Deathmasques

 Deathmasques is a collection of early writings: a few prose poems and tales from 1970-1973. 

The prose poems comprised six pieces: 'The Poet' (1970), 'No More Beauty' (1971), 'In the Palace of The Sphinx (The Supplicant)' (1972), 'Dream of Stone' (1972), 'Into The Abyss (The Renegade)' (1972) and 'Silence' (1973).
One felt that the prose poem was a particularly Decadent form. Also included were two macabre short stories 'Mute Witness' (1972) and 'We Vampires' (1972). Other texts from this period include chunks of experimental neo-gothic or modern fantastic fiction (mainly dreadful!) and various quasi-theoretical statements relating to art projects such as Crisis of the Object and Rictus Sardonicus.
Deathmasques story 'We Vampires' appeared in the anthology Haunting Tales (2008) and 'Mute Witness' from the same collection appeared in Monomyth # 44 Issue 8.2 (2008) both from Atlantean Publishing.

Deathmasques publication 1999-2020

Deathmasques I The Poet, Headstorms Short Fiction Magazine Vol 1 Inclement Publishing, 2004
Deathmasques I The Poet, Monomyth Supplement Issue 12 Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Deathmasques I The Poet, International Times Jul 2020
Deathmasques II No More Beauty, Unhinged PJL Press, 3 Sept 1999
Deathmasques II No More Beauty, International Times Sept 2020
Deathmasques III In the Palace of the Sphinx (The Supplicant), International Times Sept 2020
Deathmasques IV Dream of Stone, Unhinged 6 Sex & Death Issue PJL Press, 2000
Deathmasques IV Dream of Stone, International Times Oct 2020
Deathmasques V The Renegade, Monomyth Supplement Issue 13 Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Deathmasques V The Renegade (Into The Abyss), International Times Oct 2020
Deathmasques VI Silence, Midnight Street 2, Immediate Direction, 2004
Deathmasques VI Silence, International Times Nov 2020

Related publications 2020

Mute Witness, International Times Nov 2020

We Vampires. International Times May 2020

Illus: Neo-Convulsive Self-Portrait 1973/2001

Tortured Souls

 

If Decadence is an art of aesthetic nihilism, then Expressionism is an art of tortured souls.
One should not underestimate the influence of Lotte H Eisner’s comprehensive exposition of the cinematic dramaturgy of Expressionist film in her book The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Originally published in French as L'Ecran Demoniaque in 1952, Eisner’s seminal work was revised for its first English publication in 1969, a translation by Roger Greaves. Not only did Eisner explain the historical origins of a ‘predisposition towards Expressionism’ she also identified all of the main features of the movement, defining key ideas including Stimmung, the brooding, speculative reflection of Grubelei and the visual effects of shadowy chiaroscuro, effects that evoke the ‘twilight’ of the soul.
These, and other features were characteristics of an aesthetic tendency which, emerging in the paintings of Kirchner, Marc, Kubin, Klee and others around the period 1908-1910, formed a bridge between the final phases of nineteenth century Symbolism and the emergent avant-garde of the twentieth century. The Expressionist sensibility – all art is a matter of sensibility – is a sensibility that favours violent contrast, it cultivates a mode of ultra-dynamism finding its most extreme resolution in a climactic paroxysm.
Yet, another dimension of the same sensibility, or ‘interior vision’, can be understood as a type of super-stylisation where objects are not so much represented, but rather apprehended through a process requiring the accentuation of ‘latent physiognomy, a term used by the theorist Bela Balazs.
Expressionist intensity generates a paroxysmal vision close to a crystallisation of form, disclosing a hitherto unnoticed, mysterious realm of experience differentiated from other forms of experience by a telltale ambiguity, ‘both attractive and repugnant at the same time’. This ambiguous uncanny realm, positioned at the cultural confluence of the Gothic, the Baroque and the Romantic is the disquieting locality of those tortured souls whose psychic disposition may best be understood by combining the viewpoint of Freud with that of Hoffmann.
It was the basic proposition of The Haunted Screen that cinema – a medium at once concrete and visual – and the inter-war German cinema in particular, found ‘its true nature’ and its ‘ideal artistic outlet’ in the ethos of Expressionism as explained here. The most outstanding example of this distinctive film-dramaturgie (Balazs) is, of course, Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari based on the book by Carl Meyer and Hans Janowitz and directed by Robert Weine in 1919. Here the Expressionist treatment is at its most extreme, and the style of acting is conditioned, not by psychological naturalism, but by the studio set design intended to evoke the ‘latent physiognomy’ of a small medieval town. The two lead actors, Werner Krauss in the role of the malign Dr Caligari himself, and Conrad Veidt playing Cesare ‘the sinister somnambulist’, managed to convey the desired mode of ‘bizarre exaltation’ and febrile energy that soon became known as Caligarism. It is known that Artaud admired Veidt’s portrayal of the somnambulistic agency of shadow, a performance that even today incarnates the very essence of catatonic horror – Cesare is an alien being ‘detached from his everyday ambience, deprived of all individuality, an abstract creature…’ who kills without motive or logic.
Moving with a particular and studiously executed gestural language through the artificial filmic environment of this paranoid scenario, and in jarring contradiction to the platitudinous realism of the rest of the cast (excluding Krauss), Veidt-Cesare embodies through his screen presence a new language of ‘reduced gesture’. His performance explores an almost linear theatrical formalism, echoing, to quote Eisner, ‘the broken angles of the sets’.
If Caligari himself is a nightmare incursion of malign, manipulative authoritarian power, it is Cesare, the agent of fate who exemplifies the notion of life as a kind of Gothic ecstasy of style. It is a style that, like the existential basis of Expressionism itself, ‘breaks the bounds of petty logic and causality’ and incarnates the immediate presence of the tortured soul.

Illustration: Cesare the Somnambulist (1994)

Strange Journey, Strange Travellers

It is with some misgivings that I present to a sceptical audience this unlikely report obtained by dubious methods from an undisclosed source. It must be said at once that no independent evidence can be found to confirm the existence of the EOU and exhaustive research has failed to disclose any trace of a similar organisation operating at that time. Furthermore, as the substance of the report is so far-fetched, if not reprehensible, the likelihood that the cautious reader may feel it to be an example of a literary hoax must be very high. Alternatively, the less charitable will simply dismiss the entire farrago as crazy delusion masquerading as outrageous fact. Even so, it may be admitted that our anonymous redactor has deployed a not inconsiderable accumulation of telling details to bolster an otherwise flimsy survey, imparting an air of plausibility if not verisimilitude to the proceedings. Finally, I might mention the inclusion of an article ‘Gnostic Alchemy of the Imagination’ in Nox: A Magazine of the Abyss No 1 (1986) – but this, of course, proves nothing.

Dedicated to the ‘exorcism of illusion’ the Esoteric Order of the Ultrasphere (EOU) provides an intriguing footnote to the occult history of Britain in the late nineteen seventies.

Founded around 1979 by Comus Klingsor and Astrodamus Niger, the Order of the Ultrasphere appears to have been based upon an ideology of anti-mystical aesthetic nihilism. Although sharing some features with modern occultism of the Crowley-Spare-Typhonian variety, a close inspection of the ‘Ultrasphere Manuscripts’ leads to the conclusion that the philosophy of the organisation represented a return to the dark-side of the Enlightenment era.

A fixation with Sturm und Drang, anti-clericalism, libertinism and with the noir Gothic themes of the late eighteenth century ensured that the artistic practices and aesthetic ideas of Klingsor and Niger were rooted in the world of Goya and Sade. They sought to continue the dark, pessimistic tradition that links those artists, via Baudelaire and Lautreamont, with the incendiary actor-poet Antonin Artaud and some other Surrealists. Rimbaud’s Lettres du Voyant are a recurring point of reference in the manuscripts.

One must accept that the origins of the OU will remain forever shrouded in the deepest mystery. The earliest document that has survived is the first letter of a small collection of correspondence known as The Colchester Papers. Addressed to a recipient known simply as ‘NQNQ’, the letter proposes a future grimoire of ‘new demons’ with mildly ludicrous names based on typing errors (‘Ogdogon’, ‘Dawneophyte’, ‘Occultor’ and ‘Desiravle’ among others). Also, the writer (Klingsor) claims affinity with the Black Brothers (‘defectors/challengers of all belief systems – of belief systems as such’) and calls for the Grand Oeuvre (Great Work) to be aligned with the notion of self-initiation, claiming there are ‘no true gurus, teachers or spirit guides’.

In the second letter (Third Thoughts) a system of seven degrees of attainment is outlined but takes the form of an anti-image or mirror image of the traditional cabalistic scheme derived from the Golden Dawn and other mainstream societies. This mirror image of occult attainment arises from the application of the Formula of Reversion – a key concept of the Ultrasphere, just as the mirror was a key symbol. The author says: ‘Mirrors and reflections, images of the anti-verse, anti-matter, black holes…’ The term ‘anti-verse’ may refer to a literary as well as to a cosmological theme.

In another letter with the title Notes Written on Trains, Klingsor demands the construction of ‘new system of magic’ to oppose ‘the black magic of the world theocratic power elite’ who use faith as ‘a mechanism for draining the energy of the masses.’ The new magic of the Ultrasphere will be ‘materialistic, anti-abstractionist, non-mystical…the magic of the shamans v the magic of the priests.’ In this text (under the formula Reality = 0) Klingsor summarises the OU worldview thus: ‘in politics – Anarchism, in morality – Nihilism, in science Relativity, in art – Dadaism, in space – Black Holes.’ 

These documents date from 1979 (the year of The Postmodern Condition and the year the Voyager probes reached Jupiter), but in the archives of the Ultrasphere are numerous other artefacts and images, many of them of obscure date, many dated earlier than the Colchester correspondence. Colchester was often referred to by its Roman name Camulodunum and ‘NQNQ’ may be the same person listed on the membership register as Frater Camulodunumensis.

