video art from friend and Lucifer Poetics poet Brian Howe (and Ashley). Brian is the man coming out of the cabin in the picture heading of this blog :-)
UP
31 May 2009
and now to complicate things in a good way :-)
From the Polish poet Grzegorz Wroblewski:
Jacek Podsiadlo (for many critics a typically 'Polish New York School' poet), is a 'new generation' poet but he uses the some poetic strategies like old poets before him but with new ' language effects' etc.
Rozewicz was born before WW II. He is a Polish classic poet, but different. He is not the same as the Polish 'monumental poets' (Milosz-Herbert).
Swietlicki is a Polish Beat poet
I think this is not a question young-old, not a generation confrontation, but something else.
Public language versus private language.
Nation versus the individual etc.
Jacek Podsiadlo (for many critics a typically 'Polish New York School' poet), is a 'new generation' poet but he uses the some poetic strategies like old poets before him but with new ' language effects' etc.
Rozewicz was born before WW II. He is a Polish classic poet, but different. He is not the same as the Polish 'monumental poets' (Milosz-Herbert).
Swietlicki is a Polish Beat poet
I think this is not a question young-old, not a generation confrontation, but something else.
Public language versus private language.
Nation versus the individual etc.
the new Polish poets
After 1990 Polish poetry shifted big time. It is a damn fine shift. A shift that SHOULD draw more attention from American and UK poets. And MUCH more attention from the literary world in Poland. Poetry in the education system in Poland seems to be even worse than in the UK and US. The more exciting Polish poets are rarely taught. I have spoken to a few folks who said it was very very very hard to get materials on the Beats while doing an MA at university. But I think some Polish literature professors might have made it to the 1970's in Polish literature. But it seems, from talking to others, that they are mostly clueless.
This is a quick rough summary of the landscape taken from an essay on Post-Colonialism by Anna Kałuża.
1.
After the horrors of WWII Polish poetry as a whole showed a desire to be settled and find a place. Nation building. Space through similarity and a desire for stable meaning (Milosz in exile etc.) A desire for community. "Similarity perceived in "the other" becomes a condition for an assimilatory understanding of otherness" (Anna Kałuża). Poets in this group included:
Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Jacek Podsiadło
I feel very little for the work of these poets. Most of their work bores me to tears. Poetry with a capital P. They have a few ok poems. Much like Seamus Heaney has a few ok poems. But as a whole, their work does nothing new or interesting.
2.
Before 1990 there were also poets who used the language of otherness. Some are like the American poets Dean Young, Tony Hoagland etc. A dirivitive and often stale use of otherness. Others are more interesting. One of the influences seems to be the NY school. Hybrids. The more interesting poets in this group include:
Tadeusz Różewicz (otherness in a more classical vein)i, Marcin Świetlicki (a beat poet)
3.
The new other is very exciting. Their work takes off after 1990 (along with the static otherness in the second grouping). And builds more after 2000. I don't think they are taught in school. I think most Polish students are taught poets from the first group. The nation builders. BORING!!! But this group is hot hot hot!!!
As a whole the work of these poets does not take an overt ethical interest in building Polish society. Otherness and playfulness is different than the language of otherness in Tadeusz Różewicz and Marcin Świetlicki. The crucial and most interesting difference is:
difference is more strongely emphasized though it is not made static
The influences on both of these new poetries (1 and 2) are varied but one big influence seems to be the NY school poetry (1st and 2nd and 3rd generations).
Some of the poets in this group of non-static otherness include:
Andrzej Sosnowski, Marcin Sendecki, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki,
and my new friend
Grzegorz Wróblewski
you can check his poetry, and others, in the Jacket issue of new Polish poets here:
The NEW Polish poetry
This is a quick rough summary of the landscape taken from an essay on Post-Colonialism by Anna Kałuża.
1.
After the horrors of WWII Polish poetry as a whole showed a desire to be settled and find a place. Nation building. Space through similarity and a desire for stable meaning (Milosz in exile etc.) A desire for community. "Similarity perceived in "the other" becomes a condition for an assimilatory understanding of otherness" (Anna Kałuża). Poets in this group included:
Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Jacek Podsiadło
I feel very little for the work of these poets. Most of their work bores me to tears. Poetry with a capital P. They have a few ok poems. Much like Seamus Heaney has a few ok poems. But as a whole, their work does nothing new or interesting.
