The Voice of God Speaks Words

I gave up smoking 60 hours ago. The lust for a cigarette comes in discrete urges which each last about 3 minutes. Each urge needs to be shouted down, loudly. I seem to be having around 15 urges an hour, and keep myself going only by the Nicotinell Promise that the number of urges will decrease over time.

I don't think any sort of withdrawal is conducive to writing poetry, and thus have a ready-made excuse for the following poem:

The Voice of God Speaks Words

He speaks about the Devil's salt,
and plucks a stone from Satan's eye
to give a chat on love and trust
to people snoozing pew by pew:

"This evil works by magic. Look!
It moves by curse to curse and teach
a lesson. God can not be bought
by sinners praying. God will not

"forgive the hateful sodomites
their lecheries, nor welcome home
the quacks who rip from wombs the lives
of babies. God will not forgive

"the evilists who teach that man
once lived in trees and swung by hooks
of hands from bough to branch. The Lord
gave Jesus life and death to teach

"us God will not forgive the hoards
who mock belief and will not pray
to Him or burn for Him! His love
is not negotiated! God

"does not forgive the liar's lips
nor give His blessings cheaply. We
must fight for Him to earn His love
and terminate the vile-most whores

"of thought and deed. For He demands
His children bow and worship Him
alone. Demands that we obey
the laws He made for us. Demands

"that we atone for Adam's sin,
forsake our knowledge, learning; start
afresh, become as pure as steel
and sharp as swords. That we become

"His instruments to cut away
the cancer - slice the sins from flesh
to heal the people, strip apart
the souls of whores and satanists

"to clean them, make them fit for His
inspection. Nothing less will do!
The world is sick and we must make
it better! God will love us then!

"For every pound and ounce of flesh
is God's, and every sin a sore
that must be atomised by force
of will, belief and action. God

"will love the instruments who cure
his Kingdom. God will love the men
who take his laws within themselves
and hone their thoughts and bones to do

"His holy work - whatever that
may be: to speak His truths in streets
and alleyways; to fight the sins
with words, with fists, with fire, with truth!"

And in the pews of snoring heads
sits one young man who listens hard
and hears some words to give his life
a point. His smile

explodes his face.

My New Year's Resolution is ...

More Ska.

Gevile living #1: family

There's not much point in inventing a conworld, a conlang or a conculture unless you can do something with it. I like to show off my constuff on my website. But what would it be like to live in my conworld?

The key city (for me at this time) in my conworld is a city called Gevile (pronounced ge-vi-le - for a guide to pronunciation of the words that follow, check out this page on my website). Over the course of the next few weeks - when I haven't got much else to posts - I'll post little snippets of information on what it would be like to live in Gevile.

Birth, family and growing up in Gevile

You would probably have been born in one of the jaarvagzuush (temple infirmaries) found across the city. Your moeme (mother) would have given birth standing or crouching, assisted by a jwe'he (midwife). Your bizhve (father) would probably not have been present at the birth. Your shnaathuu (placenta) would almost certainly have been cooked and shared between the whole family.

It is most likely that you are not a single basate (child), as gyanesh (women) routinely have between three and five basatem during their fertile period. It is likely that your husplozdem (siblings) would be much older or younger than you, as the average time between basatem is about five jinsuush (years).

There's a possibility that the loife (man) you call "bizhve" is not your biological father - estimates vary, but up to 30% of all basatesh born in Gevile are believed to be the result of liaisons outside the recognised relationship. Not that you mind: everyone will spoil you rotten throughout your basaconuu (childhood). In particular, zgatesh (uncles and aunts) will make a big fuss over you.

Your closest óhslesh (friends) are likely to be your rhaajesh (cousins), and it's probable you and your gang of óhslesh would have made a nuisance of yourselves throughout the vopshe (city). You will also have been involved in a fair number of gang fights, but nothing very serious - one thing the cuklamesh (adults) around you will not tolerate is mahcantsuu (violence and bullying).

