In Defence of Stephen Alexander's 'Fragments of Glass' (2006) - by May Spear

Costas Varotsos: Dromeas (1994)

Glass and iron sculpture (Athens, Greece) 

Photo: Stephen Alexander (2006)

 

   

I. 

 

Recently, a cutting and rather condescending review of Stephen Alexander's poetic series Fragments of Glass (2006) was published by an anonymous critic assisted by artificial intelligence - or was it the other way round - in the comments section following a post published on Torpedo the Ark dated 19 Dec 2012: click here.  

 

Essentially, the critic targeted Alexander's morbid narcissism and the fact that his text allowed little space for the reader to move around in and do their own thinking (that it was authoritarian).  

 

The review certainly contained some clever insights; I particularly liked the idea of triangulation [1] i.e., that the poet positioned himself (somewhat self-dramatically) between two poles of delirium - love and death - symbolised by the two women. But to extrapolate from this that Alexander is simply posing and manipulating situations and that the fragments lack genuine feeling seems to me unfair and, in fact, mistaken. 

 

By viewing the two women as 'props' in a 'self-centred drama', the critic fails to see the fragmentation of identity common in traumatic experiences. The women represent two versions of the poet's own future; one of connection (a life together) and one of total collapse (suicide). 

 

Obviously, there is a degree of staging and performance - and yes there's an aestheticisation of trauma - but it's a work of art, after all, not a news report or a clinical history. And is it really so unusual for a poet to write about their bodies and their experiences? I think not. The kind of poetic reflection demanded by the critic is somewhat like the moon-cold objectivity that Nietzsche derides in Zarathustra as 'immaculate perception' [2].

 

Re context: the poem is set in Athens: but clearly it is not about the Greek capital and Alexander is not offering these fragments as pieces of travel writing, or postcards from a holiday destination. One might even suggest that the loss of context is crucial here; in a moment of crisis, time can stand still and the external world suddenly disappear. The poem thus accurately reflects an aspect of shock.   

 

Re scabs and scars: despite the critic's insistence that the latter are 'aged scabs in effect', that is not true. For as any nurse will tell you, whilst both are features of the healing process, a scab is a temporary protective crust formed by blood cells to seal a wound; a scar, meanwhile, is the permanent, fibrous tissue that replaces normal skin after a deeper injury has healed. 

 

It's a small point to pick at, perhaps, but indicative of the often slipshod thinking that the critic practises and by denying the difference between scabs and scars he misses the point; namely, that the poet is expressing a preference for the spectacular moment of crisis over the mundane process of healing. 

 

Re comparisons of Alexander to other poets, such as Plath and Sexton: this seems to me a pointless exercise; for as the same unnamed (but not unrecognised or unknown) critic often likes to say: All comparisons are odious. Having said that, the poppy imagery does, of course, reference Plath's work - of which Alexander is an open admirer - and the phrase 'little hell flames' is borrowed from her [3].    

 

Finally, the remark about Alexander being left to die 'once of blood loss and a second time of aesthetic delight' is admittedly humorous (one assumes AI came up with this cruel gem) and it made me smile like a splinter of glass. But there are, however, equally fine - and equally - sharp lines to be found in Fragments of Glass ...

 

 

II.  

Fragments of Glass consists of seven short verses, each six or seven lines in length. It opens with a crash and a 'sparkling chaos of glass, blood and sunshine' and ends with the shamefulness of scabs. 

 

In my view it's a fantastic work of trauma poetry, the logic and the beauty of which our anonymous critic often fails to grasp (or chooses not to acknowledge). It is also a visceral meditation on the fragility of the body and the malevolence of the inanimate universe; one that transforms trauma into art which delights in a mix of surrealism and synaesthesia. 

 

As the boundary between selfhood and the external world is shattered, the narrator of the poem is left to reflect on existential questions of the heart whilst quite literally watching his blood spill and splinters of glass assume mocking agency (the work pre-dates Alexander's interest in object-oriented ontology, but one can see already his fascination for things). 

 

To not see how glass might smile is a literalist failure.    

 

Ultimately, the poem promotes a tragic philosophy: life bleeds and we are born to 'embody our scars', a line borrowed from Deleuze, I believe, and one that further reveals Alexander's philosophical background; as does the celebration of vitality and 'everything that flows'.  

 

Fragments of Glass has its shortcomings: here, as elsewhere, Alexander tends toward the clichéd and melodramatic at times and his imagery lacks a certain nuance. I personally don't like the Alice metaphor, for example. But then, he's not pretending to be a professional poet, so I feel we can allow him some clumsiness (the same quality that resulted in his walking into a glass door in the first place).  

 

Notes

[1] For those who might be unfamiliar with this psychological concept, triangulation refers to a dysfunctional relationship dynamic where two conflicting subjects involve a third person in order to reduce tension, stabilise the relationship, or manipulate situations. 

 

[2] See Nietzsche writing in the section 'On Immaculate Perception', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

 

[3] See Alexander's post on Torpedo the Ark titled 'Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy' (29 May 2021): click here.  

 

 

May Spear is a contributing editor to the underground French literary magazine Pourquoi es-tu une con aussi odieuse? 

 

Reflections on Two Recent Poetry Collections by Simon Armitage 1: Dwell (2025)

Simon Armitage: Dwell 

(Faber & Faber, 2025)

Jetzt wär es Zeit, die tiere träten / aus bewohnten Dingen ... 

I. 

 

As a Heideggerian, I was obviously going to be intrigued by a book with the title Dwell. 

 

For dwelling [wohnen] is one of the key ideas in Heidegger's later work and refers to the fundamental way human beings exist in the world; not simply occupying space like bumps on a log, but caring for, preserving, and finding meaning as earth-dwelling mortals beneath the sky and before the gods [b]. 

 

It's the antithesis of the homelessness that for Heidegger characterises modernity. But so too is it distinct from the Nazi idea of a life rooted in Blut und Boden (even if it has a Völkisch feel to it) and is tied to the Heideggerian ethic of letting be [Gelassenheit]. 

 

When we dwell, we allow other beings to be what they are in all their complexity and do not seek to dominate, manipulate, or exploit them as a resource. 

 

Poetically speaking - and Heidegger links dwelling explicitly to poetry - man learns how to inhabit the earth by acknowledging the sacred mystery of otherness (be that in the form of birds, beasts, flowers, or demons) and finding a new revealing other than the revealing of technology, which he terms enframing [Ge-stell]. 

 

He names this new revealing poiesis - a term that refers to the act of creation as a bringing-forth (or unfolding) into being.

      

 

II.  

 

So, then, to the collection of sixteen poems by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage (illustrated by Beth Munro); a work which attempts to illuminate and reimagine the dwelling places of animals native to the UK and particularly those that inhabit the Lost Gardens of Heligan [c]. 

 

Interestingly, and in a way in which I approve, distinctions between human and animal are curdled without ever denying their otherness. Similarly, Armitage blurs the distinction between natural and cultivated when it comes to dwelling places inhabited by creatures, such as the twig-and-leaf construction of a bird's nest. But he also "warns of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers, exposed to relentless and sadly familiar environmental threats" [d].   

 

Just as even a small back-garden can provide refuge for whatever wildlife remains in this, one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world, so too, hopes Armitage, can his poems "offer lasting homes to those who dwell within their lines" [e].

 

However, Armitage also notes that, as a bare minimum, actual flesh-and-blood creatures also need to eat and breed in the extra-textual world; "and to achieve those things they need the shelter of somewhere to live" as the "consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction" (x). 

 

Unfortunately, "human dominance on Planet Earth has proved disastrous for the habitation needs of most non-human populations" (x). As a species, we are, at the very least - and it's a word I'm borrowing from Armitage - inhospitable.  

 

Because, ultimately, he's a humanist, Armitage soon says things such as this: animals should be valued because they "encourage the expansion of the human mind" (x) and "enhance what it is to be human" (xi). That's not my position: I try to think animality (and, indeed, vegetal life) outside of their value to us; to think of them as beings in their own right - but not beings that should be accorded rights by Man. 

 

As beings with irreplaceable singularity they exist independently of human evaluation or legal frameworks and should not be driven into extinction nor subjected to industrial scale slaughter. Armitage seems slightly uncomfortable at the use of the word genocide with reference to this, although he admits it has a "certain amount of justification" (x).

 

Finally, before we take a look at the verses themselves, let me quote what Armitage says re the topic of dwelling. Obviously, he's not Heidegger, but it still has some interest:

 

"If Dwell is about 'the garden' as a sanctuary or refuge, about the locations we must provide and safeguard if we are serious about co-existing with lives other than our own, its simultaneous meaning is an encouragement to slow down and spend time with ideas. [...] And the poems themselves are dwellings, too - constructions built from language and contemplation, places to enter." (xii-xiii)    

 

 

III. 

 

The short collection opens with a poem titled 'Pond'. 

 

That's a good place to start, as the word pond derives from an old English term for a confined space - particularly an enclosed body of water - which, of course implies a dwelling place, and Armitage mentions the newts that live there. 

 

However, rather strangely, he seems more concerned with the surface of the pond; "the glassy water's / two-way mirror" (3), which merely reflects life  - and that's a little concerning; as is the cinematic metaphor that follows, suggesting animals are but projections upon a screen. 

 

On a less troubling note, the verse is primarily about the fragile (but resilient) stillness of life, which Armitage (rightly) finds magical. Violent disruptions are inevitable, but the world eternally returns.      

 

 

IV. 

 

'Pond' is followed by 'Drey' which opens with the lovely description of a squirrel's dwelling place:

 

 

It's a twig-and-leaf crow's-nest squat

wombed with feather and moss

wedged in the fork of an oak. (6)

 

 

If it had been me, I'd've finished there; for it's kind of perfect as is and whilst the 26 lines that follow tell us what the poet thinks of the squirrel, they don't reveal anything of what the squirrel thinks of the poet.

 

I suppose, as a long-time reader of Lawrence, I was expecting a rather more ontologically insightful verse; to hear something of the vital, non-human otherness of the squirrel and not simply be told that squirrels have beady black eyes and are jumpy creatures which like to steal nuts from bird-feeders.  

 

Also, I don't mind a degree of anthropomorphism, but it has to remain critical in nature and not merely be a projection of human traits on to animals in an attempt to be humorous. And so, for the record; squirrels do not wear "soft work-gloves" (6) in order to tackle daily jobs and beavers - the subject of the following verse, 'Lodge' - do not watch cable TV, read House and Garden, or sip Earl Grey tea (8) [f]. 

 

If - as I've seen it said - Armitage wishes to satirise the Disneyfied manner we often think of animals by incorporating twee and sentimental images into his own poetry, then, unfortunately, I think he fails on this occasion. In other words, it's a self-defeating move that obscures the actual creature, creates a collision of tones, and takes away from the poem's ecological seriousness.

 

V. 

 

'Den' is a much harder and superior poem to 'Lodge' and 'Drey' - and I like it! One wonders: does Armitage prefer foxes to squirrels and beavers; do they more readily set his mind on fire? 

