Heaven!

Where Did It Go?

Car Booting

My second car boot of the season at Banham Zoo this morning. Highlight was selling several items I found in a skip after a good brush up! Talked to a gent about postcard collecting and car booting. Apparently the car boot at Portman Road Ipswich last Sunday was the biggest he'd ever seen - and it's only February! Recession times indeed...

While so many of us are scraping around to make ends meet, we hear that Sir Fred Goodwin has retired at fifty on a pension of £650,000 a year having left his bank in debt (billions in debt) which WE have to pick up the bill for. So here's a man who has spent a short working life exploiting others - being paid obscenely for his exploitation - while the many of us have always tried to do our best for and by our fellow man/woman - and we get next to nothing!

Society won't be able to take this division and after my January 2008 Recession prediction, it doesn't take many brain cells to foretell of tremors then earthquakes to come...

FOUR FUNERALS AND A WEDDING

New book out from Norwich emigre Ben Moss, Four Funerals and a Wedding. Lovely cover illustration by Martin Laurance (website listed on right sidebar).

Animals!

It's carbooting time again and all manner of animals gather. Some in feathers, some in fur and some in knitted suits...

Mother's Knitting

Handsome, what?

Exploding Tail

I hazard a guess that the guy fell off his ladder as he clipped his way from head to tail!

First day of Spring?

The sun was out and the snowdrops are blooming. Could this be the first day of Spring?

We journeyed to Beccles today and took in The Gallery Upstairs, charity shops and the quay side to feed the ducks.

Pics by Shirley Tolliday

A packed lunch

Just the spot for our packed lunch.

Friends

It's good to meet up with old friends and acquiantances...

Caister St Edmunds Castle

The remains of this Roman fortification provides for a very pleasant walk.

Name in Moss

Not just written in stone but moss too. Here's a stone in St Edmund's churchyard, Caister near Norwich.

Spring Cleaning

I'm busy Spring cleaning and thought I'd post these here before they're binned...

More Spring Cleaning

Then and Now

Here is a cartoon from The Daily Express 1920. Unfortunately, we can still relate to these sentiments today.

Wensum Park, Norwich

Over the coming months Shirley Tolliday and I will be photographing the parks of Norwich, together with all the accessible open areas of the city. Here is an Image from Wensum Park.

ANOUNCEMENT

From April I'll be producing/publishing a separate e-zine magazine of poetry, art and related texts centred on the work of other writers and artists. It will be produced bi-monthly. Details to follow soon...

ANONYMOUS INTRUDER by Ian Seed

There are reasons why I pick up a new book in a different way these days. While sodden on the ducking stool of the internet age, I have in recent years worked with book artist Jayne Knowles and via the InPrint artists/poets group grappled with the Poetry Vending Machine. Jayne created 3D books with and without texts, and they were first to be picked up for the eyes to walk around. In other words, the book has become more three dimensional and concrete for me, rather than just a scrolling text.

Not wishing to be the obvious anonymous intruder in Ian Seed’s eighty page volume of poetry, The Anonymous Intruder, I first encountered it from without as if distancing myself from the text and its unfolding.

The cover is stunning: a painting or print by John Woodcock and the back cover blurb is just enough to compel engagement. Sheila E. Murphy writes: “Ian Seed pushes breath beyond forethought toward the state of being empty in and of space...” Intriguing. Thus I ran my fingers through the pages, from last page to first (an act I later found illuminating).

Ian Seed’s book is in three sections - ‘Rearrangements,’ ‘Voices’ and ‘Shadows’ - and the poems are often in sequences, from tightly crafted verses to short prose poems, in that order. I should have just entered the text as any relaxed reader and fallen into its flow but as I flicked from front to back certain words jumped into my eyes: station, village, city, window, curtains...

In the opening ’The Familiar Dead’ (a sequence) we find the writer/the voice “looking for a thing to love.” Already the reader is unnerved for the quest or journey seems to be taking us through places and people into other familiar spaces:

there’s a journey through thick
grey air, a face without
a name at the end of it
But this is not just a faded memory, one’s inner past or dreams.
On the crowded tram, the accidental
touch of a hand is enough
to pinpoint your loneliness

It is the concrete world, or as tangible as it can be when it is occupied forever by spaces of memory and dream. What was the real circumstance and conclusion of the past anyway?

