The Dalai Lama

& Bono are probably the two biggest male media tarts around, but I doubt if even Bono—who I dislike—would do a celebrity appearance on the Australian version of MasterChef as His Holiness—who I used to like—has just done.


What's next? Jerry Springer?

& / on the / subject of TV . . .

One face I did not expect to see staring back at me whilst I surfed the movie channels on cable was Amiri Baraka. But, lo, in Return to Gorée, with Youssou N'Dour.

At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there's a
railroad made of human bones
Black ivory
Black ivory.

Out from Otoliths—Raymond Farr's ECSTATIC/.of facts

ECSTATIC/.of facts
Raymond Farr
112 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-3-0
$13.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/ecstaticof-facts/15978118

In ECSTATIC/.of facts Raymond Farr brilliantly investigates the relationship between language, meaning and culture by vividly demonstrating how language can shape worlds. In an insightful and stimulating journey, Farr takes an intense and often playful walk through landscapes of significance in which we are faced with the “Onslaught of language,” only to find that the “amber light of meaning stares back.” To discover meaning in something as “fundamental as chaos,” we need go no further than American suburban culture of generic mega stores, chain restaurants, popular music and blockbuster movies. Reframing these ubiquitous icons in discursive language results in an effect rather like “Marcel Duchamp…singing songs once sung by Doris Day.”

Things are not, Farr shows us, as they seem – the daily reality we experience is not the only reality. With an astute sense of phrasing and rhythm, Raymond Farr explores the interplay of language and culture by taking us through “all possible versions of a straight line” to learn that there is “a cubicle in a circle after blue skies on Saturday night.” We are urged to take linguistic responsibility for the structure of the present instance through being reminded that, “We are the consequence of cause & affect,” and that only “moments ago there was the illusion of nothing.”

The dialectical “I” in these poems is our collective aloneness in the desert of constant traffic noise. Despite our need to belong, we are ultimately alone, members only of ourselves. Overwhelmed by the lies we tell ourselves to make the terror of existence bearable, our lives become “a dream we dream to the end of the world.” Farr invites us to strip away all pretence so we can listen closely to the amorphous flux of the real, where perhaps we will hear “the prayers of angels being answered in the dark,” and glimpse the inner heart where “answers are vague” and the “only true conclusion, we conclude, is always inconclusiveness.” In the end, we have only our shadows to lose. —John C. Goodman, author of naked beauty and editor of ditch

No new cities are being built. That arrangement is palimpsest. Boroughs carved by a metonymy. And oscillation. One may artery about thing, about a place, or both. Each fact is a tenement to situation a place from which oscillations are discerned. ECSTATIC/.of facts courses within this layout, and Farr engages in no liminal simplification charting arrays of snarl. —Matthew Johnstone, author of Let’s be close Rope to mast, you Old light

Cold, hard facts: not! As Raymond Farr demonstrates in this wonderful new collection, facts are the serendipity of the real. Farr takes sentences and fragments, and he builds tenements of facts from the sky downward. His gift to readers is a city of the materiality of language and of what is absolutely, astonishingly material to life. In Farr’s words, “The facts are convincing. I am one hungry carnivore.” —Joel Chace

The Tower

of my PC looks like it's in an intensive care ward. There are cables all over the place.

It's a long time since I recorded anything, but I've had to provide audios for a journal that has accepted some poems. Had to download some recording software since the only program I had disappeared when I got rid of my second last PC. Had to find a mike since the only one around didn't seem to work anymore. So, full steam ahead—Ground Control to Major Tom—with a borrowed headset-mike combination that L. lent me.

Everything's gone well. Good to hear my voice again. But not so good is the little voice remaining at the back of my head which says "Take your protein pills and put your helmet on."

Two days

back from the chilly south, back in the tropical warmth, & I'm riddled with the flu.

Ah, unfortunately, shit does happen.

geographies: Hämeenlinna

                                The confusing sub-
                                         texts in varietal
                             showers of angst
                         tropes cause Finlandic
                                    youth to abandon 
                                      their motorcycles 
                           which are then 
                                   either stolen by the 
                             political directorate 
                                        or left to rot 
                                  under shade trees.

Leftovers

A tiny bird sits looking up at the cycle
next to a box finished in red baked
enamel with large lettering left by a
mourner. The accompanying folded
sheet is positioned in a reclining chair
about ten feet away from the model. Very
animistic. Women in another epoch
taken out of that down-cycle environment
would have remained awake with their
eyes closed indulging in wonted sorrow
despite the successful seduction. But why
is the phone on fire? Maybe was once
a wobbly table & four chairs gifted by
an aunt. Now a temporary mirror
that matches her well-chosen outfit
perfectly. He treated her like a normal
human being. This does not indicate a
relationship. Merely an obscure awareness
of the quiet, dark shades, the stone under
foot, the master of unfinished business.

Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium

7-9 July 2011
Victorian Trades Hall
Melbourne


(symposium URL front page artwork: She Prefers Fires, 2008, ink and cotton on fine art paper, Tamryn Bennett)

'Poetry and the Contemporary' is a symposium designed to foster critical and creative conversations between poets and scholars, primarily from the Pacific region. It also showcases the exciting work of a range of new and established writers. It follows on from the two "Home and Away: A Trans-Tasman Symposium" that were held at the University of Auckland and the University of Sydney respectively in 2010.

Full program, abstracts, etc. can be found here.

recycled

In Conspiracy City

I barely blink when the
fighter-jets come
screaming down
the valley

or when I see
a line of
Black Hawk helicopters
precisely perforating
the sky

but the midnight
entrances & exits
of transport planes

the small
signs
on the
highway

telegraph posts
pointing
the brown convoy
in this direction
the blue
in that

make
me wonder
when the pre-
emptive strike
is coming.

& this
is only a
whisper
of what it’s
like to live
in fear.

So low, solo

                                                  I am
falling behind . . .

geographies: Malayayalam

Out from Otoliths—Kevin Opstedal's Drainpipe Sessions

Drainpipe Sessions
Kevin Opstedal
44 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-4-7
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/drainpipe-sessions/15978079

Beneath the relentless surf ghetto aura that pervades these Drainpipe Sessions there is a place where nothing is revealed, acknowledged by the grace of having been there at all. It’s the catch & release method of poetic composition, the B-side of a once and future flashback, stubbornly adhering to a lyric drive where the measure is meant to be taken in a single breath. “If poetry is the Atlantis of the arts,” writes Noel Black, “then Kevin Opstedal can breathe under water, and each poem is a pair of shades for a beach blanket apocalypse.”

