I met Colin Herd a few years back, when I began to notice his name and his poems and his blog, The Devil Reads Poetry, almost in one flash of apprehension. Almost as soon as that, I had made up my mind he was my kind of poet.
He’s a young fellow, and so composed is his voice, for all its play with hysteria and the awkward, that I imagined he was a grown master I had somehow come to late in his career. Thus when I found out he was 23 or whatever, he had for me a touch of the marvelous from the start. I’m afraid I’ve perhaps too often remarked on him as a prodigy, and this isn’t fair, either to his acomplishment nor to real prodigies, poor things, composing concertoes at seven, bagging pig knuckles at the slaughterhouse at twenty. He was born in Stirling (Scotland) in 1985, so he’s what, 25 or 26 now. Anyhow you know how I am, Dennis—it wasn’t long before I made a determined effort to know Colin Herd, and to see just how strong and how tensile was his approach to the poem. I would throw things at him, like that old lady throwing a ball of yarn at Tom Sawyer’s lap, as a test of his disguise, when he was passing as a female—you’ll remember her theory was that the real boy would shut his legs, whereas a real girl would open them, let her skirt catch the yarn. Colin was at once infinitely responsive and infinitely inventive. There was nothing to hold him to, for he was open about his obsessions, same as me, and in fact they were the real yarn that knit together his kilt. When I heard he was publishing his first book I horned in ahead and wrote to his publisher, offering to get the word out any way I could.
Two years ago he came to San Francisco for the first time (with his boyfriend, prose writer Reuben Sutton) and Dodie Bellamy and I had a party in Colin’s honor. We made him get up and read his work to a crowd who had barely heard his name, and despite everything Colin made it work. We’d tabled him to find out who he wanted to get to know in San Francisco, and then we called them up, begged them to come by, see this thing happen. Poets came, not all of them gay either, artists came too. It was too okay! Real excitement wracked the room. Colin and Reuben had already dreamt up the title for their literary journal—Anything Anymore Anywhere—and in the years since their conquest of San Francisco have put out two sterling issues. You can get it here.
You can get too ok here or here.
You can get Like here
Interview
Colin, I’m pleased that your book is about to be released and from a US publisher on top of it. How does it feel to have your first full length book coming out?
I feel pretty nervy, and very excited. I'd love to say I was 100% happy and delighted but to tell you the truth, a thought is pestering me a little. To my knowledge, my parents have never read any of my poetry, and something makes me think they will at least read some of this book. I know it's silly but however much I tell myself that it doesn't matter whether or not they like it, I have a niggling sensation of wanting their approval. I guess it's probably standing in for general anxiety and nervousness about the book's reception. I'm also extremely grateful to Geoffrey at BlazeVOX and everyone else who helped me with it.
One of your poems quotes a remark you heard at a conference from a talk by the critic Michael Golston, that in Clark Coolidge’s work, “poetry is love in action.” Wonder if you subscribe to that definition, or what you take away from it?
“Poetry is love in action" is one of those maxims that doesn't really mean anything out of context, and barely anything even in context. Three fuzzy, pliable, seductive words: poetry, love, action. I found it in a full page of notes from a conference I'd been at, with quotation-marks around it, and a colon then the name Michael Golston. In the journal-version of the paper, it doesn't seem to appear, so I'm not sure if perhaps I misheard or whether Golston ended up deleting it when he published it. I think I'm attracted to the idea of what "love in action" would be: it sounds like it means sex, I suppose, but sex is only a tiny part of love and not always a part of love at all. I tend to think of the basis of love as attitudinal, tensional and rhythmic, and poetry the same. My experience of both follows a rhythm of uneven peaks and wobbly outward-facing troughs: boredom, desire, fascination, sensitivity, alertness, confusion and endurance. 'Love in action' is the shifting between these states and tensions. That's why I shaped the poem the way I did, and why I tried to bring in slightly ridiculous mundane details like the bathtub thing. When pulling together the poems for 'too ok', I wanted the book to have something of the various tensions and energies (the "action") of my experience of love. I am also completely enchanted by the idea of poetry as an encounter between the poet and the reader or listener. Often it's a mixture of fascination and irritation, a dynamic of withholding and as they used to say where I grew up "putting out". At it's most energetic and charged it can be awe, or a blazing row; my favourite is when it's a flirtation, and I try for that setting often in my poems. Earlier this year I read Cedar Sigo's 'Stranger in Town'; in it he writes that he has 'above all tried to bring an allure to poetry'. I can't get that formulation out my head, and it's definitely informed how I think about poetry as 'love in action'.
