One of the books I bought in New Zealand was a second-hand copy of the City Lights edition of Kerouac's Scattered Poems. Primarily bought for this quote from an explanatory note by the author.

A "Western Haiku" need not concern itself with the seventeen syllables since Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the fluid syllabillic Japanese. I propose that the "Western Haiku" simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language.

I would add to that that if you stand at any random point on the globe all languages come from the west; & remind people that submissions are open for the Hay(na)ku anthology.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about me in this Q&A.

& back to a blogger template that seems to be working again

Have had a fantastic week in Auckland, but tomorrow I'll be flying back to Rockhampton. Back to my own pc, back to find out why Blogger is now using vast sheets of ice to surround my posts

An Australasian hay(na)ku

The
Nullarbor of
(n)One Tree Hill

Bells & whistles

All these new bells & whistles seemed to have fucked the format of this blog.   Help!

Did my first public reading in thirty years tonight. Celebrating the New Zealand electronic poetry centre's third birthday. I was a little bit rusty but it went quite well. Thirteen poets, a few poems each.

Tomorrow it's going to be much more full on. On National Radio in the morning, an hour program of music & talk, Playing Favourites, sort of like a desert island disks thing, what records would you like to take with you....Since it's only an hour, & only about 3-5 minutes per track, it means a lot of my favourites just won't make it. Decided to do music I'd referenced in my poetry that fit the time criteria, so have come up with Elvis Presley doing Mystery Train, the old Sun Records one; Aretha Franklin's (you make me feel like) A Natural Women which if any song can be described as my personal anthem this is it although I've never quite worked out the sexual duality in such a choice; Miles Davis' Milestones - I wanted Time after Time, the Cindi Lauper song, but amongst their 7 million Miles records, the N.Z. Broadcasting people didn't have that; Bach's Air on the G string because I love Bach, & there's a piece on this piece in Jukka & my forthcoming The Oracular Sonnets; & finally Youssou N'Dour & Neneh Cherry's 7 seconds. An eclectic choice, but I can tie them all in my work.

In the afternoon it's going to be a half hour reading, plus half an hour by another N.Z. poet, Graham Lindsay whose author's page is also being launched, & then a Q & A session with me giving the As to Martin Edmond's Qs, plus questions from the floor. Looking forward to this a bit more. Last night's reading was videotaped & recorded for posterity which meant a static reading. & I'm a mover.

Have hardly seen anything of Auckland yet.

Sitting on the edge of Auckland Harbour, looking across at the traffic flowing across the bridge, lights in the darkness. & above it, the phallic spindle of Sky Tower. I'm back in New Zealand.

Nick Piombino "silenced by" a litany of things, including some disturbing links, at Fait Accompli. Fortunately it's a rhetorical "silence". Whatever.

This was the last poem I wrote in New Zealand, thirty-five years ago

HYMN FOR LENNON / TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS

High in Transylvania - trans-
ported location: the actual setting
3 a.m. Auckland in thin rain. Cicadas
all quiet, all still. Only the
petulant whirr of the recordplayer
& the soft-skull noises of moths
beating their brains out against the opaque walls.

Cicadas all quiet, all still. The moths die
with a soft whirring. The recordplayer
coaxes erotically for your new records. The
cat enters, all wet with droplets of rain, like a
grey night.

                 Do not attempt to isolate
the virus that besets you. Pamper it,
& the voices will emerge from the speaker,
detatch themselves & plunge embodied
into your mouth. The nausea as they beat
against the back of your throat: & the resultant
high, the nutmeg feeling, sad hallucinations
of your nightmare soul.
           
                                  But this is not
Dracula country. Garlic flowers & the sitar
have driven him away. In grey coffin
with shroud of thin night rain
he is borne ignominiously to sunshine land
to die, wither & die, a flaccid old man
with collapsed intestines, capable of only
the most inconsequential intercourse.

                                                        & you?
You turn off your mind, relax, & float
downstream, absent-mindedly scratching at the
marks the withered gums have left on your throat.

This time tomorrow I shall be above the Tasman Sea on my way to New Zealand. I will be moving forward in time. It is a three-hour flight. I shall be arriving five hours after I left.

Left behind on the desktop will be the unfinished following:

Part 4 - an interlude, of The Allegrezza Ficcione. The earlier parts are here, here & here.

A poem on this painting by Magritte.

The latest collaboration between Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & myself. Extracts from earlier collabs can be found in Shampoo & BlazeVOX. More are scheduled for publication.

I am feeling nervous about my visit. There is a great deal of history to overcome.

A commitment to Martin Edmond

... As, in accordance with the arrangement of this book, we shall pass through Siam on the way to Malacca, it is right that we should speak of it, although we shall come upon it again on the China side at the river of Odia.

Tomé Pires, in 1515. From The Suma Oriental.

Further reciprocities

Have added links in the sidebar to Deborah Pattillo's Chimera Song Mosaic & Guillermo Parra's venepoetics.

Kirsten Kaschock's NEGATIVE WINGSPAN continues to delight. Song, & dance, & sleight of hand. A wakening.

A New Zealand joke

It is said that when a New Zealander moves to Australia the average I.Q. of both countries goes up.

A sequence of events

The epigraph at the top of this blog is the first line of a poem also called Pelican Dreaming. It continues "They were his touchstone...".
I posted two items yesterday.
The first was a 1917 quote from the British Army commander in Iraq. Iraq was called Mesopotamia then.
The second was a poem that mentioned New Zealand. The nickname for a New Zealander is a "kiwi". (A piece of en passant trivia: when I was growing up in N.Z. kiwi fruit were called Chinese gooseberries.)
I checked my hotmail account before logging off. There was a message whose subject was "footstep". Probably spam, but for once I opened it.
It was a random word piece, promoting pharmaceuticals. But its first three lines.....

supreme drown ejaculate kiwi catawba cult mourn irrevocable hailstorm promulgate gregarious specious judy surmise democratic colorado lost assent compunction touchstone turtleneck gedanken backwater mesopotamia

As Tom Beckett would say.
Spooky.

