EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Twenty-Six. I am publishing this issue a couple of months before April to catch up for lost time. Also, I must admit, to get my penny-farthing’s worth in about the election of Trump before the topic has begun to go stale.
Someone (I can’t recall who) once came up with the maxim that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Well, history definitely appears to be repeating itself now, though whether this repetition will bear the above maxim out or not still remains to be seen.
We seem to have landed slap bang back in the Thirties. The present crisis began in a similar way to that of the Thirties with the financial crash in 2008, whose reverberations are still being felt and, like in the Thirties, it is culminating in very anomalous forms of political expression, which do not bode well for the future. There is no doubt in my mind that the abnormal economic situation lies of the root of the abnormal political one. The job of politics is primarily to manage things in the face of problems created on a deeper economic level. When a society is beset by abnormal economic conditions, managing things means resorting to abnormal political expedients to contain the fallout. Of course, the political response is always somewhat belated, but that it is beginning to emerge seems rather obvious to me. The idea that the old political solutions can be relied upon now seems to be rather quixotic. In the Thirties, the political ‘saviours’ of the hour took the form of Hitler and Mussolini. Now they appear in the form of people like Donald Trump – and Nigel Farage in Britain – to name only two. (In fact, there are a whole host of these freaks, including Erdogan in Turkey.) Of course, that both Trump and Farage are buffoons might be a sign that it will all end up as farce rather than tragedy, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Mussolini, after all, was also a buffoon and Hitler was like someone out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. It is quite possible that Trump will manoeuvre things in such a way – much like Erdogan has done in Turkey and Hitler did in the Thirties - that he will, by creating his own ‘Reichstag Fire’ moment, exploit opportunities to give himself vastly more powers. You don’t think it’s possible in a democracy? What was 9/11 but George W Bush’s very own ‘Reichstag Fire’ moment, which, even if it wasn’t orchestrated by the US establishment, certainly fell into its lap like a gift from the gods?
It is interesting to see the way ‘normal’ people often comport themselves in such situations, the strategies they develop to maintain their day to day equilibrium in the face of such potential calamities, the states of denial that keep them going and maintain them through such anomalous circumstances. Faith in leaders like Trump, who promise to ‘make America great again’ or events like Brexit, which in a similar way is supposed to make Britain ‘great again’, has now become a big part of the political landscape. What is also interesting is what crawls out of the woodwork as a result. So many people now airing their hatreds for this or that group in society. Such people were always there, of course, but now they seem to have been given a licence, a new kind of legitimacy. And this phenomenon seems to be occurring wherever you look. It will probably get worse before it gets better and it will only get better if people resist.
There is one big difference, however, between the USA now and Germany in the Thirties. Germany had just been through hell as a result of the Versailles Treaty, hyper-inflation in the Twenties and huge poverty and unemployment in the early Thirties. The German ruling-class would undoubtedly have welcomed a 'strong man' like Hitler, if he could rein followers like Rohm in, who took the 'socialist' part of National Socialist a little too seriously. Hence "The Night Of The Long Knives". The ruling-class in the US seems to be much more divided over Trump and it is quite possible that with mounting pressure from below cracks may appear that could really open things up. All I will say about that is that my fingers are crossed. It doesn't do to become too complacent.
So what can poets do in the face of such madness? Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen. Perhaps, but then again, nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say. Critics and poets of the Movement in the early Fifties, like Donald Davie, came up with the rather strange notion that poets like Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Rilke and Dylan Thomas were somehow responsible for the rise of Fascism and Nazism and the Second World War and all we have to do is be good little rationalists writing ‘responsible’ poetry and it will never happen again. Well, we’ve been good little rationalists, and written our ‘responsible’ poetry and it doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect, does it? Certainly, it is time to take stock, but I suspect that we need to take more risks, rather than less, if history is to repeat itself as farce rather than tragedy this time around.
And on that note, I will leave you to enjoy the rest of this issue.
N.B. Please note that all prose works in future - apart from those that fall under the category of poetry - i.e., prose-poems - will simply be labelled "Prose", as sometimes I have difficulty in actually giving labels to things or determining their 'genre'.
____________________________________________________
QUOTE (From The Graun) – Pankaj Mishra
"The largely Anglo-American intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos – and so we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” – “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”
Someone (I can’t recall who) once came up with the maxim that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Well, history definitely appears to be repeating itself now, though whether this repetition will bear the above maxim out or not still remains to be seen.
We seem to have landed slap bang back in the Thirties. The present crisis began in a similar way to that of the Thirties with the financial crash in 2008, whose reverberations are still being felt and, like in the Thirties, it is culminating in very anomalous forms of political expression, which do not bode well for the future. There is no doubt in my mind that the abnormal economic situation lies of the root of the abnormal political one. The job of politics is primarily to manage things in the face of problems created on a deeper economic level. When a society is beset by abnormal economic conditions, managing things means resorting to abnormal political expedients to contain the fallout. Of course, the political response is always somewhat belated, but that it is beginning to emerge seems rather obvious to me. The idea that the old political solutions can be relied upon now seems to be rather quixotic. In the Thirties, the political ‘saviours’ of the hour took the form of Hitler and Mussolini. Now they appear in the form of people like Donald Trump – and Nigel Farage in Britain – to name only two. (In fact, there are a whole host of these freaks, including Erdogan in Turkey.) Of course, that both Trump and Farage are buffoons might be a sign that it will all end up as farce rather than tragedy, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Mussolini, after all, was also a buffoon and Hitler was like someone out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. It is quite possible that Trump will manoeuvre things in such a way – much like Erdogan has done in Turkey and Hitler did in the Thirties - that he will, by creating his own ‘Reichstag Fire’ moment, exploit opportunities to give himself vastly more powers. You don’t think it’s possible in a democracy? What was 9/11 but George W Bush’s very own ‘Reichstag Fire’ moment, which, even if it wasn’t orchestrated by the US establishment, certainly fell into its lap like a gift from the gods?
