graveney marsh

graphic 2

2012-01-29T16:47:00.002Z

shopping trolley

2012-01-27T15:14:00.002Z

Hollowshore, January

2012-01-17T17:34:00.000Z

snowdrops

2012-01-12T17:44:00.002Z

a mom and pop movie

2012-01-08T12:02:00.001Z

Suppose a would-be avant-garde director is given a Hollywood budget and the services of a couple of A-list movie stars to work with. The movie will have a score written in fashionable neo-classical style by a composer who would secretly like to have been Aaron Copland. Some six hours of script are cut down to two and a further plot layer featuring a biblical story is excised. What’s left is Terrence Malick’s movie The Tree of Life. This family story, situated in an eternity of exploding worlds and extinct reptiles, is set in a small-town America that the director clearly sees as ‘universal’. The nuclear family, its neat house and neat front lawn, its neighbourhood populated by tail-finned 1950s American automobiles is viewed as archetypal. In this world the Bible functions both as a how-to book and as a book of premonition. Such a perspective isn’t all that far from that of Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party. Between the extended scenes of family interaction (‘society’ is seemingly non-existent: this is Margaret Thatcher’s world too) we are presented with mostly darkened shots showing the entrance of a cave from within. This continual experience of being born together with repeated sequences of swimming made this viewer feel as though he were drowning in amniotic fluid. The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or and numerous other awards. But if I want to watch a non-linear ‘hometown’ movie, my choice any day would be Guy Maddin’s witty and often moving My Winnipeg.

Ospringe, January

2012-01-02T15:37:00.000Z

urban archaeology

2011-12-23T08:24:00.002Z

My Melbourne friends have forwarded this photo taken in the gents at the John Curtin pub.

mince pies

2011-12-22T18:20:00.000Z

I’ve missed the last two Crossing the Line readings but caught the last for the year at The Apple Tree on Wednesday. The readers were Lucy Harvest Clarke who read from Silveronda (if p then q, 2009) and from work forthcoming from Knives, Forks & Spoons press. Martin Corless-Smith, visiting from Idaho, read from English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul (Fence Books, 2010) and a more recent book of ‘Roman’ and ‘Russian’ poems. Jeff Hilson is now filming as well as recording these readings. Fortunately there was enough extension lead to reach the solitary outlet. The mince pies came courtesy of a well-known supermarket chain.

performance

2011-12-20T16:33:00.002Z

It’s a little late for Christmas shopping but it’s not too late to pick up a copy of this fine record of two events. Gavin Selerie’s Performance-Texts consists of two CDs, the first containing a seventy-six minute presentation of Strip Signals dating from July 1986; the second, dating from April 2010 has eighteen minutes of work from Music’s Duel and Le Fanu’s Ghost (there is only a short extract from Strip Signals in Music’s Duel: New and Selected Poems, Shearsman 2009, though the full text will be republished before too long (the original came out with Galloping Dog Press in 1986). This extant prose piece gives only a taste of the full sequence, nor does it hint on the page of what is made of it with several voices and the instruments at the London Musicians Collective venue, NW1 (this ad hoc group assembled by Selerie includes two members of British Summer Time Ends). Fleshed out by these musicians the work becomes a virtual mini-opera. As well as being a primary voice (speaking and singing) Selerie plays guitar and percussion together with Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bob Cobbing and Petra Goltz-Cofhani (voices), and Clive Bell, Stuart Jones, Sue Ferrar and Goltz-Cofhani (on flute, rattle, accordion, cello, violin and triangle). Strip Signals is a finely paced work in which the languages of memoir, case notes, computer and technical jargon, bureaucracy and politics are balanced against each other seamlessly. The second disc features Selerie and Vahni Capildeo (voices) and Trish Elphinstone, Bruno Guastalla and Chris Stubbs (soprano sax, cello and percussion). ‘De Luce’ comes from Selerie’s early book Azimuth (Binnacle Press, 1984) but is available in the Selected Poems. The other tracks, ‘Faded Novel’, ‘Ghost Workshop’, ‘Lyceum Double’ and ‘Riverrun’ come from Le Fanu’s Ghost, Selerie’s remarkable (and beautiful) book from Five Seasons Press (2006). The acoustics are well captured in both performances. No small part of this is due to the fact that Selerie is a superb reader and performer for whom clarity of presentation is always important. The CD set is limited to fifty copies. These are available for £10 plus £2 (UK postage) at 1a Astley Avenue, London NW2 4AD. Cheques can be made out to ‘Binnacle Press’.

