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Interview with Dan Holloway

In Conversation on May 1, 2013 at 11:30 am

-Interviewed by Claire Trévien-

Art by Eleanor Leone Bennett (http://eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com/

Art by Eleanor Leone Bennett (http://eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com/

Dan Holloway is the author of several novels and poetry collections, the ringmaster of New Libertines, a touring band of poets. He has set up a new publishing imprint 79 Rat Press to publish his conceptual work, including Evie and Guy a novel in numbers, and curate conceptual literature shows, such as NOTHING TO SAY. As if that weren’t enough, Dan is a prolific blogger, writing among other things about self-publishing, and regularly writes for The Guardian.

CT: You’ve just launched 79 rat press as part of the literary exhibition Nothing to Say, can you tell me a little bit more about what inspired both these things?

DH: 79 rat press has grown organically out of eight cuts gallery, which I have run since 2010, and under which umbrella I’ve published some wonderful books that have had remarkable critical success for such a tiny outfit, such as Penny Goring’s The Zoom Zoom and Cody James’ The Dead Beat. It also hosts The New Libertines and all sorts of other events.

I think I have become aware though that I can make most of a difference through very sharply focussed, very small events and editions. I also wanted to get back to my original intention with eight cuts gallery of something literary based on a model from the art world. As you probably know, I am obsessed with both Modernism and 20th century art, culminating in the Young British Art movement. Tracey Emin is the biggest influence on my own writing, and what I have felt for a long time is that to get people truly talking about what literature can do, we need more events like art’s Freeze and Sensation, and more figures like Jay Jopling and Nick Serota to push challenging literature into the public consciousness. I think the last time that really happened was in the 60s and 70s when Carmen Callil launched Virago and Lawrence Ferlinghetti brought the Beats to the world through City Lights. I’ve always thought of myself as some kind of very weak shadow of Ferlinghetti, the guy behind the scenes who writes himself but whose pleasure is bringing other people to the world.

79 rat press is a body through which to do that – my White Cube as it were – and NOTHING TO SAY  is my first installation.

I am also endlessly infuriated by the lack of ambition in contemporary literature. It is very rare you will meet a writer who admits to wanting to change the world, or even wanting to leave the literary canon a richer and more beautiful thing for future generations. As a self-publisher, I’m used to people at events getting standing ovations for saying they want to get rich, but bustling me into a corner before I embarrass them any further if I start talking about wanting to chip away at patriarchy or wanting to unshackle the voices of the oppressed or provide a loom on which people’s voices can weave themselves into a glorious tapestry or, in fact, pretty much anything that has to do with wanting to create great art (apparently that’s arrogant – or intellectual snobbery – or even worse “rather sweet and we love that we know someone like you but can we get on and talk the grown up talk of how to sell now please” – whereas wanting to sell a stackload of books is “being a savvy entrepreneur”).

So I wanted a place that was unashamedly uncommercial (the exception being that unlike a lot of poetry presses I am paying all contributors an upfront fee) and where the sole focus was on the art. That’s probably enough for now or I’ll have nothing to say (see what I did there?) for question 3.

Veronika von Volkova (http://www.vonvolkova.com)

Veronika von Volkova (http://www.vonvolkova.com)

CT: You’ve written Evie and Guy, a novel written entirely in numbers. What prompted this idea and how did it end up in its final format?

DH: I just noticed I’ve already had 500 words and answering this in full would take twice that. Right, here goes at proving self-publishers can be concise. I’ve wanted to write a novel in numbers for about 3 years. It’s a bit like my Mount Everest – I wanted to do it because it was there. And despite a fair bit of hunting around, I don’t think anyone’s done it yet – which I have to say I find extraordinary.

The project started life as #twentyfoursevendigitalwonderland and was going to be a representation of a day in someone’s life through all the numbers they encountered. It was going to be about the digital world and how we construct our identity in it. But it wouldn’t work. I think the problem was that once I’d explained the idea, I’d kind of done it, so it’s more suitable for something once of my characters might do in a short story (I’m obsessed with writing about conceptual artists – largely because I’d like to have been one and have a whole wardrobe full of ideas for installations I haven’t the skill to make, so I write characters who make them instead – what readers will never pick up is that as I was writing the “longhand” for Evie and Guy, I actually created – in minute detail – seven separate conceptual art exhibitions that they staged between them). For all I am probably known best as the endlessly theoretical/political bar bore of independent literature who will never say “narrative arc” when he could cry false consciousness instead, I am actually a complete sentimentalist. My overriding artistic imperative is the freeing of each individual human spirit to enjoy its own sensuality and experience and express itself sensually in a world full of equally subjective, sensual spirits.

So, my novel would be in numbers, but it also had to be emotionally satisfying. It had to have characters and those characters had to have meaningful, fully-rounded experiences that would trigger readers to discover their own sensuality free from the confines of language. I came to realise more and more that I wanted to use number not language not just because I wanted to create a watercooler moment – in fact, not even to create one – but because actually there was more experiential truth for both character and reader in avoiding language. And those thoughts, combined with the academic work I’m doing at the moment, led me back to feminist interpretations of Lacan, and the fall from sensuality into language, and the desire to create something (what I rather grandiosely tend to call a “poetics of hope”) that would take some tentative steps towards enabling people to experience themselves not conceptually through a language that boxes them, putting them in this category or that category, every single one of them a fiction, but sensually, directly, by jarring them out of the myth that you “have to” or “can only” think of yourself linguistically.

Anyway, Lacan, with his notion of jouissance, the semi-orgasmic purely sensual experience of the self as self, was what gave me the lightbulb moment to make the book a list of two people’s experience of masturbation. And the more I explored the idea, the more it became obvious just how fruitful that could be as an indicator for life events and relationship events – in other words, I’d found a way to create the emotional core I wanted but to squirrel it away safely out of the clutches of language, waiting for each reader to unearth it anew as they read, and offering the possibility of reading as genuinely sensual and pre-linguistic, the first tiny step towards a poetics of hope.

CT: What do you hope people will go away thinking after attending Nothing to Say?

DH: The short and very simple answer is I want people to go away feeling what people felt after they’d been to Sensation. Or what I’d felt after I saw Tracey Emin’s and Steve McQueen’s installations at the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition. Both those exhibits slapped me in the face. Steve McQueen’s Deadpan was my first introduction in the flesh to the power of the Modernist project, and has influenced my own recent conceptual works like “All of These Taxonomies are Political”, a series of 512 almost identical limericks using just the words cock and cunt (what people forget about McQueen’s piece is its roots in comedy – a Buster Keaton sketch – and I loved that playfulness as well as the seriousness, and the way that the combination jarred me, kept pulling me up short, made me think about the structure – so using a limerick as the skeleton for a very serious linguistic exercise in repetition made perfect sense). Tracey Emin smacked me in the gut with a punch that’s left me bruised to this day. What I got from it was very simple – the most ordinary life has a transcendent quality, not because it is transformed into something greater than itself but precisely when it is not transformed – because life in all its messy minutiae IS what is transcendently important. Any art that seeks “the universal” or the general, or to make the everyday eternal is fundamentally deleterious to the human spirit. We give true voice to everything that is most important about each individual human life precisely when we burrow right down to the most insignificant and particular. It’s one reason I positively detest things like the Great American Novel.

I don’t know that I was aware of these aims as I sifted the submissions, but I was aware that certain pieces hit me viscerally, and those were the ones I clung onto.

The shortest answer of all, though would be this – I want people to go away with a heightened sense of their own sensuality. I want people’s lives after NOTHING TO SAY to contain more of their true selves than their lives before. And whilst the title may appear flippant (it was conceived as a response to poets like Geoffrey Hill who think the current generation of underground poets has nothing to say, and also references John Cage’s dictum “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”) but it’s become clearer and clearer that it is also very serious – a life lived experientially really should, in the deepest sense, have no words, just sensuality.

CT: You organize a poetry troupe called the New Libertines, and when I think of your poetry, the image of a flâneur pops up, possibly because of the organic and damaged nature of it. So I was wondering how big an influence symbolist writers, such as Rimbaud, are in your work? I’m thinking especially of poems like Baudelaire’s ‘The Swan’ and its uneasy relationship with urban renewal, in relation to your pamphlet i cannot bring myself to look at walls in case you have graffitied them with love poetry.

DH: Ha! I guess having said I want to be literature’s Jay Jopling I can’t really worm my way out of it when someone thinks about me as a flâneur.

I’m not sure how many of my influences (consciously) ever come from literature. I certainly feel an affinity for Symbolism, but I have always felt more of a conscious influence from art. I love Abstract Expressionism (my first real “artistic moment” was sitting in the Tate in the middle of a room full of Rothko canvases as an eight year old), which I would call a first cousin of Symbolism – though I think I have too much Lacan in my blood to ditch the Abstract Expressionists’ insistence on true expression coming non-verbally, o language as something we have to get around. I guess I’d say Symbolism says that when it comes to language we have to look out of the corner of our peripheral vision, whereas Abstract Expression says that to see we have to close our eyes (there might be a tiny crossover in Expressionist silent film in the 1920s, with directors like F W Murnau). I see Abstract Expressionism as a recent avatar of a form of Neoplatonism that has cropped up through history in the form of the ecstatic mystics and the via negative. There’s a long history that sees language as a hindrance rather than a help to understanding.

CT: We’ve talked in the past of the challenges of being both a live literature producer and a writer, sometimes one leads to neglect of the other. As an outsider you seem to have managed the balancing act: you have two major creative projects recently out (your novel and your show some of these things are beautiful), while also publishing other people’s works and curating events in Festivals nationwide. What’s your secret?

DH: I remember seeing an interview with Alexander McCall Smith in which he was asked exactly that, and his answer was very simple – keep walking the tightrope never look down. I find that a superb philosophy for life (it’s no coincidence that in researching recent works I’ve read a lot about parkour, and Philippe Petit the infamous high wire walker who walked between the Twin Towers). In fact it pretty much exactly sums up everything I’ve been saying about not conceptualising but experiencing yourself. Doing it, of course, is another matter – which is why I’ve also had two major breakdowns since getting into the literature game.

CT: You’re militant about the self-publishing cause, and have rejected publishing deals in the past, why is it so important to you?

DH: In part it’s a result of my own quirky mental state. I get claustrophobic sweats at the thought of a publisher telling me what to write. I had an inkling of it a year or so back when I self-published a thriller that did reasonably well, and all of a sudden people only wanted to talk about me as a thriller writer and I was trying to explain that I wanted to talk about conceptual poetry, slams, lyrical literary novels, post-communist identity politics, pretty much something different every day.

I’ve also sat the other side of the fence, and felt my authors’ pain – but also felt my own at their response to it. That’s one reason I don’t want to be a traditional publisher again but a curator of one-offs – handling the emotional rollercoaster an author goes on over the long term was too emotionally damaging for me – I can’t do it again, and I know I’d do the same to a publisher.

I also believe in self-publishing as a way to bring genuine innovation to readers, and I am deeply disillusioned with a lot of contemporary self-publishing, which is about how authors can make money. Which is fine, and I love popular fiction as much as I love the avant garde, but that’s not really widening readers’ access to life-transforming experiences. So I sort of see it as my duty to be the thorn in the side of self-publishing, reminding people of the amazing things it can do that the mainstream can’t, not for authors but for readers, and in turn I hope that will do a small part to help genuinely innovative writers to keep self-publishing. I have a feeling it makes me deeply unpopular, because it must seem like I’m always sniping form the sidelines. Fortunately in this regard I’ve got a very thick skin because I think it really is important. Readers have to come first, more than even that people and the effect culture can have on their lives has to come first and I hope I will never tire of calling people out when they bleat on about how we should publicise self-publishing as being “as good as” traditional publishing or some other form of stuffing the genuinely revolutionary back into its box. Fortunately also I started self-publishing early, and have been gobby enough for long enough that whilst I’m fully aware a lot of writers’ groups see me as a token artsy guy and are as acutely embarrassed by my presence during “serious” debate as they are rather exhilarated by having someone who does whacky things (though when it comes to it they will still always say “an important self-published book? Hmm, you should try this one, it’s just like 573 books published by Harper Collins you know”), they can’t quite push me out altogether because my tentacles are slightly too long. It makes me feel like the character you always get in an Agatha Christie novel, the black sheep child, usually a woman who does something shady like works in theatre, and drives a sports car and wears trousers who is simultaneously the family’s dark secret and the one everyone looks forward to turning up at the party because they know she’ll say what they always wanted to. That’s a role I can live with very happily.

CT: Finally, what’s next?

Well, to paraphrase Lord Flasheart, what isn’t next? Obviously the NOTHING TO SAY launch is looming (that’s at Stoke Newington Literary Festival on June 8th, followed by a week long exhibition at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore in Oxford that will include an updated mystery play stationed around Oxford, and I will be papering the walls with pages from Evie and Guy), though I have a poetry slam final even before that for which I need two new poems. Then The New Libertines 2013-14 tour is already taking shape.

For me, creatively, the next thing is a novel that interweaves all the characters whose stories I’ve been working on separately for the past 5 years. Ninety Nine Nights of Urban Dogging has all kinds of characters whose lives do (or don’t) overlap over the course of a summer around the death of a philanthropist who made his name delivering aid in the midst of the worst atrocities during the Kosovo crisis. There’s a policewoman who fled Kosovo as a child and has a second life as a dominatrix by night, a street poet who can sense when someone is about to die and tries to capture their last thoughts in poetry, an ageing feminist activist and novelist descending into dementia convinced that the plot of one of her earliest crime novels is actually real, and a group or private school students home for the holidays who discover their parents were part of a paedophile ring.

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In conversation with Anna Percy

In Conversation on January 14, 2013 at 11:15 am

-Interviewed by Claire Trévien-

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Anna Percy was born and educated in Norwich, she gained a Joint Hons BA in Creative Writing and Contemporary Culture from Cumbria Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a Creative writing MA from Manchester University in 2009. She is one half of Stirred Poetry Collective who run a feminist poetry event in Manchester. She is the author of several chapbooks, notably He is in the Stars (2012) and Ghosts at the Dinner Table (2010). She is participating in the Penning Perfumes, which I am co-organizing.

1) First, thanks so much for taking part in Penning Perfumes, it’s great to have you on board. What made you decide to accept the challenge?

I write a lot from art and music and film so I think it was the idea of making poetry from something that isn’t poetry. That’s one of the qualities I find interesting in modern and experimental poetry. It’s also that smell is the strongest link to memory.

It’s a marvellously odd project, I’m so pleased to have been a part of it. Art and poetry should intrigue people.

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2) How would you describe the place of scent in your writing up until now? Has this challenge made you more aware of it?

I have always attempted to use vivid sensory description in my work. I have written some purely smell memory poems and some that use it as it as part of synthesia as a device.

Sensory description is the thing I always impress upon people as being the most important thing for making people feel what you are feeling when I am running workshops. Smell is one of the most visceral like sound it just comes upon you and your brain fires up the memory unasked.

