Neon Highway ISSN:
issue 12a
Hi readers!
I am happy to tell you that this is the re-launch of ‘Neon Highway’. It was Alice’s idea to get the magazine going online, where we published a good batch of poems and interviews but unfortunately after a while, we did not feel that the online experience in terms of publishing was for us and therefore we decided to return to the original hardcopy format. ‘Neon Highway’ will now be issued twice a year. Subscription information is at the back of the magazine and information can also be found online at www.neonhighway.co.uk
Well, where do I begin? We have now got two other editors besides, myself and Alice. Dee McMahon and Matt Fallaize will also be editing this magazine. Please welcome them aboard!
In this issue, the poet, Allen Fisher will be interviewed by, myself and Dee.
And we hope you enjoy this issue with a new bunch of poets, as usual some of them known as well as unknown. ‘Neon Highway’ is happy to promote the unpublished poet as long as his/her work is basically, good!
We will be running reviews and listings. The website is updated for subscription and archive information. We do prefer poems and artwork to be sent in via snail-mail but obviously if you are abroad we will understand email submissions.
Well, I’ll leave you to it. Hope you were as amazed as I was by the summer rain. I had one particularly strange experience where I just gave up and lay down under a tree and allowed the rain to just fall down through the leaves and branches upon me. It really was most exhilarating. When I eventually got up, soaked and bedraggled, a teenager walking his dog ran away from me thinking I was some kind of lunatic! Of course, I wasn’t, just simply enjoying the rain, like you do, as simple as that.
All best for now.
Jane Marsh
Contents
Note from Jane: Page 1
Poems
Joanne Ashcroft: p. 3-9
Iain Britton: p. 9-10
Geoff Stevens: p.10
Jonathan Timbers: p.11-12
Brendan McMahon: p.13-14
Carol Thistlethwaite: p.15
Robert Shooter: p.16
Kathleen Kenny:p.17
Allen Fisher Interview: p.18-21
Poems
Tony Trehy: p.21-22
Jan Oskar Hansen: p.23
Reviews
p.24-26
Poems
Graham Fulton: p.27-28
Listings
p.29-30
Note from Editor, Matt Fallaize. p.31
Subscription. p.32
Joanne Ashcroft
An Irreversible Equation.
0 + 2 = 1
- 1
you
can not still must be
somewhere
I no ‘we’ am
somewhere not home
a place expecting you
one hour
I saw you move speak
(the eyes die first)
willed life back
breathe
gone ?gone
__________________
left-alone dry-shock
words can lie think
written is done undone
is that you? the wind
mocks belief you are
‘are’ must be then but
no you are unspeakable
‘are not’ absented
in everything
did you know, feel
fear pain remember
me absent
one cheated one stolen
delayed
a cold goodbye
1 > 2 ?
drinking your smell
a resurrection
your hair on my chest
I wear you
to become you
sleep foetally in you
burned on your image
damp pillow cold bed
A Parlour
painted from a good likeness
I kissed you cold
left tokens
and you
burning
Graveside
you are not black marble, not green grass, flowers or plants
do not sit here alone
I bind you to me, make you alive, address you
unanswered
but not here. grey powder in a beach box is
grey powder in a beach box
Conjuring
you are dreams
soothing trick
my senses feel
your ghost
wake you gone
beating in fear
drink to sleep again
Trick of the Light
you phoned while I slept
existing in bliss
why do you cry?
a warning
love
must live in death
Buried Alive
erasing your name = redeaths
I resist
memory rebels you gone
I write you
write you into resurrection
non sense words
search for you
no voice no reply
too hard
Enchastened
only ever with you
in me no more
desire lives and is dead
hands and mouth putrefied
beyond touch
irreplaceable sensation
phantom simulation
can not re-place
Judas
is a smile is dressed is an unclouded sun
is wearing not-black is uncrying
alone
Necrosis
condemned
to solitary confinement
consequential
to loving the dead
I a ghost
haunt myself
meander memories
for company
in brain imploding silence
these wracking wounds
are numbing me
beyond existence
desperation = hallucination
a non-conversable you
gut slashing torment
no consolation
no conclusion
no definition
no you
The Maths
am I
an improper fraction
spinning chords in a broken circle
an unmirrored axis of symmetry
a dead rooted square ?
Workings Out
If
0 + 2 = 1
then 1 from 2 = a baby
therefore, 0 +2 + 1 = 3
3 – 1 = 2
therefore ½ of you
in real terms
0 + 2 = 1 (no + 1) – 1
= ?
Sum up
irreversible equations
are the whole
minus one
where one is the whole
the whole can’t be halved
I am half of one
can’t be half only one
zero became one
from two
two fused into one
defied logic
and died
leaving
not one
but the whole minus one
I conclude
1 – 1 =
0
Revisits
in lulls you
surprise me
a scent a song invoke
hair tingling horror
reigniting you dis-ables me
- rewounded
unerasable replays of
you = unavoidable
Not 0
I alone
can recreate
you
in that insane zero
nothing is non sense
reject that conclusion
I retire the maths
and spin yarns
in memories silk
for comfort’s sake you
shall not be dead
while I exist
Iain Britton
A Consciously Diminishing Equation
Quarried from a rockfall of disused angels
and put together to fulfil a purpose, we begin
to track my scent across town, lamppost by
lamppost - a town that flops in terraces
down to a river where locals, crouch, wash
and push away parts of themselves. They wait
as if for long-legged streaks of divine light
to touch them. In Anzac Park
we squash into the backseat of my father’s car,
listening to hedgehogs
grunting in the grass, the footsteps of someone
very close. We move like conjoined moons
in slow motion – touching, searching – and for a
while, we go into ourselves
consciously diminishing. A family
stares at us from trees pruned back
for the winter, the oldest male seems incomplete,
cannibalised – he sits at roots
bulging from the grass. The oldest female
is crumpled up, reshaping the branches, unsure
about the reality of resurrection - whether it works
or not. I’m alert to the pedestrian
history of this town,
the reconstructive touch-ups that begin annually.
Each year the streets look different.
I repossess sightings of the two of us
leaning against walls and fences, or standing
under windbreaks in overgrown sections,
behind a library, or amongst the framework
of a face-lifted church. I repossess a shrivelled-up
passion, the vapour of a faded hunger, two young
people trapped in their own artwork. In this park
there are lovers doing what we’ve done all along.
They burrow into themselves, become
inconspicuous, motionless. They stain
the grass, their intimacy only a whisper.
Geoff Stevens
GREY ROOM
I am theatre in reverse.
Front of curtain
the chaos of partially built sets
abandoned scenery
unfitted costumes
unapplied make-up
and rehearsal rooms
where mistake after mistake
is displayed
Backstage the complete play
slick and entertaining
a one man show
for a one man audience
a production deserving of success
But critics sit out front
amongst the debris
Jonathan Timbers
Oh, No, it’s Andy!
He did not hunker down
in the carriage
next to our table or bow
his head to show off
‘a machete scar’;
I did not comment
on his hair loss;
or was he going
to a BNP march in Leeds
with an amateur boxer
because he was
‘a lifelong socialist’.
Likewise, the other passengers
didn’t notice him
nor did they glare at us
when we disembarked
at our destination
(undisclosed),
not minding that we
hadn’t said,
‘Don’t take any risks, Andy!
Don’t give them
Any propaganda!’
TV Quick
Harbajhan traps Lara lbw for 11. Lara doesn’t agree and puts his head to one side and rolls his eyes. But walks. They’ll be sparks in the dressing room, it’s like Time is a tap that won’t stop leaking. Change channels. There’s whiskey
in the larder and chocolate soya milk in the fridge. Change channels. On the embankment, rosebay willowherb and bindweed, its white flower a satin euphonium, speckles of yellow-headed ragwort. Remember the marsh thistle, more blades than a Swiss ary knife, the way it rises above a barbed wire
fence and growls, ‘Go away’. Change channels. Feel the weight, there above your belly. Put it down. Pick it up. Change channels.
That one and that one and that
Until I hit white noise.
It goes on like it always does,
Around, underneath,
Just like the room
And silence.
Chanderapaul is stranded on 123 not out.