It is interesting to see the way ‘normal’ people often comport themselves in such situations, the strategies they develop to maintain their day to day equilibrium in the face of such potential calamities, the states of denial that keep them going and maintain them through such anomalous circumstances. Faith in leaders like Trump, who promise to ‘make America great again’ or events like Brexit, which in a similar way is supposed to make Britain ‘great again’, has now become a big part of the political landscape. What is also interesting is what crawls out of the woodwork as a result. So many people now airing their hatreds for this or that group in society. Such people were always there, of course, but now they seem to have been given a licence, a new kind of legitimacy. And this phenomenon seems to be occurring wherever you look. It will probably get worse before it gets better and it will only get better if people resist.
There is one big difference, however, between the USA now and Germany in the Thirties. Germany had just been through hell as a result of the Versailles Treaty, hyper-inflation in the Twenties and huge poverty and unemployment in the early Thirties. The German ruling-class would undoubtedly have welcomed a 'strong man' like Hitler, if he could rein followers like Rohm in, who took the 'socialist' part of National Socialist a little too seriously. Hence "The Night Of The Long Knives". The ruling-class in the US seems to be much more divided over Trump and it is quite possible that with mounting pressure from below cracks may appear that could really open things up. All I will say about that is that my fingers are crossed. It doesn't do to become too complacent.
So what can poets do in the face of such madness? Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen. Perhaps, but then again, nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say. Critics and poets of the Movement in the early Fifties, like Donald Davie, came up with the rather strange notion that poets like Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Rilke and Dylan Thomas were somehow responsible for the rise of Fascism and Nazism and the Second World War and all we have to do is be good little rationalists writing ‘responsible’ poetry and it will never happen again. Well, we’ve been good little rationalists, and written our ‘responsible’ poetry and it doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect, does it? Certainly, it is time to take stock, but I suspect that we need to take more risks, rather than less, if history is to repeat itself as farce rather than tragedy this time around.
And on that note, I will leave you to enjoy the rest of this issue.
N.B. Please note that all prose works in future - apart from those that fall under the category of poetry - i.e., prose-poems - will simply be labelled "Prose", as sometimes I have difficulty in actually giving labels to things or determining their 'genre'.
____________________________________________________
QUOTE (From The Graun) – Pankaj Mishra
"The largely Anglo-American intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos – and so we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” – “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”
CONTENTS
POEMS - Colin Honnor
PROSE - Edward Mycue
PROSE (6 Stories) - George Held
POEMS - Louise Landes Levi
QUOTE - Jean Genet
POEM - Ted Jackson
POEMS - Robert Verdon
POEM - Vera Linder
(in dual translation - English and Italian)
PROSE - Richard Livermore
QUOTE - Joseph Chiari
POEM - Rita Degli Esposti
REVIEW - Richard Livermore
NOT-QUITE PROSE POEM-MEMOIRS - bart plantenga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDNKjfwIt_E
POEMS - Colin Honnor
Klee
He snakes towards the light that is his feast
in primaries of red yellow and blue
with pencil and burnt stick he mahles the white
sheet of his outer lens as inner kingdoms
rise and fall, become republics of his sense
until their pigment anarchies leach out
in bristly swags and tachiste blotch of black
not like a blade or eye reflecting globe
in bled dissections of each form to bones
writing their humour silent on the page
the zoo and acquarium of floating thought
as the stones ring with eagle and kestrel
he is inspired by angle and square
the clear constructions of light and air
that all forms are in nature
so that he is listening for a thought
to give an insight denied to other men:
you had thought the angels of the plants
spread their green wings,
the Tiergarten animals’ silent anguished gestures.
Fotheringhay
Cold Neme, cold Neme between willow banks
Rosemary, thyme, lungwort, ladies' fern
this ash, this elm, the carpet of may flowers
The flowers of the forest crushed underfoot
where is the stone keep and the high tower?
contraries of texts smoulder to blaze, the eye
that had read forgot its contingent lure.
Dove-coloured clouds over the velvet sable
stones carved with panther, hind and lion
while the eye gazes where lawns cloak the mound
The flowers of the forest are scythed by Spring
Where is the dark wall and the hushed crowd?
I do not know and neither do you, stranger
if your thoughts could conjure the morning group
a sable queen stripped to her red wound
you will be disenfranchised with the rest
hearing the grace notes played by wind in wires.
PROSE & POEM - Edward Mycue
WRITING
I. I’m not a professor, nor an antifessor.
II. A California poet Robinson Jeffers, ejected from tribe by critics led by Yvor Winters of Stanford University, warned against creature-specificity wherewith humans are placed way up & over the top of the pecking order.
III. Howard Zinn who died recently said “…human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice,courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. San Francisco poet/ philosopher/ teacher Lawrence Fixel who died several years ago might well have added: “But we know that already.”
IV. Fixel may have also added here: “Beyond the Name and Number/ We forget and we remember.” It’s he, junior companion in the depression era WPA writers’ project of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, student of A.R.“Archie”Rosen and Isidore Schneider, who came up with what I call FIXEL’S LAW for poets/ writers: 4 simple injunctions that are 1. begin where you are; 2. learn from the material; 3.believe in the process; 4.become your own reader.
V. I will here also invoke the name Paul Valery, a French Poet/ philosopher/ teacher who’s ART OF POETRY says in “A Poet’s Notebook” “….the habit of long labor at poetry has accustomed me to consider all speech and all writing as work in progress that can nearly always be taken up again and altered; and I consider work itself as having its own value, generally much superior to the product….no doubt the product is the thing that lasts and has, or should have, a meaning of itself and an in-dependent existence; but the acts from which it proceeds , in so far as they react on their author, form within another person more skillful and more in possession of his domain of memory….a work is never necessarily finished, for he who made it is never complete, and the power and agility he has drawn from it confer on him just the power to improve it….he draws from it what is needed to efface and remake it. this is how a free artist, at least, should regard things. And ends by considering as satisfactory only those works that have taught him something more….”
