The Imaginary in Geometry: (Salt Modern Poets)

The instruction for this new volume was to write poems with no autobiographical content -- going straight to personal myth. "The Imaginary in Geometry" is named for a book by a legendary Russian priest and mathematician martyred by the Bolsheviks. It means that any theory involves idealisation -- but also how something imaginary takes on shape and dimensions in the artistic act. Breton wanted to change Malraux's definition of modern art, as what develops a series of images into a personal myth, into the discovery of a collective stock of images, rooted in the unconscious. Such a return of archaic worlds to light would have to pick its way through the debris of myths wished on us by the agencies -- "Anglophilia, a Romance of the Docks" is a lingering exploration of the lost world of mid-century propaganda, the alluring stories of a leisure class in ideal clothes. Photographs open onto a beckoning space of generosity and inauthenticity, a glittering demon world which engulfs us we say yes to it. How indeed would we reconstruct the Past once we discard these pop images with their discreet divinities?More fundamental than a mythic narrative is the fabric of the space in which it takes place as a momentary series of high points. Symbolic space is something non-finite which can be built up by finite steps. "On the Beach at Aberystwyth" is a journey in another geometry, the Western Seaways as the routes along which Celtic culture spread. It answers the question, what is social structure? Early preoccupations with Socialist Realism and technophilia are continued here by poems about the inventor of double-tracking and a Spiritualist clergyman who constructed a machine of unknown purpose at the command of spirits.

Table of Contents:
Coastal Defences of the Self Abundance The Ruins of Guldursun Deep Dish Dished Spectrum Flight The Ghost of Fusion A Building Code for Jerusalem Wonders of Classification A Virtuality/ Cyclical Polygons Swanning with the Bishop Les Paul’s Garage Studio Radio Vortex On the Beach at Aberystwyth Anglophilia – a Romance of the Docks I Baltic Relief Mission II The Room of Light III Putting England on film IV Documentary V Darling, Let’s Stop Pretending VI Collusion VII The moving Line of Capture VIII Silver Threads and Golden Needles IX Trust X Q-landscapes XI The Outlands XII Radio Wars XIII Like Spring Water Strained Through Muslin XIV A Failed Collection XV The Forgetting 100 Bars of Inattention or, The Social Order The Spirit Mover, 1854 Wonders of Classification, Part 2 or, The Builder of Follies When Myth Becomes History 2 On the Margins of Great Civilisations 3 Anagoge or, When History Becomes Myth History of My Contemporary

About the Author :
Andrew Duncan was born in 1956, and brought up in the Midlands, “in an atmosphere of technological optimism and class levelling which the South succeeded in reversing thereafter.” He worked as a labourer (in England and Germany) after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecomms manufacturer (1978–87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988–91).