New Walk

Time for another intermission in the constant stream of hastily-written NaPoWriMo poems, this time to flag up Issue 2 of Leicester-based literary mag New Walk.

It well and truly confirms the good impression made by the debut issue back in the autumn, with poetry from, among others, Alice Oswald, Carrie Etter, Matthew Stewart, Dan Wyke, Tom Pow, D A Prince and  Martyn Crucefix, plus fiction from Bill Jones and Robert McGowan.

Best of all, perhaps, given how difficuklt it can be to find extensive writing about poetry these days, there's a wealth of good reviews, essays and comment. J M Coetzee writes on Zbigniew Herbert, Martin Stannard (the academic, not the poet) on Larkin's Letters To Monica, and there's much more - I look forward to getting stuck into it this weekend.

Among the reviews, there's Geoffrey Heptonstall's take on hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. I'll take a closer look at it on here later (probably after NaPoWriMo is finished), but for now I'll just say that I'm grateful to him for such a thoughtful and generous response to the book.

Shindig! in Leicester

Just a quick break from the madness of NaPoWriMo to let you know that the latest Nine Arches Press Shindig takes place at The Western, on Western Road, Leicester, at 7.30pm on April 18th.

Featured readers are Maria Taylor, Kathleen Bell, Matthew Stewart and myself, and there will also be open mic slots avilable on the door. Admission, as always, is free.

Matthew's going to be reading fresh from the launch of his new HappenStance chapbook Inventing Truth, which I'll be reviewing on here before too long.

Here I go...

Well, I've decided to take the plunge and have a go at NaPoWriMo 2011. I'll post a poem on here every day during April (I can't make any guarantees as to length, or quality, mind you). I'm not exactly sure what'll happen at the end of the 30 days - many magazines, webzines and journals treat even a brief posting on a blog as "previous publication", and thus disqualify any poem so displayed from appearing within their pages. On the other hand, I think it's fairly doubtful that what I post will be in anything like a 'finished' form, so it'll all probably be pretty unrecognisable by the time it eventually gets considered for sending out to editors.

Unlike four years ago, there'll be no unifying inspiration or theme. Instead, I'm going to go back through my notebooks and have a go at writing some of the poems I've meant to get round to for ages, but have put off tackling until now. There'll probably be a few spur of the moment pieces, too.

NaPoWriMo 2011

Back in 2007, I took part in NaPoWriMo for the first, and so far, only time. Basically, you're challenged to write a poem a day throughout the month of April. I used my iPod to provide inspiration each day in the form of a random song, and quite a few of the poems I produced ended up published, albeit after some fairly lengthy tinkering later.

I'm still undecided about taking part this year. My excuse to avoid it is that April's going to be a really busy month (readings, hosting a readers' holiday at work, a friend's wedding, and more), but on the other hand much the same can be said of most months, so taking part would be a welcome dose of discipline in my writing life.

But whatever I decide (and I can feel myself edging towards taking part even as I write), there's now a new, simple to use website for all participants. Register on it if you want to be part of it, and enjoy a hectic, but potentially very rewarding, 30 days.

Birding update

As I wrote that I would at the start of the year, I've been doing as much of my birding as possible on foot. But the arrival of the longer spring evenings does mean that I can do a bit of birdwatching on the way home from work, so last night I made a couple of stops.

I was hoping there might be some Wheatears around, or even an early Ring Ouzel, so I had a quick wander around at Beacon Hill. No luck, so I took myself off to the fields, maybe half a mile away, that have been a reliable spot for Curlews in the past (in fact, many years ago, they definitely bred here - more recently, I'm not so sure).

Well, I had no luck with the Curlews, either, but one of the best things about birdwatching (possibly THE best thing, in my experience), is that you almost invariably go out looking for one thing, and find something completely different. At least, that's how it works in Britain, as a consequence of us having so many birds moving in and out of the country at any one time.

So, as I focused my binoculars on the field, I realised it was full of Fieldfares, chattering away and busy feeding themselves up ahead of their imminent return to Scandinavia. I counted 550 (the largest flock I've seen this winter), but I'm pretty sure there were more, hidden in the various folds in the ground.

Closer to home, I stopped at the crossroads just at the foot of Iveshead. There's often a Little Egret or two on the brook here, but all that seemed to be around was a male Kestrel on the telegraph wires. I caught a bit of movement on the stream on the far side of the road, though - two Mandarins. There's a small flock at nearby Blackbrook Reservoir, but they usually stay tucked in at the edges. You also sometimes see them on the little pool or on the stream in the woods at Charnwood Lodge, just up the road, but again they're elusive.