Brendan McMahon
EVERYTHING
No future and no past. Just this
Attenuated moment which will whimper
To a stop sometime soon. Till then
Let’s practise nothingness, and sink
Our minds in wells of silence, so deep
We cannot hear the angel voices
Proclaim the end of everything.
THE CHILD
You can’t do endings, but might eat us out of house
And home, or come to love the river or the sea,
Or other dilute deaths.
Black mouth and eyes of glass, sleep
Broken by the heart’s dark captains,
Warm and dirty, how she bends to you,
Reeking of hay and the sun. Even
A small soul shines like the moon,
Like the stars whose feet the ocean washes.
SYSTOLE
Membrane, the shadow of excluded rain,
old fight of borders to maintain themselves,
hands pressed to an encroaching dark.
Red rush feeds muscle, nerve, capacities
for action, hamlet-wise persist so long
as only this capillary tidal crash.
Listen, how it pulls and beats,
the song reverberates, the body’s caves.
The echoes, drumming shadow thoughts,
scurry to light and blink and best
inexorable rhythms out to worlds and stars.
Carole Thistlethwaite
willow warbler
hu-eet
hop hu-eet
leaves fluttering flit-shadow hu-eet
flutterigleaves hop flank leavesfluttering
flutteringleavesflutteringtwig flank shadow leavesfluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hop tail hu-eet leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves flit shadow leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves shadow flit fluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves head flit fluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hop tail leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hu-eet flit tail fluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves willow leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves warbler leaves
flutteringleaves back flit flutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering hu-eet shadow branchfluttering
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering willow branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering warbler branchandfluteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering flitting branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranch further branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranch back branchandflutteringleavesbranch
flutteringleaves hu-eet into branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranch the branchandflutteringleavesbranch
flutteringleavesandbranchandflutteringleave
Robert Shooter
Lip l-l-l lip s-s-s service
l-l-l labial, l-l-l letting my l-l-l lips c-c-c close,
or p-p-p partially, to l-l-l let it out,
p-p-p pray, kick-start p-p-p projection,
or the w-w-w word cannot f-f-f form.
l-l-l letting through understanding
b-b-b bugger inar-r-r-t-t-t ticula sh-sh-sh tion
b-b-b bringing us b-b-b back to the w-w-w word.
f-f-f phonetics demands it
l-l-l lips p-p-p playing b-b-b ball.
b-b-b but the c-c-c conundrum t-t-t to t-t-t- truth
t-t-t telling of
l-l-l living
t-t-t truth the
w-w-w word
l-l-l lies
enou f-f-f gh
c-c-c - nowhere near lips -c-c-c- cannot
s-s-s sp-sp-sp spell
oo-oo-oo u-u-u you r-r-r require r-r-r rounded
l-l-l lips - they l-l-l lie in t-t-t truth - u-u-u oo-oo-oo you - d-d-d- do…
t-t-t too
f-f-f for the oo in t-t-t- trooth lies like
u-u-u you and I d-d-d do
w-w-w which is s-s-s so-so-so- s-s-s sound
w-w-w wh-wh-wh- y-y-y- why?
Kathleen Kenny
Day Trip
I’m going backwards
in an airline seat,
in a charabang,
The last strobes
of natural light
dashing through the sky.
The Editors ask the poet, Allen Fisher questions about his poems.
Brief Biography:
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, editor and art historian, lives in Hereford, Crewe and ‘in transit’, works at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire, where he is Head of Contemporary Arts. He has exhibited in many shows including London 2003, Hereford 1994 and York 1993. Examples are in the Tate, the Living Museum, Iceland and various private collections. His last four books were Place, Entanglement, Gravity and Singularity Stereo.
http://www.allenfisher.co.uk/afwebindextemp.htm
JANE: Hello Allen,
I hope you are well and thank you for agreeing to have us ask you questions. I am just about to read your book, ‘Gravity’. I want this to be a spontaneous process without any pre-planning so I will simply read the book and get back to you.
Jane.
Ok, a very quick reaction to first piece titled Banda. I do want to read on and I am enjoying the book but can’t resist interrupting.
Surprised at how much I enjoyed this. I imagined it far more clinical and using a language that may be more distant and heavy perhaps influenced by the title of the book, ‘Gravity’ but it is surprisingly light and sensual. There also seems to be some hope for humankind in amongst the urban ‘big brotherish’ post war city atmosphere.
She bathes in rainwater at last clean
For the first time in decades (p.13)
You give the reader hope of a beautiful world. You bring in smells such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, (my favourite spices by the way) and then you somersault into a grocers! This just made me laugh. The image of someone somersaulting into a grocers is, to put it mildly, utterly hilarious! Thank you for making my day!
And then we have wonderful use of sounds;
Launch from the ramp and the joy
Wet zings say it as wasps
And I enjoyed your use
of irony
Bird carpets copied get copied p.14
Can I ask you, are these poems a kind of thought process of something you have experienced as you walk through Brixton? Do you jot down as you experience, a little like a diary or do you reflect and write later after the experiences?
The experience of walking through Brixton is part of what Gravity
includes. I make brief notes, research, accumulate and then
assemble using a system of transformational procedures. Sometimes this
is a quick process; sometimes it takes a long time.
Do you place a lot of emphasis on the editing of your poems?
Sometimes poems are radically edited; sometimes I get it as I want it
immediately.
How would you describe your poetry?
The poetry in Gravity varies, but most of it works through
transformations of previous poems.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am building a set of 35 emblems each of which consists of a poem, an image, and a commentary (it’s a Renaissance and then Baroque idea). In 1980 or 81 Brian Ferneyhough, the composer, wrote a piece called Lemma –Icon, “Epigram, which uses a similar
tri-part set. The images are all done, the poems are underway. The commentaries have only just started.
I know that you are an artist as well. Could you tell me of anyone who has influenced you in particular and in what way they have done this?
I was initially very strongly influenced by John Cage and many of the conceptual artists in the 1970s. Having rejected art as object for a decade, in 1978, Jasper Johns London exhibition lifted my spirits and I started to make paintings. He was able to show me how painting was about thinking and feeling and transforming as extended processes.
How would you describe poetry that avoids creating a dialogue between the writer and the audience and vice versa, poetry that creates a dialogue between writer and audience?
My aesthetic stance demands that the work is in process as soon as a
reader or viewer engages with it, I wouldn’t call it a dialogue. The work is made by the viewer/reader in responses to the work initiated by the poet or artist.
Do you write about your own personal experiences?
I include record of my personal experiences in my work.
Who is your favourite poet and why?
I read about 100 American and British poets. The idea of favourites varies daily. I usually include Denise Riley, Tom Raworth, Joanna Drucker, Clark Coolidge, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Jennifer Moxley, Ed Dorn, Lissa Wolsak, Frank O’Hara, Andrea
Brady, J.H. Prynne, Gertrude Stein, Hugh McDiarmid and translations of Paul Celan in my list.
Dee Mcmahon
Questions for Allen Fisher, following my reading of
Transformed extracts from iDamage
using keywords ‘pattern’ and ‘damage’
1.
Here you explore your theory of damage in its relationship to visual perception and cognition, supported by examples from image in art, and poetry. Do you find other strong relationships between these two worlds, art and poetry? Do theory and concept in poetry inform art, and visa versa? Any other examples?
I do find a strong relationship between many of the arts. I practice
poetry and art, so I give these areas more emphasis. I find that theory and concept are to some extent embedded in the poetry and art, but I do go through a process that has a theoretical
and conceptual base. This base is partly derived from bases I have recognised elsewhere, in others work, and partly from my experience and practice. I recently listed a set of headings to
describe a practice as research process and showed how it helped with planning a calendar and it may apply here. The headings are: Enquire, Investigate, Accumulate, Analyse, Select, Transform. Like all analyses, this list unnecessarily damages it its small bits
from a larger whole, but it helps articulate the duration and space needed. How poetry or painting articulate 'Enquire' may of course seem to be widely different. If painting starts a one
moment in making sketches or collecting fragments of visual material, poetry could be, conceptually, doing the same. Anyway that may be now off the point you were encouraging. I know that I was very influenced by the conceptual art of the sixties and later,
along with the hole 'dematerialisation of the object' debate.
