JD Salinger R.I.P

I haven't really got anything useful to add to the mass of material on Salinger that has appeared in the papers and online in the last couple of days, and I guess 91 is a good age to go at. I read The Catcher In The Rye when I was 19 and loved it with a passion, and re-read it a few times in the next four or five years, but I haven't touched it since. That's quite unusual for me with a favourite book, and I think it's because deep down I'm worried that it'll turn out to be something you only love when you're that age.

I've read and re-read most of his other stuff though. The short story collection, For Esme, With Love And Squalor, is probably my favourite, especially The Laughing Man, with its story-within-a-story.

Salinger's death does raise all sorts of questions about what happens when a writer genuinely does write purely for themselves. It'll be interesting to see if they're answered if anything is now published posthumously.

Web wanderings

Given that I spend absurd amounts of time trawling the web at work, a disturbing amount of really good stuff slips under my radar. Clearly I should be looking a bit more closely rather than just amassing trivia which I can then put to use on Sporcle.

So, I’ve only just realised that Tony Frazer, of Shearsman, has a blog, and that he’s just published Elisabeth Bletsoe’s first three collections under one cover. I’m a big fan of Shearsman, who not only have some great poets on board but who also take care to make their books things of beauty. Bletsoe’s someone I’ve read too little of, but what I have seen I've liked a lot, so this will fill a gap in my knowledge.

I’ve also only just noticed that Hand + Star, the poetry reviews site, also features some original poetry. All sorts of good things there when you start looking.

Stride is an old favourite, and I really enjoyed reading the latest batch of reviews. Jeremy Over’s book sounds right up my street, so when the purse-strings allow…

And finally, a bit of a heads-up for this fundraising reading taking place in Leicester tomorrow. Sounds like a varied line-up of writers, it’s a lovely venue, and it’s for LOROS, a cause very close to my heart.

Off to a flyer

I might not get the chance to post as full a review as I'd like, with work rather getting in the way of the important stuff at the moment, but just a few words to say that last night's Nine Arches Press Shindig at The Looking Glass, Leicester, was a great start to what we hope will be a long-running series.

The downstairs room (it also gets used for the excellent Ship of Fools comedy nights) proved to be just about the perfect size - it was pretty much full, and the acoustics were good - but of course any poetry night stands or falls by the actual poetry.

So, Matt Nunn was the perfect man to kick things off. His high-octane style quickly had the very responsive audience eating out of his hand (not literally - that would just be weird). I've written before on here about how much I like his new book, Sounds In The Grass, but one more time won't hurt. It's wonderful - buy it.

Mark Goodwin was flying the flag for Leicester, and read beautifully from Shod, a forthcoming pamphlet-length sequence. You often hear the complaint these days that poets don't tackle real issues or politics, but I'm hearing more and more, and this certainly did in fine style, without ever descending into sloganeering. Keep an eye out for the pamphlet very soon.

I thought we might struggle to get open mic readers first time out, but five brave souls got up and had a go, both familiar names and new. And best of all, there was some really fine poetry in there.

Finally, Tony Williams read from his Salt collection The Corner Of Arundel Lane And Charles Street, and read very well indeed. There's something very subtly off-kilter about Tony's poetry, perhaps the result of some European infuences (I'm really not well-read enough to know for certain), but whatever it is, it gives it a certain edge of the seat quality. You're never quite certain where it's going, but you enjoy the ride a great deal.

In fact, one thing common to all three featured readers was the way they used humour. You hear it said that it's easy, at a reading, to just go for easy laughs to win the audience over, at the expense of the actual serious business of poetry. But I think what all three of these poets do so well is go for the uneasy laughs - you know it's funny, but you don't know why, and there's always its mirror-image just around the corner.

I'm rambling. Let's just say it was a great night, and thanks very much to all who took part and attended. Watch this space for details of more Shindigs in Leicester very soon.

Don't forget...

The first of a regular series of readings/open mics, run in conjunction with Nine Arches Press, takes place at The Looking Glass, on the corner of Braunstone Gate and Narborough Road in Leicester, on Monday, January 25th, at 7.30pm.

We've got a great line-up, with Tony Williams, Mark Goodwin and Matt Nunn, plus support from anyone out there who'd like to get up and launch the open mic in style.

Tony Williams is a Sheffield poet, whose debut collection The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt) has been highly acclaimed nationally. The Guardian said: “…from all our cultural loam and junk, Williams has made real magic.”

Mark Goodwin is Leicester-based, and a member of Inky Fish poets, and his work deals with landscape, nature, and their connections to the human world. I wrote about his fine Shearsman collection Else on here last year, and he's always an enthralling reader.

Last but certainly not least, there's Matt Nunn, Birmingham poet, editor and co-founder of Nine Arches, whose latest collection Sounds In The Grass was one of my favourites of last year.

The readings start at 7.30pm, and you can sign up for open mic slots on the door.

Mower mouth

My colleague Mike Weedon pointed me in the direction of this Shaun The Sheep video. Get about 2.45 into it, and the goat suddenly goes all Troy Town!

Cheers!

Nice to hear that Helen Mort's A Pint For The Ghost is the Poetry Book Society's pamphlet choice for Spring 2010, and there's also still just time to put in a good word for Helen's show and book, which is in the running for the Ted Hughes Award. Follow this link to find out more...

