Wednesday, 28 July 2010
HAIL THE HORSE! HAIL THE QUILL!
So i recently wandered into a tent by a river and realised the man on stage, gesturing wildly about his crazyily wonderful relationship to astronomy was none other than Dr. Feelgood guitarist, Mr. Wilko Johnson. No sooner had Mr. Johnson peaked in his oratical lightning storm he quite literally fled the tent. Gawn. I gestured meekly in his direction but he shot off into the night. He was brilliant. Nervous, but that just made it better.
Outside the tent Bill Drummond (ex KLF, the guy who burnt a million pounds?) spent two days building a bed - a great, jutting longship of a thing. Round the back the drummer from Elastica gave a workshop on the esoteric secrets of the drumstick. I loved it all. The tent (which i tried to buy for the School of Myth for three bronze groats and a used Wishbone Ash LP) belongs to a very fine organization called THE IDLER, British eccentricity at its best. They pay their writers in gold pieces which they procure from a small man in London. All of this is true, as their website will no doubt attest.
I salute their sanity, and advise you check them out. There was a freaky little band called THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER, who used to be in something called Circulus i believe (please You Tube Circulus and their song about bodies and sunlight - (however you react, know this, they thought it was a good idea at the time). They wore very, very tiny shorts, drawn on mustaches and claim their music is influenced by 1972 and 1272. True, as you will see. I'm still in a wonderful kind of shock.
TIM YOUNG IS COMING
On a saner note, the great American poet Timothy Young will be performing at the Westcountry Storytelling Festival, the last weekend in August. Tickets just about still available at: www.weststoryfest.co.uk
Tim has a mighty new collection just out: HERDS OF BEARS SURROUND US. It's solid at 101 poems, takes risks but also consolidates some deep ground he has been burrowing into these last few decades. It's a triumph. Very powerful work.Tim will read at the School of Myth tent as well as the wider festival, and we are hopeful that he will facilitate some sessions with emerging poets. So here's something from Tim:
HOMAGE TO WHITMAN
This day, this arch of birch over the log pile,
this large sky as blue as a sunfish fin,
this pine grove as green as a hunter’s coat.
This bluff, this corn, this mud-wrinkled road
where immigrant Swedes were captured
by the hills, ravines, creeks and oaks--by beauty.
This melting snow, this thawing ice, this heart of mine,
twisting, turning, dangling, wringing, watching and singing
in the clasp of beauty’s large fist. I eat beauty,
I breathe beauty, I rub beauty onto my chest hairs.
The loping dog, the horned ram, the sleek Ford pickup,
the echoing chortle of a strutting tom.
The taupe fields, the cut stalks.
I love the curve of the contoured rows.
The rattling maize leaves slice into my heart,
the plum bush swings its thorns to my throat
Beauty infects me. I accept
the natural hypodermics, all briars and canes,
nettles and thistles, dried and dead and working.
These skin strippers, these clothes tearers,
the ones who wish me naked with them.
I love, too, these stinkpots, this manure bed,
this nest of opossum, rank with winter refuse,
this dormant pile of rot, this embraceable torso, this limp cock.
This stirring, cracking, shuddering heart opens for them all.
Come in maple sap, lanolin, wet resin, cedar scent,
birch bark, elder root, ash gatherer, tractor hum,
horse fart, skunk tread and pocket gopher mound dust.
Put me in your furry mouth, wrap me in your diaper,
bathe me in your silky hide, scrub me with your stars.
Find more about Tim at www.twoboots.net
Off to Spain next week, following Lorca's trail as research for next book, but will try and tap out some more signs and symbols before then. Got some plans for the School of Myth tent.
Outside the tent Bill Drummond (ex KLF, the guy who burnt a million pounds?) spent two days building a bed - a great, jutting longship of a thing. Round the back the drummer from Elastica gave a workshop on the esoteric secrets of the drumstick. I loved it all. The tent (which i tried to buy for the School of Myth for three bronze groats and a used Wishbone Ash LP) belongs to a very fine organization called THE IDLER, British eccentricity at its best. They pay their writers in gold pieces which they procure from a small man in London. All of this is true, as their website will no doubt attest.
I salute their sanity, and advise you check them out. There was a freaky little band called THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER, who used to be in something called Circulus i believe (please You Tube Circulus and their song about bodies and sunlight - (however you react, know this, they thought it was a good idea at the time). They wore very, very tiny shorts, drawn on mustaches and claim their music is influenced by 1972 and 1272. True, as you will see. I'm still in a wonderful kind of shock.
