Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Sophie Mayer’

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Binders full of Women

In anthology, Saboteur Awards on April 7, 2013 at 12:43 am

-Reviewed by Joan Standwick-binders-of-women-image

Binders full of women was originally a limited-edition chapbook edited by Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe created in response to Mitt Romney’s ill-advised comment (which now has its own Wikipedia page!) These lovingly glitter-glued chapbooks have now sold-out, but the chapbook is available digitally for free, with the option to donate to two charities, Rape Crisis UK or the Michael Causer Foundation, the original recipients of the money raised by the physical chapbooks. Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe are no strangers to creating poetry projects in response to current events, earlier that year they also edited, along with Mark Burnhope, an anthology with PEN in support of Pussy Riot. Since then, Mark Burnhope and Sophie Mayer (along with Daniel Sluman) have launched Fit for Work: Poets against ATOS, a webzine with a focus on disability in all its forms, and a campaigning agenda.

There is no doubt that these are all worthwhile causes, but does it make for good poetry? Poetry that too overtly displays its agenda can be at risk of being preachy, or not slanted enough. Fortunately, Binders full of women is engaging on all levels. First one has to mention the fabulous punk-aesthetic to this chapbook, with its ripped-from-zine images plastered on the cover, and actual mini-rings binding it together. The editor’s foreword is delightfully quirky, a flow-chart of its creation, a  visual brainstorm of its purpose. This sets the tone for the poetry which is by turns funny, experimental, gut-wrenching. Take Sarah Crewe’s opening poem ‘Performance’ which simply, yet effectively, bolds different parts of the word ‘performance’ within its poem:

‘carmela, he bought you a pear. it matches your hips. chimes with your womb in parenthesis. a guns scrapes the wall and the bathtub enamel. your silence is perfect. your acquiesce perpetrates a wife’s anonymity in the script.’

It is a stealthy and deadly method of raging against silent acceptance, that avoids the easy comfortableness of a one-sided depiction.

The subjects vary from intimate moments to large political acts. There is rage at cumulative acts of patriarchal repression, such as the pressure to shave: ‘Tights were not an option, / in the same way that gravity exists’ (Rowena Knight, ‘Razor’). From this theme emerges also Steph Pike’s joyous ‘We Will not be Deodorised’:

‘take your fashion, your body fascism
your plucking and shaving

[…]

we rejoice in fat and muscle and hair
we stink of blood and sweat and piss
we will not be deodorised
we reek of the ocean deep hot hunger of our lovers’ cunts
we will not smell of the sanitised chemistry of your misoginy’

A poem that reminds me of Catechism and indeed it ends ‘we are pussies. we riot’. Chella Quint writes a love poem ‘To the Leaking Girl’, perhaps my favourite poem about periods (and in fact it appears to have been first published in a zine dedicated to menstruation poetry, something else I didn’t know), which sees a girl reclaim an accident and turn it into laughter.

There is darker material too, exploration of unhealthy domestic situations, as in Sarah Hesketh’s ‘The Adulturer Teaches his Wife to Swim’ who writes of her imagining ‘his hands in her hair — / getting the magic out’. Michelle McGrane’s ‘A Girl Like That’ is a brutal depiction of rape culture: ‘the cheeky / cunt had it coming’, as is Jacqueline Saphra’s ‘Spunk’, which rightfully condemns today’s still too prevalent attitude of victim-blaming when it comes to rape.

This is a comforting and discomforting chapbook, in all the right ways. Discomforting enough to make you want to stand up and fight for improvement. Comforting enough that I wish I had been in possession of it as a teenager. This is poetry for chanting and cradling, and long may it live.

 

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Oxford Poetry XIV.2 (Winter 2012)

In Magazine on February 13, 2013 at 12:46 am

photo (19)

-Reviewed by Claire Trévien-

It’s a compliment to say that Oxford Poetry, one of the oldest poetry magazines of its kind (113 years old to be precise), does not look its age. The cover may be quietly unassuming, in a vintage picnic basket kind of way, but the list of contributors reads like a who’s who of the Next Big Thing (with some exceptions, such as Fiona Sampson who, we can agree, is no longer emerging). Just like a previous generation of poets centred around the workshops of Michael Donaghy, many of these are regulars at Roddy Lumsden’s Poetry School workshop.

