Month: April 2023

Washing Plates with Edwin Morgan

~ oxfordbrookesuni

“Let the storm wash the plates”

— Edwin Morgan, ‘Strawberries’ (1968)

let the stems winch the petals

let the finch pinch the pitcher

let one cloud raise an eyebrow

let the lot love what’s left

let the red letter shopfronts

let the black flag an issue

let the blue note the effort

let the green light the pilot

let the slug soil the laundry

let the iron clap its hands

let the hands clap the irons

let the bets cook the bookie

let the child have a cookie

let the lit sleeper lie

let the dogs have their daycare

let the ghouls ride our horses

let our screws skew the bullseye

let our boots print the cosmos

let our ships breach the veil

let our throats weep their data

let the waves skim the profits

let the wind scratch its eyelid

let our mates do a runner

let the crabs do us justice

by Adam Crothers

From Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations

‘Washing Plates with Edwin Morgan’ is copyright © Adam Crothers, 2022, and is reprinted here from Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations (Sidekick Books, 2023) by permission of Sidekick Books. You can read more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

From Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
Why a book of misquotations? Because what’s captured in Say It Again is the jittery, jumbled essence of truth: that wisdom and edict alike are constantly customised, iterated, adjusted. Nothing stays the same. Here are gathered the sage words of philosophers, statesmen, artists and authors alongside proverbs, sayings and scripture – all distorted with varying degrees of deliberation.

The Hipflask Series is an improvised dance of unusual forms and genres, played out across four collaborative, pocket-sized collections. Each book comprises a selection of written works that skirt close to (or cross the border into) poetic composition, revealing the dynamic relationship between poetry and other written forms.

The major theme of each is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.

Quotations are used to motivate, intimidate, compel, amuse and persuade. But perhaps the quotations themselves need a little manipulation. This curious, critical, playful volume whips away carefully arranged context and sees what happens when well-known words become a little less familiar. We’re saying all the right things, but not necessarily in the right order.

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and works in a library in Cambridge. His books are Several Deer (Carcanet, 2016), which won the Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize in 2017, and The Culture of My Stuff (Carcanet, 2020).

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.

Infinity Songs

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Far removed, stretched out beneath the stars
I celebrate myself
and dreadful voices fill the sky,
fanning out as they pass one another.

I loafe and invite my Soul
to the endless dewy woods.

Here and there, lights crouched in groups of four
grizzle and nip at the darker shadows
and become undisguised and naked.

They rage and snatch
for every atom belonging to me.

I lean and loafe at my ease, observing:
houses and rooms are full of perfumes
from the infinite swamps and flatlands.

The dogs of autumn, of the wind.
The black evening echoes.
A spear of summer grass.

The moon sits twinned in the mirror.
It has no taste of the distillation
—it is odorless. I am in love with it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume.
It is for my mouth forever.
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

I will go to the bank by the wood,
and what I assume you shall assume;
roadways that stretch out like sails
through the shadows and horrors of the night,
as good belong to you.

by Walt Whitman / Émile Verhaeren (collage)

‘Infinity Songs’ is copyright © Walt Whitman and Émile Verhaeren, 2022, and is reprinted here from You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories (Sidekick Books, 2023) by permission of Sidekick Books. You can read more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

From You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
What are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing.

The Hipflask Series is an improvised dance of unusual forms and genres, played out across four collaborative, pocket-sized collections. Each book comprises a selection of written works that skirt close to (or cross the border into) poetic composition, revealing the dynamic relationship between poetry and other written forms.

The major theme of each Hipflask is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.

What are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing. There’s romance, of course – but other kinds of entanglement as well, all awash with delight and frustration, rage and joy, hope and perplexity.

Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916) was a prolific Belgian poet, art critic and multiple-times nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an influential American writer known for popularising free verse, and who was subject to censure for poems deemed obscenely sensual.

Sidekick Books is a London-based small press founded in 2010 by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving. We specialise in collaborative books, mostly made up of poems. Our guiding ethos when we began was to explore alternatives to the single-author poetry volume, and to mix poetry with other genres and types of book. Our books have been nominated for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, been featured in The Guardian and BBC Wildlife Magazine, and won the Sabouteur Award for Best Collaboration. We’ve put on various joint readings and events with other presses and organisations, including The Poetry Society, and we’ve thrown book launches as toga parties and immersive theatre.
Read more about the press on the Sidekick Books website, and follow Sidekick Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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.

Cox’s Bazar

~ oxfordbrookesuni

You plant the jackfruit’s anonymous, nubbled face and wait in the
boiling sand for something to happen.

A goat’s eye flashes gold. A girl swings on the tubewell for a cup of
water.

You plant peas to grow in the monsoon and put on your best shirt.
Yellow for optimism.

What is missing about the blank page is denied. Decimated, you
would like to cohere.