Seville II

2011-12-19T15:51:00.000Z

Seville I

2011-12-18T10:39:00.000Z

St Kilda, Melbourne, 1986 (archive)

2011-12-11T14:18:00.001Z

breathless in Bloomsbury

2011-12-07T14:54:00.001Z

Last night’s Shearsman reading, the last for the year, featured Anna Reckin and Richard Berengarten. Reckin’s Three Reds is a fine first book with an objectivist’s sense of space and sound. Berengarten’s much longer career includes work published as Richard Burns. He read the beginning and end of a long section from one of the books of the Balkan Trilogy: Under Balkan Light. The particular piece owed much to notions of breath and the sense of the oracular in poets like Whitman and Ginsberg (the entire section consisted of a single propulsive sentence against which a second reader intermittently voiced names of places in the former Slav republic). Thankfully friends and relatives made up for the depradations of seasonal flu (an affliction that cause me to miss a couple of other readings myself).

Christopher Logue 1926-2011

2011-12-06T11:01:00.000Z

At Monash University in the late 1960s Peter Craven first showed me Christopher Logue’s earlier Iliad translations that would later be collected with others as War Music. I picked these up as I would copies of some of his other books the ABC, New Numbers, Ode to the Dodo. All of these works were clearly oriented towards performance, though Logue was not a ‘performance poet’ in the sense in which the term subsequently began to be used. He was certainly a performer of poems, participating with Allen Ginsberg and others in the famous Royal Albert Hall reading in 1965. I saw him perform a portion of his Homer in Melbourne with the actor John Stanton when he visited Australia in 1986. This was at the first Melbourne Spoleto Festival late in the year at which August Kleinzahler also appeared (a more than happy substitute for an ill John Ashbery). One request Logue made to his Melbourne hosts was for a visit to Hanging Rock where the action of Joan Lindsay’s story (Picnic at Hanging Rock) and Peter Weir’s 1975 film version took place. It was a dingy and wet day with no sign of cicadas and none of our party were mysteriously abducted. I took some photographs near the summit. Here is one of Logue and Kleinzahler.

I subsequently visited Logue in London on two occasions as noted in journals:

7^th May 1987, London

Catch a cab across to Camberwell to Christopher’s new house. The builders are still working on it. We go down to Elephant & Castle to a pizzeria for lunch. On the way C asks me to summarize Europe. In the restaurant we talk art – the Velazquez and Goya works in the Prado – and poetry –if only Pound had been as good an editor with the Cantos as he was with The Waste Land – or if only Eliot had edited the Cantos; Bunting (neither of us up on ‘Briggflatts’ – it seems, like Zukofsky, too condensed, too much music and not enough speech); George Steiner - a fraud.

13^th September 1992, London

Crossing Waterloo Bridge we see Logue’s name in flashing lights over the National theatre. Get off at Camberwell Green but have trouble relating my sketch map to the geography. Realize I haven’t brought Logue’s phone number to check up. I haven’t got his street number either. We decide to ask in a pub for a telephone directory. The first pub we enter has one from A-K. The second pub claims not to have a telephone directory. We find the street and work out which house it is – near the middle, set back a bit, door on r.h.s., a church spire just behind – getting it right first time (I’d seen the place five years back when Logue had just moved in). Logue asks after various people and says he’s hoping to get to the 1994 Adelaide Festival & perhaps tour round with ‘Kings’. He’s at work on further Homer at the moment.

