Shotgun Review #5: Loydell's Annunciations

George Ttoouli reviews Rupert Loydell's Dear Mary (Shearsman 2017)

Poetry book - available from Shearsman

Time taken to read: This was my toilet book for a few weeks while I was meeting a deadline. For a week I kept getting stuck on the preface. Then I switched to dipping in randomly, reading a few short pieces in a row or one long piece, to get a sense of the mood, tone, etc. Finally, I read the whole book (exc. preface) in one sitting while listening to ‘Dear Mary’ on repeat – about 52min. I still haven’t finished the preface, not for any fault of the writing, just, well, it’s not poetry.

Time taken to review: 1hr (+ some editing)

Where found: Sent by Shearsman. Possibly for review. It’s hard to tell with Rupert, he’s been sending me things in the post for over a decade. I didn't even give him my new address.[1]

Transparency: Rupert has been a long-standing affiliate for G&P. We’ve published his solo work, some of his collaborations, various bits and pieces. Also that aggressive interview, which is still the most successful in the series, despite being the first attempt. Rupert has also published some of my work at Stride Magazine and smallminded books and also the other one which published the thing he did with Sarah Cave, which they've been talking about on G&P this week. Some might say I’m too close to him, but this is a poetry-only love affair, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think we’ve met face to face since, oh, about 2002, when he told me over a busy restaurant table that I was trying to be ‘too clever’ in my poetry. I’ve always appreciated that honesty and respect him enough to serve the same back.

Time started: 13:15-14:15 to draft + editing

Review:

Anyone wondering where Luke Kennard gets his schtick from could save themselves the bother of digging around and read Rupert Loydell's poetry.[2] Particularly this new book, Dear Mary, just out from Shearsman (April 2017). The hallmarks are all there: the strangely inviting personal voice, the diaristic sense of someone's idiosyncratic life being recorded, a headlong confrontation with religion (tho with less of LK's trademark doubt and self-castigation), and, of course, the wry humour. But where Kennard's humour is the dominant note for a lot of his work - a bass line from which he deviates, much to the disappointment of his audiences, no doubt (stop trying to show range!) - Loydell's poetry carries a less-than-obvious central emotional tone, from which he can go many places. The work isn't pigeonhole-able in the same way.

As a result, it's easier to start with the complexity underwriting this book: the multiply-threaded frame, the sense of a lived experience undigested or filtered for 'meaning.' One of the pieces that most brilliantly encapsulates Dear Mary's range arrives early on, dedicated to David Miller. Starting as if it wants to be a prose review mixed with diary, it shifts to a slim column of images, before returning to a summative prose:

The poet's book has served me well, and has sat literally and conceptually alongside a short book on colour, a re-read novel of occult training and enlightenment, and a fictional exploration of moments when the celestial and human met or even touched.

('"A Process of Discovery"' - the title has quotation marks to denote its origin as a title from Miller).

I didn't check the notes before reading and assumed the book on colour was Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour (which serves as the title of one of Dear Mary's later poems). The notes tell me otherwise - it's not entirely significant however. What's obvious is how well Loydell weaves these aesthetic and personal elements through the book, using journal styles and minimalism and a range of other modes, somehow held together by a deft complexity of tone and emotion.

Colour is the strongest, early feature-of-significance to the poems. Part of the book might be taken as a discourse on painting, on sensory visuals, on the meaning of colour preferences. An early poem ('Lost in Colour') notes, presumably, Loydell's artistic training and how to others he seemed "seduced by colour" - a criticism he wears proudly. (The moment is reminiscent, to me at least, of Robin Blaser sharing Charles Olson's accusation, that Blaser's supposedly rubbish with syntax, in a collection called Syntax.) Of course, the play with voices elsewhere suggests I'm just making a rookie mistake, associating the training with the author's biography, but that's the mode at the beginning: lyrical memoir.

Yet this colour-conversation is where the book's 'realism' or 'interpretability' begins to break down for me. Ostensibly, we're led in the first half of the collection through Loydell's love affair with Italian Renaissance paintings of Mary and the Annunciation, while on holiday in Tuscany. He paints, he swims, he mucks about with colours, he drags his family on long drives to see his favourite paintings in remote churches, only to find the churches closed and no one around to let them in... If you ask me, Loydell must be an insufferable person to go on holiday with.

But this is a projection, a reconstruction. By the mid-point in the book I found myself thinking Loydell's never been to Italy in his life. The whole thing is a set up. All the artists and poets and critics referenced are actually twentieth century or more recent: Francis Bacon, Deborah Turbeville, David Hart, David Toop, David Batchelor (a lot of Davids) - the 'Fra Angelico' is Diane Cole Ahl's, not some 16thC maestro.

The 'aha!' moment for me is in a piece called 'The Pictures Started to Instruct Me': "I wanted all the colours to be present at once. / ... How difficult it becomes when one / tries to get very close to the facts". This is not real representation, but an interrogation of how difficult it is to turn the real world into art. The danger then is that you start to believe these unreal representations more than the world itself.

Moments of real experience in the first half of the collection contribute to a sense of the ridiculousness of artistic living. At the end of the poem for David Miller, the painter-poet gives up for a bit, decides to go for a swim: "A startled lizard runs from the sudden splash." The juxtaposition is somewhat ridiculous because the poem has barely made an attempt to locate the poet spatially in Tuscany. Is he in the sea? A lake? A pool? Where the hell is the lizard and how has the painter-poet even noticed it, if he's jumping into the water? The perspective is all shot through: that's the point: this isn't trying to represent reality. It's interrogating the ease at which we are 'seduced by colour' when we read, or view art.

Which then leads me to the second thread: "a fictional moment when the celestial and the human met or even touched". The 'Mary' of the title is, unobviously, a composite. The notes here reveal the lyrics of Steve Miller's 'Dear Mary' are themselves collaged from the lyrics of several other musicians' songs.[3] So too this Mary, filtering multiple Marys into a composite; they're not really about Mary herself, most of the time, but about the process of hunting down what Mary means, building that picture from multiple sources, making idiosyncratic connections and compiling them into something that seems believable enough to be real, but in fact, like the worlds built in each painting, is just another subjective version of the world, a new world, a world-in-itself.

This sense establishes itself and then, having prepped you through a kind of uncanny accrual of not-quite-right glitches in the matrix, we're offered the first proper discomfort provided by a number of long pieces: 'Shadow Triptych' after Francis Bacon. The three parts are not numbered, and the columns are, in turn, located to the left hand side of the page, the centre and the right, each in straight-edged columns, like the panels of a triptych. The series is in fact a kind of essay, or series of essays. And it's here (and in the later long pieces, particularly 'My Paper Aunt') where the collection's occult influences seem most prevalent.

The essay combines all the threads I've emphasised, but the tone shifts to something unnerving: the tones of Bacon's paintings, the fleshy torture, the sense of darkness inside those faceless jumbles of tendon and muscle. The notes to the poem are a long list of influences, including Bacon's paintings, of course, but also, surprisingly Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase' and, unsurprisingly, E.M. Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the entire 'Shadow Triptych' is a cento, but then, that's the beauty of the whole collection: it never lets you shake off the createdness of its 'world,' and that its 'world' is nothing more than the subjective experiences of just one person, nexused through many other subjectivities. (Nothing more! Hah!)

That said, there's more here than merely listening to someone else's heartbeat-in-language. That's not the point. I started with a comparison to Kennard at the beginning (my association, deployed in expectation (some of) our reader(s) might be familiar), I'll deviate back there now. There are a few poems here that I almost took as sacriligeous. In one, Mary goes online dating while Joseph's out. An angel shows up and "When he disrobed, it was a bit of a shock to see what he'd kept hidden" ('Online Dating Annunciation').

Later, there's 'Alien Annunciation': "according to Mary her pet's barking continued to get louder and louder throughout the visitation." If these had been part of a novella by, say, Colm Toibin, there'd probably have been a witch hunt. Instead, located here, there's a gentility and a kindness - a making senseness to how they form part of the picture of someone trying to make sense of a celestial encounter with the human, the real. The need to make sense, even where it transcends understanding.

These parts are perhaps closest to the aforementioned Kennardian absurdism. Tonally, however, they range out of easy laughter. There's a batch of poems in the second half of the book where humour seems to be the dominant mode, but in context of what's gone before, particular the doomy triptych, it's hard to take them as release or relief.

Or perhaps they're a temporary relief. A bit like the process-driven pieces. A few poems smack of googlisms, lists heavy with repetition and wild juxtaposition, where the ego shines out from the cracks between curated pieces, rather than glowing in the voice-driven language. The more deceptive pieces, the ones where the voice does a very good job of sounding familiar, are the places where I found myself least secure. The process-driven stuff - flarf, Oulipo, those conscious moments of trying to get outside of representational, first person lyric conventions - feels, to me, like it has had its day, especially here, with Dear Mary's unstable eye/I. Those diary pieces, so deceptively inviting, stretch the lyric mode into strange places, finding room to manoeuvre a personal personality within the constraints of very poetry-looking poetry.

Actually, if I had to give you an accurate sense of this book, I'd say, it's a bit like wearing a Rupert-suit for an hour. Yes, really; this is poetry as a record of experience, through and through: lived moments coupled to the reflections on, the long-running tracks of thought to which one person idiosyncratically returns, time and again, coupled to a private journalism, curated through a totalising subjectivity, but one which is always overstretching the rigidity of those boundaries with new perspectives, alternative subjectivities entering through, melding with the pluralist eye/I.

The poems in Dear Mary are knitted from the real experience of a person, filtered through the alembic known as Rupert Loydell and passed on, partial, imperfect, formed into meanings and moments, against which you'll find a flicker of what it means to be not-yourself, for just a moment. If that sounds a little bit Buffalo Bill, well, maybe that's fair enough: it's just the wrong side of understandable to leave me with an uncanny feeling of having been dropped into something too familiar to be knowable.

===

[1] This is a lie, of course, and I should also add, I've had some delightful things in the post from Rupert, including a dozen or more issues from small-minded books.

[2] The fact check elves (OK, read: Rupert) notes that Kennard and Nathan Thompson and Rupert were all associated around Exeter at some point, along with people like Andy Brown (still there) and Alasdair Paterson (not sure if he's still there), latter of whom used to run a reading event, where perhaps they fraternised. The influence is speculation on my part. Also, I've slightly edited the passive aggressive, 'I miss you, Luke' out of the first sentence of the review, for reasons just stated.

[3] My rush job missed the fact that it isn't Steve Miller's song that's collaged, but Rupert's poem of the same title.

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (4/4)

"Fizzy-cola bottles with their light and dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt."

SC:

Not questioning is a problem. I hope I use poetry as an enquiry, or perhaps an interrogation, of philosophy, theology and language.

Sometimes you write poems that are about yourself, your friends, your family which could be read as memoir. Do you think it’s more difficult for women to do this and remain, to the reader, detached as men can? I use characterisation in my poems, partly to avoid this, and so that any details appropriated from my own life are allowed to exist outside of the context me.

So for example, we both talk about faith (or lack/doubt) in our poetry. Do you find that you are asked personal questions about religion?

And, while we’re adopting this serious tone, what’s your favourite pick ’n mix sweet? Mine’s fizzy-cola bottles with their light and dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt.

RML:

I don't know if I have ever done pick'n'mix! I used to like Kola Cubes when I was a kid. And white chocolate mice. Those sherbet flying saucer things too, with cardboard shells that stuck to the top of your mouth.

I was talking – well emailing – Clark Allison earlier about this whole idea of us being present in our poems. He quite rightly said we can only write about what we experience, but I was adamant that I want my poems to move away from confession. They obviously are about things that interest or concern me, but it doesn't mean the narrators are me, or that everything said in the poem is me speaking, or that what happens in them happened to me.

I have no idea if it's more difficult for women to be as detached. I don't see why it should be, and there are plenty of experimental women writers who choose not to write autobiographically or confessionally. It's also quite clear that even the likes of Lowell and Plath construct their own poetic personas. Everything is mediated!

So yes, characterisation, disruptive syntax, parataxis, jump cuts, collage, multiple voices etc are all useful tools to disabuse readers that it's me opening my heart up.

I do sometimes get asked about the content of my poems, yes. It's sometimes interesting to talk about the sources of ideas, but it depends who is asking. Despite our 'postmodernist loss of metanarratives' it's amazing how many universal ideas and stories do still exist, and the idea of the spiritual (or religious) is definitely one of them.

SC:

I think you’re ignoring the epiphanic nature of the pick‘n’mix counter.

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

YES RUPERT, STOP IGNORING THE EPIPHANIC NATURE OF THE PICK'N'MIX COUNTER. - GT.

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (3/4)

"Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a rubber duck."

RML:

Well, I look forward to the new ten poems... Yes, the male presence is interesting, something I've played with in Dear Mary, though more as a possible erotic presence or sexy male hunk than menacing presence.

I love Robert Lax's work, but it's so bare and minimal that I don't often find that it leaves room for associative texts, variations or responses, whereas the annunciation is already part of a complex web of ideas, images, theology, belief systems and associative stuff that one can go on forever responding and reinventing. I mean just that jump from angel to devil to snake to Jim Morrison of the Doors is easy. I can't do that with Lax! (He might have been relieved.)

What I do like is the sense that both Lax and Merton were in many ways recluses who lived apart from the world yet were able to intelligently observe and comment on it. I feel too awash in information, images, texts and music to get that kind of perspective. Though I wouldn't mind being a hermit in Tuscany for a while – as long as I could fly to New York or London every so often. And before you laugh, remember Thomas Merton was the kind of solitary person who sometimes jumped over the monastery wall to drink whisky with his friends and publisher. A civilized way to live, I feel.

