Never Mind the Beasts

Held at the rich mix arts centre in Brick Lane, London on June 18th 2011, Emilia Haugovà and Ivan Štrpka were joined by a half dozen London-based poets to celebrate the sixth event in the Maintenant series. As ever, the Maintenant series advocated a diverse selection of poetic methodologies, ages & nationalities – collecting together some of the most interesting performers Europe has to offer.

A translated Korean folk poem . . for the anthology of plant poems at the Urban Physics Garden in South London last week . . yippie . . . .

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http://soundcloud.com/marcus-slease/audio-recording-on-tuesday

my poem play “Godzenie” in the latest issue of Stimulus/Respond . . .

a fashion/architecture/art mag with some literature . . .

visually centred mag  . .

check it out here:

http://www.stimulusrespond.com

(friday afternoon. Tasmac. Northwest London. 10 min break time . . . recollecting in tranquility the delights of living in Ankara and feeling that thing commonly called nostalgia but for something that isn’t quite grasped or expressed  . .  what is IT?)

many times

i have cabbed upon this

in eski YENI

this is my brain

on Turkish skirts

hello kebab

hello clam

hello sweeeeet buttery balik ekmek

hello beer and no sex

hello dear hello

we live in a desert

in spring it is mud

in summer it is brittle

in winter it snows

Oh Ankara!

do you want my hand

or my bed?

Jeff Hilson’s In the Assarts (My fav Hilson yet!!!)

Tim Atkins Petrarch (from Barque Press) (my fav Atkins yet!!)

Hilson and Atkins Atkins and Hilson a cold drink of water in the desert of British poetry!!!

Kenneth Koch’s poem “On Beauty”

Elffish Jon (the unassarts) . . . . from Linus Slug . . .

Now I remember why poetry matters!!!

Language lives!!!

More to come . . .

It is raining in London. I am in Kingsbury. At a business school teaching EFL. The job will end next Thursday.

I am searching for jobs again. To survive (shelter and food etc. )

This is a continual process.

In the meantime, I have become bored (temporarily) of poetry.

Perhaps boredom can be a good thing, however.

Getting tired of the same type of poetry being written, or poetry in general.

I guess if it is not interesting to me it is not worth writing (reading). There are better things to do than write/read poetry. Such as interacting with friends (not virtually). Eating some curry with friends. Having a BBQ with friends.

I guess I want those worlds of writing and the everyday to come closer to together. I write to awake! To pay attention.

I guess that is why the NY school has been the most influential for me (and some of the beats). It allows the poetry to enter my life rather than be removed for further study.  It is not a specialized activity.

I am trying hard to be a generalist. To be humane. Interactions are the most important thing to me, not ideas. At least not all the world’s abstract ideas/philosophies. Whatever the utopian dream. I guess in that sense I prefer the empiricism of Buddhism. The down to earth pacticality. I am most interested in easing my suffering and the suffering of others. How much of that suffering is based on our choices which originate in the mind/state?

OR

How did I get here?

I am not fond of this rain today.

interview at 3:AM magazine

poems from smashing time at 3:AM magazine

big thanks to Steven Fowler . . .

Publishing Genius has some interesting work . . . no reason poetry can’t connect like Indie music scenes in the 80’s and 90’s or punk music in the 70’s . . . etc. etc.

check out this trailer for a book of poetry forthcoming

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The empty earth . . . .

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Trendy Club
(Elblag, Poland)

put a hole in your skull
says Roger
the lid
is open
but where are my eyes
my balcony opens
don’t let them
keep you here
i am giving you
a ride home
I have not adapted
I envy my neighbours
their incredible skill

Philip Whalen’s Collected Poems

Kenneth Koch’s Collected Poems

Kenneth Koch’s The Gold Standard

Lew Welch’s Ring of Bone

what a city. What time. Grzegorz Wroblewski. Paintings. Books. Louise Rosengreen (another terrific Danish poet). A journey to a place called Christiana. A freetown. A town at the end of the world. The wild west reborn.

And the strand. Ahhh what a strand. I was in a painting. It was a nice painting.

