Poem

"For All the Wild Things I Knew Died"

Paint yourself and sing to the moon
For you do not live twice
And this joke will only last as long
As you are laughing.

I am bound to my sin
The mistakes like a cloak of trash
I drag across the deck
Of my deserted barge.

And at the darkest hour
I shall go to the lonely wood
Take out my blunted blade
And share my blood with the wind.

Here I cling to the half forgotten dream
The shadow of her passing and the echo of her voice
Singing in the mad high branches of the blown oak
As the dark water gathers about our standing stone.

Watch the wall fall and the loon laugh
The birds depart for sanctuary south
While plague takes the healthy
And madness the sane.

The laws of crows are shattered
This is your ticket to freedom
Your dream of forever wishing
I woke up wrapped in laughter weeping
Forgetting what language was for.

--------*--------

Stockholm July 2013.

Dial-A-Poem Poets: Radicalizing space with the telephone

John Giorno with the  Dial-a-Poem telephone set up in 1969

“One day a New York mother saw her 12-year-old son with two friends listening to the telephone and giggling. She grabbed the phone from them and what she heard freaked her out. This was when Dial-A-Poem was at The Architectural League of New York with worldwide media coverage, and Junior Scholastic Magazine had just done an article and listening to Dial-A-Poem was homework in New York City Public Schools.” - John Giorno, August 1972

“Every faggot hiding in bar/political prisoner/Every junky shooting up in john/Political prisoner” - Diana De Prima, Revolutionary Letter No. 49

Dial a Poem began in 1968 when New York artist, actor, poet John Giorno linked up 15 connected telephones to reel-to-reel tape players and made it possible for anyone to call a telephone number and listen to a poem recited by an established, often radical, poet or author.

Millions called. "The busiest time was 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., so one figured that all those people sitting at desks in New York office buildings spend a lot of time on the telephone," wrote John Giorno, the founder of Dial-A-Poem. "The second busiest time was 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. ... then the California calls and those tripping on acid or couldn't sleep, 2 a.m. to 6 a.m" (New York Times).

Comparisons with current information systems are obvious. With Dial-a-Poem a network was established that created a space for experiencing language. Along with this experience of language came a lot of assumptions about culture, often related to gender, sexuality, class, generation and political affiliation. Giorno and his associates (William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsburg, Diana De Prima, Clark Coolidge, Taylor Mead, Bobby Seale, Anne Waldman and Jim Carroll) created a radical space that anyone with a telephone could access.

Burroughs in his dry cackle describes an old Mexican assassin "with eyes the color of a faded gray flannel suit." Diane di Prima talks calmly about the proper use of knives and Molotov cocktails. Clark Coolidge drags out every four-letter word he can think of: taps, buns, keys, cans, arms. Taylor Mead sputters like a motorcycle. Bobby Seale charismatically hates white people, while people cheer. Ms. Waldman singsongs about her sagging spirit at age 26. Jim Carroll coolly reports how he took off his shirt, then his pants, for his coach, when he was 12, to try on a new uniform. "He told me it fit perfectly over my body" (New York Times).

The space created by sound is a space of potential dissidence. This began a long time ago. The audio of song, music, poet breaks up official space, monumental space, and gives time to the carnival or the revolution. This is why we have noise ordinances in urban spaces. To break through the wall of an apartment building with music is to reclaim space for the purposes of joy. The experiments of William S Burroughs came to similar conclusions:

“Could you cool a riot by recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable demonstrator? Maybe! However, it's a lot easier to start trouble that to stop it. Just pointing out that cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a weapon. You'll observe that the operators are making a cutup as they go. They are cutting in Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent Ohio with the present sound effects at random and that is a cutup.” - The Electronic Revolution (http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/burroughs.html)

Space is communicative in media according to how it can be “tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (Lefebvre 33). In the design of digital narrative works on the World Wide Web similar relationships between signifying elements in space, such as emphasized structures, repeated components and specific perspectives, make up this communication. In this sense the signs and codes that operate in space form a symbolic order in the digital works. The reading subject can only approach the works according to these codes, which compose “the locus of communication by means of signs, as the locus of separation and the milieu of prohibitions” (Lefebvre 134-135). The interpretive responses to these signs inevitably call upon a separation, an interpretive distance and as a result a set of prohibitions, between the reader and the work. With Dial-a-Poem the radical space of the poet has admitted you the listener for the duration of the telephone call. [1]

Prohibitions are encoded into representational space. Thomas Nolden clarifies this further:

For Lefebvre, ‘frontal relations’ of production codify power relations, for example, in the form of buildings or public monuments: ‘Such frontal (and hence brutal) expressions of these relations do not completely crowd out their more clandestine or underground aspects; all power must have its accomplices – and its police’ (33) (Nolden 128).

