"Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother" at Amazon.

Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother is now on sale at UK Amazon at this link. It is also available from US Amazon. See the post below for further details.

This is the latest book in McLean's series about aspects of goddess, & Lamaštû is, together with Maa Kali & Tiamat, one of the three aspects that he regards as most primal. The next will probably be about Tiamat. As always there is a lengthy prose introduction before the poems.

The depiction of Lamaštû in popular fiction & films for the great unwashed is as offensive as the scurrilous lies told about Lilītu by the devotees of the patriarchal "gods".

But Lamaštû is a primal Mesopotamian goddess who was seen as being tasked with curbing human hubris. McLean sees Her as the form of Dark Mother most suited to the modern age, when population needs to be controlled & humanism & human narcissism need to be stamped out.

Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother

Here is Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother, my new book in the series about various aspects of goddess, Dark Mother, Kali Maa, &  this volume is about Lamaštû. It is available direct from Lulu at this link, & will be available from Amazon & other corporate whores soon enough. Blurb & cover follow, as is my wont.

Edit: I have received & approved the proof for this today the 29th of January. It will be available from Amazon etc soon enough. It looks good.

This is the latest book in McLean's series about aspects of goddess, & Lamaštû is, together with Maa Kali & Tiamat, one of the three aspects that he regards as most primal. The next will probably be about Tiamat. As always there is a lengthy prose introduction before the poems.

The depiction of Lamaštû in popular fiction & films for the great unwashed is as offensive as the scurrilous lies told about Lilītu by the devotees of the patriarchal "gods".

But Lamaštû is a primal Mesopotamian goddess who was seen as being tasked with curbing human hubris. McLean sees Her as the form of Dark Mother most suited to the modern age, when population needs to be controlled & humanism & human narcissism need to be stamped out.

 

 

"tundra" by Tanya Rakh on Amazon

The new book by Tanya Rakh has reached Amazon. It's on sale at this link for Amazon USA, & at this one for Amazon UK. See the post below for my introduction & further information.

Amazon, being corporate scumbags, don't pay very well. So, if you prefer the artist, Tanya, to make a little more for her work, please consider buying from Lulu, at this link. They at least pay acceptable royalties, though the price is forced up by Amazon.  

"tundra", by Tanya Rakh

It is enormously gratifying that a new book, tundra, by Tanya Rakh is now available from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, with a brief introduction by me. The book is fifty numbered pages, & includes Tanya's own illustrations & cover art. I might as well post my introduction below, after the cover. 

The book is available direct at this link, & the proof has been approved so the book is coming to online sites like Amazon shortly. Feel free to buy direct though, because Lulu pay authors much more than Amazon & other major booksellers.

 

It is gratifying to publish this present volume by Tanya Rakh, a short collection of poems called tundra.

For reasons that I have elsewhere described at great length, it is not possible to capture intensity & fire in the drab garb of the natural languages, but it is undoubtedly possible to adumbrate them via negativa, or to hint at them as the unnameable that hides within the interstices of the text.

that’s the secret
you can paint
with the other side
(“quill”)

As I have previously written of Rakh, this focus on fire & intensity, on all varieties of passion, means that she produces Dichtung, not Poesie: the work thereby belongs to & reveals earth as it pertains to beast & goddess, not the paltry human world, the scientific world that relies on commensurability to describe everything in terms of quality & quantity, a world blind to intensity.

It is also most gratifying to me to note that this book clearly touches on the eternal return, & does so in a way that is entirely compatible with my own Deleuzian understanding of Nietzsche & the selective, as it were, nature of the divine attention:

yes, it’s always the end, we finally make it and the wind picks up and the mountains peel back to beginning again. how do we stay? what imprints are left after the blood tide? after all these planets close their eyes?

nothing but this, love. a wide-eyed sea. all screaming ghosts of sun flesh swimming through the open dream. a sky arched over water. soft lights twinkling past the edge of a century.