2.
Before 1990 there were also poets who used the language of otherness. Some are like the American poets Dean Young, Tony Hoagland etc. A dirivitive and often stale use of otherness. Others are more interesting. One of the influences seems to be the NY school. Hybrids. The more interesting poets in this group include:
Tadeusz Różewicz (otherness in a more classical vein)i, Marcin Świetlicki (a beat poet)
3.
The new other is very exciting. Their work takes off after 1990 (along with the static otherness in the second grouping). And builds more after 2000. I don't think they are taught in school. I think most Polish students are taught poets from the first group. The nation builders. BORING!!! But this group is hot hot hot!!!
As a whole the work of these poets does not take an overt ethical interest in building Polish society. Otherness and playfulness is different than the language of otherness in Tadeusz Różewicz and Marcin Świetlicki. The crucial and most interesting difference is:
difference is more strongely emphasized though it is not made static
The influences on both of these new poetries (1 and 2) are varied but one big influence seems to be the NY school poetry (1st and 2nd and 3rd generations).
Some of the poets in this group of non-static otherness include:
Andrzej Sosnowski, Marcin Sendecki, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki,
and my new friend
Grzegorz Wróblewski
you can check his poetry, and others, in the Jacket issue of new Polish poets here:
The NEW Polish poetry
30 May 2009
Ealing Broadway. Poco Loco. 13:02. 25/5/09
Form an “O” with your mouth, raise your eyebrows and then back away slowly. Do not show teeth. Do not unhinge your mouth. Remain calm because loud noises, flailing your arms or quick movements such as running will cause other animals to feel threatened.
"this time I really trust you"
there there wake up
mr smarty mr chocolate
cum oh cum oh cum
you're a fool to whistle
at the flattened bums in Ealing
soap scum in the bath
bubbles in the beer
there's no way out of this twister
touch me as an animal
we're makin our way back to the city oh little fish
buckle-up, buck up, dry those ducts
I'm a love boat in yr gravy
mr smarty mr chocolate
cum oh cum oh cum
you're a fool to whistle
at the flattened bums in Ealing
soap scum in the bath
bubbles in the beer
there's no way out of this twister
touch me as an animal
we're makin our way back to the city oh little fish
buckle-up, buck up, dry those ducts
I'm a love boat in yr gravy
nomadic poetics
This idea, overall, is quite close to how I experience poetry, culture, the 21st century:
Nomadic Poetics
Nomadic Poetics
30th May 2009 09:03AM, London, UK
Jukebox tears. We never blamed it on the soil. We filled up. Flowers are coming bees are sucking pollen.The man in the Matrixx needed purpose. Purpose is more important than free will. I'm torn. Saint brother. Be well.
29 May 2009
The avant garde still lives! Long live the avant garde!
Nice review by John Latta here
John Latta's review of Kent Johnson
I don't know why but somehow every time I read Kent Johnson's projects (or books) (or about him) I have a bit of hope. There really is an avant garde. I hate the term Post-Avant. There is no post. I don't even think there is a post-modernism.
There is much work and play still to be done. I especially love the story of when he visited the soviet union with the big guns of American avant garde poetry in 1989. Read the Latta review if you don't know already. He is the best of the tricksters.
And kent Johnson, like Duchamp before him, shows us that context is everything.
We gotta get rough. Nothing is too precious.
John Latta's review of Kent Johnson
I don't know why but somehow every time I read Kent Johnson's projects (or books) (or about him) I have a bit of hope. There really is an avant garde. I hate the term Post-Avant. There is no post. I don't even think there is a post-modernism.
There is much work and play still to be done. I especially love the story of when he visited the soviet union with the big guns of American avant garde poetry in 1989. Read the Latta review if you don't know already. He is the best of the tricksters.
And kent Johnson, like Duchamp before him, shows us that context is everything.
We gotta get rough. Nothing is too precious.
27 May 2009
streetcake magazine
Hello talented writers, fans and friends,
this is a quick email to let you know that Issue 5 of streetcake is now on the site!
Please do give us a visit and have a read. We also have the biographies up for all the writers included this issue.
Our talented roll call is as follows:
sean burn, stephanie codsi,
trini decombe, nikki dudley,
kyle hemmings, P.A. levy,
anna mckerrow, angela readman,
sarah shaheen and lora stimson.
