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Snapshots
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AIR
The mountains darkened by distance no longer make one think blue nearer, daubs of chalk hover & tell you this is your country a single light in the village cold on the stones of a wall red roof tiles dulled now still give me colour enough for my need Martin Walker 'My notebooks tell how the eye is an instrument of contemplation, how light is power and how ornament is thought' ~ Mandelstam. Geneviève, pour donner au ferronnier to fix the guest room shower. 'Between the terrific noise of the guns I can hear two hedge sparrows making love' ~ Edward Thomas wrote that to his wife, Helen, the day before he died. A huge wind here has blown some clouds away, leaving growing streaks of blue ~ blue is the hue, not of my true love's eyes, but revealed to me in trance, where I also met a frog, a bear, a lizard and a holy witch. The last fly of summer is buzzing angrily against the window Hey! You'd die out there if I let you out, you dumb ass, so quit bitching. I never stop bitching myself, searching for what's behind my glasses. Martin Walker, Lagorce, Ardèche , 1.39 pm. Slow exposure A black bumblething steers through the air, light flows over the fields, glazing them. Quercus ilex glints along the paths. It's like a world dipped in honey here, autumn's finest. But there's a chill wind blowin' round the bend, and the quick sweat ices your skin while the gold vines rot. Autumn's funeste, skyline detonates and hills turn saurian in the dusk. Martin Walker Lagorce 17.30 - 18.30 Romance Standard Time sausage and onions was today's lunch the andouillette is composed of cow's innards in a trans parent skin that spill out when you knife or fork it a poem is more like a leaf-folded onion erect on its stem plate with (like thoughts) in season flowers & seeds that sprout from its tip procreating allium cepa sweet syllables evoking seepage rolling through all in onion-shaped drops i will not move my army without onions said grant so if you know your onions so rich in pure quercitin (theyre saving your skin) ponder their worth these layers of light wrapped round a void mine eyes smell onions (hearts of the earth) I shall weep anon sorrow & mirth mixing in droplets falling & gone Martin Walker~ Lagorce, post-prandial WEDNESDAY-SNAPSHOT-BLOGGING THROUGH THE YEARS CODGER - OLOGY HIGHLIGHTS FROM BECKMANN TO WALKER Wednesday, 29th Oct. 1947. Yeah, right, telephone with Valentin New York about portrait Detroit. - What else was there? Oh yes, picked up $100 in Clayton and looked at the landscape. - 5 O'clock party with a lot of whisky. Ted, Wally with wife, Janson with wife and son, Drewes with wife. One does have a load of fun, ha ha, Herr Beckmann giving a party, ha, ha, ha, - [end of note] . . . . . . . . . . . Wednesday, 29th Oct. 2003. Yeah, right, get on to Rixen about that numb finger. What else was there? Saw the mason this morning about *devis*, went bloody nowhere, nothing happened. Bright mist, dim disappearing hills. Write a snapshot for the poetry list, smoke joint later, hallucinate beauty of absent lovers, past holding, ha ha, what a swell party this is, imagination - gah - imagine! ain't wot it used to be, hi hi, - . . . . . . . . . . . M.J.Walker Lagorce, Ardèche , France 14.50 Romance Standard Time Simulacrum he mused with alacritous & acrid-seeming writ pretty crummy all the same I like it Martin Walker, Lagorce, 21.1.2004 18.26 Romance TimeA Queen in Green Patina what happens when it goes Snap? things hap- pen at the same time, (s)hot on the spot but is there ever a same time, & is it a game e i n m a l und nie wieder, o n c e or a break? bonne chance it's a green picture bisected by a corner of Horton's luncheonette ICE CREAM Soda Coca Cola Candy Lunch Cigars & Marianne Moore's coming out regally in the right half (left to her); you see a Kodak sign to the right of her hat, her left hand's splayed to stress the design of balance in her cloak's flared grace, her right foot forward, her stick bisects a paving stone just left of center ("It's on- ly a paper moon" occurs to me irrelevantly) ~ it's Brooklyn in '53 this is a picture in the TLS I'm rea- ding late as ever, issued Jan 23 '04 in '53 I was 10, smoked my first fag from a pack of Weights & played with myself unsuccessfully at first, but right now my heart goes out to the young man loung- ing balletically as if resting on the entrance to her left, ignor- ing Miss Moore & pretty much staring past the black-lipped bobby- soxer ga- zing at his only visible ear, while her ser- ious guy (on our left) with chin in hand is weigh- ing some- thing up ~ may- be the price of the Chesterfields that décolleté'd cigarette girl on the ad appears to be offering the blasé lounger who's a student? "too reclus- ive for some things to seem to touch him, not because he has no feeling but because he has so much" (he's too clean- cut & just too early for James Dean who next year did Women of Trachis at Cherry Lane & then East of Eden) mean- while in Epsom, where I was born some 10 years before (the TLS reader sees in a sun-dappled pic taken from 1953 The Crowning Year of Sport if he flicks to page 12) "the [toothy] Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh [looking like Roger Moore ~ NO relative] talk to Gordon Richards just before the Derby" on the sward (Yanks please go "Aagh-be" when you pronounce that word, it hurts me to hear Durh-be) "it is not the dime-novel exterior, . but 'accessibility to experience'" but what's the price of experience? to quote