Magazine

EDITORIAL

Welcome to Issue Twenty-Seven. Unfortunately, there is nothing in my bible, The Penguin Dictionary Of Symbols, about the number twenty-seven, which is surprising since it is 3 x 9 and both 3 and 9 are important numbers from a symbolic point of view. It is also 3 x 3 x 3, or 3 to the power of 3, and don’t tell me that’s not deeply significant. Ah well, life must go on, whatever happens on the symbolic plane.
            Isn’t the world in a mess? To tell you the truth, I can make nothing of it at all. All I seem to be able to do is cross my fingers and hope for the best, for at the end of the day there are no guarantees. I mean, there’s Trump and his sidekick, Bannon, who seems like everyone’s worst nightmare since Adolf was strutting his stuff on the world-stage and ranting on about his Thousand Year Reich. (There’s also Erdolf, of course – or Merd-olf – but the less said about him the better!) One hopes that Trump will have bitten off more than he can chew and that the US political and legal machinery will bring him to heel, but he may still pull his own Reichstag Fire stunt out of the hat – as Erdolf has done - and then there’ll be no turning back. And even if they do impeach him, we are only likely to get Pence in his place and he’s just as scary. I can only place my hope in the American people resisting these jokers and pulling their own rabbit out of a hat, but that’s not very certain right at the moment. In fact, nothing is even probable at this juncture, which puts paid to the hope of a quantum-mechanical outcome – at least for the time being. Chaos-Theory perhaps. We should pray to that butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon and hope for the best.
            As for Britain, my only hope is that Scotland – along with Northern Ireland, of course – divorces itself from the basket-case which England seems to be at the moment. Let them wallow in their own post-imperial nostalgia and bring back their pounds and ounces and, of course, away with everything metrical, as that symbolises Europe. Hopefully, we in Scotland will be free of these idiots, even if it means going to the back of the EU queue because Spain has problems with Catalonia. Life was never simple anyway and is unlikely to get any simpler – at least in the foreseeable future.
            And then there’s poetry – and, of course, prose. This is an issue I hope you enjoy. To negotiate your way through bart plantenga’s NOT QUITE PROSE-POEMS, simply read until you come to Read More and click on Read More. It’s simple once you get the hang of it. Thanks are due to Bart for going out of his way to help me set it up for Ol’ Chanty.
            All I can say, is that I hope you enjoy this issue and if you have stuff in future you would like me to consider for publication, just send it via the Contact-Page and I will be happy to look at it.

QUOTE - Antonin Artaud

"God does not exist, he withdraws, gets the fuck out and leaves the cops to keep an eye on things."

POEM - Mike Ferguson

NOT-QUITE PROSE-POEMS - bart plantenga

POEMS & ARTWORK (Poet - K. J. Hannah Greenberg
Artist - Nancy Ramsey)

POEMS - Christopher Barnes

QUOTE - Joseph Sobran

POEMS - Stellasue Lee

ESSAY - Richard Livermore

POEMS - Richard Livermore

POEM - – Mike Ferguson

Finding Trump in the Great American Novel

from Moby Dick

The Pythagorean Maxim

Who breathes it first
after extensive performances

gets his atmosphere
from astern,

more prevalent than winds
from any wholesome Providence.

Much the same as a contested performance:
an election for the Presidency of the

United States of Fates
where wailing winds are.

from Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Low Grammarian

Plentifully yellow,
a thick set man,
he did not seem flourishing
in conversation,
speaking

I is in defiance of Murray’s grammar

he said, and, jingling with evident satisfaction

I is quite a low man who is easy of swaggering

and trying to elbow his way to the top, said

I is bedecked with gold

and is
large and coarse
gaudy
portentous
upward in the world

the most authoritative American.

