Wednesday, 5 December 2018

December Pentagrams: the light will bend




I hear a tear in the radio static

and see it and melt electric 
into the fibers of your blue, blue dress

starlight peppering the water
in the kitchen sink



------

Friends,
It's the second Monday of the month and with it come Pentagrams In Snow, where we shall tread the boards softly perchance to dream a little dream and maybe drink a little drink or two..

Monday, 9th of December
7.30 onward
The Lamb on Holloway Rd

Thursday, 4 October 2018

Pentagrams 14: a dance to the end of the shore



Friends,

Pentagrams 14. I'll be reading Poppy & The Rain. I don't know exactly the others will be reading.There might be a couple more portraits from The Sorrow & The Pity Made Flesh (/this is what you get when you mess with love). Come down.


Monday,  8th of October
7.30 p.m. 
The Lamb on Holloway Road

Tuesday, 4 September 2018

Pentagrams 12: Lemonade



Dear friends,

It's Pentgrams' brithday. At least I think its it's birthday, but it might be the eleventh one. I could look it up in a moment, but I find online archiving unnerving. It's too quick for one thing. It's holographic system of documentation is too at odds with my conception of reality. It values speed over time. Well, I like time, it's one of the things I'm made of (increasingly so (as it goes by)). I distrust speed: the amount of dumb and regrettable things I've done through not taking a little time, lemme tell ya.. No, friends, let's just agree on treating it as its birthday. For it we shall be having celebratory readings which shall be characteristic. To get in to the spirit of things I shall be exhibiting a few works from The Sorrow & The Pity Manifest In Flesh: Portraits by Samuel Kastin.

Oh, and make no qualms about it, there will be cakes & ale..

SK

Monday the 10th of September 
7.30 p.m. 
The Lamb on Holloway Road

Friday, 10 August 2018

Pentagrams 11: Portraits



An event: Monday 13th, 7.30p.m., The Lamb on Holloway Rd 

'I'm no art critic, but I know what I hate. This I don't hate.'
Monty Burns to Marge Simpson regarding her portrait of him

Dear Friends,
Pentagrams In Snow 11 shall be taking place on Monday the 13th. For it we have created a linguistic gallery of portraits with words by writers of my choosing. It should make for a worthwhile evening. For my part I have been working on a couple of pieces that should hopefully have a fragile beauty that some may find difficult, but that anyone who has a heart will understand. We'll see..

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32944)


https://bullgoosesamuel.blogspot.com/2014/03/under-skin.html

Tuesday, 3 April 2018

 The Ripples In The Water When It Rains Look A Lot Like The Rings In A Tree Stump

When a man is tired of Venice, he is tired of death
-Sian Tamsk

I allowed myself to take one photo in Venice. The city is horrendously over photographed and it cheapens it. I feel sorry for it in the same way I feel sorry for Marilyn Monroe.


    Jazz In Venice, 2018


You can see why it works so well as a backdrop to Don’t Look Now. When one is lost it compels his sense of it. It could never be accused of a place where one goes to, as the mind and body lot like to say, to find one’s center; there isn’t one. Even when you think you have got to grips with the town, come to a familiar place, you turn the corner and find yourself walking through an alley you’ve never seen before, that you’re sure has just appeared manifestly from some neverland, but has of course been there the whole time. Much like how one memory leads to another which leads to another, and so forth, until you’re so far removed from the original memory that you can’t for the life of you remember what it was. You find yourself in an endpoint you have no conception of, and you’ve only yourself to blame, and even he isn’t all that culpable. The map of Venice does not look dissimilar from a diagram of a brain. You’d have to be incredibly literal-minded to be able to make any sense out of the map. To walk its streets, as has been remarked before, feels like a dream.
  As with anything of the mind, you begin to question whether it is real. There you are amidst all these buildings, and all this history, and it’s difficult to fathom how any of it came to be. Surely it can’t be serious. Surely it cannot be. If it is conceivable, it is my shortcoming that I cannot get much further than it might be.
  All the while the sea flows indifferently by through the canals.
  Something about the city is conducive to sickness. To mourning too, though those things are hardly mutually exclusive. That is why it is such a good place to convalesce. There’s something about the sound of it in the afterhours. Water takes on a different persona in the nighttime. Then there’s the mist. It nearly hides everything. However, it stops short of that and allows you to see through it. Rather than hide it, it coats it in a mystery. That thing that connects us all as much open space connects the universe. That connects as much as a looking glass when we look at it the same time. It contains reflections, Brodsky writes of the water, among them my own. All mirrors look the same, though not to different eyes.
  You cannot walk over one of the many bridges without contemplating jumping in and pay a schoolboy homage to Ophelia. A friend of mine tells me that on his stay here he should have like to have held a gun to his skull and relieved it of its tormented contents. Just like Hemingway. There’s probably not a suicide that hasn’t been done. What could be more derivative than death?
Inevitably you find me in a bar. The girl next to me has ordered another Spritz. Campari, I’m pleased to say. I order another beer. I’m going to let the day be whatever it becomes. Like water … (if only this town was a little bit cheaper).


Notes

·         Though the walk ways are filled with little doggies, I have yet to see one cat. Have they all been put in a sack and thrown into the canal in an act of mass felicide? Like Joyce’s Copenhagen, are there no cats of Venice? Or, are they simply confined to the apartment? Either way, the seagulls flood the square cawing out an obscene parody of a cat wailing. They hurl sneering contempt on the whiskered adversaries with relish. Presumably kitty sits somewhere plotting a revenge more exacting than Shylock’s. Like him they may come to find their spoils come to the privy coffer of the state. It always does around here.

·         More significant than the absence of cats is the absence of cars. This is an obvious point to make but you don’t realise how profound it is until you are once again surrounded by all those fucking wheels. (As I write this a gondola sails past with a long haired gondolier teaching his young buttercup blonde daughter how to use the paddle, (are there any female gondoliers?))


Friday, 30 March 2018

BC


Mary

You should have seen her
sitting there eating plums with the redheaded prostitute
whom she met whilst visiting her son as he was dying

I remember her as a girl
falling pregnant the year after her bat mitzvah
Can you get pregnant through masturbation? she asked

Full to the brim with holy spirit

Wearing a blue summer dress 
in the middle of spring
blood matting it to her body

Smiling the all knowing smile of a virgin
as if she knew something that we all forget
lost in the ways we come to define ourselves

Leaving the village with her teenage husband
led by confused/ confusing stars
scared sacred

Saturday, 24 March 2018

Roughly Relating to Plath's Daddy

Through

i
How hard it can be to look at one’s past. To turn to salt at that cold heat that comes from the blue flickerings of charred embers. To be taken back to it time after time, as if on a train, a train back and back and back, taking you to the cold destination where you are immolated on your history. To a gulag. To a lager. That holocaust of the what has been. Not even the survivors survive it. Tell any survivor they survived and they’ll rightly tell you, you must be joking, just look at my scars.

ii
There’s something about the instantaneous that robs us of our experience.  To experience something we have to live it a while. This is why our current culture of the immediate is so degenerative. I remember being on train home to London when a terrorist attack occurred in Paris. My present company kept checking their phone for updates on the story. What insight were they trying to glean from this? They were approaching it as a spectacle. They were partaking in it as a consumer. As a pig hungry for the troth to be refilled with swill. The media knows this and behaves accordingly. It is its bread and butter. It knows people engage with it in a consumptive manner. Therefore, it is a product. As any product it needs to have a selling point. It’s selling point is speed. This is the thing, money famously cannot buy time, however you canput a price upon expedience. Expedience is not something we do to make the most our time, it is what we do when we do not have enough of it. Money aims not to expand time, but to shorten it. This is why our culture has become one of convenience. It is a spiritual suicide. After all, what could be more convenient than death? To make an obvious point, the reason bullets kill people is because they move too fast. Immediacy kills our response. What we are left with in its place is a reaction. This does us no favours in the long run. What does do us favours in the long run is the long run. For the past to be of any use to us we have to nurture it. You have to live it, you cannot buy, nor pay for it to go away. At the time of its conception, the event is too immature to give us an insight. At the time of the event it is just that, an event. We have not given ourselves time enough to truly feel it. The difference between an instant reaction and a considered response is around about the same as the difference between crying and weeping. If you find that statement rather opaque I suggest that you take the time to think about what it means to you. Too give a small clue, we weep alone. Speaking from my perspective as a poet, it is the difference between the inspiration and the poem. The inspiration is embryonic, it needs time to form. If a baby were to be birthed at the moment the sperm fertilised the egg it would surely be too feeble to survive. We have to hold it in our womb for a considerable amount of time come into fruition. Once it is out of the womb we have to look after it. To look after it best we have to let it be its own thing.

iii
   The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
  Are not very pure or true

I’m sitting drinking a black coffee in the Volkstheatre café on Neustiftgasse. I’ve been reading Sylvia Plath’s Daddy. It holds a lot in its three pages. One of the things it has a lot of is disdain. The disdain is levelled at the façade of the mighty, that subterfuge that has ossified and become a ridiculous reality parodying the pure and the true. It is essentially a spit in the face of the affected face that death pulls when it gets us to act as its amanuensis. Looking out the window I can almost see the Heldenplatz. I wonder..

