Intercapillary Editions

Some great reading this morning. Alistair Noon's
Swamp Area

hit me in all the right places. Cranking it up now. Thank you Alistair and Intercapillary Editions.

multi-tasking

cutting thick slabs of Polish Christmas ham
eating prawn cocktail crisps
hanging laundry
printing official transcript requests
trying to ignore the dust motes
looking at the cover of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives
thinking of watching The Wire
trying not to think about evening ESOL class
wondering about the sore on left side of tongue
ignoring the morning dishes
thinking about community
thinking about the continuous while loving the past simple

exuberance/beauty

here is another fab interview with the poet Abraham Smith. Body energy indeed. Think Sean Bonney and Abraham Smith are distant blood brothers. Although Sean Bonney's work is much different on the page and takes on different areas thematically, it is their approach in terms of performance that has similar exuberant effects.

check it:

Abraham Smith Interview

in the interest of simplicity

i'm cleaning up this blog
there is too much stuff
perhaps it is also time to shave my head
get it nice and simple
a simple head
gorgeous
marvelous
a new head trip
community community community
what do we mean?
the banking community
the poetry community
bank on The Canon
bank on yon mini poetry celebrity
I don't know what everyone else
has to say
I haven't said anything
I don't know my size
my cultural capital is quite small
strangled in each other's reflection
noted in pleasure
who's writing the script
inspired to do wrong
socially constructed memos
conduits identify our selves
recognize the flake
in yr midst
I used to think I knew
what I was doing

The Poetry Project and community

A very interesting interview with Anne Waldman and Stacy Szymaszek about the Poetry Project at St. Marks church in the Bowery. The history. The community building. The future.

One of my favourite places in the universe. The Openned reading series in London has the potential to build along these lines.

Openned: East London

The Poetry Project: Lower East side

check out the interview about community, poetry, and the Poetry Project:

A Generation of Inspiration and Community

proliferation

so much writing out there. In the good book they say to sort the wheat from the not-wheat. texts are multiplying at increasing rates. I have heard the distinction between innovative and mainstream no longer holds sway. At least in America with so many soft surrealists and mags and blogmags popping up everyday. The Fence revolution etc. There is good poetry in all "camps" of course. Not population control but some good strong critics and more selective publications? perhaps more vision?

or perhaps poetry communities swapping their writing? cell to cell . . .

alien status about to expire

next month my alien card for the United States of America will expire. my travel document expires along with it.

noise

there is a lot of noise out there. cultural production and self promotion and so on. Sometimes I want to be somebody but when I put a foot forward I feel like going below the lines again.

In short
as always
I want simplicity


and perhaps like most (all?) writers I wonder about writing. Whether there is too much being published. Whether what i write contributes to the noise or makes something of it.

it is hard to keep up with all the work.

I love the little well-made chapbook of poetry. Sometimes those little books are far better than the official collections.

and the simplicity. ah yes the simplicity.

Reality Street Editions (book launch)

One of my favourite presses is having a book launch this Friday. Looks like a very interesting book. Here is the announcement:

Paul Griffiths:

LET ME TELL YOU
So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know.... These are the words of Ophelia at the beginning of this short novel: literally her words, in that her narrative is composed entirely of the vocabulary she is allotted in Hamlet. Within these meagre resources, she manages to express herself on topics including her love for her father (Polonius), her care for her younger brother (Laertes), her puzzlement in the face of the Prince himself, and her increasing sense that she must escape the fate awaiting her in the play.

This is no mere technical exercise or prequel to the play: the use of such a restricted vocabulary means that Ophelia’s voice, while direct and passionate, gains musical qualities as words keep recurring in perpetually changing contexts.

LAUNCHING ON FRIDAY 16 JANUARY
7pm at The Calder Bookshop, 51 The Cut, London SE1 8LF
free admission - free glass of wine

“I found let me tell you a beautiful and enthralling work, as well as a great success in Oulipian terms”
– HARRY MATHEWS


Reality Street Editions

attention span

I changed my big coat for a rain jacket.

