Hi Zero ONE

AKB-Henry Green

The wreckage beneath standing beeches was lit at this place by a glare of sunlight concerted on flat, dying leaves which hung onto life by what was broken off, the small branches joining those larger that met the arms, which in their turn grew from the fallen column of the beech, all now an expiring gold of faded green. A world through which the young man and his girl had been meandering, in dreaming shade through which sticks of sunlight slanted to spill upon the ground, had at this point been struck to a blaze, and where their way had been dim, on a sea bed past grave trunks, was now this dying, brilliant mass which lay exposed, a hidden world of spiders working on its gold, the webs these made a field of wheels and spokes of wet silver. The sudden sunlight on Elizabeth and Sebastian as, arms about one another's waists, they halted to wonder and surmise, was a load, a great cloak to clothe them, like a depth of warm water that turned the man's brown city outfit to a drowned man's clothes, the sun was so heavy, so encompassing betimes.



A knee which, brilliantly polished over or beneath, shone in this sort of pool she had made for herself in the fallen world of birds, burned there like a piece of tusk burnished by shifting sands, or else a wheel revolving at such speed that it had no edges and was white, thus communicating life to ivory, a heart to the still, and the sensation of a crash to this girl who lay quiet, reposed.

In next to no time that bath was run, with Merode stretched out under electric light and water, like the roots of a gross water lily which had flowered to her floating head and hands. This green transparency was so just right, so matched the temperature of the hidden bliss, that she half closed her eyes in a satisfied contemplation of a chalk white body. She felt it seemed to sway as to light winds, as though she were bathing by floodlight in the night steaming lake, beech shadowed, mystically warmed.



She took a whole azalea right into her mouth.

Quadralectics

Worshiping a Word God will destroy the USA, for life is composed of cubed opposites. Simple Cube Divinity is the most perfect and life-supporting form existing in the universe and on Earth - including Earth itself. Do you realize that a 4 corner square rotating 1/4 turn creates a full circle? A full rotated square will create 16 corners, 96 hours and 4 simultaneous 24 hour Day circles within only a single imaginary cubed Earth rotation. This amounts to a spiraling quad helix of Earth as it revolves around the Sun - rotating as it revolves around the Sun, to induce the value of the Sun revolving about the Earth. This act demonstrates that both Sun and Earth rotate around each other simultaneously - thus creating Opposites existing only as Opposites with a zero value existence between the binary and cancelling to nothing as One or God theism. All Creation occurs between Opposites, and exists only as Opposites - with a zero value existence. As One or as a Godism, all Opposite values cancel out to nothing. The Circle you see around Earth divides Earth into Opposite values equal to a zero existence. As One or God, both Earth and Human cancel to nothing. The whole of the Universe is composed of Opposites - with a zero value existence - that cancels to nothing as One or a God. Humans worship ONEness of DEATH, thus they are destroying the LIFE of all Opposites by which all Creation exists. I have found Evil lies in the Bible that will rock religious and academic values to their primitive origin. There is no Human or God who can match my Cube Wisdom as a Cube Phenomenologist - The Cube God Measurer. While the Circle of Earth rotation is a perpetual embodiment as it is void of the Corner Time notches that accumulate as aging Life for the 4 corner residents. Have you mentality to know 4 Days rotating simultaneously on Earth?

Ray has wagered $10,000 that his theories cannot be proven wrong. The site has been criticised for the "centered 30-point type" of its design and the "endless blather" of its content.

endless in both directions

my villi caress your face, learning the soft curves of your cheeks, the bridge of the nose. i introduce my friends, a couple of belligerent stick figures. you seem bored and disengage from my hose station with a yawn, filling out the required forms as you rollercoaster stomach drop into the oblivious void of bliss at our feet, squawking like a wounded gull. the bridge is silent now, as mitochondria dance in the bellies of beasts below, the green, greasy stench rising to dance in my nostrils.

I need to feel endless in both directions. It's personal.

the co-ordinaters of the future

albumblatt

Fucking Hell

Forever outside unseeming misdirection parse
un-useable arid Ars. invalid O I exculpate so freely
chusing him by town light. Owning all of the prick
condom petals lite unstable helio, bullet nose dread
from error crank everybody holler seismic interlude
voiding the pops. Mum screws back liniments evilly

No totally no baby endofuck resolute : : he speaka
good Ingrish              I love you so hardened quite
sublimely right, I still completely love you so my
febrile waif was ever so just love me please of shit
banana cake, Hippolytus trump the binary gouache.

