Thursday 23rd April 2009, 6.30-8.30 E24 at 6.30-8pm. (upstairs) FREE.

 

Fresh from his brilliant reading of Bird Bird at the Runnymeade Festival:

 

Jeff Hilson will be talking about his work.

 

Jeff Hilson’s works include A Grasses Primer (2000), Stretchers (2007), Bird Bird (2009), and In the Assarts (ongoing). He teaches at Roehampton University, London. With Sean Bonney and David Miller, he co-founded Crossing the Line, a reading series based in London.

 

Sampled in various small press editions over recent years and aired in live performances in London and elsewhere, Jeff Hilson’s Stretchers comprise three fast moving sequences of (more or less) 33-line poems. “Each stretcher contains a story, and each story contains other stories.”  “A stretcher mis-uses that which it stretches into. Reading down the column, which stands immaculate among the ruined vocabularies. The idea of a stretcher works so well that every reading simply multiplies – by dint of new stretcher-ideas – whatever Hilson scraps together. How far can a lie stretch?” Edmund Hardy, Intercapillary Space

 

He is also the editor of the well-received and controversial Reality Street Book of Sonnets With no fewer than 84 contributors, this is a truly groundbreaking anthology. There are plenty of modern sonnet anthologies around; but none that have delved so thoroughly into the myriad ways poets have stretched, deconstructed and re-composed the venerable form, including visual and concrete sonnets. We take as our time frame 1945 to the 21st century, with poets ranging from Edwin Denby (b. 1903) to those currently in their twenties. Jeff Hilson, the editor, contributes an introductory essay.

 

Via Robert Sheppard