,

I've returned

2011-05-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

Cheers Jonny

2010-12-31T10:12:00.000-08:00

Long outlying coast ---- living and loving
at Lascaux each morning is darker
but night gets more in common day by day,
let's say, a claim to fall down for into
the makeshift lighting of the facility basement
where the speech will never move
around its focus upon holding the closer council:    ‘he swaps
the Victorian prison for
the Georgian mansion’, but this is history for
your own safety, some new memory
of this movement along the outsides
of a building,    the hatch

is opened every five
minutes because he is OK and because
he must answer in the affirmative, candles blown

open all night behind the iron gate outside
this building, snowed in to future orbit
around every opening that now needs
to be held had not
enough time shins covered mouths steam
with wet cloth    the loss
of the final exchange
in the guestbook marked off
shore    nothing ever moves over
the window you can see from the empty street, I loved you at the
general assembly, night sticks
to vespers from the step-ladder    slow wind
around the officer number    caved-in
to silver window from the remand centre
has been burning ever since

and ISS now so truly
are you ours    what every astronaut wants
to unfurl your shimmering
new solar wings with fierce love falling
police helmet crashed into
atmosphere at 17000 mph that’s the point
voluntary wilderness response

team sets out to radiate
the fiscal meter in the microwave    sets out
together but were afraid to light
the gas leak in the far
corner of the cave     burning ever
since from where we buried

the solid day
of the satellite image
of today and who and where else
is meant by that
transformative pronoun
shift    take nothing with you
but what you’d go onto newsnight with

I’ve got your back     a stack of fagots
and Delia aflame     the warm reasoned window
and the poisoned rains    fire
on the street where the free in-
direct occupies everything
they’d never recognise

riots past the projection room as the agenda,
memory, the metaphor all loved
to ground with no markings across the skylight, bets
on no unguarded buildings but blue lights, say,
left on all night

...

2010-09-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

Another French Wieners

2010-08-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

Another Google Docs simultaneous edit collaboration with John DeWitt in Montevideo.

Some feedback from francophones? Does anybody actually use the phrase "demander le champ libre"? We've never heard it. There needs to be a way to retain the magic of the second stanza. Ideas?

Le Décours de la Pleine Lune

Il n’y a plus des fleurs à porter au
Crepuscule. L’automne et la pluie. Habille en
bleu. Pour la descente. Des chiens aboient au
portail. Descends-toi ma fille mon âme
lourd de la mémoire du ciel.

C'est l'heure pour la famine et les autels
vides. On te demand le champ libre car c’est en
ton départ qu’on atteint le printemps encore.
Aucune lumière ne luit dans la boite.
Je veux sortir à dévaliser une épicerie.

Faim. J’ai mal aux jambes. Qui nous nourrira?
Il reste des miles. Les secretes encore non lus.
Des chiens aboient dans mes oreilles. Mon homme s’est égaré.
Mon ame un cliquitis des connections perdues.
Qui va brancher la lumière à l'automne.
Quand touts les hommes sont seuls.
En bas. Et encore plus loin à descendre.
Paroles sont plus à ma bouche.
Sans voix dans la marée.

The Waning of the Harvest Moon

No flowers now to wear at
Sunset. Autumn and the rain. Dress in
blue. For the descent. Dogs bark at
the gate. Go down daughter my soul
heavy with the memory of heaven.

It is time for famine and empty
altars. We ask your leave for by
your going we gain spring again.
No lights glimmer in the box.
I want to go out and rob a grocery store.

Hunger. My legs ache. Who will feed us.
Miles more to go. Secrets yet unread.
Dogs bark in my ears. My man lost.
My soul a jangle of lost connections.
Who will plug in the light at autumn.
When all men are alone.
Down. And further yet to go.
Words gone from my mouth.
Speechless in the tide.

It's raining in Cochabamba

2010-08-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

I've been away in the Dordogne, so have been lacking in most forms of communication. I'm back in Jersey now to read the Bible & Bleak House for schoolwork. Afterwards, I may go and walk around in France for a few weeks and read the Prelude. It's going to be rollocking good fun. Anyone who wants to join, you know, give me a yodel. Here's something from last week:

this secular grace
of a light

trick in the mirror, we settle down
on the western rim

for miles & miles
we don't yet know
how to translate into milk we need

to do something more the flow
of each action into real-time
tightens & retightens around

the neck filled
with deadheaders
& leather

straps. we don't watch acid-rain, we don't
fall amongst landmarks in the
equators of the uncrying
people. is it 1972? so where

are you? standing in the dark
of the creek
true, affording
meat, you know what it is
the result

that beckons us inside the factories
upon the ground that's split in two
the manifold

space a briefcase left
behind on the train, a new surface to be

almost recognised, the way we landed
in Bogotá with circles in our eyes

& crickets! & everything
is all I had left it's by

the bend the water's edge no more an effort
to learn no

pressure it’s a test practised solfège
for true North the constant yaw
to compensate for wind

John Wieners Frenched and Spanished

2010-08-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

Leaving Montevideo on Monday to Buenos Aires to be back in Britain on Wednesday. The end of a momentous three and a half month trip. Tomorrow we are waking up at 07.30 to drive to Rocha, a province on the Brazilian border where we are spending the Sunday, but tonight friend John DeWitt and I stayed up late translating some John Wieners (he has an EPC page now with some great stuff on it) into French and Spanish. We lack a native French speaker in the room (although we plan to send the poems to a few), so we don't know what lies right at the backs of the words. This may have led to some false choices. Here is Cocaine, the most difficult one to make in French, first in English, then in our translation.

Cocaine

For I have seen love
and his face is choice Heart of Hearts,
a flesh of pure fire, fusing from the center
where all Motion is one.

And I have known
despair that the Face has ceased to stare
at me with the Rose of the world
but lies furled

in an artificial paradise it is Hell to get into.
If I knew you were there
I would fall upon my knees and plead to God
to deliver you in my arms once again.

But it is senseless to try.
One can only take means to reduce misery,
confuse the sensations so that this Face,
what aches in the heart and makes each new

start less close to the source of desire,
fade from the flesh that fires the night,
with dreams and infinite longing.

Cocaïne

Car j’ai vu l’amour
et son visage est le Coeur des Coeurs de choix,
une chair du feu pur, fusionné du centre
où tout le Mouvement est un.

Et j’ai connu
désespoir que la Figure ne me dévisage plus
avec la Rose du monde
mais reste ferlée

dans un paradis artificiel c’est l’enfer d’entrer.
Si je savais que tu étais la
je tomberais aux genoux et je plaiderais à Dieu
qu’il te remette à mes bras une fois de plus.

Mais c’est inutile d’essayer.
Tous ce qu’on peut faire c’est réduire la misère,
confondre les sensations afin que cette Figure,
ce qui s’embrase dans le coeur et fais chaque nouveau

début moins proche de la source du désir,
s’efface de la chair qui enflamme la nuit,
avec les rêves et l’aspiration infinie.

And here is a Spanish version of a little poem (but it's a big poem) from Ace of Pentacles.

Two Years Later

The hollow eyes of shock remain
Electric sockets burnt out in the
skull.

The beauty of men never disappears
But drives a blue car through the
stars.

Dos Años Despues

Los ojos huecos de descarga permanecen
Como enchufes quemados en la
calavera.

La hermosura de los hombres nunca desaperece
Mas lleva un coche azul a través de las
estrellas.

You don't have to call me Ishmael anymore

2010-07-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

Sanctions are going
to make us win are
you coming too the tide
is black just the right strength. We swim on by

the thickening light thrown up
through a live-stream & somewhere
near the surface there is dancing

but at night? & right across the bay
it is lovely: the drones of the mobile
communications unit it is fully
occupied tonight my love & the stars are lit

up by its swimming
pools you know I think we are
almost connected I think we are
almost there. And the word

is brackish as the skin spills
out through the silt stream it is
precious but barely since it's all been
at hand. & the road we take will run

right across the surface where the many
green swirls on the lake are duckweed
& all the skin flakes they will find
in the small pools will be ours.

Frigorifico at Fray Bentos

2010-07-13T13:16:00.001-07:00

back door found, ah

at last the great frigorifico
we have arrived thanks
to our friends in the meat processing

business & those at the census

bureau who have discovered
the root of our grief & made
sure we knew the cell wall

melts first then burns, that

the fat's needed for

the fire so it was good, it was

gondwana we passed by sleeping
its small mancunian
houses all around, the door we found
ajar awaits the flesh

delivery from the distant

world we don't eat, in trucks, it's true

like the desert the

world always a short crawl

away however you turn, the water

is scarce though es

un sentimiento, & anyway we learn.

NOTE: We were told by Daniel Supervielle about the largest redbrick frigorifico in Uruguay, which in Uruguayan Spanish means something like an industrial meat processing plant. It is located in Fray Bentos, on the Argentine border. Gondwana is the supercontinent. Es un sentimiento is part of a football chant for the Uruguayan national team.

Old Hole dug up from Hard Drive

2010-07-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

IV
A woman can eat at any time. I have been debating to which degree I am an inflected language. There is not enough air in this room to sustain a community. Let alone an infection. A new ailment. This, it must be said, is what I crave the most. She, the girl, is changing into new sheets. Her money is wet from her having walked along the road, where it is raining. Her name is N. N. From the alphabet, presumably. I have learned countless alphabets, but never the languages themselves. In addition, of course, I learnt everything a child is expected to learn, though often I wish my mother had stopped after the numbers. I was taught at home, in the dark, for my mother turned out the lights at every opportunity. Her reason for this is still unknown to me. My mother who spent a lot of her time kneeling outside my bedroom door in prayer. The Hole is here too, of course, lodged large in the middle, loved into the wall like some of the greatest mysteries. Mysteries which seemed in their heart thumping way to be discoveries. The earliest maps man displayed. The earliest maps for marking the locations of the graves of the first of men to die. The Hole composed of the shards of screams, the shapes of others. With an ear pressed up against the Hole one hears the sound of others moving around in our clothes, copying the rhythms of our clapboard breath. Shifting pebbles, possibly, in barrows. Right back to where they came from. N. is here to keep guard of my possessions in case I fall asleep. The few possessions I have left which are not nailed to the floor. Among them my sleep cycle. I trust N. in this house when I am asleep for though I appear asleep I am actually only pretending to be asleep. Besides, there are very few walls for her to hide behind, and plenty of light in the rooms that have windows. This room has a window though it has been broken for as long as I have been here. It lets in so little light it might as well be a wall. N. is making some onion soup for us to eat. There we are, it’s my eyes, it’s my eyes which are sore today. Or is that pain perhaps in my head. It seems too deep to be eyes. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Behind the eyes is the deepest void. Nothing can go wrong in the void. It’s a logical impossibility, as would say my father. In any case, the problem is beyond my skin. There is little one can do with anything beyond the skin, just as there is little one can do with the man spying on me as I type this from the next room. One should never trust how one feels beyond the skin, it seems. I speak, at least, from experience. The skin is how one meets the world. We all fit in the world the way we fit in our skin and we rarely dream that we will all be decapitated by a despotic regime, and we are happy, for the world is a hole exactly the same size as our bodies, and I, myself, enjoy meeting the world and being clean, though I am usually cleaner than I am today, I swear, and I usually eat less sugary snacks than I am eating at the moment, although sometimes, it’s true, I never know when to stop eating, especially when I am alone. I meet the world with my skin, though I never enjoyed being naked, even alone, or in front of animals. Of course there are many ways to meet the world. Once, before I arrived in this room, I crossed the Wisula at Warsaw, jumping from floating block of ice to floating block of ice. My father said a lot of important things that meant nothing as his plane became the sea. My father who complained often of constant redundancy. Of persistently being sent home from his job as a day shift which is what he would often say, he was a day-shift. Where he would go to dig the ground for strange objects. The mine shaft, abandoned now, gone to ground. He would continue to turn up after they closed the mine, walking around the area alone at all hours, and, eventually, the company that bought the land employed him as the security guard for the neglected shaft, and he was given his own little shack next to the dark, empty crater, and would occasionally have to chase away kids who would try to break into the underground hole at night to spray graffiti or to hold their quiet parties. Stop complaining, dear father. You are as far gone as the hole. You are now underground and you didn’t even have to break in. My father might have complained about me, most likely. Definitely he would have been displeased that I never bought this house. The house, as far as I know, has no owner. Perhaps I was invited here once to stay and take guard over somebody’s possessions while they were away. Why I came to this town, it’s nobody’s business. I just try to stop the cats from screaming. The Hole was suddenly there. Suddenly the beginning of the Hole. So I must to leave to make the plane. I sleep in the room and pretend to be dead so that N. will leave me alone and go back to the street.

