Elizabeth Bishop

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

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

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

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

This is the blurb I wrote for my forthcoming book:

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

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

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

Not Liking Auden

I had an intriguing conversation with Peter Sansom yesterday, in which we covered many subjects. I'd met him in Manchester after he'd been to a meeting with primary school teachers. We went for a cup of tea and chatted while he waited for his train to Sheffield.

The most interesting, however, was when we started talking about the famous poets we didn't like. We both agreed we didn't like Glynn Maxwell's poetry, but I said that I didn't like Auden much and he said he did.

Auden? I don't like Auden? But surely he's one of the major British poets of the 20th Century? Yes, he is, and no doubt a great one, but I just can't read him...

This isn't about whether they are "good" or "bad" poets. I can recognise Auden as a good poet - but for some reason, I just don't like his poems. Maybe it's that feel schoolmarmish to me - I don't really know. I'd make an exception for Funeral Blues but only because I have a rather shameful love for Four Weddings & a Funeral. I've had the same problem with Olson from another perspective - great poet, but it just doesn't work for me.

Admitting you don't like someone that everyone else thinks is great feels like letting out a great secret. It feels slightly sinful to not like a poet with the reputation of Auden; like saying you don't like Shakespeare (I do, actually.) But I think it's good to let these things out of the bag. Great cultural icons sometimes seem to be beyond criticism, and little old me couldn't possibly measure up to them. Well, maybe I can't be as skillful a poet as Auden undoubtedly was, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend to like something I don't.

So I'm coming out of the closet: I don't like Auden. I do like MacNeice, however. Louis MacNeice was, for me, the best of that bunch. I could happily take his poems with me to a desert island and spend my time reading them.

Library day

I went up to sunny Preston this weekend, where there was a networking day for writers and librarians. I got there late, due to not sleeping well the previous night; but apart from some introductory remarks, I don't seem to have missed much.

It was good to realise that there are people in libraries trying to promote writing and reading, even within budget constraints. I met people from Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Tameside, Cheshire and other parts of the North-West - as well as a few writers I've never met before. And someone I've met before that I'd forgotten I'd met. Apologies to her - I seem to have senior moments with gay abandon these days.

We came up with some nice ideas - including one for a kind of poetry tribute band - called perhaps "Huge Ted?" - to read favourite poems by other writers. Poetry's often put on a pedestal in many ordinary readers' minds - one it doesn't have for poets themselves - and they feel scared by it. Breaking down those barriers is always difficult, challenging and necessary. I'll have to follow up some of these contacts, do some kind of project - especially with my new book coming out, these contacts are invaluable.

Libraries have always been tremendously important for me - sources of good books, information, even computors these days. And records, CDs etc. It seems that some libraries at least are trying their best to encourage new readers and bring people into the sometimes imposing buildings that a lot of libraries still seem. I'm in one now - an elegant Edwardian local library that is both well-preserved and well-used.

I should have taken some books - unfortunately, out in a rush and all that, they stayed at home, apart from my reading copu.

Discovering/Recovering British Jazz

Isn't it a shame that we British are so crap at doing justice to our own achievements? Well, except for sporting achievements, and even there, we're more concerned with not winning the world cup than with winning the Ryder Cup for the third time in a row. Not that I'm a golf fan - or a fan of any kind of sport. Nevertheless, a twinge of delight went through me when I heard that we'd beaten the Yanks into a very ignominious second place.

Another place where America thinks it's the best and British people are inclined to agree with them is in the jazz world. Of course, Americans (African Americans mainly) invented it, so they ought to be best at it. There's a lot of great music came out of American jazz - from its origins in New Orleans to such greats as Coltrane, Miles Davis, Mingus, Coleman, Monk.

But then it came to Britain, and in that way jazz has of both transforming and being transformed into something new and strange wherever it goes, it took root here. Not that many people in this country are aware of it; but there are some great British jazz musicians who can equal the achievements of any American, except possibly for a handful of the very greatest.