This leads naturally to another compliment, that in spite of there being a sense that this grouping of poets are all part of the same ‘pack’, there is no uniformity of voice. No one could accuse Sophie Mayer and Matthew Hollis’ poems of being too similar in tone, form, or subject. Nevertheless, some themes do emerge, reflecting the tastes of editors Lavinia Singer and Aime Williams, for storytelling and still lives. Still lives here is meant as freeze-framing of a particular time, as epitomized by Daniel W.K. Lee’s ‘The Way we Wore Young’ whose snapshot of 1995 America erects cultural and time barriers, pelting information like a Windows screensaver from which a killer last line emerges. On the storytelling side, Emily Hasler’s poem ‘What Gretel Knows’ is a stand-out, a delightfully dark take on the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, set out in long barbed lines:

‘Gretel knows, put a girl in water and she’ll drown; boil it;
and she’ll cook. Gretel knows there’s no salvation; only storage,’

Each line powers forward scattering on the way clashing registers: part dark incantation, part childish glee, part sweary delicious humour. It’s an exhilarating trip, relying on our pre-knowledge of the tale to transform it into a larger meditation on these archetypal characters all ‘obsessed with our stomachs’.

Not all poems are exceptional, a number try to deal with historical or fictitious events but struggle to bring added interest to the table. For instance, Ben Parker and Alex Niven’s reports from unknown places feel insubstantial, though the latter has turns of phrase that add colour to the depictions: ‘Warriors were / expunged from the phonebook’ and ‘Friends withered and sank’, he writes. Parker’s ‘From the Histories I’ would have perhaps benefited from being partnered with his more intriguing poem ‘From the Histories II’ (also from his pamphlet, reviewed here by James Webster), which reveals the limitations of Oxford Poetry‘s current one poem format. As a standalone, however, there is little of interest in the language though the premise shows promise:

‘Conflicting reports were delivered daily
from the city of high walls and no gates.
The crops were flourishing even
as the wells came up dry.’

Also disappointing is Fiona Sampson’s ‘The Night-Drive’, a poem which doesn’t add anything to its title save for the blossom which hangs ‘hallucinatory / in darkness, beside the road’. Perhaps most frustrating with these poems is that there is no active ‘flaw’ within them, but they are unsatisfyingly straightforward descriptive poems lacking in intent or purpose.

Thankfully, there is no lack of exciting poetry elsewhere in this journal which more than makes up for this. Indeed, there are more standout poems than can fit in this review, such as Sophie Mayer’s intoxicating flight of fancy ‘The Mayer’, or Dai George’s ‘My Peace, the Ornament’, which begins with a delightfully playful description of the invasion of noise into his flat from ‘the witless bus and incontinent van /unloading on the kerb’ before ziplining the reader, along with the narrator ‘to days when childhood’s brain / was a rammed junction.’ Other favourites include a creative translation by Sophie Collins of Astrid Lampe, and Caleb Klaces’ ‘An Agreement’, whose elastic mixture of theatrics, birds and claustrophobia is set playfully on the page making the eyes leap from line to line.

Meanwhile Phillip Crymble shows what it means to take a risk; his poem ‘Brogue’ flirts with disaster with its bordering-on-cliché definitions. Taken individually its sentences feel frustratingly predictable, but they build up into an intriguing exploration of language and identity for today’s third culture kid:

‘All over. Meaning lost or gone. A local idiom that speaks
of disappointment. When asked it’s here I say I’m from.

All over. Meaning don’t belong. An orphan with no mother
tongue. The aspirated consonants of Ulster. Low-mouthed

vowel sounds. A confederacy of opposites.’

Where Crymble plays on simple expressions to create a complex tableau, John Canfield’s ‘Amortisation’ prefers to borrow from the ‘”Jargon Buster’ of a commercial property developer’ to create a humourously obscure take on a relationship:

‘Real trust exempts participants both
from growth and service. The exchange is total
return earned over a specific period
and often expressed at the beginning of the year.
Turnover. Yield.’

By turns conservative and experimental, modern and old-fashioned, this issue of Oxford Poetry is designed to please everyone, which won’t be to the taste of everyone, but who are we to point fingers at an institution for having democratic tastes?

