Marcus Slease

 

 

Public Spaces

 

Today was a class              with BBC            words in the nude

and now it is a train ride    with Bernadette Mayer's      Poetry State Forest &
Gabe Gudding    's        Rhode Island Notebook            in mind

last night a conversation          with Peter Jaeger about    NY Schools and Philip
Whalen etc.

and I'm thinking of life writing life         & Abigail Child's video         Mirror
World text      by Gary Sullivan  and appropriating     the misappropriate and so on

and over the weekend I went           to the Barbican      and saw some Laurie Anderson
& Trisha Brown      & Gordon Matta-Clark who had a house

cut in half

Anderson had a talking pillow

duet for door jamb &
violin

and a headphone table

                               where a fragment of
recorded       poetry
travels

           from table through hands                        and into ears
which act

as a pair of headphones

Brown's planes went live          three dancers moved in      and out
                          of holes

gracefully posing

as aerial footage of NYC
&
microscopic images

                                                     were projected onto the wall

                              and Laurie Anderson's
institutional dreams

                          was an experiment
to see how sleeping

in different
                     public spaces

might influence
                                 dreams

this was after visiting the

                            natural history museum
with stuffed animals
                                                       and I just wanted out

of the crowds
                                   of human monkeys gathered
to trace their ancestry

and Joe told me about      muffins with meat and clothes that never got dry

in the backwaters of Portugal

yes this process       with or in                             speech! speech!

we're gonna start back      up again

                   THIS IS SPACE AND WE FILL IT UP

 

 

 

This Ink Still Glows

 

Starbucks. Angel. Itchy leg. Area of leg below left bum cheek. Toilet flooded here hope
it's just water.

Waiting to meet Linus Slug and Michael Zand
to head
                                to Parasol Unit

for
                         "I know Something about Love"

                         at TASMAC
had a conversation                         with a man who went on       and on
                         about the

MERITS

                    of white neighbourhoods

oh god!
                         not this again!

                                              PEN FROM INK GLOWS ON PAPER
(uni-ball, eye micro)

my notebook is resting
on Beradette Mayer's Poetry
State Forest
which is resting on a sticky table
as is elbow

     muddy footprints
from flooded
toilet

spring disappeared from London

who are my people
I'm not middle class
in income
but I am white

previous notebooks displayed a stilted mind hell-
bent on future plans in continuous mindfuck
searching
for home

HERE AM I!

on the flipside being hip white
doesn't appeal

     e.g., street cred

                         from moving into crimed neighbourhoods
and driving up
property prices
with art

(SOHO, BRICK LANE but not Brixton maybe never Brixton)

                                     desperate
poverty or lulling material comforts
have little to do
with interesting art

or maybe

neither excludes
the OTHER