The Anorexic Bodybuilder (a poem from a long time ago)

The ebook version of my collected poetryI got a fan email last month, from Japan, about a poem I once wrote. This — trust me —  doesn’t happen very often.

I wrote the poem for a nightclub flyer in Galway almost 20 years ago. I found a copy of the flyer in my parents’ attic, while I was assembling my collected poems in 2010, and included it in the book.

She came across probably the only copy in Japan, brought there by Robert, a friend of mine. I would guess that a few hundred people have read it, certainly less than a thousand. It occurred to me that if it meant so much to her, maybe it would mean something to some other strangers too. So I’ve decided to put it on my blog, below. (Poems are just birds that fly in your window; the writer doesn’t own them.)

If it means something to you, no problem; copy it, print it out, put it on a T-shirt, whatever.

For those who like to know the story behind any piece of writing; no, I won’t tell you the details. But yes, it turned out OK for some of the women I knew back then. Not so well for others.

-Julian, Berlin, June 2013

THE ANOREXIC BODY-BUILDER

If I'm very lucky, once a year

(Maybe twice, if I've been eating fish)

I am dazzled by a bright idea

And here's the one I got this year (I wish

It was a bit more bright, but it's bright-ish)

Anyway, yes, body-building, then.

It's an anorexia for men.

All the girls I know hate body-builders,

Find the mass of rippling flesh disgusting

Certainly not sexy. It bewilders

Boys to think their sister could be thrusting

Fingers down her throat like that... No lusting

After bulk for women then. And mannish

Boys have no desire at all to vanish.

To blow the self up, and to disappear:

Two expressions of a single urge

To shout the Will and make the body hear

The body-builder wills the flesh to surge

The anorexic wills an ebb, a purge

The Stalin of the mind lets the tanks roll:

The body is a place they can control

Each pursues a lunatic ideal

Each is lonely in the mad pursuit

When the vision of oneself's unreal

The vision of all others lacks a root

The muscle-man exploding through his suit

The wisp of girl who frowns at her reflection

They both recede from us toward Perfection.

This should end with some kind of conclusion.

Final statement. Answer to the riddle.

If I could, I'd give you the solution

Or at least some figures you could fiddle

But I can't, I'm stuck here in the middle

Seeing men expand and women shrink

I watch them go, and don't know what to think.

(From The Psychedelian, Issue 3 Volume 1, Thursday Oct. 21st, 1994. Collected in Free Sex Chocolate, Salmon Poetry, 2010.)

An old scratchy photo of Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

I've been so FLIPPING busy that my blog has been left unfed since October. (Also, I will admit, the crack cocaine of tweeting has weaned me off the long opium dream of blog posting.)

But my old friend Suzie Shorten just sent me this photo, so feck it, I'll slap it up for your amusement.

Major flashback... Galway, 1997... Town Hall Theatre bar. Left to right: Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Suzie (who's at MCD now), future president of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, and me (with blond hair).

Some cowboys, in the Wild West, 1997: Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

By golly, a night out in Galway was a NIGHT OUT in those days. Malcolm had finished his talk, and was about to be taken away by the Arts Festival organisers, to the respectable and venerable festival club in the Warwick, in Salthill. They'd almost got him safely into the taxi when he escaped from his minders, trotted up to me and my beloved (we were sheltering for a last few minutes in the theatre doorway from the inevitable Galway rain) and, under the entirely mistaken impression that we knew where the cool clubs were, asked us where he should go. (I was a milk-drinking, hot-water-bottle-using homeboy who went out about once every three years, and my beloved was worse, but he wasn't to know that. It was the hair, man. Blondes DO have more fun.)

