Author: Kirsten Irving

I’ve been out of the loop musically for a while now, so forgive me picking up on a two-year-old song, but what spell has Katy Perry cast over the internet that I can’t find a single angry review of ‘Firework’?

Perry seems to have rehabilitated herself since the days of ‘I Kissed A Girl’ (slammed by Gossip singer Beth Ditto as a “boner dyke anthem”) and the ridiculously-defended ‘UR So Gay’, and decided that the real PR gold lies in Aguilera Hills. Xtina’s 2002 song ‘Beautiful’ basically did ‘Firework’ with a stronger vocal range eight years prior to Perry’s effort.

Let’s compare the two videos:

Beautiful (2002)
Negative female body image (skinny girl examining self in mirror)
Negative male body image (skinny boy lifting weights, surrounded by pictures of muscular men)
Bullying
Gay kiss
Suggested transgender issues (not clear whether the cross-dressing guy is meant to be a transvestite or a transgender woman)

Firework (2010)
Negative female body image (girl at pool party afraid to take off robe around her skinny friends)
Childhood cancer (how a bouncy pop song is supposed to help you cope with that, I ain’t sure)
Gay kiss
White gay getting mugged by group of mixed-race men (hmm, really breaking down the barriers here) and using – get this – magic tricks to see them off. Sound advice for urban dwellers.

So I guess let’s start with the kiss in each case. I was never a Christina fan and lyrically ‘Beautiful’ is still cloying and self-helpy in that all-American way, but hell, at least it was written by someone who understood what it was like to be gay. At the time, the video did piss some people off, for no reason other than that the kiss between two men was passionate and sustained. Aguilera has not been averse to the odd faux-gay stunt (snogging Madonna onstage with Britney while wearing a sexy wedding frock was particularly cynical), but this, as saccharine as it was, felt sincere. Aguilera herself never comes into contact with the characters, singing from a bare room while the action goes on outside.

In contrast, the characters in Perry’s video, watched over by their firework-boobed guardian angel, seem chucked in to show that KATY PERRY CARES ABOUT UGLY PEOPLE AND CANCER CHILDREN. All they need is her singing and pyrotechnics to teach them not to care that people want to kill them, or leukaemia wants to kill them, or that muggers want to kill them, or that they want to kill themselves. Don’t be a downer! Come and boogie your knife wounds away!

Perhaps if Perry herself had at least appeared in the video without a trace of makeup, it would have been a start towards sincerity or solidarity with the girl suffering low self-esteem, but no, she’s painted, coiffed and gowned, placed above them all as a guidance figure and ultimately assuming a role of superiority in magically granting them the self-confidence to rise above their situation. It’s dishonest. Life, our bodies and our minds simply do not work like that.

Money does, though, and brand awareness. And yes, both parties can be accused of this. Xtina got to reinvent the ‘Dirrrty’ version of herself with a serious ballad, just as Perry got to sing a clubworthy tune to try and get the gay community back on side after her unapologetic blunders. ‘Firework’ is more obviously cynical though, trying to crowbar serious issues into a jaunty soundtrack from an outsider’s perspective. Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ did a similar thing, the difference being that that was worked more as a defiant call to arms than hurling a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul at people in varying states of despair. ‘Born This Way’ and ‘Beautiful’ are, crucially, sung from a first-person perspective, placing empathy high on the agenda, not forgetting our problems with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream.

Following Ditto’s criticism, Katy Perry said that it was “tacky” to criticise someone else’s music. It’s not. That’s how progress is made. It’s tacky to colonise the suffering of other people in a 2-D way in order to make money.

In possibly the grandest location we’ve experienced yet (seriously check it out in that picture there!), Jon and I will be joining the ever-awesome James Wilkes, whose neuroscience-based poetry has been meddling with our minds of late, at a rather glamorous reading at Ham House.




That’s right. On Sunday 19 August at 5.30pm, we’ll be descending on this beautiful National Trust property for Out of Hours, a seriously refined evening of poetry, music and performance. Well, we’ll shoot for refined, but we lost our one comb weeks ago and it’s a devil’s own job getting knots out with a shark’s jaw.

Come on down for an eclectic goody bag of entertainment!

Tumblr for the event!

Facebook event!

