kagablog

pravasan pillay’s tearoom books has published the chapbook of the year.

there’s no escaping it.

the moment you see gary cummiskey’s face you start screaming

because

there is fire in the enema of art

he put it there

poignantly

not yet free of the dream nor of the memory of when you came to me not wearing panties beneath your light summer dress

but the moment you got on top of me and you saw my face you started screaming

As far as South Africa is concerned a reason for Gary Cummiskey’s neglect may stem from the fact that he spent almost 20 years in Randburg, and by the time he returned to settle down in Sandton, the political situation had changed and so Cummiskey’s surrealist work seemed out of place. Thus Gary had become a marginalised figure as a result of poth psychogeographical and cultural factors.

He writes in “European Writers” “Some people became poets after corresponding with European writers. I became a poet after sleeping on a razorblade.”

And this means that Gary is sharp.

He’s busy looking for a magic wand - no strings attached.

Another problem that may account for the relative obscurity of Gary’s work is the difficulty of placing it within the various ‘movement’ categorisations. While Romancing the Dead contains a number of poems dealing with the Colonial City scene in Joburg, the rest of his work does not particularly reflect the social context in which it was created.

In the end it boils down to the “Painting”:

I am hungry and dirty.
My feet stink.
I want to brush my teeth.

However, it can also not be ignored that Cummiskey’s illness sometimes made him an extremely difficult person, and most publishers and editors were reluctant to deal with him. For this reason alone Pravasan Pillay must be commended. Despite there being no physical attraction Pillay liked Cummiskey as a friend.

Gary was aware of his outsider status, and openly declared that he did not wish to fit in with any particular group or category. But there is a difference between being an outside and being marginalised to the point of neglect - and Cummiskey’s work is neglected. (Although Stephen Gray would probably not agree).

Romancing the dead is a funeral ceremony and all Gary’s sleeping relatives sit on the floor of the bathroom around the bath where his corpse is laid. Once the sleepers have been given the pills to swallow when you left you took them out from your handbag and slipped them back on.

Some people become poets after sleeping with European writers. Gary Cummiskey is a razorblade. Very sharp.

Aryan Kaganof
5/11/2009

tearoom books
ISBN 978-0-620-44717-1

Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a compilation of writings about the South African Beat poet who died in 2000, was recently published by Dye Hard Press.

Co-editors Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, along with contributor Fred de Vries, will discuss issues about the book, such as:

· Why has Sinclair Beiles’s work been neglected in South Africa?

· Why has there previously been no serious attempt to evaluate his work, and why has it fallen to a small publisher to make the first attempt at doing so?

· What are the challenges involved in trying to evaluate a marginalised writer such as Beiles?

· What is the purpose and relevance now, in 2009, in writing about Beiles?

The panel discussion will take place in the Seminar Room at WISER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University on

Monday, 9 November 2009, at 18:30

Copies of Who was Sinclair Beiles? will be on sale at the event

we criticize in others that which we most fear in ourselves. the trueism comes, i think, from pirsig’s gorgeous ‘zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’. perhaps it was freud he was paraphrasing, i don’t know, but i like it anyway. so i want to apply this to the charge of name-dropping. sinclair beiles is often accused of having been a name-dropper. most recently by stephen gray, who himself name-drops allen ginsberg. but that’s another story. here, i want to talk about what we fear in ourselves. we fear invoking the consequences (im-press by association) of a sign (big name) we feel we are simply unworthy of (or something like that). we feel unworthy. so stephen feels unworthy of associating himself with a god of the stature of allen ginsberg (even dylan bowed to ginsberg). but, because he fears the wrath of his own censure, he criticizes sinclair for name-dropping. and then, parapraxis: he namedrops allen ginsberg.

anyone who knows anything about allen ginsberg knows that he was a tireless promoter of kerouac, burroughs. his generosity of character lived long into his life and beyond it.
and here, i do not think it a valid issue to ask why belies was never promoted by ginsberg. well, perhaps the fact of the matter was that belies was not quite of the same stature as kerouac and burroughs. clearly he was not, or, clearly ginsberg felt he was not. who cares and who would like to criticize allen ginsberg for his own opinions? why didn’t you promote sinclair shamelessly? huh? now that’s the question. its noones fault, but certainly not ginsbergs, but you, you reading this, why didn’t you shout sinclairs name fro the rooftops – before he was dead!

keep reading this article on book.co.za

Couché près de toi
en silence pendant que

le vent frappe
le rideau à côté

traduit par Dionysos Andronis

Stephen Gray, in his review of “Who was Sinclair Beiles”, (Mail & Guardian, 07/09/09) implies that Sinclair was “some sort of impostor? A scam?” Gray’s egregious insinuation is further developed in the article: “In the classic accounts of the period, James Campbell’s The Beat Generation and Barry Miles’s The Beat Hotel, “our boy” merits only a footnote or two, and no listing of his works, if there were any, in the bibliographies.”

In fact Sinclair Beiles was co-author, along with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso of the hugely influential “Minutes To Go”, published by Two Cities Editions. Here is some information about this book by Jed Birmingham of Reality Studio: “One book in my collection highlights the important role of the independent bookshop in Burroughs’ social and creative life. Kaddish, Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, and Bomb were all written in part at the Beat Hotel, but the book that most captures the spirit of 9 rue Git-le-Coeur is Minutes To Go. In his editor’s note to Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, Jan Herman describes the Beat Hotel atmosphere as like a “laboratory,” and Minutes To Go is certainly the most representative result of those experiments in lifestyle and literary technique.

I want to focus on the community of bookstores involved with this cut-up collection. In fact independent bookstores made Minutes to Go a pubished reality. Minutes to Go was issued by Two Cities in 1000 copies on April 13, 1960. A limited edition of ten copies included a manuscript page. This reminds me of the limited edition for the C Press Time. I have never seen the limited Time or Minutes to Go for sale on the rare book market. The John Hay Library at Brown possesses a copy of the Minutes to Go and displayed it prominently at their Burroughs exhibition years ago.

Two Cities was a bilingual (French and English) magazine edited by Jean Fanchette, a young doctor. Fanchette published expats like Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Lawrence Durrell. The first issue was dedicated to Durrell. Years later, the correspondence between Fanchette and Durrell from this period would be published by Two Cities as well. Anaïs Nin was a correspondent for the magazine. With Gysin designing the covers, Fanchette fashioned Minutes to Go to mirror the magazine.”

“Minutes To Go” is a legendary text; a bible of avant-garde literary cut-up technique. Kathy Acker, J.G. Ballard, Lesego Rampolokeng, Paul Wessels, the list of writers influenced by this work could go on and on… Furthermore the book has exerted influence on a wide range of industrial culture outside of literature, most notably cinema (Peter Whitehead, Derek Jarman, Bruce Conner etc) and music (John Zorn, Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, Henry Cow, etc). It would not be hyperbolic to describe the entire digital sampling culture of today as being prefigured in this Ur-text of experimentation.

Perhaps Stephen Gray is unaware of these trends and tendencies in the culture of the last fifty years? Then he shouldn’t be exposing his ignorance in the Mail & Guardian. He describes Sinclair Beiles as a “demented con man” but in fact it is Stephen Gray who is the con man, pretending to be a literary connoisseur whilst in fact writing well shy of the facts. Shameful

Aryan Kaganof
14 October 2009

ps. Sinclair Beiles was also the editor of William Burroughs’ “The Naked Lunch”, he organised a lot of the book into its published sequence, even re-typed many of the pages for Burroughs. This is information that can be found in various biographical resources and interviews with Burroughs. The imputation that Gray makes in his scabrous article, namely that Beiles invented, lied about, or exaggerated these facts, is simply disgusting.

Who Was Sinclair Beiles?

JvE: I found Who Was Sinclair Beiles? a fascinating read. It was so interesting to read about Sinclair Beiles, someone I didn’t know much about, from so many different perspectives. The interviews between Beiles and Gary Cummiskey and Beiles and dawie malan especially throw much light on the nature of the man himself. The essays by Cummiskey, malan, Earle Holmes, Alan Finlay, Eva Kowalska, George Dillon Slater and Fred de Vries serve to delve behind the man’s words and give us a glimpse into a unique character. I’d be grateful if you answered a few of my questions about this enigmatic man.

Beiles’ life is typical of the saying that “a prophet is without honour in his own country.” It is sad that a poet/playwright/writer who worked with iconic Beat poets of the sixties such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others has remained largely unknown in his own country. Why do you think Sinclair Beiles was not appreciated for who he was in South Africa?

EK: Beiles distanced himself, geographically and ideologically, from South Africa as it was when he first left the country. South African writing during apartheid was to a large extent ideologically loaded and politically driven, and Beiles removed himself and his work from that sort of literary “scene”. Beiles was idiosyncratic and tended towards the antagonistic, on both a personal and political level. Later on in his life he frequently commented, as he does in the interview with Earle Holmes, that he had little desire to “fit into” the South African writing community, an attitude which for some reason clouded popular appreciation of his work. Beiles did draw attention to himself in various ways, but his artistic outlook was not an applause-seeking one; he failed to engage the mainstream because it did not interest him. Possibly he would have wanted more recognition from his contemporaries, but although his writing was known to and highly regarded by a few local writers, for the most part such appreciation was not forthcoming.

GC: There are various reasons for this. Beiles spent almost three decades out of South Africa, coming back only occasionally, and finally returning to settle down only in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Apart from his first titles, the majority of his collections were published in limited editions by small and sometimes short-lived presses, and so it has been extremely difficult to have easy access to his work. His selection of poems, A South African Abroad, was published by Lapis Press in California in 1991, but even then a relatively small number of copies found their way to South Africa. Also, as Eva says, Beiles did not want to fit in, he did not want to be part of the South African literary scene. He wanted to distance himself from it, but at the same time he was also quite angry at being ignored.

JvE: How did each of you come to hear about him? And what led you to work together on compiling this book of interviews and memoirs about him?

EK: I first came across Beiles while doing research on the American Beat writers. Beiles was part of the group living and writing at what became known as “the Beat Hotel” in Paris, so he is mentioned in literature about that era. I found the presence of a South African writer in such an important moment of Beat literature interesting, and so decided to study Beiles’s poetry for my MA thesis. In doing so I quickly realised how very little material there was about his work. There is basically nothing except for a few reviews of the less obscure titles. This was challenging in terms of my research. It is very exciting to have so fresh and unexplored a topic, but daunting to not have any perspective on Beiles’s writing to judge my own against.

The book was initially Gary’s project; when I heard about it I was very keen to contribute. I was doing all this research and writing about Beiles already, and saw this as a good opportunity to put that work to good use. When Gary asked me to co-edit Who Was Sinclair Beiles? I saw it as a chance to be involved in something really new and interesting - it is literally the first book about Beiles and his writing - and to produce something about that total lack of information and criticism around Beiles’s work.

GC: I first encountered Beiles’s name one night in Yeoville, in 1991. I was wandering down Rockey Street, and I was looking in the window of a bookstore there, and there was this clipping, a review of A South African Abroad that had appeared in Mail & Guardian. I read about Beiles, his link to the Beats, his friendship with Burroughs, and the “helter-skelter surrealism” of his poems, as I think the reviewer put it. I had been a great admirer of the Beats and the surrealists for years, since I was a teenager, and I was astonished that a South African writer had been in that scene.

I met Beiles at his house in Yeoville in 1994 and interviewed him, but the interview wasn’t published until last year, by the literary journal, New Coin. It was a short while after that I thought about putting such a book together. At first I was just going to use a handful of previously published pieces about Beiles, those by dawie malan and Alan Finlay, but that would not have been enough to create a bound book. And so the project expanded slightly. Eva came on board as co-editor, but for financial reasons I still kept a close eye on the size of the book.

JvE: Could you please sum up the significance of Sinclair Beiles and his work for those who do not know of him at all?

EK: For me Beiles is essentially a Beat writer, and so his significance lies in broadening and enriching Beat literature, which tends, wrongly in my opinion, to be viewed as a “closed” sort of canon, limited to a historical period and a handful of American authors. When Beat literature emerged, when the Beats were writing their first texts, when Beiles was writing, the ideas and ideals they had in common were quite different from what has become the conventional understanding of “Beat”.

GC: Beiles was an outsider, and his work falls outside the mainstream. His voice is unusual for South African poetry. There are elements of surrealism in his work, but it is not orthodox or conventional surrealism, and if one regards Beiles as a Beat poet, then his work is also quite different from that of many of the US Beat poets. Even if the quality of his writing is uneven at times - and it is very uneven - that does not mean that his work should be ignored and deemed unworthy of serious consideration.

JvE: It seems to me that when Beiles came back to South Africa he was past his best writing days. Do you agree? Do you think that if he’d received the credit and acclaim he was due in South Africa for his unorthodox and yet remarkable achievements in Europe, he would have continued to produce work of note?

EK: I would agree that Beiles’s best work was written in the 1970s before he returned to South Africa, but I don’t think that the reception he and his work got here would have changed what, or how, he wrote when he returned. Certainly critical acclaim, or a lack thereof, does not seem to have influenced his earlier, better writing.

GC: Well, my favourite collection is his first, Ashes of Experience, which was the first winner of the Ingrid Jonker poetry prize in 1969. But there is work from the 1970s that is also quite strong: Sacred Fix and Dowsings, for example. There are also some interesting pieces in 20 Poems, published in 1980, as well as in Khakiweeds, from 1994. I don’t think it is a simple matter of saying his best work was his earlier poetry, though certainly his last few titles, from about 1996 onwards, leave a lot to be desired. I don’t think recognition in South Africa would have made much of a difference. And besides, sometimes recognition has the exact opposite effect, and a writer churns out crap to gain mass market applause.

JvE: What do you think his most impressive piece of work is, and why?

EK: Deliria, because of its absolute lack of concern for everything but the poet in the act of writing.

GC: Ashes of Experience. There is an intense energy in these poems, a sense of freedom and exploration.

JvE: Sinclair Beiles suffered from mental illness of some sort. He attributed it to an experimental “art happening”, I suppose you’d call it today. Could you tell the readers more about this event which led to his mental instability?

EK: Beiles had bipolar disorder, an affective disorder characterised by periods of depression and mania. I really don’t think that the “happening” he participated in had anything to do with his mental illness.

GC: The incident of the happening, Space Flight by the Greek sculptor Takis, was one that Beiles himself spread around as the cause of his disorder. But I also doubt his role in the happening had anything to do with his condition. In the introduction to Sacred Fix, Beiles said that most of the works contained in the volume were written while he was under psychiatric care in London, but he could sometimes get quite angry when he found references to his being in psychiatric care. He once maintained he had never been mentally ill, but had simply gone into care on occasions for purposes of relaxation.

JvE: Do you think this instability led to a decline in his work, or perhaps the opposite? People with bipolar disorder often have periods of extremely creative mania followed by periods of deep depression. Many famous writers, painters and poets suffer from this disorder. Two of them spring to mind: Vincent van Gogh and Stephen Fry. Do you know whether SB did most of his good writing during his manic periods? Or was he able to write when he was depressed?

EK: There is a commonly perceived linked between mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder, and creativity, though it has not really been proven. There is also a sort of “mythology” of the “mad poet”, which Beiles engaged and entertained. Some people, including writers and artists, who are bipolar, do feel that their manias and depressions bring a strong influence to bear on their creativity and productivity. Arguably, however, the increased amount of work produced during a manic phase might not be better than, or even as good as, work produced at other times. Also, having bipolar disorder does not mean that one is either manic or depressed all the time - these “episodes” can be years apart. I could not speculate on Beiles’s state of mind when he wrote, though his poetry reflects aspects of his mental illness.

GC: I agree with Eva. It is impossible to speculate what mood Beiles was in when writing this or that. But he always felt he was writing against time, before the next breakdown occurred, perhaps before the final collapse. In the poem “Terrible Dreams”, in Ashes of Experience, he writes: “All I can think of is writing as much as I can/ While a semblance of sanity and strength/ remains for me …”.

Sinclair Beiles receveing a medallion from William Plomer for the first Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize in 1969 for his first collection, Ashes of Experience.

JvE: SB was famous for not rewriting any work. He believed if you had to rewrite it then it wasn’t pure poetry, if I’m correct in interpreting what I’ve read about him. Do you think this is the reason that fellow poets looked down on him for not “crafting” a piece of work for weeks or months?

EK: This “first thought, best thought” philosophy is something of a Beat dictum. In their work it is a statement about form and technique, and the nature of poetry, and, as Beiles’s idea of “pure” poetry suggests, one he believed in and adhered to. It worked for him, although probably the concept of “not rewriting” shouldn’t be taken completely literally. Successive revisions of some of his plays are archived, for instance. All writers have their own techniques, methods and beliefs about writing. I doubt any one would seriously criticise another for their methodology, rather than the finished product.

GC: A criticism that some writers have made about Beiles was that he was unable to be selective about his work, to be self-critical in evaluation. For Beiles, it didn’t seem to matter whether what he was producing was good or bad, as long as he kept writing. Hence the very uneven quality of his work.

The “first thought, best thought” thing of the Beats is, as Eva says, not to be taken literally. Ginsberg’s work was carefully crafted; so was that of Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso. Gary Snyder said in an interview that nobody really took “first thought, best thought” seriously, “but it was a challenge”. Even the “automatic writing” of the surrealists should not to be taken literally. Andre Breton’s poems were carefully crafted, as were Paul Eluard’s.

But Beiles is not alone in having work that is uneven. The complete works of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky totals 12 volumes, half of which are now dismissed even by his admirers as doggerel and propagandist hack work, though Mayakovsky himself had a high opinion of it.

JvE: Could each of you give me a favourite poem or piece of SB’s writing and say why it means a lot to you?

EK: I like Sacred Fix, especially the “Selected Catastrophes” at the end, one of which reads as follows:

that summer
the children who had suffered so much
from the revenge of their parents
discovered in their extreme despair
that they were fire-worshippers
and everywhere in the city they threw off their clothes
and made fires of them
and chanted strange words
hitherto unuttered
and drawn up from the deep wells of their souls.
most of the buildings in the city were gutted
and with them many of the children.

GC : I like “Terrible Dreams” from Ashes of Experience. It was the first poem of his that I read and it says it all:

My condition is lamentable - to me anyway.
I keep a kind of old flying machine stability
On a cupboard full of drugs
And as I fly through the day
I can hear my nerves creaking.
I look over the side of the cockpit
And below I see the horrors of enemy territory
- the mental hospitals.
All I can think of is writing as much as I can
While a semblance of sanity and strengthen
remains for me,
I fear the fate of Artaud
Of Nietzsche
Of Nijinsky.
If some small magazine editor happens to
drop into your office
Or into your soup in the form of a fly when
You eat at
The arts laboratory
Perhaps you can pull out this work for his
consideration.
Tell him I have terrible dreams.

JvE: Finally, what is the value of SB’s work? Does his work live on in any remarkable way? Did he have a message that future generations could take forward with them? Or was his message more in living his life on the edge rather than in his work?

