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Piers Faccini

I cannot think of my life without Piers. I seriously doubt he was born 5 years after me. He was born ahead, well ahead of the field. I don't remember him as a child. I don't remember him at all. Piers comes from over the hills and once you'e felt the breeze, you begin to hear him constantly. Street corners come alive. Trees begin to dance. Mountains can be deciphered.
Secret altitudes.

Piers never doubted his talent. What he doubted was the disappointment the world proposed him. He needed to play to protect his beauty. He never asked to be heard.
He just wanted to be loved.

We keep tracing our parallel lines.
Who comes first doesn't matter.
Piers Faccini, London, 1992
When I lived in New York and Piers was in Wales, somewhere around 1989, we wrote expansively to each other. The following was one of the poems which was born in that period and hints at the extraordinary power that can develop between artists when they miraculously inhabit the same mind space and allow their work to outstretch their wills. Creation is not what we think it is.

brother

to name it is impossible because it is the source of names
nor can it possess things
nor can it be this or that
for it is constantly flowing
we are turning round and round
circumventing an ever moving centre
which we sometimes inhabit for miraculous moments
before we leave for less intense spheres
it has no image
no correlation
and yet it sings and it paints and it loves
this yes
although we are already turning back from where we came
so we speak
keeping yes and no un-parted
keeping affirmation in our anger and our pain
holding our fists tight around such a fragile secret
we can contaminate
although even we do not know why
and we laugh
and we laugh despite the pain
despite the anger
because we have been unseated for the good
which we cannot name
but can only bear as an imprint
upon an invisible spectre of ourselves


Visit the website of
Piers Faccini
Piers Faccini, Heads of Antonin Artaud, 1991
Marcus Reichert

After reading Marcus Reichert's collection
Displaced Person: Poetry, Pornography & Politics, I wrote to the author:

"What is so striking when reading your collection is the unity, the cohesion over time
and place. Even if displaced, even if constantly moving between mediums and continents, between languages and costumes, your voice is always unique, always clear, always infallible. We are understandably fighting an order of pseudo morals, where everything has to be renamed, purified, words dusted down before being re-placed, searching for new morals, each time reinvented. Perhaps this is the faithfulness one hears from letter
to discussion, from poem to manifesto."

Now that I have crossed the threshold of Reichert's home and witnessed first hand the riches it withholds, my admiration is ever growing for his incredible body of work from film to novel, from poem to painting, from photography to his remarkable editorial eye.
Marcus Reichert, Venice, 1978
I am at home in his paintings. I love the forthright colours,
I love the letters scrawled seemingly haphazardly across
the canvases that come to disturb the painterly ambiance bringing the necessary dose of chaos to the scene. I love the devilish quality to his vision. His black humour crowns the whole and brings healthy cackles. His knack for good titles is without equal. Reichert could say: Everyday I get up and paint, and with every brushstroke I join with my eternal youth. The painter is the growing young of mankind.

Our first amiable encounter over a few glasses of Cévenol wine was great fun discussing Artaud's break with the surrealist movement, Francis Bacon's concept of chaos, pornography and prudery's gamble at controlling the new psychology, our mutual hatred of doctrines of all descrip-tions, commonplace arguments for outcasts and anarchists on a Saturday afternoon at Saint Hippolyte du Fort in mid July. Approximatively two years later, we began a very moving and long e-mail correspondence sparked by news
of Marcus's ill health. During these troubled times I tried to give him my take on staring up at death's glaring eyeball, I unleashed a feverish attack of poems upon the poor bed- ridden man. Thankfully, he seemed to enjoy the onslaught of bittersweet words and replied with ever greater enthusiasm.

His poems written in those moments spoke of the 'deluge
of thought' which only the work of art can conquer, a battle that is the
sine qua non of all valuable artwork, where the sanity and stability of the poet's psyche are at risk and a plague of the un-thought rocks his very soul. We had started with Artaud and here we were again at the precarious limits of thought and being, witnessing in the great man's words: 'the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain,' as 'our reason for being.'


Visit the website of
Marcus Reichert

Marcus Reichert, New Winds of Fire, 1991
Marcus Reichert, Vessel, 2008