friends of the cold picnic

Five Good Things

1. Art and thought: Freya Powell. Multi-media artist exploring geography, colonialism, military occupation, colours, and the inscription of history-making in books, texts, and maps, with emphasis on craft-making and the archive. Freya is a friend from primary school and it’s a pleasure to witness her explorations of politics and art over these years.

2. Music: ‘Los Angered’ by Trailer Trash Tracys. Reverb trance-pop; also something Cocteau Twins happening here. I am looking forward to seeing them in Glasgow 12 May, Captain’s Rest.

3. Words: ‘Marx at 193’ by John Lancaster, essay in LRB. Astute words:

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism, but if the cashpoints stopped giving out money, it would be an event on a scale that would put the currently constituted democratic states at risk of collapse. And yet governments act as if there is very little they can do about it. They have the legal power to conscript us and send us to war, but they can’t address any fundamentals of the economic order.

4. Periodical: PICPUS. A beautiful folded broadsheet with intriguing transmissions from the art world, with particular interest in historiography, politics, and the French Revolution.The first issue was scented with grass perfume as a reference to the 18th century Parisian pedestrian custom of coping with rank city smells with handkerchiefs doused with perfume. PICPUS can be picked up for free at various places (in Endinburgh: Ingleby Gallery and Talbot Rice Gallery).

5. Geology: Quartz Gabbro, Walks around Arthur’s Seat has set in motion interest in igneous rocks generally.

Four good things

1.Book: Weir’s Way by Tom Weir. This is a story of Scotland told through Weir’s passage through its geography and geology. He is a sociologist at heart, taking interest not only in the varied natural landscape (beautifully evoked, never sentimentally, like a good poem), but also throught the social landscape of the people. This is an amazing book and I am looking forward to reading his autobiography.

2.Music: Peng! by Stereolab. Who else can make the most perfect pop songs using lyrics from the Communist Manifesto and One Hundred Years of Solitude? Especially notable are the tracks K-Stars and You Little Shits.

3. Art exhibition: Alison Turnbull at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh. In one memorable piece, Turnbull has used colours ‘discovered’ by a crew member of Darwin’s Galapogos expedition while on the island, observing rocks and wildlife.  On until 5 May 2012.

4. Magazine: SCREE issue 4- now available at http://screemagazine.wordpress.com. The cover has been beautifully made by Rachel Caunt using tissue paper. The inside has a variety of excellent poetry and artwork. Comes with a cd of electronic and acoustic sounds.

Colin’s book of poems.

You probably didn’t know that last year Colin Herd’s first book of poetry was published. It’s called too ok and it has a lemon yellow cover with a drawing by Sandy Christie which I think is really fantastic. But Colin, whom I sat next to at a magazine fair recently in Glasgow, worries that the drawing may be scaring people off from buying the book. Why would it though- to me it’s a faithful depiction of a heart-asteroid zig-zagging its way into a neon maw. 

The poems inside are electric. I sat down one morning at my ‘breakfast table’ (do people who actually have breakfast tables have other tables intended specifically for other meals) and read it cover to cover, almost greedily. Ok- completely greedily. I laughed a lot and traced so many idea-phrases in my head. It’s definitely an asteroid, maybe a demure, witty, and very smart asteroid, going straight for your heart, great over any meal and in between.

I hope Colin doesn’t mind me printing one of the poems below. You can buy the book here.

i know your love is cap-
sized, louche & side
ways on your head,
gaudy, red, obscene,
its rim dramatically tilting,
lop-sided, sweat-stained,
old. at

the same time, i know
my personality is like
a kilt. heavy, scratchy &
tartan. when you reel, it
feels like you’re shrugging
me off to the tune of my
fiddle. i flap about you.

© 2010, Colin Herd
From: too ok
Publisher: BlazeVox [books], Buffalo, NY
ISBN: 9781609640491

SCREE three.

The third issue of my magazine SCREE is now in progress.

The theme of this issue is Construction. In light of the earthquake and subsequent events in Japan, the idea of construction is germane: the way in which we build civilisations in the image of permanence, investing our establishments (buildings, systems, beliefs) with a stubborn sense of invincibility. Yet can we ever live cowering? We construct edifices and name things in order to survive, hold parades and rituals -meaningfully or not- to live our days- often greedily and selfishly- in abeyance of a certain end.

Yet perhaps a more optimistic interpretation of Construction lies in the possibility of existing within systems which encourages arenas of commonality. Hannah Arendt writes, ‘To live together in this world means that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.’*

This magazine is a hopeful construction, which acknowledges words, pictures, and music as technologies, as textual,visual, and aural organisations of consciousness- and not consciousness itself. The magazine doesn’t want to take for granted the permanence of structures, but nonetheless hopes to promote thoughtful ‘structuring’ with words, images, and sound. Arendt again: ‘The reification which occurs in writing something down… is of course related to the thought which preceded it, but what actually makes the though a reality and fabricates things of thought is the same workmanship which, through the primordial instrument of human hands, builds the other durable things of the human artifice.’