The commanding general assured the people of Iraq, "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." He continued, "O people of Baghdad, remember that for 26 generations you have suffered under strange tyrants who have endeavoured to set one Arab house against another in order that they might profit by your dissensions."

General F.S. Maude, commander of the British forces, in 1917.

The Now of it

That with which we are
surrounded, in which
we are set,

like a jewelled brooch
or a flower's centre,

we are shaped by.

The environs.

He said:

"This is the space we move
through, which moves about us
when we / do not move.

"In this bright white room,
with the picture window staring out
to sea by day, & at night reflecting
the small blue klee that hangs
like an icon above the fireplace,
                     you are beautiful.

"But when it storms outside
your face takes on the turbulence.
I am forced to close the drapes,
otherwise I lose my balance
seeing you buffeted by the tide."

The words surround her,
alter her to suit their shape.

She sees he does not really see her.
His world is earth, is sea, is rooms
of shadow; & she, as is the bird
in that painting by magritte, is outline
only. The content is another universe,
blue-skied, in which he poses her. She is
imposed upon. She is not content. Her
shape, his shaping - they do not coincide.

She leaves. He does not mark
her going. The words still hold her
in his mind. Spreadeagled on the bed,
the stones singing over him, he reads
about lee harvey oswald & the death of j.f.k.

The words surround him.
The influences, their confluence.
The twenty years, the ten, the now of it.

1974

Thanks César

Paul Klee's Hauptwege und Nebenwege.

The joys of modern technology

Jukka is about to go on holiday, so for a while it's going to be palmpilot poems at ::textual conjectures::.

A delightful exchange between César de Oliveira & Ludwig van Beethoven at Hauptwege und Nebenwege(which, thinking about it, might also translate as highways & byways).

The Baggage Card

I move & my baggage comes with me.
I stand still. It snaps at my ankles then rises up
& wraps around me like a cloak or a
kaftan. (I prefer these images to that
of a bodybag which also comes to mind.)

I try heading off in unexpected directions
but it gets there before me. I visit friends. My baggage
is peering out their window, waving me away. I go
to speak & my words come out as echoes
of what it has already said, pre-empting
my thoughts. Silence is my last defence.

My baggage has become more than me
while I am becoming less; & that is not
becoming. I waste away. It tours the world,
gets written up in the social pages taking in openings
& art galleries, is seen at a bullfight in the
Camargue, flyfishing in New Zealand, wearing leather
in San Francisco. I break my silence, beg it
to come back. Now it becomes the mute.

Finally
I receive a postcard of a Louis Vuitton valise
with a Guadeloupe postmark. My name & address
are written in an elegant cursive script. There is
no message but the message
is clear. My baggage has moved up
in the world & I am on my own. Unaccompanied.

Dare I say that kari edwards' transdada looks pretty in pink.

But don't be misled by the new decor. The commitment, strength & on-going activism highlighting the hypocrisies & prejudices of the so-called straight - but, in reality, unbelievably warped - world continue unabated. This is truly an iron fist in a velvet glove.

We must continue to support kari.

hay(na)ku
are both
seed & tree.

& it's only 30 kilometres from where I live

US to focus on Shoalwater Bay
09:54 AEST Thu Jul 8 2004

The Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Queensland will be the main site for a joint US-Australian military training area, under a deal signed in Washington.
Attending the annual Australia-United States ministerial talks (AUSMIN), Defence Minister Robert Hill announced the Australia Defence Force base had been slated for a further upgrade.
He said the Americans were keen on Shoalwater Bay because it already had hosted many joint training exercises.
"It is the most developed of our major training bases. It has been utilised and appreciated by the US in the past," he told ABC radio.

genetic material

              I
        watch two
       black-tailed
            kites
           above
       the field on
     the other side
     of the lagoon
          spiral
       downwards
  in a complicated
      mating ritual
       & create a
         perfect
         double
          helix.

PO25centEM zines

Furniture Press announces PO25centEM zines, pocket sized zines that will be handed out individually AND serialized with other zines in the series to make an ‘autonomous anthology.’ Further information is available at Nemski.com.

My server has been down all day. Gave me a chance to catch up on things, decide what poems to read in New Zealand, water the garden, clean the pool, sort out all sorts of shit.

An email from Eileen has prompted the memory of this poem of mine, posted in an earlier version to As/Is some months ago.

Flirting
for Eileen Tabios

                    So the distances are Galatea
                    & one does fall in love.....
                    Charles Olson: The Distances

It is a dance in two
parts. Is ritual.

Pop song from the
Forties. A trip to the moon.

The bull, the matador.
Dance, ritual, death.

Whose death? A las
cinco de la tarde.

Usually the bull. Sometimes
the matador. Provocation

can have unexpected results.
A procession of flagellants

passes by. I am drunk on the
smell of fermented mangoes.

Red sand blood white.
What colour are your eyes?

Shampoo #21 is officially out. It includes an extract from Karl Marx' Rubric Journals, a collaboration between Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & myself. Another extract was in the most recent BlazeVOX, & a third is forthcoming from that home of so much interesting & excellent work, Andrew Lundwall & Jeannie Smith's Poetic Inhalation.

There are another two collaborative sequences of ours, The Oracular Sonnets & The Sketchbooks of Hieronymous Bosch, accepted for publication later this year. More on them when the time is closer. Plus some individual poems.

& that is just the beginning. We enjoy working together immensely, & intend the partnership to keep on keeping on.

New issues of xStream & Tin Lustre Mobile are up.

What little I
know about
flying
         comes from
those who have
never flown.

Jorge Luis Borges in a 1968 interview with Don Bell. Reprinted in Agni #52.

