Saturday, October 28, 2017

Rupert M. Loydell, THE WAY THE ARTIST CHOOSES


Benchpress, image by Rupert M. Loydell 



THE WAY THE ARTIST CHOOSES
for Lawrence

Brigadier Benchpress aka The Meter Man
is responsible for pulling the weeds up
each morning, before making breakfast
for the regiment of his dependents.

No-one is authorized to take his place,
he schedules all the activities and sets
the calendar, starting time and pace
of each and every day. He is on his way

to a heightened sense of decorum,
currently manufactures many works
influenced by his childhood dreams
of material expanding into space.

His are crack troops, involved in
art festivals, exhibitions and projects
too secret to name. Benchpress is
creating a complete world of art,

disguised as a garage of old cars
and a scruffy family home. He narrates
the forms of life and the nature of death,
how rust and oil consume metal,

how expensive acrylic paint is,
how he despairs of people in general,
and pursues wisdom and creativity,
old steam trains to take trips on.

Tormented by absence and anxiety,
he attempts to break the still surface
of our consciousness, to stabilize,
restrain and protect. All his threats

are silent, his memories will fade
tomorrow, but we will be left with
knotted and transformed language,
imitating the unconscious, lines

drawn on canvas when words fail
and spectators cannot articulate.
Colourful retrospectives of meaning
demand new purpose for self and time,

transmit life to those who have not
been seduced by digital space.
Benchpress offers us information
about invisible and visible boundaries,

ways to leave traces of belonging,
ways to engage with ourselves.
The world is infinite with no horizons,
only marks created by our hands.



—Rupert M. Loydell


Friday, October 27, 2017

Mike Ferguson, Spambolic Q&A


The Hacker’s Paradise, image by Daniel Y. Harris 




Spambolic Q&A

1

A nutritious asplenium scat –
fern juice fern juice fern juice:
farfetched? It is an endogenous
gastrointestinal squash.

Nutritious? Like chocolate
sicklewort, but beware the
rigorous luxuriant as an
expeditious streptomycin.

2

Incinerate comradery? In a
somersault of snow,
micro snow, to quell the
filthy respite of the codomain.

3

Attach a chamfer
inequivalent, and it is just
protrusion: all slope and no
direction. A meaningless meridian?

4

A girlie girlie sorority
the siren magnetite for girlies?
It is exculpatory to trust
in this inventory of gender.

5

An anthology of psychoanalytics?
It is: vainglorious, mutineering,
eigenfunctional, justiciable by the
fortiori of devious determinates.

6

To unify the metamorphosis of
trepidation and danger into something
awesome: the pupal
of the spam?

7

Adduce audibility to confer the
audible? Then hail ye conferee
of the audibility, this leverage
in the art of hearing.

8

Imploding belief smells of
frailty. Has faith lost its sheen?
In the allegory of this olfactory
snigger, the chronicle of failure.

9

Why are October leaves
at the top of tall poplars the last to
fall? This isn’t in the spam
but just in passing.

10

The stowaway was a
hoot, singing a medley
from Oklahoma.

Was he found straight away?

He was, by a bartender with
a squint, but he heard the
dharma of song.

So he saw the light?

11

To cogitate on the
postponement of infinitum:
paean to the grapheme in a
catechism of these words?


12

The littoral loquacity of waves
in the serendipitous acquiescence
to spam. Is it the wavy sisyphean
handwriting of the imagination?

Or is it the subrogation
in the sharing of the coalitions?
I say it is all about the flexure in
the goose-bumps of meaning.

13

This salvo, this various hail,
this kingdom of words. Does one
dine in a heaven? Yes, in the collocation
of finding questions in answers.



