Never Mind the Beasts

“To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.”
— Nietzsche

A terrific interview with Gabe Gudding. Really needed this fresh perspective!!!

Gabe Gudding interview

“There is a black box inside the sun. / The wreck of an earlier universe / is recorded there. There is a black / door at the center of the sun. / Seven steps lead up to it.”
— Joseph Donahue’s Terra Lucida

“Hermes, whisper to us like the sun at night. / Hermes let the soul be wired for sound.”
— Joseph Donahue’s Terra Lucida

“We hover between awareness of being and loss of being.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“All values must remain vulnerable and those that do not are dead.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“A daydream of elsewhere should be left open at all times.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“Millers, who are wind thieves, make good flour from storms.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“The Housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“Every morning I must give a thought to saint Robinson Crusoe.”
— Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

“Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply rooted foundations.”
–Anne Balif

MEMO BOOK JAN 2006

my address is 813
Dae Yang Nice
Gae Sang
Gye Yang
Incheon

Joe is a veteran of the gulf and cooks big plates of rice
Shane has a ponytail and refuses a Korean look
Tim meets us on the roof and runs through the numbers

Wonderland is a scam!!!

my ipod contains:

Jesus the Mexican Boy
Good for Good
Ocean Breathes Salty
King of Carrot Flowers
Promising the Light
Kissing the Lipless
Somebody that I used to Know
Junkyard
Bird Stealing Bread
Bridges and Balloons
Lion’s Mane
Naked As We Came
He’s Simple He’s Dumb
I Don’t Blame You
Float On!

Greenline to Shinlim Station
Exit 3
Bus 5529

Date with Beth 3:45PM at Gangnam Exit 1

Saturday 2PM Yeoksam 3
blind date from Korean Friend Finder

250 grams of meat

wed meet landlord
for hanging closet

Mike and Shane:

Go to Wal-Mart. Stand outside front doors. With Wonderland on the right, walk left. Building has huge number 201!!! There are 5 entrances. Ours is the last.

Mu (dream) So(window)

I think I
utter butter
what exactly
this is just
what must be
spoken
I’m fed with
multi-spoons
what ghosts
my friend
in our battles
for the sun
I I I I I I I i
will not paint
dream brothers
dream lovers

The dentist and I are eating our bulgogi and bean sprouts. Need visions. The small pickles and quick sushi. Korean bread baskets. When you come undone you come undone. You know you know jack shit. How far can we go? What sinks? Balloon based action reaching new heights. Are you aware of the costs? Look at this river. The children splash. The wet gaggles. Our atoms will implode. A never ending line. Welcome to the Korean summer. Keep it neon. Keep it light. Soft face fucked by soft thoughts. Just look at us. Hand in hand. They gave me prozac. We couldn’t read the signs. You threw shit around the room. I bought a tiltable screen. I masturbated. No memories. Fade. Only. For. Today. Now I can look you in the eye.

I am going to buy copies for the Soundeye festival in Cork. So if you are at Soundeye, you can buy the books direct from me if you wish.

Link for ordering is to the right. Amazon.com is the easiest way right now.

But I just purchased some of my books and placed them with small press distribution. Small Press Distribution is a terrific organization. It keeps small presses alive. Very very important. My book will be available in the next few days from SPD. This is way to order for bookshops, libraries etc.

Very happy and grateful that i finally have a book in print. Very grateful to
Stacy for creating the artwork for the cover.

and of course Geoffrey at Blazevox.

I just hope some folks get something useful from it (pleasure for example).

Polish literature in English

“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.”

— Jean Lescure

When I first arrived in South Korea I went into downtown Seoul with one of the Korean teachers named Vicky. Actually, it was literally the day after I arrived in Korea. I had just moved into my flat. I didn’t know my address. I just knew that I lived near a Wal-Mart and a Japanese restaurant. I lost Vicky in the crowds. I had no mobile phone. I knew I lived in Incheon. So I told the taxi driver to take me to the Incheon Wal-Mart. He took me to a different Wal-Mart next to a different Japanese restaurant. It was quite a distance. I paid $60 and got out because he didn’t know the other Wal-Mart in Incheon. He said the other Wal-Mart in Incheon didn’t exist. I wondered if he was right.

I walked for a few hours through all the neon lights and Friday party crowds. Finally I gave up. Got another taxi. I told him I needed the Incheon Wal-Mart. He took me to the same wrong Wal-Mart. Another $60. I got out and went into the Wal-Mart. I at least needed some snacks for the journey. It was about 4:30AM. I wanted to find some ham to snack on. Alas, no luck.