Well, in "The Aleph" I had two ideas in mind. The first was the old idea of the microcosm, the idea that the whole world, the whole universe, the world of the external, might be, for all we know, summed up or enclosed within a very short space, so that we would have, for example, a small shining circle somewhere in a drab house in Buenos Aires and there the whole universe might be found, and therein another aleph, and so on, to infinity. And then I had another idea. I thought of a man being granted a privilege of viewing the universe and making nothing of it but using this privilege to write a nonsensical poem. So those two strains were woven into the story.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Aleph

He proposed to versify the entire planet; by 1941 he had already dispatched several hectares of the state of Queensland.....

defining moments

A
catamite is
a sodomite's minion.

The Allegrezza ficcione, Part Three

In societies where oral traditions are not strong, family histories do not flow in a linear way. They jump generations, or side track down through other branches.

Umberto Allegrezza encountered the story of the journey to the East only once in his immediate family. An overheard conversation between his parents, accompanied by laughter. When he asked about it he was told it was a foolish tale, primitive, unsuitable for these times. No further explanation.

He found out more from his great great uncle Nestore, Franco's brother. But even then it was sparse, with missing pieces, like a skeleton that has been disturbed by wild dogs. More emphasis on the Chinese connection, as if it were an integral part of the story rather than an anecdote.

Ironically, it was at Nestore's funeral that the story took on substance, through his only grandchild, destined to be the last of that particular line. Christened Gemma but now known as Sister Raffaela, employed as a specialist restorer in the Vatican archives.

She & Umberto sat next to one another at the funeral; & after the burial, at the small family gathering that followed, prompted by Umberto's reminiscing about how he had learnt more of the family history from Nestore rather than from his own parents, Gemma/Raffaela told him of her work, part of which involved x-raying manuscripts to see if there was anything of more or equal importance that had been scraped off & written over.

Because she, too, had been told the story by her grandfather, she had investigated the original manuscript by Rustichello of Pisa of the journey of the Polos. Had discovered in an early chapter outlining the reasons for the expedition to the court of Kublai Khan a phrase that had been written over not once but twice.

It was her surmise that the Polo's wished to claim complete responsibility for the idea, & that at their bidding Rustichello had covered over with a mixture of chalk & gum the words he had originally written. What appeared now as "the journey of allegory" had been before that written as the journey "del allegrezza", the journey of joy.

But that, apparently, was still not far enough away from the truth for the Polos. The original wording had been "del Allegrezza". The journey of (an) Allegrezza.

Previous Part / Next Part

Take
the street-
car named Desire.

Have just posted poem #37, Eternal evidence, to Series Magritte.

Adding

César de Oliveira's Hauptwege und Nebenwege (arteries & side paths) to the sidebar.

He says the Dutch are without humour. In the main I agree, but I exclude Janwillem van de Wetering whose detective stories are extremely funny.

The Allegrezza ficcione, Part Two

History was written at the ryokan; or at least the outline of a possible history obtained by rewriting the past. The officers were chosen because of their disciplines, not their military discipline. For the purpose of the meeting was to find historical & cultural justification for Japan setting out on an expansionist policy &, in concert with the others whose nations each had similar plans of their own, to divide the new world up amongst themselves.

It was a room full of ironies. The only Japanese to have seen military action was the civilian, in the late eighteen-nineties against the Chinese & a decade later against the Russians. The highest ranking officer was the American, a general, but the only one whose presence here was not sanctioned by his government. The only foreigner not to have fought was the youngest of the Italians, Franco Allegrezza, & though his politics were suspect he was regarded highly as an Orientalist, the foremost one in the military. The youngest Japanese, Kaoru Ishikawa, practised Buddhism, a suspect religion.

Despite the importance of the discussions it is only these last two who play any further part in this story; & even they only for a little while. They shared at room & similar interests. On the occasional evenings when there was a break from the conference they would soak in the hot springs & talk, or play go in their room & talk. The older Japanese would bring in geisha to entertain them in the banquet room, would drink, their faces growing redder, until they passed out. The foreigners would hire less-than-geisha, male or female depending upon their preference, & spend the time in their rooms taking advantage of the temporary privacy.

On one of these evenings, after a day spent investigating the augmented history base that the acquisition of China would bring – the Mongol conquests, the journey of Hsuan-Tsang to India to search for the Buddhist sutras, the voyages of Zhang He – Ishikawa mentioned that there had been a preface to the first edition of Wu Ch'eng-en's "Monkey" that made reference to an even earlier journey than that of Hsuan-Tsang. The preface was obscure, no dates given, no names even. Only an initial, K or Q, of obscure origins, possibly a Uigur who had converted from animism to Buddhism & come east. The implication was that the quest, if indeed it had occurred, was unsuccessful, that the Uigur had simply decided to return home & into anonymity. The preface had been removed from all subsequent editions.

Allegrezza was mildly interested. His family had a story of a twelth-century ancestor who was supposed to have traversed the Silk Road before the Polos. Again obscure, disputed names, vague dates, no proof of a journey let alone a successful one. It was a story told as an entertainment, not as a tale of truth.

He returned home after the conference. The anecdote about the Uigur traveller became a footnote to the family history, used as a supplement in an extended telling or as a defence to reinforce the universality of quests, mystical or otherwise.

All the officers were dead before the Second World War ended. Only the civilian survived, working as an advisor to Douglas MacArthur's Army of Occupation until his death in 1948.

previous part / next part

excerpts from The Real and False Journals, Book I by Michael Rothenberg

"I started this journal the night before Philip died and finished it a year and a half later, on a clear Fall day, after spreading Philip's ashes under the snowy peak of Mt. Hood."

They're beautiful pieces. Click here to read them.

Forgive
the pieces
about my past

I'm
so fond
of posting here.

Just
simply writing
my own obituary.

