Recent News...

What with all the poetry we've been publishing here lately, we've had a slew of interesting submissions. What with all the real life we've been doing also, we've a bit of a backlog - but we've some rather good stuff lined up in December.

But meanwhile, a small interlude to offload some of the interesting poetry events scooting about the country...


- The winner of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation is... Professor Randall Couch for his translation of Gabriela Mistral's Madwomen.

"Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among her most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning."


- We've been invited by the British Library Web Archiving Programme‏ to participate in their preservation project. I get the feeling, to do it right, we'd have to write to every contributor we've had and ask for permission to allow their work to be archived there, although we could quite easily add a T&C point in the submissions form to set a start date. It's quite a bit of work, so if you have any thoughts about this, we'd be grateful to hear it. I tihnk we'd end up sitting between Gillian Clarke and Give me a Break - Cyfle i Ddianc.

- bani haykal is blogging at a new location, with his misinterpret musings. Rather brilliantly voiced, in the editors' opinions (well, one editor, but the other is hermiting again - goad goad).

- John Tucker (two poems forthcoming on G&P) wrote recently to us announcing the Anon Project: "It’s a new artistic printing and distribution experiment centred on a website that has been seven years in the making. The idea is that people visit the website and are granted two things: currency and the vote. With currency one can submit work, which can be anything from concrete word-patterns, to newsflash, to flash fiction, to verse. With votes one votes for the work to be made available for nationwide (as yet) printing and distribution on snazzy, anonymous, A6 ‘throwaways’ which can come in seven colours." It's quite a weird sounding idea, with plans to circulate printed 'throwaways' in "public transport hives, bookstores, libraries, cafes". We like weird.

- Flarestack Poets, the new pamphlet imprint from Flarestack Presshave launched their first three pamphlets, the two winners of their Pamphlet Competition and an anthology of the best poems submitted: Selima Hill's Advice on Wearing Animal Prints, Cliff Forshaw's Wake, and Mr Barton isn't Paying edited by Editors & Judges, Meredith Andrea and Jacqui Rowe. The G&P Editors attending the launch event, so expect a little more on this soon.

- Speaking of Jacqui Rowe, she runs the very entertaining bi-monthly 'Poetry Bites' series at the Kitchen Garden Café in King's Heath, Birmingham. Upcoming 2010 events:
* 26th January: Michael McKimm
* 23rd March: Nine Arches Press
* 25th May: George Ttoouli (yes, yes, OK, but...)
* 27th July: Jane Routh and Mike Barlow

- Speaking of Nine Arches and pamphlets, the Editors also attended the launch of David Morley's The Night of the Day, published by Nine Arches earlier this month. We picked up our limited edition, slightly-larger-than-life copies, with silver cover fonts and black flyleaf, which, I believe, are now sold out (less than three weeks after publication!), but there's a cheap version available.

- And we've heard, thro' our divers network of spyes, that Richard Price may soon be appearing on the Verb, talking about poetry pamphlet publishing. As one of the key luminaries at the British Library behind the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, it's something to look forward to.

- The last in Shearsman's 2009 Reading Series took place on Tuesday, 1 December at 7:30 pm, featuring Janet Sutherland & Alan Wearne. Click the names for details of the new collection that will be launched on the evening and for biographical details: Janet & Alan.

- And finally, also from the Poetry Society's press room, further details of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry have been released. You have to be a member to submit suggestions, it's UK only, and websites don't count, which seems a shame given how much new work is happening online in the UK.

Recent News...

- Tonight is unofficially London poetry night: Carcanet are hosting a triple launch with poets Jeremy Over, Richard Price and Matthew Welton, 18.30-20.30 at The Horse Hospital, Collonade, Bloomsbury.

- Also, the Shearsman Reading Series continues with two fantastic poets, Giles Goodland and Frances Presley, 19.30, Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, WC1A 2TH. Other stuff happening tonight, but didn't look quite as exciting. If anyone gets down there and wants to do us a write up, would be most kind.

