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DEC 2008
back to the machine-gun
has re-loaded its blog content


please use the side-bar for easeful navigation --- or flit through at random::
--- to some poems and information about Janette Stowell, who has a book coming out
---:: or to a recollection of the magazine's history &tc


---- :: The Midnight Horror Tree by Janette Stowell

-- A launch is scheduled, as the poet herself tells us: "11th December, and it is going to be downstairs in Revolution Bar (which is just a couple of doors down from FACT)" (in Liverpool)

-- A reading of the poem GULL on youtube about which the poet tells us: "I had to do a reading at the Whitworth a couple of weeks ago, and this is where the reading is from. I had to follow the harpist. And I was cringing: the harp music was very beautiful and I had to then read out my poems, all of which had swear fucking words in."

-- And an animation of the title poem, also on youtube

Janette Stowell's poetries

CODE   SMARTIES   GULL

A gleeful malice revealing itself as simple life-ingrained
compassion is at the heart of Janette Stowell's poetry.

Things to note about her poetics:: —

— :: Narrative, rather cool, its first tensions do not come to a point. In this ebb (of a narrative, of a drama), a dry wry humour sort of shuttles us through misadventure, nastiness, dirty bits of life.


— :: Early in the magazine's history, Miss Stowell had experimented successfuly with what she called "cine-poems", wherein filmic scenes of varied connects and disconnects were conveyed in a distant voice often with the technical apparatus — camera movements, zooms, scene shifts — of film-making.


— :: Thinking of the narrative in "code" for example, as an extension from the cine-poem/synopsis technique — that these earlier poems were a way of narrating with objectivity, working through the problem in poetry of narrative until the cine-context was no longer needed. A new non-personal narration is what remains. Who and what, is being narrated, and how it is, is partly how these poems work. Miss Stowell has worked through the problem of narration, and found herself an area in which she is entirely capable.


Code

A man was snatched from the roadside
by four men in a black car.
Blindfolded and gagged, he was driven
through city streets. There were sounds
beyond his captors’ breathing: the buses’
knackered hydraulics, the gloat of sirens,
cathedral bells.

*

Pulled from the car, he was marched
over concrete, then up steep
Piranesian staircases. Eventually, his blindfold
and gag were removed and he was asked,
Where are you?

I am here, he thought, then looked around the room:
no furniture, no windows, walls painted brown,
scruffy floorboards. One scientist
had a gold watch and a front tooth to match.

I’m in the vault of a bank, he said.

*

He is home now, sitting in his garden,
smoking. Above the elm, the sky
is an open atlas, revealing
the chartered nooks of far-flung galaxies.
He thinks back to the brown room – a back room
of an opera house (as it turned out to be).

When released, he had caught
the opening notes of the Dies Irae
and the scientists’ whispers:

...in conclusion, it’s impossible
to comprehend place until the external
has been viewed in its entirety

universe could be packed
into a tree’s trunk

latter’s markings are certainly similar
to a planet’s concentric rings, of course
just a hunch, but still

what do you fancy for lunch?...

His stomach rumbles; the sound
is reassuring. He grinds his cigarette
into an old wormhole. At least, he hopes
it’s old. Too late now. Drilling starts up
in the neighbourhood: an electric work-tool
or a woodpecker’s illiterate Morse.


Janette Stowell

Smarties

For Margaret


Another Sunday. A stray dog sniffs
its own piss. Even the crows
are bored.

Over the road, three boys
have climbed the bus-shelter
to welly stones at passing cars
and cats.

Me and Marg have done
the slide, the frame, the swing
and are now sprawled on the broken slats
of roundabout. I’m counting out
the Smarties:

one for me
one for you
one for me
one for –

From above, a fag-furred voice:

Frig’s sake, you’d think she’d never seen
a fucking Smartie before.

It’s not God, but an older girl
with tantrum-thrower arms
and hair so greasy
it could batter conger-eels.


