Van Valckenborch's Cube

Read another work supposedly by Rene Van Valckenborch and supposedly translated from the Flemish (side of his double oeuvre) by Martin Krol on the excellent Ekleksographia webzine, as part of the post-Oulipo issue edited by Philip Terry. Read the introduction to the quennets and follow the link to the poems themselves (a pdf).

Happy New Year! (They ended up in this book.)

Twitterodes

Twitterodes
for my followers and for the
followers of my followers

■ 100 (twittersonnet)

bearded ev
ergreen ov
erflowing
a craggy c

astle wall
/bag of ce
ment flat
ened and b

roken on t
ramlines t
o leave du

st/bike bu
ckled wher
e it hangs


■ 99 piggybacking girls round the monument/NEPTUNE stamping his horses (a café steals his water thunder)/black tooth windows/ladies sipping ORVAL ■ 98 a moorhen and fluffed chick stand on the girder wet webs safe from tidal flow/all motion is relative/cannot be seen beyond their conception ■ 97 Time dies. Oak leaves spread at water-level. As many roofs on display as at a roofers’ convention. How many maps to deal with a given space? ■ 96 time at the heart of space is movement/the rear of the fish restaurant lurching into the river/the empty boat with outboard bobbing/creaking ■ 95 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/cannot be seen beyond their conception hoisted from river/sagging over the waterline on the bend ■ 94 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/analysis destroyed the solidity of this fisherman’s house/sagging over the waterline on the bend ■ 93 she’s reading a book to remind her how a saint should act or:/a critique of space high above the Botermarkt/halo or crown/a forlorn corner ■ 92 chancels with bats’ wings architecture out of Hell creating the illusion of time/cars parked like odd shoes lined up under a hat-stand/blent ■ 91 green ironwork crawls up the side of the building/mental and social at once/over the way where I park my bike/Ghent where I have never lived ■ 90 his arm with hands in pockets of gesture among parcels of space/mustard gas forest seeps across paths of ice/his lowered head a wan pellicle ■ 89 faces constructed by background (interference)/bodies shudder into ice-floe paint-flick a texture of rainbow lemon and tree blot/in creases ■ 88 stroll through a world of scratches slashing burning grounded by the medium without message sinking into its impositions/fingerflicking ■ 87 past her snarl windows across the canal she tightens her open cup leotard adjusts crotchless crotch lets the world pass brushing her breasts ■ 86 something fishy about the body/head grafted from myth/curved to the tree that sways behind its back/no arms or branches but toes and roots ■ 85 the bushes look like huddled hedgehogs with their backs turned/how many maps might be needed to deal with this given space to code or decode ■ 84 the code is more deceptive than the thing when the thing is an acorn on a column or an empty plaque embossed with graffiti ■ 83 thru’ marble arch tarpaulin on which Magritte’s curtain-building is opening on flat summer skies (behind which dreams the renovating palace) ■ 82 cloven hooves aloft double breath spout/a floating medium latticed with lacy rippled contrast/class war ■ 81 the subject cannot do without the object pleading in the language of things: of handsized bricks/cut glass/cones conjured from flat tiles ■ 80 objects swamped by facts or/spitting into a little cup/ejaculations/measured by money/wishing well full of best wishes/vacant inscriptions ■ 79 patiently sit all day arms folded head bent into space complete with vanishing point spewing a lip-moulded stream of eternal spittle ■ 78 sliced buildings profess professions/professors abstract perspective inscribing human relations across the square/crowds gawp/clouds glower ■ 77 ODE TO DIVERSITY/gilded trinkets tumbling down the face of the Museum of Amnesia/Hindu woman miming destitution with anguished fists: kerbed ■ 76 laboured place/floral bolts into wood/a dragon sheered through/hand raised (swordless)/shield shielding nothing/ruthless eyes & hacked nose ■ 75 inside the frame resembles everything else/repetitious spaces repeated within repeating scenes of the Markt selling itself to itself/outside ■ 74 rows of lights under gables compose the square/a statue does not know that it is one/issuing orders or delivering blessings/texture blooms ■ 73 a set of real operations made the man in a kagoul bend over to examine the dog’s arse/another set made the dog-cobbles-bollards-street-city ■ 72 stone dog cocking a leg against the corner bollard rue de Chartreux monumentalising this quotidian moment fleeting active yet still on guard ■ 71 each pinnacle pinched with gestures/hands