Eventually, I found a night stocker. He was cutting boxes with his box knife. He cut a wee piece of cardboard for me and wrote the address of the other Wal-Mart in Korean on the cardboard. I went outside. No taxis. Walked another two hours. Through the drunk Friday night crowds. Got a taxi. Gave him the cardboard. He drove me to the right Wal-Mart. That was only the beginning of crazy world adventures!!!

Here is what I wrote in my notebook the next day. From 2006:

Incheon Wall-Mart

The weather had kidnapped me. Buzzing around with taxi after taxi. Bridge after bridge. Looking for the familiar.

bloated on elephant wings
bloated on lost brides
bloated on nan

The most wrong love found in cellophane.

Eggshells broke. Live animals crawled thru the shops.

I searched for ham but only found spam.

I lived in a tiny tiny room called a Goshiwon for 2.5 months. Just a bed. Couldn’t stretch my legs all the way. A bar above my head for clothes. A shower shared by 50 or so Koreans. Very very little contact with other English speakers.

It is still a first draft. Here it is from the notebook from 2006:

Gyesan Goshiwon

We walked in water, not on. We worked the washers with foreign signs. We reeked of kimchee. A turtle pillowed me. You must understand how the clothes hung above me. We didn’t throw fevers at the moon. Crazy horizons. My street eyes on plastic toys. Dog-eared my inner ear. Florescent coins. We met in a tunnel while snow licked my lashes. Strike that. We met in a coffee shop. They followed me up and down a step ladder. I received my papers. You must answer me now. How did I end up so far from other foreigners?

Tymoteusz Karpowicz (1921-2005)

ABOUT

Some poetry

Witold Wirpsza (1918-1985):

ABOUT

Some poetry

BRYGADA KRYZYS

Bio

Critical intoduction

Some translated poems

R. Wojaczek (1945-1971)

bio

You Have to Fear the Rose

I, Kafka

Bursa is becoming one of my favourite modern poets. Check out “Night of the long Knives” below. Translations seem quite good (always tricky of course).

(1932-1957)

All his short life he lived in Cracow. He made his debut in the press in 1954, although he never wrote praises of socialism. Three years later he died because of problems with his heart. The first book of his poems appeared after his death.

Andrzej Bursa

Now that I am in London and Godzenie is about to be published I am on fire again. All is possible. There is so much to explore in Poland in terms of neglected interesting poetry. So many interesting poets in the big world!!!

The poet Grzegorz Wroblewski has opened my eyes to Polish poetry I couldn’t find when I lived in Poland for two years. It’s another word/world.

I just can’t get enough!!!!

Grzegorz and I are planning to do joint readings in Warsaw, Copenhangen, London and maybe somewhere in the states (North Carolina).

Yeah!!!

Freedom that elusive word. That much abused word. That overly politisized word. We want it in our daily lives. Some seem to give up. Nothing is worth more! There is nothing to achieve!

The Barbarians

BruLion Magazine

Denmark Portal

Some poems translated from the Polish:

From Mercury Project

ten poems

1) The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain

2) The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

3) Prop by Peter Jaeger

4) Proper Name and Other Stories by Bernadette Mayer

5) Quaquaversals by Geraldine Monk

6) The Land Between by Wendy Mulford

7) Banquet by Geraldine Monk

8) Rapid Eye Movement by Peter Jaeger

The situation is made more paradoxical if one recalls that the other option, in Poland at least, has coexisted (precariously marginalized) with the emerging powerhouse of parnassian poetry. Miron Bialoszewski’s “Pamietnik z powstania” (“A Memoir of the Uprising”), an account of the Warsaw Uprising, suggests an alternative perspective on the same national trauma, from the point of view of a truth that does not allow itself to be extrapolated, generalized, sloganized, and reproduced into aesthetic manifestoes. Sadly an exception in Polish poetry, Bialoszewski continued an avant-garde tradition of considerable merit within a national aesthetic climate that spurned such experimentation, which it considered simply inadequate to the task of uplifting and perfecting the national soul.

Another measure of the situation, although an indirect one, is the following regularity: when the avant-garde did make an impact, and earned a place in the tissue of national existence, it was not in verse but in drama. In poetry, the nation was prepared to recognize itself only in a conservative (classicist/romantic) mirror; playwrights were the ones who were tolerated, or accepted, in their avant-garde robes.

Postmodernism in Central and Eastern Europe

Video from avant-garde album PROJEKT1 (SoulCraft Rec.)

Grzegorz Wroblewski-poems

Bobi Peru-Music and production.

