I mention the pleasures of a certain Liverpool
pub, the Belevedere, in my last post here (and the poems on its walls), and
indeed, on Sunday I visited the Belve (but forgot to point the poems out to my
companion Mike). Then we visited Ye Cracke (a veritable Beatles site, of
course), The (‘little’) Grapes, before using our Old Bastards Bus Passes to
glide down Smithdown to check out the Handyman (which graced this blog here, on the Ern Malley night - it was our venue),
and in particular Nick Ellis. I’ve seen him about three times now at the
Handyman and I like his combination of 1950s rock and roll singing, with folk
style arpeggio guitar work, Scouse narrativity, and ending up with something
that doesn’t sound like any of those things. Try to catch him if you can. He
often does this Sunday 6-9 slot. Twitter keeps you up to date. https://twitter.com/nickellis_music
The Belvedere pub in Liverpool is a particularly delightful Liverpool haunt, with a vast range of regulars and locals. One night I was talking to the landlord John O'Dowd about the fact that I knew three poets (the third is Ranjit Hoskote) who had written about the pub (had written poems which feature and name the pub). As he had a holograph Brian Patten poem on the wall already, I suggested he added ours to his collection. On Friday Chris McCabe and I dropped in to the pub to admire our handiworks. (With Sarah Crewe and Patricia Farrell.)
Above you can see me reading Chris' poem (which is about a meeting he and I had in the Belve), and behind me lies my poem, 'Meaning Me', a sonnet from the sequence 'It's Nothing'. If you're in Liverpool, do drop by and read them. And stay for a glass or pint of beer, or even a gin. (John has added to the language the noun Ginnaseum to describe his boozer.
Here's a different poem by Chris that mentions the pub, 'The Poets of Liverpool'. And my poem appears in Molly Bloom 13 (here, but this link doesn't get you to the right poems at the moment). My poem names some famous and infamous customers; Chris names a famous dog of the pub.
Ranjit Hoskote’s poem about the
Belve is online. It’s here.
But not 10 years ago TODAY! I forgot the date, last month, the 15th. It was published by Salt on the day of
the launch in 2008 at Bluecoat, of which two recordings may be seen here. What
is not recorded is the panic earlier in the day, tracking the books as they moved across England, towards Liverpool! But arrive they did, too late for me to learn to read from the volume itself, to navigate its 400+ pages, but soon enough to be able to sell (a lot of) them. Ade Jackson filmed these two extracts from the Poetry in the City event he organised. The first clip contains 'Smokestack Lightning', using some of the dying technology I had used for a London performance in 1990 or so; the second is 'A Dark Study for Lee Harwood', a quiet affair, in lineated prose, a form of the late 1990s. I write about the event here. (And give the text of 'Smokestack' too. It is not easy to hear what I'm saying at times, since I move around and manipulate tapes. I think the audience could hear.)
The book, now available in a paperback edition, can be purchasedhere.
There are some more details of this massive project there too, though the
publication date given is wrong! It was April 15th 2008. I hope if you haven't got it you will consider playing a decade-long worth of catch up!
Twentieth Century Blues was written between 1989-2000, and incorporated earlier texts when it needed to. I think of the book now as the first volume of a collected poems. In fact, the book in full is called Complete Twentieth Century Blues.
Twentieth Century Blues is a network (or ‘net/(k)not- work(s)’ as I called it) of texts that are interrelated
by 75 multilinear ‘strands’. That the project would seem open to the technology of
hyperlinks did not pass me by, and I would like to utilise this in future
presentations, although I conceived of the network’s design before this
possibility, or its now apposite metaphor, became available. Imagine the strands as links. ('Links in Ink' was actually the title of the evolving index that I published serially throughout the project's writing. Or it was the title by its end.)
One POETICS of Twentieth Century Blues may be read here
Another, 'Linking the Unlinkable' (poetics of Twentieth
Century Blues)
here.
