WORKS ON PAPER

At the apex of modernism in the early twentieth century, Bury in Lancashire was the world centre of industrial paper manufacture. Works on Paper is a serial poem looking through the history and language of that technical innovation and place of trade. The poem was written in 2008, first performed at the Text Festival in 2009, and letterpress printed on 130 gsm Hahnemuhle old antique laid by Richard Parker in October and November 2011, limited to 100 copies at £4.
Works on Paper is Crater 15 published by Crater Press, London and Brighton.

THE BURY POEMS

The Bury Poems was published in 2011 by Apple Pie Editions.

Contents
Works on Paper, Tony Lopez
6 Poems, Robert Grenier
Extract: Northern Soul, Ron Silliman
0, Geof Huth
Viaduct, Carol Watts
1 am made of desire, Philip Davenport
Stripped, Philip Davenport
Foody, Holly Pester
HEAP, Holly Pester
Footnotes
For The Bury Poems, Tony Trehy

Philip Davenport's Apple Pie Editions published this hardback collection of work related to a number of Bury Art Museum commissions set up by the Text Festival curator Tony Trehy. The book includes a good reproduction of one short sequence '6 Poems' of Robert Grenier's four-colour hand-drawn poems that are best presented as colour plates. If you haven't seen Grenier's colour work this is a useful point of reference. Ron Silliman's 'Extract: Northern Soul' is actually a tiny extract that was made into a neon poem exhibited at the Text Festival in 2011. It figures in the book as a series of 15 photographs by Philip Davenport of the neon manufacturing process including a double spread with the text. The neon is now installed in Bury tram station. I would have liked to see some more of the Silliman poem. Carol Watts contributes a sequence 'Viaduct' that is based on a fatal road accident near Bury in 1840 involving a horse. The poem uses contemporary sources and material from the Bury archives to dramatise a collision of mechanical industrial and animal worlds. The book also includes photos by Julia Grime and Steve Walton, and drawings by Darren Marsh.
    My poem sequence 'Works on Paper' is broken up arbitrarily and distributed through the book, out of the composed order, with one section used as a half-title and another as back cover copy.
    Ron Silliman's recent chapbook Wharf Hypothesis (published by Lines, NY) is a sort of 'Stranger in a Strange Land' poem describing a train journey in England taken at the time of the Text Festival 2009 and including the 2-3 lines turned into a neon mentioned above. I like the no-nonsense descriptions, Bury Market appears as "off-brand tack / in vast quantity" which it mostly is. The fresh food wouldn't look remarkable to an American, though you wouldn't find that selection of Lancashire produce anywhere else. It's good to read a poem you could argue with, that has a point of view. I'm looking forward to the rest of 'Northern Soul'.

EXETER POETRY FESTIVAL

I went to a couple of events at Exeter Poetry Festival last week. I would have liked to see more of it but I only found out about the festival because a friend who was reading told me just beforehand. I don't think there was any advertising. The readings I saw in Exeter Library were very good indeed and it was a pleasure to meet friends and have a drink there, a great way to use the library. On Saturday 8th October there was a book launch for a new anthology of prose poems This Line is Not for Turning edited by Jane Monson and published by Cinnamon Press. There were readings by Andy Brown, Anthony Caleshu, Luke Kennard and the editor Jane Monson. Andy Brown's work included some postcolonial narratives that reminded me a little of Tom Raworth's Logbook, but they were more continuous and atmospheric, less deliberately disjunctive. Anthony Caleshu read some work from his recent collection Of Whales, I really enjoyed the Writer's Room poem, and Luke Kennard's witty performance of a playful and vivid piece about scale was a delight. Jane Monson's poems were much better than her explanations about the anthology.

On Sunday 9th October there was a Shearsman event with readings by Mark Goodwin and Harriet Tarlo, who both have work in the anthology The Ground Aslant, edited by Tarlo. This was an extended reading of landscape based work, Goodwin's poems were about walking and climbing in Torridon and I loved them having climbed there myself a long time ago. Tarlo's reading from Clouds Descending was very interesting, the works like arrays of landscape features spread projective verse style across the page. These were sections from a work made in collaboration with photographer Jem Southam. It would have been great to see some of the photos projected at the same time. Photos of Harriet, Anthony, Luke and Mark were the only snaps worth posting.

SENTENCES EXHIBITION BURY

I just found these photos by Jari Kuusenaho, posted on the Text Festival Facebook page. The top photo is of the main gallery at Bury with one section of the Sentences show curated by Tony Trehy. Derek Beaulieu is walking towards the camera and Marjut Villanueuva is looking at the exhibit and writing. The second photo is my piece More and More moving between sentences.

EDINBURGH PHOTOS

In Edinburgh for a reading at the Voodoo Rooms for the University of New Orleans overseas summer writing programme, I went to see the local art museums and took photos of these outdoor works by Eduardo Paolozzi, Nathan Coley, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Martin Creed. The Finlay memorial for Robert Louis Stevenson is in Princes Gardens. A Finlay work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is badly installed next to a car park. I also saw a wonderful retrospective of Elizabeth Blackadder at the Royal Scottish Academy but no photos allowed.

READING IN EDINBURGH 25 JULY

I'm giving a reading for UNO at the Voodoo Rooms, 19A West Register Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2AA, at 8pm, 25 July 2011 with Hank Lazer, Susan Schultz, Biljana Obradavic and Dorothy Alexander.
    I've been working through the summer with the editor Bill Lavender and designer Carrie Chappell of the University of New Orleans Press on the production of the North American edition of my book Only More So. UNO currently has a summer writing programme in Edinburgh.

I POETI DI SALA CAPIZUCCHI

The Poets of the Sala Capizucchi is a new anthology published in Rimini, Italy by Raffaelli Editore and in USA by the University of New Orleans Press, edited by Caterina Ricciardi, John Gery and Massimo Bacigalupo. Poems in Italian by Maria Clelia Cardona, Luca Cesari, Mario Lunetta, Daniel Maria Mancini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Daniele Pieroni, Mario Quattrucci, Edoardo Sanguineti, Carlo Vita printed with parallel English versions; Poems in Czech by Petr Mikes printed with parallel English translations; Poems in English by Massimo Bacigalupo; Mary de Rachewiltz, Patrizia de Rachewiltz, John Gery, Tony Lopez, Biljana D. Obradovic, Wayne Pounds, Stephen Romer, Ron Smith, C.K. Stead printed with parallel Italian translations. Introduction by John Gery.
This is my first Italian publication and includes Italian translations of 'A Path Marked with Breadcrumbs', 'Look at the Screen', 'On Tuesday', 'When You Wish ...', and an excerpt from Darwin all translated by Caterina Ricciardi.