Polyolbion

Poetry Bites revisited

2012-01-30T14:58:00.002Z

I’ve been away in Cardiff for the lastthree days, so I’ve got a bit behind with what I intended to blog. I caught upwith some old friends, I ate a lot, I drank too much, and I did a lot of goodbirding around Kenfig NNR, Newport Wetlands, Ogmore and Southerndown. Thelatter two were places we went to on holiday every year when I was a kid (mygrandparents lived in Bridgend), so I’ve got a big soft spot for them. I’llreturn to them later in the week – they figure in a post about pub signs I'vebeen meaning to write for a while.

But while I remember, I want to talk aboutlast Tuesday’s Poetry Bites, at the Kitchen Garden Café in King’s Heath. Let’sstart by saying it’s a great venue – intimate and easy to project to when you’rereading, but not at all cramped. The food’s very nice, too – chips just like mymum used to make.

Most importantly, there was a large andvery attentive audience – what more can you ask for as a poet? I read two15-minute slots, mainly from hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, but including a fewolder and newer poems too. I sold quite a few books, and I sat back and enjoyedsome really excellent open mic slots, including one young man who delivered along poem entirely from memory at breakneck speed. Normally, that's not a goodthing, but this absolutely demanded such a delivery, and very impressive itwas.

I haven't got the dates to hand at themoment (more info is available here),but the March guest will be Ira Lightman, followed by Clare Best in May, bothreally fine poets. It was actually as quick and easy to get to from Coalvilleas central Nottingham, so I'll certainly get alongf to future events.

A toast...

2012-01-25T17:30:00.002Z

Tonight is, of course, Burns Night, and while I have no Scottish ancestry that I'm aware of, I'm all for anything that involves the national celebration of a poet, along with the eating of haggis (you can keep the neeps) and the drinking of a single malt or two.

Following on from the big night this year, there's an event taking place in Dumfries this Friday and Saturday, from 7.30pm-11pm, called First Foot @ The Stove. It includes an international art project, conceived and curated by Hugh Bryden and David Borthwick, called Windows On Burns Night. A whole host of poets wrote a piece of their work onto clear plastic, to be displayed on windows around the town. There are more details on it here.

My own poem, Prayer, appears at The Globe. I doubt if I'll be able to get up to Dumfries anytime soon, but I'm proud to have been involved in this project.

Funnily enough, at Monday night's Shindig in Leicester, Burns made a wholly unscheduled appearance. I've talked before about how little themes seem to emerge at each reading, and in the first half of Monday's, mice kept cropping up, especially in John Lucas's fine spot. He read at least as many poems by other people as his own, but it worked extremely well. Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press then challenged someone to read Burns' To A Mouse in the second half. I assumed that the gauntlet would remain on the ground, but Nick Leach took it up magnificently, reading the poem absolutely superbly.

The rest of the night saw great readings from Helen Calcutt and Jessica Mayhew (sadly, Phil Brown couldn't make it), and the usual excellent mix of open mic slots, including a couple of collborations.

Last night, I was reading at Poetry Bites, of which much more later in the week. In the meantime, I'm going to be having a quiet night of it, with a book or two and a large glass of Caol Ila. Here's to Rabbie...

Andy Brown at Peony Moon

2012-01-25T13:36:00.000Z

I really enjoyed reading the new work by Andy Brown posted at Michelle McGrane's superlative Peony Moon - the poems are from his new Salt collection, The Fool and the Physician.

He's one of those poets who seems effortlessly able to write out of a number of different traditions and 'schools', and while I suppose you can't always trust blurbs, in this case you should! Luke Kennard, John Burnside and Lee Harwood all have good things to say about him, and I'm not going to argue with a triumvirate like that.

Anyway, Andy's Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996-2006 is a book I go back to a lot, so I look forward to reading the new collection.

Poetry Bites - tonight!

2012-01-24T00:30:00.000Z

I'm reading at the Kitchen Garden Cafe, on York Road, King's Heath, Birmingham, tonight (Tuesday) from 7.30pm. There are more details here, and open mic slots are available to sign up for on the door. Come along if you're in the area.

Leicester Shindig! returns

2012-01-18T13:19:00.000Z

Crystal Clear Creators and Nine Arches Press are staging their latest Shindig! open mic reading at The Western,Western Road, Leicester, next Monday from 7.30pm. As usual it's free and open to all, and you can sign up for open mic slots at the door.

Featured poets are JessicaMayhew, John Lucas, Phil Brown and Helen Calcutt.

Jessica Mayhew is 22, and ispart way through her degree at the University of Northampton, where she isstudying English Literature and Creative Writing. A pamphlet, Someone Else'sPhotograph, will be published by Crystal Clear Creators in March 2012.

Phil Brown teaches English in Sutton andhas been regularly writing poetry for about 10 years. In 2009 he wasshortlisted for the Crashaw Prize and won the Eric Gregory Award in 2010. His debut collection, Il Avilit, hasjust been published by Nine Arches Press. He is the Poetry Editor for theonline magazine and chapbook publisher, Silkworms Ink.

John Lucas’s most recent book is Next YearWill Be Better: A Memoir of England in the 1950s. He runs Shoestring Press.

Helen Calcutt was born in 1988 and grew upin the West Midlands, with familial roots in South West Wales. Her firstpamphlet collection is forthcoming next year with Perdika. She works as a visiting writer for, amongothers, Creative Alliance, Writing West Midlands, and The Young People’sWriting Squads. She was awarded an Arvon writing Grant in

September 2011.

Looks a great line-up as usual - I'm looking forward to getting hold of Phil Brown's collection.

Ink, Sweat and Tears

2012-01-17T13:26:00.000Z

I have a new poem, Chirimoya, published at Ink, Sweat & Tears (you may have to scroll down a little). It's a great webzine - there are new poems, reviews, etc appearing there all the time, so keep an eye on it.

An interview with Isobel Dixon

2012-01-09T14:19:00.001Z

I met Isobel Dixon at the London launch of Sidekick Books wonderful Birdbook I last summer - her Upupa Epops (you're all such keen birders that you don't need me to tell you what species that's the scientific name of, do you?) is one of the volume's highlights, for me, and a good taster for the superb collection in which it appears, The Tempest Prognosticator.

She was born in Umtata, South Africa, and came toScotland to study in 1993. She works in London as a literary agent,representing a range of clients, including many prominent South Africanwriters. Her work is included in publications like The Paris Review, The Guardian, Penguin’s Poems for Love, The ForwardBook of Poetry and The Best ofBritish Poetry 2011. Her first collection Weather Eye won South Africa’s Sanlam and Olive Schreiner Prizes.Her second collection A Fold in the Mapwas published in the UK by Salt and in South Africa by Jacana, and The Tempest Prognosticator, is publishedin the UK by Salt and in South Africa by Random House’s Umuzi imprint. It’sbeen described as “a virtuoso collection” by J M Coetzee and an “ingeniouscarousel of a book” by David Morley.

One of the things Ienjoyed most about this collection was the vividly African flavour of many ofthe poems, both in subject matter and in the language used. How often do youget back to South Africa, and do you find that an essential spark to yourcreativity?

I’m glad you can feel Africa in it, even though there’s awider ranger of themes and settings than in the more overtly homesick andfamily-focused A Fold in the Map. There’s a lot more London, Yorkshire, Englandin The Tempest Prognosticator, partly reflecting how long I’ve lived and workedon this island. But South Africa remains essential to my life and writing. I goback twice a year, for publishing work and to see family and friends, and just tobe at home in the Karoo for a while. My mother still lives in the house where Iand my sisters grew up, and this old house and my home town Graaff-Reinet remaincrucial places for me. I was thinking ofit as I wrote as a harbour or dry dock and the phrase ‘refreshment station’keeps popping into my mind – what the Dutch East India Company called thesettlement at the Cape, a place for sailors to pick up fresh water and fruitand vegetables on their long sea journeys. A way to prevent emotional scurvy,perhaps…!

Strangely, I don’t write a lot when I’m back in the Cape(both Western and Eastern), because there is so much else to pack into thedays, but I do take a lot of notes, jotting down ideas all the time. The longdrives between towns, through my country’s glorious landscapes, are alsofruitful thinking times, and some poems invariably emerge after I leave,sometimes even on the return flight. Aeroplanes and trains seem to be essentialto my writing too…A virtue of frequent necessity perhaps.

Just a word, too, about your writing processes. The TempestPrognosticator holds together very well as a themed collection, but was equallyenjoyable to dip in and out of. Was it a case of writing ‘occasional’ poemsthat started to cohere around a central point?

Some of the poems in The Tempest Prognosticator havetravelled a long way, several pre-dating my previous collection A Fold in theMap.

In both A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator Ihave some poems that were first published in my South African debut collection WeatherEye, which is no longer in print, though you can find the odd copy on the web. WeatherEye was never widely distributed outside South Africa and while it was a veryimportant book for me, as all first books are to their creators, I wanted togive some of those early poems a new life in a new context. When I came to puttogether the manuscript for my secondcollection I realised that there were narrativefamily poems like Plenty and the title poem Weather Eye which fitted wellinto the divided shape of what became myfirst UK publication A Fold in the Map – where the first half mainly looks backto childhood and my country of birth, often from the vantage point of the UK;and where the second half traces my father’s illness and death, that terriblejourney we made together as a family, coping with the process of loss. While Iwas writing constantly, out of my own need, when my father first becameseriously ill, I had no intention of publishing the resulting poems, not tilllater when my mother and sisters had read them, and they’d grown to form somenarrative arc of their own. But I didn’t want a collection that was just aboutgrief, I wanted to show some of the fullness too, more of the light, and so thetwo halves took shape together.

So there were many poems I’d already written by the time AFold in the Map was published that just weren’t right for the form and tone ofthat collection, and I knew I would use them in another very differentcollection later. Poems like Vision, the opening poem of The TempestPrognosticator, which appeared in The Wolf in 2004, or Days of Miracle and Wonder whichwas in The Paris Review the same year.

The poems of The Tempest Prognosticator are poems thatspring from many interlinked concerns and fascinations – like the South Africannatural scientist and poet Eugene Marais, whose writing inspired Toktokkieand The Inopportune Baboon, and perhaps some more work to come. There arepoems that spring from love of travel, art, film, and a fascination withaspects of the quirkiness of life and human inventiveness, as in the titlepoem, about a Victorian device which used leeches to predict storms. Maybebecause I grew up in an extremely dry part of the world where everyone is asky-watcher and rain-measurer, I am also a little obsessed with ideas of theweather…

So the new collection jettisons family in favour of animals– but that’s not to say I’ve switched my concerns completely, the collection isjust a different beast for a different season. I am slowly writing a series ofpoems about my mother too, but that’s for some time ahead.

There’s a veritable bestiary in there, too. I liked thebalance struck between exact description of animals, birds, even insects, andtheir metaphorical use. Is that something that’s always been a part of yourpoetry?

I was once asked at a reading if I wrote so much aboutanimals and insects because I don’t like people… But I think (hope) the humanis very present in even the most creaturely of The Tempest Prognosticatorpoems.

But yes, nature, the creatures, have always been a part ofthe writing. Again because it’s all always been, completely naturally, part ofmy life. We ran quite wild as kids, in wide open but safe spaces, far from thecity. A big garden at the back of our own house, a small town in a horsehoe of(mostly dry) river, surrounded by the Karoo plains and mountains. Every holidayspent on my uncle’s farm, involved in the daily work. Two of my sisters live on a farm, one of my sisters is apainter who does a lot of Karoo landscapes,and we all love walking, the African outdoors, the wildlife. The eldest andyoungest have just been on a tent safari holiday in Botswana together and I’m feelingvery envious (though I like to keep a whole lot further away from the crocs andhippos than my adventurous heroine, Mary Kingsley of Beetle, Fish &Fetish, did…). I think the firstrambling free verse poem I wrote as a kid was about the Karoo and drought…Andthe natural world is just so rich and present, a realm of endless fascination,and the more you learn, as well as observe personally, the more amazing it allseems. Much as I love London, I often need to get away from the relentlesslyurban, both in reality and in imagination.

So the idea of a tapestry made of spider silk, as in Silking the Spider, was irresistible, or the confluence of nature and art, themaking and remaking of Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in Requiem. It’s why Ilove Eugene Marais’s writing in The Soul of the Ape and The Soul of the WhiteAnt, groundbreaking work and writing from a tragic life. It’s why I was drawnto Mary Kingsley’s brilliant and witty observations of the West African jungle,which I plundered for Beetle, Fish & Fetish, or Robert Byron’s odd, funnyand moving anecdote about an over-affectionate wild boar in The Road to Oxiana,which I recast in The Poor Wild Boar Who Went Too Far. These last two poemswere both written as part of a commission for The Travel Bookshop (now sadlyclosed) in 2010.

Which links to to your ‘occasional poems’ question earlier.For this, as with several of the themed group projects that led to poems in thecollection (like the Pink Floyd and English Counties nights), I was involved ininitiating and organising the event. So along with Simon Barraclough andRichard Price, I spent several happy hours in the Travel Bookshop, with morefantastic source material than I could mine in a year. Other poems also camefrom commissions for books or events: Mountain War Time for Roddy Lumsden’s 50States event, and Upupa Epops and A Parliament of Gulls, written forKirsten Irving and Jon Stone’s lovely Birdbook I, a chance I’ll admit I seized onwith gull-like greed. I’d never set up or take up a commission that didn’tchime with something I wanted to write, but I do like the creative pressurethat comes from writing to a certain theme, and of course, a deadline.

A final note on ‘the bestiary’ is that for the South Africanlaunch of The Tempest Prognosticator mysister Janet organised an art exhibition in her gallery, ArtKaroo, inOudtshoorn, where two South African artists, Leanette Botha and SusqyaWilliams, produced visual interpretations of some of the poems. It was fascinating to see their vision of thecreatures – the boars, zebras, lizards,baboons, orang-utans, camels, toktokkies, ostriches and more taking vigorousand colourful shape off the page. You can see a selection here.

Following on from that, is your first collection, WeatherEye, still available anywhere?

Only here and there on the web and from second hand dealers– as mentioned before, there are Weather Eye traces in A Fold in the Map and TheTempest Prognosticator, though there are poems that are published solely in thedebut book. I only have a few copies left myself.

Other highlights for me were some absolutely exquisite shortpoems – A Mess Of Vinegar, Only Adapt, Paradox and valentine among them. Ioccasionally suspect that such shorter pieces get a bit undervalued incontemporary British poetry – do you think that’s the case?

Thank you, that’s wonderful to hear. I’m a fan of the shortpoem myself – not just the subtlety of the haiku, but also short sharp shocksof poems. Emily Dickinson’s brilliance in her spare dashed lines, Les Murray’s Poemsthe Size of Photographs, and so many more.

There’s talk of a return of greater appreciation for theshort story, the essay, the novella, perhaps because we are not so restrictedby the bound format and read our texts in so many ways these days, includingthe web and Kindles and Kobos, and all the devices still being developed andnamed. Maybe it’s that way with the short poem too – though it’s never been outof favour with readers, I believe, despite not being seen as substantial enoughto win poetry prizes when up against longer work, and not published as much injournals. It’s great to see Magma launch their new short poem prize, for poemsof up to 10 lines. Penguin’s Poems for Love anthology, edited by Laura Barber,includes a very short two-liner poem of mine, truce (not yet in a collection).Perhaps love (and hate) poems, in the tradition of Catullus’s Odi et Amo areperfect for that short, sharp, shock treatment…

Finally, I wonder how your day job as a literary agentaffects your poetry, if at all?

I’m lucky to have a completely absorbing passion for myprofessional life, a job where no two days, or books, or authors, are alike. Itis pretty full-on though, and work and private life aren’t very boundaried. Thepoetry weaves its way between this, in early mornings, late nights, weekendsbetween manuscript reading. I’m never without a notebook and various pens (nothingworse than being on an overnight flight when your only pen’s just erupted.) Myown writer clients are a great example in their focus, dedication and hardwork.

Commissions and joint projects do help to keep the poetryfrom being completely swamped by my job. The rigour of a deadline’s very usefulhere. So I’m working on a production for this year’s centenary of the sinkingof the Titanic, along with poets Chris McCabe and Simon Barraclough, musician andcomposer Oliver Barrett, and film-maker Jack Wake-Walker. I will be followingthat with an art and poetry project with Scottish artist Douglas Robertson. Moreweather, and more creatures, in view with those two….

To buy The Tempest Prognosticator, click here.

Three poems from The Tempest Prognosticator

Upupa Epops

Scarcepassage migrant regular enough to skim the south

ofthis glib outcrop with your pied and pinkish now-and-then

butstill, erratic flitter on the wing, old vaudevillean,

knowingthat you’ll cause a flutter on the wires.

Aprophet less respected in those backyard days

youpoked about our frazzled lawn, a dandy priest.

Familiarityand all the blah it breeds.

Whoknew, so dapper in your black-barred

cinnamon-cum-chestnutraiment, you’d turn out to be,

backhome, a smelly nester of the first degree?

Thesins fine feathers and a rather natty crest can hide.

Oop-oop-oops,indeed.

YourGiant St Helena Ancestor went dodo,

longbefore Napoleon and the Giant Earwig did.

Butstill you pop up here and there, to stride and plunge

thatbeaky scythe, delving the underworld for breakfast –

spiderseasy over, ant lions sunny side up,

atake-out gogga, kriek or two to feed the brood.

Youfoul your hidden clutch of milky-blue. Tree-caved,

survivingcritters shit at probing eyes, and hiss like snakes.

Only Adapt

Observe the sand gazelle

who with a shrinking heart

survives the drought –

an admirable desert art,

this making small, a skill

that we who doubt

the seasonal largesse

must learn as well.

Paradox

There’s no telling what

will make the heart leap, frog-

like, landing with a soggy plop.

Love startles, makes a mockery

of us, and yet we lie awake

at night and croak and croak for it.

Poetry Bites

2012-01-07T13:44:00.000Z

I'm reading at Poetry Bites, at the Kitchen Garden Cafe, King's Heath, Birmingham, on January 24th, starting at 7.30pm. There are more details at this Facebook page - hope to see you there.

Meanwhile, Polyolbion will be swinging back into action on Monday with an interview with Isobel Dixon, plus poems from her excellent Salt collection The Tempest Prognosticator.

Up for grabs

2012-01-06T13:37:00.001Z

Fancy being the Poet Laureate of Stamford? There's details here of a competition with that as the prize. It's a wonderfully historic town, and of course has a poetic pedigree, with John Clare having grown up and lived a mile or two down the road at Helpston, so it could be very interesting.

An interview with Simon Barraclough

2011-12-19T13:27:00.003Z

I'm enjoying trying to come up with some Best of 2011 lists, with the usual agonising decisions about what to leave out and what to include. One collection that will definitely make the poetry list, though, and which I would imagine will figure on many a list by lit journos, bloggers and readers, is Neptune Blue, by Simon Barraclough. I talked to him about it, and poetry in general...

NeptuneBlue struck me as beinga product of the polar opposite of ‘second collection syndrome’ – it’sabsolutely jam-packed with ideas and diverse sources of inspiration. Is that aresult of being a very active poet, in terms of doing readings, writing forcommissions, organising events, etc?

That’s nice tohear. ‘Second collection syndrome’ sounds ominous. I think there’s truth inwhat you say: the more involved and engaged I am with events, commissions andother writers the more stimulated I’m likely to be and possibly the more likelyI am to come into contact with new ideas or themes. But I’m also quite lucky inthat I always seem to have several ideas on the go at once and many projectsI’m always trying to find time for. This may not last forever but for now theideas, subjects and sequences continue to vie for attention.

