It's
getting cooler
in the mornings.

What $100 Million buys you these days

or: Poetry? I thought you were giving it for poverty.

or: I'll do you an obscenity for $1 if that's what you're after, & throw in a blowjob for free.












Twenty-three Ways to Say I Love You
Valentine's Day poems from the PoetryFoundation.org archive.


Almost Brand New
Publishers select their favorite love poems from recent books.


Ted Kooser Sends His Love
Selections from the Poet Laureate's annual Valentine's Day postcard poems.


Forgotten Love
Discover why Tagore is one of the most beloved poets in Asia.
(from Poetry Magazine)

PLUS
Hearing Voices at the Met
Fra Angelico and the dramatic monologues of Browning. By W.S. Di Piero.


Two Drama Kings Take on a Master
Paul Giamatti and Alfred Molina Read "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "My Last Duchess."


Reading Guide: Robert Browning
In the realm of the world-class talkers.


The Diction of Dance
Applying poetics to dance: a review of the most recent New York dance season.


To Infuse (As Life) By Breathing
Facing a grim diagnosis, a man has a charmed collision with a poem. A story by Elaine Segal.


Would She Have Been a Blogger?
A letter from the editor about this new site and the founder of Poetry.


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/

Check out

the latest issue of MiPOesias & The not-so-Violent Femmes.

A couple of days ago

I was wishing I could be in Finland with my friends. Now it seems, according to this link that Marko Niemi has sent me, it mightn't be that difficult to get there.

But a couple of apologies. To my friends in the Americas, I'm sorry I didn't drop in & say hello when I was in the neighbourhood. & to Lars Palm in the Canary Islands, oops, sorry. You're either underneath my landmass, or that's me sitting across the table from you in the outdoor café on the beach & I haven't introduced myself.

There should be

some sort of moratorium put in place by Blogger that prohibits, for a number of months anyway, the acquisition of names of blogs that have been terminated by their owners.

I am overwhelmed by grief. For the past few days I have been greeted by the dreaded blog not found when I've tried to visit Kirsten Kaschock's Negative Wingspan. Now there's a blog back there, but……

The name is no longer in caps but in lower case, & napisan would be a better name for it based on the only post. It is possible that it's all a huge joke, & the links would seem to give that a whiff of creedence. But it's not clear(water), & it's not a revival, & it's a sad suicide note, if that's what it is.

So, I'll leave the link in the sidebar for a couple of days, & if the diapers haven't been changed by then…..

Couldn't resist

this word verification.

Can't decide whether it's to do with Dr e-Jeku & Mr e-Hyde, or the beginning of the climax of one of Tom Beckett's "deleted sex scene hay(na)ku competition" entries.

I always say

I won't respond to tags. But every so often I get tagged by someone I like, & my resolutions go out the window.

This time the evildoer was Rochita the Raindancer who also tagged Eileen Tabios, & since Eileen - bitch - has decided to respond, now I feel obliged to as well, though my answers will be nowhere near as interesting as either Eileen's or Rochita's.

Three books I can read over & over

I've read a lot of books over & over over the years. Singling any out - if that's the correct term when you're dealing with more than one - is hard, but I'd probably go for:

1) The New American Poetry edited by Donald M. Allen.
2) The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammett
=3) the Collected Poems I, 1909-1939, of William Carlos Williams
& Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany

Three Places I've lived

1) Hokitika (the first place I ever lived)
2) Sydney (where I lived the longest, & will probably go back to)
3) Rockhampton (where I'm living now)

Three TV shows I love

Owned up to these before.

1)The West Wing
=2) South Park, & Doctor Who
3) Buffy

Though, showing my age, I would have to say that my alltime favourites would be two documentary series, Kenneth Clark's Civilisation & Jakob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, both of which also fall into the books over & over category.

Three highly regarded & recommended TV shows I've never watched a minute of

You did say 300? Oh, only three. OK. 1) Survivor
2) Friends
3) The O.C. Can I keep on going?

Three places I've vacationed

What's a vacation?

Three of my favourite dishes

1) Fish & chips in certain places at certain times
2) My three cheese / bacon / potato / egg / pecan / carrot / tomato / sun-dried tomato / sultana (or golden raisins as Tom Beckett told me they were called in the US) & lettuce salad
3) Lamb Rogan Josh (because I cooked it tonight, & there's enough left over for tomorrow)

Three sites I visit daily

You know who you are.

Three places I'd rather be right now

1)Finland (with my friends)
2) California (with my friends)
3) Anywhere but here

for tZOM BIEckett

o.k. so
christ rose again
from th’ dead
& it’s
supposed to be
his birthday
which this year
just happened
to fall
on th’ nameday
of baron samedi
so maybe
it is a
temporal
topic

& even tho
you do
th’ voodoo
that you do
so well

i worry about
someone who
comes up
outta th’
ground @
xmas &
spends
th’ holiday
writing
with such
familiarity
about
th’ living
dead


(Posted to As/Is a year or so ago, as a response to the first of what have now become Tom Beckett's Little Book of Zombie Poems. I liked the poems then, still do, but I still worry about the writer…….)

drawrof
back
 
&
 

kcab
forward

Other-
wise it
would be prose.

For the past

twenty or so months, the ABC, the Australian public broadcaster - public in so far as the conservative government, that continues to tighten the purse strings because it thinks the ABC has a leftwing bias, will let it be - has been replaying episodes of Doctor Who, starting with ones made in 1963 & continuing through to 1989 ones. Four evenings a week, then five, then two episodes a night. Fucked up dinner preparations, but I watched them all.

Seven different leading actors across the years - regeneration in a new body was the cause of the transitions - from grandfather characters through to nerds. My favourite was Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, though it helped that this was the time when the best scripts were coming through. I might be wrong about this, but I think it was about this time that Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was, first, writing scripts, then acting as script editor.

Dr Who was amateurly done, though it improved with age (& technology), but one of the joys from this point in time is picking out just who ripped it off over the years. Star Trek definitely, Star Wars just a little & a mutual ripping off.

After 1989 it went across to radio with the same voices. I think the comic books & the paperbacks continue to come out. & a couple of years ago back to TV, different Doctors, a new one in each of the three new series, although so far in Australia we've only seen the first.

Now the replays have ended. My evenings won't be the same, though the dinners may get more attention in their making.

re the post below

I sent myself an email, asking to be let in, & it seems to have worked. But keep that paranoia chilled, Jim.

One / step away / from total paranoia

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

You are not authorized to view this page
You might not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials you supplied.

If you believe you should be able to view this directory or page, please try to contact the Web site by using any e-mail address or phone number that may be listed on the seriesmagritte.blogspot.com home page.

Just a reminder

of the "deleted sex scene hay(na)ku" competition that Tom Beckett has running

Eventually
the screaming
stopped & an

elephant
emerged from
the bedroom. Then

the
hammering started.
I looked in,

found
him re-
building the bed.

My
eyebrows quizzed
him. Noisy bloody

ele-
phants, he
said. Takes half

the
joy out
of bestiality worrying

what
the neigh-
bours might think.

Seems like

not only

Hay(na)ku
is dangerously
spreading in Mexico!

as Ernesto Priego points/posts out but it is coming dangerously close to being the official verse form of Finland.

Joining Karri Kokko, Marko Niemi (here & here), & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (co-publisher & visual interpreter of The First Hay(na)ku Anthology), is a new Finnish blogger, Lassi Miinalainen, who in his very first entry at his blog Jälkikäteen posts three poems, including a hay(na)ku.

So, as the form spreads to cold & hot climes, & everywhere in between

Let
us here
give praise to

Eileen Tabios, the
inventor of
hay(na)ku

who, despite her recent protestations to the contrary, will always be considered so.

Just out,

the latest issue of what I consider to be THE heavyweight of all e-zines, Michael Rothenberg's Big Bridge.

The only thing

I have brought out from a day of busyness, some of it crazy, some of it productive, some of it completing things only to discover that I have to do them again because some bastard changed the parameters without telling any one, is that the action, the burning of the French warship L'Orient at the Battle of the Nile, that produced the painting below


was also the inspiration for the much-bawdlerized poem Casabianca, in which

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;

The amazing

Bob Grumman is interviewed by the equally amazing Geof Huth at the (amazing)³ e-values.

The catalogue

of Bill Allegrezza's Moria e-books has just doubled with four recent additions. A global selection. From Italy, Anny Ballardini's Opening and Closing Numbers; from the U.S., Francis Raven's Cooking with Organizational Structures; from the Canary Islands, Lars Palm's Mindfulness; & from Australia, it's that damned Antipodean again, with a selection from: Series Magritte.



The books are all available for downloading from here, & are all also available as POD hardcopies via Lulu, details given on the same page.

My deepest thanks, Bill, for placing me in such wonderful company.

A footnote to my Australia Day post &/or why I am embarrassed about living where I do

paraphrased from: The Sunday Mail, 1/29/06

Five Rockhampton youths have been charged over a series of Australia Day shootings which police allege were racially motivated.

Each faced four counts of acts intended to cause grievous bodily harm by injuring or maiming, one count of unlawful wounding, & weapons offences. The teenagers were charged over the alleged shooting of an Aboriginal boy.

On Friday, Rockhampton Magistrates Court heard that **** had been driving around with an airgun, looking "to shoot an Aboriginal person" on Australia Day.

It was further reported that a 15-year old girl underwent surgery for a wound suffered on the same day. She went to the hospital thinking she had been stung by an insect, was given a Band-Aid & sent home.

But after reading reports about a 13-year old boy being shot in the ribs by an airgun on Australia Day, the girl "put two and two together" & contacted police.

They took her back to the hospital where x-rays confirmed that she had an airgun pellet in her back. She underwent surgery & remained in hospital overnight.

gong xi fa cai

Begun -
The Year
of the Dog.

satisfiction

A / midnight riff / for Karri Kokko

Haastattelee.
Hiisi vieköön!
Haastattelussa by Jove!

Terra Nullius

originally published in BlazeVOX

On January 26, 1788

Captain Arthur Phillip, on behalf of the Crown of Great Britain, took formal possession of the colony of New South Wales and became its first Governor.

However, for Aboriginal Australians and many others, the 26th of January is not a day for celebration. To them the date signifies invasion and dispossession. As Thomas Keneally noted in his 1997 Australia Day address -

"A majority of Australians can see why today cannot be a day of rejoicing for all, and that therefore there may be grounds for ultimately finding an Australia Day, a celebration of our community, with which we can all identify."

The choice of 26 January as the day of celebration for all Australians has been queried and argued from a historical and practical viewpoint from the 1800s. That the day might symbolise invasion, dispossession and death to many Aboriginal people was a concept alien to the average Australian until even the latter half of the 20th century. The Editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald of 2 January 1995, arguing for a change of date, stated that January 26 “can never be a truly national day for it symbolises to many Aborigines the date they were conquered and their lands occupied. This divisive aspect to 26 January, the commemoration of the landing at Sydney Cove, will never be reconciled”.

Involvement of the Indigenous community on Australia Day has taken many forms - forced participation in re-enactments, mourning for Invasion Day, peaceful protest through to an acknowledgment of survival and an increasing participation in community events at a local level.

By 1888, the year of the centenary celebrations, the white population had increased significantly while the Aboriginal population had declined from at least 750,000 in 1788 to a mere estimated 67,000. (Aboriginal people were not counted in the census until after 1967). The 1888 Centenary events overwhelmingly celebrated British and Australian achievement and as Nigel Parbury writes in his book Survival: ”In 1888 Aboriginals boycotted the Centenary celebrations. Nobody noticed.”

By 1938, the Aboriginal community was becoming well organised in the white ways and able to make strong demands for political rights and equality. An Australian Aborigines League (AAL) had been formed in 1932 and this was followed in 1937 by the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), a group that began to achieve publicity in the press and addressed a variety of groups such as the NSW Labor Council.

