2 am: in the zone of BBC4 wafting acrosss from a set by the window; curtains
drawn - Morrisey singing this charming man, New Order Blue Monday and a
hexagon drum: thin synthesizer and the words

"..how does it feel?

To treat me as you do?

When you've laid laid your hands upon me
And told me who you are?"

A triumvirate of Q's, new order: The Fall, Ley of the Land, green and red 
ballet dancer's hands pink-gloved, up to just below the elbow - dull drone 

North West Lancastrian versifier, telling us of Chicken Town and Simply Red,
holding back the fears, thinking i can change the thought of love into being 

literature and language

wasting all those years, and nothing really feels as if its on
holding onto a Hacienda going wrong, E's and stoned Roses, Brown monkeying 
in red and yellow kaftan, Squire in a white one; key-hole crosses sprayed on -
Fool's Gold and Happy Mondays

"Has to be a loose fit
Has to be a loose fit

Go on move in it, go on do your bit
Small, Big take your pick"

Oh go on back to 1992 and M People moving on up;
nothing can stop us, it's time to break free - Blunt
Brookes, Burgess, Collins and Charlatans' grandbags 

bezz and becks pilfering an ebag: 808 State and Baker
Street sax spun through the electronic rig -

"Doesn't have to be legit
It' s gotta be a loose fit "

 - baseball cap and custom print, light flash keyboard
all black and white - Shaun Ryder, Mancunian poetry buff

"Don't need no skin tights in my wardrobe today
Fold them all up and put them all away
Won't be no misfit in my household today
Pick him on up and send him on his way"

the day we got out our faces, stole letters from gang@
anonymous school, definite in a lose-fit, we got to get lost
extracting stone cold centuries. We waited to show off

"When our love was new and our hearts were high
When the day was young and the nights were long
And the moon stood still for the night-bird song"

Poetry Anonymous, practicing artists, cold stone dawn arriving 
where spires dream in pearly light, above a town where all things
are possible to embrace - disappointments of the fervent few, 

"God made it easy
God made it easy on me"

unfamiliar landmarks, insistent scraping off what should be eternal
paternal and a god-man material right 

"Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They will turn away no more" 

new orders, a usual route for they who breathe sadness

"Sit down next to me
Those who find they're touched by madness
Sit down next to me
Those who find themselves ridiculous
Sit down next to me"

~

Thanks very much.

I have been working in a Flarf form, kinda, of late. I don't mean Flarf in
the sense of trying to write the worst poetry one can attempt as some ironic
statement to the world on our genius. By throwing shit into the crowd to
make a political statement whose post-modern syntax heavily laden and
weighted to tipping the Cynic into further confirmation the wrong crowd are
being cheered by the mug winning leftie mass, on which our practices found
themselves the (admittedly thin) audience for what window on the soul and
self we exhibit in the corners of our workshop/s where the inner artie outs
the genuine sensitively kinetic bag of bones jangling on the call from
whatever the fuck it is, that makes us behave as we do in the world of letters.

No, the compositional process forming the shit i've been engaged with in the
previous week; evolved out of what Robert Sheppard told me, is the
Write-Through form; where we take on text and re-shuffle the words and
letters making it - into something else.

At one extreme, an artie dimwit could take the King James Bible, toss it
into the window of our consistently failing artistic selves and publically
spout we are the real author; because some mental gymnastics performed in a
Conceptual performance space where fact and fiction mix - results in us
behaving in this way, claiming to speak from a Higher plane of actuality, or
fatntasy, or whatever it is that causes what it is we do.

At the other end of the plane, we have texts were a majority of the
finished, rejigged text, consist of the orignal words, remixed into
something genuinely poetically authentic. The discipline form brings, not
coming from traditional numerical stressed syllabic form, or one from
contemporary avant garde - such as not using/using only certain letters,
numerical constraints, arbitary or thought out as a cutting edge po-biz
attempt at making wholly new forms. Flarf, for example, has had legs for
several years as something the intellegensia don't mind addressing in a
scholastically serious way.


Then we can have the highest form of Write-Through: where we rejig the
original, found text at letter-level, breaking apart the words and instead
of the rules being so many same words to shuffle; we look at the individual
letters. 