A Father dead between two sounds.

A pretty please, a plee, the splash.

There’s something really dangerous about this Hole that is a certain measurable distance around the rim. The Hole looks like it has started growing, and maybe changing shape. The Hole will remain a Hole, unless it gets filled in with chemicals that don’t yet happen here. I need a flask of something chemical. I will ask O to bring over the chemicals when O comes over tomorrow.
My legs feel like decoration. The door to the room is being slammed by the wind. Somewhere I am moving as ocean-storm, room-bright, the weather brings only more weather. If I left the room for fifty years the Hole would grow to contain the street. The Hole grows by itself. The Hole eats in its sleep. The Hole has never felt anything bigger than itself. The Hole is alive, then, in this sense. I am alive most of all. The product of how many transactions I have lost count. I sit here, next to my rhyming dictionary, unfinished. My book on alphabets, on the next desk, also incomplete. I once collected rhymes and alphabets until I no longer thought them beautiful. I have friends who would say that this was my original aim. These friends are not real, of course. Only you, dear friend, are real. Here the action takes place almost entirely inside one house that, at the end, is burnt by the protagonist to the ground. Perhaps, after all, the job of architecture. And we will all have to go home. Along with the light we will all return to where we came from. The empty canvas hangs upon the walls, next to the failed experiments with history. It is so cold in the room that the art is freezing. Every hundred words I go running. It seems however, that I have sacrificed everything apart from this house. My book on international land borders, for instance, lies incomplete with the others, it might as well be dust. It might as well be horns. They kill for those. The book, lost in its lines. Lying in its lists. The aim, the aim. Never reveal your intentions, my father told me. They stuff the guts of their first pets into cotton wool; sew the wool onto the wall next to the sequences of empty canvas. The intention of the book was to name every international border that existed at that time along with information on length, practical information for travellers (political situation, number of watchtowers, ease of passage), whether the border had natural origins (a river, a mountain range, etc), or was rather purely the result of a particular political decision, or whether it was a combination of the two, and various other similarly important factors. As research I bought thousands of maps and from them constructed my own, beautiful works, inserted into the book every few pages as glossy colour diagrams. Yes, I worked as a sculptor, from this room, listening to my wife scream as I drank her white rum. The walls were covered with my scrawling. One particularly difficult border was that of Afghanistan and China, marked, of course, by the mountain pass. I could not, for the life of me, locate that border. My trip to the area yielded nothing of utility. I was to forced to conclude, in desperation, that the border simply had no history, no length, no origin, natural or otherwise. On every map I examined, the border was unmarked, the two countries met in a blur, a touch as soft as dreaming. As hopelessness. It was nothing. I walked back and forth between the two countries at least fifty times, though the border was nowhere to be found. I returned a failure, to everybody. To my father, then still alive, most of all. Of course, I was forced to abandon the project. Out of frustration, during this time, I often shot at my friends. I refused to eat. I poisoned my pets, polished their skin. I changed my name. I became an illegal alien, somehow, without leaving my room. Bliss. I went blind. Still somewhat blind, and overweight now, I gaze at the Hole in the wall until I see it start to move, until I notice it jerk and expel something larger than itself. A jet-plane. A line of verse. A continent. Some history. Incidentally, for scale, the Hole is the size of a seed of a mythical fruit. The ear of a giant. A whole book. Myself, I have no wings, I move much slower than speed dating. I am just the right size for history. So you see, I do not fit in the Hole. My face, flayed and folded into a tight square, might very well, though of course I am not yet ready for this perfect sacrifice. Some of my friends still have faces, some have skin. Some are better at lying. I recognise them all. Though I try not to talk too much about my friends, or my face. Talking about my name buries me most of all. At some point we just stop talking. When in Budapest I followed a friend in and out of government buildings, pausing in each hallway to gaze at myself in the mirrors that were hung there while she attended to her bureaucratic business. This was when I felt compelled to gaze at my face for truth’s sake. I once collected truths, for there were many at that time, I believed, and often in the form of pianos. You’d be surprised, I’m sure, at the amount of old pianos people have had buried in fields like flies. A piano is a complicated machine, and is as a result extremely versatile; it can be used to incite revolution, and almost all other forms of violence, or, if you like, soft lighting and slow dining. Much like an alphabet, in this sense. Of course, before I collected pianos I did, in fact, collect alphabets, at one point scrawling them across the walls of the room. Alphabets existed before sound itself, I once believed. Nothing exists before sound, I now believe. Though N. often speaks before she wakes. Though I do fear N. here has been presented as mystery. She is rather a simple girl, uncomplicated as a string of letters when thought of simply as a string of letters, as monotone. Monotone is colour and sound, and is therefore far from being monotone, as a word. With enough focus, perhaps, I could find N. mysterious. Of course my favourite mysteries are those which are in themselves are discoveries. For instance, the idea of there being more land on the next Atlantic bank. Or, for instance, Trotsky’s ice pick. The body of Christ. The frozen river. Quantum mechanics. Empty space. Sundown. Indeed, the child’s discovery that one can place objects into empty spaces forms one of the most important of discoveries. In fact I once wrote about this in great detail upon the walls of the room, though in alphabets I fear I can no longer understand. Briefly, however, a small child will realise the space inside a bucket is empty space and will begin to fill it with any objects that might fit inside. This discovery comes before the discovery that there exist stories one cannot understand, and just after the realisation that one has the power to cause pain, I have found. Confusion. It is colder in the room than it once was. Or perhaps I am simply going blind. Gutless and tired, my eyes have seen the end of history. I am going to build a room, then a child, then a wall free standing in the middle of the room upon which the child will draw the objects in the room, and later self portraits, despite the child never having seen its face, there being no reflective surface in the room. Finally the child will draw only Xs on the wall. Perhaps he will count the days in roman numerals, or invent an alphabet of X. Perhaps he will perform sacrifices, crucify history, taxidermy himself with the bed clothes which are part of the wall. Eventually the child will destroy the wall. The wall will be destroyed, the room will collapse, the child will be crushed, and my precious metaphors alone will form the final objects. The final objects in a world where walls will signify nothing save the division between history and a something, the substance of which nobody knows--too large to fit in a grave, too white to read on a page, to long to have sung by bedtime--that will come to replace history. Walls are the final movement of a culture struggling not to be a symphony. A wall is the most natural of borders. The wall can be bought. The wall can be sold. After history walls, now practically useless, are placed in warm rooms, encased in bulletproof glass, surrounded by armed guards, to be photographed. Glass, strong glass, as thick as a wall. Stronger, even, for the glass and the guards serve a singular purpose: preservation, the destruction of the possibility of the end. Guards so tough they’ll fire you into the ground, up against the wall. A firing squad. Oh. The origin of my Hole? Doubtful. There would have been more than one Hole, but here, there is only one, at about the height of my heart when I’m standing against the wall. I got up just after writing ‘there would have been more than one Hole’, to strike the pose of a man facing a death squad. I feel I cannot properly mimic the face of a man condemned to die, but that’s to be expected, I suppose. It would be worrying if I could, perhaps. But perhaps if the squad had sublime aim, and made only one Hole from multiple shots? It all fits. No, nothing fits. Nothing fits into the wall, the heart, the hole in the head. The eyes. I am cold. And I miss my father’s platitudes. When I was younger I despised his use of clichés and sayings though now, long after his death, I realise that he all he was trying to do was to secure my language, protect it from the danger that we were told lay across the border, fasten it to a post so it wouldn’t float off to somewhere unknown, such as to an undiscovered continent. Of course I have on occasions attempted the same thing. To document the language so to ultimately strengthen it, to preserve it, this language that could very well be the last remaining language, for all I know, not having left the room, neither through the window nor through the door, perhaps for many years. Though I remember, I knew language when it was a small child. As a child language was as wild as an ocean-storm, even when spoken by my father, it was a force for the destruction of cities. Self-destructive, almost, its lack of landfall bruising the storm’s walls. This is what will happen when language is left on its own, I suppose. For months, on my travels throughout Central Europe, I refused to speak to anybody, believing my language to be extinct. It turned out I had been misinformed, of course, and eventually I tracked down the man who had performed such a brutal trick on me and I destroyed his house, which was in Trieste. If I could speak any language it would be an unspoken language. If I could be anything I’d be what the world decided it would leave behind. Mae would be the person who’d carry me on her back at the very end, lost, cold, worldless, exhausted, away from the area of impact. This world will never be taken from us by air-crash investigators, as once said my father, who died in a plane crash, it is true. These coincidences mean everything for they are not coincidences, I now believe. The existence of coincidence is a mean trick everybody is falling for. What I said before was a poem, perhaps, that I have stolen from somewhere or other. From where, of course, I can’t recall.

¡Uruguay!

2010-07-06T14:34:00.001-07:00

Working on this stuff these days down in Montevideo:

Lakes of the Rub' al Khali

heat. weight lifts away from the mass
flaps at the feet as the full
technicolour encounter splays
the light sensitive
tissue, we will hurt

the ruin until beginning
appears as late death to tilt
the crowd now warming up

the coordinate with stiff rubbed
hands along the sand, the half-furnished
path to dream demand we boil on or
are edited out like water, this especially good
for the end we're getting all lumped up for
tomorrow he says he was
for the new day the furthest light
we can see & the tissue, of course
it's grey and
they face it too, tomorrow, the trembling
hand with the hole in it, but

tonight, fire! & morning
we're not even
in for it, trailing the desert inside
our favourite things the ones
we love with
the holes in them, boiled straight
to love in mirage for first light
eye-locked it starts
here, its fresh slip
across a damp sand

al-Amin (continued)

2010-06-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

Make of us any
citied limit you want

alight in desert (?) the new one-eyed shut look

is straight down into the scene, old space around
you appears on screen as some new thing

we have to name. So you are now considered
to be part of the vacuum set & the entire

strike was in meaning to take your change, the slight
shift in tone to background check, light bludgeoned up

as if they'd said be there.

