WEYMOUTH SANDS INSTALLED

This is a shot of my commission Weymouth Sands for the B-Side Festival in Weymouth, timed to coincide with the Olympic Sailing events. This new text work is 51 screens of material collected in Weymouth, plus credits, shown on a solar powered traffic management sign supplied by Kelly Brothers Solar Signs. It is located on the northern end of the Esplanade that runs along Weymouth Beach, close to Brunswick Terrace, and it can be seen there until 12 August 2012.

BUNTING CONFERENCE AT DURHAM

Earlier in July I attended the Basil Bunting conference: With Sleights Learned From Others: Basil Bunting and Friends, which took place at St John's College, Durham University, 4-5 July 2012. It's a long time since I was in Durham, 1981 I think, to visit Ric and Ann Caddel and stay over with them. This was a good two day conference, with some parallel sessions, and the standard of the papers I attended was very good on the whole. I particularly enjoyed seeing Harriet Tarlo give a talk on Bunting, Lorine Neidecker and Richard Caddel, establishing a tradition coming out of Objectivism of environmental poetics. The care for precise observation and the invention of appropriate form based on 'music' would be shared. I really enjoyed the paper and thought it gave a good introduction to the poetry of Neidecker and Caddel, which was the point, for Bunting readers.
     I saw Alex Pestell on Bunting's criticism of William Carlos Williams, Nicoletta Ascuito on Bunting's use of an Italian source for his poem 'Chomei at Toyama', and Philip Sidney on W.S. Graham's use of the frozen polar landscape. Don Share of Poetry Chicago gave the annual Basil Bunting Lecture, Bunting's Persia. That evening I gave a poetry reading with Tom Pickard and Amy Evans at the Williams Library in St Chad's College, which was packed. It was a pleasure to read four of Ric Caddel's shorter poems at the beginning of my set, to get him heard in Durham, though he was unable to be there in person. I hadn't seen Tom Pickard read before, his was an excellent set and it was good to see Amy Evans read again.
    Richard Parker's talk on Bunting, Zukofsky and Briggflatts was a high point of the conference for me. Louise Chamberlain gave an interesting account of Tom Pickard's career that connected somewhat with his earlier reading. Samuel Rogers was concerned with place and National or regional identity in the writings of various modernist poets. There was a very good poetry reading by Harriet Tarlo, Rory Waterman, Michael Zand, Dez Mendoza and Julian Stannard, all of it interesting. I was particularly amused by the lovely witty poems read by Julian Stannard.
    We had a showing of a wonderful film on Roy Fisher called Birmingham is What I Think With. This ambitious documentary presented Fisher's life and work, really integrating the piano playing and writing, and using the built environment, especially the way that the 19th century industrial landscape is still there. There was a touching meeting with a young Asian boy living in Fisher's old house and a stunt of walking the old front door of the house through the city. This was great fun and woven in with shots of Fisher reading his work and playing Jazz. I loved this brilliant and funny film. I thought it a very good introduction to Fisher's work and a fine response to Birmingham. It ought to be shown on TV. It was a real treat to see it at the conference.
    A very special talk by Colin Simms was personal memoir of Bunting, rant against the morals of certain University academics in botany fieldwork, and the captions accompanying some slides of Bunting's friends, which photos were sadly not available to be seen. Colin Simms finished with the reading of a very fine short memorial poem to Bunting, which was worth the wait.
    The final session included Bradford Haas on Joseph Macleod's The Ecliptic as a forerunner to Briggflatts, very usefully putting Macleod's work in front of Bunting readers. Also Annabel Haynes, the main conference organiser did a very good reading of Bunting's poetry based on pride in skilled labour, making connections with William Morris's socialism. Last was Julian Stannard's excellent paper on 'Chomei at Toyama', I learned a lot.
     I'm very grateful to the organisers for their splendid hospitality. I enjoyed staying in St John's college. I was able to visit my friend Ann Caddel for the first time in many years and I thoroughly enjoyed a couple of days focused on Bunting's poetry.