A compendium for & of Dave Mitchell

who passed away last night.


Every couple of years

the photo below seems to make its way onto somebody's blog or site.




So I've added a poster below for the 1969 reading for which the mugshots were taken



& pulled out from the dreaming pelican some poems posted when noting the last time the photo surfaced.

High Country Weather

Alone we are born
And die alone
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

James K. Baxter (1945)

from: Night Through the Orange Window

I remember her as a fifth season
she
who came unheralded
into those lean months
shaming the precise blue evenings
with the proud eternity of her flesh

David Mitchell (1963)

For Dave Mitchell
"th prfct wrdslngr"

Seeing your poems, your picture on the
blue middle pages of the NEW ARGOT
I wish I could be with you once more in
"th cafe lebanon". It is summer, & the
spare tables will have been unstacked
& set outside; & we could sit there
in our perfect white tropical suits,
sipping pernod, smoking panatellas
&
waiting for something GREAT to happen.

Mark Young (1973)

12/29/2007

*


Why / I am / thinking about ambivalence

I have just been invited to contribute to the obituary of someone who isn't dead yet.

*

Actually.

He pauses, remembering having read somewhere that using "actually" as a prefix to a declaration often indicates a lie will follow.

He pauses, wondering if what he is about to say is truth or fiction. Not so much one or the other, perhaps a mix, perhaps a selective reading of the past.

He restarts. Actually, ambivalence is not what is disturbing him; it is just a cloak, thrown rapidly over the budding, the bubbling up of something that he would prefer to remain hidden, not to be thought about. Saying he is ambivalent gives him time to take the deep breaths necessary before starting the sifting process, the archaeological dig.

The obituary part of it does not disturb him, for the significant reality is that this writer has been dead to him for a long time, killed by separation, the act of not-seeing. What contact there has been in nearly forty years has been the gathering of memento mori—that first book of poems, signed, numbered, bought four or so years ago in a secondhand store in Auckland, thirty years after its publication—or the literary equivalent of laying flowers on a grave, writing a poem dedicated to & named for the writer.

& not just dead to him, but to many others. A decades-long wake, not talking of the dead but asking after him. "Have you heard anything of.....?" Now, it appears, it is time to exhume the corpse, even though it is not yet a corpse, since by the time the autopsy is performed & the obituary is written it may well be so.

He recalls that at times in the past, if a high-born lady fell ill, diagnosis would be carried out on a handmaiden or a servant for it was considered improper for the lady to be inspected deshabillé. Here, too, the first stroke of the knife will fall elsewhere; before writing the obituary of the other, he has to begin by writing his own.

3/28/2009

*

Sidebar #1

The poet, in his early twenties, in the mid-sixties, makes the pilgrimage to Europe, travelling by sea. In England, he meets a folksinger of a similar age from Minnesota called Bob Dylan. He goes to Spain, & the scent of the orange groves permeates his notebooks for years to come. He meets & marries a beautiful blonde Swedish model who returns to New Zealand with him.

They live with the poet's mother & brother in Aro St., Wellington. They have a daughter. (This the narrator knows not through memory but because he met her forty years later.) The beautiful blonde Swede does not like New Zealand. The country is beautiful but the people are nekulturny, barbaric. (This the narrator does not know for certain; it is an assumption he makes based on the fact that the poet starts drinking again. Though maybe it's the whole gestalt, living with mother, having a child, having a wife who doesn't like the place & who reminds the poet that he, too, doesn't really like living there.)

Five characters then. More precisely, four characters & a narrator. (Though not this narrator; he is merely the recipient of an oral history which he has chosen to pass on.) Even more precisely, four characters & a raconteur who will tell the story later, who is the one from whom the narrator heard it.

It is too distant to be precise in the living arrangements. Logic—no, not logic, rather the kernel of the story—dictates that there are three bedrooms in the house. The brother has one, the poet & his wife another, & the poet's mother shares the other with her granddaughter. It may be that the poet's mother is visiting; & the baby normally has a room to herself.

Except on this night the baby gets sick & the poet's wife moves into the baby's room to be with her, & the poet's mother moves into the master bedroom. The poet knows nothing of this; he is out drinking, has to be a party since at the time this took place, bars in New Zealand closed their doors at 6 p.m.

The poet returns home round midnight, drunk. Staggers into the bedroom, takes his clothes off in the dark & jumps onto the shape in the bed shouting "I'm going to fuck you." His mother screams, jumps out of the bed & runs from the room.

(The narrator is aware that it is probably in poor taste to retell this story; but he excuses himself on the grounds that if he is to partake in the obituary writing, to perform part of the autopsy, then it makes sense to begin the cutting at a soft point in what will inevitably be a painful history.)

3/29/2009

*

The Gallery Readings

The evening takes place in a gallery where the best contemporary New Zealand painting is on show. It's a dealer gallery; the exhibitions change every fortnight. Perhaps it's Ralph Hotere whose paintings are on the walls, or Colin McCahon, or Milan Mrkusich. In those days worth thousands of dollars; these days probably millions.

The narrator is comfortable in these surroundings. He writes about art—reviews, essays, even a book—so to him the paintings are the perfect backdrop, the perfect stage design. He likes the space; hessian walls, good acoustics. Intimate. Add to that an audience that enjoys—perhaps even delights in—being there.

It's near the end of the evening. Now the narrator is where he has always wanted to be, out in front of a rock band.

The poet & the narrator have taken it in turns to read. Then a break so the audience can buy a coffee next door, or some wine further down the road. The poet reads first when they start up again, followed by the narrator whose set this time is four blues written especially for this performance & backed by the band. They're simple lyrics; rhymed, one piece in ¾ time, another working over & around the famous Booker T. Green Onions riff. "Yr poems & yr songs will never right the wrongs that you have done to me/ & yet yr wrongs will never cloud the songs that you have sung to me....."

Then the narrator segues into Route 66. Driving rock, the Stones in everybody's mind, getting into everybody's blood. People get up & start to dance. The gallery owner is in the middle of them, then he suddenly rushes across to the switchbox shouting "the paintings, the paintings" & turns the power off. The room is plunged into silent darkness. A minute later the power is back on & everybody is dancing again. The narrator leaves the band to carry on on its own & joins the throng. The poet prowls the room looking for someone to take home & bed. Eventually everybody goes home happy.