VI. western Americans josephine miles, ann stanford, richard hugo, theodore roethke were supremely fine poets, wonderful critical writers, gifted teachers. lawrence fixel, stanley burnshaw and northrup frye in my experience were great thinkers who understood poetry, and fixel and burnshaw wrote it well. ee cummings, extraordinary poet, was also a painter and novelist, as was d. h. lawrence who as well as exquisite poems wrote stories, criticism. i ended selling pencils & books, was a gardener & oddjobsman , few years a teacher, and worked 6 years for US dept of health education and welfare.many times, i thought and many times i just blurted or bled onto paper. some fine poets represented their times while here i maundered morning into noon. seriously a poet from my noon in my 20′s until now my moonrising my vocation came to me and to which i surrendered willingly. never in early days believing i could be an elevated poet, but i have been a worker poet for many gifts may be small ones, yet be real.living in a time and place where it has been possible, in the end i have written as i breathe, and lucky to do both.
VII. poetry is an odd, restricting term. marianne moore (“i too detest it…but find in it ….”) and william carolos williams (“but men die every day for want of what is found there….”)–or something like that. but the forms and the meter and syllables and the cadence and the syncopation and the lineation are ball-breakers. i don’t want to censor myself when i am writing with the corset of the word “poetry”. just start writing. later you may discover a seed there and if not then you have some compost for some other seeds. time to destroy/ to discover said lawrence fixel in a long poem of his of that title published by panjandrum press in san francisco in 1972.
VIII. i hate poetry that restricts you. but in it miss marianne moore said there is a place for the genuine. and i love what is genuine. it’s worth pursuing.
i don’t feel sincere, nor insincere. one grows into technique and into one’s own vocabulary. and it’s a good idea to play/ really PLAY/ with the forms. in the early 1970′s william dickey and i were in the same group who met monthly sometimes at his place. bill was a forms & technique genius, the best i have ever known and it didn’t hurt his poetry. he’d say: ed, you know what you have here is…with a twitch here or a tweak there…a rondo…a villanelle…..and you can work it that way if you want…or not, he’d add. sometimes it helped the poem to do so. i liked having my choice about final shaping, but i never liked writing to a form. my way is not that. (of course, another person may do or feel differently.) things got up my nose. but that made my path..i went to n.r.crozier technical high school in dallas, texas beginning 1951 and had this (many thought ‘severe’) woodshop teacher mr. butler who wanted us not to get hurt with the tools, some of them quite dangerous –the electric planer, the table saws, and so on–: he was a magnificent teacher and quite nice to me. not once did i get that big paddle that was used judiciously and forcefully and it seems not infrequently. he must have been in his 40′s then and loved differences in woods and form as a stimulus to invention.
i keep banging out stuff with no publication plans and don’t think of them as ‘privishings’ (as lawrence fixel spoke of work assigned to the drawer vs publishing work that you consciously decide to send out).
“there” is where they come from: ‘there’, for the inside to outside and i don’t pay attention to the shape the outside becomes. of course, i may change it, reshape it by mixed arrangements. operating not simply without shame or style but from impulse (pulse) because i feel the time is a worn thread. a dumpster of memory and idea that is only phenomenologically momentarily necessary. if the moment passed without proceeding and how to make poetry work fun. if fun is the right word here and is it poetry if it isn’t fun in the making no matter how serious the content? well maybe, but i’d have to fiddle with the ‘fun’ concept. “making” is the operative word really: and the pleasure or satisfaction of making something well and the thrill of the doing in the making. i feel so limited here. sand tray therapy and the use of masks then as well about the-GIVE-and TAKE-congress-of-relations.
here’s my poem:
Swallow
There is a stranger within me,
an intruder who is not me
and is a part of me.
We co-exist and yet
it’s the other who habitates
as I exist
who swallows and I drink
who’ll die when I die,
or so I think
© Copyright EDWARD MYCUE San Francisco tel 415 387-2471
apt 320, 3595 Geary Blvd, San Francisco 94118 CA
I. I’m not a professor, nor an antifessor.
II. A California poet Robinson Jeffers, ejected from tribe by critics led by Yvor Winters of Stanford University, warned against creature-specificity wherewith humans are placed way up & over the top of the pecking order.
III. Howard Zinn who died recently said “…human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice,courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. San Francisco poet/ philosopher/ teacher Lawrence Fixel who died several years ago might well have added: “But we know that already.”
IV. Fixel may have also added here: “Beyond the Name and Number/ We forget and we remember.” It’s he, junior companion in the depression era WPA writers’ project of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, student of A.R.“Archie”Rosen and Isidore Schneider, who came up with what I call FIXEL’S LAW for poets/ writers: 4 simple injunctions that are 1. begin where you are; 2. learn from the material; 3.believe in the process; 4.become your own reader.
V. I will here also invoke the name Paul Valery, a French Poet/ philosopher/ teacher who’s ART OF POETRY says in “A Poet’s Notebook” “….the habit of long labor at poetry has accustomed me to consider all speech and all writing as work in progress that can nearly always be taken up again and altered; and I consider work itself as having its own value, generally much superior to the product….no doubt the product is the thing that lasts and has, or should have, a meaning of itself and an in-dependent existence; but the acts from which it proceeds , in so far as they react on their author, form within another person more skillful and more in possession of his domain of memory….a work is never necessarily finished, for he who made it is never complete, and the power and agility he has drawn from it confer on him just the power to improve it….he draws from it what is needed to efface and remake it. this is how a free artist, at least, should regard things. And ends by considering as satisfactory only those works that have taught him something more….”
VI. western Americans josephine miles, ann stanford, richard hugo, theodore roethke were supremely fine poets, wonderful critical writers, gifted teachers. lawrence fixel, stanley burnshaw and northrup frye in my experience were great thinkers who understood poetry, and fixel and burnshaw wrote it well. ee cummings, extraordinary poet, was also a painter and novelist, as was d. h. lawrence who as well as exquisite poems wrote stories, criticism. i ended selling pencils & books, was a gardener & oddjobsman , few years a teacher, and worked 6 years for US dept of health education and welfare.many times, i thought and many times i just blurted or bled onto paper. some fine poets represented their times while here i maundered morning into noon. seriously a poet from my noon in my 20′s until now my moonrising my vocation came to me and to which i surrendered willingly. never in early days believing i could be an elevated poet, but i have been a worker poet for many gifts may be small ones, yet be real.living in a time and place where it has been possible, in the end i have written as i breathe, and lucky to do both.
VII. poetry is an odd, restricting term. marianne moore (“i too detest it…but find in it ….”) and william carolos williams (“but men die every day for want of what is found there….”)–or something like that. but the forms and the meter and syllables and the cadence and the syncopation and the lineation are ball-breakers. i don’t want to censor myself when i am writing with the corset of the word “poetry”. just start writing. later you may discover a seed there and if not then you have some compost for some other seeds. time to destroy/ to discover said lawrence fixel in a long poem of his of that title published by panjandrum press in san francisco in 1972.
VIII. i hate poetry that restricts you. but in it miss marianne moore said there is a place for the genuine. and i love what is genuine. it’s worth pursuing.
i don’t feel sincere, nor insincere. one grows into technique and into one’s own vocabulary. and it’s a good idea to play/ really PLAY/ with the forms. in the early 1970′s william dickey and i were in the same group who met monthly sometimes at his place. bill was a forms & technique genius, the best i have ever known and it didn’t hurt his poetry. he’d say: ed, you know what you have here is…with a twitch here or a tweak there…a rondo…a villanelle…..and you can work it that way if you want…or not, he’d add. sometimes it helped the poem to do so. i liked having my choice about final shaping, but i never liked writing to a form. my way is not that. (of course, another person may do or feel differently.) things got up my nose. but that made my path..i went to n.r.crozier technical high school in dallas, texas beginning 1951 and had this (many thought ‘severe’) woodshop teacher mr. butler who wanted us not to get hurt with the tools, some of them quite dangerous –the electric planer, the table saws, and so on–: he was a magnificent teacher and quite nice to me. not once did i get that big paddle that was used judiciously and forcefully and it seems not infrequently. he must have been in his 40′s then and loved differences in woods and form as a stimulus to invention.
i keep banging out stuff with no publication plans and don’t think of them as ‘privishings’ (as lawrence fixel spoke of work assigned to the drawer vs publishing work that you consciously decide to send out).
“there” is where they come from: ‘there’, for the inside to outside and i don’t pay attention to the shape the outside becomes. of course, i may change it, reshape it by mixed arrangements. operating not simply without shame or style but from impulse (pulse) because i feel the time is a worn thread. a dumpster of memory and idea that is only phenomenologically momentarily necessary. if the moment passed without proceeding and how to make poetry work fun. if fun is the right word here and is it poetry if it isn’t fun in the making no matter how serious the content? well maybe, but i’d have to fiddle with the ‘fun’ concept. “making” is the operative word really: and the pleasure or satisfaction of making something well and the thrill of the doing in the making. i feel so limited here. sand tray therapy and the use of masks then as well about the-GIVE-and TAKE-congress-of-relations.
here’s my poem:
Swallow
There is a stranger within me,
an intruder who is not me
and is a part of me.
We co-exist and yet
it’s the other who habitates
as I exist
who swallows and I drink
who’ll die when I die,
or so I think
© Copyright EDWARD MYCUE San Francisco tel 415 387-2471
apt 320, 3595 Geary Blvd, San Francisco 94118 CA
PROSE - George Held
Six 6-word Stories
.38 pressed to his temple. Curtains.
Taking potshots at Cheerios. Cereal killer.
Diagnosed with ADHD, dosed with Ritalin.
The king farted. The page departed.
Unto them a child is born.
Warning! Reading this may cause paralysis.
.38 pressed to his temple. Curtains.
Taking potshots at Cheerios. Cereal killer.
Diagnosed with ADHD, dosed with Ritalin.
The king farted. The page departed.
Unto them a child is born.
Warning! Reading this may cause paralysis.
POEMS - Louise Landes Levi
Island of genocide
missing yr. mother/ son - mother light,
the
forest is deep, the tree is yr.
shelter, turning in
space, & be-
yond
if
he went there, we
,
we can not know,
but we know
he
went
to
Cleveland - the
press apologetic, we writhe in the
vein, the vine
falls
upon
us,
These poems are occurring,
whether I like it or not, blanket of
dream, the responsibility, when
the radiance blinds you
so that you
SEE
*
The
crow &
I follow the
dance
class.
,
IN ROUND, BIRD
OF NIGHT, SILENCE
BIRD OF DAY, DEATH IS
NOT, UNFOUND,
I , LIVING
DEATH,
IT
IS
NOW
The
crow &
I follow the
dance
class.
,
IN ROUND, BIRD
OF NIGHT, SILENCE
BIRD OF DAY, DEATH IS
NOT, UNFOUND,
I , LIVING
DEATH,
IT
IS
NOW
QUOTE - Jean Genet
"What is still called order, but is really physical and spiritual exhaustion, comes into existence of its own accord when what is rightly called mediocrity is in the ascendant."
POEM - Ted Jackson
Why No One Takes America Serious
In a burlesque show, the new, acting Emmy award (the Ken and Barbie doll) in a lead role goes to D. T. who plays a loud, self satisfied, uninformed antagonist, caricature of a politician
Who insults people and aggravates reality and excites his followers who think or don’t care if he tells the facts, they like his blustering personality and whirling dervish style.
The shallowness of his business dealings and personal life are of particular interest to the magazine minded. He enriches himself by taking advantage of others, paying himself his investors money while not paying his workers and opening and bankrupting his businesses to avoid taxes, his faithful find this clever and exciting and expect to learn and benefit financially from this one day. It’s true because he says it is!
The lack of depth in his personal life is embodied in his culturally vacant nutritious free TV show “trailer park credit card “ where he Lords over the less fortunate.
Kim Kay. is his love child with an un-documented housekeeper, her husband (a mini D.T. in the loud, lack of knowledge department, a shoe salesman always yelling how talented and smart he is) is rumored to be kissing with D.T.’s daughter, a talking mannequin.
While her frozen faced stepmother who was married to a transsexual
Is carrying on an affair with his wife, A European beauty who smiles with closed eyes and whose interests are being quiet and looking good.
The dumbing down of America.
It’s all good parody.
Chewing on this product produces cavities.
Your dentist loves you.
In a burlesque show, the new, acting Emmy award (the Ken and Barbie doll) in a lead role goes to D. T. who plays a loud, self satisfied, uninformed antagonist, caricature of a politician
Who insults people and aggravates reality and excites his followers who think or don’t care if he tells the facts, they like his blustering personality and whirling dervish style.
The shallowness of his business dealings and personal life are of particular interest to the magazine minded. He enriches himself by taking advantage of others, paying himself his investors money while not paying his workers and opening and bankrupting his businesses to avoid taxes, his faithful find this clever and exciting and expect to learn and benefit financially from this one day. It’s true because he says it is!
The lack of depth in his personal life is embodied in his culturally vacant nutritious free TV show “trailer park credit card “ where he Lords over the less fortunate.
Kim Kay. is his love child with an un-documented housekeeper, her husband (a mini D.T. in the loud, lack of knowledge department, a shoe salesman always yelling how talented and smart he is) is rumored to be kissing with D.T.’s daughter, a talking mannequin.
While her frozen faced stepmother who was married to a transsexual
Is carrying on an affair with his wife, A European beauty who smiles with closed eyes and whose interests are being quiet and looking good.
The dumbing down of America.
It’s all good parody.
Chewing on this product produces cavities.
Your dentist loves you.
POEMS - Robert Verdon
Spider
spider
reweaves
the world
in net and whorl,
web coruscating
from
twig to twig
to twig to twig
she
soars without wings,
languishes
in harsh isolation cells
under stairs and in niches
behind ever-closed doors
spider
whips a cosmic top,
warped by terror
(she eats her mate)
and keeps the flies down …
spider
when not gassed like the fly
topples giants
spider
has more children
than the crone in the shoe
but knows what to do,
and when to die
her web
wanders
the aeons,
kite
of the coeval wind,
filling space
otherwise wasted.
*****
The Empty Café
Pepperpots, no salt,
Serviettes with a lion crest,
The gleam of a teaspoon
On red gingham
vinyl
No one in sight
But clean cups
Set out for espresso,
Vitreous and empty
No face behind
The polished counter
But the door
Swings in a noon breeze
Only the sun
Comes to wait
At the table.
*****
Radio Propaganda
*Don’t trust anyone over thirty!*
joked the disc jockey,
probably past it himself, but
still, I went cold as a discarded intestine,
twenty-two years after the War
(though innocent of Rwanda),
having just turned
thirteen.
POEMS - Vera Linder
Translated from the Italian (Dual Translation)
Bodega of concepts
At the third crossing of pages
turn left
take the first exit
at the "o"'s roundabout
pass the curves
of the third “s”
avoid the word "compromise"
turn around
"conversion"
take the tunnel
dividing the "i"
from its dot.
Then, destination
a pale desert
pearly sand
silence
lack of nitrogen,
oxygen,
argon.
A little wooden cottage
in old moss-green
becomes pupil
turning the desert into
sclera.
It is a bodega
the bodega of concepts.
It has no doors
but never-ending shelves.
No one
is behind the counter
but crowds of lifeless hands
untied from bodies
offer jars
of concepts.
It has no owner
but voices
of unknown origins,
they show
the latest products and
the thoughts back in fashion.
Concepts rest
in the jars
a violet sun
tickles them
lights playing
on the wall.
Then,
a reader.
The non-existent door
creaks
its shadow
darkens the lights
He looks in the eyes
the voices
asks, without words
for an emptiness.
"A pitagoric emptiness?
the sky's breathe?
An emptiness to fear?
the denial of existence?
A romantic emptiness?
the lack of someone?
An etymological emptiness?
The vacuum, complete absence
of any matter?
A scientific emptiness?
The battle-field
of couples of virtual particles?
they rise and fall
in a never-ending duel.
A philosophical emptiness?
Talking about the emptiness itself
denies it by filling it with something.
A platonic emptiness?
Our soul, a perforated vase
perennialy unsatisfied?".
“Any emptiness will do.”
La bottega dei concetti
Al terzo incrocio di pagina
girate a sinistra
imboccate la prima uscita
alla rotonda della “o”
superate le curve
della terza “s”
evitate la parola
“compromesso”
girate intorno alla
“conversione”
entrate nel tunnel
che divide la “i”
dal suo puntino.
poi, la destinazione
un deserto pallido
sabbia perlacea
silenzio
assenza di azoto,
ossigeno,
argon.
una casupola di legno
verde marcio antico
diventa pupilla
rende il deserto
sclera.
è una bottega
la bottega dei concetti.
Non ha porte
ha scaffali infiniti.
Non ha nessuno
dietro al bancone
ma schiere di mani esangui
slegate dai corpi,
porgono barattoli
di concetti.
