WINGS

pics from our tour of the americas are over here

Bill Griffiths

here

"And the Lambs"

Larry hath
Sharp teeth open
(Well it's a white morning)
Sheep that will eat by bone
Jaws are grand axes

Uz is allays bein sinful Uz is fed up wiv it clamit Satan

And lamb

(this, I'm not sure why, is one of my favourites of Bill's poems.)

Bill was a good friend and one of the best poets I've known. I didn't see him very often, but it was always a pleasure to hang out with him when he was in town, or when our paths crossed at festivals etc. His commitments to both radical poetics and radical politics are an example to us all.

Eat Yerself Fitter

Couple of weeks back I blagged a copy of Adrian Clarke's new "Possession: Poems 1996 - 2006", from Veer Books. Don't know how much it costs but it seers your fists and everyone should get one. Now. I think the address is veer at gmail dot com, . Just find it. Razors after midnight.

Ha

Oh dear. Looks like my Baudelaire things are a bit controversial

Advert

All of my translations of Baudelaire are now up in the latest issue of Onedit (link in sidebar). And you can listen to me reading some of em at the Bad Press site (ditto), tho I think I may have said that before.

Better than Ron

"The ethic is behavioral. I am a poet. It seems to me a point of honour and deep responsibility that I not number among my friends a cop, or a doctor or lawyer, or a president of the united states, or the head of an insane asylum, or a gangster" - Ed Dorn, 1963

Yt Com News //// HEX YT SKUM

the yt communication blog (see link in sidebar) is now back in action, as are we. the role of the artist is a disturber of the peace. more noise. abolish the vortex of snobbery.

Two Translations from Baudelaire

Traps

You can listen to me reading some of my translations of Baudelaire here. Also, around about here is a video of me in Cork, although I've had a new head and jacket fitted since then Thats about it. Resignation note coming soon.

understand capitalist architecture
as the infinite made entirely
measureable, each packed number
a pit of in-numerable mysteries
marketed as just the tool you need
to make your skin pop with
the burden of being a blazing core
of happiness, dizzy with the
spendour of actively being
a symbol of government mathematics
melted down to the base signal rate
& packed into poisoned land
till vocabulary re-enters the
stratosphere as simple thumbnail
equation: this building equals ‘you’,
any other calculation results in
immediate instersection of
your back-up image with re-hab
static & stars in all our eyes -
the burst cells accumulate as
dog-puke at clandestine borders
where negative alphabets conspire
with your spit is lovely and
rings through every occulted corridor,
the line-manager’s deranged eyeglass.

Modern poetry brought us here
& dropped us off, without a
keyhole or even a view; the
windows are sealed & the sun
is kept strictly bound inside
anti-vascular jelly, that is
to say, hard cash. Some poets,
oiled & flavoured, are left
out in the heat till entirely
dessicated, their works taken
off by the US military for
research purposes, plugged
into the social mainframe as
overheard conversation, or
‘legality’ as ‘torture’, kept
entirely clean & seperable
in the mind of an award-
winning poet, gods own
property, used as a flag or
romantic veil: “I am making
a world that has no place for
orange, I am awoken by buzzers
all day and all night and what
they say is we want all the
money’s half-life flutters in-
side all the language as melt-
core of what some prick in
America tells us it says”. Mean-
while, people are being starved.
They are sealed and the poets
haven’t seen them, how could they
as competition ups the ante &
everyone without a full plate
is silently taken out & shot:
the police method of knowledge
is the newer, cleaner avant-garde.


(((NB - the photograph at the top of this post shows the king and queen of Official Verse Culture being entertained by the public murder of Saddam Hussein)))

Tracts (((7 - 8)))

personality multiplies
in social equations
favourite letter
clusters
pressed into
meaning
pseudo-hip indifference
to each voice
discretion
alphabet
radically abridged
& smuggled statements
burst in
voice cavity’s
seperable images
blend forcefully
truncated coil
sweep
where ‘passion’ is
equal to ‘containment’
on several ratios
of internalised
gentrification
systems
of locked
thresholds
arc endlessly
what scraps of
lethargy
graffiti & litter
that London can offer
monostable multitudes
whispering gently
radiate static
caramelised rust.

*

no glitches re-
produce what a razor might
activate ghost-noise
lock, in the 243 bus
on sodium circulation
endlessly clenched
persons flutter in rings
of hermetic anger’s
frequency signal
stars as static
& bourgeois fiction, dead
long before they hit ground
burrow into what our feet are
‘love’ as a blazing circular saw
glowing, ecstatic & silent
slogans wiped out
by entirely official rain
punishable by up to 10 years
in kisses, from several angles
instability threatens

Tracts (((6)))

the social is also
private, its locks
radiate specifically
through what each
voice can capture, &
this is not a painting,
where the image is
nothing but what catches
inside each throat as
doorway to something as
specific as what a ‘shop’ is,
the conversation aspires to
‘love’, but ends in
the kidnap chamber as
arched investment, patched,
a book of slit butterflies,
secret, but downloadable, &
everything on half-price
curdles this half-life
echoes each individual
letter is gashed onto
most faces are tracts
for pasting on walls.

This is what we at Yt Communication have been getting up to lately. Hackney declares war on the city, and all that . . .

my financial body
is a length
of greased rope
hooked inside love
as the most useful
style of spasm
floods milk
is seizured
largely political holes
will perform for money

*

it’s 10.00 in London
New York & Beirut
which gives you the idea
last night I was a slight &
infected string or circle
inside another person’s
memory twitches in sleep
still largely closed to ‘me’
where ‘m’ punctures ‘e’
below a surge of talk
on how this singular
& infinitely dense ball
would boil & pop
the pronoun cluster is jagged
as ink on the atlas
of time’s collected hysteria

*

permit only
chainsmoking
will keep each
seizure is
a gated community
as ‘I’, would
reproduce digits
in the mouth a
ring of sound the
head makes, glowing
as love is a set
contains hostility
& the sun’s
blind & conformist
aura split
in free dissociation
from this somewhat
limited personality
coughs nervously

Unfinished . . . .

the last tingle
of that shameful
but essentially boring
public murder
has been pressed
into our insectual holes
like some outre but
entirely conformist
entertaiment, and
thus London is,
once more, rendered
virtually unreal as
my mouth pressed
inside your ear is
a slightly radioactive
chirrup of love, cut
from the rejectamenta
of seperable time zones
& pulse-rings of
an ecstatically intimate
syllabic charge
endorsed by several
leading high st banks
who claim the
shudders we feel are
perfectly illegal, sampled
from within this
infested & private
discourse scat
is a forced community
of rope & wood & dis-
likes most of you. . . .

Mental Health Weather Check

things being dug in my fortress of solitude right now include::::

Sophie Robinson - Lovesic
Bascom Lamar Lunsford - I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground
Daniel f Bradley - A Boy's First Book of Chlamydia
Flannery O'Conner - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
CECIL TAYLOR
Skip James - I Wanna Be More Like Jesus
Black Flag - Wasted
gustave morin - the etcetera barbecue
SWELL MAPS
Angry Brigade Communiques
LEMSIP COLD AND FLU MIXTURE
Kevin Nolan - Loving Little Orlick
Paul Blackburn - Crank It Up For All of Us
(thass the one that ends 'I hope I die / soon')
Bukka White - Parchman Farm

all of these consumer products come highly recommended by me. I woke this morning after shattered and disturbing dreams, and feel very unhappy. flowers and chocalates will be accepted with much gratitude. I'd do the same for you.