The joint gallery readings are why the narrator & the poet are forever paired in the collective memory:

"...In the Barry Lett Art Gallery
I heard Mark Young and David Mitchell lay down their lines."
Bob Orr: Jerusalem

"My memories of Mark in Auckland are of poetry readings at Barry Lett Galleries and at the Wynyard Tavern. Dave Mitchell was part of a double act that combined the rhapsodic, the laconic and the hip. Wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke, through which I still see art works by Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon, as though smoky nicotine were one of the cultural pigmentations of the ’60s; with lots of flagon red wine from the Henderson valley, drugs that were subculture rather than mainstream entertainment, and the jazz of Thelonious Monk (‘Round Midnight’), these occasions set my youthful benchmarks and probably gave me much of the life I’ve had. For which I am most grateful. "
Ian Wedde: Antipodean Hipster (A review of The right foot of the giant)

but they were never friends though something / more than acquaintances. They had gone to the same secondary school; for four years they shared the same turf; but the poet was a year ahead of the narrator, & in the hierarchy of schools, that meant their paths never crossed. The narrator was something of a jock—rugby, cricket, basketball—who later played in the school orchestra, had one of the leads in a rare school play, a Shakespeare suite directed by Richard Campion, the father of filmmaker Jane, who was teaching there at the time. He never came across the poet in any of these activities.

They probably met sometime after the poet went to university, in that overlap between uni & the teachers' training college of shared parties, shared pubs, shared acquaintances. The narrator has no idea of when. But Wellington in those days was, though small, a very active city; & because it was small, anybody who was into anything soon got to know everybody else who was also into something. The musicians knew the painters knew the poets knew the actors knew the gays knew the dopesmokers knew the dancers.

The first firm date that can be put on anything was 1963, when the narrator, having taken over as editor of a little magazine, included some of the poet's pieces in it. This does not mean that the narrator discovered the poet; far from it. But he did discover a kindred spirit in that both of them were influenced by the new American poets. It might be said that they walked the same street, though on different sides of it, but it was a far distant street from the main road of New Zealand poetry.

The narrator moved to Auckland, the poet went overseas, came back, also moved to Auckland. The narrator had the knack of turning out quasi-SoQ poems which he placed in the leading N.Z. literary magazines, & some of which were subsequently included in a number of overseas anthologies. He began to develop a reputation which he used to parlay publication of the poems that meant much more to him, but generally two or so years after he'd written them. The poet remained much more true to his craft, which meant he didn't publish much. The problem for both of them was that there were only a very small number of literary magazines in N.Z., & they were all running behind the times.

The next bit is guesswork, an interpretation of a number of invitations that are posted in a gallery on the narrator's page at the new zealand electronic poetry centre. The first is a mainstream reading, the narrator appearing as one of ten readers. The poet does not appear, though there is a note in Big Smoke that credits him with arranging it though the narrator believes (a) that if he'd organized it he'd be reading & (b) that the poet would never have allowed the wanky name that appears on the poster as presenting the evening. What is important is that it was the first reading in a newly opened gallery. The second invitation is the shape of things to come, a combined reading by the poet & the narrator, with a rock band in the mix.

There were at least another four readings over the next three years. The poet believes that there was another one at the usual gallery, & knows of one more held in a different gallery in town. Some of the readings had music, a couple had another poet included, Hone Tuwhare in one, James K. Baxter in another. But however many there were & what format they took, they had one thing in common—the poet & the narrator working as a tag team. Different styles, different approaches, but each was the perfect foil for the other.

These days, with so many places to publish & such ease to do so, one sometimes forgets just how hard it could be to disseminate one's work, especially for those working outside the traditional & isolate mainstream of a nation's poetry & who did not see any importance or necessity in being "nationalistic" in their subject matter when the world was becoming more & more international. Add to that a felt need to show that there were other, equally valid—in the eyes of the poet & the narrator, even more valid—traditions that one could draw from, other paths to follow. The gallery readings did all that.

3/31/2009

*

day To

It is after midnight.

My toes are bloodied from broken blisters.

I take my shoes off.

I arrive home.

Korean dinner with friends.

Five books in my bag, gifts, swaps. Jill Jones’ Dark Bright Doors, Michael Farrell’s a raiders guide, their exceptional combined anthology Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay & Lesbian Poets. Both of them are over here. Read with both of them tonight, a great pleasure. Jill’s book was also launched tonight. The other two books I’m also delighted to have: Wystan Curnow’s modern colours, & the book nobody thought would ever see the light of day, Steal Away Boy, the selected poems of Dave Mitchell, now desperately ill in Sydney, but my partner in a series of poetry readings in the late 1960s in Auckland. “Mark played intellectual Baudelaire to Dave’s anarchic Rimbaud”, an Ian Wedde quote in the introduction by the editors, Nigel Roberts & Martin Edmond.

4/1/2010

*

Otoliths issue #21 is now live

Once again it's a wide-ranging compendium, containing text & visual work from . . . David Mitchell . . .

5/1/2011

*

Steal Away, Boy.

He / sure was / a big man

if the initial report of Clarence Clemons' death in the Sydney Morning Herald is to be believed.....

Known as the Big Man for his imposing 196-metre frame, Clemons and his ever-present saxophone spent much of his life with The Boss.

Out from Otoliths — notational by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

notational
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
68 pages
Cover painting by Joanne G. Yoshida
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-2-3
$12.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/notational/15740264

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s notational furthers an Identity Positioning System that resembles in elegance and efficacy the memory theaters of the ancients. Each page finds the margin where transition is meaning and each sensational flutter awaits its name. Intensity is all: “Power lines on the range.” She never lets the words down, nor fails to put them accurately where most needed. — Bill Berkson


In her sixth book of poems, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa breaks fresh ground, finding new ways to see and restructure her world. In fragments of observations teetering precariously and falling into the unexpected, Jane sees into the backside of social and cultural relations, while at the same time undermining them. This is the “border between identity and non-identity”. Here, we wake up “in an unfamiliar language”, and find that it is our own. — Eric Selland


Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s notational puts consciousness through an egg slicer and allows the slices to slip away and initiate poetic investigations within the environments that have come to define the fractured backdrop of the everyday: empty buses, the repletions of consumer overload, bamboo groves, eyes that gaze at each other (untranslatable), the horrible vivisection of animals, selves that melt and bend through a social stage in which the locus of identity is always the center of multiple controls. This poetry is timely, intelligent and beautiful — and though the investigations involved often move through deeply unsettling territory, the ingenuity of the poetry itself displays the imaginative promesse de bonheur that keeps the loophole opened: “grim tasks of survival do not bring happiness / yet the wind”. — Trane DeVore

& since it's Bloomsday

and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Up early

watching the total lunar eclipse. So slow.....