As the above quote illustrates, it is only intensity that is ultimately real, because the energy that constantly emanates from goddess to fuel this illusion that it pleases Her to construct is ultimately fire - it is the eternal & infinite fecundity that quantum physics shows is always already there instead of the grotesque & imaginary void that torments the imagination of the weak & reactive. It is always fang & fury & pain, & this is obviously nothing other than love.

The poem “sulfur” is perhaps the closest this book comes to the Mesopotamian understanding of primal goddess:

I cry my soul
into seven ancient rivers

each opens the mouth
of a burning star—

a sulfur world
that breathes our language

If that isn’t redolent of Lamaštû, the seven witches, then I don’t know who screams in the night or why.

"Laying Flowers on the Boundary" by Carolyn Srygley Moore

Delighted to announce a new book of poems by Carolyn Srygley Moore at Posthuman Poetry & Prose. It is now on sale at this link & the proof has been approved so it will appear on Amazon soon.  Laying Flowers on the Boundary costs $10, €10, or £8.

EDIT: After much buggering about, it is now here on bloody Amazon.  Here it is at USA Amazon too.

As I say in the blurb, this is definitely some of her best work, & Carolyn & I did a good job preparing it, I think. The poems adumbrate a fundamentally aesthetic stance that is innately moral, since moral development is largely based upon aesthetic considerations, & a poem can itself perform a small scale transvaluation. Discriminations are empty & serve to strengthen the insistent falsification that is Maya, & inspiration is arbitrary, so the sense of an aleatory & random imaginary is a great strength of this book. Generally goddess does not care for American writers, because of their tendency to narcissism, but She thinks it's alright for me to publish this & Carolyn's previous here, For All of My Beautiful Ghosts.

The cover, featuring Carolyn's photography & designed by me, is below. I endorse this book.

 

Four samples from "Lalita drinks too much"

As usual I post here a few poems as samples from the latest. Here it is at Lulu. Amazon link coming later.

"Global Trumpeter" interview

Here, at this link an interview I did for Global Trumpeter, a digital magazine from Delhi, where I am nothing like as controversial as I can be, for some reason. Horrid picture of me, of course, especially since it was taken before I recently started lifting weights again. 

Anyway, here's my Amazon UK page, where some offers are available. Here's the US Amazon page, with more detail.

 

New book by Carolyn Srygley Moore

 We all have a past, Watson. Ghosts. They are the shadows that define our every sunny day.

// Sherlock Holmes;
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

We have just completed a book called For All of My Beautiful Ghosts by awesome American poet Carolyn Srygley Moore. Carolyn actually writes real poems, which is enormously unusual nowadays, & we have done this book for her with higher quality coloured ink for the 177 numbered pages, since it also contains photos.

EDIT: It printed fine &, after final edits, here it is at Lulu, For All of My Beautiful Ghosts. Because of the ink, it's more expensive, though, to cut costs for the buyer, we did at first not sell it from corporate scumbags Amazon we have now made it more expensive & moved it to distribution through Amazon. This is because people are prepared to purchase it there, & evidently prefer to spend more rather than less. The Amazon link is here & the book is now available there. I would prefer that you buy it from Lulu though, since this gives Carolyn a lot more money, ten times more, because Amazon are bloody robber barons, & she deserves it.

I shall almost certainly review it later, but I am currently reading about Kali Maa & finishing my book about Her as primal goddess in the Mahavidyas. Carolyn sets a bloody high bar for me with her wonderful book, but I want it to be my best ever.

Cover, featuring a collage by Carolyn herself, & my blurb follow:

Posthuman Poetry & Prose is delighted to release this book of poems by Carolyn Srygley Moore, a poet & artist resident in New York State.

These poems tell a life, & they are of ghosts in the sense that what one relates to is ghostly; it is the poematic impulse, which is to capture the past, to prove that it was real & that it still is, to produce "a photograph of the feast in mourning", as Derrida so aptly puts it, so there is always poem when the ghosts fade at sunset & earth is there, sustaining the futility that is world.

