BrandosHat

Some Myths

2012-01-02T12:05:00.000Z

1) That we can do without 'labels' in poetry. Even the word 'poet' is a label we put on ourselves to distinguish ourselves from, say, prose-writers. The word 'writers' distinguishes us from 'non-writers', musicians, artists, etc... and from people who don't do 'creative' activities at all. Labels like 'avant garde', 'lingusitically innovative," "neo-formalist", "modernist" etc are often annoying and divisive when thrown around as weapons to put other poets down but help to understand where a poet is coming, and how the poem should be read (eg, if you know it's a "surrealist" poem, you won't be looking for the kind of logical sense you'd expect in a "movement" poet.)

2) That mainstream poetry is not in itself a style of poetry - that it is 'just poetry'. There is no such thing as 'just poetry', just as there is no such thing as 'just jazz': there is trad, be-bop, post-bop, free, modal, hard bop, swing, 'm-base', fusion, indo- and several others that I've left out. Again, it's a matter of expectation: though it can be restrictive. A musician who moves from one style to another (like Miles Davis) may be in danger of being pigeon-holed, so the boundaries between styles ought always to be in flux. The same is true of poetry: John Kinsella, for instance, moves between avant-garde and more mainstream with ease.

3) That 'accessibility' is the first thing a poet should think of when looking at his/her poetry: perhaps "is it in some way honest in feeling, does it do something unexpected, does it make the reader think?" are more important questions. Nevertheless, a poet ought to be able to explain to somebody unfamiliar with the style they're working with, approximately what it is they're trying to do.

4) That the poet should always have something to say. A poem is not a message, though it may contain a message if the poet chooses or if the poem arrives at one. Poetry can be as much about discovery as about, say, the poet telling us of an experience that has already happened.

5) That young poets have to 'find their voice' and then stick with it. Poetry is at least partly a form of ventriloquism. But it's not a bad thing to find a style and stick with it. Some poets make a career out of being many voices. Edwin Morgan comes to mind. A poet who only has one voice might end up being very boring; or they might end up being Norman MacCaig. In any case, your 'voice' will find you: Edwin Morgan never sounded anything other than himself, whether he was the Loch Ness Monster or a Mercurian.

6) That any anthology representation of a country's poetry can ever be complete. I'd recommend getting several anthologies of writing from all sides if you want to get a fuller picture, and remembering always that something is always left out. How many anthologies of British poetry, for instance, include visual poetry as one of its components? I can only think of one: the Oxford Anthology of British & Irish poetry ed. Keith Tuma has Bob Cobbing next to Philip Larkin. But that's only one poet.

Happy New Year, dear readers!

Some Possibly Wrong Things I May Have Learned This Year

2011-12-30T13:53:00.000Z

Poetry is a rhizome, a root system, a web of connections. It's not a tree with the best at the top and the worst at the bottom and lots of rather indifferent branches in between. It springs up in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of forms. It isn't just the Faber/Cape/Picador hegemony, nor is it just the experimental/post-avant. It takes in the visual and the sentimental: a Christmas card verse is still a poem, even if it isn't what many of us would choose to call 'good poetry'.

To say it's only poetry if it's 'good poetry' is to put a fence around certain kinds of poetry and say 'this is poetry and this is not' and poetry essentially had no fence. It includes Bob Cobbing and Helen Steiner Rice whether we like those poets or not.

That doesn't mean that all poetry is 'good' and there is no such thing as 'bad poetry': but what is considered bad cannot be rationally decided upon. A 'good sonnet' is not necessarily the most metrically correct; nor is good free verse just chopped-up prose. A good visual poem is aesthetically and visually pleasing; but isn't necessarily the one with the most paraphrasable meaning. If one writes a piece of 'inspirational verse' one isn't terribly interested in the subtlety of meaning, or even getting the metre absolutely correct. One is interested in inspiring certain sentiments.

No one anthology of any country's poetry can represent the whole range of poetry in that county. I'll believe that's possible when Wendy Cope sits next to Keston Sutherland in an anthology. Nobody can like everything. I've met people for whom doggerel is the only poetry worth reading, performance poetry the only poetry worth hearing, and others who generally confine themselves to avant garde, sound poetry, visual poetry, and everything in between. People who think if it doesn't rhyme it ain't poetry.

Poetry is a meadow. In a meadow, there are many kinds of plants, all fighting for attention from the sun (the reader?). Will we please everybody? Probably not. There is good and bad poetry (poems that survive and poems that do not may be one way of distinguishing) but not good and bad poetries. And survival isn't always the point: sometimes a poem is meant to be thrown away when read, or even written.

A Happy New Year to all poets.

2011-12-24T13:20:00.006Z

Merry

Christmas

to all

my

Readers

Three Writers I've Discovered This Year

2011-12-24T13:18:00.002Z

1. Ira Lightman
I'm currently making my way through three of his books: Duetcetera, from Shearsman, with its dual columns "conversing" with each other: sometimes you can read across, sometimes they seem to be arguing with one another, sometimes they're complementing each other. He includes some translations and I've just downloaded Trancelations (ubu editions) to read more. Mustard Tart As Lemon (Red Squirrel) seem to be a gathering together of poems that didn't fit into previous series; and Phone In The Roll: which reads like it's cut up from phone messages and other forms of communication. They all show a conceptual poet who isn't afraid of including both personal and spiritual perspectives into his work: and they repay rereading.

2. Amy De'ath
A lovely little pamphet from Salt, which promises much more, Eric & Enide is ellipitical in a way that seems finally to be starting to reach through into more prominence in British poetry. She can be political in a subtle way, and there's a sense of ideas bouncing against one another in this collection. She has a new pamphlet which I must get hold of, from Oystercatcher.

3. Stephen Emmerson
His book from Department Press, Telegraphic Transcriptions, is rather like listening to a whole host of voices at once. There are passages taken form medical literature, passages that seem like episodes of psychosis, passages of strange disparate voices coming in from all directions, and I'm still only part way through it: I have to take it a little at a time or if becomes overwhelming. Stephen is going to be someone to look for in the future, I feel: he has ambitions for his poetry that go beyond merely producing a group of stand-alone poems. He wants to write long, in series, with each poem referencing other poems, itself and the outside world, working on several voices not just one.

Some Optimistic Thoughts For Christmas

2011-12-18T15:51:00.000Z

It's been an interesting year for poetry, hasn't it? I've bought and acquired loads on anthologies this year; it seems like it's been a year of change in the poetry world. The old guard - well, they still have the increasingly irrelevant awards for themselves - but it's been a year for young poets. The Salt Anthology of Younger Poets, Eighteens (Knives Forks & Spoons) and the Shearsman anthology of innovative landscape poetry all showcase a raft of new poets who are increasingly showing what they can do.

The energy levels of all this new poetry are often exhaustingly breathtaking. Poets like Jonty Tiplady, Amy De'ath, Emily Critchley, Sophie Robinson, Stephen Emmerson, Richard Barrett and many others are doing things with language that are elliptical, innovative and often quite quite beautiful and strange, in ways that didn't seem possible when I started writing 30 years ago. The days of innovation seemed to be over.

And in one sense, they are, in the sense that no-one is inventing a whole set of new forms; the 'heroic' age of the futurists, the dadaists and a whole sweep of manifestos has probably passed. But the fact that more young poets than ever have access to that history seems to be what makes these writers so adventurous. There are still poets being straight-jacketed into the mainstream, and maybe that suits their temperament; but when a click of the mouse can take you to the poetry of Mina Loy and you can access so much amazing stuff online, it's no wonder that things are opening up.

The categories are a lot looser than they were. Though they still exist: the mainstream is still the genre that pretends it's not a genre (the way 'literary fiction' likes to pretend it's not a genre); and there are still those fusty edifices of award-winning Faber/Picador/Cape poets who like to pretend they're the Best, despite history having passed them by. But there's a lot to be hopeful for.

With regard to that Best word: I can understand why Salt used it for their anthology; and why Puppywolf use it for their anthology of Manchester poets. It's a good marketing tool. It looks good in a bookshop. But neither anthology can be an objective view of what's 'best'; the Salt book is one man's view; the Puppywolf book has four editors' opinion. Either way, they leave out a lot of excellent stuff, and include some stuff that I wouldn't consider as good. There is no objective view of 'good poetry' though; and no doubt my choice would reflect a whole different criteria of 'best' than the ones in those anthologies.

They're both good anthologies, though. Occasionally, BOMP in particular has the kind of poem that makes me cringe ('This is poem about brown eyes is really about prejudice gay people' for instance: sorry to the poet concerned, but it just struck me as too much like it should have had the word 'Moral' pinned to its last line.)

I discovered some new writers this year, rediscovered a few older ones; and felt rather more optimistic about the state of poetry than I have done for awhile. A good year for the roses, and for poetry.

Launch of Best Manchester Poets (On The Eighth Day, Dec 1 2011)

2011-12-02T11:12:00.000Z

It occurred to me in a moment of madness this morning how there is always somewhere a little corner of show-biz, the end-of-the-pier show, the TV variety show, in the arts world of Britain. Dominic Berry's performance as the master-of-ceremonies yesterday was one such example. As someone who finds all the bigging up Manchester somewhat embarrassing, I can't say I felt entirely comfortable with his performance, but that's not his fault. I used to cringe at the TV when Bruce Forsyth came on too (still do, come to think of it.)

What of the poets themselves? A mixed bunch, a gallimaufry, a Woolworths assortment of voices from surprisingly imaginative poems from old ladies to more dramatic performance poetry. Not all of it worked, and once or twice I wanted to say "cut the beginning," or "cut the end"; if the poetry was anything it was rather downbeat than upbeat, which might reflect the mood of the country. The age range was very wide, and the subject matter too, from Rosie Garland talking of cancer to poems about clubbing and a couple of rather rude poems which were subtly effective.

Apart from anything else, it was a kind evening. Everyone seemed to be listening and no-one was talking over the readers. Everybody who read got on, gave their reading and got off with great efficiency. Considering the panic beforehand about the number of readers, a surprising number of people read. It was a very inclusive evening.

As I am in the book, I perhaps ought to give some reflections on the book, but that will have to wait.

Poets & Players: Nov 26th 2011 Whitworth Art Gallery

2011-11-27T14:41:00.000Z

One really should check the website before one goes somewhere. The one poet who might have been of interest on the bill had to cancel. Not his fault; a family bereavement apparently.

One should also not go to places out of boredom on a dull Saturday afternoon; I had just done the washing and was probably not in the mood for what was basically an afternoon of 'nice' poetry.

First up was a young poet, Kim Moore, who is currently trying to finish her portfolio for a creative writing degree at Manchester Met. It showed, I'm afraid; but there was sort of nothing wrong with the poems. Nothing you could put your finger on at least; these poems were 'well-made': nicely crafted, full of nice observations and images. You may by now have detected the 'damning with faint praise' of that word 'nice'. One poem seemed to touch on the real world, which mentioned a memorial service for those killed by a mad gunner in Cumbria not so long ago. It wasn't a great poem but at least it seemed to have some reference to a world outside the poet's own head.

Next up, a poet who went to a lot of galleries and looked at a lot of pictures. Which is nice. Rita Ray did have one poem that stepped outside the nice ekphrastic world she likes to live in. It was a found poem, based on an early twentieth century phrase book for an African language, published by SPCK as an aid for missionairies in spreading the Gospel. It had wit, and a political awareness entirely lacking in any other poem of the reading, simply through the juxtaposition of phrases. Again, it was a poem that stepped out of the comfortable world of the poet and took us somewhere other.

Andrew Forster took us on a journey. Unfortunately, it was nowhere interesting. A poem about a childhood word and marbles; a poem about a train station in Scotland. Lots of neat images from South Yorkshire, Scotland and Cumbria. I can't remember anything else. I don't want to remember anything else.

Meanwhile, through the gallery window, I watched a man practising ball skills in the park; a car with sirens on it drove up the path slowly and then drove back again. The headlines in the paper were to do with strikes, Egyptian riots, the crisis in the Eurozone, there were people in curry houses in Rusholme having conversations, there was coffee in the coffee-shops.

The people in the room were quite interesting. I suspected there were a few Margo Leadbetters about. That would have made for an interesting study. But the poetry? No interest whatsover.

Minor Poetry? Attendent Lords and all that...

2011-11-24T12:11:00.000Z

I doubt I shall be rushing out and buying their books any time soon, but I was interested in the review by Mark Ford of the Collected Poems of ASJ Tessimond and Bernard Spencer, both published by Bloodaxe. I was interested, not because I think that either of them are 'unjustly neglected' or even 'ripe for revival'; but because they represent what the world of poetry is largely like for a lot of practising poets.

Most of us do not get on sylabuses, do not get articles and essays written about us, do not appear in the major print publications, but simply get on with writing our poems and doing our best. We may well have politcally left-wing sympathies most of the time, but we don't get involved in writing political poetry the way some London avant-garde poets do; because we're neither so certain of our beliefs nor do we really think a poem can do much good. We have a tendency to follow our own obsessions and hope that people will follow along with us.

We send our poems out in the world and hope for the best. Sometimes, as has just happened to a friend of mine, we get our poems rejected by the big magazines, but we still persevere. Maybe we're exploring a section of the broadly innovative school of poetry, or maybe we're solidly in what has been called 'the mainstream', 'the school of quietude' or whatever (I still maintain that, like 'literary fiction', 'mainstream poetry' is a 'genre that likes to pretend it's universal') but any impact we're going to make is likely to be small. We're not 'princes', we're 'attendent lords.'

For some people, this is an uncomfortable place to be in. They really want to be 'princes': hence they make a big noise every now and then about so-and-so is poetically, politically or idealogically 'unsound.' Or that really, people should be reading us not that lot. And sometimes our complaints are fair: Carold Ann Duffy's recent 'Christmas Truce', published in the Guardian because, hey, she is the poet laureate, is dreadful and frankly unworthy of her, never mind what you think of her poetry generally. And sometimes accusations fly that are frankly unfair, as in the recent spat between Sean Bonney and Todd Swift. I don't think Todd Swift is some kind of pro-capitalist lackey, I like some of his poetry; but neither do I think him the most innovative poet on the planet. For that matter, neither am I. I like Sean Bonney's poetry too, for very different reasons: I'm less enamoured of his need for some kind of idealogical purity (I had enough of that with the Born-Again Christians; I'm not about to chuck out my own uncertainties to jump into bed with the Marxists, though I have more sympathies with them than disagreements.)

One of the things that Mark Ford talked of in his LRB review was that both the poets he reviewed were poets of uncertainty; and they were probably not as inventive and sure of themselves as the big boys of the time. There's a poem about cats by ASJ Tessimond that I've always liked: not a great poem, in fact a pretty minor one. (I like cats.) But not everyone aspires to be the next Ezra Pound; and they both had jobs and lives outside of poetry. Poetry doesn't always have to be major to give pleasure.

Of There Was A Lake, Some Trees, And You by Richard Barrett

2011-11-02T11:16:00.000Z

I didn't know you'd be at the lake
I thought should I pretend not to have seen you
5 stops on the Victoria line
Or I guess about quarter of an hour in your car

You know my love for you is like this lake
In um the sense that
It's strange how we both ended up here
When you think about it though maybe it isn't

Please don't say you were waiting for me to kiss you
Let's jump in the lake now dressed just as we are
Something we can remember with warmth in the future
I see

Those fallen leaves you so lightly walk over
Are like leaves on the ground

This poem appeared in an issue of anything anymore anywhere, but I first encountered it in the Poetica group in Manchester library some time ago. I liked it then and I still do. But what makes it work for me?

This is a love sonnet, in the tradition of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare - well, just about anyone who's anyone in poetry. Except in another sense, it isn't. It takes the tradition of clever, highly articulate and persuasive poetry and blows it apart. A love sonnet is supposed to show you through its highly wrought imagery, through its rhetoric, just how strong the lover's feelings are for the beloved, and often, how awful it is that this person has rejected the poet.

This poem almost revels in its inarticulacy, its inability to say what it wants to say or to persuade by the cleverness of its image just how serious and deep the poet is about pursuing this relationship. Here, the poet is attempting to be clever: "You know my love for you is like this lake" but then can't follow through: "In um the sense that" and tries to extricate himself from the attempt with "It's strange how we ended up here," as if he's changed his mind about the attempt to be clever.

He makes another attempt at the heroic gesture: "Let's jump in the lake..." but she's obviously not falling for it. There's an ambiguity at the end about whether this relationship will go anywhere; the leaves are just leaves, after all.

This sonnet works because it seems to me to be about how things actually work, rather than an idealisation of a situation. Like the stutter in The Who's My Generation, it's about not getting the right words out, about trying to impress and failing. Its rhythms are the rhythms of ordinary speech not of poetry, it rejects the whole idea of clever imagery and there is no attempt to create the perfectly-formed sentences of so much of today's poetry.

In fact, if I have a complaint about today's poetry it's just that: one complete sentence after another. One complete thought after another, like nobody actually thinks in real life. In this poem, with its false starts and stutters, we get the idea of a mind in action, not one that has already decided what it wants to say and only needs to find the clever, articulate and 'interesting' words to say it. So many poems and poets out to impress you with their 'depth of feeling'; but this poem cuts through all that by not even trying to impress.

It's a small poem, and probably not the most important poem Richard Barrett will ever write. Nevertheless, it shows the strength of non-mainstream poetry at the moment. It's unafraid and honest and true in so many ways. I hope you like it too.

All The Rooms of Uncle's Head by Tony Williams (Nine Arches Press £6)

2011-10-23T15:14:00.001+01:00

It's very satisfying to read a pamphlet with such thorough-going production values as this. Osetnsibly written by an inmate of a Mittel-European asylum in the first decades of the 20th century, these sonnets are presented visually as they might have appeared on the tiles they were purportedly printed on, so there are cracks, missing peices shown as black cut-outs, borders and the overall design of the book.

This impersonation of a writer who is supposed to be mad could very easily have been patronising and exploitative. Outsider artists have been appropriated before by "professional" artists who either use their work as a stimulus for releasing themselves from the bonds of artistic "standards" set by the establishment, or as a way of saying "look how wild I am! I investigate madness!" I don't think Tony Williams is doing this; partly because the poet here is imaginary, and partly because the poems themselves are a commentary on the process. References to the Professor, as in "Survivals of hope,/ HONESTY, Professor, your soul's fly's loop the loop/ Towards the chasms of daring I suggest" (Roundel Pit Iris) seem to be as much references to the how the poet's imagination is being released by his character as part of the impersonation.

There are other characters, like the menacing Azazello, a woman called Mary; some of them seem to be outside the character's head, others seem to be inside. There is an apocalyptic feel to these poems, warnings of forthcoming doom; and always the Professor/Poet seeking to analyse, make a sensible diagnosis, preparing 'to cut the flightless fowl/ That sulks upon the meat-plate's salty lake..."

The story of this anonymous poet only comes out in fragments, if at all. Williams has resisted the temptation to narrative closure, so we don't know much more about this man at the end of the poem than we did before; only the disordered visions of the mind he chooses to reveal. Sometimes, we catch glimpses of other inmates, such as the anonymous woman in Hut Love:

Her portrait's hung above the central stairs
All blue and white as Mary under years
Of dirt and lacquer that obscure her light
As if she looks upon a hall of BRUTES...

(Hut Love)

Because it is so thoroughly imagined and so well-written, my caveats about the sequence are small. There is only one 'tile poem' in which a word in the poem (as opposed to the border) is obscured, and I think that fragmentary idea could have been taken a little further: so that there a few more gaps. There is the question of how good these poems are, and whether that detracts from the impersonation; mad people don't tend to write this well. However, the examples of both Ivor Gurney and John Clare militate against this. Mentally ill people are not constantly ill; they can have long stretches of lucidity, and are not less intelligent that anyone else. So I argue against my self on that score.

This is a fascinating pamphlet, one of the best things I've read all year. It probably won't win any awards; but it probably ought to.

Untidy Up Your Head

2011-10-17T14:42:00.001+01:00

If there's one thing certain about the poetry scene at the start of a new decade of the 21st century, it's that nothing certain can be said about it, and that part of the reason for this state of affairs is Roddy Lumsden. I was thinking this as I read the Best British Poetry 2011 anthology: an intriguing attempt to copy the David Lehman-fronted series Best American Poetry.

That an anthology can veer from the experimental to the formal in such a way as this shows that Lumsden at least has a much wider appreciation of the varied poetries in Britain at the moment than most previous anthologists. One can see it too in the anthology he edited for Bloodaxe, Identity Parade, which includes both Peter Manson and the much more mainstream, Jacob Pooley. It could, in fact, be the first anthology to reflect the actual situation of poetry in this country since Edward Lucie-Smith. I'm sure that not a few of the poets in Identity Parade are not even on speaking terms with each other; but that seems to me to be preferable to the tidied-up versions of poetry we've seen in the past.

I suspect that the Salt Book of Younger Poets will continue this trend, and that is surely a good thing. Lumsden's support for young writers is one of the things I like best about him; and the fact that he doesn't expect them to fit into his own aesthetic is also admirable. He himself seems to have a shifting aesthetic, than can take in experimental and more formal concerns.

I can't say I like all his choices in the Best British Poets anthology; but then why should I be expected to? I like the fact that the experimental poets are rubbing shoulders with more mainstream names; that the two kinds of poetry are at least starting a fitful conversation in print with one another. For me, the experimental speaks louder and more interestingly; but that's my opinion.

For too long we've had arbiters of taste telling us that this aesthetics or that is the way to go. From the Movement anthologies to The New Poetry, we've had one route of empirical, narrative verse prioritised over another, more disruptive, more surreal perhaps, more focused on sound perhaps, verse in one set of approved anthologies. But then the 'alternative' too has its own anthologies, its own networks of distribution, its own aesthetics, at war with what it sees as an opposition.

I don't entirely want to get rid of those oppositions; poetry is passionate and ought to be something you get passionate about. But today's poetry is messy, untidy and seems to be going off in all directions at once. Roddy Lumsden, whatever you might think of some of his choices, has at least recognised that, and is trying to reflect the messiness of poetry, not give us it the way he thinks it ought to be and leaving out the rest.

Being Not Boring: Some Thoughts

2011-10-06T16:05:00.001+01:00

I find a lot of poetry frankly boring.

I'm sure a lot of people find my poetry boring.

Am I a good poet? I like to think so. Others no doubt disagree.

The poetry I find boring tends to be, but is not exclusively confined to, mainstream in its general direction.

People who just write about their fairly uninteresting lives in fairly plain language are probably not going to the top of my must read list. Then again, I know several people who write like that who's work I actually do like.

Something other than the meaning of the words, or the story, has to catch my mind for me to be interested further than one reading.

Sometimes I can't get to the end of a poem because I already know where it's going. Sometimes I read a poem backward to see if it's more interesting that way around. It sometimes is...

A poem 'should surprise with a fine excess' as Keats wrote.

A lot of poetry does what a lot of poetry does. A little of the poetry I read does something I didn't know it was going to.

Most poetry is not rubbish. It's crafted well enough.

Craft is a meaningless concept when it comes to art.

What strikes me about great poetry is not how well it is written (anyone can follow all the rules and write a sonnet) but how the language catches onto the brain and won't let go.

Craft doesn't cover up a lack of ideas.

Concrete Poetry, vispo, the whole 'mess' of it...

2011-09-09T15:28:00.000+01:00

I've always had a kind of likeing for concrete poety, visual poetry and all that. The use of chance techniques, cut-n-paste and all that have often attracted me. The problem with a lot of the avant garde, though, is probably to do with evaluation. How do you evaluate a poem which is entirely based on chance proceedures, is a 'sound poem' or is, like Bob Cobbing, a piece of writing that had been photycopied repeatedly and turned into something that doesn't even look like writing anymore?

'Messy play' was a big thing in the '60's and '70's, and probably a lot of what was produced was, in the long run, pretty crap. Andrew Duncan reckons about 90% was rubbish; which sounds like a statistic worth working with, because probably 90% of any art is rubbish in the long run. Though it might have been fun at the time, it might also have been pretty boring too. A performance of Kurt Schwitter's Ursonate might be pretty remarkable; but listening to someone doing random dog noises may well get pretty grating. One poet I heard went on for an hour, about twenty minutes of which was the limit of tolerance. I'm still not sure whether watching someone eating book pages was interesting or a waste of my time.

But how do you evaluate this stuff? I still don't know; but I think there are a few clues. Firstly, I think a work of art, whether visual or literary, has to have a heart somewhere. Not a message, but a reason for existing beyond just doing an experiment with materials, or you feel like being random. Now part of this heart is actually that Stevensian phrase, "It Must Give Pleasure": both to the audience, and, actually, to the writer. Sometimes I write a poem out of some emotional state; other times I write out of some idea; other times I write because I just enjoy the process of producing something to see what might happen.

Secondly. if you're going to evaluate something, it has to be evaluated on its own terms. It's a waste of time expecting a Bob Cobbing poem to read like a poem by JH Prynne, because he's doing different things. And if I were to say that Bob Cobbing could as easily be put alongside Jackson Pollock, for instance, as against any poet of the age, is to acknowledge that a large part of Cobbing's appeal is visual, pre-literary and aural. You don't get very far by putting him against Larkin and saying that Larkin makes sense but Cobbing doesn't; because it is not part of Cobbing's purpose to 'make sense' in the way that Larkin does. The same goes for pitting Cobbing and Prynne together: unless you understand the context of a work of art, you can't get very far in evaluating it.

Thirdly, you have to acknowledge that you on your own cannot like everything out there. Nor should you. You are likely to miss out on some good stuff because you don't happen to like it; I like Bob Cobbing, but I know people who hate him and refuse to call it poetry. That's OK, as long as you can recognise that your opinion is as legitimate as mine.

Fourthly, I think you have to acknowledge the messiness of poetry. Poetry from the late 19th century on has been a 'messy' art form, like all the other arts. There were once rules that made poetry stand out form not-poetry, just as there were rules that made art stand out from non-art. In an age when a messy bed can be placed in a gallery and called art, those rules become merely one option among many. And there's nothing you can do about that. There really isn't, despite the fact that 90% is still going to be forgotten, including writing that you might actually enjoy if you came across it.

Lobe Scarps & Finials - Geraldine Monk - Leafe Press £8.95

2011-08-23T13:07:00.000+01:00

Here's the promised first review, and it's a doozie:

Geraldine Monk is one of those poets who one gets the feeling would be much wider known, if only she weren't one of those darned "other poets" who get left out of the lists when it comes to official verse culture. She is funny, wise and playful, and she probably has as much understanding of the physicality of language as any poet living in this country. In this book, as in many of her other books, sound and meaning clash and merge, dance around each other like two lovers still working each other out.

Her poems are often difficult to quote from in a blog review, because she places words very carefully on the page to emphasise their relationship and to add a visual dimension to her poems. This is often called "open form" or "projective verse", and is where we see the influence of Olson and the Black Mountain poets; but hers is also a profoundly local as well as international poetry.

In Poppyheads, for instance, she takes her inspiration from the carved at the end of pews in a church in Rotherham, not far from her home in Sheffield. These short verses evoke both the carvings and the natural magic of the North of England:

I
float
to the
edge of my pond -
flutters bug me. Litter. Water louse.
Damsels in. Nothing is for ever. Floozies
ply. So long dragons - fly now nymphs.

I see dragonflies over a river or a millpond, and I hear them too, in the alliteration, in the rhythm that dashes about. Throughout her work, there is this reaching out for a language that doesn't just explain or evoke the world, but reaches into it and brings it to life for us.

This book, in some ways, is a gathering together of various pieces rather than a fully unified collection, which her last, the sonnet sequence Ghosts & Other was. Nevertheless, the sequences do hold together and explore the mysterious edge of the natural world. She even manages, in Glow in the Darklunar Calendar to reinvigorate that old standby of poets, the moon. Though I'm always aware of Mina Loy's line from The Lunar Baedecker, about that familiar symbol of mystery "pockmarked with personification", she manages to range widely between the scientific, the mythic and the mystical in often beautiful lines that show there is life in the old satellite yet.

Perhaps not her most essential read: for that I recommend Interegnum and Escafedd Hangings; but this is nevertheless a very enjoyable book. It brings together sequences that add further to our understanding of one of the best poets, and really should be enjoyed much wider than she is. And I do say enjoyed: the gusto of these poems, the linguistic play and the brio of the dancing words is not something to be worried over. They should be read quickly first, to get the music of them, and then savoured, read aloud. She wants you to join in the dance.

Influence-a

2011-08-21T16:47:00.000+01:00

Hopefully soon, I'll be able to include a couple of reviews of books I've read recently. In the meantime, I've been thinking about poetry again, and expectations.

There was a comment I came across in an article, to the effect that there were these "bastions of neo-modernism", and it caused me to ask who they might be. Two possible candidates came to mind: Geoffery Hill and JH Prynne. They're both "difficult" poets and they could both be described as "neo-modernist"; but I wonder how much either poet sees themselves as "bastions" of anything. Personally, I lost contact with Geoffery Hill about the time of the The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy, which I remember being very good, but then he was silent for years and came back with a rush of books I've never really had time to keep up with. My loss no doubt; but there's so much to read it's not possible to keep up with everyone.

JH Prynne I know through pieces in anthologies, some of which I find frankly baffling and some of which I find bafflingly beautiful. Which means I don't know what they're about, but I kind of like them. But again I haven't really followed him up to the Collected, and perhaps I should.

But it leads me to thoughts about influence. Another article, a review of the Selected Edward Thomas, informed me that he was a really important poet for the development of English poetry. And I guess he is, but again all I've read is the stuff in anthologies. Or - I tell a lie - I have picked up his Selected in libraries and read a few poems in them, probably more than either Prynne or recent Hill. If this amounts to influence, then I'm influenced, but not much.

Of the three, I probably like Hill the best; but I can't say that any of them mean that much to me. They don't - to use a lovely Quaker phrase - speak to my condition. Other poers who may be influenced by them, or by some aspect of them, maybe do; but I don't see much influence of Prynne in, say, Lee Harwood or Tom Raworth, for instance.

Edward Thomas and Prynne, and probably Hill too, are important to some for particular reading of English poetry. Edward Thomas leads to Larkin, leads to Armitage and Duffy, say; Prynne leads to the current crop of avant garde poets; Hill, no doubt, to another kind of poet. And then you start to take sides: Thomas vs Prynne vs Hill.

I like all three poets in their way. I like Hill's depth of reference, the strange surface music of Prynne and the quietly assertive values of Thomas. But not so much that other poets don't come first on my reading list. Maybe I'll get round to Prynne; I should probably have kept up with Hill; and Thomas would be pleasant to look at. But poetry in England is not one line, or two lines, or three; it's a field full of folk, and there's so much more to listen to. I'll be missing something by not studying all three, of course I will; but then I'll miss other stuff if I don't pursue that too.

A Note On Humour & the Avant Garde

2011-07-26T11:56:00.001+01:00

Can avant garde art be funny? I don't mean ironic; lots of art is ironic without being in the least bit funny, whether avant garde or mainstream.

But I was at a performance last night by a group of improvising musicians called Centrifuge, and there were aspects of the evening that were funny. Watching a man using his flute as a snooker cue to send marbles across the floor, as part of an otherwise very intense and serious performance, certainly made me smile. It was, frankly, rather absurd, and it did help to break the tension of the evening. Or at least deflate it for awhile.

There is, of course, the old cliched image of the serious avant gardist, intense and brooding, looking not unlike Poe's Raven as he broods over the language. But absurdism, clowning and taking the piss have always been part of the experimental project, and many of the avant garde poets I read make me laugh at their antics. Poets such as Roy Fisher and Peter Finch can certainly be serious, but they can also make the reader smile; and the same is true of poets such as Geraldine Monk.

Geraldine Monk in particular has an times wicked sense of humour, as she shows in parts of Interegnum with its satirical portraits of born again Christians and bikers. Her use of vernacular and dialect speech, and the broken rhythms she uses, are also intended to make the reader smile, as well as having a serious intent.

Mind you, there are times when I've read poems by ever-so-earnest poetic politicos trying to inject their poems with humour and jokes where it's come across as no more than heavy-handed satire. In poets such as Jonty Tiplady, however, an absurdist streak makes for an exhilarating experience.

The spectacle of a serious musician chasing a marble down the aisle of St Anne's Church in Manchester is deeply amusing. Hearing Christian Bok and Jaap Blonk doing a rendition of Schwitter's Sneezing Songs is laugh-out-loud (indeed, anybody who doesn't find Eunoia funny has had a humour bypass.) Jokes are subversive of everything; and if we can't take the piss out of ourselves, someone else will.

Arab Spring for Poetry?

2011-07-21T14:08:00.001+01:00

It's been awhile since I've been here, and I've been following with a kind of awed fascination all the stuff that's happening both with News International and the Poetry Society. Both stories seem to be about openness and accountablity; does anyone for instance believe that Rupert Murdoch didn't know what was happening at the News of the World? If he didn't is that a sign that he's losing his grip? It's certainly a failure of good governance if he didn't.

The Poetry Society is not something I have very much to do with; but again it seems to be about people doing things behind closed doors: deals and counter-deals going on without the membership knowing about it. It may or may not turn out to be a storm in a tea-cup; but what does it say about a society's trustees if they can't even follow correct proceedure? I'm a trustee of an admitedly much smaller organisation, and unless I'm called in to do a specific job, I do not interfere in the daily running of that organisation. That's up to the staff, and as long as they are working for the best interests of the organisation, and are not doing anything illegal, it's not my job to decide to change policies.

Why the secrecy anyway? this is poetry, not the national debt.

Not that it doesn't confirm what a lot of people are thinking anyway: that the Poetry Society is just one more Establishment organ run for the benefit of a few at the top while the ordinary members get nothing much. Which is, of course, deeply unfair, as the Poetry Society do a lot of good work in educating the country about poetry. If Judith Palmer's claims that it represents 'all poetries' are somewhat exagerated (all mainstream poetries, maybe... which is a wide stream but not 'all poetries') it does nevertheless do a lot of good work.

Lots of Cassandras seem to be saying that the very existence of the organisation is under threat. I'm not sure I buy into that; but I certainly think that it should get its act together at the EGM tomorrow. It's a valuable organisation, as long as it remains open to its membership, not a closed shop for the poetry elite. Maybe we could have an Arab Spring for poetry as well...

Poetry Society conspiracy theories

2011-06-30T12:36:00.000+01:00

One of the things that must be quite delightful for some people about the recent rumbles at the Poetry Society is the delicious possibility of creating a few conspiracy theories around the story. Mutterings about mysterious cabals of "mainstream" poets and publishers trying to control the public image of poetry; disgruntled poets sitting in corners complaining about how the Poetry Review rejected them so it must be run by some poetic branch of the Illuminati, and if someone doesn't mention Mossad, the CIA and MI5 I'd be very surprised. Or maybe not, but at least, we'll be mentioning that strange many-headed hydra, "the establishment."

Poets like me, with an interest in the experimental and the down-right weird; or poets like my friend Angela, a solid, perfectly mainstream poet of personal lyric, probably both have some reason to complain that the Poetry Review (and, by extension, the Poetry Society) doesn't represent them. To quote Morrissey, "it says nothing to me about my life" but, on the other hand, why should it? Fiona Sampson as editor is entitled to her taste, and if it doesn't agree with ours, it's not as if we don't have outlets for our own writing elsewhere. It's just that it's not as public as the Poetry Review; but has the Poetry Review ever represented the whole of the poetry spectrum in this country? Even in the heady days of Eric Mottram, it still only represented one kind of poetry, only this time it was the experimental end of the spectrum.

The poetry world is larger and wider than any magazine, or any society, can represent; but it's also largely ignored unless someone is kicking off about mysterious goings on at the Poetry Society. Then you'll find the newspaper comments boxing filling up with splenetic philistines complaining about how much money is wasted on a 'hobby' that only requires pen and paper... and how nobody rhymes anymore and it's all incomprehensibel rubbish... and then the whole thing dies down and poets go back into obscurity until next time... We don't have much power on the whole, and that includes the editor of the Poetry Review; but that doesn't mean there are mysterious dark forces trying to dominate British poetry and trying to ensure that only "establishment" poetry is acceptable. There are only lots of people vying for attention and booksales.

I don't see lots of people becoming suddenly interested in the kind of poetry I write; and, although I'd love to have as many readers as the latest Harry Potter, it ain't going to happen. We can help people to understand what we do better; we can be open and generous to those who find what we do puzzling; but in the end I'm reasonably fine with having a small audience for what I do, because I'm stuck with it. I'm not about to start blaming mysterious dark forces for that; or editors of national poetry magazines that have a different taste from me. Even if I think her taste is largely rubbish...

I don't think the Poetry Society keeping schtum helps, and I support (from a distance...) the people who want an EGM to resolve things; but there's no cabal at the 'head' of British poetry. If British poetry even has a 'head' that is.

Poetry Soc and the Real World of Poetry

2011-06-17T15:22:00.000+01:00

Apparently, funny things are going on at the Poetry Society. Directors and Presidents resigning all over the place, and lots of rumours abount Editors of the Poetry Review only being interested in a certain cadre of poet-friends. Etc etc...

But frankly, I can't say I care very much. When was the last time that the Poetry Society was actually relevant to the real range of poetry going on in Britain today? Oh, sure it does lots of work in education... but is it just reinforcing a certain staid establishment view of poetry, or is actually reflecting poetry as it is? Poetry as it includes the mainstream and the non-mainstream, the page and the performance, the literary and the visual. Philip Larkin and Bob Cobbing.

And yes, it's full of arguments and disputes about what constitutes "real poetry": just as every other art form does, and should. If people don't get passionate about it, what's the point of it? I don't like all of it, and you won't like all of it. If the Poetry Society wants to be representative then it should reflect these things.

Poetry (Chicago) has been quite successful in reflecting the different forms of poetry by having 'specials' on visual poetry, flarf/conceptual poetry and translations. Can you imagine the current editor doing a special on visual poetry these days? If not, why not? Does she ever step out of her office to see what's going on in the non-mainstream scene, or in the regions?

The Poetry Society is largely irrelevant to most poets in this country. Maybe it's time to ask what its enormous grant from the government can do if it's redirected to something useful.

Where Have I Been? Where Am I Now? Where Am I Going To?

2011-06-02T16:27:00.001+01:00

I have to think about where I've been, where I am now and where I'm going to next for a university funding application interview.

This is difficult, because a part of me doesn't want to know the answer to any of those questions. Who wants to second guess their future or pin down their past? But here are some initial thoughts.

1) I have been, and still am, basically a lyric poet. That is, a poet of personal experience, a poet who derives much of his material from his own life, from an attempt to understand his own life in the late 20th/early 21st century.

2) My interest in the non-mainstream, the experimental, the frankly bizarre and the extreme complicates that. It's always been there: even when I started I was more fascinated with the strange edges of poetry than a lot of the centre. But I hid it well: I went to readings with mainly mainstream poets because they were the only things available, and even bought the books; while secretly looking at books by Olson, O'Hara, Ashbery; while looking for British equivalents.

3) I found them too: Lee Harwood in a bookshop in Grasmere; the Collected Edwin Morgan lying unreviewed in the City Life offices, ditto with Mina Loy; review copies of Tempers of Hazard; a pamphlet of Geraldine Monk's in Frontline Books in Manchester. Ditto for Penniless Politics by Douglas Oliver.

4) I always did have an interest in the experimental, but I never knew what to do with it until I took a pair of scissors to a crap poem and it became a good one. That released a flood of ideas: turn the poem on its head, write the thing backwards, mix up the verses, stop stop stop making sense!

5) And then it started happening here in Manchester. Suddenly, there was a community of writers I could actually identify with. The readings in the Attic of Alan Fisher, Scott Thurston etc, meeting the editors of Parameter, Matchbox, later ZimZalla and if p then q, feeling part of something exciting happening for the first time.

6) Meanwhile, I'm get older. I spent 20 years trying to fit my poems into a box they didn't want to fit in. Thank goodness I no longer do that. But I don't want to alienate my friends from the Manchester Poets era and say that everything they do/did was rubbish. a) because it's not really true b) because they're all largely nice people.

7) Nevertheless, I do sometimes rubbish their stuff. Sorry about that. When you've felt like square peg in a round hole for 20 years it's easy to say the wrong thing sometimes. What you do is fine; I just no longer want even to try to do it myself. And remember: there are writers I feel I'm supposed to admire that mean nothing to me, so if I rubbish your favourite, it's because I can't see what the fuss is.

8) Reading at The Other Room, in front, as it were, of the home crowd. I bottle it a bit, incredibly nervous like my first reading. And I can't read from thesmall print of my latest pamphlet. Get good reception nevertheless.

9) But where is my writing going? Away from strict cut-n-paste, to a kind of collage, use of found text, forays into conceptual writing; but looking for a spiritual theme in it all. Still basically exploring my own environment and life, trying to understand, to create a poetic analogy to the energy of the life around me. I want the poem to happen now in the reader's head, not to be a record of a happening sometime in the past.

10) I find it puzzling that some poets admit to only writing with a small audience of friends in mind. I want everybody to read my poetry; but without just writing what they want to hear. Writing should be a surprise for the writer and the reader; that Wallace Steven's line about resisting the intelligence almost successfully, and the importance of that ALMOST.

11) Sometimes I feel like Jake the Peg: I still have a foot in mainstream, probably at least a whole leg and a bit in the non-mainstream, and an extra leg in performance. Poetry is an oral art, an aural art, a music, a language, an unread book in the hand and an unexpressed thought in the back of the head, a word on the tip of your tongue.

12) The word that comes out of reviews of my books: the demotic. I'm interested in the language of the street. The language of signage, text, journalism, advertising. At the moment I dip in and out of the academic, and would like to plunge more systematically into it.

13) I would like to do something bigger in the future. I don't know what the future will hold. I'd like to explore my own faith/politics, my own opinions about the world; I would like to find a way of talking about those things that doesn't feel dishonest, disengenuous or otherwise declamatory. I'd like to talk about truth, whatever that means.

14) This is a provisional statement. It will always be a provisional statement.

15) There is no fifteenth statement.

Rambling Thoughts of the Post-Avant

2011-05-22T15:44:00.000+01:00

So what does it mean to be 'non-mainstream' in this age? Having recently seen the extraoridinary Ursonate performed in a dank basement in Bury, a 'sound-poem' in sonata form (roughly) first performed in 1930's Germany, it's hard to think that there's any point in the term avant garde anymore. Ron Silliman, of course, has, along with others such as the late Reginald Sheppard, coined the term Post-Avant for what comes 'after the avant garde.'

Everything has been done before, at least in terms of shocking audiences and provoking the reaction, "but that's not poetry/art/music/etc..." in an audience used to the familiar shapes of poetry before modernism came along. These days, most readers don't expect poetry to always rhyme; nor do they always expect it to 'make sense' in the way it used to do, supposedly, in some mythical golden age of simple lyric poetry.

