Three Drafts of the Same Poem by Sarah Cave

Draft 1: Lyrical Notes for a Performance Piece II
Follow Alice into
Google Streetview: an imagined Sunday afternoon at Yasnaya Polyana
                  [listening to Library Tapes on my headphones]
Alice passes David Wenngren playing

View from a Train in fragments

at the Grand piano in the Dining Room
take the right hand arrow
Alice strolls through a curtain of light
and on the porch leaves me

                                                in the sun with Natasha

yellow pegman
wearing her
yellow dress
shellac lips

                   ‘but you’ll melt’

yellow dress

                   time passes

yellow dress

                   Alice sees her shadow at the corner of the turn towards the lake

yellow dress

All I am to you, love, love, love [music skip], is
                                                                      expired celluloid                                     yellow/dress                                                  and light leaks

       spilling across an echo of analogue
All my mother taught me to be to you, love, was                              white

                                                                                                          yellow

                                                                                                          read the red
                                                                 a yellow dress
                                                                           an acetate love letter to Tolstoy                                                                  a yellow dress

                                                            Curtain.



***



Draft 2: The archaeologist watches

                                    Lenin’s embalmed hands

full of grace, again, again, again.        cut with        Yasnaya Polyana in lemon
                                                                                        July, 1865
                                                      Natasha in yellow
                                                 a triangle of green

     Watch Alice move into
     Google Streetview: imagine Sunday afternoon at Yasnaya Polyana
                              [listening to Library Tapes on headphones]

     Alice passes a Swedish Pianist playing

                                                                [View from a Train
                                                                    // Kreutzer Sonata split into fragments
                                                                                                             white noise]

     at the Grand piano in the Dining Room.
     Take the right hand arrow

     bookcases, a gramophone, old magazines

                                                  Alice follows pre-programmed paths
                                                  through walls and furniture
                                                  The door is photographed as though
     L
     y
     r
     i
     c
     a
     l

     N
     o
     t
     e
     s

                                                  curtained by light and Alice passes through
                                                  and leaves me on the porch

                                                       in the sun with Natasha

            a yellow pegman
     wearing her
                                                            yellow dress
                                                            shellac lips

                                for a Performance
              yellow dress

                    time passes

     painted red

                    Alice sees her shadow at the turn towards the lake
     and Natasha’s

              yellow dress

                              All I am love is expired celluloid is
                                                                          expired celluloid
                                               yellow/dress                                    light leaks

            spilling an echo across an acre of analogue
     All my mother taught me to be to you love white/yellow/red, was      white
                                                                                                                yellow
                                                                                                                read the red

                                                                   a yellow dress
                                                                                an acetate love letter to Tolstoy
                                                                   a yellow dress                                                                                suffering the picturesque

                                                          Curtain.



***



Draft 3: The archaeologist watches

                                    Lenin’s embalmed hands

full of grace, again, again, again.        cut with        Yasnaya Polyana in lemon
                                                                                        July, 1865
                                                      Natasha in yellow
                                                 a triangle of green

     Watch Alice move into
     Google Streetview: imagine Sunday afternoon at Yasnaya Polyana
                              [listening to Library Tapes on headphones]

     Alice passes a Swedish Pianist playing

                                                                [View from a Train

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––// Kreutzer Sonata split into fragments

                                                                                                             white noise]

                                                                                                   red
     at the Grand piano in the Dining Room.
     Take the right hand arrow

     bookcases, a gramophone, old magazines

                                                  Alice follows pre-programmed paths
                                                  through walls and furniture
                                                  The door is photographed as though
     L
     y
     r
     i
     c
     a
     l

     N
     o
     t
     e
     s

                                                  curtained by light and Alice passes through
                                                  and leaves me on the porch

                                                       in the sun with Natasha

            a yellow pegman
     wearing her
                                                            yellow dress
                                                            shellac lips

                                for a Performance
              yellow  dress

                    time passes

     painted  red

                    Alice sees her shadow at the turn towards the lake
     and Natasha’s

              yellow  dress

                              All I am love is expired celluloid is
                                                                          expired celluloid
                                               yellow /dress                                    light leaks

            spilling an echo across an acre of analogue
     All my mother taught me to be to you love white/yellow/red, was      white
                                                                                                        yellow
                                                                                                           read the red

                                                                   a yellow dress
                                                                                an acetate love letter to Tolstoy
                                                                   a yellow dress                                                                                suffering the picturesque

                                                          Curtain.

