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Wednesday 31 October 2012

Balancing the Books: An Interview with Dennis Harrison from the Albion Beatnik


We take a break from our series on emerging foreign poets to pay our tribute to the Albion Beatnik book store, who are about to stage several poetry readings in Oxford. Judi Sutherland interviews their man-o'-the-moment Dennis Harrison. Any of you who happen to be in or around Oxfordshire these days, be sure to go and check them out!


Life is tough for booksellers these days, but one famous independent bookshop and cultural hub in Oxford is working extremely hard to boost sales and build its brand, with a programme of poetry readings throughout November. Judi Sutherland interviews Dennis Harrison from the Albion Beatnik, which sells a range of books, both new and second hand.

Dennis, why is bookselling so tough these days?

It isn’t only the rise of online book sales and e-book readers. I’ve been in the business thirty years now and I’d say that the book is no longer central to cultural life. Having said that, our poetry section is doing well.  Poetry books have remained tactile – those that sell well are also beautiful objects in their own right.

How do you choose the poetry you sell?

I don’t come from an academic standpoint. Some modern poetry I find difficult, and the best way to get to grips with is sometimes to learn it. My tastes are quite eclectic, I like Jamie McKendrick’s poems, and John Hegley’s rhymes are funny. I hope it isn’t old-fashioned to say I love John Fuller’s work for its form and construction. I buy in a lot of American poetry, and it flies off the shelves.  I’m not sure why that is (maybe the name of the shop? - JS), but it has something to do with the tactile quality I was talking about; American  books seem to be beautifully produced, and some British presses could learn from that.

The poetry scene is bewilderingly large.  I sell contemporary and local poets like Bernard O’Donoghue, Jamie McKendrick and Vahni Capildeo, plus all the 20th Century warhorses such as Eliot, Hughes, Heaney.  My choice might be rashly termed serendipitous.

In general, I think there is probably too much poetry being produced these days and the quality seems patchy. Some presses (who shall remain nameless) appear to publish anything they are sent… There’s probably not enough filtering by editors, but I suppose it is hard for publishers to know how to back a winner.

You put on a lot of readings in the shop.  How did that evolve?

It’s been a gradual process. To begin with, people came to me and asked if they could put on readings, but for our new series, ‘Sounds of Surprise’, I was quite pro-active, which allowed me to be more choosy; I’m aiming for consistency and high quality. This time I’ve done a lot of the asking. Not everything that reads well on the page sounds good out loud (fishes out ‘The Same Life Twice’ by Frank Kuppner) - this is fascinating, but I’m not sure how well it would go down as a reading!

The Albion Beatnik is a natural space for poetry; the wooden floors help with the acoustics. We can move back some of the free-standing shelves and put in benches, giving us an audience limit of about seventy people. I’ve always loved jazz, so we have some musical events too.

What are the highlights of ‘Sounds of Surprise’?

There’s a lot I’m looking forward to. We have something happening almost every night through into early December. Liz Berry and Isabel Dixon have both read here before.  I loved Liz’s work and I’m delighted that she will be reading here this time with Kevin Crossley-Holland. Not many people are familiar with Kevin Ireland, but he’s almost like the Larkin of New Zealand, and because Kevin knows Fleur Adcock, we will have the two of them reading together. David Herd and Simon Smith will be reading from their collaboration ROTE/THRU, with music from The-Quartet – that will be an exciting evening.

Will the readings boost your sales?

Not really. I don’t want to sound like a natural depressive, but putting on a poetry evening is a lot of effort to sell another five or six copies.  But it raises the shop’s profile, and it’s great fun to do.  People love reading here – it works.

And how does the future look to you?

The jury is out on independent bookshops.  People tell me that the future is dead but I don’t think that’s true – the book trade will adapt.  Shops will have to work harder at presenting themselves and fitting what they do into a commercial framework.  The world is always changing. And if the internet ever crashes – I’m quids in.

The Albion Beatnik Bookstore is at 34, Walton Street, Jericho, Oxford, OX1 3AA.

Details of the Sounds of Surprise programme can be found here.

Tuesday 30 October 2012

Language and Shape: A Judge's Report


Today the National Poetry Competition blog tour arrives at the Sidekick site for its seventh and final stop. We're delighted to host the following short article by renowned poet and critic George Szirtes. Remember: the deadline for the competition is in one day. Entry details are here.


Language and Shape: A Judge's Report

Reading individual poems among a mass of others is not like reading a book. Reading a book is reading a poet: judging competitions is reading poems. The poems have to stand out. The best poems - usually forty or fifty - do so for two main reasons: language and shape.