Or before dawn when they blaze unbelievably bright
with vivid and slowly shifting iridescent colours. They
are filmy sheets slowly curling and uncurling, stretching
and contracting in the semi-dark sky. Compared with
dark scudding low altitude shitcanned tinnitus fire

ten past nine

Is relentless and self-immolating honesty any useful barometer of the immediate, or does it merely slide back into the chasm of colonial lyric desire spreading out from my fingertips? I feel that at the moment, which is really at the very moment, that the only possible ethics of writing is to impale an immediacy into passion that is at least the truth of the next second of writing - is this the precision of mortality I think it is. I want to be utterly definitive this second, to trust the voracious temporal greed that is the only useful form of greed at my disposal. What is honesty in poetry, what is the call to arms, what is the invocation of poetry to do with itself, how can what I write do everything that I do *not* want it to do because *that* in itself would be the only possible realism? But then a poetry such as that would perhaps resemble the most risible chance-based nonchalance. When is a surfeit of passionate response USEFUL to anything other than a lyric demand for clarity of expression? Its vaunted uselessness is not enough, and in any case I am creating poems which are then sent to people to be read as objects of work, any uselessness is quickly inverted even in the moment of its conception. I twist. Is the point, why is love commendable in and of itself - why should it be? How fucked up is your love, see me pirouette and land in flames, can we allow ourselves that much trust? What do I risk by writing that is not just a failure of or in the writing? I want to feel actual movement feeling, real flesh, language conspires in the meaning flesh to alter its state, to elect it, simultaneously grounded in how is your body local to me, how do I keep my skin soft, how do I make my skin shine, how can you love me. That must be the question now, not how can I love you, that's all too easy, I can slam the brakes on whilst loving you to death, but how can you love me if I love you that much? And does it even matter? Do I finally care as long as I can get a poem out of the night? Is the immediacy of experience forever lost through its mediation by exchange and the virtual insistence on an ersatz immediacy of ease and profit? You can make $400 an hour from home! Click here now! It is not enough to hate that, although that must be loved, the hatred of exploitation. Poetry should match the New-Age insistence on the transformation of consciousness but make it work through attention to the particular, and what is more particular than the next second - there must be a social instance, poetry, of the responsibility of denying oneself "the ideological misuse of one's own existence". I will perform this for you now, a remote healing, watch my hands, the contradiction of me helping you the reader to overcome the ideological misuse of your own existence whilst appealing to an ideology of literary trust, how can you love me? From "On the morality of thinking" (MM 46): "Knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insistently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled. This admittedly presupposes a relation to the general, though not one of subsumption, but rather the reverse. Dialectical mediation is not a recourse to the more abstract, but a process of resolution of the concrete in itself." Do that. Now get out.

The Gnostic Cartography of Desire: aphorisms on Olson

What I come down to is that Maximus is the poetics of temporality, laid bare. I think finally that’s how the poem ACTS, and I think only, or at least certainly by, insisting upon temporality as the primary figure of the poems in particular, can all the booming, phallocentric, thetic rhetoric of the essays be put to good use. But finally, because I always want to skip, to go straight for the jugular with Olson, can there truly be a poetics of temporality, or is such a thing only ever destined to merely describe the passage of time, as Ashbery ends up so pathetically, whimsically doing? But to go back to jumping the gun – I think it’s a real danger in reading Olson, and a fear which seems to have been born out in the whole style of the recent film Polis is This, that if you take any single one of Olson’s theoretical touchstones from Projective Verse, Human Universe, Against Wisdom as Such, or wherever, and you apply it wholeheartedly, and you look at Maximus through that one lens, you end up with just that, the end of the picture you wanted to start with, and that’s when the project segues, not without struggle, but segues relentlessly into a kind of corny mysticism. Olson is not mystic, not in the way, say, Duncan was. He got his theory of myth and muthos from Harrison, and he stuck with that actionable language, as was passed onto Ed Dorn, who has a whole other folk ontology going on. But what still bothers me is the way in. Perhaps this has come about simply because of the historical weight P.V. bears, and that Olson seems only ever to be read as living up to his constructs (which in any case are filled with wild humour, puns, the kinds of twists he practices in the verse). The essays and the poems seem to me to be both purely textual, that he was constantly practicing praxis, and that nothing else would ever do – his letters too, especially to Creeley and Bolderoff.

The hugeness of Olson – that the poetry does deal with the “primitive” (as he had it) condition, the prime conditioning, in the case of the “pejorocracy”, of man, philosophical, economic. But even these categories aren’t somehow sufficient. It’s not that they’re not wide enough, but that to describe the primary writing of Maximus as layered in philosophical, mythical (which is emphatically not mystic, because it obeys rules of perception and history), economic, personal, geographical, I mean, these things are there, but they’re not there for the sake of being aspects of the text. The text does these things, that we can call philosophical, or economic – or it should do, and it doesn’t, not all the time. There is the sense, whenever I approach Olson from anything more than a distanced, tuned imbibing (which in any case always flicks me onto a sharper rumination) of: where to start, how to get to grips with the enormity of these instances of cognitive, etc, perception that are laid out before us. And I think it important to recognize that to a large extent, the poetry itself enacts this same process of finding, exploring, receiving, is itself the taking stock of its own procedure, which is not to say it is purely auto-enacting – cf. Stephen Thompson’s excellent and articulate essay in the Ladkin/Purves Edinburgh Review 14 on American Poetry – and therefore un-usable, but precisely to pinpoint the actual condition of form AS content that so pre-occupied Olson.

