Thank you so much, Marion, and thank you all for coming out this misty afternoon.
And I apologise that this lecture is a week late.
I wanted to support the members of the university who were on strike last week.
And I think it's important that their complaint is listened to.
So here I am a week later and my lecture is called Meandering Fortune Graphs, and it is a conversation between the Book of Jove and in parenthesis.
And I'm going to attend the Book of Joe, but as a poet, not a theologian,
and I hope that I won't offend anyone because poetry requires a little bit of a wandering from the conventional approach to things.
So I hope you will bear with me.
Saint Jerome, the fourth century mystic who translated the book of Jobe into Latin, said it was a slippery thing,
as if you would hold tightly an eel or a little marine fish when you press harder, he said.
The sooner it escapes. Inspired by this field.
I thought I would use this lecture to apply some pressure to the Book of Job, since it seems to me that its nature is most revealed in its escaping.
Having caught and released and recorded the swimming away of the Book of Joe,
I thought I would then calmly turn my attention to In Parentheses by David Jones.
I wish I'd never come up with such a scheme. A lecture ought to be a fit of close reading.
But I've chosen to poems, both of which invoke some mysterious force of the earth that flings you backwards.
The closer you read them. I haven't slept and I haven't really finished this lecture.
So all I can do today is bring you several times towards confusion.
A man. There was the Book of Job Begins like The Odyssey.
It begins as a folk tale about a human in a faraway place, much suffering.
But it begins in prose. A man that was in the Land of Oz and his name was Jobe, and he fell into misfortune.
Or perhaps it was misfortune since the story says that God assaulted Joe with bad luck in order to win a bet.
First his flocks, then his servants. Then his children were destroyed.
And you would think that was his whole identity undone.
But Jope made no complaint. A man springs to mind.
There are always these figures and the poet will have known someone somewhere.
A man that was at the station who asked to be bought a milkshake and a pint of cream.
He explained that he had lost his son and now he could only travel from one city to another.
Moving on whenever he felt violent. He stood there repelling comprehension.
Sucking milkshake through a straw, filling up with blankness, whitewashing all the darkness in his mouth, making no complaint.
Then his flesh was afflicted with sores. He suffered it for seven days and nights.
Then he opened his mouth and cursed the day he was born.
It is a shock when Joe opens his mouth and speaks poetry.
There is a lurch from the completed past to the open unfolding present from the third person to the first person.
It's like witnessing Agamemnon step out of the Odyssey into the Oresteia.
The language has dropped its protection and there is the man himself in all his mystery, speaking his complaint and speaking in poetry.
Hebrew poetry works by intensifying. It pairs or reverses one phrase upon another so that the sounds in the mind get stuck.
There's too much tinnitus.
Jerome, who paid for Hebrew lessons, mistook this to throw pattern for epic six feet first, although he added this caution in the preface.
Sometimes, he said, by breaking the law of metrical numbers, the rhythm itself is found sweet and ringing.
So the composers of the King James version, although their verses appeared in a black ish black letter typeface,
nevertheless, they gave it a sweet and ringing sound.
Let the day perish wherein I was born and the night wherein it was said there is a man child conceived
Let that day be darkness Let not God regard it from above neither let the light shine upon it.
It is a double shock when you read these words in the new translation by Robert Alter,
whose sharp amateurs bring the story closer and closer until its darkness takes you over.
Luca said. All that has dark sands has to end.
He said that the end is not in the throat, that when they surges up from the soles of the feet.
This mysterious force which everyone feels and no philosopher has explained, he said It is in some the spirit of the earth.
Well, jokes curse contains 16 dark suns.
I have counted them all, but I'm none the wiser about the spirit.
And now, on the day that I was born. And the night that said.
A man is conceived that day. Let it be darkness.
Let God above not seek it out, nor brightness shine upon it.
Let darkness, death's shadow foul it. Let a cloud mass rest upon it.
Let daily gloom overtake it that night.
Let murk overtake it. Let it not join in the days of the year.
Let it not enter the number of the months.
And so on. This is curse poetry, which blots out the world through empty language and milkshake.
