IN PLACE OF LOVE & COUNTRY

A new anthology edited by John Gery and Richard Parker, In Place of Love and Country is published by Crater Press, 2013 - ISSN 2041-0948. The contributors are Mary de Rachewiltz, Ron Smith, Wayne Pounds, Biljana D. Obradovic, Julian Stannard, Amy Evans, David Cappella, Desmond Egan, Jeff Grieniesen, Tim Atkins, Daniel M. Mancini, Kevin Kiely, Richard Parker, John Gery, Michael Kindellan, Dirceu Villa, Tony Lopez, Jessica Pujol I Duran, Gavin Selerie, Stephen Romer, foreword by Walter Baumann. This is an anthology based on a reading in London at the Ezra Pound International Conference, held at the Institute for English Studies, University of London, July 2011.

READING FOR VISUAL POETICS

I was in London March 20th for the private view of Visual Poetics at the Poetry Library in the South Bank, I met Paula Claire, whom I'd seen on film at The Other Room in Manchester when I read there last year. Also Liliane Lijn who is known especially for her revolving poetry machines: I featured a photo of one of them in my review of the ICA show Poor Old Tired Horse in a much older blog post. Liliane Lijn was set up with a table and chairs to play her poetry game with a set of word cards. A group of participants were dealt a hand of cards and then took turns to add a word card to a text developing on the table. This was something like fridge magnet poetry and the vocabulary was generic poetry words.
     There was a reading by exhibition participants, including: Victoria Bean, Wayne Clements, Paula Claire, Stephen Emerson, John Gibbens, Giles Goodland, John Hall, Alan Halsey, James Harvey (read by Matt Martin), Sophie Herxheimer, Gad Hollander, Julie Johnson, Sarah Kelly, Liliane Lijn, Tony Lopez, Matt Martin, and Gavin Selerie. I particularly enjoyed Paula Claire's audience participation performance of 'Gun Law'; Giles Goodland's witty prose poem made of phrases including 'hand' and words that sound like hand; John Hall's reading from Interscriptions, his very fine collaborative Word and Image book with Peter Hughes; Alan Halsey's fully theatrical persona reading from his White Writing through a magnifying glass, doubtfully repeating the words and word fragments, turning the page around to follow the indistinct and partly erased text; Matt Martin's hilarious poem made of just acronyms. It was a great set of readings. I'm hoping to hear the recordings made by The Poetry Library soon. THANKS to the curators Chris McCabe and David Miller and all the staff at the Poetry Library for making the event go so well.
     It was my first sight of Visual Poetics, apart from photos, really good to see it. Apart from the wall display and screens, there was a lot of work that had been gathered and shown in display cases and relevant material from the main collection was also put out. There is a review of the exhibition in One Stop Arts here. Thanks to Lucy Lopez for the photos.

UNCUT AT EXETER PHOENIX

On Thursday 31 January I was the guest poet at Uncut, the local reading series at Exeter Phoenix, an arts venue located off Gandy Street in Exeter, near the Museum. The building looks like an old school and used to be the base for the University of Exeter when it was an external college of London University. Inside the Phoenix houses an art gallery, a restaurant and bar, and a range of different halls and rooms that are used for music, theatre, film, comedy and other arts events. We were in a space called the Black Box, a theatre workshop space on the ground floor. The night that I read was the opening of Maia Conran, The Crowd Laughs With You Always (1 February to 16 March). These are installations of digital works, mostly representing rows of empty cinema seats seen from different angles in grey. There was one booth we couldn't get into and I heard that it was showing a montage of old black and white film clips.
     Uncut is run by Alasdair Paterson and Gemma Green and works on the open mike format. Poets who want to read to an audience turn up and give their name to the organisers who set up a running order for the night. Each reader gets a few minutes to present normally two or three poems and then the guest poet does a set. The first 'open mike' session was an hour long. At Uncut they repeat this format. If you went to see the guest poet you could find this arrangement really obstructive and tedious, but of course many of the audience are 'open mikers' and are there to perform. The guest poet ought to bring something special to the occasion.
     I remember that when I first moved to Exeter I went to a Festival run on this basis by a series of different poetry groups. My friend the poet Ken Edwards was one of the guests, so I went along and got very impatient with the local performers because I was expecting to attend a reading by the advertised poet. What the format shows, of course, is that the main audience for poetry readings is poets themselves. Giving anyone who wants it a platform to perform is bound to produce uneven results but it does show a particular poetry community to itself, and hopefully creates the conditions to make it self-aware. Of course you can't really assume that there will be progress, because there is no more than 'show and tell'. There is no apparatus of feedback except applause. I've read at the Language Club in Plymouth also, and that runs with the same format.
    On 31st January the organisers Alasdair Paterson and Gemma Green opened each half with a reading. The other readers were Norman Jope, Simon Williams, Susan Taylor, Mary Coghill, Liz Adams, Mark Totterdell, James Turner, Jaime Robles, Graham Burchell, Ian Chamberlain and Jennie Osborne. That's thirteen poets apart from the guest poet; I hope I haven't missed anyone out. Exeter Phoenix clearly doesn't take poetry events seriously because they don't show Uncut on the programme posted on their website: so you can't tell who the guest poet is unless you are in touch with the organisers. I have seen some terrific guest poets at Uncut readings, among them Kelvin Corcoran and Harry Guest. I wouldn't miss the next guest poet Gavin Selerie on 28th February 2013.

   

GAVIN SELERIE AT FURZEACRES

It was great to see Gavin Selerie reading at Furzeacres on Dartmoor yesterday, hosted by Philip Kuhn and Rosie Musgrave. Gavin read from the second section of his book Le Fanu's Ghost, published by Five Seasons Press in 2006. The poems work over the connections between certain locations in Dublin (Phoenix Park, Chapelizod), their recreation in gothic fiction, the Sheridan / Le Fanu family, Wilde, Swift, Beckett, and especially Joyce's Work in Progress which became Finnegans Wake. These Irish literati, their houses and families, their interconnections, are a rich and luminous field for Selerie's obsessive writings and wonderfully inventive poems. The format at Furzeacres allows a writer to take the time to read from a longer work, and Gavin Selerie really benefitted from the opportunity to give us a sense of the expanded literary context of the poems, mapping in Le Fanu's The House by the Church-yard, The Cock and the Anchor, Joyce's letters and early venture as a Cinema manager, Work in Progress, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Francis Bacon's London studio reconstructed in Dublin, the rivers of Dublin and much more. Le Fanu's Ghost is a compendium of literary allusion, an expanding map of Irish culture and its workings in English but also a masterpiece of writerly poetry made of literary sources. I've heard Gavin read from it three times now, quite different performances, and this last one the best and most assured.

     Just for the record, Five Seasons Press makes the finest books you could find, beautifully designed and printed, clear type, sympathetic setting, sewn bindings, unfussy but real quality manufacture on recycled paper. Their list includes poets such as Alan Halsey, Yannis Ritsos, Gary Snyder, and Gavin Selerie, enough said.