 

He certainly seems to have a greater degree of imaginative understanding and I was excited to encounter the Armitage fox emerging "out of ash and filth" into "a wet morning" and "dripping with flames" (13).

 

 

VI. 

 

'Hive' is one of my favourite poems in the collection - and not just because I love honey or "jars of sunlight / in edible form" (17), as Armitage writes.   

 

Of course, it's not just sunlight that can be devoured; the darkness too can provide vital nourishment - if you're a bat! And in 'Roost', Armitage speaks of that twilight hour when the sun "fizzles out" and bats "unhug themselves and fly" from their dwelling places ready to "eat the night" (19).  

 

 

VII.

 

If I liked 'Hive' and 'Roost' on the one hand, I hated 'Insect Hotel' on the other: a series of imaginary online reviews posted by six-legged guests on a site such as TripAdvisor. Obviously, it's intended to be comic, but, unfortunately, it isn't funny at all - indeed, it just may be, to paraphrase Comic Book Guy, the Worst. Poem. Ever.   

 

And considering that it's written by a Professor of Poetry whose work has received numerous prizes and awards - in 2018, for example, Armitage was even given the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry) - it's a poem that, if I were him, I'd seriously consider removing from the collection. 

 

It may have a place in a children's poetry anthology, but it does not belong in a book which is intended to address a painfully tragic situation: "Tragic for the plight of animals, of course, but also a pitiful reflection on our own attitudes and activities." (x) 

 

Armitage seems to think he can have it both ways: offering a profound poetic meditation on dwelling and animality on the one hand, whilst giving us anthropomorphic dad humour on the other; but he can't. There's nothing fun or wacky about ecocide and the extermination of wildlife (including insects) and not even Beth Munro's illustrations [h] can save you this time, Simon.  

 

 

VIII.    

 

It's an interesting philosophical idea to conceive of rabbits as the intelligence of the hillside: 'Warren' (31); i.e., to suggest that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal effect of non-sentient matter.  

 

I also liked the first six days of 'Deer Diary' (32-33), in which the distinction between animals and their environment was shown to be anything but clear cut; the narrator mistakes wood smoke, a heap of leaves, shadows, patches of snow, and heat haze for various deer. 

 

I could do without Sunday's unicorn (33), however; just as I could do without the young girl's angel in 'Nest Box' (36). 

 

Again, actual biological entities such as deer and barn owls, are magical and awe-inspiring in themselves - we don't need legendary creatures and supernatural spirits, ta very much. 

 

(At a push, if feeling generous, I'd concede that all objects are equally real objects and exist on the same flat ontology, but can't help feeling that here unicorns and angels add nothing and detract from the poetic realism of the work.)  

 

 

IX. 

 

Compared with 'Insect Hotel', 'Cote' is a masterful work: and at least it rhymes. 

 

But, again, for all its attempted witty word play, it's got that depressingly unfunny comic tone and so fails to do what it wishes to do; namely, challenge the idea that the value of birds is their symbolic significance for man.  

 

We may like to believe that a dove, for example, is a symbol of the holy spirit, or divine love, or peace, hope and purity, but such idealism degrades the actual being of the bird in all its avian alterity and complex biological nature.   

 

And it also fails to offer them any protection, which is why, for example, many populations of dove are in severe decline and/or critically endangered [h]. 

 

 

X.

 

I began this post by discussing Heidegger's notion of dwelling and I'd like to close with one of Heidegger's thought-poems [Gedachtes], which affords an interesting contrast in style and tone with Armitage's verses: 

 

 

Forests spread

Brooks plunge

Rocks persist

Mist diffuses

 

Meadows wait

Springs well 

Winds dwell

Blessing muses [i] 

 

Notes

[a] I'm reworking the famous opening lines of an untitled poem written by Rilke about a year before his death in 1926 (see Insel ed., II. 185), replacing daß Götter with die tiere, so that it reads in English: 'Now it is time that the animals emerge / from things by which they dwell'.    

 

[b] Heidegger refers to these elements - earth, sky, mortals, divinities - as the fourfold [das Geviert] and argues that dwelling is a harmonisation of these things (it's not just about constructing a shelter - even if that shelter happens to be a Black Forest hut). 

      The important essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (1951) can be found in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1993), pp. 343-363. Or in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper Perennial, 1975), pp. 143-161.   

 

[c] Armitage was invited (i.e., commissioned) to write a series of poems for the Lost Gardens of Heligan; a large garden restoration project and major tourist attraction, in Cornwall: "Protected and carefully managed, the Gardens also provide a haven - both intentionally and inadvertently - for wildlife." 

      See the 'Welcome Note' to Dwell supplied by Armitage, p. xii. All future page references to this book will be given directly in the text.   

 

[d] Quoted from the publishers blurb found on their website and on the inside of the book's front cover.  

 

[e] Ibid.   

 

[f] I did like the description of beavers as teeth "that have grown bodies and tails" (9) and, again, there is little wrong with Armitage's description of a beaver's lodge, as "a kindling hut" held together "with sludge and stones" (8); a description which made me think of Heidegger's little three-roomed cabin in the Black Forest and known as die Hütte. 

      Readers who are interested in the latter might like to see Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut (MIT Press, 2006), a work which explores the intense relationship between a man and his environment and how thinking is related to dwelling.    

 

[g] Beth Munro is a hybrid printmaker and illustrator: click here to visit her website. It might be argued that Munro's complex and clever illustrations add a necessary extra layer of philosophical seriousness to Dwell - the images are certainly not just decorative.

