On the margins of great housing estates

Great Housing Estates: Sources

My new book is coming out from Shearsman Books in September.
There are notes in the book but I wanted to go into more detail about sources of moments in the poems. This has to do with accountability. There is another point about originality. If you look at the notes below, I keep using motifs from folklore. In fact this move can be seen as a “structural quote”. The use of these rich but regressive patterns is part of what is called naive art, or primitive art. By using them, I am absorbing naive art (and releasing naive parts of myself). But of course this isn’t an original idea. It is a “structural quote”. I can’t list the total set of such structures, it is not feasible. There is a pre-existing artistic language which I can use. I think someone invents a “game”, but after that every time you play it produces a unique run of events and throws of the dice.

'Controlled Conditions'. I associate this with a line from Verhaeren, l’halluciné dans la forêt de la nombre. I can’t find the line in there now, but it must have been present in an earlier draft, I think. Le cabaret du jour et de la nuit; I think this is also in Verhaeren. Somewhere.

Goths. Origo gothica has been described as “perhaps the most problematic work of the early Middle Ages”. The text is old but the title supposedly comes from Herwig Wolfram, in the 1980s. It means "origin of the Goths".

Sortes. The word means “lots”. Our word lot comes from hlutr, which is related to a root meaning “fall” and supposedly refers to small objects cast in the air to allow allocation of shares, or divination. So, a lot as a land division points to the land of a commune being shared out using chance, perhaps. By sortes gothicae I mean the celebrated division of Roman territory between barbarian warriors.

355M. As the notes say, this derives from a GPT-2 run. I looked at 100 pages of output, essentially meaningless, took one part of it, and changed it to look like a poem. The verbal structures are coherent because GPT took them from a human source, although I don’t know what that source was. It would be hard to claim ownership of this text.

(Inside and Out) Glass, claws. I got this from a volume about folklore by someone called Bernatzik.
He found a Grimms’ fairytale in which someone uses lynx claws to climb a glass mountain. He used this to interpret a Bronze Age (?) burial in which lynx claws were buried with the deceased. So, you use lynx claws to walk across the sky to the afterlife. In a Norse saga, glasvellir are the place of death, the place where dead heroes live. (That would mean glass hillsides, but the word glass may have meant glare before being attached to a substance manufactured by specialists in the Mediterranean.)

Bedesten. This is a name for market buildings, in several Turkish towns, which shelter many stalls, including antiquities dealers. The term implies a lockable building, so where relatively expensive commodities were traded. Oscar White Muscarella writes at length about bedesten objects – which he regards as unreliable, often being forged or set out with false provenances and find sites. He regards them as the raw evidence which bad archaeology is made of. Muscarella wanted to distinguish sharply between forgeries and other things, but I didn’t have this urge. I was quite excited by forgeries and by the whole patter, of dealers in antikas. I wanted to make verbal forgeries of my own.

Sacheverell Sitwell. I referred to his “Parade virtues of a dying gladiator”, which as a phrase is taken from Nietzsche. ‘Parade’ was published in the sixth number of ‘Wheels', in 1921. I think the whole of ‘Calendar Rite’ could be a re-enactment of his poem ‘The actor rehearses’. The actor is unemployed, he spends his time rehearsing parts to keep his skills strong. The theatrical illusion is projected without its proper means. ‘Rite’ is also about someone unemployed, practising their art in a private room.

12 days. The idea that the world returns to chaos at Christmas and that the following Twelve Days govern the shape of the following twelve months is described in Dumézil's Le mythe des centaures. The “December storms” play a role in this, said to represent primal cosmic forces, not yet reduced to articulate shapes by a sort of refinement process. The legend comes from the folklore of several countries, including Greece and Poland.

Altyn Dagh. The schema is that there is a mountain where on one side people speak Chinese, in the other side Indo-European, on the next Turkic, and on the next Paleo-Siberian. I like this myth and I completely invented it.
There should be a point where these so different cultures meet. Maybe there is no such point.
‘Altyn Dagh’ means ‘gold mountain’ in Turkish.

(Route march in the cultural field) Spinkel og dobbelspidse. The phrase comes from Ravn, Morten: “Guldbådene fra Nors – tolkning og datering”. It is translated in the poem, “slender and double-prowed”. The idea that the little gold ships were a spell to ensure the safety of the fleet invading England comes from Danish archaeologists. The ships are 11-12 cm long, the longest one 17 cm. They were once dated to the 3rd C AD, but the dating has been shifted so that they could be mid-5th century. They were found in Jutland, close to the North Sea.

‘that food which the living eat’. I think this came from a curse, one of those features of the high Roman Empire. Possibly from Wunsch’s Defixionstabellen. “Let him not eat that food which the living eat’. I thought the curses were like lyric poems, short and passionate. "More than 1500 curse tablets (defixiones) are now known, two-thirds of them written in Greek; of the Latin texts, over half have been found in Britain,".