Seaside Special, a set of 31 literary postcards by Tom Jenks and Chris McCabe with an all star cast including John Betjeman, Allen Ginsberg and an unfeasibly large sausage, is now available for £10 plus £2.50 post and packaging in the UK and £5.00 post and packaging elsewhere. To view the project online and buy a set, go here. Just the thing for a donkey ride with a maiden aunt.
A collaborative chapbook by Steven Fowler and Sarah Kelly, out now on the unstoppable Knives Forks and Spoons.
The Saison Poetry Library foyer, Level 5, Royal Festival Hall, London, SE1 8XX
2-4pm, Saturday 30th
Free (arrive on the day, no need to book)
“Using the poetry library as a resource, a facilitated session where those in attendance spar line to line with in concert with each other, creating series of poems in small groups while writing simultaneously to order their lines after writing, and then coming together to write one larger poem in narrative, responsive order. This Renga, but as an act of homage and theft, creating a Remix poem out of the singled, lost lines of other poets great works. A collaborative work of plagiarism, attendees will be given a set of rules with which to work and let loose.”
The Ofi press has published the first part of SJ Fowler’s collaboration with the photographer Alexander Kell Museum of Death (sample image above), with an interview. Counterexample poetics, edited by Felino Soriano, has also featured SJ Fowler as a featured poet, publishing his wolves in chernobyl. And Exquisite corpse, edited by Andrei Codrescu, has published his Wormwood scrubs, dedicated to Anselm Hollo.
Four events at London’s Southbank Centre:
Tuesday 26th June 7pm – 9pm in the Blue Room
Maintenant celebration reading I: Pekko Kappi, Christodoulos Makris, Damir Sodan, Endre Ruset & more poets to be announced…
Friday 29th June 5pm – 6pm in the Level 5 Function Room
Maintenant: Poetry from the Balkans – Damir Šodan, Ana Ristovic, Doina Ioanid, Taja Kramberger, Luljeta Lleshanaku & more poets to be announced…
Saturday 30th 7pm-9pm in the White Room
Maintenant: a celebration of the avant garde & the experimental: James Wilkes, Holly Pester, Kirsty Irving, Sam Riviere, Vahni Capildeo, Audrey Brown-Pereira, Rocío Cerón & more poets to be announced…
Sunday 1st July 1pm – 2pm in the Clore Ballroom
Maintenant celebration reading II: Donatas Petrosius, Agnes Lehoczky, Immanuel Mifsud, Gerdur Kristny, Nigar Hasan Zadeh & more poets to be announced…
What more can be asked of a poet than that they maintain their own sense of integrity towards what they deem poetic? It follows then if the poet who does maintain a writing life of such commitment is a thinker of originality and insight, and that they maintain this commitment across a lifetime, then their work will have a life far beyond them. All the more if they do so with an affability that belies their skill, and a determination that proves them to be enduring. For a lifetime of writing, Charles Simic has been one of world’s most engaging and singular poets. He has exerted such an influence over so many and for so long, he has almost come to define an era. His voice is sure, utterly recognisable, both profound and humble, both grounded and flighted, both incisive and witty and he has straddled labels and definitions, as he has the continents of North America and Europe. Never has his own work been occluded by his translations but his lifetime of service to European poetry has fundamentally shaped the perception of Serbian, and Balkan, poetry in the English speaking world at large. He is an immense presence in US poetry and inarguably one of the most important poets of the late 20th century. For edition 93 of the Maintenant series, Charles Simic.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-93-charles-simic/
To accompany the interview is a poem, never before published, ‘Ghost Cinema’
Out now on the Otoliths site, including Other Room reader SJ Fowler.
Plenty to read and watch at 3AM Magazine’s page for this event in London on 18th April, including this film of Tom Raworth.
Now more than ever, if there exists a measure of what one could call a national character, indelible and prescriptive, it seems unlikely it can be held in the terms we seem to utilize. The limited, faded suggestions of temperament, appearance and culture are increasingly fraught. The valuable misnomer that the poetic in poetry is that which is lost in translation is a fair indication of how national character is found in the lack of a culture’s culture. I can only truly speak of England and Englishness, and what I deem to be its immovable quality, both its worst and it’s best feature – an unpretentious melancholy, a moaning disposition laced with satire, a call to arms without action, a sadness that has not the melodrama to make it public, a desire for privacy, a wit and observational keen which is razor sharp and practically dull. When an artist can build this ungraspable quality into the very fabric of their work, you know they can only have done so without preparation or motive. Jeff Hilson, as a master of this vernacular, stands as one of the most singular and gifted poets of his generation. Hilson’s use of distinctive vocabulary, a lexicon of the banal, utilises a finesse that pales the false poetic posturing of those working in circles created by perceptions of what has come before and held as the established “tone” of English poetry. He is the creator of poetic vignettes, an imagery not of the surreal but of the proto-mundane, couched in the wry, unpretentious drawl of a fogged civil servant, tired but not fatigued, worn but not broken. Hilson elevates the speech of the lived life, accelerates it, never seeking out absurdity, rather that would be too much agency for the singular voice purveying lines of observation and reflection. His poetic is not one of alarm, not one of lamentation – it is poetry of urbanity. Hilson’s mode is to shed light on the ever present – what we seem not to have noticed in its readiness, the pitted corners of language which are fundamentally drole and bloodless. Hilson exposes too the churlishness of the poet who takes no time to examine their own position, the ego behind the pen. His honesty, his lyrical inventiveness, his affected bleakness produces a strong sensation in its readers / listeners because of its central truth. It is then a poetry that is necessary because the poet does not profess its necessity. Only the reluctant can offer the objective truth that poetry must evolve, that it must be allowed to warp and break and rejoin in order to be in anyway new, and in being new, represent a culture that is truly contemporary. And even then, only within a form of an apology. Against Hilson’s work the concept of the poetic soul, the poetic pretension, is exposed as a welcome fraud. The melodrama of poetry is refuted and we are left instead with a very English sagacity of intellect and poise. In an attempt to utilise the Maintenant series to present poets to Europe, as well as from Europe, we present, for our 92nd issue, one of most remarkable poets of his generation, Jeff Hilson.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-92-jeff-hilson/
Accompanying the interview is Jeff’s seven part poem Rinker, generously given over to the Maintenant series.
