Some sporadic news items

Luke Kennard has a new book out: Cain

It looks like this on my desk:

You'll notice, next to it, a postcard, one of fifty limited edition 'bonus poems' sent out with the first 50 pre-orders. You don't get to read it unless you pre-ordered. Or if you come round my house and strong-arm me into showing you my copy. But you will first have to be restrained, Hannibal Lecter style, and wheeled into the special viewing vault I have constructed, and you will be behind Perspex in case you splutter your dirty juices all over my precious postcard poem.

The Editors do have an exclusive LK unpublished poem draft, snatched from his bag acquired through legal channels at a Buzzwords event some years ago, apparently during a Matt Merritt workshop. It will go live soooon.

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Luke's launch took place at the Waterstones in Birmingham's New Street, just by the rail station. This is apparently to be a regular open mic type thing. This month (June 6th), however, Nine Arches Press are launching volume one of Primers. Kind of their answer to the Faber New Poets, and put together with The Poetry School, the project seeks out new poets and launches them into the stratosphere, or, well, as high as a punk-poetry Midlands-built rocket can send them.

I can only find an online flyer image on twitter, so that's what you get now:



I also know nothing more about the open mic at the Waterstones during Luke's launch because it was on a chalk board at the event and I wiped my brain cells of the entire evening when I got home so I could enjoy the printed poems afresh when the book arrived. Anyone has any info, wants to go, ping us. Then again, I may find out on Monday at Primers.

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Peter Blegvad has a new radio play, 'The Impossible Book', airing on BBC R3's Between the Ears, Saturday 11th June, 21:15-21:45.

I have heard a sneak preview.  It features Peter Blegvad as an unnamed writer, and Harriet Walter as Agatha Christie. It is phenomenally weird and beautiful. Produced with Iain Chambers, sound designer extraordinaire.

The short description is: "A writer is beset by hallucinations on a train travelling through time and space."

The long description, available here, hints at the depth of strange beauty at work in Blegvad's mind, and in the resulting play, spawned, so I hear, from a project originally begun around 20 years ago.

The BBC's mid-length description is entertaining because it doesn't quite make sense. Which is a really, really good sign.

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Midlands Creative Projects have teamed up with Bloodaxe Books once again to create a live poetry extravaganza. It is on at the Belgrade Theatre for two nights only, 1st and 2nd July:

Beyond the Water's Edge

The Editors are sad they can't go. Anyone who goes and would like to write up their response to it, would be most welcome to air their views here. Post a comment or something, saying you're going and will send us words. In fact, we'll gladly publish multiple responses, by anyone willing to send us three words, three hundred, or even three thousand on the subject. (Once we've run it past our legal team and you've signed a disclaimer taking full responsibility, etc. etc.)

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There is a new journal emerging, called Epizootics, which self-describes as an "Online Literature Journal for the Contemporary Animal":

"We are currently accepting submissions for our first issue, to be published online in August. We accept experimental poetries and prose, as well as criticism, philosophy, theory and reviews. Exact specifications can be found on our website. Send 3-5 poems or up to 5000 words of prose to their email address. We also particularly encourage long poems, serial poems and mixed genre works."

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The Enemies Project, long may it continue, recently partnered with Singing Apple Press (Camilla Nelson) for a tour of the South West later this year.

While the deadline has passed for participation, it does make the Editors wonder why so few poetry-related tours from outside the WMids manage to penetrate the huge 300 foot wall of the imagination surrounding us. Well, fail to leave the motorway exits. Maybe they're all like Philip Larkin, watching from a train...

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Hannah Silva's Schlock! is going to be in The Rosemary Branch theatre in London for most of November. Start planning it now.

I watched a preview several months back and it was upsettingly good. I mean upsetting and good. Or, well, something. Here is a promo video:

Schlock! by Hannah Silva (trailer) from Penned in the Margins on Vimeo.

Holophin Phor Phree!

An extremely exciting offer for Holy Week from Penned in the Margins!

