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- Contents Category: Poetry
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- Article Title: Words & Classes on Having Words
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At a lucid moment in this otherwise obscure document the author writes: ‘It strikes me that each piece is more or less obvious and I hope I’m not writing in code – suppose there’s no way to tell.’ Never has the shotgun theory had such a devout adherent. If the author can’t tell, what hope has the reader? The best one can wish for Words and Classes is that it is a deliberately nonsensical fraud, concocted by part-time schizophrenics at Outback Press. Here are the opening three lines: ‘an opportunist on crossing out the case: mind the spelling/ on trying to sell credit to he who has none: if I had the time, I’d ask you / to commit your sums you need take your fingers out of your mouth’.
- Book 1 Title: Words & Classes on Having Words
- Book 1 Biblio: Outback Press, 1978
Chris Mann, his publishers tell us, believes in ‘total freedom of information’. They say he ‘forced’ them to blot out the copyright symbol. They are ‘completely confused by the title and can make no sense of the content’. The author’s photograph, certainly, reflects a state of aggrieved determination that either has taken someone in, or is meant to. Throughout the poem, which is printed on an unmanageably large sheet approximately 145 x 102cms and boxed in cardboard, one senses the work of several hands. For example the wordy joker: ‘Incle withy, pipkin rick, / follicle to, listel fick, / rout the faggot in the nick’. ·
Then the tangled ideologue: ‘The question is no longer what is art? ... but rather the destruction of linguistic subsistence, noise as change, sissy ideolectics and the mechanist stuff of recognition.’
And finally the dazed international traveller: ‘This cat in Dublin was after me coz I was doin all this stuff he was hoping to write in 50 years time, and I was doin it now. Bummer. Weird though.’
Words & Classes has the appearance of a project abandoned in galleys but issued in that form anyway, perhaps at the insistence of the author. ‘Al Jolson made talkies thru the schlock of bothering,’ Chris Mann somewhere observes. Fraud or not, the ‘schlock’ of bothering is exactly what is missing from this incoherent work. Why was it published?
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