From “An Epistle to David Willetts”

We do not wish to ‘rate’ our teachers;
we wish to learn from them.
We are not consumers;
we are students [...]

Full text.

From “Autumn Leaves”

By Tony Leuzzi.

At the market, a man falls into the arms of another, which is just this side of inconvenient.

From “Kazoo Dreamboats”

Or, On What There Is.

By J.H. Prynne.

[...] Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish,
everyone knows this, it’s a law of nature. Rule Two: Diogenes
offered himself as a master, in the market, to any slave who needed
one. Rule Three: you do not see into the life of things, dimension-
less or not, except by harvest of data plotted against uncertainty.
Rule Four: justice is scarce ever the obverse of injustice, since
the one is the top end and the other the bottom. None of this it
must be said is the power of harmony even in charge fluctuation
or lifetimes except the desire integrate the variation of sep-
arate notice, that’s what spirit mostly does who where she went
bare in her forehead morning, only men write their socks off like
this: better to be clear than dizzy or cynic, not to refuse joy
in favour of rapture or contentment, the gradients are lateralised
in additive counterflow. But rapture is also pretty nice [...]

GH && A A A – Julia Bashmore

Caught the beginning of Golden Hour at the Forest Café, 3 Bristo Place, (formally doomed or still PKing against the CRCs? – check fund drive) incl. compére Reader-in-Residence at the Scottish Poetry Library etc., Ryan van Winkle, whose new haircut only looks good from the front, which he kept towards us; two a capella songs, w/ backstory in imposing I think Spanish / Scots accent we all must now adopt, & a bit of brisk news satirey animation whose overjokes – (a) what if pundit telly treated country & western w/ the panic-stricken strutiny I guess it treats hip-hop; & (b) spouse-centrism-espousing right wing kin-pundit is hypocrite – were well-intentioned but rather gentle, & as your one pointed out not even pretentious; & Colin Herd reading from too ok & Like & newer stuff. One poem hinged on his foreseeable failure to emit a reasonable metal growl & made me wonder about maximally operationalised shortfalls, like if you could use a smattering of e.g. Italian or Franglais (cf. Luna letter (PDF) maybe) to do something you could never do as a fluent speaker. For example, an English monoglot introducing a Frenchiness as an index of the degree to which some portrayed activity implies problems of additionality – thus your man might say I blow the harmonica but I wash la plate (your one eventually would have washed it, had he not) & aujourd’hui nous must donatonz le plus argent pour la horn d’afrique (the risk is high, in a qualitative sense perhaps, that actors undertaking this activity may immobilize other actors inclined to undertake it; also the normative force is contained within the context of complex mutual expectations based around the fungability of this activity) to which your one might disagree slightly: nous must provide much more to la famine fund drive, today. Colin is often missing the Morrisey concert because he has to take his grandparents to the supermarket or putting on a beautiful jumper on holiday only to get his leg clamped by the hard meandering smirk of a giant clam, but he has other sides. Met Kelly McQuain who read briefly (a poem about “daddy’s hands moving in the dark,” & perhaps about one way of assuming the worst, & another perhaps about hunting down one-eighth of a spirit animal) the next day at Colin’s incredibly creepy & somewhat unsettling Anything Anymore Anywhere event, along with Susan Schultz (who chuckled merrily through a lot of the English poets’ stuff & especially through Gareth’s (aargh my default “recognition” affect is switching to mawkish sorrow) & who truthfully remarked that all the English poets who read were bald & who read a longish poem in part about old women having sex – I especially liked the way she read e.g. “Rose, 96” like it was “Rose #96”) & Hank Lazer (out to whose short fast wordplayful specimen Stephen Emmerson, at least, visibly rocked), after longer readings from Stephen Emmerson (incl. recent “Letters to Berryman” which I think may be in International Egg & Poultry Review, & Telegraphic Transcriptions which should be available on paper soon; here (MP3) is previously on Stephen Emmerson), Gareth Durasow (who said candidly that was exhausted (hostel), & had been advised to perform 20 min of his seminal work, “Poet Sleeping,” but to honour his impressario would perform 20 min of his seminal work, “Audience Sleeping,” & read intertextual, nautical stuff with the twin themes of blood & interruption, & also read a poem I title “Like Wine” q.v.) & Richard Barrett (who did wear a The Fall T-shirt, & whose final poem, “Like Milk,” was a searching, quasi-narrative long thing of nebulous syntax apparently partially about going for a coffee & meeting a deadline, only very slightly resembling Beckett’s Play, cluttered & choked by managerial speech but also unwilling to use that choking cluttered throat as just an excuse, & apparently so to the attitude of someone making a careful account of unsettling recent events & actions, without expecting a sympathetic or even a comprehending audience, & yet also without letting go of credibility as a component of truthfulness – as you might be tempted to do in a kind of hermetic mode of taking stock – & I think it was the unassuming steadfastness rather than any topics or repetitious hypnosis the which made this poem kind of moving (though cf. the fuck my new mawk beak q.v. & besides the few odds & ends I gathered off Richard about it suggest this is totally wrong)): “We are lucky” (Colin). Talked a bit with Greg Thomas, on the walk, about the dialectics of misanthropy & critique, I guess? The really glib response is that critique & misanthropy really do as a matter of historical fact overlap in many essentials, a sign of the social damage which necessitates critique in the first place — I mean it pejoratively, we can do better. Some of us went to the Waverley, Maria did not sing, some of us, with the air of a ball of breeding, reddening shrimp, rapidly discussed science fiction books and films. Ian Heames has just discharged a booklet which makes a blazingly overt engagement with that sf (i.e. the more mainstreamy space opera & (post)-cyberpunk stuff, not the sf of Beckett, Ballard & Burroughs) which is either or both (a) the lamentably-largely-unremarked context for a terrible lot of very recent work in the UK incl. like at least Emmerson, Durasow, Barrett, Raworth, Katko, Thornton, Fisher, Jarvis, Robinson, Sutherland, Bergvall, Freer, Lisette, Toal, Wallace-Hadrill, Dobran, Luker, Raha, Rider &/or (b) a zone of pregnant ultramodern culture, whose many parallels & affinities w/ the perhaps ineffaceably avant-garde properties of gutsy political writing are likely to confuse, suffocate & divert that kind of writing: you should check it out. Thank God she said they were bald, though many American poets are bald on others.

Not the-thing-in-itself because the camera on my tummy symbol is shit, but:

>>>

Occasional Verse: LIKE WINE

>>>

This is classic them

>>>

Upcoming events in Edinburgh: in about three hours, something at the Voodoo Rooms — 19A West Register Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2AA (at 8pm, 25 July 2011) with Tony Lopez, Hank Lazer, Susan Schultz, Biljana Obradavic & Dorothy Alexander. & tomorrow at the Forest, Inky Fingers open mic with Jenny Lindsay & Richard Tyrone Jones.

& some new books:

Richard Barrett’s “# is a treatment of selected text output from the @_M_I_A_ Twitter feed. Using instinctive interventions, the original text has been transformed to create a new artefact. Echoes, repetitions and ghost-motifs occur and re-occur throughout #, laying trails true and false, with the # symbol doubling as medical shorthand for “fracture”. For distribution, the complete work has been split into fifty micro-texts of which only a single version exists, each presented in a labelled vial and accompanied by a bespoke extraction tool. # can be owned individually only in part and totally only in common. Each micro-text object is available in exchange for a gift, which can be in a physical, digital, verbal, gestural, symbolic or any other form. Use and exchange value are entirely irrelevant. As gifts are received, they will be listed on the Twitter feed #zimzalla. This list will be collated for presentation as a future object. [...] Visit (the zimzilla site) for more.”

& Simon Jarvis’s Dionysus Crucified: Choral Lyric for Two Soloists and Messenger from Grasp Press. ”[...] fuck properly [...]“

& Ian Heames’s Gloss to Carriers from Critical Documents.