Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Harry Giles’

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Interview: The Inky Fingers Open Mic

In Performance Poetry, Saboteur Awards, Interview on April 27, 2013 at 4:45 pm

- interviewed by James Webster -

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The Inky Fingers Open Mic has been nominated for the Best Regular Spoken Word Night category in this year’s Saboteur Awards. Here, I chat with the Inky Fingers collective about what makes their event unique.

Let’s start with the basics: how long has Inky Fingers Open Mic been running and when/where does it take place?

 We kicked off in October 2010, and we’ve run an open mic on the last Tuesday of every month ever since. Our much-loved home, the Forest Café, has had to move in that time, so the open mic’s moved three times since, but we’re now ensconced at the Forest on 141 Lauriston Place. Keep track of us at http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/!

HG

Who are the Inky Fingers collective and how did the group come into being?

The core collective currently comprises a shifting, non hierarchical, boundlessly energetic group of the following people, found in varying combinations in time and space at any one time: Freddie Alexander (Soapbox), Alec Beattie (Blind Poetics), Mairi Campbell-Jack, Harry Giles (Anatomy), Ioannis Kalkounnis (Fledgling Press), Rachel McCrum (Rally & Broad, Stewed Rhubarb Press), Katherine McMahon (Outspoken), Rose Ritchie (Craigmillar Writers Group), Tracey S. Rosenberg and Agnes Török (Soapbox). And of the group are also involved organising various spoken word and performance events in Edinburgh (specifics in the brackets).

RM

I set up the open mic back in 2010 with another writer named Alice Tarbuck, and when we realised we were onto a good thing we decided to open up the organisation to whoever had the energy and inclination! So it keeps changing and growing with whoever wants to make things happen.

We’ve answered this interview collectively as well, so you can track us by our initials.

HG

The way you describe your open mic seems to make a point of being inclusive, inviting all different kinds of work, genres and types of performance. Why did you decide on that particular focus/ethos?

Open mics grow us, not just through giving us places to practise, but also because they feed us a wonderful diversity of words. We can find out not what one editor or host thinks we want to hear, but what a scrappy, diverse collective wants to say. Open mics are also the fertiliser of a scene, because they create new performers, and that creates new organisers and events. Without them, we wouldn’t have everything else.

When I have new work in new forms I want to try out, open mics are the first place I go to. A well-hosted open mic is warm and welcoming, and the audience is there not to judge you but to enjoy being with you. An open mic gives me the license to not be that good, to get it wrong, to make a mistake and for that to be OK. Without open mics, I’d just perform the same style of thing over and over, because I’d feel too scared to try something I didn’t know worked. And every open mic I go to – literally every one – has at least one person doing something new with words I never expected.

More than that, people do words, do art, for all sorts of different reasons. Some of them want a career. Some of them find it therapeutic. Some of them want to get their anger out. Some of them want you to fall in love with them. Some of them are desperate for a place to speak out in a world that prevents them from speaking. Some of them are in love with beauty, with many different kinds of beauty. Some of them find that only doing art makes them feel good. Some of them don’t even know why they’re doing this. All of this needs a space. All of this should have a space. That’s what an open mic is. Open, and free, always.

HG

And what have the highlights of this inclusivity been? What kinds of really surprising or different performances have emerged from the open mic?

OK, so for me the best moments aren’t always the most surprising or outré. What I really live for is when a writer performs their words into a microphone for the first time. There’s this look they get, this total joy of connection with the audience, that I’m just so grateful for. That makes me keep hosting open mics more than anything else! Supporting people in finding a voice.

That said. Someone once read the instructions on a loudhailer box, that was good. Someone once performed the poems of Marilyn Monroe. There was a great flash-fiction about toothless zombies last month that made me smile. You know, words!

HG

And what do you look for when you book your feature performers and what have some of the highlights been of their sets?

Availability, variety, experimentation. We want to be a stopping point for international poets on tour, as well as a platform for up and coming local talent. Kristiana Rae Colon was a recent pleasure and privilege to put on; last year a big set from Jon Sands and Ken Arkind was joyous.

RM

What have the challenges been in running Inky Fingers in general and the Open Mic in particular?

As we’re all volunteers, sometimes we get tired…the advantage of working as a collective means that there are (usually) just enough of us to cover everything, should one or two people take a(n entirely reasonable) sabbatical.

We run an open platform and you really never know what you’re going to get. We have had, on occasion, difficult performers – drunk, offensive or over running – and it’s the host-of-the-evening’s job to manage that, and the audience… it can get interesting.

RM

What’s the spoken word scene like in Edinburgh in general?

 It’s as dynamic as a circus held inside a dance club within range of an exploding supernova.

Scheduling spoken word events in Edinburgh is notoriously difficult because no matter what night you choose, something else is always happening. A classic example of this was one Tuesday night when Ian Rankin was speaking at the Central Library, Janice Galloway was talking across the street at the National Library of Scotland, and the City of Literature folks were having their monthly salon about five minutes away. But here’s the beauty of it – all three had a good audience.

TSR

You also have a focus on open mic performances being entertaining and engaging, encouraging people to ‘bring their words to life’. Has this been a challenge for some open mic performers?

 It just takes practise and passion, really. As long as you feel it, the more you practise, and the more different kinds of audience you practise with, the better you get. Some people are more nervous, or more over-confident, or have frailer voices, or aren’t used to speaking, but everyone can live their words in time.

HG

If you’re trying to convince someone who’s never heard of the Inky Fingers Open Mic to come to your events then what do you say?

 When I first performed, I remember thinking I would need a whisky or two to get up and do this if I was prepared to be criticised for my offerings. It was not like that at all, in fact the audience couldn’t have been more encouraging. When I finally got to run away from the scene of my first ever slam poetry event my heart still beating fast with nerves and excitement. At one time I still preferred the 5 minute spots. My nerves couldn’t stand it! I stuck with it because I didn’t want to be unstuck from this amazing feeling of performing your own words.