“Did you know/I would grow tired of waiting before you/grew tired of watching?”

Or

“...in real life/a proposition is not what you want, only a picture/laid against reality...”

In a crucial sense we live in the past. Without it we cannot recognise the present. Yet there is an aching gap between the two in the “picture.” Without erasing these snapshots or editing them into a sentimental reflection, Ian Seed’s ‘Anonymous Intruder’ performs a delicate balancing act in transfusing the journeys of ‘then’ and ‘now’ into one. It is both delicate and dangerous. ‘Our own’ pasts are also our beliefs too and could become, in their exploration, just an apparition, the “outsides” of human form. And if we do explore this past might we find “...the touch of a lover who cannot look at your face.”

Not only is Ian Seed’s poetry a visceral relish and an emotional push-n-pull, it is clever too. The poet’s starting point seems to be Pierre Reverdy’s poem ‘Intruder.’

To cut a short poem short, Reverdy’s poem concerns an almost naked man entering a flimsy, gloomy room, bringing forth a disorderly carnival of excitements, in sound and sight. However, outside is the previous dark space of unease pressing in on the room; a black event pressing in from another era.

Reverdy worked closely with the Cubist Juan Grist. The internal/external sides or oppositions of Cubism are central to Reverdy’s work. As Kenneth Rexroth wrote of Cubist poetry “it is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada."

“Dissociation and recombination of elements” and “rigorous architecture” well describes Ian Seed’s own approach to structure, rhythm, syntax and voice; and his overall scaffolding, an exquisite balancing act between experience and memory toward a being of emptiness.

Though the formal elements of structure don’t intrude on the book (which is a glorious whole), they inform the reader for ‘The Anonymous Intruder’ almost seems to be written backwards:-

Section 3: Shadows. Short prose poems (including two Reverdy ‘cut ups’) which allude to the tensions of narrative climax having long been passed.
Surely, in a linear narrative we might have expected to begin here?

Section 2: Voices. These are similar fluid prose poems, so what is different here? Surely we hear Voices out of Shadows, not Shadows out of Voices?

Section 1: Rearrangements. Here are tight poems, with more edge than the voice that follows. Surely we cannot begin with Rearrangements without having built a narrative to rearrange?

However, as Rupert M. Loydell points out, “there are no postmodernisms” in ‘The Anonymous Intruder.’ While there is no central narrative to shatter to remake, there are strand upon strand of sub-plots, each pressed and wound against the other, each a window on the world rather than a reflection of the rope-walker’s own importance and acrobatics.

Shadows

Brushing the dust from your clothes, you make your way into
the town, as if it had been waiting for you all your life, but the
town knows nothing of your existence, even after you have
spent years wandering its streets. Footsteps clump past
your tiny room each night. The same door slams shut at the end of
the corridor. Someone calls your name. The voice is always
behind you, no matter how many times you turn around.

‘The Anonymous Intruder’ is a marvellous masterly book of poems.

The Anonymous Intruder £8.95p can be ordered online from Shearsman Books

Mark Wallinger's White Horse

Wallinger's 'White Horse' of Kent will certainly be the worst piece of public art in the UK. This 150 foot high thoroughbred is a nationalistic sculpture, a monument to a generation of illusions and illusionists which has brought us the biggest Slump since 1929. The artist's horse has no resonance with the historic chalk horse but is a tee-hee-hee jolly for tourists. It is diametrically the opposite of The Angel of the North: an aesthetic forged out of stud fees.

Walinger is the last of the YBA's - the young Brit Artists rat pack. With a friend in the Daily Mail's Mark Hudson who needs art anyway?

"Yet at the same time "Horse" is a manifestation of the nonchalant cool of the YBA generation – the group of artists including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin – of which Wallinger is very much part. And the fact that the British people have taken this work to their hearts to the extent that it already feels an inalienable part of the landscape is a testament to the ever-increasing acceptance of contemporary art in this country."

COMING UP...

