Wednesday 24 March 2010

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.

Saturday 13 March 2010

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


Saturday 6 March 2010

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


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