That small
fall of rain
just after
midnight
that readies
every-
thing for
another day.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Reciprocities & some more e-zines
I am reciprocating the kindness given to me by their links to the pelican & have added Josh Corey's Cahiers de Corey, Lisa Urbanic & Vincent Ponka's Ironic Cinema & Jack Kimball's Pantaloons: Tykes on Poetry to the sidebar.
& a very new blog that has the makings of a very good blog, Kirsten Kaschock's Negative Wingspan. My thanks to Josh Corey for his post that brought this to my notice.
Have also added a few more ezines - Big Bridge, Shampoo, Trout & Znine.
& am thinking about putting the Referrer's List back up. Was experiencing difficulties in the downloading of the pelican - maybe its beak was too full - so I took it off. It seems to be running okay now, so I'll probably restore it shortly.
& a very new blog that has the makings of a very good blog, Kirsten Kaschock's Negative Wingspan. My thanks to Josh Corey for his post that brought this to my notice.
Have also added a few more ezines - Big Bridge, Shampoo, Trout & Znine.
& am thinking about putting the Referrer's List back up. Was experiencing difficulties in the downloading of the pelican - maybe its beak was too full - so I took it off. It seems to be running okay now, so I'll probably restore it shortly.
Monday, May 31, 2004
There is a kookaburra perched on the pool fence. Crapping, scratching itself, rubbing its beak against the metal. A foot high from tip of tail to top of head. Occasionally it dives down to snatch an insect off the surface of the water or have a drink & then returns to the railings.
It is a blue-winged kookaburra. Unlike its slightly larger cousin it does not laugh. Tries to, but then breaks off into a fit of coughing, much like I do after fifty years of smoking.
The two varieties have different ranges in Australia, but they overlap here in Queensland. I have seen them side by side – yes, on that branch – the one laughing at the other because it / cannot laugh.
It has a kingfisher shape. Looks like a large kingfisher. Adopts the same stance. Is the largest of the kingfisher family. Though somehow I do not think Charles Olson's poem would have had quite the same impact if it had have been called "The Kookaburras".....
It is a blue-winged kookaburra. Unlike its slightly larger cousin it does not laugh. Tries to, but then breaks off into a fit of coughing, much like I do after fifty years of smoking.
The two varieties have different ranges in Australia, but they overlap here in Queensland. I have seen them side by side – yes, on that branch – the one laughing at the other because it / cannot laugh.
It has a kingfisher shape. Looks like a large kingfisher. Adopts the same stance. Is the largest of the kingfisher family. Though somehow I do not think Charles Olson's poem would have had quite the same impact if it had have been called "The Kookaburras".....
Sunday, May 30, 2004
The first cut is the deepest
This was the newspaper article that set me thinking about Nick Berg. & sometime later, sitting outside, having a cigarette, thinking about lies & deception.....
A long time ago, from a country not so far away, in a war that the current conflict is coming more & more to resemble, at a time when the first unconfirmed rumours of drug-taking by U.S. servicemen were just starting to trickle through, there came a story picked up by all the major agencies & so carried by every major newspaper whose headlines were permutations of the words HEROIN, JUNKIES, DRUG-CRAZED, NORTH VIETNAMESE, COMMUNISTS. The story was about how glassine envelopes of a white powder purported to be heroin were being found on the bodies of dead North Vietnamese soldiers & how the rumours about them being crazed commo junkies impervious to human feelings had finally been proved true. It ran for a day or two, & then died in the press but still remained impressed upon people's minds.
Sometime, about a week later, in the small print paragraphs inside one single newspaper, there was a report that the white powder had been analysed &, surprise,surprise, turned out to be an anti-dysentery medicine completely free of opiates, real or synthetic.
Sometime, a little time later, they also weren't bombing Cambodia.
A long time ago, from a country not so far away, in a war that the current conflict is coming more & more to resemble, at a time when the first unconfirmed rumours of drug-taking by U.S. servicemen were just starting to trickle through, there came a story picked up by all the major agencies & so carried by every major newspaper whose headlines were permutations of the words HEROIN, JUNKIES, DRUG-CRAZED, NORTH VIETNAMESE, COMMUNISTS. The story was about how glassine envelopes of a white powder purported to be heroin were being found on the bodies of dead North Vietnamese soldiers & how the rumours about them being crazed commo junkies impervious to human feelings had finally been proved true. It ran for a day or two, & then died in the press but still remained impressed upon people's minds.
Sometime, about a week later, in the small print paragraphs inside one single newspaper, there was a report that the white powder had been analysed &, surprise,surprise, turned out to be an anti-dysentery medicine completely free of opiates, real or synthetic.
Sometime, a little time later, they also weren't bombing Cambodia.
My answers to Tom Beckett's questions on why people write poetry
Tom Beckett asked a couple of days ago for people to comment on why they wrote poetry. My answers below.
1) What inspires you to write poetry in both the short- and long-term? In other words: what gets you started, and what keeps you going?
I write poetry because I can. This is not the glib or simplistic answer it may seem at first glance. It is a statement of fact. But once you accept that fact then your thoughts, your vision(s) become clouded by it. I once wrote “there is a poem / in everything.” I still believe it although I must admit that timing & the angle of reflection/refraction play their part. I do not believe that you write because you have something to say for we all have something to say, can all find something to say. We write because we can, because we enjoy it, because we have the opportunity. It matters to us; & if we find that what we do moves other people then that is a bonus.
2) Is poetry the primary genre that you work within? If so, why? If not, why?
Poetry is my primary genre because it is what I am most comfortable with plus I am writing for myself. That said, what I have learnt from writing poetry spills over into what I write for other people – manuals, proposals, reviews, university assignments when I was doing them, etc. Writing poetry can be as hard & as frustrating as any of these & often not as self-satisfying, but it is a challenge you have chosen for yourself.
3) Do you believe that a poet has any special sort of social responsibility?
Yes. I believe all poetry to be political. & social. They relect our views, our stance on life, no matter what we are writing about. Maybe not overtly so but given the opportunity we should speak out. We should not subjugate what we believe to be right when we write.
4) What does writing poetry do for you? Why does poetry matter?
It keeps me sane, it drives me mad. It is the only time I ever take risks. I can think of no better answer than to point to my alltime favourite poem, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Constantly risking absurdity & death…”.
1) What inspires you to write poetry in both the short- and long-term? In other words: what gets you started, and what keeps you going?
I write poetry because I can. This is not the glib or simplistic answer it may seem at first glance. It is a statement of fact. But once you accept that fact then your thoughts, your vision(s) become clouded by it. I once wrote “there is a poem / in everything.” I still believe it although I must admit that timing & the angle of reflection/refraction play their part. I do not believe that you write because you have something to say for we all have something to say, can all find something to say. We write because we can, because we enjoy it, because we have the opportunity. It matters to us; & if we find that what we do moves other people then that is a bonus.
2) Is poetry the primary genre that you work within? If so, why? If not, why?
Poetry is my primary genre because it is what I am most comfortable with plus I am writing for myself. That said, what I have learnt from writing poetry spills over into what I write for other people – manuals, proposals, reviews, university assignments when I was doing them, etc. Writing poetry can be as hard & as frustrating as any of these & often not as self-satisfying, but it is a challenge you have chosen for yourself.
3) Do you believe that a poet has any special sort of social responsibility?
Yes. I believe all poetry to be political. & social. They relect our views, our stance on life, no matter what we are writing about. Maybe not overtly so but given the opportunity we should speak out. We should not subjugate what we believe to be right when we write.
4) What does writing poetry do for you? Why does poetry matter?
It keeps me sane, it drives me mad. It is the only time I ever take risks. I can think of no better answer than to point to my alltime favourite poem, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Constantly risking absurdity & death…”.
Saturday, May 29, 2004
A brief note on Jukka's new images
Bill Allegrezza says "jukka's new image poems complicate reading patterns in a way that two dimensional writing does not. as a reader i am left wondering where to enter into the text, if there is a consistent text, and if the text is primarily aesthetic or communicative."
Jean Vengua responds that (a) "lot of the poetry that I see on the new non-linear poetry seems to be about graphic surface (color, shape) and structure. Some partial sense of meaning comes through in the existence of words or word-fragments."
My attitude towards Jukka's current work is much more aligned with Jean in that I feel Jukka has moved, rather rapidly I must add, away from poetic to painterly in his new images. The earliest ones on his new nonlinear were like magnified shots of text, fragments from a larger whole. Then colour was added, with the focus on the colour, almost as though now he'd discovered how to do it he was doing a few practice runs. Still concerned with words &/or letters, still providing an entrance way through things familiar.
Now I feel we do not enter the poems but step back from them the way we do with paintings so that we can see them entire. Certainly the words are there, fragmented, hinting, eroded. It is as if we have passed beyond the ocular microscope & are now dealing with electron microscopy that is showing us that what we thought were empty spaces between words and letters have a depth & a topography of their own. The entrance way is way back, in the verbal poems that still are there behind. We've entered a Mandelbrot world of fractals where the poems enter us rather than us entering the poems.
Jean Vengua responds that (a) "lot of the poetry that I see on the new non-linear poetry seems to be about graphic surface (color, shape) and structure. Some partial sense of meaning comes through in the existence of words or word-fragments."
My attitude towards Jukka's current work is much more aligned with Jean in that I feel Jukka has moved, rather rapidly I must add, away from poetic to painterly in his new images. The earliest ones on his new nonlinear were like magnified shots of text, fragments from a larger whole. Then colour was added, with the focus on the colour, almost as though now he'd discovered how to do it he was doing a few practice runs. Still concerned with words &/or letters, still providing an entrance way through things familiar.
Now I feel we do not enter the poems but step back from them the way we do with paintings so that we can see them entire. Certainly the words are there, fragmented, hinting, eroded. It is as if we have passed beyond the ocular microscope & are now dealing with electron microscopy that is showing us that what we thought were empty spaces between words and letters have a depth & a topography of their own. The entrance way is way back, in the verbal poems that still are there behind. We've entered a Mandelbrot world of fractals where the poems enter us rather than us entering the poems.
Friday, May 28, 2004
The latest issue of BlazeVOX is currently under construction & with it the unveiling of the partnership of Young & Kervinen. More, much more, is to come.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Another Ficcione for the Master, by Umberto Eco this time
The speaker was a monk bent under the weight of his years, an old man white as snow, not only his skin, but also his face and his pupils. I saw he was blind. The voice was still majestic and the limbs powerful, even if the body was withered by age. He stared at us as if he could see us, and always thereafter I saw him move and speak as if he still possessed the gift of sight. But the tone of his voice was that of one possessing only the gift of prophesy.
"The man whom you see, venerable in age and wisdom," Malachi said to William, pointing out the newcomer, "is Jorge of Burgos."
from William Weaver's translation of Il nome della rosa.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
A note on Tom Beckett's book, Vanishing Points of Resemblance
"All words are misspelled." If this is true then what are the meant-to-be words? & what does it mean, coming at the end? Or is this the true beginning? Do we assume it to be a conclusion or is it an Epimenidean paradox – the line below is false / the line above is true? Strange loops.
So I suspend judgment.
But earlier on I have read "Tell me who to be". Which I know to be a lie because we are being told who the writer's "me" is in the autobiographical snippets & the sensual/sensory statements throughout the work. "I have two brothers & a sister." "For years I thought I knew that the accident occurred when I was five." "I used to want to be a woman." "I caress myself, pretend to be touching someone else." So the statement now becomes a request. "Tell me what you think of me."
Self-doubt.
But no self-pity. "The secret of survival is adaptability."
I see Vanishing Points of Resemblance as a journal, one written after, not during, the journey. But the steps are being retraced in memory now that an assembly point, an entrepot for experiences, has been reached. It is set in the present looking towards the past & thinking about the future. Identity is not what we are but what we think we are, what we mistake ourselves to be. We are a mistaken identity about which we are certain. It is also how far we let others let it be, how far out we are (about) ourselves. Dare we risk "unprotected texts"?
