The Bow-Wow Shop, edited by Michael Glover, must be the only web magazine to manifest itself in flesh and blood form with a launch. Issue 3 was launched with readings a few days ago at the Arts Club. A short Ashbery poem read simultaneously in Polish and Russian translation created a pleasing and oddly soothing effect. Among the other readers was Japan-based Paul Rossiter who read an electrifying poem. ‘Komachi’, from the current issue. As well as a group of his poems there’s a substantial afterword by him, ‘Thatched Huts and Instant Noodles’, where he describes in some detail the history of his encounters with Japanese poetry, starting, long before he had visited the country, with his reading of Bunting’s ‘Chomei at Toyama’ . ‘Komachi’ takes off from a contemporary No play he happened on two weeks after arriving in Tokyo in 1981. ‘Traditional No’, he writes, is performed extremely slowly, but that is as nothing compared to the pace at which this Komachi moved. In the second line of the poem I talk about her moving 'centimetre by centimetre' across the bridge, and this is perhaps an understatement; her pace was almost impossibly slow, and it took her nearly ten minutes to cover the few metres to the centre of the stage. Moreover, the production was also almost completely silent; although there was occasionally some music (Vivaldi, 'La Vie en Rose'), and the figures in the sub-plot (squabbling 1980s' neighbours who live in the apartment next door to Komachi's ancientness) had lines to speak, Komachi herself stayed silent throughout the performance. The speechlessness, the extreme slowness of the movement, and the use of No performance practices, together created an extraordinary intensity. The performance was both phantasmagoric and perfectly controlled, and it made even someone like Peter Brook look a bit sloppy. I'd never seen anything like it.’ It sounds like a piece of performance art, and suggests a resemblance that seems to exist between such traditional forms, and Zen, with western modernism. Rossiter’s piece concludes with a hilarious account of cross-cultural endeavour and confusion, again in Tokyo, involving Kenneth Koch and the shade of Amy Lowell.
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Friday, 20 November 2009
RIMBAUD IN ADEN
Lunch yesterday at Iraqi poet Abdulkarim Kasid’s flat near Chancery Lane, to continue working on the English versions of his poems, versions he first made himself working with his daughter Sara. This method of translation has become increasingly common of course, and I’ve previously worked on the British-based Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan’s poems in a similar way. Some of those versions are among those included in a collection of his poems, ‘Sonata For Four Hands’, due out very soon from Arc Press. It’s a way of working of course that shows up a fundamental asymmetry – they know English, we don’t know Arabic, Punjabi . . .
Kasid’s first home after he got out of Iraq nearly thirty years ago was in Aden. He lived near to what was Rimbaud’s house, and one of the poems we’re working on, ‘A Volcano’, is dedicated to the poet’s memory. He has translated Rimbaud from French into Arabic and yesterday he told me he identifies with Rimbaud’s wandering lifestyle, having himself like so many others been constantly on the move through force of circumstance, something alluded to in this poem (which was in Shadowtrain a while back):
TERMINAL WISDOM
How could I know
My outbound journey
Could be the way back,
That my dreams were behind me
And I wasn’t only the walking shadow
Of a standing-still man?
Kasid’s first home after he got out of Iraq nearly thirty years ago was in Aden. He lived near to what was Rimbaud’s house, and one of the poems we’re working on, ‘A Volcano’, is dedicated to the poet’s memory. He has translated Rimbaud from French into Arabic and yesterday he told me he identifies with Rimbaud’s wandering lifestyle, having himself like so many others been constantly on the move through force of circumstance, something alluded to in this poem (which was in Shadowtrain a while back):
TERMINAL WISDOM
How could I know
My outbound journey
Could be the way back,
That my dreams were behind me
And I wasn’t only the walking shadow
Of a standing-still man?
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
STUDIES AT DELHI 1876
Sir Alfred Lyall was nothing if not an imperialist, with long service in the most senior ranks of the Indian Civil Service. The sack of Delhi in the aftermath of the ‘Mutiny’or ‘Great Revolt’, depending on your point of view, when Delhi was retaken, sacked and many of its inhabitants killed, was a particularly dreadful episode. Writing some twenty years later Lyall, in his ‘Studies at Delhi 1876’, evokes a game of badminton being played on the spot where the battle to retake the city had been fought:
Hardly a shot from the gate we stormed,
Under the Moree battlement’s shade;
Close to the glacis our game was formed,
There had the fight been, and there we played.
