Youssou N'Dour as Minister

  Fantastic news that Youssou N'Dour has been elected Culture Minister for Senegal. Listen to this sublime tune from his earlier catalogue. 

   I was trying to think of an English equivalent and its possible consequences - Mark E Smith for UK Culture Minister? Linton Kwesi Johnson? 

In Memory of Adrienne Rich

One of the defining presences of post-war poetry in English passed away this week aged 82. The unremitting political urgency and depth of her work can hardly be equalled, just at this time of widespread public dereliction when her clear, incisive voice is needed more than ever.

Meeting Hornby

                                                                
  I met Nick Hornby today at an event at the Ministry of Stories on Hoxton Street, which if I can say with my teacher's head on is a fantastic groundbreaking project promoting creative writing for children and adolescents which anyone involved in education in Hackney should check out (apparently based on a similar project Dave Eggers founded in San Fransisco.) Our students with learning disabilities had participated in several workshops encouraging them to invent 'sensory poems' about their experiences of local shops and cafes -their words were then transmuted into 'plaques' to be displayed in each of the places' windows, creating concrete links between learners' individual perspectives and their immediate environment.
   Having an 18year old son who is on the autistic spectrum, Nick Hornby ( a remarkably down-to-earth guy for a best-selling author) seemed to have an excellent understanding of what an important project this was and did the presentations of the hand-pressed books which each of the students took away. He even spoke of perhaps wanting his son to attend one of our courses.
    I'm an admirer of High Fidelity, the only book of Hornby's I've read - not so much for the style as for its insights into obsessional music geekery as both a mask for - and at the same time a furtherance of - a young man's diffidence and immaturity.
    But I despair of ever getting a novel published. Yesterday I received with surprise a self-addressed envelope with my novel-sample and synopsis in it - surprise, because I haven't sent out any postal submissions for ages. Checking the date on the covering letter, I realised it was from an agent I had submitted to in September 2010.

Catches Up as Joy: Tess Gallagher at the South Bank

                                                    
   The reading in the Purcell Rooms on Tuesday was a major disappointment in so far as John Kinsella (one of the main draws for me) couldn't make it due to sickness.
   His last-minute replacement was Rachel Boast (author of Sidereal) and,like the other first-half reader Jean Sprackland, she regaled us with the kind of over-familiar, risk-averse poetry aptly placed to garner Whitbreads and Costas and all manner of other commercially-sponsored awards. Boast was certainly the more engaging of the two, however, due to the metaphysical and scientific scope of her work, citing Samuel Taylor-Coleridge as her book's "presiding spirit".
   Tess Gallagher, with a hefty New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) to promote, was a far more vibrant reader and between-poem speaker, with poems ranging over her links to Ireland, memories of Raymond Carver, a lament for a hummingbird, and the stunning meditation 'At Lorca's Piano'. In many respects her manner has changed little since the 60s, but it's just this post-Beat quality of rambling personal disclosure imbued with a sort of ragtaggle spiritual enquiry that's still so treasurable to hear, offsetting apparently prosaic narratives with potent undertones and crosscurrents, occasionally leading to startlingly beautiful lines such as "our soon-to-be-deadness catches up in us as joy".
   Gallagher should have been the headliner as Douglas Dunn could only be described as dull. Glints of acerbic Scots wryness were the only palliatives to a monotone rehearsal of the same post-Larkinian stylings Dunn has (with the notable exception of his best and most widely-read book Elegies) soldiered on with.
  

nummi no more

                                                     
One of the Finnish poets included in the anthology I mentioned recently passed away last week. Here's a link to a fascinating interview with him along with some samples of his poems (thanks Jeremy):

http://www.finlit.fi/booksfromfinland/bff/198/nummi.htm#

Shearsman at the Swedenborg

                                                                            
  To the fetching venue of Swedenborg Hall the other night, just off Bloomsbury Square, for a reading to launch two new Shearsman debut volumes, The Marble Orchard by Sandeep Parmar and Hedge Fund and Other Living Margins by Helen Moore.
  Sandeep Parmar acquitted herself well, with nuanced readings of poems vividly seesawing between life-story and history, memory and myth. Her work on the Modernist poets Mina Loy and the Hope Mirrlees of 'Paris' seems to have seeped into her distinctive patterning of phrase and cadence, often layering different linguistic registers to arresting effect.
   Helen Moore was a sensitive reader of her own work, giving each syllable and word a rich phonetic voicing. This came across particularly well in the effective dialogic poem 'Hedge Fund' which she performed with her partner, Niall McDevitt. Other poems attempting to address ecological or gender themes came across as less than subtle and eventually one longed for the more 'oblique strategies' preferred by Parmar.

Mming In the Undertow: Burnside Marginated

As an experiment in downloading books onto my smartphone, I recently tried a sample of John Burnside's Selected Poems but the poem I received came in a strangely mislineated,truncated version that nevertheless threw up quite a few bizarre felicities:

ke me, you sometimes waken
rly in the dark
inking you have driven miles
rough inward country,

eling around you still
e streaming trees and startled
aterfowl
nd summered cattle
winging through your headlamps.

metimes you linger days
on a word,
single, uncontaminated drop
 sound; for days

trembles, liquid to the mind,
en falls:
ere denotation,
mming in the undertow of language. 

 It's like the subtlest of Burroughsian cut-ups or linguistic remixes, maintaining most of the original text but subverting it into something more disjunctive and wrongfooting than Burnside's rather predictable manner (beautiful in its way but predictable all the same) allows. Perhaps this could be extended into a kind of Oulipan procedure; it could be very easily done by drawing a line with a ruler down through a poem at a given point, rather like an invasive margin... a margination? A clipogram?

A Rare Privilege

  Just back from a restorative half-term break in Finland visiting friends, where the intense weather made England’s recent cold snap seem negligible. Despite the chilliness, to be surrounded by depths of powdery new-settled snow blanketing the whole countryside made for some starkly beautiful landscapes, the ideal window-view for the writer who wants to clear his/her mind of urban clutter and try to return to what Stevens calls ‘a mind of Winter’ – ‘nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’. It also made me think of the somehow amusing image of monks on a pilgrimage plunged over their heads beneath snow-drifts in the Prynne poem ‘Frost and Snow Falling’ – ‘That /sounds to me a rare privilege, watching/ the descent down over the rim’.

   My friends took me to visit the house of Finland’s national poet JL Runeberg (1804-77), as far as I can gather a sort of Tennyson figure who wrote lots of long heroic epics and narratives about rural hardship. He’s certainly respected in his home-town of Porvoo, where the cafes even sell a rather tasty ‘Runeberg cake’ around the time of his anniversary.(For more information on Runeberg see the link to a very interesting post by Michael Peverett in Comments)

  I've also been trying to engage with more contemporary Finnish poetry through the fascinating anthology How to Address the Fog: XXV Finnish Poems 1978-2002 (Scottish Poetry Library/Carcanet). In most of these poems the unique quality of the Finnish language - with its bristling dots, long compound words and apparently (due to its structure of inflections) a kind of modular connectivity that lends itself to neologism and wordplay - is married to a dark, off-kilter pensiveness that is certainly more akin to Transtromer's work in Swedish or to East European poets like Holub or Popa than to anyone writing in English. No doubt you need a philosophical outlook to get you through such harsh winters: as Sikka Turkka puts it, "I also want to add that snow is a great delight, though I do not understand why so much of it is needed".

szymborska obit

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/02/wislawa-szymborska?newsfeed=true

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.