The Introduction by Aad de Gids to The Zero Eye (Oneiros Books)

2POETRYMICHAELMCALORAN

"The Zero Eye"

with poetry and poets, with art, it seems a veritable probability that in the "produce" of this art there are personal developments going on which affect this art and making it a "developmental" "work in progress" even if the art executed, in this instance fullblooded poetry, is expressed in a continuous stream of perfectly formed and inherently consistent isles of artistry, expression, expulsion even exorcism orexoticism. this is in my opinion highly the case with michael mcaloran's poetry and the steady produce of high quality immanently consistent collections of poems resulting also subsequently in this striking chromatography of books.

the books share one feature described in many styles,which alone already make michael mc aloran's poetry a force to reckon with not only within the cusp of irish poetry but perhaps even more so,within the modern poetry as how it is entamized now, how it is organized around its topics now. so one thing in particular stands out: these are not the books of "vanillapoetry" and heidi on the mountain with her fucking granddad. this is endtime-poetry, perhaps in a tradition of malcolm lowry, beckett, céline but set in the time now making his poetry the answer to those eschatologist writers and ending-searching at the desolatest fields, nonfields, destitute endworlds andinnersarcophagous' milieus, interstitial, physical and highly visceral"nonplaces" postmortem or roaming around and across these places of contemporary history of death or even actual stretches of societal death hidden either or ignored, nevertheless unoverseeable fields of dereliction, disdirection, despair and an empty searching to what is known to be nonexistent. (as persistent and where this doesn't matter anymore in absinthe hazes.)

the paradox now is that there always has been developmental aspects also in michaels work. yet within an "endpoetry" at some moment it is really "the end of the line" which seems to be exhumed. i believe this is the case with "The Zero Eye", michael’s latest, last, offering of intensely stylized poems. it is the culmination of the necropolises of our endworld, but not, as some perhaps safetywise would like to believe, a world to which we are still heading. no it is the world here and now and formulated with such acuitry, that it is unsettling and disturbing but also bizarrely veritable and an astute societal portrayal of the posthuman world into which our world NOW has grown.

what i want to do now still, kind of concluding, is to insert two pieces of text out of "The Zero Eye"and then come with a kind of stupefying conclusion of which i thought i would never have the fucking analysant brains for it to reach such lucid clustering contrivance: compression.

"the zero eye will ever be/ shape without form/ density of rind branded by sting of inescapable/ rots through unto/ until/ yet given to silence/ scatters breath of nocturne/ clasp of weight/ says nothing more of I/ clean break/ subtlety of design/ crafted in absence of voice/ here or there a nothing of/ claimed yet ever-fading/ yet silenced ever/ still yet/ breakage upon rock of night’s forever distance"

"in shed of flame that was never light/ better yes never of it/ bite down upon edge-solace of/ trade anguish for oblivion/ yet naught as ever/final as/ less or more/ ever was/ remnants of then or nothing left to/ no/ no breaking forth/ no never again/ let it/ decline of/ yes death of/ yet will not/ clings unto/ as if to say/ the zero eye/un-scattered none/ falls unto or not/ utters without pause for/"

here we have the writing on the edge, a topic of the specific poetic genre michael excells in yet not as "a trick" or "device" or profitist mock or vaudeville stance. it is clear this poetry really costs blood, sweat and tears and more modern perhaps alcohol, cocaine and cigarettes or otherwise psychotrope substances even if it is abstinence bc there is a kind of feverish absolvence at stake, at the stake.

then we reach the apex really and it is as well the description of infinity or and the aggregate of finality as a machine whirring at the surf but also in our fucking cities and the rests of our woods, here is an antiheidicodex as what adorno would call: "index falsii",or: the whole is unreal, as in a philosophical treatise on the world, as he also cited somene, in "minima moralia": "life doesn't live", here we have reached the endworld, ok possibly (alone much much further) beckett’s "endgame". our posthuman society as we see buster keaton hustle around in a prepostcataclysmic world in beckett’s film "film" where all is debris, hubris, rest of nazist capitalist communist autark islamist zelous clinical murderous afterclang of our sociuses: it is happened. this is what we wanted.