fictional hybrids

2011-11-26T15:29:00.010Z

In the summer of 2009 Australian artist Vera Möller spent time in the King’s Wood at Challock, not far from here, as part of an exchange program between Stour Valley Arts and Heide Museum in Melbourne. On Thursday evening the fruits of this period of research were revealed when Möller’s show opened at the Sidney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury. She was trained as a biologist and microbiologist in Germany subsequently studying art in Melbourne. The ‘hybrids’ are tiny models of imaginary fungi which were placed in the natural environment of the King’s Wood and photographed with a macro lens. The large hall at the rear of the gallery shows these large photographic images while a small glass case houses the surprisingly small models. In the hallway and the front room are works on paper which conjure up additional imagined images of mycological specimens and cellular forms. Stour Valley Arts have put together many fine artists books and Vera Möller’s is no exception. It’s a beautiful production concentrating on the photographed hybrids and including critical texts by Justin Clemens (Melbourne), Peter Vujakovic (Canterbury), a witty imagined taxonomy by Ian Bride (Whitstable) and poem/journal extracts from me (Faversham).

Blue Bus fifty-something

2011-11-24T10:28:00.015Z

Tuesday night’s reading at The Lamb featured Gavin Selerie and Kelvin Corcoran. Gavin read new work centred on the great English/West Indian saxophonist Joe Harriott together with a longer piece from Music’s Duel, the selected poems. Kelvin read from the new Longbarrow Press book Words Through a Hole Where Once There Was a Chimpanzee’s Face (there’s a rational explanation of this title but you’ll have to buy the book to find out). It’s always a pleasure to hear these two poets. It capped off an enjoyable evening eating out with August Kleinzahler.

Gravesend

2011-11-16T10:12:00.004Z

On Saturday I also picked up Simon Smith’s wonderful new book from Veer, Gravesend. The poems within were ‘written whilst travelling by train between Charing Cross and Chatham’. I once amused myself on the trip in to London by counting all of the footballs at the bottom of embankments. Smith has done a lot more than this. The poems aren’t sonnets (strictly speaking) but they nevertheless have the feel of the modern sonnet about them.

Red Lion Square

2011-11-13T09:55:00.005Z

The annual Small Publishers’ Fair took place on Friday and Saturday at its usual location, Conway Hall, off Red Lion Square. I was there for a good part of Saturday and read with Jaime Robles in a Shearsman bracket. On Saturday morning sales seemed sluggish but as the crowd increased things looked like they were picking up. One of the pleasures of this event is purchasing things from the smallest of the small publishers. I bought a couple of Jaime Robles self-produced books at the Shearman stall. She is a wonderful book designer, having run Woodland editions from her native California and further work under her own name from Exeter. I also bought more little books from Laurie and Thomas A Clark’s Moschatel Press produced in Scotland and Japan. And Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey kindly sold some copies of my Allotments volume at their West House Books stall.

