an alphabet para Ernesto Priego, because he's feeling low & I'd like to cheer him up!

A Martian with a clown face can pass as a Venusian.
Butterflies call chaos theory the pissing or pissant theory. They believe that if two men in Guadalajara have a competition to see who can piss the highest, a blizzard will eventually develop somewhere in Siberia.
Codicia de la boca / al hilo de un suspiro suspendida…
Debonair is a tune that makes you want to whistle along with it.
Ebonaire is a dark wood with holes in it. Some people call it a recorder.
Fenêtre is French for window. Perhaps a French window.
Galapagos has tortoises. The lagoon at the end of our street has turtles. Last night I rescued a turtle from the roadway. It was heading in the wrong direction, away from the water. It didn't make me want to rewrite the theory of evolution.
Heavenly shades of night are falling, it's twilight time.
Incognito ergo sum.
Jalapeno peppers bring tears to my thighs.
Kevlar is used for making body armour. In an ideal world you wouldn't need it.
Later he would walk down to the lagoon.
Miles Davis was
Never neutral. Nor was
Octavio
Paz.
Quena is a type of flute made from a human bone. I once wrote a poem about it. The poem rhymed.
Reckon you thought I might stick in Quetzalcoatal for that previous entry, but I'm saving him for a later line.
Swallows are what bellies are for.
Teotehuacán is one of the places where the feathered serpent was formerly & formally worshipped.
U comes before
V. But one of the problems about getting old is that sometimes you actually have to check on those sort of things. The alphabet is its own mnemonic &
When you forget it there's nothing to fall back on.
X-men. Uncanny how we both thought of that together. Snap!
Y am I doing all this? Take it as an act of friendship. Do not question it. Do not pass go.
Zeus was my father. He fell upon my mother as a swan & got up despite the down. Helen of Troy is a sort of sister. Brad Pitt is no relation. But sometimes I think there is an other.
 

a kind of post(ed) comment

Unlike this & most other blogs, where the comments are displayed on a secondary page, As/Is has, for some time now, had its comments mixed in with the poems. It is probably the ideal setup for a poetry blog; but it has recently soured somewhat for me by the influx of a number of 'commenters' who seem more intent on posturing, on spraying a tomcat scent, than offering any honest response to or constructive criticism about the posted poetry.

They remind me of the character Horst Bulcholz played in The Magnificent Seven, the western remake of The Seven Samurai. This probably sounds - & probably is – patronising, but it's almost like they don't know how to behave in public. & the pity of it is that their own blogs are worthwhile, show none of the tendencies that have irritated the shit out of me over recent weeks.

So, I’ve decided to include them in my links, have added to the sidebar Jesse Crockett's differentia & PR Primeau's 'P'R'O'C'E'S'S'I'O'N'. Check them out, there's some good stuff there.
 

a question for Tom Beckett

Do you
ever
keep yr
deleted
posts or
are they
those bits of
unprotected
text, the
shadows with-
in shadows,
the points
I see vanishing
in the jet-
stream late
at night?
 

liking who you are

introrespection

&, on the subject of Jukka

He has recently taken up photography. & how! His recent posts at nonlinear poetry have been a continuation of his textual conjecturing, manipulation, through a different medium. But at textual conjectures, the photos he has just started posting there are pure poetry. Jukka poetry.

We talk sometimes about photographs as being like poems, & photographers will often say how they wish to achieve a poetic quality in their work. But these works of Jukkas are no similes. I have never, never, never ever seen before photographs that are poems.

7.30.pm Have just received an email from Jukka to say that

"I have made a little "gallery", most photos you've seen in nonlinear/ conjectures/stay resident, but there is also a bunch of more experimental shots, entitled "nondimensional". You'll find it at http://nondimensional.cjb.net"

just up at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

I interview Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.
 

a piece of nostalgia

If you're wondering how that fuckwit ever got into the White House, this might help. It was the subject of one of my first posts to the pelican, & my closest brush with Robert Creeley since he was the person who sent the link to the person who sent it to me.
 

a second speculative fiction, perhaps

Several people in blogland have recently become excited over new finds at Oxyrhynkhos. Let me just insert a cautionary word from The Allegrezza Ficcione.

Unable to contain his inquisitiveness, he asked Dae what she & Joo-eun were doing, was told that they were forging ancient Egyptian & Greek commercial documents, that one of Tamur's sidelines was selling them through blackmarket channels. Tamur admitted it, said that the dig at Oxyrhynkhos had given him the opportunity to suggest to prospective buyers that he might be able to obtain documents smuggled out from the site. Allegrezza was surprised when he told him how many museums had taken advantage of his offers.

Looks like Tamur expanded the scope of his operations.
 

por ernesto priego

were
those the
birds, some posts

below,
where, if
your most recent

post
was your
eyes, I might

expect
to find
your belly, swallowing?
 

reading(s) & writing

I have been considering my reaction to the topic of this recent post by Ron Silliman.

"It’s been at least three decades, for example, since Bromige first noted just how often I can be seen at a reading jotting something down into a notebook. It is rare, actually, that what I am scribbling relates directly  to the reading (tho at times there will be depiction of the event itself). Rather, I find that mental space of confronting the well written word aurally is a remarkable – unsurpassed, in fact – tool for turning over the language in one’s own mind/experience/ daily life as well. Thus I find myself at a reading listening to the text, observing the event & often composing something completely different all at once. Sometimes I feel that I will wander – get too far away from the reader’s text, or forget literally my own environment if I get “absorbed” into a work – but I usually can make myself return if I try."

My natural arrogance does not let me think for a single moment that I would give a bad &/or boring reading. My natural humility excludes the possibility that I might so inspire/influence someone that they felt the need to haul out a notebook & start writing. So my initial reaction would be to become pissed off at anyone in the audience that starting doing this. My second reaction would be getting even more irritated & pissed off. & my third reaction would be thinking to myself that it's a good thing that I'm not an aggressive person, because otherwise I'd get so irritated & pissed off that I'd stop reading & go out into the audience & punch their fucking lights out.