Also, we'd like a bit more feedback. So if you have any thoughts on the issue, please give us an email or find us on facebook/twitter and share your thoughts.
All the best and happy reading,
Nikki and Trini
--
check out the latest issue
this is a quick email to let you know that Issue 5 of streetcake is now on the site!
Please do give us a visit and have a read. We also have the biographies up for all the writers included this issue.
Our talented roll call is as follows:
sean burn, stephanie codsi,
trini decombe, nikki dudley,
kyle hemmings, P.A. levy,
anna mckerrow, angela readman,
sarah shaheen and lora stimson.
Also, we'd like a bit more feedback. So if you have any thoughts on the issue, please give us an email or find us on facebook/twitter and share your thoughts.
All the best and happy reading,
Nikki and Trini
--
check out the latest issue
early morning dream (scribbled in haste in the notebook)
a mother and her daughter came to visit. It was a university campus. We went to a building called Cunning linguist. The mother pointed to a ski lift. We rode the ski lift and a sufi said welcome to BFI. We rode the ski lift through a jungle a sign read NEW TURKEY. We fell into a river. A shrunken river. A mini Thames full of mud. We crashed into the river and I lost the mother and her daughter. Men with thick torches waded in the river and I was suddenly seized by child sized frogs. I couldn't shake them. The frogs wouldn't budge. I had no torch. Just groping in the river and feeling the frogs on my body.
20 May 2009
onward to Turkey
Just accepted the offer to teach at METU/ODTU in Ankara. Will leave in September. New frontiers coming.
Maybe one book per country. Almost finished with my London ms. Poland ms (Godzenie) will appear in print soon. Still finishing up Korea (Alien Memory Machine). Never mind the beasts (the United States) is making the rounds at publishers.
Maybe one book per country. Almost finished with my London ms. Poland ms (Godzenie) will appear in print soon. Still finishing up Korea (Alien Memory Machine). Never mind the beasts (the United States) is making the rounds at publishers.
19 May 2009
Docu poetics
I am interested in exploring the relationship between poetry/place. In particular, the attempt to strip down language to a documentary poetics (or perhaps an observational poetics) and a radical subjectivity. I have attempted to explore my own subjectivity and its relationship to an alien location in Godzenie (written while living in a coal mining region of Poland for two years) and in my most recent writing project Alien Memory Machine (written while living in South Korea and London).
My own background and early experiences have largely been nomadic. I grew up in Portadown, N. Ireland in an Ulster Scot community. This early experience was one of displacement. Neither Irish nor British. My family left this community for a better life, first in England and then later, when I was 12 years old, to Las Vegas and then Utah to become Mormon. I have shifted my identity many times from Ulster Scot settler in Northern Ireland to Mormon in America to philosophical Buddhist and nomadic traveller. Yet with each of these shifts there seems to be traces of the former self. Each new environment, or place, does not erase or negate the previous identity but further complicates it. I would like to see my personal history as the wake from a travelling ship while also acknowledging a complex past without repressing it.
I have not fully fleshed out my next project, but I would like to use Turkey as my basis of exploration. I would like to explore the alien landscape of Turkey and question how it interacts with my subjectivity and sense of identity. In Godzenie, I attempted to balance this intuitive sense of poetics (going on my nerve) with the use of more objective means to record or document my experiences as a process based poetics. I would like to continue this exploration of how my own subjectivity interacts with culture and place. Using the English language to make the boundaries more fluid between object and subject, academic discourse and personal writing, pathos and logos.
The American/Turkish poet and scholar Murat Nemet-Nejat, in his introduction to Eda as godless Sufism, outlines his idea of Eda in Turkish poetry as thematic, linguistic and metaphysical. All three elements interact with each other in Eda. He argues that English is much more obsessive with subject and object relations than the Turkish language and this is carried over into the thematic and metaphysical concerns of 20th century Turkish poetry. This subject/object obsession in the English language is another area I would like to explore. Perhaps my project can be explored on all three levels:
1) Thematically: my environment in Turkey. The sounds and sights. What is around me. A docu-poetics.
