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.
Back in early June, I launched School of Forgery alongside John Clegg‘s Antler, also out from Salt. Owing to an unfortunate concatenation of events, John arrived at the launch with very few copies of his book, and I gallantly deferred the chance to take home my own so that he might sell as many as possible on the night.
Earlier this week my own copy finally turned up, and while I’d say I’m probably too close to John now for a full review to be carried out with the requisite lack of bias, I did want to take a moment to say how much I like Antler and how, even against the backdrop of a steady flow of distinctive and excellent poetry volumes onto my exhausted bookshelves, it stands out as a genuinely characterful debut.
As the blurb hints at, Clegg mixes “genuine and imaginary anthropology”, and the join between those aspects of his work that are essentially tall tales or fabulation and those that the results of diligent research is practically invisible. So too is the transition between tightly controlled traditional form and ranging free verse, the former being done so softly and unostentatiously. A quick march through some of the titles (Moss, Nightgrass, Wounded Musk Ox, Kayaks, Meteor, Dill, Mosquito) reads like a sort of ingredients list – words as ancient elements, boiled down tinctures, excavated knucklebones and panned nuggets, bottled and labelled for cautious use in the creation of spells and medicines. Plus there’s the over-arching sensation of the poet’s joyous obsessiveness, like a child collecting shells or insects, in everything he writes about.
I have a new poem, Terrifying Angels, in the latest issue of Poetry Review. Following the departure of Fiona Sampson, who helmed the magazine for a number of years, the magazine is entering a phase of having guest editors at least until some time in 2013. I have to say, it already feels much fresher for it. This issue, edited by the estimable George Szirtes (he and I have briefly been on bad terms in the past but I’ve always admired both his poetry and his dedication to the cause), is themed around branching out to include poetries not comfortably included within the ‘mainstream’ bracket, hence the subtitle: ‘mapping the delta’. Szirtes’ introduction reflects my own feelings about where how I’d like to see future dialogues progress:
“But I know where the less explored areas are. They are less explored maybe because they seem more difficult, more the possession of one particular tribe … I admire much about these ‘tribes’ and wanted to invite writers to open them up through a sense of shareable enthusiasm, to tell us why they matter and to show us not so much the fascination of the difficult, but the fascination of poetry as a whole: the full delta.”
As well as some very good articles by Emily Critchley, Daljit Nagra and Adam Piette, there’s a rich crop of poetry presented, incorporating a wider-than-usual variety of styles. It’s always great to see poets we’ve published in (and first discovered through) Fuselit hitting the big time, so I’m particularly pleased that poems by Christian Ward and Joe Dresner have been included.
With the next two issues being edited by Charles Boyle of CB Editions, and Bernadine Evaristo respectively, I’m feeling very optimistic about the future of Britain’s flagship poetry journal.
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!
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.
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!
On Saturday 9th June, Kirsty and I will be running a one-off workshop at the Poetry School called Team Up & DIY. The double focus is on collaborative texts and then publishing and publicising the result of your efforts. This latter part will be drawing on our long and harrowing experience with amateur printing, binding, sourcing materials, building websites and fainting at the cost of posting parcels of literary goodness to Singapore. But the first part, the collaborative part, will be interesting too. We’ll be looking at a wide variety of (in some cases, arguably) dual-authored texts, including the potential for collaborating with dead poets, and carrying out an exercise with participants on the day that will involve them teaming up together.
Two events you should know about, for they are exciting!
Nine Arches Press team up with Sidekick to bring you Poetry Rodeo on Thursday 17 May. Spellbook and Birdbook stars Edward McKay and Nia Davies join 9A’s Alistair Noon and Andrew Frolish at the Big Green Bookshop, Wood Green (gorgeous shop – check it out) for a night of poetic fantastitude.
Click the image below for el event page:
Secondly, for those in London on 8 June, Sidekick’s own Jon Stone is launching his PBS-recommended first collection (YEAH!) School of Forgery, alongside the magnificent John Clegg, whose first collection, Antler, is a source of great toe-tapping excitement in the Sidekick camp. Check out their wistful author shots!
Buried beneath the chalk-dry tone of this William Wootten article in the TLS, there’s fighting talk. Wootten compares Alvarez’ The New Poetry to the recent Identity Parade and Salt Book of Younger Poets (both edited by Roddy Lumsden) and finds “a colossal failure of nerve” in Lumsden’s choice to pack out both books with a broad spread of poets, rather than choose a dozen or so and make the case for them being the front-runners of their generation. The problem with such plurality, he seems to be saying, is that the reader is left with an overcrowded buffet to choose from, with far too much on offer for any sensible debate to begin. The success of poetry in the 1960s, when the Alvarez anthology was published, was partly, he writes, due to “the fostering of strong and discriminating tastes and dispositions … It was they who gave reasons why contemporary poetry might actually matter.“
A few remarks on that argument. First of all, the metaphor of the man walking down the middle of the road comes to mind. Identity Parade in particular, alongside The Best British Poetry 2011 (also Lumsden-edited) has more than once been lambasted for having included the wrong poets and passed over others whose inclusion in any generational anthology should be a given. Wootten need not be worried that Lumsden’s tastes don’t offend anyone, or that he fails to be selective.
Moreover, a representative sample has to be representative. The size of the sample in relation to the population matters. If an editor or publisher is to in any way carry off the claim that their book is a generational anthology, even tentatively, it has to convince its readers that it covers a fair bit of the ground.
I don’t think this is actually possible with British poetry today, except by means of the mega-anthology. Sure, you could select your 20 or so luminaries and write a fiercely combative introduction that puts them at the centre of everything that’s happening, but no sensible person would waste time entertaining the thought that you were right. They might read your book, and they might even say you’ve articulated your views forcefully, but unless there were some reason they were in your thrall, and in your thrall alone, they would then re-subject themselves to the vast arena of poetry beyond your wagon-circle and never find themselves thinking: “But how would I refute x‘s case for those 20?”
Wootten’s romanticised ‘moment’ where “contemporary poetry and its values were treated as a singular artistic arena whose various styles and champions could be debated, intelligently and passionately if not always in ways capable of clear resolution” certainly sounds attractive. But is that what we’d get if publishers started putting out anthologies defined by their editors’ deeply entrenched positions? I really, really doubt it. We aren’t anywhere near ready for it. For there to be healthy debate, there has to be a well of common understanding, a shared sense of the starting point and of the stakes. We don’t have that. We have such a spectrum of expertise, individualism and ignorance when it comes to poetry that you’re more likely to have a conversation where neither of you has heard of the poets the other wants to namecheck than one where two champions of disparate styles can cross swords. And I mean ‘we’ here both in the sense of the general public and literary types, both of whom I know equally well (ie. not very well at all).
Maybe if I put it like this then: Wootten is asking for work to commence on the penthouse while Lumsden is still embroiled in the effort of firming the foundations. We need to draw everyone together on the same footing before we can have the grand debates. In some sense, yes, that is a backwards step for poetic culture, but only because the poetic culture of the past was at all times dominated by the upper echelons of society. Wootten is living in a sort of a dream world where a wild and boisterous declaration of poetic/editorial intent can stir or boil the blood of the average reader, rather than merely carry the faint whiff of trying too hard.
The article also includes the oft-used phrase “competent but unexceptional poets”, which is usually a shorthand for a general complaint that there aren’t enough poets on high pedestals, who can be seen for miles around. No one’s ever made a great case for why we need these pedestalled poets, and no one has, to my knowledge, made a strong case for any poet of the modern era deserving this position, and that’s why we are where we are now. But I don’t entirely dislike where we are now.
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