November 1 LOST VAMPIRE MOVIES A poem by Michael Blackburn LOST VAMPIRE MOVIES 1 I carried it 2 looking for stories 3 he slept and meditated 4 as soon as she was introduced 5 lying on the sofa 6 I cannot stay 7 we know that we are going 8 what is 9 an hour later 10 I lose it all the time © Michael Blackburn, 2007
November 4 IRON AND FIRE AND WINE
How good this band are is very very good indeed. The last time I saw them, back in May 2005, was at a much smaller and more intimate venue in Birmingham. Here, in the vast space of the Arena, I have no idea what this gig felt like if you were sitting somewhere up in the gods, but crammed in down near the stage in the standing area the Fire still somehow managed to make it seem intimate and what gigs with bands like this should be like: exciting, sweaty, and worth being there. There were 10 musicians in the band this time around, swapping instruments, moving around, oozing energy. They'd appeared onstage in a variety of Halloween masks (it was Halloween) and ripped into a pounding version of "Black Mirror".... and, flying shoes and bottles aside, it was a wonderful show. Saving the best for last, they encored with a majestic "Intervention" and finished off everything with the wonderful "Wake Up", during which Butler left the stage and finished the song in the middle of the standing area (followed by a stagehand manfully trying to keep up with him while handling the mike lead); Butler was mobbed by ecstatic fans, of course. It was mayhem but magical. And also pretty magical, though in a far less frenzied and anthemic way, was the Iron & Wine show at the Rescue Rooms last night. Iron & Wine is singer/songwriter Sam Beam, and his One of the reasons I really like Iron & Wine, though, is that Beam writes really good words. The new record is shot through with a palpable sense of unease, a backdrop of a country at questionable war, but it's achieved subtly and with intelligence. It's a record you really should listen to if your head is anywhere near to enjoying American alt-folk rocky kind of stuff. Where The Arcade Fire were ten, Iron & Wine last night were eight, a measure of how much bigger Beam's music has become. We had pedal steel guitar, keyboards, fiddle, guitars, a couple of percussionists.... and boy, they could rock along when they wanted to. And they could be quiet, too. They played all (I think, I wasn't keep a proper check) of the latest record, and a few from the back catalogue. Sam Beam is a lot of hair, but he's got a really fine voice, too. Soft but strong, with range. The show was a sellout, and for a change at the Rescue Rooms we weren't plagued by loads of people standing round chatting to their mates; everyone was in thrall to a class act, everyone around me seemed to know all the words to the songs, and there was a really nice atmosphere. At last, a couple of not just decent gigs: a couple of great gigs. Now all I want is for my bad back to stop killing me.
November 7 THE FEATHERED FURNACE
The Fiery Furnaces have always been pretty good live. The last time I saw them three years ago they were good, even though that particular day was one of the worst days of my recent life (for reasons that I am, of course, not going into here.) Mr Belbin and I have been fans of the FFs since way back when “Gallowsbird's Bark” came out. One feature of their live show has always been how they’d take songs you knew and throw them all into a big bag together and shake them up and then tip them out into a medley of fragments and play it all in a way you’d never heard before and it was exciting and energetic and challenging and the FFs never sound like anybody else. They still don’t sound like anybody else, but last night what we’d suspected might happen happened. The FF's recent records have been difficult to listen to. To put it another way, the FF's recent records have been pretty much unlistenable. They do a lot of storytelling in their songs, which is good, but they do a lot of stop/start, fast/slow changes that can get tiring, frankly, but most significantly they’ve somewhere lost or abandoned the idea of melody. What we got at this gig was individual songs, mostly tuneless, if there were stories in the songs it was beside the point because the words were inaudible, and though there were quite often some decent rhythms thumping around you could also rely on it all suddenly stopping for a change of pace, which always means everyone stopping while Matthew plays some tinkly bits on the keyboard for a few seconds. I like a decent tune, and the only time we got a hint of that was when they did a brief medley of old songs, including a barely recognisable but still great “Tropical Iceland”. Oh, I say the only time, but there was one song late on that started with a quite lovely tune, but they abandoned the tune after about 30 seconds and replaced it with some more of the same thumpy ramblings. To be honest, the best thing about the evening was Eleanor’s hair. She’s got a new style. Don't look at the picture; it's better than that now, or perhaps it's exactly like that but she'd just had it refreshed. Anyway, it's a very fashionable fringe and the sides are feathered (a technical term I’ve learned from knowing more than a few girls). And it was very shiny and obviously in very good condition. I spent all evening looking at it and waiting for a decent tune.
November 12 CHAPBOOKS IN POLYTHENE ENVELOPES Voluntary Quicksand by Byron Coley, David Keenan & Bill Shute all from Kendra Steiner Editions (details below) Review by James B. Kendrick “Kendra Steiner Editions” is the exotic-sounding name of a small press based in San Antonio, Texas. I don’t know it’s history, but of its current activities I have in hand three small chapbooks (as the Americans love to call them), each presented in its individual polythene envelope. The chapbooks are simple but well-produced side-stapled affairs, slim but pleasing to behold and hold. Two of the chapbooks are joint-author affairs:
(from "send me your pillow in burning hell”) but they can also be a little intriguing:
(from “turdblossom spoonbread”) One wonders whether drugs come into this at all. The cumulative effect has been for me, thus far, one of not knowing whether to be appalled or intrigued, or just appallingly intrigued. I had thought of saying that even if there aren’t particularly great poems in this chapbook then there are some quite good, even very good lines. But I have abandoned that idea because, to be honest, I cannot find any. A pall of sentimentality pervades the whole enterprise, the word “heart” showing up much too often for this reader’s comfort.
Dersley sounds nothing like the Americans, of course, although all of these chapbooks (I’ve said it again!) are “Beat”-derived in language, form, subject matter and treatment of said subject matter. Dersley’s world is filled with careworn lonely old women, the grim lives lived on council estates, dreams and unfulfilled dreams, and love. Which could be tedious were it not for the fact that Dersley has a strain of wit and humour that permeates most of what he does. It’s not so much that he is side-splittingly funny, it’s rather he hints that he can see beyond the immediate to a better life:
(from “Melancholy Coffee”) Kendra Steiner Editions are available for $4 each from 8200 Pat Booker Road, San Antonio, Texas, 78233. European Distribution is from Volcanic Tongue
November 19 TWO MICHAELS SINGING
It was kind of funny at first. I went with my friend Jill. We’re both 55. One of the first things she said was how old everybody in the audience was. She was right. It wasn’t like there were loads of walking frames around, but there was quite a lot of silver hair. I’ve got grey hair, but I felt quite young. Chapman is now in his sixties, I guess, but boy, can he play guitar! He split the set into two: in the first half he played solo, and later he was joined onstage by his band. I’m not even going to mention how old some of them looked. If I’d been an undertaker maybe I would’ve been measuring them up in my mind. But they played a storm. I have no idea what songs they played, because I don’t know any Michael Chapman songs, but it was all really good. Some folky stuff can be really glum and meandering and somewhat devoid of life, but life was what this show was absolutely full of.
November 23 FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE Humbug by Abi Curtis Review by Luke Kennard How’ve you been? Not so well? Sorry to hear that. Want to hear about some new poetry? No? Well, I hear there’s some great new news at bbc.co.uk – so maybe you could spend your lunch-break there instead. For those of you still here, today I’m discussing two new pamphlets from the Tall Lighthouse Pilot Series, edited by Roddy Lumsden – a thoroughly noble endeavour set up by people who noticed that some of The idea is that the pilot series, although printed to book-standard, count as pamphlets, being no longer than 20 pages, thus leaving the promising younger poets in question free to seek big league publication for their first collections. Anyway, they look edible: bright white, 20 pages, perfect bound with red end-papers. And, more importantly, the poetry is superlative. The very first couplet of “Humbug” places the reader slap-bang in the middle of their own childhood:
(from ‘Humbug’) It’s like a zoom lens – although for time (my metaphors are way off today). There’s something universal about examining the gaps in the pavement – when I was a child I basically lived there. Also, I have a thing about descriptions of rain (and this year was the first Summer I’ve ever suffered from a combination of damp-induced flu and storm-induced headaches) so I love “The murmur of the rain began like quiet terror”. For an abstract emotion it’s extraordinarily apposite and sensory. At times like these Curtis seems to have some kind of conduit straight into your head. She knows, for instance, exactly how you feel when you fall over:
(from ‘Bruise’) Let’s face it: that’s a better couplet than any of us is going to write this year. Curtis never tells you things you already know – she tells you things you are, things you’ve always felt and have never managed to put into words. It’s wondrously satisfying – like being broke then finding a twenty pound note in an old pair of jeans. It makes you realise how absent that sense is from a lot of modern poetry – the sense of a poet who actually wants to take you with her, not just tell you stuff about something that happened to them once. And if you were ever going to write about horses, don’t bother.
I’m not used to reviewing pamphlets – so I need to curb my desire to over-quote. I could easily just type out the whole thing here and write “SEE?!” at the end of it. Among my favourites is ‘Electricity’ – a sequence of biopics about the electrical pioneers, including the exhortation “damp your hands / and hold this gutted mouse.” As opposed to just using historical detail as a grab-bag of empty signifiers, Curtis looks for the resonance of the telling detail – the things you can easily wrap your head around:
(from ‘Volta’) There is a musical sensibility at work here – ‘Lupercalia’ begins like a dark neo-folk song, “This is a night to go out, / dare the wolves to circle.” – and this grants the book an urgency and contemporary feel. Humbug is a rich collection – and unbelievably full for its brevity – the colour associations, the circus superstition, the mole a “Velour glove with no fingers” – yet each poem is linked by an eerily beautiful twilight atmosphere and an intuition of the strangeness of the everyday. Anyway, that’s enough – just fucking buy it already. *
(from ‘The Whetstone’) He can make the mundanest of views fantastic without losing any of the visual accuracy: “huddled” – is the perfect choice of word here. ‘Goooogle’, about the search engine, begins:
- the geisha metaphor elegantly indicating the promise of sexuality as much as enslavement. It concludes at dawn, with the palpable sense of a night wasted in online stalking. It’s the kind of thing Carver would have written if he’d survived into the age of the internet: a heartfelt lament on our capacity to sell-out our potential goodness. The ancient and modern combine to great effect, especially in ‘Solomon’ where Song of Solomon is described as “the hissing bootleg for the fanatic”, playing on the word fan as it applies to the contemporary music aficionado, collecting rare tapes of his favourite band, and to the religious fundamentalist. And ‘Hands of an Apostle’:
O’Riordan is accomplished in a variety of registers – whether celebrating the city of his birth in ‘Manchester’:
or brilliantly, unironically eulogising Mike Tyson in ‘The Long Count’. But his voice is always clear – and his strong-suit is the striking, immediate image. ‘Cheat’ pivots on a description of sex: “our movements incessant as a distaff and spindle” which at once captures the moment itself and the mechanically inexorable journey of the narrator and his lover. I’m in danger of quoting too much again. © Luke Kennard, 2007
November 25 WHICH WAY TO TURN? My friend Nigel was around here Friday after we’d been to see “The Darjeeling Limited” which, incidentally, is a wonderful movie. Wes Anderson movies are just brilliant. (That was a review, by the way. Short and to the point.) Anyways, Nigel was browsing through the books on my table while we started in on the red wine and I knocked up a quick chilli. We got to talking about just how much poetry there is around and how, with the internet at our fingertips, it’s all available but also, somehow, not available at all. There’s a weight of numbers that is almost overwhelming and there’s no way (is there?) that you can even begin to approach the half of it. Of course, this has always been the case even before the internet. Mimeo’d magazines abounded years ago, and there were loads and loads of poets in those, too. Maybe it’s the case that there are always loads and loads of poets. Too many? I’m guilty as hell, of course, because I’m one of them. But it’s easier to get to their work Thinking about the numbers thing, and how much there is to read out there in cyberpoetryworld, here’s what happens if you follow a thread I, a very guilty one, started. If you begin here and follow the link to the publisher and go to here and click on “poets” and arrive here you find a list of 27 poets, only a couple of whom I’ve heard. Then click on the poetry links to get to here and Shearsman is top of the list so go there and click on authors and arrive here. There are 132 people listed. I’ve heard of many of them, for what it’s worth. Shearsman has its share of bigger names, I guess. By comparison, if we’d gone here we’d have only come across 9 poets. They must be a new press. Of course, like I said, I'm guilty too. I contribute to this poetry superstore. If a couple of weeks ago you did as I suggested and went here then you’d have found 61 (I think it’s 61) poets. Sixty-one! Did you read them all? I didn’t. And it’s not because I didn’t want to, it’s because I spend half my life in front of this fucking computer and enough is enough. And I have all those links down in E&D’s sidebar that will take you to so many places, but how much can you actually read? Without going into too many personal details, I like to go to bed and read. I like to have stuff pile up on what passes as my bedside table (it’s a floor, actually) and I read a bit of something then listen to the midnight news and fall asleep. But I can’t do that with what's on the internet, so "Dusie Issue 6" is loitering in cyberspace, untouched by me now, and I haven’t looked at it anything like as much as I would have done had it been something I could take to bed. I look at what I take to bed. Honestly, I do. Perhaps it’s my being back into teaching creative writing, albeit in a smallish kind of a way and already, even after only a few weeks, shying away from the questions that always creep into my head whenever I do that. Maybe I should just ignore all those questions and get on with whatever it is I get on with. I know writing this post is a waste of time. I know even thinking about this is a waste of time. So much of what I do is a waste of time. But if I stay mildly bothered and troubled, the logical conclusion to all this of course -- which I think boils down to a more than slightly confused mix of "There is too much of this stuff, and how the hell do you even begin to read the half of it?" (which is stupid, because I'd never argue for less making) & "Does poetry on the internet make for comfortable reading?" (poetry armchair & bed lovers of the world, I am one of you) -- is that (a) I should stop writing poems, to reduce the number of poets by one (b) I should shut down this website, to reduce the number of websites by one (c) I should buy printed books and magazines of poetry to take to bed, which I almost never do and (d) I should come up with a reason for even talking about this in the first place. I know this is ridiculously circular, somewhat rambling, and not asking any particular question, and only an expression of a certain unease with Poetry World that's always with me but usually remains reasonably well suppressed (albeit not wonderfully suppressed.) So forgive me. But anyway: (d) is very difficult, because I don’t really know what my point is, except one of feeling just mildly troubled about something. But while (d) is very difficult, (a) (b) and (c) are really easy to do.
November 28 BLAKE, OH MY BLAKE!
I was browsing the infoweb this afternoon, and read this by Terry Eagleton about William Blake and, to a lesser extent, (take deep breath) Gordon Brown, which I thought was pretty interesting, and then I went to the same newspaper’s music page and saw this headline: Amy Winehouse cancels rest of tour dates for 2007. |