Have
I passed
my use-by date?

The European "discovery" of Australia

In consequence, these same Endes and the Lamacheres Fishermen determined to repeat the voyage, and when they were all about to set out both the Endes and the Lamacheres were overtaken by a fear so great that they did not dare, owing to ignorance, to cross the Sea of Gold.

And it may well seem that the Almighty God desires to entrust this work to Manoel Godinho de Eredia, the Cosmographer, by Order of the most happy Lord Count Admiral, Viceroy of India intra- and extra-Ganges, that the said Eredia may be the instrument of effecting an increase in the new Patrimonies of the Crown of Portugal, and of enriching the said Lord Count and the Lusitanian Nation.

from: Report on the Golden Chersonese or Peninsula and on the Auriferous, Carbuncular and Aromatic Islands, drawn up by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, Cosmographer, 1597-1600. (Quoted by Martin Edmond)

There is some controversy over which European nation "discovered" Australia, the Dutch or the Portuguese. (Bear in mind that Australia had been discovered & settled 40-60,000 years earlier, probably overland, before tectonic drift & climate change made the world what it is today, what it was in the 15th & 16th centuries.)

The two names usually put forward are Cristovao de Mendonca & Willem Jansz or Janszoon. de Mendonca set out in 1521 or 1522 from the Portuguese colony at Ternate, in the Moluccas, with three caravels, either to search for gold or to intercept the Spaniard Ferdinand Magellan, who was rumoured to be sailing to the Pacific via Cape Horn to claim Portugal's prized Spice Islands. He returned in 1524 with, in some accounts, an unspecified number of caravels or, in others, with only two of the three that set out. There are no details of where de Mendonca actually went, but there are two things which, separately or together, are put forward as proof of his being the first European to sight / land on Australia.

The first of these can be found amongst the so-called Dieppe Maps. Presented to the French Dauphin in about 1540, & supposedly copied by spies from a map in the Casa Da India, the Lisbon records office, (which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755, and all the records with it) it shows a continent named "Jave la Grande", apparently discovered by the Portuguese, which bears a striking resemblance to Australia. This is also popularly supposed to be the chart that Captain James Cook used in the 18th century when, after his "official" voyage to observe of the Transit of Venus from Tahiti, he continued on under "sealed orders" to explore the southern Pacific

The second is the Australian equivalent of the sightings of Noah's Ark. In 1836, two sealers whose boat had overturned came ashore at a beach near what is today Warrnambool, on the southern coastline of Australia, claimed to have found the wreck of a ship partly buried in the sand dunes. They described it as being unusual in design, & already in an advanced state of disrepair.

There were 26 further sightings, up until 1880, which included descriptions of the ship as being made of "dark, hard wood", "after the fashion of a panelled door", or being made of mahogany, which gave rise to its name "The Mahogany Ship". It has been put forward that these descriptions are strongly suggestive of the design of a caravel, just like those used by de Mendonca. & from this it is extrapolated that this is the missing caravel if only two caravels did return to the Moluccas. Unfortunately, there have been no sightings of the wreck since the 1880s.

The voyage of Willen Jansz is verifiable. He captained the Duyfken ("Little Dove") , a small Dutch ship that sailed from the Indonesian island of Banda in 1606 in search of gold and trade opportunities on Nova Guinea (now Papua New Guinea). It sailed along and briefly visited what he either thought (the British version) was a coast of New Guinea or actually knew (the Dutch version) to be the west coast of what is now called Cape York Peninsula in extreme northeastern Australia. He has therefore been officially regarded as the first European to see Australia.

Now, however, a third player has been put forward, Emanuel Godinho de Eredia, the son of a Portuguese father & a Malayan princess, educated by the Jesuits first at Malacca & then at Goa, the Portuguese enclave in India. It is quite possible, if we assume the ship-wrecked caravel is a flight of fancy, that he was the first European citizen to sight & chart Australia.

When Martin Edmond started his blog Luca Antara I googled the name & discovered the abstract of a paper, 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 by an N.H. Peters & published in Cartography, Vol. 32, No. 2, which went, in part

"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 map was included in a book by Eredia, The Description of Malaca, with the manuscript dated 1613. In it, in a small chapter on Meridional India (South Indies), is a detailed report on an island called Luca.Antara to which a journey was made in 1601.

Martin was well aware of Eridia. The book he has been writing this year is based on the 1610 voyage of Antonio da Nova between Malacca and Luca Antara.

"The sole mention of this event is in a letter written by da Nova to cosmographer Manoel Godinho de Eredia and published in Eredia's Report on Meridional India; the recreation of the voyage is necessarily an act of imagination, which will evoke the lost worlds of Nusa Tenggara and the adjacent north west coast of Australia."

He didn't know of the paper until I used it in my post, but he has since corresponded with the author who sent him a copy of it.

At the time that I was writing only the abstract was accessible electronically. Now, however, the full text is available, posted on a website created by Peter J. Grigg "to allow a wider readership of the paper by Noel H. Peters". A Peter Grigg is thanked at the end of the paper; I do not know if they are one & the same or perhaps father & son. I would also like to think that Martin, through his interest & the title of his blog, helped persuade Peter Grigg to put the paper on-line.

It is an intriguing & persuasive paper, which makes use of the "Triple Connection and Gridlock technique for comparing an antique map to its modern counterpart". It also sets out some of the reasons for the secrecy necessary at the time (but which now make verification more difficult).

In essence, Eredia's writings, some twelve years after the event, appear to be a continued, deliberate smokescreen aimed at confusion by deception, subterfuge and secrecy for the protection of Portugal's long-term, political interests. One can more easily understand Eredia's deception when it is realized that from 1595 …and by 1601, no fewer than 14 Dutch fleets (at 3 to 5 ships per fleet) had sailed for the Indies and the United Provinces had overtaken Portugal as the leading trading nation in the East.

I'm intrigued that Eridea felt necessary to resort to a ficcione, specifically leaving his readers to infer that he did not visit these islands, yet he was careful to add his name to his 1602 map; and to another world map, dated 1606, on which he names himself as the descobridor of Luca.Antara in 1601. & I'm also intrigued by the Commission given Eridea, in which he is stated to have "the priority rights to discover (what is now called Australia) at some future time".

I, for one, am convinced by the paper that Eredia was the first European to visit Australia, though I admit to bias in that I would go for the Portuguese over the Dutch every time. & though I applaud these voyages of discovery I am not so enamoured of their purpose for I am appalled by what came after, in almost every country of the world, with the advent of white settlement.

My only caveat to the paper is pure whimsy on my part. The Eredia map was discovered in the National Library in Buenos Aires in 1946. Below is part of the chronology of the life of Jorge Luis Borges, author of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

1937, named to the post of assistant librarian at a small library in Buenos Aires.
1946, having opposed the military dictatorship of Juan Perón in his speeches and non-literary writings, Borges is removed from his post as librarian and offered a job as a chicken inspector.
1955, Peronist regime overthrown; Borges is made director of the National Library in Buenos Aires

The Origin of the Species

The "Next Blog" feature found at the top of most blogs these days & which takes you to a randomly-selected "public" blog, produces some humorous entries in the referers' list.

Found amongst the visitors today at Textual Conjectures is BIO 697 - Invasive Species: Ecology & Management: Reading Assignments for 9/13 - 9/17.

I can just see the next assignment. Mitosis & Apoptosis in the work of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.

Start the week off well

by checking out the great work at Harry K. Stammer's eponymous blog & Kirsten Kaschock's NEGATIVE WINGSPAN.

A new issue of

Gregory Vincent St Thomasino's eratio is online.

A turn around the lawn

Not how I would have
preferred to spend
my time. But when The
World asks you to
take a turn around
the lawn after lunch
how can you turn
the invitation down.
Forwent the siesta ex-
pecting insight &
the exposition of an
ideal set of corporate
goals. Instead subjected
to an egotistical list
of mergers, takeovers,
strategic alliances &
plays that have no
other purpose than
an exercise of
personal power. So sad
to find The World is
just another business
that is run by men.

