about
Author: Marcus Silcock
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Here is story, from Leonora Carrington, about carnivorous rabbits. And more.
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Image: Trilogy of the Desert, Salvador Dali, 1946. Dali painted The Trilogy of the Desert shortly after moving to the United States in 1946. The desert was new to me, as an immigrant in America, from Northern Ireland to the Vegas desert. Snakes, also new, since St. Patrick chased them out. And also legs, since…
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by Aimé Césaire (trans. Mary Ann Caws).
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Except from Paris Peasant, by Louis Aragon. A French surrealist classic. Pg.55-56. English translation by Simon Watson Taylor.
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“Brooms” by Charles Simic. Performed by Marcus Slease.
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A collaborative poetry experiment for the anthology Original Plus Dub (Hesterglock Press, 2019) edited by Paul Hawkins and Richard Skinner. The premise: to work with a collaborator (Richard Brammer), each producing an ‘original’ (text/poem/artwork, etc.) then swap works and ‘remix’ each other’s original piece. Here is one of our colloborations. It is called “Autechre.” The…
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(Art: Hieronymus Bosch. From Garden of Earthly Delights.
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From book of stories in progress. This one is called “A Mask of Rubber Bands.”
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The Spirit of the Bathtub is a limited edition. You can grab a copy until 1st June 2019. Here is a description of the nomadic surrealist journey: Experience surreal tales from the bathtubs of South Korea, Utah, Turkey, Italy, Poland, and London. Vibration therapy with Spirit monkeys. Trying to define yourself is like trying to…
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A small sample from Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. So much magic. It is easy to get lost in there. The best kind of traveling. (Painting: Miguel Hernadez. Music: Minor Victories. Reading: Marcus Slease)
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A small excerpt from my novel in progress, Never Mind the Beasts. This is the early 80’s, on a government housing estate in Milton Keynes, England. Don Whiskers is baptised into a new religion. Learns how to swish whiskey. Becomes a friend of Jesus. Tries to find a hammer. Acquires a Millennium falcon. He is…
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Kyoto. Spiders. Men in black coats. Minimalist existentialist prose poems by GRZEGORZ WROBLEWSKI (Painting by Janusz Tyrpak. Drawings by Grzegorz Wroblewski.)
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1969. Leonora Carrington.
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“The Subway Station” by Miroslav Holub, 1970. “Ornithology” by Bud Powell. Reading by Marcus Slease.
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by Miroslav Holub. 1970. Trans. Ian & Jaramila Miller
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From my 1st novel in progress, Never Mind the Beasts. This excerpt from the section “Howling Dogs and Crinkled Whispers.”
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by Richard Oelze, 1935.
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by Leonor Fini. A sylphlike figure, a voyeuristic dialogue. Lurking behind the perfect figure, old hags contorting themselves into lascivious gestures.
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Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. June 20th 1931. A hut or a cave by the sea? How does our slavery weigh upon us? The monotony of everyday existence. Most of life is maintenance. The nothingness that is everything. How to be freedom?
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Fantastic Art has been with us since the beginning. The birth of consciousness. Again and again.
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“A part wants to break away from the other part. The part that wants to break away claims a different culture. How many cultures make the whole. Who are the true people from the part that wants to break away and the true people from the part that believes in the whole.| My flash fiction,…
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Some excerpts from my novel Never Mind the Beasts (formally The Autobiography of Don Whiskers) in the new issue of Dream Pop. “In Milton Keynes, during the conversion, they watch E.T. with the branch, the branch is a small gathering, if it is a larger gathering it is called a ward, they don’t have a…
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From 8 year novel in progress, Never Mind the Beasts (formally The Autobiography of Don Whiskers). This part takes place after Don Whiskers has immigrated from N. Ireland to Las Vegas. It is the late 80’s. He feels the pull, temporally, towards the Cold War on his Commodore 64.
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from The Green Monk, Boiler House Press, 2018.
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Subtlety, 1928
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by Jayne Cortez
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Terrific article about the erotic art of Leonor Fini. A sexually charged lifelong revolution
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(From Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, High Risk Books, 1996
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Danishness, homo-sapiens, improv jazz, interconnections, collaborations. Reminds me what matters!! Needed that. Investigative. Imaginative. Open. An interview with nomadic existentialist artist and writer Grzegorz Wroblewski https://www.dik.org.pl/everything-connected-interview-author-grzegorz-wroblewski/?lang=en
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Are you feeling wild. Beepers were wild, especially on studly belts, in the 1990s, in Southern Utah. Here is a studly poem. From my most recent book, The Green Monk (Boiler House Press). (image: Nancy Baker, ‘Wild Man’)
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from my latest book, The Green Monk (Boiler House Press 2018).