SC:

Perhaps. Merton scores very low in Hermit Top Trumps though.

RML:

Possibly, although I think he has high spiritual superpowers which sometimes win out.

Anyway, what about this idea of themes and specifics within a web of stuff rather than on its own. Did you feel the Fra Angelico was outside your subject areas? How did you get from that painting to the ideas you used?

SC:

I didn’t. As you mentioned earlier, the annunciation has a complex web of associative images, texts and references in popular culture, so I came to it through different means. I don’t think I looked at the painting until we were several poems in. I’d written a few poems about Mary previously concerned with the bodily reality of giving birth. At the time of writing the Snow Angel Annunciation poem, I was mostly inspired by Pål Moddi’s version of Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer, the music video of which features the Norwegian folk-singer sitting on the steps of a church near the Norwegian/Russian border in sub-zero temperatures, the church having decided that it was too politically risky allowing him to play inside the church. That sense of faith being silenced and being forced to exist in the margins is present in that poem. Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a rubber duck.

I imagine when I look more closely at Fra Angelico I will be more interested in him. I like monks and nuns… not in a 1970s Nunsploitation kind of way though.

I have this web of ideas developed over thirty years of varying degrees of religious education, misinformation and re-constructed fragments in which to piece together my annunciation poems. Sunday school, Catholic friends at university, Jesus cartoons, religious music, a research interest in mysticism and the Robert Powell movie Jesus of Nazareth left plenty of material to build my new annunciation nest with.

Can you think of any more hermits for Hermit Top Trumps?

RML:

I guess Thoreau has to go straight in the set. Perhaps Saint Francis and some of the Desert Fathers. After that I kind of run out of steam. I don't think hermits is a specialist area of mine at all! If I thought harder it would be rather heavy on Christian mystics and recluses though, despite my shelves full of poets.

Marginalized belief is interesting... Sydney Carter, the poet and songwriter ('Lord of the Dance' is his most famous) writes well about spiritual doubt, and the tension with faith, which of course is much more interesting than people who are sure about everything. My friend A.C. Evans always talks about the 'leap of doubt', with a nod to existentialism and gnosticism, as well as a cynical take on occult and conspiracy theories. My own mix of Sunday school, church and reading liberal and postmodern theology, along with the death-of-god and humanist strands, not to mention fiction by the likes of Charles Williams and Tim Winton has produced my own peculiar take on it all, which as I put in 'Sudden Impact':

      We must look at what

      we see, make up our minds, pay attention

      to surfaces and the different ways they

      catch the light through religious smoke.

This religious smoke, along with new age smoke, and fundamentalist smoke, seems to me to cloud everything.

It's not so much faith being silenced, as doubt being silenced; we are asked not to question at all. And if we don't engage with thinking and questioning we seem to end up with pick'n'mix anything-goes woolly new-age nonsense.

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (2/4)

"Poets can be like the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most of the work yourself"

SC:

I don’t think these annunciation poems would have happened for me if you’d just emailed me a copy of the Fra Angelico painting one rainy Sunday.

Poets can be like the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most of the work yourself. They come along and unlock the mechanism and you think, ‘well, I was almost there’ but, in the end, they did open the jar for you because, before they came along with their jar-opening words, you were just looking at some jam (maybe Marmite if we’re talking contemporary art) through glass, scraping away the label or reading the contents list trying to imagine how all that might come together…

Sad. No toast for you and along comes this poet and out come the jam-words and everyone can have toast.

Slava was the result of me trying to open two jars at once and making a mess all over the floor. The first was the poet Robert Lax whose ekphrastic blue/black poem continues to fixate me. It really isn’t much more than, as you say, mimesis and yet something lives in the words that doesn’t in the Reinhardt painting it mirrors.

Perhaps it’s the poet himself, or, perhaps, something that the poet brought to the painting that I couldn’t.

The second jar was the polyarnik Vyascheslav Korotkin who appeared in the Guardian as photographed by Evgenia Arbugaeva. He’s the real Slava. I don’t know if I imagined a whole new life for him. I didn’t want to get too personal. Nevertheless, his life fascinated me. Turning him into a monk allowed me to work at the two emerging ideas at once. I’ve never met Lax or Korotkin but both unlocked problems I needed to work through and I had to find a way to enjoy toast with them.

I guess I did something similar in my re-imaginings of the annunciation. I wanted to re-introduce elements such as the difficult family dynamics, secrets and unreliable male figures that are erased from the gospel version of the story and work out how those erasures were problematic for me. Whilst also, hopefully, entertaining with my brand of heretical religiosity.

RML:

So, I guess like me, though perhaps with different concerns, you are weaving stories (in poetry) around and from paintings or stories or other poems? I think the idea of layers is one that I found myself peeling away when I started to think about why the Fra Angelico annunciation in San Giovanni Valdarno appeals to me so much. It's not just the image itself, it's the fact it's the least known and regarded of his annunciation paintings, the fact it used to be in a small room behind the church altar which you had to squeeze in to, and then all the symbols and motifs I had to read about to understand. Lilies, porticos, blue dress, abstract floors, not to mention early ideas of perspective; and then the centuries of annunciation paintings everywhere in Western Europe, not least of course in every tiny Italian church you care to enter.

And of course I am fascinated by this asexual, often muscular being, with glorious wings, in conversation with this placid and devotional, slightly bewildered virgin woman, who even as it happens seems to have ideas of 'Queen of Heaven' dumped on her. Where's Joseph in all this? Why are so many of the angels so prettified and resplendent? There's a magical moment being painted here, basically a kind of alien encounter – things from another world arriving in the human world. I somehow wanted to write about all that, hence the variations and retellings of the annunciation story, imaginary paintings by those, like Francis Bacon, who never did and probably never would, paint an annunciation, and a wider set of poems about Italy, colour, abstraction, and contemporary art. The series still seems to be spiralling away from the completed Dear Mary book into new areas, hence our collaboration.

Did something like this happen between Lax and Korotkin for you? I mean Lax does come with various baggage attached: ideas of being a hermit, his murky past in America, his friendship with Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt, the very cult nature of his work: elusive in language and style, but also in its availability! You suggested that sending you a Fra Angelico jpeg wouldn't have done anything, presumably just a Lax book wouldn't have either? It's associative and contextual stuff, plus the personal links we bring as individuals to a subject, yes?

SC:

Yes. I guess so. My nest of words. Your nest of words. The nest of words around certain iconic images. We’re all throwing bits of nest at each other as we interact and consequently making new nests or maybe adding extensions to the roost. Everything from the nest gets used and re-used and you can see the architecture of my brain-nest in my poems. To quote Vahni Capildeo, ‘language is my home’ and I think I can more easily understand the Lax poetry and the accounts of Korotkin’s life and build nest-images with that than I can with the Fra Angelico painting. Although, to contradict myself, I also found Evgenia Arbugaeva’s images a necessary handle on Korotkin’s life and Lax’s poetry is often concretely imagistic.

In some of my annunciation poems, I’ve changed the story completely. I was fixated, for a time, with the idea of a menacingly male angelic presence. The bluebeard figure of Leonard Cohen and the androgynous David Bowie are both symbolic of more complex, contemporary ideas of female sexuality. Both are just as problematic as the original.

It’s a strange scene, something of a monolith, that if looked at closer unravels like a green field, which you can either decide is just a green field and get on with your life or you can lie down and listen to how it’s an infinite number of other things.

You know I think I’ve just thought up ten new annunciation poems whilst writing this. Second book?

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (1/4)

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell recently collaborated on a series of annunciations (sort of), published as Impossible Songs (Analogue Flashback 2017). They talk about ekphrasis, religion, philosophy, nests and pick'n'mix. Also poetry.

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"It would be rude not to leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work"

RML:

Your poems often adopt disguises, appear to be about one thing but are actually about another. I'm thinking about Moomin poems that aren't actually about the trolls, and annunciation poems that are not really, or just, about angels and virgins.

SC:

I blame my Brown Owl.

The first art work I remember making – that didn’t consist of my parents standing next to a strange abstract expression of a house – was a pasta Jesus smiling serenely from a cardboard canvas. I suppose, even then, that was more about lunch.

The sense of the absurd is important in the poems you mention but this absurdism is also underpinned with a serious reflection usually existential. I think poetry has displaced my sense of character and Moomins, rubber ducks, angels and virgins are all fragmented apparitions of my understanding/misunderstanding of philosophy, theology or life. I studied philosophy for a time and wrote more interesting marginalia about Heideggerian shadow-puppets than I did essays about the sublime. I use masks and puppets as ways to express a sense of displacement, either my own or someone else’s.

Writing a straight description of a painting or an event has its place but it isn’t the kind of poetry that I’ve ever wanted to write. This approach loses some of the extra-imaginative content of life. If I went to a gallery, for example, I wouldn’t want to respond to the art work in this way because I would be missing something important in the exchange between me and the artwork. It would be rude not to leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work. Moominmamma wouldn’t approve of such behaviour. The Moomins throw up their own problems. As somebody else’s literary invention, there’s the risk of writing too closely to the original. Something new has to come from the interaction to justify it.

If you want to read stories about the Moomins then there’s this writer called Tove Jansson who does a great job. For the Annunciation, I recommend The Gospel of Luke. That’s my favourite.

The point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the same thing.

The point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the same thing.

RML:

Yes, of course, although ekphrasis is also to do with mimesis and the translation of image into language. But like you I want to bring some different ideas and ways of thinking to my subject matter.

In your Slava poems it is almost as though you invented a character, a state of mind, and a place for him to live, and then wrote what happened. Most of my work gets fixated on an event or idea, in the Dear Mary poems the annunciation, and work from there. I loved thinking about seeing the annunciation through a surveillance camera, or re-imagining it as an alien encounter (which I guess in many ways it was!), and looking at some of the different paintings that artists have done.

There's part of me always thinks it would be better to somehow just get my readers to look at the Fra Angelico annunciations in San Marco, Florence or San Giovanni though... I'm not trying to be modest, but there is a sense that words don't do them justice. But I hope the different ways of thinking about them, and about the whole concept of another world intervening in the human one, is a different experience. It's that intervention that I am fascinated by at the moment.

I always work in series of paintings too.

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

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)

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.

Peter Gillies & Rupert Loydell - Bill Viola

Bill Viola is not your Friend


I never thought I'd get the point
of performance art and film.
White walls made for paintings
are not cinema or tv screens
but this projected light brings tears.

Bill Viola is not your friend.
He's too busy filming life and death,
pouring water over the camera
and working out how silence sounds,
how still moving images can be.

I never thought I'd get the point
of watching videos in the dark
or tolerate reality recycled.
How long should we sit here waiting
for the creep of flesh onscreen?

Bill Viola is not your friend.
He's too intelligent and thoughtful,
explains his work too well.
Watch the man rise, catch breath
and fall; rise, catch breath, and fall.

"Being in a body we didn't own or know."

        © Rupert M Loydell



Bill Viola could be your Cousin


Pitch black at first. Not so low budget
as you might expect, better hold your breath
as his doomed giant lovers hold theirs.
One on each screen afloat,
they'll drown in all this slowed-down sincerity.

Bill Viola could be your cousin
and if you're convinced by his faith in video art
you will stand there like a pillar of salt,
seduced by his Old Testament gusto
and his play of underwater light.

Camera-shy or just a poor swimmer
he leaves his actors to fend for themselves.
They get to rise up from the waters of baptism
although some days, for sure, anything
could be preferable to water-logged transcendence.

Bill Viola could be your long lost cousin
with a film of your classmates in a High School stunt.
Now he says the ocean is a self without a shore
but when his weighty figures plunge down
does your neurotic fear of death truly disappear?

"By the time he felt comfortable enough to ask why,

he was in too deep."

        © Peter Gillies



===
3 of 3. There are more in the meatworld and in cyberspace; Stride has one, more expected at Shadowtrain, and there have been reports of the limited edition series showing up on people's doormats. Including one of the Editors' doormats.

Peter Gillies & Rupert Loydell - Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock is not your Friend


I know I shouldn't be thinking like this.
I mean it's all in the past and we've been
and moved on, but I find myself below glass
watching over and over the blur of a man
as black paint is flicked, poured and thrown.

Jackson Pollock is not your friend,
he works far too large for comfort,
makes too much mess in the lounge
and leaves drips everywhere in the toilet.
(Light olive with spots of dull umber.)

I know I shouldn't be thinking like this.
New ideas are great but up on the wall
they can suddenly seem old. And I can't
help but think of the drunk, brutish painter,
his one-sided fights with poets and friends.

Jackson Pollock is not your friend.
He wouldn't want to be one anyway,
would rather turn the jukebox up and down
pints at the bar before bragging about
his ongoing battle with colour and form.

"The stars are brilliant tonight."

        © Rupert M Loydell




Jackson Pollock could be your Cousin


That's no accident when a can of enamel
is neatly perforated to drip evenly across
miles of canvas tacked to a studio floor.
Quick drying paint goes on easily: no room
left for hesitation, no need for one to hang about.

Jackson Pollock could be your cousin
who stares at you tormentedly so you
stare back at him quizzically.
Perhaps he'll sell you a cheap one
small enough to take home in your hands.

Despite his threats of doing this or that
he tries to stay with his signature style:
pouring red, lavender, pale blue and yellow
interlaced with loops and contours of black Duco,
highlighted with trickles and spatters of silver.

Jackson Pollock could be your difficult cousin
who likes to be gently affectionate one day
and outrageously cruel the next. He knows
how to sulk, how to throw himself in the Hudson
then swim off in yet another drunken rage.

"But you should be getting something for your trouble."

"Help yourself. I should've probably thrown 'em
                                                                  all away a long time ago."

        © Peter Gillies





===
2 of 3. We like these. If anyone would like to contribute their own collaborations along these lines, we'd love to take a look.

Peter Gillies & Rupert Loydell - Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is not your Friend


I never think to read
the safety information provided.
If we crash, we crash;
we'll try to get out fast
with all our limbs intact.

Francis Bacon is not your friend.
He'd smudge your face and pin you
to the floor or bed, pull open
wounds to admire their beauty,
paint them purple, red.

I never think to read
what the critics said,
prefer to trust the horse's mouth.
If he said that's how he saw it
then that's just how it is.

Francis Bacon is not your friend
He knows how time smears flesh
and memory, how chance predicts
the future and that paint can tell you
everything you'll ever need to know.

"Words frozen in my broken mouth."

        © Rupert M Loydell



Francis Bacon could be your Cousin


How self-confident and charming
with his sado-masochistic hair
and gambling smile. So much flannel
with his jutting jaw, fudging
any slack signs of remorse.

Francis Bacon could be your cousin
down at the Gargoyle Club, introducing
you to his obnoxious friends who insist
on discussing your indiscreet walk,
your feeble fear of painful carousing.

Embarrassingly worked up, camped out even,
how can you remain impartial to such threats?
How riveted we all are
by a wildlife sportsman in pads
ripped and splattered into decay.

Francis Bacon could be your Soho cousin
on condition you admire his medical plates,
agree to wear the X-rated goggles,
sit on his couch and snarl for him,
pose as a primate-pope for a day.

"Try not to flinch at what comes popping up out of the gloom."

        © Peter Gillies






===
This is part of a series of (very) limited edition pamphlets produced by Rupert and Peter along the theme of art and artistic vision. 1 of 3.

Recent News

- I've said it before but I think it warrants repeating: Likestarlings is really brilliant. The Livestarlings bash down in London a couple of weeks ago was fantastic, not just for the range of poets, but for the underpinning shift in attentions. LK is using collaboration as a way of shifting attention away from traditional expectations of what a poem is supposed to 'do' (e.g. provide an epiphany about walking through woods, create an emotional effect, give 'meaning'). So even with a great range of poems on show, everyone was on the edge of their seat, waiting to hear how each poet in each chain responded. Likestarlings has also progressed into photography of late, where the reading shift is equally effective. And they've redesigned the website! Treats or what?

- Have been greatly enjoying Absurda's Interview Project - a David Lynch gig. As you'll see from that link, Lynch is still as mad as a bag of spiders. Utter genius. Reminiscent in some ways of David Greenberger's Duplex Planet. There's omething inherently good about the decisions underpinning the interviews and the way they're conducted makes it clear Lynch is on the side of the angels. It's not just in the dialogue, the techniques are incredibly well-controlled, a return to 'The Straight Story' vibe. I like how he starts the audio from the next cut before the previous visuals have ended. Also the weird visual intersperses - like in 'The Straight Story' where he used shots of harvests, here you get weird introductory captures of the locale, like random JCBs rolling about in the rain. Yes, this almost warrants a full on 'visual poetry' blog, but I'm feeling lazy, so it sits in the news.

- It's official: Rupert Loydell, busiest man in poetry. He has a chapbook, Lost in the Slipstream, out with Original Plus; anthology, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh with Salt; and a new Shearsman collection, Boombox. At risk of becoming Rupert's PR machine, we're hoping to run a few pieces from Lost in the Slipstream some time over summer. Stride magazine also has some interesting new stuff up, even if I do say so myself.

- The Poetry Society & Carol Ann Duffy have announced what they'll do with the Laureateship stipend: The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

"The £5000 prize will be awarded to a UK poet, working in any form, who has made the most exciting contribution to poetry in that year.

Eligible works include, but are not limited to, poetry collections (for adults or children), individual published poems, radio poems, verse translations, verse dramas, libretti, film poems, and public poetry pieces.

Nominations for the award will be made by members of the Poetry Society..."

Jury's still out on whether this is another Basho Award. Full rules, and I'd expect judges, will follow in autumn, which may clarify. Either way, the list of eligible works is interesting, but doesn't mention internet publication, where most of the exciting stuff starts (though film poems may well include that kind of thing).

- Carcanet has launched its Summer Sale - 20% discount on all publications throughout July and August. They've also launched an audio library, including John Ashbery, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, etc.

- Compton Verney currently has an interesting exhibition on (formerly at the Whitworth at Manchester University) til 6 September: Surrealism and Contemporary Art: Subversive Spaces. The Editors partook and thoroughly enjoyed. Special mention to the very well analysed display of how surrealists appropriated 'the female disease', hysteria, particularly the arch; and video artist Calin Dan who runs about Bucharest carrying a door on his back.

- Coming soon to a pub in Battersea: On a Trip to Cirrus Minor: poems inspired by the music of Pink Floyd. I can't say that I've been waiting my whole life for this to happen, but it's happening, which is in itself impressive and at least one of the Editors will be there.

- Another event a week later - the xprmntl night at the ICA in London, 30th July, features Geraldine Monk, Chris McCabe, Peter Finch and Jeremy Reed. It's part of the ICA's Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. exhibition, work inspired by concrete poetry of the sixties, including work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Henri Chopin and Alasdair Gray among others.

- And Peter Philpott has relaunched Modern Poetry with a new design and a new vibe. I'm particularly fond of the 'New Readers' sections, amongst other things. Really, someone ought to just compile that list of articles and publish it as a primer under the title, (Because you have forgotten) HOW TO READ. Admittedly, that would undercut Andrew Duncan's bizarre and entertaining Council of Heresy.

Various links added to the side bar...

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (9)

In Memoriam


The Hourglass figures if you don’t mind the walk. That is where you say we will find him. You can recognise him by his gaunt figure, wasting the day at the very point of crux.

‘No sudden movements. Just turn slowly and leave until it is time to come back again.’ Those are my instructions.

I can sense the nights are getting longer. Vampires are coming, dressed in their vicious bunny suits. Their sockets mark a space to the backs of our heads. We try to light candles in there, greased with recitations of the Hail Mary.

I leave a note to myself behind the bar that there is a full moon over the opera house. The murderer will be there too. So twirl your moustache dramatically and walk out into the night.





--
9 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (8)

After Much Thought


I have decided to change teams and follow the hourglass storyline into shadow. Underexposed photos and unanswered questions are more than enough to keep us amused. It seems to fill all the hours in the day.

I use the days simply to filter the nervous system, to exhibit complex responses and specify the correct amount of air and fluid to take on board. Phew clap whoo clap phew clap surrender.

Licking the glass clean, I stare through the pane and hope the murderer arrives soon. Last time I heard he was lecturing up north and reacting to sudden movements. Irrationality demands intervals and accusations; a power of insight to overcome optical illusions and suspicions of underhand behaviour.

A is for a house. Any house. It will never become a home, just somewhere to rest up and hide, keep warm if a little damp, cowering in the boiler room. Buses run every 15-30 minutes and if you don’t mind the walk it is ideally situated for information overload and all your everyday needs.

The central idea is individual creativity and personal excess. Public interaction is encouraged.





--
8 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (7)

Melodrama wth Aforethought


You stick dribbling to the window. Down the pane tangents of sucked lozenges bomb the suburbs. I am friendly to this but it brings no clarity.

People try not to notice, playing at wise monkeys, but the marks are genuine. You are indifferent to these shortcuts, the cherry-wood romances of Johann Strauss.

Then it becomes entirely terrible: This is a conflict in which nobody even bothers to get undressed. Cinderella weeps among her shattered slippers. She will never know.

Music for dancing suggests strings of puppets disgusted with the homophony of vast deserts. Ours is a human enterprise which doesn’t happen. Enter the murderer flexing his muscles.





--
7 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (6)

Magic Lantern


Shadows play games with unformed memories. Your sleepy danse macabre flicks ash from the music box. We are taking it in turns to be grotesque.

A witch flies upside-down in pursuit of her falling familiars. Beneath her, a crescent moon wraps around a cat retelling the past. Each time she passes she fails to grasp it.

But this is to discount jasmine outside our curtained window, lifting gently, tilting at its edges.

You keep dreaming through figures of eight, each one tighter until the knot is tangled. The last stars tense at the lips of your eyes.





--
6 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (5)

Osmosis


I’m sorry, I didn’t realise the story had gone astray. It is difficult to find plot or make headway. Memo to self: build a world with language. Memo to reader: get on with it. This was never meant to be an easy read!

“My reaction was a longing for some sense of necessity behind the work. I’d be dishonest to say otherwise.”

And I’d be dishonest if I said your comment didn’t hurt. But the parcels of books made up for it, along with a visit from a friend. I have other reputations as well, warm hands to hold until the clocks go back.

“It looks like a line, not like a line pretending to be a line. Which is why it is more interesting.”

Early evening sunshine warms the darkest corners of human memory. I am hiding your present from you.





--
5 of 9