prole

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!

new video

still no distances link on the sidebar you ask? that is true but sometime soon i’ll figure out paypal. in the meantime i came across a couple of videos floating about in the ether. the first is from the street weaving thing i was involved in last year seeing which brought back all sorts of happy memories of rocio, stefanie and all the rest. my best to you all where-ever you are! all the other people in that are just people who were passing by and fancied playing with some wool. a fine way to spend an afternoon!

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.

reading at resonate

so off we went to the resonate arts house in alloa for their international festival and to see how people would respond to distances. i was a tad miffed at the prints as the foam board we’d had for the mounts absorbed the spray mount and bubbled the finish. naturally only me and t noticed this but that’s not the point!

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

distances

after what seemed like an eternity in the making i’m delighted to announce that distances, the photobook i’ve done with roxana, finally arrived in four surprisingly heavy cardboard boxes as of this morning. it’s so new i don’t even have a thumbnail of the cover!

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.

a lazarus

and finally a lazarus is out on the kindle – just click on the image at the right. maybe a wee bit later than planned but the reasons for that will come out in due course.

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

a lazarus on qarrtsiluni

i’m happy to say that and we at bed and purest is available for listening to at qarrtsiluni. as ever, dave, beth et al maintain their usual consistent high standards and all the chapbook contest people are well worth a listen. i should point out also that the worship issue is now underway and that too will be something i’d recommend.

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.

bbc

so, thanks to rachel, a surprise appearance by the stone bible on the bbc this weekend. you can listen here for the following week – it’s on at about 1:44. i was out and missed it which was a bit of a shame. i did ask them to tell me when it was on and/or send me a sound file as it was unlikely in the first place i’d be in to hear it but for whatever reason they didn’t get it together. call me churlish but not replying to emails is just plain impolite. i find this seems to be becoming more common these days and it’s getting to be a bit of a bugbear. i could go on and on and on…!

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.

a lazarus

i was rather delighted to be informed that my collection ‘ a lazarus’ had been shortlisted for the qarrtsiluni chapbook prize. thanks then to qarrtsiluni and all associated with them. it’s fair to say that, in the shape of two of greek poems, they’ve published work i don’t think would find much of a voice here and i think a lazarus continues this with a vengeance. if you’ve not visited their site i would highly recommend it and the sites around it esp dave bonta’s video poetry site moving poems which is an ideal place to while away the afternoon.

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.

a slight change of direction

after my brief festival outing – very enjoyable and a couple of very unexpected surprises! – getting myself back down to work. it’s true i haven’t been super active in poetry land this year which doesn’t mean i haven’t been writing but more getting back to my default position of doing nothing with it! there are reasons for all of that but they’re really quite dull. i am (still) supposed to be finishing some prose work and, while i have done some of that, i remain in the process of finishing some prose work!

so far so procastinatory! what i have been doing is getting involved in conversations about having some paintings for sale next year. actual paintings by me for sale by someone else to someone else! and i’ve more or less agreed! very odd. but in that way that life will often give a hint of the direction you should go in i’ve fallen into taking possession of a studio so i should really use it!

i find it all quite exciting to be honest. quite what i’ll be doing there i have no idea but with any luck it’ll encourage me to get the things done i need to sell and the space to experiment with some new work.  and i’ll be open to visitors! so, if you’re passing by and fancy a look at what i’ve been up to, leave me a comment here

blade of glory

so, after the shatnering some wag, who shall remain nameless, has suggested my next poetry collection should look something like this

ref – 00:30