Seeing Skulls, Reading Palms: Jasper Johns in 2014

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Sarah Hayden

Jasper Johns’s Regrets is at the Courtauld from September 12th-December 14th. Before that (March 15th-September 1st), it was at MoMA. A significant portion of its contents are due to return to New York, but for now, it’s in the rather more incongruous and maybe more productively peculiar setting of the Courtauld: set in the vaguely lobby-like space that communicates between the museum’s marble spine/stairs and its permanent collection of Impressionism and its hereafters. Continue reading →

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9 Artworks from Natalia Jaeger

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Natalia Jaeger


Natalia Jaeger | EC1R 4PL | London | 16×20

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An Update to “Spying on the Poetry Scene in Edinburgh’ by Posie Rider’

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Jeremy Beardmore

[Note: the below article by Posie Rider, written November 2010, first appeared in Openned January 2011. She wasn’t findable to provide an update, so Jeremy Beardmore has kindly stepped in.]

Update on page 2.


Hail! When I received the call from Openned in late October, asking me to go as their envoy to the ice-encrusted city of Edinburgh and chronicle the most ferocious of its frost-rimed rhymers, I was both thrilled and anxious. Thrilled both because of my love for that gothick conurbation – a gathering of complex forces, like glacial cracking, to which the word ‘settlement’ is hardly applicable – and the appeal of being a bit of a poetic missionary from the South, and anxious, because daunting is the attempt to encapsulate, like some terrible Captain Cook of the mind, the current state of writing, reading and performing of any place – let alone one of which you cannot truly say ‘this is my place’.

When I was invited to read in Edinburgh on 3 December, alongside Tom Raworth, nick-e melville and Sophie Stamina (whom you may have encountered under a succession of names elsewhere), my fate was sealed. It was to Edinburgh at once by East Coast Rail, and to hell with my crisis of authorship and my tenuous claims to authority!

The best place I can think of to begin is a deconstruction of my upcoming reading itself, seeing as it chivvied me into action. Anything Anymore Anywhere represents an exciting new poetic venture organised by the charming poet, poetic impresario and massive fan of yours truly, Colin Herd. By the time this has gone to press, readers, we will have completed the first in a series of uniting readers from ‘over there’ with readers from ‘right here’ (actually over there – i.e. Scotland) – I believe the next in the series will see Andrea Brady ascending from [Londres] to read alongside local writers. The idea for the series jumped fully formed, like a young Dionysus, from the thigh of Colin, or more properly that of his journal. This publication, of which three issues so far exist, is not restricted to Scottish poets, or indeed to poetry, and its transatlanticism undoubtedly reflects Herd’s own interest in American writing. Still, certain poetry included does demonstrate tendencies in the reception and writing of poetry in Scotland, not least its concrete and visual strain inherited from endlessly beloved Scots writers of the sixties, seventies and beyond, like Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Tom Leonard and the late makar, Edwin Morgan. Text and fish-based work from Greg Thomas is certainly in this tradition – and indeed Greg will be co-curating an exhibition of concrete poetry at the SPL next Summer alongside librarian Julie Johnstone, as well as co-organising next year’s soon-to-be-announced, quasi-academic conference, Con/Versify: Poetry, Politics and Form, with other Edinburgh students, Lila Matsumoto and Samantha Walton, which should be a great deal of fun.

Another concretey offering in the journal comes in the form of the letter-based spirals and chequers of the mysterious Andrew Topel, who may be from Mosstodloch, Achnahannait, Boston or Leith, for all I know. The definitely Edinburgh-based nick-e melville’s found poetry and deleted text works, published in selections and dissections (2010), are drawn from bank-letters, benefits advice brochures, party manifestos and Robert Burns, and feature a direct intervention in social issues often absent from or nebulous in the more twee concrete work (‘frog pond plop – piss off!). They are best seen as a projected backdrop to his rage-electro, dance-punk, post-grime two-piece band, ShellSuit Massacre. Nick-e will be reading unaccompanied on the 3 December, but I did have the pleasure of seeing the band perform at the Throat Cuts, Not Bonus Cuts night he organised on 7 October. The political agenda of the event should, of course, be evident (chins up, Lib Dems!) and fusions of poetry and spoken word (i) with rousing film art by Sacha Kahir; (ii) with extraordinary renditions of Kanyé West-ish and Spanish folk songs; alluring megaphones and furious ad hoc speaker-drumming by Zorras; (iii) with visual art in a vast collection of posters by Tom Leonard; and (iv) with just its good old self by ‘punk poet legend’ Rodney Relax and Glasgow’s Jim Ferguson … who all contributed to a night sizzling with activist solidarity, heated debate and much heartening violence directed at Tory and Lib Dem rule. ‘Fucking posh-boy roulette!’ I’m sure I heard nick-e cry at one point, as I waltzed to the sounds of ShellSuit’s ‘ASBOy’, a post-techno ditty about the newly-acquired social status of an ASBO holder, accompanied visually by the lurid front pages of The Sun.

What do we learn from this? Firstly, it is undoubtedly true that poetry shares a space more comfortably and cordially with its sister arts in the Edinburgh scene than is often the case elsewhere. There’s very little awkwardness in a night that combines visual arts, poetry and music, and this is something has made the rise of the little bespoke Scree Magazine, edited by shape-shifting raccoon Lila Matsumoto, so encouraging. Conceived as a polite predecessor to Hamilton-Finlay’s generously illustrated Poor.Old.Tired.Horse and other magazines of the ‘50s and ‘60s like Migrant, Rescusitator and Black Mountain Review, the first two issues of Scree have contained ticklish little etching-a-likes, poetry, short prose tales and, joy of joys, a CD featuring local glitch-, boop- and twinky-core music from Conquering Animal Sound, Helheston, Illiop and Dead Leaves, amongst others. That the poetry of some of the musicians is also printed in the magazine should illustrate how inter-media free-for-alls are fostered in Edinburgh, and anyone who attended the second Scree launch would have been worked into a frenzy by the on-the-spot collaboration between Francis Crot, a London expat now ensconced in the Scottish scene, with Conquering Animal Sound, which combined the latter’s definitely boop-core music with the former’s attempt to taxonomise obscurantist music trivia drivel from the last hundred or so years.

Perhaps the cheerful interaction between art forms and artists is a consequence of the teeny-tininess of the city, with its 477,660 people, or perhaps the annual arrival of the Festival is to blame. This fun monstrosity bloats the city out of recognition, with creative types literally willing to kill you just in order to prop up your rigid corpse in a seat in order to impress a reviewer from The Skinny. Whatever your views on student theatre, the festival is probably terrible for poetry, and the only things I managed to see during the fortnight I spent here was such a cartload of tedious slam, pseudo-comedy, spoken word and smug storytelling that I wished I’d never been born, let alone born with an interest in the arts. Storytelling should not be given such a bad name, and indeed another, I feel confident to say it, awesome feature of general creativity in Edinburgh is the revivified interest in traditional storytelling, which is practised both at The Scottish Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile and in the upper rooms of nearby pub, The Waverly, on a Friday night. Donations are on request, the pub sells the most reasonable priced whiskey on the High Street, and you are guaranteed to burst into tears when an elderly woman from Invernesshire sings a Highland Clearance ballad passed down through innumerable grandmothers. That is a good thing, I tell you.

Secondly, poetry in Scotland manages, often, to be effortlessly political. As far as I can tell, everyone is basically to a greater or lesser extent a massive socialist in Scotland. As such, there is very little of that South-Easterly squeamishness about ‘how to write about class-issues without sounding like a do-good middle-classer,’ or ‘how to locate class-issues one may possibly write about considering one lives in Cambridge/Hampstead and there are few in sight’ or, even more cripplingly, ‘how to write about class issues considering my readers will need a PhD in order to understand my poetry, and, alas, the upper echelons of higher education and social and economic depravation mix badly, like Vodka and Milk.’ ‘England’, which is often unfortunately used as a metonym for the Westminster Parliament, forms a broad focus of political disdain, highly sympathetic to writers. What other national parliament would run courses for children to encourage them to write their own verse in response to the building, or adorn its expressive, stave-clad walls with Gaelic and Scots verse, including this offering from Walter Scott (actually from a novel but carved to look like a poem, innit? ):-

when we had a king
and a chancellor,
and parliament-men
o’ our ain,
we could aye peeble them
wi’ stanes when
they werena
gude bairns -
But naebody’s
nails can reach
the length o’
Lunnon.

