Snapshots March 2, 2005
hot night
the maths teacher has kindly left on
the air conditioner
for my TAFE evening class
in the old Perth Modern School
only some say it's too cold
yet some are sweating ...
we turn off the air con
and flick the fans on.
papers circulate (better
circulate than never)
and grimaces abound.
between all this
(or because of it)
stories are told and written,
bits of poems begun and sung ...
this grey drab room
where students learn maths
day in and day out
comes alive with
couples fucking, dogs
puking up their guts
and kelpies becoming
witty sea creatures
eating the foundations of
the city. 9 pm -
class dismissed,
i eat cake as i drive away
from Post Modern School.
Andrew Burke
***
OF ANDY G[oldsworthy]
Occupy space on the beach [feeling a complete commitment to their success]:
failure is very very important.
Aesthetically awful works-I hate looking at them.
Never fell down . . . at least when I was
drain up. I need that like I need food.
You may have seen
growing . . . They think they were the devil's seeds.
OF ANDY G[oldsworthy]
On one hand, rise to the scale of the place.
Of the night, left them on the streets of London.
A terrible press (a lot of snowball fights that evening):
"Andy Goldsworthy said the project was pointless."
And when I was asked to make work,
"Very violent thing to do to a stone."
Garden looks . . . It took me a lot of explanation to say . . .
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 3-3-05 (11:32 AM)
This follows the opening section posted two weeks ago to the Snapshot
Project, and awaits the final revisions to two acrostic half-sonnets which
originally ended the six-part, three-section serial work written while
viewing a videotape of Andy Goldsworthy's lecture at the National Gallery
of Art in Washington DC.
***
Phalaenopsis
hard to say, easy on the eye;
alternatively, Moth Orchidı.
(Such a myth-y moth I
couldnıt have invented.)
The nurserymanıs sheet
that comes with it says:
fal-en-OPP-siss, but
doesnıt that omit an aı?
Oh, youıre thinking mediaevalı?
(the aı is silent,
like the pı in swimming
my late Dadıs favourite
piece of punning.)
The flowers have a fine-china
perfection; you canıt
believe they sprang from soil
indeed half their roots,
as if despising it, dandle round
above their potıs ground.
(Reading on, Iım pondering
this: Over watering
may cause root loss.ı
Also: Never over pot.ı)
They look back at you, faces
like poised pedigree cats
wearing the merest pouts:
we know weıre exquisiteı.
Value for money, absolute.
Properly placed out of the sun,
they pose like a cluster
of lamps low-powered,
coolly spreading calm,
fragile but enduring
putting to shame
irises, daffs and the rest
who haste away so soonı
till, months after being installed,
first one moth-bloom crinkles,
droops and falls
(over-watered? under-watered?)
then another and another;
fal-en-OFF their fall silent
as the pı in swimming.
The trouble with most flowers is:
however much eye contact
you offer them, they give back
scarcely any, except these
I stared admiringly,
they stared back,
and found me wanting.
6.40pm, Wed 2 March 05
Max Richards
North Balwyn, Melbourne
***
After
June moon -
a little swoon
the snap
and crackle
after
the pop
deborah russell, 03 -02-05
11:41 am
Fort Collins, Colorado
***
snow melt
s no meld
in street ruts
stream rot
at the civic core
civil war
knee deep in the muddy
sing the bleak mid way
Douglas Barbour
***
(against angina pectoris)
Charlie Hayden and Hank Jones STEAL AWAY
the air doves
in the yard flowers
Frank Parker
Tucson, AZ
***
white on white
layer on layer
[as outer rings
of a geode]
burrying
the swingset
as I seek out
all the margins
of shaved light
Gerald Schwartz
West Irondequoit, New York, US/ 9:05 AM
***
Oh go back to your wife!
Don't look at me that way!
I would do anything but hurt you
you with the sea in your eyes
and the storm in your hands
and the city lights in your mouth
I would have you a thousand times just to give you pleasure
but not hurt you.
Go back to your wife!
She is still beautiful
she is much smarter than me
she dances like a sonnet
and dresses like a haiku
and I can see that you love her
and hurting her would hurt you.
Go back to her!
Leave me to my desperation,
masturbation,
fantasies of your skin and voice and eyes
jeans peeled off your slim hips,
t-shirt off your heart
my tongue on your nipple and my
muscle on your cock,
your hands in my hair
and your voice incoherent
and cigarettes and
searching the Web from your lap,
naked
and drinks and
late-night talk about everything
me Yoko, you John...
too much pain.
Go back to your wife.
