I am much more pleased with it than my earlier poems
Taking the top of your head off | IT (internationaltimes.it)
1/, tests by Luke Emmett (Litter Press) | Tears in the Fence
Luke Emmett’s collection of poems from Leafe Press | Rupert Mallin
I plan on keeping the blog but not updating this notes sections (and I am not looking to publish much for now).
Maybe the relaxing tonal play of ‘The Waste Land’ actually is the point of writing it, and it’s just that the awesome machinery behind it, of impersonal allusion and absent authority, is necessary not to sustain that but make it ambiguous in another sense, perhaps – looking at which lines I prefer – via intensity: am I safe from harm?
I’ll make a short note on this collection of Khaïr-Eddine, translated by Jake Syersak. I initially found the translation disappointing, which may have been due to the line-break (though the last poem is mostly prose and it is ambiguous for me), as I found looking at the French – I cannot read French at all – much more exciting until I heard it out loud, when I get a taste of seriousness to Syersak. My favourite line with its translation (ending the first stanza of the last, longest, poem):
su sang qui tue end moi les très vieux suicidaire.
with the blood that slays that age-old suicidal inside of me.
p97
I feel that both poets are shaking here, and I do not feel the translator’s verve is an imposition.
A common thread through my poetry has been making music that is a distorted non-thing: at first to return to the reign of the senses; then as something I delay about the world; then as writing that does not belong. I’d hope this learning process in some sense makes the music alone grotesque.