From A Dictionary for One, Uncertain Press (2023)

Stigmata n. Moments that brand, and as a consequence of which the remainder of life is spent wondering why. colloq. Self-spectre. Those commonly affected by stigmata (stigmatists, n. uncertain) think to return to the place and moment of their mark, but (imp.) few do.

We are fabulists at heart, no? Telling our tales, writing our histories, weaving what we remember with what we think we remember — constructing, reconstructing, daily, the narrative we call ourselves. We are all fictions, living half-in, half-out of other people’s heads, and sometimes our fiction outlasts ourselves. Politicians figured this one out years ago.

We navigate the world on the quicksand of ‘truth’ — accepting in conversation the ‘truth’ of what we each say. We would not call someone out and say ‘you’re lying’ were this not so. The world operates upon sincerity. You will be good, be truthful with me, as I am truthful and good with you. Pact.

Enter politics. O and poetry too: that which the puritan Stephen Gosson in his work, ‘The School of Abuse’, called ‘the mother of lies’ and ‘the nurse of abuse’.

In as much as ‘there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition’ (Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni), there is a kind of lazy pleasure in the invention of truth. It’s what poets and writers do and in so doing they get beneath the skin of words, of things. My poem ‘From A Dictionary of One, Uncertain Press, 2023’, plays with this notion. I have a linocut in mind which does likewise, taking a landscape and underscoring it with a fabulous ‘definition’ of the word Poet. Who knows, I might make a book of it.

Notes:

• The photo which accompanies the poem in this piece is a digitised version of a photo I took on Christmas Day, 1996, in Bolu, Turkey, using a small Pentax camera. Honestly.

• Stephen Gosson (1579) ‘The School of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth; setting up the Flag of Defiance to their mischievous exercise and overthrowing their Bulwarks by Profane Writers, Natural reason and common experience; a discourse as pleasant for Gentleman that favour learning, as profitable for all that will follow virtue’.

• Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni (1974) ‘Preface’ in Jorge Luis Borges ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’ (trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni).