Archive of the Now

Or: I'm not that, they think.
They don't dimensional;
blues their disease. And one open to be
the impulse ceiling.
They don't that, may not think that.
They are that, each when
they want to enact what the land,
born to be in theft and Esso,
mirrors into one sun.

The three poems captured on this recording are from very different collections, but all explore various hostile work-environments. The first is the opening section from a poem called Orcs, which attempts to develop a mythology for the industrial West Midlands through the subversion of what is perhaps the most famous literary artefact to emerge from this city, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The second poem is loosely modelled on the very earliest Korean literature, the hyangga or folk-songs; but is also a meditation on the Cold War machine-translation technologies used to produce the raw material from which the poems were developed. The third poem, Barbary, is a loose mistranslation of late-Roman material; and a satirical exploration of the inner-life of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.

'As a visual artist, Marc Atkins fills his work with hints and clues to a world of hidden spaces and scenarios. Here, in his writing, that world is disclosed in meticulous detail. It amounts to a reserve collection of the felt unknown, a whole new dimension that lies just beyond the familiar, on the edges of the utterly strange.' — Rod Mengham

One minute I am sitting in Spud-U-Like
                     Intoxicated with abnegation
In the village of cats
But there I am one morning waking up to find myself in bed with both
Great compassion & the six classes of beings
The stiffness of winter
                      Followed by the amputation of a leg dust a shadow
And naked shingles of the world

non-verbal threads strung between
our connections of lip-curl and spectacle adjustment
exclusivity awareness the commonly overlooked
circumscribes us and
the secret language               rebuilding
Salford in a second

If you are interested in performing spatially, somehow you will change your work; that will change your work. Similarly, if I have to struggle to read certain texts live, then that becomes part of the struggle of the piece itself. That was part of my work on language at that point. That struggle between text and performance was a sort of process of language acquisition. It was the acquisition of a voicing — I had to adapt or stretch or seek out my mouth, my reading, my breath, in relation to the event, to the space, to the acoustics, as much as to the work of my collaborators or my own texts, and not the other way round.

Chord              type                          cur   in      bones

head         pine                                     arise           remnants

    an embryo                   call          not  chord

recurs

They quote quote are exposed to the deterioration of character, arising from their loss of self-respect unquote unquote. Strength of language varies directly with deterioration of character in that as one's bodily commitment increases, as you spend more blood on keeping someone else's private pension wet with it, the language which is summoned to stem and then counter that blood loss must strengthen.

Read until
  impromptu
  never extenuates selfing
reads each disturbing phrases as
  nominal dandelions              unherbing
eternal spaces
clearings of night fumblings of noon

because your mouth is bitter
with executioners salt, perhaps
when you die, perhaps
you will flutter through Hades
invisible, among the scorched dead

may you vanish there, famished
through the known and unknown worlds 

We share one hope, and it infuses even
the green-lipped mussel we eat sickly, and the curl
of green-fringing kale. It bolts up the sky
and our assertion that there will be a future
clearing the smoke swings from its rootless peg.

You
elsewhere, sated, tousled,
celluloid dreaming
flickering lids. Arms
stretching, re
compose.

plunge pool          over the wrist slipt
ice lit        noose of water        takes
my hand away        streaming hand
to mouth taken in        drinks in the hollow
of its making        open gifts pour
through thin        skin my emptying
hands        flying white        without haste
and without rest

SUFFERING ASYLUM SEEKERS
If you choose to pay by direct debit
This could save, on average
The elite firearms section
Working under enormous pressure
Rest assured in peace
We're doing all we can to keep you
Under enormous pressure
Yours sincheerly

it is a breaking apart which is like a ceiling that the floor cannot reach, to find the space as a speechless and inept concern, a laughable misery about cold concerns, coming from where we come, from the heave in the dark, the fire of the heart, where we'll go with whoever goes first, what goes on inside the space, a fear for myself, I have seen what you are, we know who we are, we know who we are with impotence, an anguish at the point of facing what I give myself to do, you have good enough reason to stand firm, it's a will to know and to be anguished, lasting, but if abandoned, are you more easily moved

Lacking the mirror-work of Cocteau’s Orphee
or the white throat of a Busoni sonata,

mismouths become crosscuts,

the blue-black spell:
garlic in the roses.

