Poetry reading by Peter Gizzi and Michael Heller

Next Monday (10 May) the celebrated US poets Peter Gizzi and Michael Heller will be reading at The University of Warwick's Chaplaincy, 3-5pm, in a free event. Petter is over from the US on a brief tour and this is a great opportunity to see someone on a fast upwards trajectory in the world of exciting poetry.

Peter Gizzi's books include The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992) along with an expanded edition of his first collection, published in Britain: Periplum and other poems 1987-92 (Salt, 2004). He has won numerous awards and is currently Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and poetry editor of The Nation magazine.

New York poet Michael Heller is making a return visit to Warwick following the success of his last appearance here four years ago. His recent publications are Beckmann Variations & other poems (Shearsman, 2010), Eschaton (Taliusman House, 2009), and Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study (ahadada press, 2009). Two books of essays as well as his Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003) are available in the UK from Salt.

All welcome!

News! News! News!

Get that?  This is news!  Tonight, the incredibly exciting Infinite Difference, an anthology of new experimental women's poetry, edited by Carrie Etter, and published by Shearsman, is launching in London at Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. The gig starts at 7.30, and the line up includes Caroline Bergvall, Frances Presley, Carol Watts, Harriet Tarlo, Andrea Brady, and Wendy Mulford, along with many many other luminaries of avant writing.  What more could you want?  More details here.

On Sunday 14th, meanwhile, Nine Arches Press are hosting another Shindig! at Wilde's Bar in Leamington Spa.  Readers include Luke Kennard, Matt Merritt, and Myra Connell, whose From the Boat is being launched that evening.  It promises to be an exciting night: the Editors will be there with hidden microphones and a sackful of otters.  Be there or be a cube.  I think that's right...  More details here. 

Simon Turner - A Beginner's Guide to British Surrealism (1): Introductory Comments

Surrealism, that hoary old conglomeration of Freudian psychoanalysis and good old-fashioned turn of the century French decadence, never really took off in this country, for a number of reasons.  Herbert Read helps to clarify matters in long essay on the subject, where he defines aesthetics not in terms of historical forward momentum - symbolism overturning realism; Modernism overturning symbolism; the Movement overturning Modernism, and so on into the sunset - but as a continuous Manichean struggle between Classicism and Romanticism.  The Classical impulse is towards linguistic and formal order, intellectuation and orchestration, the Romantic towards an overabundance of imagination, a realiance upon organic rather than imposed form (Creeley's dictum that 'Form is never more than an extension of content' comes to mind).  It's an oversimplifcation - or my rendering of Read's argument is a crude oversimplification - but it's a useful one.  Generally, British poetry hasn't trusted Romanticism until its practitioners are good and dead (Keats and Shelley helped matter by dying young), or can be proven without a shadow of a doubt to adhere to old fashioned Tory principles (step forward, Bill Wordsworth).  When they're alive and kicking, writers of a Romantic bent tend to be labelled hellraisers, poetasters and general disruptors of the common good: those writers most lauded in the public imagination, at least in the twentieth century, are of a distinctly Classicist hue: Auden, Eliot, Larkin, Betjemen, all fit the pattern, however greatly their work varies in terms of its aesthetic choices.

Unsurprisingly, Read sees the Surrealists - both on the continent and in Britain - as following the Romantic camp, and his reading of the British Surrealist movement attempts to place them within a tradition of Anglophone visionary writing, including Blake and Coleridge, looking further back to Christopher Smart and the Book of Revelation as founding texts for Brit-born Surrealist practice.  

Another reason Surrealism didn't quite take is that it swiftly mutated into something quite different, as its chief exponents - David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, Humphrey Jennings - found themselves drawn towards other methods of expressing their poetic vision.  In Gascoyne's case, the limitations of orthodox Surrealism quickly made themselves felt, and his later work fits broadly into the category of mystic of religious visionary writing.  Sykes Davies only produced a small handful of strictly Surrealist poems and, whilst powerful, he rapidly shed that method of composition, and moved towards instead a brand of Eliotean high Modernism, as a critic and a writer.  Jennings, meanwhile, was a pioneer of documentary film-making, as well as having a hand in the foundation of the Mass Observation movement, though neither career-branch was entitrely free from the influence of Surrealist philosophy.  Aside from the defection of its high priests, British Surrealism was, more importantly, overshadowed by the internationalist Modernism of Pound and Eliot, and the more meliorative elaboration on Modernism proposed by Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis.  Later, the New Apocalyptics - Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, and Norman MacCaig amongst them - raked up the embers of Surrealism, but it was never a coherent movement, and was equally afflicted with the defection and ambivalence of its individual members as British Surrealism had been.

What will follow over the next few weeks will be a series of short sketches of the leading figures of British Surrealism: what I think their important works were, why I think they matter, and why I think they're ripe for re-engagement.  Don't say you weren't warned.  First up: Hugh Sykes Davies.          

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. 

Jake O'Leary - Apocalyptic Weathermen

It’s late or early. Channel 4 explores
Trajectories and consequences of
Potential nuclear winter underneath
A fallout residue of dirty plates.
The makeshift fort erected with a sheet
Beneath a table in the basement hides
Apocalyptic weathermen from sight
As I attempt to write my memoirs, The
Medicinal Jacuzzi Years. With each
Completed line I smoke a cigarette
Composed of previous lines and coffee beans.
If exile for a night is self-imposed,
Why pine away an evening in a daze?
They’re different kinds of days. ‘You’d better scrub
Yourself before returning’ Bill had said
As I’d begun to leave. ‘Malaria
Is bad for business’. Vaccinations hurt.
‘Are you a communist?’ enquired the wrist
Of my companion on my sleeve. ‘Why, no’
Came my reply of tugging free. ‘Why not?’
Besieged the loosened grip of grief. I am
Enlightened by my frantic scribbling and
Emancipated by the medium.
Across the room a painful humming light
Incinerates a cockroach drawn by warmth
And clearly taken by Channel 4's
Sensational prognostications. Down
A stone or two today. Could pass it off
As hunger striking or religious fasting,
Whatever fits the bill. It’s Ouija night
At the Patisserie but I can’t face
Another ancestral lament about
The wireless having had its day. Tonight
Is insubordinate, unruly hair
That sprouts from sweaty crevasses at will.
In no fit state for human interaction,
I lay my head upon a telephone
Directory and dream in technicolour.