There are still people who get shocked by sound poetry and concrete poetry; but I suspect there's much less than there used to be of shocked responses. These days, people who like it like it, and those who don't get bored by it, except possibly in the fulminating backwaters of the odd Neo-Formalist magazine, still fighting battles that everyone else got exhausted by long ago.

There are still people around who remember the so-called Poetry Wars at the Poetry Society of the late '70's; and the fact is that a lot of really interesting writers went into the wilderness for a good few years, only emerging years later with egos and reputations still bruised. Most young writers, I suspect, look on it all with some bewilderment.

That 'experimental writing' still survives, and is being practised by young writers fresh out of university, is a sign of health for the whole of the writing community. But it's no good pretending that we're any kind of avant garde. Even the 'flarf' and 'conceptual' schools of poetry are only going places that somebody has been before: flarf is a form of collage and conceptual art has been around since the '60's.

What marks out the 'non-mainstream' from the 'mainstream' then? Well, to be honest, it's partly a tribal allegiance, isn't it? Going to The Other Room, I hear plenty of snide remarks about Duffy and Armitage, and I'm as guilty as many in making the same remarks about Andrew Motion. The fact that I don't at all find his poems interesting or engaging is not really his fault though. That he's more likely to be reviewed by the Guardian than, say, Robert Shepherd or Maggie O'Sullivan says something about the values of the mainstream; but it does get dull to be always harping on about it.

There are still, I think, two basic approaches to writing: one is the direct, denotative, logical, descriptive route which is largely the approach of the mainstream; the other is associative, fractured, disruptive, illogical, indirect route favoured by the non-mainstream. Both can produce great writing, and bad; and we all have out preferences for one over the other. Then again, the direct route is not always as direct as it seems, and the indirect isn't always as indirect as it seems: or, you tak the low road and I'll tak the high road, and I'll be in Scotland afore ye. But we're both getting to Scotland, as it were.

Ursonate in Bury

2011-05-02T11:25:00.001+01:00

The final event of the text festival was all to do with Kurt Schwitters. First, there was a seminar in which people who had performed or responded to his sound-poem Ursonate talked about it, and we saw pictures of the Merzbarn in Ambleside, one of his last remarkable works. I learned something that I had never known about Bury: that for a short time, Schwitters had been interned in Bury at an old mill called Warth Mill, as an enemy alien, before going off to the Isle of Man where many European artists, thinkers and writers were sent before the British Government recognised that they weren't Nazi spies.

This strange connection of Bury to European art and the Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) that Hitler was so against made for a remarkable performance of the whole of the Ursonate in the basement of this mill. It was dark: there were candles, one anglepoise lamp and the light from mobile phones to illuminate the text for the four readers. We were inside a space with plaster peeling from old red-brick walls, lots of bare central heating pipes and a picture of the man himself at th front.

And what a remarkable piece it is: full of rolling 'r's', labial 'l's', 'k's' and in amongst this the structure of a sonata, including a rondo, a scherzo, a beautiful largo and a cadenza. The readers included Christian Bok, himself a remarkable experimental poet whose pieces in the Text Festival include a poem programmed into the DNA of a bacillus, and Jaap Blonk, himself a sound poet and musician of considerable achievement.

I left the dark of that room into the brilliant sun shining onto the tarmac a very ordinary industrial estate in a very ordinay part of a very ordinary town in North East Lancashire, reflecting on connections. The connection between Bury and international modernism, as seen both in this performance and in the text festival itself, is all the more remarkable for being so unexpected. It's almost like one of Kurt Schwitter's Merz collages: ordinary materials transformed into the extraordinary. Which is how one of the participants of the Schwitters seminar described as the purpose of art: to take bits of the world, treat it and return it back to the world transformed.

Text Festival

2011-05-02T10:49:00.001+01:00

Quite an amazing few days on the whole. First, there was a trip to the very baroque old city of Bruges, with its churches oppressively over-decorated on the inside but quite restrained outside, with its strange fountain of a man's head with two snakes coming out of his mouth. No doubt symbolic of something or refering to one of the more bizarre Greek myths. Then there was the chocolate, which is all gone now; but I've still got the nice tin box it came in.

No chance of pretending that I wasn't being terribly touristy, I'm afraid. I was not being all superior and pretending I was travelling. I went into the ferry's piano bar and joined in the singing of Billy Joel songs and even requested some Sondheim.

That was Tuesday to Thursday taken care of. What to do about the Royal Wedding? Well, I did a very good job of ignoring it, instead. Went to the park and watched ducks. Ate an icecream.

But the highlight has to have been the Text Festival, which was a remarkable event. First, the exhibition has lots of interesting things in it: and is spread across three sites. Phil Davenport's piece in the Transport Museum was very good, and I loved the way that one had to search there for these text pieces among the horse-drawn trams, buses, lorries and other transport paraphernalia. A wall full of old station signs seemed almost to be a kind of poem in itself; and the small postcards from arthur + martha were very moving in a way that there work with often marginalised people often is, because they use those peoples' actual words.

The first performance in Bury Art Gallery at 11pm was very good; with the highlight being a wonderful mix of sound and text poetry from Helen White & Moniek Darge; Márton Koppány and Marco Giovenale were also very good. Of the pieces in the exhibition, I really liked Tony Lopez's piece; but there were many highlights. Even some of the small works were interesting.

At 4pm we all traipsed into the Parish Church, which was a very strange venue for a reading of avant garde poetry but somehow seemed to work. Phil Minton's Bury Feral Choir was the first act, who filled the hall with some at times very unspiritual sounds, included laughter, what sounded like the chatter of a lot of old women, long o's and um's and all kinds of sounds. Somehow, in that setting, it did seem to sound spiritual, which makes one wonder about the meaning of place in the work. Then Satu Kaikkonen & Karri Kokko from Finland filled the space with the sounds of the Finnish language. Because there was no translation, there was no way of telling if there poems had a meaning, but the sounds and their performances were both beautiful. Finally, we had Ron Silliman. I don't really know his work as much as perhaps I should, but then it's always seemed a rather daunting read. He read an extract from Northern Soul, a poem he started at the last Bury Text Festival; and I rather revised my opinion having heard his voice. His neon piece in the exhibition is not the highlight, and isolated sounds a bit patronising ("Poetry has been bury, bury good to me")
but in the context of the larger piece, which meanders from Bury to America in a very entertaining way, it doesn't seem so.

I shall be back to this blog later to finish off the account of the Festival, but the last event deserves a blog all to itself: the remarkable Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters.

A very tentative 'I believe'

2011-04-22T13:27:00.000+01:00

Today is Good Friday - the day when we're told that Jesus died for our sins - and I'm going to go to church. Not because I'm a particularly orthodox kind of believer, or because I'm even that sure if there is a god or not, but because despite all the doubts, I still call myself a Christian.

Now part of the reason for this is a refusal to give up the title to the fundamentalists and dogmatists who insist on telling me I'm going to hell for not believing that God created the world in 6 days in 4004 BC; but some of it has to do with the sense that there is something inexplicable about the universe. And to say that there is something about the figure of Jesus, whether or not he is the 2nd person of the Trinity, that is attractive. His teaching that love of God and love of neighbour are basically one and the same thing in practical terms (that by loving your neighbour, you're loving the God in them) seems to be still axiomatic for me.

And I'm fully aware of the questions, and they don't scare me. They don't scare those whose faith is not dependent on literalist readings of scripture, or ticking the right boxes in the Creed, because we are always aware that any faith formulation is only ever an approximation of what the divine might be like. I've been fortunate enough to meet several people recently whose faith is not limited by the formulations, and they're all actually poets themselves. I think a 'poetic' understanding of religion is the only one to take: the Bible is a book full of poetry and story. There isn't much literal history in it; even the life of Christ is essentially a series of stories, not a literal history.

I still find it difficult to read the Bible, since I rejected my evangelical beginings; but it's actually getting a bit better now. I can read Jonah without thinking about how a man can live inside the belly of a whale; I can read the Gospels without wondering how it's possible for someone to walk on water, because ultimately, that's not the point of those stories. The Biblical writers were not concerned with how miracles happened; in fact, the writer of the Gospel of Mark seems very anxious at times to play down the miraculous stories, in order to get to the nub of the message. I can sometimes read the gospels now without being sidelined by questions of historicity; but I still have some way to go before I get to just reading them as stories.

The questions of spirituality are all around us, I feel. Not, how do I prove the existence of God, because ultimately it's a non-question. God doesn't in anycase 'exist' in the way a computor or a table exists. Some theologians - taking a lead both from ancient mystics and the work of Paul Tillich and Deitrich Bonhoeffer, would say that any god that 'exists' is a kind of idol. God doesn't look down on us from a great height like some ancient middle-eastern satrap, nor does he direct the traffic of life like the Fat Controller from his office in the sky. If God is in any sense real, then he/she is intwined in the fabric of life, immanent, among us, not apart from us. I suspect (let's try out a very tentative, 'I believe' shall we?) that there is no God out there, only the God in each one of us.

And that's why I'm about to go to church: not to celebrate the judgemental God who needs constant appeasement, but to celebrate the God who comes down among us all the time, who lives - if he lives at all - in the secular heart of the world.

Poetry Eating Itself

2011-04-12T11:27:00.001+01:00

The last Other Room was a really terrific night - to think that it's already got to three years is quite stupendous. Derek Henderson live-streamed from Utah was one of the highlights, as was seeing the poet and editor Carrie Etter reading from her Shearsman book, Divining for Starters. Ken Edwards was also good, as was Alec Finlay. It was an interesting evening that brought up some issues.

I really liked Derek Henderson's reading, for instance, which was a conceptual piece based around taking out every repeating word or phrase from Ted Berrigan's Sonnets. I enjoyed this because I'm aware of, and have probably been influenced by, that very seminal book; but it also brought up a question. Not the obvious one about 'ownership' of Berrigan's words; but of the very fact that I knew the derivation of these poems; but not everyone who might read Derek Henderson's book would have read the original. So it seems that's it's essentially art talking to art again.

Which is all very well and interesting to those of us who are artists; but does it not seem a rather solipsistic game to those who are not so well-versed in the arts as we are? It is a very enjoyable game to play with other writings in this way; but how much does the reader need to know before he or she can take part in the game?

It's not simply a question of elitism; none of the people I've met are at heart in the least bit elitist. If asked, I'm sure they could all explain in relatively simple terms what they're about. It would be in part a distortion, because about art there is always an unspokenness, a silence around the concept that can't be put into words. But it would be a start.

However, I find myself worrying when poetry just feeds off other poetry in this way. I liked the result of it; and this is not a criticism of Derek Henderson's poems. But if this were all that poetry was, I'd wonder if it hadn't become rather clinical and distant, and maybe a little decadent.

Nicholas Moore.

2011-03-26T15:33:00.001Z

Just wanted to big up this, from Peter Riley, which is a pdf of 10 npublished poems by Nicholas Moore, a nearly forgotten poet of the '40's who stopped writing in the '50's and didn't start again until the late '60's:

http://www.aprileye.co.uk/TheOrangeBed.pdf

They have something of the linguistic brio of Wallace Stephens, with a very English obsession with the detective story.

What Peter Riley has done to keep the memory of this poet alive is remarkable, and I applaud him for it. The '40's are a neglected era in British poetry, where there was a lot more experimentation and openness to ideas and influence from both America and Europe than the traumatised '50's poets would have us believe. Where Larkin closed up, poets like Nicholas Moore opened up.

Make Perhaps This Out Sense Of Can You

2011-03-21T11:40:00.002Z

Listening to the Bob Cobbing programme yesterday, I was struck by the question of how people actually find out about experimental writing. One of the advantages of a university education is that there is at least access to a reasonably good library; though they're not always as well-stocked as they should be. So there will be some: maybe some of the big names like Olson, for instance.

But a lot of experimental writing has been in underground, ephemeral, here-today-gone-tomorrow publications that were sold at readings in the back of pubs, and in a few select bookshops. Now those bookshops have mostly gone, there's a lot on the internet; but where do you even begin if you don't have a clue of what you're looking for? Bob Cobbing's Gestetner and all those cheap off-set machines have long gone, but there are still people producing lovely pamphlets to sell at readings.

The situation is so much better for artists, who have galleries, arts networks, colleges; and a kind of tradition of experiment that is very much more public. It's not so much better for experimental music, which again is very much a back-of-the-pub genre (I think of Counting Backwards and The Noise Upstairs in Manchester, for instance.)

Experimental writing is always going to be a minority interest perhaps; and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I hope I'm not alone in wanting other people for whom it's all a bit strange to know more about it, so that they can have the choice. A constant diet of meat & two veg is not going to kill anyone; but there is so much more on the menu to try. Except you're not going to try what you've never heard of before.

So it's great that the BBC did a programme on Bob Cobbing: whose attitude to experiment was wonderfully refreshing: try and see!

Questions: Square Pegs

2011-03-20T16:16:00.000Z

How valuable is it for a poet to have an education in creative writing/poetry/English?

I've somehow managed to go through most of my life without having acquired either an English degree or a degree in Creative Writing. This had something to do with an instinctive feeling that if I studied English I'd somehow not become a writer: fear of the inferiority complex perhaps. Was I right? Does a creative writing degree encourage poets to basically follow a roughly similar course or does it encourage experiment, accidental discoveries, individual paths, in between learning lots of theory, reading set texts and writing essays on semiotics and poetic theory?

It's the thing that worries me about young poets: are they being encouraged to find their own path, or are they being directed into the acceptable path? Could a poet as different as Geraldine Monk or Tom Raworth come out of a creative writing degree? I know some people who have done creative writing degrees and come out the other side as non-mainstream writers: Tom Jencks, Mat Dalby and Tony Trehy to name three; though Tony was probably there already. One doesn't arrange a festival in which the star readers are Ron Silliman and Geoff Huth without some prior knowledge.

I think there's enough of a breadth of poetry to say that the effect of all those creative writing courses hasn't been to make everything monotone, at least. As the Rialto young poets features showed, there's everything from fairly mainstream to non-mainstream: poetry has lots of balls in the air. But I still worry: if a teacher comes across a student who's literary tastes are very different from their own, how do they seek to engage with them? Do they try and fit square pegs into round holes, or do they look for the right shaped hole for that poet? And how do the students themselves feel about it?

My own experience of being a square peg in a round hole at various poetry groups makes me sensitive to this. I was recently described as 'eccentric' by one young performance poet. In terms of international modernism, I'm squarely in the middle of the pack; put me up against Ron Silliman or Bob Cobbing, I'm not even particularly experimental. Only in a nation that thinks Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin are 'great' poets could I be described as 'eccentric.'

So what is it like to be a young experimental poet? Do you feel like square pegs?

Edith Sitwell

2011-03-10T16:02:00.002Z

Here's an Edith Sitwell poem for you:
Heart and Mind
SAID the Lion to the Lioness-'When you are amber dust,-
No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun
(No liking but all lust)-
Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,
The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,
Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws
Though the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.'

Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time-
'The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps...so is the heart

More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules
Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:
But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
Is but a foolish wind.'

Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone,
And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,
Remember only this of our hopeless love
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.'

I've been remembering recently an early enthusiasm of mine for the extraordinary poet, Edith Sitwell, so I thought I'd share this poem, especially as it's Womens' Week this week, and I think that a lot of early modernist women writers are still not appreciated enough. I like her poems as much for their sounds as their meaning, though often, as in Colonel Fantock, for instance, there are memories and references to her awful upbringing. Even in this poem there is a sense of struggle between the demands of the heart and the demands of the mind. She was brought up to be an aristocratic lady, to be a silent 'support' for some rich man; but she was too clever and strange looking (she looked like a crane, as she herself saw.)

I don't know if she was a great poet, but like other women poets of a modernist bent, she deserves to be remembered. Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Lynette Roberts, Lorinne Neidecker and others are all on the 'neglected' list, and they're all worth revisiting.

Do They Ever Revise?

2011-03-06T12:03:00.003Z

This interesting question apparently was scribbled on a submission note to the editor of The Rialto, Micheal Mackmin, in response to Nathan Hamilton's selection of around 50 young poets, all under 35, published in the last three issues. It brings up interesting questions about 'finish' in poetry.

In his second editorial for his selection, Mr Hamilton notes that there is a distinction between a poetry of 'product' and a poetry of 'process.' Product oriented poetry emphasises 'the relability of language in emulating or capturing, and then presenting, an external reality.' Process oriented poetry, on the other hand, is concerned with a way 'of speaking about the world that simultaneously presents the difficulties of doing so.'

One can see this in the choice of poems in the two issues: it swings from the juxtapositions, opaque language and verbal play of Keston Sutherland and Marcus Slease to the little slice of socially-engaged remembrance of Tom Warner. This could be described as a struggle between non-mainstream and mainstream; but I think it's more interesting than that over-simplistic binary suggests. Many of the poets in all three selections (the last ten are in the latest issue, 71) are actually better described as existing on a plain somewhere between the two.

But back to 'finish': and the question we started with. Suppose one were to put a landscape from the 18th century and a landscape by Cezanne, say, next to one another. Which one is more 'finished'? The 18th century landscape has an overall, smooth, finish: and the Cezanne looks more rough, more, dare I say it, 'unfinished.' In the earlier painting, the difficulties of seeing have been smoothed over beneath layer after layer of paint, until we get to something that looks like a landscape. Sure, it's constructed: that landscape, should you find it, wouldn't look exactly like how it does in the picture. But we 'know' what it's about; it's recognisably part of the world we live in.

The Cezanne, however, is more fragmented, more unfamiliar; we can recognise it's a landscape, but he's also incorporated an awareness of the difficulties of seeing that landscape. It looks incomplete, because we are being asked to complete the picture, to see it as if for the first time, in a new way.

That, I think, is something to do with the difference between 'product' and 'process' in contemporary poetry. Poems of 'process' may go through as many drafts as the average mainstream poem; but they don't serve to make the poem 'clearer', or to 'finish' the poem; they aim instead to emphasise that difficulty of seeing. Cezanne led on to Cubism, an even more disorienting way of seeing the world. To me, that's the way of the world: it's in constant flux, it's never finished, it never completes itself. It just carries on changing, moment by moment, and we, and our ways of seeing, are part of that flux.

I have to confess that I have enjoyed this series, and I congratulate the editor of The Rialto for his courage in encouraging this. What is also encouraging is that there are so many young poets who are engaged in these new ways of writing; not always at the far edge of it, but sometimes, as in the poems of Luke Kennard and Helen Phillipson (and the strange not-quite-hanging-togetherness of Emily Berry's poem in this issue) in the middle of this. They are, I think, less concerned with the old dividing line of mainstream vs. non-mainstream. And that, to my mind, is a good thing.

Wild Poetry

2011-02-24T17:44:00.002Z

It's not, I've discovered, the simple difficulty of non-mainstream poetry that I like.

I've been viewing the recently uploaded Veer About anthology at http://www.intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/ - which is a wild and willfull collection of poet, visual poetry, art mixed with poetry and often very strange word-play, language poetry, straightforward modernism mixed in with all kind of avant-/post-avant poetry techniques, and while I've only just scratched the surface of what it does yet, I find myself drawn further and further in.

I probably won't end up liking everything. David Crystal's visual 'sonnets', which consist of brush strokes with a Chinese brush and ink? Hmm, maybe not... But then maybe... why not? There's material that probably will go above and to either side of my head, and not really make much purchase. Fair enough; but it's the wildness I like; the idea that has been planted somehow in these poets' heads: anything is possible. Anything probably isn't possible; but why not see if it is? There's a cover by Jennifer Pike Cobbing, wife of the late Bob: and remembering that lion of avant-gardism and what he considered to be poetry, I can see again how throughout the history of British poetry, since the '60's, there has been a wildness.

In fact, not just the '60's. One can see it in the early poems of Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull, in Basil Bunting. It's a more confined wildness; but in that it didn't see the personal lyric as the soul voice of poetry, it was the beginning of poetry escaping its cages. One can see it too in the heteronymic profusion of Nicholas Moore, in the neo-romantics still not fully recovered. In the peculiar music of Lynnette Robert's Gods With Stainles Ears, or Joseph McCleod's The Ecliptic. One could go further back, to Blake and beyond...

In fact, one of the pervading influences must be that of Gertrude Stein, whose idea of writing as a form of sculpture and language as a non-referential medium affects a lot of the experimental writing going on at the moment. That, and the experiments of the dadaists, futurists and others from the early part of the 20th century. Here, language becomes not just about meaning, but about shape, sound, place on the page. It becomes sculptural and gestural, a form of abstract dance, and one makes one's way through it feeling confused, disoriented, and constantly in a state of anticipation. Which can get wearing in bulk. Sometimes, one longs for a straightforward statement.

But, even if I don't like all of this, I like the fact that it's possible. I like the fact that tennis players with words are doing without nets.

Modern Canadian Poets ed. Evan Jones & Todd Swift (Carcanet £18.95)

2011-02-10T14:41:00.001Z

Anthologies of a nation's poetry are tricky beasts. Are they truely representative of that nation's poetry, or do they just represent the editors' idea of that nation's poetry? A British anthology without Larkin would generally be regarded as unthinkable; but should that anthology also include Bob Cobbing, or JH Prynne? Is an anthology without those names reflecting what is really going on across the whole spectrum of British poetry?

I ask these questions at the start of a review of a major new British anthology of Canadian poetry because this is really the only view of Canadian poetry most readers are going to get, unless you have a special interest in Canadian poetry. And I have to say, right at the start, that what it does include is largely worth reading, often excellant and it was good to get acquainted with many writers I'd never heard of before. Margaret Avison's spare lyricism, John Thompson's ghazals, Anne Herbert's softly surreal meditations - I'm glad to have made their acquaintance.

But when I began to read these poems, and do some research around the whole field of Canadian poetry, several absences began to seem odd. There are several poets like Norm Sibum or Kociejowski who are immigrants from the United States or Europe; and there are several emigrants such as the feisty'40's lyricists Joan Murray, both of whom I enjoyed. But no Robin Blaser, who postumously won the Griffin Prize with his Collected Poems just a few years ago. And no Earle Birney, author of the acclaimed Bear On The Delhi Road. The more experimental poets such as Bp Nichol and bill bisset are also absent, as are senior figures such as Erin Moure and George Bowering. Steve McCaffery, leading light of the Language movement, is also not there.

I'm glad to have met the poetry of John Glassco and his translations of Garneau. particularly The Game: with its glorious first line: Don't bother me I'm terribly busy... Anne Carson's poetry sparkles as always. The rural voice is well-represented, and many of the poets seem to display a metaphysical bent that I very much warm to. Anne Crompton is one such, as is Anne Wilkinson:

Little Men Slip into Death

Little men slip into death
As the diver slides into water
With only a ripple
To tell where he's hidden.

Big muscles struggle harder in the grave.
The earth is slow to settle on their bone,
Erupting into mounds or sprouting flowers
Or giving birth to stones.

And how to stand a tombstone
With the ground not quiet yet,
And what to say, what not to say
When moss is rooted and the stone is set?

Very traditional, formal but beautiful. And there does seem to be a bias towards formalism in this anthology, which makes me wonder if it's really like all those anhologies of British poetry that have neglected our own native experimental writers. So is this mostly then an anthology of 'mainstream' poetry, as opposed to 'experimental'? It does include the poetry of Lisa Robertson, and many of the poets do show a distinctly modernist bent; but there's also a tidiness about the poetry that maybe reveals a distate with extremes.

I enjoyed this anthology, despite my misgivings about its exclusions. I like the fact that it includes some translations of French Canadian poetry. It made me think of what anthologies are for, why people put them together. That in itself is a mighty fine thing to do.

The Other Room & Counting Backwards

2011-02-04T10:56:00.000Z

An oral feast over the last two days.

Firstly, Posie Rider, Joe Walton/Jow Lindsey and Stephen Emmerson in the Old Abbey Inn. In many ways, as good as usual. I really liked the 'conversation' between Posie Rider and Jow Lindsey, that was in turn, apaocalyptic, funny, associative, tender and edgy. Jow Lindsey started off by speaking in a very unconvincintg woman's voice; and there was a sly smile on his face throughout the proceedings. I liked it very much, and purchased a copy of The Woman by another Joe Waltong heteronym, Yolanda Tudor-Bloch, in the break.

Stephen Emmerson came into his reading like an express train, read a short poem that he pretended was by Simon Armitage, then a very long extract from a very long piece that seemed to be partly about schizpphrenia. I have to admit there were times when he was reading when - like Coleman Hawkins once said to John Coltrane - I wanted him to "take the fucking horn out of his mouth..." There were lots of associative leaps, uses of technical/medical language, and he very rarely slowed down long enough to take a breath. Or for the audience to take a breath. But when he did slow down, there were moments of extraordinary beauty. He writes a very edgy, energetic poetry; and I did enjoy it, but afterwards I felt like going to a darkened room and putting John Cage's 4'31" on repeat.

Counting Backwards was a revelation. I sometimes miss this because it comes straight after The Other Room and I don't feel like going out two nights in a row; but I'm glad I went last night. First, there was the conceptual/minimalist poetry of James Davies, reading using a projector from his acronyms series and from a piece called Two Fat Boys. I'm not always a big fan of minimalist poetry; but this was really rather good, especially the second part which was in turns funny and disturbing. There was a final poem of visuals: boxes with dots strategically placed in some of them and phrases. Throughout, James sat in an armchair directing the whole thing.

Then Helen Shanahan painted onto the back of the sheet on which James had projected his acronyms; there was a film of what looked like Dungeness showing and she described a set of photos which we couldn't see. The piece seemed to be about memory as much as anything, and the emotional connections we make to images. It was rather lovely.

The second half was extraordinary: the first performance of Juxtavoices, led by Martin Archer. They were a largely amatuer choir that included Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk, and the most standout piece was probably Three Iterations of a Poem by Samuel Beckett. But the blend of voices, the use of clicks, whistles, harmony and disharmony was extraordinary in all the pieces.

The Phil Davenport read just one piece: partly about and around the death of Micheal Jackson, but also taking in the torture at Abu Ghraib. He read quietly and simply into a microphone, with no special effects, and was very effective.

There's something very wonderful going on at the moment, when these extraordinary events can take place in one city. We have, I suppose, a fairly small community; but it's busy. Pretty soon, there's going to be a Writers' Forum North, which will hopefully help to cement the scene together. I'm looking forward to the future of poetry beyond the mainstream in Manchester.

BackChat-The Prospects. A live performance - Salford City Radio, on Tues...

2011-01-28T12:56:00.000Z

BackChat Poetry & Jazz project - my first appearance on YouTube (and hopefully not the last).

John Calvert: Some Poems

2011-01-04T12:36:00.001Z

Occassionally, I'd like to be able to publish a few poems by friends. Here are some from fellow member of the Accrington diaspora exiled to Manchester by the lack of anything worth staying there for, John Calvert:

TOUCHLINE

Outside the penalty area
Trains went in and out
Embankment trees weren't letting on
Afternoon and all to play for
We lay on neglected turf
Studied hand and mouth co-ordination
Blurring to bramble and poppy
The city rolled back
July pressed the sky flat
My fingers eased into extra time
Your eyes drowsing toward blue
Through the grass the faint chanting
Point, and shoot and score

DESTRUCTION LAYER

Poke anywhere Rome superceded
Your spade soon taps into red
Iceni in the layer cake
Trace of icons kicked into touch
An emperor's features. hacked-off
Spun to cesspit
Temples run to ash and blood
Precincts squared in fire
Soil gagging screams
Vanishing queen goes civic
Burns hatred into marl
Scatters

CRY
(To the memory of Frances Bellerby)

Now at the core of night
The vixens howl over the nerve ends

Like nothing on earth
Mouthing your freezing fear

Far away the world drags
Across the ice of space

The broken blackness carrying time. Again
Your pulse beat tracing the warm

The stars will wait forever
The years are staring

You are being called
How will you answer?

New Year's Revolution

2010-12-31T11:19:00.000Z

Happy New Year!

Resist the cuts in 2011!

don't renew trident in 2011!

Tax the rich not vat the poor!

2010-12-24T11:33:00.000Z

I've probably written more posts on here this year than I have for a while; which is either a very good thing or me just wasting my life away.

Whatever it is, this is probably my last for this year,

so here's my favourite Christmas poem, by Edwin Morgan, whose loss this year, though expected for some time, is still huge:

The Computer's First Christmas Card

jollymerry

hollyberry

jollyberry

merryholly

happyjolly

jollyjelly

jellybelly

bellymerry

hollyheppy

jollyMolly

marryJerry

merryHarry

hoppyBarry

heppyJarry

boppyheppy

berryjorry

jorryjolly

moppyjelly

Mollymerry

Jerryjolly

bellyhoppy

jorryhoppy

hollymoppy

Barrymerry

Jarryhappy

happyboppy

boppyjolly

jollymerry

merrymerry

merrymerry

merryChris

ammerryasa

Chrismerry

asMERRYCHR

YSANTHEMUM

MERRY CHRISTMAS ONE AND ALL

Addendum

2010-12-18T10:57:00.001Z

Some new stuff that I also did enjoy this year:

Carrie Etter's Infinite Difference - wonderfully widespread anthology full of new experimental women poets.
Elaine Randell's Faulty Mothering - probably my book of the year. Moving, Objectivist in the best way, taught as a bowstring.
Micheal Haslam - A Cure for Woodness - visionary, experimental, deeply felt, musical poems set in the Pennines, a kind of John Clare filtered through Jack Spicer and free-form jazz.

Those - in no particular order - are my top three this year, but there's also the new book from Tom Raworth and Scott Thurston's Momentum which were pretty special too.

Not Keeping Up

2010-12-15T17:06:00.001Z

Apart from reviews, I've given up trying to keep up with the current books, albums, arts events etc; so I'm not about to give you my best of list for this year. I find those lists rather tiresome anyway. So, no, I can neither recommend nor not recommend the latest books by Heaney and Armitage; because I haven't read them. I may get round to it one day. But some things I have read and liked this year, in no particular order:

1) Brain Scream At Night by Paul Sutton
2) A lovely pamphlet by David Morley
3) Sidings by Richard Barrett
4) In the Assarts by Jeff Hilson
5) The Thief by Gill Andrews
6) Folklore by Tim Atkins
7) A Map of Verona by Henry Reed

The last was published in 1946 and I found it in a bookshop in Liverpool for the princely sum of £2.

There's lots more, I'm sure, and by the end of this year, I hope to have read only my second novel of the year. I hope to read more next year. I've just got so little attention span. I am looking forward to Elizabeth Baine's The Birth Machine.

Albums? Nothing much new. I found a copy of Genesis by Stan Tracey in an Oxfam, and I enjoyed Peepers by Polar Bear, and I picked up the odd bargain from Fop. Oh, and the Neil Cowley Trio's Radio Silence. But again I don't keep up. I don't see why there can't be advantages to being over 50, and not keeping up with what's current is one of them.

This is only a provisional list. If I think about what I read this year a bit more carefully, I might come back to it. On the other hand, I might not.

Poetries Not Poetry

2010-11-23T11:18:00.000Z

I've come slightly reluctantly to the conclusion that there isn't a single species called poetry. There is instead a whole genus of poetry. The most obvious ' species division' has always been seen to be that between 'non-mainstream' and 'mainstream', or 'avant garde' and 'conservative', or 'linguistically innovative' and... what exactly? Lowell saw it as the 'raw' and the 'cooked' - and he, as a premier 'cooked' poet, coveted something of the 'wildness' he saw in Ginsberg et al, hence the freer rhythms of 'Life Studies' and after.

But that seems these days to be too binary; and I was thinking of this whilst reading the magazine Department, edited by Richard Barret, and the chapbook by Adrian Slatcher, Playing Solitaire for Money, new out from Salt.

Adrian Slatcher's book is, without being too disparaging, fairly mainstream. All the poems are well-written, often with a darkly reflective and apocalyptic edge. I really liked a lot of them, especially The Monster with its vision of urban menace symbolised by the monster seemingly made of detritus and abandoned hopes; and The Death of the Grand Gesture, about how small life seems to have come. It's an excellent pamphlet, well-worth £6.50 of your hard-earned cash.

But then we turn to Department, a magazine of innovative writing edited by one of Manchester's foremost innovative poets. Here we have poems that do not hold to the left-hand margin, but spread across the page; poems which are using language as a medium rather as an artist would, making associative leaps and including a visual element. There are poems in prose by Bill Drennan and Karen Sandhu; and the associative poetry of Stephen Emmerson and Nat Raha. Unlike Adrian's chapbook, it doesn't all make strict logical sense. But again excellent.

So far so binary; but even here we have a couple of different poetries being presented: James Davies' review of David Berridge's Knives Forks & Spoons Press chapbook is an argument for 'minimalist' poetry. There is no strictly visual poetry (though Becky Cremin's work contains an element of that) but there is another poetry.

So we have 'mainstream' poetry, 'innovative' poetry, 'minimalist' poetry, 'visual' poetry: each with their arguments for and against, and I haven't even mentioned 'formalist' poetry, which still continues over at Eratosphere, for instance. Each with their entrenched positions - and traditions. Do they have much to do with one another? And should they?

I do like the idea of poets crossing boundaries, stepping out of their safety zones and trying things; that's why I like visual poetry, where the writer is stepping into the territory of the visual artist; and 'sound poetry' which crosses the border into 'sound art' and even music.

But I doubt that anyone can like everything in poetry; I have to say that, despite being intrigued by it, 'minimalist' poetry does no more for me than most 'minimalist' art; I was always more of a maximalist in my taste. I like colour and noise and mess.

So 'genus' isn't probably the right word, as poets frequently like to cross the species barrier and borders are porous as sieves. So maybe it's more like bacteria: frequently mutating into new species and new shapes. And long may that be the case.

Things I'm Not Too Keen On

2010-11-14T14:59:00.000Z

...but can't get overly worked up about:

1) Comedy gigs - I really can't see the point in being in the same theatre as one bloke spouting off for two hours with his own 'amusing' take on the world. I might make an exception for Stewart Lee, but even then.

2) Novels that are more than 200-250 pages long. Really, you need to employ an editor. Most mainstream novels are just not that interesting enough that I need to spend that much time with them.

3) Indie music that sounds just like every other indie band that's around at the moment. Pretend indie, in other words, without an ounce of real originality. But I wouldn't turn it off the radio if it was on.

4) The kind of "art" you find in those private galleries in town, full of pictures of 'romantic' ballet dancers and 'cute' creatures. Art for people who don't really like art but have a space above the fireplace that needs filling. Actually, on second thoughts, anyone got a good flamethrower?

5) Poets with 'crazee' nom-de-plumes. Puh-leeze!

6) Most poetry published by Faber, Picador or Cape. File under mostly dull.

7) Lists. (Including this one)

8) Those 'Fifty Best TV Programmes About Grass' that keep getting repeated on More4.

9) Sequels/Prequels/Remakes of films that are never as good as the original. Or weren't even any good the first time around.

10) Rom-coms starring Jennifer Anniston, any other actor from Friends, or Steve Carrell Was Funny Once Carrell.

Look Out: It's the Rialto Young Poets!

2010-10-28T13:24:00.001+01:00

There's lots of young poets about. Suddenly, fresh young voices are jumping up out of the woodwork all over the place. Some of them sound a bit like what's gone before, others sound different. Voice Recognition, from Bloodaxe, was the first anthology to pick up on the young, along with City State: New London Poets, which confined itself to the capital. Both these anthologies are unusual in British anthologies in having both mainstream and more experimental voices swimming alongside each other, and the last two issues of The Rialto have continued this trend.

Nathan Hamilton, the guest editor of this section of the magazine, has been given about a third of the last two issues to publish these new voices; and he has, as they say round here, done a grand job. As with other collections of new poets, we have a plethora of new names to add to the mix, with a few familiar names. So we have Chris McCabe and Luke Kennard, Heather Philipson and Paul Batchelor; but we also have Ian Neames, the splendidly named Eileen Pun and Penny Boxall.

Hamilton's thesis is an interesting one: he sees the emergence of a generation of poets who are less bothered about the whole experimental/mainstream division. Some are producing interesting hybrid work, of whom he names Luke Kennard as the chief exponent. Kennard's narratives are often absurdist, funny and decidedly odd, often in prose (though here he's represented by two poems.) One can see this hybridism, though, even in a poet like Heather Phillipson: funny, and often with a philosophical edge, juxtaposing ideas but also making a kind of sense.

Some of the names I've read before include Emily Critchley, associated with the latest version of the Cambridge School but very much her own woman; and Amy De'ath, whose poem in issue 69 is, among other things, a feisty feminist declaration of intent:

I bit to chew and chewed down hard to make it known
That I am not here for smiling, coyness, shyness, or was it something
I had in mind grinning growling yakking making my
presence felt or manning up...

From Lena on the Beach

That this selection is deliberately so diverse feels like a real change in the air to me. For the first time maybe since the sixties, there seems to be a genuine movement to break down some of the barriers between poetries. A poet like Toby Martinez las Rivas, for instance, whose two long-lined, meditative poems are a highlight of issue 69, seems to owe as much to Geoffery Hill as to Barry MacSweeney. Todd Swift has tried to promote this hybridisation for some time now; and I think he may be onto something.

Even the poets who seem most comfortable within the mainstream style are perhaps less trying to ape the Armitage/Duffy style than to try to set out their own stalls. I'm quietly optimistic that this next generation will bring up many more surprises.

Writeoutloud Big Weekend & Jerome Rothenburg

2010-10-21T14:15:00.000+01:00

It's been busy of late.

Last weekend, I went as a workshop leader to Hebden Bridge for the first Writeoutloud Big Weekend. We stayed in a hostel, there were about 40 odd of us, and the nights didn't end until after 1am each night. But apart from that, it was a wonderful experience for me when I led a couple of workshops on experimental writing and managed to coax some experimental writing out of people who probably haven't come across it before, let alone tried it. The whole weekend took me back to my roots among community writing groups.

I started by introducing the theme, and the various elements that might make up "experimental writing." It's an odd term: it makes the writing sound a bit like it ought to wear a white coat. But the people who came to the workshops were eager to learn and to participate.

It's one of the problems with "experimental" writers that sometimes there is an unwillingness to explain in reasonably simple language just what you're doing. Of course, all simple explanations falsify to some extent, they're bound to; but one can explain oneself in simple terms as long as one points out that this is a provisional statement of where one is now.

It's already created some reaction on the writeoutloud.net page, with one poet posting his "experiments" and getting a mixed reaction from readers. Mixed reactions are probably a good thing. Better than indifference, at least.

Tuesday night, I went to the reading at the Anthony Burgess Centre with Maggie O'Sullivan, Allen Fisher and Jerome Rothenburg, followed by the launch of the 3rd volume of Poems for the Millenium, covering Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetries. I really enjoyed the first set of readings, especially Maggie, who's work used to befuddle me no end. Which just goes to show that one should always have an open mind. Poetry you think is beyond you can grow on you, get under your skin; and I loved the way she used the sounds of language, the parts of words, as acts of communication in themselves: communicating, not a message, but a feel of a message.

Jerome Rothenburg was also wonderful, though his reading was interupted by my having to go to the loo. Still, I made up for it later by letting him know of a bunch of Lancashire dialect poets of the cotton famine he hadn't heard of... The readings from the anthology were eye-opening - a wonderfully funny extract from Clare's letters about city folk thinking every bird they hear at night must be a nightingale, some of the extracts from late Holderlin, some Issa haiku that seemed to largely involve pissing and frogs...

It was a beautiful reading, and afterwards we went to Cocotoo's underneath the railway arches, which had a replica of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo on its ceiling...

Phone Photos

2010-10-13T13:50:00.000+01:00

Found Poetics

2010-10-11T17:20:00.001+01:00

It's been awhile since I've been here. I've been busy... not least becoming a performer in a band! Not, you understand, a singer - I would not inflict what passes for my singing voice on anyone in the public. But as a poet in a jazz/poetry combo called Backchat.

Which is kind of weird - everyone I know wanted to be in a band at some point in their lives, but most of course never got to be. Now, past the age of 50, I'm in a band. A jazz band. It's probably not the most innovative of jazz bands, but neither is it trad. A bit like my poetry - modernist, fragmentary and all that it might be; but I'm probably not at the absolute cutting edge of anything. I go to The Other Room and Counting Backwards, and I'm always inspired by what I hear/see; but I can only go in the directions that mean something to me.

Last Counting Backwards, by the way, was terrific, including a wonderful performance of the Bricks, by a woman going under the moniker, Sonic Pleasure. Also, Stephen Emmerson's poetry and the improve sax/whistle/recorder/swanney whistle of Philip Bent (I think). A wonderful evening, sometimes intense, sometimes quietly reflective. I'll never look at a pile of building materials the same way again...

What I liked about her performance were the twin aspects of temporariness and recycling. She was re-using materials in new ways, and as she performed, some of the bricks were crumbling as she banged or scrapped them together. A lot of modernist writing incorporates recycled material and found text, in my case, over- and mis- hearings. The modernist technique par excellance appears to be bricollage: you find it in Eliot, in Pound, Olson, Williams; and in contemporary writers such as Frances Presley or Tony Lopez. Even Elaine Randell's poems are using the material of others' lives in her almost case-note like poems.

Although it is how you put it together that makes the poems work, the fact that so much poetry is essentially found, fascinates me. Perhaps all poetry is found; where else would it come from? Poets recycle the world around them, but it's true in other art forms too. Be-Bop tunes are often based on older tunes, or quote them speed them up, add more notes. Collage and installation use found materials. Now there's the basis of a thesis. All art is about finding.

Feel free to use and rearrange any of these words in any order...

Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness by Tony Hoagland : Poetry Magazine [article/magazine]

2010-09-19T15:58:00.001+01:00

Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness by Tony Hoagland : Poetry Magazine [article/magazine]

I found this article fascinating because it actually articulated the differences between mainstream and non-mainstream poetry in a non-confrontational way, as a kind of argument between a rational, logical way of thinking that sees poetry as a vehicle for ordering the world; and the alternative, Dionysian way of seeing the beauty in and through the chaos of existence.

I liked the article because he was not denying the sophistication of anyone, or saying that one way is better than another. He may personally have his preferences, as I do, as we all do. But Mozart is not less sophisticated than Stravinsky; or vice versa. If mainstream poetry can sometimes to some people 'run the gamut of emotions from A to A' (as was said of Roger Moore's Bond), non-mainstream poetry can seem sometimes to be just a disorganised mess.

I like both kinds of poetry, but lean strongly towards the latter. I'm currently reading Sean Bonney's Document, and wonderful it is too: by turns angry, tender, chaotic, political, even personal. But there's also a sense that he has something to say and he's going to say it. Mainstream poets will probably write poetry that 'has something to say': that is about a specific experience or set of ideas, and then they will describe them. This book too has something to say: but he disrupts the message, makes it hard to read, muddies the water. He still wants you to understand, however; he just doesn't trust the usual ways of communicating, so he goes round the back, the side, below and above the main point. Which is, of course, that capitalism is a bad thing for everyone, including poetry. And who could disagree with that?

