Friday, October 29, 2010

50 Stories for Pakistan

Helping the victims of the floods
Produced by www.bigbadmedia.com

It should be fairly obvious what 50 Stories for Pakistan is: proceeds go to help the victims of the recent floods. The book has an introduction by Vanessa Gebbie (who as well as writing her own short stories also edited the fabulous Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story). It contains stories by:

Robert J. McCarter, Joanne Fox, Erik Svehaug, Susan Lanigan, Anne Mullane, Lisa Ricard Claro, R.J. Newlyn, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Martin Webster, Jonathan Pinnock, Trevor Belshaw, Julia Bohanna, Iain Pattison, Laura Eno, Dave Clark, Pam Howes, Alun Williams, Annie Evett, Jennifer Stakes, Rebecca Emin, Marjorie Tolchard, Marit Meredith, Paul Malone, Ewan Lawrie, Jarred McGinnis, Alex Tomlin, Gail Richards, Benjamin Solah, Ruchira Mandal, Alyson Hilbourne, Ramon Collins, Darren Lee, Riaz Ali, Nasim Marie Jafry, Heather Parker, Shazia Bibi, Andrew Parrott, Brigid O’Connor, Rob Innis, Tony Williams, Annemarie Neary, Emma Newman, Robert Long, Beryl Brown, Vanessa Couchman, Joanna Campbell, Sylvia Petter, Rosemary Hayes, Paul Anderson, and Alice Turner.

Please buy a copy. You can do so here.

Friday, October 22, 2010

James Brookes, The English Sweats

I've been meaning for ages to post something about James Brookes' debut pamphlo-book The English Sweats. (Maybe it's time we had some new coinage to reflect how poetry publishing works nowadays – a microdex could be either a pamphlet or an e-book, which means that an e-pamphlet would be a micromicrodex or perhaps a minimicrodex or an electromicrodex, which we could shorten to, oh, iVerse for marketing purposes. No doubt I've got all the Latin and Greek roots mixed up together there (I bet James Brookes could tell me that, too). So, maybe not.)

Reviewers have related Brookes' work to Geofrrey Hill's, and this holds good both at the level of subject matter (a long view of English history, the Middle Ages impinging on the present) and at the level of style (dense sheaves of words, or perhaps phalanxes of Saxons marching over the tongue). It recalls Hill's early style most closely, which is good as I generally prefer that to the more pompous later stuff. 'Mons Horse Burial' is pitilessly performed, which makes the pity all the more effective:

Even clay, after some debate, and much
struggle toward the ditch, rejects its frame.
A week of repeat salvos – the parapet's
weak soil flensed to an equine shrapnel.

Like Hill, Brookes is, for me, weaker when the metrical and semantic density is unrelieved. I'm prepared to accept that may be my fault, not following things – but I prefer the poems where contrast and balance accentuate the thrilling effect of the high pitch. For instance, '1587' from 'The Crescent of Hearing', a wonderful sonnet in which 12 lines of focused shoreline fear suddenly open out via a pronounced volta, across the sea from England to Ireland, from now to later, from the fear of an inward-looking nation to the confidence of an imperial one. It's a great (by which I mean 'great', not 'smashing') example of how form can perform and amplify the sense of a poem. This poem and others like it show a serious talent at work.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Pocket Spellbook

I've just picked up off the doormat and read in one sitting the new Pocket Spellbook from Sidekick Books. It's a beautiful and if you'll excuse the pun absolutely charming mini-anthology of poem-spells and illustrations byMark Waldron, Helena Nelson, Luke Kennard, Oliver Townsend, Alexandra Lazar, Saroj Patel and others equally fabulous but too many for me to name in this sentence. As stylish, coherent, attractive books go, well, this is one. And, er, I'm proud to be in it too.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Me on Radio Sheffield

You can listen to my interview on Radio Sheffield (for as long as the iplayer link lasts) – talking about twitter, prize shortlists, Sheffield and blank sheets of papers, and even reading a poem out too. My bit starts 1 hour 16 minutes in.

Helen Ivory, The Breakfast Machine

The Breakfast Machine is Helen Ivory's third Bloodaxe Books collection. She is an editor for The Poetry Archive and Deputy Editor for the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears. She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA, and in her spare time she makes shadow boxes.

