Verve Poetry Festival

Birmingham's Old Rep Theatre plays host to this year's Verve Poetry Festival, which runs from today until Sunday.

The full line-up is here - plenty of interesting stuff to enjoy, with poets such as Alison Brackenbury, Carrie Etter, Vahni Capildeo and Jacob Sam-La Rose.

Diversifly

This rather splendid book is out a week tomorrow, February 8th (the web page hasn't been updated yet), and as you'll see, it comes with a whole-hearted recommendation from me. As well as commissioned poems from the likes of Carrie Etter, James Sheard and Andrew McMillan, there's a lot of really fine work by other familiar and not-so-familiar names. The artwork is excellent, too, and there's a foreword by Brett Westwood. Enjoy!

Carrie Etter nominated

More heartening news - Carrie Etter's excellent Imagined Sons, one of my favourite books of last year, is on the shortlist for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. The winner will be announced in a few weeks - in the meantime, I can recommend it to anyone who hasn't yet read it.

Tears In The Fence Festival

The independent literary magazine, Tears In The Fence, is holding a festival to celebrate its 30th birthday, on 24-26 October.

It all takes place at the White Horse, Stourpaine, and among the speakers already confirmed are Peter Hughes, Carrie Etter, Dorothy Lehane, Chris McCabe and Steve Spence. You can find out more here.

Kathy Bell and Carrie Etter at Jazz & Poetry

The final Jazz & Poetry for the time being (it will return in October with the launch of Mahendra Solankia's second collection The Lies We Tell), takes place next Wednesday, July 16th, at the Guitar Bar, Clumber Avenue, Nottingham NG5.

The poetry will be supplied by Kathy Bell, reading from her new pamphlet at the memory exchange, and Carrie Etter, reading from her excellent and highly-acclaimed collection Imagined Sons.

Entry is free but donations are encouraged, and of course there's jazz from Four In The Bar (including special guests).

Jazz and Poetry: Matthew Clegg and Rennie Parker

I'm pretty certain that, for the first time in months, I'll be able to get along to Jazz and Poetry in Nottingham next Wednesday (June 11th). As always, it's at The Guitar Bar, Bar Deux, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, and starts at 8pm.

Featured poets are Zayneb Allak at 8.30, Rennie Parker just after 9, and Matthew Clegg at 10, with Four In The Bar providing jazz at all points in-between. I know Matthew's poetry in particular, and would love to hear him read, but it looks a great line-up all round.

And looking ahead, the final session of this season features Carrie Etter, and will be a week later than usual because of the World Cup, on July 16th.

Park Street Poets, 11.4.14

Friday saw me whizzing down the M5 to Bristol to read at Park Street Poets, held at the excellent Boston Tea Party, which not only boasted a really nice upstairs reading room, but also some great carrot cake. It's a quarterly event hosted by the poet David Briggs, whose Salt collections The Method Men and Rain Rider I can warmly recommend.

I read first, mainly from The Elephant Tests, although I did give a rare outing to The Meeting Place, from Troy Town, thanks to the generous time slots. The good-sized audience were more than kind, and it was, as I've said, a really nice space to read in, with the university clock chiming dimly in the background.

Alasdair Paterson's reading was excellent, taking in work from Brumaire and Later, the Flarestack pamphlet that marked his return to writing poetry after 20 years away, as well as his two recent Shearsman collections, On The Governing of Empires and Elsewhere or Thereabouts. His poetry wears its considerable learning and wit lightly, moving beyond mainstream lyrics while never forgetting the value of a good story or the musical potential of language. He reminds me of a favourite poet of mine, Lee Harwood, as well as a name that cropped up during the reading, Harry Guest, in his ability to create and inhabit a space entirely his own.

The same could be said of the final reader, Carrie Etter. Being an American expat who has taught in the UK for the last decade might be partly responsible for that, but whatever the reason, she's able to move between poetry genres and schools easily and without self-consciousness. She read from Imagined Sons, her new Seren collection, and delivered what must be difficult material (the book concerns the experience of giving up a child for adoption) with quiet confidence that had us all, I think, utterly enthralled.

I'm not going to say anything more about the poems for now, because I've spent part of today reading the book straight through twice, and I'd like to review it properly in the near future. Suffice to say that  the chosen forms work perfectly with the material, and best of all, that this is poetry that always feels as though it needs to be written.

Finally, it was great to meet Carrie at last, having been online acquaintances for several years, along with Alasdair and David, and thanks are due to the appreciative and generous audience.

Park Street Poetry, April 11th

Delighted to be reading alongside Carrie Etter and Alasdair Paterson on April 11th - more on this soon...

Two poems at And Other Poems...

I've got two poems up at Josephine Corcoran's wonderful And Other Poems blog today - she features a huge array of poets, including the likes of Alison Brackenbury, Bill Herbert, Carrie Etter, David Morley, Ian Duhig and Penelope Shuttle, with new content appearing on a very regular basis.

Both poems - The Mind's Skyline and The Dark Ages - will appear in my forthcoming Nine Arches collection, The Elephant Tests, of which more news in the next few weeks.

Every month is NaPoWriMo

Last week, Carrie Etter drew my attention to the fact that it's almost National Poetry Writing Month time again. I've signed up to it a couple of times in the past - you have to write an post a poem a day throughout April - and have found it a lot of fun and a great way of generating ideas, plus a fair few poems worth working on.

I'm going to have to give it a miss this year, because work and other commitments would make it hard to keep up with things, but Carrie did point out that there's no reason not to give it a try any time.

So, later this year, I'll be doing my own one-man NaPoWriMo (unless you'd like to join in), and attempting to write a section of a longer poem every day. Not only is it a good way (I think) to throw off the shackles and finally get something down on paper reharding an idea that I've had for a long time now, but the more I think about it the more I think a diary-like approach might suit the subject matter well. I'll keep you posted.

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.

Miscellany

Where to start? Well, the latest issue of Tears In The Fence arrived on Saturday. It's pretty much my favourite poetry mag these days - there's always a good range of poetry and a really extensive review section, so it takes weeks and weeks to get through, in the best possible way. It's still small enough to slip into a coat pocket, though - ideal for browsing in spare moments.

I've only skimmed it so far, but have enjoyed work by Simon Turner, Carrie Etter, Chris Torrance and Jackie Litherland. Still loads of stuff I haven't even touched on, though.

The latest issue of The Stanza, Leicester Poetry Society's in-house mag, also arrived. There's a generous review by Graham Norman of the reading by Pam Thompson, Lydia Towsey and myself back in November, and also Charles Lauder's equally generous and very perceptive review of Troy Town. I'll post it a bit later in the week.

Which reminds me, Graham Norman is one of the readers at the Members Night at LPS this Friday, along with Caroline Cook and Carol Leeming. It's at the Friends Meeting House, Queen's Road, Leicester, at 7.30pm.

Finally, there are some great pics of the Short-eared Owls at Cossington Meadows over at The Leicester Llama and at Soar Valley Birding.

And I thought I'd been a bit hard on Don Paterson...

Issue 3 of Horizon Review is jam-packed with all sorts of goodies, and a fairly brief trawl through it at lunchtime was nothing like long enough to do it justice.

I put the poems themselves on hold for now, and the podcast on West Midlands poetry, and turned instead to the interviews. There's a really good piece on Hugo Williams, always a favourite of mine. I love what he says about line-breaks, especially that last line about the broken thermometer. Carrie Etter and Claire Crowther's piece is good too, as you might expect if you read the interviews with them both on these pages earlier this year.

And then there's Vidyan Ravinthiran's interview with Craig Raine. Among other things, he has some pretty harsh words to say about Don Paterson, words I'd struggle to agree with, despite my previously mentioned lukewarm response to most of Paterson's work. I think there's quite a bit of 'previous' between the two, though, and it's probably safe to assume that that's where all this coming from.

There's one thing Raine definitely gets wrong, though. No one decides to support Leicester City arbitrarily. Why on earth would you, on a whim, decide to subject yourself to a lifetime of gallant, underachieving mediocrity, punctuated by an all-too-brief golden era and not-so-occasional periods of grinding misery?

The Tethers, by Carrie Etter

Carrie Etter’s debut collection, The Tethers, was published by Seren earlier this year. Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter now lives in Bradford on Avon and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

I interviewed her by email about the book, her writing and teaching, and her future plans. Read on to find out more (there's also a couple of sample poems too)...

The Tethers struck me as remarkable for its maturity – it feels far more rounded and focused than most first collections. How long were you honing these poems for?

Thank you, I’m pleased to hear that. I started collecting poems under the title Cult of the Eye in the autumn of 2002, so the book’s been evolving since then, with five poems pre-2000. I suppose the book’s maturity derives partly from the amount of time the book itself was evolving and partly from the amount of time I’ve been writing – I’ve been serious about poetry since my teens and I turned 40 this year.


I guess readers and critics must immediately be drawn to your transatlantic background in talking about your poetry (and I’m not going to be any different, sorry!). I’d be interested to know if you feel it’s allowed you to sit happily between some of the more entrenched camps in UK poetry?

I think the pluralist attitude to poetry of my generation of American poets has led me to pursue in both reading and writing a broad spectrum of poetries, and to wish there was less prejudice here, especially in regard to more experimental work. I don’t know how happily I’m sitting between camps, but I do what I can to get them to talk to one another, so to speak, and feel my position as a reviewer is helpful toward that end.

I’ve worried about the great difference among my first three books – The Tethers; Divining for Starters, a more experimental collection; and Imagined Sons, a strongly thematic collection consisting of prose poems and catechisms, but finally decided that I have to pursue my work, my desire to become a better poet, wherever it leads, regardless of response. That’s not to say I won’t pay attention to that response – I have so much to learn – but that I won’t let it narrow my options. A great part of the joy of poetry lies in its wild possibility, and that should be cultivated rather than tamed.


It’s had an obvious effect on your subject matter, too, but another thing I really enjoyed about the collection was your ability to slip between, and document a certain tension between, the urban and the rural. Do you feel you belong in one or the other?

I am heartened to hear that this issue is apparent in the book, as it’s integral to who I am. The answer to your question is that I feel I belong in both, I need both. Tonight, on a visit to my hometown in Illinois, I took a night walk, to the sound of cicadas and crickets, with my 12-year-old nephew Brandon; heading in the direction of my parents’ house meant that we were heading toward the fields. I took so much solace in that walk, in the easy conversation along the way and the noisy quiet surrounding it. At the same time, I crave the stimuli that comes with the urban, with its abundance of specificities and push for quality.


Could you tell us a bit about the process of publishing with Seren? What kind of editorial input did you receive?

I didn’t receive a great deal of editorial input, but I don’t know whether that is the norm at Seren. The poetry editor, Amy Wack, differed with me most on some of my syntactical constructions and on my use of dashes. On the former, I resisted because I felt the revisions would have normalized the syntax in a way that was untrue to the poems; on the latter, some of my dashes stayed, others were not instituted. All in all I’ve been happy in my experience with Seren, and I’m especially glad to be on a list stronger for the presence of a number of younger, intelligent women poets, Kathryn Gray, Zoe Skoulding, and Tiffany Atkinson among them.


I’m interested to know how teaching creative writing affects your own writing, both in purely practical terms (does it leave you enough time?!), and in terms of there being an ongoing exchange of ideas.

I believe teaching poetry makes me more alert in the process of writing and revising poems, as the precepts I’ve been teaching will be that much more present, consciously or unconsciously, as I work. Practically speaking, I find it impossible to write when I’m marking; something about the process of explaining to others the strengths and weaknesses of their writing inhibits my own ability to create. As far as time goes, I’m on a fractional, 0.7 contract, which means money is tighter than I’d like but I have more time to write. The exchange of ideas in teaching writing has been extraordinary; it keeps me thinking and questioning and reconsidering. I wouldn’t do anything else. The ultimate test, the lottery test, works here: if I won the lottery, I’d still teach, just less so as to allow more time for other activities.


Could you tell us a bit about your future publishing plans? I understand you’re going to be pretty busy.

Remember I’ve been writing, reading, and publishing for over 20 years before bringing out my first book, so there’s something of a backlog. Next month Oystercatcher Press will publish a pamphlet, The Son, that draws on my third book manuscript, Imagined Sons. I hadn’t planned on bringing out another pamphlet so soon, but Oystercatcher’s editor, Peter Hughes, asked me to submit, and I knew this was the work I wanted to show next.

In early 2011 Shearsman Books will bring out Divining for Starters, my second book. A draft of my third, Imagined Sons, has been by a couple poet-friends, but needs a little expansion, I think, and a final overhauling revision, before publication. The manuscript I’m actively writing, focusing on family, identity, one’s relationship to a home environment, etc., will presumably be my fourth book, The Weather in Normal. Suffice it to say I’m rarely wanting for something to write about!


Divorce

Forced to apologise
for the dirty sheets, he looks

proud in his shame.
I left that bed years ago

and have returned to collect
a forgotten book, a favourite blanket.

He knew the names of trees better
than makes of cars, but neither well.

He remembers which sister
I like least and asks

how she is doing.



Americana, Station by Station

At our lowest price today only
vote Appelman for the school board
the Lakers beating San Antonio by 39 points
your sins will be forgiven

on mattresses all your favourite brands
because as a teacher he knows
in the fourth quarter a few minutes to go
so long as you accept Christ as your lord

name-brand comfort at a great value
what students need and parents want
yet another rebound - let's see that again
you are saved, I tell you, you are saved

Browsing the blogs

Thanks to Jane Holland for flagging up this – Polesworth’s most famous son is finally getting the recognition he deserves, and there’s the chance for you to follow in his footsteps (quite literally, once the poetry trail is finished). Just follow the links provided, and your poetry could be part of it all.

And Carrie Etter has highlighted this – sign up, and you get a poem a week sent to your inbox. Presses involved are Anvil Press, Arc Publications, Cinnamon Press, Enitharmon, Heaventree Press, Landfill, O’Brien Press, Oversteps Books, Peterloo Poets, Salt Publishing, Seren Books, and tall-lighthouse. Hopefully it'll be a chance for some less well-known poets to get a bit of exposure - good on Oxford Brookes.