Followingon from what you were saying about having a lot of ideas going onsimultaneously, I was wondering about how the book came together (or your firstcollection, for that matter). Is it a case of identifying what you feel aregoing to be pretty central poems early on, and then letting the rest of thecollection coalesce around them, or is it a more strictly planned process?

The growth of acollection is quite mysterious I think: maybe a bit like how a planet or solarsystem is formed. There’s a certain amount of matter, dust and poetic gasfloating around and then it cools and shrinks and gravity begins to heat all theparticles up again. After Los Alamos Mon Amour I got quite a lot ofcommissions and published 17 of them in the mini-book Bonjour Tetris,which gave me a small core of new poems to work around. So I took 6 or 7 ofthose for whatever the next book would be and before I knew it I'd started twosequences around the same time: the planet poems and the ___________ Heartpoems. The planets was something I realised I’d always wanted to do in responseto my love of Holst’s planet suite and the Hearts came out of an odd littledream in which my heart had been replaced by a starfish. It was a very vivid,tactile dream: quite disturbing, and it kicked off a whole chain of odd littlepoems about Hearts. Finding a title for the book came down to a tussle betweenthe hearts and planets but Neptune Blue won out as I just liked itssimple music and Neptune is probably my favourite of the planet poems.

So that was 9planets (I retain Pluto with a mild touch of irony), 11 Hearts, plus the7 from Tetris, making up about half of a new book. I then blended inother poems I thought were good enough and loosely related to some of thethemes I’d already written and then, as happened towards the end of LosAlamos, I had a bit of a writing spurt that producedaround 6 new poems I thought would fit in well. I also wanted one closer to capoff the collection and that came in the form of Sol, my poem writtenfrom the point of view of the Sun, looking back from her perspective on all theplanets I’d written about earlier.

That final poemhas propelled me down another path and since Neptune Blue came out, I’vewritten about 20 Sunspot poems and have a crazy plan to write 121 ofthem. This is to do with the 11-year sunspot cycle. Bit nerdy, but I like tohave these buried structures when I write.

I like theastronomical analogy, and I think you've answered my next question, too, aboutthe Heart and Planet poems. You've touched, too, upon the ‘buriedstructures’ you use in writing sequences or putting together a collection.Within individual poems, form seems to work very much in the same way for you –would that be fair?

I’ve always enjoyedusing and reading form but I think I use it less often these days. At least, Idon’t think I adhere to a strict form throughout that many single poems unlessthe subject really demands it. I tend to use form and formal patterns as a kindof underlying skeleton but I’m quite happy to break its rules for certainpassages of a poem if the rhythm, rhetoric, line break, appearance on the pagedemand it.

I think in thatrespect the new book is freer than Los Alamos was and changes gears morereadily within a single poem. It’s an odd analogy but I like to think of thesongs of Frank Black and how tracks like I Heard Ramona Sing seem tohave two or three intros and then sudden shifts of structure in the verses. In NeptuneBlue, I think the poems Earth and SoBe It have a little ofthis quality I’m grasping at. But I’m maybe not my best reader and may be welloff the mark. And then the shorter Heart poems, I’m thinking mainly of TapestryHeart, seem almost formless. Is there something inthis? What do you think?

I thinkthat’s exactly right! I tend to find myself drawing musical analogies a lotwhen I’m reading poetry, and Frank Black and the Pixies sprang to mind morethan once during Neptune Blue. And of course those dynamic shifts create acertain zoom-in, zoom-out effect in places, which works well with theastronomical themes. It brings me back to your writing processes again – do youhave any particular rituals, or ideal conditions? I almost always find myselfwriting in the evening, even if I’ve had a completely clear day.

I really don’tthink I have any rituals. I tend to write at my desk at home, looking out overLondon (I’m on the 10th floor and am treated to spectacular skies and sunsetsalmost every day), although I can write in cafes and at airports when I needto. So I suppose the place I write is fairly constant. I can write at any timeof day. I love the idea of writing through the night but I’m usually too tiredto be effective if it’s really late.

I make notes inlonghand but I can only write poems on my computer these days. At some point inthe last 10 years my imagination became more comfortable with a keyboard than apen. It doesn’t help that my handwriting looks quite nice but is 80% illegibleto me. Most ideas now go straight into a long .txt file, which gets saved andcopied here and there in case I lose my laptop. I used to like writing inpencil because it felt freer and more flexible than pen and now I find theformat-less text file is the pencil to Word’s pen, ifthat makes sense. I don’t write every day and I have no set hours but I dothink about writing almost all the time (I imagine that’s the case with you andmost poets too)?

I read somethingabout James Joyce when I was a teenager that really affected me. I used to fussabout stationery: the right pen and notebook and so on but then I read howJoyce would write on anything with anything: crayons, bits of torn up paper,whatever was available, and from then on I dropped all notions of ‘the righttools’ or ‘the right ambience’.

Yes, Ithink I’ve gradually gone towards the same sort of system – Notepad to Wordwith some occasional scribblings by hand. Ever since I learned shorthand in mymid-20s, though, my handwriting’s been so appalling that I can rarely read itback properly. I identify with what you say about thinking about writing allthe time. How does that fit in with your day job(s)? I’m conscious of beingvery lucky in having a job that involves a lot of time on my own, and in whichI’m writing anyway (so I can hammer away at the keyboard writing a poem ornotes for one while people think I’m typing up a report).

Well for the lastseven years I’ve worked either freelance or part-time, so I have quite a lot oftime and space for writing. Doesn’t mean I use the time well, of course, but Ido my best. Writing is too solitary an activity, so I like to mix it up withevents and collaborations as much as I can. Even when I’m working though, Ioften have one of those text files open where I can ‘jot’ down ideas and scrapsof poetry when they hit.

Going backto Neptune Blue, the Heart poems were a highlight for me, I think partlybecause they manage to be both extremely playful, and at times, extremely dark.Is that opposition, or balance, something you consciously strive for?

Well, I’m alwayshappy when people think that I’ve achieved that kind of balance. It’sclearly important to me to combine the light and the dark, the painful and thecomical. I have an entirely savoury tooth when it comes to food and I thinkit’s safe to say I have the same when it comes to literature. Samuel Becketthas always been a touchstone for me but it’s his laugh-out-loud moments (oftenprovoked by comic hyperbole, such as when Mrs. Rooney in All That Fallstruggles to get into a car and declaims: “Christ what a planet!”) that I loveevery bit as much as the ditches of despair.

Perhaps I’m alsoreacting to the cliché that ‘poetry is all hearts and flowers’. Even if thatwere the case, who’s to say those flowers and hearts can’t be twisted, painful,funny, fascinating, surprising? I’m not saying mine are, but one tries. Andwhat is more complex, more sunny and yet more benighted than the poor old humanheart?

Absolutely.I think another reason they work is the way they blur the lyric "I"so well – you’re never sure as a reader whether you’re dealing with a multiplicityof hearts, and voices, or the many different facets of one. And I guess thatgoes hand in hand with the light and dark. Would that be fair?

I think so. When Iwrote them I wasn’t sure about those things either. The ‘characters’ of thehearts in question grew out of the imagery and language and developed alongtheir own paths, somehow. They seemed to have their own, speedy,particle-momentum. I think that’s why they’re quite short. There’s a bit of mein each of them but a large proportion of each feels alien to me too. That’sit: they’re alien hearts.

YourItalophilia is a thread that keeps resurfacing in the collection, too. Can youtell me a bit about how that developed (I speak as someone rapidly developingHispanophilia)?

Ah, enjoy your newphilia. I’ve had mine for many years now and I think I can trace it as far backas hearing Rossini in the cot. Something like that, to be dangerously (andprobably mendaciously) romantic. Funny you mention this, as I tend to thinkit’s less obvious in Neptune than it is in Los Alamos but I couldbe wrong. It amuses me that, being such an Italophile, so many French words andFrench references creep into the poems and into my titles.

I started studyingItalian seriously about six years ago after years and years of procrastinatingand buying books like Italian in your Lunchtime or Italian WithoutItalian and all the other quick-fixes that never work. So I hired a privatetutor to come to my home twice a week for about 14 months and since then I’vetaken courses, hired a second tutor occasionally, and tend to study a littleevery day. And I mainly go to Italy when I travel.

I remember going toVenice in 2003 and only knowing about five words of Italian and being reallyfrustrated and angry with myself. I vowed then I wouldn’t return until I’d putsome work in and so my next trip was to Turin in 2005 after three months ofquite intense study. It’s inevitable that it should creep into my writing, Isuppose, and it’s only going to get worse as I’m preparing to do sometranslating this year. I just love the country and the people, the climate, thefood and the culture but I’m not starry eyed about it. I’m aware of the darkeraspects of Italy and I hear plenty about them from my Italian friends, believeme. In a funny way, I think the ‘worse’ Italy becomes, the more friends itneeds. Maybe that goes for all countries, all people.

And of courseItalian is a wonderfully musical language and being able to read old and newpoets, while still difficult at times, is a joy and perhaps helps me with mywriting? Not sure.

Ah, you’vepre-empted my next question – I was going to ask if you had the urge totranslate. Which poets are you going to be working on?

Through a series ofhappy coincidences I came to befriend the novelist and poet Giuliano Dego andwas surprised that his epic historical-satirical poem La Storia in Rima hasn’tbeen translated into English yet. We’ve agreed that I will make a start on CantoI (there are 10 in total) and, with some input from him, we’ll see how I geton.

It presents manychallenges of course, primarily because it’s written in ottava rima (Giulianohas published a fine translation of Canto I of Don Juan and is a huge fan ofByron) and there just aren’t as many rhymes available in English as there arein Italian. But we’re agreed that the new version must have its own Englishpoetry and not follow the original too slavishly. I’ve got so much on that Ithink the process will be a slow one. But probably all the better for that.Italy is the country of the slow food movement after all...

Your lastanswer tied in with something I’ve been thinking about a lot this week – howlong I take to (a) write a poem, and (b) revise it and send it out to a mag.I’ve been making a conscious effort to be much slower in this, with the resultthat new poems seem to be arriving ‘complete’ (but not ‘finished’). The danger,I suppose, is that it might stifle any embryonic poems that really demand to bespontaneous, and of the moment. Any thoughts on this?

While thetranslating is incredibly slow, I find I’m writing new material quite quickly.For that reason I’m just letting it flow for now and I’m going to go back andrevise it all carefully later. I think I’m going to have a whole focused bookto work on, which is unusual and should be an interesting experience in termsof shaping, organising and setting up currents and patterns within it. So Ithink I’m being spontaneous with a view to being more methodical later. Best ofboth worlds? Having my cake and editing it? Then again, a couple of the Heartpoems in Neptune must have taken minutes to write, while SoBe It wasstarted 11 years ago...each poem has its own needs I suppose.

Other thanthe translations, do you have any pet projects, any books within you that youdesperately want to write? I’ve been surprised (though probably shouldn't havebeen) by how many poets have.

Oh, well this Sunbook has become one of them for me and my research is taking my mind on a richand varied journey. I’ve always wanted to write a long poetic account of theloss of the USS Indianapolis in 1945 and even went as far as applying for agrant to support research but wasn’t lucky that time around. I’ve tinkered witha book along the lines of How Laurel and Hardy Can Change Your Life andthere’s another much cherished prose project I’m not even going to mention!Superstition.

I’ll askthe same thing that I asked Mark Burnhope recently – which one thing would youdo to enthuse schoolkids about poetry (it can be as little as exposing them toa particular poem)?

That’s a goodquestion. Over the last few years I’ve tried all kinds of techniques to getschoolchildren excited about reading and writing poetry. I don’t think one poemor method has been uniquely successful but I do find that some kind ofinteractive, ludic approach works well. By which I mean things like composingpoems according to randomly generated or brainstormed ‘rules’ for each line;physically chopping up a sonnet into 14 lines and asking groups to try andreconstitute the poem ‘correctly’ (many fruitful discussions about form andmeaning arise from the ‘incorrect’ versions produced); working with shortsyllabic forms, such as haiku or Fibonaccis.

I once presented aclass with Giles Goodland’s excellent poem ‘The Bees’ and after reading ittogether a few times I asked everyone to circle bits of the language that‘disturbed’ them in some way, be it through pleasure, confusion, rhythm,imagery, nonsensical moments or any other reason, and we ended up having afascinating discussion about what the poem was doing and how. It was great tohear one kid shoot down a complex metaphor as meaningless only to be challengedby another who had grasped why the metaphor was in fact perfect.

Reading one’s ownwork and answering questions about how and why you wrote such and such a linecan work well too. It helps to demystify the writing process and bring it intothe realm of the possible for the students. But for any of this to work, if Ihad my way, I would issue a wholesale ban on sing-song rhythmic, rhyming poetryin TV adverts. They’re everywhere at the moment and they’re theequivalent of high-fat, high-salt, processed, fast food to my mind. I’ve seenso many good ideas in class ruined by the tyranny of sing-song rhyme and theabsurdities of syntax and sense it frequently produces. And I’m not against rhymeat all, when used well. Or a bit of fast food once in a while. But sometimes itfeels that this is the only kind of ‘poetry’ that exists outside of educationalinstitutions.

When I was aschoolboy, it was a couple of poems by Hughes and Auden that blew me away. Andall it took was to be presented with the work and given time to read, re-readand think about it. Sometimes you just need to present a great poem to a class.One, some, and maybe all will get it.

I like thatidea of getting them to reconstruct poems, but I think you also touch on aneven more important point about being given the time to read, re-read andthink. So I wonder if you think that poetry’s compact nature, the fact that itcan be slotted into the gaps in everyday life, is its secret weapon in thebattle to grab attention?

Hmm, that wouldseem logical wouldn’t it? Although a good lyric poem is a bit like the Tardis.It’s much bigger inside than it looks and you can squeeze through its door neverto be seen again as you wander its corridors and chambers. People often claimthey have no time to read (poetry, or at all) and I routinely say that it takesa minute or two to read a poem. But it’s not about the real time of reading,it’s the time the mind, the ears, the breath take to savour and explore itfully.

And that’s justlyric poetry; once you’re onto Paradise Lost or The Changing Light atSandover you can’t appeal to brevity or quick digestibility any more. Thething is to recalibrate life so we all have a little more time and space toread and think. Sounds idealistic. Probably is. Having said all that, dwellingon a Dream Song over lunch is a good start. Eighteen lines, one hour:not a bad ratio.

To buy Neptune Blue, click here.

Three poems from Neptune Blue

SoBe It

If I fall in love, and I think I will,
I may have to leave Miami first.

Who wuz it now wiv whom I wuz in wuv?

All those charter boats, art deco sunsets
and waitresses I tried to hit upon
in Biscayne des-per-a-tion
cling to the windshield of my Flydrive mind.

Crawling through your tome, Bret Easton,
trying to pretend the week apart to make up both our minds
had not made up her mind the very second she suggested it.
You dick.
Angler of occluded hopes, those sunburnt optimisms.
Block them, factor 451.

Are you going out in those shorts in this cold?
I've got a fishing trip. Have read my Benchley and my Junger,
got the hunger for a day's sea breeze,
some finny kills, the macho tackle,
accessories, success stories. I get no bites.

But the skipper and a baby blue shark
connect; on deck the Lindy Hop of death.
Swiss army knife of evolution, trying
all his blades, his tools, his gizmos,
carving esses in the air, winding down.

That mournful mouth. Turn your frown upside down.
The hatch to the hold's yanked open and our shark,
still twitching's kicked on down, takes the longest time
to drown.

Earth

God's gobstopper:
first mouthed to be last swallowed,
blue-green baubled gobsmacker.

Without the lunar counterweight,
the grave embrace's tidal tug,
we'd pop our dislocated poles
and shudder like a shook snow globe
and every shook snow globe on Earth
would synchronise and stormy flakes
would regulate themselves and lovely chaos
might abate. And then where would we be?

Somewhere someone's daughter asks,
'If the world is round, why is a frozen lake flat?'

This is the planet of daughters and sons,
the noisy neighbour, noise polluter,
party thrower, troublemaker,
incubator, hibernator, estivator, terminator.

Such sights. Where to start? Where will it all end?
Deep in the belly of the old star mother?
The blown red placenta, the giving one's all.

Neptune

You're so blue
you probably think that Jarman's Blue
is about you.

You're the source of all blue,
of Edwin Morgan's 'Little Blue Blue',
inexhaustiblue,

bluemungous, ur-blue.
Earth blue held up to you
is muck ball brown and grass stain green,

our oceans but a drop,
a dust of moth,
a mote of you.

Promises, promises

2011-12-14T11:17:00.000Z

I've been pretty tardy about posting on here just lately, for one reason and another, but I plan to spring back into life next week - the holiday's going to consist of little other than reading and writing, if I have anything to do with it.

There'll be an interview with Salt poet Simon Barraclough, talking about his splendid collection Neptune Blue, among other things. There'll be my usual rather slapdash end of year lists. There'll be a a piece on colour in poetry that I've been meaning to finish for ages. Likewise, I plan to add the finishing touches to two or three reviews that have been gathering dust for a while. There'll be a look at a couple of pieces of nature writing I've been enjoying recently (and one of them is a truly extraordinary book). Oh, and there'll also be an interview and poetry from another Salt poet, Isobel Dixon.

There - that's what the Radio Times would have called a bumper Christmas and New Year package.

The pamphlet process

2011-12-07T13:26:00.001Z

I've been catching up on Leicester poet Roy Marshall's account of putting together his debut poetry chapbook, Gopagilla, due out from Crystal Clear Creators in March next year. I'm always intrigued by the process of putting together collections, and I agree wholeheartedly with what Roy says about input from an editor - I've always enjoyed having to argue the case for some poems, or for certain passages between them.

I can identify, too, with what he says about laying all his possible poems out on the floor, to work out which ones fit with each other. I'm just tentatively starting the process of doing that with some new poems myself, although more with a view to deciding which might make up the core of a subsequent collection than to coming up with any kind of finished line-up. It makes the house look even more of a mess than usual, of course, but it's surprising how often you notice something new about an old poem when you read it while you're ironing shirts, or peeling spuds.

More reasons to buy Morrison

2011-12-01T13:48:00.000Z

Interesting review of Alan Morrison's Captive Dragons / The Shadow Thorns, over at Stride. It sounds like another in a growing list of fine collections from Waterloo Press - political engagement and an unflinching take on real life issues are fast becoming their hallmark, although never at the expense of musicality or readability. I can't help also being delighted that the book contains a poem referencing one of HP Lovecraft's stories - high time, too.

HappenStance happening

2011-11-30T19:44:00.000Z

I was away at the Hula Valley Birdwatching Festival in northern Israel last week. It was really excellent, but my one regret about going was that I missed the HappenStance reading in Nottingham at the weekend. As Matthew Stewart and Maria Taylor have written, it was clearly an event to remember. Next time, I hope...

Poetry at the Flying Goose

2011-11-30T13:16:00.000Z

The Flying Goose Cafe in Beeston High Road,Nottingham, hosts a reading on Tuesday, December 13th, from 7.30pm, with thefeatured readers Emily Hasler, Shaun Belcher, JT Welsch and Adrian Slatcher.It's an open reading, though, so if you want to take a poem along to read, feelfree.

It's staged by the Nottingham Poetry Seriesand NottinghamTrent University. Entry is free, but donations of £3 are welcome.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to get alongthat night, but past events have been excellent, and the cafe sells somesplendid cakes, so it's definitely one for the diary.

Speech Bubble

2011-11-29T13:22:00.001Z

Interesting open mic night in Loughborough next Monday - there's a growing number of places to read at in the East Midlands all of a sudden. I'm supposed to be at a meeting that evening, but some diary-juggling may be possible.