Once I got home, I was able to write up a few notes to the sound of a pair of Tawny Owls hooting and ke-wicking in the cemetery behind my house, then I made a rare pre-dawn start this morning to go and check back at the same sites. The Mandarins were still around, and the Fieldfares had been joined by at least one Curlew (I couldn't see any others, but the one I could see did his songflight more than once) and up to a dozen Skylarks.

Listen to StAnza 2011

There are loads of good recordings of poets reading at last week's festival here - I can particularly recommend Billy Letford, and especially his startling There's hunners o burds on the roofs. I think there are more recordings being added all the time, too, so keep going back to check for updates.

Catch it while you still can

My first full collection, Troy Town, is officially out of print as of today, with no further copies available through Arrowhead Press or Amazon. A final flurry of sales at StAnza last week cleared out the remaining stock, and I'm very grateful to everyone who's bought it since it came out in 2008.

But...I do have around 20 copies still left at home. I'll be continuing to sell them at readings, as well as through this blog - they're £9 including P&P by post, or £7 in person. So, if you want to get your hands on it in all its hardback glory, email me using the link (Getting In Touch) on the right, or use the comment box of this post.

Meanwhile, it's a big day for Arrowhead, with Martin Figura's superb Whistle in the running for the Ted Hughes Award For New Work In Poetry tonight. I'll be keeping everything crossed that he wins, and there'll be more news as I get it.

Writers at Warwick

Since it came out at the end of last week, I've been enjoying the University of Warwick's new Writers app, which features around 200 recordings of 150 authors and poets. If you've got an iPhone or iPad, it's an absolute must, a treasure trove of material with a good, eclectic range of writers. There's plenty there if you've got an academic interest in the literature, but it's also a really user-friendly and straightforward resource for the more casual browser, like me. Get downloading...

StAnza 2011 and States of Independence 2

I've spent the best part of the last week thoroughly immersed in poetry, and it's really not a bad place to be (provided it's good poetry, of course).

It all started, of course, with StAnza 2011. It was my first visit to Scotland's top poetry festival, but it won't be my last. It's an extremely friendly event, for starters, in a great location that's compact enough to make it easy to dash around between events. And like any festival, it's excellent for catching up with old friends, or meeting others who you've only previously known through a computer screen or their writing. So, in between events, I managed a couple of pints with HappenStancer James W Wood (he's got a novel coming out soon - more on that later), a rushed coffee with Rob Mackenzie, a quick word with Penelope Shuttle, plenty of chat with poetry dynamo Jo Bell, and many more.

But of course, that would all count for nothing if the events weren't up to scratch. Not a problem, though. Highlights included readings by Billy Letford (both at the first night's open mic, and at the Young Poets' Showcase) and Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh, the rest of the aforementioned Showcase (with Claire Askew, Sarah Howe and Ellen Cranitch), and two fine 'round table readings', by Tom Pow and Paul Farley. The former read from his work on dying villages, but also delved deeper into the subject, while Farley bravely presented us with the drafts of his poem Treacle and considered various aspects of the creative process.

My own reading, with Dawn Wood, went well. There seemed to be just the right amount of overlap between us where subject matter was concerned, the audience were excellent, and the books seemed to sell well. Anyway, more on StAnza in the weeks to come - I've got a few pics to sort out.

On Saturday, I was at States of Independence at De Montfort University in Leicester. It's a chance for small presses to parade their wares, but again a lot of its value is also in allowing you to meet people and simply get some idea of the wealth of talent out there outside the big presses. I did a brief reading as part of the Nine Arches Press talk, and also heard a fine reading by CJ Allen and Alan Baker (unfortunately Ernesto Priego couldn't make it).

Finally, I spent the rest of the weekend browsing the pile of books and panphlets I bought at the two events. They were:

StAnza
The Deleted Part - Adnan Al-Sayegh
A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia - Sarah Howe
The Mermaid And The Sailors - Claire Askew
Songs From A Dying Village - Tom Pow

States of Independence
Connoisseur - Dawn Wood
The Present Day - Ernesto Priego
The Road To Murreigh - Paul McLoughlin
Variations On Painting A Room: Poems 2000-2010 - Alan Baker
A Strange Arrangement: New And Selected Poems - C J Allen
All My Eye & Betty Martin - John Lucas (not poetry, this one, but excellent)

British birders

Excellent post here by the digiscoping dynamo that is Dale Forbes, about what makes Britain and its birdwatchers so distinct from the rest of the world. The points he makes about class seem spot-on to me, and I think I'd go further. I have a theory that, because so much of our common land and open spaces was snatched at a relatively early stage in our history, birdwatching (and angling, probably) are an attempt by the dispossessed to stake a claim to the landscape. I should probably go away and find some eveidence to actually back that all up, though.

