Review: "The Architecture of Chance" by Christodoulos Makris

Christodoulos Makris, The Architecture of Chance, (Wurm Press, 2015) 108 pages, poetry, $19.00 U.S.

Christodoulos Makris has established himself as one of the most important experimental poets working in Ireland today. The Architecture of Chance is his latest offering.

This is an exciting collection. Makris is fearless in his experimentation and is pushing poetry into whole new forms and realms of being. Most notable in this regard is "Chances Are", which he calls a mass collaboration poem. It appears in the collection as its HTML code. This poem can be found in application at 3am Magazine. It is a poem composed of every tweet that uses the word "chance" and updates in real time. Another boundary exploder is "From Something to Nothing" in which he took an informational text on the International Monetary Fund website and cycled it through several languages back and forth on Google Translate and turned the results into a poem that reveals much about the dynamics of language in the age of the internet. Given that Makris hails from Cyprus and has spent time in the United Kingdom while being based in Ireland, this experiment could be read as a commentary on the migrant experience.

Many of these poems are also political in nature. In "16 X 16" he writes: "I would have been a completely different person without the politics and a completely different writer." This is evident in poems like "Metro Herald's Advertorial Windbags Let Loose, 28-31 May & 4-7 June 2013"(which, as the title suggests, is a composition of adverts and editorials from Dublin's Metro Herald newspaper), "Civilisation's Golden Dawn: A Slideshow"(which contains pieces of speeches made by members of Greece's Golden Dawn party, whom Makris describes as neo-fascist), and "Public Announcement" (composed from the signs hanging in the Skerries public library on a certain day).

Others are slightly more domestic. Some are composed from emails or tweets sent back and forth in collaboration. One is composed from bits of conversations overheard around Dublin on a particular day. My personal favourite is "Heaney after Rauschenberg", which takes all the four letter words from Seamus Heaney's first collection Death of a Naturalist and places them in order of appearance. While soothingly familiar in vocabulary, it decenters Heaney's careful poetics almost completely, as if Heaney fell into a black hole when he died and this is all that is left of him in the universe. In that sense, it serves as an eerie, aching tribute of sorts - even as it seeks to shatter the comfortable traditionalism of  Heaney's legacy. Here is a brief excerpt:

"sick home hard blow baby pram when came hand tell they were away held hand hers with next went into room time left four foot four foot year

grey only from cows into like away iron gate into bank with from snug rise dead eyes used soon this they cock from left hand came came down this sake spat take your time more hole tree wild more said into mare hill back like that were that time ones that back when

dark fill dead cold like they line from some keep full tall soon back fish load from surf bend turf fear make they like clay seed shot seem they show good from bark feel roots pits live live wild land root died when lain days long clay with eyes died hard bird huts guts from like were with hope like land pits into sore stop they flop down take fill then cold

west mayo crew they from when with eyes like bone skin rose fell like they kept with beef men's then poor make food they like dogs that been hard when they with they were hope less next like dark once port ship free tart from good swim sink with zeal were

from that held arms came with have them word dead till"

This is definitely a book which requires the reader to "do the work" (Anna Strong), but the rewards are substantial. The break with Romanticism and traditional verse that began with the Modernist movement at the turn of the 20th century is spinning into free fall out of control as we become firmly entrenched in the 21st (much like society in general) and, like other experimental writers like him, Makris is making sure this is well represented in today's poetry. Only, he may be doing it better than most.

You can buy it at Amazon.

"AvantAppal(achia)" and "Human Erased"

2016 has begun and for me - with a bang!

AvantAppal(achia) launched yesterday. I'm really excited about that. I received a suggestion that I should include examples of the type of work we want, but I didn't want to limit it too much. It is for the avant garde, after all. I did, however, include a reference to Wurm im Apfel Press in the mission statement, for those who feel they must have some kind of guide. But it's an ezine about experimentation so I wanted to keep things as open as possible. We are accepting submissions in written, audio, or video formats - as well as artwork. Submission deadlines are May 31st for the June 15th issue and November 30th for the December 15th issue. See this page for details, as well as the email address for all things AvantAppal(achia) related: http://www.avantappalachia.com/submissions.html We look forward to welcoming you to our Kin(folk)!