========

The author writes: "I'm Jake O'Leary, and I live in Falmouth, Cornwall, where I'm currently studying English and creative writing. I've been writing poetry for around a year, and have a blog where I occasionally put up stuff I've been working on: glueywaterbloodywine.blogspot.com. I've had a poem, 'The Sigh-Cried Loaf of an Engels', published as part of John Bloomberg Rissman's '1000 Views of Girl Singing' project (different translations and interpretations of a Jose Garcia Villa poem), which can be found at http://www.girlsinging.com/. Three poems have also recently been published over at http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/. These were selected from the same body of work as 'Apocalyptic Weathermen', a collection called 'The Cactus Cake Patisserie', in which I've attempted to explore themes like mysticism, psychedelic drug use, Cold War memorabilia and industrial/economic decay."

Recent News...

A brief hiatus, in which many things stack up in our inboxes. We've been a bit lazy with the hereness of here, and I've a right mind to increase our reading time for submissions. Mostly I blame the other Editor for this, but then again, I'm the other Editor too, from a certain perspective.

- The Shearsman 2010 Reading Series continues on Tuesday, 2 February at 7:30 pm, featuring Sarah Law & Steve Spence. The venue is Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. Admission is free.

Books launched:
Sarah Law (biog)
Steve Spence (biog)

Subsequent readings -- at the same venue -- will take place as follows:
- 10 March: launch of the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries from UK Women Poets, edited by Carrie Etter, with short readings from fifteen of the poets featured in the book; this event will be hosted by the editor
- 20 April: Jaime Robles and Lars Amund Vaage;
- 4 May: Camille Martin & Alasdair Paterson;
- 1 June: readers tbc
- An additional reading is scheduled for 2 March, 7:30pm, at Westminster Kingsway College, Victoria, at which the Mexican poet Elsa Cross will read from her recent Shearsman Selected Poems with at least two of her translators; further venue and access details in due course.
- We expect to add a further date in late May to feature Michael Heller and Robert Vas Dias; date to be confirmed.

- Shearsman have also just republished Elisabeth Bletsoe's early work. w00t! Link there is to Shearsman's rejuvenated blog, which has been quite lively of late. (No link there to the actual publisher page for Pharmacopoeia, which is here. Tony's sales must be absolutely soaring for him to have missed that trick.)

- Carrie Etter announces the Bath Spa Reading Series 2010: "The next cycle of this highly successful series will begin on Thursday February 11 2010 at the Duncan Room, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, 16-18 Queen Square, Bath, 7.30 for 8.pm. Tickets at the door: £7.00, £5.00 concessions."
- Thursday February 11: Alan Brownjohn
- Wednesday March 3: Alan Jenkins and Paul Batchelor
- Thursday April 22: Carol Watts
- Thursday May 13: Jane Draycott
- Thursday June 10: David Morley

- A reminder of the Poetry Bites event tomorrow evening. Hosted by Jacqui Rowe, tomorrow features Michael McKimm: Michael McKimm was born in Belfast in 1983 and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. He graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. [Lots of magazine publications and commissions, clipped - go read his website.] Still This Need, his first full-length collection, was published by Heaventree in 2009. Venue: The Kitchen Garden Café, 17 York Road, Kings Heath, Birmingham B14 7SA. 7.30pm, Tuesday 26th January. (Food available from 6.30pm). Poetry Bites includes floor spots where you can share your own poetry with an appreciative audience. Please arrive early to book a spot.£5 (£4) To reserve a place email Jacqui Rowe or pay at the door.

- Mario Petrucci announces his forthcoming new collection from Enitharmon, i-tulips. I've read and heard him read a few of these and they're rather lovely, a kind of 21st Century haiku sequencing, with an accessible ecopoetic threading. (Which is not to imply they're totally pop. I ought to hold my tongue until I've seen the book, really, but when did that ever stop me?)

- Pomegranate magazine has had a snazzy makeover, courtesy of arts funding. Now it's MORE than just a magazine! It's a NETWORK! Rather trendy too, with blog feeds, tweet feeds, multimedia... Jeez, they're making me feel old...

- Sue Hubbard's Campaign to Restore the Poem to Waterloo Underpass continues on Facebook. She's looking for ideas, support, etc. While I loved it when I was in London (though lingering in any underpass for the length of time it takes to digest a poem like that has never made me feel comfortable) now I'm out of London I'm feeling a little bit heartless about it. That said, it was a wonderful poem and certainly brightened up an otherwise drab part of London. And the bastardly response of London's failing capitalist bureaucracies are just shameless. You can read the poem here, but it's definitely more effective in situ.

- Skysill Press announce a new publication on their blog: Jess Mynes' Sky Brightly Picked, a title I like the sound of. It's a lovely cover. Glad to see yet more recession-resisting new poetry flying out into the world.

- And finally, the Editors recently managed to catch the pagan euphoria of Baroness at the Hare and Hound. I still can't decide if I like the Red Album more than the Blue Album. The songs they played off the former certainly kicked me to pieces far more than the latter, but that might just have been over-familiarity.