Your feelings of discomfort and ambiguity about love make for some of your most interesting poems. I also enjoy the continued demonstration, in “too ok,” of what one might call the materiality of language. It is all over the place, obviously in a poem such as “you get yourself about somehow,” or in that “poetry is love in action” poem where the lines seem to shorten and lengthen apparently based on the urgency of your erection—like a George Herbert of today! I think this tendency, to me at least, mediates some of the otherwise lyric material. And it is often very funny! Can you comment?
I'm pleased you appreciate the shape of that poem! After I wrote it I showed it to a few friends and they couldn't see why the little hillocks were so irregular and thought it was really crass. I've had to put on that surprised "what, me?" expression and not let my feelings get hurt. I am generally drawn to poetry that nervously teeters on the threshold of full-blown lyricism, that just as it's about to be shown in, it's as if the poet starts noticing how dusty and filthy the stairwell is, how there are pest-control devices everywhere, how all the other apartments in the block are abandoned and the door has a frightening number of chains and padlocks etc. What the poet John Wilkinson calls "the seductions of lyric, in a pulse of succumbing and resistance". I think sometimes I have a tendency to just go through the door anyway, too depserate to even notice how discredited the joint is, but sometimes I do resist the lyric form at least a little, and it's probably those poems where the materiality of language is more at the fore. But really I'm overstating the tension between the two for the sake of a dumb metaphor. And your word 'mediates' is much closer to how I experience this practically. The materiality of langauge is something I try not to think about unless it comes up, because I feel like if I thought about it too much, it would come up all the time. And it is there, all the time, what Kenneth Koch called "the very hard, concrete and shining quality of language", though concrete rarely shines where I come from, it's ususally dulled, slippery and wet. I like the fact now that you mention it that probably the poem most obviously distinguished by the materiality of its language in the book, 'you get yourself about somehow', is about moving and communicating, rather than getting holed up and stuck.
You have invented a character "Mike" for your poems, a sort of guide like Virgil for "Colin" to follow through the hidden realms of —what, the body? I love the idea of Mike and wonder how you see him working through the body of "Too OK"?
The character Mike is based on a real person. There's a personal trainer in Edinburgh called Mike who makes a big deal on his website that he once trained Gwen Stefani while she was touring. I thought at one time about getting a personal trainer, but, well basically I bottled it. Shortly afterwards I wrote the first two Mike poems, which are the first two poems in the book. I think my idea was that if I wrote I had a personal trainer I might feel like getting one, or it would become irrelevant because I'd feel like I already had one. I think of Mike as emblematic of possibility, energy and desire on the one hand, but frustration and disappointment on the other. He's a guide to the body, but also a kind of a sculptor, the idea is (so far from reality) that he's toning and chiselling certain parts, recreating the body in his perfect vision. In the poem "4 lorne street", for example, the gallery and the gym-changing-room merge into one space, the image at the end of a group of men under mike's spell, allowing themselves to be brewed and distilled. I started to use Mike as a touch-stone if I wanted to convey shame or self-consciousness about body-image in a poem. On the real Mike's website there's a lot about how he will also help to change the client's attitudes to food and exercise, almost like a therapist and trainer wrapped up in one. I was interested in the idea that somehow the influence of the Mike figure- if I had gone to him- would leak into other aspects of my life, like the subtle reprogramming of my attitudes wouldn't stop there, it would cloud and profoundly alter my mindset generally, and of course my poetry too, which would slim down, become more muscular. I think I wanted to imagine that there was another force at work guiding and controlling what I wrote. Like the idea of an interfering movie-producer pushing the director this way and that. In some of the poems I feel myself wanting to be pushed, in others I try to give the impression of being frustrated by it. I started the book with two overt mike poems, then peppered two or three throughout the book. I wanted the reader to find themselves wondering if the influence of Mike was behind other more ambiguous poems too.
What I'm getting so far is a writer careful to keep us from thinking that the “Colin” in your book is the Colin who's writing it. Though there are some close relationships. Perhaps the “Colin” you're writing of is a heightened, dramatized version of the poet, or maybe he's in some sort of alternate reality where camp reigns and the entire landscape is sexualized, not always a happy thing after all. Does the real Colin even like the color you call “lemon”? Let’s go to Google Image…. I don't see you wearing lemon anywhere though wait! I spy you at a kitchen table on which sits a prominently placed lemon jar or bowl—some sort of redoubtable Scots food like haggis?
It’s not all camp by a long shot but there’s that one remarkable aria, called "Colin," in which Colin imagines Tony from West Side Story singing Stephen Sondheim's “Maria” lyric to him, only the name has been changed—repeatedly. “All the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word—Colin, Colin, Colin, Colin.”
