ANNETNA
NEPO NEW LOOP #2 |
guest
edited by Sascha Akhtar |
(design/web
by Phillip John Usher) |
Namaste
to all, and thank you to AN for having me. I hope our readers enjoy
the fine selection of works here penned by an international range of
stellar poets. I am also very pleased to present the rare appearance
of our super-special surprise guest stars...none other then Bernadette
Mayer and Phillip Good. Ciao! Sascha Akhtar. |
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sascha Akhtar juggling (multiple things as always) in London Fields
Photo (c) Nofil Naqvi 2004
| Carolina Diaz |
| (Venezuela and London) |
Alas de sangre
Un niño que correTras una figura que encontró en una nube.
(from Mediterránea, 1999)
*
La lluvia penetra por los intersticios
Cruje la maderaDesgarramiento brutal entre la vida y la muerte.
(from Mediterránea, 1999)
*
Tensión superficial
Ondas en la superficie
Se propagan,
Se pierden.
*
Brisa ancestral
Una hoja seca descascara
sobre la piel desnuda
Fuego!
Carolina
Diaz has a particular interest in the integration of Art forms.
She has developed creative work in the areas of Dance, Literature, Photography,
Book Arts and Visual Arts. She has studied and performed Contemporary
Dance since 1990. Her first book of poems “Mediterranea”
was published in 1999 by the Circle of Writers in Venezuela, and extracts
from her upcoming book “Kamikaze” have appeared this year
in their Poetry Anthology. She is currently studying Illustration at
the University of the Arts London and training in Butoh dance. Samples
of her visual work can be seen on www.newbloodart.com.
The conceptual line that links her multidisciplinary work is her interest
in the dark aspects of the psyche, dreaming, death, the surreal and
the unconscious |
 |
Nick Moudry (USA)
No one looks like Dante,
standing in a field. The
field is a void.
I love how your fingers are so cold
(in the noonday sun).
I love how the page was sewn
when the light hit the book.
There is too much in the field.
There is less (more) than there was.
Yesterday it was blue, brown and black
and snow and slush.
We are everywhere,
he smiled.
Nowhere there is light, nowhere night.
*
Language has been given to man so that he may make
A new myth. Must these beings be convinced that they
Read: Irrationality is one element, sulfur another.
My fifth note has a warm
Vessel, is hanged facing the spectators.
Thus one day you will hear the Latin water
Like river water reflecting gulps of fire
From the origins of the alphabet.
It is generally considered that stability is
Psychic automatism in its pure state.
A large blue chrysanthemum displays
Earthquakes of wall & mud.
There's lots of blue here now
& my four corners agree to the silence of an empty room.
*I like living here, where here is a word
that no one sees on paper. The sky
is blue cannot be accurately translated
onto a piece of film. Everyone dreams
inside the surveillance camera. I am
representing something that has
no meaning whatsoever.
You say there are no horses
in the desert, but how
am I to believe you
when I am riding one--
x "o lonely horse"
tonight I am waiting for you, your letter
the one that has not yet arrived
*
The hills were the art & the art I
drew. What was the English
you spoke? The hills were jumbles
I translated as "hill."
The birds were Latin I put
in the air. The birds
started flying & the hills grew grass.
Some became mountains.
At the drive-in they were showing two movies
simultaneously. One over the other & both
with the sound on.
The first was a film of Jasper
Johns creating the american flag.
The second was me at my desk: writing
*
Sounding smart is the same thing as being smart
& I don't like that I only notice things
that I don't like. The only work of art
that succeeds is the one that fails.
Understandably, the other side of the page
was filled with regimented scribblings.
The revolution looks nice on TV.
It is raining. Your feet are not wet.
You created indecision, pasting all the black
circles in a perfect arc along the wall, but
what do we know nobody understands anything.
It's interesting that no matter how one starts
a poem the poem always ends
in a perfect arc along the wall.