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LUKE KENNARD’S SCI-FI NOVELLA AVAILABLE FREE ON KINDLE 1-5 APRIL

“It is 2031 and the must-have gadget is the Holophin: a tiny, dolphin-shaped microprocessor which cures your worst impulses and phobias, comforts you in your grief or boredom and makes everything look much, much prettier.”

Holophin is the debut novella by award-winning British poet LUKE KENNARD – originally released in September 2012 as a limited edition hardback by London-based indie press Penned in the Margins.

From Monday 1 April to Friday 5 April 2013, Holophin will be available to download totally free from Amazon Kindle.

As publisher Tom Chivers explains, “the hardback edition sold out incredibly quickly – I literally have one copy left in the office – so we’re making Holophin available for free in order that more people can get hold of this mind-blowing and very funny satire of the near future.”

The heroes of the story are Hatsuka and Max, students at the esteemed Takin International School, a learning institute so magnificent it produces Holophins as a by-product of its coursework projects. The billionth device has just been sold, but when Takin’s best students are stalked by a shady rival manufacturer, Holophin’s monopoly, and the narrative itself, begins to unravel – with unexpected consequences.

Holophin is a meditation on identity and the imagination, but also offers a veiled satire of certain consumer technology brands. As Kennard says:

“I wanted to write a story about technology and memory, but I wanted to focus on the marketing side, the kind of thing you see played out between Apple and Samsung, and the way we take sides, as if either is any more evil/ethical. But it’s not surprising that we try to bring in a moral dimension, because when you think about how long we all spend fiddling obsessively with their devices, they’re kind of battling for our souls: our means of experiencing the world, of communicating with one another. So, what if there were rival companies offering to make you a soul – how would you choose?”

Critics and readers alike have praised Holophin: The Telegraph’s Science Fiction critic David Langford dubbed it “a sparky, image-rich novella that reboots familiar genre themes”, whilst literary blog Gists & Piths responded with, “wonderful reading, imaginatively fresh, technically surprising... It deserves to sell millions.”

More information about Holophin

Download Holophin FREE for Amazon Kindle (until 5 April)

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Please note: the Editors of G&P do not endorse Amazon, nor the Kindle device. Actually, one of the editors is a bit pissed off that his Kindle's screen went wrong just after the warranty collapsed. He considers it badly manufactured and unecological. Then again, he's also the kind of person who likes to spill tea on books and drop them in the bath, and you just can't do that with electronics. And since Amazon bought out Goodreads, he's been convinced they're not only going for a horizontal monopoly, which monopoly law doesn't know how to deal with, but they actually do have their sights set on dominating the words coming out of our mouths.

Blinking to miss it: Isolated Examples of Imaginative Transformation in the writings of Luke Kennard

George Ttoouli has just finished reading Luke Kennard's novella, Holophin...

This is one of those notes to self that feels fresh enough in my thinking that I want to share it here, in case someone else has input. (I'm increasingly using G&P to air ideas I've not got straight in my head, for which, trad-mag readers, I apologise. Go find a weekend supplement, they're more reliable.)

Firstly, Luke Kennard's novella, Holophin. I'm going to try and restrain myself from gushing praise, as Luke is a friend and has had enough PR from me. Read someone else on it: Annexe and also the trailer (rumour has it, Tom Chivers literally hung out of a plane at 25,000 feet to get that footage). It is, of course, wonderful reading, imaginatively fresh, technically surprising... etc. etc. I'm not entirely sure what the crazy chapter between 14 and 15 actually means, but it looks pretty.

Two isolated incidents I want to refer to:

1. In Holophin:

"the ... School's tutors have been re-hired as Learning Resource Managers. The Research Institute is no longer free - a luxury we cannot afford in such straitened times"

(I've elided some of this and not referenced precisely because some of this might constitute a spoiler otherwise.)

2. In Planet Shaped Horse (Nine Arches Press):

"The gate has no lock, but is operated by credit card, // charging you £1,500 each time you swipe to open it" (from 'Snob').

[The latter quotation was embellished by Luke in performance to something like, "£1,500 the first time, then £3,000, rising to £9,000 when you swipe to open it" so more obviously a reference to UK university tuition fees.]

Something I remember Luke saying in response to writing from personal experience: whatever happened to making stuff up?

Here's a writer who's also a university lecturer dishing out poetry about a man recovering from mental health problems waiting in a halfway house, and a[n] SF novella about a world supported by little dolphin stickers, with no little resemblance to Ghost in the Shell crossed with a war between Apple and Microsoft computing and a minor dash of Terminator thrown in for good measure. Plus fairytale, and maybe even The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I'll stop there, the influences and connections are so manifold as to become meaningless after a while - it is an original synthesis of familiar tropes in a way that utterly delights. (Oh, more gushing...) But it reads fresh, the characters are made up, as far as I can tell, the world distinct from the genre comparisons, despite the odd homage. (This pitches into an awkward discussion about how easy it might be to demonstrate originality, when it's taken to mean organisation of language, rather than structural, or contextual organisation, but let's save that for another day.)

Anyway, two references to the privatisation of education, but transformed into the context of the two books' worlds (which I've elided in the first quote, but read it yourself and decide). I got these references and responded to the satire because it's an issue close to my heart, of course. Does it stand up, or is it a cheap shot at the real world, at contemporary society, which takes you out of the SF?

SF operates in a tension between utopia and reality. The reality we are living, what we understand of the world, its physics and society today, is the reader's point of reference for engaging with the [impossible / extrapolated / speculated / dys- / u-topian] world of an SF story. (SF doesn't have exclusive rights to this, of course, as Planet Shaped Horse demonstrates: an alternative reality world where everything is surreal but plausible through a distorted subjectivity.) Holophin falls into the category of speculative fiction in the main part - a dystopian world loosely based on technological projections and the replacement of nation states by corporations. You could argue there are elements of pure fantasy SF in there, in the context of the implausible energy and material resources that would have to drive Holophin's society (which only gets one minor reference), but let's leave that alone.

Well-executed satire is satisfying, right? Only it does leave you with that bitter taste of reality washing back in after a cool clear dram of escapism. That's called morality, or if I were feeling ungenerous, moralising, but done here in a delightfully Hogarthian way, a non-puritannical 'let's make entertaining stories and be good people at the same time!' kind of thing.

Is it satisfying enough? Here, the transformation of satire on privatisation of university education is entertaining, sure, but that's just one of the three elements of great writing: "magic, story, lesson" as Nabokov put it (PDF link); or in reverse order, 'educate, entertain, enchant' as Peter Blegvad rephrased it. Along with satire, the education of social critique, we want story, the context of the world, but what about enchantment? That feeling of flow that keeps us out of reality and in the story's new world, forgetting all the research I should have been doing this morning, not going to the library to work, because I was reading this book.

I think that came out of the urgency of Hatsuka's story: her relationship to her parents, the tension with Max, the super rich room mate. Then another kind of 'dropping out' of the story arose with a thread centring on depression - something else this shares with Planet Shaped Horse - a treatment that reminded me of Eggers' film version of Where the Wild Things Are, emotionally affecting enought to make me stop and think for a moment, also dropping me out of the flow of reading.

This is all beginning to get a bit incoherent. I have been trying to say something about how Luke has managed to transform elements of his personal experience - for example, university work, no doubt some emotional life as well, to help breathe life into the characters - into something highly entertaining, morally positive, and, within the whole, a sustained degree of enchantment also. Some moments that are so hilarious they put all the cheap chuckles of a 'comic writer' like Bill Bryson into the recycling bin and throw a petrol bomb in after them - equally, moments that drop you out of the story, because you can hear yourself laughing.

Maybe we need these moments - it's not a flaw to say you left the flow of reading, the page-turning. But you're acknowledging those moments when the story made you think, or feel; moments when you remembered you were human. The idea of being fully in the flow of a story would be meaningless without little reminders of the world you have to return to; it might even be a negative thing; you might start believing that you could escape the real world, your problems, rather than only leaving for a while to gain some perspective. (Maybe that's the problem with apathetic social idealism: it isn't facing up to the problems, it's trying to escape. Oh, another can of worms - I'm leaving them in to feed the trolls.)