I can be seen reading some poems from Twentieth Century
Blueshere as
part of the Other Room Readings in 2008. (On the first clip I read ‘A Dirty
Poem and Clean Poem for Roy Fisher’, ‘From a Stolen Book’ followed by a
selection from ‘Empty Diaries’, the sequence with which I continue on the
second video, if there is one through this link.)
The BIG book (I didn’t think there would ever be a big book)
collects some previous publications, like
Edward Larrissy's The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010,
includes Simon Perril's compressed piece ‘High Late-Modernists or
Postmodernists? Vanguard and Linguistically Innovative British Poetries since
1960’, which mentions Twentieth Century Bluesin terms of the problems of the long poem.
Not everybody liked Twentieth Century Blues. Here’s account of a negative take by Andrew Duncan.
The accusation of being 'overheated' (the poem, not me; I can regulate my body temperature), probably relates to the sequence of 'Empty Diaries' (1900-2000) that runs through the project, and which is read from on the Other Room video. Here's one:
Flesh Mates on Dirty Errands
Empty Diary 1993
Fucking Time 3
Twentieth Century Blues 25
Her garters
hook his
bullseye
adorned for exposures
less human
than her
latex condom
mouth a
porn starlet
with a
strap-on
sexing her
second skin
bruised with
verbs that
frig their
nouns (his
anus flinches
at my
invasive breath
Gender
collusion, uneasy meat
October 1993
I clearly haven't learnt my lesson because I've extended the sequence out of Twentieth Century Blues (the only permitted extension of the strands noted in the multiple sub-titles, as above), as a sequence 2001-14, a corona of sonnets, but not part of the 100 sonnet book I'm thinking of calling Hap Hazard.
Fabulously fierce in Givenchy and Gucci guide women
transform technology yet at the age of 35 Zoë is in the best shape
of her life
she’s the faith healer who beat six neophytes
to death
during exorcism rituals Plunderhead’s
bundles of women’s
hair (his aggregate trophy) wriggle towards
daylight to
look at business life with a female gaze to see their
bodies
break down Fuckeye’s things flip out and up free gifts
red legs cut
from dancers perform mid-step across
the
Extended Mind he conducts along the entire length of his length
The 2015 one was published in India by Ranjit Hoskote at Poetry
at Seagam. Empty Diary 2015
The 2016 Empty Diary was published in the special 50th issue
of Erbacce. See here. Empty Diary 2017 is as yet
unfinished, still tweaking it; I haven’t written 2018 yet (though I have written 2055, and 1327
for that matter!) So Twentieth Century Blues possesses this extensive pod.
The title of the book Twentieth Century Blues refers not to the kind of blues I have sung (and do, again, briefly, on the 'mythology of the blues poem, 'Smokestack Lightning', above), but to a kitschy Noel Coward song from 'Cavalcade'. Have a listen... Three versions: Noel Coward in a version from the 1950s; the song as featured in the 1933 - was it? - film; Marianne Faithfull in a Weimar version...
This is John reading the poem as part of our launch of Atlantic Drift in February 2018 at the London Review of Books shop. Possibly part of his last reading, it was recorded by the steady hand of Jennie Byrne, writer and intern with the Edge Hill University Press. She misses the first few lines, so here they are:
your text is traced in burnt sienna
across the span of ochre wall in the old Co-op at Cebazan
& tells me now as it did in my youth
of how the wine sings in the bottles...
It's on page 141 of our anthology. It's the gentlest call to revolution that I have ever heard.
I remember John more here (with photos and a poem I wrote for him in 2005).
Sad to hear of the death of John James. We last saw him on this blog at the launch of Atlantic Drift in London in January, see here. He wasn't in the best of health then. Here's me watching him read.
But I also want to remember him at his reading at Edge Hill in 2005, as he is in this photograph, holding his Collected Poems aloft, and as he is addressed in this poem I wrote after he'd left the house with Patricia to talk to the students the morning after the reading. (It appears in Berlin Bursts.) He is an astonishing poet. I'm glad I taught his work to students, and I'm glad he's in Atlantic Drift.
A certain kind of elegance has gone out of the world.