Code Poetry: IMM LHO by George Ttoouli (3/6)

I am in that long drag
of democracy between
betrayal and the next election.

What should I do?

The city
{
        has fractures in its tarmac;
        is like earthquakes;
        turns me into a fault line;
        aggregates
        {
                empty
                {
                        packets;
                        wrappers;
                        shells;
                }
                refusals;
        }
        turns our stomachs;
        leaves our mouths
                {
                        plugged with denials;
                        stitched shut with a pencil; // if no one speaks of terror then
                                                                   // perhaps we will not know it when
                                                                   // it comes so tell me lies if lies are
                                                                   // what you have inside your heart
                                                                   // don’t follow us and find yourself
                                                                   // in pieces where we fell apart
                        marked X;                          // with no men left to pick the fruit
                                                                   // or sow the fields or dig the
                                                                   // trenches and so we all turn into
                                                                   // farmers bury our hearts in the soil
                                                                   // and go to work
                }
        }
        is a non-neutral it;
        is an unexploded bomb.
}

What should I do?

I’ll shuttle from this city
{
        like cathodes emit heat;
        escape from this un-exploded bomb with
        {
                a radar blip;
                a rocket;
                a grey cross on my flag;
        }
}
my nation ruptured by that long drag
{
        through police files;
        electoral registers;
        of pencils in the boxes
        {
                top left to bottom right;
                top right to bottom left;
        }
        through the pieces of me they have gathered;
}
all ruptured;

and I will kill the Prime Minister I will slip in behind the wooden panels of democracy and kill him with the heavy gavel of democracy and I will kill him and I will cut WAR CRIMINAL into his chest and hang him in a gallery and I will call it WAR CRIMINAL and they will ask for my signature and I will deny everything.


===

Some brief context: this was written around the time of the illegal invasion of Iraq, when I was writing poems with titles designed to test whether one could be arrested in the West for writing poetry. This title was probably the most benign/coded (I've also removed the dedication), but I soon realised people were actually being arrested for this stuff and I was just being immature. And this comes with a big disclaimer, that it didn't and still doesn't condone violence toward any individuals. The poem filtered into a portion of ‘Static Exile’ and the ‘DVD Extras’ in Static Exile. (Yeah, I know, shameless plug, but it is back in print and I am completely broke.)

Code Poetry: 'CodeSwitching 23µg' by Theo Chiotis (2/6)

Simon Turner - The Three Rs

All poems rely to an extent on repetition:
rhyme (to give just on example) is simply repetition
that’s fractured in contact with syntax; whilst repetition
in the pantoum is raised to the nth degree.  So, to repeat:
rhyme (to restate my first example) is simply repetition
imbued with variation; and that same variation
in the pantoum is raised to the nth degree.  Let me repeat:
poems (and pantoums especially) rely on repetition
combined with variation, and it’s that same variation
which fuels the engine of the poem under construction. 
A poem (this pantoum especially) relies on repetition,
although here it’s the play of semantic alternation
that’s the real engineer of the poem under construction. 
At the risk of repeating myself: poems are a form of verbal interjection
which, combined with the play of semantic alternation,
remodel the world as logocentric contraption. 
At the risk of repeating myself: poems are a kind of verbal intellection
of the contractual fracture of syntax; whilst repetition
is a model of the logos as a series of concentric contractions. 
All poems rely to an extent on repetition. 

Luke Kennard's Hills of Hamm

As stated in a previous email, these two Hamms were purloined by the Editors at a Buzzwords poetry event some years ago.



Our psychological experts are studying the handwriting for clues as to his psychic profile. However, recent evidence suggests Kennard, (a.k.a. 'Father K') has undergone counter-psych-profiling training with the aid of his Community Psychiatric Nurse (identity unconfirmed, suspected living embodiment of Biblical figure Cain) and any such profiling analysis will be redundant. It's like he's using his imagination or something.

Rupert Loydell: Five Poems 5/5

Collect, Combine, Connect

The inhabitants of a town, being collected into one place,
can easily combine together. Distance-based clustering
is done by removing clues. Smaller submodels can be added
to a main model, combining information from other sources
with the original information. Read through all the features
in a workspace, think for a moment about all the factors:
otherwise it's just a collection of meaningless words.

Various collecting ducts within the medullary pyramids
merge to form papillary channels, which drain to a portal,
and also release substances that are secreted into the tubule
to combine with sight distance and spot improvements.
The existing road is ideal for bicyclists who are riding to
somewhere else but we don't like people who mention f-zero
or are devoted to animals obtained by black market trade.

Collect the red rag, as well as the blue jumper on the floor
in between the two largest boxes. Bring these ingredients
to their delivery point and use the exposed bare metal
of the electrical wires to connect them. You must not include
functionality that proxies or the memory accounting features
of this leading-edge control technology. Those two steps
help save money on labour. Thank you for being a customer.

===
5/5

These poems are from a sequence forthcoming from Knives, Forks and Spoons, Leading Edge Control Technology. G&P is publishing one per day this week.


Rupert Loydell's recent titles:
The Tower of Babel, an artist's book-in-a-box (Like This Press, 2013)
Wildlife (Shearsman, 2011)
The Fantasy Kid, poems for children (Salt, 2010)

Rupert Loydell: Five Poems 4/5

Project, Index, Distance

Test your ability to judge short and long distance.
The mode of delivery is now in transition, moving towards
a star at a distance d which has a total power output of p.
Consider what you see when you limit your information:

The stopping distance of a vehicle is the sum of
blast area and quantity distance considerations,
because the spatial index of traditional geometry fields
cannot be used. Shooting distance affects damage

and is instrumental in stopping the fire from jumping
from the micro to the macro and then to the mega.
The perpendicular distance between adjacent planes
is related to the quest for cheaper housing.

There are too many pictures here, but if you want more,
the contact and fly ball rates are pretty easy to project.
The only thing I'm missing is the front distance sensors
to measure the spread of your influence and reputation.

===
4/5

These poems are from a sequence forthcoming from Knives, Forks and Spoons, Leading Edge Control Technology. G&P is publishing one per day this week.


Rupert Loydell's recent titles:
The Tower of Babel, an artist's book-in-a-box (Like This Press, 2013)
Wildlife (Shearsman, 2011)
The Fantasy Kid, poems for children (Salt, 2010)

Rupert Loydell: Five Poems 3/5

Isolate, Mark, Omit

It takes precisely twenty days to fell the tree
and fourteen to remove the branches.
Mark a scene as omitted and it disappears from your script.

To remove stored fat, do the least necessary;
for read-only and ambiguous cursors,
slide the adaptor slowly down the column.

Avoid electric shock or energy hazards,
too much ambiguity or omission.
(A term fittingly applied to sins.)

Come with me privately to a place
where you will see an isolated bridge device:
dramatic, well-constructed and lots of fun.

I've used that more or less
as an ingenious solution to the troubles
and in order to confound any sense of orientation.

===
3/5

These poems are from a sequence forthcoming from Knives, Forks and Spoons, Leading Edge Control Technology. G&P is publishing one per day this week.


Rupert Loydell's recent titles:
The Tower of Babel, an artist's book-in-a-box (Like This Press, 2013)
Wildlife (Shearsman, 2011)
The Fantasy Kid, poems for children (Salt, 2010)

Rupert Loydell: Five Poems 2/5

Route, Network, Flow

In theory, a flow network is a directed
optimal lane-based evacuation route.

Traffic flows proactively onto multiple paths,
colours display the severity of firewalls in place.

The paradox is on a different machine
where blind windows overlook the sea.


===
2/5

These poems are from a sequence forthcoming from Knives, Forks and Spoons, Leading Edge Control Technology. G&P is publishing one per day this week.


Rupert Loydell's recent titles:
The Tower of Babel, an artist's book-in-a-box (Like This Press, 2013)
Wildlife (Shearsman, 2011)
The Fantasy Kid, poems for children (Salt, 2010)

Rupert Loydell: Five poems from Leading Edge Control Technology

Tracing, Projection, Survey

Every plane through the origin intersects the unit sphere
and reproduces the shape and substance of an object,

but as the transducers do not transmit in all directions,
the acoustic energy is projected into the water.

