Antidote to Solitude?

 from Fair bodies of unseen prose,

Why do so few words directly contain the antidote to solitude?

One day, to be determined. Ecumenical.

In sound, in fragments. This raft, of 

inexplicable. In Orlando, withered. 

Holding shape in the hand. What kind of 

trees. The sentence, always. Whereabout. 

A preliminary phrase. Lodged. If but to 

bear witness. Translated, upon. Unwinds: 

a river of symphony. This torn ground 

will contain. It will not. This fiction of 

history. I wrote the first word.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End,(ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty(University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics(periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey(touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

author

Cherry Cola Juliet

Not down in old Soho 

If Juliet and Romeo woke up in the 21st century and obtained research fellowships after uni then they might well be reincarnated in post pandemic London as ‘caramelised’ 'boy' and 'girl' in poet Mara Nkere’s ‘Cherry Cola’ . So intense is the passion of these modern day lovers in this erotic and doomed tale of two opposites who don’t quite trust their tryst. So potent is the depth of feeling that it might be remiss to think of London as anything less than romantic purgatory. This is not a couple who meet down in old Soho for a laugh. 

These vignettes and soliloquies written in a variety of forms show modern dating as a simmering and 'atomic' love assault. The union which starts as a cagey game of chess soon begs the question: Does ‘girl’ truly believe she can withstand her own misgivings? The Romeo and Juliet theme transcends time and hyperbole is also used with devastating effect. Planets fall from heights, overdoses loom, there is much here that echoes Shakespeare’s secondary school classic. Religion plays a part as well as ‘the girl’ tells ‘the boy’, there is no contest between him and Jesus, 'because please don't let me choose boy, because it'll always be Jesus' . 

The war of words intensifies as the passionate pair use their work or post university scientific leanings to dissect their relationship. If Juliet Capulet's stars don’t quite align in time to save her life in R and J then the lead character 'girl' is a prisoner of her own blood moon and is ‘transfixed’ by the boy as he is a pendulum of a clock that stops her natural time. 

The book is divided into halves, each narrator has their own POV and love lament and the book is written in a variety of narrative styles (letters, diary entries, statements) that work so you seek for clues to the mysterious  ‘boy’ nicknamed Cherry Cola. ''Boy' meanwhile is more watchful and cautious but also feels himself being seduced into the bad torment of love.  ‘Girl’who loves her blond blue eyed young lover’s ‘extraordinary mind’ commits early and with sexual intensity but perhaps predictably isn’t far off considering ‘cutting off his dick’ and grinding it into a potion. This exotic or more grown up ‘girl’ is less needy than  Shakespeare’s innocent Juliet and will clearly make  her own choices. However this reference to potions with body parts has literary echoes of Shakespeare’s other  landmark Macbeth and Nkere’s book buzzes with personality. Funk, fusion,  modern day riffs this poetic lament has a musicality with some classic cat fight put downs. This is Romeo and  Juliet’s  spicy 21st century cousin with no Benvolio to keep the peace. It is as if 'girl' has taken a page from cousin  Tybalt in this 21st century love tango. 

A Pandemic Poem of Faith and Hope

The Stations of the Cross 

(for Fr Phillip Lemon,

Our Lady of The Assumption, Bethnal Green, London)

By Mike Parsons

“After the first death, there is no other.”  Dylan Thomas

1.Jesus Is Condemned To Death

We adore thee O Christ and we praise you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

                      “ after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors”

                                 Luke 2. 41-52

Death. Do I fear it?  I am terrified, but  there are moments, when in giving, you gain the incalculable.

So much is wrong, so much unnecessary.

Let me give.

 

We live lives dedicated to change.

“Ce petit monde est a refaire”  says Emmanuelle Billoteaux

(This little world must be remade).

 

Who is to blame?  

We can talk of specifics.

We should not talk of blame, but of understanding, 

Evaluation.  

We must identify the problems.

 

I take a walk with Christine's children in Umoja, Nairobi.

