A new issue

of Word for /Word is out.

Night Soil

Ernesto Priego has a post called Night Soil over at Never Neutral. But judging from the tone of the piece - a note (a) as to how he's got an eye infection & (b) how he's enjoying reading Sean Finney's The Obedient Door - I don't think that what he means by the term is what I mean when I use it.

In my very early childhood, younger than six, the town where I lived had neither sewerage nor septic tanks. Instead there was an outside toilet - a dunny - that had, behind & beneath the wooden bench on which you sat to crap, a small outside door through which the nightly (?) collection of excreta would be made. Hence the term night soil.

Probably every family has a much-loved story somewhere in their history about sitting on the dunny seat & having the night soil collector take the pan away from underneath them. A couple of local additions to the myth include the time the night soil truck overturned in the main street of an even smaller town a few miles away. &, what is not myth but reported fact, the time a local night soil carter got charged with breaches of the health regulations because he also delivered the milk at the same time.

Last week the
postman brought
me a letter
from The Church
of The Over-
looked Epilog
saying that, once I
gave my consent,
I would be
canonized on
the basis of
the miracles
my poetry
had wrought. They
gave chapter &
verse — verse
anyway. How
one of my poems
recited incessantly
for seven days
& seven nights
had fended off a
plague of locusts
in Sub-Saharan
Africa. How another,
printed out & mixed
with myrrh & hairgel,
was efficacious as
a cure for river
blindess. How a
third, carried inside
a Tefillin, caused
a stillbirth to be
reversed. I didn't
recognize the titles
of any of the poems
mentioned; but my
memory's not all
it used to be, so
gave my consent
anyway. A sainthood
seemed much more
attractive than the
missing Marcos millions,
discount pharmaceuticals,
superceded software
or having my cock
elongatedededededededededed
& / or
enlarged.

Today the
postman brought
me an invoice for
$50,000. Plus tax.

some quackpoet dialog for harry k.

Hammer (Groucho): ... Now here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: Why a duck?
Hammer: I'm all right. How are you? I say here is a little peninsula, and here's a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: All right. Why a duck?
Hammer: I'm not playing Ask-Me-Another. I say, that's a viaduct.
Chico: All right. Why a duck? Why a--- why a duck? Why-a-no-chicken?
Hammer: I don't know why-a-no-chicken. I'm a stranger here myself. All I know is that it's a viaduct. You try to cross over there a chicken, and you'll find out why a duck. It's deep water, that's viaduct.
Chico: That's-why-a-duck?
Hammer: Look ... Suppose you were out horseback riding and you came to that stream and wanted to ford over there, you couldn't make it. Too deep.
Chico: But what do you want with a Ford when you gotta horse?
Hammer: Well, I'm sorry the matter even came up. All I know is that it's a viaduct.
Chico: Now look ... all righta ... I catcha on to why-a-horse, why-a-chicken, why-a-this, why-a-that. I no catch on to why-a-duck.
Hammer: I was only fooling. I was only fooling. They're going to build a tunnel in the morning. Now, is that clear to you?
Chico: Yes. Everything---excepta why a duck.

Just up

Tom Beckett's interview with Shanna Compton at e-values.

11.15 a.m.

It is day.
It is dark.
The clouds
are so low I have pinned them to the clothesline
_______________________________________
  ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
 to   keep   them   here.    I   like   it   like   this.

A bigger bang for your 2000+ bucks?

Am thinking about going to see the Stones who, it has just been announced, have included Australia in their current tour. But.....

It'll probably remain thinking about. Since they're only performing in Sydney & Melbourne, it'll cost around $2000 for airfares & accomodation for the two of us before we even buy tickets to the show, & for that amount of money we could could fly to California & back.

& I'd get a bigger bang out of that. Sorry Mick, sorry Keef.

This has
nothing to
do with
poetry.

