Sunday, December 6, 2015
Danse Macabre November 2015
Sunday, November 8, 2015
L'orchidée noctambule a vingt ans
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| Couverture de la plaquette |
En octobre 1995 paraissait mon premier recueil de poèmes L'orchidée noctambule, titre que j'ai du coup utilisé pour ce blog. Les éditions Press-Stances étaient basées à Bordeaux et dirigées par Frédéric maire, disparu en 2003.
Quelques collaborations à la revue Press-Stances et Frédéric me proposa de recueillir quelques-uns de mes premiers textes dans cette plaquette, deuxième à paraître aux éditions, après celle d'Ali Boutamina Mélancolie, en août de la même année.
Frédéric fut un ami, un réel compagnon de route, l'un des premiers à croire en ce que j'écrivais et à m'ouvrir les portes de la petite presse francophone. J'en ai défoncées d'autres depuis, outre-Atlantique et outre-Manche.
Beaucoup de ces textes sont juvéniles bien sûr et peu ont survécu à ce recueil. L'un d'entre eux fait aujourd'hui parti d'un autre recueil Les chants du malaise publié en 2011 au Chasseur abstrait dans le numéro 73-74 de la RAL,M. D'autres figurent aussi dans le recueil Etranges anges anglais publié chez mgv2>publishing en décembre 2012. D'autres encore font parti d'un recueil resté inédit et qui le restera Remparts sous la lune. Ceci dit tous les poèmes ont été publiés et dans leur traduction en anglais aussi.
Ce recueil c'est aussi l'exil vers la Grande-Bretagne, Bath, et une adresse au-dessus d'un fleuriste, une existence pleine de rencontres et d'opportunités, dont celle avec l'illustrateur de la revue Craig J. McCafferty et son chat au chapeau. Relire le recueil et parcourir les quelques 30 pages qu'il contient, se dire aussi qu'il se vendait pour 25FF, et cette couverture rouge qui fut un temps la marque de fabrique de la revue et des éditions Press-Stances.
24 recueils plus tard, dont une bonne partie en anglais chez IWA après L'orchidée noctambule ou les derniers chez différents éditeurs, il reste de bons souvenirs, mais pas que, et l'impression d'avoir encore un pied au XXème siècle, comme un dinosaure, ou un étranger dans son propre siècle.
Extraits:
Ne plus compter les insomnies
reviendrait à se réveiller
et sous les escaliers pavés
de froid
de ficelle
et de bois
nos engelures se rassasient
en ouvrant nos veines
pleines.
in Remparts sous la lune
Dans la mansarde ténébreuse
l’heureuse Zelda Rissenstein
se caresse le ventre
et les seins
les soldats bruns l’emportent
sur leurs ailes d’acier
dans un wagon de tôle froissée
et sur les rails de l’enfer
le wagon roule, roule encore
son corps
mutilé et atrocité
des exhalaisons
passagères
le rythme d’équinoxe
solstice de la perte
une fournaise et puis des cendres
Zelda Rissenstein et Cassandre.
in Les chants du malaise
Saturday, November 7, 2015
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Sapiens Sucks in Nude Bruce Review 5
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| Nude Bruce Review issue 5 cover |
Anyway, this poem is part of a very short collection of poems, Fandango, I am going to try to (self?) publish as a chapbook in-print or online some time in the future.
Tamed Dracaenae has not found a place yet though I submitted it to dozens of publishers. Some have already rejected it, others will probably do the same as this collection is so multi-layered and certainly hard to access, abstruse really, and wouldn't sell much I suppose. If the publishers I submitted it to read this post they will reject it without even reading the manuscript, I have never been a really good seller of my own work.
Anyway, to have this poem published in issue 5 of Nude Bruce Review (p.87) and to have forgotten about it is somehow both encouraging and depressing; no, not depressing, I think I have come to the point that all this fandango (see the point) in the small-press and writing poetry or fiction, editing and publishing and socializing online mostly is pointless and a waste of energy I have to save for more important things in life, in my private life.
I really like this poem and tried to craft it as best as I could. It is a poem that should have been the start of a new project, but really I have so much to do and so little energy to do it that I abandoned the projects, and all the others I have had as regard writing since the summer of 2014.
I used to be a chain-smoker as well as a chain-writer, that was in the 1990s. Then I had 5 years of fallow land to cross. Dry sheet, dry muse, dry brain. It slowly came back and in the first half of the 2010s, it took me only 3 years to have 5 collections published: Maore (Lapwing), Carmine Carnival at Lazarus Media (Danse Macabre), The Loss (Flutter Press), Twelve Times Thirteen (Kind of Hurricane Press), and the latest Crossing Puddles (Robocup Press). Those and the two collections in French I (self-)published through mgv2>publishing: Etranges anges anglais and Post Mayotte Trauma. But Etranges anges anglais is a collection of poems written in England in the mid-1990s, so that doesn't really count, does it?