I had heard of an illegal wine bar, in a cellar under a solicitors on Abbeygate Street - passwords! secret knocks! - but I'd never tried to get in. It turned out that "er, yeah, that's Malcolm McLaren" was a secret password. And so Malcolm held court, enthroned in a very comfortable old leather armchair, in the Galway underworld, till pretty close to dawn. Stories, theories, stern lectures, good advice (which I never took), even better anecdotes, and his complicated, multiple, silly, brilliant future plans. (He was most excited by his Chinese, satirical/situationist, pop group, The Rice Girls... I don't think he ever did get a record company to fund that one...) A highly entertaining man. (Oh, if any tabloid journalists are reading this; the future president retired early - long before the illegal wine bar - don't worry.)

For a more detailed account of the night... er, email me.

What I'm Doing In 2010. (Books, Mostly.)

In 2010, I plan to make lots of paper aeroplanes

Allan Cavanagh (or @AllanCavanagh, as I fondly know him) just tweeted to ask me, "have you got a poetry collection coming out?" Which is one of those embarrassingly intimate questions about shameful practices best unmentioned. Apparently he had heard the magnificent Jessie Lendennie mention it earlier tonight on Lyric FM.

But the question reminded my that I haven't actually talked about, you know, books. The things I write. And what state they are in. For a long time. So let's deal with that distasteful stuff, category by category.

1.) Poems. Yes, I do have a poetry collection coming out. Salmon Poetry will publish my first collection in February 2010, God willing. It will contain all the poetry I've ever written that I'm not utterly ashamed of (which means, mostly, the recent poetry written in Berlin, and a mutilated fistful of older pieces), and all the Toasted Heretic lyrics that are fit to print. Working title is Free Sex Chocolate (collected songs and poems). And if anyone has a suitable cover image for such a book, with such a title, I'd be very interested to see it. It's poetry, so there's not much of a budget, but the glory! The glory! (You can contact me through the Mail Me button, off down there to the right.)

2.) Novels. Yes, Jude: Level 2 will finally emerge into the harsh global spotlight in June 2010, blinking, eating roadkill, and shagging anything that moves. It's set largely in London, and indeed may well get called Jude in London. You can read a piece from it here.

3.) Short Stories. I am very happy to be the official representative of the Republic of Ireland in the Dalkey Archive's scarily ambitious anthology, Best European Fiction 2010. If I were capable of humility, I'd be humbled. Here's a description I nicked off Amazon:

"Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur “Genius-Award” winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what’s happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered."

They've chosen "The Orphan and the Mob", which a lot of you will know already.

My exciting adventures in the categories of:

4.) Children's Books

5.) Feature Films

6.) Animated Films

7.) Theatre

8.) Computer Games, and

9.) Opera

...will all have to wait till I've had a good night's sleep.

(I'm afraid I lied about Opera. I have no plans to write an opera for 2010. Although 2011, now, is another matter...)

Why not the life?

I'm writing a lot lately. (More on that soon…) It's enjoyable. Tiring. But it means I'm too busy to blog the way I like to blog (in long, rambling meditations on Christ knows what). So here's someone older and wiser than me to keep you happy, or miserable. This is Jack Gilbert, from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1. He was 80 when he said this, back in 2005, and renting a room in a friend's house in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The interviewer, Sarah Fay, asked him “What, other than yourself, is the subject of your poems?”

"Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don't know why people limit it to riches, pride, security–all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can't see anything from a car. It's moving too fast. People take vacations. That's their reward–the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives–until it's too late. Though I understand that often you don't have a choice."

A note on the images: they are taken from the first solo exhibition in Europe of the Tokyo-based artists Exonemo, hosted in the Basel gallery [plug.in]. The piano and tape recorder are part of an installation called UN-DEAD-LINK, in which Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa from Exonemo modified the computer game Half-Life2 and connected its output to a piano upstairs (and to a sewing machine, paper-shredder, music turntable, some lamps...) Each death in the game turns on a machine. The murdered mouse is taken from the Exonemo film  DanmatsuMouse...

Pigs and Poems

Below is a guest posting by the American poet James P. Lenfestey. He knows a lot about pigs, and a lot about poetry. I'd go so far as to say, he taught me everything I know about stealing pigs. Sadly, he only taught me it after I'd stolen them...

