USA POETS OF LA SALA CAPIZUCCHI

I just received a copy of the USA version of The Poets of La Sala Capizucchi, edited by Caterina Ricciardi, John Gery and Massimo Bacigalupo, UNO Press, 2011, The Ezra Pound Centre for Literature series number 3. This purple covered version from UNO Press is just the same as the Italian version published by Raffaelli, except that there are photos of the poets reading at La Sala Capizucchi, Rome, 2 July 2009 on pages 84-86. The contributors are: Maria Clelia Cardona, Luca Cesari, Mario Lunetta, Daniel Maria Mancini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Daniele Pieroni, Mario Quattrucci, Edoardo Sanguineti, Carlo Vita, Petr Mikes, Massimo Bacigalupo, Mary De Rachewiltz, John Gery, Tony Lopez, Biljana D. Obradovic, Wayne Pounds, Stephen Romer, Ron Smith and C. K. Stead. I put the notice here because the Italian version will probably be unobtainable in USA. UNO Press books are distributed by National Book Network in the USA.

BRITISH MODERNISM AT WINCHESTER

On Tuesday I travelled to Winchester and stayed the night at the Wykeham Arms very near the Cathedral. This post box is on the building and the old baker's sign (below) is along Canon Street nearby. On Wednesday I took part in the British Modernism Seminar: Three Poets on British Modernism at Winchester University, my first visit to Winchester, what a beautiful city that seems to have escaped WW2 bombing. Mark Rutter gave a paper 'David Jones: In Parenthesis and the Modern Illustrated Book'. Julian Stannard's paper was 'Basil Bunting: Chomei at Toyama, Redaction and Prefiguration'. Mine was 'Lee Harwood and Harry Guest: The Orient in Later Modernist English Poetry'. I had heard Julian's paper on Bunting at the Basil Bunting and Friends conference in Durham, but it was well worth hearing again. The account of Bunting's translation of an Italian source for Chomei, picking up on Buddhist ideas and connecting with Bunting's Quaker background and Pound's translation practice in Cathay was excellent. Mark Rutter's paper about David Jones started with a brief account of Blake's hand-printed word and image books, and looked in detail at Jones' illustrated manuscripts for In Parenthesis. None of the drawings from Jones' manuscript make it into the published book and indeed it would have been another kind of book if they had. The material is rich and the meaning of the book is certainly made differently and complemented by taking the manuscript pages into account. This is an obvious publishing project for someone who wants to develop the understanding and reception of Jones' work. We had a good discussion about the idea of Modernism in British poetry. I've recently had a proof of my paper from UNO Press, so I hope to see it published early in 2013.

USA READING TOUR

I'm just back from a series of readings in USA. I went into New York on 31st October on a flight from Heathrow that I was expecting to be cancelled because of the aftermath of hurricane Sandy -- but the flight was fine and there were cabs running from JFK. I got to City Island late in the evening and everywhere was dark, no power, and trees on the roads, evidence of flooding everywhere. The next day I flew from La Guardia to Buffalo to begin readings. Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack picked me up at the airport and took me to the hotel. I had a great time in Buffalo, we had dinner with Yevtushenko which was a pleasure and turned out to be better than his stage act, really hammy. It was one of those readings that go on much too long, people were leaving, the show ended with him singing Lara's Song from Dr Zhivago out of tune, absolute self-indulgence. He certainly drew a crowd, filled an enormous venue, and got a long standing ovation.
     My first reading was in the back room at Rust Belt Books, downtown Buffalo, there was an art opening going on in the book shop when we arrived. I had a great welcome and a terrific audience in Buffalo. I got to visit the Allbright Knox museum for the first time, a huge and wonderful collection of modern art. Back in New York I got a chance to see my nephew Harry play soccer for a local Bronx team.
     At Philadelphia I read upstairs at Milano's Pizza with Rachel Blau DuPlessis. The series is run by CA Conrad making things happen in Philadelphia. I can't really imagine a more unlikely venue, but a great atmosphere and a brilliant audience including Ron Silliman and Krishna, Bob Perelman and I met Frank Sherwood who had seen a previous reading of mine at Kelly Writers' House. Rachel used the occasion to read the last section of her epic poem Drafts (she'd been saving it up to read at a Philadelphia venue). It was a real pleasure to read with Rachel and to spend time with her and Bob. We went out for dinner at a very good Italian restaurant in the city centre and the next night to Bob Perelman's and Francie Shaw's house to watch the US election results come in. Whilst in Philadelphia I saw Dancing Round the Bride, a show about the influence of Duchamp on John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. I hadn't seen Merce Cunningham dance before, even though I'd read about his work at Black Mountain College and his famous dance company. It was an education to see video made by Charles Atlas who was film maker in residence with the company.
     Next day Rachel and I travelled to New York on the Bolt bus and spent most of the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Whilst we were looking at the modern galleries, a blizzard was developing across the city and by the time we were ready to go downtown and get some dinner before the reading, the conditions were bad enough to make walking difficult and crossing roads treacherous, deep slush sometimes breaking through to unexpected pools of icy water at the kerbside.
     Our reading at the Poetry Project, St Mark's Church, was in a series organised by Stacy Szymaszek. Rachel was introduced by Rachel Levitsky and I was introduced by Arlo Quint.