Take saxophonist Joe Harriot, for instance, who refused to go to America because he thought he didn't need to. He came to Britain, where his invention of free form jazz was at least as radical - in its similarity to and in its difference from - as that of Ornette Coleman. There's much to be said about him, about how he's been allowed to fade into invisibility since his early death.

Or Tubby Hayes, who could blow everyone else away, and whose Mexican Green is one of the great British jazz albums. Or the still-playing phenomenon of Stan Tracey - whose Under Milkwood suite is one of the seminal moments in British jazz. It's a very British album - in its lyricism, its feel for the intimate landscape of sound. American jazz is often very urban, spiky and assertive; British jazz insinuates its way into your soul. It doesn't shout often; but it speaks with great depth of feeling.

I've just been listening to an extraordinary album from the early 70's, Troppo by pianist, composer and band leader, Michael Garrick. It's a frighteningly good album, full of extraordinary playing from such people as Don Rendall and Art Themen on tenors, Henry Lowther on trumpet and Dave Green on bass. Then there is Norma Winstone on vocals - whose voice soars and swoops through every track. One track stands out: Fellow Feeling, where Coleridge Goode, Joe Harriot's regular sideman, takes over on bass. There's a section of the tune where Winstone and Goode's swooping wordless humming and Goode's bowed bass are soloing and duetting off each other in such unity that you feel like you've been taken into a new world, where everyone walks around with one less skin on them.

I've only just begun to explore this music that we've been so good at hiding from ourselves for so long. Britain, whether it knows it or not, has been and still is a great jazz nation. Maybe if there's a Ryder cup for jazz, we might just give the Yanks a run for their money.

News

Exciting news on the publication front.

It seems I'm about to join the Salt stable. One of the leading new publishers of an incredible variety of poetry and criticism, from the feircely avant-garde to the interestingly mainstream, it feels like a real privilege to be part of their organisation. See what I mean at their website: www.saltpublishing.com - one of the best poetry sites on the web methinks.

The book will be called Travelator and will include lots of new stuff, and maybe the odd old poem that I can still read without cringing.

I still keep slapping myself to see if I'm dreaming.

Englishness

I've been thinking about Englishness, and what it means to me. Not yet come to any conclusions, of course; but I do have a few interim thoughts.

1) there's more than one "England," and they're often opposed to one another.

There's the England of the rural South-East, all chalk downs and nostalgia for the past, and the England of the future, all coffee-bars and glass-fronted offices.

There's the urban experience of the industrial North and the suburban experience.

There's the tough-as-nails landscape of the north and the seemingly softer South.

There's the England of the immigrant - from the Jews who've arrived here since they were allowed back in the country (18th Century?) to the England that the Polish plumber (yes I know that's a cliche) meets on his arrival in Stoke-on-Trent.

There's the England of the radical left - the Diggers, the Quakers, etc and the England of the Anglican Establishment.

There's the England of the empirical down to earth Movement poets and the England of the neo-Romantic imagination (from Dylan Thomas to Peter Redgrove and beyond.)

2.) Everybody's nostalgic for something. Nostalgia is where a lot of poetry comes from, but it can be dangerous if over-valorised.

Not been around for awhile. A bout of the blues, the probable collapse of Brando's Hat the magazine and other such things has kept me away. I shall hopefully get back to having something to say soon. In the meantime, here's a recent poem:

FOR THE WEEKEND


Everywhere the same man washes his car.
Indeterminate, in all the cul-de-sacs,
hours stretch from one galaxy to the next.

Long weekends are a wet black hole
where the tree that bears no fruit's cut down
and neighbours fall in love with themselves
then rise unrefreshed at 11 or 12.

More at least than these carbonised words
for all this effort in the kitchen. A recipe
ought to have something to show for it.

But those days I was able to lie abed,
tell huge whoppers all night, are gone.
I thought we'd all be editors someday,
not yet wanting to be tied down.

Poems by Henry Muguluma

I’m Henry Muguluma, 24 years, male, a Writer, Teacher and Project Director. I live in Kampala, Uganda working as a fulltime Director of Gaba Child Sponsorship Project. I’m currently compiling my first poetry manuscript; with some poems on the net. I also teach English Language and Literature in English.

