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.

Statements of Intent (4) - Tom Chivers: "Hone your ego on my fist"

Firstly, let me apologise for the video; for its specific darkness. Of course, this poem could be intoned and interpreted in a number of different ways. I hope there is something comic – darkly comic, I suppose – about it. Sometimes when I perform it, the final couplet gets a laugh. Occasionally someone is offended. The poem hovers around a violent core, with pseudo-allusions to the Whitechapel Murders of 1888.

Multiplicity is very important to me. In the title piece of my collection, How To Build A City, I say: ‘I do not believe in irony, just multiple levels of recognition. A democratic onion, if you will.’ (Note to self: must stop quoting from own book.) Alongside and dependent on the multiple is the notion of the SHIFT. Language in constant flux, relentlessly rewriting itself. Tonal juxtapositions, fault-lines, fissures. All terrible postmodern, I’m afraid. Sorry. My foundation influences are all masters of the shift in different ways, like Barry MacSweeney, who writes: ‘I am 16. / I am a Tory. My // vision of the future represents / no people. // Celeriac priesthood offers up my rifle to the sky.’ My use of ‘celeriac’ in ‘This is yogic’ is no homage. I just like celeriac.

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.

"a dismal, breathless, untold place": Simon Turner reviews The Terrors by Tom Chivers

Okay. First, a disclaimer: blogger has this awful habit of deleting everything you've written if you select all the text manually for formatting and so on. Its autosave function, meanwhile, means that once the work is lost, it's lost, leaving you pretty much boned without any recourse. A sensible person might save the work elsewhere, but it's part and parcel of the instantaneous nature of blogging that such concerns rarely present themselves.

Basically, I'm telling you this so that you've got some reason to forgive me for any lapses of intelligence, critical judgement or taste. No doubt the original lost version of this review was infinitely more witty and erudite than the crude reconstruction you now see before you, but only the electronic ether will ever no for sure. (I would say it was, but I'm deeply biased and you should treat all of my opinions with scepticism and disgust.) Anyway, here's the review: don't say I didn't warn you.

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The small press scene is absolutely vital to the health of poetry in this country. It's here that all the real work of poetry is done, whilst the higher echelons of the poetry kingdom reap the benefits of the hard work that the small presses have done. It's a little like feudalism, though with a lot less mud. Nine Arches Press is a new addition to the small press stable, but it's already done some excellent work publishing and promoting new poetry in the West Midlands and beyond. I'm saying this not only because the editors, after weeks of pleading, tears and threats, have agreed to publish a pamphlet by yours truly some time in the near future, but because I genuinely believe in what they're doing. So far, their editorial decisions have been spot on, and this new pamphlet from Tom Chivers does noting to alter that trend.

Tom Chivers is a very nice man who runs Penned in the Margins, which publishes and promotes new poetry in London. He often sends free books to the editors, which we never get around to reviewing because we're too boorish and lazy and uncultured. (I am, anyway: George is the very pinnacle of Guardian-reading metrosexual sophistication.) The Terrors is the first collection he's authored himself and, frankly, it's a blinder. It takes the form of emails fired off to the inmates of London's Newgate prison between, according to the author, "roughly 1700 and 1760". This is more than just a means of mining easy humour from anachronism. Rather, through the language itself - wherein internet age slang mingles uneasily with an almost Shakespearean diction to create a socio-linguistic palimpsest or montage - Chivers suggests the persistence of the past, and its unsettling intrusion into the present. In this regard, he's working very much within a continuum of London authors - which includes Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd in its rollcall - for whom the past is never a static thing, but constantly reasserting itself, often against the present's will. Barry MacSweeney's 'Ranter', with its omnivorous mingling of registers, its immersion in the world of the religious and political pamphleteers of the 17th and 18th centuries, is another definite forebear.

MacSweeney's sheer verbal energy seems to have rubbed off on Chivers, as what impresses most about The Terrors is its headlong rush of language, an explosive approach to the written word that matches the violence of the events it details:

"First, I look up 'corn-chandler'. There are Jacobites abroad, a plague of hungry Irish stamping at the bridleway. London draws you to its meagre bosom. And then, it seems like seven years: a simple country boy (that's you) stark bollock naked with a fruit knife in his hand. The plan is only half-cocked. The duffle-coated master bleeds, he bleeds, bleeds, bleeds. You pitch his blood int the coal-hole. His still-warm corpse decays inside the privy. The yard begins to smell like coffee burnt into a brick of ash. You know all this, of course. I've read the letter to your wife; how the knife was not a plan, just an afterthought. And they hung your hanged cadaver in the gibbet, Shepherd's Bush, 'til your insides trickled out and your knuckles stank of sulphur (also, an afterthought)."

