New magazine

Mimesis is the latest arrival on the poetry journal/magazine scene. I can't tell you any more about it than is on display at the website, but it looks well worth a read, not least because the editor is James Midgley, whose blog was always entertaining and highly informative reading. As you'll see, it's sort of defunct, but you can still link to its successor.

Migrant time

I've been making the most of the glorious weather this week to get out and about in search of the first summer visitors. Chiffchaffs are everywhere, and Sand Martins too, but I've yet to see a Swallow or, to my surprise, a Wheatear, despite them being reported all over the place.
While doing all that searching, though, I did see and hear my first Willow Tit, which was a very pleasant surprise, and watch a male Grey Wagtail attempt to fight his reflection in the wing mirrors of a car parked on the dam at Swithland Reservoir. The fact he seemed to be a bit of a plank didn't harm his chances in love though, as a female watched him adoringly from a few feet away throughout.

Saturday morning reading

I've probably mentioned before that I'm not a big fan of James Fenton, but I enjoyed this piece in today's Guardian. In particular, I found myself agreeing with what he says about theories on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays being a lot less important than the actual plays themselves. There's a similar thing going on nowadays with, for example, the whole Plath/Hughes saga, in which the life stories of the poets seems to obscure the actual poetry.
There was another good article, on Paul Muldoon. I do like his work a lot, although I usually find I can only take so much in one sitting, so rich is the gumbo of puns, wordplay, learned allusions and pop culture references that he serves up. But what I really liked about the interview was the fact that he doesn't make writing poetry sound like something to which he's been sentenced, as some writers do. Of course, the whole process probably IS a lot more enjoyable if you're a genius like him, but it's still good to remember that the reading and writing of it are always supposed to be, at some level, pleasurable.

There goes April...

As I mentioned the other day, until last weekend, I'd done relatively little writing for about a month, mainly because of being extremely busy at work and with the cricket coaching course.
What better way, then, to get the creative juices well and truly flowing again than to commit to writing a (draft) poem a day all the way through April? That's what NaPoWriMo2007, at the excellent Poetry Free For All site is all about. You go there, register, start a thread, post your poems on it, and get all sorts of valuable feedback. And of course, you can read other poets' work and offer them your thoughts.
I've got a couple of ideas for themed sequences I might pursue, but both would involve a certain amount of research first, so if I don't get time to do that, I'll just go with the flow and see what happens.
Thanks go to Rob Mackenzie for pointing me in the direction of this. He reckons that, out of 60 poems he wrote for the 2005 and 2006 events, 22 have eventually been published. I think that's a fantastic success rate, and just goes to show that, whatever the romantic ideal of waiting for the muse to strike, poetry is often about disciplining yourself to get something down on paper. Like anything else, practice makes perfect, although it obviously helps if you've got the sort of ideas and craft that Rob has in the first place.
If you go to his blog, Surroundings, there's also currently all sorts of stuff relating to last week's StAnza poetry festival, well worth catching up on. Its reputation is growing all the time - not surprising when you see the variety of events it involves - so check it out and start making plans for next March.

