More plagiarism

Poet Ira Lightman's Facebook page has this – perhaps the most bare-faced example of plagiarism that he has yet investigated. This time it's not poetry, but perpetrated by Steve Marshall of SNM Horror Magazine, who has stolen a bunch of Brett Graham's stories wholesale. Marshall's attempts to justify what he has done are ludicrous, and have no foundation in law. If you're a horror writer looking to get your work published, I'd suggest you avoid this vampire and his magazine like...well, like you'd avoid a vampire.

Poetry plagiarism

Really rather good take on the whole poetry plagiarism issue by Channel 4 News here – Ira Lightman comes across really well, I think.

Ira Lightman: Two chapbooks

Phone In The Roll (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2011)
Mustard Tart As Lemon (Red Squirrel, 2011)

The first of these chapbooks takes at its starting point “experiments with voice to text apps on a smartphone”. It’s a neat idea, and one that I’m surprised I haven’t come across before, but I suppose the real test of such an intriguing writing process is the end result.

The first thing to say, then, is that in reading it, the process never felt intrusive. You might expect the texts to be frustratingly haphazard, but in fact this is as thematically coherent a pamphlet as you’re likely to come across. The theme, as often as not, is the difficulty of communication, in public, in private, and in relationships, and what’s lost or distorted between thought and expression. In short, the process here suits the subject matter entirely, and instantly ceases to be an end in itself.

It’s hard to quote from, because the effect is gradual and cumulative, with the experience of reading it at times being like listening in on a conversation several seats down a noisy train carriage. Here’s the start of The Dream, for example:

I will never have what? I want it. I want

children with the woman I go live with! Fuck, for sure.
Have the new love and have to wait. You love. Search.

Children I have already take from me number of hours everyday

a number of times in three weeks. There is no room
for both children to have a time they, anyway, have had.

As the reader, you have to do a certain amount of work to fill in gaps, but there are phrases that stay with you, and importantly you keep making connections between seemingly disparate snatches of text the deeper you get into the book.

Of course, the original input into the process is Lightman’s, but the point, I suspect, is that you’re always left wondering just how large a gap there is between intention and end product. Intriguing and invigorating, and well worth revisiting.

Mustard Tart As Lemon comes across, initially at least, as a more straightforward proposition, with narratives and especially threads of arguments easier to grasp. That’s not to say they aren’t sometimes ‘difficult’, though, in the best sense of the word, precisely because Lightman is unafraid to talk about and around ideas and emotions, both directly and more obliquely. Take this passage:

I’m learning from you

not to trust too soon,
to have the courage
to feel hurt.
When I’m interrupted
or neglected, me
I’ll ride along
with the other
story, forget
mine exists.
You resist
kidnap of attention,
turn to who you
become. Some
conversations they have
are bullshit, but
I wouldn’t
dare to let them know
I think so, as you show
you do, the
volume
up on your earpiece,
simply looking down.

The cumulative effect of Lightman’s poetry is just as apparent here as in the other pamphlet – it’s not a criticism to say that many of the poems bleed into each other.

Lightman utilises the page to its fullest extent – indents and line-breaks are superbly used to pace the poems and achieve that effect of recording thought-processes as they happen, while long lines and, towards the end, concrete-type poems also make an appearance.

Most effective of all, perhaps, are the dual-column passages – the ambiguity created by being able to read down and/or across works well for a poet whose subject is often, as suggested above, the difficulties of communication, especially on a personal level.

Perhaps that subject isn't a particularly unusual one to come across, especially away from the mainstream of British poetry, but what makes Lightman consistently enjoyable and rewarding to read is that he's never deterred by the possibility of failure - for all the intrusion of technology and language into our relationships, he never loses sight of the human.

Poetry Bites revisited

I’ve been away in Cardiff for the last three days, so I’ve got a bit behind with what I intended to blog. I caught up with some old friends, I ate a lot, I drank too much, and I did a lot of good birding around Kenfig NNR, Newport Wetlands, Ogmore and Southerndown. The latter two were places we went to on holiday every year when I was a kid (my grandparents lived in Bridgend), so I’ve got a big soft spot for them. I’ll return to them later in the week – they figure in a post about pub signs I've been meaning to write for a while.

But while I remember, I want to talk about last Tuesday’s Poetry Bites, at the Kitchen Garden Café in King’s Heath. Let’s start by saying it’s a great venue – intimate and easy to project to when you’re reading, but not at all cramped. The food’s very nice, too – chips just like my mum used to make.

Most importantly, there was a large and very attentive audience – what more can you ask for as a poet? I read two 15-minute slots, mainly from hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, but including a few older and newer poems too. I sold quite a few books, and I sat back and enjoyed some really excellent open mic slots, including one young man who delivered a long poem entirely from memory at breakneck speed. Normally, that's not a good thing, but this absolutely demanded such a delivery, and very impressive it was.

I haven't got the dates to hand at the moment (more info is available here), but the March guest will be Ira Lightman, followed by Clare Best in May, both really fine poets. It was actually as quick and easy to get to from Coalville as central Nottingham, so I'll certainly get alongf to future events.