Never Mind the Beasts

anxiety does not equal passion

I am, and I know this is a cliche, happiest in the NOW!!!

I am afraid of making some money and getting comfortable and turning into a middle class humpty dumpty.

I want to go out with a bang. If sooner sooner rather than later with no mind or teeth!!!

Some interesting mags and readings coming from or energized by Naropa and her students:

Monkey Puzzle

In Stereo Press

apocryphal text

A performance at Nightlight, in Chapel Hill NC, as part of the 919 Noise showcase. Featuring Brian, Ashley, Wyatt, Wyatt, Ryan, Cameron, and Josh. The video was shot by Justine.

Nightlight Performance

23rd Feb (English as a foreign language, intermediate, 15 students, Ealing and West London College)

REPORTED SPEECH

&

DIRECT SPEECH

The reading for today

thieves attempt to
steal diamonds
from Millennium
Dome caught
by 200 police guns
hidden
in bin liners.

Questions include:

In the other story why
did the
criminal use a pen-
knife
to cut his way out of the crate?

Discuss the weak forms.

Check the meanings
in yr
mini
dictionary.

Emphasise Marxist
Feminist

empathy while
working in groups.

The future is always just

around the corner
beginnings end, beggings
begin with brass shoes
we’ve saved our seats
and kept them
dry, my mouth
mugging
was worth £5, focus
on the phrases, on
the phrasing
what is the context?

When class is
dead I
feel it

in my groin
in my scrotum
in my temples

A nice interview with some discussion of soft and hard surrealism:

interview with Johannes Göransson

Some visceral poetry and essays:

Action Magazine

captain beefheart Lick my Decals Off Baby

single malt whiskey

cheap quiche

Bergman’s the seventh seal to end the evening

22.

transmission ahead
the lipsmack of my Estruscan face

scrappy connections and pace
half blind in my Napoleonic hat eating skin bits

pastels lick the starched shirt
overseered feminine elbows into you

sentient humanity
signed up for dirt skirt

gotta keep this natural thing
cut the slavonics

sage in the robust word muck
diaristic sherbert dip

inceptive tang in the memory gap
gesundheit wie viele es muss sein

chartreuse child in the intimacy of the cavern
wheeled out the droneship

my city friends
pentecost king in the marching

drum bit and tin bit
midnight blitz of mute affection

worked over the unchanging bed
nausea in the unknown

guarded by the mythic face
death is demanding

I’ve lost the frontman
the stunt double
the greasy L of the last good lube

pontification is asswine
greased up and swelling

mad pigs

stuck in the transmission:

all unattended
selves will be removed
by the police

As Beehive Magazine ends its premiere week of publication, the tendency is to look forward rather than back. However, reflection is a necessary, and often difficult, process.

During the past week, the question towards the point of Beehive Magazine has crossed the editor’s desk many times. What is Thee Beehive’s mission? This is a difficult question to answer.

To begin, Beehive has no grand socio-political bend. It is not geared towards the politics. It is not out to change the world. You won’t find any marxists here, unless they’re harpists as well.

So what is our mission? To start simply it is literature. But it is anti-literature, as well. It is both art and anti-art. It is both building and tearing down. To turn a popular phrase, it is art for anti-art’s sake, though the inverse is true, as well.

To situate it within this age of labels, Thee Beehive can be said to follow a primitive post-dada magical surrationalism. To put it simultaneously more plain and more esoteric, Beehive Magazine is a primitive post-dada magical surrationalist publication.

We realize stating these facts is bound to alienate some readers, but it will bring more in as well. Beehive Magazine is not designed to act as the same old litarary revue. It is designed to act as a bellow of fresh air to the increasingly stagnant literary community.

Of course, Thee Beehive cannot do this without its readers and contributors. So please, keep reading, and keep writing.

And, watch out, big things are coming.

Sincerely

Christopher T Schuman
Editor-In-Chief

Bienenstock Thee Zeitschrift
Public relations officer

Beehive magazine

shaved off the beard. drinking single malt Glenfiddich.

The very passionate poet (and manager of the fabulous West End Lane Bookshop in London) Mr. Graham gave me a free bonus book yesterday: Seeking Air by Barbara Guest.

Jacket’s current issue focuses on Barbara Guest.

So next week is Barbara Guest week for me!!!

And a bit of Savage Detectives for the tube.

27 June 2004

moving moving moving

This has been a week of moving prep. Tomorrow is the big moving day. My normal reading/writing schedule is way off track. So, hopefully monday I will have a new used powermac with new used studio crt monitor mac OS X and a new writing spot. I am eagar to get down and dirty again.

Thursday was a blast of Lucipo poets. Good on the spot improvs and unrehearsed play. Mr. Todd did a very remarkable reading of his long poem. He told the audience we were the frogs. It was scary story time. Some lines amazed me.

Lucipo is moving alright (I prefer a kind of mind moving but now and again a walk in the woods is quite good for the nerves as well).

Tony’s recent blog post about class issues and the romantic myth of the artist is very interesting. I have a lot of loans but I would rather have loans from attending school than from buying a fancy car etc.

I constantly remind myself I am damn lucky

Sure poetry is work (and play). What’s the difference between work and play?

Sure it’s not quite a profession. Maybe a professing.

After 14 years of fast food, department store clerking, and a shit load of telemarketing (I did meet my wife at a telemarketing company though) I am very very very lucky to teach and write.

I am so glad I am longer trying to convince people who do not have land to buy burpie seeds to meet my selling quota.

That’s not to say teaching/selling is cake. It can be draining. The politics of university life can interrupt writing space (mental space). As a lecturer or adjunct it can be very difficult if the university wants to save money by classifying you as part time and unworthy of health benefits (I finally have health benefits for the first time at the age of 30. But that’s a political issue across the board. Many people have much worse situations).

I am not on a royal cushion but I am doing something I love. I have passion. I hope other people might have a passion for working at a department store, climbing the ladder, selling stuff over the phone.

Am I still selling? Is this blog a marketing strategy. Do I want to climb the ladder and one day be like the ceo of poetry clogs/blogs?

But I am low on the pole. I’ll never be as good as the great bloggers.

How to win friends and influence people in the world of poetry blogs? HM>>>>>>

One things for sure: I am sick of poetry as stinky cheese. Here. Eat this. The French eat it all the time. It’s good for you.

I would rather hear/read poetry suggesting possibilities than poetry all neat and polished.

I like my lid open. Stiches naught or easily torn apart as opposed to seeming naught.

Is poetry a stay against confusion? For me it is. But only for a very brief time.

By tomorrow morning I’ll need to question words again.

I will need to be moved.

29.

