Thank You So Much, We Raised £1,262.42
Wednesday 7 October, 2009 Thank you to all the poets that read at Openned last night for the Land for Lajee Project, thank you to everyone that came, thank you to the Small Presses that donated to the book table. These presses are: Veer Books, Critical Documents, Grasp Press, Hot Gun!, Street Cake, Sheersman, Reality Street, The Arthur Shilling Press, Barque Press and the best book shop for poetry in London, West End Lane Books, Bad Press and Yt Communication. I hope I have not missed anyone. If I have send me an email and I will add your name onto this post.
The poets that read at the event were, Sean Bonney, Sophie Robinson, Harry Gilonis, Josh Stanley, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Nat Raha, Posie Rider, Peter Philpott, Alan Hay, Michael Zand, Amy De'Ath, Frances Kruk, Steve Willey, Justin Katko, Adnan al-Sayegh, Will Rowe, and Palestinian poet Soumaya Susi who is currently living in Gaza, her poem was read by her brother.
Thank you to all the individual poets that donated books to the table, you are too numerous to name, but I remember Harry Gilonis, and Peter Philpott putting a massive load down... there were others too.
Thank you to Andrea Brady, as although she could not make it to the reading she donated an old copy of Grosseteste Review that was eventually auctioned off for thirty five pounds. Thanks to Joe Sacco for signing and drawing in his book Palestine, this was also auctioned off.
We raised a phenomenal £1,262.42
The next Openned night will be on the 25th of November if you want to know more about the Land for Lajee project check out the Upcoming section on the Nights page.
Best
Steve
P.S. If anyone did make any documentation of the night, photographs, poems, things like that it would be great to see it.
Reader Comments (4)
Was a really great night Steve.
I second Sean, you all did brilliantly. You couldn't have put your case across more clearly and the performances were excellent. I said as much to Harry, and he said he has hopes The Leather, The Bus etc will follow your lead in getting some political activism going ...
Thanks it is really really good to get some positive feed back posted on the website. It is really nice to hear and it was good to feel how much poets and publishers and the audience members some of who were not poets or publishers really embraced both the poetry and the politics. It made me feel a potential in the scene for something more. I really like it Sharon and it is good to hear that the night might encourage other organizers to start thinking about how the social space of the reading might be invigorated by tying it into political activism. I think it is necessary.
As poets we think a lot about how the form of language takes on a politics when it is used in a poem but in my experience most poets think little about how a reading space and a reading series is a delivery mechanism for that language. When it is thought about it is often only thought about at the level of the individual performance of the poem not at the level of how the night is actually constructed for the poem. It is banal and true to say that the space becomes part of the atmosphere of the poem and the poem colors the space. If you work with one space for long enough it begins to take on the characteristics of a discourse. It seems reasonable to me that something to aim for would be the setting up of a relationship (however one would define that relationship might well be different each time) between the poetry space (reading series, a night) as discourse and the poem as discourse. The more the poetry scene (whatever we understand that to be) questions, thinks about and does something about, how its social spaces relate to the poetry it is writing the better. It is worth saying that the answer does not have to be found in a type of sanitized politically impoverished 1960's-happening-but-for-the-modern-day, kind of thing. Instead I think one of the best ways to practice a poetics of social space is to find correlates to the politics of language as we practice it in our poetry in the politics of positive political action and to present the two simultaneously to an audience in a material space that has been specially constructed, or at least specially considered, for the night. A problem with my thought is that trying to ring-fence where the social space starts and stops is almost impossible but I do believe that thinking about the poetry scene in this way is a surely more healthy, more politically useful, more ambitious starting point for developing a map of what is new in New British Poetry than constructing any type of real or imagined 'New British School' of poetry which seeks to understand the British Poetry scene as a set of permissions, as a set of main streamlined lineages arranged in a top to bottom sort of generational way. Archive building is Quietist.
What would a map of the British Poetry scene look like if it only considered poets that were publishers, or if all poets were poetry organizers and practiced as part of their poetics a developed sense of social responsibility? A social responsibility that considered how poetry was socially framed in extra linguistic and linguistic terms.
I don't think negations practiced within language (and all that practices of negation within language imply politically) are mutually exclusive with the positive push of political activism. The two can and should contradict one another and producing this type of contradiction regularly is necessary. Even better is to produce this type of contradiction in front of an audience more numerous due to the coalitions built by the poet between the poems the political activists the reading space and the poets. To call for such action via rhetoric while not making concrete steps to enact the provocation is to render politically inert any concrete steps that have been made.
On a separate but related note I think poets might well be able to help develop the conditions for a more effective language of political advocacy as it is poets that think the hardest about the way language is implicated, compromised and complicit within the politics they wish to change.
I have obviously digressed, suffice to say that when the Openned reading series does go on its inevitable hiatus I will be thinking through these things more carefully and practicing the ideas as best I can in new social spaces and in new poetic ones as well.
Anyway what I really want to say again though is that the generosity of the poets the presses and the audience members at the Openned night on Tuesday was simply staggering and blew me away. It filled me with hope and I know the Palestinians in the audience, which there were quite a few, were really grateful, happy and moved by what everyone achieved by coming together for their cause. It was a good day for poetry I think.
I think Malcolm Phillips may have taken photos on the night. I'm sorry I didn't now.