Sometimes there is a future fret

a fret for the future
I find you constantly fretting the future
a nerve and thinking
that at any point there is chaos
there is a rocky hillside
darling a moon over the chaos mountains
stout-looking, deadpan eyes
knowledgeable in all sorts of conquest
all manners of dark accumulating
more and more flavour until you taste
spit the taste and regret the taste
it and don’t realize you are tasting dark
the darling moon, later the future arrives
then sun, then no sun, then the golden ox
while riding the golden ox you
become and accident
you forget where you put your
ten red horses
you forget and it is dawn

————————–

a dream that had troubled her at Easter

and I ask my father
father, why can’t I have
lips? And I ask him, why
can’t I have hair? OH, father,
I say, give me a body.
We are both clouds now
and I can hardly do my
work as a cloud.  But at least,
at least, let me have hair and lips
and maybe teeth.

————————–

Christine Kanownik’s poetry can be found in the past or upcoming issues of: Everyday Genius, Lungfull! Magazine, Glitterpony, Shampoo, and H_NGM_N. She’s been resident at the University of Chicago, The Congress Theater, and La Misíon in Baja, California. Her chapbook, We are Now Beginning to Act Wildly, is forthcoming from Diez Press. She currently lives and works in New York.

CLINIC & FIVE DIALS – LONDON LAUNCH
FREE, LONDON, 27th April, 7pm
Son Gallery, Peckham, Unit 9C, CIP 133 Copeland Road, London SE15 3SN (map)

Readings from Jack Underwood, Katherine Angel, Emily Berry, Caleb Klaces, Jonny Reid & more
Live music from Mat Riviere (http://matriviere.bandcamp.com)
Art from Annie Strachan and Sean Roy Parker, more TB
Plus, Five Dials will be launching their newest edition, Issue #28

***

CLINIC & THE LAST REFUGE FESTIVAL
FREE, LONDON, 1st May, 7pm
133 Copeland Road, London SE15 3SN (map)

A showcase of  theatre, comedy, cabaret and poetry running from 24th April to 4th May at the Last Refuge First Festival.
clinic will host an evening of readings from poets from all three clinic anthologies on Tuesday 1st May at 7pm. See the rest of the listings here.

***

CLINIC at SITE FESTIVAL
FREE, STROUD 4th May, 4pm
Duffle 2 John Street, Stroud, GL5 2HE (map)

A series of workshops, readings and talks held inside a temporary market, in collaboration with BRCKHSE, TopNice & Copeland Book Market.
Poetry from Sam Buchan-Watts, Harry Burke, Harriet Moore, Rachael Allen. See the full programme here.

clinic iii 

The 3rd installment in our anthology series, co-published with Egg Box, 02/04/13.

RRP £7.99 (our price £6.00 + UK postage).

ISBN: 9780956928962

120pp. 210 x 148 x 8

GREAT CLOUD

It is challenging to be made and then set down
In the world to wait for news
To acknowledge that news when it comes for you
It clings to your leg
It becomes the ugliest part of your face
I feel like emptiness is everyone’s best option
As in: I have room I have made it
I am not brimming over just yet
When I see that fantastic pink cloud on my way home
I want to know what is inside it
I visualize it transcending its literal function
And the place that it goes is purposefully secret
When I think about freedom I am overwhelmed
By my own authority
Becoming some kind of gorgeous in the dark
Where I hold a giant plastic candle
I object to not speaking on someone’s behalf
You are not a lump they have silenced
In time the sky becomes a better lobster

Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and two chapbooks: The Hero Poems (H_NGM_N) and I Was Not Even Born (Coconut Books, 2013), a collaborative work. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2013, Best of the Net 2012, Gulf Coast, Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She co-edits & publishes iO: A Journal of New American Poetry / iO Books, and lives in Northampton, MA.

Kapow!

Visual Editions: May 2012, £15, 120pp.

Since 2009, Visual Editions have established themselves as publishers of beautiful works, bridging a gap between text-driven literary books and more design-lead art books – publishing works ‘as visually interesting as the stories they tell’– and in May 2012 they released their latest offering. British author Adam Thirlwell’s novella Kapow!, stands as the latest edition in a line of wonderfully experimental texts and explores the revolutions of the Arab Spring, while pursuing revolutions of its own in the possibilities of print.

