Ruby Street

Writing comes from the body, out of the senses and rhythms of the body. The interstitial and the uncertainty in immanence is part of that process. Sense data arrives on moments. Bodily syntax isn’t smooth. The body has its digressions that the thinking body theorises. Memory is made up of fragment and trace. A heart has its arrhythmias. As do words, so hard consonants disrupt mellifluous vowels. Thus, a rhythm. For instance, whenever my writing starts en plein air, so to speak, I am not just employing an observational mode. And when I make poems with a broken or collaged narrative, that can emerge from acts of walking, changing trains, changing travel modes, the coming and going of bodies, voices, weathers. It is a continuing exploration of language and location. Fracture and discontinuity are real experiences of energy and movement. Poems are made with the materials of this world, its languages, its scratchings and surfaces, its keys and screens, as well as the poet’s body and lif...

“I was the world in which I walked.” - Wallace Stevens , from "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"

And who could forget the immortal words of The Goons on the subject of walking. Just a little late for this seasonal time, here's the first verse: I'm walking backwards for Christmas, Across the Irish Sea, I'm walking backwards for Christmas, It's the only thing for me. I've tried walking sideways, And walking to the front, But people just look at me, And say it's a publicity stunt. I'm walking backwards for Christmas, To prove that I love you.

My wild field catalogue of flowers Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers Tedious and long as they may be To some, they never weary me The wood and mead and field of grain I coud hunt oer and oer again And talk to every blossom wild Fond as a parent to a child And cull them in my childish joy from "May", John Clare

Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi Long seeking it through others, I was far from reaching it. Now I go by myself; I meet it everywhere. It is just I myself, And I am not itself. Understanding this way, I can be as I am. Tung-Shan (Tozan) (806-869) (from Two Zen Classics , Katsuki Sekida. Weatherhill. New York, 1995.)

My shadow keeps me company this moonlit evening Abbas Kiarostami (Trans. by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkad and Michael Beard) A short extract from poems by Iranian film maker, Kiarostami.

does the street draw you to walk echoing it to propagate from threshold to echo