Lightly the demoiselles tittered and leapt,
Merrily capered the players all;
North, was the garden where Nicolson slept,
South was the sweep of a battered wall.
Near me a Musalman, civil and mild,
Watched as the shuttlecocks rose and fell;
And he said, as he counted his beads and smiled,
‘God smite their souls to the depths of hell.’
Hardly a shot from the gate we stormed,
Under the Moree battlement’s shade;
Close to the glacis our game was formed,
There had the fight been, and there we played.
Lightly the demoiselles tittered and leapt,
Merrily capered the players all;
North, was the garden where Nicolson slept,
South was the sweep of a battered wall.
Near me a Musalman, civil and mild,
Watched as the shuttlecocks rose and fell;
And he said, as he counted his beads and smiled,
‘God smite their souls to the depths of hell.’
Well at least Lyall could see it . . .
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
AL CELESTINE
A message from Chris Gutkind to say that the London-based American poet Al Celestine has died. Chris wrote ‘Al has died, it's sad. He had a heart attack a few weeks back, I just found out from his very distressed boyfriend of 21 years, poor Al, such a warm man, and a wonderful mad man, and such an interesting poet, never seen anything quite like his work. He died July 28 . . .’
I published Al’s pamphlet 'Confessions of Nat Turner' in 1978 just three years after I’d started The Many Press. At that time I was printing things myself at the Poetry Society print shop in Earls Court. Production-wise this one could be criticised. The cover card (I had the covers printed elsewhere and bound the pamphlets myself) was a rather alarming dark pink. I had a Dover Book of Aztec motifs – all too easy to chop up and paste down and I went a bit wild with those.
Al was very straightforward to deal with, but quite elusive, I found, on a personal level. I have a file for each Many Press publication, where I keep letters and suchlike as well as the actual ms. But in his file all there is is the original typescript and the brief covering letter. I remember he was anxious not to be labelled a ‘Black poet’ and got quite agitated when he saw a brief review in Time Out drawing attention to that. ‘Who told them I was Black?’ he asked (I think it may have been me). At the time he was working at Joe Allen’s, a smart upmarket burger place while taking some part in the London poetry scene – I recall him standing beside me in the Poetry Society print shop and saying, in a rather resigned way, that he had to head off to Poetry Round.
There were a few other fleeting contacts. There was a group vegetarian dinner he was involved in organising – fund-raising? Amanda and I went along to that. And there were one or two brief telephone and later email exchanges and very occasionally hearing word of him which suggested he was still around now and then on the poetry scene.
What else did he publish? Something that strikes me now, re-reading the 'Confessions', is the combination of powerful rhetoric and a kind of steadiness of control. Here are a couple of passages:
Jacob strums
It's doing what must be done
And keeping up appearances
To become a part of what is.
The stars are hysterical with green omens.
The wide water parts, and he slips
Further and further down into perfection
Because song is naked, and terror
Because it's orgasmic, because it's rooted
Spreads deep into our bowels and cannot be sung.
It does not have a name, this tune.
We have nothing to cleanse our wound
When a string breaks with its own song.
He sees pilgrims, horrific puritans,
Lost, like a crow flying beyond its own field.
Doubt ripens.
Doubt sleeps in the mouth of rivers.
It has the colour of mustard greens.
It has, of course, two sides;
They sway within us like complaint.
Who wants to translate suffering, and who
Weeps for your old juju man now?
Here among hot ash each generation
Like smoke searching for its gone fire
Rises to tell us what we want.
...
I published Al’s pamphlet 'Confessions of Nat Turner' in 1978 just three years after I’d started The Many Press. At that time I was printing things myself at the Poetry Society print shop in Earls Court. Production-wise this one could be criticised. The cover card (I had the covers printed elsewhere and bound the pamphlets myself) was a rather alarming dark pink. I had a Dover Book of Aztec motifs – all too easy to chop up and paste down and I went a bit wild with those.