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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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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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Four 2011 Poetry Business Prizewinners (Smith/Doorstop 2012)

In Pamphlets on September 4, 2012 at 4:00 pm

-Reviewed by Sophie Mayer-

The four 2011 Poetry Business prize-winning pamphlets, chosen by Carol-Ann Duffy and published by Smith/Doorstop, set out their ambitious stall in their titles: Kim Moore wonders If We Could Speak Like Wolves; Julie Mellor imagines Breathing Through Our Bones; Suzannah Evans names our Confusion Species; and Rosie Shepperd looks, paradigmatically, for That so-easy thing. These are prize-winning, widely-published poets, three of them with degrees in Creative Writing, whose titles suggest the range and facility of their verse. Given the career trajectories of previous Poetry Business pamphleteers, these four poets seem destined for prominence in British poetry. Their concern with the relationship between the human and the natural world, engaged via a combination of poetic impressionism and scientific vocabularies, reflects a dominant trend in the British mainstream, as does the ability of all four poets to shift from a modern use of conventional poetic mise-en-page (left margin stanzaic poetry in prosaic syntax and punctuation, rhymed or half-rhymed) to modernist mise-en-page such as prose poems and breath lines.

All the familiar modes are here, particularly the confessional rendered oblique by thick description à la O’Hara. Shepperd’s ‘I start to understand yellow,’ a poem for her grandmother, not only rhymes ‘Jensen’ and ‘less than,’ for an inappropriately Bacharach and David feel, but builds its affect from the exoticism of casuarinas and Verna lemons that she associates with her grandmother’s memory. Also common are the lightly surreal persona poems that speak for the supposedly mute, whether archaeological remains or animals. Perhaps in imitation of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mushrooms’, these poems often take the first person plural voice. But whereas Plath’s poem uses the plural to imagine the plural singularity of fungal consciousness as alternate to human, Mellors’ ‘Blackberries’ and Evans’ ‘Swallows’ use it as a workshop exercise. Morever, Evans’ poem revisits the pre-Darwinian theory that swallows overwintered in Britain: hard not to read this as a denial of migration and global interconnection.

‘That so-easy thing’ seems – across these pamphlets – to be taking the Western relationship between poetic self and world for granted, among other returns to the mood and mode of pre-twentieth century poetry. Animals are allegories, analogies, metaphors: the wolves in ‘If We Could Speak Like Wolves’ disappear into a metaphor for a human heteronormative relationship, as the poem concludes that were wolfish behaviour (described in anthropomorphic terms such as ‘grace’) possible between humans:

 

…then we could agree
a role for each of us, more complicated
than alpha, more simple than marriage.

 

These are the wolves of Jack London: Others who offer moral lessons to humans (an outdated mode of thought exposed in Evans’ ‘North,’ in which a – presumably – EuroWestern woman receives a classic Dances with Wolves epiphany by living with the Sami, who are presented as dislocated from history, having “lost the future tense”). Moore’s poem’s romanticised yearning reinstates a sharp difference between (and therefore hierarchy of) human (EuroWestern) and animal (non-EuroWestern) that is simplistic, and deeply problematic.

Alongside these unstated, persistent ‘Lyrical Ballad’ values are the poems’ (again unstated) adherence to Wordsworth’s ‘natural language of men.’ ‘If We Could Speak Like Wolves’ ‘imitation’ of wolfspeech (biting, smell) is told, rather than being shown through an apprehension or analogisation of wolfspeech that might alter poetic dictioning. Apart from the decision to eschew capital letters and all but the final period, the poem proceeds syntactically. Even Shepperd, who is least committed to the left margin, replicates the prosody of the middlebrow novel, with Sauvignons and beach holidays conveyed to the reader via direct statement and reported speech, reproduced in such a way as to suggest depth can be mined from their banalities. ‘For a while, let this be enough,’ her collection ends.

It’s that kind of bathetic understatement that repeats throughout these collections, undercutting their apparent ambition by remanding them in the space of the conversational, the domestic – more properly, the bourgeois – the familiar. All familiar charges against women’s poetry that are awkward to repeat, given that all four poets are female, and selected by Duffy, a path-breaking poet of female experience. Julie Mellors comes closest to the radical charge of Duffy’s daring – her crafty, precise speaking of the unspoken – particularly in ‘Autobiography,’ a poem that half-rhymes sister, grandmother, lover, another, Jack the Ripper, supper, mattress, ulsters to end:

 
… I’m the daughter
in this history of mothers.
 

Strong and clear – but also a re-statement of the material of the poem, an explanation of what it has already given us through its careful form. Closure, whether oblique or over-stated, is another trait common to these poems: the desire to deliver meaning directly to the reader omits the possibility of ambiguity across the body of the poem, and particularly at its conclusion.

