Tom
Pickard: Oop norf, fook sake
bulimia oblivia
I
[h] ate
it
bulimia oblivia―Tom Pickard (w/ nods to Basil Bunting, the Newcastle poets, Liverpool “beat” poets, George Harrison, bpNichol)
bulimia oblivia
don’t woof yr cookies (Newcastle Brown Ale)
purge yourself, sunflower
say somebody’s lil’ bunting
I
here’s I me mine in yr eye
oop norf, fook sake, you bet
Yorks Bete beat the Pool [1]
[h] ate
not to get all cocky
h’8 no ’aitch 4 bp concrete
viz, getting all visual
it
ate me (’arf-time) so don’t be
telling porkies, pie-head
magpie caught in a barcode [2]
Jeremy
Prynne: Paratactic Procedures
Here I saw… telescopic to the field inside the mouth
where speech parts of separation had been swallowed
in foreground… fricative was the advice and
to palate by adhesion said to be forward
Kazoo Dreamboats―Jeremy Prynne (with a nod to Gerald Bruns [3])
Here I saw… telescopic to the field
inside the mouth
chokeberries on the line rotten beyond
description
chomp by field ate down to baby letter
shivers, bottle
our mal du doute upchuck trick, there’s a
good chap
where speech parts of separation had
been swallowed
by black holes, do not interrupt his moment
of disconnect
at all / anyway / whatever / even so /
rubbish [4]
goes down whoosh it’s got some teeth in it
in foreground… fricative was the advice
and
couple disjunct blimeys in a row pick &
prune a’miss
near scurvy them ballsy labiodental f’n
fearsome
feckful avant swine, dey do dis da joint
to palate by adhesion said to be forward
by outward tastes like collage glued on the
tongue
you can only “be” in the moment, just out Near/Miss
[5]
meets Gordon Lish meets Lewis Black, well
done old son
Tom
Raworth: gifted
a present
that
fits me
to a t
Ace
― Tom Raworth (with a nod to old Stones… & stoners)
a present
gifted, & at arms (rah-rah)
shabby old cardigan, slippers, &c. [6]
― the real raw deal!
that
’s worth a lotta r…
She corrects [7] / x-ray
muse in my devices
fits me
sting or other wrays
Rae-worth, Raw-worth let’s call
the whole thing off ?
to a t
Om boy… pleased to meet’cha
full steam a head
top speed, them ol’ rollers [8]
Jack
Spicer: No One Listens to Poetry
No one listens to poetry. The
ocean
Does not mean to be listened to.
A drop
• • •
It pounds the shore. White and
aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
Language―Jack Spicer (with nods to Robin Blaser)
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
rolls over us ― these coastal people
nothing’s out beyond this last gasp edge [9]
serial decoder of breakers
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
drip drip on little green transceivers,
whatever [10]
comes in from that darkness around us [11]
you were the real outsider, honest angel
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
jolts or jive, so okay dictate something,
anything…
Nothing, you
said, Deserves to live
& I heard that, crystal clear
One listens to poetry.
It’s difficult to get the news [12]
No one listens to radio anymore,
not even Martians
Richard
Stevenson: White and Airless Signals
(for
Rick)
It was the pulse I was interested in.
Getting between those interstices of being.
But without a constant of normality
I could neither transmit nor receive.
Mike’s Acid Story―Richard Stevenson (with nods to Jack Spicer & Robert
Herrick)
It was the pulse I was interested in.
White and airless signals,[13] a radio no one
listens to anymore (trans’istors) the night
they drove ol’ anti-cedents down
Getting between those interstices of
being.
The old lightbulb trick, as told by an ex +
poet-
star-grrl, couple high school acid queens
day trippers all along the graveyard shift
But without a constant of normality
no can check yr stoned pronouns at the
space
ship door, w-a-y out b’yond those edgy
coastal folk (oh decoder of serial
breakers)
I could neither transmit nor receive.
Such a dumb numb cisgender, transceiver
bust
… so gather ye zies & zems while ye may
dose psychic authorities [14] will have zeir day
[1] Piers Plowman, first “lit” (up) instance of the family name
Bete/Bett/Betts, with all its variant early spellings
[2] Newcastle United Football Club nicknames: Magpies, Barcodes
[3] See Gerald Bruns’ essay on Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats, in
Bruns, Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature
[4] Complete (untitled) poem in Prynne’s Down where changed
[5] Charles Bernstein’s Near/Miss
[6] TR’s reading at Kootenay School of Writing, mid-’90s
[7] Rae Armantrout corrects my pronunciation, over dinner: Rāworth, not
Răworth, as I’d been saying, like, for-ever…
[8] TR’s break-neck, monotone reading speed―bravura performance
[9] I’ve often quoted the following lines (born to it, so to speak).
Spicer: “We are a coastal people. / There is nothing but ocean out beyond us.
We grasp / The first thing coming.” (“Ten Poems for Downbeat”). And Robin
Blaser’s essay on Spicer, “The Practise of Outside”: Spicer’s west coast
landscape “seems to be at the edge of something, a gated place, an end which
opens again.”
[10] Speaking of this, in astrophysics the developing LGM theory (LGM1,
LGM2, etc.) is a physicists’ in-joke (Little Green Men 1, 2, etc.). Martin
Rees, Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others
[11] Blaser biographer, Miriam Nichols, on the subject of RB’s (&
JS’s) “serial” poems: “the idea of seriality…it’s what comes into the space…in
the poem” (Nichols’ interview with Paul Nelson, Splabman, Jan 13, 2020).
And this vital bit of news from Spicer on “serial” poems: “Poems should echo
and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live
alone any more than we can.” And of course the echo of Creeley’s “the darkness
surrounds us.”
[12] WCW’s well known lines: “It is difficult / to get the news from
poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
[13] Phrase from Spicer―see previous glosa.
[14] Lawrence Ferlinghetti coined the phrase “psychic authoritarianism,”
as I recall, for New Agers; reviving the phrase for mind-bending
third-gendering folk seems likewise appropriate nowadays.
