Wednesday 16 December, 2009 in Andrea Brady, Caroline Bergvall, Robert Hampson Robert Sheppard has pointed to a Scribd upload of papers from the recent Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry at Birkbeck. The online document features:
Tuesday 15 December, 2009 in Michael Zand via Marcus SleaseEssentially, lexico is all about poetry in translation. We are not talking about ”straight” translations, i.e. when we take words in the original language and transposing them into the English. In most cases these sorts of translations are available elsewhere or, if not, I would recommend using “google translate”.
Instead, the aim is to produce what Walter Benjamin calls “aura of the original text”. New creative material will be introduced, often to make the writings more contemporary, more challenging or even more disruptive. I will as the translator try very hard to be as subjective as possible, introducing my own ideas and literary affectations at every available opportunity. The ultimate aim is, to quote Benjamin again, “to go beyond the life (leben) of the original and to give it a higher life (uberleben) which transcends the limitations of time, culture and place”.
There will a new poem posted ever week, along with a brief description of the poet concerned and the background to the piece in question.
Monday 14 December, 2009 in Richard Barrett sometime over the next few weeks i plan to make a booklet collecting the first 20 sections of the hard shoulder. the material is already available to read here on yawn but i plan to rewrite certain bits and completely rearrange the order of the sections. maybe i'll include some photos in there as well. if anyone wants a copy of the booklet all i need is a message with address details. my email address is barrett[dot]richard1[at]googlemail[dot]com get in touch now and i'll send the booklets out when theyre ready.
£17.50 (pre-publication) / £18 (P&P) (post-publication), Reality Street Books, January 2010
ISBN 978 1874400 45 5
This is the first time this great, innovative poet’s work has been properly collected. The poetry included here was originally written and published in the 1960s and 70s, and immediately predates the work included in The Mud Fort. It includes the complete “Cycles”, War W/ Windsor”, “A History of the Solar System” and other sequences, as well as a multitude of other poems and and sets of poems, previously published in fugitive editions or not at all, presented in roughly chronological order. The volume is rounded off with Alan Halsey’s meticulous endnotes, detailing the original publishing history and variant texts.
Available via the Bookshelf.
Friday 11 December, 2009 in Ron Silliman Ron Silliman has posted a selection of YouTube vids of poets past on his blog.
£6 (50p P&P), Torque Press, 2009
ISBN 978-1-906851-02-6
Response to the visual as a complex of knowing and distortion into language makes a demand on all participants, writer, reader. Here in This is red offers a density of seeing made possible through sequential and continually framed perception and frail or desperate engagement. It gives the potential which has been realised to record internal apprehension and near narrative reading. This is red holds attention to digital image and its considerable blur – its energetic ambiguity and concreteness of understanding. The apprehension has been graphically drawn through – that is thought through – providing the reader with promise and clarity; an apprehension addressed as colour and tone addressed to "you" as singular and as collective figure at once – shifts from one to the other. - Allen Fisher
Send payment to: Jane Glenn, English, School of Humanities, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ
Wednesday 9 December, 2009 in Sophie Robinson Sophie Robinson has been interviewed by The Other Room. View the video here.
Wednesday 9 December, 2009 The Desperate For Love reading at the Komedia in Brighton was fantastic. The poets featured were Tom Raworth, Ken Edwards and Rowena Easton. The host Alan Hay also read and there was one other person whose name I did not catch. Walking through the door I managed to pick up a free Chap Book and a C.D both of which speak to the strength of this reading series. The C.D features excerpts from Sean Bonney's Baudelaire, Daniel Kane's Ostentation of Peacocks, Sophie Robinson's 'a' Tim Atkins' Petrarach Lucy Harvest Clarke's Poems, Francesca Lisette's Aqua Precinct and Keston Sutherland's Stress Position. I can not wait to put it on.
At a reading as good as this, like six rainbows smashed into a puddle, I only ever tend to catch a fraction of the content, and the fragments that do remain with me remain decayed and happily polluted with the sound of the room. At any rate Tom Raworth talked about the time of the poetry reading and how time is measured differently there - the social-time and the poem's time working with eachother to make time detourne itself into something new. I remember Tom's bitterly angry hoax poem read with a spattering of rhyme that was posted on a pro-war website before the Iraq war which later drew death threats from the other people that were writing poems on the site when they found out the poem was a hoax (thanks to Creeley apparently). I remember birds flying out of Ken Edwards' head, the 'glorious' green of phosphor on a television screen, the governor of the bank of England, you, and all other things that don't exist - oh, and transition zones: It could be the book of the dead it could be the airport waiting lounge. All in all fantastic fantastic stuff. The audience was young, vibrant, and I felt happy in the room. It was really good that Barque Press had bought books down to the reading and had them at the door I think it is a incredibly healthy thing for presses and reading series to be working together to make a scene. I managed to pick up Keston Sutherland's Stress Position (which unbelievably I had not bought yet) and J.H. Prynne's To Pollon. I ran out of money but other wise Jonty Tip Lady's collected poems II was on the buying agenda. I think perhaps my favorite lines of the night came from the last three lines of Ken Edward's poem The Sea, a poem that is very handily printed in the Desperate For Love chap book. I rewrite these lines here because they are simply great:
On the sixth day there is a rainbow,
made from the emissions of disintergrating aircraft.
It's a kind of crescendo, I call it the sea.
Anyway, thanks Alan for putting on a great night. I believe Mendoza is reading at the next one, which in the words of a poet who I won't name here, promises to be 'punk as fuck'. What with the excellent Chlorine reading series (at The Hope) and Desperate for Love both being in Brighton, as well as the presses Barque and Reality street both having roots in the area, Brighton is (and has been for a long time) a fantastic place to hang out if you are a poet. What does anyone else remember of the reading?
Tuesday 8 December, 2009 New issue of How2 out featuring more good content than it's worth replicating. If you need a reason to click this link then you haven't been to How2 before.
Monday 7 December, 2009 in Peter Philpott Issue 15 of Peter Philpott's Great Works is now available to view online, featuring the work of over 40 poets.