In Transit

Some shout and some quiet as
We squeeze
in a taxi whose

Number we didn’t read and
Whose mechanical state

We can’t tell, trusting
The unknown driver who

Seems more
into his wasiwasi
Than his passengers and

A conductor who begged
Us to board and now barks

For the fare as if we were
To escape
through windows;

One-way, two-way, roundabout
Stage, stopover,
refuelling

Overtaking and being overtaken
Bumps, potholes, corners,
jam

Parking on driveways and
Driving on parkways

Traffic
stopping us for those
Who won’t stop for us

Past familiar faces and
places,
Unfamiliar places and faces

Signposts pointing us where
They have never been

Seeing so much to take with us,
So much we
can’t take with us

Trees running, even houses
Away in the opposite
direction

Some traveling miles for smiles and
Some hating the
journey they make

But heaven or hell, we’re all
Dying to get there.

Confession


Again yesterday evening
I grabbed a cheap one
off
A bunch in Kisenyi.

So tempting in her yellow
Sun-scorched
smooth
Cotton coat with
A black brown cap.

Pulled her closer and
Her perfume stirred the monkeys.

Ripe, innocent.
Could feel the
eyes of
The hungry woman by
Her full basket

But for hunger, I
Devoured her, all
Of her, leaving no
Sugar for pancakes.

Do
you also like
Bananas?

Konyi’s Harvest

When
he finally marched to Freedom Square
Eyes didn’t see him,
Ears didn’t
hear him,
Hands didn’t salute him,
Legs didn’t attend his swearing-in:

They all stayed back in
Gulu, Kitgum, Lira. Busy
Burying the
dead.

I worked with Henry on the Crossing Borders project, and he came on leaps and bounds as a poet.

Reading

Quick notice: I have a reading coming up at Manky Poets, Chorlton Library, on the 16th June. It starts 7.30pm for 8pm, then there's an open-mike spot, then there's a break, then there's little old me, where I'll no doubt be reading more of me sonnets, and more.

Sonnet

Thanks for you kind comment on sonnets, Micheal Farrel.

Here's my reply to those who say sonnets are old-fashioned:

It is of course a sonnet:

someone asked why write a sonnet these days/

my reply? His peircing pince-nez/

dear ted, it's 12.33 pm a sonnet is a shape/

for thought/

all I hear is amateurish crap/

quick a lost poem before i go off my rocker/

for lost read last, for last read list/

only six more lines to go/

i'm writing a sequence of sonnets at the moment/

dear ted, are you spinning?/

soq is mostly boredom dressed up in a nice suit/

seems like a combination of all three to me/

the sonnet an ideal, a small explosion/

in the box of your ear. dear ted hello

Pacific Overtures

Went to Leicester Haymarket to see Pacific Overtures, Stephen Sondheim's extraordinary musical about the first meeting between the Japanese and the American. Very good in many ways, and worth the trip, though I was a bit unsure about all the corporate sponsorship from a Japanese firm at the end. Very well sung and with a great dancer playing Admiral Perry.

I met the musical director, who didn't take much to the version of Sweeney Todd I'd seen in Manchester, with its singers also being the musicians etc... Now, I liked that; though I can see it wasn't the "correct" way to do it. Not being a fully trained musician, however, has its advantages. I've always thought that if something is done wrong but done in an interesting way, it's better than something done right in a boring way.

Not that Pacific Overtures in Leicester was boring: it was very good. Leicester itself is an interesting place, much better than I'd imagined. We stayed in a chintzy hotel, but there was a few really interesting buildings around, and we visited the New Walk gallery, which has an interesting collection of German expressionist paintings, including a lovely Franz Marc. There was also a small exhibition of drawings that included three drawings by Brenda Chamberlain - someone I'd seen connected with Forty's poetry but knew nothing about. She apparently killed herself in 1971, which is tragic; but she seems to have been an accomplished artist as well as a poet. Anyone out there knows anything about her, do get in touch.