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from The Green Monk (Boiler House Press).
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Leonora Carrington, 1951.
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The first woman of African descent to take part in Surrealism, Simone Yoyotte was born in Martinique.
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Ancient elephants and Dalí. From my book The Green Monk.
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From my book The Green Monk (Boiler House Press 2018).
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A collage novel by Max Ernst. Fantastic!
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Super happy to have my book Play Yr Kardz in terrific list of books from Beach Sloth. Check ’em out over here
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Directed by Jean Cocteau
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(1947)
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A Polish Christmas poem. From The Green Monk.
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In Madrid there is a street called the street of lamps. It is called the street of lamps because they sell many lamps. It is also a street with cold floor cafe with sawdust and old medieval style damp alleyways with flowerpots on the balconies. I sat there, in the cafe, after wandering the street…
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One of my favs. Spectacular surrealist. “And So On and So Forth
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I love. Jacques-Bernard Brunius.
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Jerry sported gold chains, even when he broke the bread, the body of Jesus, and passed the little cups of water, the blood of Jesus. It was a thin one, there were thicker ones. It was the end of 1980s, North Las Vegas. French kissing was in the air. Here is a gold chain, from…
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There are so many. Dancers dance them. Lordly swans. Soft swans. Isn’t it time for the swans. Noise rock, post-punk, industrial and post-rock. Temperamental and beautiful. Here is a poem, from The Green Monk, about swans, written in London, in a bone cold room, during winter, warmed by swans, and the thought of swans, and…
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The Candle in the Pumpkin From my new book The Green Monk.
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Zapiekanka? Yes please!! Here is a flash fiction, written during Christmas 2016 in Krakow Poland, in the historic Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. Frommy book The Green Monk. Available from Boiler House Press.
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The faces in the holes were egg shaped.
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From Scenes from a Childhood by Jon Fosse. Translated by Damion Sparks. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
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The Green Monk is out in the world. Collaborations with the paintings of Dali and Leonora Carrington. The green parrots of Garcia Lorca and Paul Celan. The queer erotics of swans. The mysteries of milk in Madrid. Soul suckings. Bazaars and border fluencies. Nomadic surrealist prose poems written in Krakow, Katowice, Madrid, London and more. And…
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An excerpt from my novel manuscript, The Autobiography of Don Whiskers, is over at #thesideshow. Partly based on experiences in Katowice, Poland, Cercedilla (Spain), Madrid (Spain), and Palermo (Sicily). It is part of an ongoing trilogy of nomadic surrealist novels. Part autofiction, part magical realism. This excerpt begins in Katowice, at the Zoo, with pagan deities:…
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Super happy to have my horse poem in the new issue of Bear Review. It is from my book The Green Monk. This poem, in the new issue of Bear Review, is surrounded by many other magical poems and art, and it is a poem, in part, about the garden of eden. It was written…
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The Green Monk is heavily influenced by Surrealist writers and painters who have lived or passed through Madrid in the first part of the 20th century. It is also influenced by nomadic surrealist wanderings around Europe. It has four movements: Built to Spill Psychic Marmalade The Green Monk Great Expectations Here is an excerpt from the…
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A nice spotlight on Dostoyevsky Wannabe over at The London Magazine by Robert Greer. Greer describes the presses radical approach to publishing, in both design, distribution, and content: “With their books retailing at around £5 each, accessibility seems to me an important part of Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and the most obvious comparison for me is the independent record…
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I am very happy and excited to announce my new book, The Green Monk, is now available for pre-order. The Green Monk is a dreambox or a sweatbox of a sugar skull. A black hole full of hairspray and cigarette butts where the deer are twitching. It is the great urn of space dust where yellow…
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Super happy to have an excerpt from Hermit Kingdom (formally The Autobiography of Don Whiskers) in Adjacent Pineapple. Book 2 begins in Spain (Madrid) and the move to Barcelona. This excerpt is all about the body. And also the great Madrid fiesta San Isidro. It is also about friendship and creating a hermit kingdom as…