The “Colin” or the “I” in the poems is definitely a theatricalized and heightened version of myself. I have a pretty loose approach to using the word “I” in the poems. Basically, before every statement of action, you could put “thought about” and be nearer the mark. I think poetry is as good an art-form as any to handle a dose of make-believe and drama. I wanted the poems to occur in that zone where the things I imagine to be possible actually happen, both good and bad. But I didn't just want it to be sort of wilder than wild and excessive. I wanted there to be repercussions. For example, the poem where “I” exit triumphantly “flipping a sour lemon wave” in my cardigan, comes back hauntingly a few poems down the line in ‘the stage itself is darkened’ when the “I” character gets carried away in a sort of sexualized art performance with an older man and ends up strangling a chicken in the thighs of his lemon-coloured shorts, while the old man looks on confused. I am conscious that so much of the vocabulary, environment and the furniture of 'too ok' is sexualized, and sometimes in a very sort of naive and basic way. I am not sure why this is exactly, why a sort of desperate obsession with sexuality pervades the collection. I think maybe I am trying to articulate a frustration I definitely felt in my teens of not being or feeling able to express myself in that way at all, hence the sort of heightened alertness of sexuality (my own and others). The “Colin” poem you mention is definitely that. I used to take part heavily in youth Am-Dram theatre productions around the time I was 15. One of the productions was West Side Story. The actor playing Tony was extremely dishy. I remember thinking as he sang ‘Maria’ in a rendition less breath-taking and more voice-breaking that there were just so many factors stacked up against him or anyone like him ever singing that or a similar song directed towards me, extolling my own name with such passion. I put the poem in the book as a kind of bathetic ‘show-stopper’ maybe in a hopeful corrective to my teenage pessimism, and I’ve sometimes sung it at readings, to, well, mixed responses. I am certainly attracted to camp aesthetics, and I have a very high ‘cloy’-threshold.
The book has an epigraph by the US poet John Wieners, in which he points to the distinction between confessional and obsessional poetry. Why Wieners? Have you a fondness for American poetry? Who are your influences?
That Wieners line jumped out at me because I have a great attraction to the poets whose poetry feels so intrinsic and obsessive that it is impossible to imagine it not having been written. I suppose this is true of a lot of poetry when you get down to it, but I am drawn to the poetry that seems to hook up the poet's interior and personal thoughts with the public utterance so that poems seem to sort of froth out uncontrollably, and I tend to find the more embarrassing, awkward, ill-thought-through poems as fascinating as the rest. I think of the confessional as contrived and deliberate, but the obsessional as reckless and dangerous. I love poets whose poems depend on that obsessive engagement with the act of writing poetry. Cid Corman's another good example of that obsessive productivity. Yes, I'd say I was a big fan of American poetry. I find influence a pretty difficult thing to answer, and so this will just be a list of writers whose work I return to again and again. I'm probably very indebted to multi-generational New York School poetics, Schuyler and O'Hara being key figures that hooked me in, with other favourites including Berrigan, Myles, Elmslie, Ceravolo, Guest, Notley, Ashbery of course, Tony Towle oh, all those writers really. Anselm Hollo is a poet I really love. Gil Ott, too. And your own beloved Spicer. The poets of New Narrative- your books have been a major inspiration and thrill for me, you know about my obsession with Steve Abbott's poetry, particularly his 'Skinny Trip to a Far Place' and his 'Stretching the Agape Bra'. Dennis's poetry is oh just another stunning aspect of what he does, and 'The Tenderness of the Wolves' is a book I read a lot. It also has the most amazing picture of Dennis on the front cover, kind of emerging from a shadow in a gallery with three framed photographs on the wall. Robert Gluck's 'Andy' is stunning, and Aaron Shurin's poetry amazes and excites me. You turned me on to George Stanley, Kevin, and I love his 'A Tall, Serious Girl'. Stephen Jonas's 'Exercises for Ear' is a great book. Curtis Faville's 'Stanzas for an Evening Out', Michael Lally's 'just let me do it'. I love Rene Ricard's poems, oh and you know who else? Reed Bye, Landis Everson, CAConrad, Dorothea Lasky, Ariana Reines, Frank Sherlock, Cedar Sigo, Rob Halpern, Nada Gordon and a whole load more. I know this list maybe seems arbitrary & scatter-bomb but I just picked the first names of poets I love that flung themselves at me.
Wow, you sure know a lot about American poetry! In this are you an anomaly in Edinburgh? Do your tutors regard your enthusiasm with skepticism? Can you place your work for us in the context of Scots writing projects in general? We know there's more to Edinburgh than you and J K Rowling and Ian Rankin, but we don't know it from your angle.
