Street seen

The lawyers, on their way back to Court after lunch at a nearby pub, are all dressed like undertakers. What hope then of a not guilty verdict?

Let's do lunch

"It would be easy to suggest that the glum tone of many of Young’s poems reflects the frustrations of writing poetry in one of the most conservative, philistine regions of Australia, the heartland of Pauline Hanson’s xenophobic political movement. Young does complain occasionally about the ‘town of the/ collectively unconscious’ in which he lives and works, but the source of the unease of his Lunch Poems is just as often located far away."

From a review by New Zealand poet Scott Hamilton of my Lunch Poems which I discovered via the most recent poetry links post at Ron Silliman's blog.

Thanks Ron.

What fucking hope is there?

"Netanyahu's cabinet with 30 members, including two women ministers, is Israel's largest to date.

As the cabinet held its first session, an extra large table had to be brought in to seat all the ministers.

Two prominent Israeli newspapers, the Yated Neeman and the weekly Shaa Tova, which cater to Ultra-Orthodox Jewish readers, digitally removed the two women ministers from the first group photograph of the new cabinet.

Publishing pictures of women is viewed by many in the Ultra-Orthodox community to be immodest."

Al Jazeera

"Among the myriad of superfluous ministries handed out by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in his recent orgy of coalition building is the Ministry for Information (hasbara in Hebrew), a throwback to the days when right-wingers were convinced that there was nothing wrong in settling Palestinian territories and that all that was needed for the world to accept Israel's occupation of the West Bank was a fluent English speaker who could argue the country's case on CNN and the BBC."

The Jerusalem Post

For some reason,

even though Both Sides Now is a favorite song & Joni Mitchell a favorite singer, I had never put the two together, had forgotten she'd written it, had always associated it with Judy Collins whose version was the first I heard.

Finally put it all together, forty years after the fact—would that everything could come as quick. Caught a reasonably recent Joni Mitchell doco on cable, some of it concert footage, amongst it a beautiful version of her singing her song.

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

Ж^not

geographies: Oaxaca

Made sense at the time, later they wept at their naivity. Read of the greater use of ethanol in motor fuels. Bought up all the corn around town. Dreamt of gushers of money. Could not comprehend vast acreage under cultivation in the U.S. Midwest. Did not understand white corn for food, yellow corn for biofuel. Did not understand genetic modification, hybrid crops, subsidies. Did not understand why no-one rushed to buy their stockpile or why those they'd bought it from did not come back. Did not realize that since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, it was much much cheaper to buy corn grown above the border.

Just a reminder

that submissions for issue thirteen of Otoliths close on April 27.

Guidelines are available here.

The Nigerian email scam, encore

Once again I have received, in both my personal & Otoliths editor Gmail accounts, a Nigerian scam email from someone who has hacked into a poet's email account, this time Lars Palm.

how are you , i traveled to West africa Nigeria in Lagos for a program and i got robbed on way to the hotel .i cant believe this is happening to me right now. i need a soft loan of 1300 euros from you . i will pay you back when i arrive.please get back to me immediately you get this mail OK. waiting for your reply

This time it's a much shorter email than the one I got four months ago purporting to be from David-Baptiste Chirot & which I posted about here & here. The latter link includes a link to Google's quite extensive listing of occurences of the same scam email.

My dilemma is that if Lars' account has been "seized"—which it must have been so that return emails can be accessed by the usurper—how the hell can I let him know what's going on?

Do not assume

the narrator
is always
an avatar
of himself.

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.)

Why / I am / thinking about ambivalence

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

I
am am-
bivalent about ambivalence.

This morning's

unbidden mental musical moment was Pete Seeger doing Little Boxes.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.

Sweet Jesus! Any morning now it's going to be Kum Ba Yah.

Freshness? Vitality? Bullshit!

