Tony Williams's Poetry Blog

Gloating round-up

2012-01-06T15:08:00.000Z

Some new reviews of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head came out over the Christmas period: three at Sphinx by Jon Stone, Rob Mackenzie and Nikolai Duffy; an extended and very interesting version of Duffy's at Stride; and one by WN Herbert in the latest edition of Poetry Review (online version available here). All very gratifying, and I'm indebted to all the reviewers for their ~~discernment~~ generosity. Rob also later blogged about the issue of fictionality and hoaxing as it relates to the pamphlet. And – in other but still me-related news – the same issue of PR contains my poem 'A Bouquet for Pauline Viardot', about the C19th singer; the first time I've got in, so I'm bloody chuffed.

Situating States of Mind Conference

2012-01-06T14:41:00.002Z

Situating and Interpreting States of Mind 1700-2000

An Interdisciplinary Conference

14-16 June 2012

Northumbria University

Keynote Speakers

Professor Joel P. Eigen (Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania)

Professor Melinda A. Rabb (Professor of English, Brown University, Rhode Island)

Dr. Judith A. Tucker (Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, Leeds University)

This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference seeks to situate and interpret states of mind from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first questioning how the space, place and historical context in which mental states are experienced shaped the narratives produced by individuals. Interweaving perspectives from across such disciplines as literature, history, philosophy, art history, creative writing, psychology and sociology, the conference will explore accounts of states of mind including mental illness, dreams, sleep-walking, imaginative states and self-awareness. The conference seeks to assess how these varying states of consciousness are expressed and how such narratives are influenced by historical change, continuity or the reconfiguration of these forms of expression.

We would like to invite abstracts for papers from across disciplines on the theme of the conference, particularly related, but not limited, to the following key strands:

Experience and Representation of Mental Illness

- the gap between individual experience and interpretations by medical and legal practitioners

- the relationship between mental distress, agency, literature and cognition

- representations of mental derangement and criminal responsibility

Liminal States of Mind

- representations of liminal states of consciousness

- the relationship between experiences and representations of dreams and sleepwalking

- categorisation of imaginative states in cognitive science and philosophy

- concepts of interiority, selfhood and imaginative processing of real or fictional worlds

Self-awareness and Place

- relationship between self and place, particularly regarding the past, decay and dilapidation

- artistic expressions of situating self-awareness

- creative representations of landscape as a geographic metaphor

Abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted no later than 31 January 2012 to the conference organisers: anita.oconnell@northumbria.ac.uk or leigh.wetherall-dickson@northumbria.ac.uk. Please see www.northumbria.ac.uk/statesofmindconference for details.

PBS Pamphlet Choice

2011-11-09T13:25:00.000Z

I'm deliriously happy to say that All the Rooms of Uncle's Head is the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice!

Interview with Harriet Tarlo

2011-11-08T10:50:00.000Z

Harriet Tarlo is the editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011), a fabulously stimulating introduction to the work of sixteen poets more or less closely concerned with place and landscape. Her own work includes Poems 1990-2003 and Nab. She now teaches English and Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Harriet gave the following very generous and interesting answers to my questions:

TW: Harriet, thanks first of all for this anthology, which I've been exploring slowly. Partly that slowness is just an accident of how my reading happens at the moment, but partly it relates to the nature, and range, of the work you've chosen. Some of it's the sort of work that might get called difficult - at any rate I've been grateful for your introduction which really helps the reader to navigate the different approaches and techniques and ideas which the poets use. I keep having to stop and go away and digest something, or have a go at something myself. It's as much a book of prompts for landscape poetry as a book of landscape poetry itself - prompting further reading and further writing.

HT: I am rather delighted at the idea of you going away and trying things out; it illustrates the way in which good poetry of an exploratory bent demands participation and effort from the reader ... but takes it a step further even. Perhaps some of that will be in your next collection?

I think it will, but probably not in ways that are immediately apparent. Much of the work in the anthology is some distance from my own approach(es), so when I try it out I don't move seamlessly into it but into a strange unknown terrain somewhere in between. I'm stretching the spatial metaphor a little, but I suppose I'm agreeing with you that the work demands participation. I wouldn't want to appropriate techniques anyway, but yes, putting in some effort as a reader (as long as you get something back) tends to stimulate me as a writer.

Actually, I’ve always felt somewhere in between myself – I think many poets do when it comes down to it.

So the introduction really does introduce the work, as well as functioning as a mini-critical essay on the work and a justification for the anthology. It feels carefully judged in terms of tone, positioning, and so on. How much blood was sweated in the writing of it?

Rather a lot of blood actually -- I found it far harder than writing a "straight" academic essay. I wanted it to be subtle enough to do justice to the work, but I didn't want it to be off-puttingly academic. I wanted it to introduce the work, but not over-explain it. I wanted it to be long enough to say something, but not tediously lengthy. I also felt like a position statement for my own ideas and poetry as they have developed over the years, a justification of ideas I have been bandying around. I wanted to mention every poet at least once. Furthermore, it had to do the usual anthologising job of explaining how the book works and why the poets therein were chosen. Choosing was hard too of course. There's some great work out there, but neither Tony (Frazer, the publisher) nor I wanted to have very brief selections from many poets. We wanted decent selections from people we felt had really contributed to this area over the years.

I'm interested in the distinction you make between this work ('radical landscape poetry') and pastoral, which you argue contains at its heart 'the morally and socially-inflected contrast between the cultural/urban and the natural which has... become increasingly outdated.' There's a sleeping dog which I don't want to wake here; I mention it because I agree that pastoral is socially inflected, and while the work in the anthology often is as well, it seems to me to be more consistently interested in the relation between an individual and a landscape, in the lived experience of being somewhere. To put it another way, I think that Marvell could have written 'Upon Appleton House' (a poem I very much admire) without going there - the landscape is mainly used as a language for speaking about society. Whereas it would be absurd to say the same of Mark Goodwin's 'Borrowdale Details', for example - it's a poem about being there as much as it is about the place itself. Is this something which characterises radical landscape poetry, the idea that it's about place-as-experience rather than place-as-object?

Strangely, I have just been re-introduced to 'Upon Appleton House' by a wonderful talk about Marvell given by Elizabeth Cook, a poet and novelist who was a fellow-speaker at the Holt Festival of Nature Writing in Norfolk in February.

I agree, certainly not place-as-object and, yes, often, perhaps always, place-as-experience is part of it, but perhaps the most radical thing is to push beyond that even to try to reach place-as-place, the non-human elements as having existence in their own right and our responsibility even to try to get past just our own experience of that. We are straying into ecopoetic or even eco-critical theory here. Of course it's impossible to actually do this and that is one of the things that has always attracted me to radical work in poetry, its striving beyond itself, ourselves.

Speaking of actually being there, a number of poems in the anthology appeal to me particularly because I know the places involved - Peter Riley's 'Shining Cliff', for example, which evokes a place which happens to play a minor but significant role in the private mythology of my childhood, and the extract from Tony Baker's Scrins which takes place in Birchover. On the one hand I feel that I have special access to those poems. On the other, the scene I imagine the Birchover piece taking place in is really Winster, the next village along from Birchover, so right landscape, wrong place. My local knowledge both helps and hinders me. Does it matter that many of these poems are about very localised places and experiences of places which aren't accessible to most readers? Is landscape poetry about giving place to people in a sufficiently vivid way that it's the next best thing to being there?

At its best, I think we see the macro through the micro as one does in ecological thinking actually. The localisation gives an integrity to thinking and to poetry. Perhaps also people can seek the places and are reminded of the places. After the Sheffield Ground Aslant launch, Peter Riley came to talk to students at Sheffield Hallam about Alstonefield, his poem based on walking around that Derbyshire village. I think we all felt slightly ashamed when he asked whether we had been there. We had been reading and thinking about the poem -- I do have it in mind to go there but hadn't got round to it -- how absurd in a way. It's not a big country. But of course we are reminded of our own places by other people’s; we draw parallels all the time in reading. And then again, we might have known the place once, as you did some of the places in the book. I had a rather moving email in a way from someone who had worked in the steel industry at Workington about my Workington poems -- he remembered the tipping of the slag over onto the beach. I of course had never seen it; had used found text from the conversation I had with slag collectors on the beach. But, yes, beyond all that, I do think that landscape poetry can take you to places -- at its best all writing gets you beyond yourself, your experience.

Does it go back to the opposition with pastoral, which seems to be all about using shared, stable ways of talking about shared landscapes, whereas these poetries are about making unstable experiences of landscape available for the first time, without that reliance on convention?

Yes, basically!

Your chosen term 'radical landscape poetry' clearly gestures primarily at formal and stylistic features. But for me there's also an echo of the tradition of political radicalism that was deeply concerned with issues of land ownership and occupation. Political rights in England were always tied to the land through the ideas of the parish and constituency, and the Levellers, Luddites and Chartists seem to me to have been fighting over the way land is occupied. Perhaps all this is tenuous. But is there, do you think, a political radicalism in these poems? Is there a political (perhaps with a small 'p') radicalism in the idea that poems challenge the way we interact with landscape and the world?

Yes, I think there is, very much so, and you are not off the mark at all with your historical references. "Radical" was always meant to imply both form/language and politics/ideology. Later on than the groups you mention of course came John Clare who is an important figure for a fair number of these poets. In fact recently, on the strength of The Ground Aslant, I was invited to join a great new venture of Simon Kovesi's tentatively called the Green Man Arts & Culture Collective. Gathering thoughts for our first symposium, I was surprised myself by how much I found Clare had influenced me, strange as that sounds -- the wonderfully anarchic and metonymic prose writings as much as the poetry (as is often the case with C19 poets). It is not just his uncompromising attitude to form and the way that his observation of nature, especially birds and nests, is so close and so respectful, but also his passionate defence of commonland and resistance to enclosure. There's such a wealth of writing on the English field in Clare and the field is my current obsession. For me it is the place where people and land meet most dynamically --- changing field patterns contain that history of desire, need, exploitation, economics --- and the extraordinarily wide range of aesthetic/emotional appeal (or not) that fields have for us closely corresponds to this human relation to land. Then of course there's the environmental movement and the newly termed "ecopoetics", a much debated term, is a consciously politicised poetry in response to ecological crisis. It's a place where some of these poets are happy to be housed, though not all. I would actually be quite interested (though I can hardly believe I am writing this after all the work of the last one) in compiling an anthology of English ecopoetics. However, Ground Aslant wasn't it -- something wider and narrower in a way. But politics is always there -- it's inevitable in poets who engage seriously with language and, for me, it can't be separated from their use of language and formal experimentation either. That question of whether it is more feasible for defamiliarised language to challenge the status quo, the "mind-forged manacles", has been hotly debated since the early days of modernism. What can I say? I still buy it!

The most obvious way in which the anthology is 'radical' is with regard to form. You refer to 'a degree of formal experimentation', and it seems to me that most of the poems are what we would call 'experimental' or 'innovative'. (And let's ignore the fruitless debates to be had about the applicability of all these categorising terms.) Can you say something about the forms in use? I'm particularly interested in the idea of 'open field' writing, not least because it seems to have a pleasingly literal application. And also perhaps something about linear vs non-linear? I do see clearly that 'linear' could be used to describe a formally traditional poem, and that this might not be the best or only way to write about landscape. But some of the poems do seem to me to be basically linear in form (such as Carol Watts' fabulous 'Zeta Landsacpes'). And, taking things literally again, I can't help thinking of walking in a landscape being fundamentally linear (plotting the route on a map) - for me the experience of being in and moving through a landscape may be archetypally linear.

Interesting and I couldn't agree and disagree more with different bits of what you say here! Yes, I am seduced by the idea of Open Field writing being organically appropriate to this work and it's the "tradition of the new" that I grew up in via the Americans (Duncan, Olson, Fraser, DuPlessis) and later British exponents (Caddel, O'Sullivan, Presley). It's there in the poetry and poetics from Olson’s

“Projective Verse” (1950): “We now enter, actually, the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other” and, later when he argues that “all parts of speech suddenly, in composition by field, are fresh for both sound and percussive use, spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetables in the patch, when you work it, come spring”. It’s more than a metaphor, though it’s that too. I have written about this “field poetics” in a recent essay for Placing Poetry, a book edited by your colleague at Northumbria, Ian Davidson, and Zoe Skoulding – it is out with Rodopi soon I think. In terms of poetry, for me the more dynamic, open form style of writing, which makes use of the whole page-space to create, is particularly suited to reflecting on and engaging with the spatial, be it the openness of a field, moorland, cliff or hillside, those spaces in which we see human and non-human elements at work as on a canvas in the open air. Here, poets might even attempt to embody the vast, complex, inter-related network of vegetation, insect and animal life that such a space contains, and to reflect intelligently upon it.

“Linear” – well, it depends how you take it and your comments have certainly made me think about it again, especially regarding maps. Indeed, the work of Carol Watts and others in the anthology is not written in open form, but I don’t see it as linear either in the sense that, broadly speaking, the trajectory of the poem does not follow a cause and effect, or other logical/conventional/narrative, structure (beginning, middle, end) but is a much more circular, exploratory affair. In fact, in Carol’s case, she has invented her own prime numbers structure which is something that seems to me have been at the heart of experimental writing practice for decades – see Surrealist games, Oulipo etc, but also individual experiments such as Richard Caddel’s Ground, one of my favourite poems and one which uses a re-playing/spatialising of a found piece of text as its structure. Ultimately the writers in Ground Aslant all work in the free verse tradition that allows for the invention of independent new structures in poetry. All contemporary poets, wherever they may cast themselves or be cast on the traditional-experimental spectrum (and I agree that those debates can become tedious) are influenced by that vers libre revolution it seems to me. But, I am thinking here more about linear as used in the narratological sense where it is almost always “non-linear” in fact!

But then again, linear, as in it involves lines, is of course relevant to both poems in The Ground Aslant and maps – fields too of course in their enclosed nature (fields, walls) and in their plough-lines/planting lines. In poetry and the field, even the most open form/field poetry, the line is always there, even if only by its (relative) absence (the word “poetry” immediately demands it and won’t let it go): And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything but the LINE?, says Olson in “Projective Verse”. There is so much one can do with the line, just like any discipline. My own writing deals in line fragments. I have relatively recently discovered Leslie Scalapino’s work and in a poem I admire she uses a long line right-justified which slips over the edge in a suggestive drift. So, I don’t see a clear divide between “open form” and “linear” poetry, and not only because I have these two ways of reading the word “linear” in my head at once. Walking though to me is really not linear – I can’t see it that way. The map is a flattened landscape, made to fit a page. Walking (even if worked out on a map, which I seldom do) is not flat (especially in Yorkshire!) – it is full of drift and wandering, diversion and going around and about, rather than directly, crossing fields, moors, gates, walls, not just walking along the line of them.

Hearing various voices*

2011-11-01T16:37:00.002Z

I'm very glad to be in the latest issue of Hearing Voices magazine, edited Jonathan and Maria Taylor, ISBN 0-9551800-7-4, 978-0-9551800-7-1, £3. Other poets in this issue include David Caddy, Alison Brackenbury, Alan Baker, Jacqui Rowe and Todd Swift, from whose blog post I nicked most of this text (thanks, Todd!).

To order , please send a cheque made payable to Crystal Clear Creators to Jonathan Taylor, Crystal Clear Creators, c/o Department of English and Creative Writing, Faculty of Humanities, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, U.K. Postage and packing is free.

A subscription to all three issues of Hearing Voices costs £8 or £7 to members of Crystal Clear Creators. You can also subscribe to the third and fourth issue, which costs £5.50 for non-members, £5 to members.

Meanwhile, or rather, about a month later, I'm looking forward to the Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures at the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, given this year by Sean O'Brien on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the week commencing the 5th of December. The lectures are free - it's a turn-up-on-the-day kind of event - and they will 'explore the depiction of England in the work of contemporary poets... and discuss the importance of myth-making in present-day poetry in England'. Sounds ace. And on the next night, Thursday the 8th December, I'm reading with Peter Bennet at the same venue (not quite so free - £6/4), and hopefully being 'distinctively English' in some shape or form. Come and see some or all of the above if you can.

*You love punning titles, don't you? Don't you?

'one of the best things I've read all year'

2011-10-24T13:29:00.000+01:00

A first review of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head, from Steven Waling at Brando's Hat. I'm thrilled to see such a generous and appreciative reading; and interested that Steven raises the issue of fragmentariness - I agonised over how much of the text should be 'lost', and in the end went for a fairly conservative approach. I certainly understand the argument that I should have gone further. Anyway, hurrah!

States of Independence (West)

2011-09-30T09:31:00.000+01:00

Get yourself along to the Brum Book Festival a week a Satdee tio visit the States of Independence (West) small press book fair, jam-packed with good things.

Michael Murphy Memorial Prize

2011-09-14T16:12:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted to hear that The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street was shortlisted for the inaugural Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, as was Antony Rowland's fabulous The Land of Green Ginger. The winner was Ciaran Berry's The Sphere of Birds. More details here.

Horizon Review

2011-09-07T12:01:00.000+01:00

The new issue of Horizon Review is out - as usual a massive crop of work to look at. So far I've only read Tim Turnbull's wonderful story 'The Haunted Horse', which I clicked on first mainly because Tim's work is ace but also because it was right next to my 'Training a Champion'.

Interview with Mark Burnhope

2011-09-05T14:16:00.003+01:00

Mark Burnhope's The Snowboy is published by Salt. Mark was born in 1982 and studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset with his partner, four stepchildren, two geckos and a greyhound.

In my endorsement for the book I wrote that “Mark Burnhope’s work is concerned with the physical – how a town is a physical place, how we live in a world of machines, our bodies among them. Many of the poems address disability, not only in the narrow sense our culture understands it but also in the wider sense that our physicality acts as a pathetic curb on the life of the spirit.” They are strange, challenging poems.

I asked Mark about poetry and writing via email.

Tell me about a poem you love from the twentieth century.

I’m cheating. This one was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, and it’s pretty Modernist in lots of ways. It’s hardly a hidden gem, but it’s one of my favourite poems ever, and the first one that springs to mind: ‘Pied Beauty’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I love it because it has a whiff of ‘Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself’ decades before Wallace Stevens wrote that and Pound and the Imagists trademarked the idea. I can’t remember when I first read it, but it was years ago, and I’ve kept rediscovering ever since. It’s a praise psalm which doesn’t preach: ‘God’ is in the details. There’s an entire creative philosophy, theology and social commentary in it. The idea of God uncovered via the natural world has been around since the Psalms, and permeated Celtic Christianity as it emerged from within Paganism. In this poem, that nature stuff clashes against technology, industry, ‘tackle and trade’, those things which humans progress in and work hard at. It’s all woven together so that there’s no obvious above / below dualism. The poem simply praises design, with all its flaws. The ‘brinded cow’ and the ‘rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim’ speak of the beauty of imperfection. That seems to have moral shades as well, where Hopkins seems to say that good and bad, dark and light, right and wrong, are all blended together in this complex, beautiful world. Everything is ‘good’, even though the imagery acknowledges the darker side of industrial progress. And the poem just sings. It’s incredible to read aloud. The sprung rhythm, compound words, the liberal use of assonance, alliteration and sound recurrence. It’s a ‘squashed sonnet’, has the usual volta / turn, but the octet and sestet are shortened to a sestet and a quintet. Hopkins often reinvented forms like that. All those things contribute to the whole; the medium is really the message.

Tell me about a poem you love from any century before the twentieth.

I’ve been asked about influences before, and I’ve never mentioned Matthew Arnold. Now I’m kicking myself, because ‘Dover Beach’ is another favourite. It’s Victorian, but don’t let that put you off. It’s hardly a perfect poem, it’s quite flawed; don’t let that put you off either. Its melancholic sadness is crippling, and really helped by the sounds. ‘Bring / the eternal note of sadness in’ is one of my favourite poetic lines, which is strange considering that it consists entirely of abstractions. People bang on about onomatopoeic poetry, how these consonants or those vowels really aid this and that conceit. Sometimes it all sounds like esoteric knowledge, I don’t get it. But these sounds really do support this poem’s feeling of sadness which literally comes in inevitable waves. The lines’ rhythms, stretched vowels, all those ‘S’ sounds, do mimic the slow ebb and flow of the night seashore. But right from that moment where the speaker (possibly Arnold himself; the poem was written during his honeymoon) invites his wife to the window to ‘hear the grating roar’, there’s an implied context – a wedding night, a story of embarking on a new life – which adds all this humanity, uncertainty, threat, to the poem. That desperate bid for hope, when all faith has been lost, is so life-affirming. I’m always tempted to skip the clever-clever second stanza, where Arnold tries to shoehorn in all this mythological, historical jargon which clashes with the multi-sensory effects of the first and last strophes. That context is important; it elegises his present Victorian age, and yearns for an earlier time. But I wish it was woven into the fabric of the rest instead of being on its own, sticking out like a jellyfish-stung toe. Anyway, it’s a classic, regardless.

I’d like to know about your writing process:
What do you start with – idea, sound, form, a single phrase?
What’s the process of getting that to a finished poem? How long does it take? At what point does it make the transition from mind to page? Pen and paper or computer?
What are your writing routines, if any? When and where do you write?

It varies. I’ve learned the hard way that starting with an idea is a bad… um, idea. Whenever I’ve said ‘I’m going to write about X’, the result was awful. Now I have to have a phrase, or better, a line. If I get two lines, sometimes that’s good, other times it’s really not. If two lines fit too neatly together in my head, it’s probably because they’re a trite little couplet not worth using. So, I’ll occasionally write the line down and play with it. But more often, that doesn’t get me very far; the poem is still nowhere to be seen. So I won’t draft the poem until another line, phrase, image suggests a way to go forward. Hopefully a set of images will emerge, with similarities and differences (having things clash and disagree is important) which might hint at a theme, or several themes. All this time I’ll be mucking around with linebreaks, because it’s fun, and also because they’re essential to finding out what a poem’s about, for me. They have to communicate themselves, especially if the poem’s language is more elusive.

How long do they take? The poems in The Snowboy took anything from an hour (which rarely happens) to two or three years. I don’t keep track of drafts, but some of them have gone through so many different shapes and sizes it’s not even funny. ‘The Centre’ used to be fairly long; now it’s one of my shorter poems. I write every day. If for some reason I can’t, I don’t beat myself up over it, because I’m fairly obsessive the rest of the time. Writing is a compulsion that I find difficult to stop. Of course, the more you write the more junk you accumulate, and have to throw away because it’s unusable tosh. But that’s all part of the fun. It’s a gamble, and there’s nothing like writing a lot to teach you muscle memory; things start to become natural and more subconscious eventually, and that reward makes everything worth it.

I know you also write (or wrote?) prose fiction. Why did you move into poetry? What’s different about poetry – why does it suit you?

To say I also write fiction sounds more impressive than it is, I think. In the middle of last decade, I decided to do an MA, having no idea what kind of creative writing it would focus on but not really caring. The MA sparked a big ‘off’ period for my poetry though, because it focussed a lot on fiction, and I suddenly got it into my head that I would write a novel. That consumed me for the next couple of years. It consumed me enough to make the first three chapters into my dissertation, and then to almost finish it in the years following. But I was too indecisive, chopped and changed its plot, structure, points of view. I switched it from first to third-person a million times. Now I’m at the point where it’s still in a drawer, unfinished. I’m still convinced the story is worth telling, but how? That’s all up in the air. Part of the problem is that I’m not very good at reading novels. I often dip into them, love their use of language and ideas, but can’t finish them. There are a number of novels I’ve finished, but it’s definitely not a habit. So fiction reading, following and keeping to a plot structure and all its threads, it’s a blind-spot. I’m not confident that I can do it on that large a scale. I’ve recently got into short fiction (I’m really loving Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy at the moment), and I’m flirting with the idea of trying to write some. I’ll go back to the novel, one day. But for now I’m a poet, I think, for a million reasons. If I exercise my prose muscles now, it’s usually for poetry reviews.

Tell me about your approach to lines and linebreaks.

I think of lines as like the strings on a guitar. They’re hardly the only thing which makes the guitar’s sound. You have the body, that chamber for the air to circulate round; the neck, fret-board; the shape of the whole guitar itself, which helps to define its sound. But the strings, the lines, are what will first hit the listener’s ear. I have no single approach to them, though. Each poem’s form tends to guide me on how the lines will work, what they do and how they do it. In The Snowboy, I have a kind of ‘try everything once’ approach to form. Each poem has its own needs in terms of imagery, sound, shape, linebreaks. In collating the poems, I was more concerned that images and motifs talked to each other than that shape and line were uniform. Having a variety of shapes which were able to shift and change almost at will, depending on what I wanted them to do, was important. It suited the theme of diversity and inclusion, that idea that ‘disability’ in a social sense can’t be boiled down to a set of physical problems, and even when it is, there’s a vast array of them. Disability is only one of the pamphlet’s themes, but as it emerged, it was glue for the whole thing.

