Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Vicki Feaver - Guardian Poetry Workshop Siren

The monthly Guardian Newspapaer poetry workshop is very prestigious.

~

To hygienically stick your mental jizz in the bonces of the bores on that board, be skill-less and tick boxes in one of the numerous contemporary dot to dot career manuals lost minded rhyme-smiths and fully homogenized poets of the lyrically pedestrian unfunny line swear by, for inspirational instruction.

Randomly add a pick 'n mix content of your colour-in influences, then order (un-mangled) a syntax by numbers in dum-de-dumbed down, dim mind-numbing "I am"s, whose relevance can be immediately read as an example of the school whose one compositional method produces oeuvres instantly appraised by the oolamhs we imitate in our poems, original and interesting or cack-handed crap.

~

I posted a recognisably simple fledgling piece to Vicki Feaver, flapped it in past the midnight deadline of July 31. Sent because I desired to swipe for myself her visible poetic gift, coolly exuding from a highly professional online portrait. From this picture I deciphered her crackable psychological code, which the remote power she yearns to encounter when scribing her speech, revealed to me through a working method Amergin supposedly spoke and wrote of over ten centuries ago when Celtic rhyming was a craft akin to quantum mechanics; harnessing electricity an ungraspable concept and television's logic, a magic whose truth only extraterrestrial gods could blueprint.

Audience unable to believe what you are reading, see

the de rigueur smoulder of her stark, no-nonsense, full frontal mug-shot in natural black and white, like some still life sixties siren slipping into a post office on pension day. Gasp as the massively frozen ability behind her straight lipped chilled out stare overpowers you with OTT visual audacity and cold raw talent; oozing from her unashamedly age loving face, framed by a superbly creative hairdo, nestling next to what looks like leaves; themselves appearing to burst with vitality merely by basking in the nearness of such an unadulterated aura of pure “Vicki” vibe, fissured to nuke your post-modern mental motor when gawping at her poetess head-shot.

When my eyes first fell upon that light-generated representation of her physical form, I became instantly impelled to toss her a hand of thin-line free-verse, written last year during late spring when composing a draft idea for a bird sketch, as I stood waiting at the railings of Russell Square one Saturday morning in May, at 3am. A love god called Aonghus came and deposited a sustainable splodge of lingo jizz my mind then propagated to the finished poetic thought-flash of words my muttering mouth formed as a mechanical pencil wrought along the page doing its thing.

~

Two months ago I sent a ghost poem to the editor whose inaccurate spelling accidentally lobotomised the hard-drive of her mind and re-configured her inner pen to automatically craft bland-on-demand dribble she’ll leak when asked to come 'n hack for the rags.

As you may not know, I have an otherworldly nodal-implant harvesting the mental technology our scribble through time programmes, and was hoping to impress Esther with my universally unique state-of-the-art hardware, which has an unlimited capacity for telepathic upload.

I was serial-stalker keen for an online relationship to occur, but alas, her system allows only wrong-word psychological software now, as all the poetic bits from her brain were removed, which, due to an IQ down-grade in the subconscious section of her grey-matter-motherboard, I now possess.

Unfortunately, Esther is a black-hole of poesy at the mo and won’t be capable of running up goods from her gob for the foreseeable future. She is in desperate need of any verse-cells from those with a spare poetic intelligence, who can help correct the cock up via the medium of reading this text.

Make sure she's topped up to her previous capacity by sending your unwanted language skill to her non working areas at the earliest opportunity. Until she’s re-booted, all her opinions remain obsolete and have been safely debunked by a knowing one at the edge of life's barricade.
~

Feeling somewhat glum at my blunder which inadvertently deprived Morgan of her talent, I fell into a mild depression, significantly deepened when the net-negative benefit of her poetic transplant became apparent - and after drinking heavily for the several days I spent alone in the attic foolishly gazing at a 10 foot blow up of Ed's face, extorted from a terrified trainee at Supersnaps - I came to mistakenly believe that the one constant my life lacked in the upswing of its manic state, was a textual relationship with Jane Duran.

This was because I misconstrued the instruction of my Devine Emanation Council operative who oversees the recruitment of human beings, like me, who work for their various business organizations, trading and trailing a blaze in telepathic communication markets throughout the galaxy. My psychotic state, coupled with the chemically altered parameters of my consciousness, meant I imagined Alan - a middle-ages Moorish instructor who bashed out Yeats’s wife's automatic blather - instructed me to jerk some hip 'n savvy electric text her way. But I mistook the message when under the influence of a 2 litre torpedo of 9% ABV scrumpy, and his actual advice was -

"Don't bother. You've no chance of scoring. She needs a full re-bore which may fail and render her an unworkable write-off."

