ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Kelly is an artist living in London, working in the modernist tradition. He has collaborated with and visually translated numerous writers and poets including David Berridge, Daniele Pantano and Dylan Nyoukis. His works have been published in books such as Gilles de Rais (Like This Press 2013), The Primarchs (Bear Press 2012) and Saint Augustine of Hippo (Kitt Press). He was the Saison Poetry Library’s artist in residence for the 2012 Poetry Parnassus. He is currently creating work for group and solo exhibitions this year, 2013.

When I show up to the canvas it happens,

And when I show up to the brush, out it bleeds

Or when I glance out from the upstairs window

To see him planting trellises

For verdant green grapes in ninety nine degree heat

Waves in an earthquake-laden summer

The fragility of life calls it forward as well.

This is a time of friends who disown me

Because I disown the role of keeping them constantly entertained

Or seeding their penchant for dramatic overture

In a life that’s half over and not worth the effort,

Instead valuing the downward spiral

Of going inwards to that place where the underworld fox breathes,

Holding up palms full of red currant berries

And secrets that make the blood thicken.

And I kick myself for waiting this late

For biding so much time within parts unaccounted for

In the grandiose scheme of all that is meaningful

And it’s not lonely here although I am more alone than ever.

Looking is birthed from another bone than seeing.

Seeing requires a slow pulsing patience.

It’s the Persian sign on the main street hotel

Where little boys dressed up for a wedding giggle over a balcony

At all the bosom tops they spy from their elevated advantage,

Or the boy in front of the laundromat

Reading the Count of Monte Christo

At four p.m. on Monday

Across the street from the Japanese man throwing seeds

On the library lawn that will soon sprout

Strawberries and my neighbor yells

Shrilling things at the homeless man asleep beneath my fencepost

While I discreetly wish him sweet dreams.

My poetic panic is gone, my political unease.

It’s not that I still don’t activate often,

It’s merely that life has slowed down to accompany the breeze

Seen now through the lens of a large spanning arc,

Between the old sparks of ignition

And the mellowness that folds in beneath the skin

When one gives in to choosing one’s battles carefully

And with keen discernment.

Walking alone in the San Fernando Valley I notice new trees,

Hispanic men pruning their prized blood orange groves

While trained pit bulls protect backyards full of machinery

And the world breaks into a thousand shards of colorful strata.

It happens when I show up to the keyboard, too

When in blinding moments I am broadsided by grace

And by the soft yet guttural realization

That my muse is, and always has been,

Love, and I embrace it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimberly Cooper Nichols is an artist, writer and social anthropologist living in Venice Beach, California. She has been exhibiting for over a decade as a conceptual artist in the United States and is the author of the book of literary short fiction Mad Anatomy. She also serves as editor for the socially progressive journal Newtopia. She is a contributing editor to 3:AM where her serial poetry column Naked in Front of Strangers appears regularly. She is currently at work on her second book Neptune’s Journey as well as a 22-piece conceptual art project titled FOOL.

Conventional wisdom would suggest when a poet leaves their country of birth at a young age, for a new nation, they might bring to bear both traditions upon their writing. Perhaps it is possible, though arguably reductive, that the poet in question would be of neither nation truly – forever an immigrant in one and a stranger to another. What seems assured though, is that this sense of displacement, ambiguity of tradition and identity, this fundamental plurality of language and culture, would seem to find its proper place in the intangibility at the heart of a forceful and considered poetic, where such equivocality is not only welcome but perhaps necessary.

At the core of the last century’s European poetry tradition lies the notion of trace, of multiplicity, invention, migration and these are the defining characteristics of George Szirtes’ oeuvre. His body of work, 40 years in the making and prolific in that time, has carried across forms, mediums, language and tones. It is the poetry of a singular individual extolling individualism, a poet whose responsibilities towards generosity and openness of spirit seem gracefully self-imposed across writing, translating, teaching, editing and anthologising.

Moreover, it is the not the work of a man trapped between nations and histories, but one who has been emancipated by a lifetime’s fidelity to poetry, never bound by a national dualism, despite the complications of being explicitly Hungarian and implicitly English. Author of over 20 collections, winner of numerous prizes including the TS Eliot, the Cholmondeley, the Gold star of the Hungarian republic and the best translated book award, George Szirtes is an immense poet and undoubtedly the greatest translator of Hungarian into English of the last century, if ever. In an wide ranging and generous interview, we present the 96th edition of Maintenant.

3:AM: It seems you have often been asked to recount a sense of your identity through your nationality, and its dualism between your life in England, your entire adult life, and your childhood in Hungary. Inevitably, this question of nationality may be somewhat irrelevant, it simply is, but its invocation does involve a consistent calling back to your youth, and those experiences which have shaped your life. Do you feel that poetry has been a necessary medium for you in this specific context? in which you have explored your nationality as a Hungarian, and your experiences in Hungary as a child?

GS: The Jesuits thought the first seven years of a child’s life would determine the adult and Rudolf Steiner thought something similar. I am not always sure how and to what degree they are right but childhood is a vital formative period for everyone. Early childhood in particular provides us with a groundwork of reality, an instinctive sense of the dimensions of life. That dimensional sense is necessarily related to time, place, and language, and the people who share that time, place, and language with you may share it primarily on the basis of nationality, but there are many other potential bases for sharing, such as family, class, religion, cause, condition, nature, etc. This is a little long-winded but I want as far as possible to separate the nation-state as an idea in flag-bearing form from the far more complex sense of who or what we are. There is only one sequence of poems in which my own childhood has been the central concern, ‘Flesh: An Early Family History’ in Reel (2004). Specific memories occur in other poems as almost chance crystallisations of the dimensional sense but my actual memories of very early childhood are few. The ‘Flesh’ sequence begins with five poems on forgetting that warn the reader – and myself – that what follows is in essence the invention of memory.

That’s the personal side. As regards the Hungarian nation, the history of Hungary has meant essentially four dates for me: 1944 (the German army’s entry into Hungary and the beginning of the Hungarian Holocaust), 1956 (the year of the Uprising when we left), 1984 (the year I first returned to Hungary as a writer) and 1989 (when we spent most of the year in Hungary watching the state crumble around us). Unfortunately Hungary has been rushing as fast as it can back to the Thirties since then. Even in those poems, poems with what I think of as a historical sense, it is not so much the nation, more a set of instinctive personal dimensions that acts as the dynamic. I actively dislike nationalism in all its forms.

3:AM: Moreover, do you think the traditional interpretation of this ‘dual’ nationality, as being one of double exclusion, culturally and linguistically, is valid? To me, much of your work presents an opposite idea, that these complications of nationality have allowed you a greater sense of what is indelibly English and Hungarian?

GS: That is very hard for me to say. There is the whole of the collection titled An English Apocalypse (2001) of which the 26-section title poem refers to a great many experiences and events that I felt to be specifically English. The sequence consists of pastorals, grotesques, urban vignettes, memories of living in the North of England, the political climate of the 70s and 80s and the five apocalypses at the end.

I have, I suppose, my own distinct sense of being in England – and of being in Hungary. No doubt both are limited. It is as with memory – a good part of it is invention and imagination. In fact it’s all very dreamlike. Writing such dreams is like watching oneself dream. But I can’t help feeling ‘exclusion’ is too strong a word. I don’t think anything in particular is excluding me. I think there may instead be a delicate state of tension, a certain distancing, but that the distancing is mutual.

3:AM: Moreover, though I can’t speak of the latter (though your work as a translator from the Hungarian is arguably the most semantically important contribution to that field in modern history), but of the former, you do certainly seem to have an unusual sensitivity to the ironies and subtleties of English culture, whatever they may be. Do you feel you have developed a specific sensitivity in this regard?

GS: I hope I have but I would be the last person to know. The slightly odd thing is that nobody – with the exception of John Sears who wrote a whole book about my work (Reading George Szirtes, 2008) – treated An English Apocalypse as a serious depiction of England. Sean O’Brien refers to it briefly in his Bloodaxe lectures. The line seems to be that, as a foreigner, I can have no real perspective on England and that, despite the five apocalypses at the end, I have too rosy a view of it. They think I should leave the English to their guilt and let the Irish and the Scots address the issue for them. Well, tra-la. It may be that I speak as nobody else finds. I may be just a weirdo with a weird sense of England. I hope the sequence might at least be a set of glowing fragments within those dreamlike crypto-English dimensions of time, place and language I mentioned at the start.

3:AM: The Jewish tradition in Hungary and Romania and the Baltic is one of the most ebullient and overwhelming and fundamentally tragic in 19th and 20th century Europe – essentially an incredibly dense mixture of Hasidism, theatre, poetry, secularism, zionism – it really was the grounding for so much of the philosophy, literature and avant garde movements that resonate so completely today. Has your family a long history in this regard?

GS: Practically none as far as I know but the fact is I simply don’t know. The effect of the interwar period in Hungary which introduced the first anti-Jewish laws in 1920 following the Bolshevik revolution of 1919 (led by Jewish communists), was to discourage all such manifestations. Hungarian Jew were to assimilate as far as possible, to leave the professions – and later any employment – and to make themselves all but invisible. It didn’t help of course. My father’s people came, I believe, from Bohemia and Moravia (details lost), my mother’s from Transylvania. It was not until she had died that I was told – though I had guessed – her family were Jewish. She said they were Lutheran. The concentration camp experiences of 1944-45 were, according to her, on political grounds. She was partially educated middle-class, trained as a photographer, his fmily was urban working-class with lower middle class relatives, including in the arts. But none of these arts were Jewish. I grew up in ignorance of the whole tradition, no rituals, now festivals, no customs. To be introduced to it now would be interesting. Half of me would think I had come home, the other half would we wondering what I was doing among the Hottentots.

