Exhibits Against Manifestos
by Alan Halsey
for Rupert Loydell:
Sure features of sore futures
in the mainstream mausoleum
loyal skeletons of local selection.
1. It’s not as if
not so long ago
language was not so.
2. ‘This baboon teaches letters.’
Tell me, Thoth,
what this says about baboons.
And what does it say about letters?
3. A morning hymn to
a sixfold paronomasic
as the sun of a new day.
The top line toppling
like audacious acid,
that’s emphadence for you:
a map of anything
the total description
&c. If this resembles
a spick & span ancient accident
you’ll soon see its chips & spikes.
‘From this distance thinking towards you’
wrote Oppen
‘Time is recession.’
4. It happened in the middle of
the 19th century. Malflorists
everywhere. Suddenly. So? If
it’s pointless trust it. Categ’rists
burn faster than cigarettes
and are much less missed.
5. A seraph shot the sheriff.
The unrivalled comes unravelled
in ultra bold sans serif.
‘It is a little to write about itself.’
6. These feign foreign, authors from aether,
done but with errors on the page.
Look how the silver-furred lions jump ship.
How I keep saying to myself
I’ll be drowned
It’s a dream
I’ll be drowned.
7. As sarcasm is to scarcity:
air on the side of safety.
Ensure erasure but margin chagrin.
What is human and/or banded,
omniscient yet inconsistent,
is clearly resolved in this
you could call it an illusion.
8. Anonymous led from the start.
The odds-on favourite Analysis came last.
[‘Anonymous said that?’
‘Nah, Enormous.’
‘Leviathan?’
‘Nah, Levitation.’]
9. The desire of towing?
The formidable delight of
headlights in formaldehyde.
How can there be a language
no one understands?
10. Dear Jack
even if rabbits
don’t know what they are
there’s a question what
kind of not knowing
which affects more than rabbits
this is.
11. He’s listed all the things
he only thinks of finally
but there is no natural word order.
Before transmutation
no document’s a poem.
12. Never salutary slip from solitary lips
‘For the Greeks and the Romans
never talked to themselves, or to God,
which really comes to the same thing’
or at least betrays a certain preconception.
13. All we know is this particular
planet’s being hung out to dry.
Any day I will wake up
speaking a language not dead but
subject to recent legislation.
14. ‘They utter their commodities’:
how brittle what brutal business.
‘In a recession they’ll sacrifice
black sheep’ wrote Lucretius.
15. An emblem once put it like this:
omen, ornament or name.
Another said:
presence, person or response.
Beware the palpable vertigo
represented here. It’s made
of resuscitated things
resituated if & when spoken.
Years which start
as a literal translation
sometimes descend into paraphrase.
16. Dear Ralph
when Heidegger went to the mountains
the mountains hid in the woods
I reckon that’s why he went to the woods
and therefore
not all not-mountains are Buddhists
and only some not-Buddhists
are the very few woods
who know the difference between
not-not-being and not-mountains.
17. A trap part art. Vague
i.e. undefined
but I know which verge it’s under.
Find me its apples.
Wait for the applause.
18. Somewhere behind Exhibit 18
according to the guidebook
there’s an Übermensch
or as we say ‘Committee’.
19. A lost slab stole abuse
To be as absolute
A stab to so salute.
‘And some of them of understanding,
shall fall, to try them,
and to purge,
and to make them white.’
20. Good morning
you’re listening to Cogito Live.
Again. And last night
a thief stole what wasn’t worth stealing
for quite the wrong reason
again. As for insurance
she says Hello I’m Chloe.
Ah Chloe. I just wanted to tell you
Therefore I am.
Alan Halsey’s latest collections are Term as in Aftermath (Ahadada Books) and Lives of the Poets (Five Seasons Press). Optic Nerve recently released his reading of The Text of Shelley’s Death on CD, and an expanded edition of his collaboration with Steve McCaffery, Paradigm of the Tinctures, has been issued as an Argotist ebook. Also published in 2010 were his editions of Bill Griffiths Collected Earlier Poems (Reality Street) and Thomas Lovell Beddoes The Ivory Gate: Later Poems and Fragments (ReScript Books). An interview with Alan Halsey appears in E·ratio Issue 13. “Exhibits Against Manifestos” is an expanded version of “Nine Ways of Looking at a Manifesto” which was published in Rupert Loydell’s anthology Troubles Swapped For Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos (Salt, 2009).
