ultra wave

the first ice cream van of summer

breathless shout / mum / outside

the first ice-cream / van of summer

puts down the phone / picks up her purse.

found poem #1: telephone call note.

No Exit - William Garvin (Arthur Shilling Press, 2010)

The poems in William Garvin's no exit hum and buzz with the sounds of malfunctioning technology. We are 'drowning in video screens' with a ': network systems overload > { }' You can see from these two lines from the opening poem of the sequence that we are going to be exploring the other side of technology, the side where it breaks down and we are left trying to cope, banging our heads against the keyboard. Perhaps that is the 'no exit' of the title. Windows open 'on eternity' or appear as '...window star pool...'s. Garvin uses the page like a vandal. Most poems scatter across the white space using the stuttering language of computers. Underscores, backslashes and html code are used as eccentric versions of punctuation. It's exhilarating. The sequence feels like a malfunctioning urban landscape from which there is no exit.

You can buy it here for a modest £2 + 50p postage direct from the excellent Arthur Shilling Press.

sarajevo poem #3

sarajevo poem #2

eiffal terrinle

thirteen buildings

after holiday inn

& baricades (buses, containers

five grpe wodes

& graveled glass

punctured bicycles

our broken taps

require pliers

& patience

on the board

a knife lies

on its back

seething teeth

tocal weer gund

under portraits

of russian

tourists taking

potshots at domes

over blue trails

in the tearful

mountains

of fortress in

blitted drsnx

(eiffal terrinle)

we die in

the bread queue

or by the taps

at the

old brewery

of love

sarajevo poem #1

Sarajevo.

gar den pleas ant

it was sum

mer

& forward to

the peace of Hannover

to be away from

the wall

between his toes

at the end of the gar

den just through turn

ed twenty six

years old

a breakfast bar

in a magazine

to a pleas

ant man

a university teach

er the raked grave

l that re

vealed re

member every

thing

& our caucus

& after bound

ing by the black ()

hooks

i caught a second

ary invasion of ex

creble portent

this was the six

eties & we had

the newest tech

nology .

i was ghost .

fifty feet hi

gh in the air .

all of us were

the spectre of wa

r was heavy .

it was above &

below the news

i was beneath

the news

i slept under she

ets of news

i trans

formed the data

into prose

like japanes flow

ers

arranged on page

of elegant fire es

cape

& our caucus