The rain jacket is slim and fits nicely on my upper body.

It is a bit warmer in London.

Consequently this makes me feel lighter.

I am happy feeling simple.

I teach my tongue as a foreign language.

blog from volunteer in Gaza

Tales to Tell

Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff

good readings

Golden Handcuffs Review

Alien Memory Machine

It turns out Placebo is actually part of Alien Memory Machine. It is not a new manuscript.

Spent 7 hours revising Alien Memory Machine. Line breaks, forms, rearranging lines and poems in the manuscript and adding Placebo to the manuscript. The manuscript is not quite finished. I mainly have to revise and add poems to the Moving Pictures section. Also revise more in the other sections.

Alien Memory Machine is divided into three sections:

1. Moving Pictures

Moving pictures orbits around film noir and horror films and serials. Most of the poems are titled according to the setting/place of the film or serial. Zombie flicks. The serial Sopranos and True Blood (from HBO) and more . . .

2. London

The poems in this section were written in or near tube stops in London. Each poem is titled according to the tube stop.

3. Placebo

This section explores the human eye and memory. Narratives, as in the stories we tell ourselves, are also explored.


Place and image are two of the central concerns of Alien Memory Machine. Seems like that is one of continual obsessions (also an obsession in Godzenie but with different frames).

Martin Stannard

Found some interesting reviews and musings online by this British poet (who lives and teaches in China):

Martin Stannard 1

Martin Stannard 2

shepherds Bush

on their way to Smithfield’s market, -2, stuck shepherds, on the green, 5 minutia
from the common land, cats will lick u raw, bottle cutting stuck lips, some really
nice people, newly installed clicking spiders T junction the spiritual, diverse outposts, spot announcements, lanked out of here in 008 and 009, the biggest urban shopping in Europe, blooms or busts, fetid fervor, fetid feeble fame, fe fe fe, fee, fee, free, planitude, on their way to market some shepherds took to rest

Gaza and the Ghetto

Gaza and the Ghetto

In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in what it termed initially a “defensive war”. The invasion was in part justified by the Nazi desire to reunify what it considered historic German territory and to claim Lebensraum for a race that considered itself superior to those that surrounded it in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only the Jews, but also the Slavic races, were considered inferior, less than human, and regarded as populations that could be transferred to make room for Aryans.


It was, of course, the Jews who bore the brunt of Nazi racism. By 1940, the Nazis had begun to concentrate Poland’s Jewish population into ghettos in the main cities prior to their planned transport to the camps. In Warsaw, the largest of these ghettoes, three or four hundred thousand Jews were enclosed in less than 5% of the city, walled in by a 10-20 foot high wall, and gradually strangled by starvation and the shortage of all goods, including fuel and power. Malnutrition and disease was rampant and the exits and entrances of the ghetto were closely controlled. Resistance was subject to collective punishment: tens of Jews could be murdered in retaliation for the least act of defiance. In 1943, in the face of imminent transportation and the annihilation of the Jewish population, the remaining Jews in Warsaw organized combat brigades. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. Despite the overwhelming force of the German Army and the utter inadequacy of their own weaponry, they fought a desperate struggle in the name not only of the Jews of Poland but of Poland’s right to resist fascism and occupation. “It is a fight”, they proclaimed to the Poles beyond the ghetto walls, “for our freedom, as well as yours; for our human dignity and national honour, as well as yours….”

An inspiration to resistance movements throughout Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is remembered less as a lost cause than as the heroic struggle that it was. Though crushed by German armor and military power, in hand-to-hand and street-to-street fighting, the Jewish resistance in Warsaw stands as a symbol of the right of an oppressed people to resist occupation, collective punishment, genocide and ethnocide.

