Reading with Vision

I think it would be better instead, by frequent note-taking, to let the thoughts emerge with the umbilical cord of the original mood intact and forget as far as possible any concern for their possible use (which I would never realize anyway by looking up my journals) but more as though unburdening myself in a letter to an intimate friend, so gaining on the one hand the possibility of self-knowledge at a later moment, and on the other fluency, the same articulateness in written expression which I have to some extent in speaking, knowledge of many little traits to which I have given no more than a passing glance, and finally, an advantage, [] in that there are ideas which one gets only once in ones life. Such backstage practice is certainly necessary for anyone not so gifted that his development is in some way a public phenomenon. -Kierkegaard Because, you see, what intimation of immortality have we, save our spontaneous wishes? [] Suddenly, God moves afresh in me, a new motion. It is a new desire. So a plant unfolds leaf after leaf, and then buds, till it blossoms. So do we, under the unknown impulse of desires, which arrive in us from the unknown. -D. H. Lawrence to Catherine Carswell The word Versuch, attempt or essay, in which thoughts utopian vision of hitting the bullseye is united with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional character, indicates, as do most historically surviving terminologies, something about the form, something to be taken all the more seriously in that it takes place not systematically but rather as a characteristic of an intention groping its way. -Adorno

Visionary Hermeneutics
Everyone provideth objects but few prepare senses whereby, and light wherein, to see them. -Traherne Those who have had occasion to move about in Forward Areas recall that it is possible, if disconcerting, to do so in bright full moonlight, provided that the moon is high in the sky. -David Jones

In his 2002 lecture on Vernon Watkins, Swanseas Other Poet, Rowan Williams referred to the phenomenal difficulty of much of the important poetry. Interpretation distinct types of readerly attention hence become unavoidable issues. For Kathleen Raine, Watkinss poetry escapes what she calls the range of ordinary attention. Watkins, Raine suggested, falls through todays literary critical net on account of his works abstraction, its metaphysical concerns and qualities. Like white light or distilled water his invisibility to the common kind and degree of attention is an attribute of this poetic purity. The special moonlight of Watkinss poetic means that a transition of attention becomes necessary. A reading with rather than a theory-led reading over. Raine wrote of a miraculous shift of focus when the attention is caught up and, committing ourselves to the swift yet gentle current, we flow with the verse. But we must await the miracle, just as Watkins himself awaits the poetic manifestation:
I celebrate you, marvellous forms. But first I must cut the wood, Exactly measure the strings, to make manifest what shall be. All Earth being weighed by an ear of corn, all heaven by a drop of blood. How shall I loosen this music to the listening, eavesdropping sea? [185]

Watkinss writing encourages a sensitive hermeneutic extraction of visionary potential from out of the poetic artefact: Steal, steal from rhyme:/ Take from the glass that shone/ The vintage that remains. [360] Such a mode of attention is not mere vision-theft, but a hermeneutic that dynamically with wit perpetuates vision, or tenacious secrets of spiritual knowledges.
So thunders break man; great undertakings fail In a flash, and broken lie; then only wit And a rope held, will harness what here was spilt: Through rock facets tenacious secrets prevail. [379]

When caught up by this aspirational, striving form of attention, the light which shone through the words shines on: I have a net whose cords/ Gather the fallen day [380]. Such a netting indeed recalls the reciprocal process of visionary hermeneutics which Gerda Norvig, discussing Blakes illustrational response to Bunyan in her Dark Figures in the Desired Country, argued to occupy a cornerstone position in the structure of Blakes larger artistic programme. Blake saw something akin to his own hermeneutic mode being practiced by Bunyan himself, Norvig understood; I hoped to show how Blakes dynamic concept of the imagination [] allowed him to perceive a cognate vision operating in Bunyans Progress. Seeing her own reading itself developing the visionary mirror-work, a serial harnessing of personal secrets, she found herself explaining Blakes focus on Bunyans fable as an expression of how consciousness transforms itself from within by vision, producing its own signifiers and images of transformation to mark the way. Seizing the

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opportunity to perpetuate a path of vision in this way and rather than reading Blakes interpretative mode through the veil of a basically monotheistic [Jungian] depth psychology Norvigs study consciously tried to practice a form of visionary Blakean hermeneutic, and open my own criticism to the imaginative process of striving with systems to deliver individuals [and their works] from systems. Norvig invokes the famous anti-system Blake so as to advance the visionary hermeneutic with which she seeks to free herself from the standard, oppressively subsumptive read things through methodologies of todays academic literary criticism. In his book on The Fall, Mick Middles invoked the equally famous, personal system Blake when describing Blakes re-birth of a visionary imagination religious awakening so as to align it with that sought, in music, by Mark E. Smith, with The Fall. What is particularly interesting here is that Blake deliberately side-stepped the aesthetic trappings of any distinctive organized faith, be it Catholic or Anglican, and pursued a religious awakening all of his own. His famous words, I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans certainly resonate through the centuries. As Mark told Melody Maker: He [Blake] was a real workhorse for his time. I thought he was great, especially what he did and how he managed to do it for that period of history.
Hideous Noise Group Write St Pope Biog. Ohio, Sweden: A group has written a character portrayal of a Pope J.P. One rumoured to become a SAINT which will be presented at the Riverside Studios near some river where Rule Britannia was written. The Vatican commented We have been waiting for a sign for 7 years. Its nonsense claimed their manager from a St Johns Wood face lift surgery. [Fall, programme for Hey! Luciani, 1986]

Williams suggests that in assessing Watkinss intellectual and imaginative legacy, it is perhaps proper to relate what matters most in his thematic and rhetorical repertoire to the pervasiveness of the Christian myth in his work. For both the myth or doctrine itself and the practice of poetry may be illuminated surprisingly by being drawn into conversation in this way. Gwen Watkins stated that her husbands Christianity was the centre of his life, and he wrote only to praise and affirm that belief. This poetic stance entailed the poets subjection to the status of medium of vision.
I would be flute to that sweet air: How blasphemous it were To print her music otherwise Than in her own true skies. [429]