Once more the corpse that is most New Zealand poetry is rolled out onto the viewing table. Maybe the curtains have been changed in the interim, but judging from the exterior of this anthology it seems that nothing much else has changed since I left 40 years ago.

My belief is that poets in N.Z. read the very first line in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, Olson's

What does not change / is the will to change

got frightened by it & decided to make sure they stayed in the same old traditionalist & provincial Anglophile rut.


Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets showcases the freshness and vitality of current New Zealand poetry.
It's perhaps ironic that I found a link to this at Ron Silliman's blog since, to judge from the majority of the list of contributors, this is the Antipodean Chapter of Ron's dreaded School of Quietude writ large, & so contemporary that at least two of the poets are dead.

I love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning.....

The print editions

of Otoliths issues eleven & twelve are now available from The Otoliths Storefront.

"Shoot & don't worry about the consequences"

Attempts by the Israeli media to publish the rules of engagement for the Gaza campaign have been blocked by the military censor, but in the past couple of weeks the contents of those rules have begun to to emerge in anecdotal evidence - suggesting strongly that soldiers were told to avoid Israeli casualties at all costs by means of the massive use of firepower in a densely populated urban environment.

Worrying new questions have also been raised about the culture of the Israeli military, indicating a high level of dehumanisation and disregard for Palestinians among the chain of command and even among the military rabbinate.

An investigation by reporter Uri Blau, published on Friday in Haaretz, disclosed how Israeli soldiers were ordering T-shirts to mark the end of operations, featuring grotesque images including dead babies, mothers weeping by their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques.

Another T-shirt designed for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex" next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A shirt designed for the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion depicts a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills".

Peter Beaumont, The Observer, Sunday 22 March 2009

could a woodchuck chuck.....

Every dusk is
the same
dusk

except
for Monk's
Crepuscule with Nellie.

how much wood....

Every
day becomes
the same day.

Yesterday

a day of Australian anthems. Songs we grew up on or, for those in my loose age group, songs that grew up on us. Twin twelve hour concerts—Sydney, Melbourne—under the banner Sound Relief. Proceeds from the Melbourne one going to help victims of the Victorian bushfires, those from the Sydney concert shared between victims of the bushfire & the recent Queensland floods.

Two cable channels, one for each show. Occasional feeds from the other in the changeovers between groups. Mainly homegrown talent—allowing for the fact that the music industry here, like show business & sports, claims New Zealanders as their own—with a couple of overseas groups, Coldplay & Kings of Leon, both of whom are touring here at present, thrown into the mix. Two groups—Jet & Wolfmother—did both venues. & even though there were a few band reformations, not the normal nostalgia concert routine of aged rockers being fed glucosamine & adrenaline & sent on stage to supplement their old age pensions. Everybody, with one notable exception, still in the music business.

Sydney the more poppier concert. Coldplay to open, the close a saccharin duet by Barry Gibbs & Olivia Newton-John, Islands in the Stream, a Bee Gees song originally intended for Marvin Gaye, but taken to #1 by Kenny Rodgers & Dolly Parton.

Melbourne a bit more rock-oriented. Jet opened the concert & then flew to Sydney to perform again. A couple of recently reformed groups, & some groups reformed especially for this occasion. Great to see the Finns back in their various formats—Split Enz, Crowded House—& great to see Neil's son Liam who just might be the greatest drummer I have ever laid eyes on.

& to close the show, the Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts in the current Australian Federal Government being more political than he has since going into Politics. Mick Jagger strutting his stuff even at peak form has nothing on Peter Garrett in full flight. Midnight Oil came together for the second time in the last ten years—the other was for a Tsunami Relief concert about five years ago—with only the briefest of rehearsals, two short gigs just across the road from Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday & Friday.

They're still the greatest rock band in the country. My only regret, listening to the lyrics & bearing in mind Garrett's current job, is that it's easier to sing about change than to enact it.

Taciturn

to
the end.
Took a tacit

turn, & nobody
heard him
die.