The postmodern romantic

Gregory Vincent St Thomasino's the postmodern romantic is a strange page. It is updated, or at least the post-date changes, but the page remains the same. Or at least seems to. Perhaps a word here or there. I keep intending to copy it, to refer to what was there at a particular time so I can see what, if anything, has changed at a later time.

Or perhaps we see it differently each time we visit. Our experiences may have been updated & so we come in with a different focus. That may be the reason behind it. Not what's within, but what's without.

The second paragraph there is a single line. "She was from Germany. She wanted to see where Lennon was killed." I do not know if I, if ever in New York, would want to see that, to stand outside the Dakota. But I now know that the Dakota was built in 1874 by the founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, & was then so far out of town that it was given the ironic name The Dakota, even before that territory was separated into its two current divisions. I now know that the apartment where Lennon & Yoko Ono lived was previously owned by the late Robert Ryan, a brilliant actor, whose movies I had grown up watching, & who I always had liked.

That is information I have garnered since my previous reading of Gregory's line. It is something more that I bring to this latest reading. The line hasn’t changed, but I have, & so the reading is different.

What does not change is that the page is beautiful, & even if unchanged stands up easily to repeated readings. "That night, as she slept, I rewrote her poetry."

Everything old is new again.

This morning

A
rare pleasure.
Woken by rain.

Never understood that it ain't no good

When Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone first came out in New Zealand, it was released, because of its length, as a two-sided single. Which meant, on radio, that most times it would fade out before you turned around to see the jugglers & the clowns.

Only those announcers - deejay, my dears, was such an American word, so uncouth - who wished to prove how cool they were would play the full-length album track.

Was reminded of that cos I've just bought Greil Marcus' biography of the song. &, at the same time, Hunter S. Thompson's Kingdom of Fear. & the combination of the two writers also reminds me that in the days when the music was good, Rolling Stone was a great magazine. I think my favourite cover was by, I think, Annie Leibowitz, a photo of Dolly Parton with Arnold Schwarzenegger standing behind her.

& I also bought Charles Dickens' Hard Times. For nostalgia. Great book, terse writing. Dickens rushing to meet the weekly deadlines for its serialisation. Cost me $1, & so perches on the shoulder of the other two books like a Siamese cat.

augmentented

off the page

A selection of photographs from the recent Leaflets & Chalk event, a project by students, poets and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) to bring poems into public spaces of the University of Auckland campus as printed handouts and chalked texts on Montana Poetry Day, has been posted on the nzepc website. Also given are links to the poems handed out, & I'm delighted to see that the famous New Zealand poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen was amongst those whose poems were distributed.
 

A last post

on nuclear bombs / arsenals / arms race / threats.

I am older than the bomb. I grew up in a world under threat of nuclear war. The French & the United States tested their weapons in the Pacific, not that far away from New Zealand where I was born & lived for the first thirty years of my life. The English carried out their nuclear tests in Australia where I now live. The Russians, the Chinese & the Indians all carried out nuclear tests.

The Cold War faded. Some disarmament. Much development. It was no longer necessary to carry out physical testing to prove nuclear detonation capabilities, though, being boys, they went ahead & did it anyway. Pakistan & Israel & possibly South Africa developed nuclear weapons. There is some evidence gathered by the CIA that the latter two countries jointly exploded a nuclear device. Pakistan tested theirs in May, 1998. It has been suggested that some of the Indian tests earlier that month may have been joint Indo-Israeli tests. Possibly North Korea, possibly Iran, are either nuclear-armed or not that far away from being able to be.

The threats, theoretically, became localised. Israel v Iran, Pakistan v India. Then the threat of briefcase weapons, carried by terrorists. Blackmarket plutonium, design & nuclear exchange. Directions to build a nuclear device can be found on the internet claimed the tabloids.

But, at the end of the day of the 60th anniversary of Nagasaki, let me make a prediction. The next nuclear strike will be carried out either by or on behalf of the United States, under the guise of protecting the State, of preserving democracy.

& four days later. Fukuoka? Okayama? Kobe?

"Unknown to anyone else, there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second one was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. He said: "You got another one of those damn things?" I said: "Yes, sir." He said: "Where is it?" I said: "Over in Utah." He said: "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an aeroplane and we headed back to bring it out to Tinian, and when they got it to the California debarkation point, the war was over."
Paul Tibbets, from his interview with Studs Terkel

Fat Man, for Karri Kokko

'








 
 

Bock's Car

In that final
pass over
Nagasaki
did the crew
of Bock's Car
take any time out
as they maybe
crossed themselves
or patted the lucky
dollar / rabbit’s foot
in their flightjacket to
consider that in this
collective incarnation
as the agents of
Siva they were
about to initiate the
somewhat belated
but incendiary re-
union of St Francis
Xavier & Christopher
Columbus who had
both departed from
Atocha Station four
or so centuries
before, heading in
opposite directions?

plerasure

Dirt #1

the first issue of PR Primeau's
"....irregularly published
newsletter/'zine of ultra-simple,
minimalist poetry and poetics.
Contributions should be no more
than a few short lines -- at most."
is printed. To request a copy or for questions/comments, send an e-mail to dirt_zine AT yahoo DOT com.

It has an excellent - & not minimal - list of contributors!

from a 2002 Studs Terkel interview

with Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay.

Terkel: When you hear people say: "Let's nuke 'em, let's nuke these people (terrorists)," what do you think?

Tibbets: Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd wipe 'em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being there.

60 years ago, today

there
were no
tourists in Hiroshima

who

"saw nothing

in Hiroshima. Nothing."
 

Poetry on the Pavement

Serious writing about poetry is something you rarely find at the pelican. I'm shit at it, don't know the language, tend to go off into emotional rants when I find something close to my heart & write about the sensation of it, not the sense.

But I'm fortunate to have as a friend Michele Leggott who not only writes wonderful poetry but who writes & lectures about it equally well & has kindly let me post her words here. During the recent New Zealand National Poetry Day, she & her students took to the streets & the lecture halls & the corridors to (in)scribe poems, to re-place them, to change the way they are seen/scene. Her account below is taken from the Poetry off the page course website at the University of Auckland.

"After meeting up at Slurp, poetry day began with the frenzied dissemination of poems, chalked down on pavements, pinned up on walls, handed out in leaflets, scrawled on blackboards, whiteboards, noticeboards… Our group dispersed lines by T.S Eliot, W.B Yeats, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Stephane Mallarme, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, ending our poetic rampage in a strategic infiltration of the engineering block. Taking ‘poetry off the page’ (and onto the pavement) reterritorializes the text into the action-oriented public space where the power relations between the reader-writer-author tripartite are under constant (re)negotiation. This reterritorialization sets the text free from the archive and its effects of monumentalizing and canonizing poetry. Archived poetry implies the associative Greek etymons of archive: arkh (government) and arkhein (to rule). Out of the archives poetry becomes an arkhein (without ruling) that is in a state of anarchy rather then the governing hierarchy, hieros arkhein (sacred ruling) of the archivist. The dissemination then is a nomadic one, a freeing up and revamping of poetry. By writing a poem on the pavement it becomes new again. The aesthetic experience of the poem is radically changed; it is no longer in the private space sanctioned for ‘art’ but in the disjunctive chaos of everyday experience. The reading and writing of poetry become a public act. In between street signs, ads, graffiti and snippets of conversation lies a poem. The new context produces new resonance of meaning. New overtones of irony were produced in writing Bruce Andrews’ Species Means Guilt in close proximity to the biology block. As the poem is played out in the social space it blurs the word-world dichotomy. The text and the world inhabit each other blowing away all conventional separations. The poem foregrounds its social constructedness and reveals the world’s textual constructedness. On the pavement the act of writing (and reading) poetry becomes more visceral, the contact more physical. Somewhere between papal bull and prostrate angels my hands bleed…almost like a masochism of affective simulation. The graphicity of the text transforms from monochrome industrial-standard serif typeface to the fat doodles of bright jumbo chalk personalizing the poem with the trace of its scribe. No longer ‘immortal words’, the pavement poems are ephemeral, fragile and endangered. The poem could disappear in the next downpour or may survive relatively intact to the early hours of the morning. Reading is refocused to the moment-to-moment interactions of the text and the world. Pedestrians walk around the words, over the words, ignore them, catch a fragment or stand back and read the entire composition. Nice. What is somatism? Are we reading it the right way?"

scitentific paper

round midnight

It begins to
tell, round
midnight, round
midnight. I do
pretty well
till after
sun-
down. Supper
time I'm
feeling
sad, but it
really gets bad
round midnight.

Jon Hendricks' words to that great Monk tune. The floor is covered with printouts of poems - something I very rarely do these days, print things out. My computer corruption is complete. I see the image on the screen as an extracted thing - but I've just finished a non-sequential sequence of 25 poems, & I'm trying to decide what goes with what, & who to send them to.

So maybe it isn't so bad, round midnight, round midnight. I seem to be doing pretty well. But I think I'll wait until much later in the morning to finish the job off.

Dear
Theo, I
am having visions.

They
do not
look like crows.

Taking over the world!

I am thinking of starting another blog, to be called Taking over the WORLD! It will contain nothing but a list of the individual & participatory blogs of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & Jim Leftwich, whose latest collaborative effort, amenable noun, has just materialised.

But such a blog as I contemplate will eventually run out of room, because those two just ain't gonna run out of ideas.

striking the ?

Tom Beckett recently posted the following found hay(na)ku

"You're
currently posting
as Tom Beckett."

When I first got a similar message, I thought it said 'posing'. Which, of course, I was / am.

"There is absolutely no evidence that it is rigged."

(Taken entire from the ABC's website.)

Leaked emails from two former prosecutors claim the military commissions set up to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay are rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused.

Two emails, which have been obtained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, were sent to supervisors in the Office of Military Commissions in March of last year - three months before Australian detainee David Hicks was charged and five months before his trial began.

The first email is from prosecutor Major Robert Preston to his supervisor.

Maj Preston writes that the process is perpetrating a fraud on the American people, and that the cases being pursued are marginal.

"I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and even a fraud on the American people," Maj Preston wrote.

"Surely they don't expect that this fairly half-arsed effort is all that we have been able to put together after all this time."

Maj Preston says he cannot continue to work on a process he considers morally, ethically and professionally intolerable.

"I lie awake worrying about this every night," he wrote.

"I find it almost impossible to focus on my part of mission.

"After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."

Maj Preston was transferred out of the Office of Military Commissions less than a month later.

Rigged?

The second email is written by another prosecutor, Captain John Carr, who also ended up leaving the department.

Capt Carr says the commissions appear to be rigged.

"When I volunteered to assist with this process and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused," he wrote.

"Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged."

Capt Carr says that the prosecutors have been told by the chief prosecutor that the panel sitting in judgment on the cases would be handpicked to ensure convictions.

"You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel," he said.

Significant find

David Hicks' defence lawyer, Major Michael Mori, says the documents are "highly significant".

"For the first time, we're seeing that concerns about the fairness of the military commissions extend to the heart of the process," Maj Mori said.

David Hicks's father, Terry, says the latest revelations confirm what he has suspected all along.

"These commissions weren't set up to release people," he said.

"These commissions were set up to make sure they were prosecuted and get the time that they give them, and the other thing we've said all along, that we believe that this system has been rigged as they call it."

But the Pentagon's Brigadier General Thomas Hemingway, who is a legal advisor to the military commissions, says an investigation has found the comments are based on miscommunication, misunderstanding and personality conflicts.

He says changes have been made in the prosecutors' office.

"I think what we did is work on some restructuring in the office, there was some changes in the way cases were processed, but we found no evidence of any criminal misconduct, we found no evidence of any ethical violations," he said.

Brig Gen Hemingway says he does not know if the Australian Government has been informed of the claims.

"I can't tell you whether they were informed formally, I have so many contacts with representatives of your embassy here in town, the exchange of information has certainly been constant, open and significant but whether or not we got down into the details of this, I really have no recollection," he said.

"We certainly would have shared it with them if we found that there was any evidence of misconduct in the office of the prosecution, but we did not find any such evidence."

'Sufficient evidence'

Brig Gen Hemingway denies that the cases being prosecuted are low-level.

"All of the cases I have recommended that the appointing authority refer to trial, are cases upon which I thought there was sufficient evidence to warrant sending to a fact-finder," he said.

"In each of the four cases which have been referred, the appointing authority John Alterburgh made an independent determination that the evidence was sufficient to warrant trial."

He also denies that the commission panels are being hand-picked to insure detainees are not acquitted.

"I can tell you that any such assertion is clearly incorrect," he said.

"There is absolutely no evidence that it is rigged."

there's
no silence
in the silence

Late summer, Mars, the North Pole

At the bottom of a crater that is 35 kilometres wide. The frozen carbon dioxide has gone, leaving behind a disc of water ice.
 

a belated pointer

Partially because I was aware that Jukka was on holiday, & partially because of the order of my side bar bloglist - I knew he would email text posts in, as he did last year, so I kept up with what was happening at textual conjectures, but I didn't think he'd be emailing visual pieces, so I would cursorily check telephone poles & mailXart & nonlinear & go no further down my bloglist when I saw no new posts there - I have only in the last few days caught up with the wonderful pieces he had been emailing in to self similar writing.

They have a delicacy about them, a pastel quality unlike, say, the "thick paint" of the telephone poles. Minimal perhaps in execution, but it's the essence they have about them, like breaking a lemon leaf & being confonted by the aroma of an entire grove of lemons.

These are works by a brilliant visual artist - that's possibly a tautology, but I'm trying to differentiate from Jukka the brilliant visual poet. I'm tempted to say by someone working at the top of their form. But having seen in the past how Jukka manages to develop beyond a point where most of us would stop, self-satisfied, I will refrain from saying that, preferring not to utter words that would be obsolete within a month or two. Will only say, go there, breathe them in, be inspired.

from Impressions: van Gogh in Vietnam

Aix-en-Provence

The wrong
season, no
sunflowers
there to paint;
but in his
madness mis-
took napalm
for fields of
the real thing.

Meanwhile, south of the Tropic of Cancer

There must be something in the Mexican air that helps the germination / generation of beautiful hay(na)ku. Ernesto Priego has been writing them for quite some time, & now Rebeka Lembo joins in. I'm posting one of her latest poems below.

Thank You

&
just when
I think I

am
reaching the
ground, you have

shown
me I
have never fallen.

-Rebeka Lembo

Philosophy in the Bedroom #2

There is a variant painting & another poem posted to Series Magritte.

Found inside the pages of Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems

I have been slowly working my way through the fifty or so second-hand books I bought at the local Bookfest in May. Today I got to Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, & found this. Two hands, one – the top – a scrawl & wandering, the other tight & focused.

                    lady that I love.           moi  ??

Where do I start to tell the story
Of the lady that I love.
How do to I start to tell of the glory
Now I've learn to love
It an't easy, I'm not sorry
Now that I can love.

It's not ???, I
I turned away and turned back
Our I learn to love
She stayed with me along our 9 month track there to guide me
As I learnt to love. And watch me learn to love.
Giving ?????No illusions now its my turn
Your the lady that I love.

SoftOur hearts joining, softly yearning
together we can love.
lift it high, laugh don't cry
Our greatest gift of love.
To the lady that I love.

                         I love you Michele.
                              x x x
It's a fucking illusion, eh. Love??It's not pure, Suzanne. Love is relative – relative to our home, our job, how much money we've got in the bank. How can I love you in this environment? I'm so intense, so uptight, so trapped that love is no solace. Am I wrong in being so caught up with what's happening around us? I guess I should be consumed by love alone, as a true romantic would have me believe. But I can't help but be me – and I don't know what love means, at the moment. I can't separate it from the world hassles that surround me. Everything is one blurred mess – love, hate, job, flat, money, one blurred mess. I want to be able to recognise love again, out of that jumble of unhappiness. I want to love you again.

lines that I - & Sgt Joe Friday - wish we'd written

it's so steamy I walked up to a boy selling lemonade and just got the lemonade
Jack Kimball at Pantaloons

traduced, but not traduced

In French, traduce means to translate.

In my Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning is given as misrepresent.

In Spanish it would appear as if the same confusion exists - traducción/traición.

Ernesto Priego has translated another of my poems, The Intention. Has turned it into a hay(na)ku. I love what he's done with it.

It is posted to Never Neutral, originally under the post title of Betrayal.

In an email he worries that I might choose to assume the wrong meaning of the word.

I choose the French, because, as I wrote in response to an earlier translation, nothing refreshes a poem like seeing it in translation. It becomes new, even if it's old.

