Yours truly makes a second appearance at Felino's Counterexample Poetics.

As always, in this collection Constance Stadler achieves a balance between modern content and a sampled traditional form, whereby the poetry runs through the lexis of the traditional but with neologisms and archaisms rubbing shoulders and thighs in a glorious mêlée that achieves often the status of poetry of the purest water.

Her targets are everything from Plato (completely unjustly, the poem could be about somebody else) to Jesus and the Society of same, completely spot on target. Modern life is dissected and diagnosed here, found lacking, the anxious and painful half-lives people live are examined and found wanting, the poet's own pain is examined and there is a clear movement in the course of the book towards a tone of understanding and acceptance, the attainment of beauty in some sense is seen as a justification of the anhedonia.

The book takes us from hospital to Gaza, exploring injustices on a variety of levels, Amerikkka's war on Iraq and society's war on the individual.

Everything falls under the poet's lens – passion:

My engorged vulva
Screams for jungle abductions
And whatever would take me
Could not plunge deep enough.
Tomorrow,
Brings shower and the routines
Of numbness.
That is, if I
Conquer this animal
Night.
(Seething ...)

mortality:

Sepia catacombed
In sweet stench of young rot
The maggot is well fed.
Bloating, we are new made
In concatenated leprosies
In our mouldy hypocrisies
In the death bed lie.
(concessional)

the reticence of nature:

Grass tuft, will you not speak to me?
A blue and brown tit jumped on my table
Near the Arno and shared
My sandwich
As a full bosomed poppy floated by.
Wilted corn stalks in vermilion light
Thrill as magic
Snowy egrets dance in pond surrender
To cabbage palms.
(Terrestrial Illuminations)

This book makes love and passion in the face of sickness, dis-ease, bereavement and a more general ontic and ontological abandonment. It makes the word a lover and an expression of the body's engorgement, it makes the muse a bedfellow, and the reader a voyeur, which is what readers usually are, but not so openly expressed.

Only Constance Stadler writes like this nowadays, only she can. Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/paper-cuts/7388443.

--David Mclean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. His collection Cadaver’s Dance is available at Amazon.com. He is also the author of Pushing Lemmings and A Hunger For Mourning. Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the prehistoric epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto. Paper Cuts marks the debut of Calliope Nerve Media's literature arm.

Paper Cuts


The seminal work from one of the greatest underground poets of our generation is now available as a free e-book from Calliope Nerve Media.

"When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't crawl - when you can't do that... You find someone to carry you." --Firefly (The Message)



And it's true HULU has the greatest episode of Firefly ever created. It's called The Message. I made it easy for you and embedded it at the top of this post. :)

My Internet is back. Finally. Worked on three drafts today after I got off work, as Calliope is about to release those big projects I've been talking about for months.

I'm feeling better than I have in a while though we're still struggling. I know good things are going to happen. Putting aside all the things that bring me down. My wife asked me if, "I found my faith again?"

And I must say that the answer to that is, "Yes. Yes, I have."

The new meat. A theme from a poem I'm working on. What is it about pigs and poetry?

Or at least my poetry.

Yes, they're all Lizards. And we're dinner. The remake of V looks promising.

As for me, I'm still here. Battling the regular demons, I've had my car repoed, my electric turned off, internet etc, etc in the past several weeks so I've stayed away from personal blogging, etc for a while.

But I'm here, and it's nice so many of you have asked about me

I've got a big project coming out through Calliope Nerve next month. Stay tuned. It's the biggest thing we've ever done. The first of many.

In the meanwhile, here's an old song that matches how I've felt lately.



"I get so tired of working so hard for our survival. I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive." --Peter Gabriel

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke. --Bob Dylan

"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me." --Anatole France

My life's the usual pile of steaming cr*p. All for me. Yum!

Still dealing with the aftermath of the repo, my daughter's health issues, the lack of work, the company riding my a** over nothing, so on and so fricking forth. Here I go again sounding like a b*tch and that's why I don't do much personal blogging these days. At least not until things get better. I guess better venting to a computer than at my family.

I have been updating the The Blacklist and Muse Thing has taken on a life of it's own along with two huge projects I'm editing.

If I did drugs, I'd say I need a stint in rehab. Maybe I should start. No one likes a procrastinator. Pass the hallucinogenics please.

I even appear over there as someone else.

No one knows the real me. Not really.

Not even sure I do and I think that's the way I like it.

When I'm not in a mood, I'll tell you about the Disturbed concert, and my garden, and silver linings and sh*t.

Sleep Dealer gone.

"But sometimes I get carried away..." --The Poor

Words Within The Margin

I'm going
into
dArk.

The number of the Goat...

This whole in my chest.

"Can I still come home to you?" --MSG

Sleep Dealer

Pock marked autumn,
this time of tiny words.

Another butterfly death,
Funeral for a friend
Creatures of brief season.

While like the leaves,
Prayers fall out my mouth
A swarm of locusts.

Live on Jesus.
No comfort for me.
Saint of Killers,
Lunch time!

"These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't." --Dylan Thomas

Part XVIII of the acclaimed print edition of Calliope, Democracy Chinese, is available at Lulu.com now.

"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

I'm glad to see this dusty old thing still works.

You know what this town needs?

A literate watering hole.

As in all things geek, I love Doctor Who. They call it a cryptic prediction of what's to come, but I think we all know, a new Doctor is in store for the future.

"If you get inside, you can't get out." --Megadeth



A Secret Place is one of the finest tracks from Megadeth's departure album Risk. Pop metal, Arabic strings, something different from the greatest thrash band of all time.

Now off to write. You can thank me later.

If you haven't already, get on Calliope's e-newsletter The BLACKLIST. Lots of news, announcements, freebies, and original content coming there.

"A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long. --E.E. Cummings

Issue 11 of Calliope is up as P.O.D.

Just the first step as we evolve into viable print publishing.

This week I begin using Open Office 3.0 to edit my One Nite Pig manuscript.

"I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression." --Dylan Thomas

I'm thinking it's time to hang up this blog. Not sure yet, put writing about my personal life doesn't really interest me anymore.

My Calliope blog has taken the place of this for the most part and I use delicious to catch most my links and Constant to track the books I've read. I'm not even writing under the name Nobius anymore, though thankfully I'm still writing.

As for zines, the last Calliope old school edition is coming out and after that if I do anymore print issues I'll probably do P.O.D. I'm also very tired of trying to motivate people for the APA. If the APA folds I'm done with perzines for the foreseeable future. Besides, I really need to get One Nite Pig finished.

We'll see how the cards fall but the whole experience of writing, blogging, zines, and the like has been life changing. And I've met so many great people through this.

The end of this may be coming.

But the beginning is just starting.

The end.

The end?

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." --Kurt Vonnegut

Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos. Tattoos inspired by books, movies, music, etc.

When A Star Twitters A Ghost May Be Lurking.