2. Do you wonder what other abilities and skills such as writing music could bring to the development of theory in poetry?
I have tried 'other abilities and skills'. I find that aspects of one approach to method can be applied to another and often this exchange of method within the parameters of appropriateness, can be efficacious. In 1975 I used Bach's The Art of the Fugue as a pattern-basis for a sequence of poems (The Art of Flight). I followed this in 'Birds Locked in the Roof' (in Unpolished Mirrors which used Beethoven's last Quartet, then in other poems used piano works by Schoenberg and by Stockhausen. In the early eighties I wrote Defamiliarising ____________* which used the note pattern in Brian Ferneyhough's Time & Motion Study I. More recently I
have been using his Lemma-Icon-Epigram in a similar way. These pattern sources have been the basis of musical compositions for Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Ferneyhough, and through my transformation of them have become patterns for my work.
They don't lead to poetry that is recognisable from these patterns, what they do is to break my pattern habits, my own speech patterns for instance, and encourage my invention. There's a sense in which poets using a riming pattern encouraged their own transformations from song and proportionate design. You could think of Spenser and Sidney and their use of spectacular arithmetic
and pattern in The Fairie Queene and Asphodel & Stella. Patterns can provide the bases for conceptual understandings of what to plan to for. The use of large and small patten can be as readily available from architecture or design. When Bartok composed some of his Sonatas he had natural elements in mind which in turn could beinterpreted or analysed through Golden Section ideas in
Euclid and then Fibonacci. Rather than taking the easy option of repeating a natural pattern, I prefer to transform into a new pattern. You could say that has a metonymic dimension, a kind of requirement not to repeat, that stands for the ethos of not repeating.
3. Transformed extracts, is very detailed. What allows you to have such focus? Is full immersion necessary?
I think your implication of immersion sounds about right. It's possible to recognise an overview or conceptual preparation, which may not be immersion, but when the engagement starts it becomes necessary and effective to stay there.
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Allen.
Yours.
Jane and Dee.
------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Trehy
Calculus
0. monotonic the fall. In the cot, of equilibria and reducing
complexities, the baby recognised my death as our eyes
another reason to avoid the butchery of children’s
moment Cut, a form of transitivity when the engine stops
and you can't go on, but you get out of the car and go on.
A prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage one
experiential state of the body to another implying
augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act
She reminded me of what we could have had - and it was
remarkably paradisiacal, only less so. The dynamics
hovering bird wings, the public are mad those that aren't
found in any species in city park ascriptions of method.
Two opposing points connected by positive and negative
charge tired but it was there, something about never
getting there – the slender margin language object – daily
routine of back and forth sine wave study to the quaint
notions of windswept steppe and desert’s unequal
presumption of innocence without fear of retributive
access will be the end of memory: 1
Epigones
0. Second-rate or loosely prehensile, our heroes forgotten,
the principle of least privilege delegated accrues for sun
kings, sons richly apprenticed His, corrupt variance
toward the meaning in its use; the universe of all small
types, which contains names for all the attributes
forgotten; facilitating removal of exotics as nonalgorithmic
monuments: telomeres thin between every regeneration.
Children haunt with the smell of butchery, cost and
elections deplete memory of us, heroes, our movements
recorded and forgotten, from one traffic light junction to
the next top of the range sports car accelerates
ostentatiously away to wait to surge by system of
apologia-inertia by proxy’s excluded other, middle and
below, effectiveness derogating to ‘the same point in space
repeated times’ as last season’s telomeres thinned toward
brown, became fashionably black, decisionally
incapacitated by golden lineage, modelled proudly by
Akhenaten’s daughters, with tanned, luxuriant, pierced
bellies, the statute delegation: we were all epigones will be
again, singular in the infernal drilling noise of extractor
fans. A changed voice would stand out saying: one day you
will be someone who lived long ago: 1
Jan Oskar Hansen
The Reason
The bells you hear, when busy voices briefly ceases,
are made of brass and polished, at dawn, by the spittle
of seven deeply religious monks in the far away Tibet;
where they use yak butter in their morning tea.
When first light strikes the bells there is and explosion
of the colours, blue and green, that lives inside the sun,
without these tones the seas would have been dull as
a rain puddle, outside Gare de Lyon, a fall afternoon.
Reviews
Purple Patch no. 117
An enjoyable edition of Purple Patch with many scene setting poems such as Leaving Vyrnwy by Jane Moreton, and Empty House by Michael Newman. Landscape imagery throughout but the imagery is more striking when used otherwise, for example, in the return to childish speech ‘melt like a lolly on a hot day’ in For Glynn by William Burroughs, and the description of an impoverished scene in Arts Centre by John Denham:
‘with the impossible heroism
of the one kilowatt convector heater
as it strives alone in a dusty corner.’
Some flashes of unexpected language, for example Kate Edward’s ‘snarling’ in Absence. Despite that many of the poems are predictable and conclusive, leaving little to the reader to work with. The Most Depressing Day of the Year by Frank Burton is an exception, as is Paul Walker’s A Kind of Freedom. Probably the editor’s intention, but there was little in the way of experimental poetry. Interesting concepts were explored in Paul Walker’s Long Year of Unreason, and Gordon Scapen’s A Certain Age.
The review section cuts to the quick and looks for the positives in each publication. It is informative rather than patronising or overly critical, and a reasonable basis for choice of reading, I felt. The gossip section is interesting and controversial.
50 Heads by Tony Trehy
From a striking cover to a hugely enjoyable set of poets prose. The cover shows the mid-section of a high rise glass and steel structure, appealing in its mathematical, ordered image of contained clarity, appropriate to the poetry within.
Trehy’s set of 49 poems are all in the same prose format, and take up space within the centre of the page with an overall square or rectangular shape. They begin with 0. and end with : 1. I was unsure of the reason for this during reading, but Trehy explains that he has invented this ‘Head’ form, and that it relates to Mathematics, where ‘the probability of something happening is defined as a number between zero and one – with zero meaning that the thing didn’t happen and one meaning that it did.’ The titles are arranged alphabetically.
There seems to be within the poems a mathematical as well as poetical approach to the possibilities of language, and recurrent themes are mathematical theorems, linguistic concepts & syntax, and a sort of reflection on human nature. Within quite dissociated texts, phrases appear in more than one poem, and the reader recognises as old friends. There is a sparseness of imagery with some exceptions, such as in the first half of Poem. The poems are predominantly temporal, although there exists in many of the poems a type of mathematical imagery which leads the reader into, out of, and around part concepts, as in Content. The concepts, thoughts and images are presented fleetingly as part phrases, phrases leading to further phrases or concepts presented within the same sentence. Perhaps this is the way the brain links things instead of the formalised order imposed by societal systems, including commonly used language phrasing and syntax.
Most of the poems are made up of phrases rather than sentences, with only an occasional complete sentences within the text, occurring at the end of the poem as a possible conclusive sentence. In general there is permission to interpret the phrases and group them as the reader wished.
Tony Trehy makes up relationships between words and phrases and presents these relationships as texts that can be read and re-read, interpreted at a moment in time a first instance, then again. These are poems to be taken in small doses like 80% cocoa solid chocolate – they are intense and immensely satisfying, if you like this sort of thing.
Dee McMahon
Review of ‘countersyncopationyeah’ by Mark Sonnenfeld
This is probably the fourth time I’ve read this piece of work, written by Mark Sonnenfeld in collaboration with artist Jose Roberto Sechi. A line on what I’ll call the title page tells me its ‘about electricity and THE DOORS’. I have a basic knowledge of each, but am happy to have my belief that poetry contains no truisms confirmed here. For me this piece is quite simply about art and text and the relationships between them.
This piece of work spans nine pages and appears as collaged columns from a Spanish newspaper, possibly from the ‘looking for’ or ‘for sale’ ads, overlaid with short sequences of letters in alphabetical order, and black dots of varying sizes in varying positions. There are text and symbols, or collaged text above and below the columns on each page, and these columns never exactly fit the page. The overriding result for me is stimulation on a poetic, conceptual and artistic level. The relationships between the various texts on the page and from page to page is well disassociated although I do form an impression of both snapshots from daily life, and occasionally, an approach towards a moral commentary. The fact that the font is different for each line of text on each page and page to page, makes for more and more dislocated reading. For this and other reasons the work is unusually compulsive and draws me back to read, re-read and observe it.