Ospringe, November

2011-11-11T12:45:00.001Z

wild & woolley

2011-11-08T10:42:00.005Z

In 1973 Michael Wilding and Pat Woolley decided to start a publishing house. Michael, originally from the West Midlands, was writing short stories and teaching in the English department at the University of Sydney. Pat, a Californian, had publishing experience with her own Tomato Press. That press had published Pam Brown’s first book, Sureblock, a couple of years before, and it was through Pam that I met Pat. Wilding’s memoir, just published by Giramondo details the years of Wild & Woolley Press. One evening in 1973 not long before the idea of the Press was hatched, Pat and Michael came back to his place in Balmain to discover that ‘the poets had already entered through the bathroom window . . . eating and drinking whatever they could find . . . Robert Adamson, John Forbes, Laurie Duggan and Nigel Roberts as I remember, give or take a few’. I ended up working for Wild & Woolley at their Chippendale office as a storeman, packer and driver. There’s a photo in the book of the tiny van (powered by a two-stroke engine) with which I did the Sydney deliveries. The Press distributed American books from New Directions, Black Sparrow, City Lights, Four Seasons, Greywolf and other smaller presses and a good deal of my income was spent on these volumes. As an employee I got them practically at cost but I remember Michael saying once, watching me sweating under some boxes ‘it’s like paying the slogging natives off with alcohol’. The Press subsequently published my second book, Under the Weather, in 1978. I’d shown the manuscript to Michael and he’d immediately taken it on. His faith in the book wasn’t reciprocated by the reviewers mostly. One well-known Australian poet called it ‘an easy tiny read’. It was the book, I’ve since realised, in which I found my own way to write. I’m grateful to Michael and Pat for letting it into the world.

four from Dungeness

2011-11-06T18:28:00.003Z

Goodnestone, November

2011-11-02T16:48:00.000Z

performance

2011-10-28T15:13:00.010+01:00

If my own reading with Phil Hall represented a kind of conversation then last night’s reading at The Apple Tree was something else entirely. Here were two modes of performance that might have been poles apart. Stephen Emmerson was a classic ‘ranter’, rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet and, at least in the first part, reaching near terminal velocity. Holly Pester on the other hand drew us in initially with the quietness of her ‘News Piece’. Many of the syllables on the printed page were no more than aspirations. There was a great deal of wit in her timings and deadpan eroticisms. If you want to see some of these texts for yourselves, Hoofs has just come out as an if p then q classic.

' . . . and the hotel was even worse'

2011-10-27T08:54:00.002+01:00

John Martin’s painting ‘Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion’ (1812) lends itself to cheap shots like the title I’ve given this post. The first impression given by Martin’s works, currently on show at Tate Britain, is one of slickness and a limited vocabulary. Martin was never very good with the human figure (mostly the figures are satisfactory only as distant marching armies or fleeing crowds). And yet I don’t feel that the curatorial link to recent ‘effects’ movies (or to the Saatchi world of ‘sensation’) does him any favours. There is an element of belief in these works that for the most part is entirely absent from the world of the cinema blockbuster or that of the Chapman brothers. The paintings only connect with these recent practises through a lowest common denominator. The compensations are unexpected ones, such as the wildflowers visible in Martin’s images of Paradise, or some of the atmospheric effects once you’ve gotten past the volcanoes and collapsing rocks. The funnels at the centre of many of these works appear, as some viewers have noted, like medical images from an intestinal tract. It is easy to see why these paintings were popular and why they became unpopular (one particular work had to be substantially restored after flood damage - ironically enough – in the Tate basement where it had long been stored). They are crude, placed beside Turner or Constable, though not without their own merits.

Ryan's New & Selected

2011-10-26T16:14:00.003+01:00

It’s been a ten-year wait since Gig Ryan’s last collection Heroic Money appeared from Brandl & Schlesinger. This substantial selection takes in work from the late seventies up till now with forty pages or so of new work. It’s been worth the wait and Giramondo have done a great job.

Westminster, October

2011-10-19T18:41:00.000+01:00

57 varieties

2011-10-19T10:03:00.003+01:00

The 57^th Blue Bus reading took place last night at The Lamb. Emily Critchley and Peter Philpott read individually for the first half then together with a composite work in the second. This was a marvellous piece. For all its disjuncts it seemed as though one person had written the whole thing which was not at all the case. I meant to ask the poets whether or not they intended to publish the work as a unit. It would make a fine book.

graphic

2011-10-13T15:18:00.001+01:00

two more London gigs

2011-10-06T10:43:00.008+01:00

On Tuesday night the new season of Shearsman readings began with Ian Seed and Linda Black at the Swedenborg Hall.

