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.

West Norwood Book of the Dead

  I love Chris McCabe's recent project about locating the graves of little-known or forgotten poets in West Norwood Cemetery as described on Poems for Sale, a recent addition to my blog-roll: chris-mccabe.blogspot.co.uk
   I used to live in West Norwood and it's not the most vibrant corner of south London; in fact, now that the library has closed down, the cemetery is one of the few things it's got going for it. McCabe's painstaking interweaving of historical/literary research and pychogeographic divination in unearthing these twelve "mute inglorious Miltons" and creating a site-trail signposted with fragments of their lines will certainly draw me back to SE27 for a meander of my own this summer.

Joining the Twitterati

  I now have a Twitter account: @oliverdixon11. Expect regular updates on what brand of granola I'm having for breakfast, daily consternation ("!!") at irksome delays on the Northern Line and of course puckish asides on current affairs, Game of Thrones and The Apprentice. Oh yeah and maybe something about poetry...
  It's interesting that worthwhile poets like George Szirtes seem to be trying to actually use the tweet-form for snippets of text that are - if not exactly poetry - at least writerly. However, while the innate brevity of the format might perhaps lend itself to the concision of potentially good writing, if you spiel out your tweets as rapidly as George does the effect is somewhat lost. Call me curmudgeonly but I can't help holding to Pound's "Use no superfluous word" as the cornerstone for writing in whatever genre or context one is tackling: increasingly difficult to maintain within the public discourse of social networking where to be frank 90% of the words posted are superfluous.
    Reminds me of the opening sentence of an article I wrote a few years ago:

   One of the paradoxes of contemporary society is that while on the one hand we are privileged with access to an unparalleled abundance of communicative channels  - many now feel adrift and spurned if not granted a daily inundation of texts, emails, tweets and ‘Facebookings’ – on the other hand the general content of our communicative exchanges has never seemed more impoverished, more bereft of both meaning and style.

Fulmination

  Another pleasing review of Human Form appeared last week on the Dr Fulminare website, written by poet Judi Sutherland: http://drfulminare.com/dixonreview.php
    I met Judi briefly at the reading at Beaconsfield Library in April which is why I'm putting up this photo from her blog There Must Be More To Life Than Having It All (http://judisutherland.com). Thanks Judi, for both photo and review.

Hesketh, Trevien and Dixon rock the house

   

Interforms

                                                

  The Saloua Raouda Choucair retrospective at the Tate Modern is a revelatory survey of half a century's dazzling work in a huge variety of media - one can only baffle at an art hierarchy which means that a show of this quality and interest by a female Arabic artist is overshadowed by a big-name American like Roy Lichtenstein, a populist draw maybe but ultimately a master only of the meretricious (Brian Sewell, eat your heart out!). The comparatively small scale of the exhibition seemed inadequate to cover the range and breadth of Choucair's multifarious achievement (see for example her website: http://www.srchoucair.com/srchoucair.html ) and again attests to policies of art-curacy still dubiously weighted in terms of gender and ethnicity.
   Although early semi-figurative paintings from her apprentice years in Paris bear the influence of Matisse and Leger, Choucair had already developed towards abstraction by the 40s in a way that reflects a profound engagement with the non-representational, geometric basis of much Islamic art, giving her style a refined, rhythmically-patterned cohesion of colour and line that jumps over the macho cathartics of abstract expressionism to something nearer to the 60's Op-Art of Brigit Riley, albeit warmer in tone and more imbued with spiritual under-ripples.
   Equally,in her sculptural works, there seem few reference points within the European or American Modernist traditions and her interlocking, tessellating shapes in stone, wood, aluminium and other materials experiment with tropes of repeating pattern (or 'interforms') in a way which is perhaps more musical than mimetic or symbolic. Poetic, indeed:

  "A series of sculptures entitled Poems have parts that work together in a flexible way. Inspired by the unique stanza style of Sufi poetry, each module may stand alone as an individual or be stacked with others to be read as a whole." (Exhibition catalogue)
  
  Later sculptures, like the one in the photo above, are masterpieces of light and grace marrying architectural rigour with a seeming precariousness. Again, rather than inferring a subjective or political narrative, their condition as hard-won artefacts created within the fraught context of Lebanon during the 80s and 90s intensifies their power as aesthetic repositories, distillates of an austere imagination both reflective of and standing outside her immediate time and moment.