The complex simplicity of the Maximus project is that this is process as pedagogy – that the alienation of man/being/breath/muthologos, that for Olson are all part of the same historical schema, the pejorocracy & logocentricism – must be rectified by a poetics of temporality that puts man squarely in the driving seat. Gloucester is not microcosm, but simultaneously micro & macro – “life spills out”, every instance in Maximus is an image of the whole, transcending (but grounding) the lyric condition. It is an instruction manual of how to get out of onself and one’s debilitating culture – by appropriating history as what one does & says – and it is precisely this removal of the pejorocracy, this insistence on distancing oneself from it, which we can probably assert is the point at which Prynne, around 1970, begins to believe that such a project is too top-heavy, that the important thing to do is it collide with the pejorocracy head-on, to no longer avoid it in favour of an appeal to the Polis, which was never quite as dialectical as Thompson almost reads it, in Letter 6.

“For Olson, reality is the missionary position.” – Tomas Weber

The gnostic cartography of desire is: LIFE – which wants to abstract itself out // AND // my LIFE – which wants the particular to stand in for the whole, but stays particular. This is the lyric thrust that Prynne talks about in that most beautiful piece of friendship disguised as pedagogy, his address to the folks at Simon Fraser University in 1971. That lecture is, I know, hugely important to many people writing excellent and worthwhile poetry today, and I think perhaps more so than Maximus IV, V, VI is, or will be. But the image of desire that Prynne traces in that essay is, I think, couched in the temporal hi-jinks of Maximus as text, not as abstractable conceit, or any discourse of historical seismic shift in the space of post-modern American poetry, which I’ve no doubt Olson would have dismissed with some sort of misogynistic disparagement of the progenitors of discourse in general.

“that we act somewhere / at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides, or / the latest finest tape-recorder, or any form or record on the spot / - live television or what – is a lie / as against what we know went on, the dream : the dream being / self-action with Whitehead’s important corollary: that no event / is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal / event

The poetics of such a situation / are yet to be found out”

Which is Maximus finding them out, not on the spot, but through the course of the epic. Now this passage throws up any number of concerns, not least the phallocentric cosmic boner of the reading of Whitehead, and of course mythic genealogical penetration is everywhere in Maximus, and also that “self-action” is dangerously un-coupled from Polis, so that here it is assumed that if everyone had the Polis in their eyes, then Polis is this, that segues uncomfortably into tautology, unless we keep reading, unless we keep wanting it, which is the poem’s real beauty. That it only makes sense in the actual act of reading it is both Maximus’ supreme achievement and also its galactic faceplant. It’s no good making language ACTUAL if it only appears actual when you’re reading it? (I get a similar feeling from some of The White Stones, another whole schooner of fish, right, but just the hell of it). But then how else might a poetics make sense, how else can life spill out of a poem? How else but by the spillage from percept to example, by how you take literature to act in the space of LIFE. That is, if you define them separately as such. Because if you stick with it, Maximus nearly actually becomes LIFE, it’s grandiose colonial projections unstick because the condition of colonialism is to subjugate and condense, to temper the environment and to make it micro, whereas Olson is continually opening it all up, including himself, especially including himself. It is the most generous un-auto-biographical use of biography, because, Letter 27 [withheld], he does propose a dialectical relationship between the lived experience of a personal history, the eternal event crossing him like a secant, and the instances of time that budge a life into itself continually to form the ever-present tense within which Maximus operates, nudging it forward, “than that which is, / call it a nest, around the head of, call it / the next second / than that which you / can do!”.

This is the sense in which, for me, Maximus is not like life, is too particular to be anything so grossly universalized as “like life” – “I am a ward / and precinct / man myself and hate / universalization, believe / it only feeds into a class of deteriorated / personal lives anyway, given them / what they can buy, a cheap / belief” – but rather, as the 3rd Letter on Georges has it, “makes it with me, and I want that sense / here, of this fellow going home”, but as I compare my feelings, or write my feelings on this poem by putting a line in my mouth from a unwritten poem, from the “sense” that Olson could not write himself, of this fisherman, “of this fellow going home” that he was not, I seem to trip across the whole metonymic twist of the poems and get lost. If the best I can do (which it isn’t, in any case, but let’s investigate this for now) is allow my appreciation of the poem to rest in a sentiment that Olson wanted to express himself but could not, is that the most personal commitment to home as the condition that any one of us has access to, on Earth, or is that too much like Battleship Earth? “I want that sense / here, of this fellow going home”. Desire and deitics headbutt as Olson demands that we make it with him – I want that sense too, but “here”, slammed across the enjambment’s wet deck, is already out of the picture, is already moving off out of our reach, and we have to keep running the course of the want itself to get there, as the cadence does not slow but similarly slams into the italicised square bracket, making us instanter stop still wanting. Not much more good may now come of this tonight, but hopefully this’ll run on further. This is still the best tattoo ever:

o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)

John Wilkinson on holiday

Tourism

They improve with age.
The weathered images
are living saints
moved to a museum
from these niches; and
under this reformation
the pigeon stools instead.
A cine camera whirs
with ascending beats.

Don't be fooled. They
retain the spirit, and
coaches' disgorge
still gapes at the
empty vault of heaven.
Their vacancy
a kind of proof, and this
the buttress countenances.

Only children, these
at least, grip with
concentration. The white
regiment is unswaddled,
squalls in mufti clothes
under a chestnut tree,
stamps on prickly
armour. For it is soft

they know, and the silky
nut is released for play.