& on the subject of Jukka

I have just added a link to his text blog, ::nonlinear poetry - textual conjectures::, to the sidebar.

Buried in its backpages is the comment "nonlinear does not have anybody on their friends list". Bullshit, I say, bullshit!

Challenging the G8

The Finnish And Australasian CO-Prosperity Sphere.

Henceforward to be known as FAACOPS.

As Jukka writes:

I like FAACOPS and the whole idea is wonderful.
We founded FAACOPS and we are FAACOPS, that's beautiful !

Part One of a ficcione for Bill Allegrezza

There can be many starting places. Which one you pick depends on where you're coming from, & in what direction you are going. It is probably wisest to select from those points where there is most co-incidence, since that way more journeys are possible.

Here there are two. One excludes itself, because that is where everything unravels; & though it also ties everything together there is no longer any anticipation, knowing the story, aware of what will happen next since it has already happened. The other, then, because that is where past & future coalesce, where a grain of pollen caught in the leg hairs of an ephemeral insect is brought in contact with another & fertilises it. Without the past there is nothing. Without the future there is no story.

So then the place to start is a ryokan famous for its onsen, its hot springs, at Lake Shikotsu, a caldera lake in Hokkaido. The year 1937, the month December. There is a conference going on disguised as a religious retreat, thirteen participants, twelve of whom are serving military officers with higher degrees, in history or cultural studies. The thirteenth, a civilian, acts as the de facto chairman. He holds several positions, Professor of Military History at Kyoto University, director of one of the largest zaibatsu (& linked by marriage to another), Cabinet Minister & a member of the currently secret Preparations for War oversight committee.

Six of the officers are Japanese. The others are two Germans & two Italians, a Spaniard & an American. They are paired, sharing rooms, one gaijin to each Japanese officer. The Professor has the best room in the inn to himself.

next part

This page is clever.

A note on Lizard

Lizard was the first poem I ever wrote. I was seventeen, suffering teenaged angst & concerned about my mortality which, for some reason, seemed particularly fragile at the time. I don't know why but I decided to write about it, perhaps write it out of me or clarify my feelings. It ended up being a poem; & in the course of writing it my attitude towards death turned around. I was quite happy by the time I'd finished. I cannot remember if there was much revision. I have a feeling that there was little if any. & even then I wrote at a typewriter. Something about the separation between writer & instrument – you have to hold a pen; there is a distance between your fingers & a keyboard. It's like the start of a relationship. Those tentative touches to test the waters.

I knew no writers, though my mother wrote verse for the women's magazines of the time, knew poetry only through college & that part of my first year at University when I attended lectures. I think we did Eliot & Yeats at Uni, but everybody else I studied had been dead for at least a century. I was unenthusiastic about it. I was a musician, a classically-trained contrabassist. The cello would have been my preferred instrument – it still is the one whose sound I love the most if I put aside the personal sound of Miles Davis - but I was a lover of jazz, & the bass was an instrument for jazz.

But here I was writing. & sufficiently impressed by what I'd done to write some more. Three poems altogether, in the space of a couple of weeks. I showed them to my mother who suggested I send them off to the N.Z. Listener, a colonial imitation of the English Listener, the back with the radio programs, the front with articles & reviews & one or two poems in each issue. It was one of the few serious outlets for poetry at that time available in N.Z. I didn't know what literary journals were, or little magazines. Unsurprising, because I think there was only one of each in the country then.

They were accepted. Lizard was the second poem published, just after my eighteenth birthday.

I still played & wrote jazz. But when I returned to university the next year I had the cachet of being a Published Poet. Yes, definitely capital letters. I didn't consider myself a writer but others did. I was asked to edit the University Literary Society's annual publication. I became involved with other writers. I discovered Poetry, got influenced by people who wrote it, felt I had to write, wrote crap for the next three years. There was nobody I knew who wrote like I did when I started out so I started to write like other people who I really had nothing in common with.

Somewhere during this time I gave up playing music. If I'd played flute or piano I might have continued, but playing bass in those days was a dangerous undertaking. Wellington isn't known as windy Wellington for nothing, & there weren't many yank-tanks around, & none owned by anyone I knew. The taxis were still relatively small, English-made but not English taxicabs. Most of them I couldn't fit my bass into. I had to carry it, my shoulder fitting into its waist, whenever I had to play anywhere. Ultimately the visions of me getting caught in an uplift & blown down a hillside or off the bridge between home & the university became too much.

What saved me from becoming a pallid poet in the English tradition was Don Allen's 1960 anthology The New American Poetry which probably made it to N.Z. the year after its publication. I found in it poets whom I felt at home with, who wrote in a similar manner to how I had done when I first started writing, whose influences I didn't mind. Who I quite shamelessly stole from. Gary Snyder's Riprap – Lay down these words / Before your mind like rocks; MY's The Quarrel – Put down those words / rocks picked hastily from the beach of mind. Charles Olson's The Lordly & Isolate Satyrs; MY's Oriental Bay – The motorcyclists of Cocteau / were Death's / angels. Frank O’Hara's In Memory of my Feelings – My quietness has a man in it; MY's The Tigers – Within the tiger / reels a turmoil of desires. Poems to Denise Levertov, to LeRoi Jones. They went through my blender, came out sometimes smooth, sometimes chunky. But within a couple of years I was writing as myself, still referring to those who'd influenced me but from a different stand- & viewpoint. Openly acknowledging my influences is something I have always done. From Mirror/Images: "There is / an A-Z of those whose images I have pursued / perused & used."

& it all started with Lizard. It makes use of stereotypes but I knew no better then. It has the last vestiges of my belief in Christianity although I think that had gone out the window a year or so before, but not that long ago to make me hesitate to use facets of it. Lizard is, in all senses, a pure poem. Colloquial, uninhibited by influences, its form shaped by the poem rather than the reverse. Because I always lumped my earliest poems in a basket labelled "crap, not to be opened" it took me forty years & the prompting of others to recognise it for what it was, a poem that still works, & something to be proud of.