I am intrigued by the (mentally-assembled) list of non-contributors to the latest issue of the m.a.g.. Maybe I'm not the only one who has been turned off shopping in a bulk-buy poetry supermarket.

The Pulling Power of Poetry

My thanks to Dumbfoundry for this link.

New Zealand's poet laureate draws crowd of more than 20

As I commented, that's almost half the population of New Zealand.

Concerning Godzilla

Dear Jean

I agree with you that it's a shame about Godzilla. At first glance it appears to be some sort of sellout on the beast's part.

But then I got to thinking. Have you ever seen Dick Cheney & the big G. together? In the same place? At the same time?

At least Mothra still appears to be upholding the ethical standards now understandably prevalent throughout the post-Bikini Pacific. Last time I saw her she was on the beach with a lei & a ukelele, doing some sort of cowboy swing number. Not a politician in sight. (Though I must admit that there wasn't much beach left as the globally-warmed waters rose higher. It's a bit of a paradox, fossil fuel accomplishing what nuclear fission never did.)

Best wishes
Mark

p.s. I saw J.G.Ballard swimming in the lagoons of Truk atoll.

graffiti piece

it
is a
piece of graffiti

Millenium milestone #1 (the sorrowful one)

Count to 1000 slowly.

Millenium Milestone #2 (the joyful one)

A 1000 visitors have arrived at Eileen Tabios' The Chatelaine's Poetics via the Ellis Island of Tom Beckett's unprotected texts.

A round of howling is in order. May the influx continue unabated.

The Age of Enlightenment

it over

     -balances

Jukka rewrites The Tale of Genji

Genji lusts after a princess because he cannot resist the beauty of the music she plays on the zither. Almost instantly he declares his love for her and pursues her with a flurry of letters.

(9 p.m.) & check out the new format of & the new posts at textual conjectures.

The Magritte Poems by Hannah Weiner

I rushed through the door.
You had bitten a way for me.

Hannah Weiner: Amorous Perspective

Tracking back along a search that landed somebody at my Series Magritte
I found The Magritte Poems of Hannar Weiner, written in 1966, first published by Poetry Newsletter in 1970 & reproduced & re-produced posthumously by the Buffalo epc as both html & pdf files.

They are delightful & precise poems, not a word out of place, & with accompanying notes on each of the eight that are a joyful accompaniment, not an explanation.

A common remark when people discover my Series is that "Everybody has a Magritte poem". That may be so, but these poems by Hannah Weiner are amongst the best of them. I am sad that I had not come across them until yesterday.

The painting, Amorous Perspective, aka Amorous Vista, that the poem above relates to can be found here.

The Therapist

a memorial hay(na)ku for Donald M. Allen

The
New American
Poets – who cares

how
you grouped
them! Your showing

them
to me
was my awakening.

A True History of The Oracular Sonnets

http://meritagepress.com/oracular3.pdf

Saturday, April 10, 2004. I posted a piece, A poem beginning with a line from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, to pelican dreaming. Not a great poem, but I found humour in doing it, the title a pastiche of Robert Duncan's A poem beginning with a line from Pindar plus Jukka's description of his work as nonlinear poetry. I'd been getting bombarded through my hotmail account with spam that was comprised of random words, generated by a program I thought probably similar to one of Jukka's, had used their subject lines to make a nonlinear poem of my own, so Jukka was occupying my thoughts at the time.

We knew each other in the way that bloggers do. My first publication (apart from a curated invitation) after I came back to writing was in a journal that also had him in it. We shared the same line in the spread-across-the-page index of authors. His is a name that is easily noticed; Jukka-Pekka like a ragged mountain range, Kervinen like the valleys that slope down from them. Over the next couple of years we appeared together several times. We both became participants in the As/Is group blog, commented on one another's work from time to time. He accepted some poems of mine for xStream, then some more. We emailed one another. I sent him a manuscript for his excellent xPress(ed) series. He was one of the first to put up a link when I started pelican dreaming. His nonlinear poetry blog was the first link I put up on mine.

The Friday after the post I got an email from him, acknowledging the poem, giving me a bit of stick for my earlier remark that the content of the spam emails was from his blog. & then, in brackets, almost as if it were an afterthought, he mentioned that he had some 'intentionally unfinished' poems, templates, & would I be interested in some collaborations. Would I? Sent back an affirmative response, & received the first five the next morning.

Within three hours the template beginning " n l rs se be a t d s a" had become a poem that started "nearly seized & beaten, / but escaped through". I sent it off to him, to see if he liked it, to see if it was the way he wanted us to go. An excited email came back in the evening. Consensus. By that time I'd already done more. The next morning I sent an attachment containing eight poems off to him.

There were poems provoked by the templates, incorporating the templates – crossed out, written through, inverted, truncated - & some having absolutely nothing to do with them apart from being written within the same frenzied period. At this point there was little sense of unity between the poems – they were individual pieces, but amongst them the threads of chance, linkage & states of being.

That evening – it's a time zone thing, this morning/evening Finland/Australia correspondence - five more templates arrived. The first began " r d s se s a / o al" & from that came “roads seesaw towards the / the oracle” fourteen lines in all, the first Oracular Sonnet. Now there was an overall framework, a direction. The creative frenzy continued. Chance reinforced throughout. As example: I wanted to chop an existing sonnet in two vertically. Picked an anthology from the bookcase & the first sonnet I found was Yeats' Leda & The Swan, about beating wings. & one of the poems I had written stimulated by the first group of templates had the lines "of the / beating wings / of words". It was one of those times when everything just fell into place.

At 4.11 p.m. on the Monday evening, two & a half days after the first templates arrived, the eighteen poem sequence of The Oracular Sonnets of Mark Young & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen was on its way from Rockhampton to Espoo. Accompanied by a tumultuous roll of drums, FAACOPS, the Finnish & Australasian Co-Prosperity Sphere, had been launched.
7/9/04

The Gaudy Image

The manner of speaking is barbarous.
Coarse words, harsh incantations
that chafe like wolves' tongues
on the thighs of angels. The manner
of speaking is the way of his life. The
unhesitant, uncluttered flow of words.
Their power, the heat of them,
on which your fingers burn, or else
your body, pressed against him. In
the beginning there was silence. Though
there were words, you would not reach
into the sticky air & pick them out.
In the beginning there was your silence.
& now another, more deathly, more
strained, through which the worms of
revelation crawl, waiting to be discovered,
like pornographic pictures of yourself
you didn't admit existed. How to explain them
in soft words? or make light of them? Or even
try. Now you can only wait for the end,
your brittle fingers tilted towards the moon
to soften them. In failing light / a last
deception. The rails of your life glint
in the far distance, the scarred tracks. Mem-
ory? Common wounds? Or an old record,
worn thin, out of which some even thinner voice
rises to lick your cunt with its dry tongue.
Memory. & in the wind are faded flowers.

1967

Dear Jean

Could
this be
a piece of

Pinoy
Poetics? Writing
tag a (b)log?

A brilliant piece of writing

Martin Edmond's A man in search of his soul at Luca Antara is bloody marvellous.

The Allegrezza Ficcione, Part 11

The Mother of Wine

The mother of wine
must be sacrificed. Her
children must be seized
& thrown into prison.

It will be impossible
to take her children from her
unless you first trample
her beneath your feet

& squeeze her essence
out. Nor may you
under law separate
the baby from her breast

until she has nursed it
for at least seven months,
beginning April, through
to the end of October…..

from: 1400 bayt of Abu Abd Allah Rudaki
translated by Umberto Allegrezza
The Manichean Press; Bukhara, Uzbekistan, 1999.