3) It often feels at spoken word nights that there is a pressure for poets to be funny, to the extent where the lines become very blurred between poetry and stand-up comedy. Can you tell me a little about what makes Stirred so different?

Through choosing the guest poets we have chosen who while are picked for their ability to perform poetry effectively are picked largely because they the qualities of poetry we think are important. These are for stirred first and foremost lyrical qualities, innovative use of form, feminist values and surprising use of language. We are a team and know exactly what we are looking for in a guest. I think it is this in part that ups the game of our open mic’ers. We also have a space that is very open to new performers, queer and mental health friendly and this leads to some surprising poetic voices.

4) Somewhat related, but who are your contemporary poetry hero(ine)s?

I love the way Moniza Alvi gently brings in the surreal into her gorgeous poetry in poems like ”I was born in a glove compartment”, I had the great privilege of being taught by Vona Groarke for my MA she writes very tight often short biographical poetry. Steph Pike is a local poet who manages to write beautiful lyrical political poetry, she and Becca Audra Smith’s (my stirred co host) ability to write seriously and well about the inequities that exist in the world inspired me

5) How would you describe the Manchester literary scene, what are your favourite nights?

The scene is vast so you can find events for any kind of poetry you can imagine and its very supportive I’ve sometimes had lovely emails from people checking their event isn’t clashing with mine. We have all kind of festivals that happen the last one Stirred was involved with was Sapphormation we ran a wonderful workshop on lesbian and bisexual women writers. Bad Language is consistently one of the best events around and is packed out. This coming Tuesday is this. Knowing the organisers I expect is to be gloriously political and experimental and raucous. There’s dozens more I could mention like Paradox or the 2nd Sadcore Dadwave event. We are totally spoilt here and its wonderful. I have started up a new purely open event called Shaken that runs the first Sunday of every night running from Fab Cafe which has a sci-fi interior so the theme runs through teh poetry and prose read its been running for several months and attendance keeps going up!

6) Any big projects in the pipeline?

The first Stirred Anthology is coming out this year our first collection of feminist poetry from men and women countrywide which we are very excited about. I have other things to announce later in the year!

Anna Percy will be reading at Penning Perfumes in Manchester on 23rd February. Buy tickets here.

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An Interview with the Editors of ‘Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot’. Part 2.

In Conversation on October 10, 2012 at 10:10 pm

 

-In Virtual Conversation with Claire Trévien-

A three way interview with the editors of the print and ebook anthology Catechism: Poem for Pussy Riot: Sophie Mayer, Sarah Crewe and Mark Burnhope. The poems, were translated into Russian in collaboration with PEN and sent to the band. All funds raised by the anthology go towards Pussy Riot’s legal fund and PEN’s Writers at Risk programme. This is part 2 of our interview with them (part 1 can be found here).

4) Many of the poems generated by this project reclaim or play in some way (ooh-er) with the word Pussy, including yours Sophie and Mark. How do you situate the poem within your wider body of work, is it a natural extension of your interests? Or did you find it surprisingly tricky in some way?

Mark Burnhope: For a split second, I hesitated about using the word ‘vagina’ in a poem. But then I laughed at myself for being a pussy, and all was right in the world. Of course, if anything is right in the world, it’s because of vaginas. They are why we exist. The vagina is a symbol not just of womanhood, but of all life. Patriarchal organised religion is embarrassed about that, but human cultures, folk religions, never have been. Vagina is why I am here, in the world. My mother is the reason I was able to go from disabled baby to teenager to out-and-proud-‘crip’ adult. The vagina is a symbol for everything, any kind of path, including the spiritual. But because it’s embodied, steeped in feminine physicality, it – like nearly everything feminine – has somehow been ransacked, made morally and socially dirty. I enjoy playing with stuff like that in my poems, and I loved watching others do it here.

Sophie Mayer: Lots of poems took on the word ‘pussy,’ and its association of the female genitals with an animal (at once infantile and bestial), while others addressed the words ‘vagina’ (like mine) or ‘cunt.’ As editors, we found ourselves fascinated by the power of cat imagery in contemporary culture; from Aslan to Cheetara to LOLcats to Cat Power (in Amy Key’s brilliant response to the project), there’s such a range of feline associations – and those became part of the bold, funny, angry aspect of ‘pussy,’ as opposed to it being a derogatory term. It wasn’t a straightforward reclamation/re-visioning – it was more kittenish and playful than that.

I’ve described ‘Vagina’ as a feminist Dr. Who episode, a way of engaging (as Sophie Robinson’s ‘Free Pussy’) does, with patriarchal culture’s fear of female genitals as this powerful, alien Other. Lots of science fiction is nakedly, if unintentionally Freudian, with its thrusting rocket ships ‘penetrating’ deep space; so the poem says ‘what if outer space and/or an alien race were a vagina?’. I wrote it standing at the back of a Donut Press reading, partially inspired by Matthew Caley quoting the line from Julia Kristeva that’s in the poem. Lots have magazines have turned it down…

Sarah Crewe: A natural extension of my interests covers it perfectly. And actually, it’s been liberating. I would never have used a word like vulva previously, whereas after this project, i’ve found myself far more engaged with body politic in gender issues. Why is society so fearful of talking about vaginas?

5) Following on from that, were you surprised by some of the poems other poets sent to you?

SM: I was surprised by all of the poems! By the fact that there were any at all. And then by the volume, the variety, the swiftness with which they arrived. By the way that many poets found to be political without being didactic, to be wild and free in their language without being offensive. Several poets remarked, when they sent in poems, that they’d been surprised by their poem – that they’d found a new form, subject, voice or method in writing it, that the project had opened some wellspring or given them permission to speak in a particularly energised, open, intense way.

I was surprised to discover just how strong a spectrum of feminist voices there is in UK and Irish poetry at the moment – it’s totally decentralised; there’s no one magazine, anthology or festival that represents it, and it’s rarely talked about. So it was a delight to discover that it was out there, across emerging and established poets. And that it’s very rich and multifarious, and confident.

SC: The variety both surprised and delighted me. I can’t say any of it shocked me, but seeing how other people responded to the subject matter was just a fantastic project to be a part of.

MB: Yes and no. I was surprised at the sheer volume of stuff sent to us. If by ‘surprised’ you mean shocked, then no. I told myself from the outset that I wasn’t going to be offended. It wasn’t my place to get offended. If I was offended by anything well put, whatever it was, I was the problem. I hoped people would send us a massive range of beauty and debauchery, quietness and rage, seriousness and silliness (that was the kind of book this needed to be: serious writing dressed in a neon balaclava). And they did.

6) Another route poets went down is through music, and I love the layering of sounds in your poem Sarah. I’ll confess that I did not know about Sheela na gigs before reading it, how did the poem impose itself on you?

SC: Thanks so much Claire! I have to say, it’s the most sound based poem I’ve ever done. Curiously I’d been meaning to write about Sheela na gigs for several months but was unsure how to find a way in (insert chuckle here). I was also familiar with the fabulous PJ Harvey song. Then this came up, and I thought it was perfect. The fact it starts with a “she” noise made me want to take it apart and work with each sound from a feminist perspective.

SM: Sarah’s poem, Adrian Slatcher’s Huggy Bear poem, Alison Croggon’s poem (which is a dance), Amy Key’s Cat Power poem, Wayne Burrows’ translation of a Czech pop song, Phill Jupitus’ band name puns: lots of the poems paid tribute to Pussy Riot’s choice of punk-pop as a vehicle for their political expressions.