The blurb tells us that The Breakfast Machine 'is driven by the transformations of fairytale where the dark corners of childhood are explored and found to be alive and well in offices, kitchens and hen-houses.' Helen says: 'With these poems, I was trying to get close to the shiver I feel when watching one of Jan Svankmajer's animations.  Svankmajer's films play on how memory structures and dream images are held in the unconscious. Relationships of images often seem bizarre when put under a microscope, but in the dream world (or the film world) they are perfectly logical.  These magical relationships, for Svankmajer, are embedded in the everyday discarded objects that we encountered in childhood and continue to encounter every day.'

Penelope Shuttle called The Breakfast Machine 'an explosion in the sky of contemporary poetry', while Katy Evans-Bush, reviewing the book in Magma, callled it 'mischievously dark, rich with anti-logic and harnessed to the power of something we used to call magic'.

The book's webpage is here; you can also buy it here, of course. Or here.

Here's a poem from the book, which addresses that theme of magic:

Magicians

They think the world
is found in their pocket
if they just pull out
enough scarves.

They think doves
are for their sole amusement,
that rabbits are content
to live under their hat.

They keep the halved bodies
of all their mistakes
in cellars, with the bloodied
sequins and boas of their trade.

They think they know
what you’re thinking;
the card you hold
close to your chest.

Helen Ivory, The Breakfast Machine





The Breakfast Machine is Helen Ivory's third Bloodaxe Books collection. She is an editor for The Poetry Archive and Deputy Editor for the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears. She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA, and in her spare time she makes shadow boxes. 

The blurb tells us that The Breakfast Machine 'is driven by the transformations of fairytale where the dark corners of childhood are explored and found to be alive and well in offices, kitchens and hen-houses.' Helen says: 'With these poems, I was trying to get close to the shiver I feel when watching one of Jan Svankmajer's animations.  Svankmajer's films play on how memory structures and dream images are held in the unconscious. Relationships of images often seem bizarre when put under a microscope, but in the dream world (or the film world) they are perfectly logical.  These magical relationships, for Svankmajer, are embedded in the everyday discarded objects that we encountered in childhood and continue to encounter every day.' 

Penelope Shuttle called The Breakfast Machine 'an explosion in the sky of contemporary poetry', while Katy Evans-Bush, reviewing the book in Magma, callled it 'mischievously dark, rich with anti-logic and harnessed to the power of something we used to call magic'.

The book's webpage is here; you can also buy it here, of course. Or here.

Here's a poem from the book, which addresses that theme of magic while remaining tethered to a recognisable reality:

Magicians
They think the world
is found in their pocket
if they just pull out
enough scarves.


They think doves
are for their sole amusement,
that rabbits are content
to live under their hat.


They keep the halved bodies
of all their mistakes
in cellars, with the bloodied
sequins and boas of their trade.


They think they know
what you’re thinking;
the card you hold
close to your chest.





Friday, October 08, 2010

News Flash*

Great news for me today that Salt will be publishing a collection of my (very) short stories in (I think) spring 2012. Hurray!

*This is the sort of punning title subeditors should get sacked for

Angela France, Occupation

Angela France is a Gloucestershire-based poet whose second collection, Occupation, was published last year from Ragged Raven Press. She has had poems published in many of the leading journals, in the UK and US and has been anthologised in a number of small press anthologies. She has completed an MA in ‘Creative and Critical Writing’ at the University of Gloucestershire and is now studying for a PhD. Angela is an experienced reader and workshop leader: she has read at some of the major poetry venues including Cheltenham Literature Festival and Ledbury Poetry Festival and she has run workshops in a variety of settings.  She is features editor of ‘Iota’ and runs ‘Buzzwords’ a monthly live poetry event in Cheltenham.

George Szirtes said of Occupation: “Angela France’s robust poems move through a range of themes, but the passage of time and the struggle against it, in physical effort, in mind and in dream, recur. There is also a very welcome intellectual clarity that produces a beauty of its own, in short poems, like 'Unpoem' and 'Beeing', but also in more gritty works of realism like 'Urban'. The poems are always vigorous and rhythmically controlled. Occupation establishes a clear, firm, valuable voice in contemporary poetry.”

