Recently I left a poetry reading feeling agitated. Anxious and overeducated, the poets reading that night had tried in vain to resurrect the spirits of great dead poets instead of creating something of their own. It wasn’t the first time since moving to New York that I left a poetry reading feeling deflated– romanticizing about times past when poets were the outlaw prophets and Rimbaudian punk rockers who ran around downtown New York fizzing over with verse, transfixing everyone in their paths. A time when poetry was composed around the wild, meandering rhythms of the counterculture: stanzas found in impetuous road trips and meter heard as whispers through the walls of darkened motel rooms. When I happened upon the work of Jem Goulding (whose poetry also finds form as experimental cinepoems and photographs) I was thrilled to discover a poet canonizing the spirit of the young, unbridled, and passionate so rawly. “I want to do poetry for the now, make it hot again” Goulding recently divulged over dinner in Williamsburg, her fiery green eyes widened for emphasis. “If this level of intimacy is what it’s going to take to break through the stereotype, then fuck it.” It struck me there and then that not only was I perched opposite a poetry pioneer but, more importantly, I had just discovered poetry’s new sex symbol.
A world-traveller with a free, Laurel Canyon spirit despite her British roots, Goulding’s work is a celebration of post-digital bohemian life, love, and art. In the tradition of female artists like Lenore Kandel, Barbara Rubin, Bette Gordon, Nan Goldin, and Patti Smith, Goulding counterbalances the traditional spectatorial male gaze with an equally powerful feminine one. But feminine agency is just a small piece of Goulding’s ammo, her true originality laying in her brazen analog meditations on male beauty and sexuality that do not set out to emasculate or dissect. Her photographs and poems about paramours in paradise and surfer boys with angel faces and Mick Jagger haircuts celebrate her subjects as equals. While Goulding’s devotion to analog and warm 60s light resurrects the spirit of a time when poetry flowed more freely, her perspective — powered by an unwavering sense of sexuality parity – is clearly one of the 2010s
Goulding has already made waves in London with her experimental 16 mm cinepoem( based on a written poem of the same name) entitled“The Bone Echo.” Starring British super-muses Alice Dellal, Eliza Cummings, and Josh Beech, “The Bone Echo” features an original soundtrack by The Disappears and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, recorded live in Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon studio.“The Bone Echo” is a visually stunning paean to animalistic love; an eroticly charged, darkly magical statement that effectively gives poetry back to the wild-hearted. Goulding’s sentiments — unlike many contemporary poets – aren’t couched in esoteric language or pardoxical allusion in order to remain inaccessable. Instead Goulding treats poetry as a glass vessel in which to pour truth; as an art form that everyone can and should understand and appreciate once again. After the jump Goulding tells OAKAZINE just who she is and what she’s about. — Text by Marlo Kronberg.
The Bone Echo
by Jem Goulding © 2008
How long will you ride other wordly
Night mover, day breaker
While we suffer in muted agony
At your addiction to deceit
Breeding with magic
You are intoxicated with allure still scandalous
Drenched in tainted oblivion, entranced in desire for new fools and old flames
That let the hard heat pour through cigarette smoke
Blinding to you to confessions of our waking
Rhapsody of shadows from within swaying your metaphysical fate
Lawless lover, find atedote in my venom,
Come to core of the more of yourself, and there you’ll see me
In indigo mood and velvet tears
With wet leather skin, metallic to touch that arches and turns
Barbed mouth with seductive poison penetrating your sight like liquid
When danger is habitual, there are no warnings of it
Be ready when the moon is out sweet and hot hound who moans deep and cries for morning Chanting howls of a woman in love as she shakes her sweat free
And licks at your back etched with four satin claws, dripping lips and silver scissor teeth
Your mirror is now blood rusted, and when next you gaze against it We’ll fuck with hatred double and the cold hard stillness will reveal what our heart really is When your mouth is black and your body lays in the dirt Your eyes will not shut from our faces for now all you see is darkness Our impervious darkness.
City
by Jem Goulding © 2011
This place is void of love.
After the city lights there is only death of dreams.
Dark beings unable to see their own suffering
for they are clouded by a monotonous hum,
the sound of black desperation
The grave dance of lost and lonely clones,
the fickle kings and queens, bloodsucking fakes and the numb fuck wits
who tell you the city softens with time…
But it doesn’t
Only does your sight
With which you used to see the city lights.
Window Pain
by Jem Goulding © 2010
I drew the blinds on June
When they told me you were in the park
With Another.
Tempted to hide beneath the ledge
And spy out the swings in dark glasses
I hibernated instead
As the pavement sweat outside
In the heat wave
I played records inside
Danced with bare feet and water in my eyes
Drew the blinds on June
And July too
Made the room black
Damp with stagnant rejection
Until the plant on my mantle
With it single blue flower
Turned white and wilted
So with guilty anxiety
But a dutiful sigh
I opened the blinds to flood the air
With sunlight
Saved the lasting petals
And healed them to a long lost beauty
Not unfamiliar
Though shyer than before.
But seeing the bright blossom return
Mistaking her revival for strength
Tempted by colour
And a nostalgic scent
You knocked on my door again
And I let you back in.
If one stands in a shadowy spot
And allows tiny slices of light through the blinds
You see each glistening dot of dust
Fall lazily to the floor.
I did this lots in August
Watched the dancing dirt turn gold in the sunshine
The sun can do that to bad things
Make them seem pure.
The dust danced and I waited for you to come
Before supper like you promised
But perched by my window
Through the dusky panes
I saw you picnic
With another
So I drew the blinds on August
And wept.
Now it’s late November
And even though the cold air bites
I will open
Not only the blinds
But my window too
Perhaps Winter is as lonely for you
As Summer was for me
And I can watch you weep and wilt
Like my poor house plant did
For you.
