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Oto-housebooks are flogging this interesting concrete poetry collaboration by Mon Franz and H. Schrader. From the blurb...




Red card board box (11 x 11 x 10,5) that houses four parts of a book that measured originally 35 x 9,5 cm. The book is printed on red and white stock. The white stock (approximately 60 pages) is bound in the center of the book and these pages print Mon’s concrete poetry. After completion the book has been cut in 4 parts by Schrader.

- First edition. One of 100 copies, numbered and signed in pencil by both Schrader and Mon.

A small collection of German poetry slam flyers has a certain charm, over at kamalatta-kamalatta.

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, wrote Adorno in a much understood contemplation of the role of poetry in a post holocaust world. In a similar vain, which will be equally misunderstood, I'd like to ask, can Americans with over 600,000 people now estimated dead in Iraq as a result of the war on terror, write poetry during this bloodshed? The naive answer to this, yes we are living in dark times, we poets must write on, we must, we have to, and besides we're doing all we can to help. But in fact the truth is darker. It's a matter of simple statistics. There is no earthly reason to think that all poets, when they vote at all, vote democrat. Many will have voted Republican. They will have, by their actions, if not in their poetry, actively chosen war. Can Americans write poetry with 600,000 dead, oh yes, without doubt. Of course these poets in a post Iraq reckoning, will be excised from the history books. The unpalatable does not tend to be remembered. It was Ginsberg and company who entered the pantheon after Vietnam, not such shadows who write, about beauty, truth, and being, on the wings of bombers over the deserts of blood. This war must stop. There is poetry in action too.

Peter Brabazon of Callan Co. Kilkenny, released a slender collection entitled 40 poems just last year. It's a slice from over 28 years of writing and shows a poet in search of form, but never quite settling. Brabazon tries his hand at acrostics (one to Deirdre O' Connell formerly of Focus Theatre), concrete poems, and to my knowledge, a new and novel form, in the poem 81 Squares: The question, which when you look at it for obvious reasons can only be called the Sudoku. It's slightly beyond concrete though and for that reason is probably enough to earn him entry to OULIPOU. La Stampa Pagina 7 steals the show however, with a copied list of women's names from an advertisement in an Italian newspaper advertisement. Pure music. Some of the other work is uneven, but there's enough here to make you want to read more. I'm sure there's more to come.

Here's a shot of Nick Cave doing a little teaching at the Vienna Poetry Academy (schule fur dichtüng), back in 98. The school concentrates on the the multimedia & the multilingal aspect of poetry. Cave themed his lecture: the love song and how to write one: a practical investigation into the love song.

Look out especially for the quirky europop video with Cave, Ginsberg, and Falco. With loveable old Ginsberg singing the international crazy wisdom poetry school will save the human race it's oddly touching in a eurovision/ school play kind of way.

For those who don't quite get it, this little gag refers to Goethe's Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit. See here.

Gustav Klimt's poesie revels in a certain dreamy way, an endlessly enduring conceptualisation of the reader of poetry. One in which lovers share each other as pillow, page and word. In which sensuality, and ritual, enfold and enrapture. In a post human poetic, we can expect this idea to be consigned to oblivion. But for now, it remains deliriously irresistible and iconic.

Johann P. Tammen released in 2006, a trilingual edition (Gaelige, German, and English) of And skyward the seas. The text layout works surprisingly well, and if you find a poem you like, having it in three languages feels like a bonus. Such is the case for me with the work Snow summer night at Loccum, which as it seeks to capture and present a snowscape for the reader, has a certain acrobatic delicacy in its play with light, sound and movement. Perhaps poetry is finished when it tires with snow. The endless versatility it offers the imagination is irresistible for most poets. But probably because of this very fact, this poet has drawn his words, over a layer of self. When it opens with "Flakes all forlorn Snow in a Flurry" (not to be confused with the Mc Flurry of Burger empire fame), it soon gives way to "the ear that listens and sounds out the poem's engineering". And so this muted awarness enters the readers consciousness, who thanks to having these three languages in the one bed, can also begin to tinker. Reading the Irish we can remove the burger pun, with an sneachta ina raiste. And we can make the snow crisper by reading der lauen Zunge der Nacht instead of the mild tongue of the night. It's alot of polyglot fun, kind of overriding a work that has at times a stilted academic resonance to it. This feeling emerges as Tammen engages the themes concerning the production (a mechanics of information flow) and function of poetry: without ever really exciting the reader. This is not really a surprise, these words were written for other words, as much as other people. It often feels cold and impersonal then. But for the same reasons, on the level of ideas, certain pieces work very well:


this poem
is merely a poem
a machine gleefully dancing
between the words
mocking other machines