This is representational space, which Lefebvre defines “as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’. [...] Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre 39). Similar representational space exists in digitally mediated narrative as “non-verbal symbols and signs”, which evoke “not ‘stories’ but suggestive markings” and “trigger reactions in players in order to help them to create their own interpretations” (Nitsche 44). These ‘suggestive markings’ I equate with the dry rattle of Bill Burroughs' voice as he speaks of hipster junky life in Mexico in the 1950s, the excited chant of Ginsberg, and the echo of De Prima as she tells you where you are; “Every faggot hiding in bar/political prisoner/Every junky shooting up in john/Political prisoner”. You are in the same prison she is in, and that which connects you both is the telephone and the voice you hear holding it to your ear. Like the visiting rooms in prison they show in the movies on TV, but only now you are there holding the phone and listening.

Works Cited

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 2007.

Nolden, Thomas. “On Colonial Spaces and Bodies: Hans Grimm’s Geschichten und Südwestafrika.” The Imperialist Imagination: German colonialism and its legacy. Ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer. Sara Lennox, Susanne Zantop. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 125-141. Print.

NOTE: On Saturday 26 June 2013 at 20:00 GMT I speak in a BBC4 Radio documentary on the Dial a Poem poets along with,

Brian Patten, one of the original Liverpool poets, explores how radical, subversive and occasionally risqué poetry - rooted in the counter-culture of the late 1960s - became available to a mass audience at the end of a phone line for the first time.

I also understand the great biographer and friend of Burroughs and Gysin, Barry Miles is included in the program. You can tune in online here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ 

---

[1] Interpretation, linguistic or spatial, always includes the possibility of misreading. Interpretation is structured toward multiplicity and the digital works are no different. I do not need to account for my readings as preeminently ‘correct’, merely demonstrate how narrative can be read and how the digital works attempt to guide this reading.

Alchemy (poem from 2007)

A Global History of Revolution

A coded favor is offered by the earth
Two torn sticks wound with bark and the mud of the river
This secret was first shared with a few
To borrow from life something of magic or beauty made it valuable
It was kept then in the temple and later in the palace
For a very long time the soldiers guarded it without knowing what they were doing
It was never shared but the forces of its creation were understood by others outside the palace
Unable to make copies the holders of knowledge took power
The palace was opened and the secret spilled upon the ground
The next day the streets were cleared.

Friday Night Poem

Silent Violence

I smell rain

But it has been snowing for days

The earth frozen beneath our feet,

Trees shrouded in mourning white

Attend the sad funeral of a life

Lost to ice.

Know your pusher,

Rent out a faded corner

Of couch to the friend

You hate the most and then

Bend over backwards to discover

New domains of pain,

Favoured in the quiet backstreet

Leafy suburban panorama of normal,

The white bread variety of hell

Where we take the names of saints

In our race down to the corpse strewn

Shore of a sea that sail has long since

Left.

Smile, while I offer you

A generous finance plan

For your teeth.

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

For Syria

Strypa (A modern anti.war poem)

You sharpen your battle axe
At the back of the cave
You sour old men
Who plan the deaths of others
Because the games they play
Are not the games you like.

But be warned as the tide turns
Your army of one will be left
Standing alone as the wind wears
Away its edges.

Love supreme and unchallenged
Of all it surveys
Master of nothing
Owner of nil
The day will end
And another begin
But love is not diminished
Nor lessened by the chances taken
Or opportunities lost.

