On the Forward Prize for Poetry

Tom Chivers:

But what is increasingly apparent is that British poets in their 20s and 30s (Kennard, Challenger, Rees and Nagra, for instance) are under far less pressure to write from within a grouping. Influences are more various, more contradictory; creating a poetry that is experimental but not deliberately obscure, that works with and without form, a poetry that ‘[wobbles] on the balance beam between associative and dissociative … absurdist and cerebral’ (TonyHoagland). Now that’s exciting.

Read the rest.

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Bird bird

Available soon from Landfill Press.

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The Lynx Reviewed

Peter Philpott's Great Works links page is an ideal starting point for those interested in the online presence of contemporary poetry. Better still, he has just revised and updated all of the links. Head over there and bookmark it.

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Salt Publishing Fundraiser

Since 2000, Salt Publishing has provided tens of thousands of customers in communities around the world with a wide range of contemporary poetry and short stories. Our literary success has largely been dependent on our innovative approach to sales and marketing but more recently we have benefited enormously from the active support of our major funders, the Arts Council of England. That funding is drawing to end during one of the world’s worst recessions and Salt now needs your direct support to continue with our ambitious development programme. We hope you will join us in reaching our fundraising goal. A simple donation can be made online at Paypal or you can also send a cheque payable to Salt Publishing Ltd to: 14a High Street, Fulbourn, Cambridge CB21 5DH

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Silliman's Flymo

The question posed by Andrew Motion’s The Mower, out any minute now from David R. Godine, is: Has Britain’s most recent poet laureate always been a dreadful writer, or is this just the case of a talented young man who believed his own press clippings & slouched into a life of unrelenting clichés passed off as profound thoughts? A third conceivable argument is that he intends to be awful, an instance of flarf avant la lettre. How else might one explain the following?

Yowsers.

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onedit #12

The inimitable Tim Atkins launches onedit #12, featuring:

• Charles Bernstein
• Ann Bogle
• Adrian Clarke
• Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
• John Gibbens
• Holly Pester
• Ted Greenwald & Kit Robinson
• Jonathan Skinner
• Philip Terry
• Stephen Vincent

There are few things I wholeheartedly recommend every time. Onedit is one of them.

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Katko in Cambridge

Thursday 12th March, 7pm Performing a selection from The Death of Pringle as part of The Miscellaneous Theatre Festival. Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, Cambridge University (in the basement of the English faculty on Sidgwick Site) Admission is free.

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John Wilkinson & Peter Manson at Cambridge

Wednesday 11th March, 5.30pm

• Peter Manson
• John Wilkinson

Room GR05 (Ground Floor) English Faculty Building, University of Cambridge, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP Facebook event Admission is free.

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Readings 4

Those Birkbeck people know what they're doing. New critical documentation from (in sidebar order):

• Rachel Blau DuPlessis
• Will Rowe
• Johan de Wit
• Lawrence Upton
• Edmund Hardy
• Jenny Pike Cobbing
• David Annwn
• Esther Leslie
• Elizabeth James
• Aodán McCardle
• Ian Heames
• Peter Middleton
• Carol Watts
• Holly Pester
• Luke Roberts

Get stuck in.

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Critical Communities

Johanna Linsley:

I've just joined a collaborative writing/publishing project called Critical Communities, run by two fantastic organizations in London: New Work Network and Open Dialogues. The Critical Communities project involves twenty writers, ten in London and ten in Yorkshire. Together the participants represent a community of new work/writing practitioners who will meet regularly in London and Yorkshire to discuss notions of ‘the critical’ in relation to critical writing both on and as new work. We will be critiquing our own art/writing and that of others, examining alternate critical modes both on and off the page and collaboratively developing a publication. The community will also act as a sustained network for experimental writing/new work practitioners in the London and Yorkshire areas. Check out and contribute to the online forum for this project here.

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