To tell you the truth, I sometimes feel more anomalous than I probably am. You know it can be really pleasurable having private obsessions and feeling like they’re all yours to have and to hold. So for years I sort of despondently bemoaned the lack of exciting poetry events in Edinburgh. But in the last year or so, there has been something of a shift and Edinburgh’s a pretty exciting place to be for poetry at the moment as there’s sort of an emergent scene, without a centre per se, but with a number of events and happenings going on in different galleries and bars. nick-e melville is a found and visual poet who is something of a catalyst, organizing events and readings sporadically. The poet J L Williams, who is such a charismatic reader that I’m sure she could pack out the Usher Hall 7 nights a week, generously shares her time and organizes cross-genre readings and performance cabarets at the famous Traverse Theatre. It’s sometimes difficult to put a finger on the identities of frequently pseudonymous writers Posie Rider and Jow Walton, who have recently relocated north. But they’re here, and I’ve seen them both give electrifying readings since they arrived. Jow's also recently set up a poetry press called Sad Press. At the weekend, I hosted the second of the ‘anything anymore anywhere’ readings, for which Andrea Brady traveled up from London and read alongside a selection of local(ish) poets, Sandy Christie (the artist who did the ‘too ok’ cover), J L Williams, Richie McCaffery and A W Singerman. I’m going to be putting the videos form these events online soon. Lila Matsumoto, a grad student at Edinburgh, runs a beautifully designed little magazine called ‘Scree’. There’s also some cross-over between artists and writers. My first Edinburgh reading was organized by the artist Derek Sutherland as part of a multi-media event at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and I’m currently working with the artist Emily Fogarty on a video projection involving bed-sheets and finger-painting, to help launch ‘too ok’. Local artist Alastair Cook makes gorgeous filmpoems and shows them at readings and events. Some other local writers I’m nuts about are visual poet Greg Thomas, performance poet Sandra Alland, found poet Dorothy Alexander and poet/musician Pete McConville. The pleasure in all of this activity is that we are all coming from different influences and places- the experimental scenes in Cambridge and London, Visual and found poetry, spoken word performance poetry, text art, etc- so that no one figure or group of figures is overly influential.
You have one poem "after Adrian Wiszniewski," an artist I don't happen to know—again, the Tartan curtain separating our countries hardly lets a ray of light shine through in this direction—but maybe we can show the image and you can tell me what you like about his work and how a poet sets about "aftering" the work of a visual artist.
Adrian Wiszniewski is one of a group of artists who found fame while at Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s, known as the New Glasgow Boys. The others include Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy, Ken Currie and Peter Howson. The New Glasgow Boys were noted for their confident and concerted engagement with figuritive painting at a time when art-schools and British art in general was dominated by abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism. Wiszniewski's highly personal figuritive paintings are usually very brightly coloured, the colour of the abstract background or landscape sometimes indiscernible from the equally colourfully-dressed figures in his paintings. I'm sure I once read an interview with Wiszniewski where he said he used to try to paint abstract paintings, but he'd be halfway through and he'd realise he'd already started to outline the contours of a figure, as if he simply couldn't resist painting the body. His work is unreserved and lavish, dreamily indulgent, playful and sexy. He often uses imagery of being tangled or tied up, as in the painting I name my poem after, "A Man Tied Up in His Own Composition". In another painting, these tangling strings morph into yellowy ribbons, like banana skins pushing his figures off-balance. Much of his work is a tangle of dreams, obsessions and desires. In the 90s he began making beautiful works in neon lights, using curving voluptuous neon-pipes like brush strokes. If any artist is made for the medium of neon lights, Wiszniewski is- brash, seductive and unreal. The poem "a man tied up in his own composition" was the last one I wrote for the book. It's sort of a free 'translation' of the painting as best I can manage it into words, taking details and stylistic aspects of the painting and trying to replicate them in a poem. It started off as pretty literal description of the painting, but then I erased a bunch of that and shaded in my own experience, stuff like the reference to Dalkeith Road, which is the road that runs perpendicular to where I live. I think I wanted to put it in as something of an acknowledgement that Wiszniewski's influence colours the book in lots of ways. I think the biggest thing is how his paintings helped free me up to unabashedly (o.k., sometimes abashedly too) write poems from the subject position, about obsessions, desires, clothes, self-image, the body etc.
Uh, what does "too ok" mean to you? I am ripping it apart semantically but it may have some simple application I just don't know about.
The title "too ok" came from a conversation on an online message board. Someone said "how are you?", another person said "i'm ok" and a third person said "i am too ok". I think it was a mistake, and all he wanted to say was "I am ok too", but I loved the expression. I liked the idea of naming the book after this kind of initial, slightly awkward online small talk with people you don't know, or people you're familiar with, but only through strange usernames and in relation to one topic. I liked that it initiated the book- though of course it wouldn't come across unless I mention it- in the arena of an online message board conversation, before the ice is broken, in the awkwardness and uncertainty preceding the general riot where anything could be said. I also liked it that "too ok" seemed a pretty neat sum-up of the bored, satisfied and lazily apathetic sort of attitude that in my less generous moments I think can be pretty typical of Scottish culture. But there's also the "took" as in "taken", with that elongated of "oo o" like the hand-flapping chorus of an old Motown hit, by a group like The Velvelettes.
