Oban 06 update

The New Zealand electronic poetry centre's Oban 06 online anthology is now up.

 
s
h
y
 

 
 
 
 
token
 
 
 
 

Lunch Poem

         Put down any- 
      where, & 
               the environs 
           might be 
     somewhat 
     different 
               & the in- 
          virons a 
               bit more 
                        open / more 
closed 
            depending 
        on the deal 
             of sun 
                         but the 
                     equilibrium 
           is maintained 
        by a double 
                espresso 
                       at a side- 
              walk table 
   & Ray Charles 
                 singing You 
                             know the Night 
                  Time is The 
      Right Time on 
               the jukebox 
              of your soul.

This doesn't look like Kansas

Many months ago I saw that Black Spring was going to bring out a "Lawrence issue", & I was wondering why the fuck, in this day & age, would anyone want to bring out a whole issue devoted to D.H. Lawrence. Not until much closer to publication date, when a bit more information was forthcoming, did I realise it was a geographical descriptor. Boy, Toto, did I feel stupid.

Anyway, Jim McCrary was the editor of that issue, & he's the subject of Tom Beckett's latest interview over at e-values. & I've learned a great deal more about Lawrence.

In Context or: The Old Farts' Club

"Some of New Zealand's most iconic poets and literary figures will be looking back at the 1960s this autumn at the Auckland City Art Gallery. In Context is a series of talks organised by literary website leafsalon.co.nz and inspired by the Gallery's hugely successful exhibition Art & the 60s from Tate Britain.

In Context will run on four Saturdays throughout May and early June, and admission will be free. All sessions will start at 1pm in the Main Gallery, and last about 50 minutes.

6 May:       C K Stead with Murray Edmond

13 May:      Mark Young with an introduction by Barry Lett

27 May:      Riemke Ensing with Kevin Ireland

3 June:       Vanya Lowry with Frances Edmond

C K Stead was awarded the prestigious Michael King Writers' Fellowship last year, and was a finalist in both the fiction and poetry categories in the Montana NZ Book Awards 2005. Murray Edmond is a poet, playwright, director, editor and critic, and was also a poetry finalist in last year’s Montana Book Awards.

Mark Young left New Zealand in 1969 after becoming one of the leading poets and art reviewers of the decade. His works were published in overseas anthologies alongside Nobel prizewinners, and he penned the exhibition notes for Colin McCahon's first show at the Barry Lett Gallery. Barry Lett exhibited many of NZ’s finest artists at the gallery he co-owned with Rodney Kirk Smith in the 60s and is very active and well-known as a sculptor today.

Riemke Ensing was the editor of the first New Zealand anthology of women poets, 1977's Private Gardens, and recipient of the 2002 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. Kevin Ireland was the winner of the 2004 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement. They will be remembering the 60s both here and in London.

Vanya Lowry published the first part of her autobiography through AUP two years ago, entitled From the Wisteria Bush. When she was in her early twenties, her parents Bob and Irene hosted infamous parties for the leading lights of the arts and literary worlds. Frances Edmond is the President of the NZ Writers Guild and is a writer and an actor. She has recently devised a theatre piece based on the life and poetry of her mother Lauris Edmond, who published her first volume of poetry at fifty-one and ten years later had won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She was awarded an OBE in 1986.

Art & the 60s from Tate Britain is an extensive exhibition with over 100 major works from the Tate's superb collection, along with loans from the National Gallery of Victoria. Auckland Art Gallery's own excellent collection of 60s art is also shown. The exhibition is particularly appropriate to Kiwis, with many travelling to England and Europe for the first time during the 60s and experiencing 'swinging' London at its best.

In Context is the first 'offline' event for the website www.leafsalon.co.nz. The site focuses on NZ literature – with book news, reviews, and event and course information. It is now one of the country’s leading online forums for writers and readers."

intuitive sagacity

Out & on
up to the
bridge. Rivers
are not
always so easily
passed over. Ob-
stacles to
progress, ill
afforded. After
crossing a river,
you should get far
away from it
wrote Sun Tzu.

A reminder

OBAN 06

is the title of nzepc’s online poetry anthology, building 21-23 April 2006 as part of the BLUFF 06 poetry symposium in Southland. Bluff’s famous Oyster Festival happens over the same weekend.

