Itch Away blog

A Drawing of Spirits Ending

something alone and pure
sigh a battle
you are now angels
copies of ghosts
group flesh
I grieve and would forget
the poisonous song
always thinking and forgetting
now with the old
languid smile
officious and abruptly sobering

there are colors in the wind
lovelier than moon rising
venting beauty
the sky
a new sketching
silk thunder
so that even night
is art

With a small working note:

These poems will be published in a book responding to the work of Du Fu and Beth Ames Swartz, in November, published by Arizona State University. I’m working on a couple of online settings for the work, which will follow in a couple of weeks.

Rivers to Colour the Snow

a piece of sky
and the fierceness of angels
the talk of power this word has a new disciple –
lady, waiting for sun
the girth of glimmer
memorial girl, a dignified thunder
come back now because I am snow
charm the cold – dance like
the autumn
lustre to their ten thousand unheards

mountain fruit to restore the flesh
drifting by like Emperors‘ rules
we bury the clouds
the sky had banished
their very valour is in not knowing
drew from
intimate and
wealth and fame
in spite of
changes that have come
yesterday, I found smiles, and lips and offices
the marvel of bad luck
how hard it is to be God!

but now I see the distinction
ladies in the duckweed
and here you are
angels before thunderbolt
the fierceness of waters

1. TRANSLATING DU FU, textetc.com – http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-du-fu-1.html (accessed 12th May 2008). This article contains a helpful overview of translation issues in Chinese poetry. [↩]

I’m back from Providence where I enjoyed an action-packed day with some old and new friends (in fact, I’m already in Phoenix, this post being a combination of a couple of days’ sporadic writing in spare pockets of traveling time). I had two ‘commitments’: guest speaking for Aya Karpinska’s Electronic Writing II class at Brown University, and the performance with Cris Cheek and Angela Veomett at the Firehouse 13 venue in Providence.

The Electrronic Writing II course, currently taught by Aya (and apparently to be taught by Justin Katko – a genius of similar magnitude to Aya’s fantaschtick) was a wonderful experience for me, since I don’t get many chances to sample the functioning and discussions happening in other courses centred on experimental writing.

The students in Aya’s class, despite having been on the course for just a few weeks, clearly had the focus, enthusiasm, capacity and open-mindedness to produce fascinating work. As it happened, the assignment for today’s class was to increasingly fragment through anagram a paragraph of text written originally by that student. Clearly all of these students, in one way or another, are already ‘good writers’ in the respect that each original was a well-crafted piece of ‘narrative’. The reason I point this out is to reiterate the capacity of these students to then take interest in pulling these pieces of writing apart using procedure without somehow feeling precious about their work. The spirit of experimentation was rife in the class, and was backed up by incredibly thoughtful and intelligent approach to what was happening to their writing and why this was of relevance and interest to them.

It was really fun to give them a brief overview of my work. Fun but odd, since I’ve never really surveyed my work in a way where I connect pieces like Version 1 (2003) with new works-in-progress like Ideas on Oedipal Bitstreams. As usual, I over-prepared and overstressed myself about it. And, as usual, once I got going I barely used the notes next to me, which turned out to be little more than a reassuring mascot for me going my own improvised way. This is probably a much healthier way to deliver my work (and hopefully more useful and accessible to those listening) and the students seemed interested, again asking pertinent questions. These days, I actually look forward to QAs, which are fantastic opportunities to gain fresh perspectives on my own work which all too easily becomes dulled by my over-familiarity with it.

Cris Cheek was also guest speaking in the class, and showed the class a Flash movie produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers (under their collaborative idenitity Things Not Worth Keeping) which was textual / visual / sonic investigation into abstracted virtual locations (for example, Silicon Valley) using the bizarre-but-actually-real-I-shit-you-not-this-is-fact location of “Silicon Fen” as its focal point. The movie fits together incredibly well and stands the test of time well too, without looking too shabby for its years. One thing I’ve always found very difficult is trying to get a Flash video which incorporates photography, sounds, texts, to fit together as a cohesive whole. The video – deliberately non-navigable – perhaps represents the un-navigable psychogeography of Silicon Fen ideally. Conspicuous by its physical absence (or perhaps through its existence solely through abstract name-allocation), Silicon Fen’s repeated textual assertion reduces (elevates?) it to the level of hyper-representation, foregrounding the kind of absurd construction trajectory imposed on this physical space (or so I felt when I was watching).

