Cordite Poetry Review

Creative Licences and CCMixter

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Deb Matthews-Zott

Do you remember a time when you completed the written draft of a poem and signed it with the © symbol beside your name? By including the copyright symbol you probably thought you were asserting your ownership of the poem and establishing yourself as the creator, as well as protecting your exclusive right to publish, perform or otherwise deal with your creation. However, you do not need to include this symbol in order to be protected by copyright law; in Australia, this protection is automatic when an original work is written and you retain control of your work unless you sell or transfer the exclusive rights.

The © is really a warning to remind others not to interfere with your exclusive right. Under your control, the poem may be published, it may earn a few dollars, and it can be republished elsewhere. You might perform the poem and share it with friends, but eventually it will probably sit in a folder or a computer file as you move on to create, publish and perform new poems. The © is restrictive; it inscribes a boundary that prevents your work from being transformed by the imaginations of others; unless, of course, you can be convinced by their vision to sell them the right. But how can either party know what creative masterpiece might emerge from the raw material, the synergy of multiple imaginative processes, if the opportunity to play and experiment is denied by a symbol trapped in a circle at the bottom of the page? What is needed in order for creativity to flourish in a community of artists is a sense of license that is permissive rather than restrictive, that promotes free play and is about the joy and satisfaction of creation, rather than about money and exclusive rights. It does not have to mean that you give up your babies for adoption, but rather that you co-parent them.

I am going to share an idea for breathing new life into old poems and inspiring new ones; an idea that involves letting go of a rigid notion of copyright but one that has the potential to give your work more exposure to a wider audience, and lay it open to the artistic interpretation of other imaginations.

Here follows the story of my journey to the land of an alternative ‘C’, in fact (CC) or Creative Commons. (Note that the brackets encompass but do not completely enclose the CC, like the circle around the Copyright symbol). I’m not going to write a treatise on the various forms of Creative Commons licence or expound the philosophy of Creative Commons; there is already a plethora of reading material available on the topic. However, I will say that making your work available in this way does not mean that you give up your copyright (see Creative Commons Australia). You can decide how much you allow others to do with your work by choosing a CC licence that reflects a level of letting go that you are comfortable with.

For several years I had a desire to set some of my poems to music. I was convinced that such a coupling would add another dimension to my poetry and that I would gain a great deal of personal satisfaction and creative pleasure from setting words to music. However, my main obstacle was that I no longer played an instrument (I had long given up guitar and recorder). Nor did I have a willing band of musician friends to work with me on such a project. I made some enquiries of experts in the industry and it was suggested to me that I could pay a composer to write a musical accompaniment to my poem and pay for some studio time to make a recording. I didn’t have the money for this so my idea went nowhere but the desire remained. Then I discovered a remixing site on the Internet, called CCMixter.

CCMixter is built upon the idea of sharing and remixing music, samples, vocals, and spoken word, and releasing them under various Creative Commons licences. You can join the site and create a profile. You don’t have to have any musical knowledge or ability but you must have something to share if you wish to participate fully in the CCMixter community. It is free and easy to join. You can download someone else’s instrumental track and maybe a couple of sound effects from an associated site such as Free Sound, which you can then mix with a recording of one of your poems. You can upload the remix to your profile and it features on the recent remix page where others can listen to, review and recommend your creation. Your upload creates a URL which you can email around to other friends, or post to your blog; you can also post your upload directly to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Anyone can access the link; they don’t need to join the CCMixter site to listen.

In my experience, the community of artists involved in CCMixter are generous and honest with their feedback on uploads. I have been remixed a number of times and feel that my work has been treated with a sense of care and integrity. There is also an atmosphere of learning and encouraging that is generated by the sharing of ideas and techniques.

There are a few tools that you need in order to get started. You will need a digital recorder to record your spoken word – it doesn’t have to be an expensive one but the quality of your end product will vary according to the quality of your tools. A mobile phone with a fire wire and recorder, or a basic headset with microphone will suffice. Or you can purchase a digital recorder such as the Zoom H4n for around $450. You will need a computer with Internet access and a mixing program. There are several free open source mixing programs available online, or you can buy one such as Acoustica Mixcraft (around $90) or Cubase (this program came with my digital recorder). There are other music creation and sharing sites besides CCMixter and some of these will offer a basic online mixing tool.

For example, ACIDPlanet offers a free version of Sony’s ACID Xpress that can be used independently of the site. You don’t need any particular mixing skills as you will learn this along the way and improve as you gain experience. You also learn from the feedback given in reviews. Every remix will be slightly or significantly different, depending on how many tracks you are building and the effect that you want to achieve. A basic remix will involve importing a recording of your spoken word as one track and an instrumental recording as a second track. A more complex mix will involve duplicating the spoken word track, adding one or more musical tracks, loops or sound effects, cutting and repositioning parts of the spoken word, applying effects, setting different panning options, adjusting the tempo and volume, and maybe creating your own music using virtual instruments and effects.

CCMixter allows you to upload the text of your poem in the properties field, alongside the audio file, and this is a good idea as the site has international patronage and many of the Mixters have English as a second language, so they are appreciative of the text. I have to say that I was hesitant, at first, with regard to uploading the text of my poems and I haven’t quite felt ready to remove the © from beneath the poem. It’s an interesting point to ponder because I have no qualms about my audio being remixed. I accept the Creative Commons philosophy and I embrace openness. But text on a page? I can’t help thinking of the two collections I have published and how making the poems freely available online might affect their sale. But then I must be honest – just how well does poetry sell? How widely are my print collections read? For me, it isn’t about money anyway. I am motivated by the creative process and being able to share and receive feedback on my writing.

When an audio poem is remixed the words are often reordered or repeated, and some are omitted or mixed with another spoken word piece, or an a cappella. Several new versions may appear in the remixes and even as backing tracks for online videos. The poem has a new life. It has exposure. How then is it different from offering up the written word to be dissected and reshuffled, given that appropriate attribution is required?

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/debbizo_-_Water_in_a_Blue_Bowl.mp3|titles=Water in a Blue Bowl]

Water In a Blue Bowl [2:26]

If you’d like to explore some of my work, you will find over 80 uploads on my CCMixter page. Attribution to the creative work of others appears beside each entry and also on a separate page when you click on the title. Remixes of my work, created by other artists, are noted to the right of the entry for the piece they have sampled and links are provided.

Posted in ESSAYS, FEATURES | Tagged creative commons, remixes

All Rights Relinquished: Permapoesis

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Patrick Jones

While writing this work I have been eating wild foods, vegetables from my garden and a small amount of transported agricultural product. I am in transition, along with my family and some community friends, to relocalise food and energy resources and address the degree to which our participation in a hyper-mediated society degrades the ecologies that support us.

There can be no thought without food, and no sustainable food supply without soils teeming in microfauna and microfungi, which in turn are dependent upon a steady supply of solar radiation, water, air and decomposing biomass. Poetry, philosophy and ethics’ relationship to the landbase, and to soil microbes more specifically, should therefore be unambiguous. Why is it then that very few western schools of thought have treated this relationship seriously, if at all? The lack of attention is even more remarkable when we consider the effects that cultivating soil for food has had on society from the first technological landscapes (proto farms). It’s like we’ve been unable to witness our own separating linage, or at least respond to it with an adequate or challenging language. Rather we’ve developed a dominant Cartesian dialect able only to champion progress, the corollary of which has been ecological disembodiment, unchecked speciesism and an ever-increasing privatisation of life forms, resources, thought and creative expression.

An increasingly privatised food supply system favouring industrialised, transported and packaged product is central to global ecological crisis, central to the degradation of subsoil microbial networks, above ground biospheres, wetlands and marine environments. Supermarket food, with its reliance on industrial production methods, destroys microfauna and microfungi, is extremely water and energy intensive, and commits the atmosphere to unsafe levels of anthropogenic waste. Is the type of food we eat, therefore, contiguous with the quality of the fuel we use for poesis, for making meaning? It seems like a very direct exchange. And if we eat ecologically estranged food do we automatically make ecologically estranged thought, favouring representations, mediations and abstractions? Here’s an experiment that could well be employed to help answer this question, a question integral to examining the mental state of our culture:

Part 1. For one week eat only edible weeds, feral foods and wild food plants that you have freely foraged within walking distance of your home. Drink only untreated (non-privatised) water. Make teas from wild herbs. Record your thoughts.

Part 2. For one week eat only privatised supermarket food that has been transported from anywhere, and drink anything you can afford. Record your thoughts and make an inventory of the anthropogenic waste you produced in this time.

Part 3. Compare the notes you made between the two weeks, and publish them freely.