One of the most compulsive elements is created by the presence of black dots on the newspaper columns, always two per page. I wonder about the balance of the dots themselves, if one is large on the page, must the other be small; do they equal the same square area in each case; are they sequential; what text are they hiding; is the point the interruption of the column text or the size and position of the dots; their relationship to the text outside the columns. They engender a gracefulness, and artistry in the piece that is outside of the texts but at the same time part of the whole. In a strange way I feel related to the artistic nature of the work through these black dots, and in their simplicity and movement through the text, they make me happy!
The relationship between text and art works as counterpoint, the text dissociating, the artwork uniting. Constants are the newspaper columns, the presence of black dots, the presence of text. Variables are the black dot size and position, the content of the text, its font. It becomes apparent why countersyncopationyeah was chosen as title to the work.
That this is a work is both poetic and artistic in nature does not mean it will necessarily command repeated reading and observation. That it is stimulating and interesting on many levels means countersyncopationyeah will interest poets and artists alike.
Dee McMahon
Review of ‘A Fiery Sunset’ by Omar Musa Ballouta
A Fiery Sunset by Omar Musa Ballouta
ISBN:0-7951-8671-1
Watermark Press
3600 Crondall Lane
Suite 100
Owings Mills, MD 21117
‘A Fiery Sunset’ is a book of love poems, beautifully written from the heart. Read it all in one go and you know where Omar is coming from. For most of us at some point in our lives, we have been there. It reminded me of those relationships you have, no matter how short or long, you never forget the fleeting magic of it all, even though quite often there is pain and loss involved. We don’t know why it may sometimes end but that is the mysterious side of life. At least we can capture these memories as Omar has in this interesting and sensual book of poems. I enjoyed this collection.
Jane Marsh.
The Life of Fergus in the Hall Cupboard
During the Very Wet Summer of 2007
The highest shelves
are full of dad objects such as
a birth certificate in Spanish a flag
of Chile a strip of photographs
of a young boy in a sailor suit
smiling up at his father
on a street in Valparaiso each one
a small epic a heartbeat more
than the one
before letter
about an earthquake in 1906
a snowscape in the Andes
a Panama Canal souvenir brochure
stories still lifes poems
cigarette cards film star cards
Brigitte Helm Loretta Young
bats of the British Isles cards
famous Scottish people cards
David Livingstone Thomas Carlyle
carefully pasted cowboy scrapbooks
carefully written bicycle diaries
diaries from the war he shouldn’t have
kept in case he was captured killed
without having seen mum
without having made love
without having ridden the pulse
of longing completion creation a ship
in a bottle
Made by a German soldier
in exchange for cigarettes and chocolate
I can still smell the cork pieces clipped
from victory sheets I can still smell
the V flowers pressed
in a heavy book I can still smell
the perfume letters
about love
threads a framed picture of a sailing ship
slicing the waves of an imaginary sea
braces glasses a shaving razor
the blood plugged with tiny papers
cufflinks armbands lists of things
lists of worlds lists of music he loved
lists of music he needed to love list of things
to lift him a heartbeat more a letter
he wrote the week before
a death certificate in English a photograph
of a young boy smiling up at his father
turning into his father
on a hill of ferns in Argyllshire
who has to make the list of everything
on the highest shelves because
I can no longer be sure of
what he laughed like what he
sang like what I look like beneath the dust
Puppy Love
A weekend redneck
with his boot on a chain
transforms
his Alabama drawl
to a Greenock snarl
mutters
fuck off
after singing
every second line
of fuck off Freebird
by Lynyrd fuck off Skynyrd
to his chocolate-
coloured fuck off pup
as it plays growls
shakes
his tatty-coloured
guitar-shapped bag
scatters
his earnings
all over the slabs
looks up at his fuck
off face for approval
Graham Fulton
Listings
Purple Patch
Editor: Geoff Stevens,
25, Griffiths Road,
West Bromwich
B71 2EH
England
www.geoffstevens.co.uk
West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN
www.westhousebooks.co.uk
www.poemsinthedark.com
www.thewordtravels.com
www.mslexia.co.uk
http://ac-cygnusx.blogspot.com
www.Stridemagazine.co.uk
www.cinnamonpress.com
www.publishandbedamned.org
www.writeoutloud.net
http://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/html/contrib.htm
The Measure: an email magazine of poetry and prose
http://hometown.aol.co.uk/jumpcatrod/myhomepage/writing.html
http://www.poetsletter.com
Trespass
trespassmagazine@yahoo.co.uk
The Journal & original plus
Sam Smith
17 High Street
Maryport,
Cumbria CA15 6BQ
UK
http://members.aol.com/smithsssj/index.html
See also The Select Six - www.bewrite.net/select_six.htm
The Book Of Hopes And Dreams: a charity, poetry anthology, published to raise money for the Medical Aid, Afghanistan appeal of the Glasgow-based charity Spirit Aid.
www.rimbaud.org.uk/bookofhope.html
The anthology features the work of many well-respected poets, including Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Heath-Stubbs, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Tony Harrison, Alasdair Gray, Edwin Morgan, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson, Jon Stallworthy, Alan Brownjohn, Ruth Fainlight, David Constantine, Moniza Alvi, Cyril Dabydeen, Elaine Feinstein, Vicki Feaver, Michael Horovitz, Tom Leonard, Robert Mezey, Lawrence Sail, Jay Ramsay, Charles Ades Fishman, Geoffrey Godbert and Ian Duhig, amongst others.
http://www.ginoskoliteraryjournal.com/
www.stimulusrespond.com.
POETRY KIT (www.poetrykit.org)
http://www.thunderburst.co.uk
davidcaddy.blogspot.com
http://www.onthepremises.com/
http://www.incwriters.co.uk/
Points of Reference: cd by Edge Hill University Poets Alice Lenkiewicz, Andrew Taylor, Cliff Yates, Angela Keaton, Matt Fallaize, Dee McMahon and Robert Sheppard. £4.50 p&p from Alice or Dee
Stories of the Line: cd by Dee McMahon. £4.00 p&p 14 Tower Hill, Ormskirk, L39 2EF
Message from Editor, Matt Fallaize.
Neon Highway – Here to help
With the vast array of poetry magazines in the marketplace, it’s not always easy to send your work off confident that it’ll receive a sympathetic reading. Each editor has their likes, their dislikes, their pet hates, their secret loves. Every poem deserves to be given the best chance possible. Likewise every editor needs to spend less time sorting through submissions pile weeding out work which simply isn’t what the magazine wants.
So to make your life, and our lives, easier, let us clarify:
Here at Neon Highway we want work that is, for want of a better word, experimental. We want innovative poetry, we want interesting, engaging, poetry. We want poetry that is trying something else. We don’t care if you’re published a thousand times over, or if you’re submitting for the very fist time. We’re committed to breaking new work.
Experimentation can be linguistic, it can be thematic, it can be procedural, structural, topical. Experimental does not necessarily mean obscure, high-brow or any of the other narrow descriptions writers use unnecessarily to define themselves. It is a freshness, a state of mind, a willingness to take a risk on behalf of your writing.
What is doesn’t mean is formulaic, polemical, hectoring, old hat. A political poem is fine, a rant is not. A love poem is fine, yet another poem about how sad you are because your partner left you is not. Descriptive work is fine, work that groans under the weight of its own adjectives is not (remember what Bunting said about them bleeding nouns). Simple poems are fine, obvious ones are not. Poems about cats will be going straight in the bin.
If you think we’re the ones for you, we’d love to hear from you. If you don’t, then relax, there’s someone out there for your work. It just isn’t us, and you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time.
Subscription
Neon Highway, the magazine for experimental and innovative poetry.
Submissions of innovative poetry to be sent to editors:
Alice Lenkiewicz: 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD
Dee McMahon: 14, Tower Hill, Ormskirk, L39 2EG
Matt Fallaize: 67, Lea Crescent, Ormskirk, L39 1PG
Neon Highway is available bi-annually, with 2 issues costing £5.50, or a single
Issue available at £3.00. Order your next issue by sending a cheque to Alice Lenkiewicz 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD.
issue 12a
Hi readers!
