Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry 14 (2004)

CAMBRIDGE
CONFERENCEOF
CONTEMPORARY
POETRY 14
Review
2004
CONTENTS
a selection of work presented to CCCP14 by:
David BROMIGE
Franz Josef CZERNIN
Ariane DREYFUS
Ken EDWARDS
Forrest GANDER
Alan HALSEY
Kent JOHNSON
James KEERY
Astrid LAMPE
Chris McCABE
Anthony MELLORS
Geraldine MONK
Ike Mboneni MUILA
Joan RETALLACK
Catherine SIMMONDS
Esther TELLERMANN
Hans THILL
Ben WATSON
Reviews & Articles by:-

Elizabeth WILLIS
Lissa WOLSAK
Richard BURNS
Ken EDWARDS
© the authors 2004
published by the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry, to accompany a weekend

of readings and performance at Trinity College, Cambridge, 23 – 25 April 2004
Cover boards kindly donated by The Cloister Press, Cambridge

David BROMIGE
A Course in Miracles (15)

Hello, this is the english
Language greeting. English
Is the most widespread,
And I was born to speak it.
Hello, I am you,
Compared to a seaslug.
Oxygen in the air
Becomes blood in the brain,
Able to state the obvious.
That the heavenly bodies
Wheel through our view
Of the heavens. That
Sight grows on the skin
And skin feels electric

To the delicate touch.
Music gives the ear
A reward for listening.
Foodstuffs aplenty
Await us. Enter.
Growing within a body
Like ours we got
Big, Got
Coordinated.
Language waited, too,
Sounds like Mama and Goo,
Words like antidisestablishmentarianism,
Mouse, Febrile, Sperm.

Concepts like Randomness
And the possibility of logics.
Water, swim; Fire,
Piss on it. A man says
What life is really like,
Continual disappointment,
Until discrete, then
Perfect as could be.
Mating season unending,
Undeclared. Human enters
Human, avenges being born.
Enters humanity, this known.
“In Mohammedism there is
Much of Mysticism” (15)
But more of ems.

Sound that mumbles mother,
Milks her dry.
Most of these
Passers-by drew nourishment
Through those small holes,
Hard on the heels of
Thrusting themselves through
A naked woman’s cunt. Pardon
My French. Covered in
Blood. Excuse me. Screaming
Took the place of moaning
Or hers, or theirs? A woman

Opens to the world
Anyone’s first doorway,
Threshhold slick with tissue.
Forgive me, please. But
Here we are, showered
Shaved and clad
In consciousness,
Smoking cigarets
For the distance that they set
Between us curious
critters. Or with mouths
Veiled, Hair
Covered or otherwise
Removed, disguised.
Or disguised by hair,
Or otherwise
Cosmeticized. On TV
She’s going to reveal
She has no penis.
We sit still for this
A dozen times a day.
And the self, an old Greek says,
As it discloses, closes over.
Hi.
Franz Josef CZERNIN
from elemente. sonette, Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2002
voll pracht, hochherzig malend aus uns ganz, errichtet

leibhaft der bau sich, weitläufig an- wie ausgelegt,
abstufend reich mir zu gestalten viel geschichtet,
auch heimlich räume greift es, haupt stumm, steinern prägt,
anhimmelnd so bedacht; euch eingefleischt ihr mich verdichtet,

dass wir uns bilden ein gesicht, da glanzvoll trägt
mich, festlich körper, über euch, wie schwer gewichtet
aus tiefen wieder hallen holt, zu ruhn bewegt
auf welchen säulen, bögen! wie, im grossen, zügen

zugänglich mir, doch uns auch übersteigt dies zelt,
hebt lauf auf kreis um kreis, erschliesst, nicht nur verschwiegen,
den punkt, so hoch: ringsum ihr schallt, mich gleich euch stellt,
schön dar, dass wir von grund auf zu einander fügen:
einleuchtend stets dies haus erbaulich uns erhält.
schafe, wolken
wie wir einander sanft belämmern, blicke tauschen,

so tief wie schleier-, nebelhaft, flug anzutupfen,
besternend stoffe sattsam uns; mir im anrauschen
liest blüten, federn, wählerisch noch im verzupfen
dir augen weide: zug um zeug uns bunt aufbauschen,

doch sorg-, vielfältig, hauch zart gliedernd selbst verduften,
haut zähle mir um haar, dir krümmung zu erlauschen,
dass gräser, flügel wachsen uns auch im verpufften,
ins blaue weit: ringsum auf zungen reich zergehend,

stillschweigend angesponnen, doch in aller munden
wohltönen, sind -gelitten, überall anwehend:
gewendet selbst, allseits anhimmelnd uns umrunden,

saum bild- wie kleidsam lösen, sind verdaulich säend
dies dergestalt, doch immer fern auch, überwunden.
fanfaren, sonett
da es mich schrillt, verpfeift, bin aufgeschreckt, -gespürt,

heraustrompetet selbst verschreiend durch mich drehe;
umbraust, durchzuckt weh im verdonnern bin gerührt,
verschleudernd alles sausen lasse, flöten gehe,
bis es, zusammentrommelnd, packt mich, schlägt, abschwirrt,

mitreissend mich verzupft, verduften lässt, dass stehe,
nein, längst verweht bin, stets auf andrem blatt, verirrt,
entgeisternd mir, vergeigt, verschollen, ja, die böe,
weit fegt, hinweg...in schwebe bleibe, luft so liegen,

wie kreis, sich selbst beschreibend, mich lässt an sich deuten,
dass fern anklingend hohe bögen mich aufwiegen:
am höchsten punkt es lässt uns all dies hören, läuten,

bis wind, sich legt, auch aus-, wird still. so frisch erschwiegen,
sich wort hält atem an uns, neu mich zu besaiten?
Ariane DREYFUS
De temps en temps, se redresser aussi,

Soi-même se redresser
Comme pour frotter toutes ses fenêtres.
D’habitude quand je me penche

Tes mains - tenir pour pénétrer -
Sont plus fortes que la chute.
Ce que le vide devient ?

Un buisson comme un autre,
Bruissant.
Là n’est pas encore le mystère.
C’est quand
Les gestes même fatigués ont perdu leur ombre
A la chaleur.
Que ta paume
Se soulève un peu pour m’amener contre toi
De la tête.
Nous sommes sur une terre si fragile quand nous l’aimons.
Tu fermes les yeux ?

Ah oui, je ferme les yeux aussi, nous sommes
Les deux visages enchantés
Recroquevillée depuis dans ses brûlures,

La clématite est bien de ce monde.
Je ne sais pas en réponse à quoi elle s’est brûlée.
Elle l’est vraiment.
Tu me dis que tu marches devant : je serais vraiment folle

D’avoir peur
Puisque tu m’ouvres la route, face
A la mort.
Approchée du mur je vérifie toute la tige, sans chercher à serrer, à faire craquer, à savoir.
Je ne touche pas à ceci pour l’instant, je ne suis là
Que pour t’aimer.
Elle s’entrelace tellement, elle mettra des fleurs partout

Si vous savez attendre
En pensant que c’est vivant.
Une chance
Novembre et très vert

Un bourgeon est sorti.
Il ira jusqu’à ce que le ciel soit bleu,

Retrouvant la forme des feuilles.
Je caresse longtemps ton visage,

Mais sans chercher le printemps.
Un baiser, encore un baiser, toujours un baiser ?
Nous nous couvrons de baisers pendant que l’année passe.

Je veux bien essayer au bord mais avec toi.
Je vois ta main, ton bras et le deuxième aussi m’entoure quand la lumière baisse.
Chacun s’allonge avec l’autre, calmant son ombre.
Un doigt parfois suffit

Au vertige de te toucher pas disparu
Et puis le ciel aussi !
Qui
restera, lui, immense,
mais toi aussi, immense et tiède.
Serrée entre tes bras et le regard sur la montagne,

Je ne l’aime pas autant, l’éternelle.
Tendres flancs humains.
C’est léger une main qui caresse, qui va revenir,

Si légère quand nous continuons.
Il faut car le temps nous pose plus haut.
Extrait de Iris, c’est votre bleu d’Ariane Dreyfus (inédit)

Ken EDWARDS
“There’s something in there”
There’s something in there.
At least ... there may be. Who can say more than that?
It comes in there, or is there, sometimes. It’s suggestive of...
No-one can say what it is.
What?
What is out here is found. It was found in the woods. In the dark woods, in the midst of it all.
Like the poet, in the midst of a journey, it steals away.
It’s out here. It’s made of steel.

Steel in the woods. It curves, all the way in.
A steel cave, and what’s in it.
There’s definitely something in there.
But one can never be definite.
Let’s say a probability.
A throat. There are rivets all down its throat. But that’s not it. What it is, is in there, as
opposed to out here. By out here is meant all that isn’t in there. But where would there be?
It’s a throat, and a gnarl in the throat. Something gnarled.

Like in the woods, a gnarling, throat rivets. Or a tongue.
That would be something.
There are rivets all the way down the tongue of the thing, if it is a thing, and not just a space.
You see, it could be infinitely deep. The spaces could be silences. They could phosphoresce,
that is, liquefy.
Where does this thought happen?
There are some things here you don’t even want to think of. You can’t, you can’t say the
words properly. They used to say it was because you had a short tongue. A poet would
understand, sometimes the space seems infinitely deep, and at other times it’s like a patch of
dark velvet affixed to the outside. I comes in there, I subsequently speech-compensate for
this, as though the lake of my heart, as the poet says, almost destroyed...
What?
The poet would understand.
I mean that it’s in there, not the rivets, the rivets go all the way down to it, or you go down.
Say it’s a part of your brain. Or your mouth.
Inside your mouth.