Janet Jackson
***
the air grumbles, pressure tips down
this is not a diesel day but storm time
aloud birds track their shelter
- look for the grey within the green -
and all along the length of these minutes
there's the muttering of opinion
this time could it be golf or riots in the west
last night's opinion was spread
on the kind of wall made for it
fuck tha police
comin' at you
straight outa
Macquarie Fields
storm it is, reckons the mynah bird
the starlings and fizzing parrots
the luminous nature thing booms
of what we are afraid maybe
this is no lie, colder rain
than this falls everywhere
even if only once
Jill Jones
Marrickville, 2 March 2005
***
SEVEN MEDITATIONS ON AESTHETICS
(apologies to Mark Weiss, whose fault this isn't)
1. Gene Smith, seeking tears from his viewers via the perfect image,
feeds mercury-laden fish to the children of Minamata, a village the
proverbial stone's throw from the more famous city of Nagasaki. His
strategy works: in 1985, at a retrospective of his work at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, visitors look at the great Pieta, "Tomoko
in her bath," and weep unashamedly. But this does Smith no good,
since he had, in addition to his quest for the Great Picture, the
worst thing an artist can have, a conscience, and Chissu Chemical
Company goons beat him into blindness.
2. Greyhounds are the most aesthetically pleasing dogs on earth, and
are its second fastest animal, able to attain 45 miles per hour in
three strides. However, racing for money is not their idea since they
don't get any of it. Their handlers beat and starve them. They
collide with one another and break bones during races. At the end of
their racing careers--normally at 3 years of age--they are shot
because a bullet is cost-effective, costing only 36 cents; gassing
them en masse would be more expensive. They do not always die at once
and are buried alive. Remarkably, greyhounds are moral creatures with
the forgiveness of St. Maria Goretti: the survivors who live to be
adopted as housepets do not carry resentments and give love
unconditionally to their new humans.
3. Hitler greatly admired the German heldentenor Max Lorenz. He was
dismayed to learn that Lorenz, who had fled to England, was both a
homosexual and a Jew. Lauritz Melchior, another giant of the age,
wasn't a Jew, but could have starred in Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
4. As long as we're talking about Frederick Law Olmstead, who has a
street named for him in the Bronx, not in Manhattan, what were the
working conditions for the men who landscaped, tree-planted, laid
marble and paving blocks in Central Park? For that matter, what was
the original Central Park Zoo like? That's rhetorical: I know the
answer to that question because I am old enough to remember it. Vide
supra notes on greyhounds but read "Siberian Tiger." The only Gates
there were iron bars.
5. Stalin perfectly melded art and politics, for he fancied himself an
music and literary critic. "Fancied," nothing. When you can make
Shostakovitch and Prokofiev shit their pants, when you can dispatch
Mandelstam to some Christ-awful gulag, you are not fancied, you have
become God.
6. Eliot Weinberger writes of Cambodia that its full horror has a
name: Kampuchea, and that the name itself, Kampuchea, sums up all one
needs to know. A land conceived by Pol Pot as a work of agrarian
socialist art, a world without art, a land in which the price of art,
literacy, science, medicine, and breathing is starvation, torture, and
death.
7. Lucky Seven. All the rest is trivia.
Kenneth Wolman
***
WIRED UP
man said
'our brains
are wired up
for religion'
but perhaps
in my case
old atheist
a fuse
has blown
or a connection
has shorted
or a suspicion
that this wiring
is the sort that
promotes
father xmas
tooth fairies
pink elephants
flying pigs
etcetera
also image
floats of a
used car dealer
tricky dicky
trying to sell
something dodgy.
pmcmanus
london
***
Having found
the largest
red apple upon
that wild green tree,
i am contented
for now,
amongst the chaos
of the immature.
And paradoxically
i slip, for a moment
into my own
trampoline days
of youth.
Robert Lane
***
This is February's last day,
yet I sit in my garden, writing.
One patch of snow by the door.
One strand of ice on the ivy.
This is Joe's last week.
He sits in his high bed, waiting.
One hard chair by the window.
One small woman in the chair.
I am wearing my coat, but it's
open. The dogs sniff at the sun.
Wintergreen leaves are curled
on the trellis. One pale cloud
in the sky. Plants still stand
in the flowerbed, that should
have bent down under ice
and snow. Green is scenting
the changing air. Joe is trying
to speak. Who am I, to live
this day? One goldfish rises
to the warming skin of the water.
Sharon Brogan
***
Therefore to walk casually and beautifully, each step a grace-note:
not a likely combination, but it is spring: blue sky, pink and white
blossoms, the scarlet tinged Magnolia blooms, the pollination, the
multiple nature-given, the air a little lighter: a table-saw, its slight,
twirled shriek, the new construction, a hammered rhythm, pock-
pock-pock: the roll, hydraulic-brake trolley stop, track squeak:
morning slant-shadow, the silence, last night's showered torrent,
each tight feathered, new Robin red breast on the wire, love of,
plunge for the wet earthworm: keep walking, eye the register, table-
saw shriek again, write it down hot, wring out the red blood, deliver,
sort to a new song, pock-pock: the multiple, driven possibility.
Stephen Vincent
***
***
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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