"When one is seventeen, one isn't serious" wrote Rimbaud. But he was fifteen when he wrote it, & I think he probably changed his mind in those intervening couple of years.

Lizard

I sit on the parched front porch;
around me the house is falling down,
soon my rocking chair may fall through the verandah.
The lizard under the shadow of the rock looks at me
as though I am its new tenant.
My skin is dried and crinkled like my landlady lizard.
I may shed it soon.
Perhaps human skin is the latest lizard fashion —
Lazy Lizard, poke your tongue back in.

Old Elijah in the pawnshop looked at me between rows of watches,
'Latest crocodile skin bags, Sir.'
I wondered if his wife had died.
E.Levy's Emporium; goods bought, sold and exchanged.
Amongst broken guitars, pictures of flowers and chipped vases
ruled 'Lijah,
amongst his rocks, in their dusty shadow.
'Lijah Lizard, put your Woolworth glasses back on.

The sun beats down on my little verandah.
Here I am sitting like a guard watching my own Sahara.
Join the French Foreign Legion.
See the sands.
Allons enfants de la patrie.
French generals, German captains
dwelling in the shadow of Moroccan rocks,
Legion Lizards, put your képis back on.

It is near the end for me now.
Perhaps it is best to rest
instead of cramming in all those little things
I would like to have done.
I wanted to see the big city.
Still, there is an even bigger one
waiting for me now,
waiting for me in the shadow of the rock of ages.
Leaving Lizard, put your halo on.

1959

Check
out the
long lovely hay(na)ku

by
Jill Jones
at Ruby Street.

Les Amants

There is a painting by Magritte.

There is a poem by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.

Crag Hill is back from wherever with a veritable moving van of goodies. Too many to keep score of.

For Jean Vengua

Your poem posted
just after one
day's midnight. &
I reading it
not that long after
am already knocking
on the next. Time-
lines, lines of
different longitude;
but our songlines
are sometimes similar
to my untrained
ear. You tell me
what yesterday was
like. In return
I let you know
about tomorrow.

Was this the first hay(na)ku, tho modified for symmetry?

One of the finest examples of Zen calligraphy ever brushed is a set of scrolls written by Ryokan (1758-1831) for an illiterate farmer:

i-
ro-ha,
ichi-ni-san

(a-
b-c,
one-two-three)

After Han-Shan

(On a sumi-e painting of
Han-Shan & Shih-te by
the Zen monk Sengai.)

Han-Shan, old chinese poet madman,
tramp & hermit, a true poet of the colloquial.
Often he came down from Cold Mountain
to visit Shih-te at the Kuo-ch'ing Temple.
The monks there cannot understand them;
these two madmen laugh at everything - Ha Ha!
Their laughter rings out, loud & clear
as the black-ink brush strokes of this painting.

1966

This is not an apology

I have no compunctions about posting old poems of mine. To most of you they're new.

Adding

Clayton Couch's Word Placements not just because he's one of my favourite editors but because he's also a fine poet

&

Vincent Ponka's Napoleonic In the Works. I misread a word in the last two lines of his first poem

Napoleon
Eroica for an empire.

as erotica. Was mildly disappointed when I realised there was no t. As penance I will refrain from mentioning the Ws of Wellington, Waterloo & Winter.

For Jean Vengua, hoping she gets it, hoping she never gets it

Escherichia
Coli - usually
shortened to E.

but, I write you to let you know . . . not one person from this community called poets, not one from this group checked in to see how I was.. not one cared enough to imagine the weight this might have on one who is also a transperson... not one person.... and I can not come to but one simple conclusion... this is a hopeless battle, because no one . . . no one, has a clue... and thus the battle is lost...humanity is lost poetry is lost

kari edwards, at transdada.

mea culpa.

Life with the lions

Often you would talk of lions - a
natural enough subject, I suppose, for one
born under zodiacal lionsign with mane
of tawny hair & great laughing lionmouth
even though it never was - save once - real
lions that you spoke about. Rather of
statues, of illusions & allusions, almost as if
you were unwilling to admit there were other
living creatures that looked like you.
                                                               Down
from some small New England town at eighteen,
to New York & bigcity snow, & an acid freakout
outside the public library - flickerflacker
interchange of situations, justseen Potemkin re-
curring amongst these other steps where the
stoned lions have started roaring - that kept
you, for the moment, frozen - yes, like a
statue - & permanently ensnared by the image
of the lion.
                   Whether you fled or / followed them
I do not know. Only that the wealth of your
pilgrimfathers let you travel the world, to find
more lions in Mexico & London, Lisbon & Ankara &
christ knows where else, all stone or steel
or stuffed, & all sufficiently still to let you
overlook your fear of them, to come to look
like them, to learn the illusory/allusory lore,
from Ginsberg to 'The Girl Beneath...'
                                                      Which is where
we came in, you with your talkingbook of jungle
tales, me fluctuating between derision & desire.
I bought 'Born Free' once, drunk, to give you
for your birthday; but sobering up kept it, & my
silence. Until that night when you fucked me
more ferociously than usual, & I felt carnivore breath
on the back of my neck, real mane brushing
my shoulders. & as you came in me I
called you 'Lion'. You belted me across the head
& said "Shut up! I hate the fucking things."

1974

The pheasant coucal

I thought when we got new neighbours who had two rottweilers late last year that we wouldn't be seeing this bird again. I'd only sighted it twice but it's pretty spectacular.

Then yesterday, in the afternoon, when Lauren & I were on our way down the back driveway to go for a walk along the lagoon, we heard a rustling & saw Centropus phasianinus  running up a tree. It flies, but doesn't seem to like it. Prefers to hop from low branch to low branch. Couldn't see it when we came back; but a little later, when I was outside having a cigarette, it hopped up from the ground & onto the pool fence, hopped along that & then disappeared into the other neighbours' place.

