Tag: poetry
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The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static
I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…
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On Time and Mess
Once we understand excess, then we can get really simple. – Robert Rauschenberg Exploring poetry’s absent indispensable character Because poetry is not a thing that lives, to put it mildly, upon the regulation and control of grammar and correct spelling, in the final preparations for the publication of my book, ‘I fear…
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Concrete Music – Artificial Plant – October
Concrete Music over six foot lying on its back damp-worn sides as souvenirs of basement tenure unmoved to the top floor a sun-bleached face now that the upstairs neighbours are rubble ears within shouting distance. With shells, the BLOCK was returned to itself though imprecisely scythed; concrete lines don’t demarcate but are breached…
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Wolf yollez
‘We’re not far from wolves.’ – Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’ Human-canine relationships are some of the most conceptually disordered and uncertain of interspecies relationships, precisely because the history of domestication is so long and so complex. The type of canine perspective offered by contemporary writers such as Donna Haraway…
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Cae’r Blaidd, or Field of the Wolf
The last wolf died in this place but the hour of the wolf remains and the wolves call for us, call for you calling haunting us with their calling calling for us over and over again It is the time when we cross over as some people say of the passing away in the…
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Charmed
She calls him from a thousand miles distance – sends forth an invisible cord from her edge of cliff to his edge of existence. She calls him in autumn storms, in summer stillness, grooves a new migration route, moons him towards her for tide after tide. Some claim, with disdain, that she practised with…
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Wolf
Snow covered the town, and murmurs. Unease, downcast eyes, a rumour you were back in the holding where the song thrush is mute, where a path spills like yarn to the clearing. The fetid black leaf and the bracken. The crackle underfoot. The weird cabin. It gaped from the white like a lunatic’s face….
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Hamrammr
Úlfhéðnar in my wolf-skin, I am smuggled beneath this fearsome hide. Sneaksome, bristlepad varúlfur, I must stay concealed, keep my woman-ness below the scenting of the men. They would smell my sex and think me weak, think me there for the mating, the taking, the ruling, the putting me in my place. Bottom of…
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Phenomenology of the Feral
After the Meat Tree I Man’s best friend, woman’s best friend are has a jay, and mere has an add. I flower mere and he follows me that was made of wood and flowers and see, it is pronounced mer as the french for sea not mere lie down you are drunk. Remember…
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The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner
– adapted from SJ Fowler If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be? Black banana, fruit flies, les ananas ne parlent pas, (a little song of two children learning french on Canadian TV). In middle school, the chair in the crypt. The stack of cryptic poems high enough to use as a…
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Gilfaethwy
The pirate is part magician and part thief. With all the gauze and white tape, I know the left side of his face better than the right side. Pirates, like werewolves, live tied to the moon. The dark break in the white plaster is the negative of the full moon rising. here Gilfaethwy gills…