Matt Dalby's Review

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

***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.
You can book by e mailing paperplanes@hotmail.co.uk, though the above methods are more immediate.

Thank you for your interest, and we look forward to seeing you.

PAPER PLANES: ALL-DAY CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR
WRITE, REFINE AND GET PUBLISHED
Red Triangle Café
160 St James Street, Burnley, Lancs BB11 1NR
Tel 01282 832319
Vegetarian restaurant / cafe – Licensed. Informal daytime cafe; Fri Sat eve booking only
Sunday 15 November 2009
10.30am til 5pm, £27/£24 conc

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
REFINE Switch on new ways to look at your work, as you are guided through a wide variety of enjoyable and often surprising methods to re-write, edit, refine and re-imagine your writing
GET PUBLISHED: PROSE
GET PUBLISHED: POETRY You’ll be taken step by step through how to get published, and where possible given individual suggestions for specific magazines and internet zines to suit your style of poem or story
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
NETWORK You’ll be given free membership of the Paper Planes mailing list and kept informed of a host of competitions and submission invitations. You can network with Paper Planes and each other to increase your success rate from now on

You’ll be guided and given individual advice by experienced, published writers
Steve Waling (poet, Commonword trustee and author of Travelator),
and Comma fiction writer Anthony Sides.
Whether you write poetry or prose, and whether you’re a beginner or more experienced,
this work shop is for you

paperplanes@hotmail.co.uk myspace.com/mypaperplanes
TESTIMONIALS: -
VIEWS ON PAPER PLANES: William West: "amazing classes. .. . the teaching is pure gold!" Lynn Myint-Maung: "thank you for the work shop ... I found you graceful and organized as facilitators, but also cheerful, kindly and playful and allowing so that the atmosphere was both safe and encouraging." Adam Grant: "You guys are bloody superb, I love what you're doing with Paper Planes." Pat Selden : "I never expected it to be this good."
Elaine Speakman: "It's my favourite way to spend a Saturday, I think it's lovely."

Various Marvelous Things

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

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.

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
BARNABUS EMPORIUM
473 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester
0161-445 7744


PAPER PLANES: HAPPY ACCIDENTS
paperplanes@hotmail.co.uk myspace.com/mypaperplanes
You can come to this newly-announced work shop and enjoy trying some easy, unusual and fun writing exercises that use randomization and play to trigger fresh ideas for your writing.
You’ll look at your writing in a fresh way and take home 3 or 4 new pieces. Whether you write poems, fiction, scripts, raps or blogs, and if you’re a beginner or you’re more experienced, this work shop is for you.
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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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"

(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!

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

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)

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

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?

MERRY CHRYSANTHEMUM!

Gob blues us every wan

Adrian Mitchell RIP

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

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

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

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

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.

Conscientious Objectors, Richmond Jail

Today I saw something truely humbling. I was looking at the archives of the Northern Friends Peace Board, getting them ready to deposit in a library, and came across a series of photos taken in the '70's, I think, of the graffiti by conscientious objectors in Richmond Jail.

I came across these two verses, by one HE Hancocks, of Sheffield, from June 21st 1915:

Ez for war I calls it murder
There you has it plain & flat
And I ain't to go no furder
Than me testimint fur that

If yer takes a sword and drors it
And go sticks a feller thro'
Gov'ment ain't to answer fur it
God'll send the bill to you.

Not great poetry, I suppose, but heartfelt nontheless. It made me realise even more that poetry's in everyone's soul, not just in the mind of the clever, and when people are in extremis, they don't turn to prose. No doubt they'll not put this in any anthology of first world war poetry, most of which seem to ignore the conscientious objectors, but this is just as meaningful to me as anything by Owen, and shows that not everyone buys into war propaganda, in any age.

I don't know what happened to Mr Hancock, or how far he suffered for his beliefs; but I salute him: fellow poet, fellow human, fellow child of God.

Two Readings Reviewed

Two readings proved instructive this week. Another installment of The Other Room, with Joy As Senseless Vandalism, David Annwyn and Caroline Bergvall, and The Poetry Party. I'm afraid, in the end, I prefered the first, the more avant garde of the two. But they both had their interests.

JASV were a bit scrappily presented, with photographs and accompanying poems (or is that the other way around) but apart from that, they produced some interesting material - a combination of found material, list poetry and visual pun. David Annwyn was wonderfully lively and physical in his reading style, reading poems about figures of the avant garde like Mina Loy and others. It was lovely stuff, wonderfully presented. Caroline Bergvall was a quieter figure, reading from her Salt book, Figs, and poems such as Fuses; but the effect if anything was more charged; these were wonderful conceptual pieces which were full not just of subject matter, but the substance of language, the way it drives meaning into other areas.