As Yet Untitled Poem
for John James
I beg you to hear this boy. And hear him out.
His morning poem you’re in, now,
is neatly creased as a crisp new shirt, stiff-
backed and clipped on its cardboard torso, posed.
It trips you over the cat from the film you’ve never
seen, as you search for your spectacles.
I use my enormous brain to seek the signals
they emit. We are both The Prisoner
on this island, Crusoes of overlapping surveillance.
Sleep is where we’ve come from, captive, a misty place
of drizzled desire and mordant fear. The fog has
lifted, real enough, for the expedition that must
set off for the explanation. Your house-
guest, a sort of vapour that
an opening door dispels, coughs his soft pardons.
Serious poetry is back in town:
the Unfinished Alba of
the Unknown
Troubadour, whose vida
is word for word. The
beloved of this lyric is the hero of that epic, where
sometimes I did seek, I beg you now to flee this boy.
2005
Watch him reading 'Baudelaire at Cebazan' at the LRB here.
Later, I read more of EUOIA collaborator Alys Conran's brilliant first novel, Pigeon. It's grim, it's funny; it captures the nuances of bilingualism, and I haven't finished it. I seldom read a book where I don't want it to end. This is one. See here:
Then it was out to the Liverpool Light Night, and to Bluecoat to look at the many paintings Pete Clarke has produced using my poem about the Liverpool car park fire, 'Arena Area':
parked in the park forever
a darkness that darkens the lungs
concentrated pitch
That's one of them in the Bluecoat studio: 'blistered skin...' it says...
Pete has collaborated with me (I have collaborated with him) on making
a number of prints and paintings over the past decade and I posted images from our Edge Hill
exhibition here
and here.
A later work for the Print Bienniel in Krakow
may be viewed here
and Pete's own website is here. One
was a runner-up for the Adrian Henri Prize, and this year his work has been
selected for the John Moores Painting Prize! Fingers crossed.
Then, from the very windows you see in this photo, I spotted Jo Blowers, watching a dance piece, with whom I have worked over many years. She'd been ill so it was great to see her out and about! And to talk.
Here's Jo performing (appropriately) at Bluecoat, a piece with a text by me (published in Unfinish). Some links to her work, our works:
Then we (Patricia, Philip Jeck and I) walked to the Belvedere and I checked that they had put up the poems about the place by Chris McCabe and myself (a collaboration of sorts) - and they had. (More of that later, I think.) The whole day being spent in the company of Patricia, my most consistent collaborator (and currently an author of a piece on my collaborations with Pete!), as well the other half of Ship of Fools. (And so much more.)
Odd then that I should wake up to find a note I clearly made to myself the night before: 'Write a book about Frank Sinatra - and you.' I wonder what I meant.
I have a page on my website about my collaborations (outside of the EUOIA), here:
Nice to have Michael Gove in the segue to Billy Mills’
review of Twitters for a Lark given Gove's role in my selection of new sonnets, which really IS my ‘poetry after Brexit’ book, possibly
to be called Hap Hazard, with lines like
... are they grey EU gunboats firing on our freighters,
our entrepreneurs smuggling inflammable cladding,
the dead and the dying dumped in the English
Channel
as France
dowses England’s
chalk redoubt in cheap cheese? No.
Twitters is only accidentally about Brexit, by timing, as I've explained on this blog a number of times .
And what it stands for, I think, is resistance to the
nonsense idea that the UK
is, or can be, anything other than European. The main theme that emerges is an
interwoven history, from the classical world through the fall of the Berlin
Wall to the Greek bailout, and it is fitting that the final country represented
is the UK, the country that proposes to turn its back on that shared history,
the ‘fictive cartography’ that is all too real, and that binds us all together.
I’m disappointed that Billy thinks ‘the contents of the book
matter less than its being,’ but he’s pretty good on that being, as above. (He
does like the collaboration with Alys Conran, though, and so do I!) And when he asks, ‘Nonetheless,
I can’t but wonder if it’s getting near time for the EUIA (sic) to disband’, he
clearly hasn’t taken in the acrimonious break up of the European Union Of
Imaginary Authors, as described in the introduction! Even the five vowels are lost
to the four winds! (However, I do have some post-EUOIA plans: here!)
