Getting It And Not Getting It

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

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

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

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

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

Edwin Morgan 1920-2010

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

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

EXCHANGE SESTINA i.m. Edwin Morgan




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

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

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

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

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

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

SAVAGE SWEEPING
LIBERATING URGENT
HILARIOUS HEARTBREAKING

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

Children of Albion: Part 2

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

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

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

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

Children of Albion: Underground Poetry 40 Years On

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

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

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

Wow! 2
small virgins
carrying
a gigantic
mattress!

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

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

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

Shot Throughwithbrownlight

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sidings by Richard Barrett (White Leaf Press £5)

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

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

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

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

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

Novelty & the New

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

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

"I am making it new

You are pursuing mere novely.

They are using gimmicks."

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

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

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

Lost Your Voice? Try Strepsils.

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

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

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

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

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

Moving On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Problems of Performance

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

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

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

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


Its Eagerness to Please

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

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


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

A corrollary of this is:


Its Cuteness

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

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

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

Sometimes it explains too much

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry As Church

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-Arran Thoughts 2: Counting Backwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each to Their Own (Pre-Arran Thoughts)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fame, fame fatal fame...

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

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

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

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

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

Mexican Poetry

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

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

All in all, a great evening.

How long is a piece of string?

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

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

And then nod when they tell me.

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

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

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

Identity Parade: Pre-Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming Post Avant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Poetry

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

feels rather dated/follow your nose

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Dalby's Review

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?