People without Corners

if i were a tv show, this would be my theme

2011-12-01T19:58:00.000-08:00

And also

2011-11-27T23:42:00.000-08:00

The other day I came across the following poem:

Sporting Goods

Brave as a postage stamp
he went his way
gently clapping his hands
to count his steps
his heart red like a wild boar
beat and beat
like a pink and green butterfly
From time to time
he planted a small satin flag
When he had marched for a long time
he sat down to rest
and fell asleep
But from that day on there've been many clouds in the sky
many birds in the trees
much salt in the sea
And also many other things

Phillipe Soupault

I'd read it before, and liked it. But this time I found it strangely disturbing. I thought about why I found it disturbing for a long time, and then I realised.

The poem is so good, what is the point of writing additional poems?

Global literary production could have ceased with this poem, and been satisfied with a job well done.

Admittedly, a lot of poets would now be out of their (non-paying) jobs.

What, then, could we spend our time doing?

Sudoku?

Sudoku.

And also many other things.

Salt, salt sea

2011-11-23T02:01:00.000-08:00

S. Landau "DeadSee" by maneb40

Methuselah, King Clone, and the Trembling Giant

2011-11-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

Methuselah is a bristlecone pine tree, 4842 years old, who lives in the White Mountains of California. He has the distinction of being the oldest known single organism in the world. Something of a hermit, his exact location is a secret, and photographs purporting to be of him may be just of some other pine tree.

King Clone, a creosote bush resident of the Mojave Desert, is not so camera shy. 11,700 years old, his Highness is a clonal colony: which, as far as I can figure out, means he looks like a lot of different plants above ground but is one big plant underground. It all comes down to roots, you see.

Pando the Quaking Aspen is another clonal colony living in Utah. Aka "The Trembling Giant," Pando can remember what the world was like 80,000 years ago. Question is, was there anything back then worth remembering?

But I jest.

O plants, plants: they dance on our graves. Even worse, they dance in our graves. They've seen it all before. They know the score.

Lost and Found

2011-11-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

Cornelius 'Music' from Passion Pictures on Vimeo.

2011-10-23T04:28:00.000-07:00

Larry Matthews

February 1961 - April 2011.

Composite chalking, sometime in early 2011, Mazagran Cafe. Left-half myself, right-half Larry.

There are no words.

Empire of Signs

2010-07-26T00:47:00.000-07:00

Translation: "Danger! Watch for kids jumping out into road!"

Translation: "Everyone! Please stop breaking my bamboo. This is important bamboo. Stop it, okay?"

Translation: "Watch Out For Perverts!"

Translation: The dog wants to pour you a drink. No translation required.

"Whore by butterfly equals tortoise"

2010-04-20T22:29:00.000-07:00

From Roger Caillois's Man, Play, and Games (1962):

A striking example is furnished by the success of the "Chinese charade" (Rifa Chiffa) in Cuba. This lottery [. . .] is played by means of a Chinese figure divided into thirty-six parts, to which are assigned an equal number of symbols -- human, animal, or allegorical -- e.g. horses, butterflies, sailors, nuns, tortoises, snails, dead men, steamships, precious stones (which may represent beautiful women), shrimp (also, the male sex), she-goats (also, a sordid affair or the female genitalia), monkeys, spiders, pipes, etc.

Forgive the racial stereotype (that's him under the mess of symbols):

The "banker" or book keeper randomly selects a token marked with one of the thirty-six symbols. This is wrapped in cloth and shown to the players. The banker then invents a riddle for the players, the solution to which reveals the identity of the hidden token. The riddle makes use of the "mysterious affinities" of the differing symbols:

In effect, each possesses or does not possess one or more companions and valets. Thus, the horse has the precious stone for a companion and the peacock for a servant; the big fish has the elephant for a companion, but the tortoise is his valet. Conversely, the shrimp has the deer for a companion, but no servant. The deer has three companions - the shrimp, the goat, and the spider - but has no valet, etc. Naturally, it is necessary to play the chosen symbol, his companion, and his valet at the same time.

Confused? I am! I still can't figure out, from Caillios's description, exactly how the lottery worked. But then, I confess, I'm in it for the poetry:

In addition, the thirty-six lottery emblems are grouped in seven unequal series (quadrillas) -- merchants, gentlemen, drunkards, priests, beggars, cavaliers, and women. Moreover, the principles dominating the division now seem more obscure. For example, the priest series is composed of the big fish, tortoise, pipe, eel, cock, nun and cat. The drunkard series contains the dead man, snail, peacock, and little fish. The universe of the game is ruled by this strange classification.

An example of a banker's riddle, and its interpretation:

"I want to do you a favor. The elephant kills the pig. The tiger suggests it." An experienced player explains his reasoning:

The toad is a sorcerer, the deer is the sorcerer's helper. He carried the evil package which contains the black magic that an enemy has contrived against someone. In this case, the tiger against the elephant. The deer leaves with the package in order to place it where the sorcerer told him to. Quite clever, isn't it? Quite clever! Thirty-one, the deer, will win, because the deer starts off on a run.

Caillios devotes only a few pages to this bizarre game, and there seems to be very little written elsewhere (in English, anyway) on the topic. Caillios ends with an anecdote from Alejo Carpentier:

At the home of his wife's uncle, [he] sees a young black boy adding

2 + 9 + 4 + 8 + 3 + 5 = 31

The boy does not enunciate the numbers but says, "Butterfly, plus elephant, plus cat, plus dead man, plus sailor, plus nun equals deer." Again, to indicate that 12 divided by 2 equals 6, he says "Whore by butterfly equals tortoise." The signs and concordance of the game are extrapolated to all knowledge.

José Saramago

2010-04-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

"At the time I thought, though my grandmother was also a very wise woman, she couldn't rise to the heights grandfather could, a man who, lying under a fig tree, having at his side José his grandson, could set the universe in motion just with a couple of words. It was only many years after, when my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: "The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die". She didn't say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again."

from José Saramago's 1998 Nobel Prize lecture.

Read the rest here.

2010-04-06T03:05:00.000-07:00

When it comes down to it, all song lyrics are poetry. But not necessarily good poetry.

Here's some which are.

"Gavin Highly"

2010-03-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

A beautiful Janet Frame story, "Gavin Highly," in the New Yorker.

Ten Lions

2010-03-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

The story of a poet eating lions in a stone room

A poet named Shi lived in a stone room, and he had the habit of eating lions. He had sworn to eat at least ten. So, from time to time, he visited the lion market around ten. By chance, there were ten of them on the market one day that Shi was there. When he saw those ten lions, Shi killed them for fear of losing them. Then he grabbed their carcasses and stored then in his stone room. Since the room was damp, Shi had it cleaned by a servant. Then Shi started to taste those ten lion carcasses, and while eating them, he realized that those were indeed ten lions. Try to explain it!

taken from Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain (2009)

The thing about the above text; it isn't just a bizarre little prose poem. It's a translation of a Chinese tongue-twister, the twist being that in the original, every word in the text is pronounced as "shi" (with differing intonations). So the first sentence, if transcribed phonetically, would read:

shi shi shi shi shi shi.

And so on.

Interestingly, Dehaene's version seems to make an omission in the penultimate sentence. This translation has the poet realising that the lions are in fact "stone lions" - a detail that makes the piece seem more like a conventional riddle (at least, when read rather than heard) than the above. I confess, I prefer the above version; it resists sense even more beautifully.

Try to explain it!

D.M. Thomas

2010-02-28T14:10:00.000-08:00

Even if the seas change to salty ink,
and the forests of reeds are cut into pens
and the boundless fields spread with parchments
I could but finish writing a fraction
of my lawlessness.
And should I build a scales,
of the Cedars of Lebanon with Mount Ararat
on one side, my guilt would tilt the balance
to the other.

-St. Krikor Naregatzi (AKA Nareg)

I came upon this poem in D.M. Thomas's novel Ararat. Thomas's books - the most famous of which is The White Hotel - read like overlapping layers of dream, all open-ended and seamless, disconnected yet always coalescing into a whole. I can imagine the linear-minded getting very, very annoyed reading him.

He also takes a damn fine author photograph. Look at the intensity of his poise, the body tilted forward as if about to launch! The eyes focused on some distant target, the half-smoked cigarette angled upward like an artillery piece! And note the wonderful positioning of the "Pushkin" spine on the bookcase; is that, then, the world into which he is about to leap?

picks of the web 4 (short story edition)

2010-02-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

If you want to offend a US avant garde writer, hint that their work reminds you of something in The New Yorker.

So much for the avant garde. . .

Roberto Bolaño: "William Burns"

Uwem Akpan: "Baptizing the Gun"

J. G. Ballard: "The Autobiography of J.G.B."

(note: The New Yorker only publicly archives recent stories, so I suppose in future years readers, stumbling upon this dusty post, will find these links inoperative. Gather ye free texts while ye may. . .)

D. M. Black

2010-02-20T16:54:00.000-08:00

Way back when I started reading poetry, my first source was Penguin's British Poetry Since 1945 (1970) - a wonderful anthology that succeeds in presenting an array of very different writers, from Basil Bunting to Tom Raworth. Also in there was the work of D. M. Black. The editor's intro states that this Scottish poet has "a talent for bizarre narrative and analogies, expressed in a highly original language which seems to owe little to any other poet." Tony Attwood, on his website dedicate to Black, names three specific influences: Henri Michaux, Samuel Beckett, and W. H. Auden. Whatever its strange style and themes come from, one thing is for sure: Black's poetry kicks ass.

And I don't use that term lightly. There's a burlesque, over-the-top violence that runs through much of his work, frequently tempered with absurdity:

The fury was on me : every moment

I strode to the breadbin and cut a further hunk

From the quivering loaf, clamped against it

A slab of cheese and, chewing, went to the window. . .

It was snowing.

(from "The Fury was on Me," from 1967's With Decorum)

Some wonderful contrasts there, the "fury" against the "quivering loaf," and then the sudden relaxing of tension in the last three words (the tension amps up again in the next sentence, but I'll leave that for you to hunt out).

The Rocklestrakes, a chapbook from 1960, features a lot of relatively traditional formal verse, yet Black's weird imagination is plainly evident, as in these first lines from "The Scholar":

I have sat here so long among my books
That a race of small brown beings has come out of the crevices in the wall.
They have taken away my eyes and my hair, and cut off a short section of my tie,
For display in the museums of some distant Megalopolis.

Seven years later in With Decorum, Black gets as strange as he ever gets, linguistically speaking, in "Without Equipment," a bizarre through-the-looking glass style journey that includes a lengthy monologue, in dialect, by some kind of spelunking dwarf:

                                                    h'h'm(ght)
Canned canyon I erg was a miyldeep. I wenk deepa.
Eepa inkoo cannder cangyongs ang maw vlamboyant crevassiz,
eepa inkoo vansplastic tezaks ang O rokokoko cheologuies,
churching oo, dy unbroachable.

The section ends:

                    Zhe wed vis way
'o  'o            vat
'o      'o
            ear bushed er butibles
'o             'o               'o                               'o            'o

Indeed. There are also more "straightforward" poems on display though, for example the collection's title piece, one of my favorites, which begins:

I lay down and having
died, gave my instructions: they
filled the room with
balloons and streamers, cherubim at the four
corners of the ceiling blowing their bright bugles -
laid me on a carved catafalque, in an
embroidered robe
crusted with emeralds; doctor and
priest in black mantles;
inconsolable women. Trundling of
wheels, the en-
tire building moves to the cemetary. Seagulls are
crying at the shut window. The ba-
lloons joggle.

                    I sit up and bellow : Death,
then it is
time for the
party!

Tony Attwood has another poem from With Decorum up here, the astonishing "The Red Judge." Along with several other poems in the book, it features a weird menagerie of coloured judges - most prominent among which seem to be the red judge and the black judge. No explanation, no back story is given for these quasi-divine, at times nightmarish figures; they seem to have stepped out of Black's internal pantheon, into his poems.

Oddly, Black seems to have produced little original work since the '70s, instead dedicating his time to translating other poets - principally Goethe. A more recent poem of his can be found here. It's a good poem, but the dark warp of his earlier work is absent. It's strange to see such a strong narrative drive peter out, subsumed in the imagination of others. What happened to that rainbow of otherworldly judges? Still, the early work remains, though relegated now to obscure library shelves and the private libraries of the eccentric few. . .

. . . there was a sound of cheering,

Faintly and everywhere, and the Red Judge walked

O thirty feet high and scarlet towards our stop.

2010-02-13T12:50:00.000-08:00

I've been enjoying "Valentine's Week" over at Ten Cent Dreams so much, I thought I'd take this opportunity to link to the blog itself. It's my favorite (though I don't pretend to have viewed them all) of the many "scanblogs" dedicated to reproducing old public domain comic book stories in beautiful (and frequently hilarious) detail.

Funny thing about old comic books: there are two very different ways in which to enjoy them. The first is as nostalgia, either towards a real or imaginary childhood: the second is a more wry, postmodernist form of appropriation, part of a deliberate orientation away from "high art" into pop culture.

There is, of course, another way of reading them; as products and perpetuations of social mores and conventions. Romance comics lend themselves particularly well to such critique. But I'm not quite sure that counts as a mode of "enjoyment". . .

When I read these comics, I enjoy them for the stories, goofy and cliché-ridden as they are. But I also enjoy them for what I can see behind them. I'm not talking about social forces here: I'm talking about the people who made them, the people who sold them, the people who read them. What was the artist thinking when he inked the above panels? Was he tired, worried about his health, horny? When he finished his pages, did he smoke a cigarette and listen to the radio? When he sent them on, what was the texture of the paper of the envelope he carefully packed them into?

Where is he now?

2010-02-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

"Caustic Cover Critic" has a great post up on designer Richard Green. The post includes an interview, but for me the primary attraction is simply Green's great covers.

Anyway, check it out! You might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can sure as hell judge its cover!

If I Lived In A Jungle I Would Set It On Fire

2010-02-10T02:19:00.000-08:00

So this guy had a t-shirt which said:

"I probably don't like you as much as you think I do."

Meanwhile, stars were forming in soft-bellied nebulae.

2010-01-30T20:49:00.000-08:00

As you might have picked up from my previous post, sometimes I find myself annoyed by poetry and poets - possibly a result of my obsession with the form tipping into over saturation. But sooner or later something comes along to cure my irascibility: in this case, it's the following video of Philadelphia poet C.A. Conrad reading in the snow.

The poetry is great - especially the "Book of Frank" excerpts - and it's refreshing to see someone so joyously immersed in their work.

As a bonus, searching for Conrad on YouTube let me to the off-beat "Boo Show," hosted by the wonderful Ish Klein. So perhaps I will not become a cowboy novelist. Cowboy poems, however, may still be on the agenda. . .

sigh

2010-01-21T01:05:00.000-08:00

There is a big, ongoing hoo-haa playing out across a number of U.S. oriented blogs about an incident in which some poets read some poems at a public reading, and some people in the audience thought the poems were meant to be funny (were they? I'm too afraid to ask) and laughed, and then the poets got offended and started complaining about the "masculine violence" of the laughter, or words to that effect.

Here's the original laughter's version of events, with more hilarity here and here.

My sympathies are with the laughters. But even then, the fact that the whole thing has become such an issue is exasperating. Seriously, this kind of nonsense makes me want to give up on poetry and go write Cowboy fiction. I mean, who on earth would want to be associated with such pettiness?

Andy Kehoe

2010-01-19T00:56:00.000-08:00

Unspeakably beautiful images by Andy Kehoe.

From his bio:

Andy Kehoe was the son of a sea merchant that was killed by pirates when he was just three years old. His father barely had time to throw his son overboard before the cargo ship that usually carried pickles and kittens to Spain, carried the burning corpses of his father and all his closest friends to the bottom of the ocean.

His Web Page

2010-01-06T23:53:00.000-08:00

Lhasa de Sela

September 27, 1972 – January 1, 2010

The Living Road

Soon this space will be too small
And I'll go outside
To the huge hillside
Where the wild winds blow
And the cold stars shine

I'll put my foot
On the living road
And be carried from here
To the heart of the world

I'll be strong as a ship
And wise as a whale
And I'll say the three words
That will save us all
And I'll say the three words
That will save us all

Soon this space will be too small
And I'll laugh so hard
That the walls cave in

Then I'll die three times
And be born again
In a little box
With a golden key
And a flying fish
Will set me free

Soon this space will be too small
All my veins and bones
Will be burned to dust
You can throw me into
A black iron pot
And my dust will tell
What my flesh would not

Soon this space will be too small
And I'll go outside
And I'll go outside
And I'll go outside

Lhasa de Sela

Suur Toll

2009-12-31T15:47:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, one and all! To usher in 2010, I give you wild folkloric Estonian animation:

Suur Toll Part One

Part Two

Check out Will's wonderful related post at A Journey Round My Skull, and thanks to fushi for providing the YouTube links in the comments stream there.

Found Poem 2 - library catalogue entry

2009-12-13T15:22:00.000-08:00

PRESENTING THE GREAT FLOOD

featuring

The Great Flood
The Poor Homeless People
The Helpful Policeman
The Brave Sector Post Wardens
The Caring Welfare Staff
The Co-operative Headquarter

distribution limited to civil defence and educational bodies

guerilla artists strike again! (I think)

2009-11-30T00:08:00.000-08:00

Last Monday I was walking down the street, as I am wont to do, when I noticed that a now empty lot - the space where two old buildings where demolished, as shown here - has been attacked by artists! There was a news story here a few months back about mysterious objects appearing in public places: a see-saw in the middle of a traffic roundabout, a chair in the middle of a sidewalk. Well, unless the developers have changed their mind and are installing a public playground as opposed to a casino carpark, the guerillas have struck again:

They timed it well, anyway. The site was bustling with activity up until last Friday, but since the weekend, when the swing set must have been surreptitiously installed, the place has been deserted. I don't now how long its going to last.

But the weirdest thing is, the longer it's there, the more I start to wonder if it's maybe supposed to be there. I mean, wouldn't it vanish otherwise? The reasonable explanation is that no one from the construction company has visited the site recently. It makes absolutely no sense for this thing to be there, in a fenced off wasteland of pulverized brick. Yet its persistence makes it seem a natural part of the world. Maybe it is? Maybe everyone will just get use to it and there will be no casino carpark. Maybe.

more chalk "art"

2009-11-21T23:42:00.000-08:00

What you get when you mix several cappuccinos with chalk and a blank slate:

(Co-drawn by Larry Matthews)

"where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?" (picks of the web 3)

2009-11-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

Deborah Digges: "The Little Book of Hand Shadows" and "Greeter of Souls".

Juan Carlos Galeano: "Herons," "Pink Dolphins" and "Masks."

Cathy Park Hong: "Adventures in Shangdu".

Michael Robbins: five poems at La Petite Zine, and "Alien vs. Predator"

picks of the web 2

2009-10-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

John Beer: "Bob Hope is Not a Plan" and "Lives of the Poets"

Gabriel Gudding: "The Parenthesis Inserts Itself into the Transcripts of the Committee on Un-American Activities" and "My Buttocks."

Bob Hicok: "A History of Origami" and "In Michael Robin's class minus one."

Kent Johnson: "The Best American Poetry," "Lines for the Freeport Illinois Happy Wok Fortune Cookies," and "Sestina Avantforte."