It's the only Australian cuckoo that doesn't lay its eggs in other birds' nests.

& a reminder about the Hay(na)ku Anthology. Submission details, links & cribsheets are available here.

A note to / on / for Joseph Garver

I have decided to add a sidebar link to Joseph Garver's Artificial Prospects to go with his Hay(na)ku blog.

With some trepidation. Joseph seems to approach his blogs with a scorched earth policy. He raises them, then razes them. I am reminded of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, where only when certain stars are in alignment & the right words are said does Cthulhu's island prison of R'lyeh rise from the ocean.

Currently Artificial Prospects contains illustrations of the Kama Sutra constructed by the Pensecola Polytechnic woodwork class. Pictures of the aging Levon Helm have gone, along with a photo of what looked like an early Mormon missionary, also named Joseph Garver, that seemed to stay up for about three hours.

Still I shall perservere. I like the way he manipulates the hay(na)ku form whilst still staying true to it. & I will gladly forgive the omissions & commissions of anyone who so openly declares their admiration for Eileen Tabios.

So please, Joseph, don't be so damned self-defacing. Otherwise I shall be forced to set the Great Old Ones on you. & you know what will happen then.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

I have died & gone to heaven

In the last few weeks
harry k. stammer has done some variations on a poem of mine at As/Is
Martin Edmond has written a ficcione for me at Luca Antara
Jean Vengua has shared the depths of my darkness at Okir
& now the sublime Jukka-Pekka Kervinen has honoured me with not one but two pieces at his Nonlinear Poetry. Jukka, dear friend. I am tongue-tied. I can only speak in clichés. I am over the moon.
As the nameless shameless one would say. Forgive me while I preeeeeeen!

First contact

in memory of Rodney Kirk Smith (1937-1996),
for so many years / the invisible shoulder

Begin with what could so easily
have been the end. You, me & the
architect, asleep in the belly
of your old Citroën, parked
in the middle of the main road
an hour or so south of Auckland.
Having decided, as the party
was unraveling, to take to the highway,
to carry on the lifelong conversation
even though we had only met
quarter of an hour before. You drove,
were the last to go to sleep, stopping
where & when you finally felt
like it. Fortunate that the where
was too far north for the
coal & timber trucks that ran all night
& the when was everywhere else
mid-sixties New Zealand at
4.30 in the morning. To wake to a
landscape of cows & high voltage
power lines, observe it for the time
it took to smoke a cigarette, then
turn around & head back to the city
tacitly acknowledging the impulse of the act
but never questioning it. It was to be
the perennial pattern of our dance.

I have been trying to think of things to say to Jean Vengua in appreciation of this poem. Nothing goes far enough, deep enough. I am left indebted. Silent. But what need of words when others speak so forcefully on your behalf?

harry k. stammer rewrites Shakespeare. His blog refurbish'd. 'Tis black, on blue.

the hay(na)ku habit

Tom
has fallen
off the waggon.

Cold
turkey never
works. You have

to
taper off.
Word by word.

Line
by line.
Tercet by tercet.

The blue-faced honeyeater

The call from the garden unfamiliar. Go searching. Stand still. Find it bouncing in one of the palm trees. Back to the birdbook. Find it in amongst the honeyeaters.

An amazing name. Entomyzon cyanotis. White belly, olive back, a "conspicuous facial patch". Blue. Cyano, from the Greek kuaneos.

An amazing call. If a whistling kettle uttered discrete noises on the way to reaching orgasm this would be what they were like.

Queet. Queet. Queet.

The correspondence of M.C.Escher

Each evening he would write
what had happened
to him on the back
of an envelope. Sometimes
would add an address
to the front & send them
off to people he knew
or to others picked
at random from the pages
of the telephone directory. He
kept no record of where
they went; paid little
attention to what he
wrote. Now & then
he would send them to
himself. Could not bear
to throw them away
when they arrived. A pile
grew on the table in the
hallway. One day he read
them. That evening
he wrote about it. Addressed
it. Sent it off. To himself.

This is what I'll be doing for three days in Auckland.

Elizabeth Taylor was eleven when she made Lassie Come Home. It was the first movie I ever saw. I was four going on for five. The legacy of Hiroshima had just begun.

This time next month I will be in New Zealand.

This time next month I will be in New Zealand.

On my last night in New Plymouth I saw a Charlie Chaplin movie, City Lights or Modern Times, I think the latter. It was showing at the cinema across the road from the hotel where we were staying before we caught the morning train to Wellington. I was eleven. I do not remember moving from Hokitika to New Plymouth six years earlier.

My true thoughts on Ronald Reagan

My recent post on Ronald Reagan's funeral may have implied some sympathy for the man. To counter that suggestion - & prompted by my note on the latest issue of sidereality  below – let me just excerpt this from a poem of mine that appeared in the last issue.

Terminator Arnie's one-man army
is on the march to Sacramento, the victory celebrations
compered by a talkshow host. Maybe
the whole set-up is the lead-in
to another Jay Leno one-liner. The comparisons
are with Reagan, but he was just a fuckwit
puppet. It's Jesse The Body Ventura
who’s got a lot to answer for.

Or any excerpt from J.G.Ballard's wonderful 1968 piece Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan. I'll content myself with just one.

In assembly kit tests Reagan's face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

The latest issue of sidereality is up. Since I have no understanding of sidereal time, I will refrain from mentioning that it's a little later than promised but only say that it was well worth the wait. It overflows with great stuff.

A note of celebration

It's great to see a host of poems on As/Is again. & what a line-up! Sheila Murphy, Nick Piombino, harry k. stammer, Bill Allegrezza, Rachael Kendrick, Billy Ryan, kari edwards & Vincent Ponka.