Creative commons; foraging commons

The establishment of a creative commons goes hand in hand with the reestablishment of a public food commons. Both are networks of exchange and interrelation, and both attend to the woes of private-industrial systems of supply. In a previous work I wrote the exchange between creativity and food within a dominant supply system like this:

The arts of industrial civilisation are intrinsically linked to industrial agriculture; that what industrial agriculture does to our bodies (and with the landbase), industrial culture does to our minds. Fairly consistently the resultant pathology is a kind of intellectual diabetes that derives from the over refinement and over processing of materials – where the seduction of the reader/spectator is paramount, the common understanding is that as long as there is food preserved by synthetics and refrigerants we can afford to indulge ourselves in transcendental medias.

To mark this point two poets wheel a large display stand of ‘best selling’ potato chips from one end of an airport shop to sit beside a large stand of ‘best selling’ literature at the other. They observe the relationship these two dominating forms have with one another. This action is later made freely available online.

The copyrighting of food seeds is a reasonably new chapter of private supply ideology. Newly available biotech seeds are modified to grow in ‘dead’ soil where microfauna and microfungi networks have been systematically killed off, and the diseases that these networks would normally allay now have to be treated with synthetic pesticides, to which the biotech seeds have been made resistant. Seeds are also being developed to ‘suicide’, so as they can no longer be saved or shared. If patented biotech seeds jump fence lines courtesy of wind – a natural transporter of seed – and take root on organic or non-GMO farms, then farmers can be (and have been) aggressively sued.

An industry that refuses to include its environment and forces people to use its woeful science is monological authoritarianism at its worst, and marks the height of anthropocentric idiocy and greed. The alternatives are plenty, and the blogosphere freely represents the diversity of applied ecologics available for growing sustainable food, permaculture being the most significant whole-systems approach to tackling food supply shortages and global ecological crisis.

Australian ecologist Tim Low has sited hundreds of edible food plants in Australia not dependant on private agricultural practices. These wild plants and fungi have all the nutrients, protein, energy and vitamins that are required for disease-free life and can grow anywhere – backyard gardens, laneways, public parks and state forests. Our current synthetic diet makes us sluggish, non-vital beings while degrading the biosphere, and the most significant ingredient in this Cartesian diet is crude oil. So in extending the adage ‘we are what we eat’, to ‘what we eat determines the sort of culture we make’, we therefore cannot help but reaffirm the dominant systems of intellectual and agricultural supply unless we alter the means by which we gather our food and share our creative content.

Another experiment is underway, designed by myself in collaboration with my household, to put this kind of thought into practice. We call ourselves The Artist as Family (AaF) and we are three years into our transition to de-capitalise and relocalise our food and energy supplies, freely publishing our findings, trials and tribulations on our various blogs.

The first of our projects was to spend 17 days as artists-in-residence in Newcastle picking up discarded non-compostable waste (mostly petro-chemical materials) along the coastline and throughout the city, each day blogging our experience. Over this time we developed a close relationship with anthropogenic material. Much of the waste, like that found along many coastlines of the world, ends up in an ocean trash vortex – floating islands of toxic debris that chokes and poisons marine and bird life in the vicinity. While in Newcastle we kept a blog and made a short film of our time there, once again freely distributing all content online.

Food forest

As a result of this first AaF project the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, invited us to submit a proposal for a similar work for their forthcoming exhibition In The Balance: Art For A Changing World. We wanted to again attend to anthropogenicism and the privatisation and transportation of resources as central to global ecological crisis. We came up with Food forest, a polyculture of plants and trees designed to mimic a dynamic forest ecology for the purposes of providing free organic food to a local community and free food and habitat for non-humans in a highly urbanised environment. The work triples as a biophysical poem, community garden, and an example of applied ecology, the developments of this project are again documented and shared freely online.

There is no ‘property’ to speak of with this artwork, all rights are relinquished; there is only material – edible and conceptual – to freely forage from. In this way the aesthetics, based upon the possibilities of reengaging the primitive, uncapitalised and ecological, are determined by an unclouded ethic to make our work free and public in every sense. In order to afford this ethic we practice frugality, and middle-class anthropogenicism is kept in check by making do with very little.

The reestablishment of local food commons in union with the development of a global creative commons comes from the recognition that we are biological beings, evolved from fungi – and thus evolved from complex networks of interrelation; webs of mycelial and intellectual connectivity not limited by private capital. The dominant ideology attacks the reciprocity of open, public supply networks. A public supply of resources, both conceptual and corporeal, is a decentred supply system that makes local communities more resilient.

In summary

Copyright is a system of central licensing developed to privatise thought and turn it into capital. Copyright is a sub-system of private wealth generation dependent on abstract and anthropocentric modalities. The various modes of which are over-extending both technological landscapes and natural ecologies as human populations grow. The ideology of aggregating capital, however, is fraying at the edges, and depending upon the speeds of climate change and descent of global oil supplies, we are watching the self-determined implosion of such an illogical, go-it-alone system.

Today, the dominant ideology makes us equally susceptible to becoming our own worse victims. An ideology that favours competition over reciprocity misinterprets ecological functioning. Cities are the centralised embodiment of private, competitive anthropocentric thought, of Cartesian hyper-separation, and today a dominant urban mindset, that attempts to cheat Malthusian sustainability logic, determines the policies, politics, agricultures, poetics, philosophy and science that makes our culture systematically unsustainable.

I’d like to finish this writing with one of my slow text mesostics as an example of behavioural change that speaks to some of the ideas I’ve outlined above. I have been developing the idea of slow text in union with the principals of the slow food moment, a moment wholly engaged in a local, in-season food supply. In this work vowels are super and subscripted to aerate the poem, mimicking the way in which microbes and earthworms aerate soil. This procedure slows the reading of the work, and asks the reader to attend to a decompressed ecological time. Mesostics are centred acrostics, famously implemented by John Cage. In a mesostic there is a central trunk from where the lines of the poem branch out in a self-determining form. This becomes the natural habit of the poem, a transition from the agricultural field – where neat rows of private crops line up like monological soldiers across the page – a return to the forest, to biodiverse and open systems, and eventually, if we are to think big, to open the possibility of an all rights relinquished ecological paradigm for culture.

1. Val Plumwood (2002)

2. Ibid.

Daylesford, 2010

Posted in ESSAYS, FEATURES | Tagged creative commons, Patrick Jones, permapoesis

Zoe Rodriguez: The Danger of Copyleft

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Zoe Rodriguez

If Miles Franklin had relinquished the copyright in My Brilliant Career how would she have fared? This was her first, and by far her most, successful novel. Where I work, at Copyright Agency Limited, which collects and distributes over $100 million a year for its 17,000 authors and publisher members, we sometimes say when it all gets too hard, ‘nobody ever died because of copyright’. So, it was chastening to see the agony Tolstoy endured late in his life over whether to offer his works to the commons or retain copyright acted out with such passion in The Last Station.

When authors ask what I think about copyleft or Creative Commons, I can only tell them that it depends on their circumstances and what they want to achieve from their writing. For instance, if they expect no remuneration from their works and are happy for others to do what they will with their works, or even just to copy them as they are without having to seek permission, then Creative Commons may be for them. If they want to have a career in writing and hope to be paid for their work, then I don’t think CC is for them.

Some tell me that they are happy to offer their works under CC licensing ‘just to get their name out there’. I’m not sure that there’s any increased exposure through attaching CC licensing to works – and probably there’s far more kudos, even today, to be gained through being published by an established press, very few of which would see any benefit in CC licensing because it would hamper their ability to market and obtain monetary return for a work in which they had invested their resources. As my mother, poet Judith Rodriguez says “if you let your stuff go for free you will not likely figure in reviews… Editors of properly commercial publications vary, but their reputation rides on what they publish, so they often DO have critical principles behind their decision to choose your poem. It’s not just money you forfeit, when you say ‘Print it, it’s yours!’ but the knowledge that it’s valued – not just left-out-in-the-open available.”

And, if you’re a poet and you give works away under CC licensing, then it’s very possible you’ll never receive a penny for your work. The places that are most likely to want to use poetry are not cashed-up corporations but not-for-profit educational and cultural institutions. Educational institutions are required to pay equitable remuneration to creators of works under licences managed by CAL. Many poets and other authors have told me that the CAL fees they have received are more than any advances or royalties they have earned. A CC licence would see the end to that.

Some suggest authors shouldn’t charge for their works: they should use them as a teaser for other money-making activities. The trouble is that the vast majority of authors cannot adopt a business model predicated on their writing being a loss-leader for other goods or services. Writers just aren’t rock-stars. Readers (except crazed children’s book fans) are not going to pay a fortune for merchandise and concert going. And performance and writing are not the same thing. A number of our best authors are introverts who do not shine or wish to exist in the public eye.

