mark delivers a dead on analysis of the u.s

tony hillerman is dead. crime writing is a poorer place to be

coincidence? of course not. having spent a few days sporadically writing a review/engagement of/with christopher rizzo's playing the amplitudes i find (in an email update from goodreads) that brooklyn is at odds with the term experimental in poetry. my view on the subject is that i don't want to even imagine a poem that isn't, in at least a very basic sense, an experiment. as in ”will this work?” ”what happens if?” ”is this even remotely possible?” & so on & so forth. this, to me, is at the heart of writing poems instead of, say, political pamphlets, essays, diary entries, bumper stickers or whatever other form of more practically inclined writing you can imagine. rizzo works in what is known as an experimental tradition (a paradox perchance?) using it to write poetry that is stimulating, playful, fun, political & at times disturbing, as a good trickster would. adam fieled wants to wedge his writing in between the ”experimental” & the ”traditionalist” (his terms are ”post-avant” & ”mainstream”). i don't care much where on that spectrum my poems are, besides they're probably all over the place either way. in the rizzo book there is a sequence of sonnets. adam's when you bit... is a book of sonnets. engagements with both should appear in the next issue of eileen tabios' galatea resurrects. coincidence? probably not

just found my poem in issue one (on page 2065). i'm happy not to have written it because i find it rather cool

Dead snow

Bald portico in dead side, where
necessities have stood
There is no austerity more punctual
than snow

There is no coming lonelier
than sleep
What if he should
explore at midsummer, at midsummer, gray and
glad?

Lonely as a road
Desert, you have been here, slaking like
a way, complaining about a robber

Like lonely riddles
Like dead bodies

Is that honesty then, that
purple wishfulness?

my thanks to the editors for including my non-submission

now out from the greying ghost press

could it be the "right to life"-people are a bit narrow? what happened to the right to choose your life & how to live it?

more stupid questions later

before the nma show on tuesday night i was, briefly, at a meeting planning a multilingual translation project. there i heard about a newish latin american tradition called cartoneras. it denotes a kind of chapbook using used cardboard as cover stock & being produced on demand. i found that rather cool. & it's not like there's any shortage of used cardboard boxes in other parts of the world. & this struck me as a good way of using them

oh, horace, were you hung-over?

New Model Army at KB, Malmö. Photo by Maria Björk & reproduced here with her kind permission


last night new model army played in malmö at kb, no one here calls it by its full name, kulturbolaget. it was 20 years since i last saw them play (in 2006 i was out of the country). when they took the stage with “here comes the war” i knew it had been worth the wait. the last time i saw them was in some small basement venue in hultsfred in february or march of 1988. now they, of course, have 20 years worth of new material, not all of it top notch to be sure, to choose from. & they chose a fairly well balanced mix of the very new - “no mirror, no shadow”, “high” - & the very old - “no rest”, “51st state” (i was surprised we couldn't outsing justin on the latter). the official set-list, by the way, is posted to the notice board at the band website, by someone or other in the audience who nicked it after the show. & when they ended with “i love the world” i was too wired to do the things i was supposed to when i got home

i have a deeply personal relationship to a great deal of the songs of nma, or really mostly the lyrics, me being a text person, dating back to 1984 or 85 when someone i knew back then introduced them to me by playing “smalltown england” & “a liberal education” from a really poorly recorded cassette tape & justin (sullivan, for those of you who didn't know that) is maybe the single person who shall take the greatest blame for me getting into poetry. now that's some cross to carry

if you want there is a really fine, & haunting, live version of “the hunt” to listen to at the website

& i hope they return to these shores soon

update:
found another audience view, this one from mia

second update:
found a flickr set by jerry backlund including video snippets of "no mirror, no shadow", "the hunt", "green & grey" & "no rest"

also, on youtube, from CinnamonWeaver, "green & grey" & "vagabonds" both missing only the first few seconds