Keeping busy

Work and other commitments mean I can go weeks without going near a poetry event, but every now and then there's this sort of week, when everything comes at once.

Tomorrow night (Tuesday March 15th) I'll be at the Flying Goose in Beeston, Nottingham, for what will be the last poetry night there compered by John Lucas. Featured poets are Ann Atkinson, Poet Laureate of Derbyshire, who will read from her Smith/Doorstop book Drawing Water and other work, and Alan Baker, who'll read from his new Skysill Press book Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010. The poetry starts at 7.30pm, and admission is £3 on the door.

On Wednesday, I'm off up to St Andrew's for StAnza 2011. I'm reading with Dawn Wood in the Supper Room at the Town Hall at 11.30 on Thursday - the rest of the time I plan to see as many of the events as possible, and blog and tweet about them as they happen.

I'd have stayed for the whole five days, but I have to be at a wedding reception on Saturday night, so have to dash back on Friday night. The good side of that is that I'll be able to be at States Of Independence at De Montfort University, Leicester, from 10.30am on Saturday. I'll be doing a short reading at 11am, and there's loads of good stuff lined up. I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Ernesto Priego at 1pm.

Blackbox Manifold 6

The new issue of Blackbox Manifold has just gone live - there's an Edwin Morgan tribute, reviews, and poetry from the likes of Matthew Sweeney, Ron Silliman and John Welch.

Sphinx 16

The latest online issue of Sphinx magazine is out now - it continues the unusual (and I think, highly effective) system of three reviews for each chapbook. I reviewed Hilary Menos's Wheelbarrow Farm (as always with Templar, beautifully produced) and Martin Hayden's Meeting The Pilgrimage Halfway - see what I, and the other reviewers, made of them.

StAnza 2011

It's only a couple of weeks until StAnza 2011, and I've got a piece up on the festival's blog today, connected with one of the theme's of this year's event – The Poet's Ark. Looking forward to it all a great deal now - fine poetry, good company, and sea air.

New Welsh Review No.91

It was St David's Day yesterday (you all knew that, of course), and appropriately enough, the spring issue of New Welsh Review (No.91) was waiting on the doormat. It's almost as if they planned it that way.

Featured poets include Zoe Brigley, Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick, Helen Mort, Alison Brackenbury and Gerard Woodward, and there's the usual mix of features, fiction, photo-essays and columns as well.

There's also a wealth of reviews (NWR is to be applauded for giving each review so much space, too), including mine of Kona Macphee's Perfect Blue and Carolyn Jess-Cooke's Inroads. It's not giving too mcuh away to say that Kona's collection was one of my favourites of last year.

It's the final issue of NWR edited by Kathryn Gray (who also has a fine poem included). Her successor will be Gwen Davies.

Poetry at SoundCloud

Mark Goodwin pointed me in the direction of the rather splendid SoundCloud, and in particular the Air To Hear group. Mark and a number of other poets have been posting recordings to the group for a while now - have a listen to some of them. They're far from being straight readings of poems.

Mark's own Frost And Stars was the first that I listened to, but there's loads of other good stuff. Some work better than others, but it's a really goods way of getting poetry out there.

The Springsteen connection

Reading this blog post about Ryan Van Winkle last week, I was interested to see that he's clearly a Bruce Springsteen fan (if you follow the links, you'll see he's also a huge fan of the late, great Warren Zevon).

Just a day or two earlier, I'd noticed that Birmingham poet Joel Lane also has a mild Springsteen fixation. In his (excellent) latest collection, The Autumn Myth, there's a poem that references him, and his previous book of poetry was even called Trouble In The Heartland, which all those Bruce fans out there will recognise as a line from his song Badlands.

Two things intrigue me. One is that, not so long ago, admitting to liking New Jersey's favourite son was very definitely a totally uncool thing to do. Maybe it still is, but in that case it's nice to see these two poets caring not a fig for cultural fashion.

