{"id":4539,"date":"2010-08-20T13:38:17","date_gmt":"2010-08-20T13:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=4539"},"modified":"2010-08-20T13:38:17","modified_gmt":"2010-08-20T13:38:17","slug":"against-tyrrany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/against-tyrrany\/","title":{"rendered":"Against Tyrrany"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This morning, reading about the English critic Frank Kermode<\/strong>‘s passing at ninety (here<\/a> and here<\/a> among many other places), I couldn’t help thinking back on Eric Mottram<\/strong> (who passed away at barely 70 nearly fifteen years ago) who had so often warned me (& others) about Kermode’s reactionary literary stances \u2014 even if both men had followed each other on the stand at the Old Bailey in defense of Last Exit to Brooklyn<\/em>, famously in the dock for alleged “obscenity.” I must confess that I never took much pleasure in reading Kermode \u2014 & have forgotten to do so for a good many years now, except for some of the more journalistic pieces in the LRB, which while always intelligent, confirmed my sense of a most unexciting literary mind.<\/p>\n

But: this morning’s excursion drove me back to Eric Mottram, & as I am right now in the process of updating my relocated Homad<\/strong><\/a> website, I decided to start beefing up the Mottram part of it to, adding John Calder’s obit<\/a> from The Independent<\/em>. I hope to find the time in the months to come to add much Mottram material to the site and give it back some visibility (if anyone out there has work on Eric Mottram they would like to see added to the site, please contact me).The Calder obit quotes a poem of Eric’s I have also loved (& quote on top of the Mottram page on my site) but The Independent didn’t put in any line breaks which made me pull the book of the shelves to do just that. So here is the poem itself:<\/p>\n

\n

Eric Mottram<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAGAINST TYRANNY : ELEGY 4\r\n\r\n                                   for Jackie Kaye\r\n\r\n                               1.\r\n\r\nto regrow forests     free water from waste\r\ncollect soils foster algae\r\nthe new alchemists' intensive food gardens\r\ndeny a fifty year old world\r\nold cars for new windmills\r\nleadership shifts from shoulder to shoulder\r\nto be wise      to restore the earth\r\nagainst priests of science\r\npsychologists of money\r\nto restore windspeeds to gardens\r\nin balance      let the boundary\r\nbetween yourself and fire\r\ndisappear     to be sun fire the conscious garden\r\nmutual preparation\r\na circle of eyes ray the fire hearth\r\n\r\nfire gardens of rocks shells driftwood\r\ngourds boulders from glaciers and he holds\r\nto his face a bone mask     femur upwards\r\nas horns and he throws search    the lost\r\nhis face in cold light a frozen wind\r\nSiberian tribesmen circle in satire\r\nto their freak     Green River Cemetery holds\r\nStuart Davis    Ad Reinhardt     Frank O'Hara\r\nJackson Pollock    the colleagues\r\nhope is that all created life be rescued\r\nfrom tyranny     decay sloughed for a share\r\nin magnificence    hoof thunder     silence of\r\npines and birches across the taiga\r\nfor ginseng roots\r\nskins trail the frost\r\n\r\na region of brilliant smells intense colours\r\nmen among them confused     extravagant edge\r\nbetween stone and brick as old as olives\r\nveins trunks roots overimposed in the eye\r\ntrust and resentment entangled and it is\r\nthe survivor who cried out\r\n                                         I can never stop\r\nthinking of my friend        he is my measure\r\nour differences increase    since his accident\r\n                                         but passion funds\r\ncreation out of accident deaths\r\n                                         it is not settling scores\r\nafter revolution                 that act is sacred resistance\r\nhow to conquer anguish    see barricades go up\r\n                                         gunsmoke across barley\r\nevery year without crumbling behind a dazzling wall\r\n                                         for what\r\nhe does not cry out           is his sacrifice of passion\r\n                                         to essays as in China\r\npolitics came through poets\r\npoet-statesmen the rule   where western mandarins\r\nabjure the state or accumulate art\r\n                                         where film-maker films\r\n                                         the burning of books\r\ntattooed on our nerves      tracts in tracts of forest\r\n\r\nthis is a book I would like to read\r\nthis is a moment I would like my father to know\r\nthose fabled moments and years of study     candid\r\na grim pass<\/em>  not like iron<\/em> then     mountain amnesia\r\nroofs as tiles and tesserae     splits humanity\r\ncreating itself<\/em>     how perfect and in a moment\r\nit won't be there     thanks in the simple sunflower\r\nI am so lucky to have found my work a madness\r\napart from love a trade a commerce     with paths\r\nthrough forests     daily to school a canvas in high wind\r\nwhere to surpass yourself out of nature\r\n\r\n                                                                    1973\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning, reading about the English critic Frank Kermode‘s passing at ninety (here and here among many other places), I couldn’t help thinking back on Eric Mottram (who passed away at barely 70 nearly...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,55,64,76,91,1],"tags":[308,802],"class_list":["post-4539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism","category-intellectuals","category-literature","category-obituaries","category-poetry","category-uncategorized","tag-eric-mottram","tag-frank-kermode"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4539"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4552,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4539\/revisions\/4552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}