Then on Wednesday I read with Canadian poet Phil Hall in the Crossing the Line series at The Apple Tree, Clerkenwell. It was a great reading (even if I say so myself). Phil read from a range of books and newer work (his most recent publication is Kildeer, from Book Thug). I read mostly from the Allotments sequence, so it was a kind of launch for the Fewer & Further Press book (thanks to Ann Silversides for the photo).

Learning To Draw

2011-10-05T15:34:00.003+01:00

Skylight Press in Gloucestershire has published Basil King’s sequence Learning To Draw/A History. I’ve written on the work in progress elsewhere, in #15 of Big Bridge. Significantly King gave the task of assembling the sections to Daniel Staniforth at Skylight. Significantly because this underlines the fact that this book isn’t an exercise in high modernism: it has a democratic rather than an autocratic provenance. It says ‘enter reader where you wish and read as you wish’.

Davington, October

2011-10-02T10:21:00.002+01:00

The Swale, September II

2011-09-30T09:54:00.001+01:00

allotments

2011-09-29T12:08:00.003+01:00

Arrived today from the States: my new book Allotments, consisting of numbers #1-#29 of an ongoing series, with a cover drawing by Basil King. It is in an edition of 200, forty of which are hand sewn and signed by me. Available from Fewer & Further Press.

the big society in action

2011-09-25T10:23:00.007+01:00

I often walk around the Ham Marshes and occasionally call in to The Shipwright at Hollowshore at the junction of the Faversham and Oare Creeks. A couple of days ago a notice outside the pub indicated that Ken County Council had proposed that the area around here, about a quarter of this marsh, might be used as a gravel mine and subsequently an industrial waste dump. The pub owners were understandably alarmed; an excavation like this would put the pub out of business. I trawled a few websites discovering that the Council had been secretive about this. Even the local member for the Borough of Swale hadn’t been told about it. The Ham Marsh is at present working farm land. It is part of a continuum of marshes: Oare Marsh across the creek to the west, and Nagden and Graveney marshes across Faversham Creek to the north and east. Oare and the coastal strip of the other two marshes are maintained by Kent Wildlife as important breeding places for birds. Mining would be a bad enough intrusion but who in their right mind would want to establish a waste dump on marshland? David Cameron’s ‘big society’ seemingly only exists for the ‘big people’ i.e. the mining companies and investors.

two London gigs

2011-09-24T15:10:00.008+01:00

Tuesday night’s Blue Bus reading featured Mario Petrucci and Giles Goodland (above).

**********

Last night Artery Editions launched Strictly Illegal, unpublished poems by John Wieners, edited and introduced by Jeremy Reed with artwork by Gilbert and George, at the October Gallery on Gloucester Street. I’m not a big G & G fan, seeing them for the most part as godfathers to the 90s epidemic of Young Unscrupulous British Artists, but the pieces used in the book, dating mostly from around 1970, look great in context. After a very long spell (it felt like the silence in a Quaker meeting house) the publisher, Patricia Hope Scanlan, initiated proceedings. Then Anthony Rudolf (poet and publisher at Menard Press) read a succinct and modest short piece on his own discovery and evaluation of Wieners. Following this we viewed some good You Tube recordings with images of the poet reading his own work. Finally Jeremy Reed read a selection interspersed with his own poems. Looking rather like the New York Dolls singer David Johansen, Reed tended to over-dramatise the poems, in some cases repeating lines and phrases not present in the text. While he was doing this he scattered party glitter into the air. The nuance and indeed the humour of Wieners’ work was lost in the process. A pity because the book is a fine production and the price (including prints of the G & G works) was astoundingly good value.