3 Western Poems

2010-05-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

Ogden, Utah

Fork closed round the battle
mountain the same old cut

into many wests our plans
to hide the book cliffs

abandoned in the salt flats if
it rains tonight in Reno we

must do what they did
before that's be mapped last

Elko, Nevada

Rush to choke upon
the next west no

being no negation
we cannot handle

touches upon wood
for water the passion

I put here undersold
reflected in the light

of the latest land
purchase

Price, Utah

It's the last stratum
the rancher owns though

it may be the time it took
to get so far up also

belongs to him. The total
gradient of accumulation, the

steady shift of towns
amongst Carbon County

flats, sometime salt sometime
sand. Arrival in the empty

frequency to lead the
ghost town on

mountain time the hour
told by foot she said it's

near enough to walk

Out of Iowa

2010-05-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

1

Plainer song now shakes out some clearing

sky hints at the full land. Almost all of Iowa
& the holes are in the shape of the sky.

The sky is displeased, will refuse.

Shape to strain against Ottumwa
the sky will refuse its shape
& buckle out (& from this the small

hills, the old passes
, the light snows?)
It is here

the weather arrives and over the
land this time! Itself moving out

in full spread knowing the next
winter lies in the mouth will pass

down beside the main street the
dirt speech beside the dead

of our time the dust being blown
around inside the frame. And the framers, sun

bright as future world, new
faces set into flesh mound.

2

Flash-flood kept moving the
night-watch. New position.

Many known fields many yet unknown.

3

And the small town
arrives in good time
to harvest the whole

vocal circle got in such
terrible feathers for snatching
the moon loose & wild.

Try & tell us not
to crisscross the west for
wet rock, mostly light
mostly evaded, come--

A day in Berkeley

2010-05-11T20:22:00.001-07:00

Un Bel Di

sweet thing
rain where i feel
large machines for garotting

2010-05-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

I am starting travelling again tomorrow. New posts will appear sporadic and travelogueish. This time it seems epic: over Atlantic by air, across the North American continent by road, across the Atlantic again, and again (my plane is New York to Buenos Aires, but it stops over in Madrid. I don't know the record for the most continents under foot in 24 hours but it can't be more than 3, surely). For two months I will be living in Montevideo, Uruguay. I return to the Channel Islands mid-August.

xx

Vinegrowers

2010-04-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

Just wonderful to find a Celan poem in English I've never seen before. It's also the last he ever wrote. Pierre Joris published a translation over on his blog a few days ago. I'm putting it here to keep the energy up. This one is fragile depth, high tannin.

Vinegrowers dig up
the darkhoured watch,
depth for depth,

you read,

the invisible
one commands the wind
to stay in bounds,

you read,

the Open Ones carry
the stone behind the eye,
it recognizes you,

on the Sabbath.

ah

2010-04-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

I wrote 'Al Amin / Amin / Ameen'. Joe wrote The Strike at Camp 1. In response, though, not really, rather in the spirit of collaboration and knowing that we're sharing something, here is

AH

dead blind space what's been
built

distance to some other town or

lake well
considered here. Note map plan

for new town focus on
total sight
see Abraham no

head turn. Of which

me do they speak. Sweet

figures yet
unnumbered

you occupy

corners oh, each locality
lights up we make you
out. Fullness of stone

felt most if
kneeling crawl along

the street in front of

home. First mark
each outline

leaves we streak the road O
well.

---

This'll perhaps develop a bit but I thought post it now to keep running. Joe wrote as a note for his Strike at Camp 1, "Related materials involve radio voices and Assange." For this one: Islamic calander, attack helicopter, second death (hellfire), 'ah damn', New Baghdad.

Also, this blog is now being archived by the British Library, so, here we are, we'll be living forever. Good news. All comments will be stored I assume, so, well, just letting you know in case you wanted to write something incriminating (why wouldn't you?)...

"al-Amin" / "Amin" / "Ameen"

2010-04-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

Location: sweet, sensation:
everywhere made of things
I own everybody. Aware I'm

quoted figures I think my best march
on the minimum light. The barest burnt on

to the street meaning. Together our
stillness is more

striking combined to expand air
space one time roofs did this

show up
on radar. Space ahead quartered

already I'm good as dead touch
buildings. Already done so

happens shift a tonne
of seas kept walking

Ash. Quieting skies. No one moves. Gatwick becomes Celan poem......

2010-04-16T12:17:00.000-07:00

Dead end and sad for
you to talk we

called harmony. Help and
we touched

figures. Plot the mark

only smoke makes
matter for months

will be closed today. Do

the sound of dry ash in
your mouth do the spirit
of your throat & mine

again the minimum

returns one simple way to
expand the railroad one stone
will strain out and in

loss if we sing it's
for more o eat

with the mouth
you die with eat harder

Cleaves 2 is here and is great again!

2010-04-13T04:26:00.000-07:00

And they added a Polish section. The brilliant Tadeusz Pióro is doing things right in the middle of it:

The bar opts for tradition.
Shall we slide into breakfast?
I know I’m thinking
about a minute of silence
this programme has made a reservation in the name of

And Luke Roberts bringing the Cambridge (and the Wild West) with some big expansive, heartsy, pieces:

Controlled the rocks with
dynamite & white rhetoric,
this version expands in the
socket, mountains fixed with
landing bays, tracers done
in glass bloated planning.

The bulldozer swells its
jaw is blessed, take over
the big land, space push
through to clearing, settle
down for a night swim.

And I loved this from Ulli Freer, who I recently discovered and haven't seen in enough places.

It all spins. Just bringing the word up. I'm going to post some poems up here very soon.

Riley / Tuma

2010-04-03T18:54:00.001-07:00

Smart things said ten years ago by Peter Riley. Thoughts that come while reading the interview: If poetry is going to engage politically then shouldn't one of its main priorities be the decentring of geographical and linguistic power bases? Protesting the marginalisation of languages and dialects in favour of those prized yet mythical 'native languages'? Allowing other languages to enter into conversation, into reading... Well, here's a bit...

"It was in that climate that we turned to the States, and I feel that we sought one novelty to escape from another. To me it was a quest for scope, width, size, it was to do with seeking a poetry which commanded a large sense of the world , a vast lyrical/intellectual possibility. Terms of space-time and history and geological movement, renewings of legend. It emphatically wasn't to do with the wilful disabling of language, we already had that. I valued it very highly, but at some point I noticed that some of the writers I was getting this "size" from couldn't read, or cope with, the poetical size of John Milton, or Wordsworth, or even Dante. So something was wrong. Duncan was a poet who would attend to anything that had real substance, and listen to anybody who was sincere, he didn't programme himself. Others pushed themselves into crackpot messianic ravings.

But America is Novelty City isn't it? I still feel as I did when Kelvin Corcoran interviewed me in 1985 (and I was talking of a completely different set of American poets then) that they exert a pressure on the rest of the world which says not so much that we're better, but that we're more advanced. Always we're ahead, and the accusation against (I don't know why particularly English) poetry not willing to subscribe (though a few do, very successfully) is indeed like a death-wish against the parent. It sets you back as finished, outmoded, "insular," not part of the present tense or the present world. But who sets that agenda, actually, but the poets themselves?

And why should "American" be the only alternative to an insular "English"? What happened to the rest of the world? What happened to Australia for instance, where alienation seems to be less drastically cut through artistic endeavour? Or all the English-language poetry of India and Africa? I find one of the most hopeful areas is poetical writing from the war zones of the Near East, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria . . . such as I can get at it (in French). Modern realities engaged to a peasant cosmology. And anyway literary America is itself a much bigger and more varied proposition than the Paris-New York poetical mafia. And isn't historical time itself another vast extent, even in a very small place? And the reach that opens out when you cut through the exclusiveness of a culture prioritizing the metropolitan power-base, is another."

"She seems to have been a very virtuous lady ... for there is no record of his having killed her..."

2010-03-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

"Carlo Gesualdo, known as Gesualdo da Venosa (March 8, 1566 – September 8, 1613), Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, was an Italian music composer, lutenist and nobleman of the late Renaissance. He is famous for his intensely expressive madrigals, which use a chromatic language not heard again until the 19th century, and also for committing what are amongst the most notorious murders in musical history." (Wikipedia)

La Licorne

2010-03-27T18:25:00.000-07:00

This is a project I'm going to Uruguay to be involved with:

http://lalicorne.com.uy/

A bookshop, La Licorne, opening at the end of next month, in the neighbourhood of Punta Carretas, in Montevideo. Check out the website, is all. Project a third commandeered by my good friend and 'top' poet Juan Grunwaldt. Here is the opening paragraph for those who won't click (hint, go to Google Translate if Spanish isn't something that works):

Efectivamente. Bienvenidos a La Licorne. Un proyecto que nace de un sueño y que se convierte en realidad. Una librería viva en el corazón del tradicional barrio montevidano de Punta de las Carretas, a pocas cuadras del Río de la Plata. La Licorne, un homenaje al pasado y una apuesta al futuro. Ni centro cultural ni librería tradicional: Librería viva. Una casa típica de Pocitos, de tres pisos, donde los lectores vivan todo lo que los libros nos enseñan. Una librería que esté viva por todo lo que pasa en su interior. Atendida por sus propios dueños, literatos de tres generaciones, La Licorne busca trascender el barrio, la ciudad, el país y el continente y nuestra época. Tenemos sueños altos y el único límite es el que nos imponga el confín de nuestros sueños. Los esperamos.

Ocean in the way

2010-03-27T09:21:00.001-07:00

Armantrout

2010-03-27T08:32:00.003-07:00

"I was drawn to poems that seemed as if they were either going to vanish or explode—to extremes, in other words, radical poetries. But how do we define “radical?” Perhaps by how much is put at risk in the text, how far the arc of implication can reach and still seem apt. But so much rides, as always, on that word “seems.” Is a writing radical when it risks being wrong, when it acknowledges our wrongness? I think my poetry involves an equal counterweight of assertion and doubt. It’s a Cheshire poetics, one that points two ways then vanishes in the blur of what is seen and what is seeing, what can be known and what it is to know. That double-bind. But where was I?"

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2008/07/rae-armantrout-babel-poem-comment-plus.html

Open history

2010-03-26T16:10:00.001-07:00

I am about to speak. About to speak.

Bodies, piles of coast nothing but them
& burnt ships always burning in them

of them, huts, begun before &
burnt in these ships.

We decided hardcore was kinda dead & we wanted to try something

2010-03-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

Ten Top Trivia Tips about J Mascis!

