yeah, exactly, get back to doing things on my territory, not playing anybody elses game anymore, if you want to play now it has to be by my rules.
posted by Luke 2:35 AM
but really, why do i need to talk about it if i can just show you? that makes more sense innit?
‘of course they remain the scrawlings of dilettantes and dabblers, a product of a deep-rooted self-delusion’
‘mawkish, over-egged, impoverished.’
‘intellectually bankrupt. Politically unengaged. Insipid. Sentimental tosh of the most contemptible kind.’
Hundreds of Chinese migrants try to look inconspicuous, waiting, at 6 in the morning on the edges of Hackney marshes, waiting to be commissioned to sell pirate DVDs, teddy bears and plastic toys which flout EU safety regulations, handheld electric whisks, packs of pornographic playing cards, bootleg CDs, battery powered pendants with flashing bulbs…
‘One of them Kosovos come up to me the other day you know. Leather jacket, mobile phone, all gold on him, and he was asking for money you know! I couldn’t believe it! They must have some type of scam running. They all got bare money’
the owners of rag trade sweatshops. Smugglers of illegal immigrants. Men selling women to other men in East End pubs.
Battery farms in which pigs are kept, upside down, legs thrust through holes in the tops of the cages. Hens with clipped beaks, legs cut off at the ankle, wings stapled to their flanks. Gorillas dressed as bell boys in expensive hotels. Cows with the names and addresses of brothels branded in huge letters on their sides, left to roam the streets as mobile hoardings. A sedated bull charges woozily towards the matador who blinds him with a skilful thrust to the eye. OLE!
Needlepoint.
A lighthouse keeper teaches himself Russian long into the early hours of the morning.
A slender schoolboy lifts dumbbells, face red, veins bursting from the temples, arms quaking with the strain, goaded on by the hope of one day humiliating his tormentors.
A woman rubs at her verruca with a pumice stone, squeezes the blackheads on her nose, shaves the hair from her armpits…
‘don’t phone my phone again you slag. When I come round your yard tomorrow I want head, and I’m bringing my mate with me.’
Knitting patterns.
Penguins languish in concrete pens, sliding listlessly down the slopes into lukewarm water.
Some chimpanzees masturbate incessantly, while others beat their head against the walls, in the hope of dashing out their brains. Females offer swollen rumps to the dominant males who just sit there, staring into space.
The television whispers to us in our lonelieness, promises us companionship, and in our desperation we sit with it, for hours we gaze into it until to switch it off seems saying goodbye to a lover. We sit there before a cold grey screen for a while, hugging our knees to our chest, feeling sad.
Young girls, raised from birth in laboratories are force fed junk food in government experiments, ballooning in size till their legs are unable to support the weight of their bodies.
Frolic.
The electronic tag triggers an alarm if the curfew is broken. The subject must adhere to a strict timetable designed to inculcate discipline and obedience. The subject is woken at a regular hour, must eat a prescribed breakfast at a prescribed time, must exercise all major muscle groups for a period of one and a half hours, must socialise with friends chosen for him for this purpose for a period of 2 hours, must complete an intellectual challenge daily, chosen according to his mental ability, a problem of mental arithmetic, a cryptic crossword, a translation of a poem from a foreign language or some other such task, must spend time alone with his thoughts, must go outside and commune with an element of nature, be it a river, a hill, a meadow, must nurture his creativity through approved outlets, the painting of picturesque landscapes in watercolour or the composition of love songs on an acoustic guitar (these are to be chaste and heterosexual)…
Tomboys play kickups in an empty car-park till the sun begins to set and the encroaching gloom makes it difficult to see the ball.
A boy who’s never been in love composes love poetry
‘how do I love you? Let me count the ways. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, no, I grow tired, there are too many ways’
random acts of violence. Eruptions of the repressed. Explosions of real bombs. Real deaths. Real grief.
Tummyrot.
An Indian saint, penis sellotaped to thigh so it can never rise erect, feeding on sunlight and dirt, a stick held in his left hand to beat away any woman who dares approach, a stick in his left hand to beat away worshippers and curiosity seekers.
A child captures a pigeon and methodically strips it of every feather before setting it free.
Rainwater collects in bomb craters, miniature lakes for boys to launch paper boats upon.
Children collect shrapnel, helmets, trophies from fallen aeroplanes, pieces of fuselage, a propeller, instruments to measure speed or altitude, chase each other with guns from fallen soldiers, dare each other to take shortcuts through minefields.
The execution of the king. A sad looking head in a basket.
A bruise, brown, outlined in purple, spreads across a thigh.