Kapow! presents the parallel and interweaving tales of Uzbek taxi driver Rustam, his wife Nigora, juice-bar owner Mouloud and lovers Ahmad and Aziza during Cairo’s segment of the Arab Spring – all told to the unnamed narrator-come-author by taxi driver, Faryaq, in London. Reifying the multiple places and perspectives available to the YouTube generation, the tales themselves sprawl across the pages in various directions, with chunks of text traversing over and through each other, bursting out at angles and untethering themselves from the pages in chaotic extension of Kapow!’s revolutionary backdrop.

The thrust of Kapow! is apparent from the outset: as a consequence of contemporary multimedia technologies, we as a generation are always mindful of the Other’s perspective; we are constantly made aware of, and actively make others aware of, the limits of our own perceptions, alongside the validity and occurrence of stories outside of our own. Everything here is disjointed, limited and simply one element in an ever-changing, unrepresentable whole: there are no grand-narratives. The various tales and directions in which the texts unfold create physical embodiment of this multiplicity – gesturing to the innumerable stories and perspectives available within every story. Coupled with this new media technology and glut of representation, comes an inherent desensitisation to violence and revolution, these concepts being always already tied to representation – embodying something more cinematic or cartoonish than their actual violence. This can be clearly seen in the book’s title and is overtly referenced on the opening page: ‘Everywhere I looked I saw the cartoon sounds for violence: Wham!, for instance, or Kapow!’. It is as if Baudrillard himself were here, pulling on the novella’s representative strings.

As the narrator progresses in his quest to represent (or rather gesture to) the unrepresentable multiplicity behind Kapow!, each narrative is superseded by others – further embodied in the textual play: tangential stories are placed at tangential angles, while others burst the seams of their pages. Unfortunately however, this textual play is often too safe – it is never that experimental (predominantly being at an angle divisible by 90, in a rectangular block of text, always in English, always reading left to right, down the block) – leaving many potential avenues of representation unplumbed and meaning that after the first few of these asides, the whole project loses some of its zeal. It also has to be noted, that these are also often not wholly justified: they appear on almost every page and hardy ever seem to embody anything specific in either placement or shape. Even when a more unusual shape, other than the predominantly rectangular block of text, is used – almost always a circle in lieu of a square – it again feels without any reason other than itself. More often than not, one engages with the technique, turning the book and unfolding its pages, accepting the verfremdungseffekt and focusing on the text as text, only to come away empty handed from the first set of questions: why this particular shape? Why this point in the text? What is the relationality between this interruption, the reader and the book? Kapow!’s textual shifts readily bring to mind the oeuvre of Mark Z. Danielewski, but this is, however, an unfortunate comparison for Thirwell: Danielewski’s works always feeling more innovative and justified in their play and much more developed in their ideas.

That is not to say the textual play is never successful; some instances work particularly well, gesturing to those stories Other to themselves, whilst concurrently working to tear the very fabric of the linear, representational novel apart. One sequence in particular – the double-sided concertina towards the end – is particularly memorable and excitingly frantic in the shifting tales and ideas unfolding within. Another point of enjoyment in this textual play comes in the foldout pages themselves: their lack of page numbers leading one to simultaneously read inside and outside of the book.

Along with their narratives, Kapow!’s characters are also swiftly superseded, tending to fade rather than develop: they are either left behind in the perspective shifts or their traits seem to be forgotten – the narrator’s ‘dope smoking’ making multiple appearances in the first 20 pages before falling by the wayside. This is either deliberate – a further embodiment of the YouTube generation’s multiplicity of short stories – or a product of focusing too much on stylistic praxis at the expense of character development. One would like to think the former, but uncertainty is not the best of signs here. As each character fades and the novella’s culmination moves closer, Pynchon’s sprawling masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow regularly comes to mind – a novel that employs the same technique of multiplicity, but in its vastness gestures more clearly and with much greater effect, to the unrepresentable situation of violent chaos at its backdrop.

Kapow!’s narration is also a marked point of tension; Thirlwell is clearly writing in Kundera’s shadow and as such, Kunderan postmodern self-awareness and literary name-dropping permeates the narration. No character, no piece of textual play, no literary device is allowed to be discovered or interpreted by the reader, but is always swiftly pointed out. This self-aware, narrator-come-author is pretty passé by now and when coupled with all the other postmodern games in this novella, actually becomes pretty frustrating, leaving the reader battling for interpretive space. However, there are points of narratorial wit and humour that really stand out: ‘I was smoking so much whenever I saw him that I considered taking up smoking again for real’, alongside some superb supplementary descriptions: ‘a very light bee zoomed into Ahmad and was bounced away’. It’s just a shame that these moments of excellence aren’t allowed the space or recurrence they deserve.

