(Notes from a Lecture Delivered by a Former English Poet Laureate)



At the age of six you were a bloody little genius

Bauxite was the only word you could spell

But I knew the year of the Battle of Hastings

from a title on the spine of one of mother’s books

salvaged by the boxload at an auction for fleeced up

calculators. Now, in the online gallery I follow you

around like a fox, impressed by your use

of the word formaldehyde. You stink of it and I’m arrested
skinking the meat off the bones you left in a box

of araldite, glued, I thought, on site, for me to you,

your plexiglass apiary. Some kind of art world

controversy dogs me like a blue

kettle so that anyone who makes a film I love.

Study for a running spotlight, scrounging

for sunshine in the flangular nape of the broad

eighteenth century, soldiers waft like truffle oil.

It’s only when you come to the harbor /

that you realize how you miss it.
A Nobel Prize is not enough, you have to kiss arse as well.
Massive sense of self peers piggishly from the space between

brain and brow. Wishes critics would see in his poems

mistrust of the middle classes forbidden entry to the mistaken

political observation. The next day in The Australian 
Diabetica. Sweet graves. Lying in your vat of sugar.

Where you make the mistake is where the profundity

is Botch = depth. Computer manuscripts read like they were

yesterday. The other one, skinny and honking like a goose.

Getting you confused with some other English-speaking

painter. Someone re: cycling can read your mind.
Born of albatross, ruby skilled, fleeced sixty thousand on the first day.

Allied and German, loss of innocence, the beginning of a summer

techno war. Definition of poetry wider even than the world

War II. Tradition that goes back to Homer. Purification

critiqued—Swimmers into cleanness leaping. All the hills and vales

avoid reality. Oh, the mouthless dead. It is easy

to be dead. I tried it once, before I turned to early British

modernism culled by war 
Relies on Americans for the subject of death itself

Killed at Loos in 1915. Looking for English publisher.
Head of Brass makes love to Thomas Hardy:

‘If we could see all, then all might seem good,’

said the biography of the new Francis

Webb my love of Elizabethan melody

disrupted by the eradication of music /

Isaac Rosenberg is not an officer;

Married to a dozen unfinished poems.

Difficult to finish when bombs going off

but love gives sense of urgency. 
The red wet / thing 
permeates poems, tests my lungs for ancient value.

You would think people would care less as they get older

but it’s not the case. Crumble me

into the torn fields of France.

Poppies whose roots are in men’s veins /

Six-thirty or seven is fine with me. They meet

and begin writing poetry. Just when you thought it was over

cosmopolitan rats. We all hate home / and having to be there:

touching the hands of the opiate connotation.

Democratic erotic emphasized by
Dust of an allusion to Thomas Nash. Reverse curate

your palimpsest perception. This is the Real

Departure from previous sentimentality.

Met Wilfred Owen at the war hospital in Edinburgh.

Gave him my poems. Each slow dusk is an anthem

for doomed youth. Killed in an oven a week

before victory. Telegram arrived on the doorstep of mother’s

bells, sounding like history like bella bellissimo.

The ‘yeasted up’ language of Keats

hi on the rise of a lifetime on lips. Freudian

assumption of increased tenderness for mankind

something of a Spring

Offensive. ‘Some say god caught them

before they even fell.’ Poetry thus emerges

from the belly of the premodern. But why Owen?
nude cantata passes through, streams of globulated 
five percent civilians killed = sixty percent nature

technology. Arden Lewis died in Burma. We think he

shot himself. Back in England, we think

he shot himself. Poem ends with reference to

Edward Thomas. Village of steep hill now shoulder

of mutton. All day it is raining
Dreadlock the naming of parts
Not a decent set on them, Mother has said.

Mother loved bodies and trying to kill them.

Where the bullet stopped. 
After the first death there is no other.

Song of the dying gunner, buying ballads

by the metre, angling high for the death

of a ball turret gunner. 
Here the lover and killer are mingled.

Being damned I am amused. Just

hear this and we can go our separate ways:

I went with father to the trench of Pozieres

wallop of cods and swallow of whistle.

Lying in a field of deadly flowers,

Black bird of trespass I drink you