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Such is the state of my mind, it is constantly hallucinating a group of composite Guardian poets having continual inconsequential coma-thons; the most immortally minded egos engaged in terminally dull intercourse with a cultural void and textually insatiable artist who was the banal verbal star of a spectacularly unexciting group borgey at "Dim Slob" Loink Oxley’s funless depression festival in a North London cellar last November.

Gushing forth from lip 'n nib that forgettable winter night, was Jean MacMillan, boring all within earshot to slumber with her pointless genius for putting people to sleep whilst extemporising nursery rhymes and simultaneously remaining cognizant of seven different conversations, occurring in the filthy and fully equipped dungeon hot tub during that comatose night of non-stop torpor.

As Jean held court in the centre of the whirlpool she told the ghost of Edward Hughes to remove a jester's hat from Laurence, Hardy, Hemmingway or Auden's oeuvre, for her to wear in the joke-free Jacuzzi. A hat, of course, was semblanced from Pam Ayres' daft heyday and Jeans plainly crafted art and Barnsley wit regaled us unconscious once again until we woke and weirdly found she’d morphed into a fascinating she-male character whose talk no longer bored us but explored the boundaries of earthly existence.

S/he said telepathy's just mental adventuring into the unknown, and as s/he told us of what comes when we dare surrender blindly to the word by instinctively stepping into a circle of faith reserved for us alone, an unknown poet in the corner conjured up Ogma, a word-deity meaning the good god none there had heard of till that night, who enlightened us with the hardcore uncut logic of creation as s/he fell silent and Ogma spoke -



"Oh all ye genuine thinkers who flap language revealing the methods your muse revels in during the joy gushing forth speech, come surf to my one stop language shack stocking genres from Langpo to metrical verse. On offer - verbal compatriots - is free and safe lunacy top ups with every fibre spent believing..." -

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...it will be fun to compose as many poems on this board as we can when the next Guardian bore appears offering us their insights into and examples of poems.

Basically have a group writing session where we e mail our efforts to whichever personality poet's mug-shot is pasted up on the least wanted page; not written with a view to submit them, but to generate material we may send in subject to our desire to gift in stuff anytime up till the deadline. I will send my efforts in to whoever's picture pops up next.

It's just a thought I want to warm you with, as this place could do with a bit of group action and effort for the mutual poetic benefit of all who will chance to give online writing exercises a go. The concept of failure or loss is factored out, I sincerely believe, when groups genuinely engage in a joint artistic enterprise of this nature.

I sent the poem below in with I LOVE YOU VICKI in the subject field and this pre-amble

Hi Vicki

Please forgive me for being late with my work, but I was seized last night by several drunken transvestites who wanted to dress me up and shoot me in an outfit which may have meant I've made it onto page seven of the Big Issue. Out of fashion section. A pastel number which really accentuates the line of my arms and waist, in such a way which doesn't draw attention to the fact that I am 27 stone of sheer flab.

I was also high on heroin and crack cocaine after being abducted at straw-point by a number of christian milkshake enthusiasts who got a bit carried away when they saw me waving me Wotsits at two very well known nonentities I will not mention here, but who have been saying untalented things about online dominoes.


This confident dice I currently seer falls favourably. It is steered by an accurate eye and makes straight aimed throws cast at the intellect’s bullseye in a tossed offering adhering to the creature ethos of your online poetry workshop. Verse-truth pervades where words lie folding in dreams blown real by breaths of imaginary air Vicki


LATE MAY DAY

A fluttering
above
in the skin
soft slither thin
leaves of a
beech tree

alerts her to
a bird in the
branches
over-hanging
an oak bench.

A grey
feathered fledgling
awkwardly flaps
falling to the pitted
tarmac and nestles

its downy breast
against a coping
stone border of
the oval green. A
cricket match ends

as the birds first
flight from its nest
into the unknown
traffic of a new
world view

begins. The creature
takes its bearings
from earth level

and looking into
the depths and
complexity of
existence

anchors an
eyeline securely
on the confusion
life's nexus of
glimpses distills

across the freshly
stretched backdrop
of a silent dumb sky

offering no
foothold of slender
wood poles with
which she can measure
her ascent through
understanding

up to God's hand.

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