The book is more about collaboration than Brexit, I feel, but Billy has his focus on other recent books as well.
Reviews have been slow, so it’s good to see this one. Thanks Billy!
Read more about the EUOIA here and here. All the collaborators are
accessible via links here. More on Twittershere
and here.
One of the poems in Petrarch
3 derives from my writing the chapter ‘Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments in the Theatre of
Semantic Poetry’, in The Meaning of Form,
with its study of the literary form invented by the Polish-British writer
Themerson in his 1944 novel, Bayamus:
the Semantic Poetry Translation.[i]
In (too) blunt summary, this proto-Oulipean procedure ‘translates’ a text word by word into
its given dictionary definitions, and uses lineation to orchestrate the
results. When Themerson, whom I knew a little, died in the 1980s, I attempted a
Semantic Poetry Translation of one of my own poems, but it did not work
(possibly because my original was asyntactic). The debt was finally paid by my
deliberately prolix text that re-articulates, re-forms, Petrarch’s poem.
Buy Petrarch 3 here. Read more about The Meaning of Formhere. Or go straight here.
When it
came to the word ‘love’ – not a marginal term in the Petrarchan lexicon! – I discovered
that my normally trusty 1972 dictionary gave me the cis-definition:
the devoted attachment to one of the opposite sex
This was obviously an anachronism and I amended it thus, immediately, in the thick of creation:
the devoted attachment to one of the opposite (or same) sex
The gay version. It seems to me obvious now, of course, after waking up in the middle of the night, that this definition will no
longer do either, expressing as it does heterosexist and gender norms in this age of gender fluidity and transfeminism (and transmasculinism, for that matter). (My essay on Themerson does point out that his dedication to the Semantic Poetry Translation (also see his poetic masterpiece, 'The Semantic Sonata') carries the political charge of exposing language to ideological analysis by using definitions, and usually this works; my experience creates the caveat: it depends, which, whose, dictionary.) After rejecting a formulation like
the devoted attachment to one of the opposite (or same or
indefinite or transitional) sex,
(as too clumsy) I consulted another dictionary, and manufactured this
definition:
the devoted (the given definition had 'deep', but I liked the
chivalric note appropriate to Petrarch, in this context) affection or sexual love for someone (else)
So: the devoted affection or sexual love for someone (else).
I like the ‘else’, which, I have to confess, is also my confection. In subsequent editions to the wonderful Crater edition, which is still
available here, the lines:
It didn’t seem the time for shields and armour
Against Love’s arrows, his batters and blows;
So, unsuspecting, I wept with the world,
But that day my heartbreaks began, my woes,
will be translated
It did not appear to be
the moment at which to entertain
broad plates carried to ward off weapons
and defensive dress
to protect me
from straight pointed missiles
made to be shot
from a bow
or beatings with successive blows
or strokes or knocks
belonging to or pertaining to or
deriving from
the devoted affection or sexual
love for someone
(else)
or the personification of
the
devoted affection
or sexual love for someone (else)
as the deity
of the devoted
affection or sexual love for someone
(else)
namely
Cupid or Eros
so
having no inclination to believe
without sufficient evidence
I lamented
by leaking
drops of liquid
secreted by the lachrymal gland
in concordance
with
the system of things which accommodates
the inhabitants of this universe
but at that moment of existence
the crushing sorrows or miseries
that belong to myself alone
arose
Read the only review of Petrarch 3 by Alan Baker here. And a
response from Martin Palmer here.
[i] Stefan Themerson, Stefan, Bayamus
and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1965).
Celebrate EUROPE DAY with the European Union of
Imaginary Authors! Who else?
Read more about the EUOIA here and here. All the collaborators are
accessible via links here. The EUOIA Other Room reading from last August is now available here.