The AAL leader William Cooper and the APA's leader William Ferguson, were instrumental in organising the Day of Mourning Committee for the 1938 Sesquicentenary celebrations. A manifesto, Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights, was published and on Australia Day a conference and protest were held in the Australian Hall, Sydney. Five days later, the APA led an Aboriginal delegation to meet with the Prime Minister and soon after Australia Day, the Committee for Aboriginal Citizen Rights was formed.

The Aboriginal community's push for recognition was highlighted by the 1938 official Australia Day celebrations. Due to a refusal to cooperate by city-based Aborigines, the government imported Aborigines from western communities, locking them up in a stable at Redfern Police Barracks. Immediately following the re-enactment, the group featured on a float in the huge parade in Macquarie Street. The following day they were “sent back to their tin sheds on the Darling River”.

Re-enactments of Phillip's landing continued to be an accepted part of Australia Day ceremonies around the country and it wasn't until the Bicentennial in 1988 that the New South Wales government refused to condone a re-enactment as part of their official proceedings.

On January 26 that year, 40,000 Aboriginal people (including some from as far away as Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory) and their supporters marched from Redfern Park to a public rally at Hyde Park and then on to Sydney Harbour to mark the 200th anniversary of invasion.

From this march grew the concept of "Invasion Day" and "Survival Day", marking the anniversary of the beginning of land loss, but also recognising the survival of a race of people who had been expected to die out. In 1992 the first Survival Day concert was held at La Perouse and in 1998 the event moved to Waverley Oval near Bondi Beach.



The Aboriginal Flag was designed by Harold Thomas, an artist and an Aboriginal, in 1971. The flag was designed to be an eye-catching rallying symbol for the Aboriginal people and a symbol of their race and identity. The black represents the Aboriginal people, the red the earth and their spiritual relationship to the land, and the yellow the sun, the giver of life.

In the late 1960s, Aborigines stepped up their campaign for indigenous land rights through protest marches, demonstrations, banners and posters. The protests increased in the early 1970s and Harold Thomas noticed they were often outnumbered by non-Aborigines with their own banners and placards. He decided they needed to be more visible and the idea of the flag was born.

The Aboriginal flag was first raised in Victoria Square in Adelaide on National Aboriginal Day in 1971, but was adopted nationally by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in 1972 after it was flown above the Aboriginal "Tent Embassy" outside of the old Parliament House in Canberra.

It is perhaps the only symbol commonly accepted by the diversity of Aboriginal people.

The Aboriginal flag is increasingly being flown by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. In view of its increasing importance in Australian society, the Government initiated steps in 1994 to give the flag legal recognition. After a period of public consultation, the Government made its own decision in July 1995 that the flag should be proclaimed a "Flag of Australia" under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953. The flag was so proclaimed by the Governor General of Australia, William Hayden, on 14 July 1995.

The official flag, the Union Jack, the outcome of a competition 100 years ago, reflected the 1901 Federation’s historical background, the Southern Cross its place in space, and the large star the six States making up the Federation. Here, it was said, was a flag containing "history, heraldry, distinctiveness and beauty".

However, the flag still had no legal status beyond the original British Admiralty authorisations which only related to use at sea. It wasn't until the Flags Act 1953 (enacted 1954) was passed by the Menzies Government that Australia finally had an official national flag, and one that was required to be flown in a superior position to any other national flag (including the Union Flag).

The Flags Act 1953 formally adopted the current design as Australia's "National Flag" and the Act was assented to by Queen Elizabeth II on her first visit to Australia on 15 April 1954, the first Act of the Australian Parliament to receive assent by the Monarch rather than the Governor General. Finally, more than 53 years after the first design was hoisted, Australia had an official national flag.

The Australian flag was usually flown in conjunction with, often in an inferior position to, the Union Flag of the UK well into the 1960s despite the requirements of the Flags Act 1953. Many Australians considered themselves to be Britons, and Arthur Smout in his 1968 The Flag Book lamented the fact that many seemed to show more loyalty to the Union Flag than to the Australian flag.

Today, there is a growing debate about whether Australia should adopt a new flag, as many see the current British ensign-based design as inappropriate in an increasingly multicultural country that has been progressively weakening its ties with Britain since 1901. Also, the Union Flag occupies what is known as the vexillological honour point, and as Australia becomes more independent, many think Australian symbols rather than the flag of another nation should occupy this position.

(compiled from various sources, including http://www.ausflag.com.au/flags/aushist.html
http://www.ausflag.com.au/info/flagsact.html
http://www.australiaday.com.au/rick_farley.htm
http://www.australiaday.com.au/indigenous.html
http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/themes/theme6.htm )

Note / to myself. / Expand yr vocabulary!

Nice.
Twice. In
successive posts. Nasty!

&

Jukka has some nice work, both solo & collab, up at Nonlinear Poetry.

My thanks

to all of you who commented, posted & emailed nice things about my interview at Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S.

& Tom continues his superlative rôle as Le Grand Conservateur of this superlative² site by posting another wonderful piece, this time Michael Heller interviewed by Thomas Fink.

You can find a sampler of Michael Heller's work here, & there is an interesting essay by him wrapped around Giorgio de Chirico's painting The Uncertainty of the Poet here.

Tom Beckett interviews

a certain Australasian poet at e-values.

pic

an in(bred)-joke that will probably only be appreciated by australians

Mt Morgan -
Rockhampton's
Tasmania.

Today the
postman brought
me a cello. Sup-
posedly a gift
but there were
strings attached.

the
non-sequitur of
life after death

killing the unicorn

I am reminded

by Alex Gildzen that yesterday was the day Janis Joplin was born 63 years ago. & that reminded me of the circa 33-year old poem below, which I think I may have posted here before, but what the hell.

VERLAINE & VAN GOGH, JIMI & JANIS J.