 

[h] The European turtle dove, for example, is on the brink of extinction in the UK, its numbers having fallen by 99% since the 1960s, due to intensive agricultural practices, habitat loss, shortage of food, and shooting for sport by the French, Spanish, and Portuguese.   

 

[i] See Martin Heidegger, 'The Thinker as Poet', in Poetry, Language, Thought ... p. 14. 

      Readers who wish to read more should also get hold of Martin Heidegger, Thought Poems, trans. Eoghan Walls (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021). 

 

 

For reflections on another cleection of verse published in 2025 by Armitage - New Cemetery - please click here.

 

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Two)

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity.' 

 

 

I.

 

There are several reasons why I like Baudrillard and feel a certain degree of kinship. For one thing, we both come from humble backgrounds ... 

 

If I insist on (but do not identify in terms of) my working class origin, Baudrillard deployed his rusticity "against the intellectual milieu he would inhait for the major part of his life" [21] and often cited his peasant-nature "in order to portray himself as an alien driven into the world of the elite" [21], but never comfortably at home there.  

 

And if he was a prolific writer - publishing over forty books - he retained a certain rural laziness in defiance of an industrial work ethic and its associated values, such as competitiveness and ambition (values which underpin academia as much as they do the world of commerce). 

 

Baudrillard really didn't give a shit about belonging or becoming a benign success: "'I'm something of a [...] barbarian at heart, and I do my best to stay that way'" [21] [a]. 

 

  

II. 

 

Another reason I like Baudrillard: his style of poetry is one I recognise and have tried to emulate; little fragments of language that trigger thoughts rather than feelings (Lawrence calls them pansies). Although his poetic influences - Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Artaud - are not mine and he is a naturally more lyrical writer than I am.    

 

They key point is: Baudrillard's poetic sensibility shaped his later theory which, like the work of other French theorists, is "close to philosophical thought, but more literary and speculative in spirit, and more interdisciplinary in method" [39]. 

 

I loved this style of thinking when I first encountered it in the 1990s and I still love it now; even if others are now returning to common sense and are so over writers like Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, et al. 

 

 

III. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, I was too busy playing with my Action Man to really know what was going on in Paris in May '68, but Baudrillard was very much, as a sociologist at Nanterre, Johnny-on-the-spot (if not exactly in the thick of the action). 

 

His attitude to the Situationists, however, was ambivalent: "He accepted Debord's broad definition of the society of the spectacle, but rejected its Marxist theoretical foundations, which he considered far too 'normative'." [45]

 

Baudrillard thought "a more advanced theory of how signs operate in the modern world was needed - to understand images not as travesties of reality but as reality themselves" [46].

 

"Nevertheless Baudrillard sympathized with the Situationists' anti-authoritarian impulses, appreciated their fusion of artistic practice and politics, and enjoyed their Hegelian strategy of 'immanent critique' and attacking from within." [46]

 

Thus, there would "remain something fundamentally 'situationist' about Baudrillard's work" [46] and he cheerfully accepted the image of himself as an intellectual terrorist; i.e., one who blows up ideas and shatters beliefs: I am not a man I am dynamite, as Nietzsche would say [b]. 

  

 

IV.   

 

Yet another reason I like Baudrillard is that he shares my fascination with objects and the way they relate to each other "as a system and a syntax, denoting a world that is more complex than it seems" [50].

 

However, Baudrillard wasn't merely interested in objects as signs and the role they played within human social interactions: 

 

"He was more concerned with the object itself. For him [...] the object allows us to choose a path away from the question of the subject [...] which always tended to be privileged in contemporary philosophy." [50]    

 

It's a slightly magical way of thinking; the object doesn't simply signify - it enchants. Baudrillard thus restores a sense of mystery to the things "we share our world with and normally take for granted" [51]: lamps, mirrors, clocks, chairs, etc. 

 

 

V. 

 

Was Baudrillard a bit of a fraud? 

 

That seems a bit harsh to me.  

 

Nevertheless, his self-presentation as a lone theorist on the outside of everything was "always characteristically ironic and performative" [62] and he participated in many collective projects. 

 

The one thing he did place himself outside of in the early-mid '70s was Marxism, which he came to regard as "nothing other than the mirror-image of bourgeois society because it placed production at the centre of existence and thereby normalized the capitalist system" [65]. 

 

One of his most important works, L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976) [c], attempted a "radically different way of understanding society and culture by turning to both pre-capitalist systems as models and to a range of radical and eclectic French cultural theorists and writers, such as Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss and Alfred Jarry" [65]. 

 

Now, excess and expenditure were key terms and Baudrillard spoke of sacrifice and death. The book thus consolidated his reputation as "a highly idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, inhabiting the margins of conventional sociology or philosophy" [65]. 

 

In brief: symbolic exchange is an alternative political economy to the one imagined by Marxism and it "confounds the system of complete exchangeability or reversibility of signs that defines modern capitalism" [66].     

 

It also lets death back into the game (as the ultimate challenge). 

 

I know that, thanks to The Matrix (1999) [d], if people can name one book by Baudrillard it's Simulacra and Simulation. But, if asked to name the one text that really sets the scene for his later work and in which he becomes "no longer just a leading representative of French theory but an enigmatic, provocative and, eventually, iconic figure" [67], then it would have to be Symbolic Exchange and Death.    

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Having said that, Fantin and Nicol say that Baudrillard "would always harbour a paradoxical sene of resentment that he was never fully accepted by the French philosophical establishment" (2025, p. 27).  

 

[b] See Nietzsche writing in Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1). In the following section (2), Nietzsche adds: "I know joy in destruction to a degree corresponding to my strength for destruction ..." I am quoting from the English translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 127.