But then, I'm not a notebook sort of person.
 

joy across my big brass bed

In the light of my very recent posts about Dylan, it is extremely bizarre that I have just received the following piece of Nigerian Scam Spam from someone whose email 'name' is Joy Lady Joy.

MY NAME IS MRS.MABEL MARADAS, I AM THE MANAGER CREDIT AND ACCOUNTS DEPARTMENT GLOBAL BANK LAGOS.I WRITE YOUIN RESPECT OF A FOREIGN CUSTOMER WITH ACCOUNT NUMBER14-255-2004/CCB/NG.WHO AMONG OTHERS ON BOARD HAD A PLANE CRASH INUSAON THE 31ST OCTOBER 1999.ALL ON BOARD PERISH AND DIED IN THEPLANCRASH.SIR,SINCE THE DEMISE OF THIS OUR CUSTOMER MR GEORGE SHIMONY A LEBANESE IMPORT AND EXPORT TYCOON HERE IN LAGOS . I HAVEKEPT A CLOSE MONITORING OF THE DEPOSIT RECORDS AND ACCOUNTS SINCE THEN NO BODY HAS COME TO CLAIM THE MONEY IN THIS ACCOUNT AS NEXT OF KIN TO THE LATE MR GEORGE SHIMONY,HAS ONLY $10.5MLLION IN HIS ACCOUNT AND THE ACCOUNT IS CODED IT IS ONLY AN INSIDER THAT COULD PRODUCE THE CODE OR PASSWORD OF THE DEPOSIT PARTICULARS. AS IT STANDS NOW. THERE IS NOBODY IN THAT POSITION TO PRODUCE THE NEEDED INFORMATION OTHER THAN MY VERY SELF CONSIDERING MY POSITION IN THE BANK.BASED ON THE REASONS THAT NOBODY HAS COME FOR THE CLAIMS OF THE DEPOSIT AS NEXT OF KIN, I SEEK FOR YOUR CO OPERATION TO USE YOUR NAME AS THE NEXT OF KIN TO THE DESEASED TO SEND THIS FUNDS OUT TO A FOREIGN OFFSHOREBANK ACCOUNT FOR MUTUAL SHARING BETWEEN ME AND YOU ONLY AS I AM THE ONLY ONE WITH THE INFORMATION BECAUSE I HAVE REMOVED THE DEPOSIT FILE FROM THE SAFE .BY THIS DOING, WHAT IS REQUIRED FROM YOU IS TO SENDAN APPLICATION SEEKING CLAIMS OF THE DEPOSIT AS NEXT OF KIN TO THELATE MR SHIMONY.I WILL SEND YOU SPECIMEN OF APPLICATION AS SOON AS YOU CONFIRM YOUR READINESS TO ASSIST ME MOVE THE FUNDS OUT OF THE VAULT OF OUR BANK.NOTE: THE BANKING RULES AND REGULATIONS IN THIS COUNTRY DOES NOT ALLOW SUCH DEPOSIT TO STAY MORE THAN FIVE YEARS AS AN EXPERTRIATES ACCOUNT , IF THE DEPOSIT STAYS MORE THAN TOLD FIVE YEARS THE FUNDS WILL BE INHERITED BY NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT ASUNCLAIMED DEPOSIT.
IN VIEW OF THIS DEVELOPMENT I BEG FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE AND FULL CO-OPERATION TO COME AND LAY CLAIMED TO THIS DEPOSIT AS THE NEXT OF KIN TO MR GEORGE SHIMONY THERE IS NO RISKINVOLVE IN THIS BUSINESS AS YOU WILL BE EQUIPED WITH ALL VITALINFORMATION OF THE DEPOSI AND THE ACCOUNT. YOUR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN DOESNOTMATTER, WHAT MATTERS IS YOU AS THE NEXT OF KIN HAVING ALL NECCESSARY INFORMATION TO BACK UP YOUR CLAIMS . NOTE THAT ALL MODALITIES? FOR A HITCH FREE TRANSACTION HAS BEEN PERFECTED FROMMYSIDE I WILL SUPPLY YOU WITH ALL THE ACCOUNT PARTICULARS . I WILL NEED YOUR FULL NAME AND ADDRESS COMPANY OR RESIDENTIAL SO THAT I CAN COMPUTERISE THEM TO TALLY WITH NEXT OF KIN COLLUM IN THECERTIFICATEOF DEPOSIT.FINALLY I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE REQUEST FOR A FOREIGNER AS THE NEXT OF KIN IS OCCATIONED BY THE FACTTHATTHE CUSTOMER WAS A FOREIGNER AND FOR THAT ONLY REASON A LOCALCANNOTREPRESENT AS NEXT OF KIN.I HAVE AGREED TO SHARE THIS MONEY WITHYOUIN THE MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF 40%/60%YOU KEEP 40 WHILE I KEEP 60.YOU HAVE MERITED THIS PERCENTAGE BECAUSE YOU WILL PROVIDE THE ACCOUNT WHERE WE SHALL FINALLY TRANSFER THE FUNDS INTO ON A SUCCESSFULCLAIMING OF THE DEPOSIT. MY 60% WILL REMAIN IN THE ACCOUNT PENDINGMYARRIVAL IN YOUR COUNTRY FOR DISBURSEMENT AND SUBSEQUENTINVESTMENTS.
LASTLY FOR THE IMMEDIATE TAKE OFF OF THIS TRANSACTION YOU HAVE TO CONFIRM YOUR WILLINGNESS AND READINESS TO ASSIST ME RETRIVE THIS DEPOSIT, THEN I WILL SEND TO YOU BY FAX ORE-MAIL THE APPLICATION TEXT AND OTHER VITAL INFORMATION YOU NEEDTOKNOW ABOUT THE DEPOSIT.I ASSURE YOU OF 100% RISK FREETRANSACTION.TRUSTING TO HEAR FROM YOU.
GOD BLESS!.
YOURS RESPECTFULLY ,
MRS MABEL MARADAS,

Only $10.5 million? The man died a pauper!
 

the times they are a-changin'

Dylan's
dime stores
now $2 shops.

a footnote to the post below

& don't forget to check out dérives!
 

speculo, speculavi, speculare, speculatum

In a post of a few days ago I attempted to describe Martin Edmond's genre of writing. I first used the term 'creative prose' but that didn't feel quite right so I amended it to 'speculative prose'. Though I left it there, I still wasn't happy with the phrase. Fiction is easy to define, non-fiction that is as creative as we perceive good fiction to be far harder. Sure there are categories into which things can be fitted – Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi can be described as a travel book, Guevara's Bolivian Diaries as autobiography – but they are often a loose fit, & there is still a body of work that doesn't fit into the overlap of the multiple circles of a Venn diagram.

My use of the term 'speculative prose' is, in essence, an oxymoron. I consider Borges' ficciones as speculative fiction that could quite possibly be fact. A small transposition & I ended up with speculative fact which conjured up to me the idiocies of van Donkeyhead's Chariots of the Gods. So, speculative prose as a compromise.

Martin picks up on my dilemma with his own thoughts about & problems & responses he encounters when defining his style. I won't attempt to paraphrase since (a) his post upholds my opinion of his abilities & (b) it can be read simply by clicking here (& read also the post immediately beneath). But I will include part of the quote from Italo Calvino with which he closes the post since it is almost the phrase I had been originally looking for.

"…the more reflective kind of writing in which narrative and essay become one."
 

My favourite Dylan song

is probably Love minus zero / no limit.

In the dime stores & bus stations,
people talk of situations,
read books, repeat quotations,
draw conclusions on the wall.

Don't know why I thought of it. Actually, I do. It's the post below, Qin the Emperor, Quinn the Eskimo.

when
Qin the
Emperor gets here

ev'ry-
body's gonna
jump for joy.

The Long Good-bye

I grew up on a diet of detective stories - courtesy of my parents & their weekly trip to the Library - & science fiction - courtesy of my brother, 12 years older, who left his books behind when his work transferred him to a year's post in some provincial town in New Zealand.

Through their combined efforts the platform for my subsequent reading was made up of writers such as Chandler & Hammett, Dick, Bradbury, Clarke, Kornbluth & Sturgeon. (I first read Borges in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.) I don't read much SF these days, probably only J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson & Bruce Sterling plus I regularly re-read Samuel Delany, but I still read detective stories & buy each new book by John Sandford & Sara Paretsky & James Lee Burke & Martin Cruz Smith & a handful of others, although part of the reason for that may be that this range is one of the few that interest me that are stocked by the local bookshops. (Poetry? What's that?)

I have just finished reading a Chandler compendium of three novels featuring his famous "hard-boiled private eye" Philip Marlowe. I haven't read them in what must be decades, though in the interim I must have seen the celluloid interpretations of Bogart & Mitchum & Dick Powell many times.

I still think Chandler is a great writer, but what I had previously not been consciously aware of was how racist & homophobic he was. The first two novels, The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely, both written pre-Second World War, are full of denigrating terms & a disdain for Chinese, Japanese, Afro-Americans & Mexicans. This racism is not so evident in The Long Good-bye, written in the early fifties, although this may be in part due to the setting of the novel. But his homophobia is still very much present.

'I had a male secretary once. Used to dictate to him. Let him go. He bothered me sitting there waiting for me to create. Mistake. Ought to have kept him. Word would have got around I was a homo. The clever boys that write book reviews because they can't write anything else would have caught on and started giving me the build-up. Have to take care of their own, you know. They're all queers, every damn one of them. The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.'

This cannot be excused as characterisation because Chandler put too many speeches about things he obviously believed in in the same mouths. & I have probably not picked up on this before because in my much earlier readings & re-readings I did not consider such attitudes to be morally reprehensible. & re-reading my own earlier work - not so much the poetry but the reviews & essays I did - I discern some of the same attitudes there. Not homophobia, but there is evidence of sexism, &, in one piece that freaks the shit out of me now, is the descriptor 'n*****-minstrel', without the asterisks, a phrase that now horrifies me & makes me ashamed that I ever could have used it.

It tarnishes me as a person, it poisons my past. Let me just say, years later but far too late, I apologise.
 

I'm
a Fann
of the Finns.
 

Leevi Lehto, white knight

Of late, I've been thinking that I'm going to be forced to learn Finnish. Jukka has become involved in the local literary scene - how does he find the time to do so much? - & is editing a zine called FinStream. There's also an autogenerated version. Sound familiar?

& Karri Kokko. Not only has he started two new blogs in Finnish, but his posts to his main blog Muisti|kirja have of late been exclusively in his native language. Because that was one of my favourite ports of call in the days when I could read it - now I can only look at the occasional picture he posts - I dropped him an email the other day asking whether he had deliberately changed his policy.

He replied:

No, I haven't. Not consciously, anyway. I don't know what happened. There's a lot going on, and I guess the English dept. had to be the one to suffer. The two new blogs I have take a lot of time & energy. Uusia lauseita (New Sentences) is about random findings from the Finnish Blog Front. A "story", a comedy of written manners, or mannerisms, written blog-style from the bottom up. So far, it's become a small hit inside the Finnish blogosphere.... The name of my other blog, Varjofinlandia (Shadow Finlandia), refers to the biggest literary prize in Finland, the Finlandia Prize. To every prize and its winner there's always the real winner, the one that gets overlooked, the one that gets shadowed by all the hoopla. In Varjofinlandia, I give a voice to the vast amount of people expressing their negative feelings: depression, pain, weariness, fatigue, insomnia, addiction, sorrow. It's about the dark side of Finlandia, if you may. So there.

So here am I, knowing I'm missing out on something that I'm sure would be pretty good if I could understand it. & then Leevi Lehto comes in from left field, to use Karri's phrase, & out of the blue, on a white charger - I think those are the colours of the Finnish flag; had to work it in somehow - & publishes an "unauthorised" - & that, given the nature of the blogs, may or may not be an unintentional play on words - translation of the first 60 posts to varjofinlandia.

My guess was right. This is a marvellous piece of work. I hope both Karri & Leevi continue on, Karri daily, Leevi at regular intervals.

But I still think I'm going to have to learn Finnish. From what I can see of the local scene, there's too much activity happening to keep missing out on it.
 

dérives

When I drive cab
           A revelation of movement comes to me: They wake now.
           Now they want to work or look around. Now they want
           drunkenness and heavy food. Now they contrive to love.

Lew Welch: After Anacreon

Martin Edmond, who I consider to be the best writer of creative prose - a phrase I'm not particularly happy with but I can't think, at the moment, of a better one; perhaps speculative prose - in blogland, has hived off his taxi-driving pieces from Luca Antara & has posted them to a new blog, dérives, which doesn't so much ask the question Where to?, but rather Wherefore?

Hire thee hence. There is no flagfall. The journeys are free, exciting, enlightening, insightful. The destinations varied & endless. This is a gypsy cab.
 

annoydne

MayDay

 
ah, nostalgia, when the only war was the class war
 
 
 

those were the days, my friend

 
ah, nostalgia, when democracy took 2nd place to oil
 
 
 

Some new poems at Series Magritte. The Discovery of Fire, The Apparition, & Bel Canto.
 

lists & such

After reading Eileen's new shopping blog, I remembered this poem from around 1974 & decided it might be an appropriate post.

THE SHOPPING LIST
for Nigel Roberts

Searching through the chest of drawers
for a map of australia / for jon silkin
i have so far discovered, in just one drawer,

assorted hare krishna & divine light fliers,
a railway timetable, photos of terence stamp
& dostoievsky, photos of myself at various ages
between seventeen & thirtythree, catalogues
of pornography from the netherlands (visual) & from
france (verbal), eighteen months of rolling stone
that have gathered some mould though no moss,
lost poems, found poems, rejection slips & letters
of acceptance, a thousand letters from my mother
ninehundred & ninetynine of which say 'please write'
& the other saying 'thankyou for writing', &
several foolscap notebooks, amongst which is a

forgotten journal dating back two years that contains
quotes from j.g.ballard, rider haggard, cocteau,
h.p. lovecraft, charles olson, etc., together with
the beginnings of five s.f. novels & three plays,
captions for obscene cartoons, thoughts for poems,
poems, words to look up & meanings of those already
looked up, bibliographies & lists of books to buy,
ideas for movies, images from movies that moved me,
ideas, images, entries of the 'dear diary' variety,
epigrams such as THE MARQUIS DE SADE DREAMS
HE IS AN ANGEL & GOLDA MEIR IS LBJ IN DRAG,
&, in extremely small letters on an otherwise empty page,
an anonymous note that says

                                 there is a poem           
                                 in everything.

california pelican dreaming

I got down to Montemar Vista as the light began to fade, but there was still a fine sparkle on the water and the surf was breaking far out in long smooth curves. A group of pelicans was flying bomber formation just under the creaming lip of the waves. A lonely yacht was tacking in toward the yacht harbour at Bay City. Beyond it the huge emptiness of the Pacific was purple-grey.

Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely

on the Muppet Show tonight

Leevi Lehto always manages to discover strange things. Now it's his blog translated into "swedish chef" dialect. A sample:

Epreel 26, 2005 8:32 EM Noo in Guugle-a Puem Unthulugy: Serepheem cunnecteefity , a feene-a (und tupeecel!) puem by Merk Yuoong, ooff Oostreleea & Noo Zeelund. Bork bork bork!

&, of course, thoughts about the Muppet/Sesame Street interface with blogland rose unbidden.

There are several strong contenders for the old guys in the balcony. I'm sure we could find an Oscar & a Cookie Monster if all blogs had photos of their owners - do owners come to look like their blogs after time?. I know of a drummer out there who would probably act like Animal if his leg was chained to a post. There are a couple of Bert & Ernie blogs. Tom Beckett, at 6' 7", would make a wonderful Big Bird - Big Squirrel? & then there's the most famous Moi in the universe - despite the chateau connection, I don't think her use of the phrase derives from Louis Quatorze - who could also play the Count.

& Kermit? The line forms on the right. We take that in turns.
 

 

this
post removed
by the auditor

Fugacity 05, a final update

There are only about a dozen poems still to go up at the nzepc's on-line anthology Fugacity 05 which was built over the last few days. A tremendous response, over 100 poets, amongst whom I'm extremely pleased to see a number of fellow bloggers, plus a lot of poets I met for the first time when I was in N.Z. last year plus many other names that are new to me. There's also a marvellous collective writing exercise, everybody's autobiography to the bird sound of rain.
 

The Ten Nein Commandments of ex-Cardinal RatFink

the former head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (which was once known as The Inquisition), now known as Pope Interdict XIV.

1. Ordered the Sisters of Charity who were just about to open Australia's first medically supervised injecting room in Sydney with support from the local Cardinal, most of the press including The Catholic Weekly – they described it as a "great step forward for human dignity" - & the State Government, to cease & desist. (The Inquisition) ".. is deeply disturbed...that such an initiative is proposed by members of a religious congregation, to whom they look for good example.")

2. Ordered nursing orders & public hospitals run by the church that they should draw back from 'harm minimisation' schemes. The same line for AIDS as for drugs: abstain or die.

3. Ordered American Catholic bishops to deny John Kerry Holy Communion because Kerry was in an "objective situation of sin" for being pro-abortion & pro-euthanasia.

4. Ordered safe-sex education be stopped.

5. Ordered people with AIDS never to wear condoms, even when sleeping with their wives.

6. Declared homosexuality an 'intrinsic moral evil" & devised an argument whereby homosexuals themselves were to blame for homophobic violence. "When civil legislation is introduced to protect behaviour to which no-one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions & practices gain ground, & irrational violent reactions increase."

7. Declared the church had an obligation to tell its adherents how to vote "when this is required by faith or the moral law".

8. Instructed any Catholic lawmaker that it was his (RatFink's word) to expression his (ditto) moral opposition, & publicly to vote against anti-gay discrimination laws.

9. Instructed Catholic politicians to oppose any type of recognition for same-sex couples.

10. Instructed Catholics to uphold the church's dogma of sex & family: no divorce, no contraception, no sex outside marriage, no homosexuality, no IVF, no stem cell research, no drugs.

(with heavy achnowledgments to an article by David Marr in The Sydney Morning Herald)
 

A Magritte poem

There is a wonderful - & an equally wonderful reading of it - poem named after Magritte's painting The Betrayal of Images by Jeffery Bahr on one of the pages of his poetry website.
 