And if the preacher speaks it authentically, not from the throat, but from the souls of the feet,
he is in danger of disappearing altogether, realising just too late that he has surrendered his authority to the spirit of the language,
a mad, punning, rhyming, stamping, repetitive, paradoxical leaping and meandering spirit whose first act is to plunge the auditorium into blackened.
Oh, let that day the baron that I have no song of joy Let the day curses hex it those ready to fight Leviathan
Let its twilight stars go dark Let it hope for a day in vain and let it not see the eyelids of dawn.
Fortunately for his congregation, cliché comes quickly to the rescue.
A group of proverb makers appears in jokes courtyard.
Bill dead elephants. And so far they too have learnt the discipline of poetry.
But their enthusiasm is all for previous ways of speaking.
Cool now if that the any that will answer the. And to which of the saints will their turn for wrath kill the foolish man and and the slave.
The silly one. Like a group of children, poets breaking into the courtyard of a modernist.
These rule keepers think they have come to offer sympathy, but they quickly find themselves infuriated by jokes, intensity.
They begin to grow bored. Pious, point scoring.
Furious. Surely it can't be that bad.
If it is that bad. You must have deserved it. The more Jobe insists he's blameless, the more scared and smug and aggressive they grow.
How long will you jabber such things? The words of your mouth.
One huge wind. Would God pervert justice?
Would shadow pervert. What is right? The argument goes on and on.
Days and nights. It grows dark. It grows light and dark again.
And they are still shouting.
If you stood just behind the wall in Blake's illustration, in that inky world with an owl staring back at you from the border,
you would be surprised at how viciously poets defend their belief systems.
You might peer over and see an old man on his knees, psychotic with trauma, calling out to an invisible opponent.
Thou hast filled me with wrinkles, which is a witness against me and my leanness rising up in me, bearing witness to my face.
My breath is corrupt. My days are extinct.
The graves are ready for me. While he speaks, elephants is drumming his fingers on the table, wondering when it will be his turn.
He can't stand this kind of verse.
At last, he loses patience, shakes the old man by the neck and says, Will a wise man speak hotter and fill his belly with the east wind?
And Jobe snaps back. I have heard much of this sort wretched console as it will.
Is there any end to hot air? What compelled you to speak up?
As the narrative escapes from a folktale into a drama, it lets its voice make different voices and each voice make a different world.
And in case you are thinking me flippant, reading the Book of Jobe as an argument between poets.
Let me assure you, there is no more serious task than to choose your options for imagining the world and
to realise that the options for imagining have already been designed by language.
That's why the Irish colloquy of the two sages recorded in the book of Leinster in the 12th century,
describes an argument between an old poet and a young poet who are not just disputing the latest literary award,
although they are admittedly quite exercised about that, but they are also deeply concerned about whose description of the world is the right one.
Is it, as the old poet insists, a finite and worsening world?
Or is it, as the young poet insists, an infinite and improving one?
You can imagine what kind of politics and therefore what kind of society and
therefore what kind of world depends on the choice between those opposing poetry's.
The irony in the Book of Joke is that it is written by a poet who already favours a particular style.
He knows where the poem is heading and his own writing practice or composing practice affects the place he conjures up.
He is a scrutinise, a plant's man.
A watcher of tradesmen. An admirer of animals, expert in whether trained in philosophy, a mystic, a night walker, a phenomenal or just a storyteller?
A man that was, he says, in the land of us. And the land comes vividly into focus in the poems which follow.
Sort word and gorse grow the thorn trees, olives and vines.
There are dried up rivers where the homeless fall asleep on stones.
Wild asses, locusts, goats on a circuit of endurance.
And at the edge of this desolate place. A city where thieves and murderers creep about.
And people cry out in their sleep. And the dawn brings all this into relief.
Like a man lifting a printing seal from wet clay.
Or as Claudius. Dip garments into dye and draw them up crimson.
Like the sun being lifted from the sea. Jokes world is populated and particular because it responds to the poem inside it, a wisdom poem they call it.
But this is not like Plato's wisdom, which surrounds itself with weak stammers.
All the speakers in the Book of Job speak vigorously.
They can't help it because the poem's textual is to a firm existence over understanding.
So that even pious advice draws images to itself which outgrow their meanings.
It is not so much a wisdom poem as a thing.