3:AM: Many Romanian Jewish writers really saw their identity as Jewish and not Romanian in the way we conceive of that nation (I’m thinking of Celan, but also Dan Pagis, and Tzara even) because the Romanian states they grew up in were Austro-Hungarian constructs like Bukovina that ended with the horrific fascism of the late 30s and early 40s and the actions of the Iron guard. From that point they were no longer Romanian, but Jewish writers from extinct Jewish communities. How much has your own sense of identity between being Hungarian and being Jewish been cohesive or conflicting?

GS: It is as conflicting as Hungary chooses to make it. My mother preferred to think of herself as Romanian in the 60s and we had a nunber invitations to cultural events at the Romanian embassy. I don’t know why or how. My mother, who was ethnic Hungarian but born after WW1 in post-Trianon Romanian territory, blamed the Hungarians rather than the Romanians for the extermination of her entire family because it happened during a period when her part of Transylvania was for a few years back under Hungarian jurisdiction. I myself felt no conflict in childhood, nor did I throughout the 80s and early 90s. It shocked me in 1995 to see blackshirts march through Budapest and the potential for conflict has steeply risen since then.

3:AM: Do you think there has been an acknowledgement or a consciousness in contemporary Hungarian society of the shame of complicity that ordinary Hungarians showed toward the holocaust, in light of the actions of country like Denmark during the same period?

GS: No, absolutely not. Like most countries under Soviet control they were told they were the good people and that all the bad ones – Nazis and Fascists – had fled to the Western side. In partial mitigation Hungary had suffered a series of catastrophic defeats since 1526, so having to bear guilt as well as defeat might be feared to be psychologically crushing, but it would be a great step forward if they could do it. I don’t anticipate any time soon, however. At the moment we are as far from it as we have ever been.

3:AM: The situation in obviously deeply complex but many have spoken about a rise of the right in Hungary, a return to explicit public anti-semitism and nationalism. Has this been perceptible to you? And has it been related to cultural or economic matters in your opinion?

GS: I have kept a pretty close eye on it, blogged on it, linked to it and engaged in an LSE debate about it. It is more than perceptible – it is downright shouting in your face. Over 60% of the Hungarian public, a recent survey says, take anti-Semitic and anti-Roma attitudes. The highest in Europe. Fascist writers are back on the school syllabus, statues of Horthy and others of his time have been rising. The history and culture of the nation is being forcefully rewritten. The vulnerable isolation of the Hungarian language is also a factor. I could write you half a book on the reasons for it, and yes, it is connected to cultural and economic matters but it has long historical roots, most specifically from the end of the 19th century onwards.

3:AM: Your prolificism seems to be a fundamental part of your essence as a writer – the notion of relentless activity, of an endless engagement of writing, commentating, producing. It is admirable. How do you conceive of your own energy of output?

GS: I don’t really know. At worst it’s an addiction, at best just a surplus of energy, I think fast, feel fast, tick over fast. I don’t think that indicates a lack of depth. Dive fast, dive deep is the principle. I love the feeling of language in my hands. I want to be where it is. I wouldn’t know what I thought or felt, or was, without it. It’s not that I am sure now, but I do at least feel I’m on the track.

3:AM: Moreover so much of your activity is interactive, contemporary and accessible, you seem to have made a concerted effort to embrace the online media of communication to produce a lot of poetry, reportage, commentary and to offer a cohesive view of your work as it is happening for those who would follow. Did this happen decisively or naturally? Do you take pleasure in this ‘public’ engagement?

GS: When possible I try to say yes to things. I am not a technophile as such. I am no good at understanding the mechanics, but once engaged I am immediately interested in the nature of the medium’s existence. I entered Facebook and Twitter at other people’s prompting. but once in I was aware of them as potentially literary spaces and locations. By literary I don’t mean necessarily bookish, I mean places that language can explore.

I was not drawn there by the ‘social’ side of ‘social media’. I’m far from a life-and-soul-of-the-party man. My main objection to the slam and performance scene, admirable though it is in many ways, is that it seems like an enormous party and, as I tell others, I started writing poetry to get away from parties not to go to more. I am quite solitary in many ways. The public element of writing blogs, facebook posts and tweets, works in two main ways for me: 1) I do actually make friends with real individual people, and 2) the awareness that whatever I write in such spaces is in the semi-public arena, however ephemeral, offers an editorial standard and discipiline. I can mumble what I like to myself at my desk, but once the utterance is in public space it must stand up for itself.

Dance, dart, dive as deep as you can, emerge. It’s the way life seems to have come at me. All the long sequences have been series of such actions. In that respect, the technology / media way of working seems perfectly natural. Blog, Facebook and Twitter are interesting locations for work. And, of course, each new location invites a new poetic, a new form. I think form is a kind of action, not a product. Give me a form, give me a line, and I’ll chase it like a dog chases the wind. Each new poetic opens another possibility. Each is a form.

3:AM: And having written over 15 collections, produced innumerable translations and edited many volumes in your over three decades of publishing, what is your relationship to the finished book? Is it dead upon delivery, as they say, or do you have a sense of its continued life in that it may never be completely finished in your eyes?

GS: The big 520pp New and Collected Poems appeared in 2008. The earliest poem there dates back to 1973, the last to 2007. It’s not in the least dead matter to me – I enjoy reading from it occasionally and am proud to have written much of it – but it is done. I don’t want to be trapped in it. I certainly wouldn’t want to rewrite it or write more of the same. Even as it was being planned I had a later book in preparation, The Burning of the Books (2009), that would do some new things. I want to see what else there is to be done – what it is in me to do – without closing the pre-2008 account.

3:AM: Do you think poetry has developed a notion that an excess of writing is somehow a lack? That there is a traditional, formal and constricting suspicion of writers who are effusive, as opposed to writers who are delicately withdrawn and lonesome in tone and manner? (It certainly seems that way in Britain)

GS: Excess can be perceived as lack, but if excess indicates frivolity, there is something earnest about paucity. Some people are productive, some less so. That isn’t a moral or artistic choice. It’s a matter of metabolism. Having got beyond the Collected I feel pleasantly and generously irresponsible. That book is there and won’t vanish. That means I feel less bound than ever by the expectations or standards of ‘important people’ or the literary ‘powers’. If work interests me I will do it. I want to run around and breathe new air and learn new manners. I couldn’t do that without excess.

Blake said the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I don’t know about the wisdom, but I am enjoying the road.

3:AM: I’m interested in how you approach subjects for translation. There seems to be a remarkable depth of work in the Hungarian language, and your translations seem, objectively, to be responsible for the immense reputation of some Hungarian writers outside of Hungary. Is the process led by your reading and taste, or by publishers contacting you?

GS: There are between five and ten translators of Hungarian into English who do a very good job of trying to cover precisely that ‘depth of work’. They are mainly translators of fiction. In poetry Edwin Morgan and William Jay Smith were very important. Morgan’s translations of Attila József are still the best and it was his translation of Sándor Weöres’s ‘The Lost Parasol’ in the Penguin volume of two Hungarian poets, Weöres and Ferenc Juhász, that inspired me to think that translation is something I might do. The work of George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer, and of Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner is vital. Peter Zollman – hardly known in the UK, though he lives here – is of a high standard.

In terms of poetry I began with a series of commissions from the now defunct The Hungarian Quarterly (The New Hungarian Quarterly as it was then) whose demise is the result of one of the many attacks on independent thinking by the current Hungarian government that is determined to define what culture should be. The way it has generally worked since then is that I am commissioned by publishers to translate fiction, but it is up to me to propose poetry. I wish I had more time for poetry now: I translate individual poems but fiction takes up the majority of the time available.

I doubt that I am responsible for anything but a small part of the reputation of Hungarian writers. Being known, and having won prizes, as a poet probably draws attention to my work.

3:AM: Why do you think Sandor Márai, who was so prolific, and lived so long outside of Hungary, was only given critical and popular attention outside of Hungary in the last few decades, after his tragic death? Do you think it came down to chance, or perhaps the need for good English translations of his work?

GS: Márai’s is a tragic story. His work was banned in Hungary after the war and he could only publish in the Hungarian-language emigré press which is hardly ever noticed by anyone except other emigrés or by dissidents at home. He killed himself in San Diego at the age of 89, in 1989 just as the system that had banned him was falling apart. His discovery was down to chance. A few years after his death the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso was in Paris and borrowed Márai’s book, known in English as Embers, from a publisher’s list of forgotten classics. He loved it and made sure it received as much international attention as possible. It became a lauded best seller in many languages. This started the revival. Márai was one of those very prolific writer: in effect it was like pulling a string and finding a stash of potential gold at the other end. Everything is helped by a good translation. I have translated four novels by Márai – more may be translated but not by me. It may even be that the demand for his work is less than it was. I think he was a magnificent visionary but an erratic writer of passages rather than of fully formed novels. Embers – which I did not translate – was really a novella. as was Esther’s Inheritance (that I did). He was best as an observer (see his diaries) and a psychologist of motives and desires. His thought is heightened by brilliant sensory impressions. Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels and Portraits of a Marriage are marvellous, incomplete tours de force.

3:AM: Laszlo Krasznahorkai is another remarkably gifted novelist you have translated that seems to have gained immense respect outside of Hungary in the last decade. What is your relationship to his works as a translator? Are his novels unique challenges?