Check it:

Between directed by M. Klinger

from 2006:

all you liked about trees
the light like slanted rain
the dark inside the body
we’ve walked along this road
the moon throws fevers
across florescent cement
pink rivers in your carpet
there is something special
in your membranes
a bench was a special possibility
I could smell the soap on your neck
I’m choked by my inner speed
you tossed simple objects into the air
you put your hands into your pocket
to test its hardness
you added new vowels to my alphabet
should I wait for you to stab me?

A nice short article by one of my favourite poets Linh Dinh about living a more simple life. My life philosophy exactly!!! I couldn’t agree more!

Check it out:

Slim DOWN

Interesting article about the institution of creative writing in universities. It’s spreading. Is it a good thing???

I am undecided, but for sure I have learned the most about writing and poetry outside of the university in artist and poetry communities (Lucifer Poetics in North Carolina, Openned and Crossing the Line reading series in London etc.)

Should Creative Writing be Taught?

This is the area I lived in for two years. I actually miss it sometimes. Although maybe better to visit for a month or so rather than live forever. I recommend visiting. It is not touristy. It has its own strange industrial charm at times.

Wojciech Wilczyk

Peter Jaeger on 1 mp phone

great reading at Crossing the Line tonight in London. Near London Bridge. In the leather district. At “the leather exchange.” Cris Cheek and Peter Jaeger. Love the presence and work of Peter Jaeger. Some pics from 1.2 mp phone. This is not Peter Jaeger.

Sad to the see David Bromige has left us. An amazing poet. Generous and awe-inspiring!!

A nice send off from the poet and publisher Ken Edwards here:

David Bromige

video art from friend and Lucifer Poetics poet Brian Howe (and Ashley). Brian is the man coming out of the cabin in the picture heading of this blog :-)

UP

Grzegorz Wroblewski

From the Polish poet Grzegorz Wroblewski:

Jacek Podsiadlo (for many critics a typically ‘Polish New York School’ poet), is a ‘new generation’ poet but he uses the some poetic strategies like old poets before him but with new ‘ language effects’ etc.

Rozewicz was born before WW II. He is a Polish classic poet, but different. He is not the same as the Polish ‘monumental poets’ (Milosz-Herbert).

Swietlicki is a Polish Beat poet

I think this is not a question young-old, not a generation confrontation, but something else.

Public language versus private language.

Nation versus the individual etc.

Form an “O” with your mouth, raise your eyebrows and then back away slowly. Do not show teeth. Do not unhinge your mouth. Remain calm because loud noises, flailing your arms or quick movements such as running will cause other animals to feel threatened.

there there wake up
mr smarty mr chocolate
cum oh cum oh cum
you’re a fool to whistle
at the flattened bums in Ealing
soap scum in the bath
bubbles in the beer
there’s no way out of this twister
touch me as an animal
we’re makin our way back to the city oh little fish
buckle-up, buck up, dry those ducts
I’m a love boat in yr gravy

This idea, overall, is quite close to how I experience poetry, culture, the 21st century:

Nomadic Poetics

Jukebox tears. We never blamed it on the soil. We filled up. Flowers are coming bees are sucking pollen.The man in the Matrixx needed purpose. Purpose is more important than free will. I’m torn. Saint brother. Be well.

Hello talented writers, fans and friends,

this is a quick email to let you know that Issue 5 of streetcake is now on the site!

Please do give us a visit and have a read. We also have the biographies up for all the writers included this issue.

Our talented roll call is as follows:

sean burn, stephanie codsi,
trini decombe, nikki dudley,
kyle hemmings, P.A. levy,
anna mckerrow, angela readman,
sarah shaheen and lora stimson.

Also, we’d like a bit more feedback. So if you have any thoughts on the issue, please give us an email or find us on facebook/twitter and share your thoughts.

All the best and happy reading,

Nikki and Trini

—

check out the latest issue

a mother and her daughter came to visit. It was a university campus. We went to a building called Cunning linguist. The mother pointed to a ski lift. We rode the ski lift and a sufi said welcome to BFI. We rode the ski lift through a jungle a sign read NEW TURKEY. We fell into a river. A shrunken river. A mini Thames full of mud. We crashed into the river and I lost the mother and her daughter. Men with thick torches waded in the river and I was suddenly seized by child sized frogs. I couldn’t shake them. The frogs wouldn’t budge. I had no torch. Just groping in the river and feeling the frogs on my body.

Just accepted the offer to teach at METU/ODTU in Ankara. Will leave in September. New frontiers coming.