From Get Set in Oort's Cloud: Early Poems (Barque)

notes from the infinite source of all energy

People dying for no strategic benefit

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/16/jock-stirrup-iraq-evidence-failure

More great material from Jock. Seriously, everything this guy says is absolute gold. Remember when a few more civilians were blown up in Helmand some time ago? No? Me neither. But Jock comes out with this beauty:

"This operation … is not about battling the Taliban, it is about protecting the local population, and you don't protect them when you kill them"

Is Chris Morris secretly controlling his mouth from a tiny remote control lodged surreptitiously in the pituitary gland? He is called SIR JOCK STIRRUP. As the gasp of obsoletist irony falls way off the map of southern Iraq, what is left of this actual and blankly honest, utilitarian rhetoric that can be of any use? "You don't protect them when you kill them". It is the sufficiently self-admonishing and repulsively bureaucratically correct language of military PR, impacted to its absurdist zenith, that injects the notion of foreign death into the invading population to produce the desired level of middle-class frowning and sighing whilst simultaneously wiping out any question of the validity of the military presence in the first place, indeed, the validity of military presence itself .

Foreign death is our mediation of state-instructed murder that attempts to bear no resemblance to innocent death from terrorist attacks in the West, removing death even as a right of the invaded population and placing it squarely in the sights of the precision bombers which are the grisly chrome hallmarks of modern abstracted warfare.

on Nat's photos

Mention country second point command help one swerve gallant into prosody, on second thoughts pursue this hetero-limb back to basics yeah thanks for that. X has said nothing like that. Where unskilled workers ratchet up to fire love so stupidly, it is a bit like

Sitting in the best internet cafe in the world.

That theme song from Dawson's Creek is ringing out over the bass-heavy speakers, eliciting just the right balance of lonesome proxy nostalgia and practical revulsion to keep me going through this letter. I mean, Solo is always Solo, and we just seem to collide in the nicest possible way, with the added paranoia over leaking rooms and typhoid-ridden towels. I'm staying in the same room I lived in for a year, and pretty much staying put in this town, and doing the things I used to do when I lived here - sleep a lot, eat a lot of rice, listen to and play gamelan, hang out with friends, buy my ticket out. It's a strange sort of dialectical relationship whereby I'm constantly glad of the fact that I will be leaving, which reflexively makes my time here even more precious. I'm reading Adorno in a mosquito net (I mean generally, not right now), going to the Mankunegaran Court Palace to practice gamelan whilst the rains smash the ground around us, hanging out with my neighbours' kids, watching Yojimbo round a friend's house whilst fending off the mosquitoes. It's a life I both crave and crave to dissect from afar, conceptually proximal but physically remote, I get here and I feel completely gluey on the inside, malleable, re-workable. That fluidity of purpose and self is massively important to cultivate, as I try to, but without any pride in doing so - I also seem to be exactly where I was with the language when I left, which has made re-unions all the more palatable. I'm not really saying what I want to say. Which is strange, because here that's all you have to do, and it works. I mean, there are codes, like anywhere, there are behavioral codes and dress codes and holding hands codes, but once you have these you know how to bend and break them, and getting on in the world is as easy as ordering a taxi in a foreign language in a city you don't yet know very well because you get taxis everywhere. Ease is not a component I trust - it emphatically isn't easy to live here, but the day-to-day transactions require a modicum of love and surface-feature interiority (which the dictionary wants to "correct" to inferiority, which isn't a bad pun) that bring certain selves to the surface almost without any actual volition. I find myself deep in conversation with one of my friends about the nature of what I can say in their language, and how that defines my capacity for truth.

It is also, in many ways, a very funny place. I have never laughed harder in my life than with David, here attending the same university I went to, but what we laugh about is couched in such particular experience the transfer of the joke is always at our expense - we effectively laugh at ourselves laughing, which I suppose could get dangerously solipsistic, but that I think is the necessary corollary to being so constantly outwardly exposed, at least superficially. I still find the music pathologically beautiful, and yet last night at the court palace practice, round the back, on the old gamelan, where it leaks and the foreigners and kids practice, I wasn't struck with the same magical charm I used to be - or maybe I was and I just took it for granted because I was concentrating on playing so much. Like the music, life here consists in expansion and contraction, tightening up and widening out, speeding in and rolling away. I found a dead wall-lizard in my toilet this morning.

The sound-world here is like nothing else - at any given point in the city the melange of characteristic sounds is remarkable. From my bed I get the panoramic call to prayer from 10 different mosques, some using ancient cassette tapes on maximum gain, the sound of the gamelan cassette from downstairs with Marseno singing along, doors slamming from the building behind my bed, and the occasional train horn from across town. Pop up to the roof of the outhouse and the sound of the mosques beaming out the Word is a totally different beast. I feel composed here as nowhere else. Passively, made-up, created, re-created, but also with dignity some way off the map, present but hardly that important.

But what better role for anyone to aspire to than hero? Hang on, hang on. Real life is like a photo but it moves, all 3% and climbing.