I worked in collaboration, over a
number of years, with a team of real writers, to create a lively and
entertaining body of work of fictional European poets, nearly all of whom celebrate Europe Day.(Hermes is the unstable genius who doesn't.)
Accompanied by biographical
notes, the poets grew in vividness until they seemed to possess lives of their
own, as worked on them; they are collected now in Twitters
for a Lark, published by Shearsman.
This collection marks a continuation of the work I
ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet
René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated
Man (read an early account here;
the book is also available from Shearsman here ). (Read three of his 'Twitterodes' here. But what of a third part? My sense of neatness summons a trilogy!
Following the dissolution of the EUOIA (European Union Of
Imaginary Authors) in 2017, the four remaining poets, who feature in both A Translated Man and Twitters for a Lark (Sophie Poppmeier,
Trine Krugeland, Jurgita Zujute and Jitka Prochova), the fifth being the
deceased Lucia Cianglini (all five have pages on the EUOIA website (here)),
decide to collaborate on a continuation of Cianglini’s work in progress at the
time of her death by hanging. This poem &
features in both books and is an anaphoric poem marked by the use of the
ampersand in lines one and two of its three line stanza.
Their poem will be entitled & and &..
Jurgita Zujute (having been the president of the dissolved
EUOIA) calls them together and Trine Krugeland (being a conceptual writer)
coordinates the effort. The other two participate with them. (Poppmeier is the
fictional poet with the most worked-out ‘life’ (see here ), and was – and could
still be – the sole focus of the third part of the trilogy, if this option
doesn’t bear fruit, or is significantly altered.)
Their method (not mine, of course) is to take the first ‘book’
of &; (I have written, but not
published, this poem) and to continue a new poem from it, in collaboration, one
line each in turn (four poets and a three-line stanza makes for a particular
kind of pattern, of course): here’s an example from Book 5, about the ampersand
spotted in Cork that set her poem (and mine) off:
& an ampersand ghosted on the
wall over from the coffee shop
is a hollow in
a headlock with nothing to say to us
& there’s too much for the
mind to do each second
Using these lines as an epigraph, a guide, the idea
(Krugeland’s, obviously) is that the piece should be infinite: that they
continue for as long as they can, replacing anyone who leaves their group (currently
thought to be provisionally called EUGE (European Union of Generative
Experimenters)) with another, and so on, forever, &, &.
The first 4 poets are women but they are not fixed in that
as a permanent arrangement (but they are openly receptive to trans women, the
influence of Poppmeier, no doubt); the only proviso is that four poets at any
one time continue the work forever (and that the Estonian EUOIA wrecker Hermes
be refused admission). Borrowing from OULIPO, they declare that the poem may
only ever be deemed ‘complete’ rather than simply ‘suspended’ (they envisage
such lacunae caused by the inevitable wars in Europe they see Brexit and
Russian aggression prefiguring), by the simultaneous suicide of the four
serving poets, by hanging, to reflect Cianglini’s death, and these lines in ‘Book
One’ about not being able to fashion an ampersand:
& it looped around itself
again
& again
as
though it might accidentally hang itself (or me)
That, of course, would be part of an extensive (though by no
means lengthy) plan for a publication (translated by the fictional ‘Robert
Sheppard’, of course) that would also be extensive (though by no means lengthy),
possibly only pamphlet length. Like Oulipo again, and like some of the work in
the first two books, the fragment will stand for the whole, but in this case it
will be potentially existing in the future, whereas fragmentation was used
previously to suggest an unobtainable currently-existing plenitude (designed to
reflect the real situation of reading a voluminous foreign-language oeuvre in
limited excerpted translation). It would launch my creatures into futurity.
They might assemble their text online, like Eric Chevillard’s daily
L’Autofictif ,
(see my blog roll, right) which I learnt about
at the Edge Hill conference at which I also learnt about collaboration
theory (which I
need to re-read, pretty obviously).
But I'm also looking at more
Elizabethan sonnet sequences to 'overdub', so I need to prioritise. That's another 'European project: see here. And, you never know, I might never get round to the above...