Where the harmonic series dances.
Or my mouth, if you like. In my mouth. Or on my tongue.
I know that!
“This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I
likewise judge that it exists.”
It is said a poet said that.

He said it in the woods.
No-one knows any more.
It could be that someone was lost.
Lost in the woods. Or lost in thought. It’s the same thing.
By that is meant, that one kind of space is replaced by another kind. You go from the outside
to the inside, it can’t be explained any further than that. You’ll have to look it up. You go
from out here to in there, meaning...
There may not be any in there.
What was that?
I can’t say. It’s private. Never mind. I am privileged to do so. You what? I do have access to
it. Or ... it depends.
I can hear a voice.
It moves from in there to out here, and then back again. If you get the drift. It is reminiscent
of foxes in the garden, just before dawn. The little foxes with big ears. You need a keen ear.
Like the little dog, you know, the little dog peering down that great trumpet, in the old wind-
up days, but who can say if a sound emanates, and if it emanates what it signifies, and if it
signifies, what does that signify? For instance, is it significant? To the dog, that is. A little
dog, white with brown spots. Let’s call him Spot. “I am I because my little dog knows me.”
A poet said that. Is the dog even looking for significance, or authority, say? The question is,
who is to be the master?
But it could be comforting. It could be the only comfort he has, this evidence of private
space, emanating into public space, replacing replacing replacing....
Well, there’s a certain pleasing symmetry about that, dog on one end of the trumpet, god on
the other. Symmetry can substitute for certainty.
Where was I?
I could say that I believe there is something in there.

Although I have no grounds for such a belief.
The dog Spot got up and walked away. He walked away from his master and god.
It’s a sort of placeholder.
Look. See Spot go.
Go, Spot.
I have lost my tongue.
It’s in there. Somewhere.

Forrest GANDER
1.
Summer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through

The kitchen without comment, slams the door. An
Elaborate evening drama, I lug his forlorn weight
From floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap-
Toothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then

Breach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar
Pressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent
Laughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At
Ten, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned

His head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw
The hand untouching, distant from. What fathering-
Fear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration:
An indefinite continuation of life. I whirled out wings. Going

Toward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose.
2.
Blue-pajama-tendered wrists and hands. In rest, his musical

Neck, pillowed cheek. Else by damp relentment, swal-
Lowed almost in coverlet, fetched longwise
From lashing hours into this unlikely angle, wedge,
Elbow of unfollow. Before, the nightly footfall

-- shtoom—his bed to our bed. Scaled eyes.
(Cezanne died watching the door through which
His son did not arrive.) (Ajar, widening…)
Gone again to non-meridian dreams and

Murmuring broken noise in tens. To wit:
Lying bare, the sheets a husk shed low
Over the sorrel-vine of him. Midnight
Extracts me from sleep to bear witness to that one, there:

Local, small, breathing evenly, pathetic, soothe and bloom.
7.
Constant singing, the inward rendering pungent

Undersong and wordless high lullaby wafted over a table
Of quadratic equations. Whose whirligig beetles are these
Let loose in the toilet bowl? No shut-up is there,
No sleeping late. The insistence (full gaze) of his face,

High-cheeked, his roweled pupils, peening rum-brown
Eyes, floodgates to the wonderworld, blink wide. Close.
Vertigo of veering to kiss his full lips in the blind
Room. Answerable (the gate swings out) to his summons, this

Opening in being, vast of trouble, inward savor, reprise,
Privilege of. Is gravity. Not situation. Seeing of. What is
Taking place. The yellow pine siskin chirping to-thee, to-thee—
To devote all wakefulness, apprise and spring

As star moss rises and purple melic.
from “Voiced Stops” (Torn Awake, New Directions 2001)

Alan HALSEY
SUFFERABLE FRAGMENTS FROM THE MEMORY SCREEN NOTEBOOKS
Memory Screen is an impossible book which by now exists in at least five distinct versions each of
which begins with a snapshot of a graffito on a garage door beneath Castle Market in Sheffield. The
graffito consists of a spraycanned outline figure alongside the words ‘Memory Screen’. An alternative
reading is ‘Memori Scheem’ & so this may be the book’s correct title; the figure is either female or
androgynous, the face somewhat monkey-like. Most of the versions of Memory Screen consist of a
sequence of graphics many of which include words and word-fragments. The verbal element
sometimes detaches itself and becomes associated with a series of aphorisms which form as it were a
sequence of parallel texts. The parallel texts sometimes appear to be poems but are arguably no such
thing. Yet they are not, for the most part, captions. None of the versions is complete or completable.
Dichotomedes called himself the Casual Dogmatist. He said sleep is the mother of all and the father of
all and Will by necessity calls forth the unwilled. He liked to speak of ‘abundant chaos’ and said the
four elements are pleasure, pain, intention and resistance. The saying ‘The polis falling out with itself
looks for enemies everywhere’ is attributed to him and also the fragment ‘Heraclitus was wrong when
he said that the sun will not overstep his measure because everything does’.
‘Speaking up, talking down.’ This remark, supposedly referring to Plato’s epistemology, is cited as
the reason for Dichotomedes’ expulsion from the Academy.
Dichotomedes also said ‘The void fills [itself] as smoke [does].’ And: ‘disparateness is only
sometimes disparity.’
Last Few Days
Los. Stardust she stopgo frontier entrance. The struggle continues. It was nearly twenty years before I
heard from Sister Martyr again. Spauding overnight: Danse Macabre, Nether Edge. How to beat the
poll tax: Babel. I’m sorry Serenade To The Stars was too lost too. At least or last I know I am writing
what is already written. Accounting is an art and involves interpretation but a classic slowdown is not
a recession: picture repetition rates anybody’s lifetime as value added history I do and don’t recognise
as decades of the twentieth century I seem to have survived.
Del Adorno Corporal
Wrong which means I have to admit I stole the photo of the clock with the initials JE on a Tuesday
night when I was tired of ideas. The name wasn’t Martyr although mine by any other I could be
Midnight. A pun’s a written-out’s blast or boast weapon in or upon class or crass struggle. There are
certainly cases where U and A will do when no other vowel would except an I on the cusp or in
conjunction run to ruin ran to rain. A debit is usually busy as exchequer credit. ‘These lines and AH’:
to picture the event set off this no long distance up to line 4 and draw a curve through so that the
waterfall runs from hence into the river underground. Our garden at Nether Edge is a picture and so
thanks for the use of your emblem library. Sperror sends his best while Iconismus says farewell not to
Shelley but the firewall.
Ideas for Names for this Unpronounceable and Tagger-like Something
Bzuarb. Actual Time. Exciter Shunt Field. Lizopard. Longitudinal fissure. Chreec. Contradiction or
konkretedichtung. Synchronising Pulses. Black. White. Utilometal or Alphavitch Carte Blanche. The
shadow of Blackpool Tower. The shadows of three gulls and a ferris wheel. A curve through simple
words. A leaf or a starfish seen through a broken window at the Church of the English Martyrs.
Gargoracle. Transverse tree stone waterfall blockhaus: Descent by steps or Contact their headquarters
at once. Wroting. Barzabbea. Nathemata obpact as if Solomon Starfish. Ord pix. Obit. Copyang. The
difference between sound and ssound. The cutting-room ceiling or the ferris wheel says farewell to its
shadow. Sign writing only: ‘Criticise’. Wrong.
Spauding ‘XY’
difference between sound and ssound. Once he’d decided on the name ‘America’ Martin
Waldseemüller started to think about Virgil. Just imagine all the names America could have easily
been called but it’s no good dwelling on. The parallel event set off from hence into your emblem
firewall having noticed it was copious when outside unconstant.
‘First traveller from Dismay,’ Beddoes told his notebook on 10th November 1821. ‘33 Coventry
Street.’
‘The expectation determines the event,’ said Dichotomedes.
From the Ship of Fools Logbook: Voyage Coupon 54436
‘Dichotemedes [was] of Anticyra in Phocis [where] black hellebore grows [which] is the cure for
insanity … and gave rise to proverbial expressions [like] Avi-ucipas oe or naviget m iticyram.’
animas mortuorum simultanes
animas mortuorum simulantes
Pseudo-Mercurialis
1. ‘Certain mouths of hell and places appointed [Mons Hecla] where the dead sometimes talk with the
living’
2. The hunting of the lizopard resumed
3. Magic politely professed or what they call gargoyles when they’re at home. Unicorns, voluptas, etc.
‘Opening the gut we found a black-letter bible and several other volumes, Browne, Burton, etc., in
folio.’
4. ‘exceeding the mandrake’s cerebellum with weather abridgement and downstream stigmata’
5. Harpye (pin) dotal. Cyclopean. Magnetite. Borax. Ichneumon. Forgetful and thematic.
6. Numerations of hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorus atoms.
7. POISON! Melampode, Setter-wort, Setter-grass, Bear’s-foot, Christmas Rose. ‘No marvel it has a
sullen condition.’ Myrrha, Musae, etc. ‘A charm like mandrake wine.’
riptide with reptiles

(A is for Hunter where
L is for Cat-Root)
one fell swoon or swoop?
SOUTH AM STRICT
MOUTH LOWER FERRY
02DEC2003 PREPAID
After-image
with a label saying ‘England’.

‘Destory at once.’
I’ll try not to think there’s nothing instead of it inside.
‘Substance, or the unthought.’Aristotle considered this untranslatable remark one of Dichotomedes’

‘rebukes’ to philosophy. ‘Contaminated with purity’ was another.
A diary without dates might not want dimension although uniform as cuneiform and precipitous as
precious by definition.
‘Substance, or confusion,’ said Dichotomedes, ‘still itself.’
So much for waterfalls sketched from the life or imagined.

