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Here are two YouTube clips of Jeffrey Wainwright reading from his work
A reading of 'Is Our Language Complete?', a five poem sequence, at Poets and Players, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 23 January 2010
The text of 'Is Our Language Complete?':
1.
Is our language complete? Not on your life!
Not like H2SO4. Not like the law of sines
with its allowance for the ambiguous case.
But there is the hope
the one who hopes
for simple agreements,
perfect understanding
for nothing not ever irregular
In Stoke-on-Trent post-war we were keen on Esperanto.
Here, where breathing could be difficult,
was an inspiration to get out the door,
to world peace, nation same-speaking peace unto nation,
so charas could criss-cross from Dresden to Dresden,
Burslem to Bialystok,
happy wanderers, buying pots of tea effortlessly,
and explaining the laws of cricket faultlessly
to Russians Germans Poles and Jews,
without an itch and nary a crux word.
2
Is our language complete? No way José
exclamation point. For all the rolling off the tongue
words remain such dullards, their relations obscure.
I – wish – that – she – would – call.
Just tell me, if you can, how what I mean is there.
Or even in: I – do – wish – that – she - would – call.
Just tell me, if you can, how what I feel is there.
How do such, or any, sentences give forth,
bring into presence, stand in for, resemble … ?
No way. But justwatch them do it.
3
Is our language complete? Are you kidding?
Very often. Whichis part of the lack.
I can’t claim though that I am lied to often.
Even house-agents’ clerks don’t say the thing-which-is-not
deliberately, they are just optimists
by training, and the ones I know, the press they get,
it’s hard not to sympathise. Would he really
leave a girl like that in her bed-sit in her nothings?
Could her executive comportment turn peevish,
lead to murder in the master-bedroom even?
I don’t know.
4
Is our language complete? You bet it is!
Name one thing it can’t do.
It can dawdle meaning-less-ly like this,
or be doing the same thing soul-ful-ly, if it says so,
drifting along the ramparts in a floaty dress,
the chalky hills [enter here] in the moonlight,
could be given anything to do,
as they were once said to skip.
The only question it has to ask itself is
how much is a sufficiency, elegant or otherwise?
5
Is our language complete? Well, you read the lines /
lies in the last poem, decide for yourself.
In truth I stumble and cast about even when
I’m talking to myself. There are the best of tools
in the tidiest of racks under the stairs
and these words are not among them, nor – I ‘hazard’ –
are there any such places words may be found.
But do not despair – and that’s an order –
there are no angels, thus no perfect prattling,
and the painstaking repair of spiders’ webs
best left to what’s best adapted.
As the nightingale with her sweet self she wrangles
we must just strive with our creature tongue.
A reading of 'Beyond Enigma' at the celebration of PN Review 200, International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, 8 September 2011
The text of 'Beyond Enigma':
I hear of other modes of high indifference.
Can I imagine this?
I walk up to my enemy; I slice off my nose.
It lies at his feet. I slice off my left hand.
It drops to the ground. Is there blood in the dust?
Is there pain? Ifso it is felt.
Who feels it?
This question can’t be understood.
…
Now, how did I intend to do that?
Did I say that I would do it?
By whom would I be understood?
‘It was intended’ is all that could be said.
But it must be understood.
The understanding is yet more important
than the sharpness of the blade.
…
There are those who have lived – and died – beyond enigma:
St Laurence tucking his own grid-iron under his arm;
St Agata, coifed like Freya, imperturbable,
allowing a peek at her bleeding chest,
sometimes her paps held out in a dish;
Karl Liebknecht ‘on leave from death’.
These are not more cases of the grand indifference
but some who just knew that this is only the first world,
fretted and sick, and another is, or will be – no matterwhich –
the good, better, best and real one.
…
Now, try all that again without
the ambush, be less arch.
It must be possible to tell a story.
A good man cannot be harmed.
The wall-plaque reads:
Ha abitòqui, nel estate 1918,
il Beato Massimiliano Kolbe
che nel lager di Auschwitz
il 14 agosto 1941offrìla sua vita
per salvare un padre di famiglia
Or in another version:
Here in the summer of 1918
lived the Blessed Massimiliano Kolbe
who in the lager at Auschwitz
on the 14th of August 1941
offered his own life
to save the father of a family.
…
It must be possible to tell a story.
A Fr. Kolbe (41) a Franciscan was sent to Auschwitzby the Germans for shelteringJews
at his monastery in . . .
A Fr. Kolbe (41) an anti-semite,
as his writings show,
was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis
for sheltering partisans …
A Fr. Kolbe (41) was in Auschwitz
when one man escaped
and ten were picked
to die in his stead ….
A Fr. Kolbe (41) was in the line
but not picked out
when one of the ten,
a father …
A Fr. Kolbe (41) heard
one of the men
cry out that he was
the father of a family …
A Fr. Kolbe (41), hearing
one man plead for his life
and his children,
stepped forward in his place …
A Fr. Kolbe (41) who had taken the place
of one Francisek
Gajowniczek (46), was locked
with nine others …
A Fr. Kolbe (41) who had taken the place
of a Jewish prisoner,
would die
of hunger and thirst …
Saint Max, who is the subject
of my hero project,
led the prayers and singing
and amazed the guards .…
Saint Max, who I am
writing about for my project,
lived without any food or water
for three weeks …
One Fr. Kolbe (41), still alive
ten days later when the cell
was needed, was killed
by lethal injection …
Kolbe the anti-semitic priest
is said to have taken the place of
Franz Gajowniczek
who was not a Jew …
Fr. Kolbe was loved by all
the prisoners, and they reviled
the Jew Gajwoniczek
who stood back and survived …
Fr. Kolbe, still alive
when the cell was opened,
offered his arm to the doctor
for the carbolic acid …
Fr Kolbe was killed
by the usual drug employed,
phenol, injected by the medical staff
straight into the heart …
It must be possible to tell a story.
…
Let no man say he is happy until he is dead.
When Kolbe stepped forward he defeated life,
and he knew he was a happy man.
Perhaps in his summer in Amelia in 1918
he stuck his nose into a dish of tomatoes
just from the stem and right into the stalks
and breathed and smiled and said
‘This is life and this is good.’
And then he turned and went through a door
and stopped, as though looking for someone,
and then turned and went out again
and somewhere in this small confusion
put down the fruit and asked himself
‘How may the heart be as good as this?
It also lives here’
No answer spoke. Butwhen he stepped forward
he knew he had learned to let life pass
and was a happy man.
… But to be ‘the father of a family’,
this is life and this is good
and here life cannot pass
and this you clearly knew
as you stepped out to say ‘Take me’,
or words to that effect, or maybe
‘This life is a thing for others.’
You must be understood.
Saint Maximilien Kolbe,
martyr for Charity not the Faith,
and contender for my hero project,
was this your stepping-stone
to your better life
when at the last,
having no need of your spectacles,
you will climb naked
and perfectly toned
out of the manhole
the good doctor had
consigned you to,
or did you not see God at all,
only Franciszek Gajwoniczek
who was either a Jew
or not a Jew and who cried
‘What about my children?’
and who did or did not
do all right out of telling his story later,
and this was all you saw,
Franciszek or Franz, his flesh, his head,
the heads of his children,
and whether or not
you offered up your arm
or let the needle in
‘twixt rib and rib,
you are telling me
‘Be perfect as I am’,
or, as I make you say:
‘There is no thing cognizable
that says “Go do thou likewise”,
and “A good man cannot be harmed”,
there is only a human voice
to say it’, as though
I could listen hard enough
to catch it.
__________________
These works will appear in The Reasoner, to be published by Carcanet in September 2012.
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