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After my brother Aaron died I went on a road trip with my brothers and sisters. We traveled from Utah to the ocean of California. Along the way we stopped in Hurricane, Utah, a place in southern Utah where we used to live. I lived there mainly for my senior year in high school and…
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Terrific review of my book Play Yr Kardz Right. Thank you so much Beach Sloth!! “Over the course of the work, the use of a childlike wonder allows the poetry to expose deeper held truths within the world. Lust, love, hope, fear, these roll on through in ways that feel beyond the usual. Highly honest,…
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Do you want the magic back in your life? Me too. Also people. It is so noisy out there. Meaning in here. How about some peace. We are all competing for endless roads to nowhere. But sometimes somewhere. I am at least 60% natural hermit, ditto Ewa. It depends on the day. Of course we…
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Just before leaving London/Tower Hamlets to live in Madrid, I met up with my good friend and fellow artist Stephen Emmerson. We walked across Waterloo Bridge and wandered into a magic hat shop called The Mad Hatter. I ended up with a rabbit hat (thanks to Stephen). It is a special hat. I composed…
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As an immigrant in America I was obsessed with ninjas and invisibility. Also pink hot dogs. I was no good with baseball but liked the slap of the leather. My first pair of American sunglasses were made of gold plastic. Every journal entry ended with I am a warrior of light. Here is the poem.…
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Did you watch Watership Down, the cartoon, as a wee lad or lass? Was it scary? I think it is still scary. The theme song, with its chorus of bright eyes burning like fire, still haunts me. How about Roland Rat? Roland Rat with the floppy doll of my brother before we immigrated to the…
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Fluland published 10 of my nomadic surrealist stories/prose poems from my book The Green Monk (forthcoming from Boiler House Press on 5th November 2018). Some Las Vegas immigrant stories. Gold chains and french kissing. Aliens and fig leaves. German Edelweiss hidden in bibles. And much more! Thank you Fluland!! Check ’em out over here: http://www.fluland.com/2017/05/10/ten-poems-marcus-slease/…
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I have two prose poems in The Stockholm Review of Literature from my book of surrealist prose poems. The book is called The Green Monk. Forthcoming from Boiler House Press on November 5th 2018. One of the poems is based on Dali painting. The other based on a late night in London. They are called…
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https://nevermindthebeasts.bandcamp.com/album/never-mind-the-beasts Folk surrealism. Experimental electronic. Magical realism. Immigrant stories. Outsider art. A journey!! A collaboration between UK musician Stephen Emmerson and Madrid-based writer and performer Marcus Slease. Available over at Bandcamp: https://nevermindthebeasts.bandcamp.com/album/never-mind-the-beasts (album cover by outsider artist Grzegorz Wroblewski)
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There are so many of them. Don’t you get tired. Reading all those words. Dry lifeless fossilised language. Every technology leaves something behind. There is a cost, always, with traveling from one technology to another. For example from oral literature to written, and now, maybe the omega point, the internet. Words, there are too many…
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There are so many places in the world and the grass is always greener. If we are lucky and live in rich countries with professional jobs, or live simply, we can migrate to many new countries for work. We can try to find that perfect new homeland for living, or if not a homeland at…
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“Slease refuses the comforts of rootedness, stability, permanence. In doing so, he represents what the philosopher Rose Braidotti identifies as the model of nomadic subjectivity “in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations both creative and restrictive.” For many…
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The Grand Tour, back in the day, we based on John Dewey and experiential education, at least partially. It was also based on ideas of high culture, and the lack of it in England. Also class and privilege, since mostly it was some aristocratic females and of course upper class males. Get out of the…
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When Ewa and I first arrived in Madrid, Christian Pérez, his wife Megan, and their son Oscar welcomed us. Showed us around their neighbourhood of La Latina, lollies and neighbourhood festivals with sweet meats, up on their rooftop terrace, an introduction to mighty fine Spanish olives, wine, and cheese. And much much much more. They…
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I have never been comfortable with money. The chasing it, living my life for numbers. In America, as an immigrant, I was saturated with the lack of it. Lower middle class, chasing the American dream, the endless informercials and my family trying so many pyramid schemes, doing the grunt work to make someone else wealthy,…
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A few years ago The National Poetry Library in London invited me to record a poem. I decided to read my poem”The Fly“. After the death of my brother Aaron, I began having a series of dreams about flies. Every night the flies came. One night, I tried to speak to one of them.…