It's difficult to give an impression of the excitement this collection generates for me. It's a truly remarkable sequence, alive to the possibilities of what language can do, totally confident in its creation of a hyperreality where past and present mingle and bleed into one another. If all of its meaning is not immediately apparent at first, second, or even third reading, this is no kind of handicap. The verve and energy of the writing is enough to make the leap over any semantic gaps the reader might uncover. This is a very achieved debut, and I see it as something of a call to arms to other young poets: who's going to top it?

The Terrors Launch Tomorrow

Tom Chivers is launching his Nine Arches pamphlet The Terrors tomorrow evening. A review is in the pipeline. Details below:


Join us on Sunday 29th March from 7pm for drinking games, petty chit-chat and readings by Tom Chivers, Tim Wells, Jane Holland, Jane Commane and James Wilkes , at The Market Trader, 50 Middlesex Street E1 7EX. Nearest Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East, Liverpool Street.

The Terrors launch on Facebook

Find the venue

THE TERRORS by Tom Chivers is the first in a series of special edition pamphlets from Nine Arches Press; darkly-humoured e-dispatches of crime and punishment from over the walls and across centuries. The Terrors is a sequence of imagined emails; poetic missives from the start of the 21st century to inmates at London's notorious Newgate Prison. The emails introduce a cast of 18th century villains and their gruesome crimes: 'Half-hanged Smith'; executioner-turned-murderer Jack Ketch; the notorious Waltham Blacks.

Tom Chivers - Hasty Excise

It started in Europe’s busiest railway station, a kind of troglodytic labyrinth: sixteen lines in, no way out. You enter, as I did, through a grossly underwhelming shopping arcade, a glorified thoroughfare. Whitewashed corridors lead inside and then up. A vast runway of tracks and platforms; a boy in a blue tracksuit spitting at the rails; and beyond, the close menace of tower blocks.

The speed is astonishing.

Not the speed of the train, but the speed of forgetting. The streets below do not exist. Battersea, Nine Elms, Vauxhall are just the shitty verges of this eight-laned beast. I reach into London. Waterloo greets me with its velvet concourse, its has-been grandeur. The crowds, expecting my arrival, block the way. Outside, the air is moist. It is 10pm. A fat baby gurgles from his or her pram. A skinny man in a grey suit sits with his back to the station wall, skinny legs drawn up to his face. He has no shirt and no shoes. The mother swerves to avoid the warm trickle of urine.

There are so many people here. The heat brings them out. Below the footbridge, three obese tourists pose with Nelson Mandela’s head as a disintegrating fireball of ash scuds along the concrete.

I am moving so fast.

In one ear, tinny samba. In the other ear, a raging chorus of violins. I am stereo. The river has drawn back.

Rest In Peace, Timo Baxter, skateboarder, thrown from the bridge when it was Hungerford, rusted, unlit, high tide. In the middle of the river, the stink of weed, an oil slick. I am moving so fast I almost miss her, poised, phone raised in right hand, head covered with a white lace scarf, on the exact point of speech. A boat passes below, heading east. The water disturbs.

I am moving so fast, take the steps down two at a time. This is another place.

Motion is a good name for a club. Young men in off-the-rack suits refuse to queue. Dark poppies appear on their white shirts. This is a bad place for a club. The sudden light of the Tube is like waking from a dream, or falling into one. Something gathers inside. I apologise. The woman is so large, I struggle to get by. I find a seat. We pass through Cannon Street without stopping. The lights are dimmed. The Israeli girl with the palest face and jet-black ringlets looks back at me in the window. When I stand up, I am taller than the man she is with. When we arrive and he struggles with a suitcase, I begin to hate him less.

I am thinking about Zoroastrianism and the White Tower.

I am thinking about how fast I am moving towards Aldgate.

I am thinking about the cunt outside the hotel, and the man he is with, his olive skin and pencil moustache, and what my chances are with the girls on the Minories, or the American who says as I am passing it is brutal and sadistic or the City boy crossing who says win or lose, he’s gonna get fucked or the rude by the church who leans in as I lean back and in the alcove someone’s sleeping, foetal, wrapped in white like a mummified corpse, a horseshoe of ham in grease paper.

I never expected the hole, an absence behind hoardings, diverted bus routes, a space for the sky, and I see now how things are made vertical. A renamed avenue. The empty car park. The butcher’s hooks swinging in the wind. This light is like falling into a dream, or waking from a coma. I don’t care what you think, this is landscape. Goulston Street falls away. The city spreads out to the north like an endless ocean and I’m just on the edge. Salt on my tongue, tonsils, lips. I swerve to the right. Nobody is watching. Everyone is watching. Somewhere a casserole has been served. Somewhere unembarrassed laughter.

My laptop boots up. The screen whitens.

I am typing this now to make sure I forget.

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Tom Chivers is the mastermind behind penned in the margins, a poetry publishing and promotions venture, based in London, and the London Word Festival. Recently he was poet in residence at the Bishopsgate Institute (you can read the residency poems here). His own blog, this is yogic, can be found here: 'Excursion' originally appeared as one of its entries.