After class, we met up with John Cayley and others, had some dinner and moved on the the Firehouse 13 to finish setting up. From what Justin told me, this was pretty much the most ‘multimedia’ of these events so far. The space itself was great – wonderfully restored (no fireman’s pole, however – which Cris tells me was removed due to fire hazard issues) and before long we’d created a sort of makeshift projection space which accommodated all three of us nicely and, incredibly, obstructed neither the bar nor the toilets.

Angela and Justin at setup

Angela and an exit

I was on first, which can be tricky in terms of getting the crowd on your side, but that wasn’t a problem given the present company, who were up for it. It seemed to go well. Or, I should say, the crowd at least seemed receptive (the farting and burping boy excepted. He was either voicing his displeasure with my reading or his body was voicing its displeasure at his greeding).

Sudden digreshun: I’m updating this section of my blog post from Philadelphia, where I’m waiting for my two-and-a-half-hour-late flight to Phoenix. On the enjoyment scale, and even by the already plunderous baseline of airports, this place is Sucky McSucklington. And I have to spend at least 2 hours here before the gate opens. At least there’s an “Irish” pub.

Next up was Angela, whose 5 videos fell into 2 distinct styles, the first 3 using a documentary-style presentation (I think these were all from the Chernobyl Generation vignettes). However, these transcended straightforward documentary, inflecting the ‘narrative approach implicit in this genre by subtle use of chopped, filtered and re-tempoed visuals, and fragmented audio reminiscent of something Gregory Whitehead might do. The final 2 films were more abstract. Both of these – My Head is a Basket of Apples, and, in particular for me, Communal, were simply beautiful pieces of work especially enjoyable on such a large projection with audio filling the room.

Cris Cheek’s work was pretty predictable in the sense that it was awesome. He showed several pieces of work, including a wonderful video of some of his collaborative work with Sianed Jones. For anyone who has heard Songs from Navigation, it will come as little surprise that both fit together vocally very well in this video. But there’s more to collaboration than this, and the video confirms, as does Songs from Navigation as a whole, the true collaborative compatibility of the pair. Sometimes it’s words. Sometimes sentences. Then it’s fragments and then it truly is music. Personally I thought that seeing the two face to face in a kind of brutalised Smith & Jones feature added an interesting dimension, mesmerised as I was by the mouth movements of the pair, and the facial expressions and movements in general.

Cris performed some textual palimpsests from paper and projection:

performing the surface of the work, which also illuminated the hand-held material he read. It was great to hear, and visually striking. Along with “Dear Bob Cobbing,” a realtime projection of Cris writing and performing improvise, err, writing. On paper!
Great fun.

My thanks to:

John Cayley for organising my brief detour to Brown and giving me a wonderful opportunity to take part in the class and local scene.

Justin Katko for having me on the Firhouse bill, for putting me up, for putting up with me, for scouting out a place to drink a beer at 12:30am in pouring snow, for introducing me to a rather handsome young ladycat who lives with him, for lending me a brightly coloured towel, various books, and for watching me sleep.

Aya Karpinska and students, for listening, probing, producing.

Cris Cheek for picking up on my throwaway comments on Amy Winehouse and not letting me get away with them, and for generally being very nice

Angela Veomett for the gig share and interesting vids

All those people I met whose names I can’t remember, I’m sorry.

I’ve uploaded tweaked, improved versions of Ideas on Oedipal Bitstreams.

FAST

SLOW

What’s new in these versions:

• Two buttons in the top-left. Refit moves text to a second ’static’ configuration from which new configurations can be gestured. Stack button dumps the text at the bottom of the screen, with each fragment landing at a random location on the x-axis. From here, you can motion up your word clouds.
• Improved coding so that no mouse gestures fail – this was a real problem with the slow version
• More zealous avoidance of the mouse by the text!

This is now a finalised panel.  I will have another one completed for Providence in a week.

Grind the sonar max here.

Phew. Busy couple of weeks. But I’m finally getting to the stage where I’ve had some time to get writing again.