Flowers grow along the path; purple and yellow.

The corn has been harvested though there are still some ripening.

The whole field has been cultivated since I was here lst October,

Women were preparing the ground then, and planting.

They have worked well.

 

Some people are secure with their money and posessions.

Do they care only for themselves?

 

What Impels?

 

Please, help us with our lives.

Help us overcome our faults,

understand and change.

Forgive us our trespasses.

 

Lord Jesus, you are condemned to death a million times by greed and self-interest.

By power compounded with fear

in this vicious cycle of survival.

 

Condemned to death

and yet going beyond death.

Unstoppable.

 

You will not die,

“I will not die”.

 

We are left with the question, “Why does life destroy life

                         Why destroy that which will take the fear away?”

But their fear is not our fear.

We are not our bodies,

We are more than our minds, 

more that our sense of “I”, Tyranical, fragile, fearful…

Bit of Bovver

‘The graves (in Abney Park Cemetery) heave up from the ground like the teeth of a badly dentisted but black-hairedand winsome girl.’  Gothic scenes and a fearsome wit infect Tim Wells’  Skinwolf in London tale:Moon Stomp.

Bit of bovver

The debut novel begins innocently as protagonist Joe Boshover, prefers suspenders and red gingham to any 'bovver' and lives with his parents in Stoke Newington. Things rapidly build to a head when Lena Lovich infects Joe with a lover’s bite at a heaving punk show though and the young printer is soon howling through the cobblestoned streets from Hackney to Smithfield’s Market. Moon Stomp is not late night Hammer Horror thriller filler or schlocky 60’s/70’s era kitsch either. "Wotcher," is word on the street in the ‘never quite sure who is behind you’ world of young bovver boys on the town. The mindset is Thatcher-era early 1980’s; punks, rastas, skinheads pack in clusters around Farringdon clubs. Essex bands like Puncture and punks The Ruts keep the heaving sex and thrill seeking Joe and mates Dennis and Irish Philip, 'Flipper' sated in their nightly escapes from union jobs in the print trade. Story aside which drives ahead with the pace of a mosh pit, narrator Joe Boshover imparts the story with a likeable but take no prisoners working class narrative which by the second chapter has Joe inhabit the form of a menacing, snarling, hirsute, prowling beast of the Hackney Marshes. Teen Wolf this is not and any memory of cheeky Michael J. Fox be damned. Joe has ‘tude  in spades.  He sizes up competition,  is opinionated about the company ‘e keeps like a poet early doors at a gig. This works well and the humour sparkles. ‘He was keen on fanzines, which Joe liked about him, but also Adam and the Ants, which Joe didn’t.’  A narrator ready to trade zingers but also not looking for trouble either is a winning start and we soon side with Joe as his alter ego chomps through Abney Cemetery with howl at the moon, abandon. Although a slim volume, ironically not much bigger than a book of poetry, Moon Stomp is a page turner with some eyebrow and hair-raising scenes. The London poet's spare style works in the new leap into fiction. 

Beatific and a bit bent in Soho

With the recent passing of Glen Carmichael, here is a new review of the cult novel: STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS co-written with his friend, Kevin Evans. Available now from Burning Eye Books. 

Carmichael, Evans and co.

The spectre of Jack Kerouac casts a knowing eye over Glenn Carmichael and Kevin Evans’ cult novel ‘STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS’ which is now reissued from Burning Eye. Dean Moriarty is reincarnated in 1980’s London as dangerous driving ‘Gene Campbell’, a scene stealing, hard living poet with an eye for the ladies - and men. Echoing the role of Kerouac’s beatific, Sal Paradise and riding shotgun along Constitution Hill in their dented Vauxhall Victor is Gene's sidekick, Spike, straight man and word perfectionist searching for meaning in the repressed, Thatcher-era miasma they inhabit. It is straight man Spike's literate, self-deprecation and parody which invests our interest as the two friends careen around the Buckingham Palace roundabout trying to make their gig. The excitement builds through the tension and eyes of Spike as he wonders if he is really  'ready to.... swallow dive into the maelstrom' with this flamboyant self-seeking apostle, Gene, bent on taking them into the top tier of performance poetry. 