Poetry Gender Audit

  The gender audit on the five main poetry-publishing houses done recently by Fiona Moore on her Displacement blog makes for essential reading, as does the comment-thread its provoked, with Neil Astley of Bloodaxe and Roddie Lumsden on behalf of Salt (among others) contributing their thoughts:

http://displacement-poetry.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/big-five-poetry-publishers-in-uk-gender.html

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.

Poetry in Translation

                                                 

Janos Pilinszky

  If you didn't catch this Radio 4 programme presented by Daljit Nagra last Thursday, it's well worth a listen:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sdnqh

   In particular, enthralling stuff about Ted Hughes' and Daniel Weissbort's founding of Modern Poetry in Translation explained by David Constantine - he calls Weissbort's achievement as a longstanding editor "colossal" but so indeed has his been.
   There's a marvellous bit of Hughes reading a translation he's made of a Janos Pilinszky poem and then talking about the Hungarian poet - how "he can only write what he cannot not write...he has made his moves, as he describes it, like a chess-player, only when he must and only when forced...'I would like to write', he has said, 'as if I had remained silent.'
   For a further perspective on Hughes' versions of Pilinszky, here's a brief essay by Tara Bergin, who's working on a PhD on TH as translator:

http://www.thetedhughessociety.org/janospilinsky.htm

Electronic Voice Phenomena

  Fascinating event coming up in East London's Rich Mix next weekend when Electronic Voice Phenomenon, the mixed-media performance curated by Penned in the Margins, comes to town as part of its UK tour. The show will feature poets Ross Sutherland, Hannah Silva and SJ Fowler (the latter two featured in the recent Bloodaxe anthology Dear World and Everyone In It, of which more in a forthcoming post) plus the "hauntological synth-pop group" Outfit as part of a groundbreaking effort to locate a fertile hinterland between sound-poetry,performance-art and experimental music.
   As part of the context to the project, there's a website full of strange and alluring stuff - absolutely love the piece on telephony in Ulysses by Honor Gavin- which will hopefully develop a life of its own and see it persist beyond the current tour:    www.electronicvoicephenomena.net 
    For those less familiar with the concept of Electronic Voice Phenomena, there's a very instructive and thorough Wikipedia entry at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon. Reading this I discovered the origin of the phrase 'Ghost Box', the title of one of the most consistently brilliant record-labels of recent years, almost the founders in fact of what has come to be called 'hauntology' (Simon Reynolds' coinage, I believe) in the context of contemporary music.



Hannah Silva

Whodunnit

 

  I don't usually read crime-fiction or thrillers but I can recommend Death Comes for the Poets by John Hartley-Williams and Matthew Sweeney, a parodic take on the genre set in a skewed version of the UK poetry world. A succession of renowned poets are being bumped off one by one in bizarre and grisly circumstances, an investigator and his young side-kick are on the trail of the killer: the cliches and improbabilities of the whodunnit are embraced for blackly comic effect as the plot zips onward with the compulsiveness of any airport page-turner, the prose a spiked cocktail of energetic demotic, stock crime-ese and the odd poetic flourish. 

   What's made fun of, in fact, are the petty rivalries and bickering cliques of the poetry scene, the suggestion that beyond the veneer of fellowships or collaborations (eg. editorial groupings/poetry workshops/reading tours) lurks an animus of embittered competition. Without being identifiable as particular individuals, most of the poet-characters are ridiculous stereotypes of certain familiar species of versifiers, their well-worn styles shrewdly parodied in the mock-anthology that ends the book.

   As two much-published and respected poets who have always stood towards the edge of the populist mainstream, Hartley-Williams and Sweeney are well-placed to satirise the two-faced complacencies and infighting of the poetry world. Many will remember their earlier joint-composition Teach Yourself: Writing Poetry (Hodder and Stoughton), probably the pithiest, wittiest and most valuable book of its kind. Death Comes for the Poets deserves a wide readership and - beyond its current Muswell Press imprint ( http://www.muswell-press.co.uk/#item=death-comes-for-the-poets ) - a larger-scale print-run by one of the bigger publishing houses.