I stayed in New York for a couple of days, met up with my old friend Peter Nicholls for lunch one day and then travelled on the Amtrack train to Providence, Rhode Island, where I stayed with Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop and read at Ada Books in a series Publicly Complex, organised by Kate Schapira. I read with Anne Gorick, Meg Fernandes, and Youmna Chlala. I was surprised to be put on with three other readers in a bookshop reading, but it worked really well; we had a great crowd and a terrific atmosphere for the readings. It was wonderful to spend some time with Rosmarie and Keith, really good and generous friends, and I also got to see an exhibition of Keith's collages at Po Gallery, 155 Westminster Street, Providence. In fact there were many more collages in the room I was sleeping in than in the gallery, but it was good to see them set out in a proper display.
     It was a long journey from Providence Rhode Island to Berkeley California via New York. When I got into the taxi at San Francisco airport it felt completely different, very warm speeding on a dark freeway along the bay shore. I stayed at the Hotel Durant right next to the Berkeley campus for a week, which was a pleasure. I was met for drinks by Lyn Hejinian, Geoffrey G. O'Brien and Keston Sutherland. I got to visit my cousin Roger Housden who lives in Larkspur in Marin County. I read in the Holloway Series on Tuesday 13th November with Daniel Benjamin who read a long poem about being a visiting student on a fellowship to Cambridge. I was introduced (thank you) by Jill Richards. It was a pleasure to meet Catherine Walsh a poet whose work I've know and read for some years, also to meet Cecil Giscombe, Robert Kaufman, Alan Bernheimer, Robert Hass, Dan Blanton, Eric Falci, and to see Kit Robinson, Jean Day, Charles Altieri, David Marriott and John Shoptaw, all of whom I'd met before. Later in the week I saw a terrific reading by Keston Sutherland and John Wilkinson and then on Friday 16th November we all took part in a colloquium Boundless Poetics. I know it was a whole committee of Berkeley people who organised these events but I'm especially grateful to Lyn Hejinian for including me and doing extra work to make it happen, what an amazing company is assembled there.

FALSE MEMORY IN POLISH TRANSLATION

My poem 'Corneal Erosion' from False Memory has just been published in Polish in the journal Rita Baum, 25 (2012) 45-48, translated by Jakub Gluszak. It's a few years since I first heard from Jakub that he would like to translate something from False Memory and I'm really happy to see a copy of the journal. I wish I could read the article 'Maszyna Do Pisania' which seems to be about typewriter poems and conceptual art and includes stunning works by Zbigniew Makarewicz, Roman Gorzelski, Wojciech Sztukowski, Marzenna Kosinska, Marrianna Bocian and Stanislaw Drozdz.

AFTER INSTALLED IN RADCLIFFE

This summer and autumn I've been working on a commission for the Irwell Sculpture Trail that runs from Salford Quays to Bacup, through Bury and Rossendale, 33 miles long and over 70 works of sculpture. My work After is installed in Radcliffe, near the Metrolink Tram Station, on a footpath that leads to the Manchester, Bury and Bolton Canal, and on a bridge support along the canal towpath. There are three stone plaques each with an inscribed verse set into stone walls. The preparation of the stone and the lettering was carried out by Rossendale stonemason Ken Howe.
     This is a work that has been at the planning stage for a long time. After, also now known as The Scattered Poem is a 28 verse holocaust poem that was first published in 2000. It is a particularly abstract poem, composed using a text generation programme that was run many times to produce a vast text and the results edited down to a tiny fraction of the output. I wanted to set up a staged composition procedure that would include actions beyond my control. Of course I still needed to be responsible for the finished work and to make it my own by means of editing and refining the result. Mulling over the possibilities of the process, it gradually became clear to me that my ambition for this work just could not be fully realised on paper. It was a turning point for sure. What I now aim to do is to get verses and clusters of verses installed as far as possible from each other, so that the viewer sees only a fragment of the work. If you wanted to see more you'd have to travel, which would always put the work you'd already seen at a distance. In order to get this work established and located in different places I needed to have an example to show. To get it made I need to rely on describing the project and on photographs.
     So I've been working with Tony Trehy, director of the Irwell Sculpture Trail, and the stonemason Ken Howe, to find suitable sites and get three of the inscribed verses installed in Radcliffe. It's an interesting aspect of this kind of project that you need to collaborate to get it made and to make it visible. We still have quite a way to go. I'm hoping that we will have QR codes before too long, to add additional information. The stones are located on the Sculpture trail very near Brass Art's Falls the Shadow and Lawrence Weiner's Water Made It Wet.
     The title After comes from Theodor Adorno: 'Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch' (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric) from Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1963). After was published in my book Devolution, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2000, and in Poetry Review, 93, 3 (2003): 32-35. There is a related piece called 'Not Reading After' in Covers, Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2007, which is transcribed from a performance at Camden People's Theatre, curated by Chris Goode and also published in the journal Shearsman.