"(…text no/ this is not a/ this is not/ not this/ is/ a text not/ not this a/this/ this is not text/ not a text/ text not this is not/ a/ this/not a/ text no this is a/ not a text this/ this is not a/ this not a text is/ this not a/ not a this a text is not/ not/ not this/ a text/not a/ text not this is a/ this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text/ text no this is not a/ text no/ a text not this/ not a/ text not this is not a…ad infinitum)."

then to recapture a question somewhere in the beginning of this microdissertation:

"how is this poetry going to develop?". what L'Wren Scott did today, hanging herself in her million bucks NY home, friend of mick jagger, fashion designer, apparently with millions in debt. she hung on a silken shawl on the doorknob. she phoned her assistant around ten: "can you come?". and this assistant found her...after such radical theory poetry no, rather a poetry of abnegation more than absolvence.

michael and i had a conversation just now where he said:

"we need something, yes..."

--Aad de Gids

Michelle Greenblatt

Streaks of Scarlett: A Story in 100 Parts

from ASHES AND SEEDS

1. 

It’s 7:10, she notes. She’s just about to leave her cursed computer when an another goddamned idea demands it’s time  /  to drench the pages.

2.

I will come back…she starts, then pounds the delete key in fury. She hikes out to meet her edges.

3.

The motion of her eyelashes distracts her as she types, as does the irresistible urge to call this her autobiography. She considers this / sentence; she (re)considers herself. She looks out the window into the nothingness that envelops her. Having endured so many circular, identical events, how can she tell this story again?    

4.

He drives a shiny new white BMW, which he bought but now can’t afford; he rides around all day, looking to score. He knows his cleverness is a weapon. pour to melt, he insists.

5.

She floats in a perpetual state of emulsion, strips the last bit of syntax that makes any sense into pieces that suit her purpose.

6.

Her hand speaks out loud as it slaps her

face repeatedly,

factually and with a plethora of brutalized dreams.

7.

She picks roses |cut| She picks skulls |cut| She picks perpetuation. |cut|cut|cut|

9.

She runs through the empty chalk hallways, the white pages, the chapters of absence, looking for anybody, anybody at all who knows her name.

10.

who is she? they whisper after they have taken (their turns with) her. They don’t imagine she can hear then. None can match her features in any royal database. Facial recognition informs them she does not exist. They contact the FBI.

In hushed tones, they whisper, how can we best be rid of her? And: is she dead because her eyes have gone black.

12.

A memory: He won’t wake up and she wants him to wake up. She repeats this to herself.  you won’t wake up and I want you to wake up. you won’t wake up and I want you to wake up, wake up, WAKE UP.  Each time she thinks this, she grows mightier

in her anger.  She pauses, then rises, casting furious shadows onto the mirrorwalls.

13.

He is flecks of liquid placebo.  He harbors his many hands inside her. 

14.

disentangle! disentangle! she screams as she dashes through the palace corridors.

15.

witch and lunatic, they murmur, shaking

their heads.

16.

Meanwhile, the prince is in the forest, hunting

butterflies. He catches them, scratches their feathers off.  By this he means oh, look what’s left. And: here comes the butcher.  He does, of course, need to eat.  And he can’t fry those jeweled fish forever.

17.

His tongue is made of moonlight, of magic, of dreamlies. When she kissed him the first time—nearly nine years ago now—everything paused as her wish

(let it always be this way, let it always be this beautiful)

morphed to a smashing of prayers, then scattered into whispers, and the echoes of starless whirlwinds carried them away. 

18.

(But his kisses were dust.)

19.

Stillness. A blackbird. All is silent in that bloodforest but for the sighs of the carbon-trees and the scrape scrape of butterfly wings as the prince performs their ritual slaughter for his feast.

20.

Road reverse, reverse road: she can’t get away from this palace.

21.

The sky underfoot, the sun in her / skin (again, and always), skein of fire sweeping through her veins, blossoming in her gut, propelling her perpetually forward.

*

The foreground flies alongside her, colors blurring together in a haze of green and brown mingled with streaks of scarlet in the bloodsap leaking from the deviltrees. As for any context or sense of direction—she lost that long ago, when the weight of light broke her

back. Nothing but loneliness to keep her company now.

|cut|

*

begin, she thinks, begging herself to believe. I must begin again. 

|cut|

*

But here comes the wall of sepulchral silence slamming into her. Her 6½ sapphires spill into the abyss.

|cut||cut||cut|

28.

did you exist ever did you—Scarlett reaches for his hand, gone for so long now. But he has left her a gift of slain sky, shredded narrower than her small

despairing sighs. 