I first started in 2004, May, when I stumbled across the form, mistakenly
thinking I had invented it: after starting to write one of the six class
assignment poems, part way through my final semester of six. It suddenly
occured to me to stop with the 100 or so words I had written (a back garden
scene, spring trees in bloom and birds tweeting etc) - and use the same
words; with the rule i set myself as the exercise; being to shuffle up the
words and put them in as different an order as possible. I dunno why i
thought this, but after I had finished the exercise, I spotted Ted and
Syliva Plath's books on the computer monitor, which I had checked out as my
first entry into these two I had heard a lot of but didn't read till I was 37.

With the compositional fizz rising, how exciting, i thought, it would be to
take one of these Hughes or Plath poems I'd heard about when in lay life
when being an uneducated person working on building sites and in offices. I
skim read both books, the Collosus and one of Ted's i can't remember now;
and ended up using Collosus as the found text to write through.

I have documented the full of this process elsewhere.

http://irishpoetry.blogspot.com/2006/03/write-through.html

Not that many of you few will read it, i imagine, but you are very welcome
to, and if anyone has a sector of your practice on which the compositional
method is running along similar lines, hello colleague.

Cheers.

I found myself integrating this method into the general routine. My practice
is only online at the moment, because although I have a lot of work (three
finished collections) and a voluminious memory stick with thousands of pages
of my failures, just waiting to connect with an editor on my wavelength, who
understands the non stop drive to blather online and set myself up as one of
the few in the only medium I  have known since setting off on the path of
changing my life from that of one without learning, to one trying to
polishes off the chips and grudges.

Working int he write-through form, is just having another exercise in the
bag to work with. For example, the way a write-through usually happens for
me, is that I will stumble across a text, usually a poem, during the working
day spent surfing round the round of lampost-portals of the usual dumping
places i have acquired to work in since leaving the altar of langpo as a
ticketed nube - and writing-through it. I did a lot in Carol Rumen's poem of
the week thread when she first started worki at the guardian books blog as
resident goddess: impelled by the notion of wanting to impress her; lay down
a mark she couldn't ignore. She did of course, very noticably (not at the
time) because it took her something like eight months of weekly spamming
before she acknowledged my presence: long after all the other regulars had
been connected with.

Now she is fine, as the two years, weekly dumping sessions led to some kinda
form overall taking shape in that cyberspace. Billy Mills, who instigated
the Poster Poems activity on the guardian books blog; I found during the
early days, I used it a lot, dominating really, to just practise dumping out
my rubbish in.

There was a year or so when I was a bit unfocussed and some really
unreadable crazee gloop was the hallmark of my doings there. But i naturally
drfited off and found myself moving elsewhere; until this week, when I
returned to poster poems after a year and more not attending, and using the
predominantly anonymous poster's poems, as the base texts from whic to steal
lines and cobble together found poems.

This started with Carol Ann Duffy's first launch on the Guardian after
becoming laureate: a raft of (only) women's poems came on one Saturday, and
that was the big, exciting poetic event in the UK that week. I read them and
it occured to me to take one line from each poem and make a composite, a
found text response to the new PL's first shown-hand. It only took a short
while, because the exercise, by this point, after years of doing
write-through, has become a solid method to dribble in.

It also fits in with the Amergin text we spoke of at length here the other
month, because when I first found the Amergin text, I found the overall
shape i saw the Amergin text in - which is a long ruck of text, then a very
poetic middle section in which the four poetic sorrows and joys of human
life are listed, before the third and final clump of meaning packed lines.
So when I first started the write-throughs, i would take words from the top
and mix it with stuff from the bottom, and the overall, long term objective,
was to try and make a text like mixing concrete, giving myself as much
chance as possibel to make the finished word-strings as different as
possible from the original found text, by placing side by side, words which
had been furthest away from each other.

This is the first time I am clarifying this concept in print, though it has
been real as a visual abstract swirl of mental energy, since shortly after
the process firming earlier on in the process.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I am available for weddings and barmitzvahs,
should you require an entertaining failure never knowingly won.