Simon Turner and George Ttoouli caught up in the e-ther to discuss recent reading, like intellectual rats hooked to literary electrodes, to see if there's any charged writing around to get their pleasure muscles jumping.
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S:
So, I was thinking over
what you’d said the other day during your jaunt to sunny
Leamington, about how you’ve been feeling a little removed from the
various poetry scenes in the UK. I have to admit, and did at the
time, that I’m feeling similarly removed from proceedings, due to a
combination of age and contrarianism. That said, there are plenty of
individual poets out there whose work we admire; it’s just perhaps
that we’ve allowed context - poetics, infighting, aesthetic
battles, the scurf riding in the wake of the Poetry Wars - to fall by
the wayside. Which might not be such a bad thing, all told.
One of the things I’ve
been reading lately is a collection of interviews from the Poetry
Project that Wave Books has just published, and even though I’ve
only just begun dipping into it - it’s a treasure-trove in so many
ways - one theme that’s come up with a degree of regularity is the
notion that, ultimately, scenes, movements, poetics, aesthetics,
don’t really matter: what matters is, as a reader, finding out work
you admire; and, perhaps more importantly, as a working poet, finding
like-minded people you can become friends with, and with whom you can
share your work and enthusiasms. Everything else is just politics.
So, partly because it’s
fun to discuss one’s reading in a general sense, and partly because
I wanted to get back on the G&P pony, what say you to an
improvised textual discussion of our recent reading? What have we
loved, what have we hated? Which neglected voices do we want to crow
from the rooftops? Which over-rated prize-winners would we choose to
bury beneath impenetrable layers of feculent landfill? Thoughts?
G:
I’m fairly sure it
should be ‘faeculent’ just because it was too close to fecund for
my tastes. That said, it does remind of a story I heard recently
about people mining landfill for rare earth metals and along the way,
someone somehow managed to dig up the worst Atari game ever made,
something related to E.T.
But that’s a long way
off topic. I’ll admit, I’m not actually that long into reading
for pleasure again. I’ve been trying to compile a list of titles to
revisit, acquired over the past few years or so, with the intention
of (re-)reading with a little more attention. Looking over my
shelves, my tastes have changed a lot.
But, that said, this is
improv, so I’m going to dive in with what’s been on my mind. I
mentioned, during our foray in the park, Rupert Loydell’s new book
arrived in the post - Dear Mary (Shearsman). I actually wrote
a review of it, and it may even be live before this conversation is
ended [insert link here if so].
Another one that has
been on my mind: AK Blakemore’s Humbert Summer (Eyewear). I
met ‘AK’ several years ago when I was working a London job and
she was winning awards. I was struck by the poems’ images back then
and when I glanced through the copy in my local Waterstones, was
struck again, although there was a sharper edge to the syntax, a
little more punk to the language. I didn’t buy that copy because
someone had smeared it with black gunk and it was the only shop copy
(don’t even know what it was doing there, frankly), but ordered
from the publisher. I dipped into it, ran out of time, dipped back
in... The usual story. But it’s still interesting enough, has
enough difference in language to conventional stuff to mean I’m
going back to it.
Which reminds me: the
images were the reason I got into Nathan Thompson’s work, though
really his schtick turned out to be voice. I never did pick up his
last Shearsman. Might be time to start dishing out the spondulix
again. Sad to have lost touch with him. I’m fairly sure I had a
parcel lined up to send him, then lost track of his email and postal
addresses.
But community: that was
actually a conversation I started to have with Theo in January. I
feel like our ‘community of like-minds’ is spread all over the
place: from Birmingham to Athens, Australia to Cornwall to Singapore.
It would be nice to have the money to visit them regularly, though
that might drive me mad. Still, I feel like the Midlands has a big
red band of no around it, driving all the like-minds away. Something
akin to Baker’s description of how birds reacted to his human
shape.
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This was originally called 'Recent Reading', but the conversation happened so long ago, the hot dust of zeitgeist is now the frozen sheen of yesteryear. Part 2 tomorrow.
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