I do have a few linebreak habits. An obvious use is to change sense, where a line which seems to mean one thing is suddenly enjambed, and the next line either adds something significant to the previous one in terms of sense, or disagrees with it, or rebuts it with a joke. It’s fun to deliberately break up the sense several times, across several lines. Prynne does that a lot. Another use is to break an established rhythm. In some poems that’s really important because the subject is the broken body, the breakdown of marriage, furniture, puppetry, the bits of a landscape. I remember your suggestion to give a section of ‘The Ideal Bed’ fuller lines with smoother linebreaks. The linebreaks were all deliberately jagged. Sometimes a word was moved down to punch the start of the next line, instead of the end of the previous line, as you might expect. But I took your suggestion because that section retold a pleasant memory, remembered exactly. When the memories become more difficult to tell, the voice becomes nervous and the details more elaborate and strange, the lines begin to fall apart and the breaks become more jagged and unpredictable. The same thing happens in ‘The House, the Church and Fisherman’s Walk’, where if I’m describing broken elements in the landscape, the words scatter themselves around a bit. Larry Eigner’s use of white space to show pause and laboured breath was another inspiration. I’ve learned from those nervous, fragmented utterances separated by white space, those lines scattered all over the page. And I’ve tried to adapt it for various poems, including ‘The Snowboy’ itself.

Lastly, Peter Didsbury sometimes switches from a looser metric into more deliberate blank verse for certain lines he wants to make more prominent for various reasons. I occasionally do that. And I sometimes finish a poem like that, where if I’ve found what I think is a perfect line, I might make it a blank verse one.

Your writing isn’t scared to be discursive – though you proceed via images, there’s usually a definite sense that you aren’t simply presenting a scene, it has some point or context that’s worth looking for and thinking about. How do you negotiate that difficult terrain?

As a reader, I love the feeling that there’s a context, a world in the periphery of a poem. I like to think that a poet had a reason to write it other than to fill a page; they were spurred on by something. That’s where Confessional poetry comes in, I suppose. Confession is buried under the surface in my stuff, not overt. I hope readers will supply their own contexts; I just invite them to. Everything they need to know is in the poem. ‘The Ideal Bed’ has a background of marital breakdown. I’m working with painful memories, some too painful to remember. So I use broken bits of narrative; imagery which is literal as well as strange, symbolic, metaphorical. I try to dunk you into experience rather than retell it and say ‘Now go and think about it.’ I couldn’t do that. My memory plays tricks on me. I hope the poem itself plays some of those tricks.

When I started seriously workshopping poems, a good rule of thumb to remember was that poetry isn’t the place for preaching or ‘making a point’, and the harshest subjects needed to have the lightest touch. That took a while to go in. I’d written poems with the deliberate intention of ‘telling’ the reader something, and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. I gradually came to see that ‘points’ are earned when everything else works. The ‘point’ had to be one of a range of things my poems did. But yes, you could say that there’s a didactic, discursive element to my work, sometimes. It might be because that old ‘Show, don’t tell’ rule is a bit inadequate to me. As a reader, I want you to tell me something. If it’s worth thinking about, I’ll enjoy thinking about it. I do stand by ‘no ideas but in things’, but ‘things’ aren’t the same as ideas. The idea of ‘pure poetry’ is a widespread cliché, I think, because it’s so unattainable. Everything communicates: imagery, rhetoric, and statement, but also vocabulary, form, sound, line, and rhythm as well. It all ‘tells’ you things.

I’m interested in that word ‘discursive’ because it implies a level of confidence in ‘the message’. I hardly have that confidence. Religion and disability are dangerous territory because their traditions are so full of forceful soap-boxing, therapy, and saccharine languages. I know that some readers will find messages that aren’t there simply because of the nature of the material. As soon as I say ‘I am disabled’, some people will think I’m making a ‘point’, a political statement. But if I said ‘My eyes are blue’, would they still think that? Both statements are the same kind of pure and simple fact, but the latter is more likely to make the reader think about suffering, pain, frustration. Why is that? I do think that readers can have an intention to go into some kinds of work, and read it in a certain way, and I like to play with that intention. If you think I’m farcically labouring a point, I probably am. Maybe the ‘point’ is that there is none. I might use OTT rhetorical devices, like puns, to undermine a message I’ve half-delivered. I hope the ironic slip from a serious tone might make readers laugh, wonder if I’m really soap-boxing at all. I am being serious some of the time. I’m very serious in places, but I’ll let you decide where and when you think I am.

Last thing: you mention ‘simply presenting a scene’. I wanted to pick up on that, because in ‘Milo Won’t Go in the Water’, that’s what I’m doing, really. I paint the Leisure Centre swimming pool as a water-filled brain. It could be an inner landscape more than a literal scene. Maybe Milo is refusing to embrace or address the real issues of his Hydrocephalus. Maybe Milo is me. I don’t know. In the end I tell you how he feels about the situation, but I don’t tell you how to feel, and you’re still asking ‘Who is Milo, anyway?’ I don’t ask you to sympathise with him. I’m not interested in sympathy; empathy is more realistic, and there’s nothing like laughing with someone to make us feel empathy towards them. I often play with the idea and validity of delivering a message, rather than delivering a finished one. That’s why ‘The Man Upstairs’ (God / Schopenhauer) delivers a message to the councils instead of me: because they have the required gravitas / arrogance, and I don’t. It’s also why it’s a ‘draft’, not a finished letter. Other poems are like that, where you can see a point if you want, or you can just enjoy whatever else the poem is doing. It’s up to you.

OK, the Apocalypse is upon us: natural disasters, alien invasions, milk shortages. The British Library is on fire. Which one page do you rip out of The Snowboy to keep in your pocket as you roam the lawless wastes, and why?

Well, I’m getting married next year. By the time the Apocalypse is at its worst, my fiancée, Sarah, will be my wife. You didn’t mention zombies, but assuming she hasn’t been eaten yet (and even if she has) I’d take ‘The Snowboy’. It’s the title poem, completely central to the collection, and everything else kind of revolves around it. It commemorates the miscarriage we grieved together, and still do. It’s strange, being a father to a child who never ‘lived’, but always goes with us as a concrete fact. So it’s important. Plus, that poem is all on one page, so I wouldn’t lose any by ripping it out. In the throes of a post-apocalyptic panic, that just makes sense.

Interview with David Gaffney

2011-08-08T16:24:00.000+01:00

David Gaffney is simply the best writer of flash fiction I have ever read – it was reading his work that turned me on to the possibilities of this amazing form. As well as three collections of short fiction he has published a novel, and works in a variety of innovative ways beyond the page. His website is here.

TW: You’re best known for writing very, very short stories. I first came across your work when a student of mine at Salford recommended Sawn-off Tales (Salt) to me. I read them and was (excuse the pun) blown away. More recently you’ve been publishing longer things – looking at The Half-life of Songs, your latest collection of short fiction, the length of your pieces seems to be creeping up. Is that deliberate? Is the very short form ultimately limiting?

David Gaffney: I’m not sure. I know that lately I have found it more difficult to get things down to a 150 word format - the length I used in Sawn-off Tales - and my pieces tend to be now 500-1000 words, which I find a bit frustrating, especially when it comes to reading live because I enjoy reading the really short ones in a live setting. In a live setting I think it’s hard to concentrate on longer pieces of fiction – poetry works better as performance for the same reasons. You can grab hold of it and really explore it.

Sometimes when writing short fiction you are aiming to discover what the story really is, where it lives. Where is its beating heart? If you can excise a live, writhing sliver of 150 words from a bulky chunk of text then it’s a delight, but you don’t always find those nuggets. Very small stories are like tiny scampering animals with a constant need to eat and they are very tiring to look after. So yes, the short form does have its limitations. It reduces the time the reader gets to spend in the world of the story. You could probably reduce a lot of stories down to a few hundred words and keep the essence and the message. Here’s a 145 word version of Chekov’s the lady with the dog I just made now.

THE LADY WITH THE DOG

A new person appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri met her in the public gardens.

"May I give him a bone?" he asked; and when she nodded he asked courteously, "Have you been long in Yalta?"

"Five days."

"Let us go to your hotel," he said softly. And both walked quickly.

Afterwards they talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other. It was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They both knew that in a little while the solution would be found, but it was clear that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

The End

What you lose with flash fiction is the cumulative effect, the richly textured world which a reader can think about while they are reading, adding their own thoughts and interpretation as they go, and comparing their life to the lives of the characters. With flash fiction the reader is in and out so fast the story doesn’t touch the sides, so a re-reading is often needed, but it doesn’t always happen. People tend to gulp flash fiction down quickly like oysters, one after another, and it has been said to me that my stories ‘do your head in’ if you consume them like this. In Sawn Off Tales there are 58 stories. That’s 58 settings, 58 sets of characters, 58 scenarios and 58 plots. It’s a lot to take in. But in a sense, as my style is similar, and some of the outsider-type themes to my stories are related, there is continuity. Although the characters might have different names and jobs, possibly they are in fact the same; there is a little sawn off world where all these people live, a kind of twin peaks crossed with the archers.

TW: And you’ve published a novel, Never Never (Tindal Street Press). Was the process of writing a sustained longer piece very different from the process of writing flash fiction?

DG: The writing of novels is incredibly different to producing short fiction. The main difference for me is you can’t sit and read the whole thing quickly, or experience it the way a reader will. A reader will read your novel in small chunks and you don’t know which chunks these are going to be. Engineering a novel feels like taking your whole house apart and laying all the bits flat on the floor to have a look at them and then putting it all back together again and doing this everyday while you are still trying to live in it, or like putting together a flatpack piece of furniture when you don’t know what the piece of furniture is for, or what it does, and you have no instructions and there always some bit left over and you don’t know where it goes. I’m writing a novel at the moment and I’m trying to make each chapter like a short story because it’s easier for me to focus on completing each part if I do that.

TW: Your work is resolutely contemporary – it takes place in the world we know, of Hula Hoops and benefit fraud, Aldi and Guardian Soulmates – but it’s also often very strange. Sometimes it seems to me to veer towards speculative fiction (like in ‘Special Pudding’, where the narrator tastes everything her lover eats – and puts on weight accordingly), but more often it’s about the oddity of real people, of characters who could really exist. Do you see yourself as a realist writer? Can you comment on your choice of material, setting, tone?

DG: You are right there are a few sci-fi type weird ones, but they are all rooted in reality. 'Special Pudding' was inspired by a large woman who sat opposite a tiny thin man in a restaurant in Budapest and ate everything on the menu while she nibbled at olives. I tried all kinds of ways to get it into a story, and I’m not so sure it works that well. After I’d written it Irvine Welsh wrote a novel with the same theme. I prefer the realist stuff, but sometimes your writing takes you in that direction. There really isn’t much control. I think that fiction - or any art - should not be fully knowable or understandable on a literal level, I think it works best and has more resonance, when it’s mysterious, when you don’t know what it means or why it’s there and you can’t put your finger on why your mind keeps coming back to it and bothering it, turning the ideas of the story over and ovcr and wondering why it disturbs, why it’s funny, what it is about. So with that in mind I always tends towards the obscure I think, be it fantastical or just plain humdrum weird. You can tell people what to think or you can make them think it. An example of a work of art that is annoyingly literal is I think the lyric to John Lennon’s song 'Imagine'. Here’s how I imagine its inception.

YOKO: Mmm I like the tune John, but what’s the words gonna be about?
JOHN: Well I want the song to make people imagine that there no heaven, no god and no countries. But I’m struggling with how make people imagine those things.
YOKO: Well what about you just say imagine there’s no heaven, imagine there’s no god above us and imagine there no countries?
JOHN: That sounds too easy. What if they can’t imagine it?
YOKO: Just say it’s easy if you try
JOHN: Ok that should work –job’s a good un. What should I call it?
YOKO: Call it the distillation of truth in an annihilating world
JOHN: Catchy - thanks

TW: Who are your own favourite writers of short fiction? What books should fans of your work be reading?

DG: I love the stories of Tania Hershman, but increasingly I’m influenced by the work of visual artists like David Shrigley and text-art type poets like Patrick Coyle and James Davies.

TW: You’ve worked ‘beyond the page’ with several projects – turning your stories into mini-operas, working in the medium of PowerPoint, turning real people’s confessions into short stories, telling stories via lost cat posters, and so on. Your latest project is a sound installation for Birmingham Book Festival. Will you tell me about that, and perhaps talk more generally about your interest in this sort of project? Is it important to you to work outside the traditional writing structure of desk–coffee–paper–brain? To work with other people?