Yet imagine if the policy of appeasement had continued and Nazi Germany had made good its claim to occupy land that it considered part of the historic homeland of its people. Suppose Poland had gradually been settled, as was planned, with German families who might for the most part have desired to make peaceful and prosperous lives for themselves on the new lands they believed were rightfully theirs. Suppose Pearl Harbor had never happened, and the United States had not entered the war against the Axis powers: France and Britain would have concluded some form of peace with Hitler’s Germany, probably on the face-saving pretext of fighting a global war against Soviet communism, while the small nations of Eastern Europe would have been abandoned to their fate. Germany, instead of being seen as a nation of Nazis and war criminals, would have been understood to be the bulwark of Europe’s defense against the Soviet Union, while the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Polish resistance that supported them would have been remembered, if at all, as the “bandits” that the German generals knew them as. History, as we know, is rewritten by the victors.

Gaza too is a ghetto. One and a half million Palestinians, most of them refugees dispossessed of the lands and homes that were theirs for centuries, inhabit the most densely populated square miles of the Middle East if not the world. They are hemmed in by security walls and barbed wire fences, unable to move in or out without the permission of Israel, the occupying power. They have lived in a permanent state of siege, unable to conduct free trade with the rest of the world, virtually unable to visit the West Bank, unable even to fish in the sea off their coasts, subject to perpetual surveillance and control by land, sea and air. Their hospitals lack even the most essential medicines; power and water are controlled by the Israeli government; all goods that enter or leave this virtual prison camp do so by permission of the occupying power. The siege of Gaza has been one long collective punishment inflicted upon the population for their temerity in having elected, in free and open elections, a party, Hamas, that Israel and their allies, the United States and European Union, condemn as terrorists. Their principal crime is to deny the right to exist of a state that has dispossessed their people, occupied their lands, denied their historical existence, subjected them to ethnic cleansing, torture and collective imprisonment, destroyed their olive groves, walled them in behind a “security fence” designed to impede movement and access to farm land, schools, universities and places of work. And all these measures have been openly declared, by an Israeli minister in government, to be designed to suffocate Gaza into submission.

All this, the siege and its terrible effects on a civilian population struggling to survive in the most inhuman conditions imaginable, was ongoing before the current Israeli assault on the population of Gaza, its police force as well as old people and school children, infants and invalids. This is not an act of “defense” on the part of Israel, but a bloody continuation of a war of offense, differing only in the intensity and publicness of its brutality and in its abrupt, bloody and systematic nature. It is a war of collective punishment against a population whose resistance is less in its occasional and mostly harmless retaliatory rocket attacks than in its simple refusal to give in. It is an offensive war, like the 2006 and 1982 wars against Lebanon, a war against a people whose right to resist occupation is inscribed in international law. It is a war whose crimes—once again--include the indiscriminate, because inevitable and foreseen, slaughter of civilians, including infants and children, attacks on non-military institutions including mosques, a university and a television station, and the deliberate planning of an assault whose proclaimed ends far exceed the suppression of the purported casus belli, the rocket launching sites. It is a war designed to destroy the civil infrastructure of Hamas and to break the will of the Palestinians in Gaza to continue their resistance.

The right of the Palestinian people to resist is as indubitable as the right of the Jews of Warsaw to resist the Nazis, or of the Polish or French people to fight against their occupation by Germany. Israel is not the West’s proxy in the so-called global war against terrorism. It is a state that itself inflicts terror, and does so with a force and brutality far exceeding anything available to the most violent of terrorist organizations. It is a state whose colonial aim, to occupy and to settle land historically occupied by another people in order to provide unlimited Lebensraum for its own ethnic group, is evidenced every day in the continuing expansion of the illegal settlements on the West Bank. It is an apartheid state, whose self-declared constitution as a “Jewish State for a Jewish People” should have no more international legitimacy than South Africa’s “white state for a white people” or Northern Ireland’s “Protestant State for a Protestant people”, both of which finally fell to a combination of military and civil resistance and international opprobrium.

