Nine Arches News

Tom Chivers, in his pre-award nomination days.  Wall provided by Ducat & Legbrace of Evesham. 

The next Nine Arches Shindig! is happening this Sunday, May 16th, at Wilde’s in Leamington Spa. Guest readers include Lydia Towsey and Bob Mee (co-editor of Ragged Raven Press), and there's cracking musical support from Matt Campbell.  Doors open at 6.30 and the whole shebang kicks off at 7.30. The Editors hope to see you there: we'll certainly see ourselves.

In other news - this is the really exciting bit - two of Nine Arches Press’s beautiful pamphlets, Tom Chivers’ The Terrors and David Hart’s The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks have been nominated for the Michael Marks Poetry Award.  You can read more about this nomination here. The Editors would like to be among the first to offer Jane Commane and Matt Nunn, the head honchos at NAP, a hearty congratulations. The awards ceremony takes place at the British Library on Wednesday 16th of June at 6.30. Further information and tickets for the event are available here. Spread the word, my lovelies.

The London Word Festival kicks off on 7th March, running until April 1st.  The Editors are hoping to take time out from their hectic schedules to attend some of the events, but we highly recommend you go along to some yourselves: Leafcutter John's 'Briggflatts Rewired' on March 28th looks especially exciting.  Peter Finch and Hannah Silva are reading at the same event, and both are electrifying performers of their own work.  Other highlights include a performance of M R James' 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad' (I recommend James highly, as I gave myself the worst nightmare of my life after reading one of his stories on the cusp of bedtime, which was wildly ill-advised);  and Chris McCabe's 'Shad Thames, Broken Wharf', a play for voices detailing the history of London's Docklands, which looks rather exciting. 

Simon Turner on Tom Chivers on Barry MacSweeney

I've just returned from London, after attending the Tears in the Fence 50th (issue) birthday (more on that later in the week), and thought I'd cap off the weekend by singing the praises - and plugging the iPlayer availability - of Tom Chivers' Radio 4 programme 'The Poet of Sparty Lea', which looked at the life and poetry of Barry MacSweeney. Basically, I thought it was great, focusing as it did chiefly on the poems, with recordings of MacSweeney himself interspersed with other readers, though if I had a criticism, it was probably a matter of length. Half an hour didn't feel like quite enough time, and the poetic context of MacSweeney's work was skated over in favour of the biographical. It could be simply that a discussion of where MacSweeney's work fits in relation to the British Poetry Revival, the Poetry Wars, the work of the Cambridge School, and other currents (both radical and conservative) in British post-war poetry, in conjunction with a consideration of his own technical innovations, would have made for too heavy listening on a Sunday afternoon. What matters most, of course, is that it encourages people to return to, or discover, MacSweeney's poetry, which is some of the most exciting produced in these isles in the last 50 years. Thankfully, Tom avoids such gushingly hyperbolic terminology in his own appraisal of MacSweeney, and the programme's all the better for it. Listen and enjoy. Oh, and if the BBC are reading and happen to be looking for someone to do a similar piece on Roy Fisher, my fees are five potato pies an hour, plus expenses.