Poem. Listen to build that the shoe out, trying to prove his thesis that even as he speaks,
he seems to get distracted by actualities, as if he set out to describe a symbol.
But then he felt the life of it from inside. Listen.
As he cleared his throat, crouches, gets into character and recites.
Yes. The light at the of the wicked will gutter.
And the spark of his flame will not shine. Light goes dark and his tent and his lamp gutters before him.
His vigorous strides are straightened. His own counsel flings him down his feet, caught in a net.
He treads on a tangle of line. The trap grips his heel, the trip cord seizes him and a rope is hidden for him on the ground.
Everyone is listening. It's as if Francis Poles has joined the argument, Bill,
that has the mad conviction of someone who has often nipped out of his tent at night and tripped on a tightrope.
He must make his case. He's probably pointing at an imaginary rope, gesticulating, miming, even falling,
discovering for himself the mighty yes, of solidity, which is always more persuasive than opinion.
And then Joe says the opposite, placing his words with equally forceful exactness.
And the tree he describes gestures back at him and beyond him.
For a tree has hope, though cut down, it can still be renewed and its shoots will not cease.
Though its fruit go old in the dust from the scent of water, it flowers and puts forth branches like a sapling.
But a strong man dies. Defeated man breathes his last.
And where is he? Please notice that phrase from the centre of water.
It flowers. Brilliant, micro sensitive sketch of the outward inwardness of trees.
You hardly notice as you read that you've had to climb right into the heartwood and inhale from there the stony smell of water before it rains.
And you will have to have leaves, you will have to be possessed of some kind of vegetal coarseness to register the rustling of a tree.
Has hope. Tikva.
The Hebrew for Hope means a cord or lifeline.
It refers to the ribbon hung in a prostitute's window before the battle of Jericho, assigned to the soldiers that she shouldn't be killed.
What a metaphor. The tree's mind moves swiftly through you as you read.
There is no great effort of imagining. Simply in a verse you are printed with a tree's exuberance.
And then out the other side again, as if the poet hadn't noticed her achievement.
Her achievement, his achievement or theirs.
Nobody knows, of course, who gathered or composed these poems.
And I'm sure the slippery energy of the Book of Jobe derives partly from its oral beginnings and its many myths rememberings and reflections.
The first Hebrew version was recorded in about the seventh century B.C.,
but its complaint will have been around for a long as about as long as humans have been around.
Look, I scream outrage, and I am not answered.
I shout and there is no justice. There had already been an Egyptian dispute against suicide and a Babylonian dialogue about misery.
There is a joke in the Koran. There is a joke played by Archibald MacLeish.
And there are countless translations, countless versions, each with its own flavour, including the brilliant new volume by Robert Alter.
As with any ancient poem, especially a so-called religious poem,
there is plenty of anxiety about which version is the right version and which section might be an interpolation.
11. The Fourth of Dopes companions is believed by some scholars to be a later addition,
since his language is altogether swifter and plainer than everyone else's.
I am young in use, he says. I'm young in years and you are aged.
Therefore, was I awed and feared to speak my mind with you?
I thought that years speak and let great age make wisdom known.
I say let him speak and let his interpellation be praised since the language has no other way of escaping from its stalemate.
What Elihu does. Entering like an upward glance is to summon a vision of the weather.
Not the climate which can be plotted on graphs and made sense of, but the weather that chaotic out breath of the earth.
Look to the heavens and see and the sky that is high above you.
From the sky chamber comes the tempest and winds dispersal of the cold from God's breath.
The ice is made and wide waters turn solid with heavy moisture.
He loads the cloud, the thunderhead scatters his lightning and round about it spins in its designs.
It is Ella Hughes amazement at the sky.
And his mad, unfocused, weather ish way of speaking that invokes the whirlwind and from the whirlwind.
God speaks in verse and in judgement.
In other words, what takes place, framed by a folktale and concealed among proverbs, is a kind of ancient poetry slam.
Six poets, including God, competing to describe the nature of reality.
And it's clear as you sink a gust through the multicoloured layers of their language, it's clear suddenly that good poetry matters.
Not just because it is the liveliest way of speaking, but because the liveliest speech best reveals what life is.
There is a loop of nourishment between what exists and how it is articulated.