I am happy to tell you that this is the re-launch of ‘Neon Highway’. It was Alice’s idea to get the magazine going online, where we published a good batch of poems and interviews but unfortunately after a while, we did not feel that the online experience in terms of publishing was for us and therefore we decided to return to the original hardcopy format. ‘Neon Highway’ will now be issued twice a year. Subscription information is at the back of the magazine and information can also be found online at www.neonhighway.co.uk
Well, where do I begin? We have now got two other editors besides, myself and Alice. Dee McMahon and Matt Fallaize will also be editing this magazine. Please welcome them aboard!
In this issue, the poet, Allen Fisher will be interviewed by, myself and Dee.
And we hope you enjoy this issue with a new bunch of poets, as usual some of them known as well as unknown. ‘Neon Highway’ is happy to promote the unpublished poet as long as his/her work is basically, good!
We will be running reviews and listings. The website is updated for subscription and archive information. We do prefer poems and artwork to be sent in via snail-mail but obviously if you are abroad we will understand email submissions.
Well, I’ll leave you to it. Hope you were as amazed as I was by the summer rain. I had one particularly strange experience where I just gave up and lay down under a tree and allowed the rain to just fall down through the leaves and branches upon me. It really was most exhilarating. When I eventually got up, soaked and bedraggled, a teenager walking his dog ran away from me thinking I was some kind of lunatic! Of course, I wasn’t, just simply enjoying the rain, like you do, as simple as that.
All best for now.
Jane Marsh
Contents
Note from Jane: Page 1
Poems
Joanne Ashcroft: p. 3-9
Iain Britton: p. 9-10
Geoff Stevens: p.10
Jonathan Timbers: p.11-12
Brendan McMahon: p.13-14
Carol Thistlethwaite: p.15
Robert Shooter: p.16
Kathleen Kenny:p.17
Allen Fisher Interview: p.18-21
Poems
Tony Trehy: p.21-22
Jan Oskar Hansen: p.23
Reviews
p.24-26
Poems
Graham Fulton: p.27-28
Listings
p.29-30
Note from Editor, Matt Fallaize. p.31
Subscription. p.32
Joanne Ashcroft
An Irreversible Equation.
0 + 2 = 1
- 1
you
can not still must be
somewhere
I no ‘we’ am
somewhere not home
a place expecting you
one hour
I saw you move speak
(the eyes die first)
willed life back
breathe
gone ?gone
__________________
left-alone dry-shock
words can lie think
written is done undone
is that you? the wind
mocks belief you are
‘are’ must be then but
no you are unspeakable
‘are not’ absented
in everything
did you know, feel
fear pain remember
me absent
one cheated one stolen
delayed
a cold goodbye
1 > 2 ?
drinking your smell
a resurrection
your hair on my chest
I wear you
to become you
sleep foetally in you
burned on your image
damp pillow cold bed
A Parlour
painted from a good likeness
I kissed you cold
left tokens
and you
burning
Graveside
you are not black marble, not green grass, flowers or plants
do not sit here alone
I bind you to me, make you alive, address you
unanswered
but not here. grey powder in a beach box is
grey powder in a beach box
Conjuring
you are dreams
soothing trick
my senses feel
your ghost
wake you gone
beating in fear
drink to sleep again
Trick of the Light
you phoned while I slept
existing in bliss
why do you cry?
a warning
love
must live in death
Buried Alive
erasing your name = redeaths
I resist
memory rebels you gone
I write you
write you into resurrection
non sense words
search for you
no voice no reply
too hard
Enchastened
only ever with you
in me no more
desire lives and is dead
hands and mouth putrefied
beyond touch
irreplaceable sensation
phantom simulation
can not re-place
Judas
is a smile is dressed is an unclouded sun
is wearing not-black is uncrying
alone
Necrosis
condemned
to solitary confinement
consequential
to loving the dead
I a ghost
haunt myself
meander memories
for company
in brain imploding silence
these wracking wounds
are numbing me
beyond existence
desperation = hallucination
a non-conversable you
gut slashing torment
no consolation
no conclusion
no definition
no you
The Maths
am I
an improper fraction
spinning chords in a broken circle
an unmirrored axis of symmetry
a dead rooted square ?
Workings Out
If
0 + 2 = 1
then 1 from 2 = a baby
therefore, 0 +2 + 1 = 3
3 – 1 = 2
therefore ½ of you
in real terms
0 + 2 = 1 (no + 1) – 1
= ?
Sum up
irreversible equations
are the whole
minus one
where one is the whole
the whole can’t be halved
I am half of one
can’t be half only one
zero became one
from two
two fused into one
defied logic
and died
leaving
not one
but the whole minus one
I conclude
1 – 1 =
0
Revisits
in lulls you
surprise me
a scent a song invoke
hair tingling horror
reigniting you dis-ables me
- rewounded
unerasable replays of
you = unavoidable
Not 0
I alone
can recreate
you
in that insane zero
nothing is non sense
reject that conclusion
I retire the maths
and spin yarns
in memories silk
for comfort’s sake you
shall not be dead
while I exist
Iain Britton
A Consciously Diminishing Equation
Quarried from a rockfall of disused angels
and put together to fulfil a purpose, we begin
to track my scent across town, lamppost by
lamppost - a town that flops in terraces
down to a river where locals, crouch, wash
and push away parts of themselves. They wait
as if for long-legged streaks of divine light
to touch them. In Anzac Park
we squash into the backseat of my father’s car,
listening to hedgehogs
grunting in the grass, the footsteps of someone
very close. We move like conjoined moons
in slow motion – touching, searching – and for a
while, we go into ourselves
consciously diminishing. A family
stares at us from trees pruned back
for the winter, the oldest male seems incomplete,
cannibalised – he sits at roots
bulging from the grass. The oldest female
is crumpled up, reshaping the branches, unsure
about the reality of resurrection - whether it works
or not. I’m alert to the pedestrian
history of this town,
the reconstructive touch-ups that begin annually.
Each year the streets look different.
I repossess sightings of the two of us
leaning against walls and fences, or standing
under windbreaks in overgrown sections,
behind a library, or amongst the framework
of a face-lifted church. I repossess a shrivelled-up
passion, the vapour of a faded hunger, two young
people trapped in their own artwork. In this park
there are lovers doing what we’ve done all along.
They burrow into themselves, become
inconspicuous, motionless. They stain
the grass, their intimacy only a whisper.
Geoff Stevens
GREY ROOM
I am theatre in reverse.
Front of curtain
the chaos of partially built sets
abandoned scenery
unfitted costumes
unapplied make-up
and rehearsal rooms
where mistake after mistake
is displayed
Backstage the complete play
slick and entertaining
a one man show
for a one man audience
a production deserving of success
But critics sit out front
amongst the debris
Jonathan Timbers
Oh, No, it’s Andy!
He did not hunker down
in the carriage
next to our table or bow
his head to show off
‘a machete scar’;
I did not comment
on his hair loss;
or was he going
to a BNP march in Leeds
with an amateur boxer
because he was
‘a lifelong socialist’.
Likewise, the other passengers
didn’t notice him
nor did they glare at us
when we disembarked
at our destination
(undisclosed),
not minding that we
hadn’t said,
‘Don’t take any risks, Andy!
Don’t give them
Any propaganda!’
TV Quick
Harbajhan traps Lara lbw for 11. Lara doesn’t agree and puts his head to one side and rolls his eyes. But walks. They’ll be sparks in the dressing room, it’s like Time is a tap that won’t stop leaking. Change channels. There’s whiskey
in the larder and chocolate soya milk in the fridge. Change channels. On the embankment, rosebay willowherb and bindweed, its white flower a satin euphonium, speckles of yellow-headed ragwort. Remember the marsh thistle, more blades than a Swiss ary knife, the way it rises above a barbed wire
fence and growls, ‘Go away’. Change channels. Feel the weight, there above your belly. Put it down. Pick it up. Change channels.
That one and that one and that
Until I hit white noise.
It goes on like it always does,
Around, underneath,
Just like the room
And silence.
Chanderapaul is stranded on 123 not out.