& that's what the poem is all about, anyway. The last two verses:

Not new things:
just the old, re-
worked. So that
entering

is like
re-entering,
but through another
door.

& this added 15 minutes later, having visited Never Neutral in the interim, I see he has a new post, using these exact same verses to make the same point that I've just made.

Snap, amigo!

stray thought

I sometimes wonder what my poetry would be like if I had kept on writing instead of giving it away for 25 years.

Philosophy in the Bedroom

I have given in & finally included an image with a poem at Series Magritte rather than just linking to it.

I have always been reluctant to do so, for three reasons. The first is that I am afraid of infringing someone's copyright, & so have preferred to point to rather than provide. Secondly, lots of jpegs mean a slow download. But, most importantly, I have preferred to have the poems stand on their own, with the painting something to be looked at after the poem, even though I position the link alongside the title.

Magritte produced maybe a thousand paintings during his life. I have one book, The Portable Magritte, that contains 400 reproductions of his paintings, painted objects & sculptures. I have a couple of other books which probably, between them, contain another 100 or so paintings that are not in the Portable. Plus, in my wanderings & searches on the net, I've come across a large number of works that are not in any of my books. But to complicate matters, he did several variations of a significant number, using the same title, some, I'm guessing, in response to commissioned requests, others because he wanted to revisit a theme. Some of these are years apart, some done in the same year.

So I write a poem based around one of his paintings that I have a reproduction of, go looking for a link to it, find the title, the year's correct, but the painting is different to the one I've based the poem on. Occasionally they can be quite suitable as a substitute, but at other times it's like they're different paintings. Or, you find the actual painting that you want, but it's three-quarters of the way down a page containing 50 paintings.

Which is why I've extracted & pasted / posted this painting. There are three of the same name - plus a Homage to Mack Sennett that is sometimes reproduced under the Philosophy title - but this one is the pubic one that prompted the poem. So rather than link to a site where the painting appears only after a couple of minutes, way down the page, I have included Magritte's homage to Donatien Alphonse François, Comte de Sade.

Martin Edmond clears his debts

"Friday morning I fly to Wellington for five days. To attend the Montana New Zealand Book Awards next Monday night. Chronicle of the Unsung is a finalist in the Biography section (even though it is not a biography) which, I am told, includes Memoir (it is not a memoir either). Selection as a finalist obliges a publisher to transport their author to the ceremony, hence my trip. If I win my category I get a cash prize of $5000.00, almost the exact amount I have gone into (private) debt over the course of this year so far……"

Martin Edmond in a post last week to Luca Antara

AND THE WINNERS ARE ...

Biography
Chronicle of the Unsung by Martin Edmond (Auckland University Press).
(from the N.Z. Herald, 26 July, 2005)

What happened was, my mind drifted. One part of me would be constructing grammatically correct, if anatomically impossible and psychologically implausible, interactions, while the rest would wander in the landscapes of my youth. Lucid, brilliant images of beautiful uninhabited places I had once known and long forgotten floated in front of my eyes, so that I viewed the words processing behind the smeared plastic screen through a mist of paradisiacal scapes. The melancholy of those scenes, evoked in that seamy. steamy interior crowded with phantoms of lust, cruelty, rage and disappointment, is my strongest memory of that time.

Martin Edmond: from Chronicle of the Unsung

Congratulations, Martin. It's a beautiful book, which I treasure, though your hand-written note inside my copy is a bit fulsome.

more Reichian therapy

he
stepped out
of the orgone

box
& lit
up a cigarette

You would think

that by their very meaning, certain words should stick in the mind. But I have just spent the last five minutes trying to recall

velcro

felines & finches

Over the years we've managed to curtail most of the predatory instincts of our cat – a tortoiseshell, called Little One since we once had three cats, all strays, & at a point in time she truly was the smallest one.

In Sydney she would eat lizards & moths, dig up the little frogs from the lawn, catch the occasional bird. But up here the frogs are bigger; she sniffs at them but otherwise leaves them alone. She ignores the birds except when they get too close & then she makes strange birdnoises at them to tell them to go away & stop bugging her. I think there's still the odd moth or lizard in her diet. Her belly sag – popularly supposed to derive in cats from the eating of lizards – is much more pronounced, though that's quite possibly equally due to age. Unsure of that, but at least 16 years old.

But the last few days we’ve had quite a few
 



 
double-barred finches bopping around in the garden. Cute little owl-faced birds, with the body size of a big toe, that come down to eat the seeds of the lawn & garden grasses. Yes, it's the middle of winter, but the seasons are blurred here, would be classified as spring anywhere else, & the temperate plants are convinced that it is & have started flowering & shooting.

When the cat saw the birds, about two metres away from her, neon signs exploded from her brain. Drive through finger food, snacks, hors d'oeuvres, appetisers. She became demented, immediately went into that predatory stretch / flatten out the body / get ready to spring position. I clapped my hands to drive the birds away – hated doing it since I like having them around - & bodily dragged the cat inside.

So now I'm acting as peacekeeper, making sure the two sides are kept separate, trying to keep the cat overfed, so its thoughts & instincts don't take her to places & situations I don't want her to go.

 

One of the ways

of making 40 year old poems seem freshly minted is to see them in translation.

I recently sent Ernesto Priego some bits & pieces, including The right foot of the giant, a selection of my poems from 1959 to 1975. He has translated one of them, For M., which dates from around 1965. I've posted part of it below. The full translation can be found at Never Neutral.

Gracias, amigo.

1
Montañas emergen
de aguas frías. La música, el
sonido creciendo en gritos
de asombro repentinos. Malhumorado. Esta
noche no es la mía.

from: Para M

(The photo of Lake Wanaka is taken from the website of Owen Baxter.)

Ta Moko

"Ta moko, meaning to strike or tap, is the long-standing art form of Maori tattooing. This art form has been practiced for over a thousand years, and has withstood time and colonization. It was used as a form of identification, rank, genealogy, tribal history, eligibility to marry, and marks of beauty and/or ferocity.

 


a painting of Ena Te Papatahi by Charles Goldie
 
"Ta moko designs weren't merely tattooed upon their wearers; they were finely chiseled into the skin. The art preceded wood carvings, so accordingly the first wood carvings copied moko designs. Ta moko are most recognizably done on the face, although other parts of the body are also tattooed.

"Women were traditionally only allowed to be tattooed on their lips, around the chin, and sometimes the nostrils. A woman with full blue lips was seen as the "epitome of Maori female beauty."

"Men, on the other hand, were allowed to have a full facial moko. However not all men were permitted to have their entire faces tattooed."

from Heather Dill: What is ta moko?
 

Survival hay(na)ku

Doing
a Phil
Spector & building

a
wall of
sound around me.

The title

of yesterday's post prompted me into spending the rest of the afternoon & early evening listening to the Stones.

& my favourite Glimmer Twins' track is still Sympathy for the devil.

Let me please introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
And I laid traps for troubadours

Tattoo you

There has to be some cultural thing in Central Queensland about tattooing; which is a bit ironic since, apart from that of the indigenous Aborigines, there is next to no culture here at all.

There is only one tattoo parlour listed in the Rockhampton yellow pages, & one 40 kilometres away on the beach at Yeppoon, but a significant percentage of the local population – at least 10%, possibly higher – have visible tattoos. Maybe it's more evident because in a hot climate people tend to get about in short-sleeved dresses or T-shirts or shorts. Equibalanced between the sexes or perhaps tilting towards women more than men. Mainly small tattoos – hearts, roses, names &, yes, Ernesto, swallows – on ankles & breasts & hands & arms & backs, but there are larger imitation Maori moko or Celtic motifs showing on some legs & arms.

& generational. It is quite common to see mother / daughter / grandaughter all with tattoos. But today four generations! In the supermarket, an eightyish great-grandmother with the female side of her extended family. & showing on her right shoulder-blade, through her thin blouse, the tattoo of a rose.

untitled

He called them
episodes. Preferred
the word to
similar others. The
implications of it.
Continuity. Inter-
relationships &
-dependency. A series
of. Though not
from the beginning
but starting maybe
halfway through. In
that he found a
pattern in the past
then carried it into
the future. Thus
giving reason.
Rationale. Not
fugue. Flightpath.
 

