Procuring Poetry
after Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1945) after John Yau and Michael Palmer Charles Bernstein No fake verses about what’s going on.
No creation or death before poetry.
Compared to which, life’s a static sun,
with no heat or illumination.
Affinities, anniversaries, personal anecdotes – don’t matter.
No fake poetry with the body,
an excellent, complete and comfortable body – senseless for poetry.

Your spleen, your fits of pleasure or pain in the dark – make no difference.
Don’t share with me your feelings,
which reek of equivocation and beat around the bush.
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Lisa Kelly Ossuary

Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort

In the queue for the Catacombs only the cold
and cursing the kids for cajoling me into this
is keeping the contents of my guts from spilling.
Behind, two German teenagers cram croissants
into their mouths, and ahead the undead     
count out coins for entry into the underworld,
one-at-a-tortuous time down the spiral stairwell
we will eventually reach, just as I will eventually
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Andy Croft ‘I now believe that there is an absolute incompatibility between art and private property.’
John Berger

I HAVE NEVER SEEN so many people at a poetry festival, so many television cameras – or so many Kalashnikovs. Two years ago I was in the southern Iraqi city of Basra with my friend the poet Amarjit Chandan. We were guests of the Iraqi Writers Union for the thirteenth annual Al-Marbed International Poetry Festival.

Dedicated to the late Iraqi poet and communist Mehdi Mohammad Ali, the festival attracted almost a hundred poets, amateurs and professionals, from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Kuwait, Sudan, Iraq, Assyria, Lebanon, Syria and the Iraqi diaspora scattered across the world.

During a week of readings and debates, poetry and music, we visited the birthplace of Basra’s most famous poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, as well as ... read more