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Showing posts from 2016

Sequester the Bile

Combined with the Brexit vote disaster, Donald Trump winning the American election makes it clear that we have arrived at an historic moment when the idea of Progress itself is being turned back, when truth no longer matters, when the existence of humanity itself faces the abyss (Fascism, climate change, nuclear war, you know the list). As you know, I am dismissive of the portentous claims of Poetry, but there is a certain attraction to the Romantic image of the heroic poet standing against the apocalyptic storm to bellow ‘fuck off’ to the Darkness (I paraphrase obviously). In that shocking Trump week, I was reading a medical thing that talked about a process called sequestering bile. This seems obviously a metaphor for the requirement of this moment. It occurred to me that if poets were going to mean anything there had to be a global chorus that sequestered the bile of Trump etc on the 20 th January coincident with the Inauguration Ceremony. Poets would raise poetry to the status th

Remembrance Sunday

My grandad fought at the Battle of Kohima (Burma) in 1944. I've written this as a memorial to him (Ted Hoban). Kohima What a marvel is ancient man!   tangled propagation delayed to the end the divine sepulchre of life, tennis court overrun, bayoneted and shot extreme separation anxiety in dying or isolated from the body when pernicious lists are dry springes – when prefixed mourning   counting toward gestures of weird bread/wine ignore the recognition of absence, the suffering of absence. A petrified destination so dark it’s not like sleep, Austere black as anaesthetic, but One null device unannealed ignobly saturated in foreign rain will be no more string, strategically and in the light miss you to would miss you

The Mathis der Maler Question

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One of the great pleasures and stimulations of working with artists who connect to the cultural moment that is Bury has been the development of the personal creative dialogues that have blossomed over the years. Lots of collaborations have grown out of the confluence of artists meeting through Bury. Some of them have even involved me, as an artist rather than curator. The most recent is the new 'Place' project with Jayne Dyer which has dragged me back into writing poems. One of my last before my 'poetry retirement' in 2010 was my poetic response to a question that Riiko Sakkinen posted back in 2009(ish) - the eternal question for artists - how does the artist engage with the revolutionary struggle (or words to that effect)? This resonated with me because (not a lot of people know [or care probably] that) my favourite composer is Paul Hindemith and my favourite piece of music (since 1982 when I first heard it) is his Mathis der Maler Symphony.  The Symphony is the o

Last Things

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Except for the poem "Israel" (published on this blog) I haven't written any poetry since 2010 - poetic silence from a combination of Bury workload, more exciting creative possibilities, and the sense that I had reached a point where to write was to repeat myself. When Jayne Dyer and Wayne Warren started work on their exhibition in the Bury Sculpture Centre, they asked initially for an essay for the catalogue, but then changed their 'demands' to a poem. I said OK but didn't actually think it was likely to materialise.  It was only when I walked into the gallery and saw the installation forming that I realised that I had  to respond poetically, as the extraordinary balanced moment of beauty is beyond description or explanation being relevant. So I wrote:  Last Things forward past last things, minus one, it is all happening too fast as iff propagation delay echoes shicho Like now: and I cannot keep up capacitance I am bicontinuous counting interar

The Bury Poems

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Talking about the publications of the Text Festival, I pulled out a copy of The Bury Poems from the bookshelf, and was surprised to find alongside Tony Lopez, Robert Grenier, Ron Silliman, Geof Huth, Phil Davenport, Carol Watts and Holly Pester, there were three poems by me. I'd completely forgotten. On reading them, I only just remembered writing two of them, and had no memory of the third. The second was inspired by something Riiko Sakkinen wrote, so I think I will save posting that until November when his exhibition opens in the Bury Sculpture Centre. The other two are below.  You can purchase the Bury Poems from the Bury Art Museum shop.  (The Art of Pedestrianisation referred to in one of the poems was going to be the title of the next book after my last book  The End of Poetry   ; Strangely I was reminded of what this was going to be about this week at the Royal Academy - hope this isnt a sign of the return of the poetry virus). The Tragedy of Althusserianism The t

The Australians Are Coming (to Bury)

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Over the next week/month Bury celebrates Australian contemporary art. On Saturday afternoon (yes, I know it's an odd time), two shows - one an installation   Illuminating configurations : re forming  the line; edges, splats and cuts  by Irene Barberis and (curated by Irene) a survey of contemporary Australian drawing featuring 100 works. I'm very excited to see Irene again, we first met in Tokyo back in 2006 and it's always a pleasure to see her and her work. (some of you might have seen her installation in Bury alongside Mike Parr in 2011).  Both shows run to  13 August. The  Contemporary Australian Drawing has organically evolved from six previous exhibitions around the world, from Chicago and Rome to Dubai. The participating artists  were asked for a visual response to two texts on writing/drawing, taken from essays by Serge Tisseron and Michel Butor, “All Writing is Drawing’, and ‘the Space of Writing, what is that?’.    All artists were supplied with a standar