The history of Creative Commons comes from IT licensing systems. Some IT developers decided it was a better business model for them to permit other IT developers to use their works without having to pay them a licence fee – so long as others were able to use the resulting work for free. What many forget is that IT companies who adopted this licensing practice have a business model where IT consultants work to service the programs makes them their money. Again, this is not a model authors of fictional works can generally adopt.

What of governments and other organisations who see it as their task to see the works they publish disseminated as broadly as possible – and not as income-streams to line the coffers of the state? Well, they’ve always had the ability to publish works under terms which allowed individuals, or groups for that matter, to make copies of works without having to seek permission or pay fees. The distinction between them and authors, especially poets, is that the government runs on a business model not open to most poets – it is funded by taxes.

The rise of digital technology, and especially the increasing ability for information to be copied and broadcast around the globe almost instantaneously, has led many to believe that the frontiers are free, and that even the very content that travels along digital pathways is different from its printed/ published cousin. Seems to me this isn’t the case – distribution may have been made a whole lot easier, but the demand for quality content is still there, and experienced, gifted and professional writers need to be paid for their time if they are to continue their work.

Newspapers have tested the waters with publishing without charge in the digital world – in the belief that online advertising would replace the cover price of the printed work. It turns out that this has failed, and that newspaper proprietors are now turning back to a pay for content model – the most explicit of these moves recently taken by Rupert Murdoch.

My view is that, as with most things in life (actionable crimes aside), people are free to do what they will. Decisions should be made on the basis of informed choice. The author is the first owner of copyright in an original work they create. If an author sees dissemination of their work as the most important outcome for their creative endeavour, then CC licences might be the right path for them. However, if authors want long-term careers in writing where they obtain some economic sustenance from their intellectual capital, then CC probably isn’t the right path. It’s not always possible to predict which works will be the most valued by the readership – it could be the first work a writer publishes.

I think it’s particularly important for authors to consider carefully the terms on which they offer their works – what they produce today has a copyright life which extends through their lifetime and for a further 70 years. Miles Franklin would have missed out on the bulk of royalties from her writing if she’d used CC licensing on My Brilliant Career and writers from Patrick White to Peter Temple would not have shared the legacy.

Posted in ESSAYS, FEATURES | Tagged copyleft, creative commons

The Poetic Commons

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Susan Hawthorne

Poetry is a kind of creative commons of the culture. These days we inhabit different microcultures and that complicates matters, but there remains a kind of substratum that most members of say, one country, understand.

In 1996, Spinifex author, Suniti Namjoshi began what I think was probably the first experiment with Creative Commons in Australia. What we at Spinifex did was to set up a web site and ask readers to contribute to the novel, Building Babel, by adding their own content. This was well before Web 2.0 and so all content came to us via email and was separately uploaded to the Babel Building Site. You can see the original invitation at the archived site Pandora. All the links are now out of date, but the experiment was interesting and you can still navigate through the different pages.

So why am I telling you about this old pre-web 2.0 site? Because most of the time we speak as if these technologies were new. What Suniti Namjoshi points out in her writing is just how very old they are: that the sharing of stories across minds is as old as storytelling itself.

If you think back through your own store of stories, consider the family tales, the story about the strange uncle, the maiden aunt, the grandparent who lost the farm, these are all part of our creative commons, part of a shared culture. Sometimes it is shared with just a few, other elements are known culture wide. Say the word Cats in New York and Melbourne and you’ll get a very different response. Are you talking Broadway or football?

Poets have a broad creative commons on which they draw. The poetic history of humanity, little known corners, fragments and single lines inhabit our brains. This is in part of what Suniti Namjoshi was writing about in Building Babel. While Facebook and Twitter provide examples of the latest kind of creative commons.

In my own work, I began to explore poetry and hypertext around 1997 for my sequence of long poems, Unstopped Mouths which was later published in The Butterfly Effect. I did this because I felt that the particular poetic commons I was drawing on was not well known and this was a way of opening it up.

As a poet, I find myself engaging in conversations about poetry, or writing a poem in response to someone else’s posting. Twitter remains the realm of the haiku addict and now and then I tweet a few lines.

Poetry is hugely accessible these days and while big publishers stay away in droves, small poetry publishing is thriving. Blogs provide poets with a way to garner an audience, the publishing of chapbooks is on the rise again, and even full-length books are finding their way out into the marketplace under small imprints. In part, this is fuelled by the increasing viability of short run printing. A run of 100-300 copies has never been unusual for poetry, and print runs of these lengths are now available to anyone with some saved pennies. No longer the equivalent of going out and buying a car, printing a short run of poems can be done for under $1000. Putting it out online – assuming the writer has their own computer – can be calculated in the time it takes to put it up. Getting a following takes more work, but open readings, community festival readings and the like can all play their part.

Digital publishing has the advantage of reaching people you have never met and are perhaps unlikely to meet. Just as a widely distributed print book falls into the hands of many readers unknown to the author, a digital book has the same capacity. Like a print book it can be driven through networking, or simply by being active on several circuits. Unlike a print book, it can reach into places beyond the reach of ordinary book distributors. Three important places stand out.

1. Reaching into foreign markets where the publisher has no distributor, but where there are a significant number of English-language readers.
2. Reaching people who live in rural and remote areas where booksellers may not have the breadth of writing a reader is looking for.
3. Reaching people who for one reason or another are unable to leave their homes: the elderly, the chronically ill, people with mobility difficulties or those suffering agoraphobia.

The ability to increase the size of print is also another good reason to make your work available digitally.

There has been a great deal of fear wound up over digital publishing, and while I am supportive of authors wanting a fair deal with publishers, with my publisher hat on I can see many opportunities passing by those who wish to remain rooted to the spot. In the first instance, when we at Spinifex started to sell eBooks in late 2006, most readers pressed the buy print book button. These were probably sales we would not have made otherwise and we saw a really significant increase in the sales of books over our web site. All the books available (getting close to 100 titles) can be browsed for 15 minutes, up to ten pages can be read free of charge. They can also be searched for words used in the text. With these two options a reader can read as if in a bookshop, or check subject matter as one would by using an index. The digital advantage is that no index is required to do the looking.

More recently, the eBook versions are selling – this is particularly so in the US market where eBooks have had faster acceptance than here in Australia. With an average of around 20% of our monthly sales currently through eBooks, this is extra income for authors. It also allows a small and independent press like ours to sell to a wider market. We can track what kind of eBook is most popular and this can help us use our resources better.

As for copying and pirating, I do not believe that this a major issue. How many of you have photocopied more than 10% of a book? How many of you have read a line of poetry and credited it in the poem? How many have not? My point is that there is nothing new about copying, about failure to attribute. The main difference is that in electronic form it is far more readily spotted. Increasing digitisation may in fact reduce plagiarism.

Creative Commons is one way of retaining some control over your work while allowing it to circulate relatively freely. The advantage of circulation is that it gives the work more airing, might even help the poet to build their reputation. A range of Creative Commons licences are available. Important elements are:

1. Attribution
2. Non-commercial use
3. Whether or not Derivative works are allowed
4. Share alike – that the licence given is the one used.

These are common sense rules and provide poets with the opportunity to share their delight in the work of other poets while not stealing the artistic creativity of others. It also opens up the possibility of poetic playfulness, like a variation on a musical riff.

We at Spinifex have enjoyed our ventures into the digital world. The downside is the additional work that it creates in an already over-stretched workplace. That additional work is in the retailing.

μεταdata



you can tell we no longer



             know our classics



a postmodern breakfast



            of



            Greek and Latin



μετα- meta-: Greek preposition meaning



            with or after



data: plural of datum



            (past participle of the verb dare to give)



            Latin for a thing given or granted,



            something known or assumed as fact,



            and made the basis of reasoning or calculation



μεταdata is definitely after: after the date



            of my dictionary, printed in 1977



metadata is the data that comes with or after the book



a whole world of information and facts



attached to an eBook with ones and zeros



a spreadsheet of working days



column after column after column after column after



            six columns of ISBNs



            two ways of listing the title



            long blurbs and short



            subject matter and keywords



            prices in different currencies



            dimensions in metric and imperial



            an excerpt and its source



            a review and its source



            and more …



and everyone wants something different



                        I’m after



                              and after



                                    I’m over it

That poem was written in the midst of metadata frenzy which, with luck is mostly over now. What the poem shows is that it does take time and commitment to go digital, but if you start that way, or you begin to venture into the world, then there are feedbacks and with luck sales. Unless you are prepared to let everything go for free, your digital files need to be wrapped and secured and that way you can gain from both print and digital worlds.

Posted in ESSAYS, FEATURES | Tagged creative commons

Trods Which Follow

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Mark Dickinson

Upon each trod, given goes to trail by margins of lay; each shelter earth’s satellite in all our betweens, step pilgrims soil and sky.

