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A bit
of existentialist farting
Ghost Town Music, Bobby
Parker (£7, The Knives Forks and Spoons Press)
Mass Graves, Daniele Pantano (£5, The Knives
Forks and Spoons Press)
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There is a bit of farting going
on here:
Get up fart
piss
make tea
consider the
eggs
come back all
moody
And further on (can't give page numbers as there are none)
I ask the
doctor why I am
Farting so
much at night...
And further on - nearer the back -no pun intended - there's the associated
farting idea of having a shit:
One of the
things I really detest, I mean it really wind me up, is going for a shit.
It's more
than an inconvenience; it reminds me what a dirty ape I really am.
Dropping my
jeans. Sitting on the seat. Shitting. Pissy water splashing
back up onto
my ass while I stare at the back of the door, barely able to
contain my
irritation
But what I
really hate is the last part, snatching some toilet paper and wiping
all that shit
off myself
At this point I'm wondering how my little old
dears in the writers' group would handle Bobby's work, if I showed it to
them. I might need to take along the brandy and smelling salts to revive them
from all the farting and shitting that oozes delicately from these pages. I'm
not sure if my little old dears might appreciate being confronted with the
rawer edges of post-modernist conscripts set against the duality of the self.
Bobby is out to tell us how it is in his world - farts and all (wow this is
good Jim).
I love the textures in this work, particularly the take it or leave it
scribbles, photocopies, cartoons and so on. I love the roughness of it, it's
like a work of abstract art done on the better side of rough -and rough it
is - and I love it. Bobby is saying feck convention, feck daffodils, feck lakes,
feck beneath the fecking trees - and he has my vote. That personally I like
to take the fecking daffodils and the fecking trees and fecking lakes out of
fecking a poetry and resign these romantic constipating dreamscapes to the
fecking bin. That today mainstream poetry is dominated by this farting and
shitting bollocks and IT'S TIME FOR CHANGE. That if one of my old dears gives
another daffodilly recital that there will be consequences... I have a knife
fork and spoon ready. Baaaaaad I know...
Where's me feckin pills...
A must read.
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Daniele Pantano's Mass Graves from the same press is a different animal, more regimented and
perhaps less stunning - but craft non-the-less. Consider this, from page 11:
We wear
The
poet's uniform
Because our mothers
Are dead
Fishermen on classic
Thin ice...
Daniele Pantano arrived in Britain carrying Swiss papers (it says at the
back) which are crumpled by history and stained by broken traditions. At the
centre of this writing there is vitality. This is writing in the margins
that's can't be trusted. A water-damaged review stands in front of the
writing, its lines more like erasures than inventions, barbed wire with
tatters of words upon it. Enigmas are small but Pantano suspects the crimes
are great.
I'd go along with this and add that there is an examination of the aspect of
invention, or if you like a curiosity as regards structure and form. Perhaps
signs of deviant imagination based on a malevolent existentialism - or a
would be core to the unknown - the not seen in all of us. Something just at
the margins or contained literally in the chthonic discourses of time.
© James
McLaughlin 2011
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