I have been inspired so much over the last two years by so many people. The person that I nervously was changed and became more dramatic. That is because the words that I am expressing are mine. I edit them in my head, I own them. I listen and believe people when they tell me that they enjoy my poetry.

RF

Try it. What do you have to lose? Also, you look lovely today.

RM

And finally, have you heard of Sabotage before and are you pleased to be nominated for a Saboteur award?

 Sabotage provides a platform for some of the most insightful, original reviews out there. Long live Sabotage. And Yes! We’ve been squealing with delight!

RM

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‘Visa Wedding’ by Harry Giles

In Pamphlets on March 6, 2013 at 9:27 am

-Reviewed by Donald Gardner-

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What makes Harry Giles’s first pamphlet of poetry stand out is its concentration and humour. There are not many words wasted here and if this tautness gives the work a bit of a Spartan feel, the wit restores it to warmth. He is a poet of intent and each of these poems seems chosen for its strategic value in the collection, in the sense that he is trying out different things, in form, but also in language-play. Each of these poems has a different form. ‘Hidden Track’ is built of half lines with a blank central space that works as a caesura, while in ‘The Usual’ he uses back slashes to indicate line breaks and ends the poem mid-sentence: ‘… so my history doesn’t meet yours / so I turn to leave / so.’ With his theatrical training (East 15 acting school) and, I believe, a cluster of like-minded poets in St Andrews, he strikes me as having plenty of ‘background’ and his work has a technical maturity which maybe comes from having had plenty of focussed practice.

Giles presents himself as a performance poet, but it’s worth mentioning en passant that ‘performance poetry’ doesn’t always mean free and easy, whatever the ‘does-it-work-as-a-poem-on-the-page?’ crew aver. I particularly liked his super-solemn funny poem ‘Sermon’. It is almost a ready-made, with its sampling of predictable clichés about terrorism from a speech by David Cameron, but Giles’s interventions hijack the speech, so that he can claim it as his own, having turned banality into poem. To give an example of this technique:

‘… There are those
who use love to promote their goal. This is wrong.
There is much muddled thinking about this issue.
We should cut ourselves off from love. Let’s not
fool ourselves. If we sort out all these problems
there will still be love. …’

The effect is hilarious and one can imagine how well it would work, read dead-pan on the stage.

Although Giles is originally from the Orkney Islands, there is a big-city feel about this work. He stresses his outsider mind-set in ‘Visa Wedding # 2’:

‘… in Orkney I’m English;
in England I’m Scottish;
in Scotland, Orcadian –
this slippery, many-coloured tongue
snaps at identity…’.

This in-between state is confirmed by ‘Visa Wedding # 1’, which is the same poem as ‘Visa Wedding # 2 but written in a very personal version of Scottish. The duplication could be seen as a page-filler, but I felt it had a didactic function, that he was making a statement about language; it also struck me that the version in Giles’s piebald, ribald Scottish is a richer mix.

Underlying Giles’s humour there is plenty of passion, as in ‘Brave’, the mid-length Whitmanesque poem, written again in Scottish, with which he closes the book:

‘I sing o a Scotland whit cadna hink of a grander wey tae end a nite as
wi a poke of chips n curry sauce.
whit chacks the date o Bannockburn on Wikipaedia, …’ .

The poem has an epic free-verse line reminiscent of Whitman or Ginsberg, but the detail slows down the rant, turning it into a rich entertaining, thought-provoking mix.

Not all his poems make for a comfortable read however. Take ‘Piercings’, for instance:

‘… The lipring that turned
his pout sullen, hot. The jangle
of earrings I’d buried my face in
as he steel-tracked my heavy
shoulders. The scaffold. The sharp,
shocking stud in his busy tongue.

The poem with its taut five-line stanzas was maybe a bit too literally ‘in your face’ for me and I felt more comfortable with the two poems I described above, and also the other poems in Scots dialect. Giles seems to veer between an intellectual, formal severity and a desire to celebrate, a naughtiness that charms, as in ‘Vows’, where he devises a list of marriage vows that would obviate the need for divorce later on.

‘… I will love you for
as long as I do

I will obey you whenever
it accords with my wishes …’

It’s a cynical spoof on marriage vows but there’s a lightness of touch that lifts it off the page. I enjoyed Giles’s pamphlet, even if some of the work feels a bit as if he’s lashed himself to the mast of anarchism. Finally I noticed that there is also a love interest running through the poems, even where the text affects to be utterly disinterested: ‘I have failed to prove / the null hypothesis / that I do not love you.’ Or, ‘… Whatever: I will hold you, / no matter how bright or black you burn. …’  And how about this?: ‘…  this undesairvt wairmth / o inexplicable luve, …’ The lines are taken, rather out of context, from ‘Brave’. This is the poem that breaks the mould for me, that really says something in a way that is linguistically interesting, making me curious to see what Harry Giles will do next.

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Cerise Press: Fall/Winter 2012-13 (Vol. 4 Issue 11)

In online magazine on January 9, 2013 at 9:33 am

-Reviewed by Harry Giles-

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One of the things I appreciate most about web journals is their architectural nature: where a book is a linearly curated experience, themes developing more or less rationally, a well-built website is more obviously a co-curation between editor and reader, with multiple pathways and directions of reading readily available. Every web journal is more like a room of writings than a book, and that makes it easy to draw parallels to other architectural experiences. Cerise Press‘s regular editions are like stepping into a gorgeous (yet tasteful) salon filled with an intimidatingly erudite and international crowd of writers, talking with each other about a myriad of fascinating and impossible things in at least seven different languages at once.

Cerise curates English language poetry, international poetry in original and English translation, fictions, essays, interviews, reviews and photography and art galleries. I’ll concentrate here on the poetry and fiction; Cerise’s expansive scope would require more than one review to fully cover.