Syntax is sadistic and first rate grass hardens. I’m sick of proficient regrets and ach so I’m texting my way into a pre-emptive heaven which indeed is most modern.
————————————————————————————————————
What is heralded in the folkloric plomp of our text spume. Read the text but don’t answer the questions. Which image do you like the most?
————————————————————————————————————
Indivisible equations mother the sky but I’m searching for a softer seat to engage in Socratic discourse.
————————————————————————————————————
It appears thought is a daguerrotype of a pharmaceutical climax. Have you ever created something artistic? Forget the crowds and what’s been taken from you. How do you deal with the new light?
————————————————————————————————————
Hallucinating laughter and clogged with the bossman, dictating restlessness, I couldn’t stop looking at the fat faced boy racing around a tree with blinking shoes. I couldn’t stop myself from tonal clashes. Please help with the spotlights. I’m sure I’m gonna be somebody but I’ve got a few bits to do. A jolt from the electric fridge. It shits on its own darling. There’s something waiting by which a hue is red, cast-off by a glance and filthy around the edges. We are all distant bushels. Hardened.
————————————————————————————————————
Salt broke the decks and a speckled eye is in the corner. Yes this is a painting and the walls are painted white how else could reality arise in immolation?
————————————————————————————————————
We were insulated by the molten leather in Ravenscourt park. West London is not protected from the groans. Ah, the groans. Acute, and yet unable to speak.

awesome passionate chats with Steve Wiley (poet and co-organizer of Openned reading series) and Graham (manager of West End Lane Books).

Picked up:

1) Seeking Air by Barbara Guest
2) Loop by John Taggart
3) Don’t ever get famous essays on New York Writing after the New York School
4) The Green Lake is Awake selected poems by Joseph Geravolo
5) My Vocabulary Did this to me: The collected Poems of Jack Spicer

the story
nbc report

you are going to die

young hot pics of Tom Pickard and Susan Musgrave and Bill Griffiths and Gillian Clarke and Bob Cobbing and Geraldine Monk and Wendy Mulford and many more reading at the amazing Morden Tower, Colpitts and other exciting historic northern venues (round about the 1970’s)

check it out historic poets

An interesting sexy interview with Ron Silliman over at the best american poetry blog:

Ron Silliman loses his virginity

Wonderland (South Korea)

Rumi and the fire chicken, circle dancing, mosh pits, meat on a stick, baskets, gangnam escorts, window shopping for women, barber poles with a surprise inside, plastic eyes, a serial love poem.

Block 7A (Poland)

Zory gone eliptical. Anielle Vogel. The erotics of small birds. A philosophy of blocks. Tribes of old cronies. Wodka in winter. Matura. A burning. A charing. A using up.

Hotel Diament (Poland)

composition by sentence, a spy novel.

Return to the City (Poland)

Katowice. Christmas 2008. sentence by sentence. getting on top of it. once more up the coal smudged hill once more through the desperate train station. Reconciled exile. reconciled divorce. happiness comes from the frames.

It is very hard to imagine not existing.
To imagine nothingness.

Today is Jan 6th 2008.
Two days of snow shut down London.

Every time I roll up the blinds they roll back down.
I’m looking for new ways to bring in the warmth.

Fog headed and crawling among rocks.
A rewiring is always on the horizon.

I want to work with language.
I’m eager to get back into Wonderland.

I like thinking of all the small bones that make a bird fly
all the small books that make a life.

1.

performing childhood is something else
where light is a lonesome hymn
touching commits to memory
rhetorical proof in perpetual motion
love’s unbroken composition
approaching the furthest room
so tonight the gaps are graced
suffering and solace
in the praxis of living

to speak back to stones

there are visions in this mudpit

totem mud and mythical speech

a paradise of blemishes

music drawn like concepts

the world spins loneliness
from one skull to the next

tombstones and doors
the wet blanket
nighttooth faxed to the underworld
wild dogs at train station

there’s no eternity
without mythical speech

crazy oblivion terminates in the nude
bathing in pine needles
skin stripped from the bum
the most inquisitive children
on the sundial of the dead

12 more hours of revisions of first and last sections of Godzenie.

Getting really close now . . .

getting close to happy with this manuscript that has picked up bits and bobs from manuscripts in North Carolina.

Think this is my first mature manuscript.

Wonderland needed some rethinking but the last section written last Christmas in Poland REALLY needed work on rhythm and pacing.

A bit more tinkering, but not much.

The first section of Godzenie is called Wonderland. I have found a new way in. Revised completely. Four years ago I started working on Wonderland in Korea and now bears very little resemblance to that manuscript. The other sections written in Poland are also radically reworked. However, the Polish sections still bear the seeds (and many poems have not changed since I came to London).

I think I need some stability and calm to write and hear myself write.

I am currently considering going into technical writing. Stable. perhaps sometimes boring. But stable. A counter pose to my other writings or perhaps even a potential influence. I am attracted to the idea of scrubbing down the language and keeping the complexity. Not instrumental (perhaps the main difference between technical writing and poetry) but some shared aesthetics.

There is one of those big software companies in Galway that often looks for an entry level technical writer. Ireland could be a good next move (although not for a while). I am starting to get more comfortable (overall) in London, especially since there is some great energy with the readings and future poetry klatch meetings.

My room is super clean. dusted. vacuumed. The kitchen and toilet are sparkling. That makes me happy. Now I feel ready for a writing day tomorrow. More work on the Wonderland section of Godzenie. It is turning into a love poem to Rumi (who happens to be French). There are goshiwons and communal showers and some homoerotic suggestions. Fire chicken keeps making an appearance. Wonderland is taking me into new directions. Writing from the outside. Dictation. Orpheus. The radio.

snow snow snow in London. Buses cannot handle it. College closed so no classes to teach today. Maybe tomorrow. Nice to have free time to write but mostly bad since I am a temp worker paid by the hour. No holiday or sick pay. Also have midterm break in two weeks which is a whole week of no work or pay. -£100 and counting . . .

thinking I need to find a way into with a job with real benefits. Or just pack up and move to China where the conditions are much better in terms of standard of living for adult/community education teachers.

issue 15 of Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics:

Poetry: Peter Riley, Mark Irwin, Maurice Manning, G.C. Waldrep, Julia Hansen, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Vona Groarke and Molly Bendall.

