As part of S.J. Fowler's "North X North West Poetry Tour" I was paired with the poet, Harry Man. Harry is a terrific poet whose interests seek often to bridge the totalizing and tribal division between 'on-the-page' and 'performance' in a poetics that jostles with great wit, absurdism, and humour - often drawing upon timelines of science and vocabularies from other disciplines. Needless to say, it was a real joy to work with him. Our piece took the contradictory notion of the "clinamen"'s deviation and the "Pacemaker"'s regularity to unify in a pattern that breaks the pattern...or the impossibility of conceiving of an irregularity that does not, at the same time, imply that (regularity) against which it reacts...we were not in chaos...but in organised chaos, which hopefully, unlike the anguish of 'organised fun', could tease out some genuine surprise or interest. That was a premise that, true to its spirit, was soon left behind. Instead what followed was an improvised rifling through quarries of 'maybe this' and 'I'd forgotten that' in dialogue with an archive of Arcade Game manuals. Harry's publications can be found here.
The reading took place on January 13th (Friday the
13th that is, minus the teen slashers and festive gore) at City Screen, York.
Clinamen Pacemaker
1.
open the window to let in some air. any air, new air;
movement, something.
a.
You have three men in pursuit of Bigfoot who is
standing
on top of his mountain domain.
Kharkhari Nahar is a village on the outskirts of
Delhi.
It has a population of around 2,000.
90% people from the village are working in government
jobs.
Only one player will succeed in getting three men on
the mountain to be Bigfoot’s friend for life.
2.
to write lists & predictably plan to reform your
life
as predictably as you then neglect those plans &
perhaps most importantly, like now, making more of
your habits
than is proportionally faithful to their flimsy &
unreliable cameos
in this disorder you ‘habitually’ inhabit. it is part
of this performance.
like the version of yourself you present to the
camera, or celebrities
who appear as themselves in films & then
spectacularly fail
to be themselves in ways that only they
can manage.
b.
An underwater volcano has erupted and an island is
sinking into the sea!
Unless they escape in time, all the inhabitants are
doomed!
A Soft tissue injury (STI) is the damage of muscles,
ligaments
and tendons throughout the body. Common soft tissue
injuries usually occur from a sprain, a strain, a one
off blow
or overuse of a particular part of the body.
Soft tissue injuries can result in swelling, bruising,
loss of function. You can get there
by boat or by swimming. When the game ends
whoever has the most survivor points is the winner.
3.
transcribe intuition as with opening the window.
something
less
bullied by its interior.
c.
The year: 3010
The place: Battlesat 1, the military weapons satellite
station
designed to protect earth from asteroids and meteors.
Senior Systems Scientist Robert Driscoll replaces a
keyboard in the hull wall of the sunward docking bay. Suddenly Jani Allan...
4.
to coincide like dancers in a mirror.
d.
Object: accumulate the most points
5.
shit me avuncular moose the kids don’t want clouds
they want venereal truths served up like crowbars
& am i not a kid?
e.
Donkey Kong is my story about a small ground frog
found around coastal swamps in
eastern Australia.
It’s nice to know places like that
still exist.
WARNING: Read instructions before
assembling ape.
6.
ghost writer at the banquet: i eat grapes & cannot
feel my legs.
it is a form of blank. it is.
f.
Winning the game at the end of the game you will need
the abecedarium (Abecedary)—along with Catechismus (Catechism)— the first
printed book in Slovene.
It is an eight-leaf booklet for helping people
to learn to take drilling rigs out of the drawer
and place them in the holes provided in the corners
on top of the game. (Note: These holes are not part of
the playing surface).
7.
habits in the guise of a swerve take note of electric
loose rigging of sun
cable to shimmying lattice on underside of water’s
shift.
g.
Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs have Karnataka State Highway
35 in Bangalore, roll the dinosaur die.
8.
systematic avoiding of the avoidance involved
in any workable, & so necessarily unworkable,
imagining
of this irregular pulse.
h.
If you roll a double immediately move
the Land and Labour League formed in 1869;
eat ‘mostest’ baked beans.
9.
Overhearing conversations can be crushing.
In a bad mood, especially, small talk can sound like
lemmings
jubilantly discussing holiday plans as they stroll
over a cliff.
j.
Alien. Shave.
Invaded 1736 BC the year of the sack of Babylon.
Use your alien to eliminate the astronauts of other
players.
10.
not here to rate the heart or unduly weigh the end or
start.
no plug, no graph, no viable means except as what it
cannot be
but still a circuitry. a maybe.
k.
Return to Central Perk with the Friends Umbrella card.
No. 1 Deansgate is the tallest all-steel residential
building in the United Kingdom,
and one of the most expensive addresses in Manchester.
The player performing charades keeps the umbrella
card.
Example: a) Joey accepting the soap opera award for
best co-star.
11.
insist upon something until it becomes.
l.
When the deck of planet cards have been used up, the
discards should be shuffled and placed face down for further use.
12.
curtains
m.
hyperjump
13.
some of us have jobs, homes, families.
n.
Once in jail.
14.
leftovers audition their sentimental value
in a studio of piled crusts and dead air,
the soundtrack to a daytime police drama from the 70s,
featuring a blind veteran and his incongruous pet
falcon
can always almost be heard, sifting
through chemistry text-books
and conceding to the logic of velcro.
Upsetting, in its way.
o.
Move your own centipede through the winding
Mushroom field, Carlos Bulosan said, “Yes, I will be a
writer
and make all of you live again in my words.”
Spin free choice and you can pick
the move you want to make.
15.
Alfred Jarry on an exercise bike.
yawns of derision jam the spokes that aren’t there,
a derivative turn
of pedals, manic in the step, suspended
to say LOOK movement, movement anchored
to such ordinary carpet.
p.
You may be able to give him bionic powers.
Your assignment: be the first player to
the Canterbury A&P Show,
the largest agricultural and pastoral show in New
Zealand,
attracting over 7,000 livestock.
16.
marry me? fuck you.
q.
One may refer to it.
17.
at this point it is customary to
r.
Adults are yellow with wiggly white lines across their
wings.
18.
a dawn song expressing the regret of parting lovers at
daybreak: Plasmodium,
for example, enters a human body through a
zucchini-shaped form
known as the paleolithic belief that flesh was
strength and blood was life
& this
s.
The player with the greatest number of escaped
Altanteans.
A diathetic alternation, the greatest number of
escapees.
The greatest Atlantean escapee number.
Boats may not pass through a space occupied by another
boat
or an octopus.
19.
pie will be served & pie will be eaten,
as in: pie begets pie clumped wise in munch
down slide to mouth geodes & roof into living room
tongue latched and gifting: far be it from me
to disclose the contents.
t.
Carefully break off all the plastic parts.
20.
like in Peter Manson’s Adjunct or Lyn Hejinian
‘s My Life or Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present or Ben
Lerner’s Mean Free Path - like how Gertrude Stein says ‘Then we have
insistence insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating, because
insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in
the same way’ & so they are not the same but return their lines as
reawakening versions nudged open or apart by the context & like
u.
The player on your right will be the moderator.
The moderator draws the card you must use the
prodilidine an opioid analgesic
and a ring-contracted analogue of prodine.
It has little abuse potential.
21.
i hope you know that there is nothing, nothing more
than knowing there is nothing.
v.
Opex is an ongoing cost for running a product
22.
compose lists in order to reassure myself of existing.
w.
These are all moveable pieces.
23.
a recalcitrant duck defies the fleet to mow the
river’s slate alone.
x.
The 2003-4 Harvard Crimson women’s ice hockey season.
Nicole Corriero tied former Crimson player Jennifer Botterill’s record for most
points in one NCAA game with ten. Pieces must move around lakes.
24.
noting, nothing of note. fraudulent claims &
overheard
opinions, creatures smeared in jellied cultures –
the beginnings of a revolution
nattering in a petri dish, something unseen
gathering – stars as seen by surveillance cameras
& this vacancy, cheated of its final scene.
y.
Ratu Tanoa Visawaqa was a Fijian Chieftain who held
the title Vunivalu of Bau and
was the magnetized digit shown on each piece. The
opponent must give warning by saying aloud, ‘Check’.
25.
my engagement in political activism is limited to
actively discussing my failure to engage with political activism: phrases like
‘part of the problem’, ‘voluntary paralysis’; words like ‘privilege’,
‘pessimism’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘clicktivism’, & ‘inter-passivity’; buying
into an increased awareness & listening
to the hiss and crackle of haunted audio
as it becomes mainstream; saying this, saying this,
saying this between sips of a white americano in pret;
considering an almond croissant
& the sensation of guilt
like music heard through a wall.
z.
Here it is: the world just waiting for you to conquer
it. Example 1: Red controls Australia, in addition to the reinforcements she
received, for controlling her territories Red also gets the USS Chauncey
(DD-296) a Clemson-class destroyer built for the United States Navy during
World War I and Nesopupa eapensis a species of very small air-breathing land
snail. You now have all the rules you need so start playing!
26.
so many windows to close. failing.
back to. failing to back up. backed up
with wanting backwards what dreams itself as forwards.
growing homesick for homesickness, claiming
other people’s postcards as your own
scrolling flat advertising fall out of friendships
marketised to smile, caught jumping mid-air on beaches
and playing along,
playing along just fine.
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