2) Metaphysically: A critical exploration of my own subjectivity and questioning, in an existential sense, my own ontology
3) Linguistically: exploring how English can become fluid in its subject/object distinctions and allow for a critical/radical subjectivity
A few quite recent books of poetry that have influenced my thinking on process-based poetics and place include: Gabe Guddings Rhode Island Notebook (the American sense of the nomadic mixed with the personal and documentary), Jacques Roubaud’s The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart (an exploration of a Paris of the past), the various NY schools of poetry (the lower east side as both site and subject of poetic activity), and Brenda Coultas’ A Handmade Musuem (the Bowery in NY as a frame of mind, a docu-poetics that enacts the fluidity of the subjective and objective nature of place).
Identity and sense of place has also been one of the pre-occupations of my writing and academic coursework. My MA thesis at Western Washington University was called Resident Alien (my status in the United States) and investigated the mind/body split inherited from Plato and my own personal experience of this split as an ex-theist. It has been ten years since I completed my MA, but the same basic obsessions drive my writing. The mind/body, subject/object, identity and place. My strict religious upbringing as LDS (or Mormon) also has a large influence on these binaries. We are resident aliens of the earth (heaven is our true home) our bodies are temporary vessels and so on. I have also felt this delusional mind/body split in terms of critical and creative in my academic career. By exploring a process-based poetics in Turkey, I would like to acknowledge and attempt to move beyond these various binaries (mind/body, subject/object, spiritual/profane, the mind as place/the political and geographical as place).
My own background and early experiences have largely been nomadic. I grew up in Portadown, N. Ireland in an Ulster Scot community. This early experience was one of displacement. Neither Irish nor British. My family left this community for a better life, first in England and then later, when I was 12 years old, to Las Vegas and then Utah to become Mormon. I have shifted my identity many times from Ulster Scot settler in Northern Ireland to Mormon in America to philosophical Buddhist and nomadic traveller. Yet with each of these shifts there seems to be traces of the former self. Each new environment, or place, does not erase or negate the previous identity but further complicates it. I would like to see my personal history as the wake from a travelling ship while also acknowledging a complex past without repressing it.
I have not fully fleshed out my next project, but I would like to use Turkey as my basis of exploration. I would like to explore the alien landscape of Turkey and question how it interacts with my subjectivity and sense of identity. In Godzenie, I attempted to balance this intuitive sense of poetics (going on my nerve) with the use of more objective means to record or document my experiences as a process based poetics. I would like to continue this exploration of how my own subjectivity interacts with culture and place. Using the English language to make the boundaries more fluid between object and subject, academic discourse and personal writing, pathos and logos.
The American/Turkish poet and scholar Murat Nemet-Nejat, in his introduction to Eda as godless Sufism, outlines his idea of Eda in Turkish poetry as thematic, linguistic and metaphysical. All three elements interact with each other in Eda. He argues that English is much more obsessive with subject and object relations than the Turkish language and this is carried over into the thematic and metaphysical concerns of 20th century Turkish poetry. This subject/object obsession in the English language is another area I would like to explore. Perhaps my project can be explored on all three levels:
1) Thematically: my environment in Turkey. The sounds and sights. What is around me. A docu-poetics.
2) Metaphysically: A critical exploration of my own subjectivity and questioning, in an existential sense, my own ontology
3) Linguistically: exploring how English can become fluid in its subject/object distinctions and allow for a critical/radical subjectivity
A few quite recent books of poetry that have influenced my thinking on process-based poetics and place include: Gabe Guddings Rhode Island Notebook (the American sense of the nomadic mixed with the personal and documentary), Jacques Roubaud’s The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart (an exploration of a Paris of the past), the various NY schools of poetry (the lower east side as both site and subject of poetic activity), and Brenda Coultas’ A Handmade Musuem (the Bowery in NY as a frame of mind, a docu-poetics that enacts the fluidity of the subjective and objective nature of place).
Identity and sense of place has also been one of the pre-occupations of my writing and academic coursework. My MA thesis at Western Washington University was called Resident Alien (my status in the United States) and investigated the mind/body split inherited from Plato and my own personal experience of this split as an ex-theist. It has been ten years since I completed my MA, but the same basic obsessions drive my writing. The mind/body, subject/object, identity and place. My strict religious upbringing as LDS (or Mormon) also has a large influence on these binaries. We are resident aliens of the earth (heaven is our true home) our bodies are temporary vessels and so on. I have also felt this delusional mind/body split in terms of critical and creative in my academic career. By exploring a process-based poetics in Turkey, I would like to acknowledge and attempt to move beyond these various binaries (mind/body, subject/object, spiritual/profane, the mind as place/the political and geographical as place).