Last several times there have been even partial eclipses, it's been cloudy overhead & they haven't been visible. This morning, however, not a cloud in the sky. Perfect weather.

Google have got it live on YouTube, but they're showing it with the shadow coming in from the side.


Where we are, the shadow is coming down from the top.


Don't know if I'll stay up & watch it all. The moon is only halfway covered, & it's taken an hour plus to get this far. Which means it'll have sunk beneath the horizon before it's all over.

Synchronicity? or Synchrotron City?

Today's entry at my Won Des Laits pwoermd blog (posted late last night) — rbbait.


Today's news item on my server's home page — "Mutant rabbit found near Fukushima."

geographies: Kowloon

Kangaroo? What kangaroo? Today's marsupial story.

Volvo is evolving its pedestrian detection & avoidance system — which uses radar & an infra-red camera to determine if the car is likely to hit a pedestrian — to recognize wild animals. It will be available in Australia within three years.

Trouble is, it's designed to recognize moose & suchlike, not the large fauna that you find on Australian roads, which, because of its unusual shape, is almost impossible to program for. Sure, occasionally cows & horses are hit or missed, but many large animal accidents here involve indigenous species such as kangaroos & emus. Plus, the system is designed for static or slow-moving animals, & kangaroos emulate smart bombs; large bounds, fast trajectory.

Maybe Volvo could market the system here without modification but with a different slant, possibly describing it as an early apocalypse warning system. If the car tells you there's a moose looming up on the road ahead, then get the hell out of there. An Ice Age is coming! The apocalypse is not far behind!

One of the

conun-
drums of
life is

that certain
things
resonate in-

side you
which maybe
shouldn't.

e.g.

Pity about the misspelt name on the front screen.....

surfing the breakfast shows

There's nothing funny about fuckwits

so

wouldn't fuckwitless be a better descriptor?

Looking through

the notes & phrases & jottings that I accumulate, I found the line "their new status as North America's largest indie shop" &, for some reason or other, thought I might be able to use it in a possible "A line from Paul Revere" poem. So went looking for a Paul Revere quote, & discovered that Sarah Palin had just got herself embroiled in a contreveresy by stating that one of Revere's goals was to warn the British that what became the Revolutionary Army was waiting.

I also discovered more cause to be cautious in treating Wikipedia as an authoratitive source though often—as I demonstrate further on in this post—its presence near the top of any search means it's sometimes convenient to use instead of, in this case, plowing through a plethora of political party websites. (I apologize for my hypocrisy & the fact that I'm a lazy asshole.)

"Witness the push-back by defenders of Sarah Palin, a could-be presidential candidate who wrongly characterized Paul Revere’s Revolutionary War-era ride. Palin, on a family vacation-cum-"SarahPac" promotional tour, told reporters Revere was warning the British that the colonists would not give up their guns. She said Revere rang bells and shot his gun as a warning. Historians disagree (Revere was actually warning his comrades, not the enemy British soldiers), but Palin fans rushed to edit the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite history, seeking to turn Palin’s misstatement into historical fact. (Wikipedia has since locked the page on Revere while things calm down.)" Susan Milligan

Then I discovered a photo of the bus Sarah Palin was using for her current tour, with One Nation emblazoned on its side.....


One Nation is a still extant minor political party in Australia, that was briefly popular around the turn of the century, especially in Queensland where it garnered 22% of the vote in the 1998 state election. & here, shamefacedly, I quote Wikipedia.

"Believing the other parties to be out of touch with mainstream Australia, One Nation ran on a broadly populist and protectionist platform. It promised to drastically reduce immigration and to abolish 'divisive and discriminatory policies ... attached to Aboriginal and multicultural affairs.' Condemning multiculturalism as a 'threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values,' One Nation rallied against government immigration and multicultural policies which, it argued, were leading to 'the Asianisation of Australia.'"

Its public face was Pauline Hanson, & its appeal was based on the racist, redneck, rightwing extremism that exists in parts of this country, though usually a bit more beneath the surface. & part of the reason for the party's decrease in popularity is because the conservative parties have moved even further to the right, in order to absorb most of the constituency that was once One Nation. Another reason is that it appears a major driving force in starting up the party was to take personal advantage of public funding.

Wikipedia again:

"Since the 1998 peak, One Nation has been plagued by internal divisions and has split several times. Lawsuits from ex-members forced Hanson to repay approximately A$500,000 of public funding won at the 1998 Queensland election amid claims that the party was fraudulently registered. The suits alleged that the party was undemocratically constituted in order to concentrate all power in the hands of three rulers—Pauline Hanson, David Ettridge and David Oldfield (in particular Oldfield)—and that it technically had only two members: Ettridge and Hanson."

Pauline Hanson stood as an independent in the recent New South Wales election, failed to gain a seat, & is now claiming fraud by the Electoral Office. It might be different State to & a decade on from her political debut, but her opinions don't seem to have changed.

"If Muslim people are not willing to assimilate into a democratic Australian society, 'don't come here at all,' says former One Nation politician Pauline Hanson."

(p.s. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Palin's people were aware of & impressed by Australia's One Nation Party before setting out on their obscenic tour.)

prozaic

Bout de souffle

After the First World War began, Cravan left Paris to avoid being drafted into military service. On a stopover in the Canary Islands a boxing match was arranged between Cravan and the reigning world champion Jack Johnson to raise money for Cravan’s passage to the United States. Posters for the match touted Cravan as “European champion.” Johnson, who didn’t know who the man was, knocked Cravan out solidly out and in his autobiography noted that Cravan must have been out of training.

Today the
postman brought
me the letters
W & S. We
watched Sesame
Street together.

geographies: Joué-lès-Tours

                                     The colossal institution 
                  that is the tellurian eco-
                                              nomy comes across as
                               a disfunctional asset with
                                            minimal cognitive 
                        ability, but is still able to
                                      deliver the latest DVDs.

eyeliner

Rating things is
terribly over-
rated.

Knives Forks and Spoons Press

have just released a book from SJ Fowler, a regular contributor to Otoliths, & editor of the Maintenant interview series for 3am magazine.


It's available from Amazon UK.

What's in a word?

The news today reported another two Australian military deaths in Afghanistan. One occured when a helicopter crashed, the other:

"The lance-corporal was a cook at the forward base and was taking his turn on piquet duty when he was murdered by the Afghan National Army solider who had only recently arrived at the base."

