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The Argotist Online |
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ROBERT HAMPSON Robert Hampson is Professor of Modern Literature in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He edited the magazine Alembic with Ken Edwards and Peter Barry in the 70s, and edited the volume of essays, The New British Poetry: The Scope of the Possible (with Peter Barry). His selected poems, Assembled Fugitives, was published by Stride in 2000.
pentimento
4 redell olsen 1.
how to read the evidence:
wild
was the word
the run of the streets
the heft & feel of the blade
sideways over a bare shoulder
refusing to identify
the haphazard drama
of visual memory 2.
police reports:
years
before the fame
the recognition
the caress
of late-summer evenings
keeping company with painters 3.
court transcripts:
a
face in shadow
freehand marks
between 2 events
seeing & not seeing
the fall & folding
of the universe 4.
criminal investigations:
in
a maze of alleys
turns his shoulder
to the light
layers of varnish
little displacements
of time
in a process of
cancellations 5.
house arrest:
fixes
the optical
relations things
nobody would
mention light
incisions in
the damp plaster
infamia
terrorized by trucks & chcckpoints the collective disintegrates prostitutes rentboys holy beggars burned to ashes even the dark wings of angels as witness or accomplice of gangland tortures occupation
they’re not here to negotiate they watch tv eat pizzas it’s a quiet neighbourhood now they’re setting up interrogation centres there’s nothing to be afraid of they’re only here doing what you taught them to do
from the margins
4 peter hulme a motif of flat tyres misdirected letters not so much a slow puncture more a carelessness of address filtered through ambient noise no turning back the clock now a gaggle of 15 year olds jostled in the breakfast queue anthropology with teeth & teeth with straighteners kinship structures subjected to diasporic torque climbing the walls makes no difference
veer
& modern barbarism gifts its subjects round the clock curfew & passive spectatorship slides off the seat as the door opens & settles for a cut of the back-end gross the desire to be cool always on the verge of inelegant violence cut & re-cut all the angles figured out no amount of morphine kills the pain gets out the car &walks away plays with the codes at the top of the programme this is the way to go
copyright
©Robert Hampson |