Digital Poetics 3.32 Elsewhere and until by Ali Graham
Image from the Beacon Rock golf Course Facebook page
Elsewhere and until
I am looking at a photo which I am transcribing.
Actually I am looking at three photos. If you would
like to see these photos, you would need to google
Beacon Rock Golf Course 7 September 2017
In the middle of a sentence look away
and over to them.
These photos mediate. They bring me
not only to the photographer and to the golfers
but to that environment –
the evergreens; the induced lawn. Maybe
even to unseeables – the water droplets
I assume to be
circulating desperately
in the air in these photos. Definitely
to that opaque and startling pink.
I think about the relationship between leisure and elsewhere.
Could it be procrastination that associates the two. Leisure as generating
an elsewhere, as making it with no hurry
to make for this elsewhere. It may incorporate elsewheres as springboards for its roundabout, unhurried progress.
Do golfers wear Hawaiian shirts
when not in Hawaii?
The progress will be justified in its unhurriedness
if the stakes are low(ered). But procrastination is also
often a way to act out high stakes; a way of staging
the task’s importance. It draws out the attention.
The sense of obligation – of urgency – to do it
can only last so long as the task
has not been completed. And often
leisure activities are themselves procrastinated;
given a regretful urgency.
I really should practice more. I keep
meaning to try that.
Speech is important to procrastinating,
both inner self-berating and outward conversation.
It is a kind of performed speech;
it sets up something. The task is both sustained
and delayed as it is spoken. The speech is set up
as a representation of wanting
to do the task, the wanting put in opposition
to actually doing it.
How to pass this through to poetry.
There is no way to set performed speech apart
from ‘natural’ speech in a poem; it is all staging.
Perhaps procrastination in a poem would
look like visually indicated pauses – like punctuation.
It is not the poet that brings me and the lyric’s I through
to the elsewhere of Beacon Rock Golf Course;
it is the photographs which give me
a chance of getting there,
by making the elsewhere static. Without
the photo I would be too much of a tortoise
to the elsewhere’s hare,
a distance and time apart.
By this photograph I am brought through
to an elsewhere by intervention,
an elsewhere that otherwise would remain entirely out
of my field of reference. Taking a photograph says
that is enough movement for now.
I get to thinking about beauty that is a tithe on nature,
the beauty stemming from and not in spite of how much
is taken from an ecosystem.
For instance, Phoenician purple,
a dye obtained from the secretions of murex snails.
Twelve thousand snails makes for just under one and a
half grams of dye. The tithe is either the individual milking
of each snail, by hand, or by pulverising them all. Beauty
that does not, to my mind, redeem what Lasky calls
the “muck of making”.
It is not worth it and yet.
In poetry this might be a poem that knows it is stained imperfect twice over,
once for being a response to a medium (photography)
and again for consisting of a medium (language).
All this and still this poem does not want to be redeemed,
even expounds shamelessly
on the elsewhere(s) that temper it.
On page forty-three of the book Ecopoetry, Deborah Fleming writes:
“[j]ust as an observer of landscape must view it from a vantage point removed from
the scene in order to appreciate it, the writer about landscape must achieve aesthetic distance form the subject in order to capture its beauty. Such distance necessarily implies objectivity.”
Does it?
Why is aesthetic distance a state to be achieved,
and why is the end to capture?
Talk of human mastery and ownership
in relation to nature feels self-defeating.
I am also unsure about her yoking of beauty
to objectivity, in the sense of the two being produced by the situating of the writer.
It is an unchaotic vision;
how smooth and rhetorical
the causation of in order to.
I think cause and effect is important
to elsewhere;
an undone cause and effect.
It does not follow that what is
and what is done here is
happening that way
over there.
It is hard to think that the planet is precarious
when in your immediate vicinity
the summer is warmer and lasts longer.
It is more of itself;
it seems more of enough.
Could it be
that the orientation of pastoralism towards moments
becomes a stumbling block.
I cannot bear witness
to the Gulf Stream in the moment
and it is not a thing of beauty.
What I can see
in the moment,
what has beauty,
is a clear-skied hot day.
The sunniness overshadowing
the danger.
And this is alright.
Difference is not necessarily hierarchy.
More summery summers
and disruption to the Gulf Stream are measures
of the same phenomenon.
That it was dry and mostly sunny
- nearly 20°C - in Norwich, England,
where I was on the 7th of September 2017
is no less or more an indicator of the climate’s current trajectory
than the wildfires happening at the same time
in the state of Washington, in the midst
of record aridity and heat.
I was at a distance from the wildfires
but that is no achievement.
It did not redeem me
into capturing the beauty
of the burning at Beacon Rock Golf Course.
There is no pliability,
no ease of bending and grip.
I believe that what this poem can do is be a way to fear.
The fear it maps may not be enough,
and the route to fear is not the same as a route to an elsewhere.
The e-waste is in my own heart.
Love is not enough. It can build the fear,
give a greater feeling of what is at stake,
but it does not necessarily counter it.
I procrastinated
on making nice.
I did not want the Sublime.
The Sublime would enable shying,
would suggest ecosystems are representative
of something that you can get to
if only you have the rugged courage
to exceed nature.
I do not hold to an elsewhere fire
or a redeeming elsewhere.
It would follow from this
that there is no elsewhere of earth,
and no elsewhere of living either;
you are here
or you are not.
The Sublime seems
a kind of procrastination.