It is written with a deliberate choice of words. Perhaps well-chosen is a better description since deliberate can often mean heavy, & VpoR is not that. Precise is probably an even better word. Tom Beckett is precise in what he tells us. & what he doesn’t tell us. & again "Tell me who to be" is shown up as a lie.
The parts of the book build, the statements overlay one another, nothing contradicts itself. Again a clarity. Sometimes the writer stands outside himself & becomes the Subject. Insightful. Inside-full. Objective? Subjective? Words are placed where you least expect them. Shadows are magnifying glances, not contrary utterances. Not one word out of place.
Tom described VPoR in a blogpost as "the condensed record of well over a couple of hundred pages to get it right". Distilled Beckettessence. But it is not compressed writing in the way that, say. Borges' Ficciones are. Rather it is expansive, full of spaces that give what's beneath room to breathe, to grow. It is polished silver filigree that the darkness of the sun & the brightness of the moon shine through. & in the parts that are solid silver we see
I enjoyed VPoR. Tom's use of words delights me. I like the construction & the way that it seems to drive in towards a point, does not vanish but demands to be read again as it heads outwards like a comet's orbit round a sun. I do not know Tom Beckett any better from reading VPoR; I do know, now that I've read it, that I'd like to know him better.
But, & there is always a but, what it means is that we now expect much more from him. Now that resemblance to any other body living or dead has been done away with, the personal re-assembly replacing it is almost complete & the table has been cleared, I see it as an exquisite appetiser for the main meal whose ingredients have just been exposed & are stirring as they blink in the limelight.
So I suspend judgment.
But earlier on I have read "Tell me who to be". Which I know to be a lie because we are being told who the writer's "me" is in the autobiographical snippets & the sensual/sensory statements throughout the work. "I have two brothers & a sister." "For years I thought I knew that the accident occurred when I was five." "I used to want to be a woman." "I caress myself, pretend to be touching someone else." So the statement now becomes a request. "Tell me what you think of me."
Self-doubt.
The Subject is stepping through an environment which is full of holes. These are holes of the Subject's and of others' making. The holes increase the circulation of air. To negotiate one's way around them takes care.
But no self-pity. "The secret of survival is adaptability."
I see Vanishing Points of Resemblance as a journal, one written after, not during, the journey. But the steps are being retraced in memory now that an assembly point, an entrepot for experiences, has been reached. It is set in the present looking towards the past & thinking about the future. Identity is not what we are but what we think we are, what we mistake ourselves to be. We are a mistaken identity about which we are certain. It is also how far we let others let it be, how far out we are (about) ourselves. Dare we risk "unprotected texts"?
It is written with a deliberate choice of words. Perhaps well-chosen is a better description since deliberate can often mean heavy, & VpoR is not that. Precise is probably an even better word. Tom Beckett is precise in what he tells us. & what he doesn’t tell us. & again "Tell me who to be" is shown up as a lie.
The parts of the book build, the statements overlay one another, nothing contradicts itself. Again a clarity. Sometimes the writer stands outside himself & becomes the Subject. Insightful. Inside-full. Objective? Subjective? Words are placed where you least expect them. Shadows are magnifying glances, not contrary utterances. Not one word out of place.
Tom described VPoR in a blogpost as "the condensed record of well over a couple of hundred pages to get it right". Distilled Beckettessence. But it is not compressed writing in the way that, say. Borges' Ficciones are. Rather it is expansive, full of spaces that give what's beneath room to breathe, to grow. It is polished silver filigree that the darkness of the sun & the brightness of the moon shine through. & in the parts that are solid silver we see
What one wants to be.
What one appears to be.
What one is.
I enjoyed VPoR. Tom's use of words delights me. I like the construction & the way that it seems to drive in towards a point, does not vanish but demands to be read again as it heads outwards like a comet's orbit round a sun. I do not know Tom Beckett any better from reading VPoR; I do know, now that I've read it, that I'd like to know him better.
But, & there is always a but, what it means is that we now expect much more from him. Now that resemblance to any other body living or dead has been done away with, the personal re-assembly replacing it is almost complete & the table has been cleared, I see it as an exquisite appetiser for the main meal whose ingredients have just been exposed & are stirring as they blink in the limelight.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
I'm jealous, Jean
a megalomaniacal librarian's post-Escherian sci fi humpty-dumpty acid fantasy
Most of us have to make do with The Matrix.
Most of us have to make do with The Matrix.
Nimby
Nimby is an acronym for not in my back yard, as in I don't mind you building a nuclear waste facility but nimby. & 50-100 white cockatoos screeching at 7.00 a.m. from the guava tree down the back is definitely nimby.
A solitary bird tearing small branches from a tree might qualify as a lordly & isolate satyr; but an excited flock such as this has more in common with the plebeians baying for blood at the Colosseum or a group of drunken English soccer supporters tearing a town apart.
A solitary bird tearing small branches from a tree might qualify as a lordly & isolate satyr; but an excited flock such as this has more in common with the plebeians baying for blood at the Colosseum or a group of drunken English soccer supporters tearing a town apart.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
Saturday, May 22, 2004
A to a Q
What started me writing again? The simplistic answer is that the trigger was the letter from Michele Leggott asking if she could "rummage through the past" when she & her co-editors were in the preliminary stages of assembling Big Smoke. But another fact was that despite everything I've said above I was still writing. Mostly work-related or university assignments, but in amongst it all was some poetry. Much of it chicken-claw scratchings but amongst it pieces such as Backtracking in the Early Nineties which dates itself internally from the time of the (later-given) title.
What Michele did was transfuse me with her enthusiasm for the project & I started going through the carry-bag (which by now had been transferred to a grey document box) to search out poems which she probably would not have seen. Because of their state - flimsy, often carbon copies (remember them?), stained with coffee & smoke from the bottoms of spoons, scarred by cigarette burns - I started copying them onto the PC so there would be a clean collection for her. The copying out became a reappraisal; & I discovered that not only could I remember most of the poems but there were some pretty good ones amongst them. I also found the confidence to polish up some I thought needed it. A couple of the poems in The right foot of the giant are almost complete rewritings. In the subsequent toing & froing with Michele &, later, Alan Brunton, my enthusiasm built; jottings for new poems pushed through to the surface or were absorbed from earlier notes; Right foot came out, published by Alan's Bumper Books; & by the time the launch of Big Smoke happened there were some new poems to accompany it.
But still not easy. The poem Nemesis or: Painting by Numbers covers some of the arid ground I found when trying to bridge the years of silence. 2001 was a year of rejection slips. & depression. Could I really write or was I deluding myself? The reviews of Big Smoke & Right foot were favourable to me, but that was the past catching up. & a lot of what I was currently writing I wasn't very happy with, felt that I was still facing backwards & trying to reel in / live off the past while the present charged towards the future behind me. But at least I was still writing. & at last the breakthrough came with Lunch in Glebe which although it talked about the past did so in a way that led towards the future.
The above is an extract from a Q&A with Martin Edmond, due to be published online in the next couple of months by the New Zealand electronic poetry centre - side bar - & in print by brief, a journal edited by Jack Ross & published by the Writers Group, 6A Hastings Road, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand. Subscription for three issues is $NZ65. At current exchange rates that's around $US40. I have an email address for brief which rather than publish here & spamattract I can pass on to anyone that contacts me.
Friday, May 21, 2004
Words
I have discovered by accident that I have a poem in the latest issue of Znine, the University of Texas at Arlington's quarterly (?) ezine. (Okay, I admit it, I found it doing my monthly vanity search on Google to see if I'm still alive – Googlism reassures me that I am – or if I'd been made Pope & nobody had told me yet.) A small issue, but I was very happy to see that I'm sharing the pages with Harry K. Stammer.
In view of my recent posts it might be construed as a bird poem which it is, but only accidentally so. It's more about words or, rather, specific words. I have a thing about some words which I can't usually do anything about except possibly uncover them late at night & salivate over them privately like a collector of stolen art. Most can't be worked into a conversation or even a poem except through artifice.
The word from the Znine poem is quincunx, & the chance arrangement of olive-backed orioles was the only time I've seen one live. There was a newspaper photo, years ago, of five nuns playing in the snow; but how the hell do you work that into a conversation? "What a lovely quincunx." Bam, straight in the kisser. So, given the opportunity….
But there are some opportunities you wish you'd never been given. I refer to the secret stash of words in a poem written the day that I heard of the death of Alan Brunton, New Zealand poet, actor, playwright, essayist & publisher (including my The right foot of the giant). That usage wasn't forced. I do not remember meeting Alan though our paths probably crossed in 1969, the year I left N.Z. But we were both interviewed for a radio program about the times that the anthology Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, which he co-edited, covered. I was particularly struck by the beauty of his speaking voice. & the word "mellifluous" came to mind.
Apart from that, as I say, artifice. A hay(na)ku posted to As/Is
& the following, from around 1975 which was when I stopped writing & which first appeared in The right foot twenty-five years later.
THERE ARE WORDS OF WHICH /
I AM ENAMOURED; BUT SHALL NEVER
GET TO USE, SAVE ALL TOGETHER,
IN THE ONE POEM
In view of my recent posts it might be construed as a bird poem which it is, but only accidentally so. It's more about words or, rather, specific words. I have a thing about some words which I can't usually do anything about except possibly uncover them late at night & salivate over them privately like a collector of stolen art. Most can't be worked into a conversation or even a poem except through artifice.
The word from the Znine poem is quincunx, & the chance arrangement of olive-backed orioles was the only time I've seen one live. There was a newspaper photo, years ago, of five nuns playing in the snow; but how the hell do you work that into a conversation? "What a lovely quincunx." Bam, straight in the kisser. So, given the opportunity….
But there are some opportunities you wish you'd never been given. I refer to the secret stash of words in a poem written the day that I heard of the death of Alan Brunton, New Zealand poet, actor, playwright, essayist & publisher (including my The right foot of the giant). That usage wasn't forced. I do not remember meeting Alan though our paths probably crossed in 1969, the year I left N.Z. But we were both interviewed for a radio program about the times that the anthology Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, which he co-edited, covered. I was particularly struck by the beauty of his speaking voice. & the word "mellifluous" came to mind.
Apart from that, as I say, artifice. A hay(na)ku posted to As/Is
Yclept
is one
of a number
of
words that
frustrate me in
that
I never
get an opportunity
to
use them.
Take this poem
then
as an
act of onanism.
& the following, from around 1975 which was when I stopped writing & which first appeared in The right foot twenty-five years later.
THERE ARE WORDS OF WHICH /
I AM ENAMOURED; BUT SHALL NEVER
GET TO USE, SAVE ALL TOGETHER,
IN THE ONE POEM
Standing, staring from the belvedere
at the moon which, in syzygy, is
full & surrounded by xiphoid stars,
he is entranced by the perfume of the
ylang ylang tree as it drifts upward,
moving widdershins with an eddy
of the wind.
Though there is a
meretricious aspect to the evening
he can, for the moment, forget he is in
exile here, a giaour who has been
banished from his own land & is now
on a diaspora without definition, &
mostwheres feeling as out of place as an
anthropophage in a vegan restaurant.
Later he will descend to his room, to try &
write, a lucubration which, as the mesmerism
of the evening wears off & full awareness
of his severed roots returns, will become
more trite, more pleonastic. To be forgotten
or, at best, included in some future adespota.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
The horror! The horror!
Israeli tanks &/or helicopters blast protest marchers. American helicopters blast weddings. Self defence. Stability to the region. What hypocritical bullshit! They're boys - note to myself: it's about time women ran the world - playing with matches & I'm afraid that sooner rather than later the whole fucking forest is going to catch fire.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Check out Eileen Tabios' wonderful poem at kultureflash. & let me just say in passing that self-deprecation is not for the likes of you or I even though we may do it well. It's like Sartre's Hell, for other people. Preen, Lady, preen! You've got the goods to back it up.