Tonight there's a latihan at Pak Panggah's house in Benawa. The old village dudes that practice there are some of the best people in the world, and I love them. My teachers from last year will also be there, see below for Pak Kamso and Pak Pardi, plus some londo. Budget capitalism is cuter / the image of the advertisement on the surface of the advert / capital as a diluted reflection of itself / disparity of the Jakarta-set soap operas where literally everyone lives in a huge clean house and is even whiter than me.

Ravel + nuclear war in yr head

Last week Harry Sanderson asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a set for Primitive London's Saturday night exhibition // show // party - hell yes says I, and hell yes it was! I don't think any of it was recorded, of which I'm glad, I was rather thinking to enjoy the process of working with Harry after 2 years on respective bronze // beats, and there we go, the beats were lovingly submerged in a syrupy destructo-hedon-blitz, peaking tenderly at the roof of the railway arch, we got a fractured spleen / brain thing going on that I haven't heard this side of either Caboladies, Axolotl or BWH, not to mention the useful plugging in of the ephemeral to the necessary. Plus it's been a while since I've seen actual dancing. Everyone was there. Thanks Harry x

"Parcite dum propero, mergite cum redeo"

...Child comments that “The conceit does not overwell suit a popular ballad”, presumably because the corrupted broadside influence, filtered down through the centuries from Martial’s epigrammatic eloquence, does not to his mind cohere with the oral-poetical tradition from which the ballads spring. But it is the transcription of Greek [epic] tragedy into the local and contingent ballad form through the lens of Jones’s strident, literary revivalist musicianship that secures this sentiment all too suitably in the song’s structural dialectic. William has got his mother’s malison and knows that he must drown in the Clyde – the impossibility of his love’s fulfillment is at once both his cursed fate and that which impels him to take to his horse and seek out Margaret’s bower in the first place. The very doubt that is the originary impetus for the ballad’s narrative and structural irony is also the impacted self-knowledge of failure that drives William to live as best he might, as within the laws of the ballad universe he must, before the night comes on. Jones’ treatment of this particular facet of Clyde Water’s historical patchwork of narrative influence is therefore couched in the same humane contradiction in which the song itself is drenched; his placement of the Make me a wreck couplet as the framing element and crux of the first stanzaic unit serves to both unite the structural elements clearly under a banner of a resolute pathos (over-burdened by an overwrought tragic sensibility which it cannot sustain) as well as obscure the subjective agency of the individual actors, leaving us thus emotionally localised but lacking the precise co-ordinates of blame, themselves abstracted out to the banks of the ballad’s historical mytho-functionalism. This is a lot like life.

...The song of the lover is at once the lover's other lover. The substitute is total and cannot be compromised, say, with the other lover. The other lover is not composed of the same desires as the lover, whose song, whether his or another's, is the other in rapid oscillation between presence in the mind of the lover and absence in the traditional sense. The song and the other lover are never coeval, but displace each other and cancel each other.

got overspill wrecked upside
from the slip in gracious not
claim no rescission

plenary flat-footed gumbo solipsism easily
remembered, oh so babe for truthful sucker
punch to get our longing fixed in transit, star
to star -

to these this makes solar repugnance
inevitable, in which direction do I love, is
upbraided like the stupid shore.


No not fanciful begot Arthurian prophetic self
to come back here and sigh like roses
quickening by foreign exclamation no death
likened now to siphon all immortal dregs are not

life, by which I mean not allegory of the world

but its clear and prescient softness, only
to be bleached in sight of song
coursing final
seconds away.

tables * poets

This Saturday 7th August in London - first this, and then this. Word.

awesome song

Shoal Creek Labour Day, Alabama Sacred Harp, 2009


Gaelic psalms at Back Free Church, Isle Of Lewis, 2003


Georgian Polyphonic Choral Music


Bedhaya Dirada Meta, Jawa Tenggah


Bacchantae, Columbia/Barnard a cappella group

Boundary Situation / 8.7.10 / Hertford East

I need more. Open site proves access non
obstreperous financial poon gross abject tang
re-living in a space provided, mono-sensual, graft
escalope of belly four-eyes parcelled up to Saigon
flapping wildly please don’t prick me with the
remote. Eventually we rest. Concoction filial
but pure, gastronomically entropic to a wilder suit
your main could be your starter if you eat faster
but the guilt is timeless, passing into humoral
abstraction like the Jimmy in a text goes fallow
on the surface plop shiny blow-holes into, after.
Do you like me like this? I can do better. Pink-eyed
Icarus storms the lock, a crass retaliation, no-one
needs that many apples let me tell you how I got
here so it clicks: First spot: child of pasteurization
champ of the lakes, grimy cumshot baked on between
the breaks to make objection better, more than I can
crossbow fake duality inflicted on themselves
behind a chocolate landslide tasty as the day breaks
fall guy. Court me lately. Call off your frogspawn.
Organic re-lives splice the danger in a fixed limb our
manageable distance long, smooch also by the tracks
an awesome wind farm co-op debarred from conversation
fool hardy Tom likes his uncrusted I like mine on top
on fractal fiction loophole going back into the Truth
like a steady gong too soon. I could show you that I
mean business if you like. Then fake is fine, pharaoh
magic fits the bill for anyway & anyone encounters
dead forever, no-one needs him in their lives at least
camomile beefsteak menagerie, upshot frugal down
loading progress will aptly name apply new skin
detects an extra blowjob or its post-Earth equivalent
bartered so in meatspace revealing not 1 not 2 but
.3 recurring, tonight’s injection sprayed into a fault
less blanket. Re-set. Moon is time regained, disport
new sizes grappling with the big fat robot of the future
which I’m driving now & lastly on the range, to test
the general limits of detection. Aft. Access on the sly.

