Leeds Arts Club star, Sir Herbert Read (dubbed the ‘Anarchist Knight’* –

asterisk for that paradox) linked Surrealism

to Romanticism . . . The end of Keats’ Hyperion

was first published with a last line of fourteen asterisks

I choose to think of as lost poetic footnotes. My feet*

are limping iambic heptameters called ‘fourteeners’ –

their beat, so C.S. Lewis wrote, a jig’s – not with my hip,

plus I stop a lot to catch my breath (COPD).

Keats stopped his poem for its ‘many Miltonic inversions’:

these lines have their inversions too, though they’re not Miltonic.

Tony Earnshaw is their bright, guiding, unmisguided star,

an artist, writer, aphorist, he also wrote poems  –

one pinned to his engineering works’ notice board got him sacked

which any poet would be proud of, a consummation

devoutly wished for as the Duchamp Large Glass bachelors*

eternally wish the distant Bride might join them in the sack

or Tony’s factory reject bulb holder in its box,

impossible to turn on, beyond only connections . . .

 

I take these lines for walks like Klee, another Earnshaw star:*

or Tony’s bus dérives through our old Jewish-Irish zone

for this retrospective – in Irish: ‘dhearcadh siar’, a pun

on Yorkshire and Tony’s favourite viewpoint – ‘back o’ town’.

This recalls Sterne whose name suggests both back and German star* –

your back to town on Blind Jack’s road, will lead to Shandy Hall.

Sterne invented narrative dérives, who Nietzsche figured

as ‘the freest writer of all time’ – and, writing elsewhere,

‘You must have chaos in yourself to birth a dancing star.’*

Contrary Tony didn’t need to be told about chaos,

neo-fascism’s roots (forests now) nor roads to freedom* –

then again, with Yorkshiremen, there’s nothing you CAN tell them.

 

That Sartre related Surrealism to ‘Nothingness,

which is just the endless fluttering of contradictions’ 

suits Leeds: The Back-to-Front, Inside Out, Upside Down City,

as Tony’s Poly boss Nuttgens called his study of it.

Surrealism likewise had its own contradictions:

timeless, placeless – yet specific to both like Tony’s art;

for individual freedom – while circumventing it

through collaborations and automatism*

(Keats own ‘automatism’ some say influenced this)

but this poem’s engine doesn’t have automatic gears.

Drive on. Here’s Tony’s old home with collaborator Gail,

who gave the café it is now a mounted Earnshaw print.

An artist too, for one box she stitched black gloves LOVE and HATE,

setting off red ground reflecting Tony’s anarchism.

She let me use an image of his Blind Engine Driver

for the cover of my poetry book Blind Jack inspired,

that Milton of lines he wrote with navvies, stones and tar,

a civil engineer who made the road past Tony’s door.

 

Tony drew navvies whose picks were lifted by red balloons

à la Lamorrisse’s magical short film for children* –

‘Yes, children like my work, more so than grown-ups I may add’

That’s because I am myself a child in my heart’, he said

in an interview for his show A View from Back o’ Town.

You might guess that after seeing his Aerial Warfare:

Good Fairies Turning Evil German Aeroplanes Into Frogs,

the map of Leeds with bombs going off like asterisks now

a pond where Bashō haiku frogs splash down in printer’s ink.

‘Working in Leeds, lurking in weeds!’ Patrick Hughes’

Earnshavian aphorism conjures its neglect – and Tony’s,

(which we hope this retrospective helps correct*).

The frog he found in Harehills weeds might have been Göring once

but not a prince for a staunch republican like Tony.

 

We catch a 2 back (Tony first met Gail on one of these)*

which passes the Northern School of Contemporary Dance:

Tony didn’t like dancing, but his art’s dance was starry –

shoes in his Crusoe’s Dream, Eve Savouring the Forbidden Fruit,

The Secret Liaison’s high heel engineered with a wheel

for electric slide line dances (but not on my two left feet).

The 2 drops me off near Tony’s favourite pub, The Nag’s Head,

where Turpin drank and hobby horses danced on human feet,

opposite the graveyard with no church (that stop of all stops),

above the site of gallows where Farnley republicans

danced breathless jigs. Their line of most resistance still ran down

through Tony’s electrical resistance to give us light.

Leeds’ old radical newspaper was called The Northern Star* –

my last asterisk’s for resistant art: but bad times need

good humour too to keep up spirits for the coming trials

with Fauvel in the White House to turn the world upside-down.

So join our line dance to this gallery: add your footfall

or ride a flying frog, hobby horses, Shanks’ Pony:

don’t be afraid to laugh; that would