Thank you, Colin Herd! And promise that you won’t take years and years to return to the US. And also, you owe it to Dennis to show your face in Paris. And I predict just about everyone will fall for you the way I have, so get ready to sign lots of autographs and kiss lots of babies. And one more thing, what do you have against your celebrated namesake, “Sir Colin” Firth?
Thanks Kevin! It’s been a lot of fun answering your generous questions. I suppose I should have known though that, like David Frost, you’d slip in such an awkward and penetrating question just at the end of the interview, as you’ve got me off-guard. But I’ll try my best. What do I have against Colin Firth? I can’t be the only one can I? I just googled “why do I hate Colin Firth?”, and it seems I almost am. He has 99% approval rating on the website Amplicate. I suppose if I’m going to talk about this, D.C.’S is as likely a support group as I could hope for. The only detractors I can find tend to just complain about the fact he’s British. One person comments that she used to think she hated Colin Firth but she was getting him confused with Hugh Grant and now she knows which is which she quite likes Firth. I guess it’s that foppish, well-to-do, affable, butter-wouldn’t-melt attitude that irritates me. And the fact that his career is just a progression from one stereotype to the same stereotype all over again. I guess A Single Man is an exception, and also his early thriller Apartment Zero (1989), written and directed by Death Becomes Her writer Martin Donovan, set in Buenos Aires. Firth plays a repressed, paranoid Classic film buff, presiding over a revival cinema. He develops a strong crush on his new flat-mate, played by Hart Bochner, who turns out to be a serial killer. At the end of the film, Firth has dinner with a corpse- it’s not so bad. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer, as they say, and he’s been rubbish in a lot of awful films. I can just tell he’ll be knighted soon. It’s like his whole career has been leading up to one, especially The King’s Speech, I mean, come on...
Gallery
Colin Herd and dozens of other artists and writers and extras "acting" in Kota Ezawa's ambitious recreation of the famous "Odessa Steps" sequence from Eisenstein's Soviet classic BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN.
Colin Herd, Reuben Sutton and artist Kota Ezawa on the roof of the San Francisco Art Institute in North Beach
me, poet Jason Morris, and Colin Herd in San Francisco.
Faces in the crowd of wellwishers as Colin Herd and Reuben Sutton storm San Francisco. Poets Del Ray Cross, Suzanne Stein, Rob Halpern and the artist Bruno Fazzolari.
Reuben and Colin meeting and greeting San Francisco-based poet Cedar Sigo (in center).
Colin Herd and US poet Alli Warren
Geoffrey Gatza, whose adventurous BlazeVox Press has issued "Too OK," is Coin Herd's American publisher. He's pictured here in Buffalo in the Special Collections Department of SUNY Buffalo.
SF-based artist and poet Matthew Gordon leads rousing applause for the Stirling Stallion, Colin "Too OK" Herd.
Rob Halpern and Colin Herd
US novelist and theorist Bruce Boone sandwiched between Reuben Sutton and Colin Herd
Here Dodie Bellamy and myself grinning after the reading was over and it was clear that Colin Herd had conquered the hearts of all present.
Crowd milling at Gay's the Word in London in anticipation of TOO OK book launch and reading.
Colin Herd, "Too OK" launch at London's Gay's the Word
Poems by COLIN HERD from “too ok”
"poetry is love in action"
i
was at
a poetics
conference
and heard michael
golston say in a paper
on clark coolidge, ‘poetry is
love in action’. i jotted it down.
i desperately want that formula to
be true, like bubblebaths make you
sleep well (i haven't slept well in the
bath since we first got together, because
it frightens you to think i might slip under
and not wake up. you forget i'm a little large
to drown in our bath, i barely fit in, so could
i drown?) but what kind of love in action's
poetry? when i was a teenager, i was
hopelessly in love with some guy
(this happened rather often, with
more than one guy so i don't
have one in particular
in mind) and i
invariably
associated
a song
with him,
sometimes a
song i'd heard
him hum, or sometimes
a song that just happened to
play when we were both in a
corridor. i'd lie in my bedroom
and play the song over and over on
cassette tape. play. rewind. play. rewind.