Non ha proprietari
ma voci
di ignota provenienza,
illustrano
ultime novità e
pensieri tornati di moda.
i concetti riposano
in attesa
un sole viola
li solletica
giochi di luce
sui muri.
poi
un lettore
la porta che non c’è
scricchiola
la sua ombra
oscura i giochi
guarda negli occhi
le voci
chiede, senza parole
di ricevere del vuoto.
“un vuoto pitagorico?
quello in cui il cielo respira?
un vuoto da temere?
la negazione dell’esistenza?
un vuoto romantico?
l’assenza di qualcuno?
un vuoto etimologico?
il vacuum, mancanza assoluta
di qualsiasi materia?
un vuoto scientifico?
il campo di battaglia di
coppie di particelle virtuali?
nascono e si distruggono
in un duello infinito.
un vuoto filosofico?
il parlare di vuoto stesso
che lo nega riempendolo di qualcosa?
un vuoto platonico?
la nostra anima, un vaso bucato
perennemente insoddisfatto?”
“Mi dia pure
un vuoto qualunque.”
At the third crossing of pages
turn left
take the first exit
at the "o"'s roundabout
pass the curves
of the third “s”
avoid the word "compromise"
turn around
"conversion"
take the tunnel
dividing the "i"
from its dot.
Then, destination
a pale desert
pearly sand
silence
lack of nitrogen,
oxygen,
argon.
A little wooden cottage
in old moss-green
becomes pupil
turning the desert into
sclera.
It is a bodega
the bodega of concepts.
It has no doors
but never-ending shelves.
No one
is behind the counter
but crowds of lifeless hands
untied from bodies
offer jars
of concepts.
It has no owner
but voices
of unknown origins,
they show
the latest products and
the thoughts back in fashion.
Concepts rest
in the jars
a violet sun
tickles them
lights playing
on the wall.
Then,
a reader.
The non-existent door
creaks
its shadow
darkens the lights
He looks in the eyes
the voices
asks, without words
for an emptiness.
"A pitagoric emptiness?
the sky's breathe?
An emptiness to fear?
the denial of existence?
A romantic emptiness?
the lack of someone?
An etymological emptiness?
The vacuum, complete absence
of any matter?
A scientific emptiness?
The battle-field
of couples of virtual particles?
they rise and fall
in a never-ending duel.
A philosophical emptiness?
Talking about the emptiness itself
denies it by filling it with something.
A platonic emptiness?
Our soul, a perforated vase
perennialy unsatisfied?".
“Any emptiness will do.”
La bottega dei concetti
Al terzo incrocio di pagina
girate a sinistra
imboccate la prima uscita
alla rotonda della “o”
superate le curve
della terza “s”
evitate la parola
“compromesso”
girate intorno alla
“conversione”
entrate nel tunnel
che divide la “i”
dal suo puntino.
poi, la destinazione
un deserto pallido
sabbia perlacea
silenzio
assenza di azoto,
ossigeno,
argon.
una casupola di legno
verde marcio antico
diventa pupilla
rende il deserto
sclera.
è una bottega
la bottega dei concetti.
Non ha porte
ha scaffali infiniti.
Non ha nessuno
dietro al bancone
ma schiere di mani esangui
slegate dai corpi,
porgono barattoli
di concetti.
Non ha proprietari
ma voci
di ignota provenienza,
illustrano
ultime novità e
pensieri tornati di moda.
i concetti riposano
in attesa
un sole viola
li solletica
giochi di luce
sui muri.
poi
un lettore
la porta che non c’è
scricchiola
la sua ombra
oscura i giochi
guarda negli occhi
le voci
chiede, senza parole
di ricevere del vuoto.
“un vuoto pitagorico?
quello in cui il cielo respira?
un vuoto da temere?
la negazione dell’esistenza?
un vuoto romantico?
l’assenza di qualcuno?
un vuoto etimologico?
il vacuum, mancanza assoluta
di qualsiasi materia?
un vuoto scientifico?
il campo di battaglia di
coppie di particelle virtuali?
nascono e si distruggono
in un duello infinito.
un vuoto filosofico?
il parlare di vuoto stesso
che lo nega riempendolo di qualcosa?
un vuoto platonico?
la nostra anima, un vaso bucato
perennemente insoddisfatto?”
“Mi dia pure
un vuoto qualunque.”
PROSE - Richard Livermore
THE DEMOCRATIC VOICE
NB - The following essay is well over 10 - perhaps closer to 15 - years old. It was entered in an essay competition organised by the magazine Echoes of Gilgamesh , which I believe was based in Glasgow, but cannot be too sure any longer. Anyway, it won 2nd prize and came out in a CD along with all the other prize-winners. (I can’t remember if there was any money involved.) I am republishing it here, because I still think it has something relevant to say.
Democracy. One could call it the condition under which we live. But don’t mention capitalism in this context, still less the state. Both are irrelevant. I go to work 5 days a week and, while I am there, I must do what I’m told. That is my job. If I don’t like it, I can always find another in which the same conditions apply. It can’t be escaped. I am a wage-slave. The slavery I must submit to five days a week is not that of a master with a whip who can take the skin off my back. It is of a much more indirect and diffuse kind. Democracy makes no difference to this. In fact, it only perpetuates it. I for one am heartily sick of a democracy which disguises the indirect and diffuse form of slavery I have to submit to. Not only that, but without questioning the terms of this democracy, we must also submit to its influence on poetry and the rest of our cultural life. Democracy, in my opinion, should be regarded as no more than a means to an end and not as an end in itself? The demos should not be raised up as a god and worshipped in a temple built for that purpose called Parliament and ministered to by a priesthood called Members of Parliament, but rather demoted from its present position in our cultural life, where it now reigns supreme. Personally, I would extend the notion of democracy and limit it at the same time: extend it to cover the day to day running of our lives, at work and in the day to day administration of goods and services in our society. (The one area of our lives, in fact, to which democracy would make a real difference - i.e. the economic - is precisely the area in which it does not exist; I wonder why?) At the same time I would limit it purely to that. That is to say depoliticise it entirely, so that it no longer exerts an unhealthy ideological hold over the rest of our lives.