18 May 2009
Info on middle east technical university
got good info from my friend Josh about METU in Turkey. He taught there for a few years. I met Josh in grad school 10 years ago. MA in English program at Western Washington University near Seattle. Now he is doing a phd in Indiana in Turkish studies. Americanism in Turkey. He is getting fluent in Turkish now. He said METU was one of the two best universities in Turkey. And the world technical does not mean vocational but more like MIT. The best minds in Turkey with science professors with degrees from Harvard, MIT etc.
Also chair of the Foreign languages department department is super down to earth and friendly. Very good video conference interview. Starting to feel more and more this is right way to go for a while.
Also got the job at Bilkent but i think it would be more restrictive than METU. The job at METU is teaching in the department of foreign languages and there is potential for teaching literature during the second term. METU feels a lot more inviting and welcoming than Bilkent at least from the interview.
Also chair of the Foreign languages department department is super down to earth and friendly. Very good video conference interview. Starting to feel more and more this is right way to go for a while.
Also got the job at Bilkent but i think it would be more restrictive than METU. The job at METU is teaching in the department of foreign languages and there is potential for teaching literature during the second term. METU feels a lot more inviting and welcoming than Bilkent at least from the interview.
Brian Howe's Darkness Party
Friend and fellow poet Brian Howe's Darkness Party
Setting me right on this windy crazy London Monday!
Setting me right on this windy crazy London Monday!
16 May 2009
Spain is out; Turkey might be in
Spain is out. Never really felt in. Got job offer to teach at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Maybe for one year and then return to the UK. I want a base. The UK could be my homebase. Till Wednesday to make a decision. Applied to over 100 jobs in the UK but nothing except two week jobs here and there. Not many prospects. I can save a bit of money in Turkey, get some material for a new book, then come back to London. Leaning in that direction. Don't want to loose touch with friends and poets in London though! Maybe a cross-cultural connection between innovative poets in the UK and Turkey. That could be cool.
Is poetry special?
There is sometimes a hazy line between innovative and so-called mainstream poetics. But for me, there is also division between art and poetry that tries to close the gap between art and life and those that create a specialized discourse. Both language poetics and new formalism in the United States, as many poets and scholars have noted, are two sides of the same coin. The emphasis on critical theory in the English departments of universities have certainly contributed to this specialized status of poetry.
Mainstream poetics often accuses the innovative or avant tradition of elitism.
But that is not the issue. It is far too simplistic.
This is not a well-thought argument but the NY school of poetry and the Beats have shown us the possibility of using the personal in innovative ways. Ditto Flarf. Many poets are innovative but do not fit into either the innovative scenes or the mainstream scenes.
There is also the hipness factor. What happens, as Mark Wallace notes, when our avant garde deodorant runs out and we start to stink. The natural scent of our body fills the trapped elevator full of all the hip linguistically innovative poets.
Then what?
What if you are a poet in the UK and you are not a part of the university?
Don't get me wrong. I want to be hip. I want to be innovative. I enjoy some linguistically innovative poetry. But I find myself drifting more and more towards poets that use the personal in innovative ways (Bernadette Mayer, John Wieners, Jack Spicer, Anselm Berrigan, Amy King etc etc,)
I used to think the so-called in-between poets in the U.S. were not interesting. But maybe the original idea of Fence magazine was right. Maybe sitting on the fence produces the most interesting new work? Maybe poetry is a tad too balkanized?
I do recognize there is a real difference between the poetry in mainstream UK publications and the poetry coming out of various innovative traditions in the UK. But it seems like the use of the personal has been co-opted by slam poetics and simplistic confessional ism and identity politics (Carol Ann Duffy etc.)
But I am very bored with Language poetry and its derivatives. I am also tired of the overly academic side of innovative poetics.
If I teach university again, I want to teach people who are not poets. Not part of the small circle we call the avant garde or post-avant. The world is a much bigger place!
The simple sentence is just as complex as a sentence with disrupted syntax. And sometimes. maybe a lot of the time, I hear or read poetry that tries on the clothes of complexity (ruptured syntax, high diction mixed with informal diction, parataxis etc.) but reads like one of those terrible academic essays that says nothing!
Ok. This could go on and on. This is not a hard line. I admire some poetry/poets that rupture/disrupt syntax. I admire some poets that believe in the marxist potential of language poetics. But overall, I am bored bored bored with linguistically innovative poetry coming out of the language school tradition.