I'd be safe

 
& warm
 
 

Puffing away

I am rapidly approaching a major crisis in my life. The variety of cigarettes I have smoked regularly for fifty years are no longer being made, & I am down to my last few packets of untipped – no filter - Rothmans KING SIZE, 16 mg of tar per cigarette. & in looking for alternatives, I have discovered that the only untipped cigarettes left on the market are Camels, a brand that I remember hearing referred to as the only cigarette that has a picture of the factory on the packet.

In a recent post at really bad movies Richard Lopez, a former smoker, writes of having been enamoured of the accessories of smoking such as Zippo lighters. Not for me, though when young I used specific, obvious, cigarettes – Gauloises, Sobranie Black Russian – to accessorize a particular image I was trying to present.

I came to smoking through my family though no-one in it smoked apart from my father who smoked a pipe. But in one of those small rituals that families have to accompany certain celebrations, he would be given two cigars in metal cases at Xmas, one of which he would smoke after lunch. & I would be given a puff. Which, I'm fairly sure, I didn't inhale.

From there it was buying cigarettes loose from the tobacconist. Five for threepence, about 2½ cents. Always for one of your parents, a transparent lie but acceptable then though now that sale would be a criminal offence. I didn't smoke much, though enough to later be able to joke that I did give up smoking for a time, for a year between the ages of eight & nine.

At high school it was a packet of 20 a day. At university it went up to three packets, a rate I kept up until I was fifty when the firm for which I worked banned smoking in the office, & I went back to a daily packet. Also, L. gave up smoking around ten years ago, so since then I've never smoked in the car or inside the house – I have been fortunate in that we've always had pleasant outside areas. That latter act has drifted into my poetry, to the extent that sometimes I think of writing a macro so that with one keystroke I can insert the lines "I go outside / for a cigarette."

I am paranoid about running out of cigarettes, once thought of committing air piracy on a flight to Perth – airline schedules say it's a four-hour flight, but because of the prevailing winds it tends to be a five-hour flight there, three hours back - & forcing the pilot to set down in the Nullarbor so I could have a cigarette. I cough continuously, am short of breath, have a raspy voice that replaced the more mellifluous one I used to have. When I went back to New Zealand last year, those of my previous compatriots that were still around all seemed to have emphysema. I have overcome other addictions that are popularly supposed to be more difficult to do so. But never smoking, though I can now go for much longer without a cigarette than I previously could.

I am thinking about patches, or cold turkey. But next week I will probably go into town & buy a single packet of each of about ten varieties, try them out & then make my decision.

(Whilst writing this, I have worked out that, at their present cost, I have spent around $250,000 on cigarettes over the years. Yep, around quarter of a million dollars. Think how my life might have changed with that sort of money.)

Only one thing to do about it.

{insert macro}
 

I went for a walk......
 

On a Winter's day

John Kane's A Winter's Day. 
 

an update on FUGACITY 05

The first poems are online. The official launch is in 45 minutes. They have been swamped by poems, so it may be some time before they're all up.
 

Rimbaud's Baedeker?

"The following pages contain the writer's diary, kept during his march to and from Harar. It must be borne in mind that the region traversed on this occasion was previously known only by the vague reports of native travellers. All the Abyssinian discoverers had traversed the Dankali and other northern tribes: the land of the Somal was still a terra incognita. Harar, moreover, had never been visited, and few are the cities of the world which in the present age, when men hurry about the earth, have not opened their gates to European adventure. The ancient metropolis of a once mighty race, the only permanent settlement in Eastern Africa, the reported seat of Moslem learning, a walled city of stone houses, possessing its independent chief, its peculiar population, its unknown language, and its own coinage, the emporium of the coffee trade, the head-quarters of slavery, the birth-place of the Kat plant, and the great manufactory of cotton-cloths, amply, it appeared, deserved the trouble of exploration."

Richard F. Burton: First Footsteps in East Africa

The Veronica ficcione

It is said of Septimus
Veronicus, the last but
one Praetor appointed
to the province of
Camargua, that his
initial infatuation
with this land of bulls
& flamingoes was
gradually augmented by
an anger at its
continued oppression.

So much so that
two years into his term
he renounced his
citizenship & declared
the province independent.
Rome responded. Four
hundred soldiers & another
praetor. A short battle
on the riverbank ended
when Septimus caught
a passing flamingo &
held it out at his side
distracting the newly-
appointed official so
that he attacked the
bird, not the man.

Bullfighting aficionados
regard this move with
awe, now honour
the initiator by calling
it a veronica. History
says little else about
the time. Rome's attention
was taken up by
The Triumveral Wars that
came soon after. The man
that Septimus killed
is known only as
the last Praetor. Capes
have replaced flamingoes.
 

FUGACITY

FUGACITY, the on-line anthology from the New Zealand electronic poetry centre – details here (though if you're lazy the details & an email address for submissions are given several posts below) - has opened for submissions & will continue to build for the next two days. Why don't you send them a poem. Think what it will do for your future bionotes. "Has had poetry published in New Zealand...."

A temporal point of reference. Thursday Noon in N.Z. is Wednesday 6 p.m. in California.

An emotional point of reference. "All the leaves are brown...."
 

Cardinals to win

It's great to see the Roman Catholic Church has accepted the modern age by electing a non-European Pope sympathetic to women priests, contraception, freedom of choice & homosexuality instead of going for some 78 year old conservative fart from somewhere in Europe. Oops, they did what? Shit, that's the problem when you leave it to men to make the important decisions. Welcome Pope Interdict XIV.
 

What'd I say

Watched / listened to a Ray Charles concert on tv last night. Recorded in 2000 at the Olympia Theatre. With a guitar / bass / drums trio backing him. At first a little disappointing, even though he started with A Song For You, that marvelous piece by Leon Russell, & went through all the songs the audience had come to hear, & which I, also, sang along with. But then I thought what am I on about? The guy's 70, he can still sing, & if I was hearing him for the first time instead of fifty years after I first heard that fantastic r&b band & the Raelettes backing him, I'd be jumping out of my seat. Thought, look at yourself, old man. We can't all be like Miles Davis.
 