It is long beyond time for Israel, now the exception in every respect among nations, to be held accountable to the norms of international law. It is time for Israel to be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other state that bases its polity on sectarianism and racism, that has established one set of laws for one ethnic group and another for the rest. It is time for Israel to by judged by the international law that everywhere condemns extended occupation, condemns collective punishment, war against civilians, population transfers or ethnic cleansing, dispossession of the occupied people and the settlement of their lands. It is time for us to name Israel what it is so long as it continues to pursue the most extreme of Zionist visions: a colonial, apartheid state with neither legitimacy nor a deserved place among the community of democratic nations.

It is time for us to cease the appeasement of Israel. Even the most ardent of appeasers of Nazi Germany never supplied Germany with arms or foreign aid, with fighter planes with which to bomb civilians, never labeled the resistance to Nazism “terrorism”, never actively participated in the German stranglehold on the ghettoes where it confined its subject populations. “Constructive engagement” did not work with South Africa; numerous U.N. General Assembly resolutions that have expressed the virtually unanimous international condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its wars against its neighbors have not worked. It is time for the truth about Israel to be disseminated, even against the most effective control of the western media by Israel’s lobbyists. It is time for all who care about justice and peace, for human rights, for the fate of the innocent and the oppressed, the stateless and the dispossessed, to make our voices heard. Let it not be said that in their most extreme hour of need, the Palestinian people were abandoned by the world, as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were abandoned in 1943.

David Lloyd,

Los Angeles,

December 30, 2008

the road

the sun came out today in London. The blue skies smelt like North Carolina. I went looking for wooden porches but found red brick houses. Liverpool made it to the next stage. I have been thinking about frames. Interchangeable frames. Moving frames. Pictures and sounds. Hush puppies. My mind is not so disconnected from my stomach. i once had a porch and a swing. I never went outside today in London. The mind believes and the body follows. My hands are cold because the window is open. There is a scratch in my throat. I miss the warm home and community in North Carolina. I rediscovered poetry and rediscovered my body. After school chats with Stuart Dischell and Fred Chappell in the university pub. Lucifer Poetics on the road. I am still on the road. The road cliches but only when we let it. the road is not a map. not a movement, not a series of stops and starts, not a splattering of signs, not the now, not what comes later but a memory always in process.

i've had a muddled mind with spots of clarity. For the past three years I was in purgatory. I made my purgatory. I'm coming out. I need English in my life. I need the mirrors of community. But mostly I need English to create.

Writing is clarity. But it is damn messy. It is not always clear what is clear and what is clear might turn out to be muddy and vice versa. A faux poetics. Slow it down. Noun clusters speed it up. Gerunds rock. Prog rock poetics. Orchestral movements in the dark.

Thinking in frames. Thinking in sentences. Thinking in tenses. Thinking thinking thinking. Dot Dot Dot.

heading into 2009

A need for order drives me to write. A need to map to frame to make the hidden manifest. To give flesh. The body manifest. To tap into my others. To become aware of how I am languaged. To dialogue with language itself.

I moved away from specialized theory driven discourses because I felt it closed down this dialogue. The specialized language said keep out! Said define yr turf.

I am a generalist.

I do not believe all complex specialized discourse is suspect. Or inauthentic. But I also believe simplified diction can be equally complex.

I admire the sprezzatura of many New York school poets, especially Ted Berrgan and Anselm Berrigan. I also admire the sound based poetics of Geraldine Monk and Maggie O Sullivan. The sentence based poetics of Ron Silliman and Rosmarie Waldrop are also fascinating (for different reasons). Poetry as unlocking the energies of the unconscious appeals to me greatly. As does the humor and irony of combining some of the concerns of so-called Language Poetry with NY school wit (such as Rod Smith). Lately I am very interested in the poetics of place. This is very complex. Godzenie is concerned with many things, including place. The self as expansive. Gaps compel me as well. The gaps in Tim Atkins Horace and Folklore (as well as his use of creative translation). Sean Bonney's combining of visual and performance poetics is fascinating (as well as his creative translation of Baudelaire).

There are so many exciting poetries alive today. It is sad that so much boring, mediocre, well-crafted poetry seems to get funding and recognition. But of course it makes sense. It is safe. In America safe is good. In England too. And even the "unsafe" is quickly gentrified. Take for example Brick Lane in East London. Fashion centre of the so called counter culture. Safe. High property values. Art moves on.

Alas, there is so much to read and experience and write and so little time.

I still wonder about Jack Spicer's idea of community. It seems, overall, like the best model for innovative arts (music, poetry, visual arts). Of course there are great and interesting poets who publish with mainstream presses (Alice Notley being the prime example), but that is rare. Does publishing with Penguin really gives her any more readers than if she published with a smaller independent press? I am not sure having the most possible readers is the goal? A goal? What is a reader anyway?

A community is complex as well. There are plenty of MFA communities and academic communities. But I am interested in communities outside those frameworks.

There are at least four or five stellar reading series in London with good communities. Openned Reading series having the most energy and potential. Poem Klatch meetings to kick it all into high gear (I hope they continue).

My only real complaint about my new life in London is the hours of my job. I get enough to survive month to month but have to work mornings and evenings with a few hours free in the afternoon. I cannot attend hardly any readings unless I call in sick. I hope I can find a way around this next year. New job or a way to change my evening hours. Evening hours are the bread and butter of teaching EFL (ESL) and ESOL. Most of the students are working adults.

Ok. enough for now.

I am going to continue watching the last season of Sopranos. Perhaps try to add a poem centred around the setting of Sopranos to the new manuscript Placebo.

I hope for clear thinking and writing (without sacrificing complexity).

Clean cuts in!

frames

I have almost finished reading Gabe Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook. Gabe's book has opened up possibilities. Specifically place and history, including personal history. It is an expansive book with lots of boxes within boxes. A journey of consciousness and the practice of awareness. Of being awake. There is a rhythm to traveling. Rhode Island Notebook and Ken Edward's Nostalgia for Unknown Cities deal with place in very different ways.

Nostalgia for Unknown Cities uses disjunctive narrative and works at the sentence level. I am ware of each word, each verb tense etc. It opened me up to language and preciseness. Tight. Gorgeous. Highly imaginative.

Rhode Island Notebook is Hermes. fleet. builds. like I said expansive. Lots of details about mileage and things on the road notes and small essays on bums etc. Most everything goes in. Writing as practice in the best sense.

One of many tensions in my own work is the small esoteric lyric and the expansive disjunctive narrative. I am also finding ways into the self. The selves. A less limited exploration of the personal. Not confessional in its limited sense. In how it is mostly manifest in mainstream poetry in both the UK and US. Most mainstream poems in the US and UK rely on limited notions of the self. And limited notions of form. For me, good innnovative poetics expands notions of form (both ancient and modern) and expands consciousness. Poetry daily (the website) provides plenty of examples of poetry that expands nothing. Reinforces what we are already told or think we know (birds are beautiful, life is hard etc.) It is not theme. Themes are perhaps limited. It is form. yes the old Creeley thing. Form/content.

I mean I love frames. Whether it is narrative or conceptual. For example. Clark Coolidge's Alien Tatters, ALice Notley's In the Pines, Tim Atkins Horace, Geraldine Monk's Sonnets, Ron Silliman's The Alphabet.

Ok so that is what I mean.

so what is frame?

that is my life work

placebo has begun

Sent off some of the section "Return to the city" to literary mags last night. They were revised. Took the rough drafts off the blog.

I dreamed of North Carolina last night after watching True Blood all day. True Blood takes place in Alabama. I miss the south.

New ms Placebo (so far):

films and serials

a) Lumberton, NC (Blue Velvet)
b) Bon Temps, Louisiana (True Blood)
c) Post Apocalyptic Movie Review (The Van Guard)

Music

a) remixed lyrics from the band Placebo

currently writing Bon Temps, Louisiana while listening to Captain Beefheart's Shiny Beasts!