Venture Award Reading

You filthy dog. I see what you've been doing, don't think I don't. And it's disgusting. You, yes YOU, make me want to retch up my vodka-soaked guts and then rub the Me Mess into my own eyes so I don't have to see you any more. Even your mother would slap that face. Hard.

This is this premise - kind of - for my recently "Venture Poetry Award" short-listed collection, "Our Terraced Hum". Me starin at people an things an dat from my dank pit window. And then writing lovely sonnets about the things I see. Awww.

Anyway I'll be reading from this collection at the Oxford House Theatre in London, on 12th April (6:30-eternity / 9pm)

Details below, 7 whole British pounds to get in.

http://www.flippedeye.net/venture/92/shortlist-readings/



Russell Jones

Cadaver, Speak

Imagine, with your feeble mind, what a corpse might say - if it were able - when laid out on the anatomy class slab, being hacked to pieces.

Well you don't have to!

Marianne Boruch hosts a night of readings by medical and literature students (including my miserable self) in Edinburgh's Old Anatomy Theatre on 21st March. We'll each be reading three of Boruch's poems from her collection, 'Cadaver, Speak'

Drag your lifeless sack of limbs there. I command thee!

Check out Boruch here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/marianne-boruch

Russell Jones

Interdisciplinary Science Review: Poetries and Sciences in the 21st Century

Please feel free to circulate this call for papers!!!

Call for papers

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.isr-journal.org)

“Poetries and Sciences in the 21^st Century”

This is to invite proposals for contributions to a themed issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews on the topic of “Poetries and Sciences in the 21^st Century”, to be published as volume 39, number 1, March 2014.

Reference here to the present century is meant to imply that the relationship between poetry and science is historically contingent and that our current views of it are informed and challenged by those of the past. The intended aim of this issue is not so much to sketch what we believe to be true but to question our views by considering where they have come from and to speculate on what is to be done through an examination of the interactions between poetry and science.

As a point of departure, consider the literary critic I.A. Richards’ Poetries and Sciences, a work whose writing and revisions span the middle half of the 20^th century. Richards asked what poetry could become in a world deeply and broadly affected by technoscience, arguing that the revolution it has brought about is “too drastic to be met by any such half-measures” as promotion of wonder at the marvels of nature (1970: 52-3). What could wonder be but an attitude of ignorance when these marvels have, or are assumed to have, lawlike explanations? Science has neutralised nature, he argued, and so deprived poetry of its original well-spring: “the magical view of the world” (1970: 50). What could a poet say to those for whom making sense ultimately requires the radically plain style of scientific reasoning? Richards’ solution was to cut the language of the imagination free from the language of belief, hence from epistemological certainty, implying our philosophical freedom to explore possible worlds.

Consider also the psychologist Jerome Bruner’s essay “Possible Castles”, from his Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986). Here Bruner argues that philosophical questioning of science (by Thomas Kuhn et al.) has reawakened the ancient, even tired question of the “two cultures” by revealing science to be historically contingent. In response to this reawakening he gives us two opposed trajectories for the sciences and the humanities, both originating in curiosity and speculation about the world, but one moving steadily away from ambiguity while the other moves towards increasing “the alternativeness of human possibility” (Bruner 1986: 53). He concludes by quoting Aristotle on the poet’s function: “to describe not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen” (Poetics II.9). What matters to the poet, Bruner says, is verisimilitude to conceivable human experience. The poet’s job, we might say, is to expand what is conceivable by finding the best words, whereas the scientist’s is to extend what is explicable by equally audacious, but differently directed, acts of the imagination.

Much closer to our time, physicist Robert B. Laughlin declares that, as much in physics as in biology, we have come out of the reductionism which defined science throughout the 20^th century (2005: 208) – and so created Richard’s dilemma – into an Age of Emergence. If so, then the question to be rescued from the muddle of “two cultures” is truly vigorous and contemporary. Let us say that, to quote theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, we foreswear the crippling mental habit of “looking only downward toward subsystems, and never upward and outward” (2000: 2), which renders us unable to see emergent organizational principles, of poetry or life itself. What then might poetry and science have to do with each other? What might that pre-eminent expression of technoscience, computing, have to say about poetry and how might it go about saying it? How might our most adventurous theories of poetic discourse inform a computing that works “upward and outward” from its object of study?