      Baudrillard's self-characterisation as a terrorist can be found in Simulacres et Simulation (1981), where he writes: "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us." I am quoting from the English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 163.   

 

[c] This work was translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Iain Hamilton Grant (Sage Publications, 1993).

 

[d] In The Matrix (dir. the Wachowski's, 1999), the protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, hides a floppy disk inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation - and so it was author and book suddenly found a whole new level of fame. 

      However, Baudrillard being Baudrillard, he distanced himself from the enormously successful movie by declaring that it was 'the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce'. See 'The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview with Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1/2 (July 2004). 

      The main issue Baudrillard had with the film was that, in his view, it completely missed the point of his work and confused the classical Platonic problem of illusion with the postmodern problem of simulation. For an interesting discussion of this, see the essay entitled 'Why Baudriilard Hated The Matrix: And Why He Was Wrong', on The Living Philosophy (17 April 2022): click here.      

 

 

To read part one of this post on Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol's biography of Jean Baudrillard, click here. 

 

Part three of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part four of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Re-entering the Circle of Fragments

Self-portrait used for cover of The Circle of Fragments 

(Blind Cupid Press, 2010)

 

 

I. 

 

The final book I published with Blind Cupid Press in 2010 [1] was a collection of little poems [2] written in the period 2000-09.

 

The title of the work - The Circle of Fragments - and, to some extent, the style of the pieces themselves, was inspired by the following lines written by Roland Barthes: 

 

"To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the centre, what?" [3]  

 

"The fragment ... implies an immediate delight: it is a fantasy of discourse, a gaping of desire. In the form of the thought-sentence, the germ of the fragment comes to you anywhere: in the café, on the train, talking to a friend ..." [4]  

 

What I wrote in a very short preface to the book is even more true now than then: along with a few broken bones and some shards of shattered glass, these leftover fragments - written between Barcelona and Berlin, Aberdeen and Athens - are pretty much all that remain from this period of my life.  

 

And so, it was amusing to recently re-enter le cercle des fragments and look back at what they captured (and, just as importantly, what they missed or failed to capture).    

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I cannot reproduce all 112 of the fragments, although readers will find a number of them scattered here and there on Torpedo the Ark if they search the index closely enough (or click on those titles below that conveniently come with a link). 

 

However, I thought it might be instructive to provide a full list of titles [5] in the hope that they will provide a clue of sorts as to the content, theme, mood, and tone of the anthology:

 

Sea-Bitch, German Sea-Cow, Sun-Lizard-Rock, Love Remains the Great Adventure, In the Land of Convalescence, Underground with all the World, Death Chant, Sitges, Post-Coital Disappointment, At the Anchovy Museum (Collioure), Mosquito, Black Holes, The Holy Life, One Should Not Apologise Oneself Out of Existence Simply to Please Her, The Sorrow of an Invisible Man, The Bitterness of a Domesticated Man, The Woman Who Was Jealous of the World, Idiota, At the Funeral of a Domesticated Man, Lolita, In Memory of Anaïs Nin, In Memory of Henry Miller, The Birthday Cake, On the Other Side, Blanes, Song of a Discontented Man, When You Are Dead, In the Bookshop, Yolanda, In Becoming a Subject of the Sun, Lemon Drizzle, The Taormina Virgins, Un relation privilégiée, Phallic Defiance on Ward H2, In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, Filthy Love (In Memory of Georges Bataille), Diary Fragment, Hakenkreuz, Her Cunt, Supposing Truth to be a Woman, Life Bleeds, At the Party, Spinster (In Memory of Sylvia Plath), Flightpath, In Memory of Marinetti, Under Erasure, Haecceity, In Memory of the Divine One, The Three Consolations, Baby on the Bus, Aberdeen, Miracle, Tear Drops, Polarity, Confession of a White Widowed Male, Being and Nothingness, The Boring Dead, Little Greek, Flow, Becoming-Flower, Promises Promises, Fucked-Up, Crab-Like, Pa amb Tomaquet, Sandals, Floratopia, Fox, We Do Not Have Souls, September, In This Life, Posthumous Hope, Decree Nisi, Dawn, Image, Thomas, Mark, In Kissing Liberty, Odysseus, With the Coming of the Sun and the Rising of the Moon I Think of Her, Dawn Chorus, Conflicted Morality and Desire, Seven Fragments of Glass: I: Crash! II: In the Confrontation with Glass III: At the Hospital in Athens IV: Poppies V: The Vengeance of Objects VI: On Which Side is Wonderland? VII: I Love Everything That Flows, This is not a Love Song, Love, What She Should Tell Him, Tears, The Danger, Gifts, Self-Sacrifice, The Hired Hand, Snippets, Death Sentence, Lost Crows, We’re a Long Way From Wuthering Heights, Breast Relief for a Dying God, Little Miss Microbe, Reflections on the Abolition of Slavery, Regents Park, Cockroach, Caliban, If the World Were Caring, The Tour Guide, Roses in April, Abandoned, Baby Fingers, Negritude, Rats, Beige, Zurüchgeblieben, Aufklärung.   

 

 

III. 

 

Looking back, I still think many of these little poems sparkle in an amusing manner (even if the world at the time did not agree) and I regard them with similar affection as D. H. Lawrence regarded his own collection of fragments, which he called Pansies.

 

Better, says Lawence, to offer a simple thought which "comes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head" [6], than present clever ideas and opinions - or didactic statements - dressed up in lyrical form. 