There’s something too – very much present in the sheela-na-gig and Sarah’s poem – about the dangerous association of women with sound and music: the Sirens, the seductive and emotive qualities of music. If language is supposed to communicate stable, singular sense, then sound derails that suggestively, sets up secondary meanings and associations, subvocalic echoes, makes language sing – which undermines its legislative and executive power. So to make much of the music of language is to contest its use in sentencing and law-making, its rigid legalities.

7) Finally, what do you hope Catechism will achieve? 

SM: Catechism’s being published for free (although donations are very welcome, to be divided equally between the Pussy Riot legal fund and English PEN Writers at Risk) under a Creative Commons license, to which all the contributors have consented: that means the book and its contents can be shared, remixed, translated, and reposted. One conversation on Facebook became, via social media, a project with nearly 150 people involved in it, internationally, in just under three weeks. Retweeting a poem may not make legislative change in Russia: but it is part of a wider spectrum of actions that are taking place to support Pussy Riot. We hope, on the one hand, that the anthology directs attention to the case, and – by being funny and smart and sexy – gets noticed where a news article might not. We also hope that the poems reach the band (we’re sending them by as many routes as we can), and make some small difference to them: to know that there are people, all over the world, thinking of them and praying for them, and carrying forward their commitment to freedom of expression and liberation politics.

The anthology has also begun to do something: to make connections, between the poets involved, between poets and translators, and between poets and English PEN. There’s an incredible sense of focus, determination and generosity that I don’t think any of us knew was out there in this way: either so widespread or so organisable. Further projects, campaigns, protests, conversations, actions and poems are going to emerge from the whirl that is Catechism, extended further as new readers get involved. Each tiny step of speaking more freely, of making an alliance, of saying ‘yes’ to a bold protest against power, brings us closer to the world that Pussy Riot envision in their actions, as a band and as part of the radical art group Voina. Another world is possible: Catechism imagines that world in its words, but was also made by us working as if that world existed.

MB: For me, the most exciting thing about the project hasn’t changed: with any luck, the members of Pussy Riot are going to know we stand with them. Poetry is being put to great use here, to build positive bridges, tear down harmful ones. Obviously it will be nice if everyone thinks everything in Catechism works as poetry in itself, but the goal is bigger. At the end of the day, nothing works in or by itself. Everything is connected. If readers grasp that afresh, or again, Catechism has done its job.

SC: Awareness, largely of how very wrong it is that these women are being held behind bars. I hope it invites people to consider freedom of expression, and to be outraged at how it has been denied in this case. I also hope it achieves what it has done for me. I have never felt so engaged with feminism as a political cause, and I firmly believe the time is now, it needs to be out there. Pussy isn’t a dirty word. Neither is feminism and I don’t want to see either brushed under the carpet for any longer.

I also hope it draws more attention to the work of PEN, who are just a fantastic organisation who work hard for writers who don’t enjoy the level of freedom that we do here.

On a personal level, I’d just love it to bring smiles to the faces of three women who have suffered so much this year. The thought of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich reading just how much people care is extremely humbling to me.

 

 

 

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An Interview with the Editors of ‘Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot’. Part 1.

In Conversation on October 10, 2012 at 9:54 pm

-In Virtual Conversation with Claire Trévien-

A three way interview with the editors of the print and ebook anthology Catechism: Poem for Pussy Riot: Sophie Mayer, Sarah Crewe and Mark Burnhope. The poems, were translated into Russian in collaboration with PEN and sent to the band. All funds raised by the anthology go towards Pussy Riot’s legal fund and PEN’s Writers at Risk programme. This is part 1 of our interview with them (part 2 will follow shortly).

1) First things first, what drew you to the Pussy Riots trial above all other current events? Do you find that their actions have echoes with your own poetry (or poetry in general)?

Sophie Mayer: I came to political consciousness as a teenager, reaching against an orthodox religious upbringing, through riot grrrl and feminist poetry – writers such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Chrystos – so Pussy Riot’s case resonated with both of those, with their daring. Their appeal to a tradition of resistance within the Orthodox church, as the church of the people – and the Virgin Mary as a powerful female figure – was so strong, and so immediate. The vivid colours, words and actions, the sense of riotous humour, the energy of their performance carried so strongly internationally via YouTube. We’re the same generation, sharing access to similar kinds of knowledge and tools; that struck me hard, too.

Mark Burnhope: Well, my poetry does have an equality/civil rights/social justice thread running through it; as a disabled person, ‘advocate’ has become one of my default settings through no choice of my own, I think. But my first involvement in Pussy Riot’s story was as a poet for Catechism. I heard that the plan was to send them a poem anonymously. That was my hook. When Sophie asked me to help edit the final e-book with her and Sarah, I won’t lie, I felt like a hitchhiker, particularly on the cause of feminism. I couldn’t just tick off another social issue box to add to my CV. I called myself a feminist, but didn’t know which writers to read. I knew that by saying ‘I am a feminist’, I was placing myself somewhere on a wide spectrum of opinion and argument. Where was I? I didn’t know.

But I knew some things: 1) Governments shouldn’t use churches as buildings of entrapment. They’re meant to be places of liberation. 2) ‘Blasphemy’ as a legal category is always a misnomer: against the backdrop of a religiously diverse Russia, Pussy Riot’s ‘crime’ was to stage a surprise protest – a prayer – not against God, but against a government taking God’s name in vain, trying to monopolise the religious devotion of the people. Their ‘crime’ was exposing the irony that no one comes to the Virgin Mary, the Mother, except through Putin. Finally, 3) Jesus rioted in the Temple, turned the tables on those who had turned God’s house into a den of thieves. The thieves here were of conviction, conscience and voice, and Putin’s government had a network of dens.

In the short time I’ve worked on Catechism, I’ve become more convinced than ever that whichever rope is being pulled – for sexism, homophobia, racism, ableism – the same patriarchy is holding all the threads together. The poets writing for Catechism have heard the same bell ringing as I have.

Sarah Crewe: I had actually heard of Pussy Riot before as my brother in law is a musician and very politically active with LBGT issues, so to see them go from a band he’d talked about to suddenly being propelled into the news like that was bizarre. I think that four Russian women in a punk band, complete with colour, balaclavas and a shedload of attitude was going to be pretty hard for me to ignore personally. I think, or at least, i hope, the fact that i’m interested in women’s issues, Russia, colour and punk comes through in my own work.

2) Did the project quickly crystallize into its current shape? How did you come up with the idea of having the poems translated into Russian and sent to the band?

SM: EngPussyRiot posted guidelines for how to send a letter to the band in prison. Liv Moss, who organised an amazing fundraiser for Pussy Riot in London on 9th September, shared them on Facebook. I re-posted them and suggested we might send the band poems instead of letters, on the thinking that poems might be able to get through the prison censors more easily that direct letters. Several people jumped on it – then the following day, I invited more. Liv contacted me to say she would be able to assist with getting the letters to the band if I could get them translated into Russian.

That’s when I contacted English PEN, to ask for help finding translators. They immediately said they’d like to support the project by publishing the poem. In about three days, it went from a speculative conversation about sending a few poems to an English PEN-supported and –promoted project. And in about three weeks, it became a book.

SC: I think Sophie’s answer covers this perfectly!

3) What place do politics have in poetry? Is all poetry political, just some more explicitly than others?

SC: I certainly don’t think all poetry is political. I’ve heard people argue that just by participating in a creative medium, the act of making this choice is political, and I’ve also heard the same point being used to suggest that all female poets are feminist by this definition. I can’t agree with either. There’s nothing remotely political about writing a poem about, say, the poet’s last holiday. Many people don’t care for writing about politics, and that’s fine, as long as they don’t jump on a bandwagon claiming to be political on the grounds of being a poet.

