Loewak: independent media and news network » Literature

Poem about Zahra Bahrami

Martijn Benders — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 11:29:52 +0000

This week the Iranian government hung one of my fellow countrymen because of unclear reasons. I decided to write a poem about it when i saw this picture, so here it is. This work is free of copyright so you can reproduce it wherever you want.

Let’s talk about the guy in the safari shirt.

This woman named Zahra was hanged
because she drank alcohol, or protested the government, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter to them and it doesn’t matter to us.
Forget about Zahra. Focus on the chameleon in her hand,

can you see how it took the color of the street, can you see
the shopping bags, the guy in the safari shirt?

Let’s talk about the guy in the safari shirt.
He cannot be anything else

than a guy with a belly
in a too small safari shirt
even if he tries very hard

there will always be
a camera like this one
exposing him, in a way

he’s hanging just like Zahra was, it’s just that
he never drank alcohol, as far as we know,
and never protested anything either

and if it wasn’t for a stupid poet like me
no one would have ever noticed his demise

a thought that brings him great comfort
on a cold, distant evening in a room close
to where you are sitting now.

Martijn 29-01-2011

The Craft – new poem by Martijn Benders

Martijn Benders — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:58:06 +0000

The Craft

You have found a stone.
But it is not your stone.
So you keep polishing and polishing.
The craft, you say, is to create a flawless stone
one indistinguishably remarkable.

But it’s not your craft, is it?
It is the found beast of an old tradition.
True, there are worse things in this world
than a couple of polished stones.

One day you will stretch out your hand
and offer us your perfect stone.
It will glow, in the middle of your palm
like a star only dreamed of by puppets.

You will stand in front of the mob,
expect nothing less than a crucifixion
or, at least, to meet the original stone
receiving its autograph on your corpse.

But no one moves. The crowds stare
only reminds you of the desert of birth.
You, who owns an invisible star, are
now at mercy of a nursing wasteland.

Square one, home of the creator.
But it’s not your square, is it?

It’s been around. In all its hidden glory.
In all its hidden glory. It’s been around.

Martijn 18-01-2011

New Loewak update – tetralogy, Turing foundation and fund of criticism

Martijn Benders — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:42:53 +0000

Hi folks,

For a while you heard nothing from me because I was busy with various projects. As I have already told you I am working on a kind of tetralogy, and already working on those projects they keep changing under my eyes – it is far from crystal clear how the tetralogy will look like, what exactly it will consist of and whether it will even be a tetralogy as such.

Tetralogy

As it looks now, the series include:

1. A novel that will be called “Bilderberg”.
2. A collection of poems with a yet unknown title.
3. A philosophy book named “Holokapital’.
4. A CD with electrorap in Dutch
5. A CD with arrangements of Rachmaninov.

I think I currently about 25% of project completion is done – but I would not dare predict how long it takes for the entire project is completed. As always for me I definitely do not want to put out mediocre products, which in this case a difficult requirement, because to excel in four different genres is by no means easy. However, I am convinced that I will succeed to create a very special package from this tetralogy. Currently, I put the emphasis on the novel, since the poems already quite far advanced and I have made more than 400 songs in one year, enough material to distil things out later.

Turing national poetry contest

I also have two or three poems in the top 100 of the Turing national poetry contest. The exact number is unclear because there is a poem in the top 100 songs of the same title as a poem that I have sent, but with a different registration number. It’s possible that someone sent a poem with the same title, or there is an error in the numeration. In the former case I’m at least represented with two poems in the top 100.

I have sent the organization when it became known the following mail:

Dear Maria Böggemann

Nice to hear from you. Contrast Events which thinks
the differences between people are an enrichment. I am fully
supportive of that philosophy. Give me a nudge when I’m in the Top 20.
Top three would be even better.

I just send my standard dressing requirements, so you will
have them ready if the moment arrives:

**
Well-stocked dressing room, where available:

* At least 3 bottles of champagne brand.
* Two black corduroy bathrobes, and a prejacket and an afterjacket,
comfortable slippers.
* Six bouquets of white roses at least every 30 pieces
* Pineapples with umbrellas in them. No grocery store pineapples. No
Dutch flags.
* Animation Girls. Not older than 22, preferably with freckles.
* Masseur
* Two pieces of olive soap, no Riviera.
* NO draft excluders on windows please
* Packet dental floss mint

Possibly, I would not care but would be nice, or a belly dancer
even two.

I look forward very much to this event, and am glad that the organization
is in professional hands. I wish you a pleasant new year with enriching differences.

Martijn Benders.

