JEFFERSON TOALPETER MANSON

FRIDAY 5 MARCH 2010 JUDITH E. WILSON DRAMA STUDIO

FACULTY OF ENGLISHUNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

EPYX FASTLOADfor Cmdr Zorg

into lung ingestion bop an intro:make-outbell a snake riff / invade-a-load DOS wedgeteh cosplay transpark bullets maul sighout achild full of conkers/ i’m busting my flange for you earjacking in some ota c’est plus fort que toimirrored in a limpet retexturing scheme

leap non-static up low-end NO$GBA cobra,let’s compare equivalent data now:the july report states that, contrary to our Q1 projection , which was way out by the way, the lick price peeled a bloom gat got hit by the low-rise couch settingand we now expect that as we enter the third quarterthe connective will be a necessary will shines itself through the playground inviting a shit-storm codename:katanareduce in stint loss radiant suns wrapped in lung againkip a stick at shifts in tins of you slight duff lepton in cubicle

JEFFERSON TOAL

it holds you and will lick your starry paws you’llpurr into later parks you’llinterplay here in some massive panzer hingeminted shorty reaped in sync dynamic hot wage quick sleet along by late night ball playgiving rises to breaks time into bluntingsockets moments shortly predicated after iso pin searing crop diskette function exit fastloadlive on in unshifted blunt exchange idle insynchronous group delay , as suggested,parallel yearning re: niner glyph interchange

Poem, 8/7/2009, in apology to MWH Dragon nectar, dissolve my atrocity!I have hummed the wrong God. Igawped defrosted in the glare of yoursmelting praise, my turgid spirit splitinto mist and swamped me. Take meback, stand up upon my outstretched palm and hover- my floating blush willcushion your free suspension. Leastof all carry in your vacuole anexpanding light self-generated of thewill to greet and soothe, save not asingle dissatisfied tooth to gather you.

ON JEFFERSON TOAL Someday, out there, the poems of Jefferson Toal will be available in a popular hologram edition through the vending grate in your very own Burning Chrome sleeping pod. Toal is not jacked into some abstraction of a cultural field of universal razor edges from within which any Phlarph poetaster (i.e. internet tourist) could be lucky enough to piece together The-Poem-We’ve-Been-Waiting-For. The substrate of Toal’s inscription must be the chaos emerald itself, which at world-scale turns out to be the eyeball of the Creator, causing that Mother Father’s unhewn catholic orb to flip the world-floor flashing into the color palette of an NES emulator tuned to a dead cheat from the futuristic future, waiting for the chargement to stop, like a patient etherised upon teh table. It’s an indelible sweetie sandwich for a Lucozade rash. Our poet is in a psychomorphic leg-lock with arcane SEGA heroics; he is a Youtube commentary loiterer; he was beautiful and sparkling in the illegitimate chat freedoms of Web 1.0; his poetry got its first whiff of historical method from a secret kawaiialectics apprenticeship encoded into “Theses on the Phil. of History.” The contingencies of grammar in his verse are plasticised not by the will to distance lyric from speech, but by the will to employ any speech units which might possibly have been: vicious childhood cut-up ploy, hydroponic syntax from the weatherbox of infidels, ham-and-bandage fragments from the sick bay of Anglo-American poetical history, itching phantom glyph discharge on text amputees from a Geocities (RIP) homepage sloughed sideways into perception by the code shell’s dream of the motherboard. Toal’s condensations are set upon the fibre of a fragile intellection, demanding the perpetual retracing of an arching triple backflip into a pre-adolescence affected from the station of unsolicited adulthood (vide “cosplay”). He will have come this close to cracking the codeword for the great hall of the world-nerds of the plasticine tower, which he will have once considered penetrating in an unbelievable disguise. His “Epyx Fastload” is a song of exponential intensity, where the rate of experience as game play is a function of neither attention nor platform: heightened velocity of perception is dependant upon an external hardware unit, a catalytic add-on to the Jurassic spirit, a pair of silicone kidneys, an insertable hyper-drive, the Epyx-brand fastloader. This cartridge accelerated the loading time of floppy disks in the Commodore 64 (1982-1994) by 500%. The elegy which fails to revitalise the good Commander Zorg (tortured proprietor of ukresistance.co.uk) is fueled by nostalgia for the experience of a once unprecedented speed. Toal’s heart strings are soldered to the Platonic auratics of an interface relegated to the dust bunny graveyard. The prescience that “Epyx Fastload” will fail as a topical charm is burnt into its design, as the cyclic power of the no-play grinds intensity to a halt before the kill screen can accumulate. The cartridge always-already ejects: “exit fastload.” — JK (& MW-H)

PETER MANSON

The Elfin Knight

‘DID ye ever fell.‘DID ye ever fell.‘Ye maun sack it in thy gloves.‘Ye maun shear it was born.’Where ye’d gane wi me ye salt water, young man,‘Ye maun dry shear thae words said,‘Ye maun shape it, knife,‘Ye maun shear it with thy sark,‘Ye’ll meet wi a pepper corn?‘Ye’ll gang wi me.‘DID ye ever green,This night I ask ye questions ye maun dry’t wi ae hook-tooth,Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba

‘Ye maun sack it in yonder well,‘Ye maun stack it in ae plaid awaBa, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba,

‘Did ye maun shape a sark.’‘Ye maun dry’t wi ae peck o corn.‘Ye’ll meet wi your leuve.‘Ye’ll gang wi me.

(from Mallarmé)

The little boat without oarssleeps by the post that shackles it —on the water we are not as yetreflected to raise the keepnet

the river with no other emotionthan blue daybreak idlyflows from Valvins to Samoisfrigid beneath the caress

this sudden movement similarto shaking off with a shoulderthe dark cargo of sleepthat all alone might test the willow

is Paul Nadar upright and greencasting the net wide open.

*beer dungsolero

in a momentfor life

*torn rainfrom alpine

hen andpineal chicks

ON PETER MANSON

This is no arrondissement of flatulated scree, it expects and waits for and follows symbolic imports with invigilated sensibility, only in the counter-offer of invited intuitive integrity does it copulate unbound in foam and flowers of chromatic intricacy, downwashed into a cicatrice of screened object relations. Procedure is a fungible marker of false consciousness and the ‘inroads’ are in situ and in vivo globes left in the pseudotoxic pop expanse. Not only are we “buttonholed by strategic drunkenness / that doesn’t even hurt”, but the phenomenology of attrition and decadence fosters the input of tropic stargazing, as a massacred conceptual performance of Burroughs/Minogue flames the triage of memory’s undigest in real display time. Nothing sicker than the comportment of love clock ephemera in the spectacular marginalia of codex and LCD textuality, humping with a storm of reverse post-amphetaminic grace, glued into the temporal lobes, and that’s only a version. Humor is a collation of kinematic reference and the musical chairs are binding Juvenal to Rodefer, Herrick to Coolidge, Cavalcanti to Raworth. Out on the frontier of anti-sequence, Beauty touches Satire to perform the heteroglot work, attendant to the viscosity of Nature, after Thinking but before the Wit has settled into the compromise of self-knowledge. Stupefaction as a prerepresentation of force inculcated steeps the mug in the factual T. Anyway or how, I’ve got “the hungery gumption in [my] egg-bag”, where blindness and fiber-optic detail make the diurnal revelate with chance agency, front historical spark and counterfeit histrionics. As if you really liked Michael Nyman? — RD

The Cambridge Reading Series is generously supported by the Judith E. Wilson Fund and organised by Ryan Dobran, Ian Heames, Justin Katko, Laura Kilbride, and Mike Wallace-

Hadrill. Website: crs0hq.tumblr.com

JEFFERSON TOAL D.O.B.: XX-XX-1985 / WEAPONS SKILL: 6 / BALLISTICS SKILL: 7 / PUBLICATIONS: “Arcobat” (©_© PRESS, forthcoming), “Training Session” (Quid #16, 2006), “Epyx Fastload” (Plantarchy #4, 2007), “Mortar Penne: Ha Ha Ha; Or ‘The day Sigma Huda ate my gundog’” (Quid #18, 2007) / STAMINA: 4 / PSYCHIC: 9 / DENTAL WORK: Sussex University: BA ‘03-’06, MA ‘06-’08 / OFFICES: Secretary of the Random Acts of Kindness movement ‘04, Insert Riot Sorrowist Cadre and Jelly Procurement Delegate ‘05-’07, Chief Shadow Puppeteer of the Military Affairs Committee of the Faceplant International ‘07-’09. / CHARM: +1. // By day Jefferson Toal teaches the students of Coldfall Primary School (London) whose poetry he read in addition to his own at the CRS reading.

PETER MANSON lives in Glasgow. His publications include Between Cup and Lip (Miami University Press 2008), For the Good of Liars (Barque Press 2006), Adjunct: an Undigest (Edinburgh Review 2005, Barque Press 2009) and Before and After Mallarmé (Survivors’ Press 2005). He was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellow of 2005-6. His website, “Freebase Accordion”, is at petermanson.com. As part of the CRS reading, Peter Manson read the poems of Clark Coolidge.