TRANSPOSE THE VITAL SIGNS INTO A LEMON TWIST

AWAY ARC UP IN AIRBAG SPREE CONFLATED INTO BLISS

SEE THE CYNIC POSTURE BY THE BLADE OF HIS OWN KNIFE

IRONICALLY ENGENDERED BY A FIELD OF MEASURED SPIKES

Who’s yr daddy, caddy? After all we pass the buck on
to a silky rejection, if that, painstakingly reviewed, like,
Dude I’m having sex but better! Africa comes to life
in front of us, it’s great! Fuck Montaigne! I’m not
hang on, extravagance is a phantom wheelie bin
the blare of my laptop fan denies and I relinquish
all the fassy shit for one thing least of all – brick it

run the caramel midnight off in deep-space seclusion
tearing beta versions of the limbic stem grown thinner.

a version of the sublime

"We might begin with the hypothesis that the encounter with literary greatness - the so-called rhetorical sublime - is structurally cognate with the transcendence, gentle or terrible, excited in the encounter with landscape, the "natural" sublime...our hypothesis commits us to a search for a structure beneath the vast epiphenomena of the sublime.

It is not, however, possible to write completely exoterically. Philology teaches, or used to teach, that the history of ideas is a history of metaphors made and remade; so, too, the history of criticism. It is difficult to be wholly clear about the logical status of the metaphorical moment we seek. The conflict subsumed in a major metaphor may only be inferred, but to take the metaphor for the lived reality is to neglect the presentness of the past, the fact that it too was once a moment of origin, an instant before the metaphor crystallized. Or was it? The image of thinker or poet standing as a third term in triangular opposition to discourse (language), on the one hand, and experience (sensation and its unconscious derivatives), on the other, has an impossibly abstract look. It may be that the original moment is always just next to us, but it cannot be definitively specified or pinned in a temporal sequence, except hypothetically. For the historian, the moment of macro- or micro-origin is usually a retrospective construction designed both to secure and to assuage a necessary alienation from the past. Throughout the analytical tradition the sublime moment tends to have a typical or fictional status. The dialectic of continuity and originality can only be resolved in a fiction of some kind, and it may be that the origin, like a screen memory, is a compromise between what we cannot fail to know and what we need to believe - the latter usually a mystery to ourselves. We write, in short, about modernism from within some version of it."

The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Thomas Weiskel (John Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 11-12)

Jonny Liron wants to be fucked, or, GOING OVER THE TOP OF THE FLESH: an introduction to the pornography of poetry

Jonny Liron’s poetry is activated by desire. His writing strokes a queer trajectory that moves from Shakespeare’s walking wounds to Acker’s Rimbaud’s precocious, transcendental masochism, tenderly inverting the traits of private longing into the honest myths of localised, de-privatised bodies, advancing a zealous campaign for the dredge of all our nightly lust to be converted through the slipstream of convertible language into fecund methodologies for examining subjectivities. Here the vicariousness of the imagined sensual body is exploded in favour of a hurt directly responsible to desire, and desire that responds directly to the hyperbolic positioning of sexuality as radically un-assimilable by the predations of robotically functional capital; at least seemingly so, as the work deliberately manoeuvres itself into wranglings within both the body and the body politic, a self explored in all its flesh and letters. Hetero-throats vomit back the urgent constituting gaze in a queer cartography of gregarious delight & ethno-babes take the fervent soundscape of the succubus’ phallic intransigence and fuck with it in pertinent, esoteric song.

The activation that I nudged at formerly is part of Liron’s wider praxis of theatrical desire, or desirous theatre, one that stems from the usefulness of place demolished of its private assumptions and invigorated by desire in place of stultified communicative models of interaction, a responsive erotics of occurrence, where that desire “is always political” and trained to invert the voyeuristic mode of awkwardness and discomfort into fertile ground for performative modes of connection. Liron’s poetry seems to me part of both the elicitation of that response and the response itself, as in,