(from Everything you say is a mirage)
Intaglio print by Becky Rosen
Philip Good (USA)
Envisage
What went wrong
While I was looking
It happened once“Unrestrained by reality but spurred by desires.”
Perhaps another train station in another city will inspire the words needed to fill this page.
A new way to ask for a cup of coffee:
There’s only so many ways to ask for a cup of coffee. I would like to try them all. If only people understood my diction and didn’t wonder, “I don’t think he’s Christian?”
Waiting for the mail, more books? There was a holiday over the weekend an extra day without mail. Maybe extra mail or it could be like a holiday. There he is, dropping off the mail and Bernadette is going to beat me to the mailbox. No books.
What to do with an empty bookcase?
It’s not like we don’t have books.On another coast there’s some kind of lemon tree that I pick from. We wound them in the wine.
Not long ago and far away everything seemed Spanish. How nice it is to help those who make one stop thinking hateful thoughts, but to start agreeing about changing the direction the powers that be are moving.
There are birds here, a forgotten sound. There are voices here, a remembered dream. A source of wisdom and inspiration encouraging an evening of enjoyment.
Life is not all suffering, it’s funny!
We share information for our own amusement. Power was never our motive. Just trying to identify what we can eat for lunch is enough for one day.
We ship cakes no matter how burnt they look. Delicious where’s the butter in time for the frozen eggs to be brighter than those store bought laid factory style. Cluck, cluck, cluck.
Yesterday’s journey we collected abstract paintings. We saw rocks and minerals as food. Flowers arranged in a state museum brought a need to sit on a bench. Outside a warning of more weather. We returned just in time for the sap to be delayed. Last year’s poems reminded us when to begin boiling sugar water for sweet coffee. We discovered driving is a challenge when your pockets are empty. I dreamt of clean paint brushes to be dipped into the perfect color.Micro-mosaics made out of butterfly wings out of the past, present themselves not in Russia but California. In small dark rooms there’s no memory of a party full of hyper-egos.
If there’s too much history in the room
And everyone’s an idiot
Who’s going to be the chief idiot?It doesn’t matter when the tribe losses control of what they did not have in the first place.
The echo obliterates all doubt that what I didn’t do, that I might of done, still can be done.
After the darkest months comes countless tests to remember the names of each wildflower in the field, near the creek and along the roadside.
Taking exile in roadside writing
We can identify new ways of being
Ways of being new
Ways of making “the old new again.”
Sometimes the people I meet make me think
So what?
Philip Good’s poetry is published in many magazines including, The School of Visual Arts Literary Magazine - WORDS, A journal from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - BOMBAY GIN, And from the swamps of New Orleans - YAWP. A map of his reading appearances include New York City, Paris and Prague. A collections of his work is forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press.
Bernadette Mayer (USA)
Heigh Ho Hum
On the fourth page
Of the new ream
Of goldenrod paper
With a new ribbon
& a new copier cartridge
I feel itchier than ever
Here on the old porch
With an old-seeming moth
Writing on an old typewriter
On an old desk
That used to be my uncle' s
Who' s dead as the woodchuck
Hector killed today with
His old wolf's instincts.
Bernadette Mayer’s workshops at the St. Marks Poetry Project in New York City’s East Village are legendary. Her work extends from experiments in her own writing (such as Midwinter Day, a long poem written during the course of a single day) to translations of Catullus and Horace. The author of numerous books including Scarlet Tanager, A Bernadette Mayer Reader, Studing Hunger and Another Smashed Pinecone. She is a former co-editor of the experimental magazine 0 TO 9, and an editor at United Artists Press. Mayer lives in upstate New York.
Nofil Naqvi (Pakistan and London)
England dies roughly
with much violence in my veins
Dyes my blood purple on the streets
and dark brown on my white clothes.
England drains down the verandah
every Eid with each sacrifice,
we leave it on the sidewalks
for people to curse at. English
tea makes my throat itch like
early mango before the monsoons.I tell my wife, “there is a bit of English
in me, too!” But do they
jump from mood to mood like I do?
