see nerd) blog
horrid coincidence

I’ve received another set of CDs from Stockhausen Verlag, which, not surprisingly, remains active despite the death of the great composer. I find I really am enjoying these recordings of his late works. I hope to put some reviews up here eventually.

Stockhausen has influenced my poetry in a number of ways. This includes a couple of horrid coincidences.

I named one of my longer poems after his work Hymnen: the loneliness and isolation I heard in his music of that name inspired me. Although I started my work in the late 1980s, I only got the chance to perform it fully a decade later (at CB1 Poetry). It took a few weeks to prepare and get right. Unfortunately, events of the day changed everything. I still performed the poem, I decided I had to, but I cut some lines. The day was September 11th, 2001.

My sequence of poems C++ have been collected in the book Literature and Science, edited by Philip Coleman, publish by Four Courts Press, Dublin. This is the first time such collecting has happened to my work. The book launch was earlier this month. I was there, and enjoyed myself. Stockhausen had died that day.