Without its lining of J Mascis, your stomach would digest itself.
In Japan, J Mascis can only be prepared by chefs specially trained and certified by the government.
The word 'samba' means 'to rub J Mascis'.
J Mascis once lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest.
The book of Esther in the Bible is the only book which does not mention J Mascis.
Peanuts and J Mascis are beans.
Olive oil was used for washing J Mascis in the ancient Mediterranean world.
If you drop J Mascis from more than three metres above ground level, he will always land feet-first.
The military salute is a motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armour raised their visors to reveal J Mascis.
The risk of being struck by J Mascis is one occurence every 9,300 years.

2010-03-26T13:45:00.001-07:00

Ten Top Trivia Tips about The Hole!

There are roughly 10,000 man-made objects the size of the Hole orbiting the Earth.
The patron saint of the Hole is Saint Eugenie.
It can take the Hole several days to move just through one tree.
On stone temples in southern India, there are more than 30 million carved images of the Hole.
The Hole was invented in China in the eleventh century, but was only used for fireworks, never for weapons.
Peanuts and the Hole are beans!
The Hole will often rub up against people to lay his scent and mark his territory.
The Hole can only be destroyed by intense heat, and is impermeable even to acid.
Pacman was originally called the Holeman.
The Hole never said 'Play it again, Sam'.

An Aubade by Justin Katko

2010-03-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

This is one the great Aubades. I think it's supreme. I'm going to embed it:

Things Overheard on the 'Airport Transfer Bus'

2010-03-22T14:55:00.001-07:00

Why did I have to change my name to the J Mascis Signature Jazzmaster? This is not a street sign. Are you making me feel so happy? Is that the airport? Is the air thinner because of the true love?

That is not a street sign. Is that my hair? I think those sparks are from a blacksmith. That's the worst fucking street orphan I've ever seen.

You are glowing. Fifty thousand interrogation lamps. My arms are funny shaped explosions. Why do fire flies have to fuck. My face thinks it's the Illinois Primary. Those sparks are definately from a blacksmith. That was a sigh.

Live at the Witch Trials

2010-03-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

Certain tragedies will close the banks. I lost you searching for the jukebox. I lost you laughing at the moors.

--------------------

I am sorry that we did not make it to your interior locution. I wanted, shame, my map shows only LANDFILLS. I've heard you're now all about the overflowing of the BOURGEOIS SUBJECT. I hope you have not been hurt and are shedding still.

-----------------------

The land I bought is still in the back of my mind. It is the sky. In certain cultures this would be your accent. In certain cultures this, this, would be pain. We can do no more for your skin, we are told, it is made of holes. He had shot me the day before. It was him, I say to the Doctor, his mouth still tastes of gunpowder. I loved him or I wouldn't remember. The Doctor says I am lying upon the 'mattress' of the next predicament. My dear old mother. My Doctor cannot stand this madness, this unity. He leaves, further East, the war is larger.

Adorno

2010-03-17T12:01:00.001-07:00

"The world is not the earth. I work at the war office. I have seen pregnancies that could give you a secret life."

Derrida

2010-03-16T17:40:00.001-07:00

"The poet is someone who notices that language, that his language, the language he inherits . . . risks becoming a dead language again and that therefore he has the responsibility, a very grave responsibility, to wake it up, to resuscitate it . . . neither as an immortal body nor as a glorious body but as a mortal body, fragile and at times indecipherable."

poem

2010-03-07T10:42:00.001-08:00

She said the static energy of the church broadcast seemed proportional to the cube of its velocity multiplied by its duration. The modeling of the perfect acoustic has taken my arms forty days and still I hear strange men moving around in my clothes. Are there any weeks left and if so is the viewing deck open and if so when. When, where, the motorway never ends we are safest. She is like our clothes, moves secretly beneath us. Emptier than our spaces for music. Tearing up at the hypocenter of a blast we were not witness to. Effects were felt in a radius of 5km as round and round as the widening eye. Empty as the end that was supposed to have been edited out. The effects, also, at the end, should have been cut.

miscellaneous (theatre?) festival next week

2010-03-06T01:44:00.001-08:00

I will be reading some new Holes, plus some Small Stones concurrently with an Arabic translation by Irum Fazal. This is from Emma Hogan:

this is just a reminder that next week IS the

miscellaneous
(theatre?) festival

wednesday 10th / thursday 11th / friday 12th march

7pm start, judith e. wilson drama studio (basement of the english faculty), cambridge, england

with works from:

Robbie Stern, Rachel Thorpe, Finn Beames, Alex Eisthenthal, Jonathan Franklin, Tom Ellis, Jenny Maudsley, Merlin Sheldrake, Cathy Bueker, Joe Snape, Ben Mortimer, Emma Hogan, Jeremy Hardingham, Ahir Shah, Chris O’Rourke, Rosie Snajdr, Kate O'Connor, Ed Kiely, Decca Muldowney, Zeljka Marosevic, Edward Herring, Sophie Peacock, Pritika Pradhan, Isabel Taylor, Josh Stanley, Daisy Belfield, James Lewis, Eliot d’Silva

&& from visiting artists, including:

Mischa Twitchin
Simon Kane
Tom Lyall
Lisa Jeschke
Lucy Beynon
Ollie Evans
Jonathan Styles
Stu Calton
Tomas Weber
Keston Sutherland
Jonny Liron
Justin Katko
Irum Fazal
Drew Milne
David Hough
Jordan Hunt
Richard Power Sayeed

songs / dance / text / travesties / beginnings

A Bit of a Bit of Hole

2010-02-15T11:20:00.001-08:00

I'm leaving Madrid at the end of the week to take care of an Alpine Desert in Andalusia, where there will almost certainly be no internet.

Perhaps the child can build fire so that we can be warm. Won’t a guard shoot me into the ground, against the wall. I can no longer breathe this cold which is so cold it is making me dizzy. Can one stop a heart with a focused mind? Perhaps, but over time. Everything is over time. Can one train ears to be able to hear the slight movement of a man, a movement so slight it's invisible? Or to be able, say, to hear Romania? There are monks that have trained themselves to fly, as they always say. Certain friends, for instance, often like to say that. Often those friends who have survived, against the odds, a life-threatening situation, and now seem in love with their potential. I find such views to be distasteful. I merely collect feathers, for my father, I plant the trees. I am not sure who I last voted for. Possibly George III. He never wins, of course. It would be bizarre, surely. Me, I am as important as a dying prince, have done very little, completed even less, have never trained my ears or risked my life. My name is just another ordinary name. It’s the same for my sister. Though I did, once, plant a whole forest in Germany. I took trams everyday for free to the edge of Munich, spent all day sowing my seeds in empty meadows and parks, riding the trams back again in the evening to my apartment. The forest is still there, yes, certainly, yes. In London I rode the Circle Line on the tube for hours each day to have inspiration enough to complete my work on non-lethal weapons for the Los Angeles Police Department. Perhaps one day I will fly, also. My father flew, of course. Then sunk. Black to blue. Back to blue. Blue to blue. The only change the hue. The higher you go, the darker is gets. The deeper you sink, also, the darker. I have come to the conclusion that this ear training would quite possibly involve sitting very still and hearing every sound that arises, and following it, mentally, to its source. The training for levitation is quite different, I’m sure. Once one has traced and classified each audible sound arising in one room for one twenty four hour period one's ears will have become a little more sensitive. Or perhaps one's mind. Either way it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe I will try this in the next few days, tomorrow, even, though one doubts it would make for very interesting reading. And I’m sure it would amplify the pain inside of my head to an intolerable level. Today, anyway, it’s my lungs that are full of pain. I cannot describe the pain inside my lungs for my lungs are inside of me and I cannot describe anything that is inside of me. Even if I could, I would refuse. Perhaps if you get to know me. For instance I fail to walk straight. We might walk together in forests and you can watch me burn the trees. We might go fishing for trout, we might go and search the cities together for your lost father. My lungs, finally, are the colours of genitals. My lungs are the warmest place in my body, the warmth of a stolen car, the warmth of the best time to visit. The best time to visit is when it’s exactly room temperature. Marvellous things happen at room temperature. One can control the temperature in a room by the number of lights switched on, by the amount of human movement, whether one is cooking. All these things disturb the room. One should leave the room as soon as room temperature is reached, so not to disturb the room. History happens best at dusk, at room temperature, at a desk, they would have us think. I have left my desk. There is no desk in this room. Simply a Hole in the wall. Oh, and the wall. And some furniture that I have nailed into the floor, during my period of wanting to be a prisoner. Yes, it has to be said, it was the furniture, most of all, which attracted me to the life of the prisoner. The furniture of those jails cells. In prison one's bed is made of the same material as the wall. One could say that one’s bed is the wall, simply the wall protruding a little. Indeed, one could say one's prison cell, even, is the wall, dug just a little at a certain point. Oh, the genius of these designers. The perfect transformation of every single object into a wall. Or rather, not transformation, but integration. Marvellous. Integration of everything into the wall. Of course, my life’s work. And it follows that, psychologically, one ends up creating a wall out of the prisoner himself. He will stop moving. He will stay in the wall. And if one sleeps on a wall, walks on a wall, eats on a wall, eats a wall, sees a wall, tastes a wall, smells a wall, one probably is, after all, a wall. I must stop this reasoning. I apologise, this is not an argument, this is not a thesis. My logic once was sharp and refined though now I am not sure it was. Now, however, I am able to see a conclusion, some sparkling end-point, some climax of logic, in anything at all. No matter what the premise, I can craft any bizarre conclusion I want. Some of my friends would say this is a sign of maturity, even of enlightenment. Not so. I am mud. I disgust myself, often, with this casual disregard for the logic of history. This precious logic, a life-support, a baby bird, a dying prince, that allows us a history. I have spent too long away from a desk. I dream about desks. Not so. I dream about filling the Hole with something, though everything is nailed to the floor. Indeed I have nothing to fill the Hole with that isn’t attached in one way or another to the floor. The Hole, a lung, the day some reason all we can’t stop filling. These photographs are from a story. These photographs show how it all once was.

Still in Madrid

2010-02-10T08:05:00.000-08:00

You return
thin air
ship's surface

if it weren't for stones
you and I

the sky

blacker in hope

Leaving

2010-01-29T09:14:00.001-08:00

I am leaving Warsaw on a coach to Paris tomorrow, which takes 26 hours, with a 12 hour stop-over in Berlin.

Warsaw was interesting, I had a warm apartment all to myself, which made it quite productive, writing 20,000 words more on Hole. Highlights were getting quite a bit of writing done, hearing a concert of the Warsaw Philharmonic in which they played Prokofiev's rarely heard D minor symphony, eating goose in a very cheap but very good restaurant, eating gherkins, eating lots of sprats and herring, the beer shop near the apartment called House of Beers which sold beers from all over Europe, watching Poland ascend the European Handball championships on TV with a handball enthusiast / translator of poetry / lovely guy, whilst drinking Ukrainian and British ales, minding an art gallery which had no heating and was therefore minus 13 C inside and trying to write on my laptop but having to run around the empty gallery space every hundred words or so (a piece of art involving water in a paddling pool actually froze...), a brilliant exhibition at Zacheta which was mixed media contemporary art works about animals, the cold, and not understanding anything, I mean quite literally not a word, meaning I was a baby, especially at the shops which have mostly closed shelves (you tell the assistant what you want and she / he fetches it for you), the massive, massive cats, like lions, one of whom fell for me quite seriously, riding trams around to different cafes, the low prices of everything, and Hole picking up a distinctly Central European flavour. Thanks again to Luska for facilitating.