And the bikes. And the colours. I must go again soon!!!

Pics from the life changing trip:

some pics from Copenhagen

poet Louise Rosengreen in action:

Louise Rosengreen

This was incredible . .. a bit of spaceman feeling . . . dreamy . . . a town within a town at the end of the world:

Freetown Christiania

poet portraits

poem plays from Smashing Time

on the third day I walked again to the rynek of Rybnik and met a girl who told me to come to the electricity plant and I asked her about poetry and she said Milosz and I said I know and she said that was all she knew plus someone named Szymborska and I said I know but I wanted the underground and she said she could show me the electricity by the lake and I could take a bike or bus and meet her brother who spoke English and all this more or less took two or three hours of hand gestures in the rynek of Rybnik

on the fourth day I rolled up my sleeves and went into the rynek of Rybnik and combed the place and ate at an Egyptian chain shop called Spinx and they gave me little bits of meat with three different sauces: hot, garlic, and another one I can’t remember and I went again to the discotech which was down down down in the basement in the underground like most Polish pubs and clubs and I saw all the flowers and some statues and I pulled out my camera in the rynek of Rybnik where they minted their own money for the summer and everything seemed named after bugs like Biedronka or amphibians like Zabka and my guidebook to pronunciation didn’t help an iota and I met a 19 year old who gave me her father’s jumper and I felt like her father but ate her dinner and she told me of her modeling ways as we wandered the rynek of Rybnik after 2am in the fog

on the fifth day I did nothing but sweep the room and plan how I could say slices in Polish and count to ten and count change but on the fifth night I returned again to the rynek of Rybnik and drank drinks and looked at the beautiful peeps gathered in groups to drink and behold there we did dance again in the rynek of Rybnik

Godzenie samples

Great reading series with interviews and poetry from European poets. Steven Fowler’s Maintenant Series (if you didn’t know).

This Lithuanian poet rocked it a few weeks ago at Rich Mix in east London and Europe house. Fab fab fab work.

Check out the interview and poems here:

Interview

poems

this poet just keeps on keeping on and spurns out some seriously good language play

Clark Coolidge chapbook

from smashing time

what will and what won’t go. Books are coming in again. All those hundreds upon hundred of books let go in North Carolina to travel the world.

On the way from parent’s gift certificate:

Collected Poems of Philip Whalen

still reading collected poems of Kenneth Koch (the “short ones”)

wondering about getting Joanne Kyger’s collected poems.

These are huge books. Whalen and Kyger. “Zen cowboys” as Silliman likes to say.

Work work work. How much time is spent thinking of “the work.” Whether writing or the day job etc. etc.

and somehow getting as close as possible to life itself. That membrane of language between. Sometimes in the way. Experience. That is what we crave. Why organized religion does not satisfy. Why anything doesn’t. Including poetry. As it develops into rigor mortis. Keep it fluid. Life is fluid whether we like it or not.

is anything new? What I am typing as I am looking at the door to catch the tube for a 1 hr 20 min ride on the tube for work is NOT NEW.

I listen to zen lectures almost every night. Zencast. I want to get closer to life. To you.

best and most interesting literary journal . . perhaps . . . full stop . . .

with a new look . .. and layout . . . get your fill . . .

Jacket 2

REVISED FOUR DAYS LATER:

OH NO, HAS JACKET DONE A MERGER TO BECOME AN INSTITUTION. WHO’S IN AND WHO’S OUT. AGH! THE SAME, AGAIN?

SO IT GOES . . . .

Bernstein against national poetry month

site specific . . . environment specific . . . time specific . . . music specific . . . and so on . . .

first take no revisions from notebook . . . 6.30PM-6.45PM . . . Tues 29th March . . .

