if not in paint

if not in paint is an attempt to deploy the concept of the text as a space in which to bring to light the sense of hospitality. It is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the theme (in Derrida & Dufourmantelle 1997), which has taken increasing urgency in the first decades of the millennium with the global refugee crisis. The sequence aspires to a poetics of attentiveness and radical passivity associated with Maurice Blanchot (1986) and informing Alan Loney’s poetry (Loney 2005, 2007 & 2008). The poem operates a transformation of the concept of home from the narrow one, sentimentally associated with familial and personal identity, via betrayal and calamity, to the possibility of home as openness to the other.