DG: Yes, I really love the collaborative aspect to ‘off the page’ projects and also I like the fact that these projects are a great way to stimulate new ideas. There can be much more to writing than producing text for printed books and in some cases it’s a better way to reach people. More people might see a piece of text in an art gallery for example than on the pages of a slim volume in the little visited short story section of Waterstones. Literature can be really enhanced by linking it up with other platforms and formats. I am always trying to develop writing projects that flex with the culture and push at boundaries. My current projects include a sound installation for Birmingham book festival called Boy You Turn Me, a project with Cornerhouse Manchester called Errata Slips which will involve me inserting fictionalised errata slips into publications in Cornerhouse bookshop, a project for Preston Guild which consists of three interlinked stories which will continue for twenty years, and I’ve just finished a project at Manchester Piccadilly station called Station Stories a unique literature event using technology and live improvised electronic sound where six writers linked to the audience by wireless headphones technology take you on a tour of Piccadilly station and read specially commissioned stories inspired by the station and the people who use it and work there. Different artistic formats can converge into exciting new products no-one has ever seen before; an example might be the recent project ( not one of mine) linking car satellite navigation systems with stories about certain places, and the emerging iphone apps that use augmented reality to relate fictions about cities as we wander about and point the device at buildings. This way of working can mean coming up with really meaningful art form collaborations. I performed my PowerPoint stories project with a live free improvised music group. Having said all of this, I value a good quality printed product – something to hold and enjoy – which is why I enjoy the innovative design and graphic work of work of McSweeney’s printed books, for example, and also the work of graphic novelists like Daniel Clowes. In this world of transient digital ephemera people still want things they can touch and own and hold on to. And it’s not all about digital, which is the mistake some people make when trying to force freshness onto a writing project. Too many new developments are just printed stories on websites.

Interview

2011-07-12T19:17:00.002+01:00

Angelina Ayers of Matter magazine asks 10 questions and I try to answer them.

Peony Moon

2011-07-11T17:40:00.000+01:00

Michelle McGrane very kindly features four poems from All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at her blog Peony Moon.

All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at Ledbury

2011-07-07T10:50:00.000+01:00

Just back from a mammoth trip mixing family and friends, work and pleasure over a distance of six or seven hundred miles of motorway. The work bits were hardly onerous – on Saturday I filled in an author questionnaire (mainly draft blurb/promo material) for my book of flash fiction coming out with Salt next summer; and on Monday I read at Ledbury Poetry Festival in a de facto launch of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head, my new pamphlet with Nine Arches Press.

I read with Alasdair Paterson, who read mainly from his striking Flarestack pamphlet Brumaire and Later but also from his Shearsman book On the Governing of Empires. We did a pamphlet swap and later that evening I sat outside the bunkhouse we were staying at and read Alasdair's through, drinking Stella and watching a pair of peregrines above the woods opposite. It's a coherent, lovely pamphlet, and I'm looking forward to buying and reading the Shearsman book.

You can buy copies of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at the link, or direct from me at a reading – next one is Trashed Organ at the Bridge Hotel in Newcastle on Wednesday 13 July, 7.30 start.

Flash

2011-06-27T13:58:00.002+01:00

I've got two stories in the latest issue of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine - 'Call of Duty' and 'Lengths'.

Sample page from All the Rooms of Uncle's Head

2011-06-16T10:13:00.003+01:00

Here's the first poem from All the Rooms of Uncle's Head. The blurb at the link may help you fathom what's going on! Click on the image for a larger version.

Proof

2011-06-15T15:29:00.001+01:00

Today I got a proof of All the Room's of Uncle's Head in the post. I'm very pleased with how it looks. Should be available in a week or so - meanwhile, here's the cover and a link to the book's page at the Nine Arches Press website.

Pamphlet off to print

2011-06-10T08:45:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I sent off the final PDF files for All the Room's of Uncle's Head, my new pamphlet with Nine Arches Press. Very exciting – and I love the cover, designed by Jane Commane at NAP; it really fits what's inside.

Two more poems in English...

2011-06-03T14:46:00.000+01:00

I've got another couple of poems in the journal English - a prose poem and something a bit out of my comfort zone*, this time. You can read them here and here.

*because it uses short lines, basically.

Video-poem of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street

2011-06-02T19:18:00.002+01:00

The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street from Tony Williams on Vimeo.

I write in English...

2011-05-09T15:51:00.000+01:00

...which is to say I have two poems newly published in the academic journal of that name. One of them's about reading Arnold Bennett. You can access PDFs here and here.

The Grazable Book

2011-04-13T09:43:00.000+01:00

In Alnwick Oxfam this week I picked up an unabridged copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson. At 1000 pages, I'm not sure I'll ever read it cover to cover; but flicking through it in the shop I saw more than enough strange and toothsome snippets to enjoy (and perhaps, as writers do, to pillage in some form or other). It occurs to me that, although I really like my Kindle and have read more e-books in the last month than paper books (at a ratio of somewhere between 4 and 10 to 1), there are some ways of reading that the Kindle just isn't up to yet. One of them is this flicking through, idly looking for inspiration or interest. The e-book's commitment to linearity is tyrannical: it can't cope with the idea of grazing. There isn't even a random page button, like in Wikipedia.

As we were leaving the shop my wife pointed out that there was a copy of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, proudly face-out on display on the Oxfam equivalent of the 3 for 2 tables. I not-so-bashfully took it up to the counter and offered to sign it for them, which they graciously accepted. I've seen it in bookshops before, but to see it in a charity shop was a weird delight. (It didn't look well-used, but I couldn't begrudge the previous owner their indifference to it.)

Ink Sweat and Tears

2011-04-10T12:18:00.002+01:00

There's a new poem by me up at Ink Sweat and Tears...

NaPoWriMo

2011-04-01T20:11:00.000+01:00

Again I'm writing a poem a day throughout April. See Carrie Etter's list of participants here, and the threads here. My effort for today:

One last big tea before I leave the county

Eeh, a great oblong table

laden wi’ riches of Yorkshire and trouble

consequent on there being fuck all to do:

a truculent welcome for me and for you,

southerner sandwiches, call-centre pies,

liquorice shadows in factories of flies,

flat caps and trackies and dole queues and gyms,

non-NHS dentists coining by gums,

fenceposts and fishing and regeneration

re-opening the derelict pub at the station,

rugby bloody league with Harry bloody Gration,

moorlands as barren and gaping as gobs

of tweed-burdened burghers and shell-suited knobs,

teacakes moistened on top of the kettle,

and gift shops closed down in the centre of Settle,

Doncaster’s regal and drunken flaneurs

and Bradford pornographers’ ‘Story of Er’

and parkin and parking for five quid a day

and Parkinson threatening to come back from Bray.

Pillocks and wazzocks and breadcakes and rain

and Tina and Gilbert and Ajmal and Shane,

O give me a bite of your county of scran

and tea from the well-stewed teapot of Don –

I have lived here a decade, complacent and fat,

so goodbye and thank you, and thank you, and that.

George Shaw at the Baltic

2011-03-24T15:12:00.000Z

Spent an hour at the Baltic in Gateshead looking in wonder at George Shaw's fabulous exhibition 'The Sly and Unseen Day'. Can't recommend it enough - paintings in Humbrol enamel of landscapes and buildings around the housing estate where Shaw grew up. Shaw talks very engagingly and intelligently about the exhibition here. It's on till mid-May - go and see it if you can.

NAWE interview

2011-03-15T08:53:00.000Z

Jordan Philips interviewed me for the NAWE Young Writers' Hub - we talked about creative writing courses, publication, and writing about place. Have a look at their other interviews too...

Step and touch, step and touch

2011-03-08T21:21:00.000Z

Ooh! Very pleased to point you towards Danse Macabre du Jour, where my preposterous piece of Mitteleuropean Edwardupwardism*, 'The Beginning of the End', is ce plat du jour, or whatever the phrase is. It's good to be eaten in the house of oddity.

* I know, I know.

Darkhorsewhispering

2011-03-07T15:27:00.000Z

It’s time there was a specific word for people singing the praises of The Dark Horse, which happens in spate roughly twice a year when a new issue comes out. It bills itself as the ‘Scottish American poetry magazine’ – the cover of the latest issue, number 26, contains a quotations from Dana Gioia calling it ‘Scotland’s finest international literary journal’ – but I prefer to think of it as simply one of the most elegantly readable English-language poetry magazines full stop. (It’s also one of the most beautiful – the same cover is perhaps the best yet, a block of typographical joy on a cream background.)

The Dark Horse is noticeable for the space given over to reviews and essays. It feels like an arena for intelligent, detailed literary discussion. For example, in this issue there’s a 20-page essay on Canadian poetry by Sean Haldane; a transcription of Dennis O’Driscoll’s StAnza conversation about Scots poetry with Seamus Heaney (and a reprint of Edwin Muir’s 1923 essay on Scottish ballads); two pieces on Edwin Morgan; and pieces on Larkin and Monica Jones, and Sarah Orne Jewett and Edwin Arlington Robinson. (Maybe Gerry Cambridge, the editor, was looking for Edwin-texts this issue...)

As for the poetry, no Edwins that I can see, just a typically interesting bunch of generally lucid and attractive pieces – so far I’ve been struck by those by Alasdair Gray, Matthew Sweeney and (unrhymed) Wendy Cope. I’m looking forward to the rest.

Website here (it doesn’t yet feature issue 26 as the current issue).

Anna Woodford's Birdhouse

2011-03-02T09:55:00.000Z

I quickly devoured Anna Woodford's debut Birdhouse (yes, I know it's another Salt book, but that's not my fault). It has a wonderful lucidity - it's 'accessible' in that much-talk-about but rarely achieved way, by appealing both to poetry types (well, me) and, as far as I can guess, to people who don't often read poetry. A fluent, direct, engaging book.

O'Brien on Fisher

2011-03-01T09:41:00.004Z

I'm delighted to feature a review by Sean O'Brien of last year's two books on and by Roy Fisher.

Roy Fisher: Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, £7.95)

An Unofficial Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books, 12.95)

In ‘Inner Voice’, Roy Fisher records his widower’s habit of talking himself through mundane tasks: ‘The monologue’s so stupid / I do it in farting Mockney / or worse, mincing Estuarian: none of it worth /the touch of my own Standard Midland.’ Standard Midland and An Unofficial Roy Fisher mark the 80th birthday of one of the best and most original English poets now at work. Roy Fisher has always been fruitfully ‘unofficial’, at best uninterested in the alleged metropolis, writing as a modernist in frequently anti-modernist times while winning readers of all shades of opinion. As well as a fascinating selection of uncollected work, An Unofficial Roy Fisher includes poems, essays and informal writings in tribute to Fisher by numerous poets and critics, many of whom would agree on little else. In this sense Fisher fulfils Wordsworth’s requirement that the poet create that taste by which he (or she) is understood.

Fisher is England’s major poet of the city, the city in question being his native Birmingham, from which he accessed literature, art and jazz (his other job is as a pianist). There was a popular 1960s TV private detective series set in Birmingham, starring Alfred Burke, called Public Eye, and this is the function Fisher fulfils in his poems: enquiring in order to see what is actually there. City (1961) was psychogeography before the practice had that stupid name. As another poem says, ‘Birmingham’s what I think with’, while Standard Midland describes the speech of Midlanders, dwellers in an England-within-England.

Retiring from university teaching, Fisher moved to the Peak District, where he applies the same methods of enquiry to a different landscape: hills, ridges, farmland and old industrial sites. In the hamlet of Brough-on-Noe in the High Peak, he celebrates a secret plenitude: ‘What’s good / is the way there seem to be / more waters than there are, poured / out of the rows of hills / to the valley bottom. There seem / to be more side lanes and alleys than there ever were’ and concludes ‘There’s / no single place to be / at Brough’. As he states in a poem on one of Ivon Hitchens’s pool paintings, where the perspective is felt to move under the gaze, the here and now may offer ‘more than one life’.

Fisher has always been distrustful of metaphysical and moral ambition, at any rate in his own work, but his eye produces startling juxtapositions which provoke those very temptations in the reader. In one sense, ‘On Spare Land’ is about somewhere nothing is happening: ‘Commons without commoners / the Unadopted. A footpath worn / from corner to corner. Wormwood.// And how at the edge the hoardings / paralyse words high up / in the common air.’ In another, though never stating as much, it continues the history of the Enclosures by which land, ‘the common treasury’ sung by the Diggers, becomes property.

