- Collaborating with artists who can test my assumptions.- Fire-working: 'The world, an entity out of everything, was created by neither gods nor men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.' [Heraclitus, c.535-c.475 BC]- Antique brick, which came from the fire, weathered by decades of coal smoke, wind-whipped rain and nameless fungi.- History, because no one can make meaning without context.- Portrait photographs, because they hint at privileged knowledge: 'I could tell you, however....'- And language, how it turns around the world, searching the pockets of discarded jackets for secrets. See, here is a piece of crumpled paper:I’ll ride your smile/ into the night. Here,/take the nails/ from my index fingers/ for security: I’ll come/back. Carefully/ adjust your kiss/ until it slips/under this collar/ bone. Open/my body: pick/ the rib that carries/ the curve of your breast—/set/ that bone between/ an oak and an elm/as a cradle/ for our child.The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, which is hosted by Auckland University, maintains a web resource on my work: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/howard/index.asp
If your favourite activity is counting to infinity then apply elsewhere. I don't collect 'friends' as if they were stamps for display in this virtual album. No I won't pay your airfare to America; no I don't (necessarily) want to see your fluorescent thong. Nor do I want to read your 'proof' that the fossil record is a devilish trick. I'm more interested in exploring, with poignant humour and fledgling joy, what Samuel Beckett described [in his novel Molloy] as 'The within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and the heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath.' So I like people who understand that a life of consumption leaves you with nothing rather than everything. I try to give more than I take, welcoming collaborations with other artists. However frivolous it appears, art is one way of walking the high wire that stretches from the known to the unknown: Draw your spliced eye/ toward the hoist/ hook with the help of a pulley/ block. Tighten it/ and your ribs lift./Now guy wires designate the known./ This wind could move/ mountains? Step out,/ shouldering the magnetic pole/and you control/ all horizons./ Somersault. The line is your spine:/ convex, concave/ as you pursue/the shortest path between two stars.
Whatever I do there is an impromptu soundtrack that either intensifies or corrects my mood. If you visit here (http://rateyourmusic.com/~maxgate) you'll see that I'm not a completist; I sample rather than devour my favourites. Those who pretend that their preferred performers never went in and out of form are ignoring something we learn as we're hurtling down the birth canal, things change. Not even populist gods like The Beatles recorded albums of uniform value - so how can we trust the judgement of someone who thinks 'Beatles for Sale' is as realised as 'Revolver'?I enjoy classical, jazz, pre-war acoustic blues, and folk. I find pop/rock commodified beyond belief; its reductionist tendencies are too pronounced for me to hear (over and over) again. So my preferred musicians are modest innovators: Johann Sebastian Bach, Paul Bley, Gavin Bryars, R.L. Burnside, Marc-Antoine Charpentier ('I was a musician, considered good among the good and ignorant among the ignorant. And since my condemners were far more numerous than were my admirers, the music rendered me little honour but became a heavy burden to me.'), Alice Coltrane, Kenny Dorham, Esbjorn Svensson Trio, Bill Evans, The Fall, Fennesz, Billy Harper, Roy Harper, The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, The Kinks, Leonin, Gyorgy Ligeti, Franz Liszt, Magazine, Gustav Mahler, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Jackie McLean, Meredith Monk, Modest Mussorgsky, Maurice Ravel, Steve Reich, Alessandro Scarlatti, Franz Schubert, Small Faces, The Soft Machine, Lepo Sumera, Franck Vigroux, Chris Whitley, and Robert Wyatt - whose 'Sea Song' is a minor miracle:You look different every time you come from the foam-crested brine/ It's your skin shining softly in the moonlight/ Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale/ Am I yours? Are you mine to play with?/ Joking apart when you're drunk/ You're terrific when you're drunk/ I like you mostly late at night - you're quite all right/But I can't understand the different you/ In the morning when it's time to play at being human for a while/ Please smile!/You'll be different in the spring, I know/ You're a seasonal beast/ Like the starfish that drifted with the tide, with the tide/ So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon/ Your madness fits in nicely with my own, with my own/ Your lunacy fits neatly with my own - my very own/We're not alone...
Andrei Tarkovsky, especially Nostalgia and The Mirror: 'Taking occasional puffs on a cigarette, Mother kept her eyes fixed on the road. Somebody walking along the road vanished behind the bush. If he now came out on the left of the bush, then it was HE. If it was on the right, then it was not he, and now he would never come back. He came out on the left hand side of the bush.'
As proof that hubris exists, I was once production manager for an American cable network (assignment: live satellite uplink broadcasts from remote locations) so, having been inside the belly of the beast, I don't own a television. Apart from art films and quirky documentaries, the medium seems slight yet self-important. Too often it is the graveyard of the imagination.Like most people worth knowing, I can entertain myself. And I would rather watch a snail leaving its trail over the finger of a gardening glove than endure a sit-com; the snail has an earthier humour.
The peaks: Vicente Aleixandre, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Elizabeth Bishop, Callimachus, Paul Celan, Cyril Connolly, Andre Gide, Guido Gozzano, W.S. Graham, Thom Gunn, Llywarch Hen, Philippe Jaccottet, Osip Mandelstam, Andrew Marvell, Eugenio Montale, Robert Musil, Ovid, Blaise Pascal, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Fernando Pessoa, T.F. Powys, Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, Yannis Ritsos, Tayyib Salih ('What is death? Someone you meet by chance, who sits with you as we are sitting now, who talks freely with you, perhaps about the weather or women or shares on the stock market. Then he politely sees you to the door. He opens the door and signs for you to go out. After that you don't know.'), Louis Sebastian-Mercier, George Seferis, Kotuku Shusui, Baruch Spinoza, Salah Stetie, Denton Welch, Eudora Welty and Jacques Werup. For those who want to wander in the foothills, there's an on-line second edition from Trout Press of my 'Shebang: Collected Poems' (Steele Roberts, 2000) here: http://www.trout.auckland.ac.nz/press/shebang/shebang.html
My son, Luc, who survived his parents. - Arshile Gorky, who didn't. - Philippe Petit, who rendered the idea of parents irrelevant.