SIECLE 21, number 20

I just got a copy of Siecle 21 number 20 with a section on contemporary English writing in translation edited by Vanessa Guignery and Marilyn Hacker. There are contributions from Carol Rumens, Julian Barnes, Hassan Abdurazzak, Jane Rogers, Michael Schmidt, Aamer Hussein, Caroline Bergvall, Tony Lopez, Mimi Khalvati, Seni Seneviratne, Carl Shuker, Paul Farley, George Szirtes, Romesh Gunesekera, Jeremy Reed, Fiona Sampson, Jeanette Winterson, Ruth Fainlight, Helen Simpson, James Byrne and Paul Farley with Michael S. Roberts.
     My two poems 'Abstract Expressionism' and 'The New State' are translated for the issue by the French poet Chantal Bizzini. These poems both appeared in Devolution (The Figures, 2000); 'Abstract Expressionism' appeared first in Stress Management (Boldface, 1994). Chantal Bizzini also translated my poem 'When You Wish ...' for Action Poetique number 165, 2001.
     Siecle 21 site is located here.

THE OTHER ROOM, MANCHESTER

RUNNYMEDE FESTIVAL IN LONDON

Runnymede Literary Festival 2012 runs from Thursday 8 March to Saturday 17 March.
Readers include Andrew Motion, Susanna Jones, Dominic McLoughlin, Kate Williams, John Kinsella, Amy Evans, Luke Roberts, Justin Katko, Jennifer Cooke and Tony Lopez.
The Runnymede Festival in London events are at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG. Many of the events are free, check the programme.
Information about the festival and a complete pdf programme for download here.

READING AT BIRKBECK

25th February 2012, 4.30 - 7pm

Readings at the Birkbeck Centre for Poetics

TONY LOPEZ - REDELL OLSEN - JOHN SEED

+ a smorgasbord of found poetry by others

Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1

FREE AND ALL WELCOME

ANDREW DUNCAN THE COUNCIL OF HERESY

Andrew Duncan's book The Council of Heresy: A Primer of Poetry in a Balkanised Terrain was published in 2009 by Shearsman. This is a book about contemporary British poetry written by a poet and editor with a very developed and broad sense of what is going on. His experience as the publisher and editor of the magazine Angel Exhaust, his own writing practice, and his wide reading and general curiosity, qualify him as a guide to the scene. His critical work has been going on for some time now, a whole series of books is in progress. I have known about this for a while without really investigating properly and I can see from The Council of Heresy that it is an ambitious and entirely serious attempt to make sense of what is there in this important aspect of British culture. I had to read this book because it refers directly to my work. I'm very glad that I did read it and I'm grateful for his whole project.
     We take it for granted now in the world of Art that there is a whole range of different practices going on at the same time: that there is a very big difference between say the work we know as Brit Art and that of best known painters such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud, and then again the thousands of amateur painters who are concerned with rendering likenesses of pretty landscapes in watercolour. There are many aspects to this big change that is now well established by the existence of the multiple Tate museums: Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Tate St Ives and Tate Liverpool, and many high quality museums throughout the regions. You could tell this story in a number ways using key individuals or institutions, networks, prizes, galleries, art schools etc, but no-one would doubt that there has been a big change and that there is a variety of practices all contributing to this richness and complexity.
     It would be an over-simplification to say that in poetry the Sunday painters are in control. But it is almost true. The most ambitious and advanced poetry is largely unknown. The most praised, best known and most prominent tradition is backward looking and quite limited in scope. It is only relatively recently that the strangle hold of a small group of publishers to promote their own and drown out the opposition has been loosened somewhat. It is a failure of imagination and courage to praise the mediocre and to thus limit the possible. Consider the Arts Council funding a pamphlet series run by Faber in 2012. So Andrew Duncan's work is very useful in setting out a range, identifying different camps, and attempting to apply similar descriptive processes and criteria to different kinds of poetry. He writes to give readers a way into the Avant-Garde and to understand where the divided scene comes from. He investigates the influences of Kathleen Raine and Eric Mottram in the same chapter. He examines Peter Barry's account of the poetry wars in the 1970s. He gives space to unusually perceptive readings of Barry Macsweeney, Kelvin Corcoran and Maggie O'Sullivan. I haven't really been much interested in the careers of Kathleen Raine and Anthony Thwaite, but if Duncan finds something in them I think I ought to at least have a look. I find his writing radically uneven, his conclusions sometimes surprising and his sense of what is going on elsewhere (particularly in USA) very limited. But he is a very perceptive reader with insights you won't get anywhere else. This is a valuable book for anyone interested in what is happening in British poetry now and in the recent past; I plan to read the others and catch up.
     The cover of The Council of Heresy is based on a photo "A storm approaches Clavel Tower, Dorset" copyright 2006 by Blackbeck Photographic. You can find Andrew Duncan's author page at Shearsman Books here.