You probably hit cuklamalhetuu (puberty) around the age of 13 (for vuefnesh - girls) or 15 (for raptesh - boys). Things got a lot more complicated after that, though the belguu (coming-of-age party) in your honour to celebrate this entry into cuklamconuu (adulthood) would have been fun, given that it lasts all day and most of the night.

Conlang Spotlight: Klingon

In conlanging terms, if the 19th century can be seen as the search for an idealised international auxillary language (such as Solresol or Esperanto) and the 20th century can be considered as the development of conlangs for fantasy and storytelling - Tolkien's languages, for instance - then what of the 21st century? What sort of conlanging experience can we expect over the course of the next 100 years?

I think we can already see signs of where the art and practice of conlanging are moving, and the roots of this movement lie in the last 20 years or so of the 20th century. Role-playing games became very popular in the 1980s - partly as a result of the success of Tolkien's books, but mainly because publishers and game manufacturers found ways of popularising and standardising the game playing experience. The development of the internet and world wide web in the 1990s helped increase the popularity of role-playing fantasy, to such an extent that today there are whole virtual worlds, with virtual societies and virtual economies flourishing online. For some people, these venues are more "real life" than real life itself!

According to his biographers Humphrey Carpenter and Tom Shippey, the central tenet driving Tolkien to write his novels was not just the story - an ancient history for England - but also the languages: place names and titles would lead to sketches which outlined how such names developed, which in turn could be incorporated into the greater stories of the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. When role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons began to take on some of the feeling of Tolkien's creations, some people wanted more of an immersive feeling - either through learning a few words of Quenya or Sindarin, or by developing new conlangs for use in their games.

Suddenly, conlanging had a purpose.

Because RPG manufacturers discovered that adding a smattering of conlang to a game could help give players a more interesting gameplaying experience. A conlang could become part of the package - for instance, the D'ni language, script and counting system in the Myst series of computer games.

Alongside all this a television phenomenon was transferring to the movies. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture rolled onto the big screen in 1979, few believed that this would be the start of a renaissance, yet the film was successful and led not only to further movies but also to a host of spin-off TV series.

The premise of Star Trek is the meeting of human and alien cultures. The original TV shows, and the first movie, assumed that all humans and all aliens spoke - in effect - English. Nobody considered that any other language (natural or constructed) should be used because the target audience was not likely to understand. Alien scripts did have a place in these shows, but only as decoration.

But then somebody at Paramount Pictures decided that some of the alien species should speak a non-English language, and various grunts and hisses made their way onto the soundtrack. Then for the second movie someone decided that these sounds ought to have a bit of coherence to them to make them more believable. Enter Dr Marc Okrand, a linguistics professor in California. His first work with the studio was to re-dub the Vulcan scenes, though this was not a working conlang as such. Even so, the studio was so impressed with the effect of including "Vulcan" in the film that they hired Dr Okrand to develop sounds and phrases suitable for Klingons to speak in the third movie.

The result of Dr Okrand's work for this commission was more than just sounds and phrases: the language he produced was reasonably complete, with grammar and syntax. It met the studio's requirements in being sufficiently harsh and alien sounding (to English speaker's ears). It was also good enough for some fans to decide that it would be fun to learn the language, a wish the Good Doctor obliged by producing a Klingon-English dictionary in 1985, and extended and repubished in 1992. Other Klingon-based books followed in the 1990s.

And thus was born one of the most successful conlangs the world has yet seen. Klingon is probably more popular than Esperanto at the moment. The language has its own website - the Klingon Language Institute. It has it's own literature, including a translations of some of Shakespeare's plays. It has its own (unofficial) conscript as well as one of the most hideous latin transcriptions yet invented. It is, in short, a successful conlang.

So what of the language itself?

