Et in Arcadia Ego, Not
—On Collaborating with Thurston Moore
Trash Frost Ghost Saint Lullaby
Trash ghosts merge wasp galls
On lanky armed wattle tree
Far from city’s inversion layer
Jack in the box
Hales dead halo
Lush about plush lips
Free frost flits like saint hair
Purses snatched by lips soiled
I lick your itch ok
Wonderful meeting
To flesh out & test
Centipede reflex
Or mess with fleeting
Invectives, love’s prospect
Whip it on me goldboy
First thought is predestined desire
You know
Nothing was (sun always s/peaking)
Trucked across wastes
Nothing was gross as the moon
So we hailed
The lost to rise up & come to us
Off to bed
Blues heart the reminder
All is
OK
Above is the latest in a string of poems I have co-written with Thurston Moore. As with others we’ve done, it started serendipitously, and after a break of no email chat for some time. I said hello and sent a few lines, and a few lines came back. Where I was, it was winter, and about 8am. Where Thurston was, it was London night-summer, I’d guess by the time signature on his email, but I am only guessing—I didn’t ask. The poem did the asking and answering or avoiding. Readers might be able to deduce. It would have been about 2 in the morning. The times matter. Swapping lines via email till dawn. The aubade (to icons and iconoclasts) and the laments and the sleeping times. The wry tones of our lines and stanzas, that weave or add in to existing lines and stanzas, are given pique or refreshed by the circumstances we are respectively in. We are each largely unaware of the domestic life of the other. These blinkers help. ‘Life’ is sublimated through the lyric, and the poems become not only cultural and social commentaries, but maybe inflections and reflections of where we are at personally.
These are poems about slippage between conjecture and actuality, between an imagined real and an almost bubble-like immunity to the other poet’s personal zone. Which is not to say there isn’t caring or empathy—of course there is—but the poems are enough and do their work within themselves; they don’t need the personal details, they don’t need cushioning. What is diary or journal or observation or participation in them is hidden, and what is surreal, drawing into the dream or nightmare, what is dipping into reading or hearing or seeing or experience, is always in question.
So just now, I look out the window and set off and wonder about what might come back, and am surprised, and that sets me off in another direction. A mood always prevails. Early/late. A lullaby. Between, I send another message saying I am listening to Son House, and that filters in as gesture rather than as something literal. Son House isn’t in there, but the manner and state of listening are. But even then I am not sure. Maybe, in some way. But the essence, for me, is a sensibility and an expectation. I don’t find anything random in the process—in fact, these factors, and a knowledge of Thurston’s vast array of creativity, almost make this interaction narrative and the poems stories. There’s a dialogue, of course, but they are also lyrical stories that set their own agenda. Maybe the largest traversal is across the ‘natural’ and the ‘made’, across the urban and the rural. But there’s no binary, and other stuff is constantly filtering or forcing its way in. And often the tension between the body and the head, desire and the spirit, brings about a coalescing, and the dialogue becomes one of body and soul in which neither of us owns a role.
Thurston and I are not privy to each other’s writing process—how Thurston writes lyrics to his music has been much written about, and he and other members of Sonic Youth have discussed a process which ranges from collage to one line, then the next from chunks to the whole—process is a living thing and music speaks with words. But these poems work in their own way, and each of us provides prompts to the other in the form of lines and stanzas and a group of poems such as those in our chapbook A Remarkable Grey Horse bounce off each other and necessitate not only call and response within a poem, but between poems. The existence of one poem necessitates another. What we’re listening to, reading, where we are... the movies and ‘stars’ and icons and catchwords whose familiarity we share, growing up in different parts of the world in different ways. Thurston has been to Perth, Western Australia, and I have heard him perform there (with Sonic Youth); I know New York, we both know London, he has performed his poetry (without music) in Cambridge and I have chatted with him in public about his poetry and poetry-making process. We share a fascination for the small poetry publication, for the space of the page and the affect and effect of the poem as object. It’s language in the end... all language. The language we share in part, the language we hear everywhere as difference, the words that leap across cultural difference and become ‘buzz’ words or even ‘buzzkill’.