It seems to be the inbetweentimes of things that most stimulate Fisher. His work is often quite depopulated. Its settings – streets, buildings, neglected districts, places lodged between other places – open themselves to the imagination that happens, not quite accidentally, along for a look. The effect of such an intense regard for the material particulars of time and place might be described as an uncanny ordinariness. It is interesting to imagine how, in some unlikely earthly paradise, television property programmes would be replaced by the study of location for its own sake and ours. Fisher’s prose poem ‘Stops and Stations’ would make an excellent introduction: ‘High over the little town and the railway in its cement cutting, a vacant institution among trees. Has been a small hospital, will be again: a certain swank in the panelling. Goes every so often into commerce until commerce fails every time. Night thins out and the dark can drain away out of the corridors. And mostly it does.’

Sean O'Brien

75% Salt books

2011-02-08T12:32:00.000Z

For three days only you can get 75% off a selection of Salt books, including mine!

I'm virtually a bona fide scientist...

2011-02-01T12:49:00.000Z

... because my poem 'Improvements' was honourably mentioned by the judges in the Genomics Forum Poetry Competition. Congratulations to the winner, Sophie Cooke, and to the other winners and mentionees - a striking bunch of poems.

Under the Radar and, er, being under the radar

2011-01-29T15:55:00.000Z

Well, it's been a while since I posted here - partly because I've been settling in to a new job, and the blog has fallen through the cracks. But today I received a little nudge in the form of the latest issue of Under the Radar, the magazine published by Nine Arches Press. This is a short story special, and contains two of my stories, 'Back in a Jiffy' and 'Cichlids', both of which will appear in my book next year. ('My book' is so lame - must settle on a title soon...) It's good form of course to list the other contents of a magazine when bragging on the internet about being in it. But weekends are precious as they're the only time I get to see my family. So bad form it'll have to be - no time to read till Monday night.

Short Story: Markingitis

2011-01-04T14:43:00.000Z

It's that time of year, so I'm posting a story to help anyone who should be marking to procrastinate further:

Markingitis

I had a lot of marking that semester. In the summer we were going to Bangladesh, and I’d taken on extra teaching for the money. But I couldn’t settle to it. It wasn’t that the scripts were bad: second-year criminology. I’d seen a lot worse. Their referencing was excellent. But me and marking are like magnets with the poles aligned: we repel each other. It’s as if my arse is allergic to the chair.

We had these wonderful plums from the hippy shop down the road, really special. They shone with light, or whatever. So juicy. My girlfriend had gone mad and bought us a boxful. They were sitting there on the kitchen table – so I made a little rule.

If I got the end of a script and I hadn’t had a plum, that was a first. It indicated sustained attention. If I’d had one, a two-one; two, a two-two; and so on. If the essay couldn’t keep my mind off the plums, it couldn’t be any good.

It was a good system: when it went for second marking I didn’t get any queries. The external examiner praised us, and I like to think the plums did their bit. But I hadn’t reckoned on the consequences: I shat brown water for three days.

When we realised what it was we called it markingitis, a bad dose of comfort fruit, and that was that. A giggle. But after we got to Bangladesh my girlfriend came down with the shits herself. It happens: different food, different water. We said it was markingitis again, and maybe it was the heat but we thought it was inordinately funny. She’d sit there in the cubicle of our chalet thingy, shaking with laughter and shitting, while I made cracks about the students being responsible for this, about plum bum and fruit juice. And so on.

She couldn’t keep much down, but she was game, and kept up a dry chuckle at my gags. I had a look round the neighbourhood and came back with stories and a few bland treats. And always the markingitis jollity. It was really pretty funny.

On the sixth day I came back in with a glass of coconut milk and asked her if the exam board was sitting that morning. She didn’t even smirk. I went over and found her skin felt all clammy.

She never regained consciousness. I had to call her parents and tell them. It was a sad time, of course, and I didn’t mention markingitis on the phone or at the funeral in England later. They were dignified and polite, and I was grateful to them for that. But even now, when I see a bowl of plums, I can’t help but smile.

'A strong rhythmic kick'

2010-12-13T11:18:00.004Z

Kevin Higgins reviews The Corner ofArundel Lane and Charles Street for Eyewear:

The poet Williams’s work most resembles for me is Glyn Maxwell; the long lines, the precision of both the image and idea... Tony Williams is a very British poet whose work has a wit which renders allowable his poems’ more than occasional grimness and melancholy.

You can buy the book here - get free shipping and 30% off by using the code XMAS2010 at checkout.

Sidekick fer Chrimbo

2010-12-05T14:10:00.001Z

Click on the image to see it full-size and readable.

Collective Gallstones

2010-12-04T13:26:00.001Z

Here's a video I've been working on with Ira Lightman and umpteen other artists. I provided lines of texts to the participants, who recorded themselves performing them and sent the files to Ira, who edited them into a single piece. The participants are listed at the link – a big thanks to them and to a number of others who volunteered to take part but didn't make it to the final piece for one reason or another. And to Ira for an ace edit.

Book arrives at house, man starts reading

2010-11-30T10:03:00.000Z

My copy of David Gaffney's new collection of microstories, The Half-Life of Songs, arrived yesterday thanks to the intrepid efforts of our postman Ranulph. It's a stonking 190 pages, which is a helluva lotta short stories. So far I've read the one about the corss-dressing barbers, the one about the cliques of country music and the one about turquoise chickens – the first three in the book, in fact, and all crackers. I'm such a Gaffney fan; I want everybody to read him.

Technique as a travelling bag

2010-11-27T18:53:00.000Z

Teaching Don Juan today, a colleague pointed out how Byron compares his verse to a portmanteau or travelling bag, and how apt this is: the ottava rima is so robust a form, into which almost any experience can be poured. Of course once poured in it tends to take a certain shape; but that's what it is to have a style.

It got me thinking how inadequate my own technique is to such an analogy. The way I've been writing poems over the last year or so has produced some work I'm happy with, but I have noticed that it keeps taking me back to the same narrow band of tones and modes: elegy, mainly. It's not something I can travel with, in the long term. So, time to stitch together a new form, that I can take with me where I'm going.

38 stories down, 30something to go

2010-11-26T09:13:00.000Z

Yesterday I wrote two short stories for my next Salt book: one based on a famous bit in the Book of Matthew and one about a man having an epileptic fit. The second one isn't right yet, but the bones are there. Afterwards I added them to my list to find I have 38 stories written, out of a target of 70 odd. So, more than halfway. I'm aiming to finish the manuscript in spring next year; that's an agreeably vague deadline, but I reckon I need to hit 50 by the end of 2010, which means I need to produce about one every three days between now and then.

In a way that seems a lot. But my stories tend to be very short, so in terms of word counts it's not so bad. And actually, I find it much easier to write a lot of prose fiction than a little – once I build up a head of steam, it just feels more fluent, and the ideas come too. So one every three days is probably easier than one a week.

Meanwhile in amongst the marking and preparing for a dayschool tomorrow, I've got a proposal to draw up for a conference on short stories. I want to focus on microfiction, but I can't decide whether to make it general or whether to focus on the work of David Gaffney (whose new book was despatched to me yesterday, the Amazon robots tell me - ace).

Carrie Etter, The Tethers

2010-11-25T19:14:00.001Z

I've been enjoying Carrie Etter's The Tethers over quite an elongated timespan, which is an apt coincidence since she recently posted a link to a piece on 'slow poetry' on her excellent blog.

Whenever a book by an American living in the UK comes out there's a temptation to read it in terms of its transatlantic connections. I can't resist, anyway. What strikes me most about The Tethers is the (let's go with it) Audenesque attention to syntax. By which I mean a way of handling lineation and syntax so that they dance with each other, sometimes together and sometimes apart, which I associate with Auden's work. So, 'David Smith, Wagon II, 1964' begins:

A figure sleeps standing because the wagon it rides
never rolls on its diverse wheels, is carried

from studio to museum and back by no
motive of its own, or at least none it knows.

(The conversational piling up of that last clause is also relevant.) If we want to praise poetry that communicates before it's understood, let me say that the meaning of that sentence, lucid though it is, is almost irrelevant to my enjoyment of it: the impression of throwing a sentence out across several lines is breathtaking.

Of course Etter isn't Auden: the tones and subject matter of her work are her own. I find it slightly diddicult to know what to say about them. There's a pared-down quality, not so much to the verse as to the world it conjures; and there's urgency, the sense of things mattering. The Tethers is a fine book.

Me book out in paperback

2010-11-19T15:57:00.000Z

Unexpectedly I received in the post today a package of six copies of the new paperback edition of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. It says on the front that the book was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Portico Prize. It's currently selling for £7.99, postage free, at the Salt website. And, as we've recently established, it would make an ace Chrimbo present. Jolly poems, post-free, in a bendy sheath: what more could you ask?

It's Chriiiissstmas!

2010-11-19T09:26:00.000Z

Had a lovely evening at the Portico Prize dinner last night, in the majestic surroundings of Manchester Town Hall's Great Hall (lots of bees). I didn't win, but it was an honour just to be on the shortlist. I bought a copy of Madeleine Bunting's The Plot, the winner of the non-fiction category, which one of the judges called 'Sebaldian' – it has a lot to live up to! And the dinner itself contained a Mastercheffy trio of mini-desserts; so it wasn't so much a case of 'close, but no cigar' as 'close, and I got a chocolate cigar'. I pressed a copy of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street on Stuart Maconie, who looked at me as if I was a nut job till it dawned on him I was a shortlistee and not a random punter.\

Now that a jingle of bells is audible in the distance and sales of suet are going through the roof, you're probably worried about what to buy all your friends and family for Christmas. Well, I've made things easier for you this year, with this instructional video:

It's Chriiiiisssstmas from Tony Williams on Vimeo.

David Gaffney, The Half-Life of Songs

2010-11-15T11:00:00.000Z

It gives me great pleasure to feature David Gaffney's new collection of microfiction, The Half-Life of Songs, complete with a sample story. He's pretty much my favourite short fiction writer. Buy this book!

The blurb for the book describes 'a world where thinking is illegal, belly dancers’ blood is used to fertilize tomato plants, pensioners in leather trousers dance to two-step garage, and an architect hides crested newts in his bath. The stories are often beyond odd yet always ordinary, a warped backward-talking world of Lynchian surreality, allowing an emotional insight into the rich interior lives of social outsiders, the broken and the easily-breakable who are perpetually on the fringes of our world.'

Several of the stories in the half life of songs were written about Gaffney’s experiences of visiting towns along the M62 motorway between Liverpool and Hull; about the people and places he encountered and the ideas these towns and villages planted in his head.

Reviewers have called Gaffney's work 'witty, clever, poignant' (Time Out), 'utterly brilliant. Hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct' (Graham Rawle); the Guardian said that '150 words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than some novels'.

The history brush

‘When you live here, in Eggborough,’ Mr Fuller said, ‘you don’t even see the towers. It’s as if the towers aren’t there. They are not there to all intents and purposes. I mean they are there, but they’re not. Not really. I accept that when an outsider sees a house in Eggborough they notice the big fuck-off power plant with eight huge cooling towers in the background. But that’s not what Eggborough people see. They see the sky. So what I am asking you to do is to help me to produce a more accurate visual representation of how the houses in Eggborough would look if you actually lived here.’
I showed Mr Fuller how you could use the history brush to wipe over the towers and replace them with blue sky.
‘Excellent,’ Mr Fuller said.
‘How about I add something?’ I said.
‘What were you thinking of?’
‘I was thinking of a rainbow.’
Mr Fuller went to the window and looked out. ‘I’ve seen rainbows in Eggborough. It’s possible. It wouldn’t be a lie. But doesn’t that mean its been raining? No one wants to buy a wet house.’
‘You can have a rainbow in a blue sky,’ I said, ‘look,’ and I showed him what I’d done: liquid ribbons of colour, shimmering.
I enjoyed replacing the towers with rainbows, but after a few weeks got bored and began to add unicorns as well, hidden in the dappled shadows of lawns. You could hardly see them, but I knew they were there, and every time I sneaked a unicorn into one of the photos, that house sold quicker than any of the others. I didn’t tell Mr Fuller. He was a practical man who liked to believe his achievements were down to human ingenuity; magic had no place in the story of Mr Fuller’s success.