A seventh ficcione, for Mao Tse-Edmond
Mao Zedong as he
is now known
started the Long March
with 100,000 followers
& three movies. When
they reached Shanxi
there were only
8000 people &
one movie left. Loss of
faith, starvation, accidents
& the continual harrassment
by Jiang Jie Shi's
Guomindang army
accounted for the attrition. The
two movies – The Battleship
Potemkin & Les Enfants du
Paradis – were lost when
a landslide carried
the mule that was carrying them
away. Stagecoach was the
only one to survive; but,
fortunately, the pedal-powered
generator that provided
the electricity also
made it through un-
scathed. It is said
that by the end of the
March all the survivors
knew every word of the script
by heart. There is a poem
of Mao's that starts:
"The long shadow
of John Ford
guards the entrances
to the Shanxi Caves." That
Zhou Enlai who
drove the generator
is equally revered is
evidenced by the number
of bicycles in China today.
is now known
started the Long March
with 100,000 followers
& three movies. When
they reached Shanxi
there were only
8000 people &
one movie left. Loss of
faith, starvation, accidents
& the continual harrassment
by Jiang Jie Shi's
Guomindang army
accounted for the attrition. The
two movies – The Battleship
Potemkin & Les Enfants du
Paradis – were lost when
a landslide carried
the mule that was carrying them
away. Stagecoach was the
only one to survive; but,
fortunately, the pedal-powered
generator that provided
the electricity also
made it through un-
scathed. It is said
that by the end of the
March all the survivors
knew every word of the script
by heart. There is a poem
of Mao's that starts:
"The long shadow
of John Ford
guards the entrances
to the Shanxi Caves." That
Zhou Enlai who
drove the generator
is equally revered is
evidenced by the number
of bicycles in China today.
The Southern Boobook
There is a large gum tree at the top of our driveway. & it has one particular branch that seems to be a favoured resting place for birds. It is where I saw the spangled drongo that I wrote about earlier this month. It is where I saw a crow & a raven side by side & understood the differences between them - my bird book says the crow has an uk-uk-uk-uk call, the raven a drawn out ahh-ahh-ahh-r-r-r. Fine,you think, that's an easy way to tell them apart, until the day I saw a crow in the same tree, & with one breath it was going uk & then the next it was going ahh.
Last night's bird was the Southern Boobook, for me a nostalgic bird because as its scientific name - Ninox novaeseelandiae - suggests, it is also found in New Zealand where, I think, it is the only owl. There - & in some parts of Australia as well - it is known as the mo-poke which is one interpretation of a call that has been described as "leisurely, two-syllable, & though soft in tone can carry for some kilometres". Usually I hear them from a distance, calling from down by the lagoon or from the slightly more distant Botanical Gardens. Seeing one in the garden was kickarse.
When young I thought their name was morepork....
Last night's bird was the Southern Boobook, for me a nostalgic bird because as its scientific name - Ninox novaeseelandiae - suggests, it is also found in New Zealand where, I think, it is the only owl. There - & in some parts of Australia as well - it is known as the mo-poke which is one interpretation of a call that has been described as "leisurely, two-syllable, & though soft in tone can carry for some kilometres". Usually I hear them from a distance, calling from down by the lagoon or from the slightly more distant Botanical Gardens. Seeing one in the garden was kickarse.
When young I thought their name was morepork....
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Joseph Garver is back! The smurf dancing girls are all aquiver & eager to try out the new routines. To keep the pressure on I've added his blog to the sidebar. Pirouette!! Preen (as the Chatelaine might - not might - would say)!!
Have just added a couple of "non-painting" poems, Cloning Magritte & Magritte's Deathday, to the series.
I decided to dust this off from the pages of As/Is & give it another airing
From the Hotel Splendide
In the event of an
armed insurrection
guests are advised
to stay towards
the back of the room
& avoid all windows.
The Management accepts
no responsibility for
injuries caused by
stray bullets or ricochets.
Should the revolution
be successful the same
instructions still apply. The
victory parade is always
punctuated by the firing
of guns into the air. If
unsuccessful please do not
film the subsequent reprisals.
From a distance video cameras
may be mistaken for AK47s
or small hand-held missile
launchers. If the U.S. invades
there are forms enabling you
to claim for accidental
death from friendly fire
included with the other
hotel brochures. When
completed, please hang
outside your room along with
your cancelled breakfast menu.
In the event of an
armed insurrection
guests are advised
to stay towards
the back of the room
& avoid all windows.
The Management accepts
no responsibility for
injuries caused by
stray bullets or ricochets.
Should the revolution
be successful the same
instructions still apply. The
victory parade is always
punctuated by the firing
of guns into the air. If
unsuccessful please do not
film the subsequent reprisals.
From a distance video cameras
may be mistaken for AK47s
or small hand-held missile
launchers. If the U.S. invades
there are forms enabling you
to claim for accidental
death from friendly fire
included with the other
hotel brochures. When
completed, please hang
outside your room along with
your cancelled breakfast menu.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Changing labels from Motime to Blogger seems to have given Jukka the opportunity to post in a more varied format. This is a beautiful piece.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Friday, May 14, 2004
Jean Vengua tends to change the artwork at the top of OKIR almost as rapidly as the escalating cost of the war in Iraq displayed on kari edwards' transdada.
I am taken by the mixed-media piece currently displayed, "Warning" by Filipino painter Santiago Bose who died in 2002. If the piece has gone by the time you go to look at it, it can be found here.
There's a bit more information about the painter available at this site, & a moving essay by Eileen Tabios in an issue of our own voice.
I am taken by the mixed-media piece currently displayed, "Warning" by Filipino painter Santiago Bose who died in 2002. If the piece has gone by the time you go to look at it, it can be found here.
There's a bit more information about the painter available at this site, & a moving essay by Eileen Tabios in an issue of our own voice.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Something I would really like to be able to get to!
Michael Rothenberg and David Meltzer
read from their new books from La Alameda / University New Mexico Press
Word Play Theater June 01 tue 7:30 pm
$ 6. cover, Season passes $ 40. For more information call 1.212.262.4216
Medicine Show Theatre, 549 West 52nd St. (10th/11th), 3rd Floor, NYC 1001
========================
Beat Thing is David Meltzer’s truly epic poem — an engagement with history & his own participatory & witnessing presence. If the title at first suggests a nostalgic romp through a 1950s-style beat scene, it doesn’t take long before mid-twentieth-century America’s urban pastoralism comes apart in all its phases & merges with the final solutions of death camps & death bombs from the preceding decade. This is collage raised to a higher power — a tough-grained & meticulously detailed poetry — "without check with original energy," as Whitman wrote — & very much what’s needed now.
— Jerome Rothenberg
The Beat Thing sizzles as close as yesterday—with landmarks, names, occasions—as Poet Meltzer writes us back into the beat. Everyone's still There. As fresh as ever.
— Joanne Kyger
David Meltzer has gifted us with his beautifully written kabalistic and unique look at the Beat Generation. He also turns his eye to the American infrastructure of Bebop. This book comes out of his mature consciousness like energy spray bursting from the brow of a dolphin.
— Michael McClure
David Meltzer’s most important lyri-political work. A profound juxtaposition in which the Beat Movement’s meaning is resonated with the haunting of the Holocaust and the American years of McCarthyism and Jim Crowism. Like all great works, this entire book is single simultaneous moment in progress, written by a poet who — in terms of the rhythms, verbal inventiveness and the naming of figures of popular culture — is without equal anywhere.
— Jack Hirschman
David Meltzer is one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic; mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers. His "ear" like we used to say and his erudition are fine-tuned and precise. A kind of bop-perfection pervades this work.
—Diane di Prima
"how easily narrative falls into place, realizes itself through a story-telling historian who sets out to frame a tangled constantly permutating chaos into a familiar & repeatable story w/out shadows or dead-ends; how impulsively memory organizes into a choir to tell a story of what it remembers symphonically, i.e., formally; even experimentalists practice w/in or against forms that have formed their relationship to writing & telling stories; history is the story of writing"
—Epilogue from Beat Thing
=================================
Unhurried Vision by Michael Rothenberg--Underneath the art of poetry exists the tradition of the journal—the attempt to capture and reveal the world as it passes by. Observations, reflections, and ideas accumulate to form connections and reveal process, content and story. Unhurried Vision is a record of the year 1999, and continues Michael Rothenberg’s experiment with the journal. This is the year Philip Whalen became terminally ill and Rothenberg began taking care of him, pulled together Whalen’s archives and library and edited his book of selected poems, Overtime. Political, personal, and romantic, Unhurried Vision works to savor the impermanent, looking at the moments in a poet’s life, contemplating the body of experience. It is the mind on a quiet stroll through longing, loss and beauty.
Unhurried Vision, a year in the life of Michael, is really a deeply loving celebration & farewell to mentor Philip Whalen, poet, roshi, & all around confounder of boundaries. A day-book; a non-epic odyssey through routes & roots of living & dying; a gastronome’s pleasure dome, but above all a deeply stirred & stirring affirmation of poetry’s centrality in realizing mundane & profound instances in the everyday extraordinary. Rothenberg’s raw footage is disarming; sly, self-effacing, proclaiming, doubting, affirming. You can read it in one sitting, say blurboligists, but it takes at least a lifetime. & then what?
—David Meltzer
read from their new books from La Alameda / University New Mexico Press
Word Play Theater June 01 tue 7:30 pm
$ 6. cover, Season passes $ 40. For more information call 1.212.262.4216
Medicine Show Theatre, 549 West 52nd St. (10th/11th), 3rd Floor, NYC 1001
========================
Beat Thing is David Meltzer’s truly epic poem — an engagement with history & his own participatory & witnessing presence. If the title at first suggests a nostalgic romp through a 1950s-style beat scene, it doesn’t take long before mid-twentieth-century America’s urban pastoralism comes apart in all its phases & merges with the final solutions of death camps & death bombs from the preceding decade. This is collage raised to a higher power — a tough-grained & meticulously detailed poetry — "without check with original energy," as Whitman wrote — & very much what’s needed now.
— Jerome Rothenberg
The Beat Thing sizzles as close as yesterday—with landmarks, names, occasions—as Poet Meltzer writes us back into the beat. Everyone's still There. As fresh as ever.
— Joanne Kyger
David Meltzer has gifted us with his beautifully written kabalistic and unique look at the Beat Generation. He also turns his eye to the American infrastructure of Bebop. This book comes out of his mature consciousness like energy spray bursting from the brow of a dolphin.
— Michael McClure
David Meltzer’s most important lyri-political work. A profound juxtaposition in which the Beat Movement’s meaning is resonated with the haunting of the Holocaust and the American years of McCarthyism and Jim Crowism. Like all great works, this entire book is single simultaneous moment in progress, written by a poet who — in terms of the rhythms, verbal inventiveness and the naming of figures of popular culture — is without equal anywhere.
— Jack Hirschman
David Meltzer is one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic; mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers. His "ear" like we used to say and his erudition are fine-tuned and precise. A kind of bop-perfection pervades this work.
—Diane di Prima
"how easily narrative falls into place, realizes itself through a story-telling historian who sets out to frame a tangled constantly permutating chaos into a familiar & repeatable story w/out shadows or dead-ends; how impulsively memory organizes into a choir to tell a story of what it remembers symphonically, i.e., formally; even experimentalists practice w/in or against forms that have formed their relationship to writing & telling stories; history is the story of writing"
—Epilogue from Beat Thing
=================================
Unhurried Vision by Michael Rothenberg--Underneath the art of poetry exists the tradition of the journal—the attempt to capture and reveal the world as it passes by. Observations, reflections, and ideas accumulate to form connections and reveal process, content and story. Unhurried Vision is a record of the year 1999, and continues Michael Rothenberg’s experiment with the journal. This is the year Philip Whalen became terminally ill and Rothenberg began taking care of him, pulled together Whalen’s archives and library and edited his book of selected poems, Overtime. Political, personal, and romantic, Unhurried Vision works to savor the impermanent, looking at the moments in a poet’s life, contemplating the body of experience. It is the mind on a quiet stroll through longing, loss and beauty.
