Featured Poet #6 - Jon Stone

Lara

Lara, it is your deaths that make me marvel.
Not the pistols that stud your chafed-up hips,
alexandrite earrings of your bottom

but the way you swallow-dive, boots locked,
onto a stint of sandstone and crumple and
not your plait’s strop, dosed in jeweller’s rouge

but the boulder massaging your hapless spine
that straightens the metals of my eye and
not the oil slick of you in your wetsuit

but how you buck hard enough to break
as you drown in a deep sea grotto and
not your strut or your small, hard ‘t’s

but how, set alight, you still do ‘demure’,
gasp and expire in a sponge of moss and
not the sheer vastness of your swimming pool

but live wires caressing you in the kitchen
of a slowly capsizing icebreaker and
not the calibre of your voice actresses

but the wolves who worry your jetstream
legs to uneven kebab-shanks and
not to be your butler or obstacle course

but the Arctic waters tenderly biting
through your Parka’s scruff sealmeat and
not be the boat you climb into in Venice

but the spear sprung by a pressure pad that
tastes your knee, that you fall around and
Lara, don’t bend to pull up your sports socks

but fluff the jump again for me, would you.


Near Extremes 4


Where I come from it’s the other way round:
Seroquel’s slipped by the fistful into
ministers’ snifters, curing them (fingers x’d)
of such spells where they intuit war things
are squirreled beneath every unturned stone,

and when shell-shocked or down-on-their-luck
ex-squaddies mistake the knifeplay of light
for a gun barrel’s flinting we all hit the dirt
because after all, the odds are they’re right –
in the streets: hajjis. Hajjis everywhere we look.


Three Celan Poems

I.

THAT ANGER’S BROKEN HER EAR.
Mid-day Monday, undone, counting
foreign brutes.

Drink
out, my almond.


II.

I CURE HER, THE AXE HAS GOT BLUNT.
I cure her, the artists nick timber.

I cure her, desperate that sin and silt
hail down or hang ten.
Desperate assembly throwback.

I cure her, see lemongrass leaping,
the antsy kazoo-flux.


III.

THE GNATS HAVE STOPPERED THE WELL.
Frederick’s aghast
the way sometimes words are alarming.
Hera gets switched on. The mower
and the iron wander, hawk-legged.

--

Jon Stone was born in Derby and currently lives in Whitechapel, where he co-produces both Sidekick Books, a publisher of collaborative poetry books, and arts magazine Fuselit. He was highly commended in the National Poetry Competition 2009 in the same month his debut pamphlet, Scarecrows, was released by Scottish press Happenstance. He has also released a co-authored pamphlet, No, Robot, No!, through Forest Publications with Kirsten Irving and a full collection, School of Forgery, is due from Salt in 2012.


[eds. note: 'Three Celan Poems' look different due to the fact Blogspot wanted to make the capitalised lines way too big, so I had to use my nonexistent HTML skills.]

UEA Writers #5 - Andy Spragg w/illustration by Natalie Orme

lois scélérates


The first to be heard
is scattering coins
before the pipes and plaster
give way.


Our braves are caught in the foundry gaze,
an irradiated fat quench of things -
as foot-notes go it's all
prepped papers,
and faultline economics
and an absence of trust.


Beleaguering, the yelp does not get tied
down in specifics – the day doubles,
then stretches beyond remand.


In the past a mistake was made,
there are over a hundred
ways to clarify butter.


Running down on under-privilege


an ill judge of statues, he stands to one side and tries to measure
the space by sight alone. Where would alabaster best serve his
composing eye? In the alcove there is a leaden shade, brush it
out - a fill of scraps, an acquirement of novel depths, the sum of
his diagram. Meanwhile, a chorus is shrinking from the foreground,
a few muffled expressions, musical tongues forward to find a
mooring in amongst the clutter.

Taking in edges

The shape is an uproar of angles – there
is a spit-shine rise in its proportions
alleviating one acoustic shape after
another. Ducking monuments and
a matter – those shades in granite
are strict or serious relief.
--

Andrew Spragg is a poet, performer and critic. He has a blog at http://www.brokenloop.blogspot.com/ He is a founding member of the Norwich Poetry Choir and writes regularly for Rhythm Circus and Bonafide Magazine. In recent months he has completed the script for SHOEBOX, a performance piece staged by The Effort in 2010. He was Literature Coordinator for this year’s Norwich Fringe Festival.


He is currently working with flautist Julie Groves as performance group 'Between Soundings'.

He studied at UEA and obtained a BA in American Literature and Creative Writing. He remembers Norwich fondly.