In the next week: review of poet Ian Seed's 'Anonymous Intruder'

Before the end of February: article on visual art in East Anglia

In March: a wholly separate E-zine of poetry, largely dedicated to others' work

TROIKA ARTS

Here is the Old Bally Factory, Norwich. My studio is accessed from the otherside but I walked in this morning. It's getting busier and have produced lots of 6" x 4" paintings and prints for submission to an exhibition in May run by Troika Arts. There have been submissions from Europe and all over, so quite a job of selection. However, catch a few of my submissions on the Troika Arts Archive. Mine are landscapes and cityscapes. Also, there is a link opposite.

Golfing Grammar

Waiting to drop

Here are rain drops waiting to drop but ice is keeping them waiting. Frustratingly, it's not Spring yet.

Shadows over the snow

Here is a shadow on the snow created by a street lamp as I walked across the city at 6am this morning.

FAITH By Martin Stannard

“I believe in you because I can’t stop.”

Martin Stannard’s Faith, published by Shadow Train Books, is a ‘must have’ volume of poetry.


The power of its title is of course the weakness of the word, faith.
“...like Homer Simpson said, I wish God was still alive
to see this: a not madly handsome man, great clouds, moonlight--"


If humanity gave up faith great cathedrals would lie empty at the centre of our cities and fill with the homeless, and shrines would overgrow with nettles and thorns; yet, if a lone man loses faith there’s no one else to hear his fall from the cliff. Of course, this book's faith is not in or about God per se but the faith in all things poet Martin Stannard embraces - as any man would.


At centre here is the individual pitched into an upside-down world, alone, alienated and almost segregated from the familiar objects, furnishings, places and people most near to him. Yet this is no therapeutic meandering for that would suggest the poet is searching for his real self - or his other self - when the act of writing for this poet is the delicious means to know oneself. Faith steps outside the personal and confessional quest to find 'faith' (activity) in the delight of language, of the mind's voice.


Indeed, the muse and the literary tradition require a kind of faith as the catalyst for writing and the historic lineage for both ones reading and writing. What if you lose faith in this? What if you find yourself outside the literary castle, cut off from access to it? Or what if one day the castle appears more mortar than stone?


On an immediate level Faith takes apart the accepted notions of a book of poetry. The appendices are more fictional than the poetry they append. Appendix 1 Autobiography begins “Anne Shelton was my mum from 1952 to 1957,” while Appendix 2 is a list of the poet’s favourite pop bands (’The Blunt Pinks’ being my favourite, for personal reasons).


The opening poem Welcome begins


Hello, day
Hello, sound of traffic
Hello, my darling
Hello, light from the sky
Hello, radio
Hello, bathroom
Hello, my insides
Hello, tap and towel...


Full of child-like optimism this opening poem is followed on the facing page by a minute play script set in the foyer of a book of poems. Thus Martin Stannard has effectively enveloped his book of poems in compositions and structures from other genres. The playful parameters of his book have been set: this isn’t a dry religious faith we’re going to explore; and this isn't another volume of worthy but dry poetry. This poet can make you laugh as the lump in your throat grows difficult to swallow. Why shouldn't poetry be a play or even play dough?


In ‘My Feet. They Deserve Iambic Slippers’ the poet takes a swipe at meter; or rather he takes a humorous dig at poets and scholars and scholar poets who still believe set traditional forms can only house poetry. He attempts to scan a line of his poetry (his foot). A collision of iambs and trochees takes place (and feet don't know themselves at all).


I’ve never understood prosody (the study of poetic forms). Actually, I’m absolutely fascinated by the historic study of poetic forms but I sometimes wonder if we’ve entered the 20th Century let alone the 21st .


For Shakespeare iambic pentameters were not just written for the court, their construction was an engaging reflection of therefined language of our rulers. By and large poetry was written for the court for centuries. The first public library didn’t open until the 1840s in Britain and books weren’t available to all until the last century, thereby there existed huge divisions in language (spoken, written and read). Indeed, Shakespeare acknowledged such a division in classes in his use of language.


Even today, dialect and the colloquial use of language makes meter (poetry as a musical score) ridiculous. Around here “chew-ing” (two syllables) is “chewn” (one syllable). And what of commas, full stops and all manner of devices to pause or hurry words on the page?


Irreverently but in playful fun Martin, hand on brow, enters the world of the real poet:


I’m asleep. All of me’s snoozing. My feet
might be touching the foot of the bed
but I’m not sure. It might be
a brick. No. It’s not a brick: it’s one
of those things you stack on top of
one another to make a house. Oh yeah,
it’s a brick.
or perhaps it’s the front end of a horse.
it’s my sleep and it could be
a lugubrious tree. Or sixpence the subject
of an argument in a shop. I ate some cheese
before I came to bed perchance to dream:
& what’s happened to my feet?


Martin uses a range of devices which take us from and to the core of his conversational style: grammatical twists, unexpected line breaks, lists, and literary asides and conceits among them.


’A Relation Of Years’ is among my favourites (I’ve read and written enthusiastically about the Coral sequence and the fantastic POEM (I’m home this evening) elsewhere). ‘A Relation Of Years’ is written in the poet's more conversational, relaxed style and though edged with his ever enduring humour it is lonely, dark, clinging to faith:



Blood spilled on the broken tapestry
hills foreign in my mouth as if
uneven speech. I stood there and spat
into the wind and it came back at me
it came back at me and was my failure
with family. All those things I never said and
reached the death bed and thought about all that
had never been said. My mother and my father
and how much I love them and how often
all that had been in my mind had never been
said. But the darkness of dawn never lifted
and the dusk of early evening was the same as
the dawn. Cold and grey
awfully English..."



Real faith means all is possible when following faith curtails the possible; and, in a metaphysical sort of way, if you've the former faith your very words take you where they will: "I'd only been about 68 miles/and there was a whole world to go." It is of no surprise that Martin was destined to return to China, the geographical journey of his metaphysical muse.



This marvellous book is but the transition between England and China, though it owes its influence - its fluent and fluid style - to the New York Poets, Kenneth Koch and Martin's own US contemporaries. Martin is one of the very few contemporary English poets whose work is both challenging and accessible while increasingly universal in outlook.



***

This book is thoroughly recommended.

FAITH by Martin Stannard (80 pages), from Shadow Train Books, 34 Pinewood Avenue, Carnforth, LANCASTER, LA5 8AR, UK, price £8.95 post free (or visit www.shadowtrain.com )

The Empty Park

Textures in the Snow

Anglia Square, Norwich

I suppose the 'up' side of the Recession is that redevelopment of Anglia Square, Norwich, has been delayed by two years...

'The End Of History' Is Over

1992 to 2008: The End of an Era

Back in 1992 Francis Fukuyama announced 'The End Of History.' The Cold War was well and truly over, the Berlin Wall was down, the Eastern Bloc was no more and Yeltsin was stood on a tank defending the elected White House against a military coup. Soviet power and empire was no more and Fukuyama wrote influential books and articles proclaiming that US Liberal Democracy is the zenith of Sociocultural Evolution.

*

Yet this leading Post Modernist was actually following "Post" theory models first created by intellectual Western Communists in the 1980's. Splits in the British Communist Party led to the formation of the most influential Martin Jacques faction. I attended the launch of the New Manifesto here in Norwich circa 1988. It was a meeting of the defeated who had but words to fall back on. They believed, like zealots, that Stalinism's USSR had in someway been Socialist or that workers there had platforms in the constitution that they could use to reform the Soviet System.

*

In the 1980s all this was beginning to be swept away by the USSR's need for glasnost and perestroika - restructuring society along more overtly Western Capitalist Lines.

*

Some on the Left had for many years accepted that the USSR was State Capitalist, acting like a giant company in the global sea, and that Gorbachev's reforms were required to break up this exhausted machine. There was no revolution as the USSR dissolved into Western Capitalism. Indeed, only the military, secret police and a few oligarchs on high opposed the reforms. Eastern Bloc workers embraced the prospects of liberal democracy, so the Western Communist project had to reform itself too.

*

'Post' theories were suddenly everywhere. We had Post Fordism, Post Industrialism and, of course, Post Modernism. Internationalism was replaced with Globalisation, and Theory was the ideological champion over Practice. For me, involved in the anti-poll tax campaign at the time, my own side (The Labour Party and union leaders) had suddenly switched sides. Gone was 'us' and 'them;' and gone was any sense that history and practice makes and informs theory.

