It’s certainly not the same as sitting at a rough notebook in Paris, but in all truth I do not believe in nostalgia so I won’t dwell in some non-memory. I am sitting at a desk as I do every day, opened to the office-tones of a soft document, typing, erasing and retyping words.

There’s a few things I need to write: a progress report, most pressingly, though my sense of ‘progress’ is unsuitably abstract at the moment. A redraft of an article that has been deemed ‘inappropriate’ to its readership (a task unappealing, to say the least). A skeleton of a chapter, most likely on the relationship between experience and experimentalism. Perhaps some more notes on Stein, or science, or sense-perception. Or perhaps a weighty missive to my friends now living in Port Moresby.

Yet my overwhelming desire is to sit in this space and write aimlessly.

I also need to write a piece about Henry Miller. I am uncertain what the piece will look or sound like. I am, by no means, a performance poet. A collage is what appeals to me, but they have uncertain rhythms. You cannot anticipate a collage. Miller spent a lot of time sitting and writing, and it seemed to make him angry. I could sit here for several hours and think enough to get angry, too. Most things make me angry if I pay enough attention to them.

But Miller was a man of three things: a brain, a groin and a gut. In his language, philosophy (it’s actually quite close to Bergson’s metaphysics, or ‘intuition’) fulfils similar bodily desires as food and sex. And food and sex – one often following the other – are talked about as sudden and wonderful gifts, rather than mundane quotidian expectations. A meal must never be taken for granted, nor a passionate encounter. Likewise, lucid thought is a precious gift to oneself. I have a deep sense of empathy for Miller’s triangular sensual materialism. It makes sense that letter-writing is so attractive to him: letters are the place to try out ideas, to describe lovingly the details of meals eaten and longed for, and to extrapolate lust. When written in a letter, a compendium of bodily pleasure is a noble, good thing.

the full this is not art program is live here

& critical animals events are listed here

& it will be a wonderful weekend

please do come!

my review of the material poem has been published here at jacket magazine.

walking home late last night along paramatta road, i watched as the seagulls lined up along the roof of a warehouse next to stanmore mcdonalds, waiting for an opportune moment to swoop down for a stray chip, or crumbs of mayo-soaked bread. this mcdonalds has recently undergone a renovation, with the aim of looking more like the kind of modern, dimly-lit café that the discerning diner might like to visit. the gaudy, plasticy reds and yellows of the eighties fast food aesthetic has been replaced with square lines, wooden beams and chrome signage. i guess the hope is that any reservations that people may have about mcdonalds are soothed by the gentle, sophisticated, hip model of the future. for me, though, who only ever walks past the carpark and exhaust fans from the kitchen, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place is the sound of gulls and the smell of pig fat.

when i first moved to stanmore and noticed the seagulls – which apart from on friday nights when the carpark is an ad hoc nightclub and pick-up joint, are the most regular presence – i was disoriented, wondering where they come from. stanmore seems so neatly knitted into the inner west that you can easily forget that there is water close by. the annandale canals, which run off from glebe point, are just to the north, and the harbour curves around almost half of an imagined three-sixty degree circle around the suburb. thinking of the other suburbs i’ve lived in, there is more or less the same sense that there is water everywhere: the central network of port jackson, botany bay to the south, and, of course, the ocean to the east. each network is so complex that it is often difficult to locate yourself when at the edge of the water. i remember one night a couple of years ago, nick and i drove down to balmain late at night in heavy fog and walked around the foreshore. after about fifteen minutes, we realised that we had lost our point of reference – the harbour bridge – and we no longer knew which direction the small scalloped inlet we were following was facing.

as i passed mcdonalds last night, i realised that most of the cars parked in the lot had people in them, mostly on their own, silently eating their food. as though the design of the space, with the tacked-on drive thru, was not alienating enough, people choose to eat their food from inside their cars, lights out and windows up. i imagined that this sort of practice would displease the gulls greatly, who were still lined up on the warehouse, ready to brawl for flotsam. further down bridge road, a woman in jogging gear got out of her car and ran to the wheelie bins of an apartment block to throw her bag of rubbish away. the bag was sizable, no doubt filled with the cheap mess of plastic and waxy paper. she jogged back to her car and drove off. i could still smell the pig fat as i turned into albany road.

* a note on the map

after thinking about this, i wanted to see if i could draw a map of the waters that surround each of the houses i’ve lived in. the map is obviously not conclusive, nor particularly accurate, but was done mainly from memory and include any part of water that i have a connection to, or experiential knowledge of. i referred to a sydway street directory to clarify names in some cases.

we are in the moment between ash and pink
there’s a blue in there too, somewhere,
although the distinctions are difficult to make,
and we have an appreciation for the role that
pollution plays in all of it; the strange light
reflecting onto plates of glass and frames,
moving the whites into more fantastic colours.

side by side our arms are the wetly folded bones
of chickens, the stretch of skin across a corner;
an armpit, a hole, somewhere to put things
or to stay until it aches like sleep, and the stillness
smells like milk and dandruff, the sound of people
outside calling out and scraping car tyres,
the fall of daylight, the way the cool makes our
kidneys dull with ache, and aeroplanes buzzing.

there is a place here between light and dark,
where the air is thin and everything is wet
with cold, the body is new again, softened,
and we will stay until we fuse, our joints
the movable parts of a wing, not being together
but going together.