The original English poetry is all from poets based in America, and all from poets with impressive cultural capital: NEA awards, teaching positions, editorships, multiple prizes and major credits. This stands out in a web journal, and, along with Cerise’s elegant design, lends the site unusual gravitas for the internet. In style, there’s also little evidence of alt-lit, Flarf, or other of he more vernacular and searching internet poetry movements, though their influence is present.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s ekphrastic ‘Horse, Rider‘ gives a clear example of the curatorial style: her measured, stately lines strongly summon the poem’s statue, with alliterative devices singing through the stanza:

“Eyes gleam like rabbits’ through the fetlock,
what remains: a leg, fractured in four,
fused and balanced on the hoof’s edge.”

In Malhotra’s elevated diction, the broken statue finds a contradictory wholeness and completeness – the poem is not fractured, does not dwell on what is absent and elusive, but on the statue’s mineral presence, its “Parisian marble left unsanded at the neck / each curl tightly wound.”

Other stand-out moments come in Lightsey Darst’s pair of poems, showing a quite different style. Here there is meaning in the gaps between words and lines, fractured syntax, idiomatic phrases – though these moments are spare and carefully deployed, rather than the structure of each poem. In ‘Swiftly, in an ice mistake‘, for example, creative theology builds to a moment when:

“He withdrew

to make space in which we, remnant, contract
can trace that rivering wind from mars along your spine-bones

never mind.”

If the contemporary American poetry that headlines the collection forms a definite and steady whole, a showcase of dominant local movements, then the translations are a much broader selection, more wide-ranging and eclectic. This edition features new translations from Rilke’s ‘Windows‘ and of Du Mu’s ‘Spring, South of the Yangzi‘, alongside much less well-known poets like Italy’s Francesca Pellegrino and Vietnam’s Phan Nhiên Hạo. It is thus harder to draw conclusions here about Cerise’s role and positioning, save that it is doing much-needed curation in giving space to international voices and styles, which is again particularly unusual in English language web journals. This role is particularly well-performed by excellently-designed presentation, allowing for viewing originals (in good font-sets) alongside translations.

Phan Nhiên Hạo’s poetry, in translation by Hai-Dang Phan, is a highlight for me here, with huge scope and breadth of feeling. Fish in a well presents a simple narrative with multiply-layered meaning:

“When we were young my cousin
caught fish and fried them
some he dropped into the well
its water muddy and shallow
he said: ‘These are the lucky ones’”

The direct description and story-telling here contrasts with the more abstract explorations of other poems, such as the witty ‘Flying a single engine airplane, fuel almost empty, and need to pee‘:

“How much longer can I keep flying
this arthritic airplane looking down at the line of people
waiting for some meat at the Temple of Literature.”

Here inward-looking speculation jars against defective machinery, the stuttering self replayed in a distinctly non-American view of technology as as unwieldy and deficient as the body of the writer.

Unfortunately, not all the translations are as well-introduced as these. While the notes on these poems and on Rilke’s are illuminating, some of the others are more preoccupied with interpreting the writing or saluting stylistic flourishes than explaining national and poetic context. When reading poetry in translation, what I find I need is an understanding of where a poet sits in their national poetics and what their particular use of native language accomplishes artistically and culturally. I found engaging with Chantal Dupuy-Dunier’s and Gleb Shulpyakov’s in particular more difficult for this reason, with the translators perhaps assuming more knowledge on the reader’s part than may be present.

Like the translations, the fictions collected are more eclectic, and also international in outlook. It is peculiarly noticeable that the authors here tend to have less luminous credits than in the poetry section, though the work is also excellent – this, along with the section’s brevity and positioning under “Essays”, leads me to assume that fiction is not Cerise’s particular speciality.

Jozefina Cutura’s  Bosnian-based stories have a simple style that nonetheless conjure distinct images of Bosnian experience. Their directness allows for rather than prevents mystery – rather than using narrative devices to construct literary puzzles, the enigma at the heart of  each is simply what makes people act as they do, as mysterious to the first-person narrator as to anyone. Jadyn DeWald’s short fictions (prose poems , perhaps?) come from an entirely different literary place – cerebral, full of stylistic verve and delight in description, while J.M. Villaverde offers a wry and delightful fable in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams‘. With such variety in only three authors, it would be exciting to see Cerise expand its ambition in this department.

Cerise Press’s work overall sees a more established (and better-resourced) poetry culture – one with firm roots in academia, with its benefits as well as its restrictions – moving into the online sphere. While many contemporary web journals are rooted in digitally native poetics, and driven by youthful and web-driven social currents, Cerise Press brings the work we’d more often expect to find in print journals freely to an online audience. We are lucky to have such a high quality and ambitious publication expanding the reach and abilities of the web journal medium.

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Published Poetry 2012: a Top 10

In End of year round-up on December 10, 2012 at 12:14 am

-Listed by Claire Trévien-

June

As the end of the year approaches, it is customary to attempt round-ups of sorts. Last year, I asked for people’s favourite poetry pamphlets on twitter. This year I will be taking inspiration from last year’s fiction top ten and providing links to the top ten most read published poetry reviews (from this year). If you are looking for gift inspirations or wanting to stumble on something new, you could do worse than take a look at this list.

They are:

1. Four 2011 Poetry Business Prizewinners (Smiths/Doorstop 2012). Reviewed by Sophie Mayer.

2. Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot. Reviewed by Harry Giles.

3. Human Shade by Robert Peake (Lost Horse Press). Reviewed by Martha Sprackland.

4. lapping water by Dan Flore III. Reviewed by Ian Chung.

5. ILK #1. Reviewed by John McGhee.

6. Fleck and the Bank by Rob A. Mackenzie (Salt Publishing). Reviewed by Harry Giles.

7. All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head by Tony Williams (Nine Arches Press). Reviewed by Charles Whalley.

8. Antiphon #1. Reviewed by John McGhee.

9. Poland at the Door by Evelyn Posamentier (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). Reviewed by Ian Chung.

10. Four Rack Press pamphlets. Reviewed by Angela Topping.

Originally published in 2011, Charles Whalley’s review of Megan Fernandes’ Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) would have otherwise appeared third.

