ctrl+alt+del describes itself as ‘a contemporary poetry foldable/printable ezine’. You can find it here. You print it out on a single sheet of A4 and there is a natty video that shows you hold to fold it. Issue 1 has work by Peter Hughes, whose pamphlet ‘Paul Klee’s Diary’ I enjoyed back in the mid-90s. Issue 3 has some mesostics by myself, and ‘twelve switches’, a translation I made of a poem by Arne Rautenberg (though as you may notice I can’t always count accurately). I like what CAD is doing visually – it reminds me of the late Duncan Glen’s magazine ZED 2 O, with its zany but thoughtful design.
All posts by Ken Cockburn
The Syllabary
Norm
So what’s the norm in this neck of the woods?
Greetings and leave-takings for example,
pats, dabs, cheek-kisses, handshakes, embraces,
toasts, tips, quips, queues, curses, table manners,
neckwear, nightwear, refusals, condiments,
punctuality and superstitions,
the etiquette of stimulants, when not
to use the informal second person,
what’s for breakfast, shop-talk, the latitude
or lack thereof accorded foreigners.
Peter McCarey launched v.3 of his ongoing opus The Syllabary at the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday 10 October. An ongoing, accumulative sequence of short poems each based on a single phoneme (consonant+vowel+consonant), you can read and hear an ever-varying selection of the poems here and also here (I think the latter is the newer site). Peter reckons he has about 2000 poems to write to complete it, but he’s also now initiated a parallel project, inviting other poets each to write one poem and again aiming for that 2000 (or so) mark.
I was allocated ‘Norm’, and read my poem on the night – I just now realise the symmetry of it, 10 lines each of 10 syllables on 10th October. Also reading were Richard Price, Angus Reid, Eleanor Livingstone, Alan Riach and Sandy Hutchison.
mesostic interleaved
Last week the book mesostic interleaved was launched at the University of Edinburgh Library and the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Conceived and co-published by Alec Finlay, it features 100 poems on authors held in the university library. I contributed a number of poems, on favourite authors like James Hogg and Thomas Mann, and on others I had to do a bit of research on before I could start anything, like the pioneering 18th century vet George Stubbs, or the 17th century scientist and Catholic theologian Anastasius Kircher. 
The book is as minimal as a white cube gallery, with its texts carefully placed bottom of each page. At the top the poem is printed again, this time in barcode. The poems have also been published as bookmarks which, so I’m told, will be distributed, or leaked, slowly and randomly, by the university library. They’re also attached to the new, nattily coloured shelf-ends within the library.
Copies are available at Alec’s website.
Poems on the page and in the world 