william watkin's blog (since 2003)

Kazzer says capital killed all the crofters + Kazzer says capital killed all the crofters + Kazzer says capital killed all the crofters

trowel - render - hazchem - wrecking, bar trowel - render - hazchem - wrecking bar ducting - bolster - spatula - vent and agency agency - enthusiasm - transcedence, then - negation WELCOME TO THE UNITED KINGDOM gather your writing materials together and advance piazza - loggia - calle - portico the square sloping elegantly in a place they called siena the leaning towers of subjective experience of note # 3056, bologna, the red do you remember, subject pinion term “darling”? the roman palace in humid nights of split (in moonlight, athwart the buffed paving) versus the venetian arsenale in relcutant hvar (where we first…) how we travel vs. how they do did You arrive alone in dover at 3 am what next? You have the name of someone in the city can they help you? We cannot help you. They can? Good. Europe is a big place that has such wanderers in it. During these close nights of imminence then I got to thinking of all those blissed-out beatnik losers and crazy-eyed ayes-theetes like roussel l...

Lines in Space represents the last five years of my poetry activity. I somehow, being a slow starter, only reached maturity in my thirties even though I have been writing since my mid-twenties. As the title suggests the work is an investigation of the semiotic presence of material, written poetry in pagespace. As such many of these do not transpose easily if at all into HTML, certainly not in Blogger but those that do will appear here for a time. A large number of these are under consideration and some have been published already. Still, while the copyright remains exclusively mine will post selections and leave them up until I have to take them away. I may also post my thoughts on how the work turned out the way it did. Why not, poets never do that. We'll see if I have the energy.

a word in your shell is like we entered freely into the nautilus shell which is diminishing for some of them the sea’s suspiration was until that point as yet unheard that point of our diminishing from the shell there was no escaping from the monolith gleaned the megalith which I admit are no more than words to me words with meanings not like the ones the proper poets opt to use there was or is no choice but to pace the crouching spiral and adopt a stance which the others might pursue for the confusion of the labyrinth comes not from a mazey complexity of options turns deadends and blank walls it is rather a perpetual scaling down of the world both familiar and upsetting is the park of dolls and miniatures will disturb those who recuperate slowly little by littler by littler still we exited the nautilus from the tiny horn which announced us to the single grain of beach which they had left to us and the monolith gleamed while the megalith didn’t and the water’s urged words got smaller a...

For the past 5 years have been working on what I hope to be my first published collection, Lines in Space . Many pieces were written during this period which I value but just didn't fit into Lines in Space . This blog seems the ideal location to publish them under the title Lines out of Space . They will appear in alphabetical order.

I have been posting rather a lot of academic material so have decided August 2007 should instead be poetry month. I will post extracts from my, hopefully, forthcoming collection Lines in Space. I will also post poems which didn't make it into the final selection for that. Finally will finish posting from the four part sequence called Moths . Have posted part 1, "Ip" already. There are also some other miscellaneous projects and experiments which I never typed up so will endeavour to do so and post them as well.

The Practice of Everyday, Everybody, Everything At one point Lefebvre declares, “the true critique of everyday life will have as its prime objective the separation between the human (real and possible) and bourgeois decadence, and will imply a rehabilitation of everyday life” (Lefebvre, Critique 127). The right of each individual to a rehabilitated everyday life, that is one divested of bourgeois categorisation, returns us back to the predicament of David Antin’s mother. Denied access to the everyday, her world becomes increasingly confusing and hostile to her, her own world hostile to her, in a manner Lefebvre calls alienation. Undoubtedly, he does not see the rehabilitation of the everyday coming from the avant-garde, quite the opposite in fact, but his comment does raise a radical issue in relation to the perceived gap between art and life which is, that removal of this gap as much requires a radicalisation of the everyday as it does the processes of artistic creation. If this is to...