Al was very straightforward to deal with, but quite elusive, I found, on a personal level. I have a file for each Many Press publication, where I keep letters and suchlike as well as the actual ms. But in his file all there is is the original typescript and the brief covering letter. I remember he was anxious not to be labelled a ‘Black poet’ and got quite agitated when he saw a brief review in Time Out drawing attention to that. ‘Who told them I was Black?’ he asked (I think it may have been me). At the time he was working at Joe Allen’s, a smart upmarket burger place while taking some part in the London poetry scene – I recall him standing beside me in the Poetry Society print shop and saying, in a rather resigned way, that he had to head off to Poetry Round.
There were a few other fleeting contacts. There was a group vegetarian dinner he was involved in organising – fund-raising? Amanda and I went along to that. And there were one or two brief telephone and later email exchanges and very occasionally hearing word of him which suggested he was still around now and then on the poetry scene.
What else did he publish? Something that strikes me now, re-reading the 'Confessions', is the combination of powerful rhetoric and a kind of steadiness of control. Here are a couple of passages:
Jacob strums
It's doing what must be done
And keeping up appearances
To become a part of what is.
The stars are hysterical with green omens.
The wide water parts, and he slips
Further and further down into perfection
Because song is naked, and terror
Because it's orgasmic, because it's rooted
Spreads deep into our bowels and cannot be sung.
It does not have a name, this tune.
We have nothing to cleanse our wound
When a string breaks with its own song.
He sees pilgrims, horrific puritans,
Lost, like a crow flying beyond its own field.
Doubt ripens.
Doubt sleeps in the mouth of rivers.
It has the colour of mustard greens.
It has, of course, two sides;
They sway within us like complaint.
Who wants to translate suffering, and who
Weeps for your old juju man now?
Here among hot ash each generation
Like smoke searching for its gone fire
Rises to tell us what we want.
...
The narrow gate closed.
The yard filled with enraged masters.
Dead Eye harbored horizons.
His face loomed in the half-moon.
There wer rumors of owls.
There were pockets of blood.
Red cauldron of ignorance boils
Over with screams.
The crows was like small white teeth. Standing there
Digesting their own sins
They spoke of refusals,
The necessity of remaining pure.
The flame grew hungry; the rope bit
Savagely into Dead Eye's wrists.
Hundreds of thngs connected them.
Fear divided.
The past was a bull's eye:
The beginning, the end.
They heard something approach and stop.
The tar smiled, the feathers snickered.
Dead Eye stood still.
He cut from each defeat a thread.
He emerged
A black phoenix
Intoxicated, sinister.
VISITING EXILE
It was Souheil Sleiman, a friend and near neighbour, who made his studio available for Amanda's Hackney Downs event. I’m currently correcting the proofs of my Shearsman book 'Visiting Exile', due out in October. Souheil’s sculpture ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’, seen here on the right, will be on the cover and references to it recur throughout the book. ('All Dressed Up...' was the subject of my first post on this blog.) The work featured as Lebanon’s entry for the Alexandria Biennale last year, so the whole thing had to be dismantled and reassembled, which is referred to in the following section:Alexandria: is it
Towards a city
But defunct – that can
Swim or sprout eyes
Library lighthouse drowned statues
On the balcony, stands there, a stranger
The name is lips kissing themselves
Towards a city
But defunct – that can
Swim or sprout eyes
Library lighthouse drowned statues
On the balcony, stands there, a stranger
The name is lips kissing themselves
Where the sculpture arrives
In its packing case
Flatpack assembly:
Dismembered to two dimensions
And under the sea someone’s here
Making a shape out of something lonely
It has eyes instead of a name
In the harbour of drowning
Inimical still to the texture of flesh
It’s a carapace sloughed off
A thing of endless corners
Look backward the usual stranger
So perched it in my mind
Where everything leaves its faint print
But somewhere’s the shape of a human
‘Come over here and be loved’
And a voice, that might last in the calling
From ‘somewhere out of Africa’
Smashed to a dazzle – my animal mouth
Being walked here into a mirror’s silence
In its packing case
Flatpack assembly:
Dismembered to two dimensions
And under the sea someone’s here
Making a shape out of something lonely
It has eyes instead of a name
In the harbour of drowning
Inimical still to the texture of flesh
It’s a carapace sloughed off
A thing of endless corners
Look backward the usual stranger
So perched it in my mind
Where everything leaves its faint print
But somewhere’s the shape of a human
‘Come over here and be loved’
And a voice, that might last in the calling
From ‘somewhere out of Africa’
Smashed to a dazzle – my animal mouth
Being walked here into a mirror’s silence
AMANDA WELCH WEBSITE
Amanda Welch’s website is now up and running, at http://www.amandajanewelch.com/. My last post had Laurie Duggan’s photos of Amanda’s recent ‘Hackney Downs’ show. On her new website you can read more about it, and her statement on the project. And there's a piece by poet and critic Martha Kapos on her last series, the Devon Paintings as well as lots of images of previous work.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
HACKNEY DOWNS
Amanda Welch is showing her ‘Hackney Downs’ project in a studio generously lent to her by fellow-artist Souheil Sleiman for the week. It’s on for the rest of this week and here you can see some of the work being transported across the Downs - it will close with an event taking place on Saturday 11th July at 2pm to round it off, when some of the work will be transported by a band of willing helpers across the Downs and back to our house at 15 Norcott Road. Meanwhile she’ll be at the studio from 4-6 each day till then, or at other times by appointment. Call 020 8806 5723 for further details.
