The day I walked out of Goole, following the long straight line of the Aire and Calderdale Canal in parallel with the Dutch River, stumbling in the dusty heat - the poet Bill Griffiths died. He who lived and wrote for many years on a house boat, The Amra, until welders mistakenly set it and most of his life's work alight. I only heard the news of his death today.
And the day I stood at the very core of the motorway network in the thunderstorm funnel where the M62 and M1 meet, staring northwards - further up that seething road in Sunderland they cremated Bill Griffiths. Today I re-read his words and they commentate on my journey.
oddly individually a street will lead to Russian Orthodoxy or a golf course.
You are lost.
I know Bill Griffiths through Iain Sinclair, who remembered the pioneering writer as his London Orbital journey led him through Cowley Lock, Uxbridge where Griffiths had lived ('tactfully removed from the scene') until the fire. Sinclair wrote:
Griffiths' work atomises, splits off into discrete files or songs; his poems are many-voiced, resolutely non-hierarchic. You learn to navigate the tributaries, while waiting to be carried back into the main stream. He's a musician who deploys subtle and shocking rhythms.
That was true at many levels. For the one time Hells Angel with L-O-V-E tattooed on one set of knuckles and H-A-T-E on the other, had a grand piano in his final home, a terraced cabin in sea-coal port Seaham on the Durham coast. The one time I saw him perform was at Sinclair's Barbican do; in an eclectic set which included rudeness from Ken Campbell, metal from Jimmy Cauty and the appearance of a cardboard cut-out of J.G.Ballard, Griffiths played Bartók - beautifully. And recited some of his ingenious, playful, wonderfully suggestive verse.
Having spent the best part of this evening reacquainting myself with Griffith's epic A Book of Spilt Cities I shan't pretend I'm yet at one with it. He radically bends and reshapes language, at a pace which can leave your head spinning. As Sinclair puts it, 'Through momentum, he achieves prophetic instability'. But I've connected with enough in his work to make me want to know it more; and I can see what they mean, those who know his work far better, when they say (as does Nicholas Johnson here) that one day he will be regarded as an English great.
Lo! the surge of the new azoic prairie the mechanical country the plain / playing fields gardens / grass sportsland / spareland roadtrim / recreational first the levelness Spielenraum then TENNIS BOWLS FOOTBALL behold POSTS & PALACES stretching where life failed to reach (odd parcels) we need an alternative commitment.
john davies
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