Supplement I: Fascicle of Poems by Franz Wright
Supplement II: Blind Date: An Anthology of Argentinian Poets by Lliana Heer

Interview: Laura Severin with Valerie Gillies

Review: Rebecca Porte on Susan Stewart

Recent & Notable: Notice of recently published books by Peter Riley, Carolyn Guinzio, Yermiyahau Ahron Taub, Maurice Manning, Jack Spicer and George Oppen

Cover Image: Christ Berg

check it out:

Free Verse

Some great reading this morning. Alistair Noon’s
Swamp Area

hit me in all the right places. Cranking it up now. Thank you Alistair and Intercapillary Editions.

cutting thick slabs of Polish Christmas ham
eating prawn cocktail crisps
hanging laundry
printing official transcript requests
trying to ignore the dust motes
looking at the cover of Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives
thinking of watching The Wire
trying not to think about evening ESOL class
wondering about the sore on left side of tongue
ignoring the morning dishes
thinking about community
thinking about the continuous while loving the past simple

i’m cleaning up this blog
there is too much stuff
perhaps it is also time to shave my head
get it nice and simple
a simple head
gorgeous
marvelous
a new head trip
community community community
what do we mean?
the banking community
the poetry community
bank on The Canon
bank on yon mini poetry celebrity
I don’t know what everyone else
has to say
I haven’t said anything
I don’t know my size
my cultural capital is quite small
strangled in each other’s reflection
noted in pleasure
who’s writing the script
inspired to do wrong
socially constructed memos
conduits identify our selves
recognize the flake
in yr midst
I used to think I knew
what I was doing

so much writing out there. In the good book they say to sort the wheat from the not-wheat. texts are multiplying at increasing rates. I have heard the distinction between innovative and mainstream no longer holds sway. At least in America with so many soft surrealists and mags and blogmags popping up everyday. The Fence revolution etc. There is good poetry in all “camps” of course. Not population control but some good strong critics and more selective publications? perhaps more vision?

or perhaps poetry communities swapping their writing? cell to cell . . .

next month my alien card for the United States of America will expire. my travel document expires along with it.

there is a lot of noise out there. cultural production and self promotion and so on. Sometimes I want to be somebody but when I put a foot forward I feel like going below the lines again.

In short
as always
I want simplicity

and perhaps like most (all?) writers I wonder about writing. Whether there is too much being published. Whether what i write contributes to the noise or makes something of it.

it is hard to keep up with all the work.

I love the little well-made chapbook of poetry. Sometimes those little books are far better than the official collections.

and the simplicity. ah yes the simplicity.

One of my favourite presses is having a book launch this Friday. Looks like a very interesting book. Here is the announcement:

Paul Griffiths:

LET ME TELL YOU
So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know…. These are the words of Ophelia at the beginning of this short novel: literally her words, in that her narrative is composed entirely of the vocabulary she is allotted in Hamlet. Within these meagre resources, she manages to express herself on topics including her love for her father (Polonius), her care for her younger brother (Laertes), her puzzlement in the face of the Prince himself, and her increasing sense that she must escape the fate awaiting her in the play.

This is no mere technical exercise or prequel to the play: the use of such a restricted vocabulary means that Ophelia’s voice, while direct and passionate, gains musical qualities as words keep recurring in perpetually changing contexts.

LAUNCHING ON FRIDAY 16 JANUARY
7pm at The Calder Bookshop, 51 The Cut, London SE1 8LF
free admission – free glass of wine

“I found let me tell you a beautiful and enthralling work, as well as a great success in Oulipian terms”
– HARRY MATHEWS

Reality Street Editions

I changed my big coat for a rain jacket.

The rain jacket is slim and fits nicely on my upper body.

It is a bit warmer in London.

Consequently this makes me feel lighter.

I am happy feeling simple.

I teach my tongue as a foreign language.

Tales to Tell

Golden Handcuffs Review

It turns out Placebo is actually part of Alien Memory Machine. It is not a new manuscript.

Spent 7 hours revising Alien Memory Machine. Line breaks, forms, rearranging lines and poems in the manuscript and adding Placebo to the manuscript. The manuscript is not quite finished. I mainly have to revise and add poems to the Moving Pictures section. Also revise more in the other sections.

Alien Memory Machine is divided into three sections:

1. Moving Pictures

Moving pictures orbits around film noir and horror films and serials. Most of the poems are titled according to the setting/place of the film or serial. Zombie flicks. The serial Sopranos and True Blood (from HBO) and more . . .

2. London

The poems in this section were written in or near tube stops in London. Each poem is titled according to the tube stop.

3. Placebo

This section explores the human eye and memory. Narratives, as in the stories we tell ourselves, are also explored.

Place and image are two of the central concerns of Alien Memory Machine. Seems like that is one of continual obsessions (also an obsession in Godzenie but with different frames).

Found some interesting reviews and musings online by this British poet (who lives and teaches in China):

Martin Stannard 1

Martin Stannard 2

on their way to Smithfield’s market, -2, stuck shepherds, on the green, 5 minutia
from the common land, cats will lick u raw, bottle cutting stuck lips, some really
nice people, newly installed clicking spiders T junction the spiritual, diverse outposts, spot announcements, lanked out of here in 008 and 009, the biggest urban shopping in Europe, blooms or busts, fetid fervor, fetid feeble fame, fe fe fe, fee, fee, free, planitude, on their way to market some shepherds took to rest

Gaza and the Ghetto

In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in what it termed initially a “defensive war”. The invasion was in part justified by the Nazi desire to reunify what it considered historic German territory and to claim Lebensraum for a race that considered itself superior to those that surrounded it in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only the Jews, but also the Slavic races, were considered inferior, less than human, and regarded as populations that could be transferred to make room for Aryans.

It was, of course, the Jews who bore the brunt of Nazi racism. By 1940, the Nazis had begun to concentrate Poland’s Jewish population into ghettos in the main cities prior to their planned transport to the camps. In Warsaw, the largest of these ghettoes, three or four hundred thousand Jews were enclosed in less than 5% of the city, walled in by a 10-20 foot high wall, and gradually strangled by starvation and the shortage of all goods, including fuel and power. Malnutrition and disease was rampant and the exits and entrances of the ghetto were closely controlled. Resistance was subject to collective punishment: tens of Jews could be murdered in retaliation for the least act of defiance. In 1943, in the face of imminent transportation and the annihilation of the Jewish population, the remaining Jews in Warsaw organized combat brigades. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. Despite the overwhelming force of the German Army and the utter inadequacy of their own weaponry, they fought a desperate struggle in the name not only of the Jews of Poland but of Poland’s right to resist fascism and occupation. “It is a fight”, they proclaimed to the Poles beyond the ghetto walls, “for our freedom, as well as yours; for our human dignity and national honour, as well as yours….”

An inspiration to resistance movements throughout Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is remembered less as a lost cause than as the heroic struggle that it was. Though crushed by German armor and military power, in hand-to-hand and street-to-street fighting, the Jewish resistance in Warsaw stands as a symbol of the right of an oppressed people to resist occupation, collective punishment, genocide and ethnocide.