‘My current work’, she writes, ‘comes out of an activity, begun “on the side” in 2005, of making memory drawings.’ These are memories of cycling across Hackney Downs ‘on my way to somewhere else. It had occurred to me that these repeated incidental crossings were important’ and later in the same piece she says: ‘Paradoxically, to have no purpose became a purpose. There were conditions attached. From the start it felt important to stick to the moment of noticing – no stopping my bike to check, no going back, no filling in the missing bits, no analysis, no system; no looking for, only finding.’
Hackney Downs: the space is an ambiguous one, not quite the traditional idea of a park. It doesn’t have the curves and irregular planting of trees one associates with parkland as a manicured version of a traditional rural landscape. It’s something squarer and more abrupt, though not completely flat but rising in the centre in a irregular shallow dome and tucked in alongside the railway, formerly the line of the Hackney Brook. There are straight lines of trees on two sides, and an open space you venture into from the safety of the edge – though it has recently been somewhat softened with the planting of a ‘community orchard’ and a ‘wildlife area’.
Martha Kapos wrote of Amanda Welch’s previous cycle of work, the ‘Devon Paintings’: ‘What if you wanted a kind of painting truer to the painter’s walking eye, a painting closer to the experience of landscape as we actually enter it and circulate within it? What if you wanted all of these images and shapes together within the same surface, within the same pictorial whole?’ But moving through a city is all glimpses; a city is a solid thing, an image of permanence, but is composed for much of the time of these glimpses. Here they relate to a single, albeit various, space, and a crossing and recrossing rather than a passing through. Somewhere behind it there’s the plein air tradition of landscape painting in watercolour. Amanda Welch did a lot of paintings in this vein around twenty years ago. An aspect of this kind of work has always been a topographical recording. As in, for instance, the four volumes of Recording Britain published immediately after the Second World War, and the last major undertaking of its kind? The project was launched in 1939 in these words: ‘Artists should be invited to make a number of topographical water-colour drawings of places and buildings of characteristic national interest, particularly those exposed to the dangers of destruction by the operations of war.’ But where each plate in Recording Britain aims to represent a gathering together, a distillation of the essence of a building or landscape, in this work it is all fragments. It has been disassembled, flying apart in pieces. (There have been literal explosions. There is only one remaining towerblock, recorded in three of the ‘sculptures’, the other blocks having been blown up by the Council in front of a large audience of spectators.)
But these works have been made emphatically not by sitting in front of the landscape, but always done from memory. There is a preoccupation with time passing, recording all kinds of often very small changes and, from time to time, recording the site’s earlier history.
There are elements of the cartoon which recall Amanda’s earlier career as an illustrator, and emerge especially in the protagonist who moves through the work, a puzzled and not infrequently indignant person on a bicycle in a hurry to get somewhere else. ‘I really hate these new seats’ she declares. It’s the opposite of the painter who has set up an easel in front of a landscape and works meditatively for a prolonged period.