The poem will be fascinated by language, not in an overt or flashy way, but so you feel the words have come to the poet clear and fresh. Something will have struck the poets in a new way, tipped them slightly off balance, tipped them into language that is at some level a surprise.

A  poem is also a shape. It is a thought or feeling that has moved through language to attain an all but ideal form that takes your breath away. All but ideal is important. A shape isn’t a box that clicks shut. The shape is something that is capable of flight. It is a potential.

There are competent poems that have grace or originality of thought or feeling but don’t fully excite. They seem to be satisfied with elegant turns of phrase and some neat observations. They tend to concentrate on experiences that are in themselves touching or humane but insist on a certain propriety. They are substantial and decent but are never really off-balance.

Subject matter is secondary.  Being a good human being is secondary. Being full of passion is secondary. Being right is secondary. Being clever is secondary.

Language and shape are primary, or so it seems in the heat of judging when graces and virtues look to cancel each other out.

You choose the forty or fifty, you lose confidence, you grow whims, you lose concentration, you experience sudden blinding clarities of judgment that turn out to be wrong. Eventually you emerge with five or six and try to put them into order. You could still be wrong. You could still have missed the great poem among the good ones.  But here are some that seem gorgeously off balance, almost flying, whose language happens to have flown in, fresh as light. Or so you think. You are only human.

Then you face your fellow judges and hope.



George Szirtes has probably written thirteen books of poetry but by some counts it's fourteen. Reel (2004) was awarded the T S Eliot Prize, for which his next single volume, The Burning of the Books (2009) was also shortlisted. His new book, Bad Machine will be published by Bloodaxe in January 2013. Bloodaxe also published his New and Collected Poems (2008) which weighed in at 1 kilo. It is now available as an e-book that weighs 1 kilo less. He is also a translator of poetry and fiction from the Hungarian and has edited a number of anthologies, as well as the Summer 2012 issue of Poetry Review.

He has judged the National Poetry Competition twice, the first time with Jonathan Barker and Edwin Morgan in 1988, the second time with Deryn Rees-Jones and Sinead Miorrissey in 2010. He has also judged the Faber Prize, the Eliot Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and many other prizes. His full-bottomed judge's wig is currently at the cleaners.

Sunday 28 October 2012

Sunday Review: Jonathan Steffen's Exposure

posted by the Judge



It's Sunday, and Sunday derives from the original Greek Sunday, meaning 'a time for reviews'. To honour this ancient order, here at DrFulminare we publish our review of the day: Exposure by Jonathan Steffen, a bold attempt at synthesis of the poetic and photographic arts. Harry Giles is the man to tell us if it works.

It's a bit late in the day to wish you a great Sunday, so have a great Sunday evening, whether at home or in da street.

Saturday 27 October 2012

Something for Halloween: Psycho Poetica!


Arriving ahead of schedule! Simon Barraclough's multi-poet extravaganza Psycho Poetica is now available to buy from the Sidekick website, and will be orderable from bookshops soon! Illustrated with stills from the film, and presented in full colour, with all 12 originally commissioned poems, plus bonus 'alternative takes'. Go here for more details.

Wednesday 24 October 2012

Emerging Foreign Poets #2: Louise Dupré

written by the Judge.

  
Poetry in French, when it is not from France, tends to receive little attention. The preponderance of the ‘real’ French intellectual culture may have a natural way of eclipsing those around them, in particular their numerous historical colonies in Africa, Asia and Canada. The latter represents an interesting case-study – we are so used to thinking that literature in English is mostly produced outside of England (just like literature in Spanish is mostly produced outside of Spain), that Anglophone Canadian writers have often replicated their success internationally. Names such as those of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje or Alice Munro are familiar to high-school students all over Europe. On the other hand, how many Francophone Canadian writers can you name? They are so under-represented, in fact, that I think it’s worth bending the rules a little bit for this entry in our series. Though ‘emerging’ is not necessarily a synonym for ‘young’, I expect it may crease a few brows to learn that today's poet was born in 1949.

After picking up Louise Dupré’s most recent poetry book Plus Haut Que Les Flammes (Higher than the Flames), winner of the Grand Prix Quebecor du Festival International de Poésie 2011, I have been given a taste of what her rather obscure literary world can produce. It certainly made for an interesting introduction. The book is not a collection but a single long poem, just topping one hundred pages, divided in four parts. At the heart of it are a woman’s meditations as she puts her baby to sleep, torn between the anguish and violence of past history on one side, and the sense of hope simultaneously afforded and demanded by the child on the other. It is a surprisingly readable text, partly because the choice of form is such a natural free-fall: each section is composed of a single long sentence drawing on and on, with every brief stanza (usually two or three lines) connected by endless conjunctions. An example will give a better idea of what it reads like, so I’ve included a small extract from Part III, of my own translation, at the bottom of this article.

