DIGITALBEHEMOTHSTUDY TEXT #1

Like life is like so amazing right now

Autumn 2011

Contents

2 poems – Samantha Desmond2 poems – Jack Underwood2 poems – Paul Maddern2 poems – Clare Pollard

Haiku Revue Infamous Last Words – Richard Epstein

2 Poems – Kate Tempest3 poems – Joe Wenderoth

Solicitorial – Robert Herbert McCleanBiogs

RAQ & Textual Disclaimer

SAMANTHA DESMOND

Swimming in Sugar

Pubic hair sticks togetherclosing me off, in eager release.Only semen could dilutethis sticky that sogs pet brain.Pushes baby back into sheets.

It fuses my fingers,makes claws out of fists.I'm defenceless, syrup, drown me.World deems how sweet I've become.

You attract more with honeythan brands of acid vinegar,or so my mother claims.She likes to make my fathersticky toffee pudding,and they've been married twenty five years, give or take one or two.

Before UniversityThe year had started with you in me.By summer we barely touched.By Christmas you were further in herthan you had ever been with me.

You left. I had a father workingseventy hour weeks, chain smoking.A mother selling my childhoodto pay off her catalogue debts.

I ran from the swingswe had kissed on in the dark,but I fell over, tasted tarmacon blood split lips.

The car park where we fucked,now I know it wasn't making love,is strewn with McDonald's bags, half eaten nuggets and ciggy butts.

Eventually I moved on. A succession of limp limbstrying to suck at my tit the wayfish feed of the dead.

But I remember Eskimo kissesand clumsy fingers. Tryingto get you to read something otherthan Wilbur Smith.

JACK UNDERWOOD

The Bomb I sat on was room temp, smooth.

My balls rested on its neck; it was all neck,

apart from the fins that didn’t look real,

and the nose which seemed to slide into nothing,

then further. And I could tell it had stringy,

warm guts; electric gristle stretched inside.

I felt proud of the bomb, scared and a little sexy.

I don’t think I’m a bad person when I admit

I lent down and touched my face against it.

Reading the MilkCatching the last drips

I let the goat wander off

and cross to the shady barn

to read my hand through the milk.

Bronwyn may die in August,

an argument in parliament

will last all of July and late rain

rot the jackets of the beet.

No news therein of the website,

or the pilot scheme on floor five,

just the usual business of smokers

huddled round a lunch hour.

No clues as to how the garlic taste

is getting in the eggs, why Ed

isn’t talking to me, and despite

my looking, no cure for diggers’ knee.

But I glean this; our life will be

just fine: enough blood for the heart

to keep us edging, television light

for the days gone spare,

the table will stay put, coppers

stack down in the dish, your frown

keep pace, and everything you cook

contain a short black hair.

PAUL MADDERN

On Hearing Paul Durcan Readfor a Second Time in the Great Hall of Queen’sUniversity Belfast

Paul Durcan gave a readingon November 16th 2005 in the Great Hall of Queen’s University Belfast. On October 26th 2007 in the Great Hall of Queen’s University Belfast, Paul Durcan gave another reading.Only this time, instead of a pithy commentary on shopping malls and how they are sapping the soul of the great Irish poet, what we receivedin the position of supplicantswas a riff on nostalgia for the Dear Irish Mummy.

Because, as Dear Irish Mummies are fond of saying: Picking the same bush twicenever gets you different fruit.My own Dear Irish Mummyis one for always saying that:“Paul: picking the same bush twicenever gets you different fruit.”I told her I’d worship that advice unto the end of my days, which was a lie. Because here I am at this second Paul Durcan reading,On October 26th 2007, in the Great Hall of Queen’s University Belfast.

Excerpt from anUndelivered Letter *

[St. John Rivers to Mrs.Rochester, --istan, June24th, 1848]

…and this Adam wakes to fierceimaginings. Warn them, Jane: Youngmen who follow me must never wingthrough crowds of alley tradersstealing silk scents from bazaar-coloured boys; never dance, as dothe natives, doused in the perfumeof these nepenthean nights.

I smell the glistening skin ofhalf-clad men through the window ofmy cell, and I am heady with thesweat. The young curate (and youcalled me Apollo) says it must befever. He pulls my eager arms backin and duty done, like you, abandonsme. Oh, my inconstant shield! Youwould have driven long-lashedbeggars from my bed….

*Found among the effects of Mrs.Diana Fitzjames.

CLARE POLLARD

CryptozoologySupermarket meat aislesmake me think of cryptozoology:creatures born from insomnia, glimpses, guesses; monsters of mortal make.

By the processed fleshI think of gryphon-steaks, the shanks of yeti and chimera, unicorns pale as plastic bread.

