Don't I know you from somewhere?                                             7 October 2007


Poetry equals ambiguity. That's clear. Do you want me to carry on? Language, the English language in particular, nurtures, feeds and organises ambiguity. The end of history, ground zero and the question whether sculptures in the round are visual display units are all statements about how ambiguity operates when the going is good. The more often you repeat a word, the more ambiguous it becomes. On the page, growth reduces size to a still life. Match fit until the boardroom decides otherwise! The appreciation and understanding of poetry is cluster-based. Poetry is not yet an exotic version of the spoken language but appears to be a linguistic version of our thoroughly commercialised society. Poetry identifies with the figure when language hits the ground. Reading the page steals the main event, which for a poet is writing poetry. Poetry is the mood music of language; even a part-time academic can confirm this when they watch the witchfinder general at work. Envy is the better part of rancour. Poets who get bored with voice, noise and anger could model themselves on an incorruptible wall-to-wall carpetbagger, surely that should read beggar. Poetry sounds like a caricature when it is released without voice box; the work to be done resides in the meaning to be argued. So, David Toop prefers "the sheer surface of a Jeremy Prynne poem" to "the lyrics of an average white guitar band". Who would have thought that? I'm really stunned: a cult figure bailing out another cult figure! Just for fun, I suppose. Well, the normative strictures of the weather conditions still apply. When there's a break, there's a complementary handshake; but when a misunderstanding disrupts the qualified behaviour of decent people, there's no going back to the extended family of a poetry community that never existed (at this point my old friend Paul Brown would have said: "in the first place"). Walking up and own the page is quite an achievement when the plane is late, the pain unbearable and the lane an unending tunnel of semi-indestructibility.