see the meaning fall off like so much gravy

down the sluice you testified my testicles drooped off

into the home alone hell hole of rhyme and

syntax you cannot leave me with this butcherdress

of un living in the cattle prod of disneylanded squash the ch

christ push my face further in the shit so I can't breathe

kill me or set me free, fuck me or fuck me up,

but here god damn it no knife for us now in the

60's self referencing bitterly ironing automobile

of my reading infested with the clot of cliche drizzling

out the stigma of my earnest urge, this form is barbed

wire to be left and caught in a wing of distaste

where the incessant, barely sadistic self-harm is the index by which the poetic voice can feel again for the first time, completely wounded, real and shivering, a post-modern arsehole sonnet of failed affection but secure desire. How seriously should we take this urgent, unsimulated rhetorical demand to “fuck me or fuck me up”, and where do the ethics of this eroticism stake their claim? In the guts of poetry’s designs on a passive other, forever loved in silent sequence, the exhortation to be not only the loved one instead of the lover, but the fucked instead of the fucker, is in the poem a superfluity of “earnest urge”, however painful, in the face of what is denigrated as the “self referencing bitterly ironing automobile / of my reading”, where I take “ironing” to be a facile piss-take of “ironizing” and the general mode to be one of hope rather than despair, despite the self-satire of “my reading”. The danger implicit in a violently sexual encounter makes the body realer than referencing the self’s own desires, and thus the body needs only to be desired upon or in in order to accumulate the subjectivity necessary to make fucking vital life. The desultory and denigrating “un living in the cattle prod of disneylanded squash” makes the only viable response a mass onslaught into the fleshy processes of real life which must be accessed from a state of wanting to be transformed, to see the meaning of our bodies re-applied, not through the identity politics of straight or gay, but by queering the lover’s gaze to make the constitutive act less important than the desire behind the desire to be so constituted, the bloody real-time catwalk sped to a hurricane of lust to pump more blood through the veins than they could possibly handle, a cry against the “ironing” out of desire to the mass entrainment of normative beauty and pre-packaged, glossy, textiled love that is the very place of the poetry’s ecstatic insurgence.

Undoubtedly there are problematic points in a poetry of this kind – radical subjectivity was and never is a generalized prerequisite for fucking, although I am certain that Liron’s pornographic tendencies are aimed at re-appropriating the body from its image and re-investing it with the truth of desire whilst jettisoning exploitation. Pornography is an industry that has hi-jacked sexual desire, both gay and straight, for its own billion-dollar profits, and language that can attempt a reversal of the balance of power into the hands of those real human peoples who love & fuck in equal measure serves only to wrest influence away from pornography as the teleological arbiter of discourse on modern sex. Nonetheless, a Bataille-shaped transcendental shag is hard to pull off without sliding into exactly that kind of bathos or cynicism – the word “fuck” itself is a violent sound of attack, loaded with discrimination: the language itself is complicit. “Degradation”, notes Bataille, “which turns eroticism into something foul and horrible, is better than the neutrality of reasonable and non-destructive sexual behaviour”, because that neutrality, where too little is at stake and too little risked, is too distanced from the original taboo on violence and death that for him effectively invests eroticism with its transcendental power to glimpse the continuity of death and to burst through the barriers of our bounded subjective lives. And yet this reasoning predicates suffering and hurt, even if only for the rhetorical self declaiming the violence of desire in such a fashion. Desire is constantly co-opted. How can the poetic voice regain from corporate co-option the ability to conceive of itself as a desiring subject without itself performing those same hollow acts of appropriation that turn real love into the fantasy parameters of plastic souls? How much of that hurt can be re-invested into the work of a poetic language swimming in the erotics of theatrical desire and how much ends up superfluous damage in a subjective body already all-too wounded by commodification and cashflow? When can love corrupt capital? These are questions undoubtedly being raised (and answered) by other voices in the current poetic climate, and I submit this perky stub in the spirit of friendship and excitement about Jonny’s (and others’) continued investigations into the praxis of desire.

Jonny Liron is reading & performing in Cork at the SoundEye festival next week. Read his poetry here.

An open letter to Nicholas Brendan, c/o SOBA Sober Living Community, 22669 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu

Dear Nicky B,

It's just not fucking fair, is it? Like, one minute you're coming-to after being tasered twice in the butthole by some faggot LAPD ne'er-do-well, the next some crackpot's writing you illegitimate fan letters begging for nostalgia to be relinquished up to the youth who did begot them, those perky dreams of suicidal catch-ups, your comic / cosmic double. What was so great about the fans was that they knew they all existed. It's sickening that we end (or lose an eye, lol), but if the Prime Evil wanted you to be doing meet-and-greets at $75 a pop then fuck that, it's just not fair. What the hell is representation without trust? A fucking Hellmouth, that's what. Open mine and smile.

Come to think of it, they still have us running circles around those motherfuckers in space, how’s the line developed through first to Death and then Eternity, without whom our lives would mean as little as, say, that bucket of used pointy sticks. I mean, to prick the relative corners of our pubescent cosmographia is the medium incarnate, the acquisition of universe plugged into millions of wounded eyeballs whereby your indiscretion you both move and are the movèd; what impresses me is that you knew enough about Euripides to keep that shit in the can until such time as we could manage their despondent doom-rattle with the appropriate sardonic aplomb. When was the last time Joss called? He owes you more than this, we all do – there was no hope devoured to the last abstraction that we couldn’t squeeze into allegory, aye Xan man! Popping the fortunate foreskins of the adept! To rule without complicity the bastard lobbyists of distant galactic colonies! To lick too late the arc of desire stretching from my shuddering wrists to that barely permissible fake moustache you were sporting on YouTube last week! But I hear the people there are good, and you’re getting the attention and commitment to relinquishing reality that you need – & the point is, as you sagely put it, that you haven’t killed anybody yet, which is perhaps the most tortuous aside since that devilish honky asked the audience if they could tell when he was lying. Hetero-throats and death-breath. I for one always understood this to mean that I, specifically, but also generally and politically, was charged with planting all the seeds in the inter-personal underbelly I could manage before the curtain plunged us all into the deluge of perdition, and that my bit-part in this role of citizenry would give me unparalleled insight into the functioning of the aforementioned Prime Evil. Secure the perimeter, head straight for the jugular. Alas, the guest spots dried up, but you know what I mean, right? That little conniving cunt got his, our ambivalence diluted any sense of Furor Justitae we had thus far managed to wring out of such vampiric morality, and now we chill in orbit and play Spot the Spin-off just to get through the frontispiece.