It is necessary to carry out a triangulation of the territory:
trace, trace out, trace over, map, trigger and tune in.

Radiance of any light in space can always be obtained
by tracing the axial plane and plunge.

It has to be done in solid Earth at the stratigraphic level,
with unaliased spatial trace interpolation in the f-k domain.

Once the conjunction is completed we lose
any trace of inferred presupposition.

Imagine wrapping a piece of paper around a globe
and tracing where the paper touches the surface.

Well, I imagine tracing paper would be too expensive,
always use a calculator to complete multiple choice.


===
1/5

These poems are from a sequence forthcoming from Knives, Forks and Spoons, Leading Edge Control Technology. G&P is publishing one per day this week.


Rupert Loydell's recent titles:
The Tower of Babel, an artist's book-in-a-box (Like This Press, 2013)
Wildlife (Shearsman, 2011)
The Fantasy Kid, poems for children (Salt, 2010)

Three Poems by C J Allen

Notes for a poem provisionally titled, ‘From the Lies of the Artists’


Imagination is a kind of glowing reality
that we can never touch.  Desire is always
a work in progress.  Everything is collage

Everything is bricolage  The difference
between you and your reflection is no matter
how hard you polish, your reflection has no memory.

Is the purpose of art to fix the fugitive
or to smartarse its way to oblivion?  Everything
Andy Warhol understood life was a series

of images that change as they repeat themselves.
Somewhere in the midst of love and debauchery
are reputations destroyed.  An inch of the world

doesn’t equal an inch of Rembrandt or de Kooning.
Rothko lost it.  Manet ate his cat.



The Wolves of Poetry


They say, ‘You have been spending all your time
in books.’  Accused, you flop into a chair.
The chair is made of books.  Sheer sentences
slide beneath you, frictionless, resistance
reduced to microns by their poetry.
‘Well?’ they say.  You think before you flinch.

The moon is up and browsing through the night.
It peeks in at the window.  They do not
like this one bit.  You tip the moon a wink.
The moon is like a token or a disc
of light inside a wineglass.  Should you tell them
the moon is almost certainly a book?

They stare at you with heavy, bookless faces.
You let yourself fall very slowly shut.
‘What do you know,’ they bark, ‘about the Wolves,
the Wolves of Poetry?’  You tell them nothing,
as if to say, the book is an abyss.
All they can hear is howling, howling, howling.

 
 
Insomnia


Her name was Eve.  She was almost
invisible at first.  At dusk,
when day goes into slow reverse,
I caught her having second thoughts
about what hurts and doesn’t hurt,
and sin.  The shadows grew quite long.

We sat alone.  There were no clocks.
We sort of drifted off to sleep –
not quite, we dipped our toes in sleep –
and when we woke we saw the light
had gone out of the world.  The light
had gone and there was nothing left
to fill the sky, and so we lay
awake, not knowing what to say.

Rupert Loydell - An Essay Poem

Answering Back
for Harvey Hix

It's the time of year when my first years
read Robert Sheppard's 'The Education of Desire'
and I challenge them to think about
writing their poems differently.
They also get given Charles Bernstein
on how to read difficult poems
and a host of quotes from other authors
each articulating why and how they write.

This kind of thing has to complement
every writing workshop. How can we write
if we don't think about how we can write?
The students don't know, now we've moved on
to B.S. Johnson, Samuel Beckett and Ann Quin,
that Bernstein and Sheppard will be back
when we come to talk about poetics;
in fact Robert's visiting us to give a talk.

At our institution with and and
are more than simply words between English
and Creative Writing. To us, and means one
sits alongside the other, whereas with
means they're entwined. Literature and theory
coil around creativity, poems, stories, plays.
To management upstairs they are both ways
to sell our courses, offer options to the kids.

The same managers are never sure
if books of poems tick the research box.
Shouldn't we be writing essays about our work
or be out there giving academic talks?
Elsewhere, the battle's won, and when
I look out for examples I can use
I find Harvey Hix and Mark Amerika
working in relevant but different ways.