The Swale, September I

2011-09-15T16:45:00.002+01:00

Ospringe, September

2011-09-14T12:15:00.001+01:00

a language of birds

2011-09-11T10:39:00.003+01:00

Orkney press Brae Editions has just produced this wonderful collaboration between Poet Lesley Harrison and artist Laura Drever. The poems are short and precise resembling haiku though working as statement rather than epiphany. The drawings are beautifully textured , marks made to last, not unlike some of Cy Twombly’s smaller works.

dalmatian over the roof

2011-09-05T11:30:00.006+01:00

Could this be the last Faversham Hop Festival? I hope not but whether the event survives the Tory years or not, I wouldn’t want to guess. Swale Borough Council (Tory, natch) pulled funding for the Festival meaning that the stallholders and participants had to sacrifice some of their income (this is the meaning of ‘the big society’ aka ‘small government’). One of the problems with public events these days is the horrendous cost of insurance (in a ‘risk society’ anything might lead to a big payout). As a result of all this the stalls were thinner on the ground and the Sunday parade was a short and bedraggled one. But there were still the bands. These were, as usual, mostly repertory (or original material in some existing paradigm: ‘grunge’, ‘folk’, ‘metal’ &c). Often the music was exciting enough for this not to matter. Early Sunday afternoon The Retrophonic Archive played a dazzling set. They’re a band that do note-perfect versions of hits ranging from sixties middle-of-the-road (‘Music to watch girls by’, ‘Matthew & Son’) through to The Jam (‘A town called Malice’). Yet the band’s enthusiasm and often stunning skills made their derivative style(s) of little moment. The vocalist managed the gymnastics of Sparks’ ‘This town ain’t big enough for both of us’ and concluded (naturally enough) with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Later the sky opened for a little then cleared desultorily. As Get Carter (R & B) played in the light drizzle a helium balloon in the shape of a dalmatian escaped the clutch of its owner and flew across the rooftops.

sheep-shapes

2011-08-31T11:05:00.007+01:00

David Miller’s Spiritual Letters, a series he has been working on since the mid nineties appeared in its latest incarnation last night at The Lamb. Series 1-5 have been handsomely produced in the States by Chax Press. The reading featured Miller together with Vahni Capildeo and Brian Marley; all of them terrific readers giving the lie to Marley’s apology that one of any group of three readers has to be below par. Marley had disappeared from the reading scene for some time (I’ve got an early book: Springtime in the Rockies) but in the last couple of years he has made a welcome reappearance. Capildeo will herself have a new book out in a couple of months.

bergamot

2011-08-29T08:56:00.003+01:00

two bulb night

2011-08-25T10:13:00.004+01:00

There was one slight problem at last night's Crossing the Line reading. The upstairs room at the Apple Tree has three four-bulb chandeliers, but only two of the bulbs were working and the pub had no spares. We positioned these two in the one chandelier above the readers and for small or faint print the light of a mobile phone served the purpose. The readers were Amy De'Ath and Robert Vas Dias, an age gap of some fifty-five years between them. Both readers were good to hear and the room was gratifyingly full.

genius

2011-08-23T18:30:00.004+01:00

"She bent down, turned around and gave me a wink
said I'm gonna make it up right here in the sink
it smelled like turpentine and looked like indian ink
I held my nose, I closed my eyes . . . I took a drink"

RIP Jerry Lieber

Challock, August

2011-08-19T10:05:00.002+01:00

Miller's imprint

2011-08-18T13:55:00.002+01:00

David Miller is now into his fortieth year in London. There’s no celebration as such but August could well be his month. In a couple of weeks he will be launching the Chax Press collection of Spiritual Exercises, pieces he’s been working on for some years. Tuesday this week saw a Blue Bus reading featuring poets who have published with his small press Kater Murr. This press has published some seventy items, mostly chapbooks and folded sheets, and mostly the work of new poets Miller (both a publisher and a historian of small presses) considers interesting or older ones he feels are underexposed. These little books produced without the aid of grants are as often given away as they are sold. So thanks to David for his generous contribution to the London scene.

a final Orkney foursome

2011-08-09T16:44:00.005+01:00

four more from Orkney

2011-08-07T18:35:00.003+01:00

four from Orkney

2011-08-05T18:16:00.005+01:00

anarchy in the UK

2011-07-25T12:59:00.001+01:00