EK: Some of Beiles’s work is very provocative, very nonconformist, perhaps counter-cultural. He engages the social, cultural and political in innovative ways. It seems a pity that his work should be forgotten before it has been fully discovered just because it is ascribed to a bygone era. Beiles’s satires, social commentaries and anti-establishment rants remain entertaining and relevant beyond their immediate context.

GC: One of the reasons we compiled the book came from the realisation that while many people know of Beiles himself, or at the very least know his name, few know of or have even read his work. And when they have heard of him, it is in connection with Burroughs and the Beat Hotel. It is as if after that period Beiles disappeared off the side of the earth, so we wanted to show that there was more to him than that, and particularly more to his work.

When I first met Beiles, I was very eager to hear about Burroughs, Ginsberg, and so on, as no doubt did just about every other wide-eyed visitor who pitched up at his door. Afterwards I wondered if he ever got annoyed at this, you know, people contacting him to find out about the others, and not so much about him. It was always Sinclair Beiles, “the guy who knew Burroughs”, yet how many people pitching up at his door were interested in his own work, of visiting Belies for the sake of his being Beiles?

Yet some critics feel Beiles used the names of the Beats as a drawcard in order to “market” himself in South Africa, in order to gain recognition for a body of work they regard as highly questionable. In a recent review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? in Mail & Guardian, Stephen Gray poses the question of whether Beiles was not simply a con artist, a failure and a wannabe who used the names of his well-known acquaintances to gain credibility.

For me, the answer lies not so much in Beiles the personality, but in his work. It is a matter of whether his work is of value, of whether he made a contribution to South African literature, and the answer to that lies in his poetry.

JvE: Thanks to both of you for answering the questions above. Your insights into Sinclair Beiles’s life and works have inspired me to read more of the writings of a somewhat sad character. His contradiction in eschewing public opinion and yet bemoaning the fact that he never received recognition, is compelling too, and the perfect ingredient in creating a fascinating subject. Sinclair Beiles should be remembered not simply for his association with the Beat poets, but also for his eccentric life and his body of work. Well done to both of you for bringing him to our attention.

this interview first appeared on litnet

eventually one has to love gary cummiskey. he does not give up. he’s the kind of irascible soul that always draws trouble. something about his pugnacious nature attracts difficulties. if it can go wrong at a printer it will. twice. gary’s often stuck in traffic. the waiter dusts more flies into his soup. but unlike most people you’ve ever met who share this streak of disaster-attraction - cummiskey hasn’t got it in him to throw in the towel. you would have thought after years of publishing small press editions to little or no acclaim from the precarious south african literature “establishment” that gary would see the light and stop bothering. thank the gods he’s not that sort of bloke. gary persists. his persistency is the stuff of local literary legend. green dragon 6 is the best edition of his literary journal to date. and this volume about the late yeoville beat poet sinclair beiles is worth its weight in genetically modified stem cells. it keeps beiles alive. a collection of essays by the likes of alan finlay, fred devries, co-editor eva kowalska and gary himself, the book sheds shards of splintered, diffused and hazy light on the figure of beiles whose reputation is based largely on memories of his surly frame sitting truculently outside coffee society in rockey street, chain smoking irritably - has anyone ever read any of his poems?

in yeoville in 1994 to film “nice to meet you, please don’t rape me” i was introduced to beiles by my co-screenwriter peter j. morris, himself an equally taciturn, sour-bellied type. the two of them found things to grumble about. it was impossible for me to talk to beiles. he just seemed too far gone in a vinegary disposition exacerbated by the brutal disappointment of never having ‘made it’ (whatever that means to a poet). but this volume opens the man up. dawie malan’s exquisite essay “the trouble with sinclair beiles” resuscitates the poet, gives him a fragile, vulnerable soul - and reveals librarian dawie to be one of our most sensitive writers.

this book is essential. one day somebody will be collating a set of essays asking the question “who is gary cummiskey?”. he deserves better. he deserves to be lionised now.

aryan kaganof

ISBN: 978-0-620-42792-0
available from http://dyehard-press.blogspot.com

reviewed by David wa Maahlamela

“Welcome to the sixth issue of the resurrected Green Dragon.” That’s the first line of the editorial of this 2003 founded literary journal. In the fifth issue the editor, Gary Cummiskey announced that he was euthenising it, and thanks to Poetry Africa festival in University of KwaZulu Natal which inspired him to carry this heavy yoke again.

The first time I came across Green Dragon, I fell in love with its layout and the use of what I regard as reader-friendly theme font, Palatino Linotype. Unlike other few literary journals, Gary is not putting his name on the cover, bolded and in caps as if it’s his own compendium. Of course working alone in a journal, one will expect common typing errors such as in the third sentence of this sixth issue’s editorial: “Producing a literary journal can a lot of work and-”. I believe he forgot word such as ‘demand’ or ‘create’ after ‘can’.

A question that emerged in my mind is that how do we motivate few individuals who out of passion decide to do whatever it takes to run this few benevolent journals in the country? This came after Gary regarded it as “a thankless task”, I then realized that whatever they do; they are actually doing it for us, as writers.

Green Dragon consists of great wordsmith such as Ingrid Andersen, Janet van Eeden, Gus Ferguson, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Kelwyn Sole, Mphutlane wa Bofelo and Mxolisi Nyezwa. One other thing I like about this issue is variety of writing styles and themes used. The only problem which is not a problem is use of same writers. I spoke to several editors and realized that it’s safe to use people that you already know to avoid things like plagiarism. The only challenge is to be careful not to end up publishing names of writers rather than their products.

Former editor of New Coin, Alan Finlay’s second poem entitled ‘the flood…’ left me licking fingers. Choice of words plays a big role in this poem. Instead of saying I’m weak, he says: “my strength defeats me”. Furthermore he keeps on painting his own pictures in lines such as: “i am bitten by my own tears/ their long hot arrows, hot as sorrow…”.

As usual, Vonani Bila brings those age-restriction kind of pictorials where sensitive viewers should be cautioned. The poem, On Julie’s menu is about Julie who ‘burrows the heap of dead babies and miscarried brood at the hospital, cuts the head off, cooks and eats with pap.’ If you’ve read most of Vonani’s work, you will realize that he writes about stuff that are happening in our villages yet most writers; due to the question of credibility; avoid writing about them. Such stuff we normally talk about them in whispers, he says them loud. Poems such as Dahl Street, Pietersburg which starts with a very heavy statement; can bear evidence: “Sex-worker are burgers/ we chew the fresh ones…”. Mbengwa, Mpho, Hola Gazi and Porto Alegre Prostitute support my argument.

One poem that will adhere to your teeth is ‘homicide’ by Cecilia Ferreira. The poem is about a person who’s about to be judged or interrogated yet deep down confessing that he/she won’t sell out whatever secret he/she is keeping.

my tongue
is on a butcher’s board
(it’s not dead yet)

my tongue
is going to be slaughtered
(for dinner tonight)

my tongue
will be a platter
(with secrets on the side)

my tongue
is poison
(when silent)

Gary Cummiskey’s poem, Afterwards, just like Aryana Kaganof’s poem, The man without skeleton have something in common. One may think I’m say this hence they both use the f- language; but that’s not my focus. Of course in Gary’s poem there’s a line: “when we fucked against the wall” and in Aryan: “instead of booking into a cheap hotel and fucking the bejesus out of each other”. What I personally liked out of these poems is that they are able to take one into emotional situations and make you feel what the person felt. The use of simple or basic vocabulary enables them to be easily understood. Basically they used simple words in an artistic craft.

List of sound effects by one of the editors I respect the most, Kobus Moolman left me groping for understanding. The style of writing he applied; the same as the one on Alan Finlay’s first poem return (that’s after reading full version on Green Dragon blog), are broadly ambiguous. There are both advantages and disadvantages of this style. They are flexible to fit any situation and they turn to be relevant to any other occasions even after ages. The disadvantage is that they have many possible meanings in such a way a reader might misinterpret them.

The next poem is Visiting Hours by David wa Maahlamela – Oh it’s me! Well as much as I would like to chop myself, I don’t think I’m brave enough to do so. I will leave it for other critics. (the poem is great, actually it is very relevant around this time when government is discussing issues of a National Health Insurance. I’m not giving kudos to this poem simply because David wrote this review but the first thing that came to mind at reading it was ‘how can it be relevant to the doctor’s strike and rhetoric coming from Luthuli?’ David shies away from confessing that he, like Vonani seem to have appointed themselves as carriers of the ghetto cross, all the way to the Mount of Olives. If I had to chop the poem it would be an injustice, however the jury is out and anybody who has read Green Dragon is welcome to taunt the poet – Editor)

Tania van Schalkwyk’s Hierophant is also one of those poems you would enjoy reading again and again. It’s nice to see how a person fears the presence of a ghost yet not happy when it has to leave hence it’s someone beloved.

In The Litchis’ song lyrics I married a goose emerges the type of ambiguity I personally prefer. Goose here can imply in two ways, as a bird and informally as a stupid person or person from a stupid race. A persona might be in love with this bird in such a way that people do not approve their bond or he might be in love with a person of a different race and people of his race not approving this cultural interaction. In conclusion he says to his own race:

“If they grew feathers
If they grew a beak
Then maybe from them
A wife I would seek”

Joop Bersee portrays a descent sexual scene in his poem, A game. His second poem, Crap Pizza beautifully tells of a woman’s worth. How what we regard as small things like cooking counts in the absences of the wife. On the second line there’s what I assume to have been typing era: “the pizzas are coming un” I guess it was suppose to be “in”.

Colleen Higgs in her short story, The poet and the woodcutter which in the index list is spelled as ‘woodcuter’ with single‘t’, is short and straight to the point. The story is alerting writers not to end up living writing in such a way that they will not even lighten up for their spouses when they deepen themselves in to the world of muse. It is true, most writers find themselves at times having to answer the “between me and your writing/poetry, whom do you love the most?” question.