In terms of the place politics has in poetry, I think, as with all forms of writing, it’s a perfect opportunity to express concerns and raise issue through an artistic medium. Anything that makes people think has to be a force for good and for positive change. However, I also think that with poetry, the poetry always has to come first, i.e. if the politics are great but the poetry is awful, I can’t ignore that, and I don’t think it helps any cause at all to have what sounds like an immature, inarticulate ranting session masquerading as a poem. Good job Catechism is so brilliant really, haha!

MB: As a reader, I think that the only thing that doesn’t deserve a place in poetry is bad writing. ‘Content’ is up for grabs, and I’m not about to say what shouldn’t be written about (if I did, I would only be revealing what I can’t write about well). As a writer, I think that people too easily use ‘political’ and ‘propagandist’ as synonyms, and they’re not. Everything we write, whether we like it or not, carries what we care about. A poem might wear those things lightly or heavily (and lightly is always better, if you’ve been listening to your poetry tutors) but they’re always there. In that sense at least, poetry is always political. If a poem doesn’t invite possible objections, disagreements, disgusts, neither will it persuade anyone of anything. And if it doesn’t do either, it probably isn’t a poem.

Ultimately, I’ve always doubted ‘Art for Art’s Sake’. If people sometimes sneer at ideological ‘feminism’, it’s because they are sceptical of any single-issue politics – of disability, LGBT, any of that stuff – and to me, ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ smells of another one. Even if all poetry isn’t political, I reckon it all should be useful.

SM: What the case of Pussy Riot shows is that language is political: the case against them was about the words they used, who used them, and where. Poetry works with and in language and symbols: so, for me, poetry is political and activist, in that it engages intensively with the fabric of political discourse, and can resist the way that the powers-that-be insist on stable, singular and exclusive definition – with punitive effect, in the case of Pussy Riot.

I think that Pussy Riot made lots of us realise, with a sudden shock, just how political what we do is – about the risks that writers run when they put words together. Some of the poets in the anthology – poets involved in feminist poetics, disability poetics, or left poetics – actively practice poetry politically; while other poets may have found themselves finding a political voice for the first time.

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An Interview with Lindsey Holland

In Conversation on June 8, 2012 at 1:35 pm

-In Conversation with Claire Trévien-

As regular readers of Sabotage know, Lindsey Holland has been covering my role as poetry editor for the last six months and is therefore my personal hero. Her tenure ends on 15th June, so here is a spotlight on Lindsey’s many projects and her own creative process. Lindsey finished an MA in Writing at the University of Warwick several years ago. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in various magazines and anthologies and her first collection, Particle Soup, is due out later this year with the Knives, Forks, and Spoons Press. She’s the chair and founder member of North West Poets and is currently co-editing its anthology of poetry. She is also one of the poets involved in the Penning Perfumes project. To read more about the project, check out this companion interview with Tim Wells.

1.    What made you decide to take part in the Penning Perfumes project? Were you interested in scents prior to the project?

I was keen to be involved as soon as heard about the project. For some time, I’ve been interested in how we choose to convey multisensory experiences through language. ‘Write about all five senses’ is a common poetry prompt. Every time I’ve encountered it I’ve found myself wondering ‘Why not actually evoke and utilise the senses? Could this be done? What’s left to be said when the senses are already speaking for themselves?’.

My interest in perfume prior to working on the project was rather minimal in that I rarely used it. I’d often bought perfume whilst on holiday and I was aware of how my memory of those places was often closely connected to scents: the perfumes that were popular at the time but also the cuisine, flora, even the buildings. I visited Prague in 2003 and bought Sensi by Georgio Armani simply because it felt like bringing the city home in a bottle. The scent had seemed to be everywhere. The girl at the Marionette Theatre box office was wearing it and I got her to write the name down for me. Now, when I smell it, I think of Don Giovani (the puppet version), smiling twenty-somethings with natural tans (including myself), yellow buildings and my first reading of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, amongst other things. I suppose I’ve been aware of how powerful scent can be for a very long time.

2.    You’ve been writing a poem inspired by an anonymous scent you were given, can you tell me a little bit about your first reaction to the scent?

When it arrived, I left it in the envelope for a day before I opened it. This was partly because I wanted to focus on it with few distractions but also, I think, because I liked the mystery of it. I almost didn’t want to smell it. I was a frightened, I think, that it’d remind me of lace doilies and fake teak furniture. When I did first sniff it, I immediately jotted down every word that came to mind. It initially seemed fruity, sharp and floral. As those notes subsided, I found the perfume much more attractive: rounder, sweeter, still floral but earthier, and a lot more intriguing. There was a moment when it smelt exactly, almost violently, like a medieval hall I used to visit when I was young. It was quite a physical experience.

3.    How was the process of writing this poem for you? I hate the term ‘comfort zone’, but do you feel that it took you away from your usual writing practice, or did you find a way to make it adapt to your style?

It was a combination of these. It definitely took me away from my usual style at first and I had many failed attempts at writing a poem from it. I wanted to be accurate to the scent; there was an element of approaching it like a puzzle and trying to find the ‘right’ answers. I also wanted to move away from that and be true to my experience of the scent. It took me on a journey. I used it in my car, tried it on my daughter, wore it to meetings and sprayed it on my notebook. It never seemed the same twice. After a week, I’d reached a point at which I felt haunted by it. I visited the medieval hall that had suggested itself so strongly and talked to the guides about the smell there. One room in particular, the Great Hall, has a unique scent. In the end, I tried to forget about it for a week or two before writing more failed attempts. The final poem came in a gush of inspiration. Everything I’d been thinking came together and found shape in the way that some of my other poems do. I allowed myself to forget the initial fruity notes in the scent because the other experiences seemed to outweigh them and the body of the perfume was so intriguing.

4.    Did finding out what the perfume was [Ruth Mastenbroek's Eau de Parfum] change your interpretation of it?

Not really, although I did wonder whether I should have pursued the tropical elements a little more. Some of my aborted attempts had drawn on my experiences in Southeast Asia: palm trees, sand, flip flops and mango (I mistook the perfume’s pineapple for this). I found it hard to compromise these images with the roses, wood, a medieval hall and my feeling of being haunted by the fragrance. Because the tropical notes were more fleeting, I decided not to include them. I suppose this comes down to a desire for narrative. Mangos don’t belong in old English houses. In a way, I prioritised sense and atmosphere over absolute accuracy. The perfume didn’t feel abstract to me — I became quite close to it and almost felt as though it were telling me something — so I ruled out that approach. It made me very aware that there are always going to be compromises when you rely on language to convey a sense.

5.    Tell me about your perfume-partner, Kate Williams at Seven Scent, what was that process like?

Kate was amazing. I was struck by her intuition and by the speed at which she works. Her process is different to mine in that she writes very little down, certainly initially. It’s more of a physical process: pulling bottles from shelves, imagining which scents will be needed and trying them together. Or at least, that’s the impression I came away with. I think we both work with images though, whether visual or olfactory. At their essence, poems and perfumes both emerge from thoughts, senses and experiences so I suppose there’s an overlap in the processes of creating them.

I was delighted to learn that Kate creates what we might think of as unpleasant scents. It’s not all about bouquets; she also works with mosh pits. This definitely appeals to me! She sees a lot of subtleties in both language and scents. We talked about the words ‘crumbled’ and ‘coil’ and how, just as there are layers of meaning to each of them, there are also layers of scent.

6.    You’re just about to launch an online magazine. Can you tell me a little bit about this project?

I’m working on this with Melissa Lee-Houghton. It’ll be called ‘Conspirator Magazine’ and we’ll be asking for submissions fairly soon. The focus is on poetry that’s bold and vibrant, that has something to say and doesn’t hold back. It can be inventive, political, scientific, tender or playful but the common factor is that it has to really speak; there has to be a voice.

