Plantarchy

What would plantarchy be? the rule of plants. A new poetry magazine with this title carries the motto 'every molecule an orchid', and no pious Green-ness is suggested by shocking pink covers. Something about the ineluctable luxuriance of plant life in all but the most privative conditions? that leaves the wielder of hoe and secateurs wondering which party governs the cultivation ... There seems to be a sense of spawning (when looked for) in quite a lot of the work in this issue, a strongly generative emphasis or drive, but also a shaping aesthetic that results (for instance) in really nice, clean production and editorial choices.
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When Martin Buber looked at a tree he knew the 'constant opposition of forces ... continually adjusted', but saw also its 'stiff column in a shock of light', perceived its 'suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves' and entered into 'mutual relation' with it (but 'the tree is now no longer It'. Among the good visual work here, Jeff Hansen's 'I & Thou' is a sequence of 'layered responses' to, I think, specific contemporary aggression that turns 'thou' into 'IT'. It has the dirty-concrete look of copier-collage, but the text also circle-dances. Each piece is paired with a magnified detail of itself, as if you moved closer and began to know someone. Geof Huth by contrast appears to be grafting various species of typographic figure -- archaic characters maybe, symbols, or kerns -- to grow original unitary images which are designated poems (like Ian Hamilton Finlay's one-word poems) that genuinely stretch the potential of poetic signification, by being (brilliantly) titled: 'Sound's First flight', 'The Muscle memory of Meaning', etc.
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Another Jewish philosopher, Alan Sondheim, is flooding with effluvia, desire, the infinite, mourning enormously, never far from death, in five smeary proses, one quite long. Everything he produces is exciting to read, despite its absurd quantity. Not being on any lists any more that he posts to daily, the regular hits are missed ...
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The magazine's dimensions are generous to writing that wants to stretch the poetic line. 13 pages of Matthew Klane’s ‘re Republic’ sequence spread right across their width, but (as well-trained espalier appletrees) with very deliberate visual patterning. The well-spaced lines belie their lexical density; you can see them grown from seed: ('I text parley / Malcolm X y Karl Marx / atomism y Islam') [17]; 'for the Other, a / the-O-ry // for my mother / myrrh' [23]. Taking time to read into this work, it's exuberant and rewarding.
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In these pages, language sometimes seems psychedelic. In Camille Martin's sculpture-landscape-poem (let's call it that for now) words cut out from magazines vibrate, tucked into an informal trellis: 'volcano', 'telephone', 'Believe' -- a kind of concentration that could go minimalist but here bristles. Likewise, William Howe lets off fireworks with no expense spared: these stanzas are #671-682:
Thief puker -- fever bloke -- / Narwhal fell -- lichen plumb -- / Revel bison -- assay label / Office-pro ground toucan --/
Oh God, they're not 'his Emily Dickinson' are they? (the sequence title is 'translanations'). If so, is it beside the point to go off and try to specify the relationship, noticing en passant Dickinson's own hallucinatory formulations (reticent volcanoes with pink plans, indeed!), as well as the bits in Howe that could be by her (Fever space ... dim / Immortality ... piece paucity ... Fructified instant [except it's actually 'Fuctified', hopefully a typo ...].
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'Plantarchy' the title is acknowledged as an indirect reference to a certain English punk song ... jUStin katKO, the editor, was in London last year, at e-poetry 2005; and there are some Brits in the mag: it opens in fact with 8 pages of outrageous rhyming verse by Jow Lindsay, who's no tree hugger ('gaia, the coyote, restructures this / forest for hansel'). Here too there's a sense that it's all made from the transformation of waste (or into it); and also a systematic interruption of flow (in this case with the names of now obsolete Anglo-Saxon letters). There's a shortish Tom Raworth extract from 'Caller', whose opening could be another rubric for the whole issue: 'nature corrupt nature / romped bound constituency'. And the one critical essay here, by Stephen Perkins, is about Stuart Home and Neoism, asserted as 'the last of the historic avant gardes of the 20th century'. It's quite interesting, but Perkins's association of plagiarism, a basically desperate strategy, with collage, is I hope resistable ...
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This post has been in draft for a week and must be let go. I've enjoyed reading everything in this excellently produced and edited magazine, and would love to comment on them all -- Maria Damon's 'decrepit text', pathetically unstable; Chris Stroffolino's unsettling unreliable polemicist, and plenty more. The next issue is out now.
http://www.plantarchy.us/home.html
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At last, it's raining.

Bookscapes (1)