The contempt for Lunnon ensured that recent anti-cuts marches were well attended by a comprehensive cross-section of society, including representatives of trade unions, public sector workers, local primary schools and blocks of patriotic piping troops, some with fantastic drums, all with kilts. That said, the student march of 24 November was rather less well-attended than those taking place in England, although the commitment of the protesters (who have since been occupying a floor of the university’s Appleton Tower) was no less inspirational, and all the more so because it was intended to galvanise solidarity with students nationwide, while for some, the university cuts remain an English problem. This week there have been tweets from students occupying a group of snowmen and jumping out to frighten police, and in one unfortunate incident, a cyclist. Just this morning (30 November and St Andrews Day) I attended a spirited student march to Holyrood, which culminated in excellent speeches from a variety of speakers, including the divine Dr Suzanne Trill from the University of Edinburgh’s Literature department, and an epic snowball fight aimed at driving out the dastardly Clegg, who was ensconced inside. A fervent commitment to opposing nationwide fee cuts was on everyone’s lips today, and I will follow with a heart burning with pride the progression of the movement here. If the Scottish Parliament adopts a similar policy to cuts and fee-creation as the Con-Dem’s – degrees here are still free for Scots and at a national low for other British students – Scotland may see even more widespread protest and a more earnest attempt from workers’ and public sector groups to engage with the student protesters. On the 24 November march (attended, might I add, by a number of Edinburgh poets) we were hailed by a builder who advised us to ‘Get a proper job,’ right as we were chanting hopefully to all around, ‘Students and Workers, Unite and Fight!’ How rude! I bet he didn’t say that to the miners, they’d have ‘had’ him.

I digress. The benefit of blanket left-wing principles is vast for the poet, who rarely needs to engage in the same debates concerning poetry’s mandate to shock, interrogate and cajole its readers into political action and debate. Counterculture doesn’t sit on ice down the gloomy cul-de-sac of critique and mobilisation. Instead, it gets to cooperate in something rather like counter-hegemony – albeit with a little dubious assistance from Scottish patriotism. An antagonism towards Tory cuts and Southern directed policy is easily activated, as, like in so many towns throughout Britain, the repercussions of cuts made by the previous Tory government are still felt in perilously neglected communities. Poet nick-e melville has, incidentally, recently started his tenure as writer in ‘residence’ at HMP Edinburgh, which gives you some idea of the limited hostility to outspokenly left-wing and experimental writers in Scotland (I long for the day Sean Bonney is elected to a similar post!) and a more grassroots, poetic intervention into governmental practice can be eagerly anticipated.

Another thing that defines the Edinburgh scene is its many charity shops, book shops and libraries. Bookshops of note include the awesome left-wing purveyor of books and hoster of readings, Word Power Books and tumbledown, bureaucracy-bating Armchair Books. Anyone who remembers to bring the right bits can get membership (browsing, not borrowing) to Edinburgh University Library, Edinburgh City Library and the Scottish National Library, a copyright library the size of half a landing at the BL, but which nonetheless is never uncomfortably full. Bliss! Full borrowing rights are available at the Scottish Poetry Library. One can retrieve even the slightest pamphlets and chapbooks from their coral-coloured shelves for a month at a time, or at least until they send you an automated message asking you to return them, followed by a personal message apologising for the bureaucratic tone of the previous message, and asking you to do your best to return the book, you know, whenever you can. As well as lending out their stocks (all for free of course) the library used to organise poetry walks around the city, during which attendants were encouraged to compose lines based upon locale; they run reading groups in which participants discuss poems they have brought along; a ‘poetry-retrieval’ and recommendation service, where lost lines are reconnected with long-forgotten works and further reading is suggested. Their list of poetry events happening in and around the city is more than I could ever hope to achieve without giving up my fight against patriarchy for good, and I was hard pushed to attend or report upon but a snatch of them. These activities attest to the library’s desire to be a true public institution and to engage with people who may not as yet be readers poetry. I am always made a little uncomfortable by civilising missions, especially when they are accompanied by bastardised Arnoldian rhetoric concerning the cheering power of verse, but I do think libraries and literature have an essential function and the SPL is doing its best to be a welcoming and socially involved institution, although it still ridiculously charges for many of its evening events involving guest speakers. Poetry should always be free, of course.

Edinburgh poet Ryan Van Winkle, who was one the winners of this year’s Crashaw Prize, organised much of the weekly activity at the SPL as its poet-in-residence, although I believe his tenancy has recently ended. He is currently active in the group that is trying to save The Forest Café, the familiar not-for-profit, creative-and-crusty arts hub close to the university, which has been thrown into financial turmoil with the collapse of the organisation that owned the building and the handing over of their beautiful property to administrators. Poetry in the city will surely suffer, both because the inevitable disruption to Forest Publications, which prints a magazine and chapbooks featuring new writing, and the loss of an affordable space for readings, meetings, exhibitions and events. The related collapse of The Roxy Arthouse, where both Scree and the Throat Cuts events were staged, poses a similar threat, and if Edinburgh is not going to turn into London, where arts venues are being destroyed by the cultural cancer that is luxury hotelery and flats, it needs to put its chipper, pro-arts socialism into practice and provide proper support to these creative centres in spite of government policy South of the Border.

-Posie Rider, Edinburgh, 30 November, 2010

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A Personal Letter from the People’s Republic of Cork to the People of Cordite

Posted on March 1, 2015 by James Cummins

Cork is Ireland’s second city with a population just shy of 120,000 people. It has a river, a university, an art collage, a cathedral, some art galleries, community centres, shops, multi-national chains, pubs, cafes, restaurants; all the things you would expect from a city but nonetheless there is no getting around the fact that Cork is a small city. It also suffers, like all second cities, from an inferiority complex which leads to an extreme form of arrogance and self-belief. It is no wonder then that it is known as both the Rebel County and the Real Capitol.

If Cork suffers from second city syndrome then Ireland suffers too. The shared and troubled history of both Britain and Ireland is well documented elsewhere but it is safe to say that since Ireland regained its independence in 1921 is has and continues to be the second nation in the British Isles. I have, in the past, often felt pangs of jealousy when looking across the Irish Sea at all the poetry readings, festivals, reading groups, magazines, publishers and exhibitions which seem to over flow from the various ‘centres’ of the British poetry scene; London, Cambridge, Sussex, Edinburgh, Manchester and to a lesser degree Bristol and Sheffield. Even Cambridge, the smallest of these towns/cities, has a larger population than Cork and that is not taking into account the draw Cambridge has on young poets and academics. The poetic communities in these places can seem so much more diverse and engaged than Cork and it is hard not to feel like our little enclave is somehow inferior.

But it is easy to look wistfully elsewhere. The grass is always greener. It is easy to start to believe that these are the places poetry is ‘happening’, that these are the real centres of influence, that these are the places and the poetries in which we must strive towards and engage with. But truth be told their histories are not the same as ours, their politics are not the same as ours, their concerns do not always match ours and their ‘must read’ poets does not always make the grade. I am not trying to sound dismissive or to imply that our closest neighbour does not have a certain influence. Of course they do! We read! We engage! But this is just one part of a diverse set of influences and concerns. Historical figures are shared; with some Irish writers such as Joyce and Beckett becoming part of the framework of inter/multi/trans/national Modernists. Other figures such as Yeats looms larger in Ireland, for good or ill. There are also poets such as Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy and Denis Devlin. More established Irish writers who are still writing include Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, Randolph Healy, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills, David Lloyd and Mairead Byrne. Each of these writers have played a large role in defining the parameters of what it means to write innovative poetry in or from an Irish context. Other names include Matthew Geden, Sarah Hayden, Rachel Warriner, David Toms, Fergal Gaynor, Robert Kiely and Aodan McCardle. I am sure I am leaving people out but you get the idea. Due to the size of the city, those of us who are engaged in ‘experimental poetics’ cannot isolate ourselves. Poets such as Billy Ramsell, Jennifer Matthews, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Graham Allen, Paul Casey and Mary Noonan, might not share our poetic concerns but all play an integral part in fostering a sense of community in Cork.

For its size Cork has a pretty formidable poetry and art scene. Rachel Warriner and I moved to Cork in 2003 after attending the SoundEye poetry festival, Founded in 1997 by Trevor Joyce, Matthew Geden and Catriona Ryan. This festival over the years has hosted a wide range of Irish, British, American, Australian and non-Anglophone poets and has without a doubt been a defining influence on many poets working in or from Ireland. Currently the festival, now in its 18th year, is suffering from funding cuts but the organising committee which is includes myself, Rachel Warriner, Sarah Hayden, Trevor Joyce and Fergal Gaynor are committed to seeing it continue until its 20 year anniversary after which time we will reassess the situation. Besides this we all, in some combination or another, have been involved in a variety of publications such as DEFAULT, Runamok, Foma and Fontanelles and return to DEFAULT. There have also been reading groups, workshops and conferences organised by the Modernisms Research Centre in UCC which was set up as a way of linking the academic study of Modernism with the artistic practice which happens throughout the city.