A poet is amazed and tries to say so, but articulation demands close scrutiny.
Scrutiny provokes more amazement, which demands more scrutiny, more memory, more wisdom, more science, more amazement.
And so the world seems livelier and livelier the more it is described.
That is how God in the Book of Job wins a competition.
God's performance is deft. He enters in a whirlwind and speaks a poem, which is both the reverse and the fulfilment of Job's curse.
Beginning by turning on the light. Then by snowing, hailing, blowing, raining, and in the sound of the rain.
Removing the human altogether. Have you come into the storehouse of snow?
The storehouse of [INAUDIBLE]. Have you seen? Which way is the storm fuse lit when the east wind flashes over the earth?
And who cut a passage for water and a crack for the thunder to rain on the ground when no one lives in a wasteland of mankind?
The shift here. Is from a lyric to an epic universe.
From a personal how to an open, many centred unmeasurable unfolding form.
As if to say, listen, the best poem has already been written.
It is here and it is existence itself. Whose script is the earth and whose rhythm is the seasons?
Who ready is the ravens prey when it's young?
Cry out to go out and stray deprived of food. Do you know the mountain goats birth time?
Do you mark the carving of the gazelles? Do you number the months till they come to term and know that birthing time?
They crouch. They split open with effort. They're young.
They push out to the world. Their offspring bat and grow big in the wild.
They go out and do not return. Who set the world us free.
And the honour goes. Rains. Who loosed. Whose home I made in the steps.
His dwelling place. Flats of salt. He scoffs at the bustling city.
The drivers shout. He does not here. He roams mountains for his forage and every green thing he seeks.
God reads out the earth like a rhapsody of pictograms.
The raven. The Goat. The ass. Onaga.
Ox. Ostrich. Hawks. Hawk.
Each animal revealed in an act of freedom, which is at the same time a terrifying looseness, as if in scrutinising the Onaga,
he noticed it most itself outside the city, eating whatever it can find while the driver shouts and shouts.
Life, according to God, is a poem about things escaping animals with loose reins, driverless.
Roaming the wilderness, not listening. And one could be forgiven for thinking he or she is obliquely describing themselves.
There are not many poems written on the scale of the Book of Joe.
Paradise Lost, which professes to justify the ways of God to man Wordsworth's prelude, which claims the divine sufficiency of the human mind.
Eliot's wasteland, which never escapes from the death wish phase of jokes.
Curse. These poems all have epic reputations.
But none of them risks the inhuman energy of the Book of Job.
In parentheses. David Jones. His long poem about his experience in the First World War is, I think, an exception.
David Jones was a painter, not a poet. And I guess that is one of the reasons he never strikes a true knowing note, he writes.
As an infantry man, one of many in his preface to the poem, Jones mentions that throughout the war,
he felt himself in the presence of all the soldiers of the past,
in particular the 300 men who died at the Battle of Katrice, commemorated in the seventh century poem The Golden.
These men can be heard marching at the beginning of each section of in parentheses.
The poem surges up not from the throat of David Jones, but from the souls of these soldiers feet.
Men marched. They kept equal. Step men marched.
They had been nurtured together.
Plenty of people can research or imagine the past, but this experience of the past being bodily present gives a pressure to Jones's language,
which keeps making it leap from prose into poetry.
And what the poetry does is to make it convincing for a divinity to appear.
Here is a thing. Divinities never appear in the past, present or future.
They only appear in the resonant combination of all three, which constitutes poetry.
To open away into this triple time, which the Welsh call a New Haven is where confusion starts up again.
It does not open at the behest of the poet. Only at the whim of fortune or misfortune or misfortune.
That is something in parentheses appears to take for granted. Its form is the form of what happens to happen.
Truly the unseen wind had little but your nice body for its teeth and oh to weevil snuffle would depress anyone.
But what was the matter with that quite ordinary tree? That's a very usual looking farmhouse.
The road was as Napoleon had left it. The day itself was what you'd expect of December.
In his later poems, The Anathema to and the Sleeping Lord Jones could never quite recover this improvising,
chance constrained style in which each phrase seems astonished by the last and no one has hold of the reins.