7.    You’re editing an anthology of poetry about the North West and you’ve also been editing the poetry reviews for Sabotage. What prompted you to make the leap from writer to editor? Does the ‘other side’ give you a new perspective on your own writing?

In my case, I’m not sure that it’s much of a leap. Like a lot of poets, I find it far harder to edit my own poems than I do to edit other people’s. I’ve always felt comfortable discussing writing, and critiquing keeps me mentally active. Poets are often told that in order to write, they must read. I also think they must edit, and not only their own work. It’s all about practise. I suppose I’m also a little addicted to having projects on the go. I like to see ideas come together and to make things happen. In some circumstances, when I see potential, I find it hard to sit back and just watch. The anthology in particular has been a learning curve though. I have renewed respect for editors who spend months trying to correct formatting issues and removing inconsistencies; and that’s before you’ve even considered distribution and marketing. If there’s any leap between editor and writer, I think it’s here. I enjoy the challenge though and it brings variety to my days. I’m excited about it.

8.    When did you first call yourself a poet and to whom?

Perhaps pathetically, I can’t remember, but it was probably on a form of some sort. In conversation, I sometimes still opt for ‘writer’ rather than ‘poet’. Telling people you’re a poet seems to either a) provoke a similar response to the one you might receive if you said you have the plague (concern mixed with a desire to hastily retreat) or b) it results in a discussion of Wordsworth and/or how poor you are. I should probably approach this head-on but I’m usually too flummoxed by the question.

9.    How has the experience of editing the poetry reviews for Sabotage been for you so far? Is it preparing you adequately for reactions to your first collection do you think (tell us about it!)?

It’s been fantastic. I’ve enjoyed not only reading the reviews but spending time going into them in detail: checking grammar and punctuation, searching for photographs of book covers, reading online magazines who’ve requested reviews, all the extra bits of work that most people probably don’t see. I think it’s prepared me for reactions to my own collection quite well. The reviewers I’ve worked with have all been fair, in my opinion, but I know that’s not always the case. I think even the most hardened of editors must dread a very negative, or worse, ignorant review of their own work. 

10.  What projects are in the pipeline for you?

My main project at the moment is the anthology I’m editing, along with Angela Topping and a board of editors, for North West Poets. It’s provisionally titled Sculpted: Poetry of the North West and we have some amazing poets involved in it, of whom I can’t yet say too much. The poems will look at the North West as a region, from its geological beginnings to our contemporary experiences of it, in both urban and rural areas. We’re hoping to be able to fund a series of readings and events throughout the region and we’re working on a lot of exciting partnerships.

I’m also hoping to begin a Creative Writing PhD in September, for which I’ll ‘translate and contemporise’ dragons, witches, giants and other beasts from folklore. I’ll also look at Czech poets (particularly Miroslav Holub), surrealism, archetypes, contemporary events, existentialism and eclecticism.

I do have a few other ideas for projects. They’re currently set to simmer because they’re not quite ready yet. We’ll have to wait and see.

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An Interview with Tim Wells

In Conversation on May 17, 2012 at 6:56 pm

-a virtual conversation with Claire Trévien-

Tim Wells

Hello Tim, and thanks for ‘joining’ me for a quick chat about your projects, and in particular, your involvement in Penning Perfumes, a creative collaboration that pairs poets with perfumers. What made you decide to take part in the Penning Perfumes project? Were you interested in scents prior to the project?

It sounded like an interesting project, definitely something I wouldn’t typically be asked to do. As a burly, tattooed ex-skinhead I just had to be involved!

Prior to this I’d worn Brut, all the chaps did in the 70s. These days I usually wear Eton College cologne, to be honest it reminds me of the poet Hugo Williams. I’m not overly interested in scent, the scent of breakfast, lunch and dinner excluded. I am interested in how scent adds to the transformation of a person: from a humdrum someone to Mr Saturday Night. It seemed quite a Jason King thing to be a part of. Fancy.

You’ve written a poem inspired by an anonymous scent you were given, can you tell me a little bit about your first reaction to the scent?

It took me a while to ‘get’ the scent. Two years working with industrial chemicals and liquid fibreglass hasn’t exactly left me with a sensitive nose. The perfume was warm and I liked it. I wanted to write something about how clothes, a new attitude and scent help to form someone. In my poem it’s someone who’s going out on the pull with a new mindset after a romantic dumping, and certainly not the sort of someone who’d dump by text.

How was the process of writing this poem for you, I hate the term ‘comfort zone’, but do you feel that it took you away from your usual writing practice, or did you find a way to make it adapt to your style?

It did but that was one of the reasons I thought it would be interesting. I deliberately wrote a ‘male’ poem. I used quite a bit of nadsat, the slang from Clockwork Orange. In our  heads, me and my mates are quite often droogs. I’d been wanting to use nadsat in a poem and it suited to show the difference in a new tougher attitude and someone throwing themself into Saturday night for whatever fun that might bring. I often use vernacular and a vocabulary from slang and M25 languages in my work, so it was good to expand on that and use something we don’t actually use for real, but do talk in for a laugh.

Did finding out what the perfume was change your interpretation of it?

No, I was interested in how scent is used to transform your own attitude and focused on that. I liked the mystery of not knowing what it was. I thought it a warm, quite woody fragrance and it turned out to have liquorice in it, so I wasn’t too far off. I liked the ambiguity of whether it was a male or female scent, or even if that mattered.

You’ve been running an underground zine called Rising for many years now. Can you tell me a little bit about it?

I started Rising some 19 years ago as I wasn’t reading enough poetry that I liked. I’m very much from a ‘build it yourself’ background. Initially I was going to do a one-off ‘zine but the copies we did flew out. My next issue is our 55th. I’m pleased that the ‘zine has the best bad reputation in poetry. We have a sense of humour, enjoy punchy poetry and also generally (without it being deliberate) half or more of our writers are women. I never thought that a big deal but it is quite noticeable against many of the po-faced poetry mags. Funny when half of the world is female. I love a passionate, Alexis Colby, Ingrid Pitt, Angela Mao type voice in a poem me. Being a prole myself I’m always happy to have working class people in the ‘zine. The culture of many poetry mags is alien to me, and to many of the poets I print. I’m out and out anti-academic, pro-learning and have a sense of humour. The way forward for the working class isn’t for us to become middle-class, sorry Oxbridge.

What prompted you to make the leap from writer to editor? Does the ‘other side’ give you a new perspective on your own writing?

The main editing job in Rising is seeing how dull the majority of poetry mags are and not being like them. I read a lot of poetry regularly and go to many readings, finding voices that are entertaining, engaging and meaningful is definitely the best bit. It hasn’t really affected my work other than as a reminder to be proud of being a prole and that poetry can be a punch or a kiss but it should always be felt.


I expect you’ve read Jon Stone’s excellent post on poetry tribalism. I know that what I was keen to do with Penning Perfumes was to recruit a varied group of poets, which poetic ‘tribes’ do you feel you belong to? You’ve been notoriously publishing what people like to call ‘page’ and ‘stage’ poets in your zine for many years, do you feel that these distinctions are finally starting to blur?

I was a teenage suedehead, so that’s the tribe I’m happiest with. Even better, these days it’s practically non-existent. Jon made some interesting points. I’ve frequently said the page/stage divide, if it existed, was one constructed by and for administrators and arts professionals. I don’t think intelligent and engaged writers worry about labels. They’ll dip in and out of styles and have fun with them as well as standing styles on their heads. That to me is more important. When writers themselves are putting on gigs, editing anthologies and ‘zines then those distinctions are irrelevant. Leave it to quackademics, admins and desk jockeys to construct labels that make themselves important and, more importantly, funded. Me, I’d much rather earn a few quid and some pints doing real poetry to real people in a decent boozer.


