ISSN: 1476-9867
Neon Highway 11
Hi,
Jane Marsh here. I’m here and yes strangely enough I’m not. I had a drink at lunchtime, one of those drinks you regret. A person I hadn’t seen for years…yes you understand? What is it about those meaningless situations when you ‘catch up’ and then say goodbye forever yet again. Thankfully I was just reading a new collection of poems by William Park, called ‘Surfacing’, right in the middle of his poem ‘The Damned’, so I was able to drift off for a while into another world and distract myself from that rather...( unexpected encounter).After that I read ‘Ahasuerus On Mars’ by Steve Sneyd and went beyond into another world. Later on I reflected on that day. I knew that sometime in the future it would no longer bother me and I would be surprised at how angry I had become. Something else would be on my mind by then. Oh the uselessness of it all. Thank god for books such a wonderful form of escapism, ‘Yellow Torchlight and The Blues’ by Emma Lee, and the beautifully written prose poems of Patricia Debney, ‘How to Be a Dragonfly’. Thank you ladies.
And now I’m off to the U.S folks, heading for the stars. Have a friend who has been training me to head into space but first I have to pass my Nassa qualifications. Alice stole the idea from me for her novella ‘Maxine’. Details of Maxine in back of this issue. Do buy it, it’s just the most wacky book I’ve read in a while Oh and wait to you meet Mike Stevens. He’s a real dream. You’ll be astral travelling forever!
We are lucky to have Steve Sneyd interviewed in this issue -Fascinating man. Much more interesting than hanging out in Wigan! I have to be honest, the place was a bit…sleazy. Once had a brief ‘affair’ with a guy there who never stopped clubbing round Wigan. It was like sleeping with George Orwell, an endless journey of down and out nightclub sordid living. I existed by day and night in my evening clothes. I even got to know the people very deeply and personally at the local bars, clubs and social clubs and er…Time to change the subject before I offend, one hears polite coughs and the wine starts to spill…
Goodbye Darlings. Next issue of Neon Highway in the Spring issue 12, where Alice will publish a magazine containing a final batch of beautifully written unsolicited manuscripts. After that she will ask writers to contribute. Why? Because she doesn’t have time to answer all that post. Simple as that.
Till then.
Jane x
Contents
Thank you to Ronnie Goodyear for front cover image
5: Daniel Bevan
5-6: Charles Frederickson
7-9: Iain Britton
9-10: Davide Trame
10-11: Michael Internicola
11: Rick Taylor
12: Georgina Milne
13: Paul Amlehn
14: Jason Wilkinson
15: Ben Mason
16-17: Aoife Mannix
17-19: Thomas Lowe Taylor
19: Sheila Murphy
20-22: Adam Kane
22-23: Jim Bennett
23-28: Mark Farrell
28-30: Jon Sweet
31-32: Cory Harding
33-39: Jane Marsh questions the poet Steve Sneyd.
40-42: Poems by Steve Sneyd
43-47: Information
Daniel Bevan
Estoria
Denaistar Pemair Felesa
Faimen Ponten Dacora
Benta Lofair Tolari
Topan Lesen Bentari
Walking Pemansa
Estoria sleeping
Talking Peneta
Bolaria etching
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Frederickson
National Parks
Hundreds of jagged limestone peaks
Natural habitat of rare serows
Horned antelope in goat clothing
Creepy crawlies settling in boots
One-way fresh air steep trails
Eighteen tier gurgling waterfall cascades
Reflective drop-off pool tossing and
Turning over during sleepless nightmares
Secreted tufted exotic rainbow hornbill
Stolen jewel in formidable beak
Preening white herons fluffy mums
Storks balancing on teakwood stilts
Bat caves shuttered in darkness
Enveloped black magic foreboding curse
Sun bears sleeping away season
Ursa Major satisfying hibernation undisturbed
Strident wild boars making tracks
Dense bristles shrub stems brushed
Prickly porcupine needles stitched with
Warp snagging weft thorny brambles
Hordes of monkey teases playful
Swishy long frazzled jump-rope tails
Slender arboreal apes swinging treetops
Gibbons exposing themselves flashing rumps
Mottled fur civets anal scent
Glands secreting pungent musky odor
Shy endangered specie clouded leopard
Pelt brushed with rosette markings
Far outreaches assaulted by dragonflies
Waspish buzz of flighty intrusion
Trumpeting wild elephants tusks erect
Upper incisors carved ivory trophies
---------------------------------------------
Iain Britton
By word of mouth
*to an artist now lying in state*
So good so good are you at
flinging red splotches of paint at the ceiling
then watching how they drip and colour
the floor - so good are you at
demonstrating simulating the art of
puncturing an artery. You’re so bloody good
you’ve moved onto greater things...like today
for instance you went over to the playingfields
in Savage Crescent where state-house kids
play at wars at being war lords
bruising each other with clods of dirt
and you cut the throat of a giant cloud
that looked like a man and it’s been raining
ever since.
#
In your house you begin to dance the dance
of the seven knives
one knife in the heart of each thought
each emotion each hard-to-give-birth-to idea.
They show up as pictures in your room
as abstracts which contract like muscles
which claim to feel sharp
abdominal pains. You
aren’t afraid to split open and expose
the contents of your brain.
#
Men in black in hoods of black
are reading to you soft words hard words
words painted red on crisp white paper
words dripping from watering mouths
mouths which deliver ultimatums
which threaten you
with falling blocks of sky. These are
the men who hold your shadow by its neck
who won’t let go until their demands are met.
These are the men you’ve painted on every wall.
#
Hands on the windowsill
you stare out at the neighbours
the Kennedys the Trembaths
the Goughs the chemist who feeds his bloated
face on crimson poppies. Neighbours
ready for the chop. You axe
them one by one and pin
their living parts all over the house. You
show them to be different very different
but belonging to everyone in the town.
You have moved onto greater things. The men
in black are satisfied. The kids playkilling
for pounds of dirt are satisfied. You are so good
at squeezing out the best a body can offer. You
have spread yourself out on a
hanging canvas for all to see.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Davide Trame
WINTER SOLSTICE
In the declining light
things flash on their screens, you click
on horizons your eyes promptly swallow
and wait for clues settling in the blips.
The real landscape outside
is a stretch of grey-mauve spiky stubs,
you think the thin furrows in the field
were blooming mazes once, now buried.
At the end of the day, on the way back
you come across the year's turning
in a sparkle of window panes,
your steps in the rhythm of streetlamps
that hide a buzz of stars;
at home you want to scan their outlines,
their screened twinkles secured in your hand.
Then, the power failure.
And, all of a sudden, nothing is secured.
You too, a splinter of a maze,
are plunged down under,
suspended in a sea, waves
disentangling your web of wires,
plugs hushed in a roar of foam.
Now the light is back,
you are relieved to be still here
in your room, with a renewed
conscience of the other shore
and your screens' busy glitter perched
on the unbounded dark.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael_Internicola
TWO FOR TUESDAY
when i pass savannah, georgia and the clouds
are there and zz top did what they did i see blue
skies again. mississippi that way. up and down the
other. pearl jam in raleigh, north carolina tonight
and it's all about the freedom now even when i
don't realize it's making me happy. sometimes,
i get so free i forget. i forget i don't know where
my home is. i forget that girl i used to know.
there's bad news before exit 109. terrible crash.
news crews already there. a guy running across
interstate 95. it is the middle of april. the concert
is killer. red necks and preppies though. 37 dollars
to our name. they wouldn't even let me buy beers
without my id. hicks. next day i find myself eating
a turkey sub in a gas station parking lot because it's
so god damn nice out. new york can wait for me there.
i still got dick going but being on the road these last
three months has certainly changed things. my birthday
is in three weeks. thirty two years of age. i'll be lucky
to get a phone call. i don't give a shit. anyway--
heading to richmond to fag off with those punks.
hardly anyone around anymore. wall and his kids.
pauly and matty with the girls. new york city life is so
different. i wonder what sar's up to. i hope she's fine.
junior stole van halen's 1984 outta the sub joint. girl gone
bad is on and we're going about 80 down this stretch. god signs
and semi's everywhere. blown tires and trees forever. junior's
driving and going crazy inside and to think that this all
happen only a couple weeks back. i was walking down the street
and junior said we had three options: vegas, san fran or fla.
i've been or at least passed thru all three. in a matter of a day,
a day after i met a beautiful girl named natalie, i was gone for
three straight weeks. i've written her as best i could. i wrote
about the other one as best i could. take your time, sari. find love.
in virginia nothing looks different. emporia is ten miles away.
wherever the fuck that is.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Taylor
THE PURE LIST
for L. Cohen
The window you suggested a scene
Vancouver the backlit accomplice
I curbed you in stages
It’s the traffic mounting
Your mouth was so frantic
Robson Hotel seventh floor
A purse spills its guts
I spoke for you in the voiceover
Lie with family in the Appendix
Your father has my card
Does Perfection work
Do you dial zero or one
Very well open your thighs
Etc.
Georgina Milne
New Boots.
A spangled spike of seven inches
Brings a sharp rapport towards its noble torque.
Jelly eyes and butter hands all clam along,
Placating,…plying at the length and taut
Skin wrought from plastic while the
Heavy angled scalene arch
Threats up to
Shatter open all the little, crinkle anklebones,
And twist the sole from recognition.
It’s the detail:
Pristine polished gleam, the seam unseen and
Jointless creaseline where the boot conjoins the heel.
Paul Amlehn
KRIYA
The beginning of the beginning the end of the end an infinite and
solitary kiss. A single petal made for words. I breathe in a book of
love upon my mouth a benediction and a kiss the sound of water
says what I am thinking. Light and dark earth and sky the embrace
of lovers. The most beautiful harmony born of opposites the world
both multiple and one. The imprint of the hand sunk deep in the
mud or that of the foot the bared belly the knees marked with
crosses. Sitting there together in the dark knowing each other
waiting for words. The wind of spring billows silken curtains with
longing we smell like the spices of the trade our ears nostrils navels
toes skewered by pearls. I am waiting in your monastic breath.
Threads that tangle roots sinking into the ground the ebb and
flow of a wandering energy a glorious body fused into unity the
body the vessel becoming a lymph of The Tree of Life unspoken
voices yearning. The joining of two universes internal marriage of
male and female shadow aura void. Out of the open body comes
a colored swarm of light images of flight subtending a birth
separated from the earthly vulval bed the meeting of earth and
ether. Immersion in the chasm of the body the circle the holy
enclosure. The eternal image of woman turning the world inside
out reflections in a body of water. The mystery of endless timeless
celestial reaches wandering lights flesh hued arabesques waves
billowing and crashing. Rhythms of wind and water.