It hasn’t been long since Poetry Parnassus. The event took place between the 26th of June and the 1st of July, as part of the Cultural Olympiads, and it brought together more than two-hundred poets from all over the world for readings and debates. The scale of the project, even in retrospect, is staggering.

The event having lasted a week, and myself being constrained by the nagging trifle of having a job, I was only able to attend the events on the weekend, which disqualifies me from writing a proper review. This is just as well, because what I am interested in discussing here is not Poetry Parnassus itself as much as some aspects (and problems) of international poetry as they emerged from the festival.

I should start by saying that I thought the field day was a resounding success. The organisers did a superb job in bringing together a group of diverse and fantastic poets, including some real stars (my jaw pretty much dropped when I saw Gioconda Belli on the roster). All of the readings I attended were very interesting, and those I didn’t sounded just as promising. As importantly, the event offered myriad opportunities to pick up books of international poetry and find out information about literature from abroad, often by speaking with the foreign artists and/or editors in person. Myself, I walked away with a collection of contemporary Polish poetry and a pamphlet by a Persian author, two books that I look forward to reading in the coming days. So even though my arguments later in this article may seem critical of the festival, my final position should be clear from the start: great job, and do it again as soon as possible.

With these indispensable disclaimers out of the way, I was a little puzzled by certain of the invitations, particularly in light of what they meant in an event that declared itself as primarily international. Being interested above all in the European poetry scene, I did not look into many of the poets from North America, South America, or Africa (I’m aware that these represented the majority of the festival’s readers and I must stress once more that this article does not intend to review the festival as a whole). What struck me about the selection of the European poets was the fact that so many of them were already international by default. The choices always seemed to fall on poets who were fluent in English, professional translators from or into English, and often having lived away from their home country.

The prime example of this was Ilya Kaminsky. When I entered the site of the event, I found a list of poets by nationality. I immediately scrolled down to the link for Russia, as I am head-over-heels in love with the contemporary poetry scene from this country, and I was linked to Kaminsky’s bio. I had never heard of him before and I am unfamiliar with his work. A little reading told me that he was born in Odessa (which is in Ukraine, not in Russia, and that country has not been Russian since the fall of the Soviet Union), that he moved to the United States when he was sixteen, and that he writes in English. Presently he is, I quote from the bio, “professor of Contemporary World Poetry in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of San Diego”.

I mean no disrespect to the man, but he doesn’t strike me as the quintessentially Russian poet. When interviewed by SJ Fowler for the festival, he spoke of Horace, Borges, and Whitman, and he answered the question “What are your thoughts on contemporary Russian poetry?” by discussing the merits of people like Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and Kharms, all of whom died decades before today’s most interesting Russian poets were even born (for a comparison, imagine answering a similar question on contemporary English poetry by talking of Yeats and Eliot). He also said, when asked about the extent to which he represents his country and culture, that: “Poets are not born in a country. They are born in childhood.” This may be true, but it skirts the important question of how being born in a particular country enriches, limits, colours or otherwise affects a poet’s work. This is how contemporary St Petersburg poet Darja Suchovej writes of buying a present for a friend (the translation is my own, and so is the transcription of the name, which I’m sure I messed up):

Recently the Ozegov vocabulary was released,
the last edition, there’s a dream,
acquiring it in some alley,
among other things because you can’t find a word
in the old one with either гз or жз; in the four
volumes of the eighties’ edition, likewise:
and in the older pages yet of the Pushkin-Tongue
vocabulary (four volumes in turn)
there isn’t flatiron, computer, refrigera-
tor, and distributor, and dialer,
nor even leader. But it’s clear with the xa, the нa, the e…
End of the quotes. We had some canapé. We ate
them, without thinking, together with vodka.

This is the type of uniquely national flavour which makes it so rewarding to investigate poetic scenes outside of our own, and it is unquestionably related to the environments where the artist was raised.

The case of other attendants was similar, if not quite as extreme. Elisa Biagini, from Italy, is a translator from English and an expert in American poetry. She has lived and taught in the US (though now she resides in Florence), and she writes in English as well as in Italian. Evelyn Schlag, from Austria, studied German and English literature and writes novels set in places like Quebec, where characters meet American poets like Elizabeth Bishop. Valérie Rouzeau, from France, is a famous translator of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. So is Eli Tolaretxipi, from Spain, except that her specialty is on Plath and Bishop rather than Plath and Hughes (in her interview she cites four writers/poets, two of whom wrote in English, one in Swedish and only one in Spanish, and answers a question about her national poetic identity by saying that “rather than a country a poet has a home which can be anywhere”, which, again, misses the opportunity). Ironically, the poet whom I most readily associated with a European culture was Ryoko Sekiguchi, who represented Japan, but who lives in Paris and is a major voice in French poetry (I assume she must have a certain status in Japan as well, but I only know her work in French).

This is not to slight any of the above poets, much less the event’s organisers. I am not suggesting that these artists are not representative of their countries or that they were poorly selected. Rather, the argument goes the other way round – firstly, and as Fowler’s interviews suggest, these are poets whom by virtue of their international background are more likely to reject or downplay the role of nationality in writing than to foreground it. There is nothing wrong with this in principle, but in context of this festival, it left me with a bit of an unsated hunger. How does the rise of Silvio Berlusconi’s televisual, hegemonic politics-of-communication affect the Italian language and what can poetry do about it? How did the Spanish language respond to and reflect the shift in the perception of homosexuality that took place in Spain over the last decade? What is the attitude of the Russian poetic scene towards all these new Romantic poets who are dying young, like Boris Rizhy, Igor Davletsin, or Dmitrij Bannikov? Could the increasingly academic nature of poetry in France somehow be reflective of the left-wing’s struggles to communicate with its base, thus favouring the rise of populist right-wing parties, and if so, what is to be done? These are all important questions which cannot simply be discarded by saying, as one poet did, that “a woman has no country” (this being a quote by Virginia Woolf, it was also rather wastefully made, which perhaps exemplifies my point – you don’t need to invite an international poet to London if you want to hear people quoting Woolf).

Secondly, to continue my argument, it may be objected that I am putting the cart before the horse. It is easier to communicate with poets from an international background, so naturally they would be the first to attend such events, right? This is true, but it only highlights the difficulty (and the real challenge) of dealing with international poetry – that it is interesting precisely to the extent that it is difficult to mediate with it. A festival such as Poetry Parnassus, despite some of its more grandiloquent terms (the “World Poetry Summit”? Seriously?) is, in this particular sense, hindered by its own size. While it is a great chance to meet individual foreign poets and be exposed to their work, it simultaneously risks projecting an anglocentric understanding of global poetry – which is the trap one must try to avoid. It is true that most poets today speak English anyway because, well, most people speak English. The question that is worth exploring, however, is what can be done with other languages that can’t be done with English. For all the commendable good will of the Parnassus, the great paradox of international poetry remains that the best people to ask are those who are most inapt to answer.

This Sunday 15 July at 4pm, join us at the Ethiopian Community in Britain, 2A Lithos Road, London NW3 6EF for a celebration of Ethiopian poetry!


Hot on the heels of triumphant performances at Poetry Parnassus, a second chance to see the fantastic Lemn Sissay and Bewketu Seyum, as well as many other fantastic performers. Jon and me are joining in the fun too.

Hope to see you there!

Mark my words, pseudo-erotica will be the new children’s/YA fiction for celebrities. Eager to cash in, they will, in exactly the same way, assume that erotica is an easy genre to cash in on, and if they use 50 Shades of Grey as their benchmark, who can blame them for this assumption? If, however, they pick up any inexpensive omnibus of erotic short fiction, they will surely find the quality within undoubtedly better than that of what has become the best selling book of all time.

As Laurie Penny points out, 50 Shades is not really erotica at all. It’s porn. It’s being marketed as erotica for a variety of reasons, some spurious, some sensibly mercenary.

1. There’s still a huge stigma to women enjoying porn and masturbating. The term ‘erotic fiction’ suggests high art. Something you can discuss with your seminar group. Nin. Sacher-Masoch. Desclos. But then, The Story of O is genuinely a well-written novel with complex characterisation and masterful tension, development and build-up, as opposed to a series of passively quadorgasmic shag scenes separated by showers. And anyway, the embarrassment of reading porn, as has been endlessly pointed out, is void since the introduction of the clean, anonymous e-reader device. If women who wish to discuss it afterwards are then embarrassed to do so, perhaps they should just get an online pseudonym under which to talk filth like everybody else.