Our Smarties got left behind. Later,
I imagined the light bag of death
and the disappointment
when the crows discovered the brightly coloured shells
housed no sexy bugs.

Janette Stowell

Gull


For Stevo


Above the city's horns,
the gull's dirty laughter
shatters noon.

I've heard them say
the gull is a reincarnated fisherman.
I look away
when he warms his ass
on the hot-rocks of town roofs.

A great uncle once rooted feet
on the decks of hatch-battened trawlers —
cheeks birched by driving wind, salt-chewed
eyes, his gloveless palms
guided in the nets.

The gull picks fights
over lunchtime crusts,
but once he feasted on the splintered
wood of a crow's nest — with every list,
his nostrils filled with the ocean's truth.

It's a dicey flight
between birth and death,
though I've yet to see a gull's brain
liquefied on the road's edge
or his wingtips lashing
at the bars in zoos.

He preferred to box his way
down the back streets


of every great port. The one time
he fell, old sea-dogs licked iron
from his wounds.

The gull is above the city.
Surfing the sky's rollers,
he traces slate
to dock.

Years back, he knocked
great slabs of ice
from a herring boat's mast,
knowing the vessel
would soon keel.

The wind is rising.

When the incoming gale
bludgeons the coast,
the gull will continue to fuck
on the edge of a high cliff.


Janette Stowell

birth of :: issues 1 - 3

Back to the Machine-Gun in full-dimensioned magazine mode was first conceived of in the early summer of 2004 in the scenic beer garden of Ye Cracke, a Liverpool pub famous for its scenic beer garden and the presence of J.Lennon's arse every so often before he became famous enough to exit Liverpool and get himself assasinated by CIA brainwash victim Mark David Chapman. Already we are up to our cuff-links in history.



[1 [[2 [3-(a little below)] [4-in yellow] [5-pale, flower, below] & [7]x2]]]


1st Edition - September 2004 (Bukowski quote inside cover) -* ‘Ceasefire’ (3 short poems by MP) * ‘don’t stand up in the middle of a room’ (insane angry Biblical rant by AH) * ‘Opposite Dew’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Johnny Cash’ (poem by KM) * ‘The Symphonic Democratic Violation Bomb - Part One (1945 - 73)’ (poem by SG) * ‘Alchemy of the Word’ (Rimbaud translation by KM) * ‘The Blade’s Sloppy Kiss’ (poem by AJ) * (Four untitled short poems by MP - begins: “There’s no hope of utopia”) * ‘Sub-Central’ (short prose by AJ)- (the dead socialist graffiti-photography project on back cover / distorted) -



2nd Edition - November 2004 - * ‘A Cheap Box of Oranges’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Vincent’ (poem by JS - Janette Stowell) * ‘Saint Hood’ (4 short poems by MP) * ‘Shit on the seafront’ (underlined first line of poem as title (?) - poem by SG) * ‘Strange Re-Union’ (poem by NJ - Nathan A Jones) * ‘adventure story for boys’ (short story by AH) * ‘Vagina’ (poem by JS) * ‘The Symphonic Democratic Violation Bomb - Part Two (1964 - 01)’ (poem by SG) * ‘Drive’ (poem by AJ) * ‘The writer + his Annihilation Part 1’ (writers manifesto by MP) * ‘The Squeezed Juice of Midnight’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Go rimbaud, go go rimbaud’ (poem by KM) - (Rimbaud’s last letter inside back cover) - - (the dead socialist graffiti-photography project on back cover / distorted) -