Jason Wilkinson
-thank you for your time
1
the sun was here
but now
tennis courts are dying
softly beneath our feet/
eyes
trees
will soon be smashed up
in dreams; willowy
flesh disappearing in
a sheet of forgotten light
/glass/teenage
girls
among the brick+piss
giving head
behind tinted windows
alas
what we dream by day-
phantoms become
pictures when we sleep
become meritless when we rise
yawn yawn yawn
ring ring ring
smokestacks and nail
polish hug the sunlit street.
Ben Mason
Family Portrait
Childs Modesty
an irregular reflextion
between open thighs
a former entrance to
life. As naked in
creation as those behind
ornamental primates
abused by life
men of Guantanamo –
Uneasy nakedness
Eyes averted from
a voyeuristic keeper
of the silent moment
pleading to cover
embarrassed flesh.
Aoife Mannix
Always
How can I trust happiness
when I’ve lived my life in a house of cards?
The shifting sands of suitcases
I never learned to unpack.
The floors swept bare,
only the toothpaste graffiti,
a signature of a life I barely knew.
My mother said, ‘it’s as if we were never here’
and I thought it’s safer to be invisible,
to perfect my camouflage, blend myself into the rock,
then cling to champagne dreams of let’s pretend.
They wouldn’t let me read my own language,
and even now I lose myself in the translation,
can never quite believe you’re not leaving me.
Even though you say you love the maps in my eyes,
you can’t follow the roads that race across my skin.
You see once I start, I don’t know how to stop,
I spin out the door into a whole new costume,
Superman was never as schizophrenic as me.
And you say we can give birth to our own country,
but I’m lost and I’m scared,
and I want you to find me and bring me home
to a place that has never existed.
You say have some faith,
this is how it’s meant to be,
but I want some kind of guarantee
that if I close my eyes, you won’t disappear.
That forever is not a foreign word,
and you won’t turn into another stranger
who can’t pronounce my name,
but will always recognize me in a crowd,
always wait for me at the end of a long day,
always kiss me into existence,
always stay right here where I need you.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Lowe Taylor
(from) the Homages of Eagle
The light. Clear along yr signs, a
firmer welcome, a pattern, bedded
thorough sung as flatters song along
Yr highway’s lines are centered in
the moon’s delivered presences to
the scores, love. Loop alight her
movies playing sharply, left the rest
was sad, a moment drawn aside:
marked door drift solemn slow and
lean aside or drawn throughout, here:
strong to hold, the sentences swaying
made again these colors, flue or
charm, a wooden day and pruning
lakes are said the same and
home is shore and palm, you’d be
an eagle flying danced a dream.
Would call yr signs, review. These
are the colder lines, but gallops.
into seasons drawn astir you
are long the waves of light, onto
armies drawing artifacts throughout
Hold, the bed is broken, eyes apart
and sending outer met her flesh
at sentinel and gong the lines.
Hearts afloat and turning seems to
roam the horses peal these hoes
to foal into term, love the mark and
ship to term again, as left and
tongue would shoal to further dues
the lap of waves, the sliding hue
to the west her arches bending light
love’s arts revive the mind yr eyes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheila Murphy
recreation
a minature cymbal
spl ices humdrum
lanky airspace
warm as lotion
on the skin
akin to labor f laws
in kept pace
simple to the iron or
e
revoking innocense
across fields pressed
in waves day after
morrow’s genteel
overcast as timbre
creases slats
of fabric
parcelling the window light
fine powder in
the grace note of our oxygen
Adam Kane
Who is it?
A magazine in a new foreign language “ Czech“
it takes me time to translate
even the simplest of captions
but yeah under this picture its:
Who is it?
So, a contest
a photograph of someone famous
a woman Czech, I guess
half the face blurred to conceal her identity,
and touched up
to make it sag
and strange, this,
but one of her eyes is wandering
Who could it be?
(And what will I win?)
I scan the text,
see that international word police
in this language: policie
(and then) stupid me I figure it out
her face is that way from
decomposition
jesus jesus
christ
she’s dead,
(the magazine closed)
but
(the shame) as
I open it again
and that’s blood sprinkled
down her neck
and blouse
(continued)
(the magazine closed again)
as our young orange cat
washes herself
under the hot reading-lamp
I grab her to me close and hold her
because it’s so early in the morning and it’s so dark and
because my beautiful girlfriend is still sleeping,
she is so beautiful
when she is sleeping
(Look at all that I’ve won.)
--------------------------------
Jim Bennett
satnd
Cmoe adn satnd hree nxteto me
yuo cna haer teh smuemr diyng
lesetn to teh tierd snouds of eevnig
as the cloo ari drifts through the gate
teh drkenass is aoslmt sliod
a wlal to kepe us in
or teh wolrd otu
I neevr culod fuirge otu wchih
bwron leeavs caerp asocrs teh pitao
warey ienstcs carek adn cclik
tiehr fainl wkees
adn I satnd hree wtaiing fro yuo
to be hree netx to me
as wrdos fial me
Mark Farrell
POESY:
1/.
letter passed down through the colonies and
delivered to my flailing sanity
splintery cryptic language
falling from my eyes
and onto these pages
from memories,
adjacent verbs
that make me recognise
that a time arrives
when you must
look further within self
to realise that
it is more simple and virtuous
to die young
in a car wreck
than to bleed
translucently
from the gut
age 65 or 70
having lived a purple lie.
I remember hard now
when I was 23
and living in a small room
in venice.
living off beans and corn bread
drunk everyday by 11
lonely
half mad
I used to receive letters
from females in Australia
(place of birth and childhood)
that I hardly knew
or had met twice,
declaring solidarity to me
claiming
my vigour and honest brevity.
I used to take these letters down to the beach
with a bottle of port wine
and take off my shirt and shoes
and lie flat on my back
in the California sun
burning.
drinking that port wine down
and reading those letters aloud
always finding something
mildly humorous or
significantly interesting
in their words
and wondering what I had said
or done to these females
so far away
sending these hot words
down through the colonies
words laced with want and need
like a refugee.
separated by an ocean,
those girls with all the strength for me
so far away,
me drunk on the beach
clutching those letters
being ridiculed by the bums
and madmen.
the tourist,
looking at me like I was a rapist
because I was young and drunk and
reading aloud
and becoming conscious of it all,
the attention
from the bums and the madmen
and the tourists
and the young females in Australia.
immediately
becoming sick of the sand,
sick of the blue sky
and sick of the world.
feeling that I wanted out
but knowing I was already finished.
soon after the letters stopped.
I never replied
maybe that was why.
life was taking care of
what was left of me.
I’d return home
and my landlady
would be on all fours
cutting in the turf
for a new location for a Tulip
to die.
I’d walk by without saying a word
and check the mailbox.
“desperately empty”, she’d say.
the corners of her mouth turned up
with lucid mockery
her face playing 35
but her complexion savage with bitterness
fabricating a declaration of 50.
I’d walk on in
closing the door quietly behind
and look at the faded calendar
hanging by a nail.
with that relentless
Californian sun falling all over the place,
and my buttermilk semblance-
I’d laugh.
for all the answers
were passed over to the sane
or fare from the reach
of my simple grip.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Sweet
mural
or you hate your mother
or your father or
maybe both
you slash your wrists at
the age of sixteen
blow your brains out eleven years later
all of these brutal attempts
at self-_expression in a world filled
with battered children and still there is
the flight of birds
the silence of empty highways in the
last purple light of september evenings
and later it's the winter of '56 on fireplace road
where pollock watches his studio
from the back door
waits without hope for his hands
to reinvent the world
and you tell me that
you could never stand his work
and that those who kill others
deserve to die themselves
and you're found swinging in the room
of hanged men in the week before christmas
almost half a world away from your home
and when i'm fourteen
i approach morrison like i would a god
and when i'm twenty-five i can
finally see him as pathetic
and there's a woman in a small town i no longer visit
who will never forgive me for this
there are the men who
fathered her children then left her
and maybe the children hate them
or maybe they just don't care
maybe a two year-old girl in another neighborhood
is locked in a heated room
in the middle of august and left to die
and you ell me that this is what
you expect from welfare mothers and then
you talk about the niggers who live
down the street
about how you're not prejudiced
but you believe in the truth
and it's a song i've been living with
my entire life
it's the man downstairs
teaching his wife to bleed
it's my childhood spent in the watery light
of a dozen anonymous bars surrounded by
false prophets who can no longer
stand what they've become
and you are found on your balcony
dead of an overdose
or you're found in your living room
or maybe you get yourself clean
only to end up shot to death
in front of your home
and your blood is real
and spilling everywhere and
twenty years pass before i wake up in
the middle of the night to the sound
of my son crying
i have nothing to offer him
but the past
Steve Sneyd was born in 1941 in Maidenhead, England. Courtesy of an English father and an American mother, his childhood was spent in both England and the United States. In addition to his own work, he has supported genre poetry in general, compiling numerous lists of SF/F/H poems in publications genre, non-genre, and fannish. Sneyd's Hilltop Press publishes a number of other writers, including science fiction poetry by Lilith Lorraine, Gavin Salisbury, Andrew Darlington, and Peter Layton; and fantasy poetry by Frances Campbell; as well as both types of poems and more by Steve Sneyd himself, including his publications about science fiction, fantasy, and horror poetry in the US and UK from 1750 to the present. Write the Huddersfield address, Steve Sneyd, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, HD5 8PB for current information.
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1.
I’ve been reading through some of Alice’s past magazines and found that in issue 5 she has written a little about your book, The Pennine Triangle published by Othername Press. I enjoyed it very much. It has also made me want to put on a spacesuit so here I am. The suit is a little old fashioned but you seem the type to be unaffected by such trivialities.
Today I will ask you questions from Planet Penelope a distant cousin of Planet Pennine. The one thing I can say about Planet Penelope, unlike Plane Pennine is that everything is artificial here, nothing natural at all. Even the sky is made of plastic. What a terrifying thought or is it? Would one be happier under a plastic sky or a real sky? Wouldn’t it be strange if we couldn’t actually get through the plastic but we were still able to see space through it? How would it affect you?
Steve: Putting on a plastic sky reminds me of the ancient idea of heavenly spheres, and a crystal one enclosing earth, and also the frequent science fiction idea where the earth has been quarantined by other alien civilisations, a source of plague spot, because humans are so savage and warlike they’re too dangerous to be allowed out. If I knew it was like that, there’d be a kind of claustrophobic feel, though in a way nowadays if you live in a town, what with all the light pollution, street lights and security lights, we see less and less of fewer and fewer stars anyhow. In a way knowing there was no way of escaping from this planet, thanks to your plastic roof, could be a good thing in that it might focus minds on stopping the damage humans are doing to the earth, global warming and the rest of it, because it’d close the escape route that’s probably at the back of the ruling elite’s minds, that if worst comes to worst and this world was getting uninhabitable they could sneak off with everything needed for a luxury lifestyle to a dome on Mars or wherever.
2.
Have you ever had an out of the ordinary encounter? I remember reading about alien abductions when I lived in New Mexico and you know it was so convincing I was terrified to sleep at night in case the same thing happened to me What do you think of these stories?