Inside an airless, windowless hut, you try to re-write Stevens: Ten
Ways of Looking at a Passport. ‘I have never seen a passport, how
does it begin?’

Toothmarks in the linebreak. You want to put the art back into heart.

When your brother ran towards the Tatmadaw, crying ‘Jayzu, Jayzu’,
you turned and ran. Jahaj of air. Jail, lock and key.

Without ‘art’, it’s just ‘he’, meaning brother. Come here, brother, but
he isn’t listening.

Your mother bribes the army guard to write a letter, asks about the
non-trial. Will the guard deliver? Hope’s lottery. There is no policy
on answering the letters or the law. The page a windbreak. To write
is to petition.

The ‘I’ severs you in the photograph, so we repose. Someone else
must always be next to you. You cannot work alone.

Cyclonic clangour of rain. Sword-water in the Naf. The helicopter pumps
into Bangladeshi airspace and fires on anyone swimming away.

The poem bare as a pulse, a knife. Siblings in graves.

The poem bare as a knife, a pulse.

Your father remains stuck at the border. ‘Genocide Zone.’ Nobody
is reporting from there, so nothing is said.

The child draws pictures of a burning house. Singing out of history
in makeshift schools.

You plant and write. Plant and write. What else is there to do? Peas
on you roof grow beside the ashfire. You knot back the twine and
forecast clouds.

You write: ‘blot out’, ‘jail of air’ and the words mean the same in
the morning. Myanmar waits for the incendiary. The Saudis send
money for guns. When you ‘like’ the post about ARSA, your cousin
gets a note under his hut.

‘Ze zaga añra félai ay zaígoí’. ‘There are places we leave’ you say.
‘There are places we never leave. Home is a dream inside a nightmare.’

The first line of your first poem begins: ‘I am afraid of someone I don’t
know’.

Last night your mother peeled back the tarpaulin and asked: ‘what
are you doing, my son, why can you not sleep? Sleep!’ And you
replied: ‘Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’.

Ignore the honking of the UNHCR truck, check the download speed
for ‘100 Poets in English’ (to learn poetry, to learn English) Reload.

Already they are looking to blame the same someone. The Chinese
highway needs to be paid.

Looking at you. Between Paan branches brittled by soil erosion.

Why is it you live in the middle of the largest refugee camp in the
world and they’re calling it ‘a lost treasure’, a ‘forgotten’ national park?

They ask you to plant trees to ‘save the environment’. Yes, you think.
A few more trees to hide the smell of the latrine.

How do you write about ‘environment’? You try for the present, the
sensory, but your eyes sting, your ears hum and the smell is flesh
and smoke.

‘I want to write about family, but I have no family.’

The idea of the eternal traveller does not hold. To think of poetry as
orphic. To unthink memory: to unriver the severed head.

As if the world were a wound flapping its bandages.

As if the world were a wound. As if…

You wake up and poke your pen through the ash.

English ale. ‘Dada eta ki gari?’ High speed trains. This is where I am going.

An envelope stuffed with Taka. A bookmark. To hold nothing, to
hold your place in the book.

by James Byrne

‘Cox’s Bazar’ is copyright © James Byrne, 2022, and is reprinted here from Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) by permission of Arc Publications. You can read more about the book on the Arc Publications website.

Beginning inside the largest refugee camp in the world (Cox’s Bazar) and ending up with Lorca in Granada, Places You Leave explores questions of travel, place / displacement, self / otherness, race, feminism, national and global politics. Through poems, poetic sequences and the lyric essay, Byrne considers a ‘poethics’ of place and speaks back to the complex nature of human experience. In his most hybrid work to date, including original collages from seven different countries, Byrne advocates for activist but peaceful ways in which language might challenge existing social structures and the dynamics of power.

James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator. His most recent poetry collections are The Caprices (Arc Publications, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015). Other publications include Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009), WITHDRAWALS, Soapboxes (both KFS, 2019 and 2014) and Myths of the Savage Tribe (a co-authored text with Sandeep Parmar, Oystercatcher, 2014).

Byrne received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was given a Stein Fellowship (‘Extraordinary International Scholar’). He was the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He currently lives near Liverpool where he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

Byrne is renowned for his commitment to international poetries and poetics. He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and was editor of The Wolf, which he co-founded, from 2002-2017. In 2012, with ko ko thett, Byrne co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012). In 2017, with Robert Sheppard, he edited Atlantic Drift, a book of transatlantic poetry and poetics (Arc, EHUP). In 2019, he co-edited, with Shehzar Doja, I am a Rohingya, the first anthology of Rohingya poetry in English. Byrne’s poems have been translated into several languages and his Selected Poems (Poemas Escogidos) was published in Spanish in 2019 by Buenos Aires Poetry (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez).

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians.

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.