The term "piquet duty"—if what the reporter meant was that he was on watch, on sentry duty—is archaic, has been replaced by "picket duty." But the term "piquet" or "picquet" has another meaning, which, in these days of waterboarding & sensory deprivation, is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

To quote—forgive me for doing something I advise everybody not to do—Wikipedia:

The "picquet" (alternately spelled "piquet") was a method of torture used as military punishment in vogue in late medieval Europe.

The punishment of the picquet required placing a stake in the ground with the exposed end facing upward. The exposed end had a rounded point. The malefactor was typically a junior officer who had disobeyed orders. One thumb was suspended from a tree, while the sole or heel of the opposite bare foot was balanced atop the stake. The point of the stake was sharp enough to cause considerable discomfort, but not sharp enough to draw blood. To relieve pressure upon the tortured foot, the prisoner relegated all his weight to the thumb, all but tearing the thumb from its socket, which could only be relieved by shifting weight back onto the tortured foot.

Today the
postman brought
me an unsigned
ransom note
threatening to
destroy the world
unless I came up
& across with $10
million in incon-
sequential bills.
"Such is life," I
thought & threw it
in the rubbish. Ex-
istentialism does
have an upside.

s
q u
a r e

geographies: Urumqi

Today the
postman brought
me a book on
plagiarism. No-
thing I hadn't
read before,
word for word,
in a number
of other books.

this morning's unbidden internal songtrack

Bring me my
bow of burning
gold, bring me

my arrows
of desire. Bring
me my spear—

O clouds unfold!—
bring me my
chariot of fire.

William Blake

Chinese whispers

The raptors are coming!


Ruptures are coming!


Rip Torn is coming!

Looks like doG

is mighty pissed off with Arnie.

Today the
postman brought
me Fundamental
Humor. Mis-
representation if
you ask me. Not
a fart joke in it.

Dylan hay(na)ku

geographies: Riga

Coating the
last gray
years of
Communist
rule with
bees wax

may put less
pressure on
local forestry
but will lead
to ostracism
in any
children's
play group.

He talks of snow.
I talk of sand.

He talks of yaks.
I talk of camels.

He talks of water
flowing & spring

flowers. I listen.
We talk of ghosts.

Ashina Jiesheshuai (d. 619 C.E.)

included in: Rivalling The Six Dynasties: Poems from the Eastern Turkic Khaganate selected & translated by Umberto Allegrezza; The Uzbekistan Historical Society; Bukhara, 2000.

If I were being charitable

I might say that Mr Diaphragm Head, the leader of the conservative opposition in Australia, was trying to imitate a scrotal sac, but since he doesn't have the balls that go along with it.....

Tomorrow's

post at won des laits will be a found pwoermd, onwer.

It's fair to describe it as journalistic sloppy seconds, since the word that preceded it in the news report was the incorrectly apostrophed "it's" as in "a dog and it's onwer."

But, thinking about it, isn't "sloppy seconds" an appropriate term for most journalism these days?

A line from Anonli Necata-Logue

Admire the bucolic Blue
Ridge Mountains in
the distance as you
sit on the porch sipping

lemonade in this breezy
dress. The breathable
100% cotton material lets
the gentle wind kiss your

skin while the button
front & epaulets add subtle
decoration to the rustic
print. Add a headband,

sandals & a necklace, &
whether you're in West
Virginia or elsewhere,
you'll look like heaven.

Color me

a confused old fart, but I find it passing strange when a panel discussion on the impact of the death of Osama Bin Laden starts using terminology more suited to the dissection of a marketing campaign, with terms like franchise—referring to al-Qaeda Iraq, al-Qaeda Somalia etc.—& talk about the loss of the brand—Bin Laden himself.

What's next? The War on Dunkin' Donuts? The War on KFC?

Otoliths issue #21 is now live

The expense of getting a new designer outfit for the Royal Nuptials means there's no money left in the budget to appropriately acknowledge the fact that Otoliths is celebrating its fifth birthday, so we'll just have to let the issue speak for itself, & it does, as elegantly as ever.

Once again it's a wide-ranging compendium, containing text & visual work from Kirsten Kaschock, Tom Beckett, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, J. D. Mitchell-Lumsden, Martin Edmond, Ed Baker, Eileen R. Tabios, Nava Fader, Michael Caylo-Baradi, Curt Eriksen, Eeva Karhunen, Howie Good, Jennifer L. Tomaloff, Andrea Jane Kato, John M. Bennett, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, Sheila E. Murphy, Patrick Williamson, Michele Leggott, Beni Ransom, Philip Byron Oakes, Jim Meirose, Cilla McQueen, Thomas Fink, Theodoros Chiotis, Christopher Mulrooney, Keith Higginbotham & Matt Margo, Raymond Farr, Cherie Hunter Day, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, J. D. Nelson, NF Huth, Patrick Cahill, Mark DuCharme, Pam Brown, SJ Fowler, Tony Brinkley, Cecelia Chapman, David Mitchell, Felino Soriano, Jamie Bradley, Peter LaBerge, Charles Freeland, Corey Wakeling, Jeff Harrison, Jen Besemer, dan raphael, Yoko Danno, Joshua Comyn, Emma Smith, Cassandra Atherton, Michael Rothenberg, Bill Drennan, sean burn, Kit Schluter, Caleb Puckett, Rosaire Appel, Robert Gauldie, Zarah McGunnigle, Bella Li, Hala Hoagland, Marcia Arrieta, Reijo Valta, Gregory Kan, Lawrence Bernabe, Housten Donham, Sam Langer, Bob Heman, & Gustave Morin.

The issue is dedicated to Robert "Bob" Gauldie, painter, poet, scientist, & regular contributor, who died suddenly, in Utrecht, on April 5.

A perfect placement of words

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

William Carlos Williams
from Spring and All 1923

The Monarchy

might be an outdated institution, but, shee-it, the Brits sure do pageantry well.

A
l i n e
i
g
n
e
d

The Aussie Way ...

or, getting your priorities right.

A group in NSW's southwest ignored a man who'd fallen off the back of their ute but they stopped to pick up alcohol that also fell out of the vehicle.

The 31-year-old man, from Rochester in Victoria, died after striking his head on the road when he fell from the vehicle as it turned from Maude Road into Nap Nap Road at the town of Maude, in the early hours of this morning.

The man was one of several passengers in the rear of the ute at the time.

The ute's driver and other passengers did nothing to help him.

But they did stop to pick up cartons of alcohol, which had also fallen from the vehicle, before driving off, police told reporters.