(These notices have gone up late partly because of incompetence, partly out of bitterness that neither of the Editors can attend. London, bring a piece of yourself to the Midlands, we have poetry fans here too.)

- Salt have gone mad, in the nicest way possible. They've started offering their Facebook Fanclub and blog readers massive discounts on a range of titles, rotating on a weekly basis from now up to Christmas. Details of the first two are on their blog. First one has expired already, but I've picked up Montejo and Gelman. Fortunately nothing I want on the second list that I don't already have, else I'll be bankrupt in six weeks.

- A reminder of discounts on the Popescu Prize 2009 Shortlisted titles (it's not linked too obviously from the main competition page). We like muchly.

- Oystercatcher have just published a new pamphlet by Carrie Etter, The Son. I was lucky enough to catch her launch, with Janet Sutherland (wonderful also, reading from her new collection from Shearsman, Hangman's Acre and some samples over at peony moon), which was incredibly moving. The sequence, even without the context (you'll have to ask Carrie about that, when she's back from Prague) is extremely powerful, beautifully crafted. Genuinely brought me close to tears listening to her read. She'll be following that up next year with a full length Shearsman collection, Imagined Sons [NB: See Carrie's comment below for correct info]. Well worth keeping an eye out.

- Seeing how this is turning into a Shearsman press release, I should mention the fantastic latest issue of Shearsman Magazine #81 & 82, including new poetry by Christopher Middleton, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Lee Harwood, Linda Black, Kenny Knight, translations of Gunter Eich by Siroul Troup, etc. etc. Oh yeah, and one of the Editors. (Sorry, 8th Sin, I know, but I'm a glutton for your wrath, Si.)

N.B.: I can't avoid pointing out how much I love the fact that the image thumbnail for Ken Edwards' Red & Green is a picture of a Cartman doll. Legendary.

- And speaking of legendary, the November issue of The Believer has a fantastic interview with the Legend that is Peter Blegvad. Here's a link to 'Daughter' on youtube, with a random abstract painting.

Elisabeth Bletsoe: The Separable Soul (audio)

Late November 2008 I organised a reading for students, featuring Tony Frazer of Shearsman and Elisabeth Bletsoe, one of my favourite poets of 2008. It was a real gem of a recording, though I was completely nervous and an incompetent host (and technician, when it came to recording the event).

Elisabeth very kindly gave permission to share some of the poems from the recording of the event. To begin, 'The Separable Soul', which she introduced as wondering "what it would be like to be transformed back into a swan".



Recorded live at the Writers' Room, CAPITAL, University of Warwick. Elisabeth Bletsoe's latest collection, Landscape from a Dream, is published by Shearsman. Full text of this poem is available at Poetry International Web.

George Ttoouli - Reading Elisabeth's Bletsoe's Landscape from a Dream

extract from Ooser

II
strandloper


[...]

        the sea

gave up the dead that were in it

faces discoloured the nacreous

interior of a mussel, all

code, legacy & trace

     overscribbled by the waves'

          idiolalia

in constant erasure of the phenotype

     shattered skin;

[...]

===
Every so often, a poetry comes along that I find completely, inexplicably irresistible, partly for chiming with a stage I am at and partly for opening doors I'd not known were there. I found Elisabeth Bletsoe's writing at a time when I was struggling with 'medium-length' poetry - poems that resisted the intense brevity of the lyric, while also delivering their emotional punch without a dependency on narrative.

I say struggling - I'd written something to the tune of about 120 lines, in seven parts. Though the whole had a unity, each part depending on the others, I couldn't bring myself to take action and let them flow together, so it fell into distinct lyrics. Yet these didn't satisfy. I was struggling, I realise now, because I lacked models for what was acceptable. I wasn't trusting where the poem wanted to go, the demands it was making.