GS: László Krasznahorkai is, along with Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas, one of the three major writers of Hungarian prose fiction of the late 20th and early 21st century. Like Márai he is a visionary but his vision is more absolute and cosmological: it is essentially apocalyptic. Most Hungarian fiction tends to be translated into German before any other language and he was winning prizes there from the start. I have translated three books by him, the first of which, in terms of translation, The Melancholy of Resistance, became an object of what I think of as a cult – a small cult in terms of numbers but a potentially very influential one, a cult reinforced by the second in order of translation, War and War. His books fit very well into a world where high art literature may be represented by Thomas Bernhadt and W G Sebald. It only took one big spark to start the fire and that is what happened with the third of my translations, Satantango – his very first novel in Hungarian. Suddenly it was all blazing. I am delighted for him – he is a marvellous original writer.

He is very hard work indeed for a translator. His love of the paragraphless chapter and of the very long sentence presents obvious technical problems. It takes time to tune in and feel the timbre of the voice, to understand the nature of its darkness and humour and why those long sentences are the way they are. Hungarian syntax has to find a form in English syntax, and the effects of Hungarian syntax have to rediscover themselves in English syntax. The translator must learn the register and explore the dimensions of a vision that permeates everything. Speaking for myself, after the first working draft, I have to sit down and rewrite what is in front of me, guided only by what I hope are my best instincts.

I don’t work closely with him on the translations. I like him and respect him very much as a person but we don’t meet very often. On rare occasions I phone or email to ask him about some particular usage or term, but never about stylistic issues. I have sometimes got this or that detail wrong, but the web of the voice is the vital thing, because that is what the reader enters. It is the world the reader enters, its noise and mechanism, that is unique.

3:AM: Do you approach the translation of fiction and poetry in distinctly different ways?

GS: Poetry is more line-by-line work: it may be that the flow is from detail to whole rather than the other way, as it is in fiction. Hear the weight of the detail, find the precise chime of the workable voice made up out of such details – by which I mean not just lexicographical detail but rhythm, texture, shifting registers and manners of voice, including the voice’s relationship to formality and informality, and the hearing and locating, where possible, of English poetic echoes – no poetry works entirely out of itself, everything is born, apparently naked, out of echo – that may establish some related echo-chamber. Poetry is like listening all over the body. Fiction is like understanding a way of moving.

3:AM: You have advocated a collaborative energy throughout your writing career too, which is a greatly underappreciated notion in poetry, in my opinion. Did you always actively collaborate with peers in your early practise?

GS: I have worked with composers and visual artists from the beginning – much of the forthcoming book, Bad Machine, springs from direct collaboration with three specific visual artists – rather than with other writers although, through teaching, I have in effect collaborated in the making of new work. The poetry I most love assumes a solitary voice entering another solitary mind in a given solitary space. Given that notion of the solitary (‘In my craft or sullen art / Exercised in the still night’, as Dylan Thomas wrote) it is not surprising that poets have been wary of collaborating with each other in a sustained and substantial way. But there are levels at which collaboration retains its solitary integrity while at the same time responding fully to another voice. The collaboration with Carol Watts has been the great recent disovery for me. It has been a marvellously energetic process and is still to complete. I am very grateful to you, Steven, for getting us together.

3:AM: The Hungarian tradition is littered with figures of great prolificism and great tragedy. Poets like Nagy, Weores, Faludy and Juhasz seem counterbalanced by powerfully romantic figures like Jozsef and Radnoti. Perhaps you are uniquely situated to try and make sense of such an immense and definitive tradition. How much do you think the Hungarian 20th century poetical tradition is defined by these notions, of tragedy and immense energy?

GS: The 20th century was a remarkable period in Hungarian poetry. There are a good number of poets I could add to your list who are of world or at least European stature. Agnes Nemes Nagy (I think you mean her, the name is effectively double-barelled) was not among the prolific, nor was János Pilinszky, a great poet translated most notably by Ted Hughes. I had hoped my translation of the selected poems of Nemes Nagy (The Night of Akhenaton, 2004) would give her a more central place but the great political moment of Eastern European poetry was lost in 1989 and she may have to wait. Agnes Lehoczky, whom you mention below, is a great admirer of Nemes Nagy and wrote – and has published – only the second English language study of her important work. Tragedy and energy are very good descriptors of Hungarian poetry. The national consciousness is certainly attuned to the tragic and a furious energy animates much of the culture. It is, in many cases, leavened by irony and playfulness.

3:AM: You have been instrumental in supporting the work of many contemporary Hungarian poets too, by translating them, if not literally supporting their work. Both Agnes Lehoczky and Andras Gerevich have featured in this series in fact. Do you feel you have a strong connection to a new generation of Hungarian poets?

GS: I don’t think it is as strong as it might be. They are simply younger than I am – all the older generation of poets I got to know in the Eighties are dead now – and, naturally enough their first contacts are likely to be of their own age group. However, I did edit New Order (2010) an anthology of younger poets translated by various people, including myself, for Arc. Getting to know them properly would need a more concentrated effort on my part, and much of my recent translation work has been concentrated on prose. Maybe next academic year, when I hope to have more time, I’ll be able to do something more for them. There are so few of us who can translate Hungarian poetry, I feel I should do it, though I am hoping that poets like Lehoczky – who writes in English after all – might take up some of the slack . She was of great help with New Order.

3:AM: Obviously within the bounds of your profession as teacher at UEA part of your responsibility is to help new writers, your students, with their work, yet it seems you are well known for being instrumental in supporting a wide variety of younger poets, always remaining accessible and energetic in the support of their work. Do you view this as a responsibility that many more established poets should undertake or just part of the specific nexus of your own practise?

GS: I try to support younger poets but I think it’s two-way in that I learn a good deal from them too. That’s not a piety: discussing work with them keeps me on my toes and has an effect on what I myself do. I will in fact be retiring from UEA soon but I don’t want to lose contact with my current students and ex-students. If it were a matter of just talking to students about poetry, and about their own poetry in particular, I would be happy to continue for a long time but there are a lot of institutional extras at universities that are of secondary interest to me. IOn the other hand I have no wish to seal myself off from external energies that sap but refresh. I can’t speak for other poets. It’s not an obligation or a moral stance. Each to his or her own. I would quite like to carry on meeting them informally in cafes and bars in town.

3:AM: Huge generalisations here, but how do you view poetry and its potential for personal change, for influence, for aesthetic revelation as it relates to the individual poet and reader? Do you conceive of it as something utterly personal, or impersonal, something that goes out into the world after being written and is thus detached from you and your intentions for it, or do you give it an ethical power, an agency for moving the individual that relates specifically to your force behind it?

GS: You are right – these are huge questions so the answer must be a little longer.

The human race has been composing, reciting and hearing poetry from the very start. The conclusion must be that it is of some use to us. It is useful in making sense of a world that is part memory, part imagination. It does so by giving that world a shape in language. It makes us realise things we didn’t know we knew. It utterly changed my life at 17 when I started reading and writing it. I thought the shapes it made were magical in that they held things together by transforming them. It humanised the world for me. It was a form of power., like magic

The poet is personal: the language is impersonal. Language is not a stable or static entity – it moves and crumbles and grows at the same time. The poet’s art lies in listening intently to the micro-movements of language while never forgetting the sense of the world as the pre-language – as instinct, apprehension, desire – that drove him or her to the threshold of language in the first place. Of course there are subjects and themes but that’s about as far as intention can go. As I see it is not a matter of wanting to say something, then finding the words to say it. You discover what you and the language have to say by entering the process of saying. The ethical power of poetry lies in its precise tension with language not in any broadly stated programme of doing good. The programme is advertisement. Technique, suggested Pound, is the test of sincerity. I think he was on to something.

The reader is as personal as the writer. Like the poet, the reader looks to reinvent himself / herself within a language shape that feels like the world. That shape is as impersonal to the reader as it is to the writer. Neither of them owns it. Reader and writer enter it at different angles, from different locations, with different baggage. But they share it. The solitary voice speaking to the solitary imagination is, paradoxically, the deepest shared experience. That sharing is the useful thing, the art that does some good: the ‘message’ is to be discovered not sent.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is a poet and artist living in London. Author of four poetry collections, including Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011), he has received commissions from the Tate, the Southbank centre, the London Sinfonietta and Mercy and he is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a Phd student at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, University of London.

48.

see the leaves    what leaves?    the leaves
on the ground, the black hand flapping
the brown hand spread as if to grasp
grasp what?    a paving slab   a street   a sweep
of air    then some cruddy music    and leaf
leaf flattens, is pressed    is what?   is the body
as flat as this as brittle as surrendered   to what?
and some you burn and watch fly   and this
is    what?  an analogy as the mind makes it
of war perhaps    which war? dare we answer? dare
the body be its own dialogue? dare the
long, shall we say? rain beat down on us
and our music    is that the music? that cruddy
music you make in your bones and teeth?

who is asking the questions?    there are too
many and late and too soon and this answer
too is a question only you don’t see, no, you
don’t hear the question mark   – where?   – in the leaf
which leaf? that one there, that black-brown-green-
grey thing with its negligible weight, its music.

Muse

It was a woman’s face deep in the sea, self-constructed, as if one could make the moon out of flesh, bone, colour, reflection.

There was nothing there to touch. The sea was warm, the face gazed through it in its act of self-construction, that involved gazing.

This was it. The muse-face. The construction. The self-made moon on its seabed. The astonishing in its perpetual process of construction.

This was the face that could give and consume, made out of myth and moonlight, making itself, turning itself into gaze.