Poetry when jumping the firewall rhymes.
A longueur’s any lounger’s pitfall.
The objectionable flickering as Zilver as a frozen lake with a label attached that week there was a lull
which says ‘Resign’.
‘A shows pictures and reads the words,’ Ken Edwards reports in They Didn’t Go Home. ‘Fire sucked
by wind,’ writes a Tonalist. ‘We take the measure of it. Screen and wind and I.’ New mazes which
was being avoiding. ‘Read him,’ the Tonalist continues. ‘Read you.’ What a long running
commentary the self is. ‘Lyric intimate.’ Wall to wall coverage on Cogito Live. ‘The cat-rabbit or
chameleon,’ writes the Alphabet Assessor, ‘should not be mistaken for the lizopard.’
Kent JOHNSON
& Alexandra PAPADITSAS
from The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek, Skanky Possum, 2003
THE SEVEN MUSES OF THE BOAT-MAKING DISTRICT1
If I ever see a ghost, I hope it is Brotachos of Alkmena2.

Because I wouldn’t be afraid. I would look at him
Floating there in his lily-shaped bubble, and then I would
Fall asleep and pick up exactly where I’d stopped in
My dream, just as if I’d never left it.
If I ever go to the Cyclades, I hope it is Samos, in the last century.

Because Ibykos3 lives there. And I would track him down
To offer him a bottle of liqueur from the future,
So to drink with him and gaze at his incredibly strange face,
Which is remarkably like Brotachos’. And I would look at this face
And think, all at once, about the whole Constellation of Dioskouroi. 4
And if I ever go to heaven, I wish there to be more

Hummingbirds there than there are here.
And I hope there is a tiny golden kind.
Because when this kind beats its impossible wings so fast,
The sound of Brotachos’ voice comes out, making every poet-angel
Want so much to be so good to every other one.
And if I could ever do something all over again in the City of Athens,
It would be to go to Brotachus’ apartment in the Boat-making District.
Because it is like a boat, and Korax and Markos5 and the one whose
Name on the list is number thirty are also there. And we will read
Poetry to the music of Demostratis, sure in the knowledge that
Storms and other dangerous weathers will not harm us.
And if I should ever give someone flowers again,
I hope to give them to Brotachos of Alkmena.
Because once when I brought him flowers, he put them
In a vase in the middle of his seven bronze muses,
And he closed his eyes and bent towards them, as if in prayer,
For a long time, and I saw two tears fall into the flowers.
Therefore, if I ever give him flowers again, I hope their

Aroma to be like a drug, unbounded by time.
Because we will sit together on his goatskin-covered
Couch, and look at a long scroll of Antimenidas’ etchings.
And Brotachos will move his hand over all the parallel worlds curled
Up in there, making me want to fall asleep, and pick up exactly
Where I’d stopped in my dream, just as if I’d never left it.
And because I hope that when I wake, my head will be on

His shoulder, and his sleeping head will be resting
Lightly upon mine. And the scroll will still be open.
- Megaklys. The provenance and dates of the author of this

extraordinary poem are unknown, though the reference to Ibykos
“in the last century” would date it ca. fourth century. Intact papyrus
discovered in Alexandria in the Montazah Palace find of 1998. No
other works by him are known to exist.
1. Of course, the classical number is nine.
2. Nothing is known of this figure.
3. Great court poet of the tyrant Polykrates, from sixth/fifth century, BC.
4. The constellation of good fortune for sailors, suggesting that Megaklys may have been a
fisherman or mariner of some kind.
5. Neither of these two figures is known, nor are Demostratis or Antimenidas.

James KEERY
The Red-Legged Sandpiper
Although Montagu has done us the honour to name this bird

Tringa Bewickii, we have some reason to suspect that it may prove
To be the Ruff in one of its many diversified states of plumage.
Stratford Mill
‘Poor Tinney, so
Tenacious of property
He would rather
See his picture
On his own walls!
We are all a prey

To imaginary ills
But no man ever
Had such alarming
Paroxysms as yours!
As for my wrath
Against you or
Contempt for you
It is the shadow
Of a moonbeam.’
I have related
no imaginary ills
I live by shadows
To me shadows
Are realities
A Poet’s Poet
In the 1970s Carmi seemed to his friends to have achieved

Happiness. But his tranquil domestic circumstances
Did not serve his poetry. Separating from Tamara
And marrying a younger woman
Suited his poetic requirements: he took
Literally as well as metaphorically the dictum
Of Robert Graves (quoted in one of his poems)
That ‘the muse is the eternal other woman’.
Marot’s famous poem could provide his epitaph
(And I don’t think he would have been displeased):
‘Amour tu as été maitre: je t’ai servi sur tous les dieux!’
Pope Reflects
The gloomy verdure of Stonor, and then the shades of the evening overtook me;
The moon rose in the clearest sky I ever saw. Nothing could have more
Of that melancholy, which once used to please me, than that day’s journey.
I conformed myself to the college hours, and was rolled up in books.

I lay in one of the most ancient, dusky parts of the University,
And was as dead to the world as any hermit of the desert.
If anything was awake or alive in me, it was a little vanity;

For I found myself received with a sort of respect
Which this idle part of mankind, the learned, pay to their own species.
Methinks I do very ill, to leave the only place where I make a good figure,
And from seeing myself seated on the most conspicuous shelves of a library
To venture out again, into the sun, into the mirrors and lights of Bolton Street.
How Many Streams Can You Rake

With Your Copper Rake?
The nets have come up empty, leaving us free to imagine

What the object was. Who crayoned large, red slogans
On my body as I was sleeping? The dream
Would bleed away if I opened my eyes. This longing
Beyond you is love, and no cause for sadness.
This Station in the Woods,

How was it Built?
The oak, that has to flourish to exist,

That has to stand and change like traffic lights,
Is coolly disregarded by the reeds
For whom twilight is mirrored more than shadowed;
Autumn in the water, not the leaves;
Dreams not always rigorously curtailed.
Boxing Day
This mud always gives me

la nostalgie de la neige.
Astrid LAMPE
from De Memen van Lara, Querido, 2002
hier wil ik mijn plas wel afgeven
…een balzaal
voor mij alleen
er kleeft iets zoets onder mijn voet

(smile…!)
je bent een blij land in ontwikkeling plaagt hij

ramen rondom
je kunt dat gevoel voelen met je prettigste stel laarzen aan
er prikken- nee er dánsen stofjes in de lucht
hij kreeg ze door maar ik kom hier kissie kissie bang
de as van mijn geliefde toch niet ophalen?
hij kreeg ze door, die teksten

kopkracht
bij rouw
zachtjes fluiten
alleen zíj weet haarfijn
wat een mens met je voorheeft
alleen zij weet de weg naar de laatste waterpoel
ingerukt mars
jank met de maan
alleen zij schenkt verkoeling-

droeg je sinds het hoge water!
kent je kopkracht
woog je schoon
alleen zij onthield deze plaats
om het even welk bladerdek
om het even welke boom

Chris McCABE
a piglet imperialism
people with lollipops: watching:

fingers covered eyes horny lizards
it could cease to be –
reputation become a sandwich voucher.
for tony’s palpitations
heart rigged to a monitor

slower it goes
fitter you are
lack of intelligence
will not ignite the body
into action
in response to tube
metal adaptor
so beating faster
also measures
brain’s parameters
wheel invented to transport the carcass

& only then metachanged into a symbol of fate
boethius the bingocaller –
but enough
let us eat first & later, ruminate

dance of the victorian remote control
clop – clop – clop – clop
snuff
snuff
snuff
the victorians ran at night as well,

only slower
two on the corner can COMMUNE

in imagined glass nodes of the street
& still – for tonight at least – not be arrested
sex/city
dialectic
has replaced
desire/death
but when
the show’s sound
disappeared
due to “technical
problems”
we heard wind
rattle pipes
like the last
kicked heels
in a danse macabre
morning you are winking into a boiling kettle I wanted to warn you it might burn but wanted to see if
you found what you were looking for
bull’s nose
of the double doors
signposted
twice
with “FIRE DOORS”
& “PRIVATE”
walked
waytowards
wanting
what
wasn’t
onanism of fire
liking itself
more
than others
“housing-estate suave”
snouted authority
rubber corridors
pornography hazed
reproductive art
elevator, broken
we walk
into a pilgrim’s
palm of advice
against the grain
as diced chicken
“what it is is
life is life
so this is this, it’s
not that”
once again,
thanks john
a mid-century letter from the seaside
go go gadget mindfuck
is it someone, when the door opens

worse in afternoon light
dishwatering cubed glass –
hinge, breeze, slope?
I will shop for us today

simple provisions
then do wheelies up the highstreet
with no hands for bags –
& tonight, eat falling sand from a hairbrush

Anthony MELLORS
Elephant and Castle
the man at the bus stop looks like

Emmanuel Levinas
sometimes one is minded

to look beyond appearance
the difference
between Pinnochio and Pinochet
calls to mind a bloody hollow

the scent of crimplene badger
The absolute state of movement
It is a modest piece
typical for its date anywhere
in a small provincial place. Try
the door leading out across
offal gardens to a puddled
warehouse marking the county’s
edge. Do not
be afraid to work
sideways along this franchise
to paths where branch lines
once cut clunch valleys
spread with yellow trefoil,
all manner of creosote
nightmares having burnt
their way through
established routes,
grit heels treading
wood avens
schooled at price war

intervals, pure arsewipe
theories of trickledown
left in a postbox in Chepstow
Abandoned note on twisted trees
a walk round the estate

shows something amiss
modernity adored by
a consortium of brickies
the sunflower eclipsed

‘I is a crystal’
one side of the obelisk
frozen behind a uPVC shield

glazed expressions
which is no pun anymore than
suffocating sleepless nights

rash of desperate memory
faces turned to the rubbed
anaglypta o god o god
Geraldine MONK
Mary Through the Looking Glass
Mmms-wrens sin sweetie.