Steve: The strongest single instance I’ve ever had of that was walking along a very long straight road called, though with no connection to the Beatles, Penny Lane, northwest of Harrogate, and a long way off in the distance a tractor was coming towards me, and I suddenly had a tremendous irrational conviction that the tractor driver, when it reached me, would leap off and attack me – like that cropduster plane in North-by-Northwest – so I went and hid behind some trees in a plantation till the tractor was well past, even though I felt a real idiot doing so. It was fairly near Menwith Hill, though, even though that big U&S surveillance station’s domes weren’t quite in sight, and they apparently gave out powerful microwave radiation, so just possibly it was some effect of that penetrating my brain.
3.
What was the first piece of writing that inspired you in terms of poetry and why?
Steve: If you mean the first poem that stuck in my mind, I must have been tiny when the magpie rhyme – “one for sorrow, two for joy” etc got in my head and it’s still there every time I see the birds. “Jabberwocky”’d ‘ve been very early on, too, trying to get a meaning out of those amazing words, feeling the sense was just over the mind’s horizon somehow, to describe with hindsight, a little further and I’d be there…Looking back , the first poets I read from what I thought of as personal choice would have been Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Tennyson’s ‘The Idylls of the King’, either buying copies with my own money or pestering for copies as presents.
4.
I notice that in your writing ‘Ahasuerus on Mars’ your language takes your character on a journey quite surreal and magical. I enjoyed this and I found the dislocated language added to this affect of movement and change. What are your feelings towards this piece of work? What made you choose the name Ahasuerus?
Steve: Once a piece of writing is, or feels any how, as complete of “right” or whatever you want to call it, as it’s going to be- and that might be almost right now, or, after years of coming back to and tinkering, that old cliché about “never completed, only abandoned” gets applied. Then it seems to have moved away from me, become very distant in a sense, as if someone else wrote it – which in a way I feel generally anyhow that the reptile brain rather than the conscious mammal brain does the writing, the latter then tidies up and tries to explain if asked. So when I then see a poem in print if it gets published, or do it as part of a reading, or look back at it to think about including it in a collection, I still in a way feel as though it’s a stranger’s work, nothing any longer to do with me. So, although I hope ‘Ahasuerus on Mars’ works for at least some readers, obviously, and that it succeeds to whatever extent in doing what it was intended to do, insofar as that was a conscious decision anyhow, now its appeared I don’t really have feelings about it as such – it exists, it’s out in the world to whatever degree it gets around and gets read, and that’s it. As to why the name Ahasuerus, I was wanting to write about how an immortal would relate to, or co-exist with, or whatever, with “short lives” ie ordinary time-limited people people –responding I suppose to the fact there’s a lot of talk about drugs and techniques that may soon make immensely extended life spans possible, at least for the very rich, and huge questions arise about how society would then change in its functioning, have to change, its something almost on the fringe of ceasing to be science fiction and becoming a reality.
5.
Can you describe a day in your life briefly?
Steve: A real-life typical day is a non-stop whingeathon, spent, in Yorkshire poet Dave Wright’s wonderful phrase, “at the superglue crossroads”. Basically, it consists of me endlessly muttering and cursing inwardly or even aloud, trying to kickstart and motivate myself. It starts off with stalling, dragging out looking at the post, listening to the radio, making endless cups of tea etc, putting off starting overdue things, like the ox in the fable that starves because he can’t decide which of two equidistant piles of hay to eat first – “when everything is urgent nothing is urgent” – then, having finally made a start on something, ending up frantically scrabbling through disordered heaps of paper looking for the vital missing bits needed to finish it, and finally, with luck, just catching the post collection with it, after a mad dash and coming back to slump, full of the conviction the day’s ending with me being further behind with things than when I’d started, like those funfair duck shoots where there’s always another coming up, whether or not you hit the first one, which I never did anyhow. And if it’s nice weather, that’s worse still, as keep being tempted to fugue off out – probably afterhang of cognitive dissonance between the two things you get told as a kid, or did then, “get out in the sun, it’ll do you good”, and “do your homework” – since, of course, being a writer, as the old saying has it, means never having finished your homework!
6.
Inside Fantasy Commentator with you conversation with H. R. Felgenhauer, he mentions your press, Hilltop and the co-operative Ludds Mill magazine. Could you tell me a little about these presses and their main focus?
Steve: Hilltop Press – which has a not very imaginative name, chosen because at the time it started I lived on top of a small hill, and now I live near the top of a slightly higher one – has been since the late 80s very specialised, publishing science fiction and dark fantasy poetry, some contemporary, some revivals of neglected things out of the past, like for example an amazing cosmic voyage section from an epic tale called ‘the Star-Seer’,written in 1813 by William Dearden, who nowadays is remembered if at all, only because he was a drinking companion of Branwell Bronte. Hilltop also has published my series of slim histories of different
Aspects of SF poetry, and, for the last 14 years, Data Dump, which is a newsletter about what’s happening in the field of SF, fantasy, dark fantasy and horror poetry, and also about music using those themes, of which there’s an amazing amount, from opera to rock. Ludd’s Mill was – it closed down around the mid 80s. I suppose you could call it counterculture, magazine of poetry and fiction and articles and interviews, plus a lot of graphics – visually sort of a poor man’s Oz, perhaps. It grew out of life poetry events in Huddersfield, initially as a sort of cooperative, and I was co-editor for about 6 years, then Andrew Darlington was sole editor till it closed down because he was doing a lot of rock journalism and didn’t have time for it.
7.
I have read that you studied Chemistry to degree level. In what way did it influence your writing?
Steve: I suppose the great thing, even though I’ve forgotten just about all the detail –doubt I’d even pass a GCSE Chemistry now – is that it cured any fear of technical subjects, certainly that helped a lot when I worked as a copywriter in feeling at home talking technical stuff, and in science fiction too it means being able to be open to scientific ideas and speculations without that almost fear block you can get with some arts people, as if anything scientific is a dark impenetrable forest, “snear but don’t go near” syndrome setting in for them.
I suspect also the way shapes and patterns can be found underlying what appears a disparate surface clutter, valency theory in chemistry for example, works within my poetry, that within a mass of apparently unrelated immediate phenomena links can be teased out, perhaps like how the Strange Attractor, to use a term from Chaos Theory, works, where disparate things come into a relationship, bit like the line in alchemy from Hermes Trismegistus’ Emerald Tablets of “As above, so below”. And the way formulae, in chemistry and other sciences, are at the same time metaphors for reality, and summations of essences in it, and tools for working on it – metaphors of metaphors if you like – can suggest interesting parallels, I think, with what poetry tries to do, ways, as it were, of seeing its possible functioning, how it at once observes outer, visible reality, and tries to get inside it to essences, and, like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle at work, recognises that it cannot observe with full accuracy because the process of observation in itself changes what it observes.
8.
Have you travelled much and has it influenced your work?
We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and maybe at some level I reacted against that, and became a stay-where-I’m put adult,living in the same house in the same town since forever and so on (though my brother reacted very differently,being a tremendous traveller), much more of an armchair tourist really. It’s a paradox I suppose, when so much of my writing is about travelling the universe. Most of my travelling is very local, walking on the moors of the South Pennines, and that comes into my writing a lot, particularly the feeling you get up there, with all the traces of the past, from Mesolitihic flintknappers sites on, right to modern communications towers, that you are in touch with all the time at once, and that it’s such out of the way place aliens supposedly land undetected, so in a sense you’re between worlds of time and space up there.
9.
If you had to land on a planet where would you most like to be? What kind of landscape would it be? Who would you most like to be stranded with honestly?
Steve: If I had my druthers it’d have rings a la Saturn, and multiple suns so that colours would change constantly, and perhaps lower gravity so there’d be that feeling of ease of movement, floating rather than walking. Puzzling ruins of a lost civilisation, with luck with food and cleaning and clothes-making machines and such that still worked, so all the faff of chores could be forgotten, and with inscriptions, including graphics, so you could try to translate them as poems. As to who I’d want to be stranded with, the fantasy’d be of the perfect Platonic “other half”, although in practice even if such a person existed I imagine it’d soon drive you mad being too well understood and too perfectly in harmony, although with
A whole planet to go at least it’d be easy to give each other getaway space when that happened!
10.
Who is you favourite science fiction character?
Steve: The first one who comes to mind is the dark-haired girl who turns up over and over in Philip K. Dick’s stories, even though (perhaps because) she remains so mysterious, more a catalyst the reader knows nothing about than a fully-formed entity. Bunny Jinglejangelow in Brian Aldiss’ ‘Greybeard’ also comes to mind, mainly because I envied him his coat made of rabbit heads – the nearest I ever got to owning one is having,successively, a white then, when that went missing, a dark rabbit’s foot, which I still have, neither ever conspicuously bringing luck!
11.
You sent Alice an interesting essay you wrote on text and image. Could you say a little what motivated you to write this?
Steve: It’s seemed to me for a long time that visual images can act as another “field” for the poet, one more toll in the toolkit, to use or not use as suits the material, alongside different kinds of rhyme and metre and syllabics and spacings and so on – after all, words and pictures began in the same “place”, as communications tools. A visual within, or around, a poem, can disrupt linearity, it can give a different, even contradictory, meaning, and since one of the greatest things I think a poet can do is offer the possibility of multiple interpretation, then there’s a strong motive to consider, rather than neglect or ignore or oppose, another way of adding to that potential richness.
13.
Can you list 4 poetry books you have written with their press details that you would like to share with us.
Can you list 4 stories you have written also?
Steve: ‘Ahasuerus on Mars’has already been mentioned- that long narrative poem is in Atlantean Publishing’s Bards series, at a £1. That’s this year, and so is a palmtop-size (ie ideal to read undetected during dull work meetings) one of mainly science fiction theme haikuform syllabics called ‘Three Star Chamber’, from KRAX/Rump Press, which is 33p including postage. A couple of book-length ones are ‘What Time Has Use For’, from K T Publications, which is Arthurian poems – the third edition is still in print, that one’s £5.50. ‘Gestaltmacher, Gestaltmacher, Make Me A Gestalt’ (Four Quarters Press) is a cross section of work, science fiction, dark fantasy, sense – of – place, “mainstream”, you name it, for £6.50.
14.
And now for my little game.
You have to tick off all the objects you possess below .
If you possess less than 12 items then you have to write a short piece of sci fi , about one paragraph, about a person who lands on this planet and influences George Bush to change his mind beyond doubt about leaving the American troops in Iraque. (or if you wish you are welcome to write it anyway.) Feel free to make comments next to items.
A Spacesuit
A model of Star Trek’s Enterprise
Neon light
Crystals
Movies: Barbarella, The Fly
Space Instruction Manual
A piece of conceptual art:
Star map
Blow up alien:
Music by David Bowie:
major tom
The book ‘Communion’
Any plastic figurines:
Klingon dictionary
Periodic table of the elements:
Microscope:
Telescope
Globe:
Snow boots
So am short of the twelve needed to not write the paragraph: So here goes.