Ever beneath such plenitude, desire in unfounded ambush, which plots divide upon humility as tendril to tap over ways of passing urban and wild.

Even the light weed old growth in slight stellate the adorned square; nee parse on famished stock; silhouettes still able in the redress of situ to ground the stock of heights.

What passes for love here passes for sound there. Over each stone step, the wild becomes extrapolated by connections, extant in ways of seeing: Sacred rounding of nest,

The sparrow singing in the miniature wooded hedgerow:

Wild. Wild. Wild.

This privilege hold astounds, so much clause ascends the cambered ridge we pass.

No further but attend to the passage of sleep.

Harvesting forage in the urban growth we settle; compact over myths embedded to a clarity that diminishes the waver, describing the brown sea flotsam astride stone.

Inveigh against remittance; in sheltering beneath intricate laces of leaf, wholesome fills that litter of gift.

Plenitude radiates positive gladden cells; so riot in the best of ways parting the crescent smiles on our behalf with each grain yielding relate.

We scatter common like the numinous holding sway, pre-empting fall from pre-emptive strike; this single passage no less clause on the trail.

Fictive root; earth no venture grinds alone – only we hope;

To stand with care, of what shadow strides astern.

Given what levels before, settling each in successive unity; trample slow footwork, lay stone craft; earthworks befitting infra-communal stead with stone-structure.

Under trod, language held firm to place for what visits we pave by word of treads succession, not partial for the ca\re of you, but near, to side of harbour, loves only work this accord.

If by some unfavourable union we shallow into angst sallow, then what goes me encumbering the more then by the very less we propagate?

Reward the churl, or be the least only the venture of it; that walkways go to and we a stride come to some long reached open in the quest of recess and draw open hearts to the plaintive.

I hope not to strike, inhibit the ways, nor settle by the lea of hope; but to call open the very slights, so as to dazzle aside from what gathers by the spleen of weight: cast open the neutered chest.

What gathers by mode can handle the care of it; even the felt may be untarnished.

For this inhabits welcome, no longer in the service of summit, but a cast at what is plausible to the field we inhabit as earth:

1. Mood over tumults: wavy in parts of mute regalia in earthen glee.

2. Sorrow in stride of longing to, lone a separatists welt

3. By openings root dream phenomenon the fecund wall

4. Grazing levels cut, slowly diminish ways of mulch

5. Pastor or rut? Tableau or armature [love] embracing we

6. Earth fibres hollow, soil is to skin what waters wake dream

7. We have serviced too much on behalf of misery

8. Sharps alignment to the wrist, neck, vein: let us not depart in the pin-eye of sorrow

9. Held firm to what scarce limps beatified penult of stray longing for

10. We offer the many; lets gather there under the folds of sky

Entering the season of solace, grace limps sympathetically; at the anterior ground of language where a muscle intricately distributes cells.

As the things themselves decline, emaciated words flicker on/off, and I’m aware of what seems an insignificant loss in the making; but the trees may signal a language in the flow of air, more of the real than ever we knew, and I’m wondering at each new bright, if the clearings we made are ventriloquisms that map syntactically the many we are.

Here word, here world, only a letter apart but so much sewing to.

Stitch of L, of O, of V, of E;

The language of presence is not so scantily clad.

The open affronts the verge of curtailment:

1) Ocular System. [Settlements in the moors dispersed]

2) Digestive System. [‘too horsse lodes of fresshe fish, callid fresshe Lynge, haddokes and kyllinges’]

5) Vestibular System. [ I (distance and speed) we (in respect to each other) on these long trods]

3) Cardio-vascular System. [Cloud-breath: specialised centres in the brainstem, where water condenses into fog, clouds form.]

6) Procreative System. [‘A phallus so small that I cannot fit it in a man.’]

4) Manipulative System. [‘Bringing forth’, emerging and rising hidden within the open region this is the earth.]

7) Judgment. [‘I thereby place the soul in the unlimited sphere,’ walk as write on the surface of a radius on the thickness of a shell.]

I hear more word of the city than song in the forest, and the older we grow the more radical our longing, accelerating the distance of occupation while proximity becomes its own distance to the metastatic.

Species with rhizomes and runners, common as they are, raise their shoots to the new soil surface.

Dark satanic mills, collate the hour of accident in which labour turned adrift into the arts of death.

Dead Sphagnum pools and wet hollows, capsules of fruiting bodies, film of water and open cells of leaves: asphodel, cranberry, bogbean and cloudberry; the skin of peat across the surface stretches home a priori knowledge to which we warm in the unlimited sphere dressing the wound adrift.

Mealy by sprigs, sprung-scan sky settles meek beneath in humbling reed, wattle manger willing we to the cap of sky.

Bolt searing a clearing postulates pain; reach back into the sphagnum deep within dark folds, open forage along loosely scattered walkways: we wild we open : clear beneath sky scan sprung from the ground.

Re-earth and hope, tread in spore dictums spread for a lucky hit in which reeling we calm: stand ‘I’ before error the minutes affront, cross-class distance what irksome wrest:

1. Gentle way

2. Soft nothings

3. Post-material plea

Clamped loosely by competing gods, only to wish by the magi’s halter, the recess of more in the shadow of less; cradling the kitsch in the margins of sanity, to what loosely drifts round the gathering verge.

Here I am a small figure with the body of Hare; step to the side, quietly, carefully and you will see me patiently viewing water, each long leg surely placed; a heron to the cover of rock, a hare prone to the open field in the sky.

In the sky I am listening to the ground; in the ground, I listen to the sky, and the stars form a knowing that detracts from the ruts and the divots I’ve come to know and trust with the body.

A language forms, we raise heads and seek from the heavens of earth, our culminating we under the cowl of branches, the halo of moon settles on the surface of pond, shimmering, and something holds us, like it has always held us, seeking, our own birth stitched to the covenant of Love.

Posted in FEATURES, POETRY | Tagged ecopoetics

Peter Larkin’s Knowledge of Place

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Mark Dickinson

There are many distractions surrounding the everyday, so many asides busy vying for our attention, alleviating us of our time. Objects are seen less for themselves and more often as materials which become products, products which remove the things themselves from an originated state. Landscapes are demarcated in terms of their service.

In this way it’s become increasingly difficult to clarify certain terms. What do we mean now, for instance, when we speak of nature or the wild? Where is the common ground of understanding in these terms? What does it mean to write poetry out of a landscape that would perceive, within its own composition, not only a place occupied by nature and including by degrees notions of the wild, but also one that is perhaps predicated on an anthropocentric clause of cultivation and development, which although other, are nevertheless aspects of nature itself?

Alongside this runs a similar stream of thought, one which concerns, to some degree, a different kind of landscape, or at least a different way of seeing the landscape – that of theology. Theological writing and writing about the wild and nature have often shared the same space on a page; and more often than not, it is poetry which explores the commonality between the sacred and the wild, the corporeal and the temporal and the perceptions which inhabit the disclosed and undisclosed things which occupy them.

In the changing and developing milieu of habitations, humanities’ place grows more precarious and the paradigms or fractals of occupancy within place become ever more complex and less predictable. In our worst moments, the shifting horizon of tomorrow eschews an eschatological ruin and post-human cities are built from the neurotic wilderness and techno-scopic vision fuelled by an unsustainable market, based around infinite growth.

One of the ways in which poetry functions within this paradoxical environment is to return to the body and to simply walk out into the world. By being in the world, through an intimacy of a thorough immersion, the poetry can radically re-engage with otherness and begin to propagate alternative ways of seeing and occupying place, or at the very least, remind us of the intimacy and otherness of our surroundings. Not by relocating the human body as the central process, but as a part of a process of being within and with the world.

As a writer of poetry I am influenced by the environment in all its coherent and competing forms; I am, I suppose, interested in a poetry that is earth-sensitive without being reductive and one which navigates the subtler and complex relations that simultaneously occupy place ‘[a poetry] which alternates between being bounded and unbounded, between being mediated and immediate’[2]. From the slightest micro organism to wide ranging forests and tree lined avenues to post urban developments and brown-field sites, I seek a poetry that can take us on and on in hope of something.

Peter Larkin is one such poet; his work consists of poetry where ‘depth is still new’[3] with a ‘knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place’[4]. ‘So skindust in flotilla does encyst the membrane of the pool, is generalist heeder, not local (too global) neighbour. Our dart to depth will flout by soul’[5]. The folds of landscape and openings are what gently curves upon the ‘soul’, but ‘our dart to’ the distance, perhaps erroneously, casts us toward the further horizon, making obscure the ‘depth’ of the ‘near’ surface; for Larkin, as for Wittgenstein the ‘depths are on the surface’[6].