To build from the bones out
or the skin in - which way
is better? Best not to have to build
at all, I suppose; but some of us
do fall apart, have been found
drowning in the desert or exposing
our pricks to schoolboys. & then the
famous ones, dying of smack or
syphilis, or else shut up for singular
acts of love - the severing of an
earlobe, the shooting of an
eighteenyear old poet in the wrist.

Poor Baron Frankenstein - he had
to use stolen organs, & draw
his power from electrical storms. Now
there are switches, & pumps & plastic
valves, & parents waiting in the wings
for a chance to give their child’s
heart to someone else. & those who owe
their prolonged life to scientific artifice
no longer bear the name of monster.

But the golem still exists, still wears the
Shem Ha-Mephorash , the holy name,
upon his forehead. & stays alive through
needles in the arm, cocks in the mouth;
those locked-door transfusions that maintain
the fluids our bodies need to keep on going.

This list

is a poem in itself. The 2004 Roster of Grants given by the A.J.Muste Memorial Institute.

Have added

Charles Bernstein's Web Log.

L.H.O.O.Q. - a ready-made hay(na)ku

she
is hot
in the ass

Perhaps

if it had been described as a film about faggot cowboys or fucking poofter cowboys it might have been different, since that would have given the local populace carte-blanche to throw rocks at the screen. "The Movie you Love to Hate." But its depiction as a sensitive treatment of gay cowboys has obviously concerned the local distributors of Brokeback Mountain enough to decide against bringing it here to Rockhampton, famous for being the "Beef Cattle of Australia", infamous for its bigotry.

Have finally

got my shit together & turned the 26-poem series that I've called Betabet into a pdf file. I've sent copies to those who asked some months ago when I was thinking about doing it, but if there's anyone else who'd like a copy, just drop me an email. My address is in the sidebar.



Many of the poems have appeared or are to appear in a number of journals - Ampersand, Aught, eratio, Hamilton Stone Review, hutt, minimum daily requirements, Moria, pingpong, Starfish & Zafusy - & there are links to some of them in the "recently published poetry" part of the sidebar. So, if you check them out, like what you see & would like to see more.....

Any
body who
takes me seriously

should be advised
to think
again.

impatiently paging

low-
down slowed-
down loading night

ditty-bag

I
have been
writing position papers

for
much of
the day. What

needs
to be
done, how it

should
be gone
about, what must

be
done to
prepare the way.

Several
years since
I've done this.

So,
written out
by the strangeness

of
using un-
ambiguous & politically

correct
language, I
am meeting my

pelican
obligations by
merely posting that

I've
added links
to the sidebar.

Three as a result of the recent Hay(na)day Holiku competition.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz' Raindancers Map of Memories
Ray Craig's unnamed blog &
Lars Palm's new irregular blog-zine Luzmag.

& since I've added the latter, have also added Jonathan Mayhew's blog-zine The Duplications, one of whose reasonably recent additions was a collaboration between Jonathan & Tom Beckett who has just started up an on-going work-in-progress Chiaroscuro Metropoli. & a closing note that Jukka's (previously) e-zine/pdf/hardcopy xStream (link on the right) has now also become a blog-zine.

                                                            it was some time before the train arrived

Boys with toys

U.S. researchers have identified the largest known prime number. A team at Central Missouri State University found it last month after programming 700 computers nine years ago. The number found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 - that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power, minus 1.

"People ask why we do this," said Dr Steven Boone. "It's like going on a quest. We're looking for something incredibly rare."

Yep, like world peace in our time. Holy Grail Quest, Batman.

Spore, SCORE & more

Crag Hill has started a new blog Spore which will "focus on "reprinting" selections from the 19 issues of SCORE, & at the same time will also be announcing calls out for work for SPORE."

eyelight

Meadow Saffrons (Les Colchiques)

The meadow is poisonous but pretty in autumn
The cows grazing there
are slowly poisoning themselves
Meadow saffron the colour of your eye-shadow of lilacs
flower there your eyes are like that flower
Violet like the eye-shadow & like the autumn
& for your eyes my life slowly poisons itself

School children come noisily
dressed in their smocks & playing harmonicas
They pick the meadow saffrons which are like mothers
Daughters of their daughters & the colour of your eyelids
which flutter like flowers caught in a crazy wind

The cowherd sings very softly
whilst the slow lowing cows abandon
this great meadow ill-flowered by the autumn

-Guillaume Apollinaire

 
 
algorithma
lgorithmal
gorithmalg
orithmalgo
rithmalgor
ithmalgori
thmalgorit
hmalgorith
malgorithm

I dream of Jean V., & Jean V., apparently, dreams of me

[JV] The weirdest thing happened about two years prior to editing the anthology, before I "met" Mark on-line. I had a dream in which a man from New Zealand taught a writing workshop in which I was participating, and invited a friend and myself to share a beer with him. At the time, I thought -- who is this guy? Why on earth someone from New Zealand?

A couple years later, I became aware of Mark's website on-line, and saw a photograph. Same guy from the dream -- and Mark's originally from New Zealand!

Hot on the heels of her wonderful interview at e-values, Jean Vengua is interviewed by Ariadne Unst on The First Hay(na)ku Anthology & hay(na)ku generally.

an / afternoon thought / for Tom Beckett

an
other is
another all together

al-
together an-
other thing again

Sometimes the painting comes first, sometimes the poem

(originally "untitled", now #116 in my Series Magritte)

La Belle Idée

I start to tidy up
the tapestry. The unicorns
worry me. Not the one
all gleaming white &
shiny-horned, it's the
other, the one with
the shades & lycra bike
shorts who's lurking –
can unicorns lurk? – who's
hanging out then, there
by the castle gate,
waiting for some corn maiden
to come tripping out
on her way to the
fields where he will follow
& (impale her)². Only
just then the Lord
of the Castle comes
riding up with his entourage
who all have earpieces that
drift down into their
chainmail & steely eyes
that scan the crowd, a-
lighting on the unicorn
who pretends he's looking
at postcards in a market stall
before sliding back off
into the background &
back to his nighttime job
in a porn theatre where
the prurient masses pay
to watch some corny maiden
get impaled by a quadruped
with a condom/inium on his head.

