20 May 2004

THE COMING OF JAGO FLOOD   Now, here’s a curious tale of deceit, dissembling  & disguise & I’m not sure whether I’m proud or ashamed or just a little mystified by it all.    During a protracted trawl through the multitude of online poetry sites last year, I came across many, many poetry e-zines.  The variety of content & style, originality & substance & sophistication of presentation was extraordinary.  Some were endearingly primitive – little more than digital exercise books, dog-eared & ink-blotted.  Others came across like Hollywood movie title sequences, all exploding graphics & ambient chillout soundtracks.  It was like being in some vast, surreal dentist’s waiting room stacked high with ill-assorted & obscure publications.  I forgot my toothache in no time.   But one thing struck me from the start: regardless of the gritty credibility of the rough, roneo-in-an-appartment numbers, or the glitz & gloss of the whizzkid webmaster versions, between the covers there was, amongst a few pearls, an awful lot of horseshit.  Now, I know that tastes vary across a spectrum parsecs wide & I have no problem with that.  A well-turned piece of doggerel has its place in a classy Christmas cracker & there are many who nod sagely over Samuel Beckett’s precious sheaf of gloriously incomprehensible post-Finnegan’s Wake verses.  But here we are talking authentic alphabet soup, real-deal fridge/freezer magnet accidents, equine faeces with a vengeance.   So I got to thinking.  Given that some of the mongers of this lost-and-found flotsam seemed to have academic & creative pedigrees that were longer than the poems they’d had published, there must be editors out there who accept & publish submissions by weighing the biogs first. And given that the shadow of the Beat Generation still falls long & dark in certain quarters, there must be editors out there who’ll suck up anything that might have been found down the back of Ginsberg’s sofa.   At which point, enter Jago Flood.  He’s tall, thin & ascetic-looking. Could be any age between a wasted 35 & a ginseng-preserved 60+.  And he’s been around. His thumbnail biography tells us that he’s had verses published in the prestigious University of Ulan-Bator’s Journal of Extruded Anapaestics, in the legendary little mag Carter’s Tested Seeds Catalogue (which has featured such luminaries as Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, David Jones & Tex Avery), & in cutting edge New York lit review zitgeist (specifically the controversial 2002 edition printed entirely on recycled Hershey bar wrappers).   His exact whereabouts are something of a mystery.  There have been sightings in locations as diverse & far apart as a narrowboat on the Grand Union Canal just south of the BlisworthTunnel, where he was seen opening a lock gate, & La Place des Putains Verts in Avignon, where he was seen performing with a Dutch mime troupe.  But Jago courts anonymity, flitting through the shadows, shy, mysterious, elusive &, most significantly of course, a figment of my imagination.    The original intention in plugging in the electrodes & releasing Jago Flood into the febrile world of experimental poetry was simply to see whether any chimp with a typewriter could rattle together something that people might want to read.  Not so much a case of, ‘How can a line of bricks & a banana be called a work of art? Why, my 3-year-old could do better’. More idle curiosity as to the limits of what one might get away with under the heading of ‘poetry’.   And it kind of worked.  for starters I decided to abandon upper case & punctuation completely / sticking in a forward slash whenever a line break was needed.  Then I tried to dump all narrative line & logical sequencing, aiming for random strings of words & phrases whose association was entirely spontaneous – or at least as accidental as the selective processes of my imagination would permit.  Which is where the difficulties began: no matter how hard I tried to compose verse with no conventional semantic linkage, words & phrases seemed to congregate automatically with like seeking out like, all looking for meaningful relationships.  After several unsuccessful attempts at forging the entirely incomprehensible, & reluctant to have to resort to Brion Gysin/William Burroughs-style cut-ups or ready-made spam poems, I just let the stuff unroll as it would.  And it was a surprisingly liberating exercise.  Bits & pieces rose up from various parts of the creative anatomy (& elsewhere) & the Jago Flood oeuvre began to emerge.    And as it unfolded it revealed again & again that wherever words fall & in whatever order, conjunction, assortment or collision, they always negotiate meanings.  These may be accidental serendipities, fragments of logic or surreality that have some internal consistency.  Or they may be dream structures, incongruous & alien, allowing for no cracking & decoding, or even hazarded guesswork.  But a word is a word is a word, whatever company it may keep.  Each one is a fragment of our almost frantic compulsion to apprehend meaning within the world, to reify whatever delights, horrifies, intrigues, appals &, above all, confounds us.  So Jago pressed on, regardless & clueless.   Then I parcelled up a selection of Jago’s fertiliser  & sent it round two or three earmarked mags, ones that seemed to favour mainly the least digestible & the most semantically challenging works.  When a couple of things were accepted for publication I tried out a sardonic laugh: point proven – a home for horseshit on every block.  But by now Jago Flood was talking the talk.  For all its wilful obscurity, I’d got used to his outpourings & each piece had developed its particular resonance, its own imagistic associations.   So I had to conclude that maybe each one of those spindly, rickety, haphazard assemblages of words that were offered up as poetry in the clever, 22nd century online mags had for their progenitors some particular resonance, some set of metaphorical associations & that, in the final analysis, judgement was invidious.   So, just before Jago Flood passes like Arthur from this mortal realm, here are a couple of his more cherished creations.  ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’…   bleecker & leroy   she certain / so certain the loft flooded with a sort of sodium luminescence // something of fall // & i wild between the subway map the tiffany lamp the great glad skylight of the stars   JAGO FLOOD     names of the moon   sucked pebble: tongued smooth by ancient salt night / starflecks in a quantum field / sour white beached as night sucks out //  old coin: dun metal edged like a flint shard / spent / effaced the ghost profile watching the dust fly // bleached horns: hook hanging depending nothing but planetwrack the dead hair of comets // broken button: tugged & twine frayed against the cape & cowl / shrugged high in iceheart marrowbone dark // flat cataract: milk or smoke or silica obscuring the macula / watching only what she remembers of red shift / of spectrum drift // abalone pearl: infected by a drugged horizon thus pink & sable deep elliptical frozen albumen eyes in the night: tsuki / menes / chand / spogmay / he’ni / loar / namwaikaina   JAGO FLOOD    pic from: www.freewebs.com/skoop_on/ aboutmyclass.htm   10:57:13 PM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2004 Dick Jones. Last update: 01/06/2004; 22:10:06.