There’s a pleasing presence of webzines and self-published work on this list. Group or anthology reviews also appear to have been popular, though I suspect that the popularity of the Smith/Doorstop and Catechism reviews is in part due to their controversial natures – but if so, where is Eireann Lorsung’s thought-provoking meditation on poetic tourism in Colette Sensier’s début pamphlet How Many Camels is too Many?

So far the least viewed review of a poetry publication is Diidxadó by Víctor Terán (Poetry Translation Centre), which seems a shame considering its reviewer, Judi Sutherland, describes it as ‘Pablo Neruda in a bitter mood’, what’s not to love?

If I were to construct my own personal 2012 list free of the constraints of what has been reviewed in Sabotage, and comprising magazines, anthologies, and pamphlets, I should no doubt curse my poor short-term memory. Such a list would undoubtedly include however: Cat Conway’s Static Cling (Dancing Girl Press, being reviewed soon for Sabotage), Agenda vol. 46 no. 4, Azita Ghahreman’s Poems (Poetry Translation Centre), Kayo Chingonyi’s Some Bright Elegance (Salt Publishing), and Adelle Stripe’s Dark Corners of the Land (Blackheath Books). A couple more impose themselves, but would be ineligible since I have poems in them: Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins), Fuselit: Contraption, and Poems in Which. What would be on your list? Please do share in the comments.

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‘Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot’ edited by Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe & Sophie Mayer

In anthology on October 24, 2012 at 10:45 pm

-Reviewed by Harry Giles-

Catechism is a broad, open-hearted project, an anthology of poems for Pussy Riot, to which 110 poets donated their work in solidarity with the imprisoned protest group. As the editors say, it is “a cornucopia of approaches to freedom and to feminism” – a project which glories in and suffers from its wide range in equal measure.

George Szirtes’s questioning introduction claims it is “a political act in poetic form”, while the editors call it an “offertory” – that is, a collecting of alms. This uneasy dichotomy between charity and protest runs throughout the anthology. Szirtes’s benign bemusement is a good case in point: while in a two-sided war he knows he would stand with Pussy Riot, he is unsure what he as an older male British-based poet is doing introducing the anthology, or what the anthology itself is doing when “it is unlikely to affect the course of events in any measurable way”.

Answering this question, on the one hand, are poems like The Gingerbread Tree’s punk visual ‘This is a free riot’, which claims it has been illegally billposted over Manchester. Then there is Sally McAlister’s rousing and up-front The Queendom of Revolution which calls “For freedom // for feminism // For Revolution”, and Chella Quint’s In Vogue, which mocks the fashionable appropriation of Pussy Riot (“This is a serious cause, guys. My look has to rock.”) alongside instructions for illegal solidarity stencilling. These are punk poems, protest poems, political acts.

Scattered throughout are more oblique poems, poems riffing on the punk and feminist themes. Often these are the more experimental works, which could be seen as punking the poetic form. Karen Press’s Strange is a fine example here, as an erasure which pulls from another poem the lines “Strangers ate my cunt / asking a thousand questions as to its use” and “My word. / A rough demand. / I told them it was a weapon”. Jon Stone’s Balaclavas are also delicious: concrete poems in balaclava form in which “I raise the petrol-soaked / air to my lips and drink it”, as if the poet were downing a molotov.

On the other side of the question, there are poems like Tony Walsh’s Because the Poets Know, a simple, almost truistic list of reasons poetry and speech are important, asking us to join him in saying “Your pressure and violence / will beat neither silence /nor soul from a poet.” Similarly, Karen Connelly’s ‘Here my love, listen.’  says of a Pussy Riot heroine:

“you forsake
every weapon but the hand
thrashing a guitar.
And the voice, the unruly voice,
raising its riot
of song.”

These poems are written in solidarity, praise Pussy Riot’s speech act, and simply call for their release – they are more offering than protest. What coherent political platform there is in the anthology thus reduces to a call for freedom of speech. The poems are often also in solidarity with Pussy Riot’s feminism – but rarely are in solidarity with Pussy Riot’s wider political project: a call for autonomist (often armed) insurrection. The riot in Pussy Riot is not a floating signifier: it is a very real riot indeed. Their own words give the lie  to Laurence Ebersole’s “Pussy Riot sing civil – never violent” (Lyrical Catapult):

“Spend a violent day among strong women
Look for scrap on the balcony, raze the pavement”
– Raze the Pavement, Pussy Riot, translated at freepussyriot.org

“The knuckle-duster’s ready, feminism’s sharpened
Take your soup away to Eastern Siberia
So that Riot will become rough enough”
–  Kropotkin-Vodka, Pussy Riot, translated at freepussyriot.org

If the poets honestly face the meaning of Pussy Riot’s words, then this anthology of solidarity rarely stretches farther than the Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s apocryphal Voltaire, which with grim inevitabiltiy we find paraphrased in John Ennis’s For Nadia, Katya, Masha in Prison: “I will defend to the death your right to say what you will”. This is an admirable project, but one that seems a little limp in the face of Pussy Riot’s punk.

Some of the poems understand the situation with gorgeous poetic clarity, as in Charlotte Geater’s Avoid Using the Word ‘Pussy’, which confronts the liberal interpretation of Pussy Riot head on, asking difficult questions:

“the punk rock girl band / stop bitching
whose name we can’t say / i call them bitches
on morning television / because they are bitches

the girls are sinners, they’ve made their
choice against christ & real madonna
what pussies, when riots?”

The uncomfortable reference here is to Pussy Riot’s refusal of Madonna’s and Bjork’s financial solidarity: “We’re flattered, of course, that Madonna and Björk have offered to perform with us. But the only performances we’ll participate in are illegal ones. We refuse to perform as part of the capitalist system, at concerts where they sell tickets.” (Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, August 28th 2012)

But alongside these more riot-aware poems, some of the pieces seem bizarre in the Pussy Riot context. In Veronica Zundel’s Prayer and Pussy Riot Have Three Letters in Common, Mennonites, a fairly archetypically patriarchal religious sect, pray for Pussy Riot’s release  and supposedly “God is smiling”, as if Mennonites and God were not high on Pussy Riot’s hit-list. Or there is Tom Spencer’s Dear Pussy Riot, which reduces the group’s protest to a message to “keep at it, no matter what”, a moral no less asinine for all that the author admits that he is “a prick and a jerk” and “angry and bitter / at my failure to finish this work”.