The Last Englishman

Literary heroes generally come in two varieties, I've found. There's those whose writing you love, and who probably influence your own writing hugely, however much you try to avoid it or at least temper it, and then there's the other kind. The type whose whole life is in some way inspiring.
For me, JL Carr fits into both categories. I came across his novels some time in the late 80s, I think, when I found a copy of The Battle Of Pollock's Crossing in the local library. It's not his best, but it's still a memorable and odd book, so I sought out the rest. At first I could only find A Day In Summer, his first, which is both very dark and, by his standards, not that great. It didn't put me off, though, and I eventually read all eight of them. They all have something to recommend them, especially A Season In Sinji, The Harpole Report, and his masterpiece, A Month In The Country.
Occasionally, especially in the later books, you get the impression that the author is simply using his characters to make speeches on his behalf (even in the best books, there's a strong undertone of wish-fulfilment), but the writing is always a treat - wry and witty and wholly distinctive.
Intriguingly, Byron Rogers' excellent biography, The Last Englishman, showed that the more outlandish events and characters in the novels were generally taken straight from life. Carr had a long career as a teacher and headmaster, during which he developed highly individual (but successful) teaching strategies in which the traditional and the progressive co-existed happily. And that career was punctuated by a year teaching in a Great Depression-hit town on the South Dakota prairie, and wartime service in flying boats in West Africa, meaning that behind a seemingly quiet and unremarkable exterior was a wealth of material just waiting to be mined.
There is, I think, a trace of that opposition between the traditional and the progressive in his writing. For all that his books seem pretty straightforward 20th Century English novels, they occasionally take big risks. The Harpole Report, for example, is told entirely in the form of journal and logbook entries, letters and other official documents. Pretty odd, when you really look at it, although as you read it you just enjoy the rather Pooter-esque humour. And then there's the way that characters wander from one novel to another, without dates and ages ever quite tallying up. Possibly it was just a way of disguising the real-life models, but it all goes to help create a world of his own, slightly and subtly out of sync with our own.
And the novels are not the whole story, if you'll excuse the pun. Carr was also a one-man publishing industry, producing and selling mini-anthologies of classic poets, idiosyncratic pocket books on subjects as diverse as royal consorts and forgotten cricketers, and lavish pictorial maps of English counties. He retired early from teaching to allow himself time to write, and made a meagre living from sales of such products through Quince Tree Press. There was the campaigning, too, to save neglected churches, and to bring to public attention long-forgotten historical figures such as the intriguing Captain Pouch, Carr sharing my own fascination with 17th Century radicals (and earlier rebels, of which more very soon).
I've been re-reading the novels lately (it doesn't take long, because Carr evidently believed Polonius's assertion that brevity is the soul of wit, making every word count to the extent that none of his books are real doorstops). For the next few weeks, I'll post little mini-reviews of each one, and maybe you'll be inspired to discover a writer who, while not really underrated (he generally got glowing reviews), is inexplicably overlooked.

Normal service will be resumed

Blogging, birding and writing have all taken a back seat in recent weeks, mainly due to my having to do a lot of last-minute revision and paperwork for my UKCC2 cricket coaching assessment. It was entirely my own fault. The actual course finished in November, so I've had since then to get up to date, but in true kid-with-homework fashion, I left it all far too late.
There was a happy ending, though - the assessment at Trent Bridge on Sunday went pretty well, and I passed, despite having a very stiff neck. I might have struggled if I'd had to do any bowling demonstrations, but I got lucky and pulled out a fairly straightforward fielding one.
All day Saturday was spent coaching at an ECB roadshow in the Victoria Centre, Nottingham, which was a lot of fun, but it was a relief to get back to some reading and writing on Sunday afternoon. I 'finished' a poem that had been giving me trouble for ages, and I've been enjoying Ros Barber's How Things Are On Thursday and a few recent pamphlets.

Yo La Tengo!

It's that time of year - veteran New Jersey purveyors of noise pop and all-round greatest band in the world Yo La Tengo are doing their annual fundraiser for their community radio station, WFMU. Listeners call in to pledge money and make requests for cover versions, which the band then attempt to play without rehearsal. The results can be, well, entertaining, as last year's Yo La Tengo Is Murdering The Classics made abundantly clear.
As I expected, over the last few weeks, playing it virtually non-stop in the car, I've gradually warmed more and more to last year's 'proper' album, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass. It does pretty much all the things I've come to expect from YLT, with my only major quibble being that the last track, The Story Of Yo La Tango, doesn't really quite come up to the standards of previous epic album-closers.
Otherwise, though, it's a gloriously eclectic gumbo of pop, rock, jazz and just about every 'alternative' sub-category you can think of, an album that, moving from guitar feedback freakouts to ambient instrumentals, just begs to be played at full blast.

New issue of Sphinx

A while back I mentioned that I was reviewing Michael Mackmin's Twenty-Three Poems for Sphinx magazine.
You can read it here, along with another review, of
Alan King's Transfer.
Mackmin's book really is an absolute delight - I keep going back to it and finding new things to intrigue me. You won't spend a better £3 on poetry this year.

