A new interview with me about poets and technology

There’s a new interview with me discussing poets and technology over at
Nic Sebastian’s Blog Very Like a Whale.
1. Characterize your general attitude as a poet towards technology.
The end of hope. No, I’ve worked with new technology in publishing for almost twenty years, so a lot of my immediate thinking here centres around mark up languages [...]

Four poems from “Radio Nostalgia”

Radio Nostalgia
Paperback
92 pages
November 2005
ISBN 1-904614-19-1
Here are four poems from Radio Nostalgia “The Journey”, “Loose Meat”, “Black Flake” and “The Curtain”.

 

 The Journey [1:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Loose Meat [1:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Black Flake [1:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 The Curtain [2:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Events unfolded

Another poem driven out of a workshop challenge from Roddy Lumsden, though this naughtily ignored the terms of the challenge and was co-opted by news events unfolding in Austria and the USA of family’s held in captivity. The Fritzl case was one thing echoing in my mind. Then there was the Garrido case. But [...]

A little heresy does you good …

The Third Church of Christ Psychopath

In the Third Church of Christ Psychopath
no ruined mothers may pray for dust. Occasionally
unelected Elders order random executions of executives
that priests on weekdays covertly choose as saints.
And large-scale whippings often ensue on traditional
Nights of Holy Disaffection. Such nights being wholly charged
with miraculous bouts of ritual boasting from the grave.
On Tuesdays, [...]

Valedictory poems

Halving

There is a place I could feel at home
beneath a catastrophe of wires
in this white evening under plastic stars
I could feel all the warmth of the room
endlessly in glass in all its orchestrations and might
leaning through wet eyelids
with the valley held in frame despite
or beyond the singing shade where kids
parade in toiling sheets laughing there,
under [...]

Poem for my father

The Weapon
for Isobel Dixon
Waving hello through the Fiat’s fumes, we were waving goodbye,
a film in amber fields of Cornish shade and wheat,
yellow jerseys and a crop duster — that Corsair —
hurling its shoulders over seven-year-old dream-white air.
You had yellow fever in some antic grey chassis, too, mid-
Pacific, gauntleted, hung at my mother’s lips, that hand-painted
lilac [...]

Seated, hands planted firmly, so

The Writer

He sits in the fraying shirt with epaulettes,
hands placed squarely on the knees, so, loyal perhaps,
back taut. He sits in the beach-dreck chair
facing the south window, the long, taupe, negligible
oblong, where we hear (should we lean)
such tremendous sounds as the landscape affords.
He imagines tart packages of darkness in rotation,
winds over plantains, young birds, rasping [...]

The family have been informed

This piece stems from the Bush/Cheney days. I still like it. It’s fascinating watching British TV now, as the whole war is disentangled in an understated, completely devastating way. A monstrous saga, still not at an end, and powered by abstract conviction about the world and its desirable shape, its desirable resources. One is left [...]

A family affair

Here’s another filmic poem. I like to write from the perspective of a film maker, and often move around the poem in the way a camera man would. Checking the angles, looking for the cut away shots, adjusting the lighting to build the scene up. This poem takes place in an undetermined Latin American town. [...]

What Freddy Ricketts said …

Charly Whelan’s mam

Charly Whelan’s mam was a fucken whore,
her fanny big as a dustbin liner.
It would eat you up, shoes and all, then roar
through the panty lounge with air fresheners
for perfume, so Freddy Ricketts said.
She did twos up and nobody noticed.
Except for Big Dennis from Birkenhead,
who loved her pussy when he was shit faced
and [...]