We have always butchered forests, hacked out paths,lost to hunger for some fabulous creaturethat hasn’t yet been classified or caged,whilst other fabulous creatures - being of the world and not our minds -we have contrived to hurt into new shapes.

A girl unloads her trolley - pumped-up pork and battery thighs -grabs a glossy where impossible bodies contort.

O God how we hate what’s real!How angry it makes us, the way real things say: we’re what there is. This is all you get to have.

The Day Amy DiedAfter Frank O’Hara

It was a Saturday in July 2011. Coffee and papers, which is usually a treat but there’d been this shooting in Norway. Did you hear about that even?

Then the pub, where I heard about you.Ash had run the Race for Life and I was five ciders down.A woman came at 16.30 and said: ‘Amy Winehouse is dead’,and everyone at every table checked phones orBlackberries,BBC or Twitter; muttering ‘tragic’and ‘her dad doesn’t know yet’,and the skin on my face went very chill and tight,

and it was a warm Dalston night–you could see the Gherkin and hipsters eating Turkish chopped-salads and a girl in vintage polka-dots, black kids, TESCO full of lesbians –and when Rich and I took a back-route, smoking weed,looking at the pavement and sky, I was feeling myblood. I was thinking of you and if it’s better to liveto 27 than never live,and then at Luke and Suzi’s we said ‘tragic’ andthey fed me curry and, okay, more wine,

and when I came back, 00.30, I couldn’t help logging into look and it said 92 feared dead now in Norway andall over facebook there were links to your videos –your stopped face, but we could press play and you’d jerk to life: tiny, feral, your arms vandalised like toilet cubicles. Our cartoon.

Underneath they’d written OMG and tragic and like Janis or like Billie and stupid selfish overrated bitch

and it’s easy to say that shit is inevitable,but I won’t, Amy.I won’t.

HAIKU REVUE

Collected Works of Shakespeare – Various Publishers

If you read Shakespeare,you will never be lonely.You should read Shakespeare.

RICHARD EPSTEIN

Seatown, Connor O' Callaghan – Gallery Press

"Swans, swans, swans, swans, swans:Christ! Give us polluted loughswhere all such might rot."

PAUL MADDERN

East of Eden, John Steinbeck – Various Publishers

Not without flaws,like a handful of diamonds-beautiful with them.

SAMANTHA DESMOND

The Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille – VariousPublishers

Milk in a saucer;a hard-boiled egg in blonde cunt.Eyeball on paper.

CLARE POLLARD

Aztecs, Inga Clendinen - Cambridge University Press

That there are animals.

Animals upon animals.

That we are not going home.

Joe Wenderoth

2666, Roberto Bolano – Picador

A whole universe

that could, at any moment,

be the one you're in.

Kate Tempest

Underworld, Don DeLillo – Picador

Following the baseball:

Brooklyn to the desert nukes:

Art and waste.

Jack Underwood

Digital Behemoth, Various Poets –digitalbehemoth.tumblr.com {;)}

At any giventime, in any given space,I greet elephants.

Robert Herbert McClean

INFAMOUS LAST WORDS

I know nothing about the state of the poetryworld, other than that I can never find anythingnew to read, so have to keep rereading Olde Poets,which accounts for the occasional sense I generate--or so I have been told --that my poems werewritten by my own grandpa. It seems to me thatmost poetry, always, is squeezed towards themiddling state of whatever is currentlyacceptable. It just so happens that what isacceptable today is gray and homogenized anyway.The other distinctive feature of our landscape isthat everyone wants to be a poet, but nobody wantsto be a reader. Picture a nation of gray,windowless monads, all talking to themselves. Andthat is everything I know about the PresentCondition of the World of Poesy.

It appears to me that things used to be betterbecause Shakespeare used to be alive, and Miltonand Pope, Horace, Keats, Auden, Frost, andMarvell. Of course Colley Cibber used to be alive,too. If there is a present-day equivalent (ofKeats, et al; there are plenty of Cibber-equivalents), I am unaware of him or her, just as,Gentle Reader, you are unaware of me. There are alot people writing. I'll never find out about mostof them. That makes it tough to generalize.

Will great poetry be written in the future? Ofcourse it will. By anyone I know? Probably not. Ifthey were going to write Great Poems, they wouldhave done so by now. (If they think they have, Iexpect I'll be hearing from them.) For it to be aregular occurrence, though, the idea of poetry-as-a-craft-and-discipline, not as a vehicle for selfactualization, will have to recur. I know howweary, stale, flat, and pedagogical that sounds. Ican't help it: it happens to be true.

RICHARD EPSTEIN

KATE TEMPEST

WHEN YOU WERE MINE YOU BORED ME

When you were mine you bored me,

made me wish I had the heart to leave.

Now you have left,

I see your heart, bigger than I let it be.

THE ENDI'm imagining desolate train stations, burning tarmac,

starving children punching through vending machines,

for fistfuls of chocolate fat.

The police are all dead, women crouch

in screaming corners.

Everything is broken, the air

thickens a stench of rotting mouths.

Soon, electricity will die, people will leave

the football stadiums where they have been

making their homes, and they will trample

each other’s faces into concrete steps

as they rush against the darkness, looking for an exit.

They’ll charge through the bleeding streets

towards the churches, where cool candles will be burning,

the smiling priests swaying gently in their robes,

bloated on the guilt

of all their new believers.

JOE WENDEROTH

Nammered In The Glamulal

A young woman of Asian descentwearing a pastel floppy hat and big sunglasses, very upright on a sort of Mary Poppins bike, a big flowery basket between the handle-bars.

Smiling.

I'm like: okay God—you want to do this thing—fine—let's fucking do it.

Political Affiliation:

I watch Celebrity Rehab and Sober House religiously,high and alone. But it isn't that.I know how such a beautiful person can be gone. It's not a learning experience.

How History Is Made

Some people get together and get to thinking: what we should do is go kill a guy. Some stranger. Anyone. And completely secretly. THEN, we produce a show where one of us plays a psychic and pretends on camera to intuit every detail in how the murder went down, trembling and acting all emotional, and finally leading skeptical police into the desert where the body—(unlucky soul)—is proof of every word.

SOLICITORIAL

Digital Behemoth, was originally a title for oneof my more warped poems, which I couldn't tellwhether it was pre-, or post-, apocalyptic, as theworlds related within it represented my textualI's as rare shadows of my selves. Which was nice.I decided to produce this E-Zine as I was findingthat most poetry periodicals I read contained somewondrous poems, but they were sparse gems within adross of cliquey filler. Therefore it seemedobvious that the best way to harness aconcentration of interesting and compelling poemswas to solicit them from poets I believed couldproduce them. So I decided the theme would be“Like life is like so amazing right now...”, andthen I contacted the poets I wanted to contribute.In each issue of Digital Behemoth, there will bethirteen poems, two each by five poets, and threeby one poet. There will always be three femalepoets and three male poets. This is to sustaina balance of the anima and the animus textually.The aspiration is that after every thirteen issuesa print anthology will be produced, if I can findan interested publisher. The Infamous Last Words section is where I ask apoet to imagine him or her self to be on the vergeof the end of the poetry world as they know it,and they have one page, with consideration of thepromptness of poetry's impending doom, to say whatthey feel about poetry before it's obliteration.The Haiku Revue section was intended to be areviews section, where all the intellectualmythology and it's complimentary jargon would becondensed into the feeling the poet's had fromreading a book they believed others should readtoo. Hence the choice of haiku as the exponentlinguistic form for this endeavour. Also thehaiku meant that the poets would definitelyproduce an original poem for the E-Zine,specifically, as oppose to choosing certain poemsfrom their infinite repertoire as applicable forthe theme. Digital Behemoth is referred to as aStudy Text, because it is supposed to be studiedwhen read. I hope you do this enjoyably.

Robert Herbert McClean

BIOGS

Samantha Desmond is a daring poet whodared with me to gatecrash the OxfordUniversity Rowing Club Gala, for free drink,when we both attended the Tower PoetrySummer School, at Christ Church, Oxford, in2006. We got real.

Jack Underwood is an old sausage of mine,we both admitted to eachother, in ourGoldsmiths innocence, we were poetry fags.

Paul Maddern is the stuff of myth andlegend. He's from Bermuda, like thetriangle.

Clare Pollard gave me a copy of RobertMinhinick's Collected Poems, drunk, in theback of a hackney cab. She is happilymarried.

Richard Epstein is the greatest literarycritic I've never read.

Kate Tempest is a force of nature. Shesometimes lets me sleep on her floor.

Joe Wenderoth might be my hole model. Heteaches hole modelling at UC Davis, he usesthe inside technique. Evidence of this iseasy to heap into mounds. Search “JoeWenderoth” on Youtube or Soundcloud.

Robert Herbert McClean is the poetpreviously referred to as Robert Herbert. Isincerely think emoticons are symbols ofspiritual vacuity. ;). Blessed be bludas.

RAQ

What happens this text?Because I happen, literally.

DIGITAL BEHEMOTH

TEXTUAL DISCLAIMER

Any enlightenment caused by wordscontained in this e-zine remains the

responsibility of the poets whoconjured them.