UEA Writers #4 - Jenna Butler

The fourth of our UEA writers is the excellent Jenna Butler. Her debut collection, Aphelion, from which 'Kerouac' is taken, was one of my favourite releases of 2010, and my review of it is here on Eyewear (as you can probably guess, I highly recommend you pick up a copy). 'Farmhouse: Castor, Alberta' is taken from The Seldom Seen Road. Her final poem comes replete with notes at the end of this post. Enjoy!


Kerouac

his family heaved a sigh of relief
the day he hopped a train
and disappeared from their lives
     at least until the following Christmas

under the trees in the woodlot
his meditation place grew over     threaded with wild blue flax
they mowed it under in September for hay

never a postcard
although once a slip of paper
with lines from Han Shen
which his mother pretended to understand
justifying its place on the mantel

out in the Arizona night
home     a thousand acres of desert sand
shot through with shadows
the Mexicali girls
brought port
danced unafraid by the tracks

woke to his absence
and the dawn cinders of the Express

watched the slow sunlight
enter the imprint of his body
and obliterate his passing


Farmhouse

Castor, Alberta

early sun skims
the plate rail      a kitchen
reduced to grit & shambles
       butcherblock table
       wallpaper slumped about its knees

light here reveals
only      absence

teasel in the bones of
the victory garden       thrusting
barrel staves like iron ribs

what we have come for

lilacs pressing in
these diamond panes       their blossom
stark & fragrant across the hearth
      rainwater shifting in
      the stair’s curved spine

how this land holds everything &
nothing      back


Nyctogram

Deconstructing Carroll[*]


youth willow alembic, that burning

photograph form as witness; mnemonic gyration

alice small sickle against untethered dark; demi-disc, lunar visage

name or. calling, calling back

mirror hinges a man, shadows like smoked glass

women mathematics of desire. shame. desire

name to unface a man, just this: construct a new

_____________


history littoral boundary. sub / liminal

genius back of the mind: two rooks, barking

letters missive or lifeline

doubt (syn. fecundity.) murky armistice.

truth scumbled edges. if not, then.

self subject to fragging

_____________

speech hesitation as intrusive space

camera intermediary to need

gentleman title or caution

stone (white.) epicentre of memory

stone apropos of drowning

_____________


biography demilune or fallacy

journal crepuscular rendition, sabotage

family proponents of what truth

carroll causa sui

_____________


alice faded at eighteen

legend that brittle waif

scandal what spice or tarnish

_____________


women vapid rabble

faith as glass to a jackdaw

_____________


craft / vanishing point

--

*EXPLANATORY NOTE: Taken from a new manuscript entitled Nyctogram: The Lewis Carroll Poems. The entire collection takes Carroll's (Charles Dodgson's) poetry and anagrams it into new poems about Dodgson's life and the construction of the Carroll identity.


He was an exceptional cryptographer and often included codes (frquently anagrams) in his poems. I've cross-anagrammed "Jabberwocky" and "A Sea Dirge" to create "Nyctogram: Deconstructing Carroll." I love the idea that, like the Carroll persona, anagrams change the meaning of a text with each creator. Two people could anagram the same text and get two completely different things out of it. This is what happened to Dodgson in terms of the creation of his Carroll persona.

A "nyctograph" was one of Dodgson's inventions (he was a brilliant inventor and mathematician). It was a writing aid that would, through a series of slashes and dots, allow the user to write down thoughts in the dark without having to get out of bed to light a lamp. The nyctograph was lost after Dodgson's death, but here, I imagine these poems as "nyctograms," messages out of the dark about a man who was so little known and scarcely understood.

The collection will be an exact anagram; by the end of it, every letter from every one of Dodgson's poems will have been used to retell the story of Dodgson's/Carroll's life. (Yep, it's taking me a while to write.)

UEA Writers #3: Todd Swift w/illustration by Natalie Orme

Etcetera is flattered to be featuring three poems by Todd Swift. Todd, for those who don't know, is a major figure in the world of UK poetry. His blog, Eyewear, is full of good things, and Todd is continually championing new writers, as well as helping bring British poetry to others around the world. So it is with great pleasure that we offer you three of his poems, alongside illustrations by the excellent Natalie Orme.

Essay Number One

What is different is the availability
Of information regarding disease
And financial options, in relation to
The globalization process, enhanced

By internet-driven technologies. Or

Does technology drive the net? This

Chicken-egg dilemma may prove
Insoluble. In practice I am quite sad.

