Issue 33: Kelvin Corcoran

Correspondence

‘Where in the hierarchicals shall we place poetry?’

(Martin Corless-Smith, The Fool and The Bee.)

What I spat out? Mostly white bubbles,

with flecks of red. The doctor said,

- Oh, black honey’s filled your mind

and all these songs come from there.

There was a low star to the west

or a late flight coming in

against a Magritte sky

over the dark city composed.

Where are you, Lee? Where are you, Alan?

I lost the chord sequence, if I ever had it.

Does the video play soon?

Am I short of a line here? Throw me one.

These are the wonders on Earth:

medical science; music; poetry.

‘Exile is a grand way of saying fuck all.’

(Martin Corless-Smith, Letters from the Interior.)

The music plays, the clouds roll

and the bare trees bow in the wind

as we trudge across England to the west,

shoes sucked off by river shit, dilapidation.

Name the visions, show me the scenes of exile.

We saw the village-by-the-sea children

falling down the abandoned tin mine,

eating out of food banks, never visiting the sea.

Their forebears grub for arsenic wrapped in rags,

they are the dispossessed at birth who will never rise;

not a one-word judgement, an avoidable fact.

Going home their faces are beautiful and full of light

looking up into the unseen scheme of loss,

sunset shrinking over the park and darkened houses.

‘yet the ancient rubrics reveal that

we are back at the beginning’

(HD, The Walls Did Not Fall.)

It was said that Artemis said, it’s not personal,

nature is not personal, as she stood on the border

of every crossing over in the green dance of zero.

So, we cleared the walls of decoration to see the sun

and hacked into the roots, loosened the silver rivets,

to find one clue, a glyph, a rebus, anything to hold.

We ripped out the leylandii, not even fit for compost,

our fingers bled like sherbet fountains

and we planted lavender to repulse the scorpions.

To find one word to imprint on our palms

we dived head-first like fools into the kalderimi tunnels,

to see the autochthonic girl before us.

A first articulation in the uncased air.

The smell of lavender at every door.

‘Alas, my brothers,

Helen did not walk

upon the ramparts,’

(HD, Helen in Egypt.)

As the tide turns time calls,

- All aboard. But not you Helen, Troyless

you golden winged, keen of song,

took no bench or sail shade.

The rest is talk, mouth music

telling of a war for something

not there but that was then

and we have risen since.

We have no cities of fire

of blood-soaked rubble

where once were children, then taken

or spiralling open-mouthed on the ignited air.

To fall where HD dances with Stesichorus,

for something there not there, keen of song.

‘How can you ask

me to stand outside

your gates when I know what lost

city glimmers

within?’

(Donna Stonecipher, Souvenir de Constantinople.)

That morning, I looked up from the garden

eastward over the mountain, over history

over the fallen cities golden on the air

architectonic; my hands pulling at roots.

That morning, I looked up from the garden

saw Constantine leap in one bound from Mistra

from the double-headed eagle of Metropolis

to the broken walls of Constantinople.

Spring walks on Taygetos,

snakes bask on the kalderimi

in a cursive script recalled,

it is Spring dressing the mountain.

Outside the gates, we keep the name of the city,

hear the lyra dance along the streets within.

‘What was it like?’

(Donna Stonecipher, Model City.)

Dear Donna, I’m calling you from Milea,

are you there in that city of 72 visions

of the cherry festival polis and vergoldung,

all citizens content and the hotels transparent?

It was like this, Hippodamus said,

in Messene, Rhodes and Piraeus,

Messene of cults, rebellions and beauty,

between Mount Ithome and the River Koios.

I built the geometric pattern of the city

upon isonomy, isopolity and isomoiria;

on equal access to sacred and public buildings,

the model of the city in that fertile valley.

It was like this through the Arkadian Gate

over the three-span bridge, the sky our sanctuary.

‘O Pilgrim Pilgrim

there’s a dark wood in dreamland’

(Alan Halsey, Into the Interior.)

Sing birds sing your preloaded chemical song,

sing to the tall windows of the bad news room

sprayed in bright beads of rain,

those radiant fragments of light dancing.

I see their faces still, attended, unattended,

and the carpark stacked to the sky burning.

And I walk away on new, unmapped roads,

through the dark wood on the edge of town.

Today is for opera, for Puccini and Puccini and Puccini,

for Pavarotti singing everything and then more;

a literal account of the world if we came to our senses,

today is for the next treatment, the dark confirmation.

Sing birds sing, swoop for the wonders on Earth,

swoop for the food in the wet grass shot with light.

‘Reason made me a Language I had not.’

(Alan Halsey, In White Writing.)

I dreamt there was a book called In White Writing,

words dancing diagrammatic on a black field;

‘Reason made me a Language I had not.’

A hand next to writing, next to picture.

If reason made me that language

before mouth music made words

and the rift splitting the world,

just make it up and pretend you didn’t.

Can you see again the Dome of Parphar?

Once there was a harmless freedom in the heartland

and Beulah came riding along,

you can just walk on by, forget history.

Just walk on by and live a stupid life

foolish pride, da do do doobie da do do do.

‘To finally pull the plug on the word machine,

to rise from the chair late one evening

and step back into the quiet and darkness?’

(Lee Harwood, A poem for writers.)

The poet kept the vision box in the corner of his room,

with the polished icons and floating curtains;

at 4 a.m. he saw several youths run off with a crash barrier

down the avenue of trees colliding with starry night.

To do what? To save the season falling in a pile of leaves?

To found a just republic in the colours of Donald Evans?

But all we heard was the splintering of trees

and those songs buried off the path before sunrise.

Lee, don’t let me lose that trail of lights

bearing from the harbour like radar ghosts.

The screen is bright, the phosphorescent sea sparkles

and a good day sees your words form again,

free of intent, free of theory, the moment of the poem,

sent spinning out to return a new world.

‘To claw back something

I don’t even know yet

Talking to you? to myself? to the ether?’

(Lee Harwood, 5 Rungs up Sassongher.)

To arrive at that point in the night

adrift in the vague parenthesis of earth’s turning shadow,

just breathing, to escape the dumb dumb bass of poetry

made compulsory across dim seminar land.

It’s ok poets, no one’s listening;

so, claw back the mortal rotation of everything

at 4.20 a.m. in the conference of foxes,

test those shared processing mechanisms.

Test the old new songs you know, those songs

of drinking, sex and dancing inscribed in hexameters,

it’s ok, I saw the lyric tradition

step over the threshold of trees to play.

And Lee was there and he turned

and raised his hand to say – Oh, you made it.

---

----

One day I will live the stupid life

and my absent friends will be there

and I will sit in the garden

and watch the lemons ripen.

I will write only ballads oh

and listen to the air of the mountains,

I’ll be over the border and awa’

and play my guitar beneath the trees.

Kelvin Corcoran lives in Brussels. His first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, was published in 1985. Recent books include Below This Level, (Shearsman) 2019, The Republic of Song, (Parlor Press) 2020, Orpheus Asymmetric, 2020, and Collected Poems, (Shearsman) 2023. The sequence ‘Helen Mania’ was a Poetry Book Society choice. Corcoran’s work is the subject of a study edited by Andy Brown, The Writing Occurs as Song, 2013 and is discussed in The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from British and Greek Poetry in Dialogue, Paschalis Nikolaou, 2017. Corcoran has also edited an account of the poetry of Lee Harwood in Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood, 2008. He’s the co-editor with Robert Sheppard of The New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood, 2023.

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