what a revelation. or maybe it is only to someone who perhaps ‘isn’t the brightest’. when it comes to housepainting i hate a cheap brush – one of the things i like about that activity is getting the brushes out and putting on some decent paint (i.e. not from b&q). and, strangely enough it’s the same with painty paint brushes! so, getting used this week have been a peachy new 2 inch brush (surely the verticoli of my brush box), a textile fan and fine brush, and another sable fine (both size 0). that brush geek enough!?

anyway, other stuff i’m learning. after a howler last year when i got asked to make another picture similar to one i’d already done and realising i couldn’t actually remember how i done it i’ve been much more conscientious about making notes as i’m working. aside from avoiding obvious fits of the stupids it does avoid the above and the repetition of the same mistakes. notebooks are also great for sketches, ideas and.. notes. i like my notebooks big time (note:  moleskin = wrong)

what else have i learned. one i should have picked up from an acquaintance who knows better than me is be well cautious about making work for someone’s exhibition, preferably only use what you’ve got. it may be, if you’re from poetryland, that place cyril connolly described as ‘jackals snarling over an empty well’ (i’m paraphrasing) you might have the idea that artyworld is somehow better organised what with all those galleries and stuff. sadly not so. in artyworld just because someone says they’ll do a thing that doesn’t mean it’ll be getting done and if it does it most certainly won’t be on time. never be in a position where these people owe you money. i’m just saying….

talking of which i had a bit of an outburst today when t informed me of a gallery who were charging 60% commission and still expecting the artists to pay the vat! you’d be as well selling on the street. but of course artyworld doesn’t operate like that… which is a shame as when i was by the studio today i met christy in a state of near hypothermia. people with that sort of commitment don’t need a gouging from a gallery on top of the rest.

anyway, me i’ve got a pristine new canvas hanging in the (now leaf free) studio. it looks great and, once it gets warmer, i’m going to do two more in the same series. the drawing pieces continue. i write some poetry. i do some writing. still haven’t sorted out distances tho

lazy, lazy, lazy

that deadline component is much more prevalent with what the writing has taken a back seat to. i’ve got a painting thing i have to get finished by the middle of next month. sure i thought, that’ll be no problem and it wasn’t, at least until i decided i’d be using a bigger canvas than normal. it’s not so much that i’m having to use a different technique, tho i kind of am. more that there’s just more….

but that’s more or less going swimmingly. the next deadline is for an installation piece at the beginning of february. i’ll not say much about that beyond that it involves leaves and glueing them to metal which is why i’m just after arriving back home after yet another frustrating swear fest at the studio. if anyone knows a decent way to get leaves to bond to metal i’d love to hear it. currently all my glue options are failing, i’m unconvinced my primer is forming a decent key and i’ve also discovered that the frustration with 3m spraymount continues as i discover that while it may be utterly useless for sticking things it does dissolve car paint!

and did i get the paypal thing sorted for distances? no i did not. beginning of the week, honest….

the moral of the story being that it’s not good to take on too many things, esp at the time of year when your day job is most likely to be at its most busy

i’m happy to say that i’m in prole magazine this month. it’s always nice to be published but, for me, it’s the people who make the difference and the communication i’ve had with brett and phil, for it is they who are prole, have been a joy.

i’ve been banging on about this a lot recently but once more in case you blinked and missed it – the ‘art’ is all fair and good but it’s the people element that can add so much more. working with people who actually get out and make things can be a very synergistic process. i like prole for those very reasons and will be buying copies based on that alone. i urge you to do the same!

the second is part of a reading i did with soutar writers couple of weeks ago there’s some sweariness at the beginning in case you’re at work or have children running about (it’s very brief). it does have a first read of one of the lazarus poems tho. it was a nice wee night and very well attended which can only be good for perth.

Why a Street Weave with Rocio Jungenfeld and Morgan Downie from Stefanie Tan on Vimeo.

the couple of times i’ve been down to resonate have been great – alloa’s best times, it could be argued, are well past but to have such a space in this wee town id just great and the fact that it manages without any need of grant etc from a central funder is even more amazing. angela and the rest of them do a great job – it’s worth going out of your way to get down and see them just to coast on some of that enthusiasm. other scottish towns should take note.

a great turn out and an abundance of art on the walls. if there wasn’t something there for you could engage with i’d be very surprised. i did a brief bit of speaking and a couple of poems from the prints – they seemed to go down well – watch out for the pictures in the alloa advertiser! i had a gran chat with some of the people and, as with the reading at the festival, a surprise appearance from the past from rachel, who i haven’t seen in what must be the last fifteen years. even back then she was nagging me to get some work out so it was great to finally say here it is!

the only person who wasn’t there was roxana whose presence was limited to my mp3 stuck to the wall. i’m very taken with her versions of the poem so here they all are here

the water brother

the tea drinker’s poem

perfect day

demeter

if i say so myself, it’s a beautiful looking thing. the poetry is more towards stoneandsea than a lazarus but, despite the poems being older now, i can see both works in them.  expect little in the way of punctuation and long, skinny poems. how to describe the photography? i’d start by looking up something like sumptuous on the thesaurus. i’d hope roxana’s work needs no introduction but if you’re not familiar with it follow the link and have a treat.

i can’t comment on the translation aspect as, no matter that i promised roxana my romanian would be up to it by the time this came out, i haven’t really progressed beyond buying the cds and a firm commitment to the dodgy world of google translate. roxana, i do apologise! but, equally, roxana speaks more than enough languages for the both of us! the brief for the translation was not to do a translation but to produce a version of the original that would make sense romanian. in the end i found this one of the most entertaining aspects of the whole project. aside from layout, syntax and the like there were fundamental questions that you just don’t have to ask (or can avoid) in english. what, for instance, is the gender of the narrator? which leads to a laying out of a different set of poetic cards on the table.