2010-09-16T10:37:00.000+01:00

I went to That London at the weekend, and while I was there, photocopied some of the poems of Nicholas Moore. Here's one I find amusing, mysterious, slightly dark and somehow really beautiful, from Recollections of the Gala, his last full selection for many years before he died:

Girl With A Wine Glass

Bright intelligence. The foot moves
Skillfully, the small hand holds
Its dearest possession stiff and straight.
A young girl holds the world, a pencil

In her clean, her correct hands. Time -
That dubious bird with such a cunning eye -
Elects to look upon her with disdain,
As though it were nothing she is holding.

For Time, and it our conception of time,
Not hers, proves that it is no pencil
She holds so stiffly, nor that her
Demeanour, correct as it is, is anything

But a bluff. The foot moves. The eye
falters. There is a tree grows
In a foreign land, marked, named,
Of a rare species, valuable and tall,

And this it is which, in the woody pencil,
Her attitude is symbol to.
She is intelligent, simple. She moves
With a direct, a frank movement, talks

Without reticence, is friendly, charming, gay.
And yet she holds that thing withing her hands,
Remembering Salome, and, as she speaks,
One sees the hands fold round that tender head.

It seems almost criminal that this poet is no longer in print.

Getting It And Not Getting It

2010-09-01T13:52:00.002+01:00

Todd Swift's Eyewear review of Seamus Heaney set me to thinking about the question of how different people seem to appreciate different things. http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2010/08/humourless-chain.html There often seems to be a mutual incomprehesion of two different kinds of poetry. In the comment stream, Mark Granier seems to see things in Heaney's poetry that Todd can't see. If I read Heaney, I'd probably feel the same as Todd, I suspect.

Alan Baker puts this difference down to the "increasing sophistication" of the reader of nonmainstream poetries: just as we widen out taste in music to include more difficult pieces as we get older. But I'm unhpapy with this formulation, because it involves a value judgement. It says, nay shouts, "I'm better than you," at the unsophisticated reader of mainstream poetry, who is presumed to be less intelligent, lazy or, even worse, terribly bourgeois and accepting of the comfortable status quo. Instead of being made to think viz a viz language and meaning creation, instead of seeing how meaning is a social product etc etc... they prefer a slice of 'social realism lite', the comforting feeling of being given an insight into the human condition that isn't too different from other very similar insights, an over-described slice of life etc etc...

But then the non-mainstreamer tells us things about language that we already know, doesn't he/she? Don't we all know about the way language is manipulated by adevertising/capitalism/etc etc and isn't it just a bit boring? And why don't they make some concession to ordinary readers, instead of using all these jump-cuts and juxtapositions etc etc?

You can see how the argument goes. I personally can see where this is coming from, and am in definite sympathy with it. But, Janus-like, I can often find myself thinking that yes, there's something in the other point of view too. There are times when I read non-mainstream poetry when I get somewhat tired of being told about language and meaning creation as a social product, etc etc and just want 'a good read.' Maybe not Heaney; I still don't like his little epiphanies about the human condition; but maybe Reznikoff: his social realisms are never 'lite', but his narratives are simple, direct, "unsophisticated." But beautiful: moving, often on the edge of despair but also hopeful. And he never leaves us with any neat insights into the human condition to make us feel good about ourselves; instead you work out your insights for yourself.

In the Starbucks I'm writing this from, there's jazz trumpet coming through the speakers. Jazz is my favourite music; it's "sophisticated." But I also like pop music sometimes. Jazz fans sometims look down at "pop" fans for being "unsophisticated"; not unlike nonmainstreamers looking down their noses at mainstreamers. So I haven't really learnt why one person like Heaney, and finds great depth in him; and another thinks it's nothing that wasn't done in the 19th century. Or another likes JH Prynne while someone else finds him just incomprehensible. In can't just be to do with one person being better than another, can it?

Edwin Morgan 1920-2010

2010-08-22T15:48:00.002+01:00

I felt unaccountably sad on Thursday, when I found out that Edwin Morgan had died. I felt like I'd lost a kind of literary uncle: someone whose breadth and depth of vision, whose experimental nature and willingness to explore all kinds of poetry, from the sonnet to the sound poem, excited me when I first read him and still excites me now. He made me believe anything was possible with language.

So here is my most immediate attempt at, not an elegy, but at representing what he means to me. It's a poem made from words found in the brochure of the Royal Exchange theatre, words strangely capitalised in the paragraphs advertising the plays. As I was mucking around with the words on the back of the bus home, it occurred to me that it would be the kind of thing that he would do, and suddenly it came to seem apt to dedicate it to him:

EXCHANGE SESTINA i.m. Edwin Morgan

STUNNING SAVAGE
PASSIONATE SWEEPING
DARK LIBERATING
GRIPPING URGENT
TENDER HILARIOUS
SHATTERING HEARTBREAKING

PASSIONATE SAVAGE
DARK SWEEPING
GRIPPING LIBERATING
TENDER URGENT
SHATTERING HILARIOUS
STUNNING HEARTBREAKING

DARK SAVAGE
GRIPPING SWEEPING
TENDER LIBERATING
SHATTERING URGENT
STUNNING HILARIOUS
PASSIONATE HEARTBREAKING

GRIPPING SAVAGE
TENDER SWEEPING
SHATTERING LIBERATING
STUNNING URGENT
PASSIONATE HILARIOUS
DARK HEARTBREAKING

TENDER SAVAGE
SHATTERING SWEEPING
STUNNING LIBERATING
PASSIONATE URGENT
DARK HILARIOUS
GRIPPING HEARTBREAKING

SHATTERING SAVAGE
STUNNING SWEEPING
PASSIONATE LIBERATING
DARK URGENT
GRIPPING HILARIOUS
TENDER HEARTBREAKING

SAVAGE SWEEPING
LIBERATING URGENT
HILARIOUS HEARTBREAKING

I hope it's the kind of thing that Edwin Morgan, bricolouer, poet and experimenter, would approve of.

Children of Albion: Part 2

2010-08-17T13:52:00.000+01:00

The previous post really looked at some of the less well-known names in the anthology. People like Pete Brown and Spike Hawkins whose names only get remembered in passing these days. Pete Brown, of course, does have a second existence as a lyricist for Cream and a musician; but a lot of the names are now forgotten.

But there are poets in this anthology who could be classed as among some of the best British poets of the 20th century. Roy Fisher is here, for instance, with extracts from his very influential City, as is Gael Turnbull, Scottish-Candadian doctor and publisher of Migrant press and magazine, seminal British Modernist. Tom Pickard, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, David Challoner, Andrew Crozier are all easily among the best poets in the country, though here reresented by early work. Tom Pickard's combination of Black Mountain poetics and Newcastle dialect is only one of the many innovations here.

Then there are the British Beats. Jim Burns shines the brightest for me; I've always liked the seeming casuallness of his writing and the insight into everyday life his work gives. But I really must go and read some more of Micheal Horowitz, and his wife Frances. Not much could be said about Dave Cunliffe, unfortunately; though two of his contributions seemed to have the stink of real life about them, you could smell the patchouli again. Then there's Herbert Lomas, who may or not have been beat, but here seems remarkably sharp.

It's an interesting snapshot into interesting times, and a window into what might have been. What would English poetry be like if Larkin had been consigned to the margins and Roy Fisher had been the poet to imitate? Or if Gael Turnbull had been more widely spoken of than Heaney? I wonder...

Children of Albion: Underground Poetry 40 Years On

2010-08-12T14:26:00.000+01:00

I bought a copy of this anthology, edited by Micheal Horovitz, in my local Oxfam shop, out of curiousity as much as anything. How does it stand up after all this time? And is it still important or relevant?

There is inevitably going to be some wastage after all this time, and the less successful poems are the ones that bear too much of the imprint of the '60's. Two lines from Tom Taylor's High Sequence encapsulate its worst faults: "Violence is a drag / it brings me down". The hippy egotism of those two lines and their blissed out insoucience almost seem like cliches nowadays. This one poem shows why it's not a good idea to write when high.

On the other hand, I have a soft spot for some of the short instant poems that were probably written on the cuff, like Pete Brown's Vision:

Wow! 2
small virgins
carrying
a gigantic
mattress!

Not, I'm sure you'll agree, the most deep and meaningful verse ever penned, but it wasn't intended to be. This inclusion of humourous instant poetry gives the anthology a charm that is sometimes lacking in more serious collections of avant-garde poetry. Then there's David Kozubei's delightfully Milliganesque Tragedian's Speech:

Death, death, death, alas;
Death, death, death, alas;
Ooooooooooooooooooh!
Woe, woe, woe, woe;
Death!

I don't suppose such poetry was ever really intended to last or be important, and the fact that it got into one of the more significant anthologies of the '60's is a happy accident. But other poets also have a kind of instancy about them that reminds me of Frank O'Hara and the poets of the Lower East Side who were operating at the same time. Poets such as Paul Evans, Pete Brown and Spike Hawkins, with a touch of that English strain of surrealism that descends from Lewis Carroll:

Shot Throughwithbrownlight

She fled from the carriage
In a flurry of sandwiches
That flew around the old man's head
Their springs broken
Like small fishes panting clank

There's a mixture of sharp observation and odd juxtaposition that is very English, as well as being part American. If this is influenced by Blake, it's by the poet of Innocence & Experience, not the poet of the prophetic books.

Blake does cast a shadow over the whole anthology, not just because of the cover, but because of the Afterword, which also invokes the Beats; but it's actually surprising how few of the poets here are actually Beats. The best poets in the book; people such as Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Harry Guest and others; seem to me to be more interested in Black Mountain poetries, New York School poetries and the Objectivists. The worst poems seem like parodies of the Beats. Micheal Horowitz' own poems stand up, as do Jim Burns'; but the poems in praise of hash or about jazz music fail to do much more than be damp squibs.

So is it still an important anthology? Well, yes and no. There is still a stuffiness in the poetry that needs fresh air blowing through it. When Robin Robertson can declare with all seriousness that there are too many poetry books being published, there is still a need for the constant revolution of underground poetry. It's also good to become more aware of the various paths that poetry has taken in this country apart from the official line that leads from the Movement to Carol Ann Duffy. There is much beauty in this book, much joy, and an openness to experience, to the world outside the academy.

On the other hand, it does have its faults. The lack of women poets for one. The lack of rigour in some of the poetry is also regretable, though all anthologies contain duds. Not all the poetry here is particularly avant garde; Herbert Lomas, for instance, though I like his poems here, doesn't strike me as particularly underground. Non-mainstream poetry has moved on too, and there are ommissions from the time: no Jeff Nuttall, Eric Mottram, Bob Cobbing or JH Prynne for instance.

On the whole, I like this anthology. There are parts of it which are very sixties, but it survives the blissed-out hipness and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a trip to the past.

Sidings by Richard Barrett (White Leaf Press £5)

2010-08-07T14:07:00.000+01:00

Richard Barrett's first book is a dinky little thing you could easily fit into your pocket, but contained within are some of the most interesting words to have come out of a young Manchester poet in many a year. It's a pretty adventurous ride through the urban environment from a poet who is aware of the world around him, worries about the economy, works in an office and observes the media-saturated, channel-hopping world we all live in with a mixture of wry humour and a kind of undecieved romanticism.

The book starts with "Reason For Not Writing Poetry", a bold statement considering its possible commentary on what follows; but soon we're bang-slap into the urban environment, with references to architecture, to the consequence of the current lack of coherent policy on social housing. Throughout this collection, politics keeps rearing its head, in sequences such as the rushes and The Hard Shoulder. But this is never an agit-prop anti-capitalist rant; politics is seen here as being as much a part of life as falling in love or going to work. Throughout this collection, we feel Barrett's confusion and anger about the banking crisis, about what's going on with the language around him:

Asked to resign. Meaning
confused. That's sacked.
No hastily typed letter on
the boss's desk.
No assessing the menu for
the cheapest items. Leaving
- hint of a way back -
(to be expected).
CEO states:
at time of mortgage application /
facts were accurate.
Are we supposed to have
that short a memory?
Not idiots. We. Are. Not idiots.

His technique of rapid jump-cuts from the personal to the political, from the external to the internal and from his own thoughts to what's overheard suits these poems well. To use a phrase from his almost-manifesto, We Dig Repetition, he's trying to keep pace with mind.

Anyone with an interest in contempory poetry should be buying this collection.

Novelty & the New

2010-08-01T16:16:00.001+01:00

What's the difference between "the pusuit of mere novelty" and that Poundian injunction to "make it new?"

It's an interesting question, isn't it? Does it have something to do with your own approach to newness? What about gimmickry? Do you use gimmicks in poetry, or are you being "authentic" in reflecting your experience of the world through new techniques? Does the parsing of the verb "to make new" go something like this:

"I am making it new

You are pursuing mere novely.

They are using gimmicks."

All poets, whatever their critical allegiances, have a troubled relationship with the 'tradition.' With all those dead poets breathing over our shoulders (or rather, not breathing...) it's a wonder we ever get any work done... Even innovative poets are often working in areas that have been explored before: flarf is another form of found poetry, viso-poets are exploring areas that have been explored by other poets etc - but they are being pursued in new contexts or with a different approach. There is nothing new under the sun, as the preacher said, yet every day is a new day: we've both been here before and never been here before ever.

What is a gimmick in poetry? Is a sonnet a "gimmick" that just has the dubious virtue of having been around for a long time? Open form has been around since the early poems of Charles Olson: has it now ceased to become a gimmick and become an accepted form of writing now sixty years have passed?

The difference between novely and newness seems to be more to do with the critic's own ideology and less to do with critical acumen. How can you tell that something is going to last? I don't think you can.

Lost Your Voice? Try Strepsils.

2010-07-27T13:35:00.000+01:00

So what is voice? When I was asked what my voice was recently, I was stumped. I don't know. Isn't it up to someone else to tell me what I sound like? All I hear is what I hear in my own ears, distorted by wind, traffic noise, the beating of my own pulse, and the fact that I've got a headache this morning or went to bed too late last night or faint images of the film I saw on TV or repeats of QI on Dave. Is there something that I retain from the first good poems I wrote? Am I still a Northern Anecdotalist (copyright Roddy Lumsden) or have a become something else?

Most of my influences are New American or post-British Poetry Revival. Is that part of my voice. Is a voice a combination of all your influences plus something from your childhood plus some essential essence of individual self that somehow gets preserved from the ravages of just living your life or is there such a thing as an individual self to preserve anyway? If I was to learn another language and write in that, would I still preserve that essential ingredient, the self?

I happen to be somewhat religious, but not in the way I was when I started writing. Then I was a born-again Christian (yes, I am a Survivor of Evangelicalism.) Now I'm a Quaker who isn't at all sure if he can intellectually justify the feeling at the back of his head that there is something he calls God that in some philosophical vague way sort of exists (I could go on but I'd be here till doomsday.) Am I the same person as I was then, or have I changed?

Has my voice changed, deepened, become more or less serious, sonorous, facile, fluent, stammering, louder, quieter, and does any of this matter anyway?

Who am I? And who are you? And who's he (behind you)?

Moving On

2010-07-19T16:18:00.000+01:00

One of the things about being an artist or a writer is that you're constantly moving your own goalposts, changing the way you write. I'm sure there are some who seem to be writing very similar poems to ones they did before; but even the most seemingly familiar poet like Seamus Heaney has changed his poetry over the years. He's not writing Digging anymore, though there are continuities.

But readers sometimes don't want you to move on, and I had this experience recently. My first "proper" book, Calling Myself On The Phone, is very different from the more experimental poetry I'm writing now, though again there are probably continuities. This person, a very good friend of mine, said she liked the simple love poems I wrote then, and why couldn't I write like that now? It's the kind of challenging question that I think every poet should ask themselves now and again: why did I change?

It's a difficult question, because it also came with her feeling that I was no longer expressing my feelings in my poetry. After going through the two-fold process of "am I really avoiding feeling? (doubt)/no I bloody well am not! (anger)" I began to think this through.

And I came to the conclusion that I am basically right, after all, and there is an element of not being able to go back to what I did before, even if I wanted to. Quite simply, I haven't become a less feeling poet, and when I'm writing well, I'm not just doing it for show either. The poems I write now have as much emotion invested in them as the poems I wrote then. This friend of mine helped me to break through to writing about feelings in a way I never had before; and I've never looked back since.

But to expect me to write the same kinds of poems as I used it is impossible. Since then, there have been several more breakthroughs, including the one that led to the cut-ups of my second book Travelator, and the even more experimental poems of my latest pamphlet. Expecting me to go back now would be rather like asking Picasso to stop being cubist and go back to his Rose period. Like him, I can still look back on my earlier book with affection; but I can't repeat myself. I've forgotten how to write like that anyway.

So I'm going to keep moving on: probably my writing in the future will be different from what it is now. Who knows, some kind of clarity will return to my writing; but it won't be the same kind as before. Am I still expressing emotions through my writing? Yes, I am: but now I'm much more abstract. Still bothered about beauty as I always was. Still angry, still alive to feelings of love and loss (my mother has dementia: and the poems I write about that are very painful to write, however much I use cut-up, overheard conversation and chance proceedures.)

Anyway, I'm sure there's still copies of Travelator available, and Salt need your support. So if you still haven't got a copy, do get hold of one...

The Problems of Performance

2010-07-06T10:44:00.002+01:00

I wanted to set down, as clearly as possible, some of my own thoughts about performance poetry. As someone whose alliances are more with avant garde, post avant and experimental writings, I sometimes sound off at performance poetry without really explaining what I have a problem with, so I thought it would be useful to try and be as clear as possible.

Firstly, there are some really good performers about in Manchester, which is obviously the area I know most about. There are also some terrible ones, who don't seem to have much in the way of self-awareness; but I won't embarass them by naming them. But there are performers who are consistently good at what they do, and I'll be mentioning them as I go along.

Secondly, it's very encouraging to see so many young people involved in poetry, and the support that the older generation such as Gerry Potter and John G Hall give to the younger. There isn't a sense of competition or dog-eat-dogness; though it might be there underground, I haven't found it.

So those are the positives; and there are probably many more, but I'm here to talk about problems that I have with it, so let's get on with them. Not that my comments only refer to performance poetry; a lot of mainstream page poetry is not much different in essence, however subtly it tries to hide it. These comments are personal and don't apply to everyone at all times.

Its Eagerness to Please

And I'm not just talking about the way so many performers want to make us laugh by pretending that making your jokes rhyme constitutes writing a poem. It's also a result of having to stand in front of an audience and try to entertain them. Now, there's nothing wrong with entertainment; but poetry is an artform not just show business. The listener should be offered an experience, not merely be amused. I have seen performances like that, where the poet offered us an entrance into an unfamiliar world and we entered into it unsure if we'd come out of it again, and subtly changed by the experience; but not very often.

The poet should never be too eager to please. Or its mirror image: to shock. It's one of the problems I always had with Chloe Poems and Rosie Lugosi. They were so busy being either shocking or entertaining that the real sharpness of their poetry got lost in a frisson of music-hall outrage, that frankly most of their audiences lapped up because that's what most of them had come for. When Chloe became Gerry and Rosie Lugosi become Rosie Garland, I saw genuine voices begin to emerge that were not simply trying to entertain us, or to shock us, but were trying to enlighten us.

A poem really should be itself; it should be an experience of the poet's world. It doesn't exist to please. Though it's not a bad thing if it does.

A corrollary of this is:

Its Cuteness

Look at me! I'm not going to give you anything where you have to feel any bad emotions, sadness or anger or melancholy, and I'm certainly not going to make you think, bemuse you or confuse you, make you feel uncomfortable or bore you.

Now of course, nobody wants to be bored in a poetry performance. But do want to be constantly entertained, amused like a Roman audience at the circus? Or do we want some reality in a poet?

I've been watching Jackie Hagen perform for a few years now, and she's very good at what she does. But her performances have recently become a completely different thing. She used to be amusing, sometimes cute, and was introduced recently as a "poetry pixie." But her recent poems have taken us somewhere darker, much less cute, angrier, wilder. She's no longer trying to amuse us, to show us the wisdom of the jumble sale; she's giving us an experience that challenges us. She recently performed a poem about a man having a heart attack on Oxford Road that was raw, angry and moving all at the same time, that drew us into the experience and left me at least gasping for breath.

Sometimes it explains too much

This maybe a consequence of the kind of people who become performers rather than, say, mainstream page poets or avant garde poets. It might be a class thing or a confidence thing; although performers may have been to university, they may also be working class, or suspicious of anything too difficult or too strange. Now, I would never personally advocate a poetry that requires a string of references or notes, but a little difficulty is not a bad thing.

As an editor, one of my most common tasks is to cross the last verse out. Sometimes the first, but very often the last. This is where the poet explains to his/her reader what the poem is about, or gives us the lesson that the poet is trying to teach us. If you see yourself starting to explain what the poem is about in the poem itself, stop. Not only does your audience know as much (or as little...) as you, but they should also be given the choice to read it or experience it for themselves. Poets and poems are like cameras: they are lens through which other people see the world in a new way. They notice things, and point them out. They are not preachers, or teachers, and they are not any wiser than the rest of the world.

But what if the audience don't get it? That's the fear, isn't it? But then I have to ask, so what if they don't get it? Puzzlement, bafflement even, is as much a reaction to a poem as applause. Sometimes, a poet's imagination runs off into the surreal: so let it. A poem doesn't have to make the same kind of sense that a newspaper article does; it's a work of the imagination not an essay.

