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| inexorable weather (poetry) louis armand todmorden, lancs. (UK): arc publications, 2001 isbn: 1-900072-59-9 48pp available from shakespeare & sons, prague available from amazon.co.uk "a poetry filled with guest appearances by the languages we normally delegate authority to; which knows more than all of them put together." --rod mengham |
| from INEXORABLE WEATHER LOCI MEMORIAE (for daniel ferrer) 1. "what the camera doesn't see can't exist" the negative luminosity of sky through a closed window in march-a palimpsest of dead memories- carrion-their danse macabre (everything calculated to increase the burden of visibility)-& the prescience of an elsewhere, as they say: "elements missing are most active" 2. a vendor of souvenirs outside the crematorium- a wall hung with bouquets of petrified flowers the scene repeats itself- the interior arrangement of empty rooms "haunted by memories they could not possess" & grown foreign through familiarity 3. disintimated in a crowd-the separate sky its striations of too-emotive light-in the piazza di spagna- on the steps watching the flower- sellers weave & unweave the faceless labyrinth-voices mingling with traffic sounds-& the streets- the outward looking windows projecting interiority-& distance "just hanging there" suspended in the city's polaroid gaze 4. ... cf. o'hara's architecture of the nerves or humid cerebration in disruptions of narrative encoded ruin- a chronoscope for unthinking reliance on space as ontological paradigm-local & remote in the knotted feedback loop (certains d'entre vous savant qu'avec ce cercle & cette croix je dessine le noud borrom�en) at another time in the other imagination where it breaks off & re-begins dying & returning like the ghosts of a noh drama 5. episodes of [...] the train journey takes you from rome to vienna to prague- crossing imaginary frontiers as analogies present themselves at various points between technology & history- the unsecured exterior rushing past in the panicked traversal of endless metonymies- a documentary of the pastoral tradition from petrarch to the current welding casting moulding of "interpretive communities"- re-processing depth of field out of the filmic sequence (ambivalent to geo-political espacement?)- as cubist landscape or nature morte: the unrelenting, paranoiac tableau inscribes itself between exhaustion & pretence- knowing that the horizontal curvature of the earth is contingent upon perspective & not necessarily a matter of fact- arriving at several possible outcomes from each line of reasoning 6. "everything has its limit" is a quotation that can never be attributed without denying its universality, etc. relying on the significant clich� to bring the argument to conclusion? or summarise the tedious allegory of train tracks that have already robbed us of our selves during the night ...-this reminds me of pirandello sei personaggi in cerca d'autore & other "works of fiction" written on the same topic (during the journey the compartment itself becomes a theatre with other characters entering & departing from one station to the next-there is also the "dis- embodied voice" of the conductor, although it is barely audible, confused between languages ... (re- cognition of place-names hence becoming a function of visual apprehension? the resemblance of one to the other?): glissant sous le r�el, c'est �videmment aussi sous l'imaginaire que vous le trouvez) (c) louis armand, 2001 |