But his first poem, which he wrote, or so he claimed by accident in a kind of space between,
as you turn aside to do something, this poem is a response to war.
And perhaps for that reason it values life with a hand-painted capital l above very.
On the 10th of July 1916, David Jones and 600 members of the Welsh Regiment were moving across open ground when the man next to him was shot,
slumped backwards and they, smiling in the sun, relieved that he could now avoid the fighting.
But it isn't like that for the common run, he says. And you have no menstruation year to plot meandering fortune growth?
No. No. Whether she with a dart or the fare left to the grinding.
It isn't like that for the common run. You have no menstruation gear to plot meandering fortune growth?
No. No. Whether she with a dock or the fair left to the grinding.
As the line advanced, he had already watched two others, not so lucky, throw up their arms and die screaming.
He was 18 at the time. About the same age as those brothers in the Iliad who rode that horses hard against Diomedes.
But a spear went straight through the chest of one of them, and the other was so horrified.
He leapt, shaking out of the chariot, and a God wrapped him in mist and whisked him away home.
All I can is watching Pandora drop dead beside him.
And Aeneas jumped down, stunned to stand over the body.
Or like the father of Palin walking next to his son weeping.
Although Calcutta was so shocked by the bodies falling all around him that he stood paralysed on the battlefield as a pillar for a leafy tree,
unable to move backwards or forwards until a spear hit him in the heart.
Merciless bronze, going straight through the source of a man's meaning.
So it goes on. The Battle of Troy becomes the Battle of Jericho, the battle for Wales, the battle of Ash and Call, the Battle of Mamet's Word.
And there, among those shattered trees, the fortune graph draws its line through David Jones.
He was shot in the leg. His lament, written ten years later, carries the structure,
the deep structure of that moment when the world of things slams into the world of thoughts.
The more it is scrutinised, the less it is understood, the more it demands more scrutiny, more memory, more contradiction, more amazement.
Until the poem comes into being in praise of everything.
Baffling. Excessive. Savage. Sudden, erratic.
A 200 page inventory of touched and two solid things.
Nails and hooks on which to hang back gear. Improvised jam tunes.
The stub end of a pencil rolled mattresses.
Neatly piled bed boards. Long lines, urine.
Urinal, concrete. Corrugated iron. Some like tight belts.
Some like loose spouts, trussed up pockets, rifle bolts, webbing and buckles, great government socks, texture of rope, pieces of straw,
circular table, some painted green or blue now great and spotted with rust, jagged, twisted tins and litter of all kinds.
P Lions and butter lions. Tiny hay stalks.
The code on absolute rifles. Very new clean deal planking.
Steaks of pine stacked neatly are wooden frames, bales of wire netting, a flexible green canvas bucket, one flattened candle and a latchkey.
It's no use here so far from its complying lock.
And finally, the German label on a hand grenade looked at and admired and thrown into the weeds a few moments before that bullet hit him in the leg,
as if to pledge by touch the actuality of everything else.
Art said. David Jones is adamant about one thing She compels you to do an infantry man's job.
She insists on the tactile. In an interview broadcast in 1965.
There seem to be two poets of in parentheses.
One who keeps faith with the bullet, claiming, by the way, as if in brackets that everything in his life happened to him by accident,
including that poem which he began after about a flu when he was too exhausted to paint.
The other poet is an elf, as invoked by the interview as questions.
He claims to know certain truths from the far side of the poem that art is a sacrament, that Wales is part of the Roman Empire.
That Modernism has broken the surface of form. That a portrait must have meaning.
Stanley Spencer, he says, had this gift of an incredible draughtsmanship I mean,
he could paint any number of portraits, but me, I can't do them at all.
I mean, I suppose I could, if I could find out what the person meant.
Don't believe it. The temptation where modern poetry is concerned is to inhale all the information available to replace amazement with retrospect
and replace the poem with the biography that makes sense for a lyric poem which remains inside the vortex of its maker.
But an epic poem because it works by centring the self deserves a different kind of criticism.
All epic poems are anonymous, no matter who seems to have written them.
And whatever David Jones might think about in parenthesis, the triumph of the poem is that its characters don't belong to him.
Fleeting, mysterious portraits. Their value lies entirely in their offguard.