I'm pleased to say that my 5 sonnet sequence 'Breakout', written soon after the Brexit Referendum, has been published. I aimed for a magazine first printing and an anthology re-print, but delays in the magazine meant that they were published rather closer than I'd anticipated. No matter, I don't think that the readerships will overlap much.
The magazine is A Restricted View Form Under the Hedge (what a title! what badges!! what marvellous paper-quality!!!). You can access it here.
The anthology is The Other Room 10, the last anthology celebrating the last year of the Manchester reading series of that name and for sale at its last event (see above). You can access it here.
See here about my not making that event and here for details about the reading I conducted during that final year (a celebration of the European Union of Imaginary Authors; I include a set list, details of my collaborators and fellow-performers, and links). See its own website on which most videos of the readings are housed, here. 'Breakout' was also the first poem-sequence I read at the Sheppard Symposium reading. So here it is again:
Thanks to the spiny little creature rolled into a little ball and the guys basking in alterity beyond the door of Otherness for publishing the poems!
There's other stuff about sonnets here and here. The latter is about the 100 sonnet book-length manuscript that 'Breakout' forms part.
I have, however, in the first poem, replaced the word 'autistic' with 'autarkic', a word whose presence I owe to the eloquence of our current foreign secretary. Nazanin is still in an Iranian jail (he'd say 'Persian gaol') but I got a word out of him (to use against him). And it's a good word too, whereas the word for a mode of neurological atypicality is the wrong one.
My continuing sonnets Hap:Understudies of Thomas
Wyatt’s Petrarch is now published;
Taking only the sonnets Wyatt ‘translated’ from
Petrarch, but adding a few of my own, I’ve merged the historical Wyatt with his
hysterical contemporary analogue, a reluctant civil servant of a corrupt
administration.
from the European Poetry Festival Reading in Manchester, April 2018
Rimas Uzgiris is a poet, translator, editor and critic. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, AGNI, Atlanta Review, Iowa Review, Quiddity,Hudson Review, Vilnius Review and other journals. He is translation editor and primary translator of How the Earth Carries Us: New Lithuanian Poets, and translator of Caravan Lullabies by Ilzė Butkutė, Crystal: Selected Poems by Judita Vaičiūnaitė (forthcoming from Pica Pica Press) and of Then What: Selected Poems by
Gintaras Grajauskas (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in
philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in
creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University, and teaches translation
at Vilnius University. He has received a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a
National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and
the Poetry Spring 2016 Award for his translations of Lithuanian poetry
into other languages. Read more here and here. His translation of Gintaras Grajauskas' Then What was published by Bloodaxe Books the day before we read, quite magically. Look here for that book.
Robert Sheppard runs this blog and it features many of his projects, but he also has a website here.
The video of us reading the poem (above) may also be accessed here
as can all the videos of the Manchester evening, including the Twitters for a Lark launch.
Here is the poem:
Unreadable Expressions
1
Amid the hubbub, nothing
may be
Heard, so nothing is said.
The silence is itself an
answer.
Looking down from above,
unperturbed,
Giving a caressing smile
and
A thumbs-up, I mimed
A happiness that was not
all show,
Swifts weaving patterns in
the sky,
Standing by the pond with
its rustling
Rushes, moorhens in hiding,
Then ducks land hard like
rivets driven
To hold the fragile scenery
in place.
For this is life on the
hoof, without hooves,
Bolting for the open, but
bolted to the floor.
If only I could break the
metaphysical bank
But my body lies mortgaged
to the bone.
2
The shock I received
switching the radio on
With a sudsy washing up
thumb
Made me jump as if good
news had come
So I turned to the window
to peek at the sun
And the black and white cat
was stealthily
Treading along the narrow
wall,
Each paw placed precisely
To avoid the chinks,
prevent the fall.
You showed me your thermal
fingernails:
They go purple when cold,
red when hot,
The setting sun if we
swiftly set our sails,
An iris in the garden,
sticking to the plot.
3
Bored with each other,
bored with the game (we are playing with