Illustration VII from a set of images titled Codex Archon (1976) carries the title ‘Ultrasphere (Apocalypse)’ there are two other images from the same year, one called ‘Archon Of The Ultrasphere (The Sacrament)’, and another called ‘Life For Art’s Sake (Initiates of the Ultrasphere)’. The first picture is a pencil drawing; the others are photomontages (collages) in the style of the Surrealists or earlier Dada artists like Hanna Hoech and John Heartfield.

The earliest reference to the mythos of the Ultrasphere in the collection is a different image, this time dating from 1975 and called The ‘Archon of Goth’, another photo-montage showing a volcanic seascape and a demonic figure identified by the artist as the ancient god Set. This quasi-mythology of Archons is clearly derived from certain interpretations of Gnosticism, while the appearance of the god Set may reflect a Typhonian influence. Elsewhere Klingsor and Niger refer to a ‘Gnostic alchemy of the imagination’.

The Ultrasphere Manuscripts comprise four sub-collections. Three collections of holograph manuscripts and a small set of typescripts (photocopied) comprising the Colchester Papers, the letters to NQNQ already mentioned. There are replies from NQNQ, but not collected here.

The three collections of hand-written holographs are numbered and titled Primary Papers of the Ultrasphere (15 documents), Supplementary Papers of the Ultrasphere (10 documents) and a final group of 8 documents called Rearguard Aesthetic. This final collection seems to comprise a set of notes for some kind of artistic manifesto – an unrealised programme for ‘Ultraspheric Art’ in conflict with both the traditional canons of high culture and the official avant-garde..

The bulk of these documents consist of hastily scrawled notes and tabulations, a very few are fragments of continuous text. Separate from the documents are a number of occult illustrations or diagrams intended to visualise various tenets and themes of the system or in some cases to operate as Liberation Symbols or pictorial fetishes. These illustrations may have been intended to form part of a larger, synthesised text or grimoire.

In the papers there is reference to another text or project, Codex Sardonicus: Existence in Theory and Practice (1976-1979), predating the Order, but which Klingsor and Niger used as a point of reference, the basis of their anti-method of ‘attainment’. This was the core of the system, usually referred to as the Axis Mundi (or ‘Axis of the Ultrasphere’) – kind of ‘world-tree’ or central, axial structure that functioned, like the well-known cabalistic diagram, as an ontological framework. But, as described, the Axis was a reversion, or inversion, of usual expectations: it was a katabasis or descent, not an ‘ascension’ model of ‘higher’ attainment. The initiate of the Ultrasphere was expected to navigate downwards, to plumb the depths of his/her own personal hell, or unconscious. The ironical collage ‘Life For Art’s Sake’ shows a group of dandified initiates in the guise of eighteenth century dilettantes in a kind of submarine art gallery full of curious works – above them, on the surface, is the Sadean universe of Terra (terror); the ‘world’ as we know it.

Considerations of space preclude detailed exposition of the theoretical occultism of the OU. A summary of the various topics covered in the Primary and Supplementary papers will, however, provide a glimpse of the range and scope of the collection.

The first three Primary Papers deal with the Paths and Keys of the Axis Mundi. The fourth paper sets out a version of the Grades of attainment. The fifth paper is a list of projects and recommended authors (Auctores Damnati) whose works form the Books of Vital Doctrine or Diamond Dogmas. All these documents date from 1979.

The titles of the rest of this set are as follows: Infinite Initiation, Psychoanalysis, Anxiety, Nihilism, Initiatory Cycle, Fiat Lurks, Magia Innaturalis, Bardo Cartography, Beyond Rebirth and Initiation: The Ultimate Myth.  Paper XI (Fiat Lurks) deals with the macro-history of initiation including such topics as the ‘collapse of tradition’, infinite self-creation and the ‘rupture of the normal’. Magia Innaturalis (Paper XII) talks of ‘radical disengagement’ and introduces various art-historical concerns because ‘cultural evolution reflects the initiatory process’, although, according to Third Thoughts, the ‘object of the exercise’ remains ‘the infinite transfiguration of the self’.

The Supplementary Papers of the Ultrasphere recapitulate similar themes and ideas. The First two Supplements return to the topic of self-initiation. Initiation I is called ‘Unio Mentalis’, Initiation II is called ‘The Sanctum of the Art’. There follow three items of continuous text dealing with blood symbolism (with reference to some quotations from Artaud), death doctrines and the theme of Atavistic Resurgence (this item blatantly assimilated from the New Sexuality of Austin Osman Spare). Another paper Bestial Atavisms attempts to interpret various Symbolist paintings as images of the atavistic phenomenon. The last four papers in this group are titled as follows: Invasion/Obsession, Great Year of Renovation (rough notes on occult macro-history), Springboard to the Aethyrs and Transmutation of the Real. The term ‘aethyrs’ implies a familiarity with Crowley’s The Vision and The Voice and, therefore the ‘angelic’ scryings or workings of Dee and Kelly.

Separate from these manuscripts is another document in a different hand headed Known Members of the Order 1979-1981. There are nine names listed, all of which are ‘magical’ pseudonyms. It should be borne in mind that the nomenclature is deliberately ‘absurd’ in the ‘pataphysical’ spirit of Alfred Jarry. These include NQNQ; Nyktikorax, the Night Raven; Chryse Planitia, Mistress of the Cathedrals; Rodrigo Terra; Imbroglio Korgasmus; Sarchasmus Caesaromagus; Citrus Zest the Whore of Babylon; Comus Klingsor (707z); Frater Retrogradior and Ponerologicus Astrodamus Niger.

It appears that these alleged members of the EOU assigned extravagant titles to each other. For instance one was known as the Purple Legate of the Third Degree Below Zero (zero is the symbol of psychic death or nirvana), another, the Supreme Pontiff d’Estrudo and yet another, Cardinal of the Oversoul (the ‘Autarch’, the ultimate level of self-transfiguration, or initiation, in the Ultrasphere).

There is also an enigmatic note referring to ‘inner plane adepts’ of special interest or importance to the Order. One, a semi-legendary figure named Curion Orphee le Deranger, was thought of as a kind of wandering ‘Cagliostro’ figure and composer of wild musical works, and the other, the very sinister Archon of Othona, was also known as ‘Lord of the Dark Face’. Othona is the old Roman name for modern Bradwell, a fort on the Saxon Shore. The Essex towns of Colchester (Camulodonum) and Chelmsford (Caesaromagus) are linked with Bradwell in a kind of psycho-geographic affinity. Unfortunately, no further explanations are given.

One is left with the notion that the OU was an attempt to formulate a kind of nihilistic counterpart to the psychedelia of the preceding decade, an eclectic ‘counter mythology of inner space’ using the Axis grade system as a framework. Primary Paper IV is a fragmentary list of the grades, ranging from Grade Double Zero (Student) through Grade Zero (Mendicant) to Supreme Pontiff (Beyond the Abyss) and Magus Maximus or Autarch. These grades or levels are restated in the fourth letter of the Colchester Papers: Kinx Om Pox (1980) where each level is associated with a key attribution. For example the Mendicant is associated with the key of Fear/Hate, The Retreatant with Disgust, the Preceptor (Purple Legate) with Cynicism and the Magus Maximus with Autarchy, the infinite transfiguration of the self. Each grade key of the Axis was represented by its own particular Sigil or Liberation Symbol and every key was linked by one of the twenty-two paths mapping out the ‘Strange Journey’ of the initiate.

Here is a quotation from Primary Paper VI Infinite Initiation (Unio Innaturalis):

‘No one has time for politics. Nothing is psychotic. Initiation is total – infinite, the infinite totality of the cosmos in microcosm. The infinite totality of the microcosm writ large in the macrocosm. Each grade creates his own universe, his/her own myth, each grade is creator of his/her own dream…’

There is a lost poem by Comus Klingsor and an illustrative collage picture (still extant in the archive) with the title ‘Strange Journey, Strange Travellers’ – a very strange journey indeed.

Illus: Ultima II, 1979
Illus: Strange Journey, Strange Travellers, 1976

Another Quiet Night In The City

Which one are you today?

Despite clear message we suffer temporarily.

 – seriously? classic result re-mastered full control –

But when small copies of a theoretically possible bigger blockbuster micro-transaction surfaced, becoming one of those rare moments, all baroque and lovingly crafted, unraveling details: disproportionate ‘representations’, psychotic types running around with worse-than-expected headaches a year earlier – she moved out! 

Fast-twitch tailspin stunning-looking quest: this isn’t something we’re handling well. Keep your shifty eyes on the road ahead…

So get stuck in acquiring this new body-mod type hobby, maximum strength wireless telegraphy blow-drier treatment. Torn fishnets, piercings, eyes-on-stalks, tattoos (sex-roses-demons), extreme Steampunk weirdness. And if the dam breaks?

Well, can’t help thinking about her deprived childhood – contrasting characteristic dishy, sharp, dude well-placed to help – a dodgy Fox in Socks or, maybe a cuddly 'Mr Tickle'. Smart office, stylish furniture, dedicated receptionist, cool rooms, business lounge, one-bedroomed flat, acoustics just right, not compromised in critical areas. Just sign-up, unlock car, focus on value – may end up a consultant.

Rapid response; powerful, reliable, scaleable, innovative and very ‘new world’. The Greatest Show on Earth: pseudo-cuties, gaffe-prone clowns, intriguing old bw silent films, vintage late night factor, hoax moon landing for extra fix. Never same again – dog-hairs, notebooks, char-grilled foie gras, pizza-and-pyjama party, awesome impersonators… are we really on the way out?

Fast-twitch tailspin stunning-looking quest: this isn’t something we’re handling that well, so,  keep your shifty eyes on the road ahead… We enter the strange world of Citizen X.