(On the occasion of the publication of the Afghan War Diary 2004-2010)



(I wrote the above while listening to this and thinking)

Gary Snyder "The Practice of the Wild" Trailer

'The Practice of the Wild' is a film profile of the poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. Snyder has been a creative force in all the major cultural changes that have created the modern world. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he was a central figure of the Beat generation. He helped bring Zen Buddhism into the America scene, was an active participant in the anti-war movement and an inspiration for the quest for human potential. All along he was a founding intellect, essayist and leader of the new environmental awareness that supports legislation and preservation without losing sight of direct wild experience -- local people, animals, plants, watersheds and food sources.

This film, borrowing its name from one of Snyder's most eloquent non-fiction books, revolves around a life-long conversation between Snyder and his fellow poet and novelist Jim Harrison. These two old friends and venerated men of American letters converse while taking a wilderness trek along the central California coast in an area that has been untouched for centuries. They debate the pros and cons of everything from Google to Zen koans. The discussions are punctuated by archival materials and commentaries from Snyder friends, observers, and intimates who take us through the 'Beat' years, the years of Zen study in Japan up to the present -- where Snyder continues to be a powerful spokesperson for ecological sanity and bio-regionalism.

New Works from Jason Nelson

Three new poems from Jason Nelson. Each inspired by the landscapes and locations of Australia. Enjoy.

Sydney’s Sibera
An interactive and infinitely zooming digital poem


Birds Still Warm from Flying
An interactive/re-creatable poetry cube


Wittenoom and the Cancerous Breeze
Digital poem created from ten sections

PressPress Chapbook Award 2010

Entries for the Award are now open!
The PressPress Chapbook Award is for an original manuscript of poetry between 20-40pp. The winning manuscript will receive $600 and chapbook publication with PressPress. The Award will be announced in July 2010 on the PressPress site. The manuscript must be unpublished and not on offer to another publisher in Australia or elsewhere (except that individual poems can be already taken or on offer to journals, sites or anthologies where you keep the copyright).

See www.presspress.com.au for details.

Sinclair Beiles reading his poems (1994)

"Mother Hasn't Paid the Bill" and "Snore" read by poet Sinclair Beiles, Johannesburg, April 1994.


Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930, d. 2002, Johannesburg) - was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.

Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and writer William Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book The Beat Hotel (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit William Burroughs' book Naked Lunch.

He worked with the Greek artist Takis and read his magnetic manifesto: "I am a sculpture... I would like to see all nuclear bombs on Earth turned into sculptures" in 1962 in Paris at the Iris Clert Gallery. At this event he was famously suspended in mid-air by a magnetic field from a powerful magnet in a sculpture developed by Takis. Beiles attributed his subsequent mental instability to this experience even though he insisted that Takis provide him with a helmet to protect his head from the magnetic field.

Beiles wondered through Europe, including a spell in London and settled in the Greek islands during the 1970s. He fought frequent bouts of depression, mental illness and drug addiction. He was married to the South African poet and artist Marta Procter.

In later life he returned to South Africa and was associated with the Johannesburg-based Gallery III group of poets, writers, composers and performance artists and lived in the central and artistic district of Yeoville. He and the South African columnist and playwright Ian Fraser, formed a friendship which lasted many years. The poet had a burst of writing activity from 1991 to 2000, publishing a large number of poetry collections, including A South African Abroad (Lapis Press, 1991). He died in relative poverty.

But Cosy Poetry for a Glum Friday

The Sad Bag Cassette (1990) Steven "Jesse" Bernstein

Ozymandias as Machinima (2000)

Praised by everyone from New York Times Arts columnist Matt Mirapaul, to film critic Roger Ebert, through to games journalists and literature professors, Strange Company's groundbreaking visual adaptation of the Shelley poem remains one of the most evocative pieces of Machinima.

Developed using an early version of Strange Company's Lithtech Film Producer software (a project which was later dropped, sadly), "Ozymandias" was created in just over a week for a demonstration show. However, the idea had been in director Hugh Hancock's mind for much longer.

"I've wanted to visualise to poem for years" says Hugh. "The imagery and the feel of the words is so strong that it really is crying out to be made into a film - and indeed, our adaptation stands as the latest of a number of films based on the poem."

Roger Ebert compared the film's minimalist construction to seminal Anime work "Grave of the Fireflies", and its attempt to capture the spirit of the poem was judged so successful that several literature courses used the film as part of their teaching program. Dell used the film as part of their demonstration at the Windows 2000 launch, and it appeared at several film festivals as part of Strange Company's Machinima showcase.