It is in Kapow!’s brevity and corresponding development, that the relentless textual play and fading characters become an issue: given the shortness of the text, nothing is able to develop slowly enough, or to enough of a degree, to have any significant effect. Repetitious textual play on every page becomes a convention, rather than anything innovative, while not enough characters are abandoned to have the effect of an unrepresentable multiplicity. Of course, this could be equally argued as an embodiment of contemporary culture and anti-hierarchical perspectivism; but if so, this is perhaps not the best way to have gone about it – it having the unfortunate side effect of making the narrative(s) forgettable. Perhaps if the book were a novel-length project, the stories more multiple and the textual play not so unrelenting, this would come across with greater effect. As it stands though, Kapow! feels a little underdeveloped and seems to achieve all it intends within its first third.

This being said however, the book itself is not wholly forgettable, its beautiful physicality, textual play and intermittent prosaic flourishes creating enough enjoyment to leave a lasting effect.

Pick up your copy of Kapow! here

Ugly Duckling Presse writer Catherine Taylor kindly read for us back in June. Here are two extracts from her most recent book Apart:

if you activate parabolas of paint, a concrete floor can switch the drips to
          semaphore a disappearance subject to a kiss my apparatus lacks ink enough
          for all this confused back and forth of black on white exclusion and desire,
          (lingual and eclipsed), weak documents of history and affection’s oscillation
          wreak a politic reminder that the self, while of no matter, still clings like a
          baby despite fond exhumations where butcher string dangles from a rafter,
          stuck in looping ovals; eggs of time and rupture. As my eldest says, enough
          science, you already know it never travels the same route twice.

bad family’s a cancer or a cause, celebration’s inevitable denial flaunts misdeed
          and even evil cleans its teeth in the mirror of not me, not my people. Claims
          can’t corroborate or be made for maids and nanny’s not talking now except
          to say, those were happy, happy days, so long ago and I can’t understand
          any of you. Language haunted by history. Languages haunted by histories.
          Up the ante on your etymologies. Grammar may be a structure of
          domination’s nation, but just because it sutures subject to object or predicate
          or property doesn’t mean disruptions jump the fence with any consequence.
          Maybe vernacular’s an agent of unruliness, or maybe its in the swing
          between verse and chorus of writing as praxis. Esperanto’s whacked dream
          to make a necessary mash-up of internationalisms cleaves language between
          itselves. That’s the polyphonic shit you crave. Language as both bond and
          division. Wracked syntax a revolution won’t engender, but at least there’s a
          thread from boredom’s doom. Patience. All this hearing and being heard
          takes time. From chaos to story and back is meaning’s green oscillation.

Catherine Taylor is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her writing has appeared in The Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Jacket2, Xantippe, Postmodern Culture, Action Yes!, Witness, and elsewhere. Her first book, Giving Birth: A Journey Into the World of Mothers and Midwives (Penguin), won the Lamaze International Birth Advocate Award.

She has worked as a producer, writer, and researcher on a number of documentary films including “The Exiles” which won an Emmy Award, and was a Co-Founder and Producer of The Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Taylor is also Founding Editor of Essay Press. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University, has twice been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, and teaches at Ithaca College.

You can pick up a copy of Apart here.

Refraction
For L.

“Separation penetrates the disappearing person like
a pigment” – Walter Benjamin

through 6am coffee steam I’m caught
in the eye’s corner     a shift,
a smear of limb, shape hollowed
to an archipelago
a scattering of blanched glances
the hand that flickers until
it’s mine     tasting bitter morning

you seem to know the stranger
hanging fraught in the door-glass
honest ghost whose voice you’d share,
you’d sleep in       our silence pries the gap
nerves burning out       & you’d sing
of your content     till summer blots
me out
              with transparency

We had a wealth of diverse and interesting poetry submitted for our competition with IdeasTap, and below are the runners-up. The three winning poems can be found in the forthcoming clinic III, due this Autumn.

Cardboard Cow

I hate it here,
eating this cardboard cow
wondering what ghost of childhood brought me here.

I hate everyone with their terrible children
and their greasy potato faces,
florescent walls dull me with unwavering kitsch
and I look bacon life.

I finish in a slump,
catching my breath in forced peace.
I stand ingloriously, for nothing, to leave.
Wanting to spit curses
saying “you are a well without water,
you vampirous horde.”
But I am home now
and less of anything at all.