NOT-QUITE PROSE-POEMS
- bart plantenga

Exploration vs Consumption:
Tourism in Paris Scratch &
NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor

“The tourist seeks out Culture because – in our world – culture has disappeared into the maw of the Spectacle ... because our education is nothing but a preparation for a lifetime of work and consumption because we ourselves have ceased to create. ...”
• Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

The basic premise of Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney In Face Flat Minor : wandering & documenting 365 camera-less, “not-quite prose poems,
not-quite memoir” snapshots of everyday life that could serve as
meta-factual attempts to re-pollinate daily existence with the
neglected details of the everyday. READ MORE

POEMS & ARTWORK - J K Hannah Greenberg & Nancy Ramsey

(The 2 poems and works of art are part of a 100 piece project of coupled verses and images called Exchange Rates.

Unitary

Single units, that is, entities composed of integrated components,
Dense heads of foliage, or branches, notwithstanding, still traipse
To Old World paeans, when not padding their hours with laughter.

After all, the interrupted existence of green buds, amethyst herbs,
Small birds, occasional undomesticated cheetahs, zebras, giraffes,
Causes wildebeest calves, baboons, some other sorts, to run away.

Mostly, though, on arid, grass-covered plains, in famous biomes,
Smart predators enjoy lunch, while herds’ migration replenishes
Soil minerals, mows unwanted leaves, creates new passageways.

Prejudice

Prejudice rots. It falls from stems as reprehensibly as does recusal.
Challenging victories over medals, questioning changeable verities,
Darkening wishes and dreams, predetermining events as anguish.

Nonetheless, civilization’s builders stay responsible for commanding
Arrays of reactions, for embracing challenging matters, for stomaching
Difficulties catalyzed by media care ethics, tree frogs, and toothbrushes.

Be that as it may, it’s insufficient merely to supply research monies.
No corpus of Internet devotees compensates frustrations resulting
From snollygosters’ baguettes, snot, simple toast, sickbay crackers.

At worst, such “great scholarship,” if rented beyond norms, grows
Ignored given intellectual skints’ predilection toward peak rational
Interstices, parturition, snout bands, zebras, also contentious allies.

POEMS - Christopher Barnes

Built-In Wardrobe

“I painted the head of my two brothers playing chess,
Not in a garden this time, but in indefinite space.”
-       Marcel Duchamp

A mortal body has vacated
This nearing space.
I’ll potentially annex it
For the shelf-room overspill
Tape measure and compass played out.
The arising of depths
Is tectonics in air.
Though objects look on unique surroundings
Co-existence can be walled into cubes.

                             *

Enough horizon for The Follies as puppets
Soundlessly waggling across the box lid.

The Giveaway

Free to a good home – this ‘limited period’.
In the recklessness of a thought
The heart’s first-hand punctuality
Is attainably yours. Monotonous-hasty pendulums
Stymie synergy,
Birth-pangs or death-rattles.
Hourglass grit runs back
-       Snatch at auspicious moments –
Seasons hurtle, drift.

Ghosted

Ferreted out of bin-spill
A diagnostic x-ray,
Face down in perished cabbage,
Risky slop – Heinz beans.

Electro-magnetic radiation
Spirit-raised this after-image.
Photo-absorption,
Light-touch truths as positional structures.
Bones, cartilages,
Gossamer in a thoracic cave.

A sweetener dangles
For its pigeon chested heirship –
Distinguished hiatus hernia,
In the sepia of ages.

The Unexpected Find

A backswept alley eye-opener –
Roll up roll up to this pleasure-round attraction.
They tout tuck, ding-dong fights, wild oats music –
Customer-snatching freak shows
In diamond-studded light.
Uncork a grumbling metropolitan purlieu –
Spanner-build thrills,
Ping-clink coin-heavy arcaded.
Twist-a-whirl, shoot-the-chutes
And all your awe will be gravity-flung.

Quack

The duck as a concept
Is dead.

A dint in spick-and-span water.
Head-shake on swashing plumosity,
Saw-edged bills,
Filter-scoff in waves, depth-flicking sloshes.
Axes ground – interest looming
On brain-created wobbling lakes

QUOTE - Joseph Sobran

"So when the wolf pounces on your lamb, just ignore the pitiful bleating and remind yourself that this is a democracy, where every sheep can freely express its preference for which kind of wolf it wants to be eaten by. Many sheep, perhaps understandably, prefer a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which is after all the basic idea of democracy. So far it has worked pretty well. The wolves all agree on that, and they want to spread democracy everywhere."