Bugaboo my lugs hear it.
Map my eyes in you.
Arrest.
Toe-holds. Carpe diem.
Grrr-masques.
The long-n the short-n the tall.
Bless
O
Bess
ma curfew out this mirror flew through.
Wiregrass cuts a barb

Greeters far –I mean nooky-aye
it’s a tear before bed every neet
terse up-river through yr
veer o soot-sheen
gat a cool clear.
Inched near larking norm.

Ma breath almost barred ma
entry.
Couldn’t kill a fish the gasping
mouth of mirror is endless
gawp of sprat.
Bed heirs ya sad fries of carnal feast

ya looms of misery to un-wombed
posterity.
Do we not lobotomise worrisome fruit?
Destination dressed with
nat’l plosions.
Where be the belly-button to press me out.
Ferryman ya nabob let me snorer till noon

a-sleep out ma alien share of time weft.
Beware le wrung hands
clasped
with glory ahh ayemen.
Ma I I enter you fringe-dressed.

Oui! How they worry back home.
Furore biddy nannykins
in omnefarious ‘larmings:
if you call that a-dressing
mi missus I’ll ouster
thee now.
Meniscus amours
somnolent.
Bibliomancer learns undoer news.

Beware m-e-mirror look out.
Minnow quicksilver down the
poisonous poisson
with two faces they blame on
women’s wee
what’s new pussy cat
whoooooa whooooaaa.
Nil-be-mouth-breath.
Am almost bald as a billiard
so le swim’ll win well in a Buxton
orgasmic spas me hopes.
Ah mariner of mi mirror it’s
as much as water can do
creaseless as hot tea
me could murder
alopecia.
Werms fer b-lunches.

What am I talking?
Shouldn’t have run him through
with my looking horn so her
that must be obeyed follows
me here in her hopalong
queeny ways
clop clip-perty clip-perty .
Bah spoof!
Magnum of champers none.
Which witch dreamt it?
Fabulous monsters ma bottom
a-feely
my eye runs red and linear.
I crave a rigadoon.
G-frosh–n-ice.
Umm not much hot meatier than
I can tell but modesty and metal
slip out of hand.
Shy or sly may steal a remorse
that uppers
rampant.
Goosier ma steps through

looking you. The queen of plum cakes
ruckles my corsets
a weaponry beyond exocets
scoring time fleshed territory.
Misericord men nibble mean
leaves
the craziest paved path
engraved in grey matter.
Diversions of exorbitant unicorns.

Hoofing hung of chessmen.
Fleur de lis and fauna fabula.
Woos and ogles.
Go earth just so – aaw
here comes gruel to snap me out.
Delicacies girdle faux pas.

Ginger queen of subtraction
take loaf by knife -
a distemper lobed sadder
than sooner.
Escape is fraught.
Appearances bleed to edginess.
I will not a tuckle look
even through the glass.
Ike Mboneni MUILA
ISICAMTHO
first published in Botsotso Johannesburg 1997
In the beginning there was a word and a languages in the place of cake flour,
word was across the word canvas. Anchor yeast and baking powder. I take
Isicamtho (so called Tsotsi-taal) is a Venda, Sotho, Tsonga, Zulu, English and
township communication fire works lingo Afrikaans as incredible variants for the
which originated from the backyard of the food of love.
then Sophiatown to Emzini, the present
day Pimville. It spread all over the It is not a sin to be extra careful and
townships of Soweto, as far as the present- selective. You cannot expect to come up
day suburban areas, as a language of with a delicious piece of a pie if you do
identity amongst the city dwellers and not carefully select how to go about your
people from rural areas. One could always recipe. Take the word ‘work’. In tsotsi-
realise who was a person from rural areas taal, it is Chisela or Julate; chisel, a tool
amongst city dwellers by their use of the for hard labour. Uya ringa, tsotsi-taal
lingo, which was discovered by the meaning, he or she is speaking. It is a
Spoilers Gangsters and the Msomi word taken from English: to ring. Greeting
Gangsters. I grew up to hate the feeling words like hi, in tsotsi-taal, hola! or ola!
inside the trees and all kinds of plants. Come over, zwakala Nganeno, tsotsi-taal;
They do not think like human beings. cover hierso. Hurry up, tsotsi-taal; spinner.
Trees and plants in the wildness simply Wash in tsotsi-taal, splasha. Other
wait for osmosis to take place inside the examples are: Slyser: run away, bad, bitter.
roots, for trees to grow and spread, which Uya slyser: he is running away, he is bad.
is highly impossible with people and Brakate; a friend, a brother. Brakateskaap;
language within the creative writing arena. friendship.
Iringas came to be my vibrant fountain Isicamtho is an innovatory substantive

identity in my blood veins. Irrespective of language of poetry. Isicamtho differs from
differences in taste of whatever images tap one place to the other. In my bloodstream
many a creative writing, readers and fountain pen isicamtho set me free from
speakers alike will eventually allow petty language barriers. Isicamtho a
Isicamtho a room in a society at large, as a language on its own which draws from and
language on its own, not only as a matter brings together all South African
of separate entities. languages that kept people apart – it has
brought me to an open-ended journey
Otherwise, take for example – you want to of self-determination, self-discovery, ex-
prepare a delicious pie dish with all the ploring the magical power behind words.
ingredients and spices. You need to have Witty Kofifi-taal never entertains half
the main ingredients. In my case it is moja dry meal without salt.
Merry my babie Merry my babie
(translation)
Merry my babie Merry my babie

like whisky like whisky
Jack D Jack D
whisky Jack D whisky Jack D
waterfront scheme braai waterfront scheme roast
Jobber gate tande blush Jobber teeth gate blush
skholana appletiser cool drinks appletiser
spicy salad carry chips spicy salad carry chips
merry my babie merry my babie
like whisky like whisky
Jack D Jack D
dimmer joe dimmer joe

(translation)
dimmer joe dimmer joe

shwele baba over you father
shwele nkosiyama over you my lord
ama dimmers line them dimmers line
vole verse open en close full of verse open and close
chapter page edlawathi gazi chapter page home my blood
hola seven halo seven
with rocco ba rocco with rocco ba rocco
spectacles and sunglasses design spectacles and sunglasses design
bly jy ’n ou manotcher you stay the same clever
skuwet under cosset covered under cosset
rocco ba rocco rocco ba rocco
can prevent disgusting can prevent disgusting
windblown dust from your eyes windblown dust from your eyes
and direct sunlight heat and direct sunlight heat
from a first floor tinker bell from a first floor tinker bell
pondokie plate wasekhaya hovel plate home buddy
try rocco ba rocco try rocco ba rocco
and you won’t regret and you won’t regret
your summer seasons your summer seasons
Joan RETALLACK
from Memnoir, Wild Honey Press, 2002
Curiosity and the Claim to Happiness

Studies have shown that the brain
prefers unpredictable pleasures.
Present Tense
it’s said that it happens even in nature e.g. during the childhood the mother might
have (had) a taste for film noir and take(n) the child along
my machine is hooked up to my machin things inaccessible to the precise methods of

e.g. a Brazilian bookmobile being hijacked in a dark underground garage fiction is
precisely what they now call non-fiction too get a bit too presonal i.e. Eurydice my
dark darling don’t worry I can bear your not looking at me she cry(ed) out i.e. hoping
it (was) true
(now) (here) together in the mix of the modern metropolis Rio Vienna Paris Tokyo
Moscow Hong Kong Lagos New York Bombay London Mumbai he and she both feel
close to the idealized neuron in the book
******
some of the diffuse sensations of early childhood may still surprise us as we consider
their names e.g. joy frustration shame anxiety love rage fear anger wonder curiosity
disgust surprise longing humor pride self-respect fear but not terror fear but not horror
the mother however might not like surprises e.g. wanting to know for how many
generations a Negro in the bloodlines can produce a throwback the word is memory
the child recalls this use of memory does not know what to say for a very long time:
The soul is inwardness, as soon as and insofar as it is no longer outwardness; it is
memoria, insofar as it does not lose itself in curiositas.
otherwise one could ask at any moment e.g. in what story does an uninvited goddess
walk in and roll a golden ball down the hall or why not enjoy the story of lovers in the
same vein from different centuries but in the same story from different worlds but in
the same story I write down my dreams this is probably not one of them i.e. for a very
long time the child want(ed) more than she could say to not want more than she could
say i.e. impossible according to any simple formula for mirroring formulas
if e.g. but for the accidental clause the swerve of curiosity on the monkey bars the flash-
bulb memory the wall of fire outside the window and or something as vague as living in
time i.e. for a time near what seem to be near things swept into the stream of self-
translation in the coincidental flow of events near disregarded syllables suddenly audible
vol up sudden outburst of song sudden Ha it’s too funny how funny it is to feel
sometimes and not others how to remotely sense a sweet violence in the brevity i.e. the
spilt second glance
without yards of shimmering adjectives

description: is description possible can a sunrise be described by yards of
shimmering adjectives
While the curate was saying this, the lass in boy’s clothing stood as if spell- bound,
looking first at one and then at another, without moving her lips or saying a word, like a
rustic villager who is suddenly shown some curious thing that he has never seen
before…she gave a deep sigh and broke her silence at last….Doing her best to restrain
her tears, she began the story of her life, in a calm, clear voice.
******
without the carefully constructed container:

story: is story possible: can a life even a portion of a life be contained in a story:
would songs be better to repair the brain
when if it’s curiosity that draws attention to curiosity even the other animals like us
even in nature if for only the space of time e.g. at the watering hole e.g. during those
times when it’s too wide or too narrow for ambiguity the range of genres might now
include humor and but or horror even (then) there
this voltage through the body is brought on by the senses senses strictly speaking in
logic nothing is accidental the world divides us into seekers after facts seekers after
gold dig up much earth and find little
or less than a port royal stain it’s super being natural not wishing to symbolize the
wish to return to feel as much at home in e.g. a fortunate sentence as in i.e. an
unfortunate century
Catherine SIMMONDS
Three Movements for Spring
After the wind

has swallowed
a whole day
into its billowing
bellowing sides,
and no sound is to be
distinguished:
not tree, nor rush, nor car
passing through water;
out of dusk
blooms stillness,
and from inside it –
birdsong
like mercury
rising up
through
a thermometer.
So night comes on.
Coming home
the banks
are caught
speeding silver
before the headlights,
somewhere between
night’s monochrome eye
and the sudden halogen,
like old snapshots,
clumsily tinted:
a primrose flashes
almost yellow,
fades back
to silver
under the black
printed ash,
whose bare branches
have caught
the first crescent moon
in weeks.
The wind is back.