anyway, there’ll be a link on the sidebar in due course once i figure out how to do a paypal thingy. in the meantime i’ll be taking distances out for its first airing at the resonate arts house in alloa on friday night. which, being tomorrow means i should be off working on that. there will be other events in due course so i’ll post them on here.

in the meantime here’s a video of me and roxana mucking about with sound poetry what seems an age ago (we must do more of that!). i still have that childish sense of wonder and potential with technology and the internet and think that distances is very much a product of that. if all it does is encourage others to do something similar (or better, very different!) i’ll be very happy.

aside from some minor formatting problems i’m very happy with it. it may be that a hard copy version will be forthcoming but that depends on time and money plus the swiss lounge thing was about trying new forms. plus i was taken with the idea that it would be possible to buy a poetry collection for a cup of coffee. as for the kindle thing, outside of holidays and bike touring i’m still not altogether taken with it, but it’s a whole lot easier to publish to it than it is to do conventionally.

and i think that was an issue with this. i’m delighted that qarrtsiluni picked it up and getting i am furies into starry rhymes came just at the right time (and not forgetting the title poem’s appearance in the poetry bus) but, if i’m honest, i can’t think of anyone in the uk who would have touched it. which (and i’d be happy to be proved wrong), for me seems a shame. slp, at the face of it, appears to want to address this so it’ll be interesting to see how that project works out. but again, a wee bit like music, there’s never been a better time to bypass the conventional and adopt a do-it-yourself attitude, forge new relationships and create interesting new stuff.

i should point out for those who have read stone and sea that it is nothing at all like that so don’t be expecting something similar. what is it? i kind of like the description i put up on amazon. the notion was to take poems and use only their words to creat something else, definitely not a cut up, but something else, that made its own grammar and rhythm. i hope it looks easy because it most assuredly was not! by the time i got to the end i was most definitely the end. having to put my head repeatedly in that space disrupted my thinking, so much so i’ve hardly written poetry since and have been soothing my aching brain cells with prose. that said, as an exercise into getting into the bones of the language of a poem, it’s totally worthwhile.

so that’s the how and why of it. i would get it and try it. read it out loud, trip over the language, watch it come alive. i hope you enjoy.

oh aye, i’m ipad/iphone-less so haven’t seen what it looks like on those platforms. if anyone has those can you let me know? ta

the audio file features two readings of the poem, one a straight rendition and the other is me fiddling about with garageband (any hot tips or garage bands for idiots type guide recommendations will be gratefully received!). while this one is a bit haphazard – i forgot what i was doing between recording and that version and, of course, didn’t save it – this sort of audio doodling was great fun and something i hope to do more of in the future.

qarrtsiluni plan to do a booklet of the chapbook finalists so i’ll post up details when i get them. i’ve been pretty impressed with their previous output so again this will be something i’d recommend esp if you’ve a space in your purchasing pile.

as for a lazarus, after the qarrtsiluni thing comes out (and allowing for a couple of pressing deadlines for this month) the vague plan is to put the whole thing out as a pamphlet on the swiss lounge imprint. that has been in hiatus for the last wee while but i’ve kind of shifted around a few priorities and i’m hoping to get it going again for the end of the year. that website is going to remain down for the time being but i’ll update here or there when the time comes.

but anyway… it was a bit of a fanboy reading for me. i can’t claim to have been a fan of catatonia back in the day – i was being all electronic and refusing to listen to anything that involved voices or actual instruments (changed days, yes i know) but offstage cerys matthews did all the falling about and whatnot that was so dear to us back then (allegedly!) so that, should i have chosen to listen to something of that ilk, catatonia were well up on my acceptability list. the years go by and in the interim and she’s got all solo and all the better for it i think. so (and given that the bbc have just been a bit bbc in previous readings of me) i was looking forward to seeing what she was going to come up with.

not least because (and rachel makes the same point) i’m interested to hear what the poem sounds like, even if it’s one of mine. poems are great on the page but there’s a something about them that’s half-lived, as if they need to be out and about and breathe. plus, being that reading to each other, telling each other stories, must be among the most fundamental of human experiences, it seems daft that we don’t do it more. so, nice job, cerys matthews.

and, in that vein, and given that i’m getting a bit better with the sound recording these days, if there’s any poems out of the book or that i’ve done elsewhere that anyone wants to hear then please let me now and i’ll sort it out. if it’s not by me then you’ll need to be negotiating around permissions but if that can be done i’ll do that too.

i should also thank peadar at tfe for getting the notion of the collection together by publishing the title poem and claire askew who published i am furies at just the time i was needing it. all of which might sound a bit like so much blah blah blah but it just goes to show you’re never really on your own even when it seems that way.

i like rewriting poems. i find it a good way to get into the language, copying it out, longhand or typing, it doesn’t matter (tho i prefer longhand). so what then if i took the words in poems and only those words and fashioned it into something else. so far so oulipo(esque!). the most obvious method would just be to do a cut up. which is fine for one poem but what if you’re going to do a bunch of them? in which case you have to do something like unwiring the grammatical side of your brain and then hook it back up again in the wrong order so that the resulting work has some sort of internal sense. and everybody has to be dead…

by the time i was done, and to be honest a chapbook length thing was about as long as i could manage, my brain was thoroughly fried. so much so i had to take some time off, write nothing at all but, at the end of it i had a thing that i’d seen through, that i was happy with. i guess what i’m saying is it’s worth it, to purse these notions, to do the thing for no other reason than because you want to, to see what it’ll look like when you’re done.