Poem 267
This was written using a William Burroughs style cut up technique, combining different source texts randomly and then assembling any arbitrary but promising looking phrases that result … there were three diverse paragraphs I threw into the blender I think, one concerning the story of Oedipus, another about Jimi Hendrix mentioning his time in the military as a member of the 101st Airborne Division paratroopers the Screaming Eagles … and I forget the other one …
… there’s a lot of fortuitous and interesting connections here, for instance the crossroads where Oedipus unknowingly murders his own father but also where Robert Johnson is supposed to have traded his soul to the devil in return for guitar-playing prowess, and of course the whole concept of fate in Greek tragedy, one decision/path/action taken which then inexorably ripples out until it causes your complete destruction … the poem itself is also a crossroads of different sources stories ideas and images, the intersection of which makes its own new and multivalent entity … overall I was surprised and gratified by how much sense this managed to make …
… David Bowie met William Burroughs and borrowed his cut up method for writing lyrics, first by hand with scissors, later getting someone to design a computer application to do it for him – once your ear’s been tuned to recognise the fractured syntax that cut up engenders then you can spot it in the songs he’s most employed it for …
( I love the sun poured down eagles from the creator and dead people belted the deep night (rich and resonant images I couldn’t have got to without letting chance play its part) … the way confirmation in the crowd speaks to the centrality of the chorus in Greek theatre ie. how it dramatically represented the communal, the populace, the body politic … Oedipus’s realisation that Jocasta didn’t respond to the birth of her children with him as if they were her first (because he himself was her first child) which in retrospect was a clue to the awful truth … I also like the declamatory formality of tone as if the poem is a slightly rigid translation from a classic Greek or Roman text of antiquity … and I enjoy the satisfying sense of closure in the final two lines, the realisation that he has been only a ‘creature’, a plaything of cosmic inevitability without any self-determination – fucked by the fickle finger of fate as they would say back in Rotorua … )
Down To The Crossroads
Oedipus is heart stopped and the ice therefore began his tale what have you done what wickedness? I followed Montezuma and ascended a flaming rain again began heating a studded way across the ice the sun poured down eagles from the creator dead people belted the deep night I the murderer of any stranger urged by curiosity and depressed spirits sought a confirmation in the crowd but the crossroads haunt me my children should have given her exultation as if they were her first also the air was happy before my mutation! fate urged the fire toward his creature thus he drinks me in