2009-10-22T01:31:00.000-07:00

My local cafe, Mazagram (or is it Mazagran? Who knows? Not me, obviously) lets individuals decorate their black-board. The "art" stays up for two weeks, and during that time you get free coffee - too good to be true, you may well say, and yeah, there is actually a six month waiting list at the moment. But my scrawling was up there last month, and here it is:

I call it "Purplish-Blue-Sky-Hand Reaching Down Towards Greenish-Orange-Earth-Hand."

There you go.

picks of the web

2009-10-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

Kate Durbin: "23 Erotic Dreams of Sarah Palin."

Lisa Fishman: "Of Unknowing," "Infinity," and "Midsummer."

Sarah Manguso: "The Lyric Moment" and "What is the Correct Subject?"

Nick Piombino: "from Contradicta."

What's up with the U.S.A?

Is it something in the water over there?

the mysterious world of bridal wear

2009-10-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

What's a "huse"?

Ok, pretty lame I know, but it's the middle of the week.

Lars Lundkvist

2009-10-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

There doesn't seem to be much info in English online about this Swedish poet, which is a damn shame. According to my copy of Modern Swedish Poetry in Translation, edited by Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo, he was born in 1928 and "grew up in northern Sweden, though south of Lapland proper. Visiting relatives who lived farther north, he acquired an early familiarity with Lapp culture, and his engagement with that nomadic way of life and myth dominate his early collections."

Indeed:

Man across the moor. Looked for his calf,
came to a burning stone,

heaven's stone,
fallen in the ptarmigan's nest.

Lay down there. Night came on,
one star in the North.

Goatherds found his frosty bones,
dug a hole.

Saw spider. Heard curlew.
Ate trout for supper.

And even better:

It was so dark in Sarvan Viste.
Even the dogs longed for the sun.

So they send the cowherdess, Sirka
to look for the sun.

Sirka hurried eastward. A long way she ran,
down to the east where the forest ended.

There she saw the sun: it lay in a wooden trough
and could not shine.

Sirka wanted to punch a hole in the trough,
let out the sun. She became a bird.

That bird is now black, and lives, in the winter,
in the fast white water.

Both these poems, translated by Harding and Hollo, are seemingly untitled.

The introduction in Modern Swedish Poetry claims that Lundkvist's writing later changed, became more occupied with "social concerns," and lost "much of the magic of his language." I don't know: the long poem published here doesn't seem to have lost its magic, but then there is no indication of the date it was written. I do, however, especially like this detail from the biographical note:

When his first wife Tove had their first daughter, he decided his course as a future poet – that he would write poems that even his daughter would be able to understand.

Sidestream

2009-09-20T14:43:00.000-07:00

A new poem, "The Return," is in the latest issue of Sidestream, a neat little print zine distributed across the globe. Here in Dunedin, copies are available for free at Mazagram cafe on Moray Place (they'll be on the windowsill); there will also be copies available at Circadian Rhymn cafe in the near future.

Also in the issue:

K.A. Phyn - A Meditation on Heath Ledger’s Cleaning Woman
Jason Morales - 6 p.m. Sunday
Ila Selwyn - stolen voices
Hayden Hyams - Slip Cast. Smoke Fired.
Neesha Bremner - Art — Cherry Stained
Ernest Williamson III - the jazz of old wine
D.J. Grierson - ‘Abraham’: A Soliloquy on Sand.
Michael Botur - Wellington
Aleksandra Lane - Holding hands is so third world
Daniel Larsen - The Day Michael Jackson Died

Cover art by Ernest Williamson III - world peace held

Herberto Helder

2009-09-13T02:25:00.000-07:00

The world is full of amazing poems:

The actor lights his mouth. Then, his hair.

He feigns his faces in the ponds within.

The actor puts on and removes

a buffalo head.

A deer head.

A rhinoceros head.

He puts flowers on his horns.

No one loves as ruthlessly

as the actor.

The actor lights his feet and his hands.

He speaks slowly.

He seems to spread himself in slow diffusion, inch by inch.

An inch of star.

An inch of open window.

An inch of sinuous inner cave.

from "The Actor" by Herberto Helder, translated from the Portuguese by Suzette Macedo. Every now and then I need reminding why I try to write poetry.