Day breaks
on an image
already in motion,
framed by the window,
trees yield up
wheeling birds,
the leylandii rippling
away from itself,
freakish yellow
under a leaden sky.
A magpie
ducks beneath gusts,
tail balancing
the apex of the house.
Two now,
plotting a next move,
where to let go
is to arrive
unexpectedly
early.
Patterns
Fleet clouds
relieved of snow
passing in
January’s
sharp light.
Three coloured
houses
repeating themselves,
patterns on china
on nerves
on ice.
Sunday March 30th 2003
Lines from Mnemosyne, by Ivan V. Lalic
A prayer rosary ticks

marking time,
accumulating the smoothness
of words
repeated,
more than remembered –
engrained
in a wood
that rubbed down
still reveals the same drifts of grain,
as sand laid down in a wind,
filing over the scores of war –
of men and their bodies
blown over with sand,
with ‘time lines’,
with prayer.
What function memory?

When to look outside is to see only
the now of blossom,
the cafe terrace scrubbed down –
Sunday
where bells peal
and birds move between
flushed gardens.
Remember this then –

that trees bloom
even in war time
and people scrub cafe tables
to make way for lunchtime diners
between raids
after smashed glass
and the stench of explosives.
‘our task
is to remember, to deliver blows;
the task of the peach is to blossom.’
Collapse the two

and the peach becomes
an agent of memory.
There is nothing unconscious
in the opening of blossom during war,
or a tree
set alight
in the suburbs of a ruined city.
If you came to ask

about the pieces of this
that make no sense,
I would probably ask first:
Which tree blooms in Iraq
in March?
Esther TELLERMANN
from Geurre Extrême, Flammarion, 1999
Guerres
vous rapportaient aux songes
ponts continuaient les séries
de glaise en glaise
vers feu central
et bourreau.
Puis
routes tremblées
vers les revers lumineux
où Vous s’écarte.
Nuit mentale
s’unit aux marées
aux pistes du milieu.
Bouches me rapportent
aux eaux saumâtres
et voguions
“vers un trou d’étoiles”.
Eaux fendues
tournent autour
de celui
qui scella
une langue
de 4 boues.
Rosée préciserait
votre nuque
lataniers
linges de jasmin.
Ceci
avant notre aube.
Avant
votre double nuit
d’où jaillissent
les interprétations
les revers lumineux
images
de 4 bords
où nous fûmes.
Hans THILL
PARADOX aller Erhebung der Boden

gibt nach. Wir legen uns beiseite:
ein holziges Etwas, das beim Rudern
stört. Zu stehen es steigt bis an
die Stirn. Sich nichts anmerken
zu lassen aufrecht in den Booten zu
treiben während das Liegende ver-
schwimmt. Mit dem Handrücken gegen
die Stirn der Nachbarin feucht
oder bereits an die Strömung verkauft.
Sich aufzusparen die eigene Hitze
nicht anrechnen zu lassen
zu kauen zu hören wie das rauscht.
Mit der Nase alles zu räumen
immer die Allgemeinheit im Ohr
zu schlucken wie es kommt von unten
klopft sich seitwärts in die Knie
drückt. Das Lineal in den Einge-
weiden zu liebkosen zu denken:
willkommen zu fragen: schmeckt denn
das Treibholz nach uns
Ben WATSON
(OUT TO LUNCH)
Bent in the post, dished and smashed, triumvirate sheepskin

Paddled in boats of woad, paraded in sharktooth trivia mouse mats
The definitive article looming over Hollywood, sent-up pity
Virginal distracted disshevelled hairyface ejactamenta
The licky tongue pits swollen with saliva, silvery gonad verses
Top squeak emblazoned, the corporal pitstop hate change molasses
Tried-tone editions in slick furze hop entity trademark discourse
Slipping tasty smacks on rosy cushions meant for beefeaters
Toadstool hemlock veg stew conscious likely sweetmeat parping
And parping, the velocity motorschool parping, the partridge
The hysterical of Dolphy telling me zigzag nonterminal bonanza
Brainshark suitskin kipper tie unbelievable host farm
Midboot saltflat wrysome argument, Jeff Hilson
Talking like dancing, nose loam stickslap shodslip addendum
Frame rage pontificate retro-styled finbone uneasiness
Sharpscaled Renton-features lord discus and parping
More view greedy loincloth avalanche soaken syrup uptent
When the ingle-angle clipjoint incises restless cameo whatsits
Prenderbasket inner tingle suckquake oolith happenstance
In disagreeable leotard esemplastic readymade universals
Carving loosely doubled-up cry-me-after riverine mudboats
The length extending dislocate of razorwire moonplace
Camp death inner crime baby baby parping, with onions
Fetch from far field ausländisch corrugate
Hardknuckle wisteria cake-tin rendezvous hamlet
Push point neo-mist cardiac hardstart, with electricity
Nougat finish-line and parping, resonate imbalance
Heaving into tidalwave lampoon sugarfree cocktrap
Tarpaulin majorscale shiftsock sewn in poodle pinafore
Force-five wristwatch haircream cadenza, the
Beautiful clarifoil deed poll resumé paintpot delta view
On far-filched nevermore partridge and parping
Tone pop raggamuffin innuendo velvet cease
Jerkin astronaut petulant wolverine regiment
Hoping paper Hopi lanterns, utmost tissue wrap-up
Creased reminder gussets lampwire festoon party
Carnival and parping, quaint dot turncoat
briar bliar bliar, and parping, inkmott marker
II
Fern bake contaminate, harried hibiscus

Leaning extremely in the measly gale
Ribbons of flesh pushed past the fuming incense stencher
Problematic hellebore leafmould surveillance antiquity
The weak arguments draped like cobwebs on your shoulderblades
The cornhole webcore scoffs mouth mews like Bonjela
Junk of history stapled on bus line cockcrow soothsayer anguish
Robot mic-stand rigmarole Burger King Wrigley gum literature
A spoonful of Rob Holloway more than enough to clone the bastard
Reasonable creamcake suckquack scintillate mandrake
Perversely pursed in a lippy froth, ant acid foam war
Triplicate knee-bend christfuck attitude jealous face
Pining green hemisphere green long green district line
Etiolated in yellow flash tuck pain hamper grease eyesore
A beam optic coruscate, the slivers of rectitude
Erect SWPness effigy ragwort hosepipe double-up monster lark
Strummed feature-writer hurt load les tristes trying trying
Pin point pivot Fourier breadbin phalanx bridge rising tone
Splattered digit spastic self ju-jitsu image bankrobber
Rubber teats in weak milky tea foodbrain salient tie
Dribbled salt seasick handwrack hand gnome pittance pittance
Red green nose face blue zero find more exit light
written for performance with Pleasure-Drenching Improvers and Cul-De-Qui

Collective at an Esemplastic Tuesday, 16-iii-2004
REVIEWS & ARTICLES
Betting It All: Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager

University of California Press, 2003
ISBN 0–520-21839-6
Every poetics is a consequential form of life.
Joan Retallack’s recent collection of essays (University of California Press,