There was also an Eileen Agar frottage which was lovely; and the main collection had a great Paul Nash, and a John Tunnard. All in all a good visit. Leicester seems to be the kind of place that you might not visit just to see for itself. You'd go there for a conference, or to see a musical, and you'd spend some time looking round its museums and enjoy yourself. But you wouldn't, for instance, visit its cathedral for its own sake, unless you were a Richard III fanatic and wanted to see the memorial stone laid in the apse.

I saw Micheal Schmidt reading at Poets & Players the other day - and was really pleasantly surprised by how good his new poems are. He only read seven, but most of them were quite long and narrative-ish, including one about Jesus healing a woman which was quite startling. It's good to see he's writing again - and doing it so well.

I've been a little slack on reading recently, but I finally managed to finish John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander; for some reason, I hadn't quite got round to the last few poems. There are some great poems in the book, like Wolf Ridge which seems to reference the New York School period when everybody was friendly with one another. He's very funny in places, and nostalgic, thinking of death and suchlike (he's about eighty now I think) but remains faithful to his lack of subject matter technique. Or rather, it's not that he doesn't have a subject; he has lots of them at the same time. You can't say about an Ashbery poem, this is about "Jesus healing a woman" or "a visit to the gay bar," though in any one poem he may make reference to them both at some point. I have a little article by Meghan O'Rouke which says that his poems are basically about feelings not subjects; though of course, feelings are subjects, and you really can't say of any of his poems, this one's about feeling nostalgic, or this one's about feeling grouchy, though again, both those feelings might be in the same poem.

Anyway, one thing that bugged me recently was a remark someone made on the Ron Silliman blog comments book. Why would anyone want to write a sonnet anymore? someone asked. Well, the simple answer is because they think they can do something with it. I've written nine sonnets over the last two years, and it looks like I'll be writing a few more over the next few months. Not much rhyme, lots of cut and paste and chance technique, so it's more Ted Berrigan than George Szirtes, but hey, that's me. I like the limitation of space, and the feeling that a sonnet can be a kind of controlled explosion of thought and feeling. I like to think that some of them have the virtues of a traditional sonnet, like a volta or a closing couplet that opens the poem out, but I guess some of them are just not going to keep many of the rules at all.

Freedom and constraint is, I guess, what it's about. What can you do in a small space? How free can you be in a box? Poets have always had barriers to push against; it's what makes poetry interesting. Total freedom is boring.

Surprise

Well, it's cricket season again. And England still seem to be winning...

Anyway, interesting discussion that gets a little heated over at www.thepoem.co.uk: is there sexism in poetry publishing. Well, I guess for me the answer is, "yes and no". I don't think there's anybody out there actively discriminating against women poets, any more than I believe that there's anyone actively discriminating against black poets.

But what do we expect when we read a poem? I was reading something that Sheila Murphy was saying in an interview in Binary Myths (published by Stride a few years ago) the other day, and one of the things she looks for is "surprise." How many editors are looking for "surprise", rather than for something which is familiar to them, which will fit into preconcieved notions of what a poem should look like or sound like?

That's where the discrimination comes in: somewhere at the level of expectation. If you expect a poem to sound like, say, a regular anecdotal half-pager, rather than, say, one of those very tight but incredibly full poems of Lorinne Neidecker, or if you expect a poem to be full of clever show-offy metaphors, then that's what your choices will look like. I suspect that the editors of most of the mainstream poetry publishers are not looking far out of their chosen boxes for work.

But personally, I'd rather have a poem that surprises me than one that confirms what I already know.

Events

I'll be doing a workshop for the Chorlton Festival on 22nd May between 10pm and 3pm at Chorlton Library. The event is free and is described in the brochure as "Write & Refine with Steve Waling: Bring along a favourite piece of your writing, prose or script and be guided through an enjoyable process of editing, revising and re-imagining using a variety of often surprising methods." Chorlton library is on the main Barlow Moor Road in Chorlton Manchester, fairly easy to get to.