Anton Krueger’s poem, Naked also stole my heart. To be honest, short poems like haikus are not my thing, that’s why I find it difficult understanding poems by Mick Raubenheimer. Below is one of them entitled Loci.

there is no inside
there is no outside
even is
is taking things
a bit far.

Having said that I still enjoyed his last poem entitled Hoove print. So gently romantic in a form of questions, the person asks his “tenderest creature” if she enjoyed what he calls “monstrous sensitivity”. He beautifully asks: “does your body still throb with echoes…?”I really saw and felt what was happening that evening…that urgent net.

The hip-hop influenced poet and founder of www.kasiekulture.blogspot.com, Goodenough Mashego is sharing shame of his neighbourhood in a poem shatale (part two).

“nothing you get in here only weedsmoke & AIDS
the girls ain’t giving us love they steal our cash get us poisoned
though it’s my hood i swear to god i’ll catch the first plane out”

Goodenough’s poem reminds me of the inferno which was burning me recently. Most established writers are into weed nowadays. It is believed that it results in writing quality stuff. Bob Marley and poets such as Han Shan, Mafika Gwala, Dambudzo Marechera but to mention a few, were writing best under the influence of either marijuana or alcohol. I really don’t know if that is a right way to inspire the coming generation.

“…I ask lots of difficult/ questions most of which/ I cannot answer myself” That is a quote from Aryan Kaganof’s second poem, Letter from a girl with no head. Aryan’s short story, Glock for sale literary made me to read it again. He tells a sad story comically. The story is about a person who got mugged by “the tall so-called black” while he was in position of his glock.

“It’s hard to argue with the barrel of a 9mm in your face and the very tall so-called black man in front of you looking nervous and his finger wriggling itself all over the trigger.”

He kept on creaming the story with light jokes and informality. Unlike the conventional way of quoting where we normally say: “like said so-and-said…”, Aryan gave a quote and later he said: “You might have noticed that the previous sentence was written by a much smarter person than myself, and it was.” They say as long as the lion can not learn how to write, the hunter will always be the hero in a Lion & Hunter story, but with Aryan is the opposite. He kept on sarcastically criticizing his failure in sentences such as this: “I probably couldn’t kill myself if I tried putting the barrel in my mouth and pulling the trigger”. The quote I loved in conclusion of the story, which made me understand why he kept on saying “the so-called black man” is the following: “There are no so-called blacks or whites anymore, just a dirty shade of grey called reality” (one rapper I love, Immortal Technique says there are no longer Blacks, Whites, Coloureds and Latino but only rich and poor people, I found that quite intriguing – Editor)

Megan Hall’s poem Valentine’s Day portrays contradiction of the haves and the have-not. How relaxation time to the have is working time for the have-not.

Neo Molefe Shameeyaa also outstood herself with her documentary poem; I heard fame and fashion calling your name. In this poem she just explains things as they are without giving any input. It is written in a dream-kind of style where one is just duplicating a picture without adding any personal colours.

Arja Salafranca concludes by reminding me of James Matthwes as she embraces age in her poem Chapped hearts, observing changes on her body and memories in the heart, bearing testimony to thirty-seven year she’s completing.

All in all, I give thumbs up to this resurrected Green Dragon issue and wish it could forever conquer death.

For more information on Green Dragon, visit the following blog http://www.dyehard-press.blogspot.com/ . Mo Faya!

this review first appeared on kasiekulture

introduction

The work contained in this Big Bridge feature is by no means a wide representation of contemporary South African writing. It is rather a bringing together of some writers whose work I respond to, and there are of course many fine writers whose work is not here. It is therefore not a general “anthology of South African writing”. It is nevertheless hoped this selection will give readers an insight into the diversity of creative voices in South Africa; a diversity that is in part reflective of the multicultural nature of South African society.

The voices range from established names such as Kobus Moolman and Kelwyn Sole, to newer ones such as Neo Molefe Shameeyaa. There is the performance-orientated work of Richard Fox and Mphutlane wa Bofelo, and the socio-political voice of Vonani Bila. There are mavericks such as Aryan Kaganof and Goodenough Mashego, and the subjective lyricism of Alan Finlay and Mxolisi Nyezwa. There are also several women represented: Arja Salafranca, Haidee Kruger, Janet van Eeden, Megan Hall, Colleen Higgs, Makhosazana Xaba and Neo Molefe Shameeyaa.

The short fiction selection is only a handful of pieces, but again it is hoped they will indicate the diversity of short fiction writing in South Africa: from the poetic prose of Haidee Kruger and fantasy of Silke Heiss, to the playfulness of Liesl Jobson. There are the parables of Allan Kolski Horwitz and the exploration of relationships in the realistic work of Colleen Higgs and Arja Salafranca. Pravasan Pillay’s story is a sensitive study of early adolescence while Gary Cummiskey’s surreal horror story touches on issues central to a historically divided society: isolation, the Other, uncertainty and violence.

go to big bridge to read gary cummiskey’s selection of South African Poetry by

Gary Cummiskey

Kobus Moolman

Arja Salafranca

Haidee Kruger

Anton Krueger

Janet van Eeden

Mxolisi Nyezwa

Kelwyn Sole

Richard Fox

Alan Finlay

Megan Hall

Colleen Higgs

Aryan Kaganof

Mphutlane wa Bofelo

Vonani Bila

Goodenough Mashego

Makhosazana Xaba

Neo Molefe Shameeyaa

Allan Kolski Horwitz

Khulile Nxumalo

Dye Hard Press is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of

Who was Sinclair Beiles?

edited by Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska

In 1960, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles collaborated on the now legendary collection of cut-ups, Minutes To Go. Readers of Beat literature know of Burroughs, Corso and Gysin, but who was Sinclair Beiles?

Sinclair Beiles was a South African poet and playwright, born in Uganda in 1930. He moved to Paris during the 1950s, where for a time he was an editor at Olympia Press and a resident at The Beat Hotel. He later spent several years in Greece and his first poetry collection, Ashes of Experience, won the first Ingrid Jonker poetry prize in 1969. Many other collections followed, published either overseas or in South Africa, to where he returned in the late 1970s. Beiles died, ignored by the mainstream South African poetry anthologies, in Johannesburg in 2000.

Who was Sinclair Beiles? brings together a collection of interviews, memoirs and essays about Sinclair Beiles and his work, by Gary Cummiskey, dawie malan, George Dillon Slater, Earle Holmes, Eva Kowalska, Alan Finlay and Fred de Vries. The book also includes previously unpublished photographs of Sinclair Beiles.

Beiles’s work is in danger of sliding into obscurity forever, and it is time for a renewed assessment of his contribution to South African literature.

Publication scheduled for May 2009. Pricing to be confirmed.

Visit http://dyehard-press.blogspot.com

In South Africa, we all have ideas of what constitutes crime: we think of theft, armed robbery, mugging, car hijacking, prostitution, drug trafficking, fraud, rape, assault and murder. The Oxford English Dictionary defines crime as “a serious offence, for which there is a punishment by law”.

But more broadly speaking, crime could also be regarded as a transgression against society’s taboos, and even then, what constitutes transgression and taboo differs from one historical era to another, and from one culture or society to another.

Dye Hard Press is calling for submissions from southern Africa for a collection of five novellas to be published in 2010 on the subject of crime. But we are not necessarily looking for detective stories, stories about violent crime in contemporary South Africa, and we are definitely not wanting morality tales. Think beyond the boundaries.

Novellas should be between 15 000 and 40 000 words in length, in English, and should be submitted by email to dyehardpress@iafrica.com by the end of October 2009. Successful authors will receive four contributors’ copies on publication.

Should you have any queries, please contact Gary Cummiskey on dyehardpress@iafrica.com

In the truly generous spirit that characterises so many of the people who work as small or independent publishers, Gary Cummiskey of Dye Hard Press has kindly allowed Live Writing to link to a brilliant series which he published from 2004 to 2007 - the Dye Hard Press Newsletters, which were distributed electronically to more than 300 subscribers.The newsletters focus on issues relating to independent publishing in South Africa and are an ideal starting point for anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with the highs and lows of becoming and remaining a successful small publisher. And of course, all the thorny questions that raise their pointy heads when the words ’small’, ‘independent’ and ’self-’ publishing hit the radar.

The Dye Hard Press newsletters are now housed at Aryan Kaganof’s Kagablog - another site well worth a visit from anyone who is interested in the small/independent publishing scene. You’ll notice the use of the / here - it’s hard to categorise this sector of the publishing industry - a great lead in to one of Gary’s newsletters: Is size important? Small vs independent publishing.

Probably one of the most difficult, and yet crucial, aspects of the publication process for all publishers – but particularly small publishers – is distribution. It is also worth considering what is precisely meant by distribution … Read the rest of the article here –>

THE DISTRIBUTION DILEMMA: HOW CAN SMALL PUBLISHERS SELL BOOKS AND REACH THEIR AUDIENCE?

Since 1994, a number of independent publishing initiatives have started up in SA, often operating on small budgets but with immense dedication and energy from their founders. Technological advancements in digital publishing have also often helped them to produce quality books … Read more about the role of the independent presses here –>

INDEPENDENTS GIVE A VOICE TO THE VOICELESS

These days, when many people have ready access to a personal computer, either at home, through a friend, or at the office, it is relatively easy to produce a small publication. Also, with the advent of digital publishing (i.e. photocopying), one can achieve quality-printed pages … Read more about low-cost quality publications here –>

HOW TO HOME PRODUCE A QUALITY SADDLE-STITCHED PUBLICATION

… However, the usual situation involving vanity presses can prove quite damaging. A new author produces a novel that may not be of any literary merit. But with a vanity press … Read more about the pitfalls of vanity publishing here –>

THE VANITY PUBLISHING ROUTE – IS IT WORTH IT?

