Simon Turner - Birmingham Jazz Incarnation DVD Extras (3)

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to the editors
of the following publications, where
some of these poems first appeared in print,
like derelict gulls atop monuments:
His Master’s Gaping Overcoat; Cloud Jazz;
Brass Tarpaulin; Bleach; Visible Cities;
Instruments of Twilight; Absolute Bus;
& Spruce Cascade: Poems for Mouths and Lips.
Thanks, too, to the tireless Sally Figment,
the mistress & maker of Strangler’s Books,
“a sax amid an army of trombones”,
where I read these crowded, musty poems
to the public for the very first time,
gloved in twilight & with visible knees.

Simon Turner - Birmingham Jazz Incarnation DVD Extras (2)

Bring Him a Magus With a Carnal Sheen

Wart apples leaning atop stupid autumn. Must you?
Do I lie to a bosky au pair, a withered girl? Selection
of poultry: a junta’s a year’s harm, an androgynous mackerel.
In truth, able leeches belong in brazier heaps, or I’ll lower my fedora.
Killer billows coiled in quiche tufts. Appalling
nukes allowed sand to blot the moon, a very busy bauble. Tarry
these dire, tiled seats. His knees flocked in osprey soup,
he vends a surly cummerbund to Luke, who’s shtupped
inverse heads at High King Thistle, where Trumbo hones
butternut ass-juice deep as a Theremin. But look!
Andy Riley, me & Amber, lacking balaclavas,
caught ruing Anne Hathaway’s Dantooine sneeze.
But look! Booze baulks at Hades, & Andy’s triangular suckers love
a strident guppy. These treats wither Saskia’s teasel hips
below wings of slutty interns, the rabble assumes.
Casks of dingoes froth with treason, crates of fistulae
inured in sodden wine. The witch canoodles lonely, half-suffering,
for the Myth Egg aping Mount Hovis is an instant ruminant.
A hymen schnitzel keys the mastermind’s mawkish
ova (they see it as if it were lingual: so thick & rowdy).
Thieves found anal steam on the ornaments. The burst hoops
allowed for tin oaths; & gunboats, I figured, meant office mosaics.
These eyes leaned sweating in the wind of hyssop’s gong.
Why, I’d damn her ASBO lute as a reek of drainage overgrowth.

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This one's a simple matter of sonic extrapolation, filtered through an imagination that's unhealthily fixated on Star Wars, scatological humour, and soup.

Simon Turner - Birmingham Jazz Incarnation DVD Extras (1)

Eurotrip

Having a sense of low light conditions
without access to a library,
the poem goes on under the right arm.
Tap water & bleach-blondes are high fashion today:
a light blue fabric, clear & flowery, appears in the structure.
This ancient city has never been made of such dirty wood.
In addition, the Jazz Band designs the Sally Army.
The sector’s money clips embrace but do not improve the darkness
(& it is black: black jacket – cut to the knee –
black gloves & black shading, with coils on the shoes).
A saxophone in his mouth, spirits in the air, flowers,
& trees, of course, crazy handles of the storm,
the only open mouth with an instrument.
I mean, is that the Lord and Creator,
the city itself (free newspapers, a number of
fountains, statues, bus stations, &c)?
This is not just a product of his music.
We wait for the end of the song.
The absolute path is difficult.

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This variation was the product of online translation software, combined with a time-consuming - some might even be tempted to say 'obsessive' - constraint revolving around the official languages of the European Union. 

Simon Turner's Birmingham Jazz Incarnation is here...

No, of course, not 'here' in a literal sense, but it has been published, and met its public for the first time at what I can only describe as an epoch-redefining event at the Birmingham Literature Festival on October 14th, where I read alongside Julia Bird and Jan Carson, two brilliant co-authors with the equally brilliant Emma Press, who have taken it upon themselves to publish my crazed Oulipian scribblings.

 

"And what is Birmingham Jazz Incarnation?" I hear you ask.  No, of course, not 'hear' in a literal sense, it's a figure of speech, but I can sense nonetheless through the digital ether that you're interested.  Birmingham Jazz Incarnation is a pamphlet, lavishly illustrated by Mark Andrew Webber, in which one of my poems is un- and remade through a variety of constraints, forms and procedures: one moment it's a sonnet, the next it's the contents page for an imaginary fictional tome from the 18th century; at other times it's a skipping rhyme, whilst in extremis it's reduced to little more than an alphabetical catalogue of its own constituent atoms.       

 

Over the next few days, to whet the appetites of those of you who didn't immediately leap to their Paypal accounts to bulk-buy this genuinely gorgeous artefact after reading that scintillating description, I will be posting some variations that didn't quite make the cut: DVD extras, if you will.  In the meantime, here's a video of Kojack, singing the praises of the industrial heartland which inspired me: