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Note on the Alexine poems

These come from the underground. Poets aren’t supposed to care about exposing their murkier interests; such anxiety plagues only the unpoetic bourgeoisie, after all. Popularly, poets are not supposed to be conformist and bourgeois. In fact the opposite is true. Poets are mostly educated people who cultivate their status in a middle-class milieu; they bring up children and earn a living. Consequently, my low-life concern, with its Viz sense of humour, its Tank Girl and Lara Croft culture, is not one I often discussed with neighbours. Sympathy with foul-mouthed squatters is not obviously immoral but not easy to explain, either. It looks like puerile fantasy.

My Alexine is a homeless, smut-talking street brat. Like a character in a novel she has to be allowed, now I’ve conceived her, to speak as she likes. These verses, a fragment of a so far unfinished sequence, should be prefaced with a bad taste warning.

I don’t know if I’ll ever finish the sequence. If I do, this girl could become even more unspeakably offensive. As this volume is a selection, I could have left her out. There’s nothing quite like her in my other work, though perhaps the voice in Love Story and Dragonfly, the female in Wych Hazel, and the sympathies of Death in the Morning, were all leading to this. Alexine may have come along to remind me not to forget my freakier and more insolent voices. Doesn’t art soak up all the life that’s around, whatever it’s like?

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festering lily

Alexine’s function in life is to get right in your face and offend. She lives on the street, she begs, she spits:

some change mister

or I’ll come on to ya

and give ya a feel

As an opening declaration of intent this could hardly be cruder, and the harshness of the underground is what Alexine is about. She is the rebellious soul of the streets, of the severely dispossessed surrounded by a world of hypocritical plenty. Nae bit means ‘no more than’; she is not Scottish but is half-quoting Burns’s To a Mouse, on turning her up in her nest, with the plough, November 1785: ‘Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie.’ Alexine is being sarcastic, she is not glossy, cowering or timorous in the least. The title comes from ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 94, and in the anonymous play Edward III, 2.1.451 of 1596.

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lullwater

Alexine is bisexual. Here she is celebrating love with a girl, though she could be speaking for men, too. Oral sex, as they say, is a matter of taste. She’s in your face in more ways than one. This piece is explicit, though the theme is not confined to this piece, see the notes on the much earlier It Smells of Mortality and Wych Hazel. The part played by smell in animal love lives is well known, and celebrating it is no more than praising a joyous part of our existence. So Alexine is not just dedicated to upsetting the genteel, she is certainly that, but she is also life affirming. Hers is a raw jubilation to be sure, fuelled by adolescent hormones and a scorn for conventions. Less down-to-earth, Long Distance and Life Love contain similar sentiments, where the pride of life is related to athleticism and the sports of running and rowing. It is no accident that the sea, in Life Love for instance, should suggest the juices of life, and the combination of sweat and sea-spray ‘dries like semen’. It has taken the present Western age of full-frontal neo-pornocracy, and even more, the unconnected and cruel epidemic of AIDS, for a wider public to acknowledge that bodily fluids are exchanged by lovers. In celebrating life in the way she does, Alexine is taking a risk, even if her lover here is another woman. Giving thanks for life, with reference to whatever holy of holies, is never without its perils. Affiliate with any order and you have latent enemies as well as instant friends.

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para

Alexine is an urban guerrilla and her male lover, or fantasy lover, is a paramilitary thug. There’s a reason for this. She is not trying to please you or me. She scares me to death. If there is an anarchist cause of any kind, she is up for it with the worst of incendiary rioters. She does not expect to live long and is more likely to be a terrorist, a suicide bomber, than not. To write about her, to dredge up more than a mere identikit image of her from the sump of one’s own unpleasant angers, is to understand what it is in us that created her and her kind. At least, I think so, believing as I do that we are responsible, if only via our silence and inertia, for the human world, in its most complete sense, that we live in. Toke: marijuana cigarette. KLA: Kosovo Liberation Army; IRA: Irish Republican Army.

Alan Marshfield

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