Yet imagine if the policy of appeasement had continued and Nazi Germany had made good its claim to occupy land that it considered part of the historic homeland of its people. Suppose Poland had gradually been settled, as was planned, with German families who might for the most part have desired to make peaceful and prosperous lives for themselves on the new lands they believed were rightfully theirs. Suppose Pearl Harbor had never happened, and the United States had not entered the war against the Axis powers: France and Britain would have concluded some form of peace with Hitler’s Germany, probably on the face-saving pretext of fighting a global war against Soviet communism, while the small nations of Eastern Europe would have been abandoned to their fate. Germany, instead of being seen as a nation of Nazis and war criminals, would have been understood to be the bulwark of Europe’s defense against the Soviet Union, while the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Polish resistance that supported them would have been remembered, if at all, as the “bandits” that the German generals knew them as. History, as we know, is rewritten by the victors.

Gaza too is a ghetto. One and a half million Palestinians, most of them refugees dispossessed of the lands and homes that were theirs for centuries, inhabit the most densely populated square miles of the Middle East if not the world. They are hemmed in by security walls and barbed wire fences, unable to move in or out without the permission of Israel, the occupying power. They have lived in a permanent state of siege, unable to conduct free trade with the rest of the world, virtually unable to visit the West Bank, unable even to fish in the sea off their coasts, subject to perpetual surveillance and control by land, sea and air. Their hospitals lack even the most essential medicines; power and water are controlled by the Israeli government; all goods that enter or leave this virtual prison camp do so by permission of the occupying power. The siege of Gaza has been one long collective punishment inflicted upon the population for their temerity in having elected, in free and open elections, a party, Hamas, that Israel and their allies, the United States and European Union, condemn as terrorists. Their principal crime is to deny the right to exist of a state that has dispossessed their people, occupied their lands, denied their historical existence, subjected them to ethnic cleansing, torture and collective imprisonment, destroyed their olive groves, walled them in behind a “security fence” designed to impede movement and access to farm land, schools, universities and places of work. And all these measures have been openly declared, by an Israeli minister in government, to be designed to suffocate Gaza into submission.

All this, the siege and its terrible effects on a civilian population struggling to survive in the most inhuman conditions imaginable, was ongoing before the current Israeli assault on the population of Gaza, its police force as well as old people and school children, infants and invalids. This is not an act of “defense” on the part of Israel, but a bloody continuation of a war of offense, differing only in the intensity and publicness of its brutality and in its abrupt, bloody and systematic nature. It is a war of collective punishment against a population whose resistance is less in its occasional and mostly harmless retaliatory rocket attacks than in its simple refusal to give in. It is an offensive war, like the 2006 and 1982 wars against Lebanon, a war against a people whose right to resist occupation is inscribed in international law. It is a war whose crimes—once again–include the indiscriminate, because inevitable and foreseen, slaughter of civilians, including infants and children, attacks on non-military institutions including mosques, a university and a television station, and the deliberate planning of an assault whose proclaimed ends far exceed the suppression of the purported casus belli, the rocket launching sites. It is a war designed to destroy the civil infrastructure of Hamas and to break the will of the Palestinians in Gaza to continue their resistance.

The right of the Palestinian people to resist is as indubitable as the right of the Jews of Warsaw to resist the Nazis, or of the Polish or French people to fight against their occupation by Germany. Israel is not the West’s proxy in the so-called global war against terrorism. It is a state that itself inflicts terror, and does so with a force and brutality far exceeding anything available to the most violent of terrorist organizations. It is a state whose colonial aim, to occupy and to settle land historically occupied by another people in order to provide unlimited Lebensraum for its own ethnic group, is evidenced every day in the continuing expansion of the illegal settlements on the West Bank. It is an apartheid state, whose self-declared constitution as a “Jewish State for a Jewish People” should have no more international legitimacy than South Africa’s “white state for a white people” or Northern Ireland’s “Protestant State for a Protestant people”, both of which finally fell to a combination of military and civil resistance and international opprobrium.

It is long beyond time for Israel, now the exception in every respect among nations, to be held accountable to the norms of international law. It is time for Israel to be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other state that bases its polity on sectarianism and racism, that has established one set of laws for one ethnic group and another for the rest. It is time for Israel to by judged by the international law that everywhere condemns extended occupation, condemns collective punishment, war against civilians, population transfers or ethnic cleansing, dispossession of the occupied people and the settlement of their lands. It is time for us to name Israel what it is so long as it continues to pursue the most extreme of Zionist visions: a colonial, apartheid state with neither legitimacy nor a deserved place among the community of democratic nations.

It is time for us to cease the appeasement of Israel. Even the most ardent of appeasers of Nazi Germany never supplied Germany with arms or foreign aid, with fighter planes with which to bomb civilians, never labeled the resistance to Nazism “terrorism”, never actively participated in the German stranglehold on the ghettoes where it confined its subject populations. “Constructive engagement” did not work with South Africa; numerous U.N. General Assembly resolutions that have expressed the virtually unanimous international condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its wars against its neighbors have not worked. It is time for the truth about Israel to be disseminated, even against the most effective control of the western media by Israel’s lobbyists. It is time for all who care about justice and peace, for human rights, for the fate of the innocent and the oppressed, the stateless and the dispossessed, to make our voices heard. Let it not be said that in their most extreme hour of need, the Palestinian people were abandoned by the world, as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were abandoned in 1943.

David Lloyd,

Los Angeles,

December 30, 2008

the sun came out today in London. The blue skies smelt like North Carolina. I went looking for wooden porches but found red brick houses. Liverpool made it to the next stage. I have been thinking about frames. Interchangeable frames. Moving frames. Pictures and sounds. Hush puppies. My mind is not so disconnected from my stomach. i once had a porch and a swing. I never went outside today in London. The mind believes and the body follows. My hands are cold because the window is open. There is a scratch in my throat. I miss the warm home and community in North Carolina. I rediscovered poetry and rediscovered my body. After school chats with Stuart Dischell and Fred Chappell in the university pub. Lucifer Poetics on the road. I am still on the road. The road cliches but only when we let it. the road is not a map. not a movement, not a series of stops and starts, not a splattering of signs, not the now, not what comes later but a memory always in process.

i’ve had a muddled mind with spots of clarity. For the past three years I was in purgatory. I made my purgatory. I’m coming out. I need English in my life. I need the mirrors of community. But mostly I need English to create.

Writing is clarity. But it is damn messy. It is not always clear what is clear and what is clear might turn out to be muddy and vice versa. A faux poetics. Slow it down. Noun clusters speed it up. Gerunds rock. Prog rock poetics. Orchestral movements in the dark.

Thinking in frames. Thinking in sentences. Thinking in tenses. Thinking thinking thinking. Dot Dot Dot.

I have almost finished reading Gabe Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook. Gabe’s book has opened up possibilities. Specifically place and history, including personal history. It is an expansive book with lots of boxes within boxes. A journey of consciousness and the practice of awareness. Of being awake. There is a rhythm to traveling. Rhode Island Notebook and Ken Edward’s Nostalgia for Unknown Cities deal with place in very different ways.