Brendan McMahon
EVERYTHING
No future and no past. Just this
Attenuated moment which will whimper
To a stop sometime soon. Till then
Let’s practise nothingness, and sink
Our minds in wells of silence, so deep
We cannot hear the angel voices
Proclaim the end of everything.
THE CHILD
You can’t do endings, but might eat us out of house
And home, or come to love the river or the sea,
Or other dilute deaths.
Black mouth and eyes of glass, sleep
Broken by the heart’s dark captains,
Warm and dirty, how she bends to you,
Reeking of hay and the sun. Even
A small soul shines like the moon,
Like the stars whose feet the ocean washes.
SYSTOLE
Membrane, the shadow of excluded rain,
old fight of borders to maintain themselves,
hands pressed to an encroaching dark.
Red rush feeds muscle, nerve, capacities
for action, hamlet-wise persist so long
as only this capillary tidal crash.
Listen, how it pulls and beats,
the song reverberates, the body’s caves.
The echoes, drumming shadow thoughts,
scurry to light and blink and best
inexorable rhythms out to worlds and stars.
Carole Thistlethwaite
willow warbler
hu-eet
hop hu-eet
leaves fluttering flit-shadow hu-eet
flutterigleaves hop flank leavesfluttering
flutteringleavesflutteringtwig flank shadow leavesfluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hop tail hu-eet leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves flit shadow leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves shadow flit fluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves head flit fluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hop tail leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hu-eet flit tail fluttering
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves willow leaves
flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves warbler leaves
flutteringleaves back flit flutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering hu-eet shadow branchfluttering
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering willow branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering warbler branchandfluteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranchfluttering flitting branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranch further branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranch back branchandflutteringleavesbranch
flutteringleaves hu-eet into branchandflutteringleaves
flutteringleavesbranch the branchandflutteringleavesbranch
flutteringleavesandbranchandflutteringleave
Robert Shooter
Lip l-l-l lip s-s-s service
l-l-l labial, l-l-l letting my l-l-l lips c-c-c close,
or p-p-p partially, to l-l-l let it out,
p-p-p pray, kick-start p-p-p projection,
or the w-w-w word cannot f-f-f form.
l-l-l letting through understanding
b-b-b bugger inar-r-r-t-t-t ticula sh-sh-sh tion
b-b-b bringing us b-b-b back to the w-w-w word.
f-f-f phonetics demands it
l-l-l lips p-p-p playing b-b-b ball.
b-b-b but the c-c-c conundrum t-t-t to t-t-t- truth
t-t-t telling of
l-l-l living
t-t-t truth the
w-w-w word
l-l-l lies
enou f-f-f gh
c-c-c - nowhere near lips -c-c-c- cannot
s-s-s sp-sp-sp spell
oo-oo-oo u-u-u you r-r-r require r-r-r rounded
l-l-l lips - they l-l-l lie in t-t-t truth - u-u-u oo-oo-oo you - d-d-d- do…
t-t-t too
f-f-f for the oo in t-t-t- trooth lies like
u-u-u you and I d-d-d do
w-w-w which is s-s-s so-so-so- s-s-s sound
w-w-w wh-wh-wh- y-y-y- why?
Kathleen Kenny
Day Trip
I’m going backwards
in an airline seat,
in a charabang,
The last strobes
of natural light
dashing through the sky.
The Editors ask the poet, Allen Fisher questions about his poems.
Brief Biography:
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, editor and art historian, lives in Hereford, Crewe and ‘in transit’, works at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire, where he is Head of Contemporary Arts. He has exhibited in many shows including London 2003, Hereford 1994 and York 1993. Examples are in the Tate, the Living Museum, Iceland and various private collections. His last four books were Place, Entanglement, Gravity and Singularity Stereo.
http://www.allenfisher.co.uk/afwebindextemp.htm
JANE: Hello Allen,
I hope you are well and thank you for agreeing to have us ask you questions. I am just about to read your book, ‘Gravity’. I want this to be a spontaneous process without any pre-planning so I will simply read the book and get back to you.
Jane.
Ok, a very quick reaction to first piece titled Banda. I do want to read on and I am enjoying the book but can’t resist interrupting.
Surprised at how much I enjoyed this. I imagined it far more clinical and using a language that may be more distant and heavy perhaps influenced by the title of the book, ‘Gravity’ but it is surprisingly light and sensual. There also seems to be some hope for humankind in amongst the urban ‘big brotherish’ post war city atmosphere.
She bathes in rainwater at last clean
For the first time in decades (p.13)
You give the reader hope of a beautiful world. You bring in smells such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, (my favourite spices by the way) and then you somersault into a grocers! This just made me laugh. The image of someone somersaulting into a grocers is, to put it mildly, utterly hilarious! Thank you for making my day!
And then we have wonderful use of sounds;
Launch from the ramp and the joy
Wet zings say it as wasps
And I enjoyed your use
of irony
Bird carpets copied get copied p.14
Can I ask you, are these poems a kind of thought process of something you have experienced as you walk through Brixton? Do you jot down as you experience, a little like a diary or do you reflect and write later after the experiences?
The experience of walking through Brixton is part of what Gravity
includes. I make brief notes, research, accumulate and then
assemble using a system of transformational procedures. Sometimes this
is a quick process; sometimes it takes a long time.
Do you place a lot of emphasis on the editing of your poems?
Sometimes poems are radically edited; sometimes I get it as I want it
immediately.
How would you describe your poetry?
The poetry in Gravity varies, but most of it works through
transformations of previous poems.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am building a set of 35 emblems each of which consists of a poem, an image, and a commentary (it’s a Renaissance and then Baroque idea). In 1980 or 81 Brian Ferneyhough, the composer, wrote a piece called Lemma –Icon, “Epigram, which uses a similar
tri-part set. The images are all done, the poems are underway. The commentaries have only just started.
I know that you are an artist as well. Could you tell me of anyone who has influenced you in particular and in what way they have done this?
I was initially very strongly influenced by John Cage and many of the conceptual artists in the 1970s. Having rejected art as object for a decade, in 1978, Jasper Johns London exhibition lifted my spirits and I started to make paintings. He was able to show me how painting was about thinking and feeling and transforming as extended processes.
How would you describe poetry that avoids creating a dialogue between the writer and the audience and vice versa, poetry that creates a dialogue between writer and audience?
My aesthetic stance demands that the work is in process as soon as a
reader or viewer engages with it, I wouldn’t call it a dialogue. The work is made by the viewer/reader in responses to the work initiated by the poet or artist.
Do you write about your own personal experiences?
I include record of my personal experiences in my work.
Who is your favourite poet and why?
I read about 100 American and British poets. The idea of favourites varies daily. I usually include Denise Riley, Tom Raworth, Joanna Drucker, Clark Coolidge, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Jennifer Moxley, Ed Dorn, Lissa Wolsak, Frank O’Hara, Andrea
Brady, J.H. Prynne, Gertrude Stein, Hugh McDiarmid and translations of Paul Celan in my list.
Dee Mcmahon
Questions for Allen Fisher, following my reading of
Transformed extracts from iDamage
using keywords ‘pattern’ and ‘damage’
1.
Here you explore your theory of damage in its relationship to visual perception and cognition, supported by examples from image in art, and poetry. Do you find other strong relationships between these two worlds, art and poetry? Do theory and concept in poetry inform art, and visa versa? Any other examples?
I do find a strong relationship between many of the arts. I practice
poetry and art, so I give these areas more emphasis. I find that theory and concept are to some extent embedded in the poetry and art, but I do go through a process that has a theoretical
and conceptual base. This base is partly derived from bases I have recognised elsewhere, in others work, and partly from my experience and practice. I recently listed a set of headings to
describe a practice as research process and showed how it helped with planning a calendar and it may apply here. The headings are: Enquire, Investigate, Accumulate, Analyse, Select, Transform. Like all analyses, this list unnecessarily damages it its small bits
from a larger whole, but it helps articulate the duration and space needed. How poetry or painting articulate 'Enquire' may of course seem to be widely different. If painting starts a one
moment in making sketches or collecting fragments of visual material, poetry could be, conceptually, doing the same. Anyway that may be now off the point you were encouraging. I know that I was very influenced by the conceptual art of the sixties and later,
along with the hole 'dematerialisation of the object' debate.
