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TONY LOPEZ

 

Tony Lopez is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism. His most recent poetry collections are False Memory (Salt, 2003) and Devolution (The Figures, 2000). He has received awards from The Wingate Foundation, The Society of Authors and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His poetry is featured in many anthologies including Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford), Vanishing Points (Salt), Other (Wesleyan) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador). His critical essays are collected in Meaning Performance: Essays on Poetry (Salt, 2006). He is well known as a poetry performer and has given readings throughout the UK, Europe and North America. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first Professor of Poetry in 2000.

 

 

 

 

& Far Away

 

On stalker's paths

asylum seekers

might just walk

the timber line

into the free end

where stealth bombers

and non-renewable

mental resources

known as snakeheads

the logical conclusion

snow-capped mountains

in hostile territory

a loss of tissue

beside the stream

 

 

Lights a fire

to find the way

old maps and books

grown in Albania

from these requirements

permissive paths

broken crystals

a piper's son

transported boulders

non-white migrants

smoothly uniform

zones of contention

or prefab huts

in blue-white light

 

 

And upland areas

with added butter

are worn away

in seeking to ensure

convention status

for boulders or trees

technically restrained

common-law rights

are not recorded

in direct sunlight

to transit camps

half-way across

this lovely peak

a suspect hold

 

 

For cloud shadows

set out to dry

on definitive maps

a question of money

becomes impassable

with growing dismay

carried in reserve

when he was young

these exit visas

into a safe country

more or less defined

who leaves on horseback

a public hearing

in melting snow

 

 

From Only More So

 

DARTS of grass seed cling to our pullovers and socks. What happens if the meeting does not seem to be going well? My plan was to conceal myself at a friend’s house, and remain there a few weeks till the search was over. You sneak into the back streets, or among bushes, to pitch coppers. They live in a kind of provisional way within their self-contained realm that can be overseen, though they do so with real intensity. It was considered to be a light sentence. ‘Evaluating’ was called ‘confronting’ and ‘timing’ was known as ‘deciding’ prior to 1982. Galileo sees a swinging church lamp. Garth Edward is a trader in carbon emissions. What comes to expression in a sense of shame? The helical field and the material it contains may expand outward, becoming a coronal mass ejection. Once we were human, cultural history began to interact with innate ability to improve performance. Most orang-utans spend their lives without making or using tools. Only gravitons can escape the curtain into larger space, and such leakage may account for the observed weakness of gravity compared with other forces. The verb usually applies to human vocalisation. Let us read ‘To Autumn’ backwards. You and me were meant to be: this is us. The more connected a social network, the more likely it is that the group will retain any skill that is invented, so that in the end tolerant populations support a greater number of such behaviours. What impresses us most of all is the implicit evaluative hierarchy in the table. I was dancing with my eyes closed, just as the others did. After two to three months, banknotes should have reached an equilibrium distribution. Both men and women empathised with the pain of co-operative people, but if people were selfish, empathetic responses were absent, at least in men. A formal mathematical statement yet to be proved. A series of towns located on high, their priority being defence. This is a prediction not easily tested. ‘Scenery’ was invented for the theatre before it was discovered in the world at large. He was a brown spot in the midst of an expanse of olive-green gorse and nothing more. In the sum-over-histories interpretation, each path can be mapped out as a wave. As if meaning were present before being present. The star pattern outnumbers all other patterns in popularity. We can’t manage hierarchies above a certain size. Two apples for a penny: Beauty of Bath. By working together to build a robot, AI researchers would no longer be at the mercy of a single company or university. The consumptive has no choice but to gape after weather. Seven implants later, all signs are good. Impassable rivers may have halted the spread of tool use. Particles shown here are colourised and highly magnified. The poetry book arrived in the late morning post and smelt strongly of tobacco; in 1980 or in 1970 I wouldn’t have noticed. Metal shelves are stacked with packets of foodstuffs and other basic products purchased in the former German Democratic Republic. Thinking swamped by feeling. Like trees they are immobile, unable to flee. There does not appear to be any empirical or theoretical reason to suspect that the constraints working-memory puts on language processing are of any different kind or degree from the constraints they put on other kinds of intellectual performance. I was twenty-one years in that cage of obscene birds. Red apes in all locations are willing to be stung many times by honeybees to get at their honey. The landscape of family chimneys and grimy workshops pleased Satie; his home was a room in a slum tenement, which no one else had entered for 27 years. They rallied the drunken swarm, drove them backwards into open country, and set a guard over the town. Intrigued but uncertain of the reality of this detached source, we obtained a series of images from the beginning to the end of the flare, a sequence that covered about 10 minutes. Two thirds of stellar systems are single red dwarfs. They remain over long periods of time without orientation and focus. One way to conceive of these movement traces is to imagine that the joints of the body emit vapour trails, like jets in the sky. Candidates who survive these preliminaries will be short-listed. A larger effect is to smooth out the business cycle, because migrants increase their giving during economic downturns in their homelands and scale it back during upswings. They live in huts in the bush, which are afterwards burned. There they sometimes reconfigure solar arcades, the series of arching field lines that occur back to back. The oak leaf is the favoured motif.

 

 

BEES CAN LEARN to recognise all known explosives at levels low enough to detect traces on someone’s hands. I stood at the door with the others to receive the bridegroom and the bride. The microphone could easily be hidden in street signs, says the patent. From a business perspective, nuclear remains the highest-risk form of power generation. We decided on the creation of a new space in which shame could be experienced. The problem is leaving a small wake of destruction in contemporary thinking, and it is compounded by being folded back over onto the politics of Nazism. The weather was clear and sunny on 38 out of the 47 days from 7 August to 22 September 1819. Moonlight lay upon the hills like snow. Place the labels on people, ensuring that each wearer does not see their own. In this maze there are blank areas that are impossible to enter. Meetings should start and end at the agreed time. We went to the water trough on King’s Avenue, where I was to go to school. It means nothing in English, nor in the other European languages. There was an average of about ten kilometres between one house and another in the Final Bronze age. So I took my leave of them, and in coming along my heart melted into tears, more than all the while I was with them, and I was almost swallowed up with the thought that ever I should go home again. The deterioration of this sculpture over time was something that Beuys intended. Tourists are not external to the economy or ecosystem they visit. In a world with more than three dimensions, there would be no stable orbits for electrons, no chemistry, no chemically based life forms, no us. Our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage. Wasps clustered round the hole and tried to stick their heads through. The child is not a mere computer. It does not emit telltale radiation, like radar or laser-based devices do, so it cannot be picked up by dashboard detectors. The footprint is an estimate of the land used to sustain a population. Meanwhile this institution and others are working to provide good data. They are hardened through hunger, sleeping naked outdoors and undergoing various painful experiences, which they learn to suffer without complaint. The point of our excursion was shoplifting in Woolworth’s. The computer doesn’t know that this is the same thing. In pairs, share feelings on how meeting time is used in your team. The mist is coming home. Each chrome yellow quarter has been outlined with a sawtooth border. Square tiling generators can be used to visually represent number patterns. Biodiversity depends on a principal we might call provisional excess. As your vision recovers, you can see that the unique all-angle, real-time display could finally enable photographers to appear properly positioned and posed in timed shots of small groups, for example. Steps to record the levels of suffering in lab animals are being proposed in the UK. The energy source for solar flares is a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, in which the sun’s magnetic field lines join and quickly reconfigure themselves. Above all, Hassan seeks to differentiate the realm of the aesthetic from other realms. I floated over the tepees and began to come down feet first at the centre of the hoop where I could see a beautiful tree all green and full of flowers. Lévy walk patterns in the foraging movements of spider monkeys. Domed terracotta ovens and hearths for cooking food, are located in small artificial caves all over the region. I heard the bell and call of the rag and bone man coming into our street. Many flowers produce fire resistant seed that germinates quickly when the rains come. Although the languages were not given official status they were free to grow, thus ensuring maintenance. Memories, which appeared to be hard-wired, could be made pliable if they were recalled under emotive conditions produced by certain drugs. Descending warm air in the eye keeps it clear of clouds. The wing turns back into its own wake, which leads to higher lift forces than beating in still air. The Mediterranean world also underwent a series of profound shocks during the same period. The Jews took to the stars immediately. More than half the words in the document are people’s names. How is it possible to say the thing that I have just said? Various wartime insignia, brooches and medals, designed to indicate status and secret glamour, were available for sale in a shop close to school; at first I did not think about how they got to be there in the window. I collected clothes from the whole house: father’s jackets, nanny’s skirts and coats, gentlemen’s and ladies’ hats, umbrellas, galoshes – everything I could find and started to improvise without any preconceived plan or aim. When they find bones they can tell either from the site or from the smell of the bones if they are related. In its wooded enclave, Little Hintock is the most secluded and unadulterated, deeply engrossed in its immediate environment. One can be sure that when any person says they were treated like an animal, the treatment was cruel. He may begin with a descriptive figure, but as often as not he will develop and transform it so that its initial identity is changed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

copyright © Tony Lopez