A lot of these terms embody a kind of mapping, and it’s possible to read Larkin’s work in terms of mapping. ‘Band-stratified, they tender mass for map. By the shade of an attribute, it mulls a graph in fir needles[7]. In a more explicit way, Edward S Casey has stated that ‘far from being mere representations of the earth, [maps] can become part of the earth itself’[8].This mapping or reading of place, by scansion, by literally footwork metered out over the surface of the earth, is artistically re-presented or re-emplaced on the page as prosody. In it we seek Wordsworth’s ‘one soft impulse saved from vacancy’[9].

So much poetry vacates place in favour of an internalised dialogue, or anecdotal referent, artistically directing depth only by way of comic or ironic relief. As Larkin posits ‘a ghost of irony is in spirit in the woods’[10]. In a lot of modern verse the distance between things remains, a vacant hollowing of substance or play of meaning, but in Larkin ‘The descent into some hollow of ground serves to instil a void on which thought might have its fill.’[11]

We can read in the poetry, what Suzanne Raitt describes in the Rhetoric of Efficiency: ‘efficiency, economy, and the elimination of waste’.[12] This economy and elimination is all the more pertinent given current political and global ecological themes, although not as an eco-poetics of didacticism, or mimesis but as a poetical culture of responsibility rebuffed by intellectual vigour and folded within being. ‘I drove, repulsed, at the given-way, so many mild trees no more than hedge height felled at their linear logics of aspersal.’[13]

John Kinsella has said of his own writing practise that he writes ‘poems of resistance and protection’[14] ; in Peter’s work it seems less obviously ‘resistance and protection’ than granulation and the ‘otherness of gift’[15]. Larkin’s end, unusually, does not implicate a horizon of irrecoverable damage, piloted toward eschatological ruin, but rather it is ‘sprained of recovery.’[16] Where, nevertheless, horizon demarcates the possible, but within the limits of the given, a given which is open as much to the horizon, as it is bound to the vertical – ‘it is the ordinary become extraordinary’[17]. ‘Here, from the root outward, comes the narrowest clearing towards horizon’[18].

Jonathan Skinner in his fascinating essay ‘Poetries of the Third Landscape’ notes that ‘for Larkin, landscape is not so much a thing as a process, a kind of prosody marked by opening’[19]. In Larkin’s words a prosody or ‘A poetry of love reduced to scarcity […] a wheeling for the wild.’ [20] This wheeling is ‘no erection/ of wall.’[21] Far from it, Citing Laura Riding, ‘It is not a […] wall. It is a written edge of time’.[22]

Peter Larkin has been one of the most pervasive influences on my poetic practise, his Terrain Seed Scarcity, was a major turning point for me, and probably, in hindsight, modern or radical landscape/ pastoral[23]. So too was J H Prynne in his Plant time Manifold and Pearls that Were; Peter Riley, Thomas A Clark, Harriet Tarlo and Maggie O’ Sullivan. These contemporary voices gave me the impetus to return to the peripheries and to explore the intimate relations of place, radicalising the loci and gifting substance to hope; albeit with a matrix of clause, poetry became making, sited, as a beautiful yet complex prosodic life.

Notes:

[1] Peter Larkin, What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei, (The Gig, 2004).

[2] Eve Ingalls, “Landscape at the Edge of the Body,” artist’s statement of 1996.

[3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in Basic writings, edited by Thomas Baldwin (Routledge, 2004), p. 311.

[4] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility’. ibid 109.

[5] Peter Larkin, ‘Seek Source Bid Sink’, in Terrain Seed Scarcity, (Salt Publishing, 2001), p.44.

[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 77.

[7] Peter Larkin, ‘Three Forest Conformities’, ibid. P.62.

[8] Edward S. Casey, ‘Concluding Reflections’ in Earth-Mapping,(University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 93

[9] William Wordsworth, ‘Lines left upon a seat in a Yew-tree’, in The Major Works, (Oxford World Classics 2000), p. 29.

[10] Peter Larkin, ‘Three Forest Conformities’, ibid. P. 68

[11] Peter Larkin, ‘Landscape with Figures Afield’, ibid. P.146

[12] Suzanne Raitt, ‘The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism,’ Modernism/modernity, vol. 3,

No 1(2006), p.835

[13] Peter Larkin ‘Three Forest Conformities’, ibid. P. 57

[14] John Kinsella, ‘Vermin: A Notebook’, available online at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238296

[15] Peter Larkin ‘Scarcely on the way: The starkness of things in sacral space’, available online at: http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/03/scarcely-on-way-starkness-of-things-in.html

[16] Peter Larkin ‘Parallels Plantations Apart’, ibid. P. 113

[17] Edward S. Casey, ibid. P.165.

[18] Peter Larkin, ‘5: Leaves Field Horizon’ in Leaves of Field, (Shearsman Books, 2006.), p.51

[19] Jonathan Skinner, ‘Poetries of the Third Landscape’ in, (eco(lang) (uage (reader) ed. Brenda Iijima (portable press at yo-yo labs / Nightboat books, 2010),

[20] Peter Larkin, Preface to ‘Whitefield in Wild Wheel’, in Terrain Seed Scarcity, (Salt, 2001), p. 153

[21] Peter Larkin, ‘Rings Resting The Circuit’, (The Gig, 2004) poem 13.

[22] Laura (Riding) Jackson, ‘Poet: A Lying Word’, in The Poems of Laura Riding, (Carcanet, 1980),

p. 216

[23] I have avoided the use of ‘eco’ here as a taxonomic prefix to the poetic, as I’m not entirely comfortable with it. Although ‘landscape’ and ‘Pastoral’ are contestable terms, their very mutability and adaptability offers some service of relation, I think, to the reader.

Posted in ESSAYS, FEATURES | Tagged ecopoetics, Peter Larkin

Excerpts from ‘Brushwood by Inflection’

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Peter Larkin

Note: The ‘inflection point’ on a branch is where the direction of curve outwards changes to the direction of curve upwards, and is usually a play-off between elastic bending and thickening growth. A branch bends continuously even while it thickens and as such the shape of a branch can be seen as a function of time. But any break-off from that branch provokes a compunction of space across a strewnness which wrangles with its proneness before horizon. So, ‘inflection’ in these texts has a more speculative association, not so much with permanent deformation, as with that brushwood matting which surrounds trees or edges out beyond their line. After the break from main branch comes a further twist towards these given-aways’ sense of gift amid a heaping-up of separation. Now tree becomes the agent for which branch appears the source and brush is the locus.

Given brushwood isn’t code for a wrenched thing lying across origin but the inflection of it is forescatter where the young of the year are broken in advance of the trees’ own persistence a cob of green cud spat out by the trees’ specialism to vacate shoulder but recast the forks of surface extending bent matter to the neck of horizon

where roots creep to their edge quota, brush has swept past bed to lie out on jammed marginal rota

any scattering of timber ends in this break perfectly ramified : nothing pans out unless along what little of itself could sift within the collapse-complexion

with breach off-tree

even more world-weight

crutched on sur-

face to margin

For brushwood doubt is not the crackle of itself but what flicker there is in such brittle abandonment’s spite of intricate granting a girdling gives meta-closure, or more openly inflects what brash has bristled from mesh – the fibre of distribution no longer a hollow of the intervals themselves

push from forest

to brushwood,

horizontal graze

bunchwards

Where brushwood trips at faltered roots to re-abrupt them, fold in juxtaposition what is the brittle turn to origin ahead of fuelled despairs mimicking fluent repairs

laid over beds of reliance, reaching for the hatchings’ more shareable (castable) compliance inflected gamut of a terseness earlier than alien, rough intractives on a planet surge to brushwood

where adjacent segments of tree meet their inflection points, their bitter parts waving out the scatter at an horizonal confluence

infinite seriality

lopped rigid

in devotion to a

singled inflect-

ion of gift

traceway through

brushwood beat

of the tread

These deferred tree-limbs inspect the path, smaller ressuscitants in degree of drop with the bind of inflection stay ceased throughout the straying: a spray of unbudded but deep-seated co-emption bare with deserved array towards the horizon’s plain

in binding the evolute of a curve to the given, crossed by the perched sticks of separation respects slightness in any replete defeated choice, the bend itself reseated

what can be screened from floor to be granted at the snick of a broken finger which a detached hand gets to fan out reattaches at full extent only as this joint circumvents its precise severance part

glisters in inflected

quiet of woods

after the break

with crash

the outmapped

lay nestling

in the inflicted

Any exhausted root thin to be codified (re-shed): inflectional stratum wrinkles retrenchment slung post-extant pales of brush no longer billeted on earth shornface but go counter-depleting where cannot be inversely lopped, ie regress to parent stem is the longest offspring weald across the grain of origin