2. Do you wonder what other abilities and skills such as writing music could bring to the development of theory in poetry?
I have tried 'other abilities and skills'. I find that aspects of one approach to method can be applied to another and often this exchange of method within the parameters of appropriateness, can be efficacious. In 1975 I used Bach's The Art of the Fugue as a pattern-basis for a sequence of poems (The Art of Flight). I followed this in 'Birds Locked in the Roof' (in Unpolished Mirrors which used Beethoven's last Quartet, then in other poems used piano works by Schoenberg and by Stockhausen. In the early eighties I wrote Defamiliarising ____________* which used the note pattern in Brian Ferneyhough's Time & Motion Study I. More recently I
have been using his Lemma-Icon-Epigram in a similar way. These pattern sources have been the basis of musical compositions for Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Ferneyhough, and through my transformation of them have become patterns for my work.
They don't lead to poetry that is recognisable from these patterns, what they do is to break my pattern habits, my own speech patterns for instance, and encourage my invention. There's a sense in which poets using a riming pattern encouraged their own transformations from song and proportionate design. You could think of Spenser and Sidney and their use of spectacular arithmetic
and pattern in The Fairie Queene and Asphodel & Stella. Patterns can provide the bases for conceptual understandings of what to plan to for. The use of large and small patten can be as readily available from architecture or design. When Bartok composed some of his Sonatas he had natural elements in mind which in turn could beinterpreted or analysed through Golden Section ideas in
Euclid and then Fibonacci. Rather than taking the easy option of repeating a natural pattern, I prefer to transform into a new pattern. You could say that has a metonymic dimension, a kind of requirement not to repeat, that stands for the ethos of not repeating.
3. Transformed extracts, is very detailed. What allows you to have such focus? Is full immersion necessary?
I think your implication of immersion sounds about right. It's possible to recognise an overview or conceptual preparation, which may not be immersion, but when the engagement starts it becomes necessary and effective to stay there.
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Allen.
Yours.
Jane and Dee.
------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Trehy
Calculus
0. monotonic the fall. In the cot, of equilibria and reducing
complexities, the baby recognised my death as our eyes
another reason to avoid the butchery of children’s
moment Cut, a form of transitivity when the engine stops
and you can't go on, but you get out of the car and go on.
A prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage one
experiential state of the body to another implying
augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act
She reminded me of what we could have had - and it was
remarkably paradisiacal, only less so. The dynamics
hovering bird wings, the public are mad those that aren't
found in any species in city park ascriptions of method.
Two opposing points connected by positive and negative
charge tired but it was there, something about never
getting there – the slender margin language object – daily
routine of back and forth sine wave study to the quaint
notions of windswept steppe and desert’s unequal
presumption of innocence without fear of retributive
access will be the end of memory: 1
Epigones
0. Second-rate or loosely prehensile, our heroes forgotten,
the principle of least privilege delegated accrues for sun
kings, sons richly apprenticed His, corrupt variance
toward the meaning in its use; the universe of all small
types, which contains names for all the attributes
forgotten; facilitating removal of exotics as nonalgorithmic
monuments: telomeres thin between every regeneration.
Children haunt with the smell of butchery, cost and
elections deplete memory of us, heroes, our movements
recorded and forgotten, from one traffic light junction to
the next top of the range sports car accelerates
ostentatiously away to wait to surge by system of
apologia-inertia by proxy’s excluded other, middle and
below, effectiveness derogating to ‘the same point in space
repeated times’ as last season’s telomeres thinned toward
brown, became fashionably black, decisionally
incapacitated by golden lineage, modelled proudly by
Akhenaten’s daughters, with tanned, luxuriant, pierced
bellies, the statute delegation: we were all epigones will be
again, singular in the infernal drilling noise of extractor
fans. A changed voice would stand out saying: one day you
will be someone who lived long ago: 1
Jan Oskar Hansen
The Reason
The bells you hear, when busy voices briefly ceases,
are made of brass and polished, at dawn, by the spittle
of seven deeply religious monks in the far away Tibet;
where they use yak butter in their morning tea.
When first light strikes the bells there is and explosion
of the colours, blue and green, that lives inside the sun,
without these tones the seas would have been dull as
a rain puddle, outside Gare de Lyon, a fall afternoon.
Reviews
Purple Patch no. 117
An enjoyable edition of Purple Patch with many scene setting poems such as Leaving Vyrnwy by Jane Moreton, and Empty House by Michael Newman. Landscape imagery throughout but the imagery is more striking when used otherwise, for example, in the return to childish speech ‘melt like a lolly on a hot day’ in For Glynn by William Burroughs, and the description of an impoverished scene in Arts Centre by John Denham:
‘with the impossible heroism
of the one kilowatt convector heater
as it strives alone in a dusty corner.’
Some flashes of unexpected language, for example Kate Edward’s ‘snarling’ in Absence. Despite that many of the poems are predictable and conclusive, leaving little to the reader to work with. The Most Depressing Day of the Year by Frank Burton is an exception, as is Paul Walker’s A Kind of Freedom. Probably the editor’s intention, but there was little in the way of experimental poetry. Interesting concepts were explored in Paul Walker’s Long Year of Unreason, and Gordon Scapen’s A Certain Age.
The review section cuts to the quick and looks for the positives in each publication. It is informative rather than patronising or overly critical, and a reasonable basis for choice of reading, I felt. The gossip section is interesting and controversial.
50 Heads by Tony Trehy
From a striking cover to a hugely enjoyable set of poets prose. The cover shows the mid-section of a high rise glass and steel structure, appealing in its mathematical, ordered image of contained clarity, appropriate to the poetry within.
Trehy’s set of 49 poems are all in the same prose format, and take up space within the centre of the page with an overall square or rectangular shape. They begin with 0. and end with : 1. I was unsure of the reason for this during reading, but Trehy explains that he has invented this ‘Head’ form, and that it relates to Mathematics, where ‘the probability of something happening is defined as a number between zero and one – with zero meaning that the thing didn’t happen and one meaning that it did.’ The titles are arranged alphabetically.
There seems to be within the poems a mathematical as well as poetical approach to the possibilities of language, and recurrent themes are mathematical theorems, linguistic concepts & syntax, and a sort of reflection on human nature. Within quite dissociated texts, phrases appear in more than one poem, and the reader recognises as old friends. There is a sparseness of imagery with some exceptions, such as in the first half of Poem. The poems are predominantly temporal, although there exists in many of the poems a type of mathematical imagery which leads the reader into, out of, and around part concepts, as in Content. The concepts, thoughts and images are presented fleetingly as part phrases, phrases leading to further phrases or concepts presented within the same sentence. Perhaps this is the way the brain links things instead of the formalised order imposed by societal systems, including commonly used language phrasing and syntax.
Most of the poems are made up of phrases rather than sentences, with only an occasional complete sentences within the text, occurring at the end of the poem as a possible conclusive sentence. In general there is permission to interpret the phrases and group them as the reader wished.
Tony Trehy makes up relationships between words and phrases and presents these relationships as texts that can be read and re-read, interpreted at a moment in time a first instance, then again. These are poems to be taken in small doses like 80% cocoa solid chocolate – they are intense and immensely satisfying, if you like this sort of thing.
Dee McMahon
Review of ‘countersyncopationyeah’ by Mark Sonnenfeld
This is probably the fourth time I’ve read this piece of work, written by Mark Sonnenfeld in collaboration with artist Jose Roberto Sechi. A line on what I’ll call the title page tells me its ‘about electricity and THE DOORS’. I have a basic knowledge of each, but am happy to have my belief that poetry contains no truisms confirmed here. For me this piece is quite simply about art and text and the relationships between them.
This piece of work spans nine pages and appears as collaged columns from a Spanish newspaper, possibly from the ‘looking for’ or ‘for sale’ ads, overlaid with short sequences of letters in alphabetical order, and black dots of varying sizes in varying positions. There are text and symbols, or collaged text above and below the columns on each page, and these columns never exactly fit the page. The overriding result for me is stimulation on a poetic, conceptual and artistic level. The relationships between the various texts on the page and from page to page is well disassociated although I do form an impression of both snapshots from daily life, and occasionally, an approach towards a moral commentary. The fact that the font is different for each line of text on each page and page to page, makes for more and more dislocated reading. For this and other reasons the work is unusually compulsive and draws me back to read, re-read and observe it.
