Ticker-Tape E-Book

Rishi Dastidar

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 53

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. Rishi Dastidar's first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit. Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter's worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.

Leseprobe

Ticker-tape

Ticker-tape

Rishi Dastidar

ISBN: 978-1911027171

Copyright © Rishi Dastidar, 2017

Cover artwork © Ria Dastidar, Uberpup

Website: uberpup.net

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Rishi Dastidar has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published March 2017 by:

Nine Arches Press

PO Box 6269

Rugby

CV21 9NL

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in Britain by:

The Russell Press Ltd.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Contents

The summers of Camus’ youth

The Girl Boy Black White Urban Desert Digital Blues Rhinestone Drone Desire

Trunk shavasana (a/k/a the bliss of incantation makes it good to be alive)

Deconstructing an attempted date with Miss Pacific Standard Time

A shark comes to dinner

Contour

From Stavanger

Doom loop

“THE PACIFIC OCEAN IS BECOMING CAFFEINATED”

Matchstick Empire

22 March, Working in an Office on Berners Street

Licking stamps

Joystick Valhalla

We are Premier League

Bantz

Rave equations

On enthusiasm

Making a cheese soufflé rise

The anniversary issue

Writ

All the laurels in the world, and you give me these?

Sister of the sun

Towards a singularity

Ticker-tape

Redzone

Cheerleader

Arguing with Mondrian about space

Secrets need confidence and force

The last neon sign maker in Hong Kong

Code: pink and red and blue

Gunmetal

The valley of the infinite

Pretanic: (A journal of some proceedings on the North Atlantic archipelago)

The British genius

#MyEngland

What’s the matter with [insert (non-metropolitan) English constituency of choice]?

Diagnosis: ‘Londonism’

Strategies to save the Union

Tom Paine’s submarine

The problem of becoming English

Point of departure

A man is on the TV, telling me about

Risk patterns

Diversity campaign

The campaign for mapping generic terms for streams in the contiguous United States

Methuselah and the Link-Girl

These things boys do

What night is

Theseus’ ship

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author & this book

Parades go by /

So many beautiful parades go by /

Leave me behind

– The Magnetic Fields

The summers of Camus’ youth

In Algiers, you don’t talk about ‘going swimming’

but ‘knocking off for a swim’.

I won’t insist.

People swim in the harbour

and then go rest on the buoys.

When you pass a buoy

where a pretty girl is sitting,

you shout to your friends,

“I tell you it’s a seagull”.

These are healthy pleasures.

They certainly seem ideal to the young men.

The Girl Boy Black White Urban Desert Digital Blues Rhinestone Drone Desire

This is the first | the first in a series of agreeable gestures |

The delta is an open microphone | eleven strings tie us to you |

We will make you slaves | to dopamine fixes and ludic dreaming |

We don’t pick our heels up when we leave | We will make you like us more |

We are picking a fight | with the self-deluding structures of life |

We are salved | We will blast you by the hymns of our youth |

Thank you for being 15 minutes late for breakfast |

Renaming this stream ‘Notes on Yearning’ |

The more we say | the more we betray ourselves |

Who can afford | such luxuries anymore? |

The full-throated maximalists | modern greats generalists |

Managing for the age of managed decline |

We’re soundtracking a vision as big as the world |

Yes Cupid untying the zone of a link girl |

Why won’t the algorithms protect us from the past? |

Oh hai infinite loop of memory |

See the past comebackatcha | and shiver |

We give you the eternal ability to remember the thing you least want to |

We have collapsed | into the permanent now |

Into gravity’s grave | the projection of this project |

We’ll teach you to be street | sweet, replicants, rhinestone crust |

on paprika skin | Dreamt of your avatar last night | left tears on your hair |

We are the girl boy you never slept with | that you want to forget |

We pout and rattle to infinity | Can we objectify you yeah |

This imperative mood is infectious | This imperative mood infects us |

This is a manifesto for us | This is a manifesto for the cosmic us |

Trunk shavasana

(a/k/a the bliss of incantation makes it good to be alive)

And the concomitant sky came down to meet you

And history’s rubber vines came down to meet you

And the dreams of muscle clouds came down to meet you

And the long-hoodied ponies came down to meet you

And the gleam of kudos and chrome came down to meet you

And the sweet ride of a continent’s youth came down to meet you

And the quadriga’s thundering embrace came down to hold you

And the rabona’s blaugrana arc came down to meet you

And the collated astronauts came down to meet you

And the cities of bespoke newsprint folded down to meet you

And the sharp-suited white nights came down to meet you

And the infinite heart’s sighs came down to meet you

And the angels on workfare placements came down to meet you

And this timorous Shiva, with hands unsheathed, will come to you

Deconstructing an attempted date with Miss Pacific Standard Time

1. You are a refugee of over-achievement from the once, and coming-again-now continent.

2. She is leaning alluringly out of a moving tramcar, taking a selfie.

3. You flutter your smarter timepieces at Miss PST.

4. It is unclear whether the tramcar cares. Its headlights are blinking.

5. She is biding. You might be good for Rebel Purdah Evening.

6. She has a big idea. She calls it ‘a restoration of local time zones, with church steeples as meridians.’

7. …but what of disappointment and unreliability?

8. “Post as is to truth as pre as is to apocalypse.”

9. “There will always be a divine surplus for kids.”

10. She absolutely, categorically, without reservation, refutes the idea we’re in The Overblown Age.