SELECTIONS FROM
this is no longer entertainment °
Christodoulos MAKRIS
white letters and black backgrounds and on occasion flaming backgrounds
ablaze, on a beach, late night in summer or Autumn
shadow projected on the side of a house
is about the words, innit?
that tattooist turned a four-line poem into a five-line poem and for some reason ignored the much more pleasing and well-known typography and layout of the installations / using that corny grunge-typewriter font in lower case robs most of its weight and renders it one of those ‘quotes’ 12-year-olds post in lieu of wisdom on Instagram
Jet flying close to the speed of God.
Gone now in a hummingbird's heartbeat.
Only the silence now of sarsens.
I remember on New Year's Eve travelling in the back of a cold dark taxi across a cold rainy Toronto to participate in a few brain storming sessions.... just to see where it may go / it was a casual atmosphere, but full of electricity / 30 top professorial and scholastic ‘brainiacks’ from every field of academic life / we just informally talked at first, about individual interests.... these initial few meetings led to one year of weekly symposiums / enabled by TV and the upcoming computer age
I was initially invited to deliver the history of taxation
ended up detailing my brief career as a military couturier and costume designer
(costumes - the poetic detail of history)
made me realize
art has come full circle
°
what kind of person “backs up” their gmail account?
about 7 years worth of comments from friends on my channel page at YouTube, removed
every word and all profundity, political opinion, love, profanity, threats, obscenity and libel
could take you on my run in a snowbound park in Ljubljana 10 years ago / my run up the Black Mountain in Canberra in early 1988 ditto besides, Emirates fly direct to Dubai from Glasgow Paisley / having to engage the horror that is Heathrow, luggage to follow later / happened to our youngest and her beau from NZ / arrived Glasgow from Heathrow, no baggage
is a perfect, albeit sad example of why we should all be scared to death
no sympathy
being a cigarette-smoker makes him look foolish
a story of his which depicted a boy raping his younger brother
is just one sector of the arts / not meant to be viewed on mass, like the more out there areas of
music and visual arts
whatever offends certain sections of people is the last stand of culture / one day completely
harmless things will be banned
can be made to disappear overnight, for any reason, or, for that matter, for (seemingly) no reason
only solution is to save copies in an offline
revolving door in full swing between D.C. and Google
its name with lofty words such as ‘The Democratic Republic of...’
serious knowledge and discourse locked behind paywalls, or, worse, walls requiring credentials
° this is no longer entertainment is formed entirely out of untreated anonymous or pseudonymous text found in the open comments sections of media websites and other digital platforms. A multi-form, book-length poem, this is no longer entertainment was composed by filtering this un-authored writing through a process of immediate, instinctive selection and reframing, which is inevitably modulated by the author's interests and emotional temperature. Its composition roughly covers the period 2014-2017; a period marked by a range of notable social-political shifts and events. this is no longer entertainment will be published in full by Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2019. It is excerpted here with permission from Dostoyevsky Wannabe and the author.
Christodoulos MAKRIS has published several books, pamphlets, artist’s books and other poetry objects, including The Architecture of Chance (Wurm Press, 2015)—selected as a poetry book of the year by RTÉ Arena and 3:AM Magazine—if we keep drawing cartoons (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2016) and Browsing History (zimZalla avant objects, 2018). One of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Rising Generation’ poets, in 2017 he was Digital Poet in Residence at StAnza Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, and received a project commission from the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He is co-director of Dublin’s multidisciplinary performance series Phonica, and the poetry editor of gorse journal and associated imprint Gorse Editions.