Well, I could go on. But this is enough for now. These are my thoughts at the moment, and they'll probably change tomorrow,

2010-06-27T15:46:00.000+01:00

Firstly, more poetry church: I went to the poetry picnic at Linda Chase's place, and helped out on the bookstall. Carol Ann Duffy read to a rapt crowd, and it reminded me of a tent crusade. The poetry? Well, it was OK. Then they sold one of her manuscripts, a handwritten poem, in the auction, and I was thinking: Piece of the True Cross.

Still, it was a good sunny day and I had strawberries, and bought a book about the New York East Village poetry scene in the '60's that was worth having.

The readings at the Independent Book Fair were less reverent, but with Gerry Potter as (very able) compere it did feel a bit like Old Time Religion still. I got the chance to read, and went all pantomime by getting the audience to join in a fairly surrealist poem about Arran. Sneaking a bit of the avant-garde under the radar, I feel. I met some interesting people, including Marvin Cheeseman, who actually told me he wasn't really a poet. Funny, his poems always sound like poetry to me. Maybe a bit further along the line towards "I wish I'd looked after me teeth" poetry than me, but it's still poetry. Poetry goes from "but that's not poetry" wild experimentalism (Paula Claire, Bob Cobbing etc...) to music hall verse, in my book; and if I prefer one to the other, then that doesn't mean that poets who entertain the public with cheesy rhymes should feel that they're not really poets.

Which probably means that I find the sometimes sniffy comments about mainstream poetry that I'm often guilty of making myself somewhat unfortunate. Not that I'm about to praise the latest Simon Armitage, mind. I'll still find it dull and unimaginative. But sometimes, when I'm in a generous mood, I can admit he has his place. The same is true of Pam Ayres, though: personally, it makes me squirm, but plenty of people enjoy it. It's not great literature, though.

If this blog is coming across as a little bi-polar, perhaps that's how it should be. I have my preferences, and my "can't stand's", and I like to think that I know what I'm talking about. But I don't believe in being precious about it either. Poetry is a wide church. Not that it excuses boredom: and if something bores you, just walk away.

Poetry As Church

2010-06-18T13:23:00.000+01:00

I went to a couple of events this week that made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. Not in a nasty way, but nevertheless, it was slightly discomfiting. I went first to see Simon Armitage in hallowed surroundings of the baronial hall at Chet's. He was stood at the front, reading from a lectern and looked his usual slightly bemused Northern bloke, reading from his new book, Seeing Stars. He read well, but the whole event had the reverential air of a church service, with everyone else the members of the congregation listening respectfully to the man in the front giving us his wisdom.

I didn't object to the poetry, which was, as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says about earth, mostly harmless. Quite amusing, in fact, with a slight frisson of soft surrealism here and there. Pretty much Armitage as usual. But a part of me wanted to get up and shout "Summer is in the trees! It is time to strangle several bad poets!" not because the reading was bad, but just to puncture the atmosphere. No doubt everyone would have been polite and they wouldn't have dragged me outside to beat the crap out of me, which is what happened to George Fox when he interupted the sermons in church!

Afterwards, I went to Paradox, hosted by John G Hall because Lauren Bolger was not well. There, with the addition of alcohol and the fact that it was in Sandbar, the atmosphere was much less reverential, and there was music too. In fact, I performed myself. I found myself feeling much more comfortable in that atmosphere. A bit worrying that, as I think I probably drank too much. On the whole I enjoyed the poetry too: and predicted that there was a new San Francisco Rennaisance happening in Manchester. Somewhat over the top, but like I say, I'd drunk a lot.

Then, last night, I went to Pass On A Poem, which again had the atmosphere of a church about it. Only now, it was more like a bible study: here we all are reading these sacred texts out to each other. Not that there weren't good poems: Hopkins, Lowell and a rather fine rendition of The Hotel Brown Poems by John Ash. But again, it was this idea of poetry as almost a substitute faith.

I didn't stand up and read Kenneth Koch of course. I'm far too polite and English for that sort of thing. But I felt like it.

Pre-Arran Thoughts 2: Counting Backwards

2010-06-04T12:35:00.000+01:00

My seciond encounter with the contemporary post-avant this week was at Fuel yesterday. Mike Cannell, Holly Pester and THF Drenching. A very interesting evening.

First up was Mike Cannell, who I have to say was quite good rather than spectacular. His work is still finding its own direction; a lot of what he did was variations on the kind of sound poetry that has been going on since, well, Bob Cobbing. All very well, but not quite individual enough, though I liked individual pieces. And he had the most startling teeth I've seen for a long time, which did give an added frisson of creepiness to the performance. But it went on far too long; by the end of it I was beginning to lose all hope. Twenty minutes is about the attention span of most people; and he went on for twice that.

I think he's a promising name for the future, rather than a fully formed poet yet. But Holly Pester was terrific and really lifted the evening, She only read two pieces; which were both about 10 minutes long. In the first one, she read part of it using a public address microphone that made it sound like messages at an airport and it was a terrific performance. The second piece was one I'd heard before at the Other Room; but it was great to hear again, a kind of apocalyptic piece that might be about the end of the world, or the breakdown of civilisation. She was a quietly assertive presence at the front of an audience who were mainly much bigger than she is.

Finally, THF Drenching: an improvised set using various electronic noise-makers and drums in what was at times a wonderful cacophony of bleeps and hisses and clattering drums. I've never been a big fan of free improvisation; sometimes it's just three individuals doing their own thing; but I got the feeling that there was a lot of listening going on, and they complemented each beautifully, making at times lovely sounds, at others an ugly sound, but all somehow very well integrated.

There was, apprarently, a free-improv session going to happen after the next break; but by then, I was getting tired, last night's long night taking its toll.

It was a great evening, all told; and now I'm all ready to take my post-avant self to Arran.

Each to Their Own (Pre-Arran Thoughts)

2010-06-03T13:13:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was the latest reading at The Other Room, with three very good performances from Susanna Gardner, Peter Manson and Nicole Mauro. After a previous week where I was performing three times, including once in a jazz band, it was a relief to sit back and watch for a change.

I have to confess that The Other Room is a kind of lifeline for me: in a city that seems at times to be dominated by performance poetry evenings, it's a real pleasure to go somewhere where the art of the bleeding obvious isn't constantly on display. And it continues: tonight at Fuel, Matt Dalby and Richard Barratt are hosting an evening involving Holly Pester and others. And then there's the if p then q launch later on this month.

Because I have friends who are very much in the performance or the mainstream scenes, I can't entirely divorce myself from those scenes; even if at times I get so frustrated with the whole thing that I go off on a massive grump about the whole thing. And many of them are good at what they do, seasoned performers or writers of well-crafted poems that might not break any boundaries but are good in themselves. There's a place for performance and a place for well-crafted mainstream poems. Just not anymore on my bookshelves, or in my head.

But it's complicated: I want to be nice to people, and sometimes I say things that make me sound terribly pompous and even elitist about poetry I don't really connect with. And I get frustrated that poet x is famous for nothing much (it seems to me) while poet y, who is actually extending the idea of what poetry can be, is languishing in obscurity. Elaine Randell, for instance, knocks the socks off Carol Ann Duffy. But who's famous?

I like adventure in writing. I like something that is at the edge of understanding, at the edge of acceptable, that makes me think, but that also takes an emotional risk. There aren't many mainstream poets who do that (Jane Holland manages it, for instance, but not Armitage.) I don't see the point in saying what's already been said in ways that have already been used.

Anyway, I've got a whole host of Dusie chapbooks to read, plus a couple of full length collections. So it should keep me satisfied for awhile. I'm off to Arran in two days time, for a week of R'n'R on an island with only two roads and a distillery.

Fame, fame fatal fame...

2010-05-20T14:46:00.000+01:00

...still I'd rather be famous than holy, any day, any day, any day...

So sang Morrisey. And I go off to the Oxfam bookshop in Didsbury, and find there, for the princely sum of .99p, the book Passport to Earth by Henry Graham. This erstwhile member of the Liverpool group of poets from the '60's, according to the blurb, "is considered to be one of the most mature and permanent poetic talents yo have emerged from the 'pop' scene."

What do you mean you've never heard of him? Surely you must have if that blurb is anything to go by...

It's a good collection, actually, as is my only other substantial collection of his, Bar Room Ballads. Tinged with if not occassionally steeped in Surrealism and a deep knowledge of the visual arts, his writing is certainly worth looking up. Not particularly experimental or too dully mainstream, it's certainly more serious and contemplative than the Liverpool Scene of Roger McGough & Brian Patten. The book I bought Tuesday (after I'd had my teeth done) was published in 1971, and if anyone had taken any notice, we might have remembered it the way we remember Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist.

But maybe it wasn't special enough, or didn't get the right reviews, or wasn't taken up on any courses, and it disappeared into that enormous invisible library, the Library of Forgotten Books. Well, it's a good read, worth at least a couple of quid of anyone's money, so if you see it in an Oxfam shop near you, let it be read again, and remembered in the ears of readers.

Mexican Poetry

2010-04-21T12:17:00.000+01:00

I went to a great reading yesterday, with three Mexican poets: David Huerta, Coral Bracho and Victor Teran. It was in the very Hogwarts venue of the Baronial Hall at Chet's Library. There was a bust of the benefactor on the wall, old paintings, a high beamed roof and big old wooden doors that looked strong enough to keep out an army. It was quite an atmosphere for a reading.

The poets who read were all unknown to me, as is most Mexican poetry. In fact, pretty much all of it till last night. My favourite has to be Coral Bracho's very sensuous poetry, but Victor Teran's reading, with translation read by the very dandyish David Shook, was the best in terms of sound. He spoke his own indigenous language of Isthmus Zapotec, a language spoken by only about 100,000 people but one with its own music, and tonal in its effects. David Huerta's poetry is also very good; and he seemed the most "intellectual" of the three.

All in all, a great evening.

How long is a piece of string?

2010-04-16T11:27:00.003+01:00

I think I want to get away from the idea that poetry is a "puzzle." Puzzles have single answers, even if you can't work out what the answer is. So people ask, "what does poem X mean?" as if you can supply them with the answer. And it's not as if you can't supply an answer; you can, if the poem is more than just an exercise. But it's an answer not the answer.

So I often ask, what do you think it means?

And then nod when they tell me.

A poem is not a puzzle. It is a field of meaning, of sounds harmonising and not harmonising, of ideas and feelings and registers of language. It might be univocal or multivocal. It might represent the author's thoughts, but those thoughts might be provisional not fully formed. A poem is a stimulus for the reader's thoughts, not simply a statement of the writer's thoughts.

Some of the greatest literature in the world has been spoiled because readers want nice definite answers to it. The Bible, for instance. People go it it, ask it questions it wasn't designed to answer ("Is abortion wrong?" for instance) and either find exactly what they're looking for or complain when it doesn't do what they think it should. But the Bible - in common with most great literature - was not designed to give answers, but to stimulate thought. The writers of the Bible weren't the systematic theologians of the later church; they were much more unsystematic, working things out as they're going along. That's why I still read it, when I can rid myself of 2000 years worth of theology.

Take the creation narratives, for instance. They weren't intended to be science - no ancient Hebrew would have known scientific method from a hole in their boots - they were stories, intended to be told to hearers in the synagogue and the Temple. Arguing over whether they're scientifically accurate is pointless. The first chapter is a beautifully constructed prose poem, the second chapter is a tale, lovingly retold. They're ancient in origin, and they feel it; but they pose questions about the world such as: where do we come from? Is there a god? Does life have a meaning? 2000 years of theology has spoiled them. I think we need to strip that away and get to the real simplicity of the story underneath.

Identity Parade: Pre-Review

2010-03-31T11:08:00.002+01:00

I thought it would be interesting, before reading the book, to look at it as an object: as as thing to be handled. My friend John Calvert brought a copy round last night, though I don't personally have my own copy yet. So this is not a review of the content.

Firstly the cover. Like the recent anthology of young poets, Voice Recognition, but unlike the light blue livery of The New Poetry, this is a book clothed in black. This makes it look somewhat more serious, perhaps a little more Goth, and perhaps it reflects the more serious times. Voice Recognition has a picture of a lot of young people in a field, and Identity Parade has a rather strange picture of a piece of installation art or sculpture by Annette Messagger, with lots of eyes and faces in it. It's rather creepy, in fact: but it's striking, and on a shelf it would draw the eye toward it, if only to find out what it was.

It's a good cover, on the whole; and it speaks of the contents in two ways. Firstly, both covers emphasise the pluralism which the main theme of the anthology: neither anthology speaks of the single way forward for British poetry. But, whereas Voice Recognition emphasises youthfullness of its contents, Identity Parade emphasises its diversity. Both anthologies are serious (black livery) but Identity Parade is more so.

Both anthologies have interesting titles: one is taken from a piece of computer software; the other is a police line-up. They both suggest what might be one of the major themes of contemporary British poetry: namely, in this complex world of interlocking forces and competing markets, who am I, what am I responsible for? Am I just a blip on a cosmic computer screen?

And the book itself: a handy size, not too big, but big enough to look substantial. Looking inside (again, not really reading the content), the introduction doesn't overstay its welcome. Each poet is introduced seperately with a photo and some blurb, which actually seems useful because it gives an insight into each poet's method as well as their subjects. When Bloodaxe first did this I wasn't sure how helpful it was; but I have to put myself into the mind of someone who is only really discovering poetry through this anthology, and I think they would find it useful, though a definition of terms might have been useful: what exactly do terms such as traditional, mainstream and innovative mean?

So that's the book as a book: later, when I get my copy (anyone magazine like me to review it?) I can give my opinions on the actual poetry. But I think it's useful to ask questions about how it looks on the bookshelves at Waterstones, because that's where people will look at it, or not look at it. I think the rather creepy cover might put some off; but others (Gothy young people?) will find it intriguing enough to want to look in. I like it, personally.

What Me? I'm just Jenny from the block...

2010-03-24T14:03:00.004Z

Any body else experience this strange sensation whenever you find your name mentioned? I've just been linked for the first time to Ron Silliman's blog, and the Other Room blog seems to like my last post too. Great! I should feel glad. But I can't help that awful feeling of "why me?" Every time I see my name in print, I get this awful feeling that it's not me, it can't be me they're thinking of.

It's that Borgesian Other who goes about saying wise and significant things, or even writing half-way decent poems that get put into magazines and published online. It can't possibly be this bloke who comes from a deadend ex-industrial town in East Lancashire and has the gall to call himself a poet.

There must be several selves in there, swimming about. The religious self I hardly ever talk about. The poet self. The pacifist self. The grumpy old man who complains about the traffic down Oxford Road and the self who watches me getting all this attention and thinks, "who does he think he is, a blip on the cultural landscape? Ha!"

Becoming Post Avant

2010-03-21T11:39:00.002Z

1. Don't worry about the name. Today, Mathew I shall be Post-Avant. Tomorrow, Mathew, I shall be "Experimental". The day after tomorrow, I shall be Late/Post/Modernist/Innovative/Non-mainstream.

2. Nobody wakes up wanting to be different. Everybody wants to be different. But mostly in ways that are not different, so we can still have some friends.

3. If Faber came knocking, would I say no? Of course, I'd say yes, as long as they didn't want me to write nice anecdotal poems about my holiday in the South of France.

4. It was a pressure in my head that made me finally admit that I was whatever kind of poet it is I think I've become. I had a failing poem that annoyed me so much, as a last resort, I cut it up. Lo! A light came down from heaven illuminating the path I must follow... or something... Rather, I discovered that I didn't have to do the whole thing straight, that going the crooked route was just as interesting.

5. I want to be as clear as possible. But life isn't clear, it comes at you from all kinds of directions at all kinds of speed. And I have to confess that I like, and think that poetry should reflect my experience, rather than try to impose an artificial order on it.

6. How important is the reader? Important enough not to be mollycoddled.

2010-03-12T11:33:00.001Z

William Blake and the Naked Teaparty
12/03/2010 at 6:56 am · Filed under Publications and tagged: ekleksographia, Jesse Glass, Jonathan Penton, Phil Davenport, Tom Jenks
The new issue of Ekleksographia online magazine ‘William Blake and the Naked Teaparty’ guest edited by Philip Davenport features textworks that emphasise the touch – handwrit and haptic – particularly pieces that consider emotional engagements, human space – that weird trace and corporate/military erasure of the handmade, the human touch, the not-digital. These qualities link into the alternative tradition of poetics – and to ‘outsider’ artists who are owed a debt by the experimenters (an IOU all the way back to Will Blake, he and the Mrs sitting on the lawn in London afternoons, naked, drinking tea).
Contributors: Alan Halsey, Anna MacGowan, The Atlas Group, Ben Gwilliam, Carol Watts, Carolyn Thompson, Darren Marsh, Dave Griffiths, David Tibet, Geof Huth, George Widener, Geraldine Monk, The Gingerbread Tree, Hainer Wormann, Harald Stoffers, Helmut Lemke, Holly Pester, James Davies, Jesse Glass, Jonathan Penton, Julia Grime, Kerry Morrison, Kirstie Gregory, Laurence Lane, Lee Patterson, Li E Chen, Liz Collini, Matt Dalby, Michael Wilson, Morry Carlin, Nick Blinko, Nico Vassilakis, Patricia Farrell, Rachael Elwell, Robert Grenier, Robert Sheppard, Sarah Sanders, Sean Bonney, Stephen Vincent, Steve Waling, Sue Arrowsmith, Todd Thorpe, Tony Lopez and Tony Trehy
The issue goes online 15th March 2010 and will be launched with a 24 hour ‘live’ online writing event by Sarah Sanders
Series Editor Jesse Glass; this issue designed by Jonathan Penton.

What is Poetry

2010-03-04T11:52:00.002Z

My favourite definition of poetry at present is by an American fifth-grader: Poetry is the memory of everything. It can be found in the comments stream at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/02/poetry-is-2/

feels rather dated/follow your nose

2010-02-18T11:08:00.003Z

A little comment on this rather intriguing phrase of Matt's in his generous review of my reading at The Other Room (I personally don't think I was as good as I know I can be - a combination of bad light and the daunting prospect of reading to my first ever totally non-mainstream audience.)

I understand what he means with regard to the pop-cultural references - but than I was brought up with pop music and the like, so that's probably inevitable! I'm 51 you know! (using my best old man voice there!)

But there's a question of what it means to be "rather dated." I read a comment on Tod Swift's Eyewear (by Jeffery Sides) to the effect that Robert Sheppard is no longer non-mainstream because he now things disruptive syntax a little dated - as if disruptive syntax = non-mainstream and non-disruptive = mainstream. Which makes me wonder if there's a set of qualifications for being a non-mainstream poet, a tick-box you have to fill in. Which makes me wonder why I bother, if there is.

Talking sometimes to non-mainstream poets around Manchester, I sometimes get the feeling there's a mutual incomprehension thing going on. After one reading at the Whitworth, one chap asked why do people bother with their little anecdotal poems about animals and aunts and the like. Well, presumably they bother because they enjoy it. Otherwise they would go and do something else. And sometimes I catch myself enjoying it for what it is, rather than what I think it ought to be.

If you spent your time worrying if what you do is "up to date" I think you'd very soon give yourself a hernia. You follow your nose. I think I personally at the moment I'm following my nose in two ways: in one direction, it's all found text and (no longer involving scissors) a kind of cut-n-paste disruptiveness. In another, it's a kind of urban lyricism/wandering through life astonishment at the beauty of it all kind of thing. Some of my poems aren't so much written as assembled.

I listen to a lot of jazz and I think it sort of affects the way I write. I improvise poetry into shapes that seem pleasing to me. It's probably been done before, by someone else, somewhere in the world of poetry. But non-mainstream poetry is not a set of tick-boxes, or novel just for the sake of being novel. If it is new, then the newness is earned, and probably happens not because the poet has been self-consciously trying to be different. It happens because the poet is following his/her nose.

Matt Dalby's Review

2010-02-08T11:05:00.002Z

I recently gave a reading at The Other Room. This was Matt Dalby's review of my performance:

Despite snow there were around thirty people at The Old Abbey Inn for the latest
Other Room reading on Wednesday. The readers were Steven Waling, Holly Pester
and Rob Holloway. To be honest I found my attention wandering a lot throughout
the evening so my account will be pretty unreliable. That wasn't the poets'
fault, it's just been a hazy kind of a week, but it may have contributed to some
of the misgivings I had that will become apparent.Steven Waling opened with
poems drawn from Travelator and Captured Yes as well as other more recent poems.
This was a particularly interesting set because it appeared to offer views from
different stages of a writer attempting to rethink and reposition his practice
closer to where his interests lie than what is conventionally expected of him.
Plainly given my own history over the last few years this has resonance for me,
and it helped that I am more familiar with his work than with that of the other
readers on the night.My personal preference was for the poems from Captured Yes
because they appeared most thoroughly subjected to disruptive processes like
being cut-up and the furthest from personal/confessional poetry. This is not to
say that the poems from Travelator were not disjointed but that the way they
were read tended to smooth over any disjunctions. This is not something unique
to Steven I must stress, it is something I have noticed in some other readers,
and in a slightly different way was present in Rob Holloway's reading. I will
expand my thoughts on performance a little at the end of this review.I like
Steven's collaging of disparate elements from a variety of sources although for
my taste his use of pop culture references feels rather dated. I feel that
experimental musics and poetry on the whole have started to move beyond the
navel-gazing Romantic heroic/visionary fantasy of the artist as the centre of
their art that these references seem to conjure up. This may be a personal
idiosyncracy and didn't seriously impair my enjoyment of the reading. I did feel
that the reading was somewhat tentative and broken-up without that necessarily
being the intention.Steven's poems shift from the present tense to the past
tense or reflection, from specific observations or reported speech/text to more
abstract concerns, from simple language and quotidian detail to complex and
specialist language. There are nods to the conventional formal structures of
poetry - particularly in the form of sonnets that are in the contemporary
tradition of exploding and exploring the form and its meaning rather than the
historical tradition of inherited metrical and rhyme schemes. It will be very
interesting to see where he goes from here.