—Mike Ferguson




Sunday, October 22, 2017

AC Evans, THE DEVIL WEARS DADA


George Grosz and John Heartfield at the First Dada Trade Fair
Burchard’s Gallery, Berlin, Summer 1920




THE DEVIL WEARS DADA

Chosen for decadence, why not?
All new classic baby doll happiness delivered
Temporary emergency (gentle reminder), but we are
Now approaching artful industrial space:
Old lottery tickets, acupuncture, massage,
Esmerelda du Cane, half price – don’t miss out!
Creative Event Boutique, smash and grab
Run for it Kev! It’s the rozzers!
Eyelashes in all directions (but you’re so gorgeous)
Bongo la, bongo cha cha cha.
She was singing to herself very, very cute. Then,
Suddenly, a crowd of kinky latex pony girls
Ran yelping and screaming through the hall.
Wow!

Unlock the power to pop up anywhere, any time
Keep it personal speckled clouds (whatever).
Yeah, we’re behind the scenes at a trade fair,
Classy bricks cash & carry, confused onlookers,
Gateway to The Rising Sun, bar, BBQ and flashing novelties
Or Shade Enterprises family bucket, why not?
It’s your warm, caring workforce
Collect, swap, play, swipe right, scan this way
Local fresh. And lo! Behold! The Devil Wears Dada!
We saw a weird effigy pinned to the wall
Head like a glowing light bulb (whatever).
It’s not a joke, it’s not funny anymore.

Oi do me favour!
Diversion ends, no entry free to go,
New level… Hello? Hello?
We met up with young Melody Candles, and
Launched a drone from the top of Tatlin’s Tower
So we could film the scene; boy, the pictures were amazing!
Inter-star heavy cut to size award-winning dream designs
Pioneered by ‘Sexy Sophie from Staffs’, but
The Empress Octavia showed us the ropes and
All the tricks of the trade; you wanna climb my rigging?
Ready? Comments? Complaints? Suggestions?
No thanks, yeah, why don’t you…

Die kunst ist tot, the bitch whispered in a husky voice,
As she lovingly kissed the tip of my nose.
Bongo la, I whimpered submissively.
Welcome to the heart,
Oh nah nah nah, what’s your name?
Questions, questions, too many questions.
All across town skirt-crazy blokes are
Looking for Her,
‘Cos that She-Devil Wears Dada.
It was a great number; old press cuttings
And Constructivist make-up.
No doubt about it.
A great number, a great routine.
Well, did you evah?



—AC Evans

            

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Colin Winborn, John Tauler


Tauler Erasure, image by Irene Koronas 




John Tauler
(c. 1300 - 1361)

One man can spin,
another can make shoes.


             learn

inner      [...]

[…]        hidden.       ground

late fruit            ,,           

of dust                     derive
    
            of.       is

speaking out.      recording

     sparks come

at night.   earn.       sojourn

                no

                mere.       lore            found
    
                                         erring

babbling water.     seed.             utter.               

     first light    riven.          un

shining.         is.                     strive or

abutting.                  a bounding 

is still    just                within

     [...]                                        reach          

mother

this little           perimeter.               of           

                               [...]    is not.

               aloft





—Colin Winborn

Monday, October 16, 2017

Jonathan Mulcahy-King Interviews Eileen R. Tabios



Eileen R. Tabios
Love in a Time of Belligerence, X-Peri Series, Swan World, 2017 




Jonathan Mulcahy-King 
Interviews Eileen R. Tabios


JMK: What was the first piece of experimental writing that influenced your current trajectory and how can it be seen in your work today? 

ERT: The first “experimental” poets to move me in a deep way were John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Arthur Sze. I met them—both humans and their poems—through my book BLACK LIGHTNING (1998) that interviewed leading Asian American poets. I had just began writing poems two years earlier, so they had a major impact. At about that time, I also discovered the work of Jose Garcia Villa and I admired his eager textual experiments. Their work helped me break linear narrative which is how I began writing poems. Their poetry taught me alternative paths to poem-creation which, for me, came to incorporate a trust in the reader’s ability to help create significance out of a poem (this trust in the reader versus the poet preaching meaning at the reader also fit the transcolonial tendencies I brought to English which had been used to help colonize my birth land, the Philippines). I tend to think that the poet begins the poem’s experience, but it’s the reader (or audience) who finishes it.

This trust in the reader is seen in my work through my belief that words come with meanings and significances far beyond the dictionary and (thus) which the poet cannot anticipate. Thus, if you put any combination of words (and perhaps letters, but haven’t gotten there yet) together at random, it’s possible for a poem to surface. I push this perspective most recently in my “Murder, Death, Resurrection Project” which includes what I call “The MDR Poetry Generator”. This Generator contains a database of 1,167 lines that can be combined randomly to make a large number of poems; the shortest would be a couplet and the longest would be a poem of 1,167 lines. More information about it is available HERE: MDR I’ll also be releasing what will be this five-year poetry performance project’s monograph in 2018.

JMK: If your collective work were a piece of music, what would it be?

ERT: I actually feel this question should not be answered by me but by readers who know my work.

Once, someone ascribed cello music to my poetry, something I did not anticipate and for which I had no authorial intention. But I don’t disagree with that assessment.

JMK: I can see that, for me, it would be something post-classical, Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Olafur Arnalds, a kind of refined classical piece interceded by electronic movements…

ERT: I’m heartened they are raised by my poetry … though not from any intentions on my part—which is an example of how poetry transcends autobiography.

JMK: How would you describe the current state of poetry? Could you name some writers/ publishers that excite you right now?

ERT: Judging from poetry I recommend on LinkedIn, my top favorite publishers seem to be Ugly Duckling Presse at the number one spot, and then (in no particular order) Ahsahta Press, Black Radish Books, BlazeVOX Books, Dos Madres Press, Dusie, Farrar Straus Giroux, Flood Editions, gradient books, Graywolf Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, Lunar Chandelier Press, Marsh Hawk Press, New Directions, Norton, Omnidawn, Otoliths Books, Shearsman Books, Singing Horse Press, Talisman, Wave Books, Wesleyan and Zephyr Press.

Obviously there are authors who would be among my favorites and who are not necessarily published by the above. I won’t name names but cite instead those who actively interrogate (experiment with) form. Perhaps that’s why, looking at the above list of publishers, I have a preference for mostly those who are invested in the experimental tendency as a way to widen poetry’s expanse (there are some exceptions as some published an author or two with experimental tendencies who caught my eye but don’t generally have that interest as publisher).

I’d describe the current state of poetry as blessedly active. It’s also specifically active in reflecting the effects of technology (the internet, social media, et al). I don’t find this to be negative but I do sense some imbalance. The issue with technology is how it maximizes speed for quick results—by itself that process is not good or bad. But there is a lot to be said for its opposite, which is scale. Many things require large scale in order to be created or be effective. Scale includes time and attention. And sometimes technologically-based efficiency works against that. Right now, the scale seems tipped against works that require the depth of scale.

JMK: Is your MDR project a reflection of this culture, a kind of satire, as the work produced therein boasts a similar depth of source material, using manual algorithms to generate large-scale poetry?

ERT: Hm—I’d never thought of it as satire, though that’s certainly a legitimate read of the project, as are your reasons for thinking so. And perhaps, unconsciously on my part, there is that aspect as I’m nodding more in agreement than not.

Yet my conscious intention was actually to pay homage to the brilliance of those who created the programs that generate poetry. But I should note—partly as I’m not as technologically brilliant as those programmers—that my MDR is inspired by them but is deliberately manually generated. When I created the lines for MDR’s database, I read through each of the root source: 27 prior poetry collections. I then created lines not simply by copy-n-pasting excerpts but by noting my personal/subjective/temporal reactions at the time of readings; with hindsight, I perhaps emulated “artificial intelligence” rather than a computer program.

(As an aside, I’d like to share a link to a relatively obscure essay I wrote about my loving engagement with one of the contemporary world’s most adept poet-practitioners of technology/computer programs, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen: Moria Poetry You can see that I rely on manual versus computer programming partly due to my beliefs in subjectivity.)

The MDR certainly poses several layers of implications about poetry and modern society—or I hope there are. But several of these significances are as up to the reader as they are to me.

JMK: How would you describe “Babaylan Poetics” to a new reader, and the personal and political motivations behind this form?