“Hello, I’m Jesus, and you gotta get all your boys outta Iraq?” “How come, Lord, they’re doin your work.” “Because Rapture starts soon and I only got enough lift capability to uptake the salvationed to Heaven from one location, and that’s right here in your good ole U S of A, so unless you want your brave doughboys left behind to Satan’s hands, get ‘em back here right pronto.”
15.
Finally, What are you working on presently and have you any work being published forthcoming. If so please do provide details for the readers.
Steve: SF writer John Brunner said one of the truest things ever, that “the sort term projects turn out to be long.” For twenty years I’ve been writing poems about a conflict between a species called the Nixil, who combat us by playing with our minds and fantasies. (Last year, my longest poem ever, where the Nixil manipulate our Grail myth, appeared in Atlantean P’s Grails anthology, but most of the poems are short), I’m determined to get them all into some sort of coherent shape, with the incentive that a U S publisher was positive about the idea recently. N other things are in various stages, including trying to get back to an intended epic-length sequence of poems of a modern self-styled reincarnation of the Childe Roland of Browning’s Dark Tower, now that the two already written, as the creative writing part of my Poetry MA dissertation back in ’99, have finally both been published, in Fire magazine, but I always feel as though it’s a bit of a chicken-countingly unlucky talking about future possibilities too much. That also applies to the biggest forthcoming thing, a book about pioneering American science fiction poet Lilith Lorraine, which, with a reprinting of a selection of her work, was commissioned by Cosmos books in the States, and the text accepted by them a couple of years back plus, and proofs seen and checked 18 months or so back, but still, at time of writing, it continues, according to their website, obstinately in “forthcoming” limbo (aka development hell?) so I just hope mentioning it at all here doesn’t push it to the bottom of their priority list!
Thank you for your time, Steve!
Steve Sneyd
The Myth of Open Skies
ok you all know someone who knows someone
saw it happen some whatsisface stood up
in dock and the wig asks anything to say
before passes sentence and out comes cig
packet holds it up and says “Beam me up
Scotty” only think on a bit big universe
big big numbers someone has to beat odds
stands to reason and was me it worked for
one minute facing time for twooking next
other side of time in this glittersmooth
control room just like’d seen so often on
telly screen except see the real thing see
a little tatty as anywhere’d be too many
folk been in too long like everywhere i’ve
been for real not on the screen and i stand
there thinking trouble coming will get boot
dead quick back to where I came from but is
funny as funny no one even seems to notice
me is like i’m a ghost out of well think
about it i am i must be dead by now is so
far into tomorrow’s tomorrow the hell they
can’t see me i can do just what i like set
controls for heart of sun like that old
hit once i get knobs dials all that sussed
finish off whole lot or really surprise Uhura
like that joke about Lois Lane and Invisible
Man and Superman diving down to give her a
surprise and all seems wonderful except is
horrible food doesn’t exist yet goes right
through leaves me thinner and thinner no
reply when i speak just all these uniforms
worse’n copshot shooting round ignoring me
not even bothered to pay enough mind to
scum they think i am to listen write down
what I confess over and over i ask Scotty
beam me down no sign of life i might’s well
not exist i hit them poke them pinch them
kick em up and down should be blue black no
twitch alright if i don’t exist i’ll make
sure they don’t still got that cig packet
take it out say beam whole lot down back
Scotty into court shouldn’t work it does
squnches all whole lot by god I needed that
AT THE HEART OF NOTHING BUSINESS PLANS
dreaming joy power to annoy
safely at some genteel-gentle
lit-type do claiming proof to
hand will soon reveal of just
you wait interBronte incest in
as many possible combinations
as moor-edge hidden pathways
woke to thuds bangs to windows
whathehell next door’s garden
gone to Pennine abandoned all
heather-grown humps full bloom
now though not bright under
grey sky quarry and rust-piled it
bristled as hedgehog back with in
sort of wedged crown dead rocket
ships end of space age or USSR
stuff and how the hell got there
and to hell would worry when time
to get up too early yet to think
and thought’d teach him mock in
dream even Brontes sure after all
a coven and what powers there to
change world even dead could
even out of all stars bring all
spacemen back to visit crash
their ships in tribute to them
there and anyway good this no
longer feel obliged to go each
year see heather out in colour
here come to him his doorstep and
with that huge mess there who cd
ever even notice how his own plot
just mess setaside ca/rbon sink he
preferred name for jungle and next
time spoke to that gathering he
thought will prove how Branwell’s
biggest failure unsuccess as Fenian
spy bomber railway saboteur in
next dream side by side all battled
dinosaurs before the Flood no crazier
than blackbird gobbles hung as tight-
-rope artist till near falls off with
fatness rowan berries soon’s red
ripe will curse all winter none are
left to tasty up ice times and through
such sleep reluctant to get up restart
day’s do is sure hears in new quarry
new there so old abandoned in its
look hammer and chisel sounds of who
inscribing on those fallen dreamers’
ships messages just right to keep them
returned rightly down to earth old
Tyke way of cutting what sticks up
above parapet down to size Town
Rules etc or more likely just like
Haworth now guidance information done
in Japanese soon as Berlin Wall in
bits most even genuine as Bronte bobbins
off dead mills be time to turn starfaring
remnants into souvenirs wonder what
percent his neighbour’d share could
market slogan how really truly all
those loving Brontes found alive Out There
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Information
Maxine by Alice Lenkiewicz
ISBN: 1-904781-72-1
Bluechrome
£7.99
This is my first novella. It started as a book of poems but then developed into a story. It seems to have been placed into a science fiction category although I’m not sure if that is the correct genre for it. Maxine does astral travel and go into space (in a kind of metaphorical way) but whether it is considered sci-fi, I’m not too sure. For me it was just fiction but interesting all the same to see it categorised as sci-fi, although I am sure some would disagree. This book was my final thesis for my MA in writing studies at Edge Hill College. The book contains prose and poetry.
http://www.bluechrome.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Rupert Loydell
New Stride books, autumn 2005
TERTIUM QUID Robert Lax
ISBN 1-905024-02-9 £10.00 147pp pbck October 2005
SPIRITUAL LETTERS 3 David Miller
ISBN 1-905024-03-7 £5.00 20pp pamphlet October 2005
edition of 100 copies
THE SOLEX BROTHERS and other prose poems Luke Kennard
ISBN 1-905024-04-5 £6.95 47pp pbck October 2005
STRIDE PUBLICATIONS, 11 SYLVAN ROAD, EXETER,
DEVON EX4 6EW, ENGLAND
(In the spring of 2006, Stride will publish The Peter Redgrove Archive: new editions of his seven novels* [two co-written with Penelope Shuttle] and a new book of selected essays & interviews edited by Professor Neil Roberts.)
The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000
Robert Sheppard:
Published now by Liverpool University Press at £50 hardback.
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
ISBN: 0853238197
Synopsis
The Poetry of Saying presents the history and social development of alternative forms of British poetry, still little examined or dismissed, set against the context of the development of the Movement Orthodoxy, those writers who followed and attenuated the tradition of Philip Larkin, even as Larkin’s cultural capital fell. Ranging from the quiet work of Lee Harwood to the avant-gardism of Bob Cobbing, from the major works of Roy Fisher to the still developing sonic and semantic experiments of Maggie O’Sullivan, and covering a number of other writers in their historical context, this work is theorised in terms of a poetry of saying, which aims to keep interpretations maximally open. This theoretical perspective, which is balanced against the historicising element, uses Bakhtin and Levinas as its touchstones, and reaches its highest pitch with relation to the work of Tom Raworth, which it argues is ethically open through its textual strategies.
See further details available at:
www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3630
-------------------------------------------
SURFACING (Spike, 2005)
William Park,
ISBN: 0 9518978 7 X
£5.99
Spike Press: c/o Liver House, 96, Bold Street,Liverpool L1 4HY
---------------------------------------------------
The Hutton Enquiry
Chris McCabe,
Salt Publishing: ISBN: 1-84471-074-2
£10.99
www.saltpublishing.com
WRITING SHORT STORIES (Routledge) now available. http://www.theshortstory.org.uk for further details.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AHASUERUS ON MARS
Steve Sneyd
Atlantean Publishing
38, Pierrot Steps, 71 Kursaal Way
Southend-On-Sea, Essex, SS1 2UY, UK
Price £1.00
Cheques made payable to DJ Tyrer.
Fractured Muse
By AC Evans
Atlantean Publishing
38, Pierrot Steps, 71 Kursaal Way
Southend-On-Sea, Essex, SS1 2UY, UK
Price £1.00
Cheques made payable to DJ Tyrer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pennine Triangle
Poems by
Steve Sneyd
J C Hartly
J F Haines
Othername Press
ISBN: 0 9521806 2 6
14, Rosebank, Rawtenstall,Rossendale,BB4 7RD
email: othernamepress@tiscali.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twelve Writers on Writing
Anthology of poems from the members of the first Poetry Business Writing School, (based in Huddersfield) written while on the course.
ISBN: 1-902382-69-2
Contact Janet Fisher, The Poetry Business, Distribution Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN
Email: orders@centralbooks.com
Cathedral Poems
by Andrew Taylor
Paula Brown Publishing
ISBN: 0 9543621 9 5
www.andrewtaylorpoetry.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Yellow Torchlight and The Blues
By Emma Lee
ISBN:0953359190
Price £7.00
‘original plus’, Flat 3,18 Oxford Grove,Ilfracombe,Devon, EX34 9HQ
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to Be a Dragonfly
By Patricia Debney
ISBN: 1-902382-71-4
42 prose poems
Smith/Doorstop Books,The Poetry Business, The Studio, Byram Arcade,Wesgate,Huddersfield,HD1 1ND
£7.95
Open Wide magazine
issue 17 now available
www.openwidemagazine.co.uk
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SleepingFish
Editor: David White
www.sleepingfish.net
www.calamaripress.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pulsar
www.pulsarpoetry.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dee Rimbaud/ AA Independent Press Guide - http://www.thunderburst.co.uk
-----------------------------------------------
Citizen 32 http://citizen32live.moonfruit.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interlude Magazine
Editor: Francesca Ricci
http://interludemagazine.co.uk
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Highblue
D.P. Ryan
Founder and Publisher of the highblue community
www.highblue.co.uk
Poetrymagazines.org.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neon Highway Poetry/Art Magazine
http://www.neonhighway.co.uk/
email: poetshideout@yahoo.com
Current and forthcoming Issues numbers 11 to 12
£2 per issue.
U.S: 1 issue $6, Europe 4 euros.
Cheques made out to Alice Lenkiewicz
Address:
37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD
‘Neon Highway’ no longer accepts unsolicited work.