There are

universal truths, & there are Great Universal Truths, & the Greatest of all I found tucked away in a post by Lorna Dee Cervantes at her eponymous blog

"There's nothing that a little dancing to classic motown won't cure."

The title poem

from Ernesto Priego's chapbook The Body Aches. Ernesto has occasionally done me the honour of re-posting some of my poems to his blog. Let me repay him by posting this wonderful poem.

The body aches

How difficult it is, the body tells you, to keep a promise:
To say, painlessly, j'accepte , and keep your word.

I mean the words in those books,
The lips imprinted in pale red, almost purple.

The first page that so quickly became the last,
Among us, what a title, you think now,

How come the book is still here, unread,
Waiting patiently for the ache to go away.

-Ernesto Priego

following up

At some point yesterday, on one of the cable tv news channels, they were conducting a poll on whether "inflammatory Islamic books" should be banned/destroyed & the response was 96% in favour. Though, since it was Fox, I'm a bit surprised it wasn't unanimous.

&, in the same 24 hours,

there was a piece reporting groups in the U.S. calling for the destruction of the Harry Potter books because they were the work of the devil or some such.

& I saw Rupert Murdoch, who became a U.S. citizen so he could buy the Fox network - & who, incidentally, publishes the local weekly giveaway paper, the local daily newspaper, the local State newspaper & the only national newspaper that arrives here early in the morning & is surprised by any question about what's wrong with the concentration of media ownership - introducing Australian Prime Minister Howard who is in Washington to give the keynote address to the Deep Dish Pizza Club or the Betty Crocker Bake-off competition or whatever they call the international assembly of conservative political parties as "this great leader".

& I saw the aforesaid Little Johnnie H. having brunch with Dick Cheney & attending church with George W. & sharing a podium with Donald Rumsfeld where they both said what a free & open democratic process was being followed in the forthcoming trials of the inmates of Guantanamo Bay

& the Howard Government benevolently let "free" on some sort of containment visa the longest-incarcerated detainee in our refugee internment camps. & who, not surprisingly, was taken straight to a psychiatric hospital because seven years in a detention centre run by private industry - how can you, in all clear conscience, make a profit from concentration camps? Though, I suppose if you follow the Nazi model all things are possible - had fucked his mental processes.

& the Treasurer of the government, probably the second-most powerful man in the country, appears on stage at the largest fundamentalist church in the country, & then criticises the new Anglican Primate of Australia who expressed the view that the new industrial relations laws that are about to be brought in might disadvantage a significant percentage of the population.

Karri Kokko recently restructured a Bob Dylan title as a hay(na)ku. Let me purloin the idea & part of a song from the same album.

You
don't need
a weatherman to

know
which way
the wind blows.

Nick Piombino

has some pretty good ideas about ideas at Fait Accompli.

(Though, by his criteria, I probably run a fast food drive-through joint.)

Less than an hour after that last post, the mailman turned up with a copy of Ernesto Priego's wonderful chapbook The Body Aches [Poems and Hay(na)ku].

Jesus, if this is the benefit I get from responding to poems I like a lot then I think I might do it more often!

For what it's worth

since it's probably overall quantity rather than quality, I have posted poem #100 to my Series Magritte.

Though so far there are only 96 poems posted there as #s68-71 are due for publication in MiPoesias later on this year.

Coincidentally I discovered, looking through an old notepad that I grabbed to take with me on my bird-sighting meandering this week, amongst scribblings that later turned into a couple of poems that BlazeVOX published early last year & a couple of hay(na)ku that ended up on As/Is, the first poem in the series. Probably the worst poem, but one has to start somewhere.

& a note - series magritte / serious magritte. Glad I didn't take the latter path.

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

"No site does what this site does -- nudging those doing the doing to talk about what they do in depth."
Crag Hill's poetry scorecard

stigmata

 
Minamata is a small factory town dominated by the Chisso
Corporation. The town faces the Shiranui Sea, and Minamata Bay is
part of this sea. In Japanese, "Chisso" means nitrogen. The
Chisso Corporation was once a fertilizer and carbicle company, and
gradually advanced to a petrochemical and plastic-maker company.
From 1932 to 1968, Chisso Corporation, a company located in
Kumamoto Japan, dumped an estimated 27 tons of mercury compounds
into Minamata Bay. Kumamoto is a small town about 570 miles
southwest of Tokyo. The town consists of mostly farmers and
fisherman. When Chisso Corporation dumped this massive amount of
mercury into the bay, thousands of people whose normal diet
included fish from the bay, unexpectedly developed symptoms of
methyl mercury poisoning. The illness became known as the
"Minamata Disease". The mercury poisoning resulted from years of
environmental destruction and neglect from Chisso Corporation.
 

Hey, Mister, can you tell me / where a man might find a bed

In the 20 or so years since I first / last saw it, I have always had a soft spot for Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, his film of the farewell performance of The Band at Bill Graham's Winterland in San Francisco on Thanksgiving, 1976, remember it as one of the great music / concert movies.

Through a piece of serendipity I watched / listened to it again today. It lived up to my memories of it, though I found Scorsese as naïve interviewer quite funny after the polished perfomances as documentary narrator he's been giving for the last decade. But he's put together a beautiful movie. & Robbie Robertson is not beyond a bit of myth-making.

But the music is what makes it memorable. I've always loved The Band, & they were in great form on this night. & a nice selection of guests. Robbie Robertson & Eric Clapton engaging in a guitar battle which Clapton won. A marvellous version, quite possibly the greatest ever, of The Weight performed by The Band & The Staple Singers. Michael McClure & Lawrence Ferlinghetti read briefly. Paul Butterfield played harmonica on a couple of numbers including a driving version of Mystery Train – I don't know what happened to him, possibly he died young, but the Butterfield Blues Band, with Mike Bloomfield on guitar, was probably the best white blues band ever. Plus Neil Young, Ronnie Hawkins, Joni Mitchell, Dr John, Muddy Waters, Emmylou Harris, Van Morrison.

& finally Bob Dylan, in fine voice, doing Forever Young, & a version of Baby let me follow you down that showed he always wanted to be a rock musician. & then singing the opening verse of I shall be released which was the group finale.

I taped it all, so it won't be another 20 years before I visit it again.

Now I know

I'm living in the fucking backblocks.

Decide it's time I converted from dial-up to broadband. Make a preliminary enquiry, type in my street address, &, yes, though I can't get cable I can get ADSL. & a phone call tells me that with a little bit of wireless technology I can get two connections, in different parts of the house, that can be used simultaneously. Plus there's a special offer on at present, $0 installation fee, halfprice for the first six months of a 24-month contract, unlimited downloads, reasonable upload/download speed.

So I log in to sign up, & discover after typing in the street address that I can only get satellite delivery. Log off, ring up the telco, am told that my preliminary enquiry was just that & it's only when I apply that they do a thorough check on services to the area, that I'm more than four kilometres away from the telephone exchange which means that they can't guarantee line speeds & so won't let me go any other way than satellite & that will cost $700+ for installation of a dish - though if I live in an especially disadvantaged area, & I have to find out separately if I do because they can't tell me, I can get it at 20% of that cost - limited amount of downloads, twice the price, can't run two computers.

This is through Telstra, the national telco. At least, at present national, 51% owned by the government, though that's going to change at any tick of the clock now that the conservatives control the Upper House because they now have the numbers to push through a bill to sell off that remaining 51%. Which means Ma Bell, or one of the bellchildren, or British Telecom or the Russians or the Armenians or the French or the Outer Mongolians or the Tierra del Fuegans or the fucking Martians or anyone who is more interested in making a profit than providing a service will end up owning it.

& since Telstra own most of the infrastructure - lines, exchanges, cables - in the country, it's almost impossible to find anybody else to go through.

The only thing that might stop the total privatisation is if the junior coalition party, the Nationals, primarily rural-based, decide the promises being made just won't stack up. They're already muttering that services to the bush are shithouse, & if privatised are likely to get worse, not better.

As for me, I'm thinking semaphore, or carrier pigeons, or drums, or smoke.

inn(t)erview

A trinity

of erudite writers about poetics at Tom Beckett's e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s.

Geof Huth, who I consider to be the sage - or should that be Qage - of reasoned & informative argument about poetics - visual, verbal & all points in between & beyond - is interviewed by Crag Hill & Ron Silliman working as a tag team. & one of the delights is the way their names get jumbled up, like an excited wrestling commentator trying to keep on top of the tag team action.