It was a wonderful evening again at the Old Oak,

The Poetry Party has visions of balloons, or perhaps a meeting of lefties in an upstairs room in a pub. It was more like the latter, though, like the Old Oak, it was a packed room. It also had music, unlike the Old Oak, though I left before the last band, dischuffed that I hadn't been able to last long enough for the open mike. I was just too tired and had to go to work.

But the poetry: best of a mixed bunch was Micheal Wilson, who actually pitched his reading just right. His poems were deep enough to intrigue, and his memnonic devices didn't just include rhyme; I noticed that he looped in several refrains and iterative devices into his poems. Plus, there was something of the Dylan Thomas about his writing that was lovely. John G. Hall himself was his usual self; wonderfully vituperative, spitting out his poems with real energy.

Sophie McKeown was one of the two guest, and she was very lively and again political; but her over-reliance on rhyme and a rather obvious plain style was a bit wearing for me. I couldn't agree more with her sentiment, but wish that the language wasn't so ordinary, that there was something of the same energy in her words as there is in her performance.

Abie D'Olivera read a long poem from someone else to start with; it was a strong piece about the Troubles that apparently was written in the '80's. And therefore, I'm afraid, rather dated; though it had a very Ginsberg energy to the words. In fact, there was something of Ginsberg and other Beat poets in her poems; though on the whole they seemed to drag (something true of Ginsberg at times) and repeat themselves rather too much. A good poet who needs an editor, methinks. Sometimes the poems were very powerful, full of emotion and anger.

But her performance was something else. If there were Oscars for over-acting she would be nominated. Her poems are quite dramatic enough, especially the one about being beaten up, without the theatrics. If ever there was a case for reigning back the performance in order to pay attention to the words, it's that poem. Some element of intonation and performance is a good thing, but I often feel that the more dramatic the writing is, the less you need to perform it. It's rather like a Whitney Houston song: too much vibrato ruining a perfectly good tune.

I prefered the Other Room because it's mostly my cup of tea. But it's good to know that not all performance poetry evenings are full of dull attempts to shock or tubthumping.

Collage World

I watched a weekend of Arts TV on BBC 4 this weekend: old issues of Arena, Omnibus and Monitor; interviews with Henry Moore, Orson Welles, and a wonderfully oddball programme about Pop Art directed by Ken Russell. A programme about Picasso, an edition of Civilisation, and the wonderful Ways of Seeing with John Berger.

In it, the sadly neglected figure of Pauline Boty was featured, showing some of her collages, and she helped me to complete a painting I've been doing for ages, by incorporating some collage. I don't paint much, and it takes me ages to see where the painting is going; so that was an evening well spent. Thank you BBC.

Collage, I suspect, is pretty much the twentieth century art form. That, and its sculptural equivalent, assemblage, seems to be what the art world does best these days: disparate elements drawn in to make something new. (The turner prize is full of assemblage and collage, and very little straight painting.) From Ernst's collages made from old etchings down even to Tracey Emin's Bed, art these days has more to do with picking up the bits and pieces from life and putting them together, not into an order, so much as a jigsaw of pieces missing, and pieces from other jigsaws. It doesn't make much sense, because it can't make much sense, because our lives are often cobbled together from disparate elements. A bit of religion or anti-religion, a bit of politics, a bit of New Age, a curiously reactionary bit there; it's not exactly a fully-worked through philosophy, more a kind of smorgasbord of found ideas.

Poetry's version of the collage is the cut-up, or it could be these days, flarf. It makes a new set of relations from the materials we make. Sometimes, we collage our own writing when we make one poem out of more than one; or we collage our experience when we don't write about one thing but about many at the same time. Simultaneity, as Appollinaire might have put it, is everywhere. We flip channels; in fact, perhaps the most potent symbol of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century could well be the TV remote and the set-top box.

Keeping Up

Does anybody else feel like they're not reading the "right"poets? I sometimes get the feeling that because I don't go out and get the latest Faber or Picador poet, that I must be out of the loop. I know it's impossible to keep up; but then there's still the pressure to read "what everybody else is reading."

And then there's all the young poets. I should be keeping up with them, surely... Not really. Some.

And I'm probably missing some good poetry. I know that the few poems by Nick Laird that I've read in magazines have been enjoyable; but I wonder if I could read a whole book of them. Instead, I get hold of a review copy of Robert Shepherd's Complete Twentieth Century Blues because that's the one I want to read. It's like I'm deliberately being awkward. If Sean O'Brien or Don Paterson are bringing out a new collection, I may get around to it one day; but I'm too busy ordering the latest by Geraldine Monk.

I might even enjoy their books. But not as much as the new Geraldine Monk; or the little pamphlet of Rupert Loydell poems he's just sent me. There's a massive amount of poetry out there, and the majority of it doesn't float my boat particularly. But I don't feel like dissing it either; most of it will appeal to someone, and most poets have their coterie of readers who can't wait for their next publication.

Nevertheless, there is still the vague feeling of not reading enough, especially when I read that Roddy Lumsden reads 100 books-plus a year and I look at the long list of Books Recieved on Ron Silliman's blog. Some of them even look really interesting. And that's not to mention all the poets from earlier ages I've not read yet. People have been recommending Wyatt; and if I can find an edition that's not too expensive, I might well have a go...

But, first, I'm not made of money. Second, I have other jobs to do. Third, there has to be time to relax, take in the world outside of poetry, sleep, eat, listen to music, stare at the ceiling/stars and even, dare I say it, write. So I don't feel that bad.

Sheer Numbers

One of the things Ron Silliman is frequently commenting on is the question of numbers. There are now more poets writing than there are ever were before. Is this a good thing, or are we going to see a decline in quality because of so much quantity?

Certainly, it's impossible to read all this poetry, unless you spend 24 hours a day reading it all and have a private income big enough to buy all the books (or you're important enough to get them all sent free to you...) And where would you put them? I have to have regular a clearout just to provide some space to put the books...

And there are so many different kinds of poetry - or writings that come under the banner of poetry in some way - from highly experimental to highly traditional, and every combination in between. If I feel personally that England at least produces rather too much bland quietist verse, there's still plenty out there to keep me interested. Poets I think I ought to be reading, and haven't got round to, poets I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot bargepole, poets I might find interesting if I had the time.

Then there are the poets I ought to discover that have been forgotten about. There's a new anthology of Mervyn Peake's poetry that looks fascinating - a good addition, I think, to my collection of forgotten '40's poets. There's soem poems in an article about Nicholas Moore in PN Review that look really good.

How do we evaluate it all? Most of it will probably not last - but then some will be forgotten forever, some will get rediscovered, some will get reforgotten. Some big names now will disappear, I suspect.

I ought to be reading more Peter Riley, for instance. He sounds fascinating from the recent article in PN Review - just up my street. But when will I get the time?

The Other Room

Barely a week since my last post, and here I am again. What's going on?

Well, despite a summer cold (aren't they the worst?) I ventured out to the Other Room, a reading series in a pub behind Manchester University, last night. And very glad I am I went, though it's a shame that one of the readers, Philip Davenport, wasn't able to make it. The two other readers, Maggie O'Sullivan and Stuart Calton, were there however.

From what I've seen in anthologies, I haven't quite got Maggie O'Sullivan's work yet, but her performance last night went a long way towards me beginning to appreciate her work. It seems to straddle various strands of avant garde poetry. There's a large element of "radical pastoral" that one can see also in poets like Harriet Tarlo, Frances Presley and Geraldine Monk; but also a large element of pure sound in the work. It's interesting that the book of early work she brought with her was called "Body of Work", but it does have a very physical element to it; this is a poetry concerned as much with the physical articulation of sound as with "meaning." It seems to be to be very "instinctual"; as opposed to a more "calculated" approach. Which doesn't mean that there wasn't a very feirce intellect behind the words, because there certainly was. Although I don't want to make too obvious a connection, it's something I also find in poets such as Geraldine Monk and Micheal Haslam; although all of them have a strong intellectual basis for their work, there's something untamed about them, a kind of wandering spirit that seeks to go beneath the surface of the world and bring something elemental back.

Stuart Calton, on the other hand, seemed to be a much more calculated poet. The two long pieces he read were sometimes funny, very involved, fragmented narratives and arguments with a strong political bent. The second poem was about the Co-Op, in fact, which he is ambivalent about. Although this was very definitely non-mainstream, this was on the surface much more controlled and probably represents the more politically-charged end of the non-mainstream as represented most publically by Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady and Barque Press. It was difficult to understand, but also fascinating, and I enjoyed his performance, especially the halting way he sometimes spoke half-phrases and sentences. I bought one of his pamphlets, so I can pore over it and seek a way through it.

All in all, a fascinating evening. The Other Room is a good series to have in Manchester; we've had so much mainstream poetry for years, it's good to have something rather stranger at last.

Improvisation

Since last time I was here, I've been on holiday, a writing holiday to the beautiful Isle of Arran, and I wrote 4 poems there. But I was thinking recently about improvisation (I've just written a review of the Manchester Jazz Festival for Jazzwise magazine.) How does it relate to poetry?