Have added

to the sidebar links to Eileen Tabios' poetry blog gasps (about bloody time growls Galatea), & to Jill Jones' new translation blog latitudes.
 

A regal prepuce-cision

The King of Morocco has granted pardons to 7179 prisoners to celebrate the circumcision of his son. I suppose that's one way to keep the piece.
 

FUGACITY 05

is the title of the New Zealand electronic poetry centre's online poetry anthology, building 21 – 23 April 2005 as part of the FUGACITY 05 poetry symposium at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.

Bring a poem on a disk to any of the symposium events OR email your contribution (Word or RTF attachment, or in the body of the email) to nzepc@auckland.ac.nz between 21 – 23 April. (ballpark 20 - 22 April in the U.S. & Europe)

They aim to build a local and international poetry anthology over three days, launching Saturday 23 April at New Brighton beach. They'd welcome your poem. They'd like it to engage with time and place, transience and duration, memory and forgetting, coming and going – any or all of the FUGACITY (to use Canterbury poet Ursula Bethell's fine word) of planetary life.

"Lives there still a Japanese artist
Who, with his paint brush, could make us tremble
To see those lines, those tenuous colours
Spring again vibrant as I now see them springing
in their fugacity?"

Ursula Bethell

Anthology compilers: Brian Flaherty, Bernadette Hall, Claire Hero, Michele Leggott, Graham Lindsay and John Newton

Submission guidelines
o work should be your original composition
o if it has been published elsewhere, please include acknowledgement and publication details
o the compilers reserve the right to copy-edit submissions before uploading
o copyright for individual contributions to the online anthology remains with the author

I am fugitive, I am very fugitive
Ursula Bethell

University of Canterbury English and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre(nzepc).

More information available from the Fugacity page at the nzepc.
 

a is for absinthe

ambition is the cruellest month
bravado comes creeping on little cat feet
courage & the slithy toves did gyre & gimble
death spreadeagled in the empty air of existence
ethics has a man in it. he is transparent
fame is glazed by rain water
greed considered as a
hunger of semi-precious stones
inventiveness we trust
justice comme je suis
karma just happened to come along
liberty at five in the afternoon
minestrone wears a glove on which his crimes cannot be read
nature died in the church & was buried along with her name. nobody came
optimism loses all the time
prejudice is poisonous but pretty in autumn
quietness bent over a blue guitar
rapaciousness is no country for old men
sleep in whom I dream angels
tension was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair
unhappiness saw him disembark in the unanimous night
vanishing species on the left hand side of the beach like a motorcycle club
water was ours before we were the land's
xenophobia breaks where no sun shines
youth your rooster crows at the break of dawn
zodiac signs with few friends & no ambitions

originally published in Tin Lustre Mobile
 

Karri Kokko in The City of Light

April in Paris
chestnuts in blossom
holiday tables
under the trees.

Yip Harburg's lyrics to the wonderful Vernon Duke thirties ballad "April in Paris" (favourite version Ella Fitzgerald with Count Basie's Band). A brilliant composer - the fact that Ira Gershwin wrote lyrics for him is indicative of that - Duke also wrote another great 'seasonal' song "Autumn in New York" (favourite version a fifty-year old recording by the Modern Jazz Quartet).

One of the drawbacks to living at the bottom of the globe is the distances. I would love to be in either place, in any month, in any season. But so far, so far....

Though L. is going to a conference in South Carolina next year. Perhaps then.
 

36 views of Lion Mountain #2

Night
does not
fall

on Lion
Mountain -

it wraps
around it.
 

An ephemeral collage

Jukka tears into Das Kapital at Nonlinear Poetry & puts the pieces back together in his own inimitable way.
 

The Mail Poem

Bill Allegrezza's Mail Poems are a wonderful act of anarchy.

".....the idea behind the mail poem is that i write them to send to people who happen to have the same names as poets. i randomnly choose them and then write a poem dedicated to them, which i then send through the mail without my return address. i keep no record of the poems besides occasionally recording myself reading one before i send it out. at this point, i've written about a hundred of them."

He has links to some of those readings at p-ramblings.

I wonder if he's ever accidently sent one to the actual poet...
 

sharing my table at yesterday's lunch

 
 

new at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

I admire many, many things about Eileen Tabios. & one of the reasons for the "many, many" is that I'm convinced that she lives in a parallel universe where the days are 30 hours long. She has to to be able to do as much as she does, in so many fields. & I may have to revise that hour figure - not to be confused with her hourglass figure - upwards, because here she is at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s being interviewed by Tom Beckett.
 

The Cicerone - an extended version

Just out from Jukka's xPress(ed), The Cicerone is a sequence of poems, an extended narrative, that wraps around a piece of the same name that was posted to Series Magritte.

The dance mix & an instrumental version will be released soon.
&

It's a long time since I've driven distances in the dark. But yesterday we left in the afternoon & headed north, towards the shorter days in the year, towards the tropics where night falls early anyway.

So the last few hundred kilometres through dusk & dark. A couple of fresh-killed kangaroos, one in the centre, one on the side of the road. Always a hazard in the dawn & dusk when they come out searching for water, for fresh grass. But of more concern the smaller things, the plethora of insects & moths that emerge in the twilight, smashing & smearing against the windscreen. & with wipers perished from the sun & not previously noticed from lack of use, a white film gradually coated the whole of the glass, so that we arrived with a windscreen blinded as if with cataracts.
 

 PLAT
F O R M

The object of desire worship

There are many of us who are fans of the work of Sheila Murphy. & then there is The Fan. Polite, respectful, but with just a hint of stalking in there. This site has the beginnings of the blog equivalent of a room full of photos.
 

Waiting for Jodie

Martin Edmond, after a year as writer in residence at Auckland University in New Zealand, is back in Sydney & working as a taxi driver. His recent posts at Luca Antara are as wide & diverse as the stochastic process of his fare existence.
 

A spellcheck glitch? Or subtle racism?

From a local paper, in an article on precursors to the Michael Jackson trial, basically a quick précis of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon with a couple of more contemporary trials added.

"Jackson already has some of the big gums from the black community behind him."