A visionary reciprocity is built up: the poets, or readers, response to vision emerges out of the vision herself, and is developmental. This is the case with The Fall too, as Smith pointed out: I know what The Fall is and I dont think there is much you can do to explain it, which is why a lot that is written about us is just crap. Because theres nothing you can actually say about it really, without it being there [] It just goes on and on. Nelson Bentleys poetic narrative In Memory of Vernon Watkins stressed the developmental effect of Watkinss own acts of visionary hermeneutics on those who respond: You read your Yeats in Dublin with such vision/ The students looked like the angelic host. Less angelic, but similarly translated by vision, are the Fall students recounted by Smith. The kind of people who read Sounds, generally speaking, were more your ordinary, everyday people who were also a bit odd. Like those guys from Wakefield jailfrom all over. I knew that if The Fall could connect with them they would be there for life. It would mean something a bit more special, rather than some passing fancy for Parsons and Fucking Burchill. Middles ascribes the visionary uniqueness of Fall-activity not just to Smith himself, but also to the translation of vision that occurs as the maverick

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spirit fans out through those on the fringe of band membership, onwards and outwards, through the ungainly blend of Fall fans. This is a description of the capacity of visionary work to instigate spiritual renovation, a sort of re-birthing translation like that posited by Watkins in The Many-Peopled Night. So packed a score must be undone/ To make the morning sky. Here the hermeneutic lyric sound of an athletic body translates, mediumizes, an obscure sacred language of nature and nocturnal sexuality; the Gower coast as Psykick Dance Hall.
Its fingered notes translate the word The many-peopled night has known, Low on the breathing waters heard And locked in every stone. [430]

Iain Sinclair recalled his visit to Watkinss home on the Gower coast in his 2001 novel Landors Tower. In a prose piece from 2006, Coming to the Crossroads, Sinclair speculatively pinpointed the myth of the founding of the city of London: a head, its eyes eternally open, watching the river. This image of a perpetual vision of nature, breathing waters, then suggests the process of visionary reciprocity: two heads, two forms of perception, two spiritual intelligences. A reminiscence of Blakes sketched heads of visionary heroes, or of the Bronts caught pacing around the Haworth parlour table. The preacher, the man in black, has a board hung from his neck: a portrait. My face stolen from the tube and transmitted, a grinning skull. This story our city is all about heads. The man walks, a penitent, round and round the room, and my face, shifting, rolling, walks with him. [] His mad eyes shine. Sinclair goes on to see the reciprocity recapitulated in Swedenborgs relation, as a talkative skull, to his spirits. He saw what they saw; he saw through their eyes. Perhaps the brightest commentary on Sinclairs practice, in my opinion, is Kathy Ackers confessional essay, Writing as Magic in London in Its Summer a report on an extended discussion with Sinclair. Acker writes: This is the usual announcement of the visionary. To dream is to see. To see is to make, to bring into being. I can write only by reading and listening, says the visionary, for one makes only when one is made. Thus the angels Blake saw. It was in surrender to the process of visionary reciprocity that he made the angels. In Jerusalem Blake wrote of Time & Space/ Which vary, according as the Organs of Perception vary. And the complementary knowledge that one makes, and sees only when one is made, when one is translated, is also available in Watkinss poem The Pulse and the Shade, which mocks oh so gently at those harsh academic inscriptions cut with files/ That have no meaning for translated eyes. Democratically, the accent is on the perceivers own personal perception, which though watery is spirits hermeneutic ground. The Shade himself, since he must act as host,/ Rewrites those words that use him like a ghost. [432] Sinclair too suggests that enthralled translation, translation in thrall, can never fully grasp the word, though such visionary hermeneutics is the surest route to language that we have. The episode that is and was Emanuel Swedenborg will never be concluded, not here, not until the word, whose ghost he is, has been spoken. Now and forever. The London writer is incapable of expressing his meaning, or escaping from it. Re-enact for Cherubim In the poem Rebirth, Watkins identified understanding, hermeneutics perception to be grounded in a remaking: a re-energizing of the remnants of the visionary imagination.

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Just as the will to power From youth exhausted spins To earth, it sees a flower Rooted in ruins. From that remaking hour Perception begins. [365]

For Watkins, as Leslie Norris noted, true poetic knowledge [] is equivalent to the souls rebirth. This is what inspiration means. Norvig too, reading Blake, seeks an appreciation of how the psychopoetics operating in his oeuvre teaches the language required to perceive, understand, honour, and indeed resurrect that which he figures as the eternal body of imagination lying dormant within reader and text, spectator and image. In A Vision of The Last Judgment, Blake wrote:
The Nature of Visionary Fancy or Imagination is very little Known & the Eternal nature & permanence of its ever Existent Images is considered as less permanent than the things of Vegetative & Generative Nature yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce but its Eternal Image & Individuality never dies. but renews by its seed. just so the Imaginative Image returns by the seed of Contemplative Thought.

Blakes eternal body is the living truth to which Watkins refers in I, Centurion:
I, centurion out of time, Re-enact for Cherubim The living truth which makes them wise Forever present to my eyes.

Yet of course the visionary humans will to power is easily exhausted, and truth for us is not eternal not always immediate like the angels truth. Their wisdom is direct, but ours/ Emerges from a stress of powers. [264] There is the element of passivity, noticed within Ackers crucial definition of visionary hermeneutics: one makes only when one is made. Raine, we remember, noted in connection with Watkinss writing the receptive, attentive stance necessary for the moment of readerly visionary arrest. Reading his work I no longer seek to apply the relatively crude instruments of Practical Criticism or Seven Types of Ambiguity, but await the miracle. Anyones genuinely visionary hermeneutic works in opposition to the violence within literary-critical rationality. Visionary hermeneutics works contrary to both the grasping seizure of language by the career-building academic ego, and the subsumptive processing of language through pre-set methodologies. A good illustration of both mistakes is my reading of Vahni Capildeos first book an essay online in Jacket 26. Whereas, immersive-devotional, religious and responsive rather than secular and exploitative, a visionary hermeneuts stormy stress of powers has the goal of failure and exhaustion; because it has the goal of valuing, celebrating and releasing precisely the spiritual life within language which is to remain obscure. In Watkinss Buried Light:
What are the light and wind to me? The lamp I love is gone to ground. [] Come, buried light, and honour time With your dear gift, your constancy, That the known world be made sublime Through visions that closed eyelids see. Come, breath, instruct this angry wind To listen here where men have prayed, That the bold landscape of the mind Fly nobler from its wrist of shade. [260]

Downcast Lids Henry Leroy Finchs beautiful and clear-sighted study, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, underlines the convergence of Weils thought with the visionary hermeneutics which I am attempting to develop from Watkinss poetry here. In Waiting on God Weil suggested that our attention visionary understanding could be radically passive, radically female: our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it. Likewise, Weils own messages, Finch writes, are messages of grace, received by those who wait and not by those who grasp. Finch notes how post-Marxist Weil like Watkins in Rebirth valued sacred human understanding over progressivist will and effort:
Simone Weil is the opposite of a secularist, because for her a true human culture comes from beyond the merely human. Science, art, poetry, music, philosophy, to the extent that they come unannounced to human attention waiting in patience, she calls forms of the implicit love of God; they are sacred deliverances. This is not romanticism or sentiment because it is not egotism. True making, like true doing, is not ours.

The understanding of knowledges, such as Watkinss lyric visionary knowledges, as sacred deliverances, opens up Finch sees an emphasis on the common vulnerability and dependence of each of us on others, which is our initial situation in the world. Finch takes from Weil a Blakean critique of masculine authority, or of the discipline of the powerful God of authority; the sort of hierarchical, utilitarian, jobsworth discipline which, often in pseudofeminist garb, controls todays academic study of literature. Simone Weils God of grace is a God divorced from power and necessity, which are after all nothing to admire and worship. The supernatural influence of the divine in human affairs, for Weil, is decisive but subtle and entirely beyond human control. The human principle, like Platos Good, has an inexorability about it too, but it is a providential one beyond natural causality. Higher dimensions show themselves only at scarcely recognizable points. This is how love makes itself felt.
Ah dumb Pit, fixed beneath closed eyelids, Strong vision pledged to seek the unchanging light Of angels, true above a changing world! [166]

Watkinss The Age-Changers relates a scarcely recognizable, fragmentary descent of grace, for instance through cultural artefacts, to the necessary exhaustion of youthful enquirys bid for visionary perception. Light through downcast lids/ Is rising, where one drop of light decides. Watkins senses that an awareness of the sacred, light, can be launched by the adoration undertaken by the more elderly, more blind. Mute wonder through the sweet, blind eyes looks out,/ Starts the suns memories life forgot. [18] In The Song of the Good Samaritan, Watkins lays out a choice/ Between those visions acclaimed by pride overthrown,/ And the downcast, intimate eyes, the source of the voice. [148] The idea is that only baffled eyes, at sea in love, can see through lower dimensions: But that disguise,/ Look up now, softly: break it with your eyes. [10] Another early poem notes, Youth is itself infirm/ Until those sightless eyes/ Rarify youth and breath. [21] Then the memories of illumination can begin to emerge, themselves reminiscent of the transfiguring after-clarity of David Joness The Anathemata. Dooms serial writing sprang upon the wall/ Blind with a rush of light. [6] Spiritual Involution

The flash we saw in the distance now becomes for us a shell, Spun from the loom of waters to its own Stillness, and inward music: mark it, where it fell. [350]

The springing out of higher dimensions is twinned, in Watkins as in Blake, with a hermeneutic pursuit of grace inwards. In Jerusalem Blake recommended O search & see: turn your eyes inward: open O thou World/ Of Love & Harmony in Man: expand thy ever lovely Gates. Where Blake projected the gates on to the city streets I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear/ In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets Watkins identified them in coastal shells. Internal and external cities, still. The Interval:
It is that dark source which makes all things new Scoops out, with changing lights, those fragile shells Whose voice would perish, did I not pursue Their inmost labyrinth still, to give the god his due. [277]

The continuation of the sacred voice is aided by the poets and the readers linguistic process of spiritual involution, a process which, Watkins emphasizes in Swedenborgs Skull, leaves intact the vessel of uninterrupted calm just as the visionarys grave-robbers could not shake or destroy that interior psalm/ Intended for God alone, for his sole Creator. Hermeneutic involution becomes a developing, a complexification of the objects calm.
So I see it today, the inscrutable mask of conception Arrested in death. Hard, slender and grey, it transcends The enquiring senses, even as a shell toiling inward, Caught up from the waters of change by a traveller who bends His piercing scrutiny, yields but a surface deception, Still guarding the peace it defends. [247]

When the spiral dark is to be kept, unseen, one is mute,/ Fearing far more the heresies of speech/ Than watchful waiting. [249, 252]
I have discerned a secret Hid from the arc of day, Locked in the heart of silence, Stronger than death, and pure. [354]

The practice of hermeneutic involution distances the muted from politicoacademic rhetoric.
Stop, then, and quail beneath their tyrannous eloquence, All you, save one whose tongue is tense, Transfigured by God with a message that has no words. [127]

Deeper than Language The London writer is incapable of expressing his meaning, or escaping from it. Watkinss poetic world too is dotted with those transfigured by their supernatural messages in no words. In The Sinner, she had found Him, sleepless, redeeming time there,/ O deeper than language, in a circle where all was hushed [141]. Erinna similarly, in Erinna and the Waters, sighed to recapture the music no sea could sing [249]. In Watkins the visionarys expression relates to grace and fluidity, circularity: reciprocity. It relates to the

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senses, just as in Sinclairs A Few Hundred Yards from the Dwelling of Mr Prynne, I dip my left hand/ into Cambridge river:
Now, if I speak, my words can belong to no book For my fingers mingle the language of water and dove, Ending, here at the source, the journey they took. [148]

Watkinss sensual visionary words, which are no words because they can belong to no book, yet which follow a pilgrims journey towards language, recall the new philosophy of language produced on the brink of modernism in pre-1914 central Europe. Bourgeois positivist rationalism was undercut then and there by a potent combination of what Paul Mendes-Flohr in his editors introduction to the English translation of Martin Bubers 1909 anthology of mystical writing, Ecstatic Confessions calls epistemological skepticism and spiritual quest. The mysticism of Expressionist poetry such as Trakls was matched by the mysticism of Fritz Mauthners pioneering critique of language. (Like so much of pre-Holocaust central European culture, Mauthner is perhaps now known, if at all, only through the canonical protocols of Benjamin reception: he is mentioned twice in Scholems Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Though Mauthner could be known to Wittgensteinians too). Happily, Mendes-Flohr cites some lines from Gustav Landauers prcis, in his 1903 Skepsis und Mystik, of Mauthners thinking Landauer had edited Mauthners three-volume Beitrge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [Contribution to a Critique of Language (1901-02)]. Language, the intellect, cannot serve to bring the world closer to us, to transform the world in us. As a speechless part of nature, however, man transforms himself into everything, because he is contiguous with everything [my fingers mingle the language of water and dove]. Here begins mysticism. We can see how such ideas of the insufficiency of our language (which with Watkinss poetics argue both that we are insufficient for language, and that language is insufficient for us), and of languages supersession by vision inflect Bubers introduction to Ecstatic Confessions, which holds that language will never enter the realm of ecstasy, which is the realm of unity.
The voice returned to itself round the sevenfold world And perched on mystery. [233] The effort has destroyed a part of the false sense of fullness within us. The divine emptiness, fuller than fullness, has come to inhabit us. [Weil]