If you're writing a poem that fits a particular shape, say a sonnet, then improvisation is less important: like a piece of music, you have a particular shape that it fits into (sonata form, symphony, or the generic pop song.) But you still manipulate that shape, twist it into slightly different shapes, otherwise what you have is the same as everyone else. But if you break too far away from the basic shape, then it stops being recognisable as a sonnet, and becomes something else. That's where poetic improvisation comes in: the poem starts to develop a shape that the author isn't aware of before starting the writing.

It happens too with subject matter: if one sets out writing about one thing, one may end up writing about something wholly other. Ashbery's poems always seem to me to set off in one place and end up somewhere else, because he doesn't have a subject to start off with. He has an atmosphere, perhaps, a form of words. These lead somewhere but he's not strictly in control of it, he's let go of that control. Perhaps that's what improvisation in poetry: letting go of the controls and letting the poem lead the writer.

In Arran, I found myself writing a poem out of one of the workshops that didn't fit any shape at all. It was free-form, even open-form - even the left-hand margin wasn't sacrosanct. Then I cut a heart-shaped hole in the front page of the Observer's business page, and wrote down what was found there. I also used quotes from songs. The shape was arrived at, not because it was decided on beforehand, but because it felt right. There was no idea of what was going to be said even.

Later, the poem was revised to jazz music. Some things were changed, others stayed the same. Revision wasn't done with the idea of trying to make it tidier, but with the idea of making it truer to the moment of writing. It felt organic (Denise Levertov's essay on Organic Form comes to mind!) and I didn't feel entirely in control. Quite an exhilarating experience.

Some pictures from my recent trip to Arran.

The English Line

Rachel Fox has asked me for my definition of "English poetry," one that include Nick Laird (an Irish poet) and Andrew Motion.

It's a difficult question to answer, and I think now that it might be better to talk of the "quietist" poem. Not as in Ron Silliman's rather pejorative "School of Quietude", which is largely a rhetorical device to dismiss a lot of poets who don't fit into his notion of the "post-avant" (I see he now wants to try to encompass flarf & conceptual poetry in the same set as Ojectivism and the New York School.)

But I think it's a good description of what the English Line (to use Neil Corcoran's useful phrase) is about to call it "quietist." Here are a few characteristics I've picked out:

The quietist poem tends to be discrete, both in its aversion to extreme statement, and in the tendency for the poem to be a discrete unit in itself, unlike, say, the often messy, open-ended non-mainstream poem. There's a tendency to irony, to not expressing strong emotion.
The quetist poem tends to be written in a largely rational form, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Its syntax tends to be normative.

The quietist poem tends to be "about something" reasonably discernible - that is, it has one or two subjects and tends to stick with them. The non-mainstream tendency to drift from subject to subject, to slip between meaning and nonsense, is not much in evidence.

Use of chance techniques, improvisation, collage, is not something your average quietist poem will countenance much. Direct use of material taken from popular culture (as in flarf) or technical literature is generally frowned on, though pop cultural references can be used, as long as they're filtered through the quietist frame. Visually, left-justified is favourite, and the visual poem isn't generally seen. It's more like classical music than jazz, for instance. Not that there can't be surprise, as there is in classical music, but the resources for surprise are limited by the form.

These are just a few things I think distinguish the "quietist" poem. There are some very fine poets who fit right in here, so I'm trying not to be dismissive. Not every poem that can be identified as "quietist" will be entirely so. Not everything is as quietist as it appears.

I hope that answers the question, as well as bringing up a whole host of more questions than it answers.

Maintaining the Crumbling House

I came across this rather intriguing comment the other day by Jon Stone, on Todd Smith's Eyewear blog:

In seeming very dismissive of the mere fact of the English postulating on
an English tradition that needs to be maintained,

I wondered about what it might be saying for quite some time, and still don't know what it means. "An English tradition that needs to be maintained" sounds as if something is under threat, or fragile, or vulnerable to dry rot. It makes poetry (for that is "the tradition" of which we speak) sound like one of those old manorial fastnesses that need to be maintained by the National Trust. All very nice and historic, but not exactly relevant to the modern world.

I'm sure it's not the intention of Jon Stone to make English poetry sound like this; it's the kind of thing you say in a blog comments stream, not a considered argument. But it nevertheless does continue the postulation that English poetry (as opposed to American, say, or Australian) is somehow under attack. From whom? And what is this English tradition that is under attack?