play. rewind. i would do this for hours and
i have to admit that although in the first instance
i was filled with desire for the guy, gradually this
shifted to being desire to hear the song, until at
some point it would dawn on me that my
desire was strongest for the gap in
between when, with my finger
on the button i would hear
the very familiar buzz. i
love that faint whurr
and my anticipation
of the assertive
click-click. desire,
through a conviction
that it wouldn't ever be
fulfilled, focused on the
act of rewinding, a repetitive
act, passive, lonely and, because
i would lie there for hours, i surefootedly
can say i was in the throes of a kind of erotically-
charged boredom. it is surely not difficult to speculate
why i so fixated on this act. i was obscenely obsessed
with my own self-pity, always going back to the start
and playing it through again. schopenhauer said
that boredom is just the reversal of fascination,
that both depend on being on the outside of
something rather than the inside, and that
one leads to the other. i certainly felt 'on
the outside' and as i rewound pop
songs on cassette tapes my
intense boredom and
equally strong
fascination
continually
outstripped each
other like long-distance
runners. when one dropped
back, the other steamed on. or
like dough kneaded full of air and
knocked back to deflation, and then
re-kneaded, and so on. i wasn't doing
this through a conviction that i'd find back-
tracked satanic messages that had been leading me
and others so frighteningly astray a la the band 'cradle
of filth'. (scratch that, maybe i was. up in my room rewinding
tapes, i think i must have been looking for messages, my
desire so used to pointing outwards fruitlessly towards
guys at school that i would be willing to find some
kind of response anywhere, be it spooky as you
like.) i'm not sure whether it comes across
for anyone else but when typing this out i
sometimes felt as though i was back
listening compulsively to that buzz
again, caught up in conflicting
senses of possibility and
boring inevitability.
a basket of strawberries
a cluster of grapes & a nut.
untitled cabbage. a drapery
study. costume design for a
priest (transparent). sunshine
and shadow. spangled head.
green straw hat. two men doing
nothing. dead nature cubist.
anemones. eggs. eggs in bowl.
eggs. eggs. boy with floating eggs.
sitting duck. leaf children. spanish
children. eggs. red man. apples
with pears in a basket. nude in
space. two nudes. standing man
wearing hat. hand and apples.
blind man’s bluff. black and blue.
bust. ram in oil. bottle of something
more or less like jelly, or roe. gilt
compote. self-portrait. teeny
matisse. bookish boy holding back
pleasant woman with washed
out male nude (slight foxing to
edges & unexamined out of frame).
i’m standing in a gallery opening
(or could it be a changing room)
and the address is 4 lorne street.
that’s not a joke. maybe there
won’t be any jokes in this poem.
i’m on the black side of the room,
holding something. the guy on the
blue side of the canvas is holding
something too, his thing’s attached
so he looks sturdier than i imagine
i do.
mike- who wasn’t here a second ago-
stretches and binds calloused feet
tumbling over bikes above the blue
chalk of a man’s stiff cue. i told you. no
joke. white and morbid underpants,
covered up by spray, our steaming cups
of armpit tea and men, supposedly
frightened, but sort of concentrated &
energised, lacking conversation but
filled with worry.
my father dresses like Roland Barthes
my father dresses like Roland Barthes used to.
with great style, i mean. but this morning he
has light beige linen trousers on, loose-fitting
and well-ironed. he has matched them with a
pale purple shirt. he isn’t eating breakfast, only
drinking coffee and juice. this is because he will
go for a swim at 8.15 like he does every day. my
lashes tick as my eyes vibrate towards the clock
on the only-used-for-melting-chocolate microwave.
07:59. i am still shuffling back and forth in my seat,
brushing my sandals against the floorboards but
we’ve turned off the music and are listening to the news.
a man tied up in his own composition
(on the painting by Adrian Wiszniewski)
buttered noodles patchwork a yellow tie
& i can’t think straight, spilling yellowy yoghurt,
wearing red corduroy. remember being called
loopy? & remember being called colourful &
crouch. it makes no difference none of the loops
are knotted no difference none of me bound fast
in the weeds on the pavement on dalkeith road
this yellow cube would look alright & i might if
i get lucky get feebly entangled wish i was thin
enough to strap around your wrist what time is
when you write about people you can rub them
out and leave a ghost, and when you work over
it can become rich in colour------blue, possibly
anyway, i can’t resist putting in a face,------i put
in--a layer of--skin, an eye or two---blue, possibly
colin: a fragment of a dream.
tony:
(spoken)
colin. . .
(sings)
the most beautiful sound i ever heard:
colin, colin, colin, colin . . .
all the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word . .
colin, colin, colin, colin . . .
colin!
i've just met a boy named colin,
and suddenly that name
will never be the same
to me.
colin!
i've just kissed a boy named colin,
and suddenly i've found
how wonderful a sound
can be!
colin!
say it loud and there's music playing,
say it soft and it's almost like praying.
colin,
i'll never stop saying colin!
the most beautiful sound i ever heard.
colin.