Back in the sixties and seventies a blend of daft comedy and musical revelry highlights, like four-day event skin treatments and massages, you’ll be able to watch despite everything the blackouts the slowdowns. Creepy fan-mail but no booking fees! 
Now arriving to phase-out entire cities (New York-London-Paris-Berlin) in period costume you get on with it in an original jet-black ball-gown. True privilege light a candle have a glass of wine, closer now, mistakes are the way to learn: we dress up and dance our socks off – snake ring, fingerless gloves, edgy soundtrack impressively constructed, code missing. Automatically get everyone in the mood make sure your pet isn’t left out shouldn’t need monthly bewitching this ‘Gothic Luxe’ trend: monochrome lace spider bracelet, battered leather jacket testament to power of a multitude of sins, heaven for wild girls dates back to Saxon times – what crisis? 
Endemic issues speed up process shamelessly different shapes sizes backgrounds it was almost noon screaming agony outside veritable cornucopia of vice, dazzling discoveries if you see nothing else tune in to this reunion of opposites special edition. Three point two million years ago we observe your fast-disappearing world of coastal lagoons so Cindy’s dream of becoming an actress goes out the window fishing trip. Visit a studio, trade in crystal meth, political dossier recast as airport novel (huh?) grab an extra, find out more with sub-machine guns; yes it’s just another quiet night in the city circa 1952.

Fast-twitch tailspin stunning-looking quest: this isn’t something we’re handling well. So just keep your shifty eyes on the road ahead…We enter the strange world of...?

It’s overwhelming and truly special to be here. Fine art prints, elbow-patch blazers, hybrid golf clubs, thrills amplified first class turn-out you gotta be on some next level high-stakes electric dreamy instrumental happy slappers slapping, flappers flapping about call you tomorrow gaudy reminder of those luminous superdry suits, inflammable paper hats, glo-sticks, sin and spectacle: regrettably the air vent explodes. Exclusive chat ideal protection skinny-fit trousers, secret pockets, do your research nation-wide, slip back into that cockney accent what a laugh iconic alien cartel inside my brain welcome to hell slim design so-hated tiny minority public comment bad press not too good not the moment to get it on… so much can go wrong on the sofa with your new girlfriend honey honey don’t stop honey honey dynamic incredibly exciting are you brave enough?

Pale blue skies engine capacity post-war consumer boom culture, retro-futurism, new wave writers, deviant subtopian norms, pretentious and intrusive outdoor advertising hoardings, wires, poles, ill-sited public utilities such a fool to ask (Cindy Oh Cindy) edit your copy on trains and planes snap pictures into your diary long lens sunset over the rocky bay two couples scupper your plans think of new ways feminine variations end in another crisis.

Are we really on the way out? Today which one are you?

Illustration: The Strange World of Citizen X, 2007

Words From Nowhere

INTERVIEW WITH A C EVANS

Susan A. Duxbury-Hibbert

August-November 1996


You are known as both a writer and an artist. What is the starting point for a project, the drawings or writing?
This is quite a difficult question actually…ignoring external reasons for starting something (like being asked specifically for a poem, or specifically for a drawing) and concentrating purely on the creative viewpoint, one has to recognize the different ‘dynamics’ of different forms. Prose-versus-poetry, collage-versus-drawing. What is meant by a ‘starting point’? In the final analysis a starting point may not be a conscious thing - it’s an inspirational thing. Nevertheless there is sometimes a deliberate, definite, intention to work with visual rather than verbal methods/materials or vice versa, but the origins of the intention are non-rational. A starting point may be generated by idea-level interconnections between verbal and visual output, or continuous immersion in art-literature may prepare the ground for a ‘next step’.

When did you start drawing/writing?
I have childhood memories of drawing from sometime in the mid-1950s. My father had some artistic abilities and tended to encourage me - this was real juvenilia: pictures of soldiers and airplanes or whatever. Later on, about the age of 17 (in 1966) I suddenly started to get more serious about it. The trigger was finding the work of Aubrey Beardsley - the style and general tone of his work was quite an eye-opener...then I discovered Surrealism and started making collages.
Even as a kid I was quite a bibliomaniac, so any crossovers between art and literature interested me. The fact that Surrealism was not just to do with painting was very important. As the first Surrealists were poets, not artists, the whole movement plugged into, and extended, that nineteenth century avant-garde tradition of experimental writing (Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarme-Jarry). This became more and more significant to me. So I got a typewriter for my 21st birthday and started writing: initially fiction (the obligatory, abortive novel and ‘decadent’ short stories) but eventually poetry, after doing some translations of Max Ernst and Messiaen lyrics.

What inspires you to start a new project?
Perhaps inspiration is the unforeseen consequence of immersion - immersion in materials, researches, Myths, influences, precursors. Perhaps, at a deeper level, it is some sort of psychosomatic urge, the result of unfocussed psychic pressure from the unconscious, a surge of neuronal energy, a perturbation of the psychic atmosphere, which finally crystallizes in words and images.
The titles of pictures are a sort of poetry. The collage process is internalized (psycho-montage/ psycho-cut-up) as well as externalized in the traditional Surrealist Ducassian Encounter of disparate material elements. Art emerges from the (al)chemistry of the creative process, through interaction with the prime materia, the massa confusa, of unrefined unconscious matter. Works feed on each other - collages and drawings can inspire poems and poems can inspire drawings. Drawings can evolve from the collage procedure. Works emerge in cycles and spates - groups of poems are somehow related to each other, sets of drawings share the same motifs and techniques.
Sometimes, of course, an external requirement will be the pretext for a project - but the non-rational, chance aleatoric factor must always be there. If a project is to ‘work’ it must be an active element in the transformation process. All art is transformation, the perpetual, unstoppable transformation of the day-to-day in which the mundane becomes the bizarre.

What part, in your opinion, does illustration play in adding to a text?
‘In The Beginning Was The Word’ someone said. Well, don’t believe it. Pictures are primal. The image in the mind’s eye precedes utterance, or, to quote Duke Ellington: ‘There’s always a mental picture’. I think there has to be a kind of synergy - a deep affinity - between any image and the words it is used with. This affinity may not be obvious or concrete. Chance encounters between poems and pictures in the editorial process can often give rise to effective associations.
In a different context one may think of texts illustrating images rather than vice versa. For example The Cascades was a set of poems written to ‘accompany’ some pictures by Rupert Loydell and, more recently, both Martin Duxbury-Hibbert and Norman Jope have collaborated by providing texts (Between Alien Worlds and Zones of Impulse) for sets of images provided in advance of literary composition. In these cases successful!
Illustration depends upon a feeling of ‘rightness’ or integration into the finished product. Equal value resides in both text and illustrations. Textual content can be derived from the images. Literal illustration is ok for factual and instructional situations but I am more interested in these more oblique relationships between words and images.

When did you start publishing your work?
I first started publishing drawings in about 1968 as greeting cards. Then I managed to get drawings
Into various occult magazines during the mid-1970s and also a few lit. crit. articles and reviews from
1980 onwards. My first poetry publication was in Stride Magazine, and Stride published the first
collection of poetry and drawings, Exosphere, in 1984

What artists have influenced you?
The earliest artistic influences I can remember were illustrators - Mervyn Peake (The Hunting of the Snark and other books), Tenniel’s Alice illustrations, Eric Fraser and Joan Kiddell-Monroe - again, this was when I was kid. I really liked fantastic things and, in the case of Frazer and Kiddell-Monroe, hard-edged linearist things. When you’re that young you don’t think about ideas like Abstraction, you react to the imagistic qualities of what you see because that’s the way the imagination is.
Another key influence was Japanese Art. We had some volumes of drawings by Hokusai, which I was always looking at. His work is very naturalistic but it can also be very macabre and grotesque and ultra-stylish. Remembering the period 1966-1970, when I was trying to find my way is very confusing - there were so many ‘influences’.
The closest I got to contemporary fine art or gallery art was Richard Hamilton’s reconstruction of Duchamp’s Bride which he did for a big Tate retrospective around July ‘66. The irony of Duchamp’s stance and the iconoclasm of Dada were very important - an antidote to the Peace ‘n’ Luv culture! But then again I was undoubtedly sympathetic to Psychedelia and Op as well.
I still like Sixties design and art movies like Performance - the influences were an intermedia hotchpotch: Art Nouveau Symbolists like Klimt, Jan Toorop and Khnopff. I like Odilon Redon, Hieronymous Bosch, Grunewald, Durer, William Blake and Goya…Aubrey Beardsley…Alfred Kubin. Also the assemblage sculptures of Louise Nevelson. There was a piece of hers in the Tate called ‘Gold Wall’ which was a stylized structure of abstract, rectilinear box-shapes and compartments encrusted with commonplace, ‘found’ objects such as old chair legs and wooden slats. The whole thing was painted a uniform all-over gold colour. There was a clash of materials in Nevelson’s work, which greatly appealed to me at the time.
It’s necessary to identify different types of influence. There are precursors who influence by style, there are those who influence content and there are those who influence by example. There are some whose influence is a combination of all these factors. This is partly why it is difficult to discuss influences. There is also the problem of ‘originality’. I think everyone is influenced by someone, although lots of artists and writers (in this country at least) think that admitting to influences is like some sort of confession of inadequacy. This is just as complicated with literary influences as it is with artistic ones.