Maybe one book per country. Almost finished with my London ms. Poland ms (Godzenie) will appear in print soon. Still finishing up Korea (Alien Memory Machine). Never mind the beasts (the United States) is making the rounds at publishers.

Google’s assault on writers’ copyright …

Google and greed

last year in Ireland.

I am interested in exploring the relationship between poetry/place. In particular, the attempt to strip down language to a documentary poetics (or perhaps an observational poetics) and a radical subjectivity. I have attempted to explore my own subjectivity and its relationship to an alien location in Godzenie (written while living in a coal mining region of Poland for two years) and in my most recent writing project Alien Memory Machine (written while living in South Korea and London).

My own background and early experiences have largely been nomadic. I grew up in Portadown, N. Ireland in an Ulster Scot community. This early experience was one of displacement. Neither Irish nor British. My family left this community for a better life, first in England and then later, when I was 12 years old, to Las Vegas and then Utah to become Mormon. I have shifted my identity many times from Ulster Scot settler in Northern Ireland to Mormon in America to philosophical Buddhist and nomadic traveller. Yet with each of these shifts there seems to be traces of the former self. Each new environment, or place, does not erase or negate the previous identity but further complicates it. I would like to see my personal history as the wake from a travelling ship while also acknowledging a complex past without repressing it.

I have not fully fleshed out my next project, but I would like to use Turkey as my basis of exploration. I would like to explore the alien landscape of Turkey and question how it interacts with my subjectivity and sense of identity. In Godzenie, I attempted to balance this intuitive sense of poetics (going on my nerve) with the use of more objective means to record or document my experiences as a process based poetics. I would like to continue this exploration of how my own subjectivity interacts with culture and place. Using the English language to make the boundaries more fluid between object and subject, academic discourse and personal writing, pathos and logos.

The American/Turkish poet and scholar Murat Nemet-Nejat, in his introduction to Eda as godless Sufism, outlines his idea of Eda in Turkish poetry as thematic, linguistic and metaphysical. All three elements interact with each other in Eda. He argues that English is much more obsessive with subject and object relations than the Turkish language and this is carried over into the thematic and metaphysical concerns of 20th century Turkish poetry. This subject/object obsession in the English language is another area I would like to explore. Perhaps my project can be explored on all three levels:

1) Thematically: my environment in Turkey. The sounds and sights. What is around me. A docu-poetics.
2) Metaphysically: A critical exploration of my own subjectivity and questioning, in an existential sense, my own ontology
3) Linguistically: exploring how English can become fluid in its subject/object distinctions and allow for a critical/radical subjectivity

A few quite recent books of poetry that have influenced my thinking on process-based poetics and place include: Gabe Guddings Rhode Island Notebook (the American sense of the nomadic mixed with the personal and documentary), Jacques Roubaud’s The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart (an exploration of a Paris of the past), the various NY schools of poetry (the lower east side as both site and subject of poetic activity), and Brenda Coultas’ A Handmade Musuem (the Bowery in NY as a frame of mind, a docu-poetics that enacts the fluidity of the subjective and objective nature of place).

Identity and sense of place has also been one of the pre-occupations of my writing and academic coursework. My MA thesis at Western Washington University was called Resident Alien (my status in the United States) and investigated the mind/body split inherited from Plato and my own personal experience of this split as an ex-theist. It has been ten years since I completed my MA, but the same basic obsessions drive my writing. The mind/body, subject/object, identity and place. My strict religious upbringing as LDS (or Mormon) also has a large influence on these binaries. We are resident aliens of the earth (heaven is our true home) our bodies are temporary vessels and so on. I have also felt this delusional mind/body split in terms of critical and creative in my academic career. By exploring a process-based poetics in Turkey, I would like to acknowledge and attempt to move beyond these various binaries (mind/body, subject/object, spiritual/profane, the mind as place/the political and geographical as place).

got good info from my friend Josh about METU in Turkey. He taught there for a few years. I met Josh in grad school 10 years ago. MA in English program at Western Washington University near Seattle. Now he is doing a phd in Indiana in Turkish studies. Americanism in Turkey. He is getting fluent in Turkish now. He said METU was one of the two best universities in Turkey. And the world technical does not mean vocational but more like MIT. The best minds in Turkey with science professors with degrees from Harvard, MIT etc.

Also chair of the Foreign languages department department is super down to earth and friendly. Very good video conference interview. Starting to feel more and more this is right way to go for a while.

Also got the job at Bilkent but i think it would be more restrictive than METU. The job at METU is teaching in the department of foreign languages and there is potential for teaching literature during the second term. METU feels a lot more inviting and welcoming than Bilkent at least from the interview.

