READING IN PLYMOUTH

I'm reading with Steve Spence, 7pm, 8th February at the Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth. This is one of the Peninsula Arts series running through February 2011.

A COLLOQUY OF POETS

I'm still catching up with events listings from last year. On 13th and 14th November I took part in a Colloquy of Poets at the media centre, University of Hull. It was a busy weekend including public readings by invited poets: 1: Kelvin Corcoran, Zoe Skoulding, Matthew Welton, Philip Gross and Denise Riley; 2: Daljit Nagra, Carol Watts, Tony Lopez, Susan Wicks, and John Burnside. We stayed together at a hotel in Hull centre, near the station, and small groups walked around the city centre for a series of photo shoots with Carolyn Forbes. I had never been to Hull before. The Colloquy began with each of the poets giving a prepared talk on a poem that was important to them, and the idea, given the range of different poets invited, was set up useful encounters in poetry. I really enjoyed the readings on Saturday evening and Sunday Morning, including new commissioned poems. All of this was organised by Martin Goodman, Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Philip Larkin Centre at the University of Hull.

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.