Down Below
Caves of poetry, mountains of fiction and the air of lyric
What is the difference between poetry and lyric?
One of the most snidey (or it felt snidey) comments I ever received is that my poetry has a lyrical quality. It’s like a diss, that your stuff isn’t serious enough to be published on paper. Of course this snotty cuss came from a poetry academic (some fucker who actually has a job in poetry, which is exactly the opposite of what poetry is, for me, because poetry has always been a free space, away from the confines of expressing myself in the realms of journalism, copywriting, or monetary expectation).
To get paid for poetry has always felt like a blow to the Art for me. “You are now destined to die poor!” laughed an old friend when I started performing (for free) in the basements of Soho.
The Art was no Act to me. I was finding a truth in Poetry that I couldn’t reach commercially. I could write complaints for the modern world which were not allowed in the Kardashian-accepting populism of mass media.
I have likely said this before, but I began writing poetry to advance my own writing. It was somewhere I could play with stanzas, rhyme, rhythm, blues, the whole cosmic power of words, often within parameters, meter and form, yet boundaries of my choosing rather than ordained by whatever house I was writing for, because I was developing my own atelier of style. (This is what I am also attaining to do as an individual, to carry an absolute authentic centreline as I gather more self-belief, growing stronger, gaining strength from readers or seeing people who come to see us perform.) Poetry allows interpretations to be obvious but without being libellous, or as simplistic as having a binary opinion, or something that belonged in the traditions of politics. Good art speaks a universal language, and after playing in words for years, I like to remain playful in how I write. It helps it bounce off the page. Although a stasis of style can also impose a sense, like a minor key.
The old adage goes, we have to know the rules to break them. The empirical truth of art school was that I could call myself an artist. At journalism uni, I was a journalist already, I just needed to take myself seriously. In the school of life, what is the goal? Have the best life you can? Well, yes. But what does that look like?
We have to know our own throughline to have a baseline of what is acceptable. But in the same way that social conditioning and behaviour changes, should we hold universal rationale for everything? In the LOVE ME culture of social media, I was reading this interview with Richard Hell and felt like the risk of appearing full of acid and vitriol isn’t something we see in others so much at the moment, except maybe on X, but it’s something the culture can do to us. In Russia there’s a movement to not vote, to run away to cabins in the wood, escaping the culture which confines you. How we engage in what’s around us is a life art. I admire that rare spirit to be able to call stuff out, and not care, for women, it’s always felt like more of a risk. Diane Abbott, a case in point (the British MP who’s suffered racist slurs this week), the parties have acted far slower that the Hate Bill for mysogyny, where such acts should be reported to the police. But really, given the state of the UK, where councils are falling into bankruptcy, affording principals is not exactly part of the British showcase currently. At least musicians, or some of them, have some standards, with the US Army as one of the main sponsors of the Austin-based SXSW music industry showcase this past week, many artists have withdrawn, boycotting the event because the conference includes RTX (not Royal Trux, but the Arms Company formerly known as Raytheon, who make mucho dinero from Israel bombing the fuck out of Palestine), Collins Aerospace, BAE Systems, and agency presence from NIA, CIA, etc. Cute musicians, uh?
I’ve been writing a piece of fiction exploring esoteric capitalism recently. It should be published next year. It’s a reaction to the punks in government who use extremist binaries to stifle us with Brexit, the dismantling of the European Union and the death of everything we fought for with Acid House. Party politics are in the business of dictating norms, using traumatising logic, where we search for reason, but the chaos manifested in their propaganda to fuck with personal cultural imprints and keep us occupied in camps without barbed wire, where life is lost though engagement to their mad narratives of distraction, it’s something I set out to highlight as a journalist, but the compromise of newsrooms is never worse than with the acceleration of social media, and the time it takes up, away from books or living. The miasma of right muddling into left, or the left into right, I never realised how close these borders were till I worked with some American Republicans, whose right to bear arms was so close to anarcho libertarianism. That effect is everywhere now. The cults of Davos are little different to Blavatsky’s urgency to gain a wider picture of the world, in a similar manner to how Julian Assange attempted to redefine the fourth estate. In the blanket dismantling of responsibility to anything other than Individualism, where the madness of Covid, climate change, and the rebirth of nationalism which followed Brexit, a new era in digital propaganda emerged. Labelling of self and other was used to divide, distract, and destroy truth. A chaos matrix was initiated through social media which spread to mass media, symbols of fear, from the orange suits of Guantamano, to the imprisonment of anyone who doesn’t comply to state-controlled behaviour, ends up in the black market which the ‘white wars’ support.
