HEAT Series 1

I worked them, sharpened hooks / for high-rollers, sewing my special rigs. / Bridles for bonito, live bait that / trailed the barbed viridian in our wake.

When [Charles Wright] calls poetry ‘this business I waste my heart on’ (WTTT, 38), he is not merely making an elegant bow to an eminent rhetorical figure but acknowledging having followed a seductive and fatal path in life. And it is with this thought in mind that we notice that his relations with spiritual masters are not always ironised.

The literary world prefers its daytime rose, / sweet and thorny, seasonal, blown. / You open only at night, on the ledge, / stepping from your continent’s shelf / like Houdini on a tightrope, flesh tensed, / gazing in all directions at once / like Titian’s triple portrait beasts, / or your own words, pointing and warning.

We have all heard of Prometheus, great rebel against the gods and bringer to earth of a commodity, fire, which we have depended on from earliest times for much of what makes us human: campfires, cooked meat, the forging of iron into ploughshares, horseshoes, swords. What is not so well known is that Prometheus had a brother, also a titan and demi-god, but as his name suggests quite opposite in nature and habit of thought.

One of the four bedrooms of each of the display homes would be furnished with an imaginary white Australian boy in mind. The room would most often be arranged to suit the taste of a sporting boy, with posters of the Chappell brothers dressed in World Series Cricket uniforms taped to the wall, Little Athletics ribbons pinned to the pinboard and empty Clarks’ running shoe boxes under the bed.

She was a strong young woman with a clear sense of her place in the world and she let the candidates, or contestants or suitors, know it, amusing herself by looking on the affair as one of those folk-tales in which a penniless beggar or soldier of fortune tries for the hand of a princess, for a kingdom too, but at the risk of his head.

Much of the language of cyberspace…seems strung out on an axis between opposing desires, for both embodiment and disembodiment. Margaret Wertheim uses that most physically explicit phrase, ‘surfing the net’, as an example. We have ‘visiting a site’ and ‘hit’. The body is ‘meat’, or ‘wetware’. Having your persona destroyed in some interactive games is called being ‘gutted’.

Sticky decomposition web   riparian cacti’s vulnerable pollen / nothing-disconnécted crowned with magenta   really swimming in meaning

Yellow is my favourite colour. If red is fire and passion, and blue is calm water, yellow is a flower. Yellow is very few things? Famously: sunflowers, cheese, taxis, bees, rubber ducks. The child’s sun is yellow. As is what I used to call, as a child, ‘normal yellow butter’ (margarine). ‘Yellow’ is fun to […]

My impression of Murray’s critical reception is that it is partly based on laziness: critics don’t want to deal with him. They don’t want to argue, don’t want the bad light the poems put them in as adversaries: politically correct (how unsexy) and less mobile verbally than the poet himself.

Would you knowingly invite a reticent person to dinner, someone like my Oxford supervisor, or my friend who believed in sealing her lips? If you had no choice, how would you deal with such people? Sit them next to Chatty Carl or Commandeering Cathy in hope that their quiet attentiveness would mop up the attention-seeking of the other. The voluble need vessels, after all, into which to pour their words.

my understanding of a nation is not abstract/ if america did not let off Ezra Pound/ it would not tolerate me/ no! I am not satisfied with my own country/ but that does not mean that I shall love america

In 1958 when I was eight years old my parents took me to New York. I fell in love with its powers of abstraction. It became the city of my mind. In 1988 we took our son to New York. He was eight, and the same thing happened. Now, the door to his room is covered with a large map of midtown Manhattan in detailed axonometric projection. He reads books about places and technologies and is thinking of becoming an architect.

Running in a sequence of dismembered sections, the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes can be read as a kind of fragmented text. Its choked tunnels, collapsed archways, brief truncated arcades can be seen as the scattered passages, say, of some early ontological discourse.

In Nabatieh, the small town in the south of Lebanon my forebears and I come from, Hassiba has been the uncontested diva of Ashura.