A reasonable snapshot

of me can probably be captured by the three programs I chose to preset the VCR for whilst I was away on holiday - Buffy, South Park & West Wing. Buffy & West Wing were repeats - the former near the beginning of its second season, the latter the last episode of its second season - & though South Park was supposed to be first-run, it turned out, no doubt seasonally induced, to be a repeat of the episode where Santa brings Christmas to Iraq.

I've always liked Buffy, especially the episodes that Joss Whedon wrote. Strangely, he reminds me of the late British playwright Dennis Potter, someone whose work was destroyed when translated into American (if you ever get the chance, see Pennies from Heaven with Bob Hoskins, & the Singing Detective with Michael Gambon). Whedon works on many levels. He throws away lines that could be the premises for treatises, & Buffy still remains the only tv series I have seen where a couple of its characters discuss William S. Burroughs quite seriously.

South Park is, well, South Park. Outrageous, totally politically incorrect, but oh so funny.

If you like West Wing, & you live in Australia, then you have a problem. Commercial television doesn't know what to do with it. It was probably first bought as a job lot with something like Friends, or Sex in the City, languished unscreened until it started winning Emmy after Emmy, was then put on, probably 18 months after it first appeared in the U.S., at 9.30, 11.30, 10.30, 12.30, sometimes Monday, sometimes Wednesday, sometimes Thursday, sometimes Tuesday. You needed a higher degree in Quantum Mechanics or Chaos Theory to keep track of its programming. Cable TV, who are far less concerned with ratings, at least show it on a regular basis, start at the beginning of a series, & run it through at the same time on the same night. But they can't show it until it's been on free-to-air tv. So, I watch the reruns, & am still entranced by them.

The episode I taped was the final one of the season, where Martin Sheen's President Bartlett, having just admitted to the nation that he has MS, is deciding whether or not to run for a second term. It's an episode full of rain, of motorcades, of the National Cathedral, of tension, of hubris, of sadness, & finishes off with one of the best uses I have come across of music as something beyond soundtrack, Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" underscoring & overarching the drama of the piece.

I agree wholeheartedly with Ron Silliman's conclusion to a recent post mourning the death of John Spencer who played one of the strongest parts in the show.

"Whether it continues or not, the first three seasons or thereabouts of West Wing will remain as good as any television drama has ever been."

One of my

favourite poets/people, Jean Vengua, is interviewed by another of my favourite poets/people, Tom Beckett, at what is still that long hyphenated name on the blog, but shortened by its creator to the much easier to write e-values.

How could I not like this interview? Thanks to both of them for joining in this edifying congress.

this
year, again,
i am irresolute

There have been

some good submissions to the Hay(na)ku competition, but you still have 48 hours from the time of this post to outdo them.

Great prizes!

Great
way to
start the year.

high/light of a time away

on
my back
on a banana

lounge,
looking up
at a night

sky
unencumbered by
any polluting light

Home is

Bach on the CD player, & not having to justify why you're listening to that weird classical shit.

sea, sun - great things

Karri
Kokko's post
about the winter

solstice
& darkness
descending across the

(Fin)
land has
frightened me. So

I'm
shutting up
shop for a

couple
of days
& heading north,

Maybe
it'll be
a voyage of

dis-
covery. Maybe
only an excuse

for
a long
drive. Or maybe

it's
just the
old familiar familial

obligations.
Anyway, to
everyone, season's greetings.

A Game of Chess

I was never a competent chess player, & haven't played for many, many years. But I've always been intrigued by the chess board, its numeracy – 4³ or 8² squares – the layout, the lines of fight, the moves.

Its construction carries with it an unlimited series of directions in which one can move, not necessarily linearly, think of the knights' moves, the act of castling. & if you fill those squares with words, randomly selected, then a set of conjunctions can be created, not necessarily meaningful, but often promising just that.

I've done a few visual poems along those lines. Filling up all the squares, not just those that the chess pieces initially occupy. The structure, the sameness of it, inhibits multiple outputs, so I've permitted myself only four over the past two years. Too many & the words, their combinations, would be over-whelmed by their surroundings, would become meaningless.

The first one, published in the New Zealand print journal brief was conceived as a homage to Marcel Duchamp, a great chess player, & named in honour of his The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. The poem below, Erudite Singer, (click on the image to enlarge)appeared in Crag Hill's print journal Spore 2.0. Geof Huth generously wrote of it - &, as usual, succinctly nailed the concept:

"Mark Young produces a simple visual poem entitled “Erudite Singer,” which consists of a checkerboard pattern of white and black squares covered with black and white words. The set up of the words encourages us to read the poem in multiple directions as we hunt for sense, for some linear syntax that we don’t quite find—every line of sense runs out before it gets far. But this pulsing network of whites and blacks, of words and shapes, ends up giving us a vague but palpable impression, and we are moved as we read from “erudite” in the upper left corner to “singer” in the bottom right corner."

Erudite Singer (2005)
 
I have allowed myself only one variation, taking a point in a real chess game & placing the words in the positions they would be if they were the real pieces. I had the idea that it would be nice to track each of the moves as they occurred, but in a static setup, board by board, this would become boring, the proverbial watching paint dry. So I contented myself with just the original all squares filled in, & the progress report.

Marko Niemi came across a couple of the pieces I had in xStream, and, after translating them into Finnish, included them in the wonderful series of vispo that he has up here. But now he's gone further, & has produced a kinetic piece called Tzara vs Breton, 1921, inspired by my chess pieces, but with all the moves in.

Marko writes:

" In fact, the Maori words are from a poem named "Toto-Vaca" by Tzara which can be found at http://www.artpool.hu/Poetry/ soundimage/Tzara.html. I didn't even know it's Maori, and also wondered how you were able to recognize the language, but then I made some googling and found out that Maori is (or at least has been?) spoken in New Zealand so I guess that might be the reason it looks familiar to you? A funny thing with it is that it somewhat resembles Finnish, for instance "te" means "you" (in plural) in Finnish, "he" means "they," and "kivi" means a "rock."

