Ken Fox: Azmud: An Oily Saga on the Surface of the Wordbath in 5 Expired Generations
Paperback : 270 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-0956817648
Product dimensions : 12.7 x 1.55 x 20.32 cm
Publisher : Unkant Publishers (24 Jan. 2013)
Language: : English
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“It takes a crisis to tell us who everybody is. Azmud is that crisis
Andy Wilson
AROMATIC INFLUX of hard current, excess adiabatic export, bank picnic underpinned by mopping policy. Soak up repo options and bond the billowing billions in their rallies. Cut key rates with aggressive increase. Drain the liquid remains.

Inflocks the worldly-bird dropping white coin disturb onto placid air-hole, turbulating thru rapid-galactic talk-walls as income is downstream thump and fl utter after brass hornblasts bloat arid engine to open exit chutes but before analog infusions invade electric compound.

Acrobatic influff of drab correction, abscess ambient inland port plunks banked birdseed deeply with ramming updraft. Sponge down pop-up opinions and adhere to baloney-baked bully-cheese thru breezy pipeline. Molt cramped lock-star with diagrammatic plastic heave and collect in downdressed windbasket the blessed drains. A sample administered anaerobically, unexemplary.

Sharon Borthwick: Azmud

We’ve lost touch with our own bodily desires, smelling each other’s farts and sweat and sex smells beneath the John Lewis goose feather quilt is harshly interrupted by ALARM. “We sink with our working wage and wither”, as Ken Fox says it in Azmud.

Ben Harper, (Rivethead: Tales from The Assembly Line, 1986) said his, “pay stub was like a pair of concrete loafers” and describes the repetition of the Assembly line as strangulation.

In Azmud identities are wilting in the age of extreme Capitalism. I is always repeated, “I I I”. I who is it who is I. I cannot grasp myself. I is in it to my ears and nose – in the machine, “all to fill the general’s coffers”. Scientists are told, “leave your cosy comfort tomb and be a manager”, by General Motors, personified here as the type you’d expect him to be – intractable, GREEDY. All must be on industrial scale! There is no time to pussyfoot in laboratories. Internal dialogue goes, “Am job office plunking at this, finger-linking component strapped to transfer apparatus & obliged to prime mover.” How to exit the pain of it? Do language bombing! Blow it all up with neologisms and word jokes – go crazy over-written mad with alliteration. Gerard Manley Hopkins has landed in an oil field. All is, “heaving, heaving, heaving”. Bodies subsumed in the extraction process are, “Vapid! Voiceless! Vacuous! Voided!” In madness we go mad or maybe sane as did the Dadaists in The First World War – return to our true play selves, blow raspberries and smack the bath water – it sounds good.

And the way they suck hot sausage
But me well I wasn’t sayin too much neither
I was moral school girl
hard-working asshole
I figured I was speedo motorcycle
I had to earn my dough, had to earn my dough
But no you gotta, you gotta relate, right?
You gotta find the rhythm within
Patti Smith, Piss Factory

And so does Ken Fox find the rhythm within, though once his time was stolen on a Saskatchewan oil field drilling up mud for sampling – all Azmud, on the plains stolen from the Cree natives. All post apocalyptic, Mad Max, scrabbling in the dirt of the exhausted world landing on abandoned machine bits, the air toxic, nature consumed, trees evolving into something other, plumping up with oil, their leaves day glo radiating with radiation, instant growing glowing apples shooting from the plumpy pumpy branches.

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Binsay Poplars, 1879

In the BIG BANG BOOM times Fox makes Joycean play times, “transport ore from ear to air to eventual earth”. He reclaims bodily rights with revolting manholes and farts. Oil Fields are as Milton’s Hell – all flaming maws. These are words to counter Capitalism where your under the blanket times will be considered theft: “All time is a gift & all time is theft & you shall remain ever a donor… you shall covet something. You shall covet whatever. But covet you shall.” Fuck that says Ken Fox towards the end of this long poem piece. Fuck that several times over. And fuck it again.

Sharon Borthwick
AMM #8
December 2013