The magazine will operate on a commission basis later in 06. Details will be updated on website regarding forthcoming issues
Neon Highway 11
Hi,
Jane Marsh here. I’m here and yes strangely enough I’m not. I had a drink at lunchtime, one of those drinks you regret. A person I hadn’t seen for years…yes you understand? What is it about those meaningless situations when you ‘catch up’ and then say goodbye forever yet again. Thankfully I was just reading a new collection of poems by William Park, called ‘Surfacing’, right in the middle of his poem ‘The Damned’, so I was able to drift off for a while into another world and distract myself from that rather...( unexpected encounter).After that I read ‘Ahasuerus On Mars’ by Steve Sneyd and went beyond into another world. Later on I reflected on that day. I knew that sometime in the future it would no longer bother me and I would be surprised at how angry I had become. Something else would be on my mind by then. Oh the uselessness of it all. Thank god for books such a wonderful form of escapism, ‘Yellow Torchlight and The Blues’ by Emma Lee, and the beautifully written prose poems of Patricia Debney, ‘How to Be a Dragonfly’. Thank you ladies.
And now I’m off to the U.S folks, heading for the stars. Have a friend who has been training me to head into space but first I have to pass my Nassa qualifications. Alice stole the idea from me for her novella ‘Maxine’. Details of Maxine in back of this issue. Do buy it, it’s just the most wacky book I’ve read in a while Oh and wait to you meet Mike Stevens. He’s a real dream. You’ll be astral travelling forever!
We are lucky to have Steve Sneyd interviewed in this issue -Fascinating man. Much more interesting than hanging out in Wigan! I have to be honest, the place was a bit…sleazy. Once had a brief ‘affair’ with a guy there who never stopped clubbing round Wigan. It was like sleeping with George Orwell, an endless journey of down and out nightclub sordid living. I existed by day and night in my evening clothes. I even got to know the people very deeply and personally at the local bars, clubs and social clubs and er…Time to change the subject before I offend, one hears polite coughs and the wine starts to spill…
Goodbye Darlings. Next issue of Neon Highway in the Spring issue 12, where Alice will publish a magazine containing a final batch of beautifully written unsolicited manuscripts. After that she will ask writers to contribute. Why? Because she doesn’t have time to answer all that post. Simple as that.
Till then.
Jane x
Contents
Thank you to Ronnie Goodyear for front cover image
5: Daniel Bevan
5-6: Charles Frederickson
7-9: Iain Britton
9-10: Davide Trame
10-11: Michael Internicola
11: Rick Taylor
12: Georgina Milne
13: Paul Amlehn
14: Jason Wilkinson
15: Ben Mason
16-17: Aoife Mannix
17-19: Thomas Lowe Taylor
19: Sheila Murphy
20-22: Adam Kane
22-23: Jim Bennett
23-28: Mark Farrell
28-30: Jon Sweet
31-32: Cory Harding
33-39: Jane Marsh questions the poet Steve Sneyd.
40-42: Poems by Steve Sneyd
43-47: Information
Daniel Bevan
Estoria
Denaistar Pemair Felesa
Faimen Ponten Dacora
Benta Lofair Tolari
Topan Lesen Bentari
Walking Pemansa
Estoria sleeping
Talking Peneta
Bolaria etching
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Frederickson
National Parks
Hundreds of jagged limestone peaks
Natural habitat of rare serows
Horned antelope in goat clothing
Creepy crawlies settling in boots
One-way fresh air steep trails
Eighteen tier gurgling waterfall cascades
Reflective drop-off pool tossing and
Turning over during sleepless nightmares
Secreted tufted exotic rainbow hornbill
Stolen jewel in formidable beak
Preening white herons fluffy mums
Storks balancing on teakwood stilts
Bat caves shuttered in darkness
Enveloped black magic foreboding curse
Sun bears sleeping away season
Ursa Major satisfying hibernation undisturbed
Strident wild boars making tracks
Dense bristles shrub stems brushed
Prickly porcupine needles stitched with
Warp snagging weft thorny brambles
Hordes of monkey teases playful
Swishy long frazzled jump-rope tails
Slender arboreal apes swinging treetops
Gibbons exposing themselves flashing rumps
Mottled fur civets anal scent
Glands secreting pungent musky odor
Shy endangered specie clouded leopard
Pelt brushed with rosette markings
Far outreaches assaulted by dragonflies
Waspish buzz of flighty intrusion
Trumpeting wild elephants tusks erect
Upper incisors carved ivory trophies
---------------------------------------------
Iain Britton
By word of mouth
*to an artist now lying in state*
So good so good are you at
flinging red splotches of paint at the ceiling
then watching how they drip and colour
the floor - so good are you at
demonstrating simulating the art of
puncturing an artery. You’re so bloody good
you’ve moved onto greater things...like today
for instance you went over to the playingfields
in Savage Crescent where state-house kids
play at wars at being war lords
bruising each other with clods of dirt
and you cut the throat of a giant cloud
that looked like a man and it’s been raining
ever since.
#
In your house you begin to dance the dance
of the seven knives
one knife in the heart of each thought
each emotion each hard-to-give-birth-to idea.
They show up as pictures in your room
as abstracts which contract like muscles
which claim to feel sharp
abdominal pains. You
aren’t afraid to split open and expose
the contents of your brain.
#
Men in black in hoods of black
are reading to you soft words hard words
words painted red on crisp white paper
words dripping from watering mouths
mouths which deliver ultimatums
which threaten you
with falling blocks of sky. These are
the men who hold your shadow by its neck
who won’t let go until their demands are met.
These are the men you’ve painted on every wall.
#
Hands on the windowsill
you stare out at the neighbours
the Kennedys the Trembaths
the Goughs the chemist who feeds his bloated
face on crimson poppies. Neighbours
ready for the chop. You axe
them one by one and pin
their living parts all over the house. You
show them to be different very different
but belonging to everyone in the town.
You have moved onto greater things. The men
in black are satisfied. The kids playkilling
for pounds of dirt are satisfied. You are so good
at squeezing out the best a body can offer. You
have spread yourself out on a
hanging canvas for all to see.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Davide Trame
WINTER SOLSTICE
In the declining light
things flash on their screens, you click
on horizons your eyes promptly swallow
and wait for clues settling in the blips.
The real landscape outside
is a stretch of grey-mauve spiky stubs,
you think the thin furrows in the field
were blooming mazes once, now buried.
At the end of the day, on the way back
you come across the year's turning
in a sparkle of window panes,
your steps in the rhythm of streetlamps
that hide a buzz of stars;
at home you want to scan their outlines,
their screened twinkles secured in your hand.
Then, the power failure.
And, all of a sudden, nothing is secured.
You too, a splinter of a maze,
are plunged down under,
suspended in a sea, waves
disentangling your web of wires,
plugs hushed in a roar of foam.
Now the light is back,
you are relieved to be still here
in your room, with a renewed
conscience of the other shore
and your screens' busy glitter perched
on the unbounded dark.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael_Internicola
TWO FOR TUESDAY
when i pass savannah, georgia and the clouds
are there and zz top did what they did i see blue
skies again. mississippi that way. up and down the
other. pearl jam in raleigh, north carolina tonight
and it's all about the freedom now even when i
don't realize it's making me happy. sometimes,
i get so free i forget. i forget i don't know where
my home is. i forget that girl i used to know.
there's bad news before exit 109. terrible crash.
news crews already there. a guy running across
interstate 95. it is the middle of april. the concert
is killer. red necks and preppies though. 37 dollars
to our name. they wouldn't even let me buy beers
without my id. hicks. next day i find myself eating
a turkey sub in a gas station parking lot because it's
so god damn nice out. new york can wait for me there.
i still got dick going but being on the road these last
three months has certainly changed things. my birthday
is in three weeks. thirty two years of age. i'll be lucky
to get a phone call. i don't give a shit. anyway--
heading to richmond to fag off with those punks.
hardly anyone around anymore. wall and his kids.
pauly and matty with the girls. new york city life is so
different. i wonder what sar's up to. i hope she's fine.
junior stole van halen's 1984 outta the sub joint. girl gone
bad is on and we're going about 80 down this stretch. god signs
and semi's everywhere. blown tires and trees forever. junior's
driving and going crazy inside and to think that this all
happen only a couple weeks back. i was walking down the street
and junior said we had three options: vegas, san fran or fla.
i've been or at least passed thru all three. in a matter of a day,
a day after i met a beautiful girl named natalie, i was gone for
three straight weeks. i've written her as best i could. i wrote
about the other one as best i could. take your time, sari. find love.
in virginia nothing looks different. emporia is ten miles away.
wherever the fuck that is.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Taylor
THE PURE LIST
for L. Cohen
The window you suggested a scene
Vancouver the backlit accomplice
I curbed you in stages
It’s the traffic mounting
Your mouth was so frantic
Robson Hotel seventh floor
A purse spills its guts
I spoke for you in the voiceover
Lie with family in the Appendix
Your father has my card
Does Perfection work
Do you dial zero or one
Very well open your thighs
Etc.
Georgina Milne
New Boots.
A spangled spike of seven inches
Brings a sharp rapport towards its noble torque.
Jelly eyes and butter hands all clam along,
Placating,…plying at the length and taut
Skin wrought from plastic while the
Heavy angled scalene arch
Threats up to
Shatter open all the little, crinkle anklebones,
And twist the sole from recognition.
It’s the detail:
Pristine polished gleam, the seam unseen and
Jointless creaseline where the boot conjoins the heel.
Paul Amlehn
KRIYA
The beginning of the beginning the end of the end an infinite and
solitary kiss. A single petal made for words. I breathe in a book of
love upon my mouth a benediction and a kiss the sound of water
says what I am thinking. Light and dark earth and sky the embrace
of lovers. The most beautiful harmony born of opposites the world
both multiple and one. The imprint of the hand sunk deep in the
mud or that of the foot the bared belly the knees marked with
crosses. Sitting there together in the dark knowing each other
waiting for words. The wind of spring billows silken curtains with
longing we smell like the spices of the trade our ears nostrils navels
toes skewered by pearls. I am waiting in your monastic breath.
Threads that tangle roots sinking into the ground the ebb and
flow of a wandering energy a glorious body fused into unity the
body the vessel becoming a lymph of The Tree of Life unspoken
voices yearning. The joining of two universes internal marriage of
male and female shadow aura void. Out of the open body comes
a colored swarm of light images of flight subtending a birth
separated from the earthly vulval bed the meeting of earth and
ether. Immersion in the chasm of the body the circle the holy
enclosure. The eternal image of woman turning the world inside
out reflections in a body of water. The mystery of endless timeless
celestial reaches wandering lights flesh hued arabesques waves
billowing and crashing. Rhythms of wind and water.