 

And this passage from Lawrence re his book of pensées perfectly expresses how I felt about The Circle of Fragments: 

 

"I do not want to offer this little book as a candidate for eternity in the ranks of immortal literature. It is [...] a book of today, and if it is a book of tomorrow, well and good. But I hope that on the third day, it will have gone to sleep, and become forgotten. Immortal literature dragging itself out to a repetitional eternity can be a great nuisance, and a block to anything fresh." [7] 

      

   

Notes

 

[1] There were seven Blind Cupid Press books published in 2010. The other six titles were:  

 

Whore's Don't Fuck Between the Bedsheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse 

Outside the Gate: Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation Mediated Via the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Visions of Excess and Other Essays

The Treadwell's Papers Volumes I & II: Sex/Magic and Thanatology

The Treadwell's Papers Volumes III & IV: Zoophilia and Reflections Beneath a Black Sun

Erotomania and Other Essays

[2] As will become clear, I primarily think of the pieces as fragments, though often in the past I described them as little poems, even if that's a problematic term both for me and for my critics who insist that they lack the rhythymic language and richness of imagery that defines the art of poetry. Some have suggested that they might, at a push, be called aphorisms, but, again, I'd be weary of using that term; the fragments may be short and observational, but I'm not sure they embody any form of wisdom or truth. 

 

[3] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 92-93.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 94.  

  

[5] I'm one of those writers to whom titles matter. Indeed, I sometimes dream of the perfect title that would make the text redundant. Probably this is why I was once told that I'm not a serious writer or thinker, but, rather, a sloganeer or a comedian addicted to certain catchphrases and for whom everything is ultimately just a set up for a punchline. 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Introduction to Pansies, Appendix 6, The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 663. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Unused Foreword to Pansies, Appendix 7, The Poems, Vol. I ... p. 667.   

 

 

Oranges and Sardines: Reflections on Art & Poetry (Not Seafood & Citrus Fruit)

Michael Goldberg: Sardines (1955) 

oil and adhesive tape on canvas (80 3⁄4 x 66 in.) 

Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

 

I. 

 

Frank O'Hara's carefully crafted poem 'Why I Am Not a Painter' [1] continues to amuse readers interested in the ambiguous nature of the relationship that exists between those who, like him, choose to type words on a page and those who, like his friend Mike Goldberg [2], prefer to express themselves with oil on canvas.    

 

Whether this reveals O'Hara's conviction that the pen is not only mightier than the sword, but also the palette and paintbrush, I don't know. And even if this is his belief, like many writers, he secretly wishes he could play with colours rather than words (he lets this slip in a casual aside in the short opening stanza).

 

For the latter can never quite capture the red-yellow essence of orange, even if you produce a whole page of descriptive prose or the most exquisite poetry; a picture, they say, conveys a thousand times more information than the word (in terms of size, shape, and colour of a sardine that's doubtless true). 

 

However, sometimes - even on a canvas - images can become too much, too overwhelming, and a string of eight letters spelling out the word S-A-R-D-I-N-E-S is really all you need; particularly when you understand, as poets and philosophers understand, that no word exists in isolation; that each is connected to every other word in the language via a complex network of shared meanings, etymological roots, grammatical functions, figurative associations, and so on - even if, ironically, no word has any essential connection to the object it represents. 

 

Probably most painters understand this too, which is why they still very often give their pictures a title; particularly the more logocentric amongst them for whom the Word remains the origin and most fundamental expression of reality; titles are rarely given purely for practical reasons. 

 

 

II. 

 

The phrase, oranges and sardines, has now become fixed (one is almost tempted to say a cliché) within the arts, as a phrase referencing poetry and/as painting. 

 

Back in 2008-09, for example, the Hammer Museum [3] held an exhibition curated by Gary Garrels with this title, although, somewhat ironically, it allowed six contemporary abstract artists to reflect philosophically and poetically on their own work - their studio processes, their indebtedness to art history, etc. - without the need to consult any actual philosophers or poets (the show really should have just been called Sardines).  

 

To be honest, I don't mind that so much. Although I'd probably challenge Garrels's slightly ludicrous assertion that "artists look at art with a focus and scrutiny, a criticality and level of engagement that few of us are able to summon with the same intensity" [4]. 

 

I mean, c'mon, I admire greatly those working within the visual arts - and I'm happy to admit that many have "a deep knowledge of art and art history and of the intellectual arguments around art" [5] - but where's the evidence for this particularity of vision? 

 

Having said that, however, I know conceited poets who believe they have a unique sensitivity to language; arrogant philosophers who think they are the only ones who know how to conceptualise ideas; and even affected fashion designers who imagine it is they who are solely responsible for determining our love of cerulean blue.         

 

 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Frank O'Hara, 'Why I Am Not a Painter', in The Selected Poems, ed. Donald Allen (Random House, 1974). Written in 1956, the poem can be found on poets.org: click here.

 

[2] Michael Goldberg (1924 - 2007) was was an American abstract expressionist, known for both his action paintings and still-lifes. He was a key member of the New York School, an informal group of poets, painters, dancers, and jazz musicians living it large in the 1950s and '60s, drawing inspiration from one another and from earlier avant-garde movements, such as the Surrealists. 

      Frank O'Hara was very much at the centre of this group, before his death, aged 40, in 1966, and Gary Garrels is right to note that he was "not only a poet but also a curator and critic who grounded his critical approach to art not in theory or philosophy, but in a distinct appraisal of the artworks themselves, the cultural situation of the time, and the circumstances of the artists". See note [4] below for a link to the essay by Garrels from which I quote.

 

[3] The Hammer Museum is an art museum and cultural centre, affiliated with UCLA. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur-industrialist Armand Hammer to house his personal art collection, the museum has since expanded its scope and now hosts a wide array of free public lectures, readings, concerts, and film screenings.    

 

[4] Gary Garrels, introductory essay to Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting (Hammer Museum, 2009): click here to read the essay on the Hammer Museum website.    

 

[5] Ibid. 

 

 

Bonus video: Frank O'Hara: Why I Am Not A Painter (Optic Nerve Ltd.): click here. This is one of seven excerpts from the film Frank O'Hara: How Terrible Orange Is/& Life (Colin Still / Optic Nerve, 1995).

 

This post is for the American figurative painter SJ Fuerst who kindly sent me O'Hara's poem. 

 

 

A Feisty Evening with Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson and D. H. Lawrence

Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson & D. H. Lawrence

 

 

I. 

 

A couple of nights ago, I went to the National Poetry Library - which, for those who don't know, is housed on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre - for what was billed as a D. H. Lawrence celebration, with particular focus being given to the collection of poems entitled Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).

 

The event also called attention to a recent book by the South African poet Isobel Dixon, produced in collaboration with the highly acclaimed Scottish artist Douglas Robertson who provided a dozen finely detailed illustrations: A Whistling of Birds (Nine Arches Press, 2023).

 

II. 

 

Whilst this work is essentially a response to Lawrence's text - and his short essay 'Whistling of Birds' (1919) lends the book its name - Dixon also invites others, including William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes into the conversation, whilst still finding time to make her own distinctive voice heard. 

 

It's a work that will leave the majority of members of the D. H. Lawrence Society very happy, as it uncritically reinforces the idea of Lawrence as a nature lover in the English Romantic tradition and a poet with an almost uncanny ontological insight into the essence of birds, beasts, and flowers. 

And in their hour long presentation at the NPL, this idea of Lawrence was further reinforced; it was almost as if the important challenge thrown down by the Indian author Amit Chaudhuri twenty-odd years ago to read Lawrence's poetry in light of poststructuralist theory has been completely forgotten [1].

 

Which is profoundly unfortunate in my view. For it results in an interpretation of Lawrence that not only fails to understand the radical nature of his aesthetic, but means he is sold short as a thinker-poet whose primary object is language. 

 

It's because Lawrence writes so well, that we believe he has captured the true nature or being of a snake, for example, when, actually, he dissolves such essentialism based on the idea of a fixed identity into a game of difference and becoming - which is why philosophers including Derrida and Deleuze are such admirers of Lawrence's poetry [2].     

 

 

III. 

 

Just to be clear: I enjoyed the event and wish Dixon and Robertson every success with their book (which has already garnered considerable praise).

 

However, they disappointed by refusing to take Lawrence seriously as a writer; preferring instead to think of him in all too human terms (thus the frequent references to biographical details, as if these somehow might illuminate the text or explain away its complex and often troubling character). 

They also disappointed by dismissing Lawrence's work as a painter in a lighthearted manner, saying it simply wasn't very good. Again, without wanting to go into too much detail here - as I've written at length on this subject elsewhere - this simply betrays an ignorance of what it is Lawrence is attempting to do on canvas; namely, produce an art of sensation that is concerned with the invisible forces and flows that shape the flesh via what Deleuze terms a very special violence. 

 

His is a non-representational depiction of the body without organs and therefore Lawrence is not overly concerned with anatomical fidelity, or reducing figures to the level of optical cliché. In other words, he is not trying capture a likeness and, by his own admission, his pictures are rolling in faults of technique - but that doesn't matter; Lawrence is not so much interested in that which is merely true-to-life, but that which is more true-to-life (we might call this phallic realism).   

 

In sum: just as Lawrence's poetry is primarily involved with language and the assembling of textual abstractions, his painting is involved with colour, line, and the forces of chaos; a violence that works upon the flesh and upon the canvas, distorting and deforming bodies and liberating pictures from the tyranny of the stereotype; a violence that knows nothing of symbolism or signification and cares nothing for narrative or illustration (for if painting has no model to depict, neither has it a story to tell).

 

Lawrence may not be a great painter, or even a very good one. But he's a better one than his critics realise - and a far more intelligent and sophisticated writer than they think him too.   

  

One of Robertson's illustrations for A Whistling of Birds (2023) feat. a squirrel 

next to Lawrence's astonishing Ink Sketch (1929) feat. a nude man and woman 

within a field of rhythm and desire demonstrating how waves 

of inorganic life exceed the bounds of organic activity.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003). 

      I have discussed this book and made reference to it elsewhere on this blog: click here. I might not agree with everything Chaudhuri says, but this is an important text whose challenge to the (almost wilfully naive) manner in which Lawrence is usually portrayed and his writing interpreted has still not been met by many within the Lawrence world.

 

[2] See for example Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press, 2009).

      Readers might also be interested in a post dated 17 July 2015 on Lawrence, Derrida, and the snake: click here.

 

 

Re the use of the word feisty in the title of this post: click here. 

 

This post is for Chloe Rose Campbell and Tamara Ber.   

 

On the Feral Poetry of Fran Lock

 

Fran Lock in human and hyena form

 

 

Fran Lock likes to describe her poetic practice as feral - by which she means "omnivorous, opportunistic, accretive and excessive" [1]. 

 

Hers is not a poetry which germinates in "periods of quiet sustained reflection", but one cobbled together with a certain violence and a needs-be-as-needs-must attitude born of her working-class background. 

 

But is it any good? Based on the work I've read so far, I'd say it is ...

 

Or, at any rate, I'd say that - as a Deleuzian - it appeals to me, because, like Kafka, Lock is not attempting to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience, so much as construct a minor literature. 

 

In other words, she problematises everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar use and overlaid with doxa. 

 

Raised with a strong sense of her Irish heritage, Lock carries English away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign tongue within it; not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

 

It's no surprise that Lock is also interested in therianthropy, because writing at its best always effects a becoming-animal (be it insect, hyena, or great white whale) [2] and transports us from the land of Oedipus to that zone of indiscernibility wherein we can lose our domesticated human selves and experiment with wild forms of otherness.  

 

She doesn't always succeed, but that's okay; Lock has learnt to assume the risks of failure and embrace her "moments of humiliated over-reach", continually pushing not only beyond her own comfort zone but her own competence. 

 

It's better, she argues, to be thought ridiculous than boring and if that alienates some readers and critics, she doesn't care; "I’m not a branch of the service industry, and nobody said my relationship to the people encountering my work had to be gentle or friendly."  

 

That's a statement that makes an old punk very happy ...

 

 

Notes

[1] Fran Lock, 'T. S. Eliot Prize Writers' Notes', on the Poetry School website: click here. All lines quoted here are from this text. 

 

[2] Admittedly, and somewhat disappointingly, Lock refers her idea of becoming animal (understood in terms of literal transformation) back to the American author Charles Hoy Fort and his book Wild Talents (1932), and not to Deleuze and Guattari's more philosophical notion developed in Mille Plateaux (1980). 

 

 

Bonus: to watch Fran Lock briefly talking about her work, her relation to language, and animal transformation fantasy, click here. 

 

 

I am grateful to Chloe Rose Campbell for introducing me to the work of Fran Lock. 

 

 

The Perfect Poem (Adapted from Balzac's Short Story Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu)

 

 

 

"You may know your syntax thoroughly and make no blunders in your grammar, 

but it takes that and something more to make a great poet." [1]

 

I.

 

On a cold December morning just after Christmas, a friend mentioned a poem he had been working on for over a decade. That seemed an awfully long time to me, but he was adamant that it would be the verse by which he would finally make his name in the world of letters. 

 

'Besides', he added, 'what are ten short years in the eternal struggle with language?'   

 

I said I'd be happy to read it, if he wanted me too, but he was somewhat taken aback - even slightly offended - by the suggestion: "No, no! It's not perfect yet; something still remains for me to do."

 

Which is fair enough. The mysterious poem, a work of patience on which he had wrought so long in secret, was doubtless also a work of genius - for my friend was a man of great passion and enthusiasm who sees above and beyond mundane reality. But until he wished for it to be read, there was nothing further I could say.   

 

II. 

 

The following spring, my friend sent me a text asking if I could come visit him at his retreat in Cornwall.   

When I arrived, I was shocked. For he had "fallen a victim to one of those profound and spontaneous fits of discouragement that are caused, according to medical doctors, by indigestion, flatulence, fever, or enlargement of the spleen; or, if you take the opinion of the Spiritualists, by the imperfections of our mortal nature". 

 

The poor devil had exhausted himself in putting the finishing touches to his magnificent poem. Slumped in a huge armchair upholstered in blue velvet, he glanced up at me like a man who had sunk into depression. 

 

Naturally, I asked him what was wrong: 'Alas!' he cried, 'for one joyous moment I believed my work was finished, but now I'm sure there are still lines that need rewriting.'

 

As was his wont in times of despair, he had decided to flee abroad: 'I am going to France, to Germany, to Greece in search of inspiration - I don't know when or if I'll be back!'

 

Thinking it might help, I again offered to read the poem. He looked at me aghast: 'What! Show you my verse in all its imperfection - never! I would sooner kill myself - and kill you, my friend - than do that.'

 

I must confess myself amazed by the murderous vehemence with which these words were spoken and knew not how to reply to this utterance of an emotion as hyserical as it was profound. Was it the fabled madness of the poet or had my friend "fallen a victim to some freak of the artist's fancy?"

 

'Okay', I said. 'But be careful you don't die in the process of trying to find the perfect wording and leave the poem unfinished.'

 

 

III.

 

It was a cold December morning just before Christmas when next I heard from Moisés, back from his travels and renting rooms in London. 'Come and visit me at once,' he cried. 'My poem is perfect and I can now show it you with pride.'

 

His small studio flat was in disorder and covered with dust; a few pictures hung here and there upon the wall of dead poets and pop stars from another time. 

 

Without even offering me a drink, he pressed a single sheet of A4 paper into my hands. His dyed-black hair was disordered and his face glowed "with a more than human exaltation". 'Here it is!' he cried. 'Did you ever think that language was capable of such perfection? Have I not spoken with such elemental power that a new world is brought into being?' 

 

I looked at the sheet, but could see nothing written there, just the brilliant whiteness of the paper. Only in the bottom right-hand corner he had signed his name with such delicate beauty that it made me smile and I began "to have some understanding, vague though it was, of the ecstasy in which he lived".  

 

The next day, I heard my friend had killed himself, having first destroyed his perfect poem and all other writings.

 

   

Notes

 

[1] This was spoken by Maître Frenhofer, the main character in a two-part short story by Balzac entitled Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu ("The Unknown Masterpiece"). 

      It was first published in L'Artiste, a weekly illustrated review, in August 1831. It was later published  in Balzac's Études philosophiques (1837) and integrated into La Comédie humaine in 1846. The work is a reflection on art which had a profound influence on the thinking of both Cézanne and Picasso.

      This post is adapted from Balzac's tale and both paraphrases and incorporates lines from it. The original story can be read as a Project Gutenberg ebook: click here.