Unhurried Vision, a year in the life of Michael, is really a deeply loving celebration & farewell to mentor Philip Whalen, poet, roshi, & all around confounder of boundaries. A day-book; a non-epic odyssey through routes & roots of living & dying; a gastronome’s pleasure dome, but above all a deeply stirred & stirring affirmation of poetry’s centrality in realizing mundane & profound instances in the everyday extraordinary. Rothenberg’s raw footage is disarming; sly, self-effacing, proclaiming, doubting, affirming. You can read it in one sitting, say blurboligists, but it takes at least a lifetime. & then what?
—David Meltzer
Paul Keating's speech in Redfern, 10 December 1992
A reference to this speech on tv a couple of days got me looking at it again. Unfortunately the vision has still not been realised. Keating was voted out of office a few years later, & the current Prime Minister of Australia still refuses to apologise for the wrongs that the early European settlers did to the indigenous population as he moves his government further & further towards the conservative right under the influence of the current U.S. government.
Australia was claimed as an English colony under the doctrine of Terra Nullius, empty land, even though it had been settled for up to 70000 years. The indigenous population were not granted Australian citizenship until 1967.
Keating's speech is probably the greatest speech by an Australian politician in the last thirty years - if there are any contenders they would come from the same source. & the last two paragraphs of the extract below have an extremely contemporary relevance to what is happening today in another country.
Australia was claimed as an English colony under the doctrine of Terra Nullius, empty land, even though it had been settled for up to 70000 years. The indigenous population were not granted Australian citizenship until 1967.
Keating's speech is probably the greatest speech by an Australian politician in the last thirty years - if there are any contenders they would come from the same source. & the last two paragraphs of the extract below have an extremely contemporary relevance to what is happening today in another country.
It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
The Real Dreaming
Rupert Murdoch has a monopoly on the newspapers of Rockhampton. The local Bulletin, the state-based Courier-Mail & the national Australian are all from the Murdoch stable. So I've given up reading the newspaper on a daily basis since I've moved here.
I do, however, get the Saturday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. On a Sunday. But at least it gives me an informed & not-too-biased view of what's going on in the world as well as being a tendril still linking me to Sydney.
The thing I miss most here is the activity of a big city. Not that you ever got to see/hear much of it because there was, literally, too much going on to encompass it all. But it seemed to pervade the atmosphere...
Which brings me to the purpose of this post. In last Saturday's SMH there was a review of an exhibition by the late Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Clifford Possum is probably the greatest of the modern Aboriginal artists, & Aboriginal art, paradox though it seems because the subject matter & the style are almost totally based on an ancient tradition (though one that is constantly refreshed because it still governs the way of life), is one of the strengths of contemporary painting.
This current exhibition is described as "astonishing, eye-tripping & vertigo-inducing". One of the paintings reproduced in the SMH was Kangaroo Story (Mt Denison). A wider selection of Clifford Possum's work can be found here.
There are many sites & many books dedicated to Aboriginal painting of the last thirty years. Seeking at least some of these out will bring astonishing rewards.
I do, however, get the Saturday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. On a Sunday. But at least it gives me an informed & not-too-biased view of what's going on in the world as well as being a tendril still linking me to Sydney.
The thing I miss most here is the activity of a big city. Not that you ever got to see/hear much of it because there was, literally, too much going on to encompass it all. But it seemed to pervade the atmosphere...
Which brings me to the purpose of this post. In last Saturday's SMH there was a review of an exhibition by the late Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Clifford Possum is probably the greatest of the modern Aboriginal artists, & Aboriginal art, paradox though it seems because the subject matter & the style are almost totally based on an ancient tradition (though one that is constantly refreshed because it still governs the way of life), is one of the strengths of contemporary painting.
This current exhibition is described as "astonishing, eye-tripping & vertigo-inducing". One of the paintings reproduced in the SMH was Kangaroo Story (Mt Denison). A wider selection of Clifford Possum's work can be found here.
There are many sites & many books dedicated to Aboriginal painting of the last thirty years. Seeking at least some of these out will bring astonishing rewards.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Monday, May 10, 2004
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Five linear episodes for Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
a )
Later there would be
questions asked; but at
the time few people paid
much attention to the
small group standing off
to the side at the wake
that followed Trotsky's
funeral. Certainly
the two men at the centre
both had bodyguards; but that
was normal here & neither
had famous faces like the
Hitchcocks & Hemingways
that the press were
much more interested in.
*
0)
A few people. A strange pairing.
But Octavio Paz the only one
to see the energy
flowing & that it was
not just sexual. Always the
astute metaphysician. “The one
wanted to unravel the moon
by using recursive &
mechanical algorithms; the other
to recreate the sun with a
continuous chain reaction. I
saw the future in them.”
Islas en llamas en mitad del Pacifico
Mundos de imágenes suspendidos de un hilo de araña
(Islands in flames in the middle of the Pacific
A world of imagining suspended from the web of a spider)
*
1)
Perhaps the mescal, perhaps
the Mexican warmth, but Turing
was expansive on the day,
eschewing the cyphers he
usually talked in & of. “If I
can paraphrase Hegel, the
thing we learn from history
is that we do not learn from it.
But we are dreamers, & have
chosen to ignore that lesson. da
Vinci designed flying machines
in a flightless age; Babbage
computed a difference engine
far beyond the loom
that knitted Jacquard sweaters. I
have this idea of a machine
whose answers to a set of
questions are indistinguishable
from those of a man. & you,
Robert, you dream of a
Fabergé egg that conceals
a controlled fusion that
will level cities or turn
the desert in glass. Conceit &
concept – we have them both.
It is the world that lacks
the technology to make them
practical.” Oppenheimer smiled.
*
R)
One of the first things
Oppenheimer did as
director of Project Manhattan
was to invite Diego Rivera
north to Los Alamos to
paint a mural of
Trotsky's funeral over-
shadowed by a
mushroom cloud that bore
the face of Shiva. It was
amongst the first things
destroyed by the first
successful testing of the bomb.
*
b )
Instead of a long chain
of nucleotides, think of
the body as being
comprised of an infinite tape
that is divided into cells,
a finite number of which
contain a symbol drawn
from a finite vocabulary. To
breath life into it
add a moving head to scan
the cells as they pass; &
depending on the present state
& the symbol that is present
to overwrite or delete what it
finds there & move one cell
further on. It is not
a sequence of purine or
pyrimidine bases but of
ordered quintuples. Birth
is the initial state; the subset
of final states includes
suicide through cyanide
& assassination with an icepick.
Later there would be
questions asked; but at
the time few people paid
much attention to the
small group standing off
to the side at the wake
that followed Trotsky's
funeral. Certainly
the two men at the centre
both had bodyguards; but that
was normal here & neither
had famous faces like the
Hitchcocks & Hemingways
that the press were
much more interested in.
*
0)
A few people. A strange pairing.
But Octavio Paz the only one
to see the energy
flowing & that it was
not just sexual. Always the
astute metaphysician. “The one
wanted to unravel the moon
by using recursive &
mechanical algorithms; the other
to recreate the sun with a
continuous chain reaction. I
saw the future in them.”
Islas en llamas en mitad del Pacifico
Mundos de imágenes suspendidos de un hilo de araña
(Islands in flames in the middle of the Pacific
A world of imagining suspended from the web of a spider)
*
1)
Perhaps the mescal, perhaps
the Mexican warmth, but Turing
was expansive on the day,
eschewing the cyphers he
usually talked in & of. “If I
can paraphrase Hegel, the
thing we learn from history
is that we do not learn from it.
But we are dreamers, & have
chosen to ignore that lesson. da
Vinci designed flying machines
in a flightless age; Babbage
computed a difference engine
far beyond the loom
that knitted Jacquard sweaters. I
have this idea of a machine
whose answers to a set of
questions are indistinguishable
from those of a man. & you,
Robert, you dream of a
Fabergé egg that conceals
a controlled fusion that
will level cities or turn
the desert in glass. Conceit &
concept – we have them both.
It is the world that lacks
the technology to make them
practical.” Oppenheimer smiled.
*
R)
One of the first things
Oppenheimer did as
director of Project Manhattan
was to invite Diego Rivera
north to Los Alamos to
paint a mural of
Trotsky's funeral over-
shadowed by a
mushroom cloud that bore
the face of Shiva. It was
amongst the first things
destroyed by the first
successful testing of the bomb.
*
b )
Instead of a long chain
of nucleotides, think of
the body as being
comprised of an infinite tape
that is divided into cells,
a finite number of which
contain a symbol drawn
from a finite vocabulary. To
breath life into it
add a moving head to scan
the cells as they pass; &
depending on the present state
& the symbol that is present
to overwrite or delete what it
finds there & move one cell
further on. It is not
a sequence of purine or
pyrimidine bases but of
ordered quintuples. Birth
is the initial state; the subset
of final states includes
suicide through cyanide
& assassination with an icepick.
Friday, May 07, 2004
A couple of notes regarding the Hay(na)ku Anthology.
The editors will consider only hay(na)ku.
That
is, poems
having this form.
Anything else, no matter how good, will not be looked at.
However, what might be loosely described as "augmented" hay(na)ku - and by augmented the editors mean a poem that retains the inherent hay(na)ku form whilst containing other elements - are acceptable. (But bear in mind that the editors' definition of "augmented" may depend upon what additives were in that particular morning's breakfast cereal.)
Please indicate also if what is being submitted is a sequence or a series of separate hay(na)ku.
Feel free to send in both previously published and new work. Multiple submissions are allowed, but preferably in, say, a monthly bundle. A hay(na)ku a day might just keep the editors away.
Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged, but once the final selection is made, only those accepted for the anthology will be notified.
That
is, poems
having this form.
Anything else, no matter how good, will not be looked at.
However, what might be loosely described as "augmented" hay(na)ku - and by augmented the editors mean a poem that retains the inherent hay(na)ku form whilst containing other elements - are acceptable. (But bear in mind that the editors' definition of "augmented" may depend upon what additives were in that particular morning's breakfast cereal.)
Please indicate also if what is being submitted is a sequence or a series of separate hay(na)ku.
Feel free to send in both previously published and new work. Multiple submissions are allowed, but preferably in, say, a monthly bundle. A hay(na)ku a day might just keep the editors away.
Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged, but once the final selection is made, only those accepted for the anthology will be notified.
A sixth ficcione, for Martin Edmond again
In his soon-to-be published
autobiography titled "I was
an Iatrochemist for the CIA:
my Adventures in Alchemy"
Paracelsus tells of a
chance meeting in Antwerp
with a Flemish painter
called, he thinks, Jerome Bosh
& how they spent a day
drinking laudanum
& a night enjoying
the pleasures of a brothel
called the Garden of
Earthly Delights. Paracelsus
mentions it in passing.
He says he got nothing
out of their time together.
autobiography titled "I was
an Iatrochemist for the CIA:
my Adventures in Alchemy"
Paracelsus tells of a
chance meeting in Antwerp
with a Flemish painter
called, he thinks, Jerome Bosh
& how they spent a day
drinking laudanum
& a night enjoying
the pleasures of a brothel
called the Garden of
Earthly Delights. Paracelsus
mentions it in passing.
He says he got nothing
out of their time together.
Thursday, May 06, 2004
A further note on the spangled drongo
In Australian slang, a drongo is a fool, a stupid person.
John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, is astute in the art of self-preservation politics – though he has shown recent signs of losing it – but he is a fool in his blind obedience to the diktates of Amerikan policy, especially that relating to Iraq. Mind you, he is of a height to be able to kiss George W. Borg's arse without having to bend his knees. & where Borg won his election on Florida chad, Howard won his through the CHildren overboArD affair which provided a convenient platform of lies three days before the last federal election.
Spangled, of course, evokes the star-spangled banner.
So put them together & you then have this picture of little Johnnie wrapped in the stars & stripes, leash in mouth, begging Borg to take him for a walk so he can go doo-doos.