It would be a boring life if poets only spoke to poets and because of the size of cork it is easy and essential to interact with other artists and art forms. We have galleries here, the Crawford and the Glucksman are the two big ones. The Black Maria Gallery is small but always has top quality work. Tactic/Sample Studios student type space which is run with enthusiasm but with mixed results. The Guest House is probably Cork’s most important space as it not only has a residency space but also puts on so many high quality events and exhibitions. Oh! and serves the best food. There was also the basement project space, the couch gallery and one more whose name escapes me but was up a few flights of stairs. There are so many important visual artists working in Cork but for me the highlights are Maud Cotter, Stephen Brandes, Angela Fulcher and James McCann. Sound Art is also huge here with the like of Safe, Trace, Wölflinge/Vicky Langan, Danny McCarthy and The Quite Club all playing their part. Blacksun used to hold regular events billed as ‘weirdo music nights’.

Each of these artists and art spaces bring to the table their own set of influences and artistic concerns. Plus with so many collaborations happening throughout the Cork artistic community it starts to get much easier to stop always looking across the pond to our island neighbours for acceptance or validation. Cork has a diverse poetic and artistic community with a set of artistic concerns unique to this place. It is both inward and outward looking, not just focused on a singular national tradition we seek influences from far and wide, in both time and place. Cork might be the second city in the second nation floating off the north east of Europe but we are making things happen.

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Integral to the Ethos of The Other Room

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Scott Thurston

At the beginning of 2008 Alex Davies, co-organiser with Steve Willey of the London poetry reading series Openned, convened a meeting of a group of loosely-associated poets with a commitment to experimental and innovative writing in Manchester. The poets were James Davies, Tom Jenks, Alex Middleton, Matthew Welton and myself. The aim was to propose a new local reading series devoted to this work. James had already begun a series of readings associated with his Matchbox magazine project the year before and had put on Matthew, Tom, myself and Allen Fisher to promote our respective contributions. Tom was editing a magazine called Parameter and had organised a launch reading for one of the issues. Alex, who had translated the great Danish poet Inger Christensen, was working for the Literature division of Arts Council England, which she continues to do. I had recently begun running an MA in Innovative and Experimental Creative Writing in my (ongoing) post at the University of Salford and teaching undergraduate modules in innovative poetry. Matthew Welton was working for the University of Bolton and programming interesting poetry at the Octagon Theatre in Bolton, but was later to leave Manchester for a new job in Nottingham. We felt collectively that the time, conditions and resources were in place to inaugurate Manchester’s first regular experimental writing series.

Within three months of this meeting our first event took place at The Old Abbey Inn in Manchester Science Park, featuring Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey and Tom Jenks. Jump forward six years and we have now hosted 48 events to date, presenting over a hundred individual performers to a total audience numbering well over a thousand people. In the process our team contracted slightly to a core of myself, James and Tom, but we have maintained links with our co-founders Openned. The mission of the event has simply been to promote the innovative and experimental writing that we are excited by. The project is self-funded, so we do not need to comply with the agendas of any funding bodies. At any one time we utilise a planning grid with over a hundred names on it to programme our cycle of six to eight events a year, usually six months in advance. Our website has grown from strength to strength, now receiving an average of 36,000 hits a year. Aside from becoming a notice-board for experimental poetry news from the length and breadth of the UK and beyond, it is also the repository for our archive of video recordings of performances and interviews with poets – now approaching over fifty hours of material.

Integral to the ethos of The Other Room is the promotion of new writers alongside more established poets. We have programmed many writers of international repute including Jerome Rothenberg, Vanessa Place, Allen Fisher, Maggie O’Sullivan, Peter Inman, Tina Darragh, Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack, Caroline Bergvall, Hazel Smith, Roger Dean and many others, but also provided a platform, and in some cases the first readings, for new and emerging writers such as Richard Barrett, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Jo Langton, Sarah Crewe, Leanne Bridgewater and Stephen Emmerson. Any naming of names is necessarily partial, but alongside the event and the website, we have also sought to provide a full account of our activity through annual anthologies which gather the work of all the poets who have performed with us during a given year.

The Other Room has also become a focal point for small press publishing in the North West. Alongside James’s if p then q and Tom’s zimZalla presses, Alec Newman’s amazingly prolific Knives Forks and Spoons Press has published many Other Room readers and helped to boost audiences and readerships nationally and internationally. Our links with Phil Davenport’s Apple Pie Editions also saw us host the North West Launch of the impressive ‘language art’ anthology The Dark Would in October 2012.

After moving to a more central venue – The Castle Hotel pub on Oldham Street – about a year and a half ago, The Other Room has gone from strength to strength, drawing in new audiences whilst continuing to build a strong core of regulars. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our supporters over the years who continue to inspire us.

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Melt

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Rachel Warriner

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

Too Weak to Be Modern

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Rachel Warriner

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

poem for you

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Samantha Walton

I’ve been trying to write a poem for you
that’s lacking in lust, that has a point of reference outside of itself
which is you, not the rhetorical you
and me, the real me-misis
not cornered in a self that frankly even as a feminist
I’m getting tired of problematising

I’m being devastated by the hard lines of words
and the absorbing whiteness of it all, the sheet
the mirror suck of the
context of these blocks waiting to be filled
for me to touch them into being and say
something that I couldn’t just say
because it doesn’t exist yet, how could it?

One thing that went wrong is I’ve been
trying to construct a metaphor
around the way that
keys on a keyboard are pressed to make letters which make words
which a word processor can decipher and register

it probably involves electromagnetism or
code or something but there’s no way of googling that doesn’t
lead nowhere, like
I’ve tried how does word work and how do we make writing
and computer typing science and how does word word
which was a typo and nothing so no metaphor, barely any poem at all

it was supposed to say something about form, about a meaning filling
up its neat preformed box and the relatively limited
materials we have to work with and way language ultimatey blocks communication
and I was going to fill the serious space in the middle with some
pasted scientific words
(cf. all the poetry I’ve ever read or written)
but as I’ve no idea how it works
there’s no hope for my metaphor
but there’s still a poem for you
it’s not disappointing, it’s not vacuous
it’s not me, it’s not you, it’s
really for the reader, who’s being a brat

What’s the worst thing about this poem?
Well, it might actually throw the whole thing out
like, this is me at full stretch and this is the best you’ll get
What did you expect? Do you even know what it’s like being alive right now?
Someone’s probably emailing somebody else right now

I’m only good for my carbon
I’m offset by tax breaks and charmed by incentives
for our love
house prices are improbably going up and
the sky is frozen like its been stuffed
at the back of the fridge
I’ve been winded like a horse
stashed in the out-buildings like a corpse
strung up like road kill meat, free and illegal
and broken all the way through
shook up like change
rolled up, crushed between forefinger and thumb,
kept in a bag, lost on the Tube
befriended by cats, stuck all over with hairs and making
peace with corners and undersides and insects and
the enormous cells of their eyes
nonbeing is the new being
muyu is the new yu
one of the things about the self is that its edges bleed, and please

I get so sick of these poetry boyz being always making a fuss
writing poems about love like it’s the final cleverest metaphor
LOVE
if you were in love with me you’d shut the fuck up about it

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

iii. (Eris)

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Verity Spott 
I’m a part   of a cult. We follow the Goddess of discord. We’re going to bring down the government.
We don’t believe in things that we don’t need to / we use fruits we splendour & never harm.

I’m all alone. Only yesterday, the aphids, the aphid food, the full beetle I
sore through the eschaton,, prop up the yen,, hold my hands,,
fuck with ye friend there’s a want in us all, cut, statement of surrender, TIC cut, TIC this
cheap violent discomfort sniping for
I

to kill you. TUP // what does killing you?
to want some of purity, no muck in the wound, keeSOME PURITph/scabbing clean. I’m a member of a
cult where what we do is to / we take up the bait put out the bait talk in that tense




/

….asph..
yc
...aps
TIC
..dus
ashyi
.ahips



Satisfied she. Move t’_i wards arms
acrossed
              our feet
polder		  inept wing  hands
              no this

              no but more 
you
      still
crimp under gas light
             wait  ,, oft I solder varicose  bluff
the no room serial bind out. Turn that down.



              DON’T UNSCREW THE PART SLATS
SMASH THE FUCKING CHAIR YOU	cool!




, don’ tyousee there’s a sense in saying████blieve that if murder in a room and that room
is cleaned out leaving no trace then the next group of people in the room replicate,, are affected by
what happened previously and we should kill t/; iiiiiiiiaxhphapi




/

Do
n’t. L
oom.
Had
ron. Pu
lser.


/what we want is to / to do is have you(ahsixtphi) ,(p ’ll use kind of magics,,,
hose of my people and that in me skeptic ,,, welling up and she bent down took my cheek between my
thumbs, and kneading it pulled me through cumming cumming that we should have purged



The thing unpack hold onto the
]  flash  out (cl!)
              no muck
in  the wound  so much
              to wash


in
   the
service station loo, ketamine
              wait, thee bastards
get to the bar
              hold down his arms.
and legs, sweet man!! Turn that down.