First work out the following pre-production costs:

* Editing and proofreading.
* Getting your book typed/ word-processed.
What other costs are involved in self-publishing a book? Find out more here. –>

HOW TO COST A SELF-PUBLISHED BOOK

While digital printing and print-on-demand publishing have considerably reduced the cost of producing books, this does not mean that the costs are negligible. So how does one go about getting financial assistance? Read more here about –>

OBTAINING FUNDING FOR A PUBLICATION

Publication design is about packaging information in the most effective and appropriate way possible. Good publication design begins with good reading … and what happens next? Find out more here –>

DESIGN AND LAYOUT OF A PUBLICATION

A book cover, like a poster, is an attention grabber – a visual and verbal message designed to make us react by wanting … to read more here –>

BOOK-COVER DESIGN: SOME BASIC POINTS TO CONSIDER

On immediate publication, a book can be promoted in several ways.. Want to know more? Read all about it here –>

SO NOW YOU’RE PUBLISHED, HOW DO YOU PROMOTE YOUR BOOK?

If you wish to submit material to local literary journals, it would be worthwhile to … To assist the editor in being able to manage the amount of submissions, it would also be worthwhile to consider the following … Read more here –>

SOME TIPS ON HOW TO SUBMIT WORK TO LITERARY JOURNALS

Whenever people ask me what creative non-fiction, or creative journalism is, I … Read more here –> (This article was written by Arja Salafranca for Dye Hard Press)

CREATIVE NON-FICTION: A NEW APPROACH TO JOURNALISM

At the recent International Book Fair in Cape Town (2007), a panel discussion was held in which the situation of contemporary South African poetry and publishing was debated … Read what was said here –>

CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY: A PANEL DISCUSSION

South Africa has always suffered from a lack of outlets for poetry, a situation Lionel Abrahams once described as being more destructive than censorship. … We’re delighted to be able to publish all of Gary’s newsletters, but especially this last as Gary has told Live Writing that he plans to start publishing Green Dragon again, a poetry journal that has been sorely missed in the last year. Read more about why initiatives like Dye Hard Press deserve our support –>

DYE HARD PRESS: AN ARGUMENT FOR INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING

These newsletters really are the very tip of the iceberg. Gary’s blog is jam-packed with very useful information and provides an ideal starting point - as well as a jolly good place to visit regularly - if you are interested in trends, news and opinions in the worlds of independent/small/self-publishing!

More about Dye Hard Press and Gary Cummiskey

Dye Hard Press is an independent publisher in Johannesburg, South Africa. It specialises in promoting innovative South African poetry, and has published more than 20 titles, including work by Alan Finlay, Phillip Zhuwao, Arja Salafranca, Roy Blumenthal, Gus Ferguson and Kobus Moolman. Dye Hard Press publications are distributed by Bacchus Books, and are available in South African bookstores countrywide.

For order details about in print Dye Hard Press titles, e-mail dyehardpress@iafrica.com

Dye Hard Press is not accepting manuscripts at the moment.

Gary Cummiskey is the editor and publisher of Dye Hard Press. He was born in England in 1963 but has lived in South Africa since 1983, with the exception of a short period spent in London in 2001/2002. He is the author of several collections of poems, including When Apollinaire Died, Head (with Roy Blumenthal), Reigning Gloves and Bog Docks. He recently published a cut-up prose sequence, April in the Moon-Sun. He has published extensively in South African literary journals, online and in print. He has also published many articles of literary and cultural commentary. He lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

this page first published on livewriting.co.za

The latest short film from Aryan Kaganof is a precious, allegorical jewel of a film lasting 11 minutes and 32 seconds. Poetry is central to this film, firstly in the form of lines being composed, and then in the poetry of the female body, a favourite theme in Kaganof’s work. The poet celebrated here is Gary Cummiskey, one of the most promising poets of his generation in South Africa. The poetry of the female form comes from Taylor Rain, an exceptional performer who offers us her radiant and photogenic body.

The film is divided into four parts. In the first part, a blank screen serves as a point of anticipation. You’ll see why a little further on in the text.

The poems being written by Gary Cummiskey appear in the second part, accompanied by improvised music from the group Matmos. Even though we don’t understand the poems in their entirety (they scroll down the screen quickly, word by word), it creates a sensation of mounting excitement which becomes aesthetic and sensual. The words are not merely groups of letters, but carry an emotional charge. The suspense is accentuated by the sound of a typewriter off-screen providing a second, eerie music. We have the feeling that something is about to happen. This part lasts six minutes.

In the third part, the actress Taylor Rain starts masturbating in front of the camera. She caresses her vagina and anus. Gary Cummiskey’s poems now scroll down in the centre of the screen, becoming the true stars of the film in the foreground, while the actress provides a very beautiful background motif multiplying the wealth and interaction between the themes. A small white bear is sitting next to the beautiful young girl. It serves as an element of explanation. This significant section lasts three minutes.

The caption “Yes, that’s velvet” appears in the fourth and final part lasting 32 seconds. It is a sweet, short conclusion of exemplary grace. The background is black, in harmony with the opening image, and the artificial velvet of the little teddy bear is a metaphor for the forgery of the second body-poetry in the film. The truth lies in the words and written poetry. The body is beautiful – extremely beautiful – but the aspect of our human lives which is most alive is in the written lines.

Written by Dionysos Andronis, translated by Lucy Lyall Grant

Towards the end of September, The Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal organised the 12th Poetry Africa International Festival in Durban. About 26 poets and performers were invited from South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Mayotte, the Netherlands and the US to provide a showcase of poetic and cultural diversity, with approaches and styles ranging from written-word poetry to rap and hip-hop.

The main venue for the festival was the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, which has 400 seats, which for most of the five nights there were well filled. However, when taking into account the overall activities of the festival – which included visits to university campuses, schools and performances in public places – the organisers estimate the audience to have been about 4 000.

These numbers seem to go against the claim by many publishers and booksellers that there is no market for poetry in South Africa, but I say “seem” because there are those critics who feel that what is being showcased at Poetry Africa these days “isn’t really poetry”. In the past few years Poetry Africa has shifted its emphasis from written-word poetry to spoken word, and two of the performers this year – hip-hop trio Godessa and Jitsvinger – were definitely more singers/musicians than poets. And besides, detractors may ask, what effect does all this have on poetry readership?

For most of the festival there was a bookstall in the theatre foyer run by independent bookstore Adams Campus Bookshop, and for manager Cedric Sissing the effect of the festival was clear: for the five nights that the stall was open, he sold more poetry collections than the store would normally do in a year.

Revenue for units (books, CDs and DVDs) sold at the festival for the past three years was R24 288 in 2006, R27 366 in 2007 (a 12, 67% increase) and this year R21 013 (a 21,23% decrease).

Sissing says that while this year’s decrease can be directly attributed the sharp rise in the cost of living in South Africa, the increase in last year’s revenue is attributed to sales of books and DVDs by the Hindi Kenyan poet Shailja Patel. About 50 units of her work sold over the period.

This year the top book sellers were Megan Hall’s Fourth Child – winner of this year’s Ingrid Jonker poetry prize and published by independent Modjaji Books – which sold 19 copies, followed by Mxolisi Nyezwa’s New Country, published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, which sold 16 copies. Both of the books were launched at the festival. In third place were various titles by US rap poet Carlos Gomez, who sold 14 books and five CDs.

Of the total 108 South African units sold this year, 86 were books, with the remaining 22 being CDs.

Granted, these figures aren’t exactly earth-shattering, and Gomez told me that in the US, where he often gives performances at schools and colleges, he usually sells about 20-30 units a night.

But for Sissing the figures are a clear indication that in South Africa the sale of poetry collections has to be event- rather than retail-driven.

“Take, for example, the work of Patel,” he says. “She sold 50 units last year when she was a featured poet, but sold no copies during the year at the shop. Three copies of her work were sold at the festival this year, even though she was not featured.”

And on the subject of whether the shift in emphasis to spoken word is having any kind of effect on poetry readership, Sissing says, “It’s difficult to prove this on paper, but in the past five years, since the rise of spoken-word poetry, there’s no doubt that the spoken- word poets lift the patrons’ passion, thereby influencing them to buy more poetry. Not just spoken word, but also written word.”

And, as the figures show, book sales are still far ahead of CDs, so it is clear that written-word poetry is not in any immediate danger of extinction.

But in a nutshell what South African poets and publishers need to do is to organise more events. We need more readings, more launches, more workshops and definitely more festivals such as Poetry Africa.

first published by dye hard press

Ce nouveau recueil de poèmes de Gary Cummiskey a comme titre une phrase du peintre américain Robert Rauschenberg. La quotidienneté serait le sujet du recueil (le mot « Aujourd’hui » est le premier du titre), mais ce serait une quotidienneté transformée poétiquement. L’univers des reportages télé (surtout dans le poème central « Et nous voyons ») est un premier point d’inspiration de ce recueil vital et significatif de l’auteur. La poésie de Cummiskey, à travers son pessimisme et sa tension existentielle, devient un champ libre de réflexion et de Création humaine, comme le dernier mot du titre aimerait nous le rappeler. Chacun de nous peut apporter sa pierre de construction de cet édifice solide d’une poésie humaine, fragile, simple et baignée dans l’immédiat et les inattendus pour la plupart involontaires de la vie quotidienne.