Disregard of meaning. There is the man who lectures the cadets about rifles while he brushes a haystack from his britches.
Or the wireless operators who bend lo intently whistling low like a mechanic's mate.
Or the warden of the stores. A man seemingly native to the place.
A little sick man swathed with sucking a limp, saturated bandolier thrown over one shoulder and with no other accoutrements.
Go get it. Cogitate and not sure how to say that in a woollen balaclava groped out from between corrugated uprights,
his great moustaches beaded with condensation under his nose,
thickly grieved with mud so that his boots and patties and sandbag towns will become one hole of trickling ochre.
His mine pipe had its smoking bowl turned inversely. He spoke slowly.
He told the corporal that this was where the shovels we usually draw and for any fatigue in the support.
He slipped back quickly with a certain animal caution into his hole to almost immediately poke out his will
work head as if to ask if anyone had the time of day or could spare him some dark shack or a picture paper.
Further, should they meet a white dog in the trench?
Her name was Belle and he would like to catch any [INAUDIBLE] giving this bell the boot.
The later poems have none of this vitality. They seem to have listened to the interview and know already how people like themselves ought to speak.
Characters in the Sleeping Lord conform to a theory, whereas the miracle of in parentheses,
the reason it would do well in Jones Poetry Slam is that it catches humans just as they throw off the reins and become freely themselves.
Scoffing at the poet like an Onaga. In this same interview,
while Jones conversed with Saunders Lewis I think I saw the anonymous author of In Parenthesis Rise Once or twice Out of Darkness.
In the space between a question and an answer. Jones bowed his head and seemed bored of his own theorising, and a sigh escaped him.
As if not Jones, but Joep himself was sitting there.
For my saying. Come before I eat and my roaring is poured out upon the waters.
Or it might be it or alcazares or the Egyptian suicide saying to whom can I speak today?
Faces have disappeared. Every man has a downcast face towards his fellows.
There are no righteous. The land is left to those who do wrong.
The layout of in parentheses marks the presence of this anonymous site as a white space.
When a soldier looks at trees, for example, he begins to breathe more deeply.
He begins to speak and stop. And his words resonate in the pools.
In the inner ear in a tinnitus of repetitions.
He loses track of time. He goes into shock. He goes into a dream.
He starts thinking of Welsh trees.
The woods round Cape Harrison, where the Virgin Mary appeared once in the misty fields and was chased by local boys.
Or the woods at door where the last Welsh prince was murdered.
When he looks at these woods, he seems to stand in the future,
looking back through shattered branches to moments with which he can see through a periscope, lifting his vision over a no man's land of barbed wire.
Dead bodies and artillery fire. No wonder he begins to speak with pauses in half.
Hexed, amateurs and sighs. Two groves, always.
Men come both to their joys and to their undoing.
Come Lightfoot in Heart Season School three.
Walk on a leafy holiday with kindred and kind, come perplexed, be with first loves to tread the tangle of frustrated striking bruising the green.
Come on knights fall for amber skied find harbour with a remnant share with the prescribe that unleavened cake.
Come for sweet princes by malignant interests deprived.
Wait, wait long for with the broken man nest with the badger and the mountain cat until such time as he'd come again crying the waste for his chosen.
Or come in gathering nuts and may or run one in a shirt for the Queen's Unreason, beat boys Bush for Robin and Bob,
and come with Merlyn in his madness for the pity of it for young men rich like Green Party for the folly of it.
Here is the same word described in prose by Allen Davis.
Glorious scenes met our gaze, mangled corpses in khaki and field grey dismembered bodies, severed heads and limbs, lumps of torn flesh.
Halfway up the tree trunks, shells of all calibres burst in plenty as continuance furies a flying machine gun bullets swept from three directions.
It is all too exact. Only in the compression of tenses and physical confusions of poetry.
In its combination of luck and speechless, this kind of goddess convincingly appear as she does in Section seven,
wandering through the trees, putting crowns on the dead soldiers.
Poetry is, of course, an art of speech looseness. By leaving gaps in the language, it gives voice to the structure of voice.
And David Jones speaks briefly about the question of spacing.
In the preface to In Parentheses. He says it may be well to say something about punctuation.