I have appeared (only) in seven journals or anthologies this year, (only) twelve poems published in total, and Crossing Puddles of course. I know I should not complain, I am being a spoiled-child to whom one would have taken his toy away. I know that accountancy and poetry won't match pretty well. I'm just worried that this fallow land of writing is back, for good. And if not for good, for a long time. And what worries me the most is that if it [writing] ever comes back, I know what could make it come back, and that is scaring me a lot.
Time will tell I suppose. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the publication of this poem that was actually published over 2 months ago.
"Sapiens Sucks" in Nude Bruce Review issue 5
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada by Karla Linn Merrifield
To order a copy of this book contact the publisher Foothills Publishing here. Though their website has not been updated, I suppose they will offer a possibility that you order Karla's latest poetry book through the mail.
Excerpt from the foreword by Walter Ruhlmann with excerpts from some of the poems
Right from the title, Bunchberries, we are delivered to the natural beauty of the land as the Latin name for bunchberry – cornus canadensis – implies. From the first poems already so many places, swirling as many shots, postcards, flashes transport the mind to Canada beyond all one can imagine, like a jewel in the crown breathing in the Maritimes: Cape Breton, highland meadows, North Atlantic storms, gray seals, Lake Keiji, Brier Island, the Bay of Saint Lawrence, Nova Scotia.
And unsurprisingly ferries getting people in and out, crossing seas or bays, are at the centre of these first poems too, as this land from sea to sea offers more than vast lands, no less vast shores, and maritime landscapes. Now playing “The Pirate of Penance” and reading “Special Load”:
I transport local traffic year-round and tourists
in the summer. Mostly cars, pickups, delivery trucks
and once a month that pint-sized fuel tanker bound
for the gas pumps at Lechabeau’s General Store.
Never a semi, no further roads for such anyway.
No, nary a big boy for Old Joe, old Joe Casey.
It is also something peculiar to go from one language to the other, as one would go from land to land. A godwit in French is une barge, a barge is.. well, a barge in both languages, isn't it? Maritime-drawn. Karla uses French words especially in her poems where Quebec is the landscape. C'est quelque chose de merveilleux – It's something wonderful (to give Karla her wink back) – to read these poems where I imagine her making her French phrases surface again when purchasing items from the local grocery store “Speaking of Québec”.
I’ve fallen back into it
after ten days across Quebéc:
le français.
I ask for directions
to the marché d’alimentation,
locals’ mouthful for grocery store.
When I need to flip a new Bic
for my foul habit,
I manage to sputter
Est-ce vous avez des alumettes
pour les cigarettes?
Lost in fog too, and smell of roses. Like the memory blanks, in “Proper Adornment” (quoted bellow) where the poet, dazzled by the glittering sea glass that may not be what it looks like, relishes on a piece of driftwood that lost both memory and bark. I also recognise the fog the waitress is lot in “Lost and Found in Les Madeleines” a Proustian poem where the poet herself cannot find the French word brouillard anymore. Fog where the bodies of the departed are lost in, then found again, on the shores of Prince Edward Island on Cabot Beach.
This is the beauty
to be had
at Cabot’s Beach:
the glittering litter
not of sea glass
pocketed to take home
but the mantle, the jewels
of the dead and gone
to remember.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Rubicon: Words and Art Inspired by Oscar Wilde's De Profundis
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Saturday, March 28, 2015
Hibernatus Poeticus
Returning to a market where you previously appeared is always important. To be accepted once, I guess this has some sort of importance too, but when you make it another time, it takes a whole new dimension. It means you are worthier than you thought in the eyes of the editor.
Here, it is an editrix to quote Marie Lecrivain. Jessica Gleason runs Aberation Labyrinth. This publication started in 2012 and I totally adhere to their mission and feel close to what it represents as it is how I now see my own journal mgversion2>datura, at the time it was printed -- photocopied rather -- and called Mauvaise graine back in the late 90s.
This ezine is published quarterly and uses issuu.com as a platform to share and promote online publications, issue 15 in which "You Gave Him Your Blood" one of the last poems from Tamed Dracaenae and Some Orphans that was published this year.
Now is time to keep alarmed on bells when fresh poems get accepted.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Sunday, March 22, 2015
The Night Orchid's New Blog
On this blog you will re discover poems whether translated from the French into the English or the other way round, that were published previously but have become harder to find anywhere in-print or online. Though there will be direct links to the usual online social networking sites, I did not really want to post them on Facebook, or anything else. So here they are for you to read them again.
http://nightorchidswork.blogspot.fr/
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Crossing Puddles
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| Crossing Puddles cover art by Kevin Dooley |
A short extract from Karla Merrifield's foreword
"Some poems lean toward the lyrical, some toward the narrative. On one page an elegy, on another an acrostic. A trio of prose poems turns up. One poem, The Horizon of the Poplar Trees, is bilingual. Running Cows delights with humor. You never can tell who or what will show up on the next page."
An extract previously published in Flutter Poetry Journal, December 2012
Keeping Couched
Behind the red leaves of the tall tree, hiding me from business,
between the TV set and the iridescent five-headed lamp floor,
caresses and feathers, blue wool blanket, dreams of conquests,
for all I know, heroes and foes disappeared long ago.
Many poisons used to help me open doors – spiritual, suicidal –
through which the dark demons descended the padded staircase,
billowing in my skull, floating around the grey inner fence of my head,
the shed sheltering all the gorgeous nightmares, anthracite clouds.
Evaporating under the breath of more dragons that came and sang in unison.
The sulphur perfumed choir blew flames and cinders on my neck,
they decked my skin with scars and bruises, tattooed and wrecked
the last remains of light angels had brought like specks ages ago.
Another extract published in Pyrokinection, November 2012
Concrete Stairs
Smoking outside again, sitting on the concrete stairs descending into dad's garden,
the grey clouds covering the sky, invading my sight, some wind blowing on my face,
suffering the cold and damp weather in the Norman village, this jail I fled from years ago,
I watch the moss covering the wall, the weeping tree opposite the house
I hear the ducks quacking their ludicrous laughter as if one of them just slipped or performed
a dance like one used to sing in the eighties. I remember the red sleeve, the stupid tune.
These memories will be the end of me, the final step taken before I fall into madness,
complete, total, absolute, inevitable.
The first fall occurred some thirty-five years ago:
a toddler was I, just ready to discover the world.
I could have died the day I fell from the top to the bottom of these stairs;
a bump as big as an egg growing on my forehead.
This must have left me bad scars, bruises,
iincorrigiblebut imperceptible mental inabilities.
Prior to that
they had almost blinded me with forceps – malignancy
they had dumped me on the bare bedroom floor – overtiredness
they had left me in the sharp claws of a drunkard nanny – naivety
they had almost smashed my head against the garage door – absent-mindedness
their dog had nearly wolved me – jealousy.
I have escaped physical harm many times
but do not seem to be able to avoid being slime.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Crossing Puddles through Robocup Press pre-order page
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| Cover art by Kevin Dooley |
A short extract from Karla Merrifield's foreword
"Some poems lean toward the lyrical, some toward the narrative. On one page an elegy, on another an acrostic. A trio of prose poems turns up. One poem, The Horizon of the Poplar Trees, is bilingual. Running Cows delights with humor. You never can tell who or what will show up on the next page."
An extract previously published in Flutter Poetry Journal, December 2012
Keeping Couched
Behind the red leaves of the tall tree, hiding me from business,
between the TV set and the iridescent five-headed lamp floor,
caresses and feathers, blue wool blanket, dreams of conquests,
for all I know, heroes and foes disappeared long ago.
Many poisons used to help me open doors – spiritual, suicidal –
through which the dark demons descended the padded staircase,
billowing in my skull, floating around the grey inner fence of my head,
the shed sheltering all the gorgeous nightmares, anthracite clouds.
Evaporating under the breath of more dragons that came and sang in unison.
The sulphur perfumed choir blew flames and cinders on my neck,
they decked my skin with scars and bruises, tattooed and wrecked
the last remains of light angels had brought like specks ages ago.
Another extract published in Pyrokinection, November 2012
Concrete Stairs
Smoking outside again, sitting on the concrete stairs descending into dad's garden,
the grey clouds covering the sky, invading my sight, some wind blowing on my face,
suffering the cold and damp weather in the Norman village, this jail I fled from years ago,
I watch the moss covering the wall, the weeping tree opposite the house
I hear the ducks quacking their ludicrous laughter as if one of them just slipped or performed
a dance like one used to sing in the eighties. I remember the red sleeve, the stupid tune.
These memories will be the end of me, the final step taken before I fall into madness,
complete, total, absolute, inevitable.
The first fall occurred some thirty-five years ago:
a toddler was I, just ready to discover the world.
I could have died the day I fell from the top to the bottom of these stairs;
a bump as big as an egg growing on my forehead.
This must have left me bad scars, bruises,
iincorrigiblebut imperceptible mental inabilities.
Prior to that
they had almost blinded me with forceps – malignancy
they had dumped me on the bare bedroom floor – overtiredness
they had left me in the sharp claws of a drunkard nanny – naivety
they had almost smashed my head against the garage door – absent-mindedness
their dog had nearly wolved me – jealousy.
I have escaped physical harm many times
but do not seem to be able to avoid being slime.
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