ERT: “Babaylan” refers to an indigenous Filipino leader who functions as a healer and  community leader, among other roles. I had referenced the term to relate to indigenous Filipino practices, specifically “kapwa,” a construct of Filipino psychology meaning togetherness. That is, that all beings are related. In an earlier poetics essay, I’d correlated these indigenous elements with my poetics as such:

There’s an image from pre-colonial Philippine times of a human standing with a hand lifted upwards; if you happened to be at a certain distance from the man and took a snapshot, it would look like the human was touching the sky. I’d described the significance of this image as the moment, the space, from which I attempt to create poems. In the indigenous myth, the human, by being rooted onto the planet but also touching the sky, is connected to everything in the universe and across all time, including that the human is rooted to the past and future—indeed, there is no unfolding of time. In that moment, all of existence—past, present and future—has coalesced into a singular moment, a single gem with an infinite expanse. In that moment, were I that human, I am connected to everything so that there is nothing or no one I do not know. I am everyone and everything, and everything and everyone is me. In that moment, to paraphrase something I once I heard from some Buddhist, German or French philosopher, or Star Trek character, ‘No one or nothing is alien to me.'”

Last night I did a reading of my poem “PilipinZ” from my new book Love In A Time of Belligerence and it ends with the lines:

“But I will never forget we walk on the same planet and breathe the same air. I will never forget the same sun shines on us. I created my own legacy: No one is a stranger to me.”

It may be an impossible goal, but in poetry that’s my goal: that no one or nothing is a stranger to me. I hope to practice a poetics of both knowledge and empathy.


Sunday, October 15, 2017

Volodymyr Bilyk, Scanography 9


Scanography 9, Volodymyr Bilyk



























Volodymyr Bilyk is a writer, translator, and visual poet from the Ukraine. His works include: visual poems in the series This is Visual Poetry (2013), CIMESA (2013), Casio's Pay-Off Peyote (2013), SCOBES (2013), THINGS (2014), Laugh Poems (2014), Vispo Ay Ai Ay (2014), “To When Tea Ties Hence to Wank It Too” / “Eminent Means of Basil Dado Hem-Welt” in The Chapbook 5 (2015), “Heartbeat, Footclick, Machine Gun Vocalizes” (2016), Understanding (of language) are not enough (2016).

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Daniel Y. Harris & Jonathan Mulcahy-King, Excerpt 1.6 from Licentiam


γυνή, image by Olia Svetlanova  



Excerpt 1.6 from Licentiam


1.6

docility stitch unfurled spews  leydig cells to mount
vainglorious modem cellules cue the pulping mallet
failed RTCPeerConnection horns  somatic apologia
brace for  web-farm insertion well-greased fuck  toy
as scorp and stingray wrist or  carotid artery   daubs  
resurgent lick if heavenups knots to comb  hismatic
hair by deavatars in the ruck to foretell cum catalos,
stump to let out the nose as duct tape in a gloryhole
          sate a palfrey slow wax and sulphur melt  boils resin 


                       —Daniel Y. Harris & Jonathan Mulcahy-King





Sunday, October 8, 2017

Nathan Spoon, Excerpts from Doomsday Bunker


Rise of the Eschatons, image by Daniel Y. Harris  




Excerpts from Doomsday Bunker


Labyrinth + Nozzle

This is horrible
as a leather cupcake and
as delicious too.

It is roadkill and cloud erection
thrills of whales leaping
from miniature oceans

only to fall back into
paranoid computational
theories. Thank goodness

for red vines crawling a rock face
in a hopscotch neighborhood.
This feels like a comfortable

if out-of-use silo only
D. H. L. would pinch
the nipples of. Break off

another heel with
a buttered face and a hairdo
of live eels. Bulls are

appropriated for art daily
and the tornado that
sucked up a tidy lawn

has sprayed it against the walls
of the book somebody
will check out indefinitely

tomorrow. Another child
is weaponizing bones while reading
The Anathemata.  It’s true

coffee is a necessity
for millions who have trouble
sleeping with stranglers.


As Cinematic as Fingers

The ring goes boom!
The ring is panoramic.
The ring adds color

to watery horoscopes.
Pump a series of hairy fangs
into the spirit of the ring.