Anyway for kicks I’m posting up my very first experiments with a new piece of work. The texts use fixed backgrounds and absolutely positioned divs using CSS to give the illusion, when scrolling, of the text, rather than the user’s position on the page, moving. It works best using smooth scrolling (Safari seems to work best for now but that’s something I’ll probably have to work on). It’s already engaging with space in relation to interactivity and with attempting to create some kind of interesting reading strategy. I need to work it out – but the basic material concept is there, and I think I’m onto something. And for me it’s the first exciting start in a while…

Check the idea out if you like:

OOOOOONNNNEEE

TTWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOO

THHHHHREE

Writing electronically – with all the layers of software, coding and dependencies on which that relies – produces more than ever the risk of error in reading and writing, based on unpredictable circumstance. Something not compatible, no longer there, foregrounding the medium’s abilities (updatable, malleable) negatively.

Giselle Beigeuelman’s Content=No Cache turns error into narrative, and sends us into an absorptive state of alwayserror which soon settles into discourse. Interesting thoughts of degrees of noise, interference and their relationships to what is considered ’stability’ abound…

Issa here…

Since the Veer Away Magazine is free, I guess I’m allowed to pop up my 2 pages’ worth for the publication. So, here they are, as thumbnails and compressed images. You can download the full 2-page PDF if you like (but it’s 3.5MB…)

Illness and commitments away from puter are my excuses for my interwabsence of late. Appropriately, my recent hiatus comes the week before I give a workshop to my MA group about the importance of blogs for practice and self-enquiry (hmm, on practically every level, it would seem). What a role model.

Not that I need to be. The Small Publisher’s book fair was a triumphant weekend for the RHUL Poetic Practice group. When I arrived, I came to a table containing varied, GOOD work – impressive from a group only into their 3rd week on the course¹

It showed that these students were already engaged with writing prior to joining the course. Hopefully this event showed them that their enthusiasm (I mean that in the least patronising way possible) is not wasted.

Which has right royally fucked up the order in which this post was supposed to unfold. Much has happened in the last week – I’ve discharged at least a tonne of mucus from my now peeling dry nostrils.

The Veer Away launch presented an opportunity to put a couple more notches in my poetry bedpost. Not that I shagged a poet – god forbid – but I did watch / listen to a few. And the Veer Away mag launch was well-attended by contributors, who read if they were there. I was interested to see Ulli Freer, whose shuffling rhythmread reminded me that he has more skill than mere Bowie lookalikes. Jow Lindsay’s reading employed a half-bad American accent. I’d seen videos previously of Jow performing another text all scotch, but it doesn’t take long to realise that these are more than mere gimmickry, though tis much fun. The mag as a whole seems to contain a varied and high-quality tenderloin of work. It’s baked pretty well too – guess they were funded by some body.

Jow pointed out a non-offensively critical viewpoint with regard to my own reading, noting that its clearly visual element is lost in translation. This is a problem indeed, and one I don’t think I can resolve. The double-page I have in Veer Away is a textual assemblage, a printed kind of montage of text, image, iconography. The visual muddling and working out of strategies is part of the process of reading it. Reading it out load to an audience, I guess, somehow undermines this very important aspect of the work. Still, I think it’s still enJowable as long as someone sees the rest later.

Saturday’s reading was kind of meh but ok. Over too soon because read so fast, which was the intention, although I hadn’t quite accounted for it quite so extremely. Still, who am I to steal the limelight and overrun? Thankfully, Steve Willey had enough info in his circuitboard to rescue the rest of us. Reading last, he carried us through so we filled the timeslot without looking like pussies. Rosheen I’d never heard read before – she has an excellent reading voice for her own work, I think.

Jow has also won first prize by spotting two references to Charlie Brown in my readings in one week (separate pieces of work). Yes, Jow. It was a kennel. I thought everyone knew that. Mind you, I had no idea that beagles smoked cigarettes. I suspect they will be glad about the recent rise in age limits for smokas.

Ok, that’s it for now. Seeing as Veer Away is free, I’ll get up the section I contributed on this blog in the next day or two (you-gotta-pad-a-blog-post-or-two).

Hang Tough, hang the DJ, who revolves it.

1. Obvious exceptions were Sejal Chad and Graeme Estry, whose work was clearly more MA-ified in it’s proliferative-err, ness, but who have, let’s face it, had a YEAR and three weeks to get there [↩]