Email your contribution to the nzepc between 21-23 April.

They aim to build a local and international poetry anthology over three days, launching Sunday 23 April in Oban on Rakiura (Stewart Island). They'd welcome your poem. They’d like it to engage with time and place, transience and duration, memory and forgetting, coming and going, poetry and oysters – any or all of the above.

& if you've got an atlas, check out where Stewart Island (Rakiura) is. How low can you go?

Dental koan hay(na)ku

If
you can't
eat properly yet

is
it still
called a lunchbreak?

After Kenneth Koch

Thank you for inviting me here to talk about quantum mechanics but it's not a subject I know a great deal about so what I thought I'd do is maybe read some poetry or talk on those things I do know a little about such as the paintings of René Magritte or the early recordings of Ray Charles or how plants synthesize sunlight & then I thought I'd maybe play a little jazz to give some ambience to the ampitheatre & then segue in Bach & overdub it with a recording of Gödel talking about mathematical progressions & then I thought you could all get up & dance & I'll start projecting your composite changing energy patterns on the back wall & I'll make a cup of coffee in the microwave & read a few more poems & then overlay your dance with a horizontal hologram of Schrödinger's equation which broken up would appear asemic & then I'd bring out a dart-throwing machine that was programmed so that any throw had a 5% chance of hitting the bulls-eye & a 95% chance of hitting the outer ring but no other place & then I'd get it to throw 100 darts & then project the end image so that you could all see each dart & how together they behave like particles but you could also see the small cluster in the centre of the board surrounded by a large ring made up of the majority of the darts & the whole pattern is the accumulation of the individual darts based on the probabilities of where each dart would have landed & shows the wavelike behaviour of the darts & then I'd say well I guess that means that the overlaying ellipses of the iconic atom are out of date & the Atomic Energy Commission had better change its logo & then I'd stand there silent for a moment & say that you all know where I am up here on the stage & that's classical physics but in reality the particles of my body keep moving so that you only get an approximate idea of where I'd be & have to work out the probabilities of how they'd move to know exactly where I am & that's quantum mechanics or a very rough approximation of it then I'd do another little dance which I've called the wave-particle duality of light & matter & you could all go home knowing a little bit about the subject I was invited hear tonight to talk about & essentially a whole lot more than I do.

let me count the ways

 


 

From out

of
the bellycan
of the pelican

At Nokturno, Marko K. Niemi has added another page of Finnish translations of some of my marquee poems from pelican dreaming to his wonderful growing collection of visual poetry.

& from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's xPress(ed) - there are various links in the sidebar - a new 150-page collection



that includes a number of poems first posted to pelican dreaming & is available from here.

The backpage reads:

A note of thanks to the following who have contributed, often unknowingly, in some way to the creation of these poems.

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Michele Leggott, Jill Jones, Martin Edmond, Karri Kokko, Tom Beckett, Lauren Young, Jean Vengua, Eileen Tabios, Vincent Ponka, Kirsten Kaschock, PR Primeau, harry k. stammer, Sheila Murphy, Craig Freeman, Leevi Lehto, Didi Menendez, Bill Allegrezza, Ernesto Priego & Richard Lopez.

So, to all those named, don't bother buying the book because I'll be sending you a copy of it, once I've had a chance to look at it in its final shape, within the month.

hear

hair
hare
hier
heir
here

say 

Les objets d'art de René Magritte

a pair of diamante lorgnettes

birds that are birds, that are not birds, that are, sometimes, something else

clouds stolen from the opening of The Simpsons

death masks

Edgar Allen Poe

Fantomas

Georgette. Naked Georgette. Clothed Georgette. Incomplete Georgette. Always Georgette

horses' bells

inflamed euphoniums

jokes & jockeys

kiss. No, not the rock group but the Rodin sculpture. But not the Rodin sculpture, only the space it fills

lost worlds

Martin Luther & the King of the Jews

neologism, or at least the attachment of new labels

open-toed boots

pleasure that the girl gets from eating a bird

quantum leaps

rendering the impossible possible

sacks that cover the lovers' heads

this is not an apple, nor a pipe, not even a piece of cheese

using speech to show how speech misleads

victory is what was hoped for in this break in the clouds, even if they turned their backs on the war & the victory came unseen

what lasts is how the lovers shared a space, not how they looked at one another

x-rays of leaves, the skeletons of trees

"Your dialectics & your Surrealism en plein soleil are threadbare," wrote André Breton. "Sorry, Breton, but the invisible thread is on your bobbin," replied Magritte

Zeus. Anger. Hubris

Shadows

without

Shadows
within
Shadows.