Balloons

*****

I’ve got a little hill with little green men and green tanks
in the hills of Milton Keynes

a bottle of pop
&
a bumble bee

summer ’83

*****
Peter Tooth is delightfully
sane
(Jubilee Line. Wembley to Kings Cross)

*****

the boy scouts of America
yeeeeeeeee
still smiling into gorge
way to dry lake
to blow off bottle rockets
with little red white blue flags

******
wee boy bat
in back-
seat

santa on dash

2 galloons

of coca cola

hershey’s kiss
twinkling in moonlight

unwrap what you got

i’m itchy in eyelids

*****

the lizards are still
waiting
in Vegas

******
man leans over
notebook
on tube
from Wembley to King’s Cross
as I write what woman
across said

******

ah cretins

goodbye

such clarity come

help you
, the horrors ,

*******

my scum is so so
deep
skanky

lovebottom

I’m taking

my hat off

it’s almost a midsummer

night’s

popcorn

popping

on the apricot tree

adios!

ego!

SPLASH!

******

we’re all together

at Wet N’ Wild

but you do not

remember

stay, o, stay

amid the hideous faces

hidden

behind
balloons balloons balloons

BALLOONS

******

now i’ve found

the poem

it’s called Balloons

uhhhhgh

so quickly

hop into magnetic field

balloons contain

lolly’s

and clowned out voices

I can do it, too

this is where

we want to go

to the b-day party

or the hot dog party

the balloons in Elblag

northern Poland

near station

a room of cheeseburgers

squeeze into

how do you feel

what do you think

balloons

******

you’ve heard the poem
you’ll love the glove

this is the passage of the arkvark

*****

thank you

steamy

*****

I’m squeezing my head thru

a hole

in the wall

you’re the wall

or I’m the wall

yr wall or my wall

it’s your head

head+hole

hole+head

we’re all in

THIS

together!

quiet nostalgia . . . a bit of the old alternative sounds . . .

might change previous manuscript title to Gypsy Moth instead of Primitive Pianos. Still thinking of titles.

Poems written in Spanish Fork, Ankara, Istanbul, Trieste, Elblag, London.

Revision in progress from Trieste section:

******************************

in heaven

there is television

I’m forever blowing 

bubbles bubbles

senora senora

I’m hung up on 
love

and love I’m there

in a thin white
towel

what if getting old
means 
no one
ever finds you?

I’m always in the tunnel

not older 
not younger

I’m tired of this 
poem
but want

to give you 
everything

senorita senorita

link from friend Grzegorz Wroblewski . . . legendary Polish punk . .. waiting for a signal from “central”

eleven eleven journal

S.B.’s Ghost Shit

soap me sock me I got a table at the rainbow room
big ship
approaching the dock
I’ve got you heavy in this London sunshine
Wood Green March 4th 2011
and an Indian at the table is really a hyena
that’s who I am
suppose has some facts around
yep! imaginary income! UGH!
well the crooks are out
spastic garage feedback blues
S.B.’s GHOST SHIT!
and look at these steeples
shaking
in the first degree
the devil won’t let me be

. . . to be cont . . . . . .

Got my copy in the post today!!! Super super super good!!!! Ahhhh now this refreshes me big time!! Stuff is happening over here in the U.K.. I mean fresh fresh interesting poetry and essays!! And it’s a really handsome handmade nice on the eyes production!

check it and grab yourself a copy quick:

DEPARTMENT POETRY MAGAZINE

trace . . . . . .

1) Many Happy Returns by Ted Berrigan

2) Train Ride by Ted Berrigan

3) Tuned Droves by Eric Baus

4) Nothing to You by Ted Berrigan

Finished those fine books this week. Love to hold them in my hand. Fine specimens.

Heading to poetry library now.

Hoping to pick up

1) Alice Notely: Grave of Light (or some rare chapbooks from the 70’s and 80’s)

2) Eileen Myles School of Fish

3) Philip Whalen (some hard to find rare shit)

ONWARDS!!!

some poems in progress taken off . . . . poems sent onward to magazines who count this humble blog as already publishing them . . . . yadda yadda yadda

I’m thinking of the human voice. Of speech. Of the subversion of communication. Of the pre-fabrication of meaning. Of Emotions language and meanings. What slips past.

What infer requires of the logic of thinking. A systematic ordering may go, have gone, too far into a systematic disordering. What is the form or norm for variation? Who are WE fighting?