‘I have to sort of watch my back round this area now, cos some boy tried to jack my phone just last night so I kicked the shit out of him, badly, but if I see him the next time, and he’s got boys with him, I’m gonna have to fucking run hard.’
Some man from the caryard said he’s give me a tenner if I bring him some alloys…
Cycles of violence, ever escalating.
Sores. Lesions. Wounds.
Fractures. Internal bleeding.
Hoods pulled up, scarves cover faces. Knives tucked into waistbands. Cudgels, lengths of chain, claw hammers, baseball bats, iron bars, sharpened screwdrivers, bottles concealed under jackets.
Heroin addicts dreaming of a complete retreat into mental space, a way to lock the door behind them.
Charlatans, harridans and mountebanks.
A boy catches himself gazing at another mans chest.
Feels guilty admiring the curve of a calf muscle.
A long fingernail raked across a cheek.
A naked moon.
posted by Luke 2:31 AM
in the mornings we do megalomania, in the evenings we air our inferiority complex, that's how it works, if you don't like it go elsewhere
like here for example, to hear about Dizzee Ras tearing down Toronto like a good 'un.
posted by Luke 12:56 AM
well. i checked my email just now and i got one from daria which says
'meow!'
and i have to adnit that that is a fair comment. but let me just explain for the benefit of you lot exactly WHY i felt a bit catty. if i've gone to great lengths to build a pretence of being knoweledgeble about a subject and then someone who actually really knows something about that subject comes and pulls the rug from under my feet, it's a bit humiliating and it destroys, in one fell swoop, all that hard work and time i've invested and that really is the real reason. can you imagine! i was genuinely intimidated when i read that and i felt i had to quickly try and save some of my dignity rather than just going, hhmmm, yup you're right as it goes, i'm dumb and actually i don't know what the fuck i'm going on about. that's true. but now i feel like well, i have to just admit the truth. i am talking out my arse. so apologies to daria.
posted by Luke 12:44 AM
really enjoyed the woebots comparison of grime and old skool hip-hop, as usual streching a perfectly workable comparison to breaking point and rendering the whole exercise ridiculous. which is why it's so enjoyable really.
(he nicked the d double-biz comparison of me innit, heh! cheeky monkey)
posted by Luke 12:11 AM
and since when did being qualified have anything to do with anything? it's not like i'm exactly a literary scholar is it? i don't know fuck all. i got a b for english GCSE and that's the extent of my qualifications, my english teacher said i shouldn't really do it at Alevel cos i wasn't very good, so i didn't. the alevels i did do i failed, i don't have any kind of degree, i don't have mates that i sit around talking literature with, i work in a fucking carpark i don't let that stop me, if a total div like me can do it then fucking anyone can. I'm the biggest blagger of them all.
posted by Luke 11:50 PM
i guess what i am saying is
freud provided the conceptual framework surrealism rested on. you need only see how frequently they talk about dreams and the unconscious, how often they use terms derived from freud etc blah etc.
posted by Luke 4:23 PM
Daria! youve got a masters in english, that means you're a master! if you're not qualified to talk about poetry i should be chased out of town for even reading it!
anyway, all intersting stuff and new to me. i'll happily confess my ignorance of Pierre Janet although it's surely overstating the case to say the inception of surrealism had nothing whatsoever to do with Freud who's ideas overshadowed the whole era.
As far as Osman Spare well, sure, there's a whole range of precursors for automatism, the spiritualist church being the most well known example. The difference between automatism as practised in occultism and spiritualism and automatism as practised by the surrealists and the pychoanalyists is that for the occultists the pen was guided from without, for the surrealists and the pcyhoanalysts it was guided from within. The occultists sought posession from the spirit world, not to uncover the workings of the unconscious. Without Freud the project would never have been initiated regardless of what Breton may have claimed.
I would argee that alchemy has provided a rich seam of metaphors for fopoets. Blake read Paracelsus, Boheme, Swedenborg etc. I would also argue that for Rimbaud drugs, hormones and disorientation was far more important than partially digested occult textbooks. which is as it should be.
posted by Luke 3:57 PM
one of the boys i work with, he's a funny bloke.
'im going amsterdam end of this month' he goes
'yeah' i said 'bringing back any souviners?'
'yeah' he said ' syphillus!'
ha!