When did you first call yourself a poet and to whom?

I’m happy being called a poet, but it’s a bit like being the murderer at a dinner party. I’m not happy being called a ‘performance poet’. That’s a very loaded term used by toffs to reinforce that I have an accent and am not a ‘pwopah’ poet like what they are. I’m aware of the power of names, I see how they’re used, especially about myself. I’ve been doing live poetry since the late 70s. I started out gigging with reggae and punk bands. After being a poet in front of those audiences everything else is easy, anyway I’m not posh enough to be a comedian.


What projects are in the pipeline for you?

I’ll be gigging as ever, I’m also working on a new collection with Donut Press. I enjoy some of the weirder gigs I get; refereeing inter-gender wrestling for the comedian Simon Munnery, the ‘two dads on a sofa talking about records’ gigs I do with Phill Jupitus, poetry with the reggae sound Tighten Up Crew, so definitely more of those. I’m hoping to be gigging with Pam Ayres, she’s the last person left on my ‘people I’d like to gig with’ list, though hopefully there’ll be more people added to and ticked off. I’ve enjoyed the many gigs at the Betsey Trotwood, easily the top venue for poetry in London. I love gigging in pubs, there’s a lot of drek talked about people not relating to poetry, the problem isn’t people, it’s some of the poets. I’m working on an appreciation of Sei Shonagon for Liane Strauss’ Poets on Poets, I have a flat full of Penguin Classics in the old black jackets. My biggest project is enjoying poetry, wherever it comes from, having great friends and the right enemies. Claire, it’s your round x

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Three Love Poems for the Romantically Disinclined

In Conversation, Uncategorized on February 14, 2012 at 10:30 am

By Betty Herbert

Valentine’s Day: roses, champagne, lace knickers and bad poetry. It’s tempting to ignore the whole rotten lot of it, with its grand, clichéd gestures and craven lack of common sense. After all, if love could be righted just once on an annual basis through an expensive gift, Relate wouldn’t have such a long waiting list.

It’s the empty verbosity of Valentine’s Day that irritates me the most, the requisitioning of undoubtedly great poets to say something shallow and trite – and, worse, the proliferation of doggerel in a million spangly cards.

The problem is, we’re only seeing one aspect of love portrayed here: the blind, besotted kind that we feel at the beginning of a relationship. Those of us who are together in the long-term can’t help but feel that it’s some kind of festival for those who know nothing about love, in all its deeper and darker permutations. Let the children play, we tend to think, but just don’t bother us with your nonsense.

But what if we want to make the best of things this year? What if we want to take the opportunity to say something sincere and pertinent, that reflects the bitter intensities of long-term love, without becoming nauseating? Here are three suggestions.

 

1.     Time

The first thing we might want to say to our lover is about time, and the sense of awe it inspires when we tot up the years we’ve spent together, the percentage of our lives that represents, and the traffic that has passed through our relationship in that period.

Czesław Miłosz’s 1936 poem ‘Encounter’ is a perfect distillation of the effects of time, the bewilderment and ‘wonder’ it inspires. In it, we find a sharp, simple image of life, a shadow of death, and sense that the passing years are a marvel rather than a horror.

Except that it is addressed to ‘my love’, it is nothing like a traditional love poem, but I think that it offers something more profound than that: the knitting together of love with life.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179568

 

2. Sex

Let us turn, now, to a little naughtiness. ‘The Sun Rising’, John Donne’s heartfelt plea to the sun to give him just a little more time in bed with his lover is, on the face of it, akin to the whole ‘young love’ Valentine’s industry that I was lamenting just a few short paragraphs ago.

But what this poem offers for we lifers is a glimpse back at the delicious compulsion of sex, before we became complacent about it (or before it became more of a political act than a pleasurable encounter, depending on how things are going for you).

The Sun Rising is a lascivious cry of rebellion against the universe, whose order dares to overthrow the temporary kingdom that Donne has built with the woman in his bed. ‘Saucy pedantic wretch,’ he scolds, ‘go chide/ Late school-boys and sour prentices.’ There is a wry smile on his lips even as he says it, knowing as he does that he is really asking for an upending of natural order.

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sunrising.htm

 

3. Pain

It is impossible to talk sincerely about love without also acknowledging its bitter underbelly. Those of us who have travelled its course over many years may have cause to reflect on the moments that we have been hurt, and caused hurt; but also on the miracle of resilience in the light of these horrors.

Sarah Maguire’s ‘Spilt Milk’ is poem for those who have an intimate knowledge of atonement, both given and received. This may be an image of the end of a relationship (‘It has rained and rained since you left, the streets black/and muscled with water.’), but there is a strength in knowing that our own relationships have endured such desolate moments.

What’s more, this poem is a defiant assertion of the messiness of adult desire, a repentant je ne regrette rien. Share it with your imperfect lover on this most unrealistic of festivals.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=12216

 

Betty blogs at bettyherbert.com. Her memoir, The 52 Seductions, is published by Headline.

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An interview with Alex MacDonald, curator of Selected Poems

In Conversation on August 5, 2011 at 7:17 pm

-Interviewed by Claire Trevien-

Alex MacDonald is the organizer of Selected Poems, a monthly poetry night at the V&A where invited editors of magazines and anthologies showcase selected authors. He is also a poet in his own right with his work appearing in such things as Claire Askew‘s beautiful chapbook Starry Nights (work inspired by Allen Ginsberg).

Photo from selectedpoems.wordpress.com

Talk us through the origin of Selected Poems – did the venue or the idea come first, or was it an organic collaboration with the V&A? Is there something about the V&A space that works particularly well with poetry?

The idea definitely came first. I had always admired how the people who were passionate about poetry, who organised readings and workshops, would create books themselves. I really wanted to do a series celebrating these publications, the editors behind them and the writers in them.

I visited the V&A Reading Rooms to hear a talk by Jonathan Faires (head book-buyer for the V&A) and I was so impressed by the space. I met Jonathan afterwards and it turned out he was as passionate about the idea of indie books as I was. I set up a meeting with the V&A and proposed the reading series focused on indie poetry books.

The space is intimate enough for a poetry reading and I liked it because it was a different type of venue – one purposely built for browsing books and having a drink, nicely between bar and bookshop, the archetypal poetry hang outs.

In these evenings you put the spotlight on an independent publisher/anthology – in what state would you say the British poetry indie scene is in at the moment? 

Personally I would say that its very strong – I believe the focus will be more centred around the indie scene by next year as Arts Council cuts start to take effect on poetry publishers. A lot of anthologies and publications are coming out of new post grads, so there’s a very ready supply of new talent and ideas. There’s also a lot of good up-and-coming designers who are interested in making poetry books, too.

What are the greatest challenges of hosting a poetry night?

I would say my biggest challenge is keeping it interesting and keeping people interested. So far I have had a lot of good people reading, some wonderful editors and three great headliners who have given longer readings. It gives people a reason to come but making that quality continue is giving them a reason to keep coming back.

Who are your favourite contemporary authors? Do you think it’s necessary for poets to be performers as well as writers?

Two people I think I would constantly go back and see read are Sam Riviere and Emily Berry. They have carved out two very individual poetic styles, but their readings bring out aspects of their work that doesn’t resonate as well on the page. They’re both very witty writers, for example, but this really shows in their readings and works well with an audience in the room.

