There’s a new interview with me discussing poets and technology over at
Nic Sebastian’s Blog Very Like a Whale.
1. Characterize your general attitude as a poet towards technology.
The end of hope. No, I’ve worked with new technology in publishing for almost twenty years, so a lot of my immediate thinking here centres around mark up languages like XML, XLink, XPointer, metadata, issues around discoverability, granularity, fragmentation, standards, subject classification, topic maps (remember them?) tagging and so on — the seriously boring end of things: the kind of stuff that gets cited in the divorce proceedings. The kind of stuff that ends up in sentences that start with “He was a real loner all his life…” I’ve been working on a new database system that encodes poetry for ePub and Kindle products, but that might seem a rather constrained and reductive way to approach this question! I love programming XSLT conversions, and thinking about XSL-FO and how we might auto generate books from vast corpora of tax returns. It’s a bit sad. It’s a lot sad, actually. I think technology is a metaphor for bereavement.
Radio Nostalgia
Paperback
92 pages
November 2005
ISBN 1-904614-19-1
Here are four poems from Radio Nostalgia “The Journey”, “Loose Meat”, “Black Flake” and “The Curtain”.
The Journey [1:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Loose Meat [1:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Black Flake [1:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download The Curtain [2:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Halving
There is a place I could feel at home
beneath a catastrophe of wires
in this white evening under plastic stars
I could feel all the warmth of the room
endlessly in glass in all its orchestrations and might
leaning through wet eyelids
with the valley held in frame despite
or beyond the singing shade where kids
parade in toiling sheets laughing there,
under the hills, under last year’s windows and black bricks,
the black earth with its island kisses there —
and in that place of tobacco and sticks
and seed-strewn avenues, poured at dusk,
filled with hosepipes, rag and bone men and musk —
coal-defined, small, so small, where the roads
turn before a regimented horizon
to take away the girl, to take away the codes
love ladles in, as the lovers run
taking the sales reps and their families
into the future deserts filled with flies,
into the son’s sour contralto cries,
beside the boiling copper lies;
there is a place I could feel at home,
with street names and clangour and dogs
locked in warm sheds beside a green lawn
and all the dread and all the wishes, knocks
and skirmishes, and wise hugs,
would leave us semi-carnal on the rocks
of a magisterial sea, the radio features there,
from a red summer and in that fine archipelago
of thin shouts one sleep would do me there,
one tiny sleep would really do for me and you.
The Weapon
for Isobel Dixon
Waving hello through the Fiat’s fumes, we were waving goodbye,
a film in amber fields of Cornish shade and wheat,
yellow jerseys and a crop duster — that Corsair —
hurling its shoulders over seven-year-old dream-white air.
You had yellow fever in some antic grey chassis, too, mid-
Pacific, gauntleted, hung at my mother’s lips, that hand-painted
lilac studio shot laying near your sack of home, now twenty years apart.
In the end you waved from the car to me, crying some way in to life,
and at your breakable neighbourhood return: ripped up, corseted,
the surgery over, the coming months became love’s parasite
and you became my upholstery of broken evenings, knowing summer static.
But I broke free with all my feelings ending empty in a weapon.
HMS Devonshire, there I see you scrapped in shaking loyal air,
you are breathing in a new Korean din, and I’m inside a future destitution:
breathing still foreshortens time. I’m almost your age now.
A mouthful lies between us then in some disgust of stories and a past,
I am dwarfed beside you in that summer field, a child in mewling montage.
How can we love what’s not bestowed, in the happiest
prize blood brings? My life has always been this weaker separation since.
Plied in that robbery of nows, as you piled in your pillows, too.
The Lilac-Patterned Institution
Fostrup’s biography pours out on phlegm-
coloured snowscapes while I watch the steaming
semis. She’s remembering bismuth from
poor chemistry lessons and draped in this bling
of fairy lights. No one can escape such
cholera of the mind. Watching her pant
Colgate breaths above her bacon sandwich
shows Droylsden is parole from life. Why can’t
we neck on doorsteps before the grief thing?
Pitted between the sandbanks of new building
and the weekend theft of Samsung pressies
she’s hooked up to some post-millennial
milk and honey, cheating the horses arses
out of tax and all things matrimonial.
A good few months back, Roddy Lumsden set a challenge to write a tripartite narrative in a loose structure of triplets. The narratives were to have no connection, but resolve. I found the structure a great tease, but didn’t quite follow the rules. Here’s one of my favourite pieces that emerged. I love it when structures offer up there own voice and you just listen in …
Rita’s Creatures
Donny Scues’ Waz-mobile was only
heard in Mulbrox, like several rust jobs deep,
whacking out The Cool Kids for Compton or Big D
or cruising Aldo’s for a big widow night of bliss.
Alien detox. Crustadelic. All over soil fanatics.
It made me barf. Sissy’s kids was through with Donny anyways
but comforting though she was I really doubt
the seamless crotch was so fantastic in the seat.
You know it, too. That place is dog perfect.
How come eating cuties is so bad anyway.
Gricedale’s everlasting crudités always
left me smelling of clam soda or kelp and gave me gas,
like I’d done a week in Tina’s salon as she stubbed out
one thousand L&Ms next to the extreme nail dipper.
All that chicken gone to waist.
Slow season. Big learning, burning earth day.
Some commotion held our attention for an hour
like anti-saucer vigilantes moaning about hell
as the deli off takes sashayed through Montgomery
on a featureless pine hunt, parrots braying.
Bettie crawled out to ask, ‘Is that you, Vernon?’
But the phone in died. Donny’s bucket of love.
How come so much style can be wasted
on a creature? Even the heat ain’t pure in that life.
I mind my nails on the bag spinner and pack away
another sister’s yesterdays. I am not leaving here.
That’s one hunnerd forty two dollars, Ma’am.
Helena Nelson interviews me in the next issue of Sphinx Magazine.
Sphinx: A peep behind the scenes of poetry publishing
Sphinx includes features about (and interviews with) independent poetry publishers, self-publishers and poets. In addition, it reviews pamphlet publications (not books).
Through Sphinx you can keep up to date with what’s going on in independent poetry publishing. It’s a must for anyone interested in getting their work into print or depressed about the alleged crisis in poetry publishing. Sphinx is part of the story of poetry and the people who make it happen.
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I’ve been selected as a contributor in Roddy Lumsden’s new Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade, it’s a terrific piece of work and offers a fantastically generous overview of new British and Irish writing. Here’s the Bloodaxe description:
Identity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It is the first anthology to comprehensively represent the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of “the pluralist now”. It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry.
These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland – from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway – as well as further afield. Many new and undersung poets appear alongside this generation’s most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year.
Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado, with each poet introduced by a biographical note also covering their themes and concerns, plus an author photograph. This is the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now.
Poets included in Identity Parade: Patience Agbabi, Jonathan Asser, Tiffany Atkinson, Simon Barraclough, Paul Batchelor, Kate Bingham, Julia Bird, Patrick Brandon, David Briggs, Andy Brown, Judy Brown, Colette Bryce, Matthew Caley, Siobhan Campbell, Vahni Capildeo, Melanie Challenger, Kate Clanchy, Polly Clark, Julia Copus, Sarah Corbett, Claire Crowther, Tim Cumming, Ailbhe Darcy, Peter Davidson, Nick Drake, Sasha Dugdale, Chris Emery, Bernardine Evaristo, Paul Farley, Leontia Flynn, Annie Freud, Alan Gillis, Jane Griffiths, Vona Groarke, Jen Hadfield, Sophie Hannah, Tracey Herd, Kevin Higgins, Matthew Hollis, A.B. Jackson, Anthony Joseph, Luke Kennard, Nick Laird, Sarah Law, Frances Leviston, Gwyneth Lewis, John McAuliffe, Chris McCabe, Helen Macdonald, Patrick McGuinness, Kona Macphee, Peter Manson, D.S. Marriott, Sam Meekings, Sinéad Morrissey, Daljit Nagra, Caitríona O’Reilly, Alice Oswald, Katherine Pierpoint, Clare Pollard, Jacob Polley, Diana Pooley, Richard Price, Sally Read, Deryn Rees-Jones, Neil Rollinson, Jacob Sam-la Rose, Antony Rowland, James Sheard, Zoë Skoulding, Catherine Smith, Jean Sprackland, John Stammers, Greta Stoddart, Sandra Tappenden, Tim Turnbull, Julian Turner, Mark Waldron, Ahren Warner, Tim Wells, Matthew Welton, David Wheatley, Sam Willetts, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, Tamar Yoseloff.
£12.00 paperback
1 85224 839 4. 384pp. 2010.