Just quickly, in response to Howie, as I understand it the idea of egoless poetry has been discredited, largely because Mallarme's 'pure poetry' experiments were deemed a failure, and perhaps also because it would take a gargantuan ego to try and attempt so Sisyphesian a task. The self and its experiences are embedded in every choice of word, in the rhythms of every sentence, in the subject matter, embedded inescapably in every single choice the poet makes. There are poets who try to conceal the self, but it is revealed in the very act of concealment. We are stitched soundly into our own skins, our hearts are imprisoned in our ribcages. The poem can no more break free of the poet than the goldfish can escape it’s bowl or the turtle flee it’s own shell.
posted by Luke 1:09 PM
course, what i'm most intersted in is whether sashafrerejones is willing to drop the wisecracks for a minute to mount a convincing defence of the language poets (there's a link to ron silliman on his site) in the face of this broadside from oliver.
'Maybe more important are my deliberate omissions: the entire international school of Concrete and Language poets, George Oppen, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, and many others. Here form is a series of effects without root - feed both an "idealisation of the self and an idealisation of form", with thin, uninvolving, and, yes, quite useless results. '
an appraisal with a couple of caveats, would go along with.
(if he rises to the bait, i'll tell you what the caveats are)
posted by Luke 12:08 PM
pretty pictures
paul
justin
nick
sjf
posted by Luke 11:38 AM
responses, (as hoped for) from howie and oliver.
HA! you can't delete it now dave my son, i've just linked to it, gnnnaahhhaa!
also simon NO ONE in the entire universe believes timbaland when he says he's never heard UK dance music and came up with everything in a perfect vaccuum he created in his studio in carolina. no one is naive enough to beleive that.
posted by Luke 11:15 AM
the deeper reason is that i NEED people to be rude to me, to challenge me and correct me when i'm wrong. and i'm not really getti that at the moment, so if i need to be a litte crass and provocative to attain that then i bloody well will be!!
posted by Luke 12:17 AM
sorry oliver, i get bored, and when i get bored i try and provoke people. it's a bad habit. don't take it personally.
posted by Luke 12:09 AM
We got bored lying on our backs in the meadow, and when it started to drizzle we decided it was time to go back to our respective homes.
It was that kind of relationship.
The reality never matched up to our expectations. We got irritable in art galleries, our noses bumped awkwardly against each other when we kissed. I told her I loved her and she told me she loved me, but neither of us was truly able to believe it, no matter how much our voices might quaver or how deeply we looked into one another’s eyes. These were tics we had learned from watching soap operas and romantic movies. In truth we had no time for each other, no time for sunsets, beaches, expensive movies, flower gardens, secluded bowers, mountain retreats, moonlight, long walks and river banks, nor any other romantic cliché we might care to mention.
It was a long time before we realised this, so determined were we to experience love as we saw it represented in films and books and television. We looked for beauty in the wrong places and tried to force our hearts to swell before sights our souls had no affinity with.
Naturally diffident, the language of a Casanova was foreign to me, and in my mouth sounded quite absurd. We found a kindof contentment in downcast eyes and faltering speech, in board games and microwave meals, in nights in front of the television. Our blood quickened with the accidental brush of elbow against flank or an unexpected flash of flesh as a jumper rode up and we discovered room for mirth and clumsiness in love. Indeed, these things became what we valued most of all. We learned to cherish our fumblings and halting speech and not to feel ashamed of the distance between us and the ideals we had held so fervently.
I liked it when her glasses steamed up over a hot mug of tea and savoured the inelegance of her dress and the slight asymmetry of her features.’
Elephants lumber up mountain trails.
Victorian photographers chase fairies in landscapes bestrewn with rocks.
Cockatiels escape from drawing rooms.
Children fidget at dinner parties.
Visitors sneak toothpicks and silver cutlery into prisons.
Teenagers steal exotic plants form botanical gardens.
Small animals emerge from hibernation too early and perish in the cold.
The buffalo repopulate the cities of America.
Helium filled balloons slip the hands of their owners and escape into the sky.
Actors in horror movies sit patiently while make-up artists turn them into ghouls and monsters.
Risqué comedians get booed off stage in provincial towns.
Semi-professional golfers travel the world in search of the big-break, their lives a procession of Novotels, Holiday Inns and respectable results in minor tournaments.
Teenagers read books of poetry feverishly, in search of a way out.
Secret societies split up in acrimonious circumstances.
Teachers with fingers stained yellow with nicotine complain bitterly of recalcitrant pupils and school inspectors.
A boy gets booted out the snooker hall for extinguishing a fag on the baize in a fit of pique.
Amateur bobsleigh racers squeeze ageing bodies into lycra suits.
Greek poets accompany themselves on the lyre, reciting pastiches of Cavafy interspersed with dick jokes and finish by smashing plates against the lino floor.
East European Goths catch infections from self-piercings administered with safety pins.
On the moon, craters fill with rainwater.
At noon the mayor mistimes the release of a hundred doves, causing the death of 67 of them, caught in the propeller of a police helicopter.