Alienation theory would once have
Been a useful indicator of the climate.
It seems rather simplistic, though,
Post-Iraq (and so on), to claim any

Unique relationship to ennui or despair.
Nearly two-thirds of the world’s people are
Without clean drinking water, and some
Of us are born with conditions

Which mean that their skin sloughs off
Like tissue paper at the slightest touch.
In the context of new forms of super-bug
Which know no treatment or prevention,

And increasing destabilization due to
The rise of small groups sworn to destroy
The “Western” hegemonic system; not to
Mention proliferation of a number of

Equally disturbing trends relating to
Genetic and nano as well as bio tech issues;
Better to leave it unsaid. The increase
In poetic dissemination of material suggests

Not a triumph of content over discontent,
But instead the lack of demand triggering
An anxiety of production – a terrible
Struggle to produce something worthy.

"These women, dreams"

These women, dreams:
How they come to me,
Remain. Dragged
From the wreck of sea,

In chainmesh, to wake,
And a puritan challenge.
The small church (my body)
Rolls on the hill beneath

A sky purpling with fire
And will not break, but does
Reflect a faith’s quake.
The heart’s encased in fluid,

Palpates like immersion
In her, in the modern flood.
Little thieves, they steal sleep,
Desecrate the pews.

I walk down the aisle of them,
Bereft by the booklets
They’ve torn into figurines
Of paper and torment.

I wake in the glean, lament
The fuzz and brisk of you
And she and her and then
All is parchment and ancient

And the hull of the earth
Breaks on stone and dries
And the sea-swung girls
Turn like tides.


On The Sublime


Green is the widest colour other than black which extends
Like an ocean, as far as the mind’s hand; it is edible, lush,

Can be found in the iris, on scissor handles, ballpoint pens.
To leap your horse across the test, from Orion to Point X

Without felling steeples is a minor miracle, a major turn,
And suggests godlike prowess, the sinews of the angelic

Or years of practice in the heavens with atomic jodhpurs
Made of gold peeled from Midas as he slept cold dreams.

 
Todd Swift is a lecturer at Kingston University in English Literature and Creative Writing and a tutor for The Poetry School. His most recent collections are Seaway: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2008) and Mainstream Love Hotel (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), and a free-to-download ebook from Argotist, Experimental Sex Hospital. Todd has edited or co-edited many international anthologies, including Poetry Nation, 100 Poets Against The War, and (with Evan Jones) Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010). Todd recently blogged on The Young British Poets for The Best American Poetry blog. His poems have appeared widely, in places such as Poetry London, Poetry Review. He has been Oxfam GB Poet-in-residence, and runs the London-based Oxfam Poetry Series. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and is currently conducting doctoral research. He lives in London. He blogs at Eyewear.


Natalie Orme is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. She co-edits Etcetera, and blogs here. Her work has been exhibited in Norwich and London, and she would like to collaborate with you.

UEA Writers #2: Charlotte Hoare, w/illustration by Natalie Orme

A History of Piracy* in the Park


the pirate cut his throat
and from that deep sea of 1930s romance
she arose headlong with sleepiness
with the gentle filmy wonder of a wife
Mrs. Irene Gosse
in sincere dedication to -
all this myriad adventure -
the park empty
she gathered her shoes
stretched her arms like oars
stood up from the trunk
the dry long-wrecked hull
she had rested against
and turned with all the silent reverence
of a sail

the man with the baseball cap
with the black dragon
the black sword on his t-shirt
held his penis
looked at her
a thin smile curling like pages

*A History of Piracy, Phillip Gosse


Livingstone St.


‘it is time the stone grew accustomed to blooming’ - Paul Celan, Corona

No word from the neighbours. One house
Gutted, the other audible at ear-height through the mirror.
Children scream in the morning, nothing wakes me.

At an acute distance, birds can be seen flocking -
Gathered to a solitary leader at their apex.

Love, I opened the box in my dream.
Gold rushed from me like Midas cashing his cheque
In the river: it’s over, the world has begun.

A great breath of glass at daybreak,
The sky half-shaken to wine.
The window weeping at the boundary of warmth.


I


Faith

beams down,
one bright shaft, softens
what is struck or breaking
in a slip of wine, given―

O Lord wash our tongues
with snow water

II

Faithfulness:

when you
come home with a strange rawness, ashamed
but not sorry, body quivering
from the hot darkness that took it,
and look at me blankly
as if I should blame instead
something dwindling in the sky.


The Visit


The black gate tolerates the key.
The light grows frail and wild.

Softly, like a fountain,
the only words: I don’t know, I don’t know,
                           I don’t know

You leave, the curtains part clumsily
and will not close again.

No great path: daylight, a window.

