You need to be following current affairs in the UK at the moment to appreciate this visual pun. In particular, the resignation from Parliament of Tory MP David Davies, who is now casting himself as an unlikely successor John Hampden (look him up on Wikipedia) as a champion of traditional liberties and fundamental freedoms dating back until Magna Carta.



• Christopher Major is a regular contributor to IS&T

• Christopher Major is a regular contributor to IS&T and this latest piece will have strong resonances for anyone traveling around the UK during the summer holiday period.

Once again our favourite concrete poet Chris Major has a pertinent comment to make about current affairs...

• Christopher Major is our favourite concrete poet.

• Christopher Major is a regular contributor to IS&T

• Chris Major is a regular contributor to IS&T.

The Tiger







The Paper Clip Men


Slightly bent
And – spent around
The edges
The paper clip men
Dance – wildly on
The ledges.

 
• This is Deborah Gordon's second appearance on IS&T, she says "I began writing at the age of seven and since then have never really stopped. I like to experiment with all different styles and mediums and the concept of movement."

Regular IS&T contributor Chris Major starts off the week with two highly topical concrete poems...

Victorian Novel


I first saw you
                                half way down
                                                                    page four
                                                                                                    surrounded

in a paragraph
                                I knew it then
                                                                    that you and I
                                                                                                    would be more than

just background
                                characters
                                                                    but we would
                                                                                                    have to wait

until the bottom
                                of page
                                                                    seventy eight
                                                                                                    before we would

eventually meet
                                and then wait
                                                                    yet again
                                                                                                    until the bottom

of page three
                                hundred and sixty
                                                                    seven before we
                                                                                                    kissed

if only
                                this wasn’t
                                                                    a Victorian
                                                                                                    novel

we could have
                                fucked
                                                                    at the start
                                                                                                    of page
                                                                                                                              six


• P.A. Levy says... "I'm a Cockney sparrow now living in exile in the beautiful Suffolk countryside."

OF BEAUTY





REGRET



• This is Deborah Gordon's first appearance on IS&T. She says "I began writing at the age of seven and since then have never really stopped. I like to experiment with all different styles and mediums and the concept of movement: To make the words leap from the page or dance their way into a verse. I live in the South Coast of England with my husband and 2 feisty cats!"

We'd like to wish all our readers – all 3500 of you – a Happy Christmas and here are some seasonal offerings by Tish Davis, Maureen Weldon and Chris Major...


Two haiku by Tish Davis

virgin snow
a young boy runs ahead
to warn the rabbit
 
  ***
 
these woods again
a leaf frozen
in the spider web


• Tish Davis lives and works in the US.  Her haibun have appeared in Contemporary Haibun Online. Recently one of her haiku was recognized as a Poem of Merit in the R.H. Blyth Awards for 2007.


Like Soap Bubbles by Maureen Weldon

Winter: like soap bubbles
in a washing-up bowl.
This will not last,
this cup, that plate,
the garden reflecting in my eye.
Or my lover – he used to hold my heart –
who has a golden tongue –
a gift for music.

I brushed his body
with my long red hair.
It was Christmas then,
it is Christmas now :
green crates of decorations,
bottles of wine, flickering candles.
I see them on my kitchen window,
mirrored in fairy lights
and parcels of secrets.

From the hall, three little boys
Are singing Silent Night,
to the rhythm of their money-box.
Now my daughter shuts the door
the sound goes round and round.
In the sink the suds have sunk,
In the centre: a star.



To poems – one concrete – by Chris Major

PROTEST POEM
 
Every Christmas
it's the same:
given without
much thought,
the perfect choice
for a festive season.
Oh, there should be
stickers everywhere,
for they are not
just for Christmas;
because the novelty
soon wears thin,
and abandoned,
pushed aside
they are cruelly left,
good only to blame
odd farts on..........
..........bloody sprouts.


 SOMEWHERE (footprints)
 
 
               soon her
            step will fill:
        flowers 'n' cards
      as guilty neighbours
      churn to snowy slush
       a blank white page
         of garden path.
 
         Too little then,
         and too late,
         all print that
         is this poem's
             shape.