POEMS - Stellasue Lee

Reading The Stars

My brother calls to tell me about a trip to Belize,
the rain forest and hiking to a river,
wide and swift. There, he saw a rope

and knew, just like we all know when a time
comes for some action that is extraordinary,
that he must cross that river of fury,

Tarzan like. And, he considered how lucky
he was—how many of us never
see the rope that will save us.

II

My young student, the youngest
I have ever worked with, is writing
what she calls a “period” piece--

1990”s, she says, and here I was
thinking how 1990 seems
like yesterday…

III

My temples throb, my right foot hurts,
I have a sharp pain in my ribcage, left side,
and a twenty-one pound cat in my lap.

My notebook is propped on the cat’s back,
the pen makes its way across the paper
and the cat purrs, occasionally makes a star foot.

IV

My husband tells me that Jupiter is in my 5th house,
which means I’d better write my ass off or Jupiter’s
energy will be enacted in ways I won’t like.

V

Reading John Bennett’s work for a couple weeks now,
a “wild man” only because he writes it like it is.
I got a submission from John when I was an editor

all those years back. I’ve read everything the man
has ever written. That’s something John
and I share, our lives on paper.

My cat jumps down and I’m covered in fur.
I had fresh clothes on when I sat down.
The pain in my ribcage is gone like the pounding

in my head. I’ll have to walk to see how the foot is.
Jupiter seems appeased for the present.
My brother arrives Monday with his wife.

John Bennett is still in the Great North West
washing windows and writing every day.
I’m here, in the South. This is what we do, write!

Theory Of Flux

An A/C cycles on/off. Patti’s cat sits
at the back door, looks though glass

for deer or raccoons, other wild things,
along the banks of a Harpeth tributary

that runs though her back property.
Patti’s other cat runs up and down

the hall making wild animal sounds.
I like being at Patti’s house. It feels

more permanent than my own home
where my husband works with a crew

of women to weed though his studio.
Heraclitus, the philosopher, said

There is nothing permanent except change.
I stand very still and wait for what is to come.

If this were a movie script, I would
simply turn the page and there, there would

be all the answers to what comes next.
To stand still is an adult thing to do.

What I really want is to run up and down
the long hall and make wild woman sounds.

Recent thought on Heraclitus is that his
commitment to the flux doctrine and the

identity of opposites results in an incoherent
theory. So, what’s a girl to do but stand very still.