Previous Part / Next Part

I am not posting this

I am not posting that truth is stranger / curiouser / funnier / more entertaining than fiction

I am not posting that I agree with Jonathan Mayhew that it is difficult to say which of the two excellent pieces is the better read, Eileen Tabios' TABIOS VS TUHAN or Stephanie Young's The Bees

I am not posting that there is tension which builds towards the inevitable outcome of The Bees whereas the tension of T. v. T. is more to do with the uncertainty of the outcome of the pamanhikan

I am not posting that one story is classic horror whilst the other is a bit of a chickflick where I ended up moist-eyed

I am not posting any of this

It is a ficcione

ragTAG & bobtail

Just
so the
tag will last

more
than ein
tag, I will

climb
out of
the ring at

Jill’s
command &
get my tagteam

partner,
Jean Vengua,
in to take

my
place. Remember.
Hay(na)ku rules OK(IR).

TLM

A new issue of Tin Lustre Mobile is up.

gasp

Anybody that can get Jukka to be this garrulous ain't half bad.

Am going to add Karri Kokko's MUISTI | KIRJA to the sidebar.

The Allegrezza Ficcione, Part 10

Allegrezza searched the rest of von Holstein's papers but could find nothing else of interest. It seemed as if the capture had ended the Count's desire for travel. He had spent his remaining years staying close to his castle, writing fancies about minor personages in major historical texts & some masques for his family & servants to perform in, & breeding those dairy cattle that are all that now retain his name.

Umberto emailed Gemma, telling her what he had found, asking her to see what contacts she could arrange in Iran or Iraq or the Muslim Republics that had once formed part of the U.S.S.R., telling her that he would be in Rome in two days time.

Nestore had left him a trust fund, which he was now of an age to access. He could therefore postpone taking up a post-doctoral position for a year & instead spend the time travelling east along the Silk Road. His parents were dismayed when he told them what he was going to do – "A foolish quest by a foolish youth" said his mother; his father said nothing.

He felt he would find nothing in Turkey. Iraq was still restricted by no-fly zones, & Mosul was a centre of Kurdish unrest. He would venture there only if absolutely necessary. Tabriz seemed the place to start, & if he found nothing there then there was that magic carpet of places that came after it – Tehran, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Alma Ata, Yashgar. There was an excitement in reciting them.

In Rome he immediately went to arrange to have a new passport issued with the honorific "Doctor" and his occupation given as "literary historian", feeling it might give him a bit more credibility in what would undoubtedly be regarded as an incredible quest by most, if not all, of those he came into contact with along the way. A small bribe in association with the fee for expedition ensured he would have it within a day. Then he went to see Gemma.

She had only a few names for him, but they were far to the east. Too far, probably, to be of much use. But there were still representatives of the Italian Government in many of the places he might be going to, & trading houses. She would see what she could do, & if those names weren't forthcoming before he left, she would send them care of the embassy in Tehran which he should be able to contact once he was in Iran.

He picked up his passport the next day, & then started to arrange visas, for Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan. Easier done than said for all but the first, because most had no representatives in Rome, & were serviced through the Russian Embassy. His story of researching the local literature of the Silk Road was barely attended to & the fact that he had no travel itinerary let alone tickets – he had money, he didn't look like a preacher of dissent, he was a student, un dottore   yet – proved no impediment.

Iran was a more difficult proposition. He had to have tickets out of the country before they would let him in, places to stay which had to be on an approved list. Why did he want to go to Tabriz? Where else was he intending to go in Iran? Where else beyond its borders? Explain over & over what the reason for his journey was. Finally, they told him they would grant the visa when he appeared with his travel documents.

It would have been easier to fly directly into Tehran, but Allegrezza didn't want to arrive like a tourist. & besides, he wanted to leave Tehran until after he been to Tabriz, to follow the Silk Road as it were. He consulted Lonely Planet & other guidebooks, decided he would fly Rome to Istanbul by Alitalia, then Turkish Air to Baku in Azerbaijan where he could catch the once a week flight by Iran Air from Baku to Tabriz that left the afternoon he arrived.

His travel agent tried to talk him out of the itinerary, particularly the last part, citing the effect the trade embargo had had on Iran's ability to import parts for its aging aeroplanes. But it was cheap, & a return ticket paid for in foreign currency even more so. This would be his necessary ticket out of the country. There was scant information on hotels in Tabriz so he picked out the Darya at random, booking a room for a week even though he might not be staying for that length of time.

The transit visa for Azerbaijan was obtained as easily as those for the other former Soviet States; & with all his itinerary approved, & with a few more questions thrown in apparently for the sake of form, he had his Iranian visa within four hours.

He spent some of the eight days before he left playing tourist in his own city, seeking out places he had meant to visit all his life but had never got around to, in the manner of most locals everywhere. He had lunch with Gemma & discussed his vague plans & how they would keep in touch; had dinner with his parents twice & discussed nothing. He called on a couple of Iranians whom he had been to university with & absorbed from them what information they could provide within the confined boundaries he outlayed to them of his coming trip.

He packed, a backpack & a carry-on shoulder bag. He carefully selected some books to accompany him. Three favourites in the backpack - Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Borges' A Personal Anthology & Chang Ts'ai Shang-en's Bodhidharma & The Paradox of Ubiquitous Bunnies - plus Idoru, the new William Gibson novel, to read on the plane.

He caught a bus to the airport. No-one was there to say farewell.

Previous Part / Next Part

xStream Issue #23

xStream Issue #23 is online, again in three parts:

1. Regular: Works from 6 poets
(Steve Dalachinsky, Crag Hill, Mike Estabrook, Sherman Souther, Kenji Siratori and Thomas Lowe Taylor)

2. Autoissue: Poems generated by computer from Issue #23 texts,the whole autoissue is generated in "real-time", new version in every refresh.

3. Wryting Issue #6: a monthly selection of WRYTING-L listserv works

Che in Bolivia

If I make it
out of
here, I must thank
Fidel for his
parting gift. A book
of poetry, by a Yanqui
yet, who set out
to write
something every day
even when it was hard
to find something
to write about. It's an
idea I've picked up
on. Am keeping a diary
although daily Bolivia is
the same old same old
unlike New York
where there are "so many
things in the air!" Here
there are only mosquitoes
& the mutterings of
peasants intimidated by
our presence. They help us
because they are frightened
of us, & then send to tell
the army because they are
more frightened of
the soldiers. The Bolivian
Communist Party doesn't
want anything to do
with us. We are running out
of food, are running out of
time. "The only thing to do
is simply continue." The army
is in the next valley. It is
an inevitable confrontation.
I go forward to meet them,
a man with two hearts. The
one that beats still dreams
of revolution. The one that
weeps is in my pocket, it is
Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara.

oops

In my recent post noting the latest issue of moria, I omitted from the list of contributors one of my favourite writers, Eileen Tabios, who reviews iduna by another one of my favourite writers, kari edwards.

whatever
happened to
jean-luc ponty?

An announcement

The e-chapbook
The Oracular Sonnets,
a collaboration
between Jukka-Pekka
Kervinen & M.Y.-self,
is now up & down-
loadable at
Meritage Press.

Our publisher, the self-effacing Eileen Tabios, does enough preeeening for all of us in her press release which is up at The Chatelaine's Poetics.

conjunction hay(na)ku for j.v.

The
synchronicity of
our chosen words.

There is a nice re-working & re-assembling of poems at Jean Vengua's The Nightjar.

& when George W. loses in November

he will always have these to fall back on.

After World War II synthetic fur, a deep-pile fabric closely resembling fur, became popular. George W. Borg was among the first to adapt circular knitting machines to make a pile fabric from synthetic fibers.