And I have seen her, said the words. That gaze constructs itself and the compulsive act. And a cold shiver ran down him. And more words.

Make me a poet, said the words of the poem. Undermine me, said the gaze. Be discontent, said the muse. For ever, said the moon in the words.

These are old tropes, said the muse. But you must keep opening them. The poem lies beyond the opening, at the origin of words.

But muse, said the poem, if I am not the construction I desire to be I will die. Be sceptical, said the muse. Believe, said the poem.

Sealed With a Kiss

We were always beautiful. always. When we wrote
each other it was our beauty we were committing
to paper, a beauty composed of forgetting.
It was beauty that caught us, that set us afloat
on the great painted sea of our disasters.
It was beauty that moved us against the tide
of dead water, that slowly pushed us aside
and beached us. Here we met the masters
of our fortunes: time, separation, space
with its inevitable music, the lost boys
of the movies, the sweatered girls, the slow
ring of dancers moving to white noise,
the simple sadness of the hand and face,
the loss of the sealed kiss, the long hard blow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Szirtes Poet and translator. His first book, The Slant Door (1979) was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. In 2004 he won the T S Eliot Prize for Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books. In between, Bloodaxe published his New and Collected Poems (2008). His new book, Bad Machine (2013) is a PBS Choice. Salt published his poems for children In the Land of the Giants in 2012.

Valise of varying dimensions but always tan

enter the attic room alone
there is a bearded lady asleep on your bed
cross the room towards her
bearded lady awakes
rub butter into her belly
scrape it off with a knife
slide her into a bodystocking
slot the knife in her mouth
shout or cry
it gets better faster
shave her beard with the knife
bearded lady moans
move your tits on her bristles
wipe your knife on the slippery bedding
music ends
lights out

there is a bearded lady asleep on your bed
bundle her in to the valise
zip it
exit the attic room alone

bulky valise wobbles on the floor
tip of a knife pokes through the fabric
full length of the blade appears
catches the moon
room fills with light
bearded lady cuts four holes
two at the front for her arms
two at the back for her legs
unzips the zip
pops out her head
scuttles out the room on all fours

her legs and arms skitter
her behind waves wildly
across an empty road
over a field of mud

(the valise is subtle in a dumb way if that’s possible)

Like, a lot

i’ve got a crush on you x x x
with no holds barred or subjects taboo
can you smell it?
i am emotionally bulimic on you

will you please hold my wig while i puke?

last night we put our 3 wigs on
you came to my room and without a word
blonde wig, straight wig, curly wig
you fucked me with an intensity, a brutality, and a virtuosity
afro wig, frizzy wig, long wig
that would have enslaved me if i had not known
long wig, short wig, curly wig
every second, that you were raping Lily, not me
afro goldilocks quiff
i was, in the purest sense of the word, a cunt
enamelled flower box clutch
without face or name
wet beneath a 6ft high snowman
and a perversity normal to the promiscuous
moon melting the snowman
and now, for the first time, to me
you don’t know quite how to take me
made me exult in it
and i don’t know how to take myself

once again, i’m dismayed to discover
i’m not kurt cobain or kathy acker
WTF?
i’m still that fucky-faced me
congratulations, your dick is so dignifying
i wanna get off with you
i wanna make out
i wanna make out
everything else is a lie
let’s get off
let’s get off
like, a lot

And you know how they can let you down, these people

take the flower and place it in your mouth
place as many flowers as you want in your mouth
you do not want to eat a dry flower
eat the flower before the morning dew dries
you do not need the whole stem or any leaves
choose the flower and eat it in the early budding stages
eating flowers from national parks is illegal, so eat carefully
you can eat many flowers at a time
any flower will do
eat flowers

btw, rosy rectums

the bearded lady makes me want to have an orgasm and fart at the same time as a zillion kismet sex dolls jab pins in my balls while running thru the hoops of the nazi chain linked fortress known as world press – yves klein, btw, rosy rectums, penny goring, hands up my knickers, dad bastard – penny goring, atomic tangerine, why do dog fuck me from my pudenda, wife wanks with my hair trimmer as i watch and wank – getting my friend drunk and making him fuck me bare, penny goring my dead, penny goring my painting, get tips to get fuck our selves with a finger- ladies rectums, yves klein seconde, glass horse intercourse, and the pouch of douglas – he tied gagged apron, bearded grey cloud, ice fantasia budding bodies, my smelly dirty gusset tumblr, dolly motion deep suck – the bearded lady steep fuck as if you possessed by an idiot, do my self harm in between you ears

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Penny Goring lives in a block of flats in London. She wrote The Zoom Zoom (eight cuts gallery press, 2011). Her work has been published in HOUSEFIRE. The Guardian calls Penny ‘a lively and original new voice in poetry’.

i.

Curt islands, and
glass glimmering.
Wrist spangled.

Crushed men.

Another step and we’re
back into the light.

ii.

Today I simmer
with afterthoughts,
addenda, bits
of notes and besides
you tell me
there is nothing
under the moon
we cannot undermine.

iii.

Your eyes
are flayed with
the world’s edge

and the chance
to be born all
over again.

iv.

birds giggle you
when fluttering boast
of your feathers

scythes sinews
it ghosts
my heart up

through
the shivering cup
of the sky

v.

What do I think will happen?
I don’t know.

Black curlicues reach out into
the glutinous ocean.

Wade into it, I suppose.

vi.

Right now there is no one.
The clerks are tearing down the towns.
The poor curdle in bunkers.
Records loop endlessly.

(RIP Adam Yauch)

BRITISH POETRY 2010s

Moil, voiceless, tendrils.
Frail bird-wings and The Body.
A healthy respect for form or

free verse for minimal cool.
CVs, junkets,
status-obsessives, word-molesters.

A sallow child
begging in the belly of power
for a bone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Niven is originally from Northumberland and now lives in Leytonstone in East London. His poetry has been published in Ash, Etcetera, North-East Passage, and the Oxonian Review, and his poem ‘The Beehive’ recently provided the epigraph to Owen Hatherley’s architectural survey A New Kind of Bleak. He is currently working on a combined work of poetry and criticism for Zero Books, and a book about Oasis’s Definitely Maybe for the 33 1/3 series (Continuum).

The Bot Fly

it suck’d me first, and now sucks thee

I made $400 on in one day
I have great success following this
just PLEASE view this
bad stuff going around about you
have you read it yet? wanna see me naked
& have a dirty chat?
come chat on this thingy here
find out to see who’s been stalking you here
hey this person is writing
offensive things that are about you
just wat r u doin in this
wow disturbing lol
lol u didn’t see them tapin u
how did u not see them tapping u

Ply

Do you remember that time we were so high
up in the old library tower that every planned task
disappeared, books piled up, and we passed notes
from palm to palm under our ply-wood desk?

Or that night you told me I turned you on
to Bob Dylan, or was it Van Morrison’s Moondance?
Was it your place or mine? Or the first time we met
in the café when I was single? That guilt-free day

I turned up early, bought you green tea
on a tip-off from a mutual friend, then watched
the familiar walls lose their shape, my heart
right there on the table, my coffee going cold.

The Stephens Island Wren

Conservation Status: Extinct

Driving across the Isle of Man
the day the newspaper scandal picked up
some momentum the plan had been
to look for rabbits when our ears pricked up –
the island has the biggest population
of wallabies outside Australia. Being free
from predators it took just one generation
to settle. Then, they continued to breed.

Who’s mourning for the Stephens Island Wren?
It was the lighthouse keeper’s cat behind
the death of all the flightless birds, the story goes.
They blamed the keeper, then the cat, and then
saw the sparkle of feral eyes, shining
from under hundreds of hedgerows.

Long Exposure

Darius has mounted his camera to the fence
in the corner of the field. The shutter speed
is set to twenty minutes, giving him the chance
to sit back and take in the lounging spread
of the evening where the stars will seem still
in the same place. He knows he’ll find exposed
constellated traces, the beginning of a spiral,
the black sky purpled once the shutter snaps closed.
He says it hinges on the camera staying fixed
and leaving the subject time to move on.
How focussing on infinity is a simpler trick.
Much like the two of us, then, this three year long

exposure. The time lapsed between then and now,
the invisible differences, how you were capable
of carrying on without me noticing and how
my almost-clear eye can’t resolve the details:
work out for me to the closest millimetre
the distance that develops a smile to a sneer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Connolly is 24 and from Belfast. Both a graduate and current student of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, he is in the second year of doctoral research looking at the innovation of traditional set forms in the work of Paul Muldoon. He runs The Lifeboat reading series and is an editorial assistant for The Yellow Nib.

There is No Library for What I Know of Books

I.

The geography of a sandcastle
    is not the same as the geography
    of a wave. Some may think the wave
    has a grander geography.

This I cannot promise.
I cannot promise much

but today I can promise you
    I am thinking maps made of sand,
    certain a book is a kind of geography.
    Last week Dave sent me his.
    I took it on a trip to Italy.
    Italy is one of my geographies.

You could say I read Dave’s book
    with my Italian face and that face,
    like Dave’s, has its own geography.
    I only ever see Dave’s face by mail;
    his geography is that far from mine.

Our geographies once crossed in Syracuse
    where our adult maps were made
    and cooling lava shaped the land.
    And like that we have cooled.
    Now, we lie on sediment and silt.

Dave’s book had me in a Syracuse
when I lost it in the men’s room and then

it was gone and goodbye to all that
    and this missing became important to me.
    For the next few months it was an omen
    and if I stumbled and fell, if I cut my thumb
    I would think of Dave’s book and how
    it was a sandcastle collapsed in a wave.