In mitigation, I have to say at the beginning I could hardly read some of the pages from Captured Yes. I made a mistake there; I'll not use the book again. But he also made some interesting remarks about performance itself which will make me think for the future, so much thanks for that:

My misgivings about Steven and Rob's performances are reflected by a wider
concern with performance that I've become increasingly aware of over the last
couple of years. I appreciate that many poets do not want to perform, that many
would even see it as inimical to their practice. There is the argument that
performance can give a spurious authority to the performer and narrow
understanding of the work. There is also what I would regard as the more serious
problem that performance can draw attention to the poet, that performance can be
used in the development of a persona, and that the persona becomes a block to
critical approaches to the work. Some poetry primarily exists on the page and
any performance would be a form of translation and perhaps remove important
elements of the original work.But while recognising this I believe that if poets
choose to perform, especially if they claim that performance is a part of their
practice or an element in how certain poems were written, then that should be
reflected in the performance. Performance is not just something that happens to
the poem, and the effects on the poem are not trivial or unimportant. For one it
is different from the poem on the page in that it is a unique iteration. Those
precise circumstances of space, people, time, and other environmental factors
will not be repeated. A live performance cannot be reworked and revised in the
same way that poems can prior to their appearance on the page. The page is a
space that looks more or less the same in any place or situation, and that can
be visited at times when it's most convenient for the reader. This means that
the performer is in a unique position to react moment by moment to the specific
circumstances of the reading. For me this ability to be responsive and the
ephemerality of performance are crucial, core differences between poetry on the
page and poetry readings.This is not to say that the performance needs to be
easy to understand, or that the poet should try to project a persona that the
audience will easily warm to. Any glance at the performing arts of the last
century should demonstrate that. But any writer considering performance should
think about what they want to achieve with their performance, how they want to
go about that, and what unique aspects of performance (duration, location,
acoustics) they want to reflect in what way, and how that relates to the poems
they will perform. Surely for someone who wants to perform with any sort of
regularity, or who finds that they are performing frequently, these should be
considered in the same way that words, meaning or non-meaning, arrangement on
the page and other elements of poetry are considered during the writing and
editing of pieces. I may return to this subject at greater length shortly.

The whole review can be found at: http://santiagosdeadwasp.blogspot.com/

Ten Dumb Things To Say About Jackson Pollock

2010-02-05T10:28:00.003Z

1. I can see a face in it.

2. How can they tell it's not upside down?

3. Do you think he paints landscapes in his spare time?

4. I'd hate to be his shrink.

5. The eyes kind of follow you around the room don't they?

6. The more you look into it, the more it looks into you.

7. I hear they've taught elephants in India to paint.

8. I don't know why, but I'm thinking spag boll for tea.

9. Are you sure there's not a face in it?

10. Well, it's deep; I'll give it that.

2010-01-14T11:06:00.003Z

OLD ABBEY WEDS. 3RD FEB. 7PM (in Manchester Science Park)

The Other Room Reading with Holly Pester, myself and Rob Holloway. My chance to be terrifically post-avant without restraint.

The Cold Weather

2010-01-08T10:35:00.002Z

Oh yes, it's beautiful.

But it's murder to walk through.

Still, I've got a few new poems under my belt, and I've already written the first for 2010. It's called May Eye and has nothing to do with the snow.

I've been working my way through Barbara Guest's Collected, being amazed at every turn by just what a wonderful poet she was. I've finally finished Warrent Error, and that too is recommended, for very different reasons. I got hold of Galatea by Melanie Challenger, and I'm currently reading Cliff Yate's Frank Freeman's Dancing School.

I saw the film Nowhere Boy last Saturday, and me and my friend Elaine both agreed that it was very good. It tells the story of John Lennon's difficult relationship with his absent mother and his very different Aunt Mimi, and it's very powerful at dealing with those emotions. Kristen Scott Thomas is brilliant as Mimi, very reined in, a contrast to his mother, who seemed to me to be rather bi-polar. Worth catching.

(Irony mode) Yesterday I achieved my greatest ambition! I went on one of the new Manchester trams! I was visiting a friend near Heaton Park. Very swish they are too, and quiet.

Anyway, Happy (belated) New Year and I hope it's a productive and innovative year for all. I'm reading at The Other Room in February, so be there or be square.

Anxiety Before Entering The New

2009-12-11T10:43:00.002Z

How to be new?

When you're a mainstream poet, it's probably not a problem. You just do another variation on what's gone before. Take Carol Ann Duffy's dramatic monologues. It was a form that Browning and Tennyson made their own; and she brings a new slant to it just by her choice of characters. Psychopaths, thieves and bored unemployed young men. Not, as in Browning, safely set in the Medieval world, or in the past, but in the now. That's what makes a poem like Education for Leisure its power for many people; though technically, it's no real advance on My Last Duchess, another poem about a psychopath.

But the "innovative poet" has to go further; has to find some technical means to be "new." And this, I suspect, can get to be a terribly anxious process if you let it. Hearing Nick Thurston reading his "conceptual poetry" at The Other Room the other day, I was wondering how long he can go on producing things that are so self-consciously original. One of his pieces - a recording of the speaking clock leading up to 9pm - reminded me of a track from OMD's Dazzle Ships, probably their most "experimental" album, and one which explored musical collage and "musique concrete" as a kind of pop music.

In the end, I can only speak for my own writing; but I have to step back from being anxious about whether I'm new or not, and just write the way that it feels right. I'm constantly exploring through my reading and through thinking what it means to be a writer in the 21st century, and what it means to be new; but when I write, I have to be free to write what comes. You have to go on your nerve, as Frankie says. If somebody in 1921 wrote a poem that's a little like what you're writing now, that just means you're part of the continuing stream that is innovative writing. And it won't be the same. It'll be new.

2009-11-24T14:58:00.002Z

Paperplanes did a workshop in Burnley recently, and it went very well, despite us getting a bit bogged down in philosophical questions at one time. The Red Triangle Cafe on St James Street is a wonderful place, with good food if the bean & butternut squash casserole with polenta was anything to go by. And they do lovely coffee - good, strong filter coffee.

The people who came along were interesting and engaged fully with the discussions and the exercises. We even persuaded two people who had never read their work in public before to do so, which I suspect was a real breakthrough for them. Actually acknowledging that the stuff you write is actually worth revealing to other people is the first step on becoming a writer who is willing to publish their work. It takes a leap of faith.

So what was the "philosophical issue"? It had to do with making sense. Should a story or a film or a poem actually make sense? Well, of course, there's no real answer. There's such a thing as "artistic sense:" no-one expects a picture these days to "look like" what it's a painting of. Even in the past, the picture space was manipulated to make a harmonious painting, rather than to reflect reality. Nowadays, an artwork is seen as different from the thing or idea it is supposed to represent, and nobody complains about that. Much.

The same is true of stories and poems. They make a kind of poetic sense, in that they connect with a feeling, with a kind of linguistic pulse, with an idea; but they don't neccessarily follow in a logical order from beginning to end, with a neat conclusion at the end. Sometimes, they're all middle. Sometimes they exist merely as a game with words. Sometimes they give off a strong feeling, but are unpindownable (is that a word? It is now...)

TS Eliot's contention that a poem is appreciated before it's understood is still true. Poems communicate through rhythm, through image, through rhyme (not just end rhyme) and in all kinds of ways that can't be put into any other words than the ones on the page. And that's OK.

2009-11-05T10:35:00.001Z

***PLEASE NOTE***
IF YOU WANT TO ATTEND OUR WORKSHOP
WRITE, REFINE AND GET PUBLISHED
YOU NEED TO BOOK YOUR PLACE BEFORE 2 PM
ON WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 11
You can book your place by phoning Steve on 07954 369 774,
or call in person at the Red Triangle Cafe, 160 St James Street, Burnley BB11 1NR,
or you can phone Andy at the cafe on 01282 832 319.
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2009-10-27T10:36:00.000Z

PAPER PLANES: ALL-DAY CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR
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From getting started to getting in to print – and all the steps between
WRITE Discover new, enjoyable and challenging ways to generate new writing in a friendly, creative and supportive atmosphere. You’ll take home 3 or 4 new pieces of writing and learn how to trigger new ideas for yourself
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Various Marvelous Things

2009-10-20T14:36:00.004+01:00

I've been putting together a new collection recently - writing furiously, in fact. At least six new poems in a couple of months. I've also been reading in some unusual places - a launderette in West Didsbury, for instance, as well as in the usual pub venues. I also performed as part of a jazz/poetry trio in the Didsbury Arts Festival - that was great, as for the first time in my fifty years on this planet, I felt like I was in a band! Anyone who grew up in the last half of the 20th century probably has that ambition stitched into their skin-tight genes (sic)!

The collection, by the way, is coming from Alec Newman's Knives Forks & Spoons Press, which is also publishing the first collection by Simon Rennie, fellow Arranite and runner of poetry events. It's going to be called Captured Yes, and contains quite a few poems inspired by reading the late Barbara Guest. I have several of her collections, but I've also been sneaking into the bookshop reading the monumental Collected Poems, which came out from Wesleyan earlier this year. It's £30 so I can't afford (though if anyone wants a review, they could send it to me...) She is the missing side of the New York Poets pentagram for many people, and if you've missed out on her, go and check her out! She has a luminous depth, and possesses that serious sense of humour that all the NY poets have that punctures pomposity but isn't frivolous.

I'm also reading Elizabeth Baines' new novel Too Many Magpies, but I'm taking my time over it, because although like all good novels, it makes you want to read it, it's more reflective than most, and I want to take my time over it. It's available from Salt, by the way, as of course, is my book, which is still available if you haven't already got it (there, Chris, I'm doing my selling bit for you...;) )

I went to the Other Room and saw Craig Dworkin's film of himself reading, and Micheal Haslam. Haslam was great, wonderfully animated and powerful reading. I can't see myself rushing out to buy Craig Dworkin, though I enjoyed his New York slang version of Beowulf. He only read 100 lines of it, which is probably enough. The rest of his reading was not really to my taste; but it was good to experience it.

During the literature festival, I went to see Ruth Padel read from her Darwin book, which was very good. I also went to see four Buddhist poets at the Buddhist Centre on Thomas Street. That was OK - a bit too mainstream for me - except for one multiple-voiced poem about an abandoned asylum.

So I've been busy.

Pig Fervour & Voice Recognition

2009-09-29T13:23:00.003+01:00

There is a real groundswell of good poetry out there in the world of poetry.

Richard Barrett is just one of these poets, and a very promising local poet (Pig Fervour, publ. the Arthur Shilling Press). Here is a poet who is constantly trying out ideas, experimental and open without being dauntingly obscure. In poems such as "the good fortune of being happy in yr work" he's working out what it is to live in the modern urban environment with its constantly shifting media saturation.

Sometimes, it's like listening in to several radio channels at once, with a blizzard of word coming at you to be sorted out later. I'm reminded of Tom Raworth and Sean Bonney, but this is very much his own world he's talking about. He walks by the canal to Salford Quays, then suddenly breaks off to wonder where he's going with this poem ("Don't use Facebook in The Station?Don't Use Facebook At Home).

This pamphlet feels like a poet slowly finding his way forward to his own - I would say voice, but that's not right, poets often have several voices - style? Method? His long shortlined poems that seem to spill down the page and go off in several different directions at once, are perhaps still a little too reminiscent of his influences, but there's a confidence here that will move him forward.

If Richard Barrett is one of the more promising new "post-avant" poets around, Bloodaxe's new anthology "Voice Recognition" is rather more mainstream in its focus. There are some dizzyingly young poets in this collection, however, so anything is possible. Anna Katchinska's is a bright, sassy voice, as capable of tenderness as it is of hutzpah. And she's only 19.

There are some poets here who feel rather too like the previous generation of mainstreamers - Adam O'Riordan seems rather too much "school of Micheal Donaghy" for my liking (I was never too convinced by him myself, though I understand he's influenced a lot of people.) Others, however, seem already to be branching out on their own, and the ones who I'll be looking out for include Sandeep Parmer, Ahren Warner, Siddhartha Bose, Jonathen Morley and Sophie Robinson. All of them seem to have learned from non-mainstream poetries without being tied down to reproducing them.

Along with Tom Chivers' City State, this has gone a long way to convincing me that poetry is at last begin to burgeon with new blood again. All these poets are under 35 and haven't had a full-length collection published - 21 poets for the 21st century (cheese promotional guff though that is). But they're not the only ones. There are probably another 21 poets waiting in the wings, and there are lots of poets, published by Shearsman or Barque or Happenstance or any one of the new presses out there, who deserve our support. Look out for books from local Manchester presses too: the Arthur Shilling Press, Knives Forks & Spoons Press, ifpthenq etc etc.

I could, of course, go off and be jealous of all this youthful talent. But what the heck - it's not often that we live in an age when so much good poetry is being produced and anyone as obsessed as I am with poetry, it's all good.

2009-08-13T10:28:00.000+01:00

You’re invited to a
CREATIVE WRITING WORK SHOP
Monday 24 August 2009
2 pm til 5pm, only £10
(10% goes to Barnabus causes)
Downstairs in the café at
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473 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester
0161-445 7744

PAPER PLANES: HAPPY ACCIDENTS
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Join poet and Commonword trustee Steve and Comma fiction writer Anthony downstairs in the café with no name at 2pm

The State of British Poetry 3

2009-08-05T10:09:00.003+01:00

Being a review of City State: New London Poetry, penned in the margins, 2009 (£9.99)

The picture on the cover is of fingerprint through which can be seen a map of the London Underground. So far so London: but it says something about the status of British poetry: it goes on under most peoples' feet most of the time. It's hardly noticed by the media, and yet it goes on, beautifully producing.

And here is a good, deep shaft drilled into the poetry of the capital. I don't know what it says about what's going on elsewhere, in Sheffield, say, or Cardiff, or even remoter parts like Cockermouth; but it shows that poetry is in a very healthy state at least in the capital.

What I like about this anthology is its range. There are poets here as Heather Philipson who, I guess, could fit into the latest Bloodaxe catalogue with relative ease. There are others, like Nick Potamitis or the founders of the Oppened readers, Steve Wiley and Alex Davies, who are much more experimental and are carrying on the work of poets such as Allen Fisher and Iain Sinclair. And there's poets coming out of a more performance-oriented stream such as Jacob Sam La Rose, whose wonderfully ironic How to be Black is one of the many highlights of this collection. Holly Pester, too, is a performer, but one of a very different type: her mashups of syntax, semantics and sound probably deserve to be heard as well as read.

Mostly, these are new names to me: except for the very wonderful Chris McCabe, whose first collection The Hutton Enquiry is an essential must-buy from Salt. It's good to see so many young poets in one place, all of them writing in different ways. It's good to see a book that is so diverse: most anthologies have one poem followed by another fairly similar. Here we get the rhymes of Ben Borek followed by the more open-form Siddartha Bose, and a real sense of surprise and adventure.

If it shows one thing, it's that adventure and ringing the changes are still part of the world of contemporary poetry. When the media, if they touch poetry at all, just give us the usual suspects, it's great to know that beyond all that, there's a real wealth of poetic talent about. This is a true anthology of what's going on in poetry now; and even though it confines itself to the capital of this fair land, it's a real barometer of what's going on over the whole country.

Organised Chaos

2009-08-04T11:30:00.002+01:00

Last week saw the wonderful Manchester Jazz Festival, and what a lot of lovely noise and clatter there was about town that week. Although I didn't go to any paying gigs this year, I did see a few bands that were up-and-coming, including the very wonderful If Destroyed Still True, who combine that very English folk-jazz tradition with making a very good and at times pretty free improvising. They were at the Bridgewater Hall foyer, along with a piano trio and the Ryan Quigley Sextet (or Sextent as he kept joking throughout.) They were both good, but also a little ordinary. I also found out about the jam session and the jazz that's going on around Manchester, with a fair number of young people involved. Some great jazz during the week, and at times the rain provided extra percussion effects on the tent outside the Town Hall!

Poetry wise, I read at a charity gig for the Barnabus people who work with sex-workers and the homeless in the centre of Manchester. A Christian group putting their lives where their faith is, as it were; and the evening was gently political, with my old friends Dave Pullar and Claire Mooney providing some excellant ranting.

I'm also impressed by the Unsung Arran issue; a bunch of very enthusiastic young people who put together a magazine for free, organise a wonderful evening's reading in The Thirsty Scholar and generally don't seem to mind being among older folk like me at times. Even if I do have to say no to going on to late night parties, it's good to know there's some real enthusiasm going on with poetry around Manchester. And some of the poetry that came out of the Arran trip - I won't mention names - was great too.

The State of British Poetry 2

2009-07-25T10:12:00.003+01:00

Just as one thinks that poetry is on the rise, one reads the list of Forward Prize nominations (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/23/forward-poetry-prize-shortlist) and starts to despair again. I mean, what an unimaginative bunch. Nothing wrong with any of them; perfectly OK, and at least there is one name who might actually be interesting; but they could have looked a bit further, to say, Shearsman Press, to find a bunch of stuff that would actually be worth reading.

Instead, we get the same old names. Nothing wrong with any of them, though they don't appeal to me much. But it's the same old Faber/Picador hegemony with a couple of Americans thrown in. And in the case of Sharon Olds, an overwrought confessionalist duffer, frankly.

The real business of poetry, meanwhile, goes on under the radar. Get hold of Troubles Swapped For Something Fresh, new out from Salt, to see lots of interesting prose, prose poetic and poetic manifestos from a really exciting bunch of people, mainstream to post-avant. It will give a much more true analysis of what's actually going on in poetry than the Forward Prizes ever could. There we have a truely international grouping of ideas, of thought and emotion from the likes of Robert Shepherd, Nick Piombino, Nathan Thompson, Sheila E Murphy and a host of others, including my own modest contribution.

Perhaps poetry's under the radar status is no bad thing; it can go on and do things that official verse culture can't do. It can speak its visions uncluttered by the demands of the media. But it also needs to be heard. So go out and search out the real stuff, and don't bother with the prizewinners.

Marina Abramovich Presents

2009-07-16T10:24:00.003+01:00

Fascinating evening of performance art at the Whitworth last night. It was weird, first, to see the whole gallery empty of pictures, bare walls except for one room which had been scrawled on by one of the performance artists.

It started with The Drill, where Marina Abramovich give a speech about art then took us through a series of "excercises" that include looking someone straight in the eye, screaming loudly and walking out the room while paying attention to each movement. A good way of getting us to start paying attention of our own body processes and the world around, but being short sighted, looking in someone's eyes was difficult because all I saw was a blur!

The art itself was somewhat variable in quality. Things that didn't work for me included Melati Suryodarmo carrying a piece of glass around while saying "I love you." OK, maybe it's about the barriers we put up even when we say sweet words to each other. But it was a rather dull point, made dully. Similarly, jumping from the staircase onto a mountainous mound below while semi-naked (Amanda Coogan) didn't seem too deep to me.

But I do emphasise that this is something that may appeal to others, rather than me. Things that did work for me, however, included Ivan Civic's Back to Sarajevo, which involved projecting a film onto the wall while the artist climbed all over it, basically inserting himself into a film about a return to Sarajevo. I found it unaccountably beautiful. Similarly, Alastair MacLennan's piece, which involved carefully arranged shoes, all single shoes, no pairs; and also dry earth, pigs' heads, shredded paper, fish and chairs; with the artist himself sitting holding a bit of tree and a shoe on his head, was decidedly odd, but also strangely poetic. It seemed to me memorialising something, some past terrible deed; but it wasn't specific.

There was a little bit of nudity about, with Yingmie Duan exploring "dark desires" by walking very slowly and touching herself in a kind of mock-erotic way, and Kira O'Reilly falling very slowly down stairs, and making me think that if she slipped she could do herself an injury. These performance artists need a lot of discipline and control to do what they do; but I wasn't sure either piece had that much to say.

Nikhil Chopra was the only artist to use the gallery as his canvas, by acting the part of a fictional artist, drawing in charcoal on the walls, in a sometimes frenetic, sometimes meditative way. I liked that piece, not just because there was something happening, but because it had a sense of the primitive about it. In terms of control, Italian artist Marie Cool Fabio Balducci's piece was much cooler; but it seemed almost as if there was a barely concealed passion beneath the choreographed movements, making and unmaking of sculpure using mirrors, string, salt piles and other objects. The way she carefully lit a piece of cotton thread, that kept the flame at the same height as her hand moved down to meet it was mesmerising.

There was something mildly disturbing about seeing an artist's feet sticking out of a pile of rugs; but otherwise I think I missed the point of Jamie Isenstein's piece. Terence Koh lying about the gallery floor while music was playing similarly did nothing for me. But I liked Eunhye Hwang's The Road, which used radio static and her own body to make a curious kind of music. The noisiest piece, though, was Nico Vascallari's piece, in one of the stairwells, which involved him hitting metal on metal and causing the most amazing resonance and natural feedback effect I've ever heard. Although he was at the bottom of the stairs, some of the sound seemed to come from above.