In The Death Bell, Watkins found in Laocon a personification of the supernatural expressive capacity of those of us who have been exhausted into uncomplaining silence by the insufficiency of our language. This capacity is one to project visionary ecstasy, sublime unrest as a human potentiality if not to reach its realm through language.
He who, his strength being spent, Still remained reticent, Darts his sublime unrest Into the marvelling breast Because he did not speak. Even thus far went the Greek. [212]

Watkinss lyrics ask us to respect their own reticent forces of rhyme [335].
Verse is a part of silence. I have known Always that declamation is impure. [161]

Light Must Learn a Dying Trade

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Fisherman finds in nature the sublime unrest of visionary fragments:

There are silver fish that flash before day, in the fragile moment of dawn. I have seen them shiver before my eyes, then vanish before light shone.

These are redemptive fragments of spiritual insight, which interpretation can only gain by grace: O little weights of the mind,/ O little floats to carry me up in a moment none can foretell. As in Fingernail Sunrise, spirit-floats are liable to return to the dark; to the involution from which they emerged:
The flash we saw in the distance now becomes for us a shell, Spun from the loom of waters to its own Stillness, and inward music: mark it, where it fell. [350]

The Salmon hence traces visionary knowledge as lost and living. A moment taken out of time, a flash along a weir,/ The light all men are chasing is lost and living here. [427] This poem holds a parable, which suggests that because light is in unpredictable motion, so must interpretation be similarly fugitive. As Sinclair puts it in Walking up Walls, ATAQUE GRAVE. AS A MUGGER YOU ARE NEVER SAFE. It doesnt matter who you are, who you think you are, the trick is: never, ever, stay still.
And waiting for the salmon-flash, to steal immortal life, An old man crouched beside the pool with net and sharpened knife Till all his life had ebbed away. He slept and woke in tears, Knowing hed missed the little splash that might renew the years. [428]

The argument is that you can be still, but not when static, with sharpened knife. A readers harmless stillness enabling the reception of vision, that matches the reticence or silence from which the poet projects sublime unrest, is the grace surrounding a hermeneutic process what The Turning of the Stars calls the love that guards this book [161]. In Beckton Alp Sinclair wrote of a breathing space; of how the point of a good view is that it should capture, and give relief from, the journey that led up to it. There are no good views in isolation. No empty frames. Unwalked, uncycled. Unearned. View is always an accident, a breathing space. Watkinss The Debt touches on this notion of rewarded process, or relieved struggle; here Watkins proposes a spiritual economy of exhaustion where sacrifices race/ And leave a fuller mind.
Vision bequeaths a sum Increased by spending it. Poor if I first become, My gain is infinite. But when did I divine That what was fugitive, Like water in a mine, Alone could make it live? [413]

As Logos has it, light must learn a dying trade [427]. Beyond Knowledge in the Vermilion Chambers
The Infant Joy is beautiful, but its anatomy Horrible ghast & deadly! nought shalt thou find in it But dark despair & everlasting brooding melancholy!

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Looking back on his work in the preface to The Firewall, Sinclair identified the forms of spiritual life, the spirit-lives, to which he has most aspired: they were the double lives I wanted most, film and poetry. His description of the film side of the equation in terms of unanchored imagery, suggests his understanding of spiritual activity as work with images visions without referents; work with views that are not necessarily interpretable in connection with a material grounding. Cinema and its bastard off-spring, television, is the addiction, always: unanchored imagery, analgesic colours. Sinclairs poem Friendly Fire (included, perhaps unsurprisingly given its title, in The Firewall) indeed speaks of light beyond interpretation. In Watkins this contrast, between light or visions and all our wordy intellection, is particularly prominent in Sea-Music for My Sister Travelling.
Come down, I say, Deluge of light, and drown the words inflection, Rush through the luminous, coiled, vermilion chambers, Shatter the labyrinths white, And ruin all the mind remembers; Come down, great Resurrection [78]

Watkins values the inside of the shell: the involution, the spiritual calm too far away/ For thought to find the track [181]. But its flooding by light does not correspond to cognitive wipe-out. When shattering light, unconscious glory, disintegrates language it prepares for expansive renewal through the release of new potentialities.
What thought a thoughtless moment will express; The unconscious glory brings its undertone. Or how can thought be magnified, unless The unknown god begets upon the known? [421]

In The Replica, a waterfall shows how the fragmentation of language can return us to the thoughtless moment with its rhythm of a perpetual music, and its capacity to enrich insight beyond secular rationality.
The dissipation of unnumbered drops Vanishing in a dark that finds itself In a perpetual music, and gives light In fading always from the measuring mind: Such is the waterfall [263]

Prime Colours memorably imagines the operation of the secular interpretative measuring mind belonging to cramped, figured scribes, distorted by possession:
One man may count, with imitative hooves, The huge, high landscape that another loves, Empound the apocalypse, till truth is pent To satisfy the turnstiles of a tent.