I'll also hopefully be reading at What the Papers Said, at the Lloyds pub upstairs room at 8pm on Wednesday 24 May in an evening of satirical comedy, poetry and music including Steve O'Donoghue, Dave Pullar, Claire Mooney & others. I think it's also open-mike, so unless you hear from me otherwise, bring yourself and your poems along.

Further details, as well as details of other events, can be obtained from www.chorltonartsfestival.com.

Future Welcome

It's a funny thing being in an anthology; you look at the company you keep and wonder if it's good enough for you. Why isn't so-and-so in it/isn't it great that so-and-s0 is next to me? Well, I don't have any problem with this anthology because on the whole I don't know a lot of the writers. That's because a lot of them are Canadian, as this anthology is produced by DC Books (it's their Moosehead anthology X) and so I don't know many of their names. I don't have to feel miffed or superior; I can just enjoy some great writing and hope that my own poem comes up to scratch.

The theme of the anthology - that of the future - is sufficiently broad enough to take in lots of approaches, from science fiction to Tim Cumming's "relentless enthusiasm of American newscasters". It's one anthology I'm proud to be in because there's so much good writing in it. David Prater's Inna for instance, with its unpunctuated lines leading you down the page:

you may never have even lived in
this world on these planets your
orbs dig a furrow for my desires
i zoom in using alien technology
take soil samples & then am gone

It somehow reminds me of all those science fiction novels I read as a kid, full of terms like "server farms". It's good to see a mixture of prose and poetry, though as usual I'm way behind on the prose. There's mixture of styles from Language influenced to straight forward lyric, which I think is down to its editor, Todd Swift, who likes to mix things up.

I'm not going to quote a lot of it, but I will quote one that I really like. I've a fondness for really short poems, and Hal Sirowitz's Hiaku tickled me pink:

The future
is the past
gentrified

Other highlights include Sina Queyras, Jason Camlot, Hilary Menos, Todd Colby and so many others. It's also got my poem Every Planet Has a North.

I'd recommend you get hold of it now, from www.dcbooks.ca.

I did a workshop at the Poetry Business on Saturday, and used a couple of Robert Adamson poems as stimulus for writing. He's an Australian poet who's always lived in the same part of the Hawkesbury River, influenced by American poets like Zukovsky and Williams but there's a real sense of lived experience in his work. I sometimes feel with John Kinsella that there's always a theory behind everything he writes, however good and well-written he is. I don't get that with Robert Adamson.

I've never really been very good with theories and ideologies etc. I've always been political - pacifist, left-of-centre, liberal-minded etc... and I've never thought that such things don't matter. But as for actually using my poetry to get my ideas across, I can't do it. All that evangelical religion early on, with its guilt-inducing pressure to evangelise, did for that. So I can write from my experience, but I find it difficult if not impossible to write from my ideas. Those ideas could be religious; I want to write about those times when I was very religious and very fundamentalist even, but I find it difficult to get past criticising the ideas to the actual experience.

Religious poetry is difficult anyway; how do you express religious ideas in poetry that doesn't sound like it was lifted from Hymns Ancient & Modern? Or that doesn't sound like a catalouge of New Age vagaries? I still haven't worked that one out, even though a few of my poems have been religious. I didn't plan them that way though; I just wrote them and found out what they were about.

Which is probably my best way of working: not having an idea of what I'm going to say before I write it. I might be writing about a specific experience, but I don't know what I'll say about it. Will I even end up agreeing with myself?

Dusty in Memphis

I've been thinking about what it is that made me gravitate towards American models for poetry rather than English ones. I saw a programme about Dusty Springfield on Sunday (South Bank Show - haven't seen one for ages) and thought it was an appropriate metaphor. English provincial girl who feels out of place in her own town and has a great singing voice; English provincial boy who feels cramped in his small town but has a way with words (or at least a desire to have a way with words.) English girl hears American soul singers and reaches out to something that is so different from everything she's known, it has to be better, falls in love with Motown/Stax. English boy escapes home town, discovers American poetry, realises it's freer and more open that anything he's so far read in English poetry and falls in love with New York City.