Well, it's very rarely the English tradition of radical dissent: the Diggers, the Quakers, the Chartists, the peasant balladeers, the trades unionists, the Blakeans etc. It's usually some notion of what I can only call an Anglican compromise: middle-brow, middle-of-the-road, middling and conservative with a small c. It's certainly not the "extremism" so-called of the experimentalists: open-form, open-ended, frequently messy and unclean. It's certainly one English tradition - and it shouldn't be gainsaid that there are some great examples. Edward Thomas is a great example, and more recently, Nick Laird.

But I don't see how it is under fire. Sure, it's probably having to compete with a more open poetics, it's having to absorb a few more influences. But - rather like the English language itself - surely it can do that without having to "maintain" itself. The great thing about poetry is its ability to both continually renew itself - often in the past through translation and cultural exchange - while staying in contact with its past. And its past ought also to contain a few more of those dissenting voices (like the '40's Apocalyptics, for instance) than it does now.

Like Buses

There was an interesting article in the Guardian about the "health" of poetry recently, by Anne-Marie Fyfe. It was interesting partly for the names mentioned - some of whom I've heard of and some of whom I've not, but also for the fact that a lot of names were missed out. There's an awful lot of poetry about at the moment. It didn't, for instance, include the names of Annie Clarkson and Eleanor Rees, two recent first collections I've particularly liked. And that's just for starters. The number of poets around is ever increasing: how does anyone keep up?

The fact that there's so much new writing out there can only be a good thing. It would be dreadful if there were only a few names in the "promising" pile; where would the next generation come from otherwise? But the fact that there's a lot of them also brings up its own problems: how do you judge who will be lasting? Some people worry a lot about this; but I can't say it bothers me that much. The poet who worries too much about his or her posthumous reputation is the poet who ends up writing nothing at all. All you can do is listen to the voice(s) of the world around you and attempt to write down, as clearly as possible, what it is saying. Poets who thought they would be remembered forever are long-forgotten (Nahum Tate, Colley Cibber anyone?)

In fact, I'd venture to say that the more you look to your posthumous reputation, the less likely you are to have one. Frank O'Hara had a very casual attitude to publication and wrote about the things that were happening "now", though the "now" he wrote about is over forty years old. And people still read him. Shakespeare wrote for the audience in the stalls and in the pit, not for posterity; he had a keen eye on the box office and never let an idea of "greatness" stop him from being popular. Nevertheless, with his language and his stretching of the iambic line almost to breaking point, he was one of the most innovative writers of his day.

Still, as Ron Silliman is often pointing out, there are now many more poets out there than there ever used to be, and there's no way that any reader can get round them all. Just keeping up with the local scene here in Manchester is quite exhausting, and I don't think I've begun to manage that. So if somebody mentions a name I should have read, or heard, and I look blank, don't worry. There'll be another 3 poets coming up behind that one.

Columbo - "Oh, and one more thing..."

I've been reading quite a lot recently - in particularly, and slowly, Rupert Loydell's latest from Shearsman, An Experiment in Navigation. There's something about his poems, and the way that they meditate around issues of art, spierituality, representation and lyric that I find fascinating. His style is laconic, undemonstrative, edging towards prosiness and away from a strongly musical rhythm; but under the style is an enquiring mind and a sense of the strangeness of language. In one poem, he can be as plain as a pikestaff, deeply personal, and move into the mysterious use of technical language, culled from his own enormous reading. His use of collage to create many of his texts never seems forced or clever in any way; it somehow seems to flow together into a poem that investigates, subtly and without you noticing mostly, what the possibilities of language are in describing, or rather connoting, the world of phenomena.

Perhaps this is what led me to think of the nature of innovative writing. This book, and the thought of an interview for an MA course in Creative Writing: Innovation & Experiment. There was a question about this on the letter inviting me to the interview, and yesterday, I sat down in a coffee-bar and thought about this. I suddenly had this vision of Columbo, having just interviewed the suspect, turning back to him as he reaches the door, and saying: "Oh, and just one more thing..." The suspect is caught off guard and made to answer on the hoof, and so reveals himself for the duplicitous cad he really is...

So the innovative poet can operate - while language or the reader thinks it's got away with its description or understanding of the world, the poet comes in with one further question, one further twist: Did you really mean to say that? That's innovation for me, and that what Rupert Loydell's poems do for me.

The Other Room

I went to a reading at The Old Abbey pub (now owned by the Kro chain, it appears.) There was Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey and Tom Jencks. Geraldine read from Escafeld Hangings and some know "ghost sonnets"; Alan read some of his logoclastic, intertextual poems, including a wonderful variation on some of John Ashbery's poetry from A Tennis Court Oath. Tom Jencks read from his first book, A Priori, just published by ifpthenq - which also run a magazine of loose-leaf sheets in an envelope.