& I don't think I’m alone in this imagining. Check out these editorial cartoons.
John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, is astute in the art of self-preservation politics – though he has shown recent signs of losing it – but he is a fool in his blind obedience to the diktates of Amerikan policy, especially that relating to Iraq. Mind you, he is of a height to be able to kiss George W. Borg's arse without having to bend his knees. & where Borg won his election on Florida chad, Howard won his through the CHildren overboArD affair which provided a convenient platform of lies three days before the last federal election.
Spangled, of course, evokes the star-spangled banner.
So put them together & you then have this picture of little Johnnie wrapped in the stars & stripes, leash in mouth, begging Borg to take him for a walk so he can go doo-doos.
& I don't think I’m alone in this imagining. Check out these editorial cartoons.
Today's bird sighting
The Spangled Drongo
Dicrurus bracteatus
distinguished by its forked "fishtail". which is how I identified it.
Dicrurus bracteatus
distinguished by its forked "fishtail". which is how I identified it.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
A lamentation
Joseph
Garver's hay(na)ku
blog stands empty.
That
is a
tragedy. He had
some
wonderful pieces
on display there.
Garver's hay(na)ku
blog stands empty.
That
is a
tragedy. He had
some
wonderful pieces
on display there.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Monday, May 03, 2004
To give Tom Beckett a small pleasure I have added a referrers' list - though pelican dreaming will never match the crowds lined up before the Chatelaine's gates.
Maybe a small howl when the new moon comes around, Tom.
Maybe a small howl when the new moon comes around, Tom.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Carte Blanche
Have just posted Carte Blanche, my thirtieth poem in the on-going series, to Series Magritte.
This poem is mainly Magritte in his own words. I decided that after all my tangential imaginings it was time to give him a chance to speak for himself.
This poem is mainly Magritte in his own words. I decided that after all my tangential imaginings it was time to give him a chance to speak for himself.
Saturday, May 01, 2004
Reciprocities & reciprocations
I have just added three new links to my list of blogs in the sidebar. Steve Tills' Black Spring plus a link to his online journal named, surprisingly enough, Black Spring online (but tell me, Steve, do you want submissions embedded in the email or as an attachment?); Gregory Vincent St Thomasino's eratio & whose excellent journal similarly called eratio is already linked; & David Nemeth's nemski.com.
My thanks to you all for including pelican dreaming in your links.
My thanks to you all for including pelican dreaming in your links.
Another HHH
Just
think of
Marcel Duchamp's Nude
Descending
a Staircase
descending a staircase
three
steps at
the one time.
think of
Marcel Duchamp's Nude
Descending
a Staircase
descending a staircase
three
steps at
the one time.
Friday, April 30, 2004
Vanishing Points of Resemblance
Tom Beckett's new book "Vanishing Points of Resemblance" has been getting wonderful notices from Crag Hill, Steve Tills & Eileen Tabios. It's tremendous to see this response; because, judging by Tom's blogged comments, a great amount of himself has been given to its generation.
One of the problems that I have living in a far-flung outpost of the world is the amount of time it takes to get something from anywhere, especially if there are at least one ocean & two substantial landmasses to be traversed. I ordered the book earlier this week, but by the time my letter & the returning book have threaded their way through the paranoid terrorist-screening filters that now exist I'll be lucky if I see it within a month. (So, dear Tom, forgive me when my posting on it is a bit belated.)
The book is available from:
Generator Press
3503 Virginia Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44109
U.S.A.
for $US8.00 ($7 + p&h).
Getting to know Tom ethereally has been one of the major joys of my Adventures in Electric Blogland. I can't wait to have something physical of his in my hands......
One of the problems that I have living in a far-flung outpost of the world is the amount of time it takes to get something from anywhere, especially if there are at least one ocean & two substantial landmasses to be traversed. I ordered the book earlier this week, but by the time my letter & the returning book have threaded their way through the paranoid terrorist-screening filters that now exist I'll be lucky if I see it within a month. (So, dear Tom, forgive me when my posting on it is a bit belated.)
The book is available from:
Generator Press
3503 Virginia Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44109
U.S.A.
for $US8.00 ($7 + p&h).
Getting to know Tom ethereally has been one of the major joys of my Adventures in Electric Blogland. I can't wait to have something physical of his in my hands......
A touch of Winter in the Rockhampton air today. The overnight temperature dropped to 16°. That's degrees Celsius. Roughly translated into Fahrenheit it was around 60°. That's very, very cold for these parts. People get out their sweaters & their fur-lined jackets. Me? I'm a southerner, so I'm still running around in shorts & a T-shirt.
Thursday, April 29, 2004
Someone over the road has been doodling on a slightly out-of-tune piano, one-fingeredly picking out that song from Sound of Music called do-re-mi. &, goddammit, the song has stuck in my head.
So here I am, eating lunch, trying to read Samuel Delany's "Silent Interviews" – pieces of paper stuck all through (though they keep on falling out) to mark passages; going back to re-reading portions of it; trying to get through it, to absorb it all before I have to get it back to the library tomorrow - & singing "doe, a deer, a female deer…."
If it had to be this musical, why couldn't it have been Coltrane across the road, & My Favourite Things.
& the last passage marked....
So here I am, eating lunch, trying to read Samuel Delany's "Silent Interviews" – pieces of paper stuck all through (though they keep on falling out) to mark passages; going back to re-reading portions of it; trying to get through it, to absorb it all before I have to get it back to the library tomorrow - & singing "doe, a deer, a female deer…."
If it had to be this musical, why couldn't it have been Coltrane across the road, & My Favourite Things.
& the last passage marked....
"With Nietzsche, we learned that God was dead. With Barthes, we learned that the author was dead. With Foucault we learned that man was dead. (It's interesting that people who have no problem negotiating these other demises again and again balk at this one - to me the most important.) With Derrida we learned that the world is constituted of language and that language is undecidable. With de Man language reached new levels of undecidability, where it became undecidable whether or not something was undecidable. Then, with Rorty and Davidson, we learned that language doesn't exist - and Atlantis would seem to have toppled wholly into the sea!As Oscar Hammerstein said "ray, a drop of golden sun."
Have just posted poem #29, The Giantess, to my Series Magritte. It is a loose translation of La géante from Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire, an earlier version of which prompted & is included in the painting by Magritte.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Dreaming of Electric Sheep
The war continues
in Iraq. Nebuchadnezzar
has been found hiding
in a hole in the
ground. He refuses
to come out until
they turn Man
in the High Castle
into a movie. So many
other stories by the writer
filmed. Not yet
the best of them. The
Red Crescent gives him
food parcels, the Red Cross
rotates the DVDs
of Blade Runner & Screamers
& Total Recall & Confessions
d'un Bario & Imposter
& Paycheck on a
weekly basis. But not
Minority Report because
Neb. considers Tom Cruise
to be a pussy. The war
continues. In the rooms of
the supersafe zones up above
the politicians come &
go, searching for photo
opportunites to help them
in their various elections.
They don't know Dick.
in Iraq. Nebuchadnezzar
has been found hiding
in a hole in the
ground. He refuses
to come out until
they turn Man
in the High Castle
into a movie. So many
other stories by the writer
filmed. Not yet
the best of them. The
Red Crescent gives him
food parcels, the Red Cross
rotates the DVDs
of Blade Runner & Screamers
& Total Recall & Confessions
d'un Bario & Imposter
& Paycheck on a
weekly basis. But not
Minority Report because
Neb. considers Tom Cruise
to be a pussy. The war
continues. In the rooms of
the supersafe zones up above
the politicians come &
go, searching for photo
opportunites to help them
in their various elections.
They don't know Dick.
Monday, April 26, 2004
In 1920, W.C.W. to the Editor of Poetry
Dear Miss Monroe: Provided you will allow me to use small letters at the beginnings of my lines, I submit the following excellent American poem to you for publication in your paying magazine:
SPIRIT OF '76
Her father
built a bridge
over
the Chicago River
but she
built a bridge
over the moon.
This, as you will at once recognize, is an excellent poem and very American. I sincerely hope that no prehistoric prosodic rules will bar it from publication. Yours,
W.C.Williams
SPIRIT OF '76
Her father
built a bridge
over
the Chicago River
but she
built a bridge
over the moon.
This, as you will at once recognize, is an excellent poem and very American. I sincerely hope that no prehistoric prosodic rules will bar it from publication. Yours,
W.C.Williams
Sunday, April 25, 2004
will the well run dry?
There's
potentially a
void of inspiration
if
devoid of
inspiration isn't re-elected.
potentially a
void of inspiration
if
devoid of
inspiration isn't re-elected.
In 1967 it was a different web.....
THE DISTANCES
A slight twist of the dial
changes the music from the samisen
to the Monkees
& I am a believer
in the miracle of shortwave radio. Quito,
Ecuador or Radio Peking. The NHK
or the VOA. Pop or propaganda -
you have your choice amongst the
electronic music of the night ether.
Caught in its web, I am a Columbus
searching for new countries, turning
the dial slowly, hoping to hear
station identification through the static
& distortion.
This is 1 a.m. Auckland,
a time of dead houses, where only
the streetlamps perforate the darkness.
But in Australia it is
11 p.m. E.S.T., & in Cairo
it is eight hours earlier. To turn
the dial is to turn back the clock.
1 a.m. Auckland. The night is just beginning.
A slight twist of the dial
changes the music from the samisen
to the Monkees
& I am a believer
in the miracle of shortwave radio. Quito,
Ecuador or Radio Peking. The NHK
or the VOA. Pop or propaganda -
you have your choice amongst the
electronic music of the night ether.
Caught in its web, I am a Columbus
searching for new countries, turning
the dial slowly, hoping to hear
station identification through the static
& distortion.
This is 1 a.m. Auckland,
a time of dead houses, where only
the streetlamps perforate the darkness.
But in Australia it is
11 p.m. E.S.T., & in Cairo
it is eight hours earlier. To turn
the dial is to turn back the clock.
1 a.m. Auckland. The night is just beginning.
but a similar war
NO EXIT
L'enfer, c'est les autres
Jean-Paul Sartre: Huis Clos
If Hell is other people, this, then, must be
what mine will be like. Walking into the
Embers, Sunday night / Monday morning, to
find the place full of American sailors,
all in white, ten feet tall or dancing
with dwarves. Or, as they all really
are, youngboys, nervously not-too-sure
of the local customs, every one drunk.
We try
to sit apart from them; but we are the natives
here, and must be fed soft clichés to appease
whatever gods we have. For this place, to these
visitors, is temporarily Hell's opposite, & we
its inhabitants. & though we have long hair &
beards, fraternisation is still the democratic order
of the day.
"The War? I’d rather not talk
about it. Two buddies back there, both buried."
Or: "I really love this here country. But is coffee
all you drink? Are you sure you wouldn't like
some vodka?" & then the classic, almost popsong
lines: "You know, I really look up to you guys.
Back home" - that fabled land of faith, hope, charity &
Norman Rockwell – "we’d call you hippies. & when
I get back to San Francisco, I've decided to go straight
up to Haight-Ashbury to live."
Yeah? & wear flowers in your hair?
You can almost hear the pages of a training manual being
mentally manipulated. Section 45, paragraph 3: 'Some
useful phrases when dealing with foreign deviant
groups.' The oiled sincerity - well-oiled - & the
protective shield of angel-white uniforms symbolising peace -
but not on Earth, rather somewhere beneath, in a dimly-lit nightclub
where the angels are anonymous. Everyone scared off, or long
gone home: except those women for whom all nations'
boundaries are broken down by money, & we, who blundered in,
not knowing what there was before us.
The plethora of naval might
stunned us; & we came out of it trapped, & being patronised
by these young servicemen who have been told they're doing right
& must continue to believe so, even though their buddies die &
they themselves are losing their best years. We think of talking,
of telling them what seems to us more like the truth; but what
to say / or how to say it? This far away, with the war
closed off by distance & the flak jackets that now protect
their minds, the words that choke our throats can have no exit.
