They say that one day, powerful star-gazers will be able to detect American tidal waves from the centre of Germany…
WEB
They build a cardboard shell to become larger, and paint a white stripe down the centre of the face.
watch me disappear. live / & never let but i’m / fine. for it’s not / a thing of bitterness / but love / demolished, set against itself, / not a thing to stir
My notes for the remainder of this response continue for several pages. A loose-leaf file of notes and photographs is, it turns out, far harder to summarise than a traditional story.
into the ship’s side the over her lowered we ,after days four and ,calms of / belt been had we as soon as suddenly give-way to seemed
do you feel the quiet? / it’s you. // do you see the quiet? / nah, you.
memory seafoam / a big surprise / lose balance / rug burn / mirror crash / car engine runs / aircon on / soft pat cheeks / emit fuel price / double click / to hide white space
…it is curiously simple, in many ways, it doesn’t hurt, not in the usual way; perhaps I am jaded, perhaps I am accustomed to being flayed to pieces.
I would say we are in a museum wing, / or some kind of movie-fantasy chalet, waiting / for a villain to arrive on the ski field.
5 poems from Filipino idioms—”How could I know what was coming? / A relief to look up and recognise nothing.”
From the outset, the cryptic explanation at the front of the book has me thinking in problem-solving, puzzles, codes. What links to what? What isn’t what it seems? What does it seem?
others who emerge // every day // wearing different clothes // who want to reshape / the horizon the steep cliffs / who live in houses which slide // now & then into the sea
It was only then that they realised that the floor of the museum was covered with a layer of ash, in which their footsteps left deep but silent traces.
Each poem is exquisitely layered as things are held at arm’s length, obstacles loom, the real world intrudes bright and harmonic, words are lithe on the line.
When Chris asked me to guest edit Minarets my first thought was that I was not “cool” enough to edit a journal which I’ve always seen as a place for young and experimental poets.
Murray’s fluctuating rhythm and rhymes are like shifting river currents, his poem a river poem carrying the debris of story, hand-me-down anecdote.
A chilled evening in August seemed as good a time as any to raise the dead, and thus we catapulted the special “exquisite corpse” Issue 9 of Minarets into the world on National Poetry Day 2018.
The concept for this issue was to create a forum for an absurdist, collaborative experiment, roughly based on the surrealist Exquisite Corpse experiments from the 1920s.
I am thinking of creating (private) lists of books to read in particular circumstances. For example what to read when you have no power or running water and can only read by candlelight after a day consumed with slow-paced domestic chores.
Beyond the paradise of product lines, through an economic wilderness of hollow olives & glycerine drinks, past the invisible homeless & the ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson (his mum bringing him clean laundry), up a steaming track covered by vaporous cloud—a man with a cowboy hat will lead your pony on.