You Must Write As If Your Life Depended On It

To inform the world that I've just updated the various lists and checked the links and added some more material to modernpoetry.org.uk. I hope it's all useful. And it's on a Creative Commons licence now as well. Comment on the blog or email or whatever with any responses, suggestions etc.

Further announcement coming shortly about its future.

Labels: contemporary British poetry, updates, www.modernbritish.poetry.org.uk

To announce the final (certainly for a while and in this omnium gatherum form) Great Works, containing

Paul Holman, THE MEMORY OF THE DRIFT: Book Six: A WALKING AGE
Ralph Hawkins, The Poems of Abakan Tartar
Maximilian Hildebrand, Kylix Poems + four poems
Daniele Pantano, Translation from the German of Seventy Eight Early Notes for a Biography of an Unknown Swiss Poet
Julie Sampson, four poems
David Bircumshaw, eight poems
Rupert Loydell, four poems
Adam Fieled, from Equations
Miffy Ryan, Dwelling + Death Rattles
Jennifer Cooke, five poems
Catherine Daly, Surplice
Stephanie Jane Robinson, Ballad of the Reading Jail
Mark Smith, five poems
sean burn, from honeysuckled
Angela Gardner, five poems
Susan Adams, five poems
Mark Dickinson, from Shadows of the Sea
Matt Bryden, four poems
Sam Howell, five poems
Chris Hardy, Short of Luck on Short Street
James Price, four poems and a drawing
Martin Stannard, five poems
Gareth Farmer, Rise to Order
Bobby Larsson, Limerick Swing —
S J Fowler, nine poems
Gerard Greenway, three poems
Austin McCarron, seven poems
Sophie Mayer, three poems
Stephen Emmerson, Power Pollution + THUD
Anthony Mellors, from Bent our of Shape
Sarah Ahmad, seven poems
Reeti Roy, five poems
Robert Atherton, six poems
Glenn R Frantz, Bridge / Lawn / Solarium
Arthur Coleman, five poems
Nicholas R Scott, The Prison Series + the Pie Series
Harry Godwin, poem for P. Philpott, read at Xmasing the Line, 3/12/09

Enjoy it all!

I will post more on plans, especially for modernpoetry.org.uk and the availability of material in ebook reader format in the new year.

Labels: contemporary British poetry, Great Works, Modernpoetry.org.uk, plans, updates

I've been updating modernpoetry.org.uk over the summer, with gradual uploads as I have done so. I'd really appreciate any suggestions on two aspects:

• Video and audio material, especially video material. I really find this curiously difficult to respond to, much as I enjoy attending actual readings/performances. Were YouTube to cease to exist, I would be every unmoved. (It's my punishment for having to police classes of media students who were meant to be working, but preferred to catch up on those fascinating skateboard accident, skateboarding dogs and hypertrophied gonad clips that modern technology as so benevolently showered on adolescent males). So, any suggestions as to what may be the actual best clips online and any sites with a lot of accessible good material (not recorded in my listing on modernpoetry.org.uk) will be greatly appreciated and assistance duly recorded. I'm aware this is a hole in the site's coverage I ought to fill; but I can't on my own.



• List of Anthologies, Literary Histories & Critical Texts. What have I missed out that would interest and illuminate? I haven't access to a university library, so I really can only sample a fraction of what's published. Anything I need to add? There must be surely.

In general, indeed, any additions, corrections and emendations to my listings on the site will be greatly appreciated.

Labels: contemporary British poetry, updates, www.modernbritish.poetry.org.uk

First, apologies if you've already picked up this information, but I need to keep pushing out the message:

Change of Line Up for December 1

as a consequence of Eríin Moure's recent illness:

Tuesday, December 1: Francesca Lisette + Sophie Robinson + Roshi

Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL.
doors open at 7.30; start at 8.00; end by 10.00; entry £6 (£4 concessions).

This new series of poetry and music performance events continues with three young innovative female artists. They each take up and push the boundaries of lyricism into something rich and strange.

Francesca Lisette is the young poet responsible for the Chlorine readings in Brighton. She is a fierce and powerful poet, full of original, delightful and frightening collocations of language and a melody desperately holding itself together despite the strain. Francesca Lisette is currently studying at the University of Sussex. Her work has appeared in Axolotl and Invisibly Tight Institutional Outer Flanks Dub (Verb) Glorious National High Violence. Her poem Tarorchid is forthcoming from Grasp Press.

Sophie Robinson combines highly original and effective performance techniques with powerful and moving linguistic lyricism cut in with a mastery of media practice. Her work has been included in the important anthologies The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Her new book a was published by Les Figues Press earlier this year. She has run creative writing workshops for both children and adults in the UK and Italy, and has read and performed in the USA and Ireland as well as frequently in this country.

Roshi is an exponent of “stunningly beautiful Welsh-Iranian torch song electronica“ says Mixmag. Born in Wales to Iranian parents, Roshi Nasehi is a singer-writer who presents her own evocative songs alongside sometimes quite radical interpretations of the Iranian songs she was brought up listening to. Her songs reflect her origins, influences and experiences in a personal and unique way accompanied by unusual piano or keyboard arrangements – they are reflective, melodic and quirky – her voice airy and tender but possessed of an inner power. When she interprets Iranian song it is in a personal style bringing a contemporary twist combined with an authentic understanding of context and language.

Roshi, with her band, or alone at the keyboard is a regular and welcome live performer especially in London, developing a loyal following. She has a new CD coming out in October, The Sky and The Caspian Sea (with Pars Radio, her band), of both original and traditional Iranian songs. She has performed on Radio 3’s The Verb poetry show, and at Diverse Deeds’ predecessor, Sundays at the Oto.

Diverse Deeds MySpace and the Facebook Group will be fully updated over the next couple of days.

Labels: Cafe Oto, Caroline Bergvall, Diverse Deeds, Erin Moure, reading, updates

The most recent pair of Pistol Tree Poems, the collaborative dialogic sequence between Peter Hughes (mainly from Norfolk) and Simon Marsh (mainly from Italy) is now posted on Great Works here.

Labels: Peter Hughes, serials, Simon Marsh, updates

I've just gone over again, checked, updated and added to the material and links on www.modernpoetry.org.uk. The site needs much more doing to it and a total redesign, but, well, maybe. The Links section on Great Works has therefore also been appropriately updated, with all the British links checked etc as part of this process. and a couple more non-British sites added. More will be done on this!

Labels: contemporary British poetry, Great Works, links, updates, www.modernbritish.poetry.org.uk

Peter Hughes' and Simon Marsh's The Pistol Tree Poems and Richard Makin's St Leonards have both now been updated with their most recent episodes.

Labels: Peter Hughes, Richard Makin, Simon Marsh, updates

Richard Makin's St Leonards now has section 30 posted, with fresh formal & thematic concerns, even as the text is likely to be moving towards its end

Labels: Richard Makin, updates

(1) Great Works 14 Online

New are the following:

* Jeffrey Side, seven poems
* David Chaloner, three poems
* Richard Makin, eight poems from Rift Designs
* Hannah Silva, seven poems
* Scott Helmes, two poems
* Christopher Barnes, six poems
* Lucy Harvest Clarke, three sonnets
* Richard Barrett, two poems
* James Price, three poems
* Aidan Semmens, three poems
* John Gilmore, two excerpts from Head of a Man and three Etudes
* Kenny Knight, six poems from The Honicknowle Book of the Dead
* Ben Stainton, four poems
* Ron Singer, The Shiny Pants Brigade
* Charles Freeland, six poems
* Caleb Puckett, three poems
* Mary Michaels, three prose poems
* Boris Jardine, five poems
* Michael Egan, three poems
* Tomas Weber, two poems
* Alan Baker, from The Book of Random Access
* Rufo Quintavalle, two poems
* AnnMarie Eldon, five poems
* Mendoza, poems
* Joseto Solis, from The Ingredients of Oneself
* Tina Hyett, poems from In the Dirt
* Spencer Termott, THE MATCHING TYE SET (from In the Dirt)
+
* Richard Makin, St Leonards - most recent episode still being written! Will be up in a day or so (but I was desperate to get the New Year, then March, now April issue out before Yet Another Month)
* Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh, Pistol Tree Poems

(2) Forthcoming Sunday at the Oto

“poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure”

Third Sunday of the month, 3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL £4 entry.

May 17: Bleeding Heart Narrative + Andrea Brady + Carol Watts

Two poets and a musician: pictures out of fragments, explorations of limits of meaning & melody: out of this world, and in this world at the same time. Music & poetry get deconstructed, cleaned off, and put together again, differently. Defamiliarisation never sounded this good as you chill out with Sunday afternoon cakes and ale.

Bleeding Heart Narrative is the solo project of Oliver Barrett, comprised principally of haunting cellos, repeating piano melodies, hushed vocals and layers of otherworldly sounds.

Andrea Brady is a high energy, politically engaged and breathtakingly inventive poet, whose language mashes and reworks our present public and private languages.

Carol Watts is also a poet and university teacher, whose poetry explores a range of worlds, creatively manipulating language and meaning in innovative ways to focus on our position here and now.

for further information:

• MySpace
• Facebook Group: Sundays at the Oto

(3) Developments with Sundays at the Oto

Sundays at the Oto is coming to a close, to fit in with Cafe Oto's requirements - basically to be a cafe in the daytime, a venue only in the evening. I would like to continue SatO on a slightly different basis, and welcome suggestions how to do this successfully. It would have to be an evening event, not necessarily the same day of the month each time. to match the Cafe O requirements. I would like to carry on there as I think it is an excellent venue, welcoming and flexible with a very good atmosphere. I would like to continue with poetry and music - especially as this mix helps with two goals I have for the events: people attend who are not already part of the Crazy World of Avant-Garde Poetry or whatever it is; and there is a challenge, which can be accepted or quite happily not, for poets to go beyond reading, and present their work as performance or utterance.

I am open to suggestions and comments as to programming, arrangements etc.

I would also welcome anyone who might want to get involved with the project. It is probable I am just too old to fully engage with upcoming & bubbling up scenes & individuals (or so my paranoia tells me, and it should know)- it would be good if there were someone involved for whom this is all fresh & expanding. Probably useful, as well, if there were some contact with HE - this looks like the game plan for Alternative British Poetry's survival and indeed growth.

So - put comments here or on Facebook or MySpace, email me (peter@greatworks.org.uk), or best of all talk to me at the next event.

My thoughts at the moment are to encourage more non-cognoscenti (incognoscenti?), by giving out more information on the poets (like the info at arts cinemas), which could also be available online beforehand.

Labels: Sundays at the Oto, updates

The most recent episodes of Richard Makin's St Leonards and Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh's Pistol Tree Poems are now online.

Labels: contemporary British poetry, serials, updates

New section of Richard Makin's St Leonards uploaded, showing a dramatic formal invention.

Also on Great Work's homepage is the list of contributors for the next issue (which I am starting work on even as you read this!) - Adrian Clarke, Peter Dent & Rupert M Loydell. Gareth Durasow, Stephen Emmerson, Glenn R Frantz, William Garvin, Catherine Hales, Colin Harris, Paul Holman, Michael Jacobson, Sam Oborne, Alasdair Paterson, Ian Pople, David Rushmer, Nathan Thompson, Stephen Van-Hagen.

Labels: contemporary British poetry, updates

I'd like to announce that the just uploaded issue of Great Works contains the following new material:

• Niall Quinn, three Phlebas poems (+ two mp3s of Niall reading other texts on the site)


• Rupert Loydell, three poems


• Andy Jordan, Inside Mary Millington


• Amos Weisz, of mutabilitie + tinfoot


• Johannes Jansen, trans Amos Weisz, Ditch of fragments/Registrations II


• Sascha Anderson, trans Amos Weisz, Jewish Jetset


• Stephen Emmerson, five poems


• Lesley McKenna, Bodyscapes


• Nicholas Spicer, Six Attempts at Sincerity


• RG Gregory, three poems


• Tom Lowenstein, The Poverty of Pots and Pans


• Tina Bass, three poems


• Christopher Barnes, seven poems


• Ron Singer, Chapter 11


• Alyson Torns, two poems


• Charles Freeland, four poems


• Michael Lee Johnson, four poems


• Julia Sampson, three poems


• Thomas Mulhall, seven poems


• Alistair Noon, four poems


• Juliet Troy, five poems


• Peter Reiling, three poems and some prose

All the material on contemporary British poetry is transferred to www.modernpoetry.org.uk, which now has a proper homepage, and will be expanded. It includes a listing of readings in London. This means I don't have to remind you about the imminent launch of Sundays at the Oto, because you'll see it mentioned there. Do send details of any readings to me - at the moment I'm gleaning them as I can (which is why I'm only dealing with London).

The next stage (once I've just corrected an irritating little error on the homepage) is to redo the links. I also have to arrange for the publication of a posthumous volume of Amos Weisz's translations and other writing.

Beyond that, I aim at getting modernpoetry.org.uk onto a more professional basis - negotiating the nightmares of funding! (if any's been spared from subsidising the bloody Olympics).

Labels: Amos Weisz, contemporary British poetry, poetry websites, updates, website proposal

1. St Leonards 20 now posted, after problems with different versions of Word leading to a corrupted text.



2. Plans well under way for Sundays at the Oto - every 3rd Sunday in the month (from September), 3-5, at Cafe Oto in Dalston: two poets and some music, at 4 quid entry.
   
   Line up so far looks like (confirmed & settled persons only):
   
   
   • Sep 21: Tim Atkins + Sophie Robinson
   
   
   
   • October 19: The Mind Shop (Armorel Weston, John Gibbens and David Miller), Alyson Torns and Keith Jebb
   
   
   
   • November 16: Tom Lowenstein + tbc
   
   
   
   • December 21: tbc + Jow Lindsay
   
   
   There will be Facebook group! (Heaven preserve us - it's come to this!!!)

Labels: contemporary British poetry, Sundays at the Oto, updates

All links have been checked and updated, including those on the New Readers Start Here pages, and some additions made to the lists of websites on British innovative poetry.

There are fresh texts in the two serial publications, Richard Makin's St Leonards, and Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh's, Pistol Tree Poems.

Now added to the site is a page listing the upcoming readings and other poetry events in London.

I am contemplating a reading series at Cafe Oto, taking place monthly on a Sunday afternoon: two poets (plus an open mike), possibly some music. Email me or comment if you feel this is either a bad or a very good idea!

Labels: contemporary British poetry, reading, serials, updates

This is finally uploaded. It is huge. New material is:

John Welch, Yearn Glass
John Wilkinson, six poems
John Lowther, from Stoppages
Dave Rushmer, three poems
sean burn, trans literations
Daniel Andersson, In Time of Empire and Verse
Alistair Noon, At the Atlantic
Innocenza Istarte, eight poems
Michael Lee Johnson, two poems
Dean Nicholson, four poems
Mark Cunningham, five poems
Christopher Mulrooney, three poems
Andrew Baker, Epitaph of Reason
Charles Jason Lee, six poems
Norman Jope, six texts
Fish and Shushan, three poems
Lydia Towsey, six poems
Tom White, three poems
Steve Spence, three poems
Michael Egan, six poems
A Lee Firth, nine poems
Chris Paul, three poems
Richard Kostelanetz, Letter Links
Amos Weisz trans Monika Rinck, six poems
Lucy Harvest Clarke, seven poems
Kevin Doran, three poems
Mark Goodwin, four poems
Christopher Barnes, five poems
Chris Hardy, six poems
Adam Burbage, five poems
Sean Carey, three poems
Richard Barrett, two poems
Scott Thurston, from Momentum
Nick Wayte, two poems
Paul A Green, Voicemail
Iftekhar Sayeed, Engendered Space
RG Gregory, Proverbs of Hell (pdf file)

I hope to have the German texts of the Monika Rinck translations up shortly (waiting to hear from the publisher). I will also update the Links at least to the extent of adding fresh sites.

In the medium term, I have notified my present employer I want out in the summer, and plan to get the project for a major site devoted to publicising, explaining and exploring contemporary British poetry under way finally in the second half of this year. You may have noticed from the material linked to rather than hosted on Great Works I have possession of the domain name www.modernpoetry.org.uk. More will come of this!

Labels: contemporary British poetry, updates, website proposal

I am delighted to make public the New Readers Start Here pages on Great Works, which have taken much of this summer to produce. They are intended as a guide to those who encounter contemporary avant-garde/post avant-garde (or whatever) British poetry, and need some help in understanding it. Or in understanding why it is so culturally sidelined.

Access from the homepage, or directly at http://www.greatworks.org.uk/nrsh/nrsh.html.

Labels: contemporary British poetry, updates, website proposal

(1) New section of Richard Makin's St Leonards

(2) New poems in Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh's epistolary sequence, Pistol Tree Poems

(3) Removal, unfortunately, of the work by Chris Nelson, at his request

Now to get to grips with placing on the site a New Readers Start Here guide.

Labels: updates

I have great pleasure in informing the world that the new issue of Great Works is online, featuring as new work:

Adrian Clarke, from Supplementary Blues
Glenn Bach, from: Atlas Peripatetic
Mark Dickinson, from The Speed of Clouds
James Davies, five poems
Alan Baker, VARIATIONS ON PAINTING A ROOM
James Harvey, four poems
Carrie Etter, from Divining For Starters
Claire Crowther, six poems
Paul Bramley, seven poems
Marc Stein, year two in london, january 2005
Colin Honnor, three poems
Ian Seed, six poems
Innocenza Istarte, ten poems
A S Morgan, Ink
William Garvin, five poems
Daniel Andersson, Moonlit Night (translating Hjalmar Gullberg, Månskensnatt
Arun Gaur, three poems
Tom Hamilton, five poems
Jeffrey Side, five poems
Michael Blackburn, LET'S BUILD A CITY
Martin Jack, five poems
Chris Hardy, seven poems
Tina Bass, three poems
Dean Nicholson, five poems

plus most recent instalments of:

Richard Makin, St Leonards
Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh, Pistol Tree Poems
Giles Goodland, The Brimston Worm (the climax!)

and from the Archives:

Catherine Daly, Six in a Mix (Odds)

I’ll also announce, for anyone in the West Country, that I’m reading with Tupa Snyder on Sunday June 8th at 5 pm, at Ways With Words Festival at Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon. In a yurt.

Labels: reading, updates

2 small-scale updates:
latest monthly section of Richard Makin's non-narrative extended prose sequence St Leonards (to be published next year by Reality Street Editions), plus an addition to C Nelson's latest sequence, Nextup.

Sorry for delay in posting - work a nightmare, with all lecturers made redundant, and all ranked in a set of fake statistics based on newly appointed managers' assessments of our loyalty. I'm in the red zone, proud but threatened. The job gets in the way of Great Works, but it's nice to be able to afford a house to work in, food etc.

Labels: updates

(1) The Links page has been updated. Every link has been checked, and a new category label introduced for those sites still accessible, but completely static. There are in total:

• 121 online magazines and e-publishers


• 94 writers' homepages and blogs


• 20 audio and video sites


• 39 print publishers and magazines


• 7 readings &c


• 33 foci of information


• 4 bookshops and booksellers


• 4 sites with music I like


• 10 unexpected sites

(2) Latest serial instalments of both Richard Makin's
St Leonards, and Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh's Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh, Pistol Tree Poems, are posted.

Labels: updates