Elizabeth Bishop

I went to a celebration of Elizabeth Bishop that was very well-attended in Manchester Central Library yesterday lunchtime. There were readings by various people, a short talk by Micheal Schmidt - and the opportunity to hear the poet's own voice in a recording. That last was invaluable - it's funny how the poet's voice does make a difference to one's reading of the poem. But now, when I'm reading poems like "Crusoe in England", her marvelous reimagining of Defoe, I'll hear that New England drawl, and the way she doesn't pause at line-endings as you might expect her to.

There's something about Elizabeth Bishop's meticulousness that is universal - to count poets as diverse as Ron Silliman, James Schuyler and Sean O'Brien as fans is quite an acheivement. She wrote her poems sometimes over ridiculous lengths ot time, and there's nothing spontaneous about her work, yet the flow as smoothly as riverwater from sentence to sentence, image to image. I love the risk of a poem like "The Moose", where it takes ages to get to the ostensible subject, but nobody minds because the eye of the poet is observing everything with the same intensity, from the people on the bus to the landscape passing by.

The wonderful "Visits to St Elisabeth's" was read by Matt Welton - himself an intriguing poet, interested as such in the shape and sound of poetry as its subject. He didn't tell us it was about Pound, incarcerated in a mental hospital for his wartime broadcasts for the fascists in Italy. He drew attention to the poem itself - its use of repetition and its "The House that Jack Built" form.

The events at the library are often quietly terrific, and it's a shame I don't get along to more. Of course, when my book comes out, I want my launch there.

This is the blurb I wrote for my forthcoming book:

One day, the poet found himself with a dying poem. So, out of sheer frustration, he took a pair of scissors to it and began to cut the poem up and rearrange it, without looking at what he was doing. Suddenly, a poem that had been destined for the file marked "worthy but dull" sparked to life again, and he found himself excited by the possibilities of language again. Since then, this technique - and other uses of chance - have come to be increasingly important in his work. Constantly looking for the wonderful in the ordinary, the beautiful in the demotic, he is still essentially a lyric poet but in this book, he messes up the lyric's hair, exploring the the chances and encounters of modern life in vibrant, exploratory poems. A major section of the book are the Travelator Sonnets, inspired by Ted Berrigan's pioneering Sonnets and the boxes of Joseph Cornell, cut-and-paste sonnets exploring nostalgia, travel and the chance encounters of modern life in 14 lines. Other poems explore his life in Manchester, his travels to Europe and Africa and his relationships, and there is a section of early poems that explore similar themes.

I hope it encourages people to buy the book and doesn't sound too pretentious.

You can find some of the Travelator sonnets on Issue 9 of Shadowtrain: www.shadowtrain.com if you want a preview of the book.