"Frankly, Julian -- that was an unconvincing pignapping -- an activity with a long and honorable list of common practices in my part of the world.  Best techniques, which you amateurishly missed: under cover of NIGHT, you dolt!  Then- cover the eyes!  Throw a sack over the entire body.  While they gently sleep, you fool!  The next step frankly may be beyond you -- no reflection on the fairly slight, if energetic, frame revealed in the video.  But you gotta PICK THAT SUCKER UP!  Perhaps your Jeeves is beefy."

Yep, Jim is a tough critic. But a good poet and editor. And I know some of you write poems - don't deny it! So I thought I'd post his invitation to submit work to an anthology he's editing. But before I do, one last word of warning from Jim:

"...Make clear to all the sausage versifiers out there that I demand and accept only very high quality verse -- no manure, this is a serious enterprise which will be turned into a serious book to be purchased with real money by serious people interested in the soul and story and the smile, as well as the body, of the pig.  And I am a vicious editor, a veritable feral boar, biting fearlessly.  Some of the best poets alive, and several dead, are already feeding at the trough.  PAYMENT IS IN PRAISE (and maybe a copy of the book)."

So here's the official invite. Pass it on to any quality pig poets of your acquaintance...

Soo-eee! -- Call for pig poems for anthology

Hey.  Got any poems about pigs?  I'm working this month on an anthology, SOME PIG, to be published in early 2009 by Red Dragonfly Press. 

Right now the anthology contains poems by Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Ruth Schwartz, David Lee, Carol Bly, Bill Holm, Martin Espada, Robert Hedin, Scott King, Jim Lenfestey.

If you have 1-3 poems you think appropriate, send to me asap.  Should any be accepted, a seriously selective process, you will receive one copy of the book as payment, and be damn happy about it,  as we do this for love -- of pigs, mankind's true friend, who take us lightly, feed us copiously, and nourish our sense of justice and its opposite.  Your other good works will of course be credited in brief bios.

Jim Lenfestey, Editor
SOME PIG, Red Dragonfly Press
***
James P. Lenfestey
TURNING 40 PRODUCTIONS
1833 Girard Ave. So.
Minneapolis, MN 55403
cell: 612-730-7435
www.coyotepoet.com

Happy People

The New York Times ran a piece on Thursday (by Roni Caryn Rabin), with an opening that spoke to my soul. Not the content - though I like the content - the way it was expressed. (Maybe it's because I'm going slowly nuts thumping my own book of poems into shape, but I'm seeing gorgeous, startling poetry everywhere lately.) Anyway, this contains what must be one of the shortest (and bluntest) second pararaphs in NYT history. Maybe it needs to be seen in the context of the whole article... maybe to fully appreciate this you need to have read a truly horrible amount of long, windy NYT prose... Now I've built it up way too much, and you'll just scratch your head and think what the heck was he talking about. Ah, I'm just going to quote it and shut up.

"Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do."

Sarah Palin for U.S. Poet Laureate

(A note from about a week after I posted this: the guys at Prospect magazine read it, laughed a hollow laugh, and asked for a longer, slightly different version, which you can read here...)

Well, Sarah Palin is back in Alaska, and all you can hear around these parts is the lonesome wail of the broken-hearted satirists of Europe. Come back Sarah! We love you! It's OK if you think Africa's a country! We don't mind. It's not like you were running for President of Africa. Hell, there's people over here in Europe think America's a country...

At least she's still giving interviews, to sort out these terrible misconceptions, so I can still get my regular fix. In today's one, with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, "the Alaska governor explains what she would have discussed had she been more available to the press."

Which turns out to be stuff like - I know Africa is a continent! Embedded in sentences like this one:

"I don't know, because I remember the discussion about Africa, my concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue, as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars, I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen anymore."

I like the middle bit of that sentence the best. It has a kind of poetry. And she says "continent", just to bang it home that she knows it's a continent. Subtle, but brilliant.