I’m enriched by the everyday and how to awaken the discarded the disused language. There is a lot to discover or re-discover in the rubbish that surrounds us. We are smothered and inundated by the language of persuasion, by deadened rhetoric.

A slip of the tongue: a slip thru the wet head.

Or/and the exuberance of song.

I want to walk, or perhaps tear, thru the contempt. The contemplative. Sometimes veer off into the impure pleasures of sounds. Somewhere between a song and a chant.

There is no I shan’t. No commandments.

I find pleasures in these language arts, an impure poetics, which is a motion and a delay. A pedestrian poetics. A nomadic poetics. Always an impurity.

A steady beat or wobbly but something that tracks and derails the mind, the constrictive mind awakened not deadened by language visual rhetoric theatre music education etc. etc.

We think we know what we think but we seldom know what thinks thru us.

Someone has already said this.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetics of the 80’s and 90’s and form as content. The structure/grammar of a language is also content. Artifices of absorption and all the rest.

Considerations of audience and crass marketing. I DO NOT write from the hill above the city but IN the city. Among the rubble of everyday. The discarded. The cliched.

THIS is also a kind of difficulty: the complexity of the simple. Mind it.

Modernist techniques: collage, weird little juxtapositions, (even lineation) are used in advertising but often tells us little, or perhaps a lot, in terms of depth? Is there a faux depth? A foxy depth? A foxy death?

Intellectual and or emotional. Abstractness can be both.

(14/2/2011 from the notebook)

MiPOeasias

perfect position to write.

not sure if the heat from this laptop will decrease the potency of my sperm.

I do not need potent sperm at this time, or perhaps ever.

wondering bout Neil Gaiman?

Children’s stories etc.

It is time for M&M, peanuts, yellow, mostly.

A pedestrian poetics??????

Tomorrow is Monday. How does that feel?

some fascinating answers and questions . . . not the usual fluff:

Interview with Sean Bonney

some interesting new translations of the poet Grzegorz Wróblewski:

Grzegorz Wróblewski

now after a very intense month in London of nothing but almost mindless work my mind is coming round again. memories. Turkey. Italy. poland. nights of flickers and shadows. revising primitive pianos. lookin for a good poetry reading. will be reading at poetry cafe in covent garden in march with a bunch of other poets to celebrate the launch of the movie Howl in the UK. Should be interesting. Nice announcement today about a poetry reading in Oxford at a bookshop called Albion Beatnik. Nice name for a bookshop. Live jazz. poetry. Albion is the oldest name for England. oh white cliffs of Dover etc. Beatnik is the counter culture of the 50’s in America. Yeah. God there needs to be some serious juice. So many youngish and young poets workin sooooo hard to connect communities and build bridges. small presses. labours of love. readings. mighty fine poets out here. Hope the energy explodes again. miss the Openned readings in London. Just gotta not let job stuff suck me dry. Must reconnect with poetry communities soon!!!

Treetop Flyers

“not common speech / a dead level / but the uncommon speech of paradise /
tongue in which oracles/ speak to beggars and pilgrims.”
— Denise Levertov “A Common Ground”

“A language / excelling itself to be itself”
–Denise Levertov “A Common Ground”

————————–

the anti-poetic for the peeps
ok
there’s beauty
a drop kick
a tune or tone
ironic detached warm
compassionate love riddled
the academy is back
lets build another lemon
teaching English as a foreign
grammar

———————————

fine hairs on the white
bedsheet
toast crumbs and sperm stains and malt vinegar and curry
stain (small)

in a dream after a snowy Christmas
in London and eating
a £2 frozen dinner
he said goodbye
to former lovers
in Turkey in Poland in Korea
in a double-bedded room
overlooking the waves

In Wood Green he found
the pound shop

the fan from the old laptop was constant

the rain: stopped. Blue sky patches.

has he shit in
his nose

from the underground

or

from the fresh flowers

blowing out their fluff
to mate?

if you fail to talk
do you fail
to wake up?

the hypnotist all over
YOU TUBE
tricked people into taking
blank pieces
of paper for money

sleepwalkers

how to know or believe
we are more than machines
———————————–