"As with all of these things, I had no idea that "Ozymandias" was going to be so successful when we were making it." says Hugh. "This was one of the most off-the-wall ideas I'd come up with, and its success has been very gratifying."

Download Ozymandias

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

Poem

A small wire emerges from her
It enters me thu the hole in my eye.
I am hollowed by its sharp edges,
Of a presence as arms and torso
Become still and sore with the ache.
Made strong by the time of lasting

Battered hearts are silent in waiting
Bruised minds are seldom moving.
Rather each returns to the scene
Of the accident over and over again.
To pick thru the wreckage that remains
Wild looks, stained notebooks, broken locks.

Men and women of earth,
What is it that makes you so frightened?
Can not the flesh of your bodies feed desire?
And currents of thought answer your questions.
The towers and tunnels will never free you
Stop injury stop action stop hope stop stop

I return to the bedchamber of loneliness
And sleep surrounded by distance.
Each believes the other to be true but,
Changing garments only spreads the odor
Of impasse, where instead calibration seals
All in the steel now filling our cold embrace.

Such savage intimacies as secret names,
Known only to the loved and loving, bleed
Truth to the source of its feeling with me.
So wounded by my own pity which is perhaps
Only hunger, for I have now eaten your food.
Tasted the bitter roots of regret which lack beginning.

2009 PressPress Chapbook Award

The world's smallest, but one of the best, poetry publishers PressPress is holding its award again:

Deadline 30 May 2009

The PressPress Chapbook Award is an award for the best chapbook length collection of poems. The deadline of 30 May 2009 is rapidly approaching (not long now!).

What you need to know:

What can I submit? An unpublished chapbook length manuscript of poems (20-40 pages). Aside from that, it’s up to you.

How do I enter? Go to the PressPress site at www.presspress.com.au for conditions and an entry form. Alternatively, email info@presspress.com.au or send an SSAE to PO Box 94 Berry NSW 2535 Australia.

How long do I have? Until 30 May 2009.

What do I get if I win? Chapbook publication with PressPress and $500 AUD.

Lectures on Milton

Milton's political tract Areopagitica is discussed at length. The author's complicated take on state censorship and licensing, both practiced by the English government with respect to printed materials at the time, is examined. His eclectic use of pagan mythology, Christian scripture, and the metaphors of eating and digestion in defense of his position are probed. Lastly, Milton's insistence that moral truths must be examined and tested in order for goodness to be known is explored as an early manifestation of the rhetoric that will be used to depict the Fall in Paradise Lost.

This lecture is number eight in a series of twenty four on John Milton by John Rogers, Professor of English at Yale University. It comes to us via Academic Earth, a fine source of academic materials on the web. All of them free.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
- Milton, John

PressPress Chapbook Award 2009

The news is that after a successful Award in 2008 the PressPress Chapbook Award will run again in 2009!

The Award is for an unpublished chapbook length manuscript of poems. The winning manuscript will receive $500 (Australian, 355.644 USD) and chapbook publication with PressPress. The closing date is 31 May 2009.
Last year's Award had entries from all Australian states, as well as China, Turkey, Poland and New Zealand with one bilingual manuscript. There was a great standard overall which is good for the state of poetry and judges are happy to see innovation and risks taken with the entries. Carolyn Fisher's manuscript, The Unsuspecting Sky, was the winner and was published in October 2008. It was Carolyn's first chapbook and has been well received - especially in her home state of Tasmania.

Go to the site to check out the guidelines and get a copy of the entry form. Pass it on to people you think might be interested.


PressPress
www.presspress.com.au

Checklist:

1. Manuscript has a title but not the poet's name
2. One hardcopy of manuscript is enclosed
3. SSAE enclosed if you want your original returned.
4. Cheque/money order to PressPress or PayPal receipt for $15 is
enclosed.
5. Entry form enclosed.
6. Posted to

PressPress Chapbook Award,
PO Box 94,
Berry NSW 2535,
Australia

so it arrives by 30 May 2009.

An Aaahaa Moment with Oulipo

Today I experienced a moment of pleasant surprise while doing the thesis slog (really...today was heavy...lots of deleting took place). I had read of the Oulipo poets in relation to all this digital textual stuff I spend my time with. I thought it was some ancient use of random data generation (valves and magnetic tapes??) to create permeations that were then called 'poetry'. It appears I was wrong. After spending some hours looking into Oulipo it actually seems way cool. Ill start with a short definition and the wikipedia link:

OuLiPo, the "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle" or “Workshop for Potential Literature,” was co-founded in Paris the early 1960's by mathematician and writer Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais. Oulipian writers impose constraints that must be satisfied to complete a text, constraints ranging across all levels of composition, from elements of plot or structure down to rules regarding letters. OuLiPo thus pushes a structuralist conception of language to a level of mathematical precision; technique becomes technical when language itself becomes a field of investigation, a complex system made up of a finite number of components. (More from Dr Harris on the Oulipo)

Now, while I was previously hung up on the generative and structuralist side of the Oulipo, what I missed (and what is actually the most interesting I think) is the constraint-based text creation. The setting up of constraints in the creation of a text has enormous potential (I suppose it seemed that way in 1960 as well...I just a bit slow). In a sense a city could be constructed as an Oulipo work in progress. A text has the potential to become a performance with Oulipo. Found objects and cut-up language or images can be incorporated into a text network according to the constraints of the algorithm imposed to organize it.
In a general reference to the Oulipo poetic, I remember reading about the first printing of William Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch (1959) which was typed up and each chapter was sent off to the printers at random. The pattern of streets between rue Gît le Coeur and the Olympia Press office and the printers became the constraint to the order of the text. When the galley proofs were returned to Gît le Coeur the party involved in the typing decided it was good enough and the rest is history.
There is not a lot of literature on Oulipo is seems. My university library returns no hits for a search on the word. There are a number of books an essays listed on Google Scholar. I shall begin ordering tomorrow. I suppose it would help if one spoke French....like with many things in life.
There is a site for the generation of Queneau's hundred thousand billion poems:

Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes is derived from a set of ten basic sonnets. In his book, published in 1961, they are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book. All ten sonnets have the same rhyme scheme and employ the same rhyme sounds. As a result, any line from a sonnet can be combined with any from the other nine, giving 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. Working twenty-four hours a day, it would you take some 140,000,000 years to read them all.

Paris Poem

Pigalle La Fountaine

Suns crawl over blinds
White washed walls
Cobble stone narrow strays
Hills bend before prostitutes,
Bored and waiting
For their laundry.

Puddles explode from drain ways
Absent from rain for days
Bones crust the architecture
As cars thread through
The rich embroided city,
A telescope of history.

Collapse in feeled works
An aperture behind vision
Lifting the torn corners
Of the street peeling back
The texture of absinthe
Mixed with sand and melting.

I have lost the recipe
For sleep passed over womb doors
Dreams and wishes revealed
In the arcane wisdom of bacteria
A shell which prevents entry exit,
Breathing the city has its own sense.

Of traction provided by the lips
Of strangers spilling forth from bars
Of traffic feeding angular meetings
Of a sound that issues from the solar plexus
Of chains and pistons; rods for the back
Of man and woman.

(Paris, June ’08)

Buds a Budding: The Green Fuse Drives the Flower

Outside my window the trees are shooting out buds that seem to be growing by the minute. The greening of trees for Spring happens over a couple of days here in the sub-arctic north. I thought of a Dylan Thomas poem (see below images)







The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

From Dylan Thomas: The Poems, published by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London, 1971

First Recording of 'Howl' by Allen Ginsburg Found

Allen Ginsburg in 1956

In February 1956, during a hitch-hiking trip from Berkeley to the Pacific Northwest with fellow-poet Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg gave a poetry reading at Reed College, Portland, Oregon at which he read “Howl” and seven other poems. Ginsberg and Synder were on campus for two nights, February 13 and 14; the recording unearthed recently in the Reed archives includes Ginsberg's “Howl Part I,” the longest section of the poem published six months later by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books with the initial title “Howl for Carl Solomon.” The reel-to-reel tape held by Special Collections at Reed's Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library is the earliest-known recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl.” The recording is of high quality, and does not include the entire poem, as Ginsberg stopped reading soon after concluding Part I of “Howl.”

Listen to the Recording