If you're still waiting on an e-mail, and you probably are, because I think the only people who read this blog are people who I know and talk to, I'm sorry, it might take a little while. I'm going to be on a coach for hours and hours.

Die Welt is fort, ich muss dich tragen

2010-01-25T07:24:00.000-08:00

I am in Warsaw. Everything is cheap save the internet. Expect little.

Just heard, late, via Pierre Joris' blog, that Abdellatif Laâbi has won the Prix Goncourt (for poetry). That's brilliant news. I once translated one of his longer poems here on this blog. I even wrote an essay on him for A-Level French coursework. Hoorah.

It is minus 23 Celcius outside. Inside it feels about plus 30.

Got to go. I will try and post some stuff up here soon.

Actual

2010-01-13T16:14:00.001-08:00

The Hole seems really to be emerging into something actual at the moment. It's exciting. There is a chunk of actual story with actual characters and actual deaths and actual psychosis and actual plane crash structured around the admittedly less actual historical / geographical / cultural soup / associative gag babble you've seen before. I want to finish it before October.

I'm working what is probably the worst day job in the world. I walk for eight hours a day, non stop, nowhere. It is an eight hour monologue listening to my brain. It's almost dreamlike. With no distractions my brain just talks and talks. I do maths problems. I've never done maths problems. I also make up languages and deconstruct everything. I am leaving to go to Poland on Sunday. I will be in the middle of Warsaw in an empty, hopefully warm, apartment where I will feed cats and cook food and read and write. I am excited to see what happens to the Hole in Poland.

If somebody has an old computer that still works and is cluttering up your space I'd happily take it off you and pay for the postage. My 2003 Powerbook is severely crippled, has lines across the screen which won't leave.

Trips planned up to the summer are: Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, England, Boston until San Fransisco by way of New England, New York, DC, Chicago and then simply corn fields and plains, mountains and deserts the whole way, seems like.

MOTET*

2010-01-12T09:37:00.000-08:00

"In Queene Elizabeths time there was a songe sent into England of 30 parts (whence the Italians obteyned the name to be called the Apices of the world) which beeinge songe mad[e] a heavenly Harmony. The Duke of ______ bearing a great love to Musicke asked whether none of our English men could sett as good a songe, & Tallice beinge very skillfull was felt to try whether he would undertake the Matter, which he did and mad[e] one of 40 p[ar]ts which was songe in the longe gallery at Arundell house which so farre surpassed the other th[a]t the Duke hearinge of the songe tooke his chayne of gold from of his necke & putt yt about Tallice his necke & gave yt him."
Anon.

*A game: to write a novel that has as thick a polyphony and as imaginative a variation as this.

Negative

2010-01-02T09:29:00.001-08:00

The Hole is cracked, the first sign that says that I am here. Here it is so cold I have begun inventing colours. Investing in magnets. O. says it is almost cold enough for new mountains. O. says it might get cold enough for the Hole to start beaming transmissions. O. says the weather almost literally does not exist for cold is a Nothing, simply privation. Though I would say that the sky will soon warm up for outside I have seen very few things left that could be turned into frost. This, O. would almost certainly say, demonstrates a clear lack of understanding about the weather. Weather as the perfect Hole will fill itself, will move where it isn't. A system likely controlled by magnets.Even the grandest of mountains create each other, O. says, staring at me with bags of eyes. Out of Nothing. Nothing but magnets or the sound of magnets. Graves and the negative space below our below. Magnets as full as the Hole of, something, as silent as What we lack, What This. Winter as empty as the first letter. As angry. This the first winter , O. said, to ever try to break the blood brain barrier. To turn my hands into Void. The Hole in deep cold begins to receive longwave transmissions. Mornings as well we try our hardest to get the bombs to start. They won't. Seems I must go by foot to collect my photos. The photos I took of illness. Of people dressed up, swimming. Of your body dressed up as a negative, a new colour of inside you, you pretty postcard. Of you you were my last thought. My last thought was of the Hole. You who may have for all I know fallen into the Hole which lies at the top of the frozen lake. Fallen into all I once knew. No Hole until, of course, you fell. Before the ice, of course, the whole lake was Hole, a full Hole, strong, dug by slaves. When I die I would my body be used to interfere with radar. The plot, we have learned, was the strange object unidentified even by NORAD who scrambled the jets. The plot structure of my death will be mainly blood loss. That pilot has a death wish, a map of the ground! Those photos are of your body inside out. The liver slips around on the dish. You said it hurt in the body part that is most like a myth. Your heart is no longer a planet, it has been down-graded. It has become more like a derelict barn, filled with sunbleached money. A minor freak. An empty stone. A bomb flays the light, blood stuck together in spirit, silent trees round as silent jaw. All things wept some. You scream to cover your face, the sound of scrambled jets.

Back in a week

2009-12-29T01:41:00.000-08:00

I'm going away for a week to Devon. Expect plently on the return.

Dvorak

2009-12-27T02:02:00.000-08:00

The only way anybody can think of to get to sleep is to lie down and pretend already to be asleep. The murder dream is the best use I've ever seen of the noises that never happen. In the dark for example the tragic sight of killing. In the farce for example the tragedy will out-perform the comedy. In the room for example somebody died we are sleeping in. A dream still born, a little murder. Hear the limits of tragedy steal up the hallway mornings, deeply still, once the cock has crowen we form a gas. We feel nothing as birds. The world is the oldest now it ever has been this is the closest we have ever come to third degree burns don't you think Miss? The sight is here, through the clouds, of a landing-light. We have no reason to assume that our organs secretly hate us and hope we die. At the end we will die and our organs will be invited to share in the event. We will die only at the very end. There will be no time left for you to read about our daughters who will later tear us apart.

A round of applause for the Wing Walker who is to perform along with us the Cello Concerto. And a round of applause for the Astronomer who was, as it turns out, all along a landing light. And a round of applause for O. who created the chords which came from the Hole who created the Hole which came from my family who never brought me back the chemical O. I sometimes see you through my shadow tragic glass boo-boo you, you SR-71 you infected you V1.

The limits of tragedy are programmed into the in-flight-system, we will know if we are about to break through. If on board the Metro the limits of tragedy will pass us by above ground, swift, unknown. Certain things are super-sonic and move faster than you can cry. Nobody is held in place by anything else. We recognise just those around us who were there for the middle of our lives. The beginning was not born, the end is floating around somewhere donating pieces of itself to the grammar. You will know your own voice for it will be the only voice you do not recognise. The voice that booms throughout. 'Whoever made us, speak'. Whoever speaks last will care about turning out the light. Let us run out of police, run from panic, from the hips, up. I am taking these notes in case a certain Helen asks me to defend the war. I am taking these notes in case I become Foreign Secretary and have to ask the hole the favour of our lives.

He got a big eagle

2009-12-17T11:45:00.000-08:00

Is there something here? Maybe not. Well, I felt I should keep up, in between these shifts. The 'eagle' comes from a friend who brilliantly misheard the chorus of the new Beyonce track, Ego. Listen, the song becomes instantly almost fantastic.

"I am leaving to become, this is a bad line, to become a hologram of wild horses." I am holding her by her skin, it still feels the same way it always did, like rooms filled with moths. Like standing alone, blowing into a dog whistle. Oh, my little room-room, how long does it take for a parcel to arrive when the parcel is your knees? Your letter gets a little later everyday. Right now I am breakfasting can I drop you a line a little later? Why must you always say that when I call. And I believed you when you said that your Troy must have smudged the post-code with the crude-oil from his breakfast. I believed all that like a siren. And I know that when it's a different word you're meant to pronounce it differently. Like sincerity, when sincerity is a different word you pronounce it Chibi. "Nothing is sacred anymore," the letter must have said, "nothing is sincere. So I am leaving you for a man with a much bigger eagle. Yours is Hell, flies like gunk, though, granted, it has a great ear for line breaks. Whatever, I'm gone." Remember when we told each other our fears and they turned out to be the same fears? That we don't yet fit into any geopolitical conflict analogy, that everybody will suddenly decide to vote for us and we'd have to become the Prince? Come back / perfect / you are anarchy. The eagle is here, crying to you. You are the sly one, dog-slut, running about through architecture, picking your favourite sorts of sleep. You wanted us to express our desire by jaywalking. I knew, silently, we should be using water-balloons. But please, we can even act out that fantasy, you know, the one where I'm music. Though I would much rather, I don't know, structure. Gather the smallest / syllables for Jesus. You see? Eagle's great. Aren't you at least glad I am not as white as him? Not as far away as landscape? How do we get there, anyway, that place where the dogs are always barking brighter than a pack of burning wolves. We could walk or we could generate, we could even launch a space-something. You stand here with this dog-whistle, I'll step back and watch you verbify. This is the real role-play. This is a whole lunchbox of talk. Just don't touch. Remember, we are afraid of our fingers because of what our parents told us about gouging. We are afraid that our parents will one day write their wills with the new words we don't yet understand. Sherpa, candelabra, launch-pad. Ah, me, I must have upset you. Was it when I said you are not automatically theatre? I should have expected something was going on when you started to insist on praying last, always last, straight after me.

No coats

2009-12-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

You won't be seeing much happen here over the next week. I am about to work a 84 hour week composed of midnight to noon shifts. But everything's good, as long as season finales keep making our hair stand on end.

Mt Rushmore

2009-12-10T07:26:00.000-08:00

If the hole had eyes they would not necessarily be empty, a flight cancellation. Dear, your eyes are always empty you are a beginner at bushcraft. Try not to let the hole disturb you, remember, it is not necessarily the cancelled flight on the flight information display system. Remember when we said "this looks like the time when they grounded everything in US airspace"? You are so sweet and so cute, a justice system of a developing nation. Just try not to winge about BAE Systems. Let me kiss your f*c*, kid around with your h**r, For your birthday we will all learn foreign languages like US marine commandos. We will go somewhere where the walls are all aquariums. If you need to be sick on Air Force One then for God's sake keep it inside your mouth. Remember, this is your mother's voice in the future. This is not your mother's eyes. I would say that I am possibly the Grand Boulevard of verbless constructions. The present moment is here, the present moment is now, speaks your mother's voice, written out in IPA. The snipers make me feel worry, I cry, I only want a quick look at the wording, just give me the wording, I just need the wording, I want to read it to my grandchildren. We should all be setting goals for ourselves, for example, when I broke my arm for six months I wrote my name, visited Mt Rushmore, stopped every living thing from losing its mind. You are so cute when you dress up as the justice system of a developing nation in your dream. So pretty carrying around that sniper. Just remember that we should always remain nearby and in earshot in the rare event that the play suddenly ends and we need to come out of the wings to sing what we rehearsed (The Great Ballads of Electricity?) for our curtain call.