Amongst these are better but still problematic works, like Jack Underwood’s Our Glorious Leader Putin. This piece is a brilliantly-assembled satire of Putin the macho man and throbbing phallus of oppression, but this is Putin as easy target, Pussy Riot as easy cause celebre – the dictator too internationally loathed, the artists too passionately eloquent. It is uncomfortable to find so many British and Western poets condemnding a despot overseas while forgetting the despots at home. Why, for example, is there no 110-poet feminist anthology calling for Barack Obama to free CeCe Macdonald, the African American transgender woman imprisoned on a suspect manslaughter charge? CeCe is not so easy a cause.  And why does America’s kill-ordering, executive-expanding, citizen-murdering President not appear in Philo Ikonya & Helmuth A. Niederle’s Dictators Never: Roll Call, which approves of riot only when the bogeyman is unambiguous. Obama is not so easy a target, and not just because he is more metrosexual than shirtless Putin. But poetry should not just stand up for easy causes and pick on easy targets – that makes for easy poetry.

In short: Catechism risks, in its liberal call for freedom and human rights, being co-opted by a Western-centric anti-Russian sentiment. Unless poets are careful, we can be led to implying that terrible oppression only occurs “over there”, and never where we are standing. In an anthology as various as Catechism, of course,  some poets do square up to this very problematic. Jeff Hilton’s ‘With my Pussy Riot shorts on let me’ speaks of “the Russian the complicated anonymous / Russian” but is “sick of writing about Russians.” Sandra Alland’s Weapons of Minor Destruction concerns itself as much with domestic oppression as international violence and complicatedly says “All the people like me/ are thanking / all the people like you.” In Alex Macdonald’s Please Welcome to the Stage an apparently Western MC talks of “Where brown bears eat cats in dark alleyways” but says “ladies, please put your hands together /And keep them where we can see them.”

Catechism is uncertain what it is doing, but it is a beautiful book. Working rapidly, the editors have anthologised generosity, anger, satire, experiment, hope, and more. But what it captures is less a coherent outcry, protest, thrown brick or prayer, and more a spectrum analysis of (mostly) British ideas, interpretations and appropriations of Pussy Riot. Nevertheless, while its problematics and inconsistencies are important for all readers to understand, it is probably only curmugeonly anarchists like me who are likely to complain very deeply about them: in the grand liberal tradition, the anthology contains something for everyone, which is perhaps precisely my problem.

Catechism can be downloaded by donation or ordered print-on-demand at http://www.englishpen.org/the-poems-for-pussy-riot-project/. Pussy Riot can be followed and supported at http://freepussyriot.org/. CeCe Madonald can be followed and supported at https://supportcece.wordpress.com/, and if you’d like to work on an anthology for her then Harry would like to hear from you (www.harrygiles.org). The editors of Catechism were interviewed by Sabotage here and here.

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Edinburgh Reviews Day 6 part 2 (06/08/12): Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Tyrone Jones’s Big Heart, Flea Circus Open Slam

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 8, 2012 at 6:53 pm

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

This week Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster, and contrary reviewer Dana Bubulj, are up in Edinburgh taking in the Fringe Festival. While they’re there, they are trying to review as much Spoken Word as they possibly can, as well as a few other things that catch their eye (and fall vaguely within our purview, e.g. stand-up-orienteering)

Midsummer Night’s Dream

This Drunk Tank production set the play in a Post-apocalypse, where the characters come from Athens Bunker and music, clothing and technology seems to have stagnated in the Forties. This as a concept drew us in, and it’s a shame that a lot of its potential was wasted.

Titania’s rendition of ‘Summertime’ was delightfully decadent and the old-style film-competition of the Mechanicals was a nice nod to the era, but the setting wasn’t fully utilised. Oberon’s court were decked as soldiers, using sleep gas at the end, and the ‘lover’s remedy’ was clearly radioactive, but more could have been done to incorporate the theme.

The acting was great and the direction showed some deft touches, really managing to hit all the humour of the play; Helena in particular was fantastic. The Jazz Age wasted fairies of Titania’s court were also a nice take on the otherworldliness of Faerie, and the truculence of Puck was hilarious. As such, it was great fun, if missing some tricks.

Star Rating: 3/5

Midsummer Night’s Dream is on at 5.45 at Paradise in St Augustine’s from 4th-27th Aug (not 13th or 20th)

Richard Tyrone Jones’s Big Heart

Richard Tyrone Jones has been a driving force behind the burgeoning Spoken Word scene at the Fringe this year, and his own offering chronicles his problems with heart failure. From the unexpected beginnings just after his 30th birthday to his near-death experience (spoiler: he didn’t die), the show gives us all the fascinating (and sometimes disgusting) details.

And it is fascinating. The show is like a ventricle clogged with interesting facts and gobbets of medical information and NHS anecdotes (some flattering, some not). You come away with a much enlightened view of how the heart works (or more specifically, doesn’t work) and possibly a sudden sense of paranoia at how badly and suddenly your body can go wrong (encouraged by RTJ’s song detailing all the genetic problems you could inherit, to the tune of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, which is very well done).

There’s not a lot of poetry in the show, but what there is, is well done and Jones’s prose-poem style means some of the poetry goes unnoticed, but certainly enriches the show. And Richard’s illness, hospitalisation and eventual slow recovery is a powerful and inspiring narrative, with a great structure. The show’s use of whimsical drawings that are projected over Jones, creating characters and sets is also really well used and draw the audience into the action.

There’s a lot of black comedy, which may not be to everyone’s taste, and some gross-out humour (that wasn’t really to mine), but it’s well done and fits the show, which ends of a touching piece appreciating life and a final tribute to those with heart problems who won’t recover.