Look, the idea that montage was in any sense a contribution to a poetics of radical economy as the merely opening credit sequence makes your best expressions promo for a horny fess-up, the facial muscles roll D12 to determine the shareholder’s delight. You needn’t feel threatened by day if your heart secretes the bliss of the undead, the immortal youth of language at a summer camp in Maryland. Our polis was defined in darkest shadow, through the scree of necessary love, the lone voice-over spiralling joylessly across the firmament, O resplendent chronicle! In both human life and inanimate Orbs of Thesulah the one presence of the Buffyverse felt & seen! It’s like that with us Nicky, it’s the terrible burden we bear as progenitors of lost innocence, the onward rush of teenage fatalism draining quicker than the blood from Giles’ ruptured scrotum in the Season 9 finale.

Bollocks to that. Although I suspect that’s exactly the kind of sentiment that’s gotten you stuck up in Alphaville over there. I know you don’t need me to be the raw, reviling demi-god you always looked up to on set, I know you’re past that, and tbh when I found out James was getting hitched to that Slayer from Ohio I realised how gravely I’d misled the lad, taking him out for week-long benders filled with knock-off Campari and House of the Dead IV, when what I should’ve been doing was teaching you how to love yourself. I’m sure those patronising cunts in Malibu are telling you the same thing, but listen to this, Nicky: it is the same thing, and precisely therein lies the fucking Queller Demon masquerading around campus channelling the shade of John "Planetary Pissflaps" Donne, OK? Block them out. Yes, we are the song of the stars, and I carry my feet with Adam’s errant backbone slung to my side, being entirely there for myself and my co-stars from the thin end of the vas deferens right through to our collective epididymis. I swear Nicky, the moment you kicked in your neighbour’s door to get your mutt back the whole constellation began to topple like a disco suffering troll-damage. Can you send me the name of your sponsor so I can make sure he’s not some wide-boy in it for the action figures? I’ve got your back, comrade, remember that.

Remember also that the traitor’s reticence is his final trump, despite the lovely recourse to a just and hopeful torture - the death of one is forelock to the life we dream would yet be parted. When you’re out we’ll get back on the coke and chilli sauce and stay the fuck away from anyone who doesn’t believe in cultivating dianetical consciousness. Enclosed are some aesthetic-resistant earplugs and a pint of my own recalcitrant sperm; use them wisely, child, and know that I’m thinking of you always, especially at night.

In friendship and i’faith,

Tony. x x

Underground

O Fucker-Killer, Midnight Thriller,
Dictator in buffalo furs,
In your platinum room, with a platinum blonde,
With a pussy which whines when it purrs.

O Fucker-Upper, Double-D Cupper,
With snakes wrapped around all your necks,
With your morphine laugh, guillotine-and-a-half,
And your Amazon made out of sex.

O Spider in Drag in a brown paper bag,
In your limousine twenty miles low,
You spilled out your seed with your single good deed,
And her orgasm called out, Hello.

I'm a Killing Machine, if you know what I mean,
Please permit me to highlight your error:
Just get down on your knees while I speak in Chinese,
And I'll show you the new War on Terror.

By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
To light up a packet of crack,
As we sang to the Lord and we went overboard,
On our death-ship of Love to Iraq.

O Chief of Police, O the President's Niece,
Do you mind if I rig the election?
Go ahead but drop dead if you dip in the red,
I need cash to maintain my erection.

O American Night, O Hysterical Knight,
You chew ice while youre breaking a jaw
—But thats breaking the law—No, thats making the law,
In this town we sip lungs through a straw.

the coordinates are the reading

Just to let y'all know I will be reading with the ESTEEMED Mr. Josh Stanley & others, w/(at least more than) performance from the EXCEPTIONAL Jonny Liron, all happening this Saturday 5th at the Sit Room in 7 Sisters (check link for directions and line-up up-up updates). This will be the first time I've read since the last time I read. There will be no free wine. The co-ordinates are as follows:

Title: Manifesting on a Sunny Wednesday Afternoon, or, Hey come back here with my monk!

Prologue: The subject is fundamentally jealous of the contemporary. That's the starting point from which the pivot kind of flows down into the range of the viable. Temporally speaking, natch. Nay, not for nothing the fluxus fluxeth.

[...] - some meat-space exhortations, followed by the back-up plan: I've got two swords in one scabbard / They cost me deep in my purse / And you shall have the bestest one / And I shall have the worst - [...]

Wrap-up: Some of us will make it; some will end up naming their first-born "Zephyr".