below is a sound translation of dylan thomas’s under milkwood. the text was generated by deconstructing the language phonetically and replacing each sound with a linguistically similar one. in general, i tried to keep the cadence as close to the original as possible, so the rhythm of the poetry was not syncopated in an entirely schizophrenic way.

i first became interested in various forms of poetic translation through a conversation connecting tim, nick, charles bernstein’s blog and bp nichols’ translations of apollinaire a few months ago. my own ignorance of a second language means that any discussion of translation in strictly linguistic terms (that is, the transfer of meaning across the delicate membranes of different languages) is fixed on the limits of language and the impossibilities of smooth transfers. i am seduced by the strange hiccups and false impressions that translated poetics collects, and yet my seduction is one fraught with the semantic dilemmas of edges and deadends; i am not privy to the joke of translation.

to beg in the begging ninny.

it is prim, moonly slight, in this mauled down, styleless and bubbling-black, the coddled treats eye lent and the humped, courtesan rabbi swab limping in visible down to this lobe act, slow, black, crow be lack, fish-in-boat-bob-in-sea. the houses are blinders’ moles (though moles sea fan to night in these mounting, velveted ingles) orbit lined as cap tan cat therein the muff-led mid-dell by the plum pan the tao ink lock, this chops in mornay, the well fare whore in widows’ wee. and all the peep hole of the lull dance dumb floundered town arse leaking now.

hush, the bay bees arse leaking, theft armours, theft ishtars, theft raids man and penchant honours, cob blah, skew latina, post-man and pleb lick hand, the under take her and the fanned sea woman, drunk art, dress may cur, pre-churl, polly eats men, the webfoot cock-or-woman and the tidal waves. yum girls lie bedhead oft or gliding dreams, with rims of truffaut, brides made it by glow-worms down the island of the orgasm-splaying pud. the boys are adream in wick kid or of the buck in ranches of the knight and the jolly podgy dizzy. and the anne forthright stat chews of the whores leap in the feels, and the cows in the baiza, and the dogged welt-nosed yards; and the cat snap in the slant corns, or, lopes lie, streak in and need ling, on the wonky loud of thoreau.

it isn’t item, in the child squad chapped all, hemingway, in bonhomie and roach and bombastic lactic, butters fly choking her and boob place bone, coffee in like nanny gloats, suck in mine toes, forty-wind-king have a lewd jar; ninth in foreplay, quiet as a donkey vote. it is tonight in donkey’s treat, trotting side-bent, with seaweed honest spoofs, a long the cock-led cobblers, past curt tanned firm pot, sex and trinidad, harmed moan on him, holy dress code, water! cull her!, dumb by ham, china dog and rosy thin tea cladded. it isn’t right, readying a nun babeless.

only you can near the howlers leaping in the streams in the slowed ear-salt and silage stack, band-aid genocide. only yucatán sea, in the bland dead bedabble, the tomes and petty soaps over the tableaux over the cherished, the lugs and bearskins, the grasses of tee-hee, vow shout snot onto war, and the yell ‘oh!’, indicative bird-watching pick sores of the dead. from where you are, you candy their drear.

cap tan cat, the refined by tea cap tan, arse leak in his spunk in the she-spelled, shit-in-bottomed, shit-shake, beast cabaret of scooped nervous dreams of never succeed as a knee that swan-necked the dicks of his s.s. glib-belly smelling over the bed-hogs and german-fish slipstream sump king him down sultan speak into the gravy duck where fiscal blighting out and needle him down to his whisper, and the lawn drones narcissists factotum.

now be kind, the eye-strain secretions of the dramas in these treats pocked to sleet by the sea, see the tit clits and topshelf scurvy, bogs and mutton chops, rags and boners, gash and rhinos and can stuff and male pairings, sore liver and snuffle aches and molten fair thighs of drains, the recast prats and she-males and fistbones, wail spruce and munchausen and some more salt fried isis pup by the hip propensity.

the principle alley of this guy ripens now, oh! her grin ill! into sprig mauling locked and croaked and bawling. hoop pulls the downfall bellhop but bland cap tan cat? won by one, the sleekest are wrung out of sleet this young mauling a severe mauling. and spoon usual spree the chimpanzee’s low upflung snow as cap tan cat, in say lord scrap and sebums, anoints us to day with his loud ghetto-bed bell.

now fry in pains pit, cuddle sand cats per inch kit chains. the down-smells of spreed weed and bread clasp all the weighed-down from pay-for-view, where missus sprogmore pilchard, in smog and turbine, brig-bosomed to enrage the dusk, pricks at her parched kiss head and slips lemming-brine tea.

all overdone, babe fleas and old hen arc leaned and put into their brokendown rams and weened onto the sun-split cock-led cop-bled or out into the black shards under the dance in udder-coughs, and deft. a babel chrysler. no says are swiped, head spic, heck owned, poor scrub dead, ear spocked, and the chilled wrench reeled oftens cool. stirrupy old in the posed offers. a card writhes demarcate, fool of owls and anathema. milked yearns tanned at cordon nation caw nerve like shawls ill bird pole eat man. andes, eating at theo penny widow obscure house, bligh cap tan catheters easel the mourning of that own.