So what about literary influences?
So far as literature is concerned I would have to mention the French tradition: Baudelaire, Mallarme and Antonin Artaud as a major influence in various ways, also Huysmans and Andre Breton. My Pre-formative reading was Science Fiction (mainly British), Fantasy, Horror (particularly Poe and Lovecraft) and all sorts of myths and legends. This established a continuing involvement with ‘popular’ genres that continues to the present.
As I said I’m a compulsive bibliomaniac and read all the time. It all goes into the creative process. The American Beats had quite an impact. Beat style was so un-English, so un-literary, or so it seamed at the time. I remember reading Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Burroughs’ Nova Express and being instantly converted to a more ‘modern’ attitude to writing.
Thinking back to the same period I would name the following ‘literary’ influences: Arthur Machen, Lermontov, Thomas Pynchon (especially), De Quincey, Alfred Jarry (Faustrol), Robert Graves (The White Goddess), De Sade, Gerard de Nerval, Boris Vian, Angela Carter, J.G Ballard, Nabokov (Ada), Barth (The Sotweed Factor), Borges, and Jean Genet.
There were various non-fiction/critical works that were significant I think. For example, Jung’s writing on Alchemy, The Romantic Agony, Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic study of Poe, Masters and Houston’s Psychedelic Art, Robert Greer Cohn’s book on Mallarme, Hans Bellmer’s Anatomie de L‘Image, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Althea Hayter. A later influence was Samuel Beckett. His work, particularly the short prose and the novels (the Trilogy and How It Is) is a landmark in the imagination. Absolutely no one can afford to ignore Beckett. A combination of factors (including the influence of Austin Spare) induced me to read a lot of occult literature - but that’s another story....

Do you exhibit/ sell your artwork?
I participated in an exhibition called Cross Section in Chelmsford 1968 - but that was a one-off. I’ve never seen myself as a gallery artist or involved in the art market - it just isn’t my scene really. I see ‘originals’ as ‘masters’ for reproduction rather than traditional fine art artifacts. I’m not really geared up to do commissions and things like that. As I said - not really my scene.

What is your method of working?
Steve Sneyd has observed that the poetic act is like trying to snapshot the fragmentary immediacy of the brain’s workings and compared his methodology to ‘a trapped animal’s gnawing of it’s own leg....’. In a sense he is right about this. It is difficult to cultivate the self-awareness and objectivity needed to comment on the methodology of the creative process beyond surface characteristics.
In writing I was influenced by the minimalism of Poe who criticized the viability of the long poem - I don’t write long poems in the sense that Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or Paradise Lost are long poems. So minimalism, even miniaturism, is intrinsic to my method in many respects. Also the Postmodernist blurring of boundaries, perhaps inspired by Borges idea of 'ficciones' - cerebral, laconic, hermetic, labyrinthine, enigmatic - these are often some of the qualities I look for in a sphere where the essential differences between poetry and prose are unclear.
The poetic methodology is most elusive, Often I find myself working with a surreal psycho-montage of wordflow, sometimes incorporating ‘found words’ or cut-ups or phrases that simply emerge from the unconscious (Words from Nowhere). I regard many of my ‘poems’ as borderland texts, neither prose nor poetry. There is a narcissistic ‘working up’ of drafts and an element of faction where quasi-autobiographical or historical research material merges with pure fantasy. I reject traditional prosody as the technique of a dead era.

What about drawing methods? How do you go about obtaining the final image? Do you have a clear idea at the outset, or do you do many variations?
Drawing methods are varied. Often I will work from a store of sketches and notes for visual ideas, which I keep. These are usually pencil sketches but can be ink drawings and doodles as well. Sometimes a drawing can be spontaneous and committed to paper right away. Sketches may be quite expressionistic and unformed to begin with but then go through a number of different of versions and stylisations.
Areas of detail in Rapidograph drawings are done directly onto the final drawing in most cases. These are usually detailed areas of stippling and fine-point decoration, a sort of amalgam of Moreau’s encrustation, Beardsley’s stipple technique, Seurat-like textures and Ernstian decalcomania-like textures. This sort of work can be very time consuming. In many cases compositions are derived from pre-existing collages. Sometimes I use ‘found images’ derived from, say, newspaper photographs or magazines. Sometimes there is a pre-existing mental image and it’s like taking a snapshot. In many drawings there is a deliberate use of ‘negative space’ in the composition - space derived from the chance lines of the pen or pencil.

How necessary is it to you that you are published & ‘known’? Would you continue to write/draw if you had no public outlet?
I am reminded of a section in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider - he was quoting T. E. Lawrence (Wilson saw Lawrence as an archetypal ‘outsider’ figure) who said that a craving for the power of self-expression was the most decisive driving force in his life. This craving is the only antidote to the nihilism of our age. Without this craving for self-expression there is nothing, literally, Nothing.
Artistic creativity is the way to achieve maximum self-expression. This is an end in itself but the craving is capable of transformation – self-expression becomes individuation, individuation becomes self-initiation. An infinite process of self-initiation, a sort of Aesthetic Gnosticism perhaps. In this context publication is irrelevant. On the other hand creative editorializing can become part of The Work. Working with Stride and Memes and other magazines has lead to unforeseen creative activity through interaction, publication itself becoming part of a wider transformation process.

Do you conceive of a contemporary context, or do you feel you are working in isolation?
Well, I do conceive of a contemporary context - I also feel I’m quite isolated in what I do as well! I’ve always been interested in what you might call cultural history - the evolution of aesthetic and religious ideas, so this sense of history helps me to try to define my own contemporary context.
On the other hand my interaction with immediate contemporaries is rather limited these days and I find a lot of SP type poetry and stuff rather alienating. It’s always difficult to name names but, if pressed, I might cite Steve Sneyd, Robert Shepherd, lain Sinclair, Norman Jope, Rupert Loydell and Martin Duxbury-Hibbert as current writers who may overlap with some of my own concerns.
My original sense of contemporary context was shaped by a sort of ‘post-everything’ feeling. It seemed to me that the transition from Surrealism to Postmodernism via Pop, Situationism, Psychedelia, Neo-Dada and Op from 1966-1971 was the beginning of some sort of end - an End with a capital ‘E’, in fact. As Hassan said about Postmodernism: it ‘dramatizes its lack of faith in art even as it produces new works.’
The truth is that, in this era of ‘post-everything’ and loss of faith, one didn’t really look among one’s own generation for a contemporary context. Except, perhaps, in semi-commercial fantasy art, Psychedelia and satire (Roger Dean, Bruce Pennington, Wes Wilson, Michael English, Scarfe, Steadman), one looked to the survivors of the avant garde who were still with us. In the visual arts this meant Duchamp, Chirico, Ernst, Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Matta, Burra and Francis Bacon. I think my graphic style was very influenced by Bellmer - he must be one of the greatest draughtsmen of the twentieth century. In literature there was Andre Breton, Borges, Ballard, Angela Carter, David Gascoyne, Beckett and William Burroughs. One was conscious that they were all still around producing new works. They were the contemporary context for me.
Yet, throughout the period the sense of an ending was exacerbated by the deaths of nearly all these major figures. Breton died in 1966 around the same time as the last major International Surrealist Exhibition (‘Absolute Divergence’). He was followed by Duchamp in 1968, Bellmer in 1975, Ernst and Burra in 1976, Chirico in 1978 and, finally, J. L. Borges in 1986. By the time you got to 1976 we were into the ‘break up of Britain’, The Winter of Discontent and the New Dark Age of the ‘Enterprise Culture’…one tried to build on the previous era.


Illustration: One Gothic Night, 2000

The Stride Interview

Rupert M Loydell interviews A C Evans, January 1985

You describe your work as hermetic art; can you enlarge upon that?

For me the term ‘hermetic’ has three meanings. In general usage it has the sense of ‘obscure’ or ‘impenetrable’, as in the phrase ‘hermetically sealed’. In literature the term 'Hermeticism' was used by the Italian critic Francesco Flora, with reference to the work of Ungaretti. He was placing Ungaretti in the French poetic tradition of Valery, Mallarme, Rimbaud and their precursors, Nerval and Baudelaire. Mallarme was the supreme master of hermetic poetry in this sense. Then, of course, there is the original sense, referring to the Corpus Hermeticum, the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, which in the context of traditional alchemy gave rise to a pejorative use of the word to mean a sort of willful obscurantism. Both Mallarme and the Surrealists have subsequently seen poetry as a mode of psychological purification akin to what is known as ‘spiritual alchemy’. I would be quite happy to apply all these definitions to my own work both graphic and poetic - I use the term hermetic to refer to the fact that I do not feel the reader/viewer is obliged to ‘read’ my works searching for ‘meanings’ in the narrow sense. I would hope my work effects people in a surreal, non-rational way. 1 think one has to recognize that any valid modern artwork is only ‘meaningful’ to the artist himself - solipsism is intrinsic to the modernist position, and the prime objective of pure artistic activity should be personal self-transformation, not inter-personal communication.

What physical process do you use to draw?

For equipment I use Rotring Rapidograph needle tip pens of a number of grades ranging from 0.1 which is very fine to 0.5 which is quite broad. I just use a pencil, these pens and some reasonably good quality drawing paper. If I need to work with non-linear black masses I use an ordinary felt-tip pen. I use the Rotring pens to create a number of different effects. The needle tips scratch the surface of the paper making broken lines, as in the drawings ‘Stigma III’ and ‘Vectors of Hate’, which remind me very much of photos of particle tracks taken in cloud-chambers. I can also use them to generate cloudy masses of dots and stippling which can be elaborate, as in ‘The Astral Widow’ (Exosphere frontispiece). I like the harsh machine lines of these pens; they suit the general tone of alienation that characterises my pictures.

How about ideas? What are your Inspirations?

I feel bombarded with ideas all the time. I’m often inspired by words and phrases like ‘freezing fog’ or technical terms like ‘xerosere’. Words like this may conjure up an image or spark off a chain of word associations, which become the basis of a poem. I have drawn inspiration from scientific photos from the extreme ends of research - high-energy astrophysics, astronomy. Often a poem or picture will relate to a specific historical or political idea, like ‘The Cathedral of the Future’, which was a kind of warning - I hope not a prophecy. Other artists often inspire me, and some poems relate directly to my emotional life - drawings rarely do.

The drawings seem connected, have you created a mythical world or is it just style?

