Found several "new" old things

Here is The Kitchen Poet, from Underground Books, no idea who the model is, but great pics.

 

Here we have Acappella Zoo. & here some weird shit from Green Integer Review where my obsession with the goddess, Magna Mater the nameless & faceless, lets a little God's Mary creep in, dammit. 

There's a couple of others I noticed today also linked to the right there.

Full of Crow

Oh, I forgot all about this, from 2017. Here are three poems from Full of Crow. I like these. 

These three poems are appearing somewhat rewritten in ghosts go home: poems for Emma, which is the next book I am going to be doing after pig correspondence, which is coming soon from Oneiros Books. I think that ghosts go home is easily my best work.

Bone Orchard Poetry

Posting about the chapbook below in the last post, I noticed a shitload of poems by me as well as reviews by & of me here at Bone Orchard Poetry. Those reviewed, or reviewing, include Michael Mc Aloran, Craig Podmore, & Gillian Prew. 

Read these above-mentioned items at this link.

One chapbook, two novels, loose ends

Here I complete, somewhat brusquely, my selection of work available. starting with a chapbook from Michael Mc Aloran's Bone Orchard. It's called the children without guns, and it's here at Lulu. It is now at long last also at Amazon.

 

This chapbook is actually not bad, but now for the fiction, the two novels that were both originally published by Oneiros Books.

One is Henrietta Remembers, and it is here at Lulu. And here follows the Amazon link. Och här finns den på Bokus. EDIT: This is substantially revised in 2021 & has a nice cover.

A novel without plot about a murder rising from the emptiness that is words. David McLean's first novel demonstrates that the form is neither dead nor the exclusive province of literary establishment windbags. "A very nasty book. The repetition, rather than diminishing the effect, served rather to hammer home the innate nastiness and bleakness until it rang like a heavenly bell.
David Mitchell - author

 The other is flesh & resurrection, and it is here at Lulu. It is also here at Amazon, och, här ligger den hos Bokus i Sverige. EDIT: This is substantially revised in 2021 & has a nice cover.

The blurb says: 

Even more fucked up than McLean's first novel (Henrietta Remembers), which makes it well better, it abandons all pretense of plot & degenerates nicely into an inchoate prose poem.

Here's a free sample from the children without guns.

health warning

we regret to inform you
you are watching this life
with contaminated eyes.

and it is not even your life,
except a minuscule fraction
of you we might hope to find

a dead cold dream inside

no drugs for the dead

we pour no snowy libations
over the noses of corpses
and put no faith in names
that have slept insensate a night

till memory is impotent dust,
like words were once, like love;
their powder hearth and home
and nowhere,

implicature and absences to share.
we put these dead in zombie god's
forgotten pocket, with pornography
and other historical documents,

the sexual palimpsest that religion
is. we waste no luscious drugs
on the dead: they have gone now,
and once they were full of shit;

mourning amounts to nothing more than this

 

of desire & the desert

Here is of desire & the desert at Lulu, this one, like the earlier one "of desire ..." one from Oneiros, is inspired by Deleuze & Guattari, this time Mille Plateaux. Instead of posting samples, I instead include a review by Dom Gabrielli, which I happen to like. It occurs to me now to post other reviews of other  books, and I am sure that i shall, at the moment it seems a lot of fucking work, however, I still have to list one chapbook and my two shitty novels, & these will appear in the next post, i imagine. 

Anyway, here the fucker is at Amazon, just $12 för 148 pages.

Och här har vi samma bok på AdLibris för blott 112 kr, och med hela 148 sidor.

At any rate, huge thanks to Dom Gabrielli for this:

 

Deleuze and McLean, unlikely bed partners, A Thousand Plateaux and of desire and the desert.

it is not tools but the horrid state of masturbatory technology & intellectual impotence that makes us such scum//

The ‘Deleuzian’ century closed and its successor brought a dramatic return of the repressed as the scared masses took fright and clamoured not ‘with’ the tremors of Being but rather ‘for’ the One and its demonized Opposites, all the dreaded identities. Because as all of us know, closet Deleuzians or not, we are never one nor another, but certainly many, a mass, a crowd, a bunch and no one is supposed to win this life-game which only despots take seriously. With this return of Identity came necessarily the society of control. Deleuze had correctly predicted whose model was the motorway where freedom becomes solely an illusion, where everything one does is visioned, catalogued and potential to be used against us at any time. All that ensues is clockwork orange, and we as citizens are all decidedly lemons!

