the deletions: January 2009

(PB with apologies to Chester Gould)

It’s Laurie Duggan week here on the deletions. His new book, a long poem chronicling his life in ‘East Kent & elsewhere’ during the year 2006 - 07, has just arrived in my letterbox. I’ve read much of this poem while it was in-progress, and from that I'd recommend it. I’m looking forward to reclining on the banana lounge under the cherry tree later this afternoon and reading it in published form.

’Crab & Winkle’ is a warped Shepherd's Calendar for the age of climate change: a journal of Australian poet Laurie Duggan's first year as a resident in England, it centres specifically on the area of East Kent where he lives, featuring excursions and interludes elsewhere in Britain, the Continent and North Africa. The book's title comes from an old railway route in the heart of Duggan's new territory.

It’s published by Shearsman Books
For further information or to order a copy visit this link

Plus : to read and engage with Laurie Duggan's response to the recently published 'Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry' - click here

In mid-December I read some poems into the telephone from my recently published book True Thoughts and was interviewed for Writers Radio by Cath Kenneally. To listen to the broadcast click here.

Cath Kenneally

Very best wishes to US friends from the deletions
at this historic, momentous and wonderful time.



                      American Memories, Melbourne    

                                        (not quite after Hope Mirrlees)

                                       I   want   a   panorama



                                           SOUTH - WEST

                                         CACAO  BLOOKER

                                           GOG & MAGOG



                          green art deco bakelite in the national gallery



                                     FITZROY (ST ASPEN SHIRAZ)      

               BRUNSWICK (SQUAWKING MAGPIE SAUVIGNON BLANC)

               PARLIAMENTARY MUSEUM (HAZELGROVE PINOT NOIR)



            creak chug creak chug creak chug under Princes Bridge on the Yarra



                                       CASTLEMAINE ROCK



                   Greek woman tearing the gig posters from the lightpole

               outside her son’s bar

                                    Going down Madam ?



                   follow the commemorative brass plaques in the footpath 

                        a golden mile must be almost two kilometres



                     ne rien faire     walk slowly     doing nothing

                               for approximately two hours



          WARAKURNA ARTISTS at Alcaston Gallery in Fitzroy until Saturday



                   discover why Melbourne is called ‘marvellous’



              a grey mouse running through green & purple wisteria vines



                                 TIN BOX BUILDINGS

                     attached to creaking weatherboard cottages



                       the awful HARD art of the minimal

                                 strikes here and

   strikes again in Montréal, actually strikes TWICE in Montréal

             at the Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Musée des Beaux Arts

                                                                   too!

                                             

                               DUCRAY  ICTYANE

                  créme émolliente hydratante     blow wind blow 

                            buy Magic Gloves at Dollarama



                       red wine and voodoo at RUBIS ROUGE



         in the USA public toilets flush automatically which can be alarming

                      all announcers have Spanish accents

                   the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry is really realism

    Ron Silliman’s VOG is Voice Over Guy, Voice Of God, Very Ordinary Glory

                                            Vital Organs Grim   …



                                on the SILVER STAR 91

                from Philadelphia Pennysylvania to Richmond Virginia

           (Dixie Hummingbirds, Cab Calloway, Ruth Brown, Amos Milburn)



                                   the suitcase keys

                                         are in 

                         the alternative medicine pill bottle



                                GREAT DISMAL SWAMP



                                  Henry ‘Box’ Brown

                               mailed himself to freedom

   in a big box labelled ‘Dry Goods’ - from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849



                           on the NORTHEAST REGIONAL 94

               from Richmond Virginia to Washington District Columbia

                    (Elizabeth Cotten, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye)



                   innumerable     Stars & Stripes    innumerable



                           Famous American Female Poet :

   ‘What you might need to know is that you might not make it

    But if you do, you might have needed an astrolabe

    or a two-bit smile or smirk, this is a style

    that could get you a cup of coffee’



                            AMERICAN coffee ??

                                                  old worms in the woodwork

                                                  old hooks on the hat rack

                                                  old bottomless cups depleted



                              TIPPING drives me crazy -

                                   quoted price

                                +Value Added Tax

                                       +15%

                              bring a pocket calculator



            As Portentous As The Opening Chords Of A Big Bob Dylan Ballad

                           the prescience of the dead

 

         Yours truly, Your paranormal host,

                                                             Adelaide



            hooray    at last       here’s the panorama       coming up now



                  discover all the charms of ELEGANT and CONTEMPORARY 

                                         melbourne 



                     cross the west gate bridge for AMAZING city views 

                      observe the yarra river's BUSTLING ACTIVITY

                        see queen victoria market, fitzroy gardens 

            and albert park, home to the australian formula one grand prix. 

                       visit the HISTORIC shrine of remembrance

                      stroll along southbank's waterfront precinct 



                    this city has it ALL   -   discover it for yourself



                           pour boire, merci, thank you, tip



                                        taxi to lax



                         KOONS    RUSCHA       CHEECH the CHICANO

                          JaMaiCan LeMoNaDe   woo  you never know

                                       HeY HeY VLaMinCK !