The black Breton words are from his poem "Toutes les écolières ensemble" and its English translation. And the moves used in the pieces are from the first game of the first match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov, in 1996, the first ever game to be won by a computer against a world champion (although Kasparov eventually won the first match). "

I don't know if the Tzara piece is all Maori - &, by the way, New Zealand is now officially bilingual – since I don't recognise some of the words, but there's enough Maori words there to claim it as such.

It's fantastic to see something you only ever thought about made real. Thank you for the piece, Marko, & thank you for dedicating it to me.

For some reason or other

I've had the Ferlinghetti poem "Dada would have loved a day like this" running around in my head. Not just the poem as printed, but transformed as if it were one of Bill Allegrezza's kinetic pieces with the words fading in & out.

& since I don't know how to do those, I've compromised by deciding to post Kurt Schwitters' Kleine Dada Soirée.
 

Yes Dada would have loved a day like this
with its not so accidental
analogies

Okay

so I know it's coming up to the, ahem, festive season, &, being generous souls, you're busy getting pressies - prezzies? - for everyone else. But why don't you do yourself a favour & get some for yourself, simply by writing a brilliant hay(na)ku & entering it in the hay(na)ku competition. Probably doesn't have to be brilliant even, just somewhere this side of good.

The prizes for the ten best are far, far better than those sox or handkerchiefs that your Great-Aunt Pulchritude is going to send you. &, I promise you, they won't have the lavender scent that comes from being stored in her drawers for the last ten years.

Freight

"…and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

W.H.Auden: Musée des Beaux Arts

(photo from TIME's best pictures of 2005)

Today the
postman brought
me a 12" black
disk with a
hole in the
middle. Is
this a record?

Today the
postman brought
me a poster-
size portrait
of Terence Stamp
in his role as
Billy Budd. I've
hung it from
the yard-arm.

I think

that one of the reasons I like crime stories so much - apart from the puzzle-solving aspect which I enjoy - is because, for each writer, the protagonist - I deliberately do not use the term hero or heroine - is usually the same person. You know what they're about already, don't have to work out the quirks of their character.

farmer, fox, bag of corn, chicken fox, bag of corn bag of corn chicken

farmer, chicken farmer farmer, fox farmer, chicken farmer, bag of corn farmer farmer, chicken

chicken fox fox, bag of corn farmer, fox, bag of corn, chicken

A couple

of recent posts at chris murray's tex files, one on Andre Breton & one on Max Planck & the language of Quantum Mechanics, combined to prompt my memory of the poem at the bottom of this post, originally published in Blackmail Press #4, June, 2002.

I also received an email earlier on this year about the poem, part of which read:

"MoRST stands for the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, which advises the (New Zealand) Government on policy issues across the science world.

The Ministry has recently refurbished its offices in the Reserve Bank Building at number 2, The Terrace, Wellington. A part of this refurbishment was the creation of five large meeting rooms, as the Ministry frequently hosts forums and workshops on science and research topics.

In seeking to find a name for each of these rooms, we have had a small team of staff sharing their favourite poems that use scientific terms and imagery. One of these is your poem Scar Tissue. We would like to display the poem, in full and as published, in one of the rooms and have selected the words NEUTRON FLUX, from the poem, as the room name. The door plate would state the name of the room and acknowledge the poem and you as the author."

Unfortunately, I think the idea might have died, because I've heard no more about it apart from the fact that a couple of the authors were being difficult about granting permission. A pity.

Scar Tissue

We cannot leave emptiness alone,
even a space so small
it is beyond most common definitions.

Who knows the provocation for such
actions. Start large, & there’s
certainly ancestral memories —
agoraphobia controlled by
inventing animism, filling in the gaps
by ascribing godhood to everything
in sight & gods to everything beyond.
Start small, learning as schoolchildren
by seeing blood or pond water under
a microscope display such levels of
intricacy that we automatically allocate
to all such spaces, even those we
cannot see, an infinite number
of inhabitants. It used to be a metaphysical
conundrum, determining how many angels
danced on the point of a needle. Now
it’s called neutron flux & though we have
invented machines to measure it, still use
the language of Dada for description.

Phonoms, leptons, quarks & quasars —
these words were all originally Tzara’s.

In flew

Ensor

the big Thor-oh?

in
vino veritas,
in  flu  enza

§

Delirious
with the
flu I think

thunder
= Thor-hammer,
coughing = Thor-ax.

§

Nothing
there I
could have Thor-saw.

It's a

bit
wet here

at the moment.

apathy, n. Indolence of mind.

Lorna Dee Cervantes

has a series of longish autobiographical posts up at her eponymous blog, recollections of her life 30, 20, 10, 5, 1 year ago.

They're absolutely brilliant. Open, emotion-provoking but not necessarily emotional though the pain (& the joy) comes through, precisely written, intense.

Wonderful writing.

No wonder

it felt hot today. Got up to 40º C, that's 104º F.

the
current thunder
doesn't roll, sounds

more
like a
fat man farting.

listenin' to

Twenty years of schoolin'
& they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles

Wheeee. & heads off into the middle distance making Bob Dylan harmonica noises & keepin' the mosquitoes at bay

hay hay hay(na)ku

O
the tyranny
of distance. I

am still waiting
for my
copy.

But others have received theirs. & I am pleased by the emails I have received, & by the responses that are beginning to appear on the blogs. Eileen has begun - & I'm sure will continue - to post links to them. & don't forget the competition - details below.

de bon matin

Today, with the day barely begun,

I take a plate out of the dishwasher & find a baby gecko, about 1 inch long, clinging to the edge, very much alive &, I'm guessing / hoping, unwashed. I take the plate outside & flick the gecko into the garden.