First purge (subtly): “Daniel Heatherton, Edward Heatherton, George Heatherton, Oliver Heatherton, Tim Heatherton, Bryony Pring, Naomi Smith,
Phoebe Harrison, Ranolph Harrison, Jacob Bate, Verity Bird, Phillip Cunningham, Jamie and Alex Donaldson. Also Lucy Donaldson (some time later),
Sam Palmer, Jack Watson, Bay Watson, Edward Norton, Kevin Cox Guy Stanway, Brook Adams, Lord Arthur Fitzalan Howard (b.1991), James Cooper,
Miles Frost & Hilary Pring, Crispin Beilby Forbes Adam & Hal Francis Forbes Adam & Charlotte India Forbes Adam. & why not Charles David Forbes
Adam and████both with the same Kali dagger in the stables, lo. And how will they die? By the weapons they leave lying around their
houses. Richard Shepperd MBE, Steve Rainbow, Simon Griffiths, James Kirk, Ben Hudson, Alex McClean, Marc Jones, Ruth Tether, Rory Henderson,
Clive Friedrich, Debbie Deans, Alex Randall, Stuart Wilkinson, Sam Jamieson, Simon Howson, Jackie Goddard & David Beavers in the guise of a post
horror sex jaunt down the banks of the Foss where cover story has them pulling plastic bags over their heads and slamming claw hammers into
their rectums and faces, flashes of crimson, foams and sewage rising splendidly to snow down upon the wretched fumbling torsos. Amen. Helen
Botterill, Jane Pick, Alicia Hudson, Catherine McClean, Helen Ashby and certainly Tarnia Hudson who shall hammer his own hands to her own
forehead, screw a lock in its lung, take one retching breath through a nosebag of iron filings & chew them into a bullet, spit the bullet into the air
through a blowpipe where the bullet will fall into its frontal lobe. ZOOM”. And when this first purge is done any political motive for the killings will
be discredited by the madness of their personal orbit. These are the first people our party will dispatch. “Amen”.





Hallowed globe. A baste hate inflect
[hold onto the parts of the chair and take the chair to bits before he sits down]	(cool!)
              P&B as
(but for)  spit on  dye whip
              rivet chest on
in the stratosphere, it’s killed
              to cough in dust of phones
Hands on
                  if deviate
no hours and always at minus that. The rigid
              peeled back skin, the dick
on teeth, the teeth on it,
              swallow at the time spit
and to not care, and not do,  turn down.



but. I’ve been working hard
I’ve been going to the right people
with my problems those private inflections of /./.kiss my stomach no my actual stomach not the skin
on top of the stomach g;. get into the skin and kiss the or.;,mkl;,..//g


/

Tire
d by
will
s to
g
et on wh
at o
ver m
ust she



Second Purge (funtime - perceived public/celebrity enemies etc): Terry Bozzio, Professor Brian Cox, Mortis, Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, Janet
Street Porter, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hitchens, Gary Ablett, Glenn Hoddle, Claire Short, Rosie Lugosi, Scroobius Pip, Paul Foot, Kate Nash, Melvyn Bragg,
Paul  Daniels,  Nicky  Gumbel,  Russell  Brand,  Tim  Minchin  (&  all  other  intersectionalists),    Guido  Fawkes,  Joanne  Harris,  Katie  Hopkins,  Matt
Redman, Jodi Picoult, Lee Child & of course Prince who comes over here and who nicks our jobs. & Matthew Kelly, Harry Styles, Sergey Lavrov, Vic
Reeves, Brian Blessed, Georgina Fitzalan Howard & of course her housemaid’s knee Edward Fitzalan Howard VERTICAL, HORIZONTAL, TOP
DOWN, SIDE ANGLE TO THE LEFT, LEARN DEAN, EACH HELICAL RECIPROCAL DREAM today is the most humble R rectal POST ILLUMINATION
WOMB BOMBS, Damien Hirst, Ben Fogle, Zoe Ball, Brian Limond (see this purge is the publics ‘what the fuck is going on?’ moment, & so we’ll be
aiming arrows in a democratic display of political fairness which is why we’ll also take down some public left leaners: Stewart Lee, Terry Eagleton
(again), Laurie Penny & obvs Mark steel)... We’ll be preferring men generally, mind, men like Johann Hari, Mohammed Al Fayed, Bruce Dickinson,
Johnny Rotten & someone in our ranks sickly suggested we put one through the throat of Bill Drummond, so I decided enough was enough & that
this was no longer our party but mine. I put Bill Drummond in a nuclear bunker and headed to the next party meeting with a broomhandle mauser.
Next purge (party sadness, end of madness): I shot bullets into almost every one of my comrades killing most of them, mortally wounding some,
firing novelty ‘bang’ flags into a few. These, though, were sharpened projectile flags which jabbed into the sick party skins, left ppl bleeding not
laughing. You deserved every last bit of that, I mean look what you’ve done… Can’t you see, ‘(Rupert Murdoch) we find that violence resides everywhere
behind the false appearance of universal peace’ / ‘Today is the most humble day of your life’ I’m sorry I shot you Jonny / we need ppl to kill still more
my comrades slithering in heaps of bolognaise blood ,, they crawl and play, sashay through the windows of the party promise neo what there fell my
lover’s strobe upon the pouring guts and cheeks what now that all the F██████have been felled what I want is an approximation of what 
comes next see the allegory is set as me and mine in the tent and the aristocracy and damaged celeb figures, their national infliction, the goddess,
who by way of smiting in spite and lols threw the apple to the prissy rulers, the party, for self tearing. ON. KILL R. CHARMICHAEL,, on summer’s
breach and FRINGE FESTIVAL desocate sleep sweetly as LARRY Dwavin && FLAGS Tim Fields within without and fall into the heather on top of
the points of dear Tara Kray and Jow Montreux, be parted. And now go over to me in my bed and hex on IBEX Global Solutions plc (AIM: IBEX), a
leading provider  of  contact  centre  services and other business process outsourcing solutions, is pleased to confirm an interim dividend of 1.9 pence
per share which amounts to an aggregate cash cost of approximately $1.25 million. And be and be beautiful and be only and be purged.


Politcal purge (parties and thinkers):     get past the skin and kiss the organ
grip the skin hold the skin in your hands pull it apart
coalesce our boots
                                  the same sounds cascade    over the gentle waves
                        the rock’s babble. Then when we touch, our quiet
                        comes.                    TN CLFF/@

Then when we make
(sfz)                                  for
               arms sprayed PARSEQ in 7 y/p to induction of staff, and thereby, COOL ye inducement
the seed is the night burst
                                       a smell so
               amoebic . Then return     the self same
               once we did it slowly there was glass everywhere and long massive hopeless bottles
they used them to push me apart and they were
very funny. What they did and do now it is funny.
It’s hard to know what you’ve done.

Climb aboard for the kissing of
the genitals mounted on the
stomach, putting your lips onto
asses, screaming at the bus

making me take hold of the number
for the bus service complaints centre.
That number pull the your face ou
of the computer fox. Set it

down by G, the well sure fucking
little mug, smarmy assed Reborn
frog marched on the quiet sideline
this is not a criticism.
 
Shadowed as were / forget well
schooled £,t%*^(he movement in total funds
for the year is a net when it out
wityh hnda ha9irkdeficit of £0.1m
mainly due All digitised documents shriek to fuck stirp search
SACK it now to has been done, and to has been
and associated Thi traffic is abstracted powerhjfd.;ll; ljh5;u phehr
with l,ej
                           use that it’s thethat
it is the best i cabnl achi best I can
              abstract power ,lwe can
just hold off	but the traffic scoop
                           taff and Managers on issues such what a sound data can be
accessed through Parseq's
(2010: £1.5m), up £0.1m. This movement eto expenditure from
designated funds bdvice to sas Maternity, Paternity, pay, tax, SSP, SMP, Holiday and Sicknerought
forward. Move forward to do it better. I can get you returns on some logic
thusly: Having not been a fishmonger. Having never been in the guts
or scooping them out. Or to never have built a fishmongers then if George
truly, and I believe it, is the power significant for development of the sustainability of, say, fish. Or,
say, business models, then it is to return later. We will discuss the man
who builds with both his hands. The man exalted and funny. We’ll go back
there to him don’t you worry. He’s always about. Thank God. Don’t tell me how
to shit up my lids. And when you get to him hold on because things’ll move
quickly, we’ll have to keep up as long as we can
if we are to fuck him if he is kind enough to be fucking us
then we are kind enough to have his mouth out the excited peripheral cult-heads clutched at the rim
of my calf. Why was I thinking that under the massive gold Kallisti singalong when I should have
been aware of the gravity of the situation and not thinking about him!

He gets a blowjob for each initiate.
It’s the late sixties and you’re writing for Playboy.
Everyone gets one. But it’s still
of little use to say nothing; Mumu
pre-exists, erm, George. But not Playboy. I’m still
thinking about that now under the sun
it is my right to do it and to do whatever the fuck I like.
                                          Remember the Beanfields?

