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Translation of Eric Mottram’s TWENTYEIGHTH LEGAL (Part One) by T. Wignesan
 
N.B. If any one is interested in reading the continuation of the extracts of letters that Eric Mottram wrote from America during 1965-66 to me, please read them at POEMHUNTER.COM. For some reason, I am no more able or “permitted” to post them on POETRYSOUP.  September 27, 2017.

Extract of Eric Mottram’s essay on poetics:

  “I listen to a great deal of music of all kinds, play the piano and look at a good deal of television and films - and now have a rather large video collection. (Jeff Nuttall, the extraordinary British genius - poet, painter, ceramicist, novelist, performance artist, jazz trumpet player - was kind enough after a poetry reading to say that the rhythms and cadences in my work could only come from someone who paid attention to jazz.) Poetics are how experiences and decisions play into your life such that you still need to find words and put them  in a controlled space - place speech in other time - and order them into the curious difference of silent steadiness in poetry. How to keep risks so that they have to be read as risks. How to keep language inventive, risky, invented, urgent. How to re-read Marvell year in and year out without envy or imitation or grief. Between 1961 and 1989, I have published scores of writings on poets I admire, in order to try to understand something of their excellence - among them Walt Whitman, Basil Bunting, Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, Agnes Nemes Nagy, William Carlos Williams, Roy Fisher, Bob Cobbing, George Open, Jackson MacLow, Jerome Rothenberg, Barry MacSweeney, John Ashberry. This body of writing is probably as near as I have reached a poetics. 
   Such continuing appreciations keep you in transition about poetry and your own poems. And there have been one or two statements about my work from people whose judgment I accept completely - even if I disagree a little! And still being able to read to an audience now and then. But the happiness is mainly in the creative act and in other people’s creations. But these days, Conrad’s words are certainly primary: ‘The postulate was , that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth.’ “

Vingt-Huitième Legal

la civilisation est surtout l’histoire des armes
la poudre à canon l’alliée du bourgeois
comme l’étrier et l’harnais renforcent le pouvoir des barons
de l’Orient
                  quelles armes donnent à nous sans pouvoir
ce pouvoir furtif de viser
                                          fusil        bombe de la cuisine
                                          une flèche empoisonnée
                                             baise l’anneau du Pape Borgia
acte facile pour la faiblesse de notre démocratie
                                      ondes de radio courtes
                                      un chiffon de kérosène
contre une époque horriblement stable
comme les empires d’esclavage d’antiquité

inventaient-ils le pêché pour implémenter la domination 
dans une large mesure               quand avez
vous                      compris ça

( Notes-Resources: quotations from George Orwell: “civilisation is largely the history of weapons”; Ezra Pound: “an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity” - from  The Legal Poems, 1986) 
Pub. in The Journal of Comparative Poletics, Vol. I, n°1 (Paris), Ed. T. Wignesan, pp. 55-56.             


(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 1990/2017
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