Derwent Poetry Festival - some thoughts

2011-11-14T23:10:00.001Z

I was only able to pop into the festival on Saturday afternoon, but I had enough time to see readings by Christopher James, Kathleen Jones, Clive Allen, Susanne Ehrhardt and Jo Bell, as well as to buy a couple more of Templar's beautifully produced books (Clive's collection Violets, and the 2011 anthology, Bliss), and chat with Wayne Burrows and Roy Marshall.

I'm pushed for time, so I won't attempt any genuine review of the readings (they were excellent, though). But here's three thoughts that occurred to me...

1 Introducing one of his poems, To Read The Relationship between the Residents and the Surfers in Newquay, Clive mentioned that he had never surfed, or been to Newquay, but that he saw no reason why that should stand in the way of him writing the poem. Increasingly, that's how I feel. Not that there's anything wrong with facts finding their way into a poem sometimes, but it probably gets a bit overdone, and we probably all know the feeling you get where you try to cram all that research into the poem. Far better to wing it now and then, I think.

2 St Guthlac seems to find his way into contemporary English poetry more than any of his fellow saints, and should be declared the patron saint of English poetry forthwith. He cropped up in one of Christopher James' poems (a really fine one about fen-skaters), I've seen him mentioned in another within the last few weeks, he cropped up in Tom Chivers' How To Build A City, and he was in one of my poems in Troy Town (which, alarmingly, I've completely forgotten the title of, and I haven't got it to hand to check). Guthlac spent a large part of his life as a hermit on the fen island of Crowland, driven half-mad by the isolation, hunger, the ague, the effects of eating hallucinogenic plants, and regular visits from a whole tribe of demons. You can decide for yourself whether that makes him more or less suitable for the post.

3 Clive Allen also, in the introduction to another poem, described poetry as "a complicated way of being ignored". That might be my current favourite definition of poetry.

A Night of HappenStance

2011-11-10T17:47:00.000Z

Six HappenStance poets from as far away as Spain will be gathering for a readingdownstairs at Lee Rosy’s in Nottingham (17, Broad Street, NG1 3AJ – opposite the Broadway cinema) on 26th November, from 7.30pm. Entrance is £4, or £3 for concessions.

Helena Nelson (editor of HappenStance Press), Ross Kightly, MarilynRicci, Robin Vaughan-Williams, DA Prince, and Matthew Stewart (who will be inthe country to launch his new pamphlet, Inventing Truth) are the readers.

That's six really fine poets, and I only wish I could be there to hear them – I'll be away because of work.

Helena will also beadjudicating the Nottingham Open Poetry Competition at 2.45pm at the MechanicsInstitute (at 3 North Sherwood Street, Nottingham, NG1 4AX).

New Walk reading / Grace Nichols & John Agard show

2011-11-07T13:17:00.001Z

Ian Parks and Alan Jenkins are reading as part of the Literary Leicester Festival this Thursday at 6pm, in the Ogden Lewis Seminar Suite in the University of Leicester's Fielding Johnson Building. Entry is free, but you need to book tickets - details are here.

Straight afterwards (well, at 7.30), you can get along to the Peter Williams Lecture Theatre in the Fielding Johnson Building for Grace Nichols' and John Agard's joint performance show Sunris and Man To Pan, which look at two iconic Caribbean metaphors of transfiguration – Carnival and Steel Pan. Further details are here.

The waiting game

2011-10-28T16:10:00.000Z

I've been thinking hard about the writing process this week. After hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica came out last November, I wrote very little poetry until April, when I did NaPoWriMo. From then until the start of September, I did little more than revise a few of the poems written during that month.

It wasn't exactly writer's block, though. I don't think I've ever exactly rushed to get poems out there - I tend to revise a lot and the last book, for example, contained some poems that had their origin six or seven years ago - but I had decided that I'd really take my time before sending anything out to magazines, e-zines, etc.

In the last six weeks or so, though, I've started to write some new material alongside the continuing revisions, and rather to my surprise most of the poems seem to have been arriving 'complete'. That's not to say finished, but whole poems, rather than fragments (at other times I've often had beginnings and endings with no middle, or middle sections in desperate need of something to bookend them). I've resisted the temptation to send any of them out there yet, but it has had me wondering about how much of the process of composition takes place before you ever pick up pen, or keyboard. I have, I realise, been slowly writing these poems in my head for the last 12 months - it's only now the urge to get them down on paper has become irresistible.

Then, at Monday night's Nine Arches/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig, I was going to read a poem called Azul at the open mic. I started writing it about three years ago, and I'd read it a couple of times previously, at the Colour Conference at Warwick University earlier this year, and at the last Nottingham Shindig. I'd always felt that it needed more tweaking though, and as I sat there on Monday night, I suddenly realised what. I changed things around when I read it, rewrote it when I got home, and I think it's now a much stronger poem. Again, I wonder if the rewriting's actually been taking place each time I've read it, each time I've looked at it in frustration and bafflement.

So, the waiting game seems to be working for me at the moment. The problem, of course, is knowing when to trust first impressions and go with something the moment it hits the page. But that'd be a nice problem to have.

The Fizz 10

2011-10-26T13:01:00.000Z

Polesworth's well-established poetry reading and open mic night, The Fizz, welcomes three poets from Cork - Afric McGlinchey, Colm Scully and Jennifer Matthews - on November 3rd, as part of the Coventry-Cork Literature Exchange.

It's worth pointing out that it's on a Thursday night (not the usual Tuesday) and at the Tythe Barn on Bridge Street, rather than in the Abbey Refectory as usual. It all starts at 7.30pm, and there'll be open mic slots available, as well as refreshments. See you there...

Full house

2011-10-25T12:57:00.002Z

Last night's Shindig at The Western might have been the best yet, courtesy of a great line-up of featured readers, the usual high standard of open mic contributions, and a large and generous audience.

Mal Dewhirst, of Polesworth Poetry Trail fame, kicked off the readings in the first (Nine Arches Press) half of the night. I particularly enjoyed his piece inspired by Pooley Country Park, but all of what he read had a strong sense of place, and he's not afraid to take unusual approaches to his subject, either - I'd like to see a lot more of the archaeological 'dig' poem he read from.

It was good to be reminded of just how good a poet Nine Arches co-editor Jane Commane is, too, with her reading touching on areas as diverse as music, racehorses and maps (the latter being a subject I always find irresistible). Her bypass poem, too, was one I'd like to hear again and again.

The second half of the night, run by Crystal Clear Creators, first featured Charles Lauder Jr. I enjoyed his poems a lot - there was just enough of a transatlantic flavour to them to make them constantly surprising. I'll look forward to seeing his pamphlet from CCC next year.

Finally, Wayne Burrows, editor of Staple, read from a variety of new work. I think his apple-inspired sequence (the green things, I mean, not the Steve Jobs empire) was my favourite section, but the loose translations of Czechoslovakian pop songs from the 60s ran it pretty close.

Loads of excellent open mic readings - Mark Goodwin's poem about climbing Cader Idris with his daughter was as perfectly balanced as you'd expect, and it was nice to hear Catullus get a look in, thanks to Graham Norman. What I enjoy most is that the open mic readers are really starting to work off each other - each Shindig now seems to throw up certain themes which the poets just naturally fall into step with.

Best British Poetry 2011 - a sample

2011-10-18T13:15:00.001Z

I've not got round to posting anything from Salt's Best British Poetry 2011 yet, but over at Michelle McGrane's Peony Moon today, there are poems from Kayo Chingonyi, Abigail Parry and Jon Stone, plus links to them reading the poems. Enjoy...

A date for the diary

2011-10-17T10:53:00.000Z

The latest Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig takes place at The Western, Western Road, Leicester, next Monday (October 24th) from 7.30pm.

It's a great line-up, with readers Wayne Burrows (poet and editor of Staple magazine), Charles Lauder Jr (American expat poet whose debut pamphlet will be out from Crystal Clear next year), Mal Dewhirst (poet and film-maker and the driving force behind the Polesworth Poets Trail), and Nine Arches' own Jane Commane (recently featured in Best British Poetry 2011).

As usual, there'll be plenty of open mic slots (you can sign up on the door), and it's all free.

An interview with Mark Burnhope

2011-10-10T16:20:00.000Z

Mark Burnhope was born in 1982 and studied at London Schoolof Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University.His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. Hecurrently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset with his partner, fourstepchildren, two geckos and a greyhound, and his first chapbook, The Snowboy, was recently published bySalt.

I talked to him about it, poetry in general, and much muchmore…

How much of aninfluence is your background in theology on your writing? One of the things Iliked most about The Snowboy was theway it made me look afresh at religion, and specifically Christianity, in termsof metaphor.

That’s very kind of you. Yes, my first degree was intheology, and you could say it’s been a lasting influence, especially someprogressive and liberation theologies like Nancy L Eisland’s The Disabled God, and various thingswritten from within the L’Arche Community. In poetry, though, I try to avoid exploringthose abstract concepts in a way which divorces them from life (‘No ideas butin things’ and all that). I’m a fan of the Metaphysical poets; as well as beingserious explorers of faith, they were irreverent satirists. In Donne’s earlywork there’s this confusion, self-doubt, the personal tension of needing towrite honestly while still honouring God, and that kaleidoscope of feeling,mingled with a range of aesthetics, often amounts to something very funny. Mypoem The House, the Church andFisherman’s Walk is a slightly farcical metaphysical conceit where I pittwo Christianities’ pictures of disability against one another. It has some ofthe ecstasy of Hopkins, and the comedic side of Dylan Thomas.

I try not to write narrowly ‘religious’ poetry, but I’vefound threads in the poetry I’ve loved and pulled them together: the Romantics,landscape and nature, Confessional poetry, which grabbed me in a big way as ateenager, and hasn’t let go. I love strong, blunt feeling. Emoliage, with its flower that can never be black enough, playswith that stuff. If my poems have ‘God’ in them, I hope it’s by way of motifs,metaphors and symbols which add up to an impression of him/her/it. I’m usuallymore interested in open-ended symbol than metaphor. RS Thomas saw words as vesselswhich embody, or signs which point towards, ‘something other’, rather than justdescriptors. His poems have that sacramental / incarnational approach. I see itin current poets like Michael Symmons Roberts and Andrew Philip. I try to makethat part of my writing. Thomas often used ‘The Poet’ for ‘God’, which issymbolically suggestive, not prescriptive. I’ve used ‘The Man Upstairs’ in aslightly tongue-in-cheek way, playing with the story of the seamstress thatSchopenhauer allegedly pushed down the stairs (and to whom he’d owed money for 20years). God backs me up in my demand to see buildings made accessible,but there’s this suggestion that maybe he metaphorically pushed me (or us) down the stairs, and is shiftingresponsibility. So it’s not all overly serious. In other poems, God is situatedin a landscape or relationship. I want to leave space for the reader tointerpret things for themselves.

Ah, I didn’t want tomention RS Thomas, because I’m such a fan, I tend to worry that I see hisinfluence even where it’s not! I think in talking about ‘The Man Upstairs’, youtouched on one of the other things that’s most impressive about the chapbook –its very pragmatic, realistic engagement with political concerns, most notablydisability. My own impression is that this is something that’s gathering realmomentum in UK poetry (thank heavens) – do you think that’s the case?

I really hope so. I remember discovering Zbigniew Herbertyears ago; his deadpan, caustic wit in dealing with difficult and publicsubjects like the Nazi occupation in Poland, and received religious and poetic meaning.I wanted to see people doing similar now in the UK. It cemented my view thatpoetry is as diverse as visual art, so political and near-the-knuckle subjectsshould be encompassed and encouraged. There’s only so much pure wordplay I cantake. I hear talk about ‘poetry for poetry’s sake’, and I know what it’sgetting at, but nothing can be written in a vacuum. There are always cultures,viewpoints, theories buried in the words. Word-choice and form can carry apolitical and public message as much as, or better than, any soapbox.

Maybe the biggest clue that we don’t sniff at political /social activist stuff anymore is that Blake is back in fashion (was he ever outof fashion?). There’s great queer poetry being written in the UK at the moment,John McCullough’s The Frost Fairs andothers. Lots of stuff which isn’t UK-centric: Vesna Goldsworthy’s Crashaw prize-winningThe Angel of Salonika, just out fromSalt, is partly based in her ‘vanished Balkan homeland’, Communist Yugoslavia,but also speaks about learning to write poetry in English. I’ve only read asample, but there seems to be an undercurrent about resituating ourselves, findingfreedom in language then having to take that freedom back when old ways arelost to memory. That makes me think about reforming language in a politicalsense, to speak about things which we apparently can’t or shouldn’t. I recentlyreviewed two first collections by David Swann and River Wolton. They cover prisonlife, war and political exile consecutively. There’s that social element again,the urge to prove Auden wrong, and see that poetry does make something happen.

The other thing I’ve noticed recently is sheer variety, theblurring of boundaries like ‘light’ and ‘serious’, ‘mainstream’ and‘experimental’. Poems are multilingual, multi-worldview, infinitely pliable instructure, respectful of ‘tradition’ and given to linguistic anarchy. KatyEvans-Bush’s Egg Printing Explainedhas a kaleidoscopic approach where no worldview, school or aesthetic is givenprecedence. Jonty Tiplady, Anthony Joseph, Benjamin Friedlander (and so manyothers) are pushing that pretty far. Some have called thiseverything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach ‘post-lyrical’. I don’t know the term,but to me it amounts to a political act; or at least, it reflects where we areas a culture: a desire for diversity, inclusion, equality. That’s a goodlandscape for poets to deal with those difficult public subjects, I think. I’vefound so little poetry being written from within disability in the UK. InAmerica there’s a fledgling movement some have called crip poetry, comparable toqueer poetry in that it’s trying to redress tradition, a very able-bodied onein this case; trying to take back and redefine vocabulary (‘crip’ as a term ofendearment, for one). My interest in that happened by accident. In compiling mypoems, I realised that lots of them had this disability, prejudice anddiscrimination thread running through them. I’m happy to join the conversation,if there is one. It seems arrogant to think I’m starting one; I just want towrite more poems. Incidentally, I’ve just heard of an anthology of Americandisability poetry coming out in September, called Beauty is a Verb. Really excited about that.

One question I alwaysfind myself asking poets is how their collection came together. Did you set outwriting with a definite plan, or was it more a case of allowing ‘occasional’poems to coalesce around the themes that emerged?

There was no plan initially, I was just collecting togetherwhat I thought were my best poems. But I wanted the book to cohere in some way,not just be a random collection of jottings. They had to talk to each other. I’dhad vague ideas before: one of those was to respond to Blake. I had a couple ofpoems which did, but not enough reasons to force the Blakean idea on the wholepamphlet. I had poems about the sea, and at one point I thought I’d have a seapamphlet. But then that seemed too one-note for me, even though I’d seen othersdo it well. I had these epistles to fictional characters, and chose three ofthe best ones. I hadn’t been consciously writing about disability or faith atthe time; they were both things that I wanted to do, but I considered themblind spots (apart from two or three poems which spoke of disabilityexplicitly; they were a fluke, I thought). But collecting them together, Ifound that I’d used these images of the body – sea, land, constructed things,buildings, puppets, machines, monuments. I’d written poems where prejudicetended to pop up, those prejudices which religion has tried to excuse, to dowith the body, sexuality, nationality. I wanted The SnowboyThe Snowboy was a good central poem to encompass the whole. I got used to that idea pretty quickly. That’s when I had my title. in there but it was a while before I saw it as an emotional focal point, being born out of the miscarriage my partner and I had grieved a couple of years ago. Ira Lightman was looking at the manuscript, and one day he said that

That seems a goodpoint to ask about influences and mentors. I think I was very lucky when Istarted writing and publishing that the internet was just starting to make iteasy to get feedback and support from all over the place, and that seems to beeven more the case now. Or have you been part of a more traditional ‘scene’,centred on a local group, for example?

In some ways, I’d love to say I’ve been part of a ‘scene’ ora local group. I’ve seen these mentoring schemes and always slightly enviedanyone who did them. The truth is, I did my creative writing MA, but I didn’twrite much poetry as part of the course. I’m not sure what it’s like now, butat the time it was very much focussed on fiction, and to say I’ve written verylittle fiction since would be the understatement of the century. No, I’mdefinitely a product of the Internet generation. I’ve been a member of theonline poetry workshop PFFA for a few years, and that’s where I’ve learned somuch of my craft. The opportunities the Internet gives you to meet otherwriters either at a similar stage as you, or a little further forward, isstaggering. PFFA allowed me to learn the technical basics, to interact with afew writers I didn’t know who were going through the same baptism of fire as Iwas, as well as a few I’d already read and respected. Around the time I was publishedin Magma last year, I was reading aboutthe need to have an ‘online presence’, so I started blogging, feeling the fearbut doing it anyway. Shortly after that I joined Facebook. I didn’t know how tonetwork, but I said hello to various poets one after the other. Some of themhave become good online friends, and haven’t been shy about critiquing andoffering advice. So I feel as if I’ve had lots of mentors. There are so manypoets I’d thank for their advice, criticism, correction and support over thelast year or much more, if only I could get them all in the same chat room.

And how about thenext step? Are you working towards a full collection?

Well, first things first: I have The Snowboy to promote. I have a poem in Roddy Lumsden’s newanthology The Best British Poetry 2011(Salt), which is doing well I think. I have poems in two other anthologiescoming up, the details of which will be released fairly soon. I have vagueideas about what a first collection might look like. But I’ve only beenpublishing poems for just over a year. I’ve got a way to go, I’m in no rush. Ihave a couple of new pamphlet ideas, one of which might go to The Knives Forksand Spoons Press, if I can get it up to scratch. I’m excited about pamphlets;they’re realistically inexpensive, a good introduction to a poet’s work, and agreat way for a writer to practice collecting together poems on a larger scale.I’m happy to stay in that territory for a while. Other than that, I’m going tojust keep writing poems, and reviews. I hope to end up with enough stuff for afull collection, eventually.

Yes, the revival ofchapbooks in the last decade or so is something I like a lot, and a lot ofyounger poets, or new poets (Helen Mort is one who immediately springs tomind), seem to be using them really imaginatively to try different approachesbefore moving to a full collection. I want to ask now about readings – do youdo them, and is it something you enjoy?

I’m fairly new at reading my poems, and the only majorreadings I’ve done so far were at the Magma48 launch last year, and the Best British Poetry launch in September. But Iplan on doing more, yes. I have a couple of readings coming up for the SaltModern Voices Tour, in Oxford (24^th Oct) and London (28^thNov). Part of the problem is my lack of funds, a car, and the lack of disabledaccess in so many of the venues where poetry is read. I’ve not found a readingvenue without a staircase (or with a lift) yet. There’s an infinite amount ofloopholes preventing many cultural heritage sites, arts venues and stuff, frombecoming accessible. So there are those barriers. Lack of disabled access ispossibly a big factor in why there aren’t more physically disabled people onthe circuit. But yes, I’m looking to do more readings whenever I can, and basedon the Magma 48 launch, I can say that I really do enjoy the live event. I havethis uncomfortable mixed feeling: I think poetry really does belong on thestage (and if it was seen in more public performance venues, maybe it would getwider recognition) but that as long as readings are held in cellars and lofts,it’s excluding some of us. That complaint isn’t exclusive to poetry: I was in aband for 10 years or so, and the problem of finding gigs at accessible venueswas the same. As a way of counteracting all that, I’ve been looking atalternative ways of providing readings online, all of that viral marketingstuff. I don’t think the Internet has been fully mined yet, in terms of theopportunities it might present to those with similar difficulties in ‘gettingout there’.