Most of the drawings are interconnected. I often work in cycles of related motifs. To begin with this is just a stylistic exercise and the interest lies in manipulating the same motif in different contexts.
I regard this as a form of unconscious scanning; it’s rather like looking down a microscope, watching related images float into and out of view. The procedure then becomes more developed. Certain motifs remain with me for a long time and operate like a form of pictographic language. These interconnections do become the basis for, what could be called, a ‘private mythology’. Sometimes this mythology appears to take on a life of its own, with named characters (Xezbeth, Nyktikorax, Scabra Sanguinea, Tzeth, Nuigh) and places (Jet City, Metacropolis, Nylokeras Charontis) providing the setting of the poems - for example ‘Jet City’ and ‘Mock Transcendental Notes’. All of this should be distilled in order to avoid direct, literal interpretations.

Do you use things symbolically or allegorically in your work?

Both: in a drawing like ‘The Cathedral of the Future’ almost all the motifs are allegorical - the monumental tower is an ‘allegory’ of theocratic oppression, and refers to a Tarot card - but I try to preserve a form of ambiguity which gives the entire picture a ‘symbolic’ aura. Again I do not think the viewer needs to realise all this - although it is interesting - it is all a tactic, a technique, to create the ‘hermetic’ effect.

Do you regard your work as frightening, eerie?

I rarely set out to create horrific effects. However I am aware that the reader/viewer may react as though I have set out to do just that. ‘The Astral Widow’ has been used in Dark Horizons (British Fantasy Society Magazine) to illustrate a horror story, and also a drawing called 'Le Grimoire' - these are examples of overtly weird/macabre images finding their rightful homes. I think it is true to say that all my work is imbued with an atmosphere of unease or the uncanny. I have occasionally produced brutal images, which some people may find repellent. If someone found my work frightening I would say that it is because I use material which is ambivalent and borders on the non-human. My own term for this type of effect is ‘grotesque’.

Is the work negative or is there a hope lurking somewhere?

If you are suggesting that there is a spirit of hopelessness in my work I would say that this should be seen as more a sense of outrage - I view the entire human condition with a sense of outrage. But I think the negativity of this can be mitigated by humour - black humour as in Beckett or Andre Breton.

Stride only ever sees photocopied work ready for use, what size is the original work?

Almost always A4 size, or smaller. Large works are difficult to store.

Do you sketch different versions of the same picture?

A visual work may exist in a number of different versions. Usually it starts off as a pencil sketch - sometimes a naturalistic life study, sometimes a quasi-automatic calligraphic expression of a non-naturalistic idea. Some drawings like ‘The Tapestry of Life’ are based on collages. Most drawings are pieced together from different sketches that come together by chance – ‘Atavism’ for instance is a combination of three different sketches.

How long would one piece take on average?

An elaborate piece can take a number of days. Simple linear compositions can be completed in a few minutes.

Do you exhibit the originals?

Never.

Does your writing relate very closely to your drawings? The poems often have picture titles within them.

Yes. I regard prose writing as a sort of dredging, trawling exercise; a way of sorting out my aesthetic ideas. I will often use lines from poems as picture titles, or incorporate picture titles into poems in an aleatoric way. A good example is ‘Filigree Paintings Explode’. The collage was made at least two years before the text was written but seems to illustrate it quite well. The poem itself is a cut-up. This sort of intersection is the Burroughs-Gysin ‘Third Mind’ effect. I am extremely interested in the borderland between writing and drawing - the two activities overlap in areas like callig¬raphy, glossolalia and ‘nonsense’ poetry. I quite often use a form of calligraphic automatism that can be a sort of half-writing, half-drawing.

What are your literary tastes?

I like Burroughs, Beckett, Borges and Pynchon. On the whole I find the English tradition rather tedious, although I greatly admire Lewis Carroll and Thomas De Quincey. I am much more at home with Mallarme, Rimbaud, Artaud and Baudelaire - I read them all the time. I also read quite a lot of literary criticism and non-fiction.

Do they effect your visual and written work?

Yes. Direct influences are Huysmans, Baudelaire, Mallarme and Antonin Artaud. Also Andre Breton and the poems of Max Ernst. I am very interested in the Dada and Simultaneist poets.

What about your tastes in the art world?

Many artists I like are direct influences - the Surrealists: Matta, Tanguy, Ernst and Hans Bellmer. Bellmer particularly. I am also interested in the contemporary Fantastic Realists, like Ernst Fuchs, or H. R. Giger, who did the designs for the film Alien. Other art historic influences would be Bosch, Schongauer, Durer and earlier, medieval Gothic artists like Villard de Honnecourt who made beautiful drawings for the cathedral-builders. My earliest influence was Aubrey Beardsley. The drawing Sphinx in Exosphere is a Beardsley tribute. I am very at home with fin-de-siecle artists like Toorop, Klimt and A. O. Spare.

Do you see illustration as separate from fine art?

I find the term ‘fine art’ unacceptable. It relates to what I would call the ‘art industry’, an institution based on obsolete concepts of art trading and co1lecting. ‘Illustration’ can be stimulating. Beardsley was an ‘illustrator’ though Wilde didn’t think his Salome designs were literal enough. Wilde’s definition of ‘illustration’ was rather limiting. I rarely produce illustration from specific works and if I do they tend to be disastrous. But I am always very happy for my pictures to be related to other people’s stories, poems, tapes etc. This often generates unforeseen interconnections of word and image. The drawing ‘Stigma II’ was used in Velocities (a US magazine), in conjunction with a poem by Ivan Arguelles containing the lines:

names scattered in the perfumed air shining like the lights
used to code the various ancient constellations

For me this sentence matched/illustrated the picture perfectly - but who is illustrating who? Third Mind effect again.

Any artistic aspirations?

My overriding artistic aspiration is to be as hermetic as possible.

What are you working on at present?

I am working on a set of collage-poems in the wake of ‘Random 1/Random 2: The First Hermetic Poem’ (Stride 19), trying to assemble an anthology of pictures and texts which has the working title Ambiguous Signals and I’m writing some poems - of which ‘Filigree Paintings Explode’ is an example - under the general title Ethos Mythos. No drawings for 1985 yet...but I have some ideas.

You worked on the artwork for the last Stride compilation cassette; does music interest you, or inspire your work?

I am and have been influenced by music - although I have a very ambiguous attitude towards it - sometimes I think we live in a society of melomaniacs. In the field of ‘classical’ music I like Olivier Messiaen, Schoenberg, Webern, Debussy, Wagner and Scriabin, among others. ‘Word Music’ was a tenet of late nineteenth century hermetic symbolism, of course. I think most of my poems use words in this ‘musical’ sense, they can have an incantatory quality and are intended in many instances to be read out loud (by someone other than myself, I hasten to add!) I listen to a lot of rock. I’m totally addicted to Bowie and always have been - he’s head-and-shoulders above all other chart-orientated performers. I also like all the early Roxy Music albums and anything by Brian Eno...other likes would include The Banshees, Bob Marley, or jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington. I find rock lyrics very inspiring: almost any line from a song by Lou Reed, for instance, is streets ahead of conventional poetry.

Do you want to be famous?

If I became famous I hope I would take it in my Stride.

Interview from Stride 20, 1985

Illustration: Hopes Lurking Somewhere, 1985

Believe This

I tell you (believe this) – I have explored
Fearfully with my alien mind the limits of art.
I have seen the horizon of fear which none may cross.
But no art is as cold as my heart.

Illustration Vampyr, 1970

Phantoms Dissolving in Time

Notes For A Preface to Colour Of Dust


1. NOTES ON EARLY INFLUENCES 1966-1969

Where to begin...?
A starting point may be: Aestheticism...
Its intensity of experience, its ‘hard gem-like flame’...
Decadence and Style - the independence of the word (Havelock Ellis and Paul Bourget), ‘self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement...’ (Arthur Symons). The short lyric – ‘I hold that a long poem does not exist’ (Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetic Principle): Poe’s aestheticism as the origin of minimalism in poetry.
Nature – ‘To say to a painter that Nature may be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.’ (Whistler’s Ten O’clock).
Ideas of the fin-de-siecle – modernity, transience, impressionism, The Tragic Generation:
Davidson, Johnson, Dowson, Beardsley, Enoch Somas, Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank…
The Occult – W. B. Yeats & The Golden Dawn...The Master Therion...
Precursors – Blake, Coleridge, De Quincey, Swinburne... Japonisme... France... ‘If I spend my future life reading Baudelaire in a cafe I shall be leading a more natural life than if take to hedger’s work or plant cacao in the mud swamps’ (Oscar Wilde, 1897).

...from Symbolism to Surrealism...
The Hermetic sonnets of Gerard de Nerval (‘El Desdichado’) and the fusion of dream and waking (Aurelia).
The great innovators: Baudelaire and Mallarme....
Baudelairian themes: correspondences (occultism), le neant vaste, the voracious irony, the city, l’ennui, the whip of pleasure, The Heroism of Modern Life, the Cytherean gibbet, dandyism, cosmic aestheticism, the obscure and the uncertain... ‘I am enthroned in the azure like a sphinx beyond all understanding...’ ('La Beaute'). Baudelaire’s visionary landscapes prefigure Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy... Baudelaire and ‘absolute incompatibility’ (Charles du Bos).
Poetry without God... ‘after I found nothingness I found beauty...’ (Mallarme). The hermetic mysteries of Herodiade, Igitur, 'Prose Pour Des Esseintes' and The Sonnet on X. 'Un Coup de Des' and the radical displacement of The Word. The demon of analogy.
J-K Huysmans – Naturalism – Decadence – Occultism – Catholicism... a fate worse than death.
Rimbaud and Lautreamont – the poetry of revolt and dissociation, the Alchemy of the Word.
Laforgue and Jarry – towards the Absurd (Pataphysics), Dada and Pop.
Then, Surrealism...
Surrealist ideas: the poetic image, l’amour fou, intuition as gnosis, objective chance, automatism, the occult under the poetic angle, urban psycho-geography (Aragon), Psychoanalysis, black humour, picto-poetry, inspiration to order (collage, frottage), convulsive beauty, convulsive identity (Ernst), the crisis of the object, Open Realism, the mythology of the modern. But can there still be art after Duchamp’s Fountain?