‘Tell the truth, but tell it slant,’ Emily Dickinson famously wrote. Her poems were embedded in the domestic and natural worlds – and continue to scintillate by engaging the familiar through language that forces the reader to look again, to look anew, and to re-think relation. It wasn’t good business for Dickinson, who barely published in her lifetime. Conversely, these pamphlets are definitely poetry business: each of the poets has a firm grasp of the contemporary, and oft-garlanded, neo-Romantic mode, massed in careful observation and a strong commitment to a singular, unambiguous poetic truth stated in the clearest possible language. But the world is complex, fractious, ambiguous and open-ended: the gift of sight is present, but it needs to be extended beyond the surfaced neatness of these poems.

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‘Aqua Rosa’ by Sarah Crewe

In Pamphlets on July 18, 2012 at 9:20 am

-Reviewed by Sophie Mayer-

‘it’s a port and i’m a girl’

There, in the final line of Sarah Crewe’s poem ‘grebes do alice at albert dock,’ is the heart of this collection: the playful tensions between the world and the poet, between the city (Liverpool) and its inhabitants, between concrete reality and literary transfigurations, between Victorian imperial grandeur and pop culture weirdness. The speaker is Carroll’s Alice ‘on a Grace Slick mission,’ a Carrollian riddle that asks: how can a grebe (freshwater diving bird) be like the curious anti-heroine of Victorian childhood made curioser still through the mirror of the 60s rock diva who renewed her? Ways and means of being a girl collide and condense. Alice is a figure of the English poetic tradition of riddles, and Crewe – like her iconic heroine – favours ‘time saving in dark reflection’ rather than the closure of a worked-through, workshopped metaphor poem, or the colloquial chat of much contemporary lyric.

Alice is both girl and port, a welcoming harbour for Crewe’s concerns. She re-emerges through the mirror as ‘An Alice to a lucid glare’ in ‘Alice Through Obsidian’, one of two poems in the chapbook commissioned by Dr. Camilla Priede for the Rock Museum in Sheffield. The other, opening poem ‘Axe Actual’ makes merry both with the dual meaning of rock (mineral and music), and also with the juxtaposition of (hard) stone and (soft) femininity, imagining the axe describing itself, in a rather Björk-like way, as a ‘cryptocrystalline … Queen of the Stone Age / Mammoth bone blood and bouffant hair.’ This is poetry to rock out to.

This vivid, swift linguistic intelligence is the collection’s hallmark: there’s a physicality to the vocabulary and the figures Crewe chooses for thought-language and its movement. From its title onwards, the collection’s second poem ‘17 Seconds, Four Doors Down’ speeds irresistibly towards the reader with its description of ‘The boy [Bruce] Lee,’ again mixing figures of masculinity with a sense of camp joie de vivre in virtuosity:

Your mother cannot watch.

Barefoot bolt. Grove gazelle.

Leopard boy belts gilted safari.

Prince of Cats spins his own

The split lines echo and evoke Lee’s classic ‘Leg-kicks diagonal’ pose, as well as the rapid-eye motion of watching choreographed fights on screen. The rest of the collection holds mainly to the right-hand margin, bar two skilled prose poems that mash up memory, architecture and cultural icons to create densely collaged anti-postcards that, like Rachel Whiteread’s tippexed and hole-punched postcards (examples here), use their frame to make us rethink how we inhabit and imagine places.

The closing prose poem ‘My grandmother as Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King Liverpool’ brings to a climax the collection’s insistence on remembering the lost, marginalised and dead with the irreverence with which they lived, rather than the sentimentality too often insisted on. ‘Spiky bridesmaid’ starts the poem, punning visually on the trappings of marriage, the art of the crucifixion and the architectural embellishments of the cathedral. In its brisk, assonant observation, Crewe’s phrasing refuses such ornamentation. Sometimes, as in love poem ‘such trouble’, this insistent simplicity risks both vagueness and blandness: ‘perfect place of / beauty in mist’ does not convince.