spread, legs tossed, torsos twisted, heads bent/no faces under hats to challenge a scythe of cloud ■ 70 ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’/ICI OÙ PAUL VERLAINE BLESSA ARTHUR RIMBAUD D’UN COUP DE REVOLVER ■ 69 story twists as the narrator turns (blue pen marks on his thigh/some eye sorts this out/foliage entwines marble) turns to caress the hidden ■ 68 he appeared from the skies (an hour or so ago) skin scaly oily carbuncular and craterous unshaven/pores collecting the grit of this world ■ 67 leaf tickles founder’s ear/hand around shoulder/above finny cloak that superhumanises/bleached face adorned with felt-tip moustaches/and me ■ 66 projective space for projectile voicings projected onto you as responsibility’s double breath ■ 65 put this back on the map: (t)race the webbed salute/the contorted leap (fixed)/the water breath against a rhythm of cars-trees-lampposts ■ 64 punch up on a pinpoint squalid flailing in a narrative that covers its tracks like a map of porous borders on the point of being torn into ■ 63 which map’s he on/giving his game away escapes the arcade with jacket over shoulder scowling/invisibility unplotted/a post-it in a phone box ■ 62 as quick as mind he sleeps in a chair curved like a wave carrying his outdoor dreams hands folded liver spotted the city map ■ 61 un soldat inconnu competing with discourses to travel to a ring of growling gryphons holding up the dish of flame for een onbekende soldaat ■ 60 aloft column beyond gilded fringe Léopold heading up clouds/below gold extracted from the c(o)re of the 1831 constitution ■ 59 Function as ornament. A choice of walls packages the day. You could talk excrescence into style. Figures twisted into narrative stall. ■ 58 figures twisted into narrative move as soon as you near bleed from eye sockets rumble into your body space (Johan Muyle) ■ 57 this writing is not a body/stumps along beside rails (cracked dish carries its flame) steps on grass scratches head/this body isn’t writing ■ 56 ‘because the world is in colour’ (explains Abbas): the black and white bride marries the corpse in the photo they hold next to her ■ 55 salmon brick house on the rise beyond the canal too low to register upon whatever it is that records windows punctured with Flemish darkness ■ 54 a pagan flap of wings and tangle of talons over a body frozen and erected to the status of myth/beyond the wire cupped tulips multiple arch ■ 53 macro glass in its flat and curved space varieties abutted/micro figurative dummy catching the taint of the city on its greening skin ■ 52 the day is occurring to itself we walk into it and I think with the back of my head facing it ■ 51 I’m the man under the hedge arch looking at the dome of Le Botanique/you are the one who sees me beyond the lily pond framed by your looking ■ 50 I’m a lamppost man a lawn corpse man a pigeon man a straight path man a modernist man a hedge twig man a UFO flash in the dark trees man ■ 49 pulsions of perfect embodiedness the roof steps into cloud masturbating a place in blacked-out childhood forever under construction ■ 48 inscribed in me: me at the attic window the space of me looking out over Lievestraat and the cellar window peeping at passers’ ankles knees ■ 47 glass buildings in non-utile shapes refract each other narrowing sky spoutspray steaming below/hoisted man washes his way around the curves ■ 46 BETWEEN sagging leaves and crouching fur/soft feet and hard cobbles/canopied shade and light so naked it is invisible/WEAVES TIME’S QUESTION ■ 45 horsechestnuthands wave over water/internationalbrickwork leads to the fountain/waterspouthalo behind the vigilstatue/THINK: where are we ■ 44 column sprouting/horns of a devil//or family tree as gurgling/gargoyles//the impression of feet/on the cobbles prints unreadable/history ■ 43 rotate to landscape: shadowed archway a reservoir of ink or/pitch sky with horizon of bricklight/crabplants scuttling wherever’s up ■ 42 heraldic ensigns horizonless on the thick glass of the windows of the Huys der Liefde/pulled inside out a house of Lipsius/Montanus/Ortelius ■ 41 unseatable throne? ■ 40 rhinolalia muzzle nudges for a broken song ■ 39 aloft surveying all that isn’t his mistaken for shirtless carving beside stirring gauze that screens the equine statue/its doubtful gestures ■ 38 reclusive Balthasar’s golden compass grips the globe crippled inky fingers measure the surface of maps the ridges of print on finest paper ■ 37 the marvellous is awkward/scribbling among Plantin’s shelves dialoguing with categories the moment’s historian shot through with knowledge ■ 36 produce this house as you move through it reading the print and map rooms navigating your history thinking about what’s not present/leaning ■ 35 Plantin’s image rises from brickwork latticed windows like uncut sheets: proofread the bookish house looking inward to its garden ■ 34 of the material where material is stone as solid as stone should be between praxis and representation: lion propped up on its human fist ■ 33 moss on the bark of the tree like green light it may go around the world we live it and we think it and it thinks us in its living ■ 32 scowling Christ with sword and scales the twisted Host a print of the Spanish Fury identities fixed throwntogetherness without scatter ■ 31 letters reversed on milky window absent depth unmarked by time and drainpipes spewing tendrillar wires that sing Latvia Estonia Finland ■ 30 frame the red window frame which frames the curved cream underbelly of the stairs and the varnished wood banisters which follow them ■ 29 spatial scales stepped roofs encounter flows of flags abstractions of maps tides of information against waves of nostalgia catching light ■ 28 space outwith place where roofs meet sky: on false chimneys or high points: gold eagle/alert fox/be-piked yeoman/mariner shading his eyes ■ 27 silver crown midpoint over iron gateway a compression point funnelling people: space-time coordinate for inter-species solidarity ■ 26 the segmented reflection of the outer window ghosted its ornate patterns of authority its relative position beyond glass in focal illusion ■ 25 a priori steps of Antwerp station where people produce (carrying pushchairs lifting children hauling rucksacks) pause by marble pillars/noon ■ 24 flat planes of faces curve as intervals in negative distance a single red flag flutters on a window ledge white motif curled shyly away ■ 23 three men in sou’westers tend towards the Swiss poster promising ‘More than meets the eye’ in English/bent one way-street sign arrowing ■ 22 lateral shots of words past floral baskets gilded cornices irregularly stepped balconies café parasols the logos of international exchange ■ 21 guild houses round the Markt surface cut to the depths of the manifesto: shoulder to shoulder their tight asperities ■ 20 sculpted sleep as lids are moulded shut/a masturbator’s grip upon the mayoral scroll LEONARD VANDENHECKE ■ 19 tensions in space not forms cut into (our) time they are floating not waiting striking out not enduring ■ 18 the closer you get the less there is (approach as an eye) abrupt delineations that are read as shaded building bricks on a 2D matrix ■ 17 crouch under the ledge upon which the knight stretches an overstepping toe the space and scope left for the roughed in/beyond genealogy ■ 16 rows of knives scissors for variation a syntax of blades behind the window of the coutellerie a razor’s discrimination between flesh and air ■ 15 synchronic pan: Flemish with crane aloft/an ice façade drips/to fore: fountain where Calder mobile swings like a sail but dances in time ■ 14 decompartmentalisation of externals: glass for clouds and girders blossoming style on the superface/for depth: old perfume old iron ■ 13 fixed point or vortex/canopied ingress egress/the solidity of glass held by black wrought ironwork a cage for shoppers musical instruments ■ 12 tactical formations of repetition: conical trees amid scratched bark plane/hedges and gangly stems/garbage urns/pools of dust turds in sand ■ 11 brickwork syntax with wide cement connectives hanging there and/or sculpted there heraldic and abstracted the shell of the shell ■ 10 more an homunculus bent knees whorish pelvic stretch: the curved water pipe up his arse launches a parabola his eternal stream completes ■ 9 not botticellian scalloped arrival dispersal of piss-steam piddle-trickle the smallest statue of illiberality in the world ■ 8 blue wall pixellated in close-up winged with cracking paintwork steps down which mythic characters chase in contiguity/coincidence/overload ■ 7 nose into perspective (skip with a rope on the roof) smell basket of flowers red and purple synthesised into the spaces you sniff out ■ 6 a slash across a speckled sky/the slope of the roof/the tilt of an eye//time full of now perspective ■ 5 not the heavy timbers of the shadowy door but the saints poised for studied martyrdom in slanted sunlight tinting ingress ■ 4 De Grote Markt/carve supernal genealogies onto each spatial container/or: float them there as if by human intention ■ 3 Doric Bourse time makes KNACK space in place of crossing experience with body lurching motorbike at rest against wall of bleached exchange ■ 2 spire at dusk spearing vapour trails a lone gull gliding above the pinnacle of Europe flecked wash over clenched dark buildings ■1 breathing water spout against an irradiated dusk ripple ■ 0 tweets @ www.twitter.com/Van Valckenborch 2009-2008

Still on www.twitter.com/VanValckenborch

Twitterode 98

■ 98 a moorhen and fluffed chick stand on the girder wet webs safe from tidal flow/all motion is relative/cannot be seen beyond their conception

Twitterode 95

■ 95 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/cannot be seen beyond their conception hoisted from river/sagging over the waterline on the bend

Twitterode 94

■ 94 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/analysis destroyed the solidity of this fisherman’s house/sagging over the waterline on the bend

Twitterode 87

■ 87 past her snarl windows across the canal she tightens her open cup leotard adjusts crotchless crotch lets the world pass brushing her breasts

Twitterode 83

■ 83 thru’ marble arch tarpaulin on which Magritte’s curtain-building is opening on flat summer skies (behind which dreams the renovating palace)

Twitterodes 79 and 80

■ 80 objects swamped by facts or/spitting into a little cup/ejaculations/measured by money/wishing well full of best wishes/vacant inscriptions ■ 79 patiently sit all day arms folded head bent into space complete with vanishing point spewing a lip-moulded stream of eternal spittle

Twitterodes 72 and 73

■ 73 a set of real operations made the man in a kagoul bend over to examine the dog’s arse/another set made the dog-cobbles-bollards-street-city ■ 72 stone dog cocking a leg against the corner bollard rue de Chartreux monumentalising this quotidian moment fleeting active yet still on guard

Twitterode 70

■ 70 ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’/ICI OÙ PAUL VERLAINE BLESSA ARTHUR RIMBAUD D’UN COUP DE REVOLVER

Twitterode 63 and a possible sighting

■ 63 which map’s he on/giving his game away escapes the arcade with jacket over shoulder scowling/invisibility unplotted/a post-it in a phone box


Does this image actually show the author?

Dylan Harris, author of the excellent Antwerp (Wurm Press, 2010), reckons he's had an encounter with Mr Van Valckenborch on his travels. Read his account at

http://dylanharris.org/prose/poetry/rvv.shtml

Twitterodes 60 & 61

■ 61 un soldat inconnu competing with discourses to travel to a ring of growling gryphons holding up the dish of flame for een onbekende soldaat ■ 60 aloft column beyond gilded fringe Léopold heading up clouds/below gold extracted from the c(o)re of the 1831 constitution

twitterodes 35-42

42 heraldic ensigns horizonless on the thick glass of the windows of the Huys der Liefde/pulled inside out a house of Lipsius/Montanus/Ortelius ■ 41 unseatable throne? ■ 40 rhinolalia muzzle nudges for a broken song ■ 39 aloft surveying all that isn’t his mistaken for shirtless carving beside stirring gauze that screens the equine statue/its doubtful gestures ■ 38 reclusive Balthasar’s golden compass grips the globe crippled inky fingers measure the surface of maps the ridges of print on finest paper ■ 37 the marvellous is awkward/scribbling among Plantin’s shelves dialoguing with categories the moment’s historian shot through with knowledge ■ 36 produce this house as you move through it reading the print and map rooms navigating your history thinking about what’s not present/leaning ■ 35 Plantin’s image rises from brickwork latticed windows like uncut sheets: proofread the bookish house looking inward to its garden

