a Poetry day fer me too

I write some poyms

As a artis I write some poyms

Some of ‘em are off the cuff

A little bit rough (that’s ruff)

Around th’edges

Burri don’t mek no pledges

Nor hide behind hedges shouting about em

 

No am not pledged to any schools of art

Am just a bloke what writes

In fact

Am just a fella what creates em and

They cum in many colours Oops

In many forms they comes abart

 

Some on em are short and

Not so sweet

About my everyday life

And some are much more

Cleverer

Than that

 

I write about historic tings

Like the heroes I have

Or great names in history who we never heard of much

Cos the text books do not know them as such

But I tinks they shud have some say

In what I calls my poetray

 

Some of ma poems are real clever

Like those shaped in pots

And the ones I did using snaps I took

Of words on the walls

And in books and tings

On my way ome from the poetry library

 

So this blog by this poet wallah

On national poetry day is a show-case

Fer sum of ma werks in words and

Other forms of poems

Taken from my life and all the

Experiences what I have done.

 

2. Don’t Give Up, Things Get Better One Day

 

The fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso,

Bodhisattva of Compassion, Ocean of Wisdom, Refugee

Exiled from his home Land in Tibet he had to flee

Escaping into the charitable arms of neighbouring India

 

Do unto others as you would have others do unto thee

 

Meditate on the clear Light of the Void

And everlasting undemanding love

Om ha vajra hung

Padma guru siddi hum

 

Truth and justice and human understanding

Will triumph in the end

Over Ignorance and despair

When the oppressor finally sees the light

 

Everything is always changing

We are interdependent and need one another every which way

Nothing stays the same forever

And in the end, all Empires eventually fade away

 

You must Never give up

Things will get better one day

Things are getting better in every way

If you follow the path with your heart

 

See the Wu Li Masters prancing

Just little lights moving and dancing.

All of us merely bundles of energy

Tripping and skipping along the merry way

 

3. Vision Of Mud

 

4. my Gurdjeff Pot Poem, ‘Life Is Real Only Then When I Am’

Letterpress print by David Jury

 

5. Visit this past blArt o mine on th’Poetry Library Open Day way back

https://apulhed.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/a-happy-man/

 

Namaste

Yes Am luckier than I thought

Building up to my next book NewSI.

The Shrewd Idjet c. 1979

This book is about those heady days when the creator of Big ‘Ead (at junior school age 10)

Big ‘Ead drawn in year 5 at Tod Road primary school

and dreamed up Apple-Head-Man (in Bournemouth aged 20)

and whose Celtic name meant Ugly Head went to college from his 18th to his 22nd year in the very early 1970’s. He began in the 3rd class carriage and by his graduation had scurried into the 2nd class seats. As he watched his fellow travellers he realised that despite his best efforts he was still a complete idiot, so that’s what we’ll call this first part of The New Shrewd Idiot which is going to be released in a series of short sections.

(*I may even call it An Altered Shrewd Idiot ?)

I saw a film the other day o boy, the film being A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence which is about two men who spent their lives going round selling crap artefacts like rubber masks of a one-toothed man. I see this as a parallel to my going around trying to foist the world with an Apple-Headed mask to the sound of the Doors song,

Life is strange when you’re alone

When you’re strange

Faces come out in the rain

When you’re strange

No one remembers your name

People are strange when you’re a stranger

Faces look ugly when you’re alone

When you’re alone

Women seem wicked

When you go walking

You’re unwanted

Streets are alive when you’re alone.

It was interesting talking with Saradha Soobrayen in the Poetry Library at South Bank this weekend and she has this idea about ‘The Long Poem’ which is not a long poem like say Hiawatha but more a lifetime’s effort on the part of the poet, to find the voice and realise the potential. My NewSI ‘book’ is such an effort. It began at the beginning of my self-writing and continued throughout the next forty odd years as I wrote and learned about writers & writing. The resulting work, which is still in process, will be the long poem in the way Saradha is thinking, I think. I am excited by the possibilities. I just need to discipline myself and put them together for real rather than just in my mind’s eye.

And the long poem also includes the artworks and the ‘performances’. They add to the words with a moving feast, oh yes and the dance, which adds the moving feet. I dance because I still can. I LOVE those old films of those ancient blues dancers doing the soft shoe shuffle which prove to me we should shuffle as long as we can. Life is a dance which the words, images and ideas just feed. Two perfect examples of this ‘long-poem’ are the life works of Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen.

And I saw the big show of Joseph Cornell’s work. Cornell influenced a lot of ‘artist’s book’ makers in recent years was himself influenced, like me, by key dada artists like Max Ernst who I believe to have been a greater creative thinker and practitioner than the much vaunted Marcel Duchamp. Another big influential European who taught in the States Moholy-Nagy did his early creative experiments in poetry rather than the visual arts which flags up the cross fertilisation between the arts, so much so that I now see that my own writing, painting, drawing and printing along with performance events are interlocked for the past 40 odd years. Like Moholy-Nagy I was effected by ‘Dada’s irreverence which aimed to offend middle-class notions of good taste which taught Moholy-Nagy [and moi] to refuse to accept the limitations of the traditional definitions of art’.

And my ‘art’ encompasses many media, many ways of saying the thing.

I know we live lives capable of

Belligerence

Underestimation

Misunderstanding

but

Let us find The Lion Inside– (hear Sir Van Morrison on utube).

Inside This Clay Jug– (listen to Jackie Leven Inside This Clay Jug).

Buddha Nature-Tibet

Our True Selves- Hindu

Hidden Essence-Sufi

Matter, Energy, Meaning-Bohm*

Let us avoid Infinite Confusion (My Quagfog^) and live in Peace-Full Earth Together Endlessly.

*See Sogyal Rinpoche on David Bohm pp356-9 in The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying where he’s writing about ’An Unfolding Vision Of Wholeness.’

^ I coined the word Quagfog in my writings t’ward The Shrewd Idiot in the mid1970’s. It means that dark space we inhabit when we are down, lost and unsure where to head. Our feet seem to be bogged down in a quagmire and our heads are seemingly in a fog.

A name by any other rose

Making a name for myself.

So what is in a name? Everything? No, not really. A name is a disguise, a mask before the public/society/followers/denigrators… behind the mask the ‘star’ or ‘failure’ is of course an ordinary human albeit maybe with extraordinary quality +/or experience. I have worn a number of masks. Like my Apulhed masks, I have even worn a Pete Kennedy mask. None of my masks, except my teacher one, ever brought much income. Like thousands of other would be greats I seem to have failed in some of my mission, altho I am still pumping- my heart, my works, my buks etc. I even submitted an application to be the first ‘resident artist’ at Radio 2 on the basis of my track record meeting and photographing and painting some famous folk in the 70’s and 80’s. I have had the experience, I have the skills, but I didn’t make a name for myself as a ‘reporter/artist’ bloke. However only after I had spent longtime getting my bid ready complete with a treatment (of sorts) I noticed they had this clause in the form staing that you had to make more than half your income from your art. I don’t make any income!How dare they question my integrity as an artis-writer just because my work does not generate money. It certainly moves it out! My work takes time for the process, the making, the publication. The two most recent paintings I sold recently brought in just above the cost of the materials. My books have all cost more to make than the sales they generate, so far. I can’t help it if my works never commanded a good price, yet.my way of working and my output have integrity even tho ma income doesn’t. maybe my fame & fortune lays ahead when my work eventually receives attention. I vest a lot of effort into it without knowing if it will ever pay me back. Meanwhile I shall keep on trying. This morning I made a list of 15 artist’s books I have awaiting finalising and pushing thru. It’s not that I sit down and dream up new ideas every day, no, I am like George Harrison before he left the Beatles, all my work has been stacking up, now All Things Must Pass! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebtC3ORg9fU

In fact

Unlike Robert Zimmerman I never ‘made’-up a name for myself. Maybe I should adopt my O’Ceinedegh monika? Or Pedro A. Pulman (Artisbloke) PAPA? It’s all in the name.

After going to the Saison Poetry library this week to see a talk about b s johnson’s work I tweeted

And a party calling themselves @BSJohnsonInfo retweetd it. I learned a lot about bsj, not least that he did a book named Albert Angelo in which ‘he cut holes in the pages pages, created a type character (sic) and arranged text in columns’ the narrator says in the vid and it seems this refers to concrete poems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDMV4UF_-Rs

Because he made his name as a renegade in ‘literature’ his books are not known as ‘artist’s books, whereas Dieter Roth, who did similar things in his books is known as an artist’s bok maker. It’s all in the name?

This song is apparently about bsj- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bexd18r6ZSU&feature=youtu.be

Here’s my mention of bsj from an article I did for the blue notebook

‘Whilst considering the bookness of Lippard’s Catalogues I should introduce B S Johnson’s book The Unfortunates which is bound, but not bound as one unit. (Johnson, 1969)

Picador’s recent reprint of Johnson’s book.

 It comprises 27 sections each stapled separately held by a removable wrapper with two of the sections marked ‘First’ and ‘Last’. (At the Saison Poetry library on Wednesday 6 May 2015 I heard a hint that bsj lost a debate with his then publisher who wanted to have those two pages at start and end of the book, I suspect bsj would have wanted them free-roaming?) The reader is invited to read the rest in any order at random. I like the book because it is housed in a box covered in claret and blue, the colours of my home town team, Burnley who got to the quarter finals of the European Cup long before Notts Forest. The reference to football is not spurious as Johnson for many years reported on Nottingham Forest’s games for his local rag. Also there is a ‘report’ of part of a game in the back inside cover of the box which seems to reflect how a game can be a microcosm of life. I like the idea of the random order but the version I have seems to be of rather mean dimension and the font too small. It was not meant to be considered an artist’s book. It is however a writer’s experiment with the form of the novel, a step outside the canon contained in a box, which the publishing world of the day saw as subversive and the avant-garde saw as trivial. They missed the point Johnson was trying to make. He was attempting to convey the emotions he felt at the demise of a friend’s succumbing to a terminal illness. The loose leaves represented thoughts crossing as they do in life, not sequentially but at random.’

There’s a different version of the book on a vid by ‘mik krakow’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNk0kj0KwoU

I have referred to bsj in some other blArts:- https://apulhed.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/on-being-an-artist-or-not/

a slightly longer one- https://apulhed.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/what-am-i-doing/

this one has ref to bsj and my own work https://apulhed.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/my-gate-crashing-two-parties-des-chimpanzees-dont-make-me-a-member/

 

By the time I saw the book I had already made my boxed artist’s book called Apul-Gold Metamorphosis although mine was with careful attention to font size as well as considering paper, dimension and feel. It has alternate card and semi-transparent pages. The box is black with gold around the edges resembling an old bible but when opened it is more like a jewellery box with felt surrounds and gold ribbons. You can turn the loose pages which are, ironically, sequential because the holes in each page grow gradually to reveal a golden (moulded plastic) page with words on sculpted from twigs making the ‘word’ material or real. Behind this sheet is the final surprise, a sculpture.

A Happy Man.

A Happy Man.

Sandwiched

Between

Nancy & Sam

Pete Kennedy

16.11.2014

 

‘tangajorsarpaq eye am this orphan’

 Am rejoicing as the week has arrived for two trips into the Big City o’ Londres. I went up yesterday for a full filled day at the Poetry Library where I saw our work in such good company and two bee sandwiched between two such great practitioners as Nancy Campbell & Sam Winston was indeed a privilege. I was of course looking at werds; my verds watti wroted (not like Roth did) and David Jury printed ‘em, Nancy’s words, sam’s words, then loads of others’words like- Gaudier Brezka, Ezra £, Diter Wrot, jon Cage, Gins-oak-burger, Jean Cokatoe (I love her sketches), and many more. However you can’t go see it even ift you cry, it wer only up fer one dae. So am putting some small photos in this blArt to show you what ya mist. And I did this bit of nonsense using up werds wat I sore.

 I wer particularly inspired with Sam’s work, ‘Orphan’, in which he used a lot of words he had rote and cut & pasted. So I did the above cut & Baste misen. Eclosion means summat to do with changing frae a pupa to a angel, I tink the transformation has begunned. I invent a new word from a bill stick on a Paolozzi muriel at Tottinghen Caught Rude tube station, Ekanity

,

it’s a bit like eternity but a bit longer, or shorter, who dares? I have finally fully launcehed misen into the muddy pastureyes of the cut & Blast, some o’t werds cum frae BLAST. Thur’s mad in yer eise Einsteye, Eisenstine, Eyesore, eye eye, oh begorrah bagum.

Then at 8pm 3 poets began to read their reactions to what they had seen in the boxes of books prepared for Sunday’s display. William Wyld went first and did a tribute poem to one he’d seen about mud. I loved his words about a reluctant rebellious recalcitrant seal melting into the snow, ‘You took my claws but you couldn’t take my head’. Then Patrick Brandon read his words inspired by John Cage’s Silence on Rauschenburg. Then he did one filling in the gaps in Tom Phillip’s Humument with words like, ‘What is life other than matter complicated by time…’ In my poem in the exhibition I also refer to humans as energy. Hilda Sheehan talked about life and death too, I suppose poetry is lots about our mortality. I enjoyed her Kiss.

She too referred to John Cage’s Silence. Her poem went

Silent

it just

dis

ap

peared.

It was a poem for Georgina, after holding up a tiny piece of tangled wire Georgina had made and hung silently last year:

I’m impressed with your strings

Hung up like mirrors

Shhhhh…

silence

 

Shhh… let these (very small) images tell the story.

 

Nancy’s beautiful Icelandic poem

Nancy uses Inuit words for love (I tink)

Pete & David’s collaboration poems

I Yam a Seeker of Toots

Pete next to Sam’s poem

How Sam plays in clouds

At TotCort Rd the mural needs replenishing

 

Pete auditioning fer Egg Heads