Subjects more specific than kisses keep the poet’s eye sharp and tongue sharper. Injecting political wit into a consideration of colour in ‘Spectrum,’ Crewe enters the chromatic territory of poet Anna Mendlessohn, whose pen name (Grace Lake) and chapbook titles such as Viola Tricolor suggest the significance of colour terms as a way of parsing the politics of language. Crewe’s ‘Spectrum’ (in which orange is glossed as ‘Victor placed in / Yulia plaited headlock’, referring to the ongoing political crisis in the Ukraine) leads into a sequence that takes up the gift of Rosa Luxemburg’s name to play through the pink and red resonances of Luxemburg’s Marxist feminism. In ‘rosa luxemburg’s ghost on a free forum’ Rosa, or her contemporary online avatar, is named a ‘shop steward blood bride’, at once dressed for a protest march and to take part in Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre. The usually separate cultures of the hard Left and the uncanny feminine are re-united, as they were in Luxemburg’s pioneering feminist writing.

Crewe’s ‘scouse elf terrorist / spartacus siren’ kicks off in her ‘red fem booties’, working through the warm shades and their binarised meanings (life/death, the feminine/the warlike, the political/the sentimental) that are the book’s signature. The book cover exhibits Dorothy’s red shoes; Alice encounters (or perhaps becomes) the Red Queen; hard stone and soft girl again blur into each other in ‘Rose Quartz,’ where the stone is deliciously described as ‘pink pearl clitoral’. ‘it’s a port and i’m a girl’: the world is a hard given, inlet and outlet, rough and tumble – but as rosa, the poet’s alter or persona, writes to performance poet puma perl, ‘to be / thought of as trouble makes me tingle.’ With that superb line-break, Aqua Rosa continues the brilliance of Luxemburg, Lake and Crewe’s grandmother: girls remaking the world with the click of their heels.

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Political: A Gender @ the Royal Vauxhall Tavern 01/09/11

In Performance Poetry on September 7, 2011 at 1:21 pm

-Reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj-

‘The Cutlery Drawer’: a project raising funds for charities through music, cabaret and poetry events.

‘Political: A Gender’ : their second event, in aid of the charity Gendered Intelligence. With all performances interacting with the themes of gender, sexuality, queerness and trans issues, it featured comedy, burlesque, music and, of course, poetry, and was somewhat excellent.

Gendered Intelligence: A community interest company who run youth clubs, camping trips and provide guidance and advice in schools for anyone who has questions over their identity or gender. Finn Greig from GI gave a very elucidating talk on the activities of the charity, highlighting the good work they do, how inclusive they are, while making sure to enthusiastically thank Hel and the team, and generally coming across as a lovely human being.

Fabulous: The performances, audience and organisers.

Host:

  • Hosting was Hel Gurney, the driving force behind Cutlery Drawer and from who’s fertile brain the idea for Political: A Gender leapt and was also the night’s charming host, and is generally a fabulous and engaging activist.
  • Their hosting style was endearing, engaging and full of warmth for the delicious melting pot of acts on display.

The Poets:

  • Elaine O’Neill was horrifyingly erudite. Her mixture of humour, eloquence, emotion and wordplay was a winning combination.
  • Her poems well elegantly phrased, from appropriately transcendent thoughts on the multiple meanings of trans (culminating in ‘Optimus Primary Transexual’), to collections of acronyms seamlessly segued in ‘Acrophobia’, before losing me in verdant natural imagery. She then tied me up in clever wordplay while giving me advice about doctors and concluded with a deliciously subversive poem about sexuality and cake.
  • Roz Friggin’ Kaveney  is a legend. One of the premier commentators of pop (and geek) culture, a trans activist and writer of no small repute. A member of the Midnight Rose science fiction collective and a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship.
  • She performed a plethora of poems; a touching, haunting and glamorously brave tribute to Steve Frances and drag gone by was followed by her Sappho interpretation, its sometimes staccato painful language matching its sentiment perfectly. She broke this up with a poem she feels she’ll be remembered for ‘a poem about [her] cunt’ that was a visceral confirmation of identity tied up in a tender sensuality, which contrasted to her gently heart-breaking vignette of a relationship ending, of a love that ‘just won’t do’. She mixes poems about objectification that both point out the subjects allure while remaining conscious of its own voyeurism with incredibly sweet poems about her partner with its love of ordinary things at night time.
  • What stood out for me in her enjoyable set were her pieces on Amy Winehouse (Blues 5) where she describes the singer’s voice as ‘both the rose and the thorns’ encouraging us to ‘listen to each song, she lives in those’ and her 18th Century fictional narrative poem that had a feminist queer-gendered Kill Bill/Sweeney Todd cycle of revenge vibe to it.
  • Hel Gurney: Fun fact, I witnessed this poet’s first ever performance and reviewed the second. And Hel’s come on leaps and bounds since that first night.
  • ‘Exhibitionism’ was an engaging start with its simple repetitions, humour and knowingly indulgent introspection, moving on to ‘First Snowfall in the Village’ which was idyllically short and sweet. ‘Men’s Seas’ made a personal progression sound universal, whilst being very funny and ‘Picture of my Love’, about a snap carried with you on a phone was adorable. ‘Nec Femina Dice Nec Puer’ the last Hel performed is a typical example of this poet’s style. At once contemporary and classical, mundane and mythological, it toys with time, space and gender.
  • But my favourites of Hel’s poems were firstly the poem on ‘the person you were and are no longer’, a memory of a person who was fearless, was sure of themselves and their future, a reader, fighter, explorer of all things immaterial. And how that person can diverge from the person you are and become a stranger that on occasion you ‘flicker though like the ghost of flame’. And secondly Hel’s poem on feminism ‘Gender Rubble’ (with particular reference to the odious Julie Bindel and the excellent Judith Butler) a poem on how gender roles can be used to stifle you, but also as almost boundless expression and variation, culminating in the desire to ‘make gender a Kaleidescope.’
  • Sophie Mayer had no poems about meerkats (despite numerous audience requests).
  • She started with ‘Bourgeois Foreskin’ (apparently read at Louise Bourgeois’s funeral) a poem that presented the penis as a handbag containing the decadent and ruined detritus and archaeology of a life. She continued the penis-theme with ‘A Brief History of the Deely Bopper’ (those little headbands with antennae that stick out) that was this broad-ranging list through time, all steeped in historical decadence.
  • A poem followed on Medusa, re-imagined as an intersex cabaret-style performer, who’s still, y’know, a gorgon. It charts her accelerated puberty all ‘hairs and nipples everywhere’ as she’s ‘sprouting like a Venus Flytrap’. It’s a hissing, open wound of a poem, revelling in its neo-classical grotesque. ‘XO the 5th Sea-Nymph-ony’ was a fun pun of a title, backed up by plenty of deft aquatic language, making for nautical poetic fun. ‘When Our Lips Meet Together’ was a slightly fractured, list-poem, the focus floating in and out of different snapshots of lips doing different things together which went well with the sultry, luscious and clever ‘Sapphic Cookbook’.
  • Jo Johnson’s first poem were in a conversational style, first using childhood sports to point out sexism and highlighting the flaws in believing we live in a ‘post-feminist society’ and stressing why feminism’s still so important. Poems about unsuccessful kind were them mixed with a list of annoyances at political apathy and unchallenged bad behaviour: engaging, earnest and thoughtful stuff.
  • The last poet was James Webster. Yes, that’s me. Rather than reviewing myself I’d just like to mention what fun it was performing here. The crowd were lovely, seemed amused by my first poem (‘M.C.W.A.S.P.S.M.’), I think were relatively engaged by my second (‘That’s So Straight’) and were amazing for my third (‘The Sea, The Limpet, The Mer and Me’) coming right up to the stage making for a really intimate performance. So much fun.

The non-poetical acts were also awesome:

  • Lashings of Ginger Beer Time had a wonderful collection of radical feminist songs, sketches and burlesque. Successfully satirising Gok Wan, Disney’s heteronormative nature, ‘anti-obesity’ campaigns, Daily Mail’s perceptions of lesbians, and was generally an amazing celebration of diversity in gender, sexuality and queerness.
  • Sally Outen performed some amazing stand-up comedy. Starting from her own experiences and ranging all the way to the hilarious wrongness that is the book ‘Duncton Wood’ (which seems to be essentially Mole-porn), she was hilarious.
  • Jason Barker: Very funny comedy on the menstrual cycle performed in a ‘uterus’ costume.
  • And Naith Payton was a somewhat lovable comedian. His sketchy material was overcome by his engaging nature.
Overall a great night, entertainment, intelligent discourse and lots of lovely people. I highly recommend you check out the next Cutlery Drawer event.

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Pocket Spellbook vs Coin Opera

In anthology on November 21, 2010 at 3:19 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

Dr Fulminare is an excommunicated alchemist who gathers together poems and drawings so that they can be printed by his minions at Sidekick Books. Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone take credit as editors (minions), but in the shadow of the domineering literary persona that is Dr Fulminare. As such, Dr Fulminare seems chiefly responsible for these two micro-anthologies: Pocket Spellbook and Coin Opera.

In one, he has persuaded poets and artists to contribute work on a theme of magic. In the other, he has trapped a group of poets in the near future and released them in return for poems inspired by computer games.

I’ve decided to place the micro-anthologies in a head-to-head fight. It’s like Street Fighter, but with added elements of The Legend of Zelda.

In the red corner…Pocket Spellbook…

As an alchemist interested in publishing, Dr Fulminare would naturally want to produce a spellbook. Like most fighters, Pocket Spellbook talks itself up, in this case as a collection of poems geared toward performing magic – spells and incantations, that sort of thing.

Instead of spells with practical outcomes, however, Pocket Spellbook contains poems and drawings related to magic – some more so than others – and that lack of following through may prove a weakness. For example, Rowyda Amin’s ‘Spell for Calling Out River Horses’ describes riding a river horse, rather than providing the spell used. On the opposite page, Alexandra Lazar’s drawing ‘Wave’ is obviously connected to the river horse, but also fails to land the punch and connect with the fight that Pocket Spellbook talks; it’s not the most fitting of the drawings (see instead Oliver Townsend’s work for eerie, magical illustrations).

That slight disappointment aside, Dr Fulminare’s Pocket Spellbook successfully exposes the magic to be found in everyday life, and within each of us non-magical folk. Seemingly mundane events are invested with a magical quality, like the rolling of dice in Ian McLachlan’s ‘Unpredictability Charm’. Declan Ryan’s ‘Spell for Forgetting’ is exquisite and clever, undermining its stated purpose at every opportunity, and reminding readers of how life gets in the way of any easy/magical solutions. Its description of a break-up and the attempt to move on is heartbreaking, bittersweet and beautiful:

‘Do not note the duck-egg blue

of her iris as she turns from you, tame Basilisk,

the strobes under her skin which blink ridicule

at stars.’

The narrator notes the eyes even as he tells himself not to, recognising the power they once had over him: this is spell, poem and acute observation of life. Coin Opera struggles to match it.

Luke Kennard’s heavyweight ‘Antidote to Curses #1-17, being a reinstigation of free will following its suspension’ also goes a long way to highlighting the everyday magic that people are capable of. The poem starts as a long and complicated spell, but the magic comes in the final moment of self-assertion, not in any of the pointless tasks assigned along the way. Kennard’s writing (with its dry humour and footnotes) is not unlike Susannah Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which also applies a quaint, almost Victorian, tone to the modern day and manages to make magic credible. Such moments allow the Pocket Spellbook to punch above its weight in this contest.

In the blue corner…Coin Opera…

In style, Coin Opera follows the computer game format much more effectively than Pocket Spellbook follows the spellbook format, and has the upper hand there. The reader is welcomed with ‘Player 1 Get Ready!’ and is enticed further with other arcade game-style captions at suitable points.

Coin Opera‘s special moves are also better than Pocket Spellbook‘s: the graphic layout of some of the poems ties them in with the computer format and takes them up to a whole new level (no pun intended). Check out Julia Bird’s ‘For my Brother, Relentlessly’ for a poetic/graphic representation of arcade classic Space Invaders and a title that fully justifies a poetic use of the comma.

The reliance on computer games for content is perhaps the greatest weakness Coin Opera suffers. Some of the poems require more than a passing knowledge of gaming to be really grasped. Ross Sutherland’s Street Fighter poems make it fairly easy by quoting the game’s manual, but poems like ‘An Epic’s Chromatic Scale’ by Amy Key – though it strikes a pleasant aural tone – drop a clutch of obscure references. There’s also a distinct bias toward games of the 1980s, which the younger gamer/reader might not recognise. This renders Coin Opera light on its feet and vulnerable to a knock-out blow.

Coin Opera‘s sucker punch is packed by Sutherland’s ‘E. Honda’, based around the Street Fighter Sumo wrestler of the same name. It’s a short poem that captures the essence of the moment it describes: the ‘peace before battle’, the calm before the storm, and creates a sentimental poignancy with an internal haiku before leaving the reader with the image of the fighter heading out alone to face his opponent and the crowds.

Let’s get ready to rumble!

Although both of Dr Fulminare’s micro-anthologies are nimble little things with cute footwork, Coin Opera is a fairly hit-and-miss affair – a good technical fighter, but lacking the weight and consistency of Pocket Spellbook. On a good day, Coin Opera could take Pocket Spellbook (maybe with a special move or two), but seven times out of ten the champion’s belt is going to go to Pocket Spellbook.

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