Nostalgia for Unknown Cities uses disjunctive narrative and works at the sentence level. I am ware of each word, each verb tense etc. It opened me up to language and preciseness. Tight. Gorgeous. Highly imaginative.

Rhode Island Notebook is Hermes. fleet. builds. like I said expansive. Lots of details about mileage and things on the road notes and small essays on bums etc. Most everything goes in. Writing as practice in the best sense.

One of many tensions in my own work is the small esoteric lyric and the expansive disjunctive narrative. I am also finding ways into the self. The selves. A less limited exploration of the personal. Not confessional in its limited sense. In how it is mostly manifest in mainstream poetry in both the UK and US. Most mainstream poems in the US and UK rely on limited notions of the self. And limited notions of form. For me, good innnovative poetics expands notions of form (both ancient and modern) and expands consciousness. Poetry daily (the website) provides plenty of examples of poetry that expands nothing. Reinforces what we are already told or think we know (birds are beautiful, life is hard etc.) It is not theme. Themes are perhaps limited. It is form. yes the old Creeley thing. Form/content.

I mean I love frames. Whether it is narrative or conceptual. For example. Clark Coolidge’s Alien Tatters, ALice Notley’s In the Pines, Tim Atkins Horace, Geraldine Monk’s Sonnets, Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet.

Ok so that is what I mean.

so what is frame?

that is my life work

Sent off some of the section “Return to the city” to literary mags last night. They were revised. Took the rough drafts off the blog.

I dreamed of North Carolina last night after watching True Blood all day. True Blood takes place in Alabama. I miss the south.

New ms Placebo (so far):

films and serials

a) Lumberton, NC (Blue Velvet)
b) Bon Temps, Louisiana (True Blood)
c) Post Apocalyptic Movie Review (The Van Guard)

Music

a) remixed lyrics from the band Placebo

currently writing Bon Temps, Louisiana while listening to Captain Beefheart’s Shiny Beasts!

captain beefheart on itunes. London 1974.

guacamole and doritos

fosters

20 min and then tube to shepherds bush for NY Eve bash

no table reserved

Didi Menendez, the editor of miPOesias, did a portrait of me. I dig it. Based on a younger pic. Fun stuff.

I am envious of her talent and energy. I feel absolutely lazy when I see all the projects she juggles. Mind boggling really!

the poem below was written last night at The Windmill pub in Brixton, South London. It is mostly a collage of the flyer listing all the indie bands that played at the venue. There are some observatory sentences and some overheard sentences from the folks in the pub. We stayed after hours and met the owners and had lots of free drinks. Only problem is . . . I’m still hurting. It will be part of the stations section of Alien Memory Machine (when I revise it of course). Each poem in the stations section is written around (or near or in) a tube station in London.

The Windmill (Brixton, South London)

We are blessed with a ramshackle bohemian outpost. The crib of klaxtons. Thunderclap families with so so modern sounds. Art brute. From dusk till dawn without the vampires. The owner Seamus came from Ireland in the 70’s to dig ditches. His wife kathryn liked to dance. Met the dog Lassie. They ate post-punk rice cakes and drank Red Stripe lager. A new utopia of howling wombats piped through the ceiling. A toothless woman sd I’ve been looking at your through my rum. A disco valentine. This is my friend’s song. Alle alle vixen free. Dada chuku dada chuku dada dada dada chuku. Free passes for local residents. Past the funeral shop and you are there. Champions of the crystal stilt. They wrestled their classic education in a zen arcade. Magic numbers with a frightened rabbit. Above toilet: I’m watching you pee. I’m gonna lick yr neurons. It’s good to be lost in the city. A British Icarus. What price Wonderland?

crispy beef, egg fried rice, prawn crackers, seafood with bean paste.

movie: Pure.

Heineken on bed.

Later: Brixton, South London

Godzenie has been revised. Revisited. rethought. Things taken and things added and things shuffled. Four sections:

1) Wonderland (Seoul, South Korea)

2) Block 7A (Zory, Poland)

3) Hotel Diament (Jastrzebie, Poland)

4) Return to the City (Katowice, Poland)

Some poems fit nicely from North Carolina days into Block 7A as well.

Three individual poems to kick it off then four serial poems (Wonderland, Block 7A, Hotel Diament, Return to the City).

Finally, many years in the making, a mature manuscript is ready.

disjunctive narratives, eliptical lyrics, poetry and place, poetry and the foreign, poetry and the eye, poetry minded.

voice is not a static value

I am exhausted. Need to find food.

Now, I have a home base in London visiting Poland is a much more enjoyable event.

Just found out Godzenie did not win one of those first book contests. S ____ press also seems to have gone quite a bit conservative with a few token innovative poetries. Perhaps I am wrong. Either way, some thoughts:

1) revise revise revise Godzenie. Tear open its guts and see what can work better. Think I will add new process writing from this return to the city. My mind is in a different state now. Godzenie is written in an urgency. Add more layers of tones. Hermit Kingdom is also more observational. Like the sentence poetics and the detachment/observational poetics. Want to make it tighter and cleaner.

2) maybe find a better home for it

3) keep writing Alien Memory Machine and finish the first draft in the next month

4) start new manuscript Placebo

Ewa’s family is very very kind. Great cold cuts and bread. Nice hard mattress so woke up without a sore back for the first time in months. yeah.

Lots of good homemade Polish food. Growing slighly plumper. Feasting.

Thoughts:

1) make my matress harder in London
2) get a firm pillow
3) try crunches

reading Nostalgia for Unknown Cities by Ken Edwards and loving it.

Wrote quite a few pages in the new notebook on train, bus, and plane (see post above)

Met Rodrigo last night at City Rock. Amazing stories. Mary Jane later (fingers crossed).

Back to katowice, Poland tomorrow. Hanging with my girlfriend and her family for Yule time. Bringing my notebook and a few pens and see what crops up. The hardest part of packing is choosing the right books. I am interested in exploring the poetics of place/travel. Alas I am bringing the following books to re-read and write with:

1) In Transit by Tony Baker
2) The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart by Jacques Roubaud
3) Rhode Island Notebook by Gabe Gudding
4) Nostalgia for Unknown Cities by Ken Edwards

Will perhaps have a smidgen of internet. so only a bit of time online. Reading and writing. Walking the streets. Poems/place.

I did a collaboration with the poet Brian Howe around five years ago. Some of it was published in Tony Tost’s Faascicle magazine. Well now Scantily Clad Press has published the final version. Just published yesterday. it is a very strange little thing.