We have heard a lot over the past decade or so about “The Democratic Voice” in poetry. To me this “democratic” smells suspiciously like the ‘democratic’ of constituencies electing others to ‘represent’ them? Or perhaps it is more a question of certain publishers appointing certain poets who they want to promote - and sell, of course - as representatives of certain ‘communities’. Poetry is one activity to which I believe democracy should never apply. After all, poets are not responsible citizens when they write poetry; they are digging into their own existential marrow, and therefore can have no other credentials to mark them out than the individuality of their particular voices. To advocates of the ‘democratic voice’, however the multicultural ghettoes of black, gay or woman’s poetry and citizenship thereof, are more important than the individuality of poets’ voices. Not that being black, gay or female are unimportant; they are, after all, bound to form aspects of our individuality. But it is our individuality which matters, not our constructed group-identity. Individuality in poetry is an indication that a real shake-down has occurred and the poet has broken away. That indeed is usually why a poet of distinctive individuality is all too often ignored or attacked. That poet is a threat to those who want to control our responses to poetry and channel it down approved channels.
Democracy is like chivalry. In a minor key, chivalry is fine. In a major key, it’s far from fine. In a minor key, it is simply good manners, those little reflex actions of politeness and consideration, which oil the wheels of day to day intercourse and prevent us rubbing each other up the wrong way. In a major key, however, it becomes the institution which Cervantes lampooned in the person of his tragi-comic hero, Don Quixote. Democracy in a major key is embodied in the persons of politicians courting the votes of people who they have no other relationship with. This politicisation of democracy has so corrupted the concept itself that we no longer think of it as something applicable to our day to day lives. That, of course, is why less and less people bother to vote. They are cynical about it, and quite rightly so, although they have nothing as yet to put in its place. Not that I find that unusual; its replacement, in my opinion, could only grow out of a revolutionary situation in which circumstances forced people to take matters into their own hands and begin to organize themselves on a collective level, getting rid of politicians and capitalists, bankers and bureaucrats, police-forces and armies to rely simply on themselves and those they delegate to help co-ordinate their own self-directed activities. This, of course, is a far-cry from the ‘democracy’ we presently have, a democracy more in name than in substance.
But democracy does not only have a political dimension; it also has an ideological and therefore a cultural one; so much so, in fact, that it has now invaded nearly every aspect of contemporary cultural life; the democratic imperative to suck up to and court the demos is now almost totally pervasive. In poetry, this means that if poetry is not written in the appropriate voice, it is simply not representative of our times, and so won’t get a look in. The appropriate voice, of course, is democratic. One champion in Britain of the ‘Democratic Voice’ wants above all a poetry which is accessible to the ‘intelligent reader’ - whatever such an abstraction might mean! He raises the banner of the Democratic Inquisition against certain poets who he says are 'obscure', just as earlier inquisitors had raised their own banners against other ‘heretics’ who were seen not to conform. One leading contemporary poet has said that great poetry can no longer be written, because, after all, we are all democrats now. This is what happens when the democratic idea is played in a major key and not restricted to the minor. Democracy in this major key crushes the human spirit. Democracy in a minor key belongs to the give and take of day to day collective decision-making in which everyone is involved and nobody is privileged vis-a-vis anyone else. Its remit is strictly limited, however, because it doesn’t undergo politicisation. For that reason there is no pressure for individuals to think democratically outside these limited spheres. One could write great poetry again, without it offending the ‘spirit of democracy’. One could paint great murals again - for which the only criteria would be aesthetic. And there would be no more need to listen to those who say such works are not democratic.
It is a curious, but quite understandable, fact that so many of the great creative individuals of the 20th Century were anti-democratic and veered to the right. Their fundamental instinct was not wrong I believe, but the horizons of their times meant that - if one rules out Anarchism, which no doubt was thought too ‘pie in the sky’ - they only had three realistic options to choose from, namely, Democracy, Communism or Fascism. I can understand them ruling out Communism, since it violated their class-instincts; so, in effect, that left only two real choices - Democracy and Fascism. Yeats, Pound, Celine, Heidegger and others? Were they just being perverse or naïve? I do not think so. How could they have chosen Democracy, which in its major key crushes the human spirit and its striving towards its greatest potential? Fascism, of course, was not the answer; it renews nothing. In its demand for uniformity, in the way it politicises culture and life along populist lines, it crushes and suffocates the human spirit in exactly the same way that democracy does.
It would, I believe, be instructive to ask what differences exist between the ages of the great modernists and ourselves. The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that we do truly live in a post-modern society, in which democracy is so ubiquitous it saturates everything and is therefore impossible to oppose in the same terms as the great modernists opposed it - i.e., the elite-civilization of the past versus the mass-civilization of the present. They thought it could still be opposed via political means and - to some at least - fascism seemed ideal for the purpose. Nowadays, democracy is so pervasive that to oppose it at all seems not only perverse and eccentric, but also absurd. Yet it is possible to oppose it and to do so paradoxically by encouraging it where, in our society, it does not exist - i.e., in the day to day running of our lives on a practical level. I do not mean that in the higher political sphere democracy should be replaced by something like a dictatorship, because if there was such a thing as a true democracy - a direct and not just a representative democracy like ours - in the day to day running of our lives, neither the state nor capitalism could function. Either such a democracy exists and politics as we know it is abolished or politics as we know it continues and such a democracy remains non-existent. There is no middle way that can preserve both of them. It is either one or the other. A choice still exists, but it is no longer the choice faced by the great modernist poets and thinkers. It is what you might call a post-modernist choice, a choice between two different concepts of democracy.