And a few days later in the mail, after consultation with my standin:

Marieke, this is Bart, that’s my standin when I do not finish high enough.
Bart says he he’s disabled on the 26th. Could you please reschedule the event.
That’d be great, thanks.

I received a response only today. It was apparently impossible to reschedule the event. Bit weird of course. So much went wrong already in this contest so far. I have sent them the following email:

Dear Marieke Böggemann,

Thank you for your message. I can hardly understand from it if you
take the dressing requirements seriously. In our industry, this
all quite common, the artists life is a hard existence and
a stage artist must be able to relax before and after in an optimized
environment to maximize the effects of his performance.

You ask me further about the ‘number of people “that will come to the theatre
Frankly, I have little ideas about this. I have no idea
how many fans will turn up, that might also depend on the
promotional materials you will send out.

Your refusal to reschedule the event puts us in a difficult position.
I will consult my standin on the possibilities. Frankly, I have no idea
what exactly he has to do on the 26th. But he sounded pretty affirmative
about the fact that he had something to do It may well be something important,
like a visit to the dentist or get a swimming certificate, who knows.

I can say, to keep it short, that unfortunately I cannot say
in what form we will be present at the contest.

Sincerely,

Martijn Benders

Fund of Criticism

Positive news on the Fund of Criticism: that’s going to go ahead. I have already designed a logo for a website and within about a month the Fun will be operational.

The Fund of Criticism

Ron Silliman, stop torturing my website

Martijn Benders — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 04:06:07 +0000

Stop it, Ron.
Stop torturing my website it did
nothing wrong. It isn’t even a poem
just a bunch of digits
in decent form.

I know, I know
you’ve been on the barricades yourself
and you have thousands of precious books
on your shelves but that’s no excuse
so stop it, Ron, my website
is very strong anyway.

My website will never succumb.
So you better give it up, Ron.

If everyone did like you, if everyone
would cherrypick poetry
then nothing, nothing at all
would be new and you know it

so stop it, Ron, stop the debut
of yourself at the expense
of my website. Stop it. Now.

Martijn Benders, 05-08-2010

The open air library is once again open!

Martijn Benders — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:38:50 +0000

The Open Air Library on the highest mountain of Buyukada is once again open. Kerem aka Argos Libertos managed to open it again after the police forced him to shut it down last year but they were no match to his persistance. Kerem cured well from his jump from 3 high in the centre of Istanbul and could walk well again after being operated, first half year with help of a stick. His library has now signed works of dutch poets Arjen Duinker, Tonnus Oosterhoff, K.Schippers and Alfred Schaffer who by means of Bart van der Pligt were kind enough to donate books. When you’re in Istanbul you should surely stop by and please bring a book or two!

De Ex Libris works of Serik Kulmeshkenov

Martijn Benders — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:56:22 +0000

The Kazakhstan born graphic artist Serik Kulmeshkenov is one of the few artists that keeps the ex Libris craft alive, a special genre within the arts. Ex Libris are special book seals people use to personify their person book collection. The works of Serik Kulmeshkenov are excellent examples of why this craft should never disappear:

Ex libris Natalya Chebotar / size 90mm x 90mm, 2005.

Ex libris Sergey and Irina Khrapov / size 80mm x 105mm, 2008

Ex libris Paul Elliott / size 65mm x 82mm, 2008.

These and many more magnificent Ex libris works you can view at the website of Serik Kulmeshkenov. Every serious book collector should have such an emblem, in my opinion.

An open letter to the Bush administration: Poetry as a hidden tool for Terrorists

Martijn Benders — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:43:40 +0000

Dear members of the Bush administration,

Yesterday I read an article about the possibility that terrorists could use games like ‘World of Warcraft’ to communicate with each other and spread hidden messages about plans and attacks. This theory was vented by one Dr. Dwight Toavs of the ‘Defense University’ on a conference in Washington Tuesday. I was in shock after I read the article. It suddenly dawned upon me that Dr. Dwight Toavs was not only absolutely right: but that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that, far-fetched as his theory seems, he has overlooked the most obvious communication avenue for terrorists: poetry.

As you might know a ‘poem’ is a piece of coded text in which the writers uses so-called ‘metaphors’ to hide the real message of the poem. That already makes it a very useful medium for terrorists, as they, using poetry, can conceal their true message by pretending the text is about something else. A terrorist might write a line like ‘Oh wavering flowers of the city, where it that the bees could honk and loom’ and what he would be really saying to his fellow jihadists is ‘Guys, go take a cap and bomb those buildings flat’.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabic poetry has seen a suspicious rise in recent years. But please, let’s not forget that these terrorists could use any sort of poetry to communicate their message: what about avant-garde, Flarf, language poetry? They are all suspect. Dr. Dwight Toavs is right and wrong: writing poetry is dirt cheap while playing WOW costs 14 bucks a month, let’s not forget that’s a months salary in Afghanistan! So we can safely conclude that poetry is the tool par excellence for terrorists to communicate their hidden messages.

And it doesn’t stop with contemporary poetry, oh no. Who says these terrorists aren’t secretly reading Shakespeare to each other in those caves in Tora Bora? What did the Lithuanian poet Henrikas Nagys really mean when he wrote ‘I was awakened by the whistling sound of pigeons wings and the flood of sunshine rising in my eyes’? Is there really any end to the vile possibilities of misuse one can imagine such tools to have? Clearly, any society that is serious about combatting terrorism must do something about poetry.

What can we do? It’s clear that we have to scan the entire literary opus of humanity for hidden terrorist messages. But only experts can do that: a regular CIA trainee will have no idea what these poems mean. Therefore I must propose that the US government employs all currently known poets, domestic or foreign, to scan contemporary and past poetry for messages that seem, well, suspect. It’s a gigantic operation but it’s for the sake of World Security. While Dr. Dwight Toavs from the ‘Defense University’ has a minor point I would want to suggest he stops wasting tax payers money playing World of Warcraft and instead focus on the real dangers, the world of poetry.

Paradise

joshuastephens — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:50:33 +0000

From Kafka in �Parables and Paradoxes�:

Since the Fall we have been essentially equal in our capacity to recognize good and evil; nonetheless it is just here that we seek to show our individual superiority. But the real differences begin beyond that knowledge. The opposite illusion may be explained thus: nobody can be content with the mere knowledge of good and evil in itself, but must endeavor as well to act in accordance with it. The strength to do so, however, is not likewise given him, consequently he must destroy himself trying to do so, at the risk of not achieving the necessary strength even then; yet there remains nothing for him but this ﬁnal attempt. (That is moreover the meaning of the threat of death attached to eating the Tree of Knowledge; perhaps too it was the original meaning of natural death.) Now, faced with this attempt, man is ﬁlled with fear; he prefers to annul his knowledge of good and evil (the term, �the fall of man,��may be traced back to that fear); yet the accomplished cannot be annulled, but only confused. It was for this purpose that our rationalizations were created. The whole world is full of them, indeed the whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to ﬁnd peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.

Freestyling

Martijn Benders — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:21:12 +0000

The setup of this log allows me to post to it anywhere I go from my blackberry. At the moment I am sitting next to the seaside typing this. I can wander through istanbul and any moment I have an interesting idea just share it with the world. That’s principally what logging should be about – direct interaction with everything.Of course this means more typos and such will creep in – typing fast on a blackberry won’t produce perfect texts but the grammar fetishists will probably better look elsewhere anyway.

Journalism is a disease

Martijn Benders — Sun, 25 May 2008 08:25:35 +0000

I hate journalists. The journalist, by default, sees you as an article. He doesn’t listen to what you say, doesn’t read what you write. Words, to him, are news items. He never reads anything, he scans, scans your words like a hunting dog would, looking for an exhausted rabbit. And when he finds the exhausted rabbit, usually an imaginary one, he parades it in front of an imaginary crowd as some sort of hunting trophy. The imaginary crowd cheers as the old dog carries the half-dead, imaginary rabbit to his doghouse, the newspaper.

You might think I write this because I got negative reviews. I didn’t. My book was launched last month and got about 7 reviews, 5 from people one would call ‘common readers’ and 2 from journalists. All reviews were positive. However, what really struck me as relevant: even though the reviews were ‘positive’ the reviews that were laundered with observation failures were never the reviews of the common readers, but rather those of the journalists. A ridiculous statement is a ridiculous statement, no matter if the statement is ‘positive’. It’s a really mind boggling phenomenon: I am supposed to be ‘happy’ with a bunch of terribly incorrect statements because the review as a whole would be ‘positive’. I’d much rather read a negative review with correct statements than a positive review with incorrect statements. Does that make me weird? Am I the last of the Mohicans?

Journalism is a disease. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, hardly a hundred years old. The basic operative: propaganda. It’s hardly possibly to comprehend the modern day world without becoming an expert in propaganda techniques. Most people do not understand this. They don’t understand that there is a ‘Guantanamo Bay’ because these people want there to be a ‘Guantanamo Bay’. They want us to have a certain image of them. Guantanamo bay is the exhausted, imaginary rabbit they parade in front of us because someone, somewhere, thinks it will be to their advantage if the world is terrified.

Propaganda, by definition, is a lie. It’s the smiling facade, the fake smirk on the face of the Eurovision singer who wants to look happy when he’s deadly nervous. Propaganda is a mask. It doesn’t matter what the mask says – it can be a happy mask, a terrifying mask, it makes no difference. It’s an attempt to manipulate impressions. The journalist creates masks out of words. It’s the mask-crafting guild of terror, preying upon our world.

I don’t care what sort of mask anyone would put upon my book. What an incredible insult to suppose one should be happy to see ones work wear some idiotic, smiling mask meant to lure some imaginative audience. I was very happy with the reviews of common readers. Their reviews might not be ‘professional’ but they were at least reviews. Real people reading a real book. That is, in these sort of times, something to be really thankful for.

The inclusion of female poets in canons

Martijn Benders — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:02:42 +0000

There’s a discussion going on the Guardian site about the inclusion of female poets in the English canon, ignited by Frances Leviston, a member of good standing of the illustrious ‘Poetburo’ I’ve founded together with James Sheard. Of course my vows to the Poetburo compel me to come to Levistons defense. It’s the urgency of defending a comrade rather outweighing the painful male chauvinist tendency to be the rescuing knight, in this case, and I’m slightly disappointed that I’m the only member of the Poetburo so far that seems to have taken his vows seriously. Anyway, here’s the testament of my defense:

I think the whole discussion is somewhat silly, because it evades the essential point: that canons are on itself male forms of ordering reality. They are attempts at monopolizing literature – tribal manifestations based on the good old Ape Rock: the whole idea that anything should or shouldn’t be included there reinforces the whole idea rather than disband it. What person in his right state of mind would care about which monkey sits where; other than a few big publishers there’s really no one that’s being served by the monopolization of literature. One has to wonder why it’s always English Literature that seems keen on presenting itself this way: I hardly ever see any attempts of ‘forming canons’ in other language areas, including my own (Dutch). No one seems to bother, really. So what is it about English Literature that evokes this incredible urge to form ‘a canon’? I think that question is more relevant than any other one I’ve read so far.

The discussion can be read here

Evidence of my insanity, smalltalk only

Martijn Benders — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:55:18 +0000

I have dreams and visions. Sometimes I hear weird voices. I don’t necessarily believe in anything I hear or witness. I regard myself as a scientist regards a piece of measuring equipment. The bottom line is: I ‘experienced’ something. I severely trained myself not to attach any conclusions or beliefs to any such ‘experience’. Let me give you some examples.

A visionary dream: I had a dream when my wife was just pregnant last year where I met this cute little girl near the sea. She took my hand, took me to the sea and washed my feet with the seawater. I looked at the sea and it was alive and vibrant with hundreds of colored, magical spirals. After she washed my feet the little girl disappeared into the sea. Suddenly I was in outer space, drifting between the planets. Very pleasant feeling.

This dream obviously meant that it was gonna be a girl, so I did actually believe that and it did come true.

Example of a vision: if you want to have ‘visions’ theres a technique you can use. it’s all about quieting the brain and bring it into a state of sleep without actually losing consciousness. There’s a certain ‘area’ where the consciousness must be focussed to produce the visions. It’s like some sort of inner antenna, which just functions when you know how to focus your awareness on it.

One shouldn’t attach any definite meanings to such visions. They can sometimes be rather overwhelming. The main trick is simply to stop the mind. This is in fact an extremely hard thing to do. I still struggle with it every day.

A few months ago I had a vision where I was watching some deer graze in a forest, like white deer. It was an incredible peaceful scenery, but as soon as I began to be aware *that* i was watching I lost it again.

Another example: the seagulls here, I hear them talking in my dreams. Sometimes I wake up and they are still talking, in dutch. But that soon disappears, like some sort of after effect. One time I ‘sensed’ that they are actually watching into my dreams and commenting on them. I was dreaming about something and the seagull on the roof was giving comments about my dream, I heard his voice loud and clear. Seagulls are weird creatures. I dunno if I like them a whole lot. They seem to have no sense of privacy, that’s for sure.

Last example: it happened to me a few times this year that in the morning I hear a soft voice that says something like ‘This is the time’ and then exactly after that voice spoke my alarm goes off. Quite absurd. I hear that voice quite clearly. There’s something weird about the whole thing, because it’s so exact. I could accept an ‘inner clock voice’ theory but this really has atomic precision. It’s like some sort of doppler effect of reality.