Dead Poet Salon

I’ve recorded a reading of an old poem of mine from May 2018 for Petersfield Bookshop’s ‘Dead Poet Salon’ online open-mic (which, as with my International Poetry Circle videos, is posted on the @PragmaJournal Twitter account again as I still intractably/unhelpfully refuse to return to using social media ‘personally’). Anyway. The poem’s called ‘For Roger, For Jack’, written as a tribute/’exaltation’/whatever of the life and work of R. F. Langley (on whom I started writing a Master’s dissertation last year, which will be finished One Day when I’m able/mentally well enough/etc).

The video can be found here. For accessibility reasons and so on the text of the poem can be downloaded here: For Roger For Jack.

Cheers. I’m a little uneasy about some of this online ‘poetry explosion’ vis-à-vis COVID-19 (readers treating poetry as some sort of tonic/coping strategy/intellectual health food), but from a writing or ‘productive’ perspective it’s deeply necessary to be working at the moment just as per any other occasion of extreme biopolitical interpellation (plus, as I’m doing on this blog, attempting to account/compensate for delays to publication). It’s excellent to have these sort of attempts at ‘communal’ performance opportunities during pandemic-lockdown, at least. I’ve started working on a long ‘observational prosimetrum’ about the isolation period, entangling three immediate and false-transcendental narratives/trajectories (of the coronavirus, trying to get sober, and an inescapable and incommunicative platonic heart-longing) with journal/diary entries, both my own and others, as a concentration on the apparent impossibility of nature writing at a time when anthro-infrastructure is under attack by a virus ‘of and against nature’ while trying to avoid conceding to an ecofascist ‘Earth’s revenge’ myth… And a lot more besides, including reflections on why that cunt James Corden is in my dreams being beaten up by John Ashbery and James Baldwin (and that other Fred Perry prick from that sitcom is being spit roasted by Paul Celan and Ezra Pound). Enough about that project, though. I hope you enjoy the reading-video.

‘A Coronal’ (or, A Tangled Update)

Good enough for Zukofsky, etc.

Anyway, hello. I hope you are well / productive / productive in making yourself well, in the face of COVID-19 and otherwise. This should be a reasonably concise bulletin.

Pragma:

The print journal of “poetry, prose, and praxis” I am helping to organise responsible for was due to produce its debut edition in the first half of this year. This is now no longer a possibility, and even in the most fortuitous circumstances my prediction sets a likely date for its arrival towards the very end of 2020. Please see https://mobile.twitter.com/PragmaJournal for more information.

Poetry:

My next pamphlet, N in Scrabble, is nearly ready for publication. Given the current situation, however, it will not be appearing in print for some time. I will be posting regular batches of poems in this blog over the coming weeks, in lieu of mustering anything material, and some of these will be selected from that manuscript. The long(ish) ‘prosimetrum’ Hetrombiopen will arrive here also when it is complete, as will two other longer works.

Music:

As always, head to https://sovietdistrict.bandcamp.com/ for that sort of thing. I am slowly releasing a series of solo double bass free improvisation sessions, recorded at various points over the last couple of years, and will inevitably be adding to these with new work over the coming weeks. The same goes for guitar. The Reif album ‘The Imagined Band’ is nearly ready, but before unleashing that I would like to finish recording my solo record of Actual Songs, ‘Templates/Demonstrations’. I may even remember to post details here of forthcoming live appearances!!

There’s more but I’m quite drunk so that’ll do for now. Cheers, and please stay inside.

Matt

Two pamphlets from Soviet District Press

I’ve started a small poetry press. Or rather, I’ve produced a short collection of old poems I couldn’t really find homes for elsewhere and, more importantly, printed a sequence of fifteen poems titled Ars Felixium I got tired of shopping around to publishers hence put out myself to ‘get it out of the way’ in order to concentrate on new work. They’re cheap and links to purchase them are below (please and thank you) though you can of course read them digitally in their entirety by pressing the ‘Preview’ button on the storefront.

Ars Felixium (£4.00, 46 pages) https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9590682-ars-felixium

One Age Work-House (£2.99, 24 pages) https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9591018-one-age-work-house