Wednesday 25 June, 2008 No. 1 in an occasional series. Will also be distributed in advance to our mailing list. Please e-mail us to join the mailing list if you would like the convenience of this publication being dropped in your inbox. It's not painful. Cannibal Spices No. 1
Wednesday 25 June, 2008 in Alex Davies, Justin Katko, Steve Willey, Will Rowe 
edited by Stephen Willey, Alex Davies
Published: Jun 08
Publisher: Openned Press
Format: PDF
Price: £free
View free: PDF (1.1MB)
Poets featured in this publication:
Tuesday 24 June, 2008 An excerpt of a collaboration between Becky Cremin, Ryan Ormonde and Steve Willey is now available in the Readings section.
Tuesday 24 June, 2008 in Ryan Ormonde, Steve Willey [wpvideo QWzXxKZL] An excerpt of Openned 12 (06/03/08). Here the poets Becky Cremin and Ryan Ormonde and myself Steve Willey, gave an improvised performance. We read from sections and permutations of texts that were sent in to Openned as part of the 2007 Openned Issue: Thirteen Kinesthetic Salsa Diphthongs. The permutations were created in part by Becky and Ryan fighting over a photocopier, ripping up the poems and disturbing them mid-scan. We then gave an improvised performance of the texts at Openned, sometimes with the lights off, occasionally turning them on, in an attempt to mirror the slowed down flash of a photocopier (which was used to create the texts in the first place).
Tuesday 24 June, 2008 'The next morning we began looking once more for Paddy’s friend, who was called Bozo, and was a screever—that is, a pavement artist.... Bozo had a strange way of talking, Cockneyfied and yet very lucid and expressive. It was as though he had read good books but had never troubled to correct his grammar. For a while Paddy and I stayed on the Embankment, talking, and Bozo gave us an account of the screeving trade. I repeat what he said more or less in his own words. "I’m what they call a serious screever. I don’t draw in blackboard chalks like these others, I use proper colours the same as what painters use; bloody expensive they are, especially the reds. I use five bobs’ worth of colours in a long day, and never less than two bobs’ worth. Cartoons is my line—you know, politics and cricket and that. Look here’—he showed me his notebook—‘here’s likenesses of all the political blokes, what I’ve copied from the papers. I have a different cartoon every day. For instance, when the Budget was on I had one of Winston trying to push an elephant marked “Debt”, and underneath I wrote, “Will he budge it?” See? You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn’t put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police won’t stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The copper came along and saw it, and he says, “You rub that out, and look sharp about it,” he says. I had to rub it out. The copper’s got the right to move you on for loitering, and it’s no good giving them a back answer."' - Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Sunday 22 June, 2008 Jerome Rothenberg: 'In 2005 Granary Books published – in a very limited edition – Susan Bee’s illumination of The Burning Babe, a series of poems that I had written over the preceding several years. While the poems reappear in Triptych, which New Directions brought out in 2007, the illuminated work has been largely inaccesible till now. That work, in which Susan Bee appears at the height of her artistic powers, can now be viewed in full, courtesy of PennSound & the University of Pennsylvania.' Link
Saturday 21 June, 2008 '1. Discomfort with a translated text is discomfort with a disabled text. (“But the text can’t stand on its own!” “But something is lost, ruined, missing!”, etc.) 2. As do disabled bodies, disabled texts create a nervousness with reference to able, or enabled, texts and bodies. They give the lie to the supposed centeredness, completeness, originariness of able, enabled, or ‘original’ bodies and texts. Such nervousness is already an admission that all is not as stable—with our bodies, selves, and texts-- as we are led to believe we should believe.' Link
Thursday 19 June, 2008 'The LPA was founded on the outskirts of the Italian mountain village of Cosio d'Arriscia. The name was invented during the course of the unification conference of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB) and the Lettriste Internationale (LI) to 'increase' the internationalism of the event. Ralph Rumney (born Wakefield 1934) was its representative although he had lived in Italy for several years. He proposed a plan to dye the Venice Lagoon a bright colour.' Link Wikipedia article
Wednesday 18 June, 2008 I was reading Ron Silliman's post, which drew parallels between Flarf and Conceptual Poetry and Projective Verse and the New York School, and it made me feel a wee bit shadowed. It seems that interest in a certain poet or certain poetry is perpetuated only through the use of labels. We find a figure or a group of figures who are doing vaguely similar things, and then we name them, and then we have a box to put them in, and we spend the succeeding years decorating that box with glyphs and emblems without ever opening the box to check that what's inside hasn't rotted, or transformed, or even drilled a hole in the bottom of the box to make its escape. Worse still, poets or groups of poets that can't fit inside boxes (let's say because they're too busy in Zorbs) may find someone writing notes on the insides of their palms, or perhaps asking them to hold still while they scrawl on their foreheads, but the lack of boxing leads to exposure to the sun, which is often so bright as to obscure view of the poet(s) completely. There is a wall-building brutality to the appreciation of radical, experimental, linguistically innovative, avant-garde, call it what you will - all labels, all fundamentally useless - that is fermented within the structures and debates of academe. It is the result of a devious pragmatism that allows poets, whose subtle differences are often more important than the overarching themes of their work, to be bracketed and straitjacketed by terms that are as useful as empty boxes. Those poets who don't find a space inside these boxes (and there are poets who actively attempt to climb into them) are often left out in the wasteland. Who has time, when there are so many poets, to consider them one by one? As for the poets who build boxes for themselves to climb into, that's their prerogative, but spending that time writing poetry might be more worthwhile. Labels fray, words change. - Alex