Though they come as angels, these are
the other people. Nothing we can do but wait
for them to go & take this Hell - their Heaven -
with them.
L'enfer, c'est les autres
Jean-Paul Sartre: Huis Clos
If Hell is other people, this, then, must be
what mine will be like. Walking into the
Embers, Sunday night / Monday morning, to
find the place full of American sailors,
all in white, ten feet tall or dancing
with dwarves. Or, as they all really
are, youngboys, nervously not-too-sure
of the local customs, every one drunk.
We try
to sit apart from them; but we are the natives
here, and must be fed soft clichés to appease
whatever gods we have. For this place, to these
visitors, is temporarily Hell's opposite, & we
its inhabitants. & though we have long hair &
beards, fraternisation is still the democratic order
of the day.
"The War? I’d rather not talk
about it. Two buddies back there, both buried."
Or: "I really love this here country. But is coffee
all you drink? Are you sure you wouldn't like
some vodka?" & then the classic, almost popsong
lines: "You know, I really look up to you guys.
Back home" - that fabled land of faith, hope, charity &
Norman Rockwell – "we’d call you hippies. & when
I get back to San Francisco, I've decided to go straight
up to Haight-Ashbury to live."
Yeah? & wear flowers in your hair?
You can almost hear the pages of a training manual being
mentally manipulated. Section 45, paragraph 3: 'Some
useful phrases when dealing with foreign deviant
groups.' The oiled sincerity - well-oiled - & the
protective shield of angel-white uniforms symbolising peace -
but not on Earth, rather somewhere beneath, in a dimly-lit nightclub
where the angels are anonymous. Everyone scared off, or long
gone home: except those women for whom all nations'
boundaries are broken down by money, & we, who blundered in,
not knowing what there was before us.
The plethora of naval might
stunned us; & we came out of it trapped, & being patronised
by these young servicemen who have been told they're doing right
& must continue to believe so, even though their buddies die &
they themselves are losing their best years. We think of talking,
of telling them what seems to us more like the truth; but what
to say / or how to say it? This far away, with the war
closed off by distance & the flak jackets that now protect
their minds, the words that choke our throats can have no exit.
Though they come as angels, these are
the other people. Nothing we can do but wait
for them to go & take this Hell - their Heaven -
with them.
Saturday, April 24, 2004
Some Helpful Hay(na)ku Hints
With Meritage Press announcing a call for submissions to an anthology of hay(na)ku - details - I thought I'd start posting the occasional helpful hay(na)ku hint - hereafter to be called HHHs - for those who may not have so far used the form.The first are below.
#1
Don't
worry about
counting the syllables.
#2
If you're from
Australia or
New
Zealand they can
go like
this.
#3
Acronyms
can go
however you like.
HHH
but also
H H H.
#4
Hyphenated
words? Poem-
driven or poem-driven.
#5
Check
out Crag
Hill's Poetry Scorecard.
His
hay(na)ku are
brilliant & diverse.
#1
Don't
worry about
counting the syllables.
#2
If you're from
Australia or
New
Zealand they can
go like
this.
#3
Acronyms
can go
however you like.
HHH
but also
H H H.
#4
Hyphenated
words? Poem-
driven or poem-driven.
#5
Check
out Crag
Hill's Poetry Scorecard.
His
hay(na)ku are
brilliant & diverse.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Thursday, April 22, 2004
"...the inimitable Mark Young"
That may be so, Tom, but I'm available for cloning if the money's right.
That may be so, Tom, but I'm available for cloning if the money's right.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
THE
HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY:
A SUBMISSIONS CALL
Meritage Press is pleased to announce a Submissions Call for THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, co-edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young. Deadline: December 31, 2004. Send submissions (cutnpasted in body of e-mail) to MeritagePress. Please submit no more than ten (10) hay(na)ku.
Check out the details at the Hay(na)ku Blog.
HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY:
A SUBMISSIONS CALL
Meritage Press is pleased to announce a Submissions Call for THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, co-edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young. Deadline: December 31, 2004. Send submissions (cutnpasted in body of e-mail) to MeritagePress. Please submit no more than ten (10) hay(na)ku.
Check out the details at the Hay(na)ku Blog.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
why I never became a computer programmer
#1
My
programs were
like Russian rockets -
did
the job
but so over-engineered.
#2
If
I wrote
hay(na)ku like I
used
to program
in C++, then
nine
tercets here
instead of three.
My
programs were
like Russian rockets -
did
the job
but so over-engineered.
#2
If
I wrote
hay(na)ku like I
used
to program
in C++, then
nine
tercets here
instead of three.
Monday, April 19, 2004
a fifth ficcione, for the master this time
The spines
of the older
books in the
Libraries of
Buenos Aires
& of Babel
are worn thin
from the
number of times
Jorge Luis Borges
wandered
along the rows
& read
the titles.
of the older
books in the
Libraries of
Buenos Aires
& of Babel
are worn thin
from the
number of times
Jorge Luis Borges
wandered
along the rows
& read
the titles.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
see what i mean!
Reporter: After 9/11 what would your biggest mistake be, would you say?
George W. Borg: You know, I just - I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference - all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer. But it hasn't yet.
Crag Hill has turned the above interchange into a hay(na)ku sequence on his poetry scorecard. I love the way the slope of each stepped tercet creates a pointed head.
George W. Borg: You know, I just - I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference - all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer. But it hasn't yet.
Crag Hill has turned the above interchange into a hay(na)ku sequence on his poetry scorecard. I love the way the slope of each stepped tercet creates a pointed head.
In a post below I mention how I love the way words drift in meaning. What I hate is the way names of things are changed for either purposes of aggrandisement or because the original may have been too explicit in its purpose.
I notice in today's paper that "body bags" is no longer an approved term. The new Pentagon-speak is "transfer tubes". & I always thought that was just the passage that Borg had missing between his mouth & his brain.
I notice in today's paper that "body bags" is no longer an approved term. The new Pentagon-speak is "transfer tubes". & I always thought that was just the passage that Borg had missing between his mouth & his brain.
Diaspora (an outtake from The Cicerone)
News is
a humming-bird
unafraid of
the dark. We left
before the Spaniards
came, going across
the mountains
by the lower
passes where
the snow
was light. Then
each family
in a different
direction.
We left behind
the raw material
of myths. Took
the stories with us.
Always to be told
in a present tense
so the past is
immediate.
a humming-bird
unafraid of
the dark. We left
before the Spaniards
came, going across
the mountains
by the lower
passes where
the snow
was light. Then
each family
in a different
direction.
We left behind
the raw material
of myths. Took
the stories with us.
Always to be told
in a present tense
so the past is
immediate.
There are poems you write & give to people & say "Read this". & there are poems you write & give to people & say "Please read this & tell me what you think of it". Generally the first are the ones you're happy with. The second tend to be poems that you're unsure of, that can best be summed up by that Punch cartoon from the nineteenth century that has a Curate having breakfast with his Bishop & responding to the latter's observation that his subordinate has just been served a rotten egg with "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you parts of it are excellent".
&, of course, there are sub-categories – poems that you submit for the sake of submission knowing full well that they're not worthy of the act; or poems A, B & C are pretty good, so let's just slide in poem D to ride on their backs.
I've been working on a poem loosely linked to a Magritte painting called The Cicerone. Longish, made up of several parts, having more to do with the title than the painting. It has one longer section, the first written, which is the critical one, the core of the poem. The other sections I would classify as being akin to the photos a tourist takes of village life before & after the festival which was the main purpose of the visit. Background detail. I've worked on them, re-arranged, added, subtracted &, indeed, parts of them are excellent. But most of them don't stand alone, & as an entirety detract from the main section of the poem which is self-sufficient & the only one that derives directly from Magritte.
I posted an earlier, very similar, version of the main section to As/Is some time back. & now, after consideration & after critiques on the entire piece from Michele Leggott & Tom Beckett – Tom direct, Michele more circumspect – for which I thank them immensely, the trimmed back to the core Cicerone has now been posted to Series Magritte.
I’d also like to thank Jean Vengua for her bounce-back on the earlier posting to As/Is & for her even-earlier bounces-back & which, judging by the subtle references, I'm very gratified to see she remembers. I remember them with much pleasure, & with pride for having in part provoked them.
&, of course, there are sub-categories – poems that you submit for the sake of submission knowing full well that they're not worthy of the act; or poems A, B & C are pretty good, so let's just slide in poem D to ride on their backs.
I've been working on a poem loosely linked to a Magritte painting called The Cicerone. Longish, made up of several parts, having more to do with the title than the painting. It has one longer section, the first written, which is the critical one, the core of the poem. The other sections I would classify as being akin to the photos a tourist takes of village life before & after the festival which was the main purpose of the visit. Background detail. I've worked on them, re-arranged, added, subtracted &, indeed, parts of them are excellent. But most of them don't stand alone, & as an entirety detract from the main section of the poem which is self-sufficient & the only one that derives directly from Magritte.
I posted an earlier, very similar, version of the main section to As/Is some time back. & now, after consideration & after critiques on the entire piece from Michele Leggott & Tom Beckett – Tom direct, Michele more circumspect – for which I thank them immensely, the trimmed back to the core Cicerone has now been posted to Series Magritte.
I’d also like to thank Jean Vengua for her bounce-back on the earlier posting to As/Is & for her even-earlier bounces-back & which, judging by the subtle references, I'm very gratified to see she remembers. I remember them with much pleasure, & with pride for having in part provoked them.
Saturday, April 17, 2004
A Fourth Ficcione for M.E.
Very near the end of the last
of his thirteen thoroughly researched
but possibly premature books
on the collapse of the Mung economy
André Pierre de Sèche-Cheveux
includes as part of a footnote
an anecdote from a Norwegian doctor
working for the World Health Organisation
& one of the last étrangères
to leave the country
who tells how the transition
to Marxism produced such an
outpouring of books, from
The Poems of Ho Chi Minh
through to Marx's Das Kapital,
that the export timber trade -
which although foreign owned
still brought in the majority
of the country's overseas earnings -
was totally destroyed because
all the trees had been cut down
& pulped. A footnote which might
have appeared had there been
a fourteenth volume was that
the Mung became prosperous again
by using the cleared ground to grow
opium; &, through value-adding
& vertical expansion, oversaw
its refining & ultimate processing
into heroin & a range of
legitimate pharmaceutical alkaloids
which they moved around the world
in a fleet of converted timberships they'd
bought up cheaply at a bankruptcy sale.
of his thirteen thoroughly researched
but possibly premature books
on the collapse of the Mung economy
André Pierre de Sèche-Cheveux
includes as part of a footnote
an anecdote from a Norwegian doctor
working for the World Health Organisation
& one of the last étrangères
to leave the country
who tells how the transition
to Marxism produced such an
outpouring of books, from
The Poems of Ho Chi Minh
through to Marx's Das Kapital,
that the export timber trade -
which although foreign owned
still brought in the majority
of the country's overseas earnings -
was totally destroyed because
all the trees had been cut down
& pulped. A footnote which might
have appeared had there been
a fourteenth volume was that
the Mung became prosperous again
by using the cleared ground to grow
opium; &, through value-adding
& vertical expansion, oversaw
its refining & ultimate processing
into heroin & a range of
legitimate pharmaceutical alkaloids
which they moved around the world
in a fleet of converted timberships they'd
bought up cheaply at a bankruptcy sale.
Friday, April 16, 2004
Bill Allegrezza, in a post to his p-ramblings last month, quoted Italo Cavino's suggestion that each writer has a writer to whom he or she always returns & wondered whether this statement was true for most writers. I thought about it in relation to myself as I read it - & the fact that I had to think about it is probably the answer in itself.
But I was thinking about poetry; & though I find that there are individual poems that I constantly return to – Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem starting with "Constantly risking absurdity and death" from "A Coney Island of the Mind" & Kenneth Rexroth's "The Advantages of Learning" are two immediate examples – I couldn't think of an individual poet at the time.
There are, however, a number of prose writers to whom I return again & again for succour &/or inspiration &/or explanation & who I would be hard pressed to separate into ranks of favouritism. They are mainly speculative writers – Delany, Ballard, Eco & Borges – plus Richard Brautigan who brought joy to my soul from the very first reading in the early sixties of one of his pieces from "Trout Fishing in America". The first four have created landscapes & environments which I instinctively recognise & feel at home in. With Brautigan I am at home. & then there's Genêt…..
But back to poetry. & poets. Thinking about the books on my shelves & how often I take them down, I realise there are three poets to whom I regularly return. There's Denise Levertov who was one of my early influences; William Carlos Williams who wasn’t so much an influence as an inspiration (& whose "Be patient that I address you in a poem. There is no other fit medium" is my screensaver); but it is Gary Snyder to whose poetry – rather than his individual poems – I keep going back most often.
A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.
Going beyond the world of words, does it have to be a writer to whom one returns? Possibly the reason I had such difficulty answering Bill's question initially is because the creative streams I keep returning to are the paintings of Magritte & Bosch, the compositions of Bach &, above & beyond all others, the music of Miles Davis which I have revisited so much it is permanently engraved upon my soul.
But I was thinking about poetry; & though I find that there are individual poems that I constantly return to – Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem starting with "Constantly risking absurdity and death" from "A Coney Island of the Mind" & Kenneth Rexroth's "The Advantages of Learning" are two immediate examples – I couldn't think of an individual poet at the time.
There are, however, a number of prose writers to whom I return again & again for succour &/or inspiration &/or explanation & who I would be hard pressed to separate into ranks of favouritism. They are mainly speculative writers – Delany, Ballard, Eco & Borges – plus Richard Brautigan who brought joy to my soul from the very first reading in the early sixties of one of his pieces from "Trout Fishing in America". The first four have created landscapes & environments which I instinctively recognise & feel at home in. With Brautigan I am at home. & then there's Genêt…..
But back to poetry. & poets. Thinking about the books on my shelves & how often I take them down, I realise there are three poets to whom I regularly return. There's Denise Levertov who was one of my early influences; William Carlos Williams who wasn’t so much an influence as an inspiration (& whose "Be patient that I address you in a poem. There is no other fit medium" is my screensaver); but it is Gary Snyder to whose poetry – rather than his individual poems – I keep going back most often.
A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.
Going beyond the world of words, does it have to be a writer to whom one returns? Possibly the reason I had such difficulty answering Bill's question initially is because the creative streams I keep returning to are the paintings of Magritte & Bosch, the compositions of Bach &, above & beyond all others, the music of Miles Davis which I have revisited so much it is permanently engraved upon my soul.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
George W Borg attempting to explain that he's got the situation in Iraq under control would be worthy of the Comedy Channel if the fact that he probably believes what he's saying wasn't so frightening .
Still, if you've united the Shi'ites & the Sunnis, even if it is in opposition against you, you probably think that you're halfway there.
& the later comment from an observer that even after all this time this "Coalition of the Witless" don't really know who it is they're fighting against.
I am reminded of Samuel Delany's early sixties trilogy "The Fall of the Towers" - has anybody suggested that title be changed? - which was also about "fighting" an unknown & largely imagined enemy. Borg should take especial note of an epigraph Delany coins in it:
YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT
MOMENT WHEN YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM
As for me, I just remember the lies that were told as to why we were in Vietnam, watch another unnecessary casualty list grow & garble a quote from another Borg to come up with "futility is resistant to rational thought".
Still, if you've united the Shi'ites & the Sunnis, even if it is in opposition against you, you probably think that you're halfway there.
& the later comment from an observer that even after all this time this "Coalition of the Witless" don't really know who it is they're fighting against.
I am reminded of Samuel Delany's early sixties trilogy "The Fall of the Towers" - has anybody suggested that title be changed? - which was also about "fighting" an unknown & largely imagined enemy. Borg should take especial note of an epigraph Delany coins in it:
YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT
MOMENT WHEN YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM
As for me, I just remember the lies that were told as to why we were in Vietnam, watch another unnecessary casualty list grow & garble a quote from another Borg to come up with "futility is resistant to rational thought".
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
I watched LOTR1 on cable over the weekend. Still liked the film with little if any dimunition of pleasure since my first viewing; but then I still enjoy rereading the books every seven years or so.
But part of the visual pleasure is the fact that the film was shot in New Zealand's Southern Alps which are one of the amino acids of my psyche along with, preferably the southern ocean when it's angry, the sea – "The Sea. Even my secret speech is moist with it" as Amiri Baraka wote when he was LeRoi Jones - & the sound of distant trains.
My main memory of Hokitika, where I was born – contrary to the comment I read in an Australian newspaper a couple of months ago that no-one was ever born in Hokitika - & lived until I was six, is of one horizon made up entirely of mountains which the town's main street ran directly towards until it was swallowed up by them. Or so it seemed. Distant, but still large enough & difficult enough to pass through or over to isolate the area from the outside world. A town founded on a nineteenth-century gold rush – contemporary photos show a forest of masts rising up from the river; when I was there, only one flat-bottomed scow could make it over the bar at the river's mouth – with 47 pubs & a population of 4700 – do the maths & you'll find that there must have been little else to do except drink. A town taking its time to die, but probably now revitalised by tourism.
At spawning time the river would run bank to bank with whitebait – inanga in the Maori; I remember mountain parrots resting on the back fence; & every now & again, you would see a sacred white heron, a kotuku, flying over to or from their single breeding ground further down the coast.
But part of the visual pleasure is the fact that the film was shot in New Zealand's Southern Alps which are one of the amino acids of my psyche along with, preferably the southern ocean when it's angry, the sea – "The Sea. Even my secret speech is moist with it" as Amiri Baraka wote when he was LeRoi Jones - & the sound of distant trains.
My main memory of Hokitika, where I was born – contrary to the comment I read in an Australian newspaper a couple of months ago that no-one was ever born in Hokitika - & lived until I was six, is of one horizon made up entirely of mountains which the town's main street ran directly towards until it was swallowed up by them. Or so it seemed. Distant, but still large enough & difficult enough to pass through or over to isolate the area from the outside world. A town founded on a nineteenth-century gold rush – contemporary photos show a forest of masts rising up from the river; when I was there, only one flat-bottomed scow could make it over the bar at the river's mouth – with 47 pubs & a population of 4700 – do the maths & you'll find that there must have been little else to do except drink. A town taking its time to die, but probably now revitalised by tourism.
At spawning time the river would run bank to bank with whitebait – inanga in the Maori; I remember mountain parrots resting on the back fence; & every now & again, you would see a sacred white heron, a kotuku, flying over to or from their single breeding ground further down the coast.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
today's markyoung622 enlarge your unit by 25 percent hotmail email subject matter found poem
judicature diminution triceratops coralli
adobe detour payroll turtle controversy
loveland genera phrasemake dagger enterprise
squatter devoid haven tehran kettle morph
cloddish zippy heliocentric altercate albumen
telegram droll lyle neutron adolphus bounty
kensington promptitude codebreak algebraic
connivance howell miocene chateaux decade
One of these days I must open one instead of deleting them unread.
adobe detour payroll turtle controversy
loveland genera phrasemake dagger enterprise
squatter devoid haven tehran kettle morph
cloddish zippy heliocentric altercate albumen
telegram droll lyle neutron adolphus bounty
kensington promptitude codebreak algebraic
connivance howell miocene chateaux decade
One of these days I must open one instead of deleting them unread.
Monday, April 12, 2004
Two new poems added to my Series Magritte. The unfinished 1967 Empire of Lights & The Secret Double.
A new dialect/ic?
The spammers who bombard my "public" email address seem to have a new subject source, possibly Jukka's nonlinear poetry.
Six of them from today's crop:
silas escheat grown blend brittle
belong northerly scrawl crayfish soviet
bunt auburn commiserate orono galvanic
cranston merge configuration fudge council
bronco casual defy colloquial kalamazoo head
missouri scribe sedition arose wax collection
Six of them from today's crop:
silas escheat grown blend brittle
belong northerly scrawl crayfish soviet
bunt auburn commiserate orono galvanic
cranston merge configuration fudge council
bronco casual defy colloquial kalamazoo head
missouri scribe sedition arose wax collection
Sunday, April 11, 2004
Alan Ramsey writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 10.
The "troops home" debate is as phoney as the supposed reasons we got into Iraq in the first place. How can anyone take seriously Howard's frothing about "getting the job done" when, in a "coalition" military force of 135,000, of which 115,000 are US fighting troops, we're talking about a mere 850 Australian non-combatants, of whom only 460 are in Iraq? The proposition is absurd. Australia is in Iraq for political reasons only. Our minute military force is part of the political ballast the Bush White House needs to try to legitimise the invasion as well as the mounting toll in US blood and treasure to remake Iraq in its own strategic image. We are just part of the deception.
Which means the Howard Government's suggestion of any "force reduction" being a matter for "decision" at "the appropriate time" is just more wool. We are there for as long as the Americans want us there, just as it has coerced so many other "allies" in its ratbag "coalition of the willing".
It is all a terrible farce, but such a deadly one.
The full article is available here.
The "troops home" debate is as phoney as the supposed reasons we got into Iraq in the first place. How can anyone take seriously Howard's frothing about "getting the job done" when, in a "coalition" military force of 135,000, of which 115,000 are US fighting troops, we're talking about a mere 850 Australian non-combatants, of whom only 460 are in Iraq? The proposition is absurd. Australia is in Iraq for political reasons only. Our minute military force is part of the political ballast the Bush White House needs to try to legitimise the invasion as well as the mounting toll in US blood and treasure to remake Iraq in its own strategic image. We are just part of the deception.
Which means the Howard Government's suggestion of any "force reduction" being a matter for "decision" at "the appropriate time" is just more wool. We are there for as long as the Americans want us there, just as it has coerced so many other "allies" in its ratbag "coalition of the willing".
It is all a terrible farce, but such a deadly one.
The full article is available here.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Mark's diacritic
Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed that what was once Rene at the top of the sidebar has now become René. My thanks go to the person who added a comment to a small poem of mine to Kurt Gödel – which I had as Godel - posted on As/Is some months ago. It's taken this long, plus the intervention of a comment on Crag Hill's poetry scorecard on what characters to use to insert spaces into blogger text, plus some experimenting on my posts, to put it all together. Not only can I now indent things if I want to but I can get rid of that annoying run-on effect that joins an italicised word to the following plain text one –e.g. italicised word – that seems inherent to this particular blogger template.
I'd also like to thank Michele Leggott for using the word "diacritics" in one of her poems & thereby letting me know what the collective noun for all these little distinctive doodads is.
To all of you, just let me say áè - î ó ù.
I'd also like to thank Michele Leggott for using the word "diacritics" in one of her poems & thereby letting me know what the collective noun for all these little distinctive doodads is.
To all of you, just let me say áè - î ó ù.
Friday, April 09, 2004
part error message, part hay(na)ku
"There are too many spelling &
grammar errors for Microsoft Word
to continue displaying them."
So?
Found
out long
ago that poetry
tends
to upset
Bill Gates' software.
grammar errors for Microsoft Word
to continue displaying them."
So?
Found
out long
ago that poetry
tends
to upset
Bill Gates' software.
A poem of mine from Jacket a couple of years ago.
George W's Language Primer
He put words in my mouth.
I do not like the taste
of them, I said. Certainly
I have used them all before,
but they feel strange in this
context, have no real meaning
to me. This is not
how I would arrange them.
Spit them out & let me
look at them again, he said.
So I did. Out they came -
American terrorists fucking.
Arab mother burning.
Anti-hate flag.
