what do we get from these various communities
I like Barry Manilow and if the fire alarm goes
off we’ll meet outside the Chinese Buffet
and I’ll tick your name off the register
how do they shape us and help us
it’s like a hand with eight fingers
what is the Bermuda Triangle
have you all signed the register
where people disappear
By Steven Waling.
I have been making poems with foregrounded visual and sonic aspects for a couple of years. I like concrete poetry: maybe the idea of it more than most stuff that gets called that. It would be good to have a poem that was made out of skin or some sort of epithelial tissue, as I’m running out of letraset.
By Greg Thomas.
Being a reconstructive surgeon, perhaps the exactness that I put in the search for symmetry, hiding a scar, removing excesses, in precision, drinks from the same well that influences meter, enjambement, the graphic shadow that fills the page, all the revision process. Perhaps writing and operating, like many other arts, both have a certain respect for tradition, with an eye on creativity and originality (at the shoulders of giants). Now that you made me think about it, maybe there is a greater similarity between a page of skin and a wrinkle of paper.
In the 82nd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Portuguese poet João Luís Barreto Guimarães.
I probe what bitter taste may have lingered
to have her wishing to punish
some ten years of her life -
and find myself regretting not being able to delete memories
only wrinkles
and fine lines (slightly
marked ruins). In the pitfalls of time
nobody falls by mistake:
skin can’t be purged by the decade but at best
line by
line.
By João Luís Barreto Guimarães.
What’s happened is that we are seeing an ever increasing number of texts based on a more or less radical refusal of a referent. However I believe that when significance and signifier come unstuck, writers risk creating not so much a greater expressive freedom as a night of the sign, in which all verses turn out to be one flat gray. Facing this fact, facing up to the evident historic corrosion of the expressive weave, the single, individual solution is all that’s left to us. In my own work I like to stretch the thread of meaning. I want to see how long it resists, when it twists, to reach its breaking point. But what really interests me is the before, the during, not the after.
In the 81st of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Italian poet Valerio Magrelli.
And two night-lights are lit
as the flame takes and sleep passes
between us. But as it passes
the boiler in the basement shudders:
down there a fossil nature burns,
down in the depths prehistory’s
sunken fermented peats blaze up
and slither through my radiator.
Wreathed in a dark halo of oil,
the bedroom is a close nest
heated by organic deposits,
by log pyres, leafmash, seething resins…
And we are the wicks, the two tongues
flickering on that single Palaeozoic torch.
By Valerio Magrelli.
Some scholars and critics argue that after 9/11 there is a revival of notions like sincerity, authenticity and genuineness. Even if we are moving beyond postmodernism, its concepts are still present in discussions about literature. These questions were asked in two issues of literary magazine Parmentier: ‘Right’ and ‘Left’. Here we examined the extent of the connection between politics and literature. How do writers respond to the rise to power of a radical right-wing populist party like the Party for Freedom? Do they feel more or less obliged to protest in their writings, or do they hold to a strictly autonomous notion of literature?
In the 80th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Dutch poet Arnoud van Adrichem.
Breath defines the room, the roses get drunk in their vase.
Real people are a trend. We need to capitalise on that, sometime.
Imagine: a man and a woman. Imagine: a child. Imagine: a little rip.
This is an immeasurable talent – freshly plucked from the corner shop.
Our crew has been recording for days, but you’ll survive.
It could be anybody’s child. Our concept: flatter than the earth.
You bleach your skin and grab a sun bed. Each hue counts.
What happened to you could happen to anybody.
By Arnoud van Adrichem.
MY HEART IS MY HANDICAP.
WHEN I STOPPED
KIDNAPPING
MY HEART I BECAME
AN ARTIST.
I’M FORTY FIVE YEARS OLD.
I paint inside out, I write outside in.
By Christine Herzer.
In Petco I held a small guinea pig
and stared into its eyes as far as it would allow
It had no conscience and I dropped it
poor thing
has to exist during a financial crisis
like the rest of us though this animal
Is more cute and more vulnerable
gets away with being those things
And has a home the rest of us fight to keep.
By Feliz Lucia Molina.
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