Hie thee hence. Immediately!!!!!

fijado por los jóvenes de la marca

Outside of the days following a note here that I've posted a new poem, most of the hits on my Series Magritte come via Google. Most of them are non-English speaking searches - Europe, South America, Israel. Seems like you stick in Magritte & almost any other word & there you are.

Usually I only trackback one step to see what's on the Google page(s). But today, on a search out of Argentina, I decided to go one step further & have the site translated. I must admit I was most impressed by the lyrical quality of my poems, their resonance. I never knew I had it in me. Or out of me. Here, in all its Spanish leather, is marque la serie de Young Magritte.

I only have a couple of links on the page, but are they impressive.

puntos de desaparición de los beckett del tom de la semejanza

poesia no lineal de los kervinen del jukka-pekka

& the one you're on now: el soñar pelican

This added a bit later, after checking the link was okay. If you do go across, click on the links to Tom's or Jukka's - it's still his old Motown link - page & check out what that gives you!

I have always liked this poem by James Schuyler

SALUTE

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

first published in New World Writing in 1951

A footnote to Martin Edmond's Zheng He ficcione

His body was taken back to China and interred along with his testicles, kept, as was customary, in a sealed pouch carried since castration always on a belt at his waist.
Martin Edmond: Zheng He: A True Ficcione

All else you say is true,
though few know about the
voyage to Luca Antara. Most
thought we stopped at Java;
but he & I went further south,
in a small boat, with a
trusted crew. The same
who later kept the secret
of his burial. What history
records as happening
is a fiction. Certainly
there is an inland tomb, with
Allahu Akbar inscribed
upon it. & a nearby stela
gives details of the seven
voyages. But remember
Zheng He was both a
Muslim & a sailor: Islam
decrees a speedy burial
& the tradition of the sea
demands interment in the
ocean. We wrapped him
in silk once we'd reattached
his young boy’s balls to
their proper place with
gum arabic. & one day
out from Calicut, during the
first watch, accompanied only
by our murmured prayers
& the creak of wood being
pressured by the sea, we
did commend his body
to the waters. Entire again.

Tom Beckett has left the hay(na)ku diamond, temporarily I hope. But stepping up to bat & scoring a home run with her first hit is Kirsten Kaschock & her Sunday Number Theory.

If I don't
post anything
else today
the date
will be the
title of
this poem.

some notes for another ficcione

Legend has it that Bodhidharma cut off his eyelids to stop himself from falling asleep while he meditated. Tea plants are supposed to have sprung up from where his eyelids touched the ground.

Hsuan-Tsang, Xuan Zang in Pin-Yin

moine et pèlerin bouddhiste chinois, également connu sous le surnom de Tripitaka

As I approached China's extreme outpost at the edge of the Desert of Lop, I was caught by the Chinese army. Not having a travel permit, they wanted to send me to Tun-huang to stay at the monastery there. I told them that "if you insist on detaining me I will allow you to take my life, but I will not take a single step backwards in the direction of China."

In a preface to the first edition of Monkey, Wu Cheng-en made reference to an earlier journey west to seek the true Buddhist sutras. The remainder of the preface was so obscure that it was removed from all subsequent editions & hence never translated by Arthur Waley.

Passed down through generations of the Allegrezza family is a story that a twelth-century ancestor traversed the Silk Road a century before the Polos.

But sleightists also vanish. The performers know when such a moment has been reached, and by which of them. They feel the brief removal of their own--they call it “wicking.” It quickens their skins. They taste metal.

From Kirsten Kaschock's sleight: 6: the problem with wicking at NEGATIVE WINGSPAN.

In memory of Ray Charles

In the 1950s, in my teenage years, my musical preference was jazz. Being a jazz lover then meant that all other music – classical, I must admit, was tolerated – was excluded, even though the musicians who played at the bi-monthly Rock n Roll Jamborees at the Wellington Town Hall were the same ones that played at the quarterly Jazz for Listening concerts. (This duality was universal. If you have a look at the back covers of Ricky Nelson records there is often a photograph of the back of a guitarist with the name of Rock Murphy who is not to be confused with the great jazz guitarist Barney Kessel who died earlier this year.)

But I was also a teenager. & that meant hit parades on the radio with Sinatra & Nat King Cole & Patti Page & Perry Como but starting to shift towards the early rockers such as Bill Haley who, although greatly admired, were still old enough to be our parents.

Then came the younger guys, Gene Vincent, Frankie Avalon, Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, but they still tended to work in that older, popular, tradition. Take a look at Elvis' backing band sometime. It was the rhythm & blues influence that finally got things going. At first mainly sanitised white versions of black music, Pat Boone doing Little Richard's Long Tall Sally, but people like Little Richard & Fats Domino & Chuck Berry started getting on the charts.

& sometime in the second half of the fifties this incredible single, I got a woman, by Ray Charles. Perhaps it first made it on to the charts in a cover version by a white girl singer – Connie Francis? (though thinking about it a bit more I believe it was Hallelujah I love her so that was covered) – or perhaps it was the next single by Charles, What'd I say, that broke through. However it fell out I still loved the sound of this guy's voice, the way he phrased his songs. Loved his band & the backing singers, the tenor solos.

But I still didn't buy his records. Still stayed with Miles, Monk, Duke Ellington & the MJQ. Until one day in 1959, in a listening booth in Begg's Music Store in Wellington, I played two albums recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival the year before, Duke Ellington with an exquisite extra-long tenor solo by Paul Gonsalves, & Ray Charles. & I bought the Ray Charles. &, like Allen Ginsberg, I listened to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph....

Later I would buy more albums of his, with strings, with his band, with Milt Jackson. Would forgive him for recording country & western songs. Would forgive him for anything after having listened to The Genius of Ray Charles which has what seems like the greatest assemblage of musicians in history on one side – most of Count Basie's band plus some of Duke Ellington's plus Ray Charles' own band - & on the other, mainly with strings, some more interpretations of standards.

