Everyone.

This morning I noticed the Magma website, set up with a £10,500 public subsidy in 2008 (whose team ignore and do not tolerate any questions by the public poster asking how much subsidy they get), a fiefdom of very few who openly flout the spirit of 'Arts Council England (who) is committed to supporting public engagement' - had posted a new blog post by Roberta James - titled: Should Poets Be More Adventurous in their Use of Form?

As you know, my own practice is evolved wholly online for the last few years, and I do write in 'adventurous form', but because of the childish behaviour of at least three of the four I know who control Magma online, I am 'excluded' from that site because...I dunno.

(There's lots of name checks for the regs here in the piece, so bear with the preamble, please because all the proper adventurous people who write here and in the exciting gaffes, get mentioned.)

The three whose names I won't mention here unless they decide to come in and stop acting silly and just engage with me as a member of the public and the sort of colleague their propoganda spouts they want to read, an 'adventurous' poet - are behaving very anti- Art, i think at least, as the below response to their blog post proves.

Online practice as a bardic bore is very rewarding for those of us serious in what we do: Learn about the truth of the Brython and GaElic poetry Tradition that existed in these islands first and for 1000 plus years in print. Of which most are ignorant, and being honest, many are not only wholly disinterested, but unfairly treat those of us that are, in the way the three Magma editors funded by the public purse, do me.

Not that I am too upset about it, because life really is too short for an artist when colleagues from a straight-stream seeking power and privilege, unfairly and irrationally take against us because we are driven to seeking truth and justice. 

As I learnt in my final year in tertiary education under poet Robert Sheppard and other more intellectually driven creators in Letters: if you feel uncomfortable with the 'art' of another, rather than behaving like an ostrich, denying the 'other' by refusing to acknowledge it, it is far more beneficial artistically to set ones intellectual compass toward challenging our own self-conception of the world and those in sharing it in the forum of Letters, especially for people who claim to profess 'poetry', a drawing out rather than a filling up, fire in the head not cliquey subsidised gangs of angry silent bores unable to speak though claiming to be poets.

I practice, probably because of Sheppard's influence, what he calls 'speculative discourse', an open ended artistic inquiry whose outcome is not tendential or pre-dertermined, but hopefully, sincere and inculsive and open to accepting those who appear in Letters online, as being exactly the same and with the same right to be treated as an artist or poet, as myself and you lot, Readers.

Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks very much. This is what was up at Magma for a couple of hours before the very important in their own small and closed minds kinda colleagues removed it, not because it wasn't relevent, interesting and poetic, but because it was me who dared ask them a question they found made them question themselves, essentially.

Thanks very much everyone.

~

It is noticeable that the most significant and talented practitioners of the poetically adventurous compositional methods, who appear on pages like Harriet, Poetryetc and Britpo@jiscmail: the Bergvalls, Böks, Bonneys, Bradys, Byrnes, Croggons, Monks and Sutherlands of the global poetry village, who sing from this branch Roberta refers to – do not appear between the pages of Magma, Laurie.

Maybe the Magma team of editors and talent spotting assistant editors soliciting and commisioning, could take on board this observation and engage directly with the people who make the most ‘adventurous’ poetries, by batting about in a back and forth, just to see what happens?


If any adventurous music comes out of the exercise, excellent. If not, there’s nowt lost. You can only try Laurie and Rob, speaking with Alison, Caroline Christian, Geraldine, Keston, Mairead and Sean?
My own attempts at ‘adeventurous’ form, led to the write-through form. This is where one takes short (and once you get used to it, longer) pieces of text and break them down into their constituent Letters, before re-assembling them into a wholly new form and/or, poem.

An academic exercise and not everbody’s idea of excitement, but it is a genuinely ‘adventurous’ compositional method, and does lead to original work.

For example: Below is a horrid comment left on one popular American poet’s website by an anonymous begrduger, whose (as you will read), ‘form’ and arrangment was reduced into its constituent Letters, and then re-assembled into a genuine poem, or at least a close approximation. 

I have been practicing this form for six years, with varying results, and have lots of texts, often spam poems or even respectable ones, that I’ve had a go at turning into a write-through poem of my own. A lazy way to generate poetic thrills, some could claim, but the mental effort involved is every bit as much as with making one’s own original metrical pieces.

A pefect extremity of practice, these two at either end of the spectrum, balancing out one another as creative strategies. And no, it was not me that wrote the original troll comment, as Katy Bush will attest should you ask her. I read it and immediately got excited because I saw it as an opportunity to further exercise in the write-through form, whilst putting a bit of positivity into the world via Letters, by reversing the register of what I was reading. 


“Dear Ms Baroque (If that is your real name)
Did you know the following?

a. Noone cares about your opinion.

b. Your photo alone is enough to make most either stop reading, vomit on there crotch or track you down just to slap you round your pretensious face with there flacid cock.

c. Your head is so far up your anal passage that you have gone on a disgusting trip, passing the wonders of your bowels, instestines, stomach, up your esphongus and out your mouth which has never known when to shut up.”

Write-Through

Kieran Special – “Plain Eces Air, K”

Dear Baroque
Did you know that you
Alone make most here care
About your words
And love you for your
Face, your name, reality
And poetical opinion;
Sensuous sage who honey mouths
The art of hope,

A truth torc loose around your neck;
Sing with the eye alone
Hear alphabets’ music wooing in ether.
Your tongue scripts star-light,
Its naked truth shoving asunder
Chasms of doubt, out past new
Moon-strips opposite sun rings
Pouring down his wing-shook
Privacy, a huff on jute
You own,

chop to us
C.

~

Now, as a thought-experiment, taken to the next ‘adventurous’ level by practice, it demonstrates one who is intent on developing our brí – inherent/intrinsic personal power set by dán (lit. essence, vigour, significance), that cannot be won or gained, only developed or allowed to atrope.


Poetry, adventurous is, well, anything at all we agree it is, because as you may know (and which many reading will not) dán is a Gaelic word that means, not only poetry, but (as the bardic dictionary of poetry specific words states): ‘gift-talent-vocation, fate and destiny as a unitary concept’.

http://www.adf.org/rituals/explanations/focloir-draiochta.html

This means that when one has purchase on the etymological route of what we all want to practice, poetry-dán, what makes a poem thus, is not so much the content, but the frame and form. Be it highly obvious or hidden buried, like the reversed troll comment turned into a poem.

When this testing and stretching the limit of frame and form in a poem, is effected correctly in adventurous form, as James articulates (and the above poem alerts the reader to, perhaps, colleagues), it is very exciting for the Reader to be in with the writer doing adventurous and unique things with Letters.

~

Janet Smythe was the name it appeared under. I will be back on there because my isp isn't fixed and so it does there heads in, this dance with Desmond the poet they just can't bring themselves to acknowledge, unlike you lovely intellctuals with real talent.

Have a lovely day (later)