We have been through some crazy times. The safety of our breathing was at risk, donning masks, protecting ourselves against the Plague of irresponsibility and an absolute failure to monitor global needs. It’s no wonder states looking to be more independent from federal control tend to do return to the ancient as our sage, the commodification of the New Age, of psychedelic alternatives, the legalisation of marijuana and some drugs — that’s the industry that’s grown in these times. I edited a Magic issue of Ambit as my final one, Weird Walks publish their work, all of Richard Norris and the KLF druid conventions harness pagan-esque alternatives, and the eco-poetry trends were picked up like tarots lost in the greys of adolescence. It feels like a mass exodus from the mainstream is the only escape, or maybe that’s just my pattern. My explorations into ‘free verse’ explored rhyme and traditional stanzas, the rules leading to the form of rhyming ballads, quatrains, performing to emphasise repetition, and advances on the familiar heartbeats of nursery rhyme. It’s no surprise, I grew up on the common sense of pop songs and praised music as a more modernist world than the olde school of reading poets, although never overlooking those opium-addled wordsmiths of yore cited by lyricists I admired. Any culture builds out from what has been before, ideally progressing with Outlier ideas which can be accepted into a recognisible institution, be it a canto, or a record label, a commercial publisher, or a film distributor. But do those institutions provide a safety for true Art? As Artists (or Createurs of any kind) we have to do what Harry does, which is seek his own truth. You know he and I are related, right? (I want to write that one day). However, like him, I was bred outside of the classroom, educated more in clubs and street culture and travels and art and experience. I feel fortunate not to have the Etonian lock-up binary as my only mentality, and he’s had to escape that, which is why he adds a zest to these personality-free times. The wider the scope, the bigger the draw, it’s just about where it hits the target.
The privilege of the London suburbs I grew up in, led me to adventure in worlds now largely wiped out by the algorithm of fascism, where the digitally-pumping facade offers no logic, only evil politicians who sink councils to unreturnable points, ripe for takeovers by extremists as we are seeing in Ireland. People do the same things, but differently, over and over again. I do think Art finds a way, we crack through the holes, we are lightseekers. This instinct comes from survival and the need to express. The hardest thing to do is stay on the path, and the motorway of other people can also be one’s own road. I’ve needed to find my own ride in the past months.
Someone was asking me when I knew I was a writer the other day. When I was seven, I responded. I’d written a poem about a peach tree and it impressed my mother in a way that I had never impressed her before, or since, I suspect. It’s similar to what Stephen King describes, for his reason for writing. It’s been a roller-coaster of identity questioning and disillusionment ever since, but I’m rarely as content as I am writing.
I had a weird experience with poetry the other day, that I wanted to share, should you have got this far, and it’s the purpose of me writing here. It was about something I wrote for Gil to sing. I’m putting it below this par: I wrote it as a lyric for him, a reflection of the brilliant Down Below by Leonora Carrington (NYRB edition with forward by Marina Werner) about how she was locked in a sanatorium in Northern Spain after her lover, the surrealist artist Max Ernst was taken away in WWII. (I’ve also been watching the Dior series on Apple TV, The New Look, which explores the reich. In the words of Jock Scot, You’re so reich, you’re so reich, you’re so reich wing — but in the words of Juliette Binoche who stars as Chanel, The sexy and the rich will always be on top!).