The most disturbing and effective piece, however, was Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich's piece on the life and death of Vitaly Titov, in which he was completely encased in a wooden box, apart from a hole for his mout where members of the audience were asked to feed him, clean his teeth, even scrape his tongue. I took part in this, cleaning his tongue and it was the weirdest experience of the evening.

All in all, a good event and one I think I'll remember.

The State of British Poetry 1

2009-07-07T11:57:00.005+01:00

Seems to me that anyone who's afraid that poetry in Britain has lost its way hasn't been travelling in the circles I've been travelling recently. Though I have been known to complain about especially performance poetry, my second trip to Arran confirmed that even that is in a reasonably happy state, with a new collection from Gerry Potter about to hit the stands (in fact, his first as Gerry rather than Chloe.) Performance poetry is often about story telling, and his stories from life in Liverpool are often highly colourful and moving, though in a rather traditional mode.

I met the poets from Unsung magazine in Arran, who had camped under the stars in Lamlash and got eaten alive by the English-hating midges, who managed to set up a reading in the Lamlash Bay Hotel on the Wednesday evening. A very lively reading ensued, and some great writing from all concerned.

But it's the post-avant side of Manchester poetry that interests me most. I really must get hold of Richard Barrett's latest publication (review copy, anyone?) and James Davies and Tom Jencks are both doing things that both puzzle me and intrigue me. Matt Dalby's sound poetry performance at The Other Room was also wonderful, if at times rather hard on the ears.

In fact, throughout the country, there's a host of weird and wonderful experimental things going on. Tom Chiver's selection of London poets for penned in the margin, City State, has loads of new young poets, many of whom are playing with the edges of what poetry is, mixing up the mainstream with the nonmainstream, the performance with the post-avant, etc...

But all this goes on under any kind of radar. The BBC Poetry Season had Tom Chivers on Late Review, but that was it. If you read the Guardian Review, you'd think all poets were published by Faber and Bloodaxe and there weren't very many of them. In fact, there's loads, and a lot of it adventurous and exploratory in ways that I don't understand sometimes, but I'd rather poetry went to new places than stayed in the same places all the time. Long live British poetry!

Buy Salt!

2009-06-02T11:26:00.003+01:00

If you haven't already, go and buy some Salt books.

There's my own, of course, Travelator, for those who haven't already got it.

Then there's the work of Chris MacCabe, with The Hutton Enquiry and the new Zeppellins.

Ghost & Other is a great book from Geraldine Monk.

Jane Holland's two books are well-worth reading.

Tony Lopez is great.

Help to save one of the best publishers in the country.

Go to http://www.saltpublishing.com/ now!

Oh, and, News Just IN! A Third off all Salt Books throughout June!

Text Festival & Philip Davenport's About Everything

2009-05-15T11:42:00.002+01:00

The second Bury Text Festival is well underway, with an interesting exhibition that at the Art Gallery. I went to the reading for the Bury Poems, where Philip Davenport read from his spell-binding new long poem About Everything, which mixes news reportage with photograph in a dazzling display of collage poetry. In many ways, it's a marvelously polyvalent poem, which can be read in several different ways, so that meanings shift and slide like continental plates underfoot.

But if I have a cavil, it is that it seems a little cold and distant at times; and perhaps reflects a bias towards minimalism in the festival itself. The works are all good, technically polished pieces; and I enjoyed the exhibition. But it rather lacked a little "wildness." Actually, my favourite piece that I say that day was Stuart Pickard's neon tube version of Darwin's Evolution tree sketch from his notebooks. I'm a sucker for anything Darwinian anyway.

I liked the way Philip's poems keep inserting a square box which, when he read from it, he read as nothing. As if all communication is miscommunication and everything amounts to nothing in the end. If there's a like of wildness in the poem, there's also an acceptance of that nothing.

The Bury poems reading was actually stunning. Geoff Huth and Matt Dalby have already blogged about it; but my personal favourite was the poems of Carol Watts. There, I think, is a poet who actually doesn't seem scared of emotions; the poem she read about her "Roy Orbison phobia", with its repeated references to American iconography, was spellbinding, as well as being properly challenging and "post-avant."

They all took themselves very seriously, though. It was lightened somewhat by Tony Lopez photographing the audience, but apart from that, they hardly cracked a smile. Do post-avants have to be so serious all the time? That's why I always prefered New York to Black Mountain or Objectivist: they didn't take themselves too seriously. Jokes are Ok in poems as well as philosophy, you know.

The Luareate

2009-05-09T10:45:00.002+01:00

Some of the reaction to Carol Anne Duffy's appointment I find rather puzzling. Aside from the sexist and homophobic Daily Mail comments, I read on Tony Trehy's blog that some avant garde poets were angry about it. Why I have no idea. Avant garde poets were hardly likely to be in line for it, and most of them think it's irrelevant, so why do they care?

Personally, I'm pleased for her, and if anyone can do the job, she can. If it means that poetry gets a little more attention in the next ten years, and she manages to promote it a little out of some of its self-imposed ghettos, then good. She's not the best woman poet in the country, not when Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, Carol Watts and a host of us are around; but the post has never been about "the best"; and it's never been about the adventureous edge of poetry either. It's pure establishement; and that's Ok.

Mostly, I'm going to ignore it, as I did with Andrew Motion's tenure. I'll get on with life; it's not worse getting hot under the collar about.

Padel & Monk

2009-03-23T15:45:00.006Z

A while since I've been here. I've been getting my head down, working at the prison and thinking of what I want to do next. More about that soon.

I've been going through a slow patch, writing wise, but finally things are coming again. I've just read two books of poetry from opposite sides of the poetic track. One is Ruth Padel's Darwin, which is basically a biography in verse. It uses her characteristic long, loping lines to good effect, and is actually very enjoyable, and sometimes moving, especially in the poems about his family. She inserts a lot of Darwin's writings into the poems; but this is no avant-garde cut'n'paste job; it all takes place in chronological order, it all makes sense, and doesn't do anything more than most mainstream poetry does. But it does it well. I enjoyed it a lot, actually. Though I wished it were more adventurous, that it played with our expectations more, that it surprised us with its form. But I guess you can't expect much more from a mainstream poet.

Geraldine Monk's Ghost & Other Sonnets is a much less mainstream affair that plays with the 14 line structure of the sonnet to create dense, rich sequences and connections that are much more the kind of thing I usually like to read these days. This is probably at first glance more approachable than some of her work, but it is in fact as intriguingly structured as any of her work. The sounds of some of these poems are often extraordinary; and picking one's way through the fractured narratives, glimpses of imagery and song and the juxtoposing registers of speech here can keep you rereading for hours.

It's good to see both of these collections. If I prefer one over the other, it would have to be the Monk. She seems to me to have a handle on how we experience reality in these days where even popular films like Pulp Fiction can interweave several narratives at once, can justapose time zones and themes with a kind of cut-up craziness that make your head spin. Ruth Padel seems stuck in the old chronological, hyptactic way of thinking; whereas everyone these days is getting used to thinking paratactically. It's how the internet reads the world, cyberrealism not realism.

The poetry of the future will be less tied to the old realism, methinks. But who knows? We might see a return to narrative...

Martin Stannard "Faith"

2009-02-04T10:15:00.003Z

(Shadowtrain Books £8.95, http://www.shadowtrain.com/)

A new book from Martin Stannard is always an event for me. He's one of those poets whose voice - as cynical and world-weary as it often is - always seems fresh and open. He's probably one of the few poets in England who has genuinely brought that New York insouicient air of Romantic avant gardism successfully into English.

His poems are not difficult, but they do sometimes contain words like "happenstance" and "plangent". He's often funny, but he's ultimately serious about putting life's events into poetry in a way that takes them seriously, but doesn't over-inflate their important. He is, as the blurb on the back says, "keeping it real" but not in the usual way. There's none of the "look at me I'm working class" posturing you sometimes find in poets who want to tell you how they've suffered.

Well, Martin Stannard has suffered. So have I. So have we all. So get over yourself. His poetry about relationships reminds me at times of Jimmy Schuyler's approach to his madness, where, instead of Lowell's "I have suffered for my art, now it's your turn" schtick, we have "Jim the Jerk", going loopy but still able to laugh at himself. So the poems in the "Coral" section (previously published as a Leafe pamphlet) mock his own attempts to impress a girl with little bits of casually thrown in French words. It's easy French, and translated in the poem anyway, but does highlight the absurdity of the situation. He's serious about not being over-serious.

I've been a reader of Stannard's poetry since his pamphlet, The Flat of the Land, and he's published a lot since then. But there's also a lot still out there: some of it on the internet, some of it in obscure magazines all over the place. One day, his Ouervres Completes (Complete Works)will be so enormous that it will fill several shelves of volumes. And all of it will be full of an energy, a drive, charm and lyrical verve that very few poets in England have managed.

I can't tell whether this is as good as his last book, and I'm not sure I care. This is Martin Stannard, and he's better than most and a lot better than many. This book lives up to its title poem: it shows a profound "faith in poetry"; a belief that "The best poetry is of its time/ Or marginally ahead of it."

Excellance Be Blowed!

2009-01-28T16:02:00.003Z

I just read Tony Trehy's blog and, as we Quakers put it, it "spoke to my condition." The idea that art has to conform to some "standards of excellence" really gets my goat. There are lots of things that art can be, including messy, unruly and - actually - bad; and I think it should be allowed to be so, without interference from some jumped-up arbiter of taste.

"Excellence" targets and the like strike me as about that awful thing, the promotion of "good taste". I think it might have been the Futurists, or the Dadaists, or some such band of reprobates, whose slogan was, "TASTE IS THE ENEMY OF ART", and while the capital letters might be a bit much these days, it's still true. Taste is not something an artist should be worrying about. In fact, if we're always looking over our shoulders to see if our art will fit certain criteria of fashionable good taste, we will never produce anything that's any good. We'll provide the kind of art that looks nice on a wall, or the kind of books that sit nicely in a middle-class family bookshop, probably unread but with a nice coffee. But we won't produce anything that makes people think, or feel, or be disturbed, or feel like the top of our heads have come off.

I can still remember the way I say the world after I'd been to see the Patrick Heron exhibition in the Tate. Everything was more colourful and clear than it was. The same is true of the first time I read TS Elliot, or Frank O'Hara; or John Donne. Something that I couldn't explain was happening. I doubt very much that any of those people were thinking about whether their art fullfilled certain criteria of excellance. Was it accessible? No, it was quite often strange and inaccessible. Did it meet the needs of the local community for cultural product? Not in the least. It was elitist high art and it didn't pretend to be otherwise.

Art still can do that; but not if it has to fullfill certain criteria, if it has to conform to standards of taste, or appeal to certain groups of people. It can only take the top off your head if it surprises you, if it makes you feel and think differently from how you thought and felt a moment ago. Down with excellence!

Jen Hadfield & Mick Imlah

2009-01-13T15:21:00.003Z

I'm rather pleased that Jen Hadfield won the T.S. Eliot - she's only 30 so it shows great foresight on the part of the judges. She's also a little bit non-mainstream - or she is to some. Myself, I don't think she is very; but she's got a lot more going for her than some of the old warhorses that were also up for it.

I also heard of the death of Mick Imlah - very tragic - of motor neurone disease. A horrible way to die. I don't really know his poetry, and it doesn't seem like my sort of thing. But it's still a sad loss to British poetry.

Prog 2 (Tales from Typological Oceans)

2009-01-06T14:01:00.003Z

To compare innovative poetry to prog rock is, perhaps, rather cheeky, and there's not that much in common really, apart from the fact that they both started in the late '60's. Prog bands that "made it" (Yes, Genesis & Pink Floyd basically) ended up as bloated shadows of their former selves and were not all that experimental really, except in their early days.

But the urge to step away from the norm, to explore new territories, new sound or wordscapes, is the continuity between all these movements. And I don't see much of it happening at the moment, except in isolated pockets. Tony Trehy's innovative Text Festival, groupings such as Oppened and The Other Room, aside, there's the constant need to try and sell books. And people do like to be able to hum the tune...

But there's always a tension between writer & audience. The writer wants to reach for some kind of (even if only temporary, provisional and fractured) vision of the world, the reader wants something to read. That challenges - if they're in the mood for it - but is approachable. But not too approachable - we want to feel that we are special for being able to understand this. Prog fans saw themselves as a breed apart - largely male, geeky and grammar school. Do readers of innovative writing feel the same way?

How much do writers consider their audience?

I've just read a poem that is very approachable - an elegy for Brian Glancy. A very traditional elegy in many ways. Not at all experimental. Bit like Pete Sinfield writing for Bucks Fizz?

Prog & Poetry

2009-01-03T10:41:00.003Z

I watched the programme, Prog Britannia, on BBC 4 yesterday, and it was interesting that there were some of the same problems you get with people who are "non-mainstream" in poetry. In some ways, it confirmed my prejudices: a lot of them were public school boys or music school graduates who were often very good musicians, playing as many notes as possible and coming up with "concepts" to do with Tolkein and fantasy rather than real life. And its demise was as much to do with the bombast of its attempt at a Gessamptwerke (total work) involving overblown theatrics and lots of dry ice. But then one remembers U2's Achtung Baby tour...

But what struck me was that here again were a bunch of highly intelligent people being - well - highly intelligent. That old bugbear of English anti-intellectualism began to rear its ugly head. Though shalt not have any big ideas... And the other bug bear of not wanting to be bored. If you're capable of writing a work that lasts 20 minutes, involves several key changes and references everything from TV theme tunes to Schoenburg, why limit yourself to the 3 minutes blues/rock riffathon? Some of the people involved were not only considerably good musicians, but actually wrote challenging music that actually utilised new ways of working: Robert Fripp, in particular.

Others, of course, such as Caravan and the Canterbury bands, were plugging into a vein of English romanticism that includes Vaughn Williams and Britten, as well as utilising that peculiar ly whimisical strain of British surrealism that includes Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. And they were bringing this into rock music. Bands like that were, in many ways, the very opposite of the bombastic strain of Emerson, Lake & Palmer; which, frankly, even now just looks like a low-rent Wagner.

There were many things wrong with it, of course. Often, the ideas were not all that original: concept albums around the theme of Tolkein are a bit, well, jejune. Sometimes all the twiddly guitar and keyboard solos were less virtuoso and more self-indulgent posing. A little restraint would have avoided some of the pitfalls. But then, they were young, smoking a lot of wacky backy and no-one was actually stopping them.

It all reminds me a bit about the avant garde poets of England in the '70's: no-one was really stopping them do what they liked, because not many were actually listening. No doubt, if a non-biased way of reading such poetry ever happens, we would sort out the really good stuff from the not-quite-acheived and the overblown. But the fact that lots of people were trying things out, experimenting, making odd noises, going in wrong directions to see where they led, that wasn't a bad thing, was it?

2008-12-24T10:58:00.001Z

MERRY CHRYSANTHEMUM!

Gob blues us every wan

Adrian Mitchell RIP

2008-12-21T12:42:00.002Z

I've just read the sad news that Adrian Mitchell has died, of pneumonia.

He was something I could never be: a popular poet who never compromised on quality, who entertained, was thought-provoking and an inspiration for so many others. I have seen him perform on a couple of occasions and he was always great, a graceful reader with a quiet but assertive voice. He never had to shout and never went in for histrionics, and he always looked comfortable in himself.

His last poem has been posted on the Bloodaxe site.

On Having Nothing to Say, and Saying It

2008-11-21T14:22:00.001Z

Seems to me there's two approaches to writing poetry, which can be summed up as "having something to say" and "letting the something say you."

Many poets, I suspect, "have something to say": a subject, either over their whole life, or for a particular work. It could be "capitalism is bad, socialism is good" or it could be as simple as, "I had a really good time on holiday in Greece."

Others - and I sort of count myself among them - actually don't have something to say themselves, but are trying to "listen in" and then record what the world is saying to them. The American poet Jack Spicer, put it succinctly: "you don't speak to the Outside, the Outside speaks to you." He had this idea that the poem didn't come from inside the poet, but from some outside source, as a kind of channeling thing, that you ought to remove yourself as far as possible from the poem so that you can hear what the poem/world is saying to you.

I can see this as sounding terribly mystical and foggy, but I can identify with it as well. Some of my favourite poems of mine are in some ways mysterious to me - I don't know where they came from. I work out what they're about as I'm writing. Or sometimes months later, after I've read them several times or published them in magazines. I still don't know what some of my poems are "about."

That is really why I started cutting and pasting, and why even though I don't use that technique as much now, chance techniques are still really important to me. Poetry to me is not about imposing my view of the world on other people but about seeking what the world is trying to say to me.

All this, of course, is only a partial explanation of what I do. And it doesn't mean that I've totally rid myself of ego in some zen kind of way. I'm still the same bundle of ego and uncertainty I used to be. But it does explain why "meaning" as in something imposed by me on the reader rather than something the readers discovers in the act of reading, is something I might want to get rid of in my own poems.

Sonnets

2008-11-18T15:04:00.003Z

Been reading the Reality Street Book of Sonnets, edited by Jeff Hilson recently. I'm inclined to actually agree with Ron Silliman that it's one of the best and most significant anthologies produced in the last 25 years. It's full of so many different versions of the sonnet (and some things that aren't even sonnets) that it makes me gasp at times at the possibilities of the form. Everything from the concrete poetry of Mary Ellen Solt to variations on Berrigan's sonnets to the recent uses of the sonnet "box" by Abigail Obourne and Sophie Robinson.

There's a great deal of humour in this collection, and the sonnet is variously stretched, squashed and bent out of shape, though most people stick to at least one of the rules, even if it's only the 14 line rule, or the volta, or that peculiar out-of-balance octet/sestet division that makes it still so fascinating. There are poems and poets I don't get on with yet, but that's true of any anthology. A lovely Christmas present for the post avant poet and linguistically innovative chaps and chapesses out there.

Speaking of presents, I have recently reached the grand old age of 50. Time to lift my old willow wand to the crowd to acknowledge the applause of the crowd at reaching my first fifty. And I bet you never expected a cricket reference from me, did you?

Remembrance and Hypocrisy

2008-11-10T10:19:00.004Z

Anybody else out there feel that all this Remembrance stuff that's all over the place is a teeny weeny bit hypocritical? Here we are again, remembering the "heroic sacrifice" of the First World War, while another set of young men go out to the Gulf and Afghanistan to be "heroic sacrifices" in another pointless war.

All those young men who died on the Somme (including among them, ancestors of my own family) didn't die for a great cause. Let us be clear about this: they died in vain, to support the flawed values of a bunch of tired empires trying to prop themselves up by killing young people. They were not heroes, great warriors going in to battle evil dragons; they were ordinary working people who died in their millions to uphold the great dragon of British imperialism. The Germans who they fought were also ordinary working men upholding their own dragon of imperialism. They were no doubt terribly loyal and patriotic and, like the well-brought up young people they were, they did as they were told.

But they were sold a lie. Just as the young men (often, in the case of American troops at least, poor and ill-educated) who march off to Iraq and Afghanistan are now. Watching the black-uniformed officers marching up to the Cenotaph to lay their wreaths makes me kind of sick. These people - or at least the politicians who declare wars - are still sending young men to die for British imperialism, pretending that it's a great sacrifice, invoking God and Christ as being on "our side", and it's just as much a lie now as it was then.

But there are still some brave souls who refuse. The conscientious objectors who refused to "go for a soldier", who refused to obey orders, who refused to prop up the dragon of hatred, prejudice and greed that is still what imperialism means, deserve to be saluted. They deserve their own monument. Refusing to kill is every bit as brave as going out to kill your "enemy." In fact, it's braver. Who is my enemy anyway? An ordinary Iraqi who gets in the way of a bullet? A young German man who's just come from the fields to die in another field?

Geeks and Elites

2008-10-21T13:29:00.004+01:00

I went twice last week to the Fab Cafe in Manchester, a place dedicated to cult TV and what it calls "independent" music. It made me think some rather naughty thoughts.

There I was, basically in a crowd of geeks, people who could tell you cast lists and continuity errors in Doctor Who or Star Wars, who could talk the hindleg off a donkey about Star Wars, and I wondered, are poets like this too? Except, of course, we're interested in "high culture", not the "low culture" of long-running TV series that are perhaps not the most intellectually stimulating of programmes.

Except - they do often deal in quite poetic themes about the nature of reality, of time, even of memory. There are often quite complex themes about the nature of what we call life - is a pan-dimensional cloud of glass "alive" in any way, for instance?

I used to read science fiction all the time, and now I rarely do. Nowadays, I read an enormous amount of poetry. Most poets like to put themselves as rather superior to science-fiction fans, especially the kind of fan that dresses up as a Klingon. Yet being passionate about our art is exactly what makes us poets. Fandom is, perhaps, rather secondhand; someone else has usually done the writing, unless you become one of the many who write their own stories as an adjunct to the franchise; even then you're just slotting into an already established format. Rather like neo-formalist poets, he suggests with a tongue wedged firmly in his cheek...

One thing that fans have in their favour is that nobody ever suggests that their interest in and love of a science-fiction series is ever called "elitist", unlike those of us who are interested in "high art." Whether that "high art" is contemporary visual art, classical music, opera, or poetry (especially of the difficult late-modernist variety), it's assumed that if you like something that only a minority like, it must be "elitist."

But it's really no more elitist than watching every episode of Blake's Seven 10 times. Or prefering Tom Baker to David Tennant. We may like to think of ourselves as being concerned with more important ideas to do with language, culture etc etc etc, but I often wonder if a good science fiction story isn't as much concerned with those as poetry is.

Of course, all this could just be a temporal shift anomaly and really we're still back in Kansas.