I go out the other door to have a cigarette & tread on a dead mouse, no doubt brought there by the cat, intact except for a couple of teeth marks, but very dead. I throw that into the garden as well, for the ants or birds. If I'd put it in the rubbish-bin it would be stinking before the rubbish was collected. A grand-daddy gecko, about 6 inches long, watches me.

Three black cockatoos, rare visitors here though they're around other nearby parts, drift across & land in the gumtree in the back garden. Beautiful birds, red on the underneath of their tails, much more laid-back & raucous than their white counterparts. Birds of good omen, though amazingly pre-historic in their facial features when seen up close. Rainbow lorrikeets yodel from one of the other trees, feeding on the yellow flowers. The more they eat the less end up in the pool.

The TV tells me that David Hicks has been granted British citizenship – his mother was British. Now, perhaps, he might get out of Guantanamo Bay.

My summer cold seems to be disappearing. The sneezes & sniffles have gone, & the coughing is indistinguishable from my normal smoker's cough. I'll probably go back to work tomorrow, but today I'm catching up on my domestic duties. & my blog-reading.

The temperature is already well on its way to the predicted 38º Celcius. Just under a 100 Fahrenheit. I'm not a great fan of air-conditioning, but it's necessary here, so I'm running the ceiling fans all through the house to get the air moving before I close it up & do the dreaded dead.

I have finished (re)reading Robert Crais' entire output. I'm definitely a crime novel fan. But who to read next?

The washingmachine beeps & reminds me of my domestic duties. I hope there are no geckoes inside.

I hang out the washing. Lizards scuttle away. Green ants promenade on my legs. They're tenacious little bastards, stick their pincers in & refuse to budge. You have to flick them off at just the right angle.

Del Ray Cross

becomes a centurion at anachronizms.

Another word from "The meaning of Tingo"

Ariga-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn't want them to do and tried to prevent them doing, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favour, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude.

& check out The Meaning of Tingo blog.

Australia's new anti-terror laws

are basically racist. They've just been passed in Parliament, & now, with an official blessing for the cause, White Australia rises up drunkenly to drive the Muslims from the beaches of Sydney.

As someone said. "What a surprise. The descendants of convicts are acting like criminals."

Yesterday

was the first day of the fifth year that Australian David Hicks has spent in detention, probably illegally, most of it in Guantanamo Bay, convicted of no crime.

He is the last westerner amongst the prisoners held there, none of them U.S. citizens, all "captured" in the Middle East or in Afghanistan. Hicks was sold to the U.S. after being detained by the Northern Alliance near Kandahar, spent a month on a U.S. carrier, two years shackled in a cage at Guantanamo and another six months in solitary confinement away from sunlight. He was charged with non-specified acts in June 2004. His case hasn't yet been heard.

Since the U.S. decreed early this year that a special U.S. military commission - something not used since the Second World War - would try the alleged terrorists, eight countries have insisted that their citizens be repatriated. Many were freed on their return home because nothing could be found to charge them with.

But not the Australian Government. It has abandoned him, to whatever trumped-up charges the U.S. want to bring. So what if he fought with the Taliban - it wasn't a crime at the time he was doing it. & his activities at the time, the level of his involvement, still haven't been outlined.

& the Australian Government has the support of most of the Opposition Labor Party. A motion put forward in the Senate by a Greens Senator, that David Hicks be brought home, was defeated 53 votes to eight, supported only by the Greens & the Democrats. Fifteen Senators, most of them Labor, abstained; none voted for the motion.

The Left is now mainly a party of the Right, as strident in its support of anti-terror legislation that is racist & dismissive of human rights as the supposed conservatives. There are new sedition laws that mean that anti-globalization protests, or protests such as I took part in during the Vietnam War era could quite easily be classed as seditious acts, the participants held without charge, unable to communicate with anyone except their lawyer, & their lawyer liable to be charged if they told anyone what their client was being held for.

Fuck the Government. I have just committed sedition.

The Hay(na)ku competition - the full-text post

from The Chatelaine's Poetics.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

HAY(NA)-COOOOING RIGHT ATCHA!

Ahem :: a notice :: please to read and mayhap participate! I, after all, am all about you.

HAY NAKU TO YOU!

To cyber-celebrate the release of THE FIRST HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, Meritage Press is delighted to sponsor a

HOLIDAY HAY(NA)KU CONTEST

judged by anthology co-editor Mark Young. To participate, send your hay(na)ku to mhcyoung@gmail.com.

Deadline: December 31, 2005. Poets can submit from 1-10 hay(na)ku.

Information on the poetic form "hay(na)ku" (a tercet of one-word, two-word and three-word lines) is at http://meritagepress.com/haynaku.htm as well as the Hay(na)ku Blog at http://eileentabios.blogspot.com. Any topic or variant on the form is welcome.

Mark will pick up to ten hay(na)ku whose authors will receive as PRIZES:

THE FIRST HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, Eds. Jean Vengua and Mark Young

and other Meritage Press titles:

THE OBEDIENT DOOR by Sean Finney;

OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 by Barry Schwabsky;

100 MORE JOKES FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD by John Yau & Archie Rand;

PINOY POETICS, ed. by Nick Carbo

PUBLISHER'S PRIZE:
From Mark Young's list of winners, one hay(na)ku author also will be selected by OENOPHILES FOR POETRY to receive a bottle of fine wine (limited to residents of U.S. and states that allow shipments of alcohol from California).

ELIGIBILITY:
Open only to authors not in THE FIRST HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY

# posted by EILEEN @ 2:18 PM

importal

Phoenicia

went
swimming in
the Roland Barthes

sym em
bol
ism

up

is

not

down

"There is coral beneath the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow."

separation

voydeur

equal opportunity

Perusing
the pages
of the stud-

poet
calendar, I
believe equal opportunity

should
be afforded
those of us

who
are passed
studliness by bringing

out
a calendar
made up of

a
miscellany of
months from the

sixties
& seventies,
every one included

given
the chance
to select a

time
when their
date looked good.

panzer memories entry points mur- ex the Scilly Isles "parachutes, my love, could carry us higher" Phoenicia

"Bryher, an aged warrior in her double-breasted wool jacket and tailored skirt, brusquely cut white hair, did not give off any hint of sadness, or melancholy."

search phrase #587

Question
Google believes
the pelican can

answer -
"Does Pat
Boone have AIDS?"

