Oare, September

Reality Street at Lamb's Conduit

Tuesday night at The Lamb featured Maggie O’Sullivan and Paul Brown launching new books from Reality Street. Brown’s new book A Cabin in the Mountains is his first since 1982 (he had an even earlier book, Meetings and Pursuits, on sale for the original price of £1.95). He read hesitantly, often (with a whistle) returning to misread lines, but this had the effect it can often have of making you concentrate harder on what’s being perfomed. O’Sullivan read from Waterfalls and its predecessor Red Shifts, the music of her delivery matching the artfulness of the work on the page.

Millbank, September

a bad dream

The Austlit website posted this amazing note on its news page:

The Australian Security Research Centre is running a short story competition ‘to aid the national security community in imagining contemporary threats’.  The competition, titled ‘Australia’s Security Nightmares’, aims to produce ‘a set of short stories that will contribute to a better conception of possible future threats and help defence, intelligence services, emergency managers, health agencies and other public, private and non-government organisations to be better prepared’. Short stories will need: a security scenario as a plot element or central backdrop, an Australian context, and a setting between now and 2020.

ETZ. 2

ETZ. Number 2 is out and available from Pete Spence via spenvis@hotmail.com. It’s an A4 format with loose pages to facilitate work printed at 90 degrees so it functions as a kind of multiple broadsheet. This one includes work by Emily Stewart, francesca jurate sasnaitis, Mark Young, Michael Farrell, berni m jannsen, Rae Desmond Jones, Duncan White, nicola themistes, kent maccarter, corey wakeling, javant biarujia, Tom Wiegel and some earlier previously unpublished work of my own. Sounds good yes?

So Here We Are

A few years ago David Caddy set out to produce a monthly series of talks on poetry for miPOradio (these also appeared as a blog). He wanted to approach the important issues in contemporary British poetry in a conversational mode similar to that of Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America. Shearsman have now published these as So Here We Are. Caddy is the editor of the long running little magazine Tears In The Fence. He is based in Dorset and writes these illuminating talks from a particular and local perspective. Among others discussed in this very readable book are Raleigh, William Barnes, Blake, Bunting, Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Thomas A Clark, Prynne, John Kinsella and many others. Subjects also include the long disparaged writing of the 1940s (and the importance of Sonia Orwell as a facilitator during this period) and the ‘poetry wars’ of the 1970s. It would be a handy primer for those needing a wider perspective on current writing here in the UK, answering as it does some of the questions weightier tomes on poetic theory might gloss over.

Nightmare On Malet Street

On Tuesday night Veer launched two pamphlets and a book at Birkbeck. The readers were Richard Parker, Robert Hampson and Jeff Hilson. The latter two produce work slowly and it’s always great to hear them reading new pieces. Hampson is certainly overdue for a selection. I’ve seen work of his dating back to 1982 though there may well be earlier material. Jeff Hilson’s new sequence (a small portion of which appears as one of the pamphlets) is wonderfully kinetic and full of the kind of wit that must be a nightmare to the CamSex crowd.