Inspiring Stuff #10

Space Invader Keys

With / antojeda.com

Inspiring Stuff #9

Adorno on Hobbies





"I have no hobby. Not that I'm a workaholic who wouldn't know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies -that is, activities I'm mindlessly infatuated with only in order to kill time- if my experiences had not toughened me against manifestations of barbarism that have become self-evident and acceptable. Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would make a mockery of them." -T.W. Adorno, from his essay "Free Time" (1969)

Inspiring Stuff #8

Anne Carson: "The form hasn't emerged yet of the thing I'm working on."

INTERVIEWER

I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered, flawed and tattered.

CARSON

In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.

Text stolen from this interview in the Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

Inspiring Stuff #7

Cannon Magazine: No. 2

I stumbled upon Cannon magazine yesterday afternoon in the LRB bookshop.

Edited by Phil Baber in Amsterdam, it is filled with poetry, letters, quotations, observations, and an editors note that runs throughout the magazine as a series of Bernardo Soares-esque diary entries.

It is printed on yellow paper. The front cover shows an abstract spillage of some sort. The back cover seems to be a photo of a man gluing grey office carpet tiles to a floor.

The spine carries a quotation from Wallace Stevens:

"It is possible, possible, possible. It must be possible."

Inspiring Stuff #6

The Surreal Object: Sketched thoughts on Poetry, Duchamp, and Things 

I've always felt that Surrealism was at its best when experimenting with objects.

In searching for a 'physics of poetry' (Breton's words) it exposed and reconfigured the 'everyday' in ways that, for me, are even more radical than the film experiments of Un Chien Andalou or Dali's photo-real dreamscapes.

Man Ray

...Or if not more radical, then at least more immediate somehow, more unsettling. They insist on a new way of looking at very ordinary 'things'.

I'm not sure how true this is, but I read an essay recently on the relationship between the work of Marcel Duchamp and American poet William Carlos Williams which seemed to suggest that the path to American Modernism could perhaps be mapped in the following way:

European Realist Painting/Sculpture > European Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Modernism (Which crystallises the abstract and draws out a more definite focus.)

American Modernism then insists upon a distilled 'Abstraction' that brings 'the thing itself' to the foreground.

Dada/Surrealist experiments with the snow shovel or urinal for example.

Marcel Duchamp

But I'm jumping ahead of myself really... What I wanted to say was that I was surprised during a recent visit to the 'le Surrealisme et l'objet' exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris that my first thought was of Carlos Williams' Poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow':

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Again, there is the intense focus on the object itself.

Then later, trawling through the Internet for information, I discovered a concrete connection between Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams.

My initial thoughts are that the object intersects with the poetic at two key points:

1) Object as the fulcrum for a wider narrative
2) The 'uncanny object': A moment of very ordinary disquiet

The first seems to share more with Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow - The theatre stage prop, or gun glimpsed on the wall in the first act of a play by Chekhov. The second functions as a tripwire, a perfectly structured metaphor.

I like both.

 Salvador Dali / Alberto Giocometti

Inspiring Stuff #5

Jacques Brel

"... Even if it's dangerous... Even if it's impossible... Especially if it's impossible."

Inspiring Stuff #4

Poetry, Pret a Manger, and Luke Kennard

I'm convinced that 100 years from now, academics trying to make sense of Britain's contemporary literary landscape will divide writers into 2 categories:

1) Those who reference Pret a Manger in their work
2) Those who do not

The former will be hailed as having truly understood what it means to be human and living in the early part of the the 21st century. The latter will not.

You can write expansive novels on the interconnectedness of societies, on the fascinating/terrifying impact of emergent technologies. You can riff on the way twitter and social media have toppled despots or served as the catalysts for riots/uprisings but if you're hoping for longevity, you need to capture the heartbreak of buying a tuna baguette, announcing 'it's for here', and turning to find all the tables are taken.

If Nicholson Baker had been British, and born later, Mezzanine would have mentioned Pret a Manger.

Luke Kennard mentions Pret a Manger at least once as far as I can tell and so, according to my basic ranking system, he understands fully what it means to be human. He is currently my favourite poet.

If Dostoevsky had been British, and born later, Crime and Punishment would have mentioned Pret a Manger.

I don't feel as though I know enough about poetry to correctly analyse Kennard's work or to describe precisely why I like it, but I will bullet point a few thoughts and quotations below and hopefully some of it will make sense. I'm also only going to reference his 2012 collection 'A Lost Expression' because it's the only one I have to hand and it's cold and I don't want to get out of bed to find another one. He actually doesn't mention Pret a Manger in this book.

A Few Thoughts on What I Like About Luke Kennard's Poetry with a Few Quotations

- The exploration of the absurd in the everyday (or vice versa.)
- Humour, used as both weapon and exploratory device.
- The battle between self-determination and a world determined to impose it's own sense of chaos upon the individual:

This'll be easier if I try to give you an analogy. A
Parable. Okay. Let's say I'm running a cattery.
No, let's say I'm trying to steal business from an 
existing cattery by touting my own domestic 
cattery outside the official cattery gates...

Then later:

... I've been inundated 
with cats. Scores of them. I can't afford all the food.
I don't remember whose cat was whose. Some 
of the cats are dead. The constant yowling and 
meowing... No, actually, that isn't what I'm 
trying to say at all...
- [Jerimiah] / [Man in his 30s, professional. Shirt and jacket, tie.]

- The sense here that even in imagined situations within imagined situations, the hero has no control over the world or how he would like to describe it. (Later, the character is in charge of a tannoy
system that will only communicate feedback.)

- That his writing plays with language as much as imagery. A similar Russian doll effect is applied to language in the poem Leather-Bound Road:

It's what the singer does between the words
that makes the words the words and not just words.
- Leather-Bound Road

And, flicking back quickly to another poem, I've just remembered a similar effect through repetition:

Today The Sunken Diner is more or less empty,
everything sequestered to its relevant museum:

Museum of Coffee, Museum of Pancakes,
Museum of Ticket Stubs Dropped while Fumbling for Change,
Museum of Cigarette Cartons You Knew Were Empty
but Checked Anyway. Museum of Lowered Gazes.
- The Sunken Diner

There's more to be said about what is happening here than I'm able to say about what is happening here. Note to self: maybe google 'Constructivist Poetry'. It makes me think of Matthew Welton's pamphlet Waffles. This may or may not be a valid connection.

- His ability to craft similes and metaphors that make you feel as though a rug is being pulled from beneath you. Sometimes he makes me think of Simon Armitage. This may or may not be a valid connection.

I'll stop now because I realise I've turned this post into a rambling list and I think I've made my point. What was my point? Oh just to say that I really like Luke Kennard's poetry.

You can, and probably should, buy 'A Lost Expression' from Amazon.