2003) is a tour-de-force of neo-humanist thought, a welcome intervention in the chilly
epoch of the post-human. While I’m generally skeptical of new terminology, I’ll grant
that “poethics,” a term Retallack coined in the late 1980s when she was working with
John Cage, might be useful as a marker for the generative collision of poetic form and
its locating ethos. Rather than defining the term narrowly, Retallack unfolds its
implications through the poetry and essays of formally innovative, often transgeneric,
writers from Montaigne to Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Tina Darragh, Leslie
Scalapino, and Rosmarie Waldrop. In the process, she argues for the flexibility of
literary form and the necessity of writing beyond genre, or at the very least revising
inherited literary taxonomies.
The wager ventured here is a contractual ethics inseparable from acts of
composition, where risk bleeds into a poem’s sonic structure, troubles its surface, its
situation, even its authorial intentions. A poethical wager is not so much a new way of
writing as a recognition of the forces of undoing that accompany acts of making. It is
an acknowledgment of the powerful contract of literary production and consumption
with all its attendant ethical and aesthetic possibility. (Yes, “possibility” is more the
point than “responsibility” here; the term is descriptive rather than prescriptive.)
The Poethical Wager is not just about these conditions but is, in its own right,
a poethical text. Retallack’s own intellectual wager stems, in part, from her
recognition of “the decline of the amateur intellectual and the Enlightenment ideal of
the mind flourishing through experiment and other kinds of imaginative play,” a loss
that the contemporary academy can not quite make up for, with its “chronic
ambivalence between authority and novel thought.” While the pressure toward
professionalization within the new economy narrows the realm of debate both within
and outside the academy, Retallack proposes intellection in extremis, writing as “cliff
note.” And though literacy in the broadest sense is increasingly privatized, Retallack
insists on literature as a “public conversation” that, at its best, “radically questions the
ethos of the discourses from which it springs.” As for the occasion of poetry: “To rise
above the occasion is to miss it.” Poems are their own occasions; viable, autonomous
life forms; collateral everyday engagements with untamed play, with the political and
social realities of our species, with everything and “nothing”; the chord of Cageian
silence that helps compensate for the “stupefying global.”
Retallack’s focus on potentiality is telling; unlike most discussions of the
ethical concerns of literature, here the end is not always clear. Rather, it’s the very
tension within literary innovation that makes it a viable means of philosophical
investigation. Hence the focus on transgeneric and hybrid forms as expanding our
access to increasingly complex patterns of thought. Along the way, one gains not
only the pleasure of linguistic play but the sense that such play both serves aesthetic
resistance and, in its affirmation of the essential qualities of being human, forms the
very basis of cultural transformation on a larger scale. “What,” Retallack asks, “ is the
work of human culture but to make fresh sense and meaning of the reconfiguring
matter at the historical-contemporary intersection we call the present?” In attending to
the potential energy within poetic form, our focus shifts to process rather than
product, trade rather than commodity. Open form becomes a celebration of mutability
and endurance, less a matter of refinement than of beautiful coincidence. In this way,
poetry performs its own natural history.
While these essays are driven by Retallack’s passion for the potential of the
present moment, the strength of her writing is in its historical depth, a quality that
reinforces rather than contradicts its contemporaneity. It is the recognition of this
depth, the recognition of predecessors, that accounts for the importance of collectivity
and complication in this work: “The contemporary doesn’t leave history behind; it
further complicates it.” Eschewing the conventional critical quest for isolated genius
and formal virtuosity, Retallack presents us with compositional occasions, poems as
connecting points to systems of meaning that, like coastline fractals, form a pattern so
large we rarely see its dizzy telescopic depth. With no “end” in sight, poetry is
usefully situated by a repeated recalibration of sustainability and open-ended risk.
Retallack writes that composition is an act of “presentness.” In this Steinian system of
pointing, we ride out Zeno’s arrow as it locates yet inevitably points beyond us.
Elizabeth Willis
OMNIVOYANCE
Samuel Mallin, in his prodigious book “ART LINE THOUGHT”, written over a period
of 20 years and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1996, in
cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, actuates a
reflexive meditative quiescence and dazzlingly insightful, existential and hermeneutical
phenomenology which ranges panoramically over art history, making use of its
hypersophistocated yet completely accessible transitions through eidos, the formal
content of a culture. Mallin begins with the radiant Korai/Kouroi, male and
female sculptures of prehistoric Greece and proceeds through Minoan/Nazcan pottery
and then on to the sculpture and dance-theatre of our eminent contemporaries: Richard
Serra and Pina Bausch, respectively. Mallin, in the pure immediate and refluent
hiddenness of qualities within the works themselves, generates a sublime union of
biocentric ideas and flexuous intricacy much in harmony with string and feminist
theories, beyond the confines of psycholinguistically bound operations of intellect.
Invigorated by what ultimately does exist in each artwork, Mallin offers us a rivulose
hermeneutic and willowy epoché or suspended judgement, by way of that which shows
itself, in itself; revealing the inside of an inherent dynamism and soul of an art object, to
challenge degenerative facticity and obliterating hegemonies of regularity with their
peculiar difficulties and manifest harshness; our plight within the ineluctable
predominance and transgression of science and monologicality, master narratives,
machines and money, in particular, linear analysis and androcentrism anathema to
holisms. Thus Mallin conceives of nothing less than the lighter and finer transcendence
of learned ignorance, apotheosis of irresponsible will, false vacuums, contrived pieties
and dualities, in a thorough revisioning of our fibered-over grund or ground of being, to

reach a theosis1 which unifies all epochs. Time pretends to flow.
Naturally, Mallin does not simply posit yet one more imbalance but rather, evinces a
moral philosophy and equilibration of which modes of being thoughtfully harmonize
with the beauty and absolute necessity of line which is “the preeminent example of a
transcendental structure that is visible and sensuous through and through and, thus,
belongs to the vision of the body rather than to cognition or reason”. That is, the postulate
of a gracious ontopoietic sinuosity similar in spirit, characteristic and natural to
geodynamical processes such as wind, fire, seismicity, electromagnetic waves, water and
earth tides to name but a few, and already begun in art, physics, hypertext, complex
systems, non-linear sciences, the throb of consciousness, etc.
ART LINE THOUGHT itself is no mere mental clarity but a consummate/immaculate art
of understanding chiasmata, occurring in the depths of the osmotic, limpid depth, in what
is generally regarded as evanescent and beyond the known, to further the rigors of vision
itself while simultaneously urging us to reintuit our conclusions. Merleau-Ponty and
Heidegger are frequently cited and have contributed much to the delicacy of Mallin’s
perceptual thought process. By his gathering back and holding forth animum reflectere2,
from the widest possible vistas, in bare essences, he locates that which is not expressible
linearly; a broadened magnetism during the process of cognition; ontological coincidence
of agency and human presence, in a comfort of discontinuous space auspicious to the
breadth of moral character, living relevance and social enlightenment potential, for
within this particular schema of organoleptic3, creative dislocation we may ascertain a
1
Theosis, theiosis, theopoiesis, Gr., the removal of all otherness and all difference,
and is the resolution of all things into one thing, a resolution that is also the imparting
of one thing into all other things.
2
Animum reflectere, L., literally to bend back the mind: reflectere and reflexio, to
bend back and bending back.
vivid, palpable presence of sensory fields…“the phenomenological begins always where
scientific fact breaks off”, which when mirrored and conjugated against our total life
experience, contributes to its expansion, finding out how much value there is in a good.
Mallin exquisitely does not interfere, but with the acuity of an angel, listens, watches,
and allows things observed to reveal their own meaning and by his passionate attention
in the primordial bosom of common things brings forward the traits that bind us together
without surrender of individuality. ART LINE THOUGHT holds the socio-political wasp
by the tail to reveal the coruscating freedom of the human project. A mordant,
reaching and merciless analysis of human character from within the bristling walls of
Lebenswelt (life-world), Mallin intuits from a prereflective order of things to quicken and
transmit essential insight to the structure of reality affording us social utility, value and
emotional-volition from within universal historical space towards concord, inseparability
and intimacy with the divine, timeless Being-qua-Existenz; a ratio cognoscendi, ratio
essendi and ratio agendi.4
This is a book of astonishing scope, elegance and sobriety, amplifying and resolving
coetaneous philosophical issues, the “chthonically involved” mooty deep, or phusis, as
well as bearing witness to our civilization’s most trenchant blindspots and automaticity
to reification/deification, in an omnivoyant inexhaustible poetic truthtelling.
Lissa Wolsak
3
Organoleptic (Physiol.), Making an impression upon an organ; plastic; said of
the effect or impression produced by any substance on the organs of touch, taste,
or smell, and also on the organism as a whole.
4 Ratio cognoscendi (L): a basis of cognition, Ratio essendi (L): the basis of
being, Ratio agendi (L): a basis of action.
Richard Burns
Pour toi
(Frayed Strands)
Je est un autre.
Arthur Rimbaud, 13 May, 1871.
L’autre qui est je s’appelle toi.
RB, 13 May, 2002.
In a number of Indo-European languages, we can distinguish between

several quite distinct though overlapping uses of the word for ‘poetry’. First,
there is the poetry that is constituted by-or-in-the-poem, by-or-in-the-work-
of-art-in-words. Then there is the quality of poetry which resides not only in
the poem, but by analogy and extension, apparently, anywhere outside it
too. What interests me, here, in a first attempt to shape an integrative theory
of poetics, and to uncover or discover poetic universals, is the point of
transition or line of demarcation between what may be considered or claimed
to be poetic or poetry, and what may not – regardless of whether this point or
line is found within a poem or outside it. Within or without the poem,
whenever this transition does happen, in the Augenblick (G. ‘moment’,
literally ‘eye-glance’) of its occurrence, there is always, I think, a sense of
opening-into-or-out-of: of uncovering, discovering, recovering, rediscovering;
of heuresis, anakalipsis, anagnorisis, even of epiphany. So, in the following
relatively unrefined first working notes towards a hypothesis for a universal
poetics, what happens in this particular flittering, flickering, trickling,
volatile Augenblick constitutes the total ‘zone’ I most want to explore.
I confess that I keep having the sense of being, curiously, uneasily, and
shakily, very close to the edge of language, right up against the limits of
what it is possible for language to say – the sense that what I’m straining for
is intangible or ephemeral, or both, and so much or so entirely so, that it
can’t quite be (get) contained in (by) language – and that the moment what I
am or might be after is even half-glimpsed, or half-heard, it flashes or
flickers or vanishes or trickles, irredeemably, irremediably, away.
Yet I also have – and trust – an intuitive hunch: that a universal poetics is
not a superstructure to be arbitrarily imposed but it is already there – or,
rather, here – ‘waiting’, as it were, ‘under the surface’ (or even on it, even as
it, even in it), ‘in the grain’ – ‘ready’ to be discovered and noticed rather than
invented and constructed. An open secret?
So, for a start, shouldn’t this shaking, this uncertainty, this insistence on
feeling (along-with-or-within thinking), and on self-doubt and on self-
questioning, this refusal and refutation of the facile (of its facilities) and of
slogans, itself be an integral part of all poetic working practice – regardless of
how unfashionable it usually is to appear so ‘unconfident’?
Roethke: This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. / I learn by going