Dupré’s book makes for a fresh reading experience from the start. There is a certain apprehension that she may just mess it all up when she first references Auschwitz, but the theme and question of concentration camps comes up periodically in her poem, and eventually becomes one of the book’s central motifs. It is handled remarkably well. The first of the book’s four parts makes it a point of counterpoising the (hi)story of Auschwitz to the fairy tales that she tells her child – two issues that are in turn reflected in the child’s double nature as something extremely lovely and extremely fragile. The central conflict in both cases seems to be that between an unacceptable history and an indispensable future.

As the mother puts the child to sleep in part two, and then wakes to console the child from a nightmare, we follow the poet into a more careful construction of what we may call an ideology of the future (or should I say a deconstruction? It is hard to tell whether we are dealing with an architect or with a subtle arsonist here). For brevity, we may refer to such an ideology of the future simply as ‘the Dream,’ though this is not a term used by Dupré herself, especially not in relation to the ever-too-wakeful mother. Her argument is led to a solid and interesting conclusion: that the Dream, and the sentiment of hope for the child, are necessary for the mother, and not for the child him/herself. Without this concern for the Other, she herself cannot withstand the burden of history. At the very least, she cannot make sense of it, as her memory remains 'a white frame over a white background / a terrifyingly abstract painting.'

Part III comprises a series of meditations on the concept of pain, with emphasis on the salvational ‘caress’ of the child. There are some gorgeous metaphors in this section, though one is left wondering how Dupré will close such an ambitious and momentous discussion on the relationship between motherhood and history. Unfortunately, the ending is the only bit that is somewhat disappointing. Dupré speaks of the ‘dance’ as the way of salvation, the method by which we redeem our present from past and future history. Obviously the dance is a metaphor, standing in for a type of performative gesture, an active rather than passive way of engaging with our history. That poetry should be an example of what the ‘dance’ represents is suggested with a certain sleight of hand. The first three sections all open by discussing some mysterious ‘poem’ coming to the mother from within, and the fourth begins with the lines, ‘And you want to learn / how to dance / on the calcinated rope / of words.’ In conclusion, then, Dupré responds to the problem of history by means of a salvational aestheticism.


In my opinion this paradigm is hollow. Aesthetical answers do not satisfy ethical questions, as the first historical precedent of the Book of Job exampled as far back as three-thousand years ago. Moreover, it misses the point that Auschwitz, culturally speaking, represents precisely an attack on the precondition of the aesthetic – something so brutal and intolerable that you cannot write poetry (or ‘dance’) anymore. In the words of Primo Levi (who in turn was paraphrasing Adorno), ‘[a]fter Auschwitz there can be no more poetry, unless on Auschwitz.’ That Dupré should demonstrate little or no awareness of this historical impasse is an important shortcoming for someone who wishes to bring the problem of the holocaust into her meditations.

I don’t want to overstress this type of weakness in PHQF because it’s a very common one in contemporary poetry – like many of her peers, Dupré can point to the problem with great lucidity, but she is less able when it comes to showing us a solution.

All that said, and aside from the final let-down, the execution on the whole is very strong. The idea of projecting the timeless historical problem through the mother-son relationship gives it a visceral and original representation, and the choice (and use) of form is brilliant. I cannot speak for the rest of Quebecois poetry, but this little volume is certainly one worth hunting down.


Plus Haut Que Les Flammes, extract from Part III.

no story, no face

your memory is a frame
white on white background

a terrifyingly abstract
painting

a regret
that you scratch with the end of the nail

down to the blood
of words

because words also leave
fragments under
the skin

when the finger touches
the deadwood
of language

and the ghosts that sleep there [...]

Find out who our Emerging Foreign Poet #3 is next Wednesday.

Sunday 21 October 2012

Sunday Review: Idra Novey's Exit, Civilian

posted by the Judge


This Sunday, Rowyda Amin reviews Exit, Civilian, by Idra Novey, selected for the National Poetry Series in the US of A. You can find the review here. An entire collection dedicated to the American prison system - you don't get poetry much more socially engaged than this.

Have a great Sunday!

Saturday 20 October 2012

Kirsty's book is loose - catch it quick!

Never Never Never Come Back is out now from Salt Publishing! Available initially in a limited hardback run, with gorgeous hotfoiling under a dust jacket featuring artwork by the very talented Matt Latchford.

Here's the spiel!

