SOME TIMES BY HARRY GUEST

10th November I went to the Exeter launch of Harry Guest's new book Some Times from Anvil Press. This is the first literary event I've been to in Exeter Central Library. It was a really fine reading, as expected, sensitive, beautiful poems and Harry's readings bringing them immediately into sharp focus. 'The Custard Mountains' is first one in the book about a young boy mishearing a word in a radio performance of a Lorca poem. It would be a funny story anyway but with Harry Guest's verbal invention of exotic landscapes in variations of yellow we are led into the daydreams of childhood imagination recovered through unreliable proliferating memory. And the poem's humour and imagination is a tribute to Lorca. It's a generous intelligent book by a restless and passionate writer. Of course Harry Guest draws a good crowd in Exeter and the event had that buzz with a big queue for signed books, a good night for Anvil and the library. The cover design of Some Times is by Tamasin Cole, based on a painting by Piran Bishop.

CONTEMPORARY POETRY CONFERENCE

I failed to write anything about the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference back in September because it was a difficult and very busy time. The second in a useful series organised by various collaborating universities British and Irish Poetry 1960-2010 was held at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University of Belfast, 15-17 September 2010. There were keynote papers by Sir Christopher Ricks, William Logan and Angela Leighton, and readings by Belfast poets Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey and Leontia Flynn, with a panel of poet-publishers: Michael Schmidt, Don Paterson and Peter Fallon. Another session of readings was given by Michael Schmidt, Don Paterson, Gerald Dawe, Christopher Reid, Peter McDonald and Peter Fallon.

I was in a panel with James Cummins of University College, Cork who spoke about Tom Raworth's use of self-reflection and repetition in Writing and Catacoustics, with Lacy Rumsden who read a paper 'Reading Prynne Aloud: Constraint, Orientation, Form. I gave a talk on what was then a work in progress 'Only More So'. The panel worked really well, we could have used more time for questions.

The next day I chaired a panel including Neil Pattison of St John's Cambridge on Denise Riley, Robin Purves of Central Lancashire on Tom Leonard and Keston Sutherland, and William Rowe of Birkbeck on Barry MacSweeney. This also was a terrific panel with quite different approaches to some of the most interesting recent poetry written in English. I went to some of the other papers but the thread I was really interested in did not survive into the later sessions. I saw Derek Attridge talking about Don Paterson, Christopher Ricks on Geoffrey Hill and Angela Leighton on various poets including Philip Gross.

RICHARD PARKER LAUNCH

Richard Parker's book from The Mountain of California, Openned Press, is being launched on 18 August 2010, 7.30pm, at Carnivale, 2 White Church Lane, London, E1 7QR. Admission is free. It should be a good event, lots of readers, more information and another flyer with policemen on the Openned website.

SCOTT THURSTON READING

Last Sunday 4 July I went to a terrific reading by Scott Thurston at Furzeacres on Dartmoor, hosted by poet Philip Kuhn and sculptor Rosie Musgrave. Scott read from his new book Internal Rhyme, four sequences of identical form that are designed to be read horizontally and vertically on the page. This sounds tricky but it works, with parts of a sequence heard in both directions and phrases being recombined as the performance moved on. The sense of a web or maybe an array of half-lines that make connections but avoid closure was very strong. Sometimes the work seemed to be theoretical and sometimes personal, I liked it very much indeed, and it worked really well as a reading. Here's a picture of Scott outside the studio building at Furzeacres. Internal Rhyme is published by Shearsman Books of Exeter.

THEO JANSEN ON EXMOUTH BEACH

Our walk on the beach at low tide today included a look at Dutch artist Theo Jansen's Strandbeest which has been living and moving around on the sand for a couple of days. Theo Jansen (pictured above with his Strandbeest) explained that the creature was made out of ordinary conduit that is used everywhere in Holland for domestic and industrial buildings. The Strandbeest works on wind power, and uses moving sails to harness wind and store it as air under pressure in plastic bottles. We saw the sails working and saw the Strandbeest walk on the sand. This is the best addition to Exmouth beach that we've ever seen. Jansen drew a crowd of people for his talk about the creature and everyone was delighted to see the Strandbeest walking on the beach. There is also a smaller model that can be pulled along to demonstrate the mechanism in action and that was in use all the time. The Strandbeest is going to Exeter city centre for a few days during the Exeter Festival, and there is a Theo Jansen exhibition at Spacex currently.

SHANGHAI & HANGZHOU

I was in Shanghai and Hanzhou from 1 - 10 June for the conference Modernism and the Orient, held at the Santai Villa Hotel, Hangzhou, on 5 - 7 June. I gave a paper on the English poets Harry Guest and Lee Harwood, choosing Guest's 'Two Poems for O-Bon' and Harwood's 'Chen' as poems that represent Japanese and Chinese cultures in their different ways. There were more than seventy papers at the conference, including contributions from Ron Bush, Ira Nadel, Daniel Albright, Sabine Sielke, Christine Froula, Zhaoming Qian, Fen Gao, Qiping Yin and Jiande Lu. I particularly liked the papers by Richard Parker, David Ewick, Dorsey Kleitz but as usual I was only too aware of the papers I was missing because of timetable clashes. A high point was the visit to the Lingyin Temple on a hillside near Hangzhou, my first visit to a Buddhist site, something I should have done about forty years ago. It was a wonderful experience to see the different temples and huge carved Buddhas, buddhist saints and warrior guardians. I was invited to give a lecture at very short notice at Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade and so time for exploring Hangzhou and Shanghai was limited, but I did get to spend some time at the Shanghai Museum, a day in all, some of it with my friend Wendy Flory of Purdue University in USA who is a good companion and knows a great deal about Chinese Art. I was looked after in Shanghai and Hangzhou by various University postgraduate students and staff, a really warm welcome and great hospitality. The photos above are 1 West Lake, Hangzhou; 2 Lingyin Temple; 3 Buddhist Stele, Shanghai Museum; 4 Lingyin Temple; 5 Memorial temple for Yu Qian. My trip to China was sponsored by the British Academy, I'm really grateful for their support.

PW10 PERFORMANCE WRITING at ARNOLFINI

PW10 is a weekend festival of Performance Writing and Cross artform at Arnolfini, Bristol --

Friday 7 May evening, Saturday 8 May, Sunday 9 May

The programme includes

Opening Caroline Bergvall's and Ciaran Maher's sound installation 'Say Parsley'.

Talks by Redell Olsen, Ric Allsopp, Caroline Bergvall, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lone Twin.

Performance by Aaron Williamson, Nancy Reilly-McVittie, Low Profile, Emma Bennet.

Readings by Tony Lopez, Drew Milne, Allen Fisher.

Multi-channel audio by David Prior.

Video installation by Nisha Dugall.

Digital and Visual text by John Hall, Jerome Fletcher, John Cayley, Ellen Bell, Melanie Thompson.

Arnolfini Gallery, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA

Day pass £8 / £7 concessions

Weekend pass £20 / £15 unwaged / £10 students

Road Sign Image (above) copyright (c) John Hall, 2009.