where I have to go.
To start with, my claim and my call is that the poem’s gift, the gift of the
poem, is for you. The poem’s call, the call of the poem (double genitive) is to
you. To you and/or for you – over and above any other pronoun(s) or
person(s).
I suggest that this dative to-you / for-you is no longer applicable to vous but
has become inextricably, inevitably, irreducibly toi. Perhaps this was always
so – or at least has been ever since Sappho. Perhaps ever since Gilgamesh’s
lament for Enkidu. Perhaps ever since the first lullaby was crooned. The you
called by the poem, the you to whom the poem gives itself and gives itself
away, is by definition singular, intimate, and addressed individually and
face-to-face.
I suggest that this applies even in the most regal speeches of, say, Racine,
when character speaks to character as vous. Doesn’t the drama, the oeuvre,
and the quality of poetry in and of the drama, in and of the oeuvre, address
the toi in each member of the audience, each toi in the collective vous?
I suggest that in the act of the poem itself in addressing itself (an act which
constitutes not merely its purpose but its being), vous is only relevant or
meaningful insofar as it is turned and re-turned, decoded and deciphered,
restored and reconstituted, ‘back’ into each one of its uniquely individual
and wholly singular toi’s. I suggest furthermore that if and when vous is
addressed in or by the poem, the vous is constantly re-assessed (re-
examined, re-vitalised, re-vised, re-constituted, re-assembled, etc.) in its re-
call to the singularity of each of its toi’s.
Villon’s address to the frères humains qui après nous vivez is a case in point.
It is the ironic finesse of the balance and the bittersweet poignancy of the
contrast between the implicitly unending, continuously proud and
impersonally unwavering line of the future vous frères, and the pathetic
mortal finiteness of each individual fellow-suffering frère (toi – to whom I/you
might now surely add lecteur and semblable), which injects the compassion,
power, psyche into Villon’s ballade.
v
As for the gender-centredness of frères and fraternité, I long too for women to
be irrevocably and irreducibly included in this sense of fellowship, loss and
belonging: soeurs humaines qui après nous vivez? Hypocrite lectrice, – ma
semblable, – ma soeur? Why not? Do (would) these utterances have the same
or similar force? I think they do (can, could, should). And I welcome the
extra third syllable (‘lectrice) that ravishes the perfection of Baudelaire’s
alexandrine. I think that, in responding to these lines, each reader or hearer
becomes (is capable of becoming) either frère or soeur, perhaps even both
frère and soeur. The other and the Other (l’autre and autrui) surely both
possess and are possessed irreducibly by the mixed blessings of sexual
identity and sexual (comm)union, of gendered alterity and togetherness, and
of all that they all engender and trace – including the lineaments of gratified
desire and including the communality, com-passion, sym-pathy, em-pathy,
of simply being human. Je est un autre, Je est une autre. L’autre qui est je
s’appelle toi.
This dividing ‘back’ of vous into its toi’s constitutes a return and a
restoration. The poem itself does (performs, accomplishes) this decoding,
dividing, turning, re-turning, re-storing, re-calling (etc.) by the very act and
fact of being a poem. By the poem’s being and doing this, the exact opposite
of a reductive process is taking place. Being magnanimous, the poem puts
the human first. All other identities and group-identifications – sex, gender,
ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, class, status, belief system, creed system,
and so on – are subordinate, are sub-categorisations.
The toi is always and by definition called by the poem to, from, in and
through the fullest humanness of the toi – that is to say, the highest and
most exalted, and the deepest and most mysterious levels and layers
(Herakleitan), and the greatest of dimensions (magna- as in magnanimity;
veliko- as in Serbian/Croatian velikodušnost, megalo- as in Greek
? e?a??? ???a) – especially and ‘above all’ within the tiniest and most
unassuming, the most modest and most ‘ordinary’. These are the measures
of Marlowe’s infinite riches in a little room and Blake’s world in a grain of
sand.
Across the threshold of the Augenblick, if and when a connection is made

successfully, the hitting of the mark is memorable and remains remarkable:
frayed strands of that touch – or of its ‘needle-like’ piercing-through get
lodged in some corner of deep memory, and may reside there, stored for the
remainder of life-time(s?), always available for possible later recall, for
twisting out, for teasing back, into presence.
The poem’s calling and calling out of the fullest humanness of the toi posits
a totality, even an overabundance, of respect for the toi.
I (may) deliberately avoid exploring the word love here, because (I believe) it
may be regarded as given (datum), but simply recall Shelley’s explanation of
the integrality of poetry and love in The Defence of Poetry.
Wherever sexual and erotic longings find expression or representation,

poetry can never be far from the surface, far beneath the skin of things.
The poem’s calling and calling out of humanness also posit unquavering
recognition and reconnaissance of the total, integral and rightful freedom of
the toi. Whenever or wherever freedom is in question, or threatened, or at
risk, poems and songs pour out. This is so well-known that it is taken more
or less for granted and not thought much about or questioned. But this is
not a cliché and the fact is worth examining.
And doesn’t the inevitably political nature of any poem begin here too?
Where can any politics begin that is not to end in vileness, villainy, violence,
autocracy, oppression, atrocity, unless with the constantly and warily
upheld insistence on freedom and, out of that, on love and justice?
This gifted freedom of the toi that is celebrated, blessed and upheld in any
and every completed, perfected, born, freed poem is limited only (perhaps) by
the passage of time expressed and felt as mortality.
Yet this freedom may even be conditional (predicated) upon mortality. And in
any case, the poem’s call challenges mortality too. Poetry is gifted with the
power to touch and cover everything conceivable or imaginable and in so
doing intuit it or reveal it. This applies to all fields of knowledge, discourse
and action. Shelley said this and much more besides in A Defence of Poetry,
and there is no need to repeat it here. But in relation to mortality, and to
anything to do with or reminiscent of mortality, poetry bears very special
marks and privileges, wears special signs and is protected by special
talismanic powers which allow it to ‘pass through’.
Every loss is a kind of death. And whenever loss of any kind is in question,
poems and songs pour out too: elegies, laments, longings, nostalgias,
celebrations, nihilistic or existential complaints, heroic defiances of death
and affirmations of love, wisdom, joy and grace. I am not concerned at this
moment with the intrinsic validity or truthfulness of their content but with
the fact of their occurrence. And this fact of their occurrence is just as well
known and, as a strand in the fabric of a universal poetics, is just as worth
unpicking and following.
Might it not be said, then, that in directly addressing each toi in any
collective or plural vous, the poem simultaneously re-engenders the vous in
each toi, celebrating the capolavoro, the chef d’oeuvre, the piece-of-work, that
is a human being?
A universal poetics needs to serve us today and tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow and after-tomorrow.
It needs to be for now (pour maintenant), for hand-holding (pour main-tenant;

pour tenir-la-main / tenir-dans-la-main), for heart’s keeping (pour tenir-au-
coeur), for soul’s keeping (pour tenir-à -l’âme), for tomorrow (demain), and of-
or-from-the-hand (de-la-main), for today and for all days and for always (pour
aujourd’hui et pour tous les jours et pour toujours).
For the first time in our history, we are contemporaries of all mankind, wrote
Octavio Paz. ‘All mankind’ can scarcely not include the living and the unborn
– and the dead? This toi who is ‘I’, who is the poem’s addressee, clearly
includes (incorporates, embodies) the unopened eyes of the unborn. Each
response, which is a reading of the poem, and a new writing, happens in
what Eliot calls an eternal present. It might equally well be called: an
atemporal contemporaneity – even if that doesn’t sound quite so pretty.
And a universal poetics needs to serve us yesterday. It

needs to address the dead as well as the living.
It’s painful and difficult, the living are not enough for me
First because they do not speak, and then
Because I have to ask the dead
In order to go on farther.
Elsewhere I shall want to do more exploring of hospitality, magnanimity, gift

and call. But for now I am happy to close (to unend, to unfinish) with the
voice of Seferis.
Diversions on words & music
Ken Edwards
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Dr Sophie Scott of University