Jason Wilkinson
-thank you for your time
1
the sun was here
but now
tennis courts are dying
softly beneath our feet/
eyes
trees
will soon be smashed up
in dreams; willowy
flesh disappearing in
a sheet of forgotten light
/glass/teenage
girls
among the brick+piss
giving head
behind tinted windows
alas
what we dream by day-
phantoms become
pictures when we sleep
become meritless when we rise
yawn yawn yawn
ring ring ring
smokestacks and nail
polish hug the sunlit street.
Ben Mason
Family Portrait
Childs Modesty
an irregular reflextion
between open thighs
a former entrance to
life. As naked in
creation as those behind
ornamental primates
abused by life
men of Guantanamo –
Uneasy nakedness
Eyes averted from
a voyeuristic keeper
of the silent moment
pleading to cover
embarrassed flesh.
Aoife Mannix
Always
How can I trust happiness
when I’ve lived my life in a house of cards?
The shifting sands of suitcases
I never learned to unpack.
The floors swept bare,
only the toothpaste graffiti,
a signature of a life I barely knew.
My mother said, ‘it’s as if we were never here’
and I thought it’s safer to be invisible,
to perfect my camouflage, blend myself into the rock,
then cling to champagne dreams of let’s pretend.
They wouldn’t let me read my own language,
and even now I lose myself in the translation,
can never quite believe you’re not leaving me.
Even though you say you love the maps in my eyes,
you can’t follow the roads that race across my skin.
You see once I start, I don’t know how to stop,
I spin out the door into a whole new costume,
Superman was never as schizophrenic as me.
And you say we can give birth to our own country,
but I’m lost and I’m scared,
and I want you to find me and bring me home
to a place that has never existed.
You say have some faith,
this is how it’s meant to be,
but I want some kind of guarantee
that if I close my eyes, you won’t disappear.
That forever is not a foreign word,
and you won’t turn into another stranger
who can’t pronounce my name,
but will always recognize me in a crowd,
always wait for me at the end of a long day,
always kiss me into existence,
always stay right here where I need you.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Lowe Taylor
(from) the Homages of Eagle
The light. Clear along yr signs, a
firmer welcome, a pattern, bedded
thorough sung as flatters song along
Yr highway’s lines are centered in
the moon’s delivered presences to
the scores, love. Loop alight her
movies playing sharply, left the rest
was sad, a moment drawn aside:
marked door drift solemn slow and
lean aside or drawn throughout, here:
strong to hold, the sentences swaying
made again these colors, flue or
charm, a wooden day and pruning
lakes are said the same and
home is shore and palm, you’d be
an eagle flying danced a dream.
Would call yr signs, review. These
are the colder lines, but gallops.
into seasons drawn astir you
are long the waves of light, onto
armies drawing artifacts throughout
Hold, the bed is broken, eyes apart
and sending outer met her flesh
at sentinel and gong the lines.
Hearts afloat and turning seems to
roam the horses peal these hoes
to foal into term, love the mark and
ship to term again, as left and
tongue would shoal to further dues
the lap of waves, the sliding hue
to the west her arches bending light
love’s arts revive the mind yr eyes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheila Murphy
recreation
a minature cymbal
spl ices humdrum
lanky airspace
warm as lotion
on the skin
akin to labor f laws
in kept pace
simple to the iron or
e
revoking innocense
across fields pressed
in waves day after
morrow’s genteel
overcast as timbre
creases slats
of fabric
parcelling the window light
fine powder in
the grace note of our oxygen
Adam Kane
Who is it?
A magazine in a new foreign language “ Czech“
it takes me time to translate
even the simplest of captions
but yeah under this picture its:
Who is it?
So, a contest
a photograph of someone famous
a woman Czech, I guess
half the face blurred to conceal her identity,
and touched up
to make it sag
and strange, this,
but one of her eyes is wandering
Who could it be?
(And what will I win?)
I scan the text,
see that international word police
in this language: policie
(and then) stupid me I figure it out
her face is that way from
decomposition
jesus jesus
christ
she’s dead,
(the magazine closed)
but
(the shame) as
I open it again
and that’s blood sprinkled
down her neck
and blouse
(continued)
(the magazine closed again)
as our young orange cat
washes herself
under the hot reading-lamp
I grab her to me close and hold her
because it’s so early in the morning and it’s so dark and
because my beautiful girlfriend is still sleeping,
she is so beautiful
when she is sleeping
(Look at all that I’ve won.)
--------------------------------
Jim Bennett
satnd
Cmoe adn satnd hree nxteto me
yuo cna haer teh smuemr diyng
lesetn to teh tierd snouds of eevnig
as the cloo ari drifts through the gate
teh drkenass is aoslmt sliod
a wlal to kepe us in
or teh wolrd otu
I neevr culod fuirge otu wchih
bwron leeavs caerp asocrs teh pitao
warey ienstcs carek adn cclik
tiehr fainl wkees
adn I satnd hree wtaiing fro yuo
to be hree netx to me
as wrdos fial me
Mark Farrell
POESY:
1/.
letter passed down through the colonies and
delivered to my flailing sanity
splintery cryptic language
falling from my eyes
and onto these pages
from memories,
adjacent verbs
that make me recognise
that a time arrives
when you must
look further within self
to realise that
it is more simple and virtuous
to die young
in a car wreck
than to bleed
translucently
from the gut
age 65 or 70
having lived a purple lie.
I remember hard now
when I was 23
and living in a small room
in venice.
living off beans and corn bread
drunk everyday by 11
lonely
half mad
I used to receive letters
from females in Australia
(place of birth and childhood)
that I hardly knew
or had met twice,
declaring solidarity to me
claiming
my vigour and honest brevity.
I used to take these letters down to the beach
with a bottle of port wine
and take off my shirt and shoes
and lie flat on my back
in the California sun
burning.
drinking that port wine down
and reading those letters aloud
always finding something
mildly humorous or
significantly interesting
in their words
and wondering what I had said
or done to these females
so far away
sending these hot words
down through the colonies
words laced with want and need
like a refugee.
separated by an ocean,
those girls with all the strength for me
so far away,
me drunk on the beach
clutching those letters
being ridiculed by the bums
and madmen.
the tourist,
looking at me like I was a rapist
because I was young and drunk and
reading aloud
and becoming conscious of it all,
the attention
from the bums and the madmen
and the tourists
and the young females in Australia.
immediately
becoming sick of the sand,
sick of the blue sky
and sick of the world.
feeling that I wanted out
but knowing I was already finished.
soon after the letters stopped.
I never replied
maybe that was why.
life was taking care of
what was left of me.
I’d return home
and my landlady
would be on all fours
cutting in the turf
for a new location for a Tulip
to die.
I’d walk by without saying a word
and check the mailbox.
“desperately empty”, she’d say.
the corners of her mouth turned up
with lucid mockery
her face playing 35
but her complexion savage with bitterness
fabricating a declaration of 50.
I’d walk on in
closing the door quietly behind
and look at the faded calendar
hanging by a nail.
with that relentless
Californian sun falling all over the place,
and my buttermilk semblance-
I’d laugh.
for all the answers
were passed over to the sane
or fare from the reach
of my simple grip.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Sweet
mural
or you hate your mother
or your father or
maybe both
you slash your wrists at
the age of sixteen
blow your brains out eleven years later
all of these brutal attempts
at self-_expression in a world filled
with battered children and still there is
the flight of birds
the silence of empty highways in the
last purple light of september evenings
and later it's the winter of '56 on fireplace road
where pollock watches his studio
from the back door
waits without hope for his hands
to reinvent the world
and you tell me that
you could never stand his work
and that those who kill others
deserve to die themselves
and you're found swinging in the room
of hanged men in the week before christmas
almost half a world away from your home
and when i'm fourteen
i approach morrison like i would a god
and when i'm twenty-five i can
finally see him as pathetic
and there's a woman in a small town i no longer visit
who will never forgive me for this
there are the men who
fathered her children then left her
and maybe the children hate them
or maybe they just don't care
maybe a two year-old girl in another neighborhood
is locked in a heated room
in the middle of august and left to die
and you ell me that this is what
you expect from welfare mothers and then
you talk about the niggers who live
down the street
about how you're not prejudiced
but you believe in the truth
and it's a song i've been living with
my entire life
it's the man downstairs
teaching his wife to bleed
it's my childhood spent in the watery light
of a dozen anonymous bars surrounded by
false prophets who can no longer
stand what they've become
and you are found on your balcony
dead of an overdose
or you're found in your living room
or maybe you get yourself clean
only to end up shot to death
in front of your home
and your blood is real
and spilling everywhere and
twenty years pass before i wake up in
the middle of the night to the sound
of my son crying
i have nothing to offer him
but the past
Steve Sneyd was born in 1941 in Maidenhead, England. Courtesy of an English father and an American mother, his childhood was spent in both England and the United States. In addition to his own work, he has supported genre poetry in general, compiling numerous lists of SF/F/H poems in publications genre, non-genre, and fannish. Sneyd's Hilltop Press publishes a number of other writers, including science fiction poetry by Lilith Lorraine, Gavin Salisbury, Andrew Darlington, and Peter Layton; and fantasy poetry by Frances Campbell; as well as both types of poems and more by Steve Sneyd himself, including his publications about science fiction, fantasy, and horror poetry in the US and UK from 1750 to the present. Write the Huddersfield address, Steve Sneyd, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, HD5 8PB for current information.
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1.
I’ve been reading through some of Alice’s past magazines and found that in issue 5 she has written a little about your book, The Pennine Triangle published by Othername Press. I enjoyed it very much. It has also made me want to put on a spacesuit so here I am. The suit is a little old fashioned but you seem the type to be unaffected by such trivialities.
Today I will ask you questions from Planet Penelope a distant cousin of Planet Pennine. The one thing I can say about Planet Penelope, unlike Plane Pennine is that everything is artificial here, nothing natural at all. Even the sky is made of plastic. What a terrifying thought or is it? Would one be happier under a plastic sky or a real sky? Wouldn’t it be strange if we couldn’t actually get through the plastic but we were still able to see space through it? How would it affect you?
Steve: Putting on a plastic sky reminds me of the ancient idea of heavenly spheres, and a crystal one enclosing earth, and also the frequent science fiction idea where the earth has been quarantined by other alien civilisations, a source of plague spot, because humans are so savage and warlike they’re too dangerous to be allowed out. If I knew it was like that, there’d be a kind of claustrophobic feel, though in a way nowadays if you live in a town, what with all the light pollution, street lights and security lights, we see less and less of fewer and fewer stars anyhow. In a way knowing there was no way of escaping from this planet, thanks to your plastic roof, could be a good thing in that it might focus minds on stopping the damage humans are doing to the earth, global warming and the rest of it, because it’d close the escape route that’s probably at the back of the ruling elite’s minds, that if worst comes to worst and this world was getting uninhabitable they could sneak off with everything needed for a luxury lifestyle to a dome on Mars or wherever.
2.
Have you ever had an out of the ordinary encounter? I remember reading about alien abductions when I lived in New Mexico and you know it was so convincing I was terrified to sleep at night in case the same thing happened to me What do you think of these stories?
