Tankerton, February

Oare, February

good times bad times

Last night’s Shearsman reading featured two resident Americans, Carrie Etter and JL Williams. Carrie launched her terrific book Divining for Starters. She appears above right reading a dialogue with Claire Crowther. Among the other new books on the table was Robert Sheppard’s new critical volume When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, a series of essays on poets writing from the seventies through to the present. Pictured on the cover are the late Bob Cobbing and Maggie O’Sullivan.

blues and greens at the bus

Last Tuesday the Blue Bus parked temporarily at the Camden Eye, just across from the tube. Juliet Troy and I read. Ken White and David Miller played guitar and clarinet (and backed Juliet on a longer piece). Ken comes over from Melbourne pretty much annually and it’s always good to hear him improvise with David and, on this occasion, sing a couple of songs. The guitar pictured is a 1930s Epiphone, one of the earlier electrified instruments, though Ken in this instance had a blue-tacked mike and a miniature amplifier (we joked about the stack). Back in the late 1960s Ken was guitarist with the Melbourne band Nova Express. These days he plays in his daughter’s band regularly at The Retreat pub in Abbotsford (she is, by the way, a classy jazz vocalist). The pixillation in the lower image is period pub decor not a technical fault.

four from Margate

Faversham, February