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texts
alter space times
recent publications
New/Is written, Ankle Press, Cambridge 1994
psychoanalysis of oedipus, Leave Books, Buffalo, 1995
Lorca, Sound & Language, Lowestoft, 1997
Loving phase transitions, Sound & Language, Lowestoft, 1997
postermodern, RWC, London, 1998;
(work in) Vital Movement, Reality Street Editions, 1998
Hands Across a Love Culture, Spanner, Hereford, 1999
Trancelated (from Coinsides), UBU editions, New York City, 2004
(at www.ubu.com/ubu).
HOARSE (translations from Horace), Spectacular Diseases, Peterborough,
forthcoming
O TO SUBJECT plus introductory essay on poetics by Ira Lightman,
Radiator, Liverpool, 2003
Edited:
PUBLIC WORKS (new sequence-length writing by
women), Sound & Language, Lowestoft, 1997.
As musician: various albums by Come Flying (with Mike Higgins and Mike
McGuigan) 1994-1998, contact Ira.
Various essays and poems in American and English magazines.
biographical note
Born in 1967, one of four brothers, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,
Lithuanian-Jewish (might be Russian-Jewish) blood, home counties upbringing;
BA UCL in English, MA Victoria University of Wellington on Pound's early
Cantos, Ph.D in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East
Anglia. Married and moved to Durham in 2001, to enter selection process
for Anglican ministry (rejected 2003). One son, born 2001. Working in
disability support while in selection process for ministry, developing
interest in autism and poetics. Teaching some creative writing, beginner's
computing, and now "mesostics for kids", doing poetry in schools.
Collaborations with Alec Finlay 2003 onwards.
Presenting papers at 2 conferences in 2004: "Tuning in
and Keeping Your Distance, John Cage's Roaratorio" at UCD Dublin
and "Literary Translation in the Environment of the Original Work"
at Birkbeck.
poetics
I am most interested in analogies for literary work from other arts,
especially classical music and movies, and in the poetry of other langauges.
I am interested in blur effects that resemble how words pass by incompletely
grasped in songs and movies, and how to get some of these perception effects
on the page without literally using traditional concrete poetry blur effects
like a xerox blur. My texts are often clean by comparison but I want the
same blur in the perceiver of some of my work: like the way it doesn't
bother you that you know the chorus of a favourite song but not all the
verses so well, yet they need to be there and they do work when thrown
into sharp relief. I am not talking about how many useless words there
are in most novels, though I am interested in what I feel when I read
19th century French novels with my incomplete French vocabulary when I
take a 75 percent impression of the whole, and I am a big re-reader of
Henry
James who lodges odd "incidental detail" sentences here and
there in almost every book which complicate the apparently implied moral.
I like counterpoint, weaving voices together, and its more difficult
offspring in writing: harmonic shape: the combined form that two voices
make that is the synergy not just the sum of the parts/echoes/ghosts.
You have to
be able to think separately about voices to appreciate harmonic shape.
But maybe you can write it. But it's harder to keep on writing it. I have
critically concentrated, in studying film and music, on the amalgamation
into the whole of what are too vaguely called "set pieces";
in other words, the artist has lavished time on a whole segment, and the
larger piece dips into and out of it with jump-cuts and slight awkwardnesses,
but you know the artist could not take time to start again and through-compose
uniformly. So the set-pieces have a harmonic shape, and so does the whole,
and it's often one kind of microcosm within another kind of macrocosm.
Tuning into that,and celebrating it in others, helped me allow it in myself.
Or as the writer of North by Northwest once said to Hitchcock, you could
drive a truck through the holes in my script, but only I know where those
holes are.
contact
ira@unforgettable.me.uk
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