One of the most compulsive elements is created by the presence of black dots on the newspaper columns, always two per page. I wonder about the balance of the dots themselves, if one is large on the page, must the other be small; do they equal the same square area in each case; are they sequential; what text are they hiding; is the point the interruption of the column text or the size and position of the dots; their relationship to the text outside the columns. They engender a gracefulness, and artistry in the piece that is outside of the texts but at the same time part of the whole. In a strange way I feel related to the artistic nature of the work through these black dots, and in their simplicity and movement through the text, they make me happy!
The relationship between text and art works as counterpoint, the text dissociating, the artwork uniting. Constants are the newspaper columns, the presence of black dots, the presence of text. Variables are the black dot size and position, the content of the text, its font. It becomes apparent why countersyncopationyeah was chosen as title to the work.
That this is a work is both poetic and artistic in nature does not mean it will necessarily command repeated reading and observation. That it is stimulating and interesting on many levels means countersyncopationyeah will interest poets and artists alike.
Dee McMahon
Review of ‘A Fiery Sunset’ by Omar Musa Ballouta
A Fiery Sunset by Omar Musa Ballouta
ISBN:0-7951-8671-1
Watermark Press
3600 Crondall Lane
Suite 100
Owings Mills, MD 21117
‘A Fiery Sunset’ is a book of love poems, beautifully written from the heart. Read it all in one go and you know where Omar is coming from. For most of us at some point in our lives, we have been there. It reminded me of those relationships you have, no matter how short or long, you never forget the fleeting magic of it all, even though quite often there is pain and loss involved. We don’t know why it may sometimes end but that is the mysterious side of life. At least we can capture these memories as Omar has in this interesting and sensual book of poems. I enjoyed this collection.
Jane Marsh.
The Life of Fergus in the Hall Cupboard
During the Very Wet Summer of 2007
The highest shelves
are full of dad objects such as
a birth certificate in Spanish a flag
of Chile a strip of photographs
of a young boy in a sailor suit
smiling up at his father
on a street in Valparaiso each one
a small epic a heartbeat more
than the one
before letter
about an earthquake in 1906
a snowscape in the Andes
a Panama Canal souvenir brochure
stories still lifes poems
cigarette cards film star cards
Brigitte Helm Loretta Young
bats of the British Isles cards
famous Scottish people cards
David Livingstone Thomas Carlyle
carefully pasted cowboy scrapbooks
carefully written bicycle diaries
diaries from the war he shouldn’t have
kept in case he was captured killed
without having seen mum
without having made love
without having ridden the pulse
of longing completion creation a ship
in a bottle
Made by a German soldier
in exchange for cigarettes and chocolate
I can still smell the cork pieces clipped
from victory sheets I can still smell
the V flowers pressed
in a heavy book I can still smell
the perfume letters
about love
threads a framed picture of a sailing ship
slicing the waves of an imaginary sea
braces glasses a shaving razor
the blood plugged with tiny papers
cufflinks armbands lists of things
lists of worlds lists of music he loved
lists of music he needed to love list of things
to lift him a heartbeat more a letter
he wrote the week before
a death certificate in English a photograph
of a young boy smiling up at his father
turning into his father
on a hill of ferns in Argyllshire
who has to make the list of everything
on the highest shelves because
I can no longer be sure of
what he laughed like what he
sang like what I look like beneath the dust
Puppy Love
A weekend redneck
with his boot on a chain
transforms
his Alabama drawl
to a Greenock snarl
mutters
fuck off
after singing
every second line
of fuck off Freebird
by Lynyrd fuck off Skynyrd
to his chocolate-
coloured fuck off pup
as it plays growls
shakes
his tatty-coloured
guitar-shapped bag
scatters
his earnings
all over the slabs
looks up at his fuck
off face for approval
Graham Fulton
Listings
Purple Patch
Editor: Geoff Stevens,
25, Griffiths Road,
West Bromwich
B71 2EH
England
www.geoffstevens.co.uk
West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN
www.westhousebooks.co.uk
www.poemsinthedark.com
www.thewordtravels.com
www.mslexia.co.uk
http://ac-cygnusx.blogspot.com
www.Stridemagazine.co.uk
www.cinnamonpress.com
www.publishandbedamned.org
www.writeoutloud.net
http://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/html/contrib.htm
The Measure: an email magazine of poetry and prose
http://hometown.aol.co.uk/jumpcatrod/myhomepage/writing.html
http://www.poetsletter.com
Trespass
trespassmagazine@yahoo.co.uk
The Journal & original plus
Sam Smith
17 High Street
Maryport,
Cumbria CA15 6BQ
UK
http://members.aol.com/smithsssj/index.html
See also The Select Six - www.bewrite.net/select_six.htm
The Book Of Hopes And Dreams: a charity, poetry anthology, published to raise money for the Medical Aid, Afghanistan appeal of the Glasgow-based charity Spirit Aid.
www.rimbaud.org.uk/bookofhope.html
The anthology features the work of many well-respected poets, including Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Heath-Stubbs, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Tony Harrison, Alasdair Gray, Edwin Morgan, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson, Jon Stallworthy, Alan Brownjohn, Ruth Fainlight, David Constantine, Moniza Alvi, Cyril Dabydeen, Elaine Feinstein, Vicki Feaver, Michael Horovitz, Tom Leonard, Robert Mezey, Lawrence Sail, Jay Ramsay, Charles Ades Fishman, Geoffrey Godbert and Ian Duhig, amongst others.
http://www.ginoskoliteraryjournal.com/
www.stimulusrespond.com.
POETRY KIT (www.poetrykit.org)
http://www.thunderburst.co.uk
davidcaddy.blogspot.com
http://www.onthepremises.com/
http://www.incwriters.co.uk/
Points of Reference: cd by Edge Hill University Poets Alice Lenkiewicz, Andrew Taylor, Cliff Yates, Angela Keaton, Matt Fallaize, Dee McMahon and Robert Sheppard. £4.50 p&p from Alice or Dee
Stories of the Line: cd by Dee McMahon. £4.00 p&p 14 Tower Hill, Ormskirk, L39 2EF
Message from Editor, Matt Fallaize.
Neon Highway – Here to help
With the vast array of poetry magazines in the marketplace, it’s not always easy to send your work off confident that it’ll receive a sympathetic reading. Each editor has their likes, their dislikes, their pet hates, their secret loves. Every poem deserves to be given the best chance possible. Likewise every editor needs to spend less time sorting through submissions pile weeding out work which simply isn’t what the magazine wants.
So to make your life, and our lives, easier, let us clarify:
Here at Neon Highway we want work that is, for want of a better word, experimental. We want innovative poetry, we want interesting, engaging, poetry. We want poetry that is trying something else. We don’t care if you’re published a thousand times over, or if you’re submitting for the very fist time. We’re committed to breaking new work.
Experimentation can be linguistic, it can be thematic, it can be procedural, structural, topical. Experimental does not necessarily mean obscure, high-brow or any of the other narrow descriptions writers use unnecessarily to define themselves. It is a freshness, a state of mind, a willingness to take a risk on behalf of your writing.
What is doesn’t mean is formulaic, polemical, hectoring, old hat. A political poem is fine, a rant is not. A love poem is fine, yet another poem about how sad you are because your partner left you is not. Descriptive work is fine, work that groans under the weight of its own adjectives is not (remember what Bunting said about them bleeding nouns). Simple poems are fine, obvious ones are not. Poems about cats will be going straight in the bin.
If you think we’re the ones for you, we’d love to hear from you. If you don’t, then relax, there’s someone out there for your work. It just isn’t us, and you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time.
Subscription
Neon Highway, the magazine for experimental and innovative poetry.
Submissions of innovative poetry to be sent to editors:
Alice Lenkiewicz: 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD
Dee McMahon: 14, Tower Hill, Ormskirk, L39 2EG
Matt Fallaize: 67, Lea Crescent, Ormskirk, L39 1PG
Neon Highway is available bi-annually, with 2 issues costing £5.50, or a single
Issue available at £3.00. Order your next issue by sending a cheque to Alice Lenkiewicz 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD.