HIGH ON THE DOWNS

High on the Downs: A Festschrift for Harry Guest, edited by Tony Lopez and published by Shearsman books on Harry Guest's 80th birthday, was launched in Exeter at the Central Library on Monday 8th October, 7-9pm. The contributors are: Joan Bakewell, Michael Bakewell, Humphrey Burton, Jack Chalkley, Owen Davis, Peter Dent, William I Elliott, Peter Finch, Chris Finn, John Flower, John Ford, Peter France, John Greening, John Hall, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Lee Harwood, Jeremy Hilton, Andrew Houwen, Peter Jay, Peter Josyph, philip kuhn, Ann Leaney, Tony Lopez, Rupert M Loydell, John Mingay, Bob Nash, William Oxley, Alasdair Paterson, Michael Power, Tim Rice, Anthony Rudolf, Lawrence Sail, Deniele Serafini, Martin Sorrell, Peter Southgate, Anne Stevenson, and Chris Ward.
     Harry Guest, born in Penarth in 1932, has had a long and distinguished career as a poet, translator and teacher. He began to be published in the 1960s and Arrangements (1968), was his first book with Anvil Press Poetry, the specialist poetry publishing house run by Peter Jay. He has published twelve collections of poetry and his collected poems A Puzzling Harvest (2002). He worked as a teacher at Felsted School and at Lancing College before taking up a lectureship at Yokohama National University in Japan. He returned to England in 1972 and was Head of French at Exeter School until his retirement in 1991. Apart from his many collections of poetry, he is well-known as a translator from the French, German and Japanese, and his published translations include Post-War Japanese Poetry (with Lynn Guest and Kajima Shozo, 1972), and Victor Hugo: The Distance, The Shadows (1981). He has also published three novels: Days (1978), Lost Pictures (1991), Time After Time (2005). His non fiction writing includes The Artist on the Artist (2000) and a Traveller's Literary Companion to Japan (1994).
     At the launch party there were short readings by the following contributors: Peter Dent, John Hall, Lee Harwood, Jeremy Hilton, Peter Jay, Ann Leaney, Alasdair Paterson, Lawrence Sail, Martin Sorrell, myself and Harry Guest. The title High on the Downs is from Harry Guest's Sixth Elegy; the book cover is based on the painting Harry Guest contemplating the visit to Montepulciano by Exeter artist Bob Nash.

We have lived elsewhere. How otherwise explain
the shock of recognition at the gap in the hedge,
that day high on the downs when the sun led you
to a place you knew though it was your first visit.
Harry Guest, 'The Sixth Elegy'