I wouldn’t say they have to be good performers, but they have to be able to read in a way that supports their style of work. The amount of times I have seen poets who write long detailed poems read piece after piece with no gap or any variation of tone in their voice – it destroys an audience and makes you very apprehensive about finding out more about them.

Who are your main poetic influences?

I would say the three main poets that make me consider my own writing are T.S. Eliot (because he was my first poetry fascination), Paul Celan (because of his sparse and restrained language but rich subjects) and Frank O’Hara (for his intimacy and frivolity). Recently I’ve been reading a lot of David Harsent, Ian Hamilton and Jo Shapcott.

What is your favourite magazines?

Poetry Magazine from Chicago hands down – interesting poetry and essays, amazing letters and their online presence is excellent. For the UK I would say The White Review, The Rialto and Anon are at the top, as well as Poetry Review, but to be honest the most interesting magazines on the UK are all online – Night & Day & Five Dials are great as are the Clinic & Days of Roses blogs.

What question would you have liked me to ask you? Please answer it!

I was wondering whether you asked what my favourite poetry nights were. So to answer it – I would say the London Review of Bookshop’s poetry readings are stellar, always worth going to. Roddy Lumsden’s Broadcast nights at the Betsy Trotwood are worth going to. There is a new series that’s started in the Highgate Oxfam Books store, which I went to last month that had a great line-up, which I would thoroughly recommend.

The next three hosts for Selected Poems are Days of Roses (September), Silkworms Ink (October) & Like Starlings (November). To keep up to date, join the facebook page or follow the twitter account.

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Lee Smith and Claire Trevien interview JT Welsch (Salt Modern Voices Tour)

In Conversation on August 3, 2011 at 4:34 pm

Salt Modern Voices are a series of poetry and fiction pamphlets published by Salt Publishing. This Autumn, several of its authors will be touring the UK and reading in various venues. More info on this can be found on the website. In the lead up to the tour, SMV authors will be interviewing each other and posting the results on their personal websites. To kick this off, Lee Smith and Claire Trévien interview JT Welsch on form, masculinity, and his American heritage.

J.T. Welsch grew up in a small farm town near St. Louis, Missouri, but lives and teaches in Manchester, UK, where he completed a PhD this past year. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbox Manifold, Stand, Boston Review and Manchester Review. Orchids (Salt, 2010) is his first book of poetry. Another pamphlet, Orchestra & Chorus, will be published by Holdfire Press in September 2011.

 

One thing that I’ve noticed, or an impression that I get in any case, is that your poems are tight, tense, bundles of nerves – in the sense that they’re rather compact, with lots of enjambments & not much rhyme. How important is form to you?

I’m glad you think they’re tense and nervy, and that their compactness works on the level of sight and sound, through line-endings and rhyme (or lack thereof, which is a kind of rhyme). I’m quite narrative, but there’s also an impulse towards concretism. So meaning vs. material (both visual and aural) translates to voice vs. body, subject vs. object. Like all good binaries, they collapse into each other with the least scrutiny. For the poem, that means churning until the speech congeals into something as irrefutably thingy as the page, but still retains a sense of human self for the reader to meet. So, yes, a necessarily nervous, anxious self, there but for the grace of form.


The blurb says that Orchids ‘springs from the margins of contemporary masculinity’ which is a lovely phrase in itself (reflecting on the title nicely), I was wondering how you would define masculinity today – how does it differ from say, a decade ago?

 

Well, that’s where orchids come from, right? I look at masculinity, like any identity, for its ironic lack of definition. “Margins” really isn’t the right word, if it’s only understood in opposition to a relatively stable centre. In Sexuality Studies, there’s always a danger of pitting marginalised identities against a dominant norm. You can end up reinforcing that opposition, or else normalizing “queer”, when really, there’s nothing so queer and tenuous as the supposedly typical man. You’ve seen them, hiding in suits or in perverse athletic bodies, clustering together on the weekend. They’re absolutely terrified of being found out. That’s not to deny an imbalance of cultural power, but the strategy of these poems is to expose the general tenuousness, the fragile orchids. Rather than venerate or pin down queer masculinities like Cary Grant’s or James Dean’s, for example, I’m just looking for what it takes to get through the day, endlessly negotiating a combination of roles, all of which are marginal, and none of which you ever completely live up to.

Quite a few of the poems are ekphrastic – how intertwined are the visual and verbal arts would you say?

It’s probably a crutch, but I like to have something to work against. There’s only one translation in the book, but I do a lot of that too. Or I’m almost always playing against other texts or stories. Making a poem out of someone else’s painting feels the same, and as with translation, where I don’t really speak anything but English, it probably helps that I’ve never painted. I guess it’s vicarious. Does that sound glib? It’s the same thing about defining yourself in relation to someone else’s story. The Magritte, Caravaggio, and Monet in the book are doing very different things, but they’re all concerned with the artistic process, I think. As I say, I don’t know from experience, but the visual and verbal arts must be connected in terms of what it means to make something so impractical as “art”. In terms of the objectivity I was talking about, the visual arts have a more obvious thingyness to them. I’m probably latching onto that too.

 

Would you consider yourself a British or an American poet? Which feels more like literary home?  

 

Transatlanticism comes up a few times in the pamphlet, whether with the Pilgrims or my TS Eliot fetish. Never mind his epoch-making poetry – I’m so narcissistic, and much more interested in the fact that he’s from St. Louis and studied in Boston before moving to London, like me. There’s my bad joke that Cary Grant’s accent is like Eliot’s in reverse. But the point is the in-betweenness, or duplicity. I can change my spellings depending on where I’m submitting stuff, but it’s the tenuousness of identity again. Sorry, that’s dodging your practical question, and I’m being disingenuous, since there’s really so little exchange between contemporary British and American poetry. I grew up with the latter, of course, and the sense of experimentation and political engagement still excites me on a gut level. But I’m addicted to the lyricism and formal precision of British and Irish poetry as well. Yes, I’m being incredibly reductive.

 

Following on from that, who are your greatest influences?

 

I don’t know about influence, by my quickest route through the twentieth century goes from W.C. Williams and Eliot, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane and Stevens, through the confessionalists, especially Berryman and Lowell, up through James Merrill and Ashbery, C.K. Williams. Yikes, all American. And these are just poets. I’m at least as derivative of Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Edward Albee, Nabokov, Paul Simon, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

 

How do the poems in Orchids benefit from being published in a pamphlet rather than in a full collection?

 

The obvious thing is the unity and discipline of shorter forms. A pamphlet is more likely to be read in one sitting. I like the way poems nudge or undermine each other in a confined space, and there’s a definite shape to this sequence, although that also threatens to undermine itself. The first poem is called ‘Orchids’, but as a pamphlet, they’re a tidier bouquet of them, I hope.


Can you provide one line from the collection that you think best identifies your style (if one line is impossible, then one stanza).

I feel no duty toward these dishes, even if
I’ll be the last to read them, or their splotches,
and quickly, till each re-surfaces,
more complete than I ever hope to be.

(from ‘Meditations on Washing Up’)

Orchids is available through Salt or Amazon.

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100th Post at Sabotage Reviews and an iPhone app.

In Conversation on June 19, 2011 at 10:10 am

Quite a few benchmarks and new departures have been hit recently: our one year anniversary, the inaugural Saboteur Awards, and now our one hundredth post. The most viewed post features a video of Katie Makkai, the least viewed is this very post.

To celebrate this one hundredth post, why not download our free iphone app here?

It was kindly created by Roy Marmelstein. Please take the time to rate and review it and, of course, do hit us with feedback. What should the app have that it doesn’t yet? What would you find useful?

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