I think that’s a goodpoint – I’m not sure poets and people staging poetry events always think hardenough about just what audience they’re trying to attract. It’s interestingthat you mention a band – what did you play? And did your involvement in poetryand music ever cross over?

I was in a rock band, yeah. I played drums. We formed (if Iremember rightly) in ’97, when the grunge / alternative scene was still a hugedeal. At that point we were called Hollow. I don’t think my musical heart hasever really left Seattle, to be honest (I’ve never been to Seattle, but interms of that early-mid 90’s music scene). We changed our name to The WitnessReel much later on, when one of our friends joined as a fourth member, ourstyle was changing quite a bit, and there was a trend of having ‘The’ at thestart of your band name. Shortly after that, we all lost touch for variousreasons, and now we’re all living in different parts of the country. I miss thegigging, actually. If I could go back, I would definitely try to involve mypoetry in some way. I really believe in all the projects people are doing tofuse the artforms, or just have them work alongside one another. That synthesisis really important. Poetry started with that, didn’t it? The word ‘lyric’ getsthrown around today, but its original intent has largely been lost. Anyway, whenI was playing in my band, I hadn’t fully settled on poetry as a main priority.I did try and get a few songs written, but I don’t play guitar, so the most Icould do was to write lyrics and give them to Jon, our guitarist andsongwriter, to see what he could do with them. Sometimes it worked, sometimesit didn’t. Besides, you’ve heard all the jokes about drummers who think theycan write songs? Needless to say, mine never became live staples.

Finally, one questionslightly out of left field – which one thing would you do to enthuse schoolkidsabout poetry (it can be as little as exposing them to a particular poem)?

I’ve only taught young adults, and in a charity workshopcapacity rather than school. But based on the little experience I have, thefirst thing I think is that we can’t force enthusiasm. It seems to me that kidsneed to know that their own response is OK. Very often our own response is allwe have as a bridge into a poem. Something about training kids to answerquestions ‘correctly’ in order to pass exams etc. seems paradoxical (if notantithetical) to teaching poetry, because all that stuff tricks kids intothinking they should always be aiming for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. The onething they’re not being asked is ‘What do you think?’ There’s always a fearthat they will say ‘I hate it; it’s rubbish.’ Why are we scared of that? We couldbe saying ‘OK then, tell me why it’s rubbish.’ There’s a massive learningopportunity there; and when we’re encouraged to delve in and find out why wedon’t like a poem, we often realise that we actually do. This piece of writingwe once thought had nothing going for it is actually extremely exciting. That’sexactly what happened to me years ago with TheRed Wheelbarrow.

I’m not sure kids need encouragement to write poetry; createthe right environment and they will. They do need teachers who will tell them it’sOK to write poetry – in fact, it’s cool, and fun, and can be meaningful tothem. Those teachers need to then cultivate talent when they see it, as oneteacher – Mr. Matthews – did for me during my GCSEs. Most kids are worryingabout what their friends will think if they pick up a pen and withdraw from the‘real world’ of video games and football. Again, there’s a balance to strike.We can’t force kids to think poetry is cool. We have to rely on the fact thatit just is, and some kids will see that. Some won’t, but that’s alright. Filmsand music are cool as well. Oh, and we need to be showing kids morecontemporary stuff. They need to know that poetry’s still being written.They’re so used to reading stuff which is 30 years old or more. I was atsecondary school, anyway.

To buy The Snowboy, click here.

THREEPOEMS BY MARK BURNHOPE

The Ideal Bed

Double bed which shouldn’t look

like this: so skewiff but no one on,

I can’t even stand to smooth its sheet.

I try to circle round it, but my wheels

won’t fit down the right side, the one

which, incidentally, I try to imagine hides

who we were five years ago: you standing

heaving the bed to and fro, trying to catch

our south-facing garden’s light

(the bulbs were always blowing)

and me laughing; then afterwards

us, falling bed-long into this

self-same undividable iron maiden.

My nurse has just replaced our mattress

with a manmade, farcical memory-foam

thing: cures pressure sores faster.

You’d laugh if you could be here.

Remember shopping in IKEA,

wondering what kind of carpenter

constructed, folded, boxed and sold ourbed?

Hardlyan artist, probably couldn’t

havegiven an actual fuck, you said.

When we got home the bed refused to stand

up in the room we’d meant for it. In itsform,

we saw the ideal parts to shed:

alittle off this surface, that corner.

We grew hungry, desperately so

pushed it against the larder door

so neither of us could hoard

when the waves crashed hard. Its back

was flimsy chipboard and would give

out in the year’s most unnewsworthy

quake, if the front of the frame stayed.

So you sanded back for days, weeks,

months; pored over cookbooks,

catalogues and promotions; reclined

on the mattress like an ocean, faced

me and my canvas, and said, Draw!

(But the kitchen bulb was dying.)

Hardness the Lord made then tore:

the one you pushed aside to get past

the fact we never found

the perfect light to lie in.

The Man Upstairs Drafts a Letter to the Councils

obit anus, abit onus

Dear . . . no. My Loving . . . no. None ofyou

love me; neither should you, really. Look,

we never intended our peaceful landlady

to tumble those twenty steps to her death.

So I am about pay forward the blame,

but do you blame me? Money’s a root

of nearly every evil, don’t you know. Hers

was a house but henceforth, let all placesapply:

eatery, train tour, music venue, centre for

the frothing-over of mugs and mouths —

grant yourselves a great favour, raise

every lower surface to its higher. Fit alift.

Twelve Steps towards Better Despair

Rehearse its salt between your fingersoften, vigorously.

Have it amalgamate into your petrol-slicktinted lethargy.

Write of the cormorant’s yellow beak overher black body.

The iceberg: for a sound few seconds, itwill stand

for solid material to marvel at. It neednot sink your battleship

before you shy away from it. So don’tbemoan its tip, thank it.

Make sure you have shouldered the world fora man who tried

dying — sorry, died trying — to climb a cliff summit,

or summat like it, to find a strongersunlight.

Write of the good in global warming,icebergs melting, salt.

Recite names of the dead on your fingersoften, vigorously.

Have their ashes sown into the stinkingspumes of elegy.

Write of the widow’s blonde wig over herblack bodice.

Go fearlessly: for a modest seventy yearswe’ll stand,

most of us men, to be gawped at; neverforget that. So choose

your battles, and — if you buy — the bestcruiser in the marina.

Make sure you have shouldered rope for aman who tied

skilfully: docked a boat and helped hislover onto the land

for both to stand under the cliffs andobserve a cormorant.

Find and write of the good in swiftly dying— sorry, flying.

Underneath the arches

2011-10-10T09:47:00.001Z

Saturday saw the first States of Independence (west), at Eastside Projects, Digbeth, Birmingham, just along the street from the Custard Factory, as it turned out. Appropriately, given that the viaduct above towered over the venue, the Nine Arches Press stall was the first thing to meet my eyes as I entered, but as with the previous SoI events, at De Montfort University in Leicester, plenty of small presses were present.

I heard Geraldine Monk's excellent and energetic reading from her recent Leafe Press book, Lobe Scarps & Finials*, which lit up the rather murkily-lit reading space, and Jim Caruth's understated but quietly resonant poetry. I heard him a few years back, at the the Derwent Poetry Festival, and enjoyed his debut collection A Stone's Throw, so it was nice to catch up with what he'd done since.

In between times, I ate cake (of course), and spent some money. Longbarrow Press's anthology of readings by poets including Matthew Clegg, Kelvin Corcoran, Jim Caruth, Rob Hindle, Mark Goodwin and Lee Harwood grabbed my attention (very good it is, too), and I also bought Lee Harwood's The Books, a mini-chapbook/CD combo, also from Longbarrow. Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving of Sidekick Books were also there, and I bought their Confronting The Danger Of Art, by Ian McLachlan and Phil Cooper. I got it for my sister, but she might have to wait now until I buy a second copy. It comes complete with a badge, you see, and I can't tell you how much I like that.

It was good to chat with Robin Vaughan-Williams, who was manning the HappenStance stand as tirelessly as ever, and with another HappenStancer, Gregory Leadbetter, as well as with John Lucas, of Shoestring Press (a couple of his titles, and a couple on the Five Leaves Press table next door, really caught the eye, but will have to wait until next payday), Alan Baker of Leafe Press, Geraldine Monk, and last but not least, Salt poet Cliff Yates, whose fine collection Frank Freeman's Dancing School I enjoyed earlier in the year.**

* I was going to post a full review of the collection on here, but I'll be writing a review for the next issue of Under The Radar instead.
** If you're reading Cliff, sorry I didn't catch up with you again later. We got cut off mid-discussion and I had to scoot rather too fast. If I can remember what it was I was just about to say, I'll email you.

Transtromer enNobeled

2011-10-06T12:11:00.001Z

I was just starting to pull together a few thoughts on last night's announcement of the Forward Prize winners when Twitter started, er... twittering with speculation about who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'd completely forgotten that the announcement was due.

There seemed to be a strong rumour that Bob Dylan might be in line for it. Now, I'm a big fan (I spent the drive to work this morning listening to Blood On The Tracks, funnily enough), but I can't help feeling this would have been a bad thing. It's not so much that I'd see it as a slap in the face to novelists and poets, as a bit of a half-hearted recognition of his Royal Bobness. After all, if he'd intended his songs to be read purely as poems, he wouldn't have bothered writing the music for them, then playing and arranging it, in the first place, would he?

Anyhow, turns out that Twitter was barking up the wrong tree entirely, as it's Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer who has scooped the prize (how appropriate, on National Poetry Day). I'm highly delighted about this, although what the evil Decepticons think about it is anyone's guess (oh come on! Everyone is making at least one Transformers joke about this).

My copy of his New and Collected Poems (the New Directions edition from 2006, translated by Robin Fulton), is extremely well-thumbed, being one of those books I find myself going back to on a very regular basis. So, hats off to the judges for recognising a consistently fine body of work.

Going back to the Forward Prizes, John Burnside took Best Collection for Black Cat Bone, Rachael Boast took Best First Collection for Sidereal, and RF Langley, who sadly died earlier this year, took Best Poem for To A Nightingale.

I was a bit underwhelmed by the shortlists at the time they came out, although without having read much of what was nominated. I have rectified that partly now, and I'm pretty glad that Burnside won. I do wonder if there's an element of 'lifetime achievement' in it, because I don't think this is anything like his best work, but still, I can't grumble.

I can't really comment on Rachael Boast's book, because I haven't read it yet - Ahren Warner's the only one on that list I have read thoroughly (and enjoyed, incidentally). In the Best Poem category, I like Langley's poems a lot, so it's good to see him win. I hope it doesn't sound too bitter to say that it would have been nice to see him get more recognition while he was alive.

States of Independence (West)

2011-10-03T12:13:00.000Z

This Saturday, October 8th, sees the Statesof Independence (West) book fair, celebrating independent publishing, atEastside Projects (Gallery), 86 Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth, Birmingham B9 4AR.

It's been born out of the success of theoriginal States of Independence fairs, which take place at Leicester's DeMontfort University each March, and runs from 10am to 4pm, with admission free.

You can browse the latest in independentpublications, meet publishers, writers and other readers. There will be aprogramme of events and readings throughout the day, including paneldiscussions and a wide range of readings, as well as a quiet area to relax witha coffee and your just-bought book.

Publishers who will be present include:

Shoestring Press, Bloodaxe Books, LeafePress, Cinnamon Press, Penned in the Margins, Five Leaves Publications,Templar, Nine Arches Press, Flarestack Poets, Sidekick Books, TindalStreet Press, Offa’s Press, Ikon, Longbarrow, Flipped Eye, CandlestickPress, HappenStance, Shearsman, Queer Ink, Linux Publishing and more...

Flash Space: Short Readings

11am - Charlie Hill

11.20am - Michael W Thomas

11.40am - Gail Ashton (Cinnamon)

12.00 noon - Simon Thirsk (Bloodaxe)

12.20pm - Tom Chivers (Penned in theMargins)

12.40pm - Kirsten Irving & Jon Stone(Sidekick Books)

1pm - Robin Vaughan-Williams (Happenstance)

1.20 - pm Nick Pearson (Offa’s Press)

1.40 - pm Geraldine Monk (Leafe Press)

2pm - James Caruth (Longbarrow Press)

2.40pm - Jane Weir (Templar)

3pm - Martin De Mello (Flipped-Eye)

Think Space: Short Seminars

10.30am – Life Writing? Creative Writing? Jan Fortune-Wood discusses 'StaleBread & Miracles'.

11am – Brian Gambles talks about how the new Library of Birmingham, openingin 2013, will engage with the region’s writers.

12pm – Poetry & Dementia: Jacqui Rowe and David Calcutt introduce us toan innovative project.

1pm – Show Me The Money: Jane Commane, PaulMcDonald and Roz Goddard talk frankly about making a living out of writing.

2pm - Best Of The West: West Midlandswriters read from new work - Caleb Klaces (Flarestack Poets), Joel Lane (NineArches Press), Gaynor Arnold (Tindal Street Press) and Dave Reeves (Offa’sPress).

3pm - The Future of Independent Publishing:Bloodaxe editor Simon Thirsk, Linus Press editor Kate Cooper and writer DavidBelbin discuss.

States of Independence (West) hasbeen produced by the West Midlands Independent Publishers Network, and has beenmanaged by Writing West Midlands and Nine Arches Press. The Network includes Nine Arches Press, Flarestack Poets, Cinnamon Press, Offa’s Press, Five Seasons Press, RuberyPress and Tindal Street Press. Statesof Independence was first created in the East Midlands by Five Leaves Press,who have supported the Network in bringing this event to the West Midlands.

You can follow the twitter hashtag#SoIWestBookFair for any further updates or details.

Sussex by the sea

2011-09-30T13:07:00.001Z

I'm just back from two glorious days in Sussex, reading at the Chiddingly Festival with David Swann, Maureen Jivani and Clare Best. The sun shone, there wasn't so much as a single cloud, the readings were excellent, the people terrific, and I even did some quality birdwatching yesterday.

The first thing to say is that Chiddingly is a wonderful place to read. The venue, the Six Bells, is exactly what an old-fashioned country pub should be, with good food and beer (I can recommend the Harveys Sussex bitter), and an excellent room for the event itself, complete with bizarre but endlessly intriguing decor (you really need to see it).

There was a good-sized, responsive and appreciative audience, the whole thing ran like clockwork, and it was a pleasure to hear three really fine poets. I knew Clare's HappenStance pamphlet Treasure Ground already, but she also read from her just-published Waterloo collection, Excisions, and the poems are outstanding - direct, lucid, and yet constantly surprising, startling even.

David Swann is also with Waterloo - they really have an impressive line-up of poets for a relatively new press - and his collection The Privilege Of Rain is subtitled Time Amongst The Sherwood Outlaws, a reflection of the fact that it draws on his time as writer-in-residence at Nottingham Prison. I think what's most impressive about the poems is that David manages to bring humour and humanity to the most harrowing of situations, without either trivialising anything or allowing his gaze to be anything other than honest and unflinching. The poem he read in which he effectively remakes that old cliche "at the end of the day" was a favourite, and his between-poems banter is worth the admission price alone.

Maureen Jivani's Insensible Heart was shortlisted for the 2010 London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award, and I can see why. The poems she read were often rooted in her day-to-day work as a nurse, but were unafraid to take imaginative flight and consider a much wider perspective, and there's a lovely balance of delicacy and strength.

We all read two sets - one of 15 minutes and one of five - so I did a more general longer set, and a bird-oriented shorter one, both from hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. The books sold well, and doing a quick stock-take when I got home last night, I found I have only two copies of Troy Town and four of Making The Most Of The Light left. If you want one, now's the time to say.

I'm very grateful to Clare both for inviting me to read, and for putting me up at her lovely home (a stay enlivened by her seven-month-old whippet, Flint), and then I was able to make the most of the glorious Indian summer weather with a walk around Cuckmere Haven, and later near the Long Man at Wilmington. There were warblers and Redstarts dripping from the bushes at the coast, presumably enjoying this sudden heatwave before flying south, and it was the same story further west, at Pagham Harbour and Bosham.

I'm looking forward to reading all three poets' books this weekend, and I'll be writing more about them in the near future. In the meantime, I've got notes for poems to write up - long drives always start me writing.

Words in the Weald

2011-09-27T09:08:00.000Z

Just a quick reminder that I'll be reading at Poetry in the Pub,as part of the Chiddingly Festival in East Sussex tomorrow night.

It all takes place at the Six Bells, Chiddingly, with doors open at 7.30pm for an 8pm start. Tickets are £7. The other readers are David Swann,whose collection The Privilege ofRain (Waterloo Press, 2010) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for NewWork in Poetry; and Maureen Jivani, whose book Insensible Heart (Mulfran Press,2009) was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award, plus host ClareBest, whose collection Excisions is just out from Waterloo Press. I saw it on Saturday at the Free Verse book fair, and like everything else I've seen from Waterloo so far, it's a thing of beauty. I look forward to reading it.

You can book online here, or call 01825 872 401 (between 7pm and9pm, or book by post, enclosing a cheque to 'Chiddingly Festival Committee'mailed with SAE to Chiddingly Festival Box Office, Chauntlers, Chiddingly,Lewes, E Sussex BN8 6HD.

Further details on the evening, and the festival generally, areavailable here.

Indian summer

2011-09-26T13:03:00.001Z

The end of summer (I, of course, consider that this coincides exactly with the end of the cricket season) is supposed to be a time of quiet melancholy. Leaves turning brown, evenings drawing in, a chill in the air. You know the routine.

So why did the weekend just gone feel like the diametric opposite (we'll ignore an England batting display of such breathtaking incompetence I had to double-check that our previously all-conquering heroes hadn't been replaced by a troupe of circus clowns. Or Australians)?

The first reason, on Friday night, was the launch of Salt's The Best British Poetry 2011 at the Betsey Trotwood, in London. Quite apart from anything else, it all ran like clockwork (due mainly to compere Roddy Lumsden), despite there being 30-odd readers to cram in. On top of that, it's a great book (I know, I know, I would say that, but you'll just have to believe me), and it's always good to get another perspective on a poem by hearing it read aloud.

Favourites included Mike Bannister reading Satin Moth, Mark Burnhope (Twelve Steps Towards Better Despair), Oli Hazzard (Sonnet), Katherine Kilalea (Hennecker's Ditch), Chris MacCabe (Kingfisher), Kate Potts (Three Wishes), Jon Stone (Mustard), Chrissy Williams (Sheep) and Michael Zand (on a persian cairn), but there was much else to admire.

It was good to catch up with Mark Burnhope for a chat, too, having previously only 'met' him online, and nice to meet Giles Goodland again. Thinking about it, Giles didn't read his poem from the book, Waves. A shame, because it's one of my favourite two or three pieces in there.

I can only admire the sheer energy and enthusiasm of Salt supremo Chris Hamilton-Emery, who was also present despite having just registered as a student at UEA. I bought a copy of another anthology, The Salt Book Of Younger Poets, and very good it is too. I'll be returning to it on here soon, with a detailed overview.

The second reason for feeling suddenly buoyant came the following morning, just around the corner at Exmouth Market, at the CB Editions Free Verse poetry book fair. I'm not sure exactly what I expected, but the sheer volume of people who came through the doors, and more importantly who bought books, was genuinely uplifting.

Presses such as Arc, Shearsman, Enitharmon, Penned In The Margins, HappenStance, Donut, Carcanet, Reality Street and of course Nine Arches were all present (I think Jane Commane did pretty good business throughout), and as well as offering the opportunity to put faces to names, it was also a great chance to browse books that, however easy they might be to find on the internet, you'd never get a chance to try before you buy otherwise, unless you happened to go to a reading by the poet in question.

