My thanks to IT and Rupert for today’s posting of one of my ‘literary lines’ generative TextArt poems. Two from a sequence of four, you can read it here: https://internationaltimes.it/will-to-change/

Presumably we all have our many bugbears. One of mine is the observation ‘It was surreal’, this most commonly brought to my attention on TV interviews when a (again usually) sports person, or celebrity, or person-of-the-moment is speaking about an actual, real achievement and/or experience and they describe it as the total contradiction of ‘surreal’. There, I’ve said it:

I never got past 5 erasures from this, the fifth making its way into my Bier Bua Press found poetry collection &there4, this now withdrawn from availability when the press closed.

I’ve just come across these other 4 beginnings, but it was a task too hard to pursue for so many reasons:

My thanks to IT and Rupert for posting today. Read the poem here: https://internationaltimes.it/ordinary-ordinance/

Generative TextArt poems exploring the functions – or not – of backchannel behaviour in talk, taking me back to my A Level teaching…

Yes?

Yes.

From Gazebo Gravy Press.

This is an erasure on the theme of ‘Refuge’ – NPD theme, 2023 – where I removed all the lines from Samuel Beckett’s 1969 story Lessness (though being precise, his later English translation from the French original Sans), apart from those referencing ‘true refuge’ and the occasional ‘light refuge’. It shifts the hypnotic focus closer into this as an exploration:

I wrote about my introduction to this story – and its impact – in the following link. I also include the whole story if you want to read: https://gravyfromthegazebo.blog/2017/02/18/lessness-samuel-beckett/

My final generative TextArt exploration on the theme of ‘Refuge’.

More from researching the theme of ‘Refuge’, this is the first from The Three Refuges Buddist chant, and here is a translation,

I go to the Buddha for Refuge.
I go to the Dhamma for Refuge.
I go to the Sangha for Refuge.

I am only being brief to prevent straying from my limited knowledge! I like its variation on my previous generation from thematic TextArt poetry, and – as ever – I like the patterns produced.

I like a routine/pattern to pursue… Continuing on the theme of Refuge (and using lyrics), this is from Gimme Shelter.

The lyric’s narrative doesn’t have the same ‘sensitivity’ as my previous from Across the Borderline – I think it is more sensationalist than emotive – but it was interesting to have that link with the word ‘just’ and further sense of fragility and jeopardy,

‘War, children
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away’

I’m continuing to explore the Regfuge theme and was listening to that great song Across the Border (James Luther Dickinson / John Robert Hiatt / Ryland Peter Cooder) which is of course about escape and seeking refuge,

‘Up and down the Rio Grande
A thousand footprints in the sand
Reveal a secret no one can define
The river flows on like a breath
In between our life and death
Tell me who’s the next to cross the borderline’

but the telling word is ‘just’ from the final verse which emphasises the tenuous security that’s offered, as well as the illusion of escape and freedom,