–Thomas Morris

Visiting Connie

They tell us that your skin is leaking.
It’s seeping and ruining the best of you.
The parts I used to hold in the queue at the bank,
in line at the butchers, waiting for Mum at the bus stop.
They’ve bundled you in bandage and quilt.
Swathed your limbs to your sides so that a wave is impossible,
an acknowledgement redundant.

Visiting before I’ve caught you looking at the family picture,
saying our names like prayers,
until we were just sounds.
Until we were just names.
Until the parts you held
in queues,
in lines,
waiting,
were just a feeling,
a kind of warmth in the palm of your hand.

Now you’re concentrated into a heartbeat,
vital organs,
a skeletal face hollowed to an impression.
Almost nothing left but a slow yakking, a cackling
released from your throat
that leaves me petrified.

It takes minutes to realise you’re laughing.
That a name is as useful as the sound it makes.

–Ruthie Hartnoll

When Sam Donsky graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 he embarked on his first full collection, Poems Vs the Volcano — a sequence of one hundred poems for one hundred films. They are feverish with pop culture to the point of bursting and, with Sam’s irreverent, often daft digression on each movie, are contemporary in a brilliantly frenetic way. Each poem is accompanied by a movie still, and some live in a perpetual state of being edited — that’s if they remain on the fluid tumblr at all. The following is an interview which took place over google.docs.

SBW: As a similarly prodigious ‘web poet’ Sam Riviere (who wrote 81 poems in response to the austerity measures by the 2010 coalition government in Britain, posted sequentially on tumblr) was asked, to what extent is there a ‘performance of producing’ sentiment present in your project?

Furthermore, what kind of impact has this performance had on your practice as a writer/artist in general? If each time you have watched a new movie you have been anticipating an accompanying poem to come by the end of it, surely by poem no.100, this has had an irrevocable impact on the way you consume film. Similarly, has it been difficult to return to write ‘normal’ poems, away from PvV, or is it simply a case of poetry and pop culture being inherently bound?

SD: I think the project initially took shape as performance, yes — though on a more or less individual scale: When I began writing ‘movie poems’, it wasn’t with a project in mind; the “watch a movie, write a poem” exercise was really no different from any other prompt. My reason for continuing with them in series-form, as a conscious effort, was that (at first, anyway) they seemed to be the poems of mine most grounded in a subject-matter that appealed to my friends, as readers — almost none of whom have an independent interest in poetry. (“The Matrix: Reloaded” garners more enthusiasm among the poetry-indifferent than “Beginning with a Line from Berryman,” I’ve found. For better or worse.)  Of course my thematic interests in the project evolved from there in pretty major ways (“100 Poems to Not Bore One’s Friends With” would have given way to a rather different final product, I assume), and with that evolution I think my sense of performance has lessened considerably. 

As for PvV’s impact on my practice as a writer in general, I can’t say it’s had one: I’ve yet to really create anything outside its scope since it started. I suppose on the most basic level, it has caused me to write “more”; and hopefully I’ve improved some with practice. But then, I know a handful of people who prefer the poems from the beginning of the project… so perhaps I am terribly regressing.

I actually don’t think the project has impacted my consumer-habits. I love film a great deal, but have never pretended to understand it in the same way that I’ve at least attempted to understand poetry. Which is to say I don’t derive much of my movie-watching pleasure from the critical perspective. And maybe this is a bit of wishful delusion, but while watching each film I really do try to avoid considering its unwritten poem.

I’ll have to report back on any attempts to write ‘normally’ in PvV’s wake — though yes, I do imagine pop culture will remain attached at my work’s hip — I have never been particularly interested in writing without it. And the same goes for the internet; I find the idea of poetry with a time-stamp to be sort of thrilling.

It’s intriguing that you use time-stamp in such a positive light, because it implies that the context loses significance. Isn’t there a risk that the poems become irrelevant? Or is it the case that they pick up a new relevance?

I think that, yes, the time stamp has a tendency to do both of those things. My favorite poems are almost without exception the ones I’ve most recently written, and so in that sense, that recency, I do believe there is a certain blogginess to the (or at least my) thrill. On the internet, context takes the form of a narrative cog in ways for which the printed word’s aging curve simply does not allow. To me, that is too cool to not want to experiment with.

“Significance” is also a funny word, in this regard, because I often think of it as code for many of the characteristics that weigh down much of my least favorite poetry. The internet is an infinity: to write something that resonates on it is — in this weird, doomed, funny, invigorating way — to learn the language of insignificance. Insignificance sort of becomes the context itself: wherein every piece, post, essay, whatever, exists this click away from death. I think the best poetry operates on the same premise, and serves punch-line to, strictly speaking, the same inside joke. On the internet even the bible would be gallows humor.