29.

They must have collapsed on the moist ground, but the (lack of) hospital records contradicted the corpus delicti: blood and flesh / evidence they left on the forest floor.  

32.

Her appetite outrages him; he strikes her, pummeling her face and chest, pounding her with his right fist, raking the nails of his left hand down her breast.

No one shapes their weapons like he. 

33.

Rage taps on the window. The window taps on the door. 

34.

She washes her hands in the bloodriver. Wisps of her climb into the bus that runs back to the forest branching beyond the palace. She can’t find a single place to pray amidst this, his vast darkling forest.

38.

don’t be afraid, he says to Scarlett, I can see you in the deathmirror. 

39.  

what does this mean? she asks him.

40.

Greet the dead the way the dead greet you, she has learned

the hard way. He grabs her by the throat; he hides inside her  /  bones. She forgets what hands are for. a light will come, he promises her, you will be held up and you will be blessed; you will be raised above the most glorious of altars.

It is then that she remembers: hands are for offering him needles.

41.

O sand O silk O galactic black wild—she dances naked, breathless, on the web-spread surfaces of Zodiacal light.

O exposed bruises, O love doubled into madness, madness into self                                                         murder,

flood of sunlight bouncing off dust particles, ions in the coronal plasma, forbidden spectral emission lines—

She reads pages of blank verse; her eyes skim the skies, registering the empty majestic light of heavenly bodies, most of have already died; their light is an echo, a ghost chased by time.

She’s drowning in the cold                                                                                

moonlight..

43.

don’t move, he said to her, don’t dream,

until I come back from the dead for you.

I will come back from the dead for you.

50.

Nights like these, the edges blur into eternity, into a single red scream that begins with the heart’s first beat and continues long after the last breath expires, leaving the body

with only the fact of itself: a discarded sac of skin filled with rotting meat.

*

he sleeps and she sleeps; they dream the same dream:

(don’t move.)

(don’t dream.)

(don’t even breathe

until I come back from the dead for you.)

But to live in his palace?

(I will come back from the dead for you.)


Michelle Greenblatt is the poetry editor for Unlikely Stories. A two-time Pushcart-Prize nominee, Greenblatt’s second book, With Explorative Hands, co-authored with Bill Mavreas can be purchased on Amazon.com; her third book, Ghazals, was co-authored with Sheila Murphy. Her book, ASHES AND SEEDS, is forthcoming. She can be reached at michelle@unlikelystories.org

Craig Podmore's 'an autopsy of the spleen' reviewed by Polly Trope

An Autopsy of the Spleen -- as the title suggests, this set of poems circles around the thought of death, and takes inspiration from the poetry of Baudelaire, who made the word "spleen" famous in poetry. Sound bytes that recall Baudelaire and the old symbolism with its skewed aesthetics of the awful, are strewn all around this Craig Podmore's newest collection.
 
Titles such as "Opium in Bloodied Hands", "The Pale Drunkard" and "The Ennui is Murder" hark back to Baudelaire's celebration of opium-smoking in his artificial paradises, which often appear paired with the darkest desires. In a similar vein, references to Ennui expand upon a pivotal theme of Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil", in a modernized way that brings the banned poets of the 19th century bang up to date.
 
Boredom and moodiness as demons and the number one enemy of any poet spring back into view. With "A pale drunkard", Podmore takes us for a walk in midst the French symbolist big city monster, with its anaemic faces, its dark and squalid corners, its syphilitic prostitutes in the dim glow of less-than-sanitary late night hangouts. All these are things which quintessentially haven't changed about the fringes of city life, even though the gaze on them has shifted to more nonchalance, less repulsion. The sweaty and brutal power nurtured by a mixture of madness, illness, and alcoholism, inhabits and perpetuates the neuroses of urban life in this new collection all over again:
 
"The insight of my failures
That permeates,
My insecurities shrouded by insolence
And lack of empathy.
Gnawing nothing,
Shedding skin
And gorging on black and blue
Psychotics."
 
Setting up such a geography, Craig Podmore's chapbook draws up a portrait gallery of the distant and not-so-distant forbears of urban alcoholism and the murky innards of late night excesses as they are, and as they have been, in a half-real, half-nightmarish setting which only poetry can really capture.
 
But the word "Autopsy" -- the other part of the title -- encapsulates the more up-to-date, thriller-like aspect of this work. Circling around the image of a dead female body which crops up again and again, from different angles, forming a puzzle piece by piece, an intrigue weaves itself through the collection that is never quite solved. The lyrical narrator lets us in on a little secret : he himself is not 100% sure of the order of events or even sure of their truth. The distorted and estranged mental spaces he at times crosses over into blur and de-blur, and he tells us things in a haze.

This trope of the "unreliable narrator" hails from a much different tradition than Baudelaire, and draws up reminiscences of Dr. Caligari's Cabinet and many modern films with their double-edged confusion and portrayals of losing the moral compass.

"The murderer gazing upon his victim endlessly;
He texts his wife concerning shopping items
Followed by a thorough check of his victim’s purse.
A theft of £4.10,
A brain haemorrhage
And another human looking for something"

The dim contours of a dead woman, with whom there may or may not have been a past romance, also open up a space for the poetic reflection on death and desire in a more general sense, and this is where the full contemporariness of this volume really comes into view. If there is a dance around Christian morals and a kind of medievalism like that of Baudelaire, there is also an aesthetic of explicitness, of unconcealed pornography in pair with the sensationalism of the globally desensitized period in which we live, its nonchalance, its cruel sarcasm.


This chapbook is a success on so many levels. My warmest congratulations to Craig Podmore. It is available here

Cover Artwork from Christopher Brownsword's 'Rise Like Leviathan & Rejoice!' (Oneiros Books)

“Flayed eyes arc obtain from crossing the trajectory in waves contaminates where sigils programmed into network mimic the blueprint further beneath. Disrobed of antlers mounts quarry tied at wrists in pelt of ancient matrix: this hunger inside vertebrae by moon yields”

The book is available from Oneiros Books, here

A Preview of 'Rise Like Leviathan & Rejoice!' by Christopher Brownsword (Oneiros Books)

NEGATIVE TERMINAL

1

                             Data flux serving

hive to meld between more

lacerated controls simulacrum cast into fluctuation,

          bred there

twitching and for then

appease only if limbic sent

                             ocular to be ruinous

forces

                             grid projected via astral sea.

Reticulate bondage from light in

lens worn rancid, the

          vacuum systemised behind layers

                   replicates exterior with drone of parasite

          oscillating uterine canal as template

                                                          scanned deciphers

                                               

                             artificial                                    skin.

2

Static

anticipates

the embryo by

discharge,

jolted to ground:

neural mechanisms

render simulation in womb,

an impetus for terminus

of spliced

          permutation

where amniotic ordinance trawls re-established

under sky. Module

as fractal empty, the terror of the sun

observed through egress; synapse dilates

output - locus imprinted. The interior plane

combusts: the primal apogee sutured.

Cold nebulae to the flesh-lines;

nerves awaken,

eyes scan

sensor

(confluent as scorch respired).

Gravity-

mutation: chromosome form gelid

substrate differentiating slide.

Programmed.

Imploded.

Downloaded.

Accelerated.

G

A

T

C

A

A

T

G

A

G

G

T

G

G

A

C

A

C

C

A

G

A

Negative

terminal.

Negative

terminal.

Negative

terminal.

Negative

terminal.

Negative

terminal.

Void.

Void.

Void.

Void.

Void.

---

NEXUS

Let seed from brittle hands

grip delta

as yield torn ever into spring, her flesh

calls beyond terrain: the sky

emptied into our throats

like water

like celestial dew

 like the new

crescent moon: passion.

 

---

UNDER ERASURE

Her desolation by surge loss prism or was

ecstasy deplete whirls as reinforce should debris

husk. Flesh excites

to ancient              stimulant over

how reflect were darkening so held. I pour contact,

ebb together where at none; season exhausted by touch, her thighs

now sap ever annihilated in host.

The north wind

dilates in circuit to repel through lymph, far blackened

with sun approaching zenith across level sea. Kneeling in the

fragrant grass, I feed upon root and earth.

Ingress kept

low: burnt from tryst, settles to vast current. Had blossom

fall yet seethe only.

*

Reluctant to path always vestige smoke if jaws

were not separate at hill beyond

obelisk. Graze far                               sky

under erasure: softly

the hot rain                     moistens light.

I phalynx simulacrum

tethered by

moss.                              Winter gathers

surplus where terminal. Access sent ripple as door

pools flesh begin narrow into sunless

temple, consuming

lotus tree.