Steve: The strongest single instance I’ve ever had of that was walking along a very long straight road called, though with no connection to the Beatles, Penny Lane, northwest of Harrogate, and a long way off in the distance a tractor was coming towards me, and I suddenly had a tremendous irrational conviction that the tractor driver, when it reached me, would leap off and attack me – like that cropduster plane in North-by-Northwest – so I went and hid behind some trees in a plantation till the tractor was well past, even though I felt a real idiot doing so. It was fairly near Menwith Hill, though, even though that big U&S surveillance station’s domes weren’t quite in sight, and they apparently gave out powerful microwave radiation, so just possibly it was some effect of that penetrating my brain.
3.
What was the first piece of writing that inspired you in terms of poetry and why?
Steve: If you mean the first poem that stuck in my mind, I must have been tiny when the magpie rhyme – “one for sorrow, two for joy” etc got in my head and it’s still there every time I see the birds. “Jabberwocky”’d ‘ve been very early on, too, trying to get a meaning out of those amazing words, feeling the sense was just over the mind’s horizon somehow, to describe with hindsight, a little further and I’d be there…Looking back , the first poets I read from what I thought of as personal choice would have been Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Tennyson’s ‘The Idylls of the King’, either buying copies with my own money or pestering for copies as presents.
4.
I notice that in your writing ‘Ahasuerus on Mars’ your language takes your character on a journey quite surreal and magical. I enjoyed this and I found the dislocated language added to this affect of movement and change. What are your feelings towards this piece of work? What made you choose the name Ahasuerus?
Steve: Once a piece of writing is, or feels any how, as complete of “right” or whatever you want to call it, as it’s going to be- and that might be almost right now, or, after years of coming back to and tinkering, that old cliché about “never completed, only abandoned” gets applied. Then it seems to have moved away from me, become very distant in a sense, as if someone else wrote it – which in a way I feel generally anyhow that the reptile brain rather than the conscious mammal brain does the writing, the latter then tidies up and tries to explain if asked. So when I then see a poem in print if it gets published, or do it as part of a reading, or look back at it to think about including it in a collection, I still in a way feel as though it’s a stranger’s work, nothing any longer to do with me. So, although I hope ‘Ahasuerus on Mars’ works for at least some readers, obviously, and that it succeeds to whatever extent in doing what it was intended to do, insofar as that was a conscious decision anyhow, now its appeared I don’t really have feelings about it as such – it exists, it’s out in the world to whatever degree it gets around and gets read, and that’s it. As to why the name Ahasuerus, I was wanting to write about how an immortal would relate to, or co-exist with, or whatever, with “short lives” ie ordinary time-limited people people –responding I suppose to the fact there’s a lot of talk about drugs and techniques that may soon make immensely extended life spans possible, at least for the very rich, and huge questions arise about how society would then change in its functioning, have to change, its something almost on the fringe of ceasing to be science fiction and becoming a reality.
5.
Can you describe a day in your life briefly?
Steve: A real-life typical day is a non-stop whingeathon, spent, in Yorkshire poet Dave Wright’s wonderful phrase, “at the superglue crossroads”. Basically, it consists of me endlessly muttering and cursing inwardly or even aloud, trying to kickstart and motivate myself. It starts off with stalling, dragging out looking at the post, listening to the radio, making endless cups of tea etc, putting off starting overdue things, like the ox in the fable that starves because he can’t decide which of two equidistant piles of hay to eat first – “when everything is urgent nothing is urgent” – then, having finally made a start on something, ending up frantically scrabbling through disordered heaps of paper looking for the vital missing bits needed to finish it, and finally, with luck, just catching the post collection with it, after a mad dash and coming back to slump, full of the conviction the day’s ending with me being further behind with things than when I’d started, like those funfair duck shoots where there’s always another coming up, whether or not you hit the first one, which I never did anyhow. And if it’s nice weather, that’s worse still, as keep being tempted to fugue off out – probably afterhang of cognitive dissonance between the two things you get told as a kid, or did then, “get out in the sun, it’ll do you good”, and “do your homework” – since, of course, being a writer, as the old saying has it, means never having finished your homework!
6.
Inside Fantasy Commentator with you conversation with H. R. Felgenhauer, he mentions your press, Hilltop and the co-operative Ludds Mill magazine. Could you tell me a little about these presses and their main focus?
Steve: Hilltop Press – which has a not very imaginative name, chosen because at the time it started I lived on top of a small hill, and now I live near the top of a slightly higher one – has been since the late 80s very specialised, publishing science fiction and dark fantasy poetry, some contemporary, some revivals of neglected things out of the past, like for example an amazing cosmic voyage section from an epic tale called ‘the Star-Seer’,written in 1813 by William Dearden, who nowadays is remembered if at all, only because he was a drinking companion of Branwell Bronte. Hilltop also has published my series of slim histories of different
Aspects of SF poetry, and, for the last 14 years, Data Dump, which is a newsletter about what’s happening in the field of SF, fantasy, dark fantasy and horror poetry, and also about music using those themes, of which there’s an amazing amount, from opera to rock. Ludd’s Mill was – it closed down around the mid 80s. I suppose you could call it counterculture, magazine of poetry and fiction and articles and interviews, plus a lot of graphics – visually sort of a poor man’s Oz, perhaps. It grew out of life poetry events in Huddersfield, initially as a sort of cooperative, and I was co-editor for about 6 years, then Andrew Darlington was sole editor till it closed down because he was doing a lot of rock journalism and didn’t have time for it.
7.
I have read that you studied Chemistry to degree level. In what way did it influence your writing?
Steve: I suppose the great thing, even though I’ve forgotten just about all the detail –doubt I’d even pass a GCSE Chemistry now – is that it cured any fear of technical subjects, certainly that helped a lot when I worked as a copywriter in feeling at home talking technical stuff, and in science fiction too it means being able to be open to scientific ideas and speculations without that almost fear block you can get with some arts people, as if anything scientific is a dark impenetrable forest, “snear but don’t go near” syndrome setting in for them.
I suspect also the way shapes and patterns can be found underlying what appears a disparate surface clutter, valency theory in chemistry for example, works within my poetry, that within a mass of apparently unrelated immediate phenomena links can be teased out, perhaps like how the Strange Attractor, to use a term from Chaos Theory, works, where disparate things come into a relationship, bit like the line in alchemy from Hermes Trismegistus’ Emerald Tablets of “As above, so below”. And the way formulae, in chemistry and other sciences, are at the same time metaphors for reality, and summations of essences in it, and tools for working on it – metaphors of metaphors if you like – can suggest interesting parallels, I think, with what poetry tries to do, ways, as it were, of seeing its possible functioning, how it at once observes outer, visible reality, and tries to get inside it to essences, and, like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle at work, recognises that it cannot observe with full accuracy because the process of observation in itself changes what it observes.
8.
Have you travelled much and has it influenced your work?
We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and maybe at some level I reacted against that, and became a stay-where-I’m put adult,living in the same house in the same town since forever and so on (though my brother reacted very differently,being a tremendous traveller), much more of an armchair tourist really. It’s a paradox I suppose, when so much of my writing is about travelling the universe. Most of my travelling is very local, walking on the moors of the South Pennines, and that comes into my writing a lot, particularly the feeling you get up there, with all the traces of the past, from Mesolitihic flintknappers sites on, right to modern communications towers, that you are in touch with all the time at once, and that it’s such out of the way place aliens supposedly land undetected, so in a sense you’re between worlds of time and space up there.
9.
If you had to land on a planet where would you most like to be? What kind of landscape would it be? Who would you most like to be stranded with honestly?
Steve: If I had my druthers it’d have rings a la Saturn, and multiple suns so that colours would change constantly, and perhaps lower gravity so there’d be that feeling of ease of movement, floating rather than walking. Puzzling ruins of a lost civilisation, with luck with food and cleaning and clothes-making machines and such that still worked, so all the faff of chores could be forgotten, and with inscriptions, including graphics, so you could try to translate them as poems. As to who I’d want to be stranded with, the fantasy’d be of the perfect Platonic “other half”, although in practice even if such a person existed I imagine it’d soon drive you mad being too well understood and too perfectly in harmony, although with
A whole planet to go at least it’d be easy to give each other getaway space when that happened!
10.
Who is you favourite science fiction character?
Steve: The first one who comes to mind is the dark-haired girl who turns up over and over in Philip K. Dick’s stories, even though (perhaps because) she remains so mysterious, more a catalyst the reader knows nothing about than a fully-formed entity. Bunny Jinglejangelow in Brian Aldiss’ ‘Greybeard’ also comes to mind, mainly because I envied him his coat made of rabbit heads – the nearest I ever got to owning one is having,successively, a white then, when that went missing, a dark rabbit’s foot, which I still have, neither ever conspicuously bringing luck!
11.
You sent Alice an interesting essay you wrote on text and image. Could you say a little what motivated you to write this?
Steve: It’s seemed to me for a long time that visual images can act as another “field” for the poet, one more toll in the toolkit, to use or not use as suits the material, alongside different kinds of rhyme and metre and syllabics and spacings and so on – after all, words and pictures began in the same “place”, as communications tools. A visual within, or around, a poem, can disrupt linearity, it can give a different, even contradictory, meaning, and since one of the greatest things I think a poet can do is offer the possibility of multiple interpretation, then there’s a strong motive to consider, rather than neglect or ignore or oppose, another way of adding to that potential richness.
13.
Can you list 4 poetry books you have written with their press details that you would like to share with us.
Can you list 4 stories you have written also?
Steve: ‘Ahasuerus on Mars’has already been mentioned- that long narrative poem is in Atlantean Publishing’s Bards series, at a £1. That’s this year, and so is a palmtop-size (ie ideal to read undetected during dull work meetings) one of mainly science fiction theme haikuform syllabics called ‘Three Star Chamber’, from KRAX/Rump Press, which is 33p including postage. A couple of book-length ones are ‘What Time Has Use For’, from K T Publications, which is Arthurian poems – the third edition is still in print, that one’s £5.50. ‘Gestaltmacher, Gestaltmacher, Make Me A Gestalt’ (Four Quarters Press) is a cross section of work, science fiction, dark fantasy, sense – of – place, “mainstream”, you name it, for £6.50.
14.
And now for my little game.
You have to tick off all the objects you possess below .
If you possess less than 12 items then you have to write a short piece of sci fi , about one paragraph, about a person who lands on this planet and influences George Bush to change his mind beyond doubt about leaving the American troops in Iraque. (or if you wish you are welcome to write it anyway.) Feel free to make comments next to items.
A Spacesuit
A model of Star Trek’s Enterprise
Neon light
Crystals
Movies: Barbarella, The Fly
Space Instruction Manual
A piece of conceptual art:
Star map
Blow up alien:
Music by David Bowie:
major tom
The book ‘Communion’
Any plastic figurines:
Klingon dictionary
Periodic table of the elements:
Microscope:
Telescope
Globe:
Snow boots
So am short of the twelve needed to not write the paragraph: So here goes.
