an earlier unsent reply to you, One element of the death drive would include its being a force of de-coding—(partial) erasure of the social-psychic coding inside which we live. I used to think that was a threshold at which something different might be accomplished, a radical break, but the word radical seems to have gone dead, and the caesura that’s in operation has facilitated a death cult. Caesura that permits the crusades, the American genocide of the Indian wars, despotic kingship, etc to cut into present time. And fascist utopias of permission for everyday violence.
Complicity of language, as I wrote early. But am suspicious of that totalisation of language. Maybe the spectre of linguistic totalisation is the desire of social media, something you wrote about in Wound Building.
For reasons I don’t understand, I think
of these lines from Verity’s Coronelles: ‘the spider’s knotted hairs /
protecting empty space’ –the hairs are deafening—
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