Now come in from 2010, my dear. Reflecting this, Every part	each of eyes
use each   . Thi` traffic is abstracted power
                          use that it’s the best I can
              abstract power then maybe we can
just hold off	but the traffic scoop
                          Providing asswhat a sound
it was / yu  underneath the grass bridge
what no it  heard it. net current
assets have reduced to £1.3m at the balance sheet
date (2010: £1.4m). The main asset of
the charity is Cash at bank, Reckoned on the cusp
of the year,
                     cooking out

Now come down kiss the raw
                                     the course
              as you appeared
to run out
                           at      suck through it,
the wick  merrie call, THE BIRDS!!
Karl Holweger o with an snapper hear
ts tap tapping at the rhythd . Now tether  both our
(no just tether me)	teeth of bit
no just use what you need//
O my Eris, my life is so boring.
Could I be
in the  middle
of a significant historical moment
at least once in my life


Push me into my self, bend me forward over myself.
Tie my hands and ankles to a wooden frame
before the ascendency. We went down in
              to the pool of snakes     in the  middle of a significant historical moment at least once in my life 
I can hear her fucked up muffled screams through the wall /
I can have lustily been of those
we had killed. For their hollow hearts,
all empathy abandoned.ctor suf Pellk Creditors:
                                                                          amounts fall
                                                                          decry scrap use /
                                                                          ;
                                                                          one year -
which stood at £1.6m at the balance sheet date
& was offset by a reduction in Debtors from £0.7m to £0.2m nominally due
to decreased prepayments & BIRDS!! But befor
e the ascendency we went down in
to the pool of snakes
where we decreased to £0.5m from £0.8m

designated purge funds knocked & brought forward !
Where we now
consider the field of our vision (trippy) so totally stuck
what promise little is there have you
fully formed creatures in the belly
were paid out. At the year end,	& George,
 
                                                                                               We are still
                                                                                               even now
                                                                                               unable
                                                                                               after all/ v ert33
                                                                   cut the throat under the mud guard on the wheel and once the
throat is out of the wheel lovingly     dismantle  the  chair,  thoughtfully  await  the  return of your
manager. He may go to sit in the chair; he kicks me, & I echo with it,, his unconscious good blood
nullity surpassed by transcendence, do that to his chair, file it under BENT FUCK DOUBLE IN come on
HA then wheel it over to a place neglected by wolves, show him the lack of wolves there, show him
the operatied dexterity of your gender in the ambition to have his hair flayed in the stocks under the
general area managerial promise I did my best and my best was always 4 percent below target, the
target to be representative in and at your true self, to explain for everyone their comprehension of
your details, your preferred terms, your position on toilet breaks, your sexual & gender identity,
and for that reason the chair and I will be forever left hoping to transcend something else. BIRDS are
mocked at disassembly, so is the octopus, and the mussel, and the yellowtail and the substance of
TRACTION oil,, & I could have been the back gas in a bulb, I could have been a part of this laptop.
What have you made in your life? Constructed to be put at large into the rendition of its power?
Men are very funny
lining up one by one
to be brilliant in speeches, and that
is what they are they are
very very funny. My love skids lumps over the harbour lights because they are so full, the men in the
lights and in their planning! I can feel
their speeches, and the voiceover pilloried in the speaker
on the inside of the office toilet wall that says
you freak they are so so funny when one says to the next
what has happened in your life
my man is you’ve created something, and without
bragging you’ve become humble and funny
and peaked, and keep peaking. I would want to suck on you all and suck its harmless spectral shape on
my teeth, he is there on the outside of my digestion, his face is staring out covered by my skin. I like u.
I’ve come out 4% below my claim that the chairs in this room can no
longer hold onto your heroic back. Kill everyone on Warren Street, piss
on their furniture and children, have their children sexually abuse you.
It’s what they do best. Now that hadron pulser under the
motto cannis / carnem / ecky thump resolves to do, and do better ;
                                                                                     to be willing to
                                                                                     or to have
                                                                                     dispatched by decree
                                                                                     & in separate parts him:
                                                     This, as my body at least is, unmanageable.


(This movement is concluded by the singing
of a childhood hymn).
















기드온

















גדעון
Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

from ‘[of sirens / body & faultlines]’

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Nat Raha 
 (london will die)
                            as all we ever bought here w/
                            suffering & condemnation,
                                                                          , by the basis
                                                                          disinvested in lives & the
                                                                          workings of the hospital / 
                            dereliction carved vital into tony blair & white teeth 
                                               & smiles sound
                                                                         tracked back to work &
                                               bed closing circuit wage differentials [::]
                                                          of cyclic years cutting & our 
                                                          difference rendered the same [£]
                                                                         of things can only craned speculative
                                                                         of financial blood / abandon f’
                                                                         contemporary rot
                                                                                                          tangible 
                                between alarm rent clock day & the damp 
                                bred work & less well, you
                                sick on the skill shortage & IWGB:
                                collateral of wages for living, dear
                                                                                        boris opinion violence
                                               distributed / digested to the point of / common false 
                                                                                        you
                                               killing clean for the purpose crimeswept &
                                               arteries oligarchical, [[applause of yur latest
                                                                                                                                friends sung
                                                                until the housing bubble detonates all 
                                                                drunk dressed up to leicester square & post-
                                                    public school, 
                                                                             as solidarity bored 
                                        office cellular goes to 
                                                                             foodbank & the 
                                                                             paving, cloud top
                                                                                                           of the shard as the 
                                                                                   working class vanished severe & you
                                                                                   puke underground 
                                                                                   apology,,  
                                                                                                   [f℅ forgot from friends 
                                                                                   carved glass through the throat
                                               poem is easy & as inevitable
                                               as the next collapse :: 
                                                                  productivity absent bled 
                                                                  arms from the city
                                  , strand dust poured
                                  ashes of our work onto parliament square, which you can
                                             holiday w/ police throwing knives charge
                                                    / odeful hallway snailing city 
                                                    hall glass, your murder of
                                                                                                   frequencies & hours
                                                                                                   barb the workday
                                  & A&E warped into yur lux home to filth
                                                      to gull & garbage struck still & labourless 
                                                      & ancient foul of thameswash

                                                                                                      (14.10.14)

                                                          
     
 





                   our archives of health, abstraction 
                   & belonging / precarity, sirens
                   of work & body & home 
                                                          // consider the boss as virus attached 
                                                          tissue / muscle, our agony 
                                                                                                        growth of the 
                                                 city, sprouts & off ‘natural’ until 
                                                 collapse, where we
                                                                              organs hollow left 
                                                            heat w/out clambering 
                                                            ingredients f’ each hour had 
                           built 2008 2001 1993 
                                                            1986 1973 1929 1907 
                           1901 1896-73 1866 
                                                        1847 1837 1825 1819 
                                                            1796 1772 1720 ,, ventriloquist towns 
                                                            of our births, of death finance personified
                                                     , extract suffer
                                                                               /ance & life support / premium 
                                                            foodbanks & detentions, border strictures & 
                                                            hang of “the law private &
                                                                                                            up close / I
                                                            wanted to […] be a joke”, cracked
                                                            fetish : canary wharf
 











                                              second split
                             of all fireworks looping / saturate 
                             entire sky compliment w/ every
                                                                                       siren bright to 
                                                                                       point of tearing all ears &
                                                                                       eyes enlightenment 
                                              . you turned to thank
                             offering , obscured constitution 
                             of minds, bloods, limbs charred
                                                                                       , an image for digital
                                                                                       friends / rats myth as equal
                                             owners ground rivers knee-skimmed viral
                                             mutated official hygiene brand
                                                              now they took your name & flagged , so
                                                              happy in the minor distribution
                                                              of warmth \\ season abolished the soil
                                                                    abolished, radiation-free ocean abolished,
                                                                                                         economic democracy
                           beautiful in yur passport headshot entry in
                                                                                                         paleness destin-
                                                                                                         ations of vitality / descent the
                                                                                                         traffic according to theresa
                                                                                                         may ‘cut by
                                                                                                                             drowning at sea’ 
                             k-hole politik to point of sharing where
                             all essential intention & contradiction 
                             are outside the click of understanding, 
                                                                              glam ancient react to grow
                                                                              up in progress & happy keep
                                                                              the global south enchained
Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

from Lip Trills

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Drew Milne

Strung out goes hard wired
into the signature scarring
so shown on arching barks
as sampled tolerance slurs
and ligatures, he shall have
music wherever he goes to
stack accumulating pocket
money with foxed gatefold
and the bells on his fingers.

A sugar here, green readies
there, all burns to sidereal
industries in breath attacks,
skip the slow ballads come
pace making sunny tinnitus
so hot, so feted to become
neat, merely cute or spent
the worse if not to nothing
in impertinent middle age.