William Blake Glad day to you, Ma'am, when Can we play it again? Martin Walker 00.30 Romance Time Lagorce The scythe's not hanging in the tree. It sighs & soughs outside. Unsung accords, signs of pol- itick manoeuvres in the rafters, leave the ship NOW! I'm sunk, proffer cadences with no sense repeating what I said. Saith he. Size don't matter. Martin Walker I am feeling bitter because nothing at all is coming bitterly empty & emptily bitter while death pre- empts my bid to know why fellowship that sounds around is the cause of envy as well or ill as emulation yet of love the ground Martin Walker, Lagorce, Ardèche 23.04 Romance Time i was cd editing my latest compilation with the usual blend of flash withdrawal & gloom called if you can believe it channeling leonard cohen tesseractives first eponymous track washed the scales from my eyes then the man himselfs great event what a sigh of relief thats no way to say goodbye it's just the way it changes pasting in schumann & heines am leuchtenden sommermorgen trauriger blasser mann then joan singing live suzanne certain only drowning men could see him segueing into duparcs linvitation au voyage aimer et mourir au pays qui te ressemble and suzy vega telling the story of isaac I will help you if I must I will kill you if I can so abram rose in brittens war requiem but where the lamb for this burnt offering cut to everybody knows everybody knows the fight is fixed es ist eine alte geschichte doch bleibt sie immer neu dont go home with your hardon it will only drive you insane being leonard cohen at weddings and bar mitzvahs i spent the first year finding myself and the second year losing myself in leonard cohens day job by the austin lounge lizards its part of the price every artist must pay lady midnight said i was dead and could never return um mitternacht sie achtets nicht sie ist es müd so long marianne laugh & cry & cry & laugh about it all again Eubies memories of you with satchmo & a rosary of tears the partisan by noir desir et je nai pas peur jai tant damour for you usa its here the familys broken and its here the lonely say thats how it goes took me all afternoon to burn the thing Martin Walker Lagorce 19.18 Romance Time chunnelling duddy or diddy there seems to be uh guepe in the text L[ ]c[ ]n is the nume they worship leeter un even more sucred nume turns up uz referred to by the letter urlso uh psycho[ ]n[ ]lyst or shrink though uz so often with these 20th/21st century hominids the sucred is excoriyetied et the seem time uz it is urdoored urdoored? urdoored yes i sed yes whut the bleyzes is it text coming thru theres uh pettern to be descried now urnother someone culled Ozym[ ]ndi[ ]s urnother wholy figure I guess round the dec[ ]y of that coloss[ ]l wreck gets on your nerves doesnt it boundless and b[ ]re some monurch doubtless now I ken reed some torquing of the f[ ]ther figure on urnother lyst further firther feyther? urnother hole these eternull guepes in the text seem uz with L[ ]c[ ]n sometimes its d[ ]ddy theyre torquing of diddy or duddy? now our chunnellers voice groning end moning ut lust weet its in germen so trouncelight it okeh here goes the moment of repetition the uncunny hot summer efternoon nehru street only peinted frowen? no doubt wot they ur feeces from the windows i esceeped but noh buck in the seem street once more ive excited urtension now oh those feeces got buck ut lust to the piuzzuh murtuh I didnt touch honest to gourd pleez im thru futter? sick moond do you heer futti? im thru deddy im thru Martin Walker chunnelled in Lagorce Wed 31.03 00.03 romance time You know what I mean. Hell's gates are still open, the burning boars of Envy & Rage with the Hounds of Resentment snapping at the Opfer ~ the Scapegoats & the Scum ~ and their overlords, Empire and Dominion, doing the Strut at the Grand International Hunt Ball bash in their designer battle togs their teeth flashing for the cameras. Lagorce, 12.45 Romance Time Martin Walker tutting down in the valley while the frogs bleat polyphonically along the riverbank. Thou wast not born for toil deathless amphibian but to croak in concert coaxing the loved one ~ long live your season! Lagorce 10.20 Romance time Martin Walker Poetryetc is a listserv relating to poetry and poetics which provides a forum for poets to debate their critical and creative work. The list has over the years run a number of projects for its members, of which Snapshots has been the most enduring. Every Wednesday, Poetryetc members were invited to post short poems on any subject or in any form they chose. The idea was to make a poetic collage of instamatic “snaps” of that day that reflected the international membership of the list. The project has generated an astounding number of poems. The first two runs, of six weeks each, and the first ten weeks of the third run, are archived at Wild Honey Press www.wildhoneypress.com under Poetryetc Project. The rest - amounting in all to a run of a year - are archived here. Poetryetc, like its affiliate Salt Publishing (http://www.saltpublishing.com), was founded by Australian poet John Kinsella. Salt is managed by Christopher Hamilton-Emery (cemery@saltpublishing.com), while Poetryetc is owned by Alison Croggon (ajcroggon@bigpond.com). Poetryetc is now archived at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/poetryetc.html. and anyone interested can join from that url. To contact the listowner: Alison Croggon These pages are designed, maintained, and hosted by Rebecca Seiferle, the Editor of The Drunken Boat. To email. 
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