I have a suspicion that
they are always calm and collected,
with their eye-glasses, sitting in
their carriages decorated in gold with
seats covered with silk. Would the
Queen talk of blood one second,
then crack bawdy jokes the next?
White on whiteYour own voice embarrasses you
when you are alone and it is bared
of the medium of bodies.
Your voice breaks and falls
in echoing tricklets of white upon white.If you raise your voice at me,
if you raise it as if I had fallen silent
Again,
And you were growing impatient from calling me
If I had forgotten the words before and after
they were spoken
like a cipher
I will let them paint the walls of our room.
Inside our souls they will be painted too, slowly
after living many years in their shadow.And then, when we both lose and forget our voices
(that is, if you resign yourself to this)
we will be comfortable, and
I will stroke your womb
carrying a new voice.
Encyclopaedia of firevestige, visage, vision
monologues with spaces
left between passagespaying special attention
to angle, form, glow
down-shot: shards of lighthiccupping, stifling, sifting
shifting your profile
from right to leftstaring sexless into the camera
onto the canvas and torn images
sown into a collage.
dying as an erotic act:
A new painting to hang
from your wall.
frame dripping
colours swirlingFood: carefully prepared and battered
soup, bread-toast, beaten egg, hash cake
milk and amnesiaPounded to a pulp an ovary
of culinary adventure, temperature
adjusted to climactic and atmospheric disadvantagestripping, tolling, frothing
from the corners
from the bridges of
from the bridges ofwere often punctured,
fragmented
cut into millions of notes
scattered across sheetsand sheets
of grinding and stewing
from cauldrons of caricatures
and candlesticks
and candlesticksit’s costing me a fortune
to support this ringingand tunnels you carve
in my mind, my stomach
you lead to.
Photo (c) Sascha Akhtar 2004
Dee Rimbaud (Scotland)
A RAIN OF ROSES
I fell from the sky,
blazing a trail
of violent flowers:
orange as caesarean sex,
red as shiva-shakti,
crimson as you.My petals were torn away
in the scorched wind:the Sahara wind of you,
mad mistral mistress,
you plucked at me
with triggered fingers,
plucked at me
till I was
but dry stems
and withered seeds.You plucked
and I was undone:I fell to the ground,
a dust of forgetting,
smothering crops
and blanking out the sun.
TO BE BURNING
Day of thunder,
Thor’s domain:
I am full of fire,
dreams of raw bone.Waking screaming,
I fly swallow tailed
thru’ locked wards:
shaking cobwebs
and stained linen;
naked into
the thrashing wind.The sea women haunt me
with suicidal melodies:
songs of the crone moon
echo in their womb.The frost lays barren
my grape garden,
grips it in iron jaws:
the sun whispers
promises of abundance
and purification.I cannot stand
this tenderness:
it unloops me.I leap up
and kiss the clouds,
drink the burning waters,
surrender,
wave a white flag:
unseen
in the white wastes
of frozen night.
Dee Rimbaud is an artist and writer, living in Glasgow, Scotland. He is author of two full-length collections of poetry and one novel: ‘The Bad Seed’ (Stride, 1998), ‘Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels (Bluechrome, 2004), and ‘Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God’ (Bluechrome, 2004). His art and writing have appeared in hundreds of print and internet magazines worldwide. He is editor of The Book Of Hopes And Dreams and The AA Independent Press Guide. His website is at: http://www.thunderburst.co.uk His blog is at: http://deerimbaud.blogspot.com/
Yasotha Sriharan (Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea and USA)
The Lord God Made Them All
When Winston came to town
We learned all there was to learn
About Roald Dahl and knee-socks,
Boiled peas and itchy cardigans.
He ate porridge in the August
Weather of West New Britain Island,
His mustache twitched in narrating
Childhood months in Brighton.