II.

After my wife leaves
    I think of the book, cawing like a magpie.
    She will not promise but I know

her geography is no longer mine
and I have a face she will only visit.

And I am sure the book
    has a new skin around it, the water of the book, the kiss
    of the book has new desires and it left as my Syracuse face
    has left and can only be found in mail and in the distance
    of all the waves, all the shores
    all the shores with no waves
    all the waves with no shores
    all the faces that have waved
    at my shore.

And the geographies only get bigger.
I promise, everyday the ocean is deeper.

The geography of ice caps melting and
the style of a sandcastle to stand.

And I know how a lost geography can return:
    the geography of a lost pendant, a lost wallet,
    a love, the geography of her neck. I cannot promise
    but this is not impossible except often you return
    to an old geography with a new face.

III.

Maps on top of maps on top of maps
translucent and inaccurate but
a palimpsest nonetheless and all the time,
reading Dave’s book, I was in a Syracuse
where the ocean never arrived
and our faces never departed.

Untitled

“How many times will you do this or that, / without being aware / of the time passing / or the time that still remains to you?” Aleksandar Ristovic

And it was only a corner
but I turned it with more worry
than normally I worry

as if that corner
was the year of my death
or a shadow of death

which I’ve dreamed
since I was a child
watching street lamps

dreaming of the day a car would forget
to stop or I’d forget to look. And this
was only a corner, one

of many on a round earth
and the shadows that pass
are only shadows of people

waiting for the lights, checking
their watches or scanning
for an acquaintance

as I dream of my acquaintance
turning up, as if by surprise,
an expected surprise, sure

as the lights twitch
back to green
after a long red.

Opinions, Not Facts

I kiss the chauffeur
holding the wrong name
away like bloody offal

I correct him with my mouth, I am so tired
of shadows and ink at airports and trains and all
the bus stations. I didn’t have to rush to Bulgaria

to be alone. I could have been alone with C.
or R. or anyone but H. If you had a full name
I could not be alone with you. G. would call
this abstraction and H. would never call
this a choice, she’d call these facts. I know facts:

    1. I see other people kiss
     see kisses while pedals are still
     spinning — how he rushed
     and the bike and the red bike fell.

    2. Tonight K. spoke hypothetical so well it could have been
     German. We had hypothetical gestalt. I blame the bar
     there was no electrics, only candles, the owner
     so afraid of a shock, so fearless of fire. And K.
     so serious about the squish and blast of us
     of course I had to

tell you how many hypotheticals I’ve ruined
or how many hotels and motels and inns
I’ve covered in dust. Hallways of frozen dust
up north, crocodile sheets down south, the tub
in Rome and all the nights in the motel of my own flat,
the odd alone of my mother’s home. Even a hotel
in Zadar, the only town I’ve been bashed by a Z,

kissed a woman with a wine-stained face, yet woke only
with purple on my ribs, purple everywhere, I was so
in love the whole city was purple, 3) mornings alone, left
side of her face faded and the hypothetical woman faded
and the purple faded and still there are those
who hurry off trains, who travel light so they can hurry
off planes, luggage in only one holding hand

       4) I take everything with me when I go.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Van Winkle is Poet in Residence at Edinburgh City Libraries following a successful run as the Scottish Poetry Library’s first-ever Reader in Residence. He remains the host of the SPL’s weekly poetry podcast as well as The Multi-Coloured Culture Laser Podcast (link). Ryan has been invited to read internationally at The Melbourne Writer’s Festival, Sofia Poetics, The Edinburgh International Book Festival, and Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. His first collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, was published by Salt in 2010 and won the Crashaw Prize. His poems have appeared in New Writing Scotland, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poetry New Zealand and The Oxford Poets series. He is the host and curator of The Golden Hour a literary cabaret which has toured the world. In 2012 Ryan won the Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2012.

Draft Toward a Syllogism for a Roommate Who Won’t Let Me Get a Cat
for LM

The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting facts. There is a question. What is the question which those fathers understood just as well, and even better than we do now? It is this. What is your proof? You say you are inexcusable while we are destructive, or something of the sort. Is this not adherence to the old and tired, against the new and untried? I full indorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse.

Thoughts on A
for MO

If the condition of our relations
is less gratifying, know the temporary
reserves abound. This unusual
agitation. We have attempted no
propagandism, acknowledged no
revolution. Our struggle has been,
of course, ours. Nevertheless,
complaint, even if it were just,
would certainly be unwise.
The proposition has been made,
especially to XXXXX XXXXXXX.
It has been kindly received, yet
they fail to penetrate
and soften even the heart.

Argument Against Brevity
for KR

How then shall we perform it?
Accounts of outrages committed
by mobs. Are there no divisions?
Mr. Speaker, it is said, did steal, take, and carry away ten boars,
ten sows, ten shoats, and ten pigs. Therefore, I recommend a day
of public humiliation. A day.

But you are, perhaps, ready to ask,
“What has this to do with
the perpetuation of our Throne of Grace?”
Well, by golly, that is the most equally divided gang of hogs I ever
did hear of.

And furthermore, I answer, it has much to do with it.

No Regrets For Our Beards
for JW

A blockade could not be established,
and vigorously enforced, without committing
occasional mistakes, and inflicting
unintentional injuries. I deem it duty
to recommend, to view, to see, some from
interested motives, others upon patriotic
considerations, and still others influenced
by philanthropic sentiments. There are
there. Others have been added. Others of so extraordinary
a nature, dealing with us in anger
for our sins. I feel, more, how weak
and fruitless must be any word of mine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dustin Luke Nelson is a founding editor of InDigest and the host of the InDigest Reading Series. He is a 2012 National Poetry Series finalist and has recently had work published in the Greying Ghost Pamphlet Series, Opium, METRO Twin Cities, Scud, and elsewhere. He has been a writer and producer on Radio Happy Hour and Geocachers. He lives in Astoria and at blogsareaboutego.blogspot.com

Fake Blood

My crush can walk through walls and finger
books on my shelf leaving slime that smells
like galloping perfume rollercoasters
I sleep with her face

Doppelganger

We couldn’t sing it was so loud up
there everybody has a brass instrument
& my see-through grandfather couldn’t open the door
he was shouting other stuff

The Picture I See But Never Saw

If you hold it up
this way you will see God smoking blue and yellow
if you turn it the other way you will see
Satan bending red and black
my mother can’t find it at the moment
but I swear my family can’t eat a thing
they take turns sitting down

Saturday Morning Cartoons

He knocks my parents’ door
I make him wait until The End before I let him in
I don’t tell him what happened he likes the ones
that arrange themselves around us like council estates
laughing eye holes on the floor

Clocks that Fall Off

Don’t pick me up I’ll be okay leave me down here
with your broken keyboard
never tell them what we did in the attic and throw
my impossible gadgets away from the playground
long story short I don’t believe
this is breakfast

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bobby Parker was born in 1982 and lives in Kidderminster, England. Publications include the critically acclaimed experimental books Ghost Town Music and Comberton, both published by The Knives Forks & Spoons Press, with a pamphlet of selected poems due to be published by Holdfire Press later in the year or early 2013. He is currently working on his first novel and a book for children.

Sunday

Turning heads has become
my new hobby since it’s as
easy as holding your hand.
In the mid-morning down

pour of Nissans pathetic
fallacy seems like it sounds.
Can you feel it? Your fringe
gaping in the 60mph breath –

like those hatchbacks have
lungs – and that taste in my
mouth that toothpaste couldn’t
brush off, those five (to seven)

calories of you swimming in
my empty stomach. I feel so
whole. I can tell you that. I
can

look at
them through their
wound up windows, their
spiritual red bull damp on their
teeth. I can see them in their

safety almost. Having snatched
their pick-me-up shot of comfort.
Can you feel it? My hand jammed
tight to your thigh.

Say This Ten Times Fast

You can’t help but get Pac-Man
mouth
when
we
kiss like this: open in your kitchen.
The kettle’s talking to us; its speech
bubbles
burning
like
that cig in the ashtray. Pick it up

before it puffs out anymore clouds, they’re
condensing around our conversation. These
domestic blimps product-placing in my ears while
I’m trying to make a milky constellation in your tea.
(Should I read the leaves?)
I can’t help

but hear it. Your noisy
prophecy cannibalising the silence
fat with its etcs.

Long Distance

He found love (at last)
at the end
of the hyperlink. It was
in her pixel
pale complexion. It was
in the quiet
clicking mouse. It was
in his glass
wrist wasn’t it?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Napier is a college student in Newcastle, England, who has been writing poetry and prose since his teenage years. He’s previously appeared (or is forthcoming in) The Delinquent, The Cadaverine, The Crocodile Journal and Forward Poetry’s Inspired anthology.