A travers la sensation du macabre et du danger évident dans la vie quotidienne (l’exemple le plus caractéristique serait le dernier poème « Café du coin » où le propriétaire se fait tuer en secret et loin des yeux des clients) et du thème de la chasse quotidienne (le deuxième poème « Le rêve d’un rat » est caractéristique où l’on témoigne de cette chasse entre chat et rat dans notre domicile), Cummiskey nous livre un recueil qui nous concerne tous directement. C’est un recueil écrit d’après les visions et les angoisses de tous les jours mais dans la tête d’un observateur serein et calme qui est le poète lui-même. Il est observateur seulement parce qu’il sait très bien que son imagination offrira un produit artistique différent et meilleur mais s’inspirant de toutes ces situations affligeantes et grotesques de tous les jours. Ce sera une vision « noire » (au sens artistique du terme) aux antipodes des souhaits initiaux.

Dionysos Andronis

Café du coin

Je t’amène
au café du coin.
Il est vide
ainsi nous glissons derrière le comptoir
et nous commençons à baiser.
Après,
quand nous remontons à l’étage
nous voyons le propriétaire allongé
près de la porte, mort.

(Op.cit. page 25, traduit par Dionysos Andronis)

first published on dye hard press

“this is my immediate unedited response, after watching velvet once:

audio-only darkness…
a chaos of imaginings brought on by sound
then the words start materialising
cut up words not legible as sentences, yet violently evocative
the text/typing becomes overwhelming, overwhelms the audio
then overwhelms itself
the speed and overflow contaminate coherent interpretation
when the live action image comes in it decisively overwhelms the text
thus, each successive layer transgresses the previous,
breaks down the interpretive agency of the viewer further
forces the viewer to engage without being able to make meaning cleanly
dirties the viewer, in a sense
as each successive layer of representation becomes more dictatorial
meaning gets paradoxically more ambiguous
the viewer is forced to let go of an ordering viewpoint
to be more open to the flow of stimuli…
it’s a kind of intellectual sub space

HOWEVER even if what taylor rain is doing is symbolically ‘dirty’/taboo
what she is doing felt aseptic to me
like a gynaecological self-exam
with some calculated cootchie-coos for the viewers’ titillation
her pussy is dry
she’s not physically turned on
i’m guessing she gets off more on the fact that someone is getting off on seeing her putting her fingers in her ass than she does on putting her fingers in her ass
it’s about the intellectual effect of what she is doing to viewers
the symbolic violence of breaking their taboos and being ‘dirty’
MEANWHILE actually it’s all squeaky clean, shaven, douched, enema’d, behind 2 layers of glass, lens and screen, i.e. totally sterile and non-threatening

i’m not sure if this was intended??

what this reminds me of is the fact that film is a medium where transgressions can be enacted ’safely’ - even when the framing is ruptured, the frame never is… i’m thinking of how cronenberg’s videodrome explored a terrifying scenario where this was not the case.

(what disappointed me was the actual ‘porn’ clip
taylor rain was too blandly manipulative for my liking
very detached
and i don’t find detached hot)”

by gary cummiskey

For many years I disliked their poetry. His poetry – filled with cold, bleak landscapes, hawks in the rain, battered cats, and predatory fish hiding in ponds deep as England – gave me a taste I imagined as being similar to frozen mud. Her poetry – with its intricate imagery of birth, death, flowers, trees and bees – seemed too restricted, constrained, and laboured (is it true she wrote with an open Thesaurus at her side?)

It’s difficult to believe they were married. On the surface, despite their shared literary activities, they didn’t seem suited, almost from two different worlds.

Sylvia must have been impossible to live with, or even to have around. As a child, on hearing of her father’s death, she announced: ‘I’ll never speak to God again!’ A stubborn, angry, refusal, born out of shock and disbelief; acceptable perhaps in a child, yet the same attitude seems to have continued into her adulthood: a sense of betrayal, a demand that things go her way, that all events and people adhere to her wants and needs. And when the universe would not adhere to her wishes, she withdrew into rejection and depression, casting friends aside, highlighting how they let her down, how they failed to live up to her expectations, just as both God and her father had betrayed her. Shortly after his death, she demanded that her mother Aurelia sign a pledge not to remarry. Aurelia, still in her early thirties, adhered, but this wasn’t enough to satisfy Sylvia. Later she would attack her mother precisely for signing it. With Sylvia, one has the impression you could never win.

But such contrariness was not simply that of a spoiled child. Sylvia’s psyche was in a near-continual state of torment, hurt, fear and instability. Throughout school and university she did her utmost to conform, to fit in, to be popular. She tried to be the model student and the model daughter. She insisted on perfection, for herself and for others. She dyed her hair blonde, had several boyfriends, each of them initially satisfying her need for a father figure, the strong, ever-reliant God, unwavering and invincible; the man who would never fail her, but inevitably they would – and then it was they who were to blame. As one of her biographers, Ronald Hayman, remarked: ‘She was good at making friends, and she was good at losing them’.

In 1953, shortly after spending a month as guest editor of Mademoiselle, Sylvia told Aurelia: ‘The world is so rotten, I want to die! I Let’s die together!’ Her mother’s response was to place her in an institution where she was subjected to electric shock treatment, later to be recounted in her prose work, The Bell Jar. Perhaps understandably, Aurelia also soon found herself on Sylvia’s betrayal list. On returning home, Sylvia attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills (‘At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you.’) but was rescued in time.

Nevertheless, Sylvia managed to win a Fulbright fellowship to study at Cambridge in England, where in 1956 she met up with the young Ted Hughes at a party. Their first meeting was aggressively physical – he ripped off her hair band and kissed her, while she bit his cheek so hard that it bled. Ted was now Sylvia’s God, the tremendously strong masculine father figure who would be unwavering, dedicated and unfailing. She insisted on remaining at his side for years, rarely separated from him for more than a few hours at a time.

Within a few months they married, but even while on honeymoon in Spain, it became clear to Sylvia that the marriage would not be as ideal as she imagined it would be. Ted had untidy habits, leaving clothing and papers lying all over the place; she was fanatical about cleanliness. Tension rose. He even hit her on occasions. Ted’s family didn’t warm to Sylvia too well either, particularly his sister Olwyn. Sylvia was also ill at ease in English literary circles.

Despite all, she remained dedicated to him (‘Every woman adores a Fascist,/The boot in the face…’) She typed up his manuscripts and sent his poems off to literary journals with promptness and devotion. She was determined to make him known as a great poet. When his first collection, Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 and won a major literary prize, her faith in him seemed vindicated.

In the meantime, they travelled to the US where Sylvia taught at Smith University. She worked hard at her own poetry but her attempts to find her voice remained frustrating. Worse still, one day she caught Ted in what seemed like a hurried termination of an amorous encounter (later Ted maintained he had bumped into the woman only seconds earlier and had simply chatted to her). Soon after, the couple returned to England, mainly at Ted’s insistence.

After a brief period in London and the birth of their daughter Frieda, they moved to a house in a village in Devon. Sylvia was initially ecstatic about the move. Ted was becoming an increasing well known and respected poet among the English literary establishment, and her own first book, The Colossus and other Poems, was published in 1960.

But the optimism and calm was short lived. A miscarriage, financial pressures and increasing frustration over the isolation of the village sent Sylvia into a depression. When Ted’s affair with the seductive Assia Wevill was uncovered, tension reached new heights. Even the birth of their son Nicolas could save the marriage. They separated at Sylvia’s insistence.

Left alone with two small children in the village, Sylvia’s powerful poetic voice burst forth in many of the Ariel poems, such as ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Fever 103’, ‘Poppies in July’ and ‘Sheep in Fog’ each of them revealing her sense of anger, betrayal, loss and inner torment, taking her ‘through to a heaven,/ starless and fatherless, a dark water.’

She took sleeping pills to ward off insomnia, but by dawn they would have worn off and she was unable to get back to sleep, and so remained awake until it was time to tend to the children. A friend suggested she uses this time to write, and so The Bell Jar was written.

Leaving Devon, Sylvia moved to a flat in London, desperately trying to make a new life for herself and the children. But at the height of a freezing winter, depression, illness, despair and financial worries overtook her. On February 11, 1963, she committed suicide by gassing herself in the oven (‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.’) She had carefully sealed off the children’s bedrooms to ensure they would be safe from inhalation. A few weeks earlier The Bell Jar had been published anonymously and she had prepared Ariel for publication.

After her death – and the arrival of posthumous fame – the debate about the reasons for Sylvia’s suicide began to emerge, as well as often bitter battles between pro-Plath and pro-Hughes supporters.

While acting as editor of Sylvia’s works and ensuring their publication, Ted’s editing was regarded by some as over-zealous. When Ariel was published in 1965, he removed about 14 poems that touched on their collapsing marriage. These poems were only included in a later edition.

When Sylvia’s journals were published in 1982, Ted admitted to deleting passages, though oddly enough included some unflattering entries, including those referring to his beating her. However he also stated that one volume of her journals had ‘disappeared’ and admitted to destroying another (‘I did not want her children to have read it,’ he said.)

When A Alvarez included a chapter on Sylvia in his book The Savage God – a work that brought Sylvia’s tragic life to the public – Ted tried to halt its publication. This was the beginning of several legal wrangles regarding publications on Sylvia’s life.

While Ted’s grief over Sylvia’s death was certainly genuine, his actions suggest an increasingly public figure eager to hide any shortcomings in his personal life. When Assia committed suicide in 1967 – also by gassing herself and killing her and Ted’s son Shura at the same time – Ted’s life became even more emotionally strained. Some people had felt that both Ted and his family had laid the blame for Sylvia’s suicide at Assia’s feet.