David Gaffney is from Manchester. He is the author of Sawn Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), Never Never (2008), Buildings Crying Out, a story using lost cat posters (Lancaster litfest 2009), 23 Stops To Hull a set of stories about every junction on the M62 (Humber Mouth festival 2009) Sawn off opera a set of operas with composer Ailis Ni Riain (Radio Three, RNCM, Liverpool philharmonic and tete a tete festival London 2010) Destroy PowerPoint, stories in PowerPoint format for Edinburgh festival in August 2009, the Poole Confessions stories told in a mobile confessional box (Poole Literature festival 2010) and he has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect magazine.

Aldeburgh

2010-11-08T21:38:00.001Z

Just back from househunting in Northumberland to find that Christian Campbell has won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. I'd known a few days beforehand that I hadn't won. On Friday John O'Donoghue wrote a round-up of the shortlist for the Guardian blog. Here's what he had to say about The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street:

Tony Williams focuses on liminal areas, corners, fences, ring roads, bus routes between towns. I think when he's concise he's brilliant. Sometimes though, like the landscapes he describes, he can sprawl. But I think Williams is firmly in the line of English poets back to Betjeman, Housman, Hardy and beyond. A terrific collection.

The sprawl thing I can hardly deny – it's there, and if a reader doesn't like it there's not a lot I can do about it. I should point out that the mentioning-me-in-the-same-sentence-as-Betjeman-Housman-and-Hardy thing, while I can't help but take it as a wonderful compliment, comes in the context of an argument that the shortlist lacks experimentation, so you should see it as at least partly a Bad Thing. Still, I'm very grateful to O'Donoghue for what he says.

50 Stories for Pakistan II

2010-11-05T11:12:00.000Z

Just got my copy of 50 Stories for Pakistan. Look sace. Click on the link below to buy yours.

50 Stories for Pakistan

Helping the victims of the floods

Produced by www.bigbadmedia.com

Book Preview

Mark Burnhope interviews me at the Salt blog

2010-11-04T15:58:00.002Z

Exactly what it says on the tin, as they say.

Interview with Tim Dooley

2010-11-01T09:27:00.000Z

Tim Dooley's Imagined Rooms collects many of the poems first published in the 1980s with a number of other poems hitherto unpublished in book form. It's quietly wonderful, and speaks to anyone conscious of the absurdity of living halfway between the private and public worlds. Tim kindly agreed to answer my questions about the book, which you can buy here, here, etc. Keeping Time appeared in 2008.

Many of the poems in Imagined Rooms were originally collected in The Interrupted Dream in 1985. How does it feel to see them back in print?

I hope the ones I’ve used stand up. I’ve chosen poems that I think will work in today’s context and there’s been a certain amount of nip and tuck along the way.

The book's epigraph is a wonderful quote from Neruda which talks about 'the used surfaces of things', adding 'let our poetry be like them'. It's an apt epigraph because the poems have been at large, being used, for 25 years. But it's also apt because it seems to me you're interested in writing a poetry of used items, suburbs and disappointments. Is that fair?

Yes. Neruda sees impurity as in the nature of things and I’ve long felt a commitment to the world as it is – rather than a transformed or purified vision of it, though I can see a place for that too. But I certainly subscribe to the idea of the poem as a made thing, marked by human touch and that’s affected the formal side of the work as much as the content. There’s an everyday quality to the work, starting from what’s in front of you and the language you hear around you, but shaping that into something more challenging.

Reading the poems I couldn't help feeling that I was reading them in two ways simultaneously - just as poems, but also as historical documents, records of an era. Did you see yourself as documenting the period when you were writing the poems? Or was it more personal than public?

I think the answer is both. I grew up in a politically charged period. (I was seventeen in 1968.) And, as in the Neruda quote, ‘affirmations of faith and payment of taxes’ are as much part of the physical and emotional world of the poems as ‘soupstains’ or ‘nightwakings’. I called my last book Keeping Time partly to acknowledge that after a while these concerns make up a record. In Imagined Rooms it’s, I suppose, the political context of the1980s that’s most evident. It might not be a bad time to focus on aspects of that period again. I hoped that by exploring political and social issues in terms of everyday observation and the experience of the senses I’d keep any tendency to windy opinionating at bay. And the sense of period, I hope, helps to make the personal element representative rather than confessional.

Your subject matter seems to be the metropolitan suburbs, where life is going on in spite of it all; disappointment of ideals and of personal relationships; and the frustrations of living a private life in public terms. The habitual tone is one of ironic sobriety. All of which is leading me to say your work reminds me of Michael Hofmann's. Is that a similarity you'd recognize? And given that you were writing about some of the same subjects at the same times, do you think it's just chance, or was ironic sobriety the only possible response to that era and situation?

At the moment I’m absorbed in Don Paterson’s new book, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Here’s something he writes:

‘Poet’ is less a calling than a diagnosis, and the condition… often comes with the inability to drive a car properly, a talent for all kinds of mental illness… excessive interest in movies and alcohol… (an) ability… to fall in love at the drop of a hat, or a glove.

What Paterson doesn’t say of course is that the poet is under no obligation to act any or all of these things out (and as a human being the poet remains culpable for any harm caused), but the passage does give an inkling of what any restraint in poetic language is working against or with, and how hard-won ‘sobriety’ might be. I’ve written a few poems (‘Cousins’ in Imagined Rooms, ‘Edit’ and 'The Tambourica Player’s Wife’ in Keeping Time), which explore these tensions reasonably explicitly and it seems I’ve got harder on the Byronic bohemian impulse as I’ve got older.

To get back to your question, I think there were other responses either more escapist or more intransigent than mine, but mine are the ones that I’m stuck with and the irony in the poems comes from recognizing the mixture of compromise and integrity in the choices and actions that have been made.

I like Hofmann’s work, particularly the way he’s unafraid of pulling lyricism out of almost deliberately prosy material. So there’s an affinity, but I’ve never read him deeply enough to think of him as an influence. He has written very enthusiastically about work that is very important to me. Late Lowell, for example, and James Schuyler’s poetry. So we may have drunk from the same well.

Stylistically you use a mixture of short and long lines, sometimes alternately in the same poem. Can you say a little about the decisions that govern line length (an art I find mysterious even as I am practicing it)?

There’s a lot of talk among my contemporaries about the primacy or integrity of the line and my own line-breaks have often puzzled people to the extent of exasperation. On reflection, I think this is probably because I tend to think of the block or stanza as my primary unit of composition. This was particularly true of the twenty-four line poems I wrote between 1975 and 1982, which formed a central sequence in The Interrupted Dream, some of which reappear in Imagined Rooms as free-standing poems. I imagined these originally as blocks of language out of which meaning might surface in the manner the blocks of colour in Rothko’s large canvases.

The poems that alternate long and short lines have a different genesis. I read some of Horace’s Epodes (in a Victorian translation using a mixture of hexameter and pentameter lines) in a house we stayed in the summer I was finishing the ‘Interrupted Dream’ sequence. Soon after, I came across Schuyler’s ‘The Morning of the Poem’ with its wonderful, free-flowing meditative sprawl. This seemed the way to go for more extended ode-like writing, beginning with poems like ‘The Milky Way’ and ‘The Sound We Make Ourselves’ and leading up to ‘Working from Home’. I went back to the form for ‘In the Palm of My Hand’ the longish poem about London and the July 7th bombings, which opens Keeping Time.

All of which is to say, going back to Neruda’s notion of impurity, that it’s important to me that the musicality of verse be stalled and disrupted from time to time by the pressure of thought or the onward flow of utterance. Particularly, this means that I will from time to time end lines with unemphatic articles or prepositions. Sometimes this is to throw stress on the start of the next line, but at other times it just contributes to a general tone of anxiety. I guess this is what Claude Rawson, in a TLS review of The Interrupted Dream, meant when he talked about ‘urgent uncertainties’ in the poems.

Anyway, for me it's stanzas not lines, hence Imagined Rooms.

'Working from Home' is a beautiful, gentle, discursive poem that seems to cover many of your concerns. It fulfils one of the essential purposes of poetry, something to do with bringing all the areas of our lives into focus together. Do you write your best work at home? Where specifically do you write? And with a pen? A keyboard?

Thank you. It’s a poem I’m fond of and would have used as the title for a book, if it didn’t sound too much like a book on survival in the era of deregulation. I don’t know whether things are held in focus. It’s more like watching the ripples in the pond spread out. That’s what I’m an observer of and participant in.

I don’t write in a disciplined way. I don’t keep notebooks systematically, though I use them from time to time with pencil or pen and with a preference for unlined paper. At that stage I’m usually sketching shapes, working into a poem and that kind of writing can be done in odd moments, anywhere.
Poems get completed at the keyboard. I bought a ludicrously heavy ex-office Imperial typewriter with jumbo type in the early 1970s. On this machine, the 24-line poems of The Interrupted Dream each filled a sheet of A4. In the late 80s I graduated to an electric typewriter with a correcting ribbon, in the early 90s to a PC and over the last four or five years to a Mac. I’m always working towards an imagined printed shape. The aural element is there too, but it works in an underground way, sometimes at odds with the chosen shape.

'Working from Home' also echoes 'His best piece of poetrie', which I take to be a much earlier poem on a similar domestic theme. Were the new poems collected in Imagined Rooms written for the volume, with the older work in mind, or are such resonances accidental?

The two poems bookend the 1980s. The son that’s new-born in 'His best piece of poetrie' and who’s a toddler in ‘Heat Haze’, has a younger brother in ‘Working from Home’ and that younger brother turns eleven in ‘The Border’. So it’s personal history that I keep time with as well as public events and the poems evoke very precise personal memories for me that I can’t expect a reader to share. I’m also happy that you use the term ‘domestic’, a much disputed term that’s sometimes applied lazily to the work of women poets and rightly seen as dismissive. It doesn’t get used as frequently about the work of Craig Raine or Christopher Reid, for example, where it would be helpful. For me the domestic is emblematic of shared experience, the place where wider social shifts are felt more personally.

The uncollected poems in Imagined Rooms aren’t precisely new. I couldn’t find a publisher for a long time and when the opportunity came for a book with Salt, I had quite a lot of work to choose from. In Keeping Time I published work from this decade alongside earlier poems, but excluded poems with specific reference (personal or public) to events of the earlier decades. That means that Imagined Rooms has perhaps more of that sense of record (covering the period 1971-97) you mentioned earlier.

And finally, what's next?

Over the last few years the forms have become more traditional: sonnet-shaped, ballad-like, even proto-pantoum poems. I think that kind of engagement with form will continue to develop, but I will still look out for ways of engaging with a continuity of experience, including the experience that comes from reading and responding to different art-forms, as well as what life and the times throw in our way.

50 Stories for Pakistan

2010-10-29T08:57:00.000+01:00

50 Stories for Pakistan

Helping the victims of the floods

Produced by www.bigbadmedia.com

Book Preview

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.

James Brookes, The English Sweats

2010-10-22T09:56:00.000+01:00

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.

Pocket Spellbook

2010-10-15T15:07:00.000+01:00

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.

Me on Radio Sheffield

2010-10-13T10:07:00.000+01:00

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

2010-10-13T09:28:00.001+01:00

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

2010-10-13T09:24:00.000+01:00

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.

News Flash*

2010-10-08T21:10:00.000+01:00

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

2010-10-08T14:40:00.000+01:00

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

2010-10-08T09:28:00.000+01:00

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.

Sheffield Poet Survives Portico Prize Cull

2010-10-05T14:33:00.000+01:00

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

2010-10-05T10:30:00.000+01:00

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

2010-10-05T09:49:00.001+01:00

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?

Harry Owen, Non-Dog

2010-10-04T10:56:00.004+01:00

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

Signed book + free short story

2010-10-01T08:34:00.000+01:00

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!

Peter Daniels, Work & Food

2010-09-30T11:26:00.001+01:00

Peter Daniels' Work & Food is a very small and very stylish pamphlet from Mulfran Press, about, well, work and food. It's illustrated by Moira Coupe. I've been reading it over the last day or so, with great pleasure. The effect is calming – the poems, realist but tender, and the varied and interesting illustrations, are like a tiny day off from it all.

Peter says, 'Leona Carpenter, who runs Mulfran Press, was involved with Vennel Press in the 1990s alongside Richard Price. Vennel published a series of “Brief Pleasures” which were A6 pamphlets with themes, one of which was my Blue Mice. I was very pleased when Leona was starting Mulfran with a similar series and was able to publish Work & Food. As the Mulfran Miniatures were to be illustrated, I asked my artist friend Moira Coupe. She was fun to work with, and also satisfyingly careful about getting the right relationship of image and words. Work & Food was a possible title for the “long awaited” collection, but at least one person reading the manuscript wasn’t happy with it. I thought a more precisely themed group of poems about work and food would go well as a pamphlet, and use the title which I did quite like. The pamphlets come with an envelope in a little transparent sleeve like a greetings card – you do need a display copy, though.'