I was reading along with fellow Nine Arches poet Ruth Larbey, who performed her work both very well, and entirely from memory, and managed to catch readings by Tom Jenks, and by HappenStance poets D A Prince, Clare Best, Jon Stone, Kirsten Irving, Peter Daniels and Lorna Dowell. Unfortunately I got next to no chance to talk to Helena Nelson, but that was a mark of how busy she was kept throughout the day, talking to customers and poets, so that can't be a bad thing.

And again, half the pleasure of such an event is meeting new people, seeing Facebook friends made real, and renewing old acquaintances. Step forward Simon Barraclough (I'd just bought his excellent limited edition Penned In The Margins pamphlet Bonjour Tetris, funnily enough), Katy Evans-Bush, Tim Love and Tom Chivers, among others. Other books I bought were Steve Spence's Limits Of Control, and Ross Sutherland's Twelve Nudes, both from Penned In the Margins, and both of which I've had my eye on for a while, plus Peter Riley's The Derbyshire Poems, and David Sergeant's Talk Like Galileo, both from Shearsman.

Perhaps it helped that it was a beautiful, balmy afternoon - my moods seem to be absurdly dependent on the weather - but as I made my way back to St Pancras, I felt more optimistic about the British poetry scene than I have for ages, this summer just gone having been a thoroughly difficult one. With poets, publishers and, most importantly, readers brought face to face, you were reminded of what's actually important (getting good poetry out there to be read), and of how much time and energy gets wasted drawing up binary or even balkanised models of the poetry world. Here's hoping CB Editions will take their fair around the UK.

NB. Coming soon on Polyolbion, I'll have interviews and poems from Mark Burnhope, Simon Barraclough and Isobel Dixon.

Derwent Poetry Festival 2011

2011-09-24T16:10:00.000Z

Having mentioned Clive Allen's poetry yesterday, I received details of this year's Derwent Poetry Festival, held at Masson Mills, Matlock Bath, on November 11th-13th, and noticed that he's reading on the Saturday.

It's a great little festival, run by Templar. I went to the first a few years back, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but have been away for each one since. The diary looks all clear this year, though, so I should make it to the Saturday, at least.

Quite apart from the festival's attractions, and the natural beauty of the Derbyshire countryside, there's the wonderful Scarthin Books just round the corner in Cromford, too.

Snail Explains

2011-09-23T16:00:00.000Z

Excellent little discussion here, on the New Walk Magazine website, of CJ Allen's poem Snail Explains. I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything Nicholas Friedman says, and also thinking that one of the things I like most about the poem is that superb opening stanza. I'd be terrified, writing a poem about snails, of struggling to escape the shadow cast by Thom Gunn's towering Considering The Snail, but that first verse marks out its own territory beautifully.

Life and how to live it

2011-09-22T13:02:00.003Z

I don't suppose many people were entirely surprised when REM announced yesterday that they were jacking it in for good. Recent albums had been thoroughly underwhelming (everything since New Adventures In Hi-Fi, I reckon, and that was, what, 1996?), and there was just a sense that the music world had moved on without them.

But (and I warn you, I'm about to start sounding very "It were all fields round here when I was young") it's impossible to overstate just how important they were back in the 1980s, and early 1990s.

I can't claim to have been in there at the beginning. When their first single, Radio Free Europe, came out in 1981 I'd have been 11 or 12, and their debut album Murmur would have passed me by completely. When I was in the sixth-form, though, sometime in 1987 I reckon, I kept noticing their name in both the US singles and albums charts that they used to publish on Teletext (remember that?). In the absence of the internet, I had no idea what they were actually like, but I bought the compilation Eponymous the following year purely out of curiosity.

This was a time when 'indie' music, in the original sense of independently produced and released music, was almost unheard of in the UK charts. There was The Smiths, of course, and the Jesus and Mary Chain and New Order both occasionally flirted with mainstream success, but that was it. So, those 12 songs were a total shock to the system. Musically, the nod in the direction of The Byrds and late 60s folk-rock was easy enough to get your head around, but Michael Stipe's lyrics, by turns both funny and menacing, and always elliptical and buried low in the mix, were truly the stuff of poetry. "I believe in coyotes, and time as an abstract", anyone?

Within a few months, they were in the UK charts too, with Orange Crush, the standard-bearer of the album, Green, that really propelled them into the bigtime. I'm not as huge a fan of it as some REM fans I know, but when it's good (the aforementioned single, Pop Song 89, World Leader Pretend, You Are The Everything) it's very good indeed. And seeing them on the likes of Top of the Pops, with Stipe singing through a megaphone, was huge. Indie kids all over the UK felt, rightly as it turned out, that the Stock, Aitken and Waterman-manned walls were coming down, although we're probably all less enthusiastic now that 'indie' has too often come to mean generic, jangly anaemic guitar music.

By this time I was at university, playing that compilation to death while working my way back through all their albums up until that time. Among those, Life's Rich Pageant was my favourite, and remains, I think, their best album, although the first four tracks of Fables of the Reconstruction are also pretty great, being unfortunately let down by large parts of side 2.

One lunchtime, I came back from lectures to find a note on my door from a girl in one of the adjoining halls. As we were both in the habit of wearing REM t-shirts (far from common then), we'd chatted about the band previously. She wrote that she'd heard REM's UK tour announced on Peel's show the previous night (note, I'd missed Peel - that's how massively far from cool I was), had gone straight down to City Hall in the morning and bought tickets, and did I want one? I flew across the quadrangle to her room.

The date of the gig, May 26th, 1989, is still etched on my memory. In the morning, I had my first 1st-year exam (Europe since the Second World War). Afterwards we went to the union, had pizza and beers in the blazing sunshine, played football at the back of Newcastle United's St James's Park ground (you could have a kickabout right up against the stand), then made our way down to City Hall - me, Gaz, JB, Mark, Kirsten and John the Gooner.

Now, I'd have to say, the support act, The Blue Aeroplanes were pretty great. A singer who was a cross between Lou Reed and a beat poet, a dancer (before the Happy Mondays thought of it), umpteen guitarists, and a bunch of great songs (Weightless and Jacket Hangs, for starters - I think the awesome Colour Me came a bit later).

They were nothing, though, compared to what followed. I can't remember how long the set was, except that it seemed just right, but throughout it the band were exactly what you hoped they'd be. Stipe, enigmatic and utterly charismatic. Peter Buck, goofily and knowingly throwing rock-star shapes. Mike Mills, earnest, down to earth and simply a great all-round musician. Bill Berry, solid and reliable. Peter Holsapple filled in on second guitar and occasional keyboards, but Berry, Buck and Mills also swapped instruments with astonishing regularity and facility.

Stipe had his face daubed with paint, and regularly introduced songs with acapella snatches of other bands' songs (I can remember Gang of Four's We Live As We Dream, Alone featuring). He sang superbly, especially on You Are The Everything and a personal favourite of mine, I Believe, and a version of Gershwin's Summertime was memorable for having him on piano. Not playing it. Just on it, standing on the top, back to the audience. Other highlights included a great, sprawling version of Feeling Gravity's Pull.

I still don't think I've seen a better gig. I know my perspective is fogged by nostalgia and sentiment - one of the friends I went with is dead, others I've lost touch with for years now - but it was still as near to perfect as I can imagine a gig being. The band were harder and edgier than I'd expected, and yet more embracing and welcoming too. This was very definitely, at that time, right at the cutting edge of the 'alternative', but there was never any posing, of any sense of the band setting themselves up as smarter, or cooler, than us out there in the audience. Instead, you felt like you were being let in on a wonderful secret, a great movement in its embryonic stages, one that would grow and grow.

And it did. Out Of Time was huge, poppy and mainstream, yet still full of more invention than most bands muster in a whole career, and Automatic For The People cemented their position as superstars. It's not perfect - Everybody Hurts still annoys the hell out of me - but I think it's stood the test of time well.

After that, well, I find it easier to pick out individual songs. What's The Frequency Kenneth? might have been their best single, and New Test Leper opens with a great lyric, but by 1996, they'd just become less essential to me. Hey ho - it happens.

What remains is memories not only of great records and gigs, but of an attitude that shouldn't ever go out of fashion. You sometimes used to hear the band express their political philosophy as "think global, act local", and that sounds like pretty good advice to me, but their example is better than any slogan. I can't think of any band in my lifetime that has reached such a wide audience while still retaining their principles, and a sure, solid connection to their roots. I wish them all the best, and I hope their influence continues to be felt for a long time.

* Want discussions of REM song lyrics? This website is pretty excellent.
** Want to see that memorable 1989 tour? Tourfilm is the best seven quid you'll ever spend.

A London launch, and a bookfair

2011-09-20T19:54:00.000Z

On Friday night I'll be at the London launch of The Best British Poetry 2011, Salt's new anthology - all are welcome to the reading, at the Betsey Trotwood, on Farringdon Road. I'm looking forward to it a lot, not least because there'll be the chance to put faces to some familiar names from the world of poetry magazines.

The next day, I'm reading with fellow Nine Arches Press poet Ruth Larbey at Free Verse, CB Editions' poetry book fair, at Exmouth Market, London. We're on at 12.30pm, coincidentally just after a reading by a number of HappenStance poets. It looks like a great event all-round, with a wide variety of poetry presses featured.

The Fizz 9, with Anthony Owen

2011-09-19T12:40:00.002Z

Tomorrow night (September 20th) sees the latest Fizz poetry evening at Polesworth Abbey, with the featured reader being Anthony Owen. There are open mic slots available too, and I recommend it highly - excellent poetry in beautiful and historic surroundings. I'd love to be there myself, but have to be at a registration evening for a Spanish course I've signed up for, so it'll have to be next time.

Keeping busy

2011-09-19T09:42:00.002Z

I spent the weekend zipping up and down the M42, or rather down and up.

On Saturday, I was at the Pow Wow Litfest 2011, at the Prince of Wales, Moseley, Birmingham, for a reading. It's a terrific venue - an old-fashioned and roomy pub with a good beer garden - and there was an excellent audience for the various performances (I particularly liked the capoeira demonstration).

Joel Lane also went down well, reading one of the pieces from his new Nine Arches Press short story chapbook Do Not Pass Go, as well as a number of poems that built on some of the themes from his last poetry collection, The Autumn Myth.

I had to leave earlier than I'd have liked, but the organisers ought to be proud of such a wide-ranging and well-attended event.

Yesterday, I headed north instead, for the latest LeftLion/Nine Arches Shindig, at the Jam Cafe in Nottingham. It's a superb venue, too, just about the perfect size and comfortable, and as ever the open mic readers were very varied and pretty much uniformly excellent. Wayne Burrows' poem, Zeropolis (I might have got that wrong) was a highlight for me, and Aly Stoneman's The General's Horse, but there was plenty more to enjoy. I read a couple of poems - Azul, and a new (I wrote it on Friday) untitled one that takes its lead from a line from The Sopranos (from Patsy Parisi, in fact), and they seemed to go down well.

Joel Lane again read well, and I bought his chapbook. I've only had time to read the first story so far, but it's excellent - noir-ish crime stories with a West Midlands setting.

Angela France's reading, from her new Nine Arches chapbook Lessons In Mallemaroking, highlighted all her poetry's strengths. She's interested in seeing where unusual words or phrases take her, and in creating back stories to them. She's also, I'm pretty sure, the only poet ever published in the Sunday Sport - the poem in question, Hide And Seek Champion Found Dead In Cupboard - was a highlight here.

Tom Warner already has a really fine chapbook out as part of the Faber New Poets series, but his reading also suggested that there are great things to come. He was back on home turf, effectively (he lives in Norwich, but is from Mansfield originally), and poems that touched on subjects such as the Miners' Strike struck plenty of chords, especially after last week's tragedy in South Wales. I wish I'd had longer to talk to him afterwards, but I'll be keeping an eye out for future work from him.

It was a lovely way to round off the weekend, anyway - the carrot cake and Bundaberg ginger beer helped, too.

Voices for Nature

2011-09-17T08:50:00.000Z

For the lastcouple of years, a month or so before Christmas, I've gone along to a gatheringof writers, artists, poets, musicians, historians, scientists and film-makers,all of whom have one thing in common – they draw some or all of theirinspiration from the natural world.

The first eventwas at Oxford University, and last year's at the BTO's Thetford headquarters -both were by invitation only.

This year'ssymposium, however, under the banner of Voices for Nature, is open to all, andtakes place at Stamford Arts Centre on Friday 18th and Saturday 19th November.It's organised by New Networks for Nature, a recently-founded alliance whosegoals are to challenge the low political priority placed upon wildlife andlandscape in this country and to celebrate the central roles playedby nature in our cultural life.

Voices for Naturewill run over two days, and the first features talks from the likes of poet andnovelist Ruth Padel, Pete Cairns (founder of the 2020 Vision photographicproject), and the author Richard Hines, who trained the kestrels usedin Kes, Ken Loach's classic film. There'll also be presentations by soundrecordist Geoff Sample and Professor Tim Birkhead the author, academic andco-founder of New Networks for Nature.

On the secondday, Voices for Nature will shift just down the road to Helpston Church,in the home village of John Clare, for another day's events in association withthe John Clare Society. Speakers will include poet David Morley and the celebratedartist Carry Akroyd, much of whose recent work has been inspired by herexploration of 'Clare Country'.

I'll certainly begoing to the Friday's events, and hope to be there on the Saturday too, butthat will depend on the travel arrangements for a trip I'm going on the sameday.

If you wish toattend one or both days the charge is £30 inclusive. Bookings will be handledby the Stamford Arts Centre, on tel: 01780 763 203, or by clicking here.

For furtherdetails or information, you can email info@newnetworksfornature.org.uk ormark.cocker@virgin.net

Pow-Wow Litfest 2011

2011-09-16T09:21:00.000Z

I've suddenly realised that I've completely failed to flag up that I'm reading at the Pow-Wow Litfest 2011, at the Prince of Wales, on Alcester Road, Moseley, tomorrow. I've been blathering about it on Twitter for weeks, but I'd forgotten that I hadn't mentioned it on here.

I'll be on just after the capoeira, at around 6.45pm, while fellow Nine Arches writer Joel Lane is on an hour or so later.

As you'll see if you click on the link, there's loads of other great stuff too, including comedy, dance, DJs, more poetry and even a 'stand-up philosopher'.

I'm looking forward to the event, and to catching up with a couple of East Midlanders in exile in Brum. We'll be venturing into the Balti belt of Balsall Heath afterwards, to see how Birmingham's most famous culinary product compares with the Gujarati cuisine of Leicester's Melton Road.

Nottingham Shindig revisited

2011-09-14T12:44:00.003Z

In my last post, I failed to mention that there's even more to this Sunday's Nine Arches/Left Lion Nottingham Shindig than meets the eye.

Before the readings and open mic slots (poetry or prose, 3 minutes each, sign up on the door) begin at 7.30pm, there's a Poetry Surgery from 6pm-7pm. Further information is available by clicking on the link, but basically it's open to all poets, and will involve a Q&A session on the writing and publishing of poetry.

Between 7 and 7.30, there'll be acoustic music from Simon Richie of Hhymn, and of course drinks and cakes are available throughout. Never forget the cakes.

Nottingham Shindig

2011-09-12T07:48:00.000Z

Angela France,Tom Warner and Joel Lane are the guest readers at the next Nine Arches Press& LeftLion Shindig, at the Jam Cafe in Nottingham, a week on Sunday(September 18th).

Angela France'ssecond collection, Occupation, is available from Ragged Raven Press, she's thefeatures editor of Iota and an editor of ezine The Shit Creek Review, as wellas running Cheltenham's excellent monthly poetry café, Buzzwords. She'll be launchingher Nine Arches chapbook, Lessons In Mallemaroking.

I met Tom Warnerat a reading in Norwich a couple of years ago, and subsequently read andenjoyed as much of his work as I could find. Born in Mansfield in 1979, he wonan Eric Gregory Award in 2001 and graduated from the University of EastAnglia’s Creative Writing MA with a Distinction. His poetry has appeared in anumber of publications and magazines, including The Rialto and Stand, and in2009-10 he was Poet in Residence for Newark-on-Trent. He currently lives inNorwich where he teaches creative writing.

Joel Lane livesin Birmingham and works as a journalist. He is the author of two novels, threecollections of short stories, a novella, a chapbook, and three collections ofpoetry, the most recent of which is The Autumn Myth (Arc), which I enjoyed agreat deal. His latest publication is Do Not Pass Go – a collection of crimestories as part of Nine Arches' new Hotwire short-story pamphlet series.

It all starts at7.30pm, entry is free, and you can sign up for the open mic on the door.

New at Nine Arches

2011-09-06T12:48:00.000Z

Nine Arches Press have just launched their new blog, to complement their existing website. It will give some behind the scenes views, plus news of forthcoming projects, but I also like what Jane Commane has written on there about it allowing them to take new angles on some of their poetry and short story collections. I'm always wary of poets in any way explaining their work, but I think the sort of contextual comment that a poet can provide at a reading can only be a good thing.

And of course, while you're looking at all things Nine Arches, a reminder that hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica is available now, for £9.

Chiddingly Festival

2011-09-05T12:28:00.000Z

At the end of this month, I'm going to be reading at Poetry in the Pub,as part of the Chiddingly Festival, in East Sussex.

It takes place at the Six Bells, Chiddingly, on Wednesday, September28th, with doors open at 7.30pm for an 8pm start. Tickets are £7.

The other guest poets are David Swann,whose collection The Privilege ofRain (Waterloo Press, 2010) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for NewWork in Poetry; and Maureen Jivani, whose book Insensible Heart (Mulfran Press,2009) was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award. It's all hosted by ClareBest, whose collection Excisions is forthcoming from Waterloo Press this month,and whose HappenStance chapbook Treasure Ground (2009) I can heartily recommend(Clare will also be reading).

Further details on the evening, and the festival generally, areavailable here.

An interview with Matthew Stewart

2011-08-29T05:36:00.000Z

You'rewriting from a very unusual perspective for a British poet. Can you tell us alittle about how you came to be living in Spain, and how it (and bilingualism)informs your poetry?

Well, I read Spanish at university, cameout to Iberia as part of my degree and then decided to return once I’d finishedmy studies. Spain excited me as a counterpoint to the strictures of a suburbanSurrey upbringing. Once over here, I started off doing a bit of Englishteaching, before moving into translating and then export. These days I’m theexport manager and blender for a winery down in deepest Extremadura, which isone of the most remote and least touristy regions in Spain. I live in the townof Almendralejo, where I’m the only native speaker of English.

All the above very much does inform mypoetry, which is often still set in Blighty. First off, my view of life in theUK is enriched by having constant points of comparison with Spain. I now valuecertain aspects of British life more, while questioning others that Ipreviously enjoyed. There’s obviously the danger of falling into typical ex-patnostalgia for a caricatured homeland, but I guard against that by spending asmuch time back in the UK as possible. In literary terms, my experience ofcontemporary Spanish verse, poetics and live readings provides me with anadditional perspective on the UK scene.

My development as a poet has also beenheavily influenced by not having any English speakers around me for the pastfifteen years. I might speak bilingual-standard Spanish, but certain ideas,feelings and frames of reference are inevitably missing in my everydayconversations and end up being channelled through poetry. Teaching English as aforeign language, meanwhile, forced me to get to grips with the nuts and boltsof the language so as to explain it to my pupils. That additional understandingthen fed back into my poems.