Don’t go over the hill, or look too long into the well, or go carousing with strangers, or you’ll never never never come back. With the haunting quality of nursery rhymes but the complexity of a dark and smoky wine, these poems brood on absence and abandonment, outcasts and anomalies, monstrosity and mistakes.

At the heart of the collection are a suite of tightly focused, often impressionistic character studies ranging from cannibals to schoolgirls, but Irving also finds space in the shadows for desperate love songs to pilots and robots, satiric odes to tyrants and deft engagements with popular and literary culture. Whether turning the features of a pinball table into an emotional debris field or recounting unnerving sexual encounters, these are rich and rangy poems of a defiantly unusual character that linger in the mind as much for their controlled dissonances as their uncompromising subject matter.


Huge thanks to Salt Publishing's Chris Hamilton-Emery and my editor Roddy Lumsden. I could not be more stoked.

Stay tuned for launch details!

For review copies, please contact me on kirsten.irving@gmail.com.

Friday 19 October 2012

Two new articles

I've been asked to write quite a few short articles on poetry and personal experiences recently. Here's two that have emerged more or less simultaneously:

On Cynicism, published on the Magma blog.
Placing in the National: How it Did and Didn't Change My Life, published as part of the National Poetry Competition blog tour on E-Verse Radio. (Also includes a poem).

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Emerging Foreign Poets #1: Marianna Geyde

The first in a series of articles in which the Judge discusses some of the most interesting young poets writing in languages other than English. Today's candidate comes from Russia.

Born in Moscow in 1980, Marianna Geyde is yet another entry in the apparently endless list of precocious Russian writers, from Irina Denezhkina to Alina Vituchnovskaja. I'm going to introduce her by turning straight to the opening of one of her poems. It has no title, and the translation is my own:

may my hand be crumbled, like Sunday bread,
in twelve and two phalanxes, ordered
five by five with shields carved from bone,
and may all remain this way, until peace comes and
my bread once more turns into my hand.

I've singled out this stanza because it demonstrates, I think, the biblical economy of her language. When I say 'biblical,' I am not referring to the taste of her imagery (or, not just). It's easy to say that the first and last line recall Christ's miraculous crumbling of the bread-loaves, reversing the roles of hand and bread (and by extension, agent and object). It's also obvious that the line 'and may all remain this way, until peace comes' is alike to biblical verse in both syntax and style, including the opening with the conjunction 'and.' What I mean, over and above all of this, is her ability to charge very simple words with profound symbolic meaning, and then sustain that charge throughout.

The resonance between the first and last line, which seem to attract and repel each other magnetically, containing the rest of the stanza within their field, leaves room for a great deal of interpretation. The 'hand' is metonymic for the poet's agency, and the mutation into 'Sunday bread' (meaning festive bread) suggests the same agency's surrender into a sacred order which is at once religious, cultural, and historical (even domestic, as bread has special connotations of hospitality in Russia). The term 'Sunday' recalls Christian traditions (mass, for instance), but it also has teleological implications as the last day of the week, and thus the last step of the cycle. So surrendering the 'hand' into the bread of Sunday may refer to the hand's ultimate destination - the agent (and its actions) ending their journey in sublimation with an historical identity. Read this way, the extract is biblical even without being Christian (there are, note well, no explicit references to Christianity anywhere in the poem), in the sense that its choice of words suggests great richness of meaning without imposing any specific reading on the receptor. In fact, the whole point of the term 'bread' may be its polyfunctionality, turning the mysterious, alchemic last stanza (with the return to the concept of the cycle), into an equally sophisticated open end. The bread is turned back into the hand (or at least takes its role, as the word притворится means to transform but also to pretend, to act), returning harmony between agent and object, poet and Christ, present and myth. I shall refrain from bringing the whole central part of the stanza (much less the whole poem) into the discussion as well, but hopefully the brightness and conceptual fertility of Geyde's work has been aptly exposed.

Geyde is not, of course, the only artist to deploy this type of intertextual sensitivity. Even restraining our search to her own country we find other poets engaging with mytho-theological themes (Olga Grebennikova, for example). But she is the only one I have encountered who can execute it with such technical simplicity. The stanza above includes no erudite references to saints or historical events or past writers, of the type we so commonly find in modern and contemporary poetry. There is no recondite vocabulary at all. And the turn of phrase is a simple one, which lends itself to being followed serenely.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that she is in any way bland, or unwilling to play games with words - the two lines immediately following our extract are as follows:

you, palm-tree branch on the palm,
palm on the palm and palm-tree branch,

Here the playfulness of the verse doesn't cloud the symbolic richness (again) of the words themselves. The lines suggest a sort of subjectivity falling into itself, as the palm holds itself and also the 'branching' of itself, and then turns back into the branch. This convolution is staged in a relationship between flesh and plant which seems to involve the idea of nature, even while suggesting that nature may itself be a construct held in the 'palm.' It is also expressed rather musically, though this aspect of the verse goes beyond my powers of translation.


