Obsessed
Some upcoming happenings, a tribute to Peter J. Carroll, and Elm Street poetry
I’m engaged in a fascinating correspondence with a writer and artist in Switzerland. Over the past six months she has been responding to my panpsychist poem myu by noting synchronicities that occur and memories which are evoked.
We were recently talking about where ideas and subjects for poetry comes from. My answer is that a writer must allow themselves to become obsessed.
If we are to accept that we are all antennae tuned into the future – and why wouldn’t you accept that? – it may be that the serious writers and artists are differentiated only by how much they allow themselves to be seized by whatever gets beamed in.
Though, worryingly, my etymology dictionary boils down ‘obsess’ to being under siege by a demon. Gosh, I pity the demons, so easily conjured. Must be exhausting.
Here is some seizing.
Firstly, on Friday May 22nd, in London, I’m talking about the magickal spell a group of us cast at the end of January deep within the Bank of England. You can read about the spell here.
It’s part of Sarah Hyndman’s Sensologists series.
As well as me, speakers include the internationally renowned LJ Rich; Gulp founder Kaye Winwood; Cities and Memory founder Stuart Fowkes; and smell/architecture author Dr Jieling Xiao. Fru Bekefi will talk sensory futures and Oriente Pimentel Aldaz will bring a taste of her sound/smell research at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory with Professor Charles Spence. Co-hosts are food anthropologist Caroline Hobkinson and sensory futures expert Fru Bekefi.
I think it will be a lot of fun, you can get tickets here.
Sarah was one of my inspirations when I set out to bother poetry seven years ago. She’s one of those rare people who have invented their own career. Something which takes a lot of fortitude, patience and, let’s taste the word, obsession.
She began by self-publishing a ground-breaking book about typography (subsequently published by Penguin), went on to advise Heston Blumenthal, and now travels the world talking about the senses. Her Substack is here.
A new edition of The Idyllegy is shooting towards release. This will be on June 21st. Just one hundred copies of the first edition will be prepared. All pre-orders help and the price rises after publication. You can reserve a copy here.
The Idyllegy is a long poem in the pastoral manner. A warm blissful dream of Arcadian pastures, innocent skies and lolling figures. Golden Age poetry which lulls and seduces. Verse which is both ambient and rippling with sensuality. Uncatchable hot nostalgia in a grand eclogue tradition.
This new edition includes three exclusive full-colour Will of Margaret paintings, full colour endpapers designed by her, and her artwork as a gold foil illustration on the front. It also has additional material from me in which I describe an occult ritual.
You want a story about obsession?
Will of Margaret uses a glass pen. It requires ultimate concentration. Hear how she describes it …
‘There is a kind of torture in that discipline, the sustained focus, the fixed grip, the way the body has to be corrected again and again to meet the exactness of the material. Not pain in any dramatic sense, but pressure that does not fully release until the work is done.’
She has now completed two of the three artworks for The Idyllegy. Yesterday, after working for a significant number of hours on the third drawing an ink bubble burst from her glass pen and oozed over the paper. She had to begin all again.
After the book is released we’d like to hold a series of readings / launches. We’re aiming for the first to be in London, but for it to be a …. picnic! I love picnics and I’m sure you do too. If you buy a book then you and two friends can come. There’ll be rugs and food and music and poetry.
Looking for a suitable Arcadian space so if you’re the Head Gardner to an oligarch’s barely-used Kensington townhouse, have the keys to their garden gate and are up for facilitating a brief late-afternoon squatter’s picnic … hit me up Mellors and let’s recreate this.
It has been a year since Field System hosted a mini-retrospective of my first six years’ work in their fantastic art gallery in Devon. Art galleries don’t tend to host unpublished poets so I’m forever grateful to Mark and Milly for believing in the work.
They are possessed with the spirit of the land, so I was delighted to see them mentioned in this Guardian article about Ashburton and the Dartmoor Tors Festival as ‘the heart of the Ashburton folk revival’.
If you follow my printed work you’ll know that pretty much every other book will be about space or UFOs. It’s a lifelong obsession of mine, sparked by reading Timothy Good’s ‘Above Top Secret’ when I was a philosophical tabula rasa.
It’s fascinating now to see the first release of US government files confirm so much of Good’s findings – particularly about the many encounters the Apollo astronauts had with other intelligences.
The passage in Above Top Secret which gave me adolescent shivers were exchanges supposedly picked up by VHF radio hams (and not part of official broadcasts or transcripts) during the Apollo 11 mission.