Hell, it IS poetry. Read it again:

Africa, a poem by Sarah Palin

"And the relevance

To me

With that issue,

As we spoke

About Africa and some

Of the countries

There that were

Kind of the people

Succumbing to the dictators

And the corruption

Of some

Collapsed governments

On the

Continent,

The relevance

Was Alaska's"

As Kurtz should have said at the end of Heart of Darkness, "The relevance! The relevance!"

If Obama is serious about reaching out across the aisle; about ending the divisions between Republican and Democrat - between red states and blue states - between people who believe in evolution and people who believe in creation - between monkeys and humans - between literate and illiterate - if Barack Hussein Obama truly believes in Change - then he will appoint Sarah Palin as the United States' seventeenth, and greatest, Poet Laureate.

God Bless the U.S.A.

With only a fistful of days to go, well yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts about the US election but, you know, who cares about my thoughts on the US election. Here's a clip that doesn't contain any footage of Barack Obama, John McCain, or Sarah Palin. (OK it does contain footage of Joe Biden, but hey, perfection is for Allah.)

And, wonky sound and all, this clip contains that strange, sideways something about the USA that makes me like the place so much. I'll warn you, if you're European - this clip is corny; it is cutesy (and the sound sucks); but get past that.

To make a clarifying statement which is not as cynical as it seems: America has the potential to be the country it thinks it is.

I have often found myself repeating W.H Auden's lines (below), from "On The Circuit", as I fly away from another astonishing, infuriating, sickening, exhilarating, inspiring encounter with America. I wonder do the candidates find themselves murmuring something similar sometimes...

"Another morning comes: I see

Dwindling below me on the plane,

The roofs of one more audience

I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although

I don't remember which was which:

God bless the USA, so large,

So friendly, and so rich."

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam

There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog.  I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...

I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)

Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)

By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet:

“I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
-W. H. Auden

If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.

American Haiku

 

Ten thousand syllables

A break

Thirty thousand syllables

A break

Bashô applauds, but it’s not over.

We will be back with
A hundred thousand great new
Syllables, after

This break.

The Illustrated "Dromineer, December 2007" (my last poem of 2007)

 

Dromineer, December 2007

I

A winter storm has thatched the east shore of Lough Derg
In the traditional manner, by breaking
All last year’s dead reeds across the knee of the wind,
Then waves – chop-chop – chivvy ten thousand tons of them
Across the lake and into position
Interlocked along seventy miles of shore.

Today, the obsessive-compulsive waves have
Calmed down a bit, but
Still fiddle with it every few seconds
Like Christo adjusting the silk hem of an island,
Unable to drag himself away.
Like a writer at Christmas, poking a poem
Trying to enjoy the break
Unable to enjoy the break
Trying to enjoy the break
From writing.

II

The sun makes a grudging appearance
For one minute, to two shivering fans
Who’ve been standing on the concrete jetty in the rain.
“That’ll have ta do ye.”
It ducks back behind the zinc clouds
And sinks fast below the black hills.

“Fuck this, I’m off back to Australia,”
Mumbles one of the fans, or the sun.

It’s hard to tell over the
Splash of the lake waves, the
Crash of the lakeside
Property prices, the
Crying of developers and birds.

(Julian Gough, Tipperary, 2007.) 

 

(Photos by Julian Gough. Taken in Dromineer on the day he wrote the first draft of the poem.)
 

Dromineer, December 2007

Dromineer, December 2007

I

A winter storm has thatched the east shore of Lough Derg
In the traditional manner, by breaking
All last year’s dead reeds across the knee of the wind,
Then waves – chop-chop – chivvy ten thousand tons of them
Across the lake and into position
Interlocked along seventy miles of shore.

Today, the obsessive-compulsive waves have
Calmed down a bit, but
Still fiddle with it every few seconds
Like Christo adjusting the silk hem of an island,
Unable to drag himself away.
Like a writer at Christmas, poking a poem
Trying to enjoy the break
Unable to enjoy the break
Trying to enjoy the break
From writing.