I ran across a unique passive filter. Wonder if anyone has seen or heard of one. It is Military surplus. It is called Radio Filter FL-30. Made by The George W. Borg Corp. It appears to consist of potted torroids. It is about a 2 1/2 inch cube with a large 3 position switch on top.

even though

photographs of the trials at Guantanamo Bay cannot be taken by reporters because the U.S. Government has declared that this contravenes the Geneva Conventions

even though
the U.S. Government has contravened the Geneva Conventions in every other aspect of this incarceration

even though
the trials have been declared illegal by an international panel of jurists

even though
Mamdouh Habib & David Hicks, the Australians interned there, would, if they were sent home, be set free because they have committed no crime under Australian law

even though
even in this judicial farce they may still be be found innocent

none of this means jackshit
because they can still be declared
"enemy combatants"
& kept detained
at the pleasure of
George W. Borg

even though
the linking of
"George W." &
"pleasure"

is outlawed
under the Geneva Conventions
as a cruel &
unnatural
conjunction

The Oracular Sonnets

are coming.

Here is a teaser for them.

moria

A new issue of Bill Allegrezza's poetry mag moria is up. There are poems from A. di Michele, Arlene Ang, Claudia Alonzo, Thomas Lowe Taylor, Andrew Lundwall & Jeannie Smith, Deaborah Meadows, Raymond L. Bianchi, Skip Fox, Ruth Danon, Mark Young, Kerri Sonnenberg, Camille Martin, James Maughn & David Huntsperger, & reviews from Anny Ballardini & Rodney Robinson.

The Hay(na)ku Anthology

Let me point you in the direction of Jill Jones' marvellous impermanent tenses 1 & 2 at Ruby Street as a reminder that submissions are still open for the Hay(na)ku Anthology.

The Allegrezza Ficcione, Part 9

Who searches for
the silkworm
must first find
the mulberry tree.

Anonymous. c.600 CE
included in: Rivalling The Six Dynasties: Poems from the Eastern Turkish Khaganate selected & translated by Umberto Allegrezza; The Uzbekistan Historical Society; Bukhara, 2000.

Previous Part / Next Part

If I were sitting in Le Père Lachaise

           under a fine mossy tree
           Allen Ginsberg: At Apollinaire's Grave

We are two thirds of the way
through the holiday, heading home but still
two thousand kilometres away from it. It is
mid-morning; & I am sitting under a
mango tree in the Home Hill cemetery
being entertained by birds. Black-tailed kites
ride the thermals overhead. Yellow honeyeaters
not much bigger than the flowers they
draw nectar from race through the trees. All sorts
of supporting acts. I have taken advantage of the
break from driving to take care of the basic needs —
a piss, a coffee, several cigarettes. It's an ironic
spot for them, but even though I've made it so
this is not a comfort stop nor are we
playing tourists in this small-town cemetery.
This is where Lauren's grandmother is buried;
& she & her mother have brought
new flowers, old memories to lay on the
grave. I sit watching them, suddenly aware
that I do not know where my
parents are buried. The thought is unemotional,
but trailing it is another more animated one. That
if this were somewhere like Le P ère Lachaise
I would not be sitting, would without doubt
be playing tourist. Rushing here &
there, guidebook in hand, seeking out the graves
of people who are not even distantly related to me
now I know exactly where they are buried. It is more
than I can say about my distant relatives; but then
I have always been one who wept
at the funerals of acquaintances, stayed
dry-eyed at the funerals of family & friends.

Aural Jukka

The amazing Jukka-Pekka Kervinen - composer, visual poet, editor, manipulator extraordinaire of text, publisher (there are links to all of his activities in the sidebar at the right) - now has a new string to his bow, sound poetry.

He emailed me a link to his first piece which is "...made with speech synth, Csound DSP language and my own program" this morning. I found it quite an amazing piece. It's choral & canonical - the phrases re-entering, repeated, over-laying one another; it's like some of his visual pieces in that some of the words aren't totally defined but phase in & out, with their different textures & timbres; & it's one of his manipulated text pieces as well. & having the words in front of me as I listened to it helped me appreciate it more.

I have his permission to publicise it. The piece is called "omega thumbs" - at least that's the name of the file - & is available as an MP3 download here.

This is the text the piece is based on:

fiction worked absence ending pride chop dozen crunch seventh careers levels, produce sense cluster mails son waist gear, song ware brick fishy menace irr unpack rough largest remote awhile, wheat why hostile, omega thumbs keeper thereof why waded setback sphere acts bypass wearing rubbing revise pack linking phones steep lion glue then parity taller divine bitch domino scores averts dive crowded lady tire snake

Later (11.30 p.m.) omega thumbs is now up at Jukka's textual conjectures.

There's a long line of good pieces at Clayton A. Couch's Word Placements. Check them out.

He writes in a response to a comment from Steve Tills

"I guess I'd like to reach a place where I can assemble...... texts that have the capacity to dream on their own....."

I think, Clayton, that you've already reached the place of dreaming texts; & I, for one, want you to keep on assembling them.

via kari edwards' transdada.

On August 13, the federal government and the Labor opposition voted in the Senate to ban same-sex marriage by passing the Marriage Amendment Act, which defines marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman.

The legislation was passed just days after the closing of submissions to a Senate inquiry into the issue. The Greens and the Australian Democrats opposed the bill. The major parties rushed the legislation through in the knowledge that there are three same-sex couples preparing court cases to have their marriages, which were performed overseas, recognised.

Prominent gay rights activist Rodney Croome, from the Equal Rights Network, is investigating a High Court challenge to the legality of the legislation. He told Green Left Weekly that a campaign for its repeal is needed. “The legislation is not going to be repealed in a hurry, but this shouldn't stop us calling for that, as well as highlighting the way both major parties have fallen prey to anti-gay campaigners and fundamentalist churches. We need to channel the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex [LGBTI] community's anger into effective action, right up until the federal election and beyond, if we are to have any hope of achieving law reform in the near future.”

Word for / Word

From Jonathan Minton:

I'm pleased to announce the 6th issue of Word For/Word, which is available at http://www.wordforword.info

The new issue features poetics, prose, visuals, and poetry by: Jenna Cardinale, C. S. Carrier, Geneva Chao, Alison Eastley, Skip Fox, Vernon Frazer, Anthony Hawley, Mary Kasimor, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Donna Kuhn, Carlos Luis, Camille Martin, Andrew Nightingale, Juliet Patterson, Christian Peet, Ken Rumble, Brandon Shimoda, James Shivers, Thomas Lowe Taylor, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Steven Timm, and Mark Young.

at Series Magritte

La Lunette d'approche

Once upon a time Blogger would tell you that it was having difficulties in publishing a post & break off. Now that icon keeps on going round & round like an ill-tempered clock & you don't know where the fuck you are.

The post below took thirteen minutes to publish. I know it took that long, since in the interim between clicking the mouse to publish & the post appearing, I managed, in the words of Stan Freberg, a favourite comedian of mine in the fifties, to boil three two-minute eggs, two three-minute eggs & make 60 cups of instant coffee.

another doodle

To play the
part. To play
all the parts.
Set a part
to play. Apart.

The
words in-
tact. Or split

into
their separate
pieces. Modus operandi.

Mo
dus   op
er   and   i.

A slack Sunday

Feeling lazy, so the post below is an old poem. It was published a couple of years ago in AnotherSun, a London-based e-zine that has now ceased being refreshed.

The internal evidence of the poem dates its conception to the time when I was starting writing again, obviously struggling to get my shit back together; but I remember that it hung around like a tapeworm in the guts of the PC for quite some time before it approached anything like something I was happy with.

Why I am not writing

I am re-reading James Ellroy's
The Black Dahlia, am re-reading
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions, am
reading the sub-titles to the
opening titles of the animated
manga Neon Genesis Evangelion
when Mayakovsky rings to say
he will not be coming around
today. I scan the TV guide
& plot an alternative itinerary.

I think about opening Word
& end up opening Solitaire
instead. I listen to the humming
of the PC but it tells me nothing.
It sounds like the refrigerator but
that only hums at intervals &
does not give me card games
as a built-in option — it is
too dedicated in its purpose.