But the following stanza foresees the subversion of such positivistic, accumulative research by dissipation, a humble dust-shedding shedding of over-materialistic, empirical fragments which releases new spiritual creation within the supernatural realm of the sky.
Vast libraries vault their dead, but I can trust White dust to resurrect the moving dust, White dust of donkeys shedding dusty loads Where swallows wings paint Zechariahs words. [6]

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If it is indeed possible to trace a twentieth-century visionary poetic lineage say (to list only a few markers) from David Jones or David Gascoyne, through Celan and Watkins, Raine/Temenos and on to Sinclair then one notable instance of the contrary measuring mind, as noticed by Sinclair in his Lights Out for the Territory, would be the very Cambridge, literary-critical secular reason which fostered my own doctoral research on him. Observing the questioning Cambridge response to his publicizing of the visionary at the 1991 Shamanism of Intent event in Uppingham the younger, immodestly articulate element seethed with discontent, and felt that the whole approach to the numinous was suspect Sinclair saw that the young academics were charging shamanism, particularly in its Sixties inflection, with woolly thinking. In Sinclairs view, some sort of positivistic measuring mind was still demanding genuine and visible scholarship from a shamanic text. In my slightly later experience of it, the infinitely subtle Cambridge philosophy of Simon Jarvis in fact instead encouraged my own inchoate suspicion of positivist method, and also directed me to the potency of languages sacred capacities amongst many many other things, not least The Fall and its sacred capacities. But there was nonetheless obviously a Cambridge resistance being made to the absolutism of London visionary proclamation: in supervisions I was a truculent and often unpleasant student, a troubled post-cockney too full of Blakean moralisms. Yet still the academic resistance in Cambridge more generally was, I would now suggest, essentially to Sinclairs claim to an accessible visionary experience to what he himself calls (in Lights Out) his rhetoric, the hyperbole and also to his personal investment in the visionary as a repository of truth and value. Faith, against the facts. Prynnes relation to shamanism, by contrast, Sinclair argued, offers a measured risk: the visionary poetic of Aristeas, in Seven Years, supported by a bibliography, has not to quote Blake, in Milton cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration.
The whole point is to understand and move onnot hold seminars or open fucking web pages. [Smith]

In The Room of Pity, Watkins wrote of how Gods heart beat seconds where there was no clock [13]; our experience of the sacred cannot be grasped by a perception which would divide it up and classify it into so many rotten rags of Memory. In a way bibliographies, websites and sacred texts themselves when read as classificatory accumulations of spiritual knowledges are only so many cognitive clocks. Supports of our fake human claim to omniscience, they become measuring tools for the faithless, weapons in the academic battle for mundane status. A ninth-century Indian mystic cited by Buber, Bayezid Bistami, prayed: My God, it is not asceticism that I need, not knowledge of the Koran by heart, and not science; but give me a share in your mysteries. In 1848 Kierkegaard similarly expressed his dislike of the unnecessarily quasi-clerical character of mass Bible-reading a scholarly and legalistic type of religiousness, sheer diversion. A sort of learning in that direction has gradually found its way down to the commonest class and no human being reads the Bible humanly any more. The crux of the problem was always this sham that one must have the learning in shape before one can begin living which means one never gets around to the latter. Kierkegaard, Diogenes Allen wrote, claims academia has forgotten what it is to be an actual existing human being searching for truth. The truths revealed by Scripture, Allen goes on to argue, must be considered by the mind of a person, and in particular the mind of a person who recognizes his or her incomprehensible nature, his or her insufficiency, his or her plight. Buber called his anthology [a presentation of] personal confessio. Smith advised Middles, writing his book, to just do the bits that are natural, that are of real interest to you, not the best bits, just the bits that mean something to you. It is indeed difficult to imagine a visionary less scholarly or legalistic or

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more committed to the personalized performance of lyric scriptures than Smith. The Fall can be situated, in a way, in the Existentialist tradition of Kierkegaard and Allen the bands name is, after all, lifted from the Camus novel La Chute, published in English in 1957 as The Fall. Kierkegaards attack on the professionalizing sham that one must have the learning in shape before one can begin living which means one never gets around to the latter, was echoed by Smiths comments at a music and politics summit at the offices of New Manchester Review, in 1977. People, especially workingclass kids, are inhibited from trying to play because of the expertise of musiccollege groups like the Pink Floyd. But punk rock has shown that they can do it. Something like a Protestant nurturing of personal spiritualities, spiritual expressivities Blakean infinite talents is a core goal of the working class intellectualism propounded by The Fall.
As is rapidly becoming the case in the United Kingdom, the US is composed of fine unique people with infinite talents ruled and bullied by indecisive publicity seeking political incompetents who are allied with the hopeless and un-intelligent media, bullshit academics, and a Martian-like led civil service. [Smith, Cleveland travelogue]

Deep Conflict is the Forge What is then to be done? A one-time academic reader, all I can suggest is that we learn somehow to read visionary language with more generous vision. But this virtue involves struggle, just as did the creation of that language. For Weil, that action is good which we are able to accomplish while keeping our attention and intention totally directed towards pure and impossible goodness, without veiling from ourselves by any falsehood either the attraction or the impossibility of pure goodness. This is one point where Weils ethics converges with her aesthetics, since she concurs with Buber that whilst the ecstatic cannot say the unsayable, the visionary nonetheless speaks, he must speak, because the Word burns in him. The beautiful poem, Weil goes on to write, is the one which is composed while the attention is kept directed towards inexpressible inspiration, in so far as it is inexpressible. It was just this sort of stressed direction of attention which Watkins, in The Death Bell, saw lying behind visionary understanding or perception:
Deep conflict is the forge From which their faiths emerge Who give to humankind Mind that is more than mind. [213]

In a 1949 letter to Michael Hamburger, Watkins contrasted the conflicted soul to the secular poet, whose work derives from a rationalist contemplative attitude (probably mugged up whilst a student).
What I look for first in a poet is intensity, and you have this. A poem must, for me, contain intensity in a unique form, impossible to paraphrase without loss. It is found in Hlderlin constantly. But large tracts of contemporary verse derive from a speculation situation allied to lucidity of thought; and there is everything there except the soul.

Watkinss conception of the deep spiritual conflict from which visionary understanding can emerge is analogous to Bubers conception of the burning Word.
For the Word burns in him. Ecstasy is dead, stabbed in the back by Time, which will not be mocked; but, dying, it has flung the Word into him, and the Word burns in him. And he speaks, speaks, he cannot be silent, the flame in the Word drives him, he knows that he cannot say it, yet he tries over and over again until his soul is exhausted to death and the Word leaves him. This is the exaltatio of the one who has returned into

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the commotion and cannot resign himself to it; this is his insurrection, the insurrection of a speaker: related to the insurrection of the poet, slighter in possession, mightier in existence, than his. This is the bending of the bow for the saying of the unsayable, an impossible task, a labour in the dark.