A remix alright. Lots of found language and sounds. Swerves out of the personal. Away from the father. Away from the thick syrup of the body. Sound dictates.

check it out:

This is the Motherfucking Remix

The Lucifer Poetics Group is going strong. An organic grouping of artists with a healthy dose of various innovative aesthetics. some serious energy pumping out of North Carolina. Fascinating work happening. Check out this sample of some of the work:

LUCIFER POETICS

anatomically correct

robotically actuated

advanced formula

durable, ultra-realistic flesh-like
elastomeric gel

articulated skeleton

speaks, moves, looks, feels, smells

real

is being radically reworked

is two serial poems

“The secret of why we first took to our feet” (mythopoetics, image-centred, wisdom tradition)

“As you where” (google-sculpting, found texts, sound-centred, dense, irony )

Alien Memory Machine is also taking a different direction after writing a David Lynch poem

that’s perhaps the third section . . .

poems for film

but not sure

Hm . . .

framing. I am learning about framing. Just as poetry used rhyme and meter to keep it memorable in the oral tradition the idea the concept the frame can be keep it memorable.

so a book project

an obsessive concern

I like poems that can stand on their own feet

but like even more a book that frames the poems

don’t like the book of random scattered poems

the drive for clarity and unity and wholeness but not without first getting damn messy!!!

does the desire for order have a stronger pull for artist minded folk (poets and others) than non-artist minded thinkers???

what is an artist minded thinker?

that’s silly!!!

Perhaps a willingness to enter new environments and pulls of understanding

to re-create

an unhappiness with the given pre-fabricated

packaged happiness

so yeah, for me that questioning and re-creating takes place in language art (i.e. poetry)

poetry is not really what is taught for exams

is not GCSE or A levels or BA or MA or PhD

is not not

is simply

the frame

or not so simply

depends how you re-order it

I like to think of my writing as shuffling

I just re-order the information

and what about tone?

well irony and playful seriousness seems to be the order of the day

I worry about the order of the day but i think it has to do with a mistrust of our manipulated emotions
yeah THEM!!!

So sincerity is questioned

and humor is a damn good lubricant

just look at the good Greeks

I am glued, hooked, and ready to squirt. A body of work, working bodies, lower haves and have nots and so on:

lowerhalf

Thanks to Sean Bonney for pointing this out on his blog. Beautiful books!!!

check it:

Russian Avant Garde Books

Warning:

pierce non-
porous skin to prevent bursting

Warning:

memories are scened were hot bodies meet

A Face of Certified Holes

in the cleared mindcamp the elephant is always in the room

fear less than clear
on a flight to Belfast
to bury the dead

and couldn’t find knees

all kinds of physics at work
in the air

to trace the heat of fingers there is a kind, they say, a kind of heat, in the tracing of lives, relit, reseen, the body grown back through the feet, through the drift, stone by stone, setting eyes on, angel of the misheard, rubbings of the unreal,
the sound of hardened grass and lowered coffin, cracked and taken into, the clipped hedges grown round, flapping budgies, found in the tatters, in what’s dropped, there is a scrounging, a scourge, a rounding out in time, dug into, looked out on, grown round, come in, kissing the stone lips of the dead, a kind, they say, of certified holes, of physics, and the body repainted, remade, redone, and the bootclomps and shifted shoulders on the way to the site, angel of pampered loyalty, babies blue flowered and pink ribboned, croned, weathed, what’s out there, in the tracings, in what’s not said, re-eaten, reseen, there is always a room

Some more performance art. The amazing Cris Cheek’s decade-long collaboration(s) with Kirsten Lavers at Things not worth keeping

some great sound art and poetry from the Atlanta Poetry Group

I only looked like this for one night :-)

the new manuscript started in poland and picked up more steam in London. Now I am 50 pages in. It is about the eye. A battle between the eye and the ear.

i want to be.

Try to language my way back into my body.

Words make us conscious.

I wanna be less self-conscious.

Both alcohol and writing make me less conscious.

Writing is the better obsession!!!

not because it is healthy.

I mean who knows if it is healthy.

Just a better option.

And I need that kick, that energy, that rawness, that feeling, however short-lived, of creating some small space in which I can recreate.

Reading, writing, awareness, art.

That ain’t no freedom speech

It’s the real thing.

There is stuff happening below capitalism and careerism.

check it!!!

so what!!!

anyone live for the weekend?

That’s no way to live.

I want out.

One of my favourite literature magazines. YES YES YES!!!

Great readings and performances. CHeCK It and be moved:

Text Sound

Prodigal Drift

art reshuffles
out of date subjectivity
hello mother

an ode to milk
ovelteen on a wet Tuesday
post prandial nose-dive
in the minced stew

2nd train to London £26
£240 for box room
Seven Sisters not ideal

pajamahoods:
neighbor bangs
broom against floor
for loud bed-fucks

lets tell it and get screwed in the words squirts

yr chicken is ready in the clashing neons of milky South Ealing

the frozen ones and the bater’s in the crème bit
an aqua splash in yr yogurt

and the babies really sitting forward with their whole mouths
on the tit trumpets

breaded the sunshine
really posh early-up
mercurial visual ears

you gotta understand the lapid maze
you can hear it on the radio
pick it up operatically
hot/cold with critical speculation
throw back the sacred vows of misery
word stage of old holy
place has its hands on the lost

to take a different direction
to the prim residuals
of Victorian England

” When you leave the city and go out in the country you’re always tempted to
think, ‘This is the real America.’ ‘These are the real Americans.’ And they
have ‘real’ jobs: mechanic, country doctor, fireman, plumber. Then you start to
learn more. Maybe one of the country people you meet is old, with all their kids
grown…and they get to know you better, and they start to like you, so they
tell you some of their ideas which they haven’t spoken to anybody about in
years, and the more you listen the more you realize this person is really
crazy. Their thoughts have been bouncing around against each other, just like
the people you see on the streets of any city, talking to themselves out loud.
Nobody in America has a normal life, And the real America is wherever you
happen to be in the U.S.when you start wondering about the question.”

Andy Warhol

Gum+Cigarettes in a Litter Free Zone

a shoveling between whale bones moistens the frontiers

corrosive hunkle-buckle

sporadic blood whimper

stairs like skulls refleshed with steel

universal fun-loop sifting expectations

sounds grid this thick city

lost my tongue with the west winds of England

little pimps on the night skimps

stretched beyond the return

straightUP
dunna wanna eat it
or beat it or
mince it or
mete it
before being
sucked under

quit asking questions
about wine on counter, take potato from pocket:

peel, dice, splice

like in a film
with real milk
we can’t get the
sneezes out of our sleeves

get outside with your fuel to burn
something must
break real soon

blistered & barking
up the wrong tree

Quit asking questions about the wine on the counter and take the potato from your pocket, peel, dice, splice. Like in a film with real milk we can’t get the sneezes out of our sleeves. Get outside with your fuel to burn something must break real soon. Blistered and barking up the wrong tree. Cat eats coyote. Rain in London and slowly developing archaic tendencies. I have yet to fall into the ice with the man who speaks into my left ear. There’s an existentialist fork in the futon and butter in the microwave leaking its fat all over the viewing window. Journey won’t end in time. She was flicking ash into the sink and reading the orbisphere. It was almost religious . . . like a stone lifted from golden plates. Perceptions sneak into the blue machine and the primal beats continue.

