Letter to a doctor
(for Will Stabile)
they put a camera up my ass
they put a camera down my throat
(not the same camera)
(or not the same day) (more…)
9 07, 08
4 07, 08
Culture in a Globalised City. Zygmunt Bauman
Cities, and particularly mega-cities like London, are the dustbins into which problems produced by globalization are dumped. They are also laboratories in which the art of living with those problems (though not of resolving them) is experimented with, put to the test, and (hopefully, hopefully…) developed. Most seminal impacts of globalization (above all, the divorce of power from politics, and the shifting of functions once undertaken by political authorities sideways, to the markets, and downward, to individual life-politics) have been by now thoroughly investigated and descibed in great detail. I will confine myself therefore to one aspect of the globalization process – too seldom considered in connection with the paradigmatic change in the study and theory of culture: namely, the changing patterns of global migration. (more…)
11 06, 08
Le valle sans retour. Michael Hilton
mo’s moat is most enclosing
of the castle and its keep
i see a brazen archer
aim from yon windowseat
and what is more i know her
yon archer is of yore
winner of all tournaments
her willow bow of lore
she is the queen’s own ranger
and princess’s sister twin
i’m joe her would be lover
if i could but get in (more…)
7 06, 08
DDi22 05, 08
We imagine the police. William Wall
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto to the ‘Svendborg Poems’
13 05, 08
9 05, 08
An extract from Gomorrah. Roberto Saviano
P A R T O N E
T H E P O R T
The container swayed as the crane hoisted it onto the ship. The spreader, which hooks the container to the crane, was unable to control its movement, so it seemed to float in the air. The hatches, which had been improperly closed, suddenly sprang open, and dozens of bodies started raining down. They looked like mannequins. But when they hit the ground, their heads split open, as if their skulls were real. And they were. Men, women, even a few children, came tumbling out of the container. All dead. Frozen, stacked one on top of another, packed like sardines. These were the Chinese who never die. The eternal ones, who trade identity papers among themselves. So this is where they’d ended up, the bodies that in the wildest fantasies might have been cooked in Chinese restaurants, buried in fields beside factories, or tossed into the mouth of Vesuvius. Here they were. Spilling from the container by the dozen, their names scribbled on tags and tied with string around their necks. They’d all put aside money so they could be buried in China, back in their hometown, a percentage withheld from their salary to guarantee their return voyage once they were dead. A space in a container and a hole in some strip of Chinese soil. The port crane operator covered his face with his hands as he told me about it, eyeing me through his fingers. As if the mask of his hands might give him the courage to speak. He’d seen the bodies fall, but there’d been no need to sound the alarm or alert someone. He merely lowered the container to the ground, and dozens of people appeared out of nowhere to put everyone back inside and hose down the remains. That’s how it went. He still couldn’t believe it and hoped he was hallucinating, due to too much overtime. Then he closed his fingers, completely covering his eyes. He kept on whimpering, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. (more…)
5 05, 08
The legend of the dwarf king. Luca Paci
Listen!
The land was shrinking
And the sky was dry
The great dwarf-king
Was passing by
Listen!
There was a man in my country who owned everything
And everything he had was stolen from the people
Listen!
This man in this country became a king and his kingdom included
All the crops of the fields and radios and lawyers
And Tvs and books and papers and ships
Listen!
This man in reality was not a king
But a bald dwarf with a fake toupet
And a rubber mask
Listen!
The dwarf talked of freedom
In his nation of slaves
And democracy and honesty
In his nation of thieves
And environment and pollution
In his nation of smoke
Listen!
The dwarf king was changing the rules of the game and bringing
Zombies to life to get more voters
He talked to the judges who thought it was illegal
But he won the diatribe and they went to jail
Listen!
The land was shrinking
And the sky was dry
The great dwarf-king
Was passing by
14 04, 08
Poem. Arthur Coleman
Sick and tired of sucking blood from hearts as they pound
slowly down to a halt, the vampire retired himself in a tomb
overlaid with miserable images of Christ in agony and weeping
cherubim to lie appalled by the gruesome hallucinations
seen by undead fiends deprived of sustenance: hell
the black hole spreading out in waves, thunderous and colorless,
from an imperturbable center; the shiny luster of the devil’s eye.
Visited by recollections of numberless encounters, methods of
seduction
that led unfailingly to his tongue, now dusty with disuse, lapping
about
in hot sanguine baths as his throat convulsed to the rhythm of the
pulse
of his prey, quickened by the panic that settles in after the violent
thrashing subsides and the vampire glimpses through wide dilated eyes
what all mortals are to be seized by and look on unendingly.
9 04, 08
Projective Verse 1950. Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Projective Verse
(projective (percussive (prospective
vs.
The NON-Projective
(or what a French critic calls “closed” verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams:
it led Keats, already a hundred years ago, to see it (Wordsworth’s, Milton’s) in the light of “the Egotistical Sublime”; and it persists, at this latter day, as what you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall)
Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910, the trochee’s heave, asks it of the younger poets.) (more…)
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