Hix uses quotes and persuasive argument
in poems that answer back to other poems
(he reminds us that Bernstein does this too),
whilst Amerika remixes his own and others' texts
to dialogue with and critique themselves,
sometimes just through juxtaposition,
sometimes through collage and appropriation;
old work to make new. Hix makes new work

to discuss the old, sonnets to discuss the sonnet.
But isn't all good criticism creative anyway?
Isn't good theory creative writing too?
Rob Pope cleverly and clearly argues that
writing to and writing through, rewriting,
are all forms of creative engagement
we must regard as critical thought and deed.
'We learn by observation and immersion':

the personal transformation Hix worries about,
the 'something more' that happens when sparks
turn into fire, when process and procedures
give birth to writing at its best, might happen
anyway. Let's take that out of the equation,
it can't be our concern. All we can do is help
each other think about how and why we might
take words and arrange them for ourselves.

Each must do that on their own, with the weight
of the past behind them, the invisible future
ahead. There is everything still to play for
and pedagogy cannot help us win. We need
writers who are passionate, will experiment
and play with language, understand the links
between painting, word and sound, how
'the body [is] a language and it talk[s] to itself',

which is how Paige Ackerson-Kiely would put it
if she wrote in the present tense. The isolated body,
the self others can never know, rewrites the world
only for itself. The mode, the process, the stance,
the means and object of individual learning
are all bound up in this. We can never move
beyond, can never know why writers write,
can only and relentlessly pursue lines of inquiry.



Works Cited

My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer, Paige Ackerson-Kiely
remixthebook, mark amerika
'The Difficult Poem', Charles Bernstein
Lines of Inquiry, H.L. Hix
Textual Intervention, Rob Pope
'The Education of Desire', Robert Sheppard


===
Rupert Loydell's latest collections are Wildlife (Shearsman, 2011) and The Fantasy Kid (Salt, 2010), his poems for children.

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (9)

XXXVIII

who cleans their ears

while sleeping

to hear dreaming

commentary:

fliuch some

old words naming

water avens

invocations to rain

also bring wetlands

red wells at the centre

sepal colour is of

beaten bodies

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (8)

XXXVII

Mr President jets off

to a far black country

urges the hungry

to consume

& be his friends

the way a landowner

is friends with his fence

commentary:

one of the banned

names

lus na fola

blood herb

shepherd’s purse

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (7)

XXXVI

two ghettos dreaming

separated by wire

a dream at the front

a dream at the back which

buoys the world

the hinds the hinds

time perhaps to sing

commentary:

watch the flower rise

as it drinks

sit quietly

it happens

were you on the hill

by the lochan

of concealed soldiers

whisper this one herb

robert

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (6)

XXXV

a thrush is speaking

tarragon in the garden

it’s July 14^th

a thrush is speaking all

are born and remain free

and equal in rights

it’d be good to be

smelling buddleia

when the time

commentary:

little sister

white bone

earth sap

I name it

hidden carefully

gun cache in green

delayed deferred

broken red straw

berry

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (5)

XXXIV

efficiently stealing

when I thought I was awake

I left the land music sleeping

throbbing & urgent on

the circular breath of

humans & other creatures

following those narrow paths

that are understood

to lead to the heartland

commentary:

water & whisky

& fishmothered garlic

the wood wild blades

chorus themselves

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (4)

XXXIII

they are not benign

black helicopters

have no ovipositors

commentary:

& the one for the bird

with two notes

cuckoo flower

oh my slender gun

my blinding sun

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (3)

XXXII

before the torrents of rain

Bàgh mu Dheas

Bàgh mu Thuath

before the landslides

Rudha nan Sgarbh

Sgeir bhuidhe

leaving aside

the multitudes of frogs

the Hen-house

the Deer Shed

Maggie Baan’s Hole

Mecky’s Point

now silenced

a people of the sea

the sea

commentary:

the mast of the riverside

butterbur

named & folded back

& back into the hill

into missiles lodgings

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (2)

XXXI

it can’t be said

of the President

he wouldn’t

hurt a fly

commentary:

a little spark

I eat & name

nettle