Maybe it's the presence of at least three creative writing courses in the area (Manchester, Manchester Met and Salford) - but there's an awful lot of poetic activity in Manchester at the moment, and quite a lot of it falls into that strange category, the non-mainstream. Tom Jencks himself writes a poetry that uses the language of science and the media, that plays with the conceptual nature of language in ways that make it almost unrecognisable as poetry to those for whom narrativity and shapely well-made shaggy dog stories are the essence of poetry.

There's obviously something in the water. Years ago, we had the conventional mainstream of Manchester Poets, and that was it. Harold Massingham led a course at the Extra Mural Dept of Man U, which I went to and it was good in its way. You couldn't find non-mainstream books anywhere, really. It's really making a difference to what's going on in Manchester. I hope it keeps up and doesn't go away as quickly as it came, as the magazine Mad Cow did about a decade ago.

I have a poem in the latest issue of parameter - which has had a radical makeover. The last issue was conventional A4 staple-stiched, but issue 5 came wrapped in silver foil, with four seperately stapled booklets, one for the editorial, one for poetry, one for fiction and one for reviews and articles. Gorgeous is the word, and with people like Rupert Loydell and Ron Padgett in it, well worth £2 of anyone's money.

It was a great evening, organised partly by a London group called Oppened and by people like James Davies and Scot Thurston. The next one is in June, I think, and I'm already looking forward to it.

Companion to Lee Harwood

I've just started reading Robert Sheppherd's Companion to Lee Harwood, a book of essays about one of the best English poets around. The essays - by various hands - look at his work as influenced by the New York School, the transatlantic influences of living in Brighton, Boston and New York, and various other issues. Two essays look at his poems about relationships and the influence of women in his life, from his maternal grandmother to lovers, to other poets such as Wendy Mulford, Elaine Randell and others. There's an essay on his translation of Tristan Tzara, and one on his later poems. And a good bibliography at the back. All ably coordinated by Robert Sheppard's unfussy editing.

What everybody agrees about his work is about its openness. This is not just seen in his use of open form; but in the honesty with which he deals with feelings. He doesn't ever get sentimental, but he doesn't shy away from the personal. In fact, he has said himself that it wasn't until The Long Black Veil sequence that he realised how personal a poet he was. In many ways, he's as personal as many a mainstream poet writing about their personal life; but the results couldn't be more different from the average anecdotal closed form poem. He never comes to conclusions, for instance, and invites the reader in to make sense of the poem alongside him. He will write about a relationship in an open way, exploring its circumstances and feelings, but not giving us his answer to it. He doesn't give us the benefit of his wisdom; he leaves gaps for the reader to fill in. There's nothing "difficult" even in the Borgesian story poems he's also fond of; but the reader is not given the meaning of the poem on a plate; he or she is expected to work for it, to enter the poem like entering a room and wander about inside, figuring out what's in the room for themselves.

It's a poetry I've admired and aspired to for many years, ever since I came across the Pig Press books of his in a bookshop in Grassmere. I think he's wonderful, unjustly neglected like every good poet on the wrong side of the mainstream/non-mainstream divide and recommended to anyone who cares about English poetry.

I wish I could get here more often, but I've been pretty busy.

The second issue of the prison magazine the men started at Whatton is about to hit the cells. I've got a reading at Salford Uni on Tuesday, and a workshop with the students. Then there's the launches of Parameter, The Ugly Tree and Lamport Court, 3 of Manchester's finest magazines, on Monday Night.

I've also been doing some reading. I can thoroughly recommend a translation of Boris Pasternak's My Sister -Life, which I found in an Oxfam bookshop in West Bridgeford. I'm about to start a book of essays about Lee Harwood, when it comes from Salt. I read their Companion to Geraldine Monk, edited by Scott Thurston, and thoroughly enjoyed that.

I also recently read online a very antagonistic review of the anthology, Other, in Antigonish Review online. It was interesting not for the fact that I probably disagree with it; but in the ways that I agree with it. There are aspects of non-mainstream approaches that are no more realistic than the more mainstream ways. Non-mainstream values such things as a plurality of voices, fragmentation and so on, and will tend at times to over-emphasise that in a writer who isn't really all that fragmented; it emphasises "difficulty" but sometimes exagerates that difficulty.

I think the reviewer was almost entirely wrong in his reading of non-mainstream poets. He would mention something in an Alan Fisher poem that sounded, to him, as if it was just some politically correct mention of a London Tube station. But that's where Alan Fisher lives, and he's always written about that place. He quotes a line of one poem as being "bad", which when placed out of context on a page sounds bad. But it's not unlike those preachers cutting and pasting bits out of the Bible to prove that gay people will go to hell. It's out-of-context, and only serves to show the reviewer's prejudices up.