Star Rating: 4/5

Richard Tyrone Jones’s Big Heart is on at 6pm at the Banshee Labyrinth, 4th-25th Aug (Not 13th or 19th)

Flea Circus Open Slam

This night’s slam had good mix of subjects, each allowed 5min with some grace period and called-out scores that often leaves scores higher than needed.

Winning poets (and feature):

The highlight of the night was Katherine McMahon (whose chapbook will soon be reviewed on Sabotage) with a lovely poem about a good break-up turning to friendship. It had some lovely imagery, particularly feelings that “filigreed our veins with time”. With a score of 28, she goes through to the final on 14th August.

Fay Roberts’ ‘Credit where it’s Due’ had a nice thread of money as a debilitating addiction, with a cry to arms against banks full of “electronic mockeries of life”. It was quite quiet, however, and a little stumbly. (27.1)

Harry Giles‘ jazzy Love Poem was also good, with a nice use of rhythm matching frantic feelings and compulsion that only briefly became indistinct. (27)

Feature Jack Heal performed ‘The Relationship’, an origin story of his show’s character (Murderthon reviewed here). It was a bawdy story replete with relentless puns (“she was shrieking like a virgin or some other Madonna song”) that went down well.

Others:

James Webster’s ‘What are you thinking’ (reviewed often) had a nice touch of updating its political content to be more topical, and Lucy Ayrton’s ‘I don’t hate men, I just hate you’ was a fantastic put-down to dismissive men with “big, hard, throbbing degrees in economics”. David Duff’s school disco piece was sweet, with conversation mishaps and first kisses. Least favourite had to be Alec Beattie’s played for laugh poem about squirrels raping pigeons (sigh).

Performance Star Rating: 3/5 (a nice enough mixed bag)
The Night: 4/5 (less formal than most slams and slickly hosted; chaotic fun)

Flea Circus Open Slam is on in the Banshee Labyrinth at 7.30 from 4-14th August.

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‘Fleck and the Bank’ by Rob A. Mackenzie

In Pamphlets on July 12, 2012 at 9:39 am

        -Reviewed by Harry Giles-

 

Rob A. Mackenzie’s wee book, from the Salt Modern Voices series, is a tight, clear, wry piece of wonder, and a great use of the pamphlet form. Its small and simple purpose to “make partial sense” of the author’s absent friend, Fleck is made loud and deep by being set in a credit crunching world of financial illusion where “the flies have started dining out on other flies”.

Fleck works for a bank in Customer Service, and so we get a clear line into the financial crisis and its culture. Predatory bankers appear, even while “Banks everywhere assert their neutrality” repeatedly. This is not political poetry, though, at least not in any direct way everything about the book is indirect, a talking around, which makes the poetry more metaphysical than anything else.

Like the fairground rides “whose humped rails / end at the entrance”, or the internet where “Fleck lunges / from site to site”, the book is characterised by its lack of a centre, by the irreducible absence of its subject. The poems are a series of signs pointing not to Fleck but to other signs, because Fleck himself is not there, is someone of whom even an imagined newscaster’s imagined dress is “more solid than himself”. The author writes of Fleck’s face:

“Smile and it will smile. If you desire conviction, it will lean forward. It responds      sympathetically to self-pity.”

Fleck’s world is alienated in the usual post-modern way: “he has exchanged meals / for shelves of celebrity cookbooks”, his theological interest is in “the Spirit, absent at the crucial moment”. What makes this exciting is not just the language’s loopy precision, but also again the ironic relationship to high finance, where history is:

“supplanted by short-term hysteria
with illiquid complex ghost-assets
in security for other ghost-assets
in security for other ghost-assets
in security for other ghost-assets [...]”

That language is a joy. Mackenzie has a distinctly sad and gentle tone, spiked with occasional wicked puns (“the twin securities / of life assurance and certain death”) and sharp absurdities (“skies of scrambled egg, chicken despair”; the politicians who exchange Y-fronts for animal role-play). This is not all Derridan différance: it is poetry, words taken for a walk, a mellow, mourning dance of language.

If there are any poetic sins here, they are not mortal. There is very occasional overstatement, maybe: the Balmoral sign which is “deflected by a blinding curve [...] into holy darkness”, for example, which seems an awful lot to happen to a set of oversized letters. The theology (in which the author trained) seems to me less clear, less carefully laid out and gestured to, than the post-structuralism. But these are only rare bum notes, and maybe only in my ear, which nevertheless spent most of the time listening to the extraordinary music.

Special too are the centos and cento-likes, of which there are three: poems built by a collage of lines from other authors’ works. Of course the form matches the themes, at least in the ways I’m reading the book, but apart from that they’re stimulating nuggets in themselves. The two pure centos both respond delicately to recent collections by other contemporary Scottish poets: it is exciting to me that the author can find unforced reflections of the book’s own themes in the work of his peers. And the cento is such an unusual form that to see it done so well is a pleasure in itself, quite apart from the thematic coherence.

It is rare to find a collection put together so consistently, and perhaps being a pamphlet helps here, the themes do not get tired. But, on the other hand, the themes themselves are unusual, or at least have unusual clarity: to write more about a specific absence than any real moment or presence seems new to me, especially when achieved with such grace. And there will, as I’ve suggested, be many more ways to read this book than mine, it is far bigger than its size suggests. Fleck couldn’t hope for a better offering, wherever he is.

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Literary Bohemian #14

In Blogzines, Magazine, online magazine, Website on April 6, 2012 at 10:28 am

-Reviewed by Harry Giles-

Literary Bohemian is a lavishly produced webzine, dedicated to ‘travel-inspired writing that transports the reader, non-stop, to Elsewhere’. Its homepage splash is a carefully designed collage of faux-retro travel iconography: luggage tags, postcards, coins and coffee in the hippest of sepia tones. There’s a full and well-organised archive of 14 issues, along with book reviews, travel photos, links to lodgings and destinations – a gorgeous wealth to enjoy. It’s lovingly put together, but I’ll admit the aesthetic irked me. I worried that this would be acquisitive, appropriative, with the destinations checked off like tallies in the bathrooms of backpacker hostels. Would it be travel as bourgeois privilege or aesthetic necessity?