2. Erotica is for women, porn is for men. While most mucky fanfiction stories and erotica compilations are indeed written by, and aimed at, women, laying down an assumption like this, dressed up as fact, yet again segregates the sexes and attempts to file and categorise sexuality based on gender. Aside from the other problems this causes and reinforces, including the exclusion of those individuals caught inbetween, such a situation makes our cultural stash of smut dull, binary and generic. No fun at all.

3. Porn is purely audiovisual, while naughty stories all fall under the erotica banner. Bollocks. A story with the primary aim of titillation can totally be classed as porn, and the more diverse the media types associated with both porn and erotica, surely the more interesting, intertextual and ambitious both genres can become.

The sheep-like response to the success of 50 Shades, while typical for a bestseller of any genre, is pretty depressing. It’s like millions of women were meekly waiting for the corporate thumbs-up before rushing out and expressing their sexuality by buying an approved, tastefully packaged set text on (a completely clueless, and at times offensive, take on) BDSM. I don’t think we should whale on E.L. James, though. How about we hate on the greedy editors who marketed it as higher up the literary food chain than it is? The same publishing types who shied away from editing the shit out of this messy novel, for fear that the cash cow would walk away into the sunset.

Random House used to publish truly daring and well-crafted erotic work by authors such as Angela Carter, whose work bold and honestly investigated and magicked up real and fantastical sexuality in its many guises (golden showers, genderbending, objectophilia, centaur rape). Now they seem content to peddle tame BDSM tourism like 50 Shades, and only then after it’s already gained a hardcore following through its initial run with a small overseas publisher. It’s all a bit sanitised, and I think a small part of the backlash towards the book stems from frustration at a lack of courage on the part of the publisher and readers.

So to return to my opening prediction, this kind of lucrative, safe-yet-tamely-edgy market is exactly what celebrities with an idle interest in writing, and an active interest in increasing their brand awareness and income streams, will gravitate towards. Consider Madonna’s godawful efforts at children’s fiction, then imagine her lighting on James’s efforts, a dollar sign in each eye, and shiver. You have been warned.

Last week, for those who didn’t know, saw the unfolding of Poetry Parnassus, a festival in which a poet from every Olympic country visited London’s South Bank. Well, nearly. Unfortunately some poets were unable to secure visas, but most made it.

Parnassus took place as part of the Southbank Centre’s Festival of the World. Between 26 June and 1 July, London was treated to bilingual readings, discussions, signings, bombastic events (see below), translation labs, parties, workshops and lots more.

Many of us were asked to act as Buddies for visiting poets. This meant that someone was there to welcome those who didn’t already know/live in London, but it also forced us Brits to actually shuck off our shyness and interact with people we otherwise wouldn’t have met. I was teamed up with the awesome Jenny Wong, representing Hong Kong, though currently based in London (we were able to meet for a nice pint before the festival week started), Mr Arjen Duinker from the Netherlands and Oman’s Zahir Al-Ghafri, who I sadly didn’t get to meet, but who I hope had a grand week.

Shout-outs are due to many people. At the risk of missing out those who put in crazy hours to make it all happen, those that spring to mind are Bea Colley, Live Literature Producer at the Southbank Centre, Anna Selby, Literature and Spoken Word Coordinator at the Southbank Centre, Swithun Cooper, Chrissy Williams and Chris McCabe from the Poetry Library and all of the many, many volunteers I saw helping lost and bewildered poetry fans.

The Jamie Madrox Award for Inhuman Multitasking goes to Maintenant’s S.J. Fowler, who didn’t seem to sleep, choosing instead to divide his time between throwing packed events, reading his own poetry, running workshops, filming, uploading said films, buddying international poets and generally hurling his entire bodymass into experimental poetry.

I’ll leave you with the highlight of the weekend, the Rain of Poems. Organised by Chilean art collective Casagrande. While their metamorphic self-titled magazine puts Fuselit to shame (past issues have included pages filling underground walkways and letters from Chilean schoolchildren being transported to the stars), this was still more impressive. How often do you get to see a helicopter bombing London with thousands of poems in English and Spanish? Speaking to Julio Carrasco from the collective, I learned that just 20 people, or thereabouts, worked on translating approximately 300 poems from various languages into Spanish.

When the poems were dropped, they suddenly became valuable. Everyone really wanted them (myself included – there’s photographic evidence of me getting told off by security for flinging my bag at a tree to dislodge a poem) and it was a pretty impressive (at times violent) scramble, in which the moral maze of decking a child for a bilingual verse was frequently meandered around. Poetry could do with a few more spectacles like this. Without the violence, of course. Poets aren’t violent. We wear frilly shirts and write about spring flowers.

Anyhow, back to reality. The festival is over, and I don’t know when, or if, we’ll see its like again, but I hope it happens in the near future. It did my heart good to see polite houseguest of the arts Poetry getting such a damned good hoedown.

What’s that? You want to see the Rain of Poems? Filmed by Cambodian poet Kosal Khiev? Very well!

Those of you in and around London shouldn’t miss this week’s MASSIVE festivities at Poetry Parnassus at the Southbank Centre.

Poets from nearly every Olympic country, huge names, workshops, debates, readings galore and a rain of thousands of bilingual poems are just some of the amazing events set up to celebrate a year of international coming together in London.

Already I’ve met poets from the Netherlands, Italy, Chile, Hong Kong, South Africa, you name it!

I’ll be reading at Maintenant’s celebration of the experimental and avant-garde, organised by the ever-energetic mass-interviewer S.J. Fowler, on Saturday at 7pm, which should be awesome.

There are events going on throughout the week until 1 July. Come on down and experience something new – it promises to be something very special indeed. There really will be something for everybody, and I know there are many readers I may never get the chance to see again.

Main site

Follow @wetblackbough and @Anna_Selby on Twitter, or search #poetryparnassus.

For those who don’t yet know, last week Jon received an Eric Gregory award for his work on School of Forgery! He got to go to a lovely awards bash thrown by the Society of Authors and read the following night with the other winners, Joey Connolly, Holly Corfield Carr, Caleb Klaces, Rachael Nicholas and Phoebe Power.

In other news, this weekend, Sidekick Books have an hour’s slot at Roddy Lumsden and Emily Hasler’s New Poets Festival! It’s being held, like everything in the world ever right now, in central London, so if you’re about, please do come on down to discover a treasure trove of fresh writers.

Friday 22nd June – Join BroadCast at The Betsey Trotwood (map) for the launch of the festival, followed by part 4 of the 28 Project – Opposites Attract, which sees 14 pairs of poets reading new complementary poems based on opposing ideas.

With: Colette Sensier / Edward Mackay, Holly Hopkins / Sophia Blackwell, Hannah Lowe / Wayne Holloway-Smith, James Goodman / Nick Makoha, Mark Burnhope / Andrew McMillan, Martha Sprackland / Eloise Stonborough, Aime Williams / John Canfield, Nia Davies / Charlotte Geater, Vidyan Ravinthiran / Ben Rogers, Sophie Collins / Dai George, Dan Barrow / Tom Gilliver, Kayo Chingonyi / Amy Evans, Penny Boxall / Alice Lees and hosts Roddy Lumsden / Emily Hasler.

Launch drinks from 6.30. Readings from 7.45.

Saturday 23rd June – Today’s events are at The Blue Lion pub (map) and feature largely poets from outside of London. Plenty of breaks between sections.

Times as follows (all approximate):

3.15-4 Showcase from Cake Magazine with Andrew McMillan, Martha Sprackland and others

4.15 Vidyan Ravinthiran / Mark Burnhope

5.00 – Kim Moore / Caleb Klaces

6 – 6.30 – TBC

6.45 – 7.45 Showcase from Stop Sharpening Your Knives poets with Emily Berry, Sam Riviere, Jack Underwood and others.

8.00 Kiki Petrosino / Andrew Jamison

9 Liz Berry / Kate Kilalea

Sunday 24th June – Back at The Betsey Trotwood. Plenty of breaks between sections. Times as follows (all approximate):

3.15 Showcase from Sidekick Books with Kirsten Irving, Jon Stone, Samuel Prince, Ian McLachlan and Abigail Parry

4.20 Chrissy Williams presents Poets of the Unexpected, with Holly Pester, Lorraine Mariner and Tom Chivers

5.20 Niall Campbell / Colette Sensier

6.10 Showcase from Penned in the Margins featuring James Wilkes, Sarah Hesketh and Michael Egan

7.15 Free for all – various readers present their favourite poems by new UK poets.

8.15 Kayo Chingonyi / Dai George

9 Helen Mort / Sarah Howe

Prices: Friday: £5; Sat / Sun: each £8 (£18 for three day ticket, £14 for Sat & Sun ticket).Bargain!