Ah, Ernesto

Malest,
Ernesti, tuo Marco,
malest, me hercule

et
laboriose, et
magis magis in

dies
et horas.
For how can

any-
one let
the only Latin

hay(na)ku
pass unremarked?
Magis, Magus. (a)More.

Betabet

 
 
has been picked up by Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVOX books & is now available as a pdf file (with a much more modern cover than it used to have) here. For those of you who like the feel of a book, it is, unfortunately, no longer available as a POD.

Oban 06

A goodly number of you took part in last year's New Zealand electronic poetry centre built live on-line anthology Fugacity 05.

This year they're doing it again with Oban 06. & it's your chance to become part of history. Because unless there's ever a poetry festival in Tierra del Fuego or Antarctica, this is the furthest south anybody's ever going to be published from.

The details:

OBAN 06

is the title of nzepc’s online poetry anthology, building 21-23 April 2006 as part of the BLUFF 06 poetry symposium in Southland. Bluff’s famous Oyster Festival happens over the same weekend.

Bring a poem on a disk to any of the symposium events OR email your contribution to nzepc@auckland.ac.nz between 21-23 April.

We aim to build a local and international poetry anthology over three days, launching Sunday 23 April in Oban on Rakiura (Stewart Island). We welcome your poem. We’d like it to engage with time and place, transience and duration, memory and forgetting, coming and going, poetry and oysters – any or all of the above.

If you could see this jet
fire-seeded sky,
chill here with me
on a plastic chair
on the veranda, we'd hear Bluff hum
while lines of sodium and magnesium
bridge and wharf lights
bleed to black,
inexactly
as on other nights, other verandas,
another port - a kauri pew,
wings on the sill of an inside-out
lit window,
scrying the dark
insistent stars, fireflies -
we have talked of poetry.

      : Cilla McQueen. ‘Antiphony (Letter to Peter Olds)’


Anthology compilers: Brian Flaherty, David Howard, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen and nzepc team

Submission guidelines

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

contradiction hay(na)ku

working
on something
that doesn't work

The evil eye

One of the joys of what I shall euphemistically describe as reaching a certain age is having a doctor tell you that what's occurred is because you're old.

I have what he told me is a conjunctival haemorrhage. In other words, I'm safe if, in the next few days, I get into a situation where my opponents have been told not to fire until you see the whites of my eyes. My left eye has next to no white in it, is red, from a burst blood vessel.

& the reason for it? No specific reason, just age, old age - amended to as you grow older after I cast a one-eyed sideswiping glance at the doctor. Just happens, nothing you can take for it, do to it, doesn't affect your vision. Only wait till it goes away, a series of colour transformations, red through to yellow, just like a bruise.

Today the
postman brought
me an
invitation from
Torquemada
to attend the
Inquisition. Specified
dress. Either
full Inquistorial regalia &
bring a bag or
sackcloth & ashes
& come as you
are. That's the trouble
since Dubya assumed
the Papacy. No
middle of the road
to walk down
anymore.

A word for Tom

Alphabeckett

Galatea's erection

is actually Eileen Tabios' new review blogzine Galatea Resurrects (a poetry review), but since it's up for the first time, I pay homage to its initial erection.

Lotsa reviews. Lotsa & lotsa reviews. To quote THE EDITOR

This issue inaugurates itself with 25 new reviews of 27 poetry publications and a poetry video, e-reprints of ten reviews previously published in print publications, and a section of three featured poets partly chosen by two guest editors. The gratifying response suggests this venture is a good idea, notwithstanding its sloppy birth during one of my bouts of insomnia -- or a better idea than I even anticipated.

Well then: Let's see! And party!

Definitely!

Harry Potter & the half-arsed Politician

"His only function is to let you know
what Harry Potter's going to look like
when he's old."

Billy Connolly on Australia's Prime Minister John Howard

He stumbled
in the face
of such
fierce repartee.

from: Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher

There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water, I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.

Barbara Guest (1920 - 2006)

Still
hot in
the early afternoon.