Speaking of England Who dares speak of England unless he has first swallowed a coal from Albion’s fire? It is the world above our sight, The visible in sovereign light, Set ever against the world below Where shadows come and spirits go. It is the land that Albion won, A giant, Neptune’s wandering son; He held the realm for his own fame And gave to poetry his own name. It is the words the dead bequeath, Rhyming couplets between their teeth; A land where time and

Poetry Isn’t Trending Out of fashion now — The long hours spent Making and doing, Turning and shaping lines, For a dwindling clientele Of other poets and academics Who might notice The grain of a line, A phrase honed smooth Or left rough as timber. No one else cares to look. And yet the trade persists — If trade is even the word — Since there is nothing to gain. A dying art Like the fletching of arrows, Or the mending of clocks With a dex

A Brief Pataphysical Study of the Word ‘and’ in Poetic Titles When viewed under the lens of Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysics — the so-called science of imaginary solutions that “symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” — the humble conjunction ‘and’ occupies a liminal space in poetic titles. Easily dismissed as a mere linguistic connector, ‘and’ here acts as a non-identical operator that defies conventional logic. Lon

Melville and the White Whale Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room, On the Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over I Write down This, My Heathen Language. Making waves. Much INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD Spilled to find the White Whale — Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia rem

A tool for imitating movement, For the small things that penetrate, For the breath's expulsion ...

Words II Having material weight, a poem can be shaped, sculptured and refined; erected as units, structures, factories, bridges, outhouses and T O W E R S Or miraculously sus- pended in the air, b u o y a n t black crafts in the milky void. Or else bolted upright at the base of the world, and supported by its own true and deep foundations

A Poem Is a cluster of black atoms, of varied shapes and connections, configured with an inclination towards sense and suspended in a white and finite void

Mast/Tree The piling up of words into units, struc- tures, towers, is what might be termed the phallic unity of lang- uage. It was Hulme who said words ought to ‘stand up’ so that a poem is like a tree when the leaves are cut off -- it ‘be- comes a mast’.

A Poem Is a Picture Environed by varying degrees of space, (depending on where you draw the line), a poem is a picture of the artist's mind on a pagewhite canvas.

Words What are these things before me That come into shape? Do not ask And I will not have to answer. Weird creatures that run amok Inside their cages. Little flowers Of poison and honey. Potent as blood-drops, They scatter and return like ants, Dissolve faster than puffs of smoke. Words, I push you out And you take me where you want to go.