I do, despite all this, believe there is a real difference between most mainstream and most innovative poetries.
As a few UK poets have noted, the innovative and personal seems to be largely missing in the UK scenes!
Mainstream poetics often accuses the innovative or avant tradition of elitism.
But that is not the issue. It is far too simplistic.
This is not a well-thought argument but the NY school of poetry and the Beats have shown us the possibility of using the personal in innovative ways. Ditto Flarf. Many poets are innovative but do not fit into either the innovative scenes or the mainstream scenes.
There is also the hipness factor. What happens, as Mark Wallace notes, when our avant garde deodorant runs out and we start to stink. The natural scent of our body fills the trapped elevator full of all the hip linguistically innovative poets.
Then what?
What if you are a poet in the UK and you are not a part of the university?
Don't get me wrong. I want to be hip. I want to be innovative. I enjoy some linguistically innovative poetry. But I find myself drifting more and more towards poets that use the personal in innovative ways (Bernadette Mayer, John Wieners, Jack Spicer, Anselm Berrigan, Amy King etc etc,)
I used to think the so-called in-between poets in the U.S. were not interesting. But maybe the original idea of Fence magazine was right. Maybe sitting on the fence produces the most interesting new work? Maybe poetry is a tad too balkanized?
I do recognize there is a real difference between the poetry in mainstream UK publications and the poetry coming out of various innovative traditions in the UK. But it seems like the use of the personal has been co-opted by slam poetics and simplistic confessional ism and identity politics (Carol Ann Duffy etc.)
But I am very bored with Language poetry and its derivatives. I am also tired of the overly academic side of innovative poetics.
If I teach university again, I want to teach people who are not poets. Not part of the small circle we call the avant garde or post-avant. The world is a much bigger place!
The simple sentence is just as complex as a sentence with disrupted syntax. And sometimes. maybe a lot of the time, I hear or read poetry that tries on the clothes of complexity (ruptured syntax, high diction mixed with informal diction, parataxis etc.) but reads like one of those terrible academic essays that says nothing!
Ok. This could go on and on. This is not a hard line. I admire some poetry/poets that rupture/disrupt syntax. I admire some poets that believe in the marxist potential of language poetics. But overall, I am bored bored bored with linguistically innovative poetry coming out of the language school tradition.
I do, despite all this, believe there is a real difference between most mainstream and most innovative poetries.
As a few UK poets have noted, the innovative and personal seems to be largely missing in the UK scenes!
14 May 2009
10 May 2009
a bit of paradise
I found a bit of paradise yesterday.
First, a very cool feast at an Iranian restaurant with my former student from Iran named Ben. Sauces and yogurt drinks and all kinds of amazing bbq'ed meat. Carpets on the ceiling and wall.
Second, cool exhibition of Felix Topolski called Topolski Century. Overground trains shook above us while looking at murals from the 20th century. He was everywhere in the 20th century. Amazing work.
Third, the poetry library on the firth floor of the Royal Albert Hall. Treasures galore! I wanna live in that place. Small press wonders from the 1960's and beyond! Also a balcony with a view of the Thames and Big Ben. It doesn't get any better!
Bummer is you can only check out four items. I borrowed:
1) John Wieners The Hotel Wentley Poems (1st edition)
2) A Bernadette Mayer Reader
3) A Secret Location on the Lower East Side (all about the small presses in the 1960-1980)
4) Memorial Day by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman (Aleos Books 1971)
One day I want to start collecting my books again. But alas, I am on the move. Really nice to have this amazing resource in London.
Today was uneventful. Off to get bread, cheese, coffee and other essentials then maybe some Six Feet Under.
Not ready for Monday. But who is????
First, a very cool feast at an Iranian restaurant with my former student from Iran named Ben. Sauces and yogurt drinks and all kinds of amazing bbq'ed meat. Carpets on the ceiling and wall.
Second, cool exhibition of Felix Topolski called Topolski Century. Overground trains shook above us while looking at murals from the 20th century. He was everywhere in the 20th century. Amazing work.
Third, the poetry library on the firth floor of the Royal Albert Hall. Treasures galore! I wanna live in that place. Small press wonders from the 1960's and beyond! Also a balcony with a view of the Thames and Big Ben. It doesn't get any better!
