3:AM Magazine

These pieces are extracts from a journal I was keeping, on and off, in Sydney in the late eighties. Most of them were drawn in Karen’s kitchen, the woman who gave me a home when i was most in need of one. It was an open house, full of music and kind, creative, generous people coming and going. I kept my head down for the most part but was always listening, and often writing things down next to whatever drawing i was working on: bits of conversation, song lyrics, strange new words, wisecracks, memories I was trying to come to terms with and letters i would never send. Looking back at these pages now, I realise they also document a certain sea change in my life, a struggle that was taking place within me between drawing, which I had always assumed was where my path lay, and writing which I hadn’t much tried before. I guess words won out in the end.

In the 100th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Mark Czanik.

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Alexander Trocchi has been called a deviant, a scoundrel, a genius, a monster. Semantics, words, letters organised in order to reveal a truth. He was all these things. He is, and will always be, my flesh and blood. The illustrative Cain to my Abel, something bigger and more powerful then me that will strike me down when I raise my body to match him, but I am grateful for the pairing. These poems are scales I have plucked from his Levithan hide. I have assembled them as best I can to show him as best I can. Here’s to you Alex, we’d be drinking whisky were you here but wait for me and we’ll be drinking starlight.

In the 99th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Aimee Keeble.

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I try to treat the making of books as a problem of sharing, the solution to which needs to be continually reinvented. It’s a problem that has perplexed, confounded and excited me more and more as I experiment with different forms of publishing. Here are three ways of presenting the same poem, each of which represents a different stage in the creation of a page for a handmade book; each of which, hopefully, offers a different reading experience. In reading the physical copy of the handmade book, which I have on a bookshelf at home, the reader lifts each flap on a given page to reveal the next line of the poem. Unfortunately, I can’t invite every potential reader of my work into my home to read the physical copy of the book, so I share my handmade books at kensparling.ca, where my son Stephen has created a website that nicely captures the spirit of the experience of reading the physical book.

In the 98th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ken Sperling.

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These works are taken from Pantano’s ongoing Mass Graves project (started in 2006), in which he “writes through” his grandfather’s Nazi past, Swiss complicity in the Holocaust, and the brutal murder of one of Egon Schiele’s models.

In the 97th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Daniele Pantano.

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Though the groundbreaking literary gathering European Poetry festival has been postponed in its physical happening, in its stead are specially commissioned remote readings and performances in the vidpoe tradition from Benedikt Kuhn, Maja Jantar, Robert Prosser, Andreja Stepec, Linn Molineaux and more.

Eight brand new video-poems by poets across Europe celebrating The European Poetry Festival.

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The work is instinctive. I react to what is. I surround myself with: scribbles, ink blots, smudges, cut-up words, torn phrases, old biros, dying feltip pens, torn out phrases, second-hand texts, charcoal, correction fluid, abandoned ideas, blades… And I assemble, I layer, I disrupt, I glue, I print, I mark, I rub, I collage, I listen and as a result I visual poems or #vispo. Why poetry? Because, just as poetry requires artifice, manipulation, and a language to make itself heard/seen, so do I. The only difference being that the language I use does not derive from an al/ready-made meaning rather it makes its own meaning when it arrives.

In the 96th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Richard Biddle.

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The three prints are from a series I’m doing during the lockdown in London. They’re done on rough cardboard I take from bins and wherever they can be scavenged. Some are big and some are not. I pile them up in a room. They’re nearly up at the ceiling now. It’s making the room very dark. Many of them I can’t see all at once because they’re too large to display outside of a galery. Prints are run off from pictures I take on my phone. The paintings are just inchoate daubs. I don’t have the words or anything. But all this dying creeps into your dreams with a blank sad black and white feeling I guess.

In the 95th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Richard Marshall.

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lymph odes is an evolving poetic series that hopes – in its gestures and paradoxes – to exhibit the staged resolution of oncological traumas. One of the defining “hallmarks of cancer” is metastasis; in the Greek, ‘displacement’. The (ill)legibility of these poems, or ‘stagings’, is an attempt to aspirate the shifts and convictions, the matter-of-factness, the secluded anguish, and the sterile irony of a singular/personal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis at the age of twenty. Their visual starkness presents the exposure of lived realities, offering parallax displacements to perceptions and depictions of cancer, remission, and the chemotherapeutic experience.

In the 94th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Enis Yucekoralp.

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WST1 : This piece depicts Waardenburg Syndrome Type 1 in three formats: a drawing of syndromic, heterochromia eyes, with the double helix replacing the nose; a handwritten explanation of the underlying genetics; and a typed haiku describing my resultant appearance.

The Deafhearing community of Martha’s Vineyard : Due to hereditary deafness on the island, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language became a lingua franca for its deafhearing community; since it was probably similar to British Sign Language, I have represented it by fingerspelling M V S L in British Sign Language (BSL).

‘Write a light poem about the zoo’ : This piece is a promotional flier for the category of ‘light poem’ within the traditional, Welsh medium, local eisteddfod event, which will take place in Rhosllannerchrugog in 2021 (having been postponed); the theme for the competition is ‘The zoo’.

Operation Yellow Hammer – meta : This piece relates to the British Government’s contingency plan for a no-deal Brexit, which was codenamed Yellow Hammer – a reference to the bird, whose call, onomatopoeically, sounds like ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’.

In the 93rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Sara Louise Wheeler.

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There’s a charity shop near where I live that has a ‘free box’ outside the door filled with things deemed unworthy of a price tag.

I rummaged through the box and found this old folder of musical notation.

I imagined who it might’ve belonged to and conjured a vision of an austere piano teacher (male).

In the 93rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Michael Sutton.

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