Practical Matters

In the first instance we request abstracts of up to 500 words, highlighting the key areas of interest and possible direction of your contribution.

Articles should have a maximum length of 6000 words.

All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

Articles may contain black and white illustrations (for which authors should seek the necessary permissions).

The theme of this issue is open to interpretation and we welcome a variety of submissions. In particular, though, we aim to publish one article which considers Richards’ Poetries and Sciences in context with his career (including his involvement with the Macy Conference of 1951) as a way of revisiting Richards’ interactions with the topic and comparing them with those of contemporary poets and literary critics.

For details on format see  www.maney.co.uk/journals/notes/isr

Please address all enquiries to the issue editor:

Russell Jones

r.jones-5@sms.ed.ac.uk

September 2011

Schedule

06/2012           Declare intention to contribute (title and abstract)
12/2012           Secure commitment to submit article
06/2013           Submit first version
09/2013           Reviewers' comments and decisions back to authors
12/2013           Final materials due to the publisher
03/2014           Publication (vol 39.1)

Please address all enquiries to the issue editor:

Russell Jones

r.jones-5@sms.ed.ac.uk

September 2011

Works Cited

Bruner, Jerome. 1986. “Possible Castles”. In Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. 44-54. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Laughlin, Robert B. 2005. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. New York: Basic Books.

Richards, I.A. 1970. Poetries and Sciences: A Reissue of Science and Poetry (1926, 1935) with Commentary. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rosen, Robert. 2000. Essays on Life Itself. Complexity in Ecological Systems Series. New York: Columbia University Press.

Back like a blograt

You probably haven't noticed that nothing much has been going on here at LoathingHQ recently. That's because I was doing other very important things like shaving my arse and singing gangsta rap to the elderly. They ruddy love it.

Well to occupy your fragile mind here are a few visual poems for you to hate.

Go away.


"Event Horizon: At the Alter"

"Incubation"

"Fishing"

Russell Jones

Eddiversary

It's the 1st anniversary of Scots Makar (Scots poet laureate) Edwin Morgan's death this week. If you don't know his work then I definitely recommend you check it out. You can read and listen to some here: 
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1682

I interviewed Eddie in 2009, he was a lovely guy who is greatly missed by many. The Scottish Poetry Library has a small note on their blog, here: http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/

This is a poem (also published in an Edwin Morgan tribute anthology by SwissLoungeProductions) I'd written before Eddie died but that, to me, seems resonant now:

About Edwin Morgan

I believe too much that your white hair was once black,

that your ears are failing, that your oceanic eyes sit back,

loosely waving in your wheelchair. I thought you had a knack

for immortality, that your Whittrick never abandoned ship. In the snack

bar you revealed a dismal hump, a tented animal, long-blind, hunch-back,

half-paralysed and we were ready for that. But Eddie, how can we let the crack

of heaven wash the dishes? How can we hear Nessie’s song, save the white rhino, track

those distant, careful worlds? How can we light the cigarette without the fire of your lips? 

GO READ SOME OF HIS POETRY

Captain Cliche at Captain's Bar

Arrrr, yo ho ho and...blergh. That's enough pirate noise. Shut up.

Well it's that time of year again, the time I seclude myself from society even further, sit in the darkness and vomit into my hands, laughing like a traffic cone. It's the Edinburgh Festival.

But for one night only I'll leave my hovel and scrape my way to Captain's Bar to deliver some words to the unwitting public.

It's free!
Doors open at 7, the evening starts at 7:30 and ends by 8:30
It's free to get in
Captain's Bar, South College St.  EH8 9AA
Did I mention it's free?
http://captainsedinburgh.webs.com/festivalhaversblethers.htm



Russell Jones

Breaking Open the Medikit: Andrew Philip’s The Ambulance Box

Breaking Open the Medikit: Andrew Philip’s The Ambulance Box

The half-rusted first aid kit that attires the cover of Philip’s first book of poetry is apt: this is a book of halves and struggles. “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words” said Robert Frost, and in The Ambulance Box this transformation is frequently – though not exclusively – fuelled by the death of Philip’s son, to whom the book is dedicated. The Ambulance Box takes on a new meaning, then, to its reader who is brought in to share the various trials of the father, the poet, who simultaneously memorialises trauma whilst attempting to distance himself from it.