The Herald Sun, 4/24/11


Updated police release, 6 hours later

The driver of the utility, a 26-year-old woman, got out and assisted along with a number of other persons in performing CPR on the injured man. Emergency services personnel were contacted, however, the man died at the scene.

The Toyota Landcruiser utility, which was driven away by unknown people at the time of the incident, has since been seized for forensic and mechanical examination.

"Hand swinging the loops of paint ..."

A small smile. Watching a game of rugby union from New Zealand on cable yesterday evening. One of the two assistant referees (= line judges) was named Jackson, the other was named Pollock. :-)

& though one team was the Blues, there were, as far as I could tell, no Poles in the opposing side.

The Two Ladies

At the beginning of the 1960s, I was employed for several years as a member of the consular staff of the Embassy of Japan in Wellington. The obvious evidence of my place of work showed up at home in the ukiyo-e prints by Utamaro & Hiroshige & the Sengai sumi-e calendars that hung on my walls, the Kirin & Sapporo beer I offered visitors. The not-so-obvious evidence could be found on my bookshelves.

Certainly there was a reasonable amount of Japanese literature on those shelves, some bought before I started working at the Embassy—novels by Shōhei Ōoka, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima; Arthur Waley's translations of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon & The Tale of Genji; anthologies by Donald M. Keene & Kenneth Rexroth; D. T. Suzuki's books on Zen Buddhism—& some acquired during my time there—a delightful illustrated edition of Basho's The Narrow Road to the North, & R. H. Blyth's outstanding four volume Haiku.

But also there were a number of non-Japanese books, which I never would have been able to acquire if I hadn't been working at the Embassy. New Zealand, at that time, had not only a rather long list of banned books but also severe restrictions on foreign currency for private citizens.

Working at the Embassy allowed me to get around both things. Not only could I obtain a large number of U.S.-based small press publications & subscriptions to journals such as Evergreen Review, but I could also bring in as much of the Olympia Press catalog as I wanted to. So, also on those shelves were books by Jean Genet, Henry Miller, The Marquis de Sade, Laurence Durrell, J.P. Donleavy, Alexander Trocchi, Terry Southern, & William S. Burroughs. The Japanese books may have informed my aesthetics & my philosophies, but the imported books informed my writing style.

During this same period, in 1964, I came across an article by Burroughs, The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith, published in the Times Literary Supplement, in which he elaborated on his cut-up technique. It made a huge impact on me, though it was many years before I started experimenting along the lines he laid out.

He wrote of a fictional character, Lady Sutton-Smith, who keeps a journal which she divides into three daily columns. In the first is what she intends to do each day, the second is given over to what she actually did, & in the third are the thoughts she had & the observations she made during the day. Once the day was over, she would transcribe her entries into another book, but she would work across the page, ignoring the column breaks, as she transcribed it, so that she ended up with a non-linear but related narrative. (It's a long time since I read this piece, so my recollections of it may be imprecise.)

My take on Genji owes as much to Lady Sutton-Smith as it does to Lady Murasaki, though conceived as a confluence of streams rather than a reading across of columns.

The first stream is The Tale of Genji itself. It is the sine qua non, providing structure, sequence, characters, situations & quotes; slices of life of a particular time & place. But Genji is a timeless & universal book. Reading it a millenium after it was written means its interpretation can be affected by anything that has happened anywhere in those intervening years &, especially, by what is happening now. So the second stream—sometimes a multiple stream—is derived from results that flow from stochastically crawling through a search engine such as Google. The third stream is a recording of what's going on around you—cooking dinner, froghopping through YouTube—& what you're thinking about as a result of these multiple provocations—Eastern vs Western philosophy, the gender disparity evident in Genji & how much has it really changed, the presence or absence of the arts in our daily lives.

There is no template for how the individual poems draw on the streams, which one they start from, or how much of each is used. The only constant is that a reference to the corresponding chapter of Genji appears within the poem. As to how much of Genji remains, let me repeat the quote from Samuel R. Delany that I used as an epigraph to the collection:

And if you cut it in half again, it gets fuzzier still. But even if you have a square centimeter of the original hologram, you still have the whole image—unrecognizable, but complete.

was

this

what Walter Benjamin had in mind?

Color me

a pedantic old fart, but how can you convince people that literacy &, in this case, numeracy skills are important when they're confronted by such things as a Top 50 list that contains more than 50 items.

"Sydney's Quay restaurant has moved up one slot to become the 26th best restaurant in the world. The three other Australian restaurants on this year's S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants list were Sydney's Tetsuya's at 58 and Marque at 70, and Melbourne's Attica at 53."

Nobody fails anymore. Instead, they're given a D or an E or an F or even a ZZZZ pass.

The headline

to the "story" reads

Wave of rising costs sends Queensland families to the brink

& it's a nice stock pic


but I still can't work out the relevance of artichoke globes & white asparagus to a story on how families are doing it tough.

Does it mean to imply that these are things they can no longer buy, or that this is what they are forced to eat these days, or what the fuck?

once they are rulers they belong to the ruling class

"There are only two kinds of governmental institutions, those which provide for a change of the government without bloodshed and those which do not. But if the government cannot be changed without bloodshed, it cannot, in most cases, be removed at all. We need not quarrel about words, and about such pseudo problems as the true or essential meaning of the word 'democracy.' You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally prefer to call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other 'tyranny.' But, as I said, this is not a quarrel about words, but an important distinction between two types of institutions."

Karl Popper: Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences
(an address delivered to the Plenary Session of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy, Amsterdam, 1948)

part error message, part hay(na)ku

"There are too many spelling &
grammar errors for Microsoft Word
to continue displaying them."

So?

Found
out long
ago that poetry

tends to upset
Bill Gates'
software.

The valleys cry out
as they flee the
mountains. Fear. &
from the mountains
anger, always anger.

Yiminishuqilibi Khan. (d. 645(?) CE)

included in: Rivalling The Six Dynasties: Poems from the Eastern Turkish Khaganate selected & translated by Umberto Allegrezza; The Uzbekistan Historical Society; Bukhara, 2000.

Out from Otoliths — Spider Face, stories by Kevin Rabas

Spider Face
Kevin Rabas
56 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-1-6
$11.75 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/spider-face/15313240

Kevin Rabas' language flits between narrative and poetry to bring these characters—and their struggles with youth, love and identity—to life. Sweet and heartbreaking at the same time, the stories in Spider Face leave indelible images long after you close the book. —Jen McConnell, author of Welcome Anybody

Spider Face is a collection of true images that linger in the place between memories and dreams. Kevin Rabas dresses the dramas of mental health and sensuality, self-destruction and loyalty, grief and social status, in a veil of constant discoveries that dance translucent around each story. These are all moments of heat and passion, whether that is passion of belief, passion of music or passion of flesh, that are concentrated examples of how everyday experiences create who a person is, and, in turn, how a person creates themselves through those same events. —Matthew Porubsky, author of voyeur poems

That Kevin Rabas is a fierce new talent was already clear from his two previous books of poetry. Now, in this collection of short fiction, he reveals himself a writer of great breadth and ability. These brief tales reveal an accomplished poet’s eye in images that startle with their beauty and precision and a storyteller’s sense for character and dramatic arc. In mimimal, sometimes snapshot-like stories that dazzle like flashbulbs with their sudden radiance, Rabas explores the tumults of sex and youth, love and the body, violence and art. His range of artistic gifts as a poet, photographer and jazz musician serve him—and his readers—well, and establish him as a writer of fiction to watch and enjoy. —Tasha Haas, author of Certain Dawn, Inevitable Dawn

The full catalog of Otoliths books can be found at The Otoliths Storefront.

geographies: Port Stanley

geographies: Nicosia

Negotiations have been
going well. Gift of a
door handle. Confidence-
building. Jumpstarts the
metabolically matched
diet plan of calamari
& scallop dishes. Aspi-
rational. National
treasure. Bears no
maker's mark. Wheelchair
access is now available.

Coming to a cigarette store

near me, next year.


& haven't the tobacco companies got their knickers in a knot over it.

"We have to defend our intellectual property in court."

"The price of cigarettes goes down because it's the only competition point left, & then cheaper cigarettes [become] more accessible to younger people: smoking rates go up."

"Plain packaging will also make it easier to sell counterfeit cigarettes because fakes will be harder to spot."

atlast

Geographies

plaint

Mais
où est
le bebop d'antan?

Godzilla come home,

we've made up your room the way you like it.

"Japan has started dumping more than 10,000 tonnes of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific."

ABC News 4/5/11

InterNaPwoWriMo IV,

the fourth incarnation of International Pwoermd Writing Month, the brainchild—or, perhaps, as I sometimes think of it when I'm struggling to come up with a new pwoermd, the bastard child—of Geof Huth, began yesterday. A record number of participants—all linked to at INTERNAPWOWRIMO—is taking part this year.

I participated last year, but, for some reason or other, continued on after the month was up. & continued on, & on, & am now in my second year of daily pwoermd posts at won des laits. No idea why. The only explanation I can offer is similar to that of a guy I used to work with, who read the obituaries each morning to see if he was still alive.

The quality of my posts fluctuates wildly, but I've posted below some of my favorites from my output of the past year.

ovelrap

po
tram——line

pipe

prozaic

messiahges

virgu/e

Δαδα

trainscent

nepoetism

sangwine

theref∴re

soupsong

I've been called many things

in my time, but

a veritable Antipodean Borges
is amongst the nicest.

Thanks Ian.

Not my idea of poetry

"A suicide bomber killed six senior Revolutionary Guards commanders, including two of its top officers, and 25 other people on Sunday in one of the boldest attacks against Iran’s most powerful military institution.

"There’s a poetry here - a terror-sponsoring regime now the target of terrorists itself."

Andrew Bolt, rightwing columnist for a number of Rupert Murdoch's tabloids in Australia, climate change skeptic, all round bigot, currently facing a charge of racial vilification in the Australian Federal Court.

The first movie

I ever saw was Elizabeth Taylor's second, Lassie Come Home. She's the one on the right left. She was twelve when she made it, I was five when I saw it.


Needless to say, Muammar Gaddafi wasn't in it, thus underlining my earlier comment.

---

& an unbidden segue.....

Gaddafi? Wasn't he the poet from Alexandria that Lawrence Durrell was always going on about?

So that's why

you never ever


saw them together.....

Out from Otoliths — j/j hastain's the ulterior eden

the ulterior eden
j/j hastain
56 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-0-9
$11.75 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-ulterior-eden/14953436

the ulterior eden presents us with a contemporary Song of Songs in which allegory is subverted by eros into a more explicit and boldly unconventional passion. Large with life and ecstatic with the “names and innumerable sensations” of adoration, this communion joins beloved and beloved in the erotic chaos of a “newest pronoun.” j/j hastain makes this pact of bounty both politically and spiritually charged, shaping poetry’s intimacies as a means through which we can “mature all historical/grief/ into luminosity. —Elizabeth Robinson

j/j hastain’s poems thrust through language's own limits, opening it, re-making it to carry ideas it could not otherwise accommodate, “like a neoteric intimacy all pluck-penitent”, “the dispositions we intone rather than recant.” Short-circuiting erasure, j/j’s verbo-visual texts create a space for embodied being which transcends binaries, oppositions, proffers instead the gap into which we must leap. hastain reimagines the possibles in an ecstasy of sound/sounding and meditation, “a thing overflowing with curvature truths and tugs… an inter-ethereal design that renders its subjects submerged” in a new real. These erotic, potent, spiritual poems cast us in between, inside, loose but never aloof, as we enter into an evolutionary dialogos. A discourse through wilderness into a new wild. A birth, a dream, a text of being, hastain’s poems and image-poems “midwife” a new body, lover-and-beloved, “feral heart” beating against our ribcage, “a newest pronoun” exploding on the page. —Marthe Reed

The full catalog of Otoliths books can be found at The Otoliths Storefront

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Ceci n'est pas une pipeline
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

small snake

this time

juvenile

pencil-thin

maybe abt a ft long / in the old language

35cm in the new

black

which means

brown
or
black

but

either way

venomous

downstairs toilet

white tiles

easily seen

sneaky, though

up the wall

path between the bricks

smaller than

dislodged

back to the floor

dispatched

no spade / this time

trowel

appropriate

severed snake

half & half & a pile of blood & guts

no pics

not into snuff

uneasy now

paranoid

look before stepping

are there

snakes in the wall?

A letter to the Editor

"When do you make exceptions for reprints? I have a story titled Rxxxxxx Cxxxxxx that has been accepted by four different literary magazines, two have been published and two will soon be published. Would I be able to send that story?"

At least s/he was open about it.

A Tale of Toxic Titties

As the YouTube video below confirms, part of the recent story about a snake biting a model's breast is real, even though the breasts obviously aren't — "the largest implants available in Israel" according to the Old Testament.



However, not so real is the much-published punchline to the story, that the snake died of silicone poisoning.