Hotel Paradise
Light will never come
Now you are gone
I’m lying in a desert scene
Covagonda cemetery
*
Down Below
Dawn’s a fantasy
A place of retreat
Deep deep sleep
Facts in disarray
Mind at play
Tied to a bed
Or flinging like a monkey
From wardrobe
To the desk
Which they take away
Tune of electricity
*
Down Below
Dawn’s an echo of a coin
Faces are all gods
Tormented sleep
Don Luis’s arm
Stretches from 1943
Flies undone
Identity dawn
Heart undone
Come back from the horizon
Clouds carry freedom
Shaped as el barco velero (transl. sailboat)
*
Down below
Dawn’s a fantasy
Place of broken dreams
Let me sleep
Leonora’s mournin
heart needs t’be redrawn
*
I paint my dreams
With heroes’ winged
Escape the memories
Where Art took me
*
Down below
Dawn’s a fantasy
A place I now must leave
I can wake from this sleep
Leonora’s Dawn
I can see the sun
*
Villa Amachu
Outside the arbour
I now can see
How mad I’ve been
Library with one book
Mind forever shook
*
Down Below
Dawn’s no fantasy
A place I now can leave
You give me belief
Leonora’s Dawn
Our hearts hold the sun
*
Gil looked at these words I’d imagined him singing, with choruses, and bridges n all, and he said: No way can I sing that, it’s a poem.
Vik tried, who was staying here for a month, and we have surprised ourselves by recording an album together. Up for new methods, she tried, and I loved what she began, but with her return journey beckoning, it would have taken hours to form my offerings into song. So we axed it. It was far from her own style of lyrical delivery. And this poem therefore proves exactly what lyric is not. It did not make the grade. And for me, it is not a good poem either. But what I thought was lyric not poetry, turns out to be a poem. For it will never rise to be a song. So fuck you, all you pedants who think that poems are things which belong on paper and are better than songs. Or maybe my Down Below belongs nowhere but in this temporary space of the Internet. The immortality of print, where those words Out of Print, hang like the brilliant films I can never find on the Internet, instead filled with the constant Newness posing as nothing more than a dopamine scroll of entertainment?
What I have realised about writing a series of songs, in this past month, since Vik and Gil came back from the bar one night, smashed, full of love for the food I’d created, and we were playing around on instruments later, and Vik delivered a huge dialogue of lyrical magic — is a tune is the embodiment of the Buddhist present. I realised listeners tend to hook to one line, and that’s all a song needs, melody serves the immediate. Lyric is an Art itself. Waxing lyrical in song allows the higher cosmic value of a tune to mean lyrics can carry poetic license at a different level to what I’ve always done in writing that begins on the page, and can be read back n forth, and under a wider lens. Riffing and freeforming, as I’ve been experimenting live at gigs I’ve done over the past year, means words always provide a bass of truth, but most people aren’t really listening to the words in songs, because we can carry emotion through the music too. The art for me, is to invite thought through what I’m saying, and this new project of an album does it from a more upbeat place than I’ve achieved before.
Vik set the bar high with an incredible freeform punk exposition which reminds Gil of the Television Personalities. Through this past month, I have really understood the differences between lyric and poetry at a new level. Doubt is what can lead to great decisions in mark-making of any kind, but the confidence of being a master, floating in odes, elegies, ballads and couplets or fuckery with sestets is have one’s own belief. I’ve spent a lifetime learning from others, with one art informing another yet focussing in on what we’re good at is something I feel like I’ve neglected, despite appearance, the pursuit of income does take time. I know I am a writer first, who’s now done enough recording to know where her strengths lie, but these weeks have offered a liberty of new knowledge. No way will I ever give music the energies I give to writing but no way does that mean I am not disallowing myself to experiment out from my foundations of understanding Arts. The base of my pyramid is always held by Literature. Painting and image and the visual are like the synesthesia of imagery, the immediate that we open our eyes to, and sound elevates our consciousness, a portal to a higher frequency of truth.