Bewildering to many was Ted’s decision to make his sister Olwyn the agent for Sylvia’s estate, especially considering the antipathy that had existed between the two women. While Olwyn had told some that she had always acknowledged Sylvia’s poetic gift, she had also, according to Hayman, called her ‘a famous poetess Grace Kelly dream who descended on Yorkshire. Bloody cheek. An American student with a couple of poems in magazines.’ When Anne Stevenson published her biography of Sylvia, Bitter Fame, in 1989, presenting very much a pro-Hughes slant, it emerged that the book was effectively co-authored by Olwyn, particularly the final chapters.

Eventually, in Birthday Letters, published in 1998 shortly before his death, Ted spoke openly about his life with Sylvia. The book is filled with warm, sad and painful memories (‘Remember how we picked the daffodils? Nobody else remembers, but I remember’), devoted to the woman who was caught in her ‘tortured, crying / suffocating self’, a woman he felt to be ‘locked/ Into some chamber gasping for oxygen/ Where I could not find you, or really know you,/ Let alone understand you.’

So who was Sylvia? Was she, as Anne Stevenson called her, ‘a martyr mainly to the recurrent psychodrama that staged itself within the bell jar of her tragically wounded personality’, a self-destructive woman who wrote: ‘Dying/is an art…/I do it exceptionally well’, an explosive and unpredictable neurotic woman ‘terrified by this dark thing’ deep within her?

Or has the truth of the final months of Sylvia’s tragic life been sacrificed to the interests of a respected poet laureate and his protective, dedicated sister?

It is unlikely the full story will ever emerge.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, August 2004)

this review first appeared in the weekender of saturday november 22 2008

However, it is no easy ride and the challenges remain, writes Gary Cummiskey

Despite poetry being regarded as a marginalised genre internationally, the past 14 years has seen an increase in the number of poetry collections published in SA, and particularly a rise in number of volumes by women poets.

Arja Salafranca, author of A Life Stripped of Illusions and The Fire in Which we Burn, says: “It is difficult to pinpoint why there has been a rise in the number of women poets, “but more women are writing today than ever before in SA — whether it’s poetry, short fiction or novels. Perhaps women are finally feeling freed and empowered enough to devote time to their writing”.

Haidee Kruger, author of Lush: a poem for four voices, says: “The growth in the number of women poets being published probably corresponds to the general growth of the book industry in SA, though this growth is more centred in the genres of fiction and trade nonfiction. I have a sense of expansion and diversification in the South African book market and I think the increasing number of more women poets being published is part of this.”

Joan Metelerkamp, author of several poetry collections including Requiem and Carrying the Fire, takes a more backward glance into history, and sees it as being more of an issue of power, with many unanswered questions.

“It has as much to do with the history of the various languages in this country as with the politics of publishing and reading. Why were there many strong Afrikaans women poets published before 1980? Was it just paternalism — Afrikaners had a culture of looking after their women? And after 1948, when it was the language of power? Why did anyone still bother about poetry?”

Makhosazana Xaba, author of These Hands and Tongues of their Mothers, recently published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, says: “Men were the familiar, men had sold poetry, so men got published. When isolated publishers here and there started taking the risk publishing women, others began to feel the risk was lessening.”

Metelerkamp says: “The fact that the publishing industry was dominated by men is no surprise: every institution all over the world used to be dominated by men.”

Kruger says that “possibly there may still be a lingering perception among some that ‘serious literature’ is, by and large, written by men, while women pen chicklit and children’s books. But how prevalent this kind of perception is, I don’t know”.

Salafranca, however, feels it also involves traditional views on gender roles. “I think writing, for a long time, has been regarded as a thing that men do. Men had studies, shut the door, said to the wife and the kids that they were busy writing and this was accepted. Now women are perhaps doing the same. So they are writing — whether it is poetry or other genres.”

Megan Hall, whose debut collection Fourth Child, published by Modjaji Books, recently won the Ingrid Jonker poetry prize, disagrees that poetry has historically been regarded historically as a genre for men, but admits: “I remember reading somewhere that women who wrote under gender-neutral names were more likely to be published than those who wrote under names that were clearly those of women. I haven’t tested this out myself.”

But do women poets see themselves as different from men poets?

Salafranca says, “No, we are not fundamentally different. We’re all human. Perhaps, though, I have tackled more ‘feminine’ topics than men would approach.” A poem of mine, On the Morning of my Period, published in The Fire in Which we Burn, would certainly not really be written by a man, although men have often imagined themselves into women’s lives. But I have many poems that don’t ‘show’ or reveal my gender.”

Kruger says, “I think of myself as a poet and not as a woman poet. It is striking how often a female poet will be described as a woman, female or, to my horror, lady poet, whereas you don’t often come across descriptions of ‘the male poet Breyten Breytenbach’. There is an odd suggestion in this that the female poet is an aberration from the norm (which is the male poet) and as such needs to be qualified. I am wary of the motivations behind distinctions. This too easily leads one into gross oversimplification. Having said that, though, the fact that I am a woman does play a profound and complex role in my writing.”

Metelerkamp says: “I do differ from poets who are men, but then I also differ from women, even from women poets whose work looks similar.”

Hall says that “different poets differ from one another in different ways. I think there are other differences that are at least as interesting as those to do with gender”.

Since 1994 there has also been an increase in the number of literary journals and independent presses in SA, and women’s poetry is certainly gaining greater coverage and exposure. A few years ago, for example, independent publisher Botsotso published Isis X, an anthology of poems and photography by South African women, including Salafranca and Xaba.

Colleen Higgs, poet and founder of independent press of Modjaji Books, which focuses on women’s writing, says: “Poetry is always a bit of an a misfit genre and activity and I don’t see adequate coverage as an external issue. Poetry is unlikely to be headline news. It is a marginal activity. It is up to poets and poetry publishers to find ways of getting get coverage.

“I think we have to do things for ourselves; and not wait for some more appropriate other to do things for us. So women need to get into independent publishing, we need to claim poetry editorships; we need to see that we have power.”

Xaba says there is not yet adequate coverage of women poets in SA, but feels that “there is a growing opening of space, a growing understanding that women poets are worthy to be published, a growing acceptance that there are very good women poets in this country.”

Hall says she is curious about what percentage women actually occupy in the various new avenues of publication. “When I was working on New Contrast I did not factor gender into my choices at all. I don’t know whether the end result was balanced or not.”

However, Salafranca asks why this wider coverage for women should be an issue. “Can’t we just publish good poetry, whatever the gender of the poet? Literary journals have sometimes devoted issues to women’s writing – the most recent edition of Wordsetc celebrated women’s writing, for instance. But generally I feel women’s poetry is getting adequate attention in journals.”

Previously many women poets responded more to overseas poets than local ones, although this is obviously changing.

Salafranca says, “I love the poetry of South African Eva Bezwoda Royston. Her work was intensely personal — about her psychological experiences, for instances. She was a bold, different, fresh voice and that speaks to and inspires me. As does the confessional, skilled work of Anne Sexton. Today, I am impressed by various local poets, both men and women.”

For Higgs, the poet who has influenced her the most is Adrienne Rich. “I love her voice, her sensibility, her quiet courage, her consisAdd Imagetent position on the side of telling the truth, especially when it isn’t popular or comfortable. However I love the work of a great many poets: Raymond Carver, Nazim Hikmet, Joan Metelerkamp, Karen Press, Megan Hall, Ingrid de Kok, Yehuda Amichai, TS Eliot, Sharon Olds, Wislawa Sjmborska.”

Kruger says, “There are many active South African women writers who whom I admire, and who are inspirational in their very diverse talents: Joan Metelerkamp, Gabeba Baderoon, Napo Masheane, Finuala Dowling, Ingrid de Kok, Karen Press, Lebo Mashile, Antjie Krog and Isobel Dixon, to name a few. However, in terms of my own development as a writer, up to now, I think that, with the possible exception of Afrikaans writers such as Krog and Ingrid Jonker, it is mostly British and American poets who have influenced me. But I find myself increasingly turning to South African and other African poets.”

Says Hall: “I’m certainly moved by writing by other South Africans and southern Africans, both men and women, and intrigued and educated and encouraged too. The same goes for writers from overseas, although the biggies for me include Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Tony Harrison. I am trying to read some of the younger wave.”

While there is undoubtedly tremendous enthusiasm about the increase in the number of women poets being published and the widening opportunities, there are, however, challenges, mainly about reaching audiences.

“It’s about getting published, finding readers and reaching readers,getting readers to buy books, getting published” says Higgs. Kruger agrees, but points out that this is a challenge facing all poets, irrespective of gender.

Xaba feel that there is a definite need to boost the number of women poets published. “While there is a growth in women’s voices it’s still in its infancy. I would like to see publishers focusing more and more on women in order to undercover talent I know exists and is waiting to be exposed to the reading public.

“The financial support that exists for poets is minimal. Writers of any kind need time out and space to focus solely on their art. Writing residencies need to become commonplace within SA, and they need to be accessible. And they need to be friendly to women.”

For Salafranca the main challenge for women poets is getting published. “There are so few publishers willing to take on collections. People don’t buy them, so it’s an uphill battle to get them out into the world.

“Some presses do publish poetry, but they are few and far between. It remains a marginalised genre, an unpopular choice for local readers who prefer reading novels to poetry or short stories. Local readers are now reading local novels in droves, because we have moved beyond apartheid literature with its messages and heavy emphasis on guilt. We have seen a renaissance of novels by local authors.”

But Hall also brings in a reminder says that a huge challenge for poets in SA “would be things like having the leisure to write, or the energy and determination to force the leisure or time to appear” We also need reasonable access to writers of different persuasions, both local and international,” and Metelerkamp also emphasises the need for poets to keep writing, which is often a challenge in itself, especially in view of poetry’s marginalised position.