Geof, when prompted by himself, writes & creates brilliantly. When prompted by the team of yin & yang, he is even more forthcoming.

This is an interview not to be missed. Thanks, Tom, for providing the stage.

The bird

I saw the other day
 


 
was probably the brolga.
 

Pee time

One of the few
advantages in
being a man is
that you can see
the fattened gold
crescent of the
moon through
the toilet window.

Let us possess one world

Colin McCahon: Let us possess one world
(painted May-July, 1955)

And now good morrow to our waking soules,
Which watch not one another out of feare;
For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse our world, each hath one, and is one.

John Donne: The Good-Morrow
 

Quelle ironie!

I
gasp with
love & count

to
ten to
keep my equilibrium.

The
mistress has
finally mastered hay(na)ku!

Have increased

the text size slightly because I can't read what I've fucking written any more.

Gone to that big PI in the Sky?

Click on the Poetic Inhalation website these days, & you are greeted with "this domain name expired on 06/07/2005 and is pending renewal or deletion". Looks like Andrew & Jeannie have rolled up their tent.

Such a shame if it's not renewed or relocated. There was some wonderful material there, now out of reach. Linkrot should also have been on the agenda at the G8 meeting!

Everything
is not,
if not real.

lines I wish I'd been in a position to write, #1

I was first introduced to Dashiell Hammett by Humphrey Bogart.

from Steven Marcus' intro to D.H.'s The Continental Op. (Marcus was twelve at the time, but who cares? You could dine out on that forever.)

Leaves of Grass

Alex Gildzen reminds me in an email that it is 150 years since Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. I salute its sesqui-centenary.

What a marvellous evolution the book went through over the subsequent years from this beginning, these initial twelve untitled & anonymous poems. & the 1855 edition has a long preface that sets out what has, for me, always been the beacon for the pure side of the duality with which I regard the U.S.

"The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors....They shall be kosmos...without monopoly and secresy...glad to pass any thing to any one...hungry for equal night and day. They shall not be careful of riches and privilege....they shall be riches and privilege....they shall perceive who the most affluent man is. The most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard shall delineate no class of persons nor one or two out of the strata of interests nor love most nor truth most nor the soul most nor the body most....and not be for the eastern states more than the western or the northern states more than the southern."

Feeling a bit better, well, at least the flu symptoms have gone though I still feel like I've been hit by, are they?, neutron bombs that take out the inhabitants but leave the structure intact. & the coughing seems to have torn a stomach muscle or something.

Trying to write when you feel like this is like making telephone calls to people who you know aren't home & don't have message banks. Inevitably the call rings out. In desperation you ring up the weather or other information services, just to hear another computer-generated voice & copy down the data they give you.

I wash some life into my hair, eat a banana as an addendum to breakfast, decide to go for a drive. First time I've been away from the house in four days. Get some petrol, currently $1.11 a litre, then head off to the top of Mt Archer just to hear my ears pop. Well, a bit more than that. Hoped to see the sea without travelling out to it, but all I can see with the cloud about is a bit of space where there doesn't appear to be any land. Looking back, I track the river as it curls into the city, then a straight line through it, then curling away again, sweeping away perhaps, as it heads towards the delta & the salt farms.

I head inland, past the army barracks where the tents have all come down, past the showgrounds still full of petrol tankers waiting to be picked up on prime movers & taken away. An AWACS plane at the airport, & a couple of army helicopters circling around to remind us that it is the 4th of July & some of us are still independent, though for how much longer. The de facto 51st state of rightwing Amerika, but not important enough to qualify as a site for a live8 concert.

Inland, taking the second of the three roads that go cross-country to link up with the highway coming up from the south. I discover a cotton farm, am surprised, didn't think there was enough water to support a venture this near the coast. Several hundred kilometres inland there are cotton farms, with enough water to service them. This one looks a pretty sad attempt.

I don't take Lion Mountain Road but salute the landmark as I pass near staying on the sealed surfaces. Head towards Gracemere, think about going to see the cattle sale but decide against it, cross the Capricorn Highway which heads west & inland, then the Burnett Highway which heads south-west & inland, & finally the Bruce Highway, part of Highway 1, the major thoroughfare of Australia, which roughly follows the coast north to Cairns & south to Brisbane & beyond. To Sydney, sigh, & Melbourne, sigh.

I take a drive past the Woolwash lagoon, still drying up though there has been a little bit of rain. I've realised that it will take a flood to bring the lagoons back up to the levels they were at when we arrived two years ago. This lagoon was black swan heaven when we arrived. Now there are none. No pelicans either. In fact very few water birds.

The Yeppen Yeppen lagoon, just down the road from home, is also drying up, but there's significantly more water in it than in the other lagoons. & more bird life. I divert to look for the pelicans. They find me.

A hay(na)ku from Robert Johnson

 
I
went down
to the crossroad

&
fell down
on my knees
 
 

reading the Kaddish aloud
listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

The highlight

of yesterday, in contrast to the lowlight of finding myself on my arse, was a large glass of fresh-squeezed juice from freshly-picked oranges. We've a tree on the back driveway, that struggles to survive, gives up a branch for every fruit it brings to - fruition? They're crappy to look at, difficult to eat - too full of seeds & pith to make it an easy experience - but very juicy. Oh Lord Vitamin C - I've been touched & now I see the light!

Which reminds me. I thought Billy Graham was dead. But oh no. Seems like he survived Nixon. & copes quite adequately with the adoration of Bill & Hill.

A shopping list

Yesterday morning went up the road & bought

     a small loaf of rye bread
     a loaf of thick sliced white bread
     2 jars of red wine with mushrooms pasta sauce (on special)
     a twin pack of printed paper towels (also on special)
     2L of skim milk
     3 bananas
     3 apples

Totally mundane; except it's an indication of me in denial. No lemons, no aspirin, both of which I was out of. Which is why I ended up later in the day scavenging through the bathroom drawers & swallowing some codeine that I found there.

I should have known better. I've been a heavy smoker for 50 years, wheeze when I breathe & have the appropriate smoker's cough for the length of the addiction. Oxygen deprivation factor #1. I currently have a very heavy chest flu – Odf #2 – that in concert with #1 means that when I cough I feel my head is going to go spinning off. Heavy codeine use, as I discovered earlier this year when I collapsed in a hotel bathroom in Sydney after several days of self-medication for an abcessed tooth, is Odf #3. &, apparently, even light codeine use, when combined with the other two, also impedes the flow of oxygen.

Which is probably why I found myself on the kitchen floor this morning, with no recollection of the descent. Only the coughing fit at the beginning, & me sitting on my arse at the end.

It's about time I stopped pretending I am invincible.

emapathy

Tom Beckett’s Interview with K. Silem Mohammad

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

Putting together

another book, so have been trawling through the archives - the tail feathers? the beak? - of the pelican.

Am surprised, not by the quantity of poems - if you post most days, & much of that is poetry, then you're going to end up with a lot of poems - but by the strength of a significant proportion of it.

I tend to think of what I post here as almost throwaway. Much like the piece immediately below. & a lot of what I write is raw, unrevised. But a lot of it holds up quite well.

So put the first cull together, add some things from other outlets, look, discard, consider again. & I still end up with around 120 pages. This sure ain't gonna be your traditional slim volume.

He
paid meticulous
attention to detial.
 

feudal socialism

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the (French) restoration period had become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hind-quarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

Marx & Engels: The Communist Manifesto

preceding the post below by a couple of years

AS THE CROW FLIES

Why is there never an haruspex around
when you need one? This morning,
when I went outside, the first thing I saw

was seven crows flying silently across the
sky, bisecting it. An omen, obviously
an omen, but how to interpret it? My
knowledge of soothsaying is limited; I am
reluctant to rely solely on it. But there are
no haruspices listed in the Yellow Pages &
none of those gathered under the generic
heading of fortune tellers that I tried had any
connection to one. I cannot remember

ever having seen a shingle in the main street
amongst the dentists, lawyers & adult
book shops, though, mind you, that
phoney arcade is becoming down-at-heel
& an haruspex is just the sort of calling
that might easily find residence there. My
friends know no-one they can recommend,
making sure they point out when telling me
that of course they have no need for one,
then, as I walk away, I hear their frantic
whispering to whoever they are with
asking just exactly what it is I am
talking about. My uncertainty grows

as the day diminishes — I dislike
unfinished business, but who is there
to finish it? Finally the cat brings me back
to the fact that this is going to be a
do-it-yourself divination, depositing
on the back porch an oxymoron, a drab
exotic, a dead sparrow. I clap my hands
to drive her away & begin to explore those
entrails that she has left for me. They
are minute, messy, difficult to separate &

next to useless. By the time I have finished
I am no closer to determining what that flight
of preternaturally silent birds presaged, know
only why the Romans preferred large animals.