Timbre taken up against all
and the dues sorely stated,
slimy substantial thereness
hails the hero sulk in slacks
up, up in neighbouring fields
levellers, hip hands on deck
the devil take the crupper o
go slow, hindrance bellows,
greenbacks in festive mud.

Calling out moonings in full
to tinpan alley deal-breaker
sure slung tunes to counter
trigger happy folk-tales shot
loving to hunger emphases,
vault the songbook and flag
the white heat, the white lie
the white that broke the ice
from Vietnam to Greenland.

Then salt chip desert scalds
lunge to betterment means
shimmering treecraft to rock
the port or shake the filling
the passive-aggressive strum
on portmanteau, evening sun
to the creditors, to the tune
tinkled space rock longueurs
to ring out inner ear symbols.

Here we go a-looping down
the estrangements, down so
proper nouns can soul press
seasonal drift, everything on
eleven, still sounding ochres,
will it be a flower of droned
evils you’ll be wanting next,
no? sweet tooth, make some
chat to bit distortion chords.

Ah how housework befriends
the prospect of brooms into
microphones, ploughs on to
virtual humidicribs, lacklustre
remedies to plangent call, a
northern so-so face obelisk
tempting kitchen sentience,
really, isn’t that enough to
realise its penitent acetates.

At half the going half baked
so to prevail on Moog mode
you find the diode in dismals
or the Berlin option, slackers
for the road, slackers for the
office, clubbing, showboating
the aura of militancy sewn in
to solid states, sold diatonics
down to regress in celestials.

Another drive calls, another
looping of continents does a
feedback image, a snatching
for hallmarks out of thin air
echo off glossal restoratives
to Head of Bight, long swim
back down refrigerated water
less chilled fridges, rebirthed
radiator gurgle, hold it there.

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged ,

192.168.0.1

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Luke McMullan

as propagating through a system
whether discourse or node
(of discourse

sighting the node behind fog is better than stars
hungry for azores ,,, or bestiary

triumph flashes in wildness
in an ontic way ,,,
appenine or propagates
takes ridges
blood-network of linked peaks

take this as though ,,, you are in bat country
my friend
we are as links of blood sausage

what we know of each other comes down the navel now

take my shit
constellated though it be
fine and exemplary

do not escalate this encounter hold hands
in the human chain

just finally say hello and disappear (

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

clear jams

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Luke McMullan
I saw the first one
come down
as a bride adorned
ornate with sorrows

roid rage
incarnadine
for pushing amber
all succumb
to the ideal stir up

tumbledown sky
was all euphoria
star encasement
Worth Fighting For

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

from Becoming

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Francesca Lisette

I.

Writing. Out of the birth inamorata that shelters me.
I: cleansed. I communicate from parallel data density
socket. Eye: alright. Eye definitive K-Mart complex.
I here, touched, where technology is abandoned. I,
falling aboard. Eye rope in the primacy of winter
daylight. Numb wash of keen swallows pound the face.
I : citric water. I : dissolved into acid counts. Unhook
the temerity of walking as matched shore to shore.
Your belly goes against me like a bruise, or garbage
sack spilling. Repeat: dispenser. Repeat: the sexual
gap of your mouth (a dark rose) – love/bloody spittle/vomit.
We constitute ourselves as liquid rubber running through
the town’s tar pits. Isolated: lassitude. Hairy numbers
come crawling out with the populace’s skulls between
their teeth. River: rivulet. Scarlet flesh of a shell notated
& hollowed by grim virgin birth itemised 1st para. Not the
hole I dwell in: love–blood–vomit. Prise open the can
with a gear shift & swap genitalia albeit monkey surprise
glove excitement. The story’s O couldn’t rid me of
glossolalia no matter how hard they tried. I sang on,
vowels cresting a unintelligible glass. Cracked laminate:
the Duchy. Failed omniscience hunts to gloss panda, we.
Once were. Animals hindered by subject lines &
multiple proclivities. Every time I try to be funny
or clever my body screams so I have to stop. I have
to sacrifice my need for love or the abuse known as
interpretive approval. The body beautiful, the sunk
navigator tuned to inner anchor. Now then the body
flames it shrieks it hovers it blasts it’s been plundered
by years, animations, shit, flows. Unhindered by
sustenance, attacked for entertainment, & now
surfaces in the grass before a waiting smile.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

Trees Not Tending Leaves (extract)

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Peter Larkin 
infestation to own leaf-order, that people are now the
science of the park    how root makes increment from
what surfaces of disadvantage assort

heaving over root-steer, so many leaves to have been
stripped on form, they are not the reprisal but the retro-
sags of design, where alignment puts them ahead of itself


displacement cut to leaf only to envy a lightened origin to
this siphonable intent    trees rebegin here, not at offering a
duplicate sprig but at the leaves’ own myriad tubulars

a canopy pulls itself up onto the shallows    from which any
larger proffering may combine with the hardstanding it has
retracted onto    not structurally but out of care of a mass
terminal flutter


tresses gained each day across slight incline of trunkal
vein

not tended because pure relief of shelter dissolved to
catchment and without any skin of it desiring the trees’
advancement


untentative separables out of a rash of gummy leaf at
drop-point    the deep pitching into tree posture    where
abandonment is its moundal and the stubble of loss evenly
recessive

whose leaf-production inclines to no crop and whose
distribution of cast-offs pervades what is previous of
shortened limb in tree


not lenient in leaf but a cusp fluid, the curve of any slight
ontological retainment strip by strip, not least of any static
if staring into its own unobstructed scatter

leaves flow to the core of what doesn’t go with them, the
apex was a nurture untended at its slightened-erect:
intended debaseable vertical offering, all equation though
scarcely any inclusion


a tree alone with its dead propulsion along shaft once out
of leaf

relinquishing the ribs of tree but never its hoop
speculative immensity out of a previously thieving system


love the tree but be at bay outside it    defect onto its tinge
of touchy aggregation    a reflex of unshuffled steepness
and not a limb among it

a filter rubble baling out trees but dried to its vegetative
plane of momentarily tethered elongation


the prophetic frame brittle enough to overleaf itself, the
slightness takes that ontological vetting into net

slurs are the leaf amount into woods    to fore-tie an
eclipse of any solo depth brushward    so flat at thread
these extreme lintels of surface    lenses flushing off
intemperate core delay


leaves prolong, in failing, any ride along curve of the
diminishment, hipless leaf set to hip    by choice of a
descendent (root-purge) array    the turning airs of the
darkening sheaf

settlement stride now disclosing a rammed condition    in
at the leaf and proposing veterate ramification through the
pore


if leaf profile drew into tree it was no longer a summary
envelope    at drop-time the immaculate fritter is a shutter,
ie the click towards season, the roller armature off branch
delivery

leaf-cowl?  but less any towelling, why be hooded to a pin
of tree precinct?


unbestrewable hinterland at the root-well itself    what
leaves are covering here is how ground hovers

what is window to leaf is a shadow to tree


the sender nervure, communitarian leap reckoned token
arch, staple breach

casting a fingerable spell through the arm, the
harmlessness of heavy to root


there may be tacit reserves of leaves but no substrata    all
layering is towards light suckles along a trial of minimally
anchored deposits    opposition drawn (to root) but already
thawing at a latitude of surface

a compaction of the local at its real space deep root    a
lyric life rattling off stem    dried to a vertical vegetative
immersion


partition only along peculiar planes of adjustment    how
a toll of tree flies to its neighbour connection, on every
leaf of collision

if tree is what petrifies on its stand, the haze of leafage
was even earlier than resuscitation onto trivial sill    


lengthening the immateriality of diaphanous sewing,
seams accrete veins, display spares for credentials of
concrete wing, tree at its filmiest span

leafings not so much in trans-ascension as condensers of
soft shield towards a target at the drape of rise


leave it to leaf level to flatten out the condensation    a lair
of tree nursed into leaf, hung there from finer hairs of its
concealment lap, trunk to disc of random depth

what is lent out is for a time worthless in leaves    leaf out
of leaf, done with branching off some wry platform terror


the trees’ self-handling of a girth of earth

insular but leafed over onto the thud of defection    foiling all
tenderness as though it were itself a soil, the seal’s rim at
this several of flap just out


with leaves on scrap, to afford what the bark ratio scarps
verticaled towards

leafage is a concision of origin but no reversal, scathing
opposite traversal at such a lean fillip of beginning


this tending to finitives is not for coaching leaves, render
them their apprehending lapse of the cult of themselves:
not boughs freshen them but the whole blunder of tree

the knack of lift through branches not green in their own
weight    how the unplenty fails its forest onto leaves of
acquisition


that trees are clotted to leaf-synthetic mutual contusion:
only then the trip-circuits become root systemic,
accelerated reserves
Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

Through

Posted on March 1, 2015 by David Herd

i.