What would such a direct democracy mean for poets? First of all, you would not have ignorant politicians telling us that there is no difference between Mozart and Andrew Lloyd Weber, as if the two could be placed on the same homogenised continuum. The more ‘democratic’ we get, the more we tend to make such idiotic judgements. Politicians are after as many votes as they can get, and if that means not offending the majority by making distinctions between this kind of thing and that in the realm of culture, then so be it. Such distinctions will not be allowed. Everything, from pinball to Mozart - to use an example of Jeremy Bentham’s - must be placed on the same level and treated as equal. It begins to make one nostalgic for good old elitism, and aristocratic patronage. At least the aristocracy had the freedom to support the arts according to their own individual tastes, rather than for what votes might be in it. As I have said, democracy has a place, but it is not in the cultural or artistic realm of creation, which is primarily the realm of individuation. It has its place only in those spheres which we are forced to enter when we need to enter the collective realm, i.e., for the production, distribution, use and consumption of goods and services which society provides. (I would not leave out of this equation, the need people will have to defend themselves from attack.) This is what you might call the realm of “the administration of things”. It is not an ubiquitous realm; in fact, it is strictly demarcated and limited to what Marx called the “Realm of Necessity”. In “The Realm of Freedom”, which includes the cultural realm, the concept of individuation is absolutely essential, and the sooner we realize that and turn our backs on such notions as “the Democratic Voice” in poetry, the less compromised and corrupted will our poetic culture become.
QUOTE - Joseph Chiari
“There is no greater fallacy than that which consists in thinking of artistic creation as a kind of relay-race with a torch passed from hand to hand throughout the centuries.”
POEM - Rita Degli Esposti
ardent eyes of the poet!
says" I came for this"
thunder lightning deaf mute demon
boxed skies
infraction of rythm
(aspects that slip away from the shopkeepers)
parallel events
God's only toys
for Soyo Benn
(from "Amrita:the taste of honey on razorblade")
REVIEW
In the past five years or so, events in the Middle East seem to have fully borne out the following observation by Blaise Pascal, who it must be said was himself very devout, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” The rise of ISIS – or DAESH as the pejorative local name for ISIS is I believe – has opened the world’s eyes to the existence of a barbarism whose like has not been seen since the unlamented demise of the Nazis in 1945. The world has been shocked by the violence and cruelties employed by these minions of Allah, who have perpetrated their barbarities with extraordinary brutality in the name of religion – and continue to do so. Newspapers, television-screens, computer-consoles and smart-phones, have all relayed the horrors perpetrated by DAESH as if they were hypnotised by the spectacle of its barbarity. And in the spirit of The Spectacle (as understood by Guy Debord) we have been treated to stories, film-clips and other representations of burnings, rapes, forced marriages, head-choppings, mass executions and similar barbarities as if the private feelings of those caught up in these hideous events were of little account beyond the spectacle of the horror itself.
That is why we need to step back from the spectacle presented by the various media and try to get a view of things from within the maelstrom itself, from the various points of view of those who were caught up in it and directly affected by the tragic events that unfolded before them. And what better means could there be of achieving this end than fiction coolly registering and dissecting the horror as it emerges and unfolds. People getting on with their lives, making their plans, suddenly swooped upon by barbarians who are deeply offended at the fact that they were living their lives in their own ways rather than submitting to the yoke of their own alien notion of God.
Gharbi Mustafa’s novel What Comes With The Dust Goes With The Wind tells just such a tale from the point of view of a Yazidi girl who is kidnapped by DAESH, forcibly converted to Islam and dragged off into sexual slavery to be sold to an ageing DAESH commander to whom she is expected to marry and also bear children.
But many stories interweave themselves in Mustapha’s novel. There is not only the story of the above mentioned Yazidi girl, Nazo, who had been planning to marry and elope with Azad, who himself is killed by DAESH, there is also the story of Omed who is in love with Nazo, and that of Soz, who is in love with Omed and to whose love Omed to start with is completely oblivious because he loves Nazo who doesn’t love him. And this lacework of loves requited and unrequited is woven against the background of the horrors perpetrated by DAESH and the heroic Kurdish resistance to DAESH in the besieged city of Kobane.
It is impossible to do full justice here to the plotlines of this intricate novel or to convey anything like the complex humanity that informs the novel on every level. It shows the Kurdish female Yazidi fighters not as the haloed victims they are sometimes portrayed as, but as human beings who are not above the desire for revenge, which they want to inflict on the DAESH soldiers they capture, even to the point of killing the soldiers in pleasure for what they have suffered. The novel even addresses the question – raised by Amnesty International – of ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Kurds, evicting Arab and Turkman villagers whose prior allegiances had been with DAESH. The Kurds are not presented in an idealised light, anymore than the members of DAESH are presented as devils incarnate, completely devoid of any humanity. The novel does not indulge in such black and while caricatures. DAESH are undoubtedly evil, but the novel also raises the question of what has driven them to evil – namely their religious convictions. Indeed, one incident in the novel chillingly – and ironically – deals with the self-justification of one soldier as he is about to execute a group of Yazidi men. “We are not bloodthirsty murderers. We are soldiers of Allah implementing His Almighty Will upon the infidels. We do not kill because we like killing—we kill God’s enemies. This will open the gates of Heaven to us. There is no place for you infidels here in the lands of the Islamic State or any place on Earth. The only place that can embrace you for eternity is Hell. There is no other side. All should be on the side of Allah—but you chose to serve your Satan.” The fanaticism of such a speech is chilling because people of such beliefs can never be reasoned with – especially when they are holding a gun to you head; they can only be fought and ultimately killed.
I am not going to say more about What Comes With The Dust Goes With The Wind, except that Mustafa has written a novel which had to be written, one that deals with the full human dimension of what has been happening in parts of the Middle East. Furthermore, it does so movingly and in ways that engage your sympathies with the characters of his novel, who have all been forced against their wills to enter the hell he describes - and also resist it.
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