MISSION CONTROL: What’s there? Mission control calling Apollo 11.
APOLLO 11: These babies are huge, sir … enormous … Oh. God, you wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you that there are other spacecraft out there … lined up on the far side of the crater edge … they’re on the moon watching us.
And now we have these images released and officially inexplicable to NASA or any other scientific agency.
The path of the human species could best be described as a series of decentre-ings. As we encounter new levels of reality we are continually reminded that we are far from the centre of things.
The ontological shock of realising the sun and other planetary bodies do not circle the Earth is the obvious one.
I suspect we have two final decentre-ings to experience.
One – that human intelligence is at the furthest, slowest edge of many other intelligences. We are closer to ants than to species billions of years older than us.
And two, that the brief existence we call life is not the centre of our soul’s experience.
ANYWAY, obviously I’m going to hustle a book of mine now. If you like the UFO question and consider it all very gnostic – then you may enjoy The Idol of the Marketplace. Here’s what poetess and playwright Karina said …
‘We feel it. The Biblical swarm. Choking. Bard’s mouth explodes. Language kinked tight. Bardic tendrils starting the overrun. Psychic warfare licking the holes to “the last, wet second”, the world is in fusion, in heat, sticky, rigged, and we are narcotically unaware, lapping, inviting, prone, illiterate. My favourite book by Thomas yet. He is rattling the bone. Read it.’
Peter J. Carroll died recently. His Liber Null & Psychonaut were books integral to my discovery of Chaos Magick as a practice and way of thinking. Magician and writer Julian Vayne has a fantastic tribute to Carroll on his Substack.
I particularly liked this passage.
‘It has been said many times but bears repeating; the core of Carroll’s contribution was the idea, expressed clearly in Liber Null, that belief is not a truth to be defended, but a tool to be used. Magic operates within paradigms, systems of belief, and the magician’s task is not to find the ‘correct’ one, but to become adept at shifting between them.’
Still from ‘Eat Your Makeup’, 1968 film by John Waters with Divine as Jackie Kennedy
In my recent Symbolist poetry collection Black ribbon the Zapruder film is an image that occurs in two poems.
The Zapruder film is twenty-six seconds long and shows the murder of JFK. You have seen it I’m sure. Did you know that after Abraham Zapruder sold the rights to Life magazine he was plagued by nightmares of billboards in Times Square saying ‘See the President’s head explode!’ He never picked up a camera again.
The footage is – as the Manic Street Preachers sang on the song IfwhiteAmericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart – ‘the world's first taste of crucified grace.’
Black ribbon is a collection about reverie. For me Symbolism is a movement about reverie. I hope my forthcoming Symbolist salons will be reveries. The incongruous appearance in the poems of the cruel footage from Elm Street is because I believe it was a pivotal nightmarish vision we are still trying to wake from. And we do this by creating Symbolist imagery to bypasses the current grey-suited CIA construct.
I’ve now realised the Zapruder series of poems should be a triptych – I’d written two poems about memory and evil, but I hadn’t written about hope, so there is now a third. See below. The first two appear in Black ribbon, I might add the third to a subsequent edition.
All the people we’ll never know
The iceberg corridor
of the municipal university
momentarily welcomes horns of sunlight
with no witness, no one there.
The touched walls fade like rain drying
on Dealey Plaza asphalt sixty years on
and tutorials continue
in diffuse and removed agreement.Demon
In this room is the true demon.
An abject shred of God spasm
piteous in the vernix, the birth
grease, of arrival. Sinews of
watercolour running
vertical in arched vermilion pain.
Clacking lamella occluding the
rippling guilt of
being so easily conjured.
Androgynous chalk-ringed
eyes and the gasps of a cave
on the seashore. The gasps of
snowfall pities. The gasps of silver
halide in a Kodachrome
processing of a Dealey Plaza film.
Heart of marbled meat stuttering,
galvanised, with abandonment.An initial few seconds of film showing
Abraham Zapruder’s granddaughter
in the garden were additionally processed
Kodachrome sunny and green.
Late autumn joyful laughter
and she runs to a judder.
Did Life also purchase this?
Now I couldn’t say innocence
without you being cynical
but this redemptive cameo
should be studied too.
Kodachrome sunny and green.
Pink autumn silent laughter
and she runs to a judder.
Thanks for reading. Always feel free to email yes@thepoetryofitall.com with tales of your obsessions. x