Brain Detox

 It's not only our bodies that undergo a glut of inertia and unhealthy torpor during Christmas; our mental faculties can also face a kind of catatonic shutdown under the weight of endless repeats and festive specials on TV, Roy Wood, Noddy Holder and all the other anthems churned out on a mind-numbing loop, the logorrhoeic reiteration of banal cliches and marketing slogans thinly disguised as messages of Christian goodwill. Geoffrey Hill might now resemble a grouchy Santa Claus, but what was that old line of his about "wild Christmas": "What is that but the soul's winter sleep?" I also like this obstreperous chunk of early Christopher Middleton:
                                      " Shit
                                        On
                                        You,
                                        Mother.
                                        All I wanted was out:
                                        To be free
                                        From your festoons
                                        Of plastic
                                        Everlasting
                                        Christmas cards."  ('The Hero, On Culture')

  I had fun, sure, and it was great to spend time with my son and wider family. But also good to get the brain back in gear with some challenging reading whose intellectual rigor seems to counteract the prevailing mood of self-indulgent sloth. Robert Sheppard on Middleton, for example, in The Wolf 31 is a superb delineation of this poet's unique and far-reaching approach towards poetic form, with particular reference to the essay 'Reflections on a Viking Prow'. Sheppard's enthusiasm and willingness to draw significant principles from Middleton's theories echoes my own post on the essay from last December, No Longer A Mere Blob.   


    Andrew Duncan's piece about his critical explorations of contemporary British poetry - 'Lost Time is not Found Again' - communicates an insistence parallel on the need for an impersonal poetic, a seeing beyond the glib appraisal of a period by merely looking at its few most acclaimed poets. Similarly, Jerome Rothenberg is a figure whose tenacious endeavour over many years has been (in seminal anthologies like Technicians of the Sacred) to bring to light poetic voices well outside the literary mainstream and its predilection for male, white, university-educated liberal-humanists: the interview with Rothenberg in this edition of The Wolf demonstrates how active and tireless this under-appreciated project remains.


    The magazine also contains my review of Hill's Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, by far the most difficult text of this kind I've had to write. As a point of comparison there's an excellent, illuminating review of the same book by Karl O'Hanlon in the new Blackbox Manifold, where you can also find interesting poems by Helen Tookey, Allen Fisher and Karthika Nair.


   Also worth a prolonged look is the online journal Prac Crit edited by Sarah Howe - its title presumably a nod to IA Richards, not a bad figure to revaluate. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Tim Donnelly conducted by Dai George and Olli Hazzard's intricate, beguiling interpretation of 'Last Dream of Light Released from Sea-Ports' from The Cloud Corporation.
 

Holiday Reading

        Karthika Nair                                

   The heatwave this week has coincided with the start of my summer holiday so I've been revelling in a rare sense of untrammelled reading and writing-time, often on the balcony with the sun on my face. Like most teachers and parents, I'm also celebrating the news that Michael Gove is no longer allowed to dismantle our education system by reverting it back to his own hubristic version of a private school classocracy from the 1930s where only English authors are studied (ie. not even any Irish, Welsh or Scottish ones), only English history is taught and the arts are sidelined in favour of more utilitarian subjects - is that so different to the "narrow monoculture" the Islamic faith academies he ordained then disowned have been villified for?
   Among other things, I've been dipping into the new edition of The Wolf, whose wonderful opening poem by Karthika Nair is a potent blast of strange, estranging language; the nested, protean form of Sophie Mayer's prose-poem 'Silence,Singing', incorporating criticism, history and autobiography in a compelling assemblage, also stood out for me. There are thought-provoking reviews of Muriel Rukeyser's Selected and a collection of the envelope-poems of Emily Dickinson (this also by Sophie Mayer) - in both cases convincing me that these are books I need to acquire.
   I also took receipt of Soapboxes, a new KFS pamphlet by Wolf editor James Byrne. In it he turns his hand to the somewhat disregarded genre of the political satire, excoriating with savage wit both the media-saturated, hyper-commodified banality of Little England and the bible-wielding, war-mongering American Far-Right personified by Sarah Palin. With Pound's scabrous Hell Cantos as a reference-point, Byrne elaborates a powerful invective in a time of wholesale political disaffection and apathy.
    Byrne's clearly been writing intensively of late as he also has two full collections forthcoming later in the year, one from his UK publisher Arc (White Coins) and one from US imprint Tupelo Press (Everything That is Broken Up Dances). An intriguing sampler of work from these books can be read in the new Blackbox Manifold 12, alongside poetry by Zoe Skoulding and Kelvin Corcoran:
  http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/ 
  

Burying The Year

                                                                


Deryn Rees-Jones

 If you're looking for something to read as a distraction from the grotesque ordeal of Xmas shopping  - or stuck at home like me with this horrible noro-bug that's doing the rounds - try the latest online edition of New Welsh Review (98). It's a remarkably diverse and substantial gathering, laced with ideas and politics to spice up the literary offerings; a brilliant refutation of Richard Dawkins' atheistic bullyings, for example, a travel-piece on Havana, and a rescusitation of the brilliantly-named Welsh prose-writer Oliver Onions. I have a review of Deryn Rees-Jones' strikingly elegiac Seren volume Burying the Wren right at the end, certainly the most moving book of poems I've read this year.
   The round-up of the year edition of The Wire magazine ('Rewind 2012: The Year in Underground Music') is also well worth checking out, whatever your musical allegiances. Mostly alerts me to all the interesting stuff that has passed me by this year. Are their tastes softening perhaps? Bryan Ferry is featured on the Invisible Jukebox and I never thought I'd see a new Bob Dylan album at no.7 on the Releases of the Year rundown...
   Also just got a link to the new Blackbox Manifold, another trove of strong writing with poems by John Peck, Carrie Etter, John Wilkinson and Ian Seed and a lengthy appreciation of Peter Robinson.

Long Poem Update

  Pleased to receive Long Poem Magazine 7 in the post this week, a handsome and elegant publication I was proud to find my longish piece 'The Night-Keeper' in. One might wonder at the spate of sonnet-sequences the editors have included, somewhat stretching the definition of what constitutes a long poem (and surely yet another version of Sonnets to Orpheus joins a now overcrowded market). But like Blackbox Manifold, the interest in more expansive forms than the 20-line personal-lyric 'epiphanies' which the majority of magazines and ezines trade exclusively in can only be welcomed, gesturing towards an ambitiousness, substance and prolonged attention-span we definitely need more of.

Spring Blackbox

The new number of the excellent Blackbox Manifold is now 'live' @:

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/

Any publication that juxtaposes Ron Silliman and Matthew Sweeney should be applauded for its critical inclusivity.

In the Box

Pleased to see I have extracts from a sequence of short poems called Time and Motion Studies appearing in the new edition of the excellent 'online forum' Blackbox Manifold':

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/

There's an exciting range of poetry on there with some quite distinguished names (Sharon Olds, George Szirtes, Susan Wicks). What marks Blackbox out from other e-zines/magazines is their unusual interest in "innovative poetry that has prose, narrative or sequences in its sights." In other words, a determination to avoid the prevailing dominance of what James Byrne (in a Wolf editorial a while ago) called the "postage-stamp poem", that short, neat, undemanding lyric-poem invariably autobiographical or anecdotal in nature with which we are all only too familiar and which indicates the habitual lack of ambition and imagination so much mainstream poetry is prey to.