&
the squatters
have arrived already.

        Midges
caught by the
  sun
        aerate
    this late
  afternoon.

Taken as a
given. So
different from
received
as a gift.

An unsolicited testimonial

Never knew the
enormity of
spam

until
I opened
a Gmail account.

r.i.p.

Filamore Tabios, Sr.
1925-2006

Cameleon

I dream of solid food.

I pretend this diet of icecream, jello, scrambled eggs & iced coffee is sustaining me.

I lie.

I am living off my accumulated fats.

I am a camel.

Single-humped.

An ibis

prowls the
pathways
of the private
hospital.

*

If I was doing this post as live to air radio, it would not be appearing. I had the last of my teeth taken out this morning, my mouth has only just cleared of blood, the anaesthetic has worn off so I can move my lips, the painkillers have kicked in. I'm bearing it, but I can't grin about it.

*

I now have teeth that gleam like a Bollywood star's. Pity about the rest of me, plus I can't sing, can't dance.

*

I chip away at my writer's block. Carrera marble.

*

This morning, as I brushed my teeth, I thought about the Borges poem that begins

Of all those streets that wander to the west,
there must be one (I do not know which one)
which unawares I have walked down for a last
indifferent time…..

*

I dream of solid food.

*

Actuality.
Two antibiotics.
Two painkillers.
Washed down with a nice glass of salt water.

*

Gummy bears.

*

Where are you Hannibal Lector, now that I have need of you?

There is a saying

a universe in a grain of sand.

Compression. It's one of the reasons that I like Borges so much, that ability to compress so much into a paragraph that it becomes a page, a page becomes a chapter, a story becomes a novel. Do not even have to add water.

I was reminded of this ability to convey maximum through minimum by Eileen Tabios' continuing journal of her vigil at her father's bedside. A few words, & the ripples expand, a large stone thrown into a lake.

Eileen's writing is sparse, the feeling of notes written late at night, after returing to a home that is, in a sense, no longer her own but one where she has lived most of her life, physically or mentally. It is naked writing, laying bare her relationship with her father. It is, for many of us, a guilt trip, we who could not reconcile ourselves with our parents, even on their deathbed. It is made even worse because Eileen writes in a way that compels us to sit on her shoulder, or behind her eyes, inside her soul, & we see through our own eyes as she sees through hers.

One of the reasons I left New Zealand was to escape my parents' deaths. I was a child born late to them in their lives, at least in terms of child-bearing ages. My mother was in her early forties, my father a few years older. I was thirty when I left.

Five years or so later I received a phonecall at work from the woman who lived in one of the flats in the same converted house as I did. A telegram had arrived for me - yes, it's that long ago - & it contained bad news, she said. "Which one is it?" I asked. "Your mother."

My father died in his nineties. My paternal side is long-lived. I went back to see him about three months before he died, after a phonecall from my sister saying that he was going. I'm glad I did, but it was sad. He was frail, his leg had been amputated some years before. He was lucid, though apparently he wasn't always so. I don't think I made peace with him; there was still the distance that there had always been. But I think it helped me make peace with myself.

For at time at least. I read Eileen, & I feel guilty that I could not confront my parents' deaths with such compassion, understanding, insight into ourselves & our relationships with those who are supposed to be our nearest & dearest. I feel guilty that I could not turn my thoughts around.

Kool, I'm in

Kulture Vulture

Some
times I
forget who I

am,
& live
vicariously through myself.

instituition

It is a
sad morning
when
the
river smells
of dead fish.

I left him nearly 30 years ago. I have finally returned.

Finally.

Eileen Tabios' incredible, indelible post about her father. From grief, beauty. Passion. Compassion.

 
 
 
bro     ken
open
 
 
 

ceci n'est pas une image?

Busy doing other things

but this arrived in my email after a couple of kangaroo hops, & being a word lover I couldn't resist........

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's (2005) winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund which lasts until you realize that it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

12. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

13. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

17. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

18. Caterpallor (n.): the colour you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.