It is, unsurprisingly, those poems which are totally immersed in and part of their locations which stand out most from the latest issue. In Sean Edgley’s ‘Postcard from Belgrade’, for example, the city is built from a complex scatter of images and energetic physical moments – a skinhead ‘erupting in biceps’, a girl with ‘hips poised like the centered swivel of scissors’, a city suffering ‘the sadness of Chinese restaurants’. Edgley patiently constructs his Belgrade through profusion and surprise: there is despair and disrepair here, but it is part of a living, breathing whole.

Athena Kildegaard’s ‘Five Views of Guanajuato’ takes a similar approach, though with more delicacy. The state is seen through five perspectives, and each summons a world experienced by believable people, operating within softly sketched social context. The language is direct but full of care, from clever use of sound (burros ‘sound one slack-jawed heave. / Brave bougainvillea bloom’) to shockingly perfect simile (‘tethered animals sad as beans’).

It is probably no coincidence that the most effective of the narrative pieces, the ‘travelogue’ of Doug Clark’s ‘Love in the Time of Facebook’, succeeds partly because the travel in it is essential, rather than chosen by pins in a map. Here travel is compelled by a love that feels true through its problematic as much as through its expressed emotion, and it has a liveliness that sings in direct, honest prose. (And all this despite an over-glib, ironising title!)

Less successful are those pieces where the speaker’s presence and judgements obscure the sense of place and movement. In Ken Turner’s ‘Crossing the Border Near Lahore’ all is heavy poetry (‘ghost trains groaned through the border / leaking their loads on the rails’) carrying a burden of external observation. Though ‘fear / swelled like a corpse in the sun’ has power, if somewhat laboured, it is  not given enough real context. ‘The birds must know / the history of this place’, but it’s not clear the author does, beyond the guidebook version. The poem is an unloving judgement, rather than a considered exploration. In his ‘Saigon Streets’, as well, every noun needs its overblown verb: ‘shutters snapped’, ‘motorbikes swarm’, and if that’s not enough they swarm ‘like angry bees’.

Similarly, in Sy Margaret Baldwin’s ‘Berlin’ the city feels pre-determined, expected. Despite often felicitous word choice (‘the first hairs of frost in a hard winter’ particularly struck me), pedantic sentences cramp the poem: ‘a waterfall of cheese / that coagulates in a sticky pool at the exact level / of my neck.’ Of course this Berlin is war-torn, is ‘bullet-pocked’, has a ‘bleak construction site’. And of course this is winter. I feel as though I am watching the film of Berlin, not being transported there. Even then, though, Baldwin does close with a sharp indrawn breath of insight – and it is true that even the least moving poems here all still take me at least some of the way.

Even when I was frustrated or bemused by a piece, I was glad to have read it. In Jennifer Faylor’s ‘After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones’, I found the bland procession of unnamed countries (‘dark with foreign numbers’, ‘a beach somewhere’) something of a missed opportunity, but there was still beautiful control of sound and tightly paced revelation. Timothy Kercher’s ‘Lazarus’ is at its most convincing in the description through powerfully disjointed sentences, but less lively when the speaker enters the picture, overplaying the metaphor. ‘A town that is no longer / a husk shucked’ is a perfect, gorgeous image – so why add the lurching ‘like me’? And though in Mary Kovaleski Byrnes’s ‘Christmas Emotion Salad’ the humour may occasionally be too blunt or clunkily idiosyncratic – the opening line has far less subtlety in its cheer than the delicious closer – the poem is still in its own when the food arrives, summoning memories and futures and making my mouth water: sloppy and spicy, it is a delicious, over-seasoned, massive American meal.

The whimsy of travel has a strong place in the collection, especially in the ‘Postcard prose’. Jennifer Faylor’s ‘Buttons’ employs a magical whimsy just on the right side of sickly – occasionally overplayed, but very strong when parsimonious, especially in its closing sentences. In Kirby Wright’s ‘The Enemy Tree’ the playfulness is simpler and blacker, played calm and straight: the prose gives us one image, one experience, very clearly indeed, taking me straight to its strange country. Back in poetry, Jennifer Saunders’s ‘The Changing of the Flowers’ is a thoughtful villanelle whose sweetness and clarity of meaning almost carries it through the stumbles. Perhaps the peculiar off-beats and scattering of not-quite-rhymes are there to highlight the way her ‘immigrant clock runs counter / to this native marking of the time’, but if so it is a too-easy metaphor of form. Nevertheless, it caught me and held me and I returned to rethink the poem more than many of the others.

It is ‘A Photo of Pennsylvania in Fiji’, another Byrnes poem, which most represented the collection for me – this tension between the poems which summon a place with poetry’s magic, and those which obscure it with tendentious metaphor or weighty language. Her Appalachia is reflected in worn signifiers polished to a shine, whether through sound (‘coal / bucket, cricket dusk, hair gray static’) or insight (‘The Saturday church will heave with your wishes’). Her Fiji, though, is barely a sketch, and has the inevitable ‘Children dressed in American t-shirts’. It is as if Fiji is being seen from Appalachia rather than the other way around –  but perhaps that is how we travel: memory more present than observation, which is indeed the poem’s territory.

A mixed bag, then, but one I was delighted to rummage in. I like the motivation of the curation, its direction and drive, and am impressed with the variety and poise of the selection. I’d like to see more focus and commitment from the poets and the editors: what is it really that they want travel poetry and writing to do, and how does a writer really transport us? The best writers here are those fully absorbed in their places – for me the real successes of Literary Bohemian are, of course, when I am truly moved.