Yes,one of the first things that struck me about your poems is how hard each wordis made to work – there’s no flab there at all. Did you ever encounterdifficulties placing short poems (a lot of those in the chapbook clock in at 10lines or less)? A lot of magazines seem to shy away from both short and longpoems, and plump for a default size of around 12 to 24 lines.

I’m aware there are certain editors (and readers) who feel “brief” isinevitably synonymous with “insubstantial” or “unfinished”, but then there arealso many who value the way words have to graft in shorter poems. Beingdifferent might be an initial hurdle when approaching editors, but often endsup being a plus in the long run.

Nevertheless, I do feel that brevity is anunderrated quality in contemporary UK poetry. People sometimes encourage meto spread my wings into longer forms, implicitly and even unconsciouslyundermining my previous work, when I’m actually more interested in exploringfurther the possibilities that short poems offer. I sometimes feel like ashort story writer who's asked why he/she isn't a novelist.

I know from my ownexperience that Helena Nelson of HappenStance is a very hands-on editor,willing to ask for rewrites and to get you to argue each poem’s case. I lovedthat whole process of putting my chapbook together – did you?

Manypoetry publishers seem to look for finished manuscripts these days. There’sless time and inclination to work with a poet in bringing a collectiontogether. However, Happenstance proves the exception.

As aneditor, Helena Nelson enables poets to gain a greater understanding of theirown verse. She doesn’t try to impose a house style, far from it, but forces youto justify your own poetics from the nuts and bolts of semantics and syntax outtowards their ebb and flow through a poem.

I stillfollow countless erroneous paths when writing poetry, but my work with Helenahas helped me pick up on those mistakes far more quickly. While revising poemsmyself, I now try to imagine what holes she might pick in them!

Areyou a big reviser of your work before you send it out? I find myself takinglonger and longer to do so as I get older, and I’m not always sure that’s agood thing…

I’m afraid I’ve always been extremely slowin my writing process. The brevity and compression of my verse means thatslight tweaks make all the difference, and those slight tweaks tend to wait fortheir moment.

In other words, just as I need the filterand warp of memory to set off on writing a poem, so I have to stash the firstdraft for a number of months. Once I’ve fallen out of love with the piece, I cango back and rework it, before putting it back away and letting more time go by.This cycle may continue for years until a final, often minimal change justsomehow makes all the rest of the poem click into place and come to life.

Assomeone who can get a bit fetishistic about notebooks, pens and certain writingconditions, I have to ask, are you the same? I’ve been trying to work outwhether I really need those certain things, or whether it’s just become a sortof superstition.

I do tend to write in the same room, sothat my surroundings become an irrelevance and I can thus concentrate on thepage. I’m not particularly fetishistic about pens, etc, but notebooks are key -I can’t envisage writing poetry straight on to a computer screen.

This is because my poems go through somany incarnations. I choose, discard and then retrieve threads that would belost to me forever via a delete button. My writing process often feels likedoing a puzzle, trying a piece in one place where it initially looks right,only to realise its perfect fit is elsewhere. What’s more, rereading old drafts enablesme to retrace my steps, spot wrong turns and take another path through a poem,doing so over and over until I find the way.

Canyou tell me a bit about your use of syllabics? It’s very unobtrusive, and allthe more effective for that, I think.

There are many misconceptions aboutsyllabics, as if their use were only worthwhile as an exercise for novicepoets, as if writing in syllabics consisted of ignoring stresses andmechanically counting syllables, as if line-breaks were rendered arbitrary.

In fact, there's a subtle syllabic musicthat runs through all English-language poetry and lyrics, lying just below thestresses, at times somewhat drowned out by the heavier resonance of the latter.When writing poems I never need to count syllables - I instinctively notice andfeel them.

What's undeniable is that stresses are akey element to the rhythms of English. By this I mean that any English-languagepoet writing in so-called pure syllabics simply must also be aware of stresses.I find that syllabics enables me to play with anapests, iambs, dactyls andtrochees within a musical framework of lines and stanzas, a game that inverselyprovides me with greater freedom to do so than in free verse, all because the whisperingmusic of syllabics underpins the verse. Rather than ignoring stresses, I'mdoing quite the opposite, using them to create and disrupt aural expectations,seeking to bring together musical effects and semantics.

Readers with attuned ears do often pickup on these cadences, although I don’t need or even want anybody to noticeimmediately my use of syllabics. Instead, my aim is that they should do theirwork quietly, contributing to a poem’s overall effect without showing off andshouting “Look at me!”

Areyou working on a full collection at the moment, and if so, do you see it takingany particular thematic direction?

Inventing Truth took a long time tobring together, and my current focus is very much on helping it find anaudience. Happenstance have invested a lot of time and money in me and I wantto repay them. To that end, I’m actively seeking readings in the U.K. thisautumn and next spring..

As regards the long-term future, I’mbuilding towards a first collection, part of which will include the mostrepresentative pieces from Inventing Truth. My thematic and poetic directionsare progressing from this pamphlet rather than breaking with it.

Matthew Stewart was born in Farnham, Surrey, in 1973. Following a comprehensive school education, he took a degree in modern languages at St Peter's College, Oxford. He has lived in Extremadura, Spain, for the past fifteen years, where he works as the export manager and blender for a local winery. His poems have been widely published in UK magazines and he blogs at http://roguestrands.blogspot.com

Instructions For Coming Home

Your fingers will have to trespass

through umpteen kitchen drawers. Let them.

The gas rings will purr. That's their sound.

Hack at a spud. Defy its eyes

with your knife. Crack eggs and watch them

splutter. You'll remember this smell

used to greet you at the front door.

Lever them free, the spatula

no less a tool than any spade.

Now confront the day, bite by bite.

Extranjero

Ten years on and perfection’s lost

its distant lustre. My accent

seeps away. Every few minutes

I let some vowels tug me back home,

back towards the cadence of who

I am or was or was or am.

Epilogue

for Josefa

When you trace your wrinkles, criss-crossed

like the fine scars of unknown wounds,

and speculate how they got there;

when you’re sure you hid the stained scarf,

the note and the bent bronze bracelet

for some significant reason;

maybe you can’t remember what

you forgot, but you remember

you forgot, which is worse, far worse.

Behind The Arras

2011-08-25T12:10:00.000Z

Just a quick note to point out that the Behind The Arras website, which covers all things theatrical, also features reviews of poetry readings and open mic nights from all over the Midlands.

Many of them are by Gary Longden, who wrote this review of last Monday's Shindig, although he's far too modest to point out that his open mic spot was one of the highlights of the evening. It's a great resource, though - browsing it you realise how many good regular events there are out there.

Julian Cope vs Bill Drummond

2011-08-24T13:08:00.001Z

I recently found myself re-reading Julian Cope's autobiographies, Head-On and Repossessed. I think I bought them when they first came out as a single volume in 2000, but after enjoying them a lot at the time, hadn't picked them up since.

Cope's story of the Liverpool punk scene, the glory days of The Teardrop Explodes, and his on-off solo career in the 80s, is never less than entertaining, not least because you're never sure quite how much to believe. Amid all the tales of feuds, drug-fuelled road trips and transformation from teen idol into shamanistic rock god, though, there's lots of interesting stuff on stardom and the workings of the music business, as well as on the nature of creativity. It's a bit of shame he hasn't written a further volume covering his increasingly eccentric solo career since 1990, including his emergence as a megalithic expert.

It's an understatement to say that Ian McCulloch, Dave Balfe and Bill Drummond don't come out of the books too well, so in the interests of a bit of balance (although I am a long-term Cope fan), I've ordered a copy of Drummond's own book, 45. As the arch-scamster who created The KLF, he ought to have a good story to tell.

While searching for it online, I also came across his late 80s (and pre-KLF) solo album The Man. Most copies on there cost £25-plus, but I managed to snap up a used one for £7. It turns out that he was backed on the record by my old favourites The Triffids (minus David McComb), so it's got curiosity value for me, if nothing else. It also contains a song called Julian Cope Is Dead - I wonder where he's coming from with that one?

Last night's Shindig

2011-08-23T21:36:00.000Z

Last night's Nine Arches Press Shindig at The Western in Leicester was the usual entertaining and thought-provoking mixture of open mic and featured readings.

After I'd managed to get through my set without dissolving into a fit of coughing (I seem to manage to catch a heavy cold a couple of days before all my readings now) Deborah Tyler-Bennett read from her new Nine Arches chapbook, Mytton...Dyer...Sweet Billy Gibson, as well as from other recent collections (including the excellent Pavilion). There's always a terrific stripped-down energy to her poems, and she always reads well too. I enjoyed her set a lot, and I've been enjoying the book this evening.

The second half, hosted by Crystal Clear Creators, featured a hugely entertaining short story from Alex Plasatis, and a set from Leicester poet Roy Marshall, who has a pamphlet forthcoming from CCC. His poems are compact and poised, packing an awful lot into very few lines. I'll look forward to seeing his collection.

In between times, in the open mic spots, Gary Longden's paean to Rebekah Brooks was great, and one of the lines from Mark Goodwin's poem remained bouncing around my head for most of today, but all the readers were of a reliably high standard. What I also find really interesting is how certain ideas and themes emerge during the course of each of these evenings, from a very disparate range of poets.

I also bought Angela France's Nine Arches chapbook Lessons In Mallemaroking, and picked up a copy of Tony Williams' extraordinary All The Rooms Of Uncle's Head for review. Lots of reading ahead - looking forward to my week off from Monday.

Oh, and as usual, my set:

Zugunruhe

Things Left In Hotel Rooms

Coolidge

1984

Black-throated Diver, Lochindorb

Summer Breeze

Gossamer

Untitled

The Best British Poetry 2011

2011-08-19T06:53:00.000Z

I'm delighted to have a poem - Pluvialis - included in The Best British Poetry 2011, which anthologises poems which have appeared in British-based literary magazines and webzines over the past year (it originally appeared in Iota). The book's edited by Roddy Lumsden (there'll be a different editor in each subsequent year), and runs to 176 pages with, as you can see from the link, a long and varied list of featured poets.

The format's similar to the Best American Poetry series, and similar anthologies that have appeared in countries such as Ireland and Australia, with each poem accompanied by a note by the poet about the piece's inspiration and form.

It's published on September 1st, and costs £9.99 ($16.95).

Pluvialis, I should add, also appears in hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, which you can order direct from me, or from Nine Arches Press. If you click on the cover of any of the poetry collections on the Nine Arches site, you can now read extracts.

New at Nine Arches

2011-08-16T12:41:00.001Z

There are plenty of new publications worth looking at over at the Nine Arches Press website - poetry from Tony Williams, Angela France and Deborah Tyler-Bennett, and crime stories from Joel Lane, for starters.

You can read extracts from each of the poetry books by clicking on the cover then following the link in the sidebar. That includes hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica - click on the link to read more, or to buy.

Great, or overrated?

2011-08-12T11:47:00.002Z

I was reading this rather intriguing article last night, prompted by a tweet from John McCullough (you could be forgiven for thinking that John's tweets are becoming the sole source for posts on here). I tend to agree with Elif Batuman says there - that the right book has to reach you at the right time. Sometimes, you'll go back to a book that had previously left you cold and wonder what on earth it was you hadn't liked about it, rather in the same way that I have no idea at all why I disliked tomatoes as a child, when these days I find it nearly impossible to get through a meal that doesn't contain them.

It's set me thinking which books I'd choose for this sort of article. I've got a couple in mind (one novel, and one poetry collection), but I want to have another look at them over the next few days and see if my opinion has changed at all since the last time I tried to read them.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear your suggestions - 'classics' or canonical books that made you wonder what all the fuss was about...

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

2011-08-11T09:00:00.000Z

Alison Brackenbury sent me a link to the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, which carries a prize of £1,750 plus publication of your manuscript on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rather unusually, it's only open to poets who have published no more than one previous collection, although you'll need to read the small print there to see exactly what constitutes a collection. Well worth considering entering if you're looking for first publication, or if you've been working on a follow-up to a debut collection or chapbook.

Of the moment

2011-08-10T12:49:00.002Z

A post on John McCullough's Facebook page led me back to this Auden poem - Mark McGuinness also has some interesting things to say about it here. Well, it was either that or The Wasteland, and you need to keep something in reserve in times like these.

Still scorching

2011-08-04T12:37:00.002Z

After that post about Jason Ringenberg the other day, I trawled You Tube for videos of Jason and the Scorchers in their heyday. I'm reluctant to say that this, their cover of Dylan's Absolutely Sweet Marie, was their finest moment - there were plenty of great originals on their first two-and-a-half albums - but it was certainly their big attention-grabber, and remains one of my favourite Dylan covers. Warner Hodges' guitar solo still sounds, as Ringenberg put it himself the other night, thermonuclear.

Anyway, I was glad I made the effort to get along to The Musician. It was sauna-like, as you'd expect, but the support act, The Breakdowns, were pretty good in a Wildhearts sort of way, and Jason Ringenberg didn't disappoint at all. He's aged well - there's a bit less hair under the stetson, but he's still positively lanky and has the energy and enthusiasm of an 18-year-old.

A lot of his set was drawn from those early albums - White Lies, Lost Highway, Broken Whisky Glass, Blanket Of Sorrow, Shop It Around and Harvest Moon all made appearances - but there was more recent material too, from his solo albums and from last year's Scorchers reunion album, with Twang Town Blues a highlight. He even played a couple of his Farmer Jason songs - Honky Tonk Maniac From Mars and Moose On The Loose - which left you wondering what on earth the good farmer's primary school-age audience make of it (although, if it means they grow up to be Jason and the Scorchers fans, how can that be a bad thing?).

Throughout it all, he maintained the difficult-to-perfect combination of boundless energy and wry wit that made the Scorchers such a great live act all those years ago, and closed with the afore-mentioned Dylan cover (I'd never seen him do it before).

I bought the recent Scorchers (Halcyon Times) album on the way out, and it's really pretty good, far more in the proto-alt country vein of the early records than the country-metal they got stuck on in the late 80s. A gentleman, as ever, Jason chatted modestly and signed CDs, a true pioneer of what now gets called Americana. I hope he's back soon.

Even deeper joy

2011-08-04T11:33:00.003Z

Following my post about Professor Stanley Unwin the other day, I received this email from my friend Mark Jones, in Cardiff.

"I saw your posting about Stanley Unwin and wondered if you've ever seen his 1960s TV series The Secret Service.

"It is truly bizarre. As it was made by Gerry Anderson it's a mix of long-shots of Unwin which then cut to his Supermarianation double for close-ups. He plays a country priest who works for B.I.S.H.O.P. (British Intelligence Special Headquarters Operation Priest) and owns a device which he uses to shrink his gardener Matthew for special ops. He lapses into Unwinese quite regularly to confuse the bad guys.

"Sadly it also confused the show's producer Lew Grade, who thought it wouldn't catch on in America. Sadly it didn't catch on over here either. But all 13 bonkers episodes are now available on DVD. It helps if you drop some acid before viewing, needless to say.

"Think of it as Thunderbirds meets Sergeant Pepper and you've just about got it."

I do remember seeing a lengthy clip of this, maybe even an entire epsiode, years and years ago, but I had no idea it was out on DVD. I'm on Amazon as I write...

EDIT: My colleague, fellow birdwatcher and moth-botherer Mike Weedon has pointed out that Tim Unwin, a fellow inmate of Media House, is actually the Prof's grandson. Respect.

Deep joy

2011-08-02T13:01:00.002Z

Great piece here about Professor Stanley Unwin - Wayne Burrows says: "While many examples of creativelinguistic mangling are seen as difficult and experimental, with theriotous dream-prose of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce or the beautifullyslippery poetry of J H Prynne high on many readers’ lists of works to avoid(more’s the pity), it can also be noted that in other contexts, exactly thesame poetic and literary procedures can result in widespread popularity.Professor Stanley Unwin’s deadpan twists to ordinary speech and such tropes asthe radio lecture are a perfect example."

If you haven't the slightest idea what Wayne's talking about, look up the Prof on YouTube - there's any number of videos of him in full flow. Utter genius.

King of cowpunk

2011-07-27T17:44:00.043Z

There's no surer sign of middle age sinking its false teeth into you than realising that you can't remember the last time you went to a gig. I'm thinking that it was about two years ago, at least.

Fortunately, help is at hand, as a quick scan of The Musician's website earlier today revealed that cowpunk legend Jason Ringenberg is in town once again. So, that's my Tuesday night sorted.

Ringenberg was the front man of Jason and the Scorchers, who, back in the early 80s, were briefly bracketed with the likes of REM as the Next Big Things from the USA. You have a pretty good idea of what's happened since - Michael Stipe and band went on to world domination, while Jason and his boys faded into near-oblivion. That was a shame, because their foot-to-the-floor brand of country rock (more like The Ramones backing Merle Haggard than The Eagles harmonising blandly) was a breath of fresh air in the Spandau Ballet and Kajagoogoo-bedevilled landscape of the mid-80s. Their first mini-album, Fervor, was an absolute blast, with a great cover of Dylan's Absolutely Sweet Marie, and their next two albums were in much the same vein.

Ringenberg now pursues a schizophrenic solo career, performing children's songs as Farmer Jason, and bashing his way through new material and some old classics at gigs like next week's. And The Musician is a great venue, however unpromising its location tucked away down a side street just off the ring road. Last time I saw Ringenberg there, he ended the night playing a couple of songs standing on the bar. I'd settle for that sort of night again.

The long and the short of it

2011-07-26T13:35:00.003Z

A few things this last week have set me thinking about the length of poems, and to what extent there's a sort of default size preferred by editors and publishers (not necessarily entirely consciously - in fact, almost certainly not).

It was all sparked by this blog piece by American poet LouAnn Muhm at the excellent Loft Literary Centre blog. I think LouAnn makes a great case for the short poem (I'm thinking 10 lines or less), and hits on pretty much all the reasons why I like them. But, looking back through my own poems, the vast majority clock in at more than 10 lines, but less than 40. Why is that?

In part it's because, as you start out as a poet, you see a lot of UK poetry magazines full of poems that fall within that range. Some specifically ask for poems of no more than 40 lines (that's certainly true in many competitions), and seeing this, you naturally try to fit in with what's gone before.

At the other end of the scale, I can remember feeling that, in a submission of maybe four poems, it doesn't make sense to send something that's barely there at all. In fact, I can remember having felt that despite the fact that, frequently, editors took the briefest (but almost certainly the most tightly written) of the selection I sent them. Clearly, then, a large part of the problem is mine - I should get used to the fact that a good editor can tell a good poem regardless of its length, and fire away with the short poems.

Having talked to a few other poets about this, though, it does undoubtedly seem to be harder to place really short and really long poems in magazines. I suspect it's purely because editors are seeking to strike a series of balances - give too much space to one epic poem, and you'll get complaints from readers who wanted more variety, and leave too many of your pages as a snowscape with a tiny poem huddled in the top-left corner, and you'll get readers telling you your magazine isn't worth the money.

I get the impression that things are changing a little, maybe partly as a result of the gradual breaking down of divides between different schools and styles of poetry. For a start, sequences seem to be much more common than 10 years ago, and they can allow the poet to have the best of both worlds, with each section being highly concentrated, but effectively adding up to a single, long poem. I've been tinkering with one myself, using very short verse forms to make up a connected whole.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this ("you don't say?", I hear you thinking), except to say that I'd be interested to hear any views. Are short poems seen as somehow less substantial (in terms of literary merit, rather than quantity of ink on a page)? Are long poems seen as inevitably overwritten? And why, if I'm preaching the virtues of concision, can't I make my blog posts a bit shorter?

NB LouAnn's also running an online workshop on writing short poems - you can read more about it, and sign up, here.