Cult novel reissued

The novel is fuelled by the friends' failures; a prior musical incarnation as 'The White Brothers' died with a spat on Denmark Street and the tension builds with one man’s desire to transfix the clubs over pubs of 80's seedy Soho London. The 'commissars of the quatrain' take the stage with a vengeance in The Red Lion to breath new life into a dying and abandoned art form. Seizing on the energy vacuum the young friends control the mic and soon 'words richocheted around the walls'. Suggestions that Gene is going to be the 'lifeguard' to a dying scene play on the mind of the more introspective Spike and his fixation on this messianic figure, is the power of the novel's first few chapters. (After speaking with Kevin Evans by phone I was informed that the opening of the novel won a literary prize, and it was the conviction of the two friends Evans and Carmichael to finish the novel as a consequence of this). As 'poetry' is The Big City Beats mutual calling, Spike’s concerns about the very strange nature of poetry assault the opening like beats on a drum in a jazz club: poetry as life tonic is a succession of metaphors expressed as frenzied mind skipping through a Rolodex. Poetry Is everything and nothing, a tired ‘gentlemen’s club’, a ‘wild beast’ a ‘queer fish’. After all, with Spike seeking a release from a stifling Civil Service day job, poetry is all consuming. But in the same space of days it is also ‘an atrophied corpse’ and the rewards are not money nor fame perhaps. Spike admits, ‘Poetry, who needs it?’  The answer and driving force comes from the relentless but unreliable form of charismatic ‘Gene’, who wills Spike to memorise their lines and beat back their audience into full submission to their ‘heavenly light’.  The style of writing moves from metaphor to simile and 'that queer fish' poetry never suffers from a lack of time in the spotlight. In the world of the Big City Beats, ‘poetry’ needs a kick up the arse as it is as ‘flaccid as a eunuch’s dick, as dull as dishwater’. Like an odd couple band eschewing definition you wonder how this will all tap out. ‘Your best is not good enough,’ Gene yells at the audience.

If you consider that 'STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS' is a co-authored novel it may be appropriate that this ‘fictive book’,  based on real life, asks you to go deeper to try and figure out which poet wrote which part (Evans or Carmichael)? My gut feeling is that the opening, based on the observations of a sidekick, is written by Evans and the descriptions of the lack of organisation at a poetry reading show the point of view of a young passionate man whose anger resonates with his search for meaning. Have the action scenes been penned by Carmichael? How would the novel fare without its clever plotting? The poem ‘Distance’ at the end is a clear example of Carmichael's work and there are readings of it online.  It is hard to really know who wrote what but the book is able to easily blend an obviously mutually understood world and the characters crackle, fizz and pop. There’s is humour in the book, when show boating Gene waltzes into an East End caf and sits quietly ‘glum’ while both girlfriends, ‘Maria’ and ‘plain Claire’ hold court over the spoken word poetry scene.

"What is wrong?" asks Spike to his friend  who just stares ahead and mutters hollowly that ‘Carver, Raymond Carver has died.’ 

BIG CITY BEATS

This revelation floors Spike as he never knew his friend was a fan of Raymond Carver and the spare response and style may be a homage to the American master of 'less is more'. Spike never knows what Gene is going to do next and despite them seeming to be best friends it shows how little they know about each other outside of the desire to be the next big thing in spoken word poetry. There is a 'Withnail and I' quality about the book, though at times, the admitted ‘angry at the world tone’ is played on frequently.  What the book s great at is showing how little we do know about the people we spend time with. The action scenes are comic, perhaps penned by Carmichael (who has recently passed away) but again I don’t know. The scenes of drug taking  have maximum impact and show the debauched side of drug addiction, poverty, sex for sale, etc. The celebration of Spike’s birthday on February 14th is filled with pathos and terrible sadness as the boys veer  from name checked East End watering holes, like The Blind Beggar, to Murphy’s which is their secret name for the White Hart, all culminating in a quite debauched downward spiral as things literally go south after a disastrous reading at the posh Chelsea Arts and Crafts Fair. 

Danny Boyle, would you option this?

There is lots of great funny writing about working class observations of ‘Taffs’. The figure of Rhys a kind of stoned bully from hell who persecutes Spike for maximum comic effect is particularly effective as we want Spike to stand up for himself, which he never does.  Rhys, described as ‘the blond pale shit-bag, a neurosis and crisis written scumbag’ is over the top so we delight in the mad caper of his sadistic advances. The sadness of the book permeates through but the book has a page turning quality, and would make a decent film as the set pieces, all based  a round London landmarks like Pall Mall, Soho, The Red Lion Pub, Soho peep shows, The Blind Beggar, evoke a certain era of East End versus West End rent boys, scenesters, poets and lowlife's of 1980’s London. 

I see this book as a film. The scene driving around Buckingham Palace is a page right out of classic cinema  and the characters are rip snortingly real, as if the writer had put it down here to get the characters right when the book is filmed. This book has a very dark soul but is honest in its account of real life events which may have occurred at The Hard Edge Club from 1989 till 1995 and it features award winning writing (the first chapter won the East Side Writers award in 1998) and the comedy is there. If there were a sequel I would call it something like Spiked: Withnail’s uncle pops his clogs in Soho. 

After speaking with Kevin Evans by phone recently and in light of the recent death of his old friend Glenn Carmichael, I asked Kevin whom he would like to direct the film of this book. One particular person was in my mind but I asked Kevin anyway.  "Danny Boyle or someone like that, would do a great job." Are you a director looking for a book set in 1980's London. This one has it all, and deserves its beat, cult status. 

Caw of the wild

A review of Scott Andrew Christensen’s word play poetry debut.

Review

How Festive the 'Cultural Acclimation' or the #$@&%*! in FU

 If it be the job of the poet to capture the zeitgeist of the moment or reflect the feeling of the times in the same way that Shakespeare captured Jacobean society (or more certainly the language of Elizabethan England) or the way that the Psalms captured Biblical times then a modern poet must capture modern times surely?

In How Festive the Ambulance, an incisive stab at the quest to be heard (on several continents) the ambition of Kim Fu's assured début may put off many veterans of poetry who see poetry as a higher art form. That is not to say that the book falters because it is not finely written but more to say that poetry can be so many things. Alternatively if poetry is 'a trick on the page', or has a foot in both worlds as entertainment and enlightenment then surely somewhere in the arrangement of words the reader must be intrigued to search for deeper meaning. This book achieves this quest in a subtle way by placing the voice deep in the text, like the voice of a plotter heard through a wall who may or not be saying: ' If you haven't caught it yet no one believes what you want them to believe: the message in many cases could be an unequivocal Fuck You!! If protest be the food of modern life, is it fair to ask what the protest is against?  HFTA seduces quietly by starting with offhand remarks.

'Winnipeg has the highest density

of mosquitos per square mile

on earth'

So starts the introduction to the world of FU in 'I READ SOMEWHERE'. 

This Winnipeg trivia, which would equally get a laugh in a pub as elicit a wry smile from a child in a Grade seven class, makes the reader feel like a fly on the wall spying on a group of passive aggressive millenials or singletons.

In the title poem, the poet's ability to arrange the words in a detached cadence is showcased:

How Festive the ambulance looks

studded with jewel coloured lights

ruby and amber on the outer rim of the Ferris wheel

The meaning of the poem is obscured by the slow style until we realise in DEAR RACHEL, I BORROWED YOUR CAR, that Rachel, has been put in 'neutral'  has rolled off the pier in her car and the ambulance may or may not be there for her. Is this the little sense of outrage in these times in which language is forgotten as if the Rosetta stone or translation services to the world have left us reduced to a simple stifled expression that no one can be bothered to respond to?

The delight of FU is that she is able to show this by taking stabs at the meanings of being alive and fighting to say I see you but perhaps you don't see me. Is the neutrality of the world there in the actions of the people, shrinking away from each other left to communicate through digital means, separated by miles and miles of email and data breaching? 

In SMALL ROOMS IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD

'A teacher says I would be punished

for my mediocrity with a tiny apartment

in the land of the dead'

So is there anything here other than a strange arrangement of words? If the poet must commit, then FU does a good job of keeping you ready, like a teacher hearing inane conversations before the class erupts and all the year nines have pen and ink on them. Speaking of teaching, how many high school students would tactfully restrain themselves before they picked up on the #$@&%*! in FU?

FU has a beleagured sense of modern life (and one may imagine the myriad electronic gizmos that accompany it).

'You left Buenos Aires for New York, New York for Bombay, Bombay for Paris. I am trying to find beauty in an overturned bread bowl.'

In COMPLEXITIES OF AN INSULT:

'That he addressed her in English: Don't

though his accent was Francophone...

...

Somewhere through all of this conversation there is a light bulb going off and the readers gets a sense of the silent subversive joker laughing at the world but also looking at the boredom and apathy around us.

In

ANY NUMBER OF REMARKABLE THINGS

I stay up late

because the act of brushing my teeth

and laying my glasses on the bedside table

means there is nothing left to see.

The self awareness is also palpable for someone who may prefer not to be seen as well. 

THE PIG MAN/ I HAVE A FORGETTABLE FACE

I have a forgettable face. It allows me to belch in public, to fart, to wipe snot on my sleeve, because I don't know these people and they won't remember me.

The poems talk about the end of the mind, the end of the reliance of the mind and the simple protests that are there in daily life to shriek out against this, in little stabs and knocks at the great slumbering muse in all of us.

Revenge of the Battery Hen or...If poetry is a magic trick on the page what does poet David Alexander conjure for the mother hen in all of us?

If you've seen the recent McDonald's commercials (er at least ad vertz in the UK) you'll know that big business will go far to ensure the chicken on your plate is either Kosher, Halal, hand reared or otherwise plucked and de-clucked with kindness. Whether or not you believe this to be true is another thing and David Alexander's book of poetry, After the Hatching Oven, Nightwood Editions (2018) debunks a few of these myths and puts the pathos of henny penny back in favour of the persecuted pullet.

For those working at the Egg Boards of Canada Pluckers, how many may recall a shadowy janitorial figure with a late night case of the munchies, ambling into a 'bright, tiled place, (who) chewed through spicy tendons and veins and dropped bones onto the rain kissed sidewalk'? How would the tragic end of a cybernetic fowl register with a child who watches with interest a beak peck through a brown egg in a primary school incubator? If poetry is a magic trick on the page, what does the poet David Alexander conjure for the Mother Hen in all of us? 

Alexander is philosophical the plight of the innocent fowl and considers a chicken who may have 'rebel'led  and perhaps fomed a 'language for revolution'. That is not to say  this is a glib critique of the consumer society, although it is certainly a celebration of the place in history of the beloved farm yard hen. Many of the poems in the collection pay tribute to pheasant's domesticated cousin, gallus gallus, through literary forbears, or friends:  H.G. Wells, Bp nichol, Ted Hughes, Dani Couture, Elizabeth Bishop, Kate Sutherland; those familiar with allegorical tales may delight in nods to Animal Farm or tales from Brother's Grimm. The art of the poems is to put the lens on the hen from different vantage points: public health advisories, recipes, parables, terrorism acts. Crossing time zones and states of mind each poem is an individuated, self contained-riff on how we got to cram all those birds in small heated spaces and forgot our own modest beginnings in the doing.  From a Review of the London Poultry House, an online course on chicken behaviour and welfare, the recurring theme is our little red hen friend, and their quiet existence in our lives under duress. In Elegy a rooster crows 'who was she, was she yours?'

If you have even lived on a farm you know the cluck of a contented chicken like the purr of a contented cat. You may also know about the weird sense of itchiness that comes when you visit a chicken battery, an "Auschwitz for hens" a Jewish family friend once remarked. Is this the subversive protest of a friend left behind?

The sensitivity for the beloved bird which has been subsumed in Knorr Cubes and deep fried wings is relayed as if slogans or calls to arms, pasted on a Town Hall wall.  It is as if these carefully chosen pastiches of separate comic, existential or biblical poems is addressing a separate audience but asking the same question: would chickens be as kind to us if the roles were switched?  If chickens were as big as a Tyranasaurus Rex, if they could spread an avian flue epidemic, if they could show love to us,  would they? Or is the yolk really on us? Idiomatically, chickens as a subject, can't be topped surely? After all, you don't have to be a good egg, to know this is chicken soup for the soul, no? But is this book of poetry a simple run of cliches on our feathered friend?

No. This is a late night behind the barn with two people who are going to duke it out for the rest of the village because there is no better way to express the rage of oppression. This is the pamphlet that lies in the corner, the newspaper, the spitoon bucket, each sheet of paper a leaf of anti-hen slavery rhetoric.

This is a warning to multinationals and those persons seeking to exist on fast food. What goes around, flies right back in your face and conscience. Is it really better to persecute or beloved bird and claim ignorance and run afowl of our own conscience? After all when we drive through the KFC, isn't it better to ask how we got to this point or, seeking to bury our heads in modern convenience do we even know that if we are not careful about how we look at familiar things – surely for the benefit of our own souls –  our own goose may be cooked, our own chickens may come home to roost as well?

That Sardonic Eye

Humbert Summer

A.K. Blakemore

Eyewear Publishing 2015

Humbert Summer, winner of the 2014 Melita Hume Poetry Prize, is a memorable début from a promising young poet. Already feted by The Times as 'one to watch' and an Oxford English graduate at 23, this book perhaps shows what A.K. Blakemore was up to between train and secondary school. Some of these poems were composed whilst many were cramming for their GCSE’s though Blakemore's interplay of words, convent girl crushes, Japanese fetishes and inevitable and depressive ‘sinking on the stairs’ are relayed with quiet emotion. At their best the poems show an older voice with a bite of killing honesty; Blakemore may be a female counterpoint to that old ‘male spider in a trenchcoat’, that ultimate 1960's era hipster, Leonard Cohen whose, poem in Energy of Slaves:

"I didn't know until you walked away you had a perfect ass.

 Forgive me for not falling in love with your face or your conversation."

echoes Blakemore’s sardonic eye:

…

This is one for the

Girl who has lain a short way

Off

While his body recoils

Like a cinder

And felt part of nothing

…

You might be forgiven for thinking of the goth girl smoking the cigarette with the cutting remarks, catching you trying to look cool, too. At first, you worry that the sarcasm might be too strong, the façade too easy to hide behind. This is echoed in the very funny HATE

‘She believes the earth laughs through flowers and other asinine things…’

‘Ross and Rachel’ get the poet’s lens trained on them as well.

In ROSS AND RACHEL AS INVERTEBRATES, the annoyingly ‘in love’ couple are watched by two twenty-something singletons, perhaps on a train in from the south downs?

However we feel a sense that the skin is not as thick as it might pretend to be, that Rachel has bits of that comfort and perhaps experience about her that the others may also long for? And this hidden ongoing tension is also what makes you wonder what Blakemore will come up with next?

There are memorable moments here. 

In YOU ENVIED THE STARS THEIR HEIGHT

‘The day folded like a cabbage

while closing its wings on a windowsill.’

As a poet, more than capable of talking head lice (in Lower school?), Ganymede, Greek Temples and calling time on weak, selfish men, you might recall those college and/or school days and perhaps ‘envy’ the girl her time.