An advisor hurried up &
whispered in his ear. Let me
re-arrange them for you said
George W. when the advisor
had finished. Swallow them
again, taste them, roll them around
in your mouth & see how they feel
now, how they sound. Say
them over & over, like one
of those Buddhist montereys or
manta rays or whatever
they are called. Remember too
that you are either for us or
against us, a friend or an enemy -
there is no middle ground.
I put his words in my mouth again.
I tried what he said. Tasted them
as they came out. This time
they had a ring to them that I could learn
to live with. Hate mother-fucking anti-
American flag-burning Arab terrorists.
I tried them again & they felt even
better the second time around. Now
I use them all the time. I am proud
to be called a friend of the President .
George W's Language Primer
He put words in my mouth.
I do not like the taste
of them, I said. Certainly
I have used them all before,
but they feel strange in this
context, have no real meaning
to me. This is not
how I would arrange them.
Spit them out & let me
look at them again, he said.
So I did. Out they came -
American terrorists fucking.
Arab mother burning.
Anti-hate flag.
An advisor hurried up &
whispered in his ear. Let me
re-arrange them for you said
George W. when the advisor
had finished. Swallow them
again, taste them, roll them around
in your mouth & see how they feel
now, how they sound. Say
them over & over, like one
of those Buddhist montereys or
manta rays or whatever
they are called. Remember too
that you are either for us or
against us, a friend or an enemy -
there is no middle ground.
I put his words in my mouth again.
I tried what he said. Tasted them
as they came out. This time
they had a ring to them that I could learn
to live with. Hate mother-fucking anti-
American flag-burning Arab terrorists.
I tried them again & they felt even
better the second time around. Now
I use them all the time. I am proud
to be called a friend of the President .
what's in a word?
I see Rumsfeld is back to using terrorist again. Was "insurgents" implying too much legitimacy?
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
The latest issue of Bill Allegrezza's excellent ezine Moria is up & includes poems by Harry K.Stammer, Chris Murray, Jean Vengua, Eileen Tabios, Clayton Couch & the late LYX ISH amongst others.
Monday, April 05, 2004
These were some of my heroes in 1967 or '68
Me - if you were not you,
who would you like to be?
for Adrian Henri, who thought of it first
Tristan Tzara William Burroughs
Han-Shan The Rolling Stones
Che Guevara Akira Kurosawa
Charlie Mingus & LeRoi Jones
Borges Bunuel Bach Bosch & Breton
Gunter Grass & Heinrich Boll
Batman Robin Baron Munchausen
Ravi Shankar & Andy Warhol
Miles Davis Daisetz T. Suzuki
Rimbaud Verlaine & Baudelaire
Ginsberg Corso & Ferlinghetti
Jean Genet Apollinaire
Anais Nin & Henry Miller
Bob Dylan & Marcel Duchamp
Basho Cocteau Jean-Paul Belmondo
Dostoevsky & Terence Stamp
Ernst & Arp & Arthur Waley
Stanley Kubrick & William Eastlake
Diana Ross & The Supremes
Samuel Beckett & William Blake
Humphrey Bogart Frank O'Hara
Jimi Hendrix Pierre Reverdy
Alan Price & Alan Watts
Gary Snyder Rene Magritte
Paul Eluard Toshiro Mifune
Jack Kerouac Ray Bradbury
de Chirico & Otis Redding
John Lennon & Mahatma Gandhi
Ray Charles & Terry Southern
J.G.Ballard & John Rechy
W.C.Williams & W.C.Fields
Miro Catullus
&
last of all
me
from: The right foot of the giant
who would you like to be?
for Adrian Henri, who thought of it first
Tristan Tzara William Burroughs
Han-Shan The Rolling Stones
Che Guevara Akira Kurosawa
Charlie Mingus & LeRoi Jones
Borges Bunuel Bach Bosch & Breton
Gunter Grass & Heinrich Boll
Batman Robin Baron Munchausen
Ravi Shankar & Andy Warhol
Miles Davis Daisetz T. Suzuki
Rimbaud Verlaine & Baudelaire
Ginsberg Corso & Ferlinghetti
Jean Genet Apollinaire
Anais Nin & Henry Miller
Bob Dylan & Marcel Duchamp
Basho Cocteau Jean-Paul Belmondo
Dostoevsky & Terence Stamp
Ernst & Arp & Arthur Waley
Stanley Kubrick & William Eastlake
Diana Ross & The Supremes
Samuel Beckett & William Blake
Humphrey Bogart Frank O'Hara
Jimi Hendrix Pierre Reverdy
Alan Price & Alan Watts
Gary Snyder Rene Magritte
Paul Eluard Toshiro Mifune
Jack Kerouac Ray Bradbury
de Chirico & Otis Redding
John Lennon & Mahatma Gandhi
Ray Charles & Terry Southern
J.G.Ballard & John Rechy
W.C.Williams & W.C.Fields
Miro Catullus
&
last of all
me
from: The right foot of the giant
Sunday, April 04, 2004
I have just posted - wrote pasted which is what I also did - an extract from #15 of my Series Magritte to As/Is. I am uncomfortable when there are only sparse posts there. The site has given me so much joy since it started I feel I cannot abandon it even though I now have two blogs of my own.
The Cicerone is a long poem I am working on. It is a marvellous word - a guide who understands & explains antiquities - & a marvellous painting by Magritte.
To balance the ledger a bit, I'm posting - & pasting - a few more extracts here. When it's all done, if ever, then I'll post it to its proper home.
from The Cicerone
Maize &
manioc. Beans
& sweet potatoes.
Tomatoes. A type
of lettuce. Many crops,
but corn the most
important of
them all. Ground
into flour, fed to the
animals, fermented
for beer. Half of
what was left
we kept for trade,
half to the priests
at summer solstice. Corn
was the keystone
of our lives.
*
Yes, we knew about arches
& architecture. Some
of us had the skills
but even then allowed
the priests to tell us
how to build our houses. & we
knew about cornerstones
though to have used that here
would have meant
playing one word against another
in a way that would not please
the gods. Humour
that is invented is profane.
*
In back of
the temple the
priests' gardens. Sun-
flowers
in one, peyote
in the other. A path
to the heavens, a
passage to the
depths. Sacred
plots, secret texts.
*
Every year,
on a day we knew
but waited for
the priests to tell us
we would melt
the soft metal
& cast it
in the form
of the family
totem. Placed
on the wall
but occasionally
worn. If a boy
had been born
the previous year
a new line would
be started. If a
girl, then a space
in the father's line.
The Cicerone is a long poem I am working on. It is a marvellous word - a guide who understands & explains antiquities - & a marvellous painting by Magritte.
To balance the ledger a bit, I'm posting - & pasting - a few more extracts here. When it's all done, if ever, then I'll post it to its proper home.
from The Cicerone
Maize &
manioc. Beans
& sweet potatoes.
Tomatoes. A type
of lettuce. Many crops,
but corn the most
important of
them all. Ground
into flour, fed to the
animals, fermented
for beer. Half of
what was left
we kept for trade,
half to the priests
at summer solstice. Corn
was the keystone
of our lives.
*
Yes, we knew about arches
& architecture. Some
of us had the skills
but even then allowed
the priests to tell us
how to build our houses. & we
knew about cornerstones
though to have used that here
would have meant
playing one word against another
in a way that would not please
the gods. Humour
that is invented is profane.
*
In back of
the temple the
priests' gardens. Sun-
flowers
in one, peyote
in the other. A path
to the heavens, a
passage to the
depths. Sacred
plots, secret texts.
*
Every year,
on a day we knew
but waited for
the priests to tell us
we would melt
the soft metal
& cast it
in the form
of the family
totem. Placed
on the wall
but occasionally
worn. If a boy
had been born
the previous year
a new line would
be started. If a
girl, then a space
in the father's line.
Saturday, April 03, 2004
Seems like when the universe gets a theme it runs with it for a couple of days. I talked about Frank O'Hara yesterday, & then later discovered that a new issue of Tin Lustre Mobile was up, & in it was my "Lunch with Frank O'Hara".
Ah well, so long as I don't see Mayakovsky's hat worn by a horse.
Ah well, so long as I don't see Mayakovsky's hat worn by a horse.
Friday, April 02, 2004
Check out this wonderful N+7 makeover by Michael James Bogue of Frank O'Hara's "Why I am not a Painter" at As/Is.
In one of those synchronicities that delight the heart I was thinking of the O'Hara poem when I posted "Kuhn's Nude, Duchamp's Paradigm" a couple of days ago. "Kuhn" is an outtake from a longer poem called "The Armory Show" which got its name from the reference to Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase", a painting which caused enormous controversy in the U.S. when it was first exhibited in what has now come to be known as the Armory Show.
& now the Nude has stepped out of my poem. But the title remains. & so I was thinking about SARDINES. Sorry, make that SARGASSO.
In one of those synchronicities that delight the heart I was thinking of the O'Hara poem when I posted "Kuhn's Nude, Duchamp's Paradigm" a couple of days ago. "Kuhn" is an outtake from a longer poem called "The Armory Show" which got its name from the reference to Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase", a painting which caused enormous controversy in the U.S. when it was first exhibited in what has now come to be known as the Armory Show.
& now the Nude has stepped out of my poem. But the title remains. & so I was thinking about SARDINES. Sorry, make that SARGASSO.
It's a bit disconcerting when a comment on a poem is more evocative than the poem itself. Check out the beautiful hay(na)ku sequence in the comments on #25 of my Series Magritte by Joseph Garver.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
I have been playing around using a chessboard as a matrix. Fill all of the 64 squares with one or two words. They can be selectively random - which is what I prefer - but could just as easily be a list of titles from a CD or a poem or a passage of prose.
Select a chess game at random, & a position within that game. Somewhere between the 10th & 20th move is best, because there are still most of the 32 pieces left on the board but they're quite well dispersed. Then remove all the words from the unoccupied squares. (Or you could take a much later position, & use only those squares that don't have pieces...)
Since this is a free blog I can't include any directly here; but there's a nice little pdf file in the latest issue of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's xStream that contains three "games".
One of the many joys of xStream is the simultaneous auto issue that accompanies & rearranges in that inimitable J-P K way the poems contained within the "straight" issue. I've commented on it before
Master Class in that
a group of us
are brought together
& once we've finished
demonstrating our skills
are then shown
how it should be
done.
& then there's the ebooks, & the Wryting, & the collaborative works, & his widely-published poems & his wonderful blog.
Well worth the price of the airfare to Finland or the ethereal ether trip.
Select a chess game at random, & a position within that game. Somewhere between the 10th & 20th move is best, because there are still most of the 32 pieces left on the board but they're quite well dispersed. Then remove all the words from the unoccupied squares. (Or you could take a much later position, & use only those squares that don't have pieces...)
Since this is a free blog I can't include any directly here; but there's a nice little pdf file in the latest issue of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's xStream that contains three "games".
One of the many joys of xStream is the simultaneous auto issue that accompanies & rearranges in that inimitable J-P K way the poems contained within the "straight" issue. I've commented on it before
Master Class in that
a group of us
are brought together
& once we've finished
demonstrating our skills
are then shown
how it should be
done.
& then there's the ebooks, & the Wryting, & the collaborative works, & his widely-published poems & his wonderful blog.
Well worth the price of the airfare to Finland or the ethereal ether trip.
A Third Ficcione for Martin Edmond
In their final pass over
the city of Nagasaki
did the crew of Bock's Car
take any time out
as they maybe crossed themselves
or touched a lucky dollar
in their flightjacket
to consider that
in their collective
incarnation as Shiva
they were the messengers
sent to cause
this fatal collision
between St Francis Xavier
& Christopher Columbus
who had both departed
the Atocha Station
four or so centuries before
going in opposite directions.
the city of Nagasaki
did the crew of Bock's Car
take any time out
as they maybe crossed themselves
or touched a lucky dollar
in their flightjacket
to consider that
in their collective
incarnation as Shiva
they were the messengers
sent to cause
this fatal collision
between St Francis Xavier
& Christopher Columbus
who had both departed
the Atocha Station
four or so centuries before
going in opposite directions.
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