Friend and fellow poet Brian Howe’s Darkness Party

Setting me right on this windy crazy London Monday!

Am I an anarchist trapped inside the body of a capitialist?

Spain is out. Never really felt in. Got job offer to teach at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Maybe for one year and then return to the UK. I want a base. The UK could be my homebase. Till Wednesday to make a decision. Applied to over 100 jobs in the UK but nothing except two week jobs here and there. Not many prospects. I can save a bit of money in Turkey, get some material for a new book, then come back to London. Leaning in that direction. Don’t want to loose touch with friends and poets in London though! Maybe a cross-cultural connection between innovative poets in the UK and Turkey. That could be cool.

BlazeVOX 2k9 Late Spring 2009

Now online:

BlazeVOX mag

do i use my intuition to justify my logic or my logic to justify my intuition?

so got a job offer to teach 9-14 year olds English in Murcia area of Spain. Near the coast. 1300 EUR a month. Awaiting possible interview with Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. If I get the university gig in Anakara it should be around 1000 EUR a month.

And then there is London for the poetry community but have to work during most of the readings and living at bare minimum to survive with average monthly salary of 952 EUR. Temporary. No paid holidays or sick days etc. A morning shift and evening shift almost every day.

I walk four miles a day to work and back to save on transport plus it is good exercise (this is actually good and not a moan).

I do have some great adult students. I feel I am doing something worthwhile overall. But there is a lot of government red tape and so on. Also the subject matter (English grammar and job search classes) do not satisfy or challenge my mind.

I have made some good friends who are also poets in London.

I love having the possibility of connecting to other artists and poets face to face.

Perhaps Spain is bit too touristy. A bit too stereotypical in its happy holidays makers and property hunters. Perhaps. And then there is the difference between ages. University students and teaching English 101, 102 in Turkey or teaching ESL to 9-14 year olds in Spain.

Money is such a strange energy force. A taboo for authentic people. Something people love or try to get their whole lives.

Money becomes a bit important when there is quite a serious lack. I have no desire to own anything except books and my macbook and some clothes. No house. No car. Just my two feet. Enough to eat. Enough to see things. Enough to get a plane ticket to see my parents and brothers and sisters in America once a year.

And my own writing space. However small and simple. But mine. A center.

Someplace . . . no place . . .

I like ambient music and birds and Jack Spicer and True Blood and way down in the hole and I am addicted to the energy exchange of poetry and music and art.

I am in love with simplicity with the paring down. The measuring out. The collecting and discarding. Whittling down.

I am not in love with money. I hope I can be buried cheaply cause I doubt I will have life savings or insurance or or or . . .

So yeah. There has to be a place for folks that don’t wanna play the capitalist game.

Spain vs. Turkey vs London??????????

http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type=hd,video_uid=0a9fdab41c1be2c087

we were glad our skin had been
broken the heads were cut
from defenders 150
women of the castle over-
whelmed by steaks
of fire we were reduced
to nature’s garb there is
trouble in my bosom
the blind prophet
had a squint
bound into
the boundless
on this blank
sheet of paper
the mythopoetic
cabbage it’s summer &
large spiders
are entering
the house.

a lonesome hymn
in perpetual motion

suffering and solace
in the praxis of living

a paradise of blemishes

what we said was not
what we wanted
what was waiting
forever, undiscovered

this is a space
race

from Mr. Spicer:

“I died again and was reborn last night / That is the way with we mirror people / Forgive me, I am a child of the mirror and not a child of / the door. “

Some interesting readings on the blog and in the journal. Check it out:

noo journal blog

noo journal magazine

Unnecessary quotation marks

an ongoing project

T H E D A I L Y F I L T H

poets writing 1 poem a day for the month of April

The Daily Filth

Acton Town (West London)

to be seen right
to the shagged edge
the action is leaving
us craning for the corpses
the college of good industry
the collage of what comes
what may comma coma
sometimes dense
sometimes a new city
not a wry gamble
say say I’m best
forgotten say say
to be seen a love catch
no dogs no cycling
don’t climb the fence
don’t climb the walls
to be seen in the blinding
white eyes sucked back
to dispute the philosophies
of night