1966: Still at School
We were ‘into’ all of this around 1966, and I was still at CTHS (Chelmsford Technical High School). So was this the Sixties...? Well, sort of... I remember the big Beardsley exhibition at the V&A (May l966), the death of Andre Breton... seeing Der Golem at the NFT’s Romantic Agony season… visiting The Hellfire Caves, The Indica Gallery, Better Books basement, and reading impenetrable articles on AutoDestructivism in Art and Artists or Studio International. After school we sat in Snow’s Coffee Bar opposite the library or the Wimpy Bar near the station… we listened to The Doors and The Beach Boys... we liked Osiris Visions Posters, silver fashion (the Rabanne metal dress), Op Art carpets, Biba retro style, Allen Jones fetish furniture, Bridget Riley’s monochromes… we thought The Beatles were rubbish (I still do)... one of my mates was into John Mayall. In 1967 I read Frank Harris’ Oscar Wilde on a family holiday to Grange-Over-Sands, Cumbria. In October 1968 there was another big exhibition at the V&A, The Mackintosh Centenary Exhibition. Then there was Les Salons de la Rose-Croix at the Piccadilly Gallery. I saw the Six Days War on TV.
I was doing lots of drawings and paintings but not much writing. By 1969 I was doing collages because we were all Surrealists – despite the fact that Jean Schuster had just officially disbanded the movement on February 8th of that year (we didn’t know that).
Then I was gobsmacked by Nova Express – do you have to be American to write like this?

1970: First Writings
In 1970, I was given my first typewriter, an Olivetti Olympia Portable from Low’s Business Machines... and that was it! My first writings were moody, decadent, gothic prose poems. Poe-esque short stories and semi-surreal autobiography, inspired in part by Boris Vian. I got bogged down in a sprawling horror novel called Debris – not all these early texts have survived and most are unprintable. What was I reading? Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Genet and Cohn Wilson’s The Outsider. Apart from Boroughs and the Beats (we all read Ginsberg’s 'Howl') the other big influence was Artaud. Through Artaud I discovered the poetry of pain and abandoned ‘literature’ for what I called ‘the sub-textual’ – the border-world between writing and graphic sigils: hieroglyphs, ideograms, calligraphic automata, nonsense poetry (via Carroll, Dada and Kurt Schwitters), glossolalia, fictional languages... the deconstruction of discourse, the open fields of strophic fragmentation, nameless things and thingless names.

Marginalia, 1973
As I remember, those first ‘pure’ poetic texts (grouped here under the title Marginalia) were noted down on a train one evening as I was commuting from Brentford, where I worked, to Witham where I still lived. Undoubtedly ‘Refracted’ and ‘Express Train Interior’ were ‘surrealizations’ of immediate experience – I still think of that girl with the photocopy face. I liked these pieces because, somehow, they seemed transparent. They were, to my mind, ‘un-literary’. What they were not was more important than what they were... I wanted to avoid emotional profundities – they weren’t realistic hut they weren’t abstract either. I wanted something stripped bare, stripped down; words on a page like slivers of glass...
There had been, I think, I minor breakthrough. The catalyst had been translation.
For some reason I had started translating a few poems by Max Ernst taken from his 1970 collection Ecritures. Sept Microbes (1953), Cinq Poemes (1958) and Cap Capricorne (1965). Ernst was a painter-poet like Blake and Hans Arp. His poetry was a continuum with his paintings and graphics. Titles of paintings became titles of poems and vice-versa. There was a Carrollian fantasy, a sense of the absurd and a feeling of vast spaces in his short, enigmatic, texts. At the same time I also translated the lyrics of Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi (1945) which were similarly erotic, hieratic, mythic, cosmic and full of strange, alien wordforms: Kahipapas, mahipapas/pia pia pia doundou tchil. I immersed myself in the similarities I detected between, for example, the invented language Artaud used in his later texts, and the quasi-Quechua onomatopoeic sound-poetry of Harawi; or, between the visual and aural correspondences in Messiaen’s music and Ernst’s imagery (birds, crystalline textures, monumental ‘blocks’ of sound-colour)… I found analogies between the decalcomania paintings of Leonor Fini, the encrustations of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and the Turangalila-Symphonie.
I typed up all these poems and translations on the Olympia Portable, holed-up in my bedroom away from the summer sun, eyes itching with hay-fever, the downstairs filled with the heavy scent of bearded irises. My father, a keen gardener, loved these irises and grew them in large numbers. I developed a fascination for their ornate, fleshy forms and ‘pubic’ beards. ‘Silence: a cascade of irises/ an obdurate totem.’ (‘Silence’, 1975).

2. LOOKING AT COLOUR OF DUST

Glancing through Colour of Dust I can see various contrasts or tensions. At the level of theme
and content a tension between fantasy and realism, or the fantastic and the naturalistic. On the plane of language (poetic diction) there is a complementary tension between the hieratic and the vernacular. On the level of strophic form there is a contrast between open-field ‘scatter’ and dense compacted stanzas.
The fantastic mode includes: (1) visionary-apocalyptic pieces (‘A Demon Speaks’, ‘Life of Glass’, ‘Phobos’, ‘The Shadow Guide’, ‘The Borderlands of the World’, ‘The Crystal Snake Book’); (2) cosmological visions (The Xantras, ‘Black Hole Binary’, ‘Nil Revolution’, ‘Nebula’, ‘Externity’, ‘AL the Core of the Sun’); (3) genre pieces like the Horror Poems of The Black Mask, ‘Vampfires’ ahd ‘Cyclonic Patterns’ or Science Fiction Poems (‘Crashdive’, ‘Metacropolis’, ‘Freezing Fog’); (4) occult poems which appropriate esoteric ideas and symbols: ‘Void Mysterium’ (mystery religions), ‘Candlemas’ and ‘Gargoyle Emanations’ (ritual magic), ‘Dawn Chorus’ and ‘Black Moon Gateway’ (alchemy); ‘Chronique Scandaleuse’ and ‘Virgin Pages’ (re-incarnation/transmigration); (5) others, like manna, ‘Urspasm’, ‘Beyond the White Wall’ and ‘The Vision of Morgan Le Pay’ seek inspiration from ancient myths, legends and The Books of the Dead.
In sharp contrast to these visions and fantasies there is a large group of ‘realist’ poems -essays in urban naturalism and subjective impressionism, sometimes incorporating fragments of overheard conversations (‘They found something wrong with my brain patterns, Jack” – ‘Cascade VI’), often using a style of slangy, vernacular, street jargon: ‘No Drama’, ‘Human Wallpaper’, ‘Some Charisma’, ‘Hovering Stress’, Neon Aeon, ‘Stranger Here Myself’ and ‘Stunning Sunbirds’ – dead broken fool stroll on (‘Dodgy Electrics’). Some realist poems adopt a more clinical Camera Eye, documentary approach, for instance: ‘Time Slips’, ‘Somewhere in England’, ‘Edge City’, ‘Could be Anywhere’, ‘Vignette’, ‘Denim Yoof Type’ and ‘Artschool Blonde Type’. ‘Viewed Through Crystal’ refers to the multifaceted insect eye denoting a dispassionate interest in fleeting grotesque moments: scruffy youth pukes up a cod burger (‘Viewed Through Crystal II’).
Other modes of content: there are a few inter-media pieces, poems which relate directly to collages and drawings. This group would include ‘The Anti-Virgin’, ‘Silence’, ‘Black Light’ and ‘Dawn Chorus’.
There are some poems dedicated to poetic and artistic heroes such as Mallarme (‘Onyx Master’), Artaud (‘Cosmetic Surgery’), William Burroughs (‘The Man You’ve Been Waiting For’), Max Ernst (‘Enchanter’) Leonor Fini (‘Crystal Express’) and Andre Breton (‘Eyes’). Finally, there is a large group of personal-introspective-existential poems devoted to a corrosive nihilism: ‘What Sort of Game’, ‘Edited Skylights’, ‘Dirt Aria’, ‘No Date’, ‘The White Earth’, ‘Let There be Night’, ‘Melt’, ‘Effluent Landscape’, ‘More and More’, ‘There Was No Horizon’, ‘Thinking Of, ‘Concrete Cancer’, ‘Walking Wounded’...as Baudelaire said, ‘this life is a hospital...’. Let’s drown it in acid.

NOTES ON FORM

A multi-dimensional metamorphosis – like the anomalous formations extruded from the surface of Solaris. Basic oscillations between solidity (the prose-poems) and insubstantiality (condensed ‘minimalist’ strophes); between The Open and The Closed, between structure and de-construction, between the linear and the non-linear, between predetermination and chance.
The density of the prose-poems (The Xantras, Neon Aeon, ‘Stranger Here Myself, ‘Then Nowhere’, ‘The Vision of Morgan Le Fay’) edges towards conventional narrative. But non-linear techniques cut across narrative: collage, montage, cut-up. De-stabilize the expected, derail convention, open-up the supernatural, many-faceted, plurality of the convulsive self. Identity will be convulsive (Max Ernst). All anachronisms welcome.
The spectrum of the Open-Closed. At one pole open-field, alloeostrophic, scatter poems annexing negative space (‘Only Kiss’, ‘Still Far Figure’, ‘Transit and Culmination’, ‘Scatter Zone’, ‘The Face of Fear’, ‘Splintered Avatar’ and others). At the antithetical pole, condensed, minimalist quantum poems like ‘Imagine’, ‘Askance’, ‘Shade’, ‘Perhaps Ravens’, ‘Withdraw Into Silence’ and ‘Impossible Games’.
So far The Xanths is a one-off, a conceptualist conundrum – it has to do with the magic number seven.

