Photo: Erik Fitzpatrick
A native Californian, I relocated to London with my English wife last spring. Since it costs as much or more to ship a book that distance as it does to buy one new, we downsized considerably. I wrote a brief summary on the We Wanted to be Writers blog of the those precious few books that made the trip, and why.
Snow fell across London last night. We used a 5th-century plainsong (“A Solis Ortus Cardine”) and before-and-after photographs from the woods behind our house as the basis for a new film-poem.
On my way out the door this morning, I nearly stomped on a thin letter posted through the mail slot bearing the logo of Pushcart Press and notifying me that I have been nominated by one or more members of the Board of Contributing Editors for the 2011 Prize. I recognise a number of the names on the Board, and am deeply honored to be considered again this year. Last year one of my poems was nominated by Paul Fericano of The Broadsider. This year, I will once again be watching out for the announcement list, but this time from across the Atlantic. Between this good news, and layers of snow dusting London tonight, it has been quite a special day.
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.”
Six is my favourite number. It is the number of years between my younger sister and me. It looks like the lovechild of zero and “C”. The only single digit that is divisible by two as well as three, it seems to encompass both even and odd with a swirling, round-bottomed equanimity.
This tadpole, half of a yin-yang symbol, is also the number for idealists. Six years ago today, I counted myself among them when our son was born. I was determined to be the ideal father to an ideal son. Three days, eight hours and forty minutes later, when the doctor pronounced him dead, that idealism shattered, not by twos and threes, but into innumerable pieces.
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This evening, we collaborated on another film-poem. We live near the end of the Northern Line, and our evenings are pleasantly haunted by the sound of the train.
Readers will know I don’t generally consider myself a long poem poet. At the T.S. Eliot Shortlist Reading last weekend, Sean O’Brien remarked that one of the most dreaded phrases in a poetry reading is (said darkly), “and now for something longer.” Recalling this, I descended the stairs of the brutalist Barbican Theater into the music library, recalling the Vogon dungeon from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the protagonist is forced to listen to the “third worst poetry in the universe” as torture.
Fortunately, owing to great variety, imagination, and craft, the evening was anything but a Vogon experience. I was pleased to read my own poem, “In Pieces”, after The Lewis Chessmen, alongside nearly a dozen others. Continue reading
From the window of my office in Holborn, I watch the changing light of the London skyline with fascination.
Yesterday, with the help of an iPhone app, I propped my phone by the window for several hours and set it to take pictures six times per minute. I composited these images into video at 24 frames per second using Quicktime, then looped the clip back-and-forth, adjusted the colour, and added a panning and zooming effect using iMovie.
Valerie and I collaborated this morning on some accompanying words and music, combining it all together into another film-poem.
This evening, Valerie and I collaborated on our first film-poem. She wrote an excellent summary of the process on her own website. Here is the video and the poem:
“How can I tell what I think ’till I see what I say?”
Once again, I have taken a look over the past year, and selected one post from each month that stood out in some way.
January: The Fifth Year
Today, I said goodbye two our two-year-old Australian nephew, not sure when we will see him again. As we near the sixth anniversary of our son’s birth and death, I realise how far we have come, not only geographically, but psychologically as well. Passing the fifth year was a milestone for us.
February: Human Shade
In February, my debut short collection Human Shade was published by Lost Horse Press in America. It was extremely heartening to see so many orders arrive in such a short time. I brought a few copies with me to England.
March: London Calling
In March, we made the decision to move to London. Having lived my entire life in California, I had no idea just what a leap this would be for me.
April: Adieu, America
In April, I said goodbye to America, but not to being an American. In fact, living here, I have never felt so American as I do now. My father also bid me farewell in a very special way.
May: Through the Looking Glass
In May, we arrived with just our suitcases. We had one week to find a place to live before the start of my new job. After the whirlwind subsided, I began to feel like Alice, down the rabbit hole in a world that only superficially resembled the one I had known.
June: Notes on Contemporary British Poetry
In June, I began to take advantage of my circumstances by way of comparative Anglo-American poetics. So began an effort to overcome what I have deemed “poetic culture shock“–and come to understand the subtle differences between British and American poetry.
July: Discovering an Artistic Ancestor
In July, I discovered a remarkable book by another poet named Peake, which had a profound effect on me.
August: The Nature of Peace
In August, the London riots exploded not far from our home while we were on holiday in Wales with my parents. The contrast prompted this meditation.
September: An American Werewolf in London
In September, I began to put my finger on the sense of otherness that had been haunting me, and let myself howl a bit at the moon.
October: “On Being Straight (A Thought Experiment)“
I wrote this piece in October, and within a short span of time my “thought experiment” turning the tables on identity politics had received over 95,000 views on StumbleUpon, and been republished in The Good Men Project.
November: “The Invisible Father“
A colleague’s casual remark set off this mini-essay for The Good Men Project about the being a father without a child.
December: “British Matches“
In December, Aperçus Quarterly published this short poem, inspired by the warning label on a pack of matches. Along with comparative Anglo-American poetics, I seem to be studying semiotic estrangement–the effect of “everyday” signs and symbols on a cultural outsider.
It has been a remarkable year. Wishing peace to you and yours in 2012!
In 2006, after moving to Ojai, California from Los Angeles, I helped redesign the Ojai Poetry Festival website. Drawing inspiration from print designs by the late Hope Frasier, I outfitted the site with a newsletter, RSS news feed, and online ticket sales system, as well as information about headliner poets and photos from past events. The site served the group well for several seasons, until the festival recently went into hibernation for financial reasons.
Having recently moved to North London and joined the Highgate Poets, I seized the opportunity to help them put up their new website soon after being accepted into the group. What took weeks of custom programming to create the content management system for the Ojai Poetry Festival only took a matter of hours this time, owing to advances in the WordPress blog software.
Thanks also to a host of software plugins, the site not only features member news, but has a calendar of events, newsletter, integration with the group’s Twitter account, and much more. Going forward, options for selling anthologies on the site or enriching the list of members with more detail is just clicks away.
It is a pleasure to be associated with such a fine group of poets, actively writing and publishing in the UK, and remarkable to see how open source software such as WordPress makes setting up a dynamic website easier all the time.
