Blog

My poem “Window, Not Sky” was published last week in the online journal B O D Y. Fair warning: it involves adult themes. Be sure to check out some of the other great writers while you’re there.

Commiserate is a monthly experiment in poetic collaboration.

July 2013: Calum Rodger

I first saw Calum Rodger giving a fascinating talk on technology and poetry at the always intriguing Syndicate reading series in Edinburgh. I really liked what he was doing with experimentation and enjoyed how he used technology to make startling, surreal, beautiful work. So, I sent him some new poems and asked if he’d play around with them. Below you’ll find my originals followed by Calum’s explanation of his process and then the final pieces.

Originally, I intended to metaphorically burn the originals and leave Calum’s work to stand as our collaboration. He thought you, hypothetical reader, would enjoy seeing what he started with. Which is hypothetically true. However I must say that I consider the work he made the finished poems surpassing the originals in resonance and mystery.

Part I – Ryan’s Original Text

The Street Lights Flick On

We know the rain must come
but it holds in the sky
we aren’t children

So we don’t out stay the night
playing in the gloam
we stay in doors

Of screens, the air electric
we kick the ball, we talk
of her or luck

It looses its magic sometimes
it is hard to pay full attention
to what you are doing below you

Escalator of a Metro

pushing up those cold insisting stairs now
instead of hanging back
a net of Clementines as in Madrid or Prague
New York or worse
Paris where my hands were on your hot
neck and we felt alone as blood rising
every fold of metal
like a sunset, (the long flight ahead)

before you saw them for what they were /
petals cast into the canyon / and nudged

Calum says:

After Ryan sent me the poems, I fed them into the text generator/processor JanusNode and randomised the word-order and line-breaks using the ‘Dadafy’ function. The results, heavily edited, make up the last poem below, THIS HOT STREET.

THE STREET LIGHTS FLICK OFF is a write-through of Ryan’s poem The Street Lights Flick On, while the four cities mentioned in Escalator of a Metro become triggers for brief lyrics in the Poundian style suggested by that poem’s title in FOUR APPARITIONAL ESCALATORS.

The second line of each lyric comes from Ryan’s poem; the first comes from that city’s Wikipedia page, chosen according to search terms selected arbitrarily from The Street Lights Flick On.

I really like working with a source in this way, and not going in with any ‘goal’ as such – that’s up to the words to suggest. It removes it from self-expression a bit, which is very liberating, so the poems feel more abstract and take on more of a reality of their own, but then I still wind up feeling a connection with them – not reference as such, but resonance. I’m particularly pleased with these results – Ryan’s poems proved fertile source material indeed.

THE STREET LIGHTS FLICK OFF

The rain we know comes mustily
it holds the sky.
We’re not children

so stay the night.
We can be the flat plain gloaming
of wine-stained doors.

No air can trick its way in here,
forget the girl who kicks the coloured panel.
Talk is luck and not where love is.

Magic. When I lose that word
to the tone of your attention, it is hard.
Everything we’re doing is below us.

FOUR APPARITIONAL ESCALATORS

Madrid
street-lighting, cemeteries;
a net of hanging clementines

Prague
even in summer the nights were cold
up those insistent stairs

New York
the conflict and the center of attention;
petals, cast into the canyon

Paris
all the trains are meeting in the city
every fold of metal / like a sunset

THAT HOT STREET

attention rising
you’re magic!
(petals talk back)

sometimes
the sky is like Paris
and sometimes

a clementine sun
echoes an electric
insistence about

these streets
and we, screens
of gloam metal

instead of being
cold hang
out!

●

we were children
and could not pay
the lights flickered

on &
off
or…

I knew you in
the long air
the long kick

just what was your
lucky rain neck
doing in Paris?

and when I found you again
you were a full-blood sunset
in Prague

Calum Rodger is a poet and PhD student at the University of Glasgow working on the poetics of Ian Hamilton Finlay. His creative practice ranges from performance poetry and stand-up comedy, running live poetry night THE VERSE HEARSE in Glasgow with fellow poet Stewart Sanderson, to random lyrics and weird computer-generated and experimental stuff, which he blogs at ALL REAL CULTURE IS FREE. A chapbook, provisionally titled ‘Know yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism’, is forthcoming from Tapsalteerie.