You are engaging so much
and so much
with what nature could lead us to
that the vibrant fact of earth
is something to get around to later.
Or not at all.
I do not want to come through
to the Sublime.
Where I am is workable,
thank you very much.
Despite my determination(s),
the lyric’s I is not enough.
Because the nude has made movement
in the lyric I’s heart,
the e-waste is in the same I’s heart.
The nude that so affects them
cannot be conscionably separated
from the making of its making,
from the un-redeemability of e-waste.
A yearning to be entire and redeemable
is here in the lyric
because the earth might be met
with a comparable yearning.
A yearning for what. I think
about an enough-earth. Complete,
without temptation to make it representative.
An earth that is itself and me saying back to it
a variation on what I believe I hear it saying to me,
an earth that is the happening
in relation to the photograph of me.
‘Not enough’ suggests to me there is another .
I cannot say what,
but if this is not enough, not complete,
there may be a to complete it.
here may not be enough speech to go around.
I wish I could say something better
on my aversion to pink.
I would like not to go without saying;
I would like the writing of the poem
to never end. All eyes on the earth, anticipating.
I want the poem to eternally pink unspool and yet.
When I type in conversation
god knows this is an approximate womanhood
but it *is* a womanhood
what am I saying. That there is not enough knowing to go around?
Or: I will get around to it;
it’s all staging; my living has been and is made
representation
and representative, look what they have done to my life;
I should get some sleep;
time is short.
Or: I am waiting on earth
to let me know.
Not-enoughness is not an obligation
to infill. I can be incomplete
about stuff. This could show as leaving
a multiple choice question unanswered.
But I might (and I do), have a drive to infill,
and elsewhere might be a kind of infill, made
to show in negative what is lacking here. Lacking
ought not to be taken to mean that there is
a more complete truth that here falls short of.
What it really is
is that something is unfinished,
and a poem working in an elsewhere,
holding up a photograph to here as a mirror,
will at some point
have to be abandoned – to be finished with.
The finished-with-elsewhere is to be set against the here-in-progress,
and in doing this, what is to hand here is made different.
The poem’s hot knife might do what a hot knife does
or it may not. Either way I do not need to tell
everything. Not-enoughness is possible
even if what is seems inevitable.
Even the nudes my I speaks of are not
enough. Nakedness is not
enough. One wank is not
enough. The advent of pink chocolate is not
enough. The hottest is not
enough. A warning shot is not
enough. To pay six hundred and forty dollars to a subcontracted arms manufacturer
for a single toilet seat when you are the American government is not
enough. The cutesiness of Bambi is not
enough.
I might get around
to extricating the e-waste
from my heart. I might look away
mid-sentence.
The golfers remain golfers so long as they are in their own elsewhere, emptied of urgency.
I and this lyric’s I are not enough.
I and I know this.
Would I like to redeem my self?
It is a want, uncouth and hungry;
I want it done to me.
I am waiting on earth to let me know.
It is now 2022, two years after writing, and less than forty miles away from me in Norfolk, England wildfires are happening. Most grass has had the chlorophyll battered out of it by heat.
It is still 2022, still two years after writing, and before the wildfires, scientists establish that microplastics are present in the blood of humans and may accumulate in our organs. Microplastics are certainly passing through many of our hearts and conceivably are staying there. What lyric of this.
Could it be that what I want
and what can justly be had are
separate things.
Could it be that what I want
and what can justly be had are
the elsewhere of each other.
Beacon Rock Golf Course ekphrastic
All eyes on the earth
swing
low,
fearful / small bird of prey
wheeling and fervency. Warning shot;
Greek whitewash. Our hearts assumed and
nurtured shrivel, letting out e-waste,
and an un-sharp grey. Wildfire;
likely cloud to be reaching for your toes in and
these are
far things to the conifers.
Soft pink and green – magazine featuring
the hottest ways to atomise. Colour
of ruby chocolate, husking, double-wank nude
i.e. clarity and
a bodyness in the sense of ease of bending
and grip.
Phoenician purple
and is it
A. determination
B. swing
low
C. in the spirit of the Pentagon paying six hundred and forty dollars for a single toilet seat over and over
D. butter and a hot hot knife.
Such extinction out like keg bitters. Bambi is in the yard touching his nose to the cool of your putters
and maybe there are 3 kinds in the world; the golfers; the watchers; the person taking the photo and maybe some things are ill-suited to photographs. Overall it most certainly feels as if too many are on a moderately well-kempt golf course and the wildfire is burning one mile in the distance therefore there is no reason to move. I am sending you my hair, burnt, through the post and it is a way to fear.
In Arizona there is a petrified forest that I wanted to see but petrol and time were short.
This is after
Alice Notley’s ‘I went down there’; Arthur Sze’s ‘The Redshifting Web’; Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry is not a project;; Jane Bennett’s Vibrant matter; John Berger’s And our faces, my heart, as brief as photos; Mckenzie Wark’s Molecular Red; Paul Valéry’s ‘Recollections’; Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
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Ali Graham is a poet who lives and works in Glasgow. Their poetry has been published by The Tangerine and Cambridge Literary Review, and their essays have been published by Fruit Journal and Futch Press Journal. They have a pamphlet called Wreathing out with SPAM press and a pamphlet called Shade Song Sea Dream out with Distance No Object, and their collection Shop talk will be out with Veer2 soon. They can be found on Instagram as @aligrhm.
*
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