The culmination of this, was that I chose to chop the whole down to a single poem of about 30 lines. This probably made for a better poem, but I wasn't happy with the end result - I kept seeing the amputated lines ghosting around the poem I had left.

And then, Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books introduced me to Elisabeth Bletsoe's poetry while we were working on his Guest Edition of Poetry International Web - UK. I was stunned by the ideas opened up for me. In fact, all three of his choices blew me away, from Frances Presley's perfect balancing of self, language play, politics and voice to Peter Riley's wonderful experiments with depth of field in bolding and italicising words and all three's blending of prose poetry with deftly-considered linebreaking and surprising associations. Enough gushing, though. Back to Bletsoe's writing.

Something else chimed. Her casual engagement with all the issues I've been obsessed with in poetry for the past decade: geology, history and natural history, mythology and newly mythologised landscapes; love and sex; spiritualism - or rather, the ability to transcend accidence into substance, the sublime.

Her work - in particular The Separable Soul - made me realise that the short lyric isn't capable of containing these multitudes, unless you force yourself into the density (and, some say, inscrutability) of Geoffrey Hill. And the other models I was aware of at the time were distinctly American - Gary Snyder being one of my favourites - or Greek - dead Greek modernists, like Seferis and Elytis - so the landscapes, the approaches, felt as if they lost something in translation. My previous models were not close enough to where I was; I always feel like a thief, or pretender, trying to compete or enter into dialogue with them.

From here, I fell to thinking about where the medium-length poem had gone. I've read (in BS Johnson's Aren't you a bit young to be writing your memoirs?) that the short lyric was the natural haven for poetry after the novel took ascendancy in narrative forms. But the medium length poem can do something that short fiction, intense lyrics and prose poetry can't quite. It's also a very demanding form, unless the poet focuses too much in favour of style over substance. To some extent (argued elsewhere on G&P recently), John Burnside is guilty of this washing over of sound, yet he also demonstrates the ability of medium-length poems to pull the reader entirely within their world, to envelop in atmospherics.

There's also the extended argument or essay of the poem - a demonstration or investigation of a subject that can process through permutations of an idea, or scene. Perhaps the sequence rivals this, but not without breaking the flow of the atmosphere. And of course, being closer to the long poem, narrative isn't out of reach. Bletsoe plays with emotional narratives, intense bursts, even a version of Gawayn & the Greene Knight.

So why are these qualities often overlooked? A better question would be: Why is the industry so obsessed with the short lyric; with the '40 lines or less' competitions? Is it sheer laziness - editors not wanting to read more? The ability to fit those poems onto a single page, thereby saving paper? Or the constraints of space in general, in magazines and anthologies, that enforce page limits on editors and publishers?

There's definitely something in this that's connected to the capitalised markets in which poetry has been trying to function; a sure sign, yet again that capitalism is stifling creativity - the lack of diversity in the more commercial publishing houses' lists shows this, even where the editors are widely read and extremely open-minded, they're within capitalist business systems, which are beholden to capitalist economics: profit margins, annual growth, forecasting.

OK, if I haven't lost you already, I should say, I'm not a raving leftie. I like to consider myself critical of the current system and its effects on the things I love, both negative and positive. And so I also see the internet (a place I've been highly critical of in the past, for making room for so much of the slushpile, thereby undermining my democratic championing of poetry) as a place to bring back the medium-length poem, a place where poetry is not beholden to column inches, or cost per square inch of paper. That said, I am secretly worried that this may just open the doors to a lot of baggy self-indulgence.

Meanwhile, I've not said very much about Elisabeth Bletsoe's Landscape from a Dream. But I'm still reading it, like it says in the title to this post. So you'll just have to wait, or buy a copy yourself and make your own mind up.

Shearsman Reading Series

Just picked up the first notice of this year's Shearsman events in London. Tony Frazer, who runs Shearsman, put on some fantastic readers last year, not least of which was an exclusive event with Christopher Middleton (who is also published by Enitharmon).

