Spirit
by John Wilkinson

Transplanting to the United States brought a surprising discovery for this Briton, that to be identified as a poet was to be presumed caught up in a spiritual discipline. What ‘spiritual’ means must be nebulous enough to encompass personal deities, self-cultivation, major organised religions and their more mystical offshoots; all these qualify a person to enter the state of poet. But admitting myself a materialist who finds the gab about spirit to be repellant betrayed me as half-mad, or was taken as teasingly provocative in some obscure British way probably linked to Monty Python. Still, what I write is materialist poetry, although I don’t adhere to those materialism-of-signifying-practice notions associated with early Language poetry manifestos. Instead it’s part of my intention to dispel the miasma of spirit lying low, brilliant and poisonous everywhere.
            Nothing is more spiritual than a perfect bag in the window of Dior or Chanel. On a Chicago bus I heard young black girls talking excitedly about visiting Burberry, then was nearly knocked off a sidewalk by a gang of mid-Western jocks loudly on their way to check out what’s new at Louis Vuitton. When I think of the elaborate panoply needed to get a Catholic congregation into the right spiritual attitude, it is obvious that the Holy Ghost has migrated and now hovers above every BMW and Bentley. The desired consumer object has become a monstrance – a monstrance of its own aura. Meanwhile consumers intoxicated with the spirit look at themselves and ask anxiously: Am I a desirable object? They scrutinise one other in the car going to work: Is she desirable? And as the object aura of physical beauty becomes compromised despite the applications of spiritually potent brand-name products, spirit must be sought elsewhere. Inner beauty must be cultivated, the ability to respond at a spiritual level to art perhaps. Art offers itself as a sort of spiritual colonic irrigation.
            Does possession reduce spiritual potency? Of course it does. Addition and substitution are as necessary as keeping up attendance at mass. But aesthetic appreciation should be contemplative; consuming art too restlessly or to a schedule like an exercise regime, seems a little vulgar, a little parvenu. What is indicated is a sustained spiritual engagement with a select group of works. And to promote spiritual engagement – even union! – each work of art must give off a certain haziness, continuously. The appreciator (whose self-worth appreciates) must enter into a sort of free-floating attention, into wonderment. This is sublime. This is Rothko. This is black-and-white photography. I do not at all claim immunity: if I had a soul I would trade it for a Leica M8. (Don’t forget a set of lenses, Mephistopheles.)
            The oddest thing is that people talk about spirituality as though it were rare and precious. It may be expensive, but it is expensive as a diamond is expensive, through careful contrivance and staging around common objects and ordinary people. In reality the air is thick with spirituality. It’s the air we breathe in the US. But in poetic practice the antithesis to spirituality is not imagism or objectivism, both of which tempt the numinous. That particular model of red wheelbarrow is a must-have. Rather the materialist counter-strike demands a compaction which generates new material and conceptual entities. Genetic modification through intensities of prosody must send out unprecedented beasts to prowl and spit at the disgusting expressions of spirit, and to startle hearts towards humanity. For spirit is but a convenient and guilty fog for shiny unfeelingness – its emanation.

Also by John Wilkinson in ActionYes #5:
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