A Thousand Plateaux written with Guattari was probably the most overwhelming non-poetic reading experience I had as a student and many evenings were spent reading it aloud with my fellow students at NYU in my ground floor flat in the East Village, 3rd and 7th to be precise. Certain plateaux were read with a fine tooth comb, others were ignored and returned to at a later date. Deleuze and Guattari had after all encouraged artist-readers, non-philosophers, to take what they could when they could, to create their own machines, their own assemblages with whatever was at hand because after all the question was always: how to get out, how to let fresh air in, how to evacuate the suffocation of despotic institutions like universities which already back then (1990) were fabricating professor-business men-vendors with theories for sale and ideologies in suitcases to spread over willing student minds for pricey diplomas.

Deleuze and Guattari were unteachable in those days and any mention of them provoked chaos in the lecture rooms. Frequent adjectives were ‘unreadable,’ ‘incomprehensible,’ ‘dangerous’… That is when you could have real fun with concepts such as ‘deterritorialization.’ Much laughter was had at the expense of the advocates of the fashionable doxas of Lacarne, Derridar and Barrethes…

McLean I imagine had many a roar of laughter reading A Thousand Plateaux and as good poets will, his readings and impressions made their ways into notebooks and pads. Lucky are those today who can read these immensely enjoyable vignettes which not only play freely with the spirits of the glorious nomad thinkers but place their concepts firmly in the society of control, 2016.

It is the destiny of thinker poets to be overlooked and ignored because they fall between categories, foul of classifications and ideologies. Are they really poets, these folk who cite Hegel and Heidegger? Can thoughts be expressed into poetic form anyway? Let’s face it, the same arguments have been raised against many an illustrious predecessor. No need to mention names. But today, I am told, we are all poets. We all have little secrets to share. We have emotions to dress in romantic script. We can take up poetry, like a gardener picks up his spade to dig his first vegetable patch. Deleuze himself hated French literature for its psycho-analytical bent, for its obsessions and perversions. The superiority of Anglo-American (and he forgot to mention Irish) literature being its lines of flight…. its becomings…. But language is a recalcitrant field. The act of writing reminiscent of Sisyphus, push a frosty boulder upward, ever upward, to the unattainable star. He probably won't enjoy me saying this, but in this regard McLean is a traditional poet, as much as any today. He perfects his craft in solitude. Book by book, the idiom improves, singing, laughing, thinking. “One must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star.”

McLean's diagnosis is spot on.

we have become the creature that both eats & is eaten, a night
forever completely devoid of ideas worth having or any
conceivable meaning/ / gormless Godot is drink again &
snoozing somewhere in the worthless heart of being
(temple destroyed)

here there echoes the cretinous giggle of the pornographer
priest with his active camera, his hymns to null & the absent…
there are no honest warriors left today
(face of the despot)

What perhaps even Deleuze in his aristocratic brilliance could not presage was the rise of the pornopticon which from priest to bureaucrat, from the Kremlin to the Pharmahouse, enable the States of the world, all together and without exception, to re-territorialize desires and ‘pervertize’ the young, tying their memories and developments to a morbid technology which handicaps sexuality and puts resistance to sleep in a nihilistic heaven where even the worst fanatics with furious machetes cannot escape their immediate return as cartoons. ‘the men who police thought are not actual policemen who/would hesitate to think, were this so much as possible in their/ debilitated condition, preferring to the lick the sweaty nipples of/ evil & devote themselves to a smarmy fascism//‘

In his most recent tome, McLean comes to terms with Deleuzian concepts in a 21st century world. The parabola of the boomerang of perversion is minutely plotted by McLean using the concepts and assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari as tool boxes. This is no mean feat and we must applaud vociferously, just as often laughing at the flippant tangles which the poet inextricably ties the reader into.

let’s axiomatize indeterminism
to make the crazies go away
& keep the right white faces in mental
heaven; there are shapes to show
maybe, we do not want to know them
mostly, forever sounds so lonely
you know, like nightmares
with nowhere to go
(of axioms & other monsters)

If Outside is Desire. If the Open is constantly recaptured by ‘answers provoked’ and twisted into a ‘smarmy fascism,’ leaving poetry the only right to destroy the ideology of the Inside and resist against the grotesque State machine, folding onto imbecility a simulacrum of a poem which can be read as both flippant self-indulgence and fulgurance and illumination, because both low and high culture, pornography and art, co-exist like the evil and the good sister in Bluebeard’s cave. The simulacrum so good, you tire to distinguish one from the other.