Field mice are mangled by combine harvesters.
A defrocked priest manufactures a Neanderthal skull with an iron arrowhead piercing it and throws the academic community into disarray.
Boy soldiers play hopscotch in a ritual enacted to regain lost innocence.
Renegade zoologists teach gorillas how to make fires and the rudiments of agriculture.
Earnest jazz buffs play Charlie Parker 45s to their unborn children in the womb.
Creative writing teachers recite speeches from Dead Poets Society to blank looks and sniggers from their students.
Fastidious medical students order a glass of water between each pint of Carling.
Abandoned lovers watch TV.
A violinist serenades a woman outside her bedroom window. Later, she calls the police.
Poachers hew the tusks from sedated elephants.
Aircraft carriers are converted into prison ships.
Mothers are publicly shamed for the crimes of delinquent children, being forced to wear sandwich boards detailing the exploits of their offspring, or have their heads dunked in the public toilets by the town citizens, depending on the seriousness of the offences.
Ken Livingstone is the victim of a smear campaign, accusing him of cruelty to his newts, and hinting at perverse practises.
The Conservative leader is pictured playing steel drums at a primary school in Harlesden.
Children leap from couch to armchair, as the carpet is infested with crocodiles.
Useful poets then, ME!
posted by Luke 12:06 AM
i, in my naive way, rather hoped that me and oliver cranium (as he was named by Jim, in a stroke of genius) spouting off about our favourite poets would spark a flurry of poetic discourse throughout the blogosphere. but i guess it's still a minority interest, despite our best efforts. maybe i should just start watching I'm a Celebrity, like my dad keeps telling me too. (he's backing Jordan to win incidently)
posted by Luke 10:55 PM
i watched a film called la jette today. a few people whose opinion i respect had reccomended it to me. it was alright. it's comprised solely of still images and a voice over. the images are nice, in an arty black and white kind of way. the woman is very beautiful, in a pleasingly french kind of way. the story's a bit generic. you feel a bit bludgeoned by the music at times, a bit grandiose. the thing that frustrated me the most about was that it moves too quick. if you've got some lovely still images then let me look at them for a mintue. otherwise it's just annoying. they change quick enough to induce an epileptic fit in somone susceptible to such things. the voice-over moves much too quick too. if the eye was allowed to linger on the images for a lot longer and if the narrative proceeded at a slower pace, with more space and more silence it would have been a much more powerful film. slowness in cinema is underexplored. the closest thing i've seen to it is London by Kellior. the followup to that film Robinson in space is ruined by the same impatience, crashing along like rhino on heat. you need to let things sink in. you miss stuff if you don't pause. it's a waste of the images and it's a waste of the words. if anyone knows some films which move along at more thoughtful pace letme know.
blungblung@hotmail.com
personally i think the world wold be a better place if poets clashed each other like garage MCs
posted by Luke 8:52 PM
oliver craner's manifesto is here.
it's not an attack on him, i like him. i think he's really good.
in the lord of the decks cd everyone keeps going on about how they got stains on their clothes, they're not sweetboys, they got chapped lips and that, keep pointing tht out. wu-tang did that a lot.
posted by Luke 2:05 PM
‘Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.’
Nietzsche.
Oliver has just released his manifesto. His central conclusion, that any attempt to compose poetry according to a predetermined structure, or set of rules, will inevitably result in mannerism, a kind of poetry by numbers, is surely inarguable. There are, however, a small number of oversights, errors of judgement and factual inaccuracies contained in the text, which, in order to save him the bother, I have taken upon myself to correct.
Ezra Pound was certainly not the first to understand that poetic form is an anachronism. That honour goes to Rimbaud, though he was by no means the first to abandon form. Shakespeare’s formlessness meant he was regarded by the French as a barbarian. Baudelaire composed exquisite prose poems. Blake rejected the fetters of rhyme. (‘Poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race’) Holderlin composed poems in fragments and Rimbaud’s near contemporary, Walt Whitman was another to neglect strict rules of composition. Indeed, Pound described himself as
‘A Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt’ and it is this insistence on the starched collar which ensured he would remain a lesser talent.
What all these writers have in common and what separates them from Pound, is that for them the rejection of form is a necessity. For Pound it is a decision informed by theory and fashion. Form, as understood by the likes of Rimbaud is both an impediment to the free flow of inspiration and a falsifier.
‘Meter lays a gauze over reality; it occasions some artificiality of speech and impurity of thinking; through the shadow that it throws over thought, it sometimes conceals, sometimes emphasizes. As shadow is necessary to beautify, so “muffling” is necessary in order to make it clearer.