brushwood lacks its own climate envelope, apart from inflection never strains for a saturation by horizon in bunch depletion remains the very sparsity schedule of outreach

benched within the disparate affix-risk of gift, connections not ill-torn but embossed on fallen place to last out (as first fallers) the vertical tides they are tossed from

sword of brush under

broad curve, cure of

branch offset by

cut to branch

The vine round the knotted root sketches a brushwood of outcome, at the dishevelment of origin, pushed over penetrable core at the strike off sapling springy brush laid out to the wire, jutted breast of the depredation such slights are parallel in heap laid out of, weathers of the not were corrosive enough for no veering more than origin

a forest of poor relations but in brushwood stamp of crabby retention: buffer the encroach of a nakedness unable to crouch enough as trunk is to branch so brush is to the contra-fill off aperture, as goes with it stored wary to horizon lacking brush trees could never have unlatched such shutters, just these hit the horizontal plate as traduction let sprawl

tempestible, splinter-

towering, most impassable

but at a shoulder

of smeared clearing

as wedge cast from root

cages margins of the un-

vacancy to within de-

grees of lashwood

Avenues of the dislocation projectively harbour their cross-over, its strewnness a sharper stare than neutral severance alone, scarcer at spread than living the staple to root horizon winded on this faggot hillock aspires no second wound

each angle out of hold now pervious accelerative lattice, the estrangement hollow with after-tangle of inflective array fed to a bundle minus compression, detaches from root but awarded the creep-margin that relies on dis-upright the chips anti-rotate off rendered trees or stand in for a cheaper scurf of the ramification

dissipative reduct-

ion let substrate-

refill be for

brushwood export

Thickly laid over with a new scarcity’s post-quickness as at any finding mean of overgrowth this bides the eventual scene of hold traps exuding brushwood until let go again as the tree of it, dries out a ceiling to the tips a debris of requital protrudes from frame and puts the rap on horizon

rest the decrease poaching brushwood for tracking what re-accustom it rakes to the least fringe at horizon’s edge raggedly severed into lurch of pretext, forward repose leans long into new taperings of dependence: a good-enough soil made scanty ventricle where a mesh-haul of intersecting sticks sucks the pump

limbed for its

barebounds, the tree’s

closely unsprained

fine losings,

indurable sphere

stepped to lending

A brushwood thicket lashed to the open, not taken aback once out of hiding but braced separably for inflection cut universally falls to local devices, the scatter is neat horizon parabolic severed from tube just what intact ramification can’t disuse for cleaving post-jointed by the primary detour of mercy

left packed at site unelbowing until it comes to relay severed joints on junctionless surfaces incommensurate sweep-over tailed by horizon, reproved for terrain but not removed from recoil, the detraction undespoiled in just such a carve across swerve

cover the cleared area while shipping brush off deserted trees, anchorless in vessel to connect the sag in capsized root

scrunted but slouchless

no scrub brushwood but

rubs out from high tree

backwardly out to

acting wrist, each eye-

let rays unmisted

between branch-querk

Ungraded divergence one sole series thing far off at nearest severance to horizon taskable surface ventilates an architectonic of trees in belt as if they couldn’t be paltry enough to thread their belongings on the lateral

radiant cavities cross soils as they build to burrows of twig above it, extrapolate plenitude full in the way of micro-desertions brushed onto reincursion as the obstruct is (a gift at hand) to the claw of torn from root

dark wood’s shortcut to a comparison of ground now such obstacles inflecting less sorely over the same split unseamed, it crashes beyond the rush of it but doesn’t gutter the litter

the part played by trees in separatives of integral way: slighting the scattered chink means stitches mis-sweeping repart the open as at any treeless place, exactitude in ex-branch no longer severely spindling the ground

the crack into one

another’s inflected

postfix of arrival

primed clear of its

rammed facets, what

the ramific spares

Time in joints dejects weak numbers until frailed in brushwood, the whole is claimant about dismembering, a disjunction thrown on the lay-it-from with time for assarts of a world seen from across real extra-inherence on this rootless spur of flightlessness: a meta-order of discharging branch splays for a co-variant of the rooted snag itself

extent of displacement serves as nearness index for the commoning brushed into, dry reeds of horizon: this feature detaches extent but not an outbed bent forwards of the exposure: brushwood is source splay even before its own torso-replay

among the abraded

verticals, what gives

horizon its saltings

arid stir of root

the untying tries for a

woundless rent in horizon

Inflect this second element in surprise horizon: the filigree catastrophe lies wadged before a non-collider beckoning the sprigs of origin blaze off that fork minus handle at its unscorched scar across, bare particulars of forward radiant desertion whose highlights cluster in dissimmersion

unspasmic elan, the leap there is in ramification bridging itself for severed a shiver darting at horizon’s congestion concessionally arrived brusque new mapping in circuit sashes, the lattice of main-tree bereaves field across the lace of nearest dependent shedding, debris tellingly most outlying

brushwood a new door

to old branches

beaten at the threshold

resurges horizon

at once abjection

off tree filament

Grazing barrenness over ruck yet to be closely scarred this way, dropping fineals pluck a disconnection ample enough to be as pliant before the scratch of origin

fledged that the stake-chafer stalked to survival, this most peripheral commission unflattens revival committal to grist impossible to backstring on core tree without expelling the needle-tip just where extreme ramification is ready to mend at jib

our vanguard thrusting itself no further fear than open spires of landing outside the height

strike longwards toss,

bend tip abroad of

the lacks of approach

Precept learnt at a yard of waste brushed by unexpended tips against hard horizon the crushing had already taken place at the gift from root: drift never supinely subsequent once taken for inflection: the sense in which brushwood cast is more internal to trees than own lame root

no mean inlay, how same-side tree radial went out to recombine without distributing its access more hollowly than: awaiting a bind at outspread itself

this divestment is openness throughout quanta of the given-to by adhesion in site of dropdown: that embrittlement will disseminate horizon pre-eschewed comes to ramified flesh what can no longer be found amid vein of tree, new porches elapse to grazing the zone before horizon

cathected from tree

do it well to inflect

harrassed flailings

of gift

lost from the bays of

tree but won for

exploded graft

before origin

Posted in FEATURES, POETRY | Tagged ecopoetics, Peter Larkin

Matthew Hall Interviews Peter Larkin

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Matthew Hall

Image from Veer Books readings at the SPF 2012

Matthew Hall: Peter, as you came to writing poetry later in life than most contemporary poets, could you explain your interest in French philosophy and what impact this interest may have had on your poetic development?

Peter Larkin: I wrote some poetry before University but still thought I was a fiction writer until I’d completed one long and unpublishable novel in which very little happened (though a privately printed copy found its way into the Cambridge UL!). Interlude material for a second novel turned into my first published poem, Enclosures, but the prose traces very much remain. I’d already had an interest in the French Nouveau Roman and then discovered Derrida whom I thought was the most challenging philosopher around who couldn’t be easily ignored though I felt he was against my own instinctive grain in many ways. In the event it was Geoffrey Hartman’s swerve across Derrida that influenced me more because of the common reference point in landscape and Wordsworth. I started reading Derrida again at the time of his later work, particularly around the period of his engagement with Richard Kearney. Strangely, I didn’t read so much Merleau-Ponty until just a few years ago when some of the post-structuralist waves had settled and he was defiantly looming above the swell, though I did read quite a lot of Ricoeur throughout my ambivalent preoccupation with Derrida. All this made my own work doubly contorted, as I was relishing a post-structuralist rhetorical density but trying to get it to mutate towards more pacifically speculative or contemplative realms. Even more recently, the French writers like Marion, Chretien and Henry associated with the ‘theological turn’ within phenomenology have been a big influence, even a sort of confirmation to my own parallel but more submerged course.

MH: What, in your opinion have been some of the benefits of working as a lecturer and as the Literature Librarian at The University of Warwick in the development of your own singular poetic?

PL: The only teaching I regularly do is in IT and research methods, but I have taken part in seminars in the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature & the Arts over many years, and I have also learnt a lot from being the subject librarian for this area. Being at Warwick has exposed me to many currents, poetic, politico-ecological and theological and it has enabled me to build up stock in these areas and gain some acquaintance with the material as I do so. Not being an academic teacher has kept my mind freer for my own projects and in that way I have found it helpful to be a small fish in a big pond. My elaborated style must owe something to having dipped into hundreds of books, prefaces, chapters or conclusions over the years. I keep a notebook for anything that catches my eye.

