Death Drive Through Gaia Paris (Open Spaces)

In his latest work, Charles Noble further reins in the already tight haiku only to let loose, a 'logopoeic' poetry. Poems of 'splendid rigour' or riddles of wit that are solved by 'lifetime' insights - a dialectical poetry that still observes a phenomenological toehold but transcends the limits of locality in recognising the curled-up-but-everywhere world of media & markets - a la Frederic Jameson. And yet, these 'haikus' go straight - to 'the shock of the naive'. They turn to a middle ground, in Aristotle's sense of difficult target. They point to human acts, human reactions, & enact, themselves, a meta-linguistic wrestling, at one with the quarrelling couple in the bar hanging on each other's words & insistent with 'what do you mean by [a simple word]?' But they are also implicated in what he calls the death drive (not death wish), which arcs freely over a human life span - think architecture - & which, more radically, in the 'pleated/ crossword', 'make[s]/ good/ a/ bit/ of/ bad/ infinity' (p. 57), no expenses, except for that toehold, earth, as he would have it.