He was a good man, and innocent;
He didn’t understand our shoeless existence:
We bathed in creeks before morning
Assembly, we knew to keep away
From men at the central market
Who chewed too much sugarcane,
Gathering by the sides of bridges
On the weekend nights to discuss
This and that. He left New Guinea
In a series of gesticulations that mystified
Us. His frowns at our tamarind plants
In Milo cans, our disharmonious renditions
Of All Things Bright and Beautiful, a hymn
We thought reminded him of the best of England.
It must have been our dirty limericks
And the schoolyard creek that did him in.
The schoolyard creek,
Thin and deep and tadpole filled.
We swam in it through the seasons;
The tailless dogs on the banks barked.
While underwater, we thought of Lord and God
As separate beings. We garbled our words and kicked.
AgainThe story goes Prince Gautama rose
At dawn to kiss his wife and child
Before setting off to lose and gain
Himself in another form, giddy
From the sensualities of emaciation,
Tempted by the expected, women,
Till the final bliss beneath the tree
Which, incidentally, you sought out
In India, during one of your stays.
How you used to argue the point when
You were a boy, maddening your father
With your resentment against a figure
Who haunts you even how: How could he
Leave his family for God? But it’s not
God really, is it? As a man, you’ve seen
Suffering of a kind that fills the sails
Of the other question you lay before me.
Our happiness may have to be delayed, beloved.
I shouldn’t even speak of delay,
That invention for the earthly impatient.
The lifetimes we’ve had to cross, rocking
In a boat to find what we may have found
Before: this familiar country that unfurls
Itself once again. I speak of wanting you
For myself, that’s what all this is, really.
Go out into the world, I hear its keening.
I’ll meet you there, one day.
Yasotha Sriharan was born in Sri Lanka and spent her childhood in England and Papua New Guinea. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Massachusetts. Yasotha lives in Amherst.
AnnMarie Eldon (London, UK)
ditching each other’s outrecuidance
(sonnet on a midsummer walk)
mesamorphy stakes hostly a
pleasure in physical actioncertain somatatonia
poral the tongue lip tractionl'histoire événementielles de
nos peaux: ces qui allez secpuis – (sans pensées) - humide
dans un clignotement feck-less back along slack translation
no dumb lick-held lead but true’d,trothed: course, lanes, beleafed and sun
drunk. Some estate’s flint walled ghost ’buedwalk/stray antithetical
ouais ouais catechetical
- AnnMarie Eldon
AnnMarie Eldon, an identical twin, evolved from cryptophasic origins in once densely industrialised Birmingham, England. Since September 2001, juggling various personae interiorae, US/UK homes and children, she achieves successful adult differentiation and spiritual equanimity within the mediocrity of a picturesque market town, surviving relative domestic deprivation and hormones.
Poetry at 5 Trope, Argotist, mprsnd, Anemone Sidecar, Aught, Avatar Review, Blazevox, Caffeine Destiny, Can We Have Our Ball Back, effing press, elimae, eratio, foam:e, Guardian, Impetus, Junket, Lily, Locust, Megaera, Melic Review, Mipo, Moria, Nthposition, Niederngasse, Numbat, Pedestal, Pettycoat Relaxer, Projected Letters, Rain Dog, Rock Salt Plum, Starfish, Sentinel, Tears In the Fence, Three Candles, VLQ, Wandering Dog, xPressed, xStream, zafusy et al.
(*PJU is aware that the French in the above poem is purposefully calqued on English, rather than based on standard French. Please don't email him anymore to let him know!)
Benjamin Buchholz (USA)
MOFIRE
Mobilization is an iterative process.
Said Rilke, Your aloneness will expand and become your home.
That is the difference between the streetjunkie
Who dropped his socks to show you the stain
Of his toe
Outside Avol’s BookstoreAnd Jellaludin’s wanderer:
They precipitate inequitable homelessnesses.
They stand on different tongues of fire.
But, in the basal-jointed iteration of our clutchingYou need not even watch the second unit go.
