Poets in Dialogue: Adage Adagio* Parts I & II by David Nettleingham and Christopher Hobday I Drowned
idols are the seeds of a new
beginning, a barren
plea to the fertile dead, a way of
understanding the
movement of rivers. All life
resting on a tide, pooling
in uneven fractures; silt and
skin indefinable at its
banks, where thankless crowds deepen
even the shallows and the
elaborate harmony of belly
laughs is purifying, sweating
out salt flats and
immovable pillars, breaking
the surface of a single thought. From
without, these rare landmarks of
crowns and headdresses, they are
mountains rising from the
river, forcing us
around to secure the tread-water and
within, swim those who
would navigate these new stars, with
maps of the Indus and
broken instruments. Within,
it is a breaker’s yard. So as
engines rust in brushstrokes in the
reed beds and a thousand feet rest
their city, their idols drown in some
act of baptism knowing
little difference. – David
Nettleingham II Stop. Go
back. Hypnotic regression to the
time spent in that room empty
except for your mind, where
thought did not begin, end, resume but was
continuous, flowing off the loom, long
strands of thinking now consigned to
history. Time was up, your birth plucked
you out before you could find a grasp
on the line. Now your kind of which
you are alone upon the earth is
exiled from that perfect home where
the material was of no worth whatever. Paradox: the dearth is what
strikes you here, mass of loam that is
the universe and its content seems as
nothing, your only home slowly
and surely buried, its dome vanished, tomb without vent where
the you that was first climbs walls and
howls without relent. There is
a sense of energy unspent, locked
up with a wicked twin who calls, calls
you back and sends you forth, haunts
and hates the wherewithalls and
draws you to him with a savage passion, his
noisy cell your magnetic north. –
Christopher Hobday *The
pamphlet Adage Adagio: Drafts I-X from which these
extracts are taken was published in 2009 by The Conversation
Paperpress, and were translated and published in Italian in
2010. The text is an ongoing argument between the two poets
on the relationship between nature and society.
David
Nettleingham and Christopher
Hobday are two young British poets, working with
dialectical ways of writing and collaborating. Nettleingham
is a doctoral student, researcher and teacher of sociology
at the University of Kent, UK. He has worked as a freelance
poetry editor and has had poetry published in various
anthologies and magazines. Hobday manages the Canterbury
Poets online community. In 2008 he won the Save As poetry prize, and the same year co-authored Stubborn Mule
Orchestra with Luigi Marchini and Gary Studley. | 