Poems like this do the trick.

Helder's wikipedia page (in Portuguese).

"They are rebuilding the city"

2009-08-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

is a line from the last page of Naked Lunch, as I recall. Burroughs is a surprisingly musical writer, a fact that tends to be overlooked due to the generally bizarre and repulsive nature of his work.

Not that Burroughs has anything to do with these photos, which are of two large buildings being demolished down the street.

As I was watching, one building began to spit little bits of itself out a high window.

Someone is rebuilding the city.

But what are these two doing?

Found Poem #1 (Russian phrase list, unedited)

2009-08-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

to embrace somebody
to give somebody something to eat
mohair rug
it smells of something
dirty
slippers
wedding
plate
to warm up the dinner
saucepan
to be offended by somebody
to stick something to somebody
window
knob, handle
to light the gas
for God's sake!
mind you don't get burnt!
to turn something
to muddle something up
to poison oneself
to break, smash something
in any case, anyway
ladle
to drop something
lid
to tie, fasten, attach something to something
string
hairdresser's
to twirl, whirl
to mend something

From Eliot Weinberger's New Book, Oranges and Peanuts for Sale

2009-08-07T00:20:00.000-07:00

"Happily, the artists I visited were at the quirkier end of performance art. Ye Fu had built a huge bird's nest at the top of a tower and lived in it for a month without leaving. Cang Xin likes to lick things and has had himself photographed licking the Great Wall, the sidewalk outside of the House of Commons, and statues in Rome. Chen Wenbo paints large canvasses depicting blank sheets of paper"

from "Postcard from China," page 136. Buy it. Weinberger is one of the best writers alive.

Maybe. . .

2009-08-05T03:37:00.000-07:00

Montana Day Photos

2009-08-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

The Dunedin Public Library has a flickr set from the Montana Poetry Day reading. Most of the shots of me have me as a figure in the far distance, a vague reddish blur hovering above a pale blob. The Library has been kind enough to include, at the start of the set, a group shot in which everyone is looking goofishly in the wrong direction. The final pic, however, has everyone looking deceptively well-composed.

NZ Poetry Society 2009 Competition

2009-07-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ah well; I managed to get "commended" in the 2009 NZ Poetry Society Competition. The judge, Michael Harlow, says some nice things about my poem "Little Night Song" in his comments here.

The poem will be included in the Society's 2009 anthology, to be published later in the year.

Black Mail Press

2009-06-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

A new poem, "Father," online in the latest issue of Black Mail Press.

I haven't read through everything in this issue yet, but Iain Britton's and Sue Wootton's contributions are especially good.

Ruth Dallas Tribute

2009-05-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

A prose poem, "In a garden, someone is growing a tree," is now online as part of a tribute to Ruth Dallas at the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.

Poem in Anthology

2009-05-04T05:13:00.000-07:00

A slightly altered version of "The Cat Poems" has just been published in Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems About Animals.

"This Rabbit," hallucinogenic poem/video

2009-04-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

An audio-visual rendering of an old poem of mine, "This Rabbit." Vocals by myself and Larry Matthews, visuals by Larry.

Online poems: the back catalogue

2009-02-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

A poem published way back in 2006, as part on the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre's "Oban '06" celebrations.

"The Cat Poems" at The Lumière Reader Website.

Two very short poems, "Sunday" and "Exit," as published in Critic magazine (Note: the third piece on this page. "Lily's Pets," is not mine). In retrospect, I regret including the complete quote; it seems striking long compared with the actual poems. This was originally a print publication; the online version is somewhat visually unattractive.

More poems in the Critic archive:
"Ornithology"
"Sand Paintings"

Introduction, and some Prose Poems

2009-02-24T20:39:00.001-08:00

The site is very much under construction. Feel free to have a seat in the interim. I suppose, while you wait, you could check out the online journal Deep South. I edited the 2006 and 2007 issues, assisted with the 2008. My own work is featured here and here (these two links open as pdf files).

Thank you for your attention!!!