Charlotte Hoare grew up in the small village of Potterne in Wiltshire.  Not much happened there apart from words, and they didn’t happen that often.  There was a nice context of silence.  She moved to Norwich in 2007 to study Literature with Creative Writing, with the idea that she was the only person in the world that wrote poetry.   Luckily this insular world fell apart quite quickly.  She has recently qualified as an English Language teacher and will hopefully start work in Prague soon.  She plans to keep creating worlds that fall apart. She has a poem coming out in the S/S/Y/K (4) anthology soon.

Natalie Orme is a freelance illustrator, co-editor of Etcetera and recent NUCA graduate. Her work has been exhibited in various places in Norwich and London, and includes drawing, printmaking and lots of other non-digital design. She is currently working on expanding her portfolio, highlights of which you can see on her blog. Most recently she designed covers for Joshua Jones's debut collection, Thought Disorder, and King Laconic's first EP, Muddy Snow.

UEA Writers #1 - Ágnes Lehóczky

The first UEA-associated writer to be featured is poet Ágnes Lehóczky. Her first collection Budapest to Babel, from which the first poem is taken, is a favourite of mine; a complex and original debut that not only forces and encourages the reader to engage with its tricky syntax and innovative linguistics but rewards them in plentitudes for doing so. There are echoes of Heideggerian and Derridean philosophy in her work, as well as American post-Language poetry (and of course Agnes Nemes Nagy), as it confronts and continually defamiliarises and reinvigorates language without every losing its humane connection with the reader. The second poem we are lucky enough to be featuring is from a second collection currently in progress, more information on which will be forthcoming as and when. Enjoy! [NB. These two poems are supposed to be block formatted, but Blogger refuses to allow me to justify them. So, with apologies to and the consent of Agnes, just pretend there's a straight line of text running down the right hand side of the poems.]


Nárcisz’s breakfast letter


I will simply tell you what I can see on this table, here.
No, not on that table but on the one that floats. In the
window. The one that moves with the hour. Its lustrous
objects, some of them latent, some obvious, layer by
layer half-sheltered behind each other like a mock-up of
some insipid geology, travel by the horizon. I will tell
you. Although it’s not easy to stop. Seeing inside. A
crooked vase. Bursting flowers. They burst on the
glass. I do not know what sort but not sunflowers and
the vase is not blue of any kind. I could ask someone
and if they did not know they could ask someone and if
they did not know. Apples piled on top of each other
buoyant in a bowl relatively visible: curvaceous torsos,
perpendicularly squashing against one another with a
negligible force unit of kilo Pascal. Though, weight
nullifies for those who only watch. Did you know that
despite the apparent struggle, these apples strive for
equalization? They say. A kitchen knife tilted on its
side. Its glossy metal edge reflects another ceiling,
another sky, blurs it, blurs its white. The texture of air
woven between the metal and the white escapes and
floods the room. The razor’s edge facing down the
surface of the table reflects unknown darkness, a
darkness duplicate. The intimate recollections of the
two. A chunk of butter. Left outside sunbathing in the
light yellow light of early afternoon melting into its
own outline. Then the butter expands and steps out of
itself. It becomes smeared on the glass. I read that
objects have no contours, only oscillating transitions. I
don’t know if it is true. Perhaps the replica of it is true.
An eggshell in a gaudy eggcup, its top torn off with a
zigzagged motion. A mineralized minuscule skull,
drained, after an elongated tribal ritual. But this time no
religion, no ideology. An embroidered egg cap, a
Sunday outfit. Still warm from incubating the freshly
boiled egg. If you were here you would slip into the
needlework’s inner textile and reel up the story of the
thread stitched vice versa. If it wasn’t too late. Look,
these objects are travellers. Wait. Only a few more
things here. A light green net bag; it is more pistachio.
A fishnet fishless. Or a marionette collapsed after the
hand dropped it. Yet it seems it wakes again, stretches
with the stretching of the sun. It all changes by the
second. Let’s hurry up. It’s not easy to erect a world.
Outside. A jam jar with lumps of marmalade. Left
open. The lid is chequered; red and white, red and
white. This pattern restricted to the circle of the rim
continues outside the rim too, it brims over it,
inaudibly. But this would be a detour and we must stay,
we must stay here, with a facsimile table that’ll soon
depart. The table that is still here…just…


