PPS READING # 2: *STUART CALTON ~~ CAITLÍN DOHERTY ~~ JOHN DE WITT ~~ IMOGEN CASSELS (Cambridge, 10th Feb 2017)
The second reading in the Poetry Performance Series (PPS) features two visiting poets – Stuart Calton, from Manchester, and John De Witt, from Paris – alongside Cambridge’s Imogen Cassels and Caitlín Doherty. There will also be a book table. Please feel free to circulate info to those who might be interested.
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STUART CALTON
Stuart Calton is the author of the following books: Blepharospasms (2016), Live at Late Dilated Ileum (2015), The Torn Instructions for No Trebuchet (2013), Three Reveries (2010), The Corn Mother (2006), The Bench Graft (2004), United Snap Up (2004), and Sheep Walk Cut (2003). As a musician, he is the incomparable dictophonist TFH Drenching. His book Wimpy and André has just been released from MATERIALS press and will be on-sale on the night. A poem in ten sections, setting forth the interrelations between protagonists Wimpy, Climpy, Sandy and André, in a potentially infinite selection of mixed scenarios. Amongst other sounds, the poem includes the sounds of a car alarm, the thin barking of a radically rationalised trick poultice, a shout, a voice, silence, static, galloping and The Lark Ascending played triple-speed nine octaves up like rain on a steel bin-lid over a rave synth line.
“Just too big. Firstly way too big. And then just right.”
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CAITLÍN DOHERTY
Caitlín Doherty is the author of O (Foule Press, 2012) and Satellites (Tipped Press, 2012).
About the latter, China Miéville has written in the Guardian:
“Doherty, an outstanding young poet, uses our orbital trash, the bric-a-brac of communication tech and a deflating space race as a hook for her interrogations. Even a familiar notion is reinvigorated: the pathos of the first dog in space is not a subject previously untouched, but in her eulogy to Laika, Doherty marries cool rigour and generosity without sentimentality, and if you can get to the end without tearing up you’re stronger than I.”
Doherty is also the poetry editor of the journal Salvage, and her new book, Our Party, is forthcoming from Critical Documents.
“could you plan on my improvement
could it be wagered thus
a silk drape and a massage of the air
a yankee candle and the Tory grandee
unlabouring harmony
ah”
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JOHN DE WITT
John DeWitt was born in Mexico City, later moved to Nashville, and now lives in Paris. He is the author of Ends (Tipped Press, 2011), and Visceral Apocrypha (Shit Valley, 2013) and co-wrote, with Rosa Van Hensbergen, as Bill Ding, Buildings (Tipped Press, 2012).
“Nevermind spirits, it was motherfucker(!)
Motherfucker how could you have me at the end of my legs
He shook his fist at the chairs, at the light, maybe even at the flowers in the garden
as motherfucker has such a small mouth for the world
and such a ponytail floating in the wind”
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IMOGEN CASSELS
Imogen Cassels is from Sheffield and reads English at Cambridge. She was a Young Poet on the Underground in 2015, and in 2016 was a winner of the Poetry Business New Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The Literateur, Ambit, and the LondonMagazine.
“Somewhere they are watching rockets bombing
with fireless grace. Somewhere we end up
fucking in our sleep, and are disturbed by waking.”
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Friday 10th February [2017], 7.30pm.
Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, English Faculty Building, Cambridge.
Email David Grundy (dmg37@cam.ac.uk <mailto:dmg37@cam.ac.uk>), Rosa Van Hensbergen (rv252@cam.ac.uk <mailto:rv252@cam.ac.uk>) or Janani Ambikapathy (ja555@cam.ac.uk <mailto:ja555@cam.ac.uk>) for further details.
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