Eyewear is very glad to feature a poem by the poet, musician and visual artist Heather Phillipson this Friday.Phillipson (pictured) is one of the best of an emergent generation of younger poets now redefining poetry in London and the UK more generally, and, as such, Faber will be publishing her pamphlet later this year, along with three other younger poets. She has been Artist-in-Residence at the London College of Fashion. She was awarded the Michael Donaghy Poetry Prize from Birkbeck College in 2007, received an Eric Gregory Award in 2008, and won a Faber New Poets Award in 2009.
Forthcoming publications include Stop Sharpening Your Knives 3, S/S/Y/K/3 (Eggbox, 2009), City State: The New London Poetry (Penned in the the Margins, 2009) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009).
German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London
Page seven – I’ve had enough of Being and Time
and of clothing. Many streakers seek quieter locations
and Marlborough Road’s unreasonably quiet tonight.
If it were winter I’d be intellectual, but it’s Tuesday
and I’d rather be outside, naked, than learned –
rather lap the tarmac escarpment of Archway Roundabout
wearing only a rucksack. It might come in useful.
I can’t read any more of Heidegger’s dasein-diction,
I say as I jettison my slippers.
When I speak of my ambition
it is not to be a Doctor of Letters
or to marry Friedrich Nietzsche, it turns out,
or to think better.
It is to give up this fashion for dressing.
It is to drop my robe on the communal stairs
and open the front door onto the commuter hour,
my neighbour, his Labrador, and say nothing
of what I know or do not know, except what my body announces.
Page seven – I’ve had enough of Being and Time
and of clothing. Many streakers seek quieter locations
and Marlborough Road’s unreasonably quiet tonight.
If it were winter I’d be intellectual, but it’s Tuesday
and I’d rather be outside, naked, than learned –
rather lap the tarmac escarpment of Archway Roundabout
wearing only a rucksack. It might come in useful.
I can’t read any more of Heidegger’s dasein-diction,
I say as I jettison my slippers.
When I speak of my ambition
it is not to be a Doctor of Letters
or to marry Friedrich Nietzsche, it turns out,
or to think better.
It is to give up this fashion for dressing.
It is to drop my robe on the communal stairs
and open the front door onto the commuter hour,
my neighbour, his Labrador, and say nothing
of what I know or do not know, except what my body announces.
poem by Heather Phillipson; reprinted with permission of the author
This poem was originally published by Magma, and appears at ther site as well.
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