Nor, it appears, were the less-reported before & after lines from the snake. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....."

from the vaults

Backtracking in the Early Nineties

The dispersed pieces of a former life
fly together like a film
run backwards. A single word
sets them off — Owsley, king of the
acid chemists, the eponymous chapter heading
of a remaindered detective novel bought for
$1 in a Woolworths variety store. I see it
as I turn the page; & associations
pile up so fast I confuse the front porch
with Freud’s casting couch. Dear Doctor, I
dropped a tab for the first time on an
afternoon in spring some twenty-five years
ago. No-one else was then & there
though I do recall the cushions were this
amazing shade of purple that sang
to me, & a sudden satori gave me insight
into the hidden meaning of the cover of
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
& the deeper mysteries that lay beyond.

In the here & now the cushions are red,
have a black ideogram embossed on them
to match the cane suite
that they rest upon. The birds are back
but it is the sun that sings above a lawn
that is mowed & watered regularly. Each
month the bank deducts the mortgage
& the car payments automatically; & I am
writing this on a PC paid for by
credit card. Sic transit gloria mundi. Then
into it all comes this chapter heading
& I am out of it again. One word that
probably cost me one quarter-millionth of
one dollar & gave the writer even less
dissolves the entire environment & once again
I race through stainless steel tunnels
where lights bounce back from the shiny walls
faster than words, slower than the eye can see.

first published in can we have our ball back?
included in Sun Moon's Mother

don't ask, children

Owsley Stanley, 1935-2011


Killed in a car crash in North Queensland where he had been living for the past 20 years.

Now out from Otoliths — Marcia Arrieta's triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme

triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme
Marcia Arrieta
80 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9807651-8-2
$13.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/triskelion-tiger-moth-tangram-thyme/9898811

What do the Golden Ratio, Tassajara’s kitchen, and Noguchi’s fascination with form have to do with natural cycles and the written word? In Arrieta’s triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme, language flows between forms and fascinations sharing the elusive nature of sand, bear, and canyon and the infinite enigmas posed by modern physics, the green dragon, and the infinite reversals of Chinese puzzles. Arrieta’s poems are overlapping spheres, vanishing points, circles that reflect her fascination with modern cosmology, aesthetics, and the spirituality of language. — Andrea Moorhead

I have long followed Marcia Arrieta’s poems, impressed by her minimalist approach to language itself, her quiet southwest surrealism—reminiscent at times of the visionary artistry of Georgia O'Keeffe. Her poems are compelling, marked by deft and abrupt turnings, a total mastery of paratactic construction, and a dazzling sense of the landscape of the heart played against that insistent inner voice. Here, at last, they are gathered together, a gift well worth having, a quiet visionary voice which surprises and invites the reader to be attentive. — David Cope

Geometry defines symptoms of reality. Its elements hold in common a range of distances from other presences. In the perpetual imaginary search for probable freshness, what angle offers the most valid view? Marcia Arrieta’s book enacts philosophical inquiry into tangible experience, by way of a series of inductive expeditions. At the intersection of multiple wavelengths are poetic choices of mosaic segments that the poet sculpts into a metonymic actuality that far transcends harmonics of the selves. — Sheila E. Murphy

Marcia Arrieta’s long overdue first volume of poems charts the cycles of language within consciousness by plotting the recurrence of concepts and ideas and of certain words which, planet-like, wander among them. She has, through a process of extreme selectivity, crafted these poems-in-motion, poems on the outer reaches of philosophical thought. These poems are not for the mentally inert, but one willing to “staple the head to the sea” will receive much delight and intellectual stimulation from them. — Celestine Frost

The poems in this book are complex, "intellectually emotional" tangles of observations. Rather than through commas, these short — frequently only one noun long — observations are related to each other through periods, line breaks, empty spaces. They die out instant to instant. But they're also connected by Marcia Arrieta's acute attention, the fingerpointingtothemoon-like unpredictability of her imagery. She is a wonderful observer, for whom the naming process and the names, the things and the silhouettes of their distances, "the literary symbol." /period/ and "sea. clay. tree." belong to the same landscape, where "between the absolute." /period/ "the door is partially open." — Márton Koppány

The full catalog of Otoliths books can be found at The Otoliths Storefront.

a master of
the one-
liner

I'm not into

conspiracy theories—well, not too many of them—or Nostrodramatic prophecies of the world coming to an end later on this year—let me consult my appointment book; no, it's not scheduled for at least the next two years—but I do believe that sometimes unusual phenomena occuring in nature may be harbingers—love that word: just been watching reruns of BSG on cable; "You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace"—of forthcoming extreme events.

Thus, birds falling from the sky, on New Year's Eve. Since then.....

Out from Otoliths - Arpine Konyalian Grenier's The Concession Stand

The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins
Arpine Konyalian Grenier
84 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9807651-5-1
$16.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-concession-stand-exaptation-at-the-margins/14735087
(currently on sale at a 20% discount to the rrp)
Will also be available through Amazon later this month

Arpine is one of the few living American writers to whose works the term "profound" may be meaningfully affixed. She has as capacious a consciousness as any I have ever encountered: Science weds Philosophy and yields the Poetic and the Fictive (in Wallace Stevens' sense). Her mind is fertile like the garden and pond of Giverny. To fully appreciate her writings one must strive to emulate her genius for synthesizing the currents of a personal and intellectual history. We should not be surprised if we do not accomplish this overnight — although Dream is indeed another state of Being and Becoming: A Rainbow at Midnight, and A Dawn Eclipse. — Gerald Locklin, California State University, Long Beach

In Armenian, we learn, the word for money is the mirror image — the antigram — of the word for human. In her focus on the word as the smallest unit of composition, Arpine Konyalian Grenier’s essays and memoirs light the darkest corridors of history and disaster. That's her method. In practice, she provides a deft gloss on Fanon's notion of occult instability, locating it in language, more precisely in poetry, and always in music. Her wisdom comes not from the bookshelf, though she is the most learned essayist I know, but from life itself, or from cultural memory and its subtractions. Through her observations a longing absence ferociously prowls, growling like a lion. — Kevin Killian, Novelist, Poet, Playwright

Konyalian Grenier's The Concession Stand makes language take new turns. Her essays are poems, really. Her quest is to understand what it means to be human, in terms of poetry; she takes us along, thinking, listening, reading, laughing and seeing the world for what it is. —Jonathan Cohen, Stony Brook University

******

The print parts of Otoliths #20 are now available from The Otoliths Storefront.

the segue

Poetry NZ, issue #42