S A L V A G E

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hard to imagine batteries whole
clear thick square jars
A C I D L E V E L

filled with flowers
fairylights, blue sand
online treasure.

Hard to imagine a crate slipping
the paperwork
the swearing

underwater nurturing
of wood and screws
and packaging.

Hard to imagine the sound of glass
and gravel dropped
on rocks at night

laundering of weed and shards
in green formation
up the beach.

Hard to guess how many collisions
made the edges
almost safe

with mud between each memory
pick letters out
keep walking.

Beyond emptiness

An interview with Tom Ellis.

For me the issue is how to create art in what I see as a context of all-embracing nihilsm. I draw my imagery from imagination and direct perception, from mass media and the history of art, and then use it to ask what, if anything, might constitute valid artistic expression. In a world overflowing with images, nothing and everything is a worthwhile subject. I believe this loss of absolute value reflects a wider loss of cultural meaning and value in society as a whole. Perhaps we are living in an age of emptiness or perhaps we are beginning to live beyond an age of emptiness.

Phonographies

Woohoo! Aleksander Kolkowski’s phonographies project is now live.

You can listen to all kinds of artists and performers recorded onto wax cylinders. Suitably spooky sounds for the season.

My Kippered (Edison) Herring recreates a struggle to be heard – between Edison inventor of the phonograph, and Charles Cros who sorta got there first but was distracted by other interests such as alien contact.

I recommend listening especially to the electronic music section of the archive, where purely electronic come across like the scratchings and pipings of things with physical bodies. I would love somebody to draw these creatures.

The archive will be broadcast on Resonance on Wednesday nights at 7:30pm beginning on November 2nd  2011.

Collective Brightness

My poem ‘Singing in Tongues’ is now published in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality.

It’s a sonnet describing the experience, aged around 13 years, of being in an enormous church when all the worshippers (except for me) were moved by the Holy Spirit. I wrote this after a workshop at New Writing Worlds in Norwich 2006.

There will be a UK launch for the anthology at the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green, on Friday 21 October at 7.30pm – everyone is welcome! All the UK poets in the anthology will be reading and the editor Kevin Simmonds will be there.

Triggered : photos

 

Luke Kennard’s ‘Wolf Shibboleth’

I saw Luke Kennard perform his ‘Wolf Shibboleth‘ (no 11 in the chapbook) at the London Word Festival where he shared the bill with Christian Bok. The wolf poem I think is a perfect jumble of entertainment and experiment.

Bok did his mind-bending DNA poem, and a bit of lego patent transformed into a passage of Democritus. Stunning conceptually, but what worked best in performance were his Hugo Ball renditions.

Triggered

Coming up on Monday 13th June at King’s Place in London: ‘Triggered‘ – a dance and digital music performance featuring glyph paintings by Katy Price and Andrew Nightingale, activated by Richard Hoadley.

We are working on the glyphs right now – photos to follow after the performance.

Oramics machine

Meet the machine – Daphne Oram’s unique and astounding system for creating sound from drawings, developed in the 1960s.

The Science Museum are getting ready to explore the Oramics machine in collaboration with different groups who have stories to tell about electronic sound.

Kippered (Edison) Herring

My reading of the Edison / Cros text was recorded on a cylinder phonograph by Aleks Kolkowski this week. We did 2 versions, one with Cros underneath and Edison on top, then the other way round.

After a recording, the phonograph is covered in webs of swarf – the material cut away by making the groove.

Swarf on the Edison phonograph

When doing the second layer, you can hear the first one echoing back at you through the recording horn. This affects the performance – Edison became more hesitant, and Cros more fragmented.

The files will be digitised in a few weeks, and later made available on Aleks’ phonograph archive website. He played me some other examples from the collection – I won’t spoil the surprise, so let’s just say there are many treats in store…

Charles Cros / Thomas Edison

Texts to be recorded on a cylinder phonograph by Aleks Kolkowski – one cut on top of the other (will add link when the recording is available).

The first (in three parts) is loosely based on the Wikipedia entry for Charles Cros, incorporating two verses of his nonsense poem ‘Le Hareng Saur’. The second uses words and phrases from Thomas Edison’s diary, put into the form of Cros’s poem.

CROS

I.

Are you there?

I know it can work. We must capture the intensity of sound.

Voice now accedes to voices of the past, passé.
Vibrate; a diaphragm – engrave – diaphragm; listen.
I’ll tell you how it works.

Dia–dia–dia F-F-F. Just write it down. I must hurry, there are already too many connections. Here is the letter – my seal – they will record my name.

II.

Dearest, can you see the pricks of light? Just there – there. Allow me.

It’s not your fault, my darling the equipment lags behind. Why, if we could only pay them a visit – how much brighter their cities, more breathtaking the view -
but we shall, or our children shall.

Yes. That’s what I said.

III.

Il laisse aller le marteau – qui tombe, qui tombe, qui tombe,
Attache au clou la ficelle – longue, longue, longue,
Et, au bout, le hareng saur – sec, sec, sec.

Il redescend de l’echelle – haute, haute, haute,
L’emporte avec le marteau – lourd, lourd, lourd,
Et puis, il s’en va ailleurs, – loin, loin, loin.

EDISON

Dip into oblivion: sleep, sleep, sleep,
Sunbeams embarrass my eyes: awake, awake awake,
Mental kaleidoscope: deep, deep, deep.

Smoking too much makes me nervous: curl, curl, curl,
Satan’s principal agent: hell, hell, hell,
Dandruff is excreta of the mind, mind, mind.

Perpetual coroners of London: grave, grave, grave,
Rose Hawthorne a big live lobster: bite, bite, bite,
Freckles are mudholes of beauty: skin, skin, skin.

Good day for an angels’ picnic: smell, smell, smell,
Soul of Plato ‘stride a butterfly, fly, fly,
Pollen freight via beeline: laugh, laugh, laugh.

Dinner: ruins of a chicken: rice, rice, rice,
10 acres of raspberries: red, red, red,
Church a heavenly fire escape: hear[t], hear[t], hear[t].

Played a little on the piano keys, keys, keys,
Don’t like Dickens don’t know why: works, works, works,
Speak of realism in painting: dung, dung, dung.

Sardines the principal attraction: ate, ate, ate,
Labyrinth of my stomach: attack, attack, attack,
Stroke of vivid memory: ring, ring, ring.