Wires are crossed on my first day at school.

The First Day

So the words go right back to 2006 when we first visited Japan. Trying to recreate the feelings of speed and excitement mixed with being overwhelmed by a new language. I may have been channelling the balinese kecak chatter as well.
It incorporates something else I did on ccmixter.org called Impending Train of Doom. Robbie Dee did a great DJ remix of that and I've "re-recycled" his beats as well!

Rob Walker's Album

Japanese lessons on the bullet train

A pioneering podcast from Jan 9, 2007! out of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Inaugural Australian Poetry Show with Rob Walker, Maggie Ball and Lillian Cauldwell on Passionate Internet Voices Talk Radio.

micromacro. Maggie Ball interviews Rob Walker


meet Self Doubt


You meet Self Doubt soon after you begin school. He’s not a close friend but he’s always there for you. Saying I-told-you-so when you fail. Smirking a little, nodding politely when you succeed, just to let you know he’s still around. Self Doubt is loyal. He’ll talk to you even when no-one else will. You have so much in common. He’ll whisper to you even in the middle of those sleepless nights. Nobody quite understands you like he does. He’ll teach you his favourite expressions: Just my luck. Typical. Too good to last. Brought it on myself. Teaches you to get real. Play safe. Stop being stupid. Act your age. His advice is beyond value. He’ll bask in your success, take a long all-expenses-paid holiday overseas for years. But don’t worry. Like all true friends
he’ll be back.

© rob walker, 2011.

First published in Finger Magazine, Adelaide, Nov 2011.
http://www.fingermagazine.com.au/?p=132#more-132

Production by onlymeith.
Courtesy of ccmixter.org


Onlymeith - Self Doubt

KungFuFrijters - Sitting Back - Swimmers - Find Yourself (Roughed-Out Ditty Mix)

crimson billows

This began life as pre-dated. I was having a fishing holiday at our shack on Yorke Peninsula across the Gulf from Adelaide when I was buzzed by a chopper. I found out on the TV news that night that a local boy had been taken by a shark and the helicopter contained photographers & journos looking for shots of sharks, treacherous seas and the boy’s school. I couldn’t get the idea of predators out of my head – the media even moreso than the shark.
Onlymeith has produced an ominous soundscape to underline the mercilessness of both sharks and the mass media, using Javolanus’ disquieting sub-bass, (use your best headphones!) hints of swords unsheathing,

Pre-dated

After the poor boy is taken in shallows
Another pack of sharks 
Sniffs out crimson billows. 

Even here, on the gulf's other side
A school of choppers
Arrives for frenzied interviews and shots 
Of the victim's school

Politicians join the feeding maelstrom 
Demands on talkback 
For the creature to be shot

Only the boys parents won't play the bloodlust game
It's the last thing he would have wanted 

But they are dismissed as 
Too close to comment

The gulf widens. 

Predators move in.

© rob walker, 2006



This poem appeared in my chapbook phobiaphobia – poems of fear and anxiety (Picaro Press, Australia, 2006.)

Thanks Onlymeith for another exquisitely-produced interpretation of my words.




Onlymeith - Crimson Billows

This is a poem about the making of a poem. In January I’d signed up for the ccMixter Leap of The Heart secret mixing project before realizing that I’d be travelling in the far north of Japan. I got the secret artist sent to me while I was in a blizzard (luckily, inside a hotel which had internet in the lobby.) The following day I mixed Transcending Silence on my MacBook during a whole-day coach trip heading west. When I’d finished the remix I reflected on the entire bizarre experience and wrote a poem about it.
The music I chose is a sample by colab simply called piano 3/4. Looped, I find it hypnotic and achingly sad yet beautiful. Colab has rich ore-body of under-utilised resources!

meta poem

i have been to the north-eastern coast of hokkaido in winter going-with-the-floe in an ice-breaker-for-tourists and now we spend hours crossing back across the width of japan to sapporo. I spend elastic hours gazing at a pure-white landscape, the farmhouses and barns snowed in, the fir forests dabbed like plaster-of-paris	 scenes i’ve previously seen only on christmas cards. 
and in between i am mixing on my laptop. 

mixing my own previously-recorded voice reciting a poem i wrote years earlier about my father when he was still alive. blending it with some beautiful piano by dokashiteru and the slightly-raspy singing voice of hektor thillet. and i’ve never met these people but their music and my words are now embroidered into my poem, a constantly changing whitelinen landscape and my own emotions 

and i am simultaneously still in that nursing hospital and inside the piano and hektor’s mouth and that minimal landscape has become a metaphor for life and death and i don’t know whether the scenery is a video-clip made for the poem or the pressure-changes in my headphones are the soundtrack for life playing out before my eyes but i am existing in all times, all places yet there is no past or future. Just here 								now.

© rob walker, 2012
Meta poem was first published in Australia’s Rabbit Poetry Journal (Issue #5, May 16, 2012.)
It also appears in my collection "tropeland" (Five Islands Press, 2015) renamed as "de-composition".


Meta poem (remixed)

Another treatment of A Beginner’s Guide to Postmodernism remixed by annabloom.

“A treat for the senses, annabloom combines a grab bag of postmodern influences… beat poetry, jazz, Asian culture, minimalism & glitch into an experimental bath of sound. On the third listen, turn it up loud to catch the subliminals. Enjoy!”  (panu, ccMixter Editorial Pick)

I like the way my voice ages rapidly at the start. (Anyone remember Billy McMahon?!)

Don’t know a great deal about annabloom. I believe he/she’s a German dada artist/poet named Kurt. I do know that I love what (s)he does with my poems.


Annabloom&robwalkerpoet- Postmodernism is Antenostalgia

Len Mosley's (left handed of course, Like Jimi) great guitar original twinned with my (robwalkerpoet's) poem My Left Hand. All instruments by Len & recorded analogue.

My Left Hand

music: Len Mosley

http://www.myspace.com/lenmosley



words: rob walker

robwalkerpoet.com