Twitterode 30

■ 30 frame the red window frame which frames the curved cream underbelly of the stairs and the varnished wood banisters which follow them



(Read the stream as it appears on Twitter here. There are less than 10 posts left, until it reaches 100.)

Twitterode 20

■ 20 sculpted sleep as lids are moulded shut/a masturbator’s grip upon the mayoral scroll LEONARD VANDENHECKE ■

Twitterode 16

■ 16 rows of knives scissors for variation a syntax of blades behind the window of the coutellerie a razor’s discrimination between flesh and air

Twitterodes 13-15

■ 15 synchronic pan: Flemish with crane aloft/an ice façade drips/to fore: fountain where Calder mobile swings like a sail but dances in time ■ 14 decompartmentalisation of externals: glass for clouds and girders blossoming style on the superface/for depth: old perfume old iron ■ 13 fixed point or vortex/canopied ingress egress/the solidity of glass held by black wrought ironwork a cage for shoppers musical instruments

Twitterode 11

■ 11 brickwork syntax with wide cement connectives hanging there and/or sculpted there heraldic and abstracted the shell of the shell

Twitterodes 9 & 10

■ 10 more an homunculus bent knees whorish pelvic stretch: the curved water pipe up his arse launches a parabola his eternal stream completes ■ 9 not botticellian scalloped arrival dispersal of piss-steam piddle-trickle the smallest statue of illiberality in the world

Read Rene's Twitter Trickle (twitterodes)

at www.twitter.com/VanValckenborch

(his Flemish half, translated by Martin Krol) (They ended up in this book.)

Robert Sheppard: Two booklets

Robert Sheppard

Two new booklets available

The Given (prose unwritings of autobiographical texts)

Looking thru' a Hole in the Wall (poems about Berlin with images by Patricia Farrell).


The Given may be purchased here
Read Rupert Loydell's review of it here
Berlin Bursts is available for £4 from

Ship of Fools
78 Nicander Road
Liverpool
L18 1HZ.

(cheques made out to R Sheppard)

You can also read about writing The Given below in the last post.

The Given will be launched on 30th September at Anthony Burgess House in Manchester : 7.00
(with Scott Thurston and Antony Rowland)

Robert Sheppard : Writing The Given

MATERIALS + PROCEDURE

an account of the writing of The Given (Knives Forks and Spoons: 2010), part one of the autrebiographies now collected by KFS as Words Out of Time in April 2015; buy here. (The Given is no longer available separately.) This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).  

This work began as a project – out of an existential dilemma – to deal with particular MATERIALS: the piles of journals, diaries, and less categorisable autobiographical writings that I have accumulated since 1965 when they began, and that I have periodically attempted to use for writing. In its opting for PROCEDURE it is thus a conceptual project, but is perhaps not quite an example of ‘uncreative writing’ as that term has come to be used, but is a creative ‘unwriting’, to adapt a term I have used to describe my earlier texts refunctioned or re-moulded from others. Perhaps the work might be thought of as an ‘unwriting through’ of the MATERIALS, but such proliferation of terms is only useful if it assists a gloss on PROCEDURE.