First published in Business Day’s supplement on books and publishing November 15,2008.

first published on the web by dye hard press

They often ignore traditional market-related views and can provide a platform for passionate individual opinions, writes Gary Cummiskey

THE past five years have witnessed a surge in print book publishing in SA, while focus on internet publishing has not been so prominent, mainly because of low internet access in the country which is only at about 6%-7%. There have however been some forays into online literary publishing, and blogs in particular offer scope.

Poet and publisher Goodenough Mashego, in Shatale, Mpumalanga, is the creator of Kasiekulture, which offers some often cheeky and humorous commentary by Mashego and others on literary, cultural and sociopolitical issues. Mashego says Kasiekulture was started in 2006 as a new medium to promote “alternative literature, arts in the periphery and cultural activities in the fringes”.

The Kagablog is the brainchild of filmmaker, novelist and poet Aryan Kaganof, in Cape Town. More of an online literary and arts journal than a commentary blog, such as Kasiekulture, the Kagablog has numerous contributors from various countries. It usually has several daily postings, including music, film, visual art, poetry, fiction, criticism and photography.

Kaganof says: “I started up the Kagablog in late 2005. I was interested in creating a forum for writers, poets, artists, academics and digital explorers of all persuasions to present work. This forum would, unlike the mass media as we know it, not be market-driven, either in the sense of its content always relating to new product, or in the sense of having to pander to the consideration of what the readership wants.

“I invited contributors whose work I admired, respected, believed in and or loved. Once in as a contributor there is no editorial censorship. In this way too, the blog works very differently from market-driven mass media.”

Mashego says he gets huge satisfaction from posting material by other writers and cultural practitioners.

“While I still post lots of my thoughts and my understanding of what’s going on, what makes Kasiekulture different from many blogs is that I do post material from other people as long as it’s in line with what I’m doing. It could easily have been an online magazine in the sense of a website, but that route for me has been exhausted and is not that cost-effective. I have reviewed most mainstream books, films in the fringes, alternative music, cultural festivals and heritage sites and commentated on literary issues.”

An advantage of online publishing is, of course, that one can the ability to monitor readership through a hit counter, and, depending on the quality of the software used, obtain fairly comprehensive geographic information about visitors.

Mashego says: “I have an average of 56 visitors on a good day. Per month it would definitely be more than 1500 visits. Most of those who visit from SA access the internet from their workplaces. Most of my readers are white, given that I have more visitors from the US and Europe than Africa. In the US it seems most of the visitors are seem black, given the comments I get when I hit at people such as Molefi Kete Asante and some rappers. Locals love light-hearted opinions and political commentaries.”

Kaganof says his hit-rate can vary quite dramatically. “For instance, from November last year to February this year, the blog was getting more than 250000 hits per a month. But then when I moved to Sweden for five months from March it dropped off a bit as I was unable to give the blog as much attention as I usually would.“About half the readership is located in geographical SA, but there are a lot of hits from the US and from the Netherlands.”

Neither of the initiatives receive sponsorship. Kaganof says the Kagablog is a labour of love.

Mashego says, “I don’t think the Google Adsense strategy works. They say you apply and they post content-related ads. Yeah, they are content-related and they appear on my blog but I still have to see the money. The trick here is that as a blogger you can’t really monitor if anyone clicked on the ad, which means you depend on them to tell you that you have made a few dollars or not. I’m still waiting for a big local advertiser with a soft spot for art and culture.”

There is also the issue of SA’s low internet penetration, which raises the question of the feasibility of online publishing aimed at local audiences, but as Kaganof says, 6%-7% is better than nothing at all, and it is growing.

Mashego says, “Blogs are feasible. The penetration of the source might be very low but the information carried on these blogs reaches more people. That is why I think they have a role to play. The shortfall is just that print has not seen the importance of collaborating with blogs to help them cover the whole country. Also, newspapers should realise that if they browsed blogs they could find material to syndicate on their newspapers and pay the blogger.”

A criticism that has been made against of the blog concept is that it skips the editorial process usually involved in print or broadcast media, thereby allowing a situation where anyone can become a published writer. In SA particularly some people do not regard them as having any value.

Mashego says, “They should be taken seriously. Some time back I posted a comment after the AIDS-related death of a kwaito artist and a journalist quoted it on her tribute to the artist. This means somebody saw the seriousness of the blog and its content. We might not have reached a point where we are an alternative to print, but given that most newspaper websites carry the same stories you find in print, blogs should be regarded by South African audiences as an alternative. For example, if there is a rugby or soccer game that finishes after 9pm a blogger is likely to post the story before print or television media, which have broadcasting time frames or print deadlines. Blogs don’t have that. Acceptance is gradually coming, once people realise the staleness of stuff they read in newspapers and see on TV.

“Blogs can also be incentives for people to read books. There are books I have reviewed on Kasiekulture and then I got mail from readers asking me how they could buy copies. Some inquiries came from libraries wanting to have those the titles on their shelves.”

Kaganof takes a harder, more critical view of whether blogs are taken seriously in SA.

“The only things taken seriously in SA are drinking and sport. I cannot allow myself to be contained by the mediocre opinions of the market. What matters is that I take blogs seriously, that the contributors and the readership takes them seriously.

“Look at the print publishing industry: too many books are published and thrown out into the marketplace in the hope that something sticks. It’s just a huge jumble sale out there, and it is exhausting for readers to keep up with it all. And that’s why people retreat, they turn inwards, they find refuge in the classics, in what they already know, because it is impossible to read through all the books that are thrown at them.

“The blogging phenomenon is something entirely different. It’s a distinct medium of its own. If anything, I think blogs stimulate people to buy books because they give readers access to so many fresh critical voices who are writing from a position of passion rather than the established critical voices who write from jaded positions of power and assumed authority.”

First published in Business Day’s books and publishing supplement, November 15, 2008

first published on the web by dye hard press

Ce nouveau court métrage de Aryan Kaganof est un bijou précieux et allégorique de 11 minutes et 32 secondes. Dans ce film il y a d’abord la poésie sous la forme de vers en train de se composer et puis il y a la poésie du corps féminin, un thème favori chez Kaganof. Le poète honoré est Gary Cummiskey, un des plus prometteurs de sa génération en Afrique du Sud. La poésie du corps féminin appartient à Taylor Rain, une performeuse d’exception, qui nous offre son corps photogénique et radieux.

Le film est divisé en quatre parties. À la première partie un écran noir de deux minutes sert comme point d’anticipation. Vous verrez pourquoi un peu plus tard dans le texte.

Les poèmes en train de s’écrire de Gary Cummiskey arrivent à la deuxième partie et ils sont accompagnés par une musique improvisée du groupe Matmos. Même si on n’arrive pas à saisir les poèmes en entier, puisqu’ils défilent mots à mots et en vitesse sur l’écran, une sensation de palpitation est déclenchée qui devient esthétique et sensuelle. Les mots ne sont pas des simples lettres mais des porteurs de charge émotionnelle. La palpitation est accentuée par le son d’une machine à écrire en off qui sert comme une deuxième musique angoissante. On a le pressentiment que quelque chose se prépare. Cette partie dure six minutes.

À la troisième partie l’actante Taylor Rain commence à se masturber devant l’objectif. Elle caresse ses parties vaginales et anales. Cette fois les poésies de Gary Cummiskey défilent au milieu de l’écran. Elles deviennent les vrais protagonistes en premier plan et l’actante un très beau motif secondaire qui sert à multiplier la richesse et l’interaction entre les thèmes. Un petit ours blanc est assis prêt de la belle jeune fille. Il sert comme un élément d’explication. Trois minutes est la durée de cette partie significative.

L’inscription «Yes, that’s Velvet » (Oui, c’est du velours) vient à la quatrième et dernière partie qui dure 32 secondes. C’est une conclusion heureuse et courte d’une grâce exemplaire. Le fond de l’écran est noir pour être en accord avec l’image du début. Le velours artificiel du petit ourson - jouet serait une métaphore du faux de cette deuxième poésie corporelle dans le film. La vérité est du coté des mots et de la poésie écrite. Le corps est beau, très beau même, mais les vers écrits sont l’élément le plus vivant de notre vie humaine.

Gary Cummiskey’s cut-up prose pamphlet April in the Moon-Sun (2006, Dye Hard Press) opens with the following quote from artist and originator (along with long-time collaborator William S. Burroughs) of cut-ups, Brion Gysin: “If you want to challenge and change fate…cut up words.” One needn’t agree with this idea or the Burroughsian conceit of language as a virus and cutups as the diagnosis mechanism to appreciate it’s value as a literary method. For poets cut-ups offer a readily available avenue to go beneath the skin of language, to the mucus below, and to re-emerge with images that blind. Cummiskey’s Moon-Sun, which switches between surreal prose poems of London and Johannesburg, contains many of these kinds of images. On the first reading one gropes about for a narrative but by the second the groping stops and its the beauty of the lines that grab you. Lines - at random - like:

“Suburban living rooms with pretty studded silver nightmares”

“black bodices of stumped romantics”

“spoiled mustard-gas songs”

“the dirty slut caught reading Tarot cards”

“she sent them by express thighs”

“as right-wingers took pot-shots into the ocean”
“her second eye sewn up against the cigarette smoke”

“mama let me out! Let me out of hanging out”

“cheese melt the pussy melt”

“imaginary drunkards”

“I don’t have a heart revolution”

“the waitress leans over with her tits inked all over his pajamas”

“cure me into a poem and never to be seen again”

The line “spoiled mustard-gas songs”, in particular, stayed with me. It takes a certain kind of genius to rip through the membranes that separate “spoiled”, “mustard-gas” and “songs”. Published in 2006 this is some of the most exciting writing in 2008.