This week, I keep thinking about this poem

AFTER LORCA
by Robert Creeley

The church is a business, and the rich
are the business men.
                                      When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrament
and a golden Cross, and go doucement,  doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it's crazy.

the thame thinger, another thong

Snakes
shuck their
skins in Summer.

That's
where squirrels
get their thongs.

You
can't keep
a good man

down.
Tom Beckett
reappears in blogland.

Continuing Difficulties
Vanishing Points of Resemblance
Unprotected Texts
Vaudeville without Organs
Shadows within Shadows

Meanwhile, in Australia, in 2005

"(Australian Prime Minister) John Howard may be shocked by what he sees in Wadeye next week during a rare visit to a remote Aboriginal community.

The town with the biggest Aboriginal population in the Northern Territory, 270 kilometres south-west of Darwin, looks like a refugee camp in a Third World country.

An average 17 people are cramped into each sweltering, graffiti-covered house. Almost half the population is under 15; most of the children have had no formal education and cannot speak English; many grow up not knowing their fathers who are dead or in jail; infant mortality is four times the national average; life expectancy is 20 years less than that of non-indigenous Australians; and only 4 per cent of people of working age have mainstream jobs.

Unlike southern towns of comparable size - Picton, Bellingen or Bourke, for example - Wadeye has no mobile phone coverage and its landline phone service is outdated and unreliable, making a mockery of Telstra's claims that its services in the bush are "world class".

The town, which is cut off by road for five months each year during the wet season, is still waiting for a doctor, funding for which was promised last month.

The town, built at the edge of mangroves, has no commercial businesses such as banks, cafes, restaurants, hotels or motels. And a new study of the community, which will have implications for other Aboriginal communities, finds that governments are spending far less on its residents than on an average Territorian child.

The report finds that for every dollar spent educating the average child in the territory, only 26 cents is spent on an Aboriginal child in Wadeye."
Lindsay Murdoch: The Sydney Morning Herald, 4/2/2005

Robert Creeley in New Zealand.

Robert Creeley visited New Zealand a couple of times. The New Zealand electronic poetry centre has records of these visits including audio, video, poems, posters & photos.
 

Things I never knew we needed #471,313

Dog condoms.
 

Comings & goings

Cassie Lewis has started up a new blog, The Little Workshop. Welcome back, Cassie.

I'm also adding ecce mulier, an anonymous blog "posted by R.L." although up until a couple of days ago it was "posted by Nietzsche's Wife" which I kinda liked since it reminded me of the great Charlie Mingus' tune "All the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother". I mentally translate ecce mulier as "Behold the Donkey-Driver", but since the blog emanates from Mexico that might be construed as racist, so I'll let it pass.

I've also linked to Poetic Inhalation's eye peasant page, a comprehensive listing of "written creation links".

& I've drawn a line through all those links - although the link is still there - to blogs which have been silent for a number of months.
 

Robert Creeley 1926-2005

A COUNTERPOINT

Let me be my own fool
of my own making, the sum of it

is equivocal.
One says of the drunken farmer:

leave him lay off it. And this is
the explanation.

Robert Creeley

The exhibition of vispo

at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Miami, Florida has closed, but the entire show is still viewable here.

Well worth the visit. Several visits in fact.
 

Graffiti memories & junk emails or: How much is that Doge in the window?

Once I was young & had so much more orientation & could talk with nervous intelligence about everything – no, that's the beginning of a novel by Kerouac. Let's restart. I remember when Rock was young. Uh oh. Elton John.

Okay. When I was younger, so much younger than today, I found humour in a couple of much-quoted & -reproduced pieces of what I would describe as repartee graffiti, that is graffiti where a line is answered by another line in someone else's hand.

My favourite was always My mother made me a homosexual to which somebody had written underneath That's nice. If I gave her the wool would she make me one too. But close behind it was

I hate grils
You mean girls you fool
What about us grils?

I was reminded of the second sequence – which, of course, reminded me of the first – by the subject line of a junk email I received today. Fsreh e-book on how to make wemon really happy.

But I'd almost been brought there yesterday by a google search for doges fucking women that ended up at the pelican. How could I not resist tracking that back one step? About sixty results, one of which appears to be an essay on Ezra Pound by Jennifer Scappettone, another from the Muse Apprentice Guild – why am I not surprised? - but most of the rest mis-spellings - the car brand; he doges the blows of his opponent; a few looking for bestial sex sites. Or should that be bastial sox?

Git along little doge...
 

Heading
north for
a couple of

days.
I might
post. Might pass.

The Nightjar

Jean Vengua has revamped the format of her poetry blog The Nightjar. Gone are the surroundings that used to remind me somewhat of a Quaker kitchen. In their place is a black background. The page is crowned by a photo of arched windows reaching towards a flat roof, a dark blue sky above, all seen from the perspective of someone looking up.

The presentation conveys a depth, a darkness, an infinite night with the words as stars. &, in what is probably a totally subjective judgement because I've always liked her work, I feel an additional power, a strength, a hard-edged beauty in the new poems that are posted there.
 

A very moving piece

by Allen Bramhall at tributary on the death of his father after a long illness.

It is undercut with an emotion, a grief, that you cannot help but share.
 

A rare pleasure

to be able to include a link to another New Zealand poet's blog.

Have added Jill Chan's Navel Orange to the sidebar.

Some recent work of hers appeared in the latest issue of foam:e. Earlier poems can be found at the New Zealand electronic poetry centre.
 

Pour Prévert, some autumn leaves

              l                         t
l
  e               l
                            o
          u
                                r
       f            e                          s
                     s

            i
     s
 
        e              m                  e

After joy, sadness

I
have donned
sackcloth & ashes.

Tom
Beckett's blog
has gone dark.

Vaudeville
apparently needs
organs to survive.

I
will happily
donate my heart.
 

pelican dreaming is 1 year old today

so it seems appropriate to recognise the occasion by posting the poem from whence it got its name.

PELICAN DREAMING

Later he would walk down to the lagoon
to look for the pelicans. They were
his touchstone, the way their
solid bodies gave substance to the
landscape, a centre to it. Only when
they found him would he return.