Well, it has the virtues of neatness, even if it was all a lot more complicated than that. My first readings of Ashbery, for instance, were exercises in incomprehension. But it has some truth in it. On the www.thepoem.co.uk discussion board, Eva Salzmann says that she became fascinated with British poetry, maybe for similar reasons? Because, perhaps, it was different to what was familiar?

It's at least part of the picutre, I feel. There are lots of other reasons too, but the desire to escape from the stifling bonds of one's own upbringing is surely one of the reasons we become artists in the first place. We want to be "different", like the boys from Liverpool who grew up to be the Beatles by imitating their heroes in America.

*

I read again at the Trof last night. There was quite a lot of poetry; although I'm not sure I'd call Thick Richard poets. Pale imitators of John Cooper Clark who actually still use the word "punk" and think that taking dope is still cool. Then there was Angry Sam, a good performer from Brighton with a silly name. It sounds like a punk children's TV puppet: Postman Pat, Fireman Sam and Angry Sam. But he sounded like he cared about words.

I've been quite busy since I was last here. A quick and very short trip to Amsterdam, going by coach via York, a few hours there then back again. I visited the American Cafe and an Indonesian restaurant called Bojo's, walked around the canals, then caught the coach back; but a couple of nights on a ferry were very pleasant.

I've been reading a lot of novels: Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, Martin Booth's penulitimate novel The Industry of Souls, and I've just started on John Murray's Murphy's Favourite Channels. The Martin Booth one left me feeling sad at the end - that I had to leave the company of the main character. He was Alexander Alanovich Bayliss, an Englishman who had been caught up in the Russion gulag for twenty years, but who stayed in Russia rather than come home. It was very well written - and there's some lovely incidents in it - of eating mammoth steak in the frozen tundra, for instance. I'm not sure it's even possible, but Martin Booth made it seem so while I was reading. It's published by the publishers Dewi Lewis in Stockport - another example of a small independent regional publisher picking up on a mid-list writer who really ought to be better known. The John Murray has already had me giggling on the Metro. Very funny.

I did a workshop on Wednesday in Bolton with the Bank Street Writers, where I talked about rhyme metre and free verse. Really nice people, and a good discussion. They asked what "prose poetry" was, which kind of stumped me because I don't know enough about it. I should probably look more into it.

Anyway, I sold some copies of Calling Myself On the Phone - all the ones I took in fact - and that's no bad thing.

Reading Matters

I finally got hold of David Challoner's Collected Poems on Monday - by ordering it from my local library. I think I'll do more of this kind of thing - ordering books throught the library. That way, more books will be available to more people, and instead of paying £18.99, it'll only cost me 50p. I have to take the book back or renew it; but when I've finished, others can read it.

I'm not sure what I think of him on the whole. But I'll reserve judgement for now.

*

I've been doing a lot of reading recently. Chris McCabe's The Hutton Enquiry is also on my list. He's a youngish poet, originally from London, who now lives in London. Very lively, with a political edge and a kind of spikiness that I don't often find in poetry. I don't mean by that that he's one of those Charles Bukowski wannabees always writing "from the street", though he does have a very urban feel to him. Again, I'll try and do something more in depth later.

*

I've been trying to write as well. Half my poems these days seem to turn into unrhyming "sonnets" of one kind or another.

*

Then there's Lynette Roberts, who's proving to be a rather lovely find. What was it about the '40's that the Movement found so objectionable? There are a few characteristics: the use of the "I" for instance in lines like "I, in my intricate image..." (Dylan Thomas) where the "I" almost becomes a floating signifier, a sailor lost in the sea of selves. Then there's the seeming over the top image of lines like "Shall I make my disasters clear?" (Nicholas Moore) where the Movement poets wanted to return after the war to a kind of reticence about feelings.

It's good to see them republished, though. It feels like a gap in English poetry (a whole decade's gap) is finally being filled.