If you are wondering about the new and exciting British and Irish poetry, this is the journal to buy:

015 Veer Journal 2 – ‘veer off’ – featuring the work of over 60 leading poets available now

Veer Publication 015 [ISSN: 1758-4140]
The second in the occasional Veer journal series focusing on unconforming writing,
veer off collects current writing from a selection of outstanding contemporary authors.
A4 size. 232 pages. October 2008. £5.50

with writing from: Geraldine Monk, Steve McCaffery, Tim Atkins, Christine Wertheim, Morris Scully, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Ian Patterson, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Charles Bernstein, Jamie Wilkes, Carol Watts, Alex Davies, Peter Jaeger, Gilbert Adair, Jerome Rothenberg, Frances Presley, Mairead Byrne, MJ Weller, Out To Lunch, Harry Gilonis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Doug Jones, Tom Raworth, Jeff Hilson, John Sparrow, Richenda Power, Alice Notley, Simon Smith, Tony Trehy, Aodán McCardle, Martin Bakero, Karen Mac Cormack, Jon Clay, Alan Halsey, Stephen Mooney, Scott Thurston, Johan de Wit, Edmund Hardy, Esther Leslie, Val Pancucci, Alyson Torns, Francis Crot, James Harvey, Ken Edwards, Chris Paul, Will Rowe, John Wilkinson, Ruhul Amin, Lisa Samuels, Tina Bass, Diana Godden, Adrian Clarke, Allen Fisher, Justin Katko, Sean Bonney, John Hall, Robert Sheppard, Steve Willey, Antony John, Robert Hampson, Tom White, Lawrence Upton, Tilla Brading, & Piers Hugill.

& special thanks to Ulli Freer for his work as general editor.

words overheard, misheard, and remixed from an an Openned Poetry reading featuring Sean Bonney

Sean Bonney Remix

A clean blade with magnetic wildwood scum. Wierded weird the final host of the brain slop. We don’t know who, anyway, eclipsed, the final host. A soul net. Oh, pretty, petty, this police system of knowledge. Performed an alien nation with bobs of sound with splintered power, disconnected for not paying the bills. Queen derivative magic and private particular magic. Without entirely sufficient numbers the hyena in a pretty frock is sheared. We’ll meet in hell. Tricking the passerby with official verse culture there are no words for sky, lobsters on their backs. Ok police computer, split the little knots of yr language and expose town and country.

Some reworked poems from Godzenie in the new Streetcake magazine.

Happy for my work to be in great company.

Thank you Nikki and Trini.

34. found it 2 min ago. in my beard. hm . . . here we go

still playing with this technology. DIY. rough as all hell. gotta keep trying new things.

some more great thought thinking language

becoming camel again

loading up

before turning into lion to tear apart

and then back

to that mystical gooey eyed

chid (thank you Nietzsche)

yes that is

my favourite

the child

I am not a camel

I am a child

always

Absent

Got my copy of Minor American literary journal today in the post. Damn fine work and excellent production. Looks bloody fantastic. Strong connection with some poets in North Carolina and the Lucifer Poetics Group.

The feel of the journal in my hands makes me very very very happy. I feel very honored to have some selections of Godzenie included with such damn strong and interesting writing. For real one of the best literary journals I have ever laid hands or eyes on. I wish there were more of them. More people need to experience this puppy!!!

Thank you for the excellent editing work e. Ficarra and K. Pringle. And thank you Erik Anderson, Laura Carter, Juliette Sueyuen Lee, Christopher Martin, David Need, Tessa Joseph Nicholas, Eden Osucha, Ken Rumble, Ryan Logan Smith, and Dianne Timblin.

This is a collectors item no doubt. Try to get a copy someway somehow. You won’t regret it!!!

Also really enjoying the poetry in the latest issue of Masthead

check it!!!

Spent over 30 hours for the last two weeks finishing my three year manuscript Godzenie. Other than perhaps some small changes it is finished. Just printed and bound it with a binder clip.

Godzenie was written while I was in Korea and Poland and finished in London. Godzenie is a polish word which means to make an agreement (ex. ‘Trudne jest godzenie pracy z zabawa’ – ‘It’s difficult to reconcile work and play’). Godzenie also shares roots with godziwosc, ‘justice/fairness’ and godnosc, ‘dignity.’It’s about reconciling the mind/body split, reader/writer/meaning(s), Dionysian/Apollonian politics/aesthetics and all sorts of other divides I am unable to see as the maker of the poems. It is erotic. It is music. It is the eye. The eye is most central in the Korean section and sound is more important in the Polish section. The eye is the mind and intellect and music is the body. They are not strictly divided in the manuscript. Both are important throughout.

An eye in music.

Godzenie is also a play on the Polish godzina which means ‘hour.’

In Poland the poems are titled according to the time when composition began. In Korea they titled by date and sometimes place.

Time is a concern.

Overall I am quite happy with it.

Now it is time to try publishing it . . .

I want to avoid first book contests but maybe . . .

just want to release these growing collections of manuscripts

SUNDAYS AT THE OTO

“poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure”

Third Sunday of the month, 3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL (http://www.cafeoto.co.uk) £4 entry.

October 19: Keith Jebb + The Mind Shop (music: Armorel Weston, John Gibbens and David Miller) + Wanda Phipps + Alyson Torns

Wanda Phipps, from New York, may not be familiar to all listmembers – her work can be accessed via her website:

http://www.mindhoney.com/

She will be reading poetry, not I am afraid singing. Wanda is also appearing at Openned on Tuesday the 21st.

Cafe Oto is tucked away at the main crossroads in Dalston, just opposite & down a little way from Dalston Kingsland Overground Station (2 stations from Victoria Line at Highbury & Islington), and with good bus routes from Waterloo (76 & 243), Victoria (38), Kings Cross (30), Tottenham Court Road (38 & 242), London Bridge(149) & Liverpool Street (242 & 149), let alone North & East London. Ashwin Street is first off North side of Dalston Lane from the crossroads – its other end immediately off Abbott Street (1st off East side of Kingsland High St). There will be organic beer, cider and fruit juices etc, plus home made cakes. For further information:

Sundays at the Oto

SMALL PUBLISHERS FAIR 2008

Conway Hall,
Red Lion Square,
London WC1R 4RL

FRIDAY 24th and SATURDAY 25th OCTOBER

Open 11am to 7pm, admission to bookfair and readings is free. Holborn tube.