What part
of
      NO
don't you
under-
stand?

N?

No,
O.
 

Savaged
& ravaged
by rabid mosquitoes.
 

Have added another couple of poems to Series Magritte, The Misanthropes & The Wedding Breakfast.
 

"The thing that's really become important with me now is my involvement in ear research. I know you would think I'd be involved in eye research, but it is not so. It's ear research because I have so much respect for hearing. I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't been able to hear."
Ray Charles

Metropolis

is
full of
Moloch & marquee.
 

Felt the need for the ocean today, so this afternoon drove the forty kilometres out to it. Then twenty kilometres along the coast, pausing every so often, before turning inland again.

Apart from the wave caps, the sea was the colour of wet sand.
 

Have added

The Pillow Book - Makura no Soshi - of Shin Yu Pai to the sidebar.

& have just finished reading Unnecessary Roughness, her wonderful & witty collection of sports poems. It takes the piss out of everything athletic, but with an incisive insight that would probably get her a major coaching job.
 

Eileen Tabios on Philip Lamantia

At The Chatelaine's Poetics Eileen has a wonderful & deeply moving series of posts.
 

e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

In keeping with the expansionary intention of Tom Beckett's philosophy for the blog, former interviewee Thomas Fink becomes current interviewer of the wonderful Sheila Murphy at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s.

& as I write this, a kingfisher swoops across the yard to pause in a tree. I am a firm believer in omens.
 

36 Views of Lion Mountain

# 1

Lion
does not
appear

in the
lexicon

of the
traditional
owners

of the
land.
 

Philip Lamantia (1927-2005)

Man is a room
     where the malefic hand turns a knob
     on the unseen unknown double's door
 

Making it
happen, in a
slow
dispirited
way.
 

 
 

taiL

The Use of Torture

Severely
beaten. Knocked
unconscious. Eventually came

round
to their
way of thinking.
 

for Miss M.

cat kookaburra
late-night owl

the
avariciousness
of another
avatar

attacked by
angry ants &
in defence
a self-
inflicted
mortal blow

attempting
to emulate
the Worm
Ouroboros

auto-erotic
asphyxiation
 

Speculative Fiction

FROM: Sgt. Mark Ed
Important Message
To President / Managing Director..

Good day,


My name is Mark Ed, I am an American soldier, I am serving in the military of the 1st Armoured Division in Iraq, As you know we are being attacked by insurgents everyday and car bombs.We managed to move funds belonging to Saddam Hussien's family.

We want to move this money to you, so that you may invest it for us and keep our share for banking.We will take 50%, my partner and I. You take the other 50%. no strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq, Iraq is a warzone. We plan on using diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in one large silver box, using diplomatic immunity.

If you are interested I will send you the full details, my job is to find a good partner that we can trust and that will assist us. Can I ! trust you? When you receive this letter,kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication also your contact details. This business is risk free. The box can be shipped out in 48hrs.

Respectfully,
Sgt. Mark Ed

Ah well, it makes a change from Nigerian scams. But you think they'd get the spelling of Saddam's name right. Or is the misspelling meant to be proof of the email's authenticity?
 

a disturbing fact for the day

The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth -- levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.

Nearly all Inuit tested in Greenland and more than half in Canada have levels of PCBs and mercury exceeding international health guidelines.

Snail Mail

He
wrote a
letter while the

mail-
art blog
delivered the post.
 

Gecko

 
 

spec   intro   tion

Marquee & Music

At first the
tinkle
of a temple bell
but with
each refresh
the line
grows
longer.

Jukka's marquee pieces, more beautiful than ever, now come with or without accompaniment. See / hear / be amazed via Nonlinear Poetry.

& it would be remiss of me not to mention the marquee pieces by Jack Kimball at Pantaloons. The latest one is quite splendid.
 

sit 11

a visual / textual piece posted by harry k. stammer to his eponymous blog on 3/2/05 is wonderful. harry's work, textual, visual, visual/textual, textual/visual (& occasionally textural), both on his own blog & at As/Is is some of the best work going on around the place in any field.
 

Luca Antara

At Luca Antara, Martin Edmond posts the contents of his new book Luca Antara which don't include any mention of Luca Antara.

But what's there prompted me to answer "yes" to his question "..would you want to read a book like this?"
 

Lady Guinevere's hay(na)ku of love

The
beat of
my knight's heart
is the pulse
of my
daze.
 

non sequiturs
                                   followed

 

Will no-one free me of this turbulent priest?

Vaudeville without Organs. Tom Beckett is back!!!!

"I'm not sure I should be here again in the world of personal (poisonal--to give it a 3 Stooges inflection) blogging, but I am weak. Poor impulse control, don't you know. So, a soft opening. No e-mails to announce the rebirth. I'm not reborn."

Ah, Tom,

Withdrawals
in Winter
are alWays Worse
 

& so, in honour

I've decided to repost this poem that first appeared on As/Is since it seems quite appropriate.

My life in Vaudeville

for Nick Piombino because he didn't / ask the question
& for Tom Beckett because he gave me / the title

The players in the orchestra pit
are aging, some are
already dead or too infirm
to hold their instruments. Only
the drummer manages to keep
a beat; & that occasionally
runs ragged since his
bass drum had a triple bypass
four months ago. Nobody
wants to play this type of music
anymore. No fame or
fortune in it. The singers have all
left, the jugglers drop more
than they catch & local bylaws
have taken the fire-eater
out of the program. Two years ago
my partner died. No one to replace him
so I've been using a dummy
whose response to "Why is there
a gryphon in the garden?"
is a very wooden
"Because Thurber took the unicorn".
We've had the North Korean
Totalitarian Drill & Marching Band
in for a couple of weeks but now
they've overstayed their visas
& are due to be deported
in the morning. There's nothing
left except to clear the last
tableau & close. Next week it's
strippers, sound machine & a single
spotlight. The theatre's being re-
named, either "Vanishing Acts" or
"Pussies Galore". They'll probably
go for the latter. Boom tish.

the letter e

Jukka's latest kinetic piece, letters, has me transfixed. There is something magical, mystical about the transformation of the letter

e

as it disappears off-screen to the right.