The ring! The ring! It is
a byte and a conglobulation
of bytes sliding up the banister.

The ring is made of wings
and flies around the banister
in a large trunk with

an escort. Kindness
is erasing generic notions
of equality while the ring

glints in real time
as if Bavarian gentians
are typically spun

from neon code. Love
is talking in a forest of toes. Love
is reducible to quantity.

Tomorrow shocks from the future
are collaged into excesses
of Northern Light activity.

The ring slides between
animal species. From crevasses
glands drip pheromones

leaving eyelashes in various states
of distortion. A vodka cream puff
sleeps inside the moon.


W of Bones

A priss knows hard work
is the celestial root.
In the photo of No Go

along gloppy edges people
are running in terror.
People are kissing in rain

in antique photographs
where conscious choice
writhes in lavender water.

It is time to detonate
the eyes of bees covered
in dust in Wittgensteinian

pudding rare as the grass straying
the shallows of rivers.
A data scoop through

the backdoor left firebrands
scattered across elastic meadows.
The academe, the academe

is waiting for new liver petals.
In breech a stain of pain
beeps major allegiance

walks backward through
compartmentalization. Hordes
of seasick wires are warming

the black Northern air. John F.
is the rivulet he was
before his birth. Try wrecking

a poet’s name by changing a letter.
The pants proper exercise
will inspire are fantastic foil!


Astrological Proclivities

Bells from hell are clanging
through water lilies
and numerous hours

are squishy now. Gemini + Virgo
= Virgo + Gemini. The best time
for easing into happiness

is now. All live in a good world
which will achieve totality
of saturation tomorrow at noon.

It is night across most of space.
Space is big. Spacious even.
All touch space. All are comprised

mostly of ghostly space. Space
is what makes a good world.
Space also makes hours squishy.

Space is easy. It’s the good world
and all else exuding complexity.
Thank goodness for complexity!

Space is an infant being
continuously birthed into
a casket covered with hashtags.

Because of this sentient beings
each have a star sign
although inanimate objects

do not. Period. Because of this
commas are mostly extraneous
and days of the week break

out their finest occultwear.
Rusty gills are exhuming magic
spires puncturing heaven.


To a Culture Vulture

Yesterday is the preferable day
for humanity. It is the day
life slides gracefully through

its own veins. Yesterday
is a basket fashioned from silk.
What matters more however

is what will happen tomorrow.
Today is the sigil of tomorrow.
Today is the sigil of weird

analytics which must be stopped
before they can curtain
windows. All who yearn

for weird analytics will be
tasked with creating interface
for animadversive investors

in the sigil of tomorrow. Silk
+ milk = milk × silk ÷ by tomorrow.
These are not equations.

These are facts and eventually
facts will erase tomorrow.
A doctor finds pleasure

in keeping tomorrow alive today.
A doctor is a demon of sorts.
When a hand lands it snorts

in a manner Paul V. once felt
shapeshifting up his elemental
spine. A doctor breaks the unity

of earth water fire and air. All
are prepared to gesticulate among
mounds of paint powder.


The Congratulators 

Owls are perched along
the bottoms of her eyelids.
Owls clear as dreams

are guiding her to the next reddit
selling fried baloney sandwiches.
A sea soused up the sun

and clacked around in armor
colored by newish fevers. Owls ensure
it’s time for an omnivorous snorkel

and a praise. Owls with oars
for feathers are resisting
metronomic currents in bio lines.

Thank goodness for owls!
When music blows out
of nuclear devices the talons

of owls will defend what is left
of nature leaving only the unnatural
world to burn. Owls will be

headquartered at hidden locations
beneath mountains. Although the air
wants punctuation thank goodness

for drinkable water! Thank goodness
for stubbornness and folly! One day
sock phobias will evaporate. For

now it’s time to drink as H. said at C.’s
demise. Someday drinking will save
the owls. Thank goodness

for voices of owls! Thank goodness
for rocking chairs and reddits
and the bottoms of her eyelids!




—Nathan Spoon