We offer anecdotes:

Li Po drunk on Saki.
Li Po bent mad over books.
Li Po remade as a lithical martyr by Deng Xiaoping.

With delicious nugatory
          divi lint buffed
scored into the axed
cross out to encourage firstly
thrift. Hold a candle to this;
          the pack leaks off
to a votary rave, dawn over
Rochdale over. Without ruin
appetite not for vinegar splits,
          but for service.

Jason Camlot is the author of four collections of poetry: The Debaucher (2008, Insomniac Press); Attention All Typewriters (2005, DC Books); The Animal Library (2001, DC Books), and most recently, What the World Said (2013, Mansfield Press).

What animal? Does it learn like a child at night, listening to its own screaming?

What animal? Does it wait for a bowl of milk, or stalk off, toothed and self-feeding?

What animal? Can it know itself owned by those animals smaller than itself?

What animal? Can it own those animals when it is smaller than anything else?

What animal?

overboard is an example of literal art in digital media that demonstrates an 'ambient' time-based poetics. There is a stable text underlying its continuously changing display and this text may occasionally rise to the surface of normal legibility in its entirety. However, overboard is installed as a dynamic linguistic 'wall-hanging,' an ever-moving 'language painting.' As time passes, the text drifts continually in and out of familiar legibility - sinking, rising, and sometimes in part, 'going under' or drowning, then rising to the surface once again.

lines of colour across the table

salvaged morning

it could have rained it didn't

relief?      I'm unsure

space opening out inside here

the room is quietly

bursting

in the Cafe Graffitti to chat about what he calls the ‘pooblic’  —  to get
it you have to hear him say it really, or else say it with due syllabic
emphases. Without labouring the point his stress is on

this particular day there is a young woman with red tousled hair stood out
on the other side of the road from where we’re sat, wearing a sandwich
board reading ‘Temporary Closure  —  why waste either one’s own or
another’s time and paper on

Instruction Manual  —  Implementation Mechanical  —  Disembodied Information

I have been working 56 years, committed to ‘extending the forms of poetry.’ This reading shows you a range of techniques I use. I believe that poetry is a communal art, so from the outset when I began performing in 1969, I have invited all present to join in vocally either with ‘responsive voices’ or ‘interactive voices.’ With ‘responsive voices’ I indicate when I would like everyone to repeat a key phrase or word after me; with ‘interactive voices’ each person is given the text/score and works in various groups or improvises individually with words or sounds of the poem. The poems work for solo voice, but I invite participation whenever feasible.  My first poem is recent: 2016 – from my hour-long programme Yet More War… and PEACE . It focusses on a single ancient word and involves simple gestures.

safe Capital
sources mercurial
departures under
black budded
trees oil
seed rape
stone a
mosaic of
forest mosses
our parish
rolled back
gunmen chanting
from gaps

She’ll be grasping light, she’ll be eating it
He’ll swill great gulps of cold air, of warm air
They are undefined by metastatic mutations
proliferations of prostheses
preferring not to, playing at betraying
spreading and threading through
an immense shifting labyrinth of concrete
brick steel and glass desire
finite and endless

I had
I know
I sit
I stopped
I walked
I was

let me, like smoke,
listen now

a male spell, even blind rats route it out  • erhm •
collapsible selves pack neatly away,  stacked • bit
of a dust up • punched up the arse • they  shake
hands afterwards, move back to their  postcodes •
stand up now, fess out •

Emptied of am ex-
Pands there, remorse
But not so much
Remorse that you
Should polish intro-
Spection it could
Mean so much
To her and her
Followers if
Counters gleam
Time of relationship

Here's a jar of honey for you;
we stand the beehives in the fields of borage,
the pollen's rich, the yields are high
from the bright blue flowers you knew.

Morning light spreads across the floor
despite liars in public places,
lapis miners get to work in Badakhshan
and wind lifts the ivy on the wall.

through the pages                  i breathe aspen

bronze      but pale                          girl botanic

Like I've been searching suddenly all over
for justification. Dicing through bends in the time.
It's suddenly a wall of laughter - warping occasion

on a determined faultline. Or, we are all attached
anyway. Not the same as attack. Bent on understanding,
see? And it will curve us as we lean it out.

Rishi Dastidar is a poet, copywriter and brand strategist based in London.