Journey to the Lower World is a book, with DVD, documenting a shamanistic performance by the artist Marcus Coates, in a council flat in a condemned tower block on a housing estate in Liverpool. It seemed pretty offputting: was this some Beuys epigone with a community arts grant, patronising innocent citizens with a half-arsed orientalism, or was it a fatuous po-mo joke? The publicity postcard shows Coates draped in a deerskin (complete with head and hooves) standing in front of a lift with a small, slightly nonplussed-looking resident and a shopping trolley.
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The foreword, by Mark Wallinger, didn't help, with its casual dismissal of 'that symbol of man's folly, a tower block'. What's wrong with tower blocks is not the architecture, imo, but other kinds of structures. Drew Milne has a great sequence of tower-block-shaped poems that treats something of this subject (would't like to say what his precise opinions are though). I live on the top of a mid-rise council block, with views of the Lyons estate at World's End. I love it.
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Anyway, this book eschews conceptual formalism, with a large-ish landscape format allowing for the wide range of types of content inside: whole-page stills of the ritual in progress (blurry reaction shots of the audience of residents), prose, verse, screenlike or down-the-White-Rabbit's-hole images of animals like those Coates met on his trips into the Lower World, sequential frames of a demolition. As well as by Coates and Wallinger there are texts by the book's editor and publisher Alec Finlay, and extracts from anthropological accounts of shamanism. One of Coates's has been lineated into verse by Finlay. As art publishing goes, this is slightly out of the ordinary. If it seems a bit 'everything but the kitchen sink', that may be appropriate to the event, when large, unwieldy, potentially wild animals and possibilities enter small, domestic, contained lives, to activate, but perhaps also to discharge and convert their anxieties.
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After reading the whole book, and watching the video, I was won over. Marcus Coates was alive to all the possibilities for discomfort of his activities; he also cared (or appeared to) in an unpretentious and exploratory way, for ordinary people and for society. And the shaman thing didn't come from nowhere, or merely from the weekend course in Notting Hill(!): apparently he has been doing things with nature always. Learning to imitate animal cries, for instance. This mode of art practice came to seem a genuine if experimental attempt to contribute and discover, or uncover, something on behalf of a real world. The residents were about to be rehoused. They were looking for a comforting image, or omen perhaps; they were not deluded, but understood the nature of the avatar; and their paticipation, including embarrassment and defensive amusement, seemed really to be an observance of community, or of the desire for it, on the part of a self-consciously tiny minority of local inhabitants.
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Around the time of getting this book, in April, I attended a performance by the brilliant Chris Goode of his one-man show 'We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg', in the North London home of Sue F's friend Jonathan. This by no means purported to be a sacred ritual, and I am certain (I trust) Chris would run a mile from the word shaman, but there were solemnities, as well as sillinesses, and the gamut of stuff in between, and he is after something real. Chris presents with total theatrical command yet a resolutely 'normal' and even slightly diffident manner. And then he goes away, evading applause.
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Anyway, this conjunction left me musing a bit about, well, blokes doing strange things in other people's houses, I guess; and the potential social functions of performance ... But the aim here is to write about the book really. 'Bookscapes' is a new series of publications by Alec Finlay, under the 'Platform Projects' rubric, though his former press, Morning Star, is listed as co-publisher. I guess I first met Alec at small press fairs years ago, when he'd be hawking his exquisite little poetry publications, or you could say minimalist artists' books -- pamphlets and cards -- or sometimes minding the stall for Wild Hawthorn. Back then too I remember him giving a lecture at an art librarians' conference, about Little Sparta. With 'pocketbooks' though, Alec made a significant move into the trade press arena, and did some brilliant anthologies in particular, but also small classics by individuals, all working within an attractive unified 'brand'. Libraries of Thought and Imagination, about books and what they mean to people, and Helen Douglas's photo book Unravelling the Ripple, are my top favourites. 'Bookscapes' seem to be pushing the bounds of the bookshop book again by using a range of formats this time, and taking the multimedia further. I'll write about some more of them.
http://www.alecfinlay.com/bookscapes.html
(An account of the earlier pocketbooks: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr93-2/kelly.htm )
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This post is different from yesterday, because of wanting to write something potentially public about the bookscapes.

in these ends my beginning

Yesterday afternoon a small bookshop trawl. Through the Brompton Cemetery (a picture would be nice, wouldn't it?) onto Fulham Road, and into John Thornton's for the first time. They had a little poetry, including a practically mint copy in glassine wrapper of a lovely Cape Goliard book from 1968 (another picture wanted), Gael Turnbull's A Trampoline, for the ridiculous price of £1.50. Who designed it? Tom Raworth had moved on by then. For the same price I left behind the first pamphlet publications in the early 1940s (but second impressions) of The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding (the latter on hand-made deckle edge paper). There was also a copy of the old magazine Tlaloc (ed. Cavan McCarthy), with some great typewriter poems by d.a. levy, among other things. Bizarrely by contrast that cost £2. I'll maybe pick it up if it's there next time. The shop actually specialises in Catholic theology.

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After a ciabattina, the bookshop at World's End, where having finished with the main shelves I spotted this little brown job in the glass cabinet: Down Where Changed by J.H. Prynne! £15 less 20% discount (this seems to be a permanent offer there). Slightly dented and damp-stained on the outside, but really OK. The clever thing then would have been to put back The Marginalization of Poetry (£6) but I didn't, I stuck with it ...

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Finally at the Picador bookshop (new books) I saw Alasdair Gray's recent Book of Prefaces, a terrific anthology of paratexts, brilliantly designed and illustrated. I'll get this, in due course.

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And all this time I should have been at Tim's and Chiaki's wedding, but we had the date wrong.

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I'm not really sure yet what I'm doing here. There's an urge to gloss (which would have the merit of increasing and reinforcing what I know) and to illustrate (I do intend eventually to get a scanner again -- the old one wasn't compatible with the new PC-- and/or a digital camera) . But this whole thing may be nothing more than a strategy to stop failing to keep personal records. Writing offline's come to seem no fun.

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"I Never read the book you gave me twentyfive years ago. I want you to know that I have Now, and that it is remarkable" (WCW to Reznikoff, quoted in Perelman, 'An Alphabet of Literary History', in MoP. I am hoping this practice, if it takes off, might reduce the interval between book acquisition, reading and articulated response.

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Read DWC slowly and tiredly, yesterday, liking the large round type on the small pages; tonight skimming it rapidly brings it alive more: predominantly I get amazing weaves of sound (such as I have also noted all over my copy of the much more recent Acrylic Tips) as well as glimpses of a specific occasion, the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall (1979).