Experience is baking powder and “la mano de Dios”

an array of Xul’s arcana floating around the moon “Muros y Escaleras”
1942 boats passing the Garganta do Diabo 2011 a pilgrim raising
his hands in invocation 1942 in the foreground someone reading
a book 2011 Asian families with digital cameras shouting I’m

in the way today

Tarobá and Naipí eternally falling forever a god
wanting to marry a beautiful woman back then but Naipí’s fleeing
in a canoe with her mortal lover today and the god’s getting angry
2011 in a rage forever leaving this square or staying on the wall
1942 slashing the river back then climbing the staircase 2011
maybe jumping today all sesos and drip

-

Nothing piola underneath the rejected Wonder of the World

except aged graffiti
YO ESTUVE AQUÍ
I wanted more
To take advantage of
bigger tenses
At every academia
I try it anew
Hola
me hubiera llamado
Cristóbal
Staircase wit after
each ciao
like at the big rodeo
in el Cholar
Claudio with the Guido
fade saying
culo would come
Che tocálo un pasito así
no más
Wearing four of
Kyle’s XXL
t-shirts and an asadero
on the back
Between the mountains
drunks see
Jesus
Our summer blows cold
Meloncito rots
the teeth and I’m no
good at
footworking
cuarteto
You don’t hold on
too hard
It’s six in the morning
The stable’s full of
pasture and preserve
in the eyes
Lint collecting
navel a fortune
cookie
Dramatic
yeast waiting
for the sun
The cops ask
where’s home
Is Obama really black

-

Re-bandaging your foot watching Horacio bareback the mare

The mc saying mirá ese
paisano re-colgao
re-apretao
The D’s missing What
makes the synec
doche

And Jorge who first loved
Sky leaves the shoot
The gringo volunteers
The New Zealander
The Christian from
Rochester I hate

Eddie and
Liz too Sam
the jelqer
The ambulance wailing the way
Mineiros eat
mango peels A payador
improvising half-
sorries

No one truly wonders if
Jorge’s okay
Don Hugo passes the
calfskin canteen Come
take care of my island
he says We agree
the moon lies
my rock collection weighs heavy

Charía interrupts with
news of his enemy’s
brother He asks about
Chos Malal

and liking on Facebook

The carrier
pigeons if
they are to return

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Rey Pérez (Río Grande Valley, ’87) is an avid traveler and lover of dembow. His work appears in Catch Up’s Emerging Writers, The Scrambler, Sometimes-Always, and Bird Fly Good. He also edits the fledgling magazine, Dolce Stil Criollo. Currently, he lives in Tel Aviv, Israel and is a Visiting Lecturer at Al Quds-Bard Honors College in East Jerusalem.

Blank verse: a lecture on poetry, without misplaced notes and without additional heckling

Allow me to begin with a confession: giving a public lecture is akin to hurling oneself headfirst from a high building. I have forgotten the origin of that particular aphorism. In such cases, the rule of thumb is to mumble ‘Oscar Wilde’ and hurry on to the next point. Or, indeed, the next PowerPoint.

‘Rule of thumb’ strikes me as curious, as indicative of an inherent meekness in our language. The Germans, for example, rule by fist, as do the Dutch and the Finns. If I remember correctly, the German phrase is Faustregel. A connection with Goethe and Mann (not merely Marlowe) should be apparent.

I intend to discuss two poems with you. The first was published by Nissa Jochelson in 1969; the second was composed by me, a couple of minutes before I began this lecture.

Over the next half hour or so, I’d like to explore the relationship between these poems. It’s common practice on this course to leave fifteen minutes for questions, although I abhor questions. Ask nothing personal: to lecture is to don a series of masks. And what do masks signify? In antiquity, they were worn by the chorus, which was responsible for describing and dissecting the drama. Masks were also worn by actors playing multiple parts — actors overreaching their dramatic range.

Is historical context important when discussing the merits of a poem? Jochelson’s background is of particular interest: she was born in April 1909, to a wealthy Parisian family. In a rather typical act of late-teenage rebellion, she became fiercely left-wing; she wrote a series of pro-Republican pamphlets in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, achieving her first publication with a vitriolic attack on Franco in the early months of 1939. She was arrested in Paris, together with her parents, on the morning of July 16th, 1942. She was sent to a concentration camp. A month later, when the women’s camp was closed down due to overcrowding, she was transferred to a second camp. She survived the War, and returned to France in 1945.

Don’t feel that you need to be writing down these dates: they are dry facts, of little or no significance. I am fascinated by the work, not by the numbers behind it. In 1951, she published her first full collection, La Puanteur et la Grâce — later translated into English as Depravity and Grace. Intriguingly, the poems demonstrate no political commitment whatsoever: their content is bucolic, idyllic, hopelessly outdated.

The Road from Damascus, published three years later, details — as the title suggests — Jochelson’s movement away from the religious orthodoxy of her upbringing. In page after page of plodding hexameter, she presents her reader (it would be overly generous to use the plural, given the collection’s initial circulation) with toe-curlingly glib visions of a Socialist utopia. Until the late 1960s, all Jochelson’s published poetry could be subdivided into one of three categories: sub-Wordsworthian poems responding to the events of her childhood; political poems that rarely rose above banal Leftist propaganda; reverent pastoral pieces that would have appeared hackneyed had they been written at the time of Virgil’s Georgics, let alone in the second half of the twentieth-century.

In 1966, she broke her silence, reviewing a theatrical adaptation of Levi’s If This is a Man. Jochelson praised Levi’s account of a year in Auschwitz as ‘supremely realistic; imbued with the fascinating, unflinching horror of the truth.’ Three years later, in 1969, her Selected Poems included the piece I would like to discuss – her first, and only, attempt to turn her War experience into poetry.

My own background, meanwhile, is considerably less dramatic. On the strength of several meagre academic publications, I was employed by this university to lecture on literature. I mark undergraduate work for a salary I consider faintly insulting, and occasionally stoop to the level of the armchair anarchist in my distaste for the insidious advance of bureaucracy. This morning, my alarm clock woke me at exactly three minutes past eight — I do have my idiosyncrasies — and I showered and shaved before cycling to this lecture hall. As I waited here for you to arrive, I produced the poem I would like to discuss alongside Nissa Jochelson’s.

As you can see, both poems are entirely blank. Before we discuss their respective merits, I will endeavour to add some context. The idea that the blank poem represents a curious perfection certainly did not originate with me, nor did it originate with Nissa Jochelson. Since long before my period of expertise, writers have been intrigued by the tabula rasa, by empty spaces, by gaps in the text. Within my lifetime, Pierre Macherey has drawn attention to the idea that ‘the text says what it does not say.’ Extending that elegant formula, the text that says most is surely the text that remains silent. Macherey and Jochelson are linked on the left: in their early writing careers, both were obstructed by the urge to politicise their work.

And yet Jochelson’s silence is not political, or not merely political. It is poetic — an attempt to silence the critical voices that already know too much. We know that Jochelson was persecuted for three years because of a faith she no longer possessed, but Jochelson asks us not to let that knowledge influence our approach to her work. When, after more than twenty years of ignoring the subject at the centre of her life, Jochelson finally approaches it in poetry, the poem must be read on its own terms.

Alternatively, the poem is an attempt to fashion a space for the voices which remained with Jochelson for more than two decades. Only on the blank page will those voices have the freedom to express themselves. If we take this view, the blank poem is not silent at all — it is a multitude of voices. We can take the view that the most complete language is the language that lies beyond the reach of words.

Many poets have been fascinated by the empty page, and it requires no strenuous effort of the imagination to associate the white sheet with death, that most pregnant of silences. However, we can state with equal plausibility that every poem is concerned with creation — poems search for voices rather than searching for silence.

Heidegger writes that the poet’s oneness with language emanates from an ability to be spoken rather than to speak: what could be more natural for the poet than to turn inwards and examine the nature, and the source, of those voices that speak through him (or, of course, through her)? Throughout twentieth-century poetry, we encounter an enduring fascination with voices emerging from nothingness. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath communicated with Pan through a Ouija board (Plath records that Pan selected ‘Mussel Hunter’ as his favourite of her poems); Fernando Pessoa, who admired Aleister Crowley and translated his ‘Hymn to Pan’ into Portuguese, stated that he received dictation from the voices of the dead. You will already, presumably, be aware of the connection between Crowley and W.B. Yeats, both of whom were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Poetry, then, is gripped by the occult, is spoken by spectral voices. Those voices are loudest when the text remains significantly silent.

What of my poem? If I were to hold this sheet of paper up to you and say nothing, how many of you would conclude that it contained poetry? At this point, I feel it necessary to define, very briefly, what a poem is. In debating themselves into opposing corners on this issue, previous critics have, in my opinion, privileged qualitative concerns. In other words, they have asked ‘what is a good poem?’, or ‘what is a successful poem?’ rather than asking ‘what is a poem?’ To my mind — and this may sound overly simplistic to you — if a poet produces a piece of work which he or she describes as a poem, then that piece of work is a poem. It remains a poem whether it satisfies one’s pre-conceived notions of poetry or not.

If the spectral voices of the concentration camp are permitted to speak through Jochelson’s piece, which voices are permitted to speak through mine? I would like to argue that I have allowed several ‘influential predecessors’, to use Bloom’s term, into the space created by my poem. Speaking here, for example, is Vasilisk Gnedov, the Russian futurist who, in 1913, concluded a sequence in Death to Art with an untitled blank poem. And here — Don Paterson, something of a recidivist when it comes to composing blank poetry. In God’s Gift to Women, Paterson included ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’, a blank poem, and followed that with another blank poem, entitled ‘Unfold’, in Rain. While Gnedov sought to make a rather heavy-handed statement with his poem, Paterson shows that it is perfectly possible to write light blank poetry. ‘Unfold’ is dedicated to the memory of Akira Yoshizawa, ‘the grandmaster of origami’, and belongs to more or less the same humorous genre as James Wright’s blank poem ‘In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems.’ One doesn’t need to adopt Auschwitz as one’s subject matter, but it’s worth noting that death appears in the blank poetry of Gnedov, Paterson and Wright, as well as the blank poetry of Nissa Jochelson.

