Antiphon 7

The latest issue of Antiphon is here - there's a truly impressive range of writers featured, including Helen Mort, Bernard O'Donoghue, River Wolton, Alastair Noon, Suzannah Evans, Jonathan Davidson, Pam Thompson, Geraldine Monk and Ian Duhig. Eclectic and exciting, and certainly the best issue yet.

Cultural Exchanges 2012

Someone tweeted yesterday about the programme for De Montfort University's annual Cultural Exchanges festival. I'll admit I'd forgotten all about it, but booking has only just opened for most of the events, I think, so there's still plenty of time.

I'm going to get along to the reading by Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk on March 1, and I'd also like to be at the Crystal Clear Creators reading the following day. That might depend on work, though, and it also clashes with the launch of Milorad Krystanovich's posthumous collection in Birmingham. But the Crystal Clear event features a lot of fine poets - Jessica Mayhew, Andrew 'Mulletproof' Graves, Roy Marshall, Hannah Stevens, Charles Lauder Jr and Aly Stoneman - and it's also free (as is the Halsey/Monk event). Decisions, decisions.

Finally, I just noticed that on February 28, the festival also features Hugh McIlvanney in conversation. This one's £4, but that's a pittance to see the best British sportswriter since the Second World War (at the very least). 

Underneath the arches

Saturday saw the first States of Independence (west), at Eastside Projects, Digbeth, Birmingham, just along the street from the Custard Factory, as it turned out. Appropriately, given that the viaduct above towered over the venue, the Nine Arches Press stall was the first thing to meet my eyes as I entered, but as with the previous SoI events, at De Montfort University in Leicester, plenty of small presses were present.


I heard Geraldine Monk's excellent and energetic reading from her recent Leafe Press book, Lobe Scarps & Finials*, which lit up the rather murkily-lit reading space, and Jim Caruth's understated but quietly resonant poetry. I heard him a few years back, at the the Derwent Poetry Festival, and enjoyed his debut collection A Stone's Throw, so it was nice to catch up with what he'd done since.

In between times, I ate cake (of course), and spent some money. Longbarrow Press's anthology of readings by poets including Matthew Clegg, Kelvin Corcoran, Jim Caruth, Rob Hindle, Mark Goodwin and Lee Harwood grabbed my attention (very good it is, too), and I also bought Lee Harwood's The Books, a mini-chapbook/CD combo, also from Longbarrow. Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving of Sidekick Books were also there, and I bought their Confronting The Danger Of Art, by Ian McLachlan and Phil Cooper. I got it for my sister, but she might have to wait now until I buy a second copy. It comes complete with a badge, you see, and I can't tell you how much I like that.

It was good to chat with Robin Vaughan-Williams, who was manning the HappenStance stand as tirelessly as ever, and with another HappenStancer, Gregory Leadbetter, as well as with John Lucas, of Shoestring Press (a couple of his titles, and a couple on the Five Leaves Press table next door, really caught the eye, but will have to wait until next payday), Alan Baker of Leafe Press, Geraldine Monk, and last but not least, Salt poet Cliff Yates, whose fine collection Frank Freeman's Dancing School I enjoyed earlier in the year.**

* I was going to post a full review of the collection on here, but I'll be writing a review for the next issue of Under The Radar instead.
** If you're reading Cliff, sorry I didn't catch up with you again later. We got cut off mid-discussion and I had to scoot rather too fast. If I can remember what it was I was just about to say, I'll email you.

Just arrived

My copy of Geraldine Monk's Lobe Scarps & Finials arrived from Leafe Press this week. So far, I've only had chance to read the opening sequence, Glow in the Darklunar Calendar, but it makes a very good case for Simon Turner's blurb - "Monk is more attuned to the physical heft of words than any other poet working in English today".

In the past I've read bits and bobs of her work in various places, and have usually enjoyed it, so I wasn't entirely surprised to find myself laughing out loud within half a dozen lines of the first poem (possibly you won't find it so funny if you're a Millwall fan - but I'm not). It's non-mainstream, but it's anything but difficult or inaccessible.

Anyway, I'll come back to it later, once I've read it all, but first impressions are very good.

Killer Bob (Browning)

I’ve posted on here before about my unease when a poet’s work is interpreted as being wholly autobiographical. I can’t imagine that’s ever the case, even with ‘confessional’ poets. Poetry is, after all, art, and as such contains imagination and fictions.

With that in mind I meant to link to this piece in The Guardian a few weeks back, which seemed to me to carry that autobiographical notion to absurd extremes. I didn’t, because I was too lazy, but I opened today’s Guardian to find that Sheffield poet Geraldine Monk had done my work for me (and done it far better than I could).

Her letter reads:
“I read Elizabeth Lowry’s article about Robert Browning (“Portrait of a lady”, July 19) with mounting incredulity. To adduce murder from a poet’s writings is as serious as it is shallow. My last volume of poetry contains monologues and imaginary letters by Mary Queen of Scots. I have never once harboured any desire to murder either my husband or the Queen.”

Says it all, really. I bet it won’t deter the next would-be literary detective, though.