Art renders the sight of life bearable by laying over it the gauze of impure thinking.’ Nietzsche.
Rimbaud understood this process of falsification and it explains his veneration of Baudelaire, who introduced the banal, the cruel and the ugly into his poetry, just as it explains his criticism of him-that he lived in too artistic a milieu. In order to represent, with any degree of accuracy the inner and outer conditions of life the poet must forgo the idealisation of the self and the idealisation of form. The two go hand in hand.
Which is not to say craft and technique lose their currency, nor does it become, as Oliver maintains, ‘destructive: dismantle parts; or more actively, vividly, break them.’ It simply becomes the art of achieving effects. How best to bring an image before the mind’s eye for example. The craft goes back to it’s pre-classical magical roots, loses it’s artisan associations. Where once form was a question of-is it correct? That is to say, does it adhere to the rules, It now becomes-does it work? Does it achieve the effects it sets out to achieve?
The poems of Blake, Rimbaud, Whitman, Rilke-contain a kind of manual for, and a document of, self-transformation. A map of mental experience. (a map is both description and guide)Compare the three stages of transformation which opens Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ with a Season in Hell. Or follow the arc of question and response, doubt to faith, rejection to acceptance, which comprises the Duino Elegies.
Poetry must be freed from imposture. The most important step towards this goal lies in the act of evading the censor. The censor was identified by Freud, who became frustrated with his patients perpetual skirting around the issues of most importance, concealing embarrassing information, softening accounts of humiliations and lapses and so on. It exists to protect the self-image and the public image of the individual by withholding information (from both self and society) which contradicts the way the individual sees himself. When a person first begins to write they will find a large amount of territory is out-of-bounds for them. This is the work of the censor. With time the skilled writer learns to bypass the censor.
The surrealist project (heavily influenced by Freud) was concerned largely with this task. Automatic writing was a technique developed to evade the censor. An attempt to open up a direct line to the unconscious. Unfortunately, the surrealists (with the exception of Artaud) were poor poets and their value lies largely in the manifestoes and the techniques they established. The project was a noble one, to give a fuller, more truthful picture of the human by excavating those portions of the mind which usually lie hidden, or appear to us in disguise, in the form of poetic images, slips of the tongue, dreams, phantasies, epiphanies etc and to introduce an understanding of those unconscious, irrational processes into everyday life, a revolutionary, anti-Enlightenment project. Any poet working today who ignores the surrealist project is retrograde and essentially worthless.
The problem with satire is this- the reader instinctively identifies himself with the author who is invariably a figure of moral authority railing against the crassness, stupidity and cruelty of the world around him. This takes the sting out of all satire.
posted by Luke 2:02 PM
in stark contrast to you losers, i've got the world's best sister.
in the post today-1 (unsolicited) cd of Bill Hicks-Flying Saucer Tour Volume 1.
Bill Hicks is the closest thing i've got to a hero.
posted by Luke 10:06 AM
i heard radio 1xtra for the first time yesterday. i've decided that it is A Good Thing. The presenters are mostly corny as cornflakes but you gotta take the rough with the smooth. it plays quite a lot of east london stuff so it's helping those artists get paid and promotoed. it'd be hard to object really. not a patch on deja vu though.
i heard 'what do you call it' for the first time yesterday, on radio 1xtra. igloo is an all-time classic. the vocal is fairly mediocre, someone should have been there to coax a little passsion out of wiley. i don't think it's a bad record. unlike acidhouse i really like the lyric. it's a fairly old one, i've heard it a zillion times before. riko had a vocal on igloo that was much better.
'chatting shit all over the forum'
demon(east co)
there's a recording of nasty and roll deep live in amsterdam available. job de wit, winner of Holland's inaugural Big Brother TV challenge, sent it to me
'Now online (in RealAudio): Roll Deep, Nasty Crew and Renegade Boys + Eastwood performancing in Amsterdam a week and a half ago: http://3voor12.vpro.nl/concerts'
look out for the target mix cd, coming soon if it's not already there.
best new MC-top cat. (should change his name though. top cat is the best reggae style MC ever to emerge from this country, a true virtuoso and sadly undervalued. if you don't know the name, do yourself a favour and look it up. his style is similar to supercat, the name is itself a homage, but he's his own man. )
posted by Luke 9:13 PM
the way i look at it, pretensions are fine so long as they coexist alongside self-awareness. then pretensions become theatrical, part of a performance, a flamboyance, a form of dandyism, something joyful, generous and extravegent.
when pretension fails to recognise itself as pretension, it's just wanky.
posted by Luke 12:14 AM