I hadn't visited

Clayton A. Couch's blog for some time. Everytime I went there since May, several times over several months, the space increasing each time, it hadn't been updated; & silent blogs of writers I like are like deaths in the family. So I stayed away.

But because he's recently posted some poems to As/Is, I decided to check back. Found it was active again, had changed its name from Word Placements to Humming to Itself. & it is humming.

Some good stuff there, & it's good to see you back in blogland, Clay.

embryocation

Sorry, Aretha

I
just don't
know what to

do with myself
so I
play

Dusty
Springfield songs
in the hope

the son of
a Preacher
Man

might
come along
& take time

to make time
& tell
me

every-
thing's alright,
yes it is.

To quote my friend Karri Kokko

Oppia ikä kaikki

Runouslehti Tuli&Savu ja digitaalisen runouden sivusto Nokturno ovat koostaneet lukiolaisille suunnatun tietopaketin, jossa esitellään mm. visuaalista runoutta. Mukana ovat Geof Huth, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jim Leftwich, Mark Young ja nöyrin palvelijanne KK.

Some background information, first from Leevi Lehto:

September 30, 2005 4:26 PM The upcoming issue of Tuli&Savu, the poetry magazine, is a special one with 5000 extra copies to be delivered to 100 Finnish high schools, and featuring, among others, a Finnish adaptation of Charles Bernstein's famous Experiments list.

& then from an email from Marko Niemi who curates Nokturno:

Yes. In fact, it's all about the same project, in a way. Tuli&Savu (Fire&Smoke) is the leading Finnish poetry quarterly, and is published by the poetry association called Nihil Interit, of which chairman is Leevi Lehto. Nokturno is published by Nihil Interit, too, so there's a close relationship between them. The newest issue of Tuli&Savu is directed to high school students, and it will be sent to teachers of Finnish language and literature so that they can use it in their classes.

Along with the issue, there will be a web site which is made in cooperation with Nokturno (and it also will be published in Nokturno). The goal of the site is to introduce to students some marginal and less known forms of poetry and methods of doing poetry. I'm gathering a selection of contemporary visual poetry, and would like to include your poems there too, in addition to Geof, Jukka, and Karri

The Holiday Hay(na)ku Competition

     The
     party of
     the first part

hereinafter to be known as Meritage Press (whose figurehead is not a man in bed but the Queeeen of Preeeen herself, Eileen Tabios), has announced a holiday hay(na)ku competition to celebrate the launching of The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, first prize to be a selection of books from the Press.

It's open to anyone not included in the anthology, can include hay(na)ku that have already appeared (though new work will be given preference) & closes at 3.00 p.m. Australian Eastern Summer Time on January 1, 2006 (that's midnight, California Time). Full details are available at the hay(na)ku blog.

& as sole judge,

     I
     am quite
     amenable to bribery.

Mothra come home, all is forgiven

It's
a month
for mad moths

They're everywhere. In lifts, on chairs, on the street, in rooms, on windows. Very much like the above; at least they have a similar decal on their upper wings.

Today the
postman brought
me a tall
ship &
a GPS receiver
to steer
it by.

& then he
placed a
square

of
black silk
upon his head

AIDS day 2005

"Catachthonia

originated in the summer of 2005 when Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Jake Berry began collaborating on a series of sound files of performances (recorded by Berry in Florence, Alabama, USA) of Berry's poems The Blood Paradoxes. Kervinen, living in Espoo, Finland applied computer processing to the performances to generate sound clouds. Original recordings of Jake Berry performing The Blood Paradoxes in Florence were sent by e-mail to Jukka-Pekka Kervinen in Espoo who digitially processed them based on granular synthesis (a method in which sound is generated using very large amounts of very small extracts of the original sound grouped stochastically to form a sound cloud).These recordings were then e-mailed to Berry who added his performances to selections from Kervinen's compositions, mixed and edited the collection. Their first release, The Blood Paradox Variations is 26 track sequence of the sound clouds alone and Berry's poetry mixed with the sound clouds. Future releases will include similar collaborations, including Kervinen's processing of Berry's electric guitar improvisations mixed with other audio sources."

CATACHTHONIA: The Blood Paradox Variations

PM AT CRICKET AS NGUYEN SWINGS

There’s growing storm in Australia after Prime Minister John Howard has said he would attend a cricket match on the day that Australian Van Nguyen is hanged in Singapore.

Mr Howard, who maintains all efforts to save Nguyen have been exhausted, said he had an obligation as host to attend the Prime Minister's XI cricket match on Friday.

Nguyen will hang in Singapore's Changi prison at dawn on Friday after he admitted smuggling heroin to repay debts owed by his twin brother Khoa.

Australian Democrats senator Natasha Stott Despoja said she felt sickened by the prospect that Mr Howard would attend the game.

"This is about how Australians and the rest of the world, including the people of Singapore, will view our response to this horrendous act," she said.

Nguyen was arrested in Singapore's Changi Airport in December 2002 while trying to board a flight to Australia with 396 grams of heroin strapped to his body and in his hand luggage.

He was sentenced to death despite cooperating with drug investigations by authorities in Singapore and Australia.

The Prime Minister has rejected a call from Opposition leader Kim Beazley to send a last-ditch mission to Singapore to try to stop the execution.

The hanging of Van Nguyen wasn't formally raised at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Malta, but John Howard did speak to his Singaporean counterpart.

Tuong Van Nguyen met his identical twin a few days ago for the first time since strapping heroin to his body three years ago in a foolhardy mission to pay off his brother's debts.

On Friday December 2, Van will be hanged for his decision.

(from various news sources)