Part one began with a simple notion: that I would list – in an ironic reference to Joe Brainard’s influential anaphoric I Remember – all the events that I did not remember as I read through these records anew. I anticipated a ten page work covering 34 years. Instead I amassed 34 pages but I only reached 1979 (the end of ‘The Hungry Years’ and the beginning of ‘The Drowning Years’ in my personal periodisation)! Before beginning this project I had an unjustified belief in the accuracy of my memory; now I felt like Confused of Hippo, whose words I used as an epigraph to that first draft:

When then I remember memory, memory itself is, through itself, present with itself: but when I remember forgetfulness, there are present both memory and forgetfulness; memory whereby I remember, forgetfulness which I remember. But what is forgetfulness, but the privation of memory? 1 (St. Augustine)

The re-discovery of a series of autobiographical fragments written in 1989, ‘Voices in White Noise’ provided a series of sharply delineated memories (some of them lost over the intervening 20 years) to counter the record of forgetfulness. I combined and selected from the two texts, using a stochastic method, aiming at concision and counterpoint, although the ‘I don’t remember’ sentences dominate. The simple PROCEDURE had thus begun to grasp the complexity of the MATERIALS with scant regard for autobiographical shape. The text is allowed to make its own history, to become the biography of a practice of writing rather than my autobiography, or ‘My Life’ to refer to the title of Lyn Hejinian’s text that had both inspired and hindered me over the years. So much for memory. (Part one is also published in The Alchemist's Mind  edited by David Miller - and I have also selected it as part of my Selected Poems: History or Sleep.)  

Part two has a simple PROCEDURE – to ask one (difficult) question of the ‘hero’ of the text after reading each page of the MATERIALS, an intensely written lengthy, detailed journal. It thus distorts the passage of time, since only 1979-1982 are ‘covered’ in this exhausting paragraph. Not all the questions were finally selected and the order again resists, but does not obliterate, temporal sequence.

Part three deals with the most transformative years of my journal writing and the most rapid development of my poetics. The PROCEDURE adopted is largely that used in writing Letter from the Blackstock Road, which was written during this period (1983-1993) and is referred to in the writing: the accumulation of text and the working of that through a stochastic method of using guided chance, liberated choice, dice and eye, hand and mind, a kind of improvised textual performance at the desk. 2

The final section posed different problems. The diaries which stretch from 1994-2009 (supplemented by a few notebooks) are written in a deliberately non-literary style and often record banalities. I decided to settle on the months of May – season of elections in particular – and to account for each one (we had now moved into ‘The Age of Irony’ and ‘September 12’). I was thinking of the ‘mayday’ strand (1997-99) of Twentieth Century Blues which intertextualises these writings.3 An early draft – one paragraph accounting for each May – appears in Erbacce 18 (2009), but I wanted to disrupt chronology further to allow the MATERIALS to speak in their own new-found voice, and did so by re-adopting the PROCEDURE of one of the ‘Mayday’ texts themselves, ‘Report on Seaport’, which was written around the 1997 General Election and whose MATERIALS (sentences) were arranged in alphabetical order. (This is referred to in the text and thus it describes its constraint.)

These writings, even down to finding a title, have been the most troublesome that I have attempted. (At one point I intended to interleave between the sections other writings: the autobiographical piece ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’, 4 the critical article ‘The Colony at the Heart of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid 1980s London Creative Environment’, 5 and the meditation ‘Critical Tuning: Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing’ 6.) As the text attests at various points, this is not my first attempt, nor my second, at such a project. Despite the boldness of PROCEDURE the processes of editing have been as arduous – if not more so – than in other, less conceptual unwritings.

The Given is reprinted and now only available as part of my autrebiography Words Out of Time: see here and here. But  it's all still there!

1. The Confessions of St. Augustine, Airmont: Clinton, 1969.
2. ‘Letter from the Blackstock Road’, in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, Salt: Cambridge, 2007: 48-58.
3. In Complete Twentieth Century Blues: ‘Report on Seaport, mayday 97’: 243-9, ‘A Dirty Poem and a Clean Poem for Roy Fisher, mayday 98’: 315-6; ‘The End of the Twentieth Century, mayday 99’: 331-50.
4. ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ in eds. Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009.
5. In ed. Louis Armand, Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, Litteraria Pragensia: Prague, 2010.
6. Unpublished.