*

Francis Fukuyama gave the green light to the Left, including the Labour Party, to step up its move to the Right. Unfortunately, history doesn't wait on wise men's words: this Slump has only one parallel - the 1929 Slump followed by The Depression. These two historic events are very similar, where both began around 'bubble' stock market trading. Now factories, offices and shops are closing world wide, dole queues are lengthening and wages are being forced down. And we're paying for this again?

***

In art the whole Post Modernist ideology has led, in my view, into some cul de sacs of Conceptual Art. The lack of a Modernist sense of irony means we suffer "in house" meanings, references, communications - a sort of cerebral sudoku at best. At worst, there is just an embarrassing space between art and audience, posing as something far more important.

***

The photo above is of the East 4, Project Space, Norwich Art School. A photo of the exhibition from the street.

Back To The Streets?

KM Dersley on Radio 209 Cambridge today

KMD will appear on 209 radio tomight.

It's PatrickWiddess's show 'Headstand' which goes out on air and on the internet from 9.00-11.00pm. Live from the studio in Cambridge.

The Derz will be chatting with Patrick and reading somepoems, also singing some songs.If you can't catch it then you can stream the mp3 from the 209 website afterwards. The link:http://www.209radio.co.uk/shows/profile.php?show=headstand

More Norfolk Blogs

Here is one of my favourites, Norfolk Single Dad. Not only humorous but is full of those asides from life's daily struggle. Best of all, it's not one of those internal internet/what I said on my facebook page blog....

Luckily Single Dad is mates with Barry. You know Barry. Barry Teeth - The Beet Poet

Yes, it's looking good in Norfolk, although one very popular blog I'm not so keen on is The Norfolk Blogger but I'm not a Liberal Democrat, have no city season ticket and I don't think an English parliament would be much cop (it would be full of Tories and Liberals!)

Tom and Muriel Mallin Exhibition

There will be an exhibition of Tom and Muriel's paintings, drawings and prints at the Halesworth Gallery, Steeple End, Halesworth, Suffolk from September 5 to 16. Will include a poetry and music evening with myself and Gerald Nason.

Lying in the snow, Old Catton Park

Like everyone else... Here are some photos of yesterday's snow in Norwich.

Exposed, Old Catton Park

Morning flurry

Another from Old Catton Park

Picture by Shirley Tolliday

Norwich Blogs and Bloggers

I've lived in Norwich nearly a year and thought I ought to begin searching the city and beyond for bloggers of note. However, for 'blogs' and 'bloggers' the ground is shifting fast: all too many Norwich blogs are but spokes from commercial websites. This isn't just bad news for myself and all those independent bloggers out there but also for Blogger, Wordpress, Journal, etc.

Think about it: the success of blogging finds large website companies running appendages as if home grown blogs - displacing blogging. What do they fear? Independence! Thus, the few blogs I've found display that sense of independence. More than this, they are produced regularly.

Remember train spotting (the pursuit rather than the film)? The East Anglia Bus Blog is bus spotting in the area. Nuts you think? Train and bus spotters not merely record sightings but provide an amazing resource for defending and promoting public transport.

Landlord Law Blog is pretty unique in my view. Here is a solicitor offering free information/advice on landlord/tenant law. The latest entry on a new problem regarding tenants' deposits is spot on and spot up to date. However, if this were just a legal blog it might become a little dry. This blog is written in a warm and personal style.

"What about art?" I hear you whisper.

Why don't you write about me? is the excellent blog of an aspiring local playwright. Her enthusiasms in her pursuit shines through. Some insights too.

Like elsewhere there are poetry/prose blogs posing as E-zines (online magazines) but they are too enclosed rather than expansive. Likewise there are blogs on Sci Fi writing and even some written by journalists. The problem for me is that I believe that the Internet has perversely tended to place a conservative girdle around literature rather than be a liberator.

Perhaps I'm in need of A blogging counsellor?

Razor Blade of Life is a zany blog, the style of which I really like.

As some of you may know I'm a dog lover. A Staff or two tearing up my carpet tiles and licking my knee-caps off would be a delight. So this one is for me - Blog your dog

More from Norwich soon.