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Why do we travel? The weekend getaway. The summer and winter breaks. The islands and exotic locations. What are we looking for? The travel industry is one of the biggest on our planet. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), the travel industry generated 7.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2016. We are looking…
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Super happy to have my poem “Feedback” in Poetry magazine. It is part of my manuscript The Green Monk, forthcoming from Boiler House Press in November 2018. It was composed while ingesting everything written by the great Lydia Davis. I can’t help wondering if some of her approach to writing leaked in there, but also other…
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My partner Ewa and I visit Poland for Christmas every year. My partner Ewa is from Katowice so that is our home base. During our summer visits we explore mountains and villages, but at Christmas it is mostly family. However during Christmas 2016, after 4 months of living in Madrid, our new home base after…
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Panmelys wrote a nice review of my nomadic poetry. She writes: “seeking otherness Of a soul, hungering after ‘Hiraeth’. Which means ‘A longing for something This World can never give’, Celtic source, with an Emphasis on ‘This’ as opposed to ‘Other ‘world” I like this very much. I think it gets at the seemingly contradictory…
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The only award I ever won, and didn’t even enter, was for a poem called “Mr Whiskers and the Picnic Basket.” It was published in Hayden’s Ferry Review as a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award. I was completing my MFA at UNC Greensboro at the time. Then it was republished at storySouth in 2004. This…
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Some of my poems from Hello Tiny Bird Brain (a chapbook from Knives, Forks, and Spoon Press in the U.K.) are now available in Polish. Translated by Adam Zdrodowski. These poems in Polish originally appeared in the Polish magazine Helikopter and are now published in Helikopter‘s terrific anthology of Polish poetry – Przewodnik Po Zaminowanym Terenie [A…
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A terrific launch last night of The Spirit of the Bathtub with Grzegorz Wroblewski reading from his latest work (in English) Zero Visibility (translated by Piotr Gwiazda). Super nice folks in the audience. Nice chats during and afterwards. We are not alone folks!
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“My step father grew up in Warrington, he joined the British Army. A way out. Northern Ireland. He married my mother. In Bletchley, we went to the swimming pool. Hot chocolate, in the plastic cup, from the machine. I’ll give you a pound if you go down the slide he said. In London, in the…
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I just reached over half million visits on my blogger website Never Mind the Beasts. A mile stone maybe. Thank you so much for stopping by!! The blogger Never Mind the Beasts blog has now gone dark to avoid duplicate content. Never Mind the Beasts now has its own domain and a new site. This…
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Las Vegas, 1985, maybe August. I am a newly arrived immigrant in the United States of America. First Vallejo in a trailer park and then Las Vegas. Also, from a few years previously, a new religion, Mormonism. I was almost 12. On the border of puberty with a funny accent from Northern Ireland. Do…
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“For eight years now I have been translating the poetry of Grzegorz Wróblewski, a Polish writer and visual artist based in Copenhagen. So far we have published two volumes: Kopenhaga (Zephyr Press, 2013) and Zero Visibility (Phoneme Media, 2017). We are now working on our third project, Dear Beloved Humans: New and Selected Poems.” —…
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(Marcus Slease in 1995) Irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power.” — Jesse Thorn How do you feel about irony? And sincerity? Are they really opposites? Like all good art, they make for good cross fertilisation. In 1995, after coming home early from a Mormon mission,…
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The new international issue of Past Simple out now. Manchester, New York City, Lisbon, London, Seattle, Krakow, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Liège, Madrid, Cambridge (MA), Worcester (MA), Pittsburgh, Prague, Eindhoven, North Queensland (Australia), and more . . . Edited by Marcus Slease and Grzegorz Wroblewski. The issue is full of wild, electric, strange & wonderful writing. Check it…
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The moon is sometimes bloated. There is so much. Just stop, slow down, take a look at your brain. It is very bloated. Put your thoughts in a balloon, maybe 99 red balloons, and pop them. Over and over. Here are some balloons. From my book The Green Monk, forthcoming from Boiler House Press on…
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My poem “Feedback” (part of my manuscript The Green Monk forthcoming from Boiler House Press) was published in the November issue of Poetry magazine. Nice! Folks published in the Nov issue of Poetry magazine were asked for readings lists. I’ve added mine. Some Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Colin Herd, bill bissett, Victoria Brown, Isabel Waidner,…
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Nice book launch last night. Lots of folks scattered around the bookshop. Great chats with fab folks afterwards. Thanks for coming! Thank you Desperate Literature and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Gud Tymz!
Never Mind the Beasts 