(first published in what was, sadly, the last issue of sendecki.com. Linkrot has since set in.)
 

The first issue

of Starfish, edited by PR Primeau & Dimitri Diakopoulos, can be found here. A good collection of writers, a nice selection of their work.

For those perhaps frightened by the use of the word surrealist in the original submission call, let me just post the editors' note:

Some may question of the Surrealistic "authenticity" of the below work. Get your mind out of the gutter. Breton was just another fucking Beatle, etc.. Welcome to the 21st century. Alright!

Issue #2 awaits.
 

The Meeting of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & Karri Kokko

 
J-P.K. Posted on K.K.'s Muisti|Kirja

"I actually met the perp last night, spending a nice summer evening with Jukka and his wonderful family, talking like we've known each other for ages (the first email between us just turned a year). His studio is only a nook in the family room. He's got his lap top there, a few cameras, a keyboard to play music on, a selection of books (a Complete Wordsworth among them). And that's about it. A couple of caged birds chirping above his head, the kind you might see looking out your window, I guess. He showed me how he works. He selects a piece of writing from my blog. He taps away on the lap-top keyboard for a minute or so. Strange-looking code come and go on the screen. And just like that, out of the blue, an image, a newly-composed nonlinear poem, appears (re: Muistikirja). He's done it again. He shows me his mail-art collection. I wonder about the mailman (actually a lady) who delivers the stuff. If there's any more art, they may have to hire more mailmen. He shows me his work as publisher. There's a lot of it for a guy working out of a nook in his living room. Among them there's a book or two by a poet living far and away in QLD. We decide to invite him over. This is how it happens."

K.K. From a comments box below
 
 

Notes before finally blacking out

I have just finished re-reading Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It's probably the third time I've read it, with a thirty year gap between the last two readings. It's a book that's stayed with me, that I've always thought of as a great book. But reading it again I have changed my judgment. Now I consider it to be an extraordinary novel, was weeping as I finished it.

*

I got to thinking about what were my favourite novels, written during my life, or, at least, the part of it where I could consider myself to have some semblance of critical taste. Say from 1950 onwards. The list I came up with:

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula LeGuin
The Thief's Journal – Jean Genet
City of Night – John Rechy
The Miracle of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
The Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
Dhalgren – Samuel Delany
The Shockwave Rider – John Brunner

*

What to make of it? First, that it's obvious I haven't done all that much keeping up with fiction over the intervening years; it's pretty much a sixties list. Then that seven are male, but that inequality is also a sixties thing. Five of the writers are homosexual, six if you count Burroughs. Four of the books are science fiction; if you change that term to speculative fiction, which I prefer, then six fall into the category.

*

If I move away from the specific & into bodies of work, that is, favourite writers, then added to the above - & probably removing Rechy from the list since I consider him to be a one-book wonder, but such a book that I forgive him everything since - would be Borges, Donleavy, Ballard, Kerouac, Brautigan, Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grass, Böll, William Gibson, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Beckett, Trocchi, Eastlake, Vonnegut, de Mandiargues, Bowles, Dürrenmatt, Zelazny. Again, such sexual inequality.

*

What does it say about me? & what, further, if I admit that none of the books listed above would make it to my strictly rationed desert island bunker. That list would probably be:

The Collected Short Stories – J.G. Ballard
The New American Poetry – (ed) Donald M. Allen
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas S. Kuhn
The Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman &/or
The Collected Poems – William Carlos Williams
A Personal Anthology – Jorge Luis Borges
The Complete Nevèrÿon – Samuel Delany (cheating here; 4 books in 1)
The Ascent of Man – Jakob Bronowski
The Portable Magritte

*

All those Thes.
 

Parnasso 3/05

The latest issue of Parnasso, a Finnish journal, has a piece by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen on the cover & a large selection of his work inside.
 


 
I was honoured - thanks, Karri - to be asked to write an accompanying article, what Leevi Lehto who translated the piece - thanks, Leevi - describes as a "sympathetic memoir-essay". Part of the translation:

Silti hän on julkaissut vasta nelisen vuotta, ja enimmän ajan tästä hänen yhteytensä muihin kirjailijoihin ovat olleet yksinomaan sähköisiä. Muutama kuukausi sitten hän mailasi minulle kertoen tavanneensa ensimmäisen suomalaisen runoilijansa. Tuon jälkeen hänen paikalliset kontaktinsa ovat selvästi lisääntyneet. On miellyttävää saada seurata, miten virtuaalinen muuttuu (myös) reaaliseksi.

For those of you for whom Finnish is their first language, Leevi has posted his translation here. For the small remainder, the original sympathetic memoir-essay is posted in full below.
 
 

I sing the body electric

I came back to writing & publishing poetry, after an absence of twenty-five years, about three (publishing) or four (writing) years ago. In many ways it seemed that things hadn't changed all that much. Sure modern had given way to post-modern; there had apparently been "Poetry Wars" during my absence – I'm still unsure what they were about, but reading Ron Silliman I think they had something to do with l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry vs the 'School of Quietude'. But overall it struck me as the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

With one significant exception. The internet had evolved, had given rise to a large number of poetry e-zines; & for someone like myself who had always hated snail-mail submissions this was a gift beyond measure.

One of the first places I was published in on my return was can we have our ball back . I had heard of almost none of the poets in the issue, but amongst those with whom I shared a line in the list of contributors on the front page was a person called Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. To my Anglo-Saxon eye it was a name that leapt from the screen. Evocative. As I've written elsewhere, Jukka-Pekka like a ragged mountain range, Kervinen like the valleys that run down from them.

I recognised him immediately as an innovator, but I had difficulty with his work at first. I had an idea of what he was doing, had recently completed a degree majoring in operations research so understood about stochastic processes & recognised those within his work, realised that these pieces were the equivalent of a steady state at the end of a Markov chain. But I was looking for meaning, &, in doing so, was overlooking the meaning of & in his pieces, was disregarding the validity of chance. I had forgotten about the exquisite corpses of the surrealists, or Isadore Ducasse's chance meeting of an umbrella & a sewing machine on an operating table.

We shared more appearances in magazines. I discovered Jukka the composer, the editor, the publisher, the collaborator. I read more of his work, went back & re-read what I had previously seen. I began to appreciate the patterns in it, the beauty of haptic coagulations & aggregations of words, realised that strict structure was not necessarily a stricture. & I watched the development of the pieces, how space & spaces started to appear in them, & non-letter keyboard characters, & incomplete words.

What brought us together was the As/Is weblog in which we both participated. Occasionally we'd comment on one another's postings & we developed one of those acquaintances that you strike up in blogland. I sent him some poems for his e-zine xStream , we started to exchange emails, I started my own blog & posted there, first, a poem based on the subject lines of a series of spam emails I had been getting that seemed to use a program to produce random text which I jokingly suggested he may have developed, & second, a 'Poem beginning with a line from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen', a line which was taken from a piece posted to his nonlinear blog. We laughed about it in the emails that we exchanged after this, & 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.

These to me were the moment of enlightenment, epiphany, satori, whatever you care to call it. I was suddenly transported into his work, a dimensional shift. Letters, words, fragments floated about me like macrophages in the bloodstream. I was inspired as I had never been before, & in the space of 2½ days we conspired to produce The Oracular Sonnets.

Other collaborative pieces & sequences followed. I became influenced by what he did, not the programming aspect – I write programs like the Russians designed rockets, dreadfully overengineered – but the conceptual. I noted with interest that some techniques we'd employed in our collaborations – the overlaying of linear text on nonlinear for example – appeared in his poems.

But nothing prepared me for what Jukka started doing next. I'd seen some visual stuff of his – basically text decorated by asemic images – in an issue of eratio . I'd seen the covers for his xPress(ed) range of e-books. A couple of posts at nonlinear appeared to be magnified details of larger works, letters overlapping, some colour. Then, seemingly from nowhere, these incredibly developed text & colour pieces appeared. Letters & words drifted like the macrophages I mentioned earlier, phased in & out, hinted, tempted, teased. It was as if he was now displaying what lay beneath his work, the fractals, the Mandelbrot curves.

