The Manchester Writing School, Number 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH. Entry free, but booking essential. 7 PM start.
The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met is delighted to present this special event to launch Nikolai Duffy’s latest poetry collection, Up The Creek, published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press and Ian Seed’s short story pamphlet, Italian Lessons, published by Like This Press. More here.
Italian Lessons, a new short story by Ian Seed, published by Like This Press, 24pp, hand-bound paperback with French folds.
Translated and introduced by Ian Seed, out now on Wakefield Press.
Originally published in French in 1917 but ignored (though subsequently a collector’s item after the end of WWI), The Thief of Talant would not see a new edition until 1967, after the author’s death. To this day it remains a particularly enigmatic book in the poet’s œuvre. Challenged by his friend, poet and art critic Max Jacob, to write a novel, Pierre Reverdy produced this strangely titled experiment: a fragmented assemblage of loneliness, paranoia, and depersonalization drawn from his own experience of Paris in the early twentieth century, the sometimes antagonistic atmosphere of the avant-garde, and his own troubled relationship with the generous but frequently suspicious Max Jacob, who like many of his literary and artistic friends, detected the threat of his literary treasures getting plagiarized among everyone he knew.
Toward the end of his life, Reverdy confirmed that the alienated and anxious “thief” of this novel in verse was a portrait of himself (“Talant” conveys both the dual echo in French of “talent” and the small town of “Talan” near Dijon, thereby evoking a potential plagiarizer from the countryside, finding his way in the Paris of the years 1910–1917), and “Abel the Magus” a semi-satirical portrait of Max Jacob.
The Thief of Talant was and remains a radical experiment in verse and narrative, but it is also a hauntingly beautiful and moving evocation of the loss (and recovery) of self, and an encrypted guidebook to the “heroic” years of Cubism and that movement’s literary and artistic protagonists.
The prose poems in Identity Papers seek to construct a living bridge between the self and its shadow, between the self and other, and between present and past. They do so with a vulnerable faith, working with Heidegger’s dictum that all things must be allowed their time in darkness. Along the way, their narrators meet a series of disturbing, irresistible strangers. Identity Papers follows on from Makers of Empty Dreams (Shearsman, 2014). It is the second volume in a trilogy of prose poem collections. Out now on Shearsman.
Ian Seed says of Fidelities, ‘The poems here range from the lyrical to the more experimental, but I think that they all probe and explore a series of encounters and journeys. I see them as being faithful, “in their fashion”, to the truths they discover along the way’. This collection enacts an excursive articulation of the world and language, the shifts and creative repetitions found in both, between words and inside words, between moments and within moments: each poem finding its distinct poetic imperative to reveal these moves in the landscape in complex and subtle ways. The rhythms of these poetic journeys involve but also exceed the sonic; here is the shaping of the space and time of attention, a focus and intimacy that situates and then opens up, and into, our embodied encounters with the phenomenal world; here is presence, and reflection on presence and on being present. This is language as an eye that sees and a hand that touches and shapes, but also as ‘skin listening’. ‘We do not see from our bodies as from inside /a box. We pertain to the whole, we take our place /in the landscape, in the touching of the sleek and rough.’”
Patricia Farrell
Out now on The Red Ceilings.
April-May 2015
Kate Ashton romps through slipping seasons; Tom Snarsky shakes a tattered image of himself; David Spittle remembers to leave the door open; Anne Gorrick is sleepless and heartbroken; Katherine Holmes meditates on window-wordless birds; Tim Allen finds a lost ticket for the stars; Sarah James drinks it with down with black medicine; Neil Fulwood admires a small, discreet tattoo; Patricia Farrell pushes to the absolute end; Ian Seed rifles through Tom Jenks’ Items. Board here.
11th March 7.30 at The Rose Theatre, the Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk; £4.50
A Poetry Event of Two Halves
A Quick Fire First Set of Poetry to Celebrate 25 Years of Creative Writing at Edge Hill
Matt Fallaize
Alice Lenkiewicz
Bill Bulloch
Natasha Borton
Scott Thurston
Adam Hampton
Joanne Ashcroft
Tom Jenks
(All these poets are featured on Robert Sheppard’s blog. Go to for summary and links to all the poets
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/twenty-five-years-of-creative-writing.html
Followed by
11th March ROSE READING Ian Seed
Ian Seed teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chester. He has lived and worked in different countries, including Italy, France and Poland. His poetry, prose poetry, fiction, reviews and translations have appeared in such journals as Blackbox Manifold, Free Verse, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The North, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, Shearsman, Stride and Tears in the Fence. Seed’s first full-length collection, Anonymous Intruder, was published by Shearsman in 2009. Shearsman have also published his collections Shifting Registers (2011) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014).
http://www.chester.ac.uk/departments/english/staff/academic-staff/dr-ian-seed
Out now, featuring work from Janet Sutherland; Max Ghiara; Liz Adams; Martin Stannard; Alan Baker; Iain Britton; Lawrence Upton; Rupert M Loydell; Dick Jones; Ben Parker; Hillary Lyon; Mark Russell; Jonah Wilberg; Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins.
Shadowtrain Carriage 41:
Tuesday 19th March. 7.30 at The Gregson Arts and Community Centre, (Olive Bar), 33 Moorgate, Moor Lane, Lancaster, LA1 3PY.
Free entrance. Open bar. Books to browse and buy.
Saturday, December 8, 2012, 12:00pm until 3:00pm.
The Ship and Mitre, 133 Dale Street, Liverpool, L3 2JH.
A bi-monthly gathering of poems and other writings, edited by Ian Seed. Latest issue out now.
Out now on Nikolai Duffy’s Like This press. “Ian Seed’s mysterious Threadbare Fables equate the storytelling impulse with existential loss. Insistently sad and compelling.” – Tim Allen
New issue out now featuring:
Published towards the end of 2011 by Mark Cobley’s The Red Ceilings Press, Nikolai Duffy’s chapbook the little shed of various lamps will be launched at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester on 19th January at 6 o’ clock PM. Also reading are Jeremy Over and Ian Seed.
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:
otherroom.org 