Let’s go then

Because if we don’t nobody will –
I had that this thought for the morning,
We could concentrate our energies on the movement through
Weigh down on the action
Work out where the word becomes feeling
Through
Step over into the traffic through.

Not that it has to be a morning thing,
I work late above the dooryard

The sheer distance
That
Abstract reckoning
For no other reason
The world.

Which is chatting with you
Watching movies with you
In which the most innocent gesture

Or the smallest forgetfulness

Waiting a letter with

ii.

This I can say:
It showed me finally
That the actions of a person
Clear and pale
Thus effectively lost
Witness
The evidence
Calm, unbroken
Occur here.

I can say this in the morning
Nobody statements foreclose
No tribunal today
Not this sunshine
No letter either,
Just some life story
Folded through
Played out piecemeal as
Biography happens:

Steady
Anonymous
Simultaneous
Activity.

I talk to Simon
Simon sets the birdsong out of Peckham
We listen awhile and
Over the traffic
Somebody cultivates
The Old Kent Road –
Which is the way things go
Things go gracelessly as we go
Aware –
No one asking today
Nobody auditing –
As persons

Standing still
Which is I submit
The evidence necessary,
Trousers nothing special
Watching the way
The wind blows
In your telltale shoes,
The case against
Habouring affections
In the face of
Politics:

Six
Brushed teeth
Noticed the world wake
All dewy
And Confused.
 
Topsy
Turvy.

As these societies became more complex
The need for writing
For administrative purposes
For recording legends

For Myths
All dewy
Woke up startled into consciousness
All the evidence today assembled argued
Through

iii.

MIDNIGHT
And all the while some kind of
Collective emergency
Leafing through Mayakovsky
I look at politics in poems
Bargains

struck at dead of night

I’m thinking

LET’S GET THE TRANSLATION RIGHT SHALL WE

Habiter
From habitation

I look at politics
And stones

And use the word advisedly
I use the word ‘advisedly’ advisedly
Picture us in some kind of ruin
Waiting for the rhetoric to show
Sea whacked
And no-one home
I shake hands with Lucy Williams
You standing on the battlements
Contemplating the prospect

possibly
so.

iv.

And so the sun kicks on.
I think I’ll take that document now please
And then maybe later
We’ll come up with some kind of plan
Since this is serious and you’re so well dressed
Shoes shined like your life depended on it
In the rubble
Maintenant en Français
Oui c’est grave.

You say the word ‘grave’ advisedly,
There is no word for ‘all’ in English,
Standing watching the traffic
Waiting for the agencies to show,
Tout le monde,
Waiting for the world to show
Outside your doorstep
Like lilac like
Standing still and walking
Waiting while the dogwood
At your garden door.

Which it doesn’t happen
The way the lyric steps up all uninvited
Like lilac all
You had to do was listen
Waiting in the doorway while
The world rolled past
Some kind of presidency
One by one

I am no recipient of culture
It’s an agency thing
I listen to Jarvis
Jarvis Cocker plays
LeRoi Jones

At the doorway singing
Jarvis plays Gill Scott Heron
Collis starts up
Jarvis plays Olson
I had to learn the simplest things last
Not an ocean stretching out beneath my feet
Just that it’s a you and I thing
Crossing somewhere
Making an agreement
Following the language
Through

v.

But if we had to start over
Even only air and such
Slate grey April
Nobody roots attached
If we had to start lengthen bodies out
Set down a canopy out of nothing
Table something out of nowhere
Wouldn’t it go like this?

This is my question.
I note down books people talk to me:

Edward Casey, The Fate of Place

Mystic sheer distance
That beautiful abstract reckoning
Sun drift over Camberwell
I write a poem about space

Waiting in case the world
Let’s get the implication right shall we
Standing sampling Massive Attack
Down by the salle d’attente
And we shall construct at variance
Singing in the present participle
Urban today everybody
Uninvited

Like some document filled with other people’s songs
The only surviving parchment of the twenty-first century
Some kind of air crash
In which the only thing remaining
Was a line out of Gertrude Stein
Quoted by Simon Smith
In a train just departed Dartford
Space of time filled with moving

I write a poem about Margate
Folded out toward an abstract reckoning
Assemble this night
In the present participle
Watching the uninvited
As they start to sing
The Wreck of the Deutschland
Set down a canopy out of nowhere
Footage you are now exiting the future.

vi.

So the names roll out again
Dartford, Chennai
The angel in the doorway clicks his teeth
Because here is how he likes it
Dirty intense
Ibuprofen heavy
Thick with song.

And ready to go again
Because these folds are exquisite.
Only the phone equal
To the next spike
Blond euphoric
And so the names roll back
San Diego, Margate,
Margate, Kent.

Though nobody will vouch.
What we’re talking here is compound interest
Which stands, at a certain vantage, for love in politics
You sit
You do nothing wrong
Maybe you go for a walk.
That way there’s no redemption.

But it’s not impossible
We assemble a line
Picture a strictly ornamental universe
Geography situationism
The twenty-four hour news cycle
Your soul at bay
You like it here
Don’t you.

vii.

Lucked out didn’t we
That historic evening
When the angel of summer waved the whole thing through
And you stood outside the yard
Picking up the remains of the century
Assembling outbuildings
The way we asked them to be built.
Possibly.

Remember nothing
Immigration man.

I have this document in my pocket
Waiting to be rote
And I’m thinking if we could just do lunch
Maybe pick up something easy

Recording equipment
Is not allowed in the building.

Standing
Watching the trucks
Shake down the evening
Into particulars

Video evidence cannot be used in a court of law.

Please be aware
That any person
With picture taking capabilities
May not this
Person
Dealt according.

The way the evening stepped forth –
This broken English
At the outbreak of the century
A sensibility at work
All singing all dancing
Only a notebook in which to annotate
Totally unconvinced by anybody’s back-story.

viii.

‘Marcie’ starts up.
Hello Marcie.
Marcie knows everything
There is to know about feedback.
She stands at the edge
Listening to the qualities
Of transmission
You stand alongside her
She pushes some kind of song.

On drums:
Max Ernst.
On bass:
Hannah Arendt.
Things to address directly:
The way the story ends.
Rubble.
Mediation.
Marcie buys a bag of peaches.
Eats one.
Hides the rest from the state.

You sing along with her
Some kind of dictionary of sensibility
In the right hands it’s a love thing
Hitting all the wrong notes
A siren, a cigarette
Sure signs of somebody’s emergency
Riffing when the song stops.
Marcie cuts her own hair.

Stands outside the arcade
Learning to trust the way a person tells it
As a blackbird locks down the skyline
Scarcely credible on such a scale
Only this is the way the story opens out

People clustered together
In the Arab spring

Marcie not confident of anything
Save some kind of reckoning
Occurring here.

Marcie

A car horn

Did the percussion section leave you standing?

A cigarette
burning
indecipherable
cause
that extends.
On rhythm:

Did you call a taxi yet Marcie?
Or did the footage persuade you
This is somewhere you could stay
At night
Lined up against the square
Though nobody said so
Capable of a simple
Straightforward anger.

Marcie checks out.
The blackbird sings into
A person’s whereabouts
In the city
Some person’s washing
Leaving them hanging
In the wind to dry.
Air and such
While the networks go down
And you just standing
As the story breaks –
Still no letter
Only the operations.
Good to see you
Marcie

ix.

We should stay up all night
Watch the law prosecute its business
Still no letter

Walking the beach
Watching the aircraft drop

And you dance sometimes and I work
Because all this meantime
What else is there?

To signify
Arms laid against him.

Still no letter. Possibly so.

Things to address directly:
POLITICAL
GEOGRAPHY

In the dooryard momentarily the traffic stops
Too late for birds
And no sound happening
Of anybody’s emergency
You smile in another language
I sense a dance coming on.
Because there is space
Jarvis samples Arrested Development
Crowded only by the skyline
Not a measured room
And not stopped
Arrêté
We decline the implication

One must not have a permit

Push the tables
Back.

He slept deeply until morning
Went out into the brilliant
Threshold.
It’s what we should pitch I think:
The ground is now the sky.
Jonquil.
Bones.
Breeze to zero.
Streets roof-tops.
A person takes notes

Watch as you dance
Foot out the architecture of the century
Co-ordinated in somebody else’s neighbourhood
Only a history to call your own
Riffing on the direction of travel
Silently annotating the new geology
Pictures told in three dimensions

Even by telephone in dead of night

Quietly brilliantly
In all the available spaces
Dapper like the morning
In those tell-tale shoes
A rebuke confronted

with the structure of exception

Clockwise and counter-clockwise
Turning.

x.

Still no letter.
I use the word still advisedly.
Still you say still
Struggle to get the intonation right.
Stutter over the doorway
A plane goes down
Airburst
People gather before the wreck.

There must be something we can make of it.
You stand there radiant before the court
Explaining everything
The moment you first came through
Impossible to frame
Only this is the way things happen

Eyes set deep
Subjected to examination.

In this broken English
The sun sets laterally across the century
The fugitive lands
Crowd under separate names
Joined in semi-abstraction
You stand and regulate your bearing

Airports
Certain outskirts of our cities

Hardly a way back through
Down along the Medway River
Strolling annotating
Shipyards in the cold
Bystander taking notes
Down by the intersect
Where the language happens
Syntax
Forms like lilac
Where the uninvited
Stand in line.

And the radio fades
Nobody certain which way we’re headed
You shrug
Maybe somebody somewhere
Assembled evidence enough
At variance with the theme
Some stack of mistranslations

Statements rendered
unacceptable
Inadmissible
By the state.

But that’s their story.

Remember nothing.

I make a mappemundi
To include this point.
Your story air and such
stones bearing
Doorjamb at variance

Existing claim

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

Fantasy Index

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Ryan Dobran

In the past, you are a cocaine-laced nougat lozenge iridescently cascading down the mouth of a cold war dictator’s single-toothed intern, itself having been beaten by the authorities so frequently and with such relish that this host has absorbed several of your most cherished personality traits, including, but not limited to, that array of qualities distinguishing you from your half-twin Moloch, a hot caramel liquid ingested piping hot at “Punishing Delicacies”, a chic steroid babe hangout next door to “Crips ‘n Dales”, a generally officious locale where heavyset male dancers vie with wiry street muscle.


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Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

from Not Without Tree

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Mark Dickinson


/Not without problems
Metered by the waterline
What tells is amazement
From stretchers of testimonies’
Hesitant breath


Whispers of the ineffable
Sutures closing
The gape


These are the stalwarts
Of the unnoticeable


Where negotiations of silence
Seam obsolete
Among a strand


Of just what this is
Not without sorrow


Grit


Not without tree

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Slow Bird

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Amy De’Ath

A sensorium makes you abstract
grilled right into yourself into the grille
a sobby plasticity of childhood
or the lot that behooves women,
imposes doom and the negative
clings to negative non-women,
loves the negative,
& loves women.

There was a time in the early nineties
words like “exigencies”
and “antagonism” did not exist
Freud and Marx were beyond dead, worse,
Carolyn Steedman and Bernadette Mayer
were completely mute, nowhere around.
She fêted abstraction and
pursued it relentlessly.
Like a bat in a cave

Or a dedicated virgin saint, maybe—
then maybe:

One day, a man hammered at the door.
Who is that! Who is that man

(list of things I wanted as a girl)
A man’s arm resting around me
Black Book of Capitalism’s Embrace
Kids whose parents make them take fencing lessons
But you’re nobody, til somebody – it kills you
Etoliation gradually over the night
Suffolk as a green, green plant
We suffered and resentfully died

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

Last Year

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Amy Cutler

This poem is an erasure of existing film subtitles, returning to clichés of memory in the form of the stills. The soundtrack created in response by Edmund Hardy is partly collaged from the same sources. The two pieces can be read and played together or one after the other, as joint or separate versions of déjà vu. The failure of memory is often depicted as a failure of faithfulness. But how can one keep faith with a memory that has gone missing?

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/last-year-hardy.mp3|titles=Last Year – Edmund Hardy]Last Year (5:03)

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged ,

rising from aquifers

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Alison Croggon

In the middle of the map they put Medea.
As if to say of the site DO NOT ENTER.
As if to admit how they had provoked her.

HAZCHEM: a warning almost invocation.
Lord of the poison, sacred their mission.
That nuclear familiar wasp-sting of a sign.

She: triangle or angular. She: triangulating
all causes, all histories, all laws and all lines,
infectious connections she chews to the horizon.
Late Old English curs, of unknown origin;
no word of similar form and sense is known in Germanic, Romanic, or Celtic.

rising from aquifers salt ghost vengeful
kinstrife betrayal voices persistent
crying out birth scars here’s your physician

open cut mouth or slickwater microfractures
“reducing friction” right in the womb

take that motherfucker take that kidkiller
white ulcer written on living tissue
skulls in museums labelled in cursive

An utterance consigning, or supposed or intended to consign, (a person or thing)

hashtag/gash/gulp/pulp
rape rape rape is an “insult
to our [his] honour” is
to spiritual and temporal evil, the vengeance of the deity, the blasting of

the sticking-of in is the politics
of take, saying “virgin land” saying
peak oil Peak oil PEAK oil does it
malignant fate, etc. It may be uttered by the deity, or by persons supposed

get you hot (like to wallow) follow follow
the shockwaves to swim in poison calling
leak at every turn, shale the safe stuffed
to speak in his name, or to be listened to by him.

w/
nothing
but
In its various uses the opposite of blessing.

sweet raintrickle through earthskin
whisper the dry through
wordmaps cave to cave place to place

serpent blood
pooling in dark/worldthroat
speaking its slow song

living water living stone the upthrust living
nets of whole

you take it in your steely hand
saying “mine”
mine it

under
mine

umber
amber
sand &
ochre

no
yoke
choke
hold
no
“no”

aerial map the veins
break the vessel open
suck out the blood
discard the husk

songtalk lovetouch story
drying leaves in the wind
carcass fell & rot

and yet
still red still hot
lips still singing

shesong snaketongue to
gather            
sweetgrass       
loosestrife       
lady’s bedstraw    

all our names lovegiven
all our names soft pretties
& complex experiment
 
on our            

lipstills(t)inging
the nettle of grasp/gasp/rasp/
but
sap rISing

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged ,

Working – please stand by

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Emily Critchley

In my house I have a dead father and a dog I care about
in my heart house // I mean the dead dog
the thing that cares //
not the man who is not only dead
but only in my dreams // not in fact
though he lost his way from life
a long while ago // found this stupid rip
fell right through the gap

In my house // my head house //
he is not someone I detest
(though you might think it)
he is not someone to pity
(he’s a survival expert)
though he is the first and only
thing to come without
any feeling //
he is in that heart rip
that stupid // It would be better
if he were dead of course
it would // not only for him
the dog & me //
but maybe the dog I cared about
& me maybe could
lay down some memory feelings
if he were at last not somewhere

but probably we wouldn’t.

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

for Tim Atkins who reminded me what matters

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Emily Critchley

Waking with a whelp & a tiny prod
& head of fire
of love
for you once more my rose bud
my dear girl
all quaver like when I try to change you
all tears & limbs
extinguishing the world
with one small tear or smile
like a wine drop in Seferis’ sea
Let me not remember the trouble
of before you
Besides, it was another country
Let’s look forward instead to blossom & ducks
walking – you precious bobble head – the way you fall
on yr bottom then a second’s pause as you work out what feels
before caterwauling or a laugh – depending on what!
Who knows the little mysteries of you – space worm
tiny stranger
come to save her mama
from not knowing what’s important in life
Here’s to all the precious minutes
of every colour with each other & to papa & to poems
with happy endings

Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH | Tagged

End Notes

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Jennifer Cooke

from Apocalypse Dreams

it’s the end the end of the city end
of your city which is also a country
ending at stake the city on shut down
the city a military zone full of vigilantes
we hide everyone hides hard to tell who
might be hiding to hurt and to stay still
it feels like happening ending hiding
is utterly inadequate I am scared


in a back room perhaps 20 bodies
in black face down with backpacks
are these military forces or civilian
why did they die so odd flip one
over and not people but preparation
packs for people jumpsuits with back
packs attached provisions where are
the people to fill them why my mistake


because I am scared and seeing is
so many things I’ve never seen
before or want to again that the
incredible is not a category now
but a present feeling end of this
moment into the next too fast
for surprise a young girl relieved
to find a group of people dressed
as fierce military birds why is she
smiling they are smiling it is not


I look away I know what will now
happen to the smiling girl and do
not want to see when the moment
she thinks she is in becomes another
she will panic I would panic I am
watching this from safety and I
turn away glad of safety and sick
does she scream I cannot tell
always there is screaming somewhere
now it is the end of the city the end


a waterfall of effluence tumbling
people with everything else how
far it can fall off the edge of this
city as I watch I see people grasp
autonomy in face of the end for
some are surfing if I could feel
incredulity I would have first when
I saw people dying in this water
can it be fun to surf before you die
in sewage washed to the end the
is it hope or embrace or mastery it is
the end of the fall the pool I cannot see


with others on a boat a man is stitching
my hand I understand I am a refugee with
other refugees that I am hurt and he is help
yet he pricks my hand first in the palm to
test I do not know I know the sharpness
it hurts and the stitching continues the hurt
I cannot speak Spanish the comfort of English
is a stupidity I cannot resist with the stitcher
I feel safe but he hurts me he does not need to
it feels like after the end there are no boats in
the city this is a boat not in the city is there an
end of the city of the boat of the river will it end
in sea in spring in city when the end does not stop
ending and the present stretches the ending out

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