Klingon benefitted from Dr Okrand's earlier work on Native American languages - this is not another euroclone language! The sounds of the language are harsh, gutteral and short for a specific purpose, namely to help characterise the rase of aliens that speak the language - and as such they are entirely successful for their purpose. The grammar and syntax are also worth a closer look, if only to see that there are many patterns languages can take. Klingon marks both the subject and direct object on the verb, and has a rather wonderful system of affixes for both nouns and verbs. The script is different enough to make it interesting both from an aesthetic and from a demonstrative point of view - though interestingly the script you see in the films and spin-offs has nothing to do with the language.

The best introduction to the language is no doubt Dr Okrand's dictionaries though the KLI website is also very useful, providing both some online lessons and links to places where people can get together online to help each other learn the language.

Because make no mistake, this language is driven by its fanbase. Paramount Pictures has no interest in the language beyond making occasional use of it in its products. And Dr Okrand seems to have taken little interest in the language for the past few years - his latest excursion into the world of entertainment was producing a language (Atlantean) for the Disney Studios film Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Klingon, in my view, is a demonstration of where the future of conlanging may well lie. Tolkien's secret vice will not be secret in the 21st century; nor will it be a vice - a shameful thing to admit to. Rather, there will continue to be a demand for constructed languages in works of fiction, in films, in other entertainment outlets - Enya's latest album includes a number of songs written in what she claims to be a collaborative conlang between her lyricist and herself.

Why? Because people - fans - like a bit of wierdness in their commodity, and constructing a language for a specific product helps give it that edge of wierdness. One day, maybe, conlangs may be bought and sold in the marketplace. One day I expect we'll see litigation over conlang copyrights and patents, perhaps even accusations of plagiarism. Conlanging, in the 21st century, is going to lose its innocence.

Is this a pity? Yes and no, I think. No, because it's nice to see conlanging get the recognition it deserves - a good conlang, well developed and robust, deserves to find wider and more appreciative audiences. And yet yes also, because to me conlanging will always be an artform, an exploration of words and structures and the very basis of language itself, and sometimes these endeavours are best left untouched by commercial expediency. I remain convinced that Dr Okrand could have produced a superb conlang for the Klingons to speak if it had been born from his necessity to conlang rather than from his contract with a major film studio. But ïscuu vosalbizhuu cohmap taabrasee ïsel, as we say in Gevey.

How well do you know Rik?

I'd forgotten I'd done this:

www.friendtest.com

The first person to score 100 or more gets a goat and 3 chickens to sacrifice to the god of their choice.

Questions, questions ...

Seth Abramson has been asking questions on his blog - always a dangerous thing to do, in my opinion. Ron Silliman has answered the general thrust of Seth's questions, as his name had been used as an example in some of them. Others have contributed their views, too - Seth links to a number of those in other blogs.

Now, I've not got much interest in the "debates" (okay, spats) Americans seem to get involved in about the history, relevance and future of American poetry. Mainly because I doubt very much that there is any such thing as American poetry - what's going on in new world poetry is just too big to fit in the one box, if you see what I mean. And anyways, I ain't no Merkin. But during his self-proclaimed rant Seth touched on those questions which have kept me fascinated over the years - in particular two sorts of questions: where does the poet stand in relation to poetry; and how do people cope with poetry overload.

These are good questions for Crimbo Eve, believe me!

I offer my answers to selected Seth questions not because I want to contribute to the debate, but rather because it's more fun typing these answers at the moment than it is doing battle with the next section of Snowdrop, which is turning into a bummer of an exercise to draft.

Is being "good" the same as being "relevant"?

No. Mind you, that's one of the biggest questions around. I expect Seth's talking about this American poetry thingy, but I have to approach it from a much more parochial stance. Relevant poetry, to me, is the poetry which forms a key component of the society around us - the ceremonial poems used at key stages of a person's life, the national poems which form part of the annual cycle of the state, etc. Rarely are these poems "good", nor to be honest do they need to be. All they need to do is perform that one role which assists people and societies through the traumas of existence. You don't have to like relevant poetry, but you cannot get away from having to acknowledge its function and its importance. Nursery rhymes don't change much, and while the words of playground poems may be altered to fit the here-and-now, I doubt their structures and purpose have changed much over the centuries. Wedding poems, funeral poems, elegies to the fallen, love poems to impress the intended, poems of worship and poems of accolation - they don't change much, really. But these are the relevant poems which don't get forgotten through the passage of time - however crap they may be.

How much is genius and how much what we think we can get away with? And just how much can we get away with, anyway? What are others getting away with?

One of the most wonderful things I've learned as I've passed through my life is that everybody is making it up as they go along. When I was a kid the adult world seemed like an alien place with rules and hierarchies and processes and functions that I thought I'd never be able to understand. Nevertheless the conveyor belt of time was forcing me to try and understand how the world worked, and where my little cog fitted into the bigger engine. Sometimes during my late teens and twenties it seemed to me that everybody except me had been given an instruction book. Then when I hit my thirties I finally worked it out: there was no instruction book, just people. Many were more confident than me, and were able to put on a front that made it seem like they knew what was going on and how they played a part. But the honest truth was that everyone was making it up as they went along, and everyone was dealing with everyone else's contingencies as best they could. The same goes for writing poetry: once you've learned the basics you're on your own, and if you can convince other people that you know what you're doing then they'll likely believe you. It makes for an interesting life.

I've never met a genius. I've met some scarily intelligent people, but they're just as able to write crap poems as I am.

How much love of poetry is too much? How much fear of poetry is not enough?

I think this question is hilarious - it's an invitation to go and worship at the altar of poetry. I think I prefer to love and fear people rather than a pile of squiggles. But then I'm one of those people who think religion and spiritualism are largely delusional, as are my own personal beliefs in that area.

What do we want? Immortality, or just a good run?

The greatest goal of all: to reach the high pantheon of poets whose work is used and abused as part of daily life. Do I want little kiddies to be discussing and dissecting my poems in classes in the 22nd century? Do I want preachers and politicians to be reusing my metaphors to support or oppose some future war?

To be honest, who cares? I won't be around in 100 years time to appreciate the fact that my poetry has turned into some sort of standard for which young poets should aim, nor will I give a shit how my verses are recycled to build new points and perspectives. Dead people don't care for the living. I care more for the here and now: my poetry can die when I die.

Can you hate poetry and be a good poet? Is it okay to have some days in which you hate poetry?

Of course you can hate poetry. More particularly you can choose not to like certain types of poetry, or you can champion the work of one particular poet at the expense of others. Again, I can see little difference between this question and a question like can you spit on the cross and still be a good christian? If people insist on treating their relation to poetry in a similar way to their relationship to religion, then there is room for doubt and questioning. Personally, I'll start fearing god when the bastard hunts me down and nails me to the church door as a warning to others, and I'll continue to hate poetry as and when I see fit. I'm still working on the "good poet" bit of the equation.

Is it okay to admit these things, or will it cause one to be ostracized?

If the people you admire and want to be admired by hold certain irrational beliefs, then it is a reasonable political step to take to convince yourself that you, too, believe in those irrational beliefs. If that causes inner tensions in the poet's psyche, then tough - unless it leads to some really excellent poems in which case: tough. I prefer an easy life, and try to limit my personal delusions to the bare minimum required to keep me functioning.

Why is Blogger X the first, and not the second or the last, to bring us news of fresh voices on the national poetry scene?

We don't get to choose our leading fashion-setters - they just seem to rise to the scum on the custard's surface. Of course, many people want to be the fashion-setters and they usually achieve this through one of two ways: either be one of the first to set the fashion in a new arena; or network like fuck until their circle of supporters reach a critical mass which results in their opinion being the one that is listened to most often - even by people who have never met them or don't particularly like their point of view.

If I find myself left cold by the poetry Blogger X favors, does that say something about me, about Blogger X, about both of us, or about neither of us?

It says something about the mechanics of society, but nothing more than that.

When will we be shelved? Or our work? Is it too late? Has it already happened? Who decided? Can we convince them otherwise? Did we deserve it?

As I said, I shall be shelved when I die. Which isn't part of my gameplan for the immediate future. Posterity can look after itself: I'm too busy already.

Merry Crimbo, everyone!

Five Weird Habits

I don't really understand this meme thingy or blog games. I mean, aren't we all supposed to be typing into the void?

Anyways, I was browsing Heather's blog when I discovered (to my horror) that I've been "tagged" for some sort of blog game.

Well, okay. But only because it's crimbo time.

Rules:

The 1st player of this "game" starts with the topic "5 weird habits of yourself" and people who get tagged need to write a blog entry about their 5 weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next 5 people to be tagged and list their names.

Rik's entry

1. I pick and eat my scabs. Ever since I was 3 falling over came with the added bonus of snacks over the healing period.

2. I've got this fascination for underwater exploration, though I cannot swim and haven't got round to actually doing some underwater exploration.

3. When other people look up at the ceiling they see cobwebs and cracks. When I look up at the ceiling I see maps and unexplored lands.

4. When I was a kid I hated needles. All work on my teeth - drilling, filling, descaling, etc - was done without the help of any local anasthetic.

5. I've invented my own language - I had to struggle to think of this as "weird" because to me it isn't, but I suppose it would strike others as a bit barking.

Okay, that wasn't too painful. I'm now supposed to challenge 5 new people to play this game, but that sounds a bit like chain-lettering to me - which I totally oppose. So instead I'm going to challenge Smoog, Julie, Rob, Harry and Scavella to write a short flash fiction piece about Five Weird Hobbits. It's up to them to pass on the challenge (or not) after they've come up with the goods.

Snowdrop: Stutfall Tower

I'm shocked to realise that I've done no work whatsoever on my work-in-progress for over 2 months - curse that NaNoWriMo madness!

Anyways, I've rectified that tonight. The following section was going to be a Cento, mixing up bits of De Rerum Natura with bits and pieces of English verse, but not only was that plan too ambitious - I speak sod all Latin - but it just didn't fit into the structure of the work. This replacement is much more satisfactory, though still rough as a first draft:

Stutfall Tower

Within the walls the wind is trapped
by sails that hang from stone: the beams
that once supported them now pitch in the flames
of a fire lit on flagstones. He sits
on a wooden block whispering lyrics
in Latin - the language he lost when his shipmates
disappeared in the fogs. He flavours his broth
with Channel brine and chives from the hill.

Behind him stands the boy who shakes,
his palsy sweating his skin in the light
of the flames that kiss the copper pot.
She watches his muscles wrestle beneath
his skin, each tremor travelling the length
of his beanpole arms to break in waves
in his yellow hands. She hugs her arms
across her chest, clears out her throat.

"You said the sea had swamped the Marsh, as if
it happens every night - how can this be?
Don't answer! Let me figure out the key
that holds this madness whole - I saw the drift
of fog across the land turn into waves,
just like the scattered bricks became a church
as I approached it - tricks of moonlight search
me out, perhaps, or maybe mist enslaves
my eyes! And yet that dog was real, the queen
was real, the little kiddie bled green blood -
that's nonsense! Stop it! Think! The soldiers knew
something, and so do you - I think you've seen
the answer. Mist: where does this foggy flood
come from? You'll tell me while we eat this stew!"

And she smiles, her lips stretching apart
to frame her teeth - a fearsome effort,
long forgotten. She leans and grabs
his hand, its shake, and holds it fast.

This section slots into Part 7.

Poetry Advent Calendar 2005

Guess what I've been up to in the poetry newsgroups during December:

tinyurl.com/8o96e

Feel free to pet or kick the little mongrel thats been following me through this series of posts - it does enjoy the attention.

Poetry Journals

One part of my website is called Clot [edit: now removed] - a place where I've collected together details of over 120 North American and British/Irish poetry magazines and put them on a database which people can search through in various ways. I haven't updated the information I hold on these journals for over a year (for which I apologise), yet Clot remains one of the most popular sections of my site - in some months receiving more hits than even the Gvekuu pages, whose popularity with Danish football supporters remains a complete mystery to me.

Why am I talking about this? Well, partly because of a post by Lorcaloca on his reluctance to submit too many poems to journals (and in particular to journals where he "knows" the editor) and the comment stream the post generated.

Now, I rarely submit my poems anywhere. I don't see the point: I've got a website, and I have some favoured online workshops which I infest with poems every now and again. I've got no fears of posting poems to the newsgroups. All this activity seems enough to me to get a bit of recognition from people who enjoy reading poetry like mine, and thus all must be well with the world.

Why ruin this rather comfortable setup by doing something silly like submitting poems to journals, attending (and giving) readings, networking, etc, etc, et-sodding-cetera?

I never used to be like this. Right at the start of my serious poetry-learning career (round about when I hit 25) I was desperate to become the bestest poet ever. I was as keen as Colonel Mustard to send half-baked poems out to magazines big and small across the length of England. And I got hurt when the rejections started to flood back in.

Somehow, the message got through to the rational bit of me, which understood that the reason I was getting so many rejections was because my poems were utter crap. Rational Rik made a decision at that time to spend a bit of learning on getting a proper poetry education (courtesy of an evening course at The City Lit run by Laurie Smith). There's no arguing that it was learning well spent, and some of the later poems I wrote for those evening classes are still included in my poetry archive.

Then after a few years I started sending out poems to journals again. And the rejections came back in floods. I talked to some of the other regulars at the evening course, and found out that they, too, were getting nothing except rejections. Well, something about all this smelt a bit iffy to me, a bit conspiratorial.

Because whatever you may be thinking as you read this, Laurie Smith's classes weren't a waste of money. There were a number of extremely talented poets in those classes, people whose poetry deserved to be published and celebrated. And in my view I wasn't far behind them!

Rik was on the case! I decided to go and visit the Poetry Library at the Royal Festival Hall and have a really long, hard study of the journals which were so eager to reject my friends' work and my own. There, in the confines of the small library high up in that concrete monstrosity by the Thames, I had a revelation: most of the poems that almost all of the magazines were favouring over our work, were shite. Bilge. Mind-numbingly mis-judged, overwrought, badly scanned and rhymed, childish, sentimetalistic, boring.

This made me very angry. It was also making my friends - friends like Vicci Bentley, David Boll, Laurie Smith, Mick Delap, Helen Nicholson, John Stammers, Martin Sonenberg - pissed off in the extreme. So, angry, so pissed off, that we did something very selfish.

We started our own magazine.

Magma Magazine has been going for over 10 years now. Some of the escapades of the early years were distinctly hairy (I still shudder when I recall the 4 hour argument over the cover design for Magma 3), and a number of times the magazine stuttered due to a lack of funding to produce the next issue - Magma 6 (the issue I edited) was only printed through goodwill and overt bribery! I left the management board as Magma 7 was was being printed, after which the magazine has gone from strength to strength.

We had no choice to start Magma. Nobody was interested in printing the poetry we were writing. Nobody gave a shit that we existed. We weren't part of this favoured group or that circle of friends; we didn't go to the right readings at the Poetry Society; we didn't network with the appropriate degree of worshipfulness. Instead, we did what we had to do to change matters.

But it all left a nasty taste in my mouth: when I gave up Magma, I gave up poetry - and only came back to poetry when I discovered the poetry newsgroups a few years later. I'm more than happy for people to play the publishing game if that's what turns them on - maybe for a few it really will be the road to riches and ruin. But I know that there has to be a better way, and maybe my little website and my little blog and my little self-published book could - just could - be that better way.

There's too many maybe's in this post. Maybe it's time I ditched Clot.