The contribution list for this issue is shaping up nicely: Greg Thomas is doing the cover art, and inside contributors include Sandra Alland, Ian Brand, Rodney Relax, Richie McCaffery, Jim Ferguson, Posie Rider, nick-e melville, and many others. The issue will be coming out on May 10. Please let me know if you’d like to receive it- it will probably cost £2, but I will let you know in due course.

* all Arendt quotations come from her book The Human Condition.

Let’s go.

When I used to work on a garlic farm my fellow farmer-mate Ben used to enthuse about Robert Creeley, one of the two “one-eyed” poets he admired. Jim Harrison was the other one, and I liked him immensely: ‘How strange to see a horse/ stare/ straight up.’ I  didn’t read Robert Creeley until I started to work on my dissertation about Ian Hamilton Finlay’s little magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse., which takes its name from a Creeley Poem, ‘Please.’ It goes like this:

Oh god, let’s go.
This is a poem for Kenneth Patchen.
Everywhere they are shooting people.
People people people people.
This is a poem for Allen Ginsberg.
I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere.
This is a poem about a horse that got tired.
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
I want to go home.
I want you to go home.
This is a poem which tells the story,
which is the story.
I don’t know. I get lost
if only they would stand still and let me.
Are you happy, sad, not happy, please come.
This is a poem for everyone.

When the Scottish poet Gael Turnbull read a Creeley poem for the first time he though it was “written so perversely badly…The grammatical construction appeared to be not merely eccentric or compressed but virtually non-existent or deliberately barbarous.” But after repeated reads, Turnbull changed his mind: “I gradually came to ‘hear’ the poem in a way that I had never ‘heard’ before. It fascinated me as I could not logically understand how it worked. There was also a music which I could not scan but which radiated delight.” (The quotes are from PN Review 28)

Please read the poem out loud- it’s fun to do so, especially in an empty room that is usually filled with a large number of people. But often I wonder how other people read this poem (and other poems, for that matter), especially the first line, ‘Oh god, let’s go.’ How you read this line, I think, affects how you read the rest: it sets, if you will, the musical key.

I recently came across this website, where you can hear different people saying “Let’s go”. (It’s Angry 1, Happy 2, and Sad 1. Happy 2 is almost unbearable.) The website is part of an experiment run at Tufts University, in which researchers observed that sad speech is often spoken in the minor third pitch pattern. Not entirely related to the Creeley poem, I know, but it’s interesting nevertheless to think of poems as music- not words set to music, but as music itself: melody, rhythm, vibration.

You can hear Robert Creeley reading ‘Please’ here.

Allen Fisher.

Here is the first of four parts from the poem ‘Atkins Stomp’ by Allen Fisher. Overheard conversations, semantic architecture of someone’s back yard, restless & sardonic energy overlaid with a real sense of humour. I don’t know about you but ‘Escape over the gate with a peach’ does it for me, completely.

Atkins Stomp

1.
“I don’t know how humanity stands it
I think I’m in danger of losing altitude
In a catacomb, hope for future bliss
My hand writes on a tangent to cup spills.
At bottom a low trellis, beyond it a narrow lawn
Climbs a stool to feed meter for gas
“The enormous tragedy of the dream
No capacity to express demands for tomorrow.
Next door she say she wants to scrub my potatoes
Escape over the gate with a peach
On poster a dove sips neon
Disease promoted as health. London.

A cat walks garden wall to the railing
the path still goes from the gate
Sent in the ‘district support unit’
Trees and shrubs with dead foliage in summer.
“Take that smile off your face
Two pound of maggots wouldn’t reach tench,
          that kind of rigid
Laced on the koran a flowering meadow
Repast glows in the heads.
Ate all I famished
“three young men at the door
, digged a ditch round me
A tree in the centre, then a low wall.
Bounce a ball against a brick hammering pavement
Decides between gas and hot air
We exhume the past, dissolve parliament
“I don’t know how humanity stands it
Walked down the table to where the chairman sat
Organising rain with a sponge push
Bone heads in rows
Shits on daffodils showers them with sod.

-Allen Fisher

A gig.

We had a successful music-charity night on Monday. Money was raised for Pakistan flood relief, and lovely music was played by iliop, The Wee Rogue, eagleowl, and Alasdair Roberts. My band The Douglas Firs played too. Here’s a review. Greg Thomas made the ace poster for us. More of his work can be seen here.

In my bones.

There was something wonderful and haunting about witnessing the salmon leaps in the River Esk, in Edzell. I felt simultaneously triumphant and sad for these creatures struggling up the unrelenting river, their black bodies caught in the net of current. Most of them will die within a few days of spawning, after having made a brave journey upstream, returning to the exact place in which they were born. But of course the salmon don’t share these kind of sentimental thoughts. They are only doing what’s in their bones. It doesn’t stop me from wondering, now, back in Edinburgh, if the salmon are there on the Esk, at this exact moment, leaping towards birth & death in the semi-darkness, in that lonely spot, in the clearing with the button moon there, and the bats and the silent mushroom? So many things to think about, when I close my eyes to remember the scenes I’d stood in and was IN. A room, a path, and some moments by a river. I’m on the train shuttling home with the lights of the buildings in the towns blurring in the window-frame. I’m walking home in the encroaching winter air. The salmon leaps…