----
*
p.s. Hey. So, this weekend we not only get to celebrate and go behind the scenes of the wonderful poet and d.l. Colin Herd's new book, we have the great Kevin Killian as our host. 'too ok' is a knock out, as you you'll see, and please read and click and marvel accordingly, and my deepest thanks to Colin and Kevin for this honor and golden opportunity. ** Jheorgge, Hey, man! It's utterly splendid to see you! Yes, yes, I got the Bresson disc, and it has meant the world to me, and, yeah, just thank you so, so much for it! It sounds much more good than weird on your end, based on that report. I'd love to linger in your art department, needless to say, and thanks a lot for the boon of that link to your tumblr. As usual, I'll wait until I'm finished with the p.s. to have a good, quality look at your new works, but I will do so giddily and asap. Everyone, the mighty multi-talent and longstanding d.l. Jheorgge passes along a link to a page/site where you can see and read some of his recent works, and to say that's a must is a big duh, so click this now or at some point over the weekend, yes? I'm good, a bit crazed with work/deadlines and impending theater performances at the moment, but so it goes. Gang Gang Dance are playing here in a few days, hm. I wonder if I should make that gig. Anyway, yeah, so awesome to see you. It'd be great if you can hang out here more, obviously. Lots of love to you, pal. ** Wolf, Yeah, the Roosevelt guy's text portion kind of took the cake, right? You're going with the suit? Awesome. Pix please. 84 pages, right? I'm up to page 8. If I can get to 12 before my agent splits, I'll be lucky. ** David Ehrenstein, Those are great 'Barry Lyndon' scenes for sure. And that final title card, so brilliant. Harold Lang's butt was insane? Pray tell. ** David, I think to call 'BL' a coffee table movie is to not pay very close attention to it. Thanks about the brigade. Wow, Uni and Smash, I forgot all about them. Dead record labels might be a good post basis, hm. ** Schoolboyerrors, Loveliness begets loveliness. Your 'Eden' piece is fantastic! Spot on, instructive, et. al., plus it's so cool to get your read your great mind again. ** Bernard Welt, Aren't you imaginative and kind and diplomatic about my indiscriminate food practices. ** Alan, Oh, David has been asking to read my novel early literally since I first started writing it, and I said that would be okay when it was totally finished, which it is. But I'd really prefer in almost all cases that people read it in book form for reasons that will be clear when you read it. I was told the galleys will be ready and start going out in a couple of weeks, so it'll start being around and readable if people want then, I guess. ** Pisycaca, Oh, cool, how convenient. About 2F. This should be really easy then. Awesome! Thanks for your email address 'cos I wasn't sure if I had it. I'll write you with my cell number and stuff today. So, how were Deerhunter? Did you talk to Bradford? ** Postitbreakup, Hey, man. I'm glad to see you back. Mm, no, the stuff I'm cutting out is just my inarticulate blathering, and the only place it needs to be is in the trash can. The only thing missing from the final version will be my inability to express myself verbally. ** Jebus, Ha ha, well, I was curious once I watched the 'Molly Movie' clip. Now I understand. I guess I understood as soon as I clicked. It was funny and trippy for sure. Thanks, man. ** Bollo, Hi, Bollo. That does make me feel better, yes. I will click where indicated now without any self-incrimination. There's a new issue of The Wire.? I'll walk over to the train station and pick that up. Cool. All good, basically. All good with you? ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, Yes, glancing as I just have at that essay, the strange bedfellows aspect is understood. Lucky you, actually. I see the American escorts who write like babelfish translations from Martian as subtle critiques of the poor state of the United States' education system that employ the erotic as a subversive attention seeking tool. No, I don't. Well, I kind of do. BrokenStudent was my favorite though, for all kinds of reasons. Oh, that was a different Jonathan Chan, but he's quite nice as well. Goodness gracious, your weekend is going to be as busy and brain cell destroying as mine. Let kinship be our byword until we meet again. ** Hyrule Dungeon, Hey, man! ** Chris (British), Easter ... that's next Sunday, right? I always forget. I only know Easter is over when the chocolate bunny rabbits at the supermarket are suddenly half-price. Do document your sleeve, in progress too if possible. Bon weekend. Try to enjoy your naked arm while you still have it. ** Steevee, Hope your computer problem got fixed. I'm having this problem right now where a Word doc file that I really need to open won't open because, it says, it's in use by someone else, which is impossible. ** Brendan, That's a lot of love, thanks! It seems like the world could easily be the culprit of the depression going around. For instance, it seems like a lot more people I know in the US are depressed right now than people I know in France where the world makes more sense. You made the last collage? That's momentous. What are you going to do with the series? Install starts on the 14th? Wow, I'll probably get to see the show then. Maybe the opening if there is one. Very cool. Walk with you in Griffith Park? Sure. What part? ** Inthemostpeculiarway, He was nice to look at, wasn't