They appeared full-grown, full-blown, as if he had been working on them all his life. As visual images they were amazing, painterly, balanced, with all the tension one associates with great works of art.

A lesser person might have been tempted to stop there, to be content with this incredible achievement. But not Jukka. His work has continued to develop & evolve since then, has branched off into different directions. His asemic pieces have been hived off, he has moved into pieces without text, with vibrant colours like those intense acrylics one sees painted onto customised cars. He has moved into mailart, where he indulges his love of collage, communication & collaboration. He is now posting photographs in which he adds a further physical dimension to his 2D textual conjecturing. His blogs, for that is where we still see most of his work, cross-pollinate one another. His is a vision splendid, a vision unique. He is truly one of the great innovators of our time.

Yet Jukka has only been publishing for four years or so & for most of this time his only contact with fellow writers has been electronic. A few months ago he wrote me in an email that he had met his first Finnish poet. Since then his contacts have obviously grown. It is pleasing to see the body ethereal become the body corporeal.
 

contradiction

 
 
 

this space
deliberately
left blank

 
 
 

The Tapa Notebook

Some sculptor some-
where, who said:
Chip away at the
block of marble until
you find the form
inside. But this the
prelude, forming
the block of stone
from these white
pages. & then, &
only then. Then I
am not a note-
book person, have
only ever kept one
once before, three
decades back, East
Sydney, a bedsit
with wire on the
windows & whores
on the street outside.
& the book in keep-
ing with the cheap
surroundings, un-
branded cover,
coarse paper,
faint blue lines.

*

An internal journal. No
mention of the journeys
I sometimes made
in Paul Simon's
footsteps. Nothing
in it but lists of
books to read or
read, synopses
of Bogart movies
found in the supine
black & white ventures
of my nights. Nothing
ever out of it but
part of a poem
that lists the lists.

*

This book is
contra-
diction. The cover
tapa cloth, traditional.
But the paper inside
high-tech, high
gloss. So much
dioxin used. So
white I am
afraid to write
on it. An impediment
to speech. Contra
diction.

*

So frightening
six months to
write a word
in it. & then
a fabric-
ation that
perhaps I
wrote. Or.
Perhaps I
wrote of it
but fore-
words &
someone else
transcribed
them after. Or.
I did make
use of it. Half
anyway. & only
half of that. One
side of the
page. But
whole poems.


*

Writing on the
recto, leaving
the verso blank.
 

Lakes
freeze from
the outside in.
 

This started off as one thing, & ended up as another

After a week of showmanship, military exercises & the contemplation of Bettie's arse/ass, I've decided to try & rebalance my chi by adding a couple of blogs to the sidebar.

Yin & yang as it were. One linking to the pelican, one not. One male, one female. One indulging the physical – Jim Goar posting to Can of Corn from Seoul in South Korea - & the other the spiritual – another Jean Vengua blog, Mnemosyne's Hem, posted from beside the River Lethe. Or maybe from in it. If my memory serves me right - & it should, since my short-term memory is still fine & I looked this up only a couple of minutes ago – Mnemosyne was a Titan, & the Mother of the Muses. An apt description of Jean.

(&, in passing, let me just confess that hearing piped Suthron music emanating from the spare ribs booth at the Show last night reminded me that I rank the banjo below bagpipes which I rank below the accordion. The latter is steadily moving up the list, even if by default.)

I do not know what the etiquette of linkage is, or even if there is one. I do not feel obliged to link to a blog just because it links to mine, nor do I require, if I like the blog, that it has a link pointing in this direction. I was intrigued by someone a week or so ago who raised a link to the pelican & then removed it, two days later, because I hadn't responded reciprocally. I agree, in theory if not in practice, with Tom Beckett whose link list is his on-going crush list – "These are the blogs that I visit a time or three or four a day. I can't get enough of them. They are my cyber-paramours." But I also feel a responsibility that my island within this island in the Southern Ocean, an area sparsely populated by what I'll loosely describe as literary bloggers, can be used as a sort of caravanserai, a transit station, with signposts pointing in all directions.

I try & regularly visit as many blogs as I can in the sidebar, but these days it takes me almost a day just to get through the Js. Cycle time to cover the entire link list is probably nearly a week, for there are a large number that I try to visit daily.

& the blog itself? Ernesto Priego, at Never Neutral, recently wrote:

"I remain amazed at the possibilities of blogging. Never mind the technical ones (the raise of mp3 blogs, for example, has changed the blogosphere of late in a way I could not have predicted three years ago). I mean the possibilities for writing, for tone, of ways of addressing. I remain surprised at those bloggers who keep their blogs as open letters to what they perceive as a closed circle of relatives/friends, using a writing style similar to that of the initmate journal or the personal letter. Why use a blog then, and not, say, an email group? And yet those bloggers seem so certain that their friends/relatives are reading them. Even with my tracking thing, I could never be sure anyone -in specific- is reading me. And there are those bloggers who write as if they were publishing in a magazine or book, with a seriousness and solemnity like no other. They allow no personal hint to come out: they think their blogs are "impersonal" which, in my humble opinion, would be a contradiction of sorts), "professional" forums to showcase their work."

I do not look on this blog as a journal, though it has aspects of one - I post entries daily, which meets the jour criteria; I comment on things that happen to me, that I have encountered, I write down notes. I do not treat the blog as if I was publishing in a magazine because I'm much more casual here, let things get through even if they're rough, unpolished. & because so much of my stuff does get posted here, I now rarely send things off to journals, electronic or print - & another piece of etiquette I am unsure of; if a poem is posted to a blog, is it then published? & not available for submission elsewhere? I am not knowledgeable in poetics or philosophy, so any didactic writing tends to the political – not that I'm knowledgeable in that either, but I do have a deep-rooted leftwing set of beliefs that are often offended in these current times. I write for my friends, & learn & take pleasure from what they write. & in my isolate island, the only friends I have are those I have made through electronic contact.

Blogs have opened up a world for me, & so I open myself up to it. I write with a freedom I have rarely had. I spent too many years pretending to be someone who I was not, or, at least, showing only a part of who I was, who I am. I do not have enough years left to me to continue with that sort of masquerade.
 

Eileen

I
first thought
this, but then
 


decided
a hay(na)ku
was more appropriate.
 
 
 

Tom Beckett Title #12 - Birds are going nuts

(I'm cheating again, Tom, big time this time. The poem below originally appeared as All Things Bright & in can we have our ball back about eighteen months ago. But I think it fits in with your title, & so I'm re-badging it. I hope you've enjoyed the dozen pieces, & I thank you for providing the evocative & inspirational names. I've enjoyed the ride.)
 
 
On an otherwise uneventful day
the sun turns an angry
shade of burgundy, birds
fall screaming to the ground
& the whole cicada universe
rises in a stirring rendition of
Bohemian Rhapsody . There is
an underlying humming
which is unsettling everyone.

In this land where lemmings
are unknown, it falls to the
lemurs to be the first to throw
themselves en masse off The Gap,
the local focal point of ultimate
reconciliation for those for whom
the parts of their lives were
previously unreconcilable. Llamas
& meerkats watch in trepidation
as the humming grows louder.
Rising from a bunker deep below
an organic mink farm in the Rockies
what started off sounding like some
tantric mantra has finally resolved
into a tuneless anthem. After many
false beginnings the content now
seems settled on. There is an axis
of evil that threatens the world.
The Homeland must be protected.

Armed men stream forth to make
it happen. They are adorned with
blackened faces & head mikes, symbolic
decoration to show just how far beyond
the godless underdogs this nation
under god has progressed in a
sesqui-century — all the way
from minstrel shows to Madonna
concerts. They roam pro-
claiming they are on a holy
mission, a jihad to rid the world of
something so insidious it cannot
be seen, can only be identified
by scanning equipment that picks up
aberrations in the brain's alpha
waves. Billions have died before
it is realised the equipment is so
imprecise that any brain activity
is considered to be aberrant.

When no one else remains
the missionaries turn upon themselves
fearing that they too may have been
contaminated. Leaving behind
only the cicadas continuing to work
their way through the Queen songbook;
the mink who, finally freed from
enforced separation & a diet of
vegetables & vitamin supplements,
are frantically fucking their tiny tits off
as they prepare to inherit & ultimately
overrun the earth; & someone somewhere
saying "See, Gaia. I promised you
a fur coat, & Daddy always delivers."
 

Good Golly, Miss Molly

 
and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
 

#10 Cartoon Captions (cheating a bit)

True Humility or: The Curate's Egg
(George du Maurier, Punch 1895)


 
Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad pelican eggblog, Mr. Beckett!"
The Curate: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you ! Parts of it are excellent!"
 
 
 

What a week

& a bit it's been.

Four poems dedicated to me, by four great poets. Bill Allegrezza, harry k. stammer, Tom Beckett & Ernesto Priego.

& if that's not enough, now I discover I'm the winner of Didi Menendez' competition for a poem entitled El culo de Bettie.

Wow!

Now I know what Eileen means by the word preeeen.
 

taking over the world

It
is summer
in the northern

latitudes
& the
days are one

thousand
years long
& just so

no
second goes
by empty, Jukka-

Pekka
Kervinen has
started a new

blog,
photocollabs, with
Thomas Lowe Taylor.

Photos
by Taylor,
digital alterations, J-P.K.
 

Martin Edmond, reflecting on a year of blogging

"I loved the tone of some of the exotica I was posting last year; now the writing seems more humdrum than I would like. It was to exile the humdrum to another place that I started a companion site, dérives which might paradoxically show more flash and gleam than this one does. Or not. I'm always dissatisfied when I'm not working on a book, which I'm not now, and maybe that's all I mean. I have two folders on my desktop, both with titles I really like, neither with any definite plan. One, I can't decide whether to write as a film or a book, which probably means it should be a film. The other is certainly a book but, although I know what the subject matter is, I still haven't found the voice in which to write it. And, because it is difficult subject matter, I keep shying away from really engaging with it. At the back of my mind is the thought that there might be some other thing that has not yet lurched forward into the light. I feel, I suppose, strangely adrift from my unconscious, or dream life, or whatever ... a state I recognise having been in before. A kind of limbo perhaps. I think of what Keats said about negative capability, to be able to be in a state of suspended disbelief without irritable reaching after fact or reason. (I might be misquoting here). I think of another phrase, the discipline of indiscipline. However. On the other side of the scales, outweighing all introspection and doubt, there is the wonderful, sustaining, always stimulating sense of being a part - however obscure, hesitant or refractory - of a community of writers also engaged in this extraordinary process of extending consciousness to cyberspace."
Martin Edmond: limbo and/or cyberspace

Ah, dear Martin. Delightful, insightful, evocative, provocative, moving, grooving, enlightening & a thousand or so other adjectives might apply. But humdrum? Never!
 

Wittgenstein Etudes #2b

for Tom Beckett

I
enjoyed Wittgenstein's
warped woof much


more
when I
read Tractatus  backwards.
 

in the inbox

Dear SudsLovers,

SHAMPOO issue 24, the FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EXTRAVAGANZA,
is now hot off the shelf and ready for your shower.

Please dispense modestly from:

www.ShampooPoetry.com

Rinse and repeat and repeat with poetry by Alli Warren, Amanda Laughtland,
Anselm Berrigan, Beth Woodcome, Bill Berkson, Brent Cunningham,
C. S. Carrier, Carolyn Gregory, Cassie Lewis, Catherine Meng, Cedar Sigo,
Charles Bernstein, Chris Stroffolino, Christopher Wells, Clark Coolidge,
Cynthia Sailers, Dan Beachy-Quick, Del Ray Cross, Denise Duhamel,
Eileen Tabios, Elaine Equi, Eric Raanan Fischman, Geoffrey Cruickshank-
Hagenbuckle, Harvey Goldner, Jack Kimball, Janean Williams, Jennifer
Dannenberg, Jim Behrle, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Jonathan Hayes, Joseph Torra,
Justin Chin, K. Silem Mohammad, kari edwards, Kathleen Miller, Katina
Douveas, Kevin Killian, Kit Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Farrell,
Michael Magee, Michael Robins, Michelle Trigleth, Norma Cole, Otto Chan,
Paolo Javier, Phil Crippen, Robert Gluck, Ron Padgett, Ron Silliman, Ronald
Palmer, S.J. Holland-Batt, Sean Cole, Shane Allison, Solidad Decosta,
Stephanie Young, Stephen Vincent, Sung-san Hong, Therese Marie Bachand,
Tim Yu, Timothy Liu, Tina Celona, William Corbett, and Yedda Morrison;
plus LatherLicious ShampooArt by Ronald Palmer and Otto Chan.

What better way to thank you all for five great years of SHAMPOO pleasure!

Scrub-it-cuz-you-lub-it,

Del Ray Cross, Editor
SHAMPOO
clean hair / good poetry
 

Ficciones with Tom Beckett titles #1

Stendhal's Squirrels

Stendhal intended
Le Rouge et le Noir
to be a book for
younger readers. Some-
thing of a parable, a memoir
about his two pet
squirrels. A red he had
named Hudson after
its Latin classification
Tamiasciurus hudsonicus ; &
Caroline, the black,
Sciurus carolinensis . As he
lead them on leashes
through the Bois de
Boulogne on their morning
walks together he would
write down what he imagined
the conversations might
be about as the squirrels
explored their cultural
differences, the European
& the American, an
anticipation of Henry James.
In the early evening he
would transcribe his journal,
shaping it into the
makings of a pleasant
manuscript. Everything
went well until the day
they were attacked by a
rabid dog that scented
breakfast. The squirrels
got away from
Stendhal. So too, when
he eventually came back
to it, did the book.
 

oh joy, we're having visitors

The local paper reports:

More than 6000 Australian & 11,000 U.S. personnel will participate in Talisman Sabre '05, a merger of the Tandem Thrust & Crocodile series of exercises. They will be involved in intensive training at Shoalwater Bay, Rockhampton, Townsville & the Coral Sea.

Talisman Sabre's primary aim is to conduct collective training & exercise inter-operability between Australian & U.S. forces.

The biennial exercise will further develop the Australian Armed Forces' capability to undertake joint, combined operations & will help build regional security & complement Australia's regional partners' activities with the U.S.

Based on fictional scenarios, the exercise includes combined Special Forces operations, parachute drops, amphibious landings at Shoalwater Bay, artillery & infantry manoeuvres, air combat training & advanced maritime operations.

The exercise is being conducted in accordance with approved environmental rules, guidelines & audits.

Past experience shows that the "environmental rules & guidelines" get paid as much attention to here as they do in Iraq. The first friendly fire incident came about when an army truck laden with two armoured personnel carriers almost wiped me out when it turned across my path instead of giving way. The first hostile action occurred when two U.S. sailors were arrested in Townsville in the process of smuggling 11 kg of amphetamines ashore.

Ah, but these are minor things, considering it is estimated that around $5 million will be spent in the Rockhampton community as a result of the exercise. Though this is somewhat tempered by the fact that it tends to cost the local community about $1 million to fix up the damage caused by heavy traffic on minor roads & artillery fire in the undergrowth.
 

taken this out of the comment box below

call for work

"I am producing and editing a chapbook anthology for differentia books called, thematically, High Plains Drifting. What you need to do is make some high plains drifting in one (to two) pages of text. Address to: differentiabooks ~ gmail.com. Cite project name in subject line. I can process Word documents (while trying to acquire Pagemaker,) and inline email text and b&w (or sepia toned, or maybe color) images are fine. Selected original image gets the cover. One brilliant entry so far."
Jesse Crockett
6.10.05

A pleasurable note

I am delighted to see amongst the books listed by Charles Bernstein as being notable for Summer 2005 ( &, in passing, a big thankyou to Eileen for preening over the brick which is also on the list & pointing me towards it) Michele Leggott's Milk & Honey.
 


 
It (& the brick) have been sitting on the desk beside my pc for the last couple of months, read with continuing enjoyment & delight, a pleasure intensified by the hand-written notes from the poets inside each.

Charles Bernstein's comment:

Michelle Leggott, Milk & Honey (New Zealand University Press)Impressario of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Center and author of Reading 80 Flowers, professor at the University of Auckland, Michelle Leggott continues to write complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision.

(Though, Charles, please note there is only one l in Michele. & to describe it as being published by the New Zealand University Press would have every university in N.Z. outside Auckland frothing at the mouth.)