These fragments have to be somehow organised. Archiving is a contemporary preoccupation – but here, whether or not consciously, there are elements of parody. The process of making these objects is itself directed by impulse, using whatever materials happen to turn up. Many of the drawings as well are on scrap paper; she refers to them as ‘residues of my bicycle trips’. It’s the opposite of the reverential white-gloved approach. There is also a steadfast avoidance of the kind of neatness often associated with this kind of thing – which tends to involve work all executed on paper of exactly the same size, providing the pleasure of making a ‘set’ – like collecting stamps and sticking them in one’s album. The works was conceived in part as a way of moving on from the previous series of paintings. Looking at these drawings in bulk what is so striking is the is enlivening variousness of the result.
‘My current work’, she writes, ‘comes out of an activity, begun “on the side” in 2005, of making memory drawings.’ These are memories of cycling across Hackney Downs ‘on my way to somewhere else. It had occurred to me that these repeated incidental crossings were important’ and later in the same piece she says: ‘Paradoxically, to have no purpose became a purpose. There were conditions attached. From the start it felt important to stick to the moment of noticing – no stopping my bike to check, no going back, no filling in the missing bits, no analysis, no system; no looking for, only finding.’
Hackney Downs: the space is an ambiguous one, not quite the traditional idea of a park. It doesn’t have the curves and irregular planting of trees one associates with parkland as a manicured version of a traditional rural landscape. It’s something squarer and more abrupt, though not completely flat but rising in the centre in a irregular shallow dome and tucked in alongside the railway, formerly the line of the Hackney Brook. There are straight lines of trees on two sides, and an open space you venture into from the safety of the edge – though it has recently been somewhat softened with the planting of a ‘community orchard’ and a ‘wildlife area’.
Martha Kapos wrote of Amanda Welch’s previous cycle of work, the ‘Devon Paintings’: ‘What if you wanted a kind of painting truer to the painter’s walking eye, a painting closer to the experience of landscape as we actually enter it and circulate within it? What if you wanted all of these images and shapes together within the same surface, within the same pictorial whole?’ But moving through a city is all glimpses; a city is a solid thing, an image of permanence, but is composed for much of the time of these glimpses. Here they relate to a single, albeit various, space, and a crossing and recrossing rather than a passing through. Somewhere behind it there’s the plein air tradition of landscape painting in watercolour. Amanda Welch did a lot of paintings in this vein around twenty years ago. An aspect of this kind of work has always been a topographical recording. As in, for instance, the four volumes of Recording Britain published immediately after the Second World War, and the last major undertaking of its kind? The project was launched in 1939 in these words: ‘Artists should be invited to make a number of topographical water-colour drawings of places and buildings of characteristic national interest, particularly those exposed to the dangers of destruction by the operations of war.’ But where each plate in Recording Britain aims to represent a gathering together, a distillation of the essence of a building or landscape, in this work it is all fragments. It has been disassembled, flying apart in pieces. (There have been literal explosions. There is only one remaining towerblock, recorded in three of the ‘sculptures’, the other blocks having been blown up by the Council in front of a large audience of spectators.)
But these works have been made emphatically not by sitting in front of the landscape, but always done from memory. There is a preoccupation with time passing, recording all kinds of often very small changes and, from time to time, recording the site’s earlier history.
There are elements of the cartoon which recall Amanda’s earlier career as an illustrator, and emerge especially in the protagonist who moves through the work, a puzzled and not infrequently indignant person on a bicycle in a hurry to get somewhere else. ‘I really hate these new seats’ she declares. It’s the opposite of the painter who has set up an easel in front of a landscape and works meditatively for a prolonged period.
These fragments have to be somehow organised. Archiving is a contemporary preoccupation – but here, whether or not consciously, there are elements of parody. The process of making these objects is itself directed by impulse, using whatever materials happen to turn up. Many of the drawings as well are on scrap paper; she refers to them as ‘residues of my bicycle trips’. It’s the opposite of the reverential white-gloved approach. There is also a steadfast avoidance of the kind of neatness often associated with this kind of thing – which tends to involve work all executed on paper of exactly the same size, providing the pleasure of making a ‘set’ – like collecting stamps and sticking them in one’s album. The works was conceived in part as a way of moving on from the previous series of paintings. Looking at these drawings in bulk what is so striking is the is enlivening variousness of the result.
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