Having introduced Geyde's verse in this article, I feel I should add - on the run - a note on another poet. Readers who are a little familiar with contemporary Russian poetry may ask themselves why, when choosing to introduce a representative from that country, I should have turned to Marianna Geyde when the most obvious choice is Boris Ryzhy. The latter, born in 1974, was a geophysicist from the Urals, apparently even a member of a number of geological expeditions to the North. Published in magazines by the age of twenty, he hung himself at twenty-seven and left behind a disordered collection of brilliant, candid and utterly heart-breaking poems. His reputation as one of Russia's greatest contemporary poets is already considerable.

The reason I chose to write about someone other than Ryzhy is that he probably doesn't need it - a film about his life has already been made, and his legend seems to be growing every year. If a selection of his work were to appear in English within the next decade, I would be the last to be surprised. Marianna Geyde, on the other hand, is a young poet of extraordinary promise who could remain anonymous for many decades if no-one takes the bother to research her (and possibly translate her works). And while Ryzhy's verse is poignant precisely because it is relatively straightforward, Geyde instead develops this dense apocalyptic symbolism along the lines of Blake or Rimbaud that could provoke endless readings and debates. The only cause of complaint, really, is that her work is so infuriatingly difficult to find. Of the half-dozen poems that I have managed to put my hands on, none suggests that her oeuvre as a whole may be weaker than that selection, but that can only be ascertained if someone translates her books of verse, and maybe bothers to publish them in the UK. Anyone willing to give it a go?

Find out who our Emerging Foreign Poet #2 is going to be next Wednesday.

Sunday 14 October 2012

Sunday Review: Maria Taylor's Melanchrini

posted by the Judge


Time for our Sunday review! This week it's Maria Taylor's turn to get under our spotlight in our review of her collection Melanchrini, a book of poems heavily concerned with mythology and memory.

The book is published by Nine Arches Press and the review is expertly handled by Anthony Adler.

Enjoy!

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Resurrecting the Quagga: an interview with Kate Noakes

interviewed by Judi Sutherland

Today, Eyewear launches two new books in London: Night Journey by Richard Lambert, and Cape Town by Kate Noakes. Pop by for the launch if you're around - details, including time & place, can be found here. Dr Fulminare whets your appetite for the event by publishing an exchange with Kate Noakes, interviewed for you by Judi Sutherland. Enjoy!



Kate Noakes is a poet who lives a two-centre life. For twelve days in every fortnight, she is a partner in a major law firm in Paris; for the other two, she is a wife and mum at her family home in Reading. Happily, she still finds time to write.

How did life get so complicated?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this; I was made redundant from my UK job due to the financial crisis.  The options open to me were all based abroad, so I took up a role in South Africa with a view to bringing my family out to join me, but things didn’t go according to plan. I couldn’t go out on my own; I even had to join a hiking group to discover the walking trails around Table Mountain. The concierge in my apartment block was an armed guard. After making a tough decision, I quit my job and came home, and then I found a role as a partner in a major law firm in Paris.

But your experience in South Africa was good for your writing…

Yes, it was poetically very fruitful; my new collection Cape Town, out in October from Eyewear, is all about my time in Africa. One of the images in the book is of the swallow, migrating from Europe to follow the sun. In the prologue, ‘Hirundine’, it is me, broken-winged, heading south to heal in the African summer. The collection is then bookended by two poems about ‘fairyland’ the nickname for Cape Town’s District Six, which was cleared of its mixed-race population and demolished under the Group Areas Act, and is now resurfacing as Zonnenbloem – the sunflower. Another animal presence recurs in the poems; that of the quagga, an extinct native species similar to the zebra, which ecologists are now trying to re-breed from near relatives.  It stands for South Africa itself – is it extinct, or can it be resurrected? Does it have a viable future?

It’s a collection in three parts; how do they fit together?

The first part of the collection is all about finding myself in a new place on my own, and being disappointed and scared. The second section is more overtly political. Post-Apartheid South Africa is complicated, politically; you think you know all about it but you don’t, even though, in the Apartheid era I was involved in boycotts and marches. The final section describes me wrestling with the decision to leave a beautiful place and a rewarding job. It is a wonderful country, and I hope my poems about the wildlife and landscape show an appreciation of that, but the violence, the aggressive begging, the muggings at knifepoint and gunpoint… if something is going to happen to you in South Africa, it’s going to be bad. The ugly side of Cape Town life features in the poems, for example in ‘Green-and-yellow blanket man, Long Street’ I write about being abused by a street beggar, and in ‘Limpopo’ I describe the flight of Zimbabwean refugees across the river to South Africa, and an uncertain future.