There is a version of Come rain or come shine on it that is truly one of the great tracks of all time. I am listening to it now. I am weeping.

Harry K Stammer is keeping my name alive at As/Is. My sincere thanks, Harry.

Luca Antara

Peter - click here

"Europeans, the Dutch, ‘first discovered’ Australia in 1606. This paper claims there was probably an earlier Portuguese exploration of the Tiwi Islands in northern Australia around 1600. And it puts forward a novel bearing technique for comparing antique maps to corresponding modern publications. The technique is used to demonstrate that a 1602 map, by Emanuel Godinho de Eredia, then a leading cartographer, probably depicts these islands."

The above is part of the abstract for: Peters N. H.., (2002) Eredia Map 1602. Ouro and Luca.Antara Islands: A Case for determining that Ouro and Luca.Antara Islands shown on the Eredia Map are, respectively, Melville and Bathurst Islands of the Tiwi Islands of Australia, Cartography, Vol. 32, No. 2.

Martin Edmond is, like me, a diasporised New Zealander living in Australia (though this year he is back in N.Z., at Auckland University as the writer in residence). He is a writer whose work I like very much, although, because of my 25-year absence from all things literary, I have only discovered it in the past couple of years. He is also my interrogator in our upcoming Q&A to be published soon by the New Zealand electronic poetry centre.

He now has a blog, Luca Antara on which the first post went up a couple of hours ago. Its excellence is a harbinger of things to come. I have just broken a bottle of champagne over it. Bon voyage.

Since, once again, I am emmeshed in Borges, it seems like a good time to post this thirty-year-old ficcione

Pipe Dream

In his 'Book of Imaginary
Beings' Borges tells of a
Muslim myth that the Earth
is held by an angel standing
on a rock of ruby that rests
on the back of a bull, Kujata.

& further, that this beast
is supported by Bahamut , a fish
so immense that all the waters
of the world placed in one
of its nostrils would be like a
mustard seed set in the desert.

Beneath Bahamut   is a sea above
an abyss of air; beneath air
is fire; & beneath fire is a
serpent so great that were it not
for its fear of Allah, it might
swallow up the whole of creation.

They stop there. But I suspect
that at the bottom of everything is
Hassan-i-Sabbah, the first assassin
& the father of grass, & he is
either dreaming us all or, at the
very least, blowing kif smoke

into the snake's face, to keep it happy.

Jill Jones also stirred to hay(na)ku by the Transit of Venus.

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's work at Nonlinear Poetry continues to knock me out. Ever-changing, ever-developing, exploring, always exciting. Far far & away my favourite site.

Nga Manu o Aotearoa

Some New Zealand bird songs. The URL sent to me by Martin Edmond, the Q to my A of our forthcoming Q&A.

Reciprocities

Shanna Compton's brand new insects.
Nick Piombino's fait accompli.

A new issue of Tin Lustre Mobile is out. Plus assorted other goodies at the page.

Have just set The Liberator loose on Series Magritte.

At eratio Gregory Vincent St Thomasino adds a great deal of depth to the current discussions about Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's new images.

I am waiting for Kirsten Kaschock's east to appear.

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

A new issue of Jukka's e-journal xStream is out. Siblings as always, straight & auto.

There is an excellent pre-tornado post by Chris Murray on Jukka's new images that is extremely thoughtful & insightful.

& the following extract from an email from Jukka about his most recent pieces may be of interest.

Yes, if you mean the new images, they are hard to read and
it is deliberate. I wanted to letters and words disappear
and re-appear like being in a heavy fog. I want reader
to try 'guess' words. Basically the whole idea is (again)
from music and composition. There are (this is only one
categorization) two kinds of indeterminacy; between composer
and score, and between score and player(s). I try to simulate
different kind of indeterminate situation, where the point is
not the random/stochastic methods I use, the indeterminate
situation is between the paper (image/poem) and reader.
Althought it is 'hard' to 'read' (actually I didn't mean
that words are read as much as seen), I have enjoyed my
'personal, intimate' stochastic process of 'reading' them.

Bush or Chimp?

Courtesy of Bill Allegrezza's p-ramblings is this site, Bush or Chimp? A note on the site says it was last updated in March last year, just about the time of the pre-emptive strikes on Iraq; & I can't help wondering if maybe that Kevin Kline (?) movie about filling in for the President has been made real & it's the chimp that's actually been in charge & nobody has been able to tell the difference. After all, there has been an awful lot of monkey business going on since that time.

Democracy
is spittle
on the lips

when
used by
former leaders. Is

faecal
matter, an
unfortunate by-product of

this
re-inventing themselves
as conscienced liberals.

When
in office
they did not

know
the word.
Only three words

mattered
then. Autocracy.
& absolute power.

Usually I write about large birds. They are easier to see, always majestic in their element – the various raptors easyriding the thermals, the pelicans gliding on the lagoon - & usually announce themselves. When a cockatoo lands in a tree / the branches bounce. They are easier to identify.

But there is pleasure in the small birds also. A joy of discovery, of the type that Denise Levertov writes about.

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature....

Often you will hear them first, with a voice that is larger than their frame. A song from within the leaves of a tree. & so you wait, & watch. If lucky, the first, perhaps the only, thing you see is a small flash of moving colour. Focus on that, watch the spaces nearby. Move quietly to obtain a better view.

Today a red-browed pardalote, Pardalotus rubricatus.

It nests at the end of a tunnel bored into an earth bank.

It doesn't like being photographed. This was one page I could find.

That small
fall of rain
just after
midnight
that readies
every-
thing for
another day.

I have squashed Squawkbox & gone to Blogger comments. My apologies to all those whose tracks I have obliterated. I still love you!

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.