El Tigre

2009-12-04T18:41:00.000-08:00

I am back in Jersey. I just read a nice thing in Wittgenstein (parallel text, my German is back on the boil): "There is gold paint, but Rembrant didn't use it to paint a golden helmet". That's the sort of thing you think about for weeks until everything just, like, totally ist eingestürzt.

I wanted to write a few lines about Wittgenstein's Mistress. It is one of the most affecting books I've ever read, I think, in terms of a book affecting what you produce yourself. It structures itself as a vision of what happens to language in a world where the holders of language--other people, society--appear not to exist... What's brilliant about the book, though, is that the way it does this is not by messing about with surface texture--because this is the path that perhaps a great deal of serious writers would have taken when faced with the concept?--, but, instead, through gently distorting the relationships between, well, objects themselves, leading to deep tremors in the places where we like to tremble best. All the sentences are clean, simple propositions. This disturbance is lovely because it's self-conscious to the speaker, and, well, you can imagine the fun that gets had. I give it *****.

Erm... I'm going to Warsaw for a few weeks next month! This is directly thanks to this blog. I knew if I just kept at it long enough its purpose would become clear.
I believe I will be working in an art gallery and looking after some cats in exchange for an apartment. I scream another thank-you to all the brilliant people involved. C'man!

I also shall be doing 'something' at the Miscellaneous Theatre Festival in Cambridge mid-March. So I know now the state in which I am going to be spending the first quarter of 2010. Delirium tremens! I am excited but scared to the death.

Here are two question sentences, inspired by Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour:

Could there occur an event so powerful that it reverses a whole philosophical tradition?

What is the grave but waking up to a language that is not yours?

Quick shrapnel

2009-11-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

This would be a whole lot funnier if I were the police. If my hands were where my mouth was I would have written first. Schtum. Is there a problem at the window? A policeman? Adjourned. We all lack the cinematic vocabulary to be able to accurately imagine justice. The explosion was a great use of the light. Hope is the sight of tiny LEDs after lights-out. I dreamt I was a roadside bomb. I woke her up to reassure her it was all a dream. Is this allegory? No, this is the witness statement. Keep silent. Every day you speak you are less innocent. Is this trip hop? Habeus Corpus. Is this what I was saying? At the window? The hole. Dulce stil nuovo. Cross out the hole and language still might survive, disguised as something else. It's like when Galileo. In the event of electrical storms quickly grab whatever you can't outsource and leave the house. N., yes, they still outsource the majority of mettaloides. N., yes, they will outsource the war (note in time of war "the Hole" is to be read as "the IED". "The IED" will be then read as "the Ideogram". "The Ideogram" will be then read as "El Shaddai") Which one of you is the roadside bomb? If you need to call the police somebody will always lend you their mobile phone. The hole was made by something falling over onto the wall. Not your body. Your body is soft, it is linked to Western ascendency. Come here, hold my hand. Remember the story? When No Body came to kill the grave? Who said that, a sad man? He saved us all. Who is he? He is the police. He has come to hold your body. 'Hold me and buy me beers until they run out of beers', he says. "Ne jamais s'en sortir vivement", he wondered, driving here, looking for the road signs that I stole and replaced with painted Øs. 'Ø' they all screamed. From the cockpit. 'Ø!', from the cockpit they all screamed. 'Ø! Ø! Ø!'

Hegel / a place

2009-11-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

It follow that to learn to read and write an alphabetic writing should be regarded as a means to infinite culture that is not enough appreciated; because thus the mind, distancing itself from the concrete sense-perceptible, directs its attention on the more formal moment, the sonorous word and its abstract elements, and contributes essentially to the founding and purifying of the ground of interiority within the subject.

(citation in Of Grammatology)

I'm going to do one of these again. Essentially, I am looking for a place in Europe to stay for free. I've had it with Shakespeare and Company, but does anybody know of similar arragements specifically in Italy--though really anywhere with a climate more agreeable than Cambridgeshire--where one can do a little work in return for free beds, kettle-cooked tortellini, insufferable Hegel-quoters, etc? Please get back to me. Go on!

Haha, hello. I am on a Gap year.

2009-11-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

I am in the Cambridge public library. Things are happening here. A young guy wouldn't pay his ten pence fine and called the library attendant a "jumped up tit". Things started to blow up. An mad old guy wearing a black baseball cap that says "just say mo'" in neon letters and very small shorts is sitting on the computer opposite me, bashing the keyboard with his fists and laughing, talking to himself. The young guy and the old crazy guy joined sides against the library attendant, it seems like. Everybody is on the verge of tears.

I started learning Russian from the New Pengiun Russian Course. It seems like a very good course, so far. No illustrations and lots of verb tables. I bought a blue Raleigh bicycle from the 70s. I bought Herodotus' histories. I bought Scroggins' biography of Zukofsky. I am trying to find a place to buy some Cavalcanti. I am going to look in the Oxfam bookshop. I am in a production of Troilus and Cressida, playing Hector. Photobooths in train stations are very good places to sit and eat a sandwich while waiting for a train, I discovered. Poland. I want to fly to Poland before the year's out.

Extracts from the past few days

2009-11-16T06:39:00.000-08:00

A woman can eat at any time. I have little rhythm for prose. I have been debating to what degree I am an inflected language. There is not enough air in this room to sustain a community. She is changing into new sheets. Her money is wet from her having walked along the road, where it is raining. I sleep in the room and pretend to be dead so that she will leave me alone and go back to the street.

Thousands of pounds are hanging on the curtain rail next to her socks. She never seems asleep, she never seems dead. She speaks in Russian. She says she woke up speaking it and now will now never sleep in case she wakes up and finds it gone.

My legs feel like decoration. The door to the room is being slammed by the wind. Somewhere I am moving as ocean-storm, room-bright, the weather brings only more weather. If I left the room for fifty years the hole would grow to contain the street. The hole grows by itself. The hole eats in its sleep. The hole has never felt anything bigger than itself. The hole is alive, then, in this sense.

If I had some walking boots I would leave the room for the hills. There is rain on the hills. Small animals live in the holes in the ground. In burrows, says my son. A hole cannot be called a burrow, I told my son, unless it has been made for the specific purpose of giving shelter. Otherwise it is simply nature occuring. A ditch is nature occuring. Shade is nature occuring. Weather follows me into the hole. A burrow is a house made of holes. A house is a hole with an owner. Her money has now dried. I should wake her up to tell her.

She will soon be waking up and be forgetting her first language. O, she will cry, O! O! O! I cannot leave with this soggy money! Is the economy ready yet, she will wonder, gazing into the hole, the ends of our hands stroking around the diameter. I resolve to fill her with anything I can find, verb endings, electrical tape, her own money. I do not love her or her money. Take the damn money and get out, so to speak! Dont, leave! Go! She is gone. I am alone. There is a calander, there is a wall.

Nothing happens in the room because the room is culture. Hark, this is the sound of transport. Somebody told me about that. I am in the room because the room keeps bleeding. The grave has no body (I have friends that are priests). Helicopters are flying past overhead.

--Buy me
--Buy you.
--Like rhyme. To fill the hole, do you have anything?
--I didn't bring anything
--I went to the shop to buy some sand but the lady just gave me this bread. She kept on saying rhymes. She kept on saying rhymes and the days of the week.
--The days don't rhyme.
--They do if you say them differently. I started to protest about the bread. She interrupted, saying that anybody left unattended is not her responsibility.
--I was thinking, if only we had a child, it could play with the hole.

2009-10-14T03:53:00.001-07:00

I decided to go to London for a few months. I'm leaving in a week and a half, happily slamming straight into LEAN UPSTREAM. I need a place to live. If you have a spare bit of floor for a couple of days in late October, please contact, so I can have a little base to find a proper house. E-mail address at the bottom of the page. I will stock your fridge for the time I am there.

At work, in the jewellery shop, a very old, unwashed, man keeps returning to buy these very, very soft ladies mink fur necklaces. He is the only person who buys these things.

Mix

2009-10-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

Gladly, greatly, and again, I've been inspired by the Goode's GevortBox greatness. I seriously don't know where that alliteration came from, but it actually feels good to get it off the chest. I am posting here a small mix of my own. I actually made the mix a while back, but posting it here in the tradition of Thompson generosity, as well as to celebrate me recovering my external hard-drive, which is the only place I keep my music and various mixes and things I made in the past. I thought it was dead, but it sprung to life a few days ago. Turns out all I had to do was plug it into a different computer, but still, cause for celebration. I am very proud of this mix. In particular, the transition from the Elektrosonics to Amboy Dukes (at around 16:00!!). It is all one track because, well, I guess I'm smooth like that. It is interrupted by an electronic female voice occasionally because I'm still on the trial version of MixMaster. I do quite like the voice. Give it a listen.

Here is the tracklist:

Your Dream Lover's On Video Again - Glass Candy
Le Fille Qui Donne Le Bonheur - IOIOI
東風 - Yellow Magic Orchestra
Orbit Aurora - The Elektrosonics
I'll Prove I'm Right - The Amboy Dukes
Thunder Feedback 2 - Temple Of Bon Matin
The Statue Pt. II (A Monument And Its Muse. A Love Story) - Times New Viking
The Green Giraffe - Mandarin Movie
The Anglican - UJ3RK5
Antennae Remix - Chromatics
Je Te Parle Maintenant Même Si Tu Ne Me Répondras Jamais - Audiopixel

I finally got the new Why? album. It has the same tone as Alopecia, but even more poppy, I think. Not necessarily a good thing. I still anticipate those wripping, powerful rap refrains that don't seem to arrive on this one. I still like the album a lot.

A piece of a HOLE

2009-10-10T14:32:00.000-07:00

I am the archeologist of the hole, I came across it, it was buried inside the wall. I dug it out with light, I was reckless. Although now I see that archeology has passed, perhaps in these last few minutes, even. These few sounds I have made won’t be buried, air won't return. Am I an archeologist when I speak or is this rather taxidermy? The sound buried itself deep inside my chest. Archeology or taxidermy. Is this one of the Ancient Questions? Is this why is it cannot be answered? Doubtful. Must we be speaking in the Dead Language? Is there a way to answer the Dead Questions? If so, it lies inside the wall. I should dig holes into the walls until there lies no more history behind. I know language to be made of what I almost said, is there a way for language to be burnt, do you have a way in mind. I knew language when it was a small child. Unable to speak I knew it a massive wind breezing water, the lack of landfall bruising the storm’s walls. I did not know this before. Lately I have been as the architect, seeking to destroy the insides of buildings with light, seeking to build the walls so massive and transparent that the space will be tricked into thinking it's not there. And it will go home. And we will have to follow. Of course, I have not yet done so. I have dug deep holes in searching for that which will produce the most transparent wall, a wall older and clearer than the mild corpse OK as ancient as tempi though faster, secret, a whole tribe of words insider trading. Anything dirtier than air is a minor chord. Any resounding plainer than wind is the first sound. Exploding primarily. Chords made of two or more things happening. What is this thing? Time? The sounds of explosion. Are they not chords but sort of a speed, outrunning the sky. A double order of dust and grit from the hole falls to the floor. Such is the business of having. A chord? A slight woman breaks her arm in the process of converting her house into landscape. The woman looks like an event happening or about to, wet like a line a grey line she takes the shape of flying. A man trips, topples his tower built to chords. I am taking these notes for power. Make the house not to topple but to be still and to breathe in the dark, just like any other thing you can buy. I have seen the hole through the walls. I have dug holes into the sky to find the lightning, buried beneath the clouds. Your eyes in walls of lightning and the holes what I noticed first. And as day the hole, the little specs of light all around.