I’ll finish with some thoughts on the relative merits of the two poems under discussion. Textually, the two poems are identical, and yet I imagine most of you will feel that Jochelson’s is the stronger piece. Don’t worry — my skin is thick enough to bear the rejection. Her ‘Voices’ took twenty years to form themselves into a poem, whereas my piece was written in two minutes. Jochelson will, therefore, appeal to those of you who believe that hard graft is an essential part of writing. Her poem emerges from a set of experiences far deeper than my own; her page is full of screams, whereas mine seems simply empty.

And yet you’ll recall the following axiom, which Keats included in a letter to John Taylor: ‘…if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.’ Surely my work fits a certain Romantic conception of the poem: the extempore effusion, the piece composed in a single sitting under dictation from the Muses. Keats also believed that ‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us’, and few poems have a more palpable design on us than Jochelson’s. Her voices are didactic, pointing us back in the direction of the concentration camp and pre-emptively designing our reaction to the poem. My piece has no such designs on the reader: it is open to any number of interpretations.

Perhaps my work lacks the originality of Jochelson’s, but in what sense is Jochelson’s work original? In The Force of Poetry, Christopher Ricks notes that ‘The Nazi extermination camps are a horror which has been felt to dwarf all art and to paralyse all utterance. There would be something suspect about anybody who felt nothing of the impulse which voiced itself in George Steiner as ‘The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason.’ But then this very impulse can uglily become a routine, a mannerism, a cliché.’

Would it not be more courageous, and more original, for Jochelson to fit words to her voices? Too many indolent theorists have cited Theodor Adorno’s declaration that ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, conveniently forgetting his counterargument: ‘it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems.’ Abraham Sutzkever, the Yiddish poet, described words as ‘a kind of link between the living and the dead.’ In 1942, Sutzkever was awarded a literary prize by the Jews in the Vilna Ghetto: culture endures, and words endure. The afterlife of the wordless poem is less certain: I hope I have shown that there are no limits to the subject matter which can be addressed by a blank poem, and I hope I have shown that there are circumstances in which we must admit that a blank poem is no longer enough.

By Jacob Silkstone.

References

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Webber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981)

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: the Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980)

Vasilisk Gnedov, Smert ‘iskusstvu (Death to Art) (St. Petersburg: 1913)

John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem: Oxford lectures on poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 2006)

Don Paterson, God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber and Faber, 1997

Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)

Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

James Wright, Collected Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nissa Jochelson (1909-1970) was born in Paris. She was an active member of the PCF, and stated that her ambition was to see Israel became “an earthly paradise, with absolute equality of opportunity” by the end of the millennium. During the Spanish Civil War, she published a number of articles and pamphlets, stressing the need for unity between left-wing parties. In addition to her political writing, she published three collections of poetry and achieved some renown as a public speaker. She died shortly after the publication of her Selected Poems.

Jacob Silkstone is her English translator.

As I slash open the gates of my fortieth year, the pace quickens with the brunt of mortality.

An exhilarating urgency, cool at my neck and blowing me onward,

To paths less associated with saloon girls but more aptly carved of wood, dark and smelling of musk, awaiting my stamp.

Things are no longer so random unless randomly intentioned

And I spend nights enveloped in a sheer sense of magic that is non-manipulated, prestigious and pure,

Lacking chatter

And noise,

Like a piece of Pae White’s popcorn lined with gold.

More prone to graphite stick, orange paint, thyme tea, and cloudy sky kind of Mondays

Where now just the simple act of flinging up the blinds sets the attitudinal stage for the day,

Between hermit and open for interaction,

Which I flit between squeezed down deep into a Piscean soul, tightrope wire grooves up the middle of my big toe.

Inching forward to a white box of a room; life laden with minimal things from wherein I create and come out of sparingly for food … wine … love.

Port, eggs and broken wishbones splay across my table as self-portraits start to take on an ounce of surreality -

I have never looked this way before

And it’s better than I’ve ever looked but not because I am beautiful,

Merely more secure in this all-encompassing fleshy shell.

As I oil up my thighs for a bike ride along the coast, an old mentor of mine calls strapped to a hospital chair,

Medicine flowing into her veins to request collaboration after fifteen years,

Yet I decline because there is so little time left to do

All those things that I alone, simply want to do

And the richness is now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimberly Cooper Nichols is an artist, writer and social anthropologist living in Venice Beach, California. She has been exhibiting for over a decade as a conceptual artist in the United States and is the author of the book of literary short fiction Mad Anatomy. She also serves as editor for the socially progressive journal Newtopia. She is a contributing editor to 3:AM where her serial poetry column Naked in Front of Strangers appears monthly. She is currently at work on her second book Neptune’s Journey as well as a 22-piece conceptual art project titled FOOL.

A CHILD’S JOB

CZECH REPUBLIC (in the voice of a Rom Holocaust survivor)

Everyone at Lety had to work,
even us children.

Every morning we were
taken to the forest
to pick up dry wood.

We had to stack this wood
next to the dead bodies
so they could be burned.

Behind the camp a deep
trench was dug so
when Gypsies escaped
they would fall in.

If a prisoner was found
in the trench he was shot.

Then we had to bring wood
to burn his body too.

We also had to bring wood
to burn the naked bodies
of the women the guards used,
and those who died of typhus,
and those the guards drowned
in the rain barrel and in the lake.

When children got sick
the doctor gave them
an injection over the
heart, and we had to
burn their bodies too.

I remember when I had
to bring kindling
to burn the body
of my baby brother.

I gave him my bread,
but it wasn’t enough.
 
 

WATERMELONS, COFFEE BEANS, AND PIG LIVERS

SERBIA (my own voice)

An old woman
with only one tooth left in her mouth
a gold one
leaned over my seat
stuck her finger
in the red birthmark
on the back of my neck and
shouted, “Your mother stole watermelons
when she was pregnant with you.”

“My mother stole coffee beans,”
said the woman, sitting next to her.
“See all the brown moles on my arm.”

Everyone in the van
turned to look at the old Rom
sitting in the last row
his face covered in bits and pieces
of hanging gray flesh.

“My mother always told me
she stole some pig livers
from a Serb butcher,” he confessed
“But after I was born
she never stole again.”

“Don’t talk such rubbish,”
the gold tooth woman said.
“Everybody steals,
until they die.”

GYPSY KIDS

SPAIN (my own voice)

I never ran across Gypsies in the mountains,
unless they were buying a horse from a shepherd,
or looking for old things in an abandoned farmhouse
to sell as antiques.

I always found the Gypsies living in hovels or caves
dug out of a hill next to a town dump.
No one bothered them there.

Kilometers away, I knew I was nearing a Gypsy
community when I heard loud music. Every hovel,
every cave, had a radio blaring a different station.

Gypsy kids and their skinny dogs always rushed
to meet me, until they saw Chulin. Then the dogs
ran back, their tails between their legs, while

some kids showed how brave they were,
letting Chulin lick the dirt off their hands and faces.

Chulin loved kids but had an instinct for anybody
with bad intentions. He didn’t hesitate to chase a person
who smelled like a thief. Beggars he could put up with.

I often stayed with Gypsies. It was their tradition
never to turn away a stranger, esp. one with a dog they
valued more than his mule.

I preferred to stay in their caves. Always cool in the
summer, warm in the winter. The floor, walls and ceiling
were always white-washed. Very clean homes until
the kids came inside, smelling of garbage.

But after their mothers washed them with a hose,
they were just normal inquisitive kids asking a thousand
questions about the trails I took, riding from
America to Spain.

 
THE WELL

(in the voice of a young Romani man)

They caught me in the marketplace
where my people used to sell clothes,
where Albanians now sell contraband.

Four men threw me into the back seat
of a blue Lada, yelling, “We told you,
no more Gypsies in Prishtina.”

As I was pushed down on the floor,
I felt the gun barrel in my left ear. It was so cold
I jerked just as someone pulled the trigger.

Blood splattered the side of my face
from the wound in my shoulder.
I collapsed, pretending to be dead.

I prayed to my dear, deceased mother, to all
mulos1, that these men wouldn’t see from where
the blood was oozing. When we arrived, they
dragged me out by my feet. My head crashed on
the ground, bouncing over several stones.

They threw me head-first into a well.
I never reached the water.
There were too many bodies.

I lay crumpled up, almost unconscious
until the smell and sting of wet lime
brought me back to my senses.

I held my breath until I heard
the car leave, then choked
on the stench around me.

With only one hand, I pulled
myself over stiff legs that became
my ladder to climb out.

My face, my hands, my whole body
burned from the lime. I used grass
to wipe off what I could,
then stumbled down a dirt road
toward a long line
of slow-moving lights.

Twenty minutes later I was on the highway
watching olive-colored trucks and jeeps,
driving past as if I were a telephone pole.

I finally collapsed in front of two headlights.
I couldn’t tell if the last sound I heard
was a screech or a scream.

The next day in a military hospital
NATO interviewed me for a few minutes.
The Albanian interpreter made the soldiers smile.

By mid-day I was walking
through a woods following a wagon trail
nobody uses anymore,
except Gypsies

escaping a country
where they have lived
for almost
seven hundred years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Polansky is an American author and activist working for the rights of the Roma people in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He has also lived with Roma for the past ten years in Eastern Europe, collecting their oral histories and writing several books about their lives in the Czech republic and Kosovo, Serbia, and Macedonia. Today he heads the Kosovo Roma Refugee Foundation (KRRF), an NGO working with the afflicted residents of the UN Camps in north Kosovo. From July 1999 until September 2009 he was head of mission for the Society for Threatened Peoples in Kosovo and Serbia. On December 10, 2004, the City Council of Weimar awarded its ‘Human Rights Award’ to Polansky. He has published 27 books, including 18 books of poetry, and a number of non-fiction books including UN-Leaded Blood, which denounces described the inaction of UNMIK, as many children died from lead poisoning in the UN camps in north Kosovo.

V: CRASH

[Rules: Pgs 108-88 Harper perennial edition 2004]
the neon sign over the portico flared
london bound traffic
tell me if i’ve left anything out
flicking out the last drops of urine
muscles of his face opening and shutting like manacles
thirty or so visitors stared at the screen
the grace of the slow motion camera
a faint smile
marked with cryptic symbols
complete confinement in his own panicky universe
this sense of disembodiment
let my semen run from her vagina
some semen is saltier than others
working on a piece of gum
identity was a charade
her wrists were keyboards of perfumes
in this parody of the actress

CLOCK WISE

time does not exist clocks exist
and clocks expire.
in the breathing city called planet hollywood
transfixed by surgery
and a transgirl screamin
i don’t know nuthin i don’t know nuthin
i think they used a cathode as
an allegory for clocks
hot cathode slippin in an orifice
yee-hah
so much pain relief
putrefaction around a splinter
it went on like this
drunken spit landing on faces
lubing nonsense
i just drank six coronas
and shut the fuck up
as instructed
of course there’s time
it’s a colour of paint
that makes the past feel like porno

GUT FLORA

I’ve already turned
England into you
I miss it
I wish it never existed,
that there was just a gap
where it rains
and now and then a boat
drumming shod-shad
by ol’ dogger bank
old filthy lampost
with filthy flowers
trinkets of crashes
duck taped together
wet
and
windy
just a gap
the watford gap, and nothing
more
I wish I’d been dropped
into the channel from
the vulva of a mute swan.
To think people have been
shot here
the chink still in the plaster
not for a pearl, a petal,
a prick, a rose,
not for a finger of almond
or for this swollen milk,
or for bruised, bitten necks
or brutal conkers
fancy trousers
magic sweets.
I gave you a country
England
I wanted your little wrists
you smell like tree sap
burnt
beer
talking
and crisps
Why should I be ashamed of lovesongs?
Not everything is honking, giblets,
burgers, ha ha ha,
some things
are sad some, disgusting.
Here it is:
The way you sit on barstools
reminds me of Querelle.
I’d take out your eyes
and pickle them with mine
I want to rub caraway
onto your flanks
stop you from screaming
you are younger than me
and
that is how it will always be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William West was born in England and lives in Paris. He has published writing in Iota, Nthposition, A Tale of Two Cities, some other magazines and on a thing called the Internet. He has written four unpublished books: one about Sea World, one about being best friends with Ezra Pound in Hell, one about a Teletext cult and one about taking drugs to alleviate the paranoia that comes from breaking the law by taking drugs. He works in the service industry and (as of Aug. ‘12) has not yet killed anyone/himself.

(Image by Alexander Kell – taken in London 2012)

I cannot pretend I knew Anselm Hollo. I met him just last year, in what would be the last months of his life, which ended a few days ago. I witnessed one of the last readings he ever gave, if perhaps actually the very last, at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. I helped organise the reading and I had the chance to spend an afternoon with him. Even if I cannot say I knew him really, I met him, and before that meeting, and I am sure for many years after it, he will have a presence in my life through his poetry. For there are bonds between him and I, and it is my opportunity now, in the wake of his dying, to make them real in the act of a thorough, if primarily private, recognition. This is a man who wrote through his life – who skewered life with his work, who affirmed his being alive in poetry, and made things new there too. Anselm Hollo was a viking – he looked like one, he wrote like one, and I am told, he often lived like one. He published over 40 books, and untold numbers of translations into and from Finnish, German, Swedish and French. In 2001 he was elected the United States anti-laureate. He lived for 78 years, and for over 60 of them, he wrote.

His life was one of breaking new ground, both in the literal ashes of post war Europe and in the redefinition of what poetry might do to us and for us. He also came to stand for the singular role of what a poet might pursue – to evidence a new kind of holistic understanding – as a translator, with a reach beyond single cultures and ‘great’ figures, as an anthologist, who is a collector of specimens and not a accountant of poetries, as an editor, a teacher, an organiser, a friend to poets and a community in himself. He was completely unique in his voice, instantly recognisable, eminently witty, underhanded, profound and disarming. He was gifted in understatement and ethereal profundity. He was prolific and generous. He was a poet’s poet.

And as many of us writing now are the underlings to his achievement, so he dragged with him so much from a past that might’ve otherwise been occluded or lost in the rearranging world of his youth. Finland, always a place of quixoticism, of underappreciated extremes, spent the better part of its modern history under Swedish yoke, and the great scholars of the fin de siecle, like Hollo’s father, rode a wave of pioneering linguistic and cultural reconstruction, of archiving, of repatriation. Hollo was a child of this movement, perhaps the most important literary Finnish traveller who ever lived, for he took this spirit of newness, of cosmopolitanism, of national energy to the world, unable to leave behind the dryest of Nordic wit and poetic noir. Unwilling to let go of his propensity to admire and inculcate mishearings, misspeakings, mistranslations, he offered this gift to poetries in Germany, England, and America. This is a man who moved to Germany during the immediate post war period, then fled to England when it became too stable, and then again ditched London in the 60s for America. This is a poet who spoke his time in his poetry, who chased it down.

Returning from his last trip to his old home in London, where he was amongst some of his finest friends and peers, those who we can now only envy and take inspiration from for their innovation and energy and daring, he faced the kind of battle against ill health that even his near indestructible constitution could not hold out against. His name lives on in the children of his great contemporaries, more than one of them being blessed with the name Anselm, and we should take time in the wake of his death to mark the passing of a generation that began much of what we might hope to continue, so that we don’t err into thinking we are original while in the shadow of those who have done it all before but have just been stupidly neglected, so that we can build on what took a lifetime to produce, and so that we might try to write well, because Anselm Hollo wrote well. He was an immensely good poet and it is a loss to the world and to poetry that he has died.

You can watch the reading he gave in London last year here

I significantly recommend you buy his books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SJ Fowler is a poet, organiser and editor living in London.

your friend

he said this
he said that
when pressed
as to which
he said nothing at all

in his country the weather
was mostly rainy

he tried to ride horses
they didn’t go or went
too fast

he punched them in the head
he fell off them

he tried to love women
tried to write poems

even his fellow men
their wives their children and cattle
he tried to love

but he didn’t know
how or what was
or was good for him
at all

whatever it was
it kept punching him
in the head to make him
fall off

so he blamed them for it
all of them fellow men women
children cattle poems and horses

many a rainy
day you could hear him
yelling ‘it’s all
your fault’

after that things
were all right for a while
until the next try

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo (April 12, 1934 – January 29, 2013) was a Finnish poet and translator. He lived in the United States from 1967 until his death in January of 2013.

we have decided to make Scotland secure
hold hands with biding, that clan
the maps are being redrawn
contour-like into a frown
latitude and longitude deciding one’s fate
in between an eq-uil-lib-eri-rium in-a-rium -in-a- – -
placed, reserved, a stumped and fallow mapping
and where? and when?
chicago, first born
whores, when april, in Tbilisi, like a boy

Present Renga

waiting for people in the presence of the singing lift
waiting for buses in the presence of pouring rain
and storing the scoring of the gifted in kind
good gifts and bad lovers are tightly wrapped
heat shrunk around the fork lift present
as in a drop it was a drop of the drop of the the the the drop the the in drop the
what others edited became the instant, a pit between breakfast and supper
… … … … … … … … … … …
shaking table with the counterpoint of writing
still, as a teenager, during world war II

Pie + Mash Renga

what can be done / for love beyond / the food of evil
4 and 20 have no answers to your question
let love glean itself from the swim of liquor
double double splint by a spoon
pooling mastic gristle and newspaper
insatiable slush spits salacious sorrows
out of a mouth in a hole like a grey beneath a notion of pasting
infinite digestion, what groaned into morning
o albion! your ambrosia revisits me again, and again
blake takes an extra spoon of liquor
to give pie, that I may sit down

River Renga

and thank you for the pile of driftwood
that came from upstream, another world
unwrought word unheard of; it should
fleet running, beneath our feet
a lithe silvered street by wheat
the river withers; meandering its mollases
i sit by it i sit and watch it ebb and at an ebb it becomes an I
horizon, in itself, and ever beyond reach -
where it longed for it ran, undaunted
so the idiot’s grin, southbank’s calm return
eating the half moon, day by day

These poems were written collectively by SJ Fowler, Angus Chisholm, Taniel Yusef, Tim Wells, Iman Sid, Becky Cremin, Dennison Smith, Mitch Albert, James Wilkes, Elizabeth Guthrie and Chris Kerr.

ABOUT THE PROJECT
These poems are the result of a collaborative workshop called ‘Theft Renga’ facilitated by SJ Fowler at the launch of the ‘Dear world & everything in it‘ anthology launch, at the Saison Poetry Library, at the Southbank centre, in London, January 24th 2013. Around a dozen poets were asked to rapidly write sequential lines in response to one another, upon a piece of paper passed clockwise around the group, with reference to themes decided by the group and, if needed or desired, with the aid of plagiarised lines lifted from books in the Poetry Library’s collection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cristine Brache [b. 1984] is an artist and poet from Miami, Florida. She received a BFA from Florida State University and is currently based in China. Her work has been shown internationally in film festivals, galleries, and art spaces and has been published in various literary journals and art magazines.