“Hello, I’m Jesus, and you gotta get all your boys outta Iraq?” “How come, Lord, they’re doin your work.” “Because Rapture starts soon and I only got enough lift capability to uptake the salvationed to Heaven from one location, and that’s right here in your good ole U S of A, so unless you want your brave doughboys left behind to Satan’s hands, get ‘em back here right pronto.”
15.
Finally, What are you working on presently and have you any work being published forthcoming. If so please do provide details for the readers.
Steve: SF writer John Brunner said one of the truest things ever, that “the sort term projects turn out to be long.” For twenty years I’ve been writing poems about a conflict between a species called the Nixil, who combat us by playing with our minds and fantasies. (Last year, my longest poem ever, where the Nixil manipulate our Grail myth, appeared in Atlantean P’s Grails anthology, but most of the poems are short), I’m determined to get them all into some sort of coherent shape, with the incentive that a U S publisher was positive about the idea recently. N other things are in various stages, including trying to get back to an intended epic-length sequence of poems of a modern self-styled reincarnation of the Childe Roland of Browning’s Dark Tower, now that the two already written, as the creative writing part of my Poetry MA dissertation back in ’99, have finally both been published, in Fire magazine, but I always feel as though it’s a bit of a chicken-countingly unlucky talking about future possibilities too much. That also applies to the biggest forthcoming thing, a book about pioneering American science fiction poet Lilith Lorraine, which, with a reprinting of a selection of her work, was commissioned by Cosmos books in the States, and the text accepted by them a couple of years back plus, and proofs seen and checked 18 months or so back, but still, at time of writing, it continues, according to their website, obstinately in “forthcoming” limbo (aka development hell?) so I just hope mentioning it at all here doesn’t push it to the bottom of their priority list!
Thank you for your time, Steve!
Steve Sneyd
The Myth of Open Skies
ok you all know someone who knows someone
saw it happen some whatsisface stood up
in dock and the wig asks anything to say
before passes sentence and out comes cig
packet holds it up and says “Beam me up
Scotty” only think on a bit big universe
big big numbers someone has to beat odds
stands to reason and was me it worked for
one minute facing time for twooking next
other side of time in this glittersmooth
control room just like’d seen so often on
telly screen except see the real thing see
a little tatty as anywhere’d be too many
folk been in too long like everywhere i’ve
been for real not on the screen and i stand
there thinking trouble coming will get boot
dead quick back to where I came from but is
funny as funny no one even seems to notice
me is like i’m a ghost out of well think
about it i am i must be dead by now is so
far into tomorrow’s tomorrow the hell they
can’t see me i can do just what i like set
controls for heart of sun like that old
hit once i get knobs dials all that sussed
finish off whole lot or really surprise Uhura
like that joke about Lois Lane and Invisible
Man and Superman diving down to give her a
surprise and all seems wonderful except is
horrible food doesn’t exist yet goes right
through leaves me thinner and thinner no
reply when i speak just all these uniforms
worse’n copshot shooting round ignoring me
not even bothered to pay enough mind to
scum they think i am to listen write down
what I confess over and over i ask Scotty
beam me down no sign of life i might’s well
not exist i hit them poke them pinch them
kick em up and down should be blue black no
twitch alright if i don’t exist i’ll make
sure they don’t still got that cig packet
take it out say beam whole lot down back
Scotty into court shouldn’t work it does
squnches all whole lot by god I needed that
AT THE HEART OF NOTHING BUSINESS PLANS
dreaming joy power to annoy
safely at some genteel-gentle
lit-type do claiming proof to
hand will soon reveal of just
you wait interBronte incest in
as many possible combinations
as moor-edge hidden pathways
woke to thuds bangs to windows
whathehell next door’s garden
gone to Pennine abandoned all
heather-grown humps full bloom
now though not bright under
grey sky quarry and rust-piled it
bristled as hedgehog back with in
sort of wedged crown dead rocket
ships end of space age or USSR
stuff and how the hell got there
and to hell would worry when time
to get up too early yet to think
and thought’d teach him mock in
dream even Brontes sure after all
a coven and what powers there to
change world even dead could
even out of all stars bring all
spacemen back to visit crash
their ships in tribute to them
there and anyway good this no
longer feel obliged to go each
year see heather out in colour
here come to him his doorstep and
with that huge mess there who cd
ever even notice how his own plot
just mess setaside ca/rbon sink he
preferred name for jungle and next
time spoke to that gathering he
thought will prove how Branwell’s
biggest failure unsuccess as Fenian
spy bomber railway saboteur in
next dream side by side all battled
dinosaurs before the Flood no crazier
than blackbird gobbles hung as tight-
-rope artist till near falls off with
fatness rowan berries soon’s red
ripe will curse all winter none are
left to tasty up ice times and through
such sleep reluctant to get up restart
day’s do is sure hears in new quarry
new there so old abandoned in its
look hammer and chisel sounds of who
inscribing on those fallen dreamers’
ships messages just right to keep them
returned rightly down to earth old
Tyke way of cutting what sticks up
above parapet down to size Town
Rules etc or more likely just like
Haworth now guidance information done
in Japanese soon as Berlin Wall in
bits most even genuine as Bronte bobbins
off dead mills be time to turn starfaring
remnants into souvenirs wonder what
percent his neighbour’d share could
market slogan how really truly all
those loving Brontes found alive Out There
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Information
Maxine by Alice Lenkiewicz
ISBN: 1-904781-72-1
Bluechrome
£7.99
This is my first novella. It started as a book of poems but then developed into a story. It seems to have been placed into a science fiction category although I’m not sure if that is the correct genre for it. Maxine does astral travel and go into space (in a kind of metaphorical way) but whether it is considered sci-fi, I’m not too sure. For me it was just fiction but interesting all the same to see it categorised as sci-fi, although I am sure some would disagree. This book was my final thesis for my MA in writing studies at Edge Hill College. The book contains prose and poetry.
http://www.bluechrome.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Rupert Loydell
New Stride books, autumn 2005
TERTIUM QUID Robert Lax
ISBN 1-905024-02-9 £10.00 147pp pbck October 2005
SPIRITUAL LETTERS 3 David Miller
ISBN 1-905024-03-7 £5.00 20pp pamphlet October 2005
edition of 100 copies
THE SOLEX BROTHERS and other prose poems Luke Kennard
ISBN 1-905024-04-5 £6.95 47pp pbck October 2005
STRIDE PUBLICATIONS, 11 SYLVAN ROAD, EXETER,
DEVON EX4 6EW, ENGLAND
(In the spring of 2006, Stride will publish The Peter Redgrove Archive: new editions of his seven novels* [two co-written with Penelope Shuttle] and a new book of selected essays & interviews edited by Professor Neil Roberts.)
The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000
Robert Sheppard:
Published now by Liverpool University Press at £50 hardback.
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
ISBN: 0853238197
Synopsis
The Poetry of Saying presents the history and social development of alternative forms of British poetry, still little examined or dismissed, set against the context of the development of the Movement Orthodoxy, those writers who followed and attenuated the tradition of Philip Larkin, even as Larkin’s cultural capital fell. Ranging from the quiet work of Lee Harwood to the avant-gardism of Bob Cobbing, from the major works of Roy Fisher to the still developing sonic and semantic experiments of Maggie O’Sullivan, and covering a number of other writers in their historical context, this work is theorised in terms of a poetry of saying, which aims to keep interpretations maximally open. This theoretical perspective, which is balanced against the historicising element, uses Bakhtin and Levinas as its touchstones, and reaches its highest pitch with relation to the work of Tom Raworth, which it argues is ethically open through its textual strategies.
See further details available at:
www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3630
-------------------------------------------
SURFACING (Spike, 2005)
William Park,
ISBN: 0 9518978 7 X
£5.99
Spike Press: c/o Liver House, 96, Bold Street,Liverpool L1 4HY
---------------------------------------------------
The Hutton Enquiry
Chris McCabe,
Salt Publishing: ISBN: 1-84471-074-2
£10.99
www.saltpublishing.com
WRITING SHORT STORIES (Routledge) now available. http://www.theshortstory.org.uk for further details.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AHASUERUS ON MARS
Steve Sneyd
Atlantean Publishing
38, Pierrot Steps, 71 Kursaal Way
Southend-On-Sea, Essex, SS1 2UY, UK
Price £1.00
Cheques made payable to DJ Tyrer.
Fractured Muse
By AC Evans
Atlantean Publishing
38, Pierrot Steps, 71 Kursaal Way
Southend-On-Sea, Essex, SS1 2UY, UK
Price £1.00
Cheques made payable to DJ Tyrer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pennine Triangle
Poems by
Steve Sneyd
J C Hartly
J F Haines
Othername Press
ISBN: 0 9521806 2 6
14, Rosebank, Rawtenstall,Rossendale,BB4 7RD
email: othernamepress@tiscali.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twelve Writers on Writing
Anthology of poems from the members of the first Poetry Business Writing School, (based in Huddersfield) written while on the course.
ISBN: 1-902382-69-2
Contact Janet Fisher, The Poetry Business, Distribution Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN
Email: orders@centralbooks.com
Cathedral Poems
by Andrew Taylor
Paula Brown Publishing
ISBN: 0 9543621 9 5
www.andrewtaylorpoetry.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Yellow Torchlight and The Blues
By Emma Lee
ISBN:0953359190
Price £7.00
‘original plus’, Flat 3,18 Oxford Grove,Ilfracombe,Devon, EX34 9HQ
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to Be a Dragonfly
By Patricia Debney
ISBN: 1-902382-71-4
42 prose poems
Smith/Doorstop Books,The Poetry Business, The Studio, Byram Arcade,Wesgate,Huddersfield,HD1 1ND
£7.95
Open Wide magazine
issue 17 now available
www.openwidemagazine.co.uk
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SleepingFish
Editor: David White
www.sleepingfish.net
www.calamaripress.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pulsar
www.pulsarpoetry.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dee Rimbaud/ AA Independent Press Guide - http://www.thunderburst.co.uk
-----------------------------------------------
Citizen 32 http://citizen32live.moonfruit.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interlude Magazine
Editor: Francesca Ricci
http://interludemagazine.co.uk
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Highblue
D.P. Ryan
Founder and Publisher of the highblue community
www.highblue.co.uk
Poetrymagazines.org.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neon Highway Poetry/Art Magazine
http://www.neonhighway.co.uk/
email: poetshideout@yahoo.com
Current and forthcoming Issues numbers 11 to 12
£2 per issue.
U.S: 1 issue $6, Europe 4 euros.
Cheques made out to Alice Lenkiewicz
Address:
37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD
‘Neon Highway’ no longer accepts unsolicited work.
The magazine will operate on a commission basis later in 06. Details will be updated on website regarding forthcoming issues