Monday, Midsummer

It’s Monday again. And you are always already gone. I
wanted to spend the longest day with you. Instead
you took the train home shuffling in your head all the
reasons why I am not accompanying you into the
warm tunnels of three enduring midsummer nights.
Why I stand still like a planet unsure whether to
proceed towards the North or the South. For three
never-ending days. You see, the old painter was
curious whether you lived in this town. He sketched
your face still with his eyes. He wanted to smear
silvery blue and copper colours on his canvas. It was
such a bright night, I could not sleep. The most
perseverant insomnia of the sun. The same thing
happened with the actor. He wanted to know about
certain dates and places. He wanted to be your orbit.
He wanted to make you converse. So that he could
secretly erase the line between night and day. So that
you would never go to sleep. I was holding onto a
small pebble in my palm. When I woke I saw it was
your hand. This pebble is a rock. This pebble is a rock
face. The face of a rock. Such a bright night, I could
not sleep. Footsteps in my eardrum. Throbbing
definitely louder. Is there someone leaping up the
stairway? Is this you arriving? That night a ghost
stopped me in the street and asked about words. My
words. He asked how they sell. He was wearing a ten-
gallon hat and smoked a cigar. A drunken spectre. No
outlines. Wingless. Or with very rudimentary wings.
When I queried his knowledge he turned back into a
frog. Into an odd local who swears he never said a
word. And shuts the pub door quietly after himself.
Leaving only a tiny piece of fabric caught by the door.
The corner of his coat. It was such a bright night. I
could not sleep. I saw him again the other day in the
pub. Bespectacled. Old faced. Muttering my words,
telling me that the nights were so bright he couldn’t
sleep. Burying his face in the pages of his notebook.
His notebook was his face. That night I dreamt of
another solstice. I was buried alive in a catacomb
wrapped tightly in white linen. Always the
underground cities after all. Labyrinths of minerals.
Crypts of solar eclipses. Mummified moments. Good
soil. The stunning system of air holes. This way
memory is corporate. This way memories are parched
like the monks of Brno. Many parched monks with
mouths agape resting horizontally in a row. They
almost look alive. I once wrote about this. A long time
ago. But now, since you asked, I must remind myself
of a Monday so unalterably stationary. The
subterranean dialogues of three days and three nights.
What’s a great conversationalist? What is time? You
ask when we pass by an acrylic memorial plaque lost
in a cobbled cul-de-sac. I shrug my shoulders. I do not
know. I can only see an opaque river. Milky. Cloudy.
Transparent. Allowing light to pass. Flicking away in
gallons of silver tea. In porcelain. The earth’s axis tilted.


--

Ágnes Lehóczky is a Hungarian-born poet and translator. She studied for her Masters in English and Hungarian Literature at Pazmany Peter University of Hungary (1994-2001) then completed a Creative Writing MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia with a distinction in 2006. She is currently completing a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at UEA where she was teaching Creative Writing on the Undergraduate Programme. She has two short poetry collections, Station X (2000) and Medallion (2002) by Universitas published in Budapest, Hungary, both written in Hungarian.

Her first English collection was published by Egg Box Publishing in 2008 and is entitled Budapest to Babel. She is this year’s recipient of the Arthur Welton Poetry Award and has recently been selected as the winner of the Daniil Pashkoff Prize 2010 in poetry administered by international Writers Ink. She appeared on ‘The Forum’ on the BBC’s World Service. She is currently working on her second collection in English to be published by Egg Box in 2010/2011. Her collection of essays on the poetry of Agnes Nemes Nagy are to be published in 2010/2011 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. From September 2010 she is teaching creative writing on the Masters course at the University of Sheffield.

Announcement

Over the coming months, we are putting together what we plan on being exhaustive coverage of the best writing being produced at the moment on the various Creative Writing courses in the UK. My own feelings on Creative Writing as a subject are mixed, but it is irrefutable that there is a lot of talent being nourished by these courses, or at the very least a lot of talented writers participating in them, and it is our aim to help promote them and expose their work.

Beginning with UEA (purely for practical reasons: I am Norwich based and doing English & Creative Writing), we are going to hunt down a representative sample of what is being produced by these writers at BA, MA, PhD level and beyond. If you are an undergrad at UEA, on the esteemed MA course, studying for your PhD or would simply like to recommend someone on one of the courses we should look at, don’t hesitate to get in touch at etc.submissions@yahoo.co.uk. Equally, if you're not on the course but are at UEA and interested in submitting, please feel free to do so.

Once we’ve gathered interest we’ll be setting a deadline for entries. Until then, we look forward to hearing from you.


NB. Of course, we're not looking to categorise or tag individual writers as 'UEA' or 'xyz school' writers, merely to help promote good work using an, to an extent, arbitrary backbone of classification. I think the best thing about this endeavor will be the difference, the wild variety of styles being produced, and the impossibility of defining a generic style that can be tagged under the heading of whatever school is being featured.