Enchantment, by David Morley

2011-07-22T05:13:00.002Z

Carcanet, 2010, £9.95

Recent years have seen David Morley mining arich seam of inspiration from his Romany background – the results, in terms ofboth quality and quantity, have been enough to make any poet envious. Thislatest volume shows no sign of a drop-off in either department.

Enchantment does exactly what it says on thecover, fully living up to every sense of that word. In the modern sense, itdraws the reader in immediately, delights and intrigues, and doesn’t stop doingso until you put it down.

To do so it draws heavily on worlds of myth andmagic (as in the Latin incantare), and most importantly, it sings (cantare).The straightforward simplicity of the title is reflected in poetry that’sserious, ambitious and challenging, but never wilfully obscure.

Its early poems celebrate both friendship andthe natural world, and as you’d expect from an ecologist, Morley has a sharpeye and a knack for exact, economical phrasing to conjure it up for the reader.

He also has a gift for evoking nature in a farmore impressionistic way, though. In Chorus, a favourite at recentreadings, there’s a sparrow sorting “spare parts on a pavement” for everyturnstone doing “precisely what is asked of them by name”.

Enjoyable as they are, though, these poems aremerely the warm-up before the main event, the “lit circle” in which Romanymyths and circus stories are unfolded in sparkling, shimmering language.

This section contains the highlights of thecollection, for me. There’s Hedgehurst, telling the story of ahalf-human, half-hedgehog creator-king, The Circling Game, in which ablacksmith creates a girl from fire, and Spinning, which considers thewhole process of story-telling and translation of experience into words,bristling with lines such as:

What’s fabulous might be a hedgehogspiny with rhyme

or a bride born from gnarled nouns.What’s fabulous might be

darkness drowsing over a woman ofwords beside a waterfall

of words. What’s fabulous might be ananvil hammered white-hot

with hurt, or Lippizans held orhurtling on the harness of a verb.

Now while the Romany background is much inevidence, for me these pieces also recalled Anglo-Saxon poetry and(appropriately enough for the Midlands-based Morley) the Gawain poet in theirheavy use of alliteration and their physicality. That’s a difficult knack topull off – however much I like it, I’ll admit that in some Anglo-Saxon poetry,the metre makes it very difficult for the language to really take flight – soall the more credit to Morley for keeping his lines so supple. Passages such asthis, from The Circling Game, beg to be read aloud for the sheerpleasure of the sound:

The masters stank of rancidbank-notes. Their palms were plumy.

Their palms were planed purple withdone deals and sure things.

John played a circling game with thehorse masters, sending

himself off when wanted most, shyingon the end of a lunge line

of their flattery, letting himself betalked back to the fair with a drink

before coming back and laying out thetackle and terms of his trade.

It adds up to an intoxicating brew, and I’ll goback to that word ‘fabulous’ that’s so crucial to the passage quoted fromSpinning. As with his collection’s title, Morley’s good at getting youto consider a word’s whole lineage – he takes you back to an older meaningwhile keeping all its current connotations alive.

I’ll be surprised, and disappointed, if thisbook doesn’t end up in the running for one of the big awards this year, butregardless of whether or not it does, it’s a superb piece of work. Read it.

In the footsteps of Drayton

2011-07-20T13:00:00.005Z

Last night I dashed down the M42 to read at The Fizz 8, at Polesworth Abbey Refectory, in North Warwickshire.

As I noted in the preview pieces about the event, it was a particular thrill to be reading in Michael Drayton's hometown. In fact, both Drayton and John Donne are thought to have read in front of the same fireplace (pictured above) that's now part of the Refectory, and Shakespeare is rumoured to have spent time as a page at nearby Polesworth Hall. The chair that's pictured, by the way, isn't an Elizabethan torture instrument - it was built by one of last night's poets for use while he's playing the guitar.

In keeping with the setting, I tied to give my set a bit of a historical slant, and all went very well (except for a coughing fit in the middle of Troy Town - fortunately it's short enough to start again). There were excellent and varied open mic readers, including Barry Patterson (pictured) and Gary Longden - nice to catch up with both of them again - and Mal Dewhirst, the driving force behind Fizz and Polesworth's poetry trails.

My set (divided in two by the interval) was:

Prelude for Glass Harmonica

The sea at Ashby-de-la-Zouch

Drinking With Godberd

Chirimoya

Dreams From The Anchor Church

Leland's New Year Gift To The King, 1546

The Meeting Place

In St Martin's Square

West Leicester Lullaby

Fantasia for Glass Harmonica

The American version

Exposures

Worst Case Scenario

Troy Town

Happiness

Cahoots

Nocturne for Glass Harmonica

If you're ever in the area, Polesworth's well worth a look. As well as the Abbey Church and its 14th century gatehouse (below), there's the Polesworth Poets Trail I mentioned. Also, despite the fact that you're a stone's throw from the motorway, Tamworth, and the great sprawl of Birmingham beyond it, there's a lot of remarkably unspoiled countryside within walking distance.

The Fizz 8, at Polesworth

2011-07-18T05:31:00.000Z

A quick reminder that I'll be reading tomorrow night (Tuesday, July 19th) at regular live poetry/spoken word/open mic night The Fizz, just over the border into Warwickshire. It all takes place at the Polesworth Abbey Refectory (on the High Street), starting at 7.30pm, and refreshments are available. As I've mentioned before, Polesworth was Michael Drayton's hometown, so it's a real honour to be able to read there.

An interview with Michelle McGrane

2011-07-11T15:25:00.001Z

Michelle McGrane's third collection, The Suitable Girl (Pindrop Press), was one of the highlights of the last few months for me, a strong, unified piece of work whose poems utilise a wealth of evocative detail to build their many layers. I got the chance to talk to her about it and poetry more generally just ahead of the Cape Town launch of the book, and she also shared a couple of the poems from the collection.

TheSuitable Girl feels like a veryunified piece of work – was it conceived that way, or did you find your writingleading in a certain direction?

I’dwritten a few persona poems when The Suitable Girl, the title of a previouspoem, kept reappearing and waving at me from the wings, trying to catch myattention. At that stage I knew that I wanted to explore the idea of societalexpectations in relation to women and I thought that the irony in the titlemight work for a collection of poems about ‘unsuitable’ women, women who hadstrayed from the paths of convention. Once this consciously became the bridgingtheme it was relatively easy to continue in the direction I’d envisioned the collectiontaking, although in the three years of writing The Suitable Girl I removed and added poems to the extent that onlya couple of the earliest survived.

With a project like this, then, do you activelyresearch the personae involved, or is it a case of accumulating knowledge aboutthem over a long period of time to the point that you have to write the poem?

I try todiscover as much as I can about the character and the period throughbiographies, novels, films, art and the Internet. The more I immerse myself inthe character’s life and surroundings, the easier I find writing the poem. In away, I imagine it might be similar to preparing for an acting role where youneed to become the character in orderto portray her. As a hoarder of miscellany, I find research endlesslyfascinating, sometimes to the point where I have to steer myself back to thepoem before I lose sight of it.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourwriting processes? Do you revise and redraft a lot? And do you have anyparticular conditions/rituals that need to be in place before you can write?

Until Ihave some idea of where the poem is heading and what form it’s taking I tend todraft in longhand on lined paper with a Pilot Fineliner. There’s something veryseductive and satisfying about making loops and curls in black ink on cleanwhite paper (and for me, the finer the pen tip the better).

When thepoem is sufficiently shaped I transfer it onto my computer where I continuedrafting and editing. In the early stages of a poem’s creation I need to bealone and I work best in silence. I’ve always envied poets who are able towrite while listening to music but I find music distracting.

I don’tcarry a notebook so occasionally when I’m at a café or restaurant I’ll writenotes or a couple of lines on receipts and tickets found in my wallet; I tearpages out of my spiral bound logbook and scribble while I’m waiting for the trafficlights to turn green on my way to work.

Do you keep all the drafts of a work, even onceyou've started writing onto the computer? I heard Paul Farley talk about thisrecently, and he was saying that he keeps printouts of every draft. I sort ofenvy that, but I'd be terrified of being buried beneath a wall of paper.

An environmentallyfriendly alternative to keeping printouts of every draft might be to save them ina folder on a memory stick but, no, I don't keep every draft.

I can honestly say I've never read a poetrycollection that's made me quite as hungry as The Suitable Girl did! It's a very sensuous book generally, butespecially where taste and smell are concerned, and I thought you used themboth very evocatively in a way many poets ignore. Are they always such a focusof your poetry?

Well, itdepends what the poem requires. Thirteen Ways with Figs, Bertha MasonSpeaks and The Remise of Marie Antoinette, aged 14 are more sensuous thanthe poems about my father's death. I think the senses provide a direct route tothe reader's imagination and that by invoking them he or she can be transportedfrom the comfort and familiarity of an armchair to undiscovered worlds.

DianeAckerman's A Natural History of theSenses (Vintage, 1990) is a book I'd recommend to writers of all genres.She suggests that "Our several senses, which feel so personal andimpromptu … reach far beyond us. They're an extension of the genetic chain thatconnects us to everyone who has ever lived; they bind us to other people and toanimals, across time and country and happenstance. They bridge the personal andthe impersonal, the one private soul with its many relatives, the individualwith the universe, all of life on earth."

Movingaway from the collection a minute, I wondered what your opinions are (as a veryweb-savvy poet, and one who's able to look at the UK scene from the outside) onthe way the internet is changing poetry. My own experience is almost whollypositive - I think the internet has exposed me to the writing of poets I'dnever have come across otherwise - but I wonder too whether it's breaking downsome of the tribal divides that used to exist.

I think the Internet has opened up the world to poetsnot only in terms of having the opportunity to read work one might never havecome across and being able to interact with writers living on other continentsbut because of the news, resources and information at one's fingertips. I reallydon't feel qualified to comment on tribal divides except to say that from whatI've observed the virtual community is accessible to anyone who has an Internetconnection and shows an interest in poetry.

It's probably the question poets get tired ofbeing asked, but are there any particular poets you constantly return to forinspiration?

LouiseGlück and Margaret Atwood.

Do you enjoy the whole process of getting outthere to do readings to promote a book, and do you find the audience responsefeeding back into your next project? And is there any prospect of any UKreadings somewhere down the line?

It’sencouraging and humbling when people attend readings and I particularlyappreciate when, at the end of an evening, someone takes the time to tell mewhy a certain poem means something to them. Still, I’m always more comfortableat my desk than in the limelight. As years go by, being the centre of attentionseems less important, less real to me, than creating and writing.

I havegood friends in England so, at this stage, I’d say the prospect of a few UKreadings down the line is fairly good. I’ll keep you posted.

Bonsai

Finally, I was free to disappear

the day my husband

brought the young brush cherry home.

He settled her on the stand

between the firethorn and crab apple,

then mended the mossy wooden fence

along the property boundaries.

I knew she was different

by her tapering trunk,

glossy, red foliage,

heavy lower branches

and well-distributed roots.

Oh, she was ornamental enough.

He’d always had an eye for potential.

Through the bedroom curtain,

I watched her peel twenty years off hisage.

He couldn’t keep the smile from hisface,

spent the evening kneeling in thegarden,

singing green heart notes

to her sprouting, elliptic leaves.

No more fingering,

pinching, pruning, bleeding,

every branch and twig wired,

brown and flexible, bent to the shape

of his fingers and thumbs.

Waking in the early morning, I left him

wrapped in dreams of sweet, red flesh,

the sunlight glinting off my nodescars.

The Escape Artist

Inour three-month acquaintance, Faolán was knownthroughout circus rings as the Lord of the Fleas. Faolánmeans ‘little wolf’. He was a hairy wee beastie. Agile, a born entertainer andambitious to boot. Nothing short of global domination would satisfy theLilliputian star. From tenth generation Saratov Circus stock on his paternalside, his mother was Muirne Mac Nessa, the Irish siphonaptera racing champion.People journeyed from as far as Argentina and the Macau Peninsula to marvel athis mesmerising chariot act, dazzling tightrope performance, virtuoso cannonroutine and death-defying fire dance.

Therewas no one to blame but myself when he ran off with the ringmaster’s silverweimaraner. I should have suspected something was amiss. He stopped feedingwhen the laughing, long-haired bitch sashayed past his trailer, refused to turncartwheels as I greeted him from behind the magnifying glass. Now, I’m trainingaerial silk artistes. Of course, it’s not the same. My heart’s no longer in thehyperbole. Does he miss the good times, he spotlight, the smell of roastchestnuts and candyfloss, the cheering crowds? I sleep with his gold-trimmedtophat and tails, his diminutive whip, in a snuffbox beside my bed.

Michelle McGrane lives in Johannesburg andblogs at Peony Moon. Her collection The Suitable Girl is published by Pindrop Press in the UK and Modjaji Books in South Africa.

Templar award winners

2011-07-07T19:34:00.000Z

Just got an email to say that the winners of this year's Templar Pamphlet & Collection Awards are Clive Allen, Christopher James and Andrew Jamison.

Their short collections - Violets; The Manly Art Of Knitting; and The Bus From Belfast – will be published and launched at the Derwent Poetry Festival in November, along with the 2011 anthology Bliss.

The full Derwent Poetry Festival Programme will be available in August.

Tears in the Fence 53: hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica reviewed

2011-07-04T13:12:00.000Z

Issue 53 of Tears In The Fence arrived on Friday, so I spent large parts of the weekend dipping in and out of it. There's the usual excellent variety of poetry, but what sets it apart from many poetry mags is the amount, and quality, of reviews and critical articles included.

It was a nice surprise to find a review of hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica in this issue, and a very good review it is too, by Nathan Thompson. Of course, any poet likes being told nice things about their work, and Thompson does that ("full of some very fine descriptive and musical writing"), but he also talks in detail about what he wasn't so keen on, concluding "It [the book] is slightly overbalanced in favour of the self-contained lyric that doesn't provide (this reader at least) enough wriggle-room." He identifies two Matt Merritts, and prefers the one that "lets the roots hang out a bit and writes more open, multidimensional poems".

I think I agree, in as much as that's the type of poem I'm trying to write now, and enjoy writing most. That's not to say I'm trying to disown anything that's gone before at all, but I'd guess that the vast majority of poetry collections capture a snapshot in time, with the poet frozen for a moment on their way between two (almost certainly hard to define) points on the poetry spectrum. Which is probably a long way of saying that it's good to know that there's some evidence of development!

But anyway, I'm very grateful to Nathan and to Tears... for such a full and well-argued review, and I was particularly glad he chose Variations On A Theme By J A Baker to illustrate the sort of poem he enjoyed.

Elsewhere in the issue there's an excellent review of Gill McEvoy's The Plucking Shed, which reminded me that it's about time I got my act together and posted my own appreciation of a very subtle and surprising collection. And flicking through the latest Magma, I also noticed a review of Tom Duddy's new book. Like Gill and myself, he's a HappenStancer, and I loved his pamphlet The Small Hours, so I'll be seeking out this new collection, The Hiding Place.

Just arrived

2011-06-30T11:44:00.000Z

My copy of Geraldine Monk's Lobe Scarps & Finials arrived from Leafe Press this week. So far, I've only had chance to read the opening sequence, Glow in the Darklunar Calendar, but it makes a very good case for Simon Turner's blurb - "Monk is more attuned to the physical heft of words than any other poet working in English today".

In the past I've read bits and bobs of her work in various places, and have usually enjoyed it, so I wasn't entirely surprised to find myself laughing out loud within half a dozen lines of the first poem (possibly you won't find it so funny if you're a Millwall fan - but I'm not). It's non-mainstream, but it's anything but difficult or inaccessible.

Anyway, I'll come back to it later, once I've read it all, but first impressions are very good.

Polyolbion in Polesworth

2011-06-29T12:53:00.000Z

I'm delighted to be reading from hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica at the regular Fizz live poetry night, at Polesworth Abbey, on July 19th – you can see the details above.

Of course, as regular readers here will realise, the venue is highly significant, as this blog's guiding spirit, Michael Drayton, poet and writer of the original Polyolbion, was educated there. John Donne also used to stay there, I think, and it's a lovely location anyway.

As if all that's not enough, Polesworth also gets a mention in my favourite Julian Cope song, Reynard The Fox. You can't ask for more than that, can you?

Nuneaton Poetry Day

2011-06-28T12:53:00.000Z

This Saturday, July 2nd, is Nuneaton Poetry Day. There's a whole host of activities lined up, that you can read about in much more detail here.

Nuneaton's a town with a literary pedigree, of course, being the home of George Eliot, and it's also perfectly placed for straddling the West and East Midlands poetry scenes.

If you're anywhere nearby at the weekend, why not drop in?

It's Shindig time again

2011-06-26T13:01:00.000Z

There's a great line-up for the latest Nine Arches Press Shindig, at The Western, on Western Road, Leicester, tomorrow night at 7.30, with Luke Kennard, Simon Perrill, Joel Lane and Lydia Towsey reading, plus plenty of open mic slots (you can sign up when you arrive). Entry is free. See you there...

Catching up

2011-06-25T22:01:00.000Z

Thursday night saw the launch of Birdbook 1 at the Phoenix Artists' Club, in London. It was great to be able to be there (and reminded me that I really ought to get down to more London events), and to catch up with the likes of Jo Bell, Simon Barraclough, Roddy Lumsden, Derek Adams, and, of course, Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving, the poetry dynamos behind Sidekick Books.

I really enjoyed the readings, especially as the accompanying art was projected behind the stage. There's so much good stuff in the book that it's hard to pick out favourites, but some of the poems that kept coming back to me later included Great Tit, by Emily Hasler, Green Woodpecker, by James Wilkes, and Edward Mackay's Tacc Tacc, Blackcap. Also, several of the poems that took more oblique approaches to the birds - Chrissy Williams' Redstart, Simon Barraclough's Pied Flycatcher, and Roddy Lumsden's Daredevil (which manages to connect Scottish Crossbills and Evel Knievel). Anyway, there's a lot of high-quality poetry and art in there, so buy a copy.

In other poetry news, I was delighted to see that Kona Macphee won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize with her collection Perfect Blue. I've mentioned before that it was one of my favourite collections of last year.

Finally, there's a lovely review of hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica by Julia Bird in issue 50 of Magma, along with David Morley on Romani poetry, some Magma memories from previous contributors, and poetry from the likes of Tim Turnbull, Helen Ivory, Penelope Shuttle, AB Jackson and Michelle McGrane.

The unforgiven

2011-06-23T13:20:00.001Z

I've just bought the DVD of the excellent Fire In Babylon, a documentary film looking at the all-conquering West Indies team of the late 70s and 80s. It's a wonderful reminder of just how good they were - for all their lack of spin bowling, and very occasional fragility against good spinners (well, one great spinner, Abdul Qadir) themselves - I'd still back them to have beaten the more recent great Aussie team, or the Pakistan team of the early 90s spearheaded by Wasim and Waqar.

As a cricket fan at the time, of course, it wasn't always comfortable viewing, with England suffering some catastrophic hammerings at the hands of Lloyd, Richards, Greenidge, Haynes, Holding, Marshall, Garner and co. But, perhaps because so many of them played for long periods in county cricket too, they occupy a special place in my cricketing affections. The fact that they played such an exciting, attacking brand of cricket helped, too.

I can remember my dad taking me to see a Sunday League game at Leicester in the early 80s, against Somerset. From what I remember, Leicestershire won, with their own West Indian, the great Andy Roberts, leading the way. But the real thrill was afterwards, seeing Viv Richards and Joel Garner at close quarters. Both, I remember, seemed huge. Richards had the build of a heavyweight boxer, so you could see why bowlers tended to get intimidated by him even before they started their run-up, while Garner was just impossibly tall. Softly-spoken and charming, he quickly persuaded all us autograph-hunting ankle-biters to line up quietly while he signed everyone's book or programme.