he? Exactly, on food. Big breakfasts are dangerous. Or American ones anyway. French breakfasts are just croissants and a little jam or cheese and lots of coffee. I don't eat breakfast unless I have to go out and expend a lot of energy or something. Wow, that monkey death ritual thing. Wow. Your friend was really asking for it from the TV. It's weird how when you're depressed you want depressing input. I guess it makes sense, and it's true that a good way to get rid of depression is to force yourself to really bottom out. After reading a few reviews of 'Scream 4', my zero interest in seeing it is now sub-zero. Lindsay Lohan as Sharon Tate? That could work. I'm rooting for Lindsay, I don't know why. Hm, I don't know, I'm really getting the feeling that Lady Gaga has totally shot her wad already. Her new songs just sound like rehashes of her familiar sound now. They do the trick, but not in any kind of special or fresh way. I'm liking Britney's recent cooptations of Eastern European trash techno better than Gaga's so far. My day: I met up with my editor Michael, Kiddiepunk, and Oscar, and we metroed to the African voodoo show at Fondation Cartier, It was kind of cool but not that amazing. It was basically a bunch of scary looking voodoo icons in glasses cases plus a documentary film. It was okay. I think we all felt similarly about it. Then we went to Place St. Michel and had crepes. Not bad. I showed Michael the great, crazy bookstore Un Regard Moderne, and he was suitably impressed and bought a Harry Crews novel translated into French. Then we went to Shakespeare and Co. and checked out the books there. It was all very pleasant and relaxed and very nice. Then I worked on editing the Paris Review interview with my agent. He was kind of stressed out by my slow progress, but I'm pretty much having to rewrite every one of my answers because I talk so horribly, and it's just very slow, and I can't help it, and I'm going to be working on that all the time for the next days, and that's how it has to be, and I guess that was fine. Then I met up with Michael, and we walked to the Marais and specifically the apartment of the French/Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, who wrote this really terrific novel 'Salvation Army' that Semiotext(e) published in the US last year. He made us tea, and we visited for a while. He's really, really nice. And we four walked over to this restaurant The Hangar and had dinner. It was good, and it was good enough that the more culinary-inclined among us even liked it. They made me a 'vegetarian' plate, which was basically risotto with some stuff on it. The artist Elaine Sturtevant happened to be eating there too, so it was nice to see her. Then Abdellah said goodbye, and the rest of us walked in the direction of where I live and where they're staying, which was the same direction. It was late, and I checked my email, and went to sleep. This weekend I have to work on that interview as much as I can stand, but I'll try to do a few other things so my weekend report won't be too boring and complainy. How was your weekend? And have a great one, by the way! ** Misanthrope, What?! He was my pick-to-click, my #1. You crazy. No, thank you for the engorging of my ability to appreciate fine writing, my friend. Rutger Hauer, cool. Oh, I remember Gregory Smith. Where's he been hiding? $730! Good lord, ouch, man. Ouch. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Yeah, I think I know his name rom his poetry. That really rings a bell. But I'll see if I can find some fiction by him in English. That's very, very good news, obviously, about your grandmother. What a relief, and fingers crossed that the recovery goes smoothly from here on out. Yeah, that's great, Uli! ** Alter Clef Records, Hey, Nick. It sounds like you're cycling through the normal and sane post-break-up evolving flurry of reactions. No way around that, I don't think. I just hope it reaches somewhere approximate to peace of mind as soon as possible. My email ... use dcooperweb @gmail.com. That's my main address now. I don't have my LA plans cemented yet, but very late May to early June is a pretty good bet because I want to get back here for the Villiete Sonique Festival and the opening here on the new Terrence Malick film near the end of May. So, yeah, that sounds fairly safe. I hope you have a great weekend, Nick, even if it's against all the odds. Love, me. ** Slatted Light, Hey, D. Oh, you're most welcome and thank you! Obviously, I'm beyond interested to hear your thoughts when the time is right. My heavy work: Well, first this Paris Review interview editing, which sort of appeared out of nowhere, and which will take a ton of work. Then we start working on 'Last Spring', the big, ambitious walk-through maze/theater piece that is Gisele's and Stephen's and Peter's and my new project, and which I think could be incredible, but it'll be the biggest, most involving project we've done. And I have some writing I need to do. And the novel comes out, so I'll have to deal with that experience, which will be a lot of work emotionally at least. No, I don't know about that Evan Calder Williams book. Cool, I'll find out everything I can find out about it. Awesome about your around-ness, man. That's what I like to hear! ** Okay, you guys dig and dig around in Kevin's welcome wagon for Colin Herd's book, please, and enjoy, and be well, and I'll see you on Monday almost without a doubt.
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