TIM YOUNG IS COMING
On a saner note, the great American poet Timothy Young will be performing at the Westcountry Storytelling Festival, the last weekend in August. Tickets just about still available at: www.weststoryfest.co.uk
Tim has a mighty new collection just out: HERDS OF BEARS SURROUND US. It's solid at 101 poems, takes risks but also consolidates some deep ground he has been burrowing into these last few decades. It's a triumph. Very powerful work.Tim will read at the School of Myth tent as well as the wider festival, and we are hopeful that he will facilitate some sessions with emerging poets. So here's something from Tim:
HOMAGE TO WHITMAN
This day, this arch of birch over the log pile,
this large sky as blue as a sunfish fin,
this pine grove as green as a hunter’s coat.
This bluff, this corn, this mud-wrinkled road
where immigrant Swedes were captured
by the hills, ravines, creeks and oaks--by beauty.
This melting snow, this thawing ice, this heart of mine,
twisting, turning, dangling, wringing, watching and singing
in the clasp of beauty’s large fist. I eat beauty,
I breathe beauty, I rub beauty onto my chest hairs.
The loping dog, the horned ram, the sleek Ford pickup,
the echoing chortle of a strutting tom.
The taupe fields, the cut stalks.
I love the curve of the contoured rows.
The rattling maize leaves slice into my heart,
the plum bush swings its thorns to my throat
Beauty infects me. I accept
the natural hypodermics, all briars and canes,
nettles and thistles, dried and dead and working.
These skin strippers, these clothes tearers,
the ones who wish me naked with them.
I love, too, these stinkpots, this manure bed,
this nest of opossum, rank with winter refuse,
this dormant pile of rot, this embraceable torso, this limp cock.
This stirring, cracking, shuddering heart opens for them all.
Come in maple sap, lanolin, wet resin, cedar scent,
birch bark, elder root, ash gatherer, tractor hum,
horse fart, skunk tread and pocket gopher mound dust.
Put me in your furry mouth, wrap me in your diaper,
bathe me in your silky hide, scrub me with your stars.
Find more about Tim at www.twoboots.net
Off to Spain next week, following Lorca's trail as research for next book, but will try and tap out some more signs and symbols before then. Got some plans for the School of Myth tent.
Monday, 19 July 2010
As we wander, limp and stride into deep summer, here are just a few, possibly rash, thoughts on community to stick in the back pack. ( A few bits i have put on here before) Talking of community, i send a hearty hail to all second years at the school of myth who have just completed - a great honour to be part of this wylde band of vagabonds, minstrels and river boat gypsies. ( please note above pic of a few of the wider group this weekend on news that more cake, wine and a new translation of the Mabinogion had been smuggled in)....half completed longhouse to far left of snap.
Community and Reclaiming Time
Finding community is a tricky thing; the main emphasis I want to make is the belief that community should live at least partially in the imagination, rather than continually forced into the literal. Our community should involve long dead poets, sharks teeth, the shimmer - mist on a Scottish Glen, the erotic trim of a Bedouin tent. We could reach a wider perspective on the word rather than attempting to wrestle it always into concrete solutions, petitions, cult-is, finger wagging, committees, living in a tiny house of comrades arguing over who last bought the toiletries and who stole the tofu from the back of the fridge.
Communities could also be to do with reclaiming time: it seems to have a harsh, worried, pulse to many people. It is useful to reach back through it to a community of ancestors. I don't mean some vague concept but in the work of vitalising folks down the centuries. It is naive for us to claim personal impoverishment when we are connected to the legacy of Emily Dickinson, Taliesin, Delius, Mirabai, Black Elk, Wolfram Von Eschenbach or John Coltrane. We could find a specific soul - teacher from history and follow their lead. This will also broaden and deepen time around us, and in the same moment make us more genuinely present.
It’s quite possible to completely re - experience time. A start is to regard the coming of night as a regular move into the eternal, the end of clock time till the sun rises the next day. Take questions to the night,questions that could never accomplish themselves in the agitation of day light. Become a night walker, invite it to become an ally. What are the scents and impression that night brings? What Goddesses glide through the open window? Night as a disorderly community of dreams, sudden fears and sideways epiphanies. Allow the art you make of your life to beguile the Moon to wander to your bedside and start to talk. This allows us to flood into the wisdom of shadows and the indistinct blessings that midnight offers. It’s a grave mistake for us to only associate wisdom with the daylight hours or ‘light of knowledge’; we isolate ourselves from half the insights that twenty four hours carries. Night as an ally is to understand that it follows different deities to well mannered day: Lillith, Nyx, lusty Pan and his disgraceful fantasies – the ‘luna’tics have taken over the asylum. At the same time that very hoard of impulses can cut to the marrow of all sorts of worries, and amplify all sorts of truths that we can’t get near in the daylight hours. Night is the entering of a temple.
James Hillman claims that to reach back through history becomes a kind of osmosis, that you can merge into the leafy mulch of mystical texts and hard ideas, that you can become thousands of years old. This is another invitation to shape – leap. So we extend community by actually retreating backwards.
Become an apprentice to the way Caravaggio handled color and don’t worry about having an original thought for at least five years. Allow yourself to feel strange and slightly magical. Compose poetry that is irritable and fiery, that runs to hundreds of lines, then learn by heart and recite to nearby jackdaws. Write letters again, and find the oldest mail box you can to post them from. Decide that your hips are an altar to old Romanian Goddesses and take up Belly dancing. Give out library cards as birthday presents. Run a three week course from your porch on the relationship between the Aztec temples and Gypsy gambling games from Medieval Wales. Don’t go easy on yourself.
Community and Reclaiming Time
Finding community is a tricky thing; the main emphasis I want to make is the belief that community should live at least partially in the imagination, rather than continually forced into the literal. Our community should involve long dead poets, sharks teeth, the shimmer - mist on a Scottish Glen, the erotic trim of a Bedouin tent. We could reach a wider perspective on the word rather than attempting to wrestle it always into concrete solutions, petitions, cult-is, finger wagging, committees, living in a tiny house of comrades arguing over who last bought the toiletries and who stole the tofu from the back of the fridge.
Communities could also be to do with reclaiming time: it seems to have a harsh, worried, pulse to many people. It is useful to reach back through it to a community of ancestors. I don't mean some vague concept but in the work of vitalising folks down the centuries. It is naive for us to claim personal impoverishment when we are connected to the legacy of Emily Dickinson, Taliesin, Delius, Mirabai, Black Elk, Wolfram Von Eschenbach or John Coltrane. We could find a specific soul - teacher from history and follow their lead. This will also broaden and deepen time around us, and in the same moment make us more genuinely present.
It’s quite possible to completely re - experience time. A start is to regard the coming of night as a regular move into the eternal, the end of clock time till the sun rises the next day. Take questions to the night,questions that could never accomplish themselves in the agitation of day light. Become a night walker, invite it to become an ally. What are the scents and impression that night brings? What Goddesses glide through the open window? Night as a disorderly community of dreams, sudden fears and sideways epiphanies. Allow the art you make of your life to beguile the Moon to wander to your bedside and start to talk. This allows us to flood into the wisdom of shadows and the indistinct blessings that midnight offers. It’s a grave mistake for us to only associate wisdom with the daylight hours or ‘light of knowledge’; we isolate ourselves from half the insights that twenty four hours carries. Night as an ally is to understand that it follows different deities to well mannered day: Lillith, Nyx, lusty Pan and his disgraceful fantasies – the ‘luna’tics have taken over the asylum. At the same time that very hoard of impulses can cut to the marrow of all sorts of worries, and amplify all sorts of truths that we can’t get near in the daylight hours. Night is the entering of a temple.
James Hillman claims that to reach back through history becomes a kind of osmosis, that you can merge into the leafy mulch of mystical texts and hard ideas, that you can become thousands of years old. This is another invitation to shape – leap. So we extend community by actually retreating backwards.
Become an apprentice to the way Caravaggio handled color and don’t worry about having an original thought for at least five years. Allow yourself to feel strange and slightly magical. Compose poetry that is irritable and fiery, that runs to hundreds of lines, then learn by heart and recite to nearby jackdaws. Write letters again, and find the oldest mail box you can to post them from. Decide that your hips are an altar to old Romanian Goddesses and take up Belly dancing. Give out library cards as birthday presents. Run a three week course from your porch on the relationship between the Aztec temples and Gypsy gambling games from Medieval Wales. Don’t go easy on yourself.
Thursday, 8 July 2010
LIVE: SHAW, DEARDORFF AND DENSMORE
Hot off the press - here are the links to two video's of Daniel Deardorff and I's gig at Kulaks Woodshed in Hollywood the other week. The first is Danny, accompanied by me and the wonderful John Densmore, the second is myself with the other two renegades backing. Note - could all second year myth students be restrained and wait till post our up coming weekend where we will be studying the said story -from then on you will have this record to work with.....
http://www.vimeo.com/13143167
http://www.vimeo.com/13162521
So, just get and paste the links and you should be off to the races.
Ciao for now,
Martin
http://www.vimeo.com/13143167
http://www.vimeo.com/13162521
So, just get and paste the links and you should be off to the races.
Ciao for now,
Martin
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
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