Readings and Events on Saturday 25th.

1.00. ‘Playing with Words’: booklaunch & performances by David Toop,
Ansuman Biswas, Brown Sierra & Nye Parry

1.30.
Royal Holloway Poetic Practice:
Anna McKerrow & Becky Cremin

2.00
Cluster Arts Magazine Act Two:
selected performances and readings

2.30.
Kyle Schlesinger (Cuniform Press)
Charles Alexander, Chax

3.00.
Booklaunch: The Reality Street Book of Sonnets,
introduced by Jeff Hilson with a star-studded cast of sonneteers.

4.00.
Vincent Katz reads ‘Barge’,
a collaboration with Jim Dine

4.30.
West House Books
David Annwn and Martin Corless-Smith

5.00.
Les Coleman
The cat Talked in Latin with Greek

5.30.
Veer Books launch Bill Griffiths’ The Lion Man + readings by Sean Bonney, Johan de Wit, Piers Hugill, Jow Lindsay, Aodan McCardle & Stephen Mooney

This years fair has over 60 publishers participating. For full details visit:

small press book fair

This is an amazing reading series. Must get someone to cover my EFL classes!!!

The Next Openned night Tuesday 21st October

These People will be reading at Openned on 21st October.

Line up as it stands:

Adrian Clarke
Francesca Lisette
Wanda Phipps
Anna Ticehurst
Michael Zand
PLUS

Mike Weller (video work)
Allen Fisher (video interview, the first in a series)

Coming from London//Sussex//New York
Venue: The Foundry, 86 Great Eastern Street: EC2A 3JL
7:15 a.m Start

Openned Reading Series

Constellation: Alice Notley goes live today – a collaborative web event featuring
34 writers responding to individual Notley poems; video footage of Notley reading
at Birkbeck last May; and the publication of 10 new Notley poems.

Curated by Carol Watts at Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, Edmund Hardy at “Intercapillary
Space” and Steve Willey and Alex Davies at Openned. Step in at

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/events/alicenotleyconstellation

or via the

“Intercapillary Space” and Openned sites.

Contributors are: Tim Allen, Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth Bryant, Jon Clay,
Jennifer Cooke, Jen Currin, Ian Davidson, Melissa Flores-Borquez, Susana Gardner, John
Hall, Edmund Hardy, Ralph Hawkins, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Amy Hollowell, Sarah Hopkins,
Piers Hugill, Elizabeth James, Claudia Keelan, David Kennedy, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez,
Peter Middleton, Stephen Mooney, Alice Notley, Redell Olsen, Michael Peverett,
Sophie Robinson, William Rowe, Lisa Samuels, Zoe Skoulding, Elizabeth Treadwell,
Catherine Wagner, Steven Waling, Dana Ward, Carol Watts, Steve Willey

New Parade as Smog

there is a series of predictable problems
domains in flame

all feasible desires of the soul costume
no nature plants the cars in stricken spume

your supposed past with sense data attachments
you can just reach it with a chopstick in a 2x2x2 cube

say body tantrums, dandruff and tampons
say pons pons and bons bons
say cinnamon and sugar in other people’s eyes

what it waz was a drive through a poignant headline
overwrought rent paid with a stiff elegy

don’t bother to don yon seaflakes
deep archaic reason
at the tower’s exposed tit

Great show last Sunday at The Luninaire:

http://www.theluminaire.co.uk/

German band called Get Well Soon. Check it:

http://www.youwillgetwellsoon.com/

Private Devotion (with special thanks to Anselm Berrigan)

a lanky man with custard was recalled to life it took both cities in their underwear without a spare taxi to take the twist out of the knickers better i reckon the producers wanted an understanding and a non-stop supply this might sound a bit metaphysical shrugging and adjusting with a page torn out wearing English slave garb with strangers in the nest with cable ghosts and excess lips and bulldozed my climax with invisible soldiers low burger with brass with skits and a drama if you go ahead and ask my babysitters with their clam shaped lips as good as a calendar i won’t steal myself in order to play fluffy sometimes becoming cynical is a sexual presentation

Stage and Scream

Quit asking questions about the wine on the counter and take the potato from your pocket, peel, dice, splice. We are stuck between stage and scream. Like in a film with real milk we can’t get the sneezes out of our sleeves. Get outside with your fuel to burn something must break real soon. Blistered and barking up the wrong tree. Cat eats coyote. Rain in London and slowly developing archaic tendencies. I have yet to fall into the ice with the man who speaks into my left ear. There’s an existentialist fork in the futon and butter in the microwave leaking its fat all over the viewing window. Journey won’t end in time. She was flicking ash into the sink and reading the orbisphere. Perceptions sneak into the blue machine and the primal beats continue.

zra Pound | Late Tate
Friday, 3 October
18.30 – 22.00
Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1P 4RG
admission free

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/pound/

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Ezra Pound’s arrival in London in 1908, nine performers will present poetry, music, and creative performances inspired by Pound’s poetic work. All performances will be held in Gallery 17 of the Tate Britain this Friday from 18.30 to 22.00.

Irish poet Niall McDevitt will present Pound as the ‘Urban Shaman’ and will emphasize Pound’s meter and rhythm with a recitation of his verse accompanied with a drum. JL Williams, a Glasgow-based poet, will present her own poetry inspired by Pound. Robert Rehder, poet and professor emeritus of the University of Fribourg, will read a selection of Pound’s poetry as well as his own poems influenced by Pound. Tony Dunn, lecturer of literature and theatre at the University of Portsmouth, will present a verbal collage of Pound’s creative writings. Violinist Sarah Jane Barnes will perform the music of Pound’s Canto 75 while actor Philip Mulryne will recite the canto’s verse and David Barnes will narrate. James Byrne, editor of The Wolf poetry magazine, will read his poetry inspired by Pound, followed by London-based poet Lee Scrivner, who will recite a memorized version of Canto 38.

Performances will take place in Gallery 17 of the Tate Britain on Friday, 3 October from 18.30 to 22.00.

6.30 – 6.50 Niall McDevitt, ‘Pound as Urban Shaman’
6.55 – 7.15 JL Williams, poetry reading
7.20 – 7.40 Robert Rehder, poetry reading
7.45 – 8.10 Tony Dunn, ‘A Persona for E.P.’
8.15 – 8.40 Sarah Jane Barnes, David Barnes, & Philip Mulryne, ‘Pound’s Musical Muse’
8.45 – 9.05 Robert Rehder, poetry reading
9.10 – 9.25 James Byrne, poetry reading
9.30 – 9.45 Lee Scrivner, ‘With Usura’