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Poets in Dialogue: Adage Adagio* Parts I & II
by
David Nettleingham and
Christopher Hobday
I
Drowned
idols are the seeds
of a new
beginning,
a barren
plea to the fertile dead,
a way of
understanding
the
movement of rivers.
All life
resting on a tide,
pooling
in uneven fractures;
silt and
skin indefinable
at its
banks, where thankless crowds
deepen
even the shallows
and the
elaborate harmony
of belly
laughs is purifying,
sweating
out salt flats
and
immovable pillars,
breaking
the surface of a single thought.
From
without, these rare landmarks
of
crowns and headdresses,
they are
mountains rising
from the
river, forcing
us
around to secure the tread-water
and
within, swim those
who
would navigate these new stars,
with
maps of the Indus
and
broken instruments.
Within,
it is a breaker’s yard.
So as
engines rust in brushstrokes
in the
reed beds and a thousand feet
rest
their city, their idols drown
in some
act of baptism
knowing
little difference.
- David
Nettleingham
II
Stop. Go
back. Hypnotic regression
to the
time spent in that room
empty
except for your mind,
where
thought did not begin, end, resume
but was
continuous, flowing off the loom,
long
strands of thinking now consigned
to
history. Time was up, your birth
plucked
you out before you could find
a grasp
on the line. Now your kind
of which
you are alone upon the earth
is
exiled from that perfect home
where
the material was of no worth
whatever. Paradox: the dearth
is what
strikes you here, mass of loam
that is
the universe and its content
seems as
nothing, your only home
slowly
and surely buried, its dome
vanished, tomb without vent
where
the you that was first climbs walls
and
howls without relent.
There is
a sense of energy unspent,
locked
up with a wicked twin who calls,
calls
you back and sends you forth,
haunts
and hates the wherewithalls
and
draws you to him with a savage passion,
his
noisy cell your magnetic north.
-
Christopher Hobday
*The
pamphlet Adage Adagio: Drafts I-X from which these
extracts are taken was published in 2009 by The Conversation
Paperpress, and were translated and published in Italian in
2010. The text is an ongoing argument between the two poets
on the relationship between nature and society.
David
Nettleingham and
Christopher
Hobday are two young British poets, working with
dialectical ways of writing and collaborating. Nettleingham
is a doctoral student, researcher and teacher of sociology
at the University of Kent, UK. He has worked as a freelance
poetry editor and has had poetry published in various
anthologies and magazines. Hobday manages the Canterbury
Poets online community. In 2008 he won the Save As
poetry prize, and the same year co-authored Stubborn Mule
Orchestra with Luigi Marchini and Gary Studley.
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