If all of the above, the desert? If Desire is the adolescence of thought, its necessary madness, its rites of possession, its myriad becomings, then the Desert is wisdom, becoming imperceptible, the right to breathe in words. Finally amid the One which is everything. Here is the Desert.

& it is the futile Peyote Dance resurrected again for all the
madmen hanging like bats from the rafters in some
disingenuous midnight temple. they have torn the scabs from
their arms to wall up the seven devils dead & eternally
protected accordingly, they are losing all their memories to be;
they are forgetting memory & learning to be // they want to be
everything but no body wants to be free

Rarely has such lucidity pinpointed the hypocrisies of Self and glorified selves in Collectives clamouring for Freedom and needing corpses and morals, when they haven’t been mad enough yet to see the futility in their madness, when they haven’t collected enough matter to find the Desert in themselves, in the cold North, where ingenuous temples grow for the night amid dunes of Nothing.

Who speaks desert speaks Nomad. But who knows society knows that ‘eyes are for spying with not seeing’ and that collective hope is an alias for suffering and ‘they are watching the children the prisoners the madmen in the distorting mirrors of this disgusting cunting panopticon’ and we are probably not ready to be nomad and we are probably not ready for Deleuze or Guattari or any of his one thousand distorted plateaux. Society is not worthy. It is just killing and destruction because the State ensure ‘they are born crippled,’ and ‘death is better than labour.’

Who reads this book knows hope is extraneous to matter. The physics of poetry, the immanence of the dissecting pen, imply the end of all forms of transcendence and a mockery of all their avatars. Difference and repetition of the whole history of poetry. ‘Structure is for vermin.’

I looked in vain for the Desert. I saw some animals passing the dunes. I spotted Artaud. I will keep an eye out for the nomads as i keep reading, backwards, inside out, dancing and laughing. There really is no need to be sad in this hell, because ‘the outsider comes undone.’

I heard some echoes.
I saw some footsteps.
I know the desert will burn again one day.

passion is dead flesh

Next comes a chapbook from Black Editions Press, passion is dead flesh. Here it is at Lulu, and here at Amazon, though out of print, allegedly. EDIT: Now back on Amazon.

Sen här finns den på Bokus, fast den ska vara slutsåld. Detta ska åtgärdas snart. RED: Har åtgärdats

Both these latter sites shall be fixed soon, but for now the bugger is still on sale at the above link at Lulu.

Here's the blurb:

this is about the positivity & pleasure that hides at the heart of all the pain & hatred like a red rose in the murderer's heart, according to Genet. it is about the shit at the heart of all literature, everything here from Myra Hindley to Bodhidharma, fuck you very much.

Anyway, here are two poems from the thing

corpses & holes

& world becomes corpses & holes, a terrible amphetamine we never even bothered waiting a maybe. here is refrigerator ineffable, vulgar the reflux. the sower is not an answer unwritten a chance or even an absence it is the terrible seed groping at nothing, incessant perversion their religion is. ghost is vegetable refreshing her missing things, where it was the dead woman lived. i have forgotten her the melancholy vampire sleeping her abyss inside me, here is blood enough and insipid dreams to be
 

blueberry orgasm

the road is blueberry orgasm, tiny suicide is smelly their heaven. the laboring saviors are broken again, boring. we have a wall to stare at once, like Bodhidharma did, but are less than him

the best of them were always already dead & nothing isto be forgiving or forgot where suns come up, where moons are in us still enough the bone is abject & smoke rising over a battlefield is pointless ecstasy we cannot appropriate as easily as fish burn in insolent waters poorly

there might be flowers or razors, abject their answers are, here is tepid absolution & fuck me a forgotten

i do not care that i do not know the number of insects, or even if it might be odd or even, specific boundaries might make it indeterminate, or heaven again, skin & sullen business so memories are sex & bruises, where i am my meaningless

 

Zara & the Ghost of Gertrude

My fourth full length from Oneiros Books. Here it is at Lulu, & here it is at Amazon, 110 pages for $10. 

Dessutom så finns boken till salu i Sverige här på Adlibris för 93 kr. 

The book is composed of poems that respond to more or less short quotes from Gertrude Stein that are innocent of any relation to the content or preoccupations of the poems. See this demonstrated below: it is indicative of a refreshing semantic contingency that lets poems reside in syntactic distress & fuck meaning.

serene length

A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it
(Gertrude Stein)

night falls the longest dress conceivable
all the indistinguishable, all cats a grayness
a sudden change of place, all cats grayness
shifting subtle shape

crackles because entropy is disparate
bastards, a dress is electric blue
memory forever/ they have outworn
their murder

only the black & the red are eternity
and smell like unsubtle sugar/ sutures
and sexuality/ where the face was put
the front of some skull & a selective

scent/ elective is not infinite affinities
but there is nothing we call death
in us, ever/ there is this longing/
the longest possible dress

guns and butter

A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous
ordinarily
(Gertrude Stein)

if everything were red it would be better/
animals that see different colors
or just none/

guns & an extent of ordinary butter
with nothing neglected;
and nothing with no red in it

means the same as living

repression

A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer,
clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected.
(Gertrude Stein)

it is innocence & capacious
raucous suffering smelling not at all under heaven/
a somnolent zombie smoking beside a railway track
turning memories back into facts/

or repressed impossible sexuality therapy
Fridays before they ever invented cake:
for there was nothing dead as yet/
no such thing as a face

Thanks to Dave Mitchell & Oneiros for doing the books & to Michael Mc Aloran for the cover art.

Now an awesome review & a monstrous admission. Sometimes we draw a huge blank. I have no idea who wrote this review, & would be grateful to be able to thank the writer of this erudite piece. 

“it is incomplete, one silence

and the luscious almost nothing coming
tickling the blood to acquiescence
and the breathless presence
of death, confusion, sex,
whatever it is coming next

and all our absences are adequate to us:
we are boring corners

where worlds come to touch”

David McLean, “Rumbling Nothing.”

The poem has a darkness which is also an accuracy. “We are boring corners / where worlds come to touch” is a very accurate statement. Notice how it has a certain precision of rhythm, with the emphasized stress overlapping the hard “o” sounds at “boring corners” and there is the very clear stressing at “come to touch,” “BAH buh BAH.” The content is at first glance, negative dark, truthful, minimal. It is not illusioned poetry. You can’t exactly say it is disillusioned, because he still writes. Someone who was absolutely disillusioned would not write poetry, would they? (or would they?).

The poem is one of a little series indicating a reading of Gertrude Stein. She always seemed very dry to me, I could never really “get” her, except as a catalyst for many other artists. Lew Welch wrote a thesis about Stein which I have never read, except for a bit of it here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/welch/from_stein.html. I think of Stein as, maybe, an example of what Oscar Wilde hypothesized as “the critic as poet.” Welch delves into that in his analysis of Stein. She is definitely a catalyst for artists.

“We are boring corners / where worlds come to touch” – so here, the self has become emptied-out and hollowed-out. But, it is also the place, where worlds come to touch.

It might be helpful to back out of all this and think about the general situation of the poet. That is, the general situation of someone, when he writes. It is a poem: therefore, the person has backed out of all instrumental use of words, all of those normal “prose” uses where the words dissolve into their purpose, where the words do not exist for us to look at them, but rather to look through them at what they are about, at the referent.

The poet, the person in that situation, has as it were, backed out of the normal word-use situation where the words dissolve into their use, and so now the acoustical and other properties of words as words, start to matter. Here, you can see this in the clearly marked rhythms, as well as the foregrounding of sound properties in places, as with the panoply of “o” sounds in the last two lines.

Also, by backing out of normal “prose” use, suddenly it places the poet, as thinker, in a very weird place. All of the stereotypical deep questions come up: why are we here? Is there a god? What is? What does “is” mean? Etc. Again this is related to how we have pulled back from words as a means to an end, we are no longer writing the words as part of an instruction manual on how to use a lawnmower or the like.

The poet’s situation: the thoughtful, reflective function of the mind, no longer dissolves into a particular task at hand.

McLean is typically an abstract poet when it comes to sensory imagery. However the poems while abstract still have strong emotional tone.

Somehow, he has encountered the topic of nihilism, of nothingness, of no-meaning, void, without leaving poetry. Other examples of this happening: Larkin, Gluck.

Other tonally similar: Ingmar Bergman.

Another one, called “they were forever”:

“they seemed to be a tremulous eternity,
these walking corpses hollowed out
by cruelty and memory,

as if a sadistic sculptor had deigned to touch them

once god was forgotten, as if morality depended on makers
and the threat of heaven;

they seemed to be evident eternity, these wicked
victims, gray skeletons and fragile fetuses of hurt
become sudden lonely ghosts, their hunger

our torture, the tiniest evil disease
crawling back at us from history

and loveless, an insistent want to touch:

they seemed to be tremendous eternity

and nothing much; they had suffered though
so we thought this enough,

memories and roses and dust”

We can see formal order here, and a nostalgia for formal order. By that I mean, here you have the three-line stanzas; you have the clear rhythmic marking of the lines, which is emphasized especially by the linebreaks; you have the very fact of the linebreaks; you have clearly foregrounded musical echoes and repetitions (e.g., the “y” in “cruelty and memory,” the “o” in “lonely ghosts”); also in this one you have the gradually building pressure of the one-sentence structure, demanding a resolution and conclusion, as is also demanded by the use of the by-itself last line. These devices are all traditional, in the sense of, we have seen them in poetry for a while. This poem like the others has this sense of a retinue of traditional devices, and a desire to write a poem, being brought up against a thoroughgoing nihilism, an undercutting doubt which itself invokes a tradition (Larkin, Bergman, Nietzsche, numerous others). However the nature of nihilism is that as Nietzsche noted it can be a historically creeping phenomenon, and the effect with McLean’s poems is like the nihilism has crept in even further, nothingness has established itself even more, and yet there are still these poems.

The poem lacks details but lack of detail is one of its themes. The emotional force of the poem is clear without detail. The poem though abstract is saying things quite specifically: words like “victims” and “fragile” and “tremendous” are very closely literally saying the pressurized emotional flow which the poem is. The poem is looking for tones aside of sadness and horror. The poem reflects a point of view which is looking at ultimate things. In detaching itself from prose use of words it has confronted a groundlessness, like a shocking insight where the presence of heaven or at least its solace as a faith was supposed to be. At the end of this poem, it is as if we crawl back through ghosts to the quasi-details of “roses” and “dust” – it is as if the void which is so close to the theme of Thanatos, hauls us away from things of this world. The dematerialized quality of the poetry relates to what it is about.

Why is it that such an acute experience of void has not snuffed out the poems? For whatever reason, it has not silenced the stream of poems.

Again notice how on the measuring-stick of concrete to abstract, the text is very abstract. This abstraction feels like a stylistic minimalism which is simply a case of the text staying true to the writer’s natural predilections and preferences. He is at the far end on the abstraction scale compared to where, say, Elizabeth Bishop, or imagist poets, or classical haiku poets, would be. Yet this minimalism, which constitutes a shadowy dissolution of objects and sense-images, seems to be very organically tied to the long serious stare at nothingness which is the overall tone of the poems.

His poems violate the core principles of imagism, to wit, no ideas but in things (the rule of thumb that a poem should catch the thing-detail in vivid sensory light). Of course, what it goes to show is that there is no particular principle or rule for poetry. The poems show that use of the sense-detail-image is simply one possible technique for the poem; just as in painting, abstraction is another.

It makes sense, that things are so minimized, so much removed, from these poems, given how much their theme is that removal.

In the case of Rilke, we had a poet who, realizing the fuzziness and mushiness of subjectivity and abstraction, threw himself into a crash-course on importing the thing, the sense-detail, the object into the poem. Thus we get his apprenticeship with the sculptor Rodin, and his very deliberate “thing-poems” such as “The Panther.”

With McLean, what you have is the exploration of method for writing poems which does not go back to the sense-detail, the image, the thing. But which at the same time, gives short shrift to the subject, the subjective (the self as nothing but a “boring corner”).

The poems offer an alternative to imagism.

Another one, “in their coffins” --

“in their coffins they seem to be grinning

because there is no time in them
and every memory is gone missing
to wherever it is the time goes
and where worlds used to be
they have gone to nighttime and non-being
and become nothing and free:
in their coffins they seem to be grinning
but they are not agents today
they have nothing to be;

they have lost the terrible blessing
that is passion and need”

Again notice the abstraction. The closest the poem gets to a sense-image is the grinning skulls in the coffins, but clearly this image is not being appropriated from direct observation in life. Rather, really it is once or twice deferred from life-observation, and it is more a literary conceit, an idea, a symbol (the grinning corpse) than a thing observed in nature. He does not paint from nature; he paints from his thoughts and emotions, which are dominated by the subject of death. It has been said that death is the grand subject of philosophy, and his poetry is close to philosophy.

The poems are allusive to Housman. Both the hints of song or ballad meter, and the hints of rhyme. The overall tone is definitely like Housman in its being equal parts morally civilized and colossally disillusioned. It is also like Thomas Hardy in having a certain determinism. However the poems typically speak from an impersonal and solitary zone as opposed to the miniature character studies and short stories and drama scenes of Hardy.

Phrases such as “terrible blessing” and “passion and need” can be read as allusions back to traditional rhetorics. It is as if the poems represent continuations of a tradition into a present moment which is even more disillusioned, more nihilism-confronted and nothingness-haunted, than before. Each poem always has this feel of being the first realization of this fresh shock of this new full realization, this fact of (for lack of a better word) death, which is always more radical than any idea of it, more chilling and painful than any prior conceptualization of it. There is a sense of trauma overloading the circuits, really a subject which is “too much” to be said; an overwhelming insight which chases away all subsidiary insights. (So it is in form of a poem because the prose version of this would be silence?) A phrase like “terrible blessing” differentiates the text from regular speech and links it back to prior exemplars, such as Yeats’ phrase “a terrible beauty is born.” The poem helps us remember the past, even as it denies any transcendental saving of the past.

(Nietzsche also conveyed that very well, that sense of western nihilism as something always more freshly, shockingly realized than before. In a sense his tonal journey was a series of holding actions against an insight which came more and more freshly until it jarred him from his own sanity.)

On the Dickinson-Whitman scale, McLean is over at the Dickinson end.

One gets the sense of a specific historical moment when reading his poems. It is the moment when a previously established and believed-in belief system is undercut by a nihilism. Nihilism achieves its scariness and darkness, when viewed in the context of a happy belief in presence which it replaces. Nietzsche wrote of how it is relative to the degradation and collapse of Christian religious belief structures, that nihilism gains its force. If one could fully forget the god-construct that the religion posits, then one might not feel the darkness of nihilism, because one would no longer feel like something has been removed. Nihilism for Nietzsche was like a vacuum created by the removal of Christianity: if the removal was far enough away that one did not feel the vacuum anymore, would one still feel the nihilism anymore?

(Compare western conceptions of void to the Zen Buddhist version. There are passages in Buddhism which have a sense like what Nietzsche’s “western nihilism” could be if they did not have the tremendous collapse and vacuum of the lost xtian system to deal with at the front end.)

One more, “drums and puppies” --

“drums and puppies fighting deadly serious
like one irresolute genuflection
and some dismal demiurge nowhere
all the gods running around being homeless
Rizlas and stupidity

because world is vacant paper

and no sky ever was angry
or even a substantial subject -
in the scholastic sense -
horrible hypokeimenon
where we swim listless like fish

this smoky dusty nothingness

where worlds live, drums
and angry puppies -
nothing to forgive”

“Rizlas” is a name for cigarette rolling papers. “Hypokeimenon” means “the underlying thing.” Here we see the dramatic power that occurs when details make it into the poem. The peculiar details – drums, puppies, rizlas, hypokeimenon – these are all the more noticeable, given as the default setting of these poems is minimal at the level of such things.

Where it says, “and no sky ever was angry / or even a substantial subject” – You can see here how the sensory barrenness or minimalism of the poems seems somehow to be necessary, somehow of a piece with what the poems are about. The skeptical inquiry as to the sky’s status as a “substantial object” is close to the core of these poems. The question, when the sky contains no god, is whether the sky can even contain itself any longer. McLean is hauntingly aware of “this smoky dusty nothingness.”

Precursors:

“SEYTON:

The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare, from Macbeth.

“As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

*What means all this?

*Death hangs over thee: whilst yet thou livest, whilst thou mayest, be good.

*Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.”

Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations.

of desire & the lesion that is the ego

Next comes this one, my third from Oneiros Books, based on a reading of Anti-Oedipus. Now, I am more inclined to write in terms of libidinal energy & its folds of perverse intensity than the philosophies of desire per se, but I like this idea too, anyway. These poems were actually better than I remembered them.

This book, of desire & the lesion that is the ego is here at Lulu.

We find it here at Amazon too. Och, som utlovad, här får vi köpa den på Bokus, i vanliga fall, fast den står nu som slutsåld. Återigen, ska detta åtgärdas så fort jag kan. Och då kommer den stå som tillgänglig på AdLibris med. EDIT: Nu finns boken tillbaka på Amazon

Blurb follows

Here are words to somewhat deconstruct your daily lives. McLean delivers sermons of a beautiful nothing(s) enriched by perceptions that pervasively cover the very lives you follow inanely day in, day out. He dissects the mundane and the superfluity of existence (if any) with a hacksaw and without much anaesthetic. His language is cutting, divisive, insightful, deploring, archaic but strong with a fleshy boldness that should and will be revered. David McLean seeks out the plastic and then tends to look underneath the plasticity of what man has made; the absurdity of god, the hilarity of societal values and the hypocritical agenda of righteous folk. The lesion of what McLean explores in this collection is indeed the nonsense that dominates us all whether aware or unaware however, after you read this blistering book, you’ll be sure to be angry at something in this dying world.
Craig Podmore (Author of The Origin of Manias, Oneiros Books)

 

Again, thanks to Michael Mc Aloran for the cover.

Here's some free samples, chosen at random.

indeterminate date of ever present death

it is indeterminate
so only a wicked old man with sharp swords
has all the answers,

cold as his fingers
he never touched with yet,
not with this flesh

straw and meaningless

You're a ghost on the highway
you're trash and meaningless
(The Gun Club)

and the honest rock we are
their words never moved an inch -
it remains this dreadful empty

skin shaking under sexual suns
and bowing down before nothing
their stupid forgiveness

is the inessential remembered -
not the decent murderer
and her dismembering:

this means nothing and no time
is left us, just one second
and it is heaven

stepping out

the ghosts have fallen outside where skin is
leaving the children we have never been
naked within us, a strange beast made of distances
and the insubstantial

staggering off to some scuzzy Bethlehem
to be ambitiously aborted, manky
matrix where little lives; and here is
meretricious potentiality, acne

and masturbation so dead god
is not even insane, just perverted
priests picking the flesh of children
from their dreamless teeth,

the ghosts are stepping out today
we are pretending not to live;
there is sufficient sin to simulate
and nothing to forgive

EDIT: Very grateful to Aad de Gids for the following review

of desire and the lesion that is the ego

review by Aad de Gids

the best yet rather difficult notion derived from:
Capitalisme et Schizophrenie I: L' Anti-Oedipe
Capitalisme et SchizophrenieII: Mille Plateaux,

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is, that there wasn't an ontology displayed here. here we found not a theory of being,a philosoohy of being,an art-text of being, rather a toolbox with elements of "what there is" (as such they summarized it), that left pretty much out all of the fucking theoremas about psychoanalyse, psychology, (conventional) sociology, (conventional) psychiatry, conclusivist Nietzscheanism. they said they were dead now, "we ourselves are already old", fuck them all and look at how all is suffused with machines of desire. dichotomy of sexuality is bullshit, there is a "microscopic transsexuality". instead of the "ego" (which is always Freud's ego,or Marx's,or Nietzsche's), we have a "pack of wolves". to system theoreticians they said: "there isn't a system that doesn't leak on all sides". with "corps sans organes", body without organs, they meant, avant la lettre, for instance Fukushima, Soudan, the machinations around (and from) Iran,this "multitude" of disinformation and profitist background politics of the elite countries (US, France, England, Germany, perhaps Japan, Russia and China) who fuck up the so called "news" (like the American conservatives do) and make it a sleek glacis upon which all falters and stumbles and get disdirectional and wrongly proportioned. this, in short about d-g.

David McLean is deeply informed by these insights, and has written a "hybrid" book filled with "postpostmodern" and "postpostpositivist" poems and longer text to again break the codes in the sense of really breaking all conventionalist and societal and poetic-theoretical, codes, even the poetic codes, to nevertheless come up with a formidable and fun and challenging book.

_______________________________________________

enfolded

we are enfolded in the broken wings of time
stretched sad pinions holding birth and nothing

together, resolute and useless we are this inutile
futility – raging and permanence imagined
like bizarre statues insane on a shore
where inadequate birds swim a sickness
over us

we are enfolded in the nothing the soul sweats
instead of love, nothing is as nothing does

_______________________________________________

i think the poems of David also do not found or postulate an ontology rather they point at "what there is" as i notably still remember in a poem of his an old computer standing in the surf. "meaning" somehow erodes here, while the artefacts do still hold contingent resemblances with objects that "define" our world now, or at least we assume they are defining us. i think David's poetry kind of sits in between this post-Adornean and post-Wittgensteinian position where they said, respectively: "um zu sagen, was sie nicht sagen kann, während es doch nur von der Kunst gesagt werden kann, indem sie es nicht sagt" and "wovon man nicht sprechen kann darüber soll man schweigen". i have always believed the ensharpened differences between these two adages in fact were overrated and one could detect a common ground here. there is definitely an affirmation of "world" in both and they wanted to make sure its expression wasn't fucked up. i think the poets of our generation do just that. we're not so much indebted anymore either to the old whores Freud-Nietzsche-Marx, nor to the somewhat newer theoreticians of the Frankfurter Schule, French post-structuralism or even Rorty-Apel-Searle-Habermas-Dennett-Žižek.

_____________________________________________

all the mad grannies

and it was all the mad grannies, dozing depressive at home and sewing psychosis, little mittens to cover the fingers that are not so very innocent today, and a strange fern smelling occidental and time travelers, the Victorian answer, guns and butter.

the houses are made of gray and tomorrow foreclosed by the nightmare wait of history. all the mad grannies chasing wicked cats that come through angles and corners, the homeless evil that needs bodies to be in it, essential freedom and all the generations hopeless psychosis needs to grow healthy enough to upset a doctor or some other moron, all the deep fried suicides and god in every little wooden box a granny's granny once forget when a more serious sort of history was, and the contracts are missing and absence. all the dead men and Christ in a sweaty sidecar riding sexy and erect beside them; all the mad grannies have Valium to believe in – they do not need men or gods or the superfluity that is feeling, they have overdosed on the weight of Being; they have drugs but they do not really seem to need them – anything is better than freedom

_____________________________________________

now, after David's sublime writing, it is obvious a lot of things became superfluous.
exactly this could be of weightless liberation,to have dumped all lexicological offal: "and the contracts are missing and absence. all the dead men and Christ in a sweaty sidecar riding sexy".

Things The Dead Say

They say all sorts of stuff, obviously, but  a few of their standard cliches are here. The book is here at Lulu, and also here at Amazon.

Som jag har tidigare hotat, här ska jag säga hur man ska köpa dem i Sverige, men Bokus påstår att denna är slutsåld och Adlibris hittar den inte. Ska åtgärda detta så fort jag orkar. Man kan beställa till Sverige genom Amazon i alla fall, eller allra helst Lulu ju.  RED: Här finns den på Adlibris nu.

The blurb says 

Love hate murder sex - the boiling down of western culture to its primitive urges, horror movies as the sublimation of our self-loathing, married to a critique of the 'society of the spectacle'. Powerful stuff. 

There are two sections about horror franchises, a section of "diverse poems" and a section of Bodhidharma poems. 

Here's a couple of pieces from the latter category. 

many dharmas

there are many dharmas
and none of them matter,
none but cleaning and slow reason
where there are eons between us
immeasurable,

night is a timely toilet
nothing sticks
 

they looked for god

they looked for god once
because they assumed a meaning
behind life, did not know
what the relevant questions were
for slightly defective epistemic
engines. they wanted a heaven
and resurrection and death,

or maybe just Nirvana,
but they did not know
when to let blood-stained
Buddha go, did not know
there is no eternity,
and the enlightened wise
live their pointless lives the same

after satori, down to the tiniest details,
they are just as thirsty for non-entity
as any sexy suicide, they did not notice
that nothing at all constitutes heaven
or Nirvana, smelling like razor blades
and bitter almonds or a bullet
in the stomach,

all that should count for humans
is fucking and love and knowing
what's happening - being smart
and happily finite rutting animals,
devils, or an enlightened person,
a saint - it's exactly the same thing,
living innocent and cruel

and selfish like children -
but they looked for god,
these healthy men
because inside them
they were pitiful, inside them
they were cripples, a world
that did not listen 

without seeing the silk

and we are cutting holes in space
following orders blind,
with the inebriated mindfulness of snails or priests
or any other policemen

swallowing the moral not: here are whole eternities
i have forgotten, stretched over a cold afternoon in ’77,
but fuck them as well - they have done being heaven;
without having seen our own silk

we are dead men, dead as them

nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die

I count this as effectively my first poetry full length, though there are, strictly speaking, three that precede it. Here is nobody wants to go to heaven, but everybody wants to die at Amazon, from Oneiros Books.

Som utlovats tidigare, här förekommer skiten på Adlibris i Svea Rike, där titeln klingar lite mindre jävla falskt, faktiskt. I synnerhet med en sådan svidande nerstängning av allt som vi bemötts av nu. Vem fan vill leva utan Mellandagsrean, liksom 👅😂 Samt så "rekommendationer" om ansiktsskydd. Herregud. Vem kan motstå statliga rekommendationer om kollektivtrafiken?

& here it is at Lulu, where it is nicer for me if you were to buy it. 

From the Amazon reviews

This is not poetry for people who like things simple and easy to understand. It is for readers who are prepared to work at it. A very dark view of life and death and all that goes between with no room for easy sentiments. This is cruel beauty.
Reuben Wooley

The poet David McLean strikes me as an aggressor. One whose power is to shrink himself when one is looking upward. While one yells at God, McLean whispers a speck of dust into a dog's water bowl and waits for the silence of God. I've used the words in this book often, and any story my narrator leaps from may begin and end as such
Barton Smock

So buy this book, the cover by Michael Mc Aloran is below, after three samples, added 10th February, 2021.