II

The sun makes a grudging appearance
For one minute, to two shivering fans
Who’ve been standing on the concrete jetty in the rain.
“That’ll have ta do ye.”
It ducks back behind the zinc clouds
And sinks fast below the black hills.

“Fuck this, I’m off back to Australia,”
Mumbles one of the fans, or the sun.

It’s hard to tell over the
Splash of the lake waves, the
Crash of the lakeside
Property prices, the
Crying of developers and birds.

(Julian Gough, Tipperary, 2007.) 

Poem of the Year 2007

I should stop saying I hate poetry. It's not true. My position is far more nuanced and subtle than that. I just think 98% of all poetry is shite.

And who, citizen, subject or slave, could disagree with that grave judgement, pondered long?

I didn't read much good poetry this year, and the good poetry I read was mostly old stuff. But as the knackered year gasped its last, its liver packing in as it fell over the finish line, I read a poem that I loved (well, wanted to shag... what do you think this is, the Age of Chivalry?)

It's a Christmas poem (God help us) and it's in the Guardian (may Marx preserve us), so it should be shit squared. But Christmas is a time of miracles.

It's by Glyn Maxwell, and it's called Hometown Mystery Cycle.

Enjoy.

Too sick to write (just sick enough to blog)

Sick as a pig this morning.

Puked my ring. Scaldy hole.

 

You do not want details.

So, as I was unfit for real writing, I hung out on the Guardian Books Blog all day. Very enjoyable. At one point I was asked "Julian, are you on SSRIs?" so I may have been a bit too sick to be posting, but feckit. Mostly I argued about people's right to email poems to their friends without written legal permission from the poet's publishers (Wendy Cope is, bizarrely, against this right. I am for it... OK, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you'll have to read it, I'm not summarizing an all-day argument.) The discussion starts with a fine article by Oliver Burkeman, well worth reading.

And I helped slag off the Guardian's decision to publish their review team's Book of the Year recommendations as a 41-minute podcast instead of a list. 

If anyone wants to read all about it, or join in, here's the discussion of Wendy Cope Forbids You To Email That Poem... Put Down The Poem... Move Away From The Poem...

And here's a link to the (slightly less intellectually stimulating) People Slagging Off The 41-Minute Book of the Year Podcast...

And I'm off to bed. 

All Your Base Are Belong To Us (a poem made out of debris)

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

All your base are belong to us
Somebody set up
Us the bomb
We get signal
We get signal
We get signal
Main screen, turn on

What you say!!
What you say!!
The signs could be a borderline terrorist threat
Depending on what someone interprets it to mean

For great justice
For great justice
Turn on
Main screen:

All your base are belong to us.

Three Poems Written Between Berlin and Bristol, November 12th 2007

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(I)

I think continually of those who were really something
Creating a small universe every couple of years
Many of which continue to function
Receiving ambassadors, tourists and Vandals
Who, unfamiliar with the concept of stairs,
Walk through the squares, staring into doorways
Entirely unaware of the upper stories.

“It’s alright, but he can’t hold a candle to
Andy McNab” “…Cecelia Ahern.”

Behind them, high and unobserved
A single light, incandescent
Continues to burn.

City, star and satellite.

Stadt, Satellit, und Stern.

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(II)

I think continually of those who were really something.
Spontaneously combusting, in a locked room,
Their fat burning, bones thinning
Hair, gums and memories receding
Til suddenly there’s nothing left
But a corpse and a pile of books.

I say goodbye, lock the door.
Settle into the chair.

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(III)

I think continually of those who were really something
They hang around, watching me not write
As I sit selfish on a train
And a woman stands, caught between the age
When men stand for beauty, and the age
When men stand for age.

Later, on a plane, I trade my night’s sleep for the poem
And drink a late coffee to sharpen my brain
In the hope of nailing something in the last lines
To justify the day.

Later still, about to land,
I think:
It’s not even a good poem
And I made her stand.