Angela says, “I have sometimes been asked about the title; why Occupation. The short answer is that it is one of those slippery words with many interpretations and I enjoy ambiguity. The longer answer is that most of its meanings resonate with poems in the book: I often inhabit –or occupy- other skins and voices when I am writing; I find the specialist words, tools and attitudes of different trades and occupations fascinating and there are a few poems based on occupations; I often want to give voice to those not at the centre – the marginalised or ignored - those who are oppressed or (in some sense) occupied; and some of the characters that interest me are occupied by obsessions.”

Occupation is available from Ragged Raven Press, priced £7 (inc P&P). It has been reviewed here and here. And here's a poem, 'Urban', which George Szirtes refers to above:

Urban

When he comes to a town, he stops
trying to breathe quietly.
He allows the sound to roar
in his lungs, pulls in the tar-taste,
the dust, the particles of skin
and pigeon shit.  

Oil slicks his throat,
coats his teeth.
His skin roughens,
as his pores enlarge
to swallow smut.
He flexes his fingers,
feels a rasping in his joints.

He watches a woman disappear
from one end of the street
and appear at the other in a gritty blink.

He peers into shops,
doesn’t notice how far he has to bend.
The shoppers and registers
tingle like a rash, a tinnitus.
He shakes his head and people look up,
fumble for umbrellas.

He knows his heart is slowing,
can feel his chest creaking
as his pulse booms
like an avalanche.
Looking down he is puzzled
by the vague greyness of his hands,
the granite weight of his legs.

He leans against a wall
to rest and it feels like home,
he lies down on the road
and it feels like feather
bedding.
                 He wakes, stirs,
cars buck and crash on his chest,
shoppers scream and fall
in the corridors of his heart.
He cries out and windows shatter;
office blocks crumble. Tiny people
tumble from tall buildings
into his open throat.

National Poetry Day and that

I had a happy National Poetry Day in London yesterday, reading to a group of attentive sixth-formers and recommending they read Lisa Jarnot, Peter Didsbury, Sean O'Brien, Al Purdy and Andrew Marvell (Selima Hill would have redressed the gender imbalance to some extent, but I ran out of time), reading Tim Dooley's striking Imagined Rooms and a scattering of Auden including the spectacular verse sections of The Sea and the Mirror (Caliban's prose is exhausting, and anyway my train got in), and writing a gush of four or five poems after three months of prose only. And at least two of them may not be fatally mannered, and at least one of them may be any good.

As I was in the area I trotted round to stand outside my uncle's old flat on New Cavendish Street, the top floor of Westmoreland Mansions. The name was picked out in a green and white mosaic above the door below an ornate facade of red and London brick, and finally the two dormers at the top. The windows of the right-hand one were flung wide open – letting in the air to what had been my uncle's dining room. I stood and indulged my liquid memories of that inaccessible place, because dulce et decorum est, not pro patria mori but just to think of it, if by patria we mean one's past and loved ones. (That sentence unravelled disgracefully, but sometimes that's the way.) The pub opposite was being gutted by builders, but the one a street away which was I think the one he frequented was open. But I didn't go in, which I almost regret, but I'm off the booze at the moment and that seemed to disarm me; instead Weasel and I went for an excellent curry on Drummond Street.

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Sheffield Poet Survives Portico Prize Cull

Just heard that the longlist for the Portico Prize for Literature has evolved into a shortlist, and my book's still on it. Callooh! Callay!

Poets-in-residence at Bank Street Arts Cafe

Every Tuesday to Saturday from Saturday 9th October till the end of the month, Bank Street Arts Cafe in Sheffield is hosting a series of one-day poets-in-residence. These are free drop-in sessions when you can turn up and talk to a poet about your work, or ask them about theirs.

I'll be there 2–5pm on Tuesday 12th October and Tuesday 19th October, working on my own poems and hopefully reading and commenting on other people's. If you want to take part, just turn up with 1–3 poems you'd like me to look at. Signed copies of my book will also be available at a discount rate.

(Further details, with a full programme of the poets, will appear at the link soon.)

Recommend a friend

Yesterday I posted a piece on the Salt blog, tied to National Poetry Day, about recommending poetry to readers – how many people want to read poetry but don't know where to start. Something I said there about  the anxiety people feel when confronted by poetry generated some interesting comments, some on Facebook and this thoughtful response by Angela Readman. This morning Chris at Salt suggests the following simple expedient:

"I think that today everyone should recommend a book of poetry to three friends who don't read it."

I'm going to – why don't you?

Monday, October 04, 2010

Harry Owen, Non-Dog

Harry Owen, the inaugural Poet Laureate for Cheshire (UK), moved to South Africa’s Eastern Cape in January 2008. He is the author of four poetry collections: Searching for Machynlleth (2000), The Music of Ourselves (2004), Five Books of Marriage (2008) and Non-Dog (2010). He also hosts the hugely popular monthly open-floor poetry event called Poetry @ Reddits in Grahamstown, where he lives. Further details can be found on his website: www.harry-owen.co.uk 

Harry has this to say about the move to South Africa and the genesis of his collection Non-Dog:

When, in January 2008, I moved to the Eastern Cape from England I had no idea what to expect of life there. Indeed, some of my closest friends had warned me against going to live in such a ‘dangerous’ place. But now I know that, for all its many problems, South Africa is one of the world’s most stunningly beautiful and genuinely miraculous places. The poems in this, my fourth collection, represent my response to that realisation.

Perhaps the most telling feature for me of living in South Africa after many decades of being in the wholly Western (and Northern) cultures of Europe and the United States was the abrupt need to view the world from an entirely different perspective. What had seemed so ‘normal’ before that I had never seen the need to question it suddenly began to take on a new and revelatory significance. The phrase ‘non-white’, for instance, as a kind of catch-all for other racial groups appears to me now, in post-apartheid South Africa, to have been deeply insulting, implying as it did that there is a norm, an ideal of humanity, and this is expressed as Whiteness.

To be non-white, therefore, means you don’t achieve this ideal. You are defined, not positively and actively as, say, Black, but negatively, passively, as Non-White, and by implication as somehow deficient. No one had ever mentioned such a possibility to me before I heard the remarkable Saleem Badat, Vice Chancellor of Rhodes University, speak of it publicly. And I began to reflect on what it means ‘to be truly oneself’ rather than someone constructed by society as something other.

I hope it is not trivialising a concept of real importance to say that I often found myself reflecting on this while walking our two dogs, Dora and Daisy, who had willingly adopted me when I arrived, unannounced, in their home. As someone who had not owned dogs before, I had to get used to their ways just as they had to adapt to mine – and I’m not ashamed to say that I have learned an enormous amount from them. Indeed, the fact that they have always been (especially on those walks!) exactly and unapologetically what they are – dogs – has taught me one of the biggest lessons of my life: hence the poem ‘Non-Dog’ and the collection itself.

Copies of Non-Dog (signed, if requested) may be ordered directly from me (£8.00 or R100.00, including P&P) via my website www.harry-owen.co.uk or simply by emailing me at heo@telkomsa.net
Alternatively, you may do so from the publishing house at http://poetsprintery.book.co.za or via the publisher’s own website www.amitabhmitra.com

Non-dog

Dora, most solid Ridgeback,
wears her non-nylon,
non-green collar honestly, bravely,
and is, of course, decidedly
non-black

while Daisy, standard Poodle, non-bright,
wears a smart non-leather collar
around her sleek French neck
and is assuredly
non-brown.

All day,
racing together around the field, eyes bright,
reading the earth's text with their noses,
barking at strangers or just
keeping me quiet company
here in the house,
each is simply herself:
neither one is, despite everything,
non-dog.

Harry Owen

Friday, October 01, 2010

Signed book + free short story

OK, for a limited time only, I'm doing a special offer on my book – £10 for a signed copy (inc. P&P), with a free, unpublished short story included with every order.

Such madness can't go on forever, since I'm losing money on the deal. Not like a bank, but get it while you can.

All you have to do is email me at t.williams@shu.ac.uk and then send a cheque for £10 and your own address to the address I give you. UK only at this stage, but if anyone overseas wants a copy, email me and I'll check the cost. Roll up!