Do non-mainstream critics do the same? You bet they do. I read an article by Ken Edwards where he compared a short magazine poem from early Mathew Sweeney with a dense, allusive poem by Allen Fisher to illustrate the "superiority" of non-mainstream over mainstream strategies. Well, excuse me, but isn't that unfair? Shouldn't we at least compare similar to similar? What would happen if we take a more straightforward Lee Harwood poem and put it alongside Sweeney? Or a more densely allusive mainstream poem (Geoffery Hill?) next to Allen Fisher? What difference does that make to your point?

In the end, the whole thing comes to see like two cats fighting in a paper bag. Non-mainstream writers have a tendency to over-valorise their outsider status. Clare, Blake and others are invoked as "outsiders" - which in a sense they were; but in another sense, they aren't now.

So maybe I'm fence sitting here. Well, more on this later.

Winter Hands by Annie Clarkson

If there's any movement in poetry more stealthy than any, it's the almost invisible rise in England of the prose poem. Poets have discovered the prose poem in increasing numbers, but I can't think of anyone yet commenting on this. I went to see Simon Armitage reading from his Gawain poem, and even he ended the evening with some prose poems.

Annie Clarkson is a new, young, addition to this growing band of "prose-poets," with her first chapbook collection, Winter Hands (Shadowtrain Books, www.shadowtrain.com). Unlike her fellow prose poet, Luke Kennard, there isn't any stand-up comedy surrealism here. Instead, what we have is a dark, wintry landscape of fractured relationships, fairgrounds and factory yards and people living on the edge.

These lyrical portraits of people and places, and people in places, are not totally grim, but there is a dourness about these poems that is lifted into poetry by the exactness, and aptness, of the language. When she describes the dirty sexuality of The Fairground Man: "dark hair curling round your ears, smell of generators and dirty denim, you open the door to my skin the ride of my life the holding on..." the reader is taken spinning into the romance of the fairground ride, and the dangerous glamour of it.

In places, there is a sense of the form only just holding onto the words, which at any moment could go spinning into the atmosphere. At other times, there's a grim realism pinning it down to earth. The prose poem here is not a vehicle for reverie and over-poetic language (which compensates for the lack of "poetic devices" in some prose poems.) Nevertheless, there is nothing else to call these pieces except poems. They vibrate like poems do, they leave resonances like poems do, they leave mysteries, they make you want to go back and reread them.

Annie Clarkson is a brave poet; and these are brave poems.

Poetry mags & well-made poems

I've been trying to read both the Poetry Review and Poetry, and wondering why on earth I bought them. Not that there aren't good poems in them, but they just don't seem terribly interesting overall. Or relevant. Some poetry magazines continue while having long since lost any raison d'etre. They're not publishing the new, upcoming poets, they're just publishing the few remaining members of whatever school of poetry they were set up to support. Poetry especially seems tired; well, it is nearly 100! It's full of perfectly decent well-made poems that refuse to lift off the page. Poetry Review is a bit better, but not by much.

Which brings me to this thing about "well-made poems." Surely poems ought to be well-made, not just cobbled together? Well, yes and no is the best answer. So many poems are perfectly well-constructed but ultimately empty. They're vessels for lots of clever phrases or ideas, or little packages of not very original insights or observations. There has to be more than just a good construction to make a poem interesting, something apart from it being well-made. Though there is some value in "well-madeness," and a good traditional sonnet is still worth reading.

But then there is always the non-well-made poem: the cut-n-paste, the aleatory, the fragmentary, where the point is precisely not to look well-made. A serial poem like Maximus questions the very idea of something being finished, or looking complete, well-rounded or beautiful. The well-made poem starts, works its way through an argument and ends with a satisfying sigh or clunk at the end. The modernist fragment poem starts arbitrarily (seemingly), ends arbitrarily, doesn't finish its thoughts, sometimes doesn't even finish its sentences or stick to a horizontal line. It scatters itself about the page, mixes register, interupts itself. In short, it doesn't follow a logical or sequential order.

All these techniques have been around the block for awhile now, and I suspect that for many younger writers, the opposition between well-madeness and fragmentariness is a lot less problematic. I suspect we will see in future, poets who can do both; who can write sonnets and fragmentary cut-up poems.

I don't think many of the big name magazines have caught onto this yet. But there are a few newer magazines - Parameter, Succour and a few others - that may be cottoning onto this.