I think about work, where I have
been listening to the presentations
of consultants to decide who
will be the anointed ones to whom
we will pay hundreds of thousands
of dollars to rewrite our planning &
information systems. I have yet
to hear anything new, decide I'm
in the wrong business. But the
arrival of the consultants is
serendipitous in that it loosely
coincides with one of the subjects
I have to do at university next
semester. I plan to use the
aggregated data in my major
assignment — at least I will get
some value from what I consider
to be an obscene outlay of money.

& I am reading & re-reading my
textbooks as the exams draw nearer.
Though they & the other books are
shelved in some sort of order, the CDs
are jumbled. I am working my way
through them from the top of the
stack on down, sorting them out
by listening to each one in turn
then putting it back in the place
where it was. I have just listened
to Sonny Rollins' Saxophone
Colossus; now I am listening
to Revolver & decide again that
this album & not Sergeant Pepper
marked the paradigm shift for The
Beatles even though for me
when I first heard them the order
was reversed. & in passing
I want to thank Thomas Kuhn
for developing the concept of
paradigm shifts & for redefining
the term paradigm. When words
change meaning they are re-
energised, & if I were writing
I would hope to be using energetic
words. But instead I am singing
along with Eleanor Rigby & the
refrigerator is humming along
in harmony & the Red Queen is
shouting from the PC "Lay me
on the Black King! Lay me!" She
is off her head. But I already knew
that, was told by Jefferson Airplane
many years ago & reminded of it
by the inclusion of White Rabbit
on the Greatest Hits of the Sixties
compilation I listened to three CDs
ago. Then Mayakovsky rings
to say he has changed his mind.
I start to tidy up the house.

The Allegrezza Ficcione, Part 8 - a note on Caius Septimus

In Book VI of
De bello Gallico
there is a passage
where Julius Caesar relates
how, on the way
to his third war
with the Gauls, he
stopped over at the
villa of Caius Septimus,
a citizen who "lived
closer to Gaul than
to Rome" & spent
part of a relaxed evening
listening to his host recite
Terra Inculta, a sequence
of poems about the ten
months of the year. A scribe
of a slightly later time
records how when
Vercingetorix was
paraded in chains
though the streets of Rome
as the prize exhibit in
Caesar's triumph, he was
guarded not by soldiers
but by the retainers of
Caius, "friend of Caesar".
The poems may have
survived. Amongst the
von Holstein collection
in the library of
the University of Heidelberg
there is a 'Commentary
on the Poetry of Caius
Septimus' though some
modern scholars posit
this may be a ficcione
by the Count & point out
that Allegrezza does
does not record anything
by Caius in his definitive
recreation of the catalogue of
the Library of Alexandria. One
final point of interest. In their
investigation into a fire
at the home of an Anglophile
poet of some renown
(whose name still cannot be
mentioned for fear of a
libel action) police reported
that the blaze appeared to
have been started by the
deliberate destruction of documents
setting a rat's nest alight. All
they could find of the original
fire was a small piece of
scorched parchment on which
were written the words mensis
Aprilis mensium primori atrox est.

Previous Part / Next Part

Have posted a new poem to Series Magritte.

Jukka has redone his wallpaper at nonlinear poetry & the way it sets his pieces off is almost as good as a new post.

Nifty & nice

For once something good with Blogger's unannounced changes, the google "search-the-blog" that now resides above the pelican dreaming header. & easy to install, simply visit the blog template, save changes & it's there.

Or, thought about later, maybe all you need to do is post something new.

As Melville wrote in Billy Budd, "goodbye to you too, old Rights-of-Man!"

The following is an extract from an article by Adele Horin, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday August 14.

I don't know if Mamdouh Habib is a good guy or a bad guy. But I do know that if the North Korean Government had captured him, held him without charge in an interrogation camp for years, and denied him contact with lawyers, family or friends, the Howard Government would be apoplectic.

Faced with such flagrant abuse of his legal and human rights, the Government would work hard for his return.

But when it is our friend and ally the United States that acts as a totalitarian power, the Government throws principle and decency to the wind. It is a scandal the way our Government has abandoned Habib, and fellow detainee David Hicks, to the legal black hole that is Guantanamo Bay.

This week Habib was allowed his first phone call with his wife and four children in the three years since his capture. Despite officials monitoring the conversation, the call confirmed reports Habib had been subject to beatings, sleep deprivation and abuses. He sounded a broken man. Convicted murderers and rapists get better treatment.

This is no way to treat a bad guy. But it is shocking to think Habib might be a good guy, innocent of whatever charge is eventually brought against him.

Yet his innocence is hardly a far-fetched prospect. Dozens have been released from Guantanamo Bay in recent months to governments that lobbied hard for their citizens' rights. They included a 90-year old shepherd, cobblers, taxi drivers and foot soldiers of the Taliban, conscripted to fight against their will. Of the 147 released, only 13 have been sent to jail, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights in the US.

At the end of the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, put it, "they scooped up 10,000 people". These were not necessarily on the battlefield; some like Habib were far away in Pakistan; and most were picked up by the Taliban's enemy, the Northern Alliance, and handed over to the Americans. The Americans whisked some, including Habib, temporarily to Egypt, allegedly to be tortured.

Beginning in January 2002, hundreds of men and boys were sent to Guantanamo Bay, which has been described as "Dante's ninth circle of hell".

Yet in making Guantanamo Bay a rights-free zone for the nationals of 42 other countries, the Bush regime has taken us back to medieval times. Before the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, kings could throw a person in jail, with no charges laid, no lawyer, and no prospect of release; and now the American president can.

Against the recommendation of Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, who foresaw the repercussion for captured US soldiers, the Bush Administration also turned its back on the Geneva Conventions. These spell out how prisoners of war must be treated. Bush renamed his prisoners "enemy combatants" and said the conventions did not apply.

The US Government used September 11, 2001, to override 800 years of progress on human rights, the Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention against Torture. Rather than treating the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as acts of terrorism or crime, with perpetrators subject to criminal law, it treated them as acts of war. But even so, it refused to abide by the international rules of war.

The Howard Government, obsequious as ever to the US, acquiesced without a murmur. It went further. According to a report in The New York Times last year, when the US Government wanted to hand Hicks back, the Howard Government refused to take him because there was no evidence Hicks had violated Australian law.

In contrast, Britain has succeeded in securing the return of five of its citizens. On arrival, one was immediately released, the other four held for questioning, and then released. With Tony Blair a red-hot ally in the war on terrorism, it is certain the five would have faced trial if they were bad guys. It appears they were innocent, deprived of their freedom for two and a half years because the US has dispensed with the rule of law.

The Allegrezza Ficcione Part 7 - from: von Holstein's "The Wanderings"

"I was well-treated by my captors, but although I was allowed much freedom in their Castle, & generously provided for with food & vestments, I had been starved of conversation. I have only a few words of the Unbelievers' tongue; & to hear my own language, even if only in the form of a poor Hauptdeutsch, brought tears to my eyes.

"Al'Farah told me he was a southern European, no more specific than that, who had arrived at Smyrna from Genoa seven years before. His goal was to reach the Eastern Lands, to establish opportunities for trade, to bring back porcelain & textiles, especially the cloth called seres, silk, named after the people from whence it came.

"How he had travelled, first by ship to Iskenderun , & then to Mosul across the Aljazirah Mountains. How he had realised how unprepared he was for such a journey as awaited him so sought prenticeship with a merchant there, to learn the language & the customs. Had taken a local name, a translation of his own. How he had been approached by an agent of the great son of Sabbah, offering him service in Tabriz, ostensibly part of the Empire of Persia but in reality part of the vast domain of Hassan i Sabbah. That he had accepted, for a stipulated period of five years, in return for more learning.

"How that time was now up & so he had come to Alamut to pay homage & to say goodbye. That he would still go East; but now it was the journey, not the endpoint, that was important."

Previous Part / Next Part

& a hay(na)ku for Steve Tills

At
the baseball
game I wished

for
just hits
from the batter.

Adding

Jay Thomas' Bad with Titles.
Cassie Lewis' The Jetty.

If you ever plan to motor west

travel my way, take the highway that's the best,
get your kicks on Route 66

Or something like that. A Bobby Troup song, made famous by Nat King Cole & later covered again by the Strolling Bones.

I write somewhere that "unexpected presents / are so often the /best". & so it is proved again. In my letterbox, totally unexpected, Steve Tills' "Behave" from dPress. & what a wondrous gift it is. A series of Rants, starting with #67 - there is an unincluded Rant #66; the cover, a retouched roadsign from one of Steve's favourite highways, can be said to take its place

To someone like myself, who seriously believes that poetry should be funny even when it's being serious, who believes that words should be trifled with, truffled with, trod upon, sat upon, shat upon, played with, plaid with, parlayed into other words, speyed, splayed, relayed, decayed, flayed within an micrometer of their possible meanings & then given mouth-to-mouth so that the whole process, the hole progress, the holy protest can start all over again, this book is a joy.

well wrought,
delicious

I'm reminded of a jazz musician, has to be a sax player, someone of the calibre of Bird or Coltrane, who starts a solo with an exquisite phrase, returns to it, reworks it in a series of variations that build upon themselves until a point is reached which it seems can not be gone beyond, that it can't get any better. & then goes & tops the whole thing. & then moves on to the next song, where it happens all over again.

My dealings with Steve are filled with serendipity & synchronicity. He remarked in a post on Black Spring about a New Zealand poet called James K. Baxter whom he'd had to write essays about when doing his M.A. I pointed him to where he could find a couple of photos – Richard Lopez also made reference to one of these photos in his "books received" post on Really Bad Movies that I appropriated & re-posted a couple of days ago - of J.K.B. in company with myself & another poet, Dave Mitchell. Dave has gone back to university at the age of 60+ & is now doing his M.A. on Baxter.

& in the readings Dave & I did together as a double act I would usually work with a rock band for at least part of the night. & inevitably, as the excitement of the evening grew, there came a point where I would say "fuck the poetry" & most times we'd launch into, yes, Route 66. & everybody would get up & dance.

Won't you get hip to this timely tip
when you make that California trip
get your kicks from Rant 66

Thanks, Chris

for the pelican photo & the posted poem at tex files.

volte-face

The Opposition Labor Party has voted with the Government to ban same-sex marriages in Australia. There's an election due soon. On the basis of Labor's aboutface on this issue it seems that no matter who gets in it's going to be more of the same old conservative shit.

Dear
Ivy Alvarez.
Every time I

visit
your blog
the Referrers' List

refuses
to include
me in the

day's
visitations. So
to prove I've

been
there I've
left a small

posy
of lemon
blossom down in

the
bottom right-
hand corner. No,

not
there, a
little further down,

near
where your
hand is resting.

I think

I'll have to write a batch file that posts to the pelican on a regular basis how much I love the work of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.

At his textual conjectures the floodgates have opened; & there are these delightful centred pieces that look like they've been cut with an elliptical cookie-cutter from some extraordinary sheets of dough.

The Allegrezza ficcione, Part 6

His thesis finished, & sent to the reviewers, Allegrezza began the waiting period by sending what was essentially a chain letter to all the relatives whose addresses he could obtain. He explained that he was searching for any information about the ancestor who had headed East, leaving out that it was a personal quest by hiding it under a vague umbrella of post-doctoral research, asked that if anyone had anything at all could they please send it to him & could they please forward his letter on to any of their more distant relatives.

In the meantime he & Gemma continued their own search. By cross-checking municipal & religious records they put together a family tree that went back a millenium. There were gaps, false starts, branches that turned out to be the one branch. They discovered that one still extant branch had begun with the illegitimate offspring of a monk, that one branch became extinct when a Maria transformed into a Mario during an unwritten-about interval of years. Children died, but these deaths were not always recorded & they wasted hours looking for non-existant records or lines that had never started.

The notebooks of Rustichello were of little use. All they contained was a brief note saying "Must follow up about this Allegrezza. Polos won't tell me anything, secretive, but there may be material for another book. Possibly controversial."

Finally, in a litterae patentes dated 1041 & issued by His Eminence Bishop Artemis, they found an authority for "That Company made up of The Merchant Franco Allegrezza & his Three Sons" to be declared the sole supplier of priestly vestments to the See & The Principality of Genoa. The time seemed right, the occupation proper for someone who would have a purpose for venturing eastwards. The names of the sons weren't given; but two, Petro & Paolo, could be identified from the genealogy they had already drawn up. The third was a new player in the history.

The letters kept coming in. More rumours, myth, speculation. Variations on the name. Additions to the family history. An Allegrezza who was now a Visconti, whose grandfather, a committed Communist, had gone to Russia in the 1920s to help rebuild the post-revolutionary nation & who had been executed for counter-revolutionary activities in 1937. Allegrezzas in England, South America, North America.

& then the letter they had dreamed of. From Australia, North Queensland, a place called Home Hill.

My Great-Great-Grandmother was an Allegrezza. Something of a witch, a mystic.

She came here as a sixteen-year old girl, an arranged marriage to a man thirty years her elder, who grew sugar-cane here in the Burdekin. She had her only child, a girl, a year later; but the birth was difficult & prevented her from having any more children. Which was probably what prolonged her life.

She had no English, was alone. I learnt Italian so I could talk with her, be a companion. I lived with her, looked after her, for the twelve years before her death aged 103. For the last five years she was bedridden. But one morning I found her sitting upright on the edge of her bed, focussed on something I could not see.

Without looking at me she said "There were once a father & his three sons who were textile merchants. Each year at least one of them would travel north, to the lands of the French or the Allemands, looking for cloth to buy. One year the youngest, Giovanni, came back all excited about this cloth he had seen, that had been brought back from the East by a Leipzig merchant. It was called silk. He told his family that he would go East himself to bring a supply of it back for themselves. The next year he left. He was never seen again."

My Great-Great-Grandmother died a week after telling me this. I became a nun. I am now Sister Raffaela, of The Order of Little Sisters. I was christened Gemma.

The coincidences of her names, the fantastic but detailed story – it could not be anything but the lost piece for which they had been seeking.

Two days later Allegrezza headed north, to search the libraries & State Collections for anything within the block of time between 1050 & 1100 that might give him further information. In Leipzig he found nothing, in Strassburg he received notice of the confirmation of his Doctorate, in the University of Heidelberg he found a manuscript entitled "The Wanderings to the Land of Persia & Other Places in Search of The Grail" by Theophrastus, Graf von Holstein.

In it Holstein recounted how he had been captured & held for ransom in a mountain fortress in Persia called Alamut, though for the two years he was there he had been well looked after & kept in excellent health, better even than during his journey. His captors were extremely well organised, followed the maxim Nothing is true, everything is permitted. & led by a man called Hassan, the son of Sabbah, to whom they gave the highest allegiance, even unto death, as had been demonstrated on several occasions.

How, while he was there, there had been a banquet to which he was invited to participate. It was to farewell one of the followers, whom they called The Frankish, who was leaving to venture further north & east. An Ismali who appeared to not be from the region, who spoke passable German, who gave his name as Al'Farah. The Joy. In Italian, allegrezza.

Previous Part / Next Part

Adding Victor Az' Concretismo! with its wonderful archives which I found via Crag Hill who had also come to it via a couple of vias.

& thanks, too,

to Steve Tills for his appreciative post at Black Spring on my most recent Series Magritte poem.

Thanks

To Nick Piombino (a fellow collaborator in David Nemeth's "Bernstein Chain" which is due to go up at nemski.com today or tomorrow) for including my Series Magritte in his latest ::fait accompli:: "Crush List".

& delighted to see some of my "crushes" included on his list - Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's nonlinear poetry & textual conjectures, Richard Lopez' Really Bad Movies, Ivy Alvarez' Ivy is here, Vincent Ponka's Napoleonic in the works, the eponymous harry k. stammer & Kirsten Kaschock's NEGATIVE WINGSPAN.

I hope you like it more than its previous owner did, Richard

The following is from Richard Lopez' really bad movies:

In Praise of the Good Stuff

here is a list of books I received the past week:

Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975 edited by Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond and Michele Leggott (Auckland University Press 2000)

this book is the Big Find in a long, long time. I've been wondering how to get the books of fellow poet/blogger Mark Young and now I'm quite literally salivating. this is the book, I believe, that got Young writing again. the collection gathers together the writings of New Zealand poets and documents a scene of discovery and experimentation. there is a really cool autographed poster for a reading reproduced that is a photo of a bearded Young with James K. Baxter (also bearded) and David Mitchell. the poster reads: An Evening of Poetry, Barry Lett Galleries, Aug. 20, 8 pm. I feel very lucky in finding this book. there is even an inscription in gold ink on the frontispiece: Happy Birthday Kirsten/ Your 10th Oct. 2000/ love, Richard.

hey, wait, that's my name. what the huh?

Found word for the day

Otoliths - "earstones" - are small white bony structures found in the head of all fish other than rays, sharks & lampreys. They provide a sense of balance in much the same way that the inner ear provides balance in humans. They also aid in hearing. In some fish, the otolith is connected through fine hairs to the swim bladder & this aids the fish to hear behind itself.

Growth rings, much like those of a tree, record the age & growth of a fish from the date of hatch to the time of death in such detail that everything from the year of hatch, the migration pathways & the temperature of the water can be analysed from the otolith.

Unexpected
flecks. Unpredicted
nexts. Unprotected texts.

Adding

Jonathan
Mayhew's Bemsha
Swing to the

sidebar.
Listening to
Art Blakey's Jazz

Messengers
playing the
music of Benny

Golson
as I
do. Remembering Clifford.

The multi-talented Mr Kervinen

Jukka seems to have finally settled on Blogger for his textual conjectures. Plus, one day short of a month since the last one (& how I've been hanging out for it), there is a new piece posted to his nonlinear poetry. Plus + Plus, there are two new compositions of his, Dripping & Fold, available as MP3 downloads from the compositions page at his music site.

Sun/flower

The rich smell of earth still
slightly damp from a week of rain
comes up to our nostrils. & the
sun has the mouth of a shark, sharp-
closed around our groins. Your eyes
are shut; but mine part-open, watching
your cock rise & harden, & outline itself
against the denim of your jeans.
From where, plucked by my fingers, it
finally pushes forth, white flower, out
of the sun's mouth, & into mine.

1973

Is this dickhead for real?

George W. Borg, talking about terrorists, & demonstrating once again that his arsehole is a ventriloquist.

They never stop thinking of ways to harm our country, & neither do we.

Missing you Joseph

I have been remiss in not mentioning that David Nemeth posted a page of hay(na)ku to his nemski.com a couple of days ago.

Put it down to the fact that I have been searching for a suitable quote from H.P. Lovecraft to bemoan the fact that both of Joseph Garver's blogs have sunk beneath the sea like Cthulhu's island leaving only circling seagulls & a "Page Not Found" behind.

If I had a time machine I would stage a New Orleans funeral, where we all marched behind the blogcoffin to the mournful strains of "Flee like a bird to the mountain"; & then, after the preacher had cast a sod of earth into the grave & intoned "He was an writer of excellent hay(na)ku until the butcher cut him down", the band would break out into "Didn't he ramble" & we would all head back to a bar to remember him & his works.

But the only time machine I have is the back pages of As/Is from whence comes this hay(na)ku of Joseph's:

On
My bed
Dear Sir, sorry

I
Missed you
Signed, The Monster.

Meanwhile, on the Starship Enterprise

Chris Murray's delightful little book, Meme Me Up, Scotty!, which she produced to accompany her recent reading at The Carrboro Poetry Festival, has just been transported into my letterbox.

A deceptive volume in that it has much more weight than its size suggests.
It dances, it sings. It is an exquisite collection. From "Jump Phrasing 1" that starts

Turning it on garden then
standing fresh
in blueberry for
the grace
note

through to the beautiful "Postcard from Novi Sad" that ends

...your first cry, your first I, that one
echo holding you on the sloped roof
of first word, first window gaze
on yes: shared, how "things are good."

Yes, Chris, things are good. I would have loved to have been there to hear you read these poems.

Adding Geof Huth's dbqp to the sidebar because I like what he does, what he says

&

Swapping Carl Annarummo's arm sasser (which is "in hiatus") over to his new Ampersand and Ghetto.

I heard the Brubeck quartet mentioned below in Wellington in the late fifties or early sixties. I have never been a Brubeck fan, though I've liked a couple of things he did - Take Five & Blue Rondo a la Turk from the Time Out album; & Miles Davis' version of The Duke, Brubeck's tribute to Duke Ellington - but I've always quite liked Paul Desmond. & since hearing live jazz from overseas was a rarity in N.Z. in those days I went to the concert.

Desmond entranced me. The first number had a piano intro, & then Desmond came in over the top. He lounged - that's the only way to describe it - against the curve of the Steinway & from his first notes on it was something like an i.v. drug rush. He had an electricity.

It's a feeling I've had a number of times over the years, usually from compact things, a poem or a painting, a track from an album - k.d. lang singing So in Love on the Cole Porter tribute album - or the occasional single or t.v. spot - I recently heard Cindi Lauper do a fantastic version of Time After Time backed by a pianist & C.L. on dulcimer. Rarely do I get it from novels though there are exceptions - Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers & Burroughs' The Naked Lunch are two that come to mind - but shorter prose pieces (J.G. Ballard, Borges, Samuel Delany) quite often get me in the gut. I got it the first time I saw the Sydney Dance Company, when I saw my first Bergman film, when I saw Kurosawa's Rashomon. I got it from a scene in Billy Liar where Julie Christie made her screen debut, walking through a market with a vitality that was totally mind-blowing. I still get it from anything by Bach or Miles Davis even if I'm hearing it for the hundredth time. From Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. Occasionally I get it from people.

But the times from live music are few. I've mentioned Desmond. The High School I went to in Wellington used to hire out its assembly hall to the local chamber music society; & late one afternoon I listened to Mstislav Rostropovich rehearse for a couple of hours & have loved the sound of the cello ever since. There was a Dylan concert I went to in 1974 at the Sydney Showgrounds. Jimmie Webb doing his songs - Wichita Linesman, Macarthur Park, etc. - at The Basement in the early nineties. &, wonder upon wonder, a Michael Jackson concert at the Parramatta Stadium in the mid-eighties, where we sat on the playing field, & the synthesizers started, & the earth began to tremble. & we danced all night.

glasimmewareshieldds

The multi-lingual, multi-skilled, multi-talented, multi-posting, multi-sided, multi-xPress(ive) Jukka-Pekka Kervinen at textual conjectures.

Bird Lives! but Paul Desmond?

Eileen! Whatever you were drinking that night please let me know so I can obtain some legal mind-altering substances.

Brubeck is 82 years old, Joe Morello has gone blind, Eugene Wright has faded into anonymity & Paul Desmond died when you were a teenage spunk.

Swoooooooooooon.

Another fascination with Barbellion is the way in which his Journal resembles a weblog, nearly a hundred years before the form was invented. It is this aspect of his book which makes it seem so contemporary because, unlike many diarists, he is writing for a contemporary audience, for now, since he knew there was no sense in addressing himself to posterity.

Martin Edmond writes on the Journal of W.N.P. Barbellion at Luca Antara, & discovers Maria Bashkirtseff's "I am the Most Interesting Book of All" along the way.

A new issue of Tin Lustre Mobile is up.

That was a good idea
you had, sending me
the answers in
advance. Here
are my questions
in response. Note that
an answer can have
several questions. Where
you write that
daguerreotypes are
a greater agent of
change than a mere
silhouette, my question
could be either "what
is it that brings you
so close to madness?" or
"what part does your cat
play in the choice of
colours with which
you fill your dramas?" &
do not feel obliged to
take them in the order
I have placed them. One
has to start somewhere.
By all means break them
apart, reassemble them
so that what you have
already said might
take on an unintended
meaning. I have also
inserted some additional
answers to questions
I have yet to ask, &
embellished some
where I felt your answer
was ambiguous. & I still
have to frame the thread
of inquiry that leads up
to your final answer "the
boy I was no longer is
a catalyst for yearning."

I
have forgotten
where poetry resides.

The Allegrezza ficcione, Part 5 - an aside on Paracelsus

In a previously un-
ascribed text unearthed
by Umberto Allegrezza
in the library of
the University of Padua
& which he convincingly
demonstrated through
internal evidence, the
commonality of subject matter
& consistencies of style
to be part of De Lapide
Philosophorum, Paracelsus
uses a hen's egg
as the perfect metaphor
for the quest to transmutate
base metals into gold. The
shell, he writes, is
translucent when seen
from inside. Broken &
dropped into the molten
mix in the alembic
it aggregates & separates
the dross. Within, within,
the pure white sac of
albumen resembles the state
in which the alchemist
must be to carry out his
task. The yolk enclosed
is the object of desire. Then
comes the final paragraph,
the part that caused
this manuscript to be
consigned to an adespota
of anonymity. I prefer, he
writes, to have my eggs
soft-boiled for just two
minutes, with the water
stirred thrice with the tail-
feather of a peacock. Broken
open & served on bread,
with salt & a drop of
laudanum added to the
mix. Western travellers might
find worcestershire sauce
more easily available than
the tincture – but each is
equally appetising. In honour
of those monks who say
I am engaged in the work
of the devil, I will call
the dish Eggs Benedictine.

Previous Part / Next Part

Eileen
is contemplating
pimping her puppy

&
publishing poems
with the proceeds.

Another entry for Tom Beckett's "spooky" file

I like owls. I like frogs, especially the little green ones which, if you wet your fingers, you can stroke on the back without them moving. I think I have just discovered that owls like frogs, but for a different reason.

I found a bone dangling from the clothes-line when I went to hang the washing out. What looks like a leg bone, about an inch long, caught on the wire by a curlicue of drying sinew. A small delicate bone. Very much what I would imagine a frog's bone to be like.

The hastily assembled Rockhampton CSI team - me & the cat - have re-created the crime scene thus. A serial killer is on the loose. Has swooped down & snatched up the frog, stuck it in the back of its panel van & retreated to the trees. Eaten the frog, spitting out the bones as it goes. When replete it has returned to the ground, picked up a bone in its talons & hung it on the clothes-line as a warning to all & sundry, a boasting message.

I am expecting poetic emails to the local paper any day now. Signed mort aux grenouilleux. m.a.g. for short. An august name. 

Have just posted another Series Magritte poem.

Martin Edmond writes on Luca Antara of the serendipity of finding items of beauty whilst searching out things that are not. He told me of his mysterious correspondent when I was in New Zealand last week. The guy sounds like a fucking nutter.

But a frightening one.....

The Allegrezza ficcione, Part 4 - an interlude

Umberto was sixteen when Nestore died. He had never thought about his future before, had accepted that he would enter one of the narrow range of professions his side of the family considered appropriate; military, law or finance. His conversation with Gemma – he refused to think of her as Sister Raffaela – didn't change that but it did offer an outside interest, with some romanticism to it, something to soften the rigidity of whatever profession he decided to follow.

He saw her perhaps three times over the next two years, exchanged possibly six letters with her in the same time. She kept him up to date with her quest for further information "del Allegrezza", or rather her failure to find further information. "If there is anything," she wrote "it is further East. Istanbul perhaps, or Tehran, or Bukhara. Perhaps even in Beijing. It is not where I have access to it, but I have asked my Brothers in God in those places to look for me. Faith will be our servant."

Umberto was not so sure about that. He was disappointed that nothing more had been forthcoming, but he hadn't discarded all hope. It stayed with him, like a small uncut & unpolished diamond, wrapped away in a youthful drawer.

He enrolled at University. Still under his parents' influence he embarked on a double degree in law & economics; but in his second semester, in a lecture on the history & signage of money, he came across for the first time the term "paradigm shifts".

It was a concept that trapped his thoughts, this gradual overthrowing of a body of established beliefs that is replaced by a competing body of thought sufficiently unprecedented & open-ended enough to gather an ever-increasing & enduring number of adherents until it becomes predominant. He changed to a history degree. Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" became a kind of bible. He read Popper & Cohen, studied Mandarin as an elective stream & Arabic outside his degree structure. He completed his B.A. & went to the University of Padua to do his honours, a revisiting of the influence on contemporary medicine of one of the University's most famous alumni, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus.

His Doctoral dissertation was called "The Catalogue of the Library of Alexandria". In it he posited what books would have been in the library &, by extrapolation, what books should have been in the library. He listed previously unknown plays by Aeschylus & Euripides, a whole school of poetry from Asia Minor written in colloquial language & with lines reflecting the length of a breath, new work by Pindar, an unfinished work by Homer where Odysseus comes out of self-imposed exile to battle a barbaric invasion, the third part of a trilogy that included the Iliad & the Odyssey.

There was also a book by Ptolemy, that seemed to be made up of footnotes to another work of his, a kind of growing self-doubt about his own beliefs, that finishes with a small poem

The
Sun – the
Universe’s true centre?

 
Previous Part / Next Part

furuike ya
kawazu tobikonu
mizu no oto

Made the comment a couple of days ago that if you stand on a random point on the globe all languages come from the west. Should also have added that if you turn & face the other way all languages are eastern.

Come home, Jukka. All is forgiven.

18 days without a new image on nonlinear. Thankfully Jukka should be home soon from his "vacation" in Heinola. & thankfully I've been getting a daily text fix from his textual conjectures so I haven't had to do his absence cold turkey.

A ficcione for Michele Leggott

Having finally
come to terms
with the grief &
anger caused by
her mother's death
she formed a
piano & rhythm
trio called
Mourning Electra
& now makes
a small living
singing in a bar
on the fringes
of Chinatown
that is the front
for a fan tan
parlour. She
does a lot of
Jacques Brel
numbers. Those
patrons who do not
know her history
think she is
imitating Nina
Simone. They
do not appreciate
the irony
when she sings
Il faut oublier
tout peut s'oublier.

the hay(na)ku hay(na)ku

Must
be time
for another hay(na)ku.

What sight the light lets in

It is
that time of
the evening
just after the light
begins to fade
& you
begin to
lose your sight

We sat
outside a
café on the quayside
drinking flat white coffees
& talking of Portugal

Let
our ferries leave
without us

Talking of

The ones
after that
as well

Talking

Finally

I sit
on the back deck
facing away
from the way
the ferry
is going

It is
a deliberate act

It is
a replication

of you standing
in the same place
on the ferry that
left twenty minutes
before mine

I watched you leave
I waved
I do not know
if you could see me

It is
that time
of the evening

I watch the wharf recede
I am there on it
I am waving

It is a deliberate act

Just in case

I know
what it felt like
to wave
goodbye

I do not know
what sight
the light let in

But

Now
I can tell
what it felt like
to watch me
wave goodbye

Just in case

we ever
need to know

Jack Kimball has just posted the synopsis of a ficcione.

#2

& this should fix it, hopefully. (See the post below.)

#1

I corrected the spelling of Nullarbor (usually thought of as an Aboriginal word but actually the Latin for "no tree") in a post from last week & dragged the crap formatting back into the blog. I calculate that if I do another post after this it should correct itself, so here goes....