Poets That I Read

Sylvia Plath
Charles Bukowski
Allen Ginsberg
Jack Kerouac
William S. Burroughs
Philip Larkin
Dylan Thomas
Arthur Rimbaud
Guillaume Apollinaire
Frank O' Hara
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
Brion Gysin
Heathcote Williams
John Sinclair
Ted Berrigan
John Giorno
Harris Schiff
D.H. Lawrence
Wilfred Owen
Siegfried Sassoon
Keneth Rexroth
W.S. Merwin
Geoffrey Hill
Elenor Ross Taylor
Joe Dunthorne

Time Out of Mind

I have been listening to Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind recently, although it wasn't up there with my favourites including Blonde on Blonde, Bringing it all Back Home, Highway 61, Times They Are A-Changin', and John Wesley Harding. I stuck by his 1963-67 era music mostly.

Having listened to his later albums, and loving the blues sound to them,

indicating how much he has become his original idols of blues music, I wasn't as inclined to Modern Times and Love and Theft. (Though Together Through Life is a keeper). As I began listening to the haunting gruff voice of a love-sick man, I kept listening to it over and over. It's not a sad album per se but one of perspective and nonchalance.

I kept listening to Love Sick ("I'm sick of love, and I'm in the thick of it,

this kind of love, I'm so sick of it"), Standing in the Doorway, and Highlands, the latter being the only 16 minute song I can listen to all the way through 5 times in a row.

I suppose it's one of those albums that will keep you going because it's full

of words you're thinking, but not hearing so well. I'd love to get in that big mind of his, unfortunately I'm stuck in mine.

Why I Believe Infinite Jest To Be Following Me

David Foster Wallace has only recently come into my literary life, and has already become very important in adapting my style. I now have Infinite Jest, though only having read 25 pages of 981, I have notice his name has popped up a number of times before even knowing who he is.

My friend from Uni is a fan of DFW, and lent me Oblivion to read, which is by DFW. In this is a story called Incarnations of Burned Children which we studied for one class last October, while we were in Wales.

Before this, August 2009, I downloaded some e-books to read because I didn't have any money to buy any new ones. I found this website to get them for free, so I was getting the usual stuff I liked to read, plus some random names I thought I should give a go. One being - yes, that's right - David Foster Wallace. I'd only read some of this before Uni and did not remember the name.

But, further back when I was in University in Preston, my tutor in Creative Writing had Infinite Jest. I recently told her I had Infinite Jest and was about to start reading it, and she said she'd had it on her shelf for years (inc. the years she taught me) but never read it.

And now, flicking through Generation X by Douglas Coupland, which I bought before I even started Uni, I notice in the back it has advertised a number of books published by Abacus. One of which being Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

Although books cannot follow people, I've come to the conclusion that this one does. I should start reading it soon, but it's the biggest book I've had to read. (I've only read 300 pages of 933 of Ulysses).

On Poetry and a Novel - Gainbourg Vie Heroique

The previous Poem, Two Mystics, was written over a few hours at night, after reverting back to Sylvia Plath's poetry, which I hadn't read in a while, and she's a huge influence on my poems. It is basically my experience around people and the actions between them. How I could give a person so much - feeling like I've "had to" give something - and then feeling like I have given not enough: "I have given you less than your smiles," and "I have given you hardly a thing."

I suppose it ends with feeling ashamed; with the obvious symbol of "red,"

which then bursts into flames. The title came to me right at the end of writing it, when the line "mysticalstill" came to me (forming one word is apparently Joycean, I got from a friend at our writing worskshop), and I decided to call it, not Mystical Still, but Two Mystics, making the two people seeming exactly the same, as they act so awkwardly around each other in the exact same manner.

Havva I got from Bob Dylan's song Hava Negeila, which is a Jewish song

of the same name. I wanted to put that word in, so I looked up it's meaning and it means "Eve" which I think fits perfectly.

I have begun writing my novel. I submitted the first section of the first chapter to the workshop and got some really good feedback, so I must be doing something right. However, the thing I was worried about was true, which was I wrote something impressive, and then as it went on, it lost the impressiveness to the end. It's like I've push out every bit of stylistic writing I have in one bit, and the next bit its diluted. But with the advice I received, I think I know how to go about writing it.

It's a 4 year old story. I thought of it in 2006 and never wrote it because I

liked it so much I was worried I'd ruin it. I told this to a friend back in May, as he'd already begun his novel, and he'd said to just write it and then see where you stand. But I hate that, when people say "just write." It's really not that simple. It's so comlex that it's taken me 4 years to adapt my writing style to be good enough, and I can now use the previous mad experiences I've experienced into which I can form a somewhat semi-autobiographical novel, which I think Hunter S Thompson used in Fear and Loathing which is called a Roman-a-clef; a story based on real events, turned to fiction.

Because a lot of things have influenced me 4 years after I had the original

idea for this novel, I wonder how long I should take with anything. So if I write and publish and novel and then see it some years later, I'd probably have some better ideas for it.

I'd been using David Foster Wallace, which a friend had lent me, as an

influence. And I was also looking between Catcher in the Rye and Naked Lunch as two distinctly different first-person narratives as influences. But I recently saw the French film Gainsbourg, which I saw after I'd started writing the chapter. The life of musician Serge Gainsbourg is illuminated through Johann Sfar's portrayal in this film, which uses Absurdist-like charactures, including a giant walking head of a Jew that comes out of the propagandist poster of Nazi-occupied France and walks with the young Gainsbourg. Another is La Gueule (The Mouth), which is a 7 ft. tall persona of Gainsbourg, with a long nose and long finger, very creepy to look at, but very funny as you understand that it's just Gainbourg's thoughts personified. This is something in what I wrote, in which the character is somewhat divorced from his own body. Someone had mentioned Beckett's Molloy, (though I'd only read Malone Dies out of The Trilogy). Someone mentioned to me that at the end of season 4 of House, there is another similar concept, in which House views his own mind in the form of a dead person. I will have to watch this. I will have to get writing this thing, having been reading up on more of Pinter and about to read Hamlet for the first time.

Words; An Experimental Poem of Words Around My Room

Words Around Room


BadFormat Sin City Abbey Road The Beatles
Knight The Broken Family Band
O2 Academy Liverpool Sat 23 Oct 2009
Frank Turner Barfly Liverpool Sat 17 Jan 2009 7:30pm
price 8:00 #113
Death of a Hero Fri 23 Apr 10 #33
Greasy Lips Club Babyshambles 14 Dec 2009
Hundred Reasons plus support @ 53º Club, Brook St, Preston
27 Feb 2006 Open to the public
NME Awards Shows @ Liverpool Academy
30th Jan 2004 £13.50 Advance
Sheffield Hallam FM Arena Sat Apr 14, 2007
ITB Presents Bob Dylan and His Band
Block 215 (Row) H, (Seat) 10
Lovely day for a Guinness
Jaws Robert Shaw Richard Dreyfuss
Poker Howl Ginsberg Coca Cola
Philip Larkin Whitsun Weddings Staying Alive
Refill Pad A4, 160 page perforated Parental Advisory,
Keep Out Goodmans Volume Play Open Star Wars
Withnail & I J.G. Ballard Bootcut Fit
Jack Daniel's White Rabbit Fydor Dostoevsky,
Notes From Underground July
Trainspotting Begbie #1, Diane #2, Sick Boy #3, Spud #4,
Renton #5, 18
Seven Brad Pitt Morgan Freeman,
Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Envy, Wrath, Pride, Lust
Made in, Sony, Orange
Vans, Duster. M. 10.0 Coffee/Pale Khaki
Osiris Shoe Adams Grey/ Grey Gum 9.

Two Mystics

You stand cursed with insight – too much to look at
A dirty look smiles so easily,
Touches and un-touches; mouth pink tongue red as a poppy –
Liver-thick – it moves and shows itself once or twice.

I wish I had you; or the illusion of you,
Dangerous as ideas, hot as my spiralling blood,
A body – quite short – skin of a female god,

I have had to give you Goethe and a burst of Medusa,
Always there, talking at a distance –
Touching and un-touching,
I have given you less than your smiles –

You shrink like a pupil, Havva in late afternoon sun,
I have given you hardly a thing,
Rings around the wrist, a drink a drink –

I am seeing everything in you
Nothing happens – the world ends at your look.
Do you have anyone? Are you with someone?
Still attached at the hip and waist, smiles out of place,

I have had to kill every bit of red shame,
Bursts into flame, holds like a tunic, shares the same look,
I have had to look into your eye – brown and white –
Held there quick, in a box of fright.

Will I ever get you, or you get me?
We are stuck inside one another – mysticalstill.

B. Is For Button

B. is seated next to You, his hands out in front of him as if playing the piano with Twiglet fingers, stained with tobacco.

You look at him more than once, and resolve to do so until B. catches You at the corner of his eye. He stops moving because You have fastened him to his seat, surrounded by thick, woven arms and animal pictures with stark, glassy eyes shining in a heavy summer light through caged windows. It takes him three seconds to look away. He settles back into his mind, facing forward and listening to whatever is going on (whatever this is does not matter).

The Twins are talking, You don't know which because they both sound similar. You describe one of them in your mind: an oval-shaped head, in which are pea-soup eyes with a these-are-facts-so-listen-to-me-talk expression; thin body with no attempt at constructing either shoulders or posture. This x 2.

B. begins to write something down, as if prompted by the other one sitting next to him, which both You and B. believe is called Olive. You show an expressionless smile, jaw pushed forward, eyes glancing around. The Twins are still talking, You hear their voices like a beating hum from a sub-woofer.

The Next one in the room sits between You and the Twins, and has a permanent smile of latex, curved through a weird blue/yellow bruise, which no one includes in the conversation for fear of offending the Next one, who is now bent over, almost prostrate from the chair, reaching at her ankle to scratch. She smells of over-cooked food for some reason. It's not terrible, You think it's like she's been left in the toaster too long and You look above her head for signs of black smoke. There is none, but still You shift over by a centimetre, stopped by the arm of the couch, unable to go anywhere else. Your eyes glance over at B., who sees You at the same time, his eyes like the eyes of your dog: big round things, uncontrollable and unaware.

Finally, Olive throws a button to the floor, which lands onto a pile of buttons already there. You love how B.'s eyes follow it to the ground and bounce in synchronised motions. B. leaps forward to grab the buttons as he yells something along the lines of I've won, but Olive leaps too, and wrestles him on the ground, hits his body with a mechanic force and smashes his head against the floor. She does it again and blood squirts out, thick like soup. You smell him, it's like meat.

The Twins had stopped talking, but now resume talking, You don't know which. The Next one jumps out of her seat next to You and takes the button. It is green and orange like the iris of a smoker's eye. The Next one leaves. You are still sitting down. You don't often gamble, You are looking at Olive who sits on top of B. You think this is too bad, You liked B. His round dog-eyes were a bit like the buttons she killed him for.

You sit still and watch Olive now wrestled to the ground by three new men in white pyjamas. She kicks at the floor and the buttons stick to her bare feet. The Twins are still talking, You can hear them in your head. You are as still as B., who lies there with streaked blood footprints around his head. You are now smiling a little bit, and this is good, because it's good to smile. B. liked it when You smiled. You're smiling because You love it when this happens. You hug yourself and rest your head back against the soft, padded wall.

© 2010 Michael Holloway

This story was written along with Kouponophobia around June 2010. It was written as part of an exercise following the theme of "button" whereby anything could happen, only it has to involve a button in some way.

Kuponophobia was, obviously, about a fear of buttons and was largely praised for it's detail in such a small format, and I found that I was actually good at short fiction or 'flash fiction.'

B. is for Button is an experimental story. It was written with the intention that every character spells out the word "button" and that was how button appears in the story. ie., B., You, Twins (tt), Olive (O), and The Next One (N). It was appraised for the imagery and style, but was quite confusing to read. It wasn't really understood why B. was attacked for the button, of which is used as a type of poker chip in some betting game. In the workshop, I was able to come up with the idea - thanks to my friends - that B. is actually a mental patient who has created the entire game in his head. Revealed when he rests his head against the padded wall.

It was put on the website The Button Jar, which a friend from class had made. The stories/poems from which are being put on there.

http://www.staff.ljmu.ac.uk/ICDSHAYN/mywriting/buttonjar/pageofbuttons.html

Some Drawings