MH: For those readers who do not know about the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry versus Cambridge (or more broadly, European) divide, I was hoping you could address your own, what I see as uniquely identifiable ability to straddle both schools of contemporary poetry. You seem to have managed to find a place in the two most major English-language poetry developments in the past decades. May I ask how you see your own placement alongside these schools, and the development of your poetic as involved with, or removed from, the movement of these two groups.

PL: I’ve never tried actively to traverse the LANGPO-Cambridge divide and any sort of ‘place’ I might have in either is fairly low-key. Neither grouping has been exemplary for me in terms of practice but I have been considerably indebted to them both, particularly Coolidge, Andrews and Bernstein on the one side and Prynne, Riley, Crozier, Barnett and Wilkinson on the other. In addition, a number of North American women poets like Hejinian, Robertson and Wollsak and the two Howes have meant a lot to me. This has intensified my penchant for ‘riff’ type material and also to subjecting it to a complex or overlapping micro-syntax which slows it down and gives it a new obstinate weight, which in my case also extends to the use of internal rhyme or half-rhyme, particularly at the prosier moments. In terms of any poetic of my own, my ecological and ontological preoccupations have always demanded to come first and only after that has any more exact strategy emerged, so the influences above have become rather distorted or thinned out.

MH: Could you expand on this issue of your use of the material, from Wollsak’s and Robertson’s poetic, for example?

PL: Robertson’s The Weather (mostly written in Cambridge) has meant a lot to me with its elaborated prose refrains, and also Wollsak’s Pen Chants and especially An Heuristic Prolusion with its filigree inventiveness but underlying intensity of vision. I’ve not directly reworked any of this material into my own texts but my own writing has echoed and sounded its way across some of it. Often the material I rework or slide over in terms of generating a slippage in the phonemes to transplant invisible near-rhymes is overtly more distant from my interests or more often not poetry at all.

MH: Could you address your own change in approach as it has moved from Enclosures, or Wang Wei, to your work in the development of Roots Surfacing Horizon and now in the writing of Brushwood by Inflection? How has your approach to the work changed in the last decade?

PL: Enclosures had a very exact sense of terrain subsequently subjected to a number of speculative revisions or recodings in terms of how one might ‘read’ such places without losing their sensory immediacy. The Wang Wei versions were in some ways a side-line but allowed me to discover whether they could find their own way back to some of my main preoccupations by setting up deliberate limitations in the way of my usual means of working (‘Spirit of the Trees’ was put together with a similar concern for arbitrary impediments). My more recent work hasn’t changed in any radical way (and I like the idea that earlier threads might resurface at any moment) but the form has tended to settle into short prose clusters with verse tail-pieces (though sometimes these latter are absent). I find that a good working template rather than it being a deliberate aesthetic as such. The single more fundamental modification has been that, where I used to sometimes add a prefatory essay to a text, more recently I have incorporated that sort of ancillary material as a section within the poetry itself. This began with At Wall with the Approach of Trees where I literally reworked notebook material into five page-long paragraphs and called the section ‘Inflections’. I did something similar with Roots Surfacing Horizon which has a section in continuous unparagraphed prose and I am now working on a sequence called ‘Brushwood by Inflection’ which also has an unbroken prose section with broad margins where the material is deliberately more ‘secondary’ or discursive (though that does now have a very brief preface as well!). I had forgotten my earlier use of the term ‘inflections’ but it does indicate a move to a relatively more reflective or abstract type of writing which asks the reader to share a particular taking-off point, though I now want to run this as close to the ‘thick’ textuality of the poetry as possible.

MH: I was recently reading Gustaf Sobin’s Luminous Debris and came across the following quotation:

It is not every day that we realize we’re allowed to gaze into the contours of absence, into the specific proportions, dimensions, properties that absence, under a given set of conditions, has assumed. Is memory any different? Aren’t we continually running over the imprint, the deeply scored outline of vanished experience, attempting to read – in counterpoint – the plenitude of so many irrecuperable events, reading here what is eternally there?

These lines instantly brought to mind Sobin’s parallels with Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, both of which I see having strong inflections (if I may so use the word) in your poetic and I was hoping you could speak to the influence of Merleau-Ponty, as well as Sobin, in your work.

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Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged Matthew Hall, Peter Larkin

Introducing Peter Larkin

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Matthew Hall

This interview began on a midday walk along the Coventry and Warwick borders in England’s temperate May and was concluded over the course of these past months. My own visit to Warwick was a delight, though suffering from the travails of long distant travel and foreign flu bugs, it was a long awaited and much anticipated trip.

It had been years since I had first come across a reference to Peter’s work, in John Kinsella’s Disclosed Poetics, and with what little material I could scrounge up, I was hooked. The tightly wound lines and the phrasings and rephrasings had an eloquence and lyrical quality that was entirely unexpected from such sharply attenuated sentences; it was unlike anything I had encountered before.

And so I quickly made my way through Leaves of Field and Terrain Seed Scarcity. Both books strike that tenuous balance between difficulty and reward, instilling in the reader a great sense of accomplishment, and leaving with them a distinct notion of the distance travelled.

To my delight, and profound confusion, one morning there was a message in my inbox from Peter Larkin. Peter contacted me after reading my poem ‘a continuous plain’, which was published in Cordite’s Pastoral issue, edited by Stuart Cooke, and which quotes a line of his: ‘true scarcity of no trespass.’

My interest in and appreciation for Larkin’s work has only heightened since my first introduction and my poetry would be much less interesting without these mined sources, and without his work as a profound inspiration. Peter and I have had an ongoing correspondence and poetic exchange in which, I will be the first to admit, I have learned an incredible amount. I have been very much in awe of his use of language and the breadth of his knowledge and remain very much indebted to him for his continued interest in and support of my own pastoral poetry.

I hope that this interview serves as a good introduction to those new to Larkin’s work, and will provide some new concepts for the reading of his work for those already familiar with it. It is also with great pleasure to present an excerpt from Larkin’s newest work, Brushwood by Inflection.

In addition, Cordite is pleased to have another great British poet, Mark Dickinson, provide us with an essay on Larkin’s work, as well as one of his own poems; a poem which speak to the influence Peter Larkin has had on the development of Mark’s poetic, an inspiration we at Cordite hope to share with all of you.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ecopoetics, Matthew Hall, Peter Larkin

Not Some Racist

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Paul Mitchell

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/02-Not-Some-Racist.mp3|titles=Not Some Racist]
Not Some Racist (1:57)
Words: Paul Mitchell | Music: Bill Buttler

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Bill Buttler, paul mitchell

a text tale

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Klare Lanson

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/a-text-tale.mp3|titles=a text tale]

a text tale (3:58)

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Klare Lanson

‘Paradise’ (with Zimmer)

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Gaby Bila-Günther

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/ladygabyandzimmerparadisefasterversion.mp3|titles=Audio by Lady Gaby and Zimmer]

‘Paradise’ (with Zimmer) (3:40)

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Gaby Bila-Günther

All We Wanted / Free Information Poem

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Jorja Kelly

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/Jorja-Free-Information-Poem.mp3|titles=Jorja Free Information Poem]

All We Wanted / Free Information Poem (3:36)

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Jorja Kelly

A Night on the Town

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Eleanor Jackson

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/A-Night-on-the-Town.mp3|titles=A Night on the Town]

A Night on the Town (1:25)

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Eleanor Jackson

Creative Commons: Bastion for Utopia or Just More Creative Culture Juju?

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Yarran Leigh Jenkins

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/cordite33creativecommonsyarranjenkins.mp3|titles=Audio by Yarran Jenkins]

Creative Commons: Bastion for Utopia or Just More Creative Culture Juju? (4:31)

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Yarran Jenkins

beyond black & white

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Rob Walker

before dawn

even flowers

are grey

till magpies,

monochrome flautists,

pipe in the colours

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged rob walker

Particulunar

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Nathan Shepherdson

• he is convinced his bullet points are new moons

• even today when people use the term ‘narrative arc’ Noah leans forward

• not belonging to anything in this world this world belongs to anything

• i cut myself and you bleed

• he can’t even walk into an empty room without saying sorry

• this sentence should not be used in any poem

• even the tallest poet will fall short of this line

• how could i walk into a room and not see i was there

• even if i knew what a corner was what would i do with it

• attention spanned as small as self

• it was philosophers vs art theorists in the eyeball & spoon race

• is this jug a pour example of itself

• he said clocks are just drink coasters for the gods

• hate inspires great architecture but makes lousy coffee

• if we understood language we’d leave it on the wall like a fire extinguisher

• in every play the commas get the best parts

• only a stone’s throw away the stone throws itself away

• on the table a pair of ears held together with a paperclip

• now that politics is just a farmer’s market for lies

• even ordinary words like the ones you’re reading now will end up as something

• discovering the axis of the world is a needle she threads her life through it

• standing at one end with a stopwatch she times my swim through the mirror

• inside your throat i make your breath produce its passport

• my bones exit and stack themselves neatly so i can collapse in peace

• this sentence should be used in every poem

• after staring at the sun all day we agreed we could no longer see each other

• i sleep with your mouth open

• if i tell you where we are we won’t be there anymore

• convinced his bullet points are new moons he makes lists to avoid narrative

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged nathan shepherdson

Litany

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Anis Shivani

O well-wishers of the underground, defriend me.