Two books I ought to add to my list of favourite books of 2007.

David Morley's Invisible Kings, which is one of most inventive and enlightening books of 2007, and from the usually rather dry Carcanet press (I agree with Jane about Carcanet, often: though Ashbery & O'Hara are on their list.) Due to failing memory, I missed this out of my list. Apologies, David, it was great, especially the title poem Kings. Its use of Romanni language and its shape poetry, and its trawling of folklore, was wonderful.

And, just inside the year, Sandra Tappenden's Speed, which is Salt, of course. Very fast poetry, to be read fast, but several times over so you can get what you missed the first time. It's the kind of poetry that I can imagine some critics skimming over because it doesn't seem serious, and yet under the speed and the wit, there's a lot of serious meditation on mortality, on the way we live in the 21st century, on sexual politics.

Books I Like 2007

Poetry books I've really enjoyed this year include:

Eleanor Rees: Andraste's Hair
John Ash: The Parthian Stations
John Ashbery: A Worldly Country
Luke Kennard: The Harbour Beyond The Movie
Zoe Brigley: The Secret
Charles North: Cadenza
Tony Lopez: Covers
David Kennedy: The Devil's Bookshop
The Selected Poems of Alice Notley
Geraldine Monk: Racoon
Jane Holland: Boudicca & Co

There are others, but those are the ones I've remembered off the top of my head

I've also discovered the prose poetry of Annie Clarkson, and I'm looking forward to Sandra Tappenden's new book.

I've noticed that this year poetry by young women has become to seem more adventurous, and, dare I say it, more so than young men. But on the whole, younger poets seem less tied to particular ways of writing, mixing up genres often with an abandon I haven't seen for years. I once said that it was better for a young poet to read Ginsberg than Larkin; but maybe reading the two simultaneously (one in each hand?) is what people are doing right now. No bad thing.

Salt is my star publisher; not just because they published me (though that helps), but also because of the range of books they publish, from avant garde to mainstream. And they do look utterly gorgeous on a coffee-table. But Shearsman are also up there as among the best. Faber if anything look worse than ever.

Maybe I'm being over-optimistic in looking forward to next year's cropsof poetry and new poets. But I think we're in for some interesting new discoveries: the names I've never heard of on Dusie's British issue are quite amazing.

Salt Winter Poetry Party etc

I had a terrific time at the Salt winter Party at Foyles last Thursday. Firstly, it was great to meet poets who I've admired for ages like David Grubb and John Hartley Williams. Secondly, it was great to meet and have a drink with that fine poet and controversialist, Jane Holland. It was even more amazing to actually meet Chris, after talking to him on the phone & e-mail corresponding so much. I got to meet my publisher!

The venue was slightly awkward - long rows of seats - but there were 200 people there to hear me read (next to last - the curse of having a name that at the back of the alphabet!) and I read two sonnets from the collection. I think there were some terrific writers there - Peter Jaegar and Sandra Tappenden among the poets, for instance. Gavin Salerie - who I met once at Geraldine Monk's party - said he liked my poems, which was a boost. It means so much more to me than if Andrew Motion had said he liked my poems. Though really I'd like everyone to like my stuff. I'm that shallow.

But I had a good time in London - and found a nice cheap place to eat in Old Compton Street in Soho - the Stockpot. Reasonable to good food, not showy, very quick turnaround and pleasant atmosphere. I went to Tate Modern, and was pleasantly surprised that a room full of Surrealist art had pictures by Tristram Hillier, Eileen Agar, Roland Penrose and Ithell Colloqhun as well as the usual names. English surrealism was often thought of in the past as not as good as the greats of the continent but I think it stands up very well.

I spent some time in the Poetry Library on the South Bank, discovering a terrific Nicholas Moore poem called Meaningless Gesture, that I must type up here soon.

On the Sunday, after having stopped off Saturday at Whatton, I was back in Manchester, and went to another poetry event, at Fuel in Withington. Well, there was some good stuff: John G Hall and Micheal Wilson in particular seemed to have real energy and above, a real love of language and what it can do. But Change Kunde was dispensing Good Advice when she wasn't trying to be terribly rude (God, how I hate that British seaside postcard innuendo about sex!), Matt Panesh was all shouty and un-PC in a terribly tired way, and there was so much obvious rhyme I wanted to scream. Oh, and Gordon Zola, who would have been a scream in music-hall in 1907, but just seems so old hat now.

The Salt event was great, because even when you weren't terribly turned on by what you heard (as I wasn't by a couple) at least you were aware that the writers were crafting their work, and weren't just in love with the sound of their own voices (you couldn't always hear them, in fact: bad sound system.)