You can buy Work & Food here. And here's a poem from it, with accompanying illustration:

The Guru’s Coat

I’m going outside in the evening rain:
it’s not cold yet, but the wind’s begun.

We’re allowed to borrow the Guru’s coat
without asking, and I need to use it

but people still wonder, “Does he know what he’s done?”,
with their looks that call me to justify the loan.

The coat’s a big blanket blazoned with his face:
I walk it up the night street, wear it on the bus.

I broke the Guru’s favourite pot.
I don’t know how to replace it

and I’m not satisfied to learn
that I’ve already been forgiven,

so I go looking: but this mission’s embarrassing.
Determined I’ll go home with something,

I think of a shop with pots in the window.
I saw it last Wednesday, and it isn’t there now.

Instead there’s a railing, like any in this town,
spread with a coat I can claim as my own:

a patchwork of red and yellow imitation furs,
a hood of silk, and buttons like stars,

but as I lift it, it snags on a spike
that rips it to pieces. And so I go back

and I hang up the Guru’s coat in silence
with nothing to show. The disciples don’t notice,

busy cooking pancakes on an old iron stove:
a thin coat of batter, that keeps us alive.

Peter Daniels, from Work & Food (Mulfran Press, 2010)

Matter Launch

2010-09-30T10:44:00.000+01:00

Three launch events for the wonderful Matter magazine to tell you about. Matter is associated with the creative writing MA at Sheffield Hallam University, and always contains some great work and looks spiffing too. You can find out more here.

The main launch is at Blackwell's at Sheffield Hallam on the 13th October from 7:15pm. Refreshments will be provided. There is also a reading at The Riverside in Sheffield on the 21st October at 7pm. This will be many of the same readers, but they'll be reading more of their work, rather than just what's in Matter. The London Launch is on 4th November at London Review Bookshop from 7pm.

Aldeburgh First Collection Prize Shortlist

2010-09-29T19:33:00.000+01:00

I'm very very happy and pinching myself with the news that The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street has been shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Wow.

You can read more about the book here and you could even buy it, among other places, here.

Massive Book Sale at Salt

2010-09-27T12:54:00.000+01:00

You can get 70% off selected books in Salt's Autumn sale – some great books in there. But be quick: the Salt online shop is about to close (because the bleeding Royal Mail is closing their local Post Office), so although you'll still be able to get wonderful Salt books from any of the usual on- or off-line retailers, too-good-to-be-true sales like this one will become, well, untrue. Get 'em while you can.

Stories for Pakistan

2010-09-27T11:32:00.000+01:00

I'm really happy to be included in Greg McQueen's book 50 Stories for Pakistan, in aid of the Red Cross Pakistan Floods Appeal.

Greg's last project of this sort, 100 Stories for Haiti, went from concept to publication in six weeks, so the Pakistan book should be in production pretty soon. I'll blog about it again when it's available to buy.

Greg says, “Once again I have found myself in the position where I cannot ignore the need to do something. This time it is Pakistan … The United Nations estimates that twenty million people have lost their homes as a result of the flooding that started last July. Add to this the thousands who have already lost their lives, and the thousands who will lose their lives because of famine and disease … And well, it is once again time to do something!”

Writing 'The Prisoner of Mansfield' was a bit of a jolly, really – writing a story of a single page is hardly doing something. So I'll be making my real contribution when the book comes out, by buying a copy – and you can help to make a difference by doing the same.

Sarah Hymas, Host

2010-09-22T12:53:00.001+01:00

I'm very pleased to feature the poet Sarah Hymas and her Waterloo Press collection Host.

Sarah Hymas lives in Lancaster and at Echo Soundings. She is a poet and playwright and was a short story writer (Closet Collection appeared way back in 1994). She's not afraid of celebrity: I Wish You Love, a conversation between Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich was commissioned and toured by Gambolling Arena in 2009. They are beginning production of her second commission: Annie's Song (a play featuring songs by John Denver). At the other end of the spectrum she performs with Mouthtrap, a trio of spoken word and vocal improvisers.

She's a born collaborator, and has worked/played/performed with other writers, musicians and artists; as such her work has appeared in magazines, anthologies, multimedia exhibits, dance videos, art books, lyrics, theatre programmes, and as an improvised opera, Flocking. She wrote her poetry collection, Host, pretty much all by herself, albeit with a bit of input from virtually everyone she knows.

She is also the editor of Flax, Lancaster Litfest’s publishing imprint and the NW co-ordinator of the Poetry School as well as a freelance workshop facilitator, tutor and coach.

"The poems that make up Host cluster around my interest in heritage: family heritage and all the weight and joys that brings; and the heritage of our place in the natural world. By this I mean our expectations, fantasies and narratives of going out for a walk or visiting places. Everything reverberates, hooks into what has happened previously – to us or to others. Lineage is like a fishing reel. Although I need to remember I can throw the trout back."

Godmother Tongue

She appears late, a nursemaid
weaning me onto waters from the Bay of Biscay.

She finger clicks through my loosening larynx,
clap-claps sea-lisping English.

My childhood stutter is shunned.
Boiled octopus on the tongue

sucks each syllable with chopped tentacles.
She embroiders my name with sunshine frills.

Wind turbines spin for her.
I want to hear her sing pearls,

string them into long stories of short weeks;
dismantle my politeness, cod quick.

Once I’m home we’ll laugh less in Galician,
garble like a wide river mouth. A leviathan,

she’ll be swallowed by my barnacle.
I whet our lips, ready for the struggle.

from Host, by Sarah Hymas

You can watch Richard Miles' film of the poem here.

And the winner is...

2010-09-20T09:41:00.000+01:00

I asked entrant to my competition to identify a factual error in the first few pages of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. The one I had in mind was in the poem 'Sand', which asserts that sand is 'the grain of dross in every pearl' – as I understand it, sand is very rarely the irritant which forms the basis of a pearl. But no one got that. Luckily, several entrants pointed out that Goethe didn't as far as we know, write:

Ja, ohne die Liebe wäre die Welt nicht die Welt,
aber Matlock wäre doch Matlock noch.

[Yes, without Love the world would not be the world,
but Matlock, of course, would still be Matlock.]

Those entrants went into the hat to win the prize, and the name that came out was – Joad Raymond. Congratulations to Joad, bad luck to everyone else, and thanks for entering!

Competition closed...

2010-09-18T19:17:00.002+01:00

... but today has been manic – the results and announcement of a winner will take place by, like, Monday morning at the latest...

Shoestring

2010-09-17T14:09:00.000+01:00

Yesterday's post brought a copy of Shoestring magazine, which has grown out of the writing programme at Keele University. It's got a rather nice A4 lifestyly feel and contains poetry, short prose, photography and illustrations, and two poems by me as well.

Longlisted for the Portico Prize

2010-09-15T13:56:00.000+01:00

I was just eating my lunch (yes – in front of the computer *shame*) when Elizabeth Baines got in touch to say I've been longlisted for the Portico Prize, which is awarded to 'books about, or set mainly in, the North of England'. I'm delighted and surprised in equal measure. The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street is one of only two poetry collections out of a longlist of 21.

Other names on the longlist include, oh you know, Simon Armitage, Reginald Hill, Jacob Polley... This is my first appearance on a prize longlist so please excuse my rapture!

James Sheard: Dammtor

2010-09-13T17:56:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted to feature a poem from James Sheard's new book, Dammtor. My copy has just arrived and I'm slavering to read it.

Jim Sheard was born in Cyprus in 1962 and spent his childhood abroad, mainly in Singapore and Germany. His first collection – Scattering Eva – was published in 2005 with Jonathan Cape, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2005 and the Glenn Dimplex New Writers’ Award 2006 in the poetry category.

Sheard's poetry is intricately worked, musical and thrilling. His influences are mainly European, and his work is largely unlike anything else in contemporary UK poetry. In Dammtor it becomes more noirish, bleaker and at times funnier too. Sheard challenges expectations about what a poem ought to do – a feature at work in the poem below, 'Others', whose wry horror I find absolutely wonderful. Dammtor is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for this Autumn. Click forth and buy it.

Others

There was a rule
and the rule said
that once was ok
and twice if you had to.
She laid the rule down
on our scarred table,
on our head-stained pillow -
she stirred it into our coffee
with a tarnished spoon.
She laughed, I laughed:
because once was ok,
and sometimes you had to
fuck them twice: to tie up
the frayed end;
to slap them down;
for pleasure, for vengeance.
Sometimes you had to,
had to, had to.
So for each one, once -
or twice if I had to -
I would bring strong tea
to her morning room, and kneel
to the slats of her low bed,
to her seaweedy scent,
to his surprise. She grinned,
I grinned. I laid the tray
on her lacquered table
and padded away. Because
once was ok, and twice
if you had to, had to, had to.
As for her, she would sit
in the kitchen’s dark, watch
the hallway, listen for my steps
and the steps of the others,
let smoke drift into the light.
She stayed silent. She had to.
She most liked the time when
my soaked sleep was deepest.
She would crouch on the floor,
finger the clothing and whisper.
I would wake, yes, but lie still.
I had to, had to, had to.

James Sheard

Competition: win a copy of my book

2010-09-08T10:13:00.000+01:00

OK, it's deliberate mistake time. I'm running a competition, with the winner getting a signed copy of my poetry collection The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. Here's what you have to do:

Go to the book's webpage and download the PDF sampler from the link.

Somewhere in the poems featured in the PDF there's a factual inaccuracy. I'm not talking about a typo – one of the poems says something that isn't true. Identify that error and email me at tw@tonywilliamsdesign.co.uk (or DM me via Twitter or message me on Facebook). Please don't put your entry in the comments stream, but if you're having problems emailing me, you could let me know via the comments (and I'll send a bad kipper to my ISP).

At the end of next week (i.e. on Friday 17th September) I'll put any and all correct entries into a hat and send a signed copy of the book to the winner.

I've considered the possibility that there might be more than one factual error in the PDF - if someone finds a new one, I'll include that entry in the hat. But no entries for typos or plain bad metaphors...

Here are some links to reviews of the book to encourage you to enter...

Two Shindigs for your diary

2010-08-31T09:22:00.000+01:00

Babel and Morgan

2010-08-19T15:53:00.001+01:00

Some beautiful writing from Isaac Babel:

The freedom round me has lain down in the fields, the grass rustles all over the world, the heavens swing about above me like a concertina with many keyboards, and the heavens in the province of Stavropol, my lads, are very blue.

Meanwhile there comes the news that Edwin Morgan has died – a poet whose work I know disgracefully little. Must read more. Always, must read more.

'something like a Tardis or magic purse'

2010-08-12T12:55:00.000+01:00

Jon Stone reviews The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street for Dr Fulminare, and says some very nice things about it too, like:

Just when the picture of Williams as terror-oracle of the windy towns seems almost complete, you start discovering precise, carefully managed descriptive pieces...

'Terror-oracle of the windy towns' – I like that; maybe I'll add it to my signature...

Thurston, Sheppard and Rowland read in Manchester

2010-08-03T14:21:00.001+01:00

Yeichs

2010-08-02T15:02:00.002+01:00

Another book to buy – Michael Hofmann's been translating the wonderful Gunther Eich.

Da

2010-08-02T09:07:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned it before, but I've spent the last week or so rereading this book and it's absolutely superb: Robert Chandler's Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida. George Szirtes reviewed it here. It's a delight.

Potted Heid

2010-07-27T16:29:00.000+01:00

Here's the new film I've cooked up. Potted heid is the Scottish term for what I'd call brawn (a kind of meatloaf made from a pig's head).

I seem to have mucked up by leaving a black band on the left-hand side – no idea how or if it can be rectified in iMovie. If anyone knows, I'd be glad to find out...

Potted Heid from Tony Williams on Vimeo.

Alan Payne's Exploring the Orinoco

2010-07-27T09:30:00.000+01:00

Pamphlets are in the ascendancy these days. If you want to read one that shows off the benefit of the form, try Alan Payne's Exploring the Orinoco, a winner in the 2009 Smith/Doorstop Book & Pamphlet Competition. Alan grew up in the Caribbean before moving to Yorkshire, and the collection is structured to reflect this movement. It begins with poems that look back at his childhood before the pivotal poem, 'Colombie', which enacts his arrival in the UK:

Fabled Plymouth.
And the journey north, by train,
to Apperley Bridge.
There, in that no-man's-land,
I tasted pickled onions.
Assumed a stranger's skin.
A worsted suit.