The burning Word, through or conveying which the post-ecstatic seeks to pass towards expression of mystical experience, finds a further instance in Hildegard von Bingens comparison of visionary words to a vibrating flame (quoted in Bubers collection).
For in this vision I am not taught to write as the philosophers write. And the words in this vision are not like the words that sound from the mouths of human beings, but like a vibrating flame and like a cloud moving in pure air.

In Yeats Tower, Watkins wrote likewise of this fire which never formed a school in the hearing of which a seed of salvific visionary perception is nurtured.
Surely the seed that stirs beneath this touch Hears in its ear the wand within the wind, The miraculous fire from which all years have waned. This, if it moves, must heal the martyrs wound: O under grass, O under grass, the secret. [13]

In Demands of the Muse Watkins lets the Muse articulate the conviction that it is precisely uncategorizable visionary passion, our struggling, self-conflicted fire which never formed a school, which lends poetic language its meaning:
Yet, though a school invoke me, it is he [the poet] I choose, for opposition gives those words Their strength; and there is none more near to him In thought. It is by conflict that he knows me And serves me in my way and not another.

Burning words are humble and submissive words in that the poets integrity is shaped by necessary difficulty: The bit is tempered to restrain his words/ And make laborious all thats dear to him./ So he remains himself and not another. [282] Yet burning words, Watkins feels, can be precise words too. Dawn fires kindle perfection like a sword.
To have held through hail, stormwinds, and black frost in darkness Through the long months, gives meaning to the bud when it opens. Song loses nothing of moments that are past. So my labour is still: it is still determination To resolve itself slowly in the weathers of knowledge. [392]

Weil shared Watkinss sense that visionary understanding is indirect, even unending, and involves laborious struggle, yet can be supported by linguistic precision achieved through a slow resolution. Intelligence can never penetrate the mystery, but it, and it alone, can judge of the suitability of the words which express it. For this task it needs to be keener, more discerning, more precise, more exact and more exacting than for any other. A Pioneers Log The Bloodhound, which is probably Watkinss major extended poetic statement on the subject of visionary hermeneutics, identifies a slow resolution of readerly understanding with a process of self-abnegatory

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pilgrimage a walk of penitence. The sacred cognitive hunt is necessarily impeded:
Delay may reward me, even evasion Bring me at last to truth, to the martyrs posture, By many paths to a tree transfixed by nails, Or on to a field of remorse, to a fallen bough, To footprints under the bridge, and a folded vesture. [391]

The interpreters disparate paths of faith are marked by an abdication of selfrighteousness, its flighty, mad relentlessness matched by divine relief.
Unresting I follow the trail, a lugubrious attorney To joys keeper, the sleepless giver of rest, Great judge of the unforgiving. To find his word An exuberant calm lends meaning to every journey. [392]

The Bloodhound hints that so long as a record is made, even the most indirect interpretative process can remain guided by a sort of investigative magnetism, or turn out true to [divine] judgment:
However devious the path through inconstant water, I keep the log: my account of the trail I render, Bringing to light what ferns or the scrub had hidden, Had I gone the direct way. But, as filings quiver, I turn, as needle to star, with insistent feet. [391]

Watkinss poetic likening of visionary hermeneutics to the collation of a logbook of quivering filings shifting sands that nonetheless are providentially ordered is borne out by some statements of Dora Polks in the introduction to her Vernon Watkins and the Spring of Vision. Polk points out that, though published eventually in 1977, her academic study was written between 1967 and 1970, when Watkins studies was (already) no industry. This was why I had to win access to Watkinss work by the fumbling methods of the explorer who lacks maps or accounts to help him, and must rely principally on his own ingenuity and the tools he carries on his back. And, to continue the metaphor, my findings are recorded rather in the manner of a pioneers log a tentative account of the personal process of discovery of Watkinss vision. Polks work on Watkins was a vocation, if one long delayed by her need to earn a living. It was a genuine personal spiritual exploration: she writes of becoming the beneficiary of Watkinss vision, which, after all, is what the study of poetry is all about. A readers visionary hermeneutic is thus, Polk lets us see, part of an ongoing, developing process of spiritual re-birth; her log-book anti-method is in keeping with the shifting flux of debate surrounding the poetry, and the cumulative nature of literary criticism. A readers visionary log-book also perpetuates what Norvig calls the poets own dynamic concept of the imagination. Such magical transformations can emerge out of the social marginality of visionary poetry, for instance out of its resistance to the self-promotional procedures of academic career-building. Watkins studies, for instance, is no career option within todays entirely secularized English departments. But the spiritual aptitudes, the tools, required for genuinely vocational study, can often be more fine, quiet, deep-grained and personal, than those required for developing a successful CV.
Notebook method: the method of the failed/private/underground (upper-)middle-class repressed/suppressed outsider. Benjamin (Arcades), Kierkegaard, Kafka-diaries, Weil. Compare Stephanie Strickland on the way Weils family constricted her - & hence the relevance of her work to the womens, and mens, issues of hunger, violence, exclusion, betrayal of the body, inability to be heard, and self-hate. Unpublished

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remains. Unpublishable: Kierkegaard, backstage practice. Exiled from life: cant find a way in, a way of expressing ones gifts in the real world (versus MES: working-class popstar). Cf too Newton, in Tristram Hunts film: research as sacred, private knowledges. The reason why others my age arent wanting to write (eg diary/documentary essay form) like their adolescent literary heroes (for me, Kafkas diaries, & D H Lawrence impulse-reproduction; for IS, massive influence of Beats on his London journalistic writing mode), is that younger literary academics simply werent formed by literature they didnt read it as teenagers (one ex-colleague only reading NME, another reading nothing even as a student). Hence why should they rebel against the subsumption of literature by (cultural theoretical) concepts? And todays novelists/ poets never read fiction or poetry as kids either. At least I was reading DHL, Ginsberg, Blake as well as being groomed for professional specialization in academic lit. crit. by Leavisite/ preOxbridge school essay lit. crit. Never forming a personal relationship with the writing in this way explains the widespread incomprehension of ISs work amongst literary critics now (cf Alex M.: field of contemporary literary studies has found the task of analyzing Sinclairs writing problematic, in City Visions). [Traherne: It acts not from a centre to/ Its object as remote,/ But present is when it doth view,/ Being with the being it doth note.] Post-Brass Prynne is popular (!), more approachable (!) and written about precisely because his sheer modernist textual games prevent attachment, there is little recognizable human presence there to feel implicated with: or the residual sense of a spectral personality behind the writing is effectively ironized out of existence by its submersion within his surrounding range of depersonalizing modernist (textual/poetic) strategies [Ian Hunt, praising JHPs lacuna mode to Catling in Parataxis, takes this as a virtue]. This so even with the very strong uh Pandora comic-erotic interfusions in Triodes. Sean Bonney on hearing of my notes on Radon Daughters: You should just publish the notebook. My private moon voyages [Lud] into Kafkas diaries, age c.15 a bid for the sacred which had been pushed by my entirely secular daily routine into 3AM nightspace. (Alongside the pirate radio broadcasts). And which then disqualified me, since exhausted, from participating effectively in the worldly educational community the next day. Alienation, and misery estranged as John Lydon in the Kings Road [on The Filth and the Fury], provoked by the absence of a sacred element to view everyday capitalist life as just a rat-race stumbling bleary-eyed across Blackfriars Bridge. Fighting against the commuter crowd, like Karen Armstrong c.17 on release from her convent, & like me still (yesterday at Moorgate station). Urban Panic Attack. And, from then on in, study as a refuge from the secular world. Immersion. Which, of course, the university didnt actually turn out to be. [Bond, Workshy journal]