OK, enough. If someone knows what I was trying to say, please fax it to Luke's departmental office at the University of Birmingham. They're barely funded by taxpayers money these days, so consider it an act of resistance against the Nautilus future I'm trying to prevent (read the book to get the reference). I'll close with a list of names I came up with at one am to describe the colour of Holophin's cover - more suggestions welcome:

Lurid 9

Wallflower Comedown
Grape Grope (sadly, this one exists)
Broken Fuschia
Summer Pervert

Ripe Stains

Culpability Pink

Bubblegum Vulva  (blimey, so is this one)
Gollyberry
Keninnards

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Holophin was printed in a limited edition hardback run of 300 copies. Less than 100 remain - I know this because I have copy 203 (assuming Tom is as OCD as me and only sends them out in the correct numerical order; also he tweeted about having sold more than two-thirds). It will be out as an e-book in a few months, but trust me, the hardback is beautiful. So is the text, of course. It deserves to sell millions. I haven't read so much joy since Heartsnatcher.

Penned in the Margins New Website!

A quick update about Penned in the Margins for you, which is also an excuse for committing the Eighth Deadly Sin.

PitM have launched their redesigned website, with even slicker information, shopping and poetry information. Yes, totally shameless to be telling you this, but there are some good reasons to go over, read the blog, browse the shop and buy a poetry book or two.

Tom Chivers, he of the Legendary DigiSkills, among other things, is producing some of the most exciting new poetry around. Better still he's shit hot at promoting it, with reviews all over the place for a stable of mostly brand new poets in their twenties and thirties, who have genuinely (I speak from experience) been edited into shape, for an improved reading experience (etc. etc.). This is old style publishing for post-Generation Z; soon you'll be able to sniff these poetry books off your iPhone screen in the form of iParticles, once you've installed the necessary iNostrils, of course.

In particular, this lovely gem of a collaborative poem, a sonnet for the royal wedding. Fourteen poets, fourteen lines. It's full of exactly the kind of horrific puns ("fornicate", "placate lust's will", "embroiled", etc.) I'd have hoped for from fellow stablemates (ok, embroiled is a bit weak, but that was mine). It almost makes sense, too.

News

One of the editors is just back from the Hay Jamboree, featuring (in no particular order, but all were excellent)

Geraldine Monk
Alan Halsey
Elisabeth Bletsoe
Caroline Bergvall
Scott Thurston
Phil Maillard
Zoë Skoulding
Anthony Mellors
Richard Gwyn
John Goodby
Claudia Azzola
Jean Portante

And lots more! Was an amazing few days, though couldn't get to everything, but will be writing up responses shortly.

Meanwhile...

- The Bath Spa Reading Series continues this week with David Morley, 8pm at the BRLSI.

- Penned in the Margins announce a new 'box format' limited edition of Simon Barraclough's Bonjour Tetris.

- The 2010 Voiceworks Concert is now online, in case you missed the live stream.

- The University of Greenwich is running the Cross-Genre Festival from Wednesday 14th-Friday 16th July 2010. Line-up looks astonishingly good!

- Probably there's lots more to say, but as a round off, to save the other editor the embarrassment of committing the 8th Deadly Sin, his new book, Difficult Second Album, is out from Nine Arches Press, as is Milorad Krystanovich's Improvising Memory. Two beautifully designed, bolshy publications.

- Oh wait, just remembered, at risk of committing aforementioned sin myself, Polarity Magazine UK, eggspawn of the New Surrealism, will be launching in London at 6pm, Sunday 27th June, at The Slaughtered Lamb.

James Wilkes:Reviews (4)

Linda Hadley and Edwin Hak, 6 London Fountains (Canterbury: Panda Press, 2008), 8pp.

One ragged sheet they complicate down, a small hand-inked dribbler, of slit and fold and press within the pages. 13 spumante pencils, the central higher than the rest.

The “rational fountain”, bisected by the shadows of financial courts, turns water to a fabric draped unwrinkled over marble slabs. But a wobble turns a ravel, and it seams.

The dampened husk and scaffold of a civic flow: the blocked stone fountain gathers surplus, of material, of rainspots, in the park.



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This review is forthcoming in City State: New London Poetry, which is published today by penned in the margins. Interior Traces will be serialised in three parts on Resonance FM, beginning Friday May 29th, 15:30 to 17:00.

James Wilkes: Reviews (2)

The Art of the Kilim, by Mary Dundhed (Paris: Overboard Editions, 1994), 128pp.

The Friend laughed and pointed at the kilim, the technologised surface, he exclaimed. Later I used a wi-fi heart and unknotted this as best I could.

The blueprint for a kilim is improvised live, in the maker’s cob and breezeblock heart, he said. He smiled for effect and popped a roasted chickpea with his teeth.

The Friend prefers a glass of water, he thinks this is the happiest of drinks. I cleverly switched his for gin, and when he was tipsy I slipped my fingers up his sleeve and stole his expensive heart.

I was lying in a burned-out basement as the Friend interrogated me harshly. Streaming tears, I asked why I could never see his face. He extinguished the heart and approached.

We wandered moodily along the beach. Between the greedy cows and beach huts of the Soviet, between hypodermics, twisted fishing nets, the bloated carcasses of dogs. This too is a prayer rug, the Friend announced. Playfully I slapped his heart.



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James Wilkes is currently involved in Interior Traces. He runs Renscombe Press and was one of the Generation Txt poets for penned in the margins.

James Wilkes: Reviews (1)

Robert Steinbeck, The Leaping Pebble: a Philosophical Novel, ed. and foreword by James Lewes, Gertrude Felix and Ray Harms (Edinburgh: Stott Books, 2002), 198pp.

Speculative biomedical ethics meets dancehall reverie in this elegant folio reprint of the hard-to-find private press original (1908). Editorial cuts by Lewes et al. are largely faithful to the author’s intent, unlike Kendal’s bowdlerising excisions of 1934 (though see Selene Camphor, ‘Kendal, Steinbeck et le problème de proprioception’ in Études baltiques 65 for an alternative view). Relocating the scene of the ambiguous sexual encounter from Behlersee (Schleswig-Holstein) to Battersea (Wandsworth) is an interesting move, though it does make the appearance of the famous black stork a bit anomalous.

For anyone with even the slightest interest in whether the neural correlates of consciousness might be understood via a bedsheet tied to broomhandles on which coloured images flurry, settle, detach like film of ashes, this is a must. Otherwise wait for the stage adaptation. If chatroom gossip is correct, this will be set in Thessaloniki circa 2030, and opens with Ludwig (Robert Redford) attempting to fence DNA stolen from a medieval saint’s fingerbone.



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This review is forthcoming in City State: New London Poetry (May 20th 2009, penned in the margins). Gists & Piths will be serialising a number of James Wilkes' reviews over the next few weeks.

George Ttoouli Has Visions

Visions of the City II @ The Bishopsgate Institute, London, 3/7/08

Given Chris McCabe's prevalence, I finally found him reading at an event in a place beyond the immanent. Visions of the City II featured Hannah Silva, Tom Chivers (resident poet @ the Bishopsgate Institute and host), Chris McCabe and Iain Sinclair, reading in that order. To get it out of the way, and because I couldn't ignore it, the space was absolutely wonderful and the event beautifully timed and designed.

But being a mug, I turned up fifteen minutes late and missed Hannah Silva. My experience of the evening was therefore of the three men only; i.e. that of a testosterone-fuelled harnessing of London’s feminised territory to a marauding male aesthetic. (Allegedly.) No doubt it would have been peachier if I’d caught the full quartet, but that’s what I experienced, and that’s what you’ll have to settle for.*

The consistent thread between the three poets was that of recording experience and place simultaneously; and, as often happens with this kind of psychogeography**, a defamiliarisation-so-as-to-bring-you-closer-to-the-essence-of-the-place through the poet's language and imagery.

In a prose piece by Tom, Liverpool Street Station arrives flat-packed from, no doubt, the Ikea of Psychogeographopolis (early version here, the recent one was published as a poster-pull-out in the Edgeless Shape). Whereas the men in Chris’ London were as tall or short as their capitalist status allowed: his marxist-working-class-not-really-a-persona was dwarfed by bankers and policemen on packed out tube carriages.

Iain Sinclair was another consistent thread: the younger poets both name-checked him in epigrams and referenced him indirectly in their sets, and he danced like a crazy minstrel on their poetics. Formally for Tom this manifested in lists, catalogues, especially of road names. St Botolph's popped twice, once in Tom’s reading, once in Iain's.*** Chris read extracts from a blog project, The True History of the Working Class, which was akin to ripping off his shirt to show a tattoo of Iain Sinclair gurning on his chest. But funnier.

All three tapped into comedy at some point in their readings - Tom's sardonic wit created a sense of a London which was always out to crap on his shoulder and Iain delivered jovial rubrics inbetween his creative pieces. The funniest moment of the event was an accidental spoonerism: Iain's "city shoals"**** inverted to a, "though true, inappropriate description."

The reason I’ve highlighted the comic element is because of a vibe I started getting at some point during Iain’s (wonderful) final set. The poet-archivist's role, or the psychogeographer's role, seems to veer into a dry territory very easily. Maybe it’s because it's heavy work, this kind of poetry, at heart, even though the selection seemed pitched digestibly in terms of length and sampling. There’s a need to throw in some light relief at some point.

Is it the pressure on the wordsmith to 'do justice to' the subject, that demands an urgent, serious tone, first of all, which the poet then has to deviate from? I’m not sure. Glancing back at early practitioners, poets like Edward Carpenter, for example, or perhaps Walt Whitman to some extent, there’s a need to take oneself seriously, else the grandness of the vision might just fall apart into a randomised list. So the poet has to keep the tone strong and hypnotic, urgent and serious, else the importance of the individual’s experience of a place might not be believed, or held up to the light for scrutiny.

Or is it just me? I can't say I have the lineage, of who begat [...] who begat Sinclair who begat Chivers and McCabe. There must be some funny psychogeographical poems about, ones that stress the irreverent above all. The love-hate relationship between a poet and place, but delivered on the scale and with the grandness of vision that Iain has for East London. That, I think, is what set his work apart on the night: that he turns his subject to the light, again and again, and never finds his responses exhausted by the examination. That, too is what set him apart from the younger generation – stamina, or perhaps simply more time to write. But that’s another discussion.

Incidentally, Iain’s final gobbet was telling on this subject. While browsing the shelves of the fantastic collection at the Bishopsgate before his reading, he stumbled across a book called Death Dictionary: Over 5,500 Clinical, Legal, Literary and Vernacular Terms. The brief encounter and extract he read sealed the night beautifully, but he had turned away from his own work.

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Tom Chivers runs penned in the margins and has a blog, thisisyogic.

Chris McCabe has a previous collection from Salt, The Hutton Inquiry.

Iain Sinclair name-checked his latest manuscript/work in progress, which is almost finished, but all I caught of the title were the words 'blood' and 'Hackney'. It's a kind of memoir spanning forty years of his life there. There's also The Verbals, Iain Sinclair in conversation with Kevin Jackson (Worple Press, 2003).


* If Hannah Silva reads this and decides she wants to set the index card straight, she’s welcome to send some poems, a complaint, verbal abuse, or ASCII flowers.

** Yeah, why am I so uncomfortable about calling their poetry psychogeography, straight up? Maybe because it’s one of those terms that seems to have been downloaded to do a box-job on a kind of poetry that relies on open field’s legacy more than the closed-shop analyses of, say Ruth Padel’s poetry, or Sean O’Brien’s, or [insert endless list of mainstream poetry].

*** As a North Londoner, the East Londoner emphasis to the night all kind of washed over me. It may as well have been Timbuktu, or Swindon. Don't get me wrong, my dad grew up in Dagenham and I still have family down there, but everything was boarded up last time I went, even the sewers. (OK, I made that up.)

**** Do I really have to spell it out for you? Try saying it quickly ten times, after a large tumbler of London Dry Gin. You’ll see.

P.S. I am considering a follow up post to this: Compilation of New Terms for Death. Possibly if we get enough suggestions on email, I'll start it. Possibly though, the idea needs to be terminated.