Is an up-to-date knowledge of pop culture a prerequisite to understanding  your poems (in the same way that say, knowing certain historical references, and even Chinese, undoubtedly enhances the experience of reading Pound’s Cantos)?

Well: from the feedback I’ve gotten, anyway, I would say yes, there is a certain enhancement to be found in the reader being able to self-index some of the references. I know they tend to annoy some people. Though I do hope the poems work, at their most basic level, with or without a deep knowledge of, say, the Dipset canon. I’m sure some do better than others. 

Do you find that the ephemerality of popular culture challenges poetry? (especially when considering poetry’s privileged, history)

Yes! And I think it’s healthy, the challenge — there are few insularities of art that pop can’t cure. (Though I would say that goes for any medium.)

The allusion to pop culture in poetry divides critics. It can be seen on one end as a wholly relevant means of democratising the art, and on the other as a modish shortcut to garnering a new audience, subsequently undermining any enduring or emotional sincerity that resonates in poems.

Is there a trend you notice within American criticism generally? Do you see your poetry located within this spectrum?

My boring answer is that I think there’s room for both those perspectives to coexist. More specifically, my take is that there is already a new readership — and that its democratization has long since begun to take hold. Poetry may never echo in The Mass Market (and perhaps it ought to be this way, and perhaps not), but that market — the notion of mass anything — has collapsed so far back into itself now that poetry will have opportunities to reclaim shares regardless. Of course, this is largely the internet’s work: indie rock is dead, long live indie rock, singles vs. albums and so on. Sometimes poetry strikes me as one of the most perfect distillations of the phrase “iTunes era” possible. (Blah blah blah.)

(As far as poetry criticism goes, I will confess to not reading much of it.)

Where do you see your work in terms of print? The narrative cog of context of which you speak of — would it go completely?

What of the argument that supplementary material (stills, hyperlinking etc, in your case) is reductive of the text, ie. the poem in the most traditional sense?

I hope it’s not reductive, I certainly don’t mean or wish it to be. But someone else will have to judge that. On some level, the easiest answer is that I just do it for fun — I like how the stills above each poem look, the connectivity of the image to the text — and haven’t thought the implications through beyond the “mere” of aesthetics. But I don’t see them as essential. I have published a few of the poems in other places, minus the stills, and haven’t felt bothered by it, or like the poems themselves were lessened. (Though I should add: I don’t think they were enhanced, either.)

In terms of print, and the context that would endanger: I really don’t know. My plan has always been to attempt, eventually, to get a manuscript-version of the project published — so I don’t think on the page the poems would read of, like, dissonant or diabolically hypocritical intentions. Ha, but who knows? Fingers crossed.

Do you label film, as a medium, with such a time stamp? For it to be coupled with the ‘insignificance’ of blogging culture is interesting to me because several of the films which you use long predate what the internet is as we know it to be now.

Also, most of the films you’ve used are narrative-driven, as mainstream cinema likely necessitates, but your poems are mostly devoid of obvious narrative, they are discursive, almost frantic in their allusion; is this a fair contrast to make?

I don’t put that time stamp on film, no. To the extent that I’m actively thinking of things in any sort of ideological or schematic sense, it is really limited to the poems themselves. To call the films a “jumping-off point” would be, at this point, to sell them a little short… but at the same time, to say that I have film theory hanging over my head while I write would feel like an exaggeration. There is something there, but still — a separation. 

To end, can you list 5 poems and 5 pop flicks (– or songs) that make you tick right now?

5 poetry books:
1. So I Will Till the Ground by Greg Djanikian
2. The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert
3. The Pleasures of Peace by Kenneth Koch
4. Fuck You – Aloha – I Love You by Juliana Spahr
5. Barn Burned, Then by Michelle Taransky

5 films:
1. Damsels in Distress (Stillman, 2012)
2. Hanna (Wright, 2011)
3. Miami Vice (Mann, 2006)
4. Jane Eyre (Fukunaga, 2011)
5. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (Herzog, 2009)

5 songs:
1. “The Full Retard,” El-P
2. “My Love is Your Love,” Whitney Houston
3. “No Future Part One,” Titus Andronicus
4. “Beez in the Trap,” Nicki Minaj Ft. 2 Chainz
5. “Rex’s Blues,” Jolie Holland