Month: September 2016

Some Days I’m Visited by a Church of Rain

~ oxfordbrookesuni


The building wanders around the sky
then falls on top of me. Clouds are its ceiling,

droplets the choir. Inside, stones
achieve the ardent shades of stained glass.

Jagged pines melt and glitter. The broken air
remembers and I listen in the steam and hiss

of psalms for voices I have lost. I dream of striding
down the pavements’ dazzling aisles for years.

Then I meet the clean smell left behind, recall
how only through forgetting can the church arrive,

and I come back to my small garden,
its chalky earth young, forgiven.


by John McCullough

Acclaimed poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be visiting Oxford to lead a ‪poetry writing workshop entitled ‘The Space of the Poem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems – participants will be encouraged to share their first drafts during the session. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website, where you can also book your place (please note that those places are limited and there are only a few left!). There is a reduced price for Brookes students and staff.

‘Some Days I’m Visited by a Church of Rain’ is copyright © John McCullough, 2016. It is reprinted from Spacecraft (Penned in the Margins, 2016) by permission of Penned in the Margins.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Spacecraft navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people. Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough’s tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love. Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton’s gay scene, Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari First Book Prize. You can read more about the collection and hear John McCullough discuss the book and read from it on the Penned in the Margins website.

John McCullough’s first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize in 2012. It was a Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School, and a summer read for The Observer. He teaches creative writing at the Open University and New Writing South, and lives in Hove, East Sussex. You can find out more about his work on his website, and follow him on Twitter.

Penned in the Margins creates publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. The company believes in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. It operates across the arts, collaborating with writers, artists and creative partners using new platforms and technologies. Read more about its work on its website. You can also follow Penned in the Margins on Twitter and 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.

Qujaavaarssuk hears advice from a man who is not his father

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Listen to me, Qujaavaarssuk
                  sometimes others will contend with you
                  and sometimes they’ll tell lies

sometimes a stronger man will claim he was first to hear the whale breathing
                  even when he knows you heard it by night
                  and he did not hear it until dawnsometimes the men in your own boat will mock you
                  and you’ll hear loud laughter
                  when all you wish to hear is your wife’s singing


and sometimes your limbs will feel heavy, the sea will launch itself on your boat
                   filling it with water before you can leave the shore
                   and while you are bailing, others will reach the hunting grounds.

Qujaavaarssuk, these things are hard, but they do not bring hunger.
                   Hunger will come of its own accord.


by Nancy Campbell

This week’s poem by Nancy Campbell comes from her collection Disko Bay, which is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. This prize, together with the prizes for Best Collection and Best Single Poem, will be awarded tomorrow. You can read a conversation between the Forward Foundation and Nancy at this link. Nancy will be reading for the Poetry Centre alongside Rachel Blau DuPlessis on 14 January, and you can find more information on the Centre’s site.

Acclaimed poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will becoming to Oxford to lead a ‪‎poetry writing workshop entitled ‘The Space of thePoem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems – participants will be encouraged to share their first drafts during the session. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website,where you can also book your place (please note that those places are limited!).

‘Qujaavaarssuk hears advice from a man who is not his father’ is copyright © Nancy Campbell, 2015. It is reprinted from Disko Bay (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

The poems in Nancy Campbell’s first collection transport the reader to the frozen shores of Greenland. The Arctic has long been a place of encounters, and Disko Bay is a meeting point for whalers and missionaries, scientists and shamans. We hear the stories of those living on the ice edge in former times: hunters, explorers and settlers, and the legendary leader Qujaavaarssuk. These poems relate the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, and address tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence. As the environment begins to change, hunters grow hungry and their languages are lost. In the final sequence, Jutland, we reach the northern fringes of Europe, where shifting waterlines bear witness to the disappearing arctic ice.

Nancy Campbell is a British writer and artist whose recent work explores polar and marine environments. She has engaged in residencies at a number of ecological and research institutions, from the world’s most northerly museum on the island of Upernavik to the University of Oxford. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2013. Nancy’s books include The Night Hunter and Tikilluarit (Z’roah Press, New York, 2011/13), and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (Bird Editions, 2011), which won the Birgit Skiöld Award. Her poems, essays and reviews are widely published, and she was awarded the Terrain Non-Fiction Prize in 2014 for ‘The Library of Ice’. You can read more about Nancy’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

‘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.

The Camera Cannot Lie

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Superstitious about images I cling on
to old snapshots of long dead dogs and cats
afraid to kill a second time shapes that still
run and jump, demand and give in memory
to erase them forever as though
in the old saw of terror ‘they had never been’.
And as for the living how can I tempt fate
with fire or scissors, and so the drawer fills up.Yet they’re not us, these faces, masks, muzzles
that stare from celluloid or screen. And this latest
put into my hand by a still sad widow
of five years, shows a group of us I can
number my dead among, memorial
to a buried decade, gone yet visible
in this shiny icon. But these stills can’t show
how they ran through fields, laughed or were lovers.
Memory has to fit then up with life again
though stillI turn them over hoping to catch
their voices, friends of fur or flesh, part of
my story I retell and again.



by Maureen Duffy

News from the Centre: our international poetry competition recently closed for entries – thanks to all who sent in their poems! Our judge, Daljit Nagra, will shortly begin to judge the entries, and winners and the shortlist should be announced early next month.

We are delighted that the acclaimed poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be coming to Oxford to lead a ‪‎poetry writing workshop entitled ‘The Space of the Poem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems – participants will be encouraged to share their first drafts during the session. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website,where you can also book your place (please note that those places are limited!).

‘The Camera Cannot Lie’ is copyright © Maureen Duffy, 2016. It is reprinted from Pictures from an Exhibition (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press. 

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Maureen Duffy was born in 1933 in Worthing, Sussex. As well as being a poet, playwright and novelist, she has also published biographies of Aphra Behn and Henry Purcell, and The Erotic World of Faery , a book-length study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature. She made her début as a novelist with That’s How It Was , published to wide acclaim in 1962. Her first openly gay novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous Gateways Club in London. Recent publications include the poetry collection Family Values (Enitharmon Press, 2008) and a novel The Orpheus Trail (Arcadia, 2009). She is also the author of 16 plays for stage, television and radio, the most recent being Sappho Singing in 2010. A new novel, In Times Like These, was published by Arcadia in 2013. In total, Duffy has published 31 books, including six volumes of poetry. Her Collected Poems, 1949-84 appeared in 1985. You can read more about her work on her website.

Pictures from an Exhibition, from which this poem is taken, celebrates the mind’s eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship’s hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer. You can read more about the collection on the Enitharmon 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.