Secondly, both seem to centre their references on Springsteen's 1978 album Darkness On The Edge Of Town (of course, that's based on a very limited reading of both). It was a stripped-down, raw-edged record, in which the romance of the early albums was largely abandoned in favour of gritty realism. Perhaps it's the economic climate we're living in that makes it a touchstone again - perhaps it's just coincidence.

Anyway, I'm happy to admit to being a long-time Springsteen fan, although I do think his output has been extremely uneven over the years. Darkness... would probably be my second-favourite of his albums - my number one would be his (largely uncharacteristic) second album, The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle, which above all sounds like a band having a lot of fun.

The Word Exchange

It's a well-known fact that the size of a 'Books I'd Like to Buy' list expands as fast as the available fund for said books shrinks.

It's also the case that, if you trawl the internet aimlessly for long enough, it will eventually push you in the direction of something you actually need or want to read. Such will be your relief that you'll forget the hours of rudderless link-clicking, and become convinced that your stumbling upon the page is either a near-miraculous coincidence, or the result of divine intervention.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for an anthology of translations of Anglo-Saxon poems, preferably a pretty exhaustive one, with the Old English version on the facing page. And today, I see this. There's a review of it here. I can only conclude that the internet is telling me something.

Dave Poems

I've really been enjoying reading this blog the last few weeks. Loads of opinions - I don't necessarily agree with all, or even most, of them, but they're all well argued and backed up with close reference to the texts.

On the edge

Flicking through the Sunday papers, I came across this review of Edgelands, a new book by poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley which looks at those scrappy, scratchy, scrubby places that divide town and country yet are neither one thing nor the other.

Minutes later, trawling the web (what an energetic life I lead), I discovered this new volume from Shearsman - The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. From the accompanying blurb, I'd expect it to touch on at least some of the same territory.

Now coincidentally, the whole concept of 'edgelands' and marginal landscapes has been very much on my mind lately. I've just got back from a fairly brief trip to Extremadura, in Spain, for the launch of Swarovski's new EL50 binoculars, and as always on the Iberian peninsula, I was struck by two things.

One is the fact that many of those previously common bird species which are declining here are doing just fine over there. A good example is the Corn Bunting, now vanished from large swathes of the UK, but whose distinctive jangle was the soundtrack to almost every waking minute spent outside of the centre of Trujillo, where we stayed.

Number two was the 'messiness' of the landscape there, compared to the UK. It's beautiful, and there are plenty of areas that are unspoiled, as well as others such as the dehesa that are, although shaped by man, managed with the intention of maintaining some sort of natural balance.

But there are also plenty of patches that, were they in the UK, would immediately be tidied up or tamed, but which in Spain are simply left to grow wild. Weeds, wild flowers and scrub flourish, with the knock-on effect of providing seed and insect food for birds, as well as cover for nesting.

Back over here, on the other hand, roadside verges are being mown for no apparent reason, and hedges are being stripped so bare that there's no prospect of them being used by nesting birds this year. You'd think that, in these straitened times, councils and landowners would welcome the chance to cut back their maintenance budget and restrict work to those areas where it's absolutely necessary (at junctions, for traffic safety, for example). Apparently not. If it's not farmland, a park or a nature reserve, it has to be neatly manicured.

That has to be one of the major reasons for the decline of so many of our small birds (as well as larger species such as Lapwing). It's nothing to do with predators (the third thing you notice in Spain is the much greater density of raptors), but instead because by eliminating these marginal landscapes, these 'edgelands', we eliminate major sources of food and shelter for all sorts of birds. Instead of pursuing the absurd cull of corvids (and, potentially, raptors) being piloted by Songbird Survival, a body dominated by hunting interests, we should be looking at the root of the problem.

So, if either or both of these two books can do anything to change attitudes, that has to be a very good thing. The Shearsman anthology contains several names - Colin Simms, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Helen Macdonald, Mark Goodwin, Peter Riley and editor Harriet Tarlo - whose inclusion would make it a must for me anyway, but they both look worth a read. Might have to wait a while, though.

Catching up

Regular readers will know that a monotonous feature of this blog is an endless stream of promises to get round to finishing reading or reviewing certain books, and a parallel outpouring of apologies for failing to do so.

I actually got round to some serious reading over the last week or so, though, thanks to some travelling, so I'm going to start to clear the backlog (yeah, yeah, you're thinking, I've heard that before).

So, first up was Simon Armitage's Seeing Stars. Now, although there seems to have been something of a backlash against him in recent years, I've remained something of a fan of Armitage, although I think his work has been a lot patchier since somewhere around The Dead Sea Poems. Almost everyone I've talked to about this collection, though, has either loved or hated it, no doubt in large part because it consists mainly of prose poems/flash fictions/whatever you want to call them.

Well, I have no problem with the format, but I just don't think the execution is up to scratch. It's fun in parts, and always readable, but too often the strangeness seems a bit forced, and the end result is rather inconsequential, or predictable. I think Ben Wilkinson hits the nail pretty much on the head in this review that originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

I enjoyed Cliff Yates' Frank Freeman's Dancing School a lot more. There's a much less obvious, and thus unsettling, strangeness to his poetry. At first sight it can appear to transplant something of Geoff Hattersley's style from South Yorkshire to the Midlands, but it soon becomes clear that it's heading somewhere rather different. Yates gives seemingly plain language the smallest of tweaks to suddenly switch perspectives again and again. It's a book I'll be coming back to, and writing more about.

A bit of blog trawling produced this excellent piece on Alan Baker's Litterbug, about Don Paterson's book on Shakespeare's sonnets. Hard to find anything to disagree with there, or in the Alastair Fowler review linked to there, from the TLS.

Finally, I've just received Century of the Death of the Rose, by the Ecuadorean poet Jorge Carrera Andrade. There are parallel texts, of the Spanish originals, and the translations by Steven Ford Brown. On a recent trip to Ecuador, my guide, Juan Manuel Carrion, gave me a bird guide he'd written, in which he extensively quotes Carrera Andrade, and I liked what I read, so I ordered this book. Looking forward to getting stuck into it later.

While I remember...

I meant to post this when it appeared on Gists & Piths last week, but late's better than never. Some excellent points about Luke Kennard's Planet-shaped Horse, and scroll down to the bottom where George Ttoouli helpfully breaks my book book title down into its constituent parts.

Buzzing

Any reading series that's been going for over five years has to be doing something seriously right, and at last night's Buzzwords event in Cheltenham, it was easy to see what.

For a start, there's clearly a really strong hardcore of attendees, who were enthusiastic participants in the workshop and open mic parts of the evening, but as attentive an audience as I've ever seen during the main readings.

It was an all-Nine Arches Press affair, of course, with me and Luke Kennard reading, and Simon Turner among the open mic-ers. And the whole open mic was excellent, with plenty of variety, imagination, and energy on offer from all concerned.

Luke's reading, entirely from his new pamphlet Planet-shaped Horse, was absolutely superb, I thought. His poetry quite rightly gets huge praise for its wit, inventiveness and energy, but I think occasionally reviewers skip over the more serious side. Perhaps it's because all the different elements seem to co-exist happily (rather than him being a poet who writes in distinct modes at different times) that it's easy to miss some of them. But I'm rambling. It's late...

I enjoyed reading, always a sign that it's gone fairly well, I think. I'm very grateful to organiser Angela France for inviting us to read, and I came away with all sorts of ideas skittering around my head (also a good sign, until you try to sleep).

Oh, set-list - here it is:

Prelude For Glass Harmonica

Request Hour At The Numbers Station

The American version

The Meeting Place

Variations On A Theme By J A Baker

The sea at Ashby de la Zouch

West Leicester Lullaby

Warning Against Using These Poems As A Map

Worst Case Scenario

Cahoots

Nocturne For Glass Harmonica

Nottingham poets in Leicester

Leicester Poetry Society is playing host to Nottingham poets Alan Baker and Jeremy Duffield next Friday, February 11th.

The reading's at the usual venue - the Friends' Meeting House on Queen's Road - and starts at 7.30pm. I haven't got admission details to hand, but it's usually free to members and a small fee for those who want to be temporary members for the night.

I'll be away that weekend, unfortunately, as they're two poets well worth hearing, but go along if you get the chance.

Buzzwords reading

This Sunday, February 6th, I'll be reading at the Buzzwords Poetry Night, in Cheltenham, with the prodigiously talented Luke Kennard.

Luke's got a new pamphlet, Planet-shaped Horse, out now from Nine Arches Press, so it promises to be an entertaining evening.

It all takes place at The Brown Jug, 242 Bath Road, Cheltenham, GL53 7NB. The readings start at 8pm, but come along at 7pm and Luke and I will be running a workshop. All are welcome.

* Luke's pamphlet is launched tomorrow night (Thursday the 3rd) at The Priory Rooms, 40 Bull Street, Birmingham B4 6AF. Entry is free, and other readers include David Hart, Milorad Krystanovich and Simon Turner.