Are these poems ‘lyrics’. To music? I think so, I can hear the music that would go with them and I am sure Thurston can. He could make that music, but that’s not what he’s doing, we’re doing. The poems generate their own discords and melodies all at once. A line rolls and then clashes; it endstops and enjambs at once. This is noise poetry that can be mellifluous; it is a clash of registers that ‘marries’ itself. It is collusive and rebarbative. Maybe we always need to reset the way we hear? Some of this is written in Ireland on the southwest coast during wild storms, some on the road in America while touring with new solo material and a new band, some of it comes out of Irish legend, some out of a pedagogical ecology of the Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado. And we have our personal interactions, our worries and delights, and these poems become conduits for all that. They are much larger to us than they seem on the page, but they are also there, then gone, to reappear and disappear again and again.
Speech is about how we hear. I hear Thurston’s overhearing. I am familiar with his music—have been for thirty-five years now. I know his hearing as it manifests in art pretty well. But I don’t know his hearing when he first hears it. I don’t have that intimacy or knowledge of him, as he doesn’t of me. Yet we get ideas through each other’s work, inputs into this. Speech is what we are and overhear. The idiom he talks in, and the way he overhears across languages and geographies and cultural inflections, in venues before and after shows, in his day-to-day life. And the idiom ‘of the bush’ I am part of and collect and reproduce, mediated by my ear-experiences and attempts at imitation of speech elsewhere. Both of us are always coming and going and seeing and hearing but refer back to who we are and how we learned to speak and hear. This is in the poems.
Our poems have been composed in a variety of ways, and more ways of composition are being added. Sometimes a line adds to a line, other times a stanza follows a stanza, and on other occasions, lines or fragments of lines cut into what has come before. There might be rearranging and resetting as a ‘whole’ evolves. Punctuation may change, or a point made for retaining a certain spelling or syntax. Fairly quickly in the process of a poem, a modus operandi is established, though one ‘surprise’ word ‘late’ in a poem can change this and lead the other to ‘rethink’ what the poem was about. Building and wrecking and building.
Our poems are installations and performances. They are also quiet moments. Exchanges. They sing-speak-clash and hopefully smoulder and spark and sleep and wake and perform their daily tasks. Both of us have been involved in many forms of collaboration over the years, and I am sure I can speak for both of us in saying that collaboration is inevitably generative and stimulating to solo work. This has been a special collaboration for me in the sense that both Thurston’s solo work and his work with Sonic Youth play as a soundtrack in my head when I am writing my parts of the poem, which are so often in a different register from Thurston’s, but speak with familiarity because of this soundtrack. We are very different artists, but also, I think, share a lot of artistic sensibilities. There’s a desire to ‘control’ the mediums we work in on a technical level, but also let the art (poetry-music-visualisations) ‘happen’, to suggest their own paths, energise in their own right. Words always do the work, and we follow, ears and eyes open, ready to taste and sense everything they have on offer!
I’ll finish with a short poem we wrote during the months we were composing the poems of A Remarkable Grey Horse, but which didn’t find its way into that chapbook. It’s actually in a slightly different ‘key’ from the rest of the poems of that period, but it also connects with them. I always found a wistful sadness to a poem closing off when working with Thurston—as if the air had been sucked out of the room I was in, leaving me giddy and disorientated and ‘out of it’. It wasn’t a bad thing. Sounds weird to say, but it’s true. Like when Tracy and I heard all of Daydream Nation played by Sonic Youth by the Swan River under the gaze of King’s Park and the mining towers of Perth: surreal, extra-natural, slightly incongruous, but brilliantly and excitingly a trashing of the pastoral. That’s what I like about this process: streetwise Cage undoing Arcadia, death being overtaken by the zip of life. Buñuel, surrealism, Dada, Doris Day, performance, skateboards, punk love, sex, city meets country, Warhol and heavy weather in the Guggenheim. I am not really sure what my part is, but I am also there, with my forms and screens and ecologies and eclogues.
Ramshine
Rising on the kraken wave,
a hulahoop of a break,
the skaters set their low-
riders for a sunset dip,
a slip into smooth lingo;
Lowerlips bad mouth kissing
cigs, eyes skipping pavement
honey, wild time may last
only so long, but who dares
Care? Time to slip through.
Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy
ISSN 2200-8616