I'm very disappointed I can't make this one, mainly because of Elisabeth Bletsoe. I first stumbled on her work through Tony's guest editing of Poetry International Web (which also featured Frances Presley and Peter Riley). I was blown away.

If you get there, let us know what you think...

The first in Shearsman's 2008 Reading Series takes place on Wednesday, 16 January at 7:30 pm, featuring Elisabeth Bletsoe & Peter Robinson.

Swedenborg Hall
Swedenborg House
20/21 Bloomsbury Way
London WC1A 2TH
Admission free.

The entrance is around the corner on Barter Street.

Closest Tube Stations: Holborn (Central & Piccadilly Lines : 4 minutes' walk), Tottenham Court Road (Central & Northern Lines: 6 minutes), Covent Garden (Piccadilly Line: 10 minutes). Several buses stop a few yards from the Hall. There is an underground carpark close by, underneath Bloomsbury Square. Disabled access is available, but please let us know in advance if it is required.

Further details here of the venue:www.shearsman.com/pages/editorial/readings.html

Shearsman @ Swedenborg Hall

The Shearsman series returned this month after its summer hiatus, with two poets I'd previously unheard of (not that that is difficult) - Scott Thurston and Ian Davidson. Both came across as very interesting page/process explorers on the whole, though with a political edge that worked extremely well, when employed.

Scott Thurston kicked off with a piece that drew parallels between the felling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad and Ozymandias; I enjoyed the execution much more than I'd expected, but most especially for the introductory quotation he read out about a leg from the statue worth £6000 being impounded by UK Customs for not having a valid bill of sale to accompany it.

But his work really began to solidify after this piece. I marked him down as a poet psychoanalysing himself at the page, in the moment of arriving at the creative space, just before genesis. And so the poems produced were often about producing poems. There was a lot of self-reflexivity in his work, a dash of the abstract - talk of spaces, blankness. Two significant quotes I half-recorded, both of which indicate recurring ideas:

"Emotions are the same in poetry as in real life"

and

"Showing up at the page with a sexual core burning"

Ian Davidson used his travel experiences in Greece, the Baltics, Wales and elsewhere as a way of pointing the pen at himself, his own body. And again, a strong political edge brought in through the locational history, such as the KGB in Riga, Latvia.

There was a sense of the names of things becoming detached by change and decay and a sense that political factors had a hand in this, or an inability to keep up with the meaning of things, as they decayed, while the words stayed the same.

This carried through to an emphasis on the physical - a deep understanding of the immediately physical - organs, senses, bodily decay and construction and so on. The introduction to his recent book, which I bought at the event, talks about how he actually took up smoking and quit repeatedly while writing and actually ended up hospitalised for a while with severe throat problems. Something warped, but also pioneering about this.

Similar to Thurston, he was a poet who described the act of creating poetry, but his approach was more tangible. He met words, on the page, but also acted in dialogue with them, with the writing process, even if the experience didn't answer him in speech. The idea that took hold of me best was that words had a sensory effect upon the poet in the moment of creation.

One of my favourite of his metaphors (and my favourite in recent times), was of walking between words almost blind, between their leaf rustle, brushed by their branches. I'm paraphrasing, but the effect was to put me in mind of the wardrobe to Narnia as a paralell for poetic genesis.

Anyway, a series well worth going to if you're in London. It's free, you get to sit under the unnerving gaze of a bust of Swedenborg himself:

"At the age of fifty-six he entered into a spiritual phase, in which he experienced dreams and visions. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, where he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits."
(Wikipedia)

The choice of venue is oddball in a good way, as are a few of the poets I've seen there this year, although Christopher Middleton's visit earlier this year has left me with absolute faith in Tony Frazer's tastes. Next month Erín Moure is over from Canada. She's one of Shearsman's translators, but will read her own work.