What could be more preposterous than a Luftwaffe?
More contrived than a master race?
More insulting to nature than a caparisoned horse?
More insincere than a group of people marching together for a common cause?
More propagandist than a memorial?
More totalitarian than an enforced silence?
At what point does a past become a history?
When does the hand become a clenched fist?
When does reverence for the dead become the self gratification of necrophilia?

When a drama becomes unbelievable the dramatist often counters this by putting spectacular elements into their production. He fills the stage with sound and fury. Problematically, the phonier it is the more the public will deceive themselves into believing it. They have a genius for self deception. They hear the bluster and the blarney and they ordain it to be the truth. To a certain extent they are right, it is genuine hokum. 24 Carat. However, the rest of it is about a sincere of a clown’s offering of a cream pie. Sadly, the mob in its need for commonality and a shared belief are highly susceptible to it. Unfortunately, what they end up believing in is that that shouts loudest. Subsequently a frenzy is stirred up that robs us of our humanity. What this frenzy gets fat upon is an absence. An absence of being questioned, of being called into account. The façade grows even stronger. It eradicates the words such as shame, remorse, sympathy and their synonyms. It does so unapologetically. Impenetrability ensues. It seduces us by telling us we too can become impenetrable. It tantalises us with whispers of immortality. Man, in his childish way, tries to overcome his fear of death by causing it. The murderer becomes fool enough to believe that he is the master of the grim reaper. That he is the one summoning it to the end of his bayonet. The grim reaper goes along with this. Why would it not? It has tricked man into becoming its servant. It has tricked into carrying out its will. He has blindly walked into its servitude and he shall carry the stench of its chores to his grave.

  Not God but a swastika
  So black no sky could squeak through

iv
  (From Words)

  Axes
  After those strokes the wood rings,
  And the echoes

What comes first, the history or the putting of it into words? Plath describes the language of her childhood as..

  An engine, an engine
  Chuffing me off  like a Jew.
  A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I can’t help wonder whether it the memory exists without the ability to express it. We have all, more or less, with the idea that memory existed as a construction. That Kaspar Hauser had no mode to express his past left him carte blanc, for example. Now, lets wonder whether the past is made up mainly of memory. It has to be a large part of it. Is memory not made up of words? Is there a chasm between what is expressed and what if felt? For instance, there must be words in other languages to mine that express things that I have no term or phrase to express. Does this detach me from that thing I feel? Am I less able to feel it than the culture that has a word for it? It has been observed that people from different cultures have different patterns of behaviour. Normally this is explained in an historical context, or a geographical one (weather, etc.). Perhaps we could concede that there are linguistic factors also. As a poet one has to try and bridge the chasm between emotion and language (or else we are left with scraps, the void signifier of sentimentality). It would be a cliché to say that Plath lived her poetry. It may also miss the point. She died it. She died gassing herself to death..

  I may well be a Jew. 

The book has a feel of deathbed poems to it. The suicide she had carried within her since being a little girl had reached its termination point. It would have been rather tasteless of the disease to carry on, stringing its vessel along with the parsimony of its reprieves. The dying do not have much by way of what is ahead, just that eternity as expansive and vague as the ocean. What they have in abundance is what has been. Past. This is what Ariel is made of. A very rich song it makes out of it. I’ll tell you why. It’s because it never averts its gaze..

  Stupid pupil. It takes everything in.

Sticky business. It is an echo that does not bounce away.  The term nostalgia has its etymological rooting (roots are prominent throughout Ariel) in the Greek for old wound.  Think of that pick tissue puss that emanates from a scab once it has been picked. It emanates without leaving. One thinks of to stick to one’s fingers as a child. How sweet it was. How unpleasant also. The more you would lick it, the worse it would get. It wasn’t so easy to sever one’s self from it.. Like a marriage. We are wed to our past. For better or for worse..

  And I said I do, I do, I do.

There seems to be a suggestion inherent to the word ordering of the phrase, for better or for worse. The implication of the syntax is that it inevitably ends for worse. Some may find this pessimistic. It isn’t necessarily so. You see, it does not negate the first part, when it is for better, it nearly  is. There can be moments that come out in nighttime far more luminous than the ones that get lost in the fabric of daytime. There is the clarity of after hours. Those moments of calm that come after all has been said and done.

  And then it ends and the peacefulness is so big that it dazes you.

The paradox of one’s past is though it keeps expanding, growing ever older, when we look back at it it puts us in a childlike state. We look back to when we were little. We sit there at the table opposite to the authoritarian who scared us so.  We have inadvertently disobeyed his role. We did that in the act he performed by which we were conceived. Our birth is proof he is human, furthermore, a body, and he hates us for it. He asks us to explain ourselves. In his presence we do not know who we are. All we are when he is around him is him. The very notion that we may be something other confuses us and the words stick in our throat. We hear the start of an assertion, but we, stammeringly, cannot get passed the I..

  Ich, Ich, Ich.

Frightened mice. Eek, eek, eek. The shadows of the past stand in front of us as imposing as a statue.
 
  Marble heavy.

However, then comes the realisation of one’s vantage point. The one of being at the other side of time passed, the hereafter. We find the statue to be that of Ozymandious. That mighty man. When we come to look him in the eye we find that he is no more. He has blown away in the wind of the passing seasons. All that is left of him are his feet of clay.

  You do not do, you do not do
  Anymore, black shoe

V

Breath

Gas fills the room
Coating it in its charity
Like silence
Untouchable
Yet omnipresent
The gentle caress of God

Tiredness desolidifies like coal burning into ash
I close my eyes
And sleep
And ever
Oh, you mighty men
You have now idea
How calm a woman can be







https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM

Monday, 19 February 2018

The Heart of Saturday Night/ The Heart of a Dog



I was walking around Leeds over the weekend watching everybody tricking themselves into believing that they were having a good time. The lack of imagination was, as you can imagine, unimaginable.

At the risk of getting into keynote speech territory here I wish to share my idea of what the good life is with you. A keynote speech is the speech given to students graduating from their degree. The kind that is formed of platitudes orchestrated together to try and make some kind of life lesson. It is usually given by someone with a significant reputation, who has reached a certain level of success within their field. I, having only the five pounds in my pocket and beer in front of me to show for a lifetime's work, am not qualified to give one. However, I distrust qualifications. Humour me a while. I'm going to give you some advice. (I talk to you as that anonymous you. The you that could be anyone or no one depending on the your predilection. I write to you as I write to anyone I do not know. Idealistically. As if you are a child of light and a dark horse growing up in a mad world taking their point to point navigation from confused stars.)
  The advice is this, when you next wake up in the morning with all those unremitting engagements inevitably playing on your mind over and over as if it were a needle skipping back on a faulty groove, take a moment out and then afterward make this following commitment to yourself, I'm going to give the day to me as a gift. Think of the following lines from a poem..

I'm letting the day be what it is:
a place for a large number of things
to gather and interact-
not even a place but an occasion,
a reality for real things

Then do just that. Be open to the possibilities. Possibly you could draw a bath and watch the steam rise before you dip your head under the water to listen to your hair in the altered acoustics. There are zen masters you can learn from. For example, Huckleberry Finn. He spent a whole book floating down the Mississippi with an escaped slave called Jim. Two drifters off to see the world. It's true, there's such a lot of world to see. Be open to the beauty in it. Take it to heart. This is economical for it saves the cost of going to heaven. Remember, there's a world that's all about us, there's a world within. Find a place where you can just sit and watch the world go by. I could sit in The Cock Tavern on Mare St or the Volkstheatre Café on the Neustiftgasse for a thousand years and still come out as young as a kitten. An observation that I've made is that one is only as kind to one's self as the company he keeps. Surround yourself with good people. they shall teach you how to love. Be open to them. let Susan take you down to her place by the river. Do not become overly reliant on the company of others. Do not partake in society. Do not implement societal expectations on others. Do not allow them to implement them on you. The happiest dog is not the chitsu, the daschund, or the spaniel; it is the dog that is allowed to be a dog; an indo-to-exothermic blob of life made of dream and love, all encased within a finite shell. Once again I advocate learning a thing or two from Huckleberry Finn. Learn from Ferris Bueller. Life moves pretty fast. You can't stop that. Stop holding on so tight. When you form a fist it means nothing else can grace your palm. Hold onto the moment as if holding onto a bird; holding without holding. Let go of the thought, I wish I'd brought a camera. Let Venice sink. Let the crazy and beautiful idea be what it is, a crazy and beautiful idea that for a while almost looked as if it was going to make it. We often preserve the past at the detriment of the future. Culture thrives everywhere folks. Stop bringing out zombie Shakespeare all the time just because he has been certified art. Try something new goddamit. Love literature. You will love people in their purest form, their ideas. What could be nicer than a day in bed with Oscar Wilde or Anne Michaels? Friends, I'm going to wrap this up. If you want a sermon from a bum in  his early 30s you can read the beatitudes you can read the new testament. To bring this to a close, if you give the day to that little bit of you you call me, you will find out who me, in his or her myriad of forms, is. You will come to find out it is a very different thing to that miserly creature, the self. If you find that this is worthwhile, what I would further suggest is that the next week when you wake up in the morning with all those unremitting engagements inevitably playing on your mind over and over, take a moment out and make another commitment to yourself, I'm going to give this life to me. Now that's my idea of a good time.

S.K.

This also,
https://www.facebook.com/events/2068006526822131/permalink/2068006546822129/?notif_t=event_mall_comment&notif_id=1519316013194533