Cricket's not yet undergone the separation between players and fans that has affected football, but it still seems slightly unreal having seen such sporting gods in the flesh. Richards remains the greatest batsman I've ever seen or expect to see. Malcolm Marshall, who died of cancer tragically young, was the greatest quick bowler, but Garner would be somewhere up there too.

But if Fire In Babylon is a celebration of the Caribbean's golden age of cricket, this excellent article on CricInfo highlights a forgotten side of West Indian cricket in the 80s. When you hear black South Africans (including Nelson Mandela) speak about how vital the sporting boycott was to changing attitudes, it's hard if not impossible to argue, but it's equally difficult not to feel an awful lot of sympathy for those West Indians whose lives were wrecked by their misjudged decision to try to earn a living.

Birdbook launch

2011-06-22T13:20:00.000Z

I'm off to the launch of Birdbook 1 in London tomorrow night - if you're anywhere near the Phoenix Arts Club on Charing Cross Road at around 7.30pm, it'll be well worth a couple of hours of your time, with a large and varied line-up of poets reading from Sidekick Books' splendid publication.

Shod takes top award!

2011-06-21T12:16:00.000Z

I was delighted to see on Twitter last night that Mark Goodwin's Shod, published by Nine Arches Press, has won the East Midlands Book Award.

The worthy winner was announced by Ian McMillan, one of the judges, at the Lowdham Book Festival, with Shod chosen from this strong shortlist.

The book's very different from what you might expect from Mark if you've only read his (also excellent) Shearsman collections - I haven't seen any comments from the judges yet, but it's a book that rather transcends genres, a real one-of-a-kind.

Now it's even easier...

2011-06-15T12:32:00.001Z

...to buy Nine Arches Press books. The new online shop is up and running, meaning you can directly order copies of Under The Radar magazine, short stories by Joel Lane, or poetry from the likes of David Hart, David Morley, Roz Goddard, Luke Kennard, Myra Connell, Claire Crowther, Ruth Larbey, Simon Turner, Mark Goodwin, Peter Carpenter and myself.

You don't need a PayPal account (no bad thing, given the problems I've had getting my account to work lately), and postage is just £1 per item.

There are also seperate pages for each publication now (here's the one for my collection, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica), and a sneak-preview of some of Nine Arches' forthcoming publications.

An interview with David Briggs

2011-06-09T13:01:00.011Z

One of my favourite poetry collections of 2010 was David Briggs’ debut The Method Men, from Salt. I was lucky enough to review it for Magma 48, in which I ended by saying that it was a book that gave the impression of the arrival of a poet almost fully formed.

Re-reading it recently has only confirmed those early impressions for me, so it was a pleasure to be able to interview David about the book, and to post a couple of poems from the collection, as part of his Method and Madness virtual tour.

MM: One of the things I enjoyed most about The Method Men was the use of folklore (and maybe invented folklore) to set up a way of looking at the world more generally. Has this been a long-term concern in your poetry?

David Briggs: Yes, I think it’s been there throughout. My English degree included a large dose of Old and Middle English lit., and I’d been a folksy singer-songwriter before I turned to writing poetry, so there are some influences from those two strands.

As I see it, folklore provides narratives and methods for dealing with the world that are typically oppositional to the dominant institutional narratives of how we should live, or of what events in our lives mean. Often, they’re entirely irrational – superstitions, divinatory practices, etc. – yet, they’re also strangely potent, especially in providing signs and symbols, and have served cultures (for good and ill) across the world for aeons. If I can explain my terrible day in terms of having seen one magpie on the way to work that morning, rather than in terms of complex institutional and economic forces I’m powerless to change, I may be throwing in my lot with the chaotic forces of chance (and irrationality), but I might see two magpies tomorrow morning, and that might put a spring in my step that causes me to have what I regard as a much better day. That may be a silly example, but I’m convinced a similar (if more complex form) of folkloric irrationality is at work in us all the time, to varying extents, even in a scientific age. Folklore has a much longer half-life than radioactive material: it lingers on in the culture. It seems to work in a similar way to language, in that coinages and new-minted slang eventually find their way into the dictionary.

This is a furrow Ian Duhig’s been ploughing for some years; but, yes, it’s something that informs how I write. The psychology of why we go to folklore (in the broadest sense of that word) and what we take from it is something that lies behind the title poem to the collection. In that poem I try to suggest that there’s something almost as arbitrary, as chaotic, as the significance I ascribe to a lover’s first words in the morning (words being merely another type of sign), as there is in the divinatory significance ascribed by Carson et al to a westward flutter of swifts, or a swung pendulum. And it’s certainly present in poems like HistoriaOccultica, Twenty Below Zero and Woodland, with Two Figures. Some of these pieces seem to happen in an indeterminate historical setting, and that’s reflective of the process I’ve tried to articulate here remaining the same, regardless of time or place. Even poems like Snow touch on this, because the particular meme of ‘Eskimo words for snow’, despite being erroneous (as Stephen Pinker points out), has taken on a life of its own, become folkloric, and that sort of thing provides a lot of room for play and invention. In the case of The Ghosts of Highgate Cemetery, there seemed to be something of a psycho-geographical conjunction between the proximity of the Fleet running as an underground river near a cemetery for public figures, and then on down towards Fleet Street, with all of its former journalistic associations, that was too good to resist.

MM: I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about the music, then. Was it a case of songwriting slowly becoming poetry, or did the two strands gradually draw together?

DB: I think it was more of a case of realising my limitations as a musician, coming to the hard place of realising I didn't have the skill to write the kind of songs I wanted to write. I'd found writing words the easier part of the equation anyway, and when what I wanted to do with words felt restricted by the range of forms and styles I possessed musically, the musical accompaniment began to recede.

But I do see my work falling broadly within the lyric tradition, so rhythm, metre, sound and euphony has always been an important element in what I'm trying to do. The long poem Bloomsday, towards the back of the collection, has (to my ear at least) a strong rhythmic pulse, and that was very much a part of its composition. Derek Walcott has spoken about finding the rhythm of a poem in the first line-and-a-half, and then riding that cadence, like a wave, to the end of the poem's composition. That's definitely my experience of writing Bloomsday. You've mentioned the Anglo-Saxon influence on the metre of Seafaring in your review of the book, and I think there's a similar song-sound in poems like Winter Music. So, I think once I hung up the old guitar, any musicality I did possess found its way into the poetry.

With songs, as with poetry, there's the piece you want to write, the one in the far corner of your consciousness, of which you only get the briefest, most tantalising, glimpse. Even though you can't get your hands on it, you sense enough of it to get excited. But then there's the piece that actually comes out when you sit down to write. Often, it's a disappointment. It doesn't have that feral smell and energy of the imagined piece. I think I found I got closer to those Platonic pieces when I tried to write poems than when I tried to write songs. In the end, you go with what works.

MM: One of the things that struck me very forcefully about your collection was how coherent it feels, especially compared to most debuts. While both the folkloric themes and the musical element must have helped with that, could you tell us a little bit about the process of putting the book together?

DB: I was fortunate to get some very good advice from people like Roddy Lumsden and Matthew Caley. I have a tendency to think that any poem I've managed to place in a good magazine or competition must, by virtue of that placing, be a good poem, one that ought to go in the collection. But Roddy and Matthew counselled me to work on the sequencing and the structure of the book as a whole, and that sometimes involved excluding previously published poems, and waiting till the book as a whole came into focus. For example, of my 21 Gregory submission poems, only a handful made the final cut.

The title poem hinges on the idea that all those characters, Carson et al., have become reliant on a set of idiosyncratic, sometimes irrational, mental tics and habits. Once I realised that nearly all the characters in the poems I was writing at that time shared a similar condition, and that some of them had been forced by circumstance to recognise that their methods needed to be jettisoned for a new way of thinking, that it was time for a paradigm shift, I had a thread with which to stitch the poems together.

After that, the poems grouped themselves together fairly easily. Some folkloric pieces, including the title poem, set out some of the themes and ways of thinking, early on. They provide a lens through which to read the pieces that follow. Then you get little runs of two and three that hopefully speak to each other: a rain poem followed by a drought poem; a run of graveyard poems that end with one set in the underworld; a poem about clearing the attic in my mother's house sets up a short series of pieces about childhood memory; a self-portrait introduces the album sonnets; then, a run of wintery folkloric poems; finally, the book ends with a poem that sees a method man finally learning to abandon his method, to inhabit a moment. In that way, there's a sort of partial narrative arc running through the book.

So, while it was sometimes hard to throw out poems of which I'd become fond, and to persevere with others until the book did hang together, I'm glad I did. One of the most agreeable things about the reviews was that readers like you, Julia Bird, Steve Spence and others, noticed and approved the structural patterning. I don't think the greatest hits, or rattlebag, approach is wrong (a lot of people read poetry that way, want something they can dip into); but, I think you can add texture if poems are sequenced so as to echo each other, argue with each other, or pick up where another left off.

The Ghosts of Highgate Cemetery

in frowsy, mutton-sleeved grave-clothes,
clockless, cold and sepia
in the bucolic lanes between tombs,

come visiting two-and-two,
bearing guineas and barley cakes,
and they draw together as curtains

at graves of the newly interred.
There are courteous introductions;
calling cards are left to lean hopefully

at the more baroque mausoleums.
You think you might settle into this,
as a toast is raised to cool draughts

from the Fleet, lesser-known river
of the Underworld, whose waters confer
anonymity, distinction or infamy

according to inscrutable principles.

Snow

Contrary to popular belief, the Inuit do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English...Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen.
- STEPHEN PINKER, The Language Instinct

Say there are no words for lawyer
in the Inuit tongue; yet, perhaps,
a dozen by which to adjudicate

snowfall. Say there is no English word
for the particular spectacle
of aurora-lit snowfall,

while for lawyer we have: barrister,
attorney, brief, solicitor, silk,
advocate, justice, litigator,

magistrate, counsel, prosecutor,
perhaps even jurisprudentia.
And it follows that in the land

where they speak only statistics
there will be a sworn affadavit
against each irregular snowflake.

But you are advised not to impugn
the government of such climes
for burying truth beneath an icy

deluge of little, whitely-lying words.
Some thoughts will simply fail to settle
in our language, or gather only

in obscure, mountainous regions.
This thought itself may fail to find
the climate necessary to its

survival and, so, melt gently
on the thick muscle of my tongue
as might tla (snow), tlaslo (slow falling snow),

or penstla (merely the idea of snow).

To buy The Method Men, or for further information, click here.

Stealing Fire

2011-06-06T16:38:00.002Z

There's a good tradition of poets leading second lives as novelists, and in particular as writers of what gets called 'genre fiction' (too often that term is used rather dismissively).

David Harsent and Jane Holland are two current names that immediately spring to mind, and they're now joined by Craig Sterling, better known as Edinburgh poet James Wood.

His debut novel, Stealing Fire, will be published by Leamington Books on 23rd June, and is being distributed at airports by WH Smith/BAA plc, by Blackwell Books and other high street retailers, plus, of course, online from the likes of Amazon.

You can find a website on the book here, a YouTube video on it here, and there's even four bottles of champagne on offer for the best review of Stealing Fire under 250 words submitted before 31st August 2011.

If you're actually in Edinburgh on the 23rd, Leamington Books will be giving away 50 copies at Edinburgh Airport between 8am and 10am, and the launch party will be at Blackwell Books (Edinburgh) at 6.30pm.

Now, Craig/James has said that his sole intention was to create a novel that was fun to write, and hopefully fun to read, too. And it is. I was lucky enough to see an advance copy, and it's the sort of rattling, rollicking read that you're very grateful for on a long train or plane journey. I used to be a big reader of thrillers, although I'd have to admit that I'm more familiar with Jack Higgins/Freddie Forsyth era stuff than the new giants of the genre, and Stealing Fire is a book that does exactly what you'd want it to do. It's pacy, exciting, funny in places, and above all, it grabs your attention and refuses to let go. Get hold of a copy and see what I mean...

Buzzwords Open Poetry Competition 2011

2011-06-06T09:31:00.000Z

Buzzwords, in Cheltenham, is one of the longest-running reading series in British poetry. Having read there back in February with Luke Kennard, I can vouch for what an excellent audience it attracts - attentive, appreciative, and keen to buy books. It all makes for an entertaining and rewarding evening.

It also makes a point of paying all readers, and its annual poetry competition helps fund that. As you can see here, this year's competition is being judged by Alison Brackenbury, and carries a £600 first prize. Other prizes include one for entries from Gloucestershire. You've got until July to enter, and can pay by cheque or PayPal, so why not have a look at what's required?

Constructed Landscapes

2011-05-30T22:35:00.001Z

Last Thursday, I took part in a workshop led by Mark Goodwin at the Phoenix in Leicester, which took the work of artist Helen Saunders as its starting point.

It was a great couple of hours, very inspiring, and I'm going to go back for another look at Helen's work, as the exhibition has been extended until a week on Friday (June 10th). Quite the best thing, I think, was that Helen herself took part, and talked quite a bit about her processes and techniques.

I'm going to come back to that, and its relevance to poetry (incidentally, I might be wrong, but I think Helen's responsible for the cover of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' Edgelands), in more depth a bit later, but in the meantime, I can recommend the exhibition very highly.

Kaleidoscope

2011-05-30T22:24:00.003Z

Yesterday's Nine Arches Press reading at Warwick University, as part of the Kaleidoscope conference, was just that bit different to any reading I've done before.

After Jane Commane had talked about how the press uses colour in the design of its books and chapbooks, Roz Goddard, Matt Nunn, Maria Taylor and myself took turns to talk a little about how colour figures in our work, and why we used particular favourite colours, before reading poems that, hopefully, illustrated what we'd mentioned.

To be honest, I really enjoyed the preparation for the event. It's very strange going back through your own work in detail, and I found myself noticing a couple of themes, and more than a couple of stylistic tics, that I hadn't really noticed before. When I get a bit more time, I'll post some of my notes on here, maybe.

There was a small but very responsive audience, and it all closed with a discussion of what we'd just read that I only wish could have gone on longer. Lots of food for thought.

My set was:

Crash
Glass
Halcyon
Yellowhammers
Poem
Kilter
Azul

People of Europe, rise up

2011-05-26T16:54:00.000Z

Good post here by Alan Baker about the protests going on in Spain. I've heard various reports online, and through friends living in Spain, but it's been nearly impossible to find anything in the mainstream media in the UK.

A Nine Arches reading with a difference

2011-05-25T12:16:00.000Z

On Sunday, I'll be reading along with Matt Nunn, Roz Goddard and Maria Taylor at a conference at the University of Warwick, entitled Kaleidoscope: new perspectives on the humanities. Our Nine Arches Press Showcase takes place at 1.30pm, in Milburn House. More details are here.

StAnza afterword

2011-05-24T12:16:00.000Z

There are photos, podcasts, videos, interviews and reviews from StAnza 2011 here - enjoy!

Some recent reading

2011-05-19T08:44:00.001Z

There's a good review of Claire Askew's chapbook The Mermaid and the Sailors over at Rob Mackenzie's blog. I've been meaning to write something about it myself, and will do eventually. In fact, reading Rob's excellent piece will give me the kick up the arse I need to start rolling out some reviews from next week, starting with David Morley's Enchantment.

Sphinx has the first reviews of Matthew Stewart's fine pamphlet Inventing Truth, and there are new reviews appearing there all the time, plus a great archive of past articles.

Meanwhile, I've been enjoying Ernesto Priego's The Present Day. I've just come across this review of it, which sounds pretty spot-on to me. It's a terrific book, and I've even had a go at reading some of the untranslated Spanish poems. I might need a bit more practice there, though.

Drafting poetry

2011-05-16T09:11:00.000Z

David Morley flagged this up earlier on Twitter, and it's absolutely fascinating. It's Jacob Polley's poem The Reader, draft by draft, or at least in umpteen alternative versions.

At StAnza recently, one of the highlights for me was Paul Farley's workshop in which he took us back through the drafts of his poem Treacle. I thought it was really a pretty brave thing to do - I think I'd die of shame if some of the drafts of most of my poems ever saw the light of day. It was actually quite reassuring to see that the simple hard graft of writing and revising again and again could be so effective, but also slightly terrifying in the way it highlighted that changing just one or two words could tip a poem in a completely new direction.

Essential viewing

2011-05-09T08:24:00.000Z

So, tomorrow night at nine, our TV screens will once again be given over to the stories of a group of ruthless, back-stabbing, self-interested individuals and their endless machinations and romantic complications.

Of course, if you don't want to watch The Viking Sagas, on BBC4, which will look at the great outpouring of historically-based literature from 13th Century Iceland (it focuses on Laxdaela Saga, although my own favourite is Njal's Saga), you could go for something completely different and switch to BBC1 for The Apprentice. Which would, to be fair, be improved further by the contestants settling their differences with axes.

Two election questions

2011-05-07T15:21:00.000Z

I have a couple of questions that I'd genuinely like to hear some answers to. One's for any Lib Dems out there, the other for returning officers.

1 The Lib Dems have repeatedly said that a coalition with the Tories was the only real option open to them, other than trying to force a second election last year. Now I can understand that they didn't want to prop up a beaten Labour Party, but what was stopping them agreeing to support a minority Tory government on a bill-by-bill basis? It would have allowed them to temper the worst excesses of Cameron and Osborne, while remaining true to the principles still held by the majority of the Lib Dem rank and file. It might even have proved popular with the electorate, given that it would have involved actual debate and compromise, rather than Lib Dem MPs being used to steamroller ideologically-driven policies through Parliament.

OK, so the Tories might not have wanted it, but had they then forced a second election, the country could have drawn its own conclusions. As it stands, in return for an AV referendum they were never going to win (partly because even many supporters of electoral reform, myself included, can't see that AV is much of an improvement on FPTP) and a few cabinet posts for Clegg and his cronies, the Lib Dems are committed to supporting policies they never advocated. Individual MPs can still rebel, but it's much harder to do so inside a formal coalition. All I've heard from Lib Dem frontbenchers on this is that the country didn't need uncertainty. Oh yes, because the current arrangement is so stable, isn't it?

To argue, as Clegg and others have done, that their manifesto was for a Liberal government, not a ConDem one, and that they're not therefore breaking any promises, is a barefaced lie. They knew when they drew up the manifesto that the only situation in which they'd be able to implement any of its policies would be as part of a coalition, formal or otherwise. If any of them genuinely believed there was any likelihood of a majority Liberal government, then they're too deluded to be allowed anywhere near any sort of power.

2 At every election - general, local, European, whatever - since I moved to my current home in 2000, I've been approached on the way into the polling station by canvassers from one or other party (the three main ones, plus the BNP), asking to see my polling card. On every occasion, I've asked who they are, and what business it is of theirs, and have been told "Oh, we're allowed to" (note that they don't answer the first of my questions).

Well, no, I don't think you are. I was under the impression that the law guarantees a secret ballot, so surely that means that whether or not you vote (until it becoms compulsory, which I'd have no problem with), as well as how you vote, should remain secret? A colleague has pointed out that it also creates the impression that you have to have a polling card to vote. You don't. It speeds things up, but you don't need it.

If they're so convinced they're allowed to do this, why do they do it in such a shifty fashion, without first identifying themselves (there have been one or two honourable exceptions)? In almost every case, it's done by someone wearing no party rosettes or similar, and in a manner that suggests they're election officials.

So, perhaps someone with experience of election administration could explain why canvassers are allowed to continue doing this? In the meantime, I'll continue telling them to mind their own business.