UNHEARD OF
Bodies in cars
Headlights and horns
Me first
Not paying attention
To any other homosapien
Trivial
Is all contact
Staring at the perception
Under our gray matter
What table of contents
We must attend to
Meantime
Shrugging all
Mannered methods
Behold the stampede
What rare find
The novelty of respect
A simple gesture to gift it
Yet none
Will take the first step
• Hailing from the Southside of Chicago, Tim Kucharski was a frontman for local hardcore veterans Insult to Injury. Since that time, he has continued to craft words of urban blight and human plight . His work can be found on the Internationl Library of Poetry and www.thugworks.com A new book of his work will be out in Summer of 2008.
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Friday, November 30
Unheard of - new poetry by Tim Kucharski
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 30 Nov 2007 07:25 PM GMT
Wednesday, November 28
Two new concrete poems/caligrams by Christopher Major
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 28 Nov 2007 02:38 PM GMT
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. Monday, November 26
A pair of 'water' poems by Mark Leech
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 26 Nov 2007 11:36 AM GMT
Of Water
This distance is all flood. A kiss intended might drown a metre short. Let drop a stone upriver where water eases through the bridge, and no ripple can puzzle through to me in Hammersmith. But we will swim dreams. You'll breathe mists all week to cuddle me. I'll be a fleck of rain, a nightlamp on our window so you know I haven't felt the tides withdrawing from uneasy shores. One hand each side of heaven will cup the sun, top the current with our thoughts, light the flow up and down with messages. We swim dreams. You float an egg on the river. It hatches in the kiss I launch upstream, home. Of Water 2 (11.8.07) This loving is all rivers. You may overshoot our landing stage and reach with dripping oars towards the shore, my stretching hands, or in a sudden ebb I’ll sit, slack, surprised, until your forceful push restores the chopping of waves across my bow. Who is the water? Who the bank? We both contain the soft embrace of earth, we both can flow, or surge, or clap against the rocks. When you got into this boat with me, we cut the course we rowed. Since then, we’ve grown to let the current lead us on, taken new cargoes from the reeds. Who is the water? Who the bank? I love this journey to the sea. • When not being pursued by long-dead poets, Mark thinks about his forthcoming collection – London Water – to be published by Flarestack. www.myspace.com/markleechpoetry Sunday, November 25
New blog from IS&T contributor
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 25 Nov 2007 06:45 PM GMT
Regular IS&T contributor Gwilym Williams has just launched a new blog on poetry related topics. You can find it here... http://poet-in-residence.blogspot.com
Ben Borek podcast now available
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 25 Nov 2007 10:18 AM GMT
We've now got a podcast available of Ben Borek, the author of Donjong Heights, reading the prologue from the book – you can see a copy of its cover in the righthand column. Just click on the attached MP3 file. Donjong Heights
is published by Eggbox Publishing www.eggboxpublishing.com/store.html
– price £7.99 (with free
P&P to all UK orders).
 1 AttachmentsFriday, November 23
Leaves by Gill McEvoy
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 23 Nov 2007 08:44 PM GMT
Leaves
Folded boats of pink almond leaf float down pavements in the wind, bright coins of beech jink and shuffle in the pockets of the trees, crumble of dry tobacco dust in gutters, the tulip tree is holding on to leaves of bright green, bantam bronze, refusing to let go, the horse chestnut frees a last enormous leaf which settles on the ground. An upturned hand. Open to anything. • Gill McEvoy Wednesday, November 21
Prinny's Eye - a new prose poem by Mandy Pannett
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 21 Nov 2007 07:12 PM GMT
PRINNY'S EYE
The Brighton Lanes are popular with tourists, draw people through them like the moon on waves. The occasional person, or small pebble, may be left behind and lost. It reminded her of a pebble, the round of it, its hard to the touch; his eyeball, just the one, copied and painted for her like a portrait but much better than that, set in gold as a locket to be worn on a chain. The fastening was intricate, a secretive catch; not many people could guess she was wearing the Prince Regent's eye. Maria Fitzherbert would keep it for ever, nestled and safe on the pulse of her throat, long after the days when his eye began wandering, roving far from her, forgot it had promised to see her as his wife, shut itself tight to avoid inconvenient vows. • Mandy Pannett runs an arts cafe, supports two local writing groups and enjoys giving readings and running writing workshops. She has two poetry collections from Oversteps Books: Bee Purple and Frost Hollow. Monday, November 19
The Poetic Revolution Begins Here by Julian Stannard
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 19 Nov 2007 06:37 PM GMT
The Poetic Revolution Begins Here
Questo bombardamento poetico sulla città vuole lanciare in tutto il mondo il Manifesto di Genova della Rivoluzione Poetica… Lawrence Ferlinghetti is at the controls of a helicopter and is swooping dangerously over the Doge’s Palace. The helicopter dislodges a statue and soars up towards the one accommodating cloud. It hovers and feigns and then it turns to pepper the city of Genoa with incantatory poems. The Carabinieri take a few disparate shots and you can see Ferlinghetti shaking his fist whilst preparing to drop a particularly lethal dose of André Breton. The Genoese scatter and duck and hurtle towards the underground which hasn’t been built. All the alleyways of the old quarter are laced with poems that wind their unchallengeable way back to Walt Whitman. You can see Ferlinghetti quite clearly now dapper in his blue shirt. He’s caressing the sexual organs of the city. • Julian Stannard teaches creative writing at the University of Winchester and has published two collections with Peterloo Poets. Sunday, November 18
Tobias Hill reviewed by Brian Cole
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 18 Nov 2007 10:17 PM GMT
Love in the City
Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow by Tobias Hill Salt Publishing (2006), 67pp, £8.99, ISBN: 9781844712625 ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Yellow’ sound strange in the title of a collection of poems - would this be poetry of music and painting? In a way it is; elegiac verses transmit the essence of Hill’s love for London, his unsentimental nostalgia for his city, the Thames and Londoners, and evoke Elgar and Monet. Running through it like a river is change, death and rebirth, dispossession and repossession. Hill celebrates the new while at the same time mourning, but holding, the past. Hill was new to me but I felt an immediate connection. No Londoner, past, present or would-be, can be unaffected by his lyricism, gentle rhythmic tone, simple yet sensual language, economy of method, rhyme and delicate but powerful affection for this city. He takes us deep into a London of ghosts, old lights and names, greasy spoons, tide-washed steps and polyglot humanity, where rich meets poor, nature the man-made and the present the past. ‘I will never have seen enough of you’ he says, in the final line of ‘October’. Memories are stimulated; close your eyes and you could be on the green island of Primrose Hill, looking south at dusk, when the sky is yellow and the office windows needles of chrome light; or on a night train, rattling into Victoria on a high curve, the ramshackle yellow-lit streets swilling mysteriously below you. It is a London of ‘pizza ovens, Peking duck and piss, / the air half-edible and wholly foul’. We visit numerous people and places; Hampstead Heath; L’Algeroise; John’s Kabul Café; railway gangers working through the night; a young couple inexpertly clearing their derelict garden. We even take a trip to Paris, and Matisse, but soon come back. Hill’s voice is very English, reserved but not inhibited. He uses an easy narrative, as befits someone who also writes novels, and infuses his lines with tender vulnerability. He suspends before the reader the imminence of change, and of the attendant regret that is both inevitable and accepted: Daffodils wave their yellow heads at her and suddenly she thinks of poetry: beautiful things. The perfect words you say only later, too late, driving away’. (from ‘Yellow’) Hill is unfussed by form and writes in flexible, natural stanzas. It is his rhythms that are so beguiling and gives his simple language a rare beauty: In the garden the goldfish are nuzzling at heaps of soft late summer rain. If I could have only one thing, it would be some moment like this, when one small fact puts all the facts right, when the rain clears the London air and my thoughts lie suddenly clean and bright in the strength of their own wellspring. (from ‘September’) Not all is sadness, sweetness and light. Hill’s voice is far from gritty, but while there is none of a city’s brutality here, we do encounter bailiffs, bouncers and a religious madman. Of the thirty-two poems, twelve make up a series ‘A Year in London’. The rest of the collection is concerned with various aspects of London and its denizens, as in ‘Five Ways of looking at my Grandfather’, a work of some personal poignancy but one which sits oddly with the collection generally. Acute forensic skill is not required to enjoy Tobias Hill, yet his poems offer more and more with every reading. • Review by Brian Cole Friday, November 16
Two poems by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 16 Nov 2007 10:25 AM GMT
IN HIS BEARD A COLLECTION OF SWEET BREAD
On the emergency room table a bearded man being examined was found with ants in his beard. Each ant carried crumbs of sweet bread, which they could not enjoy because the nurse who cleaned the man's white beard, swept the ants away, some with malevolence, as she pinched the ants between her little god fingers. FALSELY ACCUSED I was accused of chasing or following a woman around. I was told I did something wrong and that is a lie. All I know was that I was on the street. I was hungry and now I am here. I don't know where my green card is. They took it from me. I don't know where it is and I don't see what business it is of yours to ask me such things. I don't have to speak to you. I was falsely accused. • Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal says "I enjoy reading the work in IS&T, especially David McLean's poetry. Recently, my poetry has appeared in Beat the Dust, Munyori Poetry Journal, and Kendra Steiner Editions. I work in the mental health field in Los Angeles, California." |
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