Shepherds Bush (West London)

the biggest urban shopping blooms or busts
may yr head not turn the other way
may your brain not be boxed
may the ass be asked before bumping
before being bruised on the soft
seats of the underground
may you be well for the imagination
may you no longer be sick from the rumors
may you may you I dunno be rambled
tadpole tadpole a tad hullabaloo
can you hear yourself crumble
when you sleep can you fetch
the staff the stately staff we’re
graying and our post-capitalist
marches float through the dark
may you overreach reedy and red
may you wake with the nymphs
of Dionysus with a twig between
your teeth oh yes may may you
lop off your fat and refind it again
in some unknown city with the creature
creeps the pipes of the boat sucking
you out from under from from the suitcase
unpacked and repacked always too
heavy and always left behind

nor dust
thou
know where
thou art
to be

in this world

oh hair let down
oh wet head

you cannot go swimming and
look after your
clothes

let us chill
like children
in great disorder
and much disdain
for chores

this thy didst
in joy whilst
thou wert
living

A personal perspective on Bob Cobbing

I am revising Godzenie. 1st proofs from Blazevox came the other day. it is coming together. I am getting happier and happier with it. I’m having fun again and feeling lighter.

Peed with Sean Bonney behind a tree in Hyde Park.

Thinking about writing. Re-reading old blog entries from four to five years ago in North Carolina. The excitement. The possibilities. It is coming back round again. Jeff Hilson, Sean Bonney, Amy De’Ath, Steve Willey, Dez, Nikki, Trini, Jim Goar, Michael Zand, Alyson Torns, Tim Atkins, Alex Davies, Jack Spicer, Sophie Robinson, Frances Kruk, Ken Edwards and others are catalyzing me.

Their writing and their in-the-fleshness are making me feel real!!! It is good to feel real.

I think I have grown tired of the so-called linguistically innovative poetry. There are exceptions of course. But I want fire. I’m a visceralist, a new brutalist. Textuality and theory are not enough for me. Not near enough. I need playfulness. I want to laugh. I want to feel awe. I don’t want only so-called textuality.

I want to be entertained and challenged in mind and heart. Dare I say authentic. At street level. A larger world outside the walls of language.

My favourite poems are struggles are love poems are an attempts to reconcile. They ultimately fail. But I hope their failure gives off sparks, gives off energy, gives away possibilities for surviving outside the garden.

Godzenie is one big awkward love poem for the birds!

new poem for Godzenie

I’ll tell you
about Godzenie

the reconciling
of marvelous
machines
that stamp
our heads

bricks
from a blown-up
post-office

fluttering
letters

a twisted
metal sculpture

here’s the kick

our tune
for the endless egg

the hills that trace
the fall

don’t ever
get famous

bodies
bound by sand

the morbid sentence
called out
of hearing

dictation for
the blue revolution

that infinite passage
of breaking light

an alien memory
machine

shoes of a girl
racing towards
the door

won’t somebody
tell me something

I poke
my fingers
through this rubble
with a heavy Eurydice

a heavy hammer that chimes
against this metal

eyes of mad celluloid

I would have killed
the snow that fell
on Katowice

the wound down
clock that beats
against this robot
heart

Skype interview is next Friday. Got the date wrong. Take off my shirt now. Do some writing :-)

10 min until the interview . . .

in good news

MY MANUSCRIPT GODZENIE, WRITTEN WHILE LIVING AND WORKING IN THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTIAL OF POLAND, HAS BEEN ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION BY BLAZEVOX :-)

YIP YIP!!!

Well, I am more sure now. Poetry and writing are number one. It is the one thing that can keep me whole, sane, mindful. Everything else falls away, eventually. What I mean by poetry is very broad however. I don’t just mean the books I read and the words that I place on the page. I mean the positioning of my mind. Poetry is just one practice that engages me, brings together my mind and body (at least for a while), makes me feel less self-conscious by plugging me into something much bigger than my self. For others there might be other practices, other ways of connecting.

I am also more sure that what I do for a job matters A LOT!

Maybe job matters even more than location. Not because of career or money, but because I can’t compartmentalize my life. But I also need healthy holy shots of community. To talk to other artists and writers.

Everything feeds into everything. I need to create an environment that is stimulating. I am obsessive. I have given up trying to be someone else. Someone less obsessive. Someone sensible with a career, retirement, life insurance, a car, a house, 2.5 children. I don’t in any way judge others that find happiness in those things. But I need something else.

I also don’t want to float around without purpose, without an achor.

That has been my dilemma for the last four years as I wondered around Asia, Poland, and now London. London has not been easy at all, but it has helped me to resee what matters.

Steve Willey and Alex Davies work their asses off to create an amazing reading series and community (aptly named Openned). See http://www.openned.com

There are also some really exciting younger and youngish poets in London and the UK (see http://www.pastsimple.org).

And this matters to me A LOT!!!