             Maurice Vlaminck’s portrait in oilpaint of Guillaume Apollinaire



                            white women smiling into the air

                             Michael Jackson and his monkey



            NO POETRY MEETING TODAY  -   EVERYONE IS WORKING 



                    greasy screen at the mex internet café grill

                                     too dangerous

                                     to walk south

                               down the SAN DIEGO freeway



                    Almost Completely Finished With Pop Art Finally

                                  call the paramedics

The quote from the ‘Famous American Female Poet’
is from Above The Leaders by Alice Notley (Veer Books, 2008)

Another year has begun and it's definitely time to begin it, so I've been sorting through some box files and folders and throwing out old clippings, photocopies, maps, pictures, postcards. Allow me a little personal indulgence - here, from the piles of files is a tiny sample from hundreds of bits and pieces. Remember, if you click on the images you can enlarge them. I'll start with a set of the card game 'Happy Families' I made, with my mother Jean, when I was seven years old. You can view the entire pack here. Clunkily cut cardboard, dribbly watercolour - I wasn't anywhere close to being even a 'budding' artist but there were hours of fun up ahead playing cards.

Little images or notes found or clipped or kept, like one of my father's military notebooks, or a scrap of paper, a ticket, a jigsaw piece, a label popped into a pocket, placed in a notebook and later saved in a box file :

click any of the images (except Her Grumpy Majesty) to enlarge them

Now now now

The Now now festival is on again this weekend.
For further information and tickets to events click here

Cover illustration by Julia Wolfson.

Ekleksographia is an independent international poetry magazine edited, produced and published by Jesse Glass, Daniel Sendecki and a revolving panel of editors. The publication revolves completely around their efforts and therefore maintains a somewhat irregular publication schedule, averaging about 2 issues a year. Ekleksographia employs a 'revolving editor' system—the magazine retains a panel of editors, each of which edits one issue every so often.

Ekleksographia is published as an Ahadada Books cooperative publication. Editors and contributors are asked actively to contribute both their talents and their time to the publication.

Ekleksographia is an exercise in asymmetrical publishing, and is a shoe (or even two!) thrown at the spotlit shrug and yawn.

This issue was curated by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. Jane's third book of poems, EXHIBIT C, has been published by Ahadada (autumn, 2008). Her other poetry books are Skin Museum (2006) and Aquiline (2007).

Contributors to Volume 1:
Frances Presley | Cyril Wong | Pam Brown | Michael Rothenberg
Cynthia Hogue | Joel Chace | Elisabeth Frost
Takako Arai (trans. Jeffrey Angles) | Alan Botsford | Harriet Tarlo
Samuel Day Wharton | Michael Crake
Yoko Danno | Kyong Mi Park (trans. Lianna Kushi) | Paul Hoover
Philip Rowland | William Allegrezza | Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

I am reading Loiterature, happily not an obsessively-linear book, by the only Australian member of OuLiPo, Ross Chambers, who is currently the Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and is a Visiting Professor at Louisiana State University.

The cover image of ‘Loiterature’ is a detail from a photograph by Montague Glover

                         Montague Glover’s photograph

Loiterature's Chapter I   Divided Attentions (On Being Dilatory) begins:

I’ve been giving up caffeine for years now, but a caffé latte steams at my elbow. Midsummer:

    Wet heat drifts through the afternoon
    like a campus dog, a fraternity ghost
    waiting to stay home from football games
    The arches are empty clear to the sky

These verses might have been written (or composed, or generated) only a few yards from where I sit, at the intersection of N. University and S. State in Ann Arbor, the suture point (in my personal myth of the city) where the campus meets the town. No campus dogs in evidence (expensive animals on leashes don’t qualify). Times change. When Frank O’Hara came to Ann Arbor in 1950 he was amused by the Midwestern candor of the cafeteria signs that read, bluntly, FOOD; today they’re more likely to read cappuccino, and it’s hard to find a cafeteria:

              (la forme d’une ville
  Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel).

Sitting lazily at this much frequented intersection, I think about intersections and I think about belatedness, my regret for an Ann Arbor I never knew (and wouldn’t have liked), the stab of Baudelaire’s midline exclamation point at “hélas!”, the image of abstention - better still, of anticipated abstention - in “waiting to stay home from football games.” Being belated, one foot in 1950, the other in the 1990s, is (like abstaining and anticipating) a form of divided attention, the “distracted” attention Benjamin thought characteristic of modernity (was it Benjamin? I must remember to look it up). One foot in campus, one in town; one in 1950, one in 1994.....

Loiterature's back cover notes give a pretty good summary of the contents :
The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance.

By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear—values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand.If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature’s digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.

Read Laurence Porter’s review and a ‘preview’ of the book here

Books by Ross Chambers include The Writing of Melancholy, Facing It : AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author, and Room for Maneuver.

the deletions

Now now now

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