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consciously worked-out correspondence. It’s actually an experiential transference, of one of my experiences, temporally speaking, into another. It happened along with other pastimes, such as the use of that early cassette tape recorder, that itself had writerly consequences: the tape poetry magazine I edited in the mid-1970s, called futuristically 1983, and possibly the training of my voice for performance. And another, such as the taking of photographs, and the ingenious and impoverished use of an antique bellows camera as an enlarger for developing negatives, possibly led to the recurrent use of photographs as writing material. But I’ve never believed that writing poems is like taking snapshots, as some writers do. I don’t describe photos; I squint at them, steal from them, riff on them. That simple recording of reality is the opposite of the act of radio broadcasting, which is already in the medium of language and, at best, is a potential intervention or interruption of the real. In the late 1980s, I developed radio quite consciously into a political analogy. I was reading of Félix Guattari’s association with the Italian radical radio station Radio Alice in 1970s Bologna, and I conceived a series of poems, “Radio Anna,” in which Anna stood for: ANarchism, Noise and Autonomy (I mistakenly thought Alice was an acronym). I conceived of the writing of poems as a radical radio station broadcasting avant-garde programmes: not programmes about the avant-garde, but noise (interference, jamming) as the message itself. Think: John Cage’s “Williams Mix,” which uses radios anyway. Think: William Burroughs’ tape experiments described in “the invisible generation.” (I’d read Burroughs’ suggestive piece by 1974 and I was sceptical. I knew from my own use of tape recorders that you couldn’t fool anyone that there was an actual riot going on by playing a tinny cassette player in a crowd!) In his article “Millions and Millions of Potential Alices,” Guattari says (or quotes): “The viewpoint of autonomy towards the mass media of communication was that a hundred flowers should bloom, a hundred radio stations should broadcast.” His neo-Maoist talk of “The guerrilla war of information, the organized disruption of the circulation of news” seemed an appropriate and quite conscious analogy for my poetry of the time. The original “Radio Anna” poem—never Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1984) 236.
published, though I notice all of its best lines were cannibalised for later texts—reads
noise/each light flashes a voice/open women’s voices between men’s language/ uncertain elements/distributive informatics/ speech act therapy/chora music/groundless voices plot music footprints/vary call signs catch desire/ANarchism/Noise/Autonomy/ magnetic storm tapes/demolition music/ noise imagination/culture belts/mistake identities/internal exile/networks and feedbacks feed in lines/flashlight opinions/sexist blackspots/critical tuning/ deliberate fading/troubling wholes/ imaginary news/government building towers of voice
It’s a poetics for the writing of that time that didn’t quite find its way into the poetry itself, and it hangs around long enough to show up, as irony, in the poetics piece “Rattling the Bones (for Adrian Clarke),” from 2002-3, in which I say: “We interrupt/ This broadcast which is a broadcast of/ interruptions,” though its renewed purpose is “to bring you/ more complex nervous systems.” The radio analogy—if that’s what it still is—is on the edge of antiquation, of course. Already with the development of push-button pre-programmed radios and with the advent of DAB radio, the frisson of straying off-message (to use a loaded phrase), the attractions of tuning away from the mainstream to find an unscheduled alternative, straining the ears to hear a weak but rare message, becomes an enthrallment of the past. DAB is no more satisfying than closed-circuit hospital radio that I recorded some poetry programmes for in the late 1970s. The internet, of course, with its blogs and sites, offers wonderful alternatives to, advances on, this technology, but the internet is also the instrument for the downloading of radio programmes out of their temporal sequence, with facilities such as iPlayer, a term that one day will be as incomprehensible as QSL card. Even when broadcasting ‘Rattling the Bones (for Adrian Clarke)’ was published on the Softblow website but is now offline. The italicised passage is a quote from John Rajachman’s The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000) 138. The full quotation reads: ‘Artworks… are not there to save us or perfect us (or to damn or corrupt us), but rather to complicate things, to create more complex nervous systems no longer subservient to the debilitating effects of clichés, to show and release the possibilities of a life.’