Pound meets Celan

This was prompted by a thread on the British and Irish Innovative Poetry discussion list in which Pierre Joris pointed out the exact words of the famous 'all poets are Jews' quote (from Mandelstam, from Tsevetsaya, from Celan). It made Ezra Pound in his Pisan cage loom overhead: 

Raised, to the head-heights

pierced
by the crossed night-lights

in a voice-mesh
Pound shouting pounds
vse poety zhidy

Reasons Against It

for the ‘poetry community’



1) Poetry corrupts language.



2) A typical poet is a mentally incurious, unimaginative, status-and-gossip obsessed phrase-stealing dedicated imitator of fashion.



3) Despite evidence and assertions to the contrary, most poets are the cringing creatures of the status quo.



4) The music of poetry is tone-deaf. And cheap perfume.



5) It raises hopes. Then thwarts them.



6) It rhymes. Often, and in public.



7) Its comparatively few sincere practitioners are condemned to a lifetime of anguish at the reality of their unfortunate election of art.



8) It drove me to drink.



9) Metaphor is a method of stealing food.



10) Longfellow was a poet



11) Like religions, and politicians, it feeds on the suggestible.



12) This is a poem.



13) It is a conversation with no-one.

ANGEL EXHAUST TWENTY-ONE

EACH AEON FREE AFTER THE FIRST ONE: THE WELSH UNDERGROUND



Despite the denials of official organs, Wales participated in the great blossoming of poetic culture of those decades between the end of the primary Cold War and the dawn of the New Right, and this unofficial English literary magazine is offering a large-scale celebration of the achievements of Welsh poets whose optimism captured them. The fall of monoliths spills daylight onto the missing half of the picture. The most interesting anglophone Welsh literature of the past century has been in the innovative vein.



A mixture of poetry, essays, memoirs, and interviews recreates a literary era in depth.

Poets featured are: John James, David Barnett, Paul Evans, Iain Sinclair, Zoë Skoulding, Ralph Hawkins, Peter Finch, David Greenslade, John Goodby, Nic Laight, Nick Macias, Niall Quinn, Philip Jenkins, Graham Hartill, Lynette Roberts, Chris Ozzard, Rhys Trimble, John Powell Ward. We touch on the history of innovative writing in Welsh and even turn up two avant garde texts in Welsh. An analytical essay (drawing on work only available in Welsh) uncovers the use of Welsh patterns of consonantal echoing in the English experimental tradition. An ample poetry anthology includes mainly unpublished poetry but also recovers texts from as far back as the seventies, defying forgetfulness.



Living witnesses told us strange tales. Recovery of original texts from archives and deposits has brought a disintegration of the intellectual legacy. Salvaged from among the debris of Christian, nationalist, and communalist ideologies, we shake clear a brilliant line of liberated and imaginative writing. Set up in order to fill a gap, the project has uncovered a whole gulf, a submerged realm of sophisticated intellectual exploration. Awed, we recover the traces of the classic Welsh magazine 2nd Aeon between 1966 and 1975. That is truly why each aeon is free after the first one.



£7. 170 pp. publication date 4 June 2010. available from: 21 Querneby Road, Nottingham, NG3 5JA. cheques payable to 'Andrew Duncan' please.



edited by Goodby and Duncan.

This is a follow-up to the celebrated 'Colonies of Belief', the special issue on the Irish avant-garde, edited by Scully and Goodby.





so much of this movement

is really human



the gentlemen of the

orchestra beckon us on



a blood stain

appears on my left eye



we follow a sinewy pavan

slowly and

lacking arms we will allow ourselves

to fall over the edge

of the known world



(Philip Jenkins, 'La Patinoire')

Chizzitku

      after Basho


An old puddle, shallow;

a frog flops off its spot. Yay.

Splopt.

           Innit.





Chizzit : an inhabitant of Leicester, as in 'how much izzit? Reputed to be a coinage  of the shopkeepers of Skegness.  This is one of a number of versions of the famous Basho haiku I've done on my decidedly unvenomous views of my adopted hometown.

Gigging all Over the World

There's an evangelical church near me: it gets more or less a full house every service. People come from across the country to attend it. Its hymns are God-awful, pun intended, Christian Rock disasters (it's an index of the mental ruin the place induces that the performers are often quite capable musicians) its liturgy a shambling street-corner mugging of language, its sermons an unrefined form of moral bullying interspersed with lame gags, its populism a front that disguises a deeply right-wing agenda.


Reminds me of some peformance poetry venues I've been to.

from Clegglet, Prince of No-Mark

To join, or not to join: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The twists and turns of Mandelson and Gordon
Or to take arms in a dark deal with Cam’ron
And while opposing back him? To lose: to win:
To choose, and by a pact to say we end
The few score seats and by-election shocks
Our party’s heir to: ‘tis a consumation
Devoutly to be missed.

Ejecta Membra

Poet defeats Prelate at Beards: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williamson came a modest second to ArchPoet Geoffrey Hill at a recent Game of Beards at Keble College.
http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/news/geoffrey-hill-conference-at-keble/image

                                         ~

While Martin Dolan has supplied this wonderful link:  

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2009/05/poets-ranked-by-beard-weight.html

which truly made my teatime.

                                         *

Etruscan carts had metal-rimmed wheels four foot and eight and a half inches apart.

                                         *

 I was asked whether I had watched last night's (the third and final) televised election debate and about the use of 'nowt', subjects that seem intimately if subterraneanly related:

I was too busy bathing my feet after a visit to Eastwood to attend to the debates. In case that first sentence causes puzzlement, not that would ever be my intent, no, I haven't joined a strange cult which indulges in rites of pedicure after entering the shrine (of D.H.Lawrence) but rather I was suffering from the after effects of following around the winding pilgrim trails of the nearby and vast Ikea store where someone was in search of curtain rings.

I was, though, able to get a copy of a volume containing Lawrence's short story 'Delilah and Mr Bircumshaw', which I haven't set eyes on in almost 40 years, from Eastwood's Public  Library. I like visiting those old colliery villages round there : people's eyes light up when they hear my surname, as with the librarian today: 'I used to know an old gentleman with that name'.

People in much of the North Midlands used to say variants of 'nowt' too, 'naht' and the like. Although a relic, it still happens sometimes in speech, language being a haunted house par excellence. And, despite the dull accounts of linguists, people, being actors, instinctive mimics like most primates, will use inflections other than their own.