Bummer is you can only check out four items. I borrowed:
1) John Wieners The Hotel Wentley Poems (1st edition)
2) A Bernadette Mayer Reader
3) A Secret Location on the Lower East Side (all about the small presses in the 1960-1980)
4) Memorial Day by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman (Aleos Books 1971)
One day I want to start collecting my books again. But alas, I am on the move. Really nice to have this amazing resource in London.
Today was uneventful. Off to get bread, cheese, coffee and other essentials then maybe some Six Feet Under.
Not ready for Monday. But who is????
9 May 2009
Tim Atkins
One of the best poets writing today. Horace and Petrarch in London. love hearing him read. And an all around fantastic guy.
check it out:
Tim Atkins
check it out:
Tim Atkins
4 May 2009
Spain versus Turkey versus London
so got a job offer to teach 9-14 year olds English in Murcia area of Spain. Near the coast. 1300 EUR a month. Awaiting possible interview with Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. If I get the university gig in Anakara it should be around 1000 EUR a month.
And then there is London for the poetry community but have to work during most of the readings and living at bare minimum to survive with average monthly salary of 952 EUR. Temporary. No paid holidays or sick days etc. A morning shift and evening shift almost every day.
I walk four miles a day to work and back to save on transport plus it is good exercise (this is actually good and not a moan).
I do have some great adult students. I feel I am doing something worthwhile overall. But there is a lot of government red tape and so on. Also the subject matter (English grammar and job search classes) do not satisfy or challenge my mind.
I have made some good friends who are also poets in London.
I love having the possibility of connecting to other artists and poets face to face.
Perhaps Spain is bit too touristy. A bit too stereotypical in its happy holidays makers and property hunters. Perhaps. And then there is the difference between ages. University students and teaching English 101, 102 in Turkey or teaching ESL to 9-14 year olds in Spain.
Money is such a strange energy force. A taboo for authentic people. Something people love or try to get their whole lives.
Money becomes a bit important when there is quite a serious lack. I have no desire to own anything except books and my macbook and some clothes. No house. No car. Just my two feet. Enough to eat. Enough to see things. Enough to get a plane ticket to see my parents and brothers and sisters in America once a year.
And my own writing space. However small and simple. But mine. A center.
Someplace . . . no place . . .
I like ambient music and birds and Jack Spicer and True Blood and way down in the hole and I am addicted to the energy exchange of poetry and music and art.
I am in love with simplicity with the paring down. The measuring out. The collecting and discarding. Whittling down.
I am not in love with money. I hope I can be buried cheaply cause I doubt I will have life savings or insurance or or or . . .
So yeah. There has to be a place for folks that don't wanna play the capitalist game.
Spain vs. Turkey vs London??????????
And then there is London for the poetry community but have to work during most of the readings and living at bare minimum to survive with average monthly salary of 952 EUR. Temporary. No paid holidays or sick days etc. A morning shift and evening shift almost every day.
I walk four miles a day to work and back to save on transport plus it is good exercise (this is actually good and not a moan).
I do have some great adult students. I feel I am doing something worthwhile overall. But there is a lot of government red tape and so on. Also the subject matter (English grammar and job search classes) do not satisfy or challenge my mind.
I have made some good friends who are also poets in London.
I love having the possibility of connecting to other artists and poets face to face.
Perhaps Spain is bit too touristy. A bit too stereotypical in its happy holidays makers and property hunters. Perhaps. And then there is the difference between ages. University students and teaching English 101, 102 in Turkey or teaching ESL to 9-14 year olds in Spain.
Money is such a strange energy force. A taboo for authentic people. Something people love or try to get their whole lives.
Money becomes a bit important when there is quite a serious lack. I have no desire to own anything except books and my macbook and some clothes. No house. No car. Just my two feet. Enough to eat. Enough to see things. Enough to get a plane ticket to see my parents and brothers and sisters in America once a year.
And my own writing space. However small and simple. But mine. A center.
Someplace . . . no place . . .
I like ambient music and birds and Jack Spicer and True Blood and way down in the hole and I am addicted to the energy exchange of poetry and music and art.
I am in love with simplicity with the paring down. The measuring out. The collecting and discarding. Whittling down.
I am not in love with money. I hope I can be buried cheaply cause I doubt I will have life savings or insurance or or or . . .
So yeah. There has to be a place for folks that don't wanna play the capitalist game.
Spain vs. Turkey vs London??????????
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