The collection opens with one of a series of four “Hebridean Thumbnails” that are placed throughout the book. “islands buried in the sky’s white sands”, reads the first, under the Gaelic title “fo cheò” (which translates as ‘mist-covered’). The poem sets things in motion with a conciseness of word and image that is typical of Philip: no word is superfluous, each is simple but well considered, there is a link to the land but also a sense of beauty and isolation in tandem. The islands are made unreal by their contrast with the sky’s “white sand” which is concurrently transient (as mist) and concrete (as sand). There is a clear play on language structures too, made apparent through Philip’s use of English, Gaelic and Scots throughout the book but also through his use of ambiguity. Here “islands” which, when read aloud, shifts between the singular and the plural (‘islands buried’ -as merely image- and ‘island’s buried’ -as an active process) enact the uncertainty of physical and spiritual existence that riddle the collection.

Philip’s approach is frequently lyrical and formal but not without diversity.  One of the most successful series in the collection, “Pilgrim Variations” experiments with notions of exploration through its appealing use of enjambment and by successfully twinning opposing images and phrases to develop a sense of displacement:

1.      THE DEPARTURE BOARD

If it’s your avowed attempt , go then: leave

and live among us

separately. Laden like that, you can forget

a swift departure for all

your talk of high speed links to yonder

wicket gate.

The series maintains the electricity of its language, which is consistently unsettling but playful, whilst alternating its form to deliver a flowing narrative that seems irregular/unusual but frequently engaging.  That said, the formal structure of The Ambulance Box is not without its flaws: it too frequently reverts to two-line stanza structures which, although give a sense of prolonged and sustained theme, eventually lose their spark. This is the poet returning to what he knows and what he is good at yet it sometimes feels as though he is resting on his laurels. This is perhaps symptomatic of the frequent return to the internal struggles of the poet, the revealing of a mind in turmoil over attempts to remember or purposefully forget the past, which is bound to repeat itself in the mind and on the page.

Perhaps the most outstanding quality of The Ambulance Box comes from the poet’s inability to maintain a coherent understanding of his own feelings towards his son’s death. As such the collection becomes a portrait of confusion, chaos, inadequacy, attempts at reconciliation and understanding, of guilt and acceptance, and ultimately of love. But we are never made to feel sorry or pity, only to consider the nature and fragility of the human body and mind. Like those early islands buried in the sky’s white sand there is a great feeling of isolation brought about by a narrator who is habitually on the outside looking inward, but permeating this is an ore of hope, typified in the collection’s namesake poem, “The Ambulance Box”:

            ... our various wounds

are at home with the box

and all it contains.

                             Hear us,

shoulder to shoulder in the dusk,

celebrate life – sprained and splinted

broken

                        bandaged

                                                set to heal

In The Ambulance Box hope is bound by this unnamed community who sit “shoulder to shoulder” but never mouth to mouth. Hope resides in the mind of the individual, in the assurance of the physical presence of the world around, in language, in the very soil of its creation. The various written languages of the book are testament to the transient nature of the collection as a whole: almost everything is undergoing change. The land, however, is reliable, it sustains the nomadic mind of the poet who is split between worlds of isolation and community, peace and anguish; a concept most honestly spoken in the third of the “Hebridean Thumbnails”, “solus na stoirme” (‘Storm Light’):

where sky and land split         a fragment of grief flickers

This reliance of the stability of the land and its ability to revivify memory is no new thing, though Philip makes a point of drawing us toward it without overstating the cause. He creates community and stability through taking the lump in his throat, his lovesickness and successfully finding the words to voice them.  

Though not always hitting the high notes this collection works as a complete body to promote persistence of the human spirit. Philip’s voice is honest, its cause just. His understanding and exploitation of formal technique is apt and, at times, excitingly enigmatic. Some of the language experiments seem out of place (see his Scots rewriting of Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer”, which works in its own right but just sits awkwardly) or lack the same fervour of others in the book, though for the most part they offer an interesting contrast to his more emotive elements and help to develop ideas of difference and doubt which play well throughout this personal, challenging and experienced read.

Philip, Andrew, The Ambulance Box (London: Salt Publishing, 2009).

Purchase here:   http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844714919.htm

1/7/2011 






Russell Jones