Buy me

2009-10-07T14:31:00.001-07:00

Sorry to do this. I still have some pamphlets to sell. If you want one for free, tell me. E-mail. My e-mail address is at the bottom of this page. It helps pay for these things for which I have come to feel a need:

a computer
the first Cambridge Literary Review
a telephone
a 1960s/early 1970s Italian racing bike
toiletries
things from Barque
things from Salt
a place to live in London

More interesting posts to come. I will probably post some new things from HOLE soon. I am watching the West Wing through for the 3rd time. First series again. I read the US constitution at work today. I thought about looking for that typo Toby talks about in season 7 though around that time the rain stopped and customers came in, making me work. After the rain started again I thought about making a weirded up glossary for the constitution. Here is a quickly (very quickly) typed, rough, quite bad example of the type of thing I am thinking about:

Impeachment: Plainly the ritual for unforgiving. Often a dance. Will happen in time if you can remember. Will happen regardless of colds and Simchat Torah. The natural consequence to perjury. Like perjury a preparation for burial (see perjury: a term of office, false statements given under-earth). No official is to be given the power to be in himself a Supermajority. At least (but not exceeding) one Supermajority is to be present at all times. Each supermajority is required to assemble only in one place and only at one time. Never should the Supermajority be permitted to eat whatever she wants. In the rare event of misdemeanor all hearings are to be tightly held. In addition, each hearing is to be held at a consistent angle (preferably held at right angles to the degree of misunderstanding) though not including to any misunderstanding that should arrive from a wrongly capitalised noun or, similarly, from any mathematical disobediance (i.e. even numbers).

It might make a nice writing project to do this well for every specialised term in the constitution. If I choose to actually do this, I will do impeachment again. I might keep working on impeachment, and just edit this post as I go, actually. Anyway, I'd definately recommend watching the West Wing three or four times through. On the third time you start to notice all sorts of cute little gaffs and things. Ever noticed that in 20 Hours in LA in Season One Donna is star-struck when she sees Matthew Perry, though then somewhere in Season Four Matthew Perry actually joins the show to play Joe Quincy? Ha. OK, probably not very healthy, but it does the job so well.

Until next time.

Fire, brother

2009-09-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

I have been scanning the blogs of airline pilots to see some of this beautiful language they speak in. Not just the stuff that comes out of the mini-feed in the flight deck, for example, "stop... new phl taf... need ldg alt", which is, obviously, seriously, seriously cool in itself--maybe because here these strange abbreviations seem to have the power to stop jumbo jets in their tracks, (and if your literature doesn't have its sights set on stopping mid-flight A320s then frankly I don't want anything to do with it...). This reminds me of what my friend Jonny said a while ago. As we were sitting next to an airport runway a jet was taking off over the sea and I, in my 8 year-old wonder, pointed out that the plane wouldn't stop or slow down until it got to land. This led him to remark that wouldn't it be very nice indeed if poetry might do the same thing...?--, but mainly the world that this serious pilot lives in and the language he spills. For example:

"Flying at the speed of heat (maximum forward velocity), we still can not make up the lost winds."

HOLY! OK, I envy being in a position not only where someone is able to think and say such a thing without having to obscure something "real"--thanks to living in a world where the speed of heat is a real measurable entity and where the winds can truly be lost (not simply that they pass by you, as in sailing, where the winds lose the boat, but where you can actually lose or escape from the winds by outrunning them) and it matters deeply that they are--, but, also, where one is actually obliged to say and think such a thing in order to save one's own life and the lives of others. The things people have to say to prevent disaster. It's the same reason why I like The West Wing (the urgency of the rhetoric, as well as for seeing the colossal complexity of the American political machine speak the language it speaks), and why I generally like thinking about large industries and infrastructures.

I spent last weekend in an empty four-story townhouse of a family who were on holiday and had left behind their pets. It gave me powerful ideas about HOLE as novel or story-board. I was sitting in one of their rooms and suddenly thought "Right now I am that character I have been writing paragraphs about for the past year or so". So this seemed to string together many ideas that I've been having a propos of making some sort of longish creeping prose stone.

I currently am working a job selling semi-precious stones. I am flying to London at the end of October to stay for a few months. Or instead I may go to America for one month. I would quite like to see the Pacific Northwest, though of course I don't know anybody there, making it expensive. New England is another choice. I may wonder around New England for a few weeks and then go south. I'll have a think and write next about which one I choose to do.

HOLE X--??? manifesto/a foretelling

2009-09-15T14:51:00.000-07:00

The hole is the beginning of something much bigger. We are built around walls, not the other way around. Art hardly exists. A bigger hole. Art museums eventually will have people knock down their walls, just to see if anything better lies behind. House owners will begin to do the same thing, happy to be protected from divine flood, excited by the prospect of a smooth, polished landscape and expansive views upwards of passing airplanes & night. With fewer walls, everything will run quicker, reality will speed up, will slick and slide freely over the landscape. All the things that people once said wouldn’t happen overnight, will start happening overnight. The switch from oil to biomass will be overnight. People will wake up, fluent in Mandarin, suddenly sober. The Coney Island development will, in one night, start and finish, as will the Australasia railway, spectrum reform, our road to stardom, controlled weight loss, universal healthcare. People will walk, carrying empty plastic bags full of wind along the streets, completely lost. They will circle the block and return home to their houses which will be what they always were, piles of bricks. Light will be different. Without walls light will spin and stream completely free. Darkness will become a rare, expensive commodity. People will have to be trained to be able to produce it, will be taught the correct number of doors to close and the order in which they are to close them, the exact height of the walls they are to construct with blankets and sofa cushions, as well as the ideal times of day to do all this. These people will be as magicians, quick, well acquainted with the rhythm and cadence, able to recite lists of numbers on request.

Robert Grenier

2009-09-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

The excellent magazine Action, Yes (I can't believe how much brilliance lurks always within Action, Yes, and it's a quarterly as well!) contains in its latest issue a very cool thing in the shape of Robert Grenier commenting upon and marking up a graduate paper somebody wrote about his work. The student didn't expect Grenier to see it, but Grenier saw it anyway. It's AMAZING to see him gradually push this essay, which is about the process of translating and deciphering you find yourself doing reading Grenier's poems, into becoming itself a (sort of visual) poem. I love stuff like this because it's exactly what I want study to be like (i.e, participatory). Critical work should allow itself to be tempted into actually participating in the work with which it concerns itself. Weird sentence but it's late. Maybe it should take the final leap. I don't know. I probably can't wait for graduate school (do we even call it that in the UK) and for Robert Grenier to scratch me into a visual poem with his primary coloured pens.

The Conet Project

2009-09-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most interesting found sound / field recording projects I've ever come across. It's a huge (4 disks) collection of recordings of spy number stations from around the world. It's dark and full of doom, a robotic male voice speaks amid hiss and drone numbers in Russian, suddenly the melody of a children's music box starts warbling and warping frequency, everything quickly becoming static or overlaps with and integrates civilian stations as the wavelengths are sent through ocean storms, piercing high pitched patter noises underscore some tracks sounding like alien rain, you get the sounds of air traffic control underneath one track, sometimes the voices seem harassed and sound like barking dogs, at least once the voice of a very small girl in Swedish starts reciting numbers, often everything just collapses into doom. It's become one of my all-time favourite records. Obviously these numbers are secret instructions to be deciphered by an agent with a one-time pad. This is purely the joy of the sign directing nowhere, into the void, across the world and out into space. Yes, I highly recommend this record, play it now looped in the dark and get twisted.

If you are into radio stuff and all things unheard and unseen and also happen to be in Paris I'd recommend taking a little look at the Palais du Tokyo exhibit "Spy Numbers". It's a small exhibit since I think half of the gallery is closed for refurbishment, but there's some really wonderful stuff. A feature is Pascal Broccolichi's sound piece Sototubes (see the picture), which involve a number of large, white amplification tubes placed horizontally in an empty white room. The purpose of these tubes is to amplify the sound of the building's electromagnetic field to an audible level, resulting in hissing and whispers and, often, creaking and whining. The spy number stuff, though, is pretty lacklustre compared to the Cornet Project recordings; just one constructed "watch tower" with speakers reeling out numbers. It's a nice piece but definately not the main focus of the exhibitition (I was so excited to go and see a contemporary art exhibition all about spy number stations, imagine, but no matter, there's a whole assembly of weird goodies I couldn't even have imagined). They even have a machine which recreates the Aurora Borealis by conjuring powerful magnetic fields to guide electrons. It's definately worthwhile.

You thought this would be a dance lesson

2009-09-07T10:06:00.001-07:00

Really sort of love Monica de la Torre.

the stuff

2009-09-07T09:31:00.000-07:00

flaherty with fifty tongues, fights fire

Grubbs and Howe in London and Cambridge-- go to these if you can I can't I don't think

2009-09-02T05:05:00.001-07:00

This is just like the Beatles. Go for me and weep.

Susan Howe and David Grubbs Seminar
Birkbeck College, Wednesday 7th October, 3-5 pm. Room tbc.

Susan Howe and David Grubbs will speak about the ideas that have nourished their collaboration as poet and musician. Howe and Grubbs have released two CDs, Thiefth (2005) and Souls of the Labadie Tract (2006), works which take the encounter between poetry and music into new territory. Each will speak for around 30 minutes and the second hour will be devoted to questions and discussion.

Susan Howe’s explorations of American history and letters place her in a line that runs from Emily Dickinson through Wallace Stevens to the frontiers of 21st-century lyric. David Grubbs is a former member of the post-rock group Gastr Del Sol whose subsequent career is notable both for his acclaimed solo releases and his collaborations with artists and writers.

Presented jointly by the Poetics Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre.

Supported by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, the Faculty of Arts and the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Howe and Grubbs will perform at the South Bank Centre on Thursday 8th October at 7.45 in the Purcell Room.

They will also perform in Cambridge on 9 October (details to be publicised separately).

The Argotist

2009-08-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

Two relatively new (made in the last few months) poems are online now at The Argotist. I'm on the list with a whole bunch of goodness, makes me glad. If you read this blog you've probably seen the poems before in certain embryonic states, but go anyway, if only to see them in their new font. Besides, it's a pretty cool place to hang out in general. A whole slew of interesting interviews with important people (Lee Harwood, Andrea Brady, Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Nick Piombino...) exist alongside the poems.

Giorgio de Chirico

2009-08-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

Translating some Paul Éluard this evening. His Capitale de la douleur is the only French book I have with me here that I feel like exploring & translating. I am in my cell-like room at half 11 at night, still slightly tired from my climb sans ascenseur up to my 7th floor an hour ago, the windows are opened onto a wonderfully balmy fresh late-summer evening, planes are going by overhead, and I feel somehow intimate with this city, as happens everytime I am just about to leave. So this all has me somehow in the mood for translating surrealist poetry. Because why not. Now outside my window a group of people have started fighting. It is very funny, because they are doing it to the music of a nearby accordian / fiddle duo, playing skippy, happy little tunes. They appear not to be aware of the juxtaposition, and are very vocal, shouting out a variety of lèche mon cul (the funniest), va te faire foutre trouduc, fils de pute, connard, allez allez allez allez....... It's great, I've been watching for a while. Anyway I've done the translation quite loosely since I wanted to have some fun.

A wall denouced another wall the
shadow defends me from my fearful
shadow    O tower of my love around
my love surrounds all walls
spun white around my silence.

You, what did you defend? Insensitive sky   pure
trembling you shelter me. The light relieved
upon sky (no more mirror of sun    sky
the day's stars amongst the green leaves.

Memories of those who spoke unknowing
masters of my frailty I too am in their place
with eyes of love and hands too faithful
to depopulate the world from which I am absent.

2009-07-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

Well, still in Paris, though am going to Jersey for three weeks in order to live for free before I start my new job here in France, which is helping to recycle precious metals by telephone. Much has happened here. Yesterday we decided to go to the Rodin museum, and it was a lovely day, since I was inspired to resume the "Hole"prose sequence which I started last winter. Old ideas of scuptors and stone and metal and bodies and textures were brought back to life by Rodin's works. Here are some new sentences:

I have lived here in this hole like a sculptor, with one hand touching the wall and the other hand touching the floor.

I have made choices. I have chosen to let the days pass, to allow them to cast themselves into the stone and light without my influence.

And I believe I have made this hole. I have pressed dents into the stone wall with my small hands whilst sitting still.

I cannot bring you who I love with me to the hole, nor can I make of you a day. Above all I cannot bear to bring you with me to the hole when you trust so in the wall. And each gesture of mine recorded in the stone wall is of you. And I have made of you a large hand to be placed upon the young figure in brass. You are the large hand upon this boy. And the well placed word is of you. And the noose is of you, the steps the still body will take in the dark.

I feel now as if this hole in the wall is larger than the wall itself, larger than is the darkness when one looks down at it from above, as I have done, possibly, from the tall cliffs, predicting dawn. And I have also composed from rock the dawn, for my hands did not believe their prediction, that it would come today, my hands they do not believe them.

Richard Schiff

2009-06-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

Salt Campaign

2009-06-10T07:39:00.000-07:00

So everybody's probably already seen the Salt 'Buy one book' mayday call, but perhaps not everybody has seen the accompanying video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdcTqXaOD2s&feature=player_embedded

Thunk

2009-04-16T04:51:00.001-07:00

Ryan Manning interviewed me and a lot of other people here.

Polis is this: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place

2009-03-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

If anybody is going to be up at 3.00 am (GMT) this evening, they should go here to watch the Charles Olson documentary that I've been trying to see since 2007 and was, at one point, about to pay £70 for (for the DVD plus a region 1 DVD player...). So this is good news. Anyway, it's playing on a New Jersey Public Broadcasting Station at 10pm Eastern Time, which I'm pretty certain is 3am Our Time. I think it can be streamed for free online.

Spellbound - Ingrid Bergman falls in love

2009-03-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

This starts off a decent scene, but Hitchcock lets the doors open, and it makes it the second greatest moment of the film.

Pre-order

2009-03-04T13:54:00.001-08:00

You can now pre-order my pamphlet The Small Stones. It is £5.90 including postage. The publication date is early April. The official release is on the 28th April, Trinity College, Cambridge, at 8pm. There will be free wine. There will be other poets. There will be free wine. Free wine.

I am watching The West Wing online

2009-02-14T15:57:00.000-08:00

Aaron Sorkin is painfully funny when he makes Toby fall for the U.S. poet laureate who quotes Ginsberg, talks about how she feels bad for Anne Sexton, and comes out with things like "I have 24 couplets on the American experience".

Icelandic poets in English

2009-02-14T14:56:00.000-08:00

Some great stuff on this page: translations of Icelandic poets into English by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl.

How do balloons fly? With many small balloons inside.

2009-02-14T14:10:00.000-08:00

The moment for treating the line as time-lapse
photography has passed. I am greedy to recover

Imminent Discos!

Broken bulbs fill the land with a
sad flash is dark liquid I'm tired
of broken bones being so
...

Names.

Mine closed.

Someone take it from me.
...

HOLE at Corduroy Mtn

2009-01-29T17:02:00.000-08:00

My mouse is broken, so I can't edit the previous post, only add a new one. This is the link where you can read a short piece of a short fiction piece of mine in The Corduroy Mtn. called "HOLE".

http://www.airforcejoyride.com/mtn27.html

HOLE

2009-01-29T10:02:00.000-08:00

I saved all of the HOLE episodes as drafts, since most of the episodes are going to be published in online lit. magazine The Corduroy Mtn. The editor of The Corduroy Mtn described HOLE as "brutal Samuel Beckett stuck in a drunk tank". When I get round to adding more episodes I may or may not put them on the blog. I'll probably just send them out to various places, and I'll announce here when/if they get accepted.

Old Interview with Alan Sondheim

2009-01-23T02:36:00.000-08:00

This is a really fascinating interview with Alan Sondheim. I first discovered Sondheim two years ago since I was subsribed to QBICO records, and received an incredible LP by Sondheim. It was Sondheim solo with guitar/zither/electronics and "field recordings". Anyway, the interview is really interesting and focuses on his digital "new media" work. It made me think about computer art differently.

Look over there! Café OTO is being something exciting!

2009-01-22T03:56:00.001-08:00

If I was in London more I would go to Café OTO all the time (like everyday). They have a really exciting programme (http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/programme.shtm) up right now. I want to find some way of going to Ashtray Navigations on January 31st. Again, check out their programme (http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/programme.shtm) and go so they don't close down, because everything good closes down. I don't want them to close before I get to London.

Perdika Press reading in April in Cambridge and my pamphlet will be born

2009-01-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

Peter Brennan, Nick Potamitis, Mario Petrucci, Tom Jones (TBC), and I, will be reading at Trinity College on the 28th April. This will be when my pamphlet The Small Stones is officially released. The various poetries of PB, NP, MP & TJ are all straight up exciting: strong and shout-out-loudable. Come to Trinity for the scream.

Reign of Barbarity

2009-01-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

As far as I know, the 1980 book Le Règne de Barbarie by Francophone Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi, who is also a political activist, having co-founded the "Souffles" Review (all issues are now online, thanks to Seattle University) has never been translated into English. I found the book in Paris in a weird second-hand bookshop, and I think it is out of print. The book was apparently written when Laabi was in prison for political reasons, and it is full of that same grand, raging, but also often tender, exuberence that is also in the Pisan Cantos, also written by E.P when incarcerated. Anyway, I have attemped to translate, as best I can, some poems from the book. I have tried to do this, firstly, because I wanted to experiment with translation as I've never tried it before, and, secondly, because I wanted to read the poems in English as they are great poems but I kept having to go to the dictionary all the time. The difficulties were there immediately. For example, in the second line, the french is "Chante le Nil", which, since he is talking about Egypt (Oum Kalthoum, pyramids, etc), would mean "sings the Nile". Translating it as that, though, loses the double meaning of the french "nil". It obviously also means "zero". I didn't want to lose the idea of a singing 0, so I destroyed the Nile. Anyway, here is my attemped translation, most probably filled with inaccuracies, of the titular poem:

The Reign of Barbarity

at close range and profane the Unviolated      Sings Oum Kalthoum in full cybernetic      Sings the Zero      the spectacular dam      Your pyramids and ours      The hearts of descendant centuries      Crazy love     Suspended quaternary      Don’t be afraid to collect clichés      My gazelle in niagaras of perfume      Forgetting to sow the beads of romance      The trails of the camp and the horse      The mounting eye      Explode watched by glassy tarantulas      Chasms slashed into streams of honey      Pipes of sacramental milk      Sing a little if it’s not for the funeral ceremony it will be for the procession      Sing that I write the book of the dead      The oral testament of conquered races      That I abolish the curse that struck us at the height of the graft      That I order Creation to an exemplary defeat      That I, insolent, to the dense poverty of interior jungles      Sing your voice sets us about and makes us laugh at the height of pleasure

“the people stop to testify how in my uniqueness I strengthen the foundations of brilliance”

Sing the arid crescent      Sing the sea of lamentations I mix together with the sea of shame      Sing the star unearthed from the collapsing East      Sing a little that I give you my eyes      Your love a charm on the agile toe of an Africa raped in cyclical ceremonies      Sing the impossible arms catching the tool      The impossible hand catching the body     The impossible pride of your broken race

Cry from the nightingale of idiotic poets      Cry of the flashing rage from unearthed asteroids      Cry of the tripe at the edge of the slaughterhouse      Cry of the secular waste suggesting the End

cry of the bulimic concentration of money
cry of miraculous treasures suspended by sorcerers
cry false learned behind power
cry of salutation from the slopes of genocide
cry medieval light of obscure centuries
cry I skate on the rails of chaos
cry the wind will stop distorted locusts
cry pressed down to the dregs of memory became organ
cry of Continent the tom-tom covers us with voice
cry throat you contain only the most hollow of my detonations
cry I am more than a man something someone in tragic expansion
cry cast mine incandescent
cry I will drown this planet with choking poetry
hammer-stab raw gas i set aside
cry I know how to talk but not to the powerful
cry      o b j e c t o r
cry the treason of a friend      of intern-speech
cry the turned puke of stagnation
cry the echoed bile in quadrilaterals raised high
cry prostituion of the ape musician to bend himself
cry the philosopher’s critical morgue
burying us in our living names
cry that we fuck peace the bastards that we are
cry Enough

indecent singer      Old courtesan      Scalping us in fevered blood      Deceiving us      Releasing us whisps and straw to the fraternity of sensory delirium      Of a lyricism that bursts us mutations of all faculties      Hitting us on the thighs and our mutual backs     Purring the stupid chorus of the fraternity of exclusion      Sings Oum Kalthoum your voice sets us about and makes us laugh at the height of pleasure

carnivorous fossil      Sister of startled mammoth      But innumerable

f    o    r    c   e

Breaker by Low

2009-01-04T18:10:00.000-08:00

18/12/2008

2008-12-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

The shadow behind the wall: light its bright descent. Tell of the shades of a slippery fall from its daylight. The fall through the hills and contours you don't recognise. Please, I remember your face for all its curves. There's enough time to remember it all. Let it fly--up, quick, and down--clear it all off before the storm flies. Quick, quick colour in the tight bit. Weave all the mist around. There. Be born into, at last, the image. Speak of unspoken stonings. Touches of love in the incline. Streaming life, stoney in the shaded. Curl around the space that is inside you now unfurling. Live there. Light shakes down the cables. That is the very end of it.