"Alien Songs" by Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru

Delighted to announce the arrival of a book of duets by Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. The poems in Alien Songs, on sale here, & on sale here at Amazon, are of the posthuman diaspora that learns to survive beyond identity. Only the divergent returns. Only what is "alien", in the sense of estranged from humanist traditions, only what is Dionysian individuation - not the I, the self, & their identity - will be validated by the posthuman naissance that celebrates the chaos of the eternal return, where the subject is the Other, & alienated, in principle, from its "self" by the Kantian "Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of 'I think' includ[ing] in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other." (Deleuze). The chaosmos goddess creates is anarchic; identities are weak, they do not return. 

& poetry just is a nostalgia for presence, for simple self-identity, for all the substantial constructs, or so Derrida tells us. But poetry needs to be the inarticulate cry of intensity, the indeterminate, that which is not concealed behind a name or a face  but dances its passion in the flame & naked. Poetry needs to capture this, per impossibile - it might scream to that which throbs an instant in the meat & cannot be measured against anything. Otherwise things play real when you look at them & words grow into unreliable maps & forget what stars there are.

Though I publish others on an occasional basis, Tanya is basically the other half of posthuman poetry, & when I return to goddess it is my hope that she will take it over. It is a privilege to publish all of her previous & forthcoming work, & a delight to see how seamless this collaboration with Ndotono is.

Tanya & Ndotono wrote this intro

Alien Songs is a fully collaborative collection of duets in verse. These duets each stand alone as individual pieces, but also join together to create an amalgamated star atlas for a breathing and multitextured extraterrestrial world.

Each of our songs embodies an aspect of this world—some echo an element, others an organ, yet others a phenomena of nature—and there are many more totems to explore. All of these pieces, separately and combined, are calls to a connection beyond the confines of everyday space and time, the heavy matter of humanity.

While the maladjusted soul may not be able to easily drag its accompanying body off this planet for a spell, it can dissolve for a while between astral wind currents when the right words are sung. These duets are incantations, oracles, scribblings on the walls of the heart. By reading them, we hope all lonely Aliens can catch a few glimmers of their home stars.

Tanya Rakh and Ndotono Waweru

The book is absolutely amazing, & the cover is below, with thanks to the brilliant photographer Shaina Sterrett for letting us use her image. Here is Shaina's Instagram where she shares her art.

Here is a sample poem online at Spillwords at this link. Alien Songs is on sale at this link. it can also be found on Amazon at this link. Note that it is better for the writers if you buy direct from Lulu.

I am looking forward to the publication of Tanya Rakh's ghost fractals soon, goddess willing. There will also be a book of visual poetry, vispo, coming from Tanya too, this will be printed with quality paper & ink, everything you do to the moon. It will be awesome.

Lulu spotlight

Here is the Lulu spotlight for Posthuman Poetry & Prose. These are the books I have available, as well as books by Tanya Rakh, Carolyn Srygley Mooore, & Linnet Phoenix, here at this link. There is now also a collaboration between Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru. Lulu charge postage, unlike Prime, but this has become much more reasonable than it used to be.

All my extant books from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & some other places earlier, are there. There are three novels, all fairly weird, basically anti-novels. There are several chapbooks, & a considerable number of books of poetry. 

Themes in the books range from antinatalist & posthumanist manifestos, discussions of cPTSD & trauma, the goddesses Tiamat, Lilītu, Lamaštû, & Kali Maa, the great mother, becomings_animal, the beast, sexuality, BDSM, love, libidinal economy, the incommensurability of intensity, anarchism, diverse inequities, & psychiatric fascism. I am indebted to Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault, Mother Juliana of Norwich, Gertrude Stein, Derrida, & others for inspiration. 

More books by me are due in the future, & all the future works by Tanya Rakh, who is half of Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & occasional books by some others in the future.

As you may know, Amazon are sleazy & try to prevent unionization so they can carry on treating their workers like shit. They also, in my case at least, frequently list books from the wrong places, like Book depository, so you have to find the Amazon version yourself. As noted, it is way better if you buy them from here, unless relying on prime for shipping. In any case, Lulu are not quite as expensive for shipping as they used to be.

Samples from "goddess gives sun enough"

EDIT: This book is now on sale here at Lulu, Amazon too. This link is to UK Amazon. This link is to US amazon.com.

I have a new book of poems forthcoming soon, the first since moving to the UK, which will be available for sale once I have seen the proof. By me, David C. McLean, from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, goddess gives sun enough. Five samples & cover below. I shall update this post once I have seen the physical cover & made the book available for sale. 

Blurb follows, then cover:

This book is the first written since McLean returned to England in 2022 , & follows a series of books of love poetry. As such, it shows an attempt to reorient to a life that is meaningful because of earth, nature, beast, & goddess, without any focus for the sexuality with which the flesh, as such, is instinct, & without any sense of social connection. The intensity differs thereby in its focus, though some themes are retained. These are poems about living on, & trusting in the goddess to give the fire & the words one needs to live & feel.

 

"Post-ed on Your Mirror", by Linnet Phoenix

We are delighted to announce the impending release of Post-ed on Your Mirror, by Linnet Phoenix. This book is based around a series of short form poems that Linnet previously posted on social media, &, in the case of a few of the poems, in some online & print publications.

I edited & produced this book for Linnet; she took all the photographs, & I designed the cover. This book is much more expensive to print than others that we have done; it is on better paper & in color, because I designed it to follow her idea of what it should look like, with image watermarks. For this reason, it is at first only going to be available on Lulu in order to keep the price down as far as possible.

Here at this link is Linnet's blog. & here below is the cover.

 

 

"down in the dirt"

Two poems at down in the dirt.

Both about muse Emma

Here is one.

Here the other.

There is now an anthology featuring all writers & artists in the issue on sale here. The cover is below.

 

Review of Urban Mustang, by Linnet Phoenix

I no longer like to do reviews, unless I particularly want to, so here is one, of Urban Mustang, the first full length poetry collection by Linnet Phoenix, from Impspired.  

Review of Urban Mustang
by Linnet Phoenix
published by Impspired
Urban Mustang on Amazon.

This new collection by English poet Linnet Phoenix, her first full-length anthology, is centered around poems that relate as much to nature as they do to her life, & many poems have as their setting the United States of America; hence the title, which also relates to her interest in horses. It shows the poet encountering the USA, an awareness of its nature, as part of the same nature as is the England depicted elsewhere in the book, & perhaps a heightened sense of her own import & value.

The poet uses a singularly attractive voice in this volume, not only describing the interpersonal world but the natural earth & its animals, frequently resorting to artfully & unusually matched pairs of words that she hyphenates, creating an effect that reminds me of Gerard Manley-Hopkins. This in itself makes Linnet superior to the vast majority of her contemporaries. (Manley-Hopkins went to my old college, by the way, which sort of compensates one for BoJo. Swinburne did too, so Balliol attracts the deviants.)

I feel a laughter,
a grip-growl
touch of gymnast,
hand-standing tall
about to let go.

(From “Lightning Bugs”)

The poems reveal a keen sense of nature, as noted, & there are many poems that do not have anything beyond this awareness & observation of the natural world as their apparent surface theme. There are, however, many that instead appear to have a romantic interest as their underlying theme.

Since Linnet is an equestrian, as noted above, horses provide a focus for her interest, even in the title of the book, & this is part of the American mythology, which relates the focus on the natural to the broadly American setting for much of the book.

The poems that relate to the interpersonal aspect are powerful though, with things generally seen in retrospect & depicted in a bitter-sweet fashion.

Beneath the northern stars
we danced in your snow
in my night lantern gloaming.

When lit by your spirit
I was a momentary queen,
a beautiful shotgun smile.

Our lives as magnolia petals
bloom before they fall.
I'm glad I caught the chance.

(From “This Dance”)

The horse poems are particularly strong, and there are several references, here one about a panicked young stallion, Caesar, where the language tenses itself, taut & intense, to match the passion of the agitated three-year-old horse.

Like a lithe gymnast, his muscles held taut,
he fought us, his dark eyes wild with fear,
adrenaline surging. Veins stood out stark
against the foaming white tide of sweat.

Never have I seen such beauty in anguish.
Powerful high stepping pride, ripped anger
fighting the fear of being trapped or tamed.
He had more to prove standing his ground.

(From “Caesar”) 

Maybe the relationship to Manley-Hopkins is connected to this, the sensitivity to animals in nature. Manley-Hopkins wrote of the Heraclitean fire that is nature during the Victorian Era, when cultural & societal themes were prevalent in the execrable poetry of his day. Just so Linnet, as she stands ecstatic before the execrable poetry of her day. Compounding words, as Linnet does, & the unconventional use of language relate the two writers further. If there are rhymes, these are often internal; again, proving my point. Manley-Hopkins was a Victorian poet who was to all intents & purposes a romantic poet, Linnet is a modern poet who relates to an earlier set of standards for writing poetry. Again, they are both anachronistic in that sense. Being is what poetry reveals, or should, so Heidegger tells us, & this is what happens here: we are presented with the reality of Caesar's terror, of the earth around & under us, the heavens above. Because Linnet's poetry is motivated by Dichtung, the opening up that prepares the soul to receive Being & its Otherness, the "poetizing" that precedes the event of any art, she is one of the few poets who will be published in the future by Posthuman Poetry & Prose.

For these reasons, Linnet’s poetry is unusual in the modern context, & this is part of its strength. It is not poetry that one would describe in the sad macho terms so often used to describe poetry, usually very inappropriately - "Kick ass", or whatever. It does not fit in to preconceived formulae for the construction of poems (“it’s cool to be an epigone”), & this constitutes its strength & its beauty.

I foresee a great future for Linnet Phoenix, & am pleased to be mentioned in the credits for this book in recognition of my mastery of the arcane art of spelling, & that sort of thing.

Here the book is anyway, & here the poet's Amazon page.

"Hydrogen Sofi" by Tanya Rakh

As noted in the previous post, we are re-releasing the books that Tanya Rakh (a Libra & a credit to that sign) previously did elsewhere along with her future work at Posthuman Poetry & Prose. 

EDIT: To the greater glory of poet Tanya, & even of me, the designer, we have produced a new cover. This is up now. The image below is the new one, & way nicer. I have also done the cover for Wildflower Hell, which is good to go soon, & huge thanks to Rob Plath for permission to use his awesome erotic shot of a pollen drenched bee flourishing her some flowers.

Here is HYDROGEN SOFI at this link. EDIT: Here Sofi is on Amazon.

This book is a huge tribute to the goddess & the beauty of the musal function that she institutes for us, where this applies regardless of the actuality of the real muse, Sofi. It relates to the becomings of Deleuze & Guattari, where the poet becomes a pack, just as one never becomes a solitary animal. (When I say "poet", I mean rather the person who writes poems, & I here remind the reader of Dichtung & Poesie as they are differentiated by Heidegger, &, seriously, fuck "poetry". Did you know, gentle reader, that some sons of whores translate Dichtung as "poesy"? Can you imagine a less appropriate translation?) The "poet" becomes the love & the relationship between the parties, which are both parts of her. Thus the book narrates a "becoming-Sofi" in the damp decay of a cityscape, a fictional union as real as any other. (The pigeons do not want us to say any of this. At some point in everybody's becoming they must stop listening to the pigeons & heed the song of the seagulls.

This book is exceptional through the absence of any actual Sofi, since this highlights a real problem. The Other is constructed in general on the basis of egomimesis, according to an image of the beloved self, which lurks behind the myth of empathy, & all the beetles in all the fucking boxes, all frenetically cancelling out, everything real "divided by zero". Walk a mile in my shoes & you'll get athlete's foot, as Killdozer put it. But Sofi is more real than most characters in memoirs, more real than most actualized characters with whom I ever interacted. This is both a tribute to the splendid fertility of the madness that is Tanya, & also an indictment of the generic & slipshod construction of the Other.

Poesie is of the damn "poetic text". Poesie is seldom really the site of Dichtung, which is the poetic impulse to thought, the opening of thought to Being, & that which aligns real poetry (also Dichtung) with philosophy. It is the origin of thought, it is adumbrated in the play of identity and Otherness that constitutes the narrator/Sofi as real persons. This is why I am happy to publish Tanya, because Being itself plays in her texts, because she is a clearing, a place for the opening of truth. The universal truth of being becomes particular in some Chicago/Paris that never was, fuck the details, & art is dependent on Dichtung ("poetizing") qua the happening of truth, the same happening that projects these characters in their original leap into Being that makes the world of Sofi more real than alleged Gothenburg outside this window here right now.) But there are seagulls here in Gothenburg, some fine seagulls here, & they open up for me the whole of Earth. 

It is a testimony to Tanya's strength that she survived the writing of this book, where she herself creates the one that creates her. 

To return now to the book at hand, we post an Amazon review here, then the cover.

Tanya Rakh’s poetry is audacious and galvanizing. She speaks words that are the cotton candy melting on the pages in a lavender sky. Her ways of spinning luminous verse guide the reader through effervescent forests, sometimes seeming frightening, only to pull you back to safety and calm with her ardent sincerity and candid vulnerability. Rakh reaches depths of swirling cosmic oceans and the still waters of complete tranquility, all the while allowing you into parts of her that feel like dipping your feet into her personal diary of a man-made pond, tossing in countless pennies, where wish after wish seem to go unnoticed.

Hydrogen Sofi is an effulgent whisper, picturesque with such breathtakingly ravishing songs. This book makes feelings twist and turn up liquefying, marble, spiral staircases, like walking slowly on quicksand, in which you just must let yourself sink. It takes emotions yet to be named or felt and drags them through dusty trails hidden on the highest of mountains while allowing you to swim through mercury and emerge safely somehow. You will hold your breath at times.

I’ve never read any other poetry as fierce and raw with so much naked purity as Tanya Rakh’s. Hydrogen Sofi is a touch. It’s a flavor. A mood, a vibe, a taste, a smell, an image splattered on a canvas vibrating against a humid Summer sky and skipping like a stone over a lost creek where magic grows.

This book will change the way you look at poetry. There’s no way to describe it without reading it and dedicating your own poem to the book itself.

down in the dirt

I have not submitted to zines for a long time, but a couple of poems are due in the December 2021 issue of Down in the dirt, "baby girl wears permanent today" & "broken clock". Both are in one of the latest ones for Emma. Actually in the forthcoming she who leads the ghosts home. The zine is due out on the 1st of December anyway.

 

 

 

because the stars say so

New from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, because the stars say so, previously fourth part of the "poems for Emma" series & now one of the two that I have retained, is now out & on sale at this link. Blurb follows. $12 or £10 for 169 pp is not bad. It is also on Amazon here.

"This is the fourth book in the "poems for Emma" series. It is love poetry, but also songs of praise to the fire & the goddess. This book contains poems with epigraphs drawn from the marvelous books of Tanya Rakh, to whom McLean is indebted for inspiration. McLean is also heavily indebted to Emma for being his perfect muse."

See the post below this one for links to Tanya's books. The cover is below. Samples will be posted in a day or two, I am sure.  

There is more religious stuff in this book, of the goddess, Mother Juliana & her (partial) misgendering of the goddess, past lives, BDSM, eroticism, Lyotard & the libidinal, the eternal return & affirmation, Deleuze & Guattari & becomings animal, & various other things. It's the book by me that I like best.

sample from "we dance the ghost"

I often post samples from forthcoming collections. This is from we dance the ghost, Emma, from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. This is probably not even close to being my best work or the best in the book, but it was the first I noticed.

& now here it is at Lulu. Trilogy complete.

How MMA Writes, a section from certain observations by Aad de Gids

A post by Aad de Gids, HOW MMA WRITES. LEE KWO, AAD GID, DAVID MCLEAN, of which I share here the section about me, having been obliged to correct Facebook's challenging formatting. I would only observe that I have adopted a new and more positive point of view recently.

Here is CODE #4 TEXTS, a collaboration by Aad & Michael Mc Aloran

Acryl Lacquer Lost in the Forest by Aad de Gids is here at Bone Orchard Poetry.

 

poetry of disdelusion DAVID C. MCLEAN

all vignettes of classicism,and then a new one. the derivational poetry of what it all not is, leaves us piquant poems unveiling dead centers. often a bit fucked up as plazas. David Mclean's poetry spurs toward such comments. his poems are concentrated lemmata in which a certain, or two, "truisms" "get's it", can get it. and it gets it. all confessionalism, thought of an afterlife, heaven or hell, the thought or idea of a god, even of spirituality, of solidity, are all heavily under fire or yet, refinedly attacked with arsenic and mould. hell rather is the here and now. only however when the heavily ecclesiastically burdened notion is bereft of all that: what belief and faith and confession have made of the world. the poetry of david is certainly post-Inquisitional,if this means all the fucking christian notions and lexicological or exegetical acribic bullshit is cut out of it. perhaps there is even a new inquisitional impulse here. it is the never ceasing curiosity about which moronic actions the society has entangled itself into now,again. if belieflessness acquires contours of zealousness it is also thrown into the dustbin of no return.

perhaps this could be an idiosyncratic feature of the poetry of david mclean. at first sight, also after having read more poems of david,one could be tempted to place the topology of his poetry within the ideological-postideological-nonideological cloud of nihilism, ascetism, logicism, antitheology, agnosticism, fatalism, hermetism, antipoetry, postpostmodernism, postironicism, neoclassicism, flarf, antiflarf, anhedonism, deathpoetry, poetry of the endworld, antihumanist poetry, posthumane poetry, poetry of the dead socius, poetry of the psychotic socius. i think it is all of this and more,yet to name but one of the above monikers as the exhaustive declarative clausule would be excreted by the poetry itself, and, asap. and this abjective reflex seems an idiosyncratic impulse in the poetry of david. an abhorrence of the mundanest things of the world where they show their mediatic poise: as "élan vital", as a vitalistic yet presumptuous assertion of what is often or and generally thought to be the regulative of the conventional and correctional societal mechanisms as eversomuch "motors" keeping our fucking economy together thereby ruining our fucking ecology as these in accumulative measurements is antropofected detrimental to all other livelihoods on the planet. this, would never be entamised as such in davids poetry yet can be easily derived as one of the major factors driving his poetry. then now we shall leave it at this abhorrence.

the poetry itself is written in an impeccable style of often mere global assertions, or, lighter, hunches, with which the poems softly begin,and weaving further on these introductive sketches, we are launched along almost atmospheric trajectories, whereby the following assertions each time annihilate the latest one, so that we perhaps hover within a certain nihilist realm, yet if this was said to be the solid regulative of these poems, david would minutiously make clear that perhaps in our perception may lie a nihilism dormant, but that he preferably shuns any "isms", and leave us with these consecutive derivative denunciations of overly happy-merry-systemy-styley-schooly pinpoints yet that his, this poetry rather resorts under, well, under nothing really, this not a devaluation of any sorts and if it is paradoxical that such poetry with that haughty of onset in any which way shall keep puking on whatever system or unsystem, then that is o.k.

the dead travel insanity

safely, this distorted world
is twisted faces
and no sense of location;

it is flux and nipples,
death and the living waiting
we are: memory and empty
falling too far,

it is remarkable that we could take almost any quote out of david mcleans poetry and we then have a prism, representative, immediately,of the lucidity and at once (david put the plugs in your ears) a kind of mysticism, of, "what there is", and it is kind of an endgame, hilarious more than tragic even if it is tragic, this, all so masterly written is nothing more than a wonder. yet nothing divine!

 

 

 

from "ghosts go home", next book after "pig correspondence"

I am still writing and include here a sneak preview from a future book. I do it as a couple of probably illegible images of freshly written things, just to be an asshole. It is a plausible year now, or whatever they say. Last year was a year that was weird, then grew weirder, but ended with my coming home, in many senses.