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Friday, April 30, 2021

Stephen Bett - The Works






Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 24 books in print. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com

***

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.