Keeping busy

I spent the weekend zipping up and down the M42, or rather down and up.

On Saturday, I was at the Pow Wow Litfest 2011, at the Prince of Wales, Moseley, Birmingham, for a reading. It's a terrific venue - an old-fashioned and roomy pub with a good beer garden - and there was an excellent audience for the various performances (I particularly liked the capoeira demonstration).

Joel Lane also went down well, reading one of the pieces from his new Nine Arches Press short story chapbook Do Not Pass Go, as well as a number of poems that built on some of the themes from his last poetry collection, The Autumn Myth.

I had to leave earlier than I'd have liked, but the organisers ought to be proud of such a wide-ranging and well-attended event.

Yesterday, I headed north instead, for the latest LeftLion/Nine Arches Shindig, at the Jam Cafe in Nottingham. It's a superb venue, too, just about the perfect size and comfortable, and as ever the open mic readers were very varied and pretty much uniformly excellent. Wayne Burrows' poem, Zeropolis (I might have got that wrong) was a highlight for me, and Aly Stoneman's The General's Horse, but there was plenty more to enjoy. I read a couple of poems - Azul, and a new (I wrote it on Friday) untitled one that takes its lead from a line from The Sopranos (from Patsy Parisi, in fact), and they seemed to go down well.

Joel Lane again read well, and I bought his chapbook. I've only had time to read the first story so far, but it's excellent - noir-ish crime stories with a West Midlands setting.

Angela France's reading, from her new Nine Arches chapbook Lessons In Mallemaroking, highlighted all her poetry's strengths. She's interested in seeing where unusual words or phrases take her, and in creating back stories to them. She's also, I'm pretty sure, the only poet ever published in the Sunday Sport - the poem in question, Hide And Seek Champion Found Dead In Cupboard - was a highlight here.

Tom Warner already has a really fine chapbook out as part of the Faber New Poets series, but his reading also suggested that there are great things to come. He was back on home turf, effectively (he lives in Norwich, but is from Mansfield originally), and poems that touched on subjects such as the Miners' Strike struck plenty of chords, especially after last week's tragedy in South Wales. I wish I'd had longer to talk to him afterwards, but I'll be keeping an eye out for future work from him.

It was a lovely way to round off the weekend, anyway - the carrot cake and Bundaberg ginger beer helped, too.

Nottingham Shindig

Angela France, Tom Warner and Joel Lane are the guest readers at the next Nine Arches Press & LeftLion Shindig, at the Jam Cafe in Nottingham, a week on Sunday (September 18th).

Angela France's second collection, Occupation, is available from Ragged Raven Press, she's the features editor of Iota and an editor of ezine The Shit Creek Review, as well as running Cheltenham's excellent monthly poetry café, Buzzwords. She'll be launching her Nine Arches chapbook, Lessons In Mallemaroking.

I met Tom Warner at a reading in Norwich a couple of years ago, and subsequently read and enjoyed as much of his work as I could find. Born in Mansfield in 1979, he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2001 and graduated from the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA with a Distinction. His poetry has appeared in a number of publications and magazines, including The Rialto and Stand, and in 2009-10 he was Poet in Residence for Newark-on-Trent. He currently lives in Norwich where he teaches creative writing.

Joel Lane lives in Birmingham and works as a journalist. He is the author of two novels, three collections of short stories, a novella, a chapbook, and three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Autumn Myth (Arc), which I enjoyed a great deal. His latest publication is Do Not Pass Go – a collection of crime stories as part of Nine Arches' new Hotwire short-story pamphlet series.

It all starts at 7.30pm, entry is free, and you can sign up for the open mic on the door.