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Experimental poetry in ManchesterArchive for shearsman
Shearsman Reading — Wednesday 15 February 2012
Tim Allen & Jeremy Reed will be officially launching their recent Shearsman titles: The Voice Thrower and Bona Vada, respectively. The reading venue is:
Swedenborg Hall
Swedenborg House
20/21 Bloomsbury Way
London WC1A 2TH
Admission free. Further details at the Shearsman site.
Tony Lopez: False Memory 2nd edition published by Shearsman
Tony Lopez’s landmark collection False Memory has been made into a second edition with a new introduction by Robert Hampson.
“[…] by far my favourite individual volume of poetry this year [was] Tony Lopez’s False Memory, a series of sonnet sequences collaging and remixing the white noise of 1990s Britain into a disorienting, sometimes hilarious, often sinister, and always satirical challenge.” —Robert Potts, The Guardian, 6 December 2003.
Shearsman Reading – Tony Lopez & Peter Robinson
The first reading in Shearsman’s 2012 series takes place on Thursday 6 February at 6:00pm for 6:30, and features Tony Lopez & Peter Robinson, who will be officially launching their new Shearsman titles: Only More So and The Returning Sky.
The reading venue is: University of Notre Dame in London, 1 Suffolk Street,
London, SW1Y 4HG (Just around the corner from the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square).
Admission free. but RSVP required as space limited. More details at the Shearsman site.
Scott Thurston:Talking Poetics— Dialogues in Innovative Poetry
This is a book of full-length interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady carried out between 2008 and 2009 in the UK and USA by Scott Thurston. During the course of these conversations, the poets explore a huge range of topics likely to interest anyone concerned with the state of innovative poetry today. Each interview considers the complete oeuvre of each writer and includes detailed engagements with selected texts as well as unfolding themes such as the role of innovation, the politics of poetry and reflections on lyric and autobiography. Each interview is footnoted and there is an extensive bibliography. Out now on Shearsman.
Shearsman’s 2011 Reading Series
Tuesday, 4 October at 7:30 pm, featuring Linda Black and Ian Seed. Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2TH. Admission is free.
For details of the books that will be launched by the authors:
Robert Sheppard launches
Launch of Berlin Bursts (poems) and When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (criticism).
Tuesday 7 June 2011, 7:30 pm.
Shared event with D.S. Marriott, who is launching The Bloods.
Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH.
The entrance is through the portico on the right of the building. There is no admission fee. Hosted by Tony Frazer, publisher of Shearsman Books.
The Ground Aslant
“Over the past 40 years or so, British poets have been remaking the pastoral. It has been a violent business. What Raymond Williams once severely called the old “enamelled world” of pastoral poetry has been worked over, its certainties cracked and shattered. Long gone are those shepherds and shepherdesses idly enacting class hierarchies. Toxins have seeped into Arcadia; “nature” is a mess of our own manufacture. Out of the static conservatisms of an ancient form has come a series of countervailing modes: the anti-pastoral, the counter-pastoral, the radical pastoral, the post-pastoral.”
The Ground Aslant, a new Shearsman anthology edited by Other Room reader Harriet Tarlo and featuring Other Room readers Zoë Skoulding and Carol Watts, reviewed in The Guardian, here.
Scott Thurston’s Internal Rhyme now archived at PENN Sound
Occassional Readings, Furzeacres on Dartmoor in Devon, UK, July 4, 2010
In this performance Scott Thurston reads the entirety of his book Internal Rhyme (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010). Divided into four sections, the book comprises a sequence of eighty poems in total, each constructed in four four-line stanzas which can be read in a vertical as well as in a horizontal direction. For this performance, Thurston experimented with reading two of the book’s sections in both directions. Taking the poems in groups of five, he used two approaches: firstly, reading all five in one direction and then returning to read the same five in the other direction and, secondly, reading each poem in one direction immediately followed by the other direction.
Internal Rhyme develops Thurston’s preoccupation with time and process as compositional elements, as seen in his previous book for Shearman, 2008’s Momentum. The subjects and themes are diverse and include poems responding to Blake, Klimt and Twombly alongside refigurings of the theoretical works of Alain Badiou.
Two new books by Robert Sheppard
Two new books by Robert Sheppard from Shearsman
BERLIN BURSTS (poems)
These new poems feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local Capital of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act
At the centre of the collection is ‘Six Poems Against Death’ whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.
Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard’s Complete Twentieth Century Blues ‘a major poem of serious intent’; Alan Baker in Litter called Warrant Error ‘political poetry of the first order’, and John Muckle wrote of ‘this brilliant, disquieting book.’
“Robert Sheppard . . . composed a few words around Liverpool’s status as City of Culture. ‘Their shit’s verdure but that’s OK/ This isn’t a nature poem.’ Sheppard’s near twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break the teeth. The city
averted its eyes . . . As if it were the poet’s fault that we want our meat pre-chewed.” -Iain Sinclair
Order from the Shearsman online store and read more at:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardBB.html
Order from amazon.co.uk
Order from The Book Depository
Order from amazon.com
Order from Barnes and Noble.com (USA)
WHEN BAD TIMES MADE FOR GOOD POETRY (criticism)
This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. Episodes cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; he also writes individual chapters on the poetry and poetics of Allen Fisher, Tom Raworth, Iain Sinclair, John Hall, Ken Edwards, and Maggie O’Sullivan.
“A landmark study.” -Benjamin Keatinge reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The European English Messenger
Order from the Shearsman online store and read more at:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardWBT.html
Order from amazon.co.uk
Order from The Book Depository
Adrian Clarke: Eurochants review by David Kennedy
Adrian Clarke’s most recent book with Shearsman gets a review from David Kennedy:
“The more you know about poetry, the more poetry becomes a matter of echoes and hauntings. Eliot dedicated ‘The Waste Land’ to Pound with the words il miglior fabbro, the same designation that Dante had given to the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel. Larkin’s ‘postal districts packed like squares of wheat’ triggers a memory of Auden’s ‘The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat’. George Herbert’s ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ becomes a kind of backbeat at the end of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. This sort of poetic relationship is at the heart of Adrian Clarke’s new book which, in the words of the blurb, tests ‘some possibilities and limits of cultural and linguistic exchange’. Eurochants gathers translations of Max Jacob; improvisations on Chinese love poems, Persius, Tacitus and Villon; and other recent work in Clarke’s characteristic short-lined, phrasal style. Daniel and Dante are in there too.”
Scott Thurston – Internal Rhyme
Published today.
BUY from SHEARSMAN
Poems at:
Review at Silliman’s Blog
Silliman’s blog – Internal Rhyme
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