the wanting is less interesting

2012-04-25

Conceived as a ‘poem video’ the work is a collaboration between artist Vanessa Hodgkinson and poet Marianne Morris.

The film is a mixture of a shoot at Leighton House Museum, London, where the artist is recreating Ingres’ Le Bain Turc, surrounded by her own personal ‘Orientalist’ objects that tell her story, and footage from a British documentary on the storming of the Iranian embassy in Iran in the early 1980s, as well as YouTube footage of more recent activities at the embassy in London, but also the British Embassy in Tehran.

2012-03-05

IRAN DOCUMENTS

FRESH POEMS. Trafficker Press have published a selection of texts from my Iran Documents (you can read a few mini-excerpts here). Trafficker’s chaps (gorgeously handmade and letterpressed by Erin Morrill) are here.

2011-07-13

Solace Poem, the first of my poems-with-beats, has been mixed and pressed by http://www.tuskrecords.com/

2009-10-10

Solace Poem (after Parvin e’Tesami)

update, Solace Poem is now a material object!

2009-10-09

Iran Documents

For those of you who asked to hear my thoughts - this post links to writings from my two-week trip to Iran, mostly collected by hand in my journal and transcribed after the fact.

I was able to make this trip thanks to funding from the Harper-Wood Studentship at St. John’s College in Cambridge, which I held for 2008-9. It marks the end of a year of reading and researching Iranian history and poetry as part of an attempt to improve my own poetic practice.

U P D A T E

A selection of Iran Documents is now available in chapbook form from Trafficker Press in the States. In the meantime, there is memory, traffic, & hair.

2009-10-06

Iran: TRAFFIC

Best thing ever: young man on motorcycle, stopped in middle of road at busy intersection, cars flying around him in all different directions, honking at him, as he casually sits and composes a text message. Also bumper stickers – ‘Only for You’, in flowery cursive scrawl across back window. ‘Honey’ in cursive gold pen scrawled on seat of bike. ‘Bad boy’ bumper sticker. And my favourite - a ‘HONDA’ sticker across back window of an Iranian-make car.

You don’t really cross the road in Iran. There aren’t crossings really, or hardly any. You just have to step out into six lanes of crazed cars and hope for the best.

HAIR. OK, so all the boys in Iran have hair like this. Huge, extravagant, offensive mullets. Usually coupled with pink t-shirts and customized motorbikes, or cars with jacked up stereo systems lobbing pop bass through the street. Shiny polyester pants and shiny polyester shirts. As the girls mill about, meekly covered.

2.58 pm. Voice from Iran: Shame on a country in which foreign embassies are safer than hospitals

— http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/liveblogging-day-8.html