I frequently rely on a pause at the end of a line to aid the sentence and form a new line which the typography would not otherwise.
Demand is used to indicate some change, inflection or emphasis.
I've only tried to make a shape in words using as data the complex sights, sounds, fears, hopes,
apprehensions, smells, things exterior and interior, the landscape and paraphernalia of that singular time.
And those particular men. He does not mention here how he had studied the art of word shaping with Eric.
And later developed his own discipline of painted lettering.
If ever there was a meandering fortune graph.
It must surely be this inscription, which he gave in 1958 to T.S. Eliot.
It quotes the Latin epigraph to the wasteland. Letting the words jostle together as if they were still alive.
No menstruation gear dictates the layout.
It was written freehand. Each letter shape in dialogue with the shrinking space that surrounds it.
I particularly love the percussion of dots with the suggestion of a musical score.
So that one sees in a flash. How every art form is connected.
And here. Is a flying fortune growth to sea boats costing Latin shadows as they skim over the surface of the paper.
It was painted in 1968 for Rupert Revelstoke, and a letter from Revelstoke describes Jones lying on his bed when he'd just finished the work.
He was on his bed polishing it off by scratching the black and yellow lettering
with a blunt a blunt razor blade in order to break the solidity in this fashion.
And the one thing that gave him huge enjoyment was his drawing of the A in razor blade and the closeness of the U.S. and Columbus.
Yes. This is the kind of poetry El Shadow would have loved.
Razor, Bill and Guillemot coming to life in the shapes of their sounds.
Using their sounds to escape the earth altogether.
It is sad that in parentheses, like all mainstream poetry was printed with menstruation gear,
Faber would not allow Jones to lay out he wanted too long columns and plenty of white space,
and in consequence the poem suffered by being marketed as prose.
One can only imagine how it might read if Jones had hand-painted the whole poem
so that the sigh might be seen as a constant somatic pressure on the language.
The trees, the wireless operators, the warden of the stores, the white dog and the bullet all brought to life and the spacing of their sounds.
And it happened after the Lord had spoken these words to Jove that the Lord said to Elif, has the terminate.
My wrath has flared against you and your two companions because you have not spoken rightly of me, as did my servant Joe.
To speak greatly about this poet judge is to get the chance in as right as David Jones does.
After all, this is not allowing the God of Genesis or your way the God of Moses.
It is El Shadow, an old Canaanite God of the wasteland, a wild or whether God, a spirit of excess,
as well as a spirit who set limits to access a northern tutelage record of place,
a mountain God, a breasted God, a female or androgynous God of growth, or goddess of the uncultivated fields.
It is Lorca's Earth spirit, the God with loose reins who scoffs at the bustling city.
And it's good to bear all those characters in mind as you read this ancient argument between five humans, now six humans and a storm.
Because, of course, the competition is not over.
El Shadow's poem, The Wasteland or Wilderness Poem, is still performing its freewheeling rhythms of migrations and extinctions rain, fire, frost, war.
The wind turns round, a city is destroyed, the aphid drift between fields and spring and trees.
In autumn the grass gets up blossoms and is flattened.
Hornets make a house in a barn, someone poisons them and the owl comes back and nobody listens.
The mountain goat gives birth. The moth makes an arc from Africa to Europe and back again.
Just as geese land in a long line on the shores of the Arctic, after leaving a field of dung and feathers on the shores of the Torridge.
We're up and out and down in different lake levels, different flowers, open and close.
In other words, there is order, but it is not a human order.
It is not a graspable order. And now I come to think of it, to compare the book of Joe to an eel,
to a little marina fish is a strange understatement when you think of the poem's scale and its final uncatchable image.
Could you draw Leviathan with a hook and with a cord pressed down his tongue?
Could you put a red line in his nose and with a fishhook pierced his cheek?
Would he urgently entreat you? Would he speak to you gentle words?
Would he seal a pact with you that you take him as a lifelong slave?
Could you play with him like a bird and listen for your young women?
Could hucksters haggle over him? Divide him among the traitors.
Could you fill his skin with darts and a fisherman's net with his head?
Just put your hand upon him. You will no more recall how to battle.
Which is, I think, an accurate description of my struggle and surrender with this lecture.
Thank you very much.