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Edinburgh’s International Women’s Day All-Female Slam

In Performance Poetry on March 17, 2012 at 11:16 am

06/03/2012

@ The Banshee Labyrinth

- reviewed by Harry Giles -

A couple of days ago we reviewed the International Women’s Day event Poetry in the Parlour, now continuing this theme Harry Giles reviews another of the plethora of IWD events, this one in Edinburgh – ed

The Event

Poetry slam can be difficult, chaotic, oppressive, liberatory, or many other things besides – but at its best it’s a beautiful expression of poetic community. At its best, slam stops being about competition and starts being a celebration of poetry’s diversity  and of our direct and passionate relationship to an audience.

Edinburgh’s International Women’s Day All-Female Slam, organised by local poet Claire Askew, set out to redress the male bias often prevalent in Scotland’s slam scene (a bias both in numbers competing and in those winning) by showcasing some of the most talented and ambitious of our female poetry talent. The make-up of the slam was also aiming to break down some of the perceived barriers between page and stage, welcoming poets more comfortable on the page into the performance arena.

This deliberate mix led to one of the most surprising and delightful slams I’ve ever attended. Though I attend and compete in slams regularly, I often find myself twitching impatiently through tired forms and heard-it-before comic turns – but every performer at the women’s slam brought something fresh and new to the stage. The audience was packed into the Banshee Labyrinth, filling every available corner, but host Claire Askew’s welcoming enthusiasm made sure everyone was happy. Although her nerves were sometimes clear, she used her passionate belief in the event and warm encouragement of every single poet to ensure that every participant has the best possible time.

The Slam

In the first round, Gayle Smith and Rose Ritchie both gave us comic observations from the tradition of Scots ballad verse. Both performances were rough and unpolished, but had real heart and warmth. Hayley Shields and Theresa Munoz‘s poems, very much from the page-led tradition, had the complexity and richness of imagery we often miss in slam, though again more practised and paced performance might have helped the audience appreciate their depth. Elizabeth Rimmer and Katie Craig both had wit and charm, and performed with enough aplomb to carry the audience with them in true slam style. A surprise performance late in the night from Lara S Williams, although she arrived to late to compete, treated us to a romp through the difficulties of trans-national identity – something that certainly spoke to a diverse audience in a country like Scotland.

Amongst the stand-out performances in the first half, qualifying for the second, Katherine McMahon startled thhe audience with real joy in her delicate but celebratory performances of “Shine” and “Forest”, which drew on the American declamatory slam style as well as a more English simplicity. I’d like to see more texture in her delivery, to help navigate her often quick and surprising poetic moves – she feels like a performer still discovering the power of her rage. Camilla Chen‘s tight, sparse verse journeyed through both snap puns (“Camilla Chen is a vegetable”) and moments of astonishing grace and insight (“Tell me the sea”). All I could wish for here is more time to enjoy the full range of what she’s reading. Tracey S Rosenberg treated us to a dry transatlantic wit with both “Genderclusterfuck” and “So where are you from?” – she found a raconteurish style that kept well away from the cynical comedy prevalent in slams through its audience-focussed warmth, while still revelling in wordplay and cynicism. Sally Evans – the editor of the venerable Poetry Scotland, who it was thus a real delight to find at a slam – gave us poems so rich in meaning and direct intention, so pleasingly funny, that her inexperience with a microphone barely mattered at all.

The Final

Tracey and Camilla both qualified for the final, and both again changed pace to perform some of the most lyrically beautiful moments of the evening. Tracey’s “Miracle”, which she revealed to be a wedding poem, was an extraordinary expression of love, while Camilla’s “France, Spring 2011 (as soundtracked by Badly Drawn Boy)” evoked waves of place, experience, and feeling with sharp, quiet stanzas. Both poets seemed slightly fazed by finding themselves in the slam final – or perhaps it was simply tiredness from the many highs of the evening. Nevertheless, it was a real pleasure to hear these last performances.

The star of the night, though, and its eventual winner, was Rachel McCrum, whose frank and resounding poems captivated the audience every time. “Are the Kids Alright?” reflected on urban unrest and violence with an enquiring and passionate concern, while “Last Night Ashore” delivered timely reflections on masculinity and poetry. Her finest turn was “Broad”, for me the highlight of the night, which moving journey through the working female bodies of the poet and her mother. This performance, in the first round, held every breath in the room: a poet talking simply, directly and beautifully about her own experience of her body while she stands just a few feet away from you is just the kind of extraordinary magic that slam at its best can work.

The Allies

Alongside these great female talents, Claire had invited a number of local male performers (including myself – see the disclosure below) to be sacrifical poets, or warm-up acts, before each round. The male performers took this opportunity to express their solidarity, and both performed with great aplomb. Matt McDonald‘s devastating poem on male shame, “Open Letter to a Rapist”, was delivered with an unrushed quiet sincerity and written with honesty and, astonishingly, tenderness: it was a highlight of the evening for many.

Colin McGuire‘s exploration of Glasgow’s queer masculine identity, “Filthy Man” brought the house down multiple times per minute – but had real depth too. The decision to include male performers was important to the integrity of he slam – it demonstrated quite clearly that this was about celebrating diversity rather than separating female poets somehow, and allowed men to vocally express their support for the slam

Colin’s set saw an extraordinary expression of just how strong the sense of solidarity and community in the venue was. Earlier in the evening, Rose Ritchie had been forced to leave the stage when, as has happened to so many slam poets, nerves claimed her memory of her poem: Colin used his own stage time to welcome her back to the stage to perform the poem she had left unfinished, which she did brilliantly.

It’s hard to say whether this slam was so exciting just because it was an all-female slam. Certainly, a sense of purpose and solidarity united the audience behind every performer, and gave each performer a definite support and welcome to play to. Certainly, a slam setting out to improve diversity will always have a better chance of surprising us with something fresh. But in the end, the success is down to something much more basic: great performers, speaking directly to the audience with skill, style and originality. That’s something that every slam needs. I hope the legacy of the first all-women’s slam is that we see it more.

Claire Askew’s own reflections on the event can be found here and here.

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