How is your current career move going?

It has proved to be more sustainable! I’m really happy in Paris, and it is close enough by Eurostar to allow frequent visits by my husband, Paul, who is a teacher, and my two daughters, and to allow me to come home regularly to Reading, from where I keep up my poetic contacts in the UK. There’s also a great Anglophone Spoken Word scene in Paris, and I’ve got involved in a regular Monday poetry night (http://spokenwordparis.com), which attracts Paris-based writers, students, and poets just passing through.  Not having to cook for and look after my family during the week, I’ve also got time to write in the evenings.

And I hear there’s a novel afoot?

I don’t want to say a lot about it, but it is a contemporary story, set in London, of a rich family in the current financial crisis.  The protagonist is an anti-hero, an obnoxious man whose redeeming feature is that he is very funny.  He shares the narrative with his wife - who is a much more interesting character. Predictably, for an accountant, I’ve got the plot, and the changes in point of view, all mapped out on a spreadsheet.

Tell me about the Welsh thing.

Although I was born in Guildford, I identify as being Welsh by nature and nurture, and I am proud that among my ancestors is the 18th century bard Sion Llewelyn. I studied for an MPhil in English Literature at the University of Glamorgan, tutored by Gillian Clarke, and I’m an elected member of the Welsh Academi. I am pleased that Welsh-speakers see a distinct Welsh turn of phrase to the language I use in my poems. My Welsh heritage has not yet emerged in the subjects of my poetry, but the poems are still coming. There’s a collection for 2013 in the works, titled I-spy and Shanty, from Cardiff-based Mulfran Press.

I have to ask about the tattoo project.  What started that?

About ten years ago, I got talking to a woman with multiple tattoos in Yosemite, California. I asked her about their meaning and significance, but the conversation didn’t materialise as writing until last summer, when, in a sandwich shop in Bristol, I spotted a man with a jigsaw puzzle piece tattooed on his arm, and started wondering whether his girlfriend might have a similar piece that fitted. Over the last year or so I’ve written no fewer than fifty-eight poems on the subject of tattoos, and there may be more. Six of the poems are in the current edition of Envoi, where I am a featured poet, and another two in the latest Prole magazine. I hope they will form a new collection. It isn’t the permanence of tattoos that inspires me, or the aspect of rebellion. It’s simply that they can look very beautiful. They are usually incredibly significant to their owners, and they often memorialise someone. The poems sometimes reflect the design’s significance in a human story, or may simply use the image as a jumping-off point.

The obvious question; have you ever been inked yourself?

Er… no. For a partner in a firm of lawyers, it might prove just a little career-limiting.

Interviewed by Judi Sutherland. Kate Noakes' third collection, Cape Town, is published by Eyewear. The launch is taking place tonight in London; if you wish to attend, details can be found here

Monday 8 October 2012

School of Forgery reviewed in Poetry London


The Autumn issue of Poetry London carries a very generous review of School of Forgery by Alison Brackenbury. Choice extracts:

"Should young poets learn to shorten their books? I hope that Jon Stone will not. School of Forgery, though replete with contemporary reference, remains old-fashioned in its rich sprawl." 

"Bold coinages and leaps of thought leave Stone's poems echoing, beyond novelties of physical description, into new spaces in the mind."

"These intricate collages flash with moving lines ... They retain all of Stone's ingenious energy ..."

"... I have never seen well-written poetry in such a brilliant visual joke as Stone's Avengers silhouettes."

(For anyone wondering, I have no plans to shorten my books. In fact, I think they might get longer. Ideally, long enough for the page corners to be used to carry a flickbook animation.)

Sunday 7 October 2012

Alaska Quarterly Review


I have a new poem, 'Lightning Conductor', published in the second of two special 30th anniversary issues of the Alaska Quarterly Review! Maybe this is the year I break America. </delusion>

Many thanks to guest editor Todd Boss for asking me to submit something. Other poets published in the rather hefty issue include ex-US poet laureate Kay Ryan, Billy Collins and the UK's own Lorraine Mariner.

Sunday Review: Absence has a weight of its own, by Daniel Sluman

posted by the Judge

Sunday review up, fellas. Amy McCauley is dealing with Daniel Sluman's collection Absence has a weight of its own, and she seems to have liked it very much.
You can read the full review here.