• Chris Major is a regular IS&T contributor

Today we've got two pieces by a new contributor – Caroline Maldonado – a concrete poem and a prose poem. And, in case you were wondering, the tango is danced in a figure of eight pattern.


TANGO IS

                               is


            Tango                               a                   



                              sad


            thought                          danced.
               


                    that                   be
                      

                               can



UNDERWORLD
                   
A safe room.  From here I can see the sky, violet before dawn, and the river, black, sucking up lamplight.
    Light from a neighbour's window slips through the slatted blinds and stripes the kitchen floor behind me.  Somebody coughs, and laughs in their sleep. The fridge sings and the plumbing yawns like a distant train. 
    The river below.

                    *

    …air and dust tug it from her fingers: it cruises round Sainsbury's car park, dives under a departing car, where it catches on a wheel round and round and round out to the street, is blown under the 266, under lorries, under Fiat and Mercedes; it flattens, rises again, up over the pavement to slap the lamppost, catch a branch of the cherry tree, hang there one-armed, in the sunlight, waving to the world – it falls again, hovers over guttering until a final gust….

                    *

Beneath city streets sewers swell, smell of sulphur, tunnel waste.  In a rats' playground men build shelters of chipped wood and tin. Bottles and needles are a game for their dogs: tap and roll.
    "I've messed up good this time."  He looks away.  "Sometimes I feel so sad I could cry.  Sometimes, I could cry."
   
The train doors open, heave a sigh, expelling breath and passengers – sssh. And then the voice:  Please mind the gap.


• Caroline Maldonado lives in London and Italy and has published poems in nth position, Obssessedwith Pipework and The Interpreter's House.

UNTITLED
(so as not to offend the Sudanese Government)
 
 
                0          0
                    ( '     '  )       
              ( )      Y      ( )
                (    '     )
                  ( ) ( )


TERMINAL?
 
 
This fine line that flows to terminate at these flexing  fingers.
 
                                                 Shortens by half its length.
 
                                              Suddenly grows darker . 
 
Transports away cravings as he removes the makeshift
 
                                                                            t
                                                                              o
                                                                             u
                                                                            r
                                                                              n
                                                                            i
                                                                          q
                                                                            u
                                                                              e
                                                                                t


• Chris Major is a regular contributor to IS&T. Check out the right-hand sidebar fr details of his new e-book.

This multimedia treatment of T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock received a name check in the books section of this Saturday's Times newspaper, so we thought we'd track down the clip and let you see it for yourself. The animation is by Everett Wilson who says "I produced the visuals for this poem by T.S. Eliot in the fall of 2001, during my brief time in the Media program at the University of Lethbridge. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, an Animated Rendition of T.S. Eliot's Poem appeared in the 'highlights reel' of the Melbourne International Student Animation Festival, which traveled to select universities across Australia. After receiving feedback on YouTube, I replaced the original narration with T.S. Eliot's voice in this 2007 revision."



 

i'm all right now.



• Landon Morgan says "i'm twenty five. i grew up in bartlesville oklahoma. marketing degree from OU. studied abroad in taipei, taiwan. film school in vancouver bc canada. graduated with "honours"...stupid canadians. moved to nashville, played hide and seek with success. for the past two years i've worked in santa monica, miami, boston, nyc...made a decision this past summer to move on from the freelance lifestyle and stabalize myself in nashville. i find much happiness playing in my memories. fifty years from now in a retirement home somewhere i will be bragging how i was an associate producer for the 2006 cmt awards. then i will die a lonely lonely death. i've purchased a contract on a condo in nashville, scheduled to be completed the spring of 2008. Who I'd like to meet: strangers are just friends you haven't met yet...and some of them have candy.
www.landonmorgan.net

Time for another example of multimedia/e-poetry – this time The Foxhole Manifesto by the US poet Jeffrey McDaniel. The running time is just over 4 minutes and the animation is by Nick Fox-Greig.

This is another animation of a Billy Collins poem - The Dead. The animation is by Juan Delcan of Spontaneous.

When we set up IS&T, one of the genre we wanted to cover was e-poetry in its broadest sense including ...   more »