Great pics

Just browsing on Andrew Shields' blog and found this link to some splendid nature photography by Manfred Delpho. Enjoy...

Have a go

Bluechrome have launched their poetry, novel and short story competitions, which look interesting.
Regardless of the publication oppportunities, I enter the odd competition because the deadlines help to concentrate my mind on writing, and because most of them put money back into literature, which can't be a bad thing. This type, where you have to submit a mini-collection, are particularly good for making you think about how poems work off each other.

Cricket lovely cricket

Deep joy - at last the Cricket World Cup is underway. OK, so the first couple of weeks are likely to be spent weeding out the minnows (although Ireland and Zimbabwe will both fancy their chances of upsetting the brilliant-or-awful Pakistan, and Kenya have a long record of giant-killing), but watching cricket from the Caribbean is always a pleasure. In part it's because the time difference makes it so convenient - you can get home from work in time to see most of the day's play, rather than going through all that getting up in the middle of the night nonsense you get with Antipodean or Subcontinental tours. In part it's because cricket in the West Indies is how the sport should always be - lots of sun, some spectacular scenery (Port of Spain is rivalled only by Cape Town in that respect), and an emphasis on entertainment.
Last night's opener confirmed what I thought might be the case - scores a little lower than predicted, thanks to slowish, low pitches, meaning that spinners and crafty medium-pacers might rule the roost, rather than real pace. For that reason, I'm tipping India or the Windies to win it, not the much fancied Aussies and South Africans. Obviously, I'm cheering England on, but although I can see them making the semis I think they'll need a run of luck to actually go all the way.
And good luck to Scotland against the Aussies later today, which gives me another chance to plug Scotland's first cricket store, Cow Corner.
Oh, and you can go to the Stick Cricket site and play their new World Cup Super Eight game. Good luck getting any work done for the next six weeks.

Room for debate

I was interested to read JG Ballard's comments in Writers' Rooms in yesterday's Guardian, especially his assertion that no great novel has yet been written on a PC. It struck me that I've absolutely no idea whether he's right, simply because I've no idea how most writers write. Was he being a bit of a grumpy old man (why should a PC be considered less 'authentic' than a typewriter), or was he making a point about the particular way a computer allows you to write? I know a lot of writers, even if they have no qualms about computers generally, like to get their first drafts down on paper by hand, maybe because it makes you think that little bit harder about every word if there's not the option to delete and rewrite straight away.
For my own part, well, it all depends. I DO like to write by hand wherever possible, and type things up much later, but it's not always possible. What about when you're sitting in front of a PC at work and a few lines come to you? Straight onto the screen, I reckon. But I'd be interested to hear people's preferences...

Poetry in motion

There are a certain number of birds that, although I know they're almost certain to show up on my year lists sooner or later, are still a huge thrill when they do. Red Kites, as I've mentioned before, are one - some weeks I see them every day on the eay to work, and yet there's still something slightly unreal about it.
Down at Sence Valley Forest Park today, I came across another. I'd gone down to see whether, with spring seemingly upon us, any early summer visitors had arrived, particularly Sand Martins. No luck though, and despite the very mild and pleasant conditions, there was very little around at all, with fewer ducks and gulls than usual.
But, heading back to the car, I was on the bridge over the little stream when a flash of blue emerged from under it and arrowed away from me. A couple of minutes frantic searching later and I managed to find the Kingfisher's hunting perch, on a tree 50 or so yards upstream, and was able to get great views of him until he headed away towards the top pools.
As I say, it's not unusual to see them there (often perched on the Sand Martins' wall, in fact), but it's never less than exhilirating. For a start, their iridescent plumage looks so out of place in a country where plumage is generally on the dull side, and I often wonder why our Kingfisher is so ridiculously bright compared to others of his family overseas. But there's also something about the way they go about their business, all that keeping absolutely still for minutes at a time before exploding into lightning quick action, seemingly aware of nothing other than the fish they're lining up for their next meal. They're one instance where that hackneyed old phrase "poetry in motion" truly does spring to mind.

Peaks of perfection

On Saturday night, I just saw the end of a Top 100 TV Dramas Ever type programme on More 4, or E4, or one of those channels. As it happened, just as I turned over, it had reached 8 or 9, and was talking about Twin Peaks.
I could argue that it should have been far higher (it'd definitely make it into my top 3 TV programmes ever), but that's obviously pretty subjective.
One thing it didn't say, though, and that I haven't seen mentioned in any of the various David Lynch articles that have been in the papers in recent weeks (he's got an art exhibition in Paris at the moment), is just how it changed the face of TV. They all acknowledge it was influential, but mainly in the way it made 'weirdness' more mainstream. I'd argue that even more important was the way in which it showed you could make a TV series with genuinely cinematic production values. All those big US dramas such as The Sopranos, The West Wing, Lost and 24 owe it a huge debt in that respect, I think.
My own love for the show is such that I found myself putting Agent Cooper's line "Damn fine coffee - and hot!" into my poem Cafe Italia, which is in the current issue of Poetry Nottingham. But my favourite character? It would have to be ultra-sarcastic FBI pathologist Albert Rosenfield, magnificently played by Miguel Ferrer. His "Sheriff Truman - I love you" scene is just about my favourite in TV history.
Here are some of his most memorable torrents of abuse - cynicism has rarely sounded so eloquent.

Fair swap

I got my notification emails from the Poetry Super Highway Great Poetry Exchange this morning.
My own chapbook will be heading to Christina Pacosz, in Kansas City, while I'll be getting a chapbook called Dear Immovable, by LouAnn Shepard Muhm (of Minnesota, as far as I can see). I like the title, so that's promising. I'll post a review up here a bit later.
I'm looking forward to receiving it, and a few poetry books recently ordered on Amazon, and getting stuck into them. I'll probably review them (and the books I bought at PN last week) too.

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant!

Wales being the land of my fathers (or my mother, to be exact), I thought I'd wish you all a very happy St David's Day.
I'm not a huge fan of leeks, or daffodils, but Welsh cakes stand as one of the finest culinary inventions ever. My mouth is watering just thinking about them. I'd have to say, they turn out much better if you've got a proper bakestone (I like them almost burnt), but a heavy griddle or skillet will do at a pinch.
Staying with St David, Katy Evans-Bush has some very interesting things to say about him, Wales and pigs at her always-compelling blog, Baroque In Hackney.
And on a different subject, I've got four poems appearing in the new issue of Umbrella, which, if I've not whole-heartedly recommended before, I will now. My fellow Happenstancer Rob Mackenzie was the featured poet in Issue One, and the interview with him is well worth reading.

Hoarse, but happy

First of all, thanks to everyone who posted kind thoughts after my last post. I need little encouragement to get stuck into the Talisker on a Friday night, and it and an overdose of Strepsils seemed to do the trick. The voice recovered a bit, and held out until the end of the reading, though it's gone again today. But the not-talking-for-20-hours thing proved impossible - it was closer to two (waking) hours.
But anyway, the reading, at Nottingham Mechanics Institute, went very well. One of the other readers, Mark Gilbert, had also been struck down by a more virulent form of the lurgy, so couldn't make it, which just left me and Davina Prince (who, as D A Prince, is a regular in all kinds of poetry mags).
I did the two poems that appear in the current issue of Poetry Nottingham, Sweet Spot and Cafe Italia, a few from the chapbook, plus six or seven others, including a couple of very new ones. They seemed to go down well, and I liked getting my reading done first, because it meant I could relax and enjoy Davina's. As I say, she's someone whose poems often stand out in poetry mags, and she reads very well. Her reading seemed very well structured, too - there were two or three themes, subtly introduced, but always there beneath the surface.
It would have been nice putting a face to the name anyway (and to that of PN editor Adrian Buckner), but the icing on the cake was finding out that Davina also hails from Coalville (she now lives a little nearer Leicester, in Kirby Muxloe). Small world.
I sold a few chapbooks, bought one by Alan Baker and an anthology that Davina had edited, and went home more than ever determined to read more regularly. I'm hoping to get down to one of the Monday night sessions at The Troubadour in London next month, and I'm looking into setting something up locally. Ideally, I'd like to find a couple of other poets interested in reading with me, so if you're interested, drop me a line.
Very little birding this weekend, except for the happy discovery of a potentially great site in Castle Donington. The EMDC industrial park is just an expanse of puddle-dotted wasteland at the moment, but when I stopped there yesterday, it contained all sorts of finches, two Shelducks (not common round here), a Ringed Plover (ditto), and 79 Pied Wagtails (I gave up counting at that point), the latter presumably attracted to the huge swarms of very big gnats that were everywhere. I'll have to go back for a longer look soon, because it looks like a potential haunt of Black Redstarts.

Typical!

I've managed, until now, to get through the whole winter without having the flu or even a proper cold, despite the fact that family, friends and work colleagues have been suffering from some real stinkers.
And what happens the day before the big Poetry Nottingham reading? My throat starts feeling like someone sandpapered it in the night, and I can only speak like the love child of Joe Cocker and Bonnie Tyler. Without the Swansea accent, obviously. And the big hair.
At this rate, the audience will have to get pretty close to hear anything. I'm hoping that not speaking for the next 20-odd hours will do the trick.

Catching up

On Sunday night, I went to the Phoenix in Leicester to see the closing night of the Leicester Comedy Festival. There were five unknown comics (well, unknown by me at least – the best were compere John Richardson and deadpan Yorkshireman Alun Cochrane), and headliner Stewart Lee, whose set was sadly shorter than usual, but as good as always. It’s his style, as much as the actual material, that makes him so entertaining, especially as he uses his peculiarly slow delivery to, at times, deconstruct the whole process of comedy. That, thankfully, sounds a lot duller than it actually is – in practice, the laughs still come thick and fast, but you’re also led to think about exactly what you’re laughing at.
I got back just in time to see the start of The South Bank Bank Show, which was looking at WH Auden, and ended up recording it and watching it on Monday. I have to confess that I’ve read far less by and about Auden than I should have done, and so it was hard to form an opinion on a lot of what was mentioned, including his decision to leave Britain for the USA just as World War Two was looming.
I did, though, find myself admiring his decision to expunge certain fairly early poems from his canon because he decided, years later, that they were just not honest, and that he had overdone the rhetoric for poetic effect. I don’t think that’s in any way arguing that poetry has to be straightforwardly emotional, or literal, just that the kernel of emotion at the heart of each piece has to be ‘true’. It was also a reminder of that old thing about poems never being really finished – if someone of Auden’s stature can keep having second thoughts, I don’t feel so bad about my own constant dithering.
I would have got round to posting this yesterday, but spent the day testing telescopes for work at Rutland Water, which was fun but doesn’t half leave you cross-eyed! And then on the way home, I went in to give blood, and found myself volunteered to go on the machine that separates your blood products there and then, allowing you to give twice as much. I decided typing counted as the strenuous exercise they warned me off.
The bird lists are steadily growing. The overall list is on 111, courtesy of four Smew (two male and two female) yesterday, plus Lesser Redpoll, Siskin and Little Owl at the weekend. The patch list is creeping up towards the century mark, with those last three all counting towards it.
I got the Little Owl near Sawley Marina, close to the M1. Despite the road, it’s a very quiet spot really, and has been attracting a lot of Short-eared Owls lately, so I went to have a look. It’s certainly SEO heaven, habitat-wise, but none showed. Still, the Little Owl was consolation and a reminder that part of the fun of birding is that in looking for one thing, you find another. The Derbyshire birding website says the SEOs are still there though, along with patch rarities such as Ringed Plover and Oystercatcher, so I’ll have another look this weekend.

The Year Of Living Vicariously

Here, as promised, is the first of my invited contributions. I'd imagine it might spark a bit of debate - I hope so.

It is ironic that the death of the legendary scriptwriter Nigel Kneale at the end of October last year went relatively unnoticed and unlamented by the medium that he had done so much to mould in its early days.
A repeat of a two-year-old documentary on his work was relegated to post-closing time airing on a minority interest digital channel - BBC4.
Yet the father of "Quatermass" once emptied British pubs as punters dashed home to catch the latest episode and see if their post-war British doldrums would be shattered by a successful invasion from outer space. Millions crammed around their small, flickering black-and-white sets to watch Professor Bernard Quatermass protect them from something the like of which they'd never seen before.
A resolutely intellectual hero, Quatermass reflected the character of his creator, of course, but he also represented those people who had secretly laboured away to save Britain from a very real menace only a decade earlier. The Great British Boffin as hero: a man we could trust. Appearing on our televisions: a medium we were quickly growing to trust.
But the series, shown during the summer of 1953, also pioneered many of the methods and ideas that made British television distinctive. None of it would have been possible without  Kneale's brilliantly tense script.
One of the litmus tests of science fiction is often said to be its "prophecy index". Did a writer successfully predict this great leap forward, that social trend or the other technical doohickey that is now firmly clamped to everyone's arm/head/torso?
Some writers pass the test with flying colours, while others don't even get out of the starting gate. Kneale falls into the former category.
His most relevant piece of prophecy is something he wrote for the BBC a decade and a half after his debut with Quatermass. And the nightmare children he foresaw in it are now top of the TV ratings tree.
In "The Year Of The Sex Olympics" there are no comforting boffins to help us gently out of harm's way. In fact, they seem to have pushed us firmly in front of a speeding truck.
The play, broadcast in 1968, shows a dystopian future where the masses have willingly acceded to subjugation by total television. Although their surroundings are brightly coloured, their inner lives are drab and drained. Outside their controlled environment the world is an environmental nightmare.
Language is reduced to a set of meaningless slices of jargon interspersed with advertising cliches. People's desires are lived out vicariously through television shows - overpopulation is controlled by sating people's desire for sex with programmed pornography: the Sex Olympics. This removes 'tensions', with war, love, hate and personal loyalty all just unpleasant memories of a discredited past. "Sex is to watch, not to do," runs a typical slogan.
But what do you do if you're a TV executive and the ratings start to fall? A pre-Rigsby Leonard Rossiter plays top executive Ugo Priest, who stumbles on the  secret when a disturbed employee (Martin Potter) accidentally falls to his death in front of the cameras. Live. On TV.
Noting the delighted reaction of the jaded audience, he conceives the idea of the "Live-Life Show". In this programme a couple and their child will be stranded on a remote island, completely separated from all the modern conveniences they are used to, and their struggle to survive will be filmed 24 hours a day.
Needless to say, the more that goes wrong the higher the ratings climb. And hopefully the odd death or two will really push the ratings up.
At this point of the DVD, you can press 'stop' and flip to Channel 4 or BBC2 and view exactly what Kneale predicted back in 1968.
In 'Big Brother' (a perverted jollying-up of Orwell's nightmarish vision if ever there was one) we can see mind-numbing bitchiness and brain-dead racism masquerading as entertainment. The worse it got, the more damage done, the more Channel 4's executives rubbed their hands in glee. It even affected 'real life'  with politicians scuttling around to try and stick plasters over Britain's damaged international reputation. The Reality TV tail wagged the dog far more successfully than any incisive political commentary or determined investigative documentary ever could.
Should the channel's executives intervene to stop it? How naive a question. Climbing ratings translate directly into climbing salary scales.
But even the proletarian mud-slinging of barely-educated breathing machines can't compete with the actual whiff of death. "Yes, we know the story ended happily-ever-after, but maybe it will be different on the replay," we all said as we tuned in to 'Top Gear', hoping that this time Richard Hammond wouldn't survive that 232-mph crash. This time perhaps we'd get to see severed limbs flying away from an already fire-blackened corpse as a car powered by a jet engine(!) stole the chirpy commentator's life away from him.
But nobody was hurt. Nobody did die. Not this year.
- Mark Howard Jones

Hmm...

I generally look forward to reading The Guardian's Saturday Review, because alone among the national papers (I think) it has a regular poetry slot, with at least one review, a poem, and a few news items.
Today's review, by Glyn Maxwell, was of Derek Walcott's Selected Poems. Now the fact of them choosing Maxwell annoyed me a bit, because he studied under Walcott in the 80s and was to some extent his protege. Too often editors give books to reviewers who they know will either gush praise about the poet, or do a total hatchet job, and the poor reader is left suspecting the truth is actually somewhere in-between.
I was briefly appeased when Maxwell admitted "there's no praise so superfluous as that of an apprentice", only to be disappointed again by "let us figure out why reading this work reduces the number of poets now writing in English to the fingers of one hand".
If he's saying that Walcott's brilliance reduces virtually all other living English-language poets to mere versifiers, he's perpetuating the myth that great poets write nothing but great poems, while minor and even mediocre poets are incapable of hitting the heights even once, indeed are incapable of writing true poetry. And that's plainly nonsense. There are plenty of great poets (Ted Hughes is the first who springs to mind), whose work is hugely uneven, just as there are plenty of great poems by relative 'one-hit wonders'.
One other point raised my hackles, namely when Maxwell said "to dispense with rhyme and metre on theoretical grounds is to oppose memorability. Among new American poets this is virtually an orthodoxy, which is why you haven't heard of any". Now, I'd hardly say my tastes in poetry are experimental or avant-garde, but I reckon every bit of that statement is nonsense. If he hasn't heard of any (and living and working in the USA, of course he has), I'd suggest that's because he's just not listening.
I have read and enjoyed both Walcott and Maxwell, so I have no particular agenda on this. And, I suppose I should say, the fact the article made me think so much is probably all the proof you need that it has done its job.

Stuck for a present?

Then what about these Happenstance Press gift vouchers? In denominations of £5, £10 and £20, they're ideal for poetry-lovers, allowing them to make their own choice from Happenstance's ever-growing and diverse range of chapbooks (plus Sphinx magazine). And, if I do say so myself, you can't really go wrong with any of them.

Practice makes perfect

One of the most enjoyable things about doing poetry readings, I’ve found, is the preparation. Admittedly, you can feel a bit of a fool walking round the house reciting your own work aloud, but it’s essential if you’re to time things right on the day. I don’t actually practice the intros or between-poem banter, such as it is, but I do make a few rough notes with each poem just in case I want to lead into it with a few words.
The best bit, though, is deciding on your ‘set-list’, because it means you can indulge any lingering rock star fantasies. You don’t have to go as far as taping a sheet of titles, hastily scribbled in magic marker, on the stage on the big day, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, last night I was going through just this process, trying to come up with the right blend of poems for the Poetry Nottingham launch next week. I’d just about got the timing right when it struck me that it was all a bit downbeat, so I’ll have to do some tinkering over the next few days to ensure a bit of light and shade.
What this teaches you, though, is just how important it is to read your own work aloud. Often. You discover weaknesses in your poems that just weren’t obvious on the page, and occasionally you realise that poem you cast aside after a couple of rejections actually has something going for it, maybe with a little fine tuning.

Spring, spring, spring

All a bit hectic at the moment with cricket coaching, writing reviews, writing and sending out poems, getting stuck in the snow, etc, but here's a little trailer for things to come.
I intend to use Polyolbion to occasionally publish poems, stories, reviews and opinion pieces - it'll generally be invited stuff, with no particular theme. Anyway, I'll be kicking it off next Monday with a piece by Mark Howard Jones on Nigel Kneale, a visionary writer whose recent death seemed to go largely unnoticed.
While, as I say, it will be largely invited stuff, I'm always open to good ideas, so if you have something literary or musical you'd like to write about, email me on the link on the main page.
On the bird front, a quick hour down at the forest park this morning saw Skylarks singing and displaying everywhere, and the breeding Curlews already back and looking out suitable nesting sites. And while I was passing Swithland Reservoir, I couldn't resist a quick scan for the Peregrines. Sure enough, both were flying, before the female settled on her favorite tree. Patch list up to 77.

Don't read if you're planning on getting some work done

I came across the wonderful, wonderful LibraryThing site on the web the other day, as you'll see from the sidebar if you scroll down a bit.
Be warned though, it'll have you whiling away hours at work trying to remember every book you own.