To compare one Art to another is not futile, as they all collide and inform each other — I’d never have explored poetry without being influenced by lyric, but to learn more about where one Art begins and another ends continues to be an exploration I very much enjoy. Like I enjoy William S. Burroughs photographs of used beds.
In Patricia Allmer’s essay on him in the Prestel published Taking Shots book (2014), she cites a Derrida comment used by he and Brion Gysin in 1978:
Nothing remains but an immense web of reading and writing, folding, unfolding, and refolding indefinitely.
I like this in response to the What is Art question. He wrote this about his famed cut-up technique in 1963:
I place a page of one text folded down the middle on a page of another text (my own or someone else’s) – The composite text is read across half from one text and half from the other – The resulting material is edited, re-arranged, and deleted as in any other form of composition – This chapter contains fold ins with the work of Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Paul Bowles, James Joyce, Michael Portman, Peter Weber, Fabrizio Mondadori, Jacques Stern, Evgeny Yevtushenko, some newspaper articles and of course my own work –.
AI could do lil better.
Without the past can we have the future? Allmer notes:
The stains themselves allude to art historical conventions of using stains to mark passages of time, such as the stain in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) […]Indeed, this stain also seems to allude to Olympia and the implications of the unmadeness of her bed. In Manet’s painting a red mattress reveals itself between the provisionally tucked in sheets, echoed in another one of Burroughs’ photographs of the bed. On one level this exposure of the mattress functions like a ‘stain of the real’ where the artifice of the scene is hastily assembled (be it after the sexual act as a cover-up – what is covered by the hastily draped throw on which Olympia rests? – or as marking the scene as artificial assemblage for a painterly portrait). The red mattress, like Burroughs’ stain, functions also as a step too far in the revelation of intimacy – literally and metaphorically it reveals too much, exposing the bourgeois viewer’s own ‘subjection to animal lust to dark instinctual drives and shameful perversions’ (Bernheimer 1989).
I feel Burroughs’ photos were just a way he could share what was a stigmatised act. A form of documenting the boys he loved in Tangier or wherever. Allmer recognises the parallels to Francis Bacon’s paintings. Although, Burroughs noted of Bacon: ‘He likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys.’
It’s always a question of aesthetics. Any expression is an extension of self, be it from the conformity of feeling held together in a suit, or the way a page holds thoughts. I was writing last time about frames, as a way women have been able to explore self. Burroughs pictures are the same.
What lyric and poetry share is similar to the crossover of fiction and fact. ie. there cannot be one without the other. In journalism you never earn space until you’ve carved away pieces in the corners. In the same way I started reading words in Soho, it was writing small commissions in journalism, of a maximum of around 500 words, but generally 100 words at a time, where I learnt my craft. I hopscotched around different styles, from scripts at the BBC to campaigns for fashion brands, to learning the people’s poetry of tabloid writing (yup, in the 90s I had a column on The Daily Star, and I’ve just realised that when everyone else was being fired from day jobs at the Manumission Motel, I simply resigned…). Such activities (acts) broke my styles every time I started a new bit writing, zeroing down to eventually feel skilled enough to write exactly what I wanted to say in a more abstract tone than the dullness of clarity. This is where poetry got me to. My identity was being challenged in similar ways as I navigated self within confines of audience and London survival. I was very much serving out, rather than addressing what was within, so experimenting in Cold Lips was formalised at Ambit. Suddenly given some gatekeeper power to select what poetry is and what it isn’t.
For someone who believes that to call oneself a poet is possibly the most arrogant term, and in fact, it’s a crown that is handed down from one great poet to another, I was never as audacious to go around calling myself a poet. But then, I didn’t need to. I was doing it without any reason other that to advance my own writing.
Yet even at Ambit, I doffed my hat to those who seemed to have followed the rules more, those who love the ‘crossword’ nature to forming haikus, villanelles, limerick, or Petrachan or Shakespearean sonnets. Those doing it ‘properly’. Why is the “right way” so attractive? I’m quite competant at critiquing myself without interference from others, if you’re seeking something, it’s probably cos something ain’t right. When others’ jealousies attack you or “teachers” and “gurus” deserve little else but a (compassionate) kicking into touch, it’s how we suck this up and continue that defines our own sense of contentment. Mathematics and patterns are not something I analyse, the shared baseline of ripping great literature into metadata of ‘hubris’, ‘catharthis’, and all those Latin jargon terms, rather than letting the spirit of the writer’s intention wash into me reminds me of my A-level English Lit teacher, who was a bit of a bitch. She tried to throw me out, and it was at Ambit I was faced again with the full frontal horror show of poetry. Not that there was a particularly higher proportion of people with mental health needs in the poetry community than most other fields I’ve worked in, it is however, a sport where my hardarse newsroom self had to become more compassionate to the many “outsiders” who wanted to published. Not that that particularly cures imposter syndrome. I opted to recruit a board of “poets” at Ambit who could see into corners that I couldn’t, and we’d have a vague stab at democracy for publishing those who were sliding into print. Maybe we were all careerist poets, published, holding some status within circles of hosting workshops, or telling other people what poetry is and also what it isn’t. Maybe it’s more a will to be good at something, we only judge ourselves, hence me feeling like obliterating whatever had been before, and I am proud of every line I published there. I have no qualms that I need to go further with my poetry because like an astanga yoga ritual, training allows forms to bring peace. The repetition allows us to become inherently practiced in something, but there’s also a magic to primitive naivety — stone circles may seem basic but there’s no doubt that they hold great intent. Primitive magic happens in youth, but I don’t think I’ll ever have seen serendipity straight in the eyes back then. For me, being in nightclubs leading me into journalism by way of the Heavenly Social Club and up the stairs of Loaded was chasing a magic quotient which no rubrics can measure. The risk is the magic. Poetry is a cosmic truth. I am instinctive. On founding the Sylvia Plath Fan Club, I wasn’t sure exactly what the intention was, other than it to be found in the act. There, I invited songwriters to perform their lyrics as poems and had an open stage for those wanting to try out a mic, or with some experience of one, as a poet or otherwise. Amplification of words, with DJing, and all the rest. The nights led Ana Sefer to introduce me to Dave Barbarossa, and I began performing words with him. He’s one of the best drummers in the world, and he told me not to join his rhythm, instead he’d find mine. I have a recording of that I must evacuate sometime. We performed to less than five people on the main stage at the Byline Festival, and five other gigs, one of my faves, was supporting Dr John Cooper Clarke at a Cold Lips party. A classic night where I left a four-foot something intern on the door and few people paid to enter.
“Bands, man!” John and I bemoaned, backstage, as fights broke out between different performers that night, with various possessions getting smashed up backstage.
Y’see, there has to be some division, some universal factors. I don’t wish to overthink you here, but I entered this cave in Spain as I needed time to rebuild my soul and reflect. As the worlds of London and this mountain battled, I found myself suffering from a period of “mareo”, a dizziness, eventually cured by Spanish drugs which seem to be labelled as a cure for female hysteria. After six months enclosed by the Sierra Nevada and the rambla of an old route to Granada, where glacial streams once made this small town the stopping point for the carrying of fish on donkeys between the port of Motril, up to the palaces of Moorish kings, the winter was absorbing into the lime plaster walls, and as the barrios fired rockets at each other, in celebration of San Anton, I found myself spinning in this truth of beauty, a reality far from anything I’ve ever known before. Triggers, ripple effects, I was scared of the traumas of my past, but now I am starting to fly over them, like words in flight.
So let our psyches be defined in light. Like our words. Words can’t always be held down, and nor should we.