The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Boys with the Bomblet

June 30, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A gang of shepherd boys minding their own
rib-caged cows. When a yellow can appears
in a dust cloud. Like soda or a sleeve
of tennis balls, clasped in a corona
of tabs known as The Spider. Casing scored
so as to better shatter in a blast
of stampeding shrapnel that will strip all
clothes and flay any naked skin, leaving
pulped, cauterized stumps. Tinkling like wind chimes
after the wetter thuds. The tiny chute
hangs limply from the lip. Designed to drift
silently, otherworldly, increasing
our scatter radius. Preset to detonate
at precise heights or times. Or with the thrum
of traffic, the plosives of speech. Tremors
of the lightest footfalls. Two boys running
off in search of a father. The one boy
holding the canister suggests, Maybe
we’ll find some food inside? The other one
slips his knife beneath the tab to find out
what’s inside The Spider.

by Dan O’Brien

A reminder that as part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford, Azfa Awad, Youth Ambassador for Poetry (a position co-sponsored by Oxford Brookes and Oxford City Council), will be reading in Oxford alongside the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, this Thursday 3 July from 7.30-9.30pm. For more details, visit the festival website.

This year’s Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public, organized by this week’s publisher, CB editions, is taking place on 6 September. See below for more details.

‘The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Boys with the Bomblet’ is copyright © Dan O’Brien, 2013, and is reprinted from War Reporter (CB editions, 2013) by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Dan O’Brien is an American playwright and poet living in Los Angeles. His play The Body of an American was the inaugural winner of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, and was produced in London in January 2014. War Reporter – which won the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize – derives from a collaboration between the poet and the war reporter Paul Watson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and has since reported from the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Read more from Dan O’Brien’s book on the CBe website, and find out why CBe decided to publish the book on its blog. You can also follow O’Brien’s work on his own website and via Twitter.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize.

In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place on 6 September at Conway Hall in London. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Why poetry?

June 23, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To catch the cat’s
studied indifference,
her yawn and stretch in the sun.

To take what once was thought
and twice rejected
and refine it
until it is not what it was.

To recover the realm
between waking and sleep
where a dragon guards
the golden hoard

and a word marks the lizard’s dart
between is and
was.

Casual, effortless, elegant
to be the heron
climbing the air.

To give to the human order
a kinder face
a better shape.

To be and not
to be Hamlet beset
by slings and arrows.

To find a way back
to the bush stream
where small fish used to hang
in shafts of sunlight.

To get ahead of yourself
and accept the silence.

by CK Stead

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford, Azfa Awad, Youth Ambassador for Poetry (a position co-sponsored by Oxford Brookes and Oxford City Council), will be reading in Oxford alongside the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, on Thursday 3 July from 7.30-9.30pm. For more details, visit the festival website.

Notes from Arc Publications:

CK Stead, poet, essayist and novelist, is only one of two writers to hold the Order of New Zealand. In The Yellow Buoy, Stead’s fifteenth collection of poetry, the writer journeys in time and space from Croatia and Colombia to Karekare and the Côte d’Azur; Catullus returns to receive plaudits, write to friends and read the world; and various other literary fellows appear in person, dream or conversation – Allen Curnow and Hugh Kawharu, Frank Sargeson and Barry Humphries, Robert Creeley and Katherine Mansfield.

You can read more about CK Stead on Arc’s page, where you can also read further samples of his work. Eight poems from Stead’s work, read by the poet himself, can also be heard on the Poetry Archive site.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday

June 16, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If the dead could be summoned
to say what they thought of you,
they would be as reluctant
and evasive as in life.
No eloquence from a friend,
no measured words from a foe,
would counter your sense of faint
virtue, lacking solid proof.

But why expect of the dead
more than of the loud voices
in present praise and debate
of your accomplished manhood?
Fading under fine phrases,
you disappear in plain sight.

by Tony Connor

This Wednesday 18 June from 6-7pm at The Poetry Society, Betterton Street, London, Jenny Wong, PhD student at the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes, presents a reading by Chinese poets Jiang Tao and Ming Di. The event is free to attend. Visit the Poetry Society website for more details.

‘Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday’ is copyright © Tony Connor, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Anvil Press from The Empty Air, New Poems 2006-2012 (Anvil Press, 2013).

Notes from Anvil Press:

Tony Connor’s tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor’s abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties:his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman. You can read further selections from the new book on the Anvil website, and more about Tony Connor from the Academy of American Poets site.

Since 1971 Tony Connor has lived partly in Middletown, Connecticut where he was a professor of English at Wesleyan University. He spends the summers in London. He left school at fourteen and worked in Manchester as a textile designer for many years.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Puddle

June 9, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Rain-junk.
Sky-litter
Some May mornings
Atlantic storm-horses
clatter this way,
shedding their iron shoes
in potholes and ruts,
shoes that melt
into steel-grey puddles
then settle and set
into cloudless mirrors
by noon.

The shy deer
of the daytime moon
comes to sip from the rim.
But the sun
likes the look of itself,
stares all afternoon,
its hard eye
lifting the sheen
from the glass,
turning the glaze
to rust.
Then we don’t see things
for dust.

by Simon Armitage

On Wednesday 18 June from 6-7pm at The Poetry Society, Betterton Street, London, Jenny Wong, PhD student at the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes, presents a reading by Chinese poets Jiang Tao and Ming Di. The event is free to attend. Visit thePoetry Society website for more details.

The Dermot Healy Poetry Competition has just been launched by the Five Glens Arts Festival and is now open for submissions. The deadline for entries is 15th July 2014. The prize money is 1,000 euro, and shortlisted entrants will beinvited to read their work at the festival. To find out how to enter, visit the Five Glens website.

‘Puddle’ is copyright © Simon Armitage, 2013, and reprinted from his book Stanza Stones (2013) by permission of Enitharmon Books.

Notes from Enitharmon

Simon Armitage lives in Yorkshire, has taught at universities in this country and the United States, and is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. He has published nine full-length collections of poetry, including Selected Poems and Seeing Stars, as well as notable translations of medieval verse such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has published two novels and three works of non-fiction; Walking Home – the prose account of his walk along the Pennine Way as a latter-day troubadour was a Sunday Times bestseller. Armitage also writes extensively for radio, television and film, is a regular broadcaster and presenter with the BBC, is the lyricist and singer with the band the Scaremongers, and has written several theatre pieces including dramatisations of both the Odyssey and the Iliad. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, most recently the Keats-Shelley Prize and the Cholmondeley Award, and in 2010 was honoured with the CBE for services to poetry. You can read more about Armitage’s work on his website.

The newly drawn Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the world. The terrain bears the deep scars of industrial exploitation, as well as those less obvious: the signs left by a hundred local generations are carved into the region’s abounding rocks. Simon Armitage was born and raised here, in the village of Marsden, and in 2012 he was commissioned through the Ilkley Literature Festival to write site-specific poetry. Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks and, with the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. Read more about it on the Enitharmon website.

The many layers of stone and sediment found beneath the surface of the rock reflect the drama of the landscape itself. Covered in decades of industrial soot and grime, the colours released by the carver’s tools will likely never return to shades of black and grey, but become a small reminder of the changes that our natural environment undergoes, and the marks, small and large, of humankind. You can learn more about the Stanza Stones Project, and watch a short film about it, on the Ilkley Literature Festival website, and listen to Simon Armitage discussing the book with Guardian Books Editor Claire Armitstead on the Guardian’s website.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)

You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month. You can also find Enitharmon on Facebook.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.