Slag Heap Critique
Slag Heap Critique
I am walking on the slag heap nature reserve
What was the Wigan Alps
Now the Three Sisters named after the bottomless shafts they could not fill
And the birds have it as their own
Watery idyll
And on a hillside of driven-in trees and new sown grasses
to mask million years old debris
I meet Owd Frank and he sez
Naw then Pey, where’s tha bin
I told him I had just completed my PhD
He is rolling tiny thin paper between golden nibbed fingers
What’s that all about, he asks of me
I tell him of Deleuze and Guattari and of rhizomatic knowing we cannot fix
Of Freire the Brazilian and his fights and the millions
Of Educators and knowers scattered across the earth
Of making learning matter and letting us all see our own worth
Of poetry and art brut
Of living life as nomads and finding a route
To not knowing that is more than all the knowledge entombed in the schools
I dance foot to foot and windmill arms waft the words higher
I tell him of this hillside as our university
These new trees the only dreaming spires
We need to dwell amongst
and we can learn from what we hear and things we see
Of assemblages and lines of flight,
of Rimbaud and Molliere, Bourdieu, and Poetry
as dynamite
My voice electric in speed and Frank nods and I wax on
About imaginaria and dialogic space
Of outsider artists and the ways we might look
At each other anew without the threat of the school
or campus
And knowing that is only always what we have brought with us
And learned from the planet and our wanderings on it
That and and and is a philosophy,
French
Of more than human networks and literature and art and philosophy
And how we can start
to build somewhere better together
How we are creators of a new land of the free
A liberation ontology that includes both thee and me
His own work is now completed and he brings flame to papery tip
The blue grey vapour wafts up and creates a veil from his chin to cap
He blows a smoke shaft into the ether
And he says,
‘Sounds belting that’.