From the lookout tower high on the bluff
Screaming in the EMNT
With two sets of rotating radar on the right hand of the hill
You can see the papal warmth
Where your fingers gripped a frosted metal
Strut.You can see the prints
Even though they are now
No more than silly brown
Stumpf Fiddles.
REFRAD
How odd in the bookstore, not looking for it
Or for anything in particular,
To find Rumi in Dutch.
Like the one hypercritical moment
When all of your chemistry condenses
To insight. (It must be a late night somewhere.
Perhaps it is not even in the lab
Where it happens
But a karaoke bar,
Or a public bathroom,
Or a bookstore.)But then, holding that polyglottal
Thesis and opening it at random,
The matter confronts you:
You must admit you know little Dutch,
Less Farsi, at least
When it comes to the point of practice.This is the quantum legitimacy:
Choose to enter the ex stasis of Coleridge’s Khan
And wake wondering at the script on the ceiling;
Or resheath it
And hear it slip into a fitted,
Prophylactic shelf.
Benjamin Buchholz is US Army Officer currently serving in Iraq. "My poetry and short fiction, sometimes inspired by war and the strange effects of random all-too-human death on the young mortally-unaware spirit of American youth and sometimes on subjects more personal, always interlaced with military jargon, my fifth language, has appeared widely in a few short years. Credits include: The Wisconsin Academy Review, Dislocate, Drunken Boat, Harness, GoodFoot, The 2River View, and others. I was the featured poet and essayist at Tryst this spring and at Surface Online this summer. For a full bib and other oddities please have a look at my new website: www.benjaminbuchholz.com "
Denis Emorine (France)
Untitled
à Lina ramona VitkauskasParfois,
il est difficile de parvenir
à sa fin,
de presser l’épaule que
l’on croit familière,
d’arrêter la respiration
du monde qui parvient
à notre oreille.
La voix de l’être aimé
traverse les jours
et caresse notre joue.
On voudrait que le passé
s’estompe,
qu’il se froisse entre nos mains.
La vie n’arrive plus à
battre des ailes.
Untitled
à Stella RadulescuJe n’arrive pas à me souvenir
du commencement du monde.
Peut-être suis-je trop jeune encore.
La douleur ne me tirait pas encore par la manche,
je ne doutais de rien sauf
des souvenirs échoués en moi.
Aujourd’hui, la marée des jours me fait suffoquer.
J’arrive à peine à ouvrir
les yeux tournés vers le temps.
Je murmure toujours les mêmes mots
et ton nom parfois.
Le gravier du temps crisse sous mon pas.
Je marche en équilibre sur la pointe des jours.
Où sont les mots qui me font
vivre ?
UntitledJe ne suis pas parti.
A l’évidence, je t’attends.
Tu apparaissais toujours au même endroit.
Le vent nous tenait lieu d’horloge.
Il y a si longtemps que nos mains
ne se cherchent plus :
j’hésite au seuil du monde.
Dans ton regard, je déchiffrais
le poème à écrire…
La terre est toujours en attente
d’un amour à vivre.
Mais
quelque part, la sentence est prononcée
contre nous.
Denis Emorine is the author of short stories, essays, poetry, and theater. He was born in 1956 and studied literature at the Sorbonne (University of Paris). His works have been published in France, Belgium, Romania, India and the USA. His theatrical output has been staged in France, India and Russia. Writing, for Emorine, is a way of harnessing time in its incessant flight. Themes that re-occur throughout his writing include the Doppelgänger, lost or shattered identity, and mythical Venice (a place that truly fascinates him). He also has a great interest for Eastern Europe. Denis Emorine is part of the editing team at La Nouvelle Tour de Feu and collaborates with various other reviews and literary websites in the U.S., Denmark, France, Germany and Japan. In 2004, he won first prize for his poetry at the Féile Filiochta International competition. his poetry has been published in Pphoo (India), Blue Beat Jacket (Japan), Snow Monkey and Cokefishing (USA). No Through World translated by Phillip John Usher was published by Ravenna Press in 2004 - click here for more information.