3rd Edition - the schoolgirl issue - June 2005 (1st editorial / cut up / inside cover) - * ‘It’s True’ (Michel Houellebecq translation by AJ) * ‘War (4 poems by SG) * ‘A small glow’ (poem by GS - Gary Smillie) * ‘Haiku’ (by AJ) * ‘Bitter Bites Lemon, Boy’ (another prose rant by AH) * ‘On the Napkin’ (shorts from Everyman by JS and KM) * ‘The Opposite of a Date’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Two Saint Poems (10, 15)’ (by MP) * ‘Synopsis Seurre Noir’ (poem by JS) - * ‘still life’ (poem by MP) * ‘Adequate Rope’ (poem by KM) * ‘The Dissection of an Argument (How to win)’ (theoretical nonsense essay by AH) - * ‘Contemporary fiction’ (poem by AJ) - (the dead socialist graffiti-photography project on back cover / distorted) -





What seems like an ending may turn into a rebirth. As of now, Back to the Machine Gun is in an uncertain flux. Member have moved, to different cities, to different continents. All sorts of things always get in the way. It becomes hard to see what has been achieved despite all the push and pull, not only of the usual demands of life, but also of distance, of mistook words, of resentments and callous egos, the common turmoil of anything really.



more poems will be linked in the future
&
a more casual overview of all issues here

untitled translation of Sergei Gandlevsky

Когда я жил на этом свете
И этим воздухом дышал,
И совершал поступки эти,
Другие, нет, не совершал;
Когда помалкивал и вякал,
Мотал и запасался впрок,
Храбрился, зубоскалил, плакал -
И ничего не уберег;
И вот теперь, когда я умер
И превратился в вещество,
Никто - ни Кьеркегор, ни Бубер -
Не объяснит мне, для чего,
С какой - не растолкуют - стати,
И то сказать, с какой-такой
Я жил и в собственной кровати
Садился вдруг во тьме ночной...


When I lived in this world
And breathed this air,
I've done some things,
Not others, no, I haven't;
I held my tongue and whined,
Squandered as well as saved some,
Tried to be brave, I scoffed, I cried
Yet salvaged nothing;
And now that I am dead,
Into matter transformed,
Not Kierkegaard or Buber, no one
Can explain to me why,
What - they won't tell me – for,
It seems too easy to ask why
I lived, and why I'd sit up in my bed
Suddenly awoken in the gloom of night…


Sergei Gandlevsky - 1995

Translated by - Olia Grebenyuk (now Hercules)

Drinking Lament


Drink this up, before you leave me
Consider what I have said.

Be careful on your way
Drink and be merry whilst you can,
Pay no mind to those left behind
Do not be pushed off course.

Drink this up, before the ship sets sail
I'll tie knots in this kerchief
Thinking of your hair in the wind.

Drink and fall around if you must
Just remember what I said,
Cut deep salt wounds.

Drink, Drink to your heart's content
I'll still be waiting by the window
Too far from the harbour to catch a glimpse.

Drink the sea spray Drink the wind
Think no more of me beyond
What I asked you to remember, but
Drink will make you forget
Of this I am sure
My request rendered pointless, but I knew.

Drink in the view
As the bow dips violently – sway, crash
Unseen rocks are approaching, still
Drink over ice, the cracks and splinters
I'll wait by the window for word
Whilst your hair tangles with seaweed, barnacles on bones.

Drink this up, before you leave me.



Alexis Hercules

untitled translation of Boris Rizhy


I shall leave for some remote Northern city,
Squatting, I will smoke a roll-up,
I'll be pricked by a dear friend accidentally,
He will sob over me when he sobers.

I know one cheerless place in medieval Rus,
Where cheerful people live for the day,
To stay there is scary, to leave is to lose honour,
To gulp spirits - for soul; and to pray - into darkness.

What rivers are located in taiga,
What vastness unfolds in the morning,
Local women roam them and fugitive lifers
Are raising horizons into the third power.

Let me go, you. I'm alive only barely,
I'm nobody's forever, a Judas, a psychopath,
I am not in deep sorrow, but the gloomy, dark fir trees
Promise a certain deep sorrow ahead.


Boris Rizhy (1974-2001)

Translated by Olia Grebenyuk (now Hercules)

spare me

the vanity of those who seek to end history
by scorning the claims of the ghost story.

We who live by mystery
have no business trespassing
on the last myths
of the blue universe.

Take the late mist of a dying princess:

the torrid blush, the fluttered lash
the camera flash
the visual challenge
of the smoky glass;

the broken heart's commodity.

The wounded driver a flame
in the eyes
of an astonished girl.

(field of landmines tiny legs a mirage on distant sands)

We who live by mystery wait.
‘I's cast open, eyes half closed
while the lights smoke in the tunnel
and the car's a wreck
the heart a brain
the palace shattered glass,

beauty shy of time.

*

In this particular kingdom of the blind
the one eyed man is too busy
shepherding to brace the reins
of a king,

warding off the accidents of human traffic,
the stumbling patsies of misplaced trust,
another lusty collusion of genocide and fun.

Yet a mile high above
in the flight paths of the blind
a stewardess advises her passengers
thus:

‘At the command: brace! place your head
between your legs and
pray - or trust at least

for the plane is losing
altitude fast
&
we all may be obliged to acknowledge soon the moment
in which
even the Beautiful People
won't be leaving
good-looking corpses

But in the locker above your head
you will find confirmation that

even the visually challenged
will have every right
to have seen and not seen the fire at the end of the universe
which the scriptures say
will burn seven times hotter
than the sun.’



Ade Jackson

gate

[ 1. ]

   funny furnishings         0           exposure
he would see 1 to all in the mind
heaven 2
as funny 3 makes way
dreamy furniture 4 to all
wavey lines 5
moved it around 6 and all
a bit 7 or


[ 2.] (accompaniment to 1.?)
  All the nonsense in the    0               or all
world greater the gummy branches
than all the nonsense 2 the body done
the world in
milked added on
him or his a thing
bed his body
place 7 peripheries


[ 3.] (solo)
     a mass                  0         a path
of fuzzy problems bodily
taken
3
twin lip two
tautly they
6
#.(one added on


[ 4.]
      heaven by high                    infinite
road dusty elements
the magic about the head
car of the driver
in the elements 4
the magic car 5 by hook
how far ? 6 or crook the
- the distance 7 long drive


[ 5.]
    lock in a system                the bed as it
all loved things appears in a dream
expansive, joined on
place the bed as it all sides
appears in by a bed
commotion under 5 impinges on
something
fed on loves


[ 6.] (all at once)
away from a hallowed gate,    0       light, that
away again bigger funny thing?
away from the gate or fun
shocked to pieces - 3 to the end
light passes on the lightened up
real world a mist, beauty
tulip, mildew, and 6 of a day after mist
all light passing through the ending


[ 7.] (reiterate)
 shut in the brain and step   0   here was heaven at the first
out, stop, down step - We thought about it
it ends in rooms,I . and there was a car journey -
put rooms here We ended that wondering is
only running out by my that anyway to go and thought
own design, enclosures . a heaven would answer "Love"
here,hear "bark" things or a means, - means of "going
hungry to clean up . or any way,where on"


M Pendleton

The Squeezed Juice of Midnight

(American dreamer; Star of Karuna; Moon of Pity; Ti Jean… . b silent & real)

Lime Street, 1 a.m.

strung between a lost train of thought

& the silence of an empty station,

tongue-tip worrying a lemon pip

in a wasted tooth, still tasting

the squeezed juice of midnight


I tease the notion that love’s a big deal after all.


When mister death

comes clawing at my threads

like a frisky leper

it’s the one thing he’ll be looking for.


As you wave at me & your ticket flutters

to the cold stone floor & limestone echoes steps

beneath the domes & tunnels as the train arrives


he’ll be the fella with the homeless rag

wheedling for nowt tonite, only waiting it out

for the chance to wrap us about his shoulders

like a widow’s ratty stole.


So walking each other home

beyond the wind’s music in the coffin groves

& the fidgety spirits of half-friends we’ve left

talking up theories in the speakeasy’s womb-glow,

fencing night’s dubious traps,

still in their cups, vibing off

their near unassailable delusions,


we’ll know that love’s a pretty good call

&the sky a benevolent madness

of hushed clouds rushing the just ice of stars.


Ade Jackson

Go rimbaud, go go rimbaud

O rimbaud, why did you leave me
for ivory traders, accountants
a dog that pissed in the street?

Maybe I too should go,
back to the suburbs
find some wife, some dog, some job
where words are just words
just a thing we use sometimes.

But when you’ve obtained the knives of the pen
by trial and error and bleeding,
you don’t give em up so easy.

Perhaps it’s a case of attrition,
slowly but slowly the knife turns blunt
and is placed one day in a drawer
maybe thrown away or forgotten
like a childhood fascination with burning matches
before you grew up and kept them for their proper use

Making you mouth move is a subtle art.
Sure, I make it look easy,
writing poems in waiting rooms,
forwarding letters to unknown addresses,
scribbling notes to imaginary gods.

You see I can’t seem to escape the feeling
that all these people want to tie down all these words
to useful meanings for times of need,
not matches casting shadows.

Kevin Millband

CINE-POEM


1. EXT. IRISH SEA, NIGHT

Mid winter. Scathing
south-easterly gale. An exorcism
of colossal waves; a ship
emerging from swell

screeching, wailing, rampant
plucking of a rusting fiddle


an almighty thud: violent
punch to the ferry's hull.

Blackout.

FADE INTO: ampoules of colour; the lights
of a distant rig.


2. INT. SHIP'S SALON, NIGHT

A dog whines. Passengers
hunch over knees. Last suppers
crump into sick-bags. Morbid
creaks from metal frames
and the pitted floors
a momentary suspension

what the -

ship rears up
behind closed hatches
crockery crashes
the 'great ninth wave'
rabid on portholes
the force nine gale
fist-fucking the funnels.

V.O. The grey wolf waits
in the halls of the gods.




3. EXT. SEABED. NIGHT

Silence as a lone crab
balances all the above
on its latticed back


NOTE TO DIRECTOR: these three scenes
should be played out on a loop
in real time i.e. seven and a half
hours of relentless misery (which, though long
is still a lot shorter than Das Boot).



Janette Stowell

Johnny Cash





Hands move‘cross piano
Like old man in love
With piano

Johnny cash
you popstar you,
Tell me of the west
you won
And the price
Down to last nickel
And dime store indian

Johnny cashed up for the night
His winnings
in desert shine
Of a sunbleached mirage.

Kevin Millband

casual causal overview

#1-----
September 2004 --had some jihadists on the cover.Only 40 or so were made, and spread about Liverpool in places forgotten and maybe bulldozed.

#2------
November 2004 -- an erased buddha for the cover.A series of Saint Poems started here.

#3------
June 2005 -- a schoolgirl in negative with geometeries for the cover.

#4------
November 2005 -- a face with thingies for the cover. At this point some poets outside the founding group were contacted, and gifted some poems.

#5------
February 2006 -- a grandmother's painting for the cover.Done in a rush for the first live event, took place in a lovely church that allowed the brisk sale of alcohols.#5's content showed an expansion in the poets featured, and the poems themselves showed similar movements into new territories.

(#6)-----------
an interesting absent issue, due to as-yet unexplained anomalies regarding arts council funding.

#7------
May 2007 -- a mussed up of prior things for the cover. This issue also commemorated a live event at the same lovely church.Also, a last meeting up for many of the founding poets.

Radio Transmission



It is Phill Jupitus on the BBC. He seems to have been in the News From Nowhere bookshop in Liverpool. At what time, we still don't know.

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our magazines so far


[1 [[2 [3-(a little below)] [4-in yellow] [5-pale, flower, below] & [7]x2]]]

mentioned on radio



It is Phill Jupitus on the BBC. He seems to have been in the News From Nowhere bookshop in Liverpool. At what time, we still don't know.