Thereafter the poems mainly inhabit Yorkshire, though they bring the Caribbean with them. It's rare to see a collection centred on place, but on two places, so that they reflect each other. It's a strange and interesting effect, and a coherent, likable pamphlet.

'Expertly manoeuvred' misc.

2010-07-26T15:14:00.000+01:00

Various basically unrelated thing to, er, relate to you today...

I've just finished reading Tania Hershman's fabulous The White Road, a short story collection I bought a week or so to do my bit for Salt's JustOneBook campaign (and because I wanted to read the book too, of course...). They're billed as science-related, but I didn't really notice that - it was just a very entertaining book of stories, some longish, other very, very short.

Next from Salt I've ordered Short Circuit, a guide to writing short stories, which I hope will come in handy as I move into writing fiction. I've just had my first acceptance, in fact, from Fuselit, of a tiny 300-word story. So that's encouraging and jolly and so on.

The latest issue of The Dark Horse is out now, and causing some controversy on the internet (well, on Facebook) over John Lucas's review of Roddy Lumsden's Identity Parade anthology, which Lucas doesn't think much of. Fight! Fight! etc. The review seems misjudged to me. Much more thrillingly from my point of view, there's a substantial review of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street by Charlotte Newman. She says stuff like:

Tony Williams shows all the signs of being an eighteenth-century Romantic, though this romanticism is infused with a postmodern twist.

and

Williams avoids sounding glib because his particular brand of eccentricity is not laboured but genuinely ruminative and tentatively philosophical... Williams is a purveyor of the modern pastoral. The pastoral for him is not the place for mere bucolics, but for an examination of diverse landscapes, whether that be physical urban and rural landscapes, or those emotional, intellectual, and linguistic landscapes explored by poetry.

Which is to say, Newman says lots of approving things, but what's particularly gratifying is that she says things that show her reading of the book matches my writing of it, as it were. I'm pathetically grateful!

'The art of nowhere'

2010-07-23T10:54:00.000+01:00

David Green generously and entertainingly reviews my book on his blog, saying 'it's a great bonus to be allowed to think one is saving the poetry publishing industry single-handedly while, in fact, Salt's renewed appeal has done me a favour by prompting me to buy this engaging book.'

So you could do worse than buy the book and help save Salt as part of the JustOneBook campaign!

Antony Rowland's Birkenau

2010-07-19T11:42:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post to tell you about Birkenau, Antony Rowland's new pamphlet from the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press (scroll down towards the bottom). You might be able to guess the subject matter from the title – almost, anyway. It's kind of about the death camps, but more about the experience of visiting the death camps, of being a Holocaust tourist:

a building is talking
in loop German über
your morbid interest in

kitchen overload

The poem is accompanied with images. It's very good - buy it. Antony's brilliant Salt collection, The Land of Green Ginger, is also still available and will bring you delight, so buy that as well.

Simultaneous swearing.... I mean blogging

2010-07-17T10:00:00.001+01:00

Foul language alert, kids.

There's this thang called the Simultaneous Blogging Experiment, organised by Mairi Sharratt, where a bunch of poetry bloggers blog on the same topic at the same moment to, er, see what happens. If it makes the world fall off its axis, sorry (but then you wouldn't be reading this anyway). I've written a piece below which actually focuses on some poetry. But the topic is 'swear', and it occurs to me that maybe everyone will just post a big fat swear word, so here goes:
KNACKERS
These are the other bloggers taking part. Have a look at what they wrote. Maybe it'll be like a slam, and people will vote for the best one (or more amusingly for the most foul-mouthed):

Mairi Sharratt - A lump in the Throat http://www.alumpinthethroat.wordpress.com

Caroline Mary Crew - Flotsam http://www.carolinemarycrew.wordpress.com

Colin Will - Sunny Dunny http://sunnydunny.wordpress.com/

Andrew Philip - Tonguefire http://tonguefire.wordpress.com/tonguefire/

Sally Evans - desktopsallye
http://www.desktopsallye.com/page16.htm

Kevin Cadwallender - Cadwallender
http://cadwallenderk.blogspot.com/

Claire Askew - One Nights Stanzas
http://www.onenightstanzas.com/

Russell Jones - Russell Jones
http://www.poetrusselljones.blogspot.com

Alastair Cook - Written in my hand
http://www.alastaircook.blogspot.com/

Martaerre Sobrecueva - de la poesia y otras disciplinas en palabras
http://miraletras.blogspot.com/

And here's what I actually have to say on the topic – in fact just a brief appreciation of a coupe of lines in a single poem:

John Stammers has a well-known poem called 'On Love', which is well known not only because it is a good poem but because it uses the word 'cunt'. It's notable because Stammers' use of the word isn't significantly ironic or dramatic. We have to speak conventionally of the poem's speaker, so in that sense it is a monologue. But the rest of the poem doesn't give us much reason to suppose the voice is substantially ironic: it's couched in the same sophisticated, bleak, smart lyrical voice that Stammers uses elsewhere. (Maybe that pile of adjectives wasn't quite right, but you get the idea.)

When he comes to use the word 'cunt', it isn't used as an insult, just as a word. The lovers slowly give in to their situation, until 'what we uncovered was all our love/opened up like a beautiful cunt before us.'

It's striking how Stammers uses 'all our love' and 'beautiful' alongside the swear word. Of course there is a contrast involved. But those other bits of language also serve to underwrite the sincerity of 'cunt' by insisting that it's being used in all lyrical seriousness.

The Waste Books

2010-07-13T09:02:00.001+01:00

Years ago I had a selection of Lichtenberg's aphorisms in the toilet of a shared house. There was also a massive pile of newspapers in there (yes, Liam used to...) and when they were cleared up it must have gone with them. I mourned it. It was some years before I got hold of another copy – this time with the title by which it is better known, The Waste Books (rather apt, in retrospect). Here's a few of the entries, from notebook F:

They sneezed, wheezed, coughed and made two other kinds of sound for which we have no words in German.

The frogs were much happier under King Log than they were under King Stork.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is unlikely to look out.

Whenever he spoke every mousetrap in the neighborhood snapped shut. [what does that even mean? But it's good]

A bound book of blank paper has a charm all of its own. Paper that has not yet lost its virginity and is still decked in the color of innocence is always preferable to paper that has been used.

The publisher has had him hanged in effigy in front of his work.

In Goettingen there is no formal theatre, to be sure, but that only makes it all the easier to put together a comedy for oneself: a scene here, a scene there.

Poems with Fred

2010-07-08T21:43:00.000+01:00

Today Fred and I wrote some poems. Here are two of them:

I am a pig and I'm in a poem
in Dolgol Dolgol
I like to eat pasta shells
and straw, and pasta shells

In Dolgol Dolgol there are
so many pigs
I've got a lentil
and it tastes nice

I am a brown pig
and I live in Dolgol Dolgol
but the other pigs
really eat just straw

*

A sheep
I mean a fox
I mean a monkey
lived in the jungle
(I mean just the monkey)

Fab(cov)er(s)*

2010-07-06T10:05:00.000+01:00

There's an interesting post here about the production of cover artwork for Faber's reissues of famous poetry collections. Interesting mainly because Faber's covers have come in for some criticism in recent years (some people love the minimalist tendency, others loathe it) – but these are just fabulous. I covet the books even though I already own other editions.

*Worst post title I have ever produced

'Derbyshire at the centre of a universe'

2010-07-05T09:56:00.001+01:00

Sean O'Brien reviews my book in the latest issue of Poetry Review:

'The Marvellian title poem is stunning. To read Williams’s work with the best of the others here [in Identity Parade and Voice Recognition] is to be convinced afresh that this is an exciting time for poetry.'

Earn Your Milk and win your salt

2010-07-05T09:37:00.000+01:00

Chris at Salt Publishing asks what Salt books people would recommend and why. Well, I'd recommend Tom Raworth's Earn Your Milk: Collected Prose, for no other reason (and is there a better one?) than I'm reading it at the moment and really enjoying it. The bulk of the book is a piece called A Serial Biography. It's a series of ambiguously linked paragraphs telling a bunch of narratives and apparently mixing fiction and non-fiction... Pretty much any way I describe it undersells the reality, which is funny and gripping and provocative and clever.

And now you have an extra reason to go and buy it because Salt are running a summer raffle - every time you buy a book from their online shop before the end of August you'll be entered for a chance to win the next 20 books they publish. Hurray! If you don't fancy the Raworth there's always a billion others to choose from. The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street is still available!

It was the best of times

2010-07-05T09:08:00.000+01:00

Time for a post-holiday round-up post. So, just back from Somerset and Cornwall, stopping off on the way to read at the Poetry Cafe in Reading hosted by the ebullient AF Harrold. I had a good time and enjoyed the open mic readers, and was benevolently heckled by my own cousin.

Holiday reading was AF Harrold's Wodehouseish, Pratchetty comic novel The Education of Epitome Quirkstandard, Coetzee's amazing short novel Foe, the first three chapters of A Tale of Two Cities (may try again another time), and Mark Kurlansky's surprisingly good history of Cod.

Peony Moon

2010-06-16T11:50:00.000+01:00

The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street is featured on Michelle McGrane's Peony Moon. Thanks Michelle!

Reading Reading 18th June

2010-06-11T09:09:00.000+01:00

So, next Friday night many of you will be in the Berkshire area and sick of football. Luckily, I'm reading at the Poets' Cafe in Reading, hosted by poetry superhero AF Harrold. Details:

Friday 18^th June
Poets’ Café at South Street Arts Centre, South Street, Reading, RG1 4QU
8pm for 8.30pm
£6/£4

In addition to the normal open mic part of the evening, in which everyone and anyone is welcome to share a piece off their work with the warm and welcoming crowd, we have a special guest reading from Tony Williams, whose latest and first collection On The Corner Of Arundel Lane And Charles Street has recently been published by Salt Publishing. Here’s a nice little review from the TLS http://blog.saltpublishing.com/2010/04/23/ben-wilkinson-on-tony-williams-in-the-tls/.

www.readingarts.com/southstreet/event.asp?id=SX98CF-A781AD28

Home again, home again

2010-06-08T08:56:00.000+01:00

Just back from a strange week's holiday in Lincolnshire – mainly made strange by the fact that I had to depart for two job interviews during the course of it. Didn't get either job, but did get to spend a large proportion of my hols sitting on hot trains in a suit. Bof.

But I have also returned with a full first draft of a new poem – one in which the conceit is clear and the meaning unparaphrasable (i.e. one with much promise).

Sheard long poem in LRB

2010-05-20T13:37:00.001+01:00

This week's LRB contains 'The Strandperle Notebook', a long poem by James Sheard. Buy and read!

Sonnet Elbow

2010-05-19T09:09:00.000+01:00

So there's a poet-in-residence at Wimbledon this year. Cripes.

On an unrelated note, have a look at this review for Matt Nunn's marvellous and eminently buyable Sounds in the Grass.

Poems to keep you chilled this summer

2010-05-15T11:02:00.000+01:00

James Sheard has been posting some poems from his forthcoming collection Dammtor – sinister and wonderful. Read them, and then sellotape a reminder to your head to buy the book when it comes out later this year.

The Matter of the Universe

2010-05-10T09:58:00.000+01:00

Have a look at Matter magazine, which is associated with the MA Writing at Sheffield Hallam and is also completely spiffing!

Farmer Willum's Election Antidote

2010-05-09T21:33:00.000+01:00

Misspelling William is all the rage; but I don't think Richard Jefferies' host in his piece on snipe shooting will lose any sleep, or votes, over it. Some good writing from 1879 to soothe your mind:

The low whitewashed walls of the house were of a dull yellowish hue from the beating of the weather. They supported a vast breadth of thatched roof drilled by sparrows and starlings. Under the eaves the swallows' nests adhered, and projecting shelves were fixed to prevent any inconvenience from them. Some of the narrow windows were still darkened with the black boarding put up in the days of the window tax.

In the courtyard a number of stout forked stakes were used for putting the dairy buckets on, after being cleaned, to dry. No attempt was made to separate the business from the inner life of the house. Here in front these oaken buckets, scoured till nearly white, their iron handles polished like silver, were close under the eyes of any one looking out. By the front door a besom leaned against the wall that every comer might clean the mud from his boots; and you stepped at once from the threshold into the sitting-room. A lane led past the garden, if that could be called a lane which widened into a field and after rain was flooded so deeply as to be impassable to foot passengers.