It is too easy, and often, it would seem, far too tempting for the assumption to be made that it is just longevity itself which accounts for the repute and esteem of certain figures in poetry, whose influence seems so fundamental and ubiquitous within a nation’s poetic culture. Yet Gunnar Harding, as much as many a near legendary poet, has influenced so many and built such an immense following precisely because of his remarkable ability to make his poetry one founded on renewal, on tone, on intricacy, on inhabitation – to strike the reader with an original voice no matter their generation and poetic taste, whether they read his first published book in 1967, or his last, a third volume of selected poems. For nearly fifty years Harding has been at the forefront of Scandinavian poetics, rising from the generation of so many great poets in the 1960’s, a former artist and jazz musician, his fluid, energetic, deeply intelligent poetry has been a consistent inspiration to his countrymen and many poets who do not have five decades of writing behind them. For the 91st edition of Maintenant, Gunnar Harding.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-91-gunnar-harding/
Accompanying the interview are three of Gunnar’s poem, translated and generously given over to Maintenant by Roger Greenwald.
It is hard to think of fitting superlatives that have not already been bestowed upon Andrei Codrescu over the course of his writing career, which spans five decades and two continents. Since his emigration from Romania in the late 1960s, his work has lodged itself in the poetic consciousness of both America and Europe for its sheer edges – its energy, its voice, its deft wit, and like all great dadaists, at heart, he is the hardest of realists, a man who cannot lie to himself above all others, in his poetry or in his ebullient criticism, journalism and collected writing. A poet whose oeuvre reaches back into the depths of Europe from the core of America, who has been peer to some of greatest writers of our century, where he now, as we roll into the 21st century, must take his own place. For the 90th edition of Maintenant, Andrei Codrescu.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-90-andrei-codrescu/
Accompanying the interview are three of Andrei’s poem, generously given over to Maintenant.
To many what was once the most expansively influential European tradition of poetry has now become one of the most hermetic. Yet within France there remains singularm emergent figures whose invention, and whose brilliance, marks them out as some of the most innovative in the world. Eric Suchère is one of them, art critic and art historian, he has created a remarkable oeuvre of conceptual, prose and written poetry over the last few decades and holds a rightful place as a leading light in the current French scene. For the 89th interview in our series, Eric Suchère.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-89-eric-suchere/
Accompanying the interview is an extract from Eric’s longer work Set, Winterwreck, translated by Lisa Robertson.
As the monumental literary figures of the velvet revolution have passed their profundity and vibrancy onto a new generation of poets and writers, the Czech Republic has faced a shift in its poetic register, as the country has in its fundamental politik. So a return to the author has taken place, and straddling the two great contrasting generations and experiences of the Czech Republic as perhaps few others could, Sylva Fischerová, poet, author, teacher, has become the representative of the very best of her times – a poet whose wit, whose wisdom, whose incisiveness has brought her devotees across the world and across languages. In the 88th edition of Maintenant we welcome the lauded Sylva Fischerová.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-88-sylva-fischerova/
Accompanying the interview is six poems, translated by Sylva and Stuart Friebert
An irrepressible poet and thinker, the work of Eugene Ostashevsky has been a dynamic presence in the New York poetry scene for some years. Born in Leningrad and emigrating while still a child, like so many who have left their homeland, alongside the ebullience and humour of his own poetry, Ostashevsky has been a tireless translator and advocate of Russian poetry, most specifically the OBERIU group, whose radical experimentation was led by the near mythological Daniil Kharms. Teaching at New York University, the energy and vibrancy, and intellectually buoyancy, of Ostashevsky places him as an invaluable link to both the Russian past, and future, in poetics. He reads in London for the first time on March 8th 2012 at Pushkin house, and celebrating that event we are pleased to welcome him as the 87th respondent of the Maintenant series.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-87-eugene-ostashevsky/
Accompanying the interview is an excerpt from the The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, a work-in-progress about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-pirate-who-does-not-know-the-value-of-pi/
Via SJ Fowler:
March 12th Monday: Maintenant presents European poets at the Southbank Centre
Though his constitution as a poet is multi-lingual, multi-national, fundamentally cosmopolitan and reflexive, it is the definitive clarity in the work of András Gerevich which has marked him out as one of the most considerable and singular voices of his generation. From the remarkable Hungarian poetic tradition, which has continued to produce poets of individuality and conscience for hundreds of years and to this very day, Gerevich has defined himself as a resolute and powerful writer, poet and screenwriter. His work burrows into the cadences of speech, of reflection, of confession, speaking clearly from the first person, while without apology it maintains its affability of form in order to scale its ambition of content. In the 86th edition of the Maintenant series we present András Gerevich.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-86-andras-gerevich/
Accompanying the interview are five poems, translated by George Szirtes, Christopher White and David Hill.
An experimental, highly affecting experimental poetry and music performance for unsuspecting audience at Liverpool Music Week, commissioned by Mercy.
Available here.
otherroom.org 