Also, "Human Erased" (digital painting; dated December 17, 2015) won a Special Recognition Award for the Photography and Digital Art category of the 5th Annual All Women Art Exhibition at the Light Space and Time Online Gallery. It will featured on the Gallery's website for the month of January 2016, after which it will be archived: https://www.lightspacetime.com/all-women-art-exhibition-2016-photography-digital-category/ It is available for sale at Fine Art America: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/human-erased-sabne-raznik.html

It is my hope that all of you have fabulous and challenging (in a good way) year! Thank you all for being loyal as we all head into new, promising endeavors.

Up and Coming: More Reviews and a New E-zine

It's been quiet on this blog, but busy in the background.

Up and coming:

 -- Reviews of three poetry collections procured at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School.

-- Launch of new e-Zine for the most groundbreaking avant garde in Appalachia and the world.

I've been working on this one since the middle of September 2015 when the idea fully crystalised. My involvement with Wurm im Apfel Press in Ireland since 2010 has demonstrated to me how valuable, even vital, experimentation and the avant garde are to any healthy, living literary scene. The Wurm poets infuse Ireland with a dose of much needed excitement and energy, challenging the established modes of expression and pushing poetry into entirely new territories (Christodoulos Makris' Twitter poem "Chances Are...", anyone?). Then in July 2015 I had the opportunity to attend the prestigious Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. There I found a good reception to my work, but generally a resistance to avant garde and indy publishing. Although the literary landscape of Central Appalachia is maturing once again into a more united, supportive community than it was 20 years ago, with a much more contemporary pulse, there do still tend to be certain conventions and traditions too "sacred" to be challenged. As far as I know, there is no publication that directly supports and encourages full experimentation, where rules exist to be broken and made new. Many editors of literary journals and presses told me at the Workshop that "there is a lot of work (they) must reject because it is too avant garde." I determined to create a home for that avant garde.

Introducing: "AvantAppal(achia)"

As you will see, the website has not launched yet. Web design is nearly complete. I may soon have a co-editor to help me with sorting submissions. We meet next week, hopefully, to hammer out the last few details before launch can take place. But it is coming soon! The Kin-folk - Ed(itor)s - at AvantAppal(achia) are proud to fill this gap in the literary scene of Central Appalachia, bring you earth-shattering new work by Appalachia's finest and around the world, and welcome you as Kin. Watch this space for more information!

A Short Conversation with Poet Kit Fryatt

(Originally published on July 10, 2008 on Yahoo! Voices.)

I first met Kit Fryatt through Livejournal.com (I have since deleted my account there) when she wrote an entry regarding an event she attended at which Bono of U2 fame read and gave her thoughts on the whole affair. Being an avid U2 fan, I was highly entertained by that entry in which she was not at all pleased. Since we share a common love of poetry, we continue to correspond and I have learned much from her over the last few years. She is an unfailing support to me poetically. She is also a very good writer as well as teacher and has been published, among other numerous journals, in the Poetry Ireland Review. As a way to give back to her, I asked her for an email interview to be published here on AC (Associated Content, later Yahoo! Voices). Without further ado, here are the results of that interview:

S. R.: Where and when were you first exposed to poetry? How did you come to love it?

K. F.: I don't remember: the first poems I heard were nursery rhymes, probably. I remember laughing and laughing at a silly rhyme my father used to say: "Spring is sprung, the grass is riz / I wonder where the birdies is?" I never got tired of that. I have memories of writing poems on a paper napkin in a restaurant when I was 7. One began "A knight / In sight / On a horse / Of course", which I think has a certain modernist flair. I learnt poems by heart at an American school for military children in Izmir, Turkey. Rose Fyleman:

I think mice are rather nice,
Their tails are long, their faces small,
They haven't any chins at all.
Their ears are pink, their teeth are white,
They run about the house at night;
They nibble things they shouldn't touch,
and no one seems to like them much,
but I think mice are rather nice.

When we were still in Turkey, my mother brought home a copy of the New Golden Treasury, not Palgrave but a new selection chosen in the 70s by Edward Leeson. Books were a special event: even in Ankara, the capital, there were only a couple of bookshops that sold English-language books. There I found:

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springeth the wude nu,
Lhude sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb
Lhouth after calve cu
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth
Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, sing cuccu
Ne swik thu naver nu!
Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!

That's from the 13th century, and it's really just a slightly -- ever so slightly: note that farting buck -- more sophisticated version of my dad's rhyme. I had a cult of Old England going on at the time, despite or because of being surrounded by the remains of much more ancient cultures in Asia Minor, and I was hooked. I think rhyme and repetition hooks children into poetry, but it's a sense of the strangeness of language that keeps them reading.

S.R.: Which poets are the greatest influence on your work and why?

K.F.: Not for me to say, I think. Influence is a slippery thing. You might think a poet is heavily inflected by Auden or Yeats and I mightn't hear it at all. I've never tried consciously to imitate anyone, except in parodies, but I find I'm always unconsciously imitating. Sometimes imitating very bad stuff.

S.R.: Are there non-poetic influences, such as environment, other interests, etc.?

K.F. : Of course: anything and everything can be material. That said, the Irish bardic schools allegedly encouraged their pupils to compose indoors, in darkness. There's something to be said for sensory deprivation, too.

S.R.: As an academic, do you feel that is beneficial to poetry or not, and why?

K.F.: I'm lucky: I get a lot of pleasure out of close analysis. Sometimes a poem won't really ravish me until I've done the forensics on it. That's not true for many people I think, even some who end up studying English at university. Students often complain that they dislike "dissecting" a poem; a revealing metaphor, because they see the poem as a corpse to start with. I tell them it's not dissection; it's vivisection, except you can't hurt a poem by torturing it, luckily. As for poets making their living in the academy: poets need their patrons; always have.

S.R.: Give a brief anecdote of an experience in your life or at a literary function that has impacted you as a poet.

K.F.: I think all the experiences that have made an impact on me poetically are experiences of reading poems, which isn't very interesting to talk about. Literary events are usually the reverse of inspiring, though sometimes there is free wine. The poets I know personally -- I think I should like them as well if they weren't poets.

S.R. What is it that you most hope readers will take away from your work?

K.F.: Words. In their particular order.

S.R.: Are there any projects you are working on or ideas for future projects? What makes these appealing to you as a poet?

K.F.: I'm sending myself to poetic boot-camp for the summer. Formal exercises, that sort of thing. Starting over is always bracing.

S.R.: If you could could give an aspiring poet advice in only one sentence, what would it be?

K.F.: I *am* an aspiring poet! I saw this on a medieval mazard bowl in the Cloisters in New York: "Reason bade that I should write, think much and speak little".

S.R.: You are originally from Britain, I believe, but have also lived in
Ireland and Scotland. Would you consider yourself a British poet or an
Irish or Scottish one? How do you think that experiencing these
different perspectives has shaped you as a poet?

K.F.: That's a big and dangerous question. I'm bound to offend someone. I was born in Iran, to British parents. I left when I was ten months old though -- no memories. I spent some time in the south of England, and then my parents travelled with me to Singapore and Turkey. Then I was at boarding school for a year before they finally came back when I was ten. I spent my teens in the south of England and moved to Ireland when I was 21. I've been spending a bit of time in Scotland over the last few months too. National identity -- whatever some critics may say -- I think is rarely to the forefront of a poet's mind when he or she is writing, and yet poetry turns out marked by the regional -- perhaps, rather than the national -- in all sorts of ways. Politically, I'm not a Unionist: I think the United Kingdom has come to a point now where it is no longer really sustainable. I would be happy to see an independent Scotland -- making the island of Ireland a single country has particular political and social difficulties which I think would have to be negotiated very carefully, but given that it's done equitably I think it would be desirable in the end. England and Wales will probably remain as a unit: an independent Wales isn't viable economically. The cultures of the British Isles have their distinct differences but they also share a lot. England is often (especially in Ireland) seen as a monolithic imperial nation, but it's actually very various. I see myself as English within a wider british culture. The small b is deliberate. I think the imperialist conception of Britain, along with English domination of the United Kingdom, should and will come to an end. English people often don't think about this stuff. Their relative power insulates them from it. Well, white English people. There's a very different usage of "British" by English people of colour, because they often feel that "English" is a racial as well as a national marker, whereas "British" is inclusive. I'd like to make my small-b britishness somehow cognate with that. Living in Ireland and Scotland has made me think about these things, which I mightn't have done otherwise -- they make their way into poems sometimes. Quite a lot of Hiberno-English gets into them too, and the odd Scots word which makes its way in via the Scottish ballads, which I love.


Wurm Im Apfel, a small press that Fryatt runs herself.
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