ESSAY - Richard Livermore

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS
Richard Livermore

Democracy In America by Alex de Tocqueville is a tome and a half of a book – almost a thousand pages long. If you read it on Kindle, as I did, you could be forgiven for thinking you might never get to the end of it. One great advantage of reading non-electronic books is that you can actually see your progress through them. Nevertheless, I have to say that I thought the book was well worth reading. Not only did it explain to me aspects of American politics which had always baffled me in the past, such as the difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives in Congress, it also showed me how US democracy is - or was - rooted in local assemblies far more than anything we have known in Europe, outside revolutionary situations. At its heart it is (or was) decentralised, although no doubt in its history Federal Government has done a great deal to erode and usurp this local democratic tradition. De Tocqueville contrasts this tradition with the centralising tradition which evolved in France both before and after the 1789 Revolution. The French Revolution may appear to have been more radical in its social and class-content (It needed to be!) but not in its actual political content. It embodied a drive towards centralisation which it inherited from pre-revolutionary times. Aristocrats did not go to the guillotine in America partly because there were no aristocrats and also, since government was so decentralised, no Robespierres could emerge to send them to the guillotine.
            I can’t, of course, talk about Democracy In America exhaustively in this short essay, but there were one or two questions which occurred to me while I was reading it. The book was written before Marx was writing, I believe, and the Marxist distinction between the economic base and political superstructure is never discussed, despite its obvious importance. Nonetheless, the book is intriguing for all sorts of other reasons. When Robert Burns wrote “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us” he could almost have been writing about de Tocqueville’s outsider insights into American democracy. What de Tocqueville has to say about a democracy’s impact on attitudes as compared to that of a more layered aristocratic society’s in which everyone knows where they stand in the social hierarchy is really fascinating.
            What emerges in de Tocqueville’s account of democracy in America is how homogenised people become when, instead of deferring to those of a higher rank, they defer to each other instead. I suspect that de Tocqueville would agree with Oscar Wilde when he wrote. “High hopes were once formed of democracy, but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out… People in a democracy go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one might call other people’s second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment…” This homogeneity and conformity seems, in de Tocqueville’s eyes, to have been taken to an extreme in America, where people appear to take their cue from each other rather than risk taking it from themselves and possibly being ostracised for it.
            De Tocqueville was writing in the 1830s, and no doubt when he was writing there was little to write home about in terms of culture and creative accomplishment in the US. Therefore, democracy seemed to him to be doomed to produce mediocrities. However, over the past 150 years, the USA has given the lie to that judgement. It has produced some of the period’s greatest creative figures and also spawned social and cultural movements which have inspired non-conformists all over the world. It has also had its dead side, of course - its entertainment industry, its cult of celebrity, its consumerism, the stupidity and tackiness of its mass ‘born-again’ religious movements, the ugliness of its racism, imperialism, ‘manifest destiny’, police-brutality, prison slave-system and so on and so forth – the list seems unending; yet in so many ways the USA cannot be considered the same country as it was when de Tocqueville was writing. It has grown up, although the legacy of democratic conformism is still very strong.
            I believe that Marxists are right to shine their light on the economic base of US society as well as its political superstructure, for in the US this economic base has obviously been much more dynamic than the political superstructure, which seems to have changed very little since its origins in the 1776 Revolution. This much greater dynamism at the economic base has gone along almost unnoticed under its own steam and in its own way to such an extent that it has thrown US society and politics into a crisis which the actual political superstructure now seems incapable of addressing. The election of Donald Trump exemplifies this, I believe. I suspect that the domination of large corporate concerns has become so extreme that unless Americans can build a grass-roots movement to fight against them – in the spirit of the original revolution, though very different in its outward manifestations – they are doomed to be ruled by a tyrannical corporate plutocracy that will have a strong resemblance to fascism – even if it does its best to disguise the resemblance. What is needed to combat the inevitable rise of this fascism is a grass-roots movement capable of short-circuiting its appeal to ordinary people. This grass-roots movement will have to resurrect something of the original spirit of the American Revolution – minus its deformities of course – and take it onto a new level entirely, a level which would allow as much for the expression of individuality as for co-ordinated organisation, and thereby hopefully end the personality-levelling homogenisation which de Tocqueville identified.
            I have no doubt that for such a grass-roots democracy to work successfully, it will have to destroy the economic power of those capitalist concerns which have played such a huge role in corrupting and suborning the present political structures to serve their ends rather than the ends of the American people. Politically, it will have to start all over again, with ordinary people taking the responsibility for their own collective life into their own hands. This is not to suggest the complete destruction of the market-economy and the emergence of a homogenised command-economy as happened in the Soviet Union. Other forms of economic organisation such as co-operatives, small family-run businesses and self-employed individuals, business partnerships, collectives and communally run businesses, all based on both competitive and co-operative principles can be brought into play. The important thing is not how economic life is organised, but how political life is organised on a grass-roots level. If political life is organised from the ground up, by-passing state-structures, under principles of direct, not representative, democracy, there will not be any political fulcra through which large companies and corporations can have undue leverage on the political life of the people.
            What I am arguing for here is not the destruction of ‘free enterprise’, but the destruction of political structures which have allowed capitalist concerns to have such a powerful influence over the lives of ordinary people, and brought the US to its present political impasse. That will of course include the destruction of state-structures which have worked on behalf of corporations. The regeneration of political life at a grass-roots level – by-passing professional politicians, of course – in the spirit of the original American Revolution is what is needed I believe. I am aware that the original revolution was a very incomplete one, since it permitted slavery and the genocide of indigenous populations, but I think that we are now at a very different crossroads of history, which should allow people to properly address these concerns in the wake of the revolutionary transformation of society as a whole.
            It is due to this decentralised grass-roots focus of mine that I begin to depart from Marxism. It is fine on the level of economic analysis and deconstructing the basis of the present political system, but economic analysis does not lead to political synthesis. The problems generated on a political level must be solved on a political level through institutions which the ferment of revolutionary upheaval will itself throw up. We must first be certain that the will of the people as it is put into effect from the bottom up through these institutions is always respected. Therefore, a machinery must be created through which ordinary people can express themselves democratically and put their own decisions into effect without the interference of ‘higher’ level bodies, whose sole purpose should be to carry out whatever has been decided on a ‘lower’ level. This, not the economy, must be the first priority – ensuring freedom of political action via the democratic decision-making process.
            If any political philosophy inspires my thinking here, it is anarchism, but classical anarchism seems to have become handicapped by its tendency to seek some kind of homogenised economic model – such as Mutualism for Proudhon, Collectivism for Bakunin and Anarchist-Communism for Kropotkin – all of which have an authoritarian streak in them. Personally, I think that as long as the machinery is in place to ensure the maximum of political democracy and freedom, and this is also extended throughout the economy, a certain freedom of economic activity and experimentation based on individual initiative should prevail. I don’t believe society can be reduced to one economic model whose thinking is informed by some sweeping dialectical sleight of hand trick in which everything has been decided beforehand because history is supposed to conform to our thinking.
We shall see whether or not the blight of homogenisation and conformity which de Tocqueville identified can be countered. My guess is that once people take direct responsibility themselves for the life of society around them, rather than leave it to their representatives, their individuality will be more completely engaged and that should be enough to undermine that deference towards other people’s opinions which stop them being fully themselves – as Oscar Wilde recognised. Where it all may lead – who knows? Everything will be up in the air. What I do believe, however, is that risks should be taken, for without them, we are doomed to repeat ourselves by doing the same thing time after time after time, while expecting to get different results. And that, as they say, is one definition of madness.

POEMS - Richard Livermore

Richard Livermore writes: "Septets is a series of poems whose common feature is that they all have seven lines. There is not necessarily any thematic connection between the poems. The poems here are a selection from about 35 poems to date.

SEPTETS

9 - Bring It On

The open window
ushers in the bird and out
she goes the baby
on the blink that no-one
knows is there until
she falls upon her knees
to be excused.

14 - Untitled

The only way forward
is to follow the tufted duck
as it dives into the dark
domain of the lake, trusting
to luck rather than eyes
as to where it might rise
to the surface again.

17 - Language-Matters

What we must parse
is a verb in the making
shaped like a noun that may
have an adjective’s sting in its tail.
Then will the present-perfect
be perfect and no one will
send it back to the past

19 - Things Fall Apart

The world on its axis
is wobbling towards
catastrophe now,
as the poles fly away
like bats in the night
and no-one knows where
the equator has gone.

23 - Something For Nothing

Why is there something
rather than nothing?
And why did that something
give birth to the moon
or take us as far
as a mother’s womb
to be born?

25 - Dashed Expectations

Death must be running
out of excuses. Mine being
one of the myriad lives
he needs to collect before
he can call it a day, I wait
for his knock on the door
but he never arrives.

29 - Further To My Previous

Baby-Happy is hungry,
has picked up a spoon
and ordered the moon to play
with the moon-cow out in
the garden where the thrush
brings the worm and its three
hundred neurons to grief.

35 - The Conditional Mood

If the wolf went down
to the river and howled,
the fish I suspect
would go down
on their haunches
and kick up a rumpus
up in the sky.