College London has shown that the brain takes speech and separates it into words and
“melody” (defined here as the varying intonation that reveals mood, gender, age,
geographical origin and so on). Her studies, reports The Guardian, i suggest that words
are shunted over to the left temporal lobe for processing, while the melody is
channelled to the right side of the brain, a region more stimulated by music.
These studies, so far as I can judge from the report, relate to auditory reception
of “ordinary” speech. But it may be supposed that the hearing, or inner voicing as one
reads silently, of poetry – of heightened speech, after all – is received in much this
way. If “melody” can be extended to cover the whole of the auditory apparatus
employed by poetry (stress, metre, assonance, rhyme, and so forth – though Douglas
Oliver refers in this context to the four traditional parameters of music: pitch,
loudness, duration and qualityii), then here is hard evidence from the fMRI scanner as
to how the brain may process the poetic experience, or at least the aural perception of
it: a stereophonic mental mix of, let us say, “musical” (right side) and “verbal” (left
side) elements. Just where in the brain or how a synthesis is made of the various
elements we don’t, of course, yet know. And we may never have that knowledge
completely, but it is probably safe to speculate that that synthetic mix is subtle and
complex, and different for each auditor/reader. And that it’s a dynamic balance, ever
shifting.
(But “music”, “poetry” – can we even use these terms any more to designate
language art? I hate to use them in this context, they’re so vitiated. “That’s music to
my ears,” people say, meaning that something, often a linguistic formulation, poses no
threat. Or “that’s sheer poetry” to designate anything vaguely pleasurable other than a
verbal experience, a perfect soufflé for instance. I have long disliked calling myself a
poet, for this reason, preferring “writer”: I don’t wish to associate myself with
someone else’s non-linguistic fantasy. “Musician” is, on the other hand, perfectly OK,
it’s just phrases such as “the music of poetry” that seem particularly egregious. It
appears to me, then, that a false, received idea of poetry is the source of the
contamination.)
What, though, of poetry set to music?
I risk drifting off-track. Let’s go back to what I started off with: that there is scientific
evidence to show what we already suspected, that interpreting human speech, and by
exension poetry, is a complex business involving the separate processing in the brain
(and presumably re-combining, re-balancing) of linguistic and “musical” elements.
If, then, poetry is “set to music” what happens to that balance? Does the intervention
of additional musical content disrupt it, or replace or interfere with it? Does the
original “musical” content of the writing get obliterated by a new and unnecessary
overlay – the musical content of the music? Are unwelcome interference patterns set
up?
Why do it anyway, what’s the point?
I recall that my first attempt at setting was not entirely voluntary. I was
obliged, at short notice in 1996, to produce a piece of original music, and having
nothing to hand but Fanny Howe’s O’Clock (which I had published the previous
year), I decided to do a setting of one of the poems, “13:17”. I recall that I decided to
mark the line
One turns fierce and puts down the phone.
with a violent tone-cluster, or block chord, on the piano, and that much later I rejected
this as falling prey to one of the obvious traps of music setting, that is to say, mimesis,
or the mimicking of semantic content with musical illustration. That original setting
(almost all of which was later rejected and reworked) led to a sequence of seven
pieces for soprano and clarinet, each based on a different poem from Fanny’s book.iii
Avoiding redundancy became the aim; no more point in “illustrating”poetic images
musically than there would be drawing pictures of them. The melodic/rhythmic lines,
I tried to ensure, would follow the speech patterns of the poems, I tried to get them to
be those patterns, to point them up rather than to illustrate them. Because of the
location of the poem sequence, an Irish tune became a source, but disguised in various
ways. Avoidance of whimsy was paramount. Even to attempt musical setting of a
poem that had not invited such treatment in the first place seems impertinence
enough.
Inadequate as it might have been, it was probably as a result of this that I was
commissioned by Artery Editions early in 2004 to set another poem by Fanny Howe,
to start off a series of collaborative works to be published by the press in a 12"x12"
album format. iv The situation was more acceptable to me this time, in that the poem
was to be written in the expectation of being set. Therefore the risk of violation and
redundancy was diminished, or so I hoped. Initially called “Walker”, the poem in its
final form was “Spiral” – and rather than setting the words themselves to be sung, this
time I decided to write what was in effect an accompanying piece, “Spiral Music”,
offering a prelude and postlude, eight discreet interludes between the stanzas and an
almost imperceptible presence while the stanzas are actually read, preferably by the
poet herself. And the music picked up in oblique or not so oblique ways on the themes
and procedures of the poem. Thus, in response to the poem’s speaker’s description of
her own movement, the entire piece was to be andante, or literally at a walking pace,
the precise tempo being at the discretion of the three musicians (flute, bass clarinet
and cello) but invariable once chosen, except in three instances: when each musician
breaks into a brief solo, at which point they have some latitude. The melodic/rhythmic
content was derived from that of certain key lines and phrases early in the poem, with
the hope that the music would echo and enhance the musicality of the writing rather
than smothering it with interference patterns. (I’ve followed the example of Janacek
here, much of whose music he derived from overheard speech patterns that he
notated.) Development of this musical material was suggested by the model of a
spiral, in that earlier elements were returned to, but at one remove, by way of
modulation or rhythmic variation – and in the final passage, the Postlude for solo
cello, the soloist arrives at a motif that is repeated, each time transposed up a fifth
with minute variations and at an ever quieter dynamic, until it disappears. v
Approaching the problem from the other end has been instructive. Over four years
ago, the pianist John Tilbury asked me for a text. In recent years he has been
performing Samuel Beckett to great effect, combining his rather sonorous vocal
projection with his own compositions in those Beckett pieces that call for music, such
as Rough for Radio and Cascando. He was looking for a contemporary piece of
writing that could be fashioned into a composition that might complement this work.
How do you write a text for music? How do you leave it sufficiently incomplete, so
that the music completes it, particularly without foreknowledge of what that music
might be, or where it might intervene? There is a problem of elective suppression
here, that is to say a problem of what to leave out. I took my time to achieve this task.
John wanted the piece to be, in some sense, “about” the piano as well as one for
piano. In conversation about Beckett, we touched on the comic scene in Watt where
piano tuners Mr Gall Senior and Mr Gall Junior arrive in Mr Knott’s house to tune an
instrument in lamentable condition. But I had no idea how to set about complying
with his request, particularly as I was at the time in my state of greatest uncertainty
concerning “musical” settings of “poetry”.
It was summer 2000, in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, grey and very cool,
sheep bleating in the distance and woodpigeons in the thickets, when I started putting
something together. I had come upon Beyond & Within in the woods, a large welded
steel sculpture by Joanna Mowbray (1995). Because I was walking in the wood and
had just turned 50, well past the “middle of the way” in other words, I was thinking of
Dante. The sculpture, which I don’t now have a picture of, sucks the eye into its
imagined interior space, its shape recalling a horn, or a throat. It became the focus for
a meditation on interiority and exteriority. I did think of the resonant interior spaces of
the grand piano, where I had witnessed John Tilbury playing John Cage prepared
piano pieces or improvising either by himself or with the group AMM. But I didn’t
want to make specific reference to the piano – I couldn’t see a way to do so.
John pronounced himself happy with the piece when I submitted it to him. He
called it a poem, which I had not done. I hadn’t wanted to write a poem, much less a
poem about a piano. But I had wanted to leave the text as open as possible for musical
use, and what he did with it, with the help of Sebastian Lexer, was cunning. The
references to “wood” and “steel” had suggested a visit to the Steinway factory and
other locations in Germany, where Sebastian recorded sounds associated with the
manufacture of pianos, to be treated, sampled and otherwise incorporated into the
piece.
There’s something in there… , a piece lasting around half an hour, for

recorded speech and sound combined with live piano, received its first performance
by John Tilbury with Sebastian Lexer at Leeds Town Hall in July 2003. It will be
released some time soon on a CD by Matchless, together with two Beckett pieces.
Strangely, I think it is more of a poem now than when I first wrote it, or to paraphrase
the late Bob Cobbing, the poem is more like itself since its completion by the addition
of music. I don’t know quite how it happened, but it looks too naked on the page now.
i
The Guardian, 2 February 2004.
ii
Douglas Oliver, Poetry & Narrative in Performance (Macmillan, 1989).
iii
O’Clock by Fanny Howe (1995) has recently been brought back into print by Reality Street Editions.
My musical suite Seven Poems by Fanny Howe is unpublished, but five of the poems were performed
by Suki Green (soprano) and Alex Fleming (clarinet) at the Tower Tavern, London, in July 2001.
iv
Fanny Howe/Tom Raworth/Ken Edwards, Spiral (Artery Editions, 90 St Leonards Rd, Hove, East
Sussex BN3 4QS, 2004).
v
The piece received its first performance, with two different groups of musicians, at the Mad Hatter
Café, Brighton, and the Poetry Café, London, with Fanny Howe herself reading the text, in February
2004.

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CAMBRIDGE

Reviews & Articles by:-

© the authors 2004

published by the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry, to accompany a weekend

Cover boards kindly donated by The Cloister Press, Cambridge

A Course in Miracles (15)

And skin feels electric

Mouse, Febrile, Sperm.

But more of ems.

Or hers, or theirs? A woman

from elemente. sonette, Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2002

voll pracht, hochherzig malend aus uns ganz, errichtet

anhimmelnd so bedacht; euch eingefleischt ihr mich verdichtet,

auf welchen säulen, bögen! wie, im grossen, zügen

wie wir einander sanft belämmern, blicke tauschen,

dir augen weide: zug um zeug uns bunt aufbauschen,

ins blaue weit: ringsum auf zungen reich zergehend,

gewendet selbst, allseits anhimmelnd uns umrunden,

da es mich schrillt, verpfeift, bin aufgeschreckt, -gespürt,

bis es, zusammentrommelnd, packt mich, schlägt, abschwirrt,

weit fegt, hinweg...in schwebe bleibe, luft so liegen,

am höchsten punkt es lässt uns all dies hören, läuten,

De temps en temps, se redresser aussi,

D’habitude quand je me penche

Ce que le vide devient ?

Là n’est pas encore le mystère.

Nous sommes sur une terre si fragile quand nous l’aimons.

Tu fermes les yeux ?

Recroquevillée depuis dans ses brûlures,

Tu me dis que tu marches devant : je serais vraiment folle

Elle s’entrelace tellement, elle mettra des fleurs partout

Novembre et très vert

Il ira jusqu’à ce que le ciel soit bleu,

Je caresse longtemps ton visage,

Un baiser, encore un baiser, toujours un baiser ?

Nous nous couvrons de baisers pendant que l’année passe.

Un doigt parfois suffit

Et puis le ciel aussi !

Serrée entre tes bras et le regard sur la montagne,

C’est léger une main qui caresse, qui va revenir,

Il faut car le temps nous pose plus haut.

Extrait de Iris, c’est votre bleu d’Ariane Dreyfus (inédit)

“There’s something in there”

There’s something in there.

It comes in there, or is there, sometimes. It’s suggestive of...

No-one can say what it is.

It’s out here. It’s made of steel.

There’s definitely something in there.

But one can never be definite.

Let’s say a probability.

It’s a throat, and a gnarl in the throat. Something gnarled.

That would be something.

Where does this thought happen?

The poet would understand.

Inside your mouth.

Or my mouth, if you like. In my mouth. Or on my tongue.

It is said a poet said that.

It could be that someone was lost.

Lost in the woods. Or lost in thought. It’s the same thing.

There may not be any in there.

What was that?

I can hear a voice.

I could say that I believe there is something in there.

It’s a sort of placeholder.