Insofar as the anti-methodical processes of visionary hermeneutics generate the form of a pioneers log-book, which records the pilgrim-path of insight as it passes through shifting cognitive sands and then it is footpad, footpad, nose to the ground,/ Ear and eye to the trail they also recall the essay form as described (and promoted) by Theodor Adorno. Both types of writing rely on self-abdication and faith: Watkinss log-keeping bloodhound is trusting the scent to discover my destination [391], whilst for Adorno the word Versuch, attempt or essay recalls an intention groping its way. But a loss of selfrighteousness and subsumptive processing does not rule out intelligence or self-consciousness: the slight elasticity of the essayists train of thought forces him to greater intensity than discursive thought, because the essay does not proceed blindly and automatically, as the latter does, but must reflect on itself at every moment. The trails elasticity is only slight, because of the unresolved tension between stasis and dynamism for example, between fixed and unfixed cognition, or between a neat commensurability of concepts to the object and the lack of such which characterizes the essay form. Adorno wrote of the essays privileging of the incommensurate, of how it is concerned with what is blind in its objects. It wants to use concepts to pry open the aspect of its objects that cannot be accommodated by concepts, the aspect that reveals, through the

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contradictions in which concepts become entangled, that the net of their objectivity is a merely subjective arrangement. It wants to polarize the opaque element and release the latent forces in it. Sinclairs Before I Left the Rue Grimoire ironically comments on our fear of this ambition.
light darts from out there not so very far strikes the inner sea we hope precise equivalent soundless & scaled down

This sort of reception of light of truth, of the meaning of an object represents the contrary of how a visionary hermeneutic aims to receive light. In a way, visionary hermeneutics hopes to read an illuminated poem imprecisely, so as to liberate its incommensurability its miraculous, formless and transforming, shifty aspects and release, not some soundless & scaled down echo, but one (to return to Beckton Alp) raw and absolute and unappeased. Sinclairs thinking about pedagogy, and about visionary experience when that thinking is filtered through the diary form of his 1971 book The Kodak Mantra Diaries again suggests an emphasis on the release of incommensurability. These diaries relay a dialogue between Paul Goodman and Sinclair in which Goodman accuses Ginsberg, his poetry, of a lack of religious depth:
He has no theological feeling at all. He doesnt know what real faith is. He understands on the other hand that religion is the crucial thing. He knows this in some deep way and so he picks up some eclectic eastern stuff which he understands in an external pedantic way but with no feeling of faith, miracle, communion, sacrament, all the things which make for religious life in a way that I would conceive it. He cops-out into notions of union, ecstasy etc etc which are all sentiments. Theyre very nice sentiments but they are merely aesthetic and have nothing to do with the springs, in terms of which heaven and hell are determined, or in terms of which the Messiah will come.

Goodmans view of Christianity, vaunting the springs deep structures, whether practical (such as Communion), or conceptual (such as the terms in terms of which heaven and hell are determined) over mystical emotional effects, recalls Watkinss poetics: much of Watkinss poetry is reducing itself to a thematic demonstration of Christian conceptual structures, for instance, such as the generation of resurrection from suffering or a pain/life dialectic. Sinclair, however, responds to the accusation of a lack of formal Christian religious depth with the question: Is that a bad thing?. Sinclair seems to be hinting here at an interest in how miracle or sacrament can be an incommensurable, everyday, more superficial phenomenon, one not reliant on being determined by deep structures whether practical structures of organized religion such as the liturgy, or pre-set, rigid conceptual structures. In The Return of Spring Watkins wrote of how what first I feared as a rite I love as a sacrament. [117] Rather as Adorno saw the essay seeking to release what is blind in its material, in The Kodak Mantra Diaries we can see Sinclair seeking out the opaque element in our religious experience, and in pedagogy:
Cant you throw out the old pupil / teacher relationship anyway, and approach any subject mutually, both looking for insights, get rid of the formal structure?

We could think towards a religious-exploratory experience which is more freeform one which is fluid, provisional, shifting, as if transformed by kick-starts of cognitive shocks. Moments of incommensurability, crystallized by visionary perception, re-organize the trail itself, as we pass through them.

Arrested Glory

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In this wild eves thunder-rain, at the batement of it, the night-shades now much more come on: whens the cool, even, after-light. [David Jones]

Perhaps writing itself is not only kick-started by perception, but is also enabled precisely by its collapse, when it is going too fast: when a translation has occurred. In The Childhood of Hlderlin, Watkins identified the intensity of Hlderlins poetry to be grounded in the extreme reciprocity between his visionary perception and the natural vision herself: when the poet has become her medium.
[] The courses of rivers Remained a compelling mystery; yet when he wrote Of these, he no longer watched, he became the river. So swift his thought, so close to the life he saw, He knew the rose as the rose is known to herself, Fell with the cataracts fall, or became that eagle Of piercing sight, or learnt the time of the fig-tree, Not by time, but by breast-feather and leaf. [309]