FESTIVALS 2012 & LITTLE SPARTA

I've been involved in a whole series of quite different festivals this year, all of them worth doing and each having their own focus.
 I read at the Runnymede Festival London (8th-17th March), on a bill with Carol Watts, at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, Acton Street, London. This was organised by Robert Hampson and is a project growing out of his work with colleagues involved in the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway University London. Some of the literary events take place in Runnymede and some in central London.
     Sounds New Festival at Canterbury in Kent is a music festival in the town that has a thread of poetry events. It is particularly strong on new music with premiere performances at all kinds of venues. I saw a performance of Common Objects by the Rhodri Davies Ensemble including some collaborative work with poets Patricia Debney and Nancy Gaffield. This was not the sort of event you come across in East Devon. I saw a terrific high energy percussion group called Powerplant, like nothing else I've seen. We saw a talk on British Poetry since 1950 by Michael Schmidt. Actually this was about a report produced for the Royal Society of Literature about contemporary poetry and the line was that it was a narrow report. My reading with Stephen Collis entitled Found Text was on the Campus of the University of Kent at Canterbury, 9th May, well attended and a very good audience. I was booked by Professor David Herd and had a great time in Canterbury. I went to see St Martin's, the oldest functioning church in the country but it was locked and I couldn't get inside. The graveyard was worth the walk.
     In June I was at the Hay Poetry Jamboree, which turned out to be nothing to do with the big Hay Literature Festival going on at the same time in a field just on the edge of town. The Poetry Jamboree, known as the Jam, was two and a bit days of solid readings with JP Ward, Andrea Brady, Jeremy Hilton, Waterloo Press readers, Caroline Goodwin, Harry Gilonis, Laurie Duggan, Philip Terry, Andrew Duncan, Harriet Tarlo, Peter Larkin, Nerys Williams, Anthony Mellors, Sophie Robinson, Jeff Hilson, Ulli Freer and me and others. I absolutely loved it, saw all the readings, and felt that I'd got a very particular and well curated view of what is happening in poetry. Many of us were put up in a couple of Crickhowell houses and had communal meals good company there later in the evenings when each day's programme was finished. The town of Hay is very attractive on a sunny day, it's great to visit the poetry bookshop that Alan Halsey used to run years ago, now run with equal flair and a great stock. I wished I'd had more time to spend with my old friend the poet and artist Allen Fisher who also attended the whole programme. Allen is co-patron of the Jam with USA's best known poetry critic Marjorie Perloff. These events were organised by John Goodby and Lyndon and Penny Davies and the readings took place in a nearly tumble down Methodist chapel very central in Hay. What an amazing concentrated fix of the real thing: a wonderful lineup and run on a shoestring with barely seedcorn funding from Literature Wales.
    It seemed that I was working for the b-side Multimedia Arts Festival right through the spring and summer but the Weymouth events were launched on 29th July and went on till 12 August. I've put some photos up in a previous post of my work Weymouth Sands that was shown on the Esplanade through the Olympic period. It was good to visit Weymouth for research and get to know the town a little, quite similar in many ways to Exmouth where I live. 31st July I did an artist's talk in the Sea View Restaurant upstairs at the Pier Bandstand on the Esplanade; it was that building, and the idea of the vanished pier that was the focus for my work in Weymouth.
     The Edinburgh International Book Festival was different in kind from the other Festivals. I travelled with Sara and stayed in Edinburgh for a few days and we went to see what we could of the Edinburgh Festivals, all going on at the same time, it seemed taking over the whole city. I read with Alan Gillis and Fiona Sampson on the 23rd August, a very good event, I hadn't seen Alan Gillis read before, whereas I've seen Fiona Sampson at a couple of other events; we did a launch together at the London Review Bookshop in 2007. The director of Edinburgh International Book Festival is Nick Barley. They really know how to look after their authors. I did an interview with Jennifer Williams for the Scottish Poetry Library. Whilst we were in Edinburgh we went to see a couple of exhibitions and the Julliard Dance company of New York and some rather tired and dreary comedy by Sean Hughes on the fringe. The dance performance by the Julliard Dance company was one of the best things I've ever seen on the stage. Three pieces in the programme, all of them very different and all stunning. It was very good to visit Edinburgh and to see our friends Randall Stevenson and Sarah Carpenter.
     We also went on a bus trip to Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden Little Sparta, that I last visited in the early 1980s. We saw a Finlay exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh and then went from there in a minibus direct to Little Sparta. I don't think you could get there otherwise unless you hired a car, it's only a dozen miles or so to the south of Edinburgh, in the Pentland Hills, but you wouldn't get a bus to anywhere nearby. The garden is a converted hillside croft and has been developed to about three times the size it was when I was last there. It is a wonder of Scottish culture, one of the most ambitious artworks in Britain, a garden of poetry and philosophy. The works are mostly inscriptions located in devised garden settings, and the garden uses native plants to great effect. The various areas of the garden have very different characters, some opening out into lochans, moorland and hillside, others quite separately developed, with their own atmosphere: the Roman Garden, the Allotment, the Temple Pool Garden, the Woodland Garden, the Wild Garden, the Lochan Eck Garden, the English Parkland. Inscriptions and sculptures are everywhere, there are lots of works I hadn't seen before. The Little Sparta Trust website has lots of excellent photos gives a good sense of the garden. These two images of Ian Hamilton Finlay works (Man: A Passerby and 1942) were taken on that visit in July 2012 and are published here with the permission of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay.