Poems For Sale

   Due to the proverbial 'technical hitches' (in this case a euphemism for a frank lack of internet know-how), I've just realised that the Paypal button I added to this blog allowing people to purchase copies of Human Form hasn't been working.
  So I'm officially relaunching it now - the book is now available for the reduced price of £7.99 directly from me and with free UK postage and packaging. You can also contact me at: oliverdixon91@gmail.com
  Here's a taster from the book, including the lines Tom Chivers adds to the page about Human Form on the Penned in the Margins website:   
 

        THE DURATION

So many things have come apart

in my hands or somehow gone astray

they could form a museum,                                                                  

a mausoleum of errings and shortfalls.

Like the one we drifted into when at a loss

that unrepeatable afternoon

we explored the historical market-town

in the rain. The vitrines of stuffed curiosities –

faded hoopoe with its punkish mohawk,

a pangolin like an outsize fir-cone

 endowed with limbs – amounted you said

to a ‘colonial mortuary’. The crude diorama

of a blacksmith’s forge – ventriloquist’s dummy

about to smite a horse-shoe while his wife

 and child look blankly on – was so unlife-like,

I wondered what a diorama of our lives

might resemble, a tableau vivant of Post-Everything

Ennui: mannequins of the three of us

watching adverts, waiting for the sky to clear,

my finger poised to hazard a futile suggestion

(like exploring an historical market-town)-

locked into our stances for the duration. 

Blackout: A Poem from Human Form

Like patient abrasion of a dug-out artefact

brittled with age, to grasp what’s come to light,

you chafe the jaded Swan Vesta across

its worn sandpaper-page – in that dank

yellow box the crumbly duds outweigh

the live. We hunch around you in mumbling

suspense, like Neanderthals at their first glimpse

of fire. At last, a cursive scribble detonates

with a sound like Velcro unseaming.

 

We recoil a touch, as you stoop, and communicate

the momentary, palm-cupped flame to a candle:

a glow-worm sacrificed to a glow-animal.

 

That abrupt blackout – moments before,

as though the whole house fell unconscious -

had you rooting through cupboards, rifling drawers

like an intruder to unearth these instruments

of sight, locating the children through a sonar

of name-calls and blindman’s-buff gropings.

 

Soon enough, the living-room’s ushered back

as a woozy apparition coaxed from tea-lights,

eery for a moment as a séance

or Hall of Rest. But someone’s prised out

a November sparkler or two, crackling-bright

and acrid: they arc-weld the candle-haloes together

and sear a blurred initial on your retina.

 

Bereaved of TV, we soon lope to bed, probing

with torch-beam the wraith-mobbed corridor

of the stairs. I colonise the freezing sheets

inch by inch, resisting awhile the liminal dreams

that muster in the frostscapes on our window,

afraid to miss the sleep-balm of your last Goodnight;

then burrowing deeper, mining for warm,

I replay my body’s initial unclenching

in the vivid, tactile blackness of your womb.

                                                        First published in Human Form, March 2013

Poem with Restored Footnote

The following poem appears in Human Form, where considerations of space meant it was published without what seems to me this essential footnote:

LAST LIVING SPEAKER

               I

(Royal Free Hospital, London, 2009)

After the stroke, English words

escaped you, like a coop

of cacophonous birds

you’d failed to tame.

The dialect of your distant

infancy – that landscape

of stifled voices - re-emerges

in their wake: revenant

of a long-

dead language,

it possesses and reclaims

your abandoned tongue.

 

              II

(Von Humboldt’s Expedition, Venezuela, 1800)

‘In a cage

             hardly permitting

his dog-eared, blue

       -and-yellow pinions

           to extend

we came upon Angel

       in the tribal village

hard by the Orinoco,

                      kidnapped trophy

of their enemies’

           last demise.

From the beak

        of a macaw

I heard at last

             the cut-off tongue

of the Atures; met

     the mournful,

                             gummy eye

               of the oracle-bird

through whose mouth

                           so many voices

are now thrown.’

 

 

Footnote: Without factual precedent Part I yokes the phenomena of stroke-victims’ reversion to a mother tongue they may not have spoken in years to the dying-out of cultural legacies when a last surviving native-speaker passes away (I was thinking particularly of Boa Snr, the last speaker of Bo, a language of the Andaman Islands, who died in 2010). Part 2 adapts an apocryphal anecdote about the famous Prussian explorer (see Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels among Disappearing Languages 2004)

Forwarding

  Delighted to hear that a poem from Human Form has been Highly Commended in the Forward Prize 2013 and will be reprinted in the Forward anthology which comes out on October 1st when the winners are announced. 'At Llantwhit Beach' doesn't seem the most natural choice and there would be quite a few others in the book I would nominate in its place but I'm certainly not complaining. It's nice that Claire Trevien - fellow Penned-poet I launched with - also had a poem Highly Commended, 'The Shipwrecked House II'. Interesting that both poems are ostensibly about the sea - do the judges perhaps think in terms of themes for the anthology?
  There's an article about judging the competition by Sheenagh Pugh here.http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jul/08/judging-forward-prizes-for-poetry and the full shortlist can be read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/08/forward-poetry-prize-shortlists-2013.
The choices for Best Book seem fairly predictable and something of a step back from the bolder list last year when Jorie Graham's PLACE won. The First Book six seem a bit more adventurous: I'm only familiar with Emily Berry's book so can't comment too much on the others.

Unexpected Body Combinations

 I was immensely pleased to come across a first review of Human Form this week in the Los Angeles Review of Books, part of an excellently-written piece on recent British debuts by Lytton Smith:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/answers-on-a-postcard-departures-or-some-accidental-british-debuts

It's as close to feeling "This is the reason I write" as it gets when someone seems to understand and intuit what you were trying to do as accurately as Lytton Smith seems to have done in his analysis of Human Form; in fact - as I'm always loathe to offer interpretations of my own work (since in a way if I knew what the poem meant I wouldn't have had to go to the lengths of writing it - as another poem about poetry says "What's made of it/I waive") - he explains it far better than I could do and in passages like the following perfectly sums up what (only semi-consciously) I was hoping/groping to articulate:

  'Human Form', the book’s title poem, reconfigures the child’s appearance in its parents’ bed as “a cubist scrum” within and into which “we struggle into consciousness / like a many-limbed Lakshmi.” This “new / configuration” unfolds in a triplet of sestets whose ragged lines are the unexpected body combinations, the “ruffled, parodic / Trinity” of human forms. Behind the ostensible neatness of British poetic form, just as behind the castle-like British home, we find something rather more difficult to parse.

   I also greatly admire the general thrust of Smith's argument (the other debuts he looks at are by Emily Berry, Heather Phillipson and Warshan Shire) which holds these quite disparate British volumes as evidence for an American readership that we've moved decisively beyond the "dreary, disheartening" conservatism that UK was formerly dogged with (and still is in certain quarters) eg. "the careful prosody retailed by the major houses (especially Faber) run[ning] the gamut from the quotidian to the banal by way of the Minor Epiphany"(GC Waldrep's words). If this new adventurousness is characterised, as Smith says,by "a stumbling-upon experience and trying to make something of it ... autobiographical, and biographical, and found, but all at a glance or aslant... it is idiomatic to its immediate cultural geography in the way William Carlos Williams also was to his", we are certainly on the right lines.

   At a time when it's sometimes said that poetry reviews no longer much matter and have little impact on book-sales, and when your ability to advertise yourself on Facebook and Twitter is supposed to be a measure of your worth as a writer, it's reassuring to read a review that's so insightful, well-thought-through and composed with it's own inventive care for language - futhermore, one that argues so persuasively and so positively for the burgeoning health of British poetry.

ABC of Reading Live

  Despite initial nerves the launch-reading went well, we had a good turn-out and it was nice to meet Claire and Roddy Lumsden at last. Reading live is a new thing for me and it's fascinating how things like tempo, pauses and tone of voice impact on the rhythm, mood and in fact the whole form and meaning of a poem. I look forward to doing more readings and developing this vocal understanding as my oratorical skills improve.
   Thanks to everyone who came along.

Launching Off

The launch of Human Form is tomorrow night at The Bell on Middlesex Street, just near Spitalfields Market. It's a joint event also featuring The Shipwrecked House, the startling debut volume by Claire Trevien: http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2013/02/the-shipwrecked-house-human-form/

Here's a poem of Claire's to draw you in:
Novella 
After Rimbaud’s ‘Roman’
    I
You can’t be serious when you’re twenty-one —
the evenings flare, a rolled joint behind your ear,
drunk on Wednesdays, university veteran!
You talk in your backyard of us all being queer.

The weed smells great on those June afternoons!
So sweet you could sleep through any exam;
the wind carries laughs, it’s humming a tune
older than you, Johnny Wright’s Hello Vietnam.

     II

The sky is all yours, you spy it through brambles
palpitating like grass you would like to caress…
You think the answer’s there to be unscrambled
if only the stars stopped changing their address.

June nights! Twenty-one! Easy to be wasted.
The cheapest wine is as good as any champagne…
You ramble on about the Bourdieu you tasted,
your lips crumple like a Communist campaign.
     III
You bildungsroman through books until
you spot a leading lady perched on a stool,
with the fruit machine lights pulsing her still
face red, green and blue. You think of Kabul.

She calls you a kid when you try to explain
— as her long nails trot gamely on the board —
why you are superior to her boyfriend,
but she leaves with her glass, looking bored.
     IV
You are in love: rented until August!
You are in love. She finds your poems laughable.
Your friends leave, your laundry starts to encrust
when at last, she responds to your madrigal!

That evening, you stroll out in the sun,
you order a kiss or a ginger beer;
you can’t be serious when you’re twenty-one
and there are summer evenings to premiere.
 

Ghostlier Demarcations

  Just realised a review of Iain Sinclair's excellent Ghost Milk I wrote a while back has just appeared on the Nudge website (formerly BookGeeks):

http://www.nudgemenow.com/article/ghost-milk-by-iain-sinclair/

 This is Sinclair's most politically scathing work, primarily a polemic against the pre-event impact of the Olympics on Hackney but widened to a many-pronged critique of the whole baleful culture of 'grand projects'. We now need a follow-up that focusses on the Games and their faltering legacy themselves.
  And talking of books, my poetry-volume Human Form is now available to order from Penned in the Margins:

http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2013/02/human-form/

            

Human Form

Cover art for the book by Garth Bowden

                                                   
   Had a hectic yet exciting few days last week going through and editing the final draft of my book of poems Human Form, the culmination of a long, often arduous process of writing, rewriting, sifting, sorting, cutting, changing, tweaking and deleting to finally come out with what is hopefully a book that in its own way and in its own time breathes and speaks.
    You learn an immense amount just from living with familar poems so intimately and so critically; you gain a novel perspective on passages and lines that are years old but suddenly open out in unanticipated directions just by being placed in juxtaposition to create a larger, roomier whole. What seemed a ragtag of disparate fragments gleaned from a dozen places you've lived in over the years, written in a seemingly arbitrary succession of attempts at a style, of experiments in form and tone and sound, finally jostle along together in the paper time-capsule of the manuscript, suddenly finding they have tacit themes in common, share links and contours, talk with the same accent.
   Others have to go. I remember when young watching an Open University programme about film-editing and the tutor saying "You have to be prepared to cut your best scene": this has always stuck in my mind as a key artistic principle, twinned with Pound's "One definition of beauty: economy of means."Only during the editing of this book, however, have I really grown to understand the importance of sacrificing certain, previously-integral elements for the sake of the broader form one is aiming for. It's true, too, that sometimes it takes an external agent such as an editor to see what the writer him (or her-)self, with their head immersed within the text, can't; poetic decisions have to be weighed against more practical and readerly considerations to create a convincing, durable final draft.
   One definition of poetry: human form. The book's published in the first week of March by Penned in the Margins.