But I also need an environment from day to day to stimulates and challenges me. I have been teaching job searching skills and how to click a mouse and a lot of basic English for the last 9 months in London. I have been teaching really basic ESL and some slightly advanced grammar and speaking for the last three years.

I admire those dedicated ESOL faculty that do this day in and day out for many many years. I believe in it.

But I cannot. I am crashing again.

Crashing like Korea, like Poland.

So I have an interview, via Skype, for Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. The interview will take place in 45 minutes.

I haven’t slept much for the last two weeks. I have been staring at the ceiling all night.

I need some serious stimulation and challenge!!!

So maybe this will help. If I can get the job.

The university seems very good from what I can tell. Bilkent University has a lot of international faculty and I would be teaching English 101, 102 and maybe some philosophy. Content based instruction means I am not teaching ESL (grammar and speaking etc.) from a textbook. There is a subject. Also a free flat near or on-campus. A library with plenty of English books and the opportunity to start paying my student loans in America and perhaps save around $9,000 per year for two years. I could restore my credit in America and renew my expired Green Card.

I don’t know if I can even get the job at Bilkent University. But I do know I want to return to university teaching. I want to learn again. I want to research and study and be challenged. Not a retreat from the so-called “real world.” I want to teach the 18 year old freshman some existentialism. I want to hear them. To listen. To learn.

I have tried being:

a dishwasher, a cook, a telemarketer (4 years), a construction worker, a marketing executive (2 months), a cement mixer, an EFL teacher, a kind er garden teacher, a robot, a clerk, a filer, a database entry, a fish and chip and so on.

I want my mind on fire.

I am no good at the blah life.

Signals magazine

what do you think
oh think
in yr mini
Vienna
through any window
piss
is raining
from the sky
sons and daughters
ninety times
out of a hundred
piss
on the streets
with knapsacks
& immigrant mullets
it is easy to put
a hole in the ground
and make a great
piss
what’s seen is
sucked
away and what
remains
is a big
train station
toilet
25p per
entrance &
exit
is this a sad
romance?
nothing is really
uncovered
stories directly
from the drain
perhaps doing
that
or this
& pissing
it all
out &
everything

37.

I was raised
under the
stands

under the
immovable
stars

forever alien
on my brow
now

this eye
twitch

this pastel
night

what is is

38.

Everything has gone

white
blinding
white

there is no
tunnel
there is only
this

the brain weaves
a strange kind of music
and our bodies
seem unable to forget
the memory of what it feels like
to be properly seen

all I have said is truly a conversation
with light as a shadow puppet
among the living

we can find breathing but we can’t find air
that defective space under which
all our selves co-mingle

it’s in the air between
you and me baby
a special way
of exing your self
you’ve come to understand
the mask as an image
the image as a house of cards
a collapsible organ
in the centre of the chest

Sounds Rite

Sent some poems from Alien Memory Machine over to The Beehive and they reshuffled them by some kind of algorithm or human hands? Must be read aloud to affect and make effects.

There are patterns (of sound and chunking and repetition).

Some new sense follows I think.

Check it:

The Beehive

Characteristics of teaching English in FE colleges

The course is generally delivered by a very limited number of staff, including part-time and sometimes temporary staff.

Staff in FE have heavy teaching loads, across all levels. A typical week for a full-time member of staff includes 24 hours of teaching, which may be in several different subjects and ranging from pre-GCSE to degree level.
Although preparation time required for HE teaching is generally greater, there is no allowance made for this.

Staff have no admin support and will be required to complete all admin associated with their teaching jobs themselves, including some marketing and selling of courses. This may include tasks such as writing and sending information letters out to individual students, as well as filling in registers, keeping course files, and making schemes of work and lesson plans.

Conferences aimed at FE lecturers tend to be focused around meeting government targets, linking with businesses, the skills agenda, and changes in relation to the development of Vocational Diplomas and HE in FE. They are less likely to be about new research, subject areas, or even teaching and learning.

Of Our Cranial Love for the Lion

we were reading toward Bethlehem
suffice it to say we were tired elephants
we were reading toward Bethlehem
we were reading toward Bethlehem
with wet blankets looking for new insurrections
suffice it to say religion stinks
but really we were reading toward Bethlehem
we did not want the skin of the farmer
we left the doctor on the side of the road
we were reading toward Bethlehem
as part of a seminar on special problems
for honest mystics
we were reading toward Bethlehem with old texts
the old texts pointed toward Bethlehem
suffice it to say we were reading toward Bethlehem
suffice it to say we were reading toward Bethlehem
suffice it to say we loved the rocking wet breast moment
suffice it to say slouching
we were reading toward Bethlehem
slugging through old texts toward Bethlehem
with insurrections toward Bethlehem
suffice it to say reading toward Bethlehem
in love with the lion

Revising manuscript Never Mind the Beasts. Quite a bit different than my current work. A lot of the poems were published in journals like Backwards City Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Conduit, Diagram, Effing Magazine, Forklift Ohio, Shampoo,
Spork Magazine, Talisman etc. And read at Lucifer Poetics events.

Might send it out in a few months. feels good to revisit it. I can see it much clearer after letting it sit for five years.

II. Castle without King

after the leaving I shaved my head
my words squared off
I shaved my head
in dialogue
I
found

the pure joy of plumbers

V. Hotel of Lost Light

When hair covers the face like a tent of images.
When tires are broadcast in treble.

O, brother we are lost in a room with buckled flexi glass.

Our wet fingerprints refuse to dry.

The mind
is a magnet
& we cannot take leave
of our senses.

There’s too much blood
under the bridge &
the pigeons refuse to carry messages.

From Who Sleeps with Who

There is no deciding what breaks. My eyes take forever to adjust. The hard fish. A Bielsko Biala summer. Hand in hand.

Immediate heartbreaking magical combinations of the fragmented.

Be bolder Sisyphus. What are we humming? Like bedded with unlike. What bed doth rock our bones?

A moan under the tables. Our suffering is your suffering. This Tropicana elevator parrot music at the local Westminster Starbucks.

Hard cums round. Try not to rush the passage from comedy to tragedy. Life does a fine job on its own.

I need to retire to another room. The so called LIVING room.

That pancreatic rabbit the fox sorrow outside the night window. To dance to slurp to . . . . . . .
That boyhood dew that mildewed ceiling.

Who runs through these twists? Night the marker doth.

The child grows like many over yon town into auto sound. Nay knave. Looping knave.

Assuage the villainous levels of digressions. O’re the lock smell

THAT CLUBBED FISH

THAT CLUBBED FISH

A man in heat.

I can’t find my horse.

This has everything to do with love.

Excellent video here. Fascinating interview and performance of concrete poetry:

Bob Cobbing

Sir magazine

A great mix of bands playing in the back of a London black cab. Just listened to My Morning Jacket and Death Cab for Cutie. many many bands!!!

Black Cab Sessions

From the North American section. This one takes found language from the serial Queer as Folk. Each poem takes its title from the main shooting location of the North American serial or horror film. Rough draft as always on this blog.

Pittsburgh

Queer as folk seem
to the Canadian
dollar he would
not have been
part of it as
one beast
torso porn
star naked
maid party
planner &
correspondent
advertising ex-
ecutive for Van-
gard

Moving Pictures has three sections:

1) Wonderland (A serial poem from South Korea)

2) London (poems written at or near tube stations since May 2008)

3) North America (poems moving through around with American serials and horror films)

Alien Memory Machine:

One long serial poem. 44 sections so far.

Waterloo (South London)

Some of the
valves are working
harder. Than. They should.
Hold yr horses. Perk up. He leans
nearer toying with his clips.
the sexless
life of childhood I need
to go and do something
nerdy. Leaning into
the rancid. Sugar
packets square unstained
table wood. Clean. Protestant.
Choke cherry. I’m moving
away from the conveniences.

I want more intimacy. More play. More direct contact with in the flesh humans.

The dishes are staring at me. I am sticky and need to shower.

fascinating report on BBC radio:

Another History of English Poetry

awareness

Hermit Kingdom (complete. renamed Wonderland. Revised and incorporated into Moving Pictures)

Resident Alien (complete and renamed Alien Measures)

Never Mind the Beasts (complete. partially abandoned. partially incorporated into Wonderland)

Godzenie (99% complete)

Moving Pictures (85% complete)

Alien Memory Machine (I have no idea when the serial will end)

Waterloo (South London)

Every night you do you put
on a new costume I’d think
you’d really like the discipline
I’m trying to work
that out he must
be quite good
decide what level
yr at. Sauna. Completely.
You’re not allowed
any gals don’t get
too close now
we’re working
together it’s one
of those sports. I’m crap. Tantrum.
The sexless life of childhood.
Some of the valves are working harder. Than. They should.
That carefully spoken middle class accent.
Hold
yr horses. Perk up. He leans
nearer toying with his clips. Laboring. What are you
doing now? How much
is it normally? coupled
into memories I need
to go and do something
nerdy. Leaning into
the rancid. Sugar
packets square unstained
table wood. Clean. Protestant.
Choke cherry. I’m moving
away from the conveniences.

the stick of a blind human