I played with the singularity of time, hounded by the noises my mother made in my ear when I was an infant, pressed close to death.

Once upon a time a child caressed by many like a fiddle grew up into a sullen behemoth.

It’s easy to insert my hand right through the maws of the classic.

There, in that ninth dimension, stand the puttering ghosts, about to break up into ash at the minutest detonation of anger.

Even Picasso had his mystery.

We know these cars, blinded by their speed pattern, have their noses turned inward.

What is that sound of thunder?

I imagine Oxford, Mississippi in the Faulkner days, under a green shadow of not-knowingness so deep even the insects had to advance cautiously.

The moon is heating up.

O my brothers and sisters who believe in the myth of Woodstock, why won’t you let us hear if you have a singing voice?

The news, when it fits the gospels, I trust.

Where do we go after we have paid the toll?

I am passionate about the size and height of my desk, but not so much the coloring. I become blind between ten and two every day.

The cats have their conference, and it is a most pleasant barter.

The child who saw me with one eye, she is named after her father’s dead father.

Windows are conspiring in the assassination, so are the doors, the garbage chutes, the laundry room’s drainage pipes, all the oak pollen falling like a nuisance rain.

Come, let us smuggle eros past grandfatherly canons.

Maybe it was a mistake to be born. Maybe I am the reincarnation of Jesus—or Napoleon. Maybe I was the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. I can taste the blood still.

My father sacrificed me when I was still swaddled, wanting no piece of me, if I wouldn’t have the fortitude of Isaac.

So we hid in the Amazon. Inside the rain bubble you feel no rain. The earth is smoking its way to a new equilibrium. The fish are fried, and the corn tastes of powder. The Mayans feel vanquished.

Cricket is a slow game. So slow you have time to become self-conscious on the field.

I call myself a novelist. I have punctured many a character’s fatuous ego.

The keys to your house tinkle generously in my pocket, but I cannot make up my mind to exit the endless corridor, where I meet up with Cocteau’s demon lovers and greet them from the twenty-first century, a period that in their worst dreams they knew was bound to come one day. It’s just that once it happens no one knows how to phrase it to preserve their innocence.

You, who call yourself savvy, defriend me. I can’t penetrate the cats’ in-joke.

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Anis Shivani

Loki

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Ashley Capes

I am more empty
than something sucked dry
by a man lost thirty days
in a desert and now
found

I feel the leg hairs of ants on my temples
and they knock
and wait for someone to open the door,
but there is no doorman
in strangling suit of blue
or maroon, or some tertiary

instead there’s a cup on a table
and it’s just about to be filled,
though not until the little man
gets back with the paper,
and by the look of the spider webs
it seems that he left weeks ago
and was in quite a hurry, his hat still on a hallway peg

I’m still looking for him, his brain
is valuable; the way he’d read his own headlines
before acting out the best bits of movies
with woodchips from the flower pots
or lie and say he had Peter Sellers’ copy of
In the Mood
or that one of his ancestors slept
beneath Cadair Idris and went mad
and ate chicken feathers all year
until he wasted away.

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Ashley Capes

the tie clip [sampling Heidegger

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Peter Lach-Newinsky

when I walk in the garden my tie is kept down with a tie clip Being Becoming Care Angst Being-Towards-Death Un-Home The Mob Babble Uncanny Mood Voiding Void Thrown-ness Speaking Situation The Clearing Being-Ahead-of-Yourself Falling Existence Letting-Be Truth Forgetting Being Hannah Arendt Authenticity Decision Resolve when I walk in the garden my tie is kept down The National Socialist Revolution brings a complete revolution to our German existence Doctrine and ideas shall no longer govern your existence when I walk in the garden my tie The Führer himself and only he is the current and future reality of Germany and his word is your law If you see a light in my office at exactly 9 pm you can come We first understand the glory and the greatness of the Hitler revolution when we carry implanted deep within us this reflection Everything that is great is in the midst of the storm when I walk in the garden Hannah Now there is a sharp battle to be fought in the spirit of National Socialism which must not stifle on account of humanistic Christian notions that hold us down by their imprecision at exactly 9 pm you can come Study must once again become a gamble with no protection for the cowardly Whoever does not survive the fight will be left to lie on the field of battle when I walk in Hannah The new courage must become accustomed to constancy for according to the leaders the battle will go on for a long time It will be fought with all the strength of the new Reich which Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality with a tie clip It must be fought by a hard race of men Hannah who take no thought for themselves and who live constantly under ordeal ever striving toward their goal like a female Jewish palindrome where monologue becomes dialogue Being & Time lose their tie clip

[Heidegger quotes from: M. Heidegger, German Existentialism. Translated and with introduction by D. D. Runes, New York: The Wisdom Library Division of Philosophical Library Inc. 1965 (direct quotes from Heidegger)

The tie clip and ‘If you see a light’ – from: W. Honan, “Hannah Arendt’s love with the perfect Nazi”, Sydney Morning Herald 11/11/1995]

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Peter Lach-Newinsky

Silence in snowy streets

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Edward Reilly

The footprints were black as tarmac,
somehow withholding the light
which otherwise streamed across
the intersection of snowy streets:
perhaps they had captured her soul
as she walked from the basilica
over to the poet’s monument
and then to the small chapel
where she would sing a hosanna:
but all I could hear was silence.

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Edward Reilly

Ways of the Mind as Subject 46-60

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Keith Moul

light wanes in Trinidad;
the red ibises return;
the mind loses its wager with disbelief

light heartedly
the mind conceived the cello
without frets

for its own security
the mind forged
the food chain

the mind serves
as windlass to its weighty thoughts

the congenial mind
offers its best vintage,
breaks its thoughtful bread

birth grants equality by right –
nurturing minds ripen its fruits

the mind, relatively young,
knows to discount the arrogance
of the Age of Reason

the mind convinces best
in the vernacular
if the speaker is interested

ever the optimist, the mind
considers itself half full

if the mind takes a spin
it always comes back dizzy

a subtle mind tends
to confuse thought with action

alone in the Pantheon
the mind circles its rotunda
only to pause at inner peace

during a melodic phase
the mind turns a musical phrase

the mind confuses addresses
while searching its old neighborhoods

when minds oppose, is law sovereign
without enlightened police?

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Keith Moul

Dogs in Space

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Maria Takolander

Somewhere in Patagonia, an old man carries an axe, and a kitten blows like tumbleweed down a street otherwise empty. The closed storefronts are vacant as dreams, and the traffic lights like absence before the raw wind. It is barely dawn. At the bus stop, near a corner shop with peeling skin, the dogs begin to arrive, one by one, some greeting each other, silently, others standing or sitting alone. There is a dog with one eye, and another with three legs perched on the doorway ledge of the corner store, its windows boarded as if there was something terrible. Then comes an old woman with a wooden cart, one wheel shrieking. When she stops, she props the lid of her cart ajar for viewing. Next, there are the strangers, their backpacks stuffed with sleep. Some of the passengers arrive on foot, others in taxis. They bring the noise, and the day grows sturdy. The people are people. The dogs are dogs. The bus arrives like market day. And departs like evening. The dogs mill like litter in its lee, and the old woman closes the lid of her wagon against the wind. Then the dogs cross the road, some alone, others together, to the lonely panic of the pedestrian lights.

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Maria Takolander

When I met you in the hall

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Adrian Wiggins

When I met you in the hall you were all
inclement weather on a stony coast
and you held my hand as though we were more
than we could be: preppy kids in a pop-song duet
retrofitting dignifying deniable half-truths
at the end of the late-night double-feature
picture show.
We met again before your disability
support pension days, when I was a bright-eyed
ingenue at the agency after-party, coked-up,
with the hands of the randy partner (a known
pederast and pants man — and oh does he come
to a sticky end) all over me. He had character
not presence — it wasn’t a failing.
How I loved you
then but find now the unexamined life continuous
digital glitch presenting as analog texture.
In Fremantle we tour the wreck
of the Batavia — preserved immersed timbers tell us
humans are heavier than water, lighter than air —
blank reflections pale as faded decals slipped
from an astrolabe’s display case.

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged Adrian Wiggins

Issue Launches.Submissions Windows.

Issue Launches.
Submissions Windows.