CUT-UP POEMS

The ‘time’ poems are Cut-Ups, using found phrases and the now traditional techniques of
‘inspiration to order’: ‘The Entranceway of Unrecognised Time’, ‘The Sickness of Time’, ‘Filigree Paintings Explode’, ‘The System’. All linked to the picto-poem ‘Contact Zero’ (see The Serendipity Caper). Enter The Colourless Peruvian Bishop and The Flesh Eating Beasts. Some poems are like old photographs: pristine monochrome images of childhood memories cut-up and folded-in - strange origami shapes of Juliet Greco in The Elusive Rose Rouge (‘Subtitled for the Incredulous’), distant sound of Doris Day singing ‘Move Over Darling’, catatonic couples slow-dancing to ‘Strangers in the Night’… Other Cut-Ups include ‘Issue 63’, ‘Chapter 6 (Autobiography)’ and (of course) ‘The Man (You’ve Been Waiting For)’. ‘Chapter 6’ might be autobiographical, then again it might not –eventually ‘inspiration to order’ becomes internalized – psycho-collage, psycho-frottage, psycho-cut-up...t hose ‘caffeine-driven psycho-montages’ (‘Now You See It Now You Don’t).

CONVULSIVE IDENTITY

The poem ‘Desecration’ is a judicious warning -just because a text includes personal pronouns does not mean that it is autobiographical. There are overt autobiographical elements in Colour of Dust (‘The Talisman’, ‘The Bloody Image’, for example). But these rare instances and (for the most part clearly signaled). Some poems read rather like self-portraits, for instance, ‘Nil Revolution’, ‘The Invariant Speed of Light’, ‘Fearful Other’, ‘Mirror Picture’ (a photograph of ‘me’ taking a photo of ‘you’, or is it ‘me’?), ‘Moi’, ‘Like the Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘Ashen Light’ and others. Am I The Gryllus’? Am I The Most Beautiful Monster? At this point, poetry, with a cruel spotlight, heightens the problem of identity. Personas: Self images not images of The Self. I is ‘another’ declared Rimbaud. Perhaps because poetry is alchemy, an art of transmutation, the ‘I’ evolves continually - here today, gone tomorrow, now you see it, now you don’t. In a draft epilogue Baudelaire wrote ‘From all things I have extracted the quintessence. The filth you gave me I have turned to gold.’ Poetry changes the ‘base’ material, the prima materia of The Art. And the base matter is the poet him-her-self (or selves).
Writing about Max Ernst’s concept of Convulsive Identity, Pere Gimferrer said ‘like external reality, we ourselves are dissociated and disintegrated: we are the space at an intersection, a confrontation.’ This is the space of Convulsive Identity. But perhaps this is the ‘space’ of the mutating self, the diverse, multifaceted intersections of the secret, evolving, ‘me and/or you,’ present at every simultaneous here-and/or-now of the immediate, infinite, multiverse of the conscious-unconscious, indeterminate subject-object.
So the author of Colour of Dust is/was/will be Inanna, Morgana, Old Scarfe, Anthea
Heartnul, Nykticorax the Demiurge, The Contortionist, Saint Anthony, Veronica Lurk, The
Scolopendra, Xezbeth, Astrid Hainault The Pet City Squeegee Menace, the ghost of Gerard de
Nerval, The Raven, The Bride, The Hanged Man, and the numerous quasi-autonomous ‘I’ figures and
sub-personalities scattered throughout these pages, slipping through negative space – but, then again –perhaps he-she-it is just The Camera Eye, observing, with cold, inhuman, insect, detachment, a kaleidoscopic spectacle of transient, diverting phenomena – images, feelings, moods, ideas –

trajectories of transformation, phantoms dissolving in time.

Illustration: The Mutant Spectre, 2001

Space Opera

GENESIS OF THE MECHANOMORPHS
A Space Opera Memoir

Space Opera was written over a period between 1984 and 1985.
The bulk of the sequence was written between April 4 and April 25, 1985. This comprised four of the seven prose poems, in the following order (1) ‘This Report Follows’ (4 April, 1985), (2) ‘The Neon Fly-By’ (5 April, 1985), (3) ‘Discovered This Other Report’ (14 April, 1985) and (4) the title poem, ‘Space Opera’ (25 April, 1985). These four sections comprised the ‘core’ of the Space Opera story. They had been preceded by ‘The First Report From Neogaea’ (Space Opera 1) written in isolation the previous month (26 March, 1985). This ‘First Report’ provided the immediate stimulus for the cycle, which was then crystallised in April. The final poem in the sequence ‘Anathema (We Are All Survivors)’ was written in May 1985. The introductory ‘prelude’ called ‘Gaze of the Medusa’ was written in 1986 for the Serendipity Caper publication of the complete sequence.
However, the ‘First Report’ referred back to an earlier poem with the title ‘Neogaea’ written in 1984 and included in a loose, evolving series of other poems, sketches and drafts with the overall title Ethos Mythos. The semi-Lovecraftian title Ethos Mythos was at that stage a provisional ‘working title’ finally carried over as a catch all label for a group of poems written (or finished) between 1984/5 and 1986. This group of poems was eventually included in the Stride collection Colour of Dust (1999), and has no direct relation to Space Opera. The 1984 poem ‘Neogaea’ with its disintegrating typography provided the initial inspiration for the eventual saga of the planet Neogaea and its weird satellite moon Neon. It was, initially, an exercise in visual typography, inspired by numerous Cubo-Futurist and/or Dada-Surrealist examples and also by the typographic style of e.e. cummings. An early draft of the poem in conventional blank verse quasi-stanza form was given the title ‘A Report From Neogaea (Necrophoresis)’. The term catagenesis in the final stanza refers to both regressive evolution and a process of cracking and organic breakdown in geology. It was probably this imagery that triggered the idea of the visual typographic ‘breakdown’ depicted in subsequent drafts.

Publication
The Stride Publications illustrated booklet Space Opera (1997) was preceded by publication in editions of Stride Magazine. ‘The First Report From Neogaea’ appeared in Stride 21 (Summer 1985). It was printed on green paper and accompanied by some related illustrations. These comprised the drawings ‘Life on Neogaea’ (1985) and ‘Social Symbioses on Neogaea’ also known as ‘Styx Insect III’ (1985), and two sections from the simultaneous collage-poem sequence Contact Zero (1985-1985).
Three edited sections from Space Opera appeared in a double issue of the US magazine Fantasy Commentator Vol. III, Nos. 3 & 4, issues 47 & 48, Fall 1995, edited by A Langley Searles, with an interview by Steve Sneyd. A version of this interview subsequently appeared in the Space Opera booklet under the title ‘Visions By Association’. The three sections from the sequence in Fantasy Commentator were ‘Gaze of the Medusa’, ‘The Neon Fly-By’ and ‘Discovered This Other Report’.
The complete Space Opera sequence was published in a special edition of Stride Magazine called The Serendipity Caper (Stride 24/25) in Summer (July) 1986. The sequence had a special title page using the drawing ‘The Neo Nova’ (also used as illustration without the title in the booklet) and was preceded by the complete version of Contact Zero. The now-redundant title Ethos Mythos still appears at the foot of the page for some of the poems from the sequence. Some phrases and lines in Space Opera link directly with Contact Zero, for example ‘gaze of the Medusa’, ‘chimaera obscura’, ‘I denounce everything: that is enough’ and ‘the membrane intercepts…’ A case of osmotic interchange confirming that the two were written in parallel and roughly about the same time.

Centre of Gravity – The Video
In February 1999 the London based digital filmmakers partnership OS2 expressed interest in using the published Space Opera text as the basis for a video film. Following discussions with Stride work started and progressed during February-April 1999. The final 6m.30s digital video production, referred to as the ‘onedotzero presentation version’, was based on parts 1-4 of the published sequence and called Centre of Gravity. It was hoped to produce a longer version incorporating parts 5-7 but this proved incompatible with the OS2 production schedule. However, the finished fragment, which includes many lines of animated original text used to overlay sequences of found footage and hi-tech diagrammatic graphics, together with an evocative soundscape of fractured effects and narrative by Firefox, successfully depicts the ‘technological breakdown of communications on board a deep space mission’.
Centre of Gravity was shown as part of wow + flutter 99, the ‘contemporary motion graphics and digital effects’ segment of the onedotzero3 digital moving image festival (in association with Film Four) held at the ICA, London between April 30-May 9, 1999. The Centre of Gravity screening took place at the ICA on May 6 and according to a press release was also shown at the SVC window (Wardour Street) and the soho_inc film festival the same year. Wow + flutter 99 films were subsequently screened at NFT2 in a Digital Underground strand on 10 August 1999.