Leicester Poetry Society

Only just getting round to writing something about last Friday's Leicester Poetry Society Members' Reading, with Alice Beer, Norman Harrington and Anne Kind.

It was a really good night, and I enjoyed hearing all three. Interestingly, both Alice and Anne came to this country before the Second World War, meaning there was some crossover in the themes their poetry dealt with. I bought a couple of Alice's pamphlets, and have been browsing through them since. I particularly like her poems on De Montfort Square, and not just because it's my favourite bit of Leicester.

The next event, on Friday February 5th, is a reading by Alex Pryce, the driving force behind PoetCasting - I'm looking forward to it.

Twitt-twoo

Well, it had to happen. About two years too late, I've decided to hop on board the Twitter bandwagon - I can be found under the name Polyolbion.

TS Eliot Prize

Something of a surprise, but a welcome one, that Philip Gross won the TS Eliot Prize last night for his collection The Water Table. He was certainly not one of the favourites, with many tipping Christopher Reid to take the award.

I've only read two of the shortlisted books (the George Szirtes and Hugo Williams collections), so it's hard to make an informed comment about the decision, but I've got a few of Gross's older collections and like them a lot, and have always wondered why he's, relatively speaking, missed out on recognition in the past. I'll have to dig them out to re-read, and catch up with this latest book.

I do have a slight problem with the judges' comments that "it was not merely a collection of poems but also so obviously a book". As Roddy Lumsden suggests over at Poets On Fire, I don't really think that the fact of it being a themed book should be that important - are we saying that an old-fashioned miscellany of occasional poems is somehow less worthy?

Hoard appeal

Glad to see that the campaign to keep the Staffordshire hoard in the Midlands is gathering pace - it would be sad if it was allowed to go abroad, as has been suggested in the last few days.

Not sure that they do the cause any good by enlisting posturing popinjay/TV historian David Starkey as their mouthpiece, though. He says: "It transforms the history of the Midlands from some kind of obscure Brummie slum into the centre of England - but we're just at the very, very beginning."

Yes, that's right, because before this, we had no idea that civilisation had even reached the Midlands in the early Anglo-Saxon period.

Leicester launch

The first of what I hope will be a regular series of readings/open mics, run in conjunction with Nine Arches Press, will take place at The Looking Glass, on the corner of Braunstone Gate and Narborough Road in Leicester, on Monday, January 25th, at 7.30pm.

We've got a great line-up, with Tony Williams, Mark Goodwin and Matt Nunn, plus support from anyone out there who'd like to get up and launch the open mic in style.

Tony Williams is a Sheffield poet, whose debut collection The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt) has been highly acclaimed nationally. The Guardian said: “…from all our cultural loam and junk, Williams has made real magic.”

Mark Goodwin is Leicester-based, and a member of Inky Fish poets, and his work deals with landscape, nature, and their connections to the human world. I wrote about his fine Shearsman collection Else on here last year, and he's always an enthralling reader.

Last but certainly not least, there's Matt Nunn, Birmingham poet, editor and co-founder of Nine Arches, whose latest collection Sounds In The Grass was one of my favourites of last year.

The readings start at 7.30pm, and you can sign up for open mic slots on the door.

Title contenders

I might have discussed it on here before, and it's certainly come up for discussion over at Poets On Fire, but what makes for a good title for a poetry collection?

Should it come 'naturally' from the contents of the collection, perhaps using the name of one of the key poems, or is it a good idea to, first and foremost, pick something eyecatching and (probably a lot more relevant these days), Google-catching? After all, isn't the first job of the title to entice readers?

The two needn't be mutually exclusive, of course. Last year, Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage, for example, was the sort of title that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have forgotten quickly as a casual browser, but which also came from one of the poems in the book. It's actually also a good example of another common device in titles these days - The Something Of Something - just as a few years ago there seemed to be an awful lot of books titled along the lines of Seamus Heaney's District and Circle.

Anyway, there's a little poll to the right, just for fun - you can vote for more than one category. I'd also be interested to hear any comments, as I'm entirely undecided at the moment.

Oh, and my favourite? RS Thomas again, and the splendid H'm.

Snowbound

Well, not exactly, but after a brief venture out this morning, I've decided I can't be bothered to take to the roads any more than is strictly necessary, and have barricaded myself inside with a plethora of reading material, a Christmas backlog of cheese, shortbread and other goodies, and a lot of malt whisky and fine port. Oh, and a box set of The Sopranos.

First thing I read today was Margaret Attwood's fine article in The Guardian about bird conservation. She covers a lot of ground, much of it the sort of thing that came up at the recent Birds, Culture and Conservation symposium.

I've also been browsing through Ian Hamilton's Collected Poems, reading The Mabinogion, and re-reading Byron Rogers' superb biography of RS Thomas, The Man Who Went Into The West.

Oh, and I've just half-watched the repeat of Bill Bailey's Birdwatching Bonanza, on Sky. It's not great, and it could be a bit shorter, but it was quite entertaining, and I suppose it's good to see birdwatching getting any sort of positive coverage. Some nice footage of Barnacle Geese, too.