More from Commiserate 2013

In this edition of the Culture Laser I have a chat with Ed Stack of Ten Tracks and Decagram about his project to bring collaboration to the music community in Edinburgh, Rachel Anderson of Small Feet Little Toes & Dave Wheatley are also here to tell us about their collaboration, and we get the chance to hear tracks from both of them and also the track Supersonic Speed Freak from Numbers Are Futile.

And it’s all at the click of a little sideways triangle.

In light of recent events in Turkey and the efforts of our friends in Gezi Park, editors Sascha Akhtar, Nia Davies and Sophie Mayer have set up Solidarity Park, a place for poets writing about the Occupy Gezi movement and Turkish politics at large. I was really pleased to contribute a short piece, To Gezi Park.

In this edition of the Laser I discuss short film with three programmers from the Edinburgh International Film Festival – experimental programmer Kim Knowles, shorts programmer Lydia Beilby and animation shorts programmer Iain Gardner. We also talk with Farah Kassem, director of the short ‘My Father Looks Like Adbel Nasser’ and have the great honour of including the title track Despite The Dark from Hailey Beavis’s new EP.

It’s all behind mystery door number one:

Sarah Broom’s first collection was completed after learning she had stage-four lung cancer in 2008. At twenty-eight weeks pregnant, she was given only months to live. When I met her in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2011 she had given birth to her daughter and was bravely writing her second collection,Gleam, while submitting herself to an exhausting regime of drug trials and treatments in Auckland, Melbourne, and Boston. She was effervescent, optimistic, charming, and generous with her time. The talent on display in her first collection, Tigers at Awhitu, was dark and haunting and I was attracted to her work before understanding how much of it was made through adversity. Sadly, Sarah Broom died on April 18, 2013, five years after her initial diagnosis. Gleam will be published by Auckland University Press in August 2013. Selina Guinness says, “It is a collection written in extremis, and contains some of the most beautiful and startling poems about dying I have ever read.” Broom is survived by her husband, Michael Gleissner, and their three children, Daniel, Christopher, and Amelia, whom she lived to see go off to school.

Our conversation is published in the most recent edition of the Prairie Schooner.

The next installment of the Enemies Project will be a two week exhibition of visual art & avant-garde poetry in collaboration at the Hardy Tree Gallery (119 Pancras Road, London, NW1 1UN) July 6th to 20th 2013, with the space open for viewing 12-6pm July 7, 11-14, 18-20, and featuring seven events over the fortnight.

I’ll reading from our ‘Suburbs’ sequence with SJ Fowler on the 18th in London as part of POW. POW is an excellent pamplet series, and Chrissy Williams’  Murder, She Wrote, a kind of dark love letter to Angela Lansbury, was one of my reading highlights of last year.

All the events are free, and it would be lovely to see you there. You can see a bit of the work SJ Fowler and I did on my Commiserate page.

We’re back from London, back in the recording studio, and back at the wheel of the Culture Laser.

Bryony Kimmings

Bryony Kimmings talks with me about her latest project, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, a social experiment, theatre show, education project and documentary. She discusses Catherine Bennett, her project to create a non-conventional role model for young people and make her famous by manipulating and utilising the current celebrity-producing methods available. Find out more on her website. Check out Catherine Bennett’s website and watch the video for her first single:

The Black Diamond Express

I chat with Toby and Tom of The Black Diamond Express. They talk about their new album ‘Brimstone for Hell’, their influences and we get the chance to listen along to the tracks ‘Never Was A Lass So Fair’, ‘The Dyin’ Crapshooters Blues’ and ‘Live Free or Die’.

Julie Brook

We discuss art, landscape, solitude and community with Julie Brook at her exhibition made, unmade in the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. During 2008/09 Julie travelled and worked in the black volcanic desert in central Libya and in the Jebel Acacus mountains in South West Libya. The stark landscape influenced a corresponding shift in the way she made large scale drawings and sculptural work in situ. This led to further exploration in 2011/12 in the semi-desert of North West Namibia where the absolute nature of the light and shadow is expressed in the new sculptural work. Also featuring a track from Tabloid Vivant’s latest EP, Don’t Yet Dismount, My Lavender Cowboy.

Thanks to all who came out to see Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel on our two-day stint at the London Lit Festival in the Southbank Centre. If you couldn’t make it, come visit Red Room at the Melbourne Fringe this September! And if you’re not in the Antipodes this autumn, perhaps take a moment to enjoy this short trailer. Filmed at the Battersea Arts Centre in December 2012 by Luke Flemming.

Thanks to all who made this a success, and see you on the road again soon.