The Cave-Drawing reveals Watkinss view that the artists visionary understanding, learning, hermeneutic can be not only as speedy as its object, but also as fugitive and fortuitous. A luck enables a singing of the light; so that precisely an arrested mine/ Of mineral wonder, a frozen crystallization, re-energizes art.
For us he made light sing in the dark of his line, Arrested motion, all animals pierced and crystalline: He, he alone had found it, his look trained down By luck their lightning emergence. This was his mine Of mineral wonder, making the skilled hand run, A hunter, spearlike, outspeeding all ages begun, At which we marvel. [149]

The arrest or training-down performed by visionary hermeneutics involves an act of celebration and compression, which is also an act of eternalization, as the resulting obscure crystal is rescued from time. In Taliesin in Gower:
Rhinoceros, bear and reindeer haunt the crawling glaciers of age Beheld in the eye of the rock, where a javelind arm held stiff, Withdrawn from the vision of flying colours, reveals, like script on a page, The unpassing moments arrested glory, a life locked fast in the cliff. [185]

A life locked fast: there is the emphasis on the crystallization of an organic unity, as in Jerusalem when Blake remarks that he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole/ Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized. Sinclair has spoken of the brief glyph-notes from which the prose sections of his Lud Heat evolved; to Acker he commented: for a long time you must train yourself to write in ways that are fast and accurate. You test yourself to see if you can make mental notes that mean something, represent something. The goal of crystallizing definition is really simplicity: none so intellectual/ As the simplest truth of all. [401] Smith told Middles: My problems knowing when to shut up on a song. I cant put that bleeding pen down, so I hone it, try to get it as simple as possible. That is something I have learned over the years. I know how to edit. Academic practice the administrative-bureaucratic method of cognition can instead necessitate purposeless complexification, in line with a melancholy Puritan work ethic. Jerusalem foretold the reign of false activity:
And in their stead. intricate wheels invented. wheel without wheel: To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind

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And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task! Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread: In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All, And call it Demonstration: blind to all the simple rules of life.

The Childhood of Hlderlin proposes, What might the gift not bring to their holy light/ Who ask love only? [309]. Similarly, Kierkegaards distrust of his days professional and quasi-professional hermeneutics Christendom has got itself stuck in cleverness made him see how someone more than its match in cleverness could continue to work for wisdom: with an aim to restore simplicity. The world has become just far too clever. The person who is to work effectively for the religious must get behind them else he wont be of much use. Nine years before, in 1839, Kierkegaards notes had drawn attention to the celebratory, even redemptive function of a backstage practice of crystallizing simplification. All poetry is lifes glorification [Forklarelse] (i.e. transfiguration) through its clarification [Forklarelse] (through being clarified, illuminated, unfolded, etc.). It is really remarkable that language has this ambiguity. The perception held by Kierkegaards poetry aims at the visionary register of Watkinss arrested glory, or the radically strange, post-real transfiguring after-clarity of The Anathemata, when life looms up curiously exact and clear, more real by half than in the busy light as noses everywhere at stare-faced noon more realbut more of Fary by a long chalk. This moonlit visionary perception or hermeneutic recalls the radically passive, detached attention proposed and practiced by Weil, which Finch likened to description, when this word has lost all of its overtones of complete logical mapping. We are looking not for exactness but for description so detached, so penetrating, so obvious that it has the character of revelation. This kind of seeing in which the ordinary becomes translucent, is suggestive of the revelatory holy light of The Childhood of Hlderlin.
What might the gift not bring to their holy light Who ask love only? Sacrifice willed by the heavenly ones Raises our god-pierced eyes. Our selves are nothing; That which we seek is all. [309] The lights over the world-flats hover uncertainly, by fits & starts, Wills-of-wisp so to say, anyway, thats the idea, - uncertainly & only now and again. Is that O.K.? [Jones to Watkins, 26 June 1960]

Seeing
Parenthetical numbering in this expos relates to The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 2000). Other, source, texts: Acker, Kathy, Writing as Magic in London in Its Summer (1997) Adams, Sam and Gwilym Rees Hughes, eds, Triskel Two: Essays on Welsh and Anglo-Welsh Literature (Llandybie: Davies, 1973)

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Adorno, Theodor W., Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) Allen, Diogenes, Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006) Blake, William, Complete Writings, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: OUP, 1972) ______.Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. by Morton D. Paley (London: Tate Gallery, 1998) Bond, Robert, More than Museums: No Traveller Returns, by Vahni Capildeo, Jacket, 26 (October 2004), http://jacketmagazine.com/26/bond-capi.html ______. Iain Sinclair (Cambridge: Salt, 2005) Boulton, James T., ed., The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: CUP, 1997) Buber, Martin, Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) Finch, Henry Leroy, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, ed. by Martin Andic (New York: Continuum, 1999) Ford, Simon, Hip Priest: The Story of Mark E. Smith and The Fall (London: Quartet, 2003) Jones, David, The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) ______. Letters to Vernon Watkins, ed. by Ruth Pryor (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976) Kierkegaard, Sren, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1996) McLellan, David, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) Middles, Mick & Mark E. Smith, The Fall (London: Omnibus, 2003) Norris, Leslie, ed., Vernon Watkins: 1906-1967 (London: Faber and Faber, 1970) Norvig, Gerda S., Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blakes Illustrations to The Pilgrims Progress (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993) Polk, Dora, Vernon Watkins and the Spring of Vision (Swansea: Davies, 1977) Scholem, Gershom, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003) Sinclair, Iain, Lud Heat/ Suicide Bridge (London: Vintage, 1995) ______. Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997) ______. Landors Tower: or The Imaginary Conversations (London: Granta Books, 2001) ______. and Emma Matthews, White Goods (Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002) ______. The Firewall: Selected Poems 1979-2006 (Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books, 2006)

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______. The Kodak Mantra Diaries: October 1966 to June 1971, Beat Scene special issue, December 2006 [orig. publ. London: Albion Village Press, 1971] Thomas, Dylan, Collected Poems: 1934-1953, ed. by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: Phoenix, 2000) Traherne, Thomas, Selected Writings, ed. by Dick Davis (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988) Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge, 1997) Williams, Rowan, Swanseas Other Poet: Vernon Watkins and the Threshold between Worlds, Welsh Writing in English, 8 (2003), 107-20

Hearing
The Fall, Psykick Dance Hall (Eagle Records, 2000) ______. The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004 (Sanctuary Records, 2005) ______. Reformation Post TLC (Slogan Records, 2007)

July 2007.

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