Artwork of the Mythos and other Associations
The video title ‘Centre of Gravity’ is derived from a drawing of the same name dating from 1984. This ‘Centre of Gravity’ was incorporated into the promotional artwork for a 1985 Stride audiocassette music compilation (Step 50 in the Stride series) using the title of the original drawing.
The compilation included tracks from bands such as Face in the Crowd, Pacific 231 and Celestial Orgy, among others. The drawing itself featured as the cover art of the accompanying booklet and even on a promotional T-shirt. The inlay card for the Centre of Gravity cassette used another drawing entitled ‘The Way Of All Flesh I The Crypt’ (1981) from a graphic series with the general title Resident Aliens. ‘The Crypt’ drawing was rendered in a kind of techno-gothic style that pointed forward to the macabre SF ethos of Space Opera, as did various other drawings from this period. The ramshackle silhouette with its battered wheel and trailing wires in the ‘Centre of Gravity ‘illustration pays homage to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel readymade via the kinetic constructions of Jean Tinguely (particularly La Tour, 1960) many of which at been displayed at a Tate Gallery exhibition in 1982. These ‘mechanomorphs’ (the name probably a distant echo of Picabia’s dessins mechaniques) surfaced in a number of drawings included in a series called Satanic Planets (1984-1985) containing many images linked, in one way or another, to the Space Opera sequence.
The mechanomorphs became identified as the inhabitants of Neogaea, the planet of astroscarps described in the original 1984 poem with its disintegrating typography. From one perspective it is fair to say that the main sequence of prose poems written from March to May 1985 were based on, or inspired by, the Satanic Planets mechanomorph drawings and the general atmosphere of the graphic series. Of the seven illustrations in the 1997 Space Opera booklet only two (‘The Scene of the Crime’ and ‘Worker Display Arena’) are new to that publication. The others had all appeared elsewhere: in Stride Magazine (editions 21 and 23) and, as already noted, in the Centre of Gravity cassette artwork. Some were published in two sets of postcards (published separately by Stride in 1985) which also included the drawings ‘Satanic Planets’ and ‘Metacropolis’ (first published in Stride 17/18 double issue, 1984), both sharing an oblique relationship with the Space Opera mythos.
The poem ‘Metacropolis’ occurs in the collection Hidden Limbo (1978) published in Colour of Dust, and, together with the small collage ‘Another Stargate (The Eye of Time)’ dated 1970, may provide the earliest intimations of the imagery of the Space Opera cycle. A small drawing ‘Stargate Variation I (The Eye Of Time)’, from 1994 but based on the 1970 collage appeared in Monomyth Issues 24 & 36 in 2004 and 2005. The phrase ‘the eye of time’ occurs in ‘The Neon Fly-By’.
In ‘Discovered This Other Report’ (Space Opera 4) is the line ‘We escaped the decaying orbit.’ This is an overt reference to the drawing ‘Decaying Orbits’ (1985) from the Satanic Planets collection. This image appeared in the 1985 Stride poetry booklet Decaying Orbits (Step 84 in the Stride series) and has been published elsewhere, including the occult-zine Nox 7 (1990) and The Grail Anthology (2004), from Atlantean Publishing. The image ‘Decaying Orbits’ with its supermassive centre of attraction and in ‘mechanomorph’ style fragmented spacecraft is a symbolic, if oblique, resume of the entire Space Opera story.

Brief Points
The phrase ‘satellite gone’ in ‘Gaze of the Medusa’ is a line from a Lou Reed song.
The 1970 collage ‘Another Stargate (The Eye of Time)’ was subsequently incorporated into a series of Xerox-based repromontage images Another Stargate/Another Room (1987). A sub-set of this series, with poems by Rupert Loydell, was included in Chain Lightning (1989) a project from Apparitions Press. The image ‘The Eye Of Time’ provided the basis for a short poem with the title ‘Some Other Star’.
The French mathematician, who gave his name to the Roche Limit, Edouard Roche (1820-1883) was a real historical figure, known for his work in celestial mechanics.
Glendenning (‘old G’ the Exosociobiologist) is a fictional character. His expedition to Neogaea is situated in the remote past in relation to the ‘present’ action of Space Opera.
The names ‘Cassegrain’, ‘Herschelian’, ‘Coude’ and ‘Schmidtt’ refer to astronomical telescopes and their lenses.
Much of the jargon in Space Opera, such as ‘trophic eggs’, ‘ergatomorphs’, ‘psychogenic symbioses’ and so on was derived from the book Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (1980) by Edward O Wilson, particularly the description of insect societies and behaviour.

The multi media Centre of Gravity Collection (2010) is listed in the Poetry Library catalogue

Space Opera Publication History, 1985-1997

Space Opera I The First Report From Neogaea, Stride 21, 1985
Space Opera (Prelude) Gaze Of The Medusa , Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera I The First Report From Neogaea, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera II This Report Follows, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera III The Neon Flyby, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera IV Discovered This Other Report, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera V Neogaea, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera VI Space Opera, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera VII Anathema (We Are All Survivors), Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera (Prelude) Gaze Of The Medusa , Fantasy Commentator Vol III, 3/4, Nos. 47/48, Fall 1995
Space Opera III The Neon Flyby, Fantasy Commentator Vol III, 3/4, Nos. 47/48, Fall 1995
Space Opera IV Discovered This Other Report, Fantasy Commentator Vol III 3/4, Nos 47/48, Fall 1995
Space Opera (Prelude) Gaze Of The Medusa , Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera I The First Report From Neogaea, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera II This Report Follows, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera III The Neon Flyby, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera IV Discovered This Other Report, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera V Neogaea, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera VI Space Opera, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera VII Anathema (We Are All Survivors), Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997

Related Artwork – Publication History 1984-2008

Metacropolis, Stride 17/18 Autumn 1984, Stride Publications, 1984
Satanic Planets, Stride 17/18 Autumn 1984, Stride Publications, 1984
Centre Of Gravity, Centre Of Gravity C60 (Step 50) [booklet] cover art, Stride Publications, 1985
Centre Of Gravity, Centre Of Gravity C60 (Step 50) [postcard], Stride Publications, 1985
The Way Of All Flesh I The Crypt, Centre Of Gravity C60 (Step 50) [inlay card], Stride Publications, 1985
Decaying Orbits, Decaying Orbits (Step 84), Stride Publications, 1985
The Question, Decaying Orbits (Step 84), Stride Publications, 1985
Contact Zero 4 Flesh Eating Beasts, Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Contact Zero 5 The Rattlesnake Pit Organ, Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Life On Neogaea, Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Styx Insect III (Social Symbioses On Neogaea), Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Life On Neogaea, Stride Postcards [bronze], Stride Publications, 1985
Styx Insect III (Social Symbioses On Neogaea), Stride Postcards, Stride Publications, 1985
Metacropolis, Stride Postcards, Stride Publications, 1985
Satanic Planets, Stride Postcards, Stride Publications, 1985
Angel With Raiding Party, Stride 23 Spring 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
The Cathedral Of The Damned, Stride 23 Spring 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
The Question, Stride 23 Spring 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
Contact Zero (Complete), Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper Summer 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
The Neo Nova, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper Summer 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
Satanic Planets, Formaos Vol 1 No 5 March 1987, Sothis Publishing, 1987
Styx Insect III (Social Symbioses On Neogaea), Nox, Vol 1 No 4 Issue 4 Mar 1987, Disrupters Press. 1987
Another Stargate/Another Room, Chain Lightning, Apparitions Press, 1989
Decaying Orbits, Nox, Vol 2 No 3 Issue 7 Jan 1990, Disrupters Press, 1990
Angel With Raiding Party, Chimaera Obscura, Phlebas, 1992
The Cathedral Of The Damned, Chimaera Obscura, Phlebas, 1992
Angel With Raiding Party, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Centre Of Gravity, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Life On Neogaea, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Scene Of The Crime, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
The Neo Nova, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
The Question, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Worker Display Arena, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Life On Neogaea, Space Opera [cover art], Stride Publications, 1997
The Elastic Mirror, Death's Door, Springbeach Press, 1999
Satanic Planets, Cold Print, Feb 2001
Decaying Orbits, The Grail Anthology, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Stargate Variation I (The Eye Of Time), Monomyth Vol 4.1 No 26 Issue 28 2004, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Stargate Variation I (The Eye Of Time), Monomyth Vol 5.4 No 34 Issue 36 2005, Atlantean Publishing, 2005
Astroscarp III, Midnight Street, Issue 9, May/June 2007, Immediate Direction, 2007
The Colossus Of Neon, Old Rossum's Book Of Practical Robots, Atlantean Publishing, 2008

Selected References

Bruinsma, Max, Exploding Cinema. Rotterdam Film Course, Sandberg Institute, 1999
Denyer, Trevor (ed.) Midnight Street, Issue 9, May/June 2007, Immediate Direction, 2007
Evans, A C, Decaying Orbits, Stride Publications, 1985
Evans, A C, Chimaera Obscura, The Phlebas Press, 1992
Evans, A C, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Evans, A C, Colour of Dust, Stride Publications, 1999
Hanson, Matt/ Walter, Shane R J, onedotzero3, Film Four/ICA, 1999
Jebb, Keith, A C Evans Space Opera/A C Evans Dream Vortex, PQR, 1998
Kopaska-Merkel, David C, Space Opera, Dreams and Nightmares, 1997
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 17/18, Autumn, 1984
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 21, Summer, 1985
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 23, Spring, 1986
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 24/25, The Serendipity Caper: An Anthology of Prose, Summer, 1986
Marsh, Jane, Jane Marsh Interviews the Poet A C Evans, Neon Highway 13, 2008
Ratcliffe, John (ed.) Cold Print, Feb 2001
Ross, Sian (ed.), Death’s Door, Springbeach Press, 1999
Ryan, Paul A (ed.), Formaos Vol 1 No 5 March 1987, Sothis Publishing, 1987
Sennitt, Stephen (ed.), Nox, Vol 1 No 4 Issue 4 Mar 1987, Disrupters Press, 1987
Sennett, Stephen (ed.), Nox, Vol 2 No 3 Issue 7 Jan 1990, Disrupters Press, 1990
Sneyd, Steve, A C Evans SF Poetry Sequence Space Opera, Data Dump 104, 2006
Sneyd, Steve, A C Evans Space Opera poem sequence, Data Dump 43, 1999
Sneyd, Steve, Flights From The Iron Moon, The Hilltop Press, 1995
Sneyd, Steve, Space Opera: An Interview with A C Evans, Fantasy Commentator Vol VIII, 3/4 Nos, 47/ 48, Fall, 1995
Sneyd, Steve, Space Opera, Data Dump 25, 1998
Sneyd, Steve, Term Speculative Poetry has more definitions, perhaps…, Data Dump 128, 2008
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), The Grail Anthology, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), Monomyth Vol 4.1 No 26 Issue 28 2004, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), Monomyth Vol 5.4 No 34 Issue 36 2005, Atlantean Publishing, 2005
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), Old Rossum’s Book of Practical Robots, Atlantean Publishing, 2008
Various Contributors, Chain Lightning, Apparitions Press, 1989
Wilson, Edward O, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition, Belknap Press, 1980
Zine Kat , Space Opera by A C Evans, Dragon's Breath 46/47, 1998