dasein – willy’s leap

Word and thing or thought never in fact become one. We are reminded that, referred to, what the convention of words sets up as thing or thought, by a particular arrangement of words. The structure of reference works and can go on working not because of the identity between these so-called component parts of the sign, but because of their relationship to difference (différance).  Intro. Jacques Derrida, Writing & Difference, adapted

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For Willy, what questions? With what are we to probe him, this straddler on the tower, this jetman, hawk, Willis Totem, Willy Robusta ‘figuring a tabloid’? This Willy is not to be interrogated. To press him means to put your hand clean thru the paper (‘pink, grey, thin, dreamt, paperman’). No; casual Willy stands aloft in his ‘to wer rr’; he leans, muses, is roused, exuberant, sees himself swollen and erect.

This ineluctable tracer of himself, this instigator of his own pageant, his edges indeterminate yet sharp, his mind heightened and keen, penetrant. The imagery of the early pages of WILLY’S GAZETTE is of ‘snappage’, the crisp planal imagery of whites, blues, sea, chrome, sky and wind, sun, the net, the whale (and of the interjection of planes: ‘he projects’).

From the opening line of the first piece ‘You blow there Willy’, to its closing whump ‘Willis looks up and his rose shirt balloons’, Willis extends – sights forward. Planes intersect, track back, are chromatic, ‘shiny’, the world is snatched over by Willy, enacts his inquiry.

This magic grid of positionings is Willy. The quick moves and points of entry: diachronic, loci.

‘a huge pole’ – the figure itself, the flick of electricity as opposite charged points approach, a movement of contacts nowhere stopped, always the shirttail out (‘ ‘), ‘covered with information’.

For Willy, too, is purposed for reading, whose real language ‘is English / invaded – and invaded with bits of Auckland, Wellington, passing Spanish phrases, Parisiana, snippets from the latest foreign mags!, and the rags of the likes of Christian Dior (‘christian door’) and Pierre Cardin: sly wily Willy, ‘beret (noir) mimes Guevara and radical chic – plimsoles (claret blazer…)’. Nowhere constrained, cosmopolitan Willy bursts into presence in things he eyes (I’s) (‘anything takes Willy’s eye’), as we track him across his twenties:

                     DISCUSSED DECISION 
                     WITH WILLIS, TWENTY-
                     FIVE

                     will seek ‘wholes’ 
                     in future, he says

Willis codes his society. Despite the slight shuffling that may have occurred in the poem’s ordering, these hundred-odd wind-biffed sonnets that comprise the GAZETTE provide a movement forward thru the four parts. What writing? (What is the naming of that one: Willy?) From the pure gaps, this movement across the four parts of the poem, Willy’s filling, filing them, there arises the sophisticate

elastic and feminine (incorp
-oreal -orating)    & linguistic
sight like a dolphin turning
upon the brown reef he drives
out blind whose flank catches
aqua beyond the beach a stream
of blips erratic and frequent 

lapsus calami, offers himself (gets offered) as a term of displacement; gets into the very chinks of the language, into the chinks of the language, into the communications system – into that terrible language which affords all that impressive economy of the language which affords all that possibility (of what is known) at the expense of a mere 26 letters (‘the seam’s worth following’ – no wonder)! Willis as script, in and out of costume, under Leigh’s nib, ‘printmakers surround the body’. Willy the speech mark within

 the ships planes autos and trains
pace by Willy slow in the evening
shallows near sleep and the
margins ceci n’est pas un homme
then, what there at first shapeless
looms upon the field what has
he captured ravelling, an opening?

placed them’). Himself slipping thru the net he deploys: his radar disk (‘bright mesh’). He anticipates readers, plays up to them. Makes and leaves tracks (‘Willis coyote’). And as he goes he himself gets edited, becomes less our immediate focus, more an emanation. Deftly leaps a gazelle over what we know.

Dick into the sunlight any ordinary 
man bland & squinting and common 
who gives evidence, I am two people 
I have been upon the range, the stick
with the red spotted bandanna is
 couched upon my shoulder.

from the back foot Willy the outlaw’s long ride, his long unreeling line. There comes Willy the old Lord Mayor of London. Willy gets more occidental, less spectacular, kind of a spectator – meets Leigh, gets aligned with the golfball (type-writer/xerox – giving the book its physical black and white appearance). In the later pieces the last line comes with less of a whump, more a subtlety, things happen in shades (‘blue bleached cambric’, ‘raw cotton’) and in these there is a frequent sprinkling back – of attention, of lines or parts of words – over earlier stuff. The way that sometimes one poem is the adjunct or perhaps the root or even the repetition or reappraisal of an earlier or later piece is quite startling.

Willy has it to re-dress himself – as in the lovely piece which includes these lines:

                                                             TheBirds
                           The Patois de l’oiseaux their toss off
                                                                       flies light
                                     runningEnglish            all seems free
                              all seems free in Willy’s MSS
                                                                   *******
                                                            turning in the draft
                                        make sketchlines

whose lines (much the same thing) appear reformed overleaf:

                     The patois de birds in the tree’s getting 
                     free and loose with their English off 
                     any way, broadcast from green wattle 
                     station

Willy quizzes L –

                     and you, L, with your curious 
                     objectives, and trove,
                     S standing in the light of the 
                     room dressing, and the thought 
                     fall, its incidence, ravelling, the 
                     two of you smiling..

Until ‘I’ moves to a position where Willy is purely notional:

                     if I could draw a date with this pencil 
                     full shirt long amours in the bowers 
                     bicycle at 45 degrees  it’d cross an 
                     edge Willy chose on Victoria Avenue 
                     salute a tossed floral dress there, a 
                     citrus tree..

Everywhere in this book is the making and unmaking of forms where all things are a form, never only form. Take it from me, this is a fine, a marvellous book. Buy it, you win!