Hope you woke up reasonably late after whatever shenanigans you underwent on Saturday night!

Saturday 6 October 2012

Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot

In protest at the disproportionate and injust incarceration of three members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, and as a gesture of solidarity with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, the magnificent English PEN have released Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot. Commissioned, curated and edited by UK poets Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe and Sophie Mayer, this collection has drawn together a huge range of writers, asked them to pen responses to the situation and then encouraged said poets to pose in balaclavas in support of perhaps the three most famous devotchkas out there right now. The resulting anthology has been flagged up by the US Poetry Foundation and The Guardian, and continues to grow in stature and support. With contributions from as far afield as Kenya and Austria, Catechism has become a borderless project, uniting poets from across the globe. Indeed, many translators have stepped up to provide Russian versions of the poems. A group of the poets involved conducted a protest outside the Russian Embassy in London on 1 October, on what was originally scheduled as the girls' appeal date (since moved to 10 October). You can see videos of that protest here, as captured by contributor S. J. Fowler:

 

New Pussy Riot poems are being posted on the English PEN website every day. Catechism is available in e-book format for a donation and in sexy hard copy for a mere £7.95 plus p&p. You can also follow English PEN on Twitter (@englishpen) and search by the hashtag #freepussyriot for further updates on the case.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Baguettes and Baccalaureates: or, French Poetry and the Problem of Academia

by the Judge

What is the best career for a person who aspires to write poetry? We have all asked ourselves this question at some point or another, seen how the business of verse seldom makes money, and more frequently takes it away. The answer is, inevitably, as subjective as poetry itself. Some will desire an occupation that in some way keeps them in touch with the art, like jobs in editing and publishing, or in libraries. Others will go for something that is wholly unrelated to writing, perhaps a little adventurous or proletarian, with the idea of bringing these interesting experiences into their work. Others yet will base their career around an ethical choice, one which informs and reflects the statement that is made by their poetry, and some will go for drudge work in exchange of spare time to read and write (say, a night receptionist). A few strongly driven individuals will put their professional career on an equal plane with their artistic one, choosing something difficult, remunerative and highly demanding, of the type that is seldom thought to be compatible with cultivating an art.

For many, though, the most obvious answer seems to lie in an academic career. Anyone who studies or has studied literature at university (and if you are reading this article, the odds are that you do or have) will know that the demands of an academic life on your spare time are not too burdensome. Sure, students complain all the time that their workload is full and that they are snowed under with books, but in reality the pace of life is nowhere near as hectic as that of someone working in a bank, in a real estate agency or for a major newspaper, to make three easy examples. Most importantly, an academic spends his or her time doing exactly what an aspiring poet loves doing in his or her spare time – reading and learning about literature.

For poets, in fact, there is something so ubiquitously seductive about an academic career that many published artists are found precisely in that field. Though there are examples aplenty from almost any country, the most representative case that I know of is found in France. The French have an exceptionally heterogeneous poetic scene, one that easily and frequently crosses over with other arts and mediums, and in which the performative aspect of poetry is very much cherished (the example I always enjoy putting forward is the way their poetry communicates with song-writing – an intimate relationship which would be worth its own article). When it comes to the more traditional ‘written word’, there is a surprising correspondence between the poets who adhere to that format and their common professional background.

I am anything but an expert on French poetry today, so what I say must be taken with a pinch of salt. It is only that every contemporary French poet I have come across so far seems to teach or be involved in teaching in one way or another. Pierre Alferi is the first son of Jacques Derrida, and he teaches at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, as well as doing some translation. Olivier Barbarant teaches in high school. Philippe Beck teaches at the University of Nantes, and he too works in translation. Benoît Conort teaches at the University of Rennes II. Antoine Emaz teaches in middle school, and Sylvie Fabre G in high school. Jean-Marie Gleize directed the Centre d’Études Poétiques of the ENS (École Normale Supérieure) of Lyon, and now directs the experimental magazine "Nioques." Emmanuel Hocquard coordinates public lectures at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Jean-Michel Maulpoix teaches at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. Christian Prigent taught in secondary school. Valérie Rouzeau makes her living with ateliers in schools and translations. Martin Rueff teaches at the University of Geneva. Ryoko Sekiguchi teaches in the INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) and the Parisian Centre of Research in Oriental Languages and Civilisations.

I have, of course, come across some exceptions – Nathalie Quintane is an actress – along with several poets whose profession I simply was unable to find out (Mathieu Bénézet, Olivier Cadiot, Gérard Noiret, Jean-Baptiste Para, André Velter – and I might as well add a memorandum to publishing houses, asking them to write poet bios which actually tell us what on earth that person does with his/her life, and not just the number of magazines in which they’ve been published!). On the whole, however, and as long as we consider only that ‘genre’ of poetry that is primarily written rather than performed, painted, or otherwise executed, the equation ‘poet equals professor’ holds in a great deal of occasions.

Though France is a bit of a borderline case, a similar story could be told in any other European country. In the UK, it's become extremely commonplace in the last decade for debut collections to come out from poets who are either studying towards a poetry-related PhD or who have already taken up a University post, usually teaching creative writing. This is the case for three of the recipients of Faber's recent New Poets awards, and a large number of the poets in the Salt Book of Younger Poets, most of whom are still working towards their first books. It is probably excessive to say that most poets in Europe are academics, but it is certainly true that no profession is more common among European poets than that of the academic.

Such a preponderance of professors among poets calls for some questioning – and the main reason is the effects that it has on poetry itself. The concern is that homogenization of the professional background for poets could result, at least partially, in a parallel homogenization of the poetic discourse. In simpler terms, if all poets do the same thing, it makes it more likely that they will write the same things. I have invoked France as an example, and I might as well continue along that road. My impression is that contemporary French poetry, while demonstrating great linguistic virtuosity of execution from one artist to the next, sees an abnormal amount of its production falling under the same genre – what we usually call ‘experimental poetry.’ Employing such a dubious expression in a sentence which is apparently critical of another’s poetic culture is the kind of thing that could get me stoned to death, but I repeat that these are no more than impressions – take them as you wish. I realise also that I should provide some evidence as to why I think French contemporary poetry is so especially experimental, but such a discussion would see me straying way off my topic. The most I can do is to encourage anyone to go out and read it and make up their own mind. If anyone can read the verse of someone like Alferi or Hocquard and contend that it is not experimental, then I have no idea where the expression can be used at all.

It is also worth asking ourselves whether academia is ideal for poetry from an individual point of view, as well as the collective one. It is true that academia leaves you a good deal of spare time, if you’re the type of person who knows how to organise his/her work-load. The downside is that the hours you do spend working are so intellectually intense that the brain comes out of them exhausted. It is hard to write an essay about the verse of Wallace Stevens and then go home and write your own poetry as well.

It will be noted that an academic career allows you to read many other poets, more than you would manage to go through while working in any other profession. While this can be helpful in terms of expanding your technique and your understanding of poetry, it doesn’t necessarily help your poetry itself. Too much breaks the bag, and an excess of time spent reading means less space for other work experiences, and perhaps life experiences in general. It is one’s life experiences that are most often the subject of one’s poetry, and not the poetry of other people. If you spend all your time in the library (and no, a holiday in Lisbon or a trip to go bungee-jumping does not count as evacuation!), then it will be harder for your own poems to get out of the library as well.

None of this is to argue that academia is ‘bad’ for writing, as much as to provide some objections to the seductive myth that academia is the best possible outlet for people with poetic aspirations. You cannot count the number of people who are not poets, of course, but in my experience I have certainly known numerous individuals who were talented and exceptionally prolific in creative writing as undergraduates, and who greatly slowed down or stopped their output altogether as they ascended in their professorship. Would they have done the same if they had chosen a profession that does not already immerse them in literature at every hour? We will never know.

The connection between academia and poetry is as old as Plato’s original Academy and it enriches both. The synergy between the role of the academic and that of the poet, on the other hand, is a societal construction with a rather short history. Poets five-hundred years ago used to be diplomats, warriors and spies. I say this with no affectation of nostalgia. I do not advocate swapping the societal constructions of today for those of yesterday (and there are no courts for us to be court-poets any longer!). It is only to say that there are no limits to what you can do alongside writing. Some may tell you that you probably won’t be a poet if you are an officer in Iraq, because the two things are spiritually incompatible. Others may suggest that you cannot write verse if you are going to be a professional athlete, because the demands it puts on your time are too intense to let you pursue your cultural interests as well. We say that’s nonsense. As long as you have access to a pen and paper, the only limits to what you can write are the limits of your imagination. If you feel that the best way for you to be creative is to become a professor, then go ahead. Just don’t be scared to consider the alternative. We already have many voices telling us what it’s like to write poetry from inside a library. If you want to write something original, consider doing something original